Timebends (96 page)

As I had expected, the Soviets fumed at this “interference in their internal affairs,” but I concluded by pleading for candor from both sides, something impossible when to all our questions about Soviet life we received the same canned answers and could hardly tell one Soviet writer from another.

Further outraged, they blew up like birds under a beaten drum, but surprisingly one of them quietly and seriously proposed that I might be correct. This was Chingiz Aitmatov, a stocky man in his late fifties, at the moment possibly the most renowned novelist and playwright in his country. He was also an elected member of the Supreme Soviet from Kirghizia and would have the honor of addressing that body a day later, just before Gorbachev himself, a most prestigious spot on the program. He had written works that required some courage, confronting the deformations Stalinism had forced upon the Kirghiz minority, still a delicate subject regardless of the pro forma condemnations of the dead dictator in the press.

Nearly a year later, Aitmatov phoned from his native Kirghizia to invite me there for what he assured me would be an independent meeting, not under the wing of the Writers Union or any other governmental arm but purely his own invention and responsibility. The idea was to discuss how the world was to get safely into the third millennium, and he had asked Fellini to come, and Dürrenmatt, and they were interested. “Let us talk freely about the future,” he said, and reeled off the names of others who had accepted: Peter Ustinov of England, the American Alvin Toffler and his wife, Heidi, the French Nobel laureate novelist Claude Simon. James Baldwin had also promised to attend, which indeed he did, along with scientists and artists from Italy, India, Ethiopia, Cuba, Turkey, and Spain. That our expenses and fare would be paid could only mean that the government was somehow behind it, but given Aitmatov's unprecedented stand at Vilnius and his assurances now of a really open gathering—plus Inge's eagerness to photograph in sequestered Kirghizia—I accepted. If Soviet intellectuals were ever to join the world community—from which, largely because of their own government's paranoid supervision, they stood apart as strangers—one owed them what help one could give.

It was in the final hour of our third and last day of discussions in a comfortable health resort on Lake Issyk-kul in Kirghizia that the invitation to meet with Gorbachev was announced. I assumed it would be a ten-minute hello, but it lasted two hours and forty minutes.

Unlike his predecessors, Gorbachev did not look baggy and bloated with drink; he wore a brown suit and beige shirt and striped tie, and had an eager grin and a certain contemporary wit in his eyes. An air of haste about him reminded me of John Kennedy, who also wanted writers to like him (so did Moshe Dayan, whom I had met years before).

His welcoming handshakes completed, he led the way from an outer office into a conference room with a long table that might seat thirty. He sat at the head with no advisers or assistants or notes. Several interpreters sat along the walls wearing earphones connected to microphones in the tabletop. As I had noticed on entering this modern office building, which fronted cobblestoned Red Square and the ancient Kremlin, its finish was remarkably fine by Soviet standards, and an acoustical hush emphasized its solidity. Here was the heart of darkness or beacon of light and hope, as one chose, and Gorbachev's sheer human ordinariness merely added to the mystery of power, for I sensed some personal need speaking from within him, beneath the command of authority.

Confessing with an ironic grin that he himself had never been in Kirghizia, he asked what we had been talking about way out there on the lake, and each of us in turn made a brief and rather inadequate comment on the discussions. The truth was that they had not been very profound, though there was one potentially important aspect: for the first time, at least in my experience, the Soviets were not defensive toward Westerners. In fact, they were clearly disciplining themselves against this old and bad habit. Otero of Cuba was no doubt a Marxist novelist, and Afework, a lofty Ethiopian, worked at his painting under a new and raw Marxist military junta that was filled with uneasily suspicious men, but neither they nor Aitmatov nor his two assistants sought at any time to put their Marxist loyalties on record. We could speak about planetary pollution or anomie, about technological unemployment in both East and West, about Chernobyl or anything else, and the result was nothing worse than the suppressed friction in an ecumenical conference among Catholics, Protestants, and Jews. Which is to say that the issue of converting one another was no more, there were only the common problems. For me, the lifting of the usual paranoid fog was almost palpable. How long it would last I could not know, but that it had been tried was, I thought, a tremendously hopeful thing.

