IT DOES SEEM astonishing that there could still be confusion over single and double digit numbers that have been in the public domain since before the PEN Congress. This can't be doing much for the reputation of writers as commentators on national and economic issues. As our teachers used to say, turn to pages 15 and 34 of the Congress program book. Now count. Result: 66 Canadian participants and moderators who were invited, who then accepted, who then participated. Now count again. Result: eight participants from the Black?Native?Asian groups singled out by Vision 21. These groups make up approximately six per cent of Canada's total population. Eight out of 66 participants makes 12.1 per cent. That is double the percentage their groups represent in the national population. Now, focus on basic history. What was the original charge made by Vision 21? It was: "PEN Canada locks out writers of colour." That charge was therefore untrue. PEN did not lock out writers Of colour. PEN ensured the participation of double the percentage their groups represent in the national population. I have just Come back from South East Asia, where I devoted part of my trip to pressing for the release of two writers who are in prison and who have been adopted by Canadian PEN. Tharawaddy San San Nwe is a leading Burmese novelist. Her sole crime is to have participated in the National League for Democracy, which was brutally crushed by the army last year. Thich Tue Sy is one of the world's leading Buddhist philosophers. He has been in a Vietnamese jail for the last six years. Both of their lives have been and are constant ly at risk. What PEN needs is more members who want to work and work hard to free more writers in prison, sick, being tortured and often, eventually, being killed. There are hundreds of writers in prison around the world. Dozens are killed every year. Inside Canada, a writer, Elaine Dewar, has been denied trial by jury thanks to legal procedure. A journalist, Doug Small, has been tried for reporting on a budget leak. Racism and prejudice are on the rise as can be seen in the decision of several cities to declare themselves unilingual English. If this isn't a limitation on freedom of speech, I don't know what is. Writers who are interested in fighting these wrongs and protecting their fellow writers, whatever group they might belong to, should join PEN and help us. John Ralston Saul Vice President for the Board of Directors of PEN Canada THE Globe and Mail published four substantial articles passing on unfounded allegations of racism against the Canadian PEN Centre. They published a 600?word letter to the editor written by Marlene Nourbese Philip repeating these same unfounded allegations. They published a snide editorial inviting Canadian PEN Centre to answer the charge of racism if they could: ". . . PEN should have no trouble dealing with these allegations." They didn't manage to send anybody to Cover a press conference called by PEN the evening before they published this editorial, which did deal with this issue; nor did they print a short statement issued at that press conference and sent to them following day. Busy, busy, busy, I suppose. The Canadian PEN Centre formulated a formal reply to these baseless accusations signed by each elected director: Graeme Gibson, June Callwood, Clayton Ruby, Michele Landsberg, Louise Dennys, Alison Gordon, Anne Collins, George Galt, and John Ralston Saul. We took considerable care in the writing. As it was a little more than 1,000 words, we indicated to them that we understood that it was not within the length normally considered by them as appropriate for a letter, and suggested that it might well he printed as an opinion on the page opposite the editorial page (Page 7). The length was perfect for that purpose. They refused to publish this response to their campaign. After it was published in the Toronto Star, their reporter, Jack Kirchhoff, wrote yet another news story that encompassed a few of the issues we raised in that article and once again allowed Ms. Nourbese Philip to spill out unfounded allegations of racism. Repeat it often enough, and people will come to believe it. In that story Mr. Kirchhoff asserts that the Globe and Mail's refusal to print the article by the directors of the Canadian PEN Centre was because of its length: It was originally submitted to the Globe and Mail as an op?ed piece, but was rejected by the Globe's editor, William Thorsell, as not suitable because of PEN's condition that it not be cut or altered in any way. This is quite untrue. William Thorsell on December 18, 1989 said in writing to me: It is too long for a letter, and you indicate it cannot be cut. it is not appropriate as a Page 7 piece as it says too much about a dispute of relevance to too few." (my