DAVID
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lent thing. "Grant-think can't be healthy," he asserted, if it discour–
ages the author from reaching an audience of readers rather than a
bureaucratic patron .
But prepared remarks were one thing, and the incendiary de–
bates that followed were quite another. These regularly scheduled
yet somehow spontaneous explosions were set off, in the traditional
way, by monologues in the form of putative questions to one or an–
other panel participant.
It
seemed that the temptation to turn any
given symposium into an "us and them" or "either/or" confrontation
simply proved irresistible to the speakers approaching the microphone
in the center aisle of the vast ballroom in the Essex House hotel.
The pattern kept repeating itself. No sooner had Updike delivered
his ironically jovial paean to the U .S. mail than fellow panelist
E.
L.
Doctorow felt obliged to chide him. It was all very well to ap–
plaud mail boxes, he said. "I have a feeling, though, that if he goes
around the corner, he'll find a missile silo buried in the next lot,
which is what I think of when we talk about the state." The German
poet Hans Magnus Enzensberger, picking up the ball, then charac–
terized Updike's vision of America as "pastoral" - as though that
were synonymous with parochialism and complacency. Under these
embattled circumstances, Updike's refusal to deny the "pastoral"
charge was quite affecting- one somehow felt, at that moment, that
a pastoral vision of America might better serve a literary or even a
moral end than any number of sermons or op-ed columns disguised
as stories or poems . And Updike's simple statement that he did not
regard the United States as "an international ogre" gained force from
the very diffidence with which it was expressed.
The exchange was far more acrimonious after Bellow's talk,
same place, same time, the following afternoon . Bellow's purpose
had been to explain, albeit in broad strokes, the problematic relation
of capitalism and culture. The "state of nature philosophers," he said,
made political provision for liberty, food, clothing, and shelter - not
for culture. Gunter Grass, seizing the microphone, ignored the com–
plications of Bellow's argument but made no secret of his ire. "I'm
wondering when you're explaining that democracy gave people not
only freedom but also shelter and food," he said . "I would like to hear
the echo of your words in the South Bronx, where people don't have
shelter, don't have food ."
It was, perhaps, the week's pivotal moment, the one that most
observers remembered most vividly after the shouting had died
down. One remembered the instructive difference in the responses
