The Mighty PEN

Literature and freedom of expression face worldwide challenges

by Nancy Goldstein

Michael Roberts recently resigned as secretary of Harvard University to become the new executive director of International PEN. The first openly gay person to hold the position, Roberts will oversee the association of prominent literary writers and editors and its work in defending freedom of expression, advancing the cause of literacy and literature, and promoting diversity in literary culture.

Roberts has worked or studied at Harvard in one form or another since 1971. Throughout that time, he managed to combine his dual interests in literature and law, first as a PhD candidate in English and then as a student at Harvard Law and an attorney for the school. For the past seven years Roberts has served as assistant to President Neil Rudenstine and as secretary of the university, a position that involves all the administrative responsibilities associated with Harvard's two governing boards.

One in Ten spoke with Roberts at his home in Cambridge, where he lives with his partner, Jay Corcoran, an actor and filmmaker who produced the documentary Life and Death on the A List. He was in the midst of leaving Cambridge and Harvard for the PEN American Center in New York City, the largest of the more than 130 centers worldwide that compose International PEN.

Q: So why are you leaving Harvard University after 25 years?

A: Wonderful as Harvard is as a place to work, I yearned for some kind of new and more direct experience with people and their problems, and more direct contact with literature and the important changes that are happening to literature.

Q: What are PEN's objectives?

A: Historically we've been dedicated to several things. First, the promotion of literature and of fellowship of writers -- the communal values of writers as they work with one another. PEN does very important programming in that area, and then it does public programming related to literature -- public events such as a major program on a new translation of Kafka's The Trial, which was held a few months ago in New York with a panel that included Susan Sontag, Aharon Appelfeld, and Paul Auster. Second, freedom of expression. Historically, PEN has advocated on behalf of imprisoned and threatened writers abroad ranging from Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn to Vaclav Havel, to, more recently, Salman Rushdie. In fact, PEN has given major awards called Freedom To Write awards every year for the last seven or eight years or so, and has actually succeeded in getting 70 to 80 percent of these people out of jail by using a tactic very close to that employed by other international human rights organizations -- essentially, PEN embarrasses governments into leaving writers alone.

Q: What will you be doing in your role as executive director, and what are some areas of particular concern to you?

A: The director works with and for the board of trustees, which consists mostly of writers, but also of some nonwriters, to shape, define, advance, and implement the mission of the organization. The other big program besides Freedom To Write is the Readers and Writers Committee, which involves taking writers into communities of people who are learning to read or have recently learned to read. Sometimes these are student communities, sometimes adult literacy communities, sometimes communities of people in difficult situations, like prison or detention centers. Literacy isn't a new initiative for PEN -- they've been doing it for 10 years -- but I hope to bring more attention to this area.

Q: How long has PEN supported people who have been sexually marginalized?

A: I think that PEN's profile on expressive issues of concern to gays and lesbians goes back a number of years before the establishment of a lesbian and gay committee, which began in the early '90s, and the period of the art wars and very overt attacks on freedom of expression in relationship to lesbian and gay topics. Dorothy Allison is the current chair, but other members include Edmund White, Craig Lucas, and Jon Robin Baitz.

Q: What are your concerns about the current state of publishing, and what do they have to do with PEN's concerns regarding freedom of expression?

A: There are some colossal facts about the state of publishing today having to do with the fact that there are seven media conglomerates that control a very high percentage of adult trade publishing in the United States. This means, among other things, that people whose personal and economic interests are not necessarily books and literature are controlling the destiny of writers and what gets published and what gets printed. I don't think there's some kind of vast conspiracy, but there are, nonetheless, consequences that follow from that fact.

Q: Such as?

A: Many writers believe, and I think there's plenty of demonstrable evidence to support this, that so-called midlist authors are having a harder and harder time -- "midlist" meaning serious adult fiction and nonfiction. And serious authors of fiction have fewer chances of getting a second novel published if the first novel doesn't sell that well. Moreover, the number of books of poetry published in this country each year is vanishingly small, and the houses that continue to publish poetry do so as a kind of grace note to their general lists.

Q: Is anything positive coming out of this battle of the superpowers for market share?

A: Well, while the publishing and bookselling titans were struggling, Grove Atlantic, a small press, published Charles Frazier's Cold Mountain, which was, as you probably know, a first novel. Certainly there are some parallels here to the current independent film scene. In the same way that Miramax or some other smaller film-distribution company can go in there and cherry-pick more promising and innovative titles, so a smaller publishing house can shop around and find smaller, promising things that they're willing to take a chance on. And sometimes, as in the case of Cold Mountain, they hit. But that's a kind of fairy tale.

Q: I recently read an article about the New York Lesbian and Gay Film Festival in which the writer complained that any queer film some big distributor thinks can go mainstream is plucked out of the festival circuit and distributed through larger commercial venues before it ever gets a chance to be a small, independent queer film. While I would love to feel reassured by the fact that Grove Atlantic and publishers like it exist, I'm concerned that they'll just be used as shopping opportunities -- marketplaces where bigger presses can let smaller presses take all the chances, then swoop down and buy them out if they're successful.

A: There's no question that market forces are going to continue to dominate in ways that are pretty indifferent to aesthetic quality and human values. Those are just facts of our lives, I'm afraid. But I do think that the rise of something like Amazon.com and Internet-access book-selling will have an enormous impact on the most significant economic fact in the publishing industry over the last few decades.

Q: Which is?

A: The impact of returns. The fact is that we have a very liberal return policy in trade publishing in the US, which means that if a retailer like Barnes & Noble buys 10,000 copies of your novel, they have a period of time during which they can return some, many, or all of them. And the larger the retailer is, the more power they have, obviously, to negotiate with the publishers about what to publish.

Q: And that, in turn, means that publishers are probably taking fewer chances on fewer people, and making those chances smaller even when they take them. It sounds like the equivalent of your movie being pulled from theaters if it doesn't do well at the box office on its first weekend out.

A: And you could probably argue that the growth of larger and larger commercial concerns means that fewer and fewer chances are being taken on the unconventional, the quirky, the new --

Q: -- the not immediately best-selling.

A: Exactly. Another phenomenon in publishing is the mega-advance. What that means is that writers working on very promising but sometimes not at all meritorious projects -- like Paula Barbieri [O.J. Simpson's former girlfriend], just to give a notorious example -- get an absurdly large advance from one of the major publishers. A very significant percentage of that publisher's entire year's budget for advances went to her. Unfortunately for everyone, Barbieri's book was a complete bomb.

Q: That may make a lot of people who considered the book inferior feel better, but the money is still gone: it's not going to writers doing more content-based work.

A: Exactly. We need to look at some of these changes in publishing with a view to the question of what the new challenges to freedom of expression may be -- in many cases, economic challenges as well as more overtly political challenges. PEN is going to have to be more and more vigilant to these kinds of issues of freedom of expression and to a new kind of danger.

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