The publication last spring of Malcolm Cowley's A Second Flowering: Works and Days of the Lost Generation¹ has reopened a question most of us might prefer to leave closed. Yet it continues to obsess us like the puzzle of some notorious unsolved crime. Just how important, really, was the generation of writers who are commonly assumed to have produced a renascence of American literature in the 1920's? What is the meaning and value of their contribution in the perspective of all that we know about them and all that has happened in our literature since their time?

Mr. Cowley, having spent fifty years studying these writers, may be forgiven if now, at seventy-five, he is unable or unwilling to offer much more than a reiteration of opinions that over the years have grown habitual with him and that have come to represent the official establishment answer to this question. His understandably strong feelings of proprietorship toward the 20's writers have caused him to take it for granted that, in spite of individual shortcomings of which he is well aware, they were, on the whole, the most distinguished literary generation the century has so far produced—the most distinguished, in fact, since the great first flowering of American literary talent in the generation of Emerson and Thoreau. Cowley has written eloquently in support of his position, and one can scarcely fault him for taking it. He has had a long career as a highly influential critical spokesman for these writers, most of whom were his personal friends. He was on the scene in Paris during the time when they were doing some of their best work, and he was one of the first critics to understand the significance of the whole artistic phenomenon which so profoundly affected the character of our literature after World War I. Today he is conscious of being a last survivor of that incredible era—left, as he has said, “with the sense of having plodded with others to the tip of a long sandspit where they stand exposed, surrounded by water, waiting for the tide to come in.” If anyone has earned the right to his biases, Cowley surely has.

For the rest of us the problem of coming to terms with the 20's writers is considerably more complex. We have existed for years in a state of gross informational surfeit, in which we have become so drugged and bored with knowledge concerning every aspect of their lives and works that the possibility of making new and original assessments of them must strike us as being very remote indeed. Furthermore, their achievement as artists is now effectively inseparable in our minds from the legendry of their lives, while their works are so commonly seen as sourcebooks of gossip and invitations to nostalgia, that no balanced view of their literary merits can be maintained for long.

We also have to contend with our own emotional relation to them, a relation which cannot be as intimate and avuncular as Cowley's, but is no less affected by sentiment or what, in the case of literary people younger than he, has so often been the most abject kind of filial admiration. After all, the 20's generation were once our very special and personal property. We came to love them long before it became official wisdom to do so, and there are complex loyalties that bind us equally to them and to that part of ourselves which was formed by their influence. For many of us who discovered them at the right (or the wrong) age, they seemed quite simply the only real writers there were, and so they became our proxy writers. They had all the experiences we would have liked to have, and they wrote exactly the books we wished we might have written. It could be fairly said that they were the first and perhaps the only generation of writers to capture our imaginations and to dramatize an image of the literary life with which we could identify because it combined creative achievement with the freedom to explore the fullest possibilities of feeling and being. We may have had the greatest respect for the work of such older men as Dreiser, Mencken, Anderson, and Lewis, but we did not envy them their lives. Their generation seemed gray, remote, and permanently middle-aged. There was something about them that smelled of beer, cigars, pool halls, and the heavy sweat of craft and naturalism. One imagined them going off to the office every morning—pot-bellied businessmen of letters—carrying their inspiration in a lunch pail. But the 20's writers were a very different breed—elegant, aesthetic, temperamentally gifted rather than soberly skilled, as extravagant and wasteful as young British lords, yet profoundly self-preserving in their function as writers. They were distinguished from their elders, above all, by their dedication to the Flaubertian ideal of the artist, their sense of belonging to an aristocratic fraternity of talent. But they also believed in the interdependence of art and experience, the necessity that literature partake of, even as it transformed to suit its own purposes, the felt realities and passions of the individual life.

They thus embodied for us an adolescent ideal which is deeply rooted in our native mythos but which, in recent years, only Norman Mailer has been able to emulate with any conviction, the ideal of the writer as poet-profligate, our fantasy inheritance from the English Romantics which for the first time among the 20's writers became a practical model of conduct for Americans. Hence, they found it possible to live the life of sensation with great vigor and still live the life of literature with great dedication and success. They were able to have it both ways so splendidly, and they made such excellent use of the opportunity, that some of us will probably never manage to see them except against the high colorations of jealousy or adoration.

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Another factor obscuring our view of these writers is that they were largely responsible for developing in us the standards by which we might have been able to judge them. For it was on the evidence of their work and that of their European contemporaries that we formed our impressions of what literary effects were possible to the modern sensibility. No other standards derived from other historical periods seemed quite applicable to them, if only because so much of their significance resulted from their collective belief that they had outmoded the past by confronting a new reality in ways wholly unique to it and to them. Also, in a very real sense the 20's writers provided the basic assumptions through which we came to perceive, and some of us to express, the experience of the modern world. Their works for a very long time seemed to have done all our essential imagining for us, just as they themselves seemed to have done our essential living, so that we had very little sense of being engaged with life that was not in some way connected with the profoundly seductive images of life with which they first came to dominate our imaginations.

