ABSTRACT
Shortly after the April 1952 Paris Festival, Josselson received long-awaited sign-off from Washington on an idea he had championed: an English-language, transatlantic magazine. The magazine, as Josselson and members of the Congress’s Executive Committee conceived of it, would be an Anglo-American partnership, with one American editor and one British one. And it would mix arts and literature with politics, so that the magazine would be more overtly political than the Congress’s seminars or festivals, but still predominantly cultural in its focus. Launching Encounter from London in October 1953 was either a muchneeded boost to transatlantic relations or a lost cause. “There’s no doubt that relations between America and Britain are now worse than at any time since 1940,” wrote Hugh Gaitskell, the leader of the Labour Party.1 Stalin’s death in March 1953 led the Churchill government to hope for a thaw in relations, and the Eisenhower administration to warn against a false sense of security.2 The Korean War – to America, a war of necessity against enemy China, to Britain a dubious drain on slim resources – staggered to an unsatisfying draw.3 American and British policies towards Mao’s China were diametrically opposed. America hoped that, by supporting the Nationalists in Formosa, China might yet return to non-Communist hands, while Britain recognized and traded with Mao’s China and considered American policy risky and unrealistic.4 Adam Watson, stationed in Washington as a Foreign Office liaison with the CIA and State Department on propaganda, recalled a “Henry James syndrome” in the relationship: “the innocent Americans being taken for a ride by these cunning Europeans,” and “a corresponding feeling in the British mind. . . . There they go again.”5 McCarthy’s rise further undercut fragile relations. British opinion considered McCarthy’s campaign against Communist infiltration excessive and resented his sustained attacks on Britain – which ranged from repeated references to “Comrade Attlee” to calls for America to “go it alone” if Britain continued to trade with China.6 The Rosenbergs’ execution in June 1953 became a further rallying-cry against American policy in Britain, where their crimes were dismissed as minor and motivated by good intentions. Most Americans, on the other hand, believed that the Rosenbergs had received fair trials for the grave crime of spilling atomic secrets to the Russians, and considered Britain danger-
British officials and longtime KGB double agents Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean defected to the Soviet Union.7 Despite this inauspicious climate, Encounter was a hit. Over the years, Encounter would publish some of the twentieth century’s most memorable articles – Lionel Trilling on Jane Austen’s use of irony, William Faulkner on Mississippi, Isaiah Berlin on nineteenth-century Russian intellectuals.8 Hugh Trevor-Roper would take to its pages to shred Arnold Toynbee’s ten-volume Study of History (“written in a style compared with which that of Hitler or Rosenberg is of Gibbonian lucidity,” yet in America “as a dollar-earner . . . it ranks second only to whisky”9). P.G. Wodehouse would allow it to print his controversial wartime broadcasts during his internment:
If anyone listening to me seems to detect in my remarks a slight goofiness, the matter, as Bertie Wooster would say, is susceptible of a ready explanation. I have just emerged from a forty-nine weeks’ sojourn in a German prison camp for civil internees . . . and the old bean is not the bean it was.10
