Writers Created an International Organization for Human Rights—PEN

 

On October 6, 1921 C. A. Dawson Scott, a now largely forgotten novelist asked some of her friends to join with her in launching a new organization.  Poets, Essayists and Novelists (PEN) was meant to promote international friendship and co-operation between writers.  In the wake of the horrors of the First World War, Scott and her friends hoped that writers could help tie the world together.  Her friends were a Who’s who of British letters.  John Galsworthy was elected as PEN’s first president and the enthusiastic founders included George Bernard Shaw, H. G. Wells, and Joseph Conrad.

 

                     PEN International was the brain child of largely forgotten English novelist C. A. (Amy) Dawson Scott in the wake of the Great War.        

PEN quickly established Centers to support the work of writers in many countries.  Because it campaigned resolutely for freedom of expression and in defense of writers who became political prisoners, the organization is considered to be both the oldest international literary society and the first international organization explicitly committed to human rights.

 

                     Noted English novelist and poet John Galsworthy lent instant prestige to the new organization as its first President.

The PEN Charter proclaimed the following goals:

Literature, national though it be in origin, knows no frontiers, and should remain common currency among nations in spite of political or international upheavals.

In all circumstances, and particularly in time of war, works of art and libraries, the heritage of humanity at large, should be left untouched by national or political passion.

Members of PEN should at all times use what influence they have in favor of good understanding and mutual respect among nations; they pledge themselves to do their utmost to dispel race, class, and national hatreds and to champion the ideal of one humanity living in peace in the world.

PEN stands for the principle of unhampered transmission of thought within each nation and among all nations, and members pledge themselves to oppose any form of suppression of freedom of expression in their country or their community.

PEN declares for a free press and opposes arbitrary censorship in time of peace. It believes that the necessary advance of the world toward a more highly organized political and economic order renders free criticism of governments, administrations, and institutions imperative. And since freedom implies voluntary restraint, members pledge themselves to oppose such evils of a free press as mendacious publication, deliberate falsehood, and distortion of facts for political and personal ends…

PEN Centers spread over Europe and literary luminaries like Anatole France, Paul Valery, Thomas Mann, Benedetto Croce and Karel Capek played active leadership roles.  As fascism spread across the contentment PEN and its members became noted for vigorous campaigns for press freedom and against censorship and for actively defending—and sometimes even helping to rescue—threatened writers.

Today PEN has 144 Centers in 102 countries. Its membership is open to all published writers regardless of nationality, language, race, or religion. Centers act as autonomous cultural and intellectual organizations within their own countries and support activities like regional conferences and seminars.  Centers maintain links with each other through PEN’s London headquarters and cooperate in supporting human rights campaigns.

Among the organization’s human rights initiatives, the best known may be PEN’s Writers in Prison Committee which works on behalf of persecuted writers worldwide. Established in 1960 in response to increasing attempts to silence voices of dissent Committee currently monitors the cases of over 900 writers who have been imprisoned, tortured, threatened, attacked, made to disappear, or killed for the peaceful practice of their profession. It publishes a bi-annual Case List documenting free expression violations against writers around the world.

 

American Norman Mailer and South African Nadine Gordimer at the PEN International Congress in January 1986. 

The PEN American Center was founded in 1922 and is headquartered in New York.   It is now the largest of all Centers.  A second American Center is located in Los Angeles.  Among the leading American members have included Arthur Miller, Norman Mailer, and Susan Sontag.

This April PEN America conducted a ceremony to salute 2025 annual award honorees hosted by Pen America President Jennifer Finney Boylan. 

The honorees included iconic actor, producer and independent publisher Sarah Jessica Parker, Macmillan Publishers CEO Jon Yaged, and Wesleyan University President Michael Roth.  Alo honored was courageous imprisoned poet Galal El-Behairy, who has been jailed in Egypt for seven years for his poems critical of the government. His father and sister traveled from Egypt to accept the award on his behalf.

