The Young Generation-A Fortyish View

...If to his left the academician of the Center finds a Dissent-nik, on his right (in, say, R. P. Blackmur's class at the School of Letters) he may find a contributor to Hudson Review, solemn before literature with a solemnity scarcely distinguishable from rigor mortis, yet finding in Ezra Pound and Wyndham Lewis a manly vulgarity to which his limpness aspires...

...and on that day I will be leaning from my window to cheer that writer and to shake down on his head the torn scraps of all surviving copies of this piece...

...his stories and essays have appeared in Partisan Review, Commentary, Encounter, Mainstream and the N.Y...

...Enough, dear friends and students, enough...

...How soon they prosper on rehashed responses to the Thirties, which they re-echo in magazines invented in those Thirties or earlier...

...The trouble is that there are no new social groups out of which a truly new writer might come...

...each does what he can, and criticizing a poem by John Crowe Ransom is better than biting one's fingernails...

...We may now become grandfathers in peace...

...Be careful what you wish for in your youth," my new version runs, "for the young will get it in your middle age...

...But the theme is here, the subject all around us: the comedy of the young in their passionate and absurd relationship with us...

...This is the second such article (the other was by Daniel Bell—age 38—"The Once-Born, the Twice-Born, the After-Born...

...indeed, the Communist movement itself became, in a sense not generally noticed, a way for intellectual social climbers, the pathway of the new intellectuals toward status and acceptance...

...For the period of the Twenties had its own magazines, say, Hound and Horn...

...hut it is completely unnerving to discover what is surely intended to be oneself—all that innocence so smugly ended, all that maturity buttoned up to the third button...

...What he does not yet perceive is that by anticipation my generation has robbed his even of new possibilities of accommodation, of the use of accommodation as a revolt against revolt...

...At the moment, one has the sense of young writers at a loss for subjects because yesterday's subjects are lost...

...It is disconcerting enough to see a host of little Trillings and Riesmans and Rahvs...

...but when I find myself nodding with comfortable approval over some bright new essay by some bright new critic, I force myself to wake to a realization that my approval is 5ei/-approval, for the ideas and attitudes are my own and those of my contemporaries, unearned intellectual income...

...He sees clearly enough that for him the revolutionary gesture would be empty mimicry, incongruous in a world that has found there is no apocalypse, and that the threat our society poses is not exclusion and failure but acceptance and success...

...And yet, for clarity's sake it is worth distinguishing subgroups among the young...

...and they passed directly from grade school to middle age with a copy of Partisan Review or Kenyon as a passport, their only youth our youth, which is to say, the mythical youth of the Thirties...

...It has lifted from me the burden of being young...

...Here is a clue, surely...

...To be sure, none of us will ever be as old as those who are now around 30, just as none of us were ever as young as, say, Scott Fitzgerald...

...For us at least, it was not all foreknown—the faculty meetings, the salons of upper Bohemia, the suburban peace—and we move in such milieux not really believing in them, winking secretly to each other across the room...

...First, violence and despair, the flirtation with failure and the commitment to revolution...

...The dream of violence and the fact of security, the dream of failure and the fact of success—this is our New Comedy which awaits only the writer capable of embodying it...

...Their attitude toward these sub-arts is amlmalent...

...the older quarterlies are open to them, as are the back pages of weeklies like the New Republic or Nation, and the New Yorker itself is not unfriendly...

...Indeed, the unyoung need no such journals to be heard...

...If I have drawn as desperate a picture as legitimate distortion can make of their plight, this is not to blame them but to blame us...

...A basic class distinction is involved...

...It is not generations, thank God, that write books or come to understanding...

...compounded of one part inverted snobbism and one part social protest...

...in the third, a timid and sophisticated urge to enter publishing and the universities, to become in the full sense intellectuals...

...The old tragedy of the poet forced into manufacturing brassieres becomes the new comedy of the proto-tycoon lecturing on the imagery of Wallace Stevens...

...We are all aware of poets with more technique than audience and more audience than theme, of novelists desperately contriving fictional subjects because their self-respect demands that somehow they make books...

...The Ivy League exegete in search of virility and the Bronx poet in quest of status meet at a common point though in mutual incomprehension...

...The only "new" political journal is Dissent, edited chiefly by aging radicals unwilling to leave the Garden of the Thirties...

