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1、The Sad Young Men Rod W. Horton and Herbert W. Edwards1 No aspect of life in the Twenties has been more commented upon and sensationally romanticized than the so-called Revolt of the Younger Generation. The slightest mention of the decade brings nostalgic recollections to the middle-aged and curious
2、 questionings by the young: memories of the deliciously illicit thrill of the first visit to a speakeasy, of the brave denunciation of Puritan morality, and of the fashionable experimentations in amour in the parked sedan on a country road; questions about the naughty, jazzy parties, the flask-totin
3、g sheik, and the moral and stylistic vagaries of the flapper and the drug-store cowboy. Were young people really so wild? present-day students ask their parents and teachers. Was there really a Younger Generation problem? The answers to such inquiries must of necessity be yes and no-Yes because the
4、business of growing up is always accompanied by a Younger Generation Problem; no because what seemed so wild, irresponsible, and immoral in social behavior at the time can now be seen in perspective as being something considerably less sensational than the degenerauon of our jazzmad youth. 2 Actuall
5、y, the revolt of the young people was a logical outcome of conditions in the age: First of all, it must be remembered that the rebellion was not confined to the Unit- ed States, but affected the entire Western world as a result of the aftermath of the first serious war in a century. Second, in the U
6、nited States it was reluctantly realized by some- subconsciously if not openly - that our country was no longer isolated in either politics or tradition and that we had reached an international stature that would forever prevent us from retreating behind the artificial walls of a provincial morality
7、 or the geographical protection of our two bordering oceans. 3 The rejection of Victorian gentility was, in any case, inevitable. The booming of American industry, with its gigantic, roaring factories, its corporate impersonality, and its largescale aggressiveness, no longer left any room for the co
8、de of polite behavior and well-bred morality fashioned in a quieter and less competitive age. War or no war, as the generations passed, it became increasingly difficult for our young people to accept standards of behavior that bore no relationship to the bustling business medium in which they were e
9、xpected to battle for success. The war acted merely as a catalytic agent in this breakdown of the Victorian social structure, and by precipitating our young people into a pattern of mass murder it released their inhibited violent energies which, after the shooting was over, were turned in both Europ
10、e and America to the destruction of an obsolescent nineteenth-century society. 4 Thus in a changing world youth was faced with the challenge of bringing our mores up to date. But at the same time it was tempted, in America at least, to escape its responsibilities and retreat behind an air of naughty
11、 alcoholic sophistication and a pose of Bohemian immorality. The faddishness , the wild spending of money on transitory pleasures and momentary novelties , the hectic air of gaiety, the experimentation in sensation - sex, drugs, alcohol, perversions - were all part of the pattern of escape, an escap
12、e made possible by a general prosperity and a post-war fatigue with politics, economic restrictions, and international responsibilities. Prohibition afforded the young the additional opportunity of making their pleasures illicit , and the much-publicized orgies and defiant manifestoes of the intelle
13、ctuals crowding into Greenwich Village gave them a pattern and a philosophic defense for 名师资料总结 - - -精品资料欢迎下载 - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - 名师精心整理 - - - - - - - 第 1 页，共 7 页 - - - - - - - - - their escapism. And like most escapist sprees, this one lasted until the money ran out, until the crash
14、 of the world economic structure at the end of the decade called the party to a halt and forced the revelers to sober up and face the problems of the new age. 5 The rebellion started with World War I. The prolonged stalemate of 1915 - 1916, the increasing insolence of Germany toward the United State
15、s, and our official reluctance to declare our status as a belligerent were intolerable to many of our idealistic citizens, and with typical American adventurousness enhanced somewhat by the strenuousjingoism of Theodore Roosevelt, our young men began to enlist under foreign flags. In the words of Jo
16、e Williams, in John Dos Passos U. S. A., they wanted to get into the fun before the whole thing turned belly up. For military service, in 1916- 1917, was still a romantic occupation. The young men of college age in 1917 knew nothing of modern warfare. The strife of 1861 -1865 had popularly become, i
17、n motion picture and story, a magnolia-scented soap opera, while the one hundred-days fracas with Spain in 1898 had dissolved into a one-sided victory at Manila and a cinematic charge up San Juan Hill. Furthermore, there were enough high school assembly orators proclaiming the character-forming forc
