BY MY OWN reckoning I had not exactly shone at this gathering of the righteous and so did not expect to hear from PEN again, a snap judgment that turned out to be incorrect.
A few months later I was in my ranch house in Texas, trying to figure out how to cram a few more books into it: it contained about twelve thousand at the time—when the phone rang. George Braziller, a distinguished publisher whose lists I have always admired, and who was, moreover, a friend of my first agent, Dorothea Oppenheimer, a fellow European with similar tastes, was on the line.
George Braziller asked me point-blank if I would agree to be president of the PEN American Center for a span of two years, a question so unexpected that I might have followed the example of the second Mrs. Woodrow Wilson, when President Wilson finally got around to proposing to her, causing her to promptly fall out of bed.
Fortunately I wasn’t in bed and ran no risk of falling out, but it was a shock anyway. Me? President of PEN, an office held by Norman Mailer and Susan Sontag? (Along with some obscure others.)
First off, I needed to know why PEN would want me. On this issue George Braziller was not particularly enlightening; he was too polite (or too smart) to mention that crowds of famous writers were not rushing down to Prince Street to offer up their freedoms in order to take what might be considered a thankless job, which involved, to begin with, riding herd on a swollen board of mostly Jews but with a sprinkling of East Coast WASPs and one (always absent) Palestinian, the late Edward Said.
Fortunately I had read, in my years as a reviewer, most of the books produced by the PEN board—indeed, I had most of their works in my library—but I had probably met less than half a dozen sitting board members: a variegated crowd of scribblers, to say the least.
That very fact—that I was a tabula rasa—might have been why I was offered the president’s job. Maybe I would be able to operate above the seething quarrels, some of which had long historical roots.
In my startlement I put George Braziller off—give me a day, I said, and he did. I had mainly been planning to shore up my bookshop—the local branch at length—and Woody and Fran, my two Vermonters, had just settled into my big house for a job that would likely take them two years. What would I be doing, during this time, other than getting in their way? That there would be culture clashes was certain. Vermonters are not much like Texans, and Woody—the only carpenter I know to make his own translation of the Iliad —could be expected to tolerate only so much Texasisme . I myself can tolerate only so much of it, and did not really want to stay around trying to cram books into the ranch house for two years.
So I took the job, becoming the first non–New York president of PEN since Booth Tarkington, who held the post at the very beginning of the existence of an American PEN.
Why did I accept a job I didn’t feel in the least suited for? Was it because I sincerely believed in the principles of PEN? Well, I believed that writers should be free to write what they want without being punished for it. There were no doubt tributary principles but I was soon so busy that I didn’t give them much thought.
Mainly, I think, I took the job because it gave me a reason for really spending time in New York City. I had been in and out of Manhattan for decades, but mostly in one- and two-day jaunts in which I scouted books. I knew the bookshops, but didn’t know the city. I could easily have missed PEN but missing New York was another thing. The chance to get to know one of the greatest of the world’s cities was what decided me. I took the job.