Familiar Double Life Exposed

Last year, Diane Wood Middlebrook published “Suits Me: The Double Life of Billy Tipton,” a biography in which she told the unusual story of a jazz musician who was born as a woman but who lived her adult life as a man. Alternately intriguing and exasperating, the book addressed itself to the issue of how Tipton’s life made the very word gender “a marker on the grave of venerable assumptions about the importance of sex difference.” Faced with severely limited source material, Middlebrook emphasized the polemical and the speculative; her Billy Tipton remained inanimate and opaque.

The empathy wanting in Middlebrook’s approach is on more generous display in “Trumpet,” a first novel by Jackie Kay, a Scottish poet whose protagonist bears a strong resemblance to Tipton. Although Joss Moody (1927-1997) was half-Scottish and half-West Indian and Billy Tipton (1914-1989) was all-white and all-American, both were born women but chose to live their lives as men. Both were accomplished jazz musicians (Tipton played the piano; Moody, whom Kay draws with a greater gift, the trumpet). Both bound their breasts in bandages; both made rituals out of “shaving” and dressing immaculately; both stayed away from urinals, swimming pools and doctors; both kept their true identity secret from their friends, colleagues and children; and both had this secret revealed immediately after their deaths.

Yet while Kay may have mined Tipton’s life for subject matter, “Trumpet” is a work of imagination in which a writer captures the experience of knowing--if somewhat less successfully of being--a human psyche in complex and layered costume. Kay gives as much weight to the ordinary in Moody’s story as she does to the extraordinary, and in this way a rounded, textured, touching, though in the end imperfect, portrait emerges.

“Trumpet” is told in a patchwork of voices. The speakers who were more remotely involved in Moody’s life address its more sensational details. Among these are a doctor, a funeral director, a housekeeper and a fortune-hunting writer, Sophie Stones, who descends on the scene after Moody’s death to collaborate on a tell-all book with his son. “The ‘90s are obsessed with sex, infidelity, scandal, sleaze, perverts,” Stones explains gleefully. “The ‘90s love the private life . . . that turns suddenly and horrifically public.”

Concerned with these topics though it is, Kay’s own book, fortunately, is leavened by compassion and sensitivity, which emerge in the commentators on the private Moody: his widow, Millie, and Colman, his son. Unlike the women in Tipton’s life, Millie knew Joss Moody’s secret from the beginning. To her, the secret “was harmless. It did not hurt anybody.” She loved and desired her husband, she loved and respected his music. “I didn’t feel like I was living a lie. I felt I was living a life,” she says as she reviews her marriage and grieves for her mate. Their sex life--although depicted--is put in the context of lazy, domestic Sundays, with breakfasts of scrambled eggs and long walks on the Hampstead Heath. Although there is arguably a thread of naivete running through Millie’s retrospection, the palpable quality of her grief, the authenticity of her memories and her genuine affection for Moody make their relationship seem plausible and tactile; a marriage with a twist but a marriage nonetheless.

Colman is a far grittier speaker. To him, his father is the guy who “conned his own son.” “I’m going to have to go back over my whole life with a fine-tooth comb,” Colman says, and he does, in fragments, reviewing, first angrily, then more thoughtfully, his experience of the person he knew as his father. Yet it is a sign of how artfully Kay has imagined Colman that she is also able to explore the effect on his life of his race (like Moody, he is of color), his adoptive origins and the difficulty of being the ordinary child of talented and unconventional parents.

Millie and Colman are faceted characters who live beyond the parameters of the book’s central issue; Joss Moody, who speaks only minimally in his own voice, is rather more dominated by it. By viewing Moody from without, as she does, Kay withholds from him the subtlety and the range she brings to her depiction of his wife and son. Although it helps to learn that, when Moody makes music, “all his self collapses--his idiosyncrasies, his personality, his ego, his sexuality, even, finally, his memory,” it is the uncollapsed Moody we wish to know better. Tenderly evoked though he is, Joss Moody remains in his way almost as elusive as Billy Tipton, an inevitable enigma perhaps, but an enigma even so.