Since salability is the only criterion of worth, any story that violates our fundamental optimistic tone is at once intercepted, revamped, “improved” or pronounced hopeless and condemned to extinction. “Not salable,” is a phrase as ominous as a jury’s “Guilty!” on a charge of murder in the first degree, and the only appeal possible is for the defendant to plead a sudden seizure of passionate desire to “pack up his troubles in his old kit bag and smile, smile, smile!” And so the law of supply and demand operates once more. The “calamity howler” is eliminated and the man or woman with the “smile that won’t come off” gets to the top. American literature becomes enriched by the advent of another “genius” imbued with the gospel that “life is great fun, after all!”
That no literature can thrive on such a barren optimism seems to be a statement so obvious as to challenge even the mere ordinary intelligence offering it. Yet pedants carry forward this optimism-tradition and preach, and lecture, and prate about the spirit of America, and threaten and punish and outlaw the few unfortunate rebels. What literature can a country produce which refuses to take even the most timid peep at life as it is, which shuts its eyes in very horror at the most fundamental problems of the land, which does not brood, contemplate or inquire, which does not know the benediction of a tear or the relief of a sigh? Can a steady diet of sugar produce anything more invigorating than diabetes? And literary sugar is what we think and preach and worship. All heroines are pretty; all heroes succeed; all complications are solved; wedding bells ring; promotions are given out; only bad people die young; the good live to a mellow age of four score and ten; life is a fairy-tale in which all the fairies are sweet young things waving magic wands over honest young brokers of their choice; the world, and America especially, is a Vale of Tempe where limousines are passed out as the reward of virtue and endeavor and where successful matches are consummated.
Our writers must be either inanimate machines or sorry human beings trained to suppress their instincts and moods. They must be on their guard not to succumb to the “blues”; quick to inhibit any sad reflection or discouraging thought. “If you can’t see the sun is shining,” wrote one editor very bluntly, rejecting a “depressing” story, “take Epsom salts and sleep it over.” And whether they are drowsy or not, sleep it over our writers must. Those who suffer with insomnia find their good neighbors either snoring peacefully or stamping about in infuriated protest. Our writers must sift their experience; if it is tragic or insufficiently uplifting they must dispatch it to oblivion. It is really most advisable not to draw upon experience at all. Not of such stuff can optimistic fiction be made. For is there life without tears and heartache and doubt; without innumerable deaths of precious fragile dreams; without graying of heads; without perplexity? Hence arises what Van Wyck Brooks calls “the doctrine of the fear of experience.... It assumes that experience is not the stuff of life but something essentially meaningless; and not merely meaningless but an obstruction which retards and complicates our real business of getting on in the world and getting up in the world, and which must, therefore, be ignored and forgotten and evaded and beaten down by every means in our power.”[19]
Here again the inconsistency in our theory of optimistic fiction is glaring. We shriek anathemas at any native product that repudiates it, yet we bow with respect to importations. We acclaim all the morbid geniuses of Europe; we accord their works places of special privilege in our curricula; we consider it a mark of culture to mention the titles of at least a half-dozen depressing books. Even our most respectable magazines are proud on occasion to publish a story by an eminent European author with the flamboyant legend placed upon it or boxed in the center of its first page by the editor: “No one but Gorki (or Maeterlink, or D’Annunzio, or D. H. Lawrence, or whoever else it might be) would have the courage to write a story such as this, and no magazine in America but The—— would have the courage to publish it.” The same legend is placed sometimes upon the work of a native writer, but after reading the story one finds that either the writer did not dare, after all, or that the editor of the brave magazine edited the contribution; that both the writer and the worthy editor had been so frightened at the mere flap of a wing that they had to offer an apology for attempting to soar.
