January 5, 1986

When Writers Talk Among Themselves

By SUSAN SONTAG

ame, prestige and sheer seniority make the writer a public figure, in some countries a very public figure. And this is when writers not only tend to get more service-minded but are expected to be more collegial. With age, and with a certain volume of accomplishment - whose vol-ume depends precisely on the writer's having been able to sit in a room every day, year after year, alone - comes a stack of invitations to board planes, cross borders and sometimes oceans, check into large hotels, in order to palaver . . . with each other.

Every writer I admire speaks condescendingly of these meetings and probably would be displeased never to be invited. One is as likely to hear us confiding how much we like conferences and congresses of writers as to hear us declaring how much we enjoy literary cocktail parties. They (the conferences) are generally dismissed as tiring, often tiresome, an amiable waste of time. At best, a pious duty. (Which is more than you can usually say for a cocktail party.) Starting out as the sole devotee, as well as deity, in a sect of one, the writer eventually is convened to take part, as an elder, in the Church of Writers - to congregate periodically to discuss the crisis of culture, the future of literature, the relation of the writer and the state. Perhaps it's because writing means being self-driven and alone that (most) writers are game for these highly organized get-togethers. The writer is either a practicing recluse or a delinquent, guilt-ridden one; or both. Usually both.

Lately I've become more and more delinquent, or dutiful - whichever way you want to look at it. In recent years I've gone to more than a few such meetings of writers, grumbling about precious time subtracted from writing and delighted at the company. Nadine Gordimer, Hans Magnus Enzensberger, Mario Vargas Llosa, Alberto Moravia, Octavio Paz, George Konrad, Umberto Eco, Danilo Kis, Joseph Brodsky, Carlos Fuentes - these are some of the reliables, fellow graying and gray eminences who I know, from past conferences, are likely to be future co-invitees. At the smaller conferences, which tend to be designed on the one-of-each principle of a World War II bomber crew in old Hollywood movies, I am often the only American - as, for instance, in mid-October, when I was in Budapest under the auspices of the International Helsinki Federation for Human Rights, one of nine writers brought from as many different countries to hold discussions with Hungarian writers on ''Writers and Their Integrity'' and ''The Future of European Culture.'' I have a certain feeling of deja vecu at these roundtables. For it's as odd - and as easy, too easy - to be the only American as it was when, once upon a time, in many professional situations, I used to be the only woman.

There's some fun in it - the snatches of sightseeing, the hanging out with writer friends you haven't seen since the last such gathering - though these conferences are not that much fun. They're grueling, even if you do only half of what you're asked to do. It's an honor, and a star turn (interviews, etc.) with possible bonuses - especially if the conference is taking place in a foreign country the writer doesn't usually visit - like the chance to meet with one's local translator or publisher. Nobody hates a free trip. Of course, there are a few writers I admire - Milan Kundera, V. S. Naipaul, Gore Vidal - whom, as I understand it, no congress of writers can tempt. When I think about them I can see their point too. W HAT gets discussed at these meetings? Although there is some lit talk - the Death of the Novel has long been replaced by the Revival of Historical Fiction, and there is usually a colloquium on translation - the main themes of most congresses of writers are much broader, about cultural relations rather than about literature.

Literature and Culture, History and Literature, the Writer and the State, the Future of Literature, the Future of European Culture, the Writer and National Identity - the diction and the possible permutations are pretty obvious. The custom is to devise a title, drawing on a small packet of such seasoned abstractions, that says as little as possible. Such a ''classical'' title promotes an ecumenical spirit: encourages compromise, mutes confrontation. To be sure, some words have become a little too worn. Spiritual Values (as in Literature and Spiritual Values) and Humanism are far from the robust concepts they once were; New is looking a little peaked too. (''Toward a New Humanism'' - the theme of the writers' congress held in Budapest in June 1936, a session of the League of Nations' Commission Internationale de Cooperation Intellectuelle, attended by Thomas Mann, Karel Capek, Bela Bartok, Paul Valery, Salvador de Madariaga, et al. - is unthinkable now.) Next week the American Center of PEN, the international writers' organization (chapters or centers in more than 80 countries) will be host in New York to the organization's 48th annual international congress, and in its zeal to produce a first-rate, memorable congress - the last one held here was 20 years ago - the program committee (of which I'm a member) may have bent custom a little, by choosing as the theme ''The Writer's Imagination and the Imagination of the State.'' But one can probably count on the piquant, slightly original topic being brought back firmly in the course of our weeklong discussions to its familiar, authentic substratum: the Writer and the State.

