Vonnegut, Kissinger, et al.
GOODMAN, WALTER
Game BY WALTER GOODMAN Vonnegut, Kissingei; etal. Come September America's Book publishers will be in Moscow exhibiting themselves at what is amusingly called the Moscow International Book...
...Congress would hold hearings...
...For some reason, Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D.-N.Y...
...Macrae, according to a report in Publishers Weekly, charged the NED with requesting a number of tides be removed from the exhibition, but there is no rec-ordofthat...
...John Macrae III, president of the International Freedom to Publish Committee, expressed " outrage" at what he said was a "a campaign of intimidation...
...When pressed, Vonnegut called his committee's product "as much a function of fatigue and resignation as anything else...
...One wonders how he would describe the Vonnegut list...
...That may be appropriate in other sorts of trade fairs, but one would think that people who call themselves the International Freedom to Publish Committee would have a different idea of trade when it comes to books...
...It is certainly more useful to them and to the USSR than to the free exchange of ideas, and is only distantly related to Western notions of what a book fair ought to be...
...Following some testy language, the publishers gave back to the NED the $50,000 they should not have accepted in the first place...
...If the title reminds you of those International Peace Festivals where the definition of Peace is set by the Kremlin and the participants are mostly too polite to stray from their assigned agenda, that is too close to the case...
...However it came about, the list, which might be more accurately dubbed "America Through Certain American Eyes," was not designed to incite the Russians...
...When Gershman asked the publishers to expand the Vonnegut selections to include some conservative voices, the cry went up of "Censorship...
...The NED is one of those peculiar public-private organizations that gets its money from the federal government yet is not officially part of the government...
...America's publishers play by Soviet rules to the extent of not offering works that will be turned back at the airport...
...When it hands out public money, though, it has a responsibility for observing how it is spent...
...Could Gershman have said that the list was, on second thought, not ideologically unbalanced...
...After all, Gershman, despite his known political preferences, seems merely to have sought an enlarged list that would have some titles that might give a broader view of American publishing to Russians privileged enough to be allowed into the book fair...
...jumped into the fray and called on Gershman to apologize to the publishers' committee for saying the list was ideologically unbalanced...
...Come September America's Book publishers will be in Moscow exhibiting themselves at what is amusingly called the Moscow International Book Fair...
...Gershman, whose political views are akin to those of the authors of some of the books omitted by Vonnegut's committee, asked a group of fellow spirits, consisting of Saul Bellow, Joseph Epstein, editor of the American Scholar, Martin Peretz of the New Republic, and William Philips, editor of Partisan Review, to assess the list...
...So long as the sponsors of Moscow' s charade of a book fair will not let in books by, say, writers who have fled to this country from the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, and so long as the fair is not fully open to the Russian people, then I cannot for the life of me understand how any group that calls itself the International Freedom to Publish Committee can even consider having any truck with it...
...Is the South African regime more abominable than the Soviet regime...
...Macrae's communique of outrage to Gershman was soon repudiated by the executive committee of the Association of American Publishers...
...Now Moscovites will not be offended by the memoirs of Henry Kissinger...
...The New American Poverty by Michael Harrington, the enduring Socialist, but nothing by neoconservatives like Irving Kris-tol...
...Or that even if it was unbalanced, that was okay...
...If there is any justification for our participation in the Soviet fete, that surely is it...
...The NED had nothing to do with the selection of the books to be included in "America Through American Eyes...
...A free country has no business compromising its deepest ideals for some business benefits...
...Is it more repressive...
...Happily, the Senator redeemed his demand with a bit of common sense when he suggested that the publishers should not accept government money and should go to Moscow "under their own diverse and clashing colors...
...The commotion would have been more illuminating if it had focused attention on the self-censorship that marks the picking of books sent to Russia's fair...
...Their list contained Seymour Hersh's skewering of Henry Kissinger, ThePrice of Power, but not Kissinger's memoirs...
...Whatis wanted by the NED is an ideologically correct list," he said...
...The Nation, which hastened to the defense of the Vonnegut committee, would mock this sort of exchange of information, and other members of the Popular Front for the Prevention of Cruelty to the Soviets would wax indignant...
...Jonathan Kwitney's Endless Enemies and Jonathan Schell's The Fate of the Earth, but no works offering a different position on nuclear weapons...
...Their views on such matters as nuclear weapons, social policy and Ronald Reagan probably reflect those of the majority of the New York literary community, and they apparently felt no obligation to reflect from the minority in their choices...
...They did not, however, raise the question of why the outrage of Macrae, who is the editor in chief of Holt, Rinehart&Winston, was not directed at the Vonnegut committee for producing a slanted selection...
...Why, people would be chaining themselves to the doors of the publishing houses...
...I am told that this fair is useful to publishers of technical books, who find a market in the Soviet Union...
...Does it do more censoring...
...That was left to a committee of apparently like-minded persons headed by Kurt Vonnegut...
...How would such an apology have been phrased...
...Rightly so...
...These titles begin to remind one of an Elaine May-Mike Nichols routine...
...By accepting the grant, the publishers invited public scrutiny and turned their journey to Moscow into a sort of public-private enterprise...
...They found, as even persons to the left of them might find, that it was loaded...
...This year, the Association of American Publishers' International Freedom to Publish Committee (the tongue stumbles over that designation in conjunction with the Moscow International Book Fair) began by making the mistake of taking $50,000 from the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) to help meetthecostsof sending about 300 books to Moscow...
...Shockley and Jensen Imagine, if you can, the reaction in this country if the government of South Africa decided to throw a book fair and our publishers agreed to attend and sent along a batch of books that had in the category of race relations only the works of William Shockley and Arthur Jensen...
...Thcv termed it "an embarrassing overreaction...
...Gershman and Macrae It did incite Carl Gershman, the head of the NED...
Vol. 68 • April 1985 • No. 6
