BARBARA PROBST SOLOMON
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are a materialistic success at the price of spiritual failure - and then
berated Bellow for his presumed celebration of America. So it was left
to Mario Vargas Llosa alone, who did valiantly, to give American
writers the belated news that the Latin left actually has been ques–
tioning the politics of Garda Marquez and Cortazar since 1971. Why
were four Germans - including Gunter Grass and Hans Magnus
Enzensberger- and three Mexicans, (Octavio Paz, Elena Poniatowska,
and Carlos Fuentes , none of whom at the last minute showed up),
invited as against only three writers from Western Europe? Claude
Simon of France and Juan Benet of Spain were part of the minority
who gave finely honed literary papers. Surely the Sontag reply to the
women's protest about
their
poor representation, which was quoted
by Nadine Gordimer, that "talent isn't an equal opportunity job,"
wouldn't be the reason she would give for the omission of nearly all
of the Common Market countries? There was almost no West Coast
representation. Carolyn Kizer, this year's Pulitzer Prize Poetry win–
ner, was not invited. The banal truth was that the men and women
writers on the PEN board put themselves on a lot of panels, (let us
not be moralistic idiots : I would have done the same had I been
given the chance) and then invited a lot offoreign luminaries, many
of whom were either infirm or dead, and the results were peculiar.
The most serious failure of the congress was to ignore the legiti–
mate needs of its base membership. PEN is a colleagual association
of distinguished writers . The board is meant to serve the interests of
this base membership, which supports PEN by yearly dues - it is not
meant to scold or
eliminate
the membership, as if it is inferior excess
baggage. For many American writers, this congress (the next U.S.
meeting is twenty-five years hence) was a unique opportunity to meet
with colleagues from other parts of the country as well as to get to
know, and be known, by foreign writers. This shouldn't have been a
publishers' hustle - Frankfurt Book Fair stuff- a media event, or a
chance for the rich to get their cultural megavitamins. Instead of
communal cocktail hours and well-publicized places in which to eat,
distinctions were emphasized. The membership was constantly cut
off at the microphone; their question time was limited while the "big"
writers like Grass and Ginsberg had endless turns and unlimited
time .
By Friday, the day of the final conference, I felt I was witness to
some sort of bodiless mass murder : the first few days already had
been dissipated with the Shultz affair . By Thursday the Ad Hoc
Committee of Women had been formed to protest the lack of women
