American Fun (34 page)

Many of his poems, moreover, like
Bessie Smith’s songs, were inspired by rent parties and cabarets, especially those published in his acclaimed first volume,
The Weary Blues
(1925), and in his generally despised (and unfortunately titled) second one,
Fine Clothes to the Jew
(1927). His earliest influences were Sandburg and Whitman, whose raw enthusiasm and populist voices suited his desire to reach a large public; also influential were the rhythms and phrasings of jazz and the blues, which helped him to express, as he put it, “
the tom-tom of revolt against weariness in a white world, a world of subway trains and work, work, work; the tom-tom of joy and laughter, and pain swallowed in a smile.” The first volume aestheticized “the Negro soul,” depicting even “low-down folk” with an elegance and purity that was well received by the
African-American press; the second volume looked unblinkingly at their pain, pleasures, violence, and vitality. In both books the commoner’s daily abjection is soothed by rhythm and peaks of joy, but in the second, his rancor—and his candor—were called shameful, amoral, and disrespectful to the race. Time has told a different story.
Fine Clothes to the Jew,
writes the biographer
Arnold Rampersad, “
marked the height of his creative originality as a poet” and “remains one of the most significant single bodies of poetry ever published in the United States.”

In the humblest and roughest ghetto scenes that make up
Fine Clothes to the Jew,
Hughes looked so intimately into average black people’s private lives (as he felt he understood them), and into their psychology and sexuality, that the critics spat back,
J. A. Rogers (the advocate of jazz’s “joyous revolt”) calling the book “
piffling trash”—“unsanitary, insipid, and repulsive”; others calling Hughes a “SEWER DWELLER” and the “poet ‘low-rate’ of Harlem,” and excoriating the “literary gutter-rat” Van Vechten, to whom the collection is dedicated, for being just the kind of reader to “revel in the lecherous, lust-seeking characters that Hughes finds time to poeticize about.” (Notably, however, amid this firestorm, DuBois’s
Crisis
published an appreciative review.) The book’s proximity to the
Nigger Heaven
scandal, and its association with
Fire!!,
where two
of its poems had been previously published, drew close attention to its depiction of fun and its intimate look at poor urban blacks, although neither can be reduced to sensationalism.

In contrast to all of the volume’s portraits of abjection—of the “Bad Man” who says “I beats ma wife” and “beats ma side gal too” or of “Gin Mary,” who regrets her prison sentence because she’ll miss her gin—is the hot-handed banter of poems like “Crap Game”:

Here Hughes plays “hot” like a jazz soloist, ripping off riffs of casual street talk, capturing the sexy fun of the game while keeping the “Trouble” of its context. But when the poem pans back and takes in the crowd, more constructive pleasures emerge—Rogers’s “recreation for the industrious” and “tonic for the strong”: people are drawn into random contact by humor, music, and robust sexuality, revealing a
Savoy Ballroom–style democracy that originates for Hughes in ghetto culture. This volume’s “
Laughers,” a seeming nod to
Walt Whitman’s “The Sleepers,” catalogues and rejoices in the poet’s “people”—a catalogue that ranges from “Dish-washers” and “Crap-shooters” to “Nursers of babies”—for their hilarity “in the hands of Fate.”

“Laughers” praises the people’s audacity, and “
Jazz Band in a Parisian Cabaret”—urging the band to “Play that thing!”—praises jazz for spreading that audacity into all corners of humanity: “Play it,” says the poem,

Hughes recognized a deep grammar in jazz. He saw the force in its folksy brilliance, in its polyglottal pleasures. It could lift a crowd above its differences to a common level of erotic pleasure:

