Jay Gatsby: A Black Man in Whiteface
by
Janet Savage
Table of Contents
Introduction
When I was an undergraduate
English major at Stanford University, I eagerly met with the graduate teaching
assistant in my “Fitzgerald and Hemingway” class to discuss The Great Gatsby.
I suggested to him that the scene where a man tries to put his car in reverse
to get it out of a ditch supports the novel’s overall theme of being unable to
undo the consequence of past events. With an embarrassed, half-smile he shook
his head “No.” I kept explaining why it worked. We each left the meeting
unconvinced.
Then, in the summer of 2014, a
friend and I were talking about writing, our true love. When she left my
office, she said over her shoulder, “Well, you know Gatsby’s black.”
What?
It was a lightning bolt,
obliterating whatever we were talking about before.
My friend tipped me to Professor
Carlyle Van Thompson’s The Tragic Black Buck: Racial Masquerading in the
American Literary Imagination in which he presents the thesis that The
Great Gatsby explores racial themes and that Jay Gatsby is a character of
black and white parentage who is passing as a white man.
Decades had passed since my conversation
with the graduate student. Since then I had learned that some people only teach
what they have been taught, and that the graduate student was no way going to
be convinced by a sophomore of ideas that he had never heard before. I had also
learned since then that F. Scott Fitzgerald chose every sentence, every word,
and every image with exquisite attention to its service of the novel’s themes.
He finished the novel in spring 1924 and then spent the better part of a year
carefully editing it. The scene with the car stuck in the ditch was part of
that polished whole. It likely meant what I said it meant, serving as one tiny
pillar of thematic support. Could it be, I wondered, that there are more tiny
pillars upholding a theme we didn’t see?
Immediately, I started researching
this “Black Gatsby” thesis and found the November 1924 letter from Scribner’s
editor Maxwell Perkins to F. Scott Fitzgerald rejecting both Fitzgerald’s favorite
title and a note he wanted to add to the book jacket.
I had to know what the note said,
what Fitzgerald had wanted to tell us but didn’t. The hunt was on.
This is the account of my quest
for the note in the summer and fall of 2016 that I serialized in my Facebook
posts as I followed the twisty path of discovery with a curious mind and heart.
Post #1
Evidence and Assumption
Some may say that the Black Gatsby
thesis is all conjecture. But that is the world of literary analysis. There is
no proof. There is never proof. There’s only textual, contextual and
biographical data subjected to responsible and reasonable analysis. Yes,
circumstantial evidence - the type of evidence on which many a conviction and
decision has been made and accepted. My goal is to gain a broader acceptance of
the Black Gatsby thesis because there is more evidence that Gatsby is a
bi-racial black man than that he is a white man, because it makes the best use
of all the novel’s content, and because it sharpens Fitzgerald’s devastating
commentary on the American Dream.
Post #2
So, who is Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald and why would he write about race?
This question has many answers.
With his St. Paul, Minnesota and
Buffalo, New York boyhood and his Princeton education, we think of Fitzgerald
as a northern writer. However, his roots and sympathies are distinctly 19th
century southern. His father, Edward Fitzgerald, guided Confederate soldiers as
a boy and grew up to be a failed businessman who regaled his young son with
romantic stories of the pre-Civil War American South, southern manners and the
southern resistance. (Mok, Bryer 240) Fitz was related to both Francis Scott
Key (anti-abolitionist and writer of “The Star-Spangled Banner”) and Mary
Suratt (Lincoln assassination conspirator). (Far 2) He refused his parent’s
request to write a work exonerating Suratt, but showed his southern sympathies
through his pride in having been named after Key. Key was a slave holder. He called black people “a distinct and inferior race
of people, which all experience proves to be the greatest evil that affects a
community.” He sought to hang abolitionists whom he claimed rushed to
“associate and amalgamate with the negro.” (Key)
Fitz’s most noted biographer,
Matthew Bruccoli, concludes that from these roots Fitz grew to be a deep
southern sympathizer. (Grand 19) There are many favorable appearances of the
Confederacy in his fiction. There are Confederate heroes at Gatsby’s parties,
the Confederate soldier Jack Saunders in Tender is the Night is based on
his father and the protagonist of Fitz’s autobiographical novel, This Side of
Paradise, is “for the southern confederacy.” (TSOP 17) Fitzgerald insisted
on being treated as a southern gentleman. (Far 11) Ernest Hemingway mocked his
southern sensibility this way: “He is always the brilliant young gentleman
writer, fallen gentleman writer, gent in the gutter, gent ruined, but never a
man.” (Sons 177)
There is no escaping Fitz’s point
of view on race and he doubled down on it when he married Zelda Sayre who was
steeped in Confederate culture. Her grandfather was a Confederate senator.
(Zelda 4) She was proud that the Confederacy was born in Montgomery and that
her ancestors had built the first Confederate white house. (Questia) Zelda
considered herself a carrier of the Confederate tradition (Tragic) and a close
childhood girlfriend said that she and Zelda “were brought up on the
Confederacy. It meant more to us than almost anything else
did.” (Montgomery)
It's clear that Fitz believed in the
contemporary ideas of racial superiority as well as the correlated need to keep
the white races pure by identifying and restricting the geographical and
biological migration of the non-white races. Some commentators have
characterized Fitz as being concerned about the fluidity of the American social
hierarchy (Bender 399, Trilling) and some conclude that he had “at least the
usual amount of ethnic prejudice of white Americans of his era.” (Race) “At
least.” “The usual amount.” Not sure which is my favorite.
