Host: Welcome to On the Line, I’m Eric Felten. Better understanding among peoples is essential to world peace, and some of the most effective contacts between countries are conducted not by professional diplomats, but by ordinary citizens: businesspeople, educators, artists, writers, even tourists. The United States sponsors many programs to bring visitors to the U-S and to send Americans abroad. And through its embassies around the world, the U-S provides a wealth of information about life in America and American values to people in other countries. Recently, the U-S State Department began distributing a booklet of essays on the experience of being a writer in America. The fifteen contributors include four winners of the Pulitzer Prize. Many of the writers will be traveling to various countries to speak about their craft. They write about America as a land of freedom and opportunity, and also, for some at times, a place of hardship. A land where tolerance is highly valued, but where people and institutions have not always lived up to that high ideal. Joining us to talk about Writers on America are Mark Jacobs, an author who contributed an essay to the new booklet; George Clack, director of the Office of Print Publications at the U-S State Department; and Joseph Bottum, Books and Arts editor of the Weekly Standard Magazine. Welcome and thanks for joining us today. George Clack, what does the U-S State Department hope to achieve with the distribution of this booklet?

Clack: I think the number one thing for me would be to get foreign audiences talking about the United States in positive ways and in fairly thoughtful ways. I think after September 11th, a number of us realized that American values that we as Americans had pretty much understood without thinking about at all, were things that were not necessarily well understood overseas. I think there’s a sense in which this booklet grows out of an effort to try to describe, explain, elaborate on fundamental American values that Americans often take for granted.

Host: Mark Jacobs, do fundamental American values come through in this or is it more about writers and their experience writing?

Jacobs: I think, frankly, that they come through loud and clear. What’s remarkable to me about the collection of essays in the book is the fact that they are as diverse as they are and yet manage somehow to convey a uniquely American sensibility, no matter who the writer is or where he or she comes from.

Host: How would you describe that sensibility?

Jacobs: A sense of understanding oneself as an American citizen. Basically what we asked writers to do was to reflect in an essay on any aspect of how being an American or America itself had influenced his or her writing. And so, I think we got fifteen really disparate and different takes on that, which I think is part of the American story about diversity. I served as a foreign service officer in a number of embassies over the years and was involved in probably literally hundreds of conversations about American identity. People are interested in who we are overseas and I think this book will make a contribution to kind of sparking that conversation now, particularly in these difficult days.

Host: Jody Bottum, the idea that literature and cultural exchange can promote understanding and good will. Literature doesn’t always promote good will or good feelings. Salman Rushdie found that out.

Bottum: Yes. And others have found it out before him. That’s certainly true. And we make an unfair demand if we somehow insist that literature have this ameliorative value out there and you know, that all American literature ought to make America look good abroad is obviously an unfair demand to be placed on literature. It is not, of course -- by the publication of this book they’re not demanding that all literature do that. They were looking for authors, it seems to me, and quite successfully in a certain light, finding authors who could present the American experience in a way that would be intelligible to non-Americans and both seem attractive where it ought to be and less attractive where it ought not to be.

Host: And do you think that that experience came through? How would you describe the experience as it is revealed through this booklet?

Bottum: One part of the American experience came through very loud and clear here, which was the immigrant experience or the experience of belonging to a group of people who had come to America either in that initial generation or some generations before. There was a strong sense here -- and perhaps that’s because it was pitched for a foreign audience or audiences -- there’s a strong sense through these pieces, not universally, some of them were quite good, Mark Jacobs of course; Richard Ford, I’m happy to say -- Richard Ford and I have had some disputes over the years in reviews I’ve written of his books -- this is a nice little essay from him about the American experience. But overwhelmingly, these were essays about: “I’m a Latvian, living in America.” “I’ve come to America from the Caribbean.” “I belong to an American Indian group.” And they were experiences about how America is tolerant and intolerant, where America is at its best and where it’s not. That’s a definitive part of the American experience, but of course, it doesn’t exhaust the American experience by any means. And it is not, I think, entirely what one ought to present to a foreign audience, because there’s also the experience of being here in the United States and not having the experience of belonging to, being the child of Latvian immigrants, for instance.

