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We were incapable of hero worship. Those we most admired, in fact, were not real heroes but the anti-heroes of fiction or film: the Jake Barnes of The Sun Also Rises or the Humphrey Bogart of Casablanca. Begin a scene from that movie, and almost any film fan of our generation can finish it with appropriate gestures and flourishes. ("What brought you here?" Claude Rains, the good guy-bad guy Vichy captain asks Bogart. "My health. I came for the waters." "What waters? We're in the desert." Bogie shrugs. "I was misinformed.") As Journalist David Halberstam, 36, puts it: "We admired people who fought the good fight against odds—and kept at it." We did not care so much what the good fight was, so long as it was waged with effortless style and nonchalance. While we could be embarrassingly sentimental, we were, paradoxically, distressed at open emotion. For us, coolness was all. Like Holden Caulfield, the confused but knowing teen-age protagonist of J.D. Salinger's Catcher in the Rye—the novel that became the decade's literary touchstone—we detested anything that we felt was phony.
We prided ourselves on being excellent critics, even of ourselves, as if we had a third eye looking in rather than out. Skeptical vision is a quality of the good journalist—and our generation has produced an extraordinary number of good journalists
but it is usually fatal to the novelist or poet,
who must have conviction in order to create. Our outstanding artists of prose and poetry can be counted quite literally on the fingers of one hand. Even the best of them seem uncomfortable with the major theses of life and death. Their concerns are more with language and style, as is the case with John Updike, 38, or with a relatively narrow range of human experience, as is true of Philip Roth, 37. There is no Faulkner, no Hemingway, no Fitzgerald, no O'Neill in our lost generation. The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test may well be our Great Gatsby, and Oh Dad, Poor Dad, Mamma's Hung You in the Closet and I'm Feeling So Sad our Desire Under the Elms.
Looking back, it is clear that we were not just a lost generation but a "last generation" as well. We were the last American generation to grow up without television; our fantasies were tied to the radio
the buzz of the Green Hornet and the exotic
adventures of Terry and the Pirates. We also read,
and who knows?—we may be the last generation
in this TV-enwrapped country to fully savor the written word. Our silence on campus had its price, no doubt, but it also had its rewards, not the least of which was the chance to grow at our own pace and to pursue, with no guilt whatsoever, the totally irrelevant. "If we had the last of the wine, the time when you could construct your own cubicle, then we were lucky," says television's Dick Cavett, 33. "I look back now on my college days as a time of fantastic luxury." Above all, we were the last generation to accept without question—or to pretend to accept—the traditional American values of work, order and patriotism.