Race mattered to Fitzgerald and he
did not leave the topic behind when he wrote The Great Gatsby.
In the first third of the 20th century there
was great anxiety in America about racial migration and mixing. The Ku Klux
Klan was at its peak, Nordicism was “a thing” and peoples around the world were
on the move after WWI. At the same time, the Jazz Age, thought of as a time of
slack morals and manners, and the Harlem Renaissance, a time of socio-economic
rise for black Americans, threatened the world of white dominance and
separation.
In this part of the century the nation debated
whether whiteness was a “legal category; a commonsense understanding; or a
worldwide civilization.” America was
approaching a “demographic tipping point” that was complicated further still by
increasing miscegenation. (Hsu) American society’s response at the time is
reflected in its culture and governance. A popular book, The Rising Tide of
Color: The Threat Against White World-Supremacy written by Harvard-educated
Lathrop Stoddard in 1920, argued that the explosion and migration of non-white
people (which included southern Europeans) would challenge white
world-supremacy and that the elimination or absorption of the white race by
non-white races would result in the destruction of Western civilization.
(Wiki1) In his seminal work, The Tragic Black Buck: Racial Masquerading in
the American Literary Imagination, Professor Carlyle Van Thompson notes the
racially-based social upheaval of the time. (Buck 80) The 1915 film “The Birth
of a Nation” had been screened at the White House and its ideas were ascendant.
The historic KKK “bloody summer” happened in 1919 and it helped introduce
immigration limiting legislation in 1921. The Johnson-Reed Act to limit
immigration by people of African descent was passed in 1924. Also about this
time, New York and Virginia introduced legislation to ban interracial marriage.
Lynchings were still happening.
Fitz said that he wanted TGG to be a novel
about modern American society. (LitRef 156) Given the zeitgeist, it makes sense
for it to have a race as a central theme.
Some think young Fitz was a socially confident
rich boy, but in fact he was never confident partly due to what he would call
his mixed “breeding” and only sometimes rich.
The Irish were often called “white Negros” and
were compared to black Americans, the African Bushmen and Hottentots. (Buck 79)
His mother was “black Irish”, considered to be the lowest of the low. (1) She
was born to a rich Catholic family, was educated at a convent, travelled Europe
and lived in a mansion. (So 47) His father came from a whiter Irish Catholic
family that claimed English ancestry and had been in America long enough
to be “old American stock”, but which
was longer on pedigree than cash. (Far 15, So 19) When his father lost his last
good job, Fitz’s mother’s family money kept them in rented homes in ritzy
neighborhoods. However, his father’s lack of status and inconsistent income
meant that Fitz never felt socially secure amongst his wealthier neighbors. He
was publicly disliked by his school mates and the teachers but he gained a
degree of popularity through stories he wrote. (TurnBio 20) At Princeton,
although he was otherwise a failure, his creativity earned him entry to the
drama scene and to a prestigious eating club. (Far 46) At about the same time,
his rich girlfriend’s society rejected him with the adage that would inspire his
greatness: “Poor boys shouldn’t dream of marrying rich girls.” (Far 57)
Fitz once said “my experience was always that
of a poor boy in a rich town; a poor boy in a rich boy’s school; a poor boy in
a rich man’s club at Princeton . . . I have never been able to forgive the rich
for being rich and it has colored my entire life’s works.” (So 56) His father’s
financial failure clearly left a mark on him. His heritage left another.
A
Darker Shade of Pale
Today, American whites are seen as a
monolithic group, the countries of their ancestors being nothing more than a
former neighborhood. (Pursuit, Catholics, Anti-Irish, Signs) Thus, it is easy
to underestimate the severity of Fitzgerald’s racial inferiority complex and
its significance to his writing.
The early British Americans opposed the
migration and citizenship of non-whites, southern Europeans and Catholics.
(Catholics, Signs, Anti-Irish) In Fitzgerald’s 1920s America, white,
Anglo-Saxon Protestants (“WASPs”) still ruled. (Chosen 23) Amongst the most hated
non-WASP groups were Irish people. The Irish were assigned a very low status
within the white racial class – and some begrudged them even that. They were
often caricatured as simians or monsters and were considered by some to be as
inferior to Anglos as black people were thought to be. (Signs) They were called
“white negroes” or “niggers turned inside out” and were mercilessly stereotyped
as happy, lazy, drunk and stupid. (Pursuit, Anti-Irish) Freed black people and
Irish people were often segregated into shared slums, thereby depriving the
Irish of separate and better housing, one of the prime privileges of white
skin. (Pursuit) Irish people received unequal and disrespectful treatment by
the police, as exemplified by the description of police wagons as “Paddy”
wagons. Paddy (short for Patrick) was a racist term for the Irish. (Pursuit)
Businesses commonly posted “No Irish Need Apply” signs and some states forbade
or taxed the entry of Irish people. (Signs, Anti-Irish) A British visitor
famously declared that being called an Irishman was “almost as great an insult
as to be stigmatized as a nigger feller.” (Anti-Irish)
Being
Irish meant that you were not an Anglo-Saxon, of course, but it also likely
meant that you were not a Protestant. Protestantism was central to the identity
of the British American as opposed to the Catholicism that characterized people
from Ireland and continental Europe. Catholics were “others” and the Pope was
considered to be the anti-Christ. (Catholics) Most American colonies initially
banned Catholics and all of them later discriminated against them. There were
anti-Catholic riots and church burnings. (Catholics, Signs) Catholics were
often banned from political office and even from voting by requiring them to
take oaths that were known to be offensive to Catholics. (Anti-Irish) The top
establishments of American culture and learning - Harvard, Yale and Princeton - did not welcome
Catholics. (Chosen 2, 23, 24, 25, 48) Historian John Higham described America’s
deep bias against Catholics as a “luxuriant, tenacious tradition.” (Catholics)
Thus, Irish Catholic Fitzgerald, a man who
wanted more than anything to be an insider, was a natural born outsider.