Host: Mark Jacobs, let’s talk a little bit about the essay that you contributed and what were you trying to get across in your essay and what was it about?

Jacobs: I think my experience among the fifteen writers was unique in the sense that I have spent a good portion of my adult life living in foreign cultures. And that has shaped my sense of history. It certainly has shaped my writing profoundly. What I was trying to get across in my essay was the overwhelming positive effects the life-long attempt to come to terms with foreign cultures and societies has done for me personally and as a writer.

Host: And is this a large strain in American fiction or is this something that is a small part of American writing?

Jacobs: It’s a chunk of American writing. I don’t know how to give it a percentage value. I think it’s an interesting chunk, however large it is. There’s a school of thought that says -- there’s a cohering body of work around the experience and the writing of people who have gone out in the world as Peace Corps volunteers. And attempted to come to terms in their fiction with that experience. And as a Peace Corps volunteer, I can sort of testify to that. I find that compelling. I think there are quite a large number of people who write based on that experience.

Host: Let’s talk just a little bit, Mr. Clark, about the nuts and bolts of how this is being distributed. How do people get their hands on this booklet and how is it being distributed around the world? Clark: Basically, it’s distributed through U-S embassies. They order copies of the booklet and then, each embassy would set up a sort of event that it would like to have. A lot of times it might be a reading by a writer at which copies of the book would be handed out. Or if the writer doesn’t happen to be touring, they might distribute them to universities for American studies teaching classes, that kind of thing.

Host: And if someone wanted to get the booklet, they would contact the U-S embassy.

Clack: That’s right. Everything we do is distributed through the U-S embassy, so there’s no point in trying to reach any central number or address here in Washington to get the book. You can look at it electronically on our internet web site, but you can’t get the print copy except by going to your local U.S. embassy.

Host: Jody Bottum, let’s talk a little bit about the broader notion of literature reflecting a given culture, reflecting a given society. Would you say that you can know England through the work of Evelyn Waugh or Russia through [Fyodor] Dostoevsky. Is there any way that you really learn about a culture through the work of its writers or do you learn about the creative art of the given author more than you learn about the given culture?

Bottum: Well, I mean I think we have to distinguish species of writing. There’s one thing, I think, that lyric poetry would do, which would be different from what a novel would try to do. A classic Victorian novel would try to kind of expose you to alternate lives, for instance. And you’re immerged into this device, for instance, with Moby Dick, where you have, you know, a great spiritual, metaphysical expression being given from a nation -- not necessarily to the nation, right? Or that this is somehow in Moby Dick the whale is a symbol of America -- rather that, you know there’s this coming out of America, here is this huge synthesis which somehow the very fact of represents it. Now, to some degree, you do have to travel abroad. [Rudyard] Kipling asks, “What do they know of England who only England know?” What do you know of America if you haven’t gone abroad and then come back to see some of it. That’s a legitimate theme, it seems to me. One of the things that’s thin in these essays is the big spiritual picture of America. There’s a lot of quoting of [Walt] Whitman, but we don’t get actually writers who are going to try and give big spiritual expressions of this nation the way Whitman himself did. We don’t have anyone trying to do in one of these essays now -- perhaps you couldn’t do it in an essay this short -- what [Herman] Melville did with Moby Dick. There is some leaving out, I think, of another chunk of American literature, line of American literature, which looks back to the Pilgrims, to the Puritans as a kind of founding American experience into which we all, wherever we subsequently came from, have to associate ourselves [with], learn about, try and become part of. Else, America as an idea, America as a spiritual idea, as a metaphysical idea, as the Platonic ideal of America is going to be inaccessible to us. And few of the writers take that line. And it is one of the legitimate things that literature does and ought to do.

