Bobbed Hair and Bathtub Gin

"This is Marion Meade’s overview. In some ways, it would be a good book to read first if you want an introduction to the Jazz Age. I think she does a very good job of getting the feel of it, and the organisation is quite clever. She tells the story of the decade through the lives and careers of four women who all knew each other and had many relationships in common. They had many mutual friends as well as, in some cases, lovers, who are threaded among the different stories. It’s the story of the decade told through these women whose lives intersect in New York. She begins in 1920 and writes about Scott’s wife Zelda Fitzgerald. Then she shifts to Dorothy Parker , who was a friend of the Fitzgeralds, and the poet Edna St Vincent Millay and [novelist] Edna Ferber. The story crosscuts among all these different women, who in their own ways were each representative of an experience of the Jazz Age. They were very “modern” women, all rebellious in their own way. American women got the vote in 1920, and these women all came of age around the same time and are seen as part of this new age of independent women. They were called flappers, but most of them were more serious than what the term generally denoted. The flapper was usually represented as a very frivolous character but most of these women worked for a living and they were all very talented and trying to be groundbreaking in certain ways, but also trying to have a lot of fun. Mostly they succeeded more at the fun, at least at the beginning, than in being groundbreaking, but they were all very interesting women. Yes, I would say they are. Most people wouldn’t talk about Zelda Fitzgerald that way, but perhaps we should. She wasn’t a very serious person in one sense until later in her life – she didn’t have any discipline or dedication to a craft or purpose, but she had a great deal of talent, she was highly intelligent and she was trying to figure out what she was going to do. She’s representative of a young woman who was trying to find her place in a changing world. In a sense, she was very much a product of her upbringing in the South, in the Edwardian years. Fitzgerald was born in 1896 and Zelda was born in 1900, so they were raised in a much more conservative era. Zelda was a Southern belle, really – raised to believe that men should take care of her – and as a young woman it doesn’t seem to have occurred to her that she should work. However, many biographers say that Fitzgerald also didn’t want her to, although this is a subject of some dispute. Later, when she was in her late twenties, she got very serious about work, first about ballet and then about writing. She wrote a novel and a play in the early 1930s, but by then she’d had a terrible breakdown and been institutionalised. Some of the other women in Marion Meade’s story were considerably more independent than Zelda was. Edna St Vincent Millay is probably the most rebellious of them all. She was certainly the most iconoclastic of the group that Meade considers. Millay was the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for poetry, she was immensely famous and I think her poetry has been unfairly neglected because she wasn’t really a modernist. She was a more traditional poet, but her life was very modern. She was famously promiscuous – with both sexes – profoundly unfaithful, and cut a swath through Greenwich Village in the early years of American bohemia that has never really been forgotten. Several of Fitzgerald’s friends were madly in love with her, including [writer and literary critic] Edmund Wilson – she was Wilson’s first great love, and some would say his last, too. Then there is Dorothy Parker, who is probably the best remembered of these women now. She was a writer, journalist and poet. Eventually she was writing for The New Yorker magazine, which was established in 1925. Dorothy knew Scott and Zelda quite well – she had a crush on Scott at one point – and Edmund Wilson thought about asking her out, so they all knew each other and socialised together with the same groups of friends. They were all working for the same editors and going to the same parties and I think that is what Meade captures well. And because her story covers the whole decade, beginning in 1920 and ending with the crash, you really get a sense of New York and America in the 1920s."