Encounter (magazine)


Encounter was a literary magazine founded in 1953 by poet Stephen Spender and journalist Irving Kristol. The magazine ceased publication in 1991. Published in the United Kingdom, it was a largely Anglo-American intellectual and cultural journal, originally associated with the anti-Stalinist left. The magazine received covert funding from the Central Intelligence Agency, after the CIA and MI6 discussed the founding of an "Anglo-American left-of-centre publication" intended to counter the idea of Cold War neutralism. The magazine was rarely critical of American foreign policy and generally shaped its content to support the geopolitical interests of the United States government.
Spender served as literary editor until 1967, when he resigned; the revelation of the covert CIA funding of the magazine occurred that year. He had heard rumours, but had not been able to confirm. Thomas W. Braden, who headed the CIA's International Organizations Division's operations between 1951 and 1954, said that the money for the magazine "came from CIA, and few outside the CIA knew about it. We had placed one agent in a Europe-based organization of intellectuals called the Congress for Cultural Freedom." Frank Kermode replaced Spender, but he too resigned when it became clear the CIA was involved. Roy Jenkins noted that earlier contributors were aware of U.S. funding, but believed it came from philanthropists including a Cincinnati gin distiller.
Encounter celebrated its greatest years in terms of readership and influence under Melvin J. Lasky, who succeeded Kristol in 1958 and would serve as the main editor until the magazine ceased publication in 1991. Other editors in this period included D. J. Enright.

Background and related intellectual journals

In the Anglo-American context, the weeklies Spectator and the New Statesman, nominally if broadly Tory and Labour, respectively, remain the most prominent such journals in Britain, with both their stateside counterparts, The Nation and The New Republic, on the other hand, said to represent the liberal point of view. Other "little magazines" include the American quarterly Partisan Review, whose inaugural decades of distinction were marked by a devotion to Marxist or Trotskyist ideals in politics and to high modernism in the arts.

Founding and first editors

The launch in October 1953 of Encounter, a monthly Anglo-American journal of politics and culture, was sponsored by the Paris-based Congress for Cultural Freedom. The CCF was an organization of largely centre-left artists and intellectuals founded in 1950. It was dedicated, in line with its title, to countering on behalf of the non-communist West the overtures and influence in culture of the Soviet Union, still under the Communist Party rule of Joseph Stalin until 1953.
The covert partial funding of Encounter by the Central Intelligence Agency, via such American organizations as the Farfield Foundation, and thence to the CCF, was revealed in 1967 in the pages of Ramparts, The New York Times, and the Saturday Evening Post. It has since been a major source of controversy; the actual contents of the magazine, have often figured as relative footnotes. Those show shifting patterns of high-journalistic political allegiance, most notably in the cultural sphere. Shifts on both sides of the Atlantic triggered by the rise of the "neoconservative" tendency in opposition to the prevailing left-liberalism in elite opinion are visible.
The choices for the first two Encounter co-editors, the American political essayist Irving Kristol and the English poet Stephen Spender were telling, and in retrospect can be seen to have set in template much of the course of the magazine's evolution even over its final twenty-three years succeeding the resignation in 1967, after the CIA-funding revelation, of Spender.

Irving Kristol and the New York intellectuals

Irving Kristol edited the political articles in Encounter from 1953 until 1958, and though still a self-described liberal then, was already laying the foundations of his eventual stance, from the late 1970s until his death in 2009, as the "godfather of neoconservatism". Blooded in the legendary alcoves of the City College of New York cafeterias of the late 1930s, where Marxist and Trotskyist and Stalinist squabbled and subdivided far into the night, and eventually after their BAs, even further into the pages of Partisan Review, Kristol had already, as of 1952, in his writings in Commentary during the McCarthy years, set the tone for the neo-populist critique of liberal "new class" elites he would later seed during his almost forty-year stint as founding co-editor of The Public Interest, the public-policy quarterly.

