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God the Womb. The deity that is substituted for God the Devil, says Fitch, "may be known as God the Womb. In his primary form he is the Womb of Undifferentiated Being . . . Doubtless one can pray to such a God as Jake does in church in The Sun Also Rises, with his pious meditations an inarticulate miscellany of self, girl friend, bullfight, need of money—a kind of visceral communion with reality . . . All the devotees of this cult make free use of the several symbols, and insist finally on an identification with reality in which all distinctions of the self and its standards must vanish. In brief their baptism is not just a lustration, a sprinkling or a spattering. It is a baptism of total immersion."
The high priest of the cult at the moment is neither Ernest Hemingway (who has often risen far above it) nor Norman Mailer. It is really Playwright Tennessee Williams, whose Cat on a Hot Tin Roof has one final merit, "to describe the town dump so that we smell the garbage"—except that "at least over the dump, as not over this rooftop, we can look up and see the stars."
Concludes Fitch: "If we say that sex is the prime symbol of this cult, then we may say that merde is the terminal symbol. Because the outcome is obscenity pure and simple—a mystique of obscenity, to be sure, but an obscenity which has nothing in common with the satirical use of it in a Swift or a Rabelais . . . When it becomes a cult, with a special ethic of honesty, with inspired and intolerant evangelists, with sacred symbols and a sacred literature, with a particular technique of religious exaltation—the mystique de la merde—then we are entitled to call on Shakespeare for a judgment of it. It is King Lear who describes that part of man or of woman which is all the fiends'—'There's hell, there's darkness, there is the sulphurous pit, Burning, scalding, stench, consumption; fie, fie, fie! pah, pah! Give me an ounce of civet, good apothecary, to sweeten my imagination.' "