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Title: Echoes of the Jazz Age
Author: Fitzgerald, F. Scott [Francis Scott Key] (1896-1940)
Author (introductory description): Anonymous
Date of first publication: November 1931
Edition used as base for this ebook:
   New York: Scribner's Magazine, November 1931
   [Vol. XC, Number 5]
Date first posted: 7 June 2014
Date last updated: 7 June 2014
Project Gutenberg Canada ebook #1183

This ebook was produced by Dr Mark Bear Akrigg






ECHOES OF THE JAZZ AGE

By F. SCOTT FITZGERALD




    "This Side of Paradise" at its publication in 1920 was the
    first signal of the coming turbulent decade. "Tales of the
    Jazz Age" (1922) gave the period a name. That age is dead.
    It went over the hill with its boom companion, Prosperity.
    Scott Fitzgerald, who was in the thick of it and portrayed
    the social changes of the times in these and other books,
    writes its obituary.


It is too soon to write about the Jazz Age with perspective,
and without being suspected of premature arteriosclerosis.
Many people still succumb to violent retching when they
happen upon any of its characteristic words--words which
have since yielded in vividness to the coinages of the
underworld. It is as dead as were the Yellow Nineties in
1902. Yet the present writer already looks back to it with
nostalgia. It bore him up, flattered him and gave him more
money than he had dreamed of, simply for telling people that
he felt as they did, that something had to be done with all
the nervous energy stored up and unexpended in the War.

The ten-year period that, as if reluctant to die outmoded in
its bed, leaped to a spectacular death in October, 1929,
began about the time of the May Day riots in 1919. When the
police rode down the demobilized country boys gaping at the
orators in Madison Square, it was the sort of measure bound
to alienate the more intelligent young men from the
prevailing order. We didn't remember anything about the Bill
of Rights until Mencken began plugging it, but we did know
that such tyranny belonged in the jittery little countries
of South Europe. If goose-livered business men had this
effect on the government, then maybe we had gone to war for
J. P. Morgan's loans after all. But, because we were tired
of Great Causes, there was no more than a short outbreak of
moral indignation, typified by Dos Passos' "Three Soldiers."
Presently we began to have slices of the national cake and
our idealism only flared up when the newspapers made
melodrama out of such stories as Harding and the Ohio Gang
or Sacco and Vanzetti. The events of 1919 left us cynical
rather than revolutionary, in spite of the fact that now we
are all rummaging around in our trunks wondering where in
hell we left the liberty cap--"I know I _had_ it"--and the
moujik blouse. It was characteristic of the Jazz Age that it
had no interest in politics at all.

* * * * *

It was an age of miracles, it was an age of art, it was an
age of excess, and it was an age of satire. A Stuffed Shirt,
squirming to blackmail in a lifelike way, sat upon the
throne of the United States; a stylish young man hurried
over to represent to us the throne of England. A world of
girls yearned for the young Englishman; the old American
groaned in his sleep as he waited to be poisoned by his
wife, upon the advice of the female Rasputin who then made
the ultimate decision in our national affairs. But such
matters apart, we had things our way at last. With Americans
ordering suits by the gross in London, the Bond Street
tailors perforce agreed to moderate their cut to the
American long-waisted figure and loose-fitting taste,
something subtle passed to America, the style of man. During
the Renaissance, Francis the First looked to Florence to
trim his leg. Seventeenth-century England aped the court of
France, and fifty years ago the German Guards officer bought
his civilian clothes in London. Gentleman's clothes--symbol
of "the power that man must hold and that passes from race
to race."

We were the most powerful nation. Who could tell us any
longer what was fashionable and what was fun? Isolated
during the European War, we had begun combing the unknown
South and West for folkways and pastimes and there were more
ready to hand.

The first social revelation created a sensation out of all
proportion to its novelty. As far back as 1915 the
unchaperoned young people of the smaller cities had
discovered the mobile privacy of that automobile given to
young Bill at sixteen to make him "self-reliant." At first
petting was a desperate adventure even under such favorable
conditions, but presently confidences were exchanged and the
old commandment broke down. As early as 1917 there were
references to such sweet and casual dalliance in any number
of the _Yale Record_ or the _Princeton Tiger_.

But petting in its more audacious manifestations was
confined to the wealthier classes--among other young people
the old standards prevailed until after the War, and a kiss
meant that a proposal was expected, as young officers in
strange cities sometimes discovered to their dismay. Only in
1920 did the veil finally fall--the Jazz Age was in flower.

