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wasn’t fully convinced that death was better than life. And now he was very contented, his only worry being that he might not get the electric chair. He’s afraid of that. That’s the only fear he has, that he might have to continue to live. I think that’s American literature
.
    —Algren and H. E. F. Donohue,
    from
Conversations with Nelson Algren
    1963 52

VIII.
    E VEN IF DREYFUS IS GUILTY,” CHEKHOV wrote to Suvorin, “Zola nevertheless is right, because the business of writers is not to accuse, not to persecute, but to side even with the guilty, once they are condemned and suffer punishment.… Even without them there are plenty of accusers, prosecutors and gendarmes, and in any event the role of Paul suits them better than that of Saul.” 53
    The function of the writer in the States as well is to champion the accused. There are already so many Junior G-men competing for posse duty that they’re paying their own expenses. “If you’re so innocent, what were you doing where the trouble was going on?” is the new Peglerism. 54 “If you’re not guilty, what are you doing in jail? You admit you don’t know the law—how can you claim to be innocent?”
    When Joseph K., in Kafka’s
The Trial
, charged by unidentified informants with a crime unnamed, is led at last out of the city by two strangers in top hats and propped against a boulder, one top hat draws a butcher’s knife and passes it, ceremonially, across K. to the second executioner—whoceremonially passes it back in an Alphonse-and-Gaston act. “K. now perceived clearly that he was supposed to seize the knife himself, as it traveled from hand to hand above him, and plunge it into his own breast.” 55
    “It may be no more than a coincidence,” Representative Busbey of Illinois comments on the suicide of a State Department employee, “that he worked in a government agency where Communists, Communist sympathizers and poor loyalty risks have plagued our security.… In view of the fact that Montgomery brought his own life to an end, we should not assume that he was innocent of such associations.”
    For so deeply now do we presume the accused to be guilty by the act of having been accused, that it seems to us no more than an act of atonement to turn the knife on himself. The accused who stubbornly declines this form of confession is now advised that either the answers he
would
have given would have incriminated him or else he would not have declined. Refusal to reply thus becomes an automatic confession of guilt. You’re damned if you do and you’re damned if you don’t. Leaving us with the implication that the men who devised the Fifth Amendment had in mind not the protection of the innocent, but of the guilty. How sick can you get?
    That this is the same sickness as that of Salem, as has been indicated: one wherein we attempt to exorcise our devils by destroying the dissenters or odd fish of the tribe.Our fear that Fort Worth and Oconomowoc are in imminent peril until Iceland and Morocco are armored like Fort Knox is not our true fear. If it were, the acquisition of great bases encircling the globe would greatly lessen it. But after five years of stretching our arms from the South Seas to the North Atlantic, we feel not a whit more secure than before. All we’ve done is to lose the trust of other peoples. We have gained a world, and lost it. When we were small, and beset by greater powers, we were less afraid. For the fear is not from monsters who walk abroad, but from monsters who walk in our own hearts.
    Like Faust, we have two souls within a single breast. We profess to believe that a people may guarantee its happiness by military might, and in the same breath disclaim authoritarianism. We say the great word Democracy, and in the same breath align ourselves with Spanish, Greek, Chinese and Korean Fascism. We wish to inherit the earth, and yet have not learned to govern ourselves. We boast of our strength, yet display our fear. At the same