Twenty-Seven

Spender

London, Paris & Prague, 1965–1968

BY THE MIDSIXTIES Stephen Spender was a doyen of the literary establishment on both sides of the Atlantic. Universities competed to offer him visiting professorships, he was elected an honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and, in 1965, he became the first foreigner appointed the Consultant in Poetry at the Library of Congress, a position that demanded he take a step back from his work for Encounter. The distinguished critic Frank Kermode took over as literary editor, with Spender remaining on board as a contributing editor. He left Encounter in good shape, having developed relationships with many of the great writers of the era and having helped establish the magazine as one of the foremost intellectual forums of the preceding decade. His work had been canonized in a collected edition in 1955, and while he now wrote fewer poems, he had become a respected public intellectual and literary critic. At fifty-six, he still worked and traveled frenetically, straining to find time for his wife, Natasha, and his two children (Matthew was an undergraduate at Oxford, Lizzie was still at school). With his shock of white hair, he cut a distinguished figure: the handsome rebel-poet of the 1930s had become a doyen of the literary establishment. Then it all fell apart.

Without his realizing it, by the time he took his prestigious position at the Library of Congress, the wheels were already in motion. The coming scandal would expose the elaborate machinery the CIA had secretly constructed to wage the cultural Cold War, and Spender would get caught up in the gears. The previous year, Wright Patman, a Democratic congressman from Texas, led an investigation into the tax-exempt status of several foundations that revealed a number of them were in fact little more than CIA fronts. (The investigation began because the IRS had demanded foundations have their tax-exempt status revoked for engaging in stock speculation and other activities.) While this revelation caused some nervousness at Langley, there was little immediate follow-up. One publication did, however, begin to connect the dots as far as Encounter was concerned. In a September editorial, The Nation raised some pointed questions. “Should the CIA be permitted,” the editors asked, “to channel funds to magazines—in London and New York—which pose as ‘magazines of opinion’ and are in competition with independent journals of opinion?”¹ The identity of the magazine in London was not hard to guess.

By this stage there were already rumors in intellectual circles in New York and London about the true source of funding behind the Congress for Cultural Freedom. Jason Epstein, a celebrated book editor at Random House and cofounder in 1963 (along with his wife, Barbara, and Bob Silvers) of The New York Review of Books, would later write that it seemed obvious at the time that with “no visible government agency” funding all these conferences and publications around the world, the presumption was that “there had to be an invisible one,” and there was only one credible candidate.² Epstein told Spender of his suspicions, as did Mary McCarthy, but when Spender passed on his concerns to people at the CCF or the Farfield Foundation, he was reassured.³ Julius Fleischmann even told him personally, while they were aboard his yacht in the Aegean, that there was nothing fishy about the funding.⁴

In April 1966, the situation became more serious. Spender was in Evanston, Illinois, preparing some lectures on American poetry for Northwestern University, when the New York Times published the results of a long-term investigation into the CIA’s funding of a whole host of organizations and institutions. The reports documented the way the CIA moved money through different foundations as a means of camouflaging its origins, allowing it to pour funds into organizations it secretly supported, among them the CCF.

The U.S. government had fought hard to prevent the New York Times from going ahead with publication. The CIA’s Angleton, Chip Bohlen, U.S. ambassador to France, and Dean Rusk, secretary of state, all tried to persuade the paper not to run the story because of the damage it would do to public confidence in the way America was waging the Cold War.⁵ But the Times knew it had something sensational on its hands, and there was no way it was going to bow to establishment pressure.

