The Chairman
A Sense of the Present.
by William Phillips.
Chilmark. 241 pp. $5.75.
As a founder of Partisan Review, William Phillips is assured of a place in the literary history of our time. This magazine still maintains its high standard and continues to publish work of great distinction. A Sense of the Present, his book of essays, stories, and reviews, makes one regret that he has published so little. Editing tends to canalize the creativity of editors into their interest in the writers they publish. It may also give to their own work the ail-too impartial character of the editorial chair. Both things have perhaps happened with Mr. Phillips, with the result that he has been too modest in developing his own gifts. His criticism is a bit too much that of a chairman who states the views of others almost too insistently and says too little about his own. However, it is rare to read a writer who not only expresses himself quietly and succinctly but who is polite. And if one gives Mr. Phillips's own views the same attention he gives to others, one is rewarded. For quietly and with assurance he has authority.
His recent essay, “Writing about Sex,” is typical of his way of going about things. In the opening paragraphs, he lays down the lines of debate between those who believe in a “freedom that goes all the way, turning everything on” and those who cling to the idea of “civilization,” by which they mean, among other things, some kind of restraint in what is discussed or described in literature. He then sets going a debate in which George P. Elliott, George Steiner, Susan Son tag, Norman Mailer, Henry Miller have their points of view stated, and D. H. Lawrence, Genet, Burroughs, Frank Kermode, and others are, as it were, called on as witnesses. It is rather like the Trial of Lady Chatterley all over again, and the reader is almost bound to feel that he is being invited to act as juryman. Nevertheless, en route, Mr. Phillips has interesting things to say. He points out that there is a disguised conservatism about both Mr. Elliott's and Mr. Steiner's point of view. Mr. Elliott fears that the whole body politic will be torn down if there is too much discussion of sex in literature, and Mr. Steiner believes that “nothing short of human freedom . . . is at stake when fiction loses its earlier reserve in handling sex and goes in for erotic detail.” Mr. Phillips quite rightly wants to take the debate outside of politics. Mr. Phillips also sees that the breaking down of literary decorum about sex is part of the breakdown of traditional standards altogether. Making allowance for a good many exceptions.
on the whole the traditional idea of sex has been associated with individual fate, that is, with human realization or destruction, through love and passion. And it is with this sexual tradition that both pornography and the new sexuality might be said to have broken, substituting for it a deflated polymorphous idea of sex divorced from love and from the institutionalized relations in which sex had in the past been located.
Mr. Phillips seems to agree with Frank Kermode (and with Harold Rosenberg, who does not, as Mr. Phillips appears to think he does, prescribe the “tradition of the new” as doctor's orders) that a complete break with tradition deprives us of standards whereby we can judge works of art, since it is from tradition that the standards derive. In his role of moderator, Mr. Phillips agrees with Professor Kermode that total novelty means a total break with all standards for judging things, and recommends, reasonably enough, a compromise, “a proper balance of the new and the old, though, admittedly, it is not always easy to keep in mind that one is changing one's tastes in the act of applying them.”
It is tempting here to state my own views about descriptions of sex in literature which “turn everything on,” and as I have never expressed them before, and as Mr. Phillips chairman's manner stimulates one to speak up, I will yield to the temptation.
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I begin by considering it as axiomatic that the use of reporting of any kind of human experience is justifiable so long as it is transformed into literature.
The only thing that ought really to concern us about pornography or predominantly erotic writing is literature and, if so, how good it is as literature.
I think that all the moral issues and issues of politics which bedevil the question can be removed if one considers books of this kind which one likes, and asks oneself how, considering them as literature, one would rate them. To me, good examples are Fanny Hill, Lady Chatterley's Lover, and the novels of Genet. I consider all of these as literature (and I would throw in here the works of Henry Miller), but literature only of the second class. They really belong to that class of literature which deals with fishing, big game hunting, and adventure. In the last analysis all of these have to do with hygiene. Like those books, they only deal with certain aspects of life as it is lived between puberty and old age. We live in multiple worlds and they deal in a world which is only valid if one has a normal temperature and at least standard sexual equipment. Nothing shows this better, and more inadvertently, than Lawrence's portrait of Sir Clifford Chatterley, the impotent husband who is paralyzed from the waist down and goes around in a wheelchair. He is treated with contempt by D. H. Lawrence and his happy pair of lovers, the reason being that Sir Clifford's invalidism invalidates their health. But a moment's thought will show us that Sir Clifford might inhabit worlds of experience far more significant than those of Connie and Mellors. He might be Jesus Christ; in fact I wonder whether somewhere in Lawrence's consciousness Sir Clifford isn't, dimly, Jesus Christ, being spat on and mocked because the crucifixion exhibits his impotence.
