Two years ago, I was on a moderated panel of writers for young people — this was in Charlotte — attended mainly by young readers, but also their parents, local writers, librarians, and all manner of interested parties. The final portion of the hour or so was a question and answer period, and a nervous woman, overlooked once or twice, but who clearly had a question to get out there, was finally called on. She stood and said, with a hint of zeal, “Do you think you bear a moral responsibility when you write for children?” If memory serves, she made it clear she was ready to continue her question in a statement of her belief that writers be held to a standard a little to the right of Jerry Falwell.

This was a loaded question, and not one I was expecting (where do you get your ideas?). The fellow sitting next to me, a graphic novelist and newcomer to the children’s arena, said, without comment, “Yes, I do,” or perhaps, “Yes, I certainly do.” I felt at once, thinking of the scotch we had shared earlier, that as a recent entry into the children’s writers field he probably decided to give the answer he knew was sought and not make waves. Fine. I was next and gave a meandering answer — something about the great number of issues out there that we, as writers, could address — but said basically the same thing: Uh-huh.

If I recall, I had at the time been reading some fiction that had something vaguely political about it, and it seemed to me that writing can carry a good deal of moral momentum with it. Think, for example, of Invisible Man or Native Son or Black Boy — works of art, all, and yet powerfully moving on a more-than-personal scale. Perhaps these things were running through my head. There was also the belief that we as moral people — and who would advertise himself as immoral? — cannot help but invest our writing with some sort of morality and that the writing could not help but pass this along to our readers. The issue is a huge one, and you can slice up the apple a dozen different ways, but isn’t the real question one of consciousness? Does the moral momentum have to exist with the artist’s collaboration? If it’s intended, does the work then become something other than art? Knotty issues for a late afternoon. But my answer was, finally, one that would have pleased the questioner, and I felt in equal measures a bit cowed and a bit all right. I left it at that.

I was surprised, however, as the question made its way down the dais (well, they were chairs, actually, set in a wide semi-circle on an auditorium stage). One writer said something completely noncommittal as regards her moral content. And this set the stage for one of us — a writer/illustrator — who stated outright, with as fierce an intent as our questioner, that the writer had no responsibility whatever other than to tell a good story. That is his single duty. If he fails at that, he should not be doing what he’s doing, and the marketplace will get rid of him soon enough. End of discussion. Next question, please.

I felt chastised. It was what I should have said. The guy was right. I completely believed that. Politicizing art destroys it; politicizing it utterly, destroys it utterly. Of course! In describing the artist’s relation to world, Walker Evans once said, “I don’t think an artist is directly able to alleviate the human condition. He’s very interested in revealing it [italics, his, apparently].” Well, yeah. William Faulkner, perhaps a greater authority, said the writer must leave “no room in his workshop for anything but the old verities and truths of the heart, the old universal truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed — love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice.” And I bow.

Clearly, there is a subject here that refuses to be exhausted. There are statements to be made on both sides. Is Guernica a study in composition and shape and color, or does it contain in its brush strokes moral outrage at the killing of civilians by fascism? What is PEN International saying when it mounts conferences to bring to light the cases of imprisoned writers? What is Amnesty International doing when it publishes limited editions of poets and novelists? Or, in fact, are artists like the photographer who takes a picture of an atrocity? He might have tossed his camera aside and stopped it, yes, but that’s not his job; that’s your job. There are all kinds of things to say about this. And maybe that’s the point of having a thinking mind. What do you think?

Recently, a book came into my workshop, The Collected Short Prose of James Agee, in which is included as engrossing a document as any I’ve found for quite a time. It’s Agee’s submission to the Guggenheim Foundation of his “Plans for Work: October 1937.” This is a wide-ranging descriptive list of nearly fifty projects that, as he states, “I am working on, or am interested to try, or expect to return to . . . ”

Among the jewels is one described as “An Alabama Record.” Ha! We know what that became (though Agee didn’t at the time). Another is for a commentary on Shakespeare in which he mentions a “good example” of a successful treatment of Marlowe’s Faustus staged by Orson Welles. Welles was known at this time, prior to his infamous War of the Worlds radio broadcast of 1938, as a stage actor, director, and producer for the Federal Theatre Project, and the founder of the Mercury Theater.

What struck me immediately is a round of connections.

Turner Classic Movies recently ran a 1932 film called The Cabin in the Cotton, a dreadful title (from the novel by Henry Harrison Kroll, the man responsible for the dreadful title) for a surprisingly interesting story about a young (?) man (Richard Barthelmess, in a fist-clenching performance utilizing an astoundingly narrow range of silent-film grimaces) pursuing a haphazard education while caught between his sharecropping family (and rustic sweetheart) and the high (again, I must ask: ?) class world of the plantation owner and his floozie daughter (played by a springy, cute Bette Davis in funky little outfits, in a role ever after mimicked by drag stars because of her one great line: “Ah’d like to kiss ya, but ah jest washed ma hair” — catch the scene on youtube, if you dare).

