REPORT ON THE LOST GENERATION
BARDIN, JOHN FRANKLIN
Report on the Lost Generation NOTHING. By Henry Green. Vildng Press, 250 pp. $3.00. Reviewed by JOHN FRANKLIN BARDIN NOTHING could be more serious lhan Nothing. Beneath the facade of this...
...NOVEL with its double plot cuts two ways: the older generation, by its emphasis on hedonism and its animal faith in the good life of the senses, has a better time — in both senses of the phrase — than its children...
...The two sets of couples—the parents, John Pomfret and Jane Weatherby, and the children, Philip Weatherby and Mary Pomfret— make a dual plot...
...The word cannot be translated into English, has meanings for the Japanese which combine Japanese culture, the nation, the Emperor, the people, racial pride, the sun god, and Japanese intrinsic superiority over all other races...
...All the critical essays included and most of the poetry sing bombastically the tedious tune that we have long been accustomed to as the major characteristic of Romanticism gone bad: the hymn of praise and joy to the liberation of the "soul...
...203 pp...
...Having said all this, I can only point out Nothing's unique quality: it is a true comic novel about a happy marriage...
...THE PASTORAL...
...In a sense, Nothing is the most James ian of Mr...
...Green's novels, especially in the use of dialogue as gesture and symbol...
...not even Henry James' The Awkward Age, to which Nothing could hardly be more faithful, is as exhaustively enacted...
...KOKUTAI NO HONGI...
...Read makes a poor qualitative estimate and an oversimplification when he bifurcates the nature of man into personality and character, and extends the dichotorny to art, analogizing Romanticism and personality, and Classicism and character...
...The conflict between the extremes in Classic and Romantic tempers is one which will continue...
...4.00...
...nor do we wish it otherwise, for from the union of thesis and antithesis rises synthesis...
...The saturation of the synthesis, of course, is determined by the respective strength of its components, and there is our problem: what is the proper mixture...
...Thte book is an essentia aid to an understanding of the major ideological problem we face m Japan today...
...Thomas' single lyric stands out amidst the general turgidity of much of the other poetry of histrionic anarchism, Scottish nationalism, and stage Irish themes, and tlie collection could well have stood a larger representation of his work...
...Harvard Ifniversity Press...
...I wish it were possible to say as much for the writers represented in this collection, who supposedly have got their inspiration from looking long into the chasm of the Id...
...As I read this book, I heard John and Jane-—the shriek of their giddy laughter is their essence...
...200 pp...
...Read is presumably inveighing...
...To term character in the individual, and by implication Classicism in art, as an "armor against experience," rather than the shaping and assimilation of the raw material of experience into significant form, which they are, is to be as dogmatic as the authoritarianism against which Mr...
...The comic situation in Nothing is that of a man and woman, once illicit lovers in a gayer, more carefree time and now parents in a time of austerity, who under the guise of arranging the marriage of their children contrive to thwart it while deciding finally to marry each other...
...Green has his parents play at being adolescent and his youths attempt the authority of adulthood to reveal home truths...
...Where symbolism exists, it is only as a reminder of the universal value of the troth...
...Philip and Mary, the children, make up in fearful carefulness for their lack of, a sure morality...
...But the translation is nevertheless an excellent job, and to be highly commended to any who will understand the present revival of racism in MacArthur's Japan...
...In addition to the longer essays and the poetry are short evaluations of Romanticism in the current cinema, novel, and short story, and a selection of three stories by Paul Vincent Carroll, Antoniu White, and Michael Sayers, which, despite the dissimilarity of their themes, are uniformly maudlin...
...This is not to say...
...The Japanese ideologists asserted that the Japanese are a god-like race, intrinsically different from all other nan...
...Gods in Asia SOUTHEAST ASIA: CROSSROADS OF RELIGIONS...
...It is not enough merely to identify Romanticism as freedom and Classicism as restraint: we should have by now matured beyond taking seriously this sort of formula...
...Beneath the facade of this "frivolous novel of manners" is a satirical exposition of the courting rituals of our civilization...
...243 pp...
...It is clearer than ever before after reading this novel that the revolution in morals that was so widely notorious in the Twenties replaced an outworn but complete sexual ethos with a rather hectic and exhibitionistic courting ritual...
...And H is ladeed significant tbjwt many of the passages from this book of racial propaganda sound like-the slogans now used by the Japan Cosjsnwist Party...
...Perhaps she stands as the true bride that neither 1 father nor son discover...
...John and Jane substitute their own feckless passion for each other for their son's and daughter's chaste mutual affection...
...It is something of a pleasure, then, to come across the single exception, Herbert Reed's piece, which, if nothing else, is well and soberly written...
...John and Jane court their lives away, unable to resist the temptation to woo each other that presents itself when their children announce their intention to wed...
...Certainly, it is in Penelope's web as much as her mother's that John is ultimately entangled—"a man about the house is what the child needs...
...However, it is necessary in this alchemy first to determine the nature of each of the ingredients involved, antecedent to any quantitative judgment...
...Edited by Henry Treece and Stejan Schimanski...
...Read and the other essayists in this collection are flaying a dead horse...
...Where earlier writers used the device ot royalty masquerading as peasantry trhd vice-versa to point up lofty sentiments, Mr...
...Penelope, Jane's six year old daughter, whom John pretends to marry and who develops certain hysterical symptoms as a consequence, is described in beautiful and piously allusive language...
