1: Blue Juniata

Somewhere the turn of a dirt road or the unexpected crest of a hill reveals your own childhood, the fields where you once played barefoot, the kindly trees, the landscape by which all others are measured and condemned. Here, under the hemlocks, is a spring. Follow the thread of water as it winds downward, first among moss, then lost in sweetfern or briers, and soon you will see the bottom lands, the scattered comfortable houses, the flat cornfields along the creek, the hillside pastures where the white-top bends in alternate waves of cream white and leaf green. The Schoharie Valley in August . . . or perhaps what we find is an Appalachian parade of mountains rank on rank: the first ridge is a shadowy green, the second a deep blue; the ridges behind it grow fainter and fainter, till the last is indistinguishable from the long cloud advancing to hide and drench the mountains, flood the parallel creeks, and set the millwheels turning in the hollows and coves. Or perhaps our childhoods differ---we are on a low bluff overlooking the Cumberland. Northward into Kentucky, south into middle Tennessee, the river lands continue with their bluffs, their bottoms, their red-clay gullies, their cedars dotting the hillsides like totem poles. It is November: smoke rises from lonely tobacco barns; a hound bays from the fields where corn stands yellow in the shock.

Perhaps our boyhood is a stream in northern Michigan, Big Two-Hearted River, flowing through burned-over lands dotted with islands of pine into a tamarack swamp. The water is swift and chill in July; a trout lurks in a hollow log, ready to take the grasshopper floating toward him at the end of your line. Perhaps we remember a fat farm in Wisconsin, or a Nebraska prairie, or a plantation house among the canebrakes. Wherever it lies, the country is our own; its people speak our language, recognize our values, yes, and our grandmother's eyes, our uncle's trick of pausing in a discussion to make a point impressive. "The Hopkinses was alluz an arguin' family," they say, and suddenly you laugh with a feeling of tension relaxed and pretenses vanished. This is your home . . . but does it exist outside your memory? On reaching the hilltop or the bend in the road, will you find the people gone, the landscape altered, the hemlock trees cut down and only stumps, dried tree-tops, branches and fireweed where the woods had been? Or, if the country remains the same, will you find yourself so changed and uprooted that it refuses to take you back, to reincorporate you into its common life? No matter: the country of our childhood survives, if only in our minds, and retains our loyalty even when casting us into exile; we carry its image from city to city as our most essential baggage:

Wanderers outside the gates, in hollow
landscapes without memory, we carry
each of us an urn of native soil,
of not impalpable dust a double handful

anciently gathered---was it garden mold
or wood soil fresh with hemlock needles,
pine and princess pine, this little earth we bore
in silence, blindly, over the frontier?

---a parcel of the soil not wide enough
or firm enough to build a dwelling on,
or deep enough to dig a grave, but cool
and sweet enough to sink the nostrils in
and find the smell of home, or in the ears,
rumors of home, like oceans in a shell.

2: Big-Town High School,

I was born in a farmhouse near Belsano, in Cambria County, Pennsylvania, on the western slope of the Alleghenies. All my summers were spent there, and sometimes the long autumns too---fishing, shooting cottontails and pine squirrels, or simply wandering through the woods by myself; I thought of Belsano as my home. But my father was a doctor in Pittsburgh and I attended a big-town high school.

It must have been like two hundred other high schools west of the mountains. It was new, it was well equipped, it was average in size, having in those days about a thousand pupils. In retrospect it seems that all sorts of people went there---I can remember the daughter of a millionaire coal operator, a future All-American halfback, a handsome Italian who later became a big-time mobster, a tall, serious and stupid Negro boy, two girls who wore cotton-print dresses all year round and whom we suspected of being sewed into their winter underwear---but the atmosphere of the school was prosperous and middle class. Everyone was friendly. There were, on the other hand, all sorts of separate crowds, the football crowd, the social crowd, the second-best social crowd, and the literary crowd composed of boys who made good marks in English Composition, read books that weren't assigned for reading, were shy, noisy, ill dressed and helped to edit the school magazine.

That of course was the crowd to which I belonged---with Kenneth Burke and Jimmy Light (who later became a theatrical director), Russell Farrell (the valedictorian of the class, who changed his mind and didn't become a priest), Jake Davis and three or four others. In the high schools west of the mountains there must have been, at that time, scores of these groups of adolescent writers. Let us see what we were like at seventeen.

I suppose we had all the normal aberrations of our age and type. We were wholly self-centered, absorbed in our own personalities, and appalled by the thought that these would some day be obliterated. We brooded often on death, often on slights to our timid vanity. We yearned: pimpled and awkward we yearned for someone to accept our caresses, be conquered by our cleverness, our real distinction, our reserves of feeling hidden from the world. We dreamed of escape, into European cities with crooked streets, into Eastern islands where the breasts of the women were small and firm as inverted teacups. We felt a bashful veneration for everything illicit, whether it was the prostitute living in the next block or the crimes of Nero or the bottle of blackberry cordial we passed from hand to hand on Sunday afternoons. We felt that we were different from other boys: we admired and hated these happy ones, these people competent for every situation, who drove their fathers' cars and led the cheers at football games and never wrote poems or questioned themselves.

Symptoms much like these have recurred in the adolescence of writers for at least two centuries; they could probably be traced much farther into the past. But we had other symptoms too, more characteristic of our time and nation.

Thus, we felt a certain humility in the face of life, a disinclination to make demands on the world about us. Art and life were two realms; art was looked down upon by the ordinary public, the "lifelings," and justly so, since it could never have any effect on them. Art was uncommercial, almost secret, and we hoped to become artists. That was our own concern. An artist, a poet, should not advertise his profession by his clothes, should not wear a black cloak or flowing tie or let his hair grow over his collar. The artist had a world of his own: his ambitions in the real world should be humble. One of my friends confided to me that he wanted to earn seven thousand dollars a year and go to a symphony concert every week: I thought he showed presumption. Another friend, like Somerset Maugham's hero in Of Human Bondage, wanted to be a ship's doctor and visit strange ports; another would be satisfied to enter his father's business. For my part I was determined to be the dramatic critic of a newspaper, metropolitan or provincial: I should earn about three thousand dollars a year and have a mistress. Meanwhile I should be writing; all my friends would be writing---but about what?

