Happy Friday, happy Tears of the Kingdom release day to all who celebrate! I loved Breath of the Wild so much I never actually beat it—I didn’t want it to end, so I just did all the side quests I could, and paused right before beating Ganon. I guess I’ll kick his ass real quick tonight before starting the new game. But how should we get through the rest of the day? If this Friday afternoon is passing too slowly for you—whether because you have Zelda plans, or just regular work-weariness—let me offer you some refreshment: ice-cold gossip about bumbling Cold War culture warriors.
I just finished Frances Stonor Saunders’ blockbuster Who Paid the Piper? The CIA and the Cultural Cold War, which details how the CIA financed a huge amount of art and literature through the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF) from the late 1940s through the 1960s. If you’re at all interested in the period or the subject matter, then I highly recommend it: Stonor Saunders has marshaled a lot of damning and unimpeachable information about what the CIA and the CCF were up to at the time, and how much the people involved lied about it (including to themselves). She also has a smooth and delightful prose style, with a great eye for just the right anecdotes and details—plus, she fuckin loves chisme. I’m grateful to Max Alvarez for teaching me the words chisme and chismosa, which mean something like “gossip” and “a woman who loves gossip” respectively, though I understand the connotations go harder than that. Anyway, Stonor Saunders is an unrepentant chismosa and so am I, it’s clear that she lives for the goss just like me. The sheer amount of drama and bitching and shit-talk she collects on the CCF and their circle…it’s honestly impressive that this crowd was able to influence the cultural conversation as much as they did, given what messy butches they were. The writers and editors and artists who took CCF and other CIA-derived funding all kinda knew where the money came from, and what the political pressures were—but it was easier to pretend that they didn’t know, and to snipe at each other in the meantime.
Stephen Spender
Poor Stephen. He was co-editor of the Encounter, a British cultural and political magazine which was funded by the CCF and tried to subtly push a pro-American line (though lots of people suspected from the beginning that they had American funding, it was pretty obvious). It was a difficult job to be sure, requiring an cast-iron sense of self—which Spender definitely didn’t have. Stonor Saunders says he had “butterfly politics” and “was consistently characterized as a watery, silly soul…W.H. Auden called him ‘a Dostoyevskian Holy Fool’ and ‘a parody Parsifal.’ [Christopher] Isherwood called him an ‘essentially comic character’ who revealed truth through farce. Others found a ‘wincing bewilderment’ (British critic Ian Hamilton) or a ‘loose-jointed mind, misty, cloudy, suffusive,’ in which ‘nothing has outline’ (Virginia Woolf).” Meanwhile, Anita Kermode, a British academic, “inverted Henry James Sr.’s famous remark (of Emerson) that he was like ‘a clue without a labyrinth,’ to describe Spender as ‘a labyrinth without a clue.’” Even Stephen’s wife Natasha had devastating opinions to share: she described her husband as “‘eminently bamboozable, because he was so innocent…They’re a very trusting family; it never occurs to them to think that other people are telling them lies.’” His co-editor Irving Kristol said that when it came to the actual work of editing the Encounter, Spender didn’t always ‘know his arse from his elbow.’”
The Encounter
The Sunday Times once referred to the Encounter as “‘the police-review of American-occupied countries.’” Mary McCarthy wrote in a letter to Hannah Arendt (these letters are a delightful source of chisme throughout the book): “‘Have you seen Encounter?...it is surely the most vapid thing yet, like a college magazine got out by long-dead and putrefying undergraduates.’”Nicholas Nabokov
Vladimir’s first cousin. Also a white Russian emigre, the less famous Nicholas was a second-rate composer and the Secretary General of the CCF. His CCF colleague Mel Lasky disliked him—according to Stonor Saunders, Lasky called Nicholas Nabokov “‘the dandy of the revolution. People like Nicky were absolutely infatuated by the fireworks and the frou-frou and the razzmatazz.’” When the CIA’s funding of the CCF became public knowledge in 1967, Nabokov (“always a man of flamboyant gestures” per Stonor Saunders) got out of an argument about it by having or faking a heart attack. He was married five times, and when he died in 1978, all five of his wives attended the open-casket funeral. Stonor Saunders reports that one of the former wives “draped herself over his coffin and tried to kiss him on the mouth.”