18、e of the strenuous life to convince more than enough otherwise sensible boys that service in the European conflict would be of great personal value, in addition to being idealistic and exciting. Accordingly, they began to join the various armies in increasing numbers, the intellectuals in the ambula
19、nce corps, others in the infantry, merchant marine, or wherever else they could find a place. Those who were reluctant to serve in a foreign army talked excitedly about Preparedness, occasionally considered joining the National Guard, and rushed to enlist when we finally did enter the conflict. So t
20、remendous was the storming of recruitment centers that harassed sergeants actually pleaded with volunteers to go home and wait for the draft, but since no self-respecting person wanted to suffer the disgrace of being drafted, the enlistment craze continued unabated. 6 Naturally, the spirit of carniv
21、al and the enthusiasm for high military adventure were soon dissipated once the eager young men had received a good taste of twentieth- century warfare. To their lasting glory, they fought with distinction, but it was a much altered group of soldiers who returned from the battlefields in 1919. Espec
22、ially was this true of the college contingent, whose idealism had led them to enlist early and who had generally seen a considerable amount of action. To them, it was bitter to return to a home town virtually untouched by the conflict, where citizens still talked with the naive Fourth-of-duly bombas
23、t they themselves had been guilty of two or three years earlier. It was even more bitter to find that their old jobs had been taken by the stay-at-homes, that business was suffering a recession that prevented the opening up of new jobs, and that veterans were considered problem children and less des
24、irable than non-veterans for whatever business opportunities that did exist. Their very homes were often uncomfortable to them; they had outgrown town and families and had developed a sudden bewildering world-weariness which neither they nor their relatives could understand. Their energies had been
25、whipped up and their naivete destroyed by the war and now, in sleepy Gopher Prairies all over the country, they were being asked to curb those energies and resume the pose of self-deceiving Victorian innocence that they now felt to be as outmoded as the notion that their fighting had made the world
26、safe for democracy. And, as if home town conditions were not 名师资料总结 - - -精品资料欢迎下载 - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - 名师精心整理 - - - - - - - 第 2 页，共 7 页 - - - - - - - - - enough, the returning veteran also had to face the sodden, Napoleonic cynicism of Versailles, the hypocritical do-goodism of Prohib
27、ition, and the smug patriotism of the war profiteers. Something in the tension-ridden youth of America had to give and, after a short period of bitter resentment, it gave in the form of a complete overthrow of genteel standards of behavior. 7 Greenwich Village set the pattern. Since the Seven-ties a
28、 dwelling place for artists and writers who settled there because living was cheap, the village had long enjoyed a dubious reputation for Bohemianism and eccentricity. It had also harbored enough major writers, especially in the decade before World War I, to support its claim to being the intellectu
29、al center of the nation. After the war, it was only natural that hopeful young writers, their minds and pens inflamed against war, Babbittry, and Puritanical gentility , ,should flock to the traditional artistic center (where living was still cheap in 1919) to pour out their new-found creative stren
30、gth, to tear down the old world, to flout the morality of their grandfathers, and to give all to art, love, and sensation. 8 Soon they found their imitators among the non-intellectuals. As it became more and more fashionable throughout the country for young persons to defy the law and the convention
31、s and to add their own little matchsticks to the conflagration of flaming youth, it was Greenwich Village that fanned the flames. Bohemian living became a fad. Each town had its fast set which prided itself on its unconventionality , although in reality this self-conscious unconventionality was rapi
32、dly becoming a standard feature of the country club class - and its less affluent imitators -throughout the nation. Before long the movement had be-come officially recognized by the pulpit (which denounced it), by the movies and magazines (which made it attractively naughty while pretending to denou
33、nce it), and by advertising (which obliquely encouraged it by selling everything from cigarettes to automobiles with the implied promise that their owners would be rendered sexually irresistible). Younger brothers and sisters of the war generation, who had been playing with marbles and dolls during
