Barbara Probst Solomon
WHAT MAKES WRITERS RUN
Balzac, Flaubert would have had a field day at the Forty–
eighth International PEN Congress in January, the first to be held in
this country since 1966.
It
was aNew York happening with a subplot
that included international writers giving papers on the imagination
of the state-does the state imagine itself? The phrase, lofty, impre–
cise, sounded like a set of English instructions on the back of a J apa–
nese electrical appliance, so most writers went off on their own tack.
Like all New York commodities, PEN is volatile blue chip stock. Now
that the returns are in, and the moveable feast at the Essex House
and the St. Moritz is finished, one needs to ask: how does PEN imag–
ine itself in relation to writers? Henry Adams, in
Democracy,
was pre–
scient in fingering how conflicts in America between government,
money, power and culture get played out; nothing has changed since
he wrote the novel over a hundred years ago. Instead of Ratcliffe as
the buccaneer Secretary of the Treasury, we had Secretary of State
Shultz metamorphosed as a closet novelist parvenu desperately chas–
ing New York culture. When Adams's-to use a favorite Mailer word
- "avatar" of New York culture, Madeline Lee, like a proper Boston–
New York liberal, resoundedly rejects the Secretary of the Treasury:
"Mr. Ratcliffe, I am not to be bought. No rank, no dignity .. . no
conceivable expedient would induce me to change my mind," she
sounds like a nineteenth-century Doctorow. After a week of writers
and wall-to-wall unprotested protests, like Madeline, I want "... to
go to Egypt. . .. Democracy has shaken my nerves to pieces." But
Henry Adams also pointed out that Madeline was a bit of a conniver
and had her own secret agenda going with another dubiously high
minded character-her other suitor, Carrington .
Heat, fury, deceit, social climbing, moral hollowness, and
writers' egos combined like volatile gases: the atmosphere was oddly
off-balance from almost the beginning. The two big backers of this
cultural boullabaisse were Donald Trump and corporate raider Saul
Steinberg who, in return for his reputed four hundred thousand dol–
lar donation, got to give the send-off fiesta for the visiting celebrity
writers in his thirty-four room apartment - in a twilight zone where a
magnificent collection of paintings by Reubens and Hals worthy of the
Prado blends with a bordello-style decor. Interestingly, the Doctorows,
