The Novel of Constantly Mutating Title takes place in June 1920, and although I’m writing a decidedly alternate universe from the one we all inhabit, I am trying to adhere to the general outlines of our world. There are a number of reasons that led me to settle specifically on 1920: I’m fascinated by the 1920s in general, I wanted to tie the story into my theoretical Madocian settlement of the New World and 1920 was a nice round 750 years after that legendary event, and, not to put too fine a point on it, I really like the clothes. The stereotypical flat-chested, short-skirted flapper and her sheikh of a boyfriend had not yet materialized, but they loomed on the horizon. So were many of the other trademarks of the decade: Prohibition, Hollywood, commercial aviation, organized crime, jazz, Art Deco … the Lost Generation was only slightly discombobulated at this point, the ink on the Treaty of Versailles only a year dry. Yes, the war had decimated the old order of things, but surely that grand clearing of the boards offered the opportunity to start from scratch and raise a newer, better world from those ashes?
In 1920, the overall silhouette was straight up and down, but many dresses had some kind of drapery around the hips. The short bob was just coming into style.
Evening Dress by Madeleine Cheruit. Artist Umberto Brunelleschi. via http://bertc.com/subthree/i38/38-3.htm
You can imagine my excitement to discover a book just published that focuses on that very year: 1920: The Year that Made the Decade Roar
Man, was I disappointed. The continuing thread of the book is the anarchist Wall Street bombing of September 16, 1920–an unsettling parallel to the 9/11 bombings eighty-one years later, and Burns is strongest in delving into the political resonances between the two. In an era of gross economic inequality and unprecedented technological change–especially in communications–an act of terrorism perpetrated against America’s financial hub by swarthy foreigners justifies a government crackdown entailing sweeping civil rights violations and hysterical accusations against any convenient Other. But from this promising opening, Burns continues on an erratic career through, not just the year that is his ostensible theme, but the decade as a whole, with little regard to tying it in to a coherent thesis.
Here’s the structure of the book: Part 1: the Wall Street bombing; the “homeland security” response. Part 2: Prohibition; women’s voting rights; black civil rights (or lack thereof); the robber barons and labor relations; Carlo Ponzi and his eponymous scheme. Part 3: Prohibition redux, i.e., Not A Good Idea After All; Margaret Sanger and birth control; Ponzi redux: Another Bad Idea After All; Woodrow Wilson’s collapse and his wife’s tacit assumption of control; radio broadcasting begins, in the context of Warren Harding’s election; Harding and his Teapot Dome-ly corrupt cohorts. Part 4: back to the investigation of the Wall Street bombing: Unsolved; “the arts,” by which he means literature; jazz and Harlem; and finally, the flapper–“a kind of footnote in this book because that is precisely what they were in their time.” Followed by a discussion of Babe Ruth.
So there we have it: a book on the 1920s that does not mention the movies. At all. Or vaudeville, or any of the visual arts.
And the choice of what is discussed seems … scattershot, at best. The literary lions included in the chapter on “the arts”: Sinclair Lewis, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, D.H. Lawrence, Agatha Christie, T.S. Eliot, Carl Sandburg, Eugene O’Neill, and the Algonqiun Club. (Black writers–W.E.B. Du Bois, Jean Toomer, Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, Alain Locke–are exiled to the chapter on jazz, for some reason.) Why Hemingway–who had not published much up to 1920–and not, say, Virginia Woolf as our representative of ultimately suicidal writers? It’s hard not to suspect that the reason circles back to that “footnote to their time” dismissal of flappers. Because what are women up to in this book? Shoving their way into the political process, with dubious results; insisting on access to birth control; and blowing it all on the election of a dapper but ethically compromised president and an overindulgence on bathtub gin and scandalously skimpy wardrobes. (“Flapper,” Burns takes care to inform us, was a late-nineteenth-century British term for a prostitute.) After barely acknowledging that there is a world outside of the US–except as a source of anarchists–what is Agatha Christie doing there? And–sorry to be a nitpicker but–how the hell did no-one catch this blooper: “[T.S.] Eliot, an Englishman who moved to St. Louis as a young man …” Really, no. Just stop. (And in light of this, it’s hard to know how to take the acknowledgement of the copy editor, whose “diligence … resulted in several fewer errors in the finished product. Thus, any errors that remain are entirely [his] fault.” Har har har.)
The underpinnings of the book are even more slipshod. References that appear in abbreviated form in the end notes are missing from the bibliography (and therefore unfindable, for those geeks who actually use the notes and bibliography to read more deeply on the subject). There are huge chunks of direct quotation from secondary sources that really should have been paraphrased–there’s nothing particularly brilliant in the original, it’s just, you can’t help thinking, that Burns was too lazy to bother expressing the information in his own words. Not to mention that it’s really confusing for your readers to quote someone who is already quoting someone else. And then there are the huge chunks of direct quotation from Burns’s own works on Prohibition and smoking–first of all, rather tacky; secondly, if you’re going to reference yourself, you could (again) at least go to the effort of rewriting rather than recycling the material; thirdly, do you really want to expose so blatantly the fact that you haven’t bothered to update your research at all in the meantime? Going back to that tactless acknowledgement of the copy editor, I’m inclined to view the problems and errors in this book not as evidence of a bad copy editing job, but as an indication of what an unholy mess this manuscript must have been when the editor got it.
All in all, the book reads like “I did a lot of research [rather: got a lot of librarians to do a lot of research for me] and slapped it all down on the paper any old which way.” It isn’t even as though Burns starts from events and ideas that were current in 1920 and traces them forward and backward into their sources and outcomes. An awful lot of this stuff wasn’t even relevant until well after 1920. It might have been better framed as a book about the decade, specifically the decade from the perspective solely of the United States, but then the omissions and wonky focuses would have been even more egregious. I can’t say that I learned anything here that previous reading hadn’t already told me. If I were a historian of the early twentieth century, you might be excused for thinking, well, so what–if you’re going to get a quick overview of the 1920s, why not start with this book as well as any other? But I’m a medievalist, so if this is stuff even a medievalist knows, then why bother at all?
A book like this always leaves me wondering, why did nobody stop it before it got out of hand? As I said, it starts off well, and there seems to be some sense of organization around political events and issues with parallels in the contemporary world. Terrorism strikes New York City! Washington DC: A cesspit of crony corruption! Carlo Ponzi: the Italian Bernie Madow! (Are we then supposed to read: Hillary Clinton: Edith Wilson all over again?) But if Burns’s strong suit is politics, why bother shoving in the random final chapters on books and music, and yet not even bother with the massive media game-changers of film and radio (outside of political coverage)? Sure, the movies got started well before the 1920s, but if he can go back to Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton in discussing woman suffrage, it’s certainly worth hitting the highlights of cinematic history before getting down to the explosion of Hollywood after its European competition was knocked back to the Stone Age as one of the aftereffects of the war. Yeah, yeah, we get it, the Roaring Twenties and jazz. Doesn’t mean you have to write about it, if your real focus lies elsewhere.
The Center for the Study of Real Interesting Stuff 