For too long there has existed a misconception as to what comprises a literary generation. Most of the writers of the post–World War II era, linked only by the common fact that their work commenced sometime during the years after Hiroshima, have, I'm sure, wondered at one time or another why the notion of belonging to a “generation” has seemed so ill-fitting or embarrassing. Born in 1925, I have always considered Saul Bellow, born a decade earlier, as much a part of “my” generation as Philip Roth, who is eight years younger than I am. This comprises a time span of eighteen years, and I have remained uneasy with the idea—pleased enough to be associated with two writers I consider admirable but rather put off by its palpable lack of logic. It should not have bothered me (not that it has to any great degree), for as Malcolm Cowley points out, we have all been merely victims of an error of definition.
“A generation,” he writes accurately, “is no more a matter of dates than it is one of ideology. A new generation does not appear every thirty years….It appears when writers of the same age join in a common revolt against the fathers and when, in the process of adopting a new life style, they find their own models and spokesmen.”
In this case he is speaking of that gorgeously endowed group of creative spirits, born in the charmed, abbreviated space of years between 1894 and 1900, whose collective self-discovery as literary artists was so dazzling that it remains an almost comic irony that we know them as the Lost Generation. Specifically, the representatives Cowley deals with are Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Dos Passos, Cummings, Thornton Wilder, Faulkner, Wolfe, and Hart Crane. (Edmund Wilson should have been included, and Cowley laments his absence.) Together they made up “the second flowering” of the title of Malcolm Cowley's book, which is at once a memoir, a series of biographical essays, a literary reexamination, a tribute, and a memorial to that extraordinary company of writers, about whom he wrote earlier in Exile’s Return and elsewhere.
It is possible to approach a work like this with just a touch of resentment. We have read about the Lost Generation until our heads are waterlogged with its self-congratulation, its nostalgia. One broods over the gallons, the tuns, the tank cars of ink spilled out on the lives and work of these men—Hemingway's bibliography alone must be on its way to several volumes requiring sturdy bookends—and one thinks: Enough. Whatever the honesty, the wit, the grace, even the possible originality of the new offering, do we really want or need another account of Scott and Zelda's Riviera turn and the golden couple's tragic decline, or the way Hemingway's magnetic appeal was so often negated by his contemptible treatment of his friends, or Wolfe's hysterical self-concern and Weltschmerz?
These are not just thrice-told tales; they seem by now to be so numbingly familiar as to be almost personal—tedious old gossip having to do with some fondly regarded but too often outrageous kinfolk. And if the work also affects a critical stance, do we look forward to still more commentary on The Bear or Cummings's love lyrics? Or another desolating inventory of the metaphors in Gatsby? In A Second Flowering all of these matters are touched upon, yet it is testimony to Cowley's gifts as both a critic and a literary chronicler that the angle of vision seems new; that is, not only are his insights into these writers’ works almost consistently arresting but so are his portraits of the men themselves.
Of course it helped to be present, and it was Cowley's great fortune to have often been very much on the scene; he was an exact contemporary. “I knew them all and some have been my friends over the years,” he writes. A lesser commentator might have made a terrible botch of it just because of this propinquity and friendship, giving us one of those familiar works of strained observation, at once fawning and self-flattering, where the subject is really victimized as if by a distorting lens held scant inches from the nose.
Several of the writers under consideration—notably Hemingway and Fitzgerald—have already undergone such mistreatment. But Cowley's affection for these writers, his honesty and devotion to what they stood for, are too deep and inward-dwelling—this feeling pervades every page of the book—for him to sentimentalize them or falsify their image. That he admires them all needs no saying—it is a sign of his critical integrity that one can search in vain to find him in a posture of adulation; even the magnificent achievement of Faulkner, whom Cowley regards as the greatest of the group, is an achievement that he feels (perhaps in a form of antiphonal response to Faulkner's own remark that his generation would be judged upon the “splendor of our failures”) falls short of the very highest level and one that cannot properly be set beside the work of such giants as Dostoevsky and Dickens.
One of the finest parts of Cowley's book, incidentally, is the now famous pioneering essay on Faulkner, published in 1945 as the introduction to the Viking Portable Faulkner, which is a lucid jewel of exegesis. It opened up Faulkner's world for me when I was a very young man struggling to read a difficult writer who was then out of print, little known, and less understood. Nearly a quarter of a century later, during which time Faulkner has been smothered in scholarship, the essay is still fresh and brilliant.
Cowley can be as rough and relentless as an old millwheel in his judgments, whether it be upon some odious personal quality, such as Hemingway's unregenerate and infantile competitiveness, or on a matter of literature. Either way, the critic cuts close to the bone. In college I read U.S.A. with the awe of a man discovering a new faith. Yet one passage in Cowley is the most succinctly stated I have ever read in explanation of the sad bankruptcy of Dos Passos's later fiction: “He broke another rule that seems to have been followed by great novelists. They can regard their characters with love or hate or anything between, but cannot regard them with tired aversion. They can treat events as tragic, comic, farcical, pathetic, or almost anything but consistently repulsive.”
