A House in St John’s Wood: In Search of My Parents. Matthew Spender

she was armed. She could ward it off.

      Now I couldn’t paddle but only stab the water as if the shark was already there, under the bobbing rubber which obviously provided no defence except at least he couldn’t smell us, but if my fist and spade flashed in and out fast enough, maybe he’d be discouraged and leave us alone. And now there were sharks all around us. I could see them under ends of the boats moored in the bay where the water was less choppy, backlit by rays that diffused into spangles of sunlight all around them. I knew these were the rudders of the boats we were passing because they were symmetrically poised and motionless under every boat, harder than any fish and more purposefully angled. But they were rudders and sharks simultaneously, for my mother was in a state of anticipated triumph and paddling furiously and I was doing my best. ‘Come on! Just a bit more!’ And we won. We were on to the hard lip of the bay of Portofino just as Alison ran up, my mother waving a towel in the air and skipping to prove we’d done it.

      My mother in north Italy in about 1949.

       9

       YOUR SINS OF WEAKNESS

      THE CONGRESS FOR Cultural Freedom came into being between 1949 and 1950. It elevated and then nearly destroyed my father. It provided him with the magazine that he’d been trying to create since the war, and Encounter grew to become perhaps the most influential cultural magazine in English. But when in the mid-Sixties it turned out that both the Congress and all its projects had been financed by the CIA, the results for him were devastating.

      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.