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B. H. HAGGIN
several of them after taking charge of the back section in 1953. In
the summer of 1954 she returned a column dealing with the volume of
Jacques Barzun's translations of Berlioz letters, objecting that it dealt
only with the errors in the translations and not with the letters; but
she published it with only an additional paragraph on the letters when
I insisted that the errors in the translations were what required report–
ing in this volume published as an example of Columbia University
scholarship. In this Miss Kirchwey presumably was influenced by her
awareness of such manifestations ,of high regard for the column as the
letter of congratulation it brought from the distinguished English critic
W.
J.
Turner, and of its popularity with the magazine's readers.
I have gone into all this to make it clear why in August 1955 I
was, like Ernest Newman, unprepared for the rejection of two columns
of mine that was only the beginning ,of the interference I was to ex–
perience thereafter. It was Mr. McWilliams-that tireless crusader for
freedom of expression in speech and print-who rejected them on the
grounds that the controversy at New York's City Center which they
dealt with had occurred a few months earlier, and that I dealt not with
the controversy but with what Olin Downes had written about it.
Knowing nothing of the changes at
The Nation,
I addressed to Miss
Kirchwey the reply in which I pointed out that these columns were
in
line with numerous earlier ones in which I had similarly dealt with a
matter of public interest as it had been presented in the press, and that
the refusal
to
accept them for publication was without precedent in my
experience with
The Nation.
She answered that she had always disliked
my "often vitriolic attacks" on other critics even when she hadn't pro–
tested them, and claimed-on the basis of her editor's responsibility for
my column as for everything else in the magazine-the right to say no
to their continuation. To this I replied that I couldn't accept her posi–
tion that it was a proper exercise of the critic's function to point out the
falsification of Moussorgsky's
Pictures at an Exhibition
by Horowitz's
arrangement of it, but an improper "vitriolic attack" to point out the
err,ors in Olin Downes's statements in justification of the arrangement;
or that it was right for
The Nation
to comment on an editorial in the
Times,
but wrong for
The Nation's
music critic to comment on
an
article by the
Times's
critic. And concerning the relation of
The Nation
and my column I wrote that it had been, and should continue to
be,
the relation between the New York
Herald Tribune
and the
columns of Lippmann and the Alsops and-when he was its
music critic-Virgil Thomson. The
Herald Tribune's
responsi–
bility goes no further than its decision that the writing of these
men is worth publishing-in its entirety, which means in its
