Fitzgerald: Event, Generation, War

F. Scott Fitzgerald – “My Generation”
(193) – It is important just when a generation first sees the light—and by a generation I mean that reaction against the fathers which seems to occur about three times in a century. It is distinguished by a set of ideas, inherited in moderated form from the madmen and the outlaws of the generation before; if it is a real generation it has its own leaders and spokesmen, and it draws into its orbit those born just before it and just after, whose ideas are less clear-cut and defiant. A strongly individual generation sprouts most readily from a time of stress and emergency—tensity, communicated from parent to child, seems to leave a pattern on the heart.

(194-5) So we inherited two worlds—the one of hope to which we had been bred; the one of illusion which we had discovered early for ourselves. And that first world was growing as remote as another country, however close in time…. I live without madness in a world of scientific miracles where curses or Promethean cries are bolder—and more ineffectual. I do not “accept that world, for as instance my daughter does. But I function in it with familiarity….

(198)… it is a fact that the capacity of this generation to believe has run very thin. The war, the peace, the boom, the depression, the shadow of the new war scarcely correspond to the idea of manifest destiny. Many men of my age are inclined to paraphrase Sir Edward Grey of 1914—“The lamps are going out all over the world—we shall not see them lit again in our time.”

violence, urbanity

Urbanity is a violence. The town spreads with one violence after another. Its equilibrium is violence. In the Creole city, the violence hits harder than elsewhere. First, because around her, murder (slavery, colonialism, racism) prevails, but especially because this city, without the factories, without the industries with which to absorb the new influx, is empty. It attracts without proposing anything besides its resistance -- like Fort-de-France did after Saint-Pierre was wiped out. The Quarter of Texaco is born of violence. So why be astonished at its scars, its warpaint?

THE URBAN PLANNER’S NOTES TO THE WORD SCRATCHER
FILE NO. 6. SHEET XVIII.
1987. SCHOELCHER LIBRARY.

- Patrick Chamoiseau, pg. 148, Texaco, trans. Rejouis & Vinokurov

on ill-placed pride, the blindness of vicarious living

You love us when we're heroes, home on leave,
Or wounded in a mentionable place.
You worship decorations; you believe
That chivalry redeems the war's disgrace.
You make us shells. You listen with delight,
By tales of dirt and danger fondly thrilled.
You crown our distant ardours while we fight,
And mourn our laurelled memories when we're killed.

You can't believe that British troops "retire"
When hell's last horror breaks them, and they run,
Trampling the terrible corpses--blind with blood.
O German mother dreaming by the fire,
While you are knitting socks to send your son
His face is trodden deeper in the mud.

- Sigfried Sassoon, "The Glory of Women"

on the crushing of spirits

I knew a simple soldier boy
Who grinned at life in empty joy,
Slept soundly through the lonesome dark,
And whistled early with the lark.

In winter trenches, cowed and glum
With crumps and lice and lack of rum,
He put a bullet through his brain.
No one spoke of him again.

* * * * *

You smug-faced crowds with kindling eye
Who cheer when soldier lads march by,
Sneak home and pray you'll never know
The hell where youth and laughter go.

- Sigfried Sassoon, "Suicide in Trenches"

on exhaustion, compassion, war

The road is thronged with women; soldiers pass
And halt, but never see them; yet they're here--
A patient crowd along the sodden grass,
Silent, worn out with waiting, sick with fear.
The road goes crawling up a long hillside,
All ruts and stones and sludge, and the emptied dregs
Of battle thrown in heaps. Here where they died
Are stretched big-bellied horses with stiff legs;
And dead men, bloody-fingered from the fight,
Stare up at caverned darkness winking white.

You in the bomb-scorched kilt, poor sprawling Jock,
You tottered here and fell, and stumbled on,
Half dazed for want of sleep. No dream could mock
Your reeling brain with comforts lost and gone.
You did not feel her arms about your knees,
Her blind caress, her lips upon your head:
Too tired for thoughts of home and love and ease,
The road would serve you well enough for bed.

- Siegfried Sassoon, "The Road"