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STEPHEN SPENDER
intelligent, creative people in the United States feel that they are, as
I have pointed out, in their lives transparent to the immensely power–
ful political and economic forces which run the country, the nation
which obliterates the
patria.
To take an example (which, although in
itself not significant, is nevertheless typical), while writing these pages
I
go into the faculty lounge of the university where I have been
teaching, and overhear a conversation between some younger col–
leagues. One remarks that she feels tainted by the corruption revealed
in the Watergate scandal. Another says that he is determined to
try
to get a job which will take him out of this country. He adds that
the corruption of American life is
so
insidious that he feels he cannot
fight it. He would almost prefer to live under a completely repressive
authoritarian system where it would at least be possible to make some
significant protest which would be recognized as objectionable by the
authorities. This remark made me reflect that the speaker could
not know much about totalitarianism. It reminded me though of
something
I
had heard Robert Lowell say at a meeting in New
York, during the era of President Johnson, when he was introducing
the Russian poet Andrei Voznesensky, who was giving a public read–
ing of his poetry, to his audience: "The governments of both the
countries in which we are poets are bad, but sometimes a poet in this
country can almost envy a Russian poet, because in your country the
government takes what poets write and say seriously enough to wish
to suppress them."
With Lowell, as with my young colleague at the university in
the Midwest, one could feel a certain frivolity in his expressed nostal–
gia for outright tyranny. However such remarks should be understood
as attempts to define the exasperated frustration felt by the American
of sensibility, his awareness of the state of the nation in which he
feels terribly implicated, while yet unable to do anything about
it.
The writer feels that the government has involved him in that cor–
ruption which is "America." Yet, while granting him freedom of
expression, it refuses to recognize
his
opposition as a factor to be
taken into consideration. Between the millstones of the public con–
sciousness to which he is so exposed and of
his
own private agony,
he fails to communicate to anyone except those who feel exactly as
he does.
The authorities provide American writers with honors, money,
