PARTISAN REVIEW
«Schon ist halb Europa, schon ist zumindest der Ralbe Osten Europas
auf dem Wege zum Chaos, fiihrt betrunken in heiligem Wahn am
Abgrund entlang und singt dazu, singt betrunken und hymnisch
wie Dmitri Karamasoff sang."
In their own minds they examined
the evidence of the poetic experience of Joyce and Eliot on which
this
hypothesis rested: and concluded that perhaps the end of a
tradition and a class was the subject of this writing. The liquidation
of a social class is a magnificent subject for literature. But by impli–
cation, Henry James or Virginia Woolf, as much as Chekhov, chal–
lenge writers in their society to produce other works about the emer–
gence of a new life and not the decay of an old one.
If
the novels of
Henry James suggest sometimes an immense remnant sale of the
fine sensibilities of an aristocracy going into liquidation, the novels
of Virginia Woolf suggest people with even finer sensibilities, in still
more reduced circumstances. After Bloomsbury, our generation had
still fewer assets to liquidate and still less reason to be attracted to
the way of life which was going into liquidation. We were looking
for something new not so much in literature as in life itself.
Another great difference in generations was made by the first
World War. Until 1930, European literature was overshadowed by
the war and the revolutions and misery which followed it. The
attitude of most writers was to regard this as an overwhelming
catastrophe, an enormous disintegration outside their control. All
they could do was ignore or accept it. Hence there were two preva–
lent attitudes: a cynical pessimism, such as one finds in the early
novels of Aldous Huxley, and a profound tragic acceptance such
as one finds in
The Waste Land
and in some of the statements of
E. M. Forster.
In the 1920's there was a tragedy to ignore or accept, but there
seemed nothing to fight for or against. The revolutions which took
place in Europe had the appearance of volcanoes, eruptions of
despair and barbarism in the minds and bodies of the masses pouring
out like lava over the cities. Besides this, the prevailing mood of the
intellectuals who had known or been opposed to the war was a
political pacifism, a conviction that armed remedies can do no good.
In the 1930's the situation was dramatically altered. Civilization
was no longer threatened with social revolutions--which, however
one regarded them, seemed to support social opportunities-which
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