By Stuart Mitchner

Introducing his Elizabethan tour de force “Tarquin of Cheapside” in Tales of the Jazz Age (Scribners 1922), F. Scott Fitzgerald admits it was “a product of undergraduate days at Princeton” that he’d since “considerably revised,” adding that “the peculiar affection” he feels for it has more to do with its age than “any intrinsic merit.” In fact, it had taken a passionate last-minute plea to convince his editor Maxwell Perkins to make space in a Jazz Age collection for a tale about Shakespeare on the run from sword-wielding pursuers.

In her introduction to Six Tales of the Jazz Age and Other Stories (Scribners 1959), Fitzgerald’s daughter Frances Fitzgerald Lanahan provides a facsimile of a handwritten list of her parents’ monthly expenditures for 1923 and wonders “how there was a moment left for the bathtub gin and the splashing in the Plaza fountain.” Everyday expenses ranging from taxes, rent, and food to typing amounted to $1,629.40. The cost of “trips, pleasure & parties” came to $2,396, including $100 for “Wild Parties.” Lanahan takes comfort in the fact that as “wasteful” as it was that her father died so young, “there must have been 48 hours a day in that Golden Era,” making it possible for him pack “at least two lives into those 44 years.”

Lanahan also wonders how her father came to be a symbol of the Jazz Age when the stories gathered under that heading, “however absorbing,” left her asking herself “what’s jazzy?” A faithful student of her father’s work and the correspondence surrounding it, she would have understood and appreciated his commitment to including “Tarquin of Cheapside,” which she gives a place in the revised collection without discussing why. Instead, she quotes Max Perkins: “Scott transcended what he called the Jazz Age, and many people did not realize this because of the very success with which he wrote about it.”

Making Room

Fitzgerald’s conflation of Shakespeare with the Jazz Age encouraged me to make room in this celebration of the 1920s for contemporary realities like the turmoil in Congress, the ex-president’s rabble-rousing, and the massacre of innocents at a music festival. In fact, there’s no way to explore the songs of the 1920s, the stories of Fitzgerald, and the diaries of Franz Kafka without discovering intimations of the roaring and ranting 2020s.

The first time I listened to Bix’n’ Bing, a CD featuring Beiderbecke and Crosby with the Paul Whiteman orchestra, the Jazz Age music and dated lyrics coincided weirdly and yet consolingly with the March 2003 invasion of Iraq. While the Bush administration was unleashing its “Shock and Awe” bombardment of
Baghdad, I kept my spirits up with repeated listenings to “’Tain’t so, honey, ‘tain’t so”  and “There Ain’t No Sweet Man That’s Worth the Salt in My Tears.” It was easy to make Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld stand-ins for the “sweet man,” along with the members of Congress from both parties who were blindsided into approving an invasion that ultimately claimed many more lives than were lost in the terrorist attacks of 9/11. Twenty years later, when I search online for the song’s lyrics, I’m waylaid by a Stand for Israel plea complete with videos of the carnage inflicted by Hamas on October 7, 2023.

Today there’s still some fun to be had matching the words Fred Fisher wrote in 1928 with six years of news dominated by the mother of all sore losers: “Down and down he dragged me / Like a fiend he nagged me … I may be blue / Still I’m through / I must tell him goodbye.” Beiderbecke’s horn of gold delivers the message a hundred years in advance, Bix whose sound Eddie Condon once compared to “a girl saying yes.” In the twilight of the decade and his life (he died in 1931), Bix is blowing a staccato wake-up call behind snappy lines like “broken-hearted sisters / Aggravating misters / Lend me your ears.”

Kafka’s ‘Tain’t So

Music from the Jazz Age provides a commentary of sorts on today’s deranged state of the nation in “’Tain’t so, honey, ‘tain’t so,” with its words of wisdom from “old Aunt Phoebe Law” who’s “known to everyone for miles around to help you when friends forsake you and troubles bear you down.” If you think “Tomorrow will bring something good … no matter what your problem may be,” well, “just look up, brother, and I’m sure you’ll agree / Tain’t so, honey, ‘tain’t so / The Devil said yes, but the Lord said no.”

