Literature, Money and the Republic
NEW YORK LETTER By M. L. ROSENTHAL Otsre. of the most confident predictions one jean make for 1967 (American literary division) is that l'aflaire William L. Manchester v. the Kennedys will evolve into the most boring of memories. The pathos of the assassination is ineradicable and colours everything now being said, but the book must be an anti-climax no matter what is in it. Mr Murray Kempton's chivalric defence of a fellow-journalist in these pages recently notwithstanding, the Kennedys' motives are far more understandable than Mr Manchester's. An expensive acting-out of the fantasy of telling 'the whole truth' was probably necessary for them. Everyone else has had his public say about the assassination; from the viewpoint of those most intimately touched by it, it must seem that no one has respected the fact that all along the tragedy was 'theirs alone.' And they have the will, the wealth, and the paralysing glamour that make it hard for life's chosen few to distinguish between desire and reality and impossible for them to avoid using other people as their mere instruments.
The ordinary writer who lives above hack- level would know such things in his bones. It is flattering but poisonous to receive such an invitation as came to Mr Manchester, and to have to agree to such a contract as he accepted is impossible. Having played out their vain dream of remaking the past into their own private domain, what could the Kennedys do but repudiate the further exposure of reality that the dream in fact became? The manuscript would have to have their approval but, in Mr Manchester's own words, it was 'unthinkable' that they should actually read it—it 'would have meant reliving their own tragedy.' Most other writers are animals a little too untamed to love the traps that are set for them. Money, the headiness of being close to power on any terms, the morbid sense of shameful secrets in high places that has been accumulating in America —all are involved in the momentary spotlighting of Mr Manchester and his book. I am afraid that eventually it is these motifs that will remain in our minds when the book has become indis- tinguishable from all the other journalistic hullabaloo of these years.
Further to the subject of literature, money, and the republic, the most recent American news is the allocation of national and state funds for humanistic research and for the arts. This is the partial fulfilment of an old dream that was once, for instance, the grand vision of Ezra Pound, reinforced by his discovery that it was part of the wisdom of Confucius to 'gather the savants around him.' According to Pound, the 'damned and despised literati' are the guardians of the language and therefore of the integrity of civilisation and of the state. During the New Deal, the Federal Arts Projects helped many artists to stick to their own lasts despite the Depression and helped bring about significant new tendencies in the arts. A little money goes a very long way in such a project as the Center for Editions of American Authors, recently granted $300,000 for its first year's work by the new National Endowment for the Humanities.
The aim of this project is to encourage the editing and publication of definitive editions of the major American authors. Such editions now exist only for Emily Dickinson and Sidney Lanier. For such figures as Emerson, Haw- thorne, Irving, Thoreau, Clemens, Howells, Whitman, Melville and Stephen Crane there have long been plans for editions, and in several in- stances a few volumes of a projected edition of many volumes have lately appeared with painful slowness. But these plans and publishing ventures have in the past been impeded by two simple realities. The first is the reality of the scholar's life. He is rarely free enough of academic duties, with a clear stretch of time before him that is all his own and with the necessary research funds to carry on his editing most efficiently, to get on with the job quickly.
The second reality is that, despite the great volume of books published every year, publishers are extremely reluctant to undertake the un- economic task of publishing truly scholarly editions of the outstanding American authors. The inferior texts now in print sell well enough; the strangling effect of copyright problems (which will yet stifle literature anyway) works in reverse with authors who are already, for the most part, in the public domain; and the industry as a whole is not notable for its vision or daring.
Various university presses, therefore, will pub- lish the texts. As the Director, Professor William M. Gibson, of New York University and the Modern Language Association, puts it: The Center will publish nothing. Its primary func- tion is to provide time and cash to editors; strength and patience the editors will have to provide themselves.' It is hoped that by 1971 there will be scholarly editions of all major nineteenth-century American writers, and that these can form the basis of inexpensive popular editions as well. Some seventy textual experts and editors are now working, with the aid of a machine known as the Hinman Collator, at the task of textual comparison.
Another agency, the new National Council on the Arts, has just allocated $2.3 million to indi- vidual artists and institutions, and to support various programmes. Sixty painters and sculp- tors have so far been granted $5,000 each, and five writers have been given $10,000 each, to en- courage their work. Architecture, films, urban planning, music and theatre have all been given attention; $1 3 million has been pledged toward establishing an American film institute. A small fund has been set up 'for recognised authors and dramatists urgently needing money.' An annual anthology of work from the little maga- zines will be published by various publishers in different years, supported by a $55,000 federal grant. Payments of $500 to $1,000 will be made to the chosen authors, who originally would have been paid as little as five or ten dollars. These, and other grants, mark a decisive change in the American cultural situation.
Money—not all that much by military budget standards, or even by the standards of Mr Man- chester's contracts for serial rights, but anyway, as far as it goes, genuinely legal tender—is actually being paid out by the government to some of our thinkers and artists. Soon a rich compost of politics-in-the-arts will develop. Already, all of us admire what is being done for the other arts far more than what is being done for our own. ('Honestly, just one grant so far to a poet.') But now honest poverty will be harder for a man to come by than ever, even without serial rights for a preordained best-seller.
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