After reading this account of an acrimonioius session of the PEN Writers' Congress n New York City in January 1986, sip a Manhattan and guess which famous participant turned out to be a forgetful ex-Nazi.
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A day of relatively calm literary discussion was shattered yesterday at the International PEN Congress when Günter Grass forcifully challenged Saul Bellow on his appraisal of the American dream.
By the time the session ended, a half-dozen prominent writers, including Nadine Gordimer, Allen Ginsberg, Salman Rushdie and Susan Sontag, traded charges and countercharges before an overflow audience.
Until Mr. Grass's statement, the afternoon session had been winding down much as had the morning session, after earnest and sometimes philosophical discussions by a variety of writers on their interpretations of alienation.
The audience heard Toni Morrison, the black American writer, declare that ''at no moment of my life have I ever felt as though I were an American,'' and George Konrad, the Hungarian novelist, assert that the Communist Party could not have come to power in his homeland had it not been for the Soviet Army. He added that the authoritarian regime in Hungary could not have lasted except for the military power of the Warsaw Pact.
Exiled Writers Speak
At the afternoon session, exiled writers from four countries expressed their sense of alienation. Comments ranged from a poignant description by Vassily Aksyonov, the exiled Russian poet, of how the exiled author feels when he is deprived of his home, culture and language, to a description by Manlio Argueta, a Salvadoran writer living in Costa Rica, of what it is like for Central American writers to ask questions of life and death when they are regularly faced with ''the very real possibility of death.''
It was during this session that Mr. Bellow spoke. By contrast, he described alienation as something to which American writers sometimes ''have a fatuous attachment.'' Toward the end of his talk he discussed Rousseau, Stendahl and Marx and added that the American middle class has been preoccupied with ''common sense desires,'' such as clothing, shelter and health care.
Mr. Bellow's talk, which included reminiscences of Robert F. Kennedy and of the author's own childhood as the son of Russian Jewish immigrants growing up in French Canada and Chicago, drew heavy applause.
But at the start of the question and answer period, about an hour later, Mr. Grass walked to the microphone in the center of the Casino on the Park in the Essex House and challenged Mr. Bellow.
Invokes Poverty of the Bronx
Speaking in accented English, Mr. Grass, author of ''The Tin Drum'' and other novels, said that while listening to Mr. Bellow talk about democracy giving Americans not only freedom, but also food and shelter, he had to wonder where he was.
''Three years ago when I was here I was in the South Bronx,'' Mr. Grass said. ''I would like to hear the echo of your words in the South Bronx where people don't have shelter, don't have food, and no possibility to live the freedom you have, or some have in this country.''
Mr. Grass, who has frequently criticized the United States in the past, added that America is a powerful country that protects dictatorships in Turkey and Pakistan.
Seated at the head table, with five foreign writers and the moderator, Robert Nozick, the Harvard philosopher, Mr. Bellow replied:
''I was talking about the majority situation in this country. I was not trying to include every exception one could think of. Of course there are exceptions. I was simply saying the philosophers of freedom of the 17th and 18th centuries provided a structure which created a society by and large free, by and large an example of prosperity. I did not say there are no pockets of poverty. I did not say this is a land of full justice. I didn't try to justify America as a superpower. I was simply saying there was no particular concern in the foundation of the country with the higher life of the country.''
Battle Is Joined
Mr. Grass returned temporarily to his seat, but at that point the literary and political battle was joined.
Breyten Breytenbach, a South African writer living in Paris, and a member of the panel with Mr. Bellow, said the ''freedom and prosperity of the United States rests possibly on the unfreedom and the poverty and the exploitation of many large parts of the world, including South Africa.''
Another panelist, Adam Zagajewski, a Pole who also lives in Paris, praised Mr. Bellow, saying ''he spoke as an old master'' who is a defender of liberty.
Mr. Aksyonov, who lives in Washington, said it puzzled him why West German writers ''are always so eager to criticize the United States.'' He urged them ''to think twice before making parallels'' between the United States and the Soviet Union.
Mr. Ginsberg, the poet, criticized the Soviet bureaucracy and ''the totalitarian grip it has taken on its client states.'' But, speaking of Nicaragua, he wondered what the United States could do ''to correct the devastation we have wrought in Latin America and elsewhere?''
By this time a line was forming behind the microphone, as much to make statements as to ask questions.
Nadine Gordimer, the South African writer, said that hearing Mr. Grass speak reminded her of the role he played in West Germany after the war - a role ''that he played not in his public speeches but in his imaginative writing to re-establish the honesty of the German language to clear it of the garbage that came up during the Hitler time.''
Mr. Grass, back at the microphone a second time, said he has ''a lot of struggles with Communist countries,'' and that he resented in the West having ''to tell everybody I am anti-Communist.''
William Phillips, co-founder and editor of the Partisan Review, added that he was ''rather baffled by some of the remarks that seem to equate terror and repression in this country with terror and repression in Bulgaria, the Soviet Union and Cuba.''
In a response to Mr. Phillips, Miss Sontag, who had been chairman of the morning session, said: ''No one would entertain the preposterous idea that the United States is at fault for all the difficulties and oppressions and tyrannies in the world. That's not even a notion worth discussing.'' >>>
-- Edwin McDowell, New York Times, January 15, 1986
Above the River of Your Longing
