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autonomy are not patriotism, honor, God and country-but their mirror
opposites which the twenties substituted for them. The world which the
twenties invented in desperation and we inherit in smugness is a world
in which we can no longer breathe. Their innocence and their assurance
poison us; these are the bitter grapes that have set our teeth on edge.
And yet the twenties, which seem in one sense our Cities of the
Plain, seem in another (or perhaps it is the same sense-for in all in–
nocence they created for us the notion of Gomorrah as Utopia) our lost
Eden. Indeed, it is as the Talmudist on Eden that Mr. Hoffman seems
most depressing (out of such joy, such wisdom!) and the lost paradise
of the weary scholar is inevitably the world without Talmuds. But it is
not the "freshness" of the period alone which intrigues us-or even its
mythopoeic power; it is perhaps above all the
unity
of the times, real or
legendary, that drives us to despair.
For if the men of the twenties were lost (as they never grew tired
of asserting) they were lost together, lonely together: a single "we" of
artists, intellectuals and emanicipated spirits exiled from the single
"they" of Rotarians, Y.M.C.A. Secretaries and Generals. In the realm
of technique, the single phrase "make it new" presided over an alliance
ranging from Mencken to Eliot, Sandburg to Stevens, James Branch
Cabell to Arturo Giovannitti. The fall to division was yet to come:
Paleface against Redskin, Whitmanian against Jamesian, neo-Catholic
against Marxist; and the rites for Sacco and Vanzetti were the last pre–
lapsarian celebration, a prelude to the end of unity as well as innocence.
It is an awareness of all this which has impelled us recently on
various levels to seek to come to terms with our lost Eden, to be done
with it at last. But sentimental rescues of Fitzgerald or Wyndham Lewis,
or gallant last stands for Ezra Pound are beside the point-we cannot
thrive on reconstructed truculence or repentance; these are the equiva–
lents in the world of literature of popular evocations of booze and sex
in the rumble seat. We must get past the barrier of the final stereotype:
not only the myth of the Lost Generation but that of the Morning
After, too-our last inheritance from the dying twenties, the image of
Babylon Revisited.
Probably the only way to exploit the real comedy of the situation
is to realize quite clearly that we are not dealing with an "actual" past,
but with a tricky relationship between a literary image of the twenties
and a present in part invented by that period, in part defining itself in
opposition to it. Fiction seems the only device complicated enough to do
justice to our plight; and in
The Disenchanted)
for instance, Budd Schul–
berg seemed within striking distance of the real point; but he had finally
too blunt and earnest a mind to distil from the relationship between his