According to Stonor Saunders, an unnamed “young intelligence officer” once met Nicholas’ elderly father (Vladimir’s uncle, presumably) at a party in Berlin after the war. “‘The old man, like all the Nabokovs, had been a liberal in Imperial Russia. I observed him going over to some high-ranking Soviets and saying, ‘You know, I was always on the side of the people!’ and then shuffling over to [his host] on the other side of the room with the same ingratiating smile and saying, ‘I knew your grandfather, his Imperial Highness, Grand Duke Alexander Mikhailovich very well! I wondered how anybody of ninety could feel the necessity for such hypocrisy!’” If you’ve read Vladimir Nabokov’s novels and are thinking “wow, a lot of stuff is coming together,” you’re right.Diana Josselson
Married to CIA agent Michael Josselson, who was in charge of the CCF, Diana was a great chismosa herself. She told Stonor Saunders: “‘All [CIA] case officers had the same attaché case with a false bottom, and they put the cables in there. It really was very funny, because you could recognize them a mile away—they all had the same standard model case. It was a riot. We’d read the incoming cables, then I’d flush them down the toilet.’” Diana’s own spycraft was either terrific or terrible. “Once,” Stonor Saunders reports, “case officer Lee Williams went out to buy baby food for [the Josselsons’ child]. When he returned, Diana was obliged to introduce him to her mother, who had come over [to Germany] from the States to help with the baby. Noticing a copy of Jane Eyre lying on the table, Diana stammered, ‘This is, er—Mr. Rochester.’ ‘How strange! Mr. Rochester. Just like in Jane Eyre!’ exclaimed her unsuspecting mother.”Diana Trilling
Married to the famous critic Lionel Trilling, this Diana was also part of the general cultural milieu of intellectual left anti-communism. Jason Epstein (co-founder of the New York Review of Books, which was proudly not a CCF front) is one of Stonor Saunders’ sources for good chisme on this crowd: he said that “‘In those days you were either ‘hard’ or ‘soft’ on Communism…’” a fact which led to a dinner party where Diana Trilling proclaimed, from her position behind her husband’s chair, “‘None of you men are HARD enough for me!’” “‘They were ridiculous people, really,’” Epstein added, “‘who lived in a teacup.’”Arthur Koestler
Author of Darkness at Noon, an anti-communist novel, Koestler was involved with the CCF planning in the early days, but the CIA considered him a bit of a loose cannon. Like many left-wing writers of the era, Koestler had been a Communist until becoming disillusioned with the Soviet Union in the late 1930s (over Stalin’s purges, the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, etc) and dramatically converting back to liberal capitalism. Anyway, back in 1932, Koestler was still a Communist, and he’d moved to Russia. There, as Stonor Saunders writes, “he fell madly in love with a clerk called Nadeshda Smirnova. He spent a week or two with her, and then denounced her to the secret police over a trifling matter. She was never heard of again.”Sen. Joseph P. McCarthy
Stonor Saunders covers the Red Scare and the McCarthy hearings in solid and sober detail: she notes, however, that Senator McCarthy “compensated for his meager intellect with a loud mouth and inveterate dishonesty (his limp, he claimed, was the result of a war wound, though actually it was acquired by slipping on a staircase.)” Arthur Koestler’s wife Mamaine described McCarthy as “‘a hairy-pawed thug.’” (How much did she know about the disappeared ex??? It’s unclear. Stonor Saunders does note that Mamaine was in favor of McCarthy’s effort to disappear communists from public life. Leopards won’t eat my face, etc.)Carmel Offie
“A career Foreign Service officer, he was by all accounts a sinister figure. Physically ugly, he taunted other men with his homosexuality by tweaking their nipples at staff meetings. He was once arrested for hanging around the public lavatories in Lafayette Park, an incident which made his CIA codename, Monk, laughably inappropriate. He had been tossed out of the Foreign Service after the war for using the diplomatic pouch for illegal currency transfers (he also dealt in diamonds, rubies and, on one occasion, a shipment of 300 Finnish lobsters).” Offie doesn’t really figure in the story that much, I just think that smuggling 300 lobsters is gay excellence.Joseph Jesus Angleton