...Leslie A. Fiedler, visiting professor of English al Princeton University, is the author of An End to Innocence...

...Trained in such a school, he will find the National Review more than a little crude...

...The great foundations are eager to invest in so predictable a youth, to send them to school or Europe or Asia or up and down America...

...intellectuals, it is « backward look by « member of the preceding generation...

...Implicit in its way of life is a rejection of the monogamous family and the PTA—¦ the sole remaining protest, perhaps, in a world where adultery has come to seem old hat...

...is typically a product of Columbia who has received certain finishing touches at the Kenyon School of Letters or Downing College or both, and who ostentatiously sports a body of learning so appalling in scope that beside it the sheer ignorance and dullness of, say, a John Aldridge seems like freshness of illusion...

...First the Party, then some splinter group, and finally a university job—-with the young before us...

...How dull we are without our pasts...

...it is lonely men...

...Contributors in this category have been Wallace Markfield, Arthur Cohen, Jascha Kessler, John Hunt, Alfred Sundel and Morton Cronin...

...But they come so fast and fade faster, queen treading on queen, the 17-year-old novelist hard on the heels of the aging 19-year-old...

...for so long as the imagination lives, any plight is potentially the stuff of a vision that will transcend it by capturing it...

...only one satisfaction it cannot bring itself to provide—violence...

...The young, who should be fatuously but profitably attacking us, instead discreetly expand, analyze and dissect us...

...I cannot conventionally deplore its creative sterility and its turning to criticism...

...It is these right-wing purists who sometimes pretend to find themselves isolated among the new young...

...how banal our dissent from dissent without the living memory of a commitment to dissent...

...for the queers, publication in Harper's Bazaar or Vogue or Mademoiselle and an entry into a world of chic and good manners, where certain sensitive, effete explorations of the Faulknerian scene and Faulk-nerian themes supply a necessary music...

...Here...

...To the younger generation now defining itself I am grateful for at least one thing: As readers will note from the opening of this ninth contribution to our symposium on the young generation of U.S...

...Whatever the imagination can conceive, there is plenty of money to subsidize...

...The generations are what the books are about, what the understanding dissolves to be recreated in art...

...eager to learn the pattern for themselves: first revolt (our revolt revisited), then the academy (their instructorships bending over our books) and a new group of students, etc., etc...

...after all, an age of interfaith tolerance, and only an occasional challenge to a duel ruffles the truce that finds Allen Tate and Philip Rahv presiding over the same summertime school for training the literary young...

...How dull they are...

...and it seems impossible for the young to identify themselves with, say, the Hungarian revolt as we did with the war in Spain...

...The new generation has founded no new journals because it has discovered no new voice, no new themes in which to invest its carefully nurtured sensibility and technique...

...The alrightnik-academician is flanked on one side by the radical once removed, the youngster who insists on reliving the politics of the Thirties in pious recapitulation...

...The generation under discussion, as defined by Norman Podhoretz in the first article of the series, was born between 1925 and 1935 and is now 21 to 31 years old...

...Yet, long since our Augustan peace has blurred the old battle lines...

...in the second, a more complicated impulse toward the (still well-paying) respectability of law or medicine...

...The take an almost political stand against the debasement of values which threatens eventually to engulf their own markets...

...Such belated, symbolic revolutionaries become Trotskyites in 1945 or 1946, subscribe to Dissent and save their finest scorn for Lionel Trilling and David Riesman, to whom they are bound in spasms of filial rejection...

...Stevens, Melville, etc.—such intellectuals normally concern themselves with "popular culture" or the "mass arts...

...We have had, notoriously enough, the most prolonged youth on record, a youth wished on us by our predecessors of the Twenties, who could conceive of no greater good...

...The Thirties saw the breakthrough of urban Jews into the centers of American cultural life...

...though, indeed, he would be the first to admit that Buckley is "really brilliant," and he dreams of a pure politics of the literary Right, presided over by Cleanth Brooks and Wimsatt, a politics in which the most delicate insights into poetry are blended with a dignified McCarthyism...

...Only one necessity of life no fund can sponsor— failure...

...What is finally most distressing about all this is not that the devices of the young seem so dismal and unpromising, but that they are not even theirs...

...We ended their innocence before they possessed it...

...Opportunities exist everywhere, not only for publication but for study and travel...

