Wyndham Lewis's ‘Very Bad Thing’: Jazz, Inter-War Culture, and The Apes of God

Abstract

The relationships between jazz and modernist writing have in recent years increasingly interested musico-literary scholars. Much of this interest centres on links between modernism, jazz, and the Harlem Renaissance, whose music and art extend ‘far beyond its geographic boundaries as well as beyond the relational boundaries of time’. 1 As evidence of this trans-national and trans-temporal influence, especially as it applies to Anglo-American culture, writers like T. S. Eliot, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Virginia Woolf, and Philip Larkin, among others, have all been considered in relation to jazz and New York in the 1920s and 1930s. 2 Such studies contribute to the growing significance of African-American traditions within modernist scholarship and provide increasingly nuanced pictures of jazz’s impact upon literary modernism (both as creative stimulus and as ‘despised’ phenomenon). However, these interpretations of the jazz ‘influence’ need to be understood as more than a reductive dichotomy. For instance, Fitzgerald was attuned to the prevalence of jazz in twentieth-century modernity, and his jazz allusions ‘anxiously suggest that beneath the surface of [what he saw as] the music’s frivolous gaiety lurks the presence of violence and chaos, which threatens to erupt at any moment.’ 3 Therefore, his complex representations of jazz music–the fact that he wrote about jazz and its cultures so extensively in his fiction and non-fiction in the first place–indicate that he recognised jazz as a specifically modern, observable fact which was crucial to realistic portrayals of inter-war life. In this regard his work, and that