On Inge’s phone, I was having a hard time making out that it was “Keith calling from London” and that he had to see me tomorrow and would fly to Paris with someone named Carver, who would explain everything. Keith Botsford, a novelist and teacher, had been one of the editors—along with Saul Bellow and Aaron Asher, who by this time was my editor at Viking—of The Noble Savage, a lively but short-lived periodical to which I had contributed two short stories a few years earlier. Now he was saying something about “PEN,” of which I had only vaguely heard.
Next day Keith, with whom I had only a passing acquaintance, arrived at Inge’s apartment on the rue de la Chaise with an immense Englishman in tow: David Carver, a Sidney Greenstreet without the asthma. In fact, as I soon learned, he had been an opera baritone of some note until the Second World War, when he became the Duke of Windsor’s aide and suffered through the war with his royal charge in the Bahamas.
Inge’s apartment was in a house that had been the Spanish embassy in the sixteenth century. The walls were thick, the ceilings very high, and the windows overlooking the ancient little two-block-long street were immaculately polished by her longtime Basque maid, Fiorina, who served us our coffee with a formality fit for three barons in a palaver about the spice trade. Fiorina’s black eyes were charged with the pleasure of having something important to do at last, after months of waiting for her adored mistress to return from America for a visit.
Keith quickly gave the floor to Carver, a man of rounded diction, apt usage, and sudden descents into the raw street-level observations of a realistic theatre pro. He had served as secretary general of PEN for many years now and had obviously given much of his hope and time to it, “but I must candidly tell you, Mr. Miller, we are now at such a point that if you do not accept the presidency, PEN will be no more.”
The presidency of PEN? I hardly knew what the organization did beyond the haziest impression that it was some sort of literary discussion club.
PEN, Carver explained, was established after the war—the First War—by such people as John Galsworthy, Bernard Shaw, G. K. Chesterton, H. G. Wells, John Masefield, Arnold Bennett, Henri Barbusse, and a number of like-minded others in England and Europe who thought that an international writers’ organization might help prevent another war by combating censorship and nationalist pressures on writers. Of course it didn’t stop the Second War, but in the thirties it helped draw the world’s attention to the menace of Nazism by expelling the German delegation, which had refused to condemn Hitler’s censorship and brutality toward writers. But the point now was that they had come to the end of the string.
“Why me?” I asked. I had no connection with PEN and no desire to run any organization. I frankly wasn’t sure I even believed in organizations for writers anymore.
Despite its valuable work, PEN had not made a bridge to the generation now in its twenties and thirties and had come to be regarded as tame and largely irrelevant. It had also been a victim of the Cold War, which had damaged if not destroyed its credit in smaller countries that were not entirely enlisted on the side of the West. The recent détente policy called for new attempts to tolerate East-West differences, which PEN had not yet gained the experience to do. A fresh start was needed now, and it was me.
Carver snapped open his gold cigarette case. Certain as I was that I wanted nothing to do with this new diversion from writing, there was no way of cutting short this great figure of a Briton, blond of hair, blue of eye, with silky skin as white as the inside of a grapefruit rind, two jolly pink rosettes on his cheeks, and shoulders as broad as the back of a wagon.
“We are trying to save some lives. We’ve managed to now and then. Not enough, but a few.”
“Lives?” This was still the mid-sixties, well before human rights concerns had surfaced in the West through such politically impartial organizations as Amnesty International, founded only a few years earlier. At this point the politicalization of human rights was complete, the Communist side erupting only when its partisans in the West were harassed, while the West made noises only when Eastern regimes clamped down on their dissidents. Carver was opening up an entirely new vista of a depoliticized human ground on which to stand and defend everybody at the same time, and thus perhaps to speak to the sterility of two decades of Cold War. It was an attractive if not quite credible position.
PEN had been able, Carver said by way of example, to convince the Hungarian government to let some imprisoned writers leave after the Russians invaded in ‘56. They still had centers in Poland and Czechoslovakia (later to be dissolved or crippled) that collected information and publicized cases of oppression from time to time. “It’s very irregular,” he confessed, “and doesn’t always do much good, but it does often enough to make it a pity to have to go out of business now.”
But what was PEN’s leverage? Why should anyone pay any attention to it?
“They dislike bad publicity in the East quite as much if not more than we in the West. In fact, they are eager to be seen as modern, up-to-date societies and not tyrannies at all,” he said, raising his eyebrows and trying not to smile.
“Why must you go out of business?”
One could almost see him put on his diplomatic black homburg. They had been unable in recent years to attract sufficient writers of note, of international standing. I could draw in people of that kind, he thought.
“I couldn’t possibly run a . . .”
“I run everything. You need only appear for the international congresses that come up periodically, perhaps once a year. I assure you it will not mean much time at all.”
“You want a figurehead.”
“Not at all. The president has real power if he chooses to take command of it.”
