ABSTRACT
By 1958, Encounter was an institution, the Congress was expanding its reach to Africa and Latin America, and Josselson and Hunt had settled into their routines of sharing the Congress’s managerial burdens and the secret of its financial arrangements. But beneath these seemingly placid waters was perhaps the greatest crisis of Josselson’s tenure. Once again, the explosive dynamics between Encounter’s editors were to blame – but, this time, the spat became public, and very nearly cost the Congress its reputation. During the 1955 Milan Congress, Josselson had made the fateful decision to hire Dwight Macdonald to join Kristol and Spender as an editorial triumvirate. Josselson had hoped that hiring Macdonald while keeping Kristol on would placate all the factions involved, and for the duration of Macdonald’s editorship, Josselson’s gamble seemingly paid off. But in February 1958, shortly after Macdonald’s editorship concluded, he submitted his essay “America! America!” to Encounter expecting carte blanche. When Spender and Kristol accepted the piece, wavered, then rejected it, Macdonald publicly blamed the “front-office Metternichs” in Paris who valued toadying to the Congress’s putative foundation sponsors over preserving editorial freedom.1 There was some truth to Macdonald’s claim: Josselson was unambiguously behind the decision to axe Macdonald’s piece. But Josselson’s motive was not to preserve a rosy picture of America or to please his employers in the Agency. Rather, Josselson persuaded Spender and Kristol to axe “America! America!” for quite a different reason: to preserve his longstanding plans to extricate the Congress from the CIA. In retrospect, hiring a man whose self-proclaimed “greatest vice is my easily aroused indignation” to edit a magazine whose self-proclaimed function was to serve the aims of the Congress was bound to end badly.2 Encounter’s editors, the Executive Committee, and the Paris office had agreed the magazine’s purpose was to make inroads against neutralism in Asia. But Macdonald was temperamentally incapable of embracing any cause for long.3 In two decades, he had run through Communism, Trotskyism, anarchism, pacifism, anti-Stalinism, nudism, hedonism, and elitism. “At any particular moment, he is completely cocksure of
next historical moment on a new, erratic tack, and often as dogmatic in the new stance as in the old.”4 Also auguring poorly was Macdonald’s career-long talent for provoking editorial disputes and resigning with a bang. “Nature and man had conspired to give Macdonald the voice of a North American screech owl, the beard of a Russian Revolutionist, and the iconoclastic mind of a Fortune magazine writer,” observed novelist Harry Roskolenko. Macdonald quit the latter when Henry Luce (whom he dubbed “Il Luce”) asked him to revise a story on steelworkers to omit Lenin and add more sympathy for management.5 When Macdonald’s comrades in the Socialist Workers’ Party refused to keep more than 4,000 of the 30,000 words in his planned article on Nazism, he became the only ex-Trotskyite to have abandoned the cause over the rigidity of its word count limits.6 He quit Partisan Review in 1943 when his fellow editors rejected his calls for more pacifist politics and less literary criticism. Macdonald shut down politics, the small, influential magazine he had started with his wife’s trust fund, when he claimed to have tired of politics.7 Friends promised he had changed; by 1955, he had been on the antiStalinist bandwagon for a decade, and had settled down at the New Yorker.8 But his résumé suggested a man who found conflagrations irresistible. Yet, for a time, Josselson was convinced that Macdonald was Kristol’s perfect replacement, and for the same reason as many a publisher before him: he was the liveliest essayist and editor of his generation. In the forties, Macdonald’s “The Root is Man” became the battle-cry of radical individualism.9 Macdonald’s reviews famously filleted everything from the Webster’s Third New International Dictionary to the King James Bible by mocking offensively modernized sentences with a vim verging on bloodlust.10 “The amount of verbal pomposity, elaboration of the obvious, repetition, trivia, low-grade statistics, tedious factification, drudging recapitulations of the half-comprehended, and generally inane and laborious junk that one encounters,” another Macdonald essay observed of American academe, “suggests that the thinkers of earlier ages had one decisive advantage over those of today: they could draw on very little research.”11 The Paris office sought someone “brilliant” with “a capacity of fitting oneself into the British frame of reference.”12 Under those criteria, Macdonald made certain sense, and Nabokov, Muggeridge, and Spender pushed him hard. Extreme eccentricity, Muggeridge advised, was just the quality to endear an American writer to deeply anti-American British intellectuals; it was the trait they least expected to find.13 (A fringe benefit was the implausibility that any outfit really connected to the CIA would ever hire anyone as unstable and iconoclastic as Macdonald.14) By early 1955, Josselson planned to sound Macdonald out quietly. “I beg you not to let anyone know that your inquiries have been prompted by me,” Nabokov told Schlesinger, who made the initial approach, for “the soreheads might, if they get wind of it, fire a nuclear weapon at Paris.”15 Spender was so sold on Macdonald that he coached him on how to win over Josselson.16 “Mike will be
