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  • “Writers and the International Spirit”: Irish PEN in the Postwar Years
  • Deirdre Brady

The vision of the writer as the liberal conscience of the world was the cornerstone on which the group now known as PEN International—easily the most prominent human rights literary organization in the world—was founded.1 When the International PEN Congress was held in Dublin in June 1953, the crusade by its members to uphold the cultural freedom and integrity of writers stood as one of the crucial objectives of the organization. On that occasion, literary, political, and cultural organizations came together to welcome some 439 delegates from thirty-seven PEN centers and twenty-seven countries in Europe, the United States, New Zealand, India, Indonesia, and Japan, and organizers enlisted the support of the president of Ireland in promoting the event. In many ways, the staging of this major literary event signaled a coming of age of the only recently declared Republic of Ireland in world literature. For a period of five days, Irish PEN and Irish writers were at the center of the literary world. Coming at a critical time in the formation of the state, it represents one of a series of nation-building events to promote a vision of Ireland as a modern nation, and also to foster tourism.2 The 1953 PEN Congress highlights the interaction between the [End Page 116] literary community and the international fight for freedom of expression during the mid-twentieth-century. It also demonstrates that the Dublin PEN center was aware of, and active in, contemporary efforts to move Ireland into the larger world. PEN’s connections with writers worldwide also challenge the commonly received notions of a post-Emergency Ireland culturally isolated intelligentsia and a stagnant literary field.

PEN—the acronym stands for poets, essayists, and novelists, though its catchment was later extended to include editors, translators and others—was founded in London in 1921.3 Envisioned by its founder Amy Dawson Scott as a vehicle for peace and cooperation, PEN’s aim is to promote friendship, freedom of expression, international goodwill and intellectual cooperation among writers. A Dublin branch of PEN was informally set up in Dublin by Lady Gregory in 1921.4 The Dublin group became a formalized club in 1934, and attracted a broad membership from Dublin’s literary circles, including Sean O’Faolain, Dorothy Macardle, Seamus McCall, Dorothy Day, Bulmer Hobson, Lady Christine Long-ford, Desmond McCarthy, Blanaid Salkeld, Maurice Walshe, Francis Hackett, Hanna Sheehy Skeffington, Sheila Pim, Lilian Davidson, Rutherford Mayne, Annie P. Smithson, Cecil Salkeld, Kate O’Brien, Seumus O’Sullivan, Maura Laverty, and Temple Lane.5 The Irish club forged extensive networks extending to South America, the United States, France, Netherlands, Sweden, New Zealand, Poland, and England (where the office of the International PEN was located). The club’s first public event was a dinner in recognition of W. B. Yeats’s seventieth birthday.Speakers included Francis Hackett, Desmond McCarthy, and Sean O’Faolain. All posited the club as an internationally minded organization, and announced their manifesto: “We have founded PEN,” O’Faolain said on the occasion, [End Page 117] “to feel the rivalry, the emulation, the excitement of ideas, of criticism, of everything that belongs to the world of imagination and ideas . . . we recognize and fight for the intellectual fraternity of mankind.” Well aware of the publicity surrounding the event, O’Faolain left the public in no doubt as to nature of the group’s intention to oppose censorship when he urged Irish writers to “fight to the last ditch” for the liberty of the press. Pointing to the problems of the suppression of writers worldwide, and invoking the concerns of H. G. Wells (a founding member of PEN) and what Wells called the “monster of organisation” in Europe, O’Faolain warned his audience of the danger that “they may in time come our own way.”6 O’Faolain’s words would prove prophetic. As war clouds loomed over Europe, censorship became more pervasive, and tensions between PEN centers heightened.

Irish attendance at PEN’s international congresses was problematic from the start. In Buenos Aires in 1936, the first congress to be attended by an Irish delegate...

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