Dear Editor
Dear Editor Spring Books You should all be bursting with pride after your Spring Book Issue (NL, May 17-31). Palo Alto. Calif. Ella Wolfe Your book number was exceptionally good. I especially...
...My impression is that because Chomsky is so strongly despised by some for his political views regarding Israel, when the Faurisson affair arose and Chomsky wrote his famous essay the opportunity to portray him as a sympathizer of Holocaust deniers was seen as too good to pass up...
...Harper's Bazaar, Vogue—and there was always an extra suitcase that was my traveling office, plus a dictaphone to send back letters to the New York office...
...In no way does this make Chomsky a defender of Holocaust revisionism, as anyone familiar with his political writings knows—despite David Singer's implication in his review of Deborah E. Lipstadt's Denying the Holocaust and Pierre Vidal-Naquet's Assassins of Memory ("The Anatomy of a Lie," NL, May 17-31...
...None of the big names liked it...
...3. Showing increasing impatience with Faurisson's critics, most especially Vidal-Naquet, Chomsky declared in the Australian journal Quadrant: "I see no anti-Semitic implications in denial of the existence of gas chambers, or even denial of the Holocaust...
...As for Simon's criticism of Robert Phillips' overannotation, I suspect that came from an editor at Norton...
...The New Leader welcomes comment and criticism on am of its features, but letters should not exceed 300 words...
...James Laughlin Holocaust Denial It is unfortunate that some who are rightly appalled by the spectacle of Holocaust revisionism feel they have the right to tell half-truths themselves...
...and, as always, Phoebe Pettingell—this time reviewing Against Forgetting: Twentieth-Century Poetry of Witness...
...For almost nothing I bought a small lodge with a Rube Goldberg ski lift, made out of old mine-tram pans, in the Wasatch Range of Utah...
...Moritz or Kitzbuhel it was to write articles for Town & Country...
...I especially liked Stefan Kanfer's demolition of the Whitney, which I thought of doing 40 years ago...
...Finally, I want to thank Simon for his kind nod to my eccentric verses...
...This revenue has supported a lot of books that wouldn't sell...
...To him who hath it shall be given...
...If, like the extreme political correctness advocates...
...This is clearly what happened to Noam Chomsky when he entered the fever swamps of Holocaust denial and became the leading academic champion of Robert Faurisson, France's chief Holocaust denier...
...Nyack, N. Y. Donald Johnson David Singer replies: Pierre Vidal-Naquet concludes his essay "On Faurisson and Chomsky" with the shrewd observation, "When logic has no other end than self-defense, it goes mad...
...Norfolk, Conn...
...Amazingly, the book carried a preface by Pierre Guillaume, France's second leading Holocaust denier...
...at worst it resembles the Big Lie technique employed by the Holocaust revisionists themselves...
...The next volumes in the series, which began with William Carlos Williams, are to be Pound...
...1 built Alta up into one of the best resorts in the West...
...4. To cap things off, Chomsky published a book in France in 1984 in which he responded to those who criticized him for defending Faurisson...
...At one point a group of us helped him to a shrink, who just made him worse...
...Alta Ski Lifts have become a gold mine...
...Oak/and, N.J...
...Selden Rodman Bless John Simon—and three or four others—for reviving Delmore Schwartz so conscientiously...
...In his earlier days he was so wonderful, so witty, such fun to be with, but he had such a miserable life at the end...
...Singer does not believe in free speech for people with loathsome views, then he should say so and criticize Chomsky for holding the opposite position...
...However, to leave unwary readers with the impression that Chomsky agrees with Faurisson (the interpretation I would give to Singer's phrase "sinister role") is at best irresponsible on his part...
...When I went to St...
...Here are the facts: 1. Chomsky first put his name at the head of a petition defending Faurisson's right to make his "findings" public, a petition that characterized the former professor of literature at the University of Lyons as a scholar "conducting extensive independent historical research into the 'Holocaust' question...
...I see no hint of anti-Semitic implication in Faurisson's work...
...I can say that nobody writes the way I do...
...I saw on those trips that there was money to be made in ski lifts, and 1 foresaw it would be good money in the USA...
...2. This was followed by Chomsky's preface to Faurisson's Treatise in Defense Against Those Who Accuse Me of Falsifying History, where Chomsky declared that he was unable himself to make a judgment about the factual basis of Holocaust denial: "I have nothing to say here about the work of Robert Faurisson or his critics, of which 1 know very little, or about the topics they address, concerning which 1 have no special knowledge...
...The falsity of the accusation was apparently deemed irrelevant...
...He thought he had invented something new—the chorus of dead voices—and that he had written a poem as great as The Haste Land...
...Believe me, I wasn't lolling around boozing it up in my skiing days...
...Merton, Henry Miller, and Tennessee Williams in that order...
...John Simon's piece on the Selected Letters of my friends Delmore Schwartz and James Laughlin...
...There had been complaints that the annotation of my correspondence with Rexroth was too sparse...
...Noam Chomsky's preface to Robert Faurisson's book defends the author's right to free speech...
...I think it was the flop of Genesis that started him down...
...Satyriasis exaggerated...
...So much for the MIT professor who taught us: "It is the responsibility of intellectuals to speak the truth and to expose lies...
Vol. 76 • July 1993 • No. 9