Meetings of writers, at least of a certain size, tend to resemble each other physically, no matter where they take place, in the way of all professional conventions: the back-to-back appointments between the official sessions; the overeating; too much sitting and talking and (everyone except the Americans) smoking; not enough sleep. The moral conditions of the writers' congress are timeless too. Each congress tackles the same questions afresh, under slightly altered rubrics. All international writers' congresses are episodes of the same master effort, sessions of a peripatetic seminar on the status of the writer in a (politically, morally) divided world that has been assembling and regrouping for well over half a century. And its veteran participants continue to orate and deliberate with the same diligence, as if this latest congress were the very first. (However, I infer from some discreet sighing and a greater reluctance to speak at length that the very senior figures still at it after decades, like Francois Bondy and Stephen Spender, have a harder time pretending to be virgins.) Moral pep talks, featuring uplifting definitions of the writer, are one response to all the continuing bad news of state interference and persecution and of cultural barbarism.

''Literature does not need freedom. It is freedom'' - Heinrich Boll. Or: ''If there exists an interest shared by all writers and resulting from a basic human right that may be considered absolute, then that interest is freedom of expression. Every writer in the world is concerned with the freedom of literature all over the world'' - George Konrad. Boll is proposing definitions of literature, of freedom, to argue that no government can give literature what it already has. But any definition of literature is a rhetorical sleight of hand. (As Nietzsche observed, only what doesn't have a history can be defined.) Nor is it more true that every writer in the world is concerned with freedom, alas. (Mr. Konrad's next point is even more rhetorical: ''Accordingly the archenemy of literature everywhere is censorship. Its synonyms are punishment, intimidation, defense-lessness, cliches and commonplaces, dullness.'') The notions that lie behind the writers' meetings -of literature, of the writer, of freedom - seem like timeless entities. It is important, and chastening, to realize that they are not. There is a specific historic process, starting in the 18th century, by which ''literature'' is separated off from other forms of writing (such as journalism, belles lettres, hack fiction, history) and the profession of ''the writer'' (someone who creates ''literature'') comes into being. I subscribe entirely - the correct word might be devoutly - to this modern, secular idea of literature as a calling, which assumes an artistic hierarchy, which assumes literature as privacy - as a social contribution, if you will, but only because the writer knows how to distance herself or himself from the collective din, above all, the din of the state. In my view, literature entails the right to be apolitical (what some would read as irresponsible). But I am aware that this is not the conception held by most writers in the world - two-thirds of whose population lives outside North Atlantic affluence.

Attending international meetings of writers reminds me of all that I assume. For example: about the solitude I am forgoing, that I take to be definitive of my condition as a writer.

We meet under the auspices of many fictions about who writers are and what they do. Writers are often said to belong to a shadow state - the republic, as some call it, or the aristocracy of letters. For all the contrasting implications of the two metaphors (that difference is another, long story), in either version it is felt that, as a transnational caste, we have essential interests in common. I am not sure when, as a step in the process whereby literature became a profession, not just an activity, the very flattering notion arose that its creators belong to an international community. But it seems obvious that the now venerable institution of international writers' conferences and congresses is a European idea; indeed, it is a transposition to the whole world of the very idea of Europe, a transnational federation of idiosyncratic communities unified by common interests and ideals. My own sense of literature and of the writer's vocation has always been enthusiastically international, which must be why I'm more susceptible than most American writers to the lure of these international meetings - where I meet representatives of literatures that count as much for me as, if not more than, the literature of my own country. But even as I adhere to it, passionately, I know that the meta-European image of the writer is not that of most writers in most of the world (including a large number of European writers too), for national self-identifications seem far more important and decisive.

WHATEVER the marvelously broad abstractions about society involved in the conference's theme, the main issue is inevitably the writer's vocation itself. Birds are expected to behave like ornithologists. The paradox of the discussions that take place is that, in the very affirming of the rights of the individual writer to create freely, as an individual voice, the writer is being considered as a member of a group - writers. The subject is, inescapably, collectivities and their cultural relations.

One often hears various forms of the argument, once made by Orwell, among others, that every book is ultimately political. This is not true, I think, except in a trivial or tautological sense. I don't agree that there is no such thing as nonpolitical literature. But I do think there is no discourse about writers that is not political. All images of the writer imply a politics. To talk about what the writer is, is to project an idea of how society ought to be.

In the 1930's, the heyday of international writers' conferences, no one doubted that political concerns of a very general sort ought to head the agenda of these meetings. But politics as dealt with in writers' meetings tends to seek a base that is not ''merely'' political, to invoke a moral consensus that is beyond politics.

