A House in St John's Wood

by Matthew Spender

  Stephen had missed the foundation of the Congress, which took place in Berlin in June 1950. One of its most active promoters was Melvin Lasky, the editor of Der Monat. As a soldier in the US Army, Lasky had persuaded General Lucius Clay of the Occupying Forces to create this magazine. Lasky’s ideas were clear and forthright. ‘The mere announcement of fact and truth is not enough. The fact must illustrate, must dramatize, must certainly be timed; our truth must be active, must enter the contest, it cannot afford to be an Olympian bystander.’

  When the CCF was founded, banner headlines in the newspapers declared ‘Freedom has Seized the Initiative’. Two British delegates to the Berlin meeting, Hugh Trevor-Roper and Freddie Ayer, had no objection to promoting truth and freedom, but what freedom, on behalf of whom? Both Trevor-Roper and Ayer had worked in British Intelligence during the war. Trevor-Roper had written a book proving that Hitler was dead, for rumours that he had survived persisted for many months. Freddie, of course, had known Stephen since his first marriage. They immediately recognized that a semi-secret institution was being created. They wanted to know who would be in charge. The British government did not have the money for that kind of thing. Did this mean it would be an American operation? When they raised objections, they were told sharply, ‘Don’t rock the boat.’ To which they sang out cheerfully, ‘Whose boat?’

  A few years before the Encounter scandal reached its climax, Freddie told us the story of ‘Don’t rock the boat.’ My mother became obsessed by it. Surely it meant that the Congress for Cultural Freedom was a clandestine American operation? She brooded, but it wasn’t exactly evidence. It was just another piece of gravel that refused to turn into a pearl.

  Lasky, replying to a hostile article of Trevor-Roper’s when he was back in London, wrote a fiery letter to the Manchester Guardian. The confusion of the Berlin conference, with its passionate fights between the delegates, was surely evidence of the kind of freedom to be pursued. ‘We had invited them here precisely because we wanted to indicate the diversity of Western ideas, the rich individuality of democratic culture, and to make possible discussion, argument, criticism – if, in the end, a certain higher democratic unity.’ Did the vague expression ‘democratic unity’ mean corralling a lot of people into one group in order to promote a single idea?

  The main office of the CCF was set up in elegant surroundings in Paris, with Lasky living in a grand flat near by. The Russian émigré composer Nicky Nabokov also moved to France and joined the CCF. He’d met Stephen recently. The Director was Mike Josselson, who was born in Estonia and had moved to Berlin when he was ten, before emigrating to America. He’d worked as a buyer for Gimbel-Saks and had lived for more years in Europe than he’d lived in the USA. His attachment to European culture was as strong as his faith in that of the United States, if not stronger.

  The American Committee for Cultural Freedom, which held its first meeting on 14 December 1950, was from the beginning beyond the control of the Paris office. It was perpetually torn by internal disputes. When Senator Joe McCarthy began his attacks on supposed crypto-communists in the universities and the government, most liberals in the American CCF wanted to resist, but the die-hard anti-Stalinists thought he should be supported. The liberals came to be defined as ‘anti-anti-communists’, a double negative that put them on the defensive.

  Money was also a problem in the New York office. They looked with envious eyes at the CCF office in Paris, where visitors were taken out to fabulous meals. Diana Trilling deduced that, at least outside the USA, the CCF must be subsidized by the CIA, for the simple reason that the Paris office could afford expensive lunches and the New York office could not. Everyone knew that the CIA was prohibited from acting on American soil.

  I take the view that at this stage it was no secret that the CIA was backing the CCF. Nor was it shameful. The vast subsidies of Marshall Aid had put Europe back on its feet, and here at last was an initiative involving culture rather than tractors. It was intolerable that young communists in Italy and France should believe the myth that communist partisans had freed their countries without any help from Uncle Sam, and any initiative challenging this illusion was to be welcomed. If you were a Fulbright scholar and you liked Italy and you were told you were a CIA agent, the best you could do was defend yourself with a joke. Oh sure; and don’t forget John Wayne. He’s also a tool of capitalist imperialism.

