NEW INNOCENTS ABROAD
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to think it is not at all of Paris that I am thinking, nor even of the
summer, but strangely of New York, and as vividly as if the silhouette
of its skyline were projected against the wall of my darkened room.
I am neither a psychiatrist nor a sociologist, and I know that on
a subject like this I am not even entitled to anything like a "theory";
but I have to put my ideas together if only to make a picture that
will connect together my summer, Louis and Gene, Dick and Arthur,
mothers and virgins, and connect them too with that brooding image
of New York that I cannot now get out of my mind. It is only as
such a picture, a moment of experience in a dark room at the end of
a summer, worth whatever it may be, that I offer these ideas. Be–
sides, as ideas they are not really new: the idea had often come to me
when I stared up at the tall cliffs of apartment houses in Manhattan
and thought of the fate of modern marriage in the metropolis, with
all those couples locked up in their boxlike apartments, that America
was in fact a vast human laboratory where the relations between the
sexes were slowly being transformed for the rest of humanity. "Amer–
ica is a great experiment," Sigmund Freud said after his one visit to
the United States, "but I do not think it will succeed." Success or
not, the point is that, even more than an adventure in technology,
America represents a vast sexual experiment, in the course of which
it may have become an advance outpost in the evolution of the
species.
No other society has ever pushed the struggle between the sexes
so clearly into the open. You need only think how much of a staple
the theme has become in the pages of
The New Yorker,
where
urbanity usually forbids reference to the uglier realities, in order to
realize the degree to which this struggle has already permeated the
American mind. This is the one subject too on which
The New Yorker
(as in the cartoons of Thurber) has permitted its humor to be savage
rather than gentle. And with good reason, I think, for nowhere else
have I heard such bitter resentment toward women expressed by
men as in New York, and none of them inverts; and nowhere else,
either, so many complaints from the other sex that American men
are unable to make their women happy.
Some years ago Thurber at last gave his theme a name in a series
of cartoons actually entitled, "The War Between the Sexes," but at
the conclusion he had the women rather surprisingly surrendering at