By the same token, our view of the literary life of the 20's is a complex mixture of myth and reality, of reality fantasized into myth and myth personalized to the point where it seems like something we ourselves experienced. One does not know, for example, whether the literature created the fantasy or the fantasy found its embodiment in the literary life. But surely a strong attraction of the period for young people was and may still be the fact that it represents their vision of the perfect college literary apprenticeship exported to Paris and prolonged for a decade. The intense, free life of Montparnasse was the idealized equivalent of the intense, free life of the campus literati. There, happily far away from parents and home town, it was possible to get drunk as often as one pleased, to stay up all night making love, wander the streets howling into the dawn, be eternally young, sensitive, and promising, do all kinds of experimental work and publish it in the little magazines, be read by an audience of friends who were the perfect classmates, all people of brilliant talent and wit and yet, except for a few, remarkably kind and helpful about one's own work. There too one could enjoy the presence of older teachers and mentors like Pound, Anderson, and Stein, the quintessential writing instructors who were the first to recognize one's gifts and gave generously of their advice and encouragement. But perhaps even more important were certain other perquisites of these literary junior years abroad: the advantages of not having to hold down a job because checks were coming regularly from home or one was on a fellowship, not having to be compromised by the bourgeois values of one's parents, not having to worry about marriage and a family, not having responsibilities of any kind except to Art, Truth, and one's friends.

It is not surprising that this image of the Paris literary life should be embellished in our minds by a cast of personages, both fictional and actual, who have the clarity of outline, the individuality, and the emotional openness which, as a rule, only young people of college age seem to possess. Their appearance and behavior remain with us almost as if recollected from life or recorded in a class yearbook in which we seem to find versions of our own former selves. Nobody will ever be like them again, and nobody will need to be. For these people exist in the roles fixed for them by memory and sentiment—larger than life because they belong to a generation which managed to mythologize its experience while still in the act of having it.

There is young Jay Gatsby, helplessly in love with the rich and sophisticated sorority girl, holding out his arms to the green light at the end of her boat dock; Amory Blaine proclaiming his valedictory “I know myself but that is all”; Eugene Gant, forever seeking “the lost lane-end into heaven . . . a stone, a leaf, an unfound door . . .”; Jake Barnes muttering through those bitter, bitter teeth the best line in the senior play, “Yes, isn't it pretty to think so”; Scott and Zelda, the most popular and beautiful couple on the campus, behaving insufferably at parties, jumping fully clothed into the Plaza fountain; Hemingway, the most talented boy in the class, writing his first stories at a table in the Closerie des Lilas; good old Tom Wolfe, a boy who never seemed to stop growing, getting very drunk, waving his arms, and knocking out the electrical system of an entire town. And remember the others, the people like Harry Crosby, Slater Brown, William Bird, Robert McAlmon, and the Gerald Murphys, who matter only because they were friends of the famous and now belong to history simply because everyone connected, however remotely, with the Paris literary life in the 20's now belongs to history.

The writers whom Leslie Fiedler once called “great stereotype-mongers” have bequeathed us themselves and their characters as clichés, and criticism has made more clichés out of the essential arguments that can be brought against them. Yet the most familiar argument is also the least avoidable. They were a group of highly talented but narrow writers, and their narrowness was most dramatically revealed in the fact that they had one abiding interest, themselves when young, an interest which, in the case of some of them, became the literary preoccupation of a lifetime. Their books had all the attributes of young consciousness. They were lyrical, nostalgic, sentimental, stylish, experimental, and iconoclastic, and they told over and over again the story of self-discovery through the first conquest of experience. We learned from them what it is like to grow up in the small towns of America, how it feels to fall in love, have sex, get drunk, go to war, to be an American in Europe, all for the first time, to be so hungry for life that you want to consume all the food, liquor, and women in the world, or to discover that the system created by adults is capitalistic and corrupt or hypocritical and dull.

