PEN fiasco

PEN Fiasco

THE ACRONYM stands for poets, essayists, and novelists, and the writers' organization held its 48th annual meeting in New York recently, the largest assembly yet, and inadvertently raised serious questions about the status and authority of writers.

At least since the Renaissance, a governing assumption in Western culture has been that literature and, derivatively, writers should be taken seriously. High culture, Matthew Arnold thought, consisted of the best that has been thought and said. He believed, or hoped, that it would shore up civilization. Robert Frost was more skeptical. He doubted that books made us better, but he thought they raised experience, joy and suffering, to a higher degree of acknowledgment.

The most visible writers at the PEN conference trafficked in cliche and stupidity, and seemed to be less interested in writing than in trendy cultural politics. The opening address by George Shultz was roundly booed and his very appearance protested, though he had interesting things to say about the roots of freedom. "It is more than a shame,' wrote E. L. Doctorow, "it verges on the scandalous, that those in stewardship of American PEN and the conference should have so violated the meaning of their organization as to identify it with and put it at the feet of the most ideologically right-wing Administration this country has seen.' The pushy Grace Paley asserted wildly that Shultz "is as responsible as anyone for the tortures and deaths in South Africa and elsewhere.' Erica Jong showed up in a bizarre hairdo, proclaiming against all the evidence of one's senses that women were "invisible' at the conference. The German novelist Gunter Grass had a good time proclaiming moral equivalences between the Soviet Union and the United States. The Ohio-born writer Toni Morrison, a black who is a hot ticket on the campus circuit these days, showed up in a huge tropical hat, and allowed that she had never felt herself to be an American. Daniel Ortega's wife, some sort of a poet, appeared in an expensive plunging neckline, accusing the United States of genocide in Nicaragua.

Shelley thought that poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the human race, and that is a deep thought. Alexander Pope had a different deep thought when he put most of the writers of his time into a poem called The Dunciad. The status of legislator of the human race is one that must be earned, not merely assumed. The smartest remark at the PEN conference was made by the Cuban writer Heberto Padilla. Asked to sign a petition critical of U.S. policy toward Nicaragua, he replied, "I sign only what I write.' And Norman Mailer deserves to be complimented for his dignified performance as chairman, one of his very greatest pranks.

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