News from the Republic of Letters

If you’re of the generation that Lasky and Bondy belonged to, both now gone, you would take the collective whine above as the plaint of lovers of the God that Failed. Andrew Roth is an unrepentant Stalinist (and it is typical of the Guardian to choose such a man to write Lasky’s obituary), John Sutherland’s ‘almost certainly’ reflects his dedication as Stephen Spender’s ‘authorized’ biographer to the poet’s ‘innocence’ of any ties to the Evil Empire of America, while the TV journalist Frances Stonor Saunders’ book starts with a premise—that to be of the left is virtuous—and sticks to it.

The anti anti-communist left still flourishes; Stalinists (Like José Saramango) are still reputed, laureled and lauded; the intellectual Cold War between the Left and the Center (no one has ever accused the Congress for Cultural Freedom or Lasky or Bondy of being rightists, only of being ‘virulent’ anti-communists) is still being fought. Younger readers think of the CIA as being a collective failure, and some of us, myself included, think that—in creating the Congress for Cultural Freedom (Would that we had founded such an organization ten or fifteen years earlier!)—it did much good and succeeded in creating the new world in which we live now, a world in which ideology-driven totalitarianism is pretty much a dead letter.

What kinds of men made this possible? What sorts of lives did they live? Arthur Koestler, Victor Serge, George Orwell, Ignazio Silone—we know about them. Lasky and Bondy are representatives of my generation’s struggle against false gods. What sorts of men were they? How did they come to be what they were? Regardless of whether or not they were part of a ‘cultural Cold War’ (Saunders) or a ‘liberal conspiracy’ (Peter Coleman) it is human lives that count. We are more what we are than what we did.

A young man asked me at Mel Lasky’s funeral in June if I did not find his career astonishing. A much older friend, around the same time, asked me whether the death of François Bondy, a year earlier, had been noted in English or American papers. I answered ‘no’ to both questions. Bondy was not ‘noticeable’ in the way Lasky was. He was no less a writer or editor but he was a much more private one. And Lasky’s life, improbable and genial as it was, did not astonish because in so many ways it was typical, distinguished mainly by the man’s courage.

What struck me as I stood in Berlin on the lush flowery slopes of that cemetery, the Friedhof Waldheim, on a bright summer day, myself revisiting old haunts, was how much the two men had in common, and how—with their deaths—a kind of political writing, educated, civilized, acute, fascinated by every passing phenomenon of language or behaviour, had vanished along with the generation, that of Hitler and Stalin, which was their particular study and their battleground.

The heart of the matter for both men was that they were men of the pre-war Left abandoned, like so many others, by the gods of their youth. They had to, and did, make new lives for themselves, but not without cost. I knew both men and am probably the youngest of their pre-war generation. I know the times we grew up in were hard and cruel, disillusioning times.

François Bondy’s Prague-born father, N.O. Scarpi, was a writer, a feuilletonist and a translator (of, among other works, Orwell’s Animal Farm). When François was born in Berlin, on the first day of 1915, his father was working in the theater with Max Reinhardt. With that mitteleuropäische background, languages were a necessity. François spoke German to his father, French to his step-mother and Italian in his high school, while reading widely in English. He didn’t just speak these languages, he wrote in them and thought in them with total fluency. So much so that when teased as to what his real language was, Bondy hesitated. Well, what language did he dream in? Bondy still hesitated. What language did he count in? Ah, Bondy said: in German. He was that much of a linguist.

Bondy went to school in Lugano and Nice before studying at the Sorbonne and in Zürich, which was to become his home.

Mel was born five years later in the Bronx, where his strict and remote Talmudist Polish grandfather still spoke only Yiddish and his successful father brought up his family to have independent American minds. Lasky therefore came from what the sweet and viperish Stephen Spender, his future co-editor at Encounter, disparagingly called ‘the Bronx box’. I doubt that Spender, who was part-Jewish, meant that in any anti-semitic way; he meant that Lasky was an upstart; that Stephen found unsettling.

