Body and Soul: The Making of American Modernism, Art, Music & Letters in the Jazz Age 1919-26

by Robert Morse Crunden

In this book Robert Crunden puts the "jazz" back in the Jazz Age. Jazz was America's greatest contribution to the Modernist movement, yet it is much overlooked. When we hear the term "Jazz Age," we conjure the ghosts of Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and Eliot, not Jelly Roll Morton, Louis Armstrong, Ethel Waters, George Gershwin, and Duke Ellington. In order to correct this imbalance, Crunden re-introduces us to these musical luminaries who gave the era its name as he traces the early history of jazz from New Orleans to Chicago to New York. While Crunden emphasizes music over literature and the visual arts, he never fails to map the complex cross-currents of literature that passed between jazz musicians and their "Lost Generation" peers, a veritable pageant of the glittering personalities of the day-James Joyce, Alfred Stieglitz, Georgia O'Keeffe, Paul Strand, John Dos Passos, Langston Hughes, Gertrude Stein.

Genres: History, Art, American History

496 pages, Paperback

First published March 22, 2000

Reviews

[Dan Gorman]

A thoughtful history of the modernist movement punctuated with gossipy anecdotes of key artists' private lives. The book has some elements suggesting it could have used further editing, but sadly Robert Crunden died before preparing a final draft. The book's central thesis — the modernists wrote in opposition to bourgeois, middlebrow American society, until modernist conceits became mainstream in the late 1920s — is not given adequate attention. We have many biographical portraits of modernist artists, and we understand the often-stifling childhoods against which they rebelled, but these are not really connected into a coherent theory of what motivated the modernist rebellion. Perhaps biographical variety was what Crunden desired, but I would have liked a better statement of the book's "So what?" message.

I am also not sure a topical structure best serves this book, since so much of it hinges upon Americans' travel to Paris and participation there in Gertrude Stein's artistic circle. Paul Rosenfeld and Alfred Stieglitz's circles back in New York matter, too. The topical structure of chapters makes it hard to keep track of which rising artists were interacting with the two impresarios at what times. Throughout these chapters, Crunden gives us bits of what modernism "is," but I would have appreciated an introductory chapter or passage, identifying in one place the nuances of modernist art, and not simply the bourgeois culture against which the modernists labored.