The revelations gave critics of the CCF the ammunition they had been seeking, foremost among them the Irish historian Conor Cruise O’Brien, who seized on the fact that a number of luminaries, including J. K. Galbraith, George Kennan, Robert Oppenheimer, and Arthur Schlesinger Jr., had written a letter to the New York Times rebutting the idea that the CCF “had been used by the Central Intelligence Agency” and insisting upon its independence.⁶ As more details emerged about how the CCF was funded, defending this position became untenable. In a televised debate, O’Brien asked Schlesinger if he had known that the CIA paid for the Congress when he signed the letter. Schlesinger paused before answering: “I did know about it while I was in government.”⁷

Spender was rattled: the New York Times claimed that while Encounter was no longer in receipt of CIA funds it had been for a long time previously. (The CCF had secured a large grant from the Ford Foundation in 1964 that cut ties with the Farfield Foundation and other CIA fronts.)⁸ On May 10, Spender coauthored a letter with fellow editor Melvin Lasky, saying they knew nothing of “indirect benefactions” and that they were “part of nobody’s propaganda”⁹ (Lasky, though, knew far more than he was letting on). Spender wrote to Michael Josselson, who ran the CCF, and Fleischmann, seeking assurances that Encounter had not been in receipt of CIA money. Josselson responded by saying he had lawyers combing the financial records to make sure they were clean. Fleischmann did not respond until September, but when the letter finally came, he also assured Spender that there was nothing untoward. Yet there had been no clear statement issued in response to the New York Times story, no retraction, and no legal action taken.

In May 1966, the month after the revelations, O’Brien struck again. In a lecture to alumni of New York University, he accused Encounter of working in the service of “the power structure in Washington” and of tricking writers of integrity into unwittingly collaborating with their project.¹⁰ Excerpts of this lecture were printed in Book Week, which was circulated at the PEN writers conference in New York in July.

In response, Encounter ran a hit piece on O’Brien. In the magazine’s anonymous “R.” column (in fact authored by Goronwy Rees), hints were dropped about O’Brien’s conduct when a UN diplomat in the Congo, and it was claimed that he was a crackpot, unhealthily obsessed with Encounter. He was accused of making reckless allegations in the manner of Joe McCarthy and ridiculed for “hunting for CIA agents beneath the beds of Stephen Spender, Irving Kristol, Melvin Lasky, and Frank Kermode.”¹¹ O’Brien’s lawyers told him the article was libelous and he filed suit in a Dublin court.

According to Mary McCarthy, at some point Spender, back in London, was riding in a taxi with Nicolas Nabokov, the secretary general of the CCF, when Nabokov apparently blurted out the truth that the CIA was behind the Congress and Encounter, and then he jumped out of the cab and ran off. This might well be an apocryphal tale—although not necessarily out of character for Nabokov—but Spender was certainly hearing enough to make him seriously concerned. Towards the end of 1966, Josselson and Lasky took Kermode and Spender out for lunch at the Garrick, a gentlemen’s club in the West End of London, and again assured them they had nothing to fear.¹² The story refused to die, however. Animosity was building against the CIA for its part in the Vietnam War, and in intellectual circles, any kind of association with it was a stigma. And Encounter’s problems were mounting. Having still failed to offer any kind of legal response to the New York Times allegations, their lawyers now offered no defense in the O’Brien case in Dublin. They claimed that it was pointless to do so as they had no Irish property to defend but that did not stop it from looking deeply suspect. When O’Brien later threatened to take his case to a British court, Encounter apologized and offered to make a significant payment to a charity of his choice.

In February 1967, while Spender was at the Center for Advanced Studies at Wesleyan University in Connecticut, he received a call from a journalist at Ramparts, a California-based magazine that had been conducting its own long-term investigation into the CIA, focusing on its infiltration and secret subsidizing of student movements and labor unions.¹³ Spender later wrote in his journal that the journalist told him Ramparts had proof that the CCF was funded by the CIA and that many of the foundations associated with it were also funded by the agency.¹⁴ Presented with this new evidence, Spender was finally convinced of the truth.

As with the New York Times investigation, the CIA tried desperately to stop Ramparts from going to press with the story. They had known about the investigation since early 1966 and, in collaboration with the FBI, set about smearing Ramparts and its journalists, claiming they were under the sway of the Soviets.¹⁵ Ramparts remained undeterred, and their reports provided irrefutable evidence of the CIA exerting clandestine influence on American citizens. With Vietnam protests spilling from the campuses into the streets, the atmosphere in the United States was feverish. For Spender it was not difficult to see the consequences of being thought complicit with the CIA.