 

Late night comedy star and writer Amber Ruffin, host for the evening, opened with a monologue that underscored the perils of the moment driven by government censorship: “Free speech is something we have to fight for. We can joke about it–until we can’t. That’s the reality of where we’re at right now.”

Her words are dramatically prophetic in light of the Trumpian attempts to remove Stephen Colbert and Jimmy Kimmel from the air and calls for censorship of academic curricula at every level and stepped up campaigns to remove books from libraries.

 

PEN America just issued its annual report on banned books—6,870 instances of book bans in the 2024-2025 school year, book bans in 23 states and 87 public school districts with Florida and Texas leading in number of bans and book bans affected the works of almost 2,600 artists, including 2,308 authors, 243 illustrators and 38 translators. 

Thanks PEN!

 

 

A Classic Myth, George Bernard Shaw, plus Lerner & Loewe Make Musical Magic

 

Poster for the original production of My Fair Lady on Broadway evoked the dead original playwright.

It was called “the perfect musical.”   From that first night on the Broadway stage, March 15, 1956, at the Mark Hellinger Theatre audiences leapt to their feet cheering, critics wore out the Thesaurus in search of superlatives, trophies could not be made fast enough.  My Fair Lady had to be moved twice to larger theaters and set a record of 2,717 performances in its first production.  The world, it seemed was singing its songs.

But the path to theatrical glory was long.  Very long.  It began with a lost legend on Cyprus about a Phoenician king named Pumayyaton who the Greeks called Pygmalion.  Centuries later the Roman poet Ovid cast Pygmalion as a sculptor who creates a perfect statue of a woman out of ivory who he named Galatea.  After sacrificing to Aphrodite, Goddess of Beauty on her feast day, he returns home where he kisses the perfect idol he has created only to learn that her lips were sweet and breasts yielding.  The goddess had granted his wish to turn the statue into a woman.

 

Jean-Leon Gerome's Pygmalion and Galatea painted in 1890 is just one of many popular art renderings of Ovid's version of the myth.

The story of the artist and his art sprung to life resonated, especially during and after the Renaissance was told and re-told many times and was depicted in painting and sculpture.  It was the subject of many poems in Victorian England.  William S. Gilbert’s blank verse Pygmalion and Galatea, an Original Mythological Comedy was produced in London in 1871 and was so popular that it was revived three times in five years and other companies rushed their own versions of the tale to the stage.  A young Irishman struggling to make his mark as a critic took notice.

Forty years later at the height of his powers George Bernard Shaw recast the themes of a woman metamophisized by her creator into one of his didactic lessons on social class.  He also wanted to propound his own pet theory that standardized pronunciation of English could help liberate the poor, who were stigmatized by their crude accents.  Written in 1912, in his Pygmalion the creator is Henry Higgins, a tyrannical, misanthropic professor of linguistics and phonetics. The object of transformation is a Cockney flower girl named Eliza Doolittle.  

George Bernard Shaw, the witty and didactic Irish born playwrite and Fabian Socialist about the time of his 1912 triumph, Pygmalion.

Shaw needed another character to whom Higgins could expound his theories and to whom Eliza could turn for comfort.  He found the perfect model in Dr. Watson, Sherlock Holmes’s sidekick whose main function was to listen to the flights of brilliance of the detective.  In the play the character is transformed into Col. Pickering, like Watson a veteran of the Indian Army.

Pygmalion opened in London in 1914 with the object of Shaw’s unrequited love, Mrs. Patrick Campbell as Eliza.  It was by far the most popular play Shaw had brought to the stage.  But audiences were dissatisfied with the ending in which the now completely emancipated Eliza abandons the professor.  During the run of the play the producers substituted a final scene in which Higgins appears at a window and throws flowers at departing Eliza, hinting that such a gesture would woo her back.  Shaw was furious and added a postscript essay, What Happened Afterwards to published editions of the play to explain why that was impossible.  He continued to fight attempts to soften the ending through revivals and other productions of the play.

