The charge by assorted gentry that James Webb is not qualified
to serve as a U.S. senator from Virginia because there are
lewdnesses in his published fiction rattles one's faith in
democracy. A few questions need to be examined, beginning with
the primary charge: smutty passages in Webb's fiction.
I have no plans to run for senator from Connecticut, but if I
did I suppose my opponent could make such charges as James Webb
is confronting, citing passages from my 18 novels. Both of us
dwell in high church elevation: Webb, because he wishes a seat in
the Senate; I, because I have been the editor of a conservative
journal of opinion that speaks out on moral questions.
James Webb's principal defense -- made on his behalf by
independent observers -- has been that in his novels he writes
about war and the military. And he saw these at first hand. One
former naval officer wrote in to say: "Anyone who writes sex-free
military fiction either doesn't know what he's talking about or
doesn't have the guts to write the truth. These passages prove
nothing except that Webb writes the military as he knew it, warts
and all. It doesn't mean he approves of all the things he writes
about (whether or not he ever did); he's certainly not the same
guy now that he was when a midshipman or a second
lieutenant."
Another commentator wrote: "I hate to break it to you folks,
but the military -- especially the Marine Corps, the service that
Webb knows best -- is largely composed of macho young men with
foul mouths and an unhealthy obsession with all things sexual.
It's a giant locker room. No one who's been in the naval service
beyond boot camp ... hasn't heard a story or two about a Filipino
stripper dicing a banana with her vagina. ... If I wrote a book
that involved some junior Marine officers deployed to Spain, and
if I were as brutally honest as Webb is, I might write a scene in
which the characters watch a live sex show. More than once.
Because that's what my fellow lieutenants and I did when we were
deployed to Spain. Am I proud of it? Not especially. But it
happened -- and it was by no means unusual."
More generally, the novelist writes to explore the human
being. One did not need to await Freud to discern that the sexual
drive is, if not the dominant impulse in human nature, at least a
subdominant, making way for love, family, political allegiances,
vocations, patriotism and treachery. In order to illustrate these
human drives it is required that authors explore manifestations
of sexual interest, and these involve scenes and thoughts that
inform us, whether we are reading "Romeo and Juliet" or "The
Merchant of Venice."
Now these disclaimers do not excuse violations of taste. But
critics are there as full-time posses to hunt down aggressors in
fiction. In politics, aggression at every conceivable level is
positively workaday. No sex scene begins to rival dank exposes of
human behavior when tempted to debauch not at brothels, but at
polling places.
Sen. George Allen, who has subscribed to the criticism of the
fiction of his opponent, Mr. Webb, has to know these truths. To
begin with, he knows that to have written a sex scene in a piece
of fiction is not as dangerous to a person's character as is
competing for public office. A month ago John Grisham co-hosted,
along with Stephen King, a fund-raiser for Webb in
Charlottesville. Last Friday Grisham said, on the question of
Webb's fiction, "This is a clear sign of a desperate campaign, if
they plow through novels trying to find evidence of
character."
At a practical level, Sen. John McCain, than whom no one is
better qualified to judge war and writers who describe war,
commented about one of Webb's novels: "It captures well the
lingering scars of the war. A novel of revenge and redemption
that tells us much about both where Vietnam is headed and where
it has been."
Some say that the mere publication of smutty, erotic,
realistic passages from Webb's fiction will undermine his claim
to credentials to serve in the Senate. There are many reasons to
vote for the Republican incumbent, but anyone who votes for him
in protest against Webb's fiction needs to -- grow up. |