Jacobs: I think you’re right on target there. I do think the essay by the poet Robert Creeley gets at that. I think he understands himself to be in that very uniquely American tradition that you just captured and maybe one or two of the other essays –- perhaps the [Robert] Pinsky essay -- gets at it a bit, but Creeley stands out in my mind there.

Clack: Yes, I was going to say, I’m not sure I entirely disagree. Within the limits of this essay form which we have here, which is, the assignment is in what sense do you see yourself as an American writer, I think there are a couple of people, and I would site some different names. Julia Alverez breaks into poetry at one point. Pinsky’s essay is sort of like a prose poem throughout. Charles Johnson’s essay about his ancestors in the United States and the sense of opportunity they experienced -- there is this what I’d call Whitman-esque kind of exultant stream that breaks through every now and then into some of these essays. Other people approached the assignment quite differently.

Host: Mark Jacobs, let me ask you a little bit about, in your experience abroad, how much of people’s impression of the United States comes from their experience of American literature? How much do people get a sense of the U-S from having read Mark Twain, or having read Raymond Chandler, and how does that affect their perspective on the U-S?

Jacobs: Well, in terms of sheer numbers, probably a relatively small proportion, I would say. But certainly an overwhelming proportion in all of the countries I served in -- and that’s a fairly broad spectrum of societies -- get their notions of America from American popular culture, the movies, etc. And that, in fact, I think is one of the grand things about this book is that it’s not pop culture. It kind of confounds people’s, non-American’s expectations about who we are and what we’re all about, in a very healthy way. And something George said at one point in this process, I think made a lot of sense. We hope this book will serve as kind of a stepping off point for conversations with people that people in our embassies deal with.

Host: Jody Bottum, how does the perception of America through it’s literature contrast with how people perceive America when they get that impression from other media, be it television shows, if they’re watching reruns of “Baywatch” or violent movies or violent rap music, how does that interact?

Bottum: You know, I once took a slow plane to Rio de Janeiro. I flew from New York to Rio and I was hours and hours and hours on the plane during which they showed perpetual reruns of a television program called “Three’s Company.” And I thought, “twelve hours of Three’s Company.” [laughter] I thought, “Oh my goodness. What do they think of America? This is the presentation of America.” Now, we have to contrast that, I think, with a high culture which is perceived by much of middle America, whether rightly or wrongly, is perceived by much of middle America to be anti-American, that America’s own high culture has to some degree, particularly in writing, turned against the very kind of American ideals that we were speaking of a few minutes ago. And one of the things that is nice about this is some proof that it isn't true. Or at least that you can call upon the mandarins [leaders] of high literary culture to speak about America in ways, if they’re going to speak to foreigners, rather than have it be the family quarrel of what we say to one another, but speak to people outside the family, and you find out, that, in fact, they have very positive things to say about America. You spoke of confounding the popular conception. It seems to me if there is a purpose in confounding, that’s exactly what it is and it’s entirely admirable.

Host: Were you surprised, George Clack, by the response you got in the essays you got from the mandarins of American letters, as Jody Bottum puts it?

Clack: I wouldn’t overstate it, but yes, a little bit. You have to understand this is the product of a particular time and place. Mark sent me an e-mail in which we discussed this idea on October 1st. That was after September 11th, 2001. So we were calling writers to do these commissions pretty much through the months of October and November, and the only word I could use to describe the response, and this really surprised me, would be the word patriotism. Many of these writers are what you would call “high culture” writers. But, as a group, they were very willing to participate in this exercise. They were willing to give it their best effort. They were willing to give us fairly sophisticated essays. Nobody said to us “No, you are a government propaganda operation; therefore, I as a writer will not be associated with you.” That surprised me a little bit.

Host: Mark Jacobs, were you surprised by the difference in what you received from what the writers might normally write? I mean, I think people reading some American fiction of the last ten years would think that everyone in America lives a life of quiet desperation. There tends to be this, you know, tendency among literary writers in America these days. But that’s not the strain that comes through in these essays.

