But these blurred yet memorable impressions—notes of an old-time fan—are mere filigree compared to the actuality of the books themselves, which penetrated the consciousness of so many young men of my time with the weight and poignancy of birth or death, or first love, or any other sacred and terrible event. With Wolfe alone I felt I had been captured by a demon, made absolutely a prisoner by this irresistible torrent of language. It was a revelation, for at eighteen I had no idea that words themselves—this tumbling riot of dithyrambs and yawping apostrophes and bardic cries—had the power to throw open the portals of perception, so that one could actually begin to feel and taste and smell the very texture of existence.
I realize now the naïveté of so many of Wolfe's attitudes and insights, his intellectual virginity, his parochial and boyish heart, his inability to objectivize experience and thus create a believable ambience outside the narrow range of self—all of these drastically reduce his importance as a writer with a serious claim on an adult mind. However, some passages—including the majestic death of old Gant in Of Time and the River—are of such heartrending power and radiant beauty that for these alone he should be read, and for them he would certainly retain a place in American literature.
Cowley makes somewhat the same point in his section on Wolfe in A Second Flowering, which is the most clear-headed brief analysis of Wolfe and his work that I have seen in print. If others of such passages as I just mentioned “had each been published separately,” Cowley writes, “Wolfe might have gained a different reputation, not as an epic poet in prose, but as the author of short novels and portraits, little masterpieces of sympathy and penetration.” But then Cowley doubts that he would have cared for that kind of fame. Mania for bigness again.
His portrait of Wolfe, while unsparing in its details about all that made the man such a trial to himself and others—his paranoia, his nearly fatal lack of self-criticism, his selfishness and grandiosity, all the appurtenances of a six-foot-seven-inch child writing in his solipsistic hell—is nonetheless enormously sympathetic and filled with respect. “He had always dreamed of becoming a hero,” Cowley writes, “and that is how he impresses us now: perhaps not as a hero of the literary art on a level with Faulkner and Hemingway and Fitzgerald, but as Homo Scribens and Vir Scribentissimus, a tragic hero of the act of writing.”
And so the other fathers also quickly took possession. I was soon reading Gatsby and In Our Time and The Sound and the Fury with the same devouring pleasure that I had read Wolfe. Perhaps I sound too idolatrous. It would be misleading to give the impression that the Lost Generation had exclusive hold on our attention—we who were coming out of college in the forties and early fifties. Recalling my own licentious eclecticism, I realize I was reading everything, from Aeschylus to John Donne to Flaubert to Proust to Raymond Chandler. Yet I think it has to be conceded that rarely has such a group of literary figures had the impact that these writers have had upon their immediate descendants and successors.
This is not to say that at least a good handful of the writers and poets who followed them have failed to be artists in their own right—several of them masterly ones—and who if they genuflect before the fathers do so with pride as well as gratitude. It is only that the influence of the older men—themselves influenced by Eliot and Joyce and Whitman and Mark Twain—has been at once broad and profound to an exceptional degree, so that while we have thankfully moved out of their shadow we have not passed out of their presence.
It is impossible to conceive, for example, that anyone born during the twenties or afterward who was crazy enough to embrace literature as a vocation was not at one time or another under the spell of Hemingway or Faulkner or Fitzgerald, to mention only the most richly endowed members of the generation. The final question is: Aside from the sharply individuated gifts that each possessed, what did they share as writers that may at least partly explain their common genius and its continuing hold on us?
Cowley's speculations are worth our attention. He starts with such considerations—superficial at first glance until one perceives their appropriateness for that epoch—as the fact that all of the members of the group except for Fitzgerald were WASPs, that most were from the Midwest or the South, and that all sprang from the middle class. “They all had a Protestant ethic drilled into them, even if they were Catholics like Fitzgerald.” Cowley also notes, in a passage which is an oblique commentary on the squalor we have produced in our schools, that every one of these men was the recipient of a sound, old-fashioned early education which placed a premium on the classics, English literature, syntax, and Latin grammar while ignoring social studies, civics, baton twirling, and other depravities.
