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Pozner Again (1990)

In the wake of the publication of his memoir Parting With Illusions (Atlantic Monthly), Vladimir Pozner has appeared on numerous American interview programs, both local and national. Every time I hear him I'm surprised that none of these purportedly sharp inquisitors asks him how someone living abroad all his adult life could sound like such an up-to-date American. Every interviewer seems to take for granted a competence that no other Soviet displays, a competence that is really quite extraordinary if you consider that he never visited these shores between 1948 and 1986. The focus of my profile, published in Liberty (March 1990), was who is this guy and how does he do it.

My conclusion was that his communicative skills depended upon his genuine love for American culture, reflected in his enthusiasm for our literature and folk music, and then upon an imaginative projection that was essentially disingenuous--that he was a free western-style commentator in a country that, at least until recently, did not know such creatures. This last illusion depended in turn upon a story-telling propensity that was known to his childhood friends in New York and has nothing to do with politics, even though it could be adapted to political ends.

On page 24 he acknowledges the childhood fibbing that others noticed at the time:

I wanted so much to be thought of as a Russian that I told lies. In the summer of 1942 or 1943 [at the age of 8 or 9], I was in summer camp in the Catskills, where we were visited by a delegation of Soviet women. All summer I had been telling the kids and the counselors that I was Russian and, of course, spoke Russian. Suddenly, here was this delegation, and I didn't speak a single word of Russian!

However, I would be remiss if I did not note that none of his childhood friends, including one mentioned in the book, remember such enthusiasm about Russia from him. Indeed, more than one told me that, contrary to his autobiography, his sudden emigration from America was a surprise to them.

Otherwise, Pozner revises stories told to me (and to his friends in Russia). Instead of staying in New York in 1948 and attending Columbia University, he now reveals he moved to East Berlin with his family and moved again with them to Moscow in 1953; he told me, by contrast, that he came at the time directly from New York, entirely on his own volition. Parting for Illusions recounts that his five years in East Berlin was so distasteful to him that you can understand why a fanciful person might want to abolish the experience from his life. (He told me how people in America were afraid to befriend him in the early fifties, purportedly his last years in New York; but the book reveals that when the Pozner family arrived in Moscow, about that time, even former friends were reluctant to meet the newcomers, for post-Stalinist fear of associating with "foreigners." Not unlike a novelist, Pozner had taken feelings from one scene and transferred them to another.)

The book repeats the story I reported about his father playing on an émigré' Russian basketball team in Paris, incidentally lending credibility to the source that told me about it--a source that is also responsible for divulging much of my report that was not included in Parting With Illusions. Pozner repeats in his book (and on American television as well) the story told to me in Moscow about his father's departure from the movie biz in 1948, even though others in that office at that time doubt it. On American television here this year, Pozner said he was not allowed to appear on Soviet television until 1986, contradicting a story told to me in Moscow about his regularly appearing several years before. He told me then that most of his Moscow journalism was done in Russian, not English; but there is no mention of such writing in this book. Though the book discusses his career as a translator, he does not repeat his earlier claim to have produced a book of John Donne translations; the émigré poet Joseph Brodsky assured me this did not exist. As I said in my profile, what fibs Pozner tells are mostly about himself and his immediate relatives, rather than politics.

This book was initiated by Brian Kahn, an unidentified American who co-holds the copyright and writes an introduction in which he reveals that he made the book proposal with transcripts of interviews made in Moscow. As Kahn tells it, Pozner initially resisted him, "His discomfort was displayed in various ways. Here we were, collaborating on a book we both wanted to see written. Yet Vladimir, a humorous and friendly person, was often cool and distant. Never once during my visits to his Moscow apartment did he offer me a cup of tea or even a glass of water." Why was Pozner reluctant to produce the book he purportedly supported? Some readers might cite political reasons, such as difficulties in getting the government clearance, formerly required in Russia, to publish anything in the West; for failure to get such permission would tarnish his self-image as a Western-style commentator. (I recollect that Pozner didn't accept an invitation to meet me in my Moscow hotel, rather than outside it as we had before. I later realized that I had created a situation that would have belied his image--without a pass from the hotel or a foreign passport no visitor to the hotel could have gotten through the front door. Nonetheless, I did get served tea at his apartment, and, as noted before, he gave me the original tape of our interview conducted on his reel-to-reel Uher. He also drove me to the Finland train station in time to make the 22:20 to Helsinki.)

