Time in Exile's Return

I noticed an interesting transition between section I and section II of Malcom Cowley's Exile's Return. Section I ends with the following: "We returned to New York, appropriately --to the homeland of the uprooted, where everyone you met came from another town and tried to forget it; where nobody seemed to have parents, or a past more distant than last night's swell party, or a future beyond the swell party this evening and the disillusioned book he would write tomorrow," (Cowley 47). This represents the prevalent attitude that members of the "Lost Generation" began to take on. Section II demonstrates how this lifestyle played out. During "The Long Furlough" Cowley begins to describe life in Greenwich Village. The post-war passage of time is intriguing. Cowley rarely, if ever, comments on time transitions in the first part of the book, but this section is filled with reminders. His diction is critical in fully capturing the mood of these changes; "February blustered into March" (49), for example, shows the suddenness and extreme nature of the change. Just a paragraph later, "It was April now," (49). Cowley essentially does a month by month breakdown of what is going on, and even within this, there is an odd fixation on time. The happenings of each day of the week are described at length. The good times weren't to last forever, however: "But it couldn't go on forever. Some drizzly morning late in April you woke up to find yourself married," (50). Before long it was "late June," and eventually the furlough was over. Life's seriousness continues to build from month to month, and with each passing month the mood changes. This is in stark contrast to how Cowley describes life in much more general terms pre-war. Perhaps a recognition of the passage of time and the changes that time brings was something born out of the war experience.

I also found this quotation to be very telling of the exile experience: "We had come three thousand miles in search of Europe and had found America, in a vision half-remembered, half-falsified and romanced," (83). The search, for many, was more hopeful and less depressing than what was ultimately found. This may be a commonality to many exiles, which is why they may not truly be able to return "home" in the symbolic sense, or appreciate home in its literal sense. The notion of home may never truly even be what they idealize, but that won't necessarily stop an exile from desiring to return there.