attitude to us, I think the answer is that they expect us to keep in touch with them, and they keep in touch with us, and Mike in his brusque way, will tell us that there is not enough about Asia.”17 To Macdonald, this “hands-off policy” was “positively idyllic,” though he knew “very little of what the Congress has been up to.”18 Rumors soon ran rampant. “Your pal Irving Kristol is getting booted out of the Congress,” Philip Roth told Bell at a party. Bell alerted Kristol (who responded “To hell with it,” and told Nabokov to worry about Macdonald’s “past reputation of political instability and bohemianism”), then informed Hook.19 Hook confronted Macdonald. Macdonald asked Spender to explain the decision to a “sore” Hook.20 Spender asserted that Kristol “is not really a very suitable collaborator” because he was not “deeply concerned with human values,” only “the wickedness of communists.”21 An irate Hook retorted that “precisely because of our own concern with human values Irving should not be characterized unjustly,” and forwarded Spender’s letter to an apoplectic Kristol.22 Thus, when Josselson arrived in mid-June to negotiate with Macdonald, two continents were abuzz with Kristol’s rumored firing. Hook warned that Macdonald risked “serious trouble” for the Congress. Still, Josselson believed that, within days, “I will have succeeded in creating a sufficiently friendly atmosphere and come to an agreement with Dwight.”23 Macdonald, too, was keen. “I’ve had a very long and agreeable talk with Michael Josselson, whom I liked very much,” he wrote Spender. “We discussed the Congress’s general ‘line,’ or rather he outlined it and I kept saying I agreed, as I do.”24 More meetings with Macdonald instead convinced Josselson that he had disastrously rushed to judgment. “I absolutely refuse to hire Dwight at this point,” he told Nabokov. “The more I see of him, the more convinced I am that he may indeed be an ideal editor of his own and independent magazine but that he probably is the worst possible choice for editing Encounter for the Congress.”25 He told Spender and Muggeridge that Macdonald was a mistake, cabling, “lone wolf lacks teamwork gifts and will tend monopolize magazine for own writings also completely lacks knowledge and feeling for anything outside American scene.”26 But they were set on him, and Josselson returned to Europe deeply concerned.27 At first, Josselson thought he could persuade Kristol to stay on and make enough concessions to placate Spender. But Kristol was in no mood to be wooed back.28 “I have been badly let down by the Paris office, for if they had backed me up, Stephen – being what he is – would have quickly backed down,” he felt.29 Now he insisted on a late September departure.30 Spender deemed any further partnership with Kristol “impossible.”31 Muggeridge professed himself “impenitently of the view that Dwight Macdonald would be far and away the most suitable co-Editor with Stephen.”32 Koestler “exploded that he would never submit an article to a mag edited by Dwight M,” reported Lasky.33 Letters flooded in from New York. “All of us are very disturbed by the fact that this exhibitionist may become the spokesman for us,” wrote New Leader editor Sol Levitas.34 Macdonald would “literally shorten your life, if you are on the scene, and ruin
people who make recommendations for possible editors do not understand the specific qualities required for this post with special reference to the purposes of the Congress.”35 Josselson took the only out he had, deferring a decision until the Milan Congress. “In view of the doubts which exist as to whether editing a magazine which is tied up with an organization such as ours would not run counter to your strongly ingrained independence,” Macdonald was to come to Milan to “get a better understanding of the Congress and its aims.”36 Spender backed down after a frank discussion with Josselson. Kristol softened; Josselson reopened negotiations.37 “I would be willing to go to bat for [Kristol] by speaking up in his favour versus Dwight to all the members of the Executive Committee,” Josselson told Hook, if Kristol would acknowledge “he made mistakes, and that he will make a determined effort not only to get along with Stephen but also to make use of our advice and assistance.” If so, “you and I can get together and discuss how we will fight this battle out in Milan. Of course it is by no means sure that we will win.” The problem was Muggeridge. Josselson confided to Hook, “Malcolm is strongly in favor of Dwight, and as you know he is also responsible for British financial contributions to the magazine. I am not at all sure that Malcolm will accept the idea of Irving staying on.”38 By Milan, Josselson was coming to reluctant terms with the fact that there were too many certain votes on the Executive Committee to avoid Macdonald’s appointment entirely.39 The situation was at an impasse. “Wranglings went on for days and nights and nights and nights before we could arrive at the compromise solution which was acceptable to everyone here,” Josselson wearily recounted. Keeping Kristol for two more years and adding Macdonald for a year, was, Josselson felt, the best that could be negotiated. “Dwight Macdonald is quite happy about it,” he told