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 sta
nds, 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.
But the power this idea had in my deepest consciousness was dramatized for me most clearly long after I had finished my term as president, when I went with Inge to China for the first time in 1978. One of the first people we met there was an expatriate left-wing American lawyer who had spent more than twenty-five years as a translator in Beijing and now, faced with the recent passing of Mao and the Cultural Revolution, was trying to orient himself not only to the mysterious present and unknown future but, of necessity, to the past with its almost total destruction of the very notion of law itself.
I had thought myself reasonably informed about China by the American press and American sympathizers until it dawned on me that we had been meeting writer after writer who replied with virtually the same line whenever I asked what he was working on now: “I am not ready to start writing again—it has been so long.” Why had it been so long, and why for all of them? It was perplexing.
Of course my angle on China had been laid down in the late thirties by Edgar Snow’s account of the Long March and the heroism of the revolution, and so the real life of the later era had never entered my dreamworld. It was a hard shock to learn that every one of the two dozen or more writers, stage and film directors, actors, and artists we met in the first week of our stay had been either imprisoned or exiled to some distant province to feed pigs or plant rice, for as long as twelve years in some cases. Many had lost spouses to torture in those years, and they were a mere handful out of thousands.
It was all succinctly put by an English-speaking Chinese who happened to sit beside us on a train, a man who got caught in Connecticut by the outbreak of the revolution in 1949 and had been forbidden by the State Department to return until now, nearly thirty years later. A physics professor, he had come back with the resolve to reorganize the department at Beijing University.
We could not believe that there was no physics department at Beijing University, but so it was.
“The Red Guards dispersed the staff ten years ago,” he said sadly. “I am traveling around to find some of the older men who were demoted to various low-grade positions and see whether I can gather them so that they can begin to form a department.” But there were hardly two hundred and fifty thousand university students left in the whole country now—fewer than on Manhattan Island, probably—and it would take some time to get things started again. “And of course the physics they know here is very much out of date. China in some fields is ten, twenty, thirty years behind the times …”
It was still very bad form for Westerners to report the Maoist catastrophe, but in Chinese Encounters I described a talk with the American lawyer in his Beijing home. I asked whether any new legal measures were contemplated to guarantee against future explosions of self-righteous (and ambitious) fanaticism masking itself as militant revolution. He did not think that necessary, although he did look a bit uneasy when he said, “The Party knows what it must do and is going to prevent it ever happening again.”
But had there been a legal system independent of the Party, a nonpolitical court of appeal—might it not have saved China these decades of lost development?
I felt a mixture of compassion and disgust with him in his situation. We all protect our spiritual investments, and he had put a lifetime into a China where classes had supposedly been abolished and level equality reigned, and he could only say now—even now—“A so-called independent judiciary implies that the Party can perpetrate injustices; this implies that it is a separate ruling class imposing its will on the people. But the Party is the people and cannot oppress itself, and therefore there is no need for lawyers or the Western idea of a separate body of professionals to protect the innocent.”
A rationalist, Marxist materialist, he was intoning a hymn of denial poetry nearly incredible now after millions of Chinese had been displaced, “put down,” murdered, or jailed with almost total arbitrariness by the very Party he was ready to rely on to insure that such insanity would not recur. What ideology, I wondered, was not based on a principled denial of the facts?
Back in China again in 1983 to stage Salesman at the Beijing Peoples’ Art Theatre, I stood in the courtyard of the building with actor-director Ying Ruocheng, my Willy, who pointed out the place where one day, more than a decade earlier, a troop of Red Guards had lined up all the dozens of actors in the company to watch as they began hectoring sixty-year-old Lao She, the famed author of many plays and novels (including one, Rickshaw Boy, that had been a success in America back in the early forties); cuffing him and calling him a bourgeois counterrevolutionary, they looked as though they were about to beat him severely then and there, when a passing policeman intervened, pretended to put the vile writer under arrest, took him around the corner, and let him loose. Next morning Lao She was found at the edge of a shallow pond. In his widow’s opinion, they had held his head under, for his shoes were dry, but others believed he had ended his own life in total despair.
Memory keeps folding in upon itself like geologic layers of rock, the deeper strata sometimes appearing on top before they slope downward into the depths again.
Inge and I left the Gorbachev meeting for London to see two of my plays, the Royal Shakespeare Company production of The Archbishop’s Ceiling at the Barbican Pit, and Peter Wood’s of The American Clock at the National Theatre’s Cottesloe. Despite Margaret Thatcher’s budget cuts, these subsidized theatres were alive with a spirit of artistic engagement and adventure refreshingly different from the tense semi-hysteria of New York’s cash-blighted fear of every shadow. The American Clock at the National had a live jazz band and a real crowd onstage when they were needed (already half a million dollars in costs on Broadway), and with scheduled limited runs, the whole success-flop terror was muted, lending artists psychic room to imagine and stretch before the broad British pub
lic rather than a narrow cult of initiates. As always when actors are free, the audience was swept up and into the fantasies of the play. And it didn’t hurt their aesthetic pleasure that they were able to afford their tickets.
It was already over a decade since I had written Clock, and seeing Wood’s version, I felt the happy sadness of knowing that my original impulse had been correct in this work; but as had happened more than once before, in the American production I had not had the luck to fall in with people sufficiently at ease with psychopolitical themes to set them in a theatrical style, a challenge more often tackled in the British theatre. I had described the play as a “mural” of American society in the Depression crisis, but the very word society is death on Broadway, and as with The Archbishop’s Ceiling, I had hopelessly given way and reshaped a play for what I had come to think of as the Frightened Theatre. In the end, as always, I would only blame myself, but I had felt despairingly alone then and was persuaded to personalize what should have been allowed its original epic impulse, its concentration on the collapse of a society.
Both plays in England were done in their early, uncontaminated versions, more or less fresh from my desk. Both were hard-minded attempts to grasp what I felt life in the seventies had all but lost—a unified concept of human beings, the intimate psychological side joined with the social-political. To put it another way, I wanted to set us in our history by revealing a line to measure from. In Clock it was the objective facts of the social collapse; in Archbishop, the bedrock circumstances of real liberty. For what seemed to pervade almost all the arts then was a scattered, amusing, antic, taunting surrealism, but with its original post-World War I rebelliousness tamed and made chic, a form of gay naturalistic reportage of life’s crazed surfaces, with no moral center. In short, it was a style of mere escape from a confrontation with our destiny, which is always tragic but always waiting to fall into pathos when shorn of social context. We had come to prize and celebrate in our art disconnection for its own sake, but this was not at all the same as tearing apart the givens of experience in order to recreate a fresh unity that would inform us newly about our lives. Our surrealism was naturalism disguised, and as incapable of projecting alternatives to what we were doing and why as naturalism had always been.
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