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able. As many writer colleagues of mine conceded, at that time they
didn't expect from me anything interesting and va luable because, by
definition, I was a reactionary. I speak of this experience not out of
bitterness, because I also had many supportive friends as well as help from
a number of French and American intellectuals . I am not, after all, a
loser.
But the problem is of very large dimensions. We should look at it
from the historical perspective, that the Revolution of 1917 really was
felt by intellectuals in the West to be a great hope, as Saul Bellow said,
and the response to those who tried to tell the truth about the Soviet
system since the beginning - because the seeds of later horrors were al–
ready there - was to place them in isolation.
If
we think of the whole
period between the two wars, when there was an isolation, a sort of
wall that was very difficult for the emigres of that time to penetrate, we
should then understand the dimensions of the problem. The great vic–
tories of Stalin in the Second World War enhanced enormously the
prestige of the Soviet system, and those books in the fifties that tried to
speak the truth about, for instance, concentration camps, were ostracized,
put aside, as invalid testimony. And really only with Solzhenitsyn's book,
The Gulag Archipelago,
was there a breakthrough, especially where Parisian
intellectuals were concerned. So I should say that not only emigres from
the East but also some writers in the West were placed by the intellectual
establishment in that uncomfortable position. The case of Albert Camus,
for instance, represents a significant phenomenon that deserves elucidation
and discussion. There was a myth of the Revolution that persisted in the
intellectual milieu as, I suspect, a necessary support for the idea of the
betterment of man, of progress. Now we are confronted with a
situation where there is no myth. How intellectuals are going to cope
with this situation is a great unknown. But this new necessity of living
without enemies is a subject for large consideration.
Ralph Ellison:
I'm not so sure as to how to go about participating in
such a discussion. For I, as you can see, am an inside-outsider. However, I
suspect that for a variety of reasons this might well be the built-in posi–
tion, the burden, the fate, that goes with being an intellectual. And
especially for writers of fiction, whose attempts at capturing the truth of
existence take the form of fashioning lies that entertain while making us
think.
Thus as an inside-outsider, one of the questions that Saul's comments
raises in my mind has to do with the effect of the Enlightenment on the
United States. What Saul said is true, but it seems to me that when the
Founding Fathers sought to make the ideals of the Enlightenment mani-
