Lovable Bums & Jolly Slashers

What's wrong with contemporary U.S. writing? In a witty "minority" report called Man in Modern Fiction (171 pp.; Random House; $3.50), Critic Edmund Fuller, 44, explodes with answers. Fuller, novelist (Brothers Divided, A Star Pointed North) teacher in the English department at Connecticut's Kent School, argues that today's most fashionable writers promote and even glorify an image of man as a depraved, immoral creature. Among those he indicts: Norman Mailer, James Jones, Nelson Algren, Tennessee Williams, Paul Bowles. Other Fuller views:

The present decline of compassion (which also is the decline of tragedy) started with the vogue of the lovable bums, and at first it was no worse than a foolish romanticizing of the scalawag: a beery, brass-rail sentimentality. [Saroyan and Steinbeck] developed the lovable bums into the fallacy of "the beautiful little people" --which always meant the shiftless, the drunk, the amoral and the wards of society. A corollary was implied: if you didn't love these characters, you were a self-righteous bigot. [Then] the lovable bum began to slip away, and in his place emerged the genial rapist, the jolly slasher, the fun-loving dope pusher. Now we see increasingly a technique of simple identification with the degraded which is miscalled compassion. A vast and blurred self-pity is appliqued upon the fictional characters --as if to do this represented compassion in the author. In some cases it is simple transference of the author's own self-pity, as shown by the inability to see or move beyond it in portraying life. In some, the assiduous stockpiling of depravities has an unmistakable element of reveling, of wallowing, of bad-boy's glee. Many of these writers cry, "Look, Ma, I'm blaspheming." [These writers] do not understand all--they devalue all. They do not forgive all. They do not forgive anything. They say there is nothing to forgive. They take murder, rape, perversion and say, belligerently, "What's wrong with it?"

Many of our writers, possibly in response to an inner fear of their own private inability to arouse, depict for us zombie women of the most avid and voracious lubricity. Of these, the prophets and pacemakers are James Jones and Norman Mailer, who dominate or inspire a large contingent. In their books women are not people but are objects. They have no human identity or individuality, no true personality or authentic psychology. These ladies of perpetual heat are no more than literary succubi, erotic hauntings.

Today we have specialists in various aspects of sex as well as those who cull a little from each. There are undressing specialists who give us an accounting of every several button, strap, and bow, layer by layer, garment by garment. James M. Cain established the now large school of clothes-ripping technicians, who have shredded enough lingerie to clothe the poor of the world. James Jones contributed shorts-shucking, which follows halter-dropping in sequence. There are specialists in the texture and surface temperature of the body, ranging in the first case from marble to velvet; in the second from hot to cool, which is partly seasonal; in summer fiction they tend to be cool. There are also body-geography and sexual-topology students--erotic spelunkers of a sort. Since the modified screenplay distantly related to From Here to Eternity, fornication in the surf has become the desideratum, so that the brief tussle in the sea foam has now become a standard image of suggestion, and when the waves keep on breaking in, all by themselves, you know what's happening. Among the orgasm symbols are the high-wind group, the fire group, and the rocket or levitation group. Fireworks are popular and have been deemed sufficiently refined even for Grace Kelly films. Earthmoving was the unique contribution of Ernest Hemingway. Now, in the language of jacket blurbs, how "bold, frank, fearless, honest, realistic, and profound" can you get? Just about every possibility you can think of in sex has been boldly, frankly, and interminably, explored. Many writers are deluded into thinking that a four-letter word vocabulary, carefully detailed scenes of undressing, and clinically direct anatomical descriptions add up to a profound study of the relations between men and women.

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