1
IN A
MINOR KEY
The Solo, Improvisation, and the Jazz Short Story
The short story has enjoyed a (comparatively) long and intimate relationship with jazz; from the literary criticâs perspective, jazz almost begins with the short story, in the guise of F. Scott Fitzgeraldâs 1922 epoch-naming volume, Tales of the Jazz Age. Not only did this book represent, even cement, the status of jazz as the defining aesthetic of the American 1920s and 1930s, it also authorized a particular association between short stories and jazz (as subject, tone, and stylistic influence). The ongoing importance and commercial success of this relationship is best exemplified by the number of volumesâincluding Chris Parkerâs 1986 collection B Flat, Bebop, Scat: Jazz Short Stories and Poems, Richard N. Albertâs 1990 volume From Blues to Bop: A Collection of Jazz Fiction, Marcela Bretonâs Hot and Cool: Jazz Short Stories (of the same year), and Sascha Feinstein and David Rifeâs 2009 Jazz Fiction Anthologyâthat anthologize and valorize the jazz short story as its own identifiable genre. But although these collections almost all include stories that range from Fitzgeraldâs jazz age to their present moment, by looking at the way this genre has evolved since the 1920s, one rapidly sees that particular tropes and narrative patterns started to recur in jazz fiction around the middle of the twentieth century, distinct from those initial appropriations of jazz.
As anyone who has been disappointed by Fitzgeraldâs volume will know, earlier short-story writers tended to overlook the musicians who created jazz, and focus on the music itself as a ready-made form of cultural capital. Indeed, as Ryan Jerving argues, jazz was âmost often soundedâ in 1920s literature in order to express âan affirmative relation to its time and place.â1 This tendency in turn reflected the commercial nature of the short story at the start of the twentieth century, where a writer like Fitzgerald saw himself as âwhoring his talentsâ writing short stories for âthe popular magazinesâ whose financial support âsustained him throughout his writing career.â2 Starting in 1934 with an early (perhaps originating) version by Langston Hughes, however, and with prominent examples by writers as disparate as Eudora Welty, James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison, and Richard Yates, a distinctive genre of âjazz storyâ developed over the 1940s and 1950s that instead focused squarely on the jazz musician: in particular, a virtuosic performer who struggles with isolation and loneliness.
That this period should see writers increasingly turn to jazz as a way of grappling with the parameters and possibilities of loneliness should not be surprising. The period that Riesman characterized as the age of âthe lonely crowdâ was bookended by works like Carson McCullersâs 1940 novel The Heart is a Lonely Hunter and Yatesâs 1962 collection Eleven Kinds of Loneliness; the subject was clearly at the forefront of the American literary psyche. Indeed, as Mary Caputi argues convincingly in A Kinder, Gentler America: Melancholia and the Mythical 1950s, the pressures of conformity and homogeneity led to an endemic experience of âloneliness and despair.â3 In turn, the performance of jazz was itself increasingly staged as an act of independence and nonconformist rebellion; Steven Elworth has shown that, by the 1940s, jazz was âno longer an important element in the dominant pop music of the day,â and instead was promoted as âan art music created primarily by young urban African Americans, part of a subculture with its own somewhat scandalous cultural codes and the use of various illegal drugs.â4 The jazz musician was consequently associated with individuality, nonconformity, and social isolation. At the same time, the popularity of the short story as a literary form, particularly among established writers, grew significantly over the course of the 1940s. Indeed, reflecting on the previous year in an article from 1951, the prominent critic Leslie Fiedler noted in wonder that there had ânever been so favourable a moment for the short story,â echoing similar summative reviews by Irving Howe, Nolan Miller, and Edith Mirrielees.5 But this popularity was not commensurate with an authoritative statusâinstead, the short story continued to be associated with a narrow focus and limited social relevance. Within the context of American publishing and criticism, it remained a minor form compared to the dominant mode of the novel.