Except for Dos Passos and Hemingway, whose friendship was destroyed because of the Spanish Civil War, they were generally either unconcerned or sophomoric in regard to politics. They had all had the experience of World War I, a “nice war,” in Gertrude Stein's phrase, which had left most of the men physically intact, restless and filled with reservoirs of unexpected energy. It was a war, however, that was foul and ugly enough to unite them all against “big words and noble sentiments.”
Ultimately more important, it seems to me, is Cowley's somewhat paradoxical but compelling notion that although each of these writers was an individualist, committed heart and mind to solitary vision, they were all bound together subconsciously by a shared morality which viewed the husbanding of one's talent as the highest possible goal. Thus, he argues, the garish myth has been deceptive. Many of them indeed had a hunger for self-destruction and were spendthrift livers, but when it came to their talent they were passionate conservationists. Measured in terms of their refusal to allow their splendid gifts to become swallowed up in the vortex of their frenzied, foolish, alcoholic, and often desperate lives, they were brave and moral men. In this sense, aside from the varied marvels of their best work, the writers of the Lost Generation provide us with a lesson in the art of self-realization.
“The good writers regarded themselves as an elite,” Cowley writes. “They were an elite not by birth or money or education, not even by acclaim—though they would have it later—but rather by such inner qualities as energy, independence, rigor, an original way of combining words (a style, a ‘voice’) and utter commitment to a dream.” Within the persuasive context of a book so free of idealization, so detached and balanced as A Second Flowering, such a statement seems enviable, exemplary, and true. Only two things matter: talent and language. “Their dream,” Cowley concludes, “was…of being the lords of language.”
As for Malcolm Cowley himself, he is seventy-five this year and rightly considers himself one of the last members of a glorious team whose exploits and defeats it was his privilege to help explain. “Now most of the team is gone,” he writes, “and the survivors are left with the sense of having plodded with others to the tip of a long sandspit where they stand exposed, surrounded by water, waiting for the tide to come in.” It should be of consolation to him that it is unthinkable that this beautiful, honest book will not be read as an indispensable companion piece to the works of Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner, Wolfe, and all the rest as long as they are read and have bearing upon men's common experience. Ave atque vale!
[New York Times Book Review, May 6, 1973.]
A Literary Forefather
He is my most beloved literary forefather, but it's not just my affection for Adventures of Huckleberry Finn that makes me feel close to Mark Twain. Our other affinities continually surprise me. Although a century, minus a decade, separates our birth dates, we had curiously similar upbringings. Mark Twain's border South and my Tidewater Virginia shared the burden of a sullen racism, even though the functional slavery of Hannibal, Missouri, had been in my case replaced by the bitter pseudoslavery of Jim Crow; both left imprints on a white boy's soul. Plainly it affected Mark Twain that the Clemens family had been slaveholders; I was haunted (and am still amazed) by the reality that my grandmother, an old lady still alive in the mid-1930s, had owned slaves as
a little girl. Our early surroundings possessed a surface sweetness and innocence—under which lay a turmoil we were pleased to expose—and we both grew up in villages on the banks of great rivers that dominated our lives.
The muddy James was an essential presence in my boyhood (“It was a monstrous big river down there,” says Huck of the Mississippi as he and Jim drift southward, “sometimes a mile and a half wide”; my James River was five miles wide), and the edgy relationship I had with black children was identical to that of Mark Twain. “All the negroes were friends of ours, and with those of our own age we were in effect comrades,” he wrote in his autobiography. “We were comrades, and yet not comrades; color and condition interposed a subtle line which both parties were conscious of and which rendered complete fusion impossible.” This near paralysis of affection (which has such a modern resonance) remained as true for me in my Tidewater village as it had been for Mark Twain in Hannibal, and worked on both of us its psychological mischief. In our later lives Mark Twain and I chose to dwell among Connecticut Yankees (during years interrupted by sojourns as Innocents Abroad), and it was there, bedeviled by our pasts, that we wrote books about slavery called Huckleberry Finn and The Confessions of Nat Turner. Both of these novels gained indisputable success and a multitude of readers but, because they dealt with America's most profound dilemma—its racial anguish—in ways that were idiosyncratic and upsetting, and because they contained many ambiguities, they invited the wrath of critics, black and white, in controversies that have persisted to this day.
