Literature of the 1920s

The social and economic changes of the 1920s not only manifested themselves in the music that was written during the decade, but into literature also.

Like the music of the Roaring 20s, some of the themes and writing styles were considered controversial at the time, but have survived to become much-loved works.

Here’s a few of our favourites…

The Great Gatsby

The Great Gatsby –  by F. Scott Fitzgerald (U.S.) 1925

The novel that defined the era.
Inspired by the parties he attended on Long Island’s north shore, Fitzgerald began writing The Great Gatsby in 1922, with the aim of producing “something new—something extraordinary and beautiful and simple and intricately patterned.”

The novel revolves around the young and mysterious millionaire Jay Gatsby and his passion for the beautiful Daisy Buchannan. It paints a critical portrait of the Jazz age, an era known not only for unprecedented economic prosperity, jazz music and flapper culture, but also for bootlegging and organised crime.

Despite being very much inspired by the mood of the time,  the plot is timeless and relatable,  exploring themes of decadence, idealism and excess and has been described as cautionary tale regarding the American Dream.

Ulysses

Ulysses – by James Joyce (Ireland) 1922

Considered to be one of the most important works of Modernist literature, Ulysses was first serialised in parts in an American journal called The Little Review between 1918 and 1920, and was published in its entirely in 1922.

Ulysses chronicles an ordinary day in the life of Dubliner Leopold Bloom and establishes a series of parallels between its characters and those of Homer’s poem Odyssey (Ulysses being the Latinised name of Odyssus).

Ulysses is approximately 265,000 words in length, using a lexicon of 30,030 words.  The experimental prose – full of puns and allusions as well as the stream of consciousness technique, rich characterisations and humour, have made the book highly regarded, however it has also attracted controversy and scrutiny.

In 1998, the Modern Library ranked Ulysses first on its list of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century.

Winnie-the-Pooh

Winnie-the-Pooh – by A.A. Milne (England)1926

Winnie-the-Pooh, also known as Pooh Bear was created by A. A. Milne. The first collection of stories about the character was the book Winnie-the-Pooh, which was published in 1926 and was followed up by The House at Pooh Corner in 1928.

Milne named the character Winnie-the-Pooh after a teddy bear owned by his son, Christopher Robin Milne, who was also the basis for the character Christopher Robin.  Christopher’s toys also lent their names to most of the other characters. Christopher had named his toy bear “Winnie” after a Canadian black bear he often saw at London Zoo, and “Pooh”, after a swan they had met while on holiday.

The Pooh stories have been translated into many languages, including Alexander Lenard’s Latin translation, Winnie ille Pu, which was first published in 1958, and, in 1960, became the only Latin book ever to have been featured on The New York Times Best Seller list.

Lady Chatterley’s Lover

Lady Chatterley’s Lover – D. H. Lawrence (England) 1928

The controversial Lady Chatterley’s Lover was first published privately in Italy in 1928.  The book became notorious for its story of the physical relationship between a working-class man and an upper-class woman, its explicit descriptions of sex and its use of words that were considered unprintable at the time.

When the full unexpurgated edition was finally published by Penguin Books in Britain in 1960, the trial of Penguin under the Obscene Publications Act of 1959 was a major public event and the publishers only escaped conviction by being able to prove the book was a work of literary merit. Until then, the only version available in Britain was heavily censored.

Besides the sexual content of the book, Lady Chatterly’s Lover also paints a picture of the class system and social conflict in Britain in the early 20th century.  The affair of the aristocratic woman with the working class man is said to draw parallels to the situation into which Lawrence was born and that into which he was married.  Lawrence’s father was a coal miner, and the signs of dissatisfaction and resentment of the working-class mining community are also present in the book.

Bambi, a Life in the Woods

Bambi, a Life in the Woods – by Felix Salten (Austria) 1923

Considered to be one of the first environmentally conscious novels ever published, Bambi, a Life in the Woods or Bambi. Eine Lebensgeschichte aus dem Walde was originally published as an adult book in Salten’s native Austria.  The novel traces the life of a male roe deer from his childhood and loss of his mother to finding a mate, whilst all the time learning from his father the dangers posed by humans in the forest.

