American Experiment (395 page)

During the 1970s writers and critics expressed a growing concern over the decline of American literature. Their worry was nothing new—every generation since the nation’s founding had denigrated its current writers as compared with the “greats” of the past. But the 1970s concerns were more than generational. Critics pointed to many a morbid symptom, found many a cause, prescribed many a cure, but it was obvious to all that from the 1960s and 1970s had emerged few novelists who could compare, in universality of appeal over time and space, not only with the likes of Faulkner, Hemingway, and Frost but with black writers like Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, and James Baldwin. Faulkner’s lengthening reputation overshadowed the rising generation of southern writers, even those with the talents of a Eudora Welty or Walker Percy.

Why the alleged decline? A common explanation was the cumulative impact of the cold war and of Vietnam on American culture, especially its chilling influence on dissent. “In the past ten years,” E. L. Doctorow told the graduating Sarah Lawrence class of 1983, “there has been a terrible loss of moral energy in art, in politics, in social expectations.” Americans and Russians, he said, had set up an unholy alliance, each aping the other’s response, creating a logic of Us or Them. “We are in thrall to our own Bomb.”

Others pointed to the impact of the mass media. Saul Bellow complained of “publicity intellectuals,” onetime students of literature, the social sciences, art, or drama who had left college and plunged directly into media jobs. There they had surrendered to the mass public’s demand for sensation, exploiting culture for its commercial return, in effect enriching themselves rather than their culture. “The million-dollar advances and earnings,” wrote Alfred Kazin, “the money-mindedness that leaves its grease stain on every discussion of a ‘popular’ book (and of a markedly
unpopular one)—these, along with the widespread contempt for politics, the breakdown of intellectual authority that gives every sexual and ethnic faction the brief authority of anger, are not just symptoms of some profound cultural malaise—they are the malaise.” Kazin pointed to the book supermarkets that gave earnest young readers no chance to discover the unexpected, the supplements that accepted “cultural comment” only if written in “snappy prose,” the English departments featuring the triumph of deconstruction over some “helpless poem.”

Other critics aimed at a variety of targets. Richard Kostelanetz decried the many blocks that barred the entrance of young writers, women, and other outsiders into the literary world—not only the publishers’ subservience to the mass media but the bias toward established authors and the “big book,” the commercial tie-ins with films, the quick shredding or dumping of books that did not take off, the decline of the creative relationship among editor, publisher, and author, growing oligopoly as conglomerates took over ancient publishing houses, the enhanced power of financial managers, the crucial influence of reviews and full-page advertisements in
The New York Times Book Review.
John W. Aldridge contended that the two currents traditionally feeding the American novel—the impulse toward “beatific transcendence” and “a hardy and altogether disenchanted pragmatism” that checked this impulse—had become disjoined, leaving the novel in a self-destructive process of demythifying itself.

As usual various literary establishments came under fire—the publishing, the academic, the old Wasp, the southern. But now a new establishment had risen that for some was the juiciest target of all—the Jewish. The “New York intellectuals,” as they came to be called, were typically the sons of immigrants from the ghettos of Eastern Europe who had settled in new ghettos in Manhattan and Brooklyn and Newark. With much scrimping and saving their fathers had put them through Columbia or City College or some other city university, only to see their prodigal sons reject parents and synagogue and plunge into radical politics during depression days. They fought together and against one another in Stalinist or Trotskyist causes, were swept into World War II, gained more education perhaps on the GI Bill, then began their climb to success through teaching and writing. To their careers they brought “gutter-worldliness” and “harsh and abrasive skepticism,” in Irving Howe’s words.

To their careers they also brought an instinct for power—or at least a fascination with it—nurtured in their endless ideological and literary struggles. As Marxists of various hues they had railed against upper-class rule, the power elite, the literary and journalistic and academic establishments.

Some saw all human interactions as power relationships—Norman Mailer’s
The Naked and the Dead
presented in 1948 a portrait of military power simplistic and exaggerated to the point of caricature. Treating power as a commodity rather than as a relationship, a physical rather than as a psychological phenomenon, these power-fixated writers rarely grasped the crucial fact that power appeared far more formidable to outsiders looking into power centers than to the wielders of power looking out.