The efforts by Josselson and the CIA to keep obfuscating were over, and at a mid-March meeting of the directors of the CCF he admitted the allegations were true. The dam had burst. Kermode telephoned Spender to let him know that at a meeting at his house in Gloucestershire, Lasky had admitted to knowing about the CIA’s role since 1963. The news sent Spender into a rage—he had never liked Lasky, and now he discovered that he had been duped by his fellow editor. He wrote a letter to the New York Times in which he said that he had been deceived over CIA funding and asked whether or not there should be a law that protects people like him from being deceived in the future.¹⁶ Josselson wrote to Isaiah Berlin, asking him to intercede, saying that Spender was “pouring oil on the flames” with his actions.¹⁷

Spender next sought a showdown, demanding a meeting of the Encounter trustees in London. His wife, Natasha, worried about the ramifications and arranged for legal counsel. On April 20, Spender flew in from the United States and headed straight for his home in St. John’s Wood. After freshening up, he and Kermode had a meeting with their lawyer and prepared formal statements. The trustees’ meeting took place at a restaurant in Picadilly. While the minutes have not survived, what is beyond dispute is that Spender was subject to a further humiliation at the hands of Lasky. With tempers flaring, Lasky launched a personal attack on Spender, telling him to get off his high horse. After all, he said, Spender’s salary had, from the beginning, been secretly paid by the Foreign Office.

This was a devastating blow to Spender because it meant that the number of people deceiving him was far greater than he previously imagined. He left the meeting in a state of distress and, according to Kermode, went straight to the National Gallery on Trafalgar Square, calming himself down by looking at some paintings.¹⁸ That night he telephoned Malcolm Muggeridge, who had been heavily involved in establishing Encounter. Spender confronted him: had Muggeridge not assured him that his salary came from contributions by Alexander Korda, Victor Rothschild, and the Daily Telegraph? “So I did, dear boy,” Muggeridge replied, “but I wouldn’t bet your bottom dollar that’s where it really came from.”¹⁹

The result of the meeting with the trustees was, in Spender’s words, a “rather bitter and loathsome compromise,” whereby Encounter would make a clean break with the CCF and limp on until June, when it would be relaunched on a fully independent footing with Spender at the helm.²⁰ Yet Lasky, who had promised to resign, changed his mind two days later and started maneuvering behind the scenes. At a second trustees meeting, at which Spender was not present, it was agreed that Lasky would stay on. “We’ve been shopped,” Kermode told Natasha Spender afterward.²¹ Spender and Kermode finally handed in their resignations, and graciously allowed the CCF time to put together a statement to save face.

Then came the third and final bombshell. A reporter from the New York Times called Spender and told him that Thomas Braden, a former OSS and CIA agent, had written an article defending the CIA’s conduct but that in doing so, Braden had revealed many new details.²² And Braden knew what he was talking about: he had been head of the CIA’s International Organizations Division, responsible for anti-Communist psychological warfare.²³ Among them was his claim that one of the Encounter editors was a CIA agent. The journalist told Spender he had spoken to Lasky, who had accused Spender of being the agent. It is not clear whether the journalist had in fact done this, or whether they were bluffing—either way, they certainly got a reaction from Spender. He denied being a CIA agent and doubted whether anyone who knew him could believe such a fanciful claim. He said Kermode was clearly not an agent and said there was no way Irving Kristol was, either.²⁴ Even if he did not name Lasky explicitly, this left only one candidate. Spender also revealed that, while it had not been made public, he had already resigned from Encounter. The story announcing his resignation was carried on the front page of the New York Times.²⁵

