P.E.N. Purge

The world's most exalted literary club met in London last fortnight 1) to assert the dignity and responsibility of writers in a threatened civilization, 2) to oust its distinguished president, Jules Romains. It was the most exciting congress the P.E.N. (Playwrights, Poets, Essayists, Editors, Novelists) Club has ever had, and the most ominous. For beyond the sound & fury there could be vaguely glimpsed the chasm of Anglo-French antagonism.

P.E.N. congresses sometimes resemble a lunch-hour stampede of Hollywood extras in makeup. Courtly, white-haired biographers are juxtaposed with cigar-smoking lady novelists who look like bouncers. Writers at the London congress were of all shapes and sizes but they were as one man in sniffing blood.

Quickly they romped through deliberations on such subjects as "authorship and propaganda" and "will young Germans write literature after the war?" Novelist Storm Jameson lit the first fuse by observing that "in war a writer ... if he's needed as a soldier has no right to run away." Thomas Mann's daughter, Erika, lit another by proposing that after the war German education must be directed from abroad. U.S. Delegate John Dos Passos (who arrived late with Thornton Wilder) declared: "Writers should not be writing at all now." H. G. Wells got into a squabble with Salvador de Madariaga. At the League of Nations de Madariaga represented Spain. At the P.E.N. congress he insisted that he represented Argentina. Said Wells of such instability, "You remind me of a small bubble of mercury at the bottom of a bath of hot water." Then he pitched into Jules Romains. Said Novelist Wells of P.E.N.'s International President, who was not present: "Now he has set up a little P.E.N. of his own in New York.* We have not any international president."

Austrian Writer Robert Neumann was more explicit. Cried he: "I am going to call a spade a spade and Jules Romains Jules Romains. He is a megalomaniac of a peculiarly straightforward kind. I mention him by name because of the link between his megalomania and politics, and these politics are our affair." Next he attacked Romains for his long pre-war friendship with Nazis Otto Abetz (now German Ambassador to France) and Ribbentrop. Basis of the attack was The Seven Mysteries of Europe, the book in which with guileless candor and a certain restrained pride, Novelist Romains described how Abetz, Ribbentrop and half the politicians in Europe had duped and used him.

Promptly the Congress replaced President Romains by a committee of five: H. G. Wells (Chairman), Thornton Wilder, Thomas Mann, Jacques Maritain, Hermon Ould. Then they sent friendly greetings to the Soviet Writers' Union.

In Manhattan last week ex-President Romains called the attacks upon him "monstrous," said he could not go to London because he had not been notified in time. The London congress, he claimed, had been called suddenly without consulting him; there was to have been no P.E.N. congress until 1942. Most of the delegates, he said, represented nobody, were "picked up on the streets of London."

Meanwhile in London, mercurial Delegate de Madariaga defended Romains for past Nazi contacts, gurgled from the bottom of his hot bath: "After all Stalin had some contacts with the Nazis too."

* European P.E.N. Club in America, of which Romains is chairman.

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