Let me try to define my generation—rather narrowly, but in a way similar to Fitzgerald's—as those of us who approached our majority during World War II, and whose attitudes were shaped by the spirit of that time and by our common initiation into the world by that momentous event. For a slightly earlier generation the common initiation was the Spanish Civil War; for us it somehow simultaneously ended and began when Harry Truman announced the destruction of Hiroshima. I wish I could say that in 1945—at the end of our war—I did anything so blissfully adventurous as to steal a locomotive as had Scott Fitzgerald. That distant war in Europe had had its own terrible ferocity but mainly for Europeans; as Fitzgerald says, it left America and Americans generally intact. By contrast our war, despite a nervous overlay of the usual frivolity (do you recall the Rosie the Riveter or Slap the Jap or the aching erotic schmaltz that suffused those “Back Home for Keeps” ads?), was brutally businesslike and anti-romantic, a hard-boiled matter of stamping out a lot of very real and nasty totalitarianism in order to get along with the business of the American Way of Life, whatever that is. Our generation was not only not intact, it had been in many places cut to pieces. The class just ahead of me in college was virtually wiped out. Beautiful fellows who had won basketball championships and Phi Beta Kappa keys died like ants in the Normandy invasion. Others only slightly older than I—like myself young Marine Corps platoon leaders, primest cannon fodder of the Pacific war—stormed ashore at Tarawa and Iwo Jima and met ugly and horrible deaths on the hot coral sands.
I was lucky and saw no battle, but I had the wits scared out of me more times than I could count, and so by the time the bomb dropped on Hiroshima, thus circumventing my future plans (I was on my way: “You can figure that four out of five of you will get your asses shot off,” I can recall some colonel telling us, as he embroidered dreamily about the coming invasion of the Japanese mainland), an enormous sense of relief stole over my spirit, along with a kind of dull weariness that others of that period have recalled and which, to a certain offshoot of my generation, later came to be characterized as “beat.” I disclaim any literary link with this splinter group but certainly the “beat” sensation was all too real, and though it may have sent Kerouac off on the road in search of kicks, to others of us it was a call to quiet pursuits: study and the square rewards of family and rather gloomy stocktaking. I think most of us were in a way subtly traumatized, which is why we didn't steal any locomotives or pull off any of the wild capers that so richly strew the chronicles of Fitzgerald's Jazz Age. We were traumatized not only by what we had been through and by the almost unimaginable presence of the bomb, but by the realization that the entire mess was not finished after all: there was now the Cold War to face, and its clammy presence oozed into our nights and days. When at last the Korean War arrived, some short five years later (it was this writer's duty to serve his country in the Marines in that mean conflict, too), the cosmos seemed so unhinged as to be nearly insupportable. Surely by that time—unlike Fitzgerald's coevals, “born to power and intense nationalism”—we were the most mistrustful of power and the least nationalistic of any generation that America has produced. And just as surely, whatever its defects may have been, it has been this generation's interminable experience with ruthless power and the loony fanaticism of the military mind that has by and large caused it to lend the most passionate support to the struggle to end war everywhere. We have that at least in our favor.
I think that the best of my generation, those in their late thirties or early forties, have reversed the customary rules of the game and have grown more radical as they have gotten older—a disconcerting but healthy sign. To be sure, there are many youngish old fogies around and even the most illustrious of these, William Buckley, is blessed by a puzzling, recondite, but undeniable charm, almost as if beneath that patrician exterior an egalitarian was signaling to get out. We seem to be gradually shaking loose of our trauma (which for some of us, by the way, also includes the remembered effect of the Depression) and one has only to flourish the picture of an embattled Norman Mailer on the steps of the Pentagon to put down the claim that political activism is the purview of the very young. Perhaps the act of participating in one horrendous war, or two, has allowed most of us to sympathize with young people and be bitterly troubled by much of the shit they have to put up with. Having been pushed around by bully boys and sub-cretins, by commissioned shoe clerks and salauds of every stripe and gauge, we tend toward more than a twinge of empathy at the sight of youth struggling with the managerial beast, military, secular, or scholastic.
In 1944, as a Marine recruit, I was shanghaied into the “clap shack,” the venereal-disease ward of the Naval Hospital at Parris Island, South Carolina. There at the age of eighteen, only barely removed from virginhood, I was led to believe that blood tests revealed I had a probably fatal case of syphilis—in those pre-penicillin days as dread a disease as cancer—and was forced to languish, suicidal, for forty days and forty nights amid the charnel-house atmosphere of draining buboes, gonorrhea, prostate massages, daily short-arm inspections, locomotor ataxia, and the howls of poor sinners in the clutch of terminal paresis, until at last, with no more ceremony than if I were being turned out of veterinary clinic, I was told I could go back to boot camp: I would not die after all, it was all a mistake, those blood tests had turned up a false reaction to an old case of trench mouth. I could have wept with relief and hatred. Such experiences have given our generation, I believe, both the means and the spirit to bridge the generation gap.
