Timebends (99 page)

In fact, by this time I knew that PEN could be far more than a mere gesture of goodwill; whatever their talents, the writers here had unquestionably responded with an instinctual self-preserving attention when in my main speech to the whole congress I said that we must indeed maintain our apolitical standards of free expression but this did not mean that we had to stay out of politics when repression was a political fact. If we wished to become universal, we had to confront the political impediments to our universality. “As with all things, you never do any good,” I concluded, “unless you get into some trouble. I am not sure people who write will not be getting into trouble in America again, and we may need your assistance. We must look at every culture with the same eyes.” It was fine to see our American delegation applauding heartily along with the Russians, for I realized that the fate of the world—as this congress certainly saw it—was in the hands of both our giant countries.

But PEN was still far from sufficient for its universalizing task, as we all understood perfectly well. As very serious waiters hastened over ancient stone floors bearing strong white wine for delegates who were getting drunker and drunker, the company seemed a band of survivors of two European civil wars. Maybe my very remoteness as an American was my value here, since as someone out of Radomizl and Brooklyn, I was a stranger to their old feuds. They were first to grasp this, but I caught on at last, and in threatening moments of unresolvable ideological tension, I took to declaring lunch, which at eleven or eleven thirty in the morning rather astonished them; but they soon got the idea, and whenever words got too hot cries of “Lunch!” would fly up from the ranks, even from the round Bulgarian lady who had not been noted for
a sense of the ludicrous, able as she was, two or three times a day, to repeat word for word her ardent invitation to visit Sofia, where she would show me the fields of roses that produced their main export, the attar.

So this was my function: to be fair, to keep the peace, and to persist in apolitically advancing the political concepts of liberty of expression and the independent author. The great thing was that these were the unspoken longings of most of those present, no matter where they came from.

But at times you could get exhausted trying to figure out why they were telling you something. One of the Hungarians—who during the sessions would rise to defend passionately his government's treatment of writers, as well as to proclaim its civilized behavior in general—had privately buttonholed me: “The new prime minister called in the former prime minister, the Stalinist who had previously been his boss—this was after the death of Stalin, of course—and the new prime minister climbed up on his desk and commanded the former prime minister to stand under him with his mouth open, and then the new prime minister pissed into the former prime minister's mouth.” (And, I thought, they were both Marxists, of course.) Was he being hip, or was this an authentic urge to square himself with American-British liberalism, which despite everything they all still regarded as the ultimate civilized standard?

And now, totally unexpectedly, Surkov, head of the Soviet Writers Union, swaying slightly from his drinks and as big-chested as his worshiped Steinbeck and Hemingway, informed me in a most solemn if not belligerent tone, “We want to join PEN, we are ready to negotiate. We would have to have a few changes in the rules and the constitution, but we can discuss all that. When I get home we will arrange an invitation for you to come.”

We shook hands; I was proud of myself; on one corner of the world's field of battle a sort of truce was apparently about to be made.

When I reported to Carver, who flushed red with excitement at this proof of PEN's relevance so soon after it had seemed moribund, we decided that Surkov's “changes” must involve the voting procedures, which he had indeed mentioned to Carver as a problem. The Soviet Union had a great number of literatures in different languages, and the question was how many votes they might demand; in the UN, of course, the USSR had its representative, and the Ukraine and Belorussia had their own delegates. If worse came
to worst, we could match them with separate votes for the Los Angeles and Chicago PEN centers, but one way or another we would have to avoid being swamped with legions of Soviet writers outvoting the rest of us. In any case, though there were problems to be smoothed out, we had moved PEN closer to its original peace-preserving purpose. With no modesty left me, I believed that it was the persuasiveness of my plays on stages on both sides of the ideological battle line that had made this bridge building possible for me. If indeed that was what had been begun here.

It took more than a year to get to Moscow; I was by now a proper lawyer for my emotions, for I had been sending what seemed an endless stream of wires and letters to Surkov protesting arrests of writers not alone in Russia but also in Lithuania and Estonia, occasionally succeeding in getting people exit visas, and pressing as well for a letup on the repression of Jews. So that by the time he lumbered into my Moscow hotel room in 1967 with his broad smile, I had resolved to be certain that when and if they entered PEN we were all of one mind about what they were doing there.

From my friendships with the less contented Soviet writers I knew what the score was for them: PEN was an exciting window on the West with some very practical advantages in view, such as better possibilities of translation into European languages, which was only fitfully done now, and the protection of solidarity with Western writers, which would widen freedom of expression—once the USSR was in PEN, it would be harder to make a Soviet writer disappear. For Surkov and the regime, membership in PEN promised prestige in the West, possibly the most needful thing of all to the Russians. But whatever his reasons, surely Surkov was sophisticated enough to see that PEN would not be deflected from its basic purposes, and if he still wanted to become part of it, no one could object. Now I would finally learn what “changes” he had cryptically referred to in Bled.

With Surkov came a large blond linguistics professor with the size and mien of an overweight Viking, an authentic Russ bone-cracker out of the bear cave, and jolly too. I have forgotten his name, but in my mind he was always Nat. He and Surkov had a few vodkas and sprawled in their chairs, and for a few minutes we were back on the weather again, talking relative mean temperatures from Novosibirsk to Philadelphia. At last Surkov said flatly, “Soviet writers want to join PEN.” It sounded final.

Was I dreaming? Was the time at hand when in Moscow or
Leningrad or Yalta writers from over sixty nations would move freely among their Soviet counterparts? The very image was bursting with possibilities of smashing the moral and political stalemate institutionalized by our time, to the impoverishment of everyone everywhere. Might the day have arrived when our
real
horrors on both sides would be allowed to surface freely—and we humbly resolve to go back and start all over again trying to figure out how to live with incessant change and lethal progress, to put man in his fragile environment on top again, not last, where he was now?