Stephen Spender and the English literary legacy

Stephen Spender cut a larger figure in strictly cultural circles, though with strong political engagements of his own – he was, at 44, one of England's leading and eventually-canonic men of letters of his generation, having been a prime constituent of the fabled 1930s "MacSpaunday" generation of young English poets whose other members included Louis MacNeice, W.H. Auden, and C. Day Lewis. During his brief Communist phase in the 1930s, he had served in the Spanish Civil War with the anti-Franco International Brigades, and later contributed to the essay collection The God That Failed edited by Richard Crossman. The other contributors who had become disillusioned with Communism included Louis Fischer, André Gide, Arthur Koestler, Ignazio Silone, and Richard Wright; Koestler and Silone would in turn become from its outset regular contributors to Encounter. Spender's apprenticeship in the editor's chair had come over a decade before when he served as deputy to the English aesthete Cyril Connolly in editing, for its first two years, the influential literary monthly Horizon, many of whose writers would show up in Encounter in due course throughout the 1950s and after.
Spender's range of cultural contacts, in and out of the academic world, combined with the high-stakes sense of Cold War cultural mission driving the Paris-based CCF, enabled Encounter to publish, especially during its first fourteen years prior to the revelation of the early CIA funding and the high-profile defections so provoked, an international range of poets, short-story writers, novelists, critics, historians, philosophers and journalists, from both sides of the Iron Curtain. The long tail of the Bloomsbury, World War I and Bright Young Things generations of the early 20th century was a marked feature of the early years of Spender's tenure atop the Encounter literary pages, chockablock with assorted Graveses, Huxleys, Mitfords, Russells, Sitwells, Stracheys, Waughs and Woolfs – Virginia in posthumous diary form, her surviving husband Leonard as political essayist and reviewer.

Celebrity dons

Encounter provided a prime forum for celebrity academics from the faculties of Oxford, Cambridge, and London—Isaiah Berlin, Hugh Trevor-Roper, and A. J. P. Taylor among them—who discussed European history and the great thinkers helping to shape it. Trevor-Roper launched noted attacks, one on Arnold Toynbee's bestselling ten-volume Study of History, and on The Origins of the Second World War by A. J. P. Taylor.
Celebrated early outings by Encounter belletrists came when Nancy Mitford and Evelyn Waugh playfully debated over successive issues the fine points of upper-class vs. lower-class English usage, as did C. P. Snow and others, if less playfully, Snow's depiction within of a yawning chasm of mind between the "Two Cultures" of the hard sciences and the humanities. Among the magazine's early luminaries in aesthetics and the history of art were Stuart Hampshire and Richard Wollheim.

Political contours

On the political side of Encounter, Kristol brought on board many members of the group usually known as The New York Intellectuals, both journalist, literary and polemical or social-scientific, among whom he had passed the years of his apprenticeship: the sociologists Daniel Bell and Nathan Glazer, who, respectively, would later serve as his successive co-editors at The Public Interest, Sidney Hook, and, not least, the ideological hummingbird and scourge of "Midcult" Dwight Macdonald, who spent a year in London as Associate Editor, a tenure with which he would later attempt to make a retrospective reckoning in his "Politics" column in Esquire for June 1967 in what he would describe several months later as his "Confessions of an Unwitty CIA Agent". Mainline Americans for Democratic Action-style left-liberal Democrats such as Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. and John Kenneth Galbraith rounded out the American contours in politics, while the early English contributions in politics came largely from the social-democratic, anti-Communist, anti-unilateral nuclear disarmament wing of the Labour fold, as represented by C.A.R. Crosland , R.H.S. Crossman, and David Marquand, with such occasional heterodox and erudite Conservative journalists as Peregrine Worsthorne and the young Henry Fairlie broadening the coverage.
Encounter provoked controversy, with some British commentators arguing the journal took an excessively deferential stand towards United States foreign policy. Cambridge literary critic Graham Hough described the magazine as "that strange Anglo-American nursling" which had "a very odd concept of culture indeed". The Sunday Times referred to Encounter as "the police-review of American-occupied countries".
Discussing the Encounter of the 1950s, Stefan Collini wrote that although Encounter was not "narrowly sectarian in either political or aesthetic terms, its pages gave off a distinct whiff of Cold War polemicizing".