More than 200 editions of the novel have been released, with almost 100 German and English editions alone, and numerous translations and reprintings in more than 20 other languages. It has also been released in a variety of formats, including printed medium, audio book, Braille, and E-book formats.

With the Second World War looming, the publisher of the first English translation of the book, Max Schuster, helped Salten who was Jewish, to flee Nazi Germany in 1933 and introduced him, and Bambi to the Walt Disney Studios.  MGM films were initially interested in making a live-action adaptation of the work, however this was considered too difficult.  Walt Disney bought the rights in 1937 and started working on the animation immediately, adapting the story for a young audience as it was considered a bit grim and sombre for children.

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Jazz at the Philharmonic

George Gershwin

When, on 24 October, APO Principal Clarinettist Gordon Richards rips into the opening notes of Rhapsody in Blue, no one will doubt for a second that George Gershwin was a genius composer.

What’s harder to answer is whether what he composed was classical or jazz. Rhapsody is shot through with blue notes and other jazz inflections, and yet it’s a piano concerto.

Ultimately, the question is moot: Gershwin was a composer of music, and drew his influences from the European tradition as well as the popular tunes he inhaled every time he strolled the streets of his hometown, New York.

Besides, in Gershwin’s music the classical/jazz distinction often lies in the interpretation. Take ‘Summertime’, from Porgy and Bess, as an example. When the soprano Cynthia Haymon sings it, in a famous recording with Simon Rattle and the London Philharmonic Orchestra, it’s classical. When Billie Holiday’s singing with Count Basie, it’s jazz. It’s a tribute to Gershwin’s ability that ‘Summertime’ sounds completely natural in either setting.

Kurt Weill

The European Twist

It’s a similar case for Kurt Weill, whose left-wing critique of capitalist decadence Die Dreigroschenoper found a home on Broadway as The Threepenny Opera, and is mostly famous these days for Bobby Darin’s cheery ditty ‘Mack the Knife’, which began life as a menacing song about a murderer.

Jazz was all the rage in 1920s Weimar Germany, when Weill wrote Die Dreigroschenoper. It was even more popular in France, where a number of African American musicians found an escape from the racism they faced in their segregated homeland. Francis Poulenc claimed not to like jazz, but his ballet Les Biches does a good job of hiding his distaste. The syncopations of the work’s ‘Rondeau’ and ‘Rag-Mazurka’ in particular show a clear debt to jazz. At a time when Paris was awash with the style, how could it be otherwise?

Francis Poulenc

Igor Stravinsky (1882-1971), despite eventually living in both Paris and New York, was Russian, and came to jazz from the perspective of an outsider. Even so, as the most rhythmically adept composer of his age, Stravinsky was perhaps inevitably attracted to the dancing pulses he heard coming from America. His most famous work in this vein was the Ebony Concerto, described by its composer as “a jazz concerto with a blues slow movement,” and written for the bandleader and clarinettist Woody Herman. By 1945, when he produced the concerto, Stravinsky had moved to America, but he had been writing jazz-influenced works since the late 1910s. The Soldier’s Tale (completed in 1918 – and to be performed by the APO in 2014) contains a ‘Ragtime’ dance and the same year saw a full work, also called Rag-Time, for 11 instruments.

Treemonisha

Giving Back

The influence didn’t go one way. The king of ragtime, Scott Joplin, wrote a ballet and two operas. The second of them, Treemonisha, has been performed with the soprano Kathleen Battle in the title role and recorded by that most establishment of classical music labels, Deutsche Grammophon.

Miles Davis

By the mid-1940s, Duke Ellington and his musical foil Billy Strayhorn were composing large-scale suites for jazz orchestra, including the ‘jazz symphony’ Black, Brown and Beige (1943).