Scarcely had the staider citizens of the republic caught
their breaths when the wildest of all generations, the
generation which had been adolescent during the confusion of
the War, brusquely shouldered my contemporaries out of the
way and danced into the limelight. This was the generation
whose girls dramatized themselves as flappers, the
generation that corrupted its elders and eventually
overreached itself less through lack of morals than through
lack of taste. May one offer in exhibit the year 1922! That
was the peak of the younger generation, for though the Jazz
Age continued, it became less and less an affair of youth.

The sequel was like a children's party taken over by the
elders, leaving the children puzzled and rather neglected
and rather taken aback. By 1923 their elders, tired of
watching the carnival with ill-concealed envy, had
discovered that young liquor will take the place of young
blood, and with a whoop the orgy began. The younger
generation was starred no longer.

A whole race going hedonistic, deciding on pleasure. The
precocious intimacies of the younger generation would have
come about with or without prohibition--they were implicit
in the attempt to adapt English customs to American
conditions. (Our South, for example, is tropical and early
maturing --it has never been part of the wisdom of France
and Spain to let young girls go unchaperoned at sixteen and
seventeen.) But the general decision to be amused that began
with the cocktail parties of 1921 had more complicated
origins.

* * * * *

The word jazz in its progress toward respectability has
meant first sex, then dancing, then music. It is associated
with a state of nervous stimulation, not unlike that of big
cities behind the lines of a war. To many English the War
still goes on because all the forces that menace them are
still active--Wherefore eat, drink and be merry, for
to-morrow we die. But different causes had now brought about
a corresponding state in America--though there were entire
classes (people over fifty, for example) who spent a whole
decade denying its existence even when its puckish face
peered into the family circle. Never did they dream that
they had contributed to it. The honest citizens of every
class, who believed in a strict public morality and were
powerful enough to enforce the necessary legislation, did
not know that they would necessarily be served by criminals
and quacks, and do not really believe it to-day. Rich
righteousness had always been able to buy honest and
intelligent servants to free the slaves or the Cubans, so
when this attempt collapsed our elders stood firm with all
the stubbornness of people involved in a weak case,
preserving their righteousness and losing their children.
Silver-haired women and men with fine old faces, people who
never did a consciously dishonest thing in their lives,
still assure each other in the apartment hotels of New York
and Boston and Washington that "there's a whole generation
growing up that will never know the taste of liquor."
Meanwhile their granddaughters pass the well-thumbed copy of
"Lady Chatterly's Lover" around the boarding-school and, if
they get about at all, know the taste of gin or corn at
sixteen. But the generation who reached maturity between
1875 and 1895 continue to believe what they want to believe.

Even the intervening generations were incredulous. In 1920
Heywood Broun announced that all this hubbub was nonsense,
that young men didn't kiss but told anyhow. But very shortly
people over twenty-five came in for an intensive education.
Let me trace some of the revelations vouchsafed them by
reference to a dozen works written for various types of
mentality during the decade. We begin with the suggestion
that Don Juan leads an interesting life ("Jurgen," 1919);
then we learn that there's a lot of sex around if we only
knew it ("Winesburg, Ohio," 1920), that adolescents lead
very amorous lives ("This Side of Paradise," 1920), that
there are a lot of neglected Anglo-Saxon words ("Ulysses,"
1921), that older people don't always resist sudden
temptations ("Cytherea," 1922), that girls are sometimes
seduced without being ruined ("Flaming Youth," 1922), that
even rape often turns out well ("The Sheik," 1922), that
glamorous English ladies are often promiscuous ("The Green
Hat," 1924), that in fact they devote most of their time to
it ("The Vortex," 1926), that it's a damn good thing too
("Lady Chatterly's Lover," 1928), and finally that there are
abnormal variations ("The Well of Loneliness," 1928, and
"Sodome and Gomorrhe," 1929).

In my opinion the erotic element in these works, even "The
Sheik" written for children in the key of "Peter Rabbit,"
did not one particle of harm. Everything they described, and
much more, was familiar in our contemporary life. The
majority of the theses were honest and elucidating--their
effect was to restore some dignity to the male as opposed to
the he-man in American life. ("And what is a 'He-man'?"
demanded Gertrude Stein one day. "Isn't it a large enough
order to fill out to the dimensions of all that 'a man' has
meant in the past? A _'He_-man'!") The married woman can now
discover whether she is being cheated, or whether sex is
just something to be endured, and her compensation should be
to establish a tyranny of the spirit, as her mother may have
hinted. Perhaps many women found that love was meant to be
fun. Anyhow the objectors lost their tawdry little case,
which is one reason why our literature is now the most
living in the world.