34、the battles of Belleau Wood and Chateau-Thierry, and who had suffered no real disillusionment or sense of loss, now began to imitate the manners of their elders and play with the toys of vulgar rebellion. Their parents were shocked, but before long they found themselves and their friends adopting th
35、e new gaiety. By the middle of the decade, the wild party had become as commonplace a factor in American life as the flapper, the Model T, or the Dutch Colonial home in Floral Heights. 9 Meanwhile, the true intellectuals were far from flattered. What they had wanted was an America more sensitive to
36、art and culture, less avid for material gain, and less susceptible to standardization. Instead, their ideas had been generally ignored, while their behavior had contributed to that standardization by furnishing a pattern of Bohemianism that had become as conventionalized as a Rotary luncheon. As a r
37、esult, their dissatisfaction with their native country, already acute upon their return from the war, now became even more intolerable. Flaming diatribes poured from their pens denouncing the materialism and what they considered to be the cultural boobery of our society. An important book rather gra
38、ndiosely entitled Civilization in the United States, written by thirty intellectuals under the editorship of J. Harold Stearns, was the rallying point of sensitive persons disgusted with America. The burden of the volume was that the best minds in the country were being ignored, that art was unappre
39、ciated, 名师资料总结 - - -精品资料欢迎下载 - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - 名师精心整理 - - - - - - - 第 3 页，共 7 页 - - - - - - - - - and that big business had corrupted everything. Journalism was a mere adjunct to moneymaking, politics were corrupt and filled with incompetents and crooks, and American family life so
40、 devoted to making money and keeping up with the Joneses that it had become joyless, patterned, hypocritical, and sexually inadequate. These defects would disappear if only creative art were allowed to show the way to better things, but since the country was blind and deaf to everything save the gli
41、nt and ring of the dollar, there was little remedy for the sensitive mind but to emigrate to Europe where they do things better. By the time Civilization in the United States was published (1921), most of its contributors had taken their own advice and were Wing abroad, and many more of the artistic
42、 and would-be artistic had followed suit. 10 It was in their defiant, but generally short-lived, European expatriation that our leading writers of the Twenties learned to think of themselves, in the words of Gertrude Stein, as the lost generation. In no sense a movement in itself, the lost generatio
43、n attitude nevertheless acted as a common denominator of the writing of the times. The war and the cynical power politics of Versailles had convinced these young men and women that spirituality was dead; they felt as stunned as John Andrews, the defeated aesthete In Dos Passos Three Soldiers, as roo
44、tless as Hemingways wandering alcoholics in The Sun Also Rises. Besides Stein, Dos Passos, and Hemingway, there were Lewis Mumford, Ezra Pound, Sherwood Anderson, Matthew Josephson, d. Harold Stearns, T. S. Eliot, E. E. Cumminss, Malcolm Cowley, and many other novelists, dramatists, poets, and criti
45、cs who tried to find their souls in the Antibes and on the Left Bank, who directed sad and bitter blasts at their native land and who, almost to a man, drifted back within a few years out of sheer homesickness, to take up residence on coastal islands and in New England farmhouses and to produce work
46、s ripened by the tempering of an older, more sophisticated society. 11 For actually the lost generation was never lost. It was shocked, uprooted for a time, bitter, critical, rebellious, iconoclastic, experimental, often absurd, more often misdirected- but never lost. A decade that produced, in addi
47、tion to the writers listed above, such fisures as Eugene ONeill, Edna St. Vincent Millay, F. Scott Fitzserald, William Faulkner, Sinclair Lewis, Stephen Vincent Bent, Hart Crane, Thomas Wolfe, and innumerableothers could never be written off as sterile ,even by itself in a moment of self-pity. The i
48、ntellectuals of the Twenties, the sad young men, as F. Scot Fitzserald called them, cursed their luck but didnt die; escaped but voluntarily returned; flayed the Babbitts but loved their country, and in so doing gave the nation the Iiveliest, freshest, most stimulating writing in its literary experi
49、ence. ?二十年代社会生活的各个方面中，被人们评论得最多、渲染得最厉害的，莫过于青年一代的叛逆之行了。只要有只言片语提到那个时期，就会勾起中年人怀旧的回忆和青年人好奇的提问。中年人会回忆起第一次光顾非法酒店时的那种既高兴又不安的违法犯罪的刺激感，回忆起对清教徒式的道德规范的勇猛抨击，回忆起停在乡间小路上的小轿车里颠鸾倒凤的时髦爱情试验方式；青年人则会问起有关那时的一些纵情狂欢的爵士舞会，问起那成天背着酒葫芦、勾引得女人团团转的“ 美男子 ” ，问起那些 “ 时髦少女 ” 和“ 闲荡牛仔 ” 的奇装异服和古怪行为等等的情况。“ 那时的青年果真这样狂放不羁吗?” 今天的青年学生们不禁好奇地向他
50、们的师长问起这样的问题。“ 那时真的有过青年一代的问题吗?” 对这类问题的回答必然只能是既“ 对” 又“ 不对” 说“ 对，是因为人的成长过程中一贯就存在着所谓青年一代的问题；说“ 不对 ” 是因为在当时的社会看来似乎是那么狂野。那么不负责任，那么不讲道德的行为，若是用今天的正确眼光去看的话，却远远没有今天的一些迷恋爵士乐的狂荡青年的堕名师资料总结 - - -精品资料欢迎下载 - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - 名师精心整理 - - - - - - - 第 4 页，共 7 页 - - - - - - - - - 落行为那么耸人听闻。实际上，青年一代的叛逆行为