“Harry received into an altercation with the New Yorker fiction author Jamacia Kincaid, who came visiting to Gayfryd and with an air of hoity-toity bemusement stated, ‘I’m puzzled by this occasion. Why are there so many wealthy folks right here?’ (As a result of writers are the most cost effective folks on this planet and don’t care about different writers, so PEN must be funded by wealthy individuals who don’t care about writers both however a minimum of are prepared to pay for a dinner, Jamaica, that’s why.)”
–Tina Brown, Vainness Honest Diaries
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Final summer time I listened to Tina Brown learn the audio model of her 2017 memoir The Vainness Honest Diaries: Energy, Wealth, Superstar, and Goals: My Years on the Journal That Outlined a Decade, and I gasped after I received to the half quoted above, wherein Brown recounts the occasions of the 1987 PEN Gala she had vice-chaired with Gayfryd Steinberg, a girl who the New York Publish as soon as known as “Park Avenue aristocracy.” It was an actual clarifying, “he admit it” sort of second for me: PEN America is a corporation funded by socialites who don’t notably care about writers.
I had been a member of PEN America since I put out a e-book in 2015 and after I joined I believed it was important group with an unimpeachable mission: defending writers dealing with assaults on free speech. As we’ve seen lately with a bunch of “free speech absolutists” who prove to very a lot not be, it’s hardly ever that straightforward.
I had begun to bitter on PEN after I used to be requested to seek the advice of on a mission launched final yr that they ended up calling Booklash, wherein false equivalencies ran rampant. PEN offered 16 case research of “problematic” books being “canceled,” and the issue with explaining the report back to you is that the books they selected didn’t have rather a lot in frequent: American Dust, Blake Bailey’s biography of Philip Roth, Mike Pence’s memoir. I had a variety of points with the report, most having to do with the truth that books have been being banned broadly by the proper, and but we have been spending a lot time on 16 titles. Censorship, PEN America insisted, was coming from either side. I encourage to vary. American Dust might have obtained plenty of (rightful) criticism, however it bought tens of millions of copies. This, ahem, shouldn’t be censorship.
In my response to the research, I discussed that the end result of publishers simply starting to consider variety is that folks with “totally different factors of view” are sometimes entry stage employees who’re overworked and underpaid and don’t have many avenues to specific their opinions. So when workers be taught that their employer is, as an example, platforming an writer who locations them or their family members in peril (hello Mike Pence!), they revolt. What different avenues have they got? (You possibly can learn my entire rant right here).
So I hated Booklash, however nonetheless, I used to be inspired when PEN put collectively a panel for his or her post-October 7 Annual Common Assembly wherein to “discover the ripple results of the battle in Israel and Palestine, a panel of writers with disparate views got here collectively to debate the problem of holding civil discourse alive.” This was the explanation they existed: to facilitate robust conversations, to advertise solidarity.
However then I watched the panel. It featured solely one Palestinian particular person, a novelist, together with three Jewish writers (considered one of whom was anti-Zionist, however nonetheless). It wasn’t a good struggle, however it additionally wasn’t speculated to be a struggle in any respect. This was speculated to be an open discussion board to speak about either side. I watched them speak over her till I might not bear it and needed to flip it off.
There was clearly bias in PEN’s protection of the struggle on Gaza, and it might solely worsen. By the point I noticed the video of Randa Jarrar being forcibly faraway from a PEN occasion for protesting it was changing into clear that though PEN values either side, it values the Zionist trigger somewhat bit extra. I’ve already written about how the weaponization of the thought of antisemitism is damaging the literary world (the commenters did not prefer it, however I’m very proud to have written it).
By the point a bunch of writers I like deeply like Naomi Klein, Lorrie Moore, and Isabella Hammad wrote an open letter dropping out of the PEN World Voices Competition, it had change into clear that PEN wouldn’t “be a part of different main human rights organizations and United Nations officers within the calls for for an instantaneous and unconditional ceasefire.”
Following its April 26 announcement of the cancellation of this yr’s PEN Awards and World Voices Competition, an article in The Atlantic highlighted PEN America’s audacious declare that it’s “above politics.” As if a free speech group might perform exterior of the political, as if this group funded by socialites, for socialites, was excited by doing something aside from sustaining the established order.
As school college students throughout America are discovering out, some free speech is extra privileged than others. PEN’s assertion on campus protests was as wishy washy as I’d come to anticipate.
As soon as once more the enchantment to either side, as if the discomfort of some American Jews was equal to the deaths of hundreds upon hundreds of Palestinian folks and the destruction of their land and their establishments.
Talking out and expressing dissent are essentially the most democratic of political establishments, those I believed PEN was combating for after I joined in 2015. However PEN defenders don’t see it that approach. In a Could 3 piece with the headline “When Writers Silence Writers,” board member George Packer equates criticism from members with silencing. It’s encouraging to see Dinaw Mengestu, the vice chairman of PEN, acknowledge in a response to Packer’s piece the validity of such criticism: “It’s laborious to overstate the diploma to which [Packer’s] piece perverts and distorts the legit and crucial criticisms in opposition to PEN America, whereas on the similar time lowering the horrific and ongoing bloodbath in Gaza to a trigger that may be compelling.”
There may be a lot extra work to do. It’s disheartening to look at PEN make misstep after misstep, getting in its personal approach repeatedly after we urgently must fight, amongst different issues, the e-book bans which can be plaguing this nation.
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An earlier model of this piece appeared at Maris Kreizman’s Substack, The Maris Assessment.