When we were finally released from lockdown in summer 2021, a hedonistic return to real life beckoned – a spangled, shimmering echo of the 1920s années folles was seemingly as inevitable as it was desirable. The covid pandemic had uncannily echoed the Spanish flu outbreak of a century earlier and there were further parallels with the 1920s: the impact of era-defining new technologies, shifty politicians on both sides relying on dog-whistling to stir up support and an apparently inexorable gulf between the richest and poorest in society. Then, on 24 February 2022, Putin invaded Ukraine and sent the international order and world economies spinning. Months of war in Gaza have only intensified the chaos and it is a working possibility that World War III looms up ahead.
Back in the early Noughties, when I was researching my book Anything Goes: A Biography of the Roaring Twenties (2008), the similarities I discerned with the 1920s were more to do with an obsession with celebrity and the easy availability of credit, which had transformed the way people spent and lived. Then 2008’s financial crash overturned everything. Although I’d sensed impending disaster while I was writing, I had assumed it would be environmental, and I wasn’t entirely wrong. Fast forward to 2024 and the warming of our planet is surging ahead, faster even than most scientists predicted, not helped by open conflict on several continents. No one seems to know what to do about new patterns of global migration, worsened by war and climate change. The Domesday Clock is the closest it has been to catastrophe; another epidemic might wipe us all out with a whimper, rather than a bang.
Perhaps it’s unsurprising that young people of the developed world aren’t racing back to the hugger-mugger of city-and-social life post-lockdown, preferring to remain safely at home in their pyjamas, interacting on screens. The fear of offending someone – anyone – is up there with the fear of being caught on camera doing something stupid. It’s safer to stay in (and many couldn’t even find their way back without their phones). Gen Z don’t drink much, and it says a lot that the drug of choice for any hedonists among them is an industrial-strength tranquiliser rather than a stimulant. We’re told they don’t have much sex and (apart from Elon Musk, ever the contrarian) they certainly don’t want to bring babies into what John F Carter Jr described a century ago as this “knocked to pieces, leaky, red hot” world.
It seems like we’ve arrived at the post-1929, “crack-up” stage of Scott Fitzgerald’s career without enjoying any of his Jazz Age fun. Our 2020s aren’t reverberating to the syncopated rhythms of the 1920s in the way we’d anticipated; instead, most of us have turned down the volume and pulled the duvet over our heads. Clearly, whatever surprises 2029 has in store, we need a shift in attitude. As the 23-year-old aspiring journalist John Franklin Carter concluded in a 1920 essay [read Boris Starling’s Roaring Olympics], when you’re living in an atmosphere of “tomorrow we die”, the only reasonable response is to drink and be merry.
When you’re living in an atmosphere of “tomorrow we die”, the only reasonable response is to drink and be merry
So much of what we remember about the 1920s is coloured by our knowledge of the crash that brought it all to an end. The key lesson we take from this is that the great gaudy spree was all paid for on the never-never and an enormous reckoning was always going to come.
We remember, too, that self-indulgent fun was enjoyed by just a tiny proportion of the population, while many other people, who didn’t record their experiences in limpid prose, were pouring the drinks or clearing up the sick, not to mention toiling in fields and factories. For them, there wasn’t much to choose between the heady Twenties and austere Thirties. The facile optimism of Emile Coué’s modish 1922 mantra, “Every day, in every way, I’m getting better and better”, did nothing to relieve their pressures.
Just as a photo can impose itself over a memory, imperceptibly merging with it, movies made long years later have given us the imagery with which we “remember” the 1920s. Both the Vaseline-smeared lens of Jack Clayton’s 1974 adaptation of The Great Gatsby and the high gloss of Baz Luhrmann’s 2013 version have infiltrated our imaginations and distorted our perception of reality. Neither film truly conveys the seedy atmosphere that underlay the decade, nor the deprivation, prejudice and moral corruption that pervaded both sides of the Atlantic. As Fitzgerald observed, as early as 1926, “we looked down and found we had flabby arms and a fat pot and couldn’t say boop-a-doop to a Sicilian”. The blissful freedom of their earlier hedonism would soon become “despair turned inside out”.
But Fitzgerald would have been first to acknowledge that the spirit of the first few years of the Twenties was a blast – years in which he and Zelda spun their way through the revolving doors of the Biltmore Hotel, travelled clinging to the roofs of taxis instead of sitting sedately inside, and splashed around in the fountain of Washington Square Park. While to some disapproving onlookers they were living far too extravagantly, heedless of consequences, to others they “looked as if they had just stepped out of the sun”. They didn’t care what people thought – a liberation unimaginable to those who currently live under the constraining gaze of 24/7 social media scrutiny. No one said it wasn’t messy, but victimhood was unknown. They laughed and danced and flirted and, if they drank too much, they accepted their hangovers as the inevitable outcome of their own frivolity.
Importantly, women were able to claim the freedom to live on a broadly equal basis to men: to make mistakes, earn their own keep, choose their own path. That’s why the images of Zelda have such enduring power, whether diving like an arrow from the high board, shimmying recklessly on the dance floor, or sitting on the knees of men who weren’t her husband, with a cocktail in one hand and a cigarette in the other. An unthinkable social shift had taken place and, although it was by no means perfect, the world would never be the same again. She and her flapper comrades should be celebrated, not judged, for revelling in their new possibilities.
Men too can learn from Beverley Nichols, who, visiting New York in 1928, wrote an article in which he rhapsodised over the joys of speakeasies: “Who, having slunk down the little flight of stairs… glancing to right and left in order to make sure no police are watching, having blinked at the suddenly lighted grille, and assured the proprietor, whose face peers through the bars, of his bona fides – who would willingly forfeit these delicious preliminaries? And who, having taken his seat in the shuttered restaurant, having felt all the thrill of the conspirator, having jumped at each fresh ring of the bell, having, perhaps, enjoyed the supreme satisfaction of participating in a real raid – who would prefer, to these excitements, a sedate and legal dinner, even if all the wines of the world were at his disposition?”
So throw out your elastic waistbands and give up those weekends with a boxset and Deliveroo. For years we have viewed the Twenties as a cautionary tale. But in the current environment, with our future more uncertain than ever, perhaps we should try to recapture just a little of their long-gone, devil-may-care pizzazz.
Lucy Moore lives in Wiltshire where she’s at work on her tenth book. Her history of the 1920s, “Anything Goes”, was a Sunday Times book of the year
