Exile's Return (part one), Malcolm Cowley

You will note in the title, this is part one. I am reading this book in pieces and will likely post continuing comments.

Early in the introduction to Exile’s Return it is pointed out that the Lost Generation lived with a pervading sense of betrayal (x). There is the implication that—even as teens—this generation was somehow different. This was not the impression I took away from the text. Perhaps in the century since it was written that sense of being different has come to be the standard. What I read seemed—felt to me very much like the work of a young (twenty-something) American, not necessarily a man, but American youth of almost any generation that followed the “lost generation.”

Cowley’s presentation of young men in high school claiming, “We felt that we were different from other boys; we admired and hated these happy ones, these people competent in every situation, who drove their fathers’ car and led the cheers at football games and never wrote poems or questioned themselves.” (16) sounds, at least to this reader, very much like James Dean, or Bob Dylan, or Kurt Cobain. To be misunderstood perhaps was not so eloquently presented as a part of American culture before this lost generation, but I am hard pressed to believe that this sense of being different—of feeling betrayed by—a people apart from those who came before was so completely new. I have witnessed the sixties, seventies, eighties and nineties and each generation had its own sense of loss. Each generation has had a sojourn in Greenwich Village (which as far as I can tell hasn’t changed much in temperament since the twenties).

I found the prose engaging and wondering did Cowley perhaps have other texts? His insight, his sharp attention to exactly what is American culture (a topic much on my mind in relationship to my thesis), what makes it unique—why do so many look to other shores to find a sense of connection? I found buried within the text nuggets but one of the most profound, one of the nuggets that does set this lost generation apart; “national consciousness—indeed, some doubted that this country was even a nation; it had no traditions” (94). Writers, throughout history have drawn on traditions—and these writers had none. Writers have drawn on the struggle and these writers had none. In their lack of history, tradition and struggle, if I read Cowley right, these writers found something distinctly American—a non culture—and they felt betrayed. I don’t think they were the first to see this gap in our society, nor were they the last. These writers did perhaps give voice to the discontent that still has no name in our society, nothing clearer than “lost.”