PEN pals and party pieces
Diana Hendry
POSTCARDS FROM ABROAD by Elizabeth Paterson Sinclair Stevenson, £9.99, pp. 189, ISBN 0953739872 Pcture the scene. It's 1970 and the PEN congress in Seoul, at which John Updike gives a lecture on 'Humour in Fiction', has just finished. The weary organisers fly on to Manila. There, perched on gilt chairs in Malacanang Palace, they discuss with Imelda Marcos the possibility of a 1972 congress in Manila. Madame Marcos apparently sees herself as a patron of the arts. She's all for it. Discussions over, she asks what the PEN party would like to do.
'Lie on a beach and recover,' says Peter Elstrob, then press officer. No sooner said than done. A click of the fingers, a telephone on a silver salver, and two helicopters later the PEN party are landed on a palm-fringed sandy beach complete with beach-house owned by the minister of defence.
This is just one of the many behind-thescenes glimpses of PEN which Elizabeth Paterson presents in Postcards from Abroad. As the spring issue of Pen News remarks, Paterson is perhaps the principal 'living archive' of PEN's history and personalities, having worked at the London headquarters for 29 years.
Postcards isn't about the serious side of PEN's work, its continual defence of freedom of expression within and between nations, its support of writers silenced or imprisoned. Rather, as Paterson says in her introduction, it's a light-hearted and very personal memoir'. It's about travelling to congresses in Vienna, Jerusalem, Sydney, Barcelona, New York etc. It's about endless lunches, dinners, receptions and very long speeches. It's about the delegates' enthusiasm for meals — 'I had often thought that only sub-machine guns would keep PEN delegates from their food' — and bedroom parties drinking duty-free whisky out of toothmugs. And, largely, it's about the idiosyncrasies and eccentricities of the general secretaries and presidents of PEN and other attendant and notable writers.
One feels that Elizabeth Paterson is a little hampered by possessing that rare quality, discretion. Indeed I feel a little hampered by it myself. I think so highly of PEN that it's nasty of me to say I found the gossip a bit tame — Arthur Miller lacking a tie, Amos Oz introducing himself to a Saudi Arabian poet as 'a neighbour of yours — from Israel', Norman Mailer appearing at a New York congress with a black eye.
And from time to time I felt frustrated at learning only the title of a talk. I mean just one line of what John Updike said on 'Humour in Fiction' would have cheered me. But this is probably unfair. Paterson's book is more about PEN members having to perform a 'party piece' at a Mongolian barbecue in Taiwan and Peter Elstob (now a PEN vice-president) singing 'There's a tavern in the town' than the conference theme of 'Thirty Years of Turmoil in Asian Literature'.
Paterson gives us an affectionate and mostly entertaining portrait of PEN, written with an observant eye and a wry, understated humour. The postcards of the title, by the way, were sent by Elizabeth to Kevin FitzGerald, writer, rock climber and raconteur. One such, sent from Tokyo, reads, 'Even in the Shinjuku Gardens, where we went to find peace and tranquillity among the azaleas, there were PEN delegates behind every bush!'
They were probably waiting for the lunch gong.
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