I SUPPOSE I went to that protest meeting to see what a protest meeting in New York—one with a literary basis—was like. My voice meant nothing. I was a midlist novelist who had gotten lucky with the movies, that’s all. I knew that during the high years of the civil rights movement, or the low years of the Vietnam War, there were frequent and worthy protests, and most of the writers I liked, such as Norman Mailer, seemed to be on the same side as I was. I even did a lunch counter sit-in in Houston, while teaching at Rice. It was the right thing to do, although I don’t think it made anyone in Houston either more or less racist
Though I did, as I’ll relate, serve for two years as president of the PEN American Center, I’ve never quite shaken off my feeling that writers in their public-protest mode seem a little silly. If they are good writers, and many were, their pages, their sentences and paragraphs, have a potency that the protests never reach. Nor are they necessarily good describers of the follies they are attempting to alleviate or prevent. Time after time, at such gatherings, I found myself wishing I was just at home, reading the very people who were declaiming away right in front of me.
I suppose it’s a quirk but if so it’s a quirk that makes me peculiarly unsuited to run an organization of a sort that I was soon to be president of.