YUGOSLAV REPORT
119
dismay one feels lingering over coffee to answer ardent, naive, very well–
infonned questions about the history of
Partisan Review
or recent off–
Broadway theater put to one by a young writer from Belgrade or Sofia
who has never been further west than Bled. Not until one sees it going
on at the next table can one grasp what it means for writers from West
and East Gennany, who have no other chance of meeting, to sit together
and talk; after the first such impromptu gathering, one East German
writer is reported to have been close to tears. No matter that a writer's
club is, at best, a diversion, at worst an irrelevance, in the permissive
quarrelsome literary capitals of New York, London and Paris. It does
mean, in many cases has meant or could mean, a great deal in Warsaw,
Montevideo, Accra, Havana, Tunis, Vientiane, Karachi. During the
fifties, at the height of the Cold War, PEN was the only instrument for
any regular dialogue between intellectuals of Communist and non-Com–
munist countries. This dialogue is scarcely less useful during the perilous
detente
of the sixties, to them and to us. The comfortable certainty with
which "Western" liberals espouse the writer's privilege to decline to serve
as a spokesman for any particular moral or social point of view reveals,
in many cases, a lack of imagination. Only change the verb: what if
the writer is not "serving" but "preserving"? One of the congress' more
instructive moments came when a Czech writer arose to argue for the
writer's duty as a moralist and educator-not, as one immediately ex–
pected, because writers should help build socialism or work for world
peace, but because they are needed to uphold the values of liberal
individualism in a collectivist society.
PEN has always had the reputation of being "outside politics,"
which accounts for its strength and survival in Eastern Europe. Yet
there is no doubt the function, purpose,
raison d'etre
of PEN-whether
it's admitted or
not-is
a political one: to liberalize the writer's situa–
tion. Since its founding in the early twenties by a wealthy Englishwoman,
Mrs. C. A. Dawson-Scott, on the model of the new international parlia–
ments that came into heing after World War I, PEN has been dominated
by its English center (John Galsworthy was the first international presi–
dent) and devoted to discreet pressure on less liberty-loving countries
to leave their writers alone. Resolutions passed at the annual congresses
are one technique. The most memorable of these was at the 1933 congress
in Dubrovnik when, under the international presidency of H. G. Wells,
the assembled members debated, then fonnally denounced the new Nazi
government for book-burning and racism and the Berlin PEN center
for expelling its Communist members, and part of the Gennan delega–
tion walked out. In recent years, Spain and Portugal have come in for
a ritual drubbing. At this congress, the usual resolution was passed
