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- Herausgeber: Pushkin Press
- Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023
Featuring short stories from F. Scott Fitzgerald, Anita Loos, Dorothy Parker, Zora Neale Hurston and more Edited and Introduced by David M. Earle Vivacious, charming, irreverent: a flapper is a girl who knows how to have a roaring good time. In this collection of short stories she's a partygoer, a socialite, a student, a shopgirl, and an acrobat. She bobs her hair, shortens her skirt, searches for a husband and scandalizes her husband. She's a glittering object of delight, and a woman embracing a newfound independence. Bringing together stories from widely adored writers and newly discovered gems, sourced from the magazines of the period, this collection celebrates the outrageous charm of an iconic figure of the Jazz Age.
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WHERE ALL GOOD FLAPPERS GO
Essential Stories of the Jazz Age
Selected and introduced by
David M. Earle
PUSHKIN PRESS
LONDON
To Mildred Scott Earle, aka Topsy (1902–1991), the original flapper grandmother, and to Lauren, who now wears her ring.
CONTENTS
Introduction
The flapper is perhaps the most instantly recognizable figure of 1920s America, which is why it is surprising that this is the first anthology of stories dedicated to her. She was a controversial embodiment of modernity, of shifting gender norms, and the break with earlier codes of behavior. She symbolized all the newness of the post-WWI generation, of the age of Prohibition, jazz, speakeasies, motor cars, and mobility.
The term “flapper” was initially British theatrical slang for young girls, especially those who gushed over matinée idols. By 1912, it was being used in America to describe modish girls who wore the new style of non-girdled, low waisted dresses, tended toward slimness, and were heavily made up. By the end of the war, as soldiers returned, hemlines rose farther, and jazz’s popularity spread across the country, the “flapper” came to signify the young generation’s post-war mixture of jaded optimism and high energy.
Unlike the suffragettes before them, flappers were more interested in social and sexual equality than political. They traded the long hair, wasp waists, and corsets of the Edwardian Gibson Girl, so well suited for the drawing room, for bobbed hair, simple short dresses with rolled stockings that exposed the ankle and knee, and a straight boyish profile. This new style celebrated the speed and mobility of modern life and broke with the cumbersome expectations of the stay-at-home wife and mother-to-be. Flapper fashion was at one with the flapper’s lifestyle, which advocated for life on the same terms as their male counterparts (known as “flippers” or, later, “sheiks”). Why, the flapper demanded, weren’t women allowed to listen to jazz, drink, smoke, and be sexually active—at least active enough to “park and pet.”
From the late 1910s, more and more women enrolled in college and trade schools, the boom economy created a high demand for office workers and shop girls, and women migrated to cities and were able to support themselves (almost all of these stories take place in New York City, America’s capital of modernity). The flapper’s advocacy for social and sexual equality appealed to this new class of urban woman. But these expanding roles for women and the unregulated intermingling of the sexes in the urban spaces and on campuses created a certain amount of anxiety for the more conservative elements who saw flapperdom as evidence of the decline of American morality. This fear was only compounded by the 1920s fascination with youth culture and by prohibition—the speakeasy removed restrictions against the separation of gender, class, and even race.
As was true of the 1920s, the flapper phenomenon was neither simple nor homogeneous. This decade saw widespread and often violent division: Jim Crow racism, economic inflation and disparity, and tectonic shifts in mores and social behavior. The definition of the flapper itself changed over the decade and registered many of these turbulent aspects; so too do these stories. Herein you will find many of the tropes that have become synonymous with flapperdom: the heroine of “Clever Little Fool” struggling to balance her fast lifestyle with the expectations of marriage; a shy girl’s transformation into a flirtatious flapper by adopting snappy dialogue in “Bernice Bobs Her Hair”; the aviatrix in “The Bride of Ballyhoo” using performance and spectacle to further her career; a powder-room attendant in “Night Club” embodying the tensions between the older generations and younger. Yet these stories are far from univocal. Authors including Dorothy Parker, Anita Loos, and Viña Delmar skewer preconceptions of the flapper even as they rely upon them. Dawn Powell’s “Not the Marrying Kind” inverts and updates the romance formula for the modern girl just as the main character of “Something for Nothing” inverts the idea of urban sophistication; gold-diggers and chorus girls—extreme manifestations of flapperdom—appear in stories by African American authors, like “The Chicago Kid” and “Monkey Junk,” which make evident the decade’s wealth disparity and limited options for women—especially African American women. Whereas the flapper movement is largely and reductively identified with the white middle class, it drew inspiration from the jazz culture and the perceived joyousness of African American society, just then reaching its renaissance in Harlem, and the presence of blackness can be found submerged in many of these stories (not always positively) by white authors. (Indeed, the flapper movement’s proximity to black culture via jazz added to the larger white fear of cultural degradation.)