Catholicism, as a belief system, proved to be easier to discard than his racial
footing. His sense that he could choose away from it is evidenced by this 1918
entry in his log: “last year as a Catholic.” (First) But his Irish roots bound
him. To Fitzgerald, a person’s racial status - mixed or pure, high or low - was immutable, unchangeable by one’s actions
or character. He believed that due to his mixed status, even if he became the
King of Scotland or graduated from Eton he would be regarded as a “parvenu”, a
person of obscure origin, therefore a person without respectable societal
standing. (Tragic 78)
Fitzgerald knew that he was perceived as being
barely white. He knew that his
financial and artistic success would never be enough to match the pedigree of
his neighbors and schoolmates. He hoped that Zelda’s unquestionable whiteness
would help.
And so it was for Jay Gatsby. Being as white
as his darkest link, he reached out for Daisy’s apparent white girlhood. He
almost made it in West Egg, just as Fitz almost made it at Princeton. Society
man Tom Buchanan threw Gatsby into the animus of George Wilson just as the
society men of Princeton’s Cottage Club threw Fitzgerald out of its rear
window.
Fitz compared himself to Gatsby: “[Gatsby]
started as one man I knew and then changed into myself. . . the amalgam was
never completed.” (Buck 79) Think about that. Fitz, not fully rich, not pure
bred from his perspective, says he is like his character Gatsby. Interestingly,
despite the many, many letters Fitz wrote there are few references to his
parents. (So 62) As he tried to pass into the upper-class, Fitz left them off
the resume just as people who racially pass do, just as Gatsby does.
Fitz’s own biography forms the substrate of
TGG. He wrote about the relationship between people with money and easy lives
and those without because he understood what it was like to have neither, to be
an outsider, to be on the brink of being called out, to be uncomfortable about
where you fit in society. He knew the paradoxical desire to want to join the
insiders even as you despise them. And he knew that a single slip up - a job loss, one inconvenient
biographical/biological fact – could keep you out.
_____________________________________________
(1) There are many definitions for this term,
ranging from an Irish person with dark eyes and hair to an Irish person who may
have black ancestry. (Wiki 13)
Evidence of
Fitz’s belief in racial hierarchy is shown in his letters, by anecdote and in
his fiction. Before launching into these next three posts I want to note that I
am not writing them to prove that Fitz was a racist. I’m writing them to show
that his attitudes and the climate in which he wrote make it very possible –
and even likely – for TGG to have race as a central theme….
Some modern filmed entertainment studios make
it a practice to know the attitudes and backgrounds of the head writers they
employ. To know the writer is to get a sense of his or her angle on things and
therefore get a better idea of what they might write and how they might write
about it. Taking this approach, this is what I conclude about Fitz.
Fitz had a family background that supported
the ideals of the Confederacy, which he doubled down on by marrying another
person steeped in that ideology and by supporting the white supremacist ideals
promulgated by eugenicists in the 1920s and 1930s. At the same time, though, he
himself felt the sting of that supremacy due to – what he might call it when he
was drunk – his own half-breed status. He also felt the sting of the lack of
money. He voted for Roosevelt and supported left wing causes that would help
eradicate socioeconomic distinctions between white people, but insisted on
keeping the racial distinctions, which he felt were based on science and thus
were fair play. This is why he might write a novel that cleverly plays with
both race and class on the bumpy road to the American Dream, or as Fitz might
say it “Under the Red, White and Blue”. (1)
_____________________________________________
(1)
That was his second favorite title for the novel. (Sons 39)
The noted historian, Arthur M. Schlesinger,
Jr. said that the Europeans who came to America sought to “forget a horrid past
and embrace a hopeful future. They expected to become American… Their goals
were escape, deliverance and assimilation.” (Disuniting 17) So, then the
American Dream is one of transformation. This lines up with the peculiarly
American device of racial passing, particularly passing from blackness into the
whiteness that is associated with privilege and property….
Post #6 A
True Story of Passing in 19th/20th Century New York and
its Parallels to Gatsby
In
the first third of the 20th century there was quite a bit of concern about
racial mixing and hiding. Think about it. Now that black bodies were not owned
or controlled, it was harder to identify who they were or where they came from.
There was no slave holder able to say, “I know that one – she’s black.” …
Everyone agrees that TGG is a story about
climbing over barriers to the American Dream. In the opening line, Nick says
his father told him that “all the people in the world haven’t had all the
advantages you’ve had.” (TGG 19) We know that the two biggest disadvantages to
achieving the American Dream is membership in a “lower” class or a non-white
race. Understanding Gatsby as black, then, does not undermine what we know
about TGG. It underscores it….
Kathleen
Martinez, a criminal attorney and maverick archaeologist from the Dominican
Republic, has reason to believe that she will find Cleopatra’s tomb at
Taposiris Magna, a gigantic, ancient temple complex in Alexandria, Egypt….
