Timebends (98 page)

At dinner at a novelist's home his child peeked around a drape calling, “Papa?” and pointing down to a car across the street in which the police sat waiting, a maneuver to warn us all that we were not alone. I would learn how to accept this surveillance as they did, by numbing my fears and informing my brains.

In the shabby offices of the literary magazine
Listy,
facing a couple of dozen writers, I sat for an interview that turned out to be the last before the magazine was shut down forever. It had not dawned on me until then that Prague was not “East” but a European city west of Vienna and quite simply, as was clear from up close, the prize of straightforward aggression, for just out of town hundreds of Soviet tanks were parked in ranks. But I was perversely thankful for my onetime attraction to Moscow since it gave me some understanding of Prague writers who had also looked to the East for liberation during the war, infatuating themselves with conflictless “socialism” and the redemption of mankind they had
seen in it. I knew all about that, and it was part of the same surreal pastiche for me as it was for them, and I was glad of it.

Some eight years later I would write
The Archbishop's Ceiling
out of this maze of relationships I found in Prague, but true to form, it took a decade more to establish itself, in the 1986 Royal Shakespeare Company production at the Barbican. It is a play of shaded meanings and splintered implications, of double and triple repercussions not altogether unknown in the political rooms of Washington, Paris, and London but more blatantly and brutally evident among writers the farther east one moves. It was basically my own bad revisions that crushed the first production, at the Kennedy Center in Washington. I mistakenly allowed myself to be persuaded that the play would not be clear enough to naive Americans in its original form. But that was the form in which it succeeded in London and in an earlier Bristol Old Vic production. Time also helped, for by 1986 people could see that the play was not about “the East” alone; we were all secretly talking to power, to the bugged ceiling of the mind, whether knowingly or not in the West; even unconsciously we had forgone the notion of a person totally free of deforming inner obeisances to power or shibboleth. It was more and more difficult to imagine in the last quarter of the century the naked selfness of a free human being speaking with no unacknowledged interest except his own truth.

I was still not sure why I had accepted the presidency of PEN even when I sat on the Belgrade-bound plane from Paris, but there is an instinct that decides such things, if not always for the better. The man who took the seat next to mine that June afternoon in 1965 looked familiar, although I knew we had never actually met. “Norman Podhoretz,” he said, offering a handshake. I was surprised that the editor of
Commentary
magazine should dignify enemy territory by his presence in Yugoslavia, but in a few moments I was finding him warm and rather funny about literary people and the New York scene. Still, if he was going to Bled to see what this PEN thing was all about, I had to assume it was with some skepticism if not outright suspicion: As for myself, I hadn't the slightest idea what to expect of this, my first congress, whose president I incredibly was. I was glad that Podhoretz, a broadly educated essayist, thought there was some point in the organization, but at the same time his presence beside me clarified at least one of my reasons for having accepted the presidency: PEN seemed to promise an awakening
of humanist solidarity at a time when the opposing creed of untrammeled individualism and private success was beginning its most recent sweep of the American political landscape.

After a thankfully short flight the plane landed on a runway at the border of a field just then being plowed. Podhoretz, whose face normally had the surprised look of a suddenly awakened baby, was even more wide-eyed as he eagerly tried to see past me through the window. Here was his first sight of a Communist state, a broken-off piece of what years later his favorite American president would call the Evil Empire. As the plane turned around to taxi to the airport, two tractors appeared in the field. “They have tractors!” he exclaimed; thinking he was kidding, I turned to see his mixed look of excited confusion. The plane stopped and the tractors drew closer. He pressed toward the window to stare at them. What a roiling mixture of feelings in him! And what an ideology that it could leave him, with all his learning, so surprised at their having tractors in Yugoslavia.

The machines were now only yards away, and I could read the Cyrillic letters cast into their radiator frames. “I think they make them here,” I said with a straight face, pointing the lettering out to him. When he looked absolutely appalled, I let him off easy. “But they're more likely Russian.”

“Probably from American designs.”