The exposure of the CCF’s secret funding had serious consequences beyond Encounter. The CCF had established magazines or taken over the funding of magazines around the world, and those who had edited or contributed to them received blowback.²⁶ Mundo Nuevo, which had helped popularize the writers of the Latin American boom, including Mario Vargas Llosa and Gabriel García Márquez, lost its credibility and its editor, Emir Rodríguez Monegal, resigned.²⁷ In India, the reputation of Quest was irreparably damaged by the revelations and it “ambled lamely” on until it folded in the 1970s.²⁸ Hiwar, which was based in Lebanon, was banned in Egypt (it had already been banned in Iraq) and collapsed in 1967.²⁹ In Uganda, Transition magazine, which had published important work by Chinua Achebe and Ngugi wa Thiong’o, came under intense attack. The magazine had long been a critic of the government in Kampala, and the revelations about the CCF was all the excuse the authorities needed to imprison its editor, Rajat Neogy (he was released the following year but only after a media campaign on his behalf).³⁰ In Japan, Hoki Ishihara, the editor of Jiyu, which was also revealed to have received CIA funding, claimed he needed police protection after his house was firebombed.³¹ By comparison, Spender had it easy. He was, though, subjected to attacks by Lasky and the trustees of Encounter for airing his grievances about the funding scandal and the way Lasky and others had covered it up. One trustee, the Chicago sociologist Edward Shils, called Spender a “coward and a brute” and implied that his hostility toward Lasky—Shils called it a “pogrom”—was anti-Semitic.³² When Natasha Spender went to the Encounter offices to retrieve her husband’s paperwork, she discovered his locked filing cabinet had been broken into and rifled. She was told there had been a burglary. Spender donated a sum equivalent to his Encounter salary from March 1966, the date of the first New York Times revelations, to various charities. He never spoke to Lasky again and never read another word that was published in Encounter.

THE REVELATIONS about the CIA’s clandestine support of writers and artists were part of a larger Cold War reckoning in the United States. The intellectuals themselves either tried their best to distance themselves from any suggestion of complicity or, in the case of those who had not taken the CCF’s money, gleefully attacked those who had. Norman Mailer, in Armies of the Night, his account of the march on the Pentagon in protest of the Vietnam War, put it in typically pugnacious terms, describing the CCF as having been so thoroughly infested by the CIA that it called up the image of “cockroaches in a slum sink.”³³ In the Summer 1967 issue of Partisan Review, editors Philip Rahv and William Phillips included “A Statement on the CIA,” in which a disparate group of intellectuals, including Hannah Arendt, Lillian Hellman, Dwight Macdonald, and Norman Mailer, expressed their opposition to CIA funding and demanded that those magazines implicated do more to exorcise their association with the agency.³⁴ There was irony in this gesture: Partisan Review had itself been in receipt of funds sourced from the CIA.³⁵

Others explored the larger ramifications for American culture. In the pages of The New York Review of Books, Epstein argued that “the fault of the CIA was not that it corrupted the innocent but it tried, in collusion with a group of insiders, to corner a free market.” The system had been rigged to favor anti-Communist intellectuals, and the result was “an underground gravy train whose first-class compartments were not always occupied by first-class passengers.”³⁶ The problem, Epstein pointed out, was not just the loss of earnings and influence of those who were not allowed to board that train, it was how this rigged system incentivized anti-Communism above all else. To Epstein, the failures of McCarthyism and the failures of the Vietnam War were the result of an anti-Communism that blinded American intellectuals to self-criticism. “The hysteria of the early Fifties and the killing that goes on today are not isolated and discrete symptoms but aspects of a larger sickness,” he wrote, pointing out that in focusing on Soviet oppression of Eastern Europe, magazines like Encounter failed to address adequately “Latin American dictatorships supported by the United States, or about the Negro problem, or the protests throughout the world over our war in Vietnam.”³⁷

In an article for The Nation in September 1967, the historian Christopher Lasch echoed Epstein in arguing that the problems faced by American intellectuals “derived from the bankruptcy of social and political thought during the fifties” in which the Cold War was defined “as a struggle for cultural freedom.” If the Johnson administration was suffering from a “credibility gap” in its statements about the Vietnam War, “what about the credibility of our most eminent intellectuals?” The damage done was substantive, Lasch argued, because in prosecuting the cultural Cold War, the Americans chose to “fight fire with fire,” a strategy that was “self-defeating because the means corrupt the end.”³⁸ The very cause that they were supposedly fighting for—cultural freedom—was undermined by the means of combat. This served as a larger analogy of the way the United States, and the CIA in particular, were fighting the Cold War: in seeking to spread freedom and American values, they had, among other things, propped up dictators in Cuba, Guatemala, and South Vietnam, and helped depose an elected ruler in Iran.