Every new generation has its own sentimentality, its symbols that move it to compassion or self-compassion. For early Romantic writers beginning with Byron, the favorite symbol was the Haunted Castle---inaccessible, lonely, dwelled in by a young aristocrat of fabulous lineage, a Manfred seeking absolution for an inner sense of guilt, but wholly contemptuous of humankind. For the socially minded writers who followed Ibsen, the stock situation was that of the misunderstood reformer, the Enemy of the People, who tries to help his neighbors and is crucified for his good intentions. The situation of the artist frustrated by society has been popular with the late Romantics. All these symbols seemed foreign to ourselves, even slightly ridiculous. Our sensibilities were touched by older situations---girls mourning their lost lovers, men crippled in battle, death, the longing for home, prostitutes weeping at songs about marriage and babies.... Those were the themes we should normally have employed, but our sensibility, at that point, was checked by our ideas.

In describing the ideas I run the danger of making them seem too reasoned and definite. Essentially they were not ideas at all: they were attitudes or emotions, persistently but vaguely felt and often existing only in germ. They are important because they help to explain what followed---because, after a period of imitation and before a period of change, they reappeared in what we wrote, and because what we felt at seventeen is an explanation and criticism of what we should later believe.

At seventeen we were disillusioned and weary. In the midst of basketball, puppy love and discussions of life---washed down with chocolate sodas on warm afternoons---we had come to question almost everything we were taught at home and in school. Religion---we had argued about it so much, Catholics against agnostics against Lutherans against Christian Scientists, that we were all converted to indifferentism. Morality, which we identified with chasteness, was a lie told to our bodies. Our studies were useless or misdirected, especially our studies in English Literature: the authors we were forced to read, and Shakespeare most of all, were unpleasant to our palate; they had the taste of chlorinated water.

We were still too immature to understand the doctrine of complete despair about the modern world that would later be advanced by the followers of T. S. Eliot (before their reconciliation with the Church), but we shared in the mood that lay behind them. During the brief moments we devoted to the fate of mankind in general, we suffered from a sense of oppression. We felt that the world was rigorously controlled by scientific laws of which we had no grasp, that our lives were directed by Puritan standards that were not our own, that society in general was terribly secure, unexciting, middle class, a vast reflection of the families from which we came. Society obeyed the impersonal law of progress. Cities expanded relentlessly year by year; fortunes grew larger; more and more automobiles appeared in the streets; people were wiser and better than their ancestors---eventually, by automatic stages, we should reach an intolerable utopia of dull citizens, without crime or suffering or drama. The progression, of course, might be reversed. The period in which we were living might prove to resemble Rome under the Five Good Emperors; it might be followed by upheavals, catastrophes, a general decline. But the decay of society was psychologically equivalent to its progress: both were automatic processes that we ourselves could neither hasten nor retard. Society was something alien, which our own lives and writings could never affect: it was a sort of parlor car in which we rode, over smooth tracks, toward a destination we should never have chosen for ourselves.

Literature, our profession, was living in the shadow of its own great past. The symbols that moved us, the great themes of love and death and parting, had been used and exhausted. Where could we find new themes. when everything, so it seemed, had been said already? Having devoured the world, literature was dying for lack of nourishment. Nothing was left to ourselves ---nothing except to deal with marginal experiences and abnormal cases, or else to say the old things over again with a clever and apologetic twist of our own. Nothing remained except the minor note. . . . And so, having adopted it humbly, we contributed artificial little pieces to the high-school paper, in which vice triumphed over virtue, but discreetly, so as not to be censored by the faculty adviser.

We were launching or drifting into the sea of letters with no fixed destination and without a pilot. To whom could we turn for advice? The few authors we admired were separated from us either by time or else just as effectively by space and language. Among the American writers of the day there were several who had produced a good book or two good books. Except for Howells, whom we regarded as one of our enemies (if we regarded him at all), and Henry James, whom we did not read (and who lived in exile), not one of them had achieved a career. There seemed to be no writer with our own background. There was no one who spoke directly to our youth, no one for us to follow with a single heart, no one, even, against whom we could intelligently and fruitfully rebel.

Yet we read tirelessly, hour after hour; we were engaged in a desperate search for guidance. We read English authors at first, Kipling and Stevenson, then Meredith, Hardy and Gissing. In The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft we found an opinion with which we agreed completely. "I have never learned to regard myself," Gissing said, "as a 'member of society.' For me there have always been two entities---myself and the world--- and the normal relation between the two has been hostile."

Forgetting the hostile world, we continued our searching. We read Conrad; we read Wilde and Shaw, who were always mentioned together. From one or the other of these dramatists---or perhaps from Mencken and Nathan, then editors of Smart Set---we derived the sense of paradox, which became a standard for judging the writers we afterward encountered. If they were paradoxical---if they turned platitudes upside down, showed the damage wrought by virtue, made heroes of their villains---then they were "moderns"; they deserved our respect. Congreve, we learned, was a modern. Ibsen was modern also, but we were a little repelled by his symbolism and not aroused by his social message; we read him dutifully, self-consciously. Strindberg was more exciting, and we plunged into Schnitzler's early plays as if we were exploring forbidden countries in which we hoped to dwell. Reading, we imagined boys in other cities, beneath the green lamps of public libraries, scheming like ourselves to get hold of the books "not to be issued to minors," and being introduced into a special world of epigrams and süsse Mädl, where love affairs were taken for granted and everyone had the sense of paradox.

For us, paradox reduced itself to the simplest terms: it was the ability to say what was not expected, to fool one's audience.

If, during a thunder shower, another boy looked out the classroom window and said, "It isn't raining, is it?" expecting us to answer "no," we would say "yes." By so doing, we were giving what we called a First Convolution answer.

The theory of convolutions was evolved in Pittsburgh, at Peabody High School, but it might have appeared in any city during those years before the war. It was generally explained by reference to the game of Odd or Even. You have held an even number of beans or grains of corn in your hand; you have won; therefore you take an even number again. That is the simplest argument by analogy; it is no convolution at all. But if you say to yourself, "I had an even number before and won; my opponent will expect me to have an even number again; therefore I'll take an odd number," you have entered the First Convolution. If you say, "Since I won with an even number before, my opponent will expect me to try to fool him by having an odd number this time; therefore I'll be even," you are Second Convolution. The process seems capable of indefinite extension; it can be applied, moreover, to any form of art, so long as one is less interested in what one says than in one's ability to outwit an audience. We were not conscious of having anything special to say; we wanted merely to live in ourselves and be writers.

