William Marion Reedy said, “In literature just now it is sex o’ clock.”
He was deploring somewhat the insistence upon sex and sex matters that
seems to be fashionable. We had a good talk on that, and, presently,
that outspoken, clear-minded writer, Frank Putnam, joined in. So there
were three editors, neither of whom had puritanical notions, all pretty
much in accord. We came to a rough kind of conclusion that there
was distortion of a kind when matters of sex occupied too prominent
a place in literature. Understand me, no one of us were other than
gross in part ourselves, but we knew that the part that sex played
in our lives was very small as compared with other things. In some
ill-defined way it seemed that in literature it should bear about
the same proportion that it does in actual life. In life, there are
women who sell themselves, men who seduce, women who attract seducers,
and those who get into all kinds of trouble because of sex, and that
being the case, it is folly to hide it, or to pretend that things are
otherwise. A writer should not be mealy mouthed. But when there is an
over insistence upon sexual appetite, we are forced to believe that it
can be explained only by the aberration of a perverted fancy. There is
a happy medium between monsters of virtue all correct, constrained and
charming, and human billy-goats. To be sure there is an impetuosity of
the senses, an upwelling of the blood, but there is something else.
Unfortunately, nationally, we are given to false modesty. Perhaps it
is the revolt against that which has made for this over insistence
on sex in literature. If so, it will eventually prove to have been a
most excellent thing should it succeed in bringing us to our senses.
For, as matters are, and according to the accepted standard of
“respectability,” we would give welcome to neither a Henry Fielding
with his “Tom Jones,” a Smollett, a Swift, a W. L. George, a Lawrence,
a George Moore nor even a Shakespeare with his Sonnets. Much less could
we have a Balzac, a De Maupassant, a Murger or a Moliere. As it is,
we are debarred from much that is well worth while from the pens of
foreign authors, while there is a very active underground trade, as
every man knows, in stuff that is frankly pornographic.