THE STRANGEST things can set Norman Podhoretz off. It's enough that he gets angry with women for having ambitions higher than cooking for their husbands, or the civil rights movement for not understanding his "Negro problem." But now, Podhoretz is angry with someone you'd think he'd be partial to--a Jewish poet who escaped the evils of Stalin.

Awarded the Nobel prize for literature this year, Jospeh Brodsky delivered a Nobel address devoted to declaring the importance of literature. Brodksy put forth the following suggestion:

... there is no doubt in my mind that, had we been choosing our leaders on the basis of their reading experience and not their political programs, there would be much less grief on earth. It seems to me that a political master of our fates should be asked, first of all, not about how he imagines the course of our foreign policy, but about his attitude towards Stendhal, Dickens, Dostoyevski.

The sentiment was sufficiently unsettling to provoke the editor of Commentary to retaliate in his syndicated newspaper column. In the process, Podhoretz showed himself incapable of relating to the main point of Brodsky's lecture--that there is an ideal higher than the democratic state.

Podhoretz began by comparing Brodsky's claims to "the most notorious American example of professional deformation in the realm of politics--Charles Wilson's "What's good for the country is good for General Motors and vice versa." He argues that like Wilson, "Brodsky's statement attributes a wildly disproportionate role to his own field of endeavor."

LITERATURE is after all just "a field of endeavor," not at all different from the business world or the journalistic world. Very few people ever read poetry, while a whole lot of people drive cars, ergo General Motors is a more important "field of endeavor" than literature.

Such an equation misses Brodsky's main point that the production and consumption of literature is not simply a task, but rather something which strikes at the heart of what it is to be human, touching something we might call character. Says Brodsky:

Being the most ancient as well as the most literal form of private enterprise, it fosters in a man, knowingly or unwittingly, a sense of his uniqueness, of individuality, of separateness--thus turning him from a social animal into an autonomous "I."

Here is the source of Podhoretz's ire. Poets like Brodsky belong to that group of people who have little time for such political questions as the value of capitalism, and are interested in something more intangible, more transcendent, such as the condition of the human imagination.

Thus, if literature were important to politics what would be the fate of the good ole' American values of freedom and democracy? American capitalism has provided a great many people with both money and liberty, so who's a poet to argue.

For Podhoretz, since communists as surely as fascists can write, it's better to view literature as something which provides a variety of tame and nebulous things such as enjoyment and pleasure. Quite simply, after a good day's work at the office, Podhoretz instructs, go home and read a book. You'll enjoy it.

Here is a case of an enemy of totalitarianism failing to listen to someone who's lived under it. The great evil of the Soviet Union or the Third Reich is its ability to stamp out the humanity of humans. Brodksy knows this evil, having lived in a world where the private realm is quite completely controlled by the state.

As a result he can write that:

Every new aesthetic reality makes one's experience even more private; and this kind of privacy, assuming at times the guise of literary (or some other) taste, can in itself turn out to be, if not a guarantee, then a form of defense, against enslavement. For a man with taste, particulalry with literary taste, is less susceptible to the refrains and the rhythmical incantations peculiar to any vision of political demogogy.

HAVING seen the state at its most evil, he has looked into its essence, such that no state, no matter how benign can be thought of as a defense against the autonomy of the soul. Brodsky implores us to care about literature because it offers a refuge from the tyranny of the state by offering us ourselves.

"It is the people who should speak the language of literature: for literature transcends history, speaks of today and possibly tomorrow, while the state forever stands for yesterday," he writes.

In the age of the modern state, we must know not only which kind of state our leaders would prefer, but also what kind of people they are. Brodsky believes that a political leader's relationship to literature reveals his respect for the autonomy of individuals, and his understanding of the integrity of the human soul. Would it be too much to say that Brodsky could hope for no better confirmation of his point than that Ronald Reagan most enjoys the fiction of Louis L'amour, while Paul Simon prefers Richard Wright?