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PARTISAN REVIEW
picking up the tab: it was Cecil King at the
Daily Mi"or.
Neil Berry al–
leges that this slightly odd relationship was the result of a deal encour–
aged by Josselson, who was beginning to be anxious about all the leaks
and therefore instructed his little fleet of monthlies to put what looked
like clear water between themselves and the fake foundations that fi–
nanced them through the congress.
My attempted inquiries were everywhere met with caution, and I
found out nothing substantial enough to be weighed against undisputed
professions of purity. So I joined, uneasily, but with some hope of en–
joying my editorial role, minor though it was. Lasky was anxious to ex–
aggerate my contribution, putting my name, on the grounds that
"K"comes before "L," ahead of his on the masthead, but I did succeed in
having this changed. Even when installed in my office I found that the
whole
Encounter
operation remained somehow mysterious. I could never
discover the circulation of the journal, or anything substantial about its
finances, and I suspected, rightly as it turned out, that the young women
who worked in the office were better informed than
I.
I took no part
in the makeup of the issues and, as with my sojourn in the Navy, it
would have made very little difference if I'd never turned up at all.
My reaction to this unsatisfying situation should have been to get
out; in fact, it was to seek more control. Lasky agreed that if either of us
wanted to argue strongly for an article, the other would not veto its in–
clusion even if he didn't like it. This pact was tested when the congress
organized at a Brighton hotel a huge conference on Europe. The State
Department, the Congress for Cultural Freedom, and nearly all the
British who were invited were strong advocates of Britain's entry into
the Common Market. The speakers were great folks from all over and
included the large Bavarian Franz-Josef Strauss. There was, I remember,
only one eloquent dissident speaker, a journalist named Leonard Beaton
from
The Manchester Guardian.
Beaton argued that Britain's entry into Europe would be very bad
for Commonwealth relations; for example, the agriculture of New
Zealand had been tailored to British requirements and might be fatally
distorted if the system of Commonwealth preference had to be discon–
tinued, as it would. ("How many New Zealanders are there? Three mil–
lion?" asked my co-editor, derisively echoing Stalin's remark about the
Pope's divisions.) More remarkably, Beaton contested many of the dismal
predictions produced by marketeers who represented entry as the only
possible cure for the British economic malaise. He claimed, giving what
sounded like plausible reasons, that these sages had deliberately underval–
ued the postwar performance of the British economy. The occasion be-
