Bureaucracy across Borders: Administering Cosmopolitan Hospitality at the English P.E.N., 1930–1945

Abstract

From its inception, hospitality was inscribed in the vision of the English P.E.N., one of its stipulated aims being to provide a ‘vehicle for friendliness and hospitality’. Yet several writers who took leading administrative and representational roles during the 1930s and 1940s – Storm Jameson, E. M. Forster and J. B. Priestley, for example – were uncomfortable with the kinds of hospitality the P.E.N. sometimes purported to offer. They were concerned about the wartime propriety of elaborate lunches, dinners and parties. At the same time, this was an organisation that also tirelessly advocated for more substantial forms of refuge for displaced writers. Drawing on extensive archival material, this essay will examine some of the ambiguities embedded in the P.E.N.’s conception of hospitality during this period: the perceived clash between a social etiquette of hospitality (expressed through P.E.N. social gatherings) and a wider politics of hospitality (expressed in its drive to facilitate refugee reception in Britain).