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Fitzgerald’s personal acquaintance with Harlemites in Paris resulted from his frequent visits to jazz clubs in Montmartre, a section in the northern part of the city where most African Americans in Paris lived during the 1920s (Stovall 39). In a very real sense, Montmartre reproduced the nightlife available in Harlem by reproducing the same kind of jazz clubs and by employing many of the same jazz musicians available in Harlem. “White American expatriates frequently vis‑ ited Montmartre’s nightclubs” (Stovall 78), and Fitzgerald was particularly fond of a famous African American jazz singer there called Bricktop, so named for her red hair, who also sang in Harlem clubs when she was in the United States (Stovall 78–79). A rather obvious question, then, seems to present itself: Why does The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald’s great novel of the Jazz Age, omit entirely any reference to Harlem, imply that jazz was a product of white culture, and limit its representa‑ tion of African Americans in 1920s New York City to a negative “comic” stereo‑ type? In other words, what was Fitzgerald’s attitude toward African Americans while he was writing his most famous novel? Although Robert Forrey and Alan Margolies, for example, agree that Fitzgerald “show[ed] signs,” toward the end of his life, of “outgrowing” his racist attitude (Forrey 296), it seems evident that The Great Gatsby, written when the author was in his twenties, arrived too early in Fitzgerald’s career to benefit from his later change in perspective. There is, indeed, a good deal of evidence to suggest that The Great Gatsby suffers from the omissions and misrepresentations noted above because its author, consciously or unconsciously, wanted to erase from his novelistic field of vision the African Americans who so visibly populated the real New York, the New York that plays such an important role in his novel’s sense of place. As we shall see, Fitzgerald believed that African Americans were woefully inferior to whites. And although the psychological motives for the author’s racism are not the issue here, it is possible that beneath his belief in the superiority of his race lay a deep-seated insecurity about his own literary value in face of the outstanding achievements of African Americans in arts and letters, which he was witnessing in Paris as well as in New York. Whatever the reason, it is evident that Fitzgerald’s attitude toward African Americans, for the greater part of his life, was decidedly racist. As Robert Forrey observes, the black characters in Fitzgerald’s numerous short stories “are almost always menial characters who are referred to disparagingly— sometimes by the author himself in the third person—as ‘coons,’ ‘niggers,’ ‘pick‑ aninnies,’ or ‘Samboes.’ Their function is usually to create a comic effect” (293). Tyler Stovall concurs, observing that Fitzgerald’s Tender Is the Night, “one of the great novels of American expatriate life,” contains “notoriously racist passages about blacks” (80). And “[i]n real life, as in fiction,” Forrey adds, “the appear‑ ance of a Negro was usually the signal for Fitzgerald to promote a prank” (294). Citing Andrew Turnbull’s 1962 biography Scott Fitzgerald, Forrey notes that, on
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