Independent States of Mind

By R.Z. Sheppard

There are more cheerful places to hold a conference than New York City in mid-January. The winter's coldest weather to date arrived with the delegates and guests. Central Park was a dismal filigree of naked branches; from hotel windows, the frozen ponds looked like the eyes of dead fish. And then there was the theme of the 48th annual congress of International PEN: "The Writer's Imagination and the Imagination of the State." PEN, founded in 1921, is an organization of poets, playwrights, essayists, editors and novelists. Almost any of its 10,000 members worldwide, it would seem, could invent a more inviting topic for discussion. But none did, and initial expectations were low for the organization that sees itself as "a dynamic moral force on a global level." At its frequent best, PEN has indeed aided the release of writers imprisoned for their works, tried to lessen censorship, and helped to establish an international forum for national literature. But at its most portentous, the group can suggest a second-rate graduate school, where the lecturers outnumber the students. Even some of the much honored guests seemed resigned to unending seminars filled with such marrow-chilling words as alienation and creativity.

No one was prepared for an exciting surprise. In a brilliant end run that assured world attention, American PEN President Norman Mailer asked Secretary of State George Shultz to deliver the gathering's opening address. Unfortunately, the novelist did not notify the PEN board of directors, who were dismayed when they learned of the invitation. Many of them objected to a high-ranking representative of the U. S. Government speaking to American PEN, a group that loudly guards its independence from official censure or sanction. Said Susan Sontag, a prominent intellectual at the congress: "We have to as writers set ourselves in opposition to the extension of state power."

But Mailer's action was not reversible; once invited, the Secretary could not be uninvited. That was hardly the end of the matter, though. The day before Shultz was scheduled to appear, Novelist and PEN Board Member E.L. Doctorow protested in the New York Times: "It is more than a shame--it verges on the scandalous--that those in stewardship of American PEN and the conference should have so violated the meaning of their organization as to identify it with and put itself at the feet of the most ideologically right-wing Administration this country has seen."

The hyperbole would increase before Mailer publicly apologized for his unilateral action and Doctorow (without accepting the apology) wryly suggested that Mailer was practicing "constructive engagement of the Reagan Administration." Shultz's arrival at the opening ceremony at the main branch of the New York Public Library was greeted by an army of the night, brandishing a protest signed by 65 of the nearly 800 writers attending the congress. Amid cries of "Read the petition!" the Secretary expressed unexceptionably liberal sentiments favoring diversity and debate and condemning censorship. Shultz added to his speech by declaring in a rather general way his belief that the McCarran-Walter Immigration Act of 1952 should not be used "to deny visas merely because the applicant wants to say that he disapproves of the U.S. or one of its policies."

The protesters were not soothed. South Africans felt a particular discomfort; they were discouraged by what they regard as the U.S. Government's sluggish response to apartheid. So it was no surprise when outspoken Novelists Nadine Gordimer and Sipho Sepamla and Poet Breyten Breytenbach boycotted the session. Nor was it astonishing to hear veteran Protester Grace Paley, a writer of finely controlled short stories, asserting wildly that "he [Shultz] is as responsible as anyone for the tortures and the deaths in South Africa and elsewhere." Journalist and Social Critic Murray Kempton had little use for rhetorical excess and poses of moral superiority, although his critique cut both ways: "Walking out on Shultz is like walking out on pudding." Novelist Kurt Vonnegut mollified matters by offering a view from the cracker barrel: "It doesn't amount to a hill of beans if we invite the Secretary of State. We have a special situation here in America: a democratically elected Government. As an American citizen, I am responsible for my Government. It's good for us to be reminded of our responsibilities as voters."

Many foreign writers who traveled thousands of miles to the congress had trouble getting into the library. Having come to contemplate the imagination of the state, they first had to encounter its machinery. Shultz arrived in the care of the Secret Service and the New York City police. To get to the south reading room, delegates and the press had to first pass through airport-style security. As the hall filled to capacity, writers were turned back and made to listen to the proceedings on a public address system. Peruvian Novelist Mario Vargas Llosa, who entered the crowded room only with the help of a journalist who reached out and pulled him in, told the New York Times, "There are Nobel prizewinners standing out in the street wondering what is going on here."

What was going on was a cacophony of frayed tempers and loud pronunciamentos. Doctorow, seething over the presence of the Secretary of State, announced that PEN was "a delicate organization with many foreign guests who suffer under regimes this Administration supports." Much was said about this situation; there was far less talk about other countries that support repressive governments, and hardly anything audible about repression that the U.S. condemns. A speech by UNESCO Director-General Amadou-Mahtar M'Bow, who backs the licensing of Western journalists covering the Third World, was politely received. No one demonstrated when Omar Cabezas, Nicaragua's chief of political direction in the Interior Ministry and author of Fire from the Mountain: The Making of a Sandinista, defended press censorship in his country. Many who decried Shultz's appearance did not know, or did not want to know, that in the past seven years PEN congresses have been addressed by many public officials, including the Presidents of Brazil and Venezuela and Jack Lang, the French Minister of Culture.

