P.E.N.: Mightier Than the Sword?

“This is a historic occasion, the dawn of a new era in the history of P.E.N.,” announced International President Francis King, as he welcomed the first center in the Soviet Union to be introduced since 1921 when the society of Poets, Essayists, and Novelists (P.E.N.) was founded to defend freedom of expression. Approval of “The Soviet Russian P.E.N. Center” in Moscow was an exciting climax to the 53rd International P.E.N. Congress, which brought 324 writers representing 72 countries to the oldest city in the Netherlands from May 7-11.

In five days of meetings, speeches, readings and spirited debate, participants such as Harold Pinter, Antonia Fraser, Larry McMurtry, Breyten Breytenbach and Chinua Achebe explored the Congress theme, “The End of Ideologies.” Echoing the chants of university students in Beijing, the Congress passed a resolution demanding that Chinese writer Wei Jingsheng be released from prison; the assembled writers issued a vigorous condemnation of the Ayatollah Khomeini for his death threats to Salman Rushdie, author of “The Satanic Verses”; they nominated the imprisoned Czechoslovakian playwright Vaclav Havel for the Nobel Prize for literature; and they elected a new international president, Rene Tavernier, of the French Center.

No single event symbolized the achievements of this P.E.N. Congress more vividly than a roar of sustained applause which greeted the nine writers in the first official Soviet delegation. Anatoly Rybakov, author of “The Children of the Arbat,” spoke to the assembly with astonishing candor about the “moral losses” his country has suffered: “Thirty years of Stalin’s tyranny and twenty years of Brezhnev’s incompetent rule is long enough to ruin any society, particularly a society that has no democratic traditions. . . . The transformation of our society has started from the spiritual sphere of people’s lives, from the things that influence a person’s outlook and his moral stand. They’ve started from literature, the arts, and the press.” (One Russian colleague remarked: “Ten years ago he could not have returned to the Soviet Union after such a speech. Now, everyone is saying these things.”)

Sixty-two prominent writers in Moscow have signed the P.E.N. charter which affirms their allegiance to freedom of expression, an allegiance that transcends national loyalties. The Soviet Union joins other Eastern Bloc P.E.N. centers such as Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Romania, Yugoslavia and the German Democratic Republic as well as language centers in exile, including Latvian, Estonian, and Lithuanian. By agreement with International P.E.N., there may be as many as five P.E.N. centers in the Soviet Union to represent the literatures of nearly 100 different language groups in that huge country.

The Soviet Russian center is the culmination of several years’ work behind-the-scenes in Moscow by Francis King and International Secretary Alexandre Blokh. Earlier this year, they reached agreement with Soviet officials about combining a government list of “official writers” with their list of “independent writers.” They also obtained assurances that the P.E.N. center would function free of the government-controlled Writer’s Union. “There are no guarantees about how this will work,” observed Andre Bitov, Soviet author of “Pushkin House” “but if we don’t start, we’ll never find out.”

The P.E.N. Congress was electrified by the surprise appearance of Chinese poet Bei Dao, who made an impassioned speech on behalf of his imprisoned colleague Wei Jingsheng. He characterized Wei as “a brave writer who is in jail because of his honesty.” His translator, Taiwanese poet Lo Ching, noted that Bei Dao’s speech was extremely courageous because he may face reprisals upon his return to the People’s Republic of China. As if to prove that point, Jian Fan Jin, a delegate from the China center, angrily denounced Bei Dao to the assembly and claimed that Wei Jingsheng was “a counterrevolutionary criminal.” Despite this outburst, the Congress passed a resolution presented by Joanne Leedom-Ackerman, president of the USA West center, to demand the immediate release of Wei Jingsheng and the other imprisoned Chinese Writers.

The most important on-going work of P.E.N. was reported in a two-day meeting of the Writers-in-Prison Committee, which examined more than 300 cases of authors, poets and journalists imprisoned for their writings. Thomas von Vegesack, chairman of the committee, observed with regret that the number of cases in Turkey, Israel, Romania, Iran and South Africa had risen alarmingly.

Despite a strong consensus on issues concerning freedom-to-write, International P.E.N. was deeply divided by the internal politics of electing a new president. Rene Tavernier, president of the French center, defeated Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe (“The Anthills of the Savannah”) by a margin of 35 votes to 30. The election was viewed as a defeat for the English, Canadian and American centers that had endorsed Achebe in an effort to broaden P.E.N. membership in Third World countries.