Muggeridge, “and Irving has received such a heavy dose of frank treatment bordering on brutality that a salutary change in his attitude can be expected.”40 Thereafter, Kristol still aggravated Josselson; their correspondence was as uncomprehending as ever. (“I don’t know where you draw the line between editorial criticism and issues of principle,” Josselson complained, adding, “I would not bite your head off if you would not stick your neck out.”41) Josselson still pushed on Asia – “I would like to know what progress, if any, you have made in securing some articles by Asian writers for the next few issues” was a perennial refrain – but was content with modest headway in circulation.42 At Muggeridge’s suggestion, “Tri-Editorial Meetings” with the editors of Encounter, Preuves, and Der Monat (now under Congress sponsorship) began; Josselson predictably asked Lasky to push for “a greater contribution, especially as far as Encounter is concerned, from Asian writers.”43 Matters improved. Complaints from the New York old guard continued, but Kristol now considered them out of touch.44 Spender and Kristol mended fences.45 “Things are going quite well so far in London and I can assure you that I shall do whatever I can to keep them that way,” Josselson told Bell, “though I
Nancy Mitford’s tongue-in-cheek “U and Non-U,” a survey of “upper-class” and “lower-class” English usages, became a sensation and netted hundreds of new Encounter subscribers. “There is no likelihood at present that Mr. Irving Kristol will go home,” reported the Manchester Guardian. “Mr. Spender says he will not change horses in the middle of such a successful stream.” Kristol would stay on another three years, until he was offered the editorship of The Reporter in New York.47 Even Macdonald was not as difficult as Josselson expected. To be sure, Macdonald’s first submission, “No Miracle at Milan,” devoted as many words to mocking the luxurious hotels and superficial differences between Western and Asian delegates as to discussing the debates. But protests from Herb Passin, the Congress’s Asia expert – “you sound as if you consider only Westerners capable of understanding the subtleties and complexities of the problems of freedom” – convinced Macdonald to accept severe edits.48 Shils’s laudatory account of Milan ran in the meantime, and Macdonald’s piece was seen as “amusing and trivial,” Kristol reassured Josselson.49 Indeed, rather than acting as a provocateur, Macdonald was uncharacteristically silent at Encounter, and professed to suffering from a severe case of writer’s block after having written over 500,000 words at the New Yorker the previous year.50 Spender later accused him of “treat[ing] your Encounter year as a sabbatical, doing work for us so strikingly inferior to what you do for the New Yorker that it would have seemed almost contemptuous, had we not all made the sympathetic effort to understand that after all you were bound to treat your year in London as a holiday.”51 Josselson groused, “By our standards, we paid him a lot of money, for which he did not produce a single first-rate article.”52 Still, disaster was seemingly avoided. As Macdonald’s London idyll drew to a close, he thanked Josselson profusely for a happy year, promising fifteen pages of his next submission gratis.53 “We are an unhappy people, a people without style, without a sense of what is and what is not humanly satisfying,” began Macdonald’s submission to his former co-editors in February 1958. “There is a terrible shapelessness about American life. These prosperous Americans look more tense and joyless than the people in the poorest quarters of Florence. . . . Why is this?” Macdonald ticked off his reasons. The British and Italians had superlative manners; “our manners are either bad or non-existent.” Italians were “excitable and passionate” but harmless; the New York Times crime report listed numerous child rapes, assaults, and murders committed for fame alone. (Macdonald added: “It’s true I live in New York, where there are many Negroes and Puerto Ricans whose crime rate, for understandable reasons, is exceptionally high” – but numerous “ ‘good Anglo-Saxon names’ ” committed crimes too). Europe venerated individual taste; the “really awful thing” about Americans was that they actually liked what “650 taste-makers produce.” Europe’s rigid class system, with “each person differentiated by status and function,” guaranteed “an orderly social structure,” while American equality of opportunity bred a national ethos of “I’ve got mine
Macdonald then castigated America’s “post-1945 imperial role” – for lacking its predecessors’ swagger. “When we come into contact with other peoples,” Macdonald charged, “we don’t impress them.” America was imperialism’s milquetoast, “gross and sentimental, immature and tough, uncultivated and hypocritical.” Britain and France had done better – they “weren’t popular with their wards” (this, in light of the bloody, recently ended Mau Mau uprising, was quite an understatement) – but “they weren’t laughed at.” And “even the Soviet Russians, for all their ruthlessness . . . seem to speak a more common language with other peoples than we do.” America embodied what was to Macdonald the one unforgivable sin of empire: a “lack of style.” The coup de grâce was Macdonald’s take on Eugene Kinkead’s recent New Yorker piece on Korean War POWs, which Macdonald