10
PARTISAN REVIEW
Years later, when he himself was under attack for suppressing a vic–
ious and motiveless undergraduate riot, Dean Gauss remembered
this
day and wrote Fitzgerald: "I remember with a good deal of feeling
how a number of years ago a number of respectable evangelists in
the cause of letters came down to Princeton crowned with laurels to
reestablish the cult of Apollo and what a scandal this was to blue–
nosed respectability. Yet the aim then in view was a worthy one.... "
Presently the Fitzgeralds moved from their honeymoon cottage
at the Biltmore to the Commodore and settled down to another round
of parties. The surprising thing is that the Commodore would have
them; they began their residence there by spending half an hour with
a group of friends whirling around in the revolving door. For by this
time the twenties had begun to define themselves. "The uncertain–
ties
~f
1919 were over- there seemed little doubt about what was go–
ing to happen- America was going on the greatest, gaudiest spree in
history.... The whole golden boom was in the air-its splendid
generosities, its outrageous corruptions and the tortuous death strug–
gle of the old America in prohibition." Of this gaudy spree the people
who were of an age with the century were casually determined to have
their share. It was not that they lacked social generosity or even po–
litical idealism, as the Sacco-Vanzetti case was to show a little later.
Even Iris March was capable of giving her hatred of the older genera–
tion a political turn, as when she says to Sir Maurice: "To you, it
seems a worthy thing for a good man to make a success in the nasty
arena of national strifes and international jealousies. To me, the world
which thinks of itself in terms of puny, squalid, bickering little nations
... is the highest indignity that can befall a good man, it is a world in
which good men are shut up like gods in a lavatory." But for the
most part we do not remember Iris March's attitude as a political one,
any more than those who remember at all Ford Madox Ford's far
more brilliant and neglected portrait of Sylvia Tietjins, remember
how politically conscious her hatred of Christopher is. For the twenties,
the situation did not define itself exclusively in political terms. " ...
In spite of the fact," wrote Fitzgerald in 1931, "that now we are all
rummaging around in our trunlr.s wondering where in hell we left the
liberty cap-'I know I
had
it'-and the moujik blouse ... it was
characteristic of the Jazz Age that it had no interest in politics at all."
For what it was worth, Amory Blaine was a socialist. "We fan-