In July 1922, Fitz wrote to his editor, Max
Perkins, that he wanted TGG to be “something new – something extraordinary and
beautiful and simple – intricately patterned.” (So 106)
Perkins said TGG was a novel in which “a vast
amount is said by implication” and that it was “over the heads of many.” (Life 109)
Fitz said that even his most enthusiastic reviewers
had “not the slightest idea what the book was about.” (Sons 44)
Let’s go symbol hunting, and weighing and
measuring, to see what they missed.
There is a growing body of literature that
discusses Gatsby’s race. Most reviewers don’t go as far as calling him black.
Instead they refer to his ethnicity or race as some form or another of “off-whiteness”
(Obscene 132) – which is curious as we live in a one-drop society. Some refer
to it as “somewhat vague” (Slater 56), possibly not “pure Aryan stock” (So
101), not “quite white” (Native 25), etc. Either way, the point is that there
is growing understanding that he is not the ultra-white character that we
assumed. The word is out.
Professor Thompson argues that Fitzgerald
skillfully uses signifiers of blackness to indicate Gatsby’s non-white status. The
signifiers (not blatant descriptors) suggest not only the blackness of Gatsby’s
body, but also the presence and atmosphere of black culture around him – which
when weighed and measured together imply his race.
The next parts explain the import of the signifiers
identified by Professor Thompson and others I identified.
“ORCHESTRA [at Gatsby’s party…] NO THIN FIVE-PIECE
AFFAIR, BUT A WHOLE PITFUL OF OBOES AND TROMBONES AND SAXOPHONES AND VIOLS AND
CORNETS AND PICCOLOS AND LOW AND HIGH DRUMS” […] plays “YELLOW COCKTAIL MUSIC”
and the “JAZZ HISTORY OF THE WORLD” and a party goer does a “FRISCO” dance
while Gatsby himself “SURPRISES” Nick with his “GRACEFUL FOX-TROT”.* (TGG 47,
48, 55, 97)
There’s much to unpack here. Obviously, one
stereotype of black people is the ability to dance to rhythmic music. In the
1920s the Fox Trot – which Gatsby does so well – was one of many dances that
were initially popularized by black Americans. The Fox Trot and its pre-cursors,
the Bunny Hug and the Turkey Trot, were danced to ragtime music, another tag to
black culture. All three dances were considered imitative of the sex acts of
lower animals. While the presence of such dancing and music at Gatsby’s party does
not mean that he is black, it does associate him with entertainment that
originated with, and is deemed by some to characterize, black people.
Then there’s the standard European-style
orchestra mashed up against black culture by playing “yellow” cocktail music.
Not just “cocktail music.” The yellow is to signify the blend, perhaps even, a
taint. Musician Richard Williams and Professor Thompson each say that Fitz
refers here to a variant of jazz music called “symphonic jazz” - classical
music with jazz influences. (Bluemoment; Buck 88) One piece of music played at
this Gatsby party is said to have caused a sensation at Carnegie Hall. Well,
the year that Fitz wrote TGG a piece of symphonic jazz did just that at a hall
up the street. It was “Rhapsody in Blue” played by George Gershwin himself at
Aeolian Hall. (Cocktail) Think of its opening bars… and there you have it –
yellow music. Again, Gatsby is surrounded by black culture, in this case a
mixture of black and white.
Fitz, by detailing the orchestra, the dance,
the music, etc. is showing us a presence and acceptance of blackness around
Gatsby and is encouraging us to make the leap, to follow the implication.
“HIS TANNED SKIN WAS DRAWN ATTRACTIVELY
TIGHT”* (TGG 55) At the start of the novel Gatsby has no reason to be tanned.
Tanning became especially trendy when Coco Chanel came back suntanned/burnt
from a vacation in 1923. This novel is set in 1922 and no one else of the East
or West Egg set is noted as having tanned skin. “Pale” – yes. “Brown” or “tan”
– yes, if the person spends time out of doors (like Gatsby when he was a sailor
and outdoor worker and the golfer Jordan.) But “tanned” with no reason to be
so? No. No one else.
“SHORT HAIR LOOKED AS THOUGH IT WERE TRIMMED
EVERYDAY”* (TGG 55) This styling allows very curly hair to lie flat.
“HIS GORGEOUS PINK RAG OF A SUIT”* (TGG 134)
Gatsby wears white and pink suits, colored and silver shirts, and gold ties.
That is the outlandishly colorful and ridiculous outfit of a minstrel, a Jim
Crow, a circus barker. Also, why is his suit a “rag”? Certainly, this is not
the dress of respectable, white, wealthy Yale or Oxford men of the times. It is
more likely a tie to both rag music and slave rags.
“CARAMEL-COLORED SUIT” (TGG 65) Gatsby wears
this suit that reveals his true, blended color during scenes in which (a) he
states a series of lies, (b) he is between a car of white people and a car of
black people and (c) he meets his friend, the gangster Wolfshiem, in a
restaurant that is appropriately located in a cellar.
“RICH CREAM COLOR . . . SWOLLEN HERE AND THERE
IN ITS MONSTROUS LENGTH” (TGG 65) and “YELLOW CAR”* (TGG 123) These are the
descriptions of Gatsby’s car. A common moniker for a light-skinned person in
the black community – especially one who is putting on airs - is “high yellow.” Add this to the myth that
black men have extra-large sex organs and voila – you have two race signifiers
in one. (By the way, Tom with his blue blood has a blue coupe.)
“More than 40 ACRES OF LAWN AND GARDENS”* (TGG
22) That and a mansion describe Gatsby’s property. This echoes the 40 acres and
a mule promised by the government to former slaves. The property of both Gatsby
and the former slaves can be seen as ill-gotten: from bootlegging in Gatsby’s
case and from the confiscation of slaveholder property in the ex-slaves’ case.