Indeed, it was the minor aesthetics of the short storyâin terms of its limited focus, constrained size, and oppositional relationship to the novelâthat led writers as early as Hughes to turn to the short story as a structure for exploring the concept of loneliness through jazz. As Mary Louise Pratt has shown, criticsâ frequent recourse to the qualities of the novel when trying to define the short story is not in itself a sign of laziness, but instead a direct consequence of a tendency in âhighly institutionalized forms of discourse, like verbal art,â toward âpairs of short and long genres.â6 Although specialists in the short story like to maintain the idea that it is âan autonomous genre,â Pratt makes the useful observation that (in English, at least) the form of the short story is essentially defined by its brevity; given that âthe conceptual aspect is that shortness cannot be an intrinsic property of anything, but occurs only relative to something else,â whenever writers come to define the short story, they almost inevitably do so in contradistinction to the âlong story,â or novel.7 This is because the qualities that critics have routinely ascribed to the genre since the essays of Edgar Allan Poeâself-containedness, compression, focus on an individual rather than a group or community, unity of effectâall rely on an implicit contrast with a longer form that emphasizes the alternative. From this perspective, the form of the short story is not just minor for being short, but minor in that it embraces the qualities neglected by the major form of the novel.
In one light, this is a positive quality of the form; Poe certainly valorized the unifying effect of a narrow, constrained aesthetic model. Many critics, particularly in the mid-twentieth-century United States,
however, equated the minor aesthetics of the short story with fragmentation and isolation. In a 1945 essay on âThe Structure of the Modern Short Story,â for instance, A. L. Balder observed that âthe modern short story is plotless, static, fragmentary, amorphousâ
frequently a mere character sketch or vignette, or a mere reporting of a transient moment, or the capturing of a mood or nuance.â8 His charge that in such stories ânothing happensâ in fact conflated two frequent attacks on the short story: sometimes it implies âthat nothing significant happens,â while sometimes it means more generally that âthe modern short story is charged with a lack of narrative structure.â These critiques had a particular urgency at a time when American critics were concerned with promoting the more democratic form of the novel; equally, they echo comments that continue to be raised against the short story. They point to the âlurking associationsâ behind the juxtaposition of short fiction and novels: âif the short story is not a âfull-lengthâ narrative it cannot narrate a full-length life; it can narrate a fragment or excerpt of a life. And if from that fragment one can deduce things about the whole life, then the more novel-like, the more complete, the story is.â9 It makes sense, then, that the short story should be associated with isolation and loneliness, for its minor aestheticsâas Deleuze and Guattari argued of Kafkaâoffer a way for writers to retreat from the sociability and totality associated with the novel. As Hughesâs story âThe Blues Iâm Playingâ demonstrates, moreover, the short story also offers the writer aware of the rhetoric around the two genres a way to question the prevailing assumptions about loneliness and the short story, by emphasizing the expansive possibilities of both.
PLAYING THE BLUES: LONELINESS, THE SOLO, AND IMPROVISATION
Hughesâs early jazz story âThe Blues Iâm Playingâ (from his 1934 volume, The Ways of White Folks) had a profound effect on the way other writers would construct stories around jazz soloists. Focused on a prodigious black female pianist, âThe Blues Iâm Playingâ deliberately points to the long-established tropes around isolated artistic brilliance. Rather than simply eliding the virtuosic jazz musician with the larger mythology of the isolated and tormented romantic
genius, however, Hughes instead emphasized that brilliance as a musician came from a connection with a wider community, in the process moving the musicâs register from the blues to jazz.
At least on the surface, however, the formal elements of the story would seem to contradict this thematic movement toward connection. As theorists like Pratt are quick to emphasize, because it is defined by its limited size, any short story must inherently narrate events limited in scope, detail, or both. Nobody writing in the 1930s exemplified this trend more than Hughesâs contemporary Ernest Hemingway, whose âfamous prose styleâplain words, simple but artfully structured syntax, the direct presentation of the objectââwas coupled with a subject matter that focused insistently on âthe fragmentary nature of modern life, with its small local victories and defeats, its focus on the present moment and its prevailing mood of disillusion.â10 In the American short story of the 1930s through the 1950s, then, this intrinsic quality of âlimitationâ was elevated to the defining stylistic featureâand âThe Blues Iâm Playing,â with its close focus on a pair of characters and their relationship, and a narrative organized around a final turning point or moment of epiphany, foregrounds precisely such stylistic compression. The title, moreover, immediately suggests a connection between loneliness and jazz, riffing on the popular connotations of âthe blues,â so that, on the surface, the formal limitations of the story appear to reinforce the protagonistâs isolation, and the pain that is associated with her music. Hughesâs story was to prove so influential, however, because of the way it subverted the expectations established by both the title and the oppressive loneliness within the story, to offer a redemptive, expansive vision of being an individual, and being alone.
