Postcolonial debates

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

one occasion, Fitzgerald “introduced an unsuspecting Negro clergyman, solicit‑ ing funds for a local orphanage, as a distinguished visitor from Africa. Polite but panic‑stricken, the clergyman fled the premises” (294). Another time, Fitzgerald made his African American chauffeur, who had a speech impediment, repeat over and over again a sentence filled with words he was unable to pronounce cor‑ rectly (Turnbull, cited in Forrey 294). And certainly Fitzgerald’s attitude toward Bricktop, the African American singer whom, as we noted earlier, he greatly admired, is revealing: although he was a great fan of her work and frequented the club where she sang, “she came to [his] hom[e] as a hired musician, not as a friend and equal” (Stovall 80). Drawing on Andrew Turnbull’s 1963 The Letters of F. Scott Fitzgerald, M. Gidley underscores a telltale passage in a letter from Fitzgerald to his friend Edmund Wilson concerning the author’s racial philosophy: God damn the continent of Europe. . . . The Negroid streak creeps northward to defile the Nordic race. Already the Italians have souls of blackamoors [black or dark-skinned people]. Raise the bars of immigration [in the United States] and permit only Scandinavians, Teutons [people of Germanic or Celtic origin], Anglo-Saxons and Celts [British, Scottish, or Irish people] to enter. (1) In another letter to Edmund Wilson, Fitzgerald wrote, “We [Anglo‑Saxons, Celts, and the like] are as far above the modern French man as he is above the Negro. Even in art!” (Turnbull, Letters, cited in Gidley 178). Equally revealing of Fitzgerald’s attitude toward African Americans, I think, is his response to a book written by his friend Carl Van Vechten. As we saw earlier, Van Vechten spent a good deal of time in and had a great deal of enthusiasm for Harlem. In 1926 Van Vechten came out with a novel about Harlem entitled Nigger Heaven. The title alone is revealing, and W. E. B. DuBois wrote that the book “is a blow in the face . . . an affront to the hospitality of black folk [who had welcomed Van Vechten into their community] and to the intelligence of white[s]. . . . I find the novel neither truthful nor artistic. . . . It is a caricature” (cited in Anderson 219). According to David Levering Lewis, “[t]he plot is sheer melodrama,” and “90 percent of the [black] race . . . saw the book as DuBois did” (181). Many white readers and literary critics disagreed, however, and Fitzgerald was among them. He called Nigger Heaven “a work of art” (Anderson 217) and praised it for its representation of “the northern nigger or, rather the nigger in New York” (Turnbull, Letters, cited in Gidley 181). According to Lewis, Fitzger‑ ald “adored the novel because, for [him] it confirmed the Afro‑American grotes‑ queries produced by civilization and the durability of . . . the ‘unspoiled Negro’ ”