Hurrah for the CIA
The Editor of this blog thanks The Editor of The Times Literary Supplement for publishing, in that paper's issue for May 8, 2020, his letter addressing topics that have him much engaged these last forty-five years.
I have long been at one with the efforts of J.C. (NB, April 24) to rescue Encounter from its reputation among the bien-pensants as little more than a propaganda front for the CIA – the source, over its first decade, of secret funding, which came via private foundations and thence Encounter’s publisher, the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF). The revelation of that funding in 1966 led to the resignation of Encounter’s founding co-editor Stephen Spender and his successor Frank Kermode, and a decline in prestige as rival start-ups such as the New York Review of Books absorbed its top-rank contributors. (George Steiner proved a notable exception, sticking with Encounter through to the late 1980s; indeed he had already alienated William Phillips, the veteran editor of Partisan Review – the signature quarterly of the New York intelligentsia for which Steiner had scant regard – by refusing to sign an anti-Encounter petition circulating among Phillips and his comrades.)
To J.C.’s enlistment of the breadth in ideas of 1950s numbers of Encounter and its French CCF stablemate, Preuves, as counter-demonstration to the CIA-dominance thesis, I add my own favourite single-issue nominee, the March 1965 Encounter, which published Kingsley Amis, Anita Brookner, Albert Camus, Robert Creeley, Richard Eberhart, Philip French, John Gross, Frank Kermode, C. S. Lewis, George Lichtheim, Mary McCarthy, Ignazio Silone, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Philip Toynbee, Lionel Trilling and John Wain – all of whom, currently under the lightest of lockdowns in the free full- facsimile file of Encounter at Unz.org, must be enjoying the latest among their literary laughs.
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