the-sad-young-men-课文和翻译教学文稿

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The Sad Young Men

Rod W. Horton and Herbert W. Edwards

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: 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-toting

vagaries of the

wild?

Generation problem?

Generation Problem;

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 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 United 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 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 code 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 expected 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 Europe 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 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

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sensation -- sex, drugs, alcohol, perversions -- were all part of the pattern of escape, an

escape 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 intellectuals crowding into Greenwich Village

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 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 States, 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

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

to get into the fun before the whole thing turned belly up.

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, 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-sided 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 personal value, in addition to being idealistic and exciting.

Accordingly, they began to join the various armies in increasing numbers, the

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 tremendous was

the storming of recruitment centers that harassed sergeants actually pleaded with

volunteers to

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-

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. Especially 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 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 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 desirable than non-veterans for

whatever business opportunities that did exist. Their very homes were often

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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 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

democracy.

also had to face the sodden, Napoleonic cynicism of 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

resentment, it

behavior.

7 Greenwich 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 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

still cheap 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 for young persons to defy the law and the

conventions and to add their own little matchsticks to the conflagration of

youth

fad. Each town had its

in reality 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 made 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, 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 they found themselves and their friends

adopting the new gaiety. By the middle of the decade, the

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 art and culture, less avid for material gain, and less

susceptible to standardization. Instead, their ideas had been generally ignored, while

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their behavior had contributed to that standardization by furnishing a pattern of

Bohemianism that had become 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 boobery of our

society. An important book rather grandiosely entitled Civilization in the United States,

written by

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 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 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 glint and ring of the dollar,

there was little remedy for the sensitive mind but to emigrate to Europe where

things better.

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 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

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 rootless as Hemingway's 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 critics 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 works ripened by the

tempering of an older, more sophisticated society.

11 For actually the

time, bitter, critical, rebellious, iconoclastic, experimental, often absurd, more often

misdirected- but never

above, such fisures as Eugene O'Neill, Edna St. Vincent Millay, F. Scott Fitzserald,

William Faulkner, Sinclair Lewis, Stephen Vincent Bené

t, 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

called them, cursed their luck but didn't 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.

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