From the greatest chronicler of the excesses of the "Roaring Twenties," F. Scott Fitzgerald's Echoes of the Jazz Age, written for Scribner's Magazine in 1931:
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. . . .
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 a grand duke 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.
. . .
Now once more the belt is tight and we summon the proper expression of horror as we look back on 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 the first abortive shortening of 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 so rosy and romantic to us who were young then, because we will never feel quite so intensely about our surroundings anymore.
Tags: F. Scott Fitzgerald, Echoes of the Jazz Age, Gatsby
Posts
.jpg)
No comments:
Post a Comment