F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Jazz Age and Baha'i

[Guest]

A LOST GENERATION

F. Scott Fitzgerald, the American writer, was forty in 1937. He said his face was “aging from within with a drawn asceticism as if from a silent self-set struggle.” He had invented the Jazz Age. Everything had gone wrong for him. His beautiful wife Zelda was mentally ill; he was an alcoholic and in debt. The long madcap party of the twenties was over for he and Zelda, living symbols of the Roaring Twenties, had long ceased to be ‘an item.’ In July 1937 he headed for Hollywood for one last chance to put his life together. In 1945 he was dead.

These were the years, 1937-1944, of the first Seven Year Plan, the first stage of the first epoch of the Divine Plan of ‘Abdu’l-Baha, an international teaching campaign that was the unfoldment of His vision of American’s spiritual destiny. In 1937 the American Baha’i community commemorated the twenty-fifth anniversary of ‘Abdu’l-Baha’s trip to America. -Ron Price with appreciation to Robert Westbrook, Intimate Lies: F. Scott Fitzgerlad and Sheilah Graham, Harper Collins,NY, 1995, pp.1-15; and Shoghi Effendi, Messages to America: 1932-1946, Wilmette, 1947, pp. 8-13.

You1 saw millions slaughtered

in the trenches, all Gods were dead,

all wars had been fought back then,

or so we hoped and thought,

all faiths had been shaken,

the final nail in the coffin,

no grog, the elixir of revolt,2

you led the way, gorgeous brats

of those Roaring Twenties that

you were, the flawless ones,

slowly becoming doomed youth:

your magic, your bright hope gone—

but jazz, man, was going from strength

to strength across a globalized world.

You were a generation lost

in the tragedy of the depression,

a lost world, an age, as he4 worked

on a new age3, as unobtrusively as

can be, on the organization, the Order,

the practice with the theory in place.

Those World Order letters kept coming,

as Baha’i administration evolved slowly

during that hiatus-time, so that when you

went West to Hollywood in 1937,

the framework was strong enough

to launch that international missionary

program which will keep us all busy

for generations to come.

1 Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, symbols of a generation.

2 The Volstead Act(1919), banned the sale and consumption of alcohol in the USA.

3 The Formative Age began in 1921. 4 Shoghi Effendi R Price 19 May 1999

[Aggie87]

Why are you bringing this stuff over here from AAJ?

At least chat and interact instead of lecture.

[JSngry]

Dude, can I tape your shows?

[Kalo]

Weren't Seals and Crofts Bahai's?

I rest my case.