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Inherent in the title of my talk writer and contemporary society is the idea that things are not as they once were either for the writer or for the society in which he lives. I think this is so and that the change is twofold. First I believe that the attitude of American society toward the writer is changing. Second and partially in consequence I believe that the attitude of the writer towards his society is in process of change. The first question the attitude of society seems to me primarily a sociological matter. The second the attitude of the writer is primarily a literary matter. Literary in quotes but here too I would insist that it has its social aspects. In the 19th century even during the period when the nation's greatest writers were producing their enduring masterpieces. This was not a hospitable place for artists of any kind.
Most of the financially successful writers were women whose names we would not even recognize today. And most of their readers were leisure class women for whom novel reading was a past time to fill otherwise empty hours. A phenomenon which has persisted down into our own time. Serious Writers found themselves regarded when they were regarded all as very odd birds indeed almost everyone in the short was busy making money and it was not until everything came crashing down in the 1930s and the writers had come home broke from self-imposed exile that Americans and particularly their leaders in Washington began to consider that intellectuals and writers might have something of value to contribute to a society in a state of near collapse. If this seemed a temporary phenomenon during the post-war boom and the Eisenhower McCarthy era it is one
that has reappeared in more recent years I'm speaking of the phenomenon of Washington's concern for the writer and the intellectual and turn in to him. And there are substantial reasons for this. Education has become big business in America. A college diploma once a prime symbol of middle or upper class status has become all but a necessity for gainful employment of a worthwhile nature. This is something to begin really with the G.I. Bill and now with the ghostly menace of automation wiping out whole categories of blue collar white collar technical engineering and even middle management jobs is driving people on into graduate level studies. It is quite possible it's true. To get through college and obtain a degree without reading many books and certainly without encountering any living writers but at least there is more of a likelihood of hearing certain
names uttered and occasionally with respect on a college campus than in a pool room or a bar. Inevitably the rising the dictation the level among the American people an irreversible phenomena brings in its wake a rising respect for the products of the mind. This is one substantial reason for the increasing seriousness with which American society regards its writers. There are others like the late Kennedy administration's emphasis on culture. But all including the political are largely related to this. Zoom in the number of secondary school and college students. Thanks to this zoom the profitable text book has taken American book publishing from the modest domain of family business usually old family business at that and let it by the hand to the realm of Wall Street and the big money. Affluent book publishers bidding against
each other for established writers hunting for new writers. Black as well as white but the lesson of James Baldwin's bestseller them is not been lost on them. These two have not been without effect upon the middle and upper class community. The young man who announces to his family that he wishes to become a writer rather than a broker a poet rather than an engineer playwright rather than a salesman is far less likely to be thrown out of the house than he would have been a generation or two ago. He's also less likely to starve if there is still no stable audience eager for his books at five or six dollars a copy. There are magazine editors ready to solicit him for his views on politics movies travel prizefighting baseball and sometimes even to buy his fiction for the mass circulation magazines to have been driven to raise their sights by an ever more sophisticated college educated reading public. We need only like the Saturday Evening Post the
home for so long of sea stories and cowboy stories and the homespun problems of Willy butts and the earthworm tractor corporation. And which now features the work of virtually every serious writer of fiction here and abroad. What is more there's apt to be a refuge for the writer while he's learning his craft in one of those colleges and universities who is in Rome and continues to skyrocket and whose English departments are now willing to give due credit and periodic for publication in periodicals less specialized in the scholarly journals. If he is established if he is an Allison bellow he's apt to find the colleges in the universities bidding against each other for his very presence on their campuses. And this in turn by the simplest of circular processes reinforces the prestige in the community at large of the writer as a professor rather than as a beatnik agitator or exile.
I do not wish to be mistaken as having said that paradise as a rival for the American writer or even that his best work is having any great impact on the millions of ordinary citizens Nothing could be further from the truth. It is still a fact that most Americans read nothing but newspapers in a magazine or two. It's still a fact that only a tiny handful of American creative artists can feed themselves and their families on the proceeds of their work. It is still a fact that no more than three or four of them can be said to have any contact with or influence the American community at large. Nevertheless it would be disingenuous to deny that as I've attempted to indicate the situation is changing. So too is the attitude of the writer to his society. It is hardly necessary to detail to you shifts that have already taken place over the generations and even within the lifespan of any one writer to say nothing of the changes that
in that one writer's feelings about his country in response to the vicissitudes of his life and the alterations in the social landscape about him. But it may be helpful to make some very rough generalisations if America was a bad joke to those writers of the 20s who exiled themselves or mocked at its inanities from their city room sanctuaries and Baltimore in Chicago. It became the subject of a love affair to the writers of the 30s. Sometimes these writers were the very same people. But their attitudes were very different. They discovered that this was a beautiful land that its traditions were those of freedom and rebelliousness and that its people black and white farmer and city worker were noble patient and long suffering and badly exploited by a tiny minority who ruled them. The war brought a tempering of this literary patriotism rather than an intensification of it as writers in uniform discovered that their fellow Americans were often backward bigoted
unlettered uninterested in the defeat of fascism much less in making a revolution particularly from the new generation of novelists came book length expressions of horror and disgust at the image of the America they encountered in the barracks as a horrible revelation. By the 1950s the disenchantment was as complete as it had been 30 years earlier. The peculiarly miserable combination of lazy self-satisfaction and venomous chicanery which marked the Eisenhower McCarthy era drove the American novelist into one of several positions in some cases he utilized the grotesqueries of American life in the fat and fearful 50s as a backdrop for the rest adventures of his hero. In others he turned his back on the whole lovely mess you know lost all of its values and quite simply cut out either spiritually or physically or both. Perhaps at this point I should be a little specific
since I am speaking of the immediate predecessors of the young new writers of the sixties. I remember writing with considerable excitement in a review of Saul Bellow's the adventures of Augie and March that this was a truly groundbreaking book that it would show the way to a whole new generation of writers. I think that time has proved the truth of that those yes tick prediction even though to my mind at least none of those who have since deserted the more formally structured novel for the looser arrest mode have done so with anything like the success the bellow achieved in his remarkable mind. As for those who cut out I'm thinking of course of the beats is my feeling that while the achievement of Carol wack and the others associated with the movement has been of slight importance in fiction if not in poetry the attitude has been of considerable significance. What they did succeed in demonstrating in their life as much as in their work was that it was not necessary to sign up in the establishment.