Fitzgerald wrote the story of young romance and riotous youth and, remarkably enough, became famous at twenty-four largely on the strength of the fact that he informed the older generation about just how badly the young really behaved. Hemingway's first and best materials were an adolescent's adventures in Europe, his initiation into the mystery cult of foreign sports, bullfighting, and big-game hunting, the loss of his innocence through the death of his ideals and his love in European war. Dos Passos found his most dependable subject in the totalitarianism of social hierarchies, whether political, economic, or military, in which the integrity of the young was destroyed or severely compromised and the artistic spirit broken under the grinding pressures of the machine. There are very few people over forty in this literature, and when they do appear, we recognize them by their stigmata of physical ugliness, venality, and hypocrisy. Only the young are truly human, but then the young are doomed to be the victims of the old, to die in their wars, to be tricked by their deceits, ruined through seduction by their false gods.

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It is logical that the qualities we remember most clearly in this literature are those that impressed us when we ourselves were young—the marvelous intensity about people and raw experience, the preoccupation with the self, with love, sex, freedom, time, adventure, the irreverence toward the world of the fathers, the disdain for the adult religion of work, self-sacrifice, expediency, competition, and conformity. It is also logical that so many of these writers were able to function effectively only so long as they could keep alive their youthful responses. A number did not live into middle age. Some died romantically young, others like Fitzgerald died old while still chronologically young. Of those who survived beyond fifty, almost all were engaged in reiterating the experiences of their youth or continued, as did Hemingway, to write out of a fading memory of emotional and intellectual premises established during the time of their first intense engagement with life.

They were, in fact, the first American literary generation to make being young into both a style of life and a state of grace. It is largely because of their influence that so many Americans are unable to perceive experience except as something that happens to one up to the age of thirty, or to understand that life can on occasion be other than a process of losing the intensities one was once able to feel. At the end of that fateful confrontation between Gatsby and Tom Buchanan in the Plaza Hotel, Nick Carraway suddenly remembers that it is his thirtieth birthday—“Thirty—the promise of a decade of loneliness, a thinning list of single men to know, a thinning brief-case of enthusiasm, thinning hair.” Read for the first time at eighteen, the passage seems one of the most poignant in the novel. But then, perhaps years later, we come to recognize that our sympathies should go not to Nick but to Fitzgerald. It is his limited vision of the possibilities of life which is exposed here, even as it is this same limitation which makes Gatsby a convincing and pathetic character.

One reason for this preoccupation with youth is that World War I had the effect of seeming to annihilate past history and the old styles of history. Hence, the generation which had fought in the war felt urgently the need to establish new premises, to redefine the terms of existence. Not only was this necessarily a task for youth, but it placed unique and dramatic emphasis on the responses of youth. Only the young were sensitive and adjustable enough to be able to determine whether a given emotion or experience conformed to the new standards of authenticity produced by the war. Besides, they were the ones who had been there, been initiated, had heard all the big words and learned that those words did not describe how they felt or what they had been through. Thus, the literature of the 20's is not merely a narcissistic but a testing literature, one in which writers were trying to create an accurate new idiom and at the same time determine the truth or falsity of a radically new experience—most often according to the responses of a provisional and existential, inevitably youthful self.

Fortunately, there were elements that worked powerfully to their advantage. First, there was the fact that their consciousness of being unique and their experience unprecedented was validated by social and moral changes so profound that a literary career might be constructed around the process simply of recording them. These writers were in a position to be among the first to witness such changes, and they were aided greatly by what Frederick J. Hoffman once called their creatively “useful innocence,” their small-town sensitivity to forms of conduct which, in spite of their surface sophistication, they could not help judging by the provincial standards they had been brought up on. It is not surprising that some of their best work has the incandescent quality of the astonished spectator, privileged to be on the scene of first encounters involving people who suddenly seem no longer to know by what assumptions they should behave.

Secondly, their prolonged apprenticeship in Europe enabled them to view American life from the perspective not only of distance but of adversary cultural values. They had inherited from their predecessors—most notably Lewis, Mencken, and Van Wyck Brooks—an intellectual arrogance, a disdain for bourgeois society, and a belief in the absolute supremacy of art and the artist which were formed into a metaphysics under the tutelage of Stein and Pound. They became cosmopolitan provincials abroad; they learned to judge America by essentially elitist European standards; and of course they found America provincial. But since they were themselves provincial, their attitudes retained a dimension of ambivalence that helped to humanize their satire and finally made it seem an expression more of regret than contempt.

They had, in short, a strong sense of belonging to, or being able to identify imaginatively with, place, perhaps just because they were physically so displaced—not only from home but from the past represented by home. They may have been creatively stimulated by the experience of living in a dramatic, changing present, but they could also feel anxious and uncertain and in need of the structures of coherence and identity they had left behind in the Midwest and South. This undoubtedly accounts for the fact that Hemingway and Fitzgerald were so continuously preoccupied with procedural questions, with the effort to formulate dependable rules of feeling and conduct. Hemingway's works can be read as a series of instruction manuals on how to respond to and behave in the testing situations of life now that the rules have changed. It might also be argued that some of his most dependable instructions are those he was able to reclaim from the past, in particular the American frontier past, the lessons of courage, fidelity, and honor which might still have the power to influence human conduct when all other values were being called into question. Fitzgerald's best novels are restatements of Henry James's great theme: the implications of the misuse of power over those who are innocent and helpless by those who are strong and unscrupulous.

