Postcolonial identity

New York, and it was on the train to New York that she first met Tom (40; ch. 2). West 158th Street in Manhattan is the location of the apartment Tom keeps for his trysts with Myrtle (32; ch. 2), which means that their taxi has to pass right by Harlem, if not pass through it, to get to their destination. Moreover, we’re told that he frequently takes his mistress to “popular restaurants” in the city, to the chagrin of his “acquaintances” who see them there (28; ch. 2). Clearly, Tom spends a good deal of time in Manhattan. Nick and Gatsby even run into him in the Forty‑second Street restaurant where they meet for lunch and where Nick is introduced to Meyer Wolfsheim (73; ch. 4). And certainly Gatsby visits New York City to meet with Wolfsheim. In addition, the confrontation scene between Tom and Gatsby, one of the novel’s pivotal events, occurs in the Plaza Hotel in Manhattan (132; ch. 7). Even most of Gatsby’s party guests (44; ch. 3), as well as the “crates of oranges and lemons” (43; ch. 3) that garnish their hors d’oeuvres and drinks, come from New York. How, then, can narrator Nick Carraway and his friends have missed Harlem? Harlem’s nightclubs, which offered such jazz greats as Eubie Blake, Fats Waller, Louis Armstrong, Bessie Smith, Duke Ellington, and Cab Calloway (Lewis 91, 120, 183, 210), attracted white people from all over the city and beyond. Night‑ spots like Barron’s Little Savoy, the Douglass Club (Lewis 28), Connie’s Inn (Stovall 29), and the Exclusive Club (Stovall 44), among others, could boast among their clientele “white debutantes, socialites, politicians, [and] perform‑ ers” (Stovall 29). And Harlem’s theaters offered the talents of such time‑honored actors as Paul Robeson, Ethel Waters, and Bill “Bojangles” Robinson (Lewis 120). As Jervis Anderson puts it, “Harlem was Manhattan’s capital of gaiety and amusement. . . . [T]here was no livelier place in all of New York City, especially after dark. Nightly, thousands of white visitors—most from downtown, some from other parts of the country, a few from cities abroad—made their way to Harlem” (139). Among the throngs of ordinary folk and wealthy whites who visited Harlem’s nightspots, David Levering Lewis reports, were the very famous, including such notables of the period as John and Ethel Barrymore, Charlie Chaplin (105–06), the famous composer Maurice Ravel (173), George Gershwin (183), Jimmy Durante, Joan Crawford, Benny Goodman, bandleaders Tommy and Jimmy Dorsey, future mayor of New York Fiorello LaGuardia, Mae West, Tallulah Bankhead, and Emily Vanderbilt (209). In fact, when the African American musical comedy Shuffle Along opened, it took all of New York City by storm. Written, produced, and performed exclu‑ sively by black people, the show appeared in the long unused Sixty‑third Street Theatre, which was considered rather far uptown for Broadway audiences to attend. Nevertheless, “[w]ithin a few weeks Shuffle Along made the Sixty‑third Street Theatre one of the best‑known houses in town and made it necessary for the Traffic Department to declare Sixty‑third Street a one‑way thoroughfare” to

handle the traffic (Johnson 188). The musical comedy opened in the summer of 1921 and ran for two years before going on the road. This means that it was running in the summer of 1922, when Nick Carraway was living on Long Island and spending most of his time in New York. Although it was a “record‑breaking, epoch‑making” show that eclipsed all other New York theatricals at that time— in fact, “some of its tunes . . . went round the world” (Johnson 186)—there is no mention of it in The Great Gatsby. The white population of New York didn’t have to depend on word of mouth to know what was transpiring in Harlem, though word of mouth was certainly active. They could read about it in such mainstream newspapers as the Daily News, The New York World, The New York Times, and Variety (Lewis 22, 61, 73). And the white literary world, including white publishers, took great interest in the literary creations of Harlem. Among the noteworthy white writers who encouraged the black literati of Harlem were Pearl Buck, Dorothy Parker, Sinclair Lewis, Sherwood Anderson, Hart Crane, and Eugene O’Neill (Lewis 98–99). Among the great writers of the Harlem Renaissance—referred to at the time as the New Negro Movement—who attracted white attention were Claude McKay, Jean Toomer, Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, Jesse Fauset, James Weldon Johnson, Arna Bontemps, and Zora Neale Hurston. In fact, while Fitzgerald was in the initial stages of planning and writing The Great Gatsby in 1923, Jean Toomer’s novel Cane was released to “outstanding” critical response, including high praise by renowned white critic Allen Tate and playwright Eugene O’Neill (Lewis 70), and Countee Cullen was interviewed in New York’s premier main‑ stream newspaper The New York Times (Lewis 77). Although Harlem was a relatively small section of Manhattan, it was really a city within a city, and like any other city it had its underemployed poor, especially as its population increased (Anderson 139). “[L]ess than two square miles” in size during the early 1920s, it was home to a black population that numbered “more than two hundred thousand” (Johnson 147). However, situated at the north end of Central Park, “in the heart of Manhattan,” 1920s Harlem was “not a fringe, . . . not a slum, nor [was] it a ‘quarter’ consisting of dilapidated tenements. It [was] a section of . . . apartment houses and handsome dwellings, with streets as well paved, as well lighted, and as well kept as in any other part of the city” (Johnson 146). Celebrated people, black and white, from the world of literature, theater, and academia could be seen at any time of the day or night strolling the streets of Harlem or giving public lectures, such as that given by John Dewey at the Har‑ lem YMCA (Lewis 104). Harlem even had its own newspapers and magazines, including Crisis, Fire!, Messenger (Douglas 312–13), and Opportunity (Lewis 120). And Harlem boasted famous black artists as well as writers, musicians, and actors, including painters