Melvin Lasky and the 1960s

The transition to Kristol's replacement on the political side of Encounter in 1958 by Melvin J. Lasky was seamless, and a key factor both in the broadening of the magazine's international scope to include a deeper extension of its European coverage, from the Soviet bloc not least, as well as its coverage of the newly decolonized nations of Africa and Asia. After combat with the 7th army and postwar service in Berlin under military governor Lucius Clay, Lasky founded the German-language monthly Der Monat, and, amid an adult life spent largely ever since in Germany, was enlisted in 1955 back in New York to edit the first two numbers of The Anchor Review, an annual published by the new Anchor Books imprint of Doubleday, fruit of the 1950s quality-paperback revolution spearheaded by Jason Epstein, and whose international roster of high-humanist contributors – Auden, Connolly, Koestler, Silone – made it resemble a concurrent mini-Encounter.

Ties to Eastern Bloc resistance

During his 32 years at Encounter, Lasky, with his balding head and Van Dyke beard centrally cast as an inverted Lenin, proved instrumental in the long and dedicated cultivation of contacts from among the persecuted writers of Poland, East Germany, Hungary, Romania, the Soviet Union, and then-Yugoslavia, and devoted extensive front-cover coverage throughout the 1960s and 1970s to the judicial travails in Russia of Andrei Sinyavsky, Yuli Daniel, Joseph Brodsky and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, and in Poland to the case of Leszek Kołakowski, the philosopher exiled to the West in 1968 by the Polish Communist Party, and who became one of the magazine's defining contributors, whose blend of intellectual history and anti-Soviet militancy made him a sort of Slavic cross between Isaiah Berlin and Sidney Hook. A special 65-page anthology in April 1963, "New Voices in Russian Writing," presented, with the aid of translations by poets W. H. Auden, Robert Conquest, Stanley Kunitz and Richard Wilbur, a selection of the latest works of the rising generation of Russian poets and short-story writers, among them Andrei Voznesensky, Yevgeny Yevtushenko, and Vasily Aksyonov.

Focus on decolonized nations

As for the nations of the so-called "developing world", thanks in part to Spender's early attention to matters echt-English, the aftermath of the British Empire not least, Indian affairs, especially as they involved writers and intellectuals, were prominent on the contents page, with the heterodox essayist and memoirist Nirad Chaudhuri among the earliest of the magazine's long-serving correspondents from the subcontinent. Lasky, for his part, having written and published Africa For Beginners in 1962, made a point of devoting a special issue to that continent, along with others devoted to Asia and Latin America.

Changing times

Thanks in no small part to its glittering cultural content and the temper of the times it reflected, virtually the whole of the decade of the 1960s would prove to be the high-water mark of Encounters time on the world newsstand. As distinguished symposiasts from diverse spheres debated in its political sections such matters as the advisability of Britain's entry into the European Economic Community, the expansion of its tax-funded higher-education system, the aftermath of empire and the strains of assimilating the influx of immigrants from the decolonized nations, and the latest false dawn for socialists in Cuba, a rising generation of critics and scholars engaged the newly arrived high thinkers of the age – Clifford Geertz, R.D. Laing, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Konrad Lorenz, György Lukács, Marshall McLuhan – and speculated on the prospect of other false dawns in culture rather than politics. In the case of the imagined Arcadia presaged by the new wave of "high pornography", reformers like Olympia Press founder Maurice Girodias weighed in for the defense, with conservative sociologist Ernest van den Haag countering with a measured defense of the social need for both pornography and censorship, with the young George Steiner, a Holocaust-haunted polymath of great erudition and mannered style, and a regular as of 1966 in both Encounter and the books pages of The New Yorker, dissenting from what to him seemed the neo-totalitarian import entailed by the literal stripping of literary characters of any vestige of privacy, in contrast to the more artful metaphoric indirections of such masters as Dante.

English poets

Encounter was eclectic in the poets it published. Its literary co-editors generally had a background in poetry, with Spender succeeded by the literary critic Frank Kermode. There were the critics, novelists and poets Nigel Dennis and D. J. Enright, and the poet Anthony Thwaite. Poets affiliated from the 1950s with The Movement —Kingsley Amis, Robert Conquest, Donald Davie, Enright, Thom Gunn, Elizabeth Jennings, Philip Larkin, and John Wain–contributed to the magazine, in many cases, in fiction and in essays also. Conquest, an independent historian of the Stalin years in Russia, held a skeptical attitude toward facile left-liberalism. Amis published in Encounter in 1960 an article against the expansion of higher education, that proved influential.

