WALTER LAQUEUR
195
Eastern European countries such as Poland.
In
London,
Encounter
faced difficulties of a different kind.
It
flourished
to a much greater degree and for a while, as the flagship of the Congress,
had the largest circulation of any serious British magazine. Irving Kristol
was in many respects an ideal editor, yet with all his Anglophilia, he did
not quite succeed in overcoming the antagonism of the British literary
intelligentsia, which resented America and foreign influences in general.
Many sympathized with
The New Statesman
(still going strong in the
1950s); others pretended to be eccentrics. The atmosphere of supercili–
ousness and negativism, of snobbism and arrogance was not promising for
a journal like
Encounter.
It
tried to accommodate itself to this mood: its
most famous article in the early years was Nancy Mitford's "British Aris–
tocracy," on "U" and "non-U," and while Evelyn Waugh and Graham
Greene did not, of course, become contributors, Malcolm Muggeridge
was one of the stalwarts. Whatever the stature of some of the British liter–
ary elite in the history of literature, to a movement devoted to the cause
of cultural freedom they were useless. Kristol mixed with the wrong
crowd - but there was no other crowd, at least not among the literati.
This was not, of course, the whole story, and if the Labour Party has
distanced itself in recent years from public ownership, much of the
groundwork was done by
Encounter
during the fifties and sixties. There
were some immensely gifted writers among the British academics, but
there was no real support for a cosmopolitan journal. Intellectual fashion
preferred
The Private Eye
and occasionally
The Spectator.
For serious maga–
zines such as those that had existed in earlier generations, there was no
longer much demand.
Encounter
provided more entertainment than sub–
stance to an audience that had no appetite for substance.
It
published
interesting and widely-read articles, but, as in the case of
Preuves,
its influ–
ence and reputation were greater outside of the country in which it was
published. And, as in the case of
Der Monat, Encounter
did not find a suc–
cessor. Since its demise there has been no serious political and literary
journal in Britain.
I did not regularly read the other Congress magazines, but
Quadrant
in Australia was among the more successful.
Forum,
published in Vienna,
was pretty much the work of one writer, Friedrich Torberg, whose in–
volvement with the Congress has recently been related in a critical,
unfriendly biography by Frank Tichey. The splenetic Torberg, one of the
greatest satirists in the German language, was largely devoted to his pri–
vate feuds with other writers. At the age of twenty, he had published an
outstanding novel about the suicide of a high-school student,
Der Schueler
Gerber hat absolviert,
followed five years later by
Die MannschaJt,
one of the
best German novels with competitive sports as a background.
In
later
