Sex in the Modern Novel

BY DOUGLAS BUSH

I AM getting tired of reading current novels, and I do not think I am alone in that. It may be only the familiar experience of surviving into an alien — and conceivably a wiser — generation, of growing old and crabbed. That is perhaps not the only reason, yet the odds are heavily against anyone who would suggest others. To discuss the technical methods of current highbrow fiction and to deal in the impressive clichés of the age of violence is to be an intellectual in good standing. But to ask if current fiction, highbrow and lowbrow alike, does not provide a surfeit of sex and sensationalism is to expose one’s self as an antique of softened brain and hardened arteries. Before such a prospect strong men blench.

However, as Juvenal said, the penniless traveler whistles in the face of the highwayman, and one who has no claims to being an intellectual cannot be read out of the party. A case could probably be made for some dimness of moral vision in both conventional novelists and their conventionally approving critics, but a more strategic ground for complaint might be found in artistic considerations alone. One may then set forth the proposition that our novelists’ common and exclusive concern with sex grows out of an unrealistically and inartistically narrow conception of the novel (if not of life) and that the common fictional products are inexpressibly monotonous and tedious. These and subsequent remarks have to do not with exceptions but with general tendencies both in subcritical fiction and in the serious writing that may be thought to suffer from the prevalent contagion as well as from a partly misguided literary creed. Further, these remarks are not prompted by the recent sensation, Lolita, which is too well written and astringent to deserve the cruder labels thrown at it but which can hardly disown the label of abnormal psychology.

Although the freedom of utterance that came with or brought about the decay of censorship was hailed as the arrival of American adulthood, a frequent result has been a regression to adolescence; or perhaps the exploitation of unadulterated sex should be called a new toy. It used to be that the curious reader in quest of the risqué had to go to the scrofulous French novel, but how pallid it was and is, compared with the modern native product. If, a century from now, the social historian should read many best sellers of our time, he would be forced to conclude that male and female Americans of this period were wholly engaged in amorous and extramarital affairs, with incidental excursions into business, politics, war, and so forth. For nowadays affairs are as automatic in a novel as corpses in a detective story; the only question is how many are required. The emotional and moral tension that might be set up by an effort at self-control hardly comes into the contemporary view of human nature.

In that charming old idyl, The Vicar of Wakefield, the innocent vicar early announces that “all our adventures were by the fireside, and all our migrations from the blue bed to the brown.” This last phrase, somewhat reinterpreted, may serve to summarize a mass of modern and especially American fiction. Everyman and Everywoman seek their souls’ salvation through a pilgrimage from bed to bed, and the more laps the race entails the finer is the resultant spiritual integrity. But there is a degree of sameness. After one has absorbed a dozen modish novels, one becomes an expert in the routine and the patter. This is, to be sure, subject to variations — you may have clinically anatomical reporting with a pseudomystical shimmer, or clinically anatomical reporting without a shimmer — but in general it runs in a standard groove. The resources of the human anatomy and vocabulary being alike limited, no one can really win the Frankness Stakes, and the contest, however profitable for author and publisher, is for the adult spectator a considerable bore.

The decorum of a family magazine hardly permits a parody, but, since the same close observation of life and the same fearless honesty are carried into the rare glimpses we are given of nonsexual activities, one might compose a sample, in such an innocuous area, of one popular technique:

I reached for my shoe and pulled it on with a jerk. It split over the base of the big toe. I began to lace it. The lace broke. I stood up and poured myself a drink. It burned my throat. I hunted for another lace. There wasn’t one in the drawer. I tied the broken pieces together. The knot wouldn’t go through the eyelet. I took another stiff drink. The sky turned purple. A bird sang outside.

In case the gentle reader misses the complex point, it may be explained that this grim vignette symbolizes the crushing weight of the modern industrial megalopolis, the shoddiness of its standardized manufactures and civilization, and the lonely desperation of the frustrated individual unable to realize himself in a stagnant and repressive society, a desperation barely mitigated by possibilities of Dionysiac rebirth. But this technique, as I said, must be shifted to the realm of sex. In the current novel all human drives and needs and activities must be channeled into sexual terms, must be translated, as it were, into the Basic of our time, and into many, many pages.

“Oh,” says the modernist, “you want our writers to be like the nineteenth-century novelists, from Jane Austen to James, who never used a word that, as Dickens’ Mr. Podsnap said, would bring a blush to the cheek of the young person.” Of course no one would want to revert to the rigorous propriety that Mrs. Grundy demanded from those novelists (and that irked some of them), and we may rejoice in the new freedom, even if it has not yet given birth to many novelists comparable in stature to the older ones. But to say this is not to grant that our self-conscious, stereotyped, blow-by-blow recording of incessant sexual encounters is artistically more effective than the method of reticent suggestion. Would Becky Sharp be in the slightest degree more vivid in her corruption, or would Sir Pitt Crawley and Lord Steyne have any more satyrlike actuality, if they had been handled in the modern manner? Mature readers are interested in feelings, states of mind.