There is, however, a practical limit to the series of convolutions. If it leads at one moment to reading Oscar Wilde because other high-school pupils have never heard of him, it leads, at the next to disparaging Wilde because you admired him once and because First Convolution people still admire him. You have entered the Second Convolution: you read Schnitzler and "go beyond him" without ever understanding what he has to say. In this manner we passed through a whole series of enthusiasms---Mencken, Huneker, Somerset Maugham, Laforgue (after we learned French)---till we encountered Dostoevski, who didn't fit into our scheme, and Flaubert, whose patience overawed us.

The sense of paradox ends by having nothing left to feed upon; eventually it is self-devouring. The desire to surprise or deceive leads often to a final deception---which consists in being exactly like everybody else. This was the stage that several of us had reached by our eighteenth year. We dressed like everybody else; we talked about girls, automobiles and the World's Series. Petting was not yet fashionable: it was called "loving up" and was permitted only by unattractive girls who had to offer special inducements; but there were dances and we attended them; we rooted for the basketball team; we engaged in all the common activities (and were sorry when the time came to leave them behind). We were like others, we were normal---yet we clung to the feeling that as apprentice writers we were abnormal and secretly distinguished: we lived in the special world of art; we belonged to the freemasonry of those who had read modern authors and admired a paradox.

It was during the first years of the European war. In New York the House of Morgan was busy making loans; in Washington the President was revising his ideas of neutrality: already it was written that several million young Americans would be called from their homes, fed by the government and taught to be irresponsible heroes. In Detroit Henry Ford had begun to manufacture I don't know how many thousand or million identical motors per day or year. Greenwich Village, crowded with foreign artists, was beginning to develop new standards of living. Young women all over the country were reading Freud and attempting to lose their inhibitions. Einstein was studying in Berlin, Proust was writing in Paris, and Joyce, having lost his job as a tutor in Trieste, was in Switzerland, working sixteen hours a day on Ulysses. The Socialist parties of the world were supporting the war and entering cabinets of national defense, but the Russian front buckled and crumbled; Lenin from his exile was calculating the moment for a Communist revolution. All the divergent forces that would direct the history of our generation were already in action. Meanwhile, in Boston, Pittsburgh, Nashville, Chicago, we boys of seventeen and eighteen were enormously ignorant of what was going on in the world. We were reading, dancing, preparing for college entrance examinations and, in our spare time, arguing about ourselves, ourselves and life, ourselves as artists, as lovers, the sublimation of sex and what we could possibly write about that was new.

3: Apprentice of the Arts

Digging through some old papers, I found a letter from Kenneth Burke that I hadn't filed away with the others. It was written some fourteen months after we had graduated from Peabody, but still, better than any other document possibly could, it evokes the atmosphere of our high-school years.

"Of course," it begins, "you are going to stop here for a few days on your way to Harvard. There is nothing to do---I have no money to entertain with, and no character to love you with---except walk, play tennis and read. Nothing hindering, I should love to take a couple of real venturesome walks with you; you know, start out for God knows where and get home in time for dinner. You could bring your sneaks along and perhaps we could play some tennis. Your playing would be distressingly bad, ça se voit, but what of that? As to reading, I can lend you books written after your heart, for I have become somewhat of an authority on unpresentable French novels."

Kenneth was already a critic and a pundit, although he hated to think of teaching or even of being taught. After a year of college he was back with his parents, having decided that he would learn more and have more time for writing if he stayed at home. The Burkes had moved to Weehawken, New Jersey, where they lived in an apartment on the Palisades overlooking the river and Manhattan. There Kenneth wrote in the mornings---stories, poems, essays, fables, plays, all of them lopsided, brilliant, immature and full of characters who explained themselves in paradoxes. In the afternoons, after his mother cooked lunch for him, he studied or wrote letters like this. Letters, except for an occasional game of tennis, were almost his only social life.

But he now had a project to boast about. "Did you know, by the way, that my going to France is no longer a mere Eintagsfliege? It has become not only a certainty but even an actual propelling force, an aim which is already affecting my conduct. I have begun hunting a job now. Some of my wages I shall save, some I shall spend for books and beer, and some I shall invest in Berlitz French. J'ai une idée fixe. Dame! Mais oui."

France was then fighting a war, but that didn't enter his calculations. The France he knew was the unmilitary France of novelists and poets. "I am not going there to stay, as I first intended. That is much too drastic. If I went to France to stay, and my money ran out, and I had no job, I should have to starve, or come home in disgrace. And besides, I shouldn't like to leave my father and mother so definitely. I like them both a lot, you know. And Pa, since I have lost my temperament, seems really clever to me. No," it was to be the sort of walk on which you start out for God knows where and get back in time for dinner. "I shall not live in France. I shall go to France on a visit. I shall have so much money saved up with which to pay for this visit. Then if I have a chance in France to get a job and thus prolong my visit, I shall take it. If when that job fails, I get a chance for another job, I shall take it and prolong my visit a little more. As long as I can get money, I shall prolong my visit, and when money ceases, my visit is over. By this arrangement I run no chance of defeat. I gamble with loaded dice. I bet against doped horses. I take a decisive step without suffering the usual vacillation. Nom d'un chien, comme le suis habile!

"I shall stop now, mon cher M; it is a glorious afternoon for tennis. But tonight, perhaps I shall write you again; for I shall probably be all alone, and there is an awfully tempting moon, une âme toute nue, that haunts the boulevard these nights. A lavish donor of delicious sadness she is, M, and I should love to watch her with you over the chilly somnolent farms. I love the moon, and the memory of ma petite jolie, and the lesser Chopin, and the cross-eyed girl next door. All that doesn't fit me for literature, Malcolm, but oh Christ, it makes it hard to renounce."

Those moonlit walks along Boulevard East were the crown of his days and the moment when his adolescence flowered. Years later he described them in another letter. "When I meant business (and every evening I meant business) I went along the Palisades, past the stone where Alexander Hamilton laid his historic and misleading head---and I stopped at the very end of the street, where it went off into nothing. Directly opposite Forty-second Street, looking down upon the exposed ribs of half-sunken barges (an era of postwar prosperity has since replaced them with concrete docks, and I trust that the bankers have got out from under the bond issue successfully), I stood silent and bareheaded, while the armies of melancholy attacked me. This was the Latrine of Endymion---necessarily, since the poet stood here for quite a while, in the cold fall air."

