Lost generation

"LOST GENERATION " OF AMERICAN LITERATURE IN XX CENTURY
The growth of American writing in the postwar period has been affected not only by sharply depicted polarizations, but also by the ability to sustain variety and dialogue in the constructions of art. That power animated Walt Whitman's quest for “the fusing explanation and tie - what the relation between the (radical, democratic) Me . . . and the (conservative) Not Me . . might be. Taken together, those competing urges are reflected in the power of American cultural ideals to legitimize dissent, to recognize and embrace both the innovative artist and the traditions art disrupts. Postwar art illustrates the prom­inence of an ever-greater diversity of voices and perspectives. The construction of this book pays homage to that diversity in formulating the categories and dialogues shaping the consideration of postwar writing².
An ever-increasing incorporation of diverse voices, an ability to absorb, sustain, and respond to the inevitable argument between art and experience, imaginative writing and commercial concerns, and a frequent reconciliation of the claims of each, easily defy notions of a static opposition between insurgent art and stable, pragmatic tradi­tions. The innovative music, drama, film, and literature of the time all negotiate with the very times and habits they seek to change. How­ever strenuous the interplay of argument, backlash and comeback, of embrace or rejection of experiments in form, the result is neither silence, nor the long-predicted “death" of the novel, nor chaotic instab­ility, but only a greater acceptance and refinement of that negoti­ation. Yesterday's avant-garde poet can be tomorrow's eminence grise. All this suggests that the enduring American gift may be precisely that constant process of exchange and incorporation that brings about a repositioning of the center.
The culture, literature, film, and drama of the United States in the postwar period are subjects each of the contributors to this volume has approached from his or her own perspective. Yet all constitute a revelation of art forms that defy simple characterization as either purely traditional or experimental and reflect a feisty engagement with American life. The ensuing new fusions have produced cross- disciplinary critical approaches to art, recast even the conception of archiving books and manuscripts, and enriched discussions across the borders of forms and genres. The result is an opening up of how literature, film, drama, music, and culture interact. As Perry Meisel makes clear, jazz does not simply constitute a negotiation with the very jazz history it transforms; it engages in close interaction in its origins, influence on American pop music, and cultural interaction with fiction. As Meisel writes: “hard bop is a superb metaphor for the many tensions that American music and culture hold in suspension in the years that follow World War II. . . . The reception of jazz and its musical heirs, rhythm and blues and rock and roll, has always been the product of a deep ambivalence in the American grain."
The argument of art with mainstream culture, the pull of creativity and the claims of commercial success, have produced writing, film, and music rich in ambivalence, celebrations, and attacks, but even richer in the subtlety with which such poles are negotiated. Much of our art calls into question American myths of innocence, conquest, tolerance, and optimism while sometimes invoking or holding onto them as ideals not yet realized, and always laying claim to openness and the right to be heard. In doing so, art carves a two-way street between newness and traditional American culture³.
Frederick R. Karl explores both the unifying myths of the 1950s and the hidden currents that surged at home beneath the growing tolerance and prosperity of the United States in the immediate post­war years. His magisterial command of the sweep of postwar culture includes the cultural waves that crested after the fifties and rocked the turbulent decades to come. Regina Weinreich's essay, “The Beat Generation is Now About Everything," explores the innovative forms and shock art of the Beats and shows how they turned lifestyles that were wildly outrageous, exhilarating, or even dangerous into a force in mainstream art. Even in the suburban pastoral of mainstream writing, ideals of stability and security were pressured by the pull of rebellion and despair.
Writers committed even to traditions of American realism revealed problems that transcended ideologies of conformity or revolt. The suburban realism of John Cheever and John Updike with its mixtures of plenty and malaise was to register a dialectic between American optimism and uneasiness. The painterly short fiction of Flannery O'Connor, with its blend of violence, mystery, and moral obsession; the sharply imagined realities of the Detroit riot of 1967, etched by Joyce Carol Oates in them; the expansive psychological realism of William Styron, exposing the burdens of history in The Confessions of Nat Turner and Sophie's Choice; and the complex creations of E. L. Doctorow, who, in The Book of Daniel and Ragtime, mixed narrative forms in his innovative confrontations with the political past as per­sonal as well as public legacy - all extended traditions of the realistic novel in depicting vital social issues as well as manners and morals. They envisioned the past through the lens of a turbulent present.
