The Wild Party

by Joseph Moncure March, Art Spiegelman (Illustrator)

Art Spiegelman's sinister and witty black-and-white drawings give charged new life to Joseph Moncure March's Wild Party, a lost classic from 1928. The inventive and varied page designs offer perfect counterpoint to the staccato tempo of this hard-boiled jazz-age tragedy told in syncopated rhyming couplets.

Here is a poem that can make even readers with no time for poetry stop dead in their tracks. Once read, large shards of this story of one night of debauchery will become permanently lodged in the brain. When The Wild Party was first published, Louis Untermeyer declared: "It is repulsive and fascinating, vicious and vivacious, uncompromising, unashamed . . . and unremittingly powerful. It is an amazing tour de force."

Genres: Poetry, Fiction, Graphic Novels, Comics, Art, Classics, Graphic Novels Comics

112 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1928

About the author

After serving in World War I and graduating from Amherst College (where he was a protégé of Robert Frost), March worked as managing editor for The New Yorker in 1925, and helped create the magazine's "Talk of the Town" front section. After leaving the magazine, March wrote the first of his two important long Jazz Age narrative poems, The Wild Party. Due to its risqué content, this violent story of a vaudeville dancer who throws a booze and sex-filled party could not find a publisher until 1928. Once published, however, the poem was a great success despite being banned in Boston. Later in 1928, March followed up The Wild Party's success with The Set-Up, a poem of a skilled black boxer who had just been released from prison.

In 1929, March moved to Hollywood to provide additional dialogue for the film Journey's End and, more famously, to turn the silent version of Howard Hughes' classic Hell's Angels into a talkie — a rewrite that brought the phrase "Excuse me while I put on something more comfortable" into the American lexicon. March stayed with Hughes' Caddo Pictures studio for several years, temporarily running the office, overseeing the release of Hell's Angels, and getting into legal trouble after an attempt to steal the script for rival Warner Bros.' own flying picture Dawn Patrol.

March worked as a screenwriter in Hollywood until 1940, under contract to MGM and Paramount and later as a freelancer for Republic Pictures and other studios; he wrote at least 19 produced scripts in his Hollywood career. His most prominent late script is probably the left-leaning John Wayne curio Three Faces West, a knockoff of The Grapes of Wrath that ends with a faceoff between Okies and Nazis.

With his third wife, Peggy Prior (a Pathé screenwriter) and her two children, March returned to the East Coast in 1940. During World War II, he worked at a shipbuilding plant in Groton, Connecticut, and wrote features (mostly acid assessments of the movie business) for the New York Times Magazine. In later years, he wrote documentaries for the State Department and industrial films for Ford Motor Company, General Motors, Monsanto Company, American Airlines, and others. Several films starring industrial films icon Thelma "Tad" Tadlock, including Design for Dreaming (1956) and A Touch of Magic (1961) were made from March's rhyming scripts. March died in 1977.

March revised both The Set-Up and The Wild Party in 1968, removing some anti-Semitic caricatures from both works. Most critics deplored these changes, and Art Spiegelman returned to the original text when he published his illustrated version of The Wild Party in 1994. (The Set-Up has not been reprinted since 1968.)

Works and legacy:
Both of March's long poems were made into films. Robert Wise's 1949 film version of The Set-Up loses the poem's racial dimension by casting the white actor Robert Ryan in the lead, while the Merchant Ivory Productions 1975 version of The Wild Party changes March's plot to conflate the poem with the Fatty Arbuckle scandal.

The Wild Party continues to attract new readers and adaptations. In 2000, two separate musical versions played in New York, one on Broadway, composed by Michael John LaChiusa, and the other off-Broadway, composed by Andrew Lippa, with mixed critical and popular success. The Amherst College library's large collection of March's papers includes unpublished poems, scripts, and a memoir entitled Hollywood Idyll.

