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357
flattery. The one thing they do not do is take their work seriously, be–
cause literature is not an influence within the area of public considera–
tion and policy. No one feels challenged by it in the way that the
authorities in Russia - so successful
in
crushing their writers - never–
theless do feel challenged. In Europe, writers probably do not expect
to have considerable public influence but they do feel that they are
able to influence individual readers who make up a society in which,
though there is a great difference between the public and the private
spheres of influence, there is not an absolute division.
Yet in the United States power is not an abstraction, nor is it
represented by men who seem made out of some special kind of
material- granite, iron, or teak - left aside by the Deity on the
last day of the Creation, for the purpose of making Russian bureau–
crats. American presidents, senators, and congressmen are human
beings, but in order to attain office they have to act in ways which,
through money, local interests, favor, intrigue, will lead to power.
The higher the office the less room for any interest which is not direct–
ed toward power. The amount of money required, the pressure of
local interest which has to be served, the number of favors which
must be gained, are all greater than in other democracies. This does
not mean that outstanding, disinterested, and highly intelligent men
do not go into politics in America, but it does mean that most of
them have special qualities of drive lacking in other men. They are
neither superhuman hor inhuman, but a special kind of being, like
people who have been multiplied by an unaccountable factor
X,
a
rare variety of the human species, kept in a zoo called Washing–
ton, D.C.
There is a dim, subterranean flirtation between imagination and
power in Washington in which imagination is forced into the role
of the rejected and humiliated (intellect in the form of Harvard
professors who become presidential advisers occasionally attains the
status of high-class prostitute ) . Robert Frost was asked to read a
poem at the inauguration of Presic.:ent Kennedy (the nearest ruler to
the Emperor Augustus - with Robert Lowell for his Catullus) . A
distinguished poet who was made poetry consultant at the Library of
Congress during Eisenhower's presidency told me that he considered
himself a cultural ambassador who, through the mediation of Russian
poets of his acquaintance, would effect a reconciliation between the
