MUCK-RAKING

Sun (Auckland), Volume II, Issue 554, 5 January 1929, Page 14

MUCK-RAKING

Ugly Passion Shown In Crude Sex Novels WOMEN CHIEF OFFENDERS If Charles Lamb came back to London I think he would swell his list of I books that are not books by adding j some of our best-sellers. Myself I shrink from the disparage- i ment of any author’s work (writes j Robert Blatchford in the London “Sunday Graphic”). It does not seem fair; for why should an unfriendly critic be allowed a licence in dealing with a novel which he would be afraid to take in dealing with Pott’s mustard or Walker’s boots and shoes? Still, one may without offence deal i faithfully with certain literary vices and foibles of the day. I am thinking . of a kind of modern realism which is not real. There is tbe Sheik story, with i f sister of the Troglodyte school, in j which the hero is a bully and a brute. I These books are generally lacking in art and humour. A healthy laugh j would shatter them, like a dirtv bubble. They are a mercenary bait for ■ the victims of a sickly form of vice called by the French the folly pas- j sionate. Most of them, I regret to say, are written by women. They j

are unwholesome and contemptible. Sadism, the cult of cruelty and shame, is a dark spot in human nature. It may be and is profitably exploited by authors who are content to sell the offal if they can feel that, like the nobleman in Janius, they lose nothing but their honour. The trade in those wares is as shameful as the trade in dope or indecent pictures. Moral Side of the Channel Another prurient school of literature is degraded by a kind of lubberly eroticism which used to be dismissed with a shrug as French, but is now paraded in more vicious shape on the ; strictly moral side of the Channel. : French authors treat the unsavoury subject with a leer. Some of the great Anatcle France’s tales remind me of the secret whisperings of a dirty-minded schoolboy. But in modern England we take our satyrs and nymphs more seriously. We grovel with a pose. We clothe adultery and voluptuousness in the colours of romance. We parade for the public entertainment the grossest animalism, the most beastly vice. We exhibit our licentiousness and lubricity naked and unashamed. This protest is not prudery; it is good taste and common decency. There is excuse to be made for human weaknesses. There is in most men some taint of the ancestral brute. The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak. There is not one without sin among us; no, not one. But though it is not easy to keep ourselves unspotted from the world, we need not pretend that our sinful spots are stars. Nor need we in portraying human nature in fiction disguise self-love and infidelity and baseness in a glamour of romance. I wish our successful purveyors of literary carrion would

occasionally read the Book of Cam 1 Prayer, and recall the reproof * dressed by Hamlet to his mother Immodest Disclosures I would say to the novelist’* turesque lovers, so wounded aim ** guished in their illicit passion: -if 15 are weary of your wedded lorn *• lady, if you disdain family ties repudiate your debts of honour, with you to South America or' \ * Borneo, and grovel in the Kricnr? | sty; but don't make a song o? 1 please. We have no use for T *• feverish pantings and immodest'?' : closures. You are very decorative doubt, and look down with lofty j?®* upon humdrum virtue, which pavw debts and keeps its faith and ml 155 its sins in modest privacy: but r are not nice to know. Lit the bl«? lover tempt you to his bed; wanton on your cheek; caliyoan, mouse and let him for a pair of re J? kisses —for what is duty that it sb?? stand in the way of grossjwf j indulgence?" When I open a book and find nva* confronted by the messy, miisV "triangle,'’ I think great scorn of tif author's experience and invention. ]! is such a threadbare scandal, such ' i darned and patched impropriaEither the gallant hero conceives purple passion for some other gent;! i man’s wife, or a palpitating, fascia? I ing feminine mystery becomes beau" j fully enamoured of some dark-brotti potential soul-mate whose marriage to a mere woman was not made heaven. And the nauseous pair {jj a-sighing and pining and bubblier until any reader who knows what m love means and has seen the ush flushed face of infidelity puts dot? the silly, sickly, hysterical book i* disgust.