Hence the rising New York intellectuals hardly dreamed that someday they too would be looked on as an establishment, a power elite. But that is just what happened. By the mid-1970s Kostelanetz and others were denouncing the Jewish “commercial establishment,” accusing it of controlling literary careers and access points, of publishing only established and approved authors, of indulging in patronage, mutual back-scratching and the like. Kostelanetz wrote of the power and wealth, the avarice and corruption, of the “New York literary mob.”

As in a novel, literature, fame, publishing, protest, and power, and the men and women who personified them, came together to do battle at a writers’ gathering in the literary capital of the nation.

The Reading Room, the New York Public Library, January 12, 1986.
Literary celebrities from home and abroad, delegates to the 48
^th
Congress of International PEN, waited impatiently to file through airport-type security. Some were left outside and seething as all seats were filled. Inside the hall tempers were even shorter. Norman Mailer, president of American PEN, without consulting his board of directors, had invited Secretary of State George Shultz to address the gathering. Sixty-odd writers had already written Shultz that it was “inappropriate” for him to open the Congress because “your Administration supports governments that silence, imprison, even torture their citizens for their beliefs.” It verged on the scandalous, E. L. Doctorow had written in
The New York Times,
that Mailer and his cronies had put themselves “at the feet of the most ideologically right-wing Administration this country has seen.” An angry Mailer apologized to Shultz for the bad manners of the “catatonic left.” Shultz then surprised the delegates with an illuminating speech.

“Freedom—that is what we are all talking about,” the Secretary of State told the crowd, “and is why we are here. And the writer is at the heart of freedom. And there is no more striking image of freedom than the solitary writer—the individual of imagination, creativity and courage, imposing through language the perceptions and prescriptions that can illuminate and perhaps change the world.” He acknowledged the tension between the
writer and the state. “The state aims to provide social order; and the writer aims to create an imaginative order of his own.” Shultz attacked the idea that “creativity forged in the crucible of totalitarianism is greater than that in politically free but culturally commercialized societies.” He concluded: “Ronald Reagan and I are with you all the way.”

This remark drew groans and catcalls; the following day Günter Grass pounced on him. He did not “feel comfortable traveling from Europe to New York,” said the German novelist, “and the first thing I get is a lecture about freedom and literature” from the Secretary of State. He had seldom met politicians who were able to listen, Grass said. “Even if you say, ‘You are right,’ they say, ‘No, you don’t understand.’ Always
they
understand better and better.” Mailer took for granted the animosity toward Americans. “In the eyes of foreigners, we’re righteous, we’re hypocritical. We’re immensely wealthy, and from a European and third-world point of view, we’re filled with hideous contradictions.” In an interview after the conference, Mailer appeared philosophical about the disputes that had racked the proceedings. “How can you have a literary conference without friendships and feuds being formed out of it?” But his equanimity had been sorely tested by an onslaught from indignant women delegates.

Betty Friedan, Grace Paley, and other feminists had protested the scarcity of women on the panels. Paley from the floor: “Out of 120 panelists, only 16 are women.” Mailer from the chair: “Who’s counting?” Novelist Erica Jong: “Why do you look at us and not see?” Mailer: “Erica Jong is the last woman in the world who can plead invisibility.” Poet Cynthia Macdonald asked, “Won’t we ever do the things to make this boring subject obsolete?” The session ended in a shouting match as women delegates staged a walkout.

Almost concealed in all the brawling was the serious theme of the conference, formally announced as “The Writer’s Imagination and the Imagination of the State.” For a time delegates struggled with this murky topic. “Our contemporary life is marked by the failure of the ruling ideologies, the bankruptcy of all the earthly delights promised or ordained by the state,” Giinter Grass opined. “By now we know full well how exhausted state Communism is in its self-imprisonment, even though its power persists; and capitalism struggles from crisis to crisis in a correspondingly ritualized manner.” Said Israeli novelist Amos Oz, “Our title has about it a ring of romantic anarchism. Indeed, a touch of Manichaeistic kitsch.” He rejected the image of “a saintly lot of writers marching fearlessly to combat” beastly bureaucracies.