Upstarts no, but super-achievers yes. The Jewish immigration of the turn of the century had ideas, energy and a fresh vernacular that was, via Delmore Schwartz and Saul Bellow, to transform our American language. Mel was part of a brilliant generation. He graduated from CCNY at nineteen in 1939 and went on to do a Master’s degree in history at the University of Michigan. History stayed with him, and I remain much struck by what he once wrote about his CCNY mentor in history, Benjamin Nelson, whose informal discussion of current events Mel called ‘gossip’, writing on ‘the visible surface of things.’ That, of course, was to become Mel’s art. Human histories derive from larger ideas, he thought, but they are in action in the here and now. He doted on the immediate, then and later. Bondy’s European ‘remove’ served him equally well; Mel’s immediacy was bound to be polemical.

While Lasky was still in his ‘teens, François had briefly joined the French communist party, leaving in disgust with the signing of the Ribbentrop-Molotov treaty between Nazi Germany and Stalin’s Soviet Union, in the fateful year of 1939. Lasky, who had been (like Saul Bellow and many others) an independent intellectual Trotskyist, lost his faith at twenty-two. In an unfinished memoir he has left a vivid picture of what he called the ‘God that Failed phenomenon’ meant to him. If you belonged to the ‘Left’, how did you reconcile the brute facts of Stalinism with the ideals of communism?

In decisive cases the great break could be a little diabolical twist, one of those famous Quantity-into-Quality changes, say from what the Old Trotskyites elaborated as ‘Defensism’ and ‘Defeatism’. Can you possibly defend—morally, ideologically—the USSR when it is a repressive and degenerated (Stalinist) Workers State? [. . .] On our way to the Finland Station—with Baron Mannerheim’s defense of Finland and Robert Sherwood’s rousing Broadway play and Trotsky’s stubborn apology for defending the Soviet invasion in 1940—there was much jejune confusion and, I suspect, hypocrisy; also repressed remorse. The most shameful, embarrassed, masochistic moment of all came, at least for me, in the late summer of 1941 [Lasky was then 22]. Arguing in Lewisohn Stadium (we all attended the outdoor concerts in CCNY’s backyard) I was suddenly paralyzed with outrage when I noted the general glee in most of our Trotskyite circles that the German army was cutting through the Soviet Russian resistance. All they could think of was how they had taken the correct position on Stalin’s purges. [. . . ] Who devoted a single thought to the onset of all the mass murders of East-European Jewry?

That one has to pay for recanting an orthodoxy is obvious. By the time of that luxurious summer burial, the zombies of that Left had, as we have seen, re-emerged from the distant past to howl ‘Treason!’ Of which, more later.

François had to pay his dues almost immediately with the German invasion of France. As a Jew and an ex-communist Bondy’s position was much the more vulnerable and perilous. Arrested in France in 1940, he was interned for three months in Le Vernet and might easily have been deported to Germany and almost certain death. Fortunately, as his family had moved from Austria and Germany to Switzerland and become naturalized Swiss citizens, the French authorities gave him a pass to the Swiss border.

As Bondy settled down in a series of journalistic jobs—on Zürich’s Weltwoche and Neue Züricher Zeitung—in New York Lasky joined the fiercely anti-Stalinist weekly, the New Leader, the official weekly organ of the Social-Democratic Federation. It was then an influential, if skimpy, magazine—as widely read among the political intelligentsia as was, later, the Nation. Its editor was the fiery and savvy Sol Levitas. As Mel wrote, every Friday ‘we thought we were changing the world . . . and doing one’s bit to win the war against Hitler . . . We became the conscience-stricken organ of ‘the Homeless Left’. At twenty-two, Lasky and his ‘managing editor’, Dan Bell, were still engrossed with arguments about just how capitalism would fail. They were young, and as Levitas said to them, ‘If things are getting so bad, why are they getting so much better?’

The New Leader was really Lasky’s proving ground: not just politically, but also in terms of a direction to his extraordinary energy—Would Der Monat and Encounter, the outstanding magazines Lasky was to edit for many decades, have been what they were without that experience? Would Bondy’s Preuves, had Bondy not served a long apprenticeship as a literary and political essayist and editor on Switzerland’s best newspapers, and in a time when lies abounded?

