Like everyone else driving along Sunset Boulevard in Echo Park last year, I couldn’t help but notice the now-iconic Shepard Fairey “Hope” poster of candidate Barack Obama emblazoned 20 feet high on the side of a building near Dodger Stadium. As a piece of advocacy, it was tremendously effective – Obama the visionary, gazing bravely into the middle distance and the distant future – even if it did turn out to be a shameless rip-off of an Associated Press photograph.
That image is now once again front and center in the wake of the revelations that the National Endowment for the Arts has apparently been colluding with the White House’s Office of Public Engagement and the president’s United We Serve “call to action” to enlist sympathetic artists in the furtherance of the administration’s political goals, in defiance of tradition and perhaps, as George Will has suggested, the law. Having served myself on both the NEA’s Opera-Music Theater and Oversight panels in 1985, I find this news to be profoundly depressing.
The NEA panels I sat on, under the leadership of Patrick Smith, were a collection of some of the finest minds in American theatrical arts at the time, including Jonathan Tunick, the orchestrator and arranger of Sweeney Todd and many other Sondheim works; the late Ardis Krainik, director of the Chicago Lyric Opera; and avant-garde writer and director Lee Breuer (The Warrior Ant). At no time was anybody’s politics discussed, nor the politics of the creators of any of the works under consideration for support, including the creative team behind one of that season’s applicants, Nixon in China, by composer John Adams, librettist Alice Goodman and director Peter Sellars. We had our pitched battles (as a very vocal supporter of the Minimalists, I generally sided with the radicals) but they were about art, not politics. Hard as this may be to believe, at the height of the Reagan Administration, it never occurred to anybody to argue about the ideology of a work, as opposed to its quality.
But the image also causes me to flash back 23 years earlier, to the fateful month of April 1986. I had traveled to Moscow from New York via Paris, accompanying the great pianist Vladimir Horowitzon his historic return to Mother Russia, to write a cover story for Time Magazine. The Soviet Union in those days was chock-a-block with “heroic” posters of whichever fearless leader was in power (Russian premiers back then were dying at the rate of about one per year), and everywhere you went there were exhortations from the government too, essentially, get with the program. This was not my first experience at the intersection of art, politics and propaganda – that had come a year earlier, when I attended the re-opening of the Semper Opera House in Dresden on the 40th anniversary of the city’s destruction by British and American bombers and had to stand in minus 20 degree weather listening to Erich Honecker rant about the “Star Wars” missile-defense program before they let us in to hear Der Freischütz – but it turned out to be the most memorable, and instructive.
The day we arrived in the Soviet Union, we learned that the U.S., on President Reagan’s orders, had just bombed Libya in retaliation for the LaBelle disco bombing in West Berlin two weeks before, which had killed two American servicemen and wounded 200 other people, as well as for the Achille Lauro attack and the twin atrocities in the Rome and Vienna airports the previous Christmas. Needless to say, the KGB was not terribly welcoming from that point on, going so far has to cut the strings on the piano in Spaso House, the residence of the American ambassador (Arthur Hartman at the time) to prevent Horowitz from practicing. Things only got worse: there was a near-riot on the day of the official Moscow concert and, on the weekend of the Leningrad concert, Chernobyl blew up. Not that anybody told us: the first I heard of it was two days later, on Irish radio, as I was driving up to my ancestral home in County Clare from Shannon Airport. You can’t ask for a more fun-filled two weeks in the U.S.S.R. than that.
Still, another memory has stayed with me, that of a surrealistic interview I conducted at the Soviet Composer’s Union in Moscow with the union’s Secretary, Tikhon Khrennikov, who was also a member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party. At the appointed hour, I was ushered along with my KGB translator (they had refused to let me bring my own translator) into a conference room, whose walls were adorned with large photographs of Shostakovich, Prokofiev, and Mayaskovsky. The pretext for the interview was Khrennikov’s scheduled appearance in Houston later in the year, but really I just wanted to see the fabulous monster in the flesh. What, I wondered, would the man who had sold his soul for political and career advancement look like?
The door opened and in strode Khrennikov, accompanied by half a dozen associates, one of whom had a serious dueling scar down the side of his face. Tikhon the Great was the very embodiment of the word “apparatchik,” a short, bullet-headed Slav who had fought his way to the top by spectacularly selling out his betters in the infamous Resolution of 1948. Enthusiastically signing on to Zhdanov’s decree that Soviet music should reflect and celebrate Soviet society and political aims, Khrennikov led the notorious assault on… Shostakovich, Prokofiev, Mayaskovsky and many others who had fallen into Stalin’s disfavor. (He lasted as Secretary of the Composer’s Union until the dissolution of his country in 1991, and died in 2007 at the age of 94.) “Enough of these symphonic diaries, these pseudo-philosophic symphonies hiding behind their allegedly profound thoughts and tedious self-analysis,” thundered Khrennikov at the time. “Armed with clear party directives, we will stop all manifestations of formalism and popular decadence.”
