Spender's Lives
After the war, Spender joined UNESCO as Counsellor to the Section of Letters, and this marked an new phase of his celebrity: a twenty-year-long stint as a kind of globe-trotting cultural emissary. The postwar years were good years in which to be an intellectual. The civilized world had to be rebuilt, but thoughtfully: this time, we had to get it right. Huge congresses were organized at which famous thinkiers debated the big questions: "Freedom and the Artist," "The Role of the Artist," "Art and the Totalitarian Threat." Spender was in regular attendance at such gatherings in Europe, and was soon in demand for trips to India, Japan, even Australia. These "junketings," as he described them, were usually paid for by the Congress for Cultural Freedom, based in Washington, as part of America�s herats-and-minds offensive against Communism. In 1953, he was approached by the congress to edit the literary side of a new monthly, Encounter, which would be "anti-Communist in policy but not McCarthyite." (He was told that the money for it cam from the Farfield Foundation, a supposedly independent body.) Spender, it had been noted, contributed to the much discussed 1949 anthology "The God That Failed," a collection of contrite essays by six of Europe�s most prominent ex-Communists. His 1936 flirtation with the Party was no longer to be laughed at: he had experienced that of which he spake, and could thus be seen as a Cold Warrior of high potential.
