The Sad Young Men
Rod W. Horton and Herbert W. Edwards
1 No aspect of life in the Twenties has been more commented upon and nsationally romanticized than the so-called Revolt of the Younger Generation. The slightest mention of the decade brings nostalgic recollections to the middle-aged and curious questionings by the young: memories of the deliciously illicit thrill of the first visit to a speakeasy, of the brave denunciation of Puritan morality, and of the fashionable experimentations in amour in the parked dan on a country road; questions about the naughty, jazzy parties, the flask-toting "sheik," and the moral and stylistic vagaries of the "flapper" and the "drug-store cowboy." "Were young people really so wild?" prent-day students ask their parents and teachers. "Was there really a Younger Generation problem?" The answers to such inquiries must of necessity be "yes" and "no"--"Yes" becau the business of growing up is always accompanied by a Younger Generation Problem; "no" becau what emed so wild, irresponsible, and immoral in social behavior at the time can now be en in perspective as being something considerably less nsational than the degenerauon of our jazzmad youth.
2 Actually, the revolt of the young people was a logical outcome of conditions in the age: First of all, i
t must be remembered that the rebellion was not confined to the Unit- ed States, but affected the entire Western world as a result of the aftermath of the first rious war in a century. Second, in the United States it was reluctantly realized by some- subconsciously if not openly -- that our country was no longer isolated in either politics or tradition and that we had reached an international stature that would forever prevent us from retreating behind the artificial walls of a provincial morality or the geographical protection of our two bordering oceans.
3 The rejection of Victorian gentility was, in any ca, inevitable. The booming of American industry, with its gigantic, roaring factories, its corporate impersonality, and its largescale aggressiveness, no longer left any room for the code of polite behavior and well-bred morality fashioned in a quieter and less competitive age. War or no war, as the generations pasd, it became increasingly difficult for our young people to accept standards of behavior that bore no relationship to the bustling business medium in which they were expected to battle for success. The war acted merely as a catalytic agent in this breakdown of the Victorian social structure, and by precipitating our young people into a pattern of mass murder it relead their inhibited violent energies which, after the shooting was over, were turned in both Europe and America to the destruction of an obsolescent nineteenth-century society.
4 Thus in a changing world youth was faced with the challenge of bringing our mores up to date. But at the same time it was tempted, in America at least, to escape its responsibilities and retreat behind an air of naughty alcoholic sophistication and a po of Bohemian immorality. The faddishness , the wild spending of money on transitory pleasures and momentary novelties , the hectic air of gaiety, the experimentation in nsation -- x, drugs, alcohol, perversions -- were all part of the pattern of escape, an escape made possible by a general prosperity and a post-war fatigue with politics,
economic restrictions, and international responsibilities. Prohibition afforded the young the additional opportunity of making their pleasures illicit , and the much-publicized orgies and defiant manifestoes of the intellectuals crowding into Greenwich Village gave them a pattern and a philosophic defen for their escapism. And like most escapist sprees, this one lasted until the money ran out, until the crash of the world economic structure at the end of the decade called the party to a halt and forced the revelers to sober up and face the problems of the new age.
5 The rebellion started with World War I. The prolonged stalemate of 1915 -- 1916, the increasing insolence of Germany toward the United States, and our official reluctance to declare our status as a belligerent were intolerable to many of our idealistic citizens, and with typical American adventurousness enhanced somewhat by the strenuous jingoism of Theodore Roovelt, our young
men began to enlist under foreign flags. In the words of Joe Williams, in John Dos Passos' U. S. A., they "wanted to get into the fun before the whole thing turned belly up." For military rvice, in
1916-- 1917, was still a romantic occupation. The young men of college age in 1917 knew nothing of modern warfare. The strife of 1861 --1865 had popularly become, in motion picture and story, a magnolia-scented soap opera, while the one hundred-days' fracas with Spain in 1898 had dissolved into a one-sided victory at Manila and a cinematic charge up San Juan Hill. Furthermore, there were enough high school asmbly orators proclaiming the character-forming force of the strenuous life to convince more than enough otherwi nsible boys that rvice in the European conflict would be of great personal value, in addition to being idealistic and exciting. Accordingly, they began to join the various armies in increasing numbers, the "intellectuals" in the ambulance corps, others in the infantry, merchant marine, or wherever el they could find a place. Tho who were reluctant to rve in a foreign army talked excitedly about Preparedness, occasionally considered joining the National Guard, and rushed to enlist when we finally did enter the conflict. So tremendous was the storming of recruitment centers that harasd rgeants actually pleaded with volunteers to "go home and wait for the draft," but since no lf-respecting person wanted to suffer the disgrace of being drafted, the enlistment craze continued unabated.
