Last Words for a Hero of the Pen

Only the bereaved can fully understand another person’s loneliness. And, for a writer, next to losing a loved one, losing one’s voice and perhaps one’s country, too, makes for immeasurable grief.

George Theiner, editor and translator, who died last week, knew this better than most. For 15 years, exiled from Czechoslovakia to Britain, he spent his hours doctoring the loneliness endured by writers who’d challenged the might of an authoritarian state. In 1973 he joined Writers and Scholars International, which had just been created by American and British intellectuals to defend freedom of expression throughout the world. Eventually, he became editor of its magazine, Index on Censorship.

Jonas Jurasas, the Lithuanian theater director, fired from the Kaunas State Theater for his independent-minded approach, called the magazine a “small boat which rescued me from a stormy sea.” Over the years the Index has saved numerous writers from intellectual loneliness and their work from the threat of oblivion.

The Index began, like Amnesty International, with a letter to a newspaper. Pavel Litvinov and Parissa Daniel, taking their careers in their hands, wrote from Moscow to the editor of the London Times to protest the trial of two fellow dissidents, Yuri Galaskov and Alexander Ginsburg.

Stephen Spender, the poet, read the letter in the Times and spent the next two days calling writers in America and Britain. The outcome was a committee to monitor censorship in the Soviet Union, and, shortly after, the Index was born.

For writers whose “royalties,” in Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s characterization, “take the form of barred windows and barbed wire,” Index was the air, light, freedom and compassion they desperately needed to give them the will to survive.

George Theiner knew first-hand of what Solzhenitsyn spoke. Although he had been news editor of the English-language service of the official Czech news agency, Ceteke, he had always refused to join the Commmunist Party. He refused, too, to bend the news, and in the end the authorities punished this highly principled man by sending him to labor for three years in the Silesian coal mines.

Under Theiner and his predecessor, Michael Scammell, the Index expanded its brief from Eastern Europe to publish a wide range of Third World authors. When the Indonesian writer, Pramoedya Ananta Toer, released from prison after 14 years, wrote a new book, the authorities ordered it to be burned. The Index was quick to print extracts and has been doing the same for other Third World authors since.

The pages of the Index have seen many writers who later climbed the ladder of achievement. In 1974 it was one of the first to denounce the shah’s Iran, publishing an article by Sadegh Ghotbzadeh, who after the revolution became foreign minister--and then was executed when the revolution began consuming its own children. When Nicaragua was under the thumb of dictator Anastasio Somoza, the Index published poems by the then-unknown Ernesto Cardenal, who went on to become minister of education in the Sandinista government. And it published the South Korean poet Kim Chi Ha long before he became an international cause celebre.

Yet the Index has been far more than “a bulletin of frustration.” It has often worked to deprive dictatorships of the freedom of maneuver to settle accounts with dissenters out of public sight, behind closed walls.

No wonder the Index is appreciated by writers. The great figures of persecuted literature--Solzhenitsyn, Milovan Djilas, Vaclav Havel, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Wole Soyinka and Ariel Dorfman--who have plenty of outlets elsewhere, continue to contribute.

But for the most part, the Index rightly concentrates on the unknowns. It has been at its best in helping victimized writers of the second and third rank and young writers just beginning to make their mark. “Among the letters I cherish,” says Scammell, “is one written by an unknown black South African poet, describing how the appearance of his poem in Index restored him to life and writing after a period of despair.”

Theiner used to say that “Index faced no danger of running out of material. We are more likely to run out of funds.” It is a little magazine with a quite small circulation and a ridiculous budget.

George Theiner and his band of dedicated editors and financial supporters on both sides of the Atlantic kept this journal alive and strong. Others will take his place and the work will go on, keeping the Index a beacon and a home to literature and critical thought that otherwise might be lost--and the authors often enough, too.