The flapper was a figure of both fascination and fear, of feminine empowerment and risqué sexuality, as the many chorus girls and gold-diggers in flapper fiction illustrate. She was debated from pulpit to press—but appeared nowhere more frequently than in the magazines of the day. By all accounts the 1920s were “magazine crazy,” with magazines catering to every interest and social position. The flapper’s merits were debated in middle-class magazines like the Saturday Evening Post, which had a circulation over 2,000,000 and helped propel F. Scott Fitzgerald to stardom. Her high-society position and fashion was glamorized in women’s magazines, which Anita Loos ironically lampoons here in “Why Girls Go South,” originally published in Harper’s Bazaar. She was championed in magazines like College Humor, which captured the fast quip- and slang-laden dialogue of youth culture (and which Dorothy Parker’s “Mantle of Whistle” hilariously sends up), and in the working-class pulp magazines, such as Snappy Stories which provides five of the thirteen stories in this collection and launched the careers of Dawn Powell, Katharine Brush, and Viña Delmar. These light, entertaining, mildly risqué stories were the reading material for those same typists, stenographers and shop girls who saw themselves reflected in the magazine’s working-class heroines even while their fantasies of upward mobility were enacted by the many high-society heroines as well. The importance of these magazines can be seen in stories like Delmar’s “Thou Shalt Not Killjoy” where a naughty pulp magazine demolishes the hold nineteenth-century morality has on the flapper’s prissy love interest.
Unfortunately, there were no pulp magazines for African Americans, so flapper fiction for a black audience and by black authors like Gertrude Schalk, Rudolph Fisher, and Zora Neale Hurston, all represented here, was published in black newspapers like the Pittsburgh Courier and the National News, illustrating the important but often overlooked interrelationships between African American culture and white flapperdom.
With this collection, the largely lost genre of popular fiction that defined the flapper in the popular consciousness of the 1920s is brought vividly back to life, as is the flapper herself—complex, unapologetic, and as jazzy as ever.
WHAT BECAME OF THE FLAPPERS?
Zelda Fitzgerald
McCall’s, October 1925
Flapper wasn’t a particularly fortunate cognomen. It is far too reminiscent of open galoshes and covered up cars and all other proverbial flapper paraphernalia, which might have passed unnoticed save for the name. All these things are—or were—amusing externals of a large class of females who in no way deserve the distinction of being called flappers. The flappers that I am writing this article about are a very different and intriguing lot of young people who are perhaps unstable, but who are giving us the first evidence of youth asserting itself out of the cradle. They are not originating new ideas or new customs or new moral standards. They are simply endowing the old ones that we are used to with a vitality that we are not used to. We are not accustomed to having our daughters think our ideas for themselves, and it is distasteful to some of us that we are no longer able to fit the younger generation into our conceptions of what the younger generation was going to be like when we watched it in the nursery. I do not think that anything my daughter could possibly do eighteen years from now would surprise me. And yet I will probably be forbidding her in frigid tones to fly more than three thousand feet high or more than five hundred miles an hour with little Willie Jones, and bidding her never to go near that horrible Mars. I can imagine these things now, but if they should happen twenty years from now, I would certainly wonder what particular dog my child was going to…
The flapper springs full-grown, like Minerva, from the head of her once déclassé father, Jazz, upon whom she lavishes affection and reverence, and deepest filial regard. She is not a “condition arisen from war unrest,” as I have so often read in the shower of recent praise and protest which she has evoked, and to which I am contributing. She is a direct result of the greater appreciation of beauty, youth, gaiety, and grace which is sweeping along in a carmagnole (I saw one in a movie once, and I use this word advisedly) with our young anti-puritans at the head. They have placed such a premium on the flapper creed—to give and get amusement—that even the dumb-bells become Dulcies and convert stupidity into charm. Dulcy is infinitely preferable to the kind of girl who, ten years ago, quoted the Rubaiyat at you and told you how misunderstood she was; or the kind who straightened your tie as evidence that in her lay the spirit of the eternal mother; or the kind who spent long summer evenings telling you that it wasn’t the number of cigarettes you smoked that she minded but just the principle, to show off her nobility of character. These are some of the bores of yesterday. Now even bores must be original, so the more unfortunate members of the flapper sect have each culled an individual line from their daily rounds, which amuses or not according to whether you have seen the same plays, heard the same tunes or read reviews of the same books.
