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PARTISAN REVIEW
board of the International Publishing Corporation, the real owners of
those two hundred and more papers. According to Peter Wright's
Spy–
catcher,
King had expressed a willingness to help MiS in a "dirty tricks"
campaign against the Wilson government; he was, according to Wright,
a "long-term contact" of MiS, an association which would have dis–
posed him to be sympathetic to the covert cultural operations of the
CIA.
After the meeting I went to Lord Goodman's flat. Less than an hour
after our arrival there, Anthony Lewis of
The New York Times
was on
the telephone asking for my version of the events at the
Mirror .
I sup–
pose King extracted my vow of silence in order to get his version pub–
lished first.
If
so the plot misfired, for the Sunday papers were full of the
story, and told it in a manner that, without being particularly accurate,
was not biased in favor of my opponents.
The reaction of
Encounter's
contributors to these goings- on were
various. Some had known or strongly suspected the truth already and
saw no reason to stop writing for a journal that offered them space and
a measure of celebrity, especially if they saw little harm in the funding of
a virtuously anti-Communist publication by the CIA. Roy Jenkins
smoothly remarked, "We had all known that it had been heavily subsi–
dized from American sources, and it did not seem to me to be worse
that these should turn out to be a U .S. government agency rather than,
as I had vaguely understood, a Cincinnati gin distiller" - the reference is
to Fleishmann and the bogus Farfleld Foundation.
Not everybody took the matter so calmly. The need to choose sides
might force amicable division in families: Lionel Trilling withdrew an ar–
ticle, Diana Trilling did not. My friend John Wain valued his association
with
Encounter,
not least because he was a freelance writer who needed
a journal where he could write at more length than the weeklies al–
lowed, because he needed the fees, and because he approved of its poli–
tics; on the other hand, he felt that to continue working for the maga–
zine would be disloyal to me, and he wrote to say that he had had to
take a very long walk to make up his mind. He revoked his contract and
dropped out of
Encounter,
though a few years later he was back. I felt
that this compromise left me nothing to complain of; it wasn't my in–
tention that he and his family should suffer out of fidelity to a cause that
was not theirs but mine, and one I should probably never have put my–
self, let alone a friend, in the position of having to defend.
For some time efforts to start another monthly with pure financial
support continued, and I remember waiting in several City anterooms
with Stuart Hampshire, with no result; we had not even Dr. Johnson's
