The Bloomsbury Handbook to Cold War Literary Cultures 9781350191716, 9781350191747, 9781350191723

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THE BLOOMSBURY HANDBOOK TO COLD WAR LITERARY CULTURES

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THE BLOOMSBURY HANDBOOK TO COLD WAR LITERARY CULTURES Edited by Greg Barnhisel

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BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 29 Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin 2, Ireland BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2022 Copyright © Greg Barnhisel and contributors, 2022 The editor and contributors have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Editor of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgments on p. ix constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover design: Rebecca Heselton Cover image: Photograph of Es’kia Mphahlele by Fred Attol. Drum Social Histories/Baileys African History Archive/Africa Media Online. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN: HB: 978-1-3501-9171-6 ePDF: 978-1-3501-9172-3 eBook: 978-1-3501-9173-0 Series: Bloomsbury Handbooks Typeset by Newgen KnowledgeWorks Pvt. Ltd., Chennai, India To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

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CONTENTS

L ist of F igures   A cknowledgments   Introduction  Greg Barnhisel

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Part 1 Production 1 How the Communist Party Shaped Gwendolyn Brooks’s Early Writing  Mary Helen Washington

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2 The Cold War Encyclopedic Novel  Jeffrey Severs

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3 Cold War Technology and Women Poets  Linda A. Kinnahan

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4 The American Long Poem Evolves, 1945–90: Cold War, Hot War, (No War), Pure War  63 Edward Brunner 5 Butler, Le Guin, and Feminist Science Fiction of the Cold War  Katlyn Williams

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6 Cold War Spy Fiction: The Ethics of Fighting Fire with Fire  Skip Willman

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7 American Jewish Writers and the Eastern Bloc: The Dissident Generation  Brian K. Goodman

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8 Writing the Cold War in the American Academic Novel  Ian Butcher

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Part 2 Circulation 9 Anglo-American Propaganda and the Transition from the Second World War to the Cultural Cold War  James Smith and Guy Woodward

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10 Book Diplomacy: Soviet–American Publishing Relations and the Moscow Book Exhibitions in the Late Cold War  Birgitte Beck Pristed and Rósa Magnúsdóttir

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11 Closets, Pulps, and the Gay Internationale: The “Homintern”  Jaime Harker

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12 Librarians, Library Diplomacy, and the Cultural Cold War, 1950–70  Amanda Laugesen

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13 The Transcription Centre and the Coproduction of African Literary Culture in the 1960s  Asha Rogers

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14 Creative Writing and the Cold War: Rebels with Transcripts  Eric Bennett

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15 How Chinese Letters Traveled to Iowa City: Hualing Nieh’s Transpacific Crossings  Yi-hung Liu

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16 William Faulkner as Cold War Cultural Ambassador: “In between propaganda and escapism”  Deborah Cohn

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Part 3 Reception 17 The Distribution and Reception of American Literature in Cold War Japan  Hiromi Ochi 18 Making a Literary Working Class in the Cultural Cold War: The Australasian Book Society  Nicole Moore

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19 Anti-Apartheid Imagination, the Cold War, and African Literary Magazines  Christopher E. W. Ouma

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20 Cuban Revolutionaries Read US Writers: Bohemian Mondays  Russell Cobb

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21 Struggles for “Cultural Freedom” in Cold War India: Fostering a Critical Spirit in the Liberal Journals of the 1950s–1970s  Laetitia Zecchini

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22 Robinson Jeffers’s Pilgrimage through the Iron Curtain: The Beloved Shepherd  Jiřina Šmejkalová

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23 Reading for Freedom in Cold War America  Kristin L. Matthews

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L ist of C ontributors   I ndex  

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FIGURES

1 At the South Side Community Art Center, 1948  2 Portrait of Audre Lorde by Robert Giard, May 1987  3 A photograph of Chinua Achebe is used to promote the “African Writers of Today” series, featured on the US National Educational Television network in the mid-sixties  4 Hualing Nieh and Paul Engle met in Taipei, 1963  5 Perry Miller at his seminar  6 Both sides of a 1958 Australasian Book Society promotional leaflet  7 Both sides of a 1958 Australasian Book Society promotional leaflet  8 Image of Jeffers’s letter to Kamil Bednář of July 7, 1958 