Left-liberals vs. early neoconservatives

The more explicit development of that very skepticism, as it happened, came to mark the evolution of the political side of Encounter as it entered the 1970s and beyond. The ideological fissures in the world of Anglo-American political/literary journals began to see hairline crack turn to outright cleavage in the wake of the rise of the neoconservative movement. The biweekly New York Review of Books, founded in 1963, began to enlist from its outset a regular roster of the cream of the very sort of prestige British humanists and scientific essayists who had so distinguished themselves in the pages of Encounter in its first ten years, creating a rival outlet for them whose greater prominence in the much larger American market would only deepen after the 1967 high-profile resignations of Spender and Kermode, both of them at the very summit of Anglo-American literary life. The then largely intra-Democratic rifts issuing from reactions to, for instance, the Vietnam War, student radicalism and the New Left, urban strife, the Great Society, the rise of Black Power and affirmative action, played out on the contents pages of the highbrow journals in a sharpening of sides among the political contributors to the liberal-to-radical New York Review in opposition to the post-1970 rightward shift of Commentary under Norman Podhoretz; the New York Review had already as of its third year shed the future neoconservatives who had marked its first two years. Another sign of the times came in 1972, when Daniel Bell, firmly of the social-democratic, anti-Stalinist, Old Left/Menshevik tendency, resigned from his co-editorship of The Public Interest, rather than strain his long friendship with Irving Kristol, who had recently left the Democratic fold and come out for Richard Nixon, easing into his final four decades in the ideological orbit of, e.g., the editorial page of The Wall Street Journal. Some among the nascent neoconservatives, like Bell's successor Nathan Glazer, would remain loyal Democrats, while others would form the advance intellectual guard of the Reagan Democrats who played a pivotal role in the 1980 and 1984 elections.

Autonomy of art

At Encounter these cleavages played out in a rather less ruptured, more gradual, more diversified and less overtly hostile manner. For one thing, its always-extensive literary pages retained a back-of-the-book autonomy, above the roiling polemical waters of the day, of a sort increasingly rare over time in Podhoretz's Commentary, in which the multiple-front assaults on the New Left, the counterculture, radical feminism, Cold War dovishness, and other such deviations came to assume a monolithic editorial supremacy — "culture war is hell and there are no aesthetes in a foxhole", as Franklin Foer put it in 1997. By contrast, Encounter retained until its end of days a pronounced overlap with the artistically-conservative focus, in both topics and often in contributors, of the formally artistic and historical side of the New York Review — divers dons from Oxbridge and London assaying the latest English literary biographies, the latest historians' "storms over the gentry" of seventeenth-century England, and, as always, new poetry and fiction.
Even in its formally political content, though, Encounter, no doubt in part as the result of its base in London rather than in New York, played something of an ongoing mediator's role vis-a-vis the squabbling left-liberals and neocon hatchlings, helping keep it in demand and clean and dry atop mid-Atlantic coffee tables otherwise subject stateside to the detritus of splashed cabernet and flung brie.
Though the student revolts of the late 1960s drew sharp rebukes in Encounter from the likes of Sidney Hook, and Robert Nisbet, the editors did not see fit to throw out the humanist baby with the radical bathwater, and so, for example, the socialist critic Irving Howe, editor of Dissent and an Old Left stalwart, was still, with such contributions as a discerning essay on Zola, still very much representative of a central tradition within of socially engaged criticism that was to those in the Encounter orbit, at once critical of the injustices of the status quo yet firmly anti-fanatic, anti-totalitarian and fiercely resistant to forms of radicalism that, especially in the academy, sought to "revise" Stalin back into favor.

