548
PARTISAN REVIEW
success was largely due to Gertrude 's help because she read his
manuscripts and encouraged him. In return he proofread the whole
of her
The Making of Americans
as it went through the press. They
did each other professional favors and were very close.
Trilling:
When you and Gertrude Stein met in 1926 did you feel that
you were meeting each other as fellow Americans, as fellow expatri–
ates?
Thomson:
Americans living in Paris never though t of themselves as
expatriates. Expatriate was a dirty word used by the home folks who
couldn't live abroad.
If
they were too rich to live abroad, or too
middle class through having to earn money for wife and children by
teaching in a college or something, they called us expatriates. We
thought we were just Americans living in another country, in the
same way that people lived in Italy or China or Turkey or India
without being called expatriates. Expatriate was only applied to the
Paris group. And, by the way, the term "the lost generation" is a
mistranslation into English.
It
was
une generation perdue.
A man
who manufactured things down in the country where Gertrude lived
in the summer said to her after the war that the French boys who had
spent four years in the Army came out a little too old to be
apprenticed to a trade, a
metier,
and so, he said, they were a lost
generation-"ils sont tous une generation perdue;" that is to say,
perdue
for the trade or profession. Now if he had meant that they
were in any way spiritually or psychologically lost, the French
would have been "une generation
de
perdus," in the plural. But
these were simply a generation lost to shoemaking or whatever. They
had skipped four years. When Gertrude Stein said to Hemingway
and some young people one evening, quoting her friend down in the
country, "Oh, you are all a lost generation," she knew perfectly well
what lost generation meant in French, but she was also perfectly
capable of stimulating them by the possible double meaning in
English. Yet at the bottom of her mind she considered them a lost
generation in the French sense, that they had fought a war and then
had come to live abroad so that really about all they could do was
journalism. They were lost to scholarship or research or really
advanced literary work.
Trilling:
I 've never heard that exp lained. It's terribly interesting. But
to
go back: when you and Gertrude Stein first got
to
be friends , you
didn't think of yourselves as expatriates but as Americans living in
France.
Thomson:
As I remarked in a book of memoirs I wrote, I went to
