Intellectuals and Writers
since the Thirties
Edith Kurzweil :
I want to welcome you and to introduce William
Phillips, Editor of
Partisall Relliew,
who will moderate this panel. Joseph
Brodsky has not yet arrived, so Czeslaw Milosz has graciously agreed to
speak this morning.
William Phillips:
The speakers need no introduction. Nearest me is
Saul Bellow, Nobel laureate in literature; you've all read his books.
Next to him is Ralph Ellison, who is the author of that great novel,
II/visible Mall,
and several volumes of essays. At the end is Czeslaw Milosz.
He is also a Nobel laureate, an exile from Poland and his native Lithua–
nia. He came to this country in 1960 and now teaches at the University
of California.
It is said that writers and intellectuals represent the conscience of
mankind, and to some extent we see that this was true in the recent
revolutions that were created in Eastern and Central Europe and in the
Soviet Union. But what I hope will be brought up here is not only the
leading role of writers and intellectuals in the liberation of Eastern Eu–
rope and the Soviet Union, but also the fact that so many writers and
intellectuals have been wrong so many times.
Saul Bellow :
In the middle of the night, I woke my wife, and she
kindly agreed to take some notes for me. So I am going to start these
proceedings by reading from these jottings, which I hope will set this
conversation going. We're here today to talk about differences between
the United States and Eastern and Central Europe, about what happens
to the higher values of these societies of ours which were set up on a
frame of ideas. Ours here in America was, as we all know, a different set
of ideas. The Enlightenment philosophers who were the founders of this
system wanted to ensure that we would overcome the challenge of
scarcity, that we would be provided for as free people, and that the basic
needs of mankind would be satisfied here on earth, where the material
needs of our species had to be met. That was the first concern of the
Enlightenment thinkers, that there would be a social contract, founded
on reason , dedicated to the conquest of nature, to the creation of con–
ditions for peace, justice, and order, and that we would forget about the
slImmum
bonum
which was the preoccupation of Aristotle and other
