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tralian Keats, dead in his twenties. A fictitious sister was said to have dis–
covered the exiguous but complete works among Malley's posthumous
papers and sent them to the editor with a letter asking for an opinion.
He thought they were wonderful. There followed a great fuss, especially
when the newspapers were told of the fraud. The story is complicated by
the fact that some of the poems weren't rubbish; the editor was not al–
together stupid to accept them. They reached England and were praised
by Herbert Read; in the United States they charmed the youthful John
Ashbery and the youthful Kenneth Koch. They were vigorously defended
by the Australian painter Sydney Nolan, who for the rest of his increas–
ingly distinguished career never wavered in his view, and to this day there
are those who strongly defend Malley's reputation. Paradoxically, it has
probably outlasted McAuley's own.
The hoax and its exposure were in my view rather sadistically man–
aged, but the whole affair left one in no doubt about the toughness of
McAuley's character and the extent of his talent. When writing under his
own name, he was a serious poet and a potent though conservative in–
fluence on Australian intellectual life. In later years he moved steadily to
the right, converted to Roman Catholicism, and became an exception–
ally committed anti-Communist: hence his editorship of a journal spon–
sored by the Congress for Cultural Freedom.
Of course all these editors were, in different degrees, anti-Commu–
nist, and some, though not necessarily all, knew from the beginning the
truth about the foundations which supported their magazines. Irving
Kristol and Stephen Spender, the first co-editors of
Encounter,
have
consistently and plausibly denied such knowledge . In any case, the work
of the congress could be represented as highly respectable, necessary to
political health, and even, up to a point, disinterested.
Encounter
parties
were distinguished by the presence of politicians from the left of the
right and the right of the left; the magazine was anti-Communist, cer–
tainly, an exponent of Cold War politics without doubt, but allowing
for the pressure this adherence necessarily placed on editorial policy, still
defensible as an organ ofjudicious and well-informed commentary. Most
readers, asked to place it politically, would have opted for the moderate
left.
Melvin Lasky, who succeeded Kristol, was a man of similar forma–
tion, the product of City College of New York in the late 1930s, its
political and largely Marxist heyday. While still attached to the U .S.
Army in Berlin, he had edited
Der Monat,
an official publication dedi–
cated to putting the American case in the tense, divided postwar city,
and played a part in the establishment of the congress - or, as Neil Berry