But if the modernist, who is no less rigorous in his way than Mrs. Grundy was in hers, insists that most of the older British and American novelists were squeamish and mealymouthed, we might think of the other great novelists of the century who cannot be charged with minimizing sex — Stendhal, Balzac, and Flaubert, Dostoevsky, Turgenev, and Tolstoy. So far as I remember, not one of these went in for seeing and telling all. Notwithstanding the portentous examples of Joyce and D. H. Lawrence, one may argue that, whether a novelist is depicting joyful ecstasy or joyless lust or a complex mixture of emotions, the piling up of physical detail constitutes, as a rule, a failure rather than a triumph of imaginative understanding and communication. To go a long way back, Virgil’s brief account of the meeting of Venus and Vulcan has been justly described as one of the most sensual passages in all literature:

ille repente accepit solitam flammam, notusque medullas intravit calor et labefacta per ossa cucurrit;

yet the means employed are no less reticent than potent.

BUT if the method of suggestion, though it has been the method of almost all the great masters, be questioned by modern practitioners and critics, there can hardly be any question about the overwhelming and myopic concentration on the theme of sex in modern novels. And, for our present concern, themes and attitudes are more important than methods. Sex, being a universal and urgent force in human nature and life, is inevitably and rightly a central theme of literature. Moreover, even the most squalid levels belong to the writer’s proper world, though one could ask if emphasis on those levels represents a rational and aesthetic balance; but that question may be passed by. Instead, taking sex in all its manifestations, we might ask if current concentration on that theme provides anything like a rounded picture of life. Such a narrowly limited vision is not found in any of the great novelists from Cervantes to those of the twentieth century.

Is the ignoring or slighting of sex in the older British and American novels a greater distortion of life than the ignoring or slighting of everything except sex? The French and Russian novelists, who enjoyed more freedom than those of Britain and the United States, treated sex as one clement in the immensely varied patterns and confusions of the human psyche and society. To run over their names, and the British and American names as well, is to be reminded of the infinite wealth of themes and material and characters they embraced and created: national strife, all kinds of moral problems, the comedy of manners and morals, the pursuit of money or power, social oppression and revolt. One can hardly count up the areas and levels of individual and social experience that make up the totality of life, areas and levels which the older novelists got into their books and which seem to be deliberately excluded from the world of most of the newer modern writers. Many of the older novelists even dealt with love — and not merely love between man and woman but all the relationships that go under that name.

One readily imagines of course all sorts of indignant replies. Perhaps the most obvious would be, “Life is like that.” Well, some parts of life have always been like that, but, if we must rely on individual testimony, the many great older novelists, as we have observed, did not see any such one-sided picture. One significant contrast, by the way, between the older fiction and ours is that, while our writers would go to the stake rather than sentimentalize (or perhaps even admit) a good character, they have not the slightest hesitation about sentimentalizing the bad - if one may use such simple categories as signposts.

There are many other possible replies. “We know that only a part of life is like that, but Freud and Company have focused the modern mind on sex as the matrix and medium of all human interests, and the activities that other novelists treated per se we are bound to render in sexual terms.”“The American bourgeois scene is in the main so respectably dull that it cannot generate a passion, an emotional crisis, and art must deal with characters who can be passionate.” “In a world newly accustomed to wholesale brutality we have to use shock tactics; people nowadays have no ear for the still small voice of Jane Austen or James.” “In the modern world the individual is consciously or unconsciously the victim of forces that he is powerless to alter; the novelist, confronted with the enormous complexities of life, can study only private behavior.” “The old capacious novel of manners is extinct; one must conform to the current vogue.” “There is no use in talking about what an artist should or should not do; he can only put down what he sees and feels; if you can’t see the truth he tells, it is not his fault.” “Of course the novelist cherishes moral values as much as anybody, though he is groping toward new and more valid ones; anyhow, the sophisticated writer has to present these by indirection and implication.” And so on.

The serious modern novel doubtless commands an enthusiastic following, considerable in intelligence if not in numbers (not to mention the millions who follow pornographic lures). But it may be thought that such defenses as have been suggested do not add up to a convincing argument. This is not the first and only ago in which mankind has lived with a half-paralyzing consciousness of disorder, though a number of intellectuals seem to have a defective historical sense and to assume that life on this earth was fairly rosy until a generation ago. Moreover, our world being in a very bad way because people feel and act as they do, one might raise the naïve question of why our extreme candor about sex is attended by such extreme reticence about virtue; novelists may be reluctant to hazard guesses as to what that is and how it works. The emphasis on sex and sensation may be related not only to moral dubiety but to lack of creative power; a reader cannot respond sympathetically to people embroiled in messes if they do not come alive as persons but remain figures moved about in accordance with an abstract diagram. If it is urged that American life is so oppressively standardized that sex is the only area in which individuality can assert itself, it may be answered that such self-assertion has become as standardized as anything else, that rebellion against convention is the most effete of conventions; and, if sex is made the vehicle for the whole complex of human experience, it is quite inadequate and much too easy.

Perhaps the best answer to all pros and cons would be the appearance of a new novelist big enough to create characters of vitality and dignity and to grasp many strands of life, as the older novelists commonly did and as Boris Pasternak has lately done; one might even entertain the bizarre notion of a novelist’s touching on the beauty of goodness. Assuredly novelists are free to, are obliged to, obey their compulsive vision (though one is not sure that this vision, even for writers of integrity, is unaffected by fashion). But readers are free too, and a number of them have had more than enough of changes rung on aggressive, sensual, frenetic egoism, whether it is or is not enveloped in a haze of sentimental morality. The critics who predict the doom of the novel, for subtler reasons than are offered here, may be right; one hopes not. Meanwhile some intelligent people are turning to the older novelists, to biography, history, science, perhaps even to poetry; they want something that the current novel seldom gives. It is conceivable that they have reason.