6 Naturally, the spirit of carnival and the enthusiasm for high military adventure were soon dissipated once the eager young men had received a good taste of twentieth- century warfare. To their lasting glory, they fought with distinction, but it was a much altered group of soldiers who returned from the battlefields in 1919. Especially was this true of the college contingent, who idealism had led them to enlist early and who had generally en a considerable amount of action. To them, it was bitter to return to a home town virtually untouched by the conflict, where citizens still talked with the naive Fourth-of-duly bombast they themlves had been guilty of two or three years earlier. It was even more bitter to find that their old jobs had been taken by the stay-at-homes, that business was suffering a recession that prevented the opening up of new jobs, and that veterans were considered problem children and less desirable than non-veterans for whatever business opportunities that did exist. Their very homes were often uncomfortable to them; they had outgrown town and families and had developed a sudden bewildering world-weariness which neither they nor their relatives could
understand. Their energies had been whipped up and their naivete destroyed by the war and now, in sleepy Gopher Prairies all over the country, they were being asked to curb tho energies and resume the po of lf-deceiving Victorian innocence that they now felt to be as outmoded as the notion that their fighting had "made the world safe for democracy." And, as if home town conditions w
ere not enough, the returning veteran also had to face the sodden, Napoleonic cynicism of Versailles, the hypocritical
do-goodism of Prohibition, and the smug patriotism of the war profiteers. Something in the tension-ridden youth of America had to "give" and, after a short period of bitter rentment, it "gave" in the form of a complete overthrow of genteel standards of behavior.
7 Greenwich Village t the pattern. Since the Seven-ties a dwelling place for artists and writers who ttled there becau living was cheap, the village had long enjoyed a dubious reputation for Bohemianism and eccentricity. It had also harbored enough major writers, especially in the decade before World War I, to support its claim to being the intellectual center of the nation. After the war, it was only natural that hopeful young writers, their minds and pens inflamed against war, Babbittry, and "Puritanical" gentility , ,should flock to the traditional artistic center (where living was still cheap in 1919) to pour out their new-found creative strength, to tear down the old world, to flout the morality of their grandfathers, and to give all to art, love, and nsation.
8 Soon they found their imitators among the non-intellectuals. As it became more and more fashionable throughout the country for young persons to defy the law and the conventions and to ad
d their own little matchsticks to the conflagration of "flaming youth", it was Greenwich Village that fanned the flames. "Bohemian" living became a fad. Each town had its "fast" t which prided itlf on its unconventionality , although in reality this lf-conscious unconventionality was rapidly becoming a standard feature of the country club class -- and its less affluent imitators --throughout the nation. Before long the movement had be-come officially recognized by the pulpit (which denounced it), by the movies and magazines (which made it attractively naughty while pretending to denounce it), and by advertising (which obliquely encouraged it by 'lling everything from cigarettes to automobiles with the implied promi that their owners would be rendered xually irresistible). Younger brothers and sisters of the war generation, who had been playing with marbles and dolls during the battles of Belleau Wood and Chateau-Thierry, and who had suffered no real disillusionment or n of loss, now began to imitate the manners of their elders and play with the toys of vulgar rebellion. Their parents were shocked, but before long they found themlves and their friends adopting the new gaiety. By the middle of the decade, the "wild party" had become as commonplace a factor in American life as the flapper, the Model T, or the Dutch Colonial home in Floral Heights.
