Bohemians, Bootleggers, Flappers, and Swells
The Best of Early Vanity Fair
edited by Graydon Carter
2014
It's been kind of an eventful month, right? I've probably spent more time reading the news than reading any of the books I have started. Plus I took a trip, and spent almost the whole time visiting and chatting. But in typical booklover's hubris, I packed my bags with the answers to the questions 'what if I finish my book?' and 'what if I finish my backup book?' and, embarrassingly, 'what if I finish my BACKUP backup book?' Well, I didn't finish anything, and carried a lot of extra weight for nothing, but I was glad that my main read was a collection of short essays, just the thing for times when there are too many competing demands on one's attention.
Bohemians, Bootleggers, Flappers, and Swells is a collection of articles published in Vanity Fair in the 1910s, 20s, and 30s. Of the 400 or so pages, the 1910s and 30s each get about a hundred pages, and the 20s fill half the book with the other two.
Compared to An Editor's Burial, which was a tightly focused collection of New Yorker articles meant to show off certain authors and specific subjects, BBFS is clearly intended to show off Vanity Fair's range, and I suspect, to flaunt as many famous names as possible, even if it's hard to believe that what they wrote was in any sense 'the best' of anything. (I'm thinking especially of AA Milne's dull account of publishers thinking his author bio was too boring...) These pieces are all much shorter than the New Yorker reprints too, usually only 3 or 5 book pages long. I bet most of these would've fit on a single magazine page, maybe two if they had to share space with advertising or illustrations.
Most of the articles are nonfiction essays, although there are a handful of short stories and a smattering of poetry by the likes of Dorothy Parker, Edna St Vincent Millay, Langston Hughes, and TS Eliot. The best of these, I think, was ee cumming's "When Calvin Coolidge Laughed," which blurs the line between story and prose poem and depicts nationwide rioting and disorder in a sing-song tall-tale voice in response to the shock of hearing Coolidge sound happy. Colette's story "The Woman Behind the Mask," which shows a husband's jealous shock at spotting his wife having an awfully good time at an Eyes Wide Shut style masked orgy, which he'd snuck out to after telling her he'd never go to such a thing, was also pretty good.
The nonfiction pieces are a blend of trend reporting and profiles of famous people, and depending on how you look at it, those might not even count as two different kinds of things. My favorites were the satirical trend pieces, which rather than straight reporting, subjected whatever fad or style to some gentle fun. I loved PG Wodehouse's "The Physical Culture Peril" about the danger that fitness and exercise will make you a boring conversationalist; Hyman Strunsky's "Are Odd Women Really Odd?" in defense of women's suffrage, employment, and sexual freedom; and F Scott Fitzgerald's metafictional "This is a Magazine," which is a script for a short play where all the characters are different types of magazine articles.
Much of the regular reporting lacks flair by contrast, even when the subject should be intrinsically interesting, like Samuel Chotzinoff's condensed (and kind of racist) history of jazz or Bertrand Russell's explanation of behaviorism. There were a few that stood out to me, both for their quality and foresight. Robert Sherwood's "The Higher Education on the Screen" fears what kids are learning about the world from the movies. Walter Lippman's "Blazing Publicity," which depicts newspaper and other media coverage as a spotlight that subjects certain people and events to intense scrutiny, one at a time, before moving on to the next thing, and leaving whatever happens outside that spotlight comparatively 'in the dark,' which still sounds more or less like how it's done today. Walter Winchell's "A Primer of Broadway Slang" surprised me, because I knew almost every term he mentioned, a few from watching so much Looney Tunes growing up, but mostly because they left the backstage, entered the common tongue, and are still in circulation now.
While women's rights are mostly referred to positively, especially earlier in the book, Aldous Huxley got an essay to complain that sex outside of marriage shouldn't be considered 'modern' (or by implication, 'good'); DH Lawrence warns that while women seem to enjoy having sex for pleasure, they're sure to soon regret jettisoning romance and marriage; and Clarence Darrow totally beclowns himself by waxing nostalgic about the great discursive community that used to be found in barbershops before men could easily shave at home, and then concludes that it's women voting and getting short haircuts that's really ruining things, and that men are now an oppressed minority. Yes, even a hundred years ago, there were men whining that any little advance for women meant that men were being persecuted and we'd better turn back whatever gains we'd made toward equality before it was too late. It's sometimes hard to tell if these guys are sincerely panicking or making a cynical bad faith argument in the hope that it's more persuasive than raw misogyny would be, but it hardly matters because they're always wrong. They always think any step toward equality is 'too far' because what they really want is more in-equality, specifically the kind that favors themselves. (There's a similar sort of White reaction to any advancement for people of color that's just as awful.)