emphasis) Has Mr. Thorsell misled Mr. Kirchhoff! Or has Mr. Kirchhoff, knowing the truth, deliberately misled his readers! After all, Mr. Thorsell's position was, on the face of it, difficult to sustain. The Globe and Mail had run all these articles repeating the false one?sided allegations again and again on this very subject. They deliberately chose never to check the allegations to see if they were true before they printed them. If the issue was relevant enough for all those news stories and a 600?word letter to the editor, how could it suddenly be insufficiently relevant for 1,000 words giving the other side of the issue! And of course, when it comes to the public explanation for the Globe and Mail's refusal to print the piece, a misleading reason is given ?? perhaps because the real reason would scarcely bear public scrutiny. A letter similar to this one was submitted to the editor of the Globe and Mail for publication on February 9, 1990. This too they have refused to publish. Clayton C. Ruby Toronto MARGARET ATWOOD'S LETTER "In Defence of PEN," primarily takes issue with Carole Corbeil's summary of last fall's 54th World Congress of International PEN, hosted in Toronto and Montreal by the English? and Frenchspeaking Canadian PEN centres. Corbeil's reply in the same issue gives voice to most of my objections to Atwood's hyperbolized version of the events, but not to those parts that concern me directly. At the heart of Atwood's hysteria (I use the word gender?neutrally, of course) is an article I co?wrote with Isabel Vincent about a demonstration by Vision 21, in which the small but vocal group of women artists outside the PEN gala concert distributed pamphlets bearing the slogan: "Canadian writers of colour locked out by PEN's invisible ink." The article also reported June Callwood's response ?? the controversial but incontrovertible "fuck off" ?? to Marlene Nourbese Philip, one of the demonstrators. Atwood describes this as "a big story trashing" Callwood. It was in fact 15 paragraphs Out of the yards and yards of copy Vincent and I had written, and would continue to write, about International PEN, PEN Canada, and the congress. Was it a big story' Certainly not. Was it unfair to PEN? Vincent and I talked to ind quoted both sides of the matter. We wrote what Vision 21 said (that there weren't enough "ethnic" Canadian writers among the delegates, and that this reflected the systemic racism of Canadian publishing), ind how PEN board members responded (that there "ere enough, and that although there is systemic racism, PEN did not represent it). I think what we wrote was fair, accurate, and neutral in tone. We reported also Callwood's "fuck Off" (in the eighth of the 15 paragraphs), what the demonstrators thought of it, and what Callwood had to say the next day. Did the article "trash" June Callwood? I don't think so, and I would bet Callwood doesn't either. She is, after all, a journalist; she knows how these things work. Atwood says I told her that "what made the story news was June Callwood swearing." That's not what I said. The Vision 21 demonstration would have been in the Globe with or without the "fuck off," but it doesn't take much news judgement, or even much imagination, to see that Callwood's response made it more of a story than the picketing and leafleting Would have done on their own. Not content with misrepresenting the Coverage, Atwood goes on to implicate me in a conspiracy: "It's Obvious," she writes, "that this story fed right into the Globe's long?time wish to dump June Callwood because it didn't like her 'bleeding?heart liberalism."' This bothers me. Like Atwood ?? and Corbeil and Nourbese Philip ?? I admire and respect June Callwood, as a writer and as a caring person who has fought all her life for the people who most need fighting for. I will miss her, and I think the Globe made a serious mistake in letting her go. That said, I cannot believe that what amounts to an embarrassment was a significant factor in her resignation, and that notion certainly never entered my mind while I was writing the article. If Callwood's discomfiture fit the agenda of A. Roy Megarry, the Globe publisher, and William Thorsell, the editor?in?chief, they did not confide in me. I certainly took no joy from it. Not incidentally, I have heard it gossiped about that Thorsell personally directed me to write the story. For the record, neither Megarry nor Thorsell had a word to say to me or Vincent on the day the article was written. Thorsell said the next day that he thought it should have been on the front page, which may or may not address his relationship to Callwood, but which inclines me to doubt that he "directed" any aspect of the coverage. Corbeil deals with PEN's self?serving, now?you?see?it?now?you?don't mathematics, but