THE NATION AND ITS WRITERS

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP90-00552R000605700088-9
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 3
• Document Creation Date: December 22, 2016
• Document Release Date: September 2, 2010
• Sequence Number: 88
• Publication Date: January 1, 1982
• Content Type: OPEN SOURCE

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T THE YALE LITERARY MAGAZINE
Ai~TICLE AP'RE :RED JAJUARY 1982
ON FAGS
The Nation and its Writers
RICHARD BROOKHISER
The American Writers Congress, which met at the Roosevelt Hotel
in New York City a few months ago, was a bit of a bust, to judge from
the coverage. The list of writers who did not show was glittering, and
included Saul Bellow and Isaac Bashevis Singer, America's entire Nobel
Prize contingent. The size of the crowd that gathered-3,000-wrinkled
some noses. "It seems reasonable to assume," conceded Newsweek, "that
the majority of what this congress calls delegates have yet to publish a
book." The Congress's agenda was inchoate. Here, a "Workshop on
Contracts, Taxes and Insurance." There, a panel, "How Can Gay and
Lesbian Writers Get Taken Seriously?" Finally, there was the outright
flakiness: Gloria Steinem being accused, by a member of the audience, of
working for the CIA.
The chief instigator and cheerleader of the Congress was the Nation,
which devoted an entire issue to the affair ("The Writer's State" was the
rather ominous title on the cover). The Nation is one of the oldest mag-
azines in. America; it certainly has a remarkable list of past contributors,
though it has functioned, for many decades now, chiefly as an entrep6t
s
on the borders of the sun-scorched deserts and dengue-ridden swamp
of political radicalism, stocking the wares of First Amendment worshi -
pers, Second Amendment haters, Gloria Steinem fans oblivious of her
CIA potential, anti-anti-Communists, and occasionally just plain Com-
munists. The socialist Michael Manley, for instance, contributed a white-
wash of his friend Fidel Castro to a recent issue. It is a proudly gritty
publication. But what it lacks in glitter, it makes up in sheer aggressive
persistence..
What, according to the Nation, do writers want? First, advice on the
technological and legal ramifications of their craft, and so "The Writer's
State" offers a (non-partisan) catalogue of data banks, videotext, and
other gadgets of the future, along with (very partisan) analysis of local
.E'er\'1 yTTE
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censorship, access to government information, and prior restraint. Joel
Gora, author of the latter piece, takes what may be called the absolutist
position: once it's in print, it's sacred. He is exercised by government
moves against Philip Agee, the renegade CIA agent who now lives
mostly in West Germany, with occasional side-trips to Havana and
Moscow, and whose publications have blown the covers of numerous
agents, in one case with fatal results. Though spooks-turned-authors were
prominently featured at the Congress, Agee prudently declined to appear
in person, phoning in his greetings.
Writers also want more money from Washington. A curious desire,
given the suspicion with which W 'ashington's activities are generally
viewed by Nation contributors. Ronald Sukenick tries to get out of the
dilemma by insisting that "the last thing we want public funding to do is
impose literary standards." What the government should do instead "is
provide the opportunity for writers, editors and critics to argue out those
criteria in a context that will allow some practical consequence."
Sukenick does not specify that public checks should go only to "writers,
editors and critics" he likes, but in the very next article Thomas Ferguson
and Joel Rogers provide a disapproving survey of the kinds of writers to
whom private checks are now going. These writers turn out to be
capitalist types, abominations like Irving Kristol or Yale economics
professor Paul MacAvoy. No one plots the vectors, but together the two
pieces seem to suggest that as public spending pre-empts private spend-
ing, Kristols will (and, in the Nation's opinion, should) give way to
Sukenicks.
There is an opposition in the writer's state, or at least minority fac-
tions. William McPherson, a former editor of the Washington Post Book
World, cousels everyone to ease off on the politicking.
Talk is pleasant, but the real work is done in that lonely place-.
where the mind directs the words to the page, and where-.'.the
mysterious, inscrutable imagination still lives.
McPherson begins his piece with the announcement that "writers are a
notoriously whiny bunch"-a bold man indeed. Barbara Grizzuti Harri-
son, even more boldly, attacks liars and ideologues, including former
"peaceniks" who refused to sign petitions criticizing the conduct of the
victorious North Vietnamese, though she does retrieve herself a bit at
the end by administering a few kidney punches to "neoconservatives."
And Allen Ginsberg contributes a poem which, being incoherent, is at
least inoffensive.
The most startling retrieval, however, comes at the end of the issue,
in the article, "Solidarity-Ever?", whose authors, Margot Cohen and
David Lindorff, hold up as a model for writers' organizations the Amer-
ican Writers Congresses of the thirties. These, of course, were Com-
munist fronts. Cohen and Lindorff do not deny it: "The importance of
CONT~r L '~'
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the Communist Party in the organizing drives among writers in this
period can scarcely be overstated." They do fudge the Party's role in a
later get-together, the infamous 1949 Waldorf conference. Here is the
Nation's account: "In 1949, a group called the National Council of the
Arts, Sciences and Professions, to which many writers belonged, spon-
sored a three-day conference on world peace at the \Valdorf-Astoria
Hotel in New York City." In fact, the Waldorf conference drew a
substantial crowd of writers-including, for instance, Sidney Hook, Max
Eastman, and Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.-to a protest at Freedom House to
oppose the conference itself, a Soviet-run dog and pony show presided
over by the wretched Shostakovich. Cohen and Lindorff slap the Party's
wrist-"the Party manipulated writers'. organizing efforts for its own
ends, often in ways that were harmful to individual writers"-but on
balance, they give it backhanded praise, the way kindergarten teachers
award E's for Effort: "it is not accurate to write off the Party's role as
totally negative."
I do not know what is most savory in their long article, though my
personal favorite is the passage about "individual writers"-as though the
literary mafia of the thirties only occasionally trod on someone's toes, and
did not encourage wholesale intellectual and aesthetic suicide. The back-
stabbing, the party-lining, the sheer prostitution-it is all forgotten. No
mention, in the Nation, of Granville Hicks dismissing the reactionary
Proust: "I feel within myself a definite resistance, a counter-emotion, so
to speak, that makes a unified aesthetic experience impossible." Of Donald
Morrow, stuffing Shakespeare into the corset of the dialectic: "When
all is said of Shakespeare, the fact remains that in expressing [his] class
he belonged with the movement forward." Of Michael Gold, editor of
the New Masses, telling the first Writers Congress in 1935 that writers
should think of themselves as "artists in uniform." Sure enough, David
Lindorff is a member of the Organizing Committee for a National
Writers Union-a resolution in support of which was passed on the last
day at the Roosevelt.
I will be grateful to anyone who refrains from accusing me of Mc-
Carthyism. "The Writer's State"-and the writer's state it envisions-is
by no means a Communist operation. The appeal of the Soviet Union,
for one thing, is quite gone, at least on the surface-with only an occa-
sional Agee here and there. The Nation is simply as left as it is possible
to be and still look yourself in the mirror. This does not enjoin it from
using tactics the Communists once used, especially if, from a Machiavel-
lian perspective, the tactics are good.
Writers will always be a prime target for such manipulation. Writing
is unusual work, and the market for it is capricious. This is an eternal
problem, as insoluble as "Why do husbands watch Bowl Games?" or
"Why does God let puppies die?" There are, in addition, enough tran-
,7 sient problems-data banks? videotexts? libel laws?-to make a Writers
Union seem like a plausible and useful entity. A year from now,-the
freak show at the Roosevelt will have been forgotten, and only a noxious
organization with an innocuous name will remain. In this sense, the
Congress may not have been a complete failure.
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