THE title is from a line by Raymond Chandler, not his most pre-possessing. "All writer are a little crazy but if they are any good they have a kind of terrible honesty."
There are other quotes in this exhaustive analysis of one brief, bright era in American cultural life that might more cleverly sum up the intellectual attitude "There is no such thing as an exact synonym or an unmixed motive", from Katharine Anne Porter, or "Not a shred of evidence exists in favour of the argument that life is serious, though it is often hard and even terrible", from Brendan Gill of the first, famed staff of the New Yorker.
But the world is not short of memorable lines from New York in the 1920s, even if you look no further than F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Ann Douglas and her editors were right to avoid pithy wit. This is not another eulogy to the roaring, bathtub ginning, bearskin coated, Charleston dancing, oh you kidding decade, or to its glamorous talents and their immortal badinage. (There isn't a single reference to the Algonquin Hotel or its round table in the entire book for this achievement alone, there must be some kind of award.)
This is a work of impressive and original scholarship, a detailed study of one point and one place from some unexpected perspectives, psychological as much as sociological theological more than political. A lot of imaginative argument pours through this discourse, and not every point is equally persuasive. But it hardly matter, because Ms Douglas has such strong and distinct views on her subject and writes with such a passionate sense of message that the book sweeps along on the enthusiastic current of her argument.
This is that the events that took place in Manhattan between the end of the first World War and the Depression recast the mould of the civilised world for the rest of the century. It was a cultural revolution that all westerners, embrace it or resent it, will carry into the next century, and it was precipitated by a single event the Great War.
What devastated Europe launched America as a superpower, a suddenly unified and supremely confident entity. It was in fact in that era that the nation became known at home and abroad as "America" the correct and modest "United States" did not come into use until the 1930s, the author points out, when the divisions in the society were all too obvious. The internal transformation was equally important for the first time in its short history, America was an urban nation and not a continent of very dissimilar rural communities.
The epitome of urbanity was, of course, the former Dutch trading colony, spawned in cheerful pursuit of commercial success and quite devoid of New England traditions in political or religious philosophy. New York from its birth was a place apart from American history. Its patriotic services, Ms Douglas writes, were negligible. Three major War of Independence battles took place in New York, and the British won all of them. They then made it their military headquarters, flanked by 12,000 prostitutes. The New York delegation to tee Continental Congress that founded the new nation abstained from voting.
The largest city of the land was, uniquely in the western world, never intended as a national capital or associated with a national ethos, and it was the obvious and only port for a generation desperate to break with the past. Between 1910 and 1920 the population of New York doubled.
Ms Douglas has chosen only some 120 of their number for her close attention, and that includes five who didn't live in New York but significantly influenced those who did Sigmund Freud, Ernest Hemingway, T.S. Eliot, Gertrude Stein, and William James although he died in 1910, she maintains that he was at the intellectual centre of an avant garde he didn't live to see in full bloom.
The young white writers and thinkers who thronged into Greenwich Village and the East Side were orphans by choice, eager to take on the mantle of Gertrude Stein's "lost generation". They were dedicated to peeling away the piety and sentiment of the American Victorian establishment, and constituted what amounted to an intellectual resistance movement against the dominant ethos of the previous century.
That period is familiar territory for Ms Douglas, whose earlier major work, The Feminization of American Culture described 19th century American cultural life, with its New England axis, as dominated by a "matriarchal ethos" Louisa May Alcott, Harriet Beecher Stowe Uncle Tom's Cabin was the American bestseller of the century and Mary Baker Eddy and her Christian Science Church with its devotion to mind over matter in the pursuit of goodness.
And while you can think of a dozen exceptions, the author makes her case. The peak came in 1913 with Eleanor Porter's best selling novel about the lit little girl who always thought positive, Pollyanna the film version starring Mary Pickford grossed a record breaking $1 million when it was made in 1920, and the era went into a rapid death rattle.
In an analysis that draws heavily on Freud, Ms Douglas describes a new and virile ascendancy. The shift from New England to New York was a shift from middle class, reform oriented, religious and constrained discourse to something that was secular and ironic. The "new moderns", as she calls them, believed that morality concerned the quest for personal truth, however painful and nihilistic honesty, however, terrible, was the only value.
Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Crane, O'Neill, Parker, Thurber, Sinclair Lewis were part of a movement that pursued facts and stark realities, with as little embellishment as possible. Under Harold Ross, the New Yorker established the obsession with accuracy that remains a hallmark. With its unrelieved lay out and commitment to the one line cartoon, the magazine could not have been conceived in any other era.
BUT it was the confluence of black and white culture that fired line revolution.
The great majority of blacks who left the south during the first World War went in search of jobs to the factories of northern industrial cities. New York however, was the mecca for black talent as opposed to black labour, and the black musicians and entertainers came there not with cynicism but with exuberance and hope to secure their deserved place in America's cultural life.
In that short span of years that marked the Harlem Renaissance, they did it. While white Manhattan flowered with a new literary vigour, black Manhattan laid the basis for the new performing arts. Ms Douglas comprehensively establishes just how fundamentally the culture of jazz and blues has shaped western culture generally since the Twenties. But she also demonstrates that for that brief time, it wasn't a question of whites freely cribbing from the black music halls, although that certainly happened (even the Charleston, the craze of high society all along the eastern seaboard, was first introduced in a 1923 black review called Runnin' Wild) rather, it was the counterpoint and collaboration of artistic and intellectual energy in that mongrel and democratic community that created a new culture.
It didn't last. Apart from anything else, New York itself frequently turned out to be a lethal personal experience, alcoholism being the usual exit route. Fats Waller, Damon Runyon, Elinor Wylie, Ring Lardner, Hewyood Broun, Edna St Vincent Millay, William Faulkner, Lorenz Hart, Bix Biederbecke about one third of Ms Douglas's subjects were heavy drinkers. Many of them died from it and died young.
The fatal blow was the Wall Street crash, when facts, stark realities and personal truths became for Americans matters of poverty exploitation, social and racial strife. The next decade brought censorship of an unprecedented weight and another war saw the beginnings of a restored faith in the old pieties and sentimental values. The western world is carrying that into the next century, too with far less joy and promise.