Romare Bearden, Aaron Douglas, and Laura Wheeler Waring and sculptors Sargent Johnson, Elizabeth Prophet, and Augusta Savage. Just to give you an idea of how productive the Harlem Renaissance was, even in terms of its paint‑ ers and sculptors (a category that has tended to receive less attention than that of writers and performing artists), by the end of the decade over one hundred Harlem painters and sculptors were entering their works in annual contests and exhibitions (Lewis 261–62). The creative output of the Harlem Renaissance was, as we have seen, well known to white New Yorkers and to the Western world at large. So how can a Yale grad‑ uate like Nick Carraway—well educated, sensitive, curious, and as he tells us, “rather literary” (8; ch. 1)—be completely oblivious to the existence of Harlem? Even if Nick somehow overlooks the celebrated outpouring of Harlem’s “high” culture—its literature, philosophical and political writing, painting, sculpture, and the like—he certainly can’t work and play in New York City without know‑ ing about Harlem’s nightlife. From a historical perspective, such an oversight is virtually impossible. Had Fitzgerald remained true to form in his description of cultural reality, Nick and his friends would have visited, or at least mentioned having visited, a Harlem nightclub. Surely, he would have taken Jordan there on one of their numerous New York dates. And there’s no way that Tom and Daisy, who consider themselves so fashionably modern, would have missed Harlem. Indeed, Nick tells us that the Buchanans “drifted here and there unrestfully wherever people played polo and were rich together” (10; ch. 1). If Tom and Daisy go where other wealthy whites of the period go to be “rich together,” they would have visited Harlem nightspots on a fairly regular basis. They at least would have gone to the most expensive and exclusive nightspots, like Barron’s Little Savoy and Connie’s Inn, which catered to a segregated white clientele (Lewis 106). As Tyler Stovall puts it, “During [the 1920s] it became the custom for wealthy and prominent white New Yorkers to finish up an evening on the town listening to jazz in one of Harlem’s many speakeasies” (29). The enormous population of African Americans inhabiting Harlem in the 1920s, moreover, was not confined to that neighborhood. In fact, African Americans from Harlem and from elsewhere in New York worked, played, and shopped all over Manhattan. Yet the only representation of African Americans in the novel occurs when Gatsby and Nick are driving into New York City to have lunch. Nick sees “three modish [fashionable] Negroes” in “a limousine . . . driven by a white chauffeur” (73; ch. 4). He describes them as “two bucks and a girl” and says, “I laughed aloud as the yolks of their eyeballs rolled toward us in haughty rivalry” (73; ch. 4). Of course, Nick’s un‑self‑conscious racism is obvious in his reaction to these characters: the black men are “bucks”—animals rather than men—and the description of their wide‑stretched, rolling eyes resonates