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This is the second collection of essays I have edited on this broad topic. The first, Pressing the Fight: Print, Propaganda, and the Cold War (2010), dealt exclusively with print culture and was not, unlike this one, focused on literature. It is gratifying that several contributors to that previous volume agreed to participate in this project, and it’s a personal pleasure to me to see how their work has broadened and expanded in the intervening decade-plus. They—Ed Brunner, Russell Cobb, Amanda Laugesen, Kristin Matthews, Hiromi Ochi, and James Smith—have established themselves as leading voices in their fields, and it’s an honor to have their chapters appear in this anthology. The contributors to this volume had to produce their chapters during one of the most extraordinary times the world has ever seen: the almost two years of varying degrees of lockdown due to the Covid-19 pandemic. For those who rely on unique archival materials, this made their task immeasurably more difficult or even impossible, as all archive libraries and collections were closed for over a year. But this affected everyone, not just because most other lending libraries were inaccessible for much of this time, but also because of the massive disruptions the pandemic and lockdowns caused to family life, travel, childcare, working conditions, employment security, and of course health. I am enormously grateful to all of my contributors for their diligence and grace in dealing with these circumstances. Unfortunately, the difficulties brought about by the pandemic, as well as other personal and professional factors, prevented some other scholars who were on the initial roster of contributors from completing their chapters. I am disappointed that readers won’t be able to see their work, but I greatly appreciate their interest in the project and willingness to be part of it. I am also enormously grateful to Mary Helen Washington and Brian Goodman, who because of that attrition joined this project quite late in the process and were very accommodating about timelines much shorter than what is customary in academia. I want to recognize that several contributors have written brilliant essays in a language that is not their native tongue. Writing is hard; scholarly writing can be especially challenging. I am in awe of these scholars’ abilities and grateful to them for their work on behalf of this volume. Thanks to David Avital, Ben Doyle, and Laura Cope at Bloomsbury Academic for commissioning the volume, providing guidance and assistance in producing it, and shepherding it through the editorial and production process. Thanks to Dean Kris Blair and the McAnulty College of Duquesne University for their financial support. Deborah Cohn’s “William Faulkner as Cold War Cultural Ambassador” originally appeared in Diplomatic History 40.3 (June 2016). Mary Helen Washington’s “When Gwendolyn Brooks Wore Red” originally appeared in her The Other Blacklist: The African American Literary and Cultural Left of the 1950s (2014). Thanks to Oxford University Press Journals and Columbia University Press for permission to reprint.

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Introduction GREG BARNHISEL

Is there an identifiable “Cold War” period in Anglophone literary history? Did the particular tensions, anxieties, and structures generated by the standoff between the “Free World” and the “Soviet bloc” engender a distinct era of literary creation, with its own institutions, themes, movements, and styles? Was the Cold War merely, as the historian Tony Judt asserted, just a long “postwar” coda to the Second World War (Judt 2005)? Or was the period from 1946 through 1989 another phase in what we might call the “long twentieth century,” which extended from the birth of modernism in the 1870s through to the present age? Most literary history looks at this question, justifiably, through a formal and thematic analysis of the actual literature produced, and from that perspective the Cold War period does appear distinct from what came before it, and what followed. Modernism, with its formal experimentation, and its devotion to master-narratives drawn from history, psychology, and mythology, preceded the Cold War period, but the Second World War ended any faith (at least among Western artists) in the master-narratives of communism, fascism, or even radical democracy. Modernism’s technical experimentation, as well, reached an end point with Joyce’s Finnegans Wake in 1939. Early Cold War literature, then, returned to an equivocal realism and a suspicion of overarching ideologies. Kitchen-sink dramas and novels of British “Angry Young Men” like Kingsley Amis and John Osborne, American novels of the working class by Saul Bellow and John Updike, a return to traditional forms in the work of poets like Philip Larkin and the early Adrienne Rich, confessional poetry by Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath: experimentation, for the most part, was out of fashion. Later, in the early 1960s, Pop Art and television spawned a wildly playful and (often) politically uncommitted postmodernism. But common to much of the well-known modernist, postmodernist, or realist literature of this time—literature that is produced by British, Irish, and American writers—was a sense of anxiety, of threat, of an ever-looming cataclysmic world-ending conflict: the Cold War itself. In the Western Cold War imagination, there are two sides, and the people of the English-speaking world were firmly on the “Free World” side, no matter if one was Labour or Tory, Democrat or Republican. But literature after the Cold War, particularly in the Anglo-American world, has replaced the a priori of a bipolar geopolitical order whose conflicts could end humanity with a sense of a “flattened” world of many centers, and many struggles. Post–Cold War literature also is preoccupied with identity politics and the constructed nature of individual identity. In that sense, Cold War literature

