Literature without children

The novel entitled Lolita is “the only immortality you and I may share, my Lolita,” says Humbert Humbert, concluding the novel. Next week I begin teaching it. Even before I begin, I am in despair. Although most of the students are likely at least to purchase the book and haul it to class, the number of those who attempt much more will be vanishingly small. I am under no illusion that reading is anything but a minority pursuit or that a minority of a minority read as if they lives depend upon it. But I am not really talking about reading. I am talking about something that precedes reading—a dim recognition if not respect for the fact that books do not merely furnish a room, but sink piers until they rest on bedrock for the foundations of a civilization.

“Unlike animals,” writes the pseudonymous Asia Times essayist Spengler, “human beings require more than progeny: they require progeny who remember them.” This is the basis of culture: man makes and draws and writes and shapes and builds to “overcome mortality,” creating a “dialogue among generations that links the dead with the yet unborn.” If the young are unwilling even to pick up the artifacts of their culture, or only go through the motions of doing so, they are accepting that they will be defined by the physical limits of their lives, and nothing more. No wonder so many of them will soon begin to poison their bodies with alcohol and drugs, if they have not already done so. Oblivion is the only alternative they can imagine to a life without meaning or transcendence.

But I don’t blame them. As Pierre Ryckmans observes, most people would never read at all if they were not told about it first. I blame those who have told the young about books and reading—their miserable teachers, and many of the writers themselves.

I belong to a generation of critics and professors who have small interest and less understanding of books, except in as far as they can be made to serve as something else—an occasion for a little sex chat, a gavel for bringing to order a meeting of the Central Committee, a level and theodolite for defining the limits of their lives, or a map to where the foundations lie so they can seek to destroy them.

Even worse are the writers themselves. Only recently, after the birth of four children in five-and-a-half years, as I sit exhausted and happy from changing diapers, winding up toys, cooking dinner, pulling pajama tops over fine-haired heads, reading bedtime stories, and picking clothes off the floor and turning off lights, have I begun to appreciate how very little of ordinary life—family life—gets into American writing. Daisy Buchanan’s entire life seems arranged to relieve her of the burdens of motherhood, while Brett Ashley decides courageously that she is “not going to be one of these bitches that ruins children.” In no way does this distinguish her from most women in American fiction. Outside of My Ántonia, I cannot think of a single American novel that celebrates a woman’s sexuality by acknowledging the deepest fulfillment of it—in childbirth. The contrast with the Hebrew bible, in which barrenness is a curse that lifts women to greatness in asking God’s help to overcome it, could not be more striking. Dolores Haze’s is not the only voice missing from the concord of children at play. American literature is a low-fertility-rate literature.

Never before had I been struck by how small a commitment American writers had made to the future—through children. Upon reflection, I wondered how many of them even bothered to raise families of their own. For a representative selection of American writers, I turned to the contents of the Norton Anthology of American Literature, the volume covering 1914–1945. Here are the number of children for each writer in chronological order:

Edgar Lee Masters, 3
Edwin Arlington Robinson, 0
Willa Cather, 0
Gertrude Stein, 0
Robert Frost, 6
Susan Glaspell, 0
Sherwood Anderson, 3
Carl Sandburg, 3
Wallace Stevens, 1
Mina Loy, 3
William Carlos Williams, 3
Ezra Pound, 2
Hilda Doolittle, 1
Marianne Moore, 0
Raymond Chandler, 0
T. S. Eliot, 0
Eugene O’Neill, 3
Claude McKay, 1
Katherine Anne Porter, 0
Zora Neale Hurston, 0
Nella Larsen, 0
Edna St. Vincent Millay, 0
E. E. Cummings, 1
Jean Toomer, 0
F. Scott Fitzgerald, 1
John Dos Passos, 1
William Faulkner, 2
Hart Crane, 0
Ernest Hemingway, 4
Thomas Wolfe, 0
Sterling Brown, 1
Langston Hughes, 0
Kay Boyle, 6
John Steinbeck, 2
Countee Cullen, 0
Richard Wright, 2
Carlos Bulosan, 0

Forty-nine children born of thirty-seven writers—a child-to-writer ratio of 1.32, the fertility rate of a former Soviet Bloc country. By comparison, the total fertility rate in the U.S. in 1945, the last year of before the baby boom, was 2.49.

Why should I be surprised that my students are unable to recognize themselves in the mirror of the literary achievements which compose their American inheritance? The Sound and the Fury—told by an idiot, full of incestuous desire and suicide. The Grapes of Wrath—no future, no past, and too many people without either. An American Tragedy—thwarted desire, murder, or maybe not, prison, execution. Native Son—more murder, more prison. Sister Carrie, Appointment in Samarra—more thwarted desire, more suicide, with a little futility thrown in for good measure. After a while, a young man or woman of decent upbringing and normal impulses would not be crazy to conclude that this is a literature of a people in irreversible decline. That this is not true about the American people, but is true about its literature, says more about our books than our students.