The best flapper is reticent emotionally and courageous morally. You always know what she thinks, but she does all her feeling alone. These are two characteristics which will bring social intercourse to a more charming and sophisticated level. I believe in the flapper as an involuntary and invaluable cupbearer to the arts. I believe in the flapper as an artist in her particular field, the art of being—being young, being lovely, being an object.
For almost the first time, we are developing a class of pretty yet respectable young women, whose sole functions are to amuse and to make growing old a more enjoyable process for some men and staying young an easier one for others.
Even parents have ceased to look upon their children as permanent institutions. The fashionable mother no longer keeps her children young so that she will preserve the appearance of a debutante. She helps them to mature so that she will be mistaken for a stepmother. Once her girls are old enough to be out of finishing school, a period of freedom and social activity sets in for her. The daughters are rushed home to make a chaotic début and embark upon a feverish chase for a husband. It is no longer permissible to be single at twenty-five. The flapper makes haste to marry lest she be a leftover and be forced to annex herself to the crowd just younger. She hasn’t time to ascertain the degree of compatibility between herself and her fiancé before the wedding, so she ascertains that they will be separated if the compatibility should be mutually rated zero after it.
The flapper! She is growing old. She forgets her flapper creed and is conscious only of her flapper self. She is married ’mid loud acclamation on the part of relatives and friends. She has come to none of the predicted “bad ends,” but has gone at last, where all good flappers go—into the young married set, into boredom and gathering conventions and the pleasure of having children, having lent a while a splendor and courageousness and brightness to life, as all good flappers should.
THE CLEVER LITTLE FOOL
Dana Ames
Snappy Stories, June 15th 1926
Margie knight was admittedly a fool—but a clever one. She was the mothers’ menace type of girl, if you know what I mean. “What I want to know is—what kind of children will a girl like that have? Tell me that!” And, “It’s not that I can’t trust my son Albert. He has a remarkably strong will power, but—” And, “Of course I can’t see anything so attractive about her, she’s just noisy—”
All of which means that Margie was a cute little thing with the kind of nose that Gloria Swanson has made famous, and a mop of gold-red hair that crinkled a bit.
She was, in type, the perennial flapper, and undoubtedly she might have gone on for five years slithering across the dancing floor of the Gates’ End Country Club, and in the same fashion trudging over its links, and motoring speedily along the smooth boulevards that led to it and more especially away from it. She managed to be mildly crazy about two or three men at a time, with an occasional college boy thrown in during vacations. A fairly good line she had, too.
“Listen… you can’t expect me to believe that?”
“Well, after all, you are so good looking and popular and everything, and somebody told me somep’n about you once! You’ve got a perfectly terrible reputation—”
“Listen, it’s not that I don’t trust you absolutely, but my conscience is non-skid—”
Yes, a fairly good line. Margie was a little fool, of course, but a rather clever one, at that.
And, at nineteen, she looked back over the many and varied experiences she’d gone through since she had left Miss Gulliver’s School two years before, and found them good. She wasn’t half so sophisticated as she thought she was—nobody could be—but her assumption of ennui, remembered hastily in moments of super-jazz, was most captivating.
She might have gone on five years, easily, broadcasting thrills without a pause for intensive thought at the Gates’ End Country Club—if she hadn’t found the White Hair.
