They're not necessarily comparing notes but they're all trying to formulate something. It has to do with the world being shattered by WWI, and having to find a stance that allows one to live where it's clear the center isn't holding anymore. That stance is a kind of cynicism, a kind of worldliness that allows you to be non-judgmental and at the same time superior to actions around you that you won't let suck you in. That's the emotional pitch of books ranging from Fitzgerald to Joseph Moncure March. What's attractive to me in The Wild Party is the genuine joy in discovering the debased possibilities of drunken parties.
Hot jazz is the closest possible analog.
March was quite knowledgeable about poetry. He creates echoing, flexible, syncopated rhymes. As in hot jazz there's a kind of sensuality and innocence and cynicism all mixed together, a real worldliness, a heightened presence that I love in the jazz I listen to and in the graphics I see from the '20s. It is when something is at the point of meeting something else but hasn't melted into it. The example I keep going back to is Seurat.