9 Meanwhile, the true intellectuals were far from flattered. What they had wanted was an America m
ore nsitive to art and culture, less avid for material gain, and less susceptible to standardization. Instead, their ideas had been generally ignored, while their behavior had contributed to that standardization by furnishing a pattern of Bohemianism that had become as conventionalized as a Rotary luncheon. As a result,
their dissatisfaction with their native country, already acute upon their return from the
war, now became even more intolerable. Flaming diatribes poured from their pens
denouncing the materialism and what they considered to be the cultural boobery of our society. An important book rather grandioly entitled Civilization in the United States, written by "thirty intellectuals" under the editorship of J. Harold Stearns, was the
rallying point of nsitive persons disgusted with America. The burden of the volume
was that the best minds in the country were being ignored, that art was unappreciated,
and that big business had corrupted everything. Journalism was a mere adjunct to
moneymaking, politics were corrupt and filled with incompetents and crooks, and
American family life so devoted to making money and keeping up with the Jones that it had become joyless, patterned, hypocritical, and xually inadequate. The defects
would disappear if only creative art were allowed to show the way to better things, but
since the country was blind and deaf to everything save the glint and ring of the dollar,
there was little remedy for the nsitive mind but to emigrate to Europe where "they do things better." By the time Civilization in the United States was published (1921), most of its contributors had taken their own advice and were Wing abroad, and many more of the artistic and would-be artistic had followed suit.
10 It was in their defiant, but generally short-lived, European expatriation that our
leading writers of the Twenties learned to think of themlves, in the words of Gertrude Stein, as the "lost generation". In no n a movement in itlf, the "lost generation"
attitude nevertheless acted as a common denominator of the writing of the times. The
war and the cynical power politics of Versailles had convinced the young men and
women that spirituality was dead; they felt as stunned as John Andrews, the defeated
aesthete In Dos Passos' Three Soldiers, as rootless as Hemingway's wandering
alcoholics in The Sun Also Ris. Besides Stein, Dos Passos, and Hemingway, there
were Lewis Mumford, Ezra Pound, Sherwood Anderson, Matthew Jophson, d. Harold Stearns, T. S. Eliot, E. E. Cumminss, Malcolm Cowley, and many other novelists,
dramatists, poets, and critics who tried to find their souls in the Antibes and on the Left Bank, who directed sad and bitter blasts at their native land and who, almost to a man,
drifted back within a few years out of sheer homesickness, to take up residence on
coastal islands and in New England farmhous and to produce works ripened by the
tempering of an older, more sophisticated society.
11 For actually the "lost generation" was never lost. It was shocked, uprooted for a
time, bitter, critical, rebellious, iconoclastic, experimental, often absurd, more often
misdirected- but never "lost." A decade that produced, in addition to the writers listed
above, such fisures as Eugene O'Neill, Edna St. Vincent Millay, F. Scott Fitzrald,
William Faulkner, Sinclair Lewis, Stephen Vincent Benét, Hart Crane, Thomas Wolfe, and innumerableothers could never be written off as sterile ,even by itlf in a moment
of lf-pity. The intellectuals of the Twenties, the "sad young men," as F. Scot Fitzrald called them, curd their luck but didn't die; escaped but voluntarily returned; flayed the Babbitts but loved their country, and in so doing gave the nation the Iiveliest, freshest,
most stimulating writing in its literary experience.
•二十年代社会生活的各个方面中，被人们评论得最多、渲染得最厉害的，莫过于青年一代的叛逆之行了。只要有只言片语提到那个时期，就会勾起中年人怀旧的回忆和青年人好奇的提问。中年人
会回忆起第一次光顾非法酒店时的那种既高兴又不安的违法犯罪的刺激感，回忆起对清教徒式的道德规范的勇猛抨击，回忆起停在乡间小路上的小轿车里颠鸾倒凤的时髦爱情试验方式；青年人则会问起有关那时的一些纵情狂欢的爵士舞会，问起那成天背着酒葫芦、勾引得女人团团转的“美男子”，问起那些“时髦少女”和“闲荡牛仔”的奇装异服和古怪行为等等的情况。“那时的青年果真这样狂放不羁吗?”