Jokes about fishermen's tales are lies, especially when told by Ernest Hemingway. They are lies because although the fish may have weighed as much as the fisherman says, what he is really trying to convey is the sensation of hooking and catching the fish, an experience which can only be communicated by exaggeration, by exciting in the reader feelings of emulation, envy or, at best, a kind of connivance. In the same sense all stories about sex, unless they lead to a completer knowledge of ourselves not as sexual objects but as people who experience sex together with a lot of other things, as part of the suffering of life, the whole human condition, are lies. The reader cannot experience the physical sensations of another person: all he can do is feel inferior in face of them or superior, or admiring, or scoffing, or he may attempt to emulate them. Pornography is the situation in which the reader tries to emulate them by turning to his own body or to someone else with whom he plots to be Lady-Chatterley-and-her-lover. Emulation is the feeling schoolboys get when they read about exploits, and all should agree that to provoke this is the mark of the second-rate in literature. It is the department—for sickness or health—of hygiene. And it is only logical that today it should be “sick” hygiene.
The standard of great literature is comprehension. Comprehension is divine, and reading Dante and Shakespeare when they describe love we do not ask questions about the performance of the author. The standard of second-rate literature is performance. We would be perplexed if we discovered that Hemingway had never caught a fish, and the fact that he made the hero of his first novel impotent cramped his style for the rest of his life. The authority of Lawrence on love is made shaky by our suspicion that his own sexual life was a failure. And we would experience a sense of profound moral shock if we discovered that Henry Miller had never had an orgasm.
There is another important consideration which makes me suspect that perhaps the reason why there is today so much of this kind of no-holds-barred writing is that we have so few writers who are not second rate.
For self-aware people there are possibly two aims in life. One aim is self-realization, to fulfill yourself, to study that as far as possible (and this may be very far out) you are not inhibited in word or deed. You regard the satisfaction of your own impulses as a sacred trust imposed on you by your subconscious mind, your physical body, and by Freud, and you believe that everyone should fulfill himself in the same way. If you are an artist your art then becomes a vehicle of your self fulfillment which you have already achieved, so far as possible, in your life, and it conveys the message of self-fulfillment through uninhibited expression to your readers.
This is what I would call the Gospel of the Sacred Second-Rate. It is the attitude which casts a terrible doubt over nearly all the work of D. H. Lawrence, and which prevents Ernest Hemingway from being a great writer. It is the doctrine which, in the last volume of his great novel, Proust—I would have thought—finally exposed and exploded. Basically it is a doctrine of health, which begins with books for boys who are advised to cultivate healthy minds in healthy bodies and ends with William Burroughs advising them to cultivate unhealthy minds in unhealthy bodies. These opposites meet because what is agreed is that the cultivation of the organism, the total realization of the physical and unconscious self, should be the propaganda of art as it is the purpose of individual life.
The opposite view, of course, is that the work is all that matters and the artist should subdue all aims of self-realization to realization of the work. By the work I don't mean of course just form and technique. I mean realizing in art perceived human experience, and this has very little to do with the need to advertise sex, although experience of sex is, of course, a very important part of this truth. The difficulty about sex as a subject for literature is that it so easily becomes the symbol not of the truth confronted and told but of self-realization. All those witnesses at the Trial of Lady Chatterley were arguing that this novel was moral and “literary” because the author faced the fact that people must be uninhibited about sex—and this is just hygiene again. But art does not realize itself through sex. If it did, there would be no need for art. Having been told what to do by D. H. Lawrence, no more novels need be written.
William Phillips's essays are, as I remarked, a bit chairmanly, and I hope the fact that I have been stimulated by one of them to add my point of view to those he summarizes, is a tribute. There are others which provide occasions where this member of the meeting would like to say a word, if he had not already said too many: about What Happened in the 30's, about Eichmann, about The American Establishment. There are also stories in which Mr. Phillips's wry humor, grasp of characters and ideas, and unexpected gifts for describing the physical appearances of people, make one regret that he did not do more of these, and that they are not developed beyond the point of being highly entertaining anecdotes.
