The Wilted '20s

THE PLEASURES OF THE JAZZ AGE (417 pp.)--Edited by William Hodapp--Farrar, Straus ($4).

As Frederick Lewis Allen has proved, the age of only yesterday, and the day before, is already history and ripe for retelling. .There is even gold to be found in ransacking the closets of the 19205--the era of the flapper and the grimacing mobster, the devotees of sex dives and bathtub gin, the frilly esthetes and champions of companionate marriage. William Hodapp has pasted together, with some success, an anthology reflecting the era through its fiction. The stories provide dramatic evidence of how drastically and quickly the patterns of U.S. life can change during a lifetime.

If read for literary value, this book soon resembles a Coney Island museum of horrors, in which are displayed the works of such literary curiosities as Vicki Baum and Warwick Deeping, such terrible stuff as Michael Arlen's green-plush patter about the smarter set and Vina Delmar's teary tribute to the "bad girl."

If read, however, as a social document, The Pleasures of the Jazz Age has the same kind of interest as a report on mating customs of ancient Egyptians. Here the reader can find such characteristic creatures of the jazz age as the hot & cold flapper ("There were two kinds of men, those you played with and those you might marry") described in the elegant, slightly elegiac prose of F. Scott Fitzgerald; the frat boys going through their rituals as if life itself depended on them ("every night a freshman stood on the roof of the Nu Delta house and announced the time every 15 seconds"); the blonde whom gentlemen preferred and who was thrilled to see in Paris "the historical spot where Mr. Coty makes all the perfume."

If today the "sweet madness" of that era, as Editor Hodapp calls it, may seem neither very sweet nor so terribly mad, still it is possible that many middle-aged readers will find in this book's backward glance a nostalgic moment--less, perhaps, for the actual quality of life in the '20s than for the kind of easy illusions it was then possible to cultivate.

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