The “joyous revolt” that Hughes and his peers observed in twenties America—the “joy” that ran “bang! into ecstasy”—sprang from a range of sources. For the “Loud-mouthed laughers in the hands / Of Fate” who migrated by the thousands from the violent Jim Crow South to the
overcrowded and rioting northern cities, jazz and jazz dance and folk humor and partying were mutual forms of racial affirmation—forms of what Chaplin called the “defiance” of “ridicule.” For more affluent African Americans, especially those who were torn between racial identification and European-American class distinction, nightclubs and
rent parties were weekend havens where Protestant rules were eased or suspended. For white slummers touring inner-city neighborhoods in hopes of experiencing “genuine” black fun, teeming dance floors were as close as most could get to losing themselves in the melting pot. And for the regular working-class denizens (whom
J. A. Rogers called the “average Negro”), the years when “Harlem was in vogue” brought exposure, often
over
exposure, to pleasures their communities had known for centuries. These various groups were at odds. The dancers on these dance floors had cause for fearing, even hating, one another. And yet writers like Hughes and many of his peers, bearing witness to these parties, saw an eros that actually gained momentum from such cross-societal purposes. Its friction was exciting, part of the fun. In a decade when America’s public sphere was threatened by political and racial conflict, the jazz band emerged like old King Charles as a radically civil rabble-rouser. It urged wallflowers to jump to their feet and stomp and swing in amicable collision. The fun it demanded wasn’t for the timid, but those who acquired a taste for the fray were converts for the public good.

THOUGH SHE WAS BORN
in 1900 to Alabama bluebloods, Zelda Sayre wasn’t your average southern belle. Mouthy, vandalous, flirty, wild, wearing rouge and lipstick at age fifteen, she was only interested in swimming and boys. “
Zelda just wasn’t afraid of anything,” said a male companion from those years, “of boys, of being talked about; she was absolutely fearless.… But she did have a bad reputation.” In high school she dated soldiers from Camp Sheridan and Camp Taylor, and she cajoled her entire senior class into skipping school on April Fool’s Day, a
prank that got all of them briefly expelled. Two months after graduating, voted “the Prettiest” in her class, she met a handsome first lieutenant from St. Paul, Minnesota, whose affections she would toy with for the next two years.

Zelda resembled the fiery heroines in Scott Fitzgerald’s undergraduate
fiction; Scott better resembled his hesitant heroes, or the eponymous
Romantic Egotist
of his first unpublished novel. He traveled regularly by bus to see her in Montgomery, and she didn’t hide the fact that he had stiff competition. Her letters described escapades with up to “
ten boys,” and when he tried to gall her with stories of pretty girls, she gave him maddening permission to pursue them. Everyone warned him against marrying a “girl who,” as he wrote, “
gets stewed in public, who frankly enjoys and tells shocking stories, who smokes constantly and makes the remark that she has ‘kissed thousands of men and intends to kiss thousands more.’ ” But the event happened anyway, on April 3, 1920.
This Side of Paradise
had been published a week before, and straightaway the newlywed Fitzgeralds kicked off the spree of high jinks, scandals, and nonstop parties with which their generation would identify.
That month they chaperoned a party for Princeton undergrads that ended in drunken brawls. (Zelda held court from her bathtub.) Tracked by gossip columnists and autograph hounds, they were evicted from their honeymoon suite at the Biltmore and evicted from the Commodore for more parties and pranks; eventually they escaped to the
Connecticut countryside.

Carl Van Vechten, who was twice their age, befriended the couple during these years and sometimes brought them to Harlem
speakeasies, an unlikely destination for the
white-supremacist Scott. Carlos, as Zelda liked to call him, seemed unimpressed by Scott, a lightweight drinker who “
was nasty” when “drunk.” But Zelda, he declared, “was an original. Scott was not a wisecracker like Zelda. Why, she tore up the pavements with sly remarks.… She didn’t actually write them down, Scott did, but she said them.” Scott also mined her diaries for material, quoting them verbatim in his first three books. And while Scott himself was certainly an “original”—the iconic American writer of the 1920s—his own sense of fun wasn’t all that new. American males had been skylarking for centuries. But Zelda’s was revolutionary. When he published
Flappers and Philosophers
in August 1920, winning sympathy for a girl who bobs her hair, it was Zelda’s philosophy that stole the show.

“Flapper” was a British term from the 1910s, but its twenties iteration was all-American, and Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald was flapper royalty. She called the first flappers “young anti-puritans” who religiously followed
“the flapper creed—to give and get amusement.” She touted the flapper’s defiant performance: “the art of being—being young, being lovely, being an object.” And this reluctant belle from Montgomery, raised in the heart of KKK country, paraded the flapper’s cross-racial curiosity: “
The flapper springs full-grown, like Minerva, from the head of her once-déclassé father, Jazz, upon whom she lavishes affection and reverence, and deepest filial regard.” For the
flapper, in all her essential whiteness, signaled young women’s freedom from—and theatrical rebellion against—all of the white patriarchal institutions that stood between females and their fun.
Buddy Bolden’s racial and sexual language let the flapper speak pleasure to power—if not miscegenistically (though flappers did that too), then culturally and symbolically.

