The American Writers Congress 1981: A Personal Account
by A. D. Coleman

In October of 1981, The Nation Institute organized and sponsored the American Writers' Congress, which took as its model the similarly-named gatherings of left-wing writers in 1935, 1937, 1939, and 1941, and included such diverse figures as Harold Rosenberg, Langston Hughes, Malcolm Cowley, Ernest Hemingway, James T. Farrell, Dawn Powell, Theodore Dreiser, Tillie Olsen, Richard Wright, Kenneth Burke, and Michael Gold. The 1981 edition brought more than 3,500 writers together at New York’s Hotel Roosevelt for three days of workshops, discussions and public readings.

Participants included James Baldwin, Robert Bly, B. J. Chute, Amiri Baraka, Noam Chomsky, Denise Levertov, E. L. Doctorow, Marilyn French, Allen Ginsberg, David Henry Hwang, Erica Jong, Norman Mailer, David Mamet and Joyce Carol Oates, and Toni Morrison as keynote speaker. (There were also skeptics and nay-sayers in attendance, aong them such neo-con luminaries as Tom Wolfe, Hilton Kramer, and Norman Podhoretz.) To quote from the Institute's own description of the proceedings, "The Congress provided a forum in which writers collectively addressed problems facing the literary community -- including censorship, financial injustices, the need for writer's libel insurance from publishers, and the consolidation of the publishing industry. This groundbreaking event led to the creation of the National Writers' Union, now more than 4,000 members strong."

I attended all but one day of the Congress, which was held from October 9-12 (an out-of-town speaking engagement kept me away for the opening ceremonies), and participated in the voting in the plenary session -- including the key resolution that gave birth to the National Writers' Union. I found the event a vital, catalytic and certainly historic event. The Roosevelt’s Grand Ballroom had been filled with writers of all stripes arguing about and voting on such issues as writers’ rights, unionization, censorship, conglomerate publishing and American foreign policy. At that time I served on PEN American Center's Freedom to Write Committee, and was asked by PEN American Center to provide a brief report on the event for its membership. The full text of that report follows.

Both my parents were active in New York writing and political circles during the 1940s and 1950s. As a young writer growing up in that milieu, I had heard much about some of the writers' congresses and smaller professional gatherings of that period. By contrast, the New York writing scene I grew into was stratified by stylistic factionalism; the dominant politics was academic conformism, the most most visible opposition a hip disaffiliation. Our meeting grounds were coffee houses and living rooms, intimate and protected -- not quite the garret or ivory tower, but not exactly the agora either. But regardless of what one's specific politics are, the experience of writing seriously (by which I mean nothing more abstruse por elitist than devoting the very best of one's energy to it) so shapes one's life and perceptions that a feeling of community with others who choose to undergo that ordeal is inevitable.

So when I found out about the American Writers Congress, I registered immediately. There would be writers, hundreds of them, arguing over the central issues of our time, writers debating the philosophical and practical problems endemic to our profession (censorship, unionization, royalty scales), writers in dialogue with their peers and colleagues. I wouldn't have dreamed of missing it.

As it happened, I missed a day of it. My time at the Congress was spent entirely at the Roosevelt Hotel, and my inclination was to attend a panel from beginning to end rather than browse. Thus my perspective is highly personal and quite limited. But my impressions remain vivid.

The first afternoon I attended PEN's Censorship Hearing. The topic is particularly urgent to me as a new member of the Freedom to Write Committee. What affected me most was hearing Judy Blume confess that she and her publisher had self-censored passages (from her new book) about masturbation and about children's anger at their parents. For my thirteen-year-old son, Judy Blume's books mean a great deal -- and those excluded subjects are important. After listening to an endless string of first-hand accounts of censorship, someone from the audience asked the right question: When are we going to stop swapping censorship stories with each other and organize massive public protest?

This attitude was reinforced by Toni Morrison's keynote address: "We have to stop loving our horror stories." I thought of myself, continually fighting work-for-hire contracts and suing in small-claims court three times over the past two years with magazine publishers. I thought of all the wasted time and energy, my own and other people's, and I resolved that my horror stories would never again be reduced to cocktail-party chatter.

At the panel on "Poetry, Language and Social Change" most of the panelists, perhaps inappropriately, spent the bulk of their time reading from their own work. But from the panel came a feeling that poetry could and sometimes did make something happen, and that a concern for the medium's potential for effectual action was alive in poets and audience alike.

The plenary session was simply an amazement. To sit in a huge hall filled with writers -- so filled that other rooms were needed for the overflow -- was in itself an unforgettable experience. To spend those interminable hours wrangling back and forth, finding our consensus, and in the process forging professional and political bonds between ourselves was, beneath the eventual tedium, a quiet joy. To hear the ballroom echo with the chant of "Union! Union! Union!"; to hear the laughter and cheering when one delegate told us that we were "working under nineteenth-century conditions" -- these and innumerable other moments made it clear that out of our suddenly confirmed community we were forging a polity.

The saddest episode for me was the last -- the misunderstanding and confusion with which the presentation of and voting on the resolution on South Africa was riddled. Obviously unacceptable even in its published form to the Black Caucus itself, the resolution was problematic in many ways. Though members of the Black Caucus argued that it was virtually identical to other parallel resolutions (such as the one on El Salvador which had been passed just before it), the differences were in fact substantial: the South Africa resolution called for a boycott of anyone who went to South Africa, regardless of purpose, and for the United States Congress to "provide material and military aid" to South African revolutionary movements. There was opposition to this resolution for many reasons, including the fact that the language of it kept changing even as we voted. The end result, after three ballots, was a narrow majority in favor of the resolution, in some form on which no one was clear.

It was a sour note on which to end. Yet, oddly, on the whole it strengthened my positive response to the Congress. For one thing, the creation of a Continuations Committee made it obvious that the entire event could not be neatly tied up and filed away. And, by so doing, it demonstrated that the Congress was not an end in itself, but rather the beginning.

This essay first appeared in the PEN American Center Newsletter, No. 48 (Winter 1982), pp. 1, 8-9.

Copyright © 1982 by A. D. Coleman. All rights reserved. For reprint permissions contact Image/World Syndication Services, POB 040078, Staten Island, NY 10304-0002 USA;T/F (718) 447-3091, imageworld@nearbycafe.com