Missed Meetings
LEKACHMAN, ROBERT
Missed Meetings ENCOUNTERS Selected by Melvin J. Lasky Basic Books. 552 pp. $8.50. Reviewed by ROBERT LEKACHMAN One of several magazines initiated and supported by the Congress for...
...This honorable position has been maintained in good faith and with good grace throughout Encuonter's first decade, even though amazingly little evidence of it is included in this collection...
...Indeed, in the essay which introduces the English edition of this volume, Sir Denis approvingly places Encounter in the line of British intellectual journals deeply committed to some distinct view of the world...
...The magazine's past is polemical, a judgment which is Sir Denis Brogan's as well as mine...
...The quarrels, such as they are, are impounded in "Problems and Polemics" and "Arts and Letters...
...I think fondly of J. H. Hexter's famous "Storm over the Gentry," which stylishly savaged both Tawney and Trevor-Roper and initiated a pleasantly embittered correspondence from friends, enemies and peacemakers among English and American students of Tudor and Stuart history...
...In short, I am disappointed not in the average literary quality or the average interest of individual items...
...Only last summer Encounter issued a special number, under the editorship of Arthur Koestler, provocatively entitled "England, Suicide of a Nation...
...Not only is the argument over socialism in Britain omitted, so also is any substantial evidence of Encounter's concern with the Soviet Union, the developing nations, the state of the Western alliance, and Castro's Cuba...
...Nancy Mitford's nonargument with Evelyn Waugh about Uand non-U behavior was a bore from the beginning...
...Reviewed by ROBERT LEKACHMAN One of several magazines initiated and supported by the Congress for Cultural Freedom, Encounter has acquired in England and the United States a circulation of 30,000 and an enviable reputation as a controversial journal of ideas, impressions and literary criticism...
...Encounter is a better and a more provoking magazine than this anthology is likely to suggest to newcomers...
...I am disappointed because Encounter's characteristic virtue, the argumentative, even the forensic, is scarcely to be found here...
...The unkindly Hugh Trevor-Roper and his sparring partner A. J. P. Taylor came to verbal blows over the latter's interpretation of the causes of World War II...
...The section entitled "Persons and Places" features Mary McCarthy's famous explanation of why she never became a Communist, Laurie Lee's stylish evocation of a Cannes film festival, and Kenneth Tynan's reflections on bullfighting...
...Both are exceedingly high...
...Encounter was a forum after the disastrous 1959 General Election in England for public reappraisals of British Socialism by R. H. S. Crossman, Anthony Crosland and others...
...If only out of deference to the past experience of Irving Kristol, Brogan might well have added the 20th century influence of Commentary...
...This is regrettable not only because of the excellence of the individual essays but because their omission diminishes some of Encounter's, importance...
...A year or so ago, John Sparrow, Warden of All Souls, advanced an interpretation of Lady Chatterley's Lover which won him vehement accusation and loyal support...
...It has succeeded more often than most of its rivals in arousing excitement and expectation among its readers...
...There is poetry by Auden, Graves, Spender, MacNeice, Muir, Dylan Thomas, and Cyril Connolly, among others...
...The strategy which its English editor, Stephen Spender, and its successive American coeditors, Irving Kristol and Melvin Lasky, have embraced is that of the continuing argument...
...It still is...
...There are half a dozen good short stories, including Nigel Dennis' grisly "The Pukey...
...As Brogan sees Encounter, its true predecessors are the militantly Whig Edinburgh Review, the resolutely Tory Quarterly Review, and the impeccably Benthamite Westminster Review...
...Read a second time, Trevor-Roper's "Arnold Toynbee's Millennium" appears tiresomely strained and unpleasantly sadistic...
...Whatever the relevance of Brogan's models, Encounter has been a journal deeply committed to the Western cultural and political side of the cold war...
...What we are offered instead is the other side of Encounter, a side which will much of the time entertain or interest most literate people...
...None of these stimuli to intellectual gaiety are included in this anthology...
Vol. 47 • March 1964 • No. 6
