Writers on America

Now that America has enemies again–now that we’re engaged in another and, to many of us, a rather more crucial historic struggle for the hearts and minds of less fortunate peoples across the globe–we find ourselves desperately in need of sophisticated propaganda. I don’t mean crude threats like we dropped with the bombs in Afghanistan; I mean serious stuff, materials that can "illuminate in an interesting way certain American values–freedom, diversity, democracy–that may not be well understood in all parts of the world."

The quote is from the introduction to the Dept. of State’s recent publication, Writers on America: 15 Reflections. It’s only available in book form through our embassies and consulates abroad, but anyone can read the book in its entirety at http://usinfo.state.gov/products/ pubs/writers/homepage.htm, and it’s worth the read for those curious about what images State is carrying to foreign shores. It’s worth the read, too, for anyone wondering what Robert Creeley or Bharati Mukherjee or Sven Birkerts thinks about being an American writer, or what led each to write essays for this particular collection. (Writers on America is also formatted for easy printing–nice for those whose eyes tire easily online.)

Producing effective American propaganda is a tough assignment these days. So much about this nation–leaving our foreign policy aside, even–is in fact rather awful. For instance, a dead kid in a basement in Newark whose social worker juggled more than 100 cases while politicians said we need to shrink our government and that the market would create the jobs our society needs. But this is a great country too, a country in which wonder, beauty and innocence daily dance cheek to cheek with cynicism, cruelty and rapacity, a country that attracts millions of would-be immigrants every year while creating relatively few expatriates. American propaganda at one level is just the idea that the enduring attraction of our country isn’t purely a materialistic power thing, isn’t a simple case of people wanting to get here to get the goodies or to be sheltered from our wrath. It’s the idea that America has something different to offer. And of course the most convincing propaganda doesn’t read like propaganda: the most convincing propaganda isn’t really propaganda at all.

The folks at the State Dept. realize this, and the writers in this collection–including Robert Olen Butler, Michael Chabon and former U.S. poet laureate Robert Pinsky–thankfully were not asked to write about portentous abstractions like "freedom, diversity, democracy." They were asked to write about in what sense they saw themselves as American writers. And if "America" itself is so big and multifarious as to often be reduced to an abstraction more easily to grapple with, Cos Cob and Perth Amboy and Des Plaines are solid realities. The essays in this collection are most convincing and memorable when grounded in the specific: a turn-of-the-century picture postcard (Butler), the stores along Main Street in early-1960s Masontown, PA (Elmaz Abinader), an 80-year-old milk bottle from his great-uncle’s dairy company that author Charles Johnson keeps in the living room.

Writers on America is interesting for anyone who cares about how and why a writer becomes a writer, or, a little more prosaically, about the relation of a writer to the place and community from which he or she comes. The contributors discuss and delight in the peculiarities of American as compared to other varieties of English, and even make some stabs at delineating what writers do when they write. Robert Olen Butler: "Artists of all nations pass each day through the portal of the personal unconscious and enter into the depths of the collective unconscious, and these artists emerge with visions of the things that bind us all together." Native American writer Linda Hogan: "With my work, I try to see the world whole again… My writing is larger than I am. It comes from some other place I can’t name."

The pieces in Writers on America can be admirably direct–kudos to Butler and Creeley and Mukherjee for forthrightly addressing the events of Sept. 11. They even say things that some readers, foreign and domestic, may be uncomfortable with. "If the sad events of September 11, 2001 provoked a remarkable use of poems as a means wherewith to find a common and heartfelt ground for sorrow, it passed quickly as the country regained its equilibrium, turned to the conduct of an aggressive war, and, one has to recognize, went back to making money." That’s from Robert Creeley’s essay, "America’s American." But too often these writers fall back on what seems to be a prearranged template for "thoughtful" prose, in terms of pace (near-soporific) and content (abstract and uplifting, eliding important particulars). Several contributors who are immigrants or from immigrant families mention how important it has been to them to engage in political activism and protest, of a sort that would not have been permitted without penalty in the lands they or their fathers came from, but the causes and issues that moved them to action aren’t specified. Perhaps more notably, not one writer besides Creeley addresses the difficulties associated with pursuing the intellectual and artistic vocation of writing in an American society that’s notoriously uneasy when it comes to matters intellectual and artistic.

Another criticism that could be leveled against Writers on America, and that one imagines will be leveled by those who disliked the State Dept.’s series of infomericals featuring Muslim Americans on the grounds that it was too positive, is that the collection is remarkably solipsistic. "Those Americans, so obsessed with their individual lifestyles and personal growth," the refrain might go, and, it must be admitted, how anyone comes to be a writer and how they see their relation to their home nation is a bourgeois topic if ever there was one. Yet on this point it might again be useful to cede the last word to one of the writers under discussion, Ms. Mukherjee: "In other words, what have you, as a writer, done for societies lacking democratic institutions…? As a fiction writer, what responsibilities do you feel for countries that have been oppressed by colonial powers…? The answer to that is: very little." Although Mukherjee distinguishes her role as a fiction writer from that of essayist, citizen or traveler, hers is a refreshingly unapologetic defense of fiction for fiction’s sake, of what she dubs "the impacted glories of individual consciousness."

So will Writers on America convince, or sway or, forgive me, "illuminate" anything for anyone in those lands where "American values…may not be well understood"? Might the collection perhaps illuminate some other values, not generally part of the official American self-description? I’m thinking of Robert Pinsky’s terrific poem, "At Pleasure Bay," and the essay surrounding it, "A Provincial Sense of Time." At the risk of trivializing the two works, or making them appear something other than what they are, these are pieces that cast a wise and accepting eye on all-American pursuits such as adultery, suicide and bootlegging, while outlining a metaphysics that has room for succubi, incubi and reincarnation. I can’t imagine such a work will resonate with many of those disposed to "misunderstand" American values, but it certainly made this reader feel proud to be an American. Those editors at State did their job well–maybe too well.