The repeal of reticence
BROOKS, DAVID
Books The Brilliance of The Repeal of Reticence By David Brooks During my first week as a reporter at the City News Bureau of Chicago, a teenager committed suicide on the northwest side. It was...
...His smart-set-ism was updated in the 1960s, Gurstein observes, by Susan Sontag...
...They mistook reticence for a cover-up, for hypocrisy, repression, and elitism...
...I had to call the woman who had been widowed hours before and get her to say something on the record...
...Our public sphere, which should have displayed and preserved the grandeur and beauty of our civil ideals and moral excellences, is instead inane and vacuous when it is not utterly mean, ugly or indecent," Gurstein writes...
...The characters she chooses to typify reticence are so reticent that few Americans would want to go live with them...
...It's not often that one stumbles across a book so well researched, so limpid, and so true...
...the aim of sexual intimacy is pleasure...
...Critics were horrified, for example, that newspapers dared to cover something as personal as a wedding ceremony...
...To read again the words in that sentence is to see how radical Gurstein is...
...I know Ms...
...As Gurstein observes, qualities like delicacy and privacy, which had once been regarded as the foundations of civilized life "came to be blamed as the root cause of personal misery, social evil, and impoverished national culture...
...Is that true...
...The Party of Exposure vanquished the Party of Reticence...
...And through these decades, the influence of Nietzsche was everywhere felt and filtered down into the larger culture by the American taste-setter H. L. Mencken...
...Mencken delighted in the sarcastic expose and posed as the tough guy who could confront harsh reality without flinching...
...The first room is an oak-paneled study in which Charles Eliot Norton sits reading Cicero...
...It was my job to call his neighbors and try to get them to tell me why he did it...
...In fact, I'd also want to spend some evenings in the Lauren Bacall room, which is reticent enough for me but also something of a party, and I'm not sure Gurstein would approve...
...Malcolm Cow-ley was speaking for the age when he disdained the "refined and bloodless" tone of genteel literature...
...Journalism has won out, in part because the people we cover invited us into their homes, willing to give up some privacy to enjoy the benefits of publicity...
...it was not something to be displayed before third parties who could not share the unspoken understandings of the two original participants...
...It wasn't only the power of journalism that undermined the reticent sensibility...
...We don't ask whether pornography degrades the public realm in and of itself...
...Henry James described the "sense of excruciation—of pollution" that sweeps over a person who has seen his life described in the public press...
...She doesn't go on to describe how the ethos of exposure has dominated recent presidential politics, but it doesn't take too much imagination to extrapolate: We had a vice president publicizing the most intimate details of his sister's death...
...We ask whether we can link it to discrete individual crimes...
...The next is a nightclub in which Lauren Bacall is smoking sexily...
...Sex educators wanted everyone to talk openly and shamelessly about sex, so as to cast off the repressive aspects of Victorian culture...
...He said journalism was "lower than brothel keeping or liquor selling, for these make no pretense to respectability, while the journalist pretends to be a public guide and teacher...
...It goes on my shelf with a handful of treasured books to be reread and consulted...
...The sacred private realm provided ballast, which gave people the seriousness needed to construct a tasteful and ennobling public square...
...wrote William Bushnell in 1886...
...Gurstein revives lost virtues and reintroduces us to debates most people have forgotten...
...They believed that shamelessness and openness were natural and that if people would simply behave naturally, then something close to utopia would be achieved...
...At least we are now inured to the invasiveness of the media...
...There are decencies that in the name of the general self-respect we must take for granted," James once observed...
...The standards were shifting, and poor Howells got left behind...
...They connected the present to the past and the future...
...He ridiculed polite custom and consigned opposing thinkers to the ash heap as ignorant Comstockians...
...Fine...
...Gurstein is not merely chronicling this culture shift...
...Ward and his fellow reformers were optimists about human nature, about man's ability to purify social life once all the cobwebs of custom were exposed and cleared away...
...But I'm afraid she'll insist that I spend all my time in the Charles Eliot Norton room, which represents the Party of Reticence...
...The final room is a photographer's studio in which Madonna is showing off her genitalia for her pornographic photo album, Sex...
...we had political conventions that were little more than one embarrassing self-revelation after another...
...the mode of erotic engagement is an endless stream of affairs...
...now he was the crude depictor of dirty reality...
...But journalism pulled back IN A STUNNING NEW WORK, ROCHELLE GURSTEIN RECOUNTS THE FATEFUL CULTURAL BATTLE IN WHICH "EXPOSURE" TRIUMPHED ovER privacy...