A touch later, Miles Davis embarked on a series of collaborations with arranger Gil Evans. Among them was the album Sketches of Spain, which contains arrangements of Rodrigo’s Concierto de Aranjuez and ‘Will o’ the Wisp’, which classical fans will know as ‘Cancion del fuego fatuo’, from Manuel de Falla’s ballet El amor brujo. Miles and Evans also got together to produce a partly improvised, partly orchestrated jazz version of Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess. Which is more or less where we came in…

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Kurt Weill: The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny (1929)

Kurt Weill (right) and Bertolt Brecht

Like The Threepenny Opera, The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny is a satirical opera, with a German libretto by Bertolt Brecht.  The music was finished in the spring of 1929, but the work was not premiered for another year.

Despite being written for operatic voices, Weill said that The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny “pays conscious tribute to the irrationality of the operatic form”.  He thought operas had become too full of ritual and lacked substance, and Mahagonny, in part, sought to deflate the “arrogance” of traditional opera. With this aim, many traditional operatic themes are subverted and made grotesque; love becomes a commodity and the law is run by criminals.

In 1933 performances of The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny were banned by the Nazis, and no significant productions were performed until the 1960s.  Since then it has played in opera houses around the world. Though never achieving the popularity of The Threepenny Opera, Mahagonny is still considered a work of stature with a haunting score.

1929…

“You can get much further with a kind word and a gun than you can with a kind word alone.”

– Al Capone

Vatican City

On 11th February 1929, the Kingdom of Italy and the Holy See of the Catholic Church signed the Lateran Treaty to establish the Vatican City as an independent sovereign enclave within Rome.  The Pope was pledged to perpetual neutrality in international relations and to abstention from mediation in a controversy unless specifically requested by all parties. Italy was under a Fascist government at the time; but the succeeding democratic governments have all upheld the treaty. In 1947, the Lateran Pacts were incorporated into the democratic Constitution of Italy.

The “Saint Valentine’s Day Massacre” took place on 14^th February 1929. Seven mob associates were murdered as part of a Prohibition-era conflict between two powerful criminal gangs in Chicago: the South Side Italian gang led by Al Capone and the North Side Irish gang led by Bugs Moran.

Al Capone

Al Capone’s men, dressed as police officers, “raided” the Moran headquarters, lining the seven victims along a wall before shooting with machine guns.  No one was ever brought to trial for the crime; however Capone’s reputation was greatly damaged by the event.

The Wall Street Crash of 1929 began in late October and was the most devastating stock market crash in the history of the United States, when taking into consideration the full extent and duration of its fallout.  The crash signalled the beginning of the 10-year Great Depression that affected all Western industrialised countries and did not end in the United States until the onset of World War II.

The crash brought the Roaring Twenties to a shuddering halt.

Also in 1929…

The first Academy Awards were presented on 16th May 1929 in a fifteen minute ceremony at the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel, honouring the best movies of the previous two years. Tickets cost five dollars and around 270 people attended the event which included a private dinner. Emil Jannings was the first person to ever receive an Academy Award, winning Best Actor for the films The Way of All Flesh and The Last Command and the 1927 film Wings won Best Picture.  This was the only Academy Awards ceremony not to be broadcast on television.

1929 saw the first appearances of two famous comic strip heroes – Tintin and Popeye.

Tintin

Tintin was created by Belgian cartoonist Hergé and was introduced in Le Petit Vingtième a weekly children’s supplement to the Belgian newspaper Le Vingtième Siècle.  Tintin was most recently brought to life in the 2011 film The Adventures of Tintin, which was directed by Stephen Spielberg and produced by Sir Peter Jackson.

Popeye

Popeye first appeared in the daily comic strip Thimble Theatre. Although Thimble Theatre was in its tenth year already, the muscled, spinach-loving sailor quickly became the main focus and Popeye became the strip’s title in later years. The popularity of Popeye helped boost spinach sales – a 2010 study revealed that children increased their vegetable consumption after watching Popeye cartoons. The spinach-growing community of Crystal City, Texas, erected a statue of the character in recognition of Popeye’s positive effects on the spinach industry.

