Men of Good Will

The P. E. N. Club is an international association of writers. Its members include most of the world's top poets, playwrights, editors, essayists and novelists. First international president was John Galsworthy. President now is Jules Romains. Founded 18 years ago in England, P. E. N. has spent 17 years of its decorous, softspoken, ineffectual existence passing futile resolutions and trying to make next year's meeting better than the last. Nations might rise or fall, populations perish, wars rage, but P. E. N. merely raised its penciled eyebrows, insisted that the writer's business is to write and that writing is a world by itself.

No trumpets sounded a change as 55 P. E. N. delegates from 29 countries forgathered at the New York World's Fair last fortnight to hold their three-day World Congress of Writers. Quietly and peaceably the writers filed into the egg-shaped, modernistic Hall of Music. But once inside, they threw down their pens with a bang heard in Berlin, Rome and Burgos, declared war to the last drop of ink on Dictators Hitler, Mussolini and Franco.

Strange indeed was such unanimity among writers, stranger still P. E. N.'s sudden plunge into politics. Startled observers asked themselves: Are P. E. N. writers ahead of their readers or are they just catching up with the world's fear that civilization is doomed? Do they really mean to fight the forces threatening it? Answers to the second question were not long in coming.

P. E. N. President Jules Romains is the short, highbrowed, big-nosed author of Men of Good Will, whose desire to report the whole life of his time in one novel has carried his book to its 15th volume. Listening as Author Romains reported P. E. N.'s change of front in 60 minutes of rapid-fire French sat writers from lands as far apart as Chile and China, delegates from Australia, Uruguay, Finland, South Africa--Germany's Thomas Mann and Ernst Toller, Spain's Pedro Salinas, China's Lin Yutang, France's Andre Maurois, the U. S.'s Dorothy Thompson, Henry Seidel Canby, Carl Van Doren, Vincent Sheean. But many of the delegates (German, Italian, Spanish) could claim no country at all.

Spontaneously they applauded Romains when he said: "We are no longer able to act as if tyranny did not exist. Therefore, we must act in order that it shall not exist. In this struggle, every day more urgent, no one can exactly take our place." Solemnly they heard him call the rape of Czecho-Slovakia "a flagrant violation," the rape of Albania a gesture "of diabolical flamboyance," cry "that from this great meeting there comes forth a sentence without appeal against the mystics of violence."

Paraphrased Hendrik Willem Van Loon: ". . . Our left flank has been annihilated, our right flank has surrendered, and our centre is beginning to give way; we shall therefore proceed to the attack."

Dorothy Thompson: "We are united against the destruction of the poets."

Thomas Mann: "Democracy is nothing but the political aspect of intellect."

Nora Wain: "I am done entirely with patriotism."

Pedro Salinas: "We must not be too confident that culture can defend itself."

Ernst Toller: "The threatened culture can only be defended if those who were fortunate enough to escape slavery, devote themselves faithfully to their language . . . fight barbarism wherever it threatens."

Max Ascoli: "I think we have the extraordinary fortune to live in such a time."

Andre Maurois struck a warning note: ". . . The greatest service we, writers, can render to the cause of peace is to hold explosive words under lock and key. . . ."

Lin Yutang struck a note of flippery: "My definition of writers as a class is that they are a race of gifted babblers whose chief service or contribution to the State is their nuisance value."

After three days of such nuisance value, P. E. N. writers agreed on a startling resolution. Pledge: "Each of us will endeavor, by every effective means, to reach the consciences of those who live behind the barriers of the regimes of force and to reawaken in them the notion of human ideals. We will endeavor also, by all means in our power, to consolidate the pacific coalition of all those peoples who would strive to arrest the progress of evil and intimidate the perpetration of aggression. . . ."

Whether Perpetrators Hitler and Mussolini would be intimidated by such words remained to be seen. At any rate, literary historians noted that literary fashion had changed again. Clearly, the ivory tower had no place in the streamlined architecture of the 1939 World's Fair: it had crashed into 55 pieces.

Funniest upset at the Congress involved neither literature nor politics, but the Fair's president, gaudy Grover Whalen. On opening day, Jules Romains should have introduced Whalen, then sat down and listened politely to his 15-minute speech of welcome. Instead, excited Jules Romains forgot Whalen, launched into his own hour-long speech in French. Very red grew Grover Whalen's face as he fidgeted and fussed on the platform while messengers buzzed in his ear that he was needed elsewhere. After 40 minutes Whalen fled.

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Not only Dictators Hitler and Mussolini were targets for inkpotshots. Last fortnight, Dictator Stalin was also under fire as 96 writers, artists and scientists, headed by Philosopher John Dewey, pledged themselves to fight totalitarian ideas of all brands, including the Soviet, phoney liberalism of every stripe. Deftly prodding the left-wing hornet nest, the Dewey group, which calls itself the Committee for Cultural Freedom, promised it would pussfoot no Communist intellectual repressions, declared it was "independent of control, whether open or secret, by any political group," implied that others were not.

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