The Young Generation of U. S. Intellectuals

...But the attack on liberalism was not—could not be—merely political...

...Its view of the world was seen to be an undignified, indeed dangerous, Anschauung for the leading nation in the West to entertain...

...Quite apart from a revolution in personal habits, the 1920s produced galaxy of fresh young writers—Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Dos Passos, Faulkner, Wolfe—all in all, the brightest period of American letters since Thoreau and Melville...

...They had learned from Henry James and Jane Austen that there could be meaning and dignity, even excitement, in the individual's movements through a world with whose basic premises and standards he was...

...If we want to understand this generation, we have to understand how the cold war—and I use the term here not in the narrowly political sense but to describe a moral climate, a condition of culture—affected people who never had any personal involvement with radicalism, who were neither a prey to the illusions nor a beneficiary of the seriousness that together gave the intellectual life of the '30s its special force...

...The new style was not very clearly defined, but there was no doubt that its shape and color had to express the conviction that a life dedicated to ideas and art was possible icithin "bourgeois ' society...

...Nor do the novels written by the young generation bear much trace of direct contact with life...

...nor have they produced a This Side of Paradise or a Farewell to Arms in which they might imagine themselves defined for all time, in which they could see themselves dramatized, and from which they could derive a sense of their own significance, of their peculiar mission in history...

...revisionism came out for the more subtle, skeptical temper with its inhibiting awareness of human limitations and its "tragic sense of life...

...This fear of experience (which readily translates into a fear of taking risks and a concomitant terror of making a fool of oneself) no doubt has some relation to the fact that the prime virtue of a period of cold war and atomic stalemate must necessarily be prudence...

...In a literal sense, yes, but we must be careful to recognize that the main impulse behind it was an effort to redress an imbalance of opinion, not an attempt to replace liberalism with a conservative ideology—though, of course, polemical excess did occasionally give rise to something that looked like a conservative ideology and often even mistook itself for one...

...The liberal mind was said to conceive of reality, both social and physical, as infinitely manipulable, as wholly subject to human power...

...there were the historians and economists who blasted away at Marxism...

...the celebration of maturity in the postwar years also constituted an assault on the intellectual life of the '30s itself...

...For this was a style based on the assumption that the real adventure of existence was to be found not in radical politics or in Bohemia but in the "moral life" of the individual, within the framework of his efforts to do his duty and assume his responsibilities in a world of adults...

...And something very wonderful may come about when a whole generation in its late thirties breaks loose and decides to take a swim in the Plaza fountain in the middle of the night...

...it was probably the happiest, most enthusiastic farewell to innocence in the history of literature...

...The ideological struggle with Communism in this country was in large part conducted not by direct assault on Communism as such—that was too easy—but by an intensive campaign against the pieties of American liberalism which, for reasons we all know, had become the last refuge of the illusions of the '30s...

...The world is seen at a distant remove, commented on quietly and wisely, never struggled with or confronted full in the face...

...to the young generation, American society seemed on the whole a reasonably decent environment for the intellectual...

...A great many of them married early...

...From the point of view of a socialist this is "conformity.' but the young people who were attempting to mold their lives according to the new style did not conceive of themselves as conforming to the world around them...

...everything must be understood before it gets out of control...

...They have found no spokesman to voice their protests or to proclaim their aspirations...

...it is the kind that comes of being a spectator of life rather than a participant...

...It is a literature of an unearned maturity, a maturity almost wholly divorced from experience, an expression, really, of the fear of experience—a maturity that has become a means of protecting one's neat little existence from the disruptive incursions of experience...

...Appropriately enough for a non-generation, the young The decade after World War E was, in more ways than one, the era of "flaming youth...

...associate editor of Commentary, his literary articles have appeared in the New Yorker, New Republic and Midstream...

...Similarly, the ten years after the Great Crash of 1929 produced thousands of young men and women dedicated to social renovation—some Socialists, « few Communists, many more who manned the barricades of the New Deal...

...In the process, America's image of its own society was radically transformed...

...it is beginning to feel cheated of its youth (that, I suspect, is the meaning of the recent revival of interest in the '20s...

...D. H. Lawrence taught them that the most important, most exacting, most challenging pursuit of life was the "hard business of human relationship," of friendship and love, while Lawrence the enemy of industrial society could make no impression on them whatever...

...Since this is a generation that willed itself from childhood directly into adulthood, it still has its adolescence to go through ¦—for a man can never skip adolescence, he can only postpone it...

...Very much aware of how complicated and difficult all problems were, very much alive to the danger of ideologies and enthusiasms and passions, very much persuaded that la verite reste dans les nuances, they struck a perfect attitude of the civilized adult: poised, sober, judicious, prudent...

...The truth is that this is a restless generation, and as it grows older it gets more and more restless...

...In any case, all the disparate forays against liberalism employed the same tactic: They all set out to show that liberalism was guilty of a failure to take a sufficiently complicated view of reality...

...They have written a great many poems and a fair number of novels...

...people who make it up can first of all be distinguished by a negative circumstance: None of them came to maturity during the Depression...

...America had grown to a position of great responsibility, and the attitudes of Americans must be made commensurate with the country's new status...

...As befitted responsible adults, there was nothing playful or frisky about these young people...

...they are beautifully disciplined and shaped, yet one feels that the discipline has been imposed only on very weak impulses...

...they cultivated an interest in food, clothes, furniture, manners—these being elements of the "richness" of life that the generation of the '30s had deprived itself of...

