Farewell to the Fallen Angel

...But it seems to me that the present generation is chiefly busy in trying to find ways to express a vision of life which is certainly far more concerned with tending one's own garden than with Utopia, an attitude perhaps more in the spirit of Melville than of Whitman...

...The "left" generation knew sharp divisions within itself, and I am not unaware of the fundamental differences between the anti-Stalinists and those who have only reluctantly and after Khrushchev given up their bright hopes for Soviet Russia in favor of Mao's China...

...And one major source of the shadows was the ambivalent attitude of much of the Left toward the Soviet Union...

...For a generation long accustomed to making pamphlets and polemics out of every shift of misunderstanding of a splinter group existing nowhere if not on paper, it is understandably difficult to think of the younger generation as anything but silent and conformist...

...Now it is obvious that many of the "reborn" members of the liberal generation are as sincerely anti-Communist as they were sincerely anti-Fascist before...

...Thus I don't believe that most of the adjectives which have been used to describe the younger generation—and they range from "beat" to "silent" to "conformist" to "worried"—are as revealing about the young as they are about those who use such terms...

...The "left" generation of the Thirties seems for many rather •faceless and forgotten, and very few of the young would define themselves or their views in terms of that period which was so haunted by the sense of building a new world for all of us...

...It is a generation groping for a kind of tragic affirmation of man based on what he is, with all his sins and shortcomings...

...This feeling of a stalemate engenders in the older generation of which I am speaking a kind of Nestorian looking backward to the heroic days when the "issues" were larger than life...

...And this turning away, which has been variously interpreted as silence or weariness or unearned maturity, is in part, at least, a kind of anarchistic reaction to a way of looking at life that seems stifling in its unreality...

...But I believe that the young have revolted in their own manner, or perhaps I should say that in countries where they are free to do so they have simply turned away...

...Certainly it is not the younger generation that regards this with anxiety or feels somehow cheated because the "enemy" (as defined in the romances of chivalry produced by socialist realism) has turned into a flock of sheep...

...The admission that the old social and political categories and the mythological characters who people them form an interesting but somewhat irrelevant hagiology does not seem to me an impasse but a beginning of the way out of the dark wood of abstraction where our intellectuals have wandered so long...

...It is conservative if this means a tempered pessimism about the possibilities of good in man, and especially man in power, or a belief that the past has something to teach us besides a paradigm of Marxist Holy Writ...

...Surely we have suffered long enough from that hate-filled image of the fallen angel, yearning to be restored to heaven at any price...

...on the other, it was reduced to a series of intellectual problems, with all the thinness and bloodlessness that ensues when the critical intelligence is not held in check by knowledge of or even interest in human nature except for what it might ideally become...

...To have been, and in fact to be, anti-Fascist was pure and clean and fine, but there was something a bit ignoble in taking an equally uncompromising attitude toward Communism...

...But the process was not so direct for many of those who had fought the battle of the pamphlets in the Thirties...

...Such feelings belong to those who have tilted at windmills for years, and they, in fact, are the Don Quixotes of our time...

...Certainly this is not a conscious and articulated feeling, except with a few...

...And when the cold war came along with the progressive disclosures of what life behind the Iron Curtain was really like, it seemed to them only natural that they should apply what they had learned about Fascism to the Soviet Union...

...The Young Generation—6 Farewell to the Fallen Angel By John Hunt Author, "Generations of Men" Rather than try to describe what the younger generation is or is not, I prefer to express a few of the views which at least some members of my generation hold toward the "left" generation which preceded us...

...I would agree that the younger generation has been silent if its output is measured in terms of pamphlets, of protests, of movements and causes as quickly splintered as joined...

...namely, that in spite of square dancing in the Catskills, dust-bowl ballads in Greenwich Village, rallies and petitions and fellowship festivals and factional fighting and constantly reiterated concern for ''the people," the generation of the Thirties rarely broke through to the human realities that lay behind the categories, the concepts and the abstractions they labored over so tirelessly...

...The most obvious of these effects are a kind of listlessness about life outside the loyal and trusted clique, a retreat into the academic or the merely clever, a disbelief in the urgency of present evils, and a general feeling that, given the present inadequacy of the categories, life has grown too confused to permit one to tell who the enemy really is or to take direct action against him—in short, that an impasse has been reached where one can do no more than sit and wait for the next all-encompassing system to be born...