I would like to address Atwood's statement (and its many variations) that "not one single journalist asked PEN for its own numbers. Not one seems to have sat down with a copy of Statistics Canada and worked out the percentages." To begin with, I did ask PEN for its numbers, and I counted them myself from PEN's guest lists before I reported them (as did Corbeil). I did not "work out the percentages," but for what its worth, neither did anybody else. Even PEN didn't bother until stung into it in December, when Vision 21 repeated its charges in letters to PEN's funding agencies and sponsors. Atwood offers some limp excuses to explain why PEN didn't "sit down with a copy of Statistics Canada" until then, but let's face it: we were all just too busy. Oh, I could see that seven out of 51 delegates was about 14 percent, and thought this seemed reasonable, even high. PEN's "mathematics" more or less confirms this, but maybe I stopped analysing before I should have. Deeper analysis might have led me to wonder about the percentage of writers of colour in PEN Canada's membership generally, or how many of the seven delegates of colour were PEN members. (Are there seven writers of colour among PEN Canada's 600 or so members?) It might have led me to wonder if the international showpiece Congress really did reflect the reality of writing in Canada, or merely the good intentions of its organizers. After praising the Star and the Sun for "quietly (dropping) the 'racism' story," Atwood says: "As late as December 13, the Globe was repeating the charges of Vision 21, still without doing its math." That would he the tiny Dec. 13 article head lined Group Reiterates PEN Racism Charges, which I wrote on Dec. 12 based on a copy of Vision 2 Is letter to PEN's sponsors (a copy provided to me by PEN, incidentally). I spent much of Dec. 12 literally begging various PEN spokespersons including Atwood and the outgoing PEN president Graeme Gibson ?? to respond to the charges. They insisted there would be no comment for publication until they had a meeting, formulated their position, and group?wrote their response. That response, with 14 signatures appended, arrived later in the week; it consisted of five. pages of sanctimonious self?congratulation and tortuously arrived at and presented percentages. The covering letter from the PEN board member Clayton Ruby said that a condition of its publication was that it run without editing ?? a condition frequently made by people who send letters and articles to the Globe, but one to which the various editors seldom accede. The response was rejected, as I had warned the PEN people it probably would be. The Star, as Atwood points out, was not so fussy. (Mind you, having missed a story, or having "quietly dropped" it, there is nothing so gratifying for a newspaper as to run something saying it wasn't a story anyway.) Once the response was in the public domain, I wrote about it, complete with PEN math and further responses. Speaking of math: in complaining about the Globe's decision not to publish the PEN statement, Atwood says, "This, after they'd done seven pieces and an editorial on the dispute and published a very long letter from Marlene Nourbese Philip." I have scoured the Globe's library data base, and can only come up with five articles prior to the day the letter was rejected that could possibly he considered "about the dispute," and a couple of those are pretty marginal. There is, of course, the original coverage (does anybody remember the second part of the article, the part "under the dot," which began: "The majority of children's literature is degrading young readers by not addressing their ethnically diverse milieus in North America, said members of a PEN panel entitled The Right to Read. . ."?Never mind); Bronwyn Drainie's column on racism in the arts in general; Vincent's article about the Torontoto?Montreal train trip, in which she briefly quotes the PEN organizer John Ralston Saul's thoughts on the matter; my wrap?up, headlined PEN Organizers Stress the Positive, detailing most of the things Atwood complains about the media ignoring; and the story about Vision 21's letter?writing campaign. The five can be stretched to seven by adding two printed after the Star's publication of PEN's response. The first was the article headlined PEN Rebuts Charges of Racism, written as soon as PEN's official response was finally made available to me. The second, I guess, was the interview with Nourbese Philip about her work as a writer and poet, in which PEN was not mentioned; in Atwood's mathematics, no doubt, interviewing Nourbese Philip amounts to an attack on PEN. Atwood presents the Globe's coverage as some sort of vendetta. I call it doing the job, and I'm no more pleased at being told I've done a lousy job