by Philipp Blom
But it was too late to turn back the clock. Prohibition was changing American society profoundly, but the effects were the very opposite of what had been intended. The same wave of technological innovation that made bootleggers and Mafia killers so successful also transformed the moral outlook of society itself. Before the war, just five people in a thousand owned a car in the United States. By 1920 this figure had risen to eighty-seven per thousand, and ten years later more than 20 percent of Americans were motorized. Closed cars, it turned out, afforded valuable privacy for dates. They brought the city to the countryside. They brought not only whisky and newspapers but also travelers who previously would have had to rely on stagecoaches, trains, or horses. They brought traveling salesmen and odd bits of news, contraceptives and city ways. They took people to the movies, where they could watch Mary Pickford—who had just been granted a very public divorce in 1920 and was having an affair with the dashing Douglas Fairbanks, followed by the press with bated breath—and Charlie Chaplin and the Marx Brothers.
Cars, movies, and radios wrought more havoc with traditional morals than oceans of alcohol could have done, but they were much more difficult to hate. By turning against alcohol, however, the prohibitionists hastened their own undoing. The speakeasies did much to accelerate social change and shifts in gender roles in the big cities. People who had gotten through the door with the little grille through which a suspicious pair of eyes would examine them before turning the key knew that they were already in contempt of the law and part of a community of revelers determined to have fun anyway, and they did.
Men and women danced close together in frequently lewd dances such as the Charleston, the energetic Lindy Hop (a distant ancestor of break dancing), or the dangerously sensuous fox-trot. Outside in the law-abiding world they would not have behaved in this way, but behind the door of the speakeasy everything seemed possible. The musicians were frequently black and brought with them the rhythms and riffs of the Deep South, where their grandparents had still been slaves. Their music became the true voice of a developing counterculture in which black cool became a growing factor.
A culture war had gripped the United States. If the prohibitionists were rapidly turning out to be the losers of their own creation, a whole new culture arose out of the ruins of their moral hopes. The speakeasies changed American and finally global culture. Modern dances and ecstatic whirling were frowned upon in dry town halls and official establishments, but they were encouraged in the illegal drinking clubs; racial segregation was largely intact outside, but inside one could count on meeting not only black musicians but also intellectuals and artists; class differences kept people from talking to one another in shops and restaurants, but the bar created an almost anarchic and exhilarating equality between drinkers—including a dangerous camaraderie between men and women, who could be found drinking, smoking, and dancing the night away. The prohibitionists had wanted to change America, and they had succeeded beyond their wildest dreams—it was just that the change went in exactly the opposite direction from what they had intended.
Self-confident, sassy, and sozzled, Mae West was the ideal Hollywood heroine of this world, and her one-liners (“Is that a pistol in your pocket or are you just glad to see me?”) became legendary. “Goodness, what beautiful diamonds,” says a young girl to West’s heroine in Night After Night (1932). “Goodness has nothing to do with it, dearie,” comes the reply. The Roaring Twenties began in the liquor-laced speakeasies.
The big winner, however, came from the South and rapidly began to conquer the world: jazz. Originally made by and for African Americans in New Orleans and other southern cities, carrying with it the memories of slavery and the rhythms of Africa and the Caribbean, and played on instruments derived from Western classical and folk music, jazz absorbed and developed from multiple pasts. Migrants brought it to the industrial cities of the North, and soon black musicians were the hottest ticket in the permissive culture of illegal partying. Louis Armstrong, Ella Fitzgerald, Jelly Roll Morton, Duke Ellington, Hoagy Carmichael, Fats Waller, and Sidney Bechet all started their careers in this highly charged atmosphere of drink, drugs, and delirium.
From here on the victory of jazz and of black culture was unstoppable. Records and concert tours spread the fame of this new music, which more than any other encapsulated the spirit of the age. Black cool, rock and roll, soul, and ultimately rap and gangsta culture would reveal themselves to be late, unintended fruits of Prohibition.
