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PARTISAN REVIEW
jectivity and culture have not made us capable of seeing around the
great literary platitudes of the twenties.
All the novels about the Second World War could never convince
an intelligent observer from Betelgeuse that such an event had ever oc–
curred; for they dearly represent the reaction of sensitive young men
to a conflict they had read about during their high school days; though,
to be sure, they have tricked it out with exotic names from the back
pages of an atlas, and have played out the trite events among coconut
palms. Indeed, a veteran of the twenties like Faulkner can write in 1954
the same anti-war book he might have produced in 1924, as if nothing
had happened since 1919-as, in the realm of the imagination, his and
ours, it had
not.
In the same way, no one has succeeded since the age of Sinclair
Lewis and Sherwood Anderson in seeing an actual American small town
or a living member of the Kiwanis club. The gross pathos of Anderson
or the journalistic thinness of Lewis is beside the point; for all of us,
the real facts of experience have been replaced by Winesburg, Ohio
and by Babbitt; myth or platitude, we have invented nothing to replace
them. Perhaps the most distressing of the stereotypes that have persisted
since the twenties
is
that of Sacco and Vanzetti-that is to say, the
political morality-play constructed out of the handful of facts about the
case anyone was able to know and remember past the passionate fiction
of
&ston, Gods of the Lightning,
etc. It is notorious how such recent
quite different affairs as the Hiss-Chambers case have been confused in
the minds of many decent people with the legendary event which reached
its climax in 1927. An age which by and large thought of itself as "realis–
tic" has taught us the odd lesson that not the real but the mythic
prompts our feelings and actions.
We have lived for thirty years in the world of someone else's dreams:
a compulsive world in which Lieutenant Henry forever declares his pri–
vate peace, Sherwood Anderson eternally walks out of his office, the
Artist forever leaves the world of Puritanism and Respectability for the
utopias of Bohemia or Expatriation. To be sure, we do not all relive
the legendary pattern, or even believe it; but we have been unable to
imagine our choices in any other image. It is strange and revealing how
little residue or legend the Marxist thirties have left; how little their
criticism of the twenties affected their image of themselves; how naked
we are of all but knowledge and irony among the monuments of the
period: those undraped figures in noble poses still declaring; "Be Free!
Be Lost! Have Fun! Make it New!"
Under the enduring spell of the twenties, we cannot convince our–
selves that the cliches against which we must fight for our imaginative