After a few warm-up questions, with Khrennikov sitting directly across from me, I got into it. “Mr. Khrennikov,” I said, “we are here in a room with photographs of some of the greatest Soviet composers of the 20th century.” I gestured around at Dmitri, Serge, and the others as Khrennikov beamed. “So how do you have the gall to sit here under their gaze, knowing that you personally tried to ruin their careers and nearly got them killed?” My translator blanched, asked the question and then slunk under the table. Scarface shuffled in his seat, ready to take me down if necessary. The others fidgeted and tried to keep a straight face. Khrennikov did a slow boil, then leaped to his feet and started pounding the table in a pretty fair imitation of Nikita Khrushchev. “I don’t see why I have to be insulted with this kind of rude question!” he foamed. “How dare you insult the Secretary of the Union of Soviet Composers?” Etc., blah, etc.
I let the steam evaporate, then replied: “Because, Mr. Secretary, when you arrive in Houston, your role in the Resolution of 1948 is the first thing the American reporters are going to ask you about, and I wanted you to be prepared.”
For a moment, nobody said anything. Khrennikov stared at me a beat or two. Then, slowly, a big smile spread across his face as he reached across the table to embrace me in a Russian bear hug. From that moment on, we were BFFs: I got invited to lunch the next day at the Union, and later in the week sat with Khrennikov and his wife in his box while we watched one of his operas. Until I left for Leningrad, I couldn’t get rid of him.
Well, as Barbara Stanwyck’s Lily Powers says to her revolting old man in Baby Face, “that’s my tough luck.” But the larger issue remains: what is the role of the artist in society? In the West, there has been art on political subjects as long as there’s been art: Monteverdi’s The Coronation of Poppea, Mozart’s La clemenza di Tito, Verdi’s Rigoletto immediately spring to mind, and that’s just operas before 1900: don’t even ask about Shostakovich’s masterpiece, Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, which brought him a thinly veiled death threat from Stalin in the pages of Pravda: “Muddle instead of Music.”
But there’s a difference between those great works (Poppea is an amoral bitch, the usurper Titus turns out to be a good guy after all, the Duke of Mantua evades the consequences of his relentless womanizing) and advocating a particular political point of view. True, the great chorus “Va’ pensiero” from Nabucco (sung by the Chorus of Hebrew Slaves in Babylon after the destruction of the First Temple in Jerusalem) later became the anthem of Italian revolution and unification, but in 1842 Verdi let his audience draw its own conclusions, without scrawling the letters HOPE in day-glo colors across the poster.
In the transcripts released today, Nell Abernathy, director of Outreach for United We Serve says: “But our goal here has really been to figure out how to implement the great vision that Buffy [not the Vampire Slayer, but Buffy Wicks, of the Office of Public Engagement] and the president have about increasing civic participation across the nation.” Increasing civic participation, however, is not the function of art, at least as I have understood and studied it during a career that’s included 25 years as a journalist, a novelist, a college professor, and a screenwriter. For artists are not revolutionaries but, in the truest sense of the word, reactionaries – reacting to the social injustices of the times (Dickens, Bleak House), to society’s rapidly changing intellectual and moral climate (Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain) and, when necessary, to a monstrous tyranny (Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago) that sucks the life out of man and relegates him to the status of a desperate animal. And that’s just the novelists.
Which is why, no matter what an artist’s ideology, the politicization of art must be resisted. I have written novels about a NYPD detective and a dead KGB agent (Exchange Alley), a Jewish speakeasy owner turned resistance hero (As Time Goes By, the sequel to Casablanca), a murderous Irish Prohibition gangster (And All the Saints), and an alienated cipher of an NSA agent code-named Devlin (Hostile Intent), who might as well be named Ishmael. Hell, I’ve even co-written, with the great Gail Parent, a Disney TV movie about a spoiled little Greenwich Village girl, played by Hilary Duff, who joins an Army JROTC drill team and learns the meaning of loss and, thus, of life (Cadet Kelly). Until High School Musical, it was their highest-rated program of all time. But I defy you to tell, from the written evidence alone, what my politics are. As JFK said, “art is not a form of propaganda; it is a form of truth.'”
And that’s the way it should be. For – in the Soviet Union, East Germany, Hungary and elsewhere between the years 1985 and 1991 – I’ve seen what happens when an artist sells his soul, not for a mess of pottage, but for a government grant. The scariest words in the English language used to be, “We’re from the government, and we’re here to help.” But now, after hearing the recently “reassigned” NEA communications director Yosi Sergant, on the Aug. 10 tapes, there’s something even scarier. Something that ought to send shivers down the spines of any true artist who prizes vision, taste, individualism and integrity. Quoth Yosi:
“Welcome to your government.”