A House in St John's Wood

by Matthew Spender

  David had not yet met Natasha. Indeed, for several months an elaborate charade was performed by Stephen as to when she should be told, how she should be told, and whether or not she would be upset when finally she was told. David formed the impression that Stephen wanted ‘to keep Natasha alerted to his sexuality without admitting it to her, to make her wonder’. It isn’t correct, for my mother of course was acutely aware of my father’s sexuality, but it was a nice game to play within the world of men-against-women. It continued for some time. When finally Nikos and David had lunch with Natasha at Loudoun Road, they had to pretend they’d never been to the house before.

  Years later, my mother integrated the tree-planting episode into a book about her garden in Provence. And retrospectively, she took charge of the whole thing. ‘I had managed to design the walk on a large roll of cartridge paper, and Stephen took a holiday break between books and went with Francis Bacon and David Plante to translate my plan into action.’ And they’d all had an improving time down there. ‘Stephen’s autumn expedition had been felt by all three friends to be not only a horticultural adventure but also a golden interlude of inspiration with which Provence endowed them. While Francis was wandering the sites of Van Gogh’s years of painting in Arles and Saint-Rémy, Stephen and David applied themselves to deciphering and fulfilling my plan.’

  She hadn’t met David at that point, and there’s no mention that Bacon was in Paris for the opening of his show at Maeght. It’s hard to imagine a man like Francis Bacon going in for ‘a golden interlude of inspiration’, let alone a ‘horticultural adventure’. Her version underlines the tenacity with which my mother controlled the marriage that she, even more than my father, had created. However hurt she was by the dramas that resulted from my father’s insistence on his ‘freedom’, she always managed to present everything as if it had happened on purpose, with the noblest of motives and completely under her control. Once she’d invented such an interpretation, she firmly believed that the past had actually happened that way.

  It may have seemed a slight step from Stephen loving Nikos to Stephen supporting Nikos and David as a couple, but it was huge. The first relationship was individual, with elements of secrecy, the second was shared and in the full light of day. My father needed to be in love, because he always hoped that it would bring him the feelings that could be turned into a poem. In greeting Nikos and David as a couple, however, Stephen was saying goodbye to intimacy and substituting for it social recognition. Love was poetry, social recognition was politics.

  Stephen told David: ‘I wish that when I was your age I had had what you have now with Nikos.’ David replied, ‘But Stephen, you are giving us both what you didn’t have at our age.’ This was true. By treating him and Nikos as a couple, Stephen helped them to become a couple. ‘I feel he has given Nikos and me a world in which our relationship can expand and expand, so that in discovering the world he has opened to us we are discovering one another.’

  There remained the vicarious fantasy of young men all together, facing the world in order to conquer it. And within the confines of this fantasy, Stephen could remain the same age he’d always been: a boy of seventeen, ‘without guilt’.

  Nineteen-sixty-six was the year when the Encounter scandal finally broke.

  In May, my father was still in America teaching at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. In his absence, Maro and I were heavily involved in keeping my mother calm in the face of Lasky’s perfidy. As my father put it in a letter to Nikos, ‘Natasha is hysterical on the subject of Lasky & Encounter and the children are having hell trying to cope with her rage.’

  A fortnight or so before he arrived back in London, Maro and I invited Mum to supper at Percy Street. After supper the three of us sat down to summon a spirit through the Ouija board. We thought it would be a distraction for her. Mum addressed the room in a serious voice: ‘Who is behind the financing of Encounter?’

  The upturned glass started moving, slowly at first, then faster. I looked at Maro, and her eyes were jumping to the appropriate letter a fraction of a second before we got there. The Ouija board told us, ‘Malcolm Muggeridge.’

  Afterwards, when we were alone, Maro hotly denied that she’d cheated. But we knew the name of Muggeridge was in the forefront of Natasha’s suspicions. He’d worked in British Intelligence during the war and had kept up his contacts ever since. Years later, it turned out that Mum’s suspicions had been justified.

