THE JAZZ AGE
Popular Music in the 1920's
Arnold Shaw
New York: Oxford University Press, 1987
350 pp., $19.95
A set of contrasting themes dominates the popular image of America in the 1920s. The negative side portrays the United States as retreating into an isolationism that forswore any responsibility for upholding peace and thus opened the door for a breakdown of world order climaxing in World War II. Domestically, the picture of America in the 1920s is of a country returning on a grander, more recklessly abandoned scale to what Vernon L. Parington called "the Great Barbecue." The business of America was business--and the accompanying speculative orgy received its comeuppance in the Great Depression. Simultaneously, the soured Puritanism of the countryside and small town was making a last-ditch bid to impose its crabbed and narrow values upon the more open, freer ways of the city dweller. Its most signal triumph (if long-run downfall) was Prohibition; its most menacing expression, the Ku Klux Klan. But there is a more positive side to the picture--a contrapuntal spirit of exuberance, excitement, and adventure. Not simply were intellectuals and artists experimenting with new ideas and modes of expression, but a large segment of the nation's youth was in rebellion against the genteel respectability of its elders. F. Scott Fitzgerald made his reputation as the literary chronicler of that rebellion; he and his wife, Zelda, appeared, in their own lives, its personification. It was Fitzgerald who was responsible for identifying the ferment of the decade with a distinctive musical idiom by titling his 1922 collection of short stories Tales of the Jazz Age.
Fitzgerald was not alone in seeing the time in which he was living as a watershed. "On or about December 1910," Virginia Woolf proclaimed in 1924, "human nature changed.... All human relations shifted--those between masters and servants, husbands and wives, parents and children. And when human relations change there is at the same time a change in relation, conduct, politics, and literature." "It was in 1915," D. H. Lawrence echoed, while picking an alternative date, "the old world ended." Art critic and historian Herbert Read, writing in 1933, sounded the same apocalyptic note:
There have been revolutions in the history of art before today. There is a revolution with every new generation, and periodically, every century or so, we get a wider or deeper change of sensibility which is recognized as a period--the Trecento, the Quattro Cento, the Baroque, the Rococo, the Romantic, the Impressionist and so on. But I do think we can already discern a difference in kind in the contemporary revolution: it is not so much a revolution, which implies a turning over, even a turning back, but rather a break-up, a devolution, some would say a dissolution. Its character is catastrophic.
Although they differ over the timing, historians agree that the years after 1890 witnessed a sea change in the culture of the Western world--one of "those fundamental convulsions of the creative human spirit that seem to topple even the most solid and substantial of our beliefs and assumptions."
Critics and scholars have chosen the label modernism to identify the new outlook that arose out of the breakdown of the old
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