“I couldn't be happier,” I said. “We would all welcome you in PEN.” The writing community would at last be a light unto the nations.

“We have one problem,” Surkov said, “but it can be resolved easily.”

“What is the problem?”

“The PEN constitution. There would have to be some changes in it. But they could easily be accomplished.”

Nat interpreted with great speed, and I almost forgot he was there, despite his size. Earlier, during our weather warm-up conversation, he had complained to me that young nothing-writers like Yevtushenko and Voznesensky flipped off a few dumb lines and were celebrated coast to coast and around the world and got to fly everywhere free while hardworking professors who had put lifetimes into mastering their fields were unknown and never got to travel anywhere—all this when I asked if he had ever visited America. It was the same worm that bored holes in the academic heart everywhere, one more universality that I hoped PEN might uncover, thereby enhancing our identifications with one another, and our sense of humor too. In that time of détente I was determined to find the good in everything. Vietnam was blasting away, we were killing ourselves there, and I needed all the hopefulness I could find.

“What changes do you have in mind?” I asked, assuming he meant the voting problem. But it was something else, he said, and looked at the carpet. My illusions began to curl up like paper in a fire. My recollection of the PEN constitution was of a total of four brief articles, each a variation on the same theme—that the writer was to be protected in his right to say what he wished, without governmental or other censorship; also, that he was bound by his membership in PEN to oppose such censorship in his own country as well as abroad. What could Surkov want to change in this crystal litany?

“But let us not worry about that now,” the burly ex-wartime
tanker said. “We will come to the next congress and talk further there.”

“Wait, now,” I broke in, trying to keep smiling. Incredibly, his manner insinuated some kind of collaboration on my part that would end with me acting as his instrument. Why else—in a cynic's estimate, it suddenly occurred to me—would I have bothered inviting them? Surely it could not have been a desire to weaken Soviet censorship! My hopes all but totally gone, I asked now out of pure curiosity, “What kind of changes are you thinking of?”

“We can discuss these things at the congress next time.”

“Very well, but you must understand that before the constitution can be changed we would . . .”

“Oh, now, Miller, you can change it.” He leaned toward me over the arm of his chair with a worldly wink that clattered shut like a guillotine.

“Me?”

“If you wanted it they would do it. It is up to you.”

“Well, that's very flattering, but you don't get the idea—they'll have to vote on any changes.”

“Not if you tell them, Miller. If you tell them what you want them to do . . .”

“You will have to be specific. What changes are we talking about?”

“There are certain things that Soviet writers can't accept. It would be impossible.”

Of course. It was all quite simple: they would never agree to mitigate censorship in Russia, much less protest it; I was as unquestionably in dictatorial control of PEN as any such leader of a Soviet organization would normally be, and they had approached me in the belief that I would help to gut the constitution and its libertarian aims. What they were after was merely the prestige of membership in a Western organization whose newly rewritten rules would no doubt continue to espouse freedom while being transformed into another justification, an international one this time, for the disciplining of their own writers.

This whole scene came back to me when, in the eighties, UNESCO introduced a new press “charter” under which governments could not be criticized and offending journalists could lose a “license” to operate. Of course I could not foretell such a horror back in the sixties, but my senses told me that Surkov was offering Soviet membership in PEN in return for its emasculation.

“I don't want you to walk into a scandal,” I now warned. I felt
dried up and angry and simply wanted him gone. His grandpa's smile sank away. “It will be a big step backwards if you propose what you seem to have in mind.” He did not ask me what I thought that was, so it was obvious. “Better leave things as they are than blow up a new conflict between us. Maybe sometime in the future we can get together on terms we can all support, but I like the constitution as it stands, and I don't want you imagining I would help change it.”

The pudding thickened then and cooled quickly. When the door had closed behind them and I stood alone again, paranoia hit me full force. Did they mean to replace PEN's charter with some code of “responsibility”—I could just see it—“of the writer to peace-loving forces,” absent which said writer could be read out of PEN? I could not help going even further—was Surkov thinking to drive a wedge of Soviet “discipline” into the West, spreading the age-old Russian sludge of state control of authors into the lands of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment? In short, was their wish to join PEN a mere campaign of a disguised aggression?

Surkov had taught me a lot in a few minutes. The pity of it all was that I knew Soviet writers who despite my every doubt had pressed me to continue this kind of negotiation, hoping for a miraculous change in policy that they insisted I must encourage, no matter what the odds against it.

But anxiety dissolved as I realized that the world, in effect, was against Surkov. The wish for freedom was built into human nature, and his kind had to lose.

And once these reassurances were digested I began worrying again, but not only about Russians. The barbed questioning of the Un-American Activities Committee resurfaced. Of course they could be voted out of office, as their like in Soviet society could not be, but how could American democracy keep producing people who saw nothing illegitimate in using their tremendous powers to make outcasts of political dissidents?

Was this battle never, never to end?

The miraculous rationalism of the American Bill of Rights suddenly seemed incredible, coming as it did from man's mendacious mind. America moved me all over again—it was an amazing place, the idea of it astounding.

I have mentioned that there is a lawyer in almost all my plays—a fact of which I was not aware until a scholar wrote me and pointed
it out. In the four years of my presidency of International PEN, and then over the long months of the Reilly case, I began to see that to me the idea of the law was the ultimate social reality, in the sense that physical principles are the scientist's ground—the final appeal to order, to reason, and to justice. In some primal layer Law is God's thought.