The late 1920s were an age of islands, real and metaphorical. They were an age when Americans by thousands and tens of thousands were scheming to take the next boat for the South Seas or the West Indies, or better still for Paris, from which they could scatter to Majorca, Corsica, Capri or the isles of Greece. Paris itself was a modern city that seemed islanded in the past, and there were island countries, like Mexico, where Americans could feel that they had escaped from everything that oppressed them in a business civilization. Or without leaving home they could build themselves private islands of art or philosophy; or else - and this was a frequent solution - they could create social islands in the shadow of the skyscrapers, groups of close friends among whom they could live as unconstrainedly as in a Polynesian valley, live without moral scruples or modern conveniences, live in the pure moment, live gaily on gin and love and two lamb chops broiled over a coal fire in the grate. That was part of the Greenwich Village idea, and soon it was being copied in Boston, San Francisco, everywhere.
Malcolm CowleyTags: art love philosophy civilization idealism paris escape greece social-life mexico americans san-francisco boats pure islands lost-generation greenwich-village scruples 1920s oppressive isles
She murmured, “I love the imagery of Sappho, the warm summer air across the velvety darkness, the lover between love’s thighs.” She stayed quiet a moment. “But it takes a man’s kiss to put the fire to the metaphor.
Paul A. MyersTags: paris france 1920s left-bank versailles-peace
As the avenues and streets of a city are nothing less than its arteries and veins, we may well ask what doctor would venture to promise bodily health if he knew that the blood circulation was steadily growing more congested!
Hugh FerrissTags: health automobile cars skyscrapers infrastructure transportation 1920s
There was music from my neighbor's house through the summer nights. In his blue gardens men and girls came and went like moths among the whisperings and the champagne and the stars. At high tide in the afternoon I watched his guests diving from the tower of his raft, or taking the sun on the hot sand of his beach while his two motor-boats slit the waters of the Sound, drawing aquaplanes over cataracts of foam. On week-ends his Rolls-Royce became an omnibus, bearing parties to and from the city between nine in the morning and long past midnight, while his station wagon scampered like a brisk yellow bug to meet all trains. And on Mondays eight servants, including an extra gardener, toiled all day with mops and scrubbing-brushes and hammers and garden-shears, repairing the ravages of the night before.
Every Friday five crates of oranges and lemons arrived from a fruiterer in New York--every Monday these same oranges and lemons left his back door in a pyramid of pulpless halves. There was a machine in the kitchen which could extract the juice of two hundred oranges in half an hour if a little button was pressed two hundred times by a butler's thumb.
At least once a fortnight a corps of caterers came down with several hundred feet of canvas and enough colored lights to make a Christmas tree of Gatsby's enormous garden. On buffet tables, garnished with glistening hors-d'oeuvre, spiced baked hams crowded against salads of harlequin designs and pastry pigs and turkeys bewitched to a dark gold. In the main hall a bar with a real brass rail was set up, and stocked with gins and liquors and with cordials so long forgotten that most of his female guests were too young to know one from another.
By seven o'clock the orchestra has arrived, no thin five-piece affair, but a whole pitful of oboes and trombones and saxophones and viols and cornets and piccolos, and low and high drums. The last swimmers have come in from the beach now and are dressing up-stairs; the cars from New York are parked five deep in the drive, and already the halls and salons and verandas are gaudy with primary colors, and hair shorn in strange new ways, and shawls beyond the dreams of Castile. The bar is in full swing, and floating rounds of cocktails permeate the garden outside, until the air is alive with chatter and laughter, and casual innuendo and introductions forgotten on the spot, and enthusiastic meetings between women who never knew each other's names.
The lights grow brighter as the earth lurches away from the sun, and now the orchestra is playing yellow cocktail music, and the opera of voices pitches a key higher. Laughter is easier minute by minute, spilled with prodigality, tipped out at a cheerful word. The groups change more swiftly, swell with new arrivals, dissolve and form in the same breath; already there are wanderers, confident girls who weave here and there among the stouter and more stable, become for a sharp, joyous moment the centre of a group, and then, excited with triumph, glide on through the sea-change of faces and voices and color under the constantly changing light.
Suddenly one of the gypsies, in trembling opal, seizes a cocktail out of the air, dumps it down for courage and, moving her hands like Frisco, dances out alone on the canvas platform. A momentary hush; the orchestra leader varies his rhythm obligingly for her, and there is a burst of chatter as the erroneous news goes around that she is Gilda Gray's understudy from the FOLLIES. The party has begun.
Tags: parties gatsby 1920s descriptive-prose
As I’ve said before, “the Mod generation”, contrary to popular belief, was not born in even 1958, but in the 1920s after a steady gestation from about 1917 or so. Now, Mod certainly came of age, fully sure of itself by 1958, completely misunderstood by 1963, and in a perpetual cycle of reinvention and rediscovery of itself by 1967 and 1975, respectively, but it was born in the 1920s, and I will maintain this. I don’t care who disagrees with me, and there are dozens of reasons that I do so —from the Art Deco aesthetic, to flapper fashions (complete with bobbed hair), to androgyny and subtle effeminacy, to jazz.
Ruadhán J. McElroyTags: fashion jazz blog-post subculture blog 1920s mod art-deco mod-culture
Le pire n'est pas que l'on se brûle, mais que le feu s'éteint.
Natalie Clifford BarneyTags: love lost-generation 1920s lesbian-erotica lesbian-sex
Confession is good for the soul even after the soul has been claimed” (p. 381).
Mona RodriguezTags: historical-fiction fiction book immigration statue-of-liberty novel italy new-york prohibition wwi suffrage world-war-i women-s-rights 1920s 40-years-and-a-day 40-years-in-a-day best-historical-fiction cafe-society dianne-vigorito ellis-island forty-years-in-a-day hell-s-kitchen italian-american-book mona-marzano mona-rodriguez new-historical-fiction suffragist-movement top-fiction
Its magnificence was indescribable, and its magnitude was inconceivable. She felt overwhelmed in the presence of its greatness. Pg 87
Mona RodriguezTags: historical-fiction fiction book immigration statue-of-liberty novel italy new-york prohibition wwi suffrage world-war-i women-s-rights 1920s 40-years-and-a-day 40-years-in-a-day best-historical-fiction cafe-society dianne-vigorito ellis-island forty-years-in-a-day hell-s-kitchen italian-american-book mona-marzano mona-rodriguez new-historical-fiction suffragist-movement top-fiction
Why are you perpetuating a childhood you grew up despising?
Mona RodriguezTags: immigration statue-of-liberty italy prohibition wwi 1920s cafe-society ellis-island hell-s-kitchen suffragist-movement
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