That certainly is a factor, but don’t you feel
power over your own interpretation of the world
which really is not dependent upon how well some-
one else is going to agree with that?
Well, it really is, because if you are Ezra
Pound and your interpretation of the world is
markedly different from the country in which
you happened to be born, you will find yourself
adjudged insane, which is quite unfair. Do you
understand? And that does happen, I think, fre-
quently enough to make us take pause. You get
into the whole thing with the Soviets and their
writers and, of course, we with ours. We don’t do
ours the same way as the Soviets do, because what
we do with ours is just buy them out. The end
result is the same thing, and if we can’t buy them
out, we simply refuse to publish them; we kind of
hound them out of the country, essentially. But it
all amounts to the same thing. I think that I have
a view of the word, that I have an obligation, if
not just your basic right, to share. But I don’t
consider that, in any respect, that that connotes
any power. I still have to go upstairs [even
though] they’re locking CETA out. I still have
to go to IGA.
You know, the artist is not a god, and I
mention Mailer because he’s such a prototypical,
awful artist. Of all the real dumb things that he’s
said recently, the most stupid had to be on
the Jack Abbott case. As a writer, you just simply
cringe that somebody is justifying murder
because the guy can put three words together.
It’s totally unacceptable. The writer is not god.
It’s what we do for a living. It’s not who we are.
And I have a great resentment—you haven’t
ruffled my feathers on that one at all, but you
will see the hairs on the back of my neck rise—
because writing is not who I am. It is what I do.
And I think that anybody who fails to separate
what they do from who they are, and that is from
Ronald Reagan to Lyndon Johnson to Pope John
Paul to whomever, is in serious, mental trouble.
You’ve got to separate yourself; unfortunately, a
lot of people don’t.
And a lot of the people who don’t are Reagan,
and Pope John, the people who are in power.
But, hey, lot of people don’t. The only rea-
son we talk about the people in power is because
that is who we know. You want to chart mental
illness? We can go right up I-75 to Detroit and
see a guy who has been laid off for six months
who was a mechanic: who is nothing more. Now,
we just don’t talk about him, unless we are Studs
Terkel. That appears to be a very human trait,
but it also appears to be one that we have
learned, because if we go back—again we are
talking Africa or we go back to Chinese history,
for two quickies and two good ones—you will
see people and artisans, and what you did was
not who you were.
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