From the WSJ Opinion Archives
TASTE COMMENTARY
Get Them Rewrite
A sad tale of literary figures pronouncing on presidential politics.
American literary figures are speaking out against President Bush's re-election with unusual fervor and unanimity. From our best writers we might expect a high standard of vituperation. We are often disappointed. Listen to what Walt Whitman might have called the hum of multi-valved voices.
Rick Moody (responding, like others below, to a Slate magazine survey): "Under the cynical disguise of evangelical Christian moralizing Bush conducted a fire sale, in which he auctioned off the entire nation to the highest corporate bidder." Amy Tan: "I'm voting for Kerry because I have a brain and so does he." Diane Johnson: "Even the English, our supposed allies, sneer. . . . Our world reputation aside, I find Mr. Bush embarrassing." Jay McInerney (speaking to a French interviewer): "[Bush] grew up in a small town in Texas, a terrible place called Midland, Texas, and he's really kind of a cowboy." E.L. Doctorow (in a speech): "This president does not know what death is. He hasn't the mind for it. . . . You study him, you look into his eyes and know he dissembles an emotion which he does not feel in the depths of his being because he has no capacity for it." Judith Guest: "I'm tired of feeling like an alien in my own country." Russell Banks: "I'll vote for John Kerry. His election won't reverse our nation's rush to establish a fascist plutocracy, it's too late for that."
Yes, a fascist plutocracy. Norman Mailer senses this fascist tendency, too. Writing in the New York Review of Books, he notes: "The sorriest thing to be said about the US, as we sidle up to fascism (which can become our fate if we plunge into a major depression, or suffer a set of dirty-bomb catastrophes), is that we expect disasters. We await them. We have become a guilty nation." And it's not just a general historical tendency; it comes from Mr. Bush, who, Mr. Mailer told New York magazine, "has one of the emptiest faces in America. He looks to have no more depth than spit on a rock."
Jane Smiley, in the New York Times, reached for the Hemingwayesque: "Faulty intelligence. An administration eager to go to war. Volunteer army. Doctrine of pre-emptive attack. Here's how I connect the dots: arrogant fantasy resulting in criminal waste of blood, money and international good will." Nicole Krauss, a novelist of less fame but equally strong opinions, was moved to write elsewhere: "I really think it's not alarmist to say that if Bush is reelected to another four years, it may be the end of life as we know it."
Life as we know it! Other writers are even more nuanced. Nicholson Baker recently published a novel, "Checkpoint," in the form of a dialogue between two men, one of whom wants to assassinate President Bush. "I don't actually think it would be such a hot idea for somebody to assassinate the president," Mr. Baker told Newsweek reassuringly. But he was moved to write the book to protest the Iraq war, as if "mourning the war, the stupidity and the wastefulness of what we did."
Philip Roth, writing in the New York Times Book Review, uses a wisecrack so old that it sounds almost fresh. "Aristophanes, who surely must be God, has given us George W. Bush, a man unfit to run a hardware store let alone a nation like this one." Mr. Roth goes on to say that the president has reaffirmed, for him, the maxim "that makes our lives as Americans as precarious as anyone else's: all the assurances are provisional, even here in a 200-year-old democracy."
How did we get to this point--to such indulgence in smug assumptions, such languid trading in crude stereotypes and awful clichés? In the 19th century, Hawthorne and William Dean Howells devoted themselves to the noble task of writing campaign biographies (of Franklin Pierce and Rutherford B. Hayes). As Evan Cornog notes in "The Power and the Story," Howells's book is charming, sensitive and balanced--though not sufficiently persuasive to give his candidate a majority of the popular vote.
For much of our history, litterateurs held themselves aloof from everyday politics, considering it a grim and grubby business. The novelist of the early 20th century was far more likely to be concerned with reproducing the experience of the common man--or rallying on behalf of Sacco and Vanzetti--than forming committees in support of, say, Warren Harding or James B. Cox. Even F. Scott Fitzgerald's Amory Blaine--the Kerryesque hero of "This Side of Paradise"--was a socialist and revolutionary rather than a Democrat or Republican.
Writers began to embrace electoral politics after World War II, when Henry Wallace and then Adlai Stevenson seemed to capture their affections. But Stevenson lost, and lost. Things accelerated when John F. Kennedy created Camelot in 1961. But even then there were contingencies. Diana Trilling remembered meeting James T. Farrell (author of the great "Studs Lonigan" novels about Chicago) on a train to Washington, looking disheveled and disreputable. He had been invited to a White House dinner by the Kennedys and was carrying a bulging briefcase stuffed with old royalty statements. Farrell believed that his invitation would allow him to settle the matter of some past IRS audits while enjoying the president's hospitality.
In the same administration, William Styron helped the great, if underrated, novelist Richard Yates to get a job as Robert Kennedy's speechwriter. Yates's tryout was to write a speech to be delivered by the attorney general at a private women's college. Yates won the job--according to his biographer, Blake Bailey--by imagining Kennedy as a fictional character, "an attractive young man seductively persuading a group of female admirers to support the cause of civil rights." The Kennedy years were supremely suited to fiction at its most self-regarding.
But the novelists of that generation were not merely anti-Eisenhower or anti-Nixon--they were pro-Kennedy. It is hard to find evidence of a kind of updated New Frontiersmanship among today's engagé writers. What is abundantly present is rigidity, self-satisfaction and pride--qualities with which they lavishly endow President Bush.
They might do well to recall another moment from the life of James Farrell, who had struggled in opposition to everything--a radical socialist anticommunist. In order to stop Henry Wallace in the 1948 election, whom he saw as reactionary, he voted for Norman Thomas for president--and then found himself glad that Truman had won after all. "I felt I had made a big mistake and I thought how wonderful it is to be able to learn by trying, and not to be shot for one's mistakes, not to be imprisoned."
Maybe this year's ferocious anti-Bush sentiments will be a similar sort of learning experience for the literary community. To take one more example: In 1931, Theodore Dreiser tried to assemble a committee to visit Harlan County, Ky., to investigate violations of coalminers' civil rights. He looked at the two hapless novelists who at first were the only ones to volunteer--Lester Cohen and Harold Ornitz--and told them (as biographer Richard Lingeman recounts it) that he wanted to form a committee of "representative Americans" but, having failed, "we are now reduced to writers." Luckily for Mr. Kerry, he has other friends.
Mr. Schulman is a writer in New York.