It was not necessary to join up the corporation. That was not necessary to buy all the camp that passed for serious thinking slop that passed for culture garbage that passed for state with statesmanship. And that even in the absence of radical political movements radical political currents. It was possible to swim against the stream to turn one's back on a swine or society and somehow to survive so far in the sixties as I have not been the first to observe the leading tendency in American fiction has been one which is loosely labeled as a comic novel. As far as I'm concerned it is a misnomer since most of the examples of the genre that I have sampled have not been particularly comical or even funny. I should prefer to call it the wild novel since it is usually characterized by a series of disconnected incidents that could more readily be thought of as wild than as comic
and it is usually peopled by figures who are also usually wild free floating and physically or spiritually grotesque. It seems fairly clear that these novels from Catch 22 to whatever the latest example may be they're not coming up in an endless stream of derive literarily from Belo on the one hand and from the beats on the other and that socially they represent a kind of cultural lag a delayed a delayed reaction to these stupidities and the horrors of the Second World War as well as to the idiocies of the post-war era. What they seem to be saying those that have anything to say at all is that in a ridiculous and hideous world one in which millions of Jews were cold but to be slaughtered thousands of other human beings were blown to pieces or incinerated by hellish new bombs. The United States is as ludicrous as any spot on earth. That in the face of the stupidities inanities and
obscenity of our countrymen. All one can do is be at the moon. This would be all very well if what we're called for in an era of prolonged reaction were a fictional restatement of disaffiliate from a hopelessly rotten and moribund society. But I submit that in the 1960s disaffiliate converted into a nihilist pose by an author's determination to gain popularity by mocking at Everything is no longer appropriate. And that is why despite the temporary bestseller status of some of these books they have no more to tell us about ourselves than do say the French and novels those finicking collections of words about minute alterations and perceptions and states of being which are supposedly more scientific and hence more accurate descriptions of reality than the great fiction of the 19th and 20th
centuries now reasonably dated but the basic truth about our time is not it seems to me that is one of oppressive stagnation so hopeless that it corrodes of nihilism is a civilized and reasonable reaction on the part of a sensitive man. It is rather that this is a time of explosive change without parallel in human history. What we have seen demonstrated in recent years what we are seeing at this very moment is that people will not submit indefinitely to oppression or to stagnation or to the threat of annihilation. There does exist in man no matter how we tend to disbelieve it and periods of reaction in erratic global yearning to be free. And in this time of explosive change revolution after revolution is sweeping the world. Technological revolution social revolution.
It does not follow that there exists a clearly defined task in quotes for the writer much less that such a task should involve the concoction of jolly uplifting fables about a brighter tomorrow. But it does follow. I do believe that much of what is being produced nowadays by American writers who see the world as merely ludicrous meaningless or absurd. And by extension as simply grotesque and comical is in itself of no particular relevance to the rest of us who live in that world and experience it very differently. For you Diana. But the world that has produced the hydrogen bomb has also produced hundreds thousands upon thousands of active protesters and demonstrators against continued testing and against world terror. The bomb still exists. It has been used by America to destroy hundreds of thousands of human
beings. It may yet be used to destroy us all. But testing has there is a detente of sorts and we proceed. All of us except for lunatics who must still be brought under control on the assumption that we are not going to blow each other up and the world that has produced Naziism genocide and the unspeakable Holocaust visited upon European Jewry has also produced Israel a renewed consciousness of their historical identity on the part of the Jews who were not destroyed and a very belated but nonetheless genuine beginning of an attempt to grapple with the terrible complexities of the ethical problems raised by the Holocaust as witness the international controversy aroused by the Eichmann trial and by the deputy and all of their polemical aftermaths the
numbness of the 50s has been succeeded by the questing of the sixties. What is more the continuous revolution of the oppressed and the degraded is sweeping every continent without exception driven from Asia. The outpost of Empire still raised the flag only in a few last ditch corners of Africa. Nor have the Russians been immune. Posner East Berlin and Budapest have already warned them of what lies in store if they do not let down the barriers and allow the winds of freedom to blow. As for the Americans we need not peer at Latin America we need not go beyond our own borders to smell the odor of revolution in Montgomery and Greenwood in New York and Washington D.C.. I have no wish to be a Racal or a righteous. I have no wish to prescribe the tone or the temper that any of my fellow writers should adopt.
