‘An age of miracles, it was an age of art, it was an age of excess, and it was an age of satire’

Perhaps it's because I regret not having Sky Atlantic, and am unable to fall for the unashamed glamour of Boardwalk Empire, like all the wealthy telly box owners out there, but the nineteen twenties are playing on my mind at the moment. 

This 1920s preoccupation could also be because I was privileged to sup on a couple of handsome cocktails in a moodily-lit London parlor this week. 1920 saw Harry Craddock leave a Prohibition ridden America and seek solace behind The Savoy's 'American Bar'. He embarked on a cocktail mission, based on the premise that it was a 'great necessity of the age' to develop some kind of 'anti-fogmatic, eye opener, bracer, corpse reviver or morning glory.' Well, a couple of gin induced anti-fogmatics in The Hawksmoor, and I quite fancied myself as a twenties urbanite.  

Harry Craddock's whimsical gravitation typifies the American twenties. F. Scott Fitzgerald, himself, described America as, ‘going on the greatest, gaudiest spree in history and there was going to be plenty to tell about it.  The whole golden boom was in the air – its splendid generosities, its outrageous corruptions and the tortuous death struggle of the old America in Prohibition.  All the stories in my head had a touch of disaster in them.’ The Beautiful and the Damned, supposedly, mirrors his own bout of expensive frivolity with Zelda, his wife.

What I love about Fitzgerald's portrayal of the twenties in The Great Gatsby is the extravagant intangibility of all the characters. Nick Carraway describes the guests at Gatsby’s parties as behaving according to the rules of behaviour associated with an amusement park. They came ‘with a simplicity of heart that was its own ticket of admission’, rubbed champagne into their host’s hair and disappeared into the night. Their movements were fluid, matching the liquor they consumed and the careless wave of opportunism they besieged the country in. In the aftermath of the First World War, who can blame them?

Film adaptations of the novel have failed time and time again because it’s impossible to capture this incorruptible dream-like trance the nation was in. In a letter to John Peale Bishop, 9 August 1925, Fitzgerald wrote, ‘You are right about Gatsby being blurred and patchy.  I never at any one time saw him clear myself.’ If this is the case, then how does Baz Luhrmann suppose Leonardo DiCaprio will fit the bill?

I know we should be welcoming a time of creative interpretation, but for a man whose films are gaudily grotesque in appearance, I approach his adaptation of one of my favourite books with great trepidation. The fact Luhrmann has ‘workshopped’ his ideas for the film in 3D suggests he’s got the wrong end of the stick already. What part of a nation built on glitzy, flimsy facades does he expect to make burst out at the audience? If the film turns out anything like this monster, flapper fans get ready to fight.

For now though, let’s continue to sip Harry Craddock concoctions, and pretend they're made of Gatsby’s ‘incomparable milk of wonder.’ Best way darling, best way.