Review: Trumpet

Trumpet, Jackie Kay

[Publisher: Picador (Imprint Pan Macmillan) (1998) ISBN: 978-0-330-33146-3 The death of legendary jazz trumpeter Joss Moody exposes an extraordinary secret. Unknown to all but his wife Millie, Joss was a man with the physical sexual characteristics of a woman. The discovery is most devastating for their adopted son Colman, whose bewildered fury brings the press to the doorstep and sends his grieving mother to the sanctuary of a remote Scottish village. A novel about the lengths to which people will go for love, "Trumpet" is a moving story of a shared life founded on an intricate lie, of loving deception and lasting devotion, and of the intimate workings of the human heart. Jackie Kay makes the unbelievable gloriously real. This book is all about love. The qualities of sympathy and tenderness in the novel make it special and make Kay a writer to respect.]

The book is written with a poet’s sense of place. This is a passage about a country cottage at night, caught between grief and momentary comfort:

“It is getting dark now outside. Solemn and deep and secretive. When I come here the quality of the dark takes a bit of getting used to. The weight and the depth of the country dark. It is so absolute, so uncompromising. When I go outside to stare into the dark, it feels final. Even the stars don’t change the deep dark of the hedges, the small lanes, the sudden corners. I close the curtains. The sea is out there getting up to no good. I light a fire, then put a newspaper over the front of it, holding on tightly to each side of the wall till I see the newspaper dip.” [pp93-94]

There is a lot of about grief in this book as it deals with the consequences of Joss Moody’s death. This is complicated by the reality, known only to Joss and his wife Millie, that he was born and dies with the outward physical sexual characteristics of a woman. Hiding this fact as well as being inconvenient, leads to a lifetime avoidance of doctors which probably contributes to his death. The book is also about anger. Anger at exploitative journalists, anger as a diversion from grief, anger at a difficult childhood …….

The novel deals a lot with the official mechanics of death. The GP’s certification, the registrar and the undertaker. The communication between the undertaker and his dead clients is disturbing. Some people felt the novel went too deeply into this. In a similar way the novel deals with the emotional details of grief, and would be very difficult for someone to read who has recently lost someone. These parts of the novel revolve around a very raw description of death, shown in this passage:

“The fire is shrinking too. Collapsing in on itself , turning to ash. I get up and put the guard over the fire and go into the kitchen. ….. Sleeping in our bed here is so terrible; I considered sleeping in Colman’s old room, or sleeping on the couch downstairs, or sleeping on the floor. I felt as if I’d be deserting Joss though. I climb into our old bed and place my tea at my side. The space next to me bristles with silence. The emptiness is palpable. Loss isn’t an absence after all. It is a presence. A strong presence here next to me. …. It doesn’t look like anything, that is what is so strange. It just fits in. Last night I was certain it was a definite shape. I bashed the sheets about to see if it would declare itself. It won’t let me alone and it won’t let me sleep….” [pp11-12]

The central characters in the novel are not Joss or his wife Millie, but their adopted son Colman and the greedy journalist Sophie. The description of Colman shows the range of Jackie Kay’s powers of observation and description. Colman has a neurotic ability to be contradictory and complicated. He manages in his estimation to fail consistently, and sees the fact that he did not know about his father as ultimate evidence of his own stupidity. He is unkind to strangers one minute and generous the next. He is self critical but also self obsessed. He is brutally realistic about himself, but also gets involved in an unrealistic scheme to produce an exploitative book with Sophie. He manages to be miserable and outrageously inappropriately funny. He first finds out about his father at the undertakers. All children have to reevaluate their parents, but Colman gets a crash course:

“When I undressed you father, Mr Moody. I discovered that she is a woman. I was not told this. Your mother referred constantly to the deceased as her ‘husband’. I thought the guy must be getting paid to perform some sick joke on me. Perhaps they have organisations where instead of sending live kissograms to a birthday a party, you send a weird deathogram to a funeral parlour. The man must not be the real man. I tell him I want to see the real undertaker, the mortician, whatever the fuck you call it, your boss. I said is this your idea of a joke, you sick bastard.” [pp 63]

