Love Among the Organization Men
KEENE, FRANCES
Love Among the Organization Men The Decline and Fall of Sex. By Robert Elliot Fitch. Harcourt, Brace. 114 pp. $3.00. Reviewed by Frances Keene Critic, translator; contributor, N. Y. "Times...
...Let's stop inveighing against shows of violence and copulation in the "serious" writers (emotional drives have been a subject of strong fiction from Old Testament times—it didn't take Hemingway to make sex and violence sometimes synonymous) . Let's stop kidding ourselves that adultery will lessen if people love as did Tristan and Iseult (oh, that French horn...
...And he makes canny use of the supposed paradox, Minister Talks on Sex...
...Instead, let's see what time is left the young or middle-aged Organization Man for a gentle, tender and profound human relationship...
...Robert Elliot Fitch, has appealed quite as much as the subject: a statement of surfeit with the titilating goo which often passes, in these United States, for love...
...Let's not just string one bon or fairly bon mot after another—and call it revelation...
...What the Congregational minister is against is clear enough: He speaks out boldly and with repetitious insistence...
...Incidentally, there is no lyric quality to Dr...
...Fitch's writing...
...What is unclear from start to finish is what he is for...
...Let's see what place emotional involvement is permitted in his society-oriented life...
...He is against the dainty prurience of the are-you-lovable, -kissable, -smell-able, -pattable ads, with their insistent play on a puritanical fear of "offending" someone or something by the mere fact that the body exists at all...
...He is against the bland acceptance of adultery as a social phenomenon...
...Fitch has read a random sampling of the Great Books, and an unconscionable amount of Elinor Glyn...
...But what does he suggest as a solution to the American dilemma...
...contributor, N. Y. "Times Book Review," "Saturday Review" Excerpts from this small volume have appeared in periodicals over the past years, and the brisk tone of the author, Dr...
...He is against the top billing, in serious and light fiction alike, that the sexual act gets when contrasted with the small type in which enduring spiritual and physical union is set...
...Let's fight emotional indifference with an exploration of the many-sided nature of love...
...And, of course, he has read Hemingway enough to quote from his least distinguished work, Across the River . . . (This quotation, like the Kinsey inference, is so twisted as to make Hemingway's views seem identical with those of the character quoted...
...What are we to do with the author who rails against adultery, and warns that the excessively early marriages now the fashion have scant emotional depth, when he uses Tristan and Iseult, then Romeo and Juliet as his examples of enduring passion in literature...
...Let's forget Elinor Glyn: Most of today's young people not only don't recall her name (they never knew it) but are in no way influenced by the mores of the Twenties...
...Instead, a kind of out-Heroding Herod use of ad man's jargon makes the lecture "go down easy" for the uncritical reader...
...He quotes from both sources lavishly, though Miss Glyn, by my count, has a slight edge...
...Let's face squarely the cost to him, and his (frequently) working mate, of setting a new, full and demanding love pattern above more readily manageable aims...
...He has also leafed through Kinsey, whose purpose, a statistical record of sexual patterns, he seems to have missed (with wooly logic, he implies that Kinsey's reports of prevalence are tantamount to permission...
...All right, the lyric quality of the writing transforms the situation to a certain extent, but adultery and youthful marriage are the states of the chosen lovers...
...A review of our apparent emotional bankruptcy has long been needed, but, unless we are all convinced the situation is hopeless, Fitch's book is still far from the goal...
...But sloppy thinking is even worse than sloppy use of sources...
...Of course, Fitch is on the right track when he deplores the "deep freeze" in which emotional attachment has been plunged because surface sensuality has taken its place...
...Fitch is agin' the monotonous harping on the sex theme which cinema and ad men have so played up that Average Americans, whoever they are, supposedly can't recognize the huckster product from the real thing...
Vol. 40 • September 1957 • No. 39