  I’ve probably given too much weight in this book to the Encounter affair in relation to other aspects of my father’s life: for example, his genuine and generous concern for young writers, his intuitive understanding of art, his great capacity for producing unusual books of criticism and his own considerable achievement as a poet. But he’d also aimed at editing a magazine for at least ten years before Encounter materialized, so I cannot argue that it was an accidental distraction. Life did not impose this task on him. He’d sought it. Thus Encounter, for me, stands for the parts of my father’s life that are the real enemies of literary promise: the contamination of art by power, the ambiguous role of the intellectual in society and the political relationship of England with the United States. Encounter in my mind stands for Temptation.

  I need answers to the following questions: Was he aware of what he was doing? In what way did Encounter represent the CIA? And how did my father manage to emerge relatively unharmed, whereas most of the others who had been involved with the Congress for Cultural Freedom were tainted for the rest of their lives?

  First, a quick run through the facts.

  On 27 April 1966, the New York Times published an article discussing American support of anti-communist liberal organizations, such as the Congress for Cultural Freedom and its magazine, Encounter. The next day Arthur Schlesinger, in a TV interview with the left-wing scholar and politician Conor Cruise O’Brien, admitted that support of the non-communist left was a part of American foreign policy. Five days later, Stephen wrote to Mike Josselson asking whether the Congress for Cultural Freedom was a CIA front organization. This letter was not answered, but it seems that it was read and discussed in the CIA headquarters at Langley, Virginia.

  In the background of these events lay President Johnson’s irritation with those Democrat left-wingers who were coming out against the war in Vietnam. His anger at what he saw as their betrayal was swiftly becoming paranoid. The previous June, he’d told one of his assistants: ‘I am not going to have anything more to do with the liberals. They won’t have anything to do with me. They all just follow the communist line – liberals, intellectuals, communists. They’re all the same … I’m not going in the liberal direction. There’s no future with them. They’re just out to get me. Always have been.’ So it’s possible that the whole ‘international non-communist left’ was dumped as a result of a peremptory order from President Johnson.

  On 19 May, Conor Cruise O’Brien read a lecture at New York University suggesting that Encounter was part of the ‘power structure’ of Washington. (A personal dig, seeing that Stephen, while working at the Library of Congress, had recently been living in Washington.) O’Brien’s piece was immediately published in Book Week and distributed by the US branch of the PEN Club. In response Goronwy Rees, for the August number of Encounter, wrote an attack on O’Brien. Over the summer, O’Brien wanted to publish a reply in the New Statesman, but Frank Kermode persuaded the editor not to print it.

  For a while things hung fire. In the background Spender and Kermode tried frequently and unsuccessfully to obtain a straight answer about the CIA background. From September to October, Stephen was in India on behalf of UNESCO. In January 1967, he took up a teaching job at Wesleyan University in Connecticut. Then in February, O’Brien sued Encounter for libel contained in the personal attack by Rees, cleverly choosing to present his case in Ireland, where he was something of a hero. Encounter lost. Which implied that his thesis, that Encounter was subsidized by the CIA, was true.

  From then on the situation deteriorat
ed. At Wesleyan, Stephen was contacted by Ramparts magazine saying they were about to reveal the connection between the CIA and Encounter, and what did he think about that?

  Ramparts was more interested in the CIA’s use of infiltrators within the international students’ unions. Having read this in a newspaper report, and not noticing the implications regarding Encounter, I wrote to Dad asking whether infiltrating student unions with secret agents constituted Fascism.

  Out to dinner that evening at Wesleyan, my father put this question to an ‘Admiral type’ who happened to be sitting next to him. ‘The effect was electrifying. He shot about 2 feet into the air and said: “I’d have you know I’m the greatest friend of Allen Dulles (head of the CIA) and we planned this thing together. Tell your son, that it is like your BBC or British Council. You Europeans will never understand how we Americans do things.”’

