The Trustees thought they’d also better resign, and they did so as quietly as they could so that Encounter could survive. Spender, threatened by Lasky, resigned from the Trust on 11 May. Lasky had told him he’d tell the press that, as Stephen had been Chairman of the British CCF back in the early days, he must know more about the financing of the Congress than Lasky did!
On 20 May, the Saturday Evening Post published an article by Tom Braden, one of the founders of the ‘non-communist left’ strategy. He was proud that the CIA had been immoral, he wrote. This is taken by scholars as the moment when the CIA washed its hands of a discarded policy. Braden would never have published his piece without the CIA’s approval.
Now to the three questions that interest me. Did my father know? Was Encounter run from Langley? How did his reputation survive?
With regard to the first question, let me play the devil’s advocate and summarize the case against him. He’d wanted to edit a magazine from the late Thirties onwards, and he’d become the co-editor of Horizon at the beginning of the war. Towards the end of the war, he’d worked for the Political Information Department, which was the public face of the Political Warfare Executive, in charge of all propaganda directed at Europe. In 1945, he’d wanted to start an Anglo-German magazine with Ernst Robert Curtius. In 1946, he’d been asked by Information Services Control to provide a plan for an international magazine, and he’d done so, complete with the suggestion that the British government should pay for it. Meanwhile the bureaucratic successor of the Political Information Department was the Information Research Department, the subsequent British backer of Encounter. While it lasted, he was Chairman of the British Committee for Cultural Freedom. He made numerous trips outside England on behalf of the Paris CCF, the British Council, the International PEN Club, UNESCO, the BBC and occasionally, in a very nebulous way, the Foreign Office. (I am guessing that his contacts with Guy Burgess had some FO connotations.) On the other hand, he was never an employee of the British Civil Service, and he never signed the Official Secrets Act. His engagement by the above bodies was always fee-earning, which meant he could accept a task or not, as he felt like it.
I am sure that most readers of this book will say: It’s impossible that he did not know what he was doing. That he didn’t depends on understanding the power of his ‘ambivalence’. Whether vice or virtue, my father’s ‘ambivalence’ kept him open where to others the choice would seem either/or. ‘Ambivalence’ in fact means not choosing, not selecting, not dismissing new experiences, not concluding, not – and I cannot stress this strongly enough – being pinned down.
Stephen always claimed that he never knew about the CIA connection and that from 1962 until 1966 he had been consistently deceived by his employers. His anger was sincere, but righteous anger of an uncontrollable kind often overcame him whenever his ‘innocence’ was placed in doubt. For example: his anger with the political commissars during the Spanish Civil War when they didn’t see why they should release Tony Hyndman from his duties, or his anger with Inez when she’d left him after she decided she couldn’t accept his continued relationship with Tony.
The mere fact that he was sincerely angry does not convince me of his innocence. Yet one aspect does strike me as curious. Whenever he writes to his friends or in his journal about Irving Kristol, or Dwight Macdonald, but most of all Melvin Lasky, politics do not feature in his complaints. He held against them their hatred of literature, their self-serving manner and, in Lasky’s case, the habit of lying to cover his tracks. He thinks that the ruthlessness of Lasky, like that of Michael Goodwin before him, is due to their pursuit of personal ‘success’, not that they were working to a secret agenda. He gives no hint that he himself was involved with power, influence, propaganda or cultural manipulation, or that he was aware that his colleagues were.
Against this plea for his innocence there is one small incident.
David Plante tells me that twenty years later, in the period of Gorbachev’s glasnost, he and Nikos invited Stephen to tea to meet a young Russian friend of theirs, Sergei Belov, recently arrived from Moscow. The subject of Encounter came up. ‘The whole story had been prominent in the Soviet news; blinking, as if wondering if he should speak or not and finally giving way to the presence of this young Russian, Stephen said, “I knew, somehow I knew,” and we were all then silent.’