In 1937 Shaw licensed his plays to Hungarian producer Gabriel Pascal for the cinema.  He reluctantly agreed to allow Pygmalion to be the first film on the condition that he retain full artistic control.  Shaw collaborated on the screenplay and wrote whole new scenes, including the ballroom scene where Eliza is put to the test of passing as a lady. Knowing Pascal wanted a happier ending Shaw offered to write a new final scene showing Eliza and her callow suitor now husband Freddy Eynsford-Hill tending their flower shop catering to gentlefolk.  Instead, without Shaw’s knowledge, Pascal inserted a short scene following Eliza’s departure in which she returns with her bags and the self-satisfied Higgins leans back, cocks his hat over his face and demands, “Eliza, where the devil are my slippers?”  Shaw was outraged, but the scene stayed.

Leslie Howard as Professor Henry Higgins and Wendy Hiller as Eliza Doolittle in the 1938 film version of Pygmalion.

The 1938 film starred Leslie Howard and Wendy Hiller.  It was a huge hit on both sides of the Atlantic and even won Shaw an Oscar for his contributions to the screenplay. 

Part of Shaw’s agreement with Pascal was that none of the plays could be made into a musical.  He had earlier been greatly disappointed with The Chocolate Soldier, a Viennese operetta based on Arms and the Man.  Despite numerous pleas over the years, Pascal could not get Shaw to yield.  But when the old man died in 1950 at the age of 94, the producer approached Alan J. Lerner, the lyricist and librettist who had created Brigadoon with Frederick Loewe and Love Life with Kurt Weill.  Lerner worked on the project intermittently for two years before abandoning it.

Other tried their hands at it—Arthur Schwartz and Howard Dietz and then Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II, the reigning kings of American musical comedy.  Rogers told Learner that it was impossible because “it has no sub-plot.”  The other problem was the talky nature of the play and the lack of big scenes for an ensemble.  

Frederick Loewe (left) and Alan Jay Lerner had to repair a fractured partnership to work on a musical version of Pygmalion with out even knowing if they could secure the rights.

Lerner had become estranged from Lowe, his original partner on the project.  But when he chanced on Pascal’s obituary in the newspapers, he decided to give the project a second chance.  Reuniting with Lowe, Lerner realized that the key to the production was opening it up from the stage play, as Shaw himself had done with the addition of the ballroom scene in the film version.  Lerner added other “action that takes place between the acts of the play” as Shaw had written them, notably the Covent Garden scene after Higgins departs in which Eliza sing Wouldn’t it be Loverly, Alfred P. Doolittle’s  rollicking I’m Getting Married in the Morning number, and the extended Ascot racetrack scene.  In between he preserved most of Shaw’s witty dialog and even the social messages.  He did, however, retain the ending of the film, not Shaw’s beloved declaration of independence.

Learner and Lowe went ahead with their work not knowing if they could get the rights from Pascal’s estate which was being managed with flinty business no-nonsense by Chase Manhattan Bank.  There were other bidders, most notably MGM which tried threats to muscle Learner aside.  He bet that when the time came the fact that he and Lowe had a completed libretto and score would tilt the bank in their direction.  It did and they won the right to mount the musical on the stage.  MGM would later have to spend a ton of money to buy Learner and Lowe’s show from them for the big screen.

After securing the services of one of Broadways most successful directors, Moss Hart, attention turned to casting.  Everyone’s first choice for Higgins was Noel Coward but he turned down the part.  He did suggest that they try Rex Harrison who had starred in other film adaptations of Shaw’s work.  Harrison was a huge star in Brittan once dubbed Sexy Rexy for his appearances as a leading man in the ‘30’s and ‘40’s but he was less well known in the U.S.  Harrison was interested but both he and the creative team were concerned with one little problem.  Harrison could not sing, or rather he had a very narrow vocal range.  After some tinkering by Lowe and handing the most soaring melodies off to other characters, it was agreed that Harrison could sing/speak his numbers.

