silly objectively, but which has meaning to the two persons subjectively. This phenomenon is one of the hardest things for any writer to communicate on paper, so Lewis solves the problem by saying descriptively: “Yes, the individual words are probably silly, but the sum is important because it expresses intimacy and love.” This is inexcusable literarily. A writer who wants to be true to reality should undertake here to convey the romantic code of lovers. It would be difficult, but it can be done.
Observe that the two Romantics I have presented, and the in-between case of Thomas Wolfe, all made a big to-do (to put it in Sinclair Lewis’s style) about the issue of love; they focused on it in detail. By contrast, Lewis spends pages describing Martin’s school and Leora’s hospital [he is a medical student and she a nurse]; then, when the Naturalist comes to that which makes life important—their first romance—he gives it a short, semisatirical paragraph. This is not an accident. Not all Naturalists are as inhibited as Lewis, who has a quality here of the repressed Romantic, but the essence of their method is always the same.
From Star Money by Kathleen Winsor
They went into his room and took off their clothes, smiling at each other and without self-consciousness. Johnny was undressed first and he lay down on the bed, his hands behind his head, watching her. Shireen turned, stepped out of her petticoat and faced him. Her eyes had turned dark and her face lapsed into sudden serious intensity, as if she wondered how he would find her; but also as if she had lost Shireen Delaney and came toward him only as a woman, a part of time and every woman who ever lived. She sat beside him on the bed, leaning forward, one hand lifting and moving to touch his hair. He reached out and took hold of her and all at once he grinned.
“Chocolate cake with peppermint frosting—that’s you.” His hands touched her breasts lightly. “You’re all the favors wrapped up in one package.”
Shireen gave a sudden triumphant ringing laugh and he pulled her down against him.
This passage is typical of what is known as “magazine writing.” The words are completely inconsequential; the style, lacking any emotional or intellectual significance, is merely one step above a plain synopsis. The particular quality of magazine writing is that almost anything can be said or can happen.
The author does show—I assume, unintentionally—what love means to the woman in the scene. In a moment of passion, all she is thinking about is how the man will find her when she takes off her clothes; and when he finds her to be a chocolate cake, she gives a triumphant ringing laugh. She passed the test. All that love means to this woman is reassurance to her ego—a self-esteem derived from somebody else’s appreciation.
The description here is totally meaningless and unemotional—but then the author apparently remembers that she is writing a love scene and that something important has to be said. So she slings some tired, superficial generalities: “as if she had lost Shireen Delaney and came toward him only as a woman, a part of time and every woman who ever lived.” I think she was trying to say something like “This is love, which would have the same meaning for every woman in every time.” Then, having done her duty by love’s significance, she goes back to the magazine style: “She sat beside him on the bed, leaning forward, one hand lifting and moving to touch his hair. ”
The dialogue is Naturalism (if one can call it anything at all) in that the author is using what she considers realistic slang. She probably thought: “This is how a real he-man talks.” Of course, nobody talks like that, not even in a bad Hollywood movie. (Even magazine fiction is not that ridiculous.)
If you ever attempt to write without full awareness of what you are saying, why you are saying it, and what you are writing about, this will be the result. This is somebody who is writing in a half-dazed state, not projecting the reality or the emotional or intellectual meaning of her subject matter, but merely slinging words together while drawing on the subconscious residue of her impressions of similar scenes from other stories.
From By Love Possessed by James Gould Cozzens
In recollection’s light, first to be noted was the plain fact that, by standards of what was later learned, the feelings affording a young man his