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Living Section of the San Bernardino SUN March 19, 2006 Issue 
Bobbed Hair and Bathtub Gin, Writers Running Wild in the Twenties By Marion Meade 
Women Creating Literature in the 1920s "March is the month of expectation," wrote Emily Dickinson. She would be amused to find that today it is also the month in which we celebrate women and their contributions to - well, everything. Ages ago, only a poem or two of Dickinson's might have made their way into college American literature classes. Today there are Women's Studies departments virtually at every university that might offer several complete courses on Emily Dickinson. There is also a plethora of books on women's achievements and they all have one major theme running through them - women had to claw their way to the top in every field. They broke social barriers and suffered ridicule only to emerge victorious. I am probably flattering myself and my generation in thinking that we, the baby boomers who came of age in the late 1960s and early 1970s rediscovered Dorothy Parker, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Zelda Fitzgerald, Sara and Gerald Murphy and the rest of the young and wild iconoclasts who shaped American literature of the 1920s. There was something seductive and romantic in their hyperbolic and bohemian lives, in their total abandon to anarchy and the moment. In "Bobbed Hair and Bathtub Gin, Writers Running Wild in the Twenties" author Marion Meade focuses on the lives of four women who left an indelible mark on American literature during the 1920s. This is the story of Edna St. Vincent Millay whose lines "My candle burns at both ends, it will not last the night, but ah, my foes, and oh, my friends - it gives a lovely light," are familiar even to schoolchildren. The Edna St. Vincent Millay who received the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1923, the one famous for bisexual affairs, for discarding lovers casually and falling in love with unattainable men. It is also the story of Dorothy Parker, who penned the wittiest poems. The Dorothy Parker who coined "Boys don't make passes at girls who wear glasses" and "Brevity is the soul of lingerie." It is the story of Zelda Fitzgerald, the volatile Southern belle whose witty quips, characteristics and diaries, found their way into her husband's novels. The same Zelda who wanted to be something other than just the wife of a famous writer, who in a moment of pique wrote "Save Me the Waltz" and tried to be a ballerina and eventually went completely and irrevocably mad. And it is the story of Edna Ferber who wrote about independent and accomplished women who did not need men to complete them. The Edna Ferber whose liaison with one of the jurors of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction got her that prize in 1925. And then there is the cast of supporting characters: F. Scott Fitzgerald who put not only his wife in his books but also himself; who in spite of alcoholism succeeded in capturing moments of the human condition; Harold Ross, the high school dropout with extraordinary knowledge of grammar and syntax who in 1925 started publishing The New Yorker; Edmund Wilson, the venerable literati of later years whose first sexual encounter was with Edna St. Vincent Millay and whose third wife was another literary femme fatale - Mary McCarthy; Hemingway - F. Scott Fitzgerald's best friend as well as arch literary rival; Robert Benchley, Alexander Woollcott, John Dos Passos and of course the setting, the fabled Round Table at the Algonquin Hotel, stories of which have sent many would-be writers on pilgrimages to New York. They lived for the moment. They loved, danced, drank bootleg gin, and wrote in creative bursts while nursing hangovers. Frequently they cranked out trashy stories for magazines to pay the bills. Mostly they lived in hotels and did not own homes or have pension plans. When they fell on hard times, they found their way to Sara and Gerald Murphy's Villa America on the French Riviera. And then the decade ended and tragedy overtook them all. But that is another story. As if preparing us for what's to come, in this book the author strips away the myth and we see all the players as they really are - self-destructive, trapped in their adolescence forever, they are posed on the edge of catastrophe. Reading about these 1920s creative spirits now when I am definitely older and perhaps a bit wiser, made me wonder about their erstwhile allure. It also brings to mind the eternal question - are ordinary, mainstream life and creativity compatible or do writers and artists need angst in order to create? Ophelia Georgiev Roop Library Director San Bernardino Public Library |
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