Here is the connection; slight, perhaps, but fascinating to me. The film is about sharecroppers (no state is mentioned, though at one point Madge Norwood (slender Bette) mentions that she’s hired a jazz band for her party and it’s “coming up from Memphis,” although, of course, “up” could, rurally speaking, just as easily mean “down;” so we could be in Tennessee, Georgia, or Mississippi. Be that as it may, the screenplay was penned by Paul Green, who later collaborates with Orson Welles in adapting novels for the stage (famously, Native Son by Richard Wright). Further, the actual information about sharecropping is liberally dispensed (the novel was a bit of a tract, I hear) and truthful, and the terminology (the annual “settle” of accounts), and the basic situation, wherein the farmer was always in debt to the planter, always kept uneducated, and ever patronized, are completely on target, according to what we know about the system.

And we know about the sharecropping system in large part (these days) from Agee’s famous collaboration with Walker Evans, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, the “Alabama Record” he lists in his Guggenheim application. It’s just that round of person to person, work to work, collaboration to collaboration, art to art that is so fascinating. To me.

One more thing. According to Laurence Bergreen, Agee’s biographer, “Reading Richard Wright’s autobiographical novel Black Boy, Agee identified so intensely with the protagonist that he considered himself more of a black than a white Southerner . . . ” A situation, we might add, that makes for much of the creative tension of Famous Men.

And, finally, another item on Agee’s Guggenheim list is “A true account of a jazz band”. But I’ll let it go now; the “connections” game risks becoming silly.

On one of the many rainy days last week I headed up to the University of Connecticut to do some newspaper research for a book. Turns out, after consulting online catalogs and calling a couple reference librarians (including those at Bridgeport Public and the Sterling library at Yale), that UConn’s is the only library in the state with certain holdings. So I made the familiar trip, got to the junction of 195 and 44, known happily in my day as “Four Corners,” a little before 10am, and experienced the first shock of the day. My favorite college restaurant, Kathy John’s, has closed its doors. And windows. And everything else. You know you’re in trouble when the only car in the lot is an abandoned wreck. The “no trespassing” signs look even more ominous. But it’s all over when you read the cardboard sign taped to the door: “Sorry . . . ”

A tradition gone into the long good night.

Stopped at the Co-op, which in its previous incarnation, I used to work for; they seem to have gotten over it. Picked up a book for old times’ sake. Feasted on yogurt muffin (moist) and coffee (ditto). Headed into the main library; all by eleven.

Microfilm on third floor, readers on first floor. You just go up, collect the goods, and set yourself up at a reader station. Printing? Alas, no. The library has ordered new reader/printers and won’t reorder the supply of toner for the current printers. Well, we’re in summer session now, and it’s a minor inconvenience in these economic waters. We’re happy just to have the film of old newspapers.

Old newspapers! The ones I needed to consult were from 1959, and you’ll not be surprised to hear that on every single page was at least one story — buried over the decades to unknowing — worth retelling, a la our century. It’s harsh to realize how much is lost to the great ocean of the past that could, if retained, help us do a little better than we’re doing. I haven’t the time to go into specifics here — let’s talk after the book is under contract — but in primary documents, the nuances of history softened and dulled by regurgitation and general public awareness are seen in the original to be sharp, vital, and immediate.

Things being the way they are, the screen between a reader and film and the awkward mechanism used to make that film readable will have to suffice; but how much more present would the past seem if you were able to hold fifty-year-old papers in your hands, to feel the life in that crinkled texture? Someday, perhaps. Not on this project.

It may seem obvious, but isn’t the eloquence of human thought a product not of conversation, but of the printed word? In discussing literacy, I suppose I simply want to acknowledge that a mind will be able to express itself in subtlety only if its owner learns subtlety of expression, and that quality can most effectively be learned by reading it on the page.

It’s that old thing: I write to know what I think (who’s responsible for that nugget?). Reading is how we learn to express the depth and shading and nuance of sophisticated thought. Nearing the end of his life and looking over his work, John Cheever said, “A page of good prose remains invincible.”

You can live and die in that statement, and I’m sure a part of each writer does. But the subtleties we have to employ in managing our cities, our country, and the relationships of global cultures, as well our families and ourselves, are nurtured by just such a thing: a page of good prose. Or a poem. Or a novel. Or a biography, history, essay, or letter. Considered words, written in reflection and read in meditation. The fineness of the written word — and, surely, it’s not all fine, but the reader’s discernment is part of the process of developing eloquent thought — contributes to the refinement of its reader’s thinking mind.

The reflected thought, contemplated, absorbed.

That’s all.