IN HIS POEM “Esthétique du Mal,” Wallace Stevens speaks of “the lunatic of one idea.” Melvin J. Lasky might be thought such a person. He had the energy of a lunatic, and, though widely read and interested in everything, he could nonetheless be described a “one idea” man.
That idea, however, was the most significant political idea of the 20th century: Antitotalitarianism was its name–and far from being the idea of a lunatic, it was absolutely crucial to any claim of political integrity in what now appears, in sheer number of people murdered for political reasons, the cruelest of all centuries in history. Melvin Lasky, who died on May 19 at age 84, devoted his life to the antitotalitarian idea and contributed heavily, on the intellectual front, to the defeat of communism in his lifetime.
Born in the Bronx in 1920, Mel Lasky grew up in an intensely political milieu. He went to City College, and was of the generation there of Irving Howe, Daniel Bell, Irving Kristol, and other young men who cut their Marxistical distinctions finer than they cut the belly lox at Ratner’s old Lower East Side restaurant. Unlike these others, Lasky longed for Europe, and would soon become one of those mid-Atlantic men: Americans most at home in Europe, and Europeans most at home in America. After serving in World War II, he stayed on in Germany to edit the magazine Der Monat, to which he brought such continental writers as Arthur Koestler, Raymond Aron, Bertrand Russell, and Ignazio Silone. The Swiss writer François Bondy wrote of Mel’s German editorship that “a young American gave several generations of Europeans not only a literary platform but something like a common intellectual homeland.”
Mel Lasky acquired wider fame as the second American editor of Encounter (the first was Irving Kristol). He edited it with panache, and, while drawing on the best English writers, enriched it with his many continental connections. He was editor when it was revealed that Encounter was partly financed, through splendidly labyrinthine ways, by the Central Intelligence Agency, which caused a great intellectual scandal in its day. Not everyone was scandalized; and I myself have long viewed the CIA’s helping to underwrite this perhaps best of 20th-century magazines as one of its solidest achievements.
I knew Mel Lasky through Edward Shils, who was an occasional contributor and full-time though usually ignored adviser to Mel during his Encounter days. In a letter, Edward described Mel to me as “awful, remarkable, and admirable.” The “awful” referred to Mel’s more flamboyant side; he had the dramatizing imagination of a boy who grew up on revolutionary fantasies. He frequently availed himself of such Trotskyist phrases as “hoist on his own petard” (I like the phrase better with “petard” replaced by “foulard”), “crossing polemical swords,” and “it is no accident that,” even inserting them into other people’s articles. He was also a nearly nonstop talker, even at transcontinental telephone rates, but the talk was high quality and I enjoyed it.
Mel was small, wiry, bald, and wore a Lenin-like goatee. At one point during the 1970s, he added long thick sideburns, causing Shils to say to him, “Now, Melvin, you can be either Lenin or Brahms, but I will not permit you to be both simultaneously.” More likely, Mel thought himself the 20th-century Alexander Herzen, a man inspired by the socialist impulse but very wise about all the ways that utopian dreams go astray. Lasky’s most ambitious book is Utopia and Revolution.
“A Farewell to Utopia” is the title that Mel gave to an essay I sent to him about my own mildly radical youth. I had published earlier pieces in Encounter in response to his red ballpoint scrawled notes asking me for contributions. Because Encounter was often in financial trouble, the checks for payment were frequently very late arriving. Because this particular essay had been commissioned as part of a book, for which I received a good fee, I instructed Mel that he need not pay me for it out of Encounter funds. Naturally, a check arrived straightaway. Perfect Mel. “Melvin is like a dog who knows seven languages,” Edward Shils used to say about him, “and obeys in none.”
Although he published a number of books, Mel Lasky was foremost an editor, a man who finds things for other people to write. Like all superior editors, he had an instinctual sense, in the realm of intellectual life, of the fashionable and the enduring and the right balance between the two. Encounter always had a firm line on totalitarian communism, but, owing to the breadth of Mel’s interests, there was generally a great deal else in the magazine for curious readers. He was himself such a reader, and a compulsive clipper of articles from journals and papers around the world. One of the changes he made over his predecessor’s Encounter was to add little boxes of material from the world press, so that the magazine’s pages sometimes seemed the intellectual equivalent of a collage.
When financial troubles finally drove Encounter under, Mel Lasky was, for the first time in his adult life, without a magazine. You have to imagine Roy Rogers without his horse, Frank Sinatra without a microphone, Rita Hayworth in flats. Unthinkable, really.
He lived his last years in Berlin, where he wrote the first of a projected three-volume study on The Language of Journalism. He continued clipping stray articles, and his last scrawled note to me contained a clipping from the English press on goofy new usage, which he thought I might enjoy. He asked that I send him some news, by which of course he meant gossip about intellectual life in America. I sent him what little I had, and told him how much I missed Encounter, which I did and still do. The magazine was passionate, turbulent, overflowing with items of oddity and interest, done with genuine flair–like Melvin J. Lasky himself.
Joseph Epstein is a contributing editor to The Weekly Standard.