What I am saying is that as a reader as well as a writer I react with deep suspicion to writing that seems the product of a fashion cashing in on what is said to be the clique inevitably it seems to me. Fashions and writing must lag behind the reality that the reader himself is apprehending. Once again however I must pause in order to make it quite clear that I am not calling for a literature that attempts to compete with a five star final or the 11 o'clock news. What I do seek is a literature that evidences a spirit aware of the life of our time not just of the fashion of our time. A spirit attuned to the temper of our age and not the temper of the day before yesterday which in the temple of this age might as well be that of the pre-Civil War era in point of fact. The writer who was most sharply painfully gloriously aware of what is going on about
him in the world even as he writes all alone may very well be concerning himself with the life of a bygone age or with a fictional examination not of the immediate present which is generally beyond the grasp of the imaginative writer but of the roots of that present of the past from which it sprang. It should not be surprising therefore that some of the most interesting writers in recent years should be those who have proceeded to such an examination unencumbered by any felt necessity to write what would be hailed as chic or modish in the revealing media. The first novel of James Baldwin. And if I may venture the judgment still his best fictional work to date. Go Tell It On The Mountain makes meaningful for us the tortured life of a Harlem boy not simply through the vicissitudes of his own growing up but through an artist's understanding of the lives and the moving forces of those who preceded
him. Those who came up from the south those who molded him and against whom he rebelled. Likewise a younger but remarkably gifted writer Norman Proctor concentrates in his most unusual first novel coat upon a stick. Not on the 12 year old boy whom we may reasonably identify I should think with the author not even the boy's father. A suburban television repairman. Instead he turns his plain powerful prose like a searching beam upon the grandfather. An old Jew who lives alone in a ditch in a detained tenement on New York's Lower East Side. The old man is mean and crabbed. He is a cheat and a liar. He hates his own son for having wandered from the narrow path of the true faith. But he is a figure of great pathless and at moments even of tragic stature as he struggles to cope with the moral demands made upon him by a revolutionary figure who enters his life virtually at its close.
And when we have finished this book written by a man in his very early twenties we sense not only the connection between the generations but the full weight of the tradition that is going to shape the life of the young boy and many others like him long after the story itself is concluded. It is not by accident that I singled out a novel by a negro and won by a Jew. A disproportionate number of the new voices now just beginning to make themselves heard in our country comes from these minorities which is readily understandable. Their people have suffered more they themselves have more to say. And thanks to the factors I have already discussed there is a growing public for their work and in consequence there are publishers and producers ready to back them and bring out their work. As I listen to their voices it seems to me that they are speaking of both past and present of a past filled with Torment and glory of a present at
best troubled and at worst terrifying. It is already apparent that we are going to witness a substantial movement of new negroes liberated from ignorance self underestimation and self depreciation into the fields of poetry drama and fiction. We do not as yet have the full measure however of what these young intellectuals will be able to accomplish. Liberated from the stultification of ghetto education and exposed to these burgeoning universities with their writers and residence and their individual cultural boomlet it's already the eagerness with which their work is awaited is such that a speaking parent if I were a young negro writer making my first submissions to editors and publishers I would be quite wary of those who mistakenly deem it a part of the civil rights crusade. And a good business as well to extend the notion of preferential treatment into the literary or cultural arena.
I was most impressed. I might add reading very recently an interview with Leroy Jones those telling a little while ago in the paper of the source of which I can't even remember. And one moment however the interviewer asked Mr Jones the customary question why do you write. And he answered by saying Do show them that this is not true. Oh I guess you know. Show them. This is one God a bastard can't get. Now ultimately the writer is a writer no matter what else he may be and the staying power of his work will manifest itself in its innate quality and not in such extraneous momentarily modish matters as his religious ancestry or his skin tone.