He was like Balzac's young man, climbing the heights of Montmartre to survey the city he would conquer, mapping out Paris street by lighted street; but the quality of his ambition was. different, bitterly defensive; there was no thought of conquest in his mind, nor was New York his chosen city. Yet he would soon be plunged into its life. Next week---it had been decided that evening at the dinner table---he would go to work as a bank runner, but he would not rise by diligent ruthlessness to the control of corporations and a seat on the Exchange; he would perhaps rise to a clerkship. Later he might go to Paris (but only for a visit), he might live in a garret (but not starve there spectacularly), he might write plays (but not have the world fall at his feet nor yet be garlanded with the arms of pretty actresses). The glory and the drama were for others, those who lived in the world without question. Living in himself, he could hope only to preserve his self-integrity---to yield, if it was necessary to yield, but make his enemies pay for their triumph; to lie or cheat as a last resort, but never write sloppy prose. Meanwhile he was privileged to feel a sentimental regret for what he was losing.---"Surveying the city (night-sharp lights against the water) the poet meditated upon New York's sinfulness, its prodigality and its cruel ability to get along so well without him. He thought of autumn carnivals in vaguely located woods, of soft, breathless, cold-nosed girls, of a dewy, wide-eyed moon with sportive figures shivering and cuddling in its flannel light. Retaining the vocabulary of Grecian deities as preserved in Keats (or should I say in The Golden Treasury?), he considered indeterminately Artemis and gaslit chop suey houses, stage doors and marbles in a grove, bacchantic dances and his job as a bank runner."

The chill of the sidewalks was striking through the damp soles of his shoes. About midnight he went home to brush his teeth in front of the bathroom-cabinet mirror, question his face for new pimples, repeat a phrase from Laforgue and go to bed. He was alone, four hundred miles from his boyhood.

4: American College, 1916

It often seems to me that our years in school and after school, in college and later in the army, might be regarded as a long process of deracination. Looking backward, 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 of the world.

In school, unless we happened to be Southerners, we were divested of any local pride. We studied Ancient History and American History, but not, in my own case, the history of western Pennsylvania. We learned by name the rivers of Siberia---Obi, Yenisei, Lena, Amur---but not the Ohio with its navigable tributaries, or why most of them had ceased to be navigated, or why Pittsburgh was built at its forks. We had high-school courses in Latin, German, Chemistry, good courses all of them, and a class in Civics where we learned to list the amendments to the Constitution and name the members of the Supreme Court; but we never learned how Presidents were really chosen or how a law was put through Congress. If one of us had later come into contact with the practical side of government---that is, if he wished to get a street paved, an assessment reduced, a friend out of trouble with the police or a relative appointed to office---well, fortunately the ward boss wouldn't take much time to set him straight.

Of the English texts we studied, I can remember only one, "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow," that gave us any idea that an American valley could be as effectively clothed in romance as Ivanhoe's castle or the London of Henry Esmond. It seemed to us that America was beneath the level of great fiction; it seemed that literature in general, and art and learning, were things existing at an infinite distance from our daily lives. For those of us who read independently, this impression became even stronger: the only authors to admire were foreign authors. 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. If we tried, notwithstanding, to write about more immediate subjects, we were forced to use a language not properly our own. A definite effort was being made to destroy all trace of local idiom or pronunciation and have us speak "correctly"---that is, in a standardized Amerenglish as colorless as Esperanto. Some of our instructors had themselves acquired this public-school dialect only by dint of practice, and now set forth its rules with an iron pedantry, as if they were teaching a dead language.

In college the process of deracination went on remorselessly. We were not being prepared for citizenship in a town, a state or a nation; we were not being trained for an industry or profession essential to the common life; instead we were being exhorted to enter that international republic of learning whose traditions are those of Athens, Florence, Paris, Berlin and Oxford. The immigrant into that high disembodied realm is supposed to come with empty hands and naked mind, like a recruit into the army. He is clothed and fed by his preceptors, who furnish him only with the best of intellectual supplies. Nothing must enter that world in its raw state; everything must be refined by time and distance, by theory and research, until it loses its own special qualities, its life, and is transformed into the dead material of culture. The ideal university is regarded as having no regional or economic ties. With its faculty, students, classrooms and stadium, it exists in a town as if by accident, its real existence being in the immaterial world of scholarship---or such, at any rate, was the idea to be gained in those years by any impressionable student.

Take my own experience at Harvard. Here was a university that had grown immediately out of a local situation, out of the colonists' need for trained ministers of the Gospel. It had transformed itself from generation to generation with the transformations of New England culture. Farming money, fishing money, trading money, privateering money, wool, cotton, shoe and banking money, had all contributed to its vast endowment. It had grown with Boston, a city whose records were written on the face of its buildings. Sometimes on Sundays I used to wander through the old sections of Beacon Hill and the North End and admire the magnificent doorways, built in the chastest Puritan style with profits from the trade in China tea. Behind some of them Armenians now lived, or Jews; the Old North Church was in an Italian quarter, near the house of Paul Revere, a silversmith. Back Bay had been reclaimed from marshland and covered with mansions during the prosperous years. after the Civil War (shoes, uniforms, railroads, speculation in government bonds). On Brattle Street, in Cambridge, Longfellow's house was open to the public, and I might have visited Brook Farm. All these things, Emerson, doorways, factory hands and fortunes, the Elective System, the Porcellian Club, were bound together into one civilization, but of this I received no hint. I was studying Goethe's Dichtung and Wahrheit and the Elizabethan drama, and perhaps, on my way to classes in the morning, passing a Catholic church outside of which two Irish boys stood and looked at me with unfriendly eyes. Why was Cambridge an Irish provincial city, almost like Cork or Limerick? What was the reason, in all the territory round Boston, for the hostility between "nice people" and "muckers"? When a development of houses for nice Cambridge people came out on the main street of Somerville (as one of them did), why did it turn its back on the street, build a brick wall against the sidewalk, and face on an interior lawn where nurses could watch nice children playing? I didn't know; I was hurrying off to a section meeting in European History and wondering whether I could give the dates of the German peasant wars.

I am not suggesting that we should have been encouraged to take more "practical" courses---Bookkeeping or Restaurant Management or Sewage Disposal or any of the hundreds that clutter the curriculum of a big university. These specialized techniques could wait till later, after we had chosen our life work. What we were seeking, as sophomores and juniors, was something vastly more general, a key to unlock the world, a picture to guide us in fitting its jigsaw parts together. It happened that our professors were eager to furnish us with such a key or guide; they were highly trained, earnest, devoted to their calling. Essentially the trouble was that the world they pictured for our benefit was the special world of scholarship---timeless, placeless, elaborate, incomplete and bearing only the vaguest relationship to that other world in which fortunes were made, universities endowed and city governments run by muckers.