Born in 1929

Actresses Audrey Hepburn and Grace Kelly, civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr, racing driver Graham Hill, athlete Roger Bannister, diarist Anne Frank, First Lady of the Philippines Imelda Marcos, American First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, British criminal Ronnie Biggs and Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat were all born in 1929.

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Poulenc: Les Biches (1922)

Francis Poulenc

The ballet Les biches was premiered by the Ballets Russes. Poulenc, who was relatively unknown at the time, was asked by Sergei Diaghilev, the founder of the Ballets Russes, to compose a piece based on Glazunov’s Les Sylphides, written 17 years earlier. Poulenc, however, chose to base his work on paintings by Watteau that depicted Louis XV and various women in his ‘Parc aux biches’; the word biche usually translated as hind, or a female deer. Poulenc described his work as a “contemporary drawing room party suffused with an atmosphere of wantonness, which you sense if you are corrupted, but of which an innocent-minded girl would not be conscious.” Diaghilev recognized the great potential of the ballet and produced it for the 1924 Ballets Russes season, bringing Poulenc into the forefront of French music.

Poulenc continually revised the music through the 1940s, eventually reducing it to an orchestral suite in five movements.

1922…

“It was a sight surpassing all precedent, and one we never dreamed of seeing.”
– Howard Carter

Frederick Banting

The first successful insulin treatment of diabetes was made by Canadian Frederick Banting in January of 1922. On 11 January, Leonard Thompson, a 14-year-old diabetic who lay dying at the Toronto General Hospital, was given the first injection of insulin. The first extract was so impure, Thompson suffered a severe allergic reaction, however the second was completely successful, not only in having no obvious side-effects but also in completely eliminating the glycosuria sign of diabetes.

The Irish Civil War and Battle of Dublin began on 28 June 1922. The Irish National Army, using artillery loaned by the British, began to bombard the anti-Treaty Irish Republican Army forces occupying the Four Courts in Dublin. The conflict claimed more lives than the War of Independence that preceded it, and left Irish society divided.

The burial mask of King Tutankhamun

The tomb of Pharoah Tutankhamun was discovered in November 1922, when English archaeologist Howard Carter and Lord Carnarvon became the first people to enter the tomb in more than 3,000 years. The discovery received worldwide press coverage and sparked a renewed public interest in ancient Egypt, for which Tukankhamun’s burial mask remains the popular symbol. Exhibits of artefacts found during the discovery have toured the world.

The British Broadcasting Company began its radio service in the UK on 14 November 1922, broadcasting from station 2LO in London. The company was dissolved on 31 December 1926 and its assets were transferred to the non-commercial and Crown Chartered British Broadcasting Corporation.

Also in 1922…

Nosferatu

The German Expressionist horror film Nosferatu, eine Symphonie des Grauens (translated as Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror; or simply Nosferatu) was released in 1922. The film, is an unauthorized adaptation of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, with names and other details changed because the studio could not obtain the rights to the novel (for instance, “vampire” became “Nosferatu” and “Count Dracula” became “Count Orlok”). Stoker’s heirs sued over the adaptation, and a court ruling ordered that all copies of the film be destroyed. However, one print of Nosferatu survived, and the film came to be regarded as an influential masterpiece of cinema.

Vegemite was invented by Australian entrepreneur Fred Walker in 1922. Prior to the introduction of Vegemite, the Sanitarium Health Food Company in New Zealand began manufacturing and shipping to Australia a version of Vegemite’s biggest competitor, Marmite. Vegemite was invented, following the disruption of imports after World War I, using yeast being dumped by breweries.
Following a nationwide competition with a prize of £50 to find a name for the new spread, the name “Vegemite” was selected out of a hat by Fred Walker’s daughter, Sheilah.

Born in 1922
Actors Betty White,  Sir Christopher Lee, Veronica Lake and Ava Gardner,  novelist Kinsley Amis, poet Philip Larkin, French fashion designer Pierre Cardin and comics creator Stan Lee were all born in 1922.

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New in 1900

1900 – 1910 was not just a new era for orchestral music and the arts – huge discoveries were being made in the scientific world too.

