The Lost Generation

Of all the American generations, none bears a label as depressing and unhopeful as the “Lost Generation.” The term, which was first used by one of its best-known members, Ernest Hemingway, applies to men and women who were born in the last years of the 19th Century and reached maturity after World War I, during a period known as “The Roaring Twenties.”

There was a reason for the doomsday moniker. WWI was an exceptionally tragic episode in the abysmal history of warfare. It was triggered by the assassination in July, 1914 of an Austrian archduke and rapidly and almost mindlessly escalated into a four year-long carnage that cost the lives of more than ten million young Europeans. It proved nothing beyond the human capacity for committing a boundless blunder, but it deeply affected a group of American writers and poets, a few of whom — Hemingway included — witnessed the horrifying spectacle first-hand.

The senseless slaughter of their European contemporaries distressed and angered these extraordinarily talented artists so profoundly that, in some ways, they lost their way. Though mostly born and raised in America’s heartland, almost all left the U.S. in their youth to seek fame or at least recognition abroad, usually in Paris or London. Some drifted away completely from their roots, and some even turned against their own country and its democratic system.

And yet, these bitterly critical and frequently pessimistic creative individuals left behind a brilliant heritage that has firmly established America as a literary superpower. Their novels and poems have been translated into dozens of languages, and many have become part of every intellectual’s “must-read” list. Four of the “Lost Generation” authors — Hemingway, T.S. Eliot, John Steinbeck, and William Faulkner — have been honored by the Nobel Prize for Literature, the highest acknowledgment of a literary genius.

Considering these accomplishments, the adjective “lost” is a misnomer. Hemingway used it as a fitting epithet for a group of hedonistic American and British expatriates who travel from Paris to Pamplona in Spain in his book The Sun Also Rises to watch the running of the bulls and the bullfights. But in a way, the book counters Hemingway’s gloomy descriptive and is regarded as one of his best and most enduring works.

In fact, one of the reasons for the success of the “Lost Generation” literati was that they were far from “lost” in their message and the artful prose or poetry in which they delivered it. Their harshest judgment was aimed at the undeserved hardships of the poor — Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath is one example — and the excesses and empty lives of the rich — such as the opulent parties in Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby or his Tales of the Jazz Age, and the footloose life and heavy drinking of expatriates in A Moveable Feast.

Another striking theme of some of these disenchanted Americans was a rejection of the traditional beliefs and values of their childhood. Henry Miller verbally spat and trampled upon any and all civilized conventions and customs; Hemingway, a converted Roman Catholic, wrote in The Movable Feast that “All thinking men are atheists” and regarded organized religion as “a menace to human happiness...”; Gertrude Stein and Ezra Pound glorified brutal dictatorships.

The Faulty Compass of the Expatriates

Stein and Pound were extreme examples of the tendency of many of Americans writers abroad to embrace and sometimes support one or both of the two radical ideologies which, after WWI, captivated millions of followers: Communism, which became the official doctrine of the newly created Union of Soviet Socialist Republic, and, at the opposite end of the spectrum, Italian fascism and Nazism in Germany. It was in this, the turbulent political arena of post-WWI Europe, where several paragons of the “Lost Generation” were truly without a compass.

The oddest example of this moral blindness was Stein, who was famous as one of the most avant-garde writers in the English language. A Jew and a friend of Picasso, a Communist sympathizer, Stein endorsed a proposal for a Nobel Peace prize for Adolf Hitler in 1934, and after his Wehrmacht conquered France, she became a translator and propagandist for Marshal Pétain, the head of the pro-Nazi Vichy government. She publicly praised Pétain for his accomplishments when, after the war, he was sentenced to death for treason.

Another fervent admirer of the far right was Pound, whose Cantos are regarded as immortal poetry. A brilliant wordsmith who was widely admired for the clarity, precision, and economy of his language, Pound was a virulent anti-Semite who blamed the First World War on the Jews and international capitalism.

After the war, he admired both Adolf Hitler and the fascist doctrines of Italy’s Benito Mussolini. In 1924, Idaho-born Pound moved to Italy and, after WWII broke out, became the most prominent American traitor by working for the fascist government and delivering hundreds of broadcasts denouncing the U.S. democracy, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and, of course, the Jews.

Not as lucky as Stein, who escaped all retribution, Pound was arrested by the U.S. Army in 1945, charged with treason, and eventually spent more than 12 years in an American psychiatric hospital. Upon his release in 1958, he returned to Italy, where he lived until his death.