In this way, Gatsby shares a profile with newly freed black Americans whom many
felt had been unfairly and illegally benefitted, causing a disruption to the
social order.
BOOTLEGGER* (TGG 63) A bootlegger is one who
sells counterfeit products. In TGG, Gatsby is both the bootlegger and the
product. He sells himself as old money and white when he is neither. Bootleg
whiskey was illegally manufactured and was deemed to be aberrant and impure. A
Gatsby of mixed race fits the bill.
WEST INDIES* (TGG 93) Jimmy Gatz’ journey to
become Jay Gatsby begins as he sheds his shredded clothes and replaces them
with the blue and white nautical dress of a yachtsman. Where do he and his
slick benefactor Dan Cody go first? The West Indies. This is a signal that those
nautical whites will not change where you came from or where you are going.
(Sounds like currents sweeping you ceaselessly into your past, doesn’t it?)
MONTENEGRO* Here Fitz uses one word to do
double duty. Montenegro is in Southeastern Europe and the name means “black
mountain.” Here Fitz gives Gatsby a history that tangentially connects him to
two races.
DEAD FAMILY/MISSING PARENT* Only Gatsby’s
father shows up for his funeral. There’s no explanation for his mother’s
absence and no discussion of her reaction to his death. For obvious reasons, in
the literature of passing the black parent usually does not share scenes with
the main characters. This doesn’t prove Gatsby’s mother is black; but if she
were she would not be seen and she isn’t seen or even mentioned in the novel.
Thus, Gatsby’s biography falls in line with that of other passing literary
characters who must craft a new identity out of a shady past.
“A PALE WELL DRESSED NEGRO [said] . . . IT WAS
A YELLOW CAR”* (TGG 123) Back in the day, light-skinned blacks were used by
businesses as “spotters” of other light-skinned blacks. The spotter’s purpose
was to prevent unintended integration by racial passers. After Myrtle dies it
is just such a person who ends up calling out Gatsby’s car. This man does not
identify Gatsby himself as the driver, but the fact that Fitz chooses to have
someone of his description be the one who points the finger towards Gatsby
references such spotters.
“WHAT DID YOU SAY TO WILSON THAT AFTERNOON?”
(TGG 152) Tom admits to Nick that he told George that Gatsby had killed Myrtle.
The text indicates that Tom knew it was a lie. Professor Carlyle Van Thompson
has noted the conspiratorial nature to this co-operation between the two men
whose commonality is not class but race. These white men cross the class divide
to work together to save the honor of their white wives. Which leaves Gatsby on
the other side of that other divide. (1)
“ON THE WHITE STEPS AN OBSCENE WORD, SCRAWLED
BY SOME BOY WITH A PIECE OF BRICK, STOOD OUT CLEARLY IN THE MOONLIGHT, AND I
ERASED IT, DRAWING MY SHOE RASPINGLY ALONG THE STONE.”* (TGG 153) In chapters
three and five Gatsby’s steps are referred to four times as “marble”, no color
noted. By chapter eight those steps are referred to as “white” and Gatsby in
his pink suit stands out as a “bright spot of color” against them. In chapter
nine they are white again. But now Gatsby is dead and where he last stood in
pink-of-life relief against them, there is an obscene word. Could the single
word have been one about blackness? Could the boys have tagged Gatsby’s home
the way the homes of neighborhood undesirables have been tagged for centuries?
Seems very possible. This small action occurs just three sentences before we
get to the green light stuff. When we think about the patterning and the clues
that have come before, it seems unlikely for the word to be unrelated to the
story, or to the man. It has to matter. And just one single, meaningful,
obscene word comes to mind.
_____________________________________________
* These signifiers were identified by
Professor Thompson. (Buck 75-103)
(1) Further evidence of the Tom-George-white
supremacy link (and thus also Gatsby’s race) is that Tom and George each share
a surname with a president who is especially associated with the preservation
of slavery and/or racist behaviors and policies: James Buchannan and Woodrow Wilson.
Another tiny pillar.
Gatsby’s
war record sounds like that of black WWI soldiers
There was a famous WWI battle in
the Meuse-Argonne forest. The all-black 92nd American division (92nd)
was ordered to fill the gap between the all-white 77th American division
on one side of them and the allied French soldiers on the other side. (Wiki5, Dallas)
That means the 92nd was
in the
middle. The middle. This is important.
Some scholars believe that
Gatsby’s description of the battle he says he engaged in matches up with this
real battle. (Wiki5) It is easy to assume when reading TGG that Gatsby was
white and not French and so therefore participated in this battle as part of
the 77th Division, the white American unit. However, the description
of Gatsby’s service better matches the experience of black soldiers who were at
this battle, like Nathan Goodloe.
Gatsby’s war story: Gatsby tells Nick that he
fought in the “ARGONNE FORREST” as a “LIEUTENANT” and that he engaged in a
dangerous operation where a “GAP ON EITHER SIDE” of his unit developed and he
killed many Germans with machine guns called “LEWIS GUNS”. With an unusual
level of detail, he also says that he was in the infantry until “JUNE 1918”
when he joined a “MACHINE GUN BATTALION.” Further he produces a medal that he
says is the “ORDERI DI DANILO” medal from Montenegro for this service. (TGG 66)
Goodloe’s war story: After much public
controversy, the US Army created two black combat units in WWI: the 92nd
and the 93rd. (Respect) The
92nd Division shipped out in “JUNE 1918.” (Wiki4) One black soldier
named LIEUTENANT Nathan Goodloe in that division joined the MACHINE GUN BATTALION.
