‘The One about Sitting on His Top Hat and Climbing up His Shirt Front’: Fitzgerald and Musical Theatre

This chapter shows how Fitzgerald drew upon musical comedies of the stage and screen to inform his characterisation, plotting, and integration of song with dramatic action. Using his ‘playlet’, ‘Porcelain and Pink’, as a case study, this chapter shows how Fitzgerald’s use of song underscores themes of concealed identity and satirises the consumption and advertising practices of his era. This chapter argues that the intersection of morality and entertainment, depicted in the iconic flapper figure, characterises much of Fitzgerald’s presentation of popular culture. Though he did not continue his undergraduate occupation of writing libretti for Princeton’s Triangle Club, Fitzgerald continued to allude to songs from musicals throughout his career. This chapter explores how Fitzgerald’s use of the disguise motif, amongst other literary techniques, has analogues in musical comedies, and argues for certain of his stories, like ‘The Captured Shadow’, to be read in the context of the stage and film musicals Fitzgerald enjoyed, such as those featuring Irving Berlin’s work. It is argued that it is Fitzgerald’s fascination with the theatre that fuels his lifelong interest in participative, even immersive, media. This chapter analyses the influence of film musicals on Fitzgerald’s aesthetics, particularly in terms of their lavish visual spectacle.

‘Satyre upon a Saxaphone’: Fitzgerald and Music

This chapter demonstrates how Fitzgerald invokes music in his short fiction, which heavily features jazz. Fitzgerald shows how white artists such as the Castles and Irving Berlin often profited from the appropriation of African American musical culture such as jazz and blues. Fitzgerald’s explorations of Tin Pan Alley’s output demonstrate that a more malleable treatment of established formulae can yield valuable results. This book draws parallels between Irving Berlin’s subversion of tired Tin Pan Alley formulae, and Fitzgerald’s own manipulations of the popular magazine short story genre. In his later use of music, Fitzgerald explores the limitations of language, the role of the artist in society, and questions the value of popular culture itself. He satirises the conventions of popular songs, and subtly parodies short story conventions (particularly romantic short story conventions). Fitzgerald identifies with the songwriter, whose role is to provoke emotion and forge an intimacy with the consumer, much like the commercial short storyist. By positioning Fitzgerald’s thematic and character repetitions and concessions to the magazine format as deliberate rather than desperate, this chapter suggests that his self-parody is a conscious aesthetic decision in the process of exploring the identity of the authentic literary craftsman, dancer, or musician.

The ‘Chocolate Arabesques’ of Josephine Baker: Fitzgerald and Jazz Dance

This chapter shows how Fitzgerald often associates modern dance with the primitive. Fitzgerald’s engagement with African American culture is complex, and though the appropriation of African American culture for profit is punished in certain stories, Fitzgerald’s engagement with black culture is elsewhere more challenging. This chapter explores how performative identity (that is to say, the deliberate, theatrical presentation of inner traits) functions at the level of both form and content in the story ‘Babylon Revisited’, using the appearance of the dancer Josephine Baker’s ‘chocolate arabesques’ as a platform from which to explore how people perform identity. Fitzgerald prizes authenticity as the key attribute of any artist, dancer, or writer. In the story, Baker is berated for an inauthentic performance, merely delivering her routine without improvisation. This chapter argues that this sense of inauthentic artistry informed Fitzgerald’s self-conception as a popular short storyist. In Baker, Fitzgerald presents an artist who has bridged the ‘high’ and popular arts: ballet and cabaret. Fitzgerald sets up jazz dance as formulaic by satirising blind adherence to rules and fashions, and this chapter offers a reading of these rules as a metaphor for the short story conventions within which Fitzgerald toiled as a commercial short storyist.

