The Disputed Twenties

Sean O’ Faolain’s The Vanishing Hero: Studies in Novelists of the Twenties (Atlantic-Little Brown, $3.75) is a brilliant work, full of poetic insights and that wonderfully soft quality which Irish writers generally bring to their own particular manipulation of the English tongue. Whether its point of view, its selection of representative authors and its conclusions are entirely just to the period, however, is something worth considerably more argument than Mr. O’Faolain is disposed to give it.

Briefly, Mr. O’Faolain condemns the novelists of the twenties for concentrating on the will-less man. Maybe “condemns” is too strong a word for it, for Mr. O’Faolain does not hold his chosen novelists—the list includes Aldous Huxley, Evelyn Waugh, Graham Greene, William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, Elizabeth Bowen, Virginia Woolf and James Joyce—responsible for the state of the society into which they happened to be born. Nevertheless, the note of something considerably stronger than regret is there; quite obviously Mr. O’Faolain thinks that affirmation does not wholly depend on social circumstances, even though he does say that “nobody can affirm out of personal integrity alone.”

JC

About the Author

John Chamberlain

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

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Sean O’ Faolain’s The Vanishing Hero: Studies in Novelists of the Twenties (Atlantic-Little Brown, $3.75) is a brilliant work, full of poetic insights and that wonderfully soft quality which Irish writers generally bring to their own particular manipulation of the English tongue. Whether its point of view, its selection of representative authors and its conclusions are entirely just to the period, however, is something worth considerably more argument than Mr. O’Faolain is disposed to give it.

Briefly, Mr. O’Faolain condemns the novelists of the twenties for concentrating on the will-less man. Maybe “condemns” is too strong a word for it, for Mr. O’Faolain does not hold his chosen novelists—the list includes Aldous Huxley, Evelyn Waugh, Graham Greene, William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, Elizabeth Bowen, Virginia Woolf and James Joyce—responsible for the state of the society into which they happened to be born. Nevertheless, the note of something considerably stronger than regret is there; quite obviously Mr. O’Faolain thinks that affirmation does not wholly depend on social circumstances, even though he does say that “nobody can affirm out of personal integrity alone.”