Don't forget that I liked Pozner, initially as a fellow New Yorker who had gone to a companion Greenwich Village elementary school several years before me (and then to Stuyvesant High School, from which my girl friend at the time had graduated), a literate colleague with similar cultural interests, who owned a book of mine. Living in West Berlin in those years, away from the U.S. for the first time in sixteen years, I was cultivating Americans and ex-Americans; and I imagined that were I ever in Moscow for long, Pozner's company would be a pleasure. He kept his mind in America, even if his body had long gone away. The initial draft of my profile, titled "Radio Moscow's Best 'American,'" reported my enthusiasm. It was only when I did a little extra research into his childhood in the US that I discovered he had set me up to disseminate his fabrications. Had that first draft appeared immediately after I wrote it, I could have been exposed as a fool, which was not what I had in mind, thanks.

I still think his pseudo-American competence extraordinary. The only other ex-American I ever met to show it was the late David Gelbin, a New Yorker who moved to East Berlin in the early fifties. In his mid-twenties at the time, he subsequently kept in contact with America by listening daily to our Armed Forces Network, whose radio signal was beamed all over Berlin; and unlike Pozner, Gelbin spoke English with his wife and children and with other ex-Americans resident in East Berlin. Knowing Gelbin as I did made me more impressed with Pozner.

I brought mixed feelings to Parting with Illusions. I wondered about the truth of charming stories that could not be checked from here. Nonetheless, some of Pozner's writing is marvelous, simply as description. On the back of the dust jacket is reprinted his recollection of the chaos accompanying Stalin's death:

The vast crowds surged along, and as they moved, people were crushed to death by the sheet weight of this multi-headed and multi-legged monster. Some died gasping their last breath, rib cages cracking, plastered against building walls and cast-iron fences. Others, shoved into the sharp contours of army trucks, snapped in two like matchsticks. Yet others slipped on the ice--the winter of 1952-53 had been exceptionally cold, and though it was March, the streets of Moscow were still covered with ice and snow--and were trampled to death. This nightmare acquired apocalyptic proportions around Trubnaya Square. The boulevard leading to it from Stretenka Street dipped steeply, and as the multitudes advanced, people lost their footing and fell--first one, then another, then several, all going down with muffled criers. As the bodies piled up, more people tripped on them and fell. The crowd panicked and surged forward, literally lifting the mounted police, horses and all, into the air and then trampling them, too. The plunging terrified the horses, the cursing police swinging their clubs in a last desperate effort to stave off the inevitable, the black masses of people swirling and eddying along, engulfing everything in their path like some terrifying maelstrom--who could have imagined a more fitting kind of final rite for the monster for even in death took so many with him?

This reminds me of, and compares favorably with, the concluding scene of Nathanael West's The Day of the Locust. I also could imagine an anthology of essays reprinting Pozner's brief critical characterizations of Soviet leaders.

The excellence of such prose persuaded me that the real tragedy of Pozner's life--it's the implicit theme of his book--is that he should have been an English-language author, writing both nonfiction and fiction about a variety of experiences; but coming of age in Moscow, where such a career was impossible, unable to emigrate to an English-speaking country, he was steered into what he could do best for the state--talk to Americans, initially for Soviet Life, then on Radio Moscow, eventually on American networks. His career epitomizes the tragedy of talent in a closed economic system. Now that he is trying to enter ours, the publishing business requires that first he write a good-seller about his exceptional experience. In this respect, he resembles the African-American writer of, say, fifty years ago who couldn't expect a contract for second book unless he first wrote one about being black. Since Vladimir Pozner has paid those dues, so to speak, I for one look forward to his future work.