Writers into the Breach
THE CULTURE WAR AROUND PROHIBITION was fought in literature, too. But here it was an unequal fight. Without Congress or law enforcement to call upon, the dry side could field only Upton Sinclair, a fine but moralistic novelist always moved by great causes, whose father, a liquor salesman, had drunk himself to death, and Jack London, who also took a dim view of the devil booze. On the other side was arrayed a formidable battalion of talent and wit: Ernest Hemingway, John Dos Passos, E. E. Cummings, Dorothy Parker, William Faulkner, Thomas Wolfe. The battle was not only about alcohol; “it mixed up Catholics, romantics, expatriates, libertarians, art-for-art’s-sakers in a battle for free drinking, evolution, free thought, free love, Al Smith, Freud, Joyce, Karl Adam, Karl Marx, Russian movies, against traditionalists, Jew-baiters, Catholic-haters, political and social conservatives, moralists, legalists.”11
The writer most associated with the young generation in the 1920s and their path from disillusion with society to disappointment in themselves was F. Scott Fitzgerald, whose novels This Side of Paradise (1920), The Beautiful and the Damned and Tales of the Jazz Age (1922), and The Great Gatsby (1925) were immediately acclaimed as literary monuments to this culture with its flappers, its hard-bitten young men and women, and its cult of pleasure for pleasure’s sake. “Here was a new generation,” Fitzgerald wrote in This Side of Paradise, “shouting the old cries, learning the old creeds, through a revelry of long days and nights; destined finally to go out into that dirty gray turmoil to follow love and pride; a new generation dedicated more than the last to the fear of poverty and the worship of success; grown up to find all Gods dead, all wars fought, all faiths in man shaken.”12
Fitzgerald’s own life was uncomfortably similar to the carousel of glamorous cocktail parties, orgiastic binges, and spiritual emptiness he described in his works; indeed, it could have been a cautionary tale straight out of a prohibitionist’s pamphlet. Born into a middle-class family in Minnesota in 1896 and educated at Princeton, he had left college without a degree. Drafted into the military and stationed in Alabama, he met Zelda Sayre and proposed to her. She initially accepted but then broke off the engagement, unwilling to marry a man without an income. Fitzgerald worked in an advertising agency while writing his first novel, This Side of Paradise. When the novel was published in 1920 and became a great success, Zelda finally agreed to marry the now famous author.
The ensuing years are the stuff of legend: the famous couple in New York, in Paris, on the French Riviera, young and glamorous, socializing and drinking and writing, writing and drinking and socializing. In Paris they met Ernest Hemingway, and the two men became close friends. Zelda resented this friendship, especially as Hemingway accused her of encouraging her husband to drink in order to stop him from writing. But Fitzgerald desperately needed to write, and not only because he had always been driven.
Despite the financial success of his novels and despite the short stories Fitzgerald turned out to keep the wolf from the door, the high life the couple led plunged them into debt. When his agent refused to advance him any more money the pressure on the author increased and he found little time to do anything but commercial work. Zelda, meanwhile, was descending into schizophrenia and was hospitalized. By now a middle-aged alcoholic and a shadow of his meteoric former self, Fitzgerald never produced anything equaling his brilliant early work and ended up in Hollywood writing short stories and screenplays, none of which were ever produced.
Going Abroad
SCOTT AND ZELDA F
ITZGERALD were not the only writers choosing to flee Prohibition-era America and settle in Paris during the Jazz Age. Paris was fun; it had a reputation; it had been the scene of the prewar avant-garde of Picasso, Apollinaire, Stravinsky, and Diaghilev. But most of all, it was cheap. A weak franc made it the ideal place for American artists who wanted their money to stretch further, and they came in droves. Sherwood Anderson, whose portrayal of the American provinces in the short-story collection Winesburg, Ohio had influenced a whole generation of younger writers; the scandalous and beautiful author Djuna Barnes; the socialist activist and novelist John Dos Passos; the deliciously explicit Anaïs Nin and her young lover Henry Miller; the lanky, eccentric poet and critic Ezra Pound—altogether some two hundred thousand English-speaking expatriates, mostly young and looking for excitement, were living in Paris in the 1920s.
