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You'd Better Come Quietly

Three Sketches, Some Outlines

And Additional Notes

Leonard Feeney, S. J.

Sheed and Ward, 1939

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Clean Literature

The problem is not merely a moral one; it is a psychological and cultural one as well. I should like to offer a few considerations on this subject. There will be no harm in setting them down in thesis form. And some of our young people may be interested in reading them, if only to be provided with topics for discussion.

1. The intellect as such can face any subject without quailing. But none of us is an intellect “as such.” Our intellects are united in substantial union to a most delicately exquisite and tenuous instrument of knowledge which is material, the imagination. This imagination is not discriminative, and when it is assailed with foul and brutal pictures it records them with the fidelity of a camera film, and stores them away for future reference. This imagination can be easily injured. It is the focal point for such disturbances as frights, phobias, nightmares. When it is attacked by a lewd picture or a lewd description in a book, it cannot bear to hold the shock within itself, but quickly diffuses it to the sense appetites and desires, thereby destroying the symphony of purity that should exist in a child of Mary. I am not speaking here of “mortal sin, mortal sin.” That can come only when the spiritual will enters and freely approves the whole performance. I am simply speaking of the disorder, the disgustingness, the sickness of the whole business.

2. What it is needful for us to know can always come to us under the proper auspices. In such cases we learn facts, not merely luxuriate in them; the intellect is directly catered to with no effort to inflame the imagination. A class in moral theology or medicine can be as chaste as a lily garden. But it is simply abysmal ignorance for anyone who pretends to be an educator not to know that in the case of the young the imagination always outspeeds the intellect in performance, and that guarded and graded instruction in the matter of adolescent morals is the only intelligent procedure possible.

This does not mean that one must answer the candid questions of a child untruthfully. This need never be done, and God gives to parents, confessors, teachers and doctors who have the child’s spiritual welfare sincerely at heart, the Grace to create auspices under which legitimate questions can be legitimately answered. But it is extremely important to remember that a child’s problems are those of a child, not of a parent. To force-feed him with sex instruction as to how he shall become a parent before he has well enjoyed the rapturous experience of being a child, is not only a devilish device, not only out of all proportion with the physical capacities of his nature, it is a disastrous spiritual and imaginative experience. That this forced-feeding abounds in our irreligious schools is common knowledge. No wonder our children must pass from the classroom to the psychoanalyst’s clinic in order to arrive safely at the tottering maturity of twenty-one. It is tragically ridiculous to read in the newspaper this very day of a psychoanalyst who killed himself with an icepick. I thought psychoanalysts were people who teach you how to keep from doing such things.

3. There has always seemed to me something weird, something sinister, something really diabolical about going to a drug store to buy a book. And drug stores, as you know, are going in for literature nowadays in a large way. The innocuous pieces can be displayed on the counter, but the “love literature” is kept under cover with the licorice and the laudanum. One asks for it in a sotto voce, sneaks it home without a poison label attached, and then surrenders his precious instruments of thought to the prurient inventions of a writer whose culture would hardly do credit to an object in the zoo.

4. Chastity can be satirized, but this only in the case where it is the only virtue one possesses: the inhibited young girl who is seething with suspicions and jealousies, the refrigerated spinster who gossips about her married neighbors. Chastity is like sunlight; it is meant to light up and embellish the other virtues. No one goes into a room just to see a roomful of sunlight. There must be pretty pictures, agreeable furniture and objects of art. But if there is no sunlight, all the other beauties are lost in a murky haze. And if, in addition, the room is pervaded with coatings of dust and an ill smell, the relish vanishes even from Rembrandt, Michelangelo and Chippendale. Chastity makes the other virtues sparkle, makes them gay. But there must be other virtues. Chastity shining on a vice makes it cruel and cold: a chaste liar, a chaste thief.

5. The edge is positively taken off humor when it is made impure, and that I defy anyone to deny. There is a distinct and appreciable difference between the sound-quality in a laugh that greets an unwholesome and a wholesome funny story. The former is coarse and visceral. The latter is light, airy, in the lungs.

6. It takes no talent to write an unclean story.

7. One should meet a book as one meets a friend. Imagine being invited to meet a friend of whom it is recommended: “Oh, do come to dinner and meet Mr. Pigface. You will find him delightfully frank, brutal and realistic, and he will share with you a rehearsal of all his lewdness, and will now and then give you a companionable kick in the shins.”