I said a moment ago that the suffering of the negro and the Jewish minorities has provided the fertile soil from which talent has sprung. It ought to be noted I think that among the more fortunate talents of both groups particularly among the Jewish middle class writers the suffering has often been vicarious experience so to speak at second hand. In such cases one of the triggering emotions may very well be guilt. And this is a phenomenon familiar to anyone who has ever been involved in a war. The civilian feels guilty that he is not in uniform. The home front soldier feels guilty that he's not overseas. The rear echelon soldier feels guilty he's not in combat. The combat soldier feels guilty that he's not been hurt and the wounded soldier feels guilty that he's still alive. I gather that I need hardly labor the point. With regard to those negroes fortunate enough to grow up outside the
deep south of the confines of the Northern ghettos or for those Jews who are fortunate enough to escape the Nazi killers or who lived like American Jewry beyond their grasp and in some instances irony of ironies profited from the war in which others gave their lives to rescue the living remnant from the concentration camps extermination camps. All I need say I think is that being human I too have felt the sting of that guilt and what is more have felt that as a factor in my own writing and I am quite simply sure that what is true of me must be true of others as well. There are of course a multitude of factors that drive men to write. In our society as well as in others. What I'm trying to do here is to isolate out those some of those that operate specifically in our heterogeneous explosively changing culture
as distinct from those that work in a more stable tradition bound society. And as distinct from those presumably operative universally the desire to gain immortality to be popular or notorious to be attractive to women to be rich and so on. If I'm at all correct in the assumption that because of changes in our social structure commanding positions on our literary front are in the process of being taken over by writers of the new generation coming from minority groups hitherto only marginally represented in the constellation dominated by Hemingway's Faulkner's Fitzgeralds Frost's pounds Elliot's Wharton's James's London's cranes Norris's dressers Twains Howell's Dickinson's Melville's Hawthorne's and Thoros white Anglo-Saxon Protestants one and all. If
I'm at all correct in this then it follows that American literature in the years immediately ahead will be the product often of men driven to write by anguish at the fate of their brothers and by guilt that in the solitude of the study they do not always share that fate. Great works have been created and therefore once again can and will be created under the whip of guilt and the scars of anguish and despair. They have been created too with the inspiration of compassion and hope. They've even been created out of hatred. But and this I would insist upon. Not very often. For hatred not rage but hatred is more sterile and nihilism and more soft destructive of the creative impulse. A literature cannot be grounded in hate.
Perhaps politics can but not one that I would care to associate myself with the politics of the recent past was fascism and the politics of the present is grounded in fear. Fear of the unknown fear of the technological revolution. Fear of the social revolution. Fear the racial revolution. Besides literature is not politics nor can it become the willing weapon or easy tool of any politics. If we Americans learned nothing else we should have learned that from the literary history of the 19 30s. That was the decade during which a revolution was often talked about and argued for particularly among literary people but never took place. This however is a decade during which a revolution just as much talked about is taking place in consequence. The young writer of the 60s is going to find it twice as bad as the young writer of the 30s to determine what part of
him is a writer which means just what it always has in terms of lonely that a cation unremitting concentration on work which may seem to have no relation to life and death matters. And what part of him is a politician. Which means nowadays a revolutionist. This is not a determination to be easily or glibly made nor if I am to judge by my own experience. And I am not even an active participant in the Negro revolution to be resolved even over the course of a lifetime. For some of us. In the summer of 1961 I wrote in the introduction to a collection of my essays called radicals in America in our country the Jew has moved from a marginal position to one of central ality in the next generation. It may very well be the negro the tenth American who will come to be regarded by many of his fellow citizens and by many around the world
not necessarily as presidential timber. That old Jewish gag is already much too old even for Irish politicians. But as the most typical American. It is my feeling today that this typicality will come to be true not just for the negro as American but for the negro writer as American writer. Generation after generation of American writers has seen its obligation as one of discovering the past for its people of inventing mythic euro's for a people who started with none who had no history no pantheon of gods and goddesses no fabled Kings a nobleman nor even a common language of its own other than that borrowed from the old empire. The Europeans we may remember were for a long time amused by the ridiculous presumptuousness on the part of the motley semi barbaric Americans in thinking that they could create a culture of their own that would go beyond hog calling and the
manufacture of cuspidors and later afford cars. It was not until our own lifetime that Europe could finally bring itself to concede not only that America was capable of creating a culture in an unhistorical wilderness but that in truth it had already demonstrated in fiction and painting to say nothing of music and architecture that its vitality and originality had outstripped Europe's. There's an interesting parallel here. It seems to me between the case of the American artist as viewed by his European critics and that of the Negro Artist as viewed by his American critics it was granted. In fact it was insisted patronizingly by the white supremacists that the negro all negroes had a sense of rhythm a natural sense of rhythm I think was the way they like to put it and that their contribution to culture was a primitive After all American music known as jazz. The
idea that a negro might prefer the cello to the tenor sax that it might as readily compose a Sonata as a blues song that it might in fact not be musical at all came very hard to the White who cherished his stereotypes. And of course we have still not arrived at the point where the negro gains acceptance not as a Negro Artist but as an artist not as a negro writer but as a writer. We have not arrived there but we are getting there. That is what is new what is contemporary in American life the multiracial society. Coming as a product of the racial revolution its consequences not just for the negro writer but for all American writers are incalculable. One thing I think we can be sure it will mark the end of that sense of powerlessness which is oppressed us since the Nazi death camps and the dropping of the bomb.
