Per Wästbergs tal vid PEN:s internationella kongress i Uppsala

I samband med PEN:s internationella kongress i Uppsala 27/9-1/10 höll Per Wästberg, författare och ledamot av Svenska Akademien, följande tal:

I was president of Swedish PEN for 11 years, International President for 7 years. My first PEN meeting was Bled 1965, Arthur Miller new in the chair, Spender and Neruda among speakers. In 1973 I got the chance to organize a PEN seminar in Stockholm with writers such as Naipaul, Vonnegut, Nadine Gordimer, Claude Simon, Chinua Achebe, Michel Tournier, Hans Magnus Enzensberger, Peter Weiss, Heinrich Böll.

The 43rd 1978 congress which I chaired was held in Stockholm Parliament chambers with writers in great number: Inger Christensen, Max Frisch, György Konrad, Klaus Rifbjerg, Christa Wolf, Amos Oz, André Brink, my predesessor Mario Vargas Llosa – to name but a few. Five outstanding African writers were present, Wole Soyinka among them; they had all suffered prison and exile.

Pavel Kohout, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, Jevtusjenko, Voznesenskij were not allowed to travel to Sweden. A long, smuggled message from Vaclav Havel I read to the congress. We suspended Chile´s PEN for defending Pinochet. We expressed support for imprisoned writers, notably Jiri Grusa who became a PEN president, Jacobo Timerman, Pramoedja Ananta Toer, Breyten Breytenbach. 85 writers were registered by the Writers in Prison Committee.

We received greetings from Graham Greene, Günter Grass, Anthony Burgess, Italo Calvino. The economy was disastrous. Our International Secretary Peter Elstob, adventurous former airforce pilot and tanks commander, worked full time free and Elizabeth Paterson, administrative secretary, for 2300 pounds a year. Swedish PEN as usual nominated two names for the Nobel prize: Wole Soyinka, V. S. Naipaul. Both got it.

The theme of the 1978 Congress was Literature in disguise. Arthur Miller said ”We all meet in disguise. Alone and unobserved, we stand mystified before the questions of life and death … The writer is only that member of mankind who dares to tremble in public, to express with what courage he can master, his challenge to meaninglessness and the void.”

In an introduction I said ”A lot of literature is disguised as sociology, documentary evidence, reportage, philosophy. We seem to live in an atmosphere where intellectual discourse rates higher than imaginative play.”

And: ” Serious writers do not accept the official version of events, they write between the lines of history … For getting us to understand that tears and laughter of people faraway are as real as our own, literature provides a unique means of transport. If it has to travel under disguise, under an assumed name, the blame must be put on those who try to regulate the exchange of ideas and experiences as if it were bread rationed in times of famine.”

A task for literature is to make people realize they are not powerless. Autocrats wish people should feel themselves unworthy of justice, private life, independent thinking. The valuable literature tries to counteract people´s belittling of themselves, and that means trouble. And so censorship hits not only writers but readers most of all. When a reader is denied access to a book her freedom is menaced, her possibility to glimpse the truth diminished. Just as one can store nuclear weapons, one can by silencing truth store falsified information, stupidity, immorality, so that they glue together into a wall hard to penetrate, and that creates endless individual suffering.

The name of Salman Rushdie was mentioned earlier. That he remains in danger does not depend on The Satanic Verses that few have read. His crime is to treat the sacred word of the Koran and the Bible as myth and not as unshakeable truth. There are no such holy words, only the manifold expressions of human imagination in myths, fairy tales, epics and poetry. While humor and compassion are two qualities that get on well together, they do no coexist in the breast of the fundamentalist.

Literature need not ask for freedom, it is freedom, said Nobel laureate Heinrich Böll. No regim, no society could claim to give literature what it owns by nature. The lie, propagated by many states, is that there is no truth in imagination. The debasement of words and concepts in official use is a special feature of our times, and the task of serious writers is to expose hypocrisy and raise the standards of world honesty. Where politicians may work in a spirit of pragmatism and compromise, writers, by being single unorchestrated voices, can afford another sincerity.

350 delegates from all over the world – I especially salute the brave Ukrainian PEN representatives – have gathered in Uppsala old castle to serve a cause greater than ourselves. I´ve been a member of PEN for 67 years, so I have seen PEN develop, change, and flourish. I have witnessed its necessity constantly deepening. Since it is difficult to be hopeful these days, with parts of the world in flames, I limit myself to wish International PEN energy and resilience enough for the next 100 years. Cheers for that – skål!