“Paris was where the twentieth century was,” remarked the oracle and hostess of an entire generation of artists, Gertrude Stein, who had settled in Paris permanently together with her companion, Alice B. Toklas.13 Independently wealthy, strong-willed, and possessed by an intense desire for fame, Stein collected the works of the most daring and experimental artists of her day—Picasso, Matisse, Braque, Gris—and wrote novels and plays whose distinguishing feature was the complete absence of any kind of linear plot or apparent logic, huge, unreadable behemoths of words redeemed only by their obvious delight in punning and surreal images.
At Stein’s famous open houses on Saturday evenings, one could meet artistic giants such as Picasso, Braque, and Matisse talking with expatriate writers such as James Joyce and Hemingway, Paul Bowles and the Fitzgeralds. According to Hemingway, it was Stein who gave the young American artists and wannabes flocking the streets of Paris the name by which they were to be known. When a young car mechanic was unable to repair her car, she shouted at him, “You are all a génération perdue.” When relating the incident to Hemingway, she stuck with the phrase that had appeared to her in a moment of angry frustration: “That is what you are. That’s what you all are . . . all of you young people who served in the war. You are a lost generation.”14
The English “lost generation” may have been a myth, but the young, disillusioned, and unmoored expat bohemians in Paris were very real. Their members were aware of belonging nowhere, and expatriate life suited them. It was easier to live with the feeling of not being at home if they were in a foreign country, where they could live carefree lives. The culture war raging in the United States between drys and wets, vice and virtue, WASPy Presbyterian rectitude and “un-American” ideas and identities seemed far away here, and the refugees from these battles could ask themselves what exactly it was they had lost, or rather what they had never possessed.
Growing into adulthood after the war, they were acutely aware that they were lost, that they were missing a sense of themselves, of purpose, and of direction. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald were fun in a flapperish sort of way, but their incessant partying was a little too frenetic to be innocent. Djuna Barnes had lost too much too early: raped, most likely by her father, at sixteen, she had been married off to a man almost forty years her senior, whom she left after a torturous two months. When her family fell on hard times, she had been forced to support her siblings by working as a journalist. Uncompromising in living her hard-earned freedom, she took a succession of lovers, both male and female, and finally came to Paris in 1921 on an assignment to interview James Joyce, whose novel Ulysses, published in 1922, she admired so intensely that for a while she thought she would never be able to write again: “Who has the nerve to after that?” She eventually managed to work up the courage to publish again. Her autobiographical novel Ryder (1928) would expose in graphic detail the tawdry reality behind the bourgeois façade of pre-1914 middle-class life.
Among all the artists of the lost generation, Ernest Hemingway was both one of the most utterly lost and the most penetrating analyst of this condition. His own experiences in Paris and at bullfights in Spain were distilled in The Sun Also Rises (1926), a novel that captured an entire generation’s sense of loss and its rebellion against this hollow existence. Wounded in the war, the book’s protagonist, Jake, is impotent. His life as a foreign correspondent in Paris (a position Hemingway himself had held) is a joyless succession of drunken parties and distrustful encounters with people who are equally cynical and equally lacking in orientation. To escape the emptiness, Jake makes a trip to Spain with his friend Cohn and Cohn’s lover Brett, an English aristocrat whose male-sounding name indicates that she is more of a man than her companions. They live in a poisonous love triangle. Brett is very much a “new woman” and sexually liberated. She loves Jake, but because of his injury she does not commit to him, sleeping instead with Cohn and also seducing a bullfighter, the very image of traditional masculinity. In the end they all lose—their love, their hopes, and each other.
Montmartre Rag
THE CULTURE WARS between conservative values and the worldview of the postwar generation was played out throughout the European continent, and in many of these battles America became a symbol for the liberating power of the New World, far away from the stifling atmosphere of Europe’s prewar ideas.
