Terrible Honesty: Mongrel Manhattan in the 1920s.

During the winter months, trapped by a dreadful flu, I buried myself deep in red flannel and tiger balm, sipped endless cups of cold-and-flu tea, and read Genius in Disguise, the biography of New Yorker founder Harold Ross. Now this is not a book I would have purchased - it came in a bag of goodies handed out at a fancy party celebrating The New Yorker. Still, I hoped to browse quickly through its copious pages to see if it would illuminate those shadowy aspects of cultural life in New York City that I long to understand. As a newcomer to Manhattan, I am fascinated by the city's cultural history. Of course, New York has seduced me. Of course, I go around telling everyone who lives someplace else that it is the only city in the country that lets you be an intellectual without feeling like a freak. I mean everybody reads here, or at least pretends they do. I'm amazed at the number of magazines, newspapers, etc., that get consumed daily.

Mind you, I didn't learn much about what makes New York the happening place it is from reading the Ross book, which did reveal that he was a rather interesting eccentric man, but did so in a most uninteresting manner. Still seeking to understand the origins of that special magic that gives New York culture a claim on the attention of everyone on the planet at some point in their life, I was more than pleased when Ann Douglas' Terrible Honesty: Mongrel Manhattan in the 1920s appeared. Like the Ross biography, this is a book full of details, facts, and an elaborate maze of name-dropping that could make your head spin. In this way it conjures up that feeling of oversaturation and perverse incestuous networking that is common in the lives of those New Yorkers who are seeking to maintain the culture of border-crossing, transgression, and plain old hedonistic excess that Douglas documents.

Situating the '20s as the period when New York gained cultural preeminence in the U.S., Terrible Honesty cuts through conventional Eurocentric historical biases to tell all, unabashedly naming the fusion of black and white culture as what created the city's distinctive allure. For Douglas, the mass migration of black folks from the agrarian South to the industrialized North was an act of border-crossing that transformed New York: "No other American city of the 1920s was as receptive to black talent as New York was; no offer city pioneered in black and white art and entertainment to the degree New York did." Highlighting this cultural miscegenation, Douglas explores the myriad ways a passion for Freud and psychoanalysis, popular culture, and spirituality, among other things, converged here to create a distinct fast-lane culture of pleasure and danger.

The book begins with a general sketch of Manhattan, then looks into what Douglas calls "the dynamic of American metropolitan modernism." Linking the impact of the Great War, and the nation's growth as a superpower, to a "matricidal" scenario in which the 19th-century American vision of woman as domestic angel gave way to an exchange of the angel for the whore, she then discusses how the relationship between whites and blacks created a context for the major musical forms of the decade: ragtime, blues, jazz. It was the culture that emerged from these acts of both appropriation and collaboration that gave America its "global hegemony in the fast-growing field of popular culture."

Much of Terrible Honesty rather dispassionately explores the lives and works of those who made these acts of cultural hybridity possible. Scholars of African-American cultural history have laid the groundwork on which Douglas builds. Her work is unique only in that it brings this history together with the more conventional cultural histories that focus primarily on white folks, in an act of synthesis that insists readers recognize that the margins did indeed transform the center. This synthesis, coupled with the focus on gender and matricide, makes Terrible Honesty necessary reading for anyone who wants to understand all that has been and remains marvelous about this city's culture.

Douglas' writing is not consistently compelling, however, and though it's great to see black culture placed solidly within the discussion of American culture, much of what she has to say is old news. Also, frankly, her interpretations of black experience are full of contradictions. Here's an example. First, Douglas defines the blues diva as an anarchist who is fundamentally antibourgeois. Then, only a few pages later, she describes Bessie Smith violently rejecting an embrace from a well-off white lady and makes the rather inane comment, "White manners were on this occasion, I think, more impressive and far less confused, conflicted, and unhappy than black rudeness." At such moments one wishes Douglas had overcome her obvious antipathy to strands of feminist thinking that would have led her to a more sophisticated analysis, one taking account of the interplay of race, gender, and class. Douglas is clearly aware of the intense, racially based assault Smith endured: HELLO! No doubt being a constant victim of white-supremacist aggression, constantly on display as a well-paid Negro pet, helped create the psychological context for Smith's unruly behavior, alcohol addiction, and the rage Douglas puts down as "self-destructive fury."

There are countless such moments of faulty reasoning in Terrible Honesty: it is as though, as Douglas shifted her position to gain new critical insights, she also rather aggressively clung to old ways of seeing. Statements like "Freud's relevance to the black moderns might have been less than to the white ones, but his quasi-anthropological equation of the 'primitive mind' and the 'savage' with the unconscious and the id helped to shape the New Negro's creative possibilities" seem uninformed by any rigorous exploration of how Freud was seen by African-Americans. In her focus on the fusion of black and white culture, Douglas provides too many details and too little analysis.

Given Douglas' academic training as an Americanist and her long-standing concern with issues of gender, it makes sense that her chapters on these issues are her most lucid, witty, and insightful. Her understanding of the forces that shaped '20s New York culture is best revealed when she discusses the shift from a feminine focus in culture to what she calls a matricidal one. The chapters "You Are About to Discover Yourself" and "The 'Dark Legend' of Matricide" are fascinating. No scholar has written as perceptively about Mary Baker Eddy and the development of Christian Science, which she strategically links with Freud. Douglas writes, "America was the only Great Power of the nineteenth century that produced three new religions, all of global scope, Spiritualism, Christian Science, and Mormonism. . . . The mind-over-matter philosophy was not simply an American product or tradition but the identity, the actual history of a people who patented much of modern technology and conquered a continent in a brief century or two. Freud might see himself as a pioneer, but Americans considered themselves, in Melville's words, 'the pioneers of the world.'"

Such moments make Douglas' endless details worth the effort. Those who know little of the collaborations between whites and blacks in the '20s have much to learn from Terrible Honesty. But in its address of the ruptures that occur when vernacular culture, the world of the streets, converges with high culture, the book has more facts than flavor. Its style and tone fail to capture the spirit of most of what it critiques. It lacks the "terrible honesty" that would push the reader beyond superficial understanding of the diverse cultural mixings that infused mongrel Manhattan in the '20s with an aura so intense that the spirit of the time still lingers, still moves and stirs the city's soul, still seduces.

bell hooks is Distinguished Professor of English at City College, New York. Her next book, Visual Politics, will be published shortly by the New Press, New York.