My Dear Cornelia/Book 1/Chapter 4
Among the novelists who have arrived within the last ten years, it is more difficult to discover any community in constructive ethical intention or tendency. One can no longer feel sure that marriage is regarded as the normal condition, for which fidelity in illegal relations is a substitute. One recalls numerous heroines who collect erotic adventures like female Don Juans, and others who stoutly and "conscientiously" refuse marriage to lovers to whom they refuse nothing else. And here is George F. Hummel's After All, advertised as follows: "Its analysis of the inherent self-destructiveness of marriage is carried to a conclusion which, however opposed to accepted standards of morality, has in it the logic and compelling force of a thinking man's profoundest conviction." Here are D. H. Lawrence's Lost Girl and Arnold Bennett's Pretty Lady, and W. L. George's Ursula Trent, and Willa Cather's Lost Lady, and Joseph Hergesheimer's Cytherea, and the heroine of Mr. Masters's Domesday Book—a whole troop of damsels who meander where they will in quest of rosebuds. Here is Robert Herrick's Lilla deliberately and successfully discarding marriage for an unsanctioned union. Here is Margaret Prescott Montague's Julie (in Deep Channel) finding in an illicit relationship the effective key to a larger and more spiritual life. Here is even Mrs. Gerould permitting a grave and thoughtful illegal relationship to the hero of Conquistador, whom she would apparently have us regard as the very pink of essential purity. No single explanation will account for the community in "destructive" tendency discernible in the latest phase of the movement; or for the fact that there is hardly one in a dozen recent novels which Cornelia would care to see in the hands of her daughter; or for the more alarming fact that, if there were one such novel in a dozen, Cornelia's daughter probably would not care to read it.
Since, in the United States, marriage has been by no means a legally irretrievable disaster, it would be absurd to point to the rigor of our law as a very important occasion of the widespread indifference or disrespect for chastity exhibited or reflected by many American writers. The occasions of our revolt lie deeper than that, and many causes conspire to give to our current fiction its unwonted aspect of levity and license.
First, as a literary inheritance, the Wells-Galsworthy group of the elder novelists bequeathed to their successors a profound skepticism about the legal touchstone of chastity, together with a pleasant rule of virtue which tends, as a social regulation, to be unworkable, since it is incapable of objective and public application. Their "rule," developed a little, lands one in an anarchical moral individualism; and their successors developed it by omitting the word "permanent" from the definition of virtue.
Secondly, the appearance of a good many rather frothily wanton pictures of frothily wanton younger sets may still be attributed to reaction from the austerities of war; the writers of the futilitarian school take chastity lightly because they take everything lightly: for examples, Mr. Carl Van Vechten and Mr. F. Scott Fitzgerald—though it must be admitted that the latter, in The Beautiful and Damned, has written the most impressive temperance tract of our time. (I wonder whether Cornelia noticed that it is a temperance tract.)
Thirdly, women are discovering various means of avoiding the inevitable penalties which the earlier novelists inflicted upon sorrowful blue-eyed girls who stooped to folly: they don't, in fiction at least, so often have to abandon a baby (Adam Bede), or to lose their job (Esther Waters), or to be barred from marriage (Tess of the Durbervilles), or to suffer ostracism or exile (David Copperfield).
Fourthly, as in the use of cocktails and tobacco, the double standard is manifestly giving ground before a single standard, and that a masculine standard: see any novel of the literary and artistic "villages" of New York or Chicago—for example, those of Mr. Floyd Dell. In Meredith Nicholson's Broken Barriers, an extraordinary disclosure from the Indiana school, unchastity is almost blandly presented as, for a considerable group of young business women, something like the accepted avenue to social advancement and as a preliminary to a good marriage.
Fifthly, chastity, legal and spiritual, has for a dozen years been under fire in this country as a distinctive aspect of that "Puritanism" which, as we know, must be destroyed, root and branch, before we shall have any art, letters, or society that are really worth mention.
Sixthly, the idea of sex as a sacred mystery, under protection of Church and State, has given ground before an interesting series of competing ideas: the idea of sex as a chapter in physiology; the idea of sex as a social asset and a contribution which every good mixer makes to the occasion; and the idea of sex as a horrible nuisance.
