KAREN KENNERLY , who became and remains a close friend, had been the executive director of the American PEN Center for a very long time. She came down to D.C. to brief me on the labyrinth of projects and committees that PEN had going at the time, some of them new, many of ancient growth.
Although her briefing was expert, my eyes tend to glaze over when I’m told stuff. My normal practice involves inventing characters, which was unnecessary at PEN, since most of the board members had already invented themselves. When I first entered it, the noisy space at Broadway and Prince seemed like a world-class aviary; there was, for sure, a lot of plumage.
For a time I was dispatched by Karen to separate but equal lunches with the heads of various more or less warring comittees. Everyone but myself seemed to have long settled and passionately held views on what PEN should or should not be doing. I had no opinion on most of these issues—where, indeed, would I have gotten one?—and decided that a cautious neutrality offered my best hope.
The most interesting of my lunches was with Donald Barthelme, the sharp Texas postmodernist whom I had somehow never met, although we had crisscrossed with one another in Houston for many years, never meeting unless it was glancingly; neither of us could remember for sure. I think Don had once been passionate about PEN and its politics, but by the time we met for lunch he was sick and had mainly lost interest. He had just time left in which to establish a first-rate writing program at the University of Houston. I saw him once more, at a Texas Institute of Letters banquet where he was given a Life Achievement award—it was richly deserved, in my view. He said that night that writing had enabled him to have a splendid life—and so it has for me as well.