SOON AFTER THAT Susan Sontag, whom I had yet to meet came to my bookshop and bought two books by Laura Riding, but I was not in the shop that day and missed her. As president of the PEN American Center, succeding Mailer, Susan created at least as many controversies as Mailer had but I didn’t find this out until I had to deal with the bitter harvest of some of them.
I was, meanwhile, building my book town in West Texas—the contentions of the New York literary world seemed very distant. I had never done a single chore for PEN but when glasnost showed up and a few Russian writers were brought to America in the wake of Gorbachev’s visit, I was asked to help with a reading at the Folger Library.
These Russian writers had only recently, remember, been let out into the light of Western sunshine. Though Joseph Brodsky, just back from getting his Nobel Prize, stayed with us all day and helped out as best he could, the Russians were, nevertheless, condescended to over and over again, not least on a morning visit to the Folger, where they were taken into the vaults and shown the Laws of Catherine the Great—the book was held at a distance of about ten feet. It would have been better, in my view, to take the book up, rather than bringing the Russians down into what probably looked to them like a very up-to-date prison. I was embarrassed for them, exposed in their shabbiness to Western snobisme at its most extreme.
Lunch at The New Republic went a little better. I then snuck a few of the men off to my bookshop, where they could touch the books, and also have a few beers.
That evening at the Folger I read with Daniil Granin, who, as a boy of eighteen, had commanded a tank battalion during the siege of Leningrad, holding his line for one thousand days. He was probably the oldest of the visiting Russians. I liked him a lot.
Karen Kennerly, the executive director of the PEN American Center, seemed to like my performance at the Folger, while perhaps not noticing how much I didn’t like the whole proceedings. The next time I heard from her it was to ask me to read yet again. This reading was held at the U.N., I forget the cause. Norman Mailer wore battle scars—his wife had slugged him, he announched proudly. We went over to the U.N. on the subway, the first and only time I have ridden the New York subway. Susan Sontag came along—we met but glancingly.
I was given a passage from one of Václav Havel’s Letters to Olga , which mentioned the name of a French philosopher named Levinas, of whom I had never heard. It didn’t matter.
The crowd at the U.N. was not vast but it was respectable and none of us disgraced ourselves.
Later I looked up the works of M. Levinas and found them quite opaque.
Later still, at a dinner at Katharine Graham’s, I met Václav Havel himself. His country was now free. He did his best with the Georgetown crowd but looked as though he would rather be outside, having a smoke.
In order to spread him around I ate dinner at his table, but, for dessert, was asked to move one table away so that others could enjoy the rather raspy responses of the new president of the Czech Republic.
Actually I was glad to move. Havel was under heavy constraint, as anyone would be at one of Mrs. Graham’s dinners, many of which, like this one, were semi–state dinners, Reagan having evidently decided not to put on a show for the Czechs.
I also liked the table switch because Pamela Harriman, greatest horizontale of her era, was just across from me. Though we were neighbors in Georgetown for many years, and I knew of her extraordinary history, it was the one and only time I sat at table with her.