As the Congress turned into a “fully clawed political organism,” in
Cynthia Ozick’s report of it, and meeting rooms bristled with manifestos and accusations, the real issue surfaced. It was the millennia-old dilemma of the power of the state versus the freedom of the individual writer. After Saul Bellow spoke eloquently of the American dream of democracy, the irrepressible Grass challenged the American novelist to hear the echo of his words in the South Bronx. He was not ignoring pockets of poverty, Bellow responded, “I was simply saying the philosophers of freedom of the 17
^th
and 18
^th
centuries provided a structure which created a society by and large free.” An overflow audience at a session titled “Censorship in the U.S.A.” was informed that school and library authorities in forty-six of the fifty states had recently tried to censor such works as
The Catcher in the Rye
and Anne Frank’s
Diary.

It soon became evident that the American writers knew much more about their individual liberty than they did about the politics and power of the state. John Updike benignly described his relationship to the state in terms of the vast friendly postal service culminating in his blue mailbox—“I send manuscripts away; I sometimes get praise and money in return,” while some of his listeners reflected that
their
mailboxes more often contained rejection slips than checks. American speakers attacked the state as a monolithic evil, even though many of them had benefited for years from largess in the form of grants, travel money, and Fulbrights, and many also had long and successfully been urging the federal government to exercise its power to end poverty, strengthen civil rights, bolster public education, broaden the Bill of Rights. It was curious: writers who had described social and even political relationships in all their subtlety and variety, who had produced intricate, sensitive tapestries of all manner of human relationships—convoluted alliances, enmities, love affairs, rivalries, jealousies, generosities—could find for the state only the metaphor of the sledgehammer.

It remained for foreign writers, many of whom had in fact suffered at the hands of the sledgehammer state, to remind the Americans of those subtleties and complexities. A PEN committee on writers in prison told the delegates that over 400 of their peers were “detained” or missing in foreign lands. But, as Amos Oz contended, there were degrees of evil and it was the writer’s particular task to make the distinctions. Present at the meeting were representatives from Nicaragua and other countries confronting the painful question that had faced Lincoln during the Civil War— to what extent could certain liberties or rights like habeas corpus be sacrificed for the sake of the victory that would protect all the Bill of Rights freedoms and indeed bring liberty to southern slaves? These delegates
defended retreats and compromises on such liberties for the sake of national survival in the good old American pragmatic spirit, and for the sake of freedom as they defined it.

American writers appeared more distressed than authoritative about such complexities. More often the delegates retreated to the high moral ground, but as a refuge from hard thought rather than a place for deep analysis. Many years earlier Henry James had complained, in
The American Scene,
of the “thinness” of American life. Bellow in 1963 had sensed continually in modern literature not “the absence of a desire to be moral, but rather a pointless, overwhelming, vague, objectless moral fervor.” At the PEN Congress the moral imagination as well as the understanding of many of the American writers appeared thin, vague.

Over the whole proceedings, for the foreigners at least, hovered the ghosts of the American “greats.” Said a Swedish novelist, “You don’t have any truly great writers.” Said a German, “The strongest impact still is Faulkner.” Said Amos Oz, “It’s been a long time since I’ve read an American novel that evoked gutsy passion in me.” Said South African poet Breyten Breytenbach, “There was a time when one sensed through Hemingway and Mailer the American manhood. Then, such authors as James Baldwin and Ralph Ellison explored the black experience, and Bernard Malamud and Saul Bellow gave a clear sense of growing up Jewish in America. But now, except for maybe William Styron, nothing like that is being attempted.” When she drove past mobile homes in upstate New York, said South African novelist Nadine Gordimer, she wondered, “Who are these people?” She did not meet them in American fiction. To many of the writers from abroad, American novels of the past twenty years appeared to be filled with the personal, the trivial, with “tiny fictions” untouched by history and environment.