YUGOSLAV
REPORT
117
mond Lehmann. (Ionesco promised but failed to show up; Charles Olson
came on the last day.) But what one noticed was the absence of all the
star novelists, poets, and playwrights who had been invited and had
turned PEN down. Of those who did come there seemed to be a dis–
proportionate number of critics and of writers who are regularly con–
nected to institutions, inured to the professional reasonableness of com–
mittees. Spender is an editor of
Encounter,
and currently at the Library
of Congress; Vladimir Dedijer is not only Vladimir Dedijer but has also
taught at the University of Manchester and several American univer–
sities; Jean BIot (from France) and Jose Angel Valente (from Spain)
both work for UNESCO; Pablo Fernandez (from Cuba) is his country's
cultural attache
in
London; and there were
also
Roger Caillois, editor
of
Diogenes,
Norman Podhoretz, editor of
Commentary,
Jean Bloch–
Michel,
li~rary
editor of
Preuves,
Robie Macauley, editor of
Kenyon
Review,
Ivan Boldizsar, editor of
The New Hungarian Quarterly
(an
excellent magazine, printed in English, which more American intellectuals
should read), and university-bas-ed critics like Jan Kott, of the Univer–
sity of Warsaw, and Roger Shattuck, of the University of Texas. And
then there were the PEN masses, legions of obscure toilers, busy on their
eighth novel, their travel articles, their childrens'
books,
their mystery
stories. These were the "lady writers" (the celebrity-writers' throwaway
label for all of them, male and female), invariably middle-aged or
elderly, who filled the plenary s'essions held in the large hall, adjusting
their plastic earphones to tune in the speeches translated into English
and French (the official languages of the congress), collecting autographs
from the celebrity-writers, dutifully taking all the tours and consuming
the endless food and drink provided by the Slovene PEN center, lavishly
generous hosts to the congress. A writer is a writer.
Discussions about literature useful to writers as poets, essayists and
novelists were, then, conspicuously absent; their surrogates were speeches
about "The Importance of Literature Today" and "Mass Communica–
tion." Sharing few assumptions about their art, particularly the level at
which it was to be practiced, the writers were called on to consider them–
selves as diagnosticians of culture. And a pretty amateurish lot in this
role they proved to
be.
Early on during the congress, the members found
in
their hotel mail slots the following questionnaire-which I am quot–
ing
verbatim- made up by two Yugoslav weekly magazines,
TT
of Ljubl–
jana and
Svet
of Belgrade:
1. What are the most important ideological and philosophical
trends of the world at present (Marxism, Buddhism, Existen–
tialism, etc.) and which is the strongest integrative force?
2. What is the teal root of the East-West conflict, and what
of the North-South conflict?