In his comments, Gorbachev stressed the “new thinking” that he said was rapidly spreading in Russia—a transideological if still
nominally Marxist pragmatism instead of an outmoded dogmatism. Pointedly, he kept returning to Lenin rather than Stalin for inspiration. “Politics needs to be nourished by the intellectual in each country because he is more likely to keep the human being at the center of his examination. Any other concentration is immoral. I read and reread Lenin,” he said at one point, “and in 1916 he wrote, ‘There must be a priority given to the general interest of humanity, even above that of the proletariat.'” He paused then and grinned. “And I wish ‘the other world' would also realize this.” He seemed to be hinting that the general welfare should even come before the needs of the Party. If he was indeed saying this aloud in public, he had to be taken seriously as a remarkable new force, for to question the absolute priority of Party interest had always been sacrilege. But when I returned home and wrote an account of the meeting, which contained information new at the time, I could not find a newspaper or national magazine that would print it, so total was the editorial cynicism toward any possibility of change in the Soviet world. Nor was my authorship the issue; Alvin Toffler, author of
Future Shock
and other probes into the technological world to come, met with the same press blackout. In the end,
Newsweek
published a boiled-down version on its “My Say” page of purely personal opinion. It was not only the Soviets who ought to be hearing what they preferred not to. Denial was in the saddle, as ever.

In my turn I repeated to Gorbachev what I had been saying at Issyk-kul, that our sacred ideologies were keeping us from irreverent facts. Marx ruled Russia, and Adam Smith the American administration, one philosophy a century old and the other two, and neither had dreamed of the computerized, televised, half-starved and half-luxuriating world we had now, a world with a shrinking proletariat and a burgeoning middle class (despite Marx), and a growing mass of the starving or the merely hungry and deranged wandering the cities of capitalism (despite Adam Smith). If only it were possible to allow the facts of life to rule rather than to serve what each side wished to prove ideologically . . .

Our history is the baggage of our brains, and I was carrying a lot of it in my head as I watched the chairman; it went all the way back to the handball game on East Fourth Street, Brooklyn, when that college boy first whispered to me about Marxism. By this time—having just spent my seventy-first birthday in Kirghizia, and already nearly twenty-five years married to Inge—I bore an old man's skepticism toward genuine changes of heart as I listened to
Mikhail Gorbachev impressing us Westerners with the liberality of his mind. But I thought I knew what he wanted, and it was encouraging because there had to be more than his personality behind this new toleration; the leadership must have realized that technological advancement was impossible under a government with a paranoid fear and suspicion of its own people as well as foreigners. My real question was not whether he wished to liberalize the regime but whether it was possible without legalizing a genuine opposition, be it inside the Communist Party or without. I judged that he had before him the Chinese dilemma—which I had seen in operation in two visits there, especially during my two months of directing
Salesman
in Beijing three years earlier—namely, how to unleash a nation's ingenuity and still keep it under one-party control.

But I had also had the personal experience of dealing with other Soviets who “wanted to change,” and I had learned some hard lessons in the process. In that room with the chairman, my thoughts went back and forward and back again to 1967 and a Moscow hotel room where I had come to negotiate the entry of Soviet writers into International PEN.

It all began in 1965 with a call on the crackling French telephone in Inge's apartment in Paris, where we had come for the Luchino Visconti production of
After the Fall
with Annie Girardot. I had found it unfocused. His acutely thought-out movies notwithstanding, Visconti seemed to have missed the verb of the play, regarding it as a sort of exposé of primitive American sexual perplexities. There would be a far more incisive production, directed by Franco Zeffirelli, a year later in Rome, with Monica Vitti and Giorgio Albertazzi. Zeffirelli was not afraid to allow Quentin the full anguish of a man not at all trying to explain himself but searching for himself, a different attitude entirely, and one I thought moving and persuasive. His set was a series of six or eight concentric steel rectangles growing progressively smaller upstage—it was like looking through the back of a bellows camera toward the lens in the far distance—and the black velour between each square allowed actors to enter and exit up the whole of the very deep stage while silent lifts in the floor raised and lowered pieces of furniture to create and erase the locations in Quentin's mind almost instantaneously, as in a dream or reverie. The production toured the main Italian cities, and its reception confirmed the play for me.

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.