David comments: ‘He knew, but only “somehow”, and don’t you think that this “somehow” was a constant helpless doubt he had about everything he did, “somehow” never sure of anything?’ No, I don’t believe he was unsure about what he did, though it’s a plausible argument. On the contrary, within the cloud of ambivalence that surrounded him, Stephen was remarkably persistent in pushing forward his ideas over a long period of time. In that respect, to admit to a Russian what he’d never admitted to anyone else seems to me significant, because there was a Russian side to the whole story that did not die when my father left Encounter.
My verdict: he did not know about the IRD, or the CIA’s financial involvement, or the serpentine chain of command going back to Cord Meyer. But he knew what Encounter was for, even though his for was absolutely not the same as Mel Lasky’s.
I often thought of saying to my father, ‘Dad, you think you’re a poet but in fact you’re a politician, and a brilliant one,’ but I never did.
Auden wrote a tolerant and understanding letter to my mother when she wrote to ask his help against Lasky’s attempt to subvert Stephen’s reputation. ‘You and I may think he has been a little naïf, and even, perhaps, once he had got Encounter really on its feet, a little negligent. But his artistic, political and financial integrity are so obvious that I can’t imagine what they could possibly accuse him of.’
With regard to the second question, how much propaganda was involved in Encounter, much work has been done by specialist scholars and more still remains to be done.
From 1954, the man in charge was Cord Meyer, who within the CIA occupied a precarious position. He’d once been investigated by the FBI for ‘communist tendencies’, and it took him a year to clear his name. This corroborates Arthur Schlesinger’s impression that the cultural department of the CIA was a beleaguered minority, with rival departments constantly intriguing against it. The chain of command travelled from Cord Meyer to Mike Josselson to Melvin Lasky – all under the strain of having to keep things secret. Plus, in the background, the British IRD, which constantly resisted any attempt by the CIA to move ‘their’ magazines towards overt propaganda.
In my opinion, the chain of command was too convoluted for the story of Encounter to be interpreted as a successful CIA plot. Money passed hands. Nothing more. No instructions.
This assessment does not alter the fact that, if you are a writer who has been selected because you represent an undisclosed government programme, your writing is loaded with messages that you didn’t intend. It’s one thing if a ballerina dances because she’s ambitious and loves dancing, and entirely another if she’s been chosen without her knowledge to represent the West’s idea of political freedom.
Meanwhile my father’s participation in Encounter reveals many differences between England and America regarding how the Soviet bloc should be confronted, and the ways in which their respective intelligence services fitted into society. In my view these aspects have not been sufficiently discussed – but at this point I have to give way to feelings that cannot be so detached. The fact is, I absolutely loathe the mixing of politics and culture. Although I think I’ve managed to create a life that is generally free from stress, on this subject I am unable to think coherently.
I know that there have been periods when art has been used politically, and that sometimes the results are marvellous. The baroque churches of the Counter-Reformation, for instance. And what about the Parthenon? And the great paintings that Jacques-Louis David dedicated to Napoleon? I even like moments when political rhetoric goes mad, such as in the portrait busts of late Roman emperors, when the vulgarity of different colour
ed stones unconsciously mocks the nobility of their demeanour. But all such cases involve the transparent use of art. It’s politics by visual means, and we can judge it accordingly. With CIA involvement, the US covert programme mocks the art it’s designed to support.
In the 1970s, articles were written to suggest that the American Abstract Expressionist movement was a vast CIA plot. To put it briefly: Jackson Pollock was pushed to the front because his manner of painting epitomized the freedom of the West. And it was a success. The Soviet East was unable to offer a counter-offensive. Italian painters such as Afro, Scialoja and Vedova abandoned Social Realism to follow the lead of the Abstract Expressionists, and the Italian Communist Party embraced them, thereby moving Italian culture into a fluid role somewhere between America and Russia. Social Realism was so out of fashion by the Seventies that figurative painters had a hard time finding exhibition space.