Having arrived in the French capital during the war as soldiers, African American musicians decided to stay in or return to Europe rather than trying to make a living in their homeland, where stronger competition from other black bands and the prevalent racism of the white population made life difficult. To many demobilized black musicians the memories of Europe seemed golden, despite the dangers and hardships they had encountered at the front. Now they returned to Paris with their instruments, settling in and around Montmartre, in the rue Lance, rue Pigalle, and rue des Martyrs. The city was waking up from the trauma of a war that had caused more death and suffering among the French population than in any other Western country. People wanted to forget the killing and maiming and the grimness of war.
Mitchell’s Jazz Kings at the Casino de Paris in the rue de Clichy brought the sound of the American South to the Parisian public every evening, and also accompanied French singers such as Maurice Chevalier and Mistinguett. In 1924 Le Grand Duc in the rue Pigalle became another home for le ragtime or la musique nègre in the capital. Having arrived from London, where he had been on tour, the great clarinetist Sidney Bechet was astounded to find Montmartre very similar to Harlem: “Any time you walked down the streets you’d run into four or five people you knew—performers, entertainers, all kinds of people who had real talent in them . . . you’d start to go home, and you’d never get there. There was always some singer to hear or someone who was playing. You’d run into some friends and they were off to hear this or do that and you just went along. It seemed like you just couldn’t get home before ten or eleven in the morning.”15
From Montmartre, the syncopated rhythms of cornets, clarinets, and percussion traveled along the railway lines to Brussels and Amsterdam. A breath of black American culture brought with it a distinct aroma of freedom. London was another important destination, but here things were not so easy. Like Parisians, Londoners were seeking to forget the war and were rediscovering pleasure, but unlike France, Britain had employed black workers from the West Indies in factories to make up for the worker shortfall, a solution that seemed all the more attractive to employers as they paid black workers less than their white counterparts.
After demobilization, white British workers were competing for these jobs, resenting the blacks even more as they accused them of depressing wages. Another motive for the enmity of white workingmen toward blacks was sexual jealousy, as Francis Caldwell, then head constable of Liverpool, reported: “For some time there has existed a feeling of animosity between the white and colored population in this city. This feeling has probably been engendered by the arrogant and overbearing conduct of the negro population towards the white, and by the white women who live or cohabit with the black men, boasting to the other women of the superior qualities of the negroes as compared to those of whi
te men. Since the Armistice the demobilization of so many negroes into Liverpool has caused this feeling to develop more rapidly and actively.”16
White workers refused to work alongside black colleagues, and factories began laying off blacks to make space for whites. In July 1919 these tensions boiled over in Liverpool when 120 black workers were laid off from a sugar refinery. Mobs of blacks and whites armed with sticks, chains, revolvers, and cutthroat razors faced each other in street battles. One man, a black sailor, was killed, and scores were wounded. It was precisely during these bloody days that Sidney Bechet and his fellow musicians of the Southern Syncopated Orchestra docked in Liverpool. They played to large audiences in London’s Philharmonic Hall in Great Portland Street and were even invited—or commanded—to play at Buckingham Palace.
Culture Wars and Civil War
IN GERMANY, defeated and ostracized, it was initially more difficult to find access to the rhythms of postwar celebration. The first jazz music to reach Berlin came in 1920 in the form of a record, an awkward cover version of the “Tiger Rag” played by an otherwise unknown German band and put out by a German label. But even if the phrasing had nothing of Bechet’s sensuous elegance and the musicians studiously avoided all “dirty” notes, playing the music exactly like any dance-band tune, the record caused a small sensation. Two years later original jazz records could be imported from the United States, and German musicians and bands eagerly listened, transcribed, and imitated, to the delight of their young audiences. Jazz had come, had been listened to, had conquered.
Berlin was a major battleground in the culture wars between the old world and the new, and while jazz was relatively slow to assert itself here, certainly much more so than in Paris, the battle was waged initially on different terrain, albeit also with strong references to America and the supposed freedoms to be enjoyed there.