Secrets of the Jazz Age

Fitzgerald reveals how sudden good fortune, flappers, and the midnight frolic belied the secrets of the Jazz Age.

1

As I hovered ghost-like in the Plaza Red Room or went to lush parties in the East Sixties, I was haunted by my other life — my drab room, my square foot of the subway, my shabby suits.

2

I was a failure —  mediocre at advertising work and unable to get started as a writer.  Hating the city, I got roaring, weeping drunk on my last penny and went home.

3

Incalculable city.  What ensued was only one of a thousand success stories of those gaudy days, but it plays a part in my own movie of New York.

4

When I returned six months later the offices of editors and publishers were open to me, impresarios begged plays, the movies panted for screen material.

5

For just a moment, before it was demonstrated that I was unable to play the role, I was pushed into the position of spokesman for the time.

6

A dive into a civic fountain was enough to get us into the gossip columns, and we were quoted on a variety of subjects we knew nothing about.

7

The first speakeasies had arrived.  The plays were Declasseé and Sacred and Profane Love, and at the Midnight Frolic you danced elbow to elbow.

8

Later, I realized that behind much of the entertainment the city poured forth into the nation were only a rather lot of lost and lonely people.

9

When bored . . . a quart of Bushmill’s whiskey, then out into the freshly bewitched city.  At last we were one with New York, pulling it after us through every portal.

10

My first symbol was now a memory, for I knew triumph is in oneself; my second one had become commonplace — two of the actresses I had worshipped from afar had dined in our house.

11

But it filled me with a certain fear that the third symbol had grown dim — the tranquility of Bunny’s apartment was not to be found in the ever quickening city.

12

By this time “we knew everybody” but we were no longer important.  The flapper upon whose activities the popularity of my first books was based, had become passé.