The Red-Pulp View

Today's fiction may be corrupting the morals of youth--but not for the reason most people think. It is not the sex, says Novelist J. B. Priestley in the New Statesman and Nation, it's the sadism.

In recent years, says Priestley, both Britain and the U.S. have been deluged with books that "describe, with a gusto missing from the rest of their narratives, scenes that descend to the depths of atrocity. Moreover, they ask not only for our interest, but for our admiration. It is not just the villains who smash noses, gouge eyes, and beat people to a jelly; the heroes do it too, and indeed are handier at it than the villains . . .

"This is not a good dream life to offer adolescent lads . . . The hero is what they would like to be. Outwardly he is everything they are not: tall, broad-shouldered, very strong, very brave, attractive to the girls . . . Nothing new here: boys and youths have been identifying themselves with the Hero for thousands of years . . . But we might see to it that the Hero is not so often kicking people in the stomach and then smashing their faces into red pulp . . . It will be as well if the citizens of tomorrow do not take it for granted that people they dislike should be beaten, pounded, minced. The red-pulp view of life should be discouraged.

"If some of our cleaners-up would stop thinking about sex and take a look at this violent cruel stuff, they might yet do us a service . . . Nine youngsters out of ten will sooner or later discover sex for themselves . . . but this cruel violence is something else. It is by no means an essential part of us. No doubt there is in us the germ of it, a spark of savagery, especially in youth. One of the aims of civilisation is to smother that spark . . . But here in this popular fiction the whole civilised trend is being carefully reversed.

"It is more than a question of manners. There is in much of our early fiction--in Fielding and Smollett, for example--a lot of rough-and-tumble, knockabout brutality, as much a reflection of its time as Hogarth's pictures were. But this new violence, with its sadistic overtones, is quite different. It is not simply coarse, brutal from a want of refinement and nerves, but genuinely corrupt, fundamentally unhealthy and evil. It does not suggest the fairground, the cattle market, the boxing booth, the horseplay of exuberant young males. It smells of concentration camps and the basements of secret police. There are screaming nerves in it. Its father is not an animal maleness, but some sort of diseased manhood, perverted and rotten . . ."

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