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:—
Thou rascal beadle, hold thy bloody hand!
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 mediaæval 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.