Some left-wing critics viewed this American influence on Italian art with misgiving, and the idea that it might all be a CIA plot went straight to the heart of conspiracy theorists. And, inevitably, one day I came across an article that mentioned Maro’s father and my father in the same breath as tools of American imperialism. This dark thought had lurked in the back of my mind for a long time, but I was unprepared for my own reaction when it appeared in the press. I was overwhelmed by physical revulsion. It was a ‘short circuit’ between my father and Maro’s of the worst possible kind.
I should have recovered by now but I don’t think I have. The fact that our fathers were involved means that, for me, this particular punch goes way below the belt.
Third question: how did my father emerge unscathed?
When Arthur Schlesinger told Maro and me under the awning of Claridge’s, Your father will survive, I was irritated because I assumed that of course he’d survive. What was he talking about? But it was a good point. Mike Josselson and Nicky Nabokov saw their lives damaged by exposure. ‘Your father is still famous,’ Josselson’s daughter told me recently, ‘my father is just slightly infamous.’ Stephen was saved by the fact that Encounter was only one part of a complex life. ‘Ambivalence’ also meant being interested in more things than Encounter.
Stephen never held it against Nabokov that he’d been involved in the deception. On the contrary, he felt sorry for him. Far in the future, when Nicky was long dead, a rumour surfaced that he’d been paid half a million dollars for not writing his memoirs about the Congress for Cultural Freedom. Because he did not care about money, my father thought this was merely amusing; but my mother, who was as careful as Dad was frivolous when it came to money, felt that the person who ought to have been paid a fat sum was Stephen, not Nicky. As the editor of Encounter, Stephen had been far more influential. And he’d also been the Agency’s dupe.
Stephen took for granted that he’d succeeded in keeping his political life separate from his creative life. Literary London accepted this, as it accepted with unexpected calm the revelation of yet more American interference in English politics. It was only to be expected. ‘Too much politics’ was not the accusation levelled against my father by literary London in his later years. Critics attacked him because he’d been too ‘social’; and the idea that to his peers he’d become a ‘parlour poet’ hurt him deeply. The sense of failure that often came over him in his old age had more to do with wasted time and a feeling that he had not used his gifts properly. The novels he’d written didn’t really work and too many poems had failed to materialize because he’d been busy with other things. He tried not to let his sense of failure, which was sometimes strong, overwhelm him. My father was, after all, an optimistic man.
26
ROMANTIC FRIENDSHIPS BEFORE ALL
WE SPENT THE summer of 1967 on Patmos, where Mougouch had rented a small house on the unfashionable side of the bay: Maro and me, her sister Natasha, Mougouch and her two other daughters, plus various guests who appeared expectantly on the veranda at mealtimes.
Mougouch was unhappy because a man she loved had refused to marry her. It was the first time in her life that she had ever been rejected and she took it very badly. She’d left England for a year delegating the mothering role to Maro – which was tough, as Antonia was rebelling against her boarding school and Chapel Street had been leased to a madwoman. ‘I can always count on you, dear,’ said Mougouch cheerfully when Maro asked for help. ‘You are my Little Meg. Maro Efficiency Gorky.’ This as an alternative to coming back from Athens and taking charge.
That summer on Patmos, Mougouch was dazzling in her unhappiness, but all of us were a bit mixed up. I was making horrible paintings that I threw away at the end of the summer. Susannah was an adolescent, and beautiful, and yet she didn’t want to say goodbye to her childhood. Maro was broody for babies, though it wasn’t yet apparent.
She found a half-drowned kitten on the beach and nursed it back to life. In the early hours of the morning she’d latch it on to my breast, because she said that although she fed it well with an eye-drop pipette, it needed to suckle, otherwise it would be psychologically deprived. My tit was more like a cat’s than hers, she said. So I lay there patiently every morning as this wild thing kneaded my breast with adamantine claws and chewed my nipple with needle-sharp teeth. After a week, I began to lactate. Everyone thought this was very funny, but later, on the laborious trip back to London, my breast became infected. In the end I had to have a mastectomy. Our domestic solidarity was thus confirmed by losing my right breast to a kitten.