...When a young writer arises who can treat this matter in all its ridiculous freshness, we will be done with false pathos and symposia...

...Indeed, I have the feeling sometimes that homosexuality is the purest and truest protest of the young, not an aberration merely or a disease, but a last politics...

...My own high-school-age son, reliving for a third or a fourth time the attitudes I first remember noticing in my freshman classes just before World War II, complains to me that by anticipation I have robbed him of the possibilities of revolt...

...Partisan Review-ex and Kenyon-ite...

...Needless to say, their youth is noticeably shopworn even in a world of second-hand youth...

...In a similar way, wave after wave of young Southerners emerged from their own areas of deprivation, twin volumes of poetry and criticism proffered in lieu of passports—only to disappear into the colleges of the North, still shouting the slogans of agrarianism to their own students now interested only in the poetry of the Fugitives...

...And yet it does not matter really...

...The young are able to share our Depression experience only vicariously...

...The New York intellectual, the alrightnik in academia...

...The Princeton graduate has no use for the graces of Lionel Trilling but finds in Yvor Winters in art or in Willmoore Kendall in politics a kind of moral ferocity compatible with the ideals of a Christian gentleman...

...the Thirties, Partisan and Kenyon...

...But for the young who follow there is only the world we have prepared for them—possessed, mapped and cleared for comfortable living...

...then, all the savor of slow disenchantment, and only at long last the acceptance of responsibility and success: This was the pattern I imagined and have approximately lived, the pattern of many of us to whom the Depression seemed perversely enough Our Great Good Time and the Spanish Civil War, to which we did not go, our war...

...they, too, teach at Columbia or Minnesota or Bard...

...and the world is so ready for them, waiting with a tolerance as large and damp as that which smothers the Jews...

...First, the New York Jewish academics, who represent the latest form of status-striving among the descendants of Eastern European immigrants...

...What comes after has nothing—or worse than nothing, the Hudson Review, which is to say, Kenyon reborn in the full flush of genteel and middle-aged youth...

...On the one hand, thev seek to dissociate themselves from self-conscious culture-vulturism by publicly preferring Westerns to art films and boxing to ballet: on the other...

...To me, the most appalling aspect of the new generation's writing, as of its life style, is its familiarity...

...we prayed under our breath was answered...

...The daily newspaper falls from their hands which clutch the latest reprinting of Orwell's Homage to Catalonia...

...I have talked so far of the younger generations as if they were a unit, but one internal division I have already suggested—the cleavage into New Yorker and Southerner, urban and agrarian, sociologue and New Critic...

...Beyond all these and within are the homosexuals, the staunchest party of them all...

...and anyhow I always added under my breath: "Not yet, dear God, not quite yet...

...Frankly, I like criticism...

...It is a terrifying enough thought, but at 40 I feel capable of amending it into one still more terrifying...

...Expatriation is financed with the same even-handed munificence as an academic study of population pressures or right-left asymmetry...

...In a world rent by violence, America remains strangely immune to disaster...

...it is all the more appalling to catch glimpses of imitation Irving Howes and Willmoore Kendalls...

...They, too, sit in the offices of Rinehart or Simon and Schuster...

...This is...

...Yet, the sensibility of the young has been conditioned by a literature of the Thirties based on violence and failure...

...God knows, the "Not yet...

...No one after this series of statements will again, I hope, dare refer to my fortyish contemporaries as "young novelists," "young critics," "young intellectuals...

...our reaction from it they can not only live but live on...

...For each group there is a fitting and proper mode of accommodation...

...In addition to contributing toward the Talmudic commentaries 011 a canon set in the Twenties and Thirties—Faulkner...

...But, alas, they cannot in role or function distinguish themselves from their colleagues, who admire Riesman and Trilling and subscribe to The New Leader or Encounter...

...but for them, too, there is a place on Mike Wallace's program...

...they follow the lead of Riesman or Dwight Macdonald...

...Times Book Review...

...In the first generation, there was a simple-hearted drive for wealth in woolens or ladies' underwear or junk...

...and the Ford Foundation is only too delighted to subsidize what their politics has in large measure become—the writing of histories of the radical past...

...Since what I wished for when I was younger was maturity and an end to innocence—in short, middle age itself— I thought I was playing it safe...

...their dreams are possessed by the images life is too good to match...

...for the new unyoung are mature with the maturity we dreamed...