Open Letter to Leonid Leonov

ByEDWARD F. EUBANKS

1

IT is only rarely that a piece of writing by a Russian affects an American as strongly as your “Writers Must Be Our Conscience” in the March Atlantic affected me. It not only stimulated in me a great enthusiasm for the way the Soviet government is meeting the problems of its writers, but it enabled me to see just how much we in the United States are losing in allowing our writers to dissipate their energies on inconsequential themes. Your article opened up a whole new social and literary realm for me. It is the eve of a new day in American literature. We are standing on the peak ol Mount Chaos (the highest peak in the Waste and Confusion range) ready to descend into the Valley of Order.

Much as I respect the direction the Soviet writers have taken, and grateful as I am for the encouragement their example gives me, in America, we shall have to go in a different direction. It is mainly a matter of momentum. We might conceivably adopt your theme of the righteousness of labor (and, indeed, some of our writers have done just that), but we have already gone so far in another direction that it would be impossible now to retrace our steps.

I hesitate to say this because I hope that a strong friendship will grow out of this correspondence, but conditions might be different if it were not for the bad name your boys have given our labor unions. But I think you will agree that it is not the adopted theme that is important, but the ultimate objective.

Probably you are wondering who I am and with what authority I speak. If you have never heard of me, do not feel uninformed. Nobody else in the reading public, American or Russian, has ever heard of me either. But I speak as the self-appointed spokesman of a new generation of American writers, and you may be confident that everybody will know my name as soon as my plan is in operation.

My plan calls for a new government bureau to be called OKA—pronounced okay. Although OKA (Office of Kept Authors) was suggested by your Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (B) on Repertories of Dramatic Theaters and will have the same objectives as that committee, the methods used by OKA will have to be different from those of your organization. Ultimatums are just not effective in the United States. They create resentment and antagonism and they do not do the job. Of necessity, we shall have to use more indirect methods. If my approach appears weak to you, I hasten to assure you that the indirect method is the only one that will work here.

My idea is to have OKA issue a list, of fundamental tenets for American writers, a writers’ code based on the motto “Everything is okay and it’s getting more so.” Now it would be fatal to our cause to issue a governmental proclamation ordering every writer in the country to write according to the code. We shall have to make them want to do it. We can start the organization off with a dinner at one of the big New York hotels. The most important people among government officials, writers, movie actors, and businessmen will be there to make speeches and to congratulate the writers on their patriotic effort to unite in the service of their country. The whole thing will he broadcast over a major network.

That will get the plan off to a good start; but to maintain the initial enthusiasm and to quiet any unenlightened dissenters, machinery of persuasion will have to be set up. Luxurious hotels will be appropriated by the government (or new ones built.) at all the resorts and in all the big cities, for the exclusive use of OKA writers. There will be writers’ hotels in Palm Beach, Palm Springs, Hollywood. San Francisco, Sun Valley, New York, Chicago, Honolulu, Cape Cod, Newport, and in all the other places where American writers might wish to live. I think one of the first of these homes should be a dude ranch a few miles outside of Reno or Las Vegas, Nevada. On second thought, we could have one at each of these outposts of American culture. All expenses will be paid by OKA. In addition to the hotels, every OKA writer will be given an automobile and provided with free passes for air, rail, and steamship transportation. Meal tickets will also be issued, good for the biggest meals at all the best restaurants in the country.

Intellectual food will not be neglected. Subscriptions to all the most popular magazines will be given to the writers, and they will receive copies of all the OKA-approved best-sellers. They will have a radio in every room they occupy, and in their automobiles; and portables will be provided for use while traveling on public conveyances. Arrangements will be made to enable them to see a Hollywood movie every night, no matter where they happen to be. All this will be made available in addition to weekly salaries, and bonuses for anything written and published.

You might object that it all sounds good but that there is nothing in the plan that prevents a writer from renouncing the whole thing and striking out on his own. I would answer that it will not be necessary to use force with most of the writers. The benefits of OKA will be enough to make them see the truth in the code. But for the recalcitrant few, we have a most effective means of coercion. First, if a writer refuses to write according to the code, he will lose his OKA membership card and all the privileges that go with it. If that is not enough, through the cooperation of the advertisers, publishers, and, if necessary, the suppliers of paper, we can make it next to impossible for any but OKA writers to publish.

2

THE possible heights American literature could attain under OKA are thrilling to contemplate. No longer will the American public be subjected to the scribblings of malcontents like Steinbeck, Falkner, and Dos Passos, and to the irrelevant musings of wastrels like Robert Frost, Katherine Anne Porter, and Wallace Stevens. Our writers will extol the virtues of mass production and standardized entertainment. Poets will sing of the beauties of indoor plumbing and mahogany-paneled station wagons. Our novelists will show us how satisfied are the American workers, the American housewives, the American fathers, the American kids. (Never will they use the word children.)

The first thing I am going to do is find the man who wrote the mighty line, “ How American it is to want something better!” If I have my way, he is going to be the vice-chairman of OKA. I do not have to tell you, Mr. Leonov, who the chairman will he.

There is something else that will have to he provided for the writers of OKA — an ample supply of benzedrine and phenobarbital. To the kept writer who retains delusions of artistic integrity, they are essentials. Even now, one writer I know would not last a week without them. He just pops a phenobarbital tablet into his mouth at bedtime and sleeps like a baby, with none of those wakeful hours of selfaccusation that are so damaging to writers. In the morning, his head cleared with benzedrine, he is ready for a day’s work.

There is one point on which we might disagree, Mr. Leonov. That is on the matter of collision that you mentioned in your article. Russian writers have a ready-made subject for collision in their denunciation of the enemy—the reactionary, bourgeois, capitalistic forces that are antagonistic to the Soviet Union. It so happens that it works two ways. We can both collect on the same collision. With the OKA code as a starting point, the collision in the works of American writers would logically occur between the good people who stand behind the American Way of Life and the bad people who want, to destroy it (the Reds, Commies, and so on), and of course, for variety, the peoples of countries that have a paucity of flush toilets and eight-cylinder automobiles, who might conceivably be trying, by such methods as pleading with us to lower our tariffs or to lend them money, to drag us down to their level.

Of course (and I think you will agree with me on the wisdom of this) we will encourage our men to say nice things about the work that is being done at Lake Success, as long as they do not make any demands, and as long as they continue to point out, every page or so, the superiority of the American Way of Life over all other ways.

I hope that you and I can rise above the differences that are bound to develop between our countries out of the conflicts — or collisions, if you prefer — in our literatures, because we do agree so well on ultimates. I never should have developed my plan if I had not read your article, and I am very grateful to you.

But perhaps there is something I can do for you, friend Leonov. Apparently, phenobarbital and benzedrine are unavailable in the Soviet Union. You, for one, I am afraid, need them very badly. Your article had all the earmarks of a piece written at four o’clock in the morning by a chronic insomniac. To tide you over until your government resumes production of these essentials, I am sending you a six months’ supply of these wonderful drugs.