The cultural-political month-to-month Encounter was printed from 1953 to 1991. Whether it is remembered these days, it’s normally in reference to the revelation that, for the primary decade or so of its existence, it had secretly been funded by the CIA (by way of the Congress for Cultural Freedom or CCF) and the British International Workplace (by way of its covert propaganda unit, the Worldwide Analysis Division or IRD).
I used to be dimly conscious of this historical past when, in August 2020, I listened to a London Evaluation of Books podcast concerning the literary critic Frank Kermode, who had died 10 years earlier. Kermode had been a prolific contributor to the LRB; he had additionally co-edited Encounter, earlier than resigning when the circumstances of its funding by the CIA and IRD got here to gentle within the spring of 1967.
In line with Mary-Kay Wilmers, the LRB’s longtime editor and proprietor, Kermode had been identified within the LRB workplace as “SSF.” Sly Sir Frank, she defined, was a “malign” character who maintained shut ties along with her “leftish paper” regardless of “the actual fact” that he “was related with the CIA, or the Congress for Cultural Freedom, which was a CIA outfit.” The “contradiction” between these two positions “would have been one thing that fairly happy Frank.” Though he disliked being reminded of the Encounter affair, he may even have been “secretly fairly pleased with the truth that he was… sneaky, and the truth that he was efficiently sneaky was in all probability significantly interesting to him.” What type did this profitable sneakiness take? Convincing people who he had identified nothing of Encounter’s true sponsors.
Wilmers’s feedback shocked me. On the time, I used to be making an attempt to resolve whether or not or to not write a guide about Kermode (like me, his papers reside in Princeton, New Jersey), and the person she sketched bore little resemblance to the one I envisaged. Earlier than I actually knew it, I had taken the plunge. The story that started to emerge was sophisticated and way more fascinating than the LRB podcast might allow. One a part of it was particularly revealing: what Kermode did as soon as he knew, and knew that everybody else knew he knew, the reality of Encounter’s preparations in its early years.
On 14th February 1967, the New York Instances printed a front-page story confirming that the Nationwide Scholar Affiliation had taken cash from the CIA in alternate for steering its members in direction of anti-Soviet positions. Over the subsequent two months, there was a cascade of additional revelations concerning the CIA’s cultural-political actions. Kermode was agitated, as was Stephen Spender—one in every of Encounter’s founding co-editors, and by then its editor-at-large. What bothered them was much less the revelations themselves than the prospect that—in repeating assurances concerning the journal’s independence that that they had obtained from Melvin Lasky (Spender’s after which Kermode’s prickly co-editor at Encounter) and Michael Josselson (the affable CIA officer who served as govt director of the CCF)—they may very well be seen as having lied. Worse, as having lied within the service of a Chilly Warfare ideology that, because the struggle in Vietnam rumbled disastrously onwards, appeared tarnished past restore.
On twentieth March, Kermode wrote to Spender with the information that Lasky had lastly admitted the CIA connection. On twenty ninth March, Kermode wrote to Lasky demanding to know when he had realized of the CIA connection, and stating that if Lasky had identified for years then he (Kermode) must resign his place on the grounds that Lasky had not solely deceived him, however had precipitated him to be the “agent and provider” of falsehood. Kermode then travelled to the Isle of Man for 4 days, the place his mom had simply died. On third April, Lasky visited Kermode in Bristol, and the 2 talked for a number of hours in Kermode’s again backyard: Lasky admitted he had been conscious of the reality since Josselson instructed him about it in 1963, and that he had sought to “shield” Spender after which Kermode from the burden of realizing.
Lasky’s disclosures went down badly. Kermode and Spender insisted on a gathering of the Encounter trustees, and one was scheduled for twentieth April. However now, Kermode and Spender modified tack. It will, they agreed, be higher for Encounter if Lasky have been to depart and that the journal’s editorial voices have been theirs alone—ideally, with the help of a managing editor to deal with day-to-day affairs. Energy with out overmuch accountability.
The twentieth April assembly was heated: Lasky accused Spender of hypocrisy for getting bent out of form by the CIA revelations when his personal wage had secretly been paid by the British IRD; Spender stormed out, irate and probably incredulous. (I are inclined to the view that the CIA was information to Spender, however the IRD is one other matter.) Though the assembly was inconclusive, in its aftermath Lasky appears briefly to have been amenable to resignation. As soon as it grew to become clear that he had resolved to remain, one other clear-the-air assembly was scheduled on fifth Might within the Day by day Mirror workplaces of Encounter’s proprietor, Cecil King, chairman of the Worldwide Publishing Company.
The CCF had handed possession of the journal to King in 1964, meaning to insulate it from assaults on its independence or credibility. However even this association now appears to have been doubtful. King maintained hyperlinks with the intelligence companies within the UK and US, and it appears possible that the CCF continued to tug some or all of Encounter’s strings. In an undated letter of February–March 1967, Kermode knowledgeable Spender that he had simply obtained “a notice from John Le Carré [David Cornwell] during which he speculates… that E’s current course of funds may nonetheless be a channel for provides from the outdated agency. Maybe only a guess, however DC could be very nicely knowledgeable and would make good guesses.”