The story charts the relationship between an elderly white widow, Mrs. Ellsworth, and her âprotĂ©gĂ©eâ (78), the talented young (and crucially, black) pianist, Oceola. A patron to a number of artists, Mrs. Ellsworth expects Oceola to dedicate her life to perfecting her music, living the âbeautiful lifeâ of one of âthe few beautiful people who live for their artâand nothing elseâ (83). Idealizing a romantic narrative of sacrifice, wherein the artist rejects earthly pleasures in dedication to art, she encourages Oceola to give up her teaching and performances at churches, believing that âshe must learn to sublimate her soulâ (78). Crucially, this means rejecting love and emotional fulfillment; Mrs. Ellsworth tries to talk Oceola out of marrying a black medical student, Pete, and after they are engaged, blames âPeteâs influence on her protĂ©gĂ©eâ for a less-than-perfect performance: âAll that time you were playing on that stage, he was here, the monster! Taking you out of yourself, taking you away from the pianoâ (81). The kind of âbeautifulâ art that Mrs. Ellsworth wants her to create, moreover, is restricted to traditional genres: despite Oceolaâs love of jazz, Mrs. Ellsworth expects her to only play classical pieces, believing still âin art of the old school, portraits that really and truly looked like people, poems about nature, music that had soul in it, not syncopationâ (78). Hughes takes great pains not only to expose the coldness that lies beneath traditional expectations of geniusâthat âart is bigger than loveâ (83)âbut also to show the incompatibility of such isolation with jazz.
Ultimately, Oceola rejects her patronâs expectations of her lifestyle as an artist, and the kind of music she can produce. In the final action of the story, she breaks free from her patronâs stifling expectations, performing an earth-moving jazz improvisation at Mrs. Ellsworthâs house. By the time Hughes depicts this climactic, syncopated performance, however, he has already shown Oceola regularly questioning the validity of her patronâs idealized artistic life, wondering why âwhite folks think you could live on nothing but art?â (83). For a period, Mrs. Ellsworth pays for Oceola to live and study in France, where for the first time she mixes with a group of âseriousâ (rather than syncopated) artists. She cannot, however, understand how they can âargue so much about life or art,â juxtaposing their pained and intellectualized engagement with art against her own organic, holistic experience of music: she âmerely livedâand loved itâ (79). In defiance of her patronâs sacrificial expectations, moreover, Oceola maintains that she doesnât need to be isolated from other to create beautiful music. She forcefully demonstrates this not only through her relationship with Pete, but her insistence on continuing to perform in her community: âshe still loved to play for Harlem house parties,â where she no longer performed for money, but instead âout of the sheer love of jazzâ (78).
Indeed, her joy and success as an artist are directly connected to her relationships with others. It is telling that, despite the reference to âbluesâ in the title, within the story Hughes describes Oceolaâs performances as âjazz.â Like recent theorists, Hughes himself defined jazz in terms of its group dynamicâso that, in his well-known speech on âJazz as Communication,â he argues that the blues is a form of jazz when it moves toward communication. Within âThe Blues Iâm Playing,â certainly, Hughes characterizes Oceolaâs jazz performance as a form of musical expression that gains strength from a sense of community. It is what allows her to break down the loneliness that she otherwise feels in Paris: performing jazz at a black club, her music transcends the question of technical skill and instead takes on a communicative function. In a moment of transcendent signification, she makes âthe bass notes throb like tom-toms, the trebles cry like little flutes, so deep in the earth and so high in the sky that they understood everythingâ (79). This sense of shared understanding, bringing together the members of the audience and the performer, is reinforced by their unity of movement, and the pure pleasure Oceola feels when âthe night club would get up and dance to her blues.â Far from living for her art, Hughes asks us to see Oceola as living through her art.
Beyond the harmony created in the club, however, the story probes a broader question of community, to which Hughes would return a number of times in his career: whether art, particularly music, can overcome the racial divide in America. Oceola, on the one hand, seems to reject the idea that music could facilitate cross-racial unity, simply declaring âBunk!â to the âcultured Negroes who were always saying art would break down color lines, art could save the race and prevent lynchingsâ (79). And her stance seems justified, in light of Mrs. Ellsworthâs disdain for jazz, and horror at her performance in the final stages of the book. But equally, Oceola herself comes to define jazz as a form of artistic expression that brings together black and white, characterizing it through a bivalent aesthetic that encompasses dual
emotionsââListen! . . . How sad and gay it...