In Lasch’s estimation, Spender at least “had the wit . . . to recognize the situation for what it was,” quoting him as saying that he and his fellow writers and editors were “being used for concealed government propaganda” and that this made a “mockery” of intellectual freedom. At the same time, it was evident to anyone who had read Encounter that it was not simply pushing American propaganda: there was too much variety of content in each issue for that to appear credible. How much influence had the CIA exerted over editorial decisions? It was something that Spender worried over. As recently as September 1966, Josselson had told Spender that the “proudest achievement” of the Congress was “to have given a number of gifted people the means to publish intellectual magazines of the highest standing without any interference or any strings attached.”³⁹

Spender believed he had been making autonomous editorial decisions, and in the early days, he and Kristol had successfully prevented the CCF from imposing on the magazine a column about the Congress’s activities. In the aftermath of the revelations, Spender’s son, Matthew, asked him if he could remember specific pieces that had been suspiciously spiked and he recalled one, a laudatory piece about Castro’s Cuba.⁴⁰ Frances Stonor Saunders has demonstrated that a 1958 piece by Dwight Macdonald, which Spender had initially accepted, was rejected under CCF pressure.⁴¹ (However, that it was later published in another CCF journal, Tempo Presente, suggests that any such editorial interference was not particularly well organized.) Saunders also found evidence that a 1954 article by Emily Hahn on U.S. policy in China was spiked under CIA pressure.⁴² And of course influence could take more subtle forms than banning the publication of stories. “It would be untrue to write that the Congress never tried to influence the editorial policy of Encounter,” Spender later recalled, “although the influence it attempted to exercise was by no means always political: simply, the people in Paris had bright ideas about the kind of articles we should put in.”⁴³

The question for Spender was how he could rebuild his reputation. He knew that, for some, he had been “indelibly branded” and that he was always going to face skepticism about his role with Encounter and what he knew when.⁴⁴ Even if he had not been aware of what had gone on—and the evidence from his papers suggests that he must have kept up an elaborate deception with many people for many years if he did know—he had certainly been credulous. Spender later said that, “It was as with the people who come and tell you that your wife is unfaithful to you. Then you ask her yourself, and if she denies it, you are satisfied with it.”⁴⁵ Amid the anger and shame of betrayal, Spender decided that he had to do something. If his credibility, and the credibility of much of his generation had been tarnished, then what about the new generation that was challenging the old order? Around the world, radical movements were gaining momentum on university campuses. Just a year shy of his sixtieth birthday, Spender set an itinerary for New York, Paris, Berlin, and Prague, to get a taste of the spirit of ’68 and the revolution against the establishment.

IN MAY 1968, Spender went to Paris to visit the occupied Sorbonne. His friend Mary McCarthy, recently returned to Paris aftter reporting in Hanoi, wrote to Hannah Arendt to say that he was there “expiating the CIA.”⁴⁶ He certainly threw himself into the action. In the Latin Quarter he witnessed some of the street battles that took place between the protesters and the police. He gazed, fascinated, as the students constructed barricades by ripping up paving stones, felling trees across the Boulevard Saint-Germain, and dragging parked cars into the streets. He watched the students arm themselves with dustbin lids and improvised spears as they faced off against the ranks of the police, who slowly began marching down the street “like a thick wedge of mercury up a glass tube.”⁴⁷ The students set fire to anything flammable lodged in the barricades as the police launched tear gas into their midst.

