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
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Reference
Robert Graves and Alan Hodge, The Long Weekend (1961 edn) p. 324.
Arnold Bennett, Journals (1954 edn) pp. 301–2.
Michael Phillips, ‘Landfall’, The Listener (21 November 1974 ).
Sybille Bedford, Aldous Huxley, I, 1894–1939 (1973) p. 266.
Christopher Isherwood, The Lion and the Shadows: An Education in the Twenties (1938) p. 265.
Victoria Sackville-West, Passenger to Teheran (1926) p. 74.
Evelyn Waugh, When the Going Was Good (1951 edn) pp. 236–7.
Graham Greene, Journey Without Maps (1936; 1971 edn) pp. 17–19.
Leonard Woolf, Growing (1961) pp. 51–3, 211–2.
Woolf, Downhill All the Way (1967) pp. 9, 40, 48.
Noreen Branson and Margot Heinemann, Britain in the Nineteen Thirties (1971) pp. 145–6.
F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (1926; 1950 edn) pp. 11–13, 19.
Aldous Huxley, Beyond the Mexique Bay (1934; 1949 edn) pp. 8–9.
Harold Nicolson, Diaries and Letters 1930–1939 ed. Nigel Nicolson (1969 edn) pp. 89, 92.
V. G. Kiernan, The Lords of Human Kind (1972 edn) p. 336.
Alan Bullock, Hitler: A Study in Tyranny (1962 edn) pp. 66, 339;
William L. Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (1964 edn) pp. 63–4, 299;
Richard Grunberger, A Social History of the Third Reich (1974 edn) pp. 548–9.
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© 1979 David Craig and Michael Egan
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Craig, D., Egan, M. (1979). Decadence and Crack-up. In: Extreme Situations. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-16180-5_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-16180-5_4
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