Small wonder that, when the shooting stopped, there was an explosion of new works in all genres, more than a depressed market could bear, some of it flickering between passion and mortality. "I want you," wrote the Hungarian poet Deszö Kosztolányi, "as life wants death." A new amorality was in the making. The Russian poet Anna Akhmatova married a colleague she did not love and started affairs with two others. "I thought it would be like a cleansing," she explained, "like going to a convent knowing that you are giving up your freedom." 

Zuckmayer, chaste with his fiancée, was drawn to a "female underworld in which the problem of fidelity or infidelity never crossed the threshold of consciousness: a world of vague, nocturnal, lewd and nymphomaniac creatures . . . the fashionable cocottes of Brussels, the officers' girls of Lille, Ghent or Douai." 

The war shattered the formal rules of social relationships. To a generation that lost its moral anchor between 1914 and 1918, art became both refuge and beacon. The next decade proved to be among the most nervous and fertile in human civilisation, a fertility complicated by external insemination.

The United States came late into the war. For three long, sideline years, it made do with domestic entertainments, augmented by the spread of new technology—the gramophone, the silent film, the motor car, the urge to fly. Popular music, a hybrid form, flourished in the absence of imports. Jazz became the bedrock music of dance and romance. When America entered the war, it took command of mass culture.

The chronology is compelling. Ragtime reached Europe in February 1918. Sidney Bechet came to London the following year, buying his first soprano saxophone and catching the ear of the influential Swiss conductor, Ernest Ansermet, who proclaimed him "an artist of genius". By November that year, Ansermet's friend Igor Stravinsky was writing Piano Rag Music, while Erik Satie and Ravel were syncopating sonatas.