  I’m thrilled my letter produced this indirect confirmation that there was a difference between Britain and the United States when it came to fighting communism. But to go on with my father’s letter:

  America is not a fascist country. It is much more complicated than that. A thing like the CIA affair is more like the conspiracies of big business than like the police state. It is really more a form of cornering a market, the commodity cornered being power rather than money, though lots of money made it possible. Paradoxically it arose originally as a move by Central Intelligence to get round McCarthyism. In 1949 the great Foundations had not got going properly, and all arrangements for travel, culture etc were subject to attack by the UnAmerican Activities Committee for being Red. This meant in practice that the fare of a student to an international conference could not be openly paid unless the student was approved by McCarthy or not likely to be attacked by him. So some rather bright and even liberal people in Central Intelligence used secret funds to sponsor indirectly through respectable seeming channels (like the Congress for Cultural Freedom, the Asian Foundation etc) people who presented a ‘liberal’ though anti-communist image of America. The people, of course, were not told about this and mixed among them were CIA agents and very skilful amoral operators gifted in deviousness concealment and not so much lying as never telling the truth, of whom a prime example is Melvin Lasky. Above all these operators have a limpet-like tenacity and once they have got into a position it is almost impossible to remove them, because you can never obtain evidence to prove they are agents because the Intelligence agencies are the only people who could supply the proofs.

  For the first time my father heard that the man in charge was Cord Meyer. Again, coincidence gave him clues. A colleague of his at Wesleyan happened to be Richard Goodwin, a former adviser to both Kennedy and Johnson. In his letter Dad writes: ‘I asked him the other day “Who is Cord Meyer?” He said: “He’s one of the top CIA directors, responsible for culture.” I said: “He seems to have played quite a role in my life the past twelve years.” Dick Goodwin said: “Don’t I know it!”’

  Back in London, a new British representative was appointed to the board of Encounter: William Hayter, the Principal of New College (where I met him several times), a former ambassador to the Soviet Union with experience in secret matters.

  Everyone wanted to damp down the scandal. Nobody wanted Spender to leave and start writing articles criticizing the way Encounter had been managed over the last decade. By this time it was widely suspected that Lasky was employed by the CIA. I remember Stuart Hampshire telling my mother, ‘He’s a blown agent,’ which immersed the matter into the murky world of spy stories. In London it was taken for granted that Lasky would resign and Encounter would return to what it was supposed to be: an English magazine run by English editors. But Lasky was a fighter and he refused to give in.

  At this point the difference between Spender and Kermode on one side and Lasky on the other becomes clear. Lasky was a Cold Warrior. They were intellectuals. They believed in telling the truth, he was prepared to do whatever he felt was necessary to win. If they assumed that having been publically unmasked, he would withdraw in confusion, they were mistaken.

  Lasky had Cecil King, the newspaper magnate, on his side. King had ostensibly taken over the financing of Encounter from the CCF in 1963, when questions about the CIA had first been aired. He hadn’t interfered in the running of the magazine; nor (it seems) had he looked at its accounts. He was the perfect owner.

  King’s political agenda was as tough as Lasky’s, and he preferred Lasky to Spender as Encounter’s editor. At a later date, King was involved in a bizarre plot to overturn the Labour Prime Minister, Harold Wilson, in a coup d’état. (King thought that Wilson was a Russian spy. He tried to replace him with an emergency government headed by Lord Mountbatten.) Since King owned Encounter, there wasn’t much to be done. There was, however, an Encounter Trust that oversaw the running of the magazine. A meeting was scheduled for 20 April 1966, so that King and the Trust could come to an agreement.

  Arthur Schlesinger flew to London for this meeting.

  My father had arrived back from Wesleyan the day before. Even at this late date he could still feel bored by the whole thing. As he wrote to Nikos, ‘The trouble with this Encounter row is it is all about trivial things to do with quite trivial people – and yet at the same time it has to be fought.’

  Egged on by my mother, the first thing he did on arrival was to telephone Malcolm Muggeridge. Hadn’t Malcolm always told him that the money for Encounter came from private donors with impeccable credentials? According to my mother, Malcolm told my father: ‘So I did, dear boy, so I did. But I wouldn’t bet your bottom dollar that’s where it really came from.’