Reviews

[Dave Schaafsma · Rating 4 out of 5]

Some love is fire, some love is rust,
but the fiercest, cleanest love is lust.--March

The Wild Party was published in 1928, and “rediscovered” (with the new subtitle, “The Lost Classic”) in the nineties, and illustrated by Art Spiegelman (Maus). A narrative poem, in a series of rhyming couplets, it has a dash of dirty limerick, a bit of Ogden Nash, part mock-epic, depicting one night, one party, during the Jazz Age. One main character is Queenie:

Queenie was a blonde, and her age stood still,
And she danced twice a day in a vaudeville.

whose partner is an abusive rake, Burrs. Another, Black, "spends part of the evening" lustfully with Queenie:

"His hips were jaunty,
And his gestures too dextrous.
A Versatile lad!
He was ambisextrous."

and those three figure centrally in the story all the way through to the abrupt ending:

And the cops rushed in.

A lot of the poetry is bad, doggerel, maybe kind of fitting the salacious subject matter: drunkenness, casual sex/swapping, an orgy, misogyny, and, spoiler alert, manslaughter:

His mouth and his throat were foul cotton.
God, he felt rotten!

And:

His mouth twitched:
He was dangerously still,
By an enormous power of will.
Her eyes filled with a martyred look:
She registered grief, and her voice shook.

So, that’s not great poetry, but you know, I liked it, anyway. Even though it is just about a love triangle in a big drunken bathtub gin bash, I read it all in one sitting. It was banned in Boston and all sorts of other fashionable cities, which led to its success, of course. It’s been made into a bad movie and two theatrical productions.

It’s a syncopated tale of Jazz Age debauchery, where the best thing about it, maybe, the thing that raises the level of the poetry and story to something approaching great is Art Spiegelman's black-and-white woodcut-style drawings in the manner of Lynd Ward, of a century ago. It provides a kind of perfect angular counterpoint to the action. I liked it!

[Erin · Rating 5 out of 5]

OMG people. This book is all nuts and screws. Art Spiegelman illustrates this bit of Speakeasy grit, all told in rhyming couplets. Eighty pages of them. I did not move. I did not pee. I did not do anything but turn each page for two hours until I was through. It makes me wonder the things my grandma has seen that I'll never know about. Reminds me of the time she told me about girls that "went" together. She said, "Now we didn't mean anything by it . . . but we used to call them: queer."

"Good news, Mag!" I told her, "and no worries. They call themselves that now!"

[Drew Canole · Rating 4 out of 5]

Art Spiegelman brings this "lost classic" of narrative verse back into print in a rather handsome volume full of Spiegelman artwork. The design is wonderful and really does help bring the verse to life. It made for a wonderful reading experience and elevated it above say just reading The Wild Party's text on a kindle.

First written in 1928 the poem tells the story of a, um, wild party, during the jazz-age. It follows a couple the beautiful Queenie and her brutish boyfriend Burrs who decide to throw a big party. Both of them go their separate ways at the party and meet new potential sexual partners. The night ends in tragedy.

[Laura · Rating 5 out of 5]

I bought this because of the Art Speigelman illustrations. Kai and I read it out loud together. It’s a narrative poem about an unhappy couple, Queenie and Burrs, who throw a huge party. This was written 100 years ago and god damn people were getting crazy! The introduction warned that the edition we were reading had the problematic bits included, and that the author did revise it later in life but that Speigelman chose to stay with the original for this edition. I was preparing for the worst so it was much less severe than I thought it was going to be, but yes there are some anti Semitic stereotypes etc. The party is quite diverse and everyone seems pretty open minded to say the least. There’s a lesbian seductress, a bisexual man who is refered to as “ambisextrous” who causes discord between identical twins, a multiracial orgy, a man beats the shit out of a guy for trying to assault a 14 year old, and of course the interpersonal drama between Queenie, Mr. Black, Burrs and Kate.

