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PARTISAN REVIEW
several years - what crossed my mind was that , in addition to the odd
notion (ascribed to by the PEN board) that foreign women be super
icons , what the list also underscored is the painful fact that American
contact with the contemporary scene abroad is alarmingly shallow.
We know the figureheads, just as Europeans know about Eleanor
Roosevelt andJohn Steinbeck- but what about
today?
We are terrific
at Amnesty International issues ; PEN does important things about
imprisoned tortured writers, and it is imperative that they continue
to do this . But let us Americans not delude ourselves that prison
knowledge equals cultural imagination ; we don't "know" other coun–
tries because we protest the variousness of barbarity . It would be
nice if more of us - not as a task but out of delight and inspiration–
did know more about the rest of the world .
After Mailer and Paley squared off-and I learned more about
camera positioning from this congress than I did about writing–
there was a brief moment of relief. For sheer dramatic imagery and
swirling movement, Erica Jong was magnificent. At a key moment,
blond hair flying, in a diaphanous dress, arms outstretched like
Marianne de France , she careened down the aisle, in black net
butterfly-embossed stockings - a Henri Bendel gypsy with perfect
camera aim-"Norman , Norman-for generations we write , and we
keep on writing, but for you, we remain invisible. Why do you never
see us?" Norman, faced with the swirling heat of Erica, protested, "I
see you - Erica, you are the last woman who can claim invisibility."
Erica Jong has the purity of a true solo artist : she was on target. She
confronted Mailer
mana a mana:
one writer to another, her point that
the prime crime for a writer
is
to be blind is a good one. And she
wasn't a ward heeler. Then, in a dizzying moment of complete mad–
ness, Doctor Moursy Saad El Din, the Egyptian delegate, chided the
protesters . He pointed out that disruption by women of a PEN sum–
mary meeting could never happen in his country because the women
writers there got such equal treatment they never had reason to com–
plain. This was greeted in silence, as the audience ruminated, in
wonderment, about possibility in Egypt . The lack of coherence afloat
by then was mind-boggling. Mailer dug himself in deeper and deeper.
The situation was made worse precisely because it was never clear
who was protesting. Were Grace Paley and Cynthia Macdonald pro–
testing in the name of the board? The women's caucus? I assumed
that Mailer's remark, "You should have protested six months ago,"
was meant for the board , but it was totally confusing. The real rea–
son the room went out of control was that nobody could distinguish
