BOOKS
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period-not about writers who have helped make our minds and who
may even be great!" the author answers me, unruffled in the midst of
his evidence, "Oh, can't I though!" And, God bless him, he can.
Mr. Hoffman's is not, I fear, a particularly lively or original mind;
but it cannot, I am sure, be as dull as it seems to me. On the other hand,
my distress cannot be merely a matter of the incongruity of our tempers.
No, I am convinced that he is, in large part, the victim of his subject–
or more precisely, of a difficulty inherent in our connection with the
twenties.
Certainly, our relationship to that time is a difficult and degrading
one; and what is most difficult and degrading about it is our awareness
of that fact. How hard it is to be the sober and hardworking children of
grasshoppers-and to
know
it! To know that we were born middle-aged,
older than our forbears knew how to become; and to feel at once our
own indignity and theirs: the indignity of never having been quite young,
and the equal and opposite one of being forever barred from growing
decently old. We have our revenges, of course: nasty and superior essays
puncturing the dated poses of the survivors of the twenties
(The New
Yorker
on Hemingway or
Life
on Faulkner), bibliographies, Ph.D.
theses, collections of critical essays. These are, after all, coals of fire
heaped on our own heads. No matter often we assure ourselves that the
twenties overestimated the worth of their own achievement (and they
did, they
did!)
and that we underestimate the value of our own, we
must still face up to the fact that they had the nerve proper to their
excesses and we have only the caution proper to ours.
In
the eternal comedy of fathers and sons, we have been left only
revolt against which to revolt, only non-conformism to which to refuse
to conform. The only real blasphemy still possible to us is to write a
history of blasphemies between the Great War and the Great Depression
in which we prove those blasphemies merely manifestations of a deeper
piety than ours-and this, I should be happy to believe, is the secret
motive of Mr. Hoffman's book.
What irks our age and drives us to the more shameful excesses of
"scholarship" ("After such experiences," Mr. Hoffman asks, "what
forms of ... defining ... the human condition?" Answer: the glossary,
the lexicon, the footnote!) is that we feel ourselves trapped among the
cliches of anti-cliche that we have inherited from the great stereotype–
mongers of the twenties. We should be ashamed to be as nakedly
"square" as Fitzgerald, as unawarely sentimental as Hemingway or
Faulkner, as prone to maudlin self-pity as Ezra Pound, as ignorant or
as absurdly self-educated as any of these. Yet our irony, sensibility, ob-
