NEW YORK-CLOSED-DOOR POLICY?: With no official explanation,...

NEW YORK-CLOSED-DOOR POLICY?: With no official explanation, the South African government has denied anti-apartheid activist Mewa Ramgobin permission to travel to the United States. The action came despite intercession on Ramgobin’s behalf by the U.S. State Department and by Amnesty International. Ramgobin, the author of “Waiting to Live” (published June 27 by Aventura/Vintage), had been invited to this country to discuss the book and South African issues by his publisher. “The only reason that Mewa Ramgobin has been denied permission to come to America is the color of his skin,” Random House board chairman Robert L. Bernstein said. “Small acts always reveal most vividly what a government stands for. This small act, resulting from South Africa’s determination to be completely arbitrary and lawless, is unacceptable to all civilized peoples and must be protested as vigorously as possible.” Agreed Ramgobin’s editor at Random House, Erroll McDonald, “Once again, the South African government brilliantly affirms its barbarism.”

PEN NOTES: Not that anyone can actually replace Norman Mailer, but Hortense Calisher has been voted to succeed Mailer as president of American PEN for 1986-1988. Calisher is the author of 10 novels, several collections of short stories and a memoir, “Herself.”

EVERY WORD COUNTS: A $10,000 college scholarship is the plum for the grand-prize winner of the Webster’s New World Scholarship Sweepstakes, sponsored by Prentice Hall Press, publisher of Webster’s New World Dictionary. The sweepstakes takes the form of a crossword puzzle, with answers lurking in the dictionary. Details are at participating bookstores, and entries must be received by July 15. The sole condition on the grand prize is that the winner must use the cash award to advance his or her higher education.

IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF IACOCCA?: Former astronaut Frank Borman, recently resigned as CEO of Eastern Airlines, is shopping his memoirs. A close associate says Borman has had “hundreds” of inquiries.

ESSAYS OF ONE’S OWN: Three previously unknown early essays attributed to Virginia Woolf have been published in the newsletter Virginia Woolf Miscellany, published by Stanford University. Written early in Woolf’s career, the essays were published unsigned in 1905 and 1906 in the women’s pages of an English church newsletter. Their authenticity was first determined by S. P. Rosenbaum of the University of Toronto. “I am convinced these are Woolf essays, but I will be interested to see if other people disagree,” said Stanford English professor Lucio Ruotolo, a specialist in the writings of Woolf and a founding editor of the newsletter. The essays are “A Walk by Night,” describing an evening walk in the fog in Cornwall; “The English Mail Coach,” a discussion of the writings of Thomas de Quincey, and “Portraits of Places,” a review of Henry James’ “English Hours.”

ENCHANTMENT: William Jovanovich thought so highly of Daphne Merkin’s first novel of that name that he not only agreed to publish it (it’s out in September from Harcourt Brace Jovanovich), but hired Merkin as senior editor.

AFTER THE WAR: For three years, Al Santoli traveled in North America, Europe and Asia, collecting nearly 4,000 pages of transcripts from taped conversations for “To Bear Any Burden: The Vietnam War and Its Aftermath in the Words of Americans and Southeast Asians” (Ballantine Books, $3.95). Translation costs were so high that Santoli, best-selling author of “Everything We Had,” had to take out a bank loan to finish the book. One sample recollection, this from Eddie Adams, the Associated Press photographer who won a Pulitzer Prize for his 1968 Tet photo: “You’d walk in the jungle with advisers and get really ticked off if you didn’t get shot at. Because there wasn’t any story then.”

LIONS AND TIGERS AND BEARS, OH MY: Targa the elephant was among the stars that helped inaugurate Ringling Readers at Lincoln Center here not long ago. The effort by Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey to encourage children to read--and to keep them reading--has been undertaken in conjunction with Reading Is Fundamental (RIF). Festivities are planned for the 85 cities the Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey circus will visit this year.

LOVE’S LABORS: Franz Kafka’s harsh attitude toward love took its roots in his own life, according to Boston University religious studies professor Nahum Glatzer. At age 83, Glatzer has published “The Loves of Franz Kafka” (Schocken Books), contending that Kafka was a man at war with his attraction to young, immature women; the upbringing that would have landed him in a respectable marriage; and, most important in Glatzer’s view, his own self-loathing. Although Kafka often said, “I am made of literature, I am nothing else and cannot be anything else,” the author also confessed that “sex keeps gnawing at me, hounds me day and night.” Writes Glatzer, “There is no harsher, more damning attitude to sexual embrace in Western literature than that found in Kafka’s writings.”

YOU GOTTA HAVE FRIENDS: Preliminary results of a survey of Friends of Libraries groups indicate that nearly 600,000 citizens raised $27.7 million in support of their libraries, an average of $46 per member. The study by Friends of Libraries USA encompassed 2,329 groups.

QUOTATIONS FROM CHAIRMAN MILTON: Due out next spring from McGraw-Hill and written with the help of “a group of writers,” Milton Berle’s new book will not be another autobiography, his agent Arthur Pine promises, but instead will be a “fun kind of book” detailing his experiences with the Friars Club. “Sort of like the Algonquin Round Table,” Pine predicts.

WINNERS: Jo Anne Williams Bennett, a 41-year-old social anthropologist from Ottawa, Ont., has won the $50,000 Seal Books First Novel Award for her novel “Downfall People,” a political and social intrigue set in West Africa. The book will be published in the United States by Bantam Books. . . . In its 15th annual Children’s Science Book Award Program, the New York Academy of Sciences has chosen “The Big Stretch” by Ada and Frank Graham (Knopf) and “Breakthrough: The True Story of Penicillin” by Francine Jacobs (Dodd, Mead) as the two best books on science for children published in 1985.

In Fort Worth, the Western Writers of America Inc. have named Jack Schaefer, author of the classic Western “Shane,” winner of the Levi-Strauss Saddleman Award. The group’s Spur Awards went to Larry McMurtry, for “Lonesome Dove”; John Byron Cooke, “The Snowblind Moon”; Paul Andrew Hutton, “Phil Sheridan and His Army”; Pam Conrad, “Prairie Songs”; Nellie Snyder Yost, “The National Game Out West”; Bill Brett, “The Way It Was Told to Me”; Steven Kellogg, “Ivan Dunnit and the Big Wind,” Michael Butler and Dennis Shryack, “Pale Rider.”

Winners of the 1986 Western States Book Awards were announced at a party in the stately French Quarter home of Louisiana Rep. Lindy Boggs, an event held during the American Booksellers Assn. meeting in New Orleans. For poetry, the winner was Mary Barnard, author of “Time and the White Tigress” (published by Breitenbush Books of Portland, Ore.); Clarence Major won for fiction with “My Amputations” (The Fiction Collective of Boulder, Colo.); Anita Sullivan, “The Seventh Dragon: The Riddle of Equal Temperament” (Metamorphous Press of Lake Oswego, Ore.), for creative nonfiction, and a special citation of excellence to Kim Stafford for “Having Everything Right: Essays of Place” (Confluence Press of Lewiston, Ida.). The awards were created two years ago to recognize and promote writers of excellence living in the West.

Gustavo Segade of San Diego has taken first place in the poetry category, and Hector Mendez of Goleta took the top prize in short stories in the 12th annual Chicano Literary Contest, sponsored by the University of California, Irvine, Department of Spanish and Portuguese.