FRANK KERMODE
Life at
Encounter
By the 1960s I was writing for papers on both sides of the ocean. For
some years I'd been doing pieces for
Encounter
and knew the editors
quite well. In 1965, when Stephen Spender retired from the co-editor–
ship and went to America, Melvin Lasky, the other editor, asked me to
take his place.
This was an unexpected and in some ways barely credible invitation,
and my decision to accept was delayed and uneasy; such delay and unease
is a familiar prelude to my doing things I shouldn't. It may be difficult
for those who do not remember
Encounter
in the 1950s and 1960s, hav–
ing perhaps seen it only during its long half-life between 1967 and its
closure in 1991, to understand its influence. It was started in 1953 with
the backing of the Congress for Cultural Freedom, a gentlemanly Cold
War organization supported by American foundations, some of which
later turned out to be merely "fronts" for the CIA. The congress so lav–
ishly endowed conferences in pleasant places that it became a well–
known gravy train, and some who later admitted or boasted that they
had always known of its covert connections took full advantage of the
congress's open hand.
Although there was a good deal of gossipy conjecture about it, the
funding of
Encounter
and its sister journals -
P,euves
in France,
Tempo
Presente
in Italy,
Cuadernos
in Spain, and
Quadrant
in Australia - was still
at this time obscure. Anybody who wanted to call it in any sense disrep–
utable had to accommodate the fact that the editors of these publica–
tions were all intellectuals . in good standing, for example Nicola
Chiaromonte in Italy and in Australia James McAuley.
I suppose McAuley was a typical choice for a congress-funded editor–
ship. As a young man he had achieved a strange celebrity as part-author
of the poems of Ern Malley, and could therefore be said to have been
the prime mover in one of the most successful hoaxes in literary history.
As it happened, I had known him in Sydney in the last year of the war
and had a close-up view of the whole Em Malley affair. The bogus po–
ems were accepted by an avant-garde editor of whom McAuley and his
associate, Harold Stewart, disapproved; the victim was comprehensively
taken in, and the poems were cried up as the work of a sort of Aus-
