Leonard Kriegel
WRITERS AN 0 ETHNICITY
A few weeks ago, I received a letter from an organization
devoted to helping American writers keep their economic heads above
water. Among the tasks it assumes on behalf of America's writers,
Poets
&
Writers , Inc. sponsors readings and workshops for members
of the profession who require additional income to practice their
"sullen art" - a description which fits every writer of my acquaintance.
But like other well-intentioned organizations, Poets
&
Writers has
discovered our newest cultural growth stocks - race, ethnicity, gen–
der, and sexual identification. How else explain a request that writ–
ers choose, from a list of ten the organization provided, as many as
three "ethnic, political , and social groups" with which they would
like to work?
The mail arrived while I was browsing through De Crevecouer's
Letters From An American Farmer,
a book I find it helpful to look at when–
ever I need to remind myself of how this nation was once viewed .
Engrossed in De Crevecouer's two hundred year-old paean to the
"new man" in the New World, I put aside the letter from Poets
&
Writers. Long before historians and writers happened upon the idea,
De Crevecouer had been a passionate advocate of the "melting pot."
Enjoying diversity, he was convinced that life in America would be
different, and that even before the Revolution this nation already
had changed ineradicably the way men related to other men . Of
course , De Crevecouer's
Letters
simply embodied an idea common to
many Europeans in the late eighteenth century.
"Amerika,"
wrote
Goethe,
"du hast es besser."
And most of the civilized world echoed his
sentiments .
Such sentiments have long since passed out of fashion . In the
early 1960s, writers and historians discovered the attractions of race
and ethnicity, and soon after that a sexual ethos in which everything
was allowed and nothing mattered was transformed into a close ap–
proximation of a religious tenet. Few writers today could possibly
speak of the "melting pot" without an acute sense of embarrassment.
On
the other hand, most nonliterary people believe that Americans
are different because they have followed Mark Twain's advice and
allowed
all
of the juices to swap . Perhaps the only saving grace I ob–
served in the recent Miss Liberty weekend was the sentiment, uttered