Early in the novel we are told Colman was adopted, several months after he was born:

“When I’d tell people I was adopted they’d say things like you could have been brought up in another part of the world, with rich parents, poor parents, mormans, communists ……….. Let’s face it, a pal of mine said, adoption is a lucky dip. Lucky you ended up where you did. I’d like to find some of the fuckers now. Ask them what they think of this. The children of lovers are orphans anyway. I forget who it was that said that. Some bright spark. It about sums me up.” [pp 46]

The journalist Sophie is something of a parallel character imagining the emotional rewards of a successful exposé book:

“My parents will have to stop saying, ‘Sarah this and Sarah that’ to everything. This time is going to be it. I can feel it in my bones. Something lucky is about to happen (Will they love me? Is success loveable?) It will completely change my life, place me in another league.” [pp 129]

The novel is partly based on the real life story of Jazz pianist and band leader Billy Tipton, who was only revealed to have born with the physical sexual characteristics of a woman after his death. Like the novel his refusal to see a doctor contributed to his death. He also has a quartet of feminist Jazz musicians named in his memory, as Joss does in the novel. There were also sensationalist and exploitative newspaper stories and a best seller "Suits Me: The Double Life of Billy Tipton" by Diane Middlebrook.

This site contains music and other material about Billy Tipton, but be warned it has an ambivalent attitude to transsexual issues http://www.queermusicheritage.com/feb2003bt.html . This confusion is exemplified by folksinger Phranc. Does the assurance of the words of the 1991 song contradict the measured 2005 interview? See http://www.queermusicheritage.com/FEB2003/Tipton/Phranc.M3U . The Billy Tipton story diverges from the fictional Joss Moody in that Tipton’s adopted sons seem to have considered him a wonderful father.

We discussed the reasons for Joss living as a man. Some of the incidental arguments in a related essay “Masculine Trans-formations in Jackie Kay's

"Trumpet” by Mandy Koolen of Southampton Solent University (See http://journals.msvu.ca/index.php/atlantis/article/download/174/181 ) were described. Joss starts his professional music career in the 1960s when being a woman or a lesbian is not the barrier to success as an instrumentalist in the Jazz world that it had been. Joss exhibits many typically masculine patterns of behaviour in his private life that go beyond the need to hide. Hence the author is describing a transsexual man avoiding transphobia, rather than someone primarily motivated by avoiding sexism or homophobia. No one argued against this interpretation. Koolen also makes the point that Joss has a happy childhood, which contradicts the stereotype of transgender people having unhappy childhoods “trapped in the wrong body”.

It is not transgender that is really interesting but society’s reaction. Why do people get so upset when social gender boundaries are blurred or crossed? What is it in us that leads to irrational transphobia? Why it is people feel comfortable with men crossing gender roles as entertainment, but are hostile in real life? Why is society becoming much more accepting of gay people, but still wants to see trans women or men as threatening and unnatural?

In the novel the transgender identity of Joss does not matter to his Jazz colleagues after his death. There is a build up in the novel to Colman meeting Joss’s mother. We assume Colman will ask if she knows, but we are curiously never told what they talk about. It is as if something more real and more relevant is implied as happening between the final chapters. The real question Colman has is answered, by his visit to his adopted grandmother and the letter Joss writes to him before he dies. This letter is a meditation on the kind of dislocation that Joss’ father’s experiences, when emigrating and adapting to foggy cold alien Scotland.

Joss’ dislocation is dealing with society’s rigid ideas about gender. Colman’s dislocation probably has no cure as much. Perhaps the novel suggests he will come to realise his real problem, and so there is hope of finding better strategies of coping? In conclusion the novel is a revealing story of the clash of different attitudes and motivations, with the discovery of Joss as a Transexual Man being the catalyst for events rather than the main theme.