BARBARA PROBST SOLOMON
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between board and audience . (The fact that the board also got some
non-PEN signatures , such as from the Writer's Union, for their
Shultz protest also muddied the waters.) I watched and suddenly
understood the terror, the senseless mob fury that took place last
year in Belgium when the British football team created, with their
inchoate fury at the Italians , a massacre. Most of us were numb. Gay
Talese managed to break the paralysis by suggesting to Mailer that
he turn the microphone over to Nadine Gordimer, who then started
to tell us in her calm distant voice about bad matters in South Africa.
Then it all ended and I went home . I wasn't sure what I had
seen, but I had witnessed something; it took me one week to pull
myself together. Was I feeling deep postcongress blues because the
congress had mirrored a raw snap of New York writers' true condi–
tion - the media hype, the glitz, the clamor-glamour of protest blitz,
the political incoherence, the lack of writers' true community; and
finally , the lack of passionate awe, moral commitment and enduring
astonishment that has been the writer's home, that firm place where
intelligence and passion have met, since the time of the Bible? We all
were wrong; we all allowed ourselves to cannibalize and be cannibal–
ized. Another truth is that Norman Mailer, some members of the
board, and the PEN staff had worked like dogs for this congress, and
matters had gotten so crazy that no one thanked them for giving their
time, imagination , and energy. Yes, things went wildly askew, but
the failures of this event should be looked at in the spirit of improving
matters, not as a federal inquiry fingering criminals. (And there were
also many good nuggets: the "small voice of the writer" that occa–
sionally managed to be heard - Amos Oz, the exiles George Konrad,
Czeslaw Milosz.) There was a surprising lack of fuss between the
Israelis and members from Arab countries, which is unusual- for a
mixed cultural congress .
We can't allow ourselves to become McCarthyite witch hunters.
It
is, as Amos Oz said, a question of
nuance.
Either we writers muster
some generosity in dealing with each other, or the body that got
murdered will be of the writer, all of us, singly and collectively.
