LEONARD KRIEGEL
117
turned to the letter from Poets
&
Writers, Inc., with its list of "ethnic,
political, and social groups" before whom they would permit me to
sell my wares. In place of De Crevecouer's "new man," Poets
&
Writ–
ers offered me the following:
A.Black
B.HispanidLatin
C .Puerto Rican
D.Chicano
E.Asian-American F.Native American G.Feminist H.Gay
Men I.Lesbian J.Other (please specify)
"What then is the American, this new man?" asked De Creve–
couer proudly . Poets
&
Writers was apparently willing to tell him .
I read the list. I reread it. I studied it, trying to find a place for
De Crevecouer. But the truth was undeniable. With or without his
name change, De Crevecouer was an
Other.
And in the grab bag of
categories which Poets
&
Writers had unleashed on my America
with all the self-righteous certitude of the God of Moses unleashing
his ten plagues on the Egyptians, he was by no means alone. The
English, French, Scottish, Irish, Dutch, Germans, and Swedes–
those he had happily called "this promiscuous breed" who, in coming
together, had fashioned the "new man" - were also
Other.
And they
could be joined by the Irish, Italians, and Jews in myoid neighbor–
hood in the Bronx, about whom I had written a book some ten years
earlier. Like De Crevecouer's "promiscuous breed," their stamp was
Other.
Of course, they had a great deal of company. Saroyan's Ar–
menians, Kate Chopin's Creoles, Algren's Poles, Steinbeck's Okies–
all could be classified
Other.
Eliot was an
Other,
and Prufrock was an
Other.
That Pound was an
Other
had, I felt, a certain poetic justice
to it. But I, too, was an
Other,
as were my sons and wife. Even my
eighty-six year-old mother, convinced that she is somehow
more
Amer–
ican than her friends and neighbors who are also immigrants because
she managed to arrive here on George Washington's birthday in
1920-my mother, it turns out, is as much an
Other
as Pound, since
she can claim membership in neither of the list's categories specifically
reserved for women, lesbian or feminist.
It
always has seemed to me that classification of any kind is a
writer's enemy. And yet, this was a list created
by
writers ostensibly
for
writers. The least I could do was to give it a writer's attention.
Like the Homeric Catalogue of Ships in
The Iliad
and like the rules
and regulations relentlessly set down in the Book of Leviticus, here
was a list whose hidden meanings begged for the kind of textual ex-
