“The break of day — the broken day
The fall of night — the fallen night
No such thing as a single ray
Behold the undivided light...”
From Crumbs by Bachchoo

Living in London after my university days and beginning to write and sell the occasional article to newspapers and magazines, I was introduced to a sunken Sri Lankan whose name I won’t mention, for fear of libel lest he be still alive, who said I would be better off “syndicating” what I wrote. (Very much alive at the time, this patron kept a coffin with a truncated mattress in it instead of a bed in his single room). I didn’t know what “syndicate” meant but he kindly took me and three of my articles as samples to an agency called Forum World Features (FWF) in Lincoln’s Inn Fields. He introduced me to the editor who read my pieces on the spot, signed me up to contribute articles once a week and said he’d pay me £25 a go. At the time it seemed like winning the national lottery.
There was the added ego boost of receiving through the post a cyclostyled bundle of articles with mine almost always towards the top of the stapled pile and statements as to which international papers had picked the articles up for publication.
The Vietnam War was the cause celebre of the Left in Britain and I inevitably, with socialist and Marxist leanings and commitment, began to write about the campaign against America’s military presence in southeast Asia and to even argue for a Viet Cong victory. The purely descriptive articles about the campaign passed muster and were published readily, but as the tone and substance of the articles got increasingly more rhetorical, they came back with rejection slips. Soon it became clear, even when I wrote about subjects other than the anti-war movement, that my relationship with FWF was at an end.
Years later, having made something of a career in writing, the British newspapers unearthed a curious story. Forum World Features had been the creation and instrument of a United States government intelligence agency. Each issue contained subtle propaganda articles by writers of the agency and, by selling itself as an independent supplier of features, it had managed to infiltrate the editorial pages of publications all over the world. So my articles were not enthusiastically embraced as great writing or vital journalism, they were bought to provide a cover of independence and Left-sounding views for the insidious substance the US agency wanted to disseminate. My articles and those of others perhaps were used as red-herring journalism.
I suppose it was the closest I got to working for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).
FWF was not alone in being financed and sponsored by such an agency. Years before FWF, a very popular literary-political magazine called Encounter had become, in my college days and on campuses all over the world, compulsory reading. It was edited by Stephen Spender and Melvyn J. Lasky. My friends and I awaited and read it diligently. It was where I first encountered the work of Harold Pinter, John Wain, V.S. Naipaul and very many others. It was crisply edited and designed and I doubt if it crossed any reader’s mind that its very style and authority were being used as cover for some specially targeted articles and opinions which the CIA wanted disseminated. If there were such articles, they seemed to be part of the political mix of information and not in any sense blatantly propagandist.
It emerged years later that the Congress for Cultural Freedom, which owned Encounter, was an offshoot of the CIA and was launched as part of the intellectual artillery of the Cold War.
Encounter was distinctly highbrow and became a habit and a prop of intellectual pretension. The other publications that came into our house were magazines called Woman’s Own, Woman and Home and the Reader’s Digest whose demise, after all these years, was announced this week.
I don’t think any of these was owned or financed by the US or other government’s agencies. The women’s mags dealt in the main with recipes, knitting and possibly with fashion. I only remember getting the impression that British architecture seemed uniformly to be what I now know to be fifties’ lower-middle class suburban housing. The Readers’ Digest on the other hand was distinctly and proudly low brow. I read it diligently at the time, not knowing that “brows” existed, much less how to distinguish between their comparative elevations.
It seemed to contain regular attacks on the Soviet Union with articles about how children were encouraged and even paid to spy on their parents for hints of counter-revolutionary activity. I don’t think the articles achieved the object of filling me with fear and loathing for the Soviet way of life. Instead I can remember wondering which of my relatives I would denounce if the Communist system ever came to India and denouncing became lucrative.
There were regular features such as “Humour in Uniform” which I took to be a hangover from the World War II and a regular quiz called “How to Increase Your Word Power” which offered you recondite words and a choice of likely definitions. It was the first page to which I turned when the magazine, to which my aunts subscribed, came through the post.
It was around the years when Encounter was being published that I must have picked up the fact that there were distinctions to be made in the quality of literature. I don’t quite know where this incipient critical notion came from. I was certainly not taught it.
In those Reader’s Digest days or years, I read any and everything and but had no way or even need to distinguish between reading Thomas Hardy, say, and reading Earl Stanley Gardner. I was certainly aware that Jane Austen wrote in a very different style from the cowboy novels of Max brand or Luke Short, but the question of which was better prose and why never entered the discourse.
But then the change came, perhaps with the advent of more demanding magazines such as Time which took everything seriously and Encounter which was responsible for introducing, for the first time to me, through its reviews of books, the critical approach to reading.
It was only then that I began to be grateful to the Reader’s Digest for giving me a genre of publication to look down on.