Tuesday, February 28, 2006
What F. Scott Fitzgerald knew about maxixe
A young novelist looks back on a dance fad.
Jazz Age dancers by John Held, Jr.
In his short life, F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940) published nearly 160 short stories. In his introductory essay to the story collection Flappers and Philosophers, Fitzgerald’s biographer Arthur Mizener noted that “[t]here is scarecly a three-month period in [Fitzgerald’s] career not represented by a story (the main exception is the period between June, 1937 and July, 1939, when he was working in Hollywood), so that in these stories we can follow, almost month by month, the slow and fascinating maturing of his imagination.”
Short stories were Fitzgerald’s bread and butter. Following the extraordinary success of his first novel, This Side of Paradise (1920), his output found a ready place in popular magazines such as The Smart Set, The Saturday Evening Post, Collier’s, and Metropolitan Magazine. It’s natural that the pressure to produce on a regular basis, coupled with the expectations of the marketplace, made Fitzgerald resort to formulas. Early on, he carved out a niche for himself as the chronicler of the Jazz Age. His 1920s protagonists were spoiled yellow-haired girls, often flappers and invariably nineteen, and their affluent Joe College beaux—the same set illustrated so memorably by John Held, Jr.
Class was important. So was fashion. Being “in” was dictated by both. The most fun was to be had by dancing and drinking at the country club. An orchestra would play the latest dance rhythms, and the most up-to-date society cats assiduously learned the new dances as soon as they appeared.
One of the dance fads of the 1910s was the Brazilian maxixe. In no fewer than four of his 1920s works, Fitzgerald points to the maxixe as an indicator of fashion, viewed in retrospect. The dance makes its earliest appearance in the story “Benediction,” published in The Smart Set in February 1920. In this story, young Lois visits her Jesuit brother Kieth [sic] in the seminary where he has lived for many years.
“I want Kieth’s sister to show us what the shimmy is,” demanded one young man with a broad grin.
Lois laughed.
“I’m afraid the Father Rector would send me shimmying out the gate. Besides, I’m not an expert.”
“I’m sure it wouldn’t be best for Jimmy’s soul anyway,” said Kieth solemnly. “He’s inclined to brood about things like shimmys. They were just starting to do the—maxixe, wasn’t it, Jimmy?—when he became a monk, and it haunted him his whole first year. You’d see him when he was peeling potatoes, putting his arm around the bucket and making irreligious motions with his feet.”
Two years later, the novel The Beautiful and Damned was published. Chapter 2 described the following scene, which takes place in November or December of 1913:
On Thursday afternoon Gloria and Anthony had tea together in the grill room at the Plaza. Her fur-trimmed suit was gray—“because with gray you have to wear a lot of paint,” she explained—and a small toque sat rakishly on her head, allowing yellow ripples of hair to wave out in jaunty glory. In the higher light it seemed to Anthony that her personality was infinitely softer—she seemed so young, scarcely eighteen; her form under the tight sheath, known then as a hobble-skirt, was amazingly supple and slender, and her hands, neither “artistic” nor stubby, were small as a child’s hands should be.
As they entered, the orchestra were sounding the preliminary whimpers to a maxixe, a tune full of castanets and facile faintly languorous violin harmonies, appropriate to the crowded winter grill teeming with an excited college crowd, high-spirited at the approach of the holidays.
What were castanets doing here? Fitzgerald knew little about the technical aspects of music, yet in this case he wasn’t too far off the mark. The Ernesto Nazareth expert Alexandre Dias told me about four different recordings of “Dengoso” that feature castanets. However, since Fitzgerald was an acute social observer, his descriptions might help pinpoint the arrival of maxixe on the American scene, or at least its adoption by the early birds of fashion. An unrealistically early date for the start of the maxixe fad is given in the story “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button,” which appeared in Collier’s magazine on 27 May 1922.
Benjamin’s growing unhappiness at home was compensated for by his many new interests. He took up golf and made a great success of it. He went in for dancing: in 1906 he was an expert at “The Boston,” and in 1908 he was considered proficient at the “Maxixe,” while in 1909 his “Castle Walk” was the envy of every young man in town.
The Boston, now known as the American Waltz, had been around since the 1830s. The Castle Walk, on the other hand, was not introduced until 1912. Could Fitzgerald have erred in the maxixe as well?
[The article continues]
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10:15
 
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