270
PARTISAN REVIEW
book
The Sun Also Rises.
Malcolm Cowley almost made a living
out of being the spokesman of the Lost Generation.
Interviewer:
The Lost Generation idea seems at odds with the feverish
activity of youth that you have described .
Farrell:
The twenties were marked profoundly by postwar
disillusionment. Everything that Graham Wallas had said in his
Great Society
was demonstrated dramatically, tragically, mur–
derously in the First World War. It was the first terrible great
shock. Some of the best of the generation of the European
countries were killed in the war, and any man who had been in it
went through experiences that were considered to be unimagin–
able. The war had no sooner ended than, both in Europe and the
United States, there began a postwar reaction. Those generations
that grew into young manhood and young womanhood after the
war were distinctly different in attitude. It was not simply a
matter of a clash of generations, but a distinct difference, marked
by a feeling of instability in human relationships, instability in
marital relationships, a sense of instability in
life.
There was a
disillusionment with most of the values, including the religious
v'tIues, which men had cherished. This disillusionment began
during the war and was intensified by the Treaty of Versailles in
1919. One of the very influential books that nourished this feeling
was
The Economic Consequences of the Peace
by John Maynard
Keynes, in which Keynes argued with considerable plausibility
that the peace would not work, that the imposition of reparations
on Germany would result either in a reactionary Germany or a
Bolshevik Germany.
Interviewer:
How did that feeling display itself in American writing?
Farrell:
Among those who had been in the war there were many
young men from Harvard and other universities who wrote
books. There were a number of books dealing with the war
critically, almost in terms of exposure . This was also true in
Europe. A great novel,
Under Fire,
by Henry Barbuse, was
published in 1917; and one ofthe first Modern Library books was
written by a Hungarian, Andreas Latsko, called
Men at Ufzr,
describing the war in terms of horror rather than as the
achievement of glory, the occupation of heroes . John Dos Passos,
in one of his best books,
Three Soldiers,
was influenced by a young
liberal, a great spirit, a young man of tremendous promise-