As I wrote last year and I think that Mississippi in the summer of 1964 makes it a thousand times more true. Young men and women are demonstrating that they can work civic wonders with their own bodies with the power of their own minds and spirits. They are demonstrating that life is not meaningless or absurd but wonderfully valuable. They are demonstrating this finest and most sacrificial generation of Americans that by believing and willing they can inspire others and so change the world. There is a new source of inspiration not just for Negro writers but for all writers and for the next generation of writers in a multiracial society freed from the wasteful necessity of deciding what it means to be white to be black to be whatever are of struggling for things which will then be taken for granted. There will be as a product of this racial revolution the whole world of stories legends and myths replete with heroes
heroines and great deeds to equal those of any people in the dark bloody and glorious history of mankind from the memory of what is being struggled for now will come a new kind of literature for a newer and we hope a better kind of human being. It is down on the floor if you're the writer the author has implied that the negro in the future will be more typical American then others. And I would like to know what referential see using for this. And the reason I ask that question and a book on America that was written by a number of different authors a British evaluation of the book said that the only writer who tended to capture what America really was was one of the negro writers and I would like to know what reference are you using to say the negro and the future will be
more typical America American than some of the others seem to imply that. I didn't mean necessarily to imply that the nigger would be more typical than a more typical American than any other Americans because it seems to me to be a kind of fruitless discussion. What I meant to imply was that it seemed to me that we were approaching a time when the negro would be taken as a typical American not as a more typical American than others because his comparative business. As I say seems to me to be fruitless and part of my reason for that I tried to explain in the talk that was that the Americans have been characterized in their writing by their writing. And I think to other peoples people who had made a break with the past in one way or another and had fled or been drugged and or been seduced or whatever had been brought to come paid their way cut to come the United
States or come to follow relatives or fled oppression. I mean one of the numbers various numbers of causes that sent people to this country made them cut their ties with the past cut their roots become deracinated and become something new something that they are still trying to define and American is I think as much or more typical of the negro then of any other peoples and this is I think now beginning to become clear as Negro writers and Negro intellectuals generally are groping for a sense of connection with the past connection with Africa a sense of their difference from it considering turning around questions like negative dude and so forth in their minds. This seems to me to run a very interesting parallel with the other American literary endeavors of the last over the generations to attempt to mark out and identity for themselves.
And I think when people come to market identify themselves in a multiracial society we will then have a new kind of person emerge and we are now in a kind of transitional period in which I think the Negro is already being recognized as a typical American voice rather than as some sort of fluky minority element which has its own little culture and surprisingly turns out an occasional writer writes from Berkeley Oakland. It cost a chilly ations here this question. I'm not quite sure how to put it but I wonder about the negro who is not definitely a get a negro or a deep south make grow or negro who is really next to or living in quote unquote the problem. Can she write about the Negro problem with honesty. Not you know being really involved in it you talked about the sort of vicarious guilt this this feeling for the problem but not be in the problem directly. And can
this be a valid expression I'm not quite sure if you if you can you know understand what I mean. But there's the problem of say the middle class Negro who is more or less accepted you know more except in say the Harlem negro or the Tennessee negro or whatever. Can she write about being a Negro in America and get his point across without this white appropriation of the culture and all that sort of thing. My only answer to that could be that it will depend on the talent of the individual person at work. There is the analogy which I attempted to draw the parallel as one of the breaks down of course obviously at many points but in a rough way as that of the middle class Jewish writer today and the young man who wrote the book which I spoke about for a few moments. Mr. NORMAN Proctor I don't think had suffered because of the fact that he grew up as a Jew in the United States and I think he suffered one bit. He probably I don't know him but I imagine he had a comfortable middle class childhood
and fairly so and he went off the usual business of Fulbright and I think he wrote the book in England and the whole bit. What distinguished him from dozens and dozens of other young Jewish middle class writers is that he had talents and he had the kind of sensitivity and insights to make fruitful use of the torment of his grandfather who had really suffered more than his father even because by now the American Jews are two generations removed from that for their own good fortune historical accident and so forth. Two generations removed or an ocean removed from the kind of hideousness that was visited upon the Jews of Europe just kind of correct. Well I I think the Negro is Mark typical sorry. Put my foot in hot water but I think that one of the characteristics of what the professors call a subculture is that the Negro has preserved many
elements of American culture that the white majority has thrown away. One of the secrets of understanding the Negro community in which you live is that a vast majority of them are comparatively sane Southerners. You know all Southerners pretty hard to take unless he has a dark skin. But the thing that the South has done and that the Negro has done especially is to hold fast to certain one thousandth century values of American culture which the white civilization has thrown away. And this is one reason for his militancy at the present time. AW And I think that there is a creative tension here I'm making a little speech rather than asking a question. But I think it's important and I would like to hear some discussion of this problem because in the contemporary negro writer there are
several tendencies pulling in opposite directions which presumably would create either destruction of the person as a creative personality or great creative tension and great fruitfulness. And they are this typical American ness then the ordination of the writer generally then the adoption of race. It's a facet of this alienation that is you know it would have been very convenient to Botha Lera had been a negro. Unfortunately he wasn't. And then the issue of Negritude the recovery of the past. Now the creative solution it seems to me is where all three of these horses are driven like Ben-Hur side by side. But I think that we make a great mistake if we think of the negro as being cut off from the past. He has carried over into the present. I
think many more valuable elements of the American past than any other group. After all he is one of the first families of Virginia to say in response to Mr. Rexroth that I am inclined to agree with what he says about the negro as Southerner but I would take exception to. If this were carried over to characterize say the teenage kids who had been rioting in Jersey City in Bedford-Stuyvesant Brooklyn and Harlem Rochester and so forth there is there a sense of. Not only loss of values but absence of values absence of any sense of the past or tradition of any anything worthwhile. The desperate kind of emptiness that is obviously surging through these kids that they're feeling that the kind of values that their parents and grandparents had held fast to as Mr. Rexford says I had brought with them when they came from the
south are now meaningless to them. All that is the the. The values of the establishment are ludicrous to them the values of their parents are meaningless to them. No one is offering them anything worthwhile the so called leadership militant you know civil rights revolutionary leadership seems to them and a bunch of squares. And this is the. A terrifying thing that's why I wouldn't want to generalize about about all Negros being traditionalist or something. My name is Luis alimony. JANE BOWEN asked the question why should I become part of a burning house. And the question I have as an aspiring writer is why should I stick around in this crazy culture. Why not go to a go to Italy for example where my forebears came from the sea and where where the values make more sense to me. Why should I try and change this crazy society want to leave it.