The culture and canon wars of the 1980s polarized radicalisms on the right and left. A polemical intensity distorted discussions in Amer­ican universities over the very definition of what should be taught. Discussions of the role of emerging voices in the study of contempor­ary writing twisted the legitimate claims of serious current literature into a false either/or. It was never necessary to argue that reading a contemporary African American or Hispanic writer meant the elimina­tion of every preceding author. Reading Dante has not replaced study­ing Virgil any more than reading Shakespeare has required burning the works of Sophocles. The controversy over “multiculturalism" and the western canon had literature as its primary focus, but was about far more. The sheer intensity of its polarizations registered the pent-up anxiety caused by many social disruptions. Arguments over multiculturalism and “identity politics" expressed the ethnic pressures caused by the growing participation in the American mainstream of those who came after the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 had abolished quotas that favored immigrants from northern European countries. But the culture and canon wars also circulated around the Vietnam War, the youth revolution, the explosion of feminist out­rage, the gay liberation movement, the sudden visibility of art based on long-taboo subjects, and an increasing attention to nontraditional literary forms⁴.
Writing from today's perspective on precisely the mixture that so aroused controversy, Marvin J. Taylor describes the collision between art and society as it comes alive when the “Downtown" art movement in New York collides with the library, that “establishment" organ for defining value and categorizing forms. Curator of a unique collection of Downtown works, Taylor explains how “Downtown works . . . question the structures of society - the available discourses by which we describe things - question the library as a similar available dis­course, one that does violence through categorization of materials that are not beholden to the same philosophical, political, cultural outlook as those discourses that inform the libraries' structures." He describes an art whose impulses were shared by a large number of writers: musicians, filmmakers, and video artists who . . . began to push the limits of traditional categories of art. Artists were also writers, writers were developing performance pieces, performers were incorporating videos into their work, and everyone was in a band. Along with the profound disruption of artistic specialization, Downtown works them­selves undermined the traditions of art, music, performance, and writ­ing at the most basic structural levels. Rather than overthrow traditional forms and establish a new movement, Downtown work sought to undermine from within the traditional structures of artistic media and the culture that had grown up around them.
Writing on the Hollywood film, Leonard Quart and Albert Auster take on the reverse effect. Even as insurgent artists sought to transform establishment expectations, the establishment itself was incorporating insurgency as essential to reaching its audience. From within the commercial calculations of the filmmaking industry, and in the famil­iar genres of the western, the thriller, or the gangster film, Hollywood carried on its own interrogation of value by making the “murder mystery" and “moral mystery" mirror each other. Across genres there emerged, along with technical mastery and visual quotation, a ques­tioning and darkening of populist optimism. Political and crime films interrogated American dreams and optimism, and exposed the fault- lines in precisely the mainstream culture they could both fascinate and provoke. From the Godfather trilogy, through the twisty manipula­tions of fact in JFK or Nixon, to Wag the Dog, Quart and Auster make clear that Hollywood watched us, even as we watched its films⁵.
American theater provided a more intimate site for the dramatic interplay between postwar life and dynamic art. John Bell explores a layering of attitudes toward theater as high art and commercial enter­tainment that guided the evolution of drama, shaping its forms and sharpening the conflicts between the claims of imagination and com­merce, of idealism and necessity, tragedy and escapism, that were incorporated in the variety of dramatic forms. From dramas of intim­acy to musicals, from Broadway to off-Broadway, Bell explores how theater captured America's self-consciousness about its place in the world and its changing views.
Nowhere are myths of an easy American triumphalism challenged more explicitly than in the literature of the Vietnam War, with its stark and powerful renderings of the soldier's effort to persevere with courage and even to maintain a measure of past hope and idealism when confronted with the actualities of an ill-conceived war. Belief confounded by disillusion emerges as a core experience in fiction that rendered the struggle for survival in a universe of doubt and death. Pat C. Hoy II enables an understanding of that literature as the crucible in which established certainties were challenged and often transformed.
Hoy brings an encompassing perspective to a rich and haunting liter­ature shaped by the collision between “our destructiveness [and] our political failures . . . and signs of grandeur: willing sacrifice for the welfare of others, deep love for comrades, redemptive acts of mourn­ing, the revelation of character, the knowledge of what it means to be responsible, the acknowledged ache of loneliness."