Albert Einstein proposed his Theory of Relativity in 1905, Max Planck formulated Quantum Theory in 1900 and Sigmund Freud published both the ‘Interpretation of Dreams’ and his Theory of Sexuality during this decade.

It was also a decade of great invention, with the creation of some of the everyday household items we couldn’t imagine living without today…

An artists represenatation of Puffing Billy

Vacuum cleaner

Hubert Cecil Booth of England has the strongest claim to inventing the motorised vacuum cleaner, in 1901. The idea came to him as Booth watched a demonstration of a cleaning device, which blew dust off the chairs, and thought it would be much more useful to have one that sucked dust up. He tested the idea by laying a handkerchief on the seat of a restaurant chair, putting his mouth to the handkerchief, and then trying to suck up as much dust as he could onto the handkerchief. Upon seeing the dust and dirt collected on the underside of the handkerchief, he realised the idea could work.

The initial device was a large, horse-drawn creation, nicknamed the “Puffing Billy”, with a piston pump and a cloth filter.

Booth initially did not attempt to sell his machine, but rather sold cleaning services. The vans of the British Vacuum Cleaning Company (BVCC) were bright red; uniformed operators would haul the hose off the van and route it through the windows of a building to reach all the rooms inside. Gaining the royal seal of approval, Booth’s motorized vacuum cleaner was used to clean the carpets of Westminster Abbey prior to Edward VII’s coronation in 1901.

Bakelite Jewellery

Bakelite

The first so called plastic, based on a synthetic polymer was invented in 1907, by Leo Hendrik Baekeland, a Belgian-born American living in New York state. Baekeland was looking for an insulating shellac to coat wires in electric motors and generators. He found that combining phenol (C6H5OH) and formaldehyde (HCOH) formed a sticky mass and later found that the material could be mixed with wood flour, asbestos, or slate dust to create strong and fire resistant “composite” materials. Bakelite was originally used for electrical and mechanical parts, coming into widespread use in consumer goods and jewellery in the 1920s.

An early Gillette advertisment

Safety Razor

On November 15, 1904, patent #775,134 was granted to King C. Gillette for a safety ‘razor’. After his Wisconsin home was destroyed by fire, Gillette decided that the only way to successfully make some money and build back his life, was to come up with a great invention.

In 1895, after several years of considering and rejecting possible inventions, Gillette suddenly had a brilliant idea while shaving one morning. It was an entirely new razor and blade that flashed in his mind—a razor with a safe, inexpensive, and disposable blade.

It took six years for Gillette’s idea to evolve and during that time, technical experts told Gillette that it would be impossible. However by 1903, he had succeeded and production of the razor and blade began as the Gillette Safety Razor Company started operations in South Boston.

An early Kellogs advertisment

Cornflakes

This idea for corn flakes began by accident when Dr. John Harvey Kellogg, the superintendent of The Battle Creek Sanatorium in Michigan, and his younger brother, Will Keith Kellogg, left some cooked wheat to sit while they attended to some pressing matters at the sanatorium. When they returned, they found that the wheat had gone stale, but being on a strict budget, they decided to continue to process it by forcing it through rollers, hoping to obtain long sheets of the dough. To their surprise, what they found instead were flakes, which they toasted and served to their patients.

In 1906, Will Keith Kellogg decided to try to mass-market the new food. He tried adding sugar to the flakes to try to make them more appealing to the masses, but this caused a rift between his brother and him. At the same time, Kellogg also began experimenting with new grain cereals to expand his product line. Rice Krispies, his next great hit, first went on sale in 1928.

Teabags

The first tea bags were hand-sewn silk bags. Tea bag patents date back as early as 1903, first appearing commercially around 1904. Tea bags were successfully marketed by the tea and coffee shop merchant Thomas Sullivan from New York, who shipped his tea bags around the world. The loose tea was intended to be removed from the sample bags by customers, but they found it easier to brew the tea with the tea still enclosed in the porous bags.

The first serving of iced tea was also made in 1904 by Englishmen Richard Blechynden at the St. Louis Fair.

 

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