The Lost and Found Generation

...Except for Thornton Wilder, all the writers of A Second Flowering are gone -hart Crane died in 1932, then Thomas Wolfe in 1938, Fitzgerald in 1940, Hemingway in 1961, Faulkner and Cummings in 1962, Dos Passos in 1970...

...A special poignancy permeates Cowley's present chronicle, though, because of the inexorable toll of decline and death that he, as a hardy survivor in his 75th year, must now record...

...while Cowley allows himself merely the softest impeachment of the present in comparison with his own generation, the strongest resonance that A Second Flowering sounds in the reader's mind is this: These writers saw themselves as a coherent unity, a generation, not simply by the accidents of birth but because, as a group, they were "more conscious of possessing shared purposes than the groups that preceded or followed...

...Unlike the young rebels of the '60s, who scorned art in favor of political action, and preferred the spontaneity of free-floating amateurism to the mastery of a difficult craft, the fundamental concern of these writers of the '20s was "How can I best live in order to produce the books that are in me...

...The crucial point to remember is that the giants of Cowley's generation believed above all in the sacred-ness of their talent, that they "were all working together to produce a cycle of myths for a new century which . . . was to be partly a creation of their own...

...This, in his later work, Dos Passos entirely failed to do, and he could therefore feel toward his "consistently repulsive" characters nothing stronger than "tired aversion...

...As an excellent critic, he was quick to share his discoveries with the world at large...

...This pathos of mortality is easily understood...

...ndeed...

...This overwhelming sense of his having been, through five tumultuous decades, an alertly devoted custodian and observer of these large talents-his own as well as his friends'?makes A Second Flowering a book rather than a mere collection, although it is composed of essays written for separate occasions in the past, along with some new chapters...

...Their dream was of . . . being the lords of language and the captains general of plots and characters...

...The most important of the older essays is Cowley's pioneering introduction to The Portable Faulkner, written in 1945, when the Mississippi novelist was either scandalously ignored or stupidly misunderstood by all but a few American critics...

...His fine-honed mind and lucid pride have been focused, through most of his career, on that remarkable group of American novelists and poets who came to prominence in the 1920s and whom Gertrude Stein, with lazy glibness, labeled "a lost generation...

...Nonetheless, his intransigent ideal of the highest quality in art forces htm to admit, in his final assessment, that "Not one member of the generation carried out Fitzgerald's ambition of winning a place among 'the greatest writers who have ever lived.' " They did accomplish something of a splendidly bright permanence, however, and Cowley was the first to see what was truly untraditional in their work, the first to respond intelligently to attitudes toward language, life and art that seemed shocking in the '20s...

...But countless other intimates of these aggressively outsize personalities have remembered them publicly, with either mawkish or disastrous results...

...Their risky but unfatal war service widened their horizons, quickened their appetite for the outrageous extremes of experience, and fed their brazen courage to rebel against the father and fashion a new lifestyle...

...Cowley's gift for critical synthesis, his profoundly intuitive grasp of the hidden postures and distortions of sensibility buried deep within a writer's devices, make his portraits a constantly enriching intellectual adventure to read...

...they had together with a common background and similar youthful experiences the same hope-The writing of masterpieces...

...Yet Cowley, undeterred by this bibliomaniacal proliferation, has managed the astonishing feat of producing a powerfully moving book that is part memoir, part literary evaluation, part intellectual history of his gifted friends...

...Rather, Cowley argues, "great novelists can hold almost any sort of position, radical or conservative . . . but on one absolute condition, that they should believe in their characters more firmly than they hold to their opinions...

...Exile's Return, published in 1934, when so much of the life and writing he described had happened only yesterday...

...The relevance of these comments to our own time, when the most loudly touted novelists, like Pynchon and Roth, are so proudly indifferent to creating any character that is not a monster or a freak, is obvious...

...What puts Cowley into another league is his incomparable mingling of personal affection with critical detachment, of sympathetic candor with hard-headed intelligence, of homage that is never blindly worshipful with judgment that is never malicious...

...At that time, Cowley reminds us in 1973, no one, except for a few defenders, "had more than distantly suggested the scope and force and interdependence of this work as a whole...

...Writers &Wfriting THE LOST AND FOUND GENERATION BY PEARL K. BELL the half-century since he produced his first literary essay on "This Youngest Generation," Malcolm Cowley has been writing essays and books on the same subject...

...One might with some justice think that by now it would be humanly impossible for Cowley-or any critic-To find anything remotely new to say about the dazzling figures who composed the collective rocket of near-genius that burst on the American scene after World War I. They were not only brilliantly original writers whose influence on future novelists and poets persists to this day...

...It was not a simplistic matter of his writing well when radical and poorly when he turned conservative...

...Of course he knew them all and knew them well, in their best years and their worst...

...He had a better mind than any of his friends...

...Since Cowley is not a cranky old man enslaved by quixotic memories of the past, but a wise and honest thinker, he does not belabor the point for our own time...

...The millions of words that have been written about Hemingway and Fitzgerald alone beggars counting...

...The gradual attrition of this hope in recent decades must be seen, in the light of Cowley's discussion, as an incalculable loss for American literature...

...He was their precise contemporary, sprang from the same middle-class soil, and shared their literary ambitions and self-imposed bohemian exile in Greenwich Village, Paris and the Connecticut countryside...

...Some inscrutable literary magic is at work here, and I find its taproots as elusive as Cowley's prose is irresistible...

...Still, one comes away from his book with a sense of grief for the absence of this dream among contemporary anti-novelists...

...The six other literary titans born between 1894 and 1900 whom Cowley discusses in A Second Flowering: Works and Days of the Lost Generation (Viking, 276 pp., $7.95)-john Dos Passos, E. E. Cummings, Thornton Wilder, William Faulkner, Thomas Wolfe, and Hart Crane-Spawned a similarly awesome abundance of commentary, speculation, exegesis, and trash...

...his insight into both the temperaments and the writings of these eight men is consistently sharp and illuminating, and the occasional severity demanded by his critical standards is always leavened with an unsentimental but pervasive tenderness and generosity...

...Their abiding goal, no matter how self-destructively they seemed to live, was the writing of great novels and poems, and as Cowley wisely comments, "It was a professional question...

...With equal shrewdness, Cowley explains Dos Passos' deterioration as a novelist...

...We seem to have forgotten that, as Ezra Pound declared, "Good writing is news that stays news...

...We owe Cowley an immense debt, for it was he who initially discerned the grand design of Faulkner's oeuvre as a continuing, brooding history of Yoknapatawpha County, that tragic microcosm of the Deep South into which each of the novels and stories, like the bricks of a master mason, could be seen to fit perfectly, once Cowley had mapped "the straightest road into his imaginary country...

...It is harder to account for the vitality that Cowley bestows on every idea and anecdote...

...The authors he considers were born in those confident years when a new century seemed theirs for the taking, yet only by stern application of the Protestant ethic, which even the Catholic Fitzgerald was raised to obey...

...Most of them were markedly uncommon personalities drawn to sensational exploits that have continued to attract cultural magpies and scandal-mongers in the decades since their death...

...Hemingway's persistent courtship of danger and death is the commonest of critical currencies, but Cowley adds a surprising dimension to one's understanding of the writer's suicide: "His lifelong aggressiveness and his killer instinct were being turned against himself, the last of his possible trophies...

...Incredibly, it seems as freshly recollected, as passionately felt and deeply reflective, as his earlier history of the same group...