Books: Independent States of Mind

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."