LETTER
FROM HOME
275
of what purports to be reporting or description strikes a distempereld
note in my ear. Not the angry vituperation of political antagonists, per–
haps, but something more subtle. Yet the French are less, not more, at
peace with each other than we are. Even before the Algerian war it was
hard to imagine that they could be more hopelessly divided. The point,
I suspect, is that their differences are with each other. .ours are with
ourselves.
* *
*
By what delayed reflex or inner wound is one of our younger critics,
to take the example which happens to be closest to me, seized with such
nausea when he looks at his contemporaries? Such a feeling is less diffi–
cult to understand in the slick hack, with his jargon, his slogans, the
bright patter of allusion and pun which is not so much a shortcut to
thought as a substitute for it. The popular reviewer often operates within
a rhetoric which demeans his belief, his perceptions, his entire experience.
He simply has no genuine concern with h'is subject. But I cannot under–
stand it in Leslie Fiedler, whose essay on our "Unangry Young Men"
I have just read with consternation in the January issue of
Encounter.
What depresses me in this piece is not what Fiedler says about our
young: that their "devices are so dismal and unfruitful," and "not even
theirs"; that they "have no new voice and no new themes"; that they
are dull, docile, bored and unprotesting, "committed in advance to aca–
demic life or the salons of upper Bohemia or suburban peace." These
strictures are not new, nor am I questioning their foundation in fact.
If
these are the youth to whom Fiedler must teach literature, he deserves
our condolence and whatever comfort we can afford him in recalling
that we made similar complaints about our own classmates, after all,
since they too were "committed in advance" to the horrendous fates
abovementioned. The young have a way of taking care of themselves–
the problem is always the parents. Alas! The latter are presented as a
collection of guilt-ridden ex-rebels who, having had their eye on the
main chance all along, have now achieved it and can settle down to
"accommodation." But if the parents have nothing but contempt for
themselves, if they reduce all the complexity of their youthful experience
to
some sort of imbecilic "innocence" and all their aspirations to the
"savour of slow disenchantment," the achievement of "middle age itself"
and "places . . . cleared for comfortable living," then where is the
"living memory of a commitment" which would distinguish their dullness
from that of their children?
Surely, Leslie Fiedler, we were never as bad as all that. Our ex–
periences were in any case very different, whatever the surface similarities,
