My Generation (48 page)

But throughout this bedraggled finale of his life, he was sustained by his intense concern for his daughter, Scottie, then at Vassar, and by his enduring devotion to Zelda; the letters included here to his wife and daughter are the
best in the book, and those to Scottie, taken together, form a small masterpiece. It is hard to imagine that more winning letters from a father to a child have been written by an American. They are hortatory to a degree—Fitzgerald's solicitude for her welfare, doubtless because of Zelda's continuing illness and his doubled responsibility, can only be described as ferocious—but they are also tender, allusive, witty, stern, playful, and, finally, informed by wisdom. One cannot read them without feeling a vast respect for this man who—sick and poor, feeling himself forgotten—could retain the splendid equanimity, the compassion and humor, the
love
that sounds through these pages like a heartbeat. Nor is it possible to scorn someone who in the midst of penury and raging sick fevers and neglect still had the boldness of spirit to try for “a big book.” He survives what he believed to be his failure triumphantly, a loving and courageous man.

Fitzgerald was not above pettiness, and his most destructive fault was perhaps his lack of self-esteem. But a quality of abiding charity was at the root of his character, and if a collection of letters has the power to illuminate the myth by suffusing it with the sense of a dominant virtue, then this collection succeeds, for it is everywhere filled with Fitzgerald's charity. In 1937, Fitzgerald's close friends of the Riviera days, Gerald and Sara Murphy, had suffered the death within the space of two years of two of their three young children. The letter which Fitzgerald wrote them upon the death of their second child seems appropriate to quote in its entirety, if only for the reason that it may be one of the most beautiful letters of its kind that we have.

Dearest Gerald and Sara:

The telegram came today and the whole afternoon was so sad with thoughts of you and the happy times we had once. Another link binding you to life is broken and with such insensate cruelty that it is hard to say which of the two blows was conceived with more malice. I can see the silence in which you hover now after this seven years of struggle and it would take words like Lincoln's in his letter to the mother who had lost four sons in the war to write you anything fitting at the moment. The sympathy you will get will be what you have had from each other already and for a long, long time you will be inconsolable.

But I can see another generation growing up around Honoria and an eventual peace somewhere, an occasional port of call as we all sail deathward.
Fate can't have any more arrows in its quiver for you that will wound like these. Who was it said that it was astounding how deepest griefs can change in time to a sort of joy? The golden bowl is broken indeed but it
was
golden; nothing can ever take those boys away from you now.

Scott

[
New York Review of Books
, November 28, 1963.]

F
or too long there has existed a misconception as to what comprises a literary generation. Most of the writers of the post–World War II era, linked only by the common fact that their work commenced sometime during the years after Hiroshima, have, I'm sure, wondered at one time or another why the notion of belonging to a “generation” has seemed so ill-fitting or embarrassing. Born in 1925, I have always considered Saul Bellow, born a decade earlier, as much a part of “my” generation as Philip Roth, who is eight years younger than I am. This comprises a time span of eighteen years, and I have remained uneasy with the idea—pleased enough to be associated with two writers I consider admirable but rather put off by its palpable lack of logic. It should not have bothered me (not that it has to any great degree), for as Malcolm Cowley points out, we have all been merely victims of an error of definition.

“A generation,” he writes accurately, “is no more a matter of dates than it is one of ideology. A new generation does not appear every thirty years….It appears when writers of the same age join in a common revolt against the fathers and when, in the process of adopting a new life style, they find their own models and spokesmen.”

In this case he is speaking of that gorgeously endowed group of creative spirits, born in the charmed, abbreviated space of years between 1894 and 1900, whose collective self-discovery as literary artists was so dazzling that it
remains an almost comic irony that we know them as the Lost Generation. Specifically, the representatives Cowley deals with are Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Dos Passos, Cummings, Thornton Wilder, Faulkner, Wolfe, and Hart Crane. (Edmund Wilson should have been included, and Cowley laments his absence.) Together they made up “the second flowering” of the title of Malcolm Cowley's book, which is at once a memoir, a series of biographical essays, a literary reexamination, a tribute, and a memorial to that extraordinary company of writers, about whom he wrote earlier in
Exile's Return
and elsewhere.

It is possible to approach a work like this with just a touch of resentment. We have read about the Lost Generation until our heads are waterlogged with its self-congratulation, its nostalgia. One broods over the gallons, the tuns, the tank cars of ink spilled out on the lives and work of these men—Hemingway's bibliography alone must be on its way to several volumes requiring sturdy bookends—and one thinks: Enough. Whatever the honesty, the wit, the grace, even the possible originality of the new offering, do we really want or need another account of Scott and Zelda's Riviera turn and the golden couple's tragic decline, or the way Hemingway's magnetic appeal was so often negated by his contemptible treatment of his friends, or Wolfe's hysterical self-concern and
Weltschmerz?

These are not just thrice-told tales; they seem by now to be so numbingly familiar as to be almost personal—tedious old gossip having to do with some fondly regarded but too often outrageous kinfolk. And if the work also affects a critical stance, do we look forward to still more commentary on
The Bear
or Cummings's love lyrics? Or another desolating inventory of the metaphors in
Gatsby
? In
A Second Flowering
all of these matters are touched upon, yet it is testimony to Cowley's gifts as both a critic and a literary chronicler that the angle of vision seems new; that is, not only are his insights into these writers' works almost consistently arresting but so are his portraits of the men themselves.

Of course it helped to be present, and it was Cowley's great fortune to have often been very much on the scene; he was an exact contemporary. “I knew them all and some have been my friends over the years,” he writes. A lesser commentator might have made a terrible botch of it just because of this propinquity and friendship, giving us one of those familiar works of strained observation, at once fawning and self-flattering, where the subject is really victimized as if by a distorting lens held scant inches from the nose.

