Editor’s note: “The long, shining table: writers in Eastern Europe” by Hortense Calisher appeared in the January issue of The New Criterion. What follows is one of four observations on some of the issues raised in Miss Calisher’s essay.
I happened on Hortense Calisher’s record of a journey just after returning myself from some literary encounters abroad: at the long, shining table of the Rockefeller Foundation’s conference center in Bellagio, Italy. At that table, after three days of impassioned free annunciation and sardonic free denunciation by writers from several countries— everyone there, including a number of escapees from Eastern Europe, was now living in freedom and had either as a birthright or as a friendly new acquisition the talent for yelling whatever came freely to mind—I heard the Canadian critic Ruth Wisse put literature in its place. Literature, she said, cannot be a stand-in for an integrated culture; it cannot make do for what is not there; it cannot fill in the missing parts; it cannot represent powers not its own, no matter how urgently these powers are needed.
If all the philistines in a free country stop for red lights, running them does you no honor—certainly not intellectual honor.
In other words, where writers are taken too seriously, watch out for something rotten, incomplete, unhealthy.
American writers are not taken seriously. We know that. They