This needs to be added to the Female Manipulator canon. Queenie is playing Mr Black like a fucking violin. (Queenie lives with Burrs, but her BFF Kate brings a handsome Mr. Black and they switch partners for the night). Mr Black is pretty innocent and sheltered, and clearly comes from a more well-off background. Queenie has been around the block a few times, lets just say. At first Mr. Black sees her as not much more than an easy lay. She makes him feel extremely guilty for thinking that once she reveals Burr’s abuse. Mr Black then feels like he must be her hero to sweep her off her feet and get her out of this situation, plus he is consumed with guilt for the way he originally judged her (even though that judgment was correct tbh). Mr. Black’s assumption and subsequent guilt is all part of the plan. Queenie is in control the entire time, she’s playing mind games with this boy. He’s younger and inexperienced and falls into all of her traps. Ultimately she fucks around too hard and also falls in love even though she had like 7 layers of mind games going on.

The tension between Queenie and Mr Black was masterfully done. It perfectly captures the experience of becoming enthralled with someone at a party and spending the night in your own little world. Everyone around them is hooking up casually, but they just talk all night long, and when they finally do fuck the tension is crazy!!! It was very erotic.

Each chapter starts with lights flickering and the music playing. The candles get lower over time and the music gets more chaotic because people are drunkenly singing and the piano twins are pissed off and a drunk sad guy keeps playing the record over and over. We saw the movie KIDs about a month ago, and I was amazed at the similarities even though this book is 100 years old. The arc of the party, the layout of the apartment, even several images were identical. Burrs opening the door and seeing Queenie and Mr Black in bed was the same as Jenny opening the door on Telly and the girl. The partygoers at Queenie’s house were actually morally superior to the KIDs kids, they actually beat the shit out of anyone who tries to mess with a child. I wonder if it was an inspiration or if this is just the natural arc of a party. I hate to say it but I thought of my high school prom afterparty with the general ebb and flow and everyone sleeping on the floor with party debris everywhere.

It was really fun to read aloud, and I loved the illustrations. The poem rhymes but the meter is all over the place. You never really know what is going to happen. At one point a limerick snuck its way in there! It’s so much fun and full of delightfully sleazy drama, but darkness remains underneath. fantastic.


"Books?
Books?
My god! You don't understand.
They were far too busy living first-hand
For books.
Books!"

[Bob Jacobs · Rating 4 out of 5]

Korte rijmende verzen brengen The Wild Party van March tot leven. Door de taal voel je de ritme van het feest.

De illustraties van Spiegelman zijn ook een absolute delight.

Loved it.

[GONZA · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ci sono dei piccoli gioiellini nascosti, di cui solitamente si ignora l'esistenza e che in libreria non passano da tanto, per non parlare delle biblioteche. Capita poi che girando sotto la neve in una Berlino prossima al congelamento, si passi per caso davanti ad una bellissima cabina del book-crossing illuminata a giorno, che se fosse un armadio sarebbe sicuramente la porta di Narnia.
Succede poi anche che, nonostante i guanti ed il cappello si peschi subito il libro in italiano, perché la costina non mente e quella gialla di Einaudi anche meno. E poi di questo passo fino alla metro e poi a casa, mentre fa quasi piú caldo al solo pensiero di aver presto tra le mani un libro di Art Spiegelman, che era da Maus che non capitava e quasi dico, quasi, uno é felice di vivere a Berlino pure se é inverno e la lingua é infame. E per finire ci sono quelle rare volte in cui le aspettative non vengono disattese e ti fai i complimenti perché forse, e dico forse, questo libro era proprio destinato a te e ti stava aspettando, perché se ci sono uomini che sussurrano ai cavalli, ci sono anche donne a cui i libri parlano forte e chiaro.

[Sabra Embury · Rating 4 out of 5]

A friend lent me this poetry book, illustrated by Art Spiegelman, at a party where we played many rounds of exquisite corpse and everyone got drunk off Campari. Tipsy handing it to me after a conversation about graphic novels, she said: this is a naughty book, you'll like it. And she was right. The book's forward, and the forward--also by Spiegelman, goes into how William Burroughs decided to be a writer after reading the Wild Party at Harvard. Considering the characters and content surrounding lust and heavy debauchery in rhyme, that makes sense.

[Nancy Siouri · Rating 5 out of 5]

Once you grab it, you just can't stop reading til you reach the last page. And then you start again!