And also as a writer as a writer. The question then becomes perhaps like Baldwin or Hemingway the rest of them. If I get out of this crazy culture perhaps I can see it but that's a kind of a kind of rhetorical question that I don't you know I don't know that he really seriously will want some sort of a retort. Well I've stated as my tentative kind of thinking but really the question I'm asking you as a writer and all the writers here is see if I stick around here there is that creative tension. I see that my values are different and the values of a lot of people around me you see. And so this this makes me feel lonely for example and trying to express it. Whereas perhaps if I went to another culture. You see where my feel more comfortable. There won't be the urge to write or to express myself. What you're expressing is a
typically American literary concern if I may say so and I don't I can't think of any writer offhand who has not felt this at one time or another who hasn't picked up and packed up and gone off. Baldwin has and Mr. Rexroth has and I have and you know I can think of has been people I mentioned Saul Bellow or the younger people like Norman from up there. There are now things available that can get them out of the United States when they get up here after a while. But then when they come back they don't take up Better citizenship as they used to back before World War 1 or after World War 1 and they come back because there is more cooking here and marks bloating here and this because this is the center of everything that's going on everyplace else what's happening in northern Italy in Milan and so for there's a pale shadow or even a Liverpool a pale shadow of what's happening here and this is the center. This is where everything is cooking so people get out and they come back clean and draw a deep breath and go away to think about what they've been living through or watching and they come back again I think this is true of what the color of the
writer is or is national background or anything else that's seems to be a fairly constant phenomenon among American writers. And there is one just simply improvise a solutions from time to time to get away for six months or a year or whatever or long enough to write something that will get out of your system the things that you feel about your country you people kind of culture that you know better than any other. And therefore I want you to be writing about it and then maybe come back again. And this has been the pattern that almost been followed by almost everybody I can think of very few that haven't left the United States and haven't forsaken their roots even Faulkner used to go to New York. Julian Lawson I'd like to know what you think the negro writer should write about. I gathered from your remark that you had an impression that he should
express something of the experience of the ghetto life whereas the young lady in the front raised the question about the negro writer who is not a product of the ghetto and asked if he could write about the ghetto life. It seems to me that the negro writer should have a more fundamental role as a writer. Who should take on a question of basic fundamental things that any human being should encounter and that his subject matter should perhaps willy nilly concern negroes but should aim for the presentation of a wider experience do you think that's true. I certainly do. I think that a writer should and I'm not going to say will focus on forcing design to be a tool but should write about what he knows and cares about most deeply. As I tried to indicate it all to many writers to my mind seem to be writing what is most momentarily fashionable or motive. Now days it happens to be the adventures of some amoral young man who
is supposedly amusing because of the peculiar adventures he gets into and so forth. I find it just tiresome after a while. The first six or eight of such books and I don't feel any deep motivation on the part of the writer to say something he feels very deeply. He's trying to get a book published that's all. And this would be true whether he's white black or any other color. I care about the people that I write in because they feel deeply impelled to write and if they don't they're negroes who come from a middle class background with a bit more or less not too badly scarred by ghetto life or by life in deep south then they will write about what they care about most deeply and know most profoundly if they're serious and worthwhile people. And I wouldn't attempt to predict or to prescribe to them what it is that they ought to be writing about to find out themselves as I say there's always going to be a tension between what I call literature and politics. You know should I be involved in what other people my own people are are doing. To what extent this is something which everyone has resolves in the course of his life struggling all along to the day of his
death I think never comes any final resolution and it's great. My name is Sherman. I agree with you wholeheartedly that a writer should write about what he feels and knows best. But do you think honestly that if a Negro writer in this country today wrote about something other than the negro that he would be accepted. That's a very hypothetical question on the other hand I think of a play like Raisin In The Sun which did not strike me as being particular about negroes I just happened to have me go actors and I thought it was a Jewish play basically and I said. And Lorraine Hansberry was very well accepted. I wish I was accepted as the right answer. That I think is the simplest answer that I can get it was just happenstance that this was
you know that the people playing the role on stage were niggas that's I'd seen similar things. And Second Avenue in New York and as I say it's the mom of the business about the mom and the play with the children is as a theme that is appeared in Jewish fiction over the generations and Italian fiction for very good reason and for a very good reason the negroes too but I didn't feel that it was specifically negro and I think it was just accidental. And when she was very well played was a great hit among whites and it does miss the slot I was using so long that the negro should not write as a Negro but as a writer as a creative person. OK. Now do you feel that now or in the future you know there will be any entity in a black person that is writing that we can called Negritude or Pan-Africanism. Do I feel that there is an entity which would be identifiable as such I mean some special
quality. Yes. Well here again I I would turn to the parallel of the Jews and I'm speaking as a Jew it's a myth. So it's fairly easy for me although I don't have very much about Judaism but still I'm a Jew. I think of the relationship of the Jews with the nationalist movement over the generations starting the 19th century within our hearts on the rise of Zionism and Zionism was both attractive and repellent to Jews for well from the 1880s and 90s in Russia and Poland down through 1800. Forty three and four when the question became academic was just a question of saving lives and getting people to the only place that little hunk of sand where they could go where you want to put it and raise up a flag then have an army and bugles and all of the rest of that jazz because no one else would take these people in ited States Britain and all the other so-called democracies are willing to let these people go down the drain.
