BARBARA PROBST SOLOMON
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like Grace Paley quickly to pass the buck. I had never heard of a
board so self-indulgent as to permit its members to jump sides in
mid-stream and mid-act, and sabotage a congress.
Gay Talese reported to me that just before the now legendary
Friday meeting in which Mailer and the women's caucus confronted
one another, having lunch with Mailer and Karen Kennerly and
Susan Sontag, he had urged the women to explain what really had
happened. He wanted Kennerly and Sontag to make a brief state–
ment that Sontag and Donald Barthelme had been in charge of the
invitation committee; they, together with Kennerly and Mailer, had
planned the list. Quite simply, there had been some mistakes made.
(Why shouldn't mistakes have been made? Writers aren't professional
organizers.) Talese said matters got compounded because Mailer
didn't feel that Kennerly, as PEN Executive Secretary, which is a
paid position, should take the heat. Talese indicated that Mailer
may have wanted the confrontation. Susan Sontag, who according
to Talese had the most to do with the original invitation list - which
indeed looked like a scenario of
Susanna and the Elders
-
wiggled ou t of
making a statement. Had Talese had his way, we women would have
had to confront the fact that we have the same problems as the unions
did when they realized their unions were being run with represen–
tatives who used the voice of the people, but no longer were of it.
Women have power-and women remain excluded. Now, how do
we handle this one?
My guess is that after lunch there were maybe eight hundred
people in the Essex House conference room. The women's caucus
had assembled early so that in the front part the overwhelming pro–
portion of seats were occupied by women . When Mailer placed him–
self on the podium, like an angry pasha, confronting mass woman
fury, because of the sheer numbers of women, and because oddly it
was almost fan frenzy in reverse, the atmosphere became indecently
sexualized; an ugly heat rose in the room. Suddenly nobody looked
good: we all became cannibals.
I couldn't figure out why Mailer goaded the women by his re–
mark on their lack of intellectual power. Some days later, in a state–
ment to Walter Goodman at
The New York Times,
he said that he had
meant to say that in some countries women are so exploited that they
don't have a chance to become intellectuals. But his modified state–
ment came after the fact. At the time, while Mailer was reading the
long list of aged women luminaries who had been invited - as well as
the dead Elsa Morante, who had been hospitalized with cancer for