[Daniel · Rating 4 out of 5]

Joseph Moncure March's "The Wild Party," first published in 1928, is something of a revelation. Reading this book-length poem is like discovering the well -- or perhaps cesspool is the better word -- from which sprung everything from pre-Hayes Code Hollywood films to the writings of Bukowski and Burroughs. (William S. Burroughs, in fact, acknowledged his debt to "The Wild Party," and March himself later went on to write for the movies.)

The poem teems with drunkenness, gay love triangles, casual sex, socially acceptable anti-Semitism, partner swapping, pedophilia, misogyny, gunplay, and, ultimately, manslaughter. It's easy to see what "The Wild Party" may have influenced, and harder to see what it may have been influenced by. Dirty limericks and the naughtier bits of Walt Whitman and Chaucer come to mind, but little else does.

It's hard to review "The Wild Party" without quoting from it, and one is tempted to quote the whole thing. Short of that, a small sample -- certainly not the dirtiest section, but representative, and one that can stand on its own -- will have to do:

The bedroom door swung open wide,
And a girl sauntered out
With a man at her side.
They kissed, in a matter-of-fact way,
And were mildly gay.
His suit was badly out of press.
She tried to smooth her crumpled dress
With small success.
He pulled his tie back in its place:
She rouged her lips:
She powdered her face.
She rearranged disordered hair.
What had been going on in there?
Who noticed the two--
And nobody seemed to care.

The edition of "The Wild Party" I read is introduced and illustrated by Art Spiegelman, a long-time fan of the book who pushed for it to be reprinted. The illustrations are fine and fit the period, as one would expect from an artist as talented as Spiegelman, but feel largely unnecessary. The poem is colorful and lively enough to stand on its own. Spiegelman nevertheless deserves credit for championing this previously lost classic.

[Hip E. · Rating 5 out of 5]

I learned of this book from an interview on Fresh Air with Terry Gross on November 29, 1994 (wow, I love the internet). It was night and my family was driving home from Seattle to Portland after Thanksgiving with the grandparents. Spiegelman described how he found the book in a dusty corner of some little bookstore and almost read the whole thing while standing in the shelves. He read some of it on the air. It was gritty and glamorous. I wanted it. It was to become the 2nd book I ever bought for myself, after Atheism: The Case Against God. I still have The Wild Party, but A:TCAG was thrown in the garbage by Tony "Loony Tunes" Perez (a noted Catholic) in college. I memorized the first two chapters of The Wild Party, and it sat atop my short list of Favorite Books before being dethroned by Lolita, which lost out to Blood Meridian, which was topped by For Whom the Bell Tolls. It's a good book though. The movie sucked, and I haven't seen the musical yet.

[talia ♡ · Rating 3 out of 5]

loveeeeeeeee to see the words "a lost classic" on the cover of a book

[Charlotte · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wow. Wow. Wow.

Not usually a fan of poetry- this knocked me off of my feet. Loved the story. Loved the illustrations. Loved the velvet pages. Loved how it made me feel. Loved that I instantly wanted to memorize the whole thing so I could have it with me at all times.

I'm not sure if this is something I want to admit- but this poem brought a sense of nostalgia for wild parties past and excitment for wild parties future. <3

A must have for my personal library.

[Brian DiMattia · Rating 4 out of 5]

The poetry itself is decent, but the setting and characters that makeup the story are great. Vicious and entertaining, and Spiegelman did a beautiful job illustrating it. He does everything in a version of his normal work which seems woodblocked, so it has a feeling of being deep and simple at the same time. Good for poetry lovers, great for the more open minded of sequential art readers, and just really, really cool for those who like Jazz Era New York culture and history.

[Kathleen Stevens · Rating 3 out of 5]

A quick read... but as I'm really not fond of graphic novels it wasn't really my style of reading. It was written as a poem... so if you read it out loud some of the scenes make more sense.

[Rehan Abd Jamil · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some wild party.

[Phil J · Rating 3 out of 5]

It’s a product of its time. By most standards, the poetry is kind of bad, but being good is beside the point. It is very evocative of a time in a place. I probably would’ve gotten bored with it if it weren’t for the great illustrations.

