An interview with
a
A Democratic
non-event
T HE DEMOCRATS could learn a lot from the
Republicans, considering the overwhelming
popularity Ronald Reagan now seems to be en-
joying. But one Republican lesson the Democrats
should avoid is how to stage a political non-event.
Two weeks ago, the Republicans created a non-
event not soon to be forgotten as the vice-
presidential spot was at the last minute snatched
from Gerald Ford's clutching hands (or at least
that's how the media portrayed it.
Two weeks from, now, the Democrats may
stage their own - with consequences significantly
more devastating than the few red faces caused by
the Republicans.
The Democrats are now engaged in a last-
minute effort to open their New York national con-
vention so President Carter does not receive an
automatic first ballot nomination.
They realize that if Carter is allowed to win on
the first ballot, the Democrats will slit their own
political throats, losing not only the presidency but
also numerous congressional seats. Should the
Open Convention Movement fail, then it will be a
tragic non-event.
Spurred on by Carter's disastrous economic
policies, inconsistent foreign policies, and dubious
familial policies (witness not only Billy Carter but
also such "family" members as Bert Lance and G.
William Miller), Democratic congressional leaders
are intensifying their drive to allow delegates to
change their minds about the party's presidential
nomination.
Unfortunately, opening the balloting requires a
vote of the full convention - a convention
dominated by delegates committed to Carter in the
nation's primaries and caucuses this year.
The Carter forces are of course opposed to the
open-convention movement, not wanting to
relinquish the first-ballot nomination of Carter that
is assured if delegates are bound by their primary
commitments.
Open-convention advocates, however, have
argued that the party's candidate will be much
stronger if nominated by a vote of uncommitted
delegates, who would make their choice not on the
basis of months-old primary results but on the
basis of current political realities.
Clearly, an open Democratic convention
makes sense. Carter cannot win the presidency
against Ronald Reagan. Perhaps neither can Sen.
Edward Kennedy. But from among the names now
being offered as possible choices - Vice President
Walter Mondale, Sen. Henry Jackson, Secretary of
State Edmund Muskie, and Rep. Morris Udall -
the Democrats can surely find a viable candidate.
The Republican non-event was little more than
a momentary, welcome diversion in Reagan's
otherwise unsuspenseful progress toward the
White House. A Democratic non-event would hand
Reagan that House on a silver platter.
Isaac Bash
By Katha Pollitt
Yiddish, which in the 19th and early 20th
centuries possessed a flourishing literary
tradition, persists today in the work of one
man, 76-year-old Isaac Bashevis Singer, whose
terse, passionate, sometimes mystical novels
and short stories of life among Polish Jews in
Europe and America won him the Nobel Prize
for literature in 1978. In the pleasant, rambling
upper West Side apartment where Singer and
his wife Alma have lived quietly for many
years, he talked to me about his early days as a
writer, first in- his native Warsaw and later in
New York, and offered opinions of a variety of
literary topics.
Q. Did you always know that you wanted to be a
writer?
A. You might say so. My father was a writer, in a
way. He was a rabbi, but he wrote religious books;
and my older brother, I. J. Singer, began to write
while I was still a child. So I decided I had to be a
writer too. When I was a little boy in cheder
(Hebrew school), I used to boast to my friends that I
was going to write a book.
Q. How did you begin?
A. When I was 12 or so, I wrote an imitation of one
of Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories, which I
read in Yiddish. But it wasn't until I was 19 or 20
that I really started, first in Hebrew and then in
Yiddish.
Q. Did your wish to become a writer create op-
position in your family?
A. Yes, but luckily my brother had already begun
writing, so all the quarrels and fights had been gone
through already. By the time I started, the waiwas
half over. My parents considered it vulgar for us to
write love stories, or any other sort of worldly
stories.
Q. Many young writers today study creative
writing in order to learn from older writers. Did you
have a literary mentor?
A. My brother, of course. But we certainly didn't
take creative writing courses! What can a teacher
tell you? I learned as writers have always learned:
through observing life and reading. Of course, now
that I am kind of a teacher myself, I see some good
can come of it. ut you haveto have talent,you
can't learn writing the way you can learn
engineering.
Q. I read a story about you and wonder if it's true.
When you were a young man did you really with-
draw your first book after it had been accepted for
publication?
A. It is absolutely true. When I was 26 or 27, I had
a book of short stories accepted by a Yiddish
publisher. It was set in type and the galleys were
sent to me. I read them and I thought, this is not
going to be my book-certainly not my first book. I
told the publisher and there was a hue and cry,
because in those days a Yiddish publisher was far
from being a millionaire. To pacify him and to com-
pensate him financially, I translated two books by
Knut Hamsun from German and Polish into Yid-
dish. Then I decided to wait a few years before
coming out with another book. Actually, I waited 28
years.
Q. Was that first book really so terrible?
A. I would say many worse books have been
published and praised. But I didn't like it. I had the
same literary taste then that I had 10 years later,
and when something was boring I rejected it. I tell
you, I waited 28 years to publish another book!
Q. Do you think of your English and Yiddish
audiences differently?
A. I don't think about an audience at all. I think
about a story. I am my own first reader, and
pleasing me is a hard job. If a story doesn't satisfy
me, I have a good friend under my desk: the
wastepaper basket.
Q. Does much of your work end up there?
A. Plenty! But about audiences, I will tell you. I
assume that my readers are as intelligent as I am
and that they know as much about life as I do. I
-don't talk down to them, or feel I have to instruct
them. Some writers are always afraid that their
evis Singer
readers won't understand them, assuming that he is
so high and they are so low. I never have this
illusion for a moment.
Q. You've said harsh things about Joyce, for in-
stance.
A. I will tell you. Just today, by accident, I
opened a book by Henry Miller. I was astonished to
see that he said more or less the same things about
Joyce as I have-that he was a writer for
professors. He wrote so that he would have to be ex-
plained all the time, in countless footnotes and
scholarly papers. For me, good literature teaches
you, but it also entertains you.
Q. Didn't you once says that entertainment has
become the dirtiest 13-letter word in the English
language?
A. Only among the literati.
Q. And yet your stories do so much more than en-
tertain. Sometimes I think you're teasing.
A. I never said entertainment was the only pur-
pose of writing. It's just the first. The first thing that
matters about a restaurant is that the food is good.
After that you think about whether it's elegant,
whether the waiters are polite, and other such
things. Entertainment is a minimum and a must.
a
I
Siger
The message is not. Anna Karenina, for instance,
has almost no message. You can't make a
generalization that all women who have lovers
commit suicide. But the story itself is so mighty it
stands on its own. Only bad stories have to lean on
the crutches of messages.
Q. Yet Tolstoy himself came to believe that art
had to have a message.
A. In his old age he thought so, and he wrote many
wonderful things even then-he couldn't help it. But
the real Tolstoy is the earlier writer, not the one who
wrote Resurrection. Besides, nobody took his ver-
sion of Christianity seriously anyway, neither the
Christians nor the atheists.
Q. You are unusual as a serious writer in that
your audience isn't only educated people. The man
who runs the Laundromat I use, for instance, is a
big fan of yours.
A. The truth is, the man who runs the Laun-
dromat knows as much about life as I do. He may
not know Hebrew or Aramaic, but he's lived. A real
writer can reach almost everyone with his words.
Every Russian, if he could read at all, could read
See AN, Page 13
Katha Pollitt is a New York poet and critic.
Portions of the article reprinted here originally
appeared in the July, 1980 issue of Saturday
Review.
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