The Shultz issue continued to burn the following day when the writers assembled. German Novelist Guenter Grass grumped about having flown in from Europe to get a lecture about freedom and literature: "Writers listen to politicians, but I have never met a politician, and I've met many, who is able to listen." Gordimer called for a public reading of the protest letter, and Doctorow accommodated her. That should have ended the matter, but Mailer made his way to the platform to demonstrate his forensic footwork. "Frankly," he began, "I'm up here to protect myself before last night becomes myth." He explained that the idea to invite the Secretary of State had come from John Kenneth Galbraith. Mailer said he was sorry and then threw his opponents off balance by calling for a poll of the audience: "If I'm boring all of you, I'll step down. We'll take a vote." The show of hands was inconclusive, and Panel Moderator Doctorow rang the bell: "I may unilaterally declare you have to shut up." It was a draw.

Members of the congress then settled down, hoping to hear what they had come for: dazzling discussion. They were not disappointed. Gordimer likened a political body to a rotating mirrored ball in a dance hall: "It winks all over the place, casting back upon all who pass under its surveillance whatever spotlight it chooses to illuminate itself with from without--turning faces timid with green, tense with violet or happy with sunset-rose." John Updike defined his relationship to his Government in the pastoral image of a blue mailbox: "I send manuscripts away; I sometimes get praise and money in return." The optimism befitted a successful, middle-aged man of letters who lives far from the New York crowd. Thoughts of the official U.S. filled him with equanimity: The state "can imagine only a continual health, the vigor of a gently inflationary status quo; this is because its imagination is composed of the wills of thousands of its administrators, almost none of whom wishes to lose his or her job."

The panelists' high level of intelligence and articulateness could not disguise an obstinate fact. Generally, writers who have suffered at the hands of their governments took dimmer views of the state than those who had not. To Hungarian Novelist George Konrad, the writer's responsibility is not loyalty but watchfulness. Exiled Czech Poet Jiri Grusa spoke of the hatreds bred of rigid ideologies and isms. At times the discussions about collective and individual imaginations threatened to harden into polar abstractions, with the writer symbolizing individuality and freedom, and the state--whether democratic or Communist--invariably cast as the villain.

This susceptible notion was eloquently shattered by Israel's Amos Oz. "Our title has about it a ring of romantic anarchism," he declared. "Indeed, a touch of Manichaeistic kitsch. I reject the image of a saintly lot of writers marching fearlessly to combat heartless bureaucracies on behalf of all the sweet and simple human beings out there. I am not in the business of beauties versus beasts." Stressing the need for writers, of all people, to make distinctions, Oz also rejected the notion that all states are equally bad (see box).

The confrontations grew more personal when Saul Bellow analyzed the American Dream and concluded that democracy was a resounding success. West Germany's Guenter Grass countered bitterly, challenging the Nobel laureate to hear the echo of his words in the poverty-stricken South Bronx. It was an ungainly assault from a usually subtle and original mind, but Bellow responded with patient grace, "I was simply saying the philosophers of freedom of the 17th and 18th centuries provided a structure which created a society by and large free, by and large an example of prosperity. I did not say there are no pockets of poverty." It was exactly the sort of heavyweight matchup the delighted audience had come to hear.

Other participants mounted vigorous attacks on different fronts. Led by Betty Friedan, a rump group of feminists protested the small number of women on the panels. "Who's counting?" asked Mailer. The exchanges were fast and sharp. "Why do you look at us and not see?" demanded Novelist Erica Jong. Replied Mailer: "Erica Jong is the last woman in the world who can plead invisibility." Vargas Llosa brought an authentically tragic tone to the proceedings by speaking of his fellow Latin American authors. "There is a widespread belief that writers have a monopoly on lucidity on political matters and that the statesman has a monopoly on political blindness," he said. "But even great writers can be totally blind on political matters and can put their prestige and their imagination and fantasy at the service of a policy, which, if it materialized, would be the destruction of what they do." In Latin America, he warned, "we can effectively pass from Pinochet to the gulag. To be in the situation of Poland is no better than to be in the situation of Chile. I feel perplexed by these questions. I want to fight for societies where perplexity is still permitted."

By week's end one could almost accept Vonnegut's extravagant assessment of the proceedings as "the most gifted and articulate parliament, and the most planetary of this or any century." It was certainly the most glamorous and expensive, with a budget of about $800,000, raised partly through donations, including 200 free hotel rooms at the St. Moritz by New York Real Estate Developer Donald Trump. Since the gifts are tax deductible, one might argue that even the U.S. Government was a contributor, a thought that is taboo to many American PEN members and that suggests the possibility that the kickoff speaker could have been the director of the Internal Revenue Service.

Among the many rewards of the congress was the chance for unknowns to meet such lions as Nobel Prizewinners Bellow, Czeslaw Milosz and Claude Simon as well as Playwright Arthur Miller and International PEN President Per Waestberg. They mingled in places as dissimilar as hotel coffee shops and the 34-room apartment of Saul Steinberg, the takeover artist. There was also a party at Gracie Mansion, where Mayor Edward Koch and Poet Allen Ginsberg hummed a mantra, and a wall-to-wall reception in the vast Egyptian wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Milling around the reconstructed Temple of Dendur, star watchers could search for the Santa Claus figure of Canadian Novelist Robertson Davies and eavesdrop on the exquisite ironies of Indian-born Novelist Salman Rushdie. Beside the reflecting pool, the gifted throng could contemplate the imaginations of two great states: a perfect theocracy that maintained its inflexible slave system even in the afterlife, and a permanently unfinished republic whose contentious factions offer possibilities still to be imagined. --By R.Z. Sheppard. Reported by Dean Brelis and Amy Wilentz/New York

With reporting by Dean Brelis, Amy Wilentz/New York