So the whole question then shifted its ground and the attitude of Jews who had been anti Zionist was one I mean they were Jews are anti-Zionist to gave their lives fighting the British blockade or whatever they get the Jews out of Europe into this land. Whether or not it was their ancient holy land or was just a hunk of sand that was that would hold them where they could establish some sort of an outpost and survive for a while was academic. Now the question of Zionism shifts again you see and receded to the point where the United States its its like the endless effort to teach people Gaelic you know among the Irish root node and the four or five million Jews couldn't care less about the question of Zionism they're not about to emigrate to Tel Aviv. They send tracts you know they send money. And they go on I've had endless seminars and conferences talking about you know all the identity of the Jew and the Zionist and so forth and they get free rides to Israel to discuss it over there. Well I think there is a parallel between that and the whole question of Negritude I
think it's something that is just simply going to be useful and fruitful as a gold and as an irritant to new guys I wouldn't attempt to tell anybody whether he should feel one way or the other about his past or what he's trying to concoct an artificial past for himself as many Jews thought that other Jews were saying well you know looking back to something too I couldn't care one less what happened 2000 years ago in the desert. I care about the culture of Western Europe of which I am a part whereas others said well the day will come when you these people of Western Europe will slit your throats and we're going to start our own society that there was a kind of tension at work there which I think was. Enormously useful and fruitful to the Jewish intellectuals of Western Europe regardless of the basic issue. If there was any single issue which could be so isolated on this whole broad question of nationalism and one's roots and I think that the same as far as I'm concerned would be true if I were a negro writer of this whole question if you do that
one makes one's personal resolution or struggles back and forth with the with the matter. To me some of what I've read seems artificial and fruitless and false. But if it works for people it will work there are many things which are artificial foodless and false which work for writers that believe in all sorts of gods and idols and so forth which help them produce have helped them produce great great works in the past and still do. And so I wouldn't argue against that I would argue for the whole matter as one of the kind of nervous tension a vitality that helps people produce. What I care about. While the towers in Oakland Mr Swan Those two sweaters said that the theme of much of the 960 fiction was fictional. This affiliation from a moribund society which it affected and he later said that this just
affiliation is no longer appropriate. My question is this would be fair and say that there is some correlation between book a work of art containing this disassociation and becoming a commercial success I don't know that I can account for why a book becomes a commercial success I really don't and I don't think the publishers do either. If they did they would only publish books that are commercial successes and they wouldn't publish all of these novels which if you're just talking about fiction and I read all too many of them are you going to get hooked on it and the publishers send them to you and there they are you just go through them that's a tech it's a terrible habit. Most of them are terrible. Most books that get published are simply awful and you wonder why the publisher publishes them.
And you see these fashions coming along you know this happens to be this particular wave of the this particular type of fashion and you and I are talking about only a few have been commercially successful. Why those and not some of the others. I'm not quite sure. I'm not arguing about why a good book doesn't become successful and why another one does this book by this young man for example was read I suppose by I don't know handful of people the United States was very successful in England where it came out first but not here. It's understandable to me why it should not be particularly successful because most people don't want to read about an old man living alone in a tenement that's falling apart in Lower East Side. Why some of the other books have been I couldn't say I wouldn't want to make a simple one to one correspondence between the extent to which a book is as you put it the product of disaffiliate or as I would put it of nihilism and the and its excess or lack of it I would only make one proviso. And then I would just want to make it clear that I'm not talking now of 8.
