Encounters with writers
Writer’s conferences — national, regional or international — are so common these days that they are no longer newsworthy unless something dramatic happens in them or they are attended by some international celebrity. These meetings can be deadly serious and the discussion sometimes gets obfuscated with jargon. At times, because writers are great showoffs, they can become insufferable and boring.
I have in the past 50 years organized some and attended some. It is not so much the meetings and their conduct, however, that were memorable. It is those incidents outside the session halls, in the corridors, at the dining tables that reveal writers at their worst or best human behavior.
Some internationally famous writers are known to be boors. The late Graham Greene accepted an invitation to attend a PEN Congress in Rio de Janiero in 1960 — he went, but not once did he appear in the session hall.
Norman Mailer is known to be very difficult, but when he attended a PEN (Poets, Playwrights, Essayists and Novelists) meeting at Solidaridad during the Marcos regime, he turned out to be very sweet, staying on long after he was supposed to leave. He was also very candid in answering questions, mentioning that he wrote so much because he had to pay alimony to the wives he had divorced. And he admitted that if he were in the Soviet Union at the time, he would have conformed because he liked his comforts. The lion is dead. We remember him if only for his The Naked and the Dead which is set in the Philippines.
Gunter Grass, who was also at Solidaridad, was very warm; in conferences, he likes talking with other writers and posing for pictures.
The late Yasunari Kawabata attended a conference in Taipei. He never said a word, rarely smiled, but gladly posed with other writers — maybe because he didn’t speak English, but he did have his translator with him, Edward Seidensticker, who passed away in Tokyo last year.
Yukio Mishima was also known to be difficult. I experienced his kind of snootiness which, I soon realized, was a put-on because he sent a certain manuscript that I had requested from him.
The English are supposed to be aloof and reserved but the English poet Stephen Spender, who was editor of the defunct journal Encounter, was extremely jovial; he welcomed me to his Haymarket office not just with tea but with lunch.
After the 1958 founding of the Philippine Center of International PEN I was invited to several PEN Congresses abroad. The organization has this annual congress; over a hundred PEN Centers compete with one another to host this conference which will then bring 200 or more of the world’s most famous writers to the host country. Any PR person therefore sees how valuable this congress is. While the host country pays for the board and lodging of two official delegates from each center, the delegate must spend for his travel, incidental expenses and registration. And in the Philippines where there are no rich writers, attending such a Congress entails some sacrifice.
Fortunately, for us, there are always some institutions willing to shell out the cost. I was able to attend a few. One such Congress was in Seoul in the ‘60s.
That Seoul meeting was memorable. Anding Roces, Kit Tatad and myself were the Philippine delegates. Several name writers were there — from the United States, John Updike and John Cheever; from France, the eminent poet Pierre Emmanuel. I met Pierre several times in Paris — he was one of the founding members of the Congress for Cultural Freedom to which Raul Manglapus and I belonged. He was married to a beautiful Chinese lady, and several times, I had been to their apartment for dinner.
Pierre missed that welcome dinner at the Blue Cloud restaurant outside Seoul. The Blue Cloud was then a famous kaesang house. A word about kaesang — she is the Korean equivalent of the geisha, and more. She is good at conversation, at dancing and at entertaining the male guest. And as our Korean host at the table that evening explained. if any of us wanted to bring to our hotel any of the girls who were serving us that evening, that could also be arranged.
He was in his early 30s, in the white uniform of a colonel in the Korean army. He was seated next to me and after I introduced myself, he said apologetically that he was not a writer although he did read a lot of contemporary literature in translation, sometimes, in English but he had difficulty with the language although he spoke it quite well.
And what, may I ask, is a Korean colonel who is not a writer doing in a meeting of writers?
He smiled broadly. “I am your security officer,” he explained simply.
At the time, curfew was still in force in Korea; all parties had to break up at midnight but in case there were late partygoers, he was there to see to it that they got back to their hotel without any problem.
Security officer — How interesting! I was very eager to ask him more questions. Of all the conferences that you have secured, is there any particular conference that is memorable? After all, they all look the same.
“Yes,” he said. He gave it some thought, then he smiled broadly. “Yes, this is the conference of ASPAC foreign ministers.”
ASPAC, what is that?
“The Association of Pacific Asian Countries. I was the chief security officer. It was not a very large conference like this one. But it was very important — the foreign minister of these countries and their vice ministers.”
What made it so memorable?
He smiled again. “I provided girls for all the participants,” he said. “All of them — except one, and that is why it is memorable.”
One of them refused?
He nodded.
And who could this rare gentleman be? Maybe he was gay.
“I don’t think so,” he said. “But anyway he refused. He is Thailand’s foreign minister, Thanat Koman.”
And so several years later, here I was in Bangkok attending another conference and who would I have for breakfast company that morning at the posh Oriental but Alex Melchor, former Executive Secretary, the Asian scholar from Berkeley, Robert Scalapino and — you guessed it, Mr. Koman himself.
I could hardly wait to tell him the story of the Korean security officer. And so I finally spilled it out.
“You were the only one, Sir,” I said, “who refused a girl that evening.”
Mr. Koman shook his head, looked at me and smiled, “Frankie, I made a terrible mistake.”
And yet another PEN conference, this time in Dublin, Ireland: at the pre-conference dinner that evening, the main attraction at our table was Nikolai Fedorenko, the head of the Russian delegation. It was the ‘70s, long before Perestroika and Glasnost. Mr. Fedorenko had been to Manila, was an authority on Chinese ceramics and a novelist of sorts. He was a rigid apparatchik, that I found out later. On that evening, however, he was himself, gregarious and brimming with robust Russian humor, some of his jokes definitely anti-communist. Chairman Mao had just died and we were all wondering what would happen next, the tumultuous event of a leader whose passing would create upheavals not just in his country but in the whole communist world including Russia.
“What do you think will happen?” The question was directed at the oracle of the evening.
Mr. Fedorenko sat back, looked at the ceiling and seemed in deep thought, then he leaned forward to make the oracular statement: “First, of course, Mao will have to be buried.”
The following morning, he made the opening address. How the man had changed from the jocular personality that evening to a stern-faced, social-realist party stooge! He spewed nothing new, the ragged party line and all that asinine blather that defined Russian culture.
Later in Moscow where I was a guest of the Writers Union which Mr. Fedorenko headed, he was again the jovial host that Russians always are.
He took me around the headquarters of the Writers Union, to the manorial restaurant, the manicured grounds, I wondered aloud how writers anywhere, particularly in a socialist country, could afford such munificent housing, such wonderful food in such an elegant restaurant.
Mr. Fedorenko leaned over and said, “So Frankie, just remember this, when you have your revolution, don’t burn down Forbes Park. Our Writers Union office is one of the villas of the Romanovs.”
