The Black Genteel Tradition

Abstract

In 1911 the Harvard philosopher George Santayana published a lecture, “The Genteel Tradition.” His subject was focused specifically on philosophical thinking in America, but the phrase itself, the “Genteel Tradition,” took off and soon came to designate a wider phenomenon, the whole high-culture ethos that one of its gravediggers, Sinclair Lewis, declared in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, for at least half a century had been the persistent enemy and slow poisoner of good writing in America. The Genteel Tradition was the American variant of Victorianism, the style of that period synonymous with sexual repression and moral uplift: a perfect example, the frieze The Triumph of Arts and Letters in the Royal Albert Hall that includes triumphing nude pseudo-Greek figures in heroic poses—but with no genitals. The literature that issued from and contributed to this moralistic matrix is neatly encapsulated in the definition that Oscar Wilde’s Miss Prism gives of the novel: “The good end happily, and the bad unhappily. This is what fiction means.” Malcolm Cowley, in his introduction to After the Genteel Tradition (1937), notes that the editor of one of the nation’s leading journals pulled a war story that had already been accepted for publication because it contained this sentence: “The bullet had left a blue mark over the brown nipple.” Nude statues with no genitals, soldiers with no nipples (to speak of): this was the Genteel Tradition. But the avertedeyes squeamishness extended to much more than body parts. An editor at Scribner’s refused stories that contained “slang, profanity, vulgarity, agnosticism or radicalism.” The grimmer aspects of life—the desperate poverty of immigrants, for instance, or the post-Reconstruction