“Well, no, ours are better, I understand. These are kind of clunky and hard to maneuver.”

Now he seemed to feel some relief.

“But I hear they last.”

He caught on and unwillingly had to laugh. Having been in Russia, I was pretty sure he'd find plenty here to exercise all his feelings, from condescension to fear.

Hardly had I unpacked in the Belgrade hotel when there was a knock on the door and there he was, the commentator-critic-editor craning to see what accommodations I had been given. Actually, I had the vast suite used by Tito when he came to town, five or six bedrooms and baths reeking of power and gloom, a full kitchen, and a conference-living room containing three couches and a huge dining table with a cut-glass vase and three welcoming roses on its gleaming surface.

“How the hell do you rate this? I've got a lousy little room!”

“I'm the president, Jack, and I may have to make a speech out there to an enormous crowd, too.” I took him to a corner window opening onto a balcony from which, one story above the great square, Tito had probably given some speeches. Norman laughed,
but not heartily. He had not yet published his book
Making It,
but looking back on this day, I would wonder if he wasn't already working on it there in the Croatian capital. As a competitor myself, I recognized the symptoms, and he had them really bad, as he was all but admitting to me himself.

Bled is in high mountains, and the restaurant near midnight was cold. The woman on the tiny stage up front was apparently going to take off her clothes despite the fact that of the thirty or so tables only ours and five or six others were occupied. Earlier, I had hooked up with a Yugoslavian newspaperman named Bogdan, and two other journalists had attached themselves to us after one of the PEN round table discussions in the hotel that faced the lake on the other end of town. Now we all sat staring at the stripper, who was unhooking her skirt and undulating to the bumpy jazz of a small, cold band. At a table nearby a couple of stumpy local women in thick sweaters were sipping vodka with their men, stolidly watching the tiny stage as Yugoslavia went modern, no matter what.

The PEN Congress had been going for two days, long enough for me to fear that I was out of my depth in this job, too hopelessly ignorant of writers who were not out of New York, London, Paris, or more recently Latin America. For all I knew, there were writers here who might well be world figures had their works been written in one of the major languages. What provincials we all were, not only the Americans but also the British and French.

Nevertheless, the majority of the hundred and fifty or so delegates were really academics or journalists, like my table companions, not creators at all. And up to this point PEN seemed little more than an intricate exercise in diplomacy leavened only by a rare moment or two of frankness. I could see no great victory in the fact that French, British, and West German writers were sitting in the same room as East Germans, Bulgarians, Hungarians, and Poles, not when the deep moral and political conflicts between them were rarely allowed to surface. Nobody wanted the same kind of logjam in PEN that they had in the United Nations, but we seemed to be indulging in vacuous discussion instead. I was starting to be sorry I had accepted the presidency. I was not looking for trouble, but it was hard to see how we were doing much bridging of hostile cultures here. Yet Bogdan kept insisting PEN was vital and that to Yugoslavs it was important that I be president, especially since I was an American.

“In the first place, I am not an ‘American.' My government
doesn't like me, never did. I don't represent the American people either.”

“Yes, we know,” he would say, and leave it cryptically at that. The simple and nearly absurd fact was that with an American as president, they thought their cultural independence from the Sovietized East more safely confirmed. We were in a world of pure symbolism here, to the point where I wondered if all of life was this same sort of dream.

The stripper dropped her blouse, revealing a pair of anticlimactic surprises, but I saw she had good legs now that they were bared, and I asked my new friends if they could tell from looking at her what her ethnicity was. Bogdan was Croatian, the two journalists were Slovenian and Serb, and now each began trying to foist her off on the others—she was too short for a Slovenian or too fair for a Serb and so on. When her act was finished she came down past us in a blue woolen bathrobe, carrying her clothes over her arm, and I reached out and stopped her to ask where she was from.

“Düsseldorf,” she said, and went on out with no pause.

