Gertrude Stein calls the postwar youth a “lost generation”

Gertrude Stein calls the postwar youth a “lost generation” is an episode in which a rebuke heard at a garage becomes a sweeping judgment on young people who served in the war. The phrase’s passage from the garage patron to Stein, and then into Ernest Hemingway’s later writing, gives the episode its force: a casual reprimand hardens into a label, while Hemingway’s memories of war and friendship complicate its authority.

Background and the Phrase’s Origin

The exchange takes place after Hemingway and Gertrude Stein have returned from Canada and are living on Rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs, while they are still good friends. Stein is having ignition trouble with the old Model T Ford she drives. A young garage worker, who had served in the last year of the war, has not repaired it adeptly—or perhaps has failed to give it priority over other vehicles. After Stein protests, the garage’s patron severely corrects the young man and tells him, “You are all a génération perdue.”

The phrase therefore enters the scene as the patron’s reprimand to one worker, not as an expression Stein originates. Its first context is practical and local: a faulty car, a repair delayed or mishandled, and an employer’s dissatisfaction with an employee. Stein takes that judgment beyond the garage. Her shift from the particular boy to “all” the young people who served in the war turns a rebuke about conduct into a verdict about a generation.

Stein’s Accusation

Stein directs that verdict at Hemingway. “That’s what you are. That’s what you all are,” she says, identifying the young people who served in the war as “a lost generation.” Hemingway answers, “Really?” Stein insists that they have “no respect for anything” and “drink yourselves to death….” When Hemingway resists the characterization, she cuts off the argument: “Don’t argue with me, Hemingway,” she says, repeating that they are all a lost generation, “exactly as the garage keeper said.”

Her repetition makes clear that the garage patron’s words have become evidence for her judgment, while the label itself closes down distinctions among the people it describes. Hemingway’s brief question does not settle the disagreement; his later recollection instead places the accusation beside specific memories of wartime service and of Stein herself. The scene preserves both the intimacy of her direct address and the breadth of the claim she makes about an entire cohort.

Hemingway’s Response and the Walk Home

That night, walking home, Hemingway thinks about the mechanic and wonders whether he had ever been carried in one of the vehicles converted into ambulances. The recollection moves from the garage to the mountain roads of the war: loaded ambulances burned out their brakes descending with wounded aboard, braking first in low gear and finally using reverse. The last vehicles were driven over the mountainside empty so they could be replaced by larger Fiats with an H-shift and metal-to-metal brakes. These details make the young mechanic’s wartime service more than a category in Stein’s argument; they call up the dangerous work and worn-out equipment associated with carrying the wounded.

Hemingway also thinks of Stein and Sherwood Anderson, and of “egotism and mental laziness versus discipline.” Against the ease of attaching a label, he asks himself who is calling whom a lost generation. Near the Closerie des Lilas, the bronze statue of Marshal Ney stands with its sword out, alone among the shadows of the trees. Hemingway recalls Ney’s failure at Waterloo and his personal fighting with the rear guard during the retreat from Moscow, while Napoleon rode away in a coach with Caulaincourt. The statue and the historical recollection extend his question beyond Stein’s immediate accusation: the past offers no generation untouched by failure or loss.

Friendship, Later Writing, and the Episode’s Afterlife

Hemingway’s disagreement does not erase his affection for Stein. He recalls her warmth and the beauty with which she had spoken of Apollinaire, who died on the day of the 1918 Armistice while delirious and mistaking the crowd’s cries of “à bas Guillaume” for cries directed against him. Hemingway resolves to serve Stein and see that she receives justice for her good work, while rejecting her “lost-generation talk” and what he calls “all the dirty, easy labels.” The recollection thus refuses a simple break between loyalty and dissent: he can oppose her judgment and still affirm the friend who had supported and moved him.

The episode’s later consequence appears in Hemingway’s account of writing his first novel. He tried to balance Stein’s quotation from the garage keeper with a quotation from Ecclesiastes. The phrase therefore persists, but not as an uncontested explanation of postwar youth: it is set against another text and carried forward as a tension to be weighed. At the end of the walk, Hemingway returns to the flat above the sawmill, where his wife, his son, and his son’s cat, F. Puss, are happy beside a fire. He tells his wife, “You know, Gertrude is nice, anyway.” The domestic ending restores the personal relation after the argument over a public label, leaving affection intact without withdrawing his objection.