It lay at a distance, even from the college world in which we were doing our best to get ahead. The rigorous methods and high doctrines taught by our professors applied only to parts of our lives. We had to fill in the gaps as best we could, usually by accepting the unspoken doctrines of those about us. In practice the college standards were set, not by the faculty, but by the leaders among the students, and particularly by the rich boys from half-English preparatory schools, for whose benefit the system seemed to be run. The rest of us, boys from public high schools, ran the risk of losing our own culture, such as it was, in our bedazzlement with this new puzzling world, and of receiving nothing real in exchange.

Young writers were especially tempted to regard their own experience as something negligible, not worth the trouble of recording in the sort of verse or prose they were taught to imitate from the English masters. A Jewish boy from Brooklyn might win a scholarship by virtue of his literary talent. Behind him there would lie whole generations of rabbis versed in the Torah and the Talmud, representatives of the oldest Western culture now surviving. Behind him, too, lay the memories of an exciting childhood: street gangs in Brownsville, chants in a Chassidic synagogue, the struggle of his parents against poverty, his cousin's struggle, perhaps, to build a labor union and his uncle's fight against it---all the emotions, smells and noises of the ghetto. Before him lay contact with another great culture, and four years of leisure in which to study, write and form a picture of himself. But what he would write in those four years were Keatsian sonnets about English abbeys, which he had never seen, and nightingales he had never heard.

I remember a boy from my own city, in this case a gentile and a graduate of Central High School, which then occupied a group of antiquated buildings on the edge of the business section. Southeast of it was a Jewish quarter; to the north, across the railroad, was the Strip, home of steelworkers, saloons and small-time politicians; to the east lay the Hill, already inhabited by Negroes, with a small red-light district along the lower slopes of it, through which the boys occasionally wandered at lunchtime. The students themselves were drawn partly from these various slums, but chiefly from residential districts in East Liberty and on Squirrel Hill. They followed an out-of-date curriculum under the direction of teachers renowned for thoroughness and severity; they had every chance to combine four years of sound classical discipline with a personal observation of city morals and sociology and politics in action.

This particular student was brilliant in his classes, editor of the school paper, captain of the debating team; he had the sort of reputation that spreads to other high schools; everybody said he was sure to be famous some day. He entered Harvard two or three years before my time and became a fairly important figure. When I went out for the Harvard Crimson (incidentally, without making it) I was sent to get some news about an activity for which he was the spokesman. Maybe he would take an interest in a boy from the same city, who had debated and written for the school paper and won a scholarship like himself. I hurried to his room on Mt. Auburn Street. He was wearing---this was my first impression---a suit of clothes cut by a very good tailor, so well cut, indeed, that it made the features above it seem undistinguished. He eyed me carelessly---my own suit was bought in a department store---and began talking from a distance in a rich Oxford accent put on like his clothes. I went away without my news, feeling ashamed. The story wasn't printed.

Years later I saw him again when I was writing book reviews for a New York newspaper. He came into the office looking very English, like the boss's son. A friendly reporter told me that he was a second-string dramatic critic who would never become first-string. "He ought to get wise to himself," the reporter said. "He's got too much culture for this game."

In college we never grasped the idea that culture was the outgrowth of a situation---that an artisan knowing his tools and having the feel of his materials might be a cultured man; that a farmer among his animals and his fields, stopping his plow at the fence corner to meditate over death and life and next year's crop, might have culture without even reading a newspaper. Essentially we were taught to regard culture as a veneer, a badge of class distinction---as something assumed like an Oxford accent or a suit of English clothes.

Those salesrooms and fitting rooms of culture where we would spend four years were not ground-floor shops, open to the life of the street. They existed, as it were, at the top of very high buildings, looking down at a far panorama of boulevards and Georgian houses and Greek temples of banking---with people outside them the size of gnats---and, vague in the distance, the fields, mines, factories that labored unobtrusively to support us. We never glanced out at them. On the heights, while tailors transformed us into the semblance of cultured men, we exercised happily, studied in moderation, slept soundly and grumbled at our food. There was nothing else to do except pay the bills rendered semi-annually, and our parents attended to that.

College students, especially in the big Eastern universities, inhabit an easy world of their own. Except for very rich people and certain types of childless wives, they have been the only American class that could take leisure for granted. There have always been many among them who earned their board and tuition by tending furnaces, waiting on table or running back kickoffs for a touchdown; what I am about to say does not apply to them. The others---at most times the ruling clique of a big university, the students who set the tone for the rest---are supported practically without efforts of their own. They write a few begging letters; perhaps they study a little harder in order to win a scholarship; but usually they don't stop to think where the money comes from. Above them, the president knows the source of the hard cash that runs this great educational factory; he knows that the stream of donations can be stopped by a crash in the stock market or reduced in volume by newspaper reports of a professor gone bolshevik; he knows what he has to tell his trustees or the state legislators when he goes to them begging for funds. The scrubwomen in the library, the chambermaids and janitors, know how they earn their food; but the students themselves, and many of their professors, are blind to economic forces and they never think of society in concrete terms, as the source of food and football fields and professors' salaries.

The university itself forms a temporary society with standards of its own. In my time at Harvard the virtues instilled into students were good taste, good manners, cleanliness, chastity, gentlemanliness (or niceness), reticence and the spirit of competition in sports; they are virtues often prized by a leisure class. When a student failed to meet the leisure-class standards someone would say, "He talks too much," or more conclusively, "He needs a bath." Even boys from very good Back Bay families would fail to make a club if they paid too much attention to chorus girls. Years later, during the controversy over the New Humanism, I read several books by Professor Irving Babbitt, the founder of the school, and found myself carried back into the atmosphere of the classroom. Babbitt and his disciples liked to talk about poise, proportionateness, the imitation of great models, decorum and the Inner Check. Those too were leisure-class ideals and I decided that they were simply the student virtues rephrased in loftier language. The truth was that the New Humanism grew out of Eastern university life, where it flourished as in a penthouse garden.

