An altogether nasty thought about modern life occurred to me while sitting here in the garden of the Pierpont Morgan Library:
Not only is modern life generally characterized by the advent of dreadful and altogether nasty new things; they always seem to follow the disappearance of truly wonderful classic things.
Consider literature, as one is inclined to do here in this repository of some of the greatest books in all history. Literature is having foisted upon it a truly dreadful and nasty new thing: confessional non-fiction — books devoted solely to the revelation of horrid personal matters.
A particularly egregious example of this was the recent “The Kiss,” a supposedly factual account of not terribly successful novelist Kathryn Harrison’s steamy affair with her own father.
Harrison is not a particularly good writer — “(he) pushes his tongue deep into my mouth: wet, insistent.” But she finally gets her spot on the best-seller shelf because all this tongue pushing is between daddy and daughter.
Coming at us in paperback is “My Life in High Heels,” in which actress Loni Anderson reveals all about her dreadful marriage to Burt Reynolds.
Just sold, as yet unwritten and doubtless even yuckier, is a forthcoming confessional by the notorious/martyred Lt. Kelly Flinn. Her becoming America’s first female B-52 bomber pilot was a lastingly insignificant event that went largely unremarked, I think, even by B-52 bomber pilots. But because she admittedly crawled between the sheets with the bounder husband of an enlisted woman, and indulged as well in some sweaty stuff with an enlisted man, her printed words now supposedly command our attention.
It’s not that I abhor amour — or even hot panting sex — in literature. I’m as fond of Henry Miller as I am of Lawrence Durrell, or even Edith Wharton.
But the proper place for sin, don’t you think, is in a novel — or better, the sinner’s diary or journal, which is the truly wonderful classic and great thing whose disappearance I observed earlier.
Diaries are vanishing, aren’t they? In fact, they seem to have become museum pieces. Hence a marvelous exhibition here at the Morgan Library this summer called “Private Histories: Four Centuries of Journal Keeping.”
Diaries have numerous advantages over the contemporary confessional. One is writing only to oneself, so there perforce is candor. As John Steinbeck wrote: “I have tried to keep diaries before, but it didn’t work out because of the necessity to be honest.”
Also, diaries are almost always published posthumously (Sylvia Plath, probably the most posthumous person in literary history, is represented here). Not only does this delay preclude personal embarrassment and thus further enhance the prospect of candor, but it guarantees that, to gain our attention, the diarist be a remarkable person, have lived through a remarkable circumstance or time, or have had a remarkable way with words.
Thus we have Deborah Sylvester, a weaver from Massachusetts who happened to be on hand for “the shot heard ’round the world,” and wrote:
“The Regulers march out of Bouston and march to Lexington, whare the massaakre first begun, and killd six men, taking over peopel at unwares, but thay mustered and drove them back to Charleston. They killd 41 whites, one black, and sum report thare now 500 of the enemy wounded and slain.”
And there is Sophia Hawthorne, wife of author Nathaniel:
“Oh lovely GOD! I thank thee that I can rush unto my sweet husband with all my many waters & sing & thunder with all my waves in the vast expanse of his comprehensive bosom. How I exult there. How I foam & sparkle in the sun of his love — how I wish for no broader legion, because I have as yet found no limit to this. I myself am spring with all its birds, its rivers, its buds, singing, rushing, blooming in his arms. I feel new as the earth which is just born again. I rejoice that I am, because I am his, wholly, unreservedly his.”
If this does not suffice and you still insist on steamy sheets, put aside Kathryn, Loni and the B-52 babe and pick up “The Diaries of Anais Nin,” a far more literate lady who wrote: “He has scarcely pulled the door after him when Henry and I are tasting each other’s flesh. We fall together into our savage world. He bites. . .”
Whoops. As Harrison et al fail to comprehend, some things aren’t always for publication.
