There Are Left the MountainsrnAmerican Writers and the Perishing RepubHcrnby Bill KauffmanrnArchibald MacLeish—”macarchibald maclapdog macleish,”rne.e. cummings dubbed him—wondered, from hisrnsinecure as Librarian of Congress in 1940, why “the writers ofrnour generation in America” had such a provincial indifferencernto the war in Europe. They seemed, in Bernard De Voto’srnphrase, more interested in Paris, Illinois, than in Paris, France.rnThe reaction to this poetaster’s question—indeed, the factrnthat it was asked at all—tells us much about the lost Americarnof prewar days. MacLeish was jeered by his peers and taken torntask by his more talented and “acutely isolationist” coeval EdmundrnWilson, who harrumphed that MacLeish “has a goodrndeal to say about liberty . . . but he makes it perfectly plain thatrnhe believes that, as a matter of policy, certain kinds of dissentientrnwriters should be discouraged from expressing theirrnideas.”rnThis has ever been true, as those who chorus loudest in thernpews of Democracy jam the decapitated heads of heretics inrnthe sacristy, but in Wilson’s day the dissentients had moxiernenough to protest. I am reminded of a reporter who traveled recentlyrnto Wilson’s hometown of Talcottville, New York. Thernvisitor asked the locals for their recollections of the great man;rntypical was the woman who remembered, as a girl, walkingrnhome from school past Wilson’s Old Stone House every day,rnand every day a stout stuttering drunk would emerge onto thernporch to holler “G-g-g-get the hell out of here!” This is curmudgeonlinessrnbeyond the call of duty, but the proprietaryrnprinciple underlying Wilson’s bile is valuable: the lawn (andrnthis country) belonged to him, and he would not allow inter-rnBill Kauffman is author of the novel Every Man a King.rnlopers to defile it.rnEdmund Wilson had plenty of company. Citizens of thernUnited States have accepted the myth that American writers—rnmake that all persons of intelligence and worth—had rallied tornthe banner of Mars by 1940. Oh, there were exceptions, wernsuppose—for instance the insane Jew-baiting fascist EzrarnPound or the Germanophile poet George Sylvester Viereck—rnbut they merely confirm the rule. In fact, the MacLeishes werernoutnumbered (and outwritten) by the Wilsons, and for everyrnEdna St. Vincent Millay versifying the magnificence of massrnslaughter there was a Robinson Jeffers issuing dark warningsrnthat war carried the pod of the empire that would replace ourrnperishing Republic. Indeed, it is useful to think of Jeffers andrnWilson and company as the men fighting to stay human inrnDon Siegel’s classic Invasion of the Body Snatchers. If they arernsometimes hysterical, so was Wilson’s brother-in-law KevinrnMcCarthy, whose idyllic Santa Mira was remade as thoroughlyrnas our America.rnAmerican writers were once citizens of the Republic hrst andrnforemost, and they participated in the nation’s governance asrnsuch. The best were by and large Jeffersonians: figures as disparaternas Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, and WaltrnWhitman called themselves “Loco Focos,” the libertarianrnpurists of the Jaeksonian era. The dominant political coloringrnof American writers has been “petty-bourgeois anarchist,” inrnUrsula Le Guin’s self-description. You can trace a straight hnernand it connects the unlikeliest dots, from Emerson (“Massachusetts,rnin its heroic day, had no government—was an anarchy.rnEvery man stood on his own feet, was his own governor;rnand there was no breach of peace from Cape Cod to Mountrn16/CHRONICLESrnrnrn