LEONARD KRIEGEL
119
And even while I was writing about "white ethnics," I had no
illusions about ethnicity. Like gender and race and politics, it is, for
a writer, a potential mine field, threatening to blow his work right off
the map. A writer must guard against confusing the sources ofimag–
ination with imagination itself.
It
is for this reason that Saul Bellow
and the late Bernard Malamud would repeatedly insist that American
writers who were Jews were simply that and not Jewish-American
writers. Obviously, anyone who reads Bellow and Malamud can see
the extent to which they were influenced both by Yiddish and the
lives of the first-and second-generation Jews in America with whom
they came of age. But they each understood that for a writer, all clas–
sifications are arbitrary, and they threaten to pull him away from his
imaginative purpose.
And such classifications pose an equal threat to writers when
they are applied to our audience. They create divisions that are not
only shortsighted and stupid but that are ultimately destructive to
good writing. Any kind of list is an implicit denial of imaginative
truth, since it insists on the preeminence of categories. And good
writing has nothing to do with lists. Good writing is not some child's
game of ethnic or racial or sexual pick-up-sticks. And an organiza–
tion devoted to serving writers simply has no right to endorse, either
by its own actions or by implication, the kinds of invidious distinc–
tions this list makes -
not even
if
its funding depends upon making such
distinctions.
Writers write and readers read. And life is occasionally simpler
than we writers believe. One seeks in literature not the affirmation of
group identity but that "shock of recognition" Melville spoke of. I
happen to admire the novels of William Kennedy. I do not admire
Kennedy because he is an Albany Irishman but because of what he
has managed to create out of the lives and the language of the Irish
in
Albany.
It
is, after all, language and imagination that link writers
to each other and to their work. But given the kind of list created by
Poets
&
Writers, one might assume that the link between, say, Bel–
low and Updike and Eudora Welty is that they can all be stuffed,
along with the audience for their books, under the category
Other.
It seems to me that we have been, for the past two decades, vir–
tually buried beneath these categories. And for any American writer
to herd either himself or his audience into the arbitrary ghettoes sug–
gested by the list offered by Poets
&
Writers is absurd.
If
lists are the
best we writers can create, then we might just as well leave the writ–
er's task, the task of imaginatively re-creating the world, to pollsters
and accountants and statisticians, all of whom are better able to deal
