[Dixielandjazz] F. Scott Fitzgerald and music - Wall Street Journal, May 9, 2013

[Robert Ringwald]

The F. Scott Fitzgerald Songbook
by Will Friedwald
Wall Street Journal, May 9, 2013
A scene that never fails to move me: The teenage hero, Amory, is trying to score
a kiss with his girl, Isabelle, in the middle of a busy, chaperoned party. Meanwhile,
another couple of kids are singing what was then a contemporary popular number by
Jerome Kern, "Babes in the Woods" (from 1917's "Very Good Eddie"). The song is about
youth, innocence and the beginning of love, and precisely mirrors the interaction
between Amory and Isabelle, two young people just beginning to understand what it
feels like to be attracted to each other. They never do quite manage the kiss, but
one feels the heat of their attraction magnified through Kern's rich, operettalike
music. Everything is real, from the aching emotions of the pair to Kern's majestically
beautiful music.
And yet it isn't "real" at all; it's a scene on the printed page, not a movie, from
"This Side of Paradise" (1920) -- F. Scott Fitzgerald's first novel. In the book,
Fitzgerald incorporates the song and quotes the lyrics in a way that anticipates
the way talking pictures, a generation or two later, would use background music.
The music helps bring the scene and the characters to life, even though it's being
played only in our heads.
Which underscores the point that Baz Luhrmann and Jay-Z (not to be confused with
Jay Gatsby) picked the wrong literary giant to mess with when they saturated the
soundtrack of the latest filming of Fitzgerald's "The Great Gatsby" (1925) with rap
and hip-hop. Obviously, there's no law that the musical score for a historical drama
must be period specific. But more than virtually any other major novelist, Fitzgerald
made a remarkably specific use of music. Ruth Prigozy, in her pioneering 1977 essay,
"Fitzgerald and Popular Music," began compiling a running list that today includes
close to 100 different songs that Fitzgerald directly cited in his five novels and
170 or so short stories.
When he talks about Gatsby's guests wandering home from one of his bacchanals in
the middle of the night, he doesn't just tell us that the band played on. We learn
that, at the top of the steps, "'Three O'Clock in the Morning,' a neat, sad little
waltz of that year, was drifting out the open door." All the details, right down
to the time signature, are concrete and correct. When he talks about Daisy dancing
at a ball, he offsets her cheerful idealism with saxophones wailing "the hopeless
comment of the 'Beale Street Blues' while a hundred pairs of golden and silver slippers
shuffled the shining dust."
Fitzgerald was the novelist who most thrillingly and accurately captured the roar
of the 1920s, the "great gaudy spree" that witnessed the most overwhelming economic
boom in U.S. history, a time when money and bathtub gin flowed like water. No one
is more ambitious than Gatsby himself, who has made himself into a zillionaire for
the sole purpose of enticing his old flame to leave her husband and come back to
him. And yet in "Gatsby," at the height of the hero's most lavishly excessive shindigs,
Klipspringer plays "The Love Nest" (which tells us that a love nest "cozy and warm"
is "better than a palace with a gilded dome") and "Ain't We Got Fun," two rather
simplistic songs of the era that loudly declare that money is the last thing you
need to be happy.
Fitzgerald frequently uses specific songs to convey character. In his novel "The
Beautiful and Damned" (1922), Muriel, a friend of the heroine, is established as
a scatterbrain when she strolls around a cabaret singing the half-remembered words
to Irving Berlin's "He's a Rag-Picker." In the 1930 story "First Blood," 16-year-old
Josephine is shown as being similarly shallow when she writes letters to the object
of her affection that contain "much quoting of lines from current popular songs,
as if they expressed the writer's state of mind more fully than verbal struggles
of her own."
In "Tender Is the Night" (1934), the novel's two leading characters, Nicole and Dick,
court each other in a Swiss sanitarium by playing American records. Fitzgerald supplies
a blistering sentence that incorporates no less than six distinct songs: "They were
so sorry, dear; they went down to meet each other in a taxi, honey; they had preferences
in smiles and had met in Hindustan, and shortly afterward they must have quarreled,
for nobody knew and nobody seemed to care -- yet finally one of them had gone and
left the other crying, only to feel blue, to feel sad." Running out of records, Nicole
serenades Dick with the old folk blues "Silver Dollar," which wouldn't be formally
published until 1939 or recorded for some time afterward.
Music also parallels Fitzgerald's own biography: It was Fitzgerald himself who gave
the era its name with his 1922 short-story collection "Tales of the Jazz Age." But
many of the songs he cited are operetta and ragtime numbers from his own teenage
years in the period before World War I. He mentioned comparatively fewer songs from
the early and mid-1930s, the years of his financial and self-described emotional
bankruptcy, but in "The Last Tycoon," written mostly in 1940, he notes that "the
music was getting better again.... So Stahr and I danced to the beautiful music of
Glenn Miller playing 'I'm on a See-saw.'" There are several rare inaccuracies there:
Miller didn't have a working band of his own in 1935, the year in which "Tycoon"
takes place, and he probably never played "I'm on a See-saw," though Fats Waller,
Jimmy Dorsey and many others did.
These are the kind of missteps Fitzgerald doubtlessly would have corrected had he
lived to finish "The Last Tycoon," but he died in December 1940, with the novel incomplete.
Music meant a great deal to Fitzgerald, as is shown by an endearing image of the
author given to us by his friend and biographer Andrew Turnbull, who describes F.
Scott Fitzgerald in 1932 waving "good-by from the lighted porch, singing 'Goodnight,
Sweetheart' in a weak, rather tuneless voice, and suddenly breaking into a little
foxtrot shuffle."
__________
Mr. Friedwald writes about jazz for the Journal. He is the creator of "Tales from
the Jazz Age: The F. Scott Fitzgerald Songbook," which premieres next month at the
Cafe Carlyle.


-Bob Ringwald
www.ringwald.com
Amateur (ham) Radio Operator K6YBV
916/ 806-9551

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