William Phillips called,” reads an undated office memorandum to Grover.
“On that letter to General Smith, he asks if he should say he was writing at your suggestion—or would you suggest your name not be mentioned, or what?”17 After the 1960s revelations, several New York intellectuals were surprised by the high-toned, moralistic stance Phillips took on the question of covert subsidies, particularly his condemnation of CCF magazines such as Encounter. “I can’t forget how ardently Phillips wooed the CIA when he thought he could get money for The Partisan Review, ” Bertram Wolfe told Encounter editor Melvin Lasky.18
It is not hard to understand why the CIA should have been interested in Partisan Review. Having originated as a literary organ of the New York Communist Party, the magazine had rebelled against Stalinist domination in 1936 and, after its relaunch on an independent footing the following year, emerged as a major center for the American non-communist left. It also enjoyed immense cultural prestige, in Europe as well as the United
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States, thanks to its association with such literary eminences as T. S. Eliot, Edmund Wilson, and George Orwell. Here, then, was a publication that commanded the respect of precisely the sort of foreign intellectual the Agency most wanted to influence and whose mere existence demonstrated that, contrary to Soviet propaganda, America did possess a high intellectual tradition. And if these qualities were not already evident to those charged with dispensing official patronage, boosters of the magazine were more than ready to point them out. “From direct experience, I know that those who have seen Partisan Review find it immensely interesting and stimulating,” wrote Hook to John Thompson, Executive Director of the Farfield Foundation in 1959 (and himself a writer well known in New York intellectual circles). “I am convinced that its distribution abroad in certain selected institutions will prove to be very fruitful.”19
Collaboration between the CIA and Partisan Review, however, had its limits. During a visit to the U.S. embassy in Paris in the winter of 1949, Phillips was asked by an intelligence officer if he would “pass money to friendly Europeans” he might encounter in his work as a writer and editor.
Like the unionist Victor Reuther a few years later, Phillips refused, citing his “feeling of discomfort and of being compromised by anything having to do with secret agencies.”20 Still, this squeamishness did not prevent him from pursuing a plan for raising the international profile of his beloved Partisan Review: publishing a European edition of the magazine, secretly backed by the CIA. In January 1950, back in Paris, Phillips contacted an expatriate American author and UNESCO official, H. J. “Kappy” Kaplan, asking if Kaplan would be interested in managing the venture, “the object of which is to create proper conditions for a fruitful dialogue between European and American intellectuals.”21 Despite Phillips’s dangling a pledge of $40,000 from the “AF of L” before Kaplan, the latter, doubtful that he would be allowed any editorial freedom by the magazine’s New York office, turned down the invitation.22 Back in the United States, Phillips continued to discuss the proposal with James Burnham, who was impressed by the potential of a Paris-based, anticommunist review to serve not only as a “rally-point for French intellectuals” but also as “a point of liaison and contact, and also of cover, with many potential uses.” Nonetheless, Burnham was not convinced that Phillips had “a practically feasible plan” worthy of OPC “financial support,” and the notion of a “French Partisan Review” was quietly dropped.23 However, the idea of a highbrow
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American literary review edited from Paris was not abandoned altogether.
It is tempting to speculate that the Paris Review, taken over by Peter Matthiessen and George Plimpton in 1953, was descended in part from Phillips’s proposal, especially given that we now know, thanks to research by Richard Cummings, that Matthiessen used the magazine as cover for his work as a CIA officer and that Plimpton served the Agency as an
“agent of influence.”24
In any case, what is clear is that the CIA’s tastes in literature were predominantly highbrow and modernist. Much the same could be said, it seems, of the visual arts. The abstract expressionist movement (whose guiding aesthetic principles received their fullest expression in the writings of New York art critic and Partisan Review editor Clement Greenberg) has featured most prominently in accounts of the cultural Cold War.25