...Perhaps it is just that after the first real love, or hate, of a lifetime, all the others seem pretty much the same...

...Those who had missed the Thirties felt a little guilty when they remembered these things because they were privileged to take them for granted without paying the price...

...Yet it seems to me that this is largely a case of self-projection, and that the tiredness which they attribute to the younger generation is actually their own...

...The ambivalence toward the USSR and the somewhat aggressive and professional humanitarianism of which I shall speak further on belong chiefly to the latter, but the general dehumanization, the King Midas touch which turns everything into the fool's gold of abstraction, belongs peculiarly to both...

...In lieu of detailed comment, I would simply like to describe very generally what I take to be a significant fact about the generation, and a central fact against which the younger generation has reacted...

...I cannot, of course, claim to speak for the younger generation, nor would I wish to...

...Not having gone through an adolescent affair with the Soviet demon lover in the Thirties, the young were not ecstatic when the USSR came into the war...

...For a generation which lived transfixed for so long by the dream of a few remaking the many, it must seem that this generation takes intellectuals rather lightly, which in itself is a special kind of sin...

...Yet turning away was not really easy...

...The young were aware of all that many of the generation of the Thirties had done to awaken people to the real nature of Fascism, and were grateful for the part their elders had played in making the peaceful revolution under Roosevelt...

...Jazz, a concern with individual human relationships, immersion in the techniques of art rather than in its propaganda value, an interest in tradition rather than in "making it new," even the exploration of the greatest taboos of all, "bourgeois" life and religion, are far more appealing and immediate and, in a sense, non-conformist than the tired programs for man and society that echo from the Thirties...

...It is even possible that these voices from the past might have succeeded in selling the younger generation the notion that it was tired and silent and the rest of it if it had not been for the shadows that kept lengthening behind their cliches...

...They produced labored and increasingly sophisticated arguments to demonstrate that it was not so simple a matter as it appeared (this was their version of complexity...

...The result was a kind of oversimplification that seemed intolerable for many of the younger generation who came to social awareness during or just after the war...

...Nevertheless, I believe that much of what the younger generation is writing and the way they write it, as well as the way they live and think, can best be understood if seen in the light of a deep reaction toward those who succeeded in making themselves the •spokesmen of a decade which seems more remote to many ;than the '20s...

...It is indeed sober and dull if radicalism and bohemianism are some kind of mystical index of intelligence and creativity...

...No one who had missed the Depression and Spain could ever make up for the loss, in spite of the War and the Bomb and then the Cold War...

...One further qualification...

...All of us have heard enough of the collective voice for longer than we care to think...

...This penchant for issues and "problems" produces several striking effects among true believers when it becomes apparent even to them that such classifications are not an adequate description of reality...

...It also causes them to regard the members of the younger generation with a strange kind of pity because they cannot, under such conditions, be the heroes they once were...

...This is not the occasion to go into detail about the kind of activities the generation of the Thirties interested itself in, to gauge the depth of the flood of materials they produced, or to judge the issues with which they were so earnestly engaged...

...On the one hand, life was construed as a warm haze of indiscriminate solidarity in the face of various highly emotionalized issues...

...And even though the older generation often spoke of the good old days in a vocabulary that in its way seemed as quaint as a Civil War dispatch, the young were somehow ashamed that they were such a tired and beat generation that they could not respond...

...Nor is there any real necessity to do so, for it is certain that by no stretch of the imagination •could they be considered a silent generation, and they are still noticeably fond of writing at length about themselves, •their clubs and their quarrels, as thought they had gone directly from an exuberant adolescence to a somewhat arch senility and were now a generation of professional old-timers, telling over and over about those fabled times when they were in their prime and there were fighting issues all over the place...

...And if "complexity" is one of their favorite words, I believe it is used in answer to those who would make man invisible by passionately obscuring his differences or by reducing his nature and his works to a mere function of society...

...But for many of the younger generation who by and large are not carrying any emotional baggage from the Thirties, it seems equally obvious that many of these people underwent a strange kind of brainwashing which made it impossible for them to apply the same standards to the Soviet Union as to Nazi Germany and, later, to Hungary as to Spain...

...But I have -felt for some time that with all our differences, many of us have shared at least a common revulsion, and it is this feeling of having turned away from certain attitudes which were so dominant in the Thirties that gives us at least a measure of identity...