Seventhly, there is appearing here and there in current literature evidence of the growth among us of an æsthetic philosophy which rejects the moral valuations of life. Its doctrine is briefly this:—You can't be sure that any act will yield you happiness. You can't be sure that any act will be virtuous. You can be sure that every act will yield you experience. Let us go in for experience, and value our acts according to the quantity and intensity of the experience which they yield.
Mr. Hergesheimer at present, I think, best represents the æsthetic point of view. I am afraid that Mr. Hergesheimer is just a little bit of a poseur. He pretends to feel surprised that many people regard his books as of immoral tendency. I myself am not one of those who are much worried by the moral aspects of his work. If he were content to let the novels speak for themselves, few people would guess how unorthodox the author is. As a matter of fact Mr. Hergesheimer is a renegade Presbyterian. He is a Presbyterian turned artist. He is proud of his apostasy and he likes to talk about it. He has shaken off his patrimonial "Puritanism"; he finds life more delectable since; and he delights to find a cool spot in a Havana hotel, and to stretch out his legs and discourse somewhat expansively, for the benefit of his fellow citizens north of the Gulf, upon his "emancipation," with frequent pointed references to his informal dinner-jacket of Chinese silk, the orange blossoms in his buttonhole, the flourished Larrañaga cigar in his fingers, and the frigid mixture of Ron Bacardi, sugar, and vivid green lime at his elbow.
As an artist, he is interested in two things: first in the luxurious, the colorful, the exotic; and second, in the poetry of passionate idealisms, martyr-hot. He himself exhibits a middle-aged prudence and coolness; he possesses a certain amount of taste of a certain kind, which preserves him from a certain kind of now popular grossness; he paints himself as a connoisseur of sensations: these qualities, together with his old-fashioned romantic attachment to "grand passions," give him a salient distinction, indeed real isolation, among the "Jacksonian rabble" who imagine that Mr. Hergesheimer is one of them, and who still constitute the main body of the anti-Puritan movement. Yet, as an artist, he finds himself constrained to be essentially an anti-moralist. He welcomes all experience in proportion to its intensity and richness of color. He cannot help admitting his "preference for girls who have the courage of their emotions." He cannot help confessing his artistic pleasure in observing a crucifix as the background of a prostitute. He cannot deny himself the revenge upon his Presbyterian ancestors, which consists in referring to the prostitutes of a house in Havana as "informal girls," as if, forsooth, when one emerges from the ancestral hypocrisies of Presbyterianism, "formality" remains the only real distinction between these girls and any other sort of girls.
Oh Cornelia—I begin to understand what troubles you!
Mr. D. H. Lawrence seems to have set out with the notion that sex is the greatest thing in the world, and with the correlative notion that we can't very well have too much of it, or have it on too easy terms. He is still, if I understand him, a great believer in experience for experience's sake, and he passes in many quarters for a dangerous immoralist. To the conventional sense, indeed, he may easily appear to write his novels as if the world of conventional morals had no existence. Even in Sons and Lovers, his heroes and heroines explore their sexual good where they find it with barbaric or übermenschlich indifference to legality—or, should one say, with the indifference to legality prevalent among a coal-mining population? In his more recently published Women in Love, his seekers of experience and self-realization are men and women who have exhausted the possibilities of gratification through any ordinary intimacy of relationship. The book has offended pudency by a few intelligible paragraphs of plain speech where we were formerly accustomed to silence. But its really shocking aspect is its studious, remorseless revelation of what a horrible, devouring mania sexual passion may be: how involved with mortal fear; and with cold, probing curiosity; and with murderous hatred. One of the characteristic high spots in the story is that in which Hermione expresses the kind of intimacy that she desires with Birkin, and consummates her "voluptuous ecstasy" by seizing a beautiful ball of lapis lazuli and bringing it crashing down upon his head. Except for a lively incident of this sort here and there, Women in Love must impress the ordinary novel-reader as intolerably dull, dreary, difficult, and mad: and anyone who declares that it makes sex attractive should be punished by being required to read it through.
