DAVID LEHMAN
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ing Room made it a decent alibi . "Oh come now, Norman," said
Murray Kempton, dryly . "When Grace Paley rises to speak, you can
tell in advance what she's going to say ." Mailer then, switching his
tactics , demonstrated his trustworthy knack for extending a contro–
versy by altering its terms . "I didn't invite Mr. Shultz here," he said,
"to have him pussywhipped ."
People immediately began speculating about the repercussions
of the Shultz incident. Mailer was clearly troubled . Would it, he
wondered, threaten the dialogue with the State Department that
PEN had carefully nurtured during the past year? As far as Mailer
could see, Shultz's speech conveyed what government officials like to
call "a signal" - it seemed to indicate the State Department's readi–
ness to be "disembarrassed" of the McCarran-Walter Act. What's
more , as Mailer pointed out, the State Department had proved fully
cooperative in the months preceding the Congress; no writer, regard–
less of ideological stance, had been denied entrance to the country.
This being the case, what useful point could be served by a display of
"silly bad manners" ? John Kenneth Galbraith, who had in his own
opening remarks admonished all against being "too relentlessly sol–
emn" (advice that was roundly applauded and instantly forgotten),
took a more benign view of the flap. Perhaps , he reasoned, it will
have the salutary effect of securing more media attention for the con–
gress than it would otherwise have received.
That it did. And the results were very quickly and very clearly
evident. The disruption, tame as it was , succeeded in transforming
an unremarkable speech by a rather dull speaker into front-page
news ; it made Shultz look good . As for the Doctorow-Paley forces ,
their intolerance struck one as painfully ironic in view of PEN's com–
mitment to free speech . By next morning, the whole affair was be–
ginning to seem at best a tiresome distraction, blown up out of all
proportion. "Is Mr. Shultz the only subject that arouses passion at
this congress?" asked Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa, plainly
nonplussed at the Monday morning session he chaired. Yet the con–
troversy refused to die down. Gunter Grass, Vargas Llosa's fellow
panelist, averred that he was "shocked" by Shultz's appearance–
though it's customary for the host nation's foreign minister to make a
welcoming address . Mayor Koch , holding forth at a Gracie Mansion
bash that night, allowed that he was "shocked" as well- by the pro–
testers' refusal to give a courteous hearing to the Secretary of State .
"This is the most intelligent group in the world," Koch said in his
cheerfully hyperbolic manner. "And therefore this group shocked me .