‘All My Stories are Conceived Like Novels’

This chapter suggests several unifying features of a typical Fitzgerald story, including conceits of disguise and mistaken identity, a tone of lyrical nostalgia, and the deployment of popular cultural references, through a sometimes parodic lens. This chapter argues that Fitzgerald is moralising and entertaining simultaneously in his short fiction, and that his ambivalence towards the popular cultural forms examined is actually evidence of Fitzgerald’s attempts to convey through language the multiple strata of intertextual interpretative possibilities inherent in each dance, piece of music, or film. His allusions are not merely period detail but rather explorations of how people perform and consume popular culture. This chapter shows how Fitzgerald explores the disconnect between what dance, music, musical theatre, and film can achieve, compared with literature’s capabilities to fulfil Conrad’s exhortations to make the reader hear, feel, and see.

Not ‘a Sincere and Yet Radiant World’ but ‘Trashy Imaginings’ – Representations of Popular Culture in Fitzgerald’s Short Fiction

This chapter discusses Fitzgerald’s conflicted relationship with popular culture in the interwar period from 1918 until his death in 1940. Magazines like the Saturday Evening Post were lucrative, and helped Fitzgerald to establish his early flapper ‘brand’, but he was often wary of being identified with these commercial magazines. Fitzgerald carefully uses references to popular culture in order to disrupt our expectations of his lyrical style as well as the established magazine short story conventions of the 1920s and 1930s. By using such experimental techniques whilst also courting a mass audience, Fitzgerald can be seen pursuing literary acclaim as well as financial security: joint aims that he harboured throughout his career. This chapter shows how Fitzgerald uses parody to shed new light on popular cultural forms of the period, as well as to interrogate the concept of leisure in a period in which there was a great upheaval of cultural values. He identifies with black entertainers and African American culture as a means of theorizing his own relationship with the entertainment industry. His use of parody enables him to navigate fluidly between popular and ‘high’ culture, and to undermine commercial magazine formulae, whilst establishing his own brand of literary modernism.

‘A More Glittering, a Grosser Power’: Fitzgerald and Film

Fitzgerald imports cross-stylistic features from the spheres of dance and music into his fiction, and this chapter shows how he also employs filmic technique in his short stories. Joseph Conrad’s Preface to The Nigger of the Narcissus was central to Fitzgerald’s fiction-writing credo, encouraging him to make his readers hear, feel, and see. His popular culture references lend themselves to this approach, but nowhere more so than in his references to film. This chapter uses ‘Magnetism’ as a case study, analysing the use of filmic techniques such as close-up, dream sequence, and soundtracking, and offers a reading of George Hannaford as a satiric metaphor for the motion picture industry, reflecting Fitzgerald’s own conflicted relationship with Hollywood. This relationship is also visible in the Pat Hobby stories, which have often been noted for their markedly different style. It is argued that this compressed style metafictively satirises Hobby’s voice, bringing to life the lackadaisical reticence of the industry veteran. This chapter argues that in the Pat Hobby stories Fitzgerald explores, through parody, the shortcomings and inherent potential of the film industry to combine artistic merit and commercial success, using it as a vehicle critically to explore leisure pursuits of the interwar period.

‘Dancing Modern Suggestive Dances that are Simply Savagery’: Fitzgerald and Ragtime Dance

Irene and Vernon Castle were stewards of the transition from Victorian to modern dancing, and Fitzgerald uses this period as the setting for two series of stories. The rigid rules of Victorian dances gave way to a more improvisation-based style, and this chapter argues that a similar shift can be seen in Fitzgerald’s manipulation of short story formulae. This chapter draws parallels between the production lines of Taylorist management philosophies and the dance manuals that broke dances down into fragmented gestures and machinistic imitative steps, contextualising this as part of a wider cultural shift from the artisinal to the mass produced. In the course of his search to regain the popularity of his explosive debut at the beginning of the 1920s, Fitzgerald parodies certain of his early heroines in his later work. The use of such parodic ‘ragging’ and syncopation draws upon musical techniques that emerged from African American culture, such as jazz. Rather than reading these reimaginings as symptomatic of Fitzgerald’s dwindling talents or financial desperation, this chapter argues that this self-parody serves creative aims as well as constituting Fitzgerald’s subtle criticism of the public’s insatiable demand for the formulaic flapper stories favoured by the ‘slick’ magazines.