Nor was it the only growth that adorned these high mansions of culture. There was also, for example, the college liberalism that always drew back from action. There was the missionary attitude of Phillips Brooks House and the college Y.M.C.A.'s, that of reaching down and helping others to climb not quite up to our level. There was later the life-is-a-circus type of cynicalism, rendered popular by the American Mercury: everything is rotten, people are fools; let's all get quietly drunk and laugh at them. Then, too, there was a type of aestheticism very popular during my own college years. The Harvard Aesthetes of 1916 were trying to create in Cambridge, Massachusetts, an after-image of Oxford in the 1890s. They read the Yellow Book, they read Casanova's memoirs and Les Liaisons Dangereuses, both in French, and Petronius in Latin; they gathered at teatime in one another's rooms, or at punches in the office of the Harvard Monthly; they drank, instead of weak punch, seidels of straight gin topped with a maraschino cherry; they discussed the harmonies of Pater, the rhythms of Aubrey Beardsley and, growing louder, the voluptuousness of the Church, the essential virtue of prostitution. They had crucifixes in their bedrooms, and ticket stubs from last Saturday's burlesque show at the Old Howard. They wrote, too; dozens of them were prematurely decayed poets, each with his invocation to Antinoüs, his mournful descriptions of Venetian lagoons, his sonnets to a chorus girl in which he addressed her as "little painted poem of God." In spite of these beginnings, a few of them became good writers.

They were apparently very different from the Humanists, who never wrote poems at all, and yet, in respect to their opinions, they were simply Humanists turned upside down. For each of the Humanist virtues they had an antithesis. Thus, for poise they substituted ecstasy; for proportionateness, the Golden Mean, a worship of immoderation; for imitating great models, the opposite virtue of following each impulse, of living in the moment. Instead of decorum, they mildly preached a revolt from middle-class standards, which led them toward a sentimental reverence for sordid things; instead of the Inner Check, they believed in the duty of self-expression. Yet the Humanist and the Aesthete were both products of the same milieu, one in which the productive forces of society were regarded as something alien to poetry and learning. And both of them, though they found different solutions, were obsessed by the same problem, that of their individual salvation or damnation, success or failure, in a world in which neither was at home.

Whatever the doctrines we adopted during our college years, whatever the illusions we had of growing toward culture and self-sufficiency, the same process of deracination was continuing for all of us. We were like so many tumbleweeds sprouting in the rich summer soil, our leaves spreading while our roots slowly dried and became brittle. Normally the deracination would have ended when we left college; outside in the practical world we should have been forced to acquire new roots in order to survive. But we weren't destined to have the fate of the usual college generation and, instead of ceasing, the process would be intensified. Soon the war would be upon us; soon the winds would tear us up and send us rolling and drifting over the wide land.

5: Ambulance Service

During the winter of 1916-17 our professors stopped talking about the international republic of letters and began preaching patriotism. We ourselves prepared to change our uniforms of culture for military uniforms; but neither of these changes was so radical as it seemed. The patriotism urged upon us was not, like that of French peasants, a matter of saving one's own fields from an invader. It was an abstract patriotism that concerned world democracy and the right to self-determination of small nations, but apparently had nothing to do with our daily lives at home, nothing to do with better schools, lower taxes, higher pay for factory hands (and professors) or restocking Elk Run with trout. And the uniforms we assumed were not, in many cases, those of our own country.

When the war came the young writers then in college were attracted by the idea of enlisting in one of the ambulance corps attached to a foreign army---the American Ambulance Service or the Norton-Harjes, both serving under the French and receiving French army pay, or the Red Cross ambulance sections on the Italian front. Those were the organizations that promised to carry us abroad with the least delay. We were eager to get into action, as a character in one of Dos Passos's novels expressed it, "before the whole thing goes belly up."

In Paris we found that the demand for ambulance drivers had temporarily slackened. We were urged, and many of us consented, to join the French military transport, in which our work would be not vastly different: while driving. munition trucks we would retain our status of gentleman volunteers. We drank to our new service in the bistro round the corner. Two weeks later, on our way to a training camp behind the lines, we passed in a green wheatfield the grave of an aviator mort pour la patrie, his wooden cross wreathed with the first lilies of the valley. A few miles north of us the guns were booming. Here was death among the flowers, danger in spring, the sweet wine of sentiment neither spiced with paradox ---nor yet insipid, the death being real, the danger near at hand.

We found on reaching the front that we were serving in what was perhaps the most literary branch of any army. My own section of thirty-six men will serve as an example. I have never attended a reunion of T.M.U. 526, if one was ever held, but at various times I have encountered several of my former comrades. One is an advertising man specializing in book publishers' copy. One is an architect, one a successful lecturer who has written a first novel, one an editor, one an unsuccessful dramatist.

The war itself put an end to other careers. A Rhodes scholar with a distinguished record was killed in action. The member of the section who was generally believed to have the greatest promise was a boy of seventeen, a poet who had himself transferred into the Foreign Legion and died in an airplane accident. Yet T.M.U. 526 was in no way exceptional. My friends in other sections where there was a higher percentage of young writers often pitied me for having to serve with such a bunch of philistines.

It would be interesting to list the authors who were ambulance or camion drivers in 1917. Dos Passos, Hemingway, Julian Green, William Seabrook, E. E. Cummings, Slater Brown, Harry Crosby, John Howard Lawson, Sidney Howard, Louis Bromfield, Robert Hillyer, Dashiell Hammett . . . one might almost say that the ambulance corps and the French military transport were college-extension courses for a generation of writers. But what did these courses teach?

They carried us to a foreign country, the first that most of us had seen; they taught us to make love., stammer love, in a foreign language. They fed and lodged us at the expense of a government in which we had no share. They made us more irresponsible than before: livelihood was not a problem; we had a minimum of choices to make; we could let the future take care of itself, feeling certain that it would bear us into new adventures. They taught us courage, extravagance, fatalism, these being the virtues of men at war; they taught us to regard as vices the civilian virtues of thrift, caution and sobriety; they made us fear boredom more than death. All these lessons might have been learned in any branch of the army, but ambulance service had a lesson of its own: it instilled into us what might be called a spectatorial attitude.

