Comstock Lives

I know I’ll have trouble here with the editors of national review, but let me say it my way, and you can retaliate later . . .

“Pious Fudge”: That was Mencken’s description of the mewlings of those who hold to the “theory that the enforcement of chastity by a huge force of spies, stool pigeons, and police would convert the Republic into a nation of moral aesthetes.” If the ideas of these “Puritan mullahs,” as everybody’s favorite curmudgeon put them down in the Smart Set (May, 1919), were “actually sound, then the great artists of the world would come from the ranks of the hermetically repressed, i.e., from the ranks of old maids, male and female. But the truth is, as everyone knows, that the great artists of the world are never Puritans, and seldom even ordinarily respectable. No moral man—that is, moral in the YMCA sense—has ever painted a picture worth looking at, or written a symphony worth hearing, or a book worth reading, and it is highly improbable that the thing has ever been done by a virtuous woman.”

DB

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David Brudnoy

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I know I’ll have trouble here with the editors of national review, but let me say it my way, and you can retaliate later . . .

“Pious Fudge”: That was Mencken’s description of the mewlings of those who hold to the “theory that the enforcement of chastity by a huge force of spies, stool pigeons, and police would convert the Republic into a nation of moral aesthetes.” If the ideas of these “Puritan mullahs,” as everybody’s favorite curmudgeon put them down in the Smart Set (May, 1919), were “actually sound, then the great artists of the world would come from the ranks of the hermetically repressed, i.e., from the ranks of old maids, male and female. But the truth is, as everyone knows, that the great artists of the world are never Puritans, and seldom even ordinarily respectable. No moral man—that is, moral in the YMCA sense—has ever painted a picture worth looking at, or written a symphony worth hearing, or a book worth reading, and it is highly improbable that the thing has ever been done by a virtuous woman.”