I've been shying away from doing Tuesday Teasers (which is really just another excuse to be able to chat about a book I'm reading) as I tend to give a teaser and then let the book fall by the wayside. Hopefully I'm not going to jinx myself. My track record is not so good, but I wanted to share something from my latest nonfiction read anyway, Marion Meade's Bobbed Hair and Bathtub Gin: Writers Running Wild in the Twenties (besides I am optimistic that I'll see this one through). I have an endless fascination for this period, and every time I think I'm ready to move on to something completely different I find myself returning to it in the end. So, as I finished a book of correspondence last weekend it was time to choose a new nonfiction read and this simply called out my name and I couldn't refuse it.
I hate throwing out such an awful cliché as this (as I can say this about every book, right?), but Bobbed Hair and Bathtub Gin is a hugely readable book, almost an unputdownable one (praise I usually heap on suspense novels or rollicking good stories with lots of plot). I'm often slowed down when reading nonfiction due to the sheer amount of information an author is conveying as I want to process it and remember as much as I can, but Meade has a very engaging writing style.
Edna St. Vincent Millay, Dorothy Parker, Zelda Fitzgerald and Edna Ferber are Meade's main subjects. Looking through the notes at the end of the book it's obvious Meade did a lot of research, but she presents her material as a series of anecdotes. Each chapter covers one year from 1920-1930. The women she writes about were struggling writers, published writers or in the case of Zelda Fitzgerald, F. Scott Fitzgerald's wife, part of the literary scene. They certainly interacted or were aware of each other and in some cases clashed.
I've read a little about Dorothy Parker and Zelda Fitzgerald, but know next to nothing about Edna St. Vincent Millay (who had rather open ideas about intimate relationships) or Edna Ferber (one of the writers, along with Dorothy Parker, associated with the Algonquin Round Table). There is obviously a decided literary slant to this book, but I like reading about the attitudes and mores of the period as well. Despite her famous subjects I can consider Meade's book a piece of social history, which I always enjoy reading.
But the point of my post is to give a little teaser. Only a chapter into the book and Meade has already shared so many good stories, but as Edna Ferber's life story is so new to me, here is a bit about her in 1920.
"For months Edna had been struggling with a novel about three generations of Chicago women. Each morning she would station herself religiously at the Underwood and shove fresh sheets of paper into the machine, but the writing only inched along until she was frantic. She was a successful writer of short fiction for magazines such as the Saturday Evening Post and Woman's Home Companion. She had also published a half-dozen collections of stories and two novels. Several movies and a Broadway play, Our Mrs. McChesney, starring Ethel Barrymore, were based on her work. After ten years, shouldn't she be in her prime? She expected fiction to be easy by now."
"It wasn't. Interminable hours at the Underwood sometimes produced a mishmash of awkward sentences and dumb metaphors. She found herself taking wrong turns and wandering down blind alleys, until finally The Girls just squatted there like a stubborn child. Edna was sensitive to criticism, and she was painfully aware of belittling remarks made by certain other writers. In an offensive recent novel a Princeton boy named Fitzgerald had laughingly lumped her with Zane Grey, the popular writer of Westerns. Edna did not like being laughed at."
Ouch. Though she will go on to win a Pulitzer, so her time will come. Bobbed Hair and Bathtub Gin is by no means literary criticism, and it probably won't offer an in-depth look at the work and lives of these four women, but I fully expect to learn a few things along the way, be entertained as well.