  Next day, Maro and I were invited to Loudoun Road for supper, during which Schlesinger was supposed to be won over to Stephen’s side.

  We arrived early. Dad opened the door. He was tense and jet-lagged. Along with everything else, he’d lost his voice. He hissed at us in the front hall, ‘Whatever else you do, be polite. Everyone says Arthur’s going to be the next Secretary of State.’

  When Schlesinger arrived, we were left alone with him in the piano room. Mum was downstairs cooking, Dad was so nervous he stayed in his study. He was probably thinking that Arthur must have known about Encounter’s financing from the very beginning. How would he get through the evening without betraying his anger?

  In the piano room we were polite to Schlesinger as requested, but we were not over-awed by the future Secretary of State, because Maro had a family connection with him. Schlesinger, like several other members of the East Coast liberal left, was a regular summer visitor on Cape Cod. Mary McCarthy and her then husband Boden Broadwater also summered on the Cape, her former husband Edmund Wilson lived in Wellfleet, Dwight and Nancy Macdonald had been there for years. Some of the properties owned by members of this group had been sold to them by Jack Phillips, Maro’s ex-stepfather. There were Slough Pond and Horseleech Pond and Slag Pond – lots of pond life among those drab, moth-eaten pines. And cocktail parties. Maro as a child had often passed the literary peanuts on several distinguished lawns. One evening, instead of passing the peanuts, with her Phillips half-sisters she’d gathered up baskets of frogs and thrown them at the feet of the grown-ups.

  So Arthur knew Maro from Cape Cod, and for a while we talked about that. Then, of all things, the subject of the Marx Brothers came up. Arthur gave us a seminar on their movies: the early ones with a muted social context and the later ones that gradually reached total anarchy. Their hatred of war, for example. He said the Marx Brothers came from a tradition of Jewish radical socialism that went right back to the Russia of the 1880s.

  Dad still did not appear. Finally I asked Schlesinger: could he please tell us something about the CIA and Encounter? He was embarrassed, but the explanation that followed had the same friendly but didactic tone with which he’d just compared Groucho’s political rage with Harpo’s gentler one. And it corroborated what my father had just told me in his letter. The CIA, he said, is a large institution employing many people. Most of the per
sonnel come from the military. It’s divided into sections that are often in competition with each another. The group in charge of ideas – and we wouldn’t deny that Encounter was an ‘ideas’ proposition – is extremely small and beleaguered and despised by everyone else. The military prefers to support right-wing governments, in Europe and elsewhere, because direct confrontation is instinctive to them. They distrust the subtle, long-term calculation of using the centre-left to win over votes from the communists. In spite of this, the CIA is the only American institution that could ever have supported such a plan. ‘You’d never have convinced Congress to back anything that had the word “socialist” in it,’ he said. ‘For a liberal magazine like Encounter to exist at all, it’s almost a miracle.’

  My main reaction at the time was disgust that my father, an English poet, should have become a cog in machinery so complicated, and so utterly bound up with the United States.

  I don’t remember what happened at supper, but afterwards Maro and I drove Arthur back to Claridge’s Hotel in my cramped Morris Minor. It was raining. There was more talk about Cape Cod as the windscreen steamed up and we felt our way towards Piccadilly. (What was Mougouch up to now? Does she like living in London?) We got out of the car to say goodbye and stood under the hotel’s wet awning. Arthur said we shouldn’t worry about Stephen. All this was would blow over. It wouldn’t affect him. ‘He’ll survive.’

  As for the Encounter crisis, it was hardly worth having crossed the Atlantic for. ‘It’s really not that important.’ Then, feeling that our silence was not entirely on his side, he added defensively, ‘Except of course people’s feelings are always important.’

  My father went back to Wesleyan without attending a second meeting of the Trust on 5 May. At this meeting Cecil King made it clear that he supported Lasky. On 7 May, Kermode and Spender resigned as editors, and on the following day Stephen gave an interview with the New York Times stating his position, which was that he could not continue to work as an editor of a magazine that had been financed by the CIA.