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SUSAN SONTAG
condemning censorship in these two countries, and particularly singling
out the Spanish government's suppression of outlets for Catalan writers
and refusal to permit one of its dissident writers and a guest of honor at
the congress, Jose Bergamin, to make the trip to Yugoslavia. But most
of PEN's effective work, one gathers, takes place behind the scenes.
David Carver, the organization's international secretary for the last
fifteen years (the only full-time salaried official of PEN) and president
of the English center as well, is credited with getting out of prison and,
in a number of cases, saving the lives of eighteen Hungarian writers in
1956. He is also said to have been instrumental, through communication
with Alexei Surkov, head of the Soviet Writers Union, in securing the
release from prison of Olga Ivinskaya, Pasternak's former secretary, and
her daughter, soon after they were sentenced to seven years for currency
offenses. And to cite only one more instance, among many that are
reliably reported, he tried to do something about the editor and two
assistant editors of a South Korean newspaper who were sentenced to
death
for publishing an editorial advocating cultural, not political, con–
tacts with North Korea. (The American
PEN
tried to get Washington
to intervene; the editor was executed, the two assistant editors are still
in jail.)
The specter that hung over the
PEN
congress this time was, of
course, the case of Mihajlo Mihajlov, the young Yugoslav academic who
had been sentenced to nine months in jail for his outspoken account of
the Stalin era and the not exactly impetuous progress of de-Staliniza–
tion, "Moscow Summer 1964." I imagine a good many delegates to
PEN
came to Yugoslavia prepared to raise a row over Mihajlov, but
just a few days before the congress opened the appeals court acquitted
Mihajlov of one of the two charges, and suspended his sentence. It was
scarcely as complete a victory as one would have liked, not only because
Mihajlov was not wholly cleared but, more important, because no firm
precedent was established. Yet I met no Yugoslav literary bureaucrat,
of which there were many at the congress, who did not deplore the per–
secution of Mihajlov. And there seems no doubt that the verdict of the
appeals court was partly, or even mainly, due to the imminent arrival of
PEN, and to the quiet pre-congress negotiationi between Carver and
Matej Bor, head of the Slovene
PEN
center; Bor is said to have inter–
vened decisively on Mihajlov's behalf.
Of course, one can cite plenty of distressing instances where
PEN
has been silent. Where was the
PEN
resolution in the fifties when
Arthur Miller's passport was taken away for six years, when Lillian Hell–
man was threatened with jail, when Dashiell Hammett and a number
of other writers actually were imprisoned? Where are the
PEN
resolu-