CIA agent and Allen Dulles’ right hand, Angleton is a really wild character (check out David Talbot’s The Devil’s Chessboard for more.) His main gimmick was in being (or pretending to be) a gentleman spy, a real-life James Bond. Stonor Saunders includes an embarrassing line from writer Clare Booth Luce, who gushed to Angleton: “There’s no doubt you are easily the most interesting and fascinating figure the intelligence world has produced, and a living legend.” Angleton may have been “interesting and fascinating” but he was also hugely embarrassed about himself and his identity. Born in Idaho, Angleton attended Malvern college in the U.K., where Stonor Saunders says “he worked at becoming ‘more English than the English.’” The American poet Reed Whittemore said that Angleton felt a lot of shame over his mother’s Mexican heritage and his middle name (Jesus) in particular, as “‘it suggested he was not an upper-class Englishman, which was then the image that he was trying to project.’” As an adult, Stonor Saunders says Angleton spoke with a “slight” English accent.Abstract Expressionism
Apparently when Henry S. Truman was president, he often went to the National Gallery early in the morning to look at Old Master paintings. He did not like modern art. “‘It’s a pleasure to look at perfection and then think of the lazy, nutty moderns,’” he said. “‘It is like comparing Christ with Lenin.’” Truman also said that Dutch master paintings “‘make our modern day daubers and frustrated ham and egg men look just what they are.’” Is this a conservative, regressive, anti-intellectual opinion? Sure. Is “frustrated ham and egg men” an unbeatable description? Also yes.
It’s really not the abstract expressionists’ fault that they got co-opted by the CIA and the State Department, but they did get co-opted, and people knew or guessed it from the beginning. An exhibition featuring twelve American modern artists traveled to France in 1953-1954: a French newspaper called the artists: “‘Mr. Foster Dulles’ twelve apostles.’”Ad Reinhardt
Stonor Saunders says that the painter Ad Reinhardt was the only major abstract expressionist who managed to stave off CIA co-option, which meant he stayed poor while they got rich. Reinhardt disliked the art world: he said that art criticism in particular was like “‘pigeon droolings.’” He also made savage comments about his fellow painters which aren’t really fair, but definitely funny: He called Mark Rothko a “‘Vogue magazine cold-water-flat-fauve,’” Jackson Pollock a “‘Harpers Bazaar bum,’” and Barnett Newman “‘the avant-garde huckster-handicraftsman and educational shopkeeper’” as well as “‘the holy-roller explainer-entertainer-in-residence.’” (Stonor Saunders notes that Newman sued Reinhardt over the last comment, I’m not quite clear on what grounds.) Anyway, lest you think Reinhardt was just some crank and hater, Stonor Saunders adds that, unlike all his fellow abstract expressionists—who made a big show of having left-wing (though of course non-communist) politics—Reinhardt joined the 1963 March on Washington for Black civil rights.George Orwell
You may not know this (I didn’t) but Orwell turned into an informer late in life, reporting on the suspected Communist activities of friends and acquaintances to the Information Research Department (a British Cold War-era cultural warfare outfit). People like Mary McCarthy were disgusted. Per Stonor Saunders, “Commenting on what she saw as Orwell’s move to the right, Mary McCarthy remarked it was a blessing he died so young.”Shepard Stone
Stone was brought in late to try to salvage the mess of the CCF after it had been exposed as a CIA front. A colleague said that Stone was “‘a bumbling jackass’” and “‘a fool, enjoying a position and perquisites completely undeserved,’” and that “the only thing Stone understood about world affairs…was how to work an expense account.”The Spaghetti Party
After the CCF had been exposed, many of its associates and hangers-on who had taken money were chagrined. There was apparently a house party in Evanston, Illinois, attended by a number of these people, including Stephen and Natasha Spender, Hannah Arendt, and Saul Bellow. According to one guest, most of the attendees “‘had all been involved with the Congress in one way or another. After the spaghetti, they all angrily engaged in calling each other naive for not having known who their backers really were, and for not passing the information onto the rest.’” It’s really the little details that make for great chisme. “After the spaghetti”! You can see the whole scene: it’s pathetic. I still love my girl Hannah, but this crowd truly lived in a teacup.
I didn’t expect to learn a new fact regarding Arthur Koestler and women that would make me hate him *worse*. I knew he was a date rapist but he’s basically a murderer.