But I had a suspicion of being used and wondered suddenly whether our State Department or CIA or equivalent British hands might be stirring this particular stew. I decided to flush them out. “What if I wanted to invite Soviet writers to join PEN?”
Carver’s mouth dropped open. “Why, that would be wonderful! Of course! Yes! In fact, you see, we are always in danger of splitting apart altogether, our East bloc centers are always rather on the edge; and you would be most persuasive to the Eastern people.”
“… Because if the point is to help prevent war, the presence of Soviet writers would be . . .”
“Absolutely, yes. It would be stupendous if we and the Soviet writers could all join together in a single organization. Will you take it on?”
I stalled, said I’d think about it for a bit. But he had to know in the next few days, “before the invitations go out for the Bled Congress.”
“Bled? Where is Bled?”
“In Yugoslavia.”
“There’s a center in Yugoslavia?”
“Oh, yes, a very good one. And they need us very much. It will be our first congress in Yugoslavia.”
After a couple of days, reluctantly but snagged by curiosity, I consented, but I was left with the mystery of why I had been chosen. I could only suspect what two decades later I learned was probably the truth. Among the entries in my dossier, which I was finally able to wheedle out of the FBI in 1986, was a 1965 cable to Washington from the U.S. embassy in Moscow describing my reception there, two short weeks before this visit of Carver’s, as “semi-official” and warm; in fact, Botsford had phoned the day we returned to Paris from the East. The British press may have reported my welcome at the train station by a quite large delegation from the Soviet Writers Union, but it was also possible that Carver had other sources of information about my current favor with the Soviets. In any case, he knew that I was acceptable to both East and West, the perfect PEN president now that the organization’s very existence was in grave question. PEN stood stuck in the concrete of what I would soon learn were its traditional Cold War anti-Soviet positions, but like the Western governments at this point, it was now trying to bend and acknowledge Eastern Europe as a stable group of societies whose writers might well be permitted new contacts with the West, from
which they had for so long been cut off. Thus, after some forty years, PEN’s original peace-preserving impulse might have a chance to exert itself in the real world. Willy-nilly, I was pitched into the still indeterminate tangle of détente politics to begin a new and totally unexpected stage of my learning life.
For Inge, to see a valise was to start packing. With her genius for languages she had learned Russian before the trip began. She could also speak English, French, Spanish, and Italian fluently, and Rumanian with some residual difficulty, because she had studied it early in the war years and had not used it since. After two weeks in Greece, I suddenly realized on one of our last evenings there that she was now speaking that language, which she had never studied at all. I would gradually learn to turn to her in any foreign country for interpretation of what the local barbarians were trying to tell me, and it usually worked. This capacity for concentration, and at the same time a romantic playfulness of spirit, had a way of disarming men of power. In the late forties, after she interviewed and photographed German chancellor Konrad Adenauer, he insisted she become his chief secretary. In China one lunchtime in the eighties, she found herself between a German-speaking Chinese official, a Russian-speaking Chinese writer, and an English-speaking Chinese tourist guide. These men rarely got a chance to speak their second languages, so they happily tried them on Inge, and at one point she was translating three European languages into and out of Chinese. I thought I saw smoke coming out of her ears as she grew paler and paler, but she refused to give up until everyone realized what was happening and broke down in laughter.
We had gone by train to Moscow from Dusseldorf, two nights and nearly two days across an ocean of January snow, an expanse without limit or definition. It made one realize all over again that the human race most adores its leaders who are most mad; that Napoleon could put an army to marching, let alone fighting, through such chest-high drifts, and that Hitler could repeat the attempt, had to prove that these were insane men leading credulous hordes of devotees into their final frozen dream. The train moves at a good clip, and you have your breakfast looking out the window at the snow and then your lunch looking out the window at the snow and then your dinner looking out the window at the snow, and then you sleep dreaming of the window and the snow and wake next morning to look out the window at the snow, and there is nothing else for two and a half days.
My plays had been on the Soviet stage for nearly twenty years, and the affection of the audiences for my work ran deep, as I shortly discovered. Because the press was so tightly controlled and fiction writers had to battle for each paragraph and even word of candor, it was in the theatre that people found the most ample room for their spontaneous, unhampered insights and emotions. It was not that plays with unorthodox themes could be produced but that irony could be introduced by a raised eyebrow, a gesture, and the sheer human presence of the actor. The tactile vividness of live performances even of classic plays somehow energized the audience, and Russians treasured the theatre’s relative freedom of feeling and imagination.
In 1965 it happened that A View from the Bridge was being played, and of course we had to see it. The large theatre was packed, and at the end I took ten minutes of applause, but I learned several contradictory things in short order.
