During my first week as a reporter at the City News Bureau of Chicago, a teenager committed suicide on the northwest side. It was my job to call his neighbors and try to get them to tell me why he did it. A few days later, a semi-notable died in a car crash. I had to call the woman who had been widowed hours before and get her to say something on the record. 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. Is that true?” Ever since these experiences, I’ve had trouble taking the phrase “journalistic ethics” very seriously.
At least we are now inured to the invasiveness of the media. But when mass journalism was fresh, people were appalled by it. 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. Critics were horrified, for example, that newspapers dared to cover something as personal as a wedding ceremony.
“All the sanctities of life are ruthlessly violated by the ‘satanic press,’ and for what?” wrote William Bushnell in 1886. 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; 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.”
Henry James described the “sense of excruciation — of pollution” that sweeps over a person who has seen his life described in the public press. ” There are decencies that in the name of the general self-respect we must take for granted,” James once observed. “There’s a kind of rudimentary intellectual honor to which we must, in the interest of civilization, at least pretend.” But journalism pulled back every curtain and pried into every custom and manner. James wrote a novel, The Reverberator, about a family destroyed by a manipulative newspaperman.
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. 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. The Party of Exposure vanquished the Party of Reticence.
The ethos of reticence is now so forgotten, its vocabulary so archaic, that Gurstein has to go to some pains to describe it. Her description is historical. In the 18th century, the Scottish Enlightenment created the image of man civilized by commerce. As a man encountered new and different sorts of people while trading, he would necessarily polish his manners and refine his emotions. But in the 19th century, people concluded that capitalism was not enough to enrich the personality. Quite the contrary: Capitalism could be brutalizing and could encourage conformity. So gradually attention shifted to the private realm, an area withdrawn from the harshness of public life. In their classic 1890 essay, “The Right to Privacy,” Louis Brandeis and Samuel Warren wrote that “the intensity and complexity of life attendant upon advancing civilization have rendered necessary some retreat from the world, and man, under the refining influence of culture, has become more sensitive to publicity, so that solitude and privacy have become essential to the individual.”
Gurstein shows how this reticent sensibility played out in daily life. After John Ruskin described (inaccurately) his first meeting with the American scholar Charles Eliot Norton in his 1888 memoirs, Norton was humiliated even to see himself described in print: “I, the lover of seclusion, am suddenly to be brought before the public under the tremendous light thrown by your affectionate imagination!” Gurstein recounts that correspondents habitually burned treasured letters, even from famous writers, because they believed that a letter was an intimate communication from one soul to another; 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. 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. Sex educators wanted everyone to talk openly and shamelessly about sex, so as to cast off the repressive aspects of Victorian culture. The realist novelists aimed to describe in photographic detail the intimate and mundane. These writers saw the metaphysics of earlier fiction as a bunch of mumbo jumbo. Their emphasis would be on the physical, the nitty gritty.
These three movements all saw privacy as a sham. They mistook reticence for a cover-up, for hypocrisy, repression, and elitism. Their operating principle was that light should flood the dark places. “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. 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. They believed that shamelessness and openness were natural and that if people would simply behave naturally, then something close to utopia would be achieved. 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.”
The movement in favor of exposure picked up speed and devoured its young. 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. The standards were shifting, and poor Howells got left behind.
Freud came along, with the theory that troubled people should uncover repressed experience and talk it out. Greenwich Village intellectuals like Randolph Bourne treated manners and customs as irrational taboos. “It is not lustful thoughts which mar human personality, but only a sense of shame,” Bourne wrote. 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; now he was the crude depictor of dirty reality. Malcolm Cowley was speaking for the age when he disdained the “refined and bloodless” tone of genteel literature. 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. He popularized the tone of ironic detachment. He ridiculed polite custom and consigned opposing thinkers to the ash heap as ignorant Comstockians. Mencken celebrated the enlightened minority and pioneered a tone of self-satisfied withdrawal from the stupidity of the world. His smart-setism was updated in the 1960s, Gurstein observes, by Susan Sontag.
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. 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 had political conventions that were little more than one embarrassing self- revelation after another; we had Bob Dole, the last reticent politician in America, forced to expose his personal life, to his evident discomfort.
Gurstein is not merely chronicling this culture shift; she is lamenting it. 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.
“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. To read again the words in that sentence is to see how radical Gurstein is. Grandeur, beauty, civil ideals, and moral excellences are words and phrases that have practically vanished from our lips.
Gurstein contends that customs, traditions, and protections offered by the culture of reticence provided weight to the lives of our forefathers. They connected the present to the past and the future. They provided roles through which people could pursue excellence. The sacred private realm provided ballast, which gave people the seriousness needed to construct a tasteful and ennobling public square.
But the Party of Exposure has taken intimate activities and made them banal or obscene by shoving them into public view. The liberationist temper leads to what Milan Kundera called “the unbearable lightness of being.” Gurstein writes: “Lightness is essentially an aesthetic temper where a person tries to lose himself or herself in the immediacy of present experience; the aim of sexual intimacy is pleasure; the mode of erotic engagement is an endless stream of affairs.”
Exposure’s victory also means that we no longer have a clear notion of what constitutes the public sphere. Now, in conversation and especially in our jurisprudence, we regard the public as the sum of our private longings. We don’t ask whether pornography degrades the public realm in and of itself. We ask whether we can link it to discrete individual crimes. 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.
Gurstein revives lost virtues and reintroduces us to debates most people have forgotten. 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. Her weakness is that she makes the American past seem more refined and genteel than it really was. The characters she chooses to typify reticence are so reticent that few Americans would want to go live with them.
As I was reading The Repeal of Reticence, I imagined myself standing in a hallway, looking into three rooms. The first room is an oak-paneled study in which Charles Eliot Norton sits reading Cicero. The next is a nightclub in which Lauren Bacall is smoking sexily. The final room is a photographer’s studio in which Madonna is showing off her genitalia for her pornographic photo album, Sex. I know Ms. Gurstein wouldn’t want me to go into the Madonna room, which represents the Party of Exposure. Fine. 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. 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.
Still, given the absolute victory of exposure, perhaps we need a response that is absolutist in favor of reticence. The Repeal of Reticence clarifies and illuminates a series of cultural trends that had not been so clearly described. It goes on my shelf with a handful of treasured books to be reread and consulted. It’s not often that one stumbles across a book so well researched, so limpid, and so true.
By David Brooks
