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PARTISAN REVIEW
only person I will talk to is Hilton Kramer." So I was on the spot. I went
to Abe Rosenthal and said, "Look, I am very eager to go to Cavendish
to do this interview, but knowing that there is a lot of anti-Solzhenitsyn
sentiment on this paper, I am not going to do the interview unless I have
your personal guarantee that it will be published in the
Times
as written
by me." And he said, "Absolutely, you have my guarantee."
It was quite some time before this could be accompl ished, and I did
indeed spend a long weekend with Solzhenitsyn and his family in
Cavendish. I couldn't write about the details at the time, particularly
about the children, because Solzhenitsyn was terrified that the KGB was
going to either kidnap them or do something as a way of avenging them–
selves on his campaign against them. When I arrived with Pat Blake, the
first thing I commented on to Solzhenitsyn was, "Where's all the barbed
wire? Where are the electronic gates?" Because these were the fictions
that the American media had created about Solzhenitsyn in Vermont,
that because he had suffered so much in the Gulag he had put up barbed
wire around his compound in Vermont. Well, there was nothing. When
I commented on that, he said, "Please don't write anything about that
because our only security system here is the myths in the American
media." And so I agreed to that.
This long weekend was extraordinary, and I came back and started
working on quite a long piece. When I had completed it to my satisfac–
tion, I went to see Abe Rosenthal. But he was traveling somewhere in
Asia, which I knew was bad news. The managing editor was Seymour
Topping, who had been a correspondent in China, an experienced jour–
nalist with something of a sweet tooth for Maoist policies, and, in my
view, was somewhat compromised by the fact that his wife was Cana–
dian and his wife's father was or had been the Canadian ambassador to
China. Well, Sy Topping wouldn't even read my piece. He said he wasn't
interested in that and the person who would pass judgment on it was an
assistant managing editor named Jimmy Greenfield. Jimmy thought that
many of the things that Solzhenitsyn was quoted as saying in this inter–
view were too outrageous. They were too anti-American. They were too
critical of American policy toward the Soviet Union and toward com–
munism generally, and his remarks on his religious beliefs and so on were
just too unpalatable for the
New York Times.
I reminded them that I had
a guarantee from Abe Rosenthal. They knew of no such guarantee and
said the piece would have to be significantly edited and revised. I refused
to revise it or edit it. Mr. Greenfield reminded me that I was, as he put it,
a writer for hire at the
New York Times
and anything I wrote belonged
to the
Times.
It
was their property, and they wou ld publish what they
