Bookgazing

According to the introductory note ‘Gentleman Jigger’ was heavily influenced by Richard Bruce Nugent’s involvement in the emerging Harlem Renaissance. The first section is a fictional account of his time working with Wallace Thurman, with whom he created the journal (insert name). Nugent’s stand in character Stuart and Thurman’s avatar Rusty, spend this section cooking up artistic schemes on the fly. These projects are designed to enhance the artistic reputation of African American artists, but Nugent’s book also heavily frames them as flighty, off the cuff schemes primarily thought up so that Stuart and Rusty can earn more money for booze. They create a journal, open an art exhibition in their rooms when funds are tight and gather a group of artistic followers around them who keep the gin flowing.

The reader emerges from ‘Gentleman Jigger’ with an awareness that artistic revolution often springs from less than idealistic enterprises, this does not negate the readers appreciation of the value of the art that Rusty and Stuart’s group ( but especially Stuart) produce. Rusty is very off hand about the integrity of Stuart and the other contributors art work, asking them to knock something up quickly to fill space in the journal. He is more concerned with the rise in artistic status that producing a provocative journal will confer on himself and by association, African American art. Stuart himself often agrees that while talented, he is much too lazy to produce consistant work of substance and bangs out frenzied work for cash. However, his refusal to take his talent as seriously as those around him would like feels deliberately designed to provoke those who he sees as too serious, as is much of his talk.

Perhaps his resistance to concentrating on his work, as others would like him to, is his way of rebelling against what he sees as peoples wish for him to conform and gain approval from white authorities. Nugent’s novel is a delightfully gossipy, alchol drenched romp set in the 1920s and it contains a lot of dryly written dialogue and funny episodes, but it’s also a rigorously intellectual book. The first section sees Stuart calmly dispute the views that many other people, including his black peers, hold about subjects related to race. At various points he deconstructs the lazy way people label art as having a very ‘African’ style, denys that his disgust at a white mans involvement in a quarrel between two black men is an issue of race and debates the ‘one drop’ theory, often riling those around him with his calm assurance in his own ideas¹. One of the recurring intellectual arguments about race that Stuart spends a lot of time disecting is what he sees as other black people’s black hating desire to be approved of by the white establishment; their quest to be validated as serious, worthwhile and civillised. Towards the end of this section Stuart is begining to see his paintings become successful without ever really becoming more serious. Although he often spends time working himself hard, he remains hard drinking, flippant, irresponsible and deliberately provoking, yet receives large commissions from his art. It feels as if Stuart’s own vision of African American liberation is the freedom to be as irresponsible as he likes, the freedom to not have to always respectably represent his race and not have to pay any kind of professional consequence for refusing to conform to a life style people would see as more ‘civillised’.

The second section sees Stuart leave Rusty and his friends. In the first section there is a running question about whether Stuart is primarily gay or straight, even though he is asumed to make love to both men and women. Although no one in the group seems to have a problem with someone who sleeps with both men and women, it does seems to frustrate Rusty’s set that Stuart refuses to confirm which gender he prefers for his romantic partners. Stuart makes a point of furthering his friends frustration and confusion in a memorable chapter where he dates a brother and sister pair, both named Bob.

However, in the second section it becomes clear that Stuart is much more sexually interested in men than women. It is also revealed that he has been playing the experienced, cynical, master of sexuality. He is still young, rather untried and unfortunately constantly open to being hurt. In this part of ‘Gentleman Jigger’ the reader sees a much more vulnerable side of Stuart, as he becomes involved in various relationships with Italian gangsters. He is required to untangle the complex way in which these men profess to hate gay men and yet sleep with him, then adjust himself to exclude anything that would align his behaviour with the gay men they profess to despise².

I enjoyed ‘Gentleman Jigger’ because it was a witty, sometimes scathing, novel set in the 1920s, feuled by gin, that reminded me a little bit of Dawn Powell’s satires. It featured entertaining, thoughtful, if sometimes snobbish characters and made its most endearing character firmly #teamboyskissing. It was perfectly suited to my tastes. Even though I feel like a lot of the intellectual side of this novel went over my head and I expect that people with a better grasp of race and GLBTQ historical arguments would delight in unpicking the responses of its characters to some big questions. Still, I did enjoy at least trying to come to grapple with the challenge of understanding. The feeling of your mind being stretched is hard to beat.

¹ I don’t have enough knowledge about how racial arguments developed to really understand the merits, negatives and depths of many of the discussions about race in the first section of ‘Gentleman Jigger’. If anyone knows where I can any critical analysis of the arguments in this book, please point me to it.

²Again, there are a lot of arguments here that I just don’t have the tools to unravel and I’d love to see someone with more knowledge about the history of rhetorical responses to gay relationships take on reviewing this novel (I know, ‘I am demanding’ redux, right?).

Other Reviews

Times Book Review