I think that ought to be a distinction made between a book or between a writer who disassociates himself with the establishment or who asserts his lack of affiliation with the ruling of the master values of our society and a writer who scorns everything who regards everything as square. And that to my mind there was a great good distinction between the latter the nihilism and the man who simply takes what to my mind as an I was an honorable position and as a traditional position of a literary man that he wants no part of the of the show as being run by the people who are running it now and then whether or not this is results in commercial success is a matter it seems to me that is and a matter of chance. It seems to me that the position of America now is analogous to the one in 1930 where you say America was at a
state of near collapse and implicit in your statement is that we now need the negro writer to help us as well as other right as this new grow who does not want any part of the show as it is now. Seems to me a real problem how are you going to get him to want to be a part of the show the mainstream of American literature where he was denied entrance for so long. I understand why he should want to be. I don't want to be a part of the main show Washington you or I don't want to be a part of it. I don't I'm not a Muslim as I understand you. I don't see why a writer should feel that he is a part of the show. He feels I should think a certain sense of kinship with the people in Kosovo and Mississippi or whatever you know with certain people whom he identifies himself with just as the white writer does. But why should he want to feel himself a part of some amorphous unlike the mainstream of American literature or whatever into
volumes you know that it seems to me however follow in the 30s that there was a stifling of the creative impulse may be in the Negro ride so that even now we have writers who had great promise in the 30s who sort of stopped writing because I suppose they felt their work wasn't sufficiently appreciated. I found Now you said this younger generation who has no real sense of values. They're often they also have maybe fewer language arts skills than they had they and the young. Nigro at the city. I think his educational background is perhaps in a worse state than it was when he was in the south and educated by his own educational leaders. Now what I am wondering is how are you going to get him
interested in the creative effort of finding it worthwhile to do anything literary. Well I think you're asking really a social question Aren't you rather than a literary question. And this is a matter it seems to me I'll do I'll have to step out of my role here and just make a political statement and say that X numbers of billions of dollars are simply damn well going to have to be spent by the United States in these areas in order to bring people to a sense of their own worth and dignity and value as human beings and short of that money being spent. The kids are there to do what the left college kids around who want to go in the areas are already demonstrated to things like the Northern student movement that they're willing to take a year or two or more out of their lives and work like hell with kids to bring up their reading skills and to bring them from fourth grade level when they're in eighth grade up to sixth grade level or whatever and maybe open the eyes of one or two and a whole new horizons.
The kids are there it's a matter of providing the. Very simply the money we have that's a very distinguished man of the year a very place to have seen other movies television. Well the director of the theater in Los Angeles is also a playwright. The ranks of are from the I have several questions I suppose I would like to provoke a real discussion. But there are several things that have been said which seem confusing. And it would for clarification purposes I would like to understand what it is that you mean by the word Negro. I am not in any way being clever or smart or facetious.
I think that much of the confusion that leaves us stirred like one of putting a stick in a bucket and spinning it around and then we are stirred and involve momentarily and when the stick is removed we are right back where we started. It's all settled. It comes about because of a misunderstanding of terms. And I think to understand not only the writer in society but since there have been so many references to the negro writer in society and since the distinction has been made about a play that represents life in America as a not just a negro play but a play that might have been about Jewish family or talents or. And to learn why this distinction and what is meant by the Negritude from from the speaker's point of view. I have a few other questions.
Well if I can retreat again to the Jewish business you know the definition of a Jew is one who is considered thought of other people. It seems to me a negro as one who is considered by other people and so considered by himself. And I wouldn't want to go any further than that I don't know how I'm not being a negro how to go any further than that in terms of definition.
Program
The writer in contemporary society
Producing Organization
KPFA (Radio station : Berkeley, Calif.)
Contributing Organization
Pacifica Radio Archives (North Hollywood, California)
AAPB ID
cpb-aacip/28-416sx64f3c
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Description
Description
Talk by Harvey Swados on the role of Black authors in American society given at "The Negro Writer in the United States" conference, sponsored by the University of California Extension school.
Broadcast Date
1967-09-27
Created Date
1964-08-05
Genres
Event Coverage
Topics
Literature
Race and Ethnicity
Subjects
The Negro writer in United States conference -- Asilomar, California -- 1964; University of California, Berkeley. University Extension; African Americans--Civil rights--History
Media type
Sound
Duration
01:05:01
Embed Code
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Credits
Producing Organization: KPFA (Radio station : Berkeley, Calif.)
AAPB Contributor Holdings
Pacifica Radio Archives
Identifier: 2387_D01 (Pacifica Radio Archives)
Format: 1/4 inch audio tape
Pacifica Radio Archives
Identifier: PRA_AAPP_BB0899_The_writer_in_contemporary_society (Filename)
Format: audio/vnd.wave
Generation: Master
Duration: 1:04:55
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Citations
Chicago: “The writer in contemporary society,” 1967-09-27, Pacifica Radio Archives, American Archive of Public Broadcasting (GBH and the Library of Congress), Boston, MA and Washington, DC, accessed March 29, 2024, http://americanarchive.org/catalog/cpb-aacip-28-416sx64f3c.
MLA: “The writer in contemporary society.” 1967-09-27. Pacifica Radio Archives, American Archive of Public Broadcasting (GBH and the Library of Congress), Boston, MA and Washington, DC. Web. March 29, 2024. <http://americanarchive.org/catalog/cpb-aacip-28-416sx64f3c>.
APA: The writer in contemporary society. Boston, MA: Pacifica Radio Archives, American Archive of Public Broadcasting (GBH and the Library of Congress), Boston, MA and Washington, DC. Retrieved from http://americanarchive.org/catalog/cpb-aacip-28-416sx64f3c