272
JOHN HENRY RALIEGH
to their respective valets. Generally speaking, it has remained for
the twentieth century to "tell all."
I'll leave aside the question whether it would not be in fact better
to leave certain things obscure and accord the dead the privacy that is
usually accorded the living, and go on to say that no other century
has had the passion for the valet's-eye-view as has the twentieth. This
is both good and bad. On its bad side it is merely a passion for gossip
and the salacious detail. Less harmfully, this passion ' for details is
also a manifestation of the general impulse of the "you-are-there"
spirit that likewise permeates the age in all media of communication
from television to wide-screen movies to "The Day That . . ." series
of popular histories. What did Christ have for breakfast on the day
of the Crucifixion, what were the last words of the Captain of the
Titanic, what did Joyce and Nora do on their first evening together?
All these burning issues are an inexhaustible meat supply for this
voracious and bottomless maw, and the practice itself is quite
harm–
less. Aristotle said that man was a knowledge-acquiring animal, and,
literally, anything is relevant.
What is good about the passion for the whole truth, the passion
that produced Ellman's Joyce and Schorer's Lewis,* is that it repre–
sents the culmination of the one positive element in Western culture
of the past century, that is,' a drive toward truth-telling.
If
the
modern world wants to bury itself under platitudes, cliches, lies, false
beliefs, anachronisms, it also has a passion for the truth, at any cost.
There are four things that people have habitually lied about:' war,
money, sex, and themselves. But after Tolstoy and after the literature,
not to mention the experience, of World War I, war will never again
be glorious and purposeful, nor after Marx Will money be so mys–
terious, nor after Freud, not to mention Joyce and Lawrence, will
sex be so hidden. For it was precisely the point of both Marx and
Freud that our "thinking" about money and sex was a tissue of lies
or euphemisms, conscious or unconscious. Likewise Lawrence and Joyce
"suffered" for the truth. The amount of resistance by society to
the truth can be gauged by the difficulties undergone by Marx, Freud,
Joyce, and Lawrence. But
if
war, money, and sex can now
be
talked
about with some degree of honesty, people will still lie about themselves.
And thus the second irony about reading character is that only a
*
SINCLAIR LEWIS: An American Life.
By
Mark Schorer. McGraw-Hill.
$10.00.