... Sometimes for three days at a time, a column of men and guns wound through the village where we were quartered. Chasseurs slouching along in their dark-blue uniforms, canteens and helmets banging against their hips; a regiment of Senegalese, huge men with blue-black faces, pink eyeballs and white teeth; then a convoy of camions in first and second gear, keeping pace with the moving files. Behind them, dust rose from an interminable line of seventy-fives drawn by great bay horses, with very blond Flemish artillerymen riding the caissons; then came a supply train; then, in horizon blue, an infantry regiment from Provence, three thousand men with sullen features; then rolling kitchens and wagons heaped with bread the color of faded straw. The Annamites, little mud-colored men with the faces of perverted babies, watched from the ditches where they were breaking stone; the airplanes of three nations kept watch overhead, and we ourselves were watchers. It did not seem that we could ever be part of all this. The long parade of races was a spectacle which it was our privilege to survey, a special circus like the exhibition of Moroccan horsemen given for our benefit on the Fourth of July, before we all sat down at a long table to toast la France héroïque and nos amis américains in warm champagne. In the morning we should continue our work of carrying trench-mortar bombs from the railhead to the munition dumps just back of the Chemin des Dames-that too would be a spectacle.

Behind the scenes, that early summer, a great drama was being played. The Russians had had their February revolution, the French and British their April offensive; the second had been turned into ridicule when the Germans safely withdrew to stronger positions. There were grumblings in the armies round Verdun and in the Ile de France. Too many men were being killed. The battalion of chasseurs once stationed in our village---those dark stocky men who asked how much longer it would go on, and begged a little gasoline for their cigarette lighters, and got drunk with us while telling of their losses in the last attack---had mutinied the following week. A division from the Midi had refused to go into the trenches. Everywhere there was discontent; it was a question whether the troops would imitate the Russians or fight on patiently till the arrival from America of the help that everybody said would end the war. We ourselves, as representatives of America at the front, were being used to soften this discontent, were being displayed as first-tokens of victory, but we did not realize that we were serving a political purpose. We were treated well, that was all we knew. We were seeing a great show.

I remember a drizzling afternoon when our convoy grumbled into an artillery park with a consignment of 155-millimeter shells. Soldiers came to unload our camions, old dirty Territorials with gunny sacks over their heads. We watched them wearily, having driven and stopped and driven since four in the morning. A shell suddenly burst on the north side of the park. The Territorials disappeared into holes in the ground like so many woodchucks; we ourselves found shelter under an overhanging bank. The bombardment continued: shrapnel mixed with high explosive was bursting in the road every two minutes, regularly. Somebody found that by rushing into the center of the road after each explosion, he could gather warm fragments of steel and return to the shelter of the bank before the next shell burst in the same spot. The rest of us followed his example, fighting over our trophies. A tiny change in the elevation of the German guns and the whole park would be destroyed, ourselves along with it, but we knew that the guns wouldn't change: our lives were charmed. Spectators, we were collecting souvenirs of death., like guests bringing back a piece of wedding cake or a crushed flower from the bride's bouquet.

On a July evening, at dusk, I remember halting in the courtyard of a half-ruined chateau, through which zigzagged the trenches held by the Germans before their retreat two miles northward to stronger positions. Shells were harmlessly rumbling overhead: the German and the French heavy batteries, three miles behind their respective lines, were shelling each other like the Brushton gang throwing rocks at the Car Barn gang; here, in the empty courtyard between them, it was as if we were underneath a freight yard where heavy trains were being shunted back and forth. We looked indifferently at the lake, now empty of swans, and the formal statues chipped by machine-gun fire, and talked in quiet voices-about Mallarmé, the Russian ballet, the respective virtues of two college magazines. On the steps of the chateau, in the last dim sunlight, a red-faced boy from Harvard was studying Russian out of a French textbook. Four other gentlemen volunteers were rolling dice on an outspread blanket. A French artillery brigade on a hillside nearby---rapid-firing seventy-fives---was laying down a barrage; the guns flashed like fireflies among the trees. We talked about the Lafayette Escadrille with admiration, and about our own service bitterly.

Yet our service was, in its own fashion, almost ideal. It provided us with fairly good food, a congenial occupation, furloughs to Paris and uniforms that admitted us to the best hotels. It permitted us to enjoy the once-in-a-lifetime spectacle of the Western Front. Being attached to the French army, it freed us from the severe and stupid forms of discipline then imposed on American shavetails and buck privates. It confronted us with hardships, but not more of them than it was exhilarating for young men to endure, and with danger, but not too much of it: seldom were there more than two or three serious casualties in a section during the year---and that was really the burden of our complaint. We didn't want to be slackers, embusqués. The war created in young men a thirst for abstract danger, not suffered for a cause but courted for itself; if later they believed in the cause, it was partly in recognition of the danger it conferred on them. Danger was a relief from boredom, a stimulus to the emotions, a color mixed with all others to make them brighter. There were moments in France when the senses were immeasurably sharpened by the thought of dying next day, or possibly next week. The trees were green, not like ordinary trees, but like trees in the still moment before a hurricane; the sky was a special and ineffable blue; the grass smelled of life itself; the image of death at twenty, the image of love, mingled together into a keen, precarious delight. And this perhaps was the greatest of the lessons that the war taught to young writers. It revivified the subjects that had seemed forbidden because they were soiled by many hands and robbed of meaning: danger made it possible to write once more about love, adventure, death. Most of my friends were preparing to follow danger into other branches of the army---of any army---that were richer in fatalities.

They scattered a few months later: when the ambulance and camion services were taken over by the American Expeditionary Force, not many of them re-enlisted. Instead they entered the Lafayette Escadrille, the French or Canadian field artillery, the tanks, the British balloon service, the Foreign Legion, the Royal Air Force; a very few volunteered for the American infantry, doing a simple thing for paradoxical reasons. I had friends in distant sectors: one of them flew for the Belgians, another in Serbia, and several moved on to the Italian front, where John Dos Passos drove an ambulance. Ernest Hemingway was also an ambulance driver on that front, until the July night when an Austrian mortar bomb exploded in the observation post beyond the front lines where he was visiting at the time, like a spectator invited to gossip with the actors behind the scenes. E. E. Cummings was given no choice of service. Having mildly revolted against the discipline of the Norton-Harjes Ambulance Corps, and having become the friend of a boy from Columbia University who wrote letters to Emma Goldman, he was shipped off to a French military prison, where he had the adventures later described in The Enormous Room.... But even in prison threatened with scurvy, or lying wounded in hospitals, or flying combat planes above the trenches, these young Americans retained their curious attitude of non-participation, of being friendly visitors who, though they might be killed at any moment, still had no share in what was taking place.

Somewhere behind them was another country, a real country of barns, cornfields, hemlock woods and brooks tumbling across birch logs into pools where the big trout lay. Somewhere, at an incredible distance, was the country of their childhood, where they had once been part of the landscape and the life, part of a spectacle at which nobody looked on.

