American Fun by John Beckman

Author:John Beckman [Beckman, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-90818-6
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2014-02-04T05:00:00+00:00

Risk-loving flappers dance the Charleston—in high heels—on the ledge of Chicago’s Sherman Hotel, December 11, 1926. (Courtesy of Underwood & Underwood, CORBIS images.)

As so many twenties writers would have it, under all the booze, whangdoodle, and fun was a sneaking insecurity that belied both the sheik’s and the flapper’s confidence: fun was a cover-up that made matters worse. The deep distractions of the 1920s seemed to lead death-driven wild partiers, like Parker and Harry Crosby, ever farther from, not “nearer to,” the “frank and full enjoyment of life” identified by Robert L. Duffus. Most likely, it was the Parkers and Crosbys whom reformers like Duffus had hoped to “guide.” The wild-spinning fun, like Tilyou’s Human Roulette, tossed weakly clutching citizens into the ditch. Throughout the story “Big Blonde,” for instance, people clamber together in pursuit of reckless fun; in the end, the damaged ones—like Hazel, the eponymous Big Blonde herself—seek “drowsy cheer” in the sweet and absolute slackening of death.

The way Parker represents it, indeed the way she seems to have lived it, these two communities—the partygoers and the suicides—were on a continuum of risky pleasure that characterized Jazz Age extremity. At the era’s illegal and extralegal wild parties, where only cops and parents weren’t welcome, citizens were not only exposed to risk; they welcomed it, pursued it, demanded it. They laughed at tedious common sense. They flouted laws, civil and social, and tested the limits of decency and safety. It took resilience under such conditions for the average citizen to keep it together—to keep from succumbing to addiction and violence; to keep from knuckling under to tyrants.

The streetwise flapper put a premium on resilience. She tested her mettle in this risky age, and she expected other women to do the same. But as Parker demonstrates in “Big Blonde” and elsewhere, fun for fun’s sake had special dangers for women, who lacked advantage in the world of men. Whether she was valued for her sex, her wits, or her fun, the woman’s role at the party was often to entertain, even when what she wanted was only to amuse herself.

Dorothy Parker would die of a heart attack, but until then she was chronically suicidal. Like her Big Blonde, Hazel Morse, she once took an overdose of the sedative Veronal. Another time she consumed a bottle of shoe polish. It was in her character to turn even her suicide attempts into stunts and practical jokes. Having slashed herself with her husband’s razor, she greeted bedside visitors with blue ribbons tied to her bandaged wrists. After an overdose of sleeping powders, she sent a telegram from the country estate where she was recovering: “send me a saw INSIDE A LOAF OF BREAD.”

Gallows humor sets the tone for the Big Blonde’s failed suicide. Approaching her beloved vials of Veronal, Hazel feels “the quick excitement of one who is about to receive an anticipated gift.” Drinking down the pills she intones once more, “Here’s mud in your eye.”

But of course she doesn’t die. That would have been a happy ending.

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