Cowley's criticism of The Sun Also Rises, while considerably more generous in its overall feeling, has the same kind of tough abrasiveness. But again, although he can be rueful about the failures and lapses of the writers—scolding Cummings for his frequent triviality, Wolfe about his “mania for bigness”—the prevailing tone is not that of a dismantler of reputations, a type often so prompt to scuttle into sight with his little toolkit at the end of an era, but one of generosity and preoccupying concern, as if Cowley knew he was an overseer—a kind of curator of some of the loveliest talents, however self-damaged and flawed, that America ever produced.
It is clear that Cowley still takes delight in having known them, and one can appreciate his delight. To recollect one's own modest familiarity with the ancestors is irresistible. Being of another time and place, I had no opportunity to know them—though on a couple of very brief occasions I saw two of the gentlemen plain. (I will not invade the privacy of Mr. Wilder, with whom I am acquainted, and who is a noble survivor.) By the time I came to the pleasure of reading, in the forties, Fitzgerald and Hart Crane and Wolfe—my earliest passion—had met untimely deaths.
Later, in New York in the early fifties, I met E. E. Cummings for a weird, bewitched hour or so. It was for tea at the tiny apartment of a pleasant old lady in Patchin Place, where Cummings also lived. Let Cowley describe him as he also appeared to me: “He had large, well-shaped features, carved rather than molded, eyes set wide apart, often with a glint of mischief in them….In later years, when he had lost most of the hair and the rest was clipped off, he looked more like a bare-skulled Buddhist monk.” Although the poet was considerably older than the Cummings of Cowley's reminiscence when I met him, and his tempo must have been slower, his manner more subdued, Cowley's further description corresponds nicely to my impression during that little encounter. What a talker!
“He was the most brilliant monologuist I have known,” writes Cowley; “what he poured forth was a mixture of cynical remarks, puns, hyperboles, outrageous metaphors, inconsequence, and tough-guy talk spoken from the corner of his wide, expressive mouth: pure Cummings, as if he were rehearsing something that would afterward appear in print.”
My only other contact with the Lost Generation was when I had lunch with Faulkner a single time, again in New York. Faulkner was then writing in an office at Random House. What I remember most vividly about this gentle, soft-speaking, somber-eyed little man with the drooping gray mustache is not his conversation, which was rambling and various (he talked lovingly and a lot about horses—one reason being that he was preparing to write an article on the Kentucky Derby for Holiday—and about Truman Capote, whose talent he genuinely admired but whose personality left him rather unnerved), but a beguiling item of literary marginalia. I had gotten up to go to the men's room, and when I returned Faulkner had vanished. “He said to tell you he'd see you again,” said Robert Linscott, the Random House editor who had been dining with us. “Bill sometimes gets that strange look in his eye and that means he can't sit still another minute. He's just got to go back to the office and work.”
What Linscott then told me supported an observation that Cowley makes—that is, how generally unremarked or indeed unknown is the influence that certain members of the Lost Generation had upon each other. Cowley singles out the effect of Hemingway's work on Faulkner—an unlikely connection until one rereads Faulkner's short masterpiece, “Red Leaves,” that grim and marvelous tale set in the autumnal light of early-nineteenth-century Mississippi, when the Indians owned black slaves and practiced human sacrifice.
Linscott related how Faulkner had once told him about the great difficulty he had in getting down the feel and atmosphere of the story to his satisfaction. It was not the story itself; the painful part had to do with the dialogue, a grappling with Anglicized Choctaw which thoroughly buffaloed Faulkner, since he had no idea how to render imaginary Indian talk into English. Finally, according to Linscott, Faulkner solved the problem while rereading a book he admired very much, Death in the Afternoon. The stilted, formalized Castilian-into-English which Hemingway had contrived seemed to Faulkner's ear to have just the right eccentric intonation for his Indians, and so his dialogue became a grateful though individualized borrowing—as anyone who compares the two works will readily see.
But these blurred yet memorable impressions—notes of an old-time fan—are mere filigree compared to the actuality of the books themselves, which penetrated the consciousness of so many young men of my time with the weight and poignancy of birth or death, or first love, or any other sacred and terrible event. With Wolfe alone I felt I had been captured by a demon, made absolutely a prisoner by this irresistible torrent of language. It was a revelation, for at eighteen I had no idea that words themselves—this tumbling riot of dithyrambs and yawping apostrophes and bardic cries—had the power to throw open the portals of perception, so that one could actually begin to feel and taste and smell the very texture of existence.
I realize now the naïveté of so many of Wolfe's attitudes and insights, his intellectual virginity, his parochial and boyish heart, his inability to objectivize experience and thus create a believable ambience outside the narrow range of self—all of these drastically reduce his importance as a writer with a serious claim on an adult mind. However, some passages—including the majestic death of old Gant in Of Time and the River—are of such heartrending power and radiant beauty that for these alone he should be read, and for them he would certainly retain a place in American literature.