No matter his motivations, King decided that Lasky’s companies have been indispensable. Regardless of lobbying from Kermode, the Encounter trustees agreed. Kermode due to this fact handed over each his personal letter of resignation and one from Spender (who had left for a go to to Chicago). In his 1995 memoir, Not Entitled, Kermode would replicate that, like a naval vessel compelled to interact superior opponents, he had been “outclassed” and “outmanoeuvered.”
Writing to an American good friend on ninth Might, Kermode had already begun the method of detachment: “In all these latest tumults I’m the candid man, the person who has nothing to cover, which is true, however I am going on the radio and tv and behave precisely like a person who is legendary for being candid and don’t have anything to cover, similar to Sartre’s waiter enjoying the waiter function.” As for the ultimate assembly with King, it was “like CP Snow with even worse dialogue: a newspaper baron with no one to beat however me doesn’t put forth his energy however smiles politely as I sit candidly earlier than him.”
This self-dramatising lugubriousness was not only a rhetorical posture. The issue was Spender. He had introduced, by way of the entrance web page of the day gone by’s New York Instances, that “in view of the revelations which were made and allegations which can nonetheless be made concerning the previous sources of Encounter funds, I really feel that any editor who was knowingly or unknowingly concerned in receiving these ought to resign. I’ve accomplished so.” Within the follow-up report on ninth Might, Kermode took a extra circumspect line. Lasky’s conduct left him with out the “basis of confidence on which I might cooperate with my co-editor.”
So it was that Kermode discovered himself in a spot. Ought to he affirm the reality that their resignations have been the results of a power-grab gone improper? Or ought to he enable the grandstanding pastoral of a good friend and colleague determined to guard his popularity, and with it his livelihood as a literary careerist? As normal, Kermode selected Forster over Aristotle: friendship first, and on one thing like precept. Kermode discovered methods to fudge the difficulty, and Spender might inform his model of occasions unimpeded. The rub was that performing this form of candour with out being absolutely candid debased the foreign money not simply of plain talking—frankness, if you’ll—however of friendship too.
However I believe that Kermode got here to see a extra basic drawback with the Encounter challenge. Its origins lie within the query that Spender pretended to have answered on precept. Why didn’t Kermode and Spender resign as soon as they realized of both the unique CIA-IRD funding or the truth that that they had been deceived about it, the extra so after Le Carré gave them cause to suspect the integrity of preparations underneath Cecil King? The quick reply, after all, is their perception that they might have been good for Encounter and that Encounter would have been good for them. However it’s the circumstances of this perception which might be most telling. In all of the correspondence that I’ve learn from 1966–1967, neither man deviated from the view that regardless of the place its funding got here from, Encounter had been and remained editorially impartial.
Kermode and Spender have been nervous that they had lied within the service of a Chilly Warfare ideology that appeared tarnished past restore
That they had a degree: after some boundary-setting back-and-forth between the editors and the CCF within the Fifties, neither the CCF nor Cecil King’s organisation confirmed the least curiosity in asserting (to borrow a phrase from the founding editor of the LRB, Karl Miller) “a proprietorial proper” in respect of the fabric printed.
Though Encounter was by no means going to supply area to Marxists or the marxisant, such a view was removed from naive or wilfully blind. As Louis Menand places it in 2021’s The Free World, the CIA realised that it might be counterproductive to insist that its publications stay uncritical of western coverage: “The truth that dissent was tolerated in the US was a serious Chilly Warfare promoting level.” Freedom of thought and expression was not solely a transparent distinction between life east and west of the Coca-Cola line, however may very well be weaponised within the battle towards the Soviet bloc.
Kermode’s most celebrated guide, The Sense of an Ending, was printed only a month after the Encounter disaster reached its zenith. In it, he treats political ideologies as not more than one other of the “harmony fictions” to which we flip in making an attempt to convey order to the tangled woof of our existences. A match topic for literature and literary criticism, however wholly insufficient as a information to—a lot much less as a body for—literary or cultural enquiry. It’s, briefly, straightforward to see how Kermode was drawn to the urbane pluralism that Encounter labored so onerous to domesticate.
And but, and but. Right here is Menand once more: the CIA’s ruse of propaganda-through-dissent “meant that writers who imagined themselves as having a crucial distance from American coverage, or a sceptical relation to capitalism or consumerism or militarism or vulgar anti-communism, have been truly taking the celebration line. They didn’t should be purchased out as a result of that they had been on board all alongside.” Though Kermode would later determine this out for himself, I don’t consider that he had accomplished so in April and Might 1967. Nor, crucially, did he at that time perceive the influence of what had simply been revealed.
To a lot of these on the left, the publicity of CIA funding merely confirmed that which they already believed to be true: liberal pluralism was a sham designed to spare the blushes of a military-industrial advanced that, in its flip, propped up the inequitable constructions of capitalist society. Regardless of the successes and failures of Spender and Kermode and quite a few others in disassociating themselves from the CCF and its works, from this attitude the CCF challenge—and with it doctrines just like the precedence of artwork over politics—was solid firmly on the improper facet of historical past.
Finally, what troubled Kermode’s recollections of Encounter was neither disgrace nor secret satisfaction that he had danced to Langley’s tune and bought away with it. He was as an alternative aware of getting helped to convey a couple of catastrophic lack of credibility for his fashion of literary and cultural criticism. Maybe there was some queasy reduction, too: if he and Spender had succeeded in taking up Encounter, no quantity of tactical water-muddying would have allowed them to salvage their reputations.