than the average fiction writer. I resent being made a target for Atwood's cheap generalizations, nasty innuendoes, and jumps in logic. We covered the hell out of the PEN Congress (about 30 features, news stories, interviews, booknote items, editorials, and excerpts, for the mathematically minded.) And while there are, in retrospect, things I would like to have done more about ?? the Next Generation series, for instance, or the exhibition of native women's art ?? I don't see how I could have done much differently on the Vision 21 matter. I suspect that nothing would do for Atwood but that I ignore it entirely. H. J. Kirchhoff Arts Reporter, Books and Publishing Globe and Mail CIVILITY FIRST GREAT HEAVENS, what have we all come to? Not writing, that's for sure. just read objectively Atwood's plaint and Corbeil's reply. Who 'mongst them (and I include M. N. Philip of the June Callwood affair) 'scapes whipping? What a debasing, destructive, misguided mess of racial politics they all got themselves into by insisting on a public exhibition of their sanctimony. Can we not put an end to these interminable, counterproductive battles about "racism"? In a Sears fashion ad, for example, with 20 children modelling the spring collection, are we to legislate proportionate representation for each ethnic group, each skin colour, each gender (three now, I gather), and every religious (and nonreligious) form of belief in the country? In writing: whatever happened to those fine old standards underlying the choice of guests and speakers: talent, intelligence, achievement, and the ability to say succinctly something provocative and witty about our craft and our world? But insist PEN make proportional representation of minorities the criterion and we forsake just about everything but social engineering. Most Canadians stubbornly resist affirmative action because they see it as simply reverse discrimination. Every dispossessed and depressed minority in history has had to fight for its place ?? blacks, women, Jews, Catholics, German and Irish immigrants to North America in the 19th century, the English in Australia, and Orientals and everyone else including our own native peoples in the 20th. Affirmative action and proportional representation ?? social engineering, as it were ?? if adopted, would see the next PEN conference exclude white males. Even if they were good writers and engaging participants. And excluding specifically white males who purloin the native heritage by making stories out of the supposedly copyright minority experience. Atwood and Corbeil sound like 12?year?old boys on a playground arguing which of their teams, or their classes, or their conkers, is best. Margaret and Carole, I'm settling the argument for you: you are both best. As to Nourbese Philip, to someone a long way from Toronto she sounds not only misinformed but arrogant. Only June Callwood comes out of the donnybrook with dignity ... Who doesn't admire her writing? And for that matter, her life and her work? (And Trent Frayne. Can anyone tell me how such good fortune came about, for two such decent and talented people to meet and be together and be such good journalists for so long?) Ms. Atwood and Ms. Corbeil, please behave yourselves, get back to your typewriters. You can begin by helping out strangers with an explanation: what do you call people who aren't white? It used to be Negroes. That was the way to avoid pejorative and insulting descriptions. Then in the '60s the term was banned as euphemistic and condescending. The proper description was "black" In the U.S. some have recently converted to "African?American." That's inappropriate here. In any case, whatever the term chosen it would not be sufficiently encompassing. We seemed to be safe with "visible minorities" Now I see from Books in Canada we are using "persons of colour." What does the Department of Multiculturalism in Ottawa have to say? While we await their word, why don't the rest of us simply treat each other, colourblind, with consideration, courtesy, civility, and fairness? Norman Klenman Salt Spring Island, B.C. THEY GO WHERE HUGO IN 1986 DOUGLAS & MCINTYRE published my literary travel book Beyond Forget: Rediscovering the Prairies. It contained two epigraphs, one of them a quotation from an obscure medieval monk by the name of Hugo (or Hugh) of St. Victor. Last fall, I was surprised to find that two new Canadian books had appeared with exactly the same epigraph ?? The Roncesvalles Pass, a novel by Paul Bowdring, and Anatolian Suite, a travel book by Kildare Dobbs. Is this mere coincidence? Should I be delighted or annoyed? Should there be a copyright for epigraphs? Does Hugo of St. Victor have a secret fan club? Are there other books as well that begin with the same quotation? Mark Abley Montreal