Spender was reminded of his own youth when his generation rose up to fight fascism and volunteered for action in the Spanish Civil War. Yet he was also struck by differences that he found harder to reconcile. The New Left was in many ways libertarian, distrusting the “system” at every turn and breaking social taboos on sex and drugs. In France, it defined itself in opposition to De Gaulle and the traditional values he espoused. Instead of the rigorous structures of the Old Left, which carried the taint of hierarchy, the New Left embraced spontaneity and direct democracy. Rather than focus exclusively on class, the new generation also stressed the importance of gender, race, and the Third World. Mostly students, these were middle-class rebels who felt alienated from consumer culture and angered by the failures of liberal democracy. They protested against nuclear weapons and the Vietnam War and saw in America a new imperial power wrapping its tendrils around the globe. Their intellectual idol was the German emigre philosopher Herbert Marcuse, and their political hero was the Cuban revolutionary Ernesto “Che” Guevara.

As Spender discovered in Paris, the opposition to American capitalism did not translate into a support of Soviet Communism. On entering the courtyard of the Sorbonne, surrounded by what he described as “cliffs of buff-coloured stucco walls,” Spender discovered tables piled high with revolutionary literature—none of it would have gone down well at the Kremlin.⁴⁸ “The brands of revolution offered by the students are Maoist, Castroite, Trotskyist,” he wrote. Emblematic of this new movement’s dissatisfaction with the Cold War dichotomy was the German student leader Rudi Dutschke, who had fled the totalitarian regime in East Germany, only to find himself disenchanted by the inequities of the West (the previous month he had survived being shot in the head by a young anti-Communist).

In New York the previous month, Spender had climbed an improvised ladder into the occupied dean’s office at Columbia University to try to understand what motivated the students in their rebellion. He found them to be naive and directionless and that rather than setting an agenda, they were simply reacting to the demands of the moment. Spender could not see how this was going to get them anywhere. He was much more impressed with the African American protesters he met on the Columbia campus, as they seemed to have a much clearer sense of purpose. In Paris he came up against the same issue. The students did not want to think of themselves in the context of previous revolutions, nor did they want to learn from the failures of their predecessors. When it was pointed out, in an editorial in the Times, that the rebels had clearly not read Animal Farm, Spender realized “they would not want to read it and if they did read it could find there nothing which they thought applied in their case.” Spender found them to be “unself-critical” and that they were quick to “take refuge in the idea theirs was an unprecedented generation.”⁴⁹

On May 20, Spender attended what was called the “grand spectacular of the writers” at the Grand Amphitheatre of the Sorbonne. He arrived early—at 7:20 P.M.—and while Jean-Paul Sartre, the star attraction, was not scheduled to appear until 10 P.M., the room was already packed. When McCarthy arrived and took a seat in the area reserved for the press, at the back of the stage, Spender picked his way through the crowd to join her. Sitting on stage, and clearly too old to be students, the pair became a target of the crowd, who demanded their removal. Spender found it an unnerving experience as “looking at that immense shouting, moving, gesticulating mass was like looking into a cavernous mouth full of raging teeth.”⁵⁰ McCarthy and Spender took up new berths to the side of the main platform. The room continued to fill until students began climbing up into the niches of the walls to get a view of the stage. When Sartre finally arrived, Spender had a ringside seat.

It was one of the paradoxes of the movement that while the students rejected the idea of authority, they were drawn to the charismatic leadership of Sartre, whose hostility to all bourgeois values was central to their approach. He had spoken up on behalf of the students and condemned the violent manner in which the police had attacked protesters. That morning his interview with one of the public faces of the movement, Daniel Cohn-Bendit, had been published in Nouvelle Observateur. There was much mutual admiration. Spender thought it remarkable that Sartre managed to negotiate the crowd to take his place on the stage, blinking at the audience from behind “lenses as thick as portholes.” The questions started to pour in from the students. Spender felt there was something clinical about Sartre as, “computer-like,” he “produced small neat packaged answers in his crackling voice.”⁵¹ Hundreds more listened outside, as Sartre’s replies were broadcast through loudspeakers. “You must reinvent your tradition,” Sartre said at one point, “a tradition worthy of this cultural revolution.”⁵²