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THE Bloomsbury Handbook to Cold War Literary Cultures

can clearly be distinguished from what came before and after, and was clearly influenced by the unique features of the Cold War period in history. There is, then, a “Cold War literature.” For all of its diversity, Cold War literature has a few pervasive characteristics. Terror and anxiety about the possibility of nuclear destruction. The omnipresence of an ideologically driven state policing its citizens’ beliefs and activities. A bipolar world in tense confrontation, and the loyalties of “nonaligned” states as capital to be bargained for. Worries about, or celebration of, new technologies that seem to be expanding beyond control. Consumerism as an end in itself. Spying. Paranoia. And, particularly after the 1960s, the sense that the old sociopolitical order based on the dominance of white men was starting to crumble. But the more we look at the Anglophone literature of the long twentieth century, and expand our understanding of “English-language literature” beyond the British Isles and the United States to Australia, India, the Caribbean, Africa, and East Asia, the more we see that many of these themes predate the Cold War, and that the literature of that time doesn’t feel as if it broke in any significant way from the literature of the decades preceding or following. We also see another set of developments that predated the Cold War’s beginning in 1946 and have continued long after its 1989 end: increasing literary production and evolution in the “peripheries” of the Englishspeaking world; transformations of the Anglo-American literary tradition as it meets other cultures with their own rich heritages; and new institutions and technologies of communication that are increasingly shaping these other changes. The Bloomsbury Handbook to Cold War Literary Cultures is particularly interested in those institutions of literature—the organizations and practices and conventions surrounding and determining how literature is produced, how it reaches readers, and how readers make sense of it. The diverse institutions examined by our contributors include publishing houses, nonprofit foundations, universities, radio broadcasters, political parties, magazines, libraries, trade fairs, professional societies, bookstores, and of course government agencies of every description. This volume, while a critical survey of Cold War literature itself, also very much takes a “book-historical” approach to its topic. By this, I mean that this anthology’s special concern is the production, circulation, and reception of Cold War–era Anglophone literature, and how such institutions shaped those dynamics and relationships. This approach in fact informs one of the three theses of this anthology, which we might state as Thesis 1: the Cold War period was marked by the unprecedented growth of institutions and their presence in all facets of life, both in the West and the East Bloc, and these institutions exercised enormous influence over the creation, circulation, and reception of literature. The so-called “Third World” lagged behind the West in this development, but there, too, writers increasingly worked through, and were supported by, governmental and nongovernmental organizations— both homegrown and foreign—and these institutions mediated between readers and texts. Focusing on the material and social factors behind the production, dissemination, and reception of this writing, then, gives us a unique perspective from which to examine whether the “Cold War” even makes sense as an era. Did the end of the Second World War and the events of 1946 really mark a distinct break from what had been going on in Western and world history and did 1989 usher in a “new world order,” as US President George H. W. Bush memorably put it in 1990? Or, was the Cold War simply one phase in a longer twentieth century that began with the First World War or even before? Bureaucratic nation-states continue to expand their reach into the lives of

