BOOKS
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lack of illusion afforded by Marxism, and then to land in what seems
to be utter disillusion, only to be forced, stage by stage, to even greater
depths of disillusion. This is the experience of the generation that has
come to maturity during the depression, .the sanguine period of the
New Deal, the days of the Popular Front and the days of Munich, and
the slow, loud, ticking imminence of a new war. With the advent of war,
every conceivable temptation not to be honest, not to look directly at
experience, not to remember the essential vows of allegiance to the intel–
ligence and to human possibility and dignity-every conceivable tempta–
tion and every plea of convenience, safety and casuistry has presented
itself.
Joseph, the hero of
Dangling Man,
is remarkable because he has the
strength (and it is his only strength) to keep his eyes open and his mind
awake to the quality of his experience. He has been for a time a mem–
ber of the Communist Party and he has been offered a business career
by a successful older brother. He has rejected both. With the coming
of the war, he undergoes the slow strangulation of being drafted but
not inducted into the army because of various bureaucratic formalities.
During this period in the inter-regnum between civilian and army life,
he is gradually stripped of the few pretenses and protections left to him.
A Communist refuses to speak to him; his brother attempts to lend
him money; his niece taunts him as a beggar; his friends who have
made their "meek adjustments" are repelled by his unwillingness to ac–
cept things as they are; he quarrels with his friends, his relatives, his
wife who is supporting him and the people who live in the rooming
house in which he spends his idle days. And finally, unable to endure
the continuous emptiness and humiliation of his life, he sees to it that he
is
immediately taken into the army.
Is it necessary to emphasize the extent to which this experience is
characteristic? Here are the typical objects of a generation's sensibility:
the phonograph records, the studio couch, the reproductions of Van
Gogh, the cafeteria; and the typical relationships: the small intellectual
circle which gradually breaks up, the easy and ·meaningless love affair,
the marriage which is neither important nor necessary, the party which
ends in hysterical outbreaks or sickness of heart, the gulf separating this
generation from the previous one and the family life from which it
came.
What is not typical is Joseph's stubborn confrontation and evalua–
tion of the character of his life. He insists on making explicit his de–
pendency on his wife. He tells himself again and again that his days are
wasted. He seizes the Communist party-member who tries to snub him,
and insists that as a human being he has a right to be greeted. He tells
himself and anyone who will listen that he does not like the kind of life
his society has made possible. And he refuses to yield to the philistinism
and the organized lack of imagination that consoles itself by saying: "It