Barbara Hutchinson joined us. She and Mougouch decided that if Maro and I got married, Mougouch would be able to come back to London with a flourish. Her feeling of rejection would be forgotten and social life in Chapel Street could start up again. I distinctly remember the two of them watching the Patmos boat drift across the bay and pick up steam before chugging off towards Athens. There was only one boat every three days. I couldn’t escape! Then they turned to me smiling and started work.
Maro and I thought of ourselves as being married already. What was this bourgeois convention they were insisting on? Why make promises of permanence when permanence was already there? And hadn’t Barbara been married three times?
‘Yes,’ she said passionately, ‘and every time I’ve always believed it was absolutely the right thing for me to do, and even when a marriage failed, I still believed it to be right. Every time! Absolutely right! It’s a gesture, you see – a protest against time. Time always wins, but in the meantime you’ve said, I defy you! Here I am! Here we are! We are facing the challenge of the future, side by side, through thick and thin.’
I thought this was terrific; so I said Fine, we’ll do it. I sank to my knees and proposed. Maro, who always refuses any gift, didn’t say yes and didn’t say no, but over the next few days it was obvious that the answer was yes; and that deep down, she’d been longing for this moment.
Mougouch on Patmos, wearing a broken umbrella as a sun hat.
I set off by the next boat two days later to join my parents in the South of France and tell them the news. Piraeus to Brindisi through the Corinth Canal, deck class on a sleeping bag, the rhythm of the boat aggravating my swollen breast. Train up Italy, the council houses around Bologna glowing in the afternoon sun. In Milan, I sat in the station offering mugs of wine to anyone who’d come near, and thus I missed the connection to Marseilles. I was scared. I didn’t want to get there.
No news was received more despondently by any parents. ‘We thought you must have something up your sleeve,’ said my mother wearily.
I sneaked down to the post office and sent Maro an enthusiastic telegram in their names. It hadn’t occurred to either of them to send a message welcoming her into the family.
I think we met David Plante that autumn. Dad brought him to tea with us at Percy Street. David sat on the edge of his chair and was very polite.
In the car travelling down Gower Street a few days later, Dad asked Maro and me what we thought of him. I said, making a joke, ‘I think he must be one of those creeping plants.
’ The result was scary. Dad slammed on the brakes – luckily there was no one behind us – and said tragically, ‘How CAN you treat ANY human being with such contempt?’
I thought about this for a long time. Was he overreacting? Yes! To make a joke about Plante’s name was corny, perhaps even in bad taste, but surely no more than that? However, thinking it over, I decided that Dad’s anger was justified. My casual remark was a form of rejection, not so much of David Plante himself as of this whole arcane world that my father valued, which I felt I couldn’t enter.
He always spoke about David and Nikos in intense, hushed tones. Perhaps he just wanted to introduce us to them as one young couple to another, but at the time I misread his signals as being connected with a certain kind of glamour. When it came to glamour, I could see what Dad desired. When glamour struck, being alive bound him to the way the whole world moved. His hair rose in a halo, his face turned pink. His sense of self suddenly fused with the greed of the planet. Success is hyper-awareness of time, a prickling of the skin. Fun – as I’ve learned for myself in the few spasms when it’s come up in my life. But at the time I rejected it as a form of madness, for pleasure so intense could only mean something to the person it touches. And glamour spurns everyone outside its magic circle.
Dad enveloped Nikos and David in a part of London life where creativity and glamour overlapped and, by doing so, he gave them something they wouldn’t otherwise have had. It made me uneasy then, and I’m awkward as I write about it now, for I can’t quite pin down the problem. After reading an early draft of this book, a friend told me, ‘You’re making it too complicated. You were just jealous of your father’s lovers!’ It’s almost true. I was wary of Nikos, whose purity combined with intelligence often seemed poised to produce razorblades out of thin air.
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