Julie Andrews, a young British singer/actress was a sensation as Eliza Doolittle in the Broadway Production of My Fair Lady.

Casting Eliza was more difficult.  The part was first offered to Texas-born Mary Martin who wisely concluded that she was unsuited to play a Cockney.  Gertrude Lawrence who Learner had envisioned for the role when he first started work on the project in 1950 had inconveniently died in 1952 and was unavailable.  They finally settled on a young English singer/actress, Julie Andrews.  Legend would have it that she was plucked from obscurity for the part, but she already had one Broadway hit under her belt, The Boyfriend.

The cast was rounded out with veteran character actor and music hall performer Stanly Holloway as the philosophic dustman Alfred P. Doolittle; Robert Coote as Col. Pickering; John Michael King as Eynsford-Hill who got to sing On the Street Where You Live, the show’s only love song; and Kathleen Nesbitt as Higgins’s mother.

The title My Fair Lady made oblique reference to the title Shaw used in early drafts of Pygmalion, Fair Eliza, and to the repeated refrain from the nursery rhyme London Bridge is Falling Down.

The show almost did not go on for its first performance in out of town tryouts in New Haven, Connecticut.  Hours before the curtain Harrison became frightened by the pit orchestra that was much larger than anything he had encountered in rehearsals.  Fearing that they would down him out, he told producers that, “that under no circumstances would he go on that night...with those thirty-two interlopers in the pit.”  He then locked himself in his dressing room.  After fruitless pleading, producers decided to dismiss the company for the night and make an announcement to the audience that was beginning to assemble.  Less than an hour before curtain time, Harrison got a grip on himself and emerged from the dressing room.  Producers frantically recalled the cast, and the show went on.  It ended with a thunderous standing ovation.  Everyone knew that this would be a hit.

Indeed, it was.  The original cast album became a perennial hit.  After Edward Mulhare and Sally Anne Howes took over the parts on Broadway, Harrison, Andrews and most of the original cast took the show to London where it debuted at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane in the West End on April 30, 1958.  The show would run for 2,281 performances there.

Since then, there have been numerous revivals in both New York and London, each winning slews of awards for its casts just as the original production swept the Tony Awards.  There have been touring companies, productions in almost every language conceivable—an interesting challenge for a play revolving around English pronunciation,—regional, community, college, and high school productions.

Audrey Hepburn with Jeremy Brett as Freddy Eynsford-Hill and Rex Harrison as Professor Higgins in the Ascot scene--a dazzlingly stylized production number added to the script to open the talky Shaw script up for the film.

In 1964 MGM brought My Fair Lady to the screen as one of the grandest of its musicals.  But not without controversy.  Although Harrison, Holloway, and other members of the Broadway cast were signed, studio big wigs did not think Julie Andrews was a big enough star to carry the expensive film.  They cast Audrey Hepburn as Eliza.  Broadway fans were furious.   Many vowed never to see the film—a threat virtually none of them carried out.   Hepburn’s songs were dubbed by Marni Nixon, the soprano behind many non-signing Hollywood actresses.  

A few years ago, the Wouldn’t It be Loverly scene surfaced with Hepburn singing.  She turns out to have had a pleasant, if breathy voice, and acquitted the song quite well.  But convention decreed a traditional stage soprano sing the part.  If the movie could be made today, she would probably be allowed to sing her own songs.

Andrews got her revenge, however, when she was cast the same year in Mary Poppins which became Disney’s biggest grossing live action picture.  She also took home the Academy Award for Best Actress. Hepburn herself was not even nominated despite turning in a charming performance.

Not the My Fair Lady was snubbed at the Oscars.  The film took home the statuettes for Best Picture; Best Director, George Cukor, Best Actor for Harrison; and five other awards.  In addition, Learner was nominated for Best Adapted Screen Play, Holloway for Best Supporting Actor, and Gladys Cooper for Best Supporting Actress as Mrs. Higgins.  It remains one of the most beloved films of all time.