As much as he was taken with the romantic aspects of this youthful revolt, Spender’s concern was that in the interests of creating a new tradition, the rebels were prepared to throw out what was valuable in the old. Attacking the hierarchies in society was one thing, but tearing down the university was another. In The Young Rebels, the book he wrote about his time among the students, he pointed out that Karl Marx would not have gotten very far without the British Museum. There was, he concluded, something alarming and nihilistic in this desire to destroy the very institution that had armed them with their rebellious ideas in the first place. More generally, he was disheartened by their wholesale rejection of anyone or anything old, for that meant Spender himself.

IF IN PARIS SPENDER FELT LEFT BEHIND, in Prague he rediscovered purpose. There he found himself confronted by the issue that had prompted his involvement in the cultural Cold War in the first place: freedom of literary expression. He arrived in the city in July and set about meeting with students and writers who had participated in the protests leading up to what became known as “the Prague Spring.” After the cultural suffocation under the uncompromising rule of Antonin Novotny, a committed Stalinist, the energy and enthusiasm he found in Czechoslovakia delighted Spender. The efforts of the country’s new leader Alexander Dubcek to create “socialism with a human face” was a project that appealed to the old radical in Spender, whose left-wing politics always accommodated the need for individual freedom.

Some of the Czechoslovak writers that Spender met traced the stirrings of rebellion back to a 1963 conference on the work of Franz Kafka. Since Kafka wrote in German, many of these writers had not previously been familiar with his strange stories, even though he had lived much of his life in Prague. As good Marxists, they had been taught that alienation was something that happens under capitalism, but in Kafka’s depiction of an arbitrary and hostile bureaucratic state, many of them had recognized the alienation they felt under Communism.

Over the following years, writers began pushing back more forcefully against the Novotny regime. The demand for freedom of literary expression was the leading edge of a call for greater liberalization. In 1965, an increasingly restless student body had made Allen Ginsberg the “King of May” at their traditional May Day bacchanal. The shaggy-haired Beat poet paraded around Prague wearing a crown, much to the delight of the student body, many of whom had read his experimental and explicit poem “Howl” in translation. The Czechoslovak police kicked Ginsberg out of the country the following week, but a symbolic victory had been won.

In June 1967, the Fourth Congress of Czechoslovak Writers had turned into a scene of unexpected rebellion. The novelist Ludvik Vaculik led the charge, pointing out that the only reason they were assembled was that the Communist Party willed it to be so. He made the heretical claim that art and power should be kept separate. Another novelist, Milan Kundera, supported Vaculik and demanded to know why it was that the “guarding of frontiers was still more valued than the crossing of them.”⁵³ After the conference, the writers who had shown dissent, including Ivan Klíma, Pavel Kohout, and the young playwright Václav Havel, were either kicked out of the writers’ union or threatened with a ban on publication.

At a meeting of the student union later that year, groups of radical students expressed their solidarity with the writers who had spoken out. On October 31, the electricity failed at one of the largest student dorms, and while this was a frequent occurrence, this time the residents poured out into the street carrying candles and began to march through Prague chanting, “We want light! We want to study!” They were met by police who decided to put an end to the impromptu protests with a combination of tear gas and clubs. Dubcek, a reform-minded politician who had been secretary of the Party in Slovakia, called for an inquiry, and Novotny found his support dwindling rapidly. He resigned and was replaced by Dubcek, who, after a slow start, began instituting a series of reforms that dramatically opened up the country. “The Czechoslovaks were sincere,” Spender wrote, “in wanting to combine the utmost freedom of the individual (by which they meant, precisely, our freedom) with Communist government.”⁵⁴

