The Wasted Generation

by Owen Johnson

A budget of letters with a touch of home has sent me back to my diary this morning, which, as I feared, I have neglected these last weeks. At the time these letters had been written no word had reached them of my having been wounded at Verdun, and as I sat recalling the thousand details of our daily life, I imagined how the family would receive the news.

Nothing could be more characteristic of the Littledale family than its departure to worship on Sunday morning. We are organized on the theory of absolute liberty of conscience in matters religious as well as political. My mother and Ben departed in one direction for the Unitarian Church, Aunt Janie to the Congregational, and my father, Molly and myself for the little Presbyterian chapel in the village square. Rossie, the privileged character of the family, remained in that state of suspended judgment which permitted him to lengthen the Sunday morning rest. No asperities, no dissensions resulted from this opposition of views. In fact, each Littledale was a little proud of the family’s individualism, regarding it as the inherited trait of a strong intellectual strain.

We were four brothers and a sister, and all as different as one day is from another. Because of my mother’s public interests and her theories on individualism, we were brought up with small restraint, along lines of our own choosing. Alan, the third of the line, was the rebel of the family. As I look back, I can see where the mistakes were all on the part of Ben and myself. Wild, impatient of restraint, Alan certainly was, yet the rough discipline which the older brother inflicted was the worst method of dealing with him. The two never understood each other. Every idea and every instinct was opposed and each in his way was remarkably unyielding in type.

While Rossie was alive, he and Molly, through their good humor and affection, were able to hold the insurgent in check, but after Rossie’s tragic drowning matters went from bad to worse. Alan quickly assumed the traditional rôle of the family black sheep.

In every respectable family of New England there is, I suppose, always that predestined place. It had been so in my father’s generation and in the generation before him. We all, with the exception of Molly, who was too young to have an opinion, expected that Alan would sooner or later disgrace the family, and as we did not conceal from him the state of our convictions he did his best to justify them. After being expelled from two schools and dragged into college by the application of every family influence, there came the final storm. In his sophomore year he became involved in a disgraceful row which reached the columns of the metropolitan press. Alan was permitted to resign, returned home, had a violent scene with Ben and my father, and departed, vowing never to set foot in the family home again. That we were all unjust to him admits of no doubt—I among the rest—but at that time I was completely under the influence of Ben, who was three years my senior.

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I have left my brother Ben until the last: utterly different from me in temperament, impulse and character, he exercised over me the strongest domination. From boyhood we had been inseparable. Study came laboriously to him, to me naturally, so, despite the difference in age, we passed through school and college together. Mentally I was his superior but he exercised over me a moral supremacy by the direct and ruthless expression of his will. His strength lay in the fact that he was diverted by no complexities. He had little imagination, read little, and talked less. The two or three ideas which guided him were settled convictions. Nothing perplexed him. In all things he was a direct force.

I have noticed the same phenomenon in later life. Men of little imagination and small mental baggage often dominate men of superior imagination by the sheer tenacious simplicity of never being in doubt of what they want. As I see them now, Alan was revolt and Ben traditionalism in its most rigid New England form. He was born to maintain what was as it had been, a mid-Victorian in his tastes, a Bourbon in his ideas,—quite capable, in another era, of burning witches at the stake.

For better or for worse, our destinies have been tragically intertwined,—how tragically, I alone know. His code of morality would not have looked well in copy books but, such as it was, it did have the advantage of sincerity and a contempt for hypocrisy as he saw it in others.