AMERICAN FICTION AND AMERICAN VALUES
689
adolescent and neurotic material never provides the slightest inkling
of all the good and solid American lives being lived all over the nation.
Now, it is just these decent and solid American lives that I wish to
place in question here, so far as the purposes of literature are con–
cerned; and if I were to choose a single book to support my thesis, it
would be a novel like James Gould Cozzens'
Guard of Honor
(which
Aldridge in any case should have included as a war book), a work
"positive" enough in
its
values to win the acclaim of even so staunch
a guardian of the public virtues as Bernard De Voto. Cozzens shows
an amazingly competent grasp of the machinery of fiction, his story
runs ahead smoothly on very little fuel, and
his
characters are recogniz–
ably real Americans that we have all met one time or another in our
lives. But the book will have no permanent place in our literature:
it lacks depth, its characters are the kind of decent and struggling
Americans whose perplexities about life are only practical problems to be
solved, while the ultimate or primitive things, never articulated and
faced, are hardly more than faint shadows in the background.
Sex may be the deepest, it is certainly the most sensational subject
in our novels that has to do with values. In its sexual codes the Amer–
ica of 1950 is certainly a different civilization from the America of
1900. Our novels now deal with sex frankly as a matter of course;
and such frankness is hardly a matter of mere literary convention, but
a part of the changed
mores,
a consequence of the deeper fact that
sexual freedom itself is now taken for granted and therefore cannot
be
for us the
thrill
that it was, in its newness, for the original Lost Gen–
eration of the 'twenties. This may
be
why sex in some quarters has lost
its value, so that we encounter the interesting phenomenon of
nihilism
in
the bedroom:
a novel like
Anna Karenina,
for example, could hardly
be written nowadays; if we were to have a tragedy of sex at all, it could
not
be
in this form, for all the rules of the game have changed. One
profound sign of this devaluation of sex is the figure of the homosexual,
as the sexual grotesque, looming very large
in
our recent literature. But
one need not go to homosexual fiction to discover that the relation
between man and woman does not play the same part in life it once
did:
From Here to Eternity
is in this respect a perfectly indicative book;
if Jones is an adolescent about women, his adolescence is nevertheless
very American, and there is more than private meaning in the fact that
the significant human relations in his novel are between man and man,
those between man and woman being in the long run much less im–
portant for either party concerned. But here again we are grappling with
Proteus when we try to sum up American values, for part of our sexual