The end of censorship prompted an explosion of creative work in art, film, and literature, and previously banned work came back into circulation. As if this was not enough to alarm the Soviet Union, the Dubcek regime began weeding out Soviet agents in its police and security forces and began an inquiry into crimes committed in the purges that followed the 1948 Communist coup. Such was the success of these reforms that people demanded more. In an essay entitled “On the Subject of Opposition,” Havel argued that the only way to guarantee the future of democratic socialism in the country was to institute a two-party structure and free elections. Dubcek remained a committed Communist and realized the need to check the speed of liberalization, especially as Brezhnev was presiding over an ideological hardening back in the Soviet Union. But it was already too late. The warnings from Moscow began coming thick and fast, and with a Party congress approaching in which the remaining Novotny loyalists were expected to be kicked out, Brezhnev decided to act.

On the night of August 20, a huge Soviet force, supported by Warsaw Pact allies, crossed into Czechoslovakia. The next morning two planes carrying Russian commandos landed at Prague airport. Tanks rolled onto Wenceslas Square in the center of Prague, and Dubcek and his political allies were arrested and flown to Moscow. There was scattered resistance, but such was the show of force by the Russians that any kind of concerted fight back was futile. Instead Czechoslovaks began a campaign of nonviolent resistance against the occupiers. The actions of the Soviet Union were met with outrage around the world, even among the European Communist Parties, some of which broke with the Kremlin permanently over the issue. When Dubcek returned to Prague, he was a beaten man and while he was allowed to stay on until he was replaced by Gustáv Husák the following year, his reforms were gradually reversed in a process known as “normalization.” For the Czechoslovak writers, the Soviet suppression of the Prague Spring was a devastating blow. Some, like Kundera, went into exile while others were silenced. Their resistance was far from over, however. Led by the example of Havel, writers found new ways to fight back, circulating texts in samizdat and organizing the Czechoslovak underground. They had lost the battle but were still fighting the war.

Perhaps the most remarkable protest against the Soviet invasion took place in Moscow itself, where a group of seven courageous dissidents, including Larisa Bogoraz, the wife of Yulii Daniel, waved placards in a protest on Red Square. With the Brezhnev regime continuing to crack down on any form of local dissidence, they were swiftly arrested. By that time, Bogoraz and Pavel Litvinov, a physicist and dissident, were already known to Spender. After Alexander Ginzburg and his collaborators on The White Book were sent to labor camps in January 1968, Bogoraz and Litvinov wrote “An Appeal to World Public Opinion,” an open letter that was published in newspapers in the West. Spender saw it in the Times and rallied writers and intellectuals including W. H. Auden, Cecil Day-Lewis, Mary McCarthy, Sonia Orwell, and Bertrand Russell to issue a statement of solidarity that was immediately distributed to the world press. Litvinov learned about the statement from foreign correspondents in Moscow and wrote to Spender urging him and his friends to create an organization that would champion the cause of writers who were subject to censorship or persecution around the world, a literary ancillary to the human rights organizations that were growing in influence. Shortly afterward, Bogoraz and Litvinov were themselves arrested for staging their protest in Red Square against the crushing of the Prague Spring. They were sentenced to exile in Siberia.

Spender ran with Litvinov’s suggestion. Perhaps he saw in it a chance for redemption, an opportunity for an honorable return to the Cold War fray. With advice from Amnesty International and in collaboration with David Astor, Stuart Hampshire, and Edward Crankshaw, Spender formed Writers and Scholars International, a charitable trust that, in 1972, launched a new magazine, Index on Censorship, under the editorship of Michael Scammell.⁵⁵ The magazine became, and remains, a respected forum in which oppressed writers can find a home for their work. Among its most important successes was helping to continue the work of its founding protesters, that is, keeping alive the spirit of the Prague Spring. It was in Index on Censorship that the English translation of Charter 77 first appeared. This manifesto, authored by Václav Havel among others, was a rallying point for the Czechoslovakian resistance, and its authors went on to play instrumental roles in the Velvet Revolution. From deep within the ethical murk of the cultural Cold War, Spender had found a light leading toward a clearer path.