...Was this a conservative reaction...

...What's going on in the minds of the five million Americans who have graduated college since Hiroshima...

...most of them made firm and decisive commitments to careers of a fairly modest kind, such as teaching...

...Norman Podhoretz, 27, was educated at Columbia, Cambridge and the Jewish Union Theological Seminary...

...This series seeks answers...

...The mistake of the '30s had been to suppose that society could ever be more than a bad bargain with the absolute...

...The decade thai followed World War II produced no such writers...

...if not quite at peace, then at least not at war...

...At any rate, to the young people educated in the late '40s and early '50s it seemed that a war was being fought in American culture between two styles of asserting one's seriousness as an intellectual: the old style of "alienation," represented by commitment to the ideal of Revolution and an apartment in Greenwich Village on the one hand, and, on the other, the new style of "maturity...

...It is also related, I think, to the powerful skepticism bred by the cold war itself...

...But because this defense of maturity had, however indirectly, a political purpose behind it, because it was carried on as a polemic, and because it often involved covert self-castigation, it acquired a passionate urgency rather inappropriate to a literature whose point was to emphasize the virtues of age and pessimism...

...In such a world there was very little one could know, very little one could do...

...there was a rash of articles and books which put American popular culture into a new perspective and argued that the attitude of liberals toward the movies, television, and even the comic strips was a compound of misdirected middlebrow snobbism and vaguely Stalinoid notions about the function of culture...

...But it was not only liberalism that was implicated here...

...The poems are extremely well-bred, with a surface as impeccable as the poets' taste in clothes and a manner as composed as their behavior at the sober little parties they attend...

...It was full of excitement and a sense of wonder at the discovery of lost treasures...

...The young generation has not been unproductive...

...they discovered that ""conformity' did not necessarily mean dullness and unthinking conventionality, that, indeed, there was great beauty, profound significance, in a man's struggle to achieve freedom through submission to conditions...

...Intellectuals What makes it especially difficult to characterize the younger generation of intellectuals in this country is that they have not been articulate about themselves...

...From Hawthorne...

...Quite the contrary—they were trying to realize its finest and deepest possibilities...

...In general, it might be said that the critique of liberalism added up to a defense of wisdom as opposed to rational speculation, to a defense of the qualities of maturity against the values of youth—for at bottom contemporary liberalism was represented as a conglomeration of attitudes suitable only to the naive, the inexperienced, the callow, the rash: in short, the immature...

...But the paradox is that despite the early marriages and the devotion to career, the composure has been too easily acquired...

...They are full of properly complex ideas about God, Man, Society, Life, Death, Sex...

...Today's young people, on the other hand, seem remarkably apolitical...

...there were, finally, and perhaps most important, the literary critics who implicitly (the New Critics) and explicitly (Lionel Trilling) brought the liberal picture of human nature into utter disrepute...

...Indeed, so elusive is this generation that one hardly knows where to look for it, one hardly thinks of it as a generation at all...

...It also means that the crucial public experience to which they were subjected was the aftermath of World War II and the whole complicated series of events that came to be known as the cold war...

...Donne, from the Augustinian theologians who became extremely popular during this period, from Hobbes and Burke (who supplanted locke and Mill as the dominant political philosophers...

...And the fact that its members have not developed a sufficiently strong feeling of identification with one another to emerge as a clearly delineated and self-conscious group only increases the suspicion that perhaps there is no such thing among us as "the younger generation"—perhaps there is only an assortment of discrete individuals with no collective identity: a "non-generation," as it were...

...Indeed, the literature that has been produced in our time by people in their twenties is one of the most remarkable phenomena in cultural history: It is a literature written by Olympians who got to the top of the mountain not by inching their way up the slippery faces of the rocks and arriving bruised and torn and bloody, but who were safely deposited there by helicopter and who know nothing about mountains except that the air on the peaks is rarefied...

...But it would be a mistake to accept the sobriety and composure of the young generation at face value...

...With an eye on the liberal emphasis on the rights of man, revisionism pointed to the correlative duties and responsibilities of man...

...one was living in a world of severely limited possibilities, balanced precariously on the edge of an apocalypse...

...there were the sociologists who tore apart cliche after liberal cliche about the nature of American life...

...That means that they were all born between, say, 1925 and 1935, and that they now range in age from 21 to 31...

...their very presence and bearing announced that they were serious men and women with no time for fooling around, burdened with a sense of mortality, reconciled to the sad fact of human limitation...

...Hopkins...

...The younger generation grew up in what might be called an atmosphere of intellectual revisionism...

...And get down to business the young generation did...

...The trick, then, was to stop carping at life like a petulant adolescent, to recognize that your own experience as an American in the 20th century was no less valid and interesting than the experience of a 19th-century Englishman, to begin regarding the life around you with respect for its complexity and its drama, and to get down to the business of adult living as quickly as possible...

...There is, then, a certain justice in regarding the young generation as a non-generation, a collection of people who, for all their apparent command of themselves, for all the dispatch with which they have taken their places in society, for all their sophistication, for all their "maturity," know nothing, stand for nothing, believe in nothing...

...The social theorists joined in with demonstrations of how simplistic the liberal conception of society was...

...Complexity became a key word in the discourse of the period, it became one of those words that exercises a thaumaturgic hold on the imagination of the young...

...Everything that happens to these young people seems immediately to be milked of its "meaning" before it has a chance to make an impact...

...it was a love-song to the shades of the prison house and a rapturous welcome to the years that bring the philosophic mind...