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1、-the sad young men 课文和翻译 1 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 questionings by the young: m
2、emories 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-toting sheik, and the moral and st
3、ylistic 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 business of growing up is alw
4、ays 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 Actually, the revolt of the young peo
5、ple 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 United States it was reluctantl
6、y 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 or the geographical protectio
7、n 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 code of polite behavior and well-
8、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 expected to battle for success.
9、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 Europe and America to the destructio
10、n 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 alcoholic sophistication and a
11、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 escape made possible by a general pro
12、sperity 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 intellectuals crowding into Greenwich V
13、illage gave them a pattern and a philosophic defense for their escapism. And like most escapist sprees, this one lasted until the money ran out, until the crash 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 proble
14、ms 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 States, and our official reluctance to declare our status as a belligerent were intolerable to many of our idealistic citizens, and with typical A
15、merican adventurousness enhanced somewhat by the strenuous jingoism of Theodore Roosevelt, our young men began to enlist under foreign flags. In the words of Joe 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 19
16、16- 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, in motion picture and story, a magnolia-scented soap opera, while the one hundred-days fracas with Spain in 1898 had dissolved into a one-sid
17、ed victory at Manila and a cinematic charge up San Juan Hill. Furthermore, there were enough high school assembly orators proclaiming the character-forming force of the strenuous life to convince more than enough otherwise sensible boys that service in the European conflict would be of great persona
18、l value, in addition to being idealistic and exciting. Accordingly, they began to join the various armies in increasing numbers, the intellectuals in the ambulance corps, others in the infantry, merchant marine, or wherever else they could find a place. Those who were reluctant to serve in a foreign
19、 army talked excitedly about Preparedness, occasionally considered joining the National Guard, and rushed to enlist when we finally did enter the conflict. So tremendous was the storming of recruitment centers that harassed sergeants actually pleaded with volunteers to go home and wait for the draft
20、, but since no self-respecting person wanted to suffer the disgrace of being drafted, the enlistment craze continued unabated.6 Naturally, the spirit of carnival and the enthusiasm for high military adventure were soon dissipated once the eager young men had received a good taste of twentieth- centu
21、ry 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. Especially was this true of the college contingent, whose idealism had led them to enlist early and who had generally seen a considerable amount o
22、f 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 bombast 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 st
23、ay-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 desirable than non-veterans for whatever business opportunities that did exist. Their very homes were often uncomfortable to them; they had outg
24、rown town and families and had developed a sudden bewildering world-weariness which neither they nor their relatives could understand. Their energies had been 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 thos
25、e 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 safe for democracy. And, as if home town conditions were not enough, the returning veteran also had to face the sodden, Napoleonic cynicism o
26、f Versailles, the hypocritical do-goodism of Prohibition, 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 Greenw
27、ich Village set the pattern. Since the Seven-ties a 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
28、War I, to support its claim to being the intellectual 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
29、in 1919) to pour out their new-found creative strength, 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 f
30、or young persons to defy the law and the conventions 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 rea
31、lity this self-conscious unconventionality was rapidly 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 mad
32、e it attractively naughty while pretending to denounce 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,
33、who had been playing with marbles and dolls during 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
34、they found themselves and their friends adopting the 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
35、 they had wanted was an America more sensitive to 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 becom
36、e as conventionalized as a Rotary luncheon. As a result, 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 bo
37、obery of our society. An important book rather grandiosely 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 th
38、e country were being ignored, that art was unappreciated, 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 devoted to making money and keeping up with the Joneses t
39、hat 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 glint and ring of the dollar, there was little remedy for the
40、 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 and would-be artistic had followed suit.10 It was in thei
41、r 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 generation attitude nevertheless acted as a common denominator of th
42、e 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 rootless as Hemingways wandering alcoholics in The Sun Also Ri
43、ses. 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 critics who tried to find their souls in the Antibes and on the
44、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 works ripened by the tempering of an older, more sophisticated
45、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 addition to the writers listed above, such fisures as Eugene ON
46、eill, 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 intellectuals of the Twenties, the sad young men, as F. Scot
47、 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 experience. 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
48、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
49、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落行为那么耸人听闻。 实际上，青年一代的叛逆行为是当时的时代条件的必然结果。首先，值得记住的是，这种叛逆行为并不局限于美国，而是作为百年之中第一次惨烈的战争的后遗症影响到整个西方世界。其次，在美国，有一些人已经很不情愿地认识到如果不是明明白白地认识到，至少是下意识地认识到无论在政治方面还是在传统方面，我们的国家已不再是与世隔绝的了；我们所取得的国际地位使我们永远也不能再退缩到狭隘道德规范的人造围墙之后，或是躲在相邻的两大洋的地理保护之中了。 在当时的美国，摒弃维多利亚式的温文尔雅无论如何都已经是无可避免的了。美国工业的飞速发展及其所带来的庞大的、机器轰鸣的工厂的出现，社会化大生产的非人格性，以及争强好胜意识的空前高涨，使得在较为平静而少竞争的年代