During the Meuse-Argonne battle, Goodloe fought heroically. Even though his
division, the 92nd, was roundly criticized for allowing the gap to
occur, he was given a commendation – but it was not the Orderi di Danilo.
Once again, Gatsby is placed near blackness.
First, by having Gatsby fight in the space between friendly forces, he places
Gatsby in the middle, which is where the black 92nd unit was
supposed to be. Second, it’s unlikely that Gatsby was in the 77th
Division. That was a famously heroic division and if he were in it he surely
would have claimed it. He doesn’t. Third, because the army was segregated, if
you declared your unit, you declared your race. A black Gatsby would have every
reason to lie about his division and he does. (See below) Fourth, Gatsby says
he used Lewis guns, which are machine guns. Those guns were disfavored and not
adopted by the American army, but they were popular with the French. (Wiki7,
Military) Parts of the 92nd during this battle were under French
command. (Wiki4) Gatsby’s specific statement that he used Lewis guns is further
indication that he was part of the black 92nd Division.
Of
all the battles in all of WWI…
Why does Fitz attach Gatsby so closely to this
battle where a black unit famously fought? Why is the date Gatsby left the infantry
to join the machine gun battalion the same date that the 92nd ’s machine
gun battalion shipped out to the Argonne? Why does Fitz even specify the month
and year of such a seemingly unimportant fact? Why does he tell us exactly what
sort of machine gun Gatsby uses? It seems that he is tracing real events and
perhaps even real people. (1)
Gatsby’s Role
Models
Camp Taylor in Louisville housed black
soldiers and officers from the 92nd Division. Even though the camp
had segregated facilities, the white and black soldiers did see and meet each
other and sometimes trained together. (Sweeney 79, 80, Scott 81) Fitzgerald spent a month at Camp Taylor in
Louisville in 1918. (TurnBio 82) While there he likely observed black soldiers
like Goodloe and knew something about the 92nd’s general movements.
He would have seen black soldiers who could pass as white – such as Julian
Bond’s grandfather who was stationed there. It is well-established by critics
and Fitz himself that he wrote closely from his experience and frequently used
events from real life. Thus, it is plausible that Fitz used his knowledge of
these soldiers when coming up with Gatsby, a young soldier who met Daisy in Louisville,
of all places.
Gatsby Dresses the Part
The circumstance in which Gatsby presents his
war medal also indicates that he is lying about his race. In chapter 4 of TGG
Gatsby presents what he says is an Orderi di Danilo medal given to him by
Montenegro for his military service. It is metal and engraved in English. (TGG
67) The real Orderi medal is enameled and not engravable and the printing it
does have is in Cyrillic. Clearly, Gatsby’s medal is fake.
In a 1924 letter, Fitz asked his editor to
tell him what the Orderi medal looked like. (Sons 33) If there was a response,
it has been lost. What is clear though is that the medal’s physical description
matters to the story in some way because Fitz took care to describe it. It
seems he wanted to know what the real one looked like so he could make Gatsby’s
medal as wrong as these other statements in the passage are:
Gatsby was the son of a westerner, not a
middle-westerner;
he had the chance to take some classes at
Oxford, but was not a true Oxford student;
he was the assistant to paternalistic wealthy
people, not their son; and
he didn’t travel Europe like a rajah.
What’s important about this is that when
spouting these lies on what Nick calls the “disconcerting ride” to New York
(TGG 65) Gatsby wears a “caramel-colored” suit. In this scene, Fitz invites us
to take another look at the man we now know for sure is not who he says he is.
And when we do, there he is, covered in brown.
The 7th Infantry Lie
A seemingly unremarkable conversation between
Nick and Gatsby is one of the most revealing passages in the novel. In this
conversation, Nick’s truth about his military service exposes Gatsby’s lie
about his, and thereby Gatsby’s lie about his race.
In chapter 3, Gatsby tells Nick that he was in
the 7th Infantry. (TGG 53) In the lie-filled passage in chapter 4
mentioned above, Gatsby says that he fought in a battle in the Argonne Forest.
(TGG 66) The problem is that the 7th Infantry was never in the
Argonne Forest. (US Forces) So, is he lying about the 7th or about
the Argonne? And why?
He is lying about the 7th and
here’s how we know. In chapter 3, Gatsby tells Nick that he has seen him during
the war, which implies that Nick and Gatsby fought in the same place. Remember,
Gatsby claims to have fought in the Argonne. In that same conversation in chapter
3, Gatsby tells Nick he was in the 7th Infantry and Nick says that he
was in the 3rd Division, 9th MG Battalion. (TGG 53)
Nick’s claim checks out – his division and battalion were in the Argonne. Again,
Gatsby’s was not. (USForces) Both men fought in the war, but these facts give Nick’s
statement the ring of truth and Gatsby’s the ring of truthiness.
Fitz deliberately places this exchange about
military units outside of the lie-filled passage. If both the 7th Infantry
statement and the Argonne statement were in the lie-filled passage, we wouldn’t
know which was false even though we know that one must be. By placing Gatsby’s vague
7th Infantry lie next to Nick’s specific 3rd Division, 9th
Battalion truth, Fitz is tipping us that that is where the lie is. Gatsby
fought in the Argonne, just not in the division that he claimed. Fitzgerald has
skillfully introduced one truth into the lie-filled passage (i.e., that Gatsby fought in the
Argonne), and uses that truth to prove an earlier statement to be a lie. (Here,
I pause to remind that it is important to read TGG with heightened awareness of
its intricate design.)
