Lost Generation

EXILE'S RETURN--Malcolm Cowley-- Norton ($3).

Like the A. E. F.'s "Lost Battalion." the Lost Generation (named by Gertrude Stein, advertised by Ernest Hemingway) was not really lost but merely mislaid. A crowd of prodigal sons who refused to come home, this Lost Generation was the self-consciously intellectual counterpart of the late U. S. phenomenon, Flaming Youth. Except for a few Peter Pans and a few suicides, these War Babies have now-grown up. In Exile's Return Malcolm Cowley takes a good look at his literary generation, admits "it was an easy, quick, adventurous age, good to be young in; and yet on coming out of it one feels a sense of relief, as on coming out of a closed, smoky room too full of talk and people into the sunlight of the winter streets."

Author Cowley calls his book "a narrative of ideas." His composite hero is a youth of middle-class background and literary ambitions who graduated from college between 1916 and 1922. School and college began the long process of deracination. ''Looking backwards, I feel that our whole training was involuntarily directed toward destroying whatever roots we had in the soil, toward eradicating our local and regional peculiarities, toward making us homeless citizens. . . . We came to feel that wisdom was an attribute of Greece and art of the Renaissance, that glamour belonged only to Paris or Vienna and that glory was confined to the dim past. . . . Essentially we were taught to regard culture as a veneer, a badge of class distinction. . . ."

The War, which gave them a free trip to experience, completed the demoralizing process. After the Armistice they came back to Greenwich Village, whence they escaped again when they could, to Europe and the country of little magazines. "In those days young American writers were drifting everywhere in Wrest Europe and Middle Europe; they waved to each other from the windows of passing trains." Back from Europe again, forced home either by economic pressure or half-confessed nostalgia, the Lost Generation found itself unwilling to go all the way home to its various Midwestern birthplaces, congregated in Manhattan, cynically took jobs or hopefully free-lanced for a living, began to colonize Connecticut with weekend or summer cottages. The crash of 1929 and the depression sobered them further, turned the majority into politically-minded (usually leftwing) writers, complete with careers, creeds and clientele. Right-wing readers will find little to sympathize with in Author Cowley's narrative. They will not be amused by his account of Dada, most extreme of modern French literary cults, whose founder, Tristan Tzara, appeared at a public meeting and "read aloud a newspaper article, while an electric bell kept ringing so that nobody could hear what he said." A later meeting was delightedly reported by Dadaist Tzara: "For the first time in the history of the world, people threw at us not onlv eggs, vegetables and pennies, but beef-steaks as well. It was a very huge suecess." They will sniff at the mock-heroic episode in which Malcolm Cowley smote a Paris cafe proprietor for Art's sake, thus gathering a two-fisted reputation that later scared bookish Critic Ernest Boyd. Nor will they be moved by his version of the long-drawn-out suicide of Harry Crosby, whom he regards as a symbolic figure. But left-wingers will find much to interest them, much to applaud. To plain readers Exile's Return will seem a well-documented, often amusing but essentially serious case history of a minor period, whose importance its author can be pardoned for exaggerating.

The Author. Son of a Pittsburgh doctor, Malcolm Cowley was born 35 years ago on a western Pennsylvania farm, spent all his summers there. He left Harvard in 1917 to drive a munitions truck in the French Army, later transferred to the American Ambulance Service, like his colleagues Ernest Hemingway, e. e. cummings, Edmund Wilson, John Dos Passos. After several years' free-lancing in Manhattan and two years in France, he settled down in the U. S. to make his literary fortune, bought an upstate farm (on which he made the first payment with a cash poetry prize), was an editor of the late Broom, wrote for the late Dial. In 1929 he became associate editor of The New Republic. Translator, poet and champion of his literary generation, he has published one book of verse (Blue Juniata), numerous translations from the French, many a literary article. Slow of speech, heavyset, jovial, he is a devotee of deck tennis, an addict to fishing. Though not a member of the Communist Party, he has become "politicalized," writes with a strong leftish slant.

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