Creators' Congress

Thomas Mann once said that watching a creative writer at his work, groaning and making faces as he scratched out the well-chosen words of his manuscript, gave you the idea that writers were just people for whom writing was a particularly trying ordeal. Last fortnight this observation was confirmed by some 360 U. S. novelists, poets, critics and journalists, and several times as many onlookers, who assembled in Manhattan's Carnegie Hall for the second National Congress of American Writers, to discuss the current problems of their professional lives. It was confirmed not only by evidence of their creative torments, but because they discovered that before they could get down to talking about writing they had to get straight about where they stood on fascism, democracy, the menace of war, the civil war in Spain and a host of other social and political problems whose relation to art constituted the main theme of their discussions.

For three sweltering, temperamental days they attended meetings and passed resolutions, listened to some 20 erudite papers, wound up by agreeing to hold another Congress in two years. Unlike the First Convention of the Legitimate Theatre held a week before (TIME, June 7), theirs was a nervous, intense gathering, an assemblage of solitary spirits accustomed to working in isolation, whose earnestness was almost in direct proportion to their stage fright.

For most observers the significance of the Writers' Congress lay not so much in what it accomplished, or how it was run, as in the fact that so many serious and able U. S. writers considered it necessary that it should be held. Sponsored by authors ordinarily aloof from contemporary political activities--Critics Van Wyck Brooks and Carl Van Doren, Dramatist Marc Connelly, Poet Archibald MacLeish, Journalist Vincent Sheean--the Congress was far more impressive than smaller writers' gatherings held in the past few years in New York, Minneapolis, San Francisco. It was addressed by Ernest Hemingway, Donald Ogden Stewart and Walter Duranty, as well as by Earl Browder, secretary of the Communist Party. Majority of the delegates were young people, with one or two novels or books of verse behind them, or the editorship of one or two small literary magazines. But among them were writers of the professional standing of John Gunther and Thornton Wilder, whose Bridge of San Luis Rey used to be taken by radical critics as a prime example of reaction.

What brought them all together, first in crowded Carnegie Hall and later in the hot, smoky classrooms of the New School for Social Research, became apparent at their first meeting. It was their alarm about the growth of fascism and their concern about the Spanish civil war. Chairman of the first open meeting, nervous and unobtrusive Archibald MacLeish faced an audience of 3,500 (2,000 were turned away) and warned them soberly:

"Fascism with ... its official press, its ventriloquist stage, is a matter of concern to men whose work demands, as the basic condition of its existence, freedom to publish. . . . The war is already made. Not a preliminary war. Not a local conflict. The actual war between the fascist powers and the things they would destroy, the war against which we must defend ourselves. . . . And in that war. that Spanish war on Spanish earth, we, writers who contend for freedom, are ourselves, and whether we so wish or not, engaged."

Walter Duranty, whose brilliant correspondence from Moscow to the New York Times is written under duress of another kind, pounded impatiently on the floor with his cane and repeated that writers could not write honestly under facism.

Tall, baldish Donald Ogden Stewart began mildly with a description of working in Hollywood, soon came back to the same unhumorous warning.

Making the first big public speech of his career, Ernest Hemingway did not appear until 10 p.m. while groups of his agitated admirers tried to locate him in hotels and bars, checking the airport where he had landed after flying from Bimini. Arriving while Walter Duranty was still speaking, he paced the wings before going onstage muttering: "Why the hell am I making a speech?'' But as he began to describe what he had seen reporting the Spanish war, he warmed up eloquently:

"A writer, when he knows what it is about and how it is done, grows accustomed to war. ... It is a shock to discover how truly used to it you become. . . But no one becomes accustomed to murder. And murder on a large scale we saw every day. . . . The totalitarian fascist states believe in the totalitarian war. That put simply means that whenever they are beaten by armed forces they take their revenge on unarmed civilians. In this war, since the middle of November, they have been beaten at the Parque del Oeste, they have been beaten at the Pardo, they have been beaten at Carabanchel, they have been beaten on the Jarama. they have been beaten at Brihuega and at Cordoba, and they are being fought to a standstill at Bilbao. Every time they are beaten in the field they salvage that strange thing they call their honor, by murdering civilians."

Shown at the Writers' Congress were selections of The Spanish Earth, a film of the civil war, taken on, the Loyalist side of the front lines, the work of a gifted young Dutch cameraman, Joris Ivens, who with Hemingway spent several weeks on the battlefields and whose picture is being prepared for distribution by John Dos Passos and Archibald MacLeish.

Because it was a congress of writers everything was a little disorganized: the film began unwinding before Ivens had introduced it, and it was only after some difficulty that Chairman MacLeish managed to get it stopped. The sound had not been put into the picture, so occasionally through the hot silence the ghostly voice of Photographer Ivens would be heard saying, "At this point you would hear machine guns." But also because it was a congress of writers, they filled such gaps with their imaginations, responded with enthusiasm to some brilliant photography, much of it taken under fire, of the shelling of University City, and of Madrid streets, and an air raid on Morata.

Then the writers trooped to the closed meetings of their respective crafts. What I happened in these would have been incredible anywhere else. Along with the discussion of scholarly and original papers like that of Professor Newton Arvin of Smith College on Roots of American Literature, there were bewilderingly hair-splitting literary squabbles that ranged from attacks on Gone With The Wind to attacks on Stalin and the French Popular Front. Now and then there were Dostoevskian interludes when embittered poets or philosophers interrupted the proceedings with autobiographical statements or expositions of their personal credos. Since in any group of 360 U. S. writers there are sure to be some who have commented unfavorably on the work of others present, professional hostility sometimes hampered objective discussion. Closest the Congress came to a real explosion was in the critics' section where critics criticized each other, the Congress, the Communist Party, until Chairman Granville Hicks (The Great Tradition ) lost his temper.

From outside, the Congress was attacked by Novelist James Farrell in The Saturday Review of Literature. He called attention to all the books the delegates had not written.

By the time the Congress adjourned the delegates had listened to some 24 hours of speechmaking, essay-reading and discussion in its various departments, had chosen John Dos Passos' The Big Money, Joseph Freeman's An American Testament, Carl Sandburg's The People, Yes, John Howard Lawson's Marching Song and Van Wyck Brooks' The Flowering of New England as the most valuable works of the past year. To Gone With The Wind (1,350,000 copies printed) they gave one vote.

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