David Lehman
WHEN PEN PALS COLLIDE
Many had reason to regret the highly politicized nature of
the International PEN Congress in New York City this January, but
no one should have been taken by surprise. Part of the problem, ev–
eryone said from the outset, was the congress's theme: "The Writer's
Imagination and the Imagination of the State." Excuses for it were
made in advance. For seasoned conference-goer Susan Sontag, it was
on a par, more or less, with "Literature and Culture," "The Future of
Literature," "The Writer and National Identity," and sundry other
stand-bys that serve as mere pretexts for literary gatherings, them–
selves in no need of specific justification or a specific agenda. "The
custom," as Sontag disarmingly put it in a pre-congress article in
The
New York Times Book Review,
"is to devise a title, drawing on a small
packet of such seasoned abstractions, that says as little as possible."
George Steiner, writing in the same pages a week later, was less
generous - and less flip - about "The Writer's Imagination and the
Imagination of the State." He called it "a vacant phrase" and won–
dered whether its grammatical awkwardness wasn't symptomatic of
"a deeper muddle or mendacity in public and private affairs."
It
got
so that an agitated Norman Mailer - the President of American PEN
and the congress's master of ceremonies, who performed heroic fund–
raising feats for it all last year - strategically reminded the opening
night audience that the theme and its peculiar wording had really
been the brainchild of not his but two other "fine minds," Donald
Barthelme's and Richard Howard's.
In his
Times
article, Steiner reduced the theme to its essential
components, "the writer and the state," thereby calling things by their
proper name. And indeed, at the PEN Congress itself, this simplifi–
cation defined the
a priori
structure to the week's unrehearsed events
- except that "the writer and the state" was taken to mean "the writer
versus the state." The various authors on parade, nearly seven hun–
dred of them from over forty-five countries, were presumed "alienated"
unless proven otherwise. It was something of an article of faith, re–
minding one of the joke about
Partisan Revieuf
in the forties when its
office typewriters were alleged to have a special key that typed out
"alienation" on command. The word in the immediate context sounded
not only anachronistic but also almost comically ambiguous, given