[Lauren · Rating 3 out of 5]

First of all, the book's endpages are red velvet! If nothing else, pick it up to have that experience. I discovered this poem/story randomly as I was browsing over at the Main library here on UGA's campus. Noticing Art Spiegelman's name on it, I immediately placed it in my stack of books. An interesting read although it possesses a very dark and depressing undertone. Ominous. The reader feels & knows that this is a party that is not going to end well. Spiegelman mentions in the introduction that during a conversation with William S. Burroughs that this was the first story Burroughs read that really made him want to write. Make yourself a mint julep and sit down to enjoy the quick rhythm of the prose and Spiegelman's wonderful art, as usual.

[Lizzie · Rating 5 out of 5]

A narrative poem from 1928 describing a night among louche theater people. It was widely banned but still a big success. It's powerful not just for being daring but also wonderfully written, and I say this as someone who doesn't like poetry much. I can't stop thinking about the ending. Art Spiegelman did expressive illustrations for this 1994 version in a woodcut style reminiscent of Lynd Ward.

[Janet · Rating 5 out of 5]

The darker side of paradise, which Fitzgerald shows us by tipping up a corner of the rug here and there, is front and center in this weird, fabulous booklength poem, a tale of a jazz age debauch. The Spiegelman illustrations are a perfect match of sensibilities, frosting on the cake to this quintessential, tragic dirty blues.

[Alex Sarll]

The poem - a syncopated tale of Jazz Age debauchery - is slight, but pleasant enough for a quick read. The nineties introduction by Art Spiegelman, though, has dated far worse. Remember the End of History? Ha. His illustrations still aren't really my thing, but capture the fleshiness and signs of wear the poem demands.

[Doug · Rating 3 out of 5]

March's jazz age narrative poem can be read in an hour, and my main impetus for re-reading it was having recently seen a production of Andrew Lippa's musical version - which, necessarily strays fairly far from the original slim material. While Spiegelman's drawings certainly enhance the experience, the poem itself isn't really much to crow about.

[S · Rating 4 out of 5]

It's almost impossible to write a proper review for The Wild Party, way too many things to be said. To keep it simple, it's as wild as the title promises (as well as awfully but yet delightfully disturbing and funny)!

[Bill Fletcher · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Spiegelman illustrations are great. The poem, though very much of its age, is very affecting. And very funny in places. My favorite lines:

"His hips were jaunty,
And his gestures too dextrous.
A Versatile lad!
He was ambisextrous."

[Jeff · Rating 3 out of 5]

The Wild Party is a novella-length poem written in the mid-1920s about a party that includes everything you'd expect from a wild party of that time period--bootleg liquor, cocaine and gun-play. If Dashiell Hammett had written poetry instead of prose this would be it.

[Nye Rees · Rating 2 out of 5]

Although this is an undeniably well-written poem, it's taught me that I only enjoy poetry in moderation. It seems to be a matter of taste with this type of book and this time round it just wasn't my thing.

[Rob · Rating 5 out of 5]

Truly a 'lost' classic. This was such a quick fun read and captured the crazy, sultry lifestyle of the Roaring 20's. Definitely had shades of the type of shenanigans that Hemingway described in another classic 'The Sun Also Rises'. I thoroughly enjoyed this little gem.

[Oriana · Rating 4 out of 5]

I am definitely not partial to poetry, but this book is awesome. The drawings are incredible & the writing is very clever.

[Matt · Rating 4 out of 5]

A really driving narrative story told in vivid poetry. It's very much a period piece, but fun. Spiegelman's illustrations are excellent.

[Carol Storm · Rating 5 out of 5]

Decadence! Cruelty! Sickening violence! Sudden death! Bootleg Gin and Bottomless Despair! Makes Studs Lonigan look like Pride and Prejudice!

[Northpapers · Rating 3 out of 5]

The art and packaging are superlative. Spiegelman is a master. Five stars. The poem itself, fun and sleazy and pretty near worthless. I averaged the whole thing out to a really enjoyable three stars.