COMMENTARY ON F. SCOTT FITZGERALD'S "ECHOES OF THE JAZZ AGE" (Selected passages)

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 under-world. 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.

From his vantage point Fitzgerald offers a view that is nostalgic even before the events described have occurred.. In fact, his early works reflect such a moral commentary when the age has not yet felt its death knell. The age is characterized by its sense of apprehension-the nervous energy. As voice of the age, Fitzgerald does not simply comment individually on his own experience; he offers his vision as a collective one. He captures the moment by offering his voice to others; he told his readers that "he felt as they did." In his nostalgic view, Fitzgerald associates the "nervous energy" with youth.

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".

The public and the private are shared in the common elements of the circumstances: the attachment of the car to sexual exploration. What is critical in Fitzgerald's reading is the sense of revelation of the private. He both engages the scandal and moderates its intensity. It gives the sense that he chronicles an actual phenomenon. He initiates the myth by tying this performance to the other moments of the age:

At first petting was a desperate adventure even under such favourable 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 standard 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.

Commentary becomes so powerful because it is out of place from its first affirmation

commentator and his reflection

the alcohol and effort to recover the force of the age

nervous energy created by the synergy between the nostalgia and the moral commentary

always observing

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.

Between the excesses of alcohol and the nervous energy of youth Fitzgerald interposes his own creation, his jazz. The author identifies this artifice somewhat by talking around it. It is the corresponding attachment that writer develops in his readers for the depicted pageantry. The carnival is not illegitimately stolen from the young. Their nervous energy receives its exalting in his vision. The strength of the vision is no more due to the alcohol than it is to the youth. Instead, Fitzgerald's sense of nostalgia needs an actual form for its reassurance. The costume drama attempts to capture all nuance that previously dynamized social interaction.

A whole race going hedonistic, deciding on pleasure.

In the portrayal, pleasure becomes a form of work; pleasure more or less mimics the transformation of work, the frenzy of the market. There is already prohibition inherent in the pleasure. The excitement surrounds what cannot be said so it is only natural that the culture would find a prohibition to reflect the divide within the character.

The precocious intimacies of the younger generation would have come about with or without prohibition [...]

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.

Respectability ends up contradicting its intent. In its very form, it graces the prohibition. Even where order is imposed and the hedonistic is avoided the products of work seek their accounting. Demand must be induced. So Fitzgerald readily offers a myth that contains its own sense of reckoning. The more the pleasure drives the ludicrous, the more judgement motivates the insanity. It is that impending doom that makes the nervousness seems so appealing . Even if, the imposition of prohibition created a belief, Fitzgerald shows how that belief is mocked by the reality.

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 today. 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 Chatterley'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.

The divided self now seeks to exaggerate the attachment to pleasure. And in this attachment there is something of the deviant. It is deviant only because in its refined form the self seeks to dominate everyone's attention with the most mundane indiosyncracies.

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.

Desire asserts itself in a way apparently devoid of awareness. It is a context of heightened awareness, of show, that is masked by a sense of obliviousness. The annoying habit is the fetish that is marketed for an audience. Simultaneously, the self drifts apparently into entertainments with more and more stimulation.

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 ex-patriate opening a letter from a mutual friend of ours, urging him to come home ind 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 "accidently" 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.

The divided self now yields to these enactments; literature invites its performance. The faded imitation only asks for an escalation.

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 speakeasies 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.

Even in the midst of the hedonistic pursuit, there is a longing for salvation. But Fitzgerald's appreciation needs to be reversed. He values the heroic precisely because it places the social dissipation in the foreground. He feigns this devotion to the old best dream, but such utter positivity emerges in coincidence with the age of hyperbole, not in spite of it. Where the pursuit of pleasure is the desire to observe the self, the visionary is simply the fool who is whirled around by the total carelessness of the moment, insignificant because it does not fit his vision.

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.

So just as he props up the era's toy soldiers, he searches for evidence to condemn the more elaborate gestures of his contemporaries. The moral judge needs scandal more than the libertine. And the further stages of the jazz age become deviations where shock seems to be the only motivation. This contrasts with Fitzgerald's commitment to the nervous energies of youth. But such commitment only makes sense in the performances that follow. Fitzgerald can besmirch the reputation. But even the belt-tightening is itself an excess.

If the upper tenth of a nation could assert itself with such confidence, why did the bubble burst? Why couldn't they sustain their access to privilege. In this unstoppable syllogism, charm became transformed into genius. The initial investment was continually fed back into the monster. More than simple excitement, the belief attained a reality. He notes the political abdication which accompanied this unfolding. Nevertheless, the dynamic seemed like it could spread and place a significant burden on the dominant social order. Before the excesses of the one tenth, who exercised the legitimacy of princes. Fitzgerald is so quick to pick up the mantel of nobility in his condemnation. Even he fears the democratic implication of the movement. Again, he relishes the scandal for just this reason. It serves as a brake on the social change. The markets took a hit because of what they represented to the Brahmins of the former period. Sure, it played tribute to the inescapable heights of wealth. But why would the punishment be to let the industrial dynamo lie fallow? More than ever, the structure of the markets needed to reordered. As inflation rose, the inevitable demands of labor might rear its ugly head. No wonder his model seems to be the idle who substitute reputation for actual production. That is how the market functioned to distribute wealth by directing production towards regions of demand.

It ended two years ago (1929), 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 favour to accept hospitality that required any traveling. 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.

In the sobering retrospective, he trades his wasted youth for a transcendental vision-hence the moralism. The nostalgic projection of seeing things as they were is the height of fiction. The created past could never sustain its grasp. Or at least it entirely achieved its goal, while distracting the observer to some deeper moment. In this paradise, the abortive shortening of the skirts became a gesture of the gods.