The finding of the White Hair was brought about in the most casual, ordinary way. It was two-thirty in the afternoon, and Margie was bellowing from her bedroom for the immediate services of one black and affable Cora. Cora was shared between Margie, her mother, and an older sister, and it is quite possible that Cora worked harder upstairs than the cook ever did downstairs. However…
Margie was due for a game of golf at the country club at three. At two-thirty, therefore, Cora was helping her into an athletic undergarment of turquoise silk, beige woolen stockings and swagger little oxfords with suede fringes. Margie, leaping to the dresser to powder her nose, was all ready except for the sweater and skirt that Cora was patiently dangling in mid-air.
“Nev’ mind, Cora darling, I’ll just drag a comb through the old haystack and jump into the clothes—deeump-dump-dump—deum-dump-dump—Oh-h!-o-h!—OH!”
“Too many gin fizzes ’fore lunch and your nerves are all jumpy,” Cora remarked sagely. “Here, honey, lemme—”
But Margie was standing practically petrified, holding gingerly between thumb and forefinger an authentic White Hair. Fifteen minutes later she tottered weakly to the phone and informed Jimmy Nesbit that she couldn’t possibly play golf until further notice.
Of course she shouldn’t have taken the thing so seriously. But think of the things in this odd little world that are taken seriously, if it comes to that.
“It isn’t the fact that I’ve had a white hair,” she remarked plaintively to her mother. “’Cause Lord knows I pulled that one out faster’n the eye could see! But any day I might find another—and another—and another!”
Soberly she stared into the picture of her complete decay. She saw herself with twinges of rheumatism in her dancing legs—with pouches under her very blue eyes—with natural bracelets around her slim white throat.
Just as soberly she jerked out of the turquoise blue thing and the woolly sweater and skirt, and allowed herself to be poured into a warm tub with the right kind of bath salts for evening and likewise into a ginger-colored georgette dinner dress. Then she treated Jimmy Nesbit to three or four of her father’s drinks, snatched from the paneled safe under the sideboard in the dining room—Margie having cracked harder propositions than safes in her time. And so, as Mr. Pepys says, on her rather mournful way with Jimmy Nesbit to the Country Club…
The Older Generation—playfully called “older” not because of the way they looked but because of the way they wore their inhibitions—had long since given up coming to the club in the evenings. They patronized the links and timidly they sat on the wide, awninged veranda in the afternoons, but it was understood that their sons and daughters disapproved heartily of their making themselves conspicuous after 10 p.m. They were expected to motor into town for the Opera, a calm and cruel dictate to which they bowed their heads, meekly.
Consequently the Gates’ End ballroom looked, as Margie and Jimmy paraded into it, like a Methodist minister’s idea of the devil’s own go-cart, rapidly sliding southward.
“H’lo! H’lo there, Margie! Come and get a little nip right out of daddy’s hip pocket—”
“Say, Margie, come and Charleston with me after I get through tossing Jim Nesbit outa window. I’m sick and tired of this girl Peggy snagging her heels in my instep—”
Margie snapped automatically into form. It was all right for Bill Older to kid Peggy Carruthers, because everybody knew that Peggy turned down his honorable proposal of matrimony every weekend. And everybody knew, too, that no one could Charleston the way Margie could Charleston.
She grinned, and slid into Jimmy’s arms. After one dance they skidded into a locker room and had many drinks from many flasks. Quiet, sweet little drinks. The whole gang was there, howling and purring and screeching just as usual. And, as far as these things can be rated outside of the novels of 1910, Margie was the star of the performance—also as usual. There wasn’t any dead hush when she came into a room, or anything medieval like that, but there were a dozen proffered drinks, dances, dates or whatever anybody happened to have. Life ought to have been a pleasant bonbon for Margie Knight… it ought to have been.
She drifted out to a corner of the veranda for a little judicious necking with Jimmy. Jimmy was her current heavy love. He hadn’t been last week, and he might not be next week, but he was now.
“Gosh! What a night!” said Jimmy.
Margie sighed. She recognized this as the opening of the Line Romantic.
But she murmured, “Umm-h’mm—stars ’n—’n the moon ’n everything.”
“Sure. Listen, did anyone ever tell you—”
Margie sighed again, almost inaudibly, her mind on other matters. Jimmy was a sweet kid, but meaningless. He’d just come out of Princeton with a great gesture, aged twenty-two years and eight months. And it was well known that, just as he’d contracted with his father not to smoke until he was eighteen, so had he contracted not to marry until he was twenty-five. At the risk of losing most of the mint and a handful of railroads.
