EATING ROSES FOR SERBIA
John Ralston Saul finds
poetic disagreement on East-West imperialism
Belgrade GEO Bogza, Romania's greatest poet, opened this year's meeting of the Serbian Writers' Union by eating a rose. Very tall and ancient, in a well-cut double-breasted suit, Mr Bogza stood at one end of the Union's Victorian drawing room before a crowd of some Western writers, 40 from the Eastern bloc and 100 Serbs. At least part of the plotting which destroyed the Austro-Hungarian Empire had happened in the same room. Gavrilo Princip and his Black Hand friends may even have drop- ped in to chat about assassinating archdukes and destroying Western civilisa- tion as they knew it.
Appropriately enough, the subject of the week-long meeting was the apocalypse and literature. Mr Bogza stayed relatively clear of that. His ear lobes were long enough to wriggle when he moved — a Chinese condition for long life — but I could not keep myself from wondering how he had survived so well the apocalypse which has swept over his country since the last war. He finished by waving the enormous long- stemmed red rose before us and proposing to eat it in honour of Serbia. This took a number of bites and lengthy chewing, encouraged by clapping from the audience.
When he reached the stem, I rushed out ahead of the crowd along with David Gascoyne and down to the basement, where an old chef called No runs the best restaurant in Belgrade. It is open to non-writers and so the prosperous of the city, Party members or not, flock there for enormous helpings of rich food.
This prosperity, in spite of an economic crisis which includes 100 per cent inflation, is one of the attractions for Eastern bloc writers. A conference in Belgrade is a holiday from reality. And as Yugoslavia is still technically communist, it is an easier place to be sent to than, say, Paris. What's more, the officials in Moscow must see their delegations as angels sent to tempt the Slays back into the fold from which they escaped in 1948.
If that was their idea, the Russians made a serious error the next morning at the opening plenary session. The meeting had moved to a steel and glass convention centre with four-language simultaneous translation on the banks of the river Sava. There the writers declaimed one after the other poems about death and the risks of death in an uncontrollable world. This moving exercise was brought to an ambi- guous end by Ernesto Cardinal, Nicara- guan minister of culture, poet and priest; he whom the Pope had tapped on the head a few years ago on the runway at Managua airport, when he discovered the priest lined up along with the other government ministers to greet him. Father Cardinal read a lengthy impassioned poem, which he had written for the day, about bombs and blood and dying children. There was a feeling in the hall that the poem was bad, very bad, but that the Nicaraguan cause was good, and so he was given warm applause. Father Cardinal was then whisked ministerially out of the building.
At that point the chief Russian writer got up looking like the vice-president (admi- nistration) of a Houston oil company. Nobody seemed to know what kind of writer he was but the speech he read dealt first with his Leader, Mikhail S. Gor- bachev, who had attempted to save man- kind at Reykjavik and, second, with the `hero' in fiction. There seemed to be a link between the leader and the hero. A silent sort of horror seeped through the hall, as if a time warp of the early Fifties had overwhelmed us. Only the Yugoslays seemed quietly content, having been re- minded, no doubt, of how smart they had been to break with Moscow in the Forties. And I realised that my own paper, in- tended as an attack on introverted Western writers, would now sound like a specific reply to the Russian. The Serbs, in any case, went on to demonstrate their sense of free speech by talking about anything and everything, including the apparently violent struggle between Serbs and Albanians in the south- ern area of Kossovo. They said the new horseman of the Apocalypse, the fifth, was man himself. All men. Vesna Parun, a Croatian poetess clearly adored by the Serbs, said that politics had captured too much of the human imagination. Too much was going to Caesar. And if all of this were not enough to mark their distance from the Eastern bloc, the next day we were driven off to read poetry in Belgrade's central square. A crowd of several hundred citizens and live national television watch- ed as Father Cardinal was whisked back into our lives with the fixed smile of having heard too many confessions. A Japanese followed a Spaniard who followed a Gha- naian onto the podium; a good 50 poets one after the other. But it was a middle- aged Latvian who caught my eye. She read her poems — as people discreetly pointed out — already translated into Russian and her hair was tied back to reveal no make- up. She wore the sort of grey tweed suit you might order from an ad in the Tele- graph and a pair of Adidas jogging shoes. After her came a Serbian poetess, young and beautiful, with fish-net stockings and a bright green dress unbuttoned on the side well up her thigh.
We were no sooner back in the confer- ence hall than a time warp struck again. An American called Max Schwarz reconsti- tuted himself directly from the 1960s, ponytail, cowboy boots and big emotions all intact. 'My country,' he kept shouting and interrupting others to insist, 'has done wrong.' Nicaragua. Bombing Libya. Ev- erything wrong in the world today was his country's fault and someone had to make them pay for it. He wanted purity, peace and happiness providing it involved the physical humiliation of America. The other American delegate kept his head down while various Yugoslays tried to point out that sitting where they geographically sat, the problem lay to the east not to the west.
I later ran into Geo Bogza, the rose- eating Romanian. When he heard I was Canadian, he burst out: 'Like my friend Endicott from the days of the world peace movement.' Dr Endicott is an old radical who had been in the forefront of the movement against the Vietnam war. Sud- denly I realised that that disastrous war had accomplished one positive thing. It had permitted Eastern writers to travel and work with Western writers in the name of a single cause. By the time that show was over, it was too late for their governments to put them back into the complete isola- tion of the 1950s.
The next morning in the dining-room, the Russian writer stopped me to ask what I had thought of his speech. A Pole acted as an uncomfortable translator. I said it had sounded as if someone else had written the thing for him. He nodded gravely and went on at length to explain that they had problems just as we had problems. I couldn't stop myself saying that our prob- lems didn't involve writers in prison. He nodded gravely and went on explaining. The third and final time warp struck during the closing session. Another Rus- sian made an impassioned plea for all of us to do something about the imminent apo- calypse as personified by America. The Serbs showed no sign of interest, but Mr Schwarz leapt to the floor to shout, 'The Russians are right. We must stop my country.' I saw one of the Russians pushing back his chair to propose a vote. Things were about to slip out of control when Miodrag Bulativic, the forceful Serbian novelist who was in the chair, stated that a motion would be inappropriate and changed the subject. I looked around. The Serbs showed a hint of relief. The Poles, Czechs, Hungarians and so on had an impassive look about them.
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