In 1922—the same year
Life
featured a full-color “Flapper” as a butterfly in a see-through dress; the year
Flapper
magazine (“Not for Old Fogies”) declared “
Flapper Styles Will Prevail!”—Zelda published her “
Eulogy on the Flapper.” It was a pat flapper move: morbidly ironic, reported as if from beyond the grave. Writing for
Metropolitan,
the same magazine that had just serialized
The Beautiful and Damned
and elected the Fitzgeralds the first couple of fun, she honored the “deceased” flapper as a young woman of singular integrity. She praised her for keeping “mostly masculine friends,” for wearing “a great deal of audacity and rouge … into the battle,” for flirting “because it was fun to flirt,” and for sporting “a one-piece bathing suit because she had a good figure.” In short, she described the dangerous young woman who had seduced F. Scott Fitzgerald.

The flapper, poor thing, had died of popularity. This icon of female urbanity, Zelda mourned, was being imitated by “several million small-town belles.” Flapping had been democratized, and the girl in the crowd didn’t understand its original “philosophy.” Which was? “The desire for unadulterated gaiety.”

But by all remaining evidence, by 1922, the average flapper’s “gaiety” was still “unadulterated”—she smoked, swore, danced, drank, strutted her flesh, and petted heavily. She wrung all the fun from her supersaturated moment and generally kept “Old Fogies” on guard, just as Zelda Sayre used to do. Only now the party was out of control. Even rural girls
were acting cosmopolitan. Women everywhere were “absolutely fearless.” And in 1927, the year of the It girl, F. Scott knew the flapper wasn’t dead. He updated the term with
Clara Bow, calling her “
the quintessence of what the term ‘flapper’ signifies … pretty, impudent, superbly assured, as worldly-wise, briefly-clad and ‘bard-berled’ as possible. There were hundreds of them, her prototypes. Now, completing the circle, there are thousands more, patterning themselves after her.”

THE “NEW WOMAN” MOVEMENT
, like the “
New Negro” Renaissance, gave a variety of new perspectives on the 1920s wild party. Its scofflaw fun, more often than not, was edifying and liberating—and for that reason thrilling, joyful, and scary. Contributing new tactics to their larger constituency of
“Wild Wets,” who reignited Merry Mount’s old battle with Plymouth, women reimagined American rebellion according to their out-group identity. Joining forces among themselves, “New Women” took strength from leanings and attributes that had always been dismissed as weaknesses. Much as African-American comedy, music, and sexuality were embraced by younger black artists as sources of distinction, so too did women’s bravado and eroticism, which had been scorned or exploited throughout American history, suddenly become ammunition—and the height of fashion.

Whether they were sensuous
bohemians, emasculating flappers, lightning-tongued hedonists, or the singularly incendiary
Mae West, the leonine New Women of the 1920s put the dusty old guard on notice: pleasure was a source of dangerous power, and having fun defined the citizen in ways not unlike the right to vote—it connected the individual to community, it gave groups of citizens bold expression, and it came with weighty responsibility.

THE POET
EDNA ST. VINCENT MILLAY
was the original flapper of 1920s letters. Raised poor in turn-of-the-century rural Maine, she was taught to be bold by a liberated mother who evicted Edna’s no-account father. In 1912, at the age of twenty, she sent a palpitating lyric to a
national contest that led to a scholarship at Vassar. Upon graduating, emboldened by her successful first book,
Renascence and Other Poems,
she moved into a garret in
Greenwich Village where they called this classical beauty “Vincent” and made her the toast of thriving bohemia. The avant-garde sniffed at her traditional verse forms—which looked dowdy next to mavericks like Stevens, Eliot, Pound, Stein—but her second collection,
A Few Figs from Thistles,
earned her acclaim as “
the unrivaled embodiment of sex appeal, the It-girl of the hour, the Miss America of 1920.” And her third collection won the 1923 Pulitzer Prize, the first one ever given to a woman, after which her international renown was secure: she was adored by fashion magazines, mobbed at train stations. Now, for anyone who didn’t already know, Millay was the voice and mind of the New Woman—not only boasting the flapper’s “unadulterated gaiety” but vividly disclosing her insatiable desires.