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citizens, even as the nation-state itself is challenged by large institutions such as multinational corporations, professional and interest societies, transnational political movements, universities, and nongovernmental organizations. Neoliberal, market-based logic asserts itself more than ever as the only conceivable form of common sense. And the peoples, nations, and states outside of the West continue to contend with the vestiges of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century colonialism. These developments preceded the Cold War, and have continued since. Expanding our purview beyond the traditional centers of the British Isles and the United States, then, demonstrates that the Cold War was less a distinct period in itself than one dramatic stage in a longer era marked by macrotrends of growing state and corporate power and surveillance of individuals, of the breakdown of a racist and imperialist colonial order that coalesced in the late eighteenth century, of the questioning of Enlightenment certainties, and of an increasingly democratized access to information and cultural capital. The essays in The Bloomsbury Handbook to Cold War Literary Cultures share a concern with how the writing of the Cold War period was shaped by and exhibits the effects of these macrotrends. And these essays are in conversation with each other—sometimes explicitly, sometimes implicitly—about the writers and works of the time, and about how the time shaped them. The subject of the present volume is limited to English-language writing in the Cold War period, not Cold War literature around the world. In part, this is because English became the unquestioned dominant world language in this period, finally triumphing in its long rivalry with French. And while American military, economic, and cultural power bolstered the presence of English everywhere, it had in reality already been almost everywhere, due to the vast reach of the British Empire. The British were particularly assiduous about embedding their language and cultural practices (including their literary tradition) in the regions that they colonized, and so many of the contributors to this volume are writing about how the Empire “spoke back”: how writers from Shanghai, from Johannesburg, from Lagos, from Delhi claimed the language and its literary tradition and made it theirs. And often, they did this not as solitary artistic voices but as members and beneficiaries of institutions like literary magazines, cultural organizations, universities, and even mass-communication organizations like the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC). But Anglophone literature is the subject of this book because the Cold War also marked one of the most remarkably fertile periods in British, and especially American, literary history. Literary modernism had largely unfolded in Europe, but after the war the United States, and in particular New York City, asserted that it was now the world’s artistic center. New York “stole the idea of modern art,” as Serge Guilbaut famously put it (Guilbaut 1983). The Beats; the New York School of poets; mainstream literary Broadway theater by playwrights like Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams, and Lorraine Hansberry; a rising generation of Jewish-American novelists; Black novelists like Ralph Ellison and James Baldwin; and the fractious New York Intellectuals and their house organ Partisan Review all started or were based in New York City. Institutions, again, made this possible. Guilbaut points to a small set of art critics and their magazines, in turn funded by US government agencies including the Central Intelligence Agency, as the responsible parties; but on the literary side of things, the publishing industry was by far the most important force. American publishing in the 1950s and 1960s was in its golden age, thriving due to the increasing affluence and near-universal literacy of the American public. The so-called “paperback revolution” (the creation and popularization of the “trade paperback” and the explosive growth of the “pocket book”) vastly expanded markets and profits for the industry as a whole, and

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this money allowed publishers to take chances on and support the careers of young writers (see Davis 1984). Harper & Brothers (later Harper & Row and today HarperCollins); the Farrar, Straus firm (which survives today as Farrar, Straus, & Giroux); Simon & Schuster; Scribner’s; Viking Press; Random House; Little, Brown; Harcourt, Brace; Houghton Mifflin; and especially Alfred A. Knopf cultivated the most prominent American writers of the postwar period: Updike, Roth, Bellow, Ellison, Baldwin, Toni Morrison, Norman Mailer, Mary McCarthy, J. D. Salinger, Joyce Carol Oates, Joan Didion, Susan Sontag, and many others. This “golden age” ended relatively quickly, as the logic of capitalism and economies of scale prompted a wave of mergers and acquisitions in American publishing. Random House swallowed Knopf in 1960 in a move that shook the literary world, but this union was negligible compared to the conglomeratization that followed, in which gargantuan “holding companies” that owned dozens of firms in unrelated industries started shopping for publishers. The most notorious of these was Gulf + Western, which in 1975 brought Simon & Schuster into a fold that also included Consolidated Cigars, Madison Square Garden, Stax Records, Simmons Bedding, New Jersey Zinc, and Paramount Pictures. In this economy, books became just another widget. Publishing had long thought of itself as a genteel business, more interested in quality than money, but these amalgamations increased the pressure on publishers to deliver profits on all of their books. Editors could no longer justify nurturing an author for years as she built an audience; blockbuster titles became the main goal. Consolidation increased through the 1980s, and by the 1990s only six major American publishers remained, all of them owned by entertainment and communications conglomerates such as Viacom, Disney, Bertlesmann, and NewsCorp. (When Penguin Random House bought Simon & Schuster in 2020, this left only a “Big Four” responsible for the vast majority of American publishing: Penguin Random House, Macmillan, Hachette, and HarperCollins. By the time this book appears, that could be three.) When the large publishers became more “corporate” and bottom-line driven, though, another set of publishers stepped in to pick up the slack. The 1960s and 1970s were a boom time for small independent and underground publishers, many of them based outside New York City. San Francisco’s City Lights Books, also a landmark bookstore, published many of the Beat writers. Grove Press in New York (and its literary quarterly, the Evergreen Review) put out editions of experimental authors like Samuel Beckett, Kathy Acker, Tom Stoppard, and Harold Pinter, and helped to erode US obscenity laws when it published D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover in 1959 and Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer in 1960. New Directions Books’ characteristic blackand-white paperbacks were a fixture on college dorm bookshelves. And, as Jaime Harker shows in her essay, small feminist publishers like Kitchen Table Press gave a voice to lesbian and radical feminist writers who had been shut out of the corporate publishing industry. The contributors to this collection also demonstrate how American nonprofit foundations— especially the Ford Foundation, Rockefeller Foundation, and Carnegie Corporation—also influenced and underwrote literary production, circulation, and reception. Ford and Rockefeller provided funding to many of the literary magazines that published the work of these writers, as well as to the universities that increasingly employed them (and collected their papers). But they also wanted a hand in interpreting the work. Hiromi Ochi’s piece on American literature in postwar Japan details the collaboration of the military occupation authorities, State Department diplomats, and Rockefeller and Stanford University in creating annual seminars training Japanese

