Palm Sunday Read Online Free

was burned, and in many other communities too numerous to mention.
    “I have not said that our government is anti-nature and anti-God. I have said that it is non-nature and non-God, for very good reasons that could curl your hair.
    “Well—all good things must come to an end, they say. So American freedom will come to an end, too, sooner or later. How will it end? As all freedoms end: by the surrender of our destinies to the highest laws.
    “To return to my foolish analogy of playing cards: kingsand aces will be played. Nobody else will have anything higher than a queen.
    “There will be a struggle between those holding kings and aces. The struggle will not end, not that the rest of us will care much by then, until somebody plays the ace of spades. Nothing beats the ace of spades.
    “I thank you for your attention.”
    •   •   •
    I spoke at Gatsby’s house in the afternoon. When I got back to my own house in New York City, I wrote a letter to a friend in the Soviet Union, Felix Kuznetzov, a distinguished critic and teacher, and an officer in the Union of Writers of the USSR in Moscow. The date on the letter is the same as the date of the Sands Point oration.
    There was a time when I might have been half-bombed on booze when writing such a letter so late at night, a time when I might have reeked of mustard gas and roses as I punched the keys. But I don’t drink anymore. Never in my life have I written anything for publication while sozzled. But I certainly used to write a lot of letters that way.
    No more.
    Be that as it may, I was sober then and am sober now, and Felix Kuznetzov and I had become friends during the previous summer—at an ecumenical meeting in New York City, sponsored by the Charles F. Kettering Foundation, of American and Soviet literary persons, about ten to a side. The American delegation was headed by Norman Cousins, and included myself and Edward Albee and Arthur Miller and William Styron and John Updike. All of us had been published in the Soviet Union. I am almost entirely in print over there—with the exception
of Mother Night
and
Jailbird
. Few, if any, of the Soviet delegates had had anything published here, and so their work was unknown to us.
    We Americans were told by the Soviets that we shouldbe embarrassed that their country published so much of our work, and that we published so little of theirs. Our reply was that we would work to get more of them published over here, but that we felt, too, that the USSR could easily have put together a delegation whose works were admired and published here—and that we could easily have put together a delegation so unfamiliar to them that its members could have been sewer commissioners from Fresno, as far as anybody in the Soviet Union knew.
    Felix Kuznetzov and I got along very well, at any rate. I had him over to my house, and we sat in my garden out back and talked away the better part of an afternoon.
    But then, after everybody went home, there was some trouble in the Soviet Union about the publication of an outlaw magazine called
Metropole
. Most
of Metropole’s
writers and editors were young, impatient with the strictures placed on their writings by old poops. Nothing in
Metropole
, incidentally, was nearly as offensive as calling a chaplain’s assistant a “dumb motherfucker.” But the
Metropole
people were denounced, and the magazine was suppressed, and ways were discussed for making life harder for anyone associated with it.
    So Albee and Styron and Updike and I sent a cable to the Writers’ Union, saying that we thought it was wrong to penalize writers for what they wrote, no matter what they wrote. Felix Kuznetzov made an official reply on behalf of the union, giving the sense of a large meeting in which distinguished writer after distinguished writer testified that those who wrote for
Metropole
weren’t really writers, that they were pornographers and other sorts of disturbers of the peace, and so on. He asked that his