War, Youth, and Beauty

The Great War recharged those currents that have occupied us so far and served as their conduit into the postwar world. They had started to meet resistance; but in the trauma of war, nationalism strengthened its cult of youth, the sense of male beauty, and camaraderie—its stereotype of manliness. Any threatening sensual and homoerotic implications were supposedly stripped away. War was an invitation to manliness. Christopher Isherwood wrote during the late 1920s that English writers were suffering from a sense of shame that they had missed the war.¹ It had been, they thought, a test of courage, maturity, and