Vietnam writing continues the democratic tradition of American war writing - in play since Walt Whitman's poetry of the Civil War or John Dos Passos's Three Soldiers in World War I - of focusing on the common soldier. It exploits the use of the platoon of men from differ­ent races or ethnic backgrounds - reinforced in such World War II novels as Norman Mailer's The Naked and the Dead - as a microcosm for American differences reconciled in the interdependent wholeness of the platoon or squadron. But it would go further, subjecting each soldier to self-shattering, traumatic encounters, mixtures of violence and futility, of captured ground immediately evacuated, of bodycounts as success measurements, of the jungle itself as enemy, of the names of the soldiers often replaced by nicknames stripped of all associations with their past lives. This literature moved deeper into realms of consciousness where the soldier's American life disappeared and his heroic, pop icons, his John Waynes, became ironic figures as the challenge to certitudes of any kind grew deeper.
Fiction
The rich literary legacy of the First World War proved adaptable to the experience of the next generation of authors who, sooner than they had expected after the “war to end all wars,” were living through one of their own. As Malcolm Cowley, somewhat tongue-in-cheek, puts it in his postwar assessment:
One might say that a great many novels of the Second World War are based on Dos Passos for structure, since they have collective heroes in the Dos Passos fashion, and since he invented a series of structural devices for dealing with such heroes in unified works of fiction. At the same time, they are based on Scott Fitzgerald for mood, on Steinbeck for humor, and on Hemingway for action and dialogue.³
In fact, the major points of criticism of American novels about the Second World War up to the 1960s were that they were neither formally nor thema­tically innovative, nor did they have the wide and powerful effects on their audience that many novels about the previous war had achieved. There is some truth to this charge, as the first generation of Second World War authors did not feel an immediate need to look for new and adequate forms of literary discourse. It should be remembered, though, that the innovative writers of the First World War, like cummings, Dos Passos, Faulkner, Fitzgerald, and Hemingway, were a minority among their contemporaries, and that that first generation of Second World War writers widely adopted and developed the styles and narrative techniques of their immediate predecessors. Yet the new war also spawned new literary modes: Novels such as William Eastlake’s Castle Keep (1965), John Hawkes’s The Cannibal (1949), Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 (1961), Kurt Vonnegut’s Mother Night (1961) and Slaughterhouse- Five (1969), and Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow (1973) pioneered different forms of postmodern discourse, not only in war literature but in American literature in general. It is this marked difference in literary dis­courses that signals the distinction between the two major schools of American fiction about the Second World War - the mimetic mode and the postmodern mode.
Fiction: the mimetic mode
The more traditional authors, such as John Horne Burns and Leon Uris, present the war as an extraordinary event which can be placed in its time- space continuum in history and acquires meaning in the framework of ame­liorative evolutionary concepts as one more step in the progress of civiliza­tion. The mode is generally mimetic, employing conventional literary structures: The focus is on telling a “story” whose chronology more or less corresponds to the historical sequence of events⁶. Characters conform to the tradition of psychological realism that encourages readers to identify with protagonists, and the connection of events by means of chronological narra­tive and plot structure suggests that the sense-making of the fictional “story” is more or less identical with what took place. At the end, readers have a sense of closure and the feeling that the things that happen in this fictional world can be explained and understood. Primary subject matter includes descrip­tions of battle scenes and the fate of a military unit and its individual members, while themes cover comradeship, courage, cowardice, endurance, the experience of death and danger, as well as the often problematic relations between officers and the lower ranks.
“Combat novels” are the most numerous in the mimetic mode; They focus on concrete missions that are rendered in detail and without much concern for a wider political or ideological context. Only a few of them rise above the level of what John Keegan once called the “Zap-Blatt-Banzai-Gott im Himmel- Bayonet in the Guts” adventure story.⁴ A notable exception is Harry Brown’s A Walk in the Sun (1944), the tersely told story of a company’s mission in southern Italy. Brown reveals the existentialist underpinnings of Hemingway’s factual style and also convincingly illustrates the effects of what has been called “combat numbness” - the prolonged exposure to the violence of war - on the soldiers. The main character, Corporal Tyne, sets the tone for his GIs’ attitude towards war when he reflects, as he and his men are about to storm an ominously harmless-looking farmhouse, “What they were about to do was merely a job ... It was the war. It was the job. It was their job. Get it done and then relax, that was the thing to do.”⁵ Compared to Brown’s plain style, later novels often show more action, suspense, and patriotic fervor, as, for example, Leon Uris’s Battle Cry (1953), a very realistically written tale from the Pacific theater of operations about the battles of Guadalcanal and Tarawa, employing the army-as-microcosm device to signal the “unity in diversity” of the American melting pot. Glenn Sire’s The Deathmakers (i960) and James Jones’s The Thin Red Line (1962) are other works replete with action and suspense. James Dickey, who served in the US Army’s night squadrons during the war, published Alnilam in 1987, which explores the secrets and codes of the “higher military,” and To the White Sea in 1993, which presents the fight for survival of an American Air Force gunner shot down during a bombing raid over Tokyo. William Chamberlain’s two collections of skillfully crafted short stories about the Second World War and Korea (Combat Stories of World War II and Korea [1962], More Combat Stories of World War II and Korea [1964]) likewise feature a large variety of attitudes in characters trying to cope with military, logistic, and psychological challenges in their course of duty.
