高级英语（第二册） Lesson 10 The Sad Young Men (Rod W. Horton and Herbert W. Edwards)

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 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 \

were not enough, the returning veteran 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 \

complete overthrow of genteel standards of 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

\

5

高级英语（第二册） Lesson 10 The Sad Young Men (Rod W. Horton and Herbert W. Edwards)

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

\

became a fad. Each town had its \set which prided itself on its unconventionality ,

although 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 \

6

高级英语（第二册） Lesson 10 The Sad Young Men (Rod W. Horton and Herbert W. Edwards)

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

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 \

7

高级英语（第二册） Lesson 10 The Sad Young Men (Rod W. Horton and Herbert W. Edwards)

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 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 \

a 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,

8