50
PARTISAN REVIEW
covered.
It
was the nearest thing to the Zola period in France that
America had produced.
The outlook of the lost generation, like its French forerunners, the
Symbolists, Cubists, Dadaists and Surrealists, was indirectly a repudiation
of the Dreiser period. The protoype of the new generation was Paul
Valery, to whom writing was a form of speculative research. Some
writers, like the
transition
group, adapted this principle to thr linguistic
methods of Joyce. Others aped for a while the extreme "detached"
techniques of Dadaism and Surrealism. And Eliot and a few disciples
changed the existing social derivations of literature by going back to
earlier English traditions and to French Symbolism for more generalized
symbols of contemporary life. However, only a few of the more im–
portant figures, like Eliot and Stein, (who really belong to a slightly
earlier period) persisted for any length of time in any of these methods.
The return of the exiles marked the general return to more direct equiva·
lnts of the American scene. The period turned out to be one of transi·
tion, one of infiltration of new currents, one of cosmopolitanization.
That this generation is not merely a chronological one is seen
in
the number of writers who came of age at this time but who remained
on the fringe or were only remotely influenced by the emigre movement.
But, howeveri remote the influence, it served to break the line of literary
tradition. Important novels were no Ienger written in the manner of
Dreiser and Anderson, nor poetry in that of Robinson or Frost. And
criticism became more urbane, more subtle. Faulkner, for example, became
neither Dadaist nor modernist of any kind, but his native stories of
the
South have a verbal and psychological sequence reminiscent of Joyce.
The point is that this generation succeeded not only in introducing
new
ways of handling new subjects, but also in assimilating many significant
ideas of the period. The apparent objectivity of scientific me.thod, the
relativity of time to motion, (ill! fiction, to action), the idealistic denial
of immediate realities or their submersion in eternal verities or symbols,
the sense of autonomous psychological sequence (as in Freud), are a
few
of the ideas which, in one way or another, entered into literature.
At present the lost generation has slipped into literary history.
The
last stubborn remnants are petering out in Paris. The individual writen,
like Cowley himself, who has written their epitaph, though retaining
their equipment, are shifting toward the alternative forces-Communism
and Fascism. Some few still pretend an impartiality. Beyond question,
the most talented and those who always showed the greatest clanty
in
