16 TALES OF THE JAZZ AGE All of them drink, and drink hard: Fitzgerald, Hemingway and the Irishman Joyce. They drink, too, because as Hemingway says, Paris is a feast, a ‘moveable feast’. And a temporary one, everyone knows that intuitively without ever really saying so, because the last war is still so close and the seeds of the next one are already threatening to germinate. But before they fear and fight again, they’re going to have a party. And these American lushes are going to make sure the party is far enough away from America itself, where you can’t get a single beer except by ordering it from Al Capone’s underlings. Everything seems so paradoxical in America: women dress like men, they smoke cigarettes, they’ve had the vote since 1920; young people rebel, they talk about sexuality, they alarm the puritans who, as always, see morality threatened by the decadence of these Roaring Twenties. Young people dance, offending prudes and bigots with the Charleston and jazz, that jazz which spreads like bacteria through radio broadcasts that reach further and further afield. Its dances escape and leap across the Atlantic, all the way to Paris! The America represented by jazz has found in Paris a place to revel in freedom of expression.
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