Dear Editor

...If the deed complies with the registration law of the jurisdiction as to form, signature, attestation etc., the recorder has no discretion...

...Los Angeles, Calif...

...Examination of my notes shows that Engel had suggested that a law be passed making it illegal for a Washington recorder of deeds to record a deed containing a restrictive covenant...

...His acceptance and recordation gives the document no "official status" and cannot by the widest stretch of the imagination be considered as an endorsement of the contents of the document...

...In her argument Mrs...

...It assumes quite unwarrantedly—it strikes me as illogical—that if one appeals for a redress of a wrong one automatically becomes persuaded that the wrong is "accidental and isolated" or that the wrongdoers are any less wicked for having been asked to cease and desist...

...Rent is made up of taxes, insurance, utilities, up-keep and repair, depreciation, management and operation costs, interest on capital invested and financing charges...

...Here is what Scheuer, developer of the project, said to the Commission: "The only important variable is the cost of financing...

...This difference cannot be dismissed by now interchanging the two words as Lasky does in characterizing the appeal of the British writers to the Union of Soviet Writers...

...One never knows in such desperate situations what (or who) might contribute to caution, sanity, hesitation or second thoughts...

...Obviously, under Nikita Khrushchev, who has the wits, as Stalin did not, to realize how much the Soviet Union has to gain by mitigating some of the excesses of Soviet Communism, there is bound to be a certain sensitivity to Western disapproval...

...DEAR EDITOR PASTERNAK PROTEST I have read Diana Trilling's article, "Politics and Cultural Freedom" (NL, February 2), and noted especially her line-by-line critique of the Boris Pasternak protest letter which we published recently in Encounter...

...I would appreciate it if Smith would break down his rent figures of $79 and $107 and show how the financing charge alone created this difference, with all other expenses constant...

...But what might logically happen next in the Pasternak affair, if Khrushchev has enough support from his intellectual classes, is that he will re-instate Pasternak and thus demonstrate to the democracies how really human he is, how open to good influence, and how far the Soviet Union has progressed beyond Stalinist tyranny...

...Irving Engel of the American Jewish Committee departed from his prepared statement to call to the Commission's attention the problem of restrictive covenants...

...I did not imply that the West should keep quiet before the mistreatment of Pasternak...

...There are, as anybody who has talked privately with Iron Curtain intellectuals knows, substantial individual opinions beyond the double-think and double-talk...

...I myself did not keep quiet, as I think Lasky knows...

...Under present FHA urban renewal financing, monthly rent for a two-bedroom garden apartment which cost $12,350 to build would have been $119...

...Because Federal National Mortgage Association special assistance funds were then available at 41/4 per cent interest instead of 5 per cent, and 11/2 per cent amortization instead of 2 per cent, these units came on the market at $107 per month...

...Arndt is probably right that, without such a law, the recorder would unfortunately have no alternative but to record these deeds and I appreciate his clarification of the point...

...STANLEY M. ARNDT Ralph L. Smith replies: A preliminary note—the $110 figure in my article for FHA financing in Cleveland is a typographical error...

...London MELVIN J. LASKY Co-editor, Encounter Diana Trilling replies: What Melvin Lasky would seem to be saying in this letter is that I am more interested in political tactics, or "ideological rectitude," than in a man's life...

...I tried to indicate, however, the difference, both subjective and objective, between appeal and protest—the fact that an appeal ignores the reality of political dictatorship over Soviet culture, whereas protest can hope to alter the political context in which the Soviet Union reaches its cultural and human decisions...

...Trilling pursues an interesting, if somewhat cold and abstract, line of reasoning...

...Trilling seems to think, that there is among Russian writers nothing but an official unanimity and personal helplessness...

...He then goes on to say, "If it could have been financed under the type of financing available in New York under State programs, the apartment could have been offered for $79...

...The telegram in question on behalf of Boris Pasternak was sent to Moscow in the week of the heaviest barrage against the author of Dr...

...My analysis of the Encounter telegram referred to the mistaken premise on which I think this message rested—namely, the assumption that Soviet culture is sufficiently free of political control so that the West can "appeal" to it to rectify its errors...

...A message of protest and appeal (or so it seemed to the signers) was a matter of moral and humanitarian urgency...

