Writings from the New Yorker 1925-1976 Read Online Free PDF Page B

make change.
    ACCREDITED WRITERS?
    12/11/48
    BEFORE A BOOK CAN BE PUBLISHED in Czechoslovakia, the publisher must submit an outline of it to the government for approval. Accompanying the outline must be written opinions of “responsible literary critics, scientists, or writers.” (We are quoting from a dispatch to the Times.) The question of who is a responsible critic or writer comes up in every country, of course. It must have come up here when the Algonquin Hotel advertised special weekend rates for “accredited writers.” We often used to wonder just how the Algonquin arrived at the answer to the fascinating question of who is an accredited writer, and whether the desk clerk required of an applicant a rough draft of an impending novel. It seems to us that the Czech government is going to be in a spot, too. No true critic or writer is “responsible” in the political sense which this smelly edict implies, and in order to get the kind of censorship the government obviously wants, the government will need to go a step further and require that the critic himself be certified by a responsible party, and then a step beyond that and require that the responsible party be vouched for. This leads to infinity, and to no books. Which is probably the goal of the Czech government.
    The matter of who is, and who isn’t, a responsible writer or scientist reminds us of the famous phrase in Marxist doctrine—the phrase that is often quoted and that has won many people to Communism as a theory of life: “From each according to his ability; to each according to his needs.” Even after you have contemplated the sheer beauty of this concept, you are left holding the sheer problem of accreditation: who is needy, who is able? Again the desk clerk looms—a shadowy man. And be-hind the clerk another clerk, for an accreditation checkup. And so it goes. Who shall be the man who has the authority to establish our innermost need, who shall be the one to approve the standard of achievement of which we are capable? Perhaps, as democracy assumes, every man is a writer, every man wholly needy, every man capable of unimaginable deeds. It isn’t as beautiful to the ear as the Marxian phrase, maybe, but there’s an idea there somewhere.
    SATIRE ON DEMAND
    1/8/49
    ONE OF OUR CONTEMPORARIES , the Russian humor magazine called Crocodile, has been under fire lately. Crocodile got word from Higher Up that it would have to improve, would have to bear down harder on “the vestiges of capitalism in the consciousness of the people.” This directive, according to the Associated Press, came straight from the Central Committee and was unusual only for its admission that there were any such vestiges. Crocodile was instructed to gird on its satiric pen and by “the weapons of satire to expose the thieves of public property, grafters, bureaucrats . . .” It has never been our good fortune to observe a controlled-press satirist who is under instructions from his government to get funnier, but it is a sight we’d gladly crawl under a curtain to see. A person really flowers as a satirist when he first slips out of control, and a working satirist (of whom there are woefully few in any country) careens as wildly as a car with no brakes. To turn out an acceptable pasquinade is probably unthinkable under controlled conditions, for the spirit of satire is the spirit of independence. Apparently the Russian committee anticipates difficulties in stepping up humor and satire by decree. Crocodile used to be a weekly. From now on it will appear only every ten days. Three extra days each issue, for straining.
    THE THUD OF IDEAS
    9/23/50
    AMERICANS ARE WILLING to go to enormous trouble and expense defending their principles with arms, very little trouble and expense advocating them with words. Temperamentally we are ready to die for certain principles (or, in the case of overripe adults, send youngsters to die),