...2.50...
...Kokutai No Nongl has a long introduction by Robert K. Hall, an authority on education in Japan under the Occupation...
...The comedy of manners is in our time one of the novel's more viable forms...
...The appendix included post-war documents by Jhe Emperor and others which indicate that the racist Kokutai of Japan has not changed...
...The technical investigation of their media carried on by the Classicists of our time, such people as Picasso, Schoenberg, and Joyce, is anyT. L. Berger is librarian of she Rand School of Social Science...
...Who in the democratic cultures of the 20th century western world is imposing a tyrannical "Classicism" on the artist...
...And because these researches have disclosed something of the nature of organic, rather than imposed structure, it is now possible for the artist not only to say things a new way, but also to say things that have never been said before...
...The pastoral convention which Henry Green uses to expose the irony of social interrelationships requires a "high" and a "low...
...Nothing seems to indicate that "good" and ''bid form" lead to disaster and that the people who disapprove...
...This volume is a translation of an official text-book and guide used during the late 1930's by the militarist government of Japan in the indoctrination of Japan's youth...
...their own lives are disrupted by the economic and personal needs of the middle-aged "children...
...It is a clear exposition of the virulent racism in Japan...
...Both Mary and Philip are so uncertain of their place in the scheme that at one point they fear that they are actually brother and sister...
...After leafing through A New Romantic Anthology, one can appreciate the plight of Cyril Connolly's Horizon, which recently suspended publication because, among other economic reasons, of the current dearth of good British writing...
...He writes of the religions of Thailand, Indonesia, and Annam with clarity and understanding...
...Translated by John O. Gauntlett...
...The difference today is that unlike previous eras, the economic and social structure of southeast Asia has been basically disturbed, with the consequence that the West will influence Southeast Asia far more deeply than did Islam or the earlier invading creeds...
...The symbolism in the novel is subordinated to the scenic content...
...Reviewed by T. L. BERGER THE CONTRIBUTORS to this volume...
...The good, old days when life was one, big party had a joy to them that the cautious prudery of the inheritors will never know...
...British writers to a man, make out a rather poor case for the recrudescence of Romanticism in contemporary English letters...
...After indicating that the basic animistic practices and beliefs of these peoples have not been overly altered by adopting Buddhist or Islamic conceptions, his final chapter outlines that postwar period and the problem of westernization, concludes that the Asian elite group are converting Asia to westernism...
...Here are some familiar names: Stephen Spender, Alex Comfort, Hugh McDiarmid, Edwin Muir, and Dylan Thomas...
...Carroll's story, a tale of the "sensitive," effeminate lad of a family of rough seafarers who falls in love with the simple but resourceful wife of his mariner brother, should be a cinch for Hollywood, ending, as It does, with the hero's head on the heroine's breast, which a C. B. DcMille storm rages outside on the rock-ribbed Irish coast...
...The constant interplay of dialogue presents the characters in their full ambiguity: their many-sided natures are displayed by the Protean facets of their idiom...
...And when they ask John and Jane to quiet their suspicions, they get an ambiguous answer: their parents' long affair was confused enough that Philip and Mary's marriage might really be incestuous, although probably not—but they can not be sure...
...Henry Green sees the youth of the 'Twenties, who are the erstwhile parents of the 'Forties, as emotionally retarded wastrels whose lives were confounded by the conspicuous sexual freedom of their decade...
...Landon is a former missionary who lived in Thailand and has had two decades in the Orient...
...The novel of manners, though it passes as funny because we are accustomed to ridicule our own gestures, is actually a social scalpel that can make the incision in depth that Gide demanded of naturalism...
...aflequate explanation...
...Hitler claimed that the Germans were a Master race...
...Reviewed by RICHARD DEVERALL BOTH THESE BOOKS will interest those especially concerned about Southeast Asia...
...John Franklin Bardin is the author of several novels...
...Yet John and Jane, with their continual stress on doing things the right way—serving a dinner, having a party, being gay over the comic mishap of a friend—place a disproportionate value on "good form...
...4.00...
...Modern Romantics A NEW ROMANTIC ANTHOLOGY...
...THE VERSE, which for the most part is undistinguished, is organized into sections bearing the names of the subnationalities of the contributors—Eng-' lish, Irish, Scottish, and Welsh...
...Technically, this novel is a triumph of the scenic art...
...thing but "blind compulsion to an external and arbitrary ideal": rather, it is an attempt to extend, by the use of scientific method, the effectiveness of the various means of artistic expression...
...Japanese racism was intrinsically different from Hitler's...
...Nothing is another, perhaps the Anal, report on the lost generation...
...however, that because Read's essay is one-eyed in the kingdom of the blind, his conclusions are altogether acceptable...
...In this topsy-turvy world, the parents cling to the irresponsibility they knew in the'1' youth and the children, having fought a war and being engaged in the struggle to survive in an impoverished if moral Britain, are left to assume the responsibility of their elders...
...art likely to end up without any "sense of form" at all...
...By Kenneth P. Langdon...
...Unfortunately, the word "kokutai' is translated as "national unity" without Rtchaad Deverell Is AFL ropresatstettve la India...
...Grey Walls Press...
...Philip is obsessed with a desire to know his family and Mary idealizes her father in much the way a mother / would her son...
...University of Chicago Press...
...The children, already among the planners of a new Socialized Britain, become the parental authority...
Vol. 33 • April 1950 • No. 16
