Brash, Breezy—and Balderdash

Here Today so Louise Tanner, a post-Mary McCarthy product of Vassar, calls her book (Crowell, $4.50). The imputation, brash as are most things that emerge from the great sophistication factory up at Poughkeepsie, is that her fourteen symbolic Americans, ranging from F. Scott Fitzgerald and Edna St. Vincent Millay of the Jazz Age to William F. Buckley Jr. and John W. (After the Lost Generation) Aldridge of the Grey Fifties, will be gone tomorrow.

Since Shelleys aren’t born every year, she may be right. But Mrs. Tanner doesn’t really believe her own propaganda. Sure enough, the attitudes of Fitzgerald and Millay, the hopes of Whittaker Chambers and the young Charles A. Lindbergh, the dreams of Brenda Frazier and Barbara Hutton, are as dated now as Shirley Temple’s first picture. But every so often it dawns on Mrs. Tanner that she doesn’t really know the people she is writing about. There was, she suspects, more to them than attitudes. And with this realization comes a grudging respect: even the worst of them had verve, commitment, a feeling that life is not something to be lukewarm about. In consequence, her book, which began with a concern for changing values, ends up as a paean to yesterday’s vitality.

JC

About the Author

John Chamberlain

John Chamberlain (1903–1995) was an American writer.

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Here Today so Louise Tanner, a post-Mary McCarthy product of Vassar, calls her book (Crowell, $4.50). The imputation, brash as are most things that emerge from the great sophistication factory up at Poughkeepsie, is that her fourteen symbolic Americans, ranging from F. Scott Fitzgerald and Edna St. Vincent Millay of the Jazz Age to William F. Buckley Jr. and John W. (After the Lost Generation) Aldridge of the Grey Fifties, will be gone tomorrow.

Since Shelleys aren’t born every year, she may be right. But Mrs. Tanner doesn’t really believe her own propaganda. Sure enough, the attitudes of Fitzgerald and Millay, the hopes of Whittaker Chambers and the young Charles A. Lindbergh, the dreams of Brenda Frazier and Barbara Hutton, are as dated now as Shirley Temple’s first picture. But every so often it dawns on Mrs. Tanner that she doesn’t really know the people she is writing about. There was, she suspects, more to them than attitudes. And with this realization comes a grudging respect: even the worst of them had verve, commitment, a feeling that life is not something to be lukewarm about. In consequence, her book, which began with a concern for changing values, ends up as a paean to yesterday’s vitality.