This spectatorial attitude, this monumental indifference toward the cause for which young Americans were risking their lives, is reflected in more than one of the books written by former ambulance drivers. Five of the principal characters in Dos Passos's 1919---the Grenadine Guards, as he calls them--- Dick Savage (a Harvard aesthete), Fred Summers, Ed Schuyler, Steve Warner (another Harvard man, but not of the same college set), and Ripley (a Columbia freshman) first enlist in the Norton-Harjes Ambulance Corps, and then, when the American army takes it over, go south to the Italian front. In February of the last wartime year, Steve Warner reads that the Empress Taitu of Abyssinia is dead, and the Grenadine Guards hold a wake for her:

They drank all the rum they had and keened until the rest of the section thought they'd gone crazy. They sat in the dark round the open moonlit window wrapped in blankets and drinking warm zabaglione. Some Austrian planes that had been droning overhead suddenly cut off their motors and dumped a load of bombs right in front of them. The anti-aircraft guns had been barking for some time and shrapnel sparkling in the moonhazy sky overhead but they'd been too drunk to notice. One bomb fell geflump into the Brenta and the others filled the space in front of the window with red leaping glare and shook the villa with three roaring snorts, Plaster fell from the ceiling. They could hear the tiles scuttering down off the roof overhead.

"Jesus, that was almost good night," said Summers. Steve started singing, Come away from that window my light and my life, but the rest of them drowned it out with an out of tune Deutschland, Deutschland über Alles. They suddenly all felt crazy drunk.

"Fellers," Fred Summers kept saying, "this ain't a war, it's a goddam madhouse . . . it's a goddam Cook's tour." It remained, for many of us, a goddam crazy Cook's tour of Western Europe, but for those who served longer it became something else as well.

Ernest Hemingway's hero, in A Farewell to Arms, is an American acting as lieutenant of an Italian ambulance section. He likes the Italians, at least until Caporetto; he is contemptuous of the Austrians, fears and admires the Germans; of political conviction he has hardly a trace. When a friend tells him, "What has been done this summer cannot have been done in vain," he makes no answer:

I was always embarrassed by the words sacred, glorious, and sacrifice, and the expression in vain. We had heard them, sometimes standing in the rain almost out of earshot, so that only the shouted words came through, and had read them, on proclamations that were slapped up by billposters over other proclamations, now for a long time, and I had seen nothing sacred, and the things that were glorious had no glory and the sacrifices were like the stockyards at Chicago if nothing was done with the meat except to bury it.... Abstract words such as glory, honor, courage, or hallow were obscene beside the concrete names of villages, the numbers of roads, the names of rivets, the numbers of regiments and the dates. Gino was a patriot, so he said things that separated us sometimes, but he was also a fine boy and I understood his being a patriot. He was born one. He left with Peduzzi in the car....

Two days later the Germans- broke through at Caporetto.

The passage dealing with the Italian retreat from river to river, from the mountains beyond the Isonzo along rain-washed narrow roads to the plains of the Tagliamento, is one of the few great war stories in American literature: only The Red Badge of Courage and a few short pieces by Ambrose Bierce can be compared with it. Hemingway describes not an army but a whole people in motion: guns nuzzling the heads of patient farm horses, munition trucks with their radiator caps an inch from the tailboard of wagons loaded with chairs, tables, sewing machines, farm implements; then behind them ambulances, mountain artillery, cattle and army trucks, all pointed south; and groups of scared peasants and interminable files of gray infantrymen moving in the rain past the miles of stalled vehicles. Lieutenant Frederick Henry is part of the retreat, commanding three motor ambulances and half a dozen men, losing his vehicles in muddy lanes, losing his men, too, by death and desertion, shooting an Italian sergeant who tries to run away---but in spirit he remains a non-participant. He had been studying architecture in Rome, had become a gentleman volunteer in order to see the war, had served two years, been wounded and decorated: now he is sick of the whole thing, eager only to get away.

As he moves southward, the southbound Germans go past him, marching on parallel roads, their helmets visible above the walls. Frightened Italians open fire on him. The rain falls endlessly, and the whole experience, Europe, Italy, the war, becomes a nightmare, with himself as helpless as a man among nightmare shapes. It is only in snatches of dream that he finds anything real---love being real, and the memories of his boyhood. "The hay smelled good and lying in a barn in the hay took away all the years in between. We had lain in hay and talked and shot sparrows with an air rifle when they perched in the triangle cut high up in the wall of the barn. The barn was gone now and one year they had cut the hemlock woods and there were only stumps, dried tree-tops, branches and fireweed where the woods had been. You could not go back"; the country of his boyhood was gone and he was attached to no other.

And that, I believe, was the final effect on us of the war; that was the honest emotion behind a pretentious phrase like "the lost generation." School and college had uprooted us in spirit; now we were physically uprooted, hundreds of us, millions, plucked from our own soil as if by a clamshell bucket and dumped, scattered among strange people. All our roots were dead now, even the Anglo-Saxon tradition of our literary ancestors, even the habits of slow thrift that characterized our social class. We were fed, lodged, clothed by strangers, commanded by strangers, infected with the poison of irresponsibility---the poison of travel, too, for we had learned that problems could be left behind us merely by moving elsewhere---and the poison of danger, excitement, that made our old life seem intolerable., Then, as suddenly as it began for us, the war ended.

When we first heard of the Armistice we felt a sense of relief too deep to express, and we all got drunk. We had come through, we were still alive, and nobody at all would be killed tomorrow. The composite fatherland for which we had fought and in which some of us still believed---France, Italy, the Allies, our English homeland, democracy, the self-determination of small nations---had triumphed. We danced in the streets, embraced old women and pretty girls, swore blood brotherhood with soldiers in little bars, drank with our elbows locked in theirs, reeled through the streets with bottles of champagne, fell asleep somewhere. On the next day, after we got over our hangovers, we didn't know what to do, so we got drunk. But slowly, as the days went by, the intoxication passed, and the tears of joy: it appeared that our composite fatherland was dissolving into quarreling statesmen and oil and steel magnates. Our own nation had passed the Prohibition Amendment as if to publish a bill of separation between itself and ourselves; it wasn't our country any longer. Nevertheless we returned to it: there was nowhere else to go. We returned to New York, appropriately ---to the homeland of the uprooted, where everyone you met came from another town and tried to forget it; where nobody seemed to have parents, or a past more distant than last night's swell party, or a future beyond the swell party this evening and the disillusioned book he would write tomorrow.