said was full of “disturbing data on the American way of life.” An alarmingly high percentage of American POWs died in the Korean War, Macdonald claimed, because their “defective sense of community” led them to collaborate with the enemy and lose their will to survive. Their Turkish cellmates, whose strong national identity was a source of inner strength, resisted, and lived to see the end of the war. (He overlooked another reason the Turks found it easy to resist collaboration: none of their captors spoke Turkish.54) Americans, Macdonald concluded, were so lacking in national character that they would obey “the latest effective authority” – even if Communist.55 Spender, the first to read “America! America!,” praised it extravagantly.56 Kristol was lukewarm, but felt “there are an awful lot of good things in it.” The piece was scheduled for May.57 Then Spender showed it to Nabokov, who reacted strongly. The piece, Nabokov felt, would be read as a universal comment on America versus Europe based on skewed and unqualified comparisons. Spender reread it, saw the point, and sent off a hurried request for a rewrite before decamping for Tokyo. In light of Nabokov’s views, Spender explained to Macdonald, he now felt “[i]t is not enough to distinguish America from Europe by producing a rag-bag of American statistics.”58 Macdonald refused, arguing that the editors had already accepted the piece and that belated consultations with “General Secretary and Grand Master of International Decorum Nicolas Nabokov” were no way to run a magazine.59 As Macdonald’s reply made its way across the Atlantic, Kristol consulted Josselson about a further response. “Nicolas was terribly mad because his appearance before the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations in New York would have coincided with the publication of Dwight’s piece,” Josselson told Kristol.60 Neither Josselson nor Kristol wanted the section on Korean War POWs, but Josselson apparently had no quarrel with the rest.61 Kristol’s follow-up to Macdonald attributed Nabokov’s “over-reaction” to his imminent fundraising trip. After further discussion with Josselson, he wrote, they felt Macdonald’s “unhealthily self-lacerating” piece should run – so Kristol made a counter-offer: “we publish the piece as is, except that we end it with the item about Sherman Adams and his ‘cultural conference’ ” – i.e., before the discussion of Korean War POWs. “It is at this point in the piece that one feels enough is enough, and anything more
Macdonald agreed – “I feel like a man who kicks in a door only to find it was unlocked the whole time”63 – and praised Josselson’s “delightful” view that “the only way to run a magazine is to print things the editors, rather than the fundproviders, like.”64 So the matter seemed settled. Indeed, as of April 1958, Tempo Presente, the Congress’s Italian-language magazine, had already run “America! America!”65 Even Josselson assumed the revised version would run in Encounter, though he took Macdonald’s effusive letter as an opportunity to impart some frank realities. “You must understand that Irving and Stephen must eat, that you must be paid for your articles, that ENCOUNTER must be able to say the things that it is best qualified to say without jeopardizing its future by saying things that can better be said elsewhere,” that “without tightrope acts by Nicolas and myself, ENCOUNTER and much else would cease to exist” – even if “you are very right about a great many things and we all know it.”66 That might have been the end of it, except Macdonald’s new draft arrived with the offending section pared down but still intact. “You are, if I may so, as stubborn as a mule. I do wish you had omitted entirely the New Yorker thing about Korea,” Kristol wrote. “It does make a bad impression when an American, writing for an English publication, seems determined to say the worst about his own country” – and, “by the time one reaches the Korean episode, one feels slightly distressed by the whole performance. I do wish you would take my word over this . . . everyone in the office is of the same opinion.”67 But Macdonald, “in affection but with undented armor of Missouri mulishness,” insisted, “It is exactly the note I want to end on – a note of major questioning of the US way of life.”68 Kristol turned to Josselson for advice. “Ought we to keep pressing him . . . or can the present version pass? I myself think it can pass, but should like your opinion . . . I must know before the end of next week, whether we are going to use it in our next issue.”69 What Josselson thought was that “I really cannot understand how Kristol’s mind works,” since “Macdonald has brushed his piece up stylistically but has made it even worse politically. It is the most blatant anti-American piece I have ever read and belongs in Literaturnaya Gazeta,” he told Hunt. “Please don’t lose the galleys. Dwight will probably raise a stink and attack us publicly but I am ready to face it.”70 Kristol relayed the news to Macdonald, explaining:
We’re not going to use your piece after all, it having been decided that, in view of the current negotiations for Foundation support, it would be highly inadvisable, and perhaps even fatal to the continued existence of the magazine itself – the Foundations not being much interested in having Europeans and Asians think worse of America than they already do.
