McAlmon’s soldiers are very fond of their off-color vocabulary. Like the youth of to-day they affect the use of slang. It is one aspect of their revolt. But to go back to our heroes (?), the problem of the World War is not the only one which preoccupies them. Their conversation takes on a more general turn. It is the meaning of life which they question. Peter Reynalds and Lloyd Scott, whom I have already quoted, continue to exchange their impressions. They compare their philosophies of life. “Enough!” says one of them. “It is still better to be making money. Skepticism never made anyone rich.” “Yes,” says the other, “but you have to act according to your temperament.” (See Dreiser.) “That is more interesting than letting social conventions which change with every generation dictate your actions. Why should one limit oneself?” Whereupon Lloyd Scott ceases to follow him and wonders what the deuce is the matter with him. Peter answers this question in a thoroughly skeptical manner. Why choose a stand if you are disgusted with every one of them beforehand? There is something wrong with his will power: “It’s this. I’ve got to make a living for myself, and I’m damned if there’s anything I like doing that pays. I tried newspaper work; did sob stories for awhile and then couldn’t contemplate existence any more; tried office work in a lumber concern and died with the boredom of companionship about me. It’s the damned unrelated unrest of an Irish temperament, I suppose. If the bloody war hadn’t come on I’d have struck for Europe to see if living over there wasn’t more gracious; aber mein gott. It’s this being an American; neither a savage nor a civilized man. A roughneck, who’s a little too refined.” Whereupon the Wentworth Hamlet says good-night to his friends. Before the war these pessimistic dialogues used to end with a return to the village where wine, gambling, practical joking, love-making, and now and then a suicide or an escape, proved that there was no smoke without fire and that even in America not everything was well with the best of possible worlds. * * * * * In “The Portrait of a Generation” and “Post-Adolescence,” Robert McAlmon has repeated himself. He has made himself the spokesman of the pathetic nihilism in which young Americans are struggling to-day. “The Portrait of a Generation” is a handbook of pessimism mitigated with humor and fantasy. It is Leopardi disguised as one of Jean Cocteau’s _parade_. Robert McAlmon has learnt the “Gay Savoir” at the school of the French Sadists. The door of his Inferno might well bear the motto: “Jazz here,” just like any American bar in Montmartre or Montparnasse. But under this travesty the pessimism is nevertheless profound: