Decadence and Crack-up

Abstract

The twenties managed to become celebrated as bright, young, smart, jazzy, as though life at that time was all parties and holidays. Even the ten years that span the Slump, Hitler’s rise to power, and the final failure to appease, let alone stop him, have been included in the ‘long week-end’. Of course this is a playboy’s view of social life. It has managed to become celebrated because the same ‘set’ owned both country houses such as Cliveden where the whooping-up went on and the newspapers which coined the images and nicknames. We cannot suppose that even, say, the merrymakers who danced the Charleston in and out of the fountains on Long Island were perfectly forgetful. Scott Fitzgerald, looking back on the twenties from 1931, recalled how his contemporaries ‘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.¹