  With regard to this early phase of the cultural Cold War, there were even some light-hearted moments. Jason Epstein, later one of the co-founders of the New York Review of Books, was commissioned to go to Nigeria on a weird mission. The Russians were building a deep-water port in Ghana and the CIA wondered whether, since they were there, the Russians would try to brainwash the young by infiltrating Stalinist textbooks into the high schools of Ghana and Nigeria. He was met by two local agents with crew-cuts wearing identical seersucker jackets. So inconspicuous! But the local schools had excellent schoolbooks provided by the British and there were no signs of this particular plot by the Russians, so Epstein just spent time hanging out in bars with the local agents.

  Can I really argue that the financing of culture was cheerfully taken for granted in 1951 and a dozen years later it had turned into a murky secret? I think I can. Shame comes into the picture. By the mid-Sixties, with the Vietnam War and the interference of the CIA in South America, it was no longer possible to be light-hearted about art shows and ballets whose ultimate sponsors were secret government institutions.

  The English branch of the CCF, calling itself the Committee for Cultural Freedom, came into being on 11 January 1951. It acquired about forty members, most of whom were just names on the stationery. Stephen was ostensibly its Chairman, but he was frequently absent on lecture tours in the United States; or in Israel, which he visited for three months from March 1952 in order to write a book about the early days of the country. As far as Stephen was concerned, all that the English Committee achieved in its first two years was to give a few cocktail parties.

  At the end of 1951, Stephen learned from Nicky Nabokov that the Paris CCF had recently purchased Twentieth Century, a British magazine languishing in financial difficulties. Stephen had a connection with this magazine, which he wanted to steer away from badly written political discussions that he found dull. Michael Goodwin, Secretary of the English CCF, thought he was in charge both of the magazine and of the Committee, and he became engaged in a struggle with the Paris office to maintain his position.

  By now, Stephen knew that both the English CCF and Twentieth Century were subsidized by the Paris office, ‘which, in turn, receives its funds from the American Federation of Labor’. Casually, almost indifferently, he qualifies this by adding: ‘To many people, though, it seems that in fact its money comes from the State Department.’

  If he’d followed up on this and tried to find out who was backing the CCF, would he have maintained a connection with it? I think not. But, by not asking, he could establish an understanding based on silence. What he wanted – literature – could run parallel to whatever it was the State Department wanted.

  Stephen in a photo taken in Jerusalem shortly after he’d written a long entry in his diary about the intrigues behind the founding of Encounter.

  Goodwin tried to convince his fellow committee members that they must resist any attempt of the CCF in Paris to give them orders. He bravely used the word ‘dictatorship’, and ran up bills at a grand restaurant, wining and dining those who he thought would help him in his struggle with Nabokov. At a certain point Stephen became so irritated with this behaviour, which eternally postponed the problem of improving the contents of Twentieth Century, that he resigned from the editorial board of the magazine – only to be told he didn’t hold a post that he could resign. The same confusion existed in the English Committee for Cultural Freedom. Apart from the fact that Goodwin was Secretary and Treasurer, nobody seemed to have any official position at all.

  Stephen wrote a dense summary of the infighting as he travelled by b
oat to Israel in March. He hadn’t kept notes in his journal hitherto. The aspect that most interested him, in this retrospective moment, was Goodwin’s personal ambition. ‘He is, to me, a new type of person. Someone whose entire position rests in handling his own public and social relations.’ And he and his cronies were not interested in publishing literature. A colleague of Goodwin’s had written to Paris at some point, ‘You continentals don’t seem to realize that literature and poetry have no appeal to us English.’

  For the moment, writing this on the deck of a ship travelling to Haifa, the whole intrigue involving Goodwin seemed to Stephen merely absurd. Politics don’t come into his account. It was just a question of personalities. It was amusing to see how badly people behave. ‘There is an idea for a novel in this somewhere.’

