14
PARTISAN REVIEW
a knotty integrity of her own. But too many other Congress speakers
dampened the enthusiasm of their youngish audiences with a
rhetoric as stale as the revolutionary jargon of urban guerrillas.
Only an eloquent keynote speech by Toni Morrison rescued the
eagerly attended opening session, from which a thousand people had
to be turned away. Here at last was a real
writer,
someone with a
finely sensual feeling for words.
The favored rhetoric at the Congress was not really Marxist; it
was a rhetoric of crisis, less historical than hysterical. Yet the
Reagan policies on first amendment rights, on the domestic role of
the CIA and FBI, on the Freedom of Information Act, on Latin
America, on the regulatory agencies, on the environment, on taxes,
on social programs, on affirmative action, on military spending, and
on nuclear weapons lent plausibility to apocalyptic statements that
would have seemed grossly exaggerated a year earlier. The political
energy of the Congress came less from a resurgent left than from a
left up against the wall, angry, frustrated, fighting battles that
seemed won thirty years ago. Yet the gathering also demonstrated
what a large reservoir of impassioned liberal and radical sentiment
survives from the sixties - though, like the Congress itself, it remains
below the threshold of media attention. The stingy press coverage
only proved what Toni Morrison and others had repeatedly
asserted, that as writers the participants were marginal to the life of
the country. "We are toys," said Morrison, "things to be played with
by little kings who love us while we please, dismiss us when we
don't."
The contrast with the sensational coverage of the Brinks holdup
was instructive. Without a trace of political theater, with nothing to
attract the camera eye but words and more words, the Writers
Congress was more Old Left than New, more interested in
mobilizing its participants than in manipulating the media. Yester–
day's radical celebrities like Abbie Hoffman passed through the halls
of the Congress almost unnoticed. Instead speakers strained, some–
times persuasively, to link the worsening lot of writers with social
and economic trends in the nation, especially the concentration of
power in the hands of fewer and fewer large corporations.
The most damning testimony against the publishing industry
came from those inside it, like Faith Sale, an editor at Putnam's,
who eschewed ideological rhetoric but itemized the baleful impact of
conglomerates, of large-scale bookstore chains monopolizing distri–
bution, of huge advances to a few books and bottom-line pressures
