Is the Party Over or About to Begin?

WHERE ARE WE? Is this the beginning of the end, or the end of the beginning? Is the party over forever, or are the good times just around the corner? Have we already experienced the most fun we’ll ever have, or is it yet to come?

One of the many confusing and dispiriting things about our shared moment is that it’s not shared at all. Because the pandemic has affected everyone, we naturally assume that there must be some common experience to be found, that with the disease has come a set of universalizing truths. But, in fact, the opposite is true: We may all be living with Covid-19, but our experiences with it, not to mention our reactions to it, have instead illuminated vastly different philosophies and perspectives — even saying that the disease exists is, to some, a debatable statement.

Then there’s the fact that we can’t determine where we are in our epoch. Humans love creating narratives, especially in times of tragedy, personal or national. Defining the era, the moment, the minute in which we’re living gives us a sense of control, allows us to feel that we are the author, not a character. Yet what kind of story is this one, with its unpredictable back and forth, with its promises of resolutions that peter out in dead ends, with its confusing, inconsistent plotlines? If it were a novel, you’d abandon it midway through: Where is this thing going after all? Nothing about it makes sense! And then, beneath the frustration, the fear: When is the denouement going to come? What if it never does?

But as Mark Harris reminds us in his brilliant essay for this issue, this sense of suspension is hardly specific to our age. For proof, just look at Joseph Moncure March’s 1928 book-length poem “The Wild Party,” which unfolds, as its title promises, over the course of a single night, at a wild party in an unnamed city that ends in disaster. Even a near-century later, the mood March evokes with his deliberately destabilizing rat-a-tat verse feels familiar: the desperate giddiness, the forced jollity, the nihilism masquerading as abandon. Here are the Roaring Twenties that so many of us spent last year invoking with hope and expectation.

Yet as Harris points out, our nostalgia for the Roaring Twenties demands a large amount of strategic forgetting. We all know that this was a period bookended by a war (and, yes, a pandemic) on one end and a financial collapse on the other. But we often choose not to remember that it was also an era in which many people weren’t free: to love whom they wanted, to live where they wanted, to be who they wanted. The party may have been swell, but not everyone was invited. Were the Roaring Twenties a time of release, as they’re often depicted in pop culture — all those glittery dresses and tiaras and marcelled hair! All that jazz! — or were they a societal interregnum, the intermission between two decades of disaster? Were they actually, as Harris writes, a period in which people tried to distract themselves from feeling like they were stuck in the middle of the plot, “a kind of semipermanent Wednesday of the soul, a spirit-flattening acceptance of stasis and complacency”?

I don’t know, and neither did March, and neither, it seems, does anyone else. “It’s never particularly good news for the world when March’s shivery danse macabre of a poem threatens to come back in vogue,” Harris notes. “Today, ‘The Wild Party’ feels so timely that one can legitimately ask, ‘What did he know and when did he know it?’ It’s a question without an answer, just as the poem is a diagnosis without a prescription.” But although no one would ever call “The Wild Party” hopeful, there is hope in it still: All eras do come to an end. What lies beyond the next hill is unknown. It might be better. It might be worse. But eventually we’ll reach it, and our future will become our present: Our ’20s, roaring or whimpering, trudge onward.

Photographs by Shikeith. Styled by Alex Harrington. Hair by Nigella Miller. Grooming by Jamal Scott. Models, left, from left: Matthew “MattMatt Raybeam” Thompson and Oche George. Models, right, from left: Desmond Sam and Rahm Bowen