194
PARTISAN REVIEW
After all, to paraphrase Robert Frost, many people would rather
vote than think.
As delegates, journalists, and assorted celebrities descended
upon the 42nd Street entrance of the New York Public Library that
night, a petition deploring Shultz's presence - and decrying the
McCarran-Walter Act, which permits the State Department to deny
visas to persons deemed ideologically undesirable - circulated and
gathered some sixty-five signatures. Tempers were frayed, moreover,
by the presence of Secret Service men and by the crowded conditions
inside the South Reading Room, where the opening ceremonies took
place; doors were shut in the faces of numerous writers. When it be–
came Shultz's turn to speak, up stood Grace Paley to demand that
the letter of protest be read aloud; Mailer refused, and several dis–
gruntled writers walked out. Shultz's speech itself, though it was a
highly conventional defense of intellectual freedom, and was indeed
unimpeachably liberal in its declared sentiments, met with scattered
heckling and hissing. These outbursts, whatever else they accom–
plished, gave the stolid speaker the chance to look unexpectedly mag–
nanimous and avuncular. "Don't be so surprised by the fact that
Ronald Reagan and I are on your side," he told the crowd , having
earlier announced his delight at finding himself the center of a hot
intellectual controversy, proof positive of a healthy intellectual life
made possible by the freedom we take for granted, and so on.
It
was
a neat rhetorical way to turn the tables on his antagonists, who had
obligingly weakened their own cause with their rudeness. In an ap–
propriate irony, Mailer - never known for his insistence on decorum
- prefaced his own speech by publicly apologizing to Shultz for "the
silly bad manners exhibited here tonight." Nor did Mailer leave the
opposition unnamed. "There is a kind of puritanical leftism," he
charged, "that is more interested in keeping the house clean than in
warming it."
At the press conference that followed, no one could talk about
anything besides the aborted disturbance - much to the chagrin of
Mailer, whose own prepared statement went entirely unnoticed.
Mailer compounded the furor with a series of remarks seemingly de–
signed to keep everyone off-balance. First he owned up to being
"startled by the liberality of [Shultz's] views" and angered by those
whose "aim was to sabotage the meeting." Next question . Why, he
was asked, had he failed to yield the floor at Grace Paley's demand?
Because he couldn't hear her, he said, sounding a suddenly defensive
note; and indeed the notoriously poor acoustics at the South Read-