Jacobs: Right. And I think we’ve touched on the reason why. This is, we’re talking to the world here. The writers are talking to people “outside the family,” to use your term. And so, in that sense, I’m not surprised and I’m delighted with the tone of address that has been adopted generally.

Host: Jody Bottum, what does the nature of American literature, not the content of it per se, but rather the nature of American literature say about America? Is there anything to be gleaned from that? For example, if you looked at Latin American literature, you wouldn’t think, well, there’s a greater preponderance of magical things happening in Latin America just because there’s a style of magical realism there. Is there a style and does it say something about America or is it merely a style?

Bottum: Well, we’ve passed through many styles in American literature. And up through the 1950s at least, there was some consistency even amongst those very, very different styles. I mean, what social realism was doing as a species of literature was quite different from what the romantics had been doing. I mean, you know, you can’t really throw [Nathaniel] Hawthorne and William Dean Howells and [Ernest] Hemmingway all into the same stew, except by external grounds and say they were all Americans. On the other hand, there may be something that unites them despite their disparate styles. And it’s something I can describe only with the via negativa, by thinking about what happens when you seem to begin to lack it in the 60s and the 70s and the 80s. There was a giving up, for instance, on the project somewhere in the 1970s of writing the great American novel. You just stopped seeing people who -- perhaps Norman Mailer was the last person who really thought in this old-fashioned way that you could really go out and write “the American novel” John Updike.

Host: What is “the American novel”?

Bottum: I don’t know. John Updike may be one of the last belongers to that. Saul Bellow is still alive and still writing. One of the results of that, though, [is that] people have sort of given up on the great idea that you could create this one work of art that would have somehow all explanation and all explanatory devices packed into it. This was the novel at its modernistic peak. It was going to have everything packed into it. It was going to give full psychological explanation, historical, national, metaphysical explanation, for the entire nation. The modernist novel was going to do this for us and somewhere along the line after Thomas Pynchon wrote Gravity’s Rainbow, everybody said, “Oh well. That can’t be done anymore.”

Jacobs: And I think one of the reasons why it’s not done in the way that you’re describing anymore is the fact that American society has profoundly changed. We have come to terms with and begun to learn to celebrate our diversity in a way that was not possible and that opens up the material with which to write to a much wider audience.

Bottum: It does, but there’s also a thinning out that I think we also have to acknowledge that happens at the same time. Yes, there’s a wider audience, but we don’t have, if you would have put this program together in say 1950, think of the writers you would have tried to get, the writers of weight and fame that you would have tried to get. Do any of the writers now on the list have anywhere near the weight of fame and name recognition that, you know, [John] Steinbeck, would have had at that time, that the writers you would have tried to get in 1950 would have had?

Host: Now is that because literature doesn’t have the same place in American culture these days?

Bottum: I think in part it’s the emergence of something good that Mark just pointed out. In part it is the decline of literature, I think, as a cultural force and its prestige has declined. And in part, these add up to mean we no longer have the same kind of magisterial figures that in 1950 you could have called upon. You would have called upon. Look at, you know, this style of thing. American embassies have been doing this kind of thing for many years. Look at the older versions of this and it would have been not the four Pulitzer Prize winners, but the four Nobel Prize winners whose names you would have gotten, or you would have made an effort to get to produce this kind of thing.

Clack: Well, if we have a volume two of this, I don’t rule out that we will seek some of the current giants. You know, we might call John Updike or Philip Roth. My only point really is that there are great writers living and at work today with those kinds of ambitions. We chose to, what I would say, take it one level down, to the Pulitzer Prize winner, from the sort of senior giants for this book. But I don’t rule out the giants.

Host: Well, I’m afraid that’s going to have to be the last word for today. That’s all the time we have. I’d like to thank my guests: Author Mark Jacobs, George Clack of the U-S State Department, and Joseph Bottum of the Weekly Standard magazine. Before we go, I’d like to invite our audience to send us your questions or comments. You can e-mail them to Ontheline@ibb.gov For On the Line, I’m Eric Felten.

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