YtUGOSLAV REPORT
WRITERS AND CONFERENCES
I came t,o the PEN congress in Bled last summer with a well
why not attitude, easy to adopt if one is going, all expenses paid, to one's
first literary congress (curiosity), and it's taking place by a lake at the
foot of the Julian Alps in northern Yugoslavia (vacation-lust). It was
almost too easy
to
be cynical. The official theme of the congress was
that venerabl'e catch-all "The Writer and Contemporary Society," and, as
W. H. Auden (who was invited and didn't come) is reported to have
written to Stephen Sp'ender (who did come), surely in the last thirty
years everything that can be said on
,tlutt
subj'ect has been said. Of
course. Yes, the writer has the right to absolute freedom of expression,
protected by the law, and access to publication; his right to b'e politically
disengaged, asocial, morally heretical, or just plain irresponsible must be
zealously defended. Yes, writing and writers flourish when they have
some sense of responsible connection with the life of their societies;
writers are also citizens, educators, guardians of language, etc. What more
could be done than to recite truisms, to glance fondly from "on the one
hand" to "on the other"? And PEN? What was that? In New York:
a joke, a bore, something to be polite to. Monthly postcards announcing
cocktail parties at the Hotel Pi'erre on which one might be improbably
promised the chance to meet at one fell swoop Virginia Kirkus, William
Burroughs, and Isaac Bashevis Singer? Expensive dinners at the Over–
seas Press Club with dessert a lecture on how
to
write articles for travel
magazines, or a panel discussion on whether the modem novel is going
"too far"? And if the activities of the American PEN are rather remote
from literature as an art, what would an international PEN congress do
but compound the distance?
The truth is, the recent PEN congress did have little to do with
literature. And how could it have been otherwise? One does not become
a member of PEN because one is a good writer, but simply because one
is a writer. Everyone there
("Poets,
Essayists, Novelists") was a writer.
There were top drawer personages like Stephen Spender, Arthur Miller,
Ignazio Silone, Pablo Neruda, Richard Hughes, I vo Andric, and Rosa-