The celebrity profiles again mostly seem like editor Graydon Carter simply wanted to show off all the people who wrote for Vanity Fair and all the people they wrote about. We get so-so stories about Picasso, James Joyce, Cole Porter, Harpo Marx. The best one, I think, was Janet Flanner's "The Grand Guillotiner of Paris" about how even in the 1930s, being a French executioner was a hereditary position endowed by the state, and the family privately owned the only working guillotines in the country. Darwin Teilhet also has an interesting piece about the then-ubiquitous Tarzan and the many, many licensing opportunities Edgar Rice Burroughs used to get the character into books, magazines, the movies and Sunday newspaper comic strips, and working as an ad spokesman for countless products. Unlike a lot of the others pieces, those seem to be here due to sheer quality, rather than because they talk about something modern readers are likely to strongly associate with the time period.
Compared to An Editor's Burial, which was a tightly focused collection of New Yorker articles meant to show off certain authors and specific subjects, BBFS is clearly intended to show off Vanity Fair's range, and I suspect, to flaunt as many famous names as possible, even if it's hard to believe that what they wrote was in any sense 'the best' of anything. (I'm thinking especially of AA Milne's dull account of publishers thinking his author bio was too boring...) These pieces are all much shorter than the New Yorker reprints too, usually only 3 or 5 book pages long. I bet most of these would've fit on a single magazine page, maybe two if they had to share space with advertising or illustrations.
Most of the articles are nonfiction essays, although there are a handful of short stories and a smattering of poetry by the likes of Dorothy Parker, Edna St Vincent Millay, Langston Hughes, and TS Eliot. The best of these, I think, was ee cumming's "When Calvin Coolidge Laughed," which blurs the line between story and prose poem and depicts nationwide rioting and disorder in a sing-song tall-tale voice in response to the shock of hearing Coolidge sound happy. Colette's story "The Woman Behind the Mask," which shows a husband's jealous shock at spotting his wife having an awfully good time at an Eyes Wide Shut style masked orgy, which he'd snuck out to after telling her he'd never go to such a thing, was also pretty good.
The nonfiction pieces are a blend of trend reporting and profiles of famous people, and depending on how you look at it, those might not even count as two different kinds of things. My favorites were the satirical trend pieces, which rather than straight reporting, subjected whatever fad or style to some gentle fun. I loved PG Wodehouse's "The Physical Culture Peril" about the danger that fitness and exercise will make you a boring conversationalist; Hyman Strunsky's "Are Odd Women Really Odd?" in defense of women's suffrage, employment, and sexual freedom; and F Scott Fitzgerald's metafictional "This is a Magazine," which is a script for a short play where all the characters are different types of magazine articles.
Much of the regular reporting lacks flair by contrast, even when the subject should be intrinsically interesting, like Samuel Chotzinoff's condensed (and kind of racist) history of jazz or Bertrand Russell's explanation of behaviorism. There were a few that stood out to me, both for their quality and foresight. Robert Sherwood's "The Higher Education on the Screen" fears what kids are learning about the world from the movies. Walter Lippman's "Blazing Publicity," which depicts newspaper and other media coverage as a spotlight that subjects certain people and events to intense scrutiny, one at a time, before moving on to the next thing, and leaving whatever happens outside that spotlight comparatively 'in the dark,' which still sounds more or less like how it's done today. Walter Winchell's "A Primer of Broadway Slang" surprised me, because I knew almost every term he mentioned, a few from watching so much Looney Tunes growing up, but mostly because they left the backstage, entered the common tongue, and are still in circulation now.
While women's rights are mostly referred to positively, especially earlier in the book, Aldous Huxley got an essay to complain that sex outside of marriage shouldn't be considered 'modern' (or by implication, 'good'); DH Lawrence warns that while women seem to enjoy having sex for pleasure, they're sure to soon regret jettisoning romance and marriage; and Clarence Darrow totally beclowns himself by waxing nostalgic about the great discursive community that used to be found in barbershops before men could easily shave at home, and then concludes that it's women voting and getting short haircuts that's really ruining things, and that men are now an oppressed minority. Yes, even a hundred years ago, there were men whining that any little advance for women meant that men were being persecuted and we'd better turn back whatever gains we'd made toward equality before it was too late. It's sometimes hard to tell if these guys are sincerely panicking or making a cynical bad faith argument in the hope that it's more persuasive than raw misogyny would be, but it hardly matters because they're always wrong. They always think any step toward equality is 'too far' because what they really want is more in-equality, specifically the kind that favors themselves. (There's a similar sort of White reaction to any advancement for people of color that's just as awful.)
The celebrity profiles again mostly seem like editor Graydon Carter simply wanted to show off all the people who wrote for Vanity Fair and all the people they wrote about. We get so-so stories about Picasso, James Joyce, Cole Porter, Harpo Marx. The best one, I think, was Janet Flanner's "The Grand Guillotiner of Paris" about how even in the 1930s, being a French executioner was a hereditary position endowed by the state, and the family privately owned the only working guillotines in the country. Darwin Teilhet also has an interesting piece about the then-ubiquitous Tarzan and the many, many licensing opportunities Edgar Rice Burroughs used to get the character into books, magazines, the movies and Sunday newspaper comic strips, and working as an ad spokesman for countless products. Unlike a lot of the others pieces, those seem to be here due to sheer quality, rather than because they talk about something modern readers are likely to strongly associate with the time period.
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