Swiftly people came to see and feel this, too. The first outburst of wrath that resulted in our disfranchisement was quickly over. Even out citizenship was quietly restored to us within three years. (As for myself, I was only eighteen when it happened, and cannot even be said to have missed a legal vote because of it.) Each of us was allowed to return to college the next year after our expulsion, and finish the full course. The sentiment of people everywhere not only softened: the verdict quickly became: “They didn’t mean to do it. They were just damned fools.” Later, by the time of our re-enfranchisement, public sentiment actually became liberal in its tone of pardon. “They’ve been punished enough,” people said by then. “They were just kids—and they didn’t mean to do it. Besides”—this became an argument in our favour—“it cost a life, but it killed hazing in the state.”
As to the later record of the five—Randy Shepperton is dead now; but John Brackett, Stowell Anderson, and Dick Carr have all enjoyed a more than average measure of success in their communities. When I last saw Stowell Anderson—he is an attorney, and the political leader of his district—he told me quietly that, far from having been damaged in his career by the experience, he thought he had been helped.
“People,” he said, “are willing to forget a past mistake if they see you’re regular. They’re not only willing to forgive—on the whole, I think they’re even glad to give a helping hand.”
“If they see you’re regular!” Without commenting on the meanings of that, I think it sums up the matter in a nutshell. There has not only been no question since about the “regularity” of the other three—Brackett, Anderson, and Carr—but I think any natural tendencies they may have had towards regularity were intensified by their participation in the Pine Rock case. I believe, too, that the denunciations of my “irregularity”, following the publication of my first book, might have been even more virulent and vicious than they were had it not been for the respectable fellowship of Brackett, Anderson, and Carr.
Well, Fox, I have taken the trouble to tell you about this unrecorded incident in my life because I thought you might hear of it some time and might possibly put a strained construction on it. There were those in Libya Hill who thought it offered a reasonable and complete explanation of what had happened to me when I wrote the book. So, too, you might come to believe that it twisted and embittered me and somehow had something to do with what has happened now. With nine-tenths of your mind and heart you understand perfectly why I have to leave you, but with that remaining tenth you are still puzzled, and I can see that you will go on wondering about it. You have, from time to time, tried to reason with me about what you called, half seriously, my “radicalism”. I don’t believe there is any radicalism in me—or, if there is, it is certainly not what the word implies when you use it.
So, believe me, the Pine Rock case has nothing to do with it. It explains nothing. Rather, the natural assumption, for me as for the others who were involved in it, would be that the experience should have established me in a more staunch and regular conformity than I should otherwise have known.
You have a friend, Fox, named Hunt Conroy. You introduced me to him. He is only a few years my senior, but he is very fixed in his assertion of what he calls “The Lost Generation”—a generation of which, as you know, he has been quite vociferously a member, and in which he has tried enthusiastically to include me. Hunt and I used to argue about it.
“You belong to it, too,” he used to say grimly. “You came along at the same time. You can’t get away from it. You’re a part of it whether you want to be or not.”
To which my vulgar response was:
“Don’t you-hoo me!”
If Hunt wants to belong to The Lost Generation—and it really is astonishing with what fond eagerness some people hug the ghost of desolation to their breast—that’s his affair. But he can’t have me. If I have been elected, it was against my knowledge and my will—and I resign. I do not feel that I belong to a Lost Generation, and I have never felt so. Indeed, I doubt very much the existence of a Lost Generation, except insofar as every generation, groping, must be lost. Recently, however, it has occurred to me that if there is such a thing as a Lost Generation in this country, it is probably made up of those men of advanced middle age who still speak the language that was spoken before 1929, and who know no other. These men indubitably are lost. But I am not one of them.