Mr. Lawrence's interest in it is predominantly the interest of an exploring moralist who has specialized in sexual relations and is coming to conclusions which are important, if true. He is coming to the conclusion that—for men, at any rate—passional surrender is not the greatest thing in the world. He is coming to the conclusion that the romantic poets and the romantic novelists—including, perhaps, Mr. Wells and Mr. Galsworthy—have all been on the wrong tack in representing as the height of human experience that ecstasy in which one individuality is merged and absorbed in another. This he regards as in its essential nature an ideal of decadence. This is an aspiration toward death and disintegration, from which the inevitable reaction is disgust. The virtue of a man is to preserve his own integrity and resist the dissolution of union. "When he makes the sexual consummation the supreme consummation, even in his secret soul, he falls into the beginnings of despair." I quote this sentence from Mr. Lawrence's fantastic and curious Fantasia of the Unconscious. And from his Studies in Classic American Literature I quote these words, calculated to trouble both his enemies and his friends: "The essential function of art is moral. Not æsthetic, nor decorative, nor pastime and recreation, but moral. The essential function of art is moral." This will perhaps trouble Mr. Hergesheimer more than it troubles me.
Among the later novelists of the Middle West one might choose either Sherwood Anderson or Ben Hecht as a striking representative of the anti-Puritan movement. But there is so much cloudy symbolism in the author of Many Marriages that one may more expeditiously indicate the position of the author of Gargoyles—and of less widely circulated works. Mr. Hecht, generally speaking, appears to be the inheritor of Mr. Dreiser's moral outfit, during the latter's lifetime. He interests me more than Mr. Dreiser ever did, because his intellectual processes are much more rapid. Mr. Dreiser reaches his conclusion by a slow, vermiculous emotional approach, like the promenade of the lumbricus terrestris; Mr. Hecht darts at his like a wasp. He is a stylist, and he feels a kind of ecstasy in the stabbing use of words. He is a satirist exulting in the stripping of shams. In Gargoyles, he is a cynic with the point of mad King Lear crying:—
Why dost thou lash that whore? Strip thy own back.
Thou hotly lusts to use her in that kind
For which thou whip'st her.
He is an angry and disenchanted moralist. But he is also—and this is the particularly interesting aspect of his case—an angry and disenchanted "immoralist." The emancipated heroes of Gargoyles and Erik Dorn hurl themselves over precipices of experience to wallow in abysses of spiritual inanity and despair. Yet before they are emancipated, as Mr. Hecht sees them, they are in an equal agony of moral chains. Basine, in Gargoyles, loathes all women for his wife's sake. "His distaste for his wife kept him faithful to her because his imagination baulked at the idea of embracing another Henrietta." Again we are told—almost in the Dreiserian phraseology—that "cowardice" had made him an excited champion of domestic felicity, marital fidelity, and kindred ideas.
In his symbolical romance, Mr. Hecht represents man as an agonized animal, self-crucified on the cross of his moral ideals, martyrizing himself in behalf of laws and conventions to which his desires and appetites are in unvanquishable opposition. Hitherto, his satire of conventional sexual morality has not revealed to me any constructive element: its caustic and sulphurous bolts leap from an anarchical darkness of all-embracing disillusion and fathomless disgust.
The note of sexual disgust is, to the student of contemporary morals, a point of high interest in the recent realistic fiction. This note of disgust is clamorous in Blackguard, by Mr. Hecht's spiritual satellite, Mr. Maxwell Bodenheim. It is a steady undertone through the novels and short stories of Sherwood Anderson; in The Narrow House and Narcissus of Evelyn Scott; and in the Rahab of Waldo Franck. It is a cry of diabolic torture in James Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as Young Man; and in Ulysses it is a rolling ordurous pandemonium.
In reading the novels of Ben Hecht, Maxwell Bodenheim, Sherwood Anderson, Evelyn Scott, Waldo Franck, and James Joyce, one's first impression is frequently of wonder as to what motive can prompt an author to perpetuate a record of experience so humiliatingly painful, and a vision of souls so atrociously ugly. Is the motive revenge upon life for having taken them in? Is the motive to cleanse the stuffed bosom of the perilous stuff that preys upon the reason? The mad King Lear perhaps felt relieved when he had completed his psychoanalysis of the "simp'ring dame"; but when he had reached his conclusion in "burning, scalding, stench, consumption," he cried perforce: "Give me an ounce of civet, good apothecary, to sweeten my imagination!" In the Emetic School of fiction appears the reductio ad nauseam of the idea of sex as a social asset. No lust-bitten monk wrestling with hallucinations in a mediæval cloister could have made the entire subject more bewilderingly detestable than this group of anti-Puritan and anti-Catholic emancipators, who apparently set out with a desire to make it pleasant.