Updike Society member Lang Zimmerman was reading Salman Rushdie’s Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder (Random House, 2024) when he came upon a second-chapter account of the birth of the PEN America World Voices Festival:
Rushdie wrote, “I’ll just say that if Norman Mailer hadn’t been president of PEN back in 1986—if he hadn’t raised a ton of money and invited a glittering array of the world’s greatest writers to New York City for that legendary Congress at which Günter Grass and Saul Bellow got angry with each other about poverty in the Bronx, and John Updike used the little blue mailboxes of America as a metaphor of freedom and his coziness irritated a substantial segment of the audience, and Cynthia Ozick accused the American ex-chancellor Bruno Kreisky (a Jew himself) of anti-Semitism because he had met with Yasser Arafat, and Grace Paley got angry with Norman for putting too few women on the panels, and Nadine Gordimer and Susan Sontag disagreed with Grace because ‘literature is not an equal opportunity employer’ . . . .”