As for Huckleberry Finn, it's quite likely that if Mark Twain had merely used “slave” instead of the word “nigger,” which appears more than two hundred times during the course of the narrative, many of those who have recently attacked the book on the grounds of racism would have been at least partially appeased. But “nigger,” our most powerful secular blasphemy—now that virtually all crude sexual expressions have become part of public speech, melded into the monotonous jawing of stage, screen, and cable TV—still has a scary force. Huck Finn's use of it, especially in these touchy years, has driven some people around the bend. Although a twelve-year-old Missourian would have had scant familiarity, in the 1840s, with the word “slave”—a term that was generally confined to governmental proclamations, religious discussions, and legal documents—Huck's innocent vernacular usage appears to be one of the reasons for the panic that recently impelled the Cathedral School of Washington, D.C., of all esteemed institutions, to remove Huckleberry Finn from its tenth-grade curriculum. Only the nature of the school surprises; over the past decades the book has been banished from library shelves innumerable times.
Even more incoherent is the activity of a black educator from Fairfax, Virginia, named John H. Wallace. With some success, Wallace has campaigned to protect youth from the bad word by insisting that Huckleberry Finn be taken away from school libraries, and has published what has to be an all-time curiosity in the annals of bowdlerization: a version of the text from which every use of the word “nigger” has been expunged. The crusade of Wallace, who has described his nemesis as “the most grotesque example of racist trash ever written,” might be considered merely a spectacular eccentricity if it weren't a fairly menacing example of the animus that has always coalesced around the novel. Not that the book is beyond criticism. It has been charged that Huckleberry Finn reveals the mind of a writer with equivocal feelings about race, and signs to that effect may certainly be found. The wonder is that his upbringing and experience (including a brief stint in the Confederate army) should have left Mark Twain so little tainted with bigotry. Although most of its millions of readers, including many black people, have found no racism in the book (Ralph Ellison wrote admiringly of the author's grasp of the tormented complexity of slavery, his awareness of Jim's essential humanity), Huckleberry Finn has never really struggled up out of a continuous vortex of discord, and probably never will as long as its enchanting central figures, with their confused and incalculable feelings for each other, remain symbols of our own racial confusion.
As I reflect on the kinship I have always felt with Mark Twain, I am reminded that no American rivers are so bound up with the history of slavery as are the Mississippi and the James. As a boy I had learned that our own slavery began on the James, in 1619; I sometimes had vivid fantasies in which I would see, far out in the channel, that first small clumsy Dutch galleon beating its way upriver to Jamestown, with its cargo of miserable black people in chains. For me the river meant stifling bondage. For Mark Twain, writing after the Civil War, the Mississippi, and the uproarious, extravagant voyage he launched upon it, meant freedom—not merely freedom for Jim but a nation's freedom from the primal ache that had racked its soul ever since Jamestown. It's a measure of Huckleberry Finn’s greatness, but also perhaps of the insufficiency of the relief it has given us from pain, that it still receives such savage attacks. The pain continues. Let the attacks continue, too. They will only prove the durability of a work that has withstood the complaints of boors and puritans, and will surely weather the blows of this grim and dogmatic time.
[New Yorker, June 26–July 3, 1995. The text was abbreviated by The New Yorker; the full version published here is taken from the surviving manuscript at Duke University.]