Another identifiable group of authors writing in the mimetic mode expand their vision beyond the immediate horizon of combat, problematizing the role of the military as a hierarchic structure within a democracy and the potential danger for civil society if its power runs unchecked. Dos Passos’s techniques of the collectivist novel are often deployed in this genre. These novels tend to be critical of the excessively authoritarian behavior of the military command. Such works include “classics” like Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead (1948), James Jones’s From Here To Eternity (1951), James Gould Cozzens’s Guard of Honor (1948), and Herman Wouk’s The Caine Mutiny
(i95i).
A related group of authors provides an even stronger critical focus that clearly points to their roots in the progressive and socially oriented move­ments of the American i930s. Their novels are examples of what Frederick J. Hoffman called “ideological melodrama”; they often feature a liberal “intellectual who must mature, the external menace or bogey, the signs of inner corruption that resembles the enemy.”⁶ These novels include Irwin Shaw’s best-selling The Young Lions (1948), Stefan Heym’s muckraking The Crusaders (1948), Anton Myrer’s The Big War (1957), John Hersey’s chilling “factional” account Hiroshima (1946), and his psychopathological case study The War Lover (1959). These authors often filter their views of individuals, (military) society, and the war through evolutionary models of Freudian or Marxist origin and present Nazism and fascism as a regression to lower forms of cultural as well as personal individual development.
In view of the broad consensus during the war and the general climate of the following cold war years, which was not very congenial to critical voices or texts, it is a clear sign of intellectual sincerity and vitality that American literature brought forth a remarkable number of novels with these critical perspectives. Hersey, Heym, Mailer, and Shaw are foremost among those who, while supporting the goals of the Second World War, pointed to its potentially dangerous effects on the victors. However, no matter how severe their critiques, these authors never attempted to discard basic American values. Rather, they warned of abuses of power and of corruption within the USA, early critics of what at the end of the Eisenhower years became known as the “military-industrial complex.”
The fact that the war brought Americans into contact with a multitude of different cultures also yielded a rich literary harvest; a good number of novels explicitly or implicitly compare their home country with other cultures, not always completely in favor of the American way of life. In The Gallery (1947), finished shortly before he died near Naples, John Horne Burns portrays the suffering of Italian civilians with great sensitivity and sympathy, as do John Hersey in A Bell for Adano (1944) and Alfred Hayes in The Girl on the Via Flaminea (1949). James Michener’s Tales of the South Pacific (1947) counter­act prevailing negative attitudes towards Asians with tales of love and humaneness.
The noncombatant auxiliary’s experience features in Thomas Heggen’s Mister Roberts (1946), an instant success upon publication, which provides a behind-the-lines view of the Pacific Campaign. Mr. Roberts, First Lieutenant and Cargo Officer of the USS Reluctant, which carries supplies between the tiny islands of Tedium, Apathy, and Ennui, is a born leader who meets life’s and the war’s challenges with laconic humor. The highly success­ful dramatic version (1948) diminishes the tragic elements and highlights the farcical aspects of the novel, as does the film version, starring Henry Fonda as Mr. Roberts and Jack Lemmon as Ensign Pulver⁷.
American women had widespread experience of service in noncombatant units or as journalists during the Second World War. Novels based on these experiences by American women writers include Cathleen Coyle’s To Hold Against Famine (1942), Grace Livingston Hill Lutz’s Time of the Singing of Birds (1944), Martha Gellhorn’s The Wine of Astonishment (1948), Susan Cooper’s Dawn of Fear (1970), and Janet Hickman’s The Stones (1976)⁸. Kay Boyle, who lived in Austria, England, and France from 1922 to 1941, very perceptively catches the rise of Nazism in Austria in her story “The White Horses of Vienna” (1935), and in “Defeat” (1941) portrays the collapse of