  When World within World came out in April 1951, Auden wrote him an affectionate but critical letter from New York.

  Have read World within World several times with increasing respect. The only criticism I have is that, while confessing your sins of weakness you pass over in silence your sins of strength, ie of calculation and coldness of heart; and nobody, my dear, who is as successful or can be as funny as you, is without them. The self you portray would never have got invited to all those houses and conferences. We love people because of their warmth and endearing weaknesses but we want to get to know them because of their powers.

  This echoes a letter Wystan had written to him in 1942: ‘I believe that you are a very strong, ruthless character. When you behave badly, it is not due to weakness of will but excess of will, unlike people such as, for example Cyril or me, who, when we behave badly, do so out of fright and a fear of independence.’ This was consistent with Auden’s bizarre categories of human types involving the truly strong, the weak, the man of Will and so on. Auden never reversed his first impression of my father. It was the same as the theory he’d told to Stephen’s governess when he was printing Wystan’s first book of poems twenty-two years previously.

  Cyril Connolly also had doubts about World within World. It was a great book, but what about the man who wrote it? ‘Mr Spender has always seemed to me two people,’ he wrote in his review.

  Let us call them S I and S II. S I is the youthful poet as he appears in Isherwood’s Lions and Shadows, and to others who knew him in the early Thirties. An inspired simpleton, a great big silly goose, a holy Russian idiot, large, generous, gullible, ignorant, affectionate, idealistic – living for friendship and beauty, writing miraculous poems, expecting too much from everybody and from himself on whom he laid charges and responsibilities which he could never carry out. S II was shrewd and ambitious, aggressive and ruthless, a publicity-seeking intellectual full of administrative energy and rentier asperity, a young tiger sharpening its claws on the platform of peace.

  The subtext of Connolly’s review is that poets shouldn’t become distracted by going on too many ‘junkets’. This was the word they used among themselves regarding the friendly chore of attending conferences. Perhaps Cyril meant it as a warning.

  We spent the summer of 1951 in Torri del Benaco, a small fishing village halfway up the eastern shore of Lake Garda in Italy.

  We took over one entire wing of the Albergo Gardesana. Five rooms, including one for my baby sister Lizzie and her nanny. A piano hired in Verona followed us out. The brand-new railings of the brand-new staircase were cut down and rewelded to get the instrument up to Mum’s room on the first floor. Such luxury would be unthinkable today; yet the hotel paid. The whole village participated in moving that piano. They were fascinated, and we were rich. A poet! Of international fame! Today, the fishing skiffs have been replaced by expensive speedboats and Torri is entirely commercial, but in those days there was innocent curiosity regarding these glamorous foreigners. It must have been baffling to think that words on paper could produce such wealth.

  North from the hotel along the lake’s edge, the way became blocked by houses flanking the shore. I was a nimble six-year-old and could work my way round them by jumping on curious stumps poking out from the mud. Someone told me that these were the remains of huts built on stilts in a prehistoric moment, and immediately the word ‘prehistoric,’ or rather ‘pre-high-storic’, acquired immense resonance for me. I imagined gorilla-like ancestors eating shellfish and staring out across the water, chewing morosely.

  In the other direction, towards the wooden Lido, stood the remains of the towers that gave Torri its name. There was a long wall topped with swallowtail battlements. Lizards crept in and out of the flaking plaster of the lower levels, or ventured to cross the sharp gravel at my feet, not yet in those days covered with asphalt. The wall was so long I never got to the end of it.

  After a week I made friends with a gang of boys my own age. I learned Italian quickly and took things at face value, as children do. The sole ambition of these boys was to grow up, leave school and earn money for their families. There was only one available opening: the tile factory a couple of miles down the road towards Verona. The tiles were made by mixing cement with coloured stones and pouring the mixture into long moulds which, after they’d set, were cut into slices like salami. Lots of dust, no extraction fans. It was considered unvirile to wear a mask, but the boys made hats out of old cement bags and wore them to protect their nicely oiled hair. These grinning playmates of mine were so proud of what they did. It was real work. The cement dust was corrosive and many of these early friends died in their forties. Start work at twelve and die at forty. The heroic period of Italy’s ‘economic miracle’.

