Stephen Spender

His confession on top of the Rampart's revelations meant there was no denying it anymore, and as the story spread, it left a trail of ruined reputations and furious, humiliated writers behind it.

The most prestigious journal the CIA had been secretly funding was a London-based magazine called Encounter, co-edited by the celebrated poet Steven Spender.

When the truth finally surfaced, Spender seemed truly shocked.

He and a fellow editor resigned in disgust.

I'd love to know where you stand on this.

There's a final piece to this.

We tend to assume that the great enemy of art is censorship, a government that bans books, jails poets, and tells painters exactly what they're allowed to paint.

And that's real.

I think just to understand what this thing is, it's worth giving a very brief summary of what happened to the academy in the aftermath of World War II, which is, as Hannah Arendt would describe in her Origins of Totalitarianism, the repositioning of the Soviet Union as the enemy of the Anglo-centric liberationist world order.

And because of this, You not only had self-evident CIA operations like Steven Spender's magazine Encounter, which was designed to press new left stuff into the academic sphere instead of hardcore Stalinist stuff, but you also had loads of really weird liberationist brands of feminism being actively advocated within the academy that largely departed from the materialist bases that feminism had at the beginning of the 20th century.

What were these bases? Well, in order to come to an understanding of that, we can just look at the classic essay or pamphlet that was associated with the French Revolution, Qu'est-ce que c'est l'État? What is the Third Estate? by Abbé Sieyès, I think his name is.

The idea is the Third Estate does absolutely everything and it has zero political representation.

And from that perspective, I'm struck by a phrase in Berlin's great book about liberty, in which he refers to, quote, "The moral or emotional or intellectual collisions, the particular kind of acute mental discomfort which rises to a condition of agony from which great works of the human intellect and imagination have sprung." What might this pluralist agony have to do with works of imagination? Berlin was a deeply literary person and was, I think, keenly responsible, uh, keenly responsive to the literary thinking of his time.

Four Essays on Liberty, uh, I suppose his masterpiece, is actually dedicated to Stephen Spender.

But it's William Empson whom I want to turn to here as a literary context for Berlin's pluralism, acknowledging here a very, very good essay by Mark Thompson on this subject.

In a book published in nineteen fifty-one, while discussing the theories of I.A. Richards, Empson says, "It may be that the human mind can recognize actually incommensurable values." So a Berlin-ish vocabulary, though before Berlin has used it, that should be said.

Oh, yeah.

And then when you, it was amazing that when you then see, read the letters he had with Stephen Spender when he was around 16, you know, they spent their time together in Snowdon in North Wales.

Yeah.

Lucian's understand of the English because he plays with words.