People

By Guy D. Garcia

It is rare that two playwrights of international stature are cast together in a real-life drama, but that is what happened when Arthur Miller, 69, and Harold Pinter, 54, traveled to Turkey for PEN, the international association of writers in which both are vice presidents of their national sections. Miller and Pinter spent five days meeting with Turkish politicians and fellow writers as well as monitoring progress in the trial of 48 members of the Turkish Peace Association. The defendants, most of whom are writers, have been on trial for 18 months and face prison terms of from five to 15 years. The experience left the playwrights worn and wary. "We already had a very hard time in Istanbul," Pinter told one group of reporters in Ankara, "and we don't want to talk." Back in Connecticut last week, Miller observed of the Turkish press: "We couldn't find an editor who wouldn't say that he couldn't tell the whole truth." Miller and Pinter will have no such restraints when they write their reports to PEN on the state of Turkish intellectual freedom.