Writers' Congress

As orderly as a flock of well-shepherded sheep, 453 left-minded U. S. novelists, poets, critics and journalists met last fortnight in Manhattan. Brought together as the Third American Writers' Congress, they and an audience of more than 2,500 were addressed on opening night in Carnegie Hall by English Novelist Sylvia Townsend Warner ("The pen is not mightier than the sword, but it is as mighty"); by Exile Thomas Mann ("Fascism has overstepped its mark ... its decline is already determined."); by Eduard Benes, ex-President of Czecho-Slovakia ("a kind of United States of Europe will be the end. . . ."). After a collection ($1,653) but no hymns, the delegates trooped to the swank St. Moritz Hotel for a reception.

Next two days, the writer-delegates got together in closed meetings at the New School for Social Research. A critics' group argued the merits of Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath (verdict: an exciting novel with a weak last half). A verse group was entertained by Dorothy Parker with a speech called Sophisticated Verse, and the hell with it. A fiction group heard a dozen speeches, ranging from talks on how to worm social-conscious fiction into pulp magazines to Dashiell Hammett's warning that Hollywood techniques are poison to novelists.

Mean temperature of the Congress was well below the boiling point. Rare were such fighting words as: "Writers have no base outside the labor movement." Rare were such old battlecries as "proletarian," "class-consciousness." Delegates hurried nervously through their mainly autobiographical speeches, subsided meekly on the chairman's time-signal, as polite fellow delegates rose politely to comment. From Communists, as such, came not a sheepdog's bark.

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