In short, one finds in these writers and in some of their contemporaries a concern with the moral authenticity of certain traditions they might have presumed to be outmoded. It may be expressed only in a nostalgic recurrence to the locales that provided security in childhood—Hemingway's Big Two-Hearted River or Wolfe's Old Catawba. But it may also involve complex loyalties and codes of honor that once gave a human dimension to life—as Nick Carraway discovers through the experience of Gatsby and Dick Diver through his marriage to Nicole. Both characters derived a “sense of the fundamental decencies” from their fathers and so can evaluate and ultimately condemn a society in which such decencies no longer have meaning.

One of the very best of Fitzgerald's stories, “Babylon Revisited,” is yet another expression of the desire to reconstitute certain values of moral discipline and self-control after the violent dissipations of the decade that ended in bankruptcy in 1929. Charlie Wales, a battered survivor of the time, returns to Paris in the hope of regaining custody of his daughter. To do this he must prove to his sister-in-law that he has become a fit and responsible person. He very nearly succeeds in convincing her, but fails at the last moment when two of his old drinking friends reappear and destroy his chances of making a new life. Just as Nick after Gatsby's death wanted “the world to be in uniform and at a sort of moral attention forever,” so Charlie felt the need “to jump back a whole generation and trust in character again as the eternally valuable element.” But there is no escape from the consequences of his wasted past:

Again the memory of those days swept over him like a nightmare—the people they had met traveling; then people who couldn't add a row of figures or speak a coherent sentence . . . the women and girls carried screaming with drink or drugs out of public places.

—The men who locked their wives out in the snow, because the snow of twenty-nine wasn't real now. If you didn't want it to be snow, you just paid some money.

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The act of moral reclamation may be a necessity for every literary generation. In America we do not so much build on tradition as steal from it those elements we think may help us to understand the always unprecedented experience of our own time. The 20's writers had a singular relation to the problem. They had the strongest sense that their experience was indeed unprecedented and that the older modes of literary statement were inadequate to describe it. They therefore became excessively preoccupied with experience and, in both their writing and their lives, with the innovative and defiant. For reasons perhaps of temperament and historical position they were fixated at the level of rite de passage, where they were condemned permanently to play the roles of rebellious sons and wayward daughters, able to find their identity only in the degree of their opposition to the literary and social conventions of the past.

Yet in reviewing their achievement one is struck by how often their most admirable qualities seem to have been achieved at those rare moments when the writer was able, perhaps by accident, perhaps out of desperation, to transcend the limits of the adversary stance and define his materials in some clear relation to the sustaining values of an older tradition. If Fitzgerald and Hemingway experienced such moments, as some of their best work would seem to indicate, they did so only occasionally because the life of their own time absorbed them much too completely, and they were never able to see that life in a consistently maintained moral perspective.

All that Dos Passos essentially had to support his intricately panoramic vision of American society were the values of an adversary politics, and it is significant that as he grew older, his vision did not deepen: only his politics aged. E. E. Cummings and Hart Crane were, in their very different ways, poetically adversary. Cummings made a limited kind of artistic convention out of wit and irreverence, while Crane, like Wolfe, sought all his life for a convention that would give shape and significance to the chaotic responses of his personality. Both poets had the defect of being confined by personality, and Crane in particular existed in that state of psychic nihilism in which, as one critic has observed, “any move is possible because none is necessary.”

The examples of Faulkner and, on a much lower level, Thornton Wilder should serve to remind us that there were alternatives to the more fashionable positions taken by so many of the 20's generation. There were alternatives if one possessed, as Wilder did, an intellectual culture broad enough to enable one to draw creatively on the whole of Western literary tradition, or if one had Faulkner's access to the abundant resources of the Southern tradition. But without these advantages, supplemented by talent of very large size, too many of the 20's writers remained locked into their first youthful responses to an experience that was too overwhelmingly intense to serve as very much more than the material of an often brilliant, but very personal and limited literature. They may be forever established in our minds as the immensely charismatic personages of one of the most dramatic decades in our literary history. But it is significant that we can never separate them from the image we retain of the life of their time, just as they could never separate themselves and, in so doing, become larger than their experience, its imaginative possessors, the shapers of those truths it contained which might have made timeless in art what is otherwise lost to history.

¹ Viking, 276 pp., $7.95.