Lois Cook was chairman of the Council of American Writers. It met in the drawing
room of her home on the Bowery. She was the only famous member. The rest
included a woman who never used capitals in her books, and a man who never used
commas; a youth who had written a thousand-page novel without a single letter o,
and another who wrote poems that neither rhymed nor scanned; a man with a beard
who was sophisticated and proved it by using every unprintable four-letter word
in every ten pages of his manuscript; a woman who imitated Lois Cook, except
that her style was less clear; when asked for explanations she stated that this
was the way life sounded to her, when broken by the prism of her
subconscious--"You know what a prism does to a ray of light, don’t you?" she
said. There was also a fierce young man known simply as Ike the Genius, though
nobody knew just what he had done, except that he talked about loving all of
life. The Council signed a declaration which stated that writers were servants
of the proletariat--but the statement did not sound as simple as that; it was
more involved and much longer. The declaration was sent to every newspaper in
the country. It was never published anywhere, except on page 32 of New
Frontiers. The Council of American Artists had, as chairman, a cadaverous youth
who painted what he saw in his nightly dreams.
