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-2-While, the organisation of the Congress was excellent as far as the technical side was concerned, (hotels, public meetings, receptions, press interviews, etc.), the debates of the Congress took place under conditions which showed a considerable lack of imagination and ignorance of parliamentary procedure on the part of those responsible for the way in which the business of the Congress was transacted. Skeggs, Muhlen, and Bondy are certainly nice fellows with the best intentions. However, they seem to have had no previous experience at all on how to run a conference."All delegates had been asked to prepare papers on various subjects. It was obviously impossible to have all those papers read in the public meetings of the Congress (they were mimeographed and will be distributed). It was necessary to make a selection of topics and speakers. The best method would have been to appoint a steering committee which would have made this necessary selection with the maximum of objectivity. Unfortunately, this was not done. Instead, the question of who was to speak and how long was decided by Skeggs and his associates who did it in a rather arbitrary and haphazard manner. To explain what I mean let me cite a few examples:First, the case of our friend, Max Yergin. Together with Max we worked rather hard on his paper (one night we had no more than two hours sleep). The final product received rather favorable comments from Hambley and Arthur Schlesinger. I tried to make Skeggs understand the importance of having Communist propaganda regarding the Negro problem answered and refuted by a competent person who is a Negro himself. Skeggs first promised me that Yergin would have fifteen minutes speaking time. When we arrived at the meeting where Max was scheduled to speak, he was told that he would not get more than ten minutes. He went to work again, and deleted some passages so as to have a ten-minute text. However, when Max was about to take the floor, he was informed by Bondy that he should not speak longer than five minutes. As a result, Max got confused and delivered a completely inadequate version of what he originally wanted to say. Similarly, Sascha Schwarz was prevented from making a report on the situation of the working class in Russia. Nor did the delegate from Spain and the one and only representative of Latin-America to the Congress have a chance to speak."On the other hand, Koestler spoke four or five times and there was generally a marked tendency to build him up as a kind of praeceptor mundi. He seems to have enjoyed himself in the role of a task-master censoring and lecturing the delegates. As far as I gathered from a conversation with Skeggs, Koestler was given this prominent place because, due to the fact that as a well-known writer, his pronounce-ments were supposed to attract public-attention in a greater measure than speeches by other delegates. The same consideration was evidently applied in the case of Silone. However, Silone seemed to be anxious to be as non-committal as possible, quite in line with his ambiguous political attitude. While Skeggs' preoccupation with problems of publicity is understandable, I do not think that the method of treating authors according to the sales of their books is apt to promote a lasting cooperation among writers, scholars, etc. For once, scholars will never be able to sell as many copies of their books as Koestler.SECRET