This inconsistency is particularly reflected in our current criticism and literary textbooks. With the same breath a reviewer will praise Dostoyevski and chastise some native youngster for his horrible morbidity. In the same chapter the text will refer to Chekhov and Maupassant and Zola and Poe with almost cringing reverence and eloquently preach the gospel of cheap optimism as the supreme message of the story writer. And the young would-be procures copies of the great masters, reads them, and comes back perplexed. “Why do they write about such horrid things?” asks one young student. I look into her large, innocent eyes and smile. The Great Creator must have been in a diplomatic mood when he invented a smile. I glance down at my copy of The Literary News, lying on my desk and note that an editor of a prominent and liberally-paying magazine is in the market for “stories of rapid action—cheery short stories, encouraging, helpful—the kind that makes the world better,” and I proceed to discuss how this kind of story is written....
2. Sex
Of all our taboos none has contributed so large a share in keeping our literature swathed in baby blankets as that on sex. In its essence it is merely a direct irradiation of taboo No. 1 on optimism. If everything in the universe is good and beautiful and holy and the writer’s business is to chant incessant halleluiahs, then sex is all of these and must be treated reverently. Its unsavory aspects as well as those leading to unhappiness must be passed by, and since in the muddled world we are living in sex has felt most severely the combined forces of bigotry, suppression and inhibition, of pathologic social and moral conditions, its aspects are most frequently unsavory and unhappy and therefore must be either ignored entirely or made savory and happy. We have a hoary phrase perpetually playing upon our glib lips—it is to the effect that we are a “clean-living, moral people.” The phrase itself has long lost its meaning, even to the most uninformed of citizens, but it has remained a sacred fetish forever, it seems.
Again it is not in the total abstaining from any treatment of sex that our taboo is expressed, but in our peculiar angle of treatment. Total abstaining were indeed impossible, for any literature, and least of all for our literature. The truth is that ours is, in the main, essentially a sex-literature—largely because of our “reverent” attitude. Strong elemental forces long suppressed erupt in irrepressible, if furtive, curiosity. No country on earth can boast of as many periodicals specializing in the risque, the sexually-sensational, the cheaply suggestive, as the land of the “clean-living.” The fact is incontrovertible. Where there is a continued supply there must be a continued demand. Our publishers know their market. Even the titles of a host of our periodicals exploit, not too artistically, this crude reaction of a sex-conscious people. “Saucy Stories,” “Breezy Stories,” “Snappy Stories,” “Live Stories,” “Droll Stories,” “The Parisienne,” “True Stories,” “The Follies,” “Telling Tales,” “Secrets,” “I Confess,” “True Confessions,” “High Life,” “Hot Dog,”—these are some of the titles that wink mischievously at the purchaser timid with guilt. But the purchaser is rarely pleased with his dissipation. He finds the wine exceedingly mild. Most of the stories under the suggestive cover bearing the inviting title and a still more inviting pretty girl, usually attired in very becoming négligé, are, after all, “clean.”
And this “cleanness” is the characteristic blight of nine-tenths of our entire literature. It is vulgar with the lowest kind of sex-consciousness but it doesn’t go “too far.” It is the “cleanness” of our moving pictures. Is there any reason why a production entitled “Du Barry” in Europe should be rechristened to read “Passion” for American exhibition? Is there any reason why Barrie’s “Admirable Crichton” should become “Male and Female” as a photoplay? Is there any reason for such titles as “Sex,” “The Restless Sex,” “His Wedded Wife,” “The First Night,” “The She Woman,” “The Leopard Woman,” “Wedded Husbands,” “Why Wives Go Wrong,” “Forbidden Fruit,” “The Primrose Path,” “What Happened to Rosa,” “Why Change Your Wife?” “The Woman Untamed,” etc., etc? It surely does not require an erudite psychoanalyst to find the reason for this avalanche of suggestiveness.
Perhaps, if they deemed it wise to speak, our motion-picture producers could shed some light on the subject. Seemingly their opinion of our “clean-living, moral people” is not very flattering. And their judgment is substantially founded upon the generous reports they receive from the distributing exchanges.