I knew no Russian, but I thought that at least in the first scene the text had been altered, and my interpreter confirmed my suspicion. In View the feelings of the longshoreman Eddie Carbone for his niece, Catherine, prompt him to betray his illegal immigrant relatives to the authorities in order to get rid of the young man Catherine wishes to marry; his unacknowledged love, illicit as it is in his eyes—he has raised Catherine as a daughter—is gradually pressed out of him by circumstances. But on the Soviet stage, hardly had the young girl walked past him for the first time when Eddie, with an obvious sensual inflection, said to Beatrice, his wife, “I love her.” It was almost like Oedipus turning to Jocasta in the first moments of the play and saying, “It’s no good being married to you, Mother …”
After the performance I complained about this foolish tampering to Oleg Efremov, director of the Sobremenik Theatre and later head of the Moscow Art Theatre. What struck me was not his remarkable defense of the change—“We are not interested in all that psychology” —but his underlying easy disdain, amounting to a contempt for an author’s right to his own work. Not that I had always been spared such arrogance elsewhere, including New York. But in combination with the elaborate adulation that was heaped on me, it seemed a mockery and somehow added a sinister color to our welcome, quite as though what had been given by one hand was being crushed by the other.
I learned in future years that while it was fairly common practice in the Soviet Union to laud and publish writers like Twain and Hemingway, the translations excluded politically or “morally” inconvenient passages and even added more convenient new ones, especially such as would underline criticism of American society. I was glad to know that Death of a Salesman had been produced, but my pleasure was greatly diminished by the news that it had been severely changed: Willy had been caricatured as a total fool, and Charley, who offers him financial help, was rewritten and acted as a clownish idiot, since as a businessman he could not possibly be even slightly altruistic or have a shred of sincerity.
At the same time, there was the theatre audience and its almost prayerful attention, the power of its concentration on the happenings on the stage, and its openhearted joy in greeting me. Between that audience’s innocent generosity and a luncheon given by the head of the Writers Union, Alexei Surkov, I first began to glimpse the coil of the Russian paradox.
Surkov’s reputation rested on some very popular war poems, but his ruthlessness in carrying out Stalinist repression of writers was by now the source of his renown. A gray-haired, grandfatherly man, he affected that big-chested country heartiness which tends to freeze the soul, and at the large luncheon in my honor at the Writers Union he lost no time in laying on the subtle two-ton hand. To get things going with a non-Russian speaker, the weather was the inevitable opening topic, and I said that it seemed terribly cold to me. Someone at the end of the long and crowded table opined in a gently polite tone that it had been even colder this time last year, and someone else disagreed, recalling it was warmer. There were several variations on both positions until Surkov leaned back and roared, “You see, Miller—we writers can never agree on anything!” The whole company howled approval, heavily nodding right down to the tablecloth at this instantaneous disintegration of any compulsory Party line in a writer’s life.
The heart sickened at the childishness of this organized naiveté, but what interested me was that at least in a foreigner’s presence liberty was still the standard. Why could it not simply be acknowledged that they believed a writer should carry out a predigested Party line in his work? Why shouldn’t writers agree with the all-seeing Party if it helped the human race to progress? But they persisted in nodding toward liberty, and I chose to see something perversely heartening in this.
But then there was the stroll through the snowy street past the Kremlin with our guide-interpreter, a young and serious fellow. When I glanced up toward the windows of what I was told had been Stalin’s apartment and wryly said, “There must have been some goings-on up there the night he died, right?” he returned a look of blank surprise.
“Why?” he asked.
“Well, all those other guys rushing around trying to decide who would succeed him.”
“It is not our business what goes on in there.”
This was a stern rebuke; who ruled them and how was not rightfully within the bounds of their curiosity. In fact, my prying seemed slightly unholy. How to understand this?
Yet within hours we sat watching a Yuri Lyubimov production of an adaptation of Ten Days That Shook the World, and hope soared again, for it was so subtle, so tasteful, so expertly conceived and acted, as to raise it above almost any other theatre I could recall. Surely we must share a common humanity! A couple of decades la
ter, of course, Lyubimov would be in self-exile in Italy, having given up trying to work under the attacks and strictures of the Party. Russia would not cease the lavish waste of her talents.
Through our two weeks there, we received the warmest welcoming embraces from Russian artists: Maya Plisetskaya in Don Quixote at the Bolshoi performing a special cadenza in my honor, her eyes lifted to our box as she danced; the novelist Konstantin Simonov in his country house offering us the respect of candor about the terrible past; Ilya Ehrenburg describing his discovery, upon his return from reporting the Spanish Civil War, that every Soviet journalist who had come back from Spain before him had been shot for fear of contamination by the West, though he had somehow survived not only this but also the general purge of the time, what he called “the lottery.”
There seemed no single, simple thing to be said about Russia by the time we were back in Paris, except possibly what I did say to David Carver, that if PEN could penetrate Soviet isolation it could only be to the good. Entering the country by train had helped me to understand something of the littleness a Russian writer must feel as he tries to speak his unique truth to that awful immensity, which at the same time enfolds him in a primitive smothering warmth.
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