In the space of an internet minute I can go from Willard Robison’s sprightly ditty to Franz Kafka’s Diaries, happy to be there after much too long an absence. When I check to see what he was thinking at the dawn of the decade that would be his last (he died in 1924, having written but not finished The Castle in 1922), here he is on January 9, 1920, musing about “Superstition and principle and what makes life possible: Through a heaven of vice a hell of virtue is reached. So easily? So dirtily? So unbelievably? Superstition is easy.”

I can hear Bix playing that cadenza of so-so-sos, a variation on “the Devil said yes, but the Lord said no,” and instead of the “sound of a girl saying yes,” this is more like what happens when Bix, in the words of Philip Larkin, “explodes like Judgment Day out of the Whiteman orchestra.”

Fitzgerald’s Kafka

If not for the heart attack that killed him in December 1940, Fitzgerald might have read Kafka’s Diaries (Shocken 1948, 1949) and found them as stimulating and companionable as the letters of his literary hero John Keats. Writing in spring 1939 to an old Princeton classmate about “the stuff that stirred me lately,” he singles out Kafka’s “fantastic novel” The Trial as “an influence among the young comparable only to Joyce in 1920-25.” A week before his death, in the last letter he ever wrote to his lifelong editor Max Perkins, Fitzgerald says of Kafka: “He will never have a wide public but The Trial and Amerika are two books that writers are never able to forget.” Given how wide Kafka’s “public” has grown, make that “writers and readers.”

   In both letters Fitzgerald emphasizes Kafka’s ethnicity, describing him to Perkins as “an extraordinary Czechoslovakian Jew” and to his classmate as a “Czech Jew.” In Kafka’s most famous work, one that readers are definitely “never able to forget,” a salesman wakes from “unsettling dreams” to find himself “changed in his bed into a monstrous vermin.” George Steiner notes that vermin is among the Nazi synonyms of choice for “Jew” and suggests that “vermin” will be “actualized” in Kafka’s “seeming fantastications,” a “concrete fulfillment of augury, of detailed clairvoyance,” manifested when his three sisters are murdered in the camps. And now, almost a hundred years later, the “augury” is manifested in the Nova festival massacre.

A Jazz Age Shakespeare

Although Fitzgerald revised “Tarquin of Cheapside” in the aftermath of the Great War, the story has a headlong, ageless freshness. As he says in Tales of the Jazz Age, “At the time of its conception I had but one idea — to be a poet — and the fact that I was interested in the ring of every phrase, that I dreaded the obvious in prose if not in plot, shows throughout.”

As I read “Tarquin” in Fitzgerald’s daughter’s edition of Six Tales of the Jazz Age and Other Stories, I found numerous passages that stood out either for “the ring” of the phrasing or for a fervid energy evoking the “jazz” in Jazz Age. As “Soft Shoes” (alias Shakespeare) flees “down long and sinuous lanes,” the “hunted and the harriers” are “in and out of the moon in a perpetual queen’s move over a checker-board of glints and patches.” Fitzgerald plays on the cross-centuries connection when he declares “an era is an era, and in the reign of Elizabeth, by the grace of Luther, Queen of England, no man could help but catch the spirit of enthusiasm.”

“Rising Sun”

Bix’n’ Bing was George Harrison’s “favorite record in his later years,” according to his son Dhani, quoted in the October 2002 issue of Beatles Monthly. I didn’t know this when I first heard the CD in 2003, two years after Harrison’s death on November 29, 2001. The following year brought the release of Brainwashed, with George’s affectionate cover of the Harold Arlen standard “Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea.” For me the highlight of the album, however, is “Rising Sun,” which I was compulsively listening to when I first discovered Bix ’n’ Bing: “In the rising sun you can feel your life begin / Universe at play inside your DNA / You’re a billion years old today / Oh the rising sun and the place it’s coming from is inside of you…” I’m listening to the song again and to the slide guitar ecstasy at 3:50, as clarion clear as the sound of Bix — the sound of the soul saying “yes.”

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The passage from Kafka’s 1920 diary was translated from the German by Martin Greenberg with the cooperation of Hannah Arendt; it appears in truncated form in the 1922 translation by Ross Benjamin.