by Allen Drury
There is, in my view, much in the past of this nation, and in its present which even as we live it becomes the past, upon which to build in facing the tasks that confront us in a world whose tragic problems are really not much changed simply because a sinister little visitor who desires our death has learned how to say “O.K.”
First, however, a little something about the novel, how it came to be written, the mechanics of it, and the like. Each writer, I suppose, has his own source of inspiration and his own ways of proceeding; and since it is the book which brings me here, and it is the book, basically, that you are interested in, I thought I might tell you something about it before I return to the broader subject which engages us here tonight.
The genesis of a novel, any novel, I suspect, lies in some one insistent theme that rises out of the writer’s general observation, living and experience. In the case of Advise and Consent, that one theme was, of course, the America democracy and how it operates.
One gradually arrives, after covering the government of the United States at its heart for sixteen years, at some sort of philosophy about Congress, about America, and about the American people, in relation to themselves, to their times and to each other.
There are some, I think in the minority, who have arrived at a philosophy of angry and ironic contempt. There are others, I hope in the majority, who have arrived at about what I have arrived at—a realization of America’s weaknesses, and appreciation of her strengths, and a balance that comes down, even as it looks some quite hard facts in the eye on the side of hope.
I do not contend in this book, nor I think can any honest man contend, that this government or this country or this people are perfect; for they are not. On the other hand, neither do I accept the glib and too-ready appraisal of some native critics that they are completely imperfect; for they are not. They are human institutions and human beings, rather more idealistic and good-hearted and well-meaning than most on this globe, in my estimation; and while they are sometimes venal, sometimes weak, sometimes shortsighted and sometimes corrupt, they also possess a fundamental duality which permits them to be on other occasions, and sometimes at the very same time, noble and generous and forward-looking and kindly and decent and good.
Their strengths, as their weaknesses, it seems to me, are attributable entirely and exclusively to what they are, a free people of many backgrounds, living in a free country and doing what they please as they deem best.
This is a very wonderful thing, and never has it been more wonderful than in this sick age when too many states and peoples are taking the coward’s way out and abandoning the difficult method of freedom to place their destinies in the hands of some one man or little group of men who will silence their doubts, and kill their freedom, and tell them what to do.
This American duality, which I think the facts will support, is too much for some of our more vocal citizens and they spend their time and their energies nagging at the country’s shortcomings without ever once conceding, or indeed ever understanding her strengths. Those of you that have read it are aware that there are in this book many somber things about America, for she is seen, I hope, through an honest glass; yet the end result, as I said before, comes down on the side of hope. To Bob Munson of Michigan, the Majority Leader, to whom I have given quite a few of my own thoughts to express, I have given this one, too, as he sits in the Senate toward the end of Advise and Consent awaiting the final vote on Bob Leffingwell:
“Surveying all these men, and thinking about them and about this old Senate which he had known so long and loved so much, the senior Senator from Michigan could not find it in his heart to be so concerned about his country, when all was said and done. The system had its problems, and it wasn’t exactly perfect, and there was at times much to be desired, and yet—on balance, admitting all its bad points and assessing all its good, where there was a vigor and a vitality and a strength that nothing, he suspected, could ever quite overcome, however evil and crafty it might be. There was in this system the enormous vitality of free men, running their own government in their own way. If they were weak, at times, it was because they had the freedom to be weak; if they were strong, upon occasion, it was because they had the freedom to be strong; if they were indomitable, when the chips were down, it was because freedom made them so. He said a little prayer of thankfulness, sitting there at his desk in the United States Senate, to all the men and women back over the centuries who by their dreaming their striving and their working and their dying had made it possible for their heirs to take with them into so dark and fearful a future, so great and wonderful a gift and so strong and invincible an army.
(There follows a brief history of the novel; this same story is recounted in more detail in the Appendix to our new edition of Advise and Consent.)
But a novel, as I say, is not a finished act. The multitudinous and sometimes conflicting interpretations of the critics confirm for an author the observation he has already made on the basis of the reactions of those who have seen his product in its early stages. A book is in the mind of the reader, and each reader brings to it his own ideas and his own emotions and hopes and fears and prejudices, so that it becomes changed and transformed, sometimes into shapes that quite surprise the author.
The book takes on its own life, becomes a thing apart; and even as it is changing your life, you realize that it is living in ever-widening life of its own that will affect many minds and many hearts unknown to you, growing far beyond words typed on paper purchased at the Senate Stationery Store, in a house on the banks of the Potomac River.
It is in the spontaneous letters of readers around the country, as I said at the outset, in which this fact is brought home to you most forcefully; and it is in them that you hear the authentic voice of the country speaking. It is a troubled voice, an uneasy voice, a voice uncertain and bewildered by the challenge of great events; yet from it you get the feeling that the heart of the country is still good and that the people, if they can but be given a minimum of effective leadership to show them the way, are of a strength sufficient to meet whatever may be required of them.
