The first essay in the Jazz Age collection sets the tone for the rest of the book. The author of This Side of Paradise, Tender is The Night, and The Great Gatsby, gives a kind of social history of the 1920's and '30's, starting with a run through of what, in his estimation, the public learned from books published during the Jazz Age.
The Jazz Age, Starring F. Scott Fitzgerald
On page seven, he sums up his pronouncements with this only half-ironic paragraph recounting the literary revelations of the ten years of the Jazz Age (note the appearance of his own first novel in this timeline):
"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 (Winesberg, Ohio, 1920) that adolescents lead very amorous lives (This Side of Paradise, 1920)"…(7)
Co-written With Zelda Fitzgerald
Even though it includes him, this essay really is a social history—after all, the author incorporates into the story the main political, cultural, literary events of the times (which he, of course, was there to see), creating a rich and believable context—but at its heart, Echoes of the Jazz Age, co-written with his wife, Zelda Sayre, is a memoir, more concerned with the author and his own feelings about the formation and eventual deterioration of his wasted youth than anything else.
An amusing section on pages ten and eleven describes Americans (especially the author and his friends, I assume) getting “soft.” “We were turning out not to be an athletic people like the British, at all…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 noticed we had flabby arms and a fat pot…”
End of The Jazz Age
The next paragraph describes a series of tragic deaths and psychotic episodes that happened to the author’s friends toward the end of the Jazz age. This is meant to illustrate the decline of the free-spirited ‘20’s, but is really more about the author’s own downturn, his gnawing worry about money, his looks, his mental health, and his position in the literary world.
With his characteristic half-irony, that tone which keeps him cool and contemporary and readable by cynical New York audiences despite his root level earnestness, Fitzgerald introduces readers to the beginning of the end. “In 1927, a widespread neurosis began to be evident, faintly signaled, like the nervous beating of the feet, by the popularity of cross-word puzzles.” A few lines later, Fitzgerald gives in and writes in the kind of lecture style he seems most comfortable with:
“By this time contemporaries of mine had begun to disappear into the dark maw of violence. A classmate killed himself and his wife on Long Island, another tumbled, “accidentally” from a skyscraper in Philadelphia, another purposefully 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… these things happened not during the depression, but during the boom (11).”
Fitzgerald and the 1920’s
The essay concludes with a reflection on the narrator’s youth, and on the Jazz age generally, as a wild and free and miss-spent time that can never be repeated—and in the end, the metaphor works—the Jazz age can be used to describe the rise and fall of this author, since his coming of age so closely lines up with the years of the social phenomenon of the 1920’s and also because this author, and his wife and his friends, helped define the years in our national consciousness.
So although these essays are biased and subjective and endlessly self-referential, they are some of the soundest historical re-counting we have—what could work better as a history of the Jazz age than a memoir of the man who above all others represents in our mind the striving, the excess, and the fallout of that age?
Fitzgerald, F. Scott. The Jazz Age. New York: New Directions, 1996. Print.
See The Jazz Age, Essays by F. Scott Fitzgerald.
Eva Gordon - Eva Sage Gordon
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