Several of the writers under consideration—notably Hemingway and Fitzgerald—have already undergone such mistreatment. But Cowley's affection for these writers, his honesty and devotion to what they stood for, are too deep and inward-dwelling—this feeling pervades every page of the book—for him to sentimentalize them or falsify their image. That he admires them all needs no saying—it is a sign of his critical integrity that one can search in vain to find him in a posture of adulation; even the magnificent achievement of Faulkner, whom Cowley regards as the greatest of the group, is an achievement that he feels (perhaps in a form of antiphonal response to Faulkner's own remark that his generation would be judged upon the “splendor of our failures”) falls short of the very highest level and one that cannot properly be set beside the work of such giants as Dostoevsky and Dickens.

One of the finest parts of Cowley's book, incidentally, is the now famous pioneering essay on Faulkner, published in 1945 as the introduction to the Viking
Portable Faulkner
, which is a lucid jewel of exegesis. It opened up Faulkner's world for me when I was a very young man struggling to read a difficult writer who was then out of print, little known, and less understood. Nearly a quarter of a century later, during which time Faulkner has been smothered in scholarship, the essay is still fresh and brilliant.

Cowley can be as rough and relentless as an old millwheel in his judgments, whether it be upon some odious personal quality, such as Hemingway's unregenerate and infantile competitiveness, or on a matter of literature. Either way, the critic cuts close to the bone. In college I read
U.S.A
. with the awe of a man discovering a new faith. Yet one passage in Cowley is the most succinctly stated I have ever read in explanation of the sad bankruptcy of Dos Passos's later fiction: “He broke another rule that seems to have been followed by great novelists. They can regard their characters with love or hate or anything between, but cannot regard them with tired aversion. They can treat events as tragic, comic, farcical, pathetic, or almost anything but consistently repulsive.”

Cowley's criticism of
The Sun Also Rises
, while considerably more generous in its overall feeling, has the same kind of tough abrasiveness. But again, although he can be rueful about the failures and lapses of the writers—scolding Cummings for his frequent triviality, Wolfe about his “mania for bigness”—the prevailing tone is not that of a dismantler of reputations, a type often so prompt to scuttle into sight with his little toolkit at the end of
an era, but one of generosity and preoccupying concern, as if Cowley knew he was an overseer—a kind of curator of some of the loveliest talents, however self-damaged and flawed, that America ever produced.

It is clear that Cowley still takes delight in having known them, and one can appreciate his delight. To recollect one's own modest familiarity with the ancestors is irresistible. Being of another time and place, I had no opportunity to know them—though on a couple of very brief occasions I saw two of the gentlemen plain. (I will not invade the privacy of Mr. Wilder, with whom I am acquainted, and who is a noble survivor.) By the time I came to the pleasure of reading, in the forties, Fitzgerald and Hart Crane and Wolfe—my earliest passion—had met untimely deaths.

Later, in New York in the early fifties, I met E. E. Cummings for a weird, bewitched hour or so. It was for tea at the tiny apartment of a pleasant old lady in Patchin Place, where Cummings also lived. Let Cowley describe him as he also appeared to me: “He had large, well-shaped features, carved rather than molded, eyes set wide apart, often with a glint of mischief in them….In later years, when he had lost most of the hair and the rest was clipped off, he looked more like a bare-skulled Buddhist monk.” Although the poet was considerably older than the Cummings of Cowley's reminiscence when I met him, and his tempo must have been slower, his manner more subdued, Cowley's further description corresponds nicely to my impression during that little encounter. What a talker!

“He was the most brilliant monologuist I have known,” writes Cowley; “what he poured forth was a mixture of cynical remarks, puns, hyperboles, outrageous metaphors, inconsequence, and tough-guy talk spoken from the corner of his wide, expressive mouth: pure Cummings, as if he were rehearsing something that would afterward appear in print.”

My only other contact with the Lost Generation was when I had lunch with Faulkner a single time, again in New York. Faulkner was then writing in an office at Random House. What I remember most vividly about this gentle, soft-speaking, somber-eyed little man with the drooping gray mustache is not his conversation, which was rambling and various (he talked lovingly and a lot about horses—one reason being that he was preparing to write an article on the Kentucky Derby for
Holiday
—and about Truman Capote, whose talent he genuinely admired but whose personality left him rather unnerved), but a beguiling item of literary marginalia. I had gotten up to go to the men's room, and when I returned Faulkner had vanished.
“He said to tell you he'd see you again,” said Robert Linscott, the Random House editor who had been dining with us. “Bill sometimes gets that strange look in his eye and that means he can't sit still another minute. He's just got to go back to the office and work.”

What Linscott then told me supported an observation that Cowley makes—that is, how generally unremarked or indeed unknown is the influence that certain members of the Lost Generation had upon each other. Cowley singles out the effect of Hemingway's work on Faulkner—an unlikely connection until one rereads Faulkner's short masterpiece, “Red Leaves,” that grim and marvelous tale set in the autumnal light of early-nineteenth-century Mississippi, when the Indians owned black slaves and practiced human sacrifice.

Linscott related how Faulkner had once told him about the great difficulty he had in getting down the feel and atmosphere of the story to his satisfaction. It was not the story itself; the painful part had to do with the dialogue, a grappling with Anglicized Choctaw which thoroughly buffaloed Faulkner, since he had no idea how to render imaginary Indian talk into English. Finally, according to Linscott, Faulkner solved the problem while rereading a book he admired very much,
Death in the Afternoon
. The stilted, formalized Castilian-into-English which Hemingway had contrived seemed to Faulkner's ear to have just the right eccentric intonation for his Indians, and so his dialogue became a grateful though individualized borrowing—as anyone who compares the two works will readily see.

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.