NOVEL AND AMERICA
II
or our critics' conspiracy of silence in
this
regard. (Or
is
it the
critics'
unawareness
of the fact?) Why, one is driven to
ask,
why
the distortion and why the ignorance? But the critics, after
all,
are children of the same culture as the novelists they
discWII;
and
if we answer one question we will have answered both.
Perhaps the whole odd shape of American fiction arises
simply (as simplifying Europeans are always ready to assure us)
because there is no real sexuality in American life and therefore
there cannot very well be any in American
art.
What we cannot
achieve in our relations with each other it would be vain
to
ask
our writers to portray or even our critics to
miss.
Certainly many
of our novelists have themselves believed, or pretended to believe,
this.
Through
The Scarlet Letter,
there is a constant mournful
undercurrent, a series of asides in which Hawthorne deplores the
sexual diminution of American women. Mark Twain in
1601
somewhat similarly contrasts the vigor of Elizabethan English–
women with their American descendants; contrasting the sexual
utopia of pre-colonial England with a fallen America where the
men copulate "but once in seven yeeres"; and
his
pornographic
sketch, written to amuse
aI
clergyman friend (for men only!),
ends on the comic-pathetic image of an old man's impotent lust
that "would not stand again." Such pseudo-nostalgia cannot be
taken too seriously, however; it may, indeed, be the projection of
mere personal weakness and fantasy. Certainly, outside their
books,
Hawthorne and Twain seem
to
have fled rather
than
sought the imaginary full-breasted, fully sexed woman from
whom American ladies had presumably declined. Both married,
late in life, pale hypochondriac spinsters, intellectual invalids–
as
if
to assert publicly that they sought in marriage not sex but
culture!
Such considerations leave us trapped in the chicken-egg
dilemma. How can one say whether the quality of passion in
American life suffers because of a failure of the writer's imagina-
