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PARTISAN REVIEW
This is the way of Mailer's imagination, but it is not the stuff of
which media events are made. Far easier is it to get into an op-ed
frame of mind and play at being the unacknowledged legislators of
the world. "PEN was founded on the attractive notion that writers
speak across national boundaries more naturally and gracefully than
governments," Mailer proclaimed, but this particular piety proved
far less accurate, in the instance, than his throwaway figure of speech
likening the founding of PEN in 1921 to "a literary League of Na–
tions." The results were dependable. As one panel discussion after
another turned into an impromptu jury pronouncing on the United
States, and even unwilling combatants found themselves caught in
the polemic crossfire, more than a few participants and a great many
observers wished they would all do a little less campaigning and get
a little more, well, literary in their talk. Not that everyone minded.
On the contrary. The hard left seemed intent on politicizing the pro–
ceedings even before the first gavel. But it did so, oddly enough, im–
pulsively, without calculation, and certainly without anticipating that
it might do itself more harm than good . It acted as though a leftist
commitment were part of the cultural deal, as though the literary
community is always, instinctively and necessarily, on and of the
left.
If
there was one general assumption that was tested that week,
this was it.
Judging by the decibel level at the congress, the literary left was
having itself a field day. Each day brought a new protest, a new issue,
a new cause. For Gunter Grass it was the capitalist system. Anyone
affirming "the American way of life," he said, "has to be enough of a
hypocrite to ignore the slums on the periphery and the world-wide
hunger." E. L. Doctorow fulminated more specifically at the Reagan
administration . Grace Paley led a feminist uprising against "the tire–
someness of the drone of grownup male voices," conveniently forget–
ting that she herself is a board member of American PEN and as
such had ample opportunity all last year to insist that there be more
women on the panels. Toni Morrison declared that "at no moment
of my life have I ever felt as though I were an American"; the reason
she gave for being there at all was that "some black children got their
brains shot out in streets all over this country, and, having the 'good
fortune' to be televised, slowly, slowly forced the State to pay atten–
tion." Rosario Murillo, the common-law wife of Sandinista leader
Daniel Ortega, condemned U.S.-sponsored "genocide" in Nicaragua,
and Allen Ginsberg, petition in hand, carried on as though Nicara–
gua were a repeat of Vietnam.