The moral consensus that dominated the writers' conferences of the 1930's was the struggle against fascism and Nazism. Now, in retrospect, we see what more complex and often duplicitous politics that seemingly self-evident struggle concealed. The issue on which writers feel secure today is censorship - as if it were a self-evident cause, beyond politics. Censorship and the larger questions of the fate of writers imprisoned, tortured, murdered have been the liveliest issue at writers' meetings. I date the current character of international writers' gatherings from an ambitious congress on dissidence organized under the aegis of the Venice Biennale in December 1977, attended by Joseph Brodsky, Hans Magnus Enzensberger, Alberto Moravia, George Konrad, Stephen Spender, Francois Bondy and myself, among many others. Remarkably enough, Mr. Moravia was the only Italian writer among the many invited to this meeting held in an Italian city who had the courage to come, for the word had gone out that the Venice conference was essentially an exercise in protest against the cultural policies of the Soviet Union and the oppression of culture in the countries occupied by the Soviet Union. It was. And hard as that is to believe now, in 1977 it still felt premature for bien-pensant Italian writers to be anti-Communist in this blunt a fashion. (With one exception, the Hungarian Mr. Konrad, the writers from the Soviet bloc countries, who included Mr. Brodsky, Andrei Sinyavsky, Efim Etkind, were all in exile.) But after 1977, statements that had still seemed to be controversial - and could, in certain Western European contexts, seem like cold war-mongering - became obviousness itself.

THAT most international writers' conferences ever since have been dominated by the issue of dissidence and human rights is one example of the enormous impact that the presence of writers in exile from the countries in the Soviet camp has had, starting in the mid-1970's. (The ''Solzhenitsyn effect'' is not the whole story, of course. It is possible that testimony by some who did not emigrate, notably the two great books of Nadezhda Mandelstam, has had at least as much authority and influence.) There is a modified agenda, a new sense of cultural relations. Not only is there a livelier interest, and far more information, about the situation of writers worldwide - thanks to the work of Amnesty International, the Helsinki Watch committee, PEN itself (which has more and more been functioning as a human-rights organization), that invaluable journal Index on Censorship, and many emigre publications. Writers everywhere are more sensitive to related topics, such as self-censorship, than a decade ago.

Context, of course, is all. Views that I had expressed about the similarity of Communist and fascist tyranny in discussions about Soviet tyranny in Venice in 1977, at an international conference on writing and censorship held at New York University in 1980 and at an ad hoc writers' conference in Toronto (in support of Amnesty International) in 1981 had an entirely different impact when I expressed them in a political meeting in support of Solidarity at Town Hall in 1982. That meeting was addressed mostly by writers, but its audience was not writers; and afterward those remarks were blown up on the wide screen of the media. One reason for cherishing the writers' congress is that it may be one of the last places in our current cultural life where the closed session still has some viability. It is the character of our culture, as exemplified by television, to make all utterances context-less. To have a context for one's remarks, so that they can be addressed to some and not others (not to ''everyone''), has become an endangered privilege!

What is most valuable about these events is that they are, or should be, meetings of writers among themselves. Not talking to the media. Not state-sponsored, or even welcomed by representatives of the state. Of course, this is not necessarily what the writers want. The truth is that most writers love power, are far more frequently courtiers than adversaries. Nevertheless, in the institution of writers' conferences, the cosier relations to the state and to power are at least not taken for granted.

Being a famous writer has been a bully pulpit since the 18th century. And perhaps in the beginning the idea of a world community of writers, incarnated in the creation of PEN, in 1921, was inspired by the achievement of individual writers who have been virtuosos at denouncing political and moral infamy (think of Voltaire, Victor Hugo, Zola, Mark Twain, Tolstoy), the hope being that a community of writers acting in concert with one another for irreproachable goals - for peace, against censorship - would be even more influential. But the history of writers' conferences has not demonstrated that writers acting collectively can do much to mobilize public opinion, and League of Nations idealism has been scaled back to United Nations realism: even if writers cannot save the peace, it's still valuable that they go on talking. Meanwhile, rare individual writers continue to have an incalculable moral influence. Think of the difference Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn has made; that Nadine Gordimer and Joseph Brodsky, among others, are making now.

ACTING alone, in his or her books, the writer addresses a public at large. The real opportunity of writers' congresses and conferences isn't to attract the attention of the press or television, with the resulting, necessarily abridged and simplified version (for an even larger public) of what is being said, but precisely to talk among ourselves. For whatever we may say to cheer ourselves up in the face of the enormities of state power, in fact we have more disagreement (about our relation to power, about what we mean by freedom), less commonality of principle and interest, than is generally admitted. As exercises in self-education and mutual education, the international writers' conferences and congresses are rarely a waste of time. Further, it is likely that, among all the speeches, there will be two or three complex, inspiriting statements, for among these writers there are a few great writers. And from a great writer one may and should expect some wisdom.

Susan Sontag's most recent books are ''I, etcetera'' (stories), ''Under the Sign of Saturn'' (essays) and ''A Susan Sontag Reader.'' She is a vice president of American PEN.