Constantly recurring throughout these communications, as I noted, are the words “heartened and encouraged,” and they express a feeling that the heritage of America is still around, that it is still the source of the nation’s hope and strength; that the present, if you like, should indeed be built upon the past, and that only by such a careful building can the structure be kept in shape and fit to withstand the howling tempests of the times.
These are the ways of American government, American politics and American society which you have shown them; and with a pleased recognition they tell you they are glad to see them, to know that they are still there, to feel that they are, for all their sometime weaknesses and shortcomings, still around. The letters indicate that the country is hungry for affirmation in its literature, that readers are pleased to come across a writer once again who says, “Yes, this land has it faults, but let us not forget its greatness.”
They are grateful for that, and the warmth of the gratitude is the measure of how much they have hungered for it, and how much it has been lacking in recent American writing.
I do not mean by this, of course, that there is a requirement upon anyone to approach the nation in a mood of Pollyanna; God knows she has her faults, and much useful purpose can be served by exposing them. But it should be done, I submit, with judgment and with balance and with common sense. It should be done, if you please, with maturity. And maturity, I suggest has been sadly lacking from American literature for quite a long while.
No one is calling for rose-colored glasses or the rose-colored treatment. This is not a nation or a society which needs to be gilded to bring out their strong points. Paint them as they are, and the strengths shine through, for they are there. A candid view and a fair appraisal are sufficient to the task of restoring the country’s faith in itself; and in one author’s mail, at least, there is ample evidence that the restoration is
greatly desired by the nation’s people.
So we come finally, and they too have a bearing upon your theme it seems to me, to those queries with which an author is often faced, “What kind of a writer do you want to be?” and “What do you want to accomplish with your writing?” For this writer, and I would hope for a good many others, the answers are fairly clear.
The kind of writer I would like to be is the kind of writer who says something a little valid about the human experience, insofar as it is given him to see it, and who illuminates also something of his times so that his contemporaries and those who come after may find their understanding a little better for what he has done. If I can do those two things, I shall be quite content.
As for the allied pomposity of, “What do you want to do with your writing?” There too, I think, the answer is plain.
And that is to say a little something honest, in a phony time, about a country who needs all our understanding and all our help and all our love if she is to come safely through the fearful perils which beset her.
We live, it seems to me, in an era in which America seems to have gotten lost from herself, somehow, hidden away and submerged and obscured by the more clamorous of her clever, clever citizens. This false coin of her detractors has its other side in the false coin of her adulators. They have given us an era in which slogans are substituted for reality, in which false values have behind them all the force of organized advertising and promotion, in which an unfounded optimism is offered as a counterfeit for sober bravery; in which everything is slightly out of focus, so that nothing shows clear and it is hard to remember and recapture and hold fast to the things that make our Republic, and us as a people, what we once were and should be again, a beacon for mankind.
It is an era, to reduce it to absurdities which are not, unfortunately, as completely absurd as they should be, in which the folk-tunes of a nation celebrate its premium beer and its acid indigestion; the virile chanteys of its stalwart men pay tribute to cigarettes and automobiles; and the golden mean of its society is summed up by Fortune Magazine, which knows about such things, as “the creative conformist.”
Somewhere under all this phoniness, God knows, there still lives a great nation and a great people; and it is to them that I, and I would hope most thoughtful writers, should like to be true in whatever I may write. For I suspect that when the last television program is snapped off, the last urgent advertisement is laid aside, and the last hearty admonition from the hidden and not-so-hidden persuaders dies out upon the quivering air, the great majority of us in this country are still creative non-conformists—skeptical and down-to-earth and, for the most part, level-headed; quite confused by what we face and sometimes quite scared by it, but on the whole valiant and sound, possessed of a goodly land and a heritage that warrants hope.
Beneath the mush and the organized hogwash, beneath the phony pretensions and the phony hopes with which too many in influential positions try to hide from the problems of our world instead of facing up to them honestly and unafraid, there is still, I think, a great vigor and a great vitality and a great decency and a great courage, both of purpose and, quite often, of achievement.
It is this essentially that I, and I would hope an increasing number of my fellow authors, should like to record, in whatever ways I may have the ability, when all else is said and done—that here is a Republic, not perfect yet with great decencies; not infallible, yet with great strengths; not all-knowing, yet with a kind intention and a brave heart.
I should like to so write about America that my contemporaries can say, “Yes, we see ourselves” and in a latter day if men happen to come across it, they may say to one another, “This is how it was—in that country—in that time.”
I find, in the response I am receiving to Advise and Consent, a great need for this among the American people. I think perhaps it may herald the beginning of a new approach to the country on the part of at least some of her writers. I would hope so, certainly, for she has troubles enough without the added burden of attacks by her own.
America does not need the rose-colored approach; she needs only the honest approach. Given that, it seems to me, there need be no fears for her future.
Thank you so much.
—Allen Drury
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