Puritanism and flirting: American women rock the world

 

It became a commonplace in the American culture of the 20s to decry “puritanism”.

Twenties culture was heavily influenced by Mencken, who played a role similar to Emerson’s (a writer he despised) in the 1840s and 1850s – he somehow became the impresario of American culture. The anti-puritan note came from Mencken. Puritanism was associated with democracy, socialism, progressivism, and all the things that Mencken found laughable.

In the Smart Set essays of 1913-15, collected by S.T. Joshi, Mencken made his most extensive attack on the products of puritanism. In considering what makes the American different, Mencken bumps into puritanism:

“That further explanation is to be found, I believe, in the continued survival of a dominating taint of Puritanism in the American character—a survival no less real and corrupting because many of its outward evidences have been concealed by time. Since the very dawn of his separate history, the American has been ruled by what may be called a moral conception of life. He has thought of all things as either right or wrong, and of the greater number of them, perhaps, as wrong. He has ever tended, apparently irresistibly, to reduce all questions of politics, of industrial organization, of art, of education, and even of fashion and social etiquette, to questions of ethics. Every one of his great political movements has been a moral movement; in almost every line of his literature there is what Nietzsche used to call moralic acid; he never thinks of great men and common men, of valuable men and useless men, but only of good men and bad men. And to this moral way of thinking he adds a moral way of acting. That is to say, he feels that he is bound to make an active war upon whatever is bad, that his silence is equivalent to his consent, that he will be held personally responsible, by a sharp-eyed, long-nosed God, for all the deviltry that goes on around him. The result, on the one hand, is a ceaseless buzzing and slobbering over moral issues, many of them wholly artificial and ridiculous, and on the other hand, an incessant snouting into private conduct, in the hope of bringing new issues to light. In brief, the result is Puritanism.”

This is both Mencken at his best and Mencken at his worst. We recognize our American cultural politics here – from puritanism to political correctness. But we also notice elements that are treated as given – right and wrong, bad and good – that point to something Mencken always lacked: any sense of dialectic. He could see that the American was, as he put it, a mongrel, but he couldn’t tear himself away from the basics on which he was brought up in urban America: hence, the racism, the mistaken idea that traits are immutable, the misconceived Darwinism.  This, too, is recognizable today. We see it all around us and label it “fascism”, when it precedes fascism in the Mussolini sense and was “American common sense” among the movers, shakers and thinkers, from the halls of Harvard to the pages of the Baltimore Sun.

In 1915, as Mencken was creating his vision of American cultural politics, Freud published an essay, Zeitgemäßes über Krieg und Tod – Contemporary observations about war and death, to give an awkward translation. In this essay about the pleasure principle gone mad, so to speak, there is a throwaway observation around which has grown a little subliterature, It occurs in a passage in which Freud is talking about the way death, the fact of death

Our stance with relation to death has a strong effect on our life. Life is impoverished, it loses interest, when the highest stake in the game of life – life itself – cannot be wagered. It becomes as shallow, as without substance, as an American flirt, with which it is presupposed that nothing will come of it in distinction from a continental love affair, with which both partners must continually remain aware of the serious consequences.”

This is quite the comparison.

I see Mencken as primarily operating as a misogynist. A sexist, by cliché and convention, sees a woman as an object – a misogynist sees a woman as an enemy. The identification of women with puritanism was one of the presupposed syntheses in the modernist struggle against puritanism. In that struggle, I think, there is a long misinterpretation of the uniqueness of American female culture, of what that creole, mongrel crisscrossing was all about. Freud, I think, was also writing here as a misogynist, but with a vision of that crisscross culture that helps us understand both the misogyny and the sexism.

That women’s place in the great national division of emotional labor was to come at the world ethically was a programmatic truth for Mencken; in this, he was reflecting a long and even trans-Atlantic tradition. His own contribution was to given this a name, puritanism, and a carnivalesque role: the joykiller. Freud, though, saw something else – saw the joy in the realm of flirting that posed a true threat to the mandarin thinker, to the thinker’s prestige in general. For without the thinker, what is life worth? By succedaneum (for the thinker is usually elsewhere when the battle is waged), the thinker thinks about life and death issues and thus puts into the balance his own life.

I myself have played the role, here, of seeing through Mencken and Freud; that’s a bit of impudence on my part. I read both Mencken and Freud with pleasure, with my hat off, in admiration. But I think they cast up screens that make it hard to see one of the truly unique contributions of American culture to world culture, which was a very different form of women’s culture that was neither the joykiller nor the serious thinker’s muse. From Daisy Miller to Josephine Baker, there was a different set of co-ordinates, a different orientation that made the “flirt” possible.