THE EROTIC MYTH OF AMERICA
593
were in too poor a condition after the special treatment he had
given them."
Luckily it is not necessary to detail the plots of Mr. Raymond's
work. The notorious, and vastly successful,
No Orchids tor Miss
Blandish
follows fairly closely the plot of Faulkner's
Sanctuary)·
Twelve Chinks and a Girl
that of Hemingway's
To Have and Have
Not)
and the later works novels by Hammett and Chandler. The
characters are reduced to pasteboard, the plots are coarsened, vul–
garized and complicated, but the original pattern is generally dis–
cernible. In these books the sadism is chiefly homosexual; men torture
and mutilate other men at the slightest pretext, and incidentally to the
action, "I" being the chief aggressor. Thus, in his latest book,
You)re Lonely when Y ou)re Dead)
the narrator breaks into a
gambling club, where he is stopped by a couple of bouncer-guards.
After being held prisoner for half an hour, he is let go, without suf–
fering any ill-treatment:
"He (one of the guards who was showing him out) was beginning a
slow leering smile when I hit him. I didn't give him a chance to
duck. The punch travelled about four inches and it had all my
weight behind it. My fist bounced against the side of his jaw with
a crack like the snapping of dry wood. As he began to fall I slammed
in another punch to the same spot and stood back to watch him
fold on the floor. Then I grabbed his arm and rolled him over on
his
back. I had to work fast. Gates (the other guard) might come out
to see what the row was about. When I had him on his back, I
placed the heel of my shoe squarely on his nose and mouth and put
my weight on it."
Later in the same book "I" and an associate use a blowtorch on the
feet of a minor witness to make him talk. When he had told the lit–
tle he knew, my associate and partner "shoved the flame of the blow–
lamp in Louis' (the witness') face."
These books,
it
must be repeated, are enormously popular.
They must represent fulfillments of deeply felt but furtive wishes.
But the thought of gratifying such reprehensible wishes must also
arouse a great deal of guilt. During the heyday of Victorian morality,
the prostitutes who gratified (true,
in
more concrete fashion) the
reprehensible wishes of respectable gentlemen, were accused by the
respectable gentlemen of being the source of their sin. The psycho-