...He popularized the tone of ironic detachment...
...and the spectacle which he presents, peddling out moral precepts with one hand and scandal, vulgar gossip, and family secrets with the other, is most revolting...
...But the Party of Exposure has taken intimate activities and made them banal or obscene by shoving them into public view...
...The ethos of reticence is now so forgotten, its vocabulary so archaic, was an intimate communication from one soul to another...
...All the sanctities of life are ruthlessly violated by the 'satanic press,' and for what...
...Mencken celebrated the enlightened minority and pioneered a tone of self-satisfied withdrawal from the stupidity of the world...
...There's a kind of rudimentary intellectual honor to which we must, in the interest of civilization, at least pretend...
...James wrote a novel, The Reverberator, about a family destroyed by a manipulative newspaperman...
...Exposure's victory also means that we no longer have a clear notion of what constitutes the public sphere...
...The struggle between exposure and reticence was essentially decided in the 1930s, Gurstein says, so that by the time the "rebels" came along in the 1950s and '60s, they were pushing on an open door...
...Many literate Americans saw journalism as a threat to something that had been considered inviolate—the private realm where people could nourish emotions and sensibilities too delicate to withstand the glare of exposure...
...Whatever must be done secretly and clandestinely will be done improperly and become an evil," wrote sociologist Lester Ward in a remark that captures a central principle of contemporary social reform...
...Or as Rochelle Gurstein puts it more broadly in her stunning book, The Repeal of Reticence (Hill and Wang, 355 pages, $27.50), the whole culture shifted...
...Her weakness is that she makes the American past seem more refined and genteel than it really was...
...Their emphasis would be on the physical, the nitty gritty...
...They provided roles through which people could pursue excellence...
...every curtain and pried into every custom and manner...
...Their operating principle was that light should flood the dark places...
...Greenwich Village intellectuals like Randolph Bourne treated manners and customs as irrational taboos...
...we had Bob Dole, the last reticent politician in America, forced to expose his personal life, to his evident discomfort...
...Gurstein writes: "Lightness is essentially an aesthetic temper where a person tries to lose himself or herself in the immediacy of present experience...
...When Sinclair Lewis won the Nobel prize for literature in 1930, the literary hero had become the opposite of a Jane Austen or a Henry James type...
...Gurstein contends that customs, traditions, and protections offered by the culture of reticence provided weight to the lives of our forefathers...
...Still, given the absolute victory of exposure, perhaps we need a response that is absolutist in favor of reticence...
...One of Gurstein's more interesting themes is how the novelist William Dean Howells represented daring realism for one generation, repressed gentility for the next...
...It is not lustful thoughts which mar human personality, but only a sense of shame," Bourne wrote...
...A few days later, a semi-notable died in a car crash...
...she is lamenting it...
...But when mass journalism was fresh, people were appalled by it...
...The realist novelists aimed to describe in photographic detail the intimate and mundane...
...She is strongest when demonstrating how the exposure of the private has crowded out the more formal virtues and discussions that previously dominated the public sphere...
...As I was reading The Repeal of Reticence, I imagined myself standing in a hallway, looking into three rooms...
...While one is constantly delighted by her clever parallels and her imaginative research, the heartfelt argument, which sweeps one along, is that the abandonment of reticence has been a tragedy...
...These writers saw the metaphysics of earlier fiction as a bunch of mumbo jumbo...
...The Repeal of Reticence clarifies and illuminates a series of cultural trends that had not been so clearly described...
...Now, in conversation and especially in our jurisprudence, we regard the public as the sum of our private longings...
...Gurstein wouldn't want me to go into the Madonna room, which represents the Party of Exposure...
...These three movements all saw privacy as a sham...
...The libera-tionist temper leads to what Milan Kundera called "the unbearable lightness of being...
...The movement in favor of exposure picked up speed and devoured its young...
...Freud came along, with the theory that troubled people should uncover repressed experience and talk it out...
...Most Americans have a vague sense that the public realm is degraded, but don't have the language to describe their anxiety without sounding like Babbitts...
...The best way to get new widows to talk, I was instructed, is to open the interview by saying, "I've been told your husband was a generous man...
...In the sort of provocative parallels that characterize her broad-ranging book, Gurstein shows how sex education and realist novels joined journalism to make up the three prongs of the assault on reticence...
...Grandeur, beauty, civil ideals, and moral excellences are words and phrases that have practically vanished from our lips...
...Ever since these experiences, I've had trouble taking the phrase "journalistic ethics" very seriously...
Vol. 2 • December 1996 • No. 12
