Not in Europe or America are we at home, we, that ostracized portion of degenerate mankind which lives on the continent criticizing our home countries. The family of course is a decaying institution. We don’t go in for dutifully pretended affections now. What we want is an aristocracy of the intelligence. Not the hard French face, so disillusioned. Not the wooden English visage, prizing rudeness as a social asset.... Nothing left. There is really nothing left for them or for the reckless American flapper-impulsive need to keep rushing about space without tradition or direction, swirled in the dynamic maelstrom, human steel dust, lithe voiced electricity broadcast. The nation mourns his honoured death. Then Mr. McAlmon shows us the younger generation carried away in the maelstrom of modern dynamism like scraps of steel, like those wireless waves “whose voice races nimbly throughout the whole world.” “Ah! let America at least weep decently over her own demise!” The novels of youth published by American writers in the last few years are quite numerous; I cannot review them all. The Parisian house of the “Contact” editions whose president is Mr. McAlmon, has specialized in realistic novels. It has published the most significant confessions of these young writers, and among others the books of George Hemingway, John Herrman, Emmanuel Carnevali, Gertrude Beasley, etc.[57] In “My First Thirty Years,” Miss Beasley is hardly more reassuring than Robert McAlmon. Her book frankly tells the brutal story of a young woman obsessed by evil instincts in the midst of her family circle. Contact with reality has stripped her of all illusions. She curses life and those who have given it to her without her consent. She wishes that she had never been born. It sounds like the Book of Job. After cursing her father and mother, the heroine turns against the country of her birth, “America is the land of murderous institutions. To be sure they do not kill the body, but they leave us, like Frankenstein’s monster, a being without a soul.” Thirty years ago, I lay in the womb of a woman, conceived in a sexual act of rape, being carried during the pre-natal period by an unwilling and rebellious mother, finally bursting from the womb only to be tormented in a family whose members I despised or pitied, and brought into association with people whom I should never have chosen. Sometimes I wish that, as I lay in the womb, a pink, soft embryo, I had somehow thought, breathed or moved and wrought destruction to the woman who bore me, and her eight miserable children who preceded me, and the four round-faced mediocrities who came after me, and her husband, a monstrously cruel, Christlike, and handsome man with an animal appetite for begetting children.