The men suppressed an explosive laugh and even wiped off their smiles in deference to the holy and lethal divisions in the country, which were no laughing matter—unless you thought about them for a minute. And now I remembered wondering, way back there in the Brooklyn of the Marxist-materialist thirties, who would be left to bury the Jewish dead and support the synagogues once my parents' generation was gone, since it was perfectly obvious that the age of religion and small pesky nationalities was finished forever. Ah, yes.

The irreality of my life was not improving here in Yugoslavia. The mood was symbolized a few days hence when I climbed out of the Adriatic off Dubrovnik and sat on a rock beside my friend Bogdan, who only then informed me that these waters were full of sharks but that he had not wished to spoil my swim by telling me in advance. Up in Bled, I kept trying to identify delegates and was given meaningless names of editors of unknown newspapers and magazines and professors at colleges I had never heard of, and the depressing futility of so voluble yet powerless a gathering of people all but convinced me that I had been had.

Slowly, however, matters improved. I found Stephen Spender, who made a speech strongly suggesting that the poets present should read their poems to whoever was interested, and this simple but amazing idea banished the prevailing dustiness for a while. I noticed that Ignazio Silone, the fiercely anti-Communist novelist,
was able to sit quietly talking to Pablo Neruda, the Chilean Communist poet. And some hard searching turned up other creators: Rosamond Lehmann, Richard Hughes, Charles Olson, Robie Macauley, Roger Shattuck, and Susan Sontag among the writers in English, and Yugoslavia's Nobel laureate Ivo Andrič. It turned out that we were all equally skeptical of any reality here but all secretly hoping to see something come of this largely gestural meeting. Almost despite myself I began feeling a certain enthusiasm for the idea of international solidarity among writers, feeble as its present expression still seemed.

I learned that A. den Doolaard, a burly, mustached member of the Dutch Center, had been making clandestine trips into Poland for years now to distribute PEN money to destitute families of imprisoned writers. As a result of the Bled congress Mihajlo Mihajlov, whose
Moscow Summer 1964
had earned him a nine-month jail sentence, was freed (although not totally cleared), and even the Yugoslav bureaucrats present openly expressed their relief. Carver, I discovered, had quietly negotiated his release with Matej Bor, chief of the PEN Slovene Center.

It was not lost on me, as I moved among the Westerners and shared their guarded conversations with writers from the East bloc, that American PEN had been silent when my passport was taken from me in the fifties. But the past was the past, and now perhaps there was a chance to rise to the same indignation no matter what the quarter from which repression spoke. With Carver I became the advocate of a new birth of PEN's influence in America, and also in Africa and Asia. We must have a congress soon in Africa, I thought (and indeed the Ivory Coast hosted the 1967 congress).

The common enemy was our terrifying provincialism. I thought of Lillian Hellman's 1948 dinner with the two pleading Yugoslav UN delegates and felt embarrassment now at how abstractly we had talked around her sparkling table, as though it were simply an ideological dispute! But the Yugoslavs had torn their country away from the Germans, and in Belgrade Bogdan had pointed out apartment buildings with concrete firing slits cut discreetly into their upper stories to take on the expected Soviet invasion after Tito had defied Stalin. “The slits are facing east,” he had said. The two young UN delegates were no doubt thinking of those slits.

The big news at Bled was the appearance of seven Soviet “observers,” plus the fact that they did not huddle together, as their delegations normally did, but attended round table discussions separately
and without supervision. With the exception of the novelist Leonid Leonov they were dutiful members of the apparatus, but that was less important, I thought, than their uniform efforts to show me, the new president, a kindly face—PEN was clearly no longer the suspicious instrument of the Western secret services in official eyes.

At the closing party of the congress in the old Bled castle-fort, whose battlements were romantically floodlit for the gala night, I sat with Alexei Surkov and his accompanying Soviets, who were comparing their vodka with the slivovitz of some Yugoslav writers, all of them awash and being heavily Slav and singing old Partisan songs, and what with the eastward-facing firing slits in Belgrade, PEN seemed to assume a relevance, or at least a promising irony.