Encounter Across the Seas

For highbrow little magazines, life is seldom easy, frequently short. Editor Cyril Connolly bitterly put an end to Britain's Horizon after trying for ten years to make ends meet. In the U.S., the monthly Partisan Review has been forced to cut down to six issues a year, is still constantly casting about for angels. Since they traditionally operate in the red, only the little magazines backed by universities, well-heeled nonprofit organizations or foundations have any security. This week in London, 10,000 copies of a brand-new little magazine rolled off the presses, and it not only has the backing of an organization but is also a highbrow magazine whose roots are transatlantic. The magazine: Encounter, an 80-page international monthly ($5 a year), backed by the world-wide Congress for Cultural Freedom, whose headquarters are in Paris.

Edited by British Poet Stephen Spender, 44, and Irving Kristol, 33, onetime managing editor of the U.S. monthly Commentary (TIME, Jan. 29, 1951), Encounter hopes to provide "an interchange of views among intellectuals of the whole English-speaking world." Anything that has any bearing "on culture or freedom," explains Editor Kristol. "or preferably both together, will be the hub of the magazine." In its first issue, Encounter prints articles, fiction and poetry by writers from six countries, including the unpublished diaries of Virginia Woolf, essays by France's Albert Camus and British-born Christopher Isherwood, poetry by C. Day Lewis and Edith Sitwell. Among future contributors of articles and fiction for the magazine: Arthur Koestler, Bertrand Russell, W. H. Auden, Aldous

Huxley, Arnold Toynbee, Lionel Trilling, Sidney Hook.

Encounter's backer, the devotedly anti-Communist Congress for Cultural Freedom (whose purpose is the "defense of intellectual liberties against all encroachments on the creative and critical spirit of man"), gets its money from such angels as Yeast Heir Julius Fleischmann, the Rockefeller Foundation, trade unions and other groups. The Congress, which has given the new magazine's editors a free hand, will distribute Encounter all over the world, hopes to boost its circulation to 25.000. British-born Editor Spender and American-born Kristol think an international magazine will help writing in both countries. Kristol feels that U.S. writers may have something to learn from the British, while Spender says: "Too many British writers are writing for themselves and their own little group of. say. six other writers. This will get air into British writing."

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