The “extraordinary air of discontent” detected by Norman Mailer at the inaugural proceedings of the 48th International PEN Congress had vanished by the time the literary luminaries hit Saul Steinberg’s thirty-four-room Park Avenue triplex for the opening-night bash. There a happy crowd admired Cranachs and Rodins, galleries of seventeenth-century Dutch, Flemish, and Italian masters, and rare antique lamps. Elizabeth Hardwick and William Gass chatted beneath a painting most people have seen only on a slide in Fine Arts 13. Saul Bellow wandered down a marble-floored hallway with real candles flickering in bronze wall sconces. Allen Ginsberg wondered what the dogs had just done to the young man with the bloody groin in the Rubens that occupied a whole wall. This, one felt, was the real purpose of the congress: it was a famous writers’ school reunion. Czeslaw Milosz and Gunter Grass, Nadine Gordimer and Salman Rushdie, Claude Simon and E. L. Doctorow, John Updike and Donald Barthelme. . .No mute inglorious Miltons here. These were the big boys.

The congress was billed as the largest official gathering of writers ever convened, and there were some predictable (and widely publicized) moments of confrontation, but they were few and far between. Mostly, people wandered in and out of meetings, read newspapers, gossiped in the back of the Essex House conference room where the panel discussions took place. There were occasional challenging questions from the floor, but the microphones in the aisles were dominated by repeaters: the excitable Czech translator, the British “novelist” with the upper-class accent, the man from New Zealand who described himself as “a poet, novelist, editor, and adviser of young women.”

The real action was outside the hall. Herds of writers migrated from party to party: cocktails at the library, the Temple of Dendur reception, the Gracie Mansion affair, where Mayor Koch— by his own account “one of the few mayors who has successfully written”—gave an effusive speech lauding the conferees as “the most intelligent group in the world.” There was the Harcourt Brace Jovanovich party for Amos Oz and Ryszard Kapuscinski at La Reginette; a jostling throng at Roger Straus’s town house; a benefit at the Cat Club; a lunch hosted by Harper’s at the Russian Tea Room; parties at John Irving’s and Jean Stein’s. Or you could just hang around conference headquarters at the St. Moritz and listen to the murmurous hum of innumerable egos. “You can speak,” Norman Mailer told a Yugoslav poet who attempted to address the chair after the plenary session was declared closed, “but no one will respond.”

James Atlas