Contrary to popular opinion the movies of the Jazz Age had
no effect upon its morals. The social attitude of the
producers was timid, behind the times and banal--for example
no picture mirrored even faintly the younger generation
until 1923, when magazines had already been started to
celebrate it and it had long ceased to be news. There were a
few feeble splutters and then Clara Bow in "Flaming Youth";
promptly the Hollywood hacks ran the theme into its
cinematographic grave. Throughout the Jazz Age the movies
got no farther than Mrs. Jiggs, keeping up with its most
blatant superficialities. This was no doubt due to the
censorship as well as to innate conditions in the industry.
In any case the Jazz Age now raced along under its own
power, served by great filling stations full of money.

The people over thirty, the people all the way up to fifty,
had joined the dance. We graybeards (to tread down F. P. A.)
remember the uproar when in 1912 grandmothers of forty
tossed away their crutches and took lessons in the Tango and
the Castle-Walk. A dozen years later a woman might pack the
Green Hat with her other affairs as she set off for Europe
or New York, but Savonarola was too busy flogging dead
horses in Augean stables of his own creation to notice.
Society, even in small cities, now dined in separate
chambers, and the sober table learned about the gay table
only from hearsay. There were very few people left at the
sober table. One of its former glories, the less
sought-after girls who had become resigned to sublimating a
probable celibacy, came across Freud and Jung in seeking
their intellectual recompense and came tearing back into the
fray.

By 1926 the universal preoccupation with sex had become a
nuisance. (I remember a perfectly mated, contented young
mother asking my wife's advice about "having an affair right
away," though she had no one especially in mind, "because
don't you think it's sort of undignified when you get much
over thirty?") For a while bootleg negro records with their
phallic euphemisms made everything suggestive, and
simultaneously came a wave of erotic plays--young girls from
finishing-schools packed the galleries to hear about the
romance of being a Lesbian and George Jean Nathan protested.
Then one young producer lost his head entirely, drank a
beauty's alcoholic bath-water and went to the penitentiary.
Somehow his pathetic attempt at romance belongs to the Jazz
Age, while his contemporary in prison, Ruth Snyder, had to
be hoisted into it by the tabloids--she was, as _The Daily
News_ hinted deliciously to gourmets, about "to cook, _and
sizzle, AND FRY!"_ in the electric chair.

The gay elements of society had divided into two main
streams, one flowing toward Palm Beach and Deauville, and
the other, much smaller, toward the summer Riviera. One
could get away with more on the summer Riviera, and whatever
happened seemed to have something to do with art. From 1926
to 1929, the great years of the Cap d'Antibes, this corner
of France was dominated by a group quite distinct from that
American society which is dominated by Europeans. Pretty
much of anything went at Antibes--by 1929 at the most
gorgeous paradise for swimmers on the Mediterranean no one
swam any more, save for a short hang-over dip at noon. There
was a picturesque graduation of steep rocks over the sea and
somebody's valet and an occasional English girl used to dive
from them but the Americans were content to discuss each
other in the bar. This was indicative of something that was
taking place in the homeland--Americans were getting soft.
There were signs everywhere: we still won the Olympic games
but with champions whose names had few vowels in them--teams
composed, like the fighting Irish combination of Notre Dame,
of fresh overseas blood. Once the French became really
interested the Davis Cup gravitated automatically to their
intensity in competition. The vacant lots of the
Middle-Western cities were built up now--except for a short
period in school we were not turning out to be an athletic
people like the British after all. The hare and the
tortoise. Of course if we wanted to we could be in a minute;
we still had all those reserves of ancestral vitality, but
one day in 1926 we looked down and found we had flabby arms
and a fat pot and couldn't say boop-boop-a-doop to a
Sicilian. Shades of Van Bibber!--no Utopian ideal, God
knows. Even golf, once considered an effeminate game, had
seemed very strenuous of late--an emasculated form appeared
and proved just right.

By 1927 a wide-spread neurosis began to be evident, faintly
signalled, like a nervous beating of the feet, by the
popularity of cross-word puzzles. I remember a fellow
expatriate opening a letter from a mutual friend of ours,
urging him to come home and be revitalized by the hardy,
bracing qualities of the native soil. It was a strong letter
and it affected us both deeply, until we noticed that it was
headed from a nerve sanitarium in Pennsylvania.

By this time contemporaries of mine had begun to disappear
into the dark maw of violence. A classmate killed his wife
and himself on Long Island, another tumbled "accidentally"
from a skyscraper in Philadelphia, another purposely from a
skyscraper in New York. One was killed in a speak-easy in
Chicago; another was beaten to death in a speak-easy in New
York and crawled home to the Princeton Club to die; still
another had his skull crushed by a maniac's axe in an insane
asylum where he was confined. These are not catastrophes
that I went out of my way to look for--these were my
friends; moreover, these things happened not during the
depression but during the boom.

