Literary Gossip
I took a little break from the computer last night to attend the annual PEN black-tie bash, held this year at the Museum of Natural History.
The PEN American Center, if you don't know, is a literary organization that fights for freedom of the press around the world and, increasingly in recent years, here in the United States. Its director, Michael Roberts, used to work at Harvard under Neil Rudenstine.
I was the guest of Joan Khoury and the Bank of New York, who, I'm delighted to announce, will be advertising in the next issue of 02138.
Some thoughts on the evening.
It's easy to be cynical about these affairs—wealthy New Yorkers getting all dressed up to schmooze—but there is something inspiring and fundamentally serious about the PEN dinner. The evening paid tribute to the four Connecticut librarians who refused to comply with a Patriot Act request for information on the Internet searches of its patrons—that's my home state! Small, but feisty—and to a Cuban journalist, Normando Hernandez Gonzalez, who is dying in prison. His mother came to accept an award for him, and gave a short but moving speech in Spanish. After the black tie is hung up until next year, these are the memories that linger and matter.
That said, the PEN dinner is also really terrific for people-watching, partly because it's a bit of a challenge: Literary celebrities are only semi-famous, and you often look at them and think, I
know I know who that is, but I can't quite remember...
Here are some tidbits.
Salman Rushdie was on hand with his wife, the model/writer/chef
Padma Lakshi, who is so beautiful, it's difficult not to simply stand and gawp. She is quite tall, with flowing black hair, flawless skin, and hypnotic eyes. She was wearing a faux-fur wrap and a lime green dress with a long, sloping cut down the back, exposing an arc of her skin from her top right shoulder to her left hip. I can tell you this because she had a long conversation right in front of me—I swear, this was not intentional on my part—and it was logistically impossible not to look. She also seems like a nice person.
Salman Rushdie, on the other hand, looks kind of surly. The tabs have these two on the outs, and for a few minutes, he looked irritated as more people seemed interested in talking to his wife than to him. He kept trying to catch her eye in that, "Okay, honey, can we go now?" look that all husbands and wives are familiar with. But then a couple of fans came up to him, and he was happy again.
PEN and Borders bookstore gave an award to Gore Vidal, I have no idea what for, but bully for them; as speaker Tina Brown pointed out, the dinner this year was without Kurt Vonnegut, David Halberstam, and Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., which is a heavy-hitting threesome. Gore Vidal is a pain in the ass, but he is brilliant and unique and we should celebrate that while he's still alive.
Vidal didn't look well. He could not stand to receive the award, and his body looked shrunken. His mind, however, is as acerbic and contrarian as ever. He made a little joke about entering the museum and seeing old friends—"the dinosaurs"—and then thanked Tina Brown, whom he called the best editor of The New Yorker, despite the fact that David Remnick was hosting a table not far from him. Then he railed against the Bush administration, which went over better than his claim that Tina Brown was a better New Yorker editor than David Remnick.
I spoke briefly with Alex Kuczynski, author of Beauty Junkies, a book about plastic surgery. She was there with her husband and mother, who was very sweet. "Ever since that book came out," she whispered to me, "people keep looking at my face." To quote a great man, charming as hell.
Tim Russert was the MC of the night, which was a little depressing—even at a literary dinner, TV people are the real stars—but then, he has been embroiled in some freedom of the press fights recently. Russert was wearing make-up. He began his speech with two Yogi Berra jokes, which felt like two jokes he has delivered about 100,000 times.
I talked to the brilliant Peter Carey, who would not tell me about the new novel he is writing. I also talked with Jennet Conant, who also would not tell me about the new book she is writing. (Her last book, you will remember, was largely about her grandfather, former Harvard president James B. Conant.) "It's something about World War II and spies," she said. "But then, that's what all my books are about."
Gay Talese looked dapper as usual, in black suede lace-ups, a tux, and a black fedora.
Calvin Trillin was the guest of honor at my table, and he is just delightful—warm and funny and unpretentious. He spoke of his grandchildren with a quiet love. On taking them shopping, he said, he found himself saying something he'd never before said: "Don't you have anything more expensive than that?"
The moment was particularly poignant because Trillin's wife, Alice, passed away (of natural causes) on September 11, 2001, and grandchildren really matter under such circumstances.
I saw Jay McInerney wandering around, looking slightly pissed, in a Salman Rushdie sort of way, that no one wanted to talk to him. Then he saw a woman he knew. Much better.
Writers have a challenge these days, and that is to claim their relevance in a culture where television and the Internet have usurped the prominence of writing. The silver lining is that, in hard times like the ones we currently find ourselves in, writers do matter; they are important.
(I bumped into New Yorker editor Henry Finder—former editor of the Harvard-based magazine, Transition—and had the chance to tell him what a powerful, and important piece of journalism I thought George Packer's recent article about the fate of Iraqis who risked everything to work for the United States—and how the White House is abandoning them to be slaughtered.)
Whether in the United States or abroad, more and more writers are rising to the challenge of writing in an age when freedom is under siege. Let's hope it makes a difference; I have to believe it will.
