FRANK KERMODE
665
ing what it was, his speech was not received with acclaim, indeed few
took any notice of it; but it seemed to me good that somebody had
produced arguments that could leaven the lump of a conference which
was otherwise as dull as it was grand, because it was committed to a
preordained consensus.
When the talking was over, I drove back to London with Beaton
and asked him to write up his speech for
Encounter.
Surprised and
amused, he asked me what made me think there was the slightest chance
of such an article getting into the journal. Remembering the co-editorial
pact, I said I thought there was every chance. As soon. as possible I spoke
to my co-editor, fazing him for once. After reflection he said that it
could be done only if a counter-argument were given equal space in the
same issue. This extra piece, a specific refutation of Beaton's, would of
course be additional to all the other pro-Europe reports of the confer–
ence. In the end, of course, nothing was done, and I lapsed into my
usual useless activity, writing this and that myself, reading dozens of
hopeless unsolicited contribution and commissioning reviews, some of
these by writers soon to be celebrated, such as David Lodge, and A. S.
Byatt. But I can't delude myself into thinking that I revitalized the non–
political part of the magazine.
This side of it didn't much interest Lasky, though he looked it over
benignly. He was, as I wasn't, a journalist. Whether they belonged to
the front or the back, he liked articles that could cause a bit of a stir,
like the one about U and non-U language, or John Sparrow's demon–
stration that the prosecution in the trial of
Lady Chatterley's Lover
had
missed the buggery episode; he took pains to ensure that such pieces got
a great deal of advance publicity.
Encounter
was always in his thoughts.
He scanned the press of England, Europe, and the United States for the
revealing one-liners or ten-liners he gathered into the small inset boxes
that enlivened the pages. He talked tirelessly to foreign journalists and
politicians. In rare moments of leisure he worked at his book on revolu–
tions. He was never anybody's simple mouthpiece, and if his politics
closely resembled the politics of the State Department, that was because
he believed the State Department had on the whole, and conveniently,
got things right.
I'd been on
Encounter
for less than two years when the great crisis
developed. It was in part a reflection of the larger turmoil of American
politics, the war in Vietnam and the civil-rights movement, subjects on
which
Encounter
had tended to be reticent. Conor Cruise O'Brien had
already in 1963 begun questioning its disinterestedness, and in 1966 he
gave a lecture in New York which explicitly accused the magazine of