In the spring of '27, something bright and alien flashed
across the sky. A young Minnesotan who seemed to have had
nothing to do with his generation did a heroic thing, and
for a moment people set down their glasses in country clubs
and speak-easies and thought of their old best dreams. Maybe
there was a way out by flying, maybe our restless blood
could find frontiers in the illimitable air. But by that
time we were all pretty well committed; and the Jazz Age
continued; we would all have one more.

Nevertheless, Americans were wandering ever more
widely--friends seemed eternally bound for Russia, Persia,
Abyssinia and Central Africa. And by 1928 Paris had grown
suffocating. With each new shipment of Americans spewed up
by the boom the quality fell off, until toward the end there
was something sinister about the crazy boatloads. They were
no longer the simple pa and ma and son and daughter,
infinitely superior in their qualities of kindness and
curiosity to the corresponding class in Europe, but
fantastic neanderthals who believed something, something
vague, that you remembered from a very cheap novel. I
remember an Italian on a steamer who promenaded the deck in
an American Reserve Officer's uniform picking quarrels in
broken English with Americans who criticised their own
institutions in the bar. I remember a fat Jewess, inlaid
with diamonds, who sat behind us at the Russian ballet and
said as the curtain rose, "Thad's luffly, dey ought to baint
a bicture of it." This was low comedy but it was evident
that money and power were falling into the hands of people
in comparison with whom the leader of a village Soviet would
be a gold-mine of judgment and culture. There were citizens
travelling in luxury in 1928 and 1929 who, in the distortion
of their new condition, had the human value of pekinese
bivalves, cretins, goats. I remember the Judge from some New
York district who had taken his daughter to see the Bayeux
Tapestries and made a scene in the papers advocating their
segregation because one scene was immoral. But in those days
life was like the race in "Alice in Wonderland," there was a
prize for every one.

The Jazz Age had had a wild youth and a heady middle age.
There was the phase of the necking parties, the Leopold-Loeb
murder (I remember the time my wife was arrested on
Queensborough Bridge on the suspicion of being the
"Bob-haired Bandit") and the John Held Clothes. In the
second phase such phenomena as sex and murder became more
mature, if much more conventional. Middle age must be served
and pajamas came to the beach to save fat thighs and flabby
calves from competition with the one-piece bathing-suit.
Finally skirts came down and everything was concealed.
Everybody was at scratch now. Let's go--

But it was not to be. Somebody had blundered and the most
expensive orgy in history was over.

It ended two years ago, because the utter confidence which
was its essential prop received an enormous jolt and it
didn't take long for the flimsy structure to settle
earthward. And after two years the Jazz Age seems as far
away as the days before the War. It was borrowed time
anyhow--the whole upper tenth of a nation living with the
insouciance of grand ducs and the casualness of chorus
girls. But moralizing is easy now and it was pleasant to be
in one's twenties in such a certain and unworried time. Even
when you were broke you didn't worry about money, because it
was in such profusion around you. Toward the end one had a
struggle to pay one's share; it was almost a favor to accept
hospitality that required any travelling. Charm, notoriety,
mere good manners, weighed more than money as a social
asset. This was rather splendid but things were getting
thinner and thinner as the eternal necessary human values
tried to spread over all that expansion. Writers were
geniuses on the strength of one respectable book or play;
just as during the War officers of four months' experience
commanded hundreds of men, so there were now many little
fish lording it over great big bowls. In the theatrical
world extravagant productions were carried by a few
second-rate stars, and so on up the scale into politics
where it was difficult to interest good men in positions of
the highest importance and responsibility, importance and
responsibility far exceeding that of business executives but
which paid only five or six thousand a year.

Now once more the belt is tight and we summon the proper
expression of horror as we look back at our wasted youth.
Sometimes, though, there is a ghostly rumble among the
drums, an asthmatic whisper in the trombones that swings me
back into the early twenties when we drank wood alcohol and
every day in every way grew better and better, and there was
a first abortive shortening of the skirts, and girls all
looked alike in sweater dresses, and people you didn't want
to know said "Yes, we have no bananas," and it seemed only a
question of a few years before the older people would step
aside and let the world be run by those who saw things as
they were--and it all seems rosy and romantic to us who were
young then, because we will never feel quite so intensely
about our surroundings any more.





TRANSCRIBER'S NOTE:

The edition used as base for this ebook contained the
following apparent error, which has been corrected:

These are not catastrophies
=> These are not catastrophes






[End of Echoes of the Jazz Age, by F. Scott Fitzgerald]