Literary sweepstakes are a bore, especially when this is a matter of comparing generations, and the situation is not enhanced in this case by Fitzgerald's boast, with its implication that the men of his era produced achievements in prose writing that would cause those who followed after to feel like sacred epigones. The stature of Faulkner alone would have been enough to cow any young writer, all the more if he were Southern; as Flannery O'Connor remarked so wonderfully: “No one wants to get caught on the tracks when the Dixie Special comes through.” Yet it has been a rich time for writing, I think, richer than may be imagined. Certainly, whether or not as a group we shall receive posterity's sweet kiss—whether our names will date as sadly as Cyril Hume and Edward Hope Coffey—no gathering ever comprised a clutch of talents so remarkably various: Mailer, Baldwin, Jones, Capote, Salinger, the incomparably infuriating Gore Vidal, John Barth, Terry Southern, Heller (where's that second book, Joe?), Walker Percy, Peter Matthiessen—who would survive as the finest writer on nature since John Burroughs even if he never found due recognition for his badly underestimated fiction—William Gaddis, Richard Yates, Evan Connell, George Mandel, Herbert Gold, Jack Kerouac, Vance Bourjaily, John Clellon Holmes, Calder Willingham, Alan Harrington, John Phillips, William Gass, and, honorifically, George Ames Plimpton.
To this roll must be added, incidentally, the name of Richard Howard, the city of Cleveland's gift to France and the most elegant translator from the French tongue writing in English.*1
Catalogs like the foregoing are at best an amusement, surely a trifle silly, so I won't make another quite as extensive, but a list of the poets of this generation would sparkle brightly, from Simpson to Merwin, James Dickey to Anthony Hecht, Snodgrass to Allen Ginsberg.*2 There are, obviously, quite a few others of equivalent stature. As John Hollander, himself a fine poet, has written about their best poems: “[They] stand as some sort of testament to the continuing spiritual revolution to which poetry in English has been committed for more than a century-and-a-half, and to the ancillary struggle to redeem poetry itself, as the product of imaginative creation, from the sickness with which Literature as a realm is too often infected.”1
So all in all a pretty good show, I would say, for a crowd that started out with the blind staggers—with the disease of McCarthy and the drug of Eisenhower—one that some ineffably fatuous critic long ago dismissed with the tag, “the Silent Generation.” And let us brood for a moment on our predecessors. Despite the buoyancy in which Fitzgerald commences his reflections on his own brothers in art, there is something dispirited, tired, elegiac about that little memoir. There is an odor of the grave about it. Faced with the sure prospect of a cataclysmic war and—who knows?—a premonition of his own imminent death, perhaps this fading tone, this pervasive mood of farewell was inevitable. Wolfe, Hemingway, Dos Passos, Faulkner, Wilder, all his peers—Fitzgerald had truly been born into noble company. But the best, the greatest work of all these men was long behind them, including Faulkner, who was the only one of them capable of a sustained level of quality until the very end. It is perhaps this knowledge, an instinctive sense of decline, that causes a mood of sadness to overlay this essay of Fitzgerald, who knew no better than the rest of us why whole groups of talents will burst into thrilling efflorescence, and then as mysteriously fade away. Writing now at roughly the same age as Fitzgerald, I can say that I feel no such a falling off, no similar sense of loss about my own generation. Revolution rends the air, the world around us shivers with the brave racket of men seeking their destiny, with the invigorating noise of history in collision with itself. This generation, once so laggardly, now confronts a scene astir with great events, such a wild dynamo of dementedly marvelous transactions that merely to be able to live through them should be cause for jubilation. Mes amis, aux barricades! I would not be astonished if our truly most precious flowering lay in the time to come. As for myself—reflecting on the way in which we all started out—I have never felt so young.
[Esquire, October 1968. Published together with essays by F. Scott Fitzgerald and Frank Conroy on their respective literary generations.]
*1 Howard (b. 1929), American poet, critic, and translator of Baudelaire, Barthes, Foucault, Gide, Robbe-Grillet, and other French authors.—J.W.
*2 Chronologically, Richard Wilbur should be included here, but he started publishing very young, and might be considered an influence on, rather than a member of, this generation.—W.S. (1968)