Introduction

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teachers of American literature. American literature, US officials hoped, would help “democratize” the Japanese mind. And sub rosa, foundations such as Farfield funneled CIA money to cultural organizations like the Congress for Cultural Freedom, laundering out the real source of the funds. Cultural diplomacy itself grew dramatically in this era—nations signed more international cultural accords and treaties during the Cold War than in all previous history—and Great Britain and the United States accordingly created huge new bureaucracies such as the United States Information Agency (USIA). Literature and writing took a central role in this. William Faulkner was only one of dozens of eminent American authors to serve as cultural diplomats abroad, touring and reading across the globe, as both Deborah Cohn’s and Ochi’s chapters describe. These programs continued well into the 1980s, as Brian Goodman shows in his essay on how their USIA-sponsored trips to Eastern Europe changed the relationships of Jewish-American authors like Philip Roth and Saul Bellow to their roots in the region. The British had beaten the United States to this. The British Council, founded in 1934 to promote British culture abroad (partly in response to fascism), had been active for a number of years by the time the Cold War began, but it was by no means the only organ of the UK government using literature to achieve political aims. In her chapter, for example, Asha Rogers looks specifically at how the Transcription Centre supported many of the Anglophone African writers such as Es’kia Mphahlele and Chinua Achebe who later came to worldwide prominence. What was intended to be a bulwark against African Communism, though, ended up strengthening the independence movement among Britain’s African colonies and protectorates. Rogers’s chapter, along with those of Laetitia Zecchini, Russell Cobb, Christopher Ouma, Yi-hung Liu, and Nicole Moore, are the most important statements here of the second, closely related argument of this collection, which we could state as Thesis 2: the Cold War mapped closely onto, but did not determine or overshadow, the parallel dynamic of decolonization, which began before the Cold War and continued long after. While writers in the UK and US focused mostly on the Cold War conflict itself, Anglophone writers in the decolonizing world often repurposed the forces and institutions of the Cold War in their own local struggles for political and cultural self-determination. Finally, the Cold War period witnessed the artistic decline and cultural sanctification of literary modernism. Although modernism emerged from the rejection of the institutions of bourgeois Western life, after the Second World War it was adopted and celebrated by these same institutions— the mainstream press, design and advertising, universities, foundations, even government agencies. This gave the lie, to some extent, to modernism’s claims to wild experimentation: how rebellious could a work be if it was taught at Yale, or used in magazine ads, or deployed by governments as propaganda (as with the well-known 1947 “Advancing American Art” exhibition (Littleton and Sykes 1999))? And as modernism migrated away from the imperial centers of London and Paris and into the periphery—not just New York but Kolkata, Kampala, Taipei—its claims to universality came into conflict with cultures that didn’t share its cultural heritage and its individualist (or antiindividualist) values, and with writers who drew very different lessons and types of inspiration from its masterworks. Modernism had always relied on a structure of cultural hierarchy, positioning itself as high culture. It documented, and often deplored, the growing dominance of the forms of popular culture produced by consumer capitalism. Before the Cold War, modernism retained its oppositional

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status: it was high culture, yes, but it was not official culture. But when it did become a kind of official culture, it lost its claims to be a critical or dissenting voice. Into that void of dissent emerged what became known as “postmodernism,” a style that, like modernism itself, crossed generic boundaries from painting to sculpture to literature. But instead of deploring pop culture, it embraced it. It rejected the cultural hierarchies and master-narratives of modernism, instead juxtaposing everything on the same level. The decline of modernism, the revival of realism, and the birth of postmodernism are the context for the last of this book’s main arguments: Thesis 3: As cultural institutions embraced modernism, it lost its artistic vitality. Some writers returned to realism while others helped develop a new style called postmodernism, each of which became a powerful tool for previously marginalized groups such as women, queer writers, writers of color, Jewish writers, and writers from outside the United States and the UK to establish their voices and demand inclusion in the Anglophone literary world. Louis Menand’s recent The Free World is particularly good on how postmodernism itself (and “Pop Art,” its most familiar iteration) arose specifically out of the Cold War environment, but here several contributors provide analyses of individual postmodern works and link them to the global conflict. History, for postmodernism, is just another narrative, of no more value or validity than any other. In this volume, Jeffrey Severs shows how three of the major American postmodern novelists—Thomas Pynchon, Robert Coover, and Don DeLillo—rewrite the history of the Second World War and the American 1950s, and Linda Kinnahan looks at how poets Marianne Moore, Lorine Niedecker, and Audre Lorde did the same thing. And without the highly advanced consumer culture that had sparked modernism in the first place, but with an acute awareness of how colonial powers used cultural hierarchy as a tool of repression and domination, writers in places like India and sub-Saharan Africa often practiced their own kind of homegrown postmodernism that rhymed with, but did not replicate, that of the UK and the United States. The organization of this volume reflects the common division of book history into three spheres—production, circulation, and reception. The Bloomsbury Handbook to Cold War Literary Cultures, though, isn’t just a contribution to book history but also a piece of literary criticism. Accordingly, the essays that deal primarily with criticism and analysis have been placed into the “Production” section, as they are primarily about the literary texts themselves and the factors that influenced their creation, including the author’s life (as with Washington’s chapter on Gwendolyn Brooks’ leftism), the conventions of genre (as Katlyn Williams, Skip Willman, and Ian Butcher detail in their respective essays on science fiction, spy fiction, and the academic novel), and writers’ transformations of history as a source text (as Kinnahan, Severs, and Ed Brunner analyze in their chapters on Cold War poetry and the encyclopedic novel). If the “Production” section focuses on how texts were created, the main subject of the “Circulation” section is how texts got to their readers (or listeners), and it’s striking how varied these vectors of dissemination were. There were bookstores, of course, but as Harker shows in her chapter on the “Homintern,” purchasers could also buy cheap paperback books at drugstores and department stores and train stations. Trade fairs connect publishers to bookstores and wholesalers, but those trade fairs, like everything else in the Cold War, were affected by global political tensions or even disagreements about copyright law, as Rósa Magnúsdóttir and Birgitte Beck Pristed detail in their essay. When the superpowers wanted to get information to a foreign population, they often used libraries and reading rooms, and Amanda Laugesen and Ochi both describe such “library

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Introduction

diplomacy” as conducted by the UK and the United States. Failing that, one could just airdrop books and leaflets, as James Smith and Guy Woodward illustrate. Radio, especially in Africa, became a powerful medium for writers to reach publics (and, as Rogers shows, earn a living), and beginning in the 1950s, as Eric Bennett and Liu show, university creative-writing programs became an unexpected vehicle for the circulation of Cold War political ideas, and of transcontinental literary exchange. Deborah Cohn’s essay on William Faulkner’s State Department–sponsored travels abroad concludes this section, and argues (in part) that even as his literary celebrity bolstered his status as a US cultural diplomat, his work as a cultural diplomat expanded the circulation of