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JOHN THOMPSON
itself
(this
is the reason we don't really mind the continual "be..
trayal" behind our backs); and the novel enlarges this group for
us. Also the novel can bring us, sometimes, news that even gossip
cannot bring, things we really do need to know and need to talk
about, too. Maybe gossip (in "mixed company") is freer than ever
today, and certainly the novel is, about things that used to
be
secret.
It was thought that this would be a great blessing.
Surely it would
be
hard to wish this freedom away, to ask for
a return to reticence. Yet in some ways it may only make things
worse. That is, the freedom of subject and language in our talk and
in our writing may have changed our talk, but has it changed the
things that happen? Perhaps it has, somewhat. We can come very
directly now to the center of our troubles, or at least to the center
of other people's, so that their troubles stand for our own; perhaps
this has brought us all to act more openly and more at the center
of troubles. Has this done anything to get rid of the troubles? No,
it hasn't so far. Still, we want to know what people
do;
everybody
does
something,
and we need to know.
One thing novels have always given us that gossip gives less
well to most of us is knowledge of new sorts of trouble, or trouble
that seems a bit new to us, the trouble of the very young. We need
to know this, because their way of life is only the result of ours,
is
ours refined and stripped. But this is hard for us to know because
the very young don't like to tell the truth about it to us, and while
the essential problems of a culture may become more and more
acute, the way they are lived through changes very rapidly with
great acceleration. We can't rely on memories of our own experi–
ence.
Everybody must recall the shocked misadventures of Mary
McCarthy's young heroine of the 'thirties in acquiring her first
"pessary"; and only a couple of years ago, the Radcliffe girl in
Philip Roth's story was troubled enough
by
her guilty possession of
a diaphragm to leave it around for her mother
to
find, thus ending
her affair. The girl in
The Beat of Life,
by Barbara Probst Solo–
mon, as she moves in with her young man upon graduation from
college,
is
chatting with him about the past-Spain, Bunny Berigan,
and
all
that-and says, "I've never seen an old-fashioned contracep–
tive. They must have been dreadful."