strongly with racist stereotypes that portrayed African Americans as foolish, childish, overly dramatic, comic characters. In addition, Nick’s description of these characters fulfills the kind of narrative function Toni Morrison describes in her analysis of the Africanist presence in white American literature. These black characters—fashionably dressed, rid‑ ing in a chauffeured limousine, very conscious of their social status in the eyes of others—are the mirror and shadow of Gatsby. The only obvious difference between them is that Gatsby can hide his origins, which he does, whereas they can’t because they can’t hide their color. From Nick’s point of view, despite Gats‑ by’s “elaborate formality of speech [that] just missed being absurd” (53; ch. 3), his ridiculous fabrication of wealthy “ancestors” (69; ch. 4), his “circus wagon” (128; ch. 7) of a car, as Tom calls it, and all his other ludicrous affectations, he is the romantic embodiment of success. The black characters, however, are its parody. In barely more than one sentence, in the single image with which Nick describes the black characters, he projects onto them everything about Gatsby that he, and perhaps the reader, hold in contempt. They are preposterous, not Gatsby. Thus, Nick’s racist attitude toward these characters facilitates their function as scapegoats sacrificed to Nick’s, and the text’s, recuperation of Gatsby. To put the matter another way, the novel erases real African Americans, who were a very visible and important presence in New York City during the 1920s where, as we have seen, much of the novel is set, and substitutes in their place a comic stereo‑ type that reinforces white superiority. This is no small move, given the historical reality of New York City during the 1920s. Apparently, Fitzgerald decided not only to remove African Americans from his representation of the Jazz Age, but he also decided to remove jazz from the hands of the African Americans who invented it. For the novel gives the credit for jazz symbolically to whites. The only musicians we see playing jazz are the white musicians at Gatsby’s party. And they are “no thin five‑piece affair,” Nick tells us, “but a whole pit full of oboes and trombones and saxophones and viols and cornets and piccolos and low and high drums” (44; ch. 3). In other words, jazz has been “elevated” to the status of high culture in the form of an orches‑ tra, and high culture belongs to white, not black, Americans. Significantly, the orchestra spotlights its performance of a piece that, the conductor informs us, was played at Carnegie Hall: “Vladimir Tostoff’s Jazz History of the World” (54; ch. 3). Could Fitzgerald have found a more conspicuously European—that is, white—name than Vladimir Tostoff? There’s no way a reader could mistake him for an African American. In the world of this novel, jazz is, symbolically at least, a European invention. Thus, Tom’s warning that “[i]t’s up to us who are the dominant race to watch out or these other races will have control of things” (17; ch. 1), though mocked by Nick and by the novel’s unflattering characterization of Tom, is an attitude the novel unconsciously shares.

What could be responsible for such a glaring omission on the part of an author known for his accurate renditions of setting? Certainly, as Lauraleigh O’Meara notes, Fitzgerald was personally familiar with Manhattan in all its “remarkabl[e] divers[ity]” (34). Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald were married in New York City in April 1920 and spent the first month of their married life at the Biltmore and Commodore hotels in New York City. Although they spent the next several months in Westport, Connecticut, Manhattan was a mere fifty miles away, and they frequently went to the city for fun. Moving back to New York City in Octo‑ ber 1920, they remained there, in an apartment on West Fifty‑ninth Street, until they left for Europe for the summer of 1921, but by 1922 they had returned to Manhattan. Although the couple lived in Great Neck, Long Island, from Octo‑ ber 1922 to April 1924, they often partied in New York City (O’Meara 33–34). Indeed, from their home on Long Island, New York was too nearby and too inviting, which is why they again left for France in April 1924 (O’Meara 50). Fitzgerald’s personal acquaintance with New York City included a personal acquaintance with Harlem as well through his friendship with white writer, critic, and photographer Carl Van Vechten. Van Vechten was fascinated by Harlem and was very well known there. By the mid‑1920s, Van Vechten had become “Harlem’s most enthusiastic and ubiquitous Nordic” (Lewis 182). Fitzger‑ ald attended Van Vechten’s parties, which were given in his own home on New York’s west side for both white and black guests, including, of course, Van Vech‑ ten’s friends and acquaintances from Harlem (Lewis 182–84). In fact, Fitzgerald refers specifically to the diversity of New York City, including Harlem, in his 1922 novel The Beautiful and the Damned, and Fitzgerald is known to have based that novel, like so much of his other work, on his personal experience (O’Meara 34). Even the time Fitzgerald spent in Paris contributed to his awareness of Harlem because, as Tyler Stovall points out, African Americans, many of whom were from Harlem, established an expatriate artists’ colony in Paris—consisting of African American jazz musicians, writers, painters, sculptors, and athletes—just as Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Stein, and other members of the “Lost Generation” established a writers’ colony there (26). Stovall claims, in fact, that “few of the tens of thousands of illustrious exiles in Paris during the 1920s had a greater impact on the city than the hundreds of African Americans who chose to call it home in those years” (25–26). “[B]lackness became the rage in Paris during the 1920s,” for “Parisian intellectuals took black culture seriously, considering it to represent the spirit of the age” (Stovall 32). Fitzgerald, who himself wanted to represent the spirit of the age in his novels, could not have failed to notice that the 1921 Prix Goncourt for literature, “the most prestigious literary award in France” went “to the novel Batouala by René Maran . . . a black Frenchman . . . [b]orn in Martinique” (Stovall 32).