February 21, 2006
What Did the Vets Really Want? Posted by Ellen Feldman at 10:00 AM EST Recent articles about men and women returning from service in Iraq have reminded me of other veterans returning from other wars. In Being Geniuses Together, Kay Boyle’s joint memoir with Robert McAlmon, she records Hemingway’s observation that it would be difficult for their generation “to adjust to the prosaic and dull routines of peace, war-shocked and disillusioned as we were.” The prediction turned out to be prescient, and not only for the artistically inclined expatriates who fled Prohibition-era America for Paris. The twenties were a riotous, raucous, and unbridled decade on the home front as well. Prohibition was a joke, though according to Sinclair Lewis’s gimlet-eyed depiction of George Babbitt’s attempt to purchase alcohol for a dinner party, not as comfortably circumvented by law-abiding citizens as we have come to believe. The country was drunk on business, boosterism, advertising, and, of course, the stock market. Everyone was getting rich quick, including the celebrity evangelists who thundered against the temper of the times. Then came the bone-aching, nausea-inducing, suicide-inciting hangover of the Depression. What I find most curious about Hemingway’s prediction, however, is that it should have proven true for the aftermath of the first war and not the second. With the notable exception of the Beats and various visual artists, most returning GIs seemed to want nothing more than “to adjust to the prosaic and dull routines of peace,” though I doubt they were any less “war-shocked and disillusioned” than the generation who had fought before them. My first instinct was to ascribe the difference to America’s shorter and less devastating participation in World War I. But Europe, which had endured four years of unimaginable slaughter, had its own version of the roaring twenties, including expatriates. In her book February House, Sherill Tippins recounts that young British writers like W. H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood flocked to Weimar Berlin for artistic and sexual freedom, just as their American counterparts did to Paris. And the twenties roared almost as noisily abroad, fueled by legal alcohol, as it did at home, fueled by illegal. Perhaps the explanation for the difference between the postwar attitudes of the lost generation and the greatest generation (though let’s hope that particular label is on the way out) lies in what came before they marched off to battle. The earlier generation was not only reacting against the horrors of war, it was also rebelling against the decades of suffocating Victorian and Edwardian peace. In 1920, America voted for a return to normalcy, but what it really wanted was not to go back to security but to throw off restraints. In 1946, returning vets and the women they had left behind wanted nothing so much as that dull normalcy under which their elders had chafed and which most of them were too young to have known, thanks to the Depression, but not too disillusioned to still dream of.
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