Both men had wars that could be described as marginal; they neither fired a shot nor were shot at. Bondy was safe in neutral Switzerland. His qualities as a journalist were evident early: his versatility, his command of languages and literatures, his high seriousness, but also what Iso Camartin called his phronesis, a useful Greek term that implies thinking, understanding, practical judgment and perhaps what we would call today ‘common sense’. Compared to Lasky’s career, Bondy’s was stable and sober, as befitted his nature, which was ever modestly ironical and self-deprecating.

Lasky was drafted in 1942 and de-mobilized in 1946, having appropriately served as a combat historian with the Seventh Army, where no doubt he made the connections that were to enable him to stay in Berlin when the war ended. Their lives, which had run on parallel lines, now began to converge.

If the war was a turning point, the post-war years, widely known as the ‘Cold War’, were decisive and defining. The war was thankfully over, one totalitarianism had been defeated, only for us to discover the full horrors of the Nazi regime and its destruction of not just the Jews, but Gypsies, Poles, prisoners-of-war, the mentally deficient or disabled, homosexuals and opponents of the regime. Another totalitarianism had taken its place.

While François was tackling the issues with his pen, the ever-restless Mel was, on demobilization, to take up his moral sword. And here, as in all our lives, circumstances were going to play a role in his life. He—as I had, only more briefly—had seen the evils of the time first hand, ‘live’ as we would say today. He had been to the camps in the East; he was fluent in German; he had seen the Russian occupation of Berlin with his own eyes. When he was de-mobilized in 1946, he decided to remain in Berlin. The place fascinated him and, as the chapter from his unfinished memoirs which we publish in this issue shows, he felt he had a role to play, as did François and a goodly number of other intellectuals in America and Europe.

We had been slow to recognize—despite ample warnings—what was going on inside the Third Reich. We were as slow, or reluctant, to understand, though we had even greater warning, that equal monstrosities had taken place under the communist regime. In the five years between 1945 and 1950 a good part of our generation caught up to the truth which some—Silone, Koestler, Victor Serge, Orwell and company—had been telling us about. The moral position seemed clear. Like Victor Kravchenko (one of the earliest ‘defectors’) we ‘Chose Freedom.’ But in the joy of victory (with our ‘gallant Soviet allies’), in the chaos of the post-war, of the migration of populations, of occupation, with the loss of all eastern Europe to the Soviet Union, how would we combat the huge machinery of the Communist parties in the West and their intellectual allies and sympathizers, the Sartres, the Picassos, the Brechts, the Bertrand Russells, amongst our intellectuals? The answer was going to come with the Congress for Cultural Freedom, in which both men played leading roles, Lasky’s being the more prominent. If a part of the press saw fit to limit Lasky to its favorite tag, ‘Cold Warrior’, it was because, as a mere twenty-seven-year-old, his definitive moment came when he challenged the Soviet cultural juggernaut on its own ground.

His account of that fateful meeting and his challenge, in fact its accidental, spontaneous and explosive nature, is in this issue. As when David Rousset stood up to a howling mob in Paris to denounce the Gulag and all its works, as Solzenitsin did inside the Soviet Union, all it takes to challenge orthodoxy is one brave man armed with the truth. Lasky’s view—as was to be Bondy’s view in France—was that if freedom were to defeat totalitarian mass-culture, it would not be with guns but with an awareness that what was at stake was nothing less than free and objective thought. He thought the western powers then occupying Berlin were far too craven in yielding the cultural battle-field to communist orthodoxy. He was up against a packed house; he prevailed. As an example of sheer chutzpah it ranks high (that the reader can decide for himself). General Lucius Clay came close to expelling Lasky from Berlin for his outspokenness. He didn’t, and in the aftermath the Congress for Cultural Freedom was launched with, as it turned out, the covert backing of the CIA.

What would such a project require? Secrecy, obviously. Also someone—in the event Mike Josselson (no ninny intellectually) to mind the store. But above all, a hands-off appreciation of intellectual freedom and independence. What would have been the point of creating a U.S. ‘apparatus’ to match the Soviet Union’s? The crisis was serious, the need urgent, the strategy high-risk. But it worked. The gravely-underestimated Josselson was no apparatchik. He kept the Congress independent. And within that context, both Lasky and Bondy could, and did, work freely. Neither of them was suitable as Agency ‘employees’.