1970s

The economic sclerosis of the 1970s, afflicting all the world's advanced democracies with a corrosive blend of decade-long inflation, sector-wide industrial strikes, overburdened welfare states expanded under pressure of an affluence-driven "revolution of rising expectations", the overturning of the supremacy of Keynesian economics under a simultaneous inflation and recession long thought inconceivable, and the resulting unraveling of the postwar, bipartisan social-democratic consensus – such was the stuff of a good portion of the debate on domestic affairs within Encounter throughout the 1970s. Those from the center-left addressing such topics included the veteran analysts of capitalism Andrew Shonfield and Robert Skidelsky, biographer of Keynes, and economic historian of Depression Britain. Among those from the developing New Right to assail eminent thinkers leftward was the Australian-born LSE political scientist Kenneth Minogue, among whose many contributions was a stinging rebuke to John Kenneth Galbraith for offering, in his 1977 documentary series The Age of Uncertainty, far more wit than wisdom – a charge to which the Harvard economist replied, wittily. Ferdinand Mount, novelist and political writer, then in his thirties and later to serve as a Thatcherite policy adviser early the next decade, did regular double duty as political essayist and book reviewer. And thirty years after The Road to Serfdom had made the name of Friedrich A. Hayek known among the non-economist educated public, the Austrian-born thinker, in the decade that saw his writings earn him both the Nobel Prize in Economics and a starring role in the education of the English prime minister newly arrived at its end, contributed four essays in the history of ideas, among them one on "The Miscarriage of the Democratic Ideal" and another on his cousin Ludwig Wittgenstein. Shirley Robin Letwin took the American liberal legal philosopher Ronald Dworkin to task for promoting judicial activism in his signature work Taking Rights Seriously, while the young conservative philosopher Roger Scruton, a recent Encounter hand, examined the cultural roots of latter-day ills, and economist EJ Mishan assayed the parasitic moral hazards arising from economic growth. And lively debate over the North-South divide, the Brandt Report, and western foreign aid to the Third World was on hand courtesy of the prestigious development economist Peter Bauer and his critics.

Hazards of detente

In foreign affairs in the 1970s, Encounters prime interests, along with Euro-terrorism and Euro-communism, included the strains upon the detente with the Soviet Union inaugurated during the Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford years posed by the military buildup and underlying intentions, conventional and nuclear, of the Soviet Union, the latter's renewed adventurism-by-proxy in the Middle East and in Africa, and its ongoing abuses in human rights and in the coerced psychiatric treatment of dissidents. One of the prime set-pieces among the hawk-vs-dove needle-matches underway came with a six-installment series in which the eminent diplomat-historian — and "containment" theorist of the first years of the Cold War — George F. Kennan, then in his early seventies, squared off against his critics in the form of several interviews he had granted to George Urban of Radio Free Europe, with detailed rejoinders — and another mutual follow-up round — in succeeding issues by the veteran historian of the Russian empire at the University of London's School of Slavonic and Eastern European Studies, Hugh Seton-Watson, by Richard Pipes of Harvard — the latter due in several years for a post helping Ronald Reagan plot strategy toward the Soviet Union — and Leopold Labedz, Polish-born editor of Survey, a quarterly journal of Soviet-bloc affairs. The exchanges, marked each time on the part of Kennan's critics by a ritual and almost incantatory deference to his stature and role as almost Old Testament wise man, grew increasingly testy on both sides, with Seton-Watson accusing Kennan of allowing his aristocratic-utopian hand-wringing over Western cultural degeneracy to vanquish his sense of the moral urgency and legitimacy of the west's need to better defend itself against a newly hardened foe, with Pipes accusing him of an overly-optimistic estimate of relaxation in Soviet military strategy since the death of Stalin, charges amplified by Labedz. Kennan, for his part in reply, fired back from several angles with a long-running complaint of his, perhaps best summarized as: nobody understands me.

Rising talent on the literary side

The range of literary figures, some young and others established, whose first contributions to Encounter came during the 1970s included novelists Martin Amis, Italo Calvino, Elias Canetti, Margaret Drabble, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, Paul Theroux, D.M. Thomas, William Trevor, critics and essayists Clive James, Gabriel Josipovici, Bernard Levin, David Lodge, Jonathan Raban, Wilfrid Sheed, Gillian Tindall, poets Alan Brownjohn, Douglas Dunn, Gavin Ewart, James Fenton, Seamus Heaney, Erica Jong, Michael Longley, John Mole, Blake Morrison, Andrew Motion, Tom Paulin, Peter Porter, Peter Reading, Peter Redgrove, Vernon Scannell, George Szirtes, and R. S. Thomas.

