AMERICAN FICTION AND AMERICAN VALUES
683
can be useful, and most of them have been genuine in that they have
come of a deep-felt sense that we Americans do not yet have enough
past to be definite to ourselves; and
if
they have sometimes been
spurious in surrendering to the illusion that this past could be con–
jured up at will and in a hurry, by talk rather than the arduous pro–
cesses of life itself, we have on the other hand to remember that no
tradition is ever built without all the talk and thought and introspection
necessary to define it.
Aldridge's book has attracted a good deal of attention because of
its thesis. As the first work of a young critic, it deserves approbation for
the vigorous candor of its opinions; but as the study of a literary period
it
has serious deficiencies: in the rather arbitrary selection of writers
considered, the failure to deal adequately with the political and social
background without which these writers would not be what they are,
and, finally, a superficial treatment of its main problem: the nature and
place of values in American life. But these animadversions have been
made so compactly and soundly in a brilliant review by Robert Gorham
Davis in the New York
Times
that I think it unnecessary to repeat
them here. Besides, I am interested here not so much in Aldridge's
book for its own sake as in the very important question it raises about
our present literary environment and the values of American life as
the determinants of this environment.
Aldridge's thesis is that the fiction of the present literary genera–
tion suffers from an essential nihilism: since the writer no longer shares
with his readers the assumption of a stable set of values, he has come,
out of this state of spiritual deprivation, to portray the life around him
as futile and meaningless. This current nihilism has its roots in the revolt
of the original Lost Generation after the First World War, whose theme
and prayer might very well have been that beautiful invocation of
Nothingness by the waiter in Hemingway's story, "A Clean Well-Lighted
Place"; and, accordingly, Aldridge sets the stage by a critical account
of the three novelists of the first Lost Generation-Hemingway, Fitz–
gerald and Dos Passos-who were the literary fathers of the present.
But the despair of the 'twenties was considerably different from what
we have now, for their revolt was a passion to the Lost Generation,
while that of the present (if we judge from their fiction) is so tame,
dispirited, or disorganized that it too has lost its meaning. Here and
there Aldridge writes as if he were berating a group of delinquent
writers, and naturally enough
this
is the aspect of the book that
Life
magazine singled out for an encomiastic article; but on the whole he
makes no bones about the fact that his accusation incriminates the