Cowley makes somewhat the same point in his section on Wolfe in A Second Flowering, which is the most clear-headed brief analysis of Wolfe and his work that I have seen in print. If others of such passages as I just mentioned “had each been published separately,” Cowley writes, “Wolfe might have gained a different reputation, not as an epic poet in prose, but as the author of short novels and portraits, little masterpieces of sympathy and penetration.” But then Cowley doubts that he would have cared for that kind of fame. Mania for bigness again.
His portrait of Wolfe, while unsparing in its details about all that made the man such a trial to himself and others—his paranoia, his nearly fatal lack of self-criticism, his selfishness and grandiosity, all the appurtenances of a six-foot-seven-inch child writing in his solipsistic hell—is nonetheless enormously sympathetic and filled with respect. “He had always dreamed of becoming a hero,” Cowley writes, “and that is how he impresses us now: perhaps not as a hero of the literary art on a level with Faulkner and Hemingway and Fitzgerald, but as Homo Scribens and Vir Scribentissimus, a tragic hero of the act of writing.”
And so the other fathers also quickly took possession. I was soon reading Gatsby and In Our Time and The Sound and the Fury with the same devouring pleasure that I had read Wolfe. Perhaps I sound too idolatrous. It would be misleading to give the impression that the Lost Generation had exclusive hold on our attention—we who were coming out of college in the forties and early fifties. Recalling my own licentious eclecticism, I realize I was reading everything, from Aeschylus to John Donne to Flaubert to Proust to Raymond Chandler. Yet I think it has to be conceded that rarely has such a group of literary figures had the impact that these writers have had upon their immediate descendants and successors.
This is not to say that at least a good handful of the writers and poets who followed them have failed to be artists in their own right—several of them masterly ones—and who if they genuflect before the fathers do so with pride as well as gratitude. It is only that the influence of the older men—themselves influenced by Eliot and Joyce and Whitman and Mark Twain—has been at once broad and profound to an exceptional degree, so that while we have thankfully moved out of their shadow we have not passed out of their presence.
It is impossible to conceive, for example, that anyone born during the twenties or afterward who was crazy enough to embrace literature as a vocation was not at one time or another under the spell of Hemingway or Faulkner or Fitzgerald, to mention only the most richly endowed members of the generation. The final question is: Aside from the sharply individuated gifts that each possessed, what did they share as writers that may at least partly explain their common genius and its continuing hold on us?
Cowley's speculations are worth our attention. He starts with such considerations—superficial at first glance until one perceives their appropriateness for that epoch—as the fact that all of the members of the group except for Fitzgerald were WASPs, that most were from the Midwest or the South, and that all sprang from the middle class. “They all had a Protestant ethic drilled into them, even if they were Catholics like Fitzgerald.” Cowley also notes, in a passage which is an oblique commentary on the squalor we have produced in our schools, that every one of these men was the recipient of a sound, old-fashioned early education which placed a premium on the classics, English literature, syntax, and Latin grammar while ignoring social studies, civics, baton twirling, and other depravities.
Except for Dos Passos and Hemingway, whose friendship was destroyed because of the Spanish Civil War, they were generally either unconcerned or sophomoric in regard to politics. They had all had the experience of World War I, a “nice war,” in Gertrude Stein's phrase, which had left most of the men physically intact, restless and filled with reservoirs of unexpected energy. It was a war, however, that was foul and ugly enough to unite them all against “big words and noble sentiments.”
Ultimately more important, it seems to me, is Cowley's somewhat paradoxical but compelling notion that although each of these writers was an individualist, committed heart and mind to solitary vision, they were all bound together subconsciously by a shared morality which viewed the husbanding of one's talent as the highest possible goal. Thus, he argues, the garish myth has been deceptive. Many of them indeed had a hunger for self-destruction and were spendthrift livers, but when it came to their talent they were passionate conservationists. Measured in terms of their refusal to allow their splendid gifts to become swallowed up in the vortex of their frenzied, foolish, alcoholic, and often desperate lives, they were brave and moral men. In this sense, aside from the varied marvels of their best work, the writers of the Lost Generation provide us with a lesson in the art of self-realization.
“The good writers regarded themselves as an elite,” Cowley writes. “They were an elite not by birth or money or education, not even by acclaim—though they would have it later—but rather by such inner qualities as energy, independence, rigor, an original way of combining words (a style, a ‘voice’) and utter commitment to a dream.” Within the persuasive context of a book so free of idealization, so detached and balanced as A Second Flowering, such a statement seems enviable, exemplary, and true. Only two things matter: talent and language. “Their dream,” Cowley concludes, “was…of being the lords of language.”
As for Malcolm Cowley himself, he is seventy-five this year and rightly considers himself one of the last members of a glorious team whose exploits and defeats it was his privilege to help explain. “Now most of the team is gone,” he writes, “and the survivors are left 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.” It should be of consolation to him that it is unthinkable that this beautiful, honest book will not be read as an indispensable companion piece to the works of Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner, Wolfe, and all the rest as long as they are read and have bearing upon men's common experience. Ave atque vale!
[New York Times Book Review, May 6, 1973.]