Friends and Contemporaries
My Generation
Let me try to define my generation—rather narrowly, but in a way similar to Fitzgerald's—as those of us who approached our majority during World War II, and whose attitudes were shaped by the spirit of that time and by our common initiation into the world by that momentous event. For a slightly earlier generation the common initiation was the Spanish Civil War; for us it somehow simultaneously ended and began when Harry Truman announced the destruction of Hiroshima. I wish I could say that in 1945—at the end of our war—I did anything so blissfully adventurous as to steal a locomotive as had Scott Fitzgerald. That distant war in Europe had had its own terrible ferocity but mainly for Europeans; as Fitzgerald says, it left America and Americans generally intact. By contrast our war, despite a nervous overlay of the usual frivolity (do you recall the Rosie the Riveter or Slap the Jap or the aching erotic schmaltz that suffused those “Back Home for Keeps” ads?), was brutally businesslike and anti-romantic, a hard-boiled matter of stamping out a lot of very real and nasty totalitarianism in order to get along with the business of the American Way of Life, whatever that is. Our generation was not only not intact, it had been in many places cut to pieces. The class just ahead of me in college was virtually wiped out. Beautiful fellows who had won basketball championships and Phi Beta Kappa keys died like ants in the Normandy invasion. Others only slightly older than I—like myself young Marine Corps platoon leaders, primest cannon fodder of the Pacific war—stormed ashore at Tarawa and Iwo Jima and met ugly and horrible deaths on the hot coral sands.
I was lucky and saw no battle, but I had the wits scared out of me more times than I could count, and so by the time the bomb dropped on Hiroshima, thus circumventing my future plans (I was on my way: “You can figure that four out of five of you will get your asses shot off,” I can recall some colonel telling us, as he embroidered dreamily about the coming invasion of the Japanese mainland), an enormous sense of relief stole over my spirit, along with a kind of dull weariness that others of that period have recalled and which, to a certain offshoot of my generation, later came to be characterized as “beat.” I disclaim any literary link with this splinter group but certainly the “beat” sensation was all too real, and though it may have sent Kerouac off on the road in search of kicks, to others of us it was a call to quiet pursuits: study and the square rewards of family and rather gloomy stocktaking. I think most of us were in a way subtly traumatized, which is why we didn't steal any locomotives or pull off any of the wild capers that so richly strew the chronicles of Fitzgerald's Jazz Age. We were traumatized not only by what we had been through and by the almost unimaginable presence of the bomb, but by the realization that the entire mess was n
ot finished after all: there was now the Cold War to face, and its clammy presence oozed into our nights and days. When at last the Korean War arrived, some short five years later (it was this writer's duty to serve his country in the Marines in that mean conflict, too), the cosmos seemed so unhinged as to be nearly insupportable. Surely by that time—unlike Fitzgerald's coevals, “born to power and intense nationalism”—we were the most mistrustful of power and the least nationalistic of any generation that America has produced. And just as surely, whatever its defects may have been, it has been this generation's interminable experience with ruthless power and the loony fanaticism of the military mind that has by and large caused it to lend the most passionate support to the struggle to end war everywhere. We have that at least in our favor.
I think that the best of my generation, those in their late thirties or early forties, have reversed the customary rules of the game and have grown more radical as they have gotten older—a disconcerting but healthy sign. To be sure, there are many youngish old fogies around and even the most illustrious of these, William Buckley, is blessed by a puzzling, recondite, but undeniable charm, almost as if beneath that patrician exterior an egalitarian was signaling to get out. We seem to be gradually shaking loose of our trauma (which for some of us, by the way, also includes the remembered effect of the Depression) and one has only to flourish the picture of an embattled Norman Mailer on the steps of the Pentagon to put down the claim that political activism is the purview of the very young. Perhaps the act of participating in one horrendous war, or two, has allowed most of us to sympathize with young people and be bitterly troubled by much of the shit they have to put up with. Having been pushed around by bully boys and sub-cretins, by commissioned shoe clerks and salauds of every stripe and gauge, we tend toward more than a twinge of empathy at the sight of youth struggling with the managerial beast, military, secular, or scholastic.
My Generation: Collected Nonfiction Page 49