Frankie and Johnny Were Sweethearts

Jazz a novel by Toni Morrison.  Plume/Penguin.  229 pp.  $11.95

As I move chronologically through Toni Morrison’s fiction and arrive at her sixth novel, I’ve come to various conclusions:

I think of her as a Southern writer.  Actually, she grew up on Lorain, Ohio, and never lived in the South.  (Lorain, as she describes it in the documentary, The Pieces I Am, was a remarkably diverse place, where everyone was accepted for who they were.  If a white person said such a thing, I wouldn’t believe her.  But when a highly sensitive and intelligent African American woman says it, I do.)  Any African American’s heritage comes through the South, and in Beloved she confronts that heritage at its core.  Jazz continues that exploration.[1]

I think of her as an heir—perhaps the only legitimate one—to Faulkner.  When Henry Louis Gates said that, in order to understand American culture, one should read chronologically through the novels of Toni Morrison, having already read Faulkner and Ralph Ellison, his mention of the earlier writers seemed an afterthought.  But I don’t think it was.  Rhetorically, and also in the sheer scope of her work, she’s the only writer I would rank close to Faulkner.  It’s ridiculous to compare authors, of course, and I’m not saying she’s his equal.  But I keep thinking of Faulkner as I read her.

She’s what I think of as a religious writer.  She doesn’t write from a religious tradition (she apparently converted to Catholicism when she was a teenager, but makes light of that in interviews, saying there was a side of her family that was Catholic and she decided to go with them.  She doesn’t apparently practice a religion, but also said—whimsically, it seemed—that the current Pope might draw her back).  But she takes up the major questions of life, and writes from the depths of its mystery.  When she centers a whole novel around the fact that a murdered girl comes back physically from the dead, she isn’t claiming such a thing actually happened.  She’s saying there’s a truth that transcends realism.

Her primary interest is in character.  There is plot in her books, but her focus is examining people lovingly and at whatever length it takes, plot be damned.  She isn’t just a psychological or spiritual writer: she writes about the whole person all at once.  Her characters are idiosyncratic and strange, but they go together as a piece.  You finish a book and have a feeling you know this person.  There’s also a lot you don’t know.

She makes me feel like a moron.  I’ve been reading literature seriously for over fifty years, and feel I understand it as well as anyone, but Morrison makes me feel like a novice.  She humbles me.

As a case in point, I have no idea why she titled this novel Jazz.  It takes place in 1926, around the time when modern jazz was being born (critics say that Louis Armstrong’s Hot Five and Hot Seven recordings were a major breakthrough, in effect creating the jazz solo and the virtuoso soloist, and they were recorded around this time).  One of the characters is carrying an Okeh record (Armstrong’s label), and someone refers obliquely to the immoral influence of such music.  But jazz isn’t otherwise a factor as far as I can tell.

I don’t even know what the novel’s first word is.  My puzzlement begins there.  In The Pieces I Am, Morrison says that the whole plot of The Bluest Eye is on the first page, and that you only read the book to find out why it happened.  The same things is true of Jazz.  So this is a spoiler alert; I’m about to tell the whole plot.  But all I’m doing in quoting the first paragraph.

“Sth, I know that woman.  She used to live with a flock of birds on Lenox Avenue.  Know her husband, too.  He fell for an eighteen-year-old girl with one of those deepdown, spooky loves that made him so sad and happy he shot her just to keep the feeling going.  When the woman, her name is Violet, went to the funeral to see the girl and to cut her dead face they threw her to the floor and out of the church.  She ran, then, through all that snow, and when she got back to her apartment she took the birds from their cages and set them out the windows to freeze or fly, including the parrot that said, ‘I love you.’”

That’s the plot of the novel.  She elaborates for 228 pages.  But that’s the whole thing.

One other puzzle: I have no idea who this “I” is.  She talks about herself (I assume it’s a she) a little toward the end of the novel, but is not, as far as I know, a character in the action.  I have no idea how she knows all she does.

Violet can seem flat out crazy.  She did, after all, stab somebody who was already dead, and she walks the streets of Harlem talking to herself, at one point sits down in the middle of the street.  But she also eventually befriends the aunt—the legal guardian—of the woman who was killed, and eventually they get together for tea and conversations about a variety of things, including the doomed affair that led to the murder.  Violet is fifty, would freely admit she’d been neglecting her husband, and that it’s not surprising he strayed.  She also loves him, and he loves her.  That becomes more evident as things proceed.  By the end they seem to be the true lovers.

We have to believe, of course, that an eighteen-year-old woman falls for a fifty-year-old man, but the portrayal of Joe Trace, Violet’s husband, convinces us.  He’s not a Lothario, hasn’t strayed before; he doesn’t just like sex, but genuinely likes women.  He enters into the affair almost reluctantly, because he isn’t getting what he needs (he seems to understand what Violet’s going through; that’s what makes his dilemma difficult).  He arranges with a woman cousin (who at first is outraged) to rent her apartment afternoons and evenings, while she is off cleaning office buildings.  He doesn’t meet just to have sex—we don’t see them doing it much—but spends hours talking to his young lover, listening, and gives her gifts.

If there’s a villain in the piece (or maybe just a dolt) it would be the girl herself, whose name is Dorcas.  We think of her for much of the novel as an innocent, but she entered into the affair for the attention, and gave Joe up for a man who was a Lothario, had gone through all the women of his acquaintance and now latched onto her.  She likes it that she’s won out over the others (for about three nights, probably).  When Joe shoots Dorcas, he only hits her shoulder, and she probably would have been fine if she’d gone to the hospital.  But she doesn’t want to go; she lies down and slowly bleeds to death.  Joe spent months afterwards mourning.  There’s an implication that Dorcas might not have gotten treatment anyway, and that the police had no regard for her death.  Joe was never prosecuted.

Morrison goes into elaborate detail about her characters’ pasts; that’s largely what the novel is about.  It is their pasts that connect this novel with Morrison’s earlier work, especially Beloved.  Joe and Violet have strange connections, including one character who is born of a white woman who had sex with a slave.  That’s the subplot that seems most Faulknerian.  And that seems to be Morrison’s real interest, the pasts that have created these people.  The event that brought them all together, the shooting, is almost incidental.

I was once again riveted to this novel and its language, the stories from the past that weave together so weirdly.  Morrison’s career doesn’t follow a trajectory.  It seems to get larger and deeper, darker and stranger.

[1] People apparently speak of Beloved, Jazz, and Paradise as Morrison’s “Dantaesque Trilogy.”  I don’t know if Morrison had any such intention.