...With each of these items except the financing charges the same, Smith claims that the difference in financing under the New York State program and the "Fannie May" program increases rent from $79 to $107...

...If the document complies with the registration and recordation statutes, he must accept it...

...A recorder or registrar of deeds exercises a ministerial and not a discretionary function when he accepts for recordation of a deed or other document...

...It is not to my taste to use the public press as a place where I assess my capacity or lack of capacity for decent human feeling...

...Although there is, of course, no way of knowing, we like to believe that the writers who raised their voices in the West somehow helped to restrain vindictive hands...

...Smith says that in a housing project in Cleveland FHA financing would have required a rent of $110 for a two-bedroom garden apartment but that special assistance from the Federal National Mortgage Association made it possible to offer the unit for $107...

...If New York State Mitchell-Lama financing had been available at 3 per cent interest, .87 per cent amortization, and no insuring fee, the apartment would have rented for $79...

...The state or the city lends 90 per cent of the cost of a development, at approximately 3 per cent interest, repayable over 50 years...

...I feel that one statement therein contained is not correct and that the inference contained in another is unjustified...

...There is another aspect...

...In such an event, however, T suppose that Lasky, blind to the strategy of such a move as he is blind to other aspects of the present pattern of Soviet totalitarianism, would be only confirmed in his sense that there is "no way of knowing" what kind of response one can expect from the Russians...

...But why should even our most complete theoretical insight into the processes of "totalitarian control in Russian culture" stifle a cry of anguished hope...

...Arndt is correct about the status of recorders of deeds...

...He is duty-bound to record the deed...

...If direct government loans for 50-year terms and at substantially the government cost of borrowing money were available to finance moderate-priced housing, built, owned and operated by private capital, rents could be cut one-quarter to one-third below the current rent levels of urban renewal housing...

...But as she likes to say, "there is only one thing wrong with it...

...Even in Moscow—as the number of important missing names from the anti- Pasternak campaign indicated...

...The correct figure is even higher—$119...

...It was motivated, I believe—and should one be embarrassed at so simple a conception of '"strategy and tactics"?—by a frightened concern over the possible fate of the man...

...He is not a judge nor a censor, nor a police officer...

...It is not my belief that a dictator who is clever enough not to shoot his closest political associates when they oppose him would endanger his entire and beautifully successful program for softening the Western democracies by shooting an author...

...That means that financing under "Fannie May" costs over 35 per cent more than financing for exactly the same apartment under New York State programs...

...If Khrushchev did shoot a Pasternak, it would seem to me it could indicate only one thing—a much greater intellectual ferment within Russia than I think we can now count on...

...Zhivago...

...Smith, in the second paragraph of his article, refers to the recordation by the Washington, D. C., Recorder of Deeds, of a deed containing a racial discrimination clause, and states: "The language of the deed, and the fact that it was given official status as a matter of course, typify the barriers that hinder progress toward equality of opportunity in housing in America...

...Nor did I suggest that Western protest in situations like that of Pasternak is without effect in the Soviet Union...

...Surely the conduct of exercises in ideological rectitude could safely have been left for another time...

...I shall not undertake to correct this rather grim personal estimate of me...

...DISCRIMINATION I read with interest and sympathy Ralph Smith's article in your February 16 issue on "Racial Discrimination In Metropolitan Housing...

...That is hard to believe...

...I have just completed a small urban renewal project in Cleveland...

...I also apologize to James H. Scheuer for the incorrect spelling of his name in my piece...

...It was signed by T. S. Eliot, Bertrand Russell, E. M. Forster, Graham Greene, Julian and Aldous Huxley, Somerset Maugham, Herbert Read, Rebecca West, Stephen Spender, among others...

...Should one have done a full-fledged theoretical analysis...

...Are we to believe, as Mrs...

...New York State has such a program in its Mitchell-Lama Law...

...Smith's article contained so many effective arguments in favor of- his thesis that it is unfortunate that he should have been carried away by his enthusiasm in these two respects...

...Surely she would not have wanted writers to dispatch a message—and in those earnest November days when there was widespread fear that Pasternak might simply be taken out and shot—reminding the Bolsheviks of all their past crimes, of how we never expected any better of them, and why we just know the worst is yet to come (especially where a "little-known" poet is involved...