TERRIBLE HONESTY

A colorful, persuasive re-evaluation of 1920s New York City, pinpointing it as the birthplace of modern American culture. Douglas (American Studies/Columbia Univ.) draws on familiar sources—memoirs by such Jazz Age novelists as Fitzgerald and Hemingway, the works of Harlem Renaissance writers, biographies of all these figures, virtually every academic text ever written about the period—but puts them together in exciting new ways to create a portrait of New York that includes black and white artists, men and women, elite and popular culture, architecture and aviation. She characterizes the 1920s' search for ``terrible honesty'' (Raymond Chandler's phrase) as a revolt against the sentimental, moralizing, matriarchal Victorian ethos she explored in The Feminization of American Culture (1977). Yet she links the unique ``adrenaline rush that was modernism'' to historical traits of American life that New York intellectuals rediscovered and claimed as their own: ``the flickering sense of place, purpose, and identity'' in the works of Twain, Melville, Hawthorne, and Poe, the pessimism that ``gained more in energy than it lost in hope.'' Her assessment of African-American music's impact on the 1920s and of black writers' complex relationship with the Jazz Age forcefully makes the point that American culture has always been a black-and- white affair—for people on both sides of the color line. Douglas sees 1920s New York as standing at a turning point, with the new mass media drawing their energy and structure from older forms of folk culture. She captures its essence in a lively narrative sprinkled with fabulous quotes: Zelda Fitzgerald remarking of the new tanning craze, ``I love those beautiful tan people. They seem so free of secrets''; singer Todd Duncan writing of his audition for George Gershwin, ``Imagine a Negro auditioning for a Jew, singing an old Italian aria.'' Analyzing this rich material with undogmatic passion, Douglas rescues multiculturalism from clichÇ and reclaims it as America's defining characteristic. Groundbreaking cultural history.