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. 4 I