A way was found and the CIA funded it. But it was not, as alleged, ‘responsible’ for the creation of the Congress. The need for what one could call ‘engaged resistance’ to totalitarian infiltration of the world of the arts was not only plain in 1950. It had been plain since the 1934 meeting presided over by Romain Rolland. Koestler, Silone, Srerber, Serge and countless others had long seen the need, and come to such an idea from their independent and personal convictions. They knew what Willi Münzenberg was up to on the ‘other’ side. They’d been there on the Left and done that. The CIA did not lead; it followed. It did what it was created to do.

Both men went on to create and edit long-lived and vital magazines: Mel edited Der Monat (founded in October, 1948) and Encounter (He took over from Irving Kristol as Co-Editor with Stephen Spender in 1958), and François, Preuves (whose first issue appeared in March 1951). François’ cast of mind was more widely ‘cultural’, Mel’s centered on politics and the zeitgeist. These flagships of the Congress’s publications (to which one could add Tempo presente, edited by Ignazio Silone and Nicola Chiaromonte engaged in meaningful dialogue with their readers; it is the readership that made them different from one another in both content and style. Bondy’s, like Silone’s, was engaged with an audience to whom fellow-traveling was as much a habit and a need as digestion. England and Germany were more receptive to the kind of lively commentary on current events and issues that Der Monat and Encounter provided. Preuves was a slender defiance to the hegemony of Jean-Paul Sartre; Der Monat was on the front line, in Berlin, and had to withstand both the terrorism of the Rote Armee Fraktion (about which Lasky wrote remarkably) and a barrage of propaganda from East Germany. To that battle, Lasky brought remarkable gifts. He was a first-rate intellectual historian, a superb journalist and a polemicist of the first order—that is, one who backed up his arguments with hard fact and an immense knowledge of politics. At Encounter, he added another passion, one for the uses to which language is put, which finally led to his witty and discursive survey of journalistic practice, The Language of Journalism.

The ‘line’ followed by the Congress’s magazines is clearly set out in an editorial François Bondy wrote for the eighth issue of Preuves, when it was still little more than a chap-book:

Preuves had a difficult life in France. It survived, and eventually flourished, thanks to the Central-European who edited it. It was a deeply European magazine and much more open to new writers and artists than the NRF or Esprit or Sartre’s Les Temps Modernes. The opposition to it was, and remains, purely political. What brought it into the mainstream was a political event, the Hungarian anti-totalitarian Revolution of 1956. That caused widespread defection from the communist ranks in France and elsewhere, and together with revisionist movements in Poland and central Europe, made possible the careful but constant inclusion of writers from those countries.

Hostile commentary—from Saunders to obituarists like Roth—make it seem that these magazines, which were must reading for people of my generation, were mere flim-flam, some ancillary part of a plot to force-feed passive intellectuals in the West with CIA and State Department pap. The magazines themselves give the lie to that. They might still be publishing today had not the Congress—to the joy of the anti anti-communists—been blown out of the water. Was Tom Braden, a former CIA executive officer himself, acting independently when he wrote in the Saturday Evening Post that the Congress was no more than a CIA ‘front’? Thus betraying his oath of secrecy and the trust which had been placed in him? Or had the Agency itself decided to rid itself of the Congress, and Braden became simply the means at hand? If the latter supposition, why did the CIA so decide? Was it because the Congress, administered by two of its own and watched over by a jolly crew in Langley, was insufficiently malleable? Because of internal power struggles in the Agency? Because American objectives had shifted? Because the Agency knew the other side was about to expose its involvement with the Congress? Or was it just part of the general fall-out from Viet Nam, one every bit as relevant today as it was back then?

If Braden acted on his own (his shiftiest and most dangerous propagandist was Conor Cruise O’Brien, the Mother Teresa of the Left), then that represents—for we are now in the mid-Sixties—the first great triumph of gab, a foretaste of the loss of honor, discretion and modesty with which we are now familiar. The people who talked to Saunders largely belong to the same tattle club. For some reason America since the Sixties seems to find it impossible to shut up when faced by journalists. What need has the Bush administration of Bob Woodward, he of meaningless speech dressed up as significance? Public gab, like Braden’s, is an over-statement of one’s own importance. It’s self-inflation. John Aubrey went round the great men of his century, the seventeenth, with slate in hand instead of a tape-recorder. He regarded it as important that so-and-so had passed a stone or had trouble making water. That was human information. He didn’t ask who his interlocutor’s friends were at court and what they’d said to him.

I have my own view on the Congress, since I was happy to support it, for the same reasons that Mel and François and countless others did, and am not in the least abashed that it was sustained financially by the CIA. I know well only one avowed ex-CIA man, and I know his oath of secrecy was one he took seriously. It is only very recently that he avowed (I mean ‘avowed’, not ‘confessed’, as though membership were as dirty a secret as, say, joining Skull & Bones definitely is) what I had long suspected and he had often denied. ‘Why did you lie to me?’ I asked. ‘Are we not friends of fifty-five years’ standing?’ He answered, ‘If I had told you, you would have felt obliged to lie to others. I preferred to lie myself rather than you have to lie on my behalf.’ I say handsome is as handsome does.

I will end, Aubrey-like, by conveying my ‘feel’ of Mel and François, what I felt to learn of their deaths.

Lasky was the more difficult of the two. I liked him a great deal and I like to think we often had fun together, when I dragged him off to his first real football game, chatted with him in his office during visits from South America to London, always being prodded to ‘look into’ this or that, when we ate together in London or Berlin or wherever (he was a considerable Feinschmecker), but I will not say that friendship with Mel came easily. He was both cocky and fiercely energetic, so that you felt—as I felt when meeting his wife, Brigitte, dressed like a pert little cossack in high red boots of polished and supple leather—you were being carried along in his wake. Both Lasky and Bondy were a kind of pre-computer Internet, so that one really never lost touch with either of them. Like all Congress people, they had stuffed briefcases and huge files of clippings which were sent hither and yon and which demanded reading and reaction. All that Mel sent over the years I have kept, together with the hurried scrawled notes that accompanied them. Nothing, absolutely nothing, was alien to his devouring curiosity, his remorseless tracking down of corroboration for facts.

Both men were terrific editors in every sense of the word: they prompted texts, stole texts, re-wrote texts, argued, pushed and got they wanted. But they were also placable, well-founded, intelligent men who were always eager to wise one up. Physically, of course, they were poles apart. Mel was stocky and brief and bearded: a strange irony gave him a remarkable resemblance to Lenin, as Dan Bell often reminded me of Molotov. I have no idea if this was a private joke of theirs. Bondy, on the other hand, while tall and beaky was relaxed and a much better listener than Mel.

I cannot say if they had happy lives. At home, in their familiar places, they radiated a kind of domestic harmony. At work they were somehow different. Their work always seemed urgent, and the time to do it in too short. They knew everyone and were open to anyone of talent. But politics is a taint on human life. It is a different kind of happiness which they saw as they outlived their youths and watched the collapse of the Berlin wall, Berlin being their spiritual home.

If you sense a hint of reservation in my feeling for Mel, it is the European part of me speaking. That I could share with a lighter heart with Bondy—we could be two Italians, or French, or Poles together. And Bondy’s heart, to tell the truth, was, like mine, more in literature. Our talk was consequently of a different kind. Both Der Monat and Encounter, I thought, suffered from a similar deformation, a kind of hostility to the arts and especially to younger artists. They were reportorial in nature. Bondy read very widely, Mel not so much for pleasure but to find what he needed. This led to a number of arguments between us and, I think, leads me to a real tragedy in his life. Bondy had no need to write up his life: he was present in everything he wrote. The last time I saw François he was already stooped over and weakened. Time lay heavy on his hands. But it must be for twenty years at least that I have been hearing about Mel’s ‘memoirs’. I know that he did everything in his power to avoid writing them until it was too late. We were corresponding about those very memoirs when he died. And they remain incomplete.