今天的青年学生们不禁好奇地向他们的师长问起这样的问题。“那时真的有过青年一代的问题吗?”对这类问题的回答必然只能是既“对”又“不对”——说“对，，是因为人的成长过程中一贯就存在着所谓青年一代的问题；说“不对”是因为在当时的社会看来似乎是那么狂野。那么不负责任，那么不讲道德的行为，若是用今天的正确眼光去看的话，却远远没有今天的一些迷恋爵士乐的狂荡青年的堕落行为那么耸人听闻。
实际上，青年一代的叛逆行为是当时的时代条件的必然结果。首先，值得记住的是，这种叛逆行为并不局限于美国，而是作为百年之中第一次惨烈的战争的后遗症影响到整个西方世界。其次，在美国，有一些人已经很不情愿地认识到——如果不是明明白白地认识到，至少是下意识地认识到——无论在政治方面还是在传统方面，我们的国家已不再是与世隔绝的了；我们所取得的国际地位使我们永远也不能再退缩到狭隘道德规范的人造围墙之后，或是躲在相邻的两大洋的地理保护之中了。
在当时的美国，摒弃维多利亚式的温文尔雅无论如何都已经是无可避免的了。美国工业的飞速发展及其所带来的庞大的、机器轰鸣的工厂的出现，社会化大生产的非人格性，以及争强好胜意识的空前高涨，使得在较为平静而少竞争的年代里所形成的温文尔雅的礼貌行为和谦谦忍让的道德风范完全没有半点栖身之地。不论是否发生战争，随着时代的变化．要我们的年轻一代接受与他们必须在其中拼搏求胜的这个喧嚣的商业化社会格格不入的行为准则已经变得越来越难了。战争只不过起了一种催化剂的作用，加速了维多利亚式社会结构的崩溃。战争把年轻一代一下子推向一种大规模的屠杀战场，从
而使他们体内潜藏的压抑已久的狂暴力量得以释放出来，待到战争一结束，这些被释放出来的狂暴力量便在欧洲和美国掉转矛头，去摧毁那日渐衰朽的十九世纪的社会了。
这样一来，在一个千变万化的世界中，青年一代便面临着使我们的道德习惯与时代合拍这一挑战。而与此同时，青年人。——至少美国的青年人——又表现出这样一种倾向：他们试图逃避自己的责任。沉溺于一种老于世故、以酒自娱的生活作风之中，装出一副波希米亚式的放荡不羁的样子。追求时尚，为了短暂的快乐和一时的新奇而大肆挥霍，纵情地狂欢，寻求各种各样的感官刺激——性行为，吸毒，酗酒以及各种各样的堕落行为——这些都是他们逃避责任的表现形式，是一种由社会的普遍繁荣及战后人们对于政治、经济限制和国际义务所产生的厌烦情绪所造成的逃避方式。禁酒法令使青年人有了更多的机会寻求违禁取乐的刺激。文人墨客纷纷涌人格林威治村，他们那些被大肆渲染的放纵行为和挑战性言论也为青年人的逃避主义提供了一种表现形式和一套哲学辩护辞。这种逃避主义者的纵情狂欢，像大多数逃避主义者的纵情狂欢一样，一直要持续到狂欢者囊空如洗为止。到二十年代末世界经济结构总崩溃之时，这种狂欢宴会便告停歇，那些寻欢作乐者也只得从酣醉中清醒过来，去面对新时代的各种难题了。
青年人的叛逆行为是随着第一次世界大战而开始的。1915—1916年间那旷日持久的僵持局面。德国对美国所表现出的越来越傲慢无礼的态度，以及我国政府迟迟不愿宣布参战的作法，都使我们理想主义的公民觉得无法忍受。我们的青年，本身已怀着典型的美国式冒险精神，又多少受到西奥多·罗斯福的
狂热沙文主义思想的怂恿，于是便开始在外国旗帜下入伍参战。用约翰·多斯·帕索斯的《美利坚合众国》中的人物乔·威廉斯的话说，他们“是想趁着战争还没结束就参加到这场游戏中去”。因为在1916—1917年间，入伍当兵还是一种富于浪漫色彩的职业。在1917年正处于上大学年龄的
