Is PEN Mightier in Imagination Than the State? : George Shultz Speech Enlivens 48th Worldwide Writers’ Congress in N.Y.

The theme--a “pressing moral and artistic issue,” according to conference organizers--was imagination: specifically, “the writer’s imagination and the imagination of the state.” Imagination was no problem: After all, these nearly 800 men and women gathered for the 48th international congress of PEN, the worldwide writers’ group, are novelists, poets, playwrights, essayists, historians, biographers, translators and literary editors, and most of them find their life’s work in somehow giving rein to their imaginations.

The “state” part, on the other hand, was quite another matter. On that notion there was debate, disagreement and a full day’s worth of often-heated discussion.

“The state has no imagination,” South African novelist Nadine Gordimer declared.

“I think the state has an imagination,” West German novelist Guenter Grass said, “and I fear that the state has a greater imagination than we think.”

“The imagination of the state exists only in the mind of the writer,” Israel’s Amos Oz said, “like those who concocted the title of our discussion here.”

Said a reflective Hans-Magnus Enzensberger, a West German novelist: “The imagination of the state, as I understand it, differs (from that of the writer) not only in quality of art, but in intention.”

Updike’s Positive View

And John Updike, the North American novelist, allowed as how his lifelong perception of the state was decidedly positive, since even as “a child born into a tribe with its mystic rites, signs and symbols, the place where my personal hopes and dreams and the world intersected was the postal system.

“In those days,” Updike went on, “when a stamp cost 3 cents, I sent letters to great men, some of whom deigned a reply.” His friendly relationship with the postal system “is still true for me today,” Updike added. “I send manuscripts in the mail, and often I get praise and money in return.

“I never see a blue mailbox,” he said, “without a sense of wonderment that this system is maintained for my benefit.”

But even before Sunday evening’s official opening of the weeklong congress, “state” had vaulted itself into a paramount area of discussion. Acting, he said, on a suggestion from American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters president John Kenneth Galbraith, PEN American Center president Norman Mailer had last month invited Secretary of State George P. Shultz to address the group’s plenary session. Almost immediately, the objections to the presence of a Reagan Administration official began pouring in, and by Sunday evening, the ire among some PEN members had reached near-stratospheric levels.

“All you have to do is see what is happening,” novelist and short story writer Grace Paley said as PEN members gathered for this first session in the elegant South Reading Room of the main public library on 5th Avenue. “People can’t come in here freely,” she fumed as uniformed guards examined passes and identification badges. “The whole nature of this event has been changed by this man, and it is really outrageous.”

Of the secretary of state, Paley demanded: “What is his relationship to us? Is he a writer? What has he got to do with us? There is no reason to have him here, and people resent it.”

Like Paley, novelist E. L. Doctorow was among 65 signers of a public letter calling Shultz’s appearance “inappropriate.” The letter, brief but angry, faulted Shultz because “under your leadership the State Department has, in the past, excluded many writers from the United States using the McCarran-Walter Act.” That action, passed at the height of anti-communist hysteria in 1952, permits the exclusion of persons from the United States based on their political views.

Writing a commentary in the Jan. 18 edition of The Nation, Doctorow had blasted “Shultz’s government” as “conscientious in its application of the ideological exclusion provisions of the McCarran-Walter Act, which keeps out such dangers to the Republic as Nobel Prize-winner Gabriel Garcia Marquez.” Further, Doctorow charged, “writers both black and white have been tortured in South African prisons without a word on their behalf from Shultz.” In extending the Shultz invitation, Doctorow wrote, “American PEN (has) betrayed itself.”

‘A Disturbing Thing’

“It is a disturbing thing,” Doctorow said in the library moments before Shultz was to appear. “If this were a convention of mechanical engineers or automobile salesman, it would of course be a great honor for the secretary of state to appear.” But, Doctorow said indignantly, “this is a group of writers.”

Indeed, Shultz was greeted not only with the letter objecting to his presence, but with a chorus of hisses and boos. Repeatedly, Paley and poet Allen Ginsberg rose from their seats to shout their displeasure and to demand Shultz’s ouster.

Later, an obviously displeased PEN American Center president Mailer would apologize to Shultz for “the silly display of bad manners exhibited here tonight.” Such carrying-on, he said, reflected “a kind of puritanical leftism.” And, Mailer said: “I did not invite Secretary Shultz here to get insulted.”

On the contrary, Mailer said, in its way the appearance of Shultz was a victory for free speech. Shultz, Mailer said after hearing the secretary’s speech, “surprised me with the liberality of his ideas.”

For his part, Shultz began by describing himself as “the latest PEN controversy.” But no matter, said Shultz: “In Norman (Mailer)’s world that’s a high form of flattery--and that’s how I take it. And I salute you for taking this decision in favor of free speech.”

Soon Shultz was offering what resembled nothing so much as a love song to the creative process. “Nearly every field of knowledge emulates--or ought to emulate--literary models of analysis, persuasion and explanation.” And “if mathematics is the queen of sciences,” Shultz said, “literature is king of the humanities.

” . . . Diversity, debate, contrast, argumentativeness are what we as a people thrive on,” the secretary of state said. “The larger and noisier PEN has become, the more it has been able to do for freedom around the world.”

Said Shultz, still massaging the audience’s collective literary ego, “Freedom--that is what we are talking about, and is why we are here. And the writer is at the heart of freedom.”

Then, in reference to the controversial enforcement of the McCarran-Walter Act, Shultz insisted that “This Administration is committed--and I am personally committed--to protecting free expression of all political ideas. We agree with PEN’s charter when it states that ‘literature, national though it be in origin, knows no frontiers.’ ”

Shultz was adamant that “No denial (of a visa) is ever based on a person’s abstract beliefs.” But, he said sternly: “I want to make it clear, however, that we will deny personal access to people who aim to undermine our system through their actions, who are likely to engage in proscribed intelligence activities, or who raise funds or otherwise assist our enemies.”

In sum, the secretary said, “I am proud to represent an Administration that more than any in this century is committed to the philosophy and in fact to reducing the intrusion of government into the lives, minds and livelihood of the individual.” Applied to writers and artists, Shultz said, this practice creates a kind of bond: “So I put it to you,” he told his PEN audience, “that we have more in common than you think.”

And, voicing optimism for freedom and for the future, Shultz closed his talk with an admonition. “Don’t be so surprised,” he said, “by the fact that Ronald Reagan and I are on your side.”

For North American writer William Gaddis, that comment was the coup de grace . Asked to discuss the writer’s imagination and the imagination of the state at Monday’s first daylong session of the congress at the Essex House Hotel, Gaddis drew laughter as he said that because of that final remark, “the subtitle of my talk is the willing suspension of disbelief.”

Greatest Fiction

In fact, Gaddis said, “we who struggle to create fiction must regard the state with awe, for the state is the greatest fiction to be concocted of all.”

To Chinese novelist Wang Meng, jumping at the chance “to meet my old and new friends and to exercise my poor English,” the congress’ title topic made him wonder “Who can tell what a given writer will imagine in the next minute? Will it be heaven? Hell? A black cat?

“A writer lives in the world of his imagination,” Meng said, “but also in the factual world. He shall not try to turn every thought into fact.

“The imagination of the state, however, must not run unrestrained, out of bounds.” That government whose imagination is “realistic, constructive and rational,” that state that “faces up to grim realities” will cause “writers to rejoice, along with the people.

“In such a country,” he said, “a writer retains the right to his own imagination.”

But Gordimer, one of several prominent South African authors to make the journey to the PEN colloquium, was less sanguine. Lacking any imagination of its own, she said, “the state sees imagination as something to be put into service.” The writer, however, “is put into service by his imagination. He or she writes at its dictates.”

Historically, Gordimer said, “the philosophy of social order was first imagined by the writers.” Was it not Plato, she asked, who first set forth the notion of a republic?

Laboring behind a battered banner labled imagination, states in fact practice a kind of mass fantasizing of reality, Gordimer said, “And so you have the kind of total travesty that exists in my own country, South Africa,” said Gordimer, “where the state fantasizes a democracy, while more than half the population cannot vote.”

But, harking back also to history, Germany’s Guenter Grass contended that “literary imagination was needed for the development of the state imagination.” Still, when adopted by the state, that literary imagination may suffer, “as we can see by the fate of Utopias from Thomas More’s to Karl Marx’s. What happens to Utopias as soon as the state assumes the role of putting fences around earthly paradises?”

Momentarily, Grass’ interpreter struggled with his translation. “Put some imagination into it,” panel chairman Mario Vargas Llosa of Peru whimsically suggested, and the room grabbed the opportunity for some much-needed laughter.

‘State Organized Insanity’

In reality, Grass grimly continued, “the imagination of the state has exceeded Kafka’s tale, and even the most far-flung science fiction novels.” A world, Grass said, of “state-organized insanity, the daily threat to the planet of nuclear disaster presents a challenge to the imagination of the writer.

“And what can that imagination come up with,” he wondered, “except hellish laughter?”

Japanese novelist Kobo Abe, furiously blinking his eyes behind thick-lensed glasses, then finally taking them off entirely, admitted through his interpreter that “generally speaking, I am not fond of attending congresses of this sort. But the theme of this congress was extraordinarily attractive to me, and that made me think that having come up with a title like this, American writers must be at a higher level than I had imagined.”

A discussion of imagination and the state, Abe said, gives rise to a series of personal memories. Watching a televised account of Iran after the invasion by Iraq, Abe said the camera panned on a pile of wreckage long enough for him to notice a book by Dostoevsky lying in the wreckage. The sight brought back a memory from when Abe was 17.

“I had just discovered Dostoevsky,” he remembered. “I had read the first volume of ‘The Brothers Karamazov’ and was on my way to the library to get the second volume. It was that morning that I heard that war was declared between my country and the United States.

“Of course that was big news,” Abe said. “But I was much more concerned about whether the copy I wanted would be at the library, or whether someone else had taken it out.

“Looking at an example like this tells you what kind of a nuisance works by someone like Dostoevsky can be to the state.” Recalling the Russian’s rocky relationship with his own government, Abe said, “as we ponder upon what writers need today, it might be interesting to think what it was about Dostoevsky that bothered the state so much.”

With so much talk of the writer and the state, it seemed inevitable that the discussion would shift also to politics and to politicians. “I think it is perhaps a nice dream that we have literature on one side and the state on the other,” Guenter Grass said. “But for this to happen, something is necessary: that they are able to listen to each other.

“But I have very seldom met a politician, and I have met a lot, that is able to listen. He understands it all to begin with, and he understands it better than anyone else.”

In the face of such non-hearing politicians, Grass said, it behooves writers “to learn to be anarchists again. . . . We have put our private anarchy deep in our pocket, and now it is time to look in that pocket and to make clear what is going on.”

Later, Israeli novelist Oz took exception with the very concept of “the state.” Some states are good, he said, and some are clearly evil.

“Friends,” he told his fellow writers, “let us not ascribe a demonic imagination to the state and a redeeming imagination to ourselves. It is all in our heads.” As writers, Oz said, “we ought to be telling bad from worse to worst.”

And North American novelist Robert Hughes concurred: “To speak of the state as if there were one quintessential state is rubbish,” Hughes said.

Capsulizing a day’s worth of intense dialogue, E. L. Doctorow said he found himself “oddly enough, in agreement with Mr. Mailer, who thinks this is a substantive matter for us to discuss.”

In a sense, he said, all discussion of the writer’s imagination and the imagination of the state led back to the night before, and the address by Secretary of State Shultz. “I would like to tell you that this was all a planned psychodrama, conceived, written and orchestrated by Norman Mailer and E. L. Doctorow.

“But alas,” he said, “this was not a preconceived and planned scenario.”

Growing Weary

In a press conference following the panel talks it was clear that even the participants had grown weary of the Shultz situation. Hughes called the matter “far overplayed,” and Doctorow, too, said he thought he’d said enough about the event.

By evening time, at a reception given at Gracie Mansion by New York Mayor Ed Koch, it was clear from the din that writers can make noise at least as eloquently as they make words. Never at a loss for words, lots of words, Koch was in classic form, saying he took special pleasure in welcoming these guests “because I am among writers and have written myself.” The author of two best-selling books, Koch said, “I think I am one of the few mayors who has written successfully.”

So much so, in fact, that PEN’s Kurt Vonnegut wasted not a moment in recruiting Koch for membership in the organization.

Nibbling on sausages that looked and tasted remarkably like the variety sold on New York street corners, guests disagreed as to whether the Shultz affair had overshadowed PEN’s personal matters at hand.

“I thought the Shultz stuff brought everyone to life,” poet Rose Styron said. “It was a catalyst. It stirred things up and now everyone feels very close.”

Focusing the Subject

“It was quite relevant to a discussion of the state,” poet Allen Ginsberg agreed. “It was a way of focusing the subject.”

Speaking through his interpreter wife Ruth, Nicaragua’s Omar Cabezas, author of a top-selling memoir and his country’s minister of the interior, allowed that “I think there were many different positions espoused. I thought it was very interesting.”

And relevant, novelist/poet Antonio Olinto of Brazil said. “It was eclectic,” he said, “and I like it when things are eclectic, because life is eclectic, life is not logical.”

“I think it was good preparation for peace,” said his wife, science fiction writer Zora Seljan. “Peace is the capacity to live together with people who are not necessarily thinking as we think. This is peace.

“A writers’ meeting such as this can give ideas to the technicians, to the bureaucrats,” Seljan said.

“And writers can create the future,” her husband averred. “I think it is the obligation of the writers to suggest the future.”