1980s and end of the Cold War

The final decade for Encounter, the 1980s, was marked by regular elegy for old and distinguished friends of the magazine who had aged along with it, chief among them the Hungarian-born novelist and polymath Arthur Koestler and the influential French political philosopher and journalist Raymond Aron. Longtime social-democrat friend of the magazine Sidney Hook died at 86 in July 1989, missing by less than six months the peaceful revolutions in Eastern Europe, previewed his memoir Out of Step: An Unquiet Life in the Twentieth Century in Encounter in the mid-1980s. As Brezhnev gave way to Andropov, then to Chernenko and finally to Gorbachev, such contributors as former Labour cabinet secretary Alun Chalfont were dedicated to exposing what they saw as the errors of assorted unilateralist disarmers in the peace movement and foes of nuclear deterrence such as the English historian E.P. Thompson, as the NATO agreement to counteract Soviet SS-20s in the European theater took shape. The Polish resistance still covertly active after the crushing of the Solidarity trade union movement by martial law received ongoing coverage. Encounters range of political contributors edged closer to the stateside neoconservative orbit found in the 1980s grouped round, such as Commentary, the editorial page of The Wall Street Journal, and the American Spectator.
Edward Pearce, a regular contributor to the magazine in the 1980s, claims that Encounter's editors reassigned him from political writing to theatre criticism after he repeatedly used his Encounter column to criticise the Thatcher government.
Though the literary side of Encounter throughout the 1980s featured a far smaller proportion of writers at the forefront of their national literatures as had its 1960s incarnation under Stephen Spender, and a 1983 change in cover design scrapped its austere "Continental" template in favor of a glossy look more characteristic of proverbially "slick" periodicals familiar from American newsstands, given the lofty heights from which it would recede, it still sustained its nonpolitical autonomy and ample proportions when the English poet Anthony Thwaite was replaced in 1985 by Richard Mayne, an English journalist, broadcaster, translator from the French, the magazine's Paris correspondent and "M." columnist, and former assistant to Jean Monnet, architect of the European Economic Community.
Encounter published its final issue in September 1990, almost a year after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of Communist rule in the European satellites, and a year before the largely peaceful demise of Soviet rule itself. The magazine's end was brought about due to its increasing debts.

Recognition

Thanks to the uncommon distinction, disciplinary and geographic range of the contributors it brought together in one venue, especially during the years 1953–67 prior to the CIA-funding revelations, Encounter earned regard as a high-water mark in postwar periodical literature. In a review of recent work by Stephen Spender in The New Republic in 1963, the American poet John Berryman wrote, "I don't know how Spender has got so many poems done, especially because he does many things besides write poetry: he is a brilliant and assiduous editor." In the early 1970s, the American monthly Esquire said of Encounter that it was "probably not as good now as when it was backed by the CIA, but still the best general monthly magazine going." In the late 1970s, The Observer wrote that "Encounter is a magazine which constantly provides, in any given month, exactly what a great many of us would have wished to read... there is no other journal in the English-speaking world which combines political and cultural material of such consistently high quality", while the International Herald Tribune called Encounter "one of the few great beacons of English-language journalism... a model of how to present serious writing." In a review in 2011 in The New Republic of a posthumous collection of essays by Irving Kristol, Franklin Foer wrote that "Encounter... deserve a special place in the history of the higher journalism... was some of the best money that the ever spent. The journal, published out of London, was an unlikely coupling of the New York intelligentsia with their English counterparts—an exhilarating intermarriage of intellectual cultures. I am not sure that any magazine has ever been quite so good as the early Encounter, with its essays by Mary McCarthy and Nancy Mitford, Lionel Trilling and Isaiah Berlin, Edmund Wilson and Cyril Connolly. In his typically self-effacing manner, Kristol heaped credit upon Spender for the achievement."

Most prolific authors

The following is a list of all authors who appeared in Encounter at least ten times: