A House in St John's Wood by Matthew Spender

Author:Matthew Spender [Matthew Spender]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2015-07-07T04:00:00+00:00

19

WITHOUT BANQUETS

DWIGHT MACDONALD WAS replaced by Melvin Lasky, who became the American co-editor of Encounter halfway through 1959. I don’t remember meeting the other editors of Encounter but I have a strong memory of Lasky.

The offices of Encounter consisted of a few rooms at the top of Panton House, a building on a side street between Piccadilly Circus and Trafalgar Square. From the window of my father’s office one could see Horatio Nelson on top of his column, larger than life and vaguely inhuman in the weathered darkness that lay beneath his wedge-shaped hat. He stood on roofs of slate that glittered like the sea. I could stare at him for a long time from inside this cluttered room before turning back to the tin filing cabinets and the overloaded desk.

On the wall hung a lithograph given to Stephen by Jean Cocteau. It showed Baudelaire looking longingly at a sack of money. The sack had wings and was flying away and the piercing look of Baudelaire was unable to stop it.

Across a corridor the office organizer, Margot Walmsley, kept charge of a much neater room. She was ash-blonde and fluffy and when she became flustered, she stammered. When years later Mum and I learned that she worked for British Intelligence, all we could do was laugh. It was so unexpected, yet so obvious. If the CIA was running something in England, British Intelligence would have had to participate.

Melvin Lasky’s office lay between Margot’s and Dad’s. Lasky was short, with a hard belly held in check by a waistcoat. His nostrils were large and he, like Kristol and Macdonald, wore a goatee. Behind him on the wall hung a dozen photos of himself next to various important people, and they also had goatees. Some of these photos were plausible: Lasky with Sidney Hook, for instance. I didn’t know anything about Hook other than that he was as near to being a communist as it was possible to be while simultaneously loathing all communist regimes. But Lasky with Leon Trotsky? Lasky with Sigmund Freud? The cumulative impression was that they were all fake. I think Dad and I laughed about this over lunch at the Asiatique, a cheap Chinese restaurant off Trafalgar Square. It was surely childish to hang these things on the wall, we thought.

The duel between Lasky and Spender had elements of snobbery on my father’s part. At one point he told a colleague that the trouble with Lasky, as with Macdonald and Kristol, is that they all came out of ‘the Bronx Box’. He was referring to the common background of Trostkyite radicalism which, in England, counted for nothing. But there’s also the suggestion that Lasky wasn’t altogether a gentleman.

Lasky was certainly no fool, but he and my father were playing to a different set of rules. Mel had no use for Stephen’s wishy-washy liberalism. He knew more about contemporary history, he was a fast and shrewd journalist and he paid attention to every piece of information that came out of the Soviet world.

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