T.S. Eliot, another major “Lost Generation” poet of rare talent (and a friend of Pound, who was his mentor) had his own reason for pursuing a career far from Missouri, where he was born. Oxford- and Harvard-educated, Eliot found his intellectual and artistic home in London, where he won a glittering reputation as a poet, essayist, publisher, playwright, and critic.

Praised as "one of the twentieth century's major poets" for his book-length poem The Waste Land, Eliot did not long remain an American expatriate. After 14 highly successful years in London, he formally renounced his U.S. citizenship and, at the age of 39, became a British subject.

What set most “Lost Generation” expatriate writers apart from their contemporaries in the U.S. was their fascination with the revolutionary creed of Karl Marx — the “dictatorship of the proletariat” — that after 1917 was formally (though not in fact) established in the Soviet Union. Angered by the real or perceived unfairness of the capitalist system and the exploitation of the working classes, a significant number of highly talented American expatriates became enamored of the Communist Party propaganda pouring out of Moscow.

Hemingway was one of them. Although he never joined the Communist Party, he — according to recently released Soviet archives — “repeatedly expressed his desire and willingness to help” the KGB, the virulently anti-American and anti-Western Soviet spy agency. But there is no record that he actually became a KGB spy and, like other expatriates, he eventually responded to the sobering facts about the real nature of the Soviet regime. In the 1930s, Hemingway prominently supported President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s socially progressive (but democratic) “New Deal.”

Another early admirer of communism was John Dos Passos, who was so impressed by Marxism that in 1928 he traveled to the Soviet Union to study socialism. Two years later, he wrote the first novel — The 42nd Parallel — of his most famous but deeply pessimistic trilogy about his country, The U.S.A. He later became a leading member of the Communist League of American Writers.

He only changed his politics after he arrived in Spain in 1937 to support the government forces fighting the rightist insurgents led by General Francisco Franco. A reportedly Moscow-ordered murder of José Robles, Dos Passos’ close friend and translator, angered him so deeply that he broke up with leftist friends and wrote a series of scathing articles denouncing communist doctrines.

From then on, Dos Passos gravitated to the political right. In the 1960s, he campaigned for Republican presidential candidates Barry Goldwater and Richard M. Nixon.

Another famous expatriate who made a political about-face was John Steinbeck. The author of twenty-seven books, including his famous novels Of Mice and Men, The Grapes of Wrath, and East of Eden, Steinbeck made no secret of his membership in the Communist Party. In 1939, he signed a letter supporting the Soviet invasion of Finland and the establishment of a Soviet-controlled puppet government.

Documents released in 2012, however, show that in 1952 Steinbeck secretly offered his services to the CIA; its director, Walter Bedell Smith, was eager to take him up on the offer. In later years, Steinbeck became a personal friend of President Lyndon Johnson, a progressive Democrat and, in 1967, he confirmed his political conversion by writing a report praising the U.S. troops in Vietnam.

What was perhaps the most complete personal reversal was made by Henry Miller. A native New Yorker, Miller played no politics while living abroad. “I regard politics as a thoroughly foul, rotten world,” he told an interviewer. But as an author, he was a ruthless iconoclast, an intellectual rebel in an all-out war on societal restraints and traditional values.

His novels so overflowed with obscenities, explicit sexual descriptions, derision, and personal insults that a critic characterized one of them as a “libel, slander, defamation of character. This is not a book, in the ordinary sense of the word. No, this is a prolonged insult, a gob of spit in the face of Art, a kick in the pants to God, Man, Destiny, Time, Love, Beauty... what you will.”

Miller’s most highly prized works — Tropic of Cancer, Black Spring, Tropic of Capricorn, and The Rosy Crucifixion trilogy — had the distinction of being banned in the United States until 1961 for obscenity.  And yet in 1972, nearing the end of his career, Miller wrote three essays, one of which testifies to the strength of the conventional emotions and yearnings against which he had railed and raged for decades.

“If at eighty you’re not a cripple or an invalid,” he wrote, “if you have your health, if you still enjoy a good walk, a good meal (with all the trimmings), if you can sleep without first taking a pill, if birds and flowers, mountains and sea still inspire you, you are a most fortunate individual and you should get down on your knees morning and night and thank the good Lord for his savin’ and keepin’ power.”

No longer “lost,” Miller ended his crusade against conventions the same way some of his fellow expatriates shed their revolutionary politics: by embracing the values of their home in America.