Opinion

Long-term resident

The Roaring Twenties

1920 saw the births of the nov­el­ist Joan Pe­ru­cho and the so­cial­ist leader Josep Pal­lach in Cat­alo­nia, of film­maker Fed­erico Fellini in Italy, the writer Charles Bukowski in Amer­ica, along with the ac­tors Yul Bryn­ner, Wal­ter Matthau and Shel­ley Win­ters, the singer Peggy Lee, the jazz mu­si­cian Char­lie Parker and the LSD proto-hip­pie Tim­o­thy Leary; also born in 1920 were the mu­si­cian and writer Boris Vian in France (who died in a cin­ema, 39 years later while watch­ing the film adap­ta­tion of one of his books), the mu­si­cian Ravi Shankar in India, the writer Miguel De­libes in Spain, and the World War II hero­ine Yeveg­niya Rud­neva in the USSR. In 1920, the pres­ti­gious Cata­lan labour lawyer Francesc Layret was shot dead by as­sas­sins linked to the Span­ish mil­i­tary, whereas the Span­ish nov­el­ist Pérez Galdós, the Ital­ian painter Amedeo Modigliani, and the re­lent­less de­fender of the Welsh lan­guage Owen Ed­wards, all passed away from nat­ural causes. The Nor­we­gian Knut Ham­sun won the Nobel Prize (which he col­lected when he was blind drunk). Pro­hi­bi­tion was im­posed in the United States, even­tu­ally lead­ing to the in­ven­tion of cock­tails and bath­tub gin; and in the same coun­try women’s suf­frage was fi­nally put into ef­fect (but they couldn’t drink to cel­e­brate it). F. Scott Fitzger­ald pub­lished his first novel, ’This Side of Par­adise’ (in which a 27 year old woman was de­scribed as ’old’). Es­to­nia fought a war of in­de­pen­dence against the So­viet Union, and won. The British army burnt down the cen­tre of Cork, which didn’t stop most of Ire­land be­com­ing in­de­pen­dent two years later. Arabs and Jews clashed in Jerusalem re­sult­ing in 9 deaths and 216 in­jured. Adolf Hitler pre­sented his first po­lit­i­cal pro­gramme to the fledg­ling Nazi Party. Three African Amer­i­can cir­cus work­ers were lynched by a mob of thou­sands in Min­nesota. The guer­rilla fighter Nestor Makhno es­tab­lished a state­less, an­ar­chist so­ci­ety in east­ern Ukraine, but was de­feated by Trot­sky’s Red Army the fol­low­ing year, went into exile in Paris and drank him­self to death.

In short, a hun­dred years ago artists of all stripes saw the light of day for the first or last time; con­flicts were re­solved or flared up or dragged on (and the ground­work was laid for fu­ture ones); some laws were passed that im­proved peo­ple’s lives; whereas oth­ers – some of them ob­jec­tively daft – made them con­sid­er­ably worse; a few coun­tries lost their sov­er­eignty and a few more gained theirs; some peo­ple com­mit­ted sick­en­ing crimes and oth­ers never hurt a fly; and in gen­eral the 1,971,496,000 peo­ple who ex­isted on the five con­ti­nents in 1920 tried to mud­dle their way through their lives as best they could (the way one does).

A sim­i­lar state of af­fairs will doubt­less pre­vail all over the planet in 2020, homo sapi­ens hav­ing proved it­self times be­yond num­ber to be a species as pre­dictable as, oh, cats. Per­son­ally how­ever, there is one par­tic­u­lar event that is far from pre­dictable but which I would very much like to see long be­fore the year is out: the ab­so­lu­tion and re­lease of Carme For­cadell, Do­lors Bassa, Oriol Jun­queras, Raül Romeva, Jordi Sànchez, Jordi Cuixart, Joaquim Forn, Jordi Tu­rull and Josep Rull, jailed for hav­ing helped to bring about a ref­er­en­dum that a ma­jor­ity of the Cata­lan pop­u­la­tion wanted; and Fer­ran Jolis, Ger­mi­nal Tomàs, Alexis Co­d­ina and Jordi Ros, im­pris­oned in Madrid on ev­i­dence-free ter­ror­ism charges. For what it’s worth, I – and, I’m sure, many, many oth­ers – wish them all a gen­uinely happy New Year.

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