Looking back over her heavy loves, Margie admitted ruefully to herself that there had been something the matter with all of them… if one considered them matrimonially. One had a wife—a sort of a wife—another was too pouchy around the eyes, another subsisted solely as a perennial house guest, another—
Oh, Lord! What was the use! Wasn’t there anything hanging around loose for a girl to marry!
There was not. And Margie, since she’d found the White Hair, was determined that she must marry while her market value was at its height. She just couldn’t go on having a good time until she joined the rocking chair brigade—still with a one-syllable prefix hitched to her name. This might be 1926—but that sort of thing wasn’t done. You simply had to be “one of our prettiest debutantes” or else “one of the most popular of our younger matrons.” And you couldn’t go on being one of our prettiest debutantes with silver threads among the gold—not in this day of being quick on the hip and fast on the draught.
But Jimmy was still talking.
“Honestly, I never knew a girl I was so crazy about. You’ve got just simply everything, Margie. Looks and charm—and all the manly virtues. You know what I mean. Carrying your alcohol and not blowing lady-like smoke rings and all that. There’s always been something that’s got me on the ragged edge about every woman I’ve ever known—except you.”
“Oh, gosh, Jimmy—I get so sort of fed up! What good does it do me being marvelous? What good does it do any of us? If we were really knockouts—Peggy Joyce or Gilda Gray or the Queen of Roumania—you see what I mean? I’m not really marvelous at all, that’s just moonlight and moonshine—I’m just what’s called a ‘good egg’ and also in the interesting process of either getting scrambled or hard-boiled.”
“You’re morbid tonight.”
Margie lit a cigarette and tossed the match to the lawn. “No, I only just stopped pulling a line, for once. And consequently you get scared to death of me. Nev’ mind, Jimmy dear. Let’s go inside and show ’em all how two white people can dance when they really want to.”
But this wasn’t the end of that particular evening on the profane precincts of the Gates’ End Country Club—not by a long way.
Margie, being a good egg whether she wanted to be or not, was not one to leave an evening flat on its back, strangling for breath. Nor did anyone but the dumb Jimmy have any inkling that there was anything preying on what might have been her mind. She didn’t get up and announce to the assembled throng that frankly she wanted a husband and that she wouldn’t be happy till she got one—with a single chin and six bank accounts. She kept on dancing without a pause if you don’t count the glides into the locker room from time to time—until it was about one o’clock and the black boy with the banjo was just getting good—and Janet Prescott came in with a new man on her arm.
Immediately Margie spotted the new man, and bore down on him, figuratively. It looked as if Heaven had suddenly taken a great personal interest in Margie. For it was whispered around, faster than a six-tube set could broadcast an Indian love lyric, that this new man, by name of Robert Luther, was thirty years old, unattached as a floating pink cloud, and just delirious with money.
And Robert fell for Margie.
They went out on the veranda. (A different corner from the last time—Margie had her subtle delicacies.)
And to Margie’s infinite satisfaction, Robert not only went in straightway for the Line Romantic but likewise for the Line Protective. From which you can always distinguish the men who marry from the men who like to have their breakfasts alone with a siphon bottle.
“Sure you won’t be cold? That dress—”
Margie preened in ginger-color. “Don’t you like the dress?”
“H’mm… it’s a pretty shade, but if you belonged to me—”
Margie shook the mop of red-gold hair out of her eyes. “I don’t like it very much myself. It’s too—too extreme. But you’ve no idea how hard it is—to sort of keep up with the—the others—”
He slipped an arm around her shoulders. “You don’t mind, Margie? If you were my own sister—I wish, though, you’d let me tell you what I think about you?”
“I’d adore having you…”
“Well, even in just this half hour of our knowing each other, I think probably I understand you a lot better than all these friends of yours do. They’re trying to make a jazz-girl out of you, and all the time you’re the mother type.”
Margie restrained her little heels from kicking. “I—I’d like to live up to your ideal of me, but honestly I’m just a silly little thing—”
“Oh—no! D’you mind if I kiss you, just once?”