  Having to cope with the gang of small boys taught me a lot about leadership. There was one occasion as we were mooching around the edge of the port when we came across an unusual sight: two German boys our own age, complete with lederhosen and a proprietary look. My boys became very tense. This was only six years after the war, and it was the first sign they’d seen of tourists from the great black beast on the other side of the Alps. How dare they? Garbled memories of atrocities were poured into my ears. I had to do something. Well, to cut a long story short, I threw them into the bay, one after the other. Their self-confidence vanished and they paddled helplessly towards the shore in their wet leather shorts, like frogs. I felt guilty afterwards. It occurred to me, aged six, that leadership meant followership. I would never have done such a thing on my own.

  All day my friends fished around the port with bamboo rods and filigree catgut and hooks as small as a baby’s fingernail and bait made of spit and the inside of bread rolls. The tiny fish thus caught were cooked by the sun. A rock near by would become a board on which they rested until they stopped moving, then they’d gradually curl up, and later that afternoon the fisher-boy would eat them as if removing pieces from a game of chess.

  The Albergo Gardesana had its own mystique, the opposite of dust and cruelty. There, all was order and cleanliness. Corridors of waxed marble floors and fresh plaster, dark and cold after the brightness outside. In the enormous kitchen I watched Signora Tomei bossing the cook as she made gnocchi at a wooden table, two at a time, one white pellet under each flour-dusted palm, the right going clockwise, the left counter-clockwise. The smells of freshly ironed linen and newly rolled gnocchi were as steadfast as columns in a church. The bossiness of la padrona. Her husband Commendatore Tomei had hair so firmly combed it seemed ironed to the top of his skull. The sacramental quality of service at table. The obligation to sit still, don’t fidget, the food will be here soon. The waitress whose clothes were black and shiny and her white frilly apron stiff with starch. The binary quality of relationships, where to sit at table required manners that you could forget when you met Martino Tomei, their son, later in the street.

  My father worked at a table on a balcony overlooking the lake. In the family album there are photographs of the American poets Robert Lowell and Allen Tate sitting against the background of the picturesque port, so his vivid and varied social life followed him even here. Over the water on the west side of the lake stood a beautiful mountain that look
ed like a fallen profile – of Napoleon, they said, though it could have been anybody. The sounds of the lake were soothing, but next door my mother was grappling with a late Beethoven sonata. I remember her warm-up pieces: Ravel’s Jeu d’eau and Debussy’s Reflets dans l’eau. Perhaps Mum liked their watery association with the lake.

  In late June, a journalist came out from London to interview my father. What was his explanation for the sudden disappearance of Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean, the British diplomats who had defected to Moscow?

  The Case of the Missing Diplomats was perhaps the worst secret service disaster of the 1950s. Nobody knew quite what they’d done, and indeed even today the actual damage has not been quantified, but meanwhile the various agencies of the United States were furious that two such obvious liabilities had been allowed to spy for the Russians for so long. It was living proof that the Brits were ‘soft on communism’. Meanwhile in the English popular press, the ‘old-boy network’ of upper-class clubmen was held responsible for having protected them from exposure and arrest.

  Stephen knew Burgess and liked him. He knew Maclean only by sight. Seeing that the journalist from London had made a long journey, my father spoke openly about Burgess, explaining that everybody was completely at a loss for an explanation. ‘Everybody’ included Stephen’s friend the poet and literary editor John Lehmann, and in his innocence my father showed the journalist a letter he’d just received from Lehmann saying how puzzled they all were. The journalist asked if he could borrow it, promising to keep it confidential. Off he went, and a few days later the letter appeared on the front page of the News Chronicle.