Gatsby lied and now here’s why. It was big
news - even civilians knew – that the 92nd
was a black unit and that it was the only one in the Argonne. If a bi-racial
Gatsby wanted to brag about his Argonne experience he could not have stated his
true military unit. And he doesn’t.
This is a curious sequence of
choices by Fitz. When added all together it seems that Gatsby was an
undistinguished soldier in a black division in the Argonne battle. If so, what
to make of Nick’s exclamation that the medal “had an authentic look”? (TGG 67)
Answer: It looked as real as Gatsby’s uncut library books looked from far away.
Neither the medal nor the books are quite what they should be. A careful read
of Nick’s response to the medal shows that it is similar to the response of the
wiser Owl Eyes who more clearly expresses his appreciation for the quality of
the fakery, calling Gatsby a “regular Belasco.” (TGG 52) Belasco was a pioneer
of stage lighting and effects. (Wiki6) But what about the war medals that
Wolfshiem says Gatsby wore on his uniform? Well, we know he offered at least
one fake medal, so why not more?
Gatsby’s less than stellar
military service fits in nicely with his racial and other lies. They all have a
few drops of truth.
_____________________________________________
(1) Goodloe’s
story made headlines and could have been known by Fitz. An armchair follower of
the war, he followed the news and even mapped out the battles.
A charactonym is a literary device where the
author gives a character a name that suggests that character’s traits. Charles
Dickens used them often. The tough teachers in his Hard Times are named
Mr. Gradgrind and McChokum Child and the title character in his most
autobiographical novel, David Copperfield, shares his initials in
reverse. Remus Lupin, the werewolf in the Harry Potter series, and Daddy Warbucks
in “Annie” are other examples.
Now,
“Gatsby”….
Post #12 Who’s “all white here”?
Gatsby, Nick, Daisy, Tom and Jordan sit in the
Plaza Hotel room when Tom “standing alone on the last barrier of civilization”
once again launches into his eugenics theories. In one of TGG’s most iconic
lines Jordan says, “We’re all white here.” (TGG 116)
No one objects.
So, then how can Gatsby be black?...
Post
#13 What did Nick Know?
There’s a call and response in the literary
world. It goes like this:
Call: “unreliable narrator”
Response: “Nick Carraway”
He’s the prime example of a narrator who does
not tell you everything. He’s a Yale man, an upstanding Middle- Westerner.
While lying may be beneath him, courteous and secret omission is not.
He lets us know in the second line of the
novel that when someone has not “had the advantages” that he has had, he has
been taught to avoid criticizing them. And he does just that by laying out
Gatsby’s lies, but never calling them lies. For example, Nick likely knows that
Gatsby is lying about his hometown because San Francisco is not in the Middle-West;
that the 7th Infantry was not in the Argonne; and that Gatsby is not
a legitimate businessman. Nick knows these things, but never directly says to
the reader that Gatsby had lied. Even more indicative of his penchant for
omission is that Nick also doesn’t tell the other characters.
This pattern of Nick showing us the lie, but
not calling it repeats when it comes to Gatsby’s race.
It seems that Nick is suspicious of Gatsby’s
race from the start. Shortly after his tanned skin/frequently trimmed hair
observation he says: “I would have accepted without question the information
that Gatsby sprang from the swamps of Louisiana or the lower east side of New
York.” (TGG 54) Note, not just the swamps. Not just Louisiana. Not just New
York, but the lower east side. Why?
To this day older black New Orleans residents
refer to the “front of town” and “back of town”. The back of town is the
swampland close to Lake Pontchartrain that flooded in Hurricane Katrina. In
Fitz’s time, free blacks and Creoles lived in the back of town/swamp
neighborhoods. (Wiki8) There was so much racial mixture and social fluidity in
these neighborhoods that Creoles developed a term for the racial passers:
“passabone”. (Buck 85) If Gatsby is a passabone it is plausible that someone
like him had started out from such a place, just as Nick suggests.
Nick suggests that Gatsby could also have come
from the “Five Points” neighborhoods of New York’s lower east side. Freed black
people were originally segregated there and they stayed there until they were
pushed to Harlem in the 1920s. (Columbia1) It’s of note that around the time of
Gatsby’s birth (c. 1890) other lower east side districts that were close to the
black ones had so many German immigrants they were called “kleindeutschland”
(Columbia2). There are hints that Gatsby is part German because the name “Gatz”
is mostly considered to be German (Jew, Obscene 133) and his father follows the
Lutheran religion, popular in Germany. (Slater 56) It’s easy to imagine a
Gatsby of mixed race springing from here.
Swamps or New York’s lower east side, either
way Gatsby is once again placed amongst black populations and culture. And if
it is both ways (i.e., he has a German
father and a Creole mother), then Gatsby is the personification of the
northward creeping negroid streak. (Thus, it makes sense within the novel’s
themes that Tom has a hand in vanquishing him. This is an example of how a
black Gatsby renders this book whole and seamless.)
Let’s re-consider the caveat: don’t criticize
people who “haven’t had the advantages you’ve had.”
We know that Nick largely doesn’t criticize
Gatsby. Based on Nick’s principles, it follows that he must deem Gatsby to have
disadvantages. Since Nick believes that Gatsby may have come from one of the
well-established locales of free (usually lighter-skinned) black Americans, it
is possible that Nick believes (or at least wonders) whether Gatsby’s
disadvantages go beyond class to race. But having concluded that Gatsby is
“worth the whole damn bunch” of the “rotten crowd” (TGG 134), Nick is not going
to tell us. He is not going to let anyone else tell us either – that’s why he
calmly erases the obscene word on the steps, a word whose appearance didn’t
seem to surprise him. Thus, following the pattern, Nick has laid Gatsby’s
biggest lie out in front of us, but refuses to call it.
I think in the end Nick was indeed what he
said he was: a “keeper of the secret griefs of wild, unknown men.”
A) Tom Buchannan would not
have a black man in his house. The rebuttal is that Gatsby is a light-skinned
black man and that Tom doesn’t know. Tom’s ignorance is part of the novel’s
structure and its theme at once. (Fitz is a genius.)…
Post #15 Why Fitz didn’t “tell” on
Gatsby
A) Fitz repeatedly said that
no one understood what the book was about. Since readers and reviewers alike
saw the obvious class theme, that could not have been what they didn’t get. So if
Gatsby is a bi-racial character, why didn’t Fitz tell everyone? He tried. His
first instinct was to tell us through his favorite title for the book
(“Trimalchio in West Egg”), which his publisher advised against, and through
the book jacket note, which his publisher forbade. The reason Fitz gave in is
that he was on dangerous ground….
A few years ago, I saw the
fabulous six-hour production of The Great Gatsby (with a 30 - minute
intermission.) One actor read the book cover-to-cover as he and others silently
performed some of the action. I recall remarking that
the audience laughed quite a bit. I thought nothing more of it until now….
Post #17 Everybody loves Jay
because everybody is Jay
I’ve never met a single
person who dislikes the character Jay Gatsby even if they dislike the novel
itself….
Upon hearing the Black Gatsby
thesis, I went in search of evidence that would support it. First, I examined the
contextual evidence (i.e., Fitz’s
political point of view and biography as well as the zeitgeist.) Next, I examined
the textual evidence of the thesis.
The following posts include an
analysis of the physical evidence. If someone is stabbed, there should be blood
somewhere. If there is an underlying principal theme of blackness in TGG, there
should be some residue of that scheme beyond the pages of the book. In short,
there should be "chatter". Everywhere I looked I found it. Here goes.
The next three posts show how the history of
the selection of the title, the deletion of the infamous book jacket note and
the physical description of Gatsby support the Black Gatsby thesis….
A “scheme” is a
clever and often dishonest plan to do or get something.
I have never
heard of character description being part of a novelist’s scheme. But it is in
TGG and Fitz and Perkins worked together to preserve it. First, they kept the
safer title to avoid betraying Gatsby’s character. Then, they had to come up
with a physical description of him….
I started this quest looking for the note that
Fitz wrote for the book jacket. He thought the note would support the book and
Scribner’s thought it would injure it. In the end the note was not included….
I agree with Professor
Maureen Corrigan that the novel has a “fated feel to it. All exit doors are
locked before the story begins: . . . the end is preordained.” (So 10) In the
face of this unchangeable and persistent past, it is appropriate that Fitz’s
own hopeful, hardworking protagonist dies in a pool of tiny currents, befitting
both his limited boundaries and insufficient power to disturb what came before,
to make a wave….
“The whole idea of Gatsby is
the unfairness of a young man not being able to marry a girl with money,” said
Fitzgerald. (TurnBio 150) If that is what it was all about, I suggest that
it is not what it was only about….
I will always wonder what
Fitz would have had left in his tank if he had not filled it with so much gin
and Zelda….
Works Cited
92nd
|
“History of the American Negro in the Great
World War eBook”
<http://www.bookrags.coom/ebooks/16598/148.html#gsc.tab=0>
|
AMC
|
Mad Men, AMC, 2007 – 2015. Television.
|
Anti-Irish
|
Dolan, Jay P., “Anti-Irish Racism in the
United States”, August 1997.
<http://www3.nd.edu/~jdolan/IRISHCONFERENCE-CORK.html >
|
Auction
|
Bruccoli, Matthew J., ed. And Judith S.
Baughman, F. Scott Fitzgerald in the
Marketplace: The Auction and Dealer Catalogues, 1935-2006, Columbia, U of
South Carolina Press 2009
|
Authorship
|
Fitzgerald, F. Scott, F. Scott Fitzgerald on Authorship, Columbia, University of South
Carolina Press 1996
|
(more)
|
|
“92nd
Infantry Division (United States)”, Wikipedia, <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/92nd_Infantry-division-(United_States)>
Accessed 11/14/2016
|
“93rd
Infantry Division (United States)”,
Wikipedia,
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/93rd_Infantry_Division_(United_States)>
date last modified 10/25/2016 Accessed 9/29/2016
|
“African
American Heritage”
<http://www.dkv.columbia.edu/demo/tenement/african_american_heritage.html
> Accessed 11/16/2016
|
“Anti-miscegenation
laws and the U.S. Constitution”
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-miscegenation-laws-in-the-United-States>
Accessed 11/11/2016
|
“Awards and
Decorations, World War I Statistics”, An extract from the Annual Report of the Secretary of War to
the President: War Department Fiscal Year Ended June 30, 1923. Government
Printing Office, 1923, p. 172
|
Bender, Bert, “His Mind Aglow: The Biological Undercurrent
in Fitzgerald’s ‘Gatsby’ and Other Works,” Journal of American Studies, Vol. 32, No. 3, Part 1 (Dec 1998)
<http://www.jstor.org/stable/27556476>
|
(more)
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