This was a poser. Up to this time Margie had hated men who put any responsibility up to anybody but themselves. But she kind of turned her cheek around. Robert Luther kissed her. Chastely.
When they finally got back into the big room, Margie was worrying over whether to have Janet Prescott or Alice Dorn for maid of honor. Robert’s intentions, seething in his mind, were as evident as the Star Spangled Banner on the Fourth of July…
Obviously it was her cue now to be demure, and Margie Knight was not one to miss a cue. It was hard, though, seeing Janet in the limelight, clad scantily in the leopard-skin rug off the tiles in front of the fireplace, doing an imitation of somebody or other doing something.
“Oh, fine!” said Jimmy, cattily. “Here we have a moving picture, vintage of 1908—”
Jimmy was jealous on Margie’s account, because Margie and Janet had always been rivals for the calcium glow…
But Margie didn’t mind, this time—much. Because Robert Luther evidently wasn’t aware that there was a girl in a leopard-skin garment alive in the world. His nice brown eyes were as fixed on Margie as tacks in a carpet. They had, off in the locker room, two nice little drinks of straight lemonade with seltzer water (Margie giving occasional little squeaks because it was so sizzy!) and while they were indulging in these refreshments Robert told her All About Himself.
“I just know you come from the West,” said Margie.
“Say, that’s clever of you. Yes, Wyoming, and I only came East to round off a cattle deal; I can’t always trust my agents in New York for the big stuff. They’re terribly afraid of turning over five cents—”
Margie’s eyes were admiring. Golly! How she did need, with her tastes, the sort of husband who wasn’t afraid of turning over five cents! Yea, verily…
“I honestly think you’re simply wonderful,” she said, with a certain earnestness.
“Oh, I don’t know! Just business. But I’m sure talking about business must be dull for you. My kid sister—she’s the one who married Jordan Arthur, the bread king—well, she always says when I get started on cattle I’m impossible. By the way, I want you to meet my sister some time soon. She’s keen to have me marry some attractive, really decent girl—and settle down—”
Decent? Margie wondered. What were the Wyoming standards of decency, anyhow? It made so much difference whether or no you had a decent mind. Some people might think that she and Jimmy Nesbit, two nights ago, had been—had been, well, a little reckless. But Margie thought then, and still thought now, that when you’re young and very much alive and the stars are out like a thousand million diamonds—well, that you can’t be expected to act as if you had wrinkles behind the ears.
Wrinkles. White Hair. Age. Security.
That brought her back, fast enough, to Robert Luther. She leaned forward a little, and in a moment she was in his arms. Not much thrill to Robert, but he was darn nice. Anybody could see that. Treated her as if she were eighteenth century lace. Now Jimmy always treated her, when he got the chance, as if she were sport flannel, washable… and absolutely nothing by the yard! Margie gave herself a little mental shake. It wasn’t quite square reconciling herself to a new love by running down an old one.
“Say!” said Robert suddenly. “I’m going to run back to the hotel and get some pictures I have of my sister and her family. I want to show you. I’ll be back in half an hour.”
Margie waved goodbye to Robert and sauntered into the big room. She was radiant, but a little thoughtful too. A man doesn’t dash off in the middle of the night to show you pictures of his sister unless he’s as serious as pneumonia. Margie knew that. She had Mr. Robert Luther. And forthwith she would become “one of our most popular young matrons” any time she wanted. She could easily persuade Robert to live in the East, while he was in the first wild transports or whatever you called ’em—and probably Janet Prescott had better be maid-of-honor—.
Well, this was her last half hour, then, of being wild. She shook off her conscience and made a dash for Jimmy.
“It’s too bad,” he said grumpily “that a guy can’t see the girl he dragged to a rotten dance more’n once every four hours—”
“Not a rotten dance. Listen to that music!” Margie flashed a grin at the black boy with the banjo. “Listen—he’s playing somep’n good. Don’t know what it is, but they wrote it on molasses.”
Jimmy was immediately in a good humor. That was one of the nice things about Jimmy. He didn’t have any sense.
“Sure is keen music. Keen time, too. And a keen dress you got on.”
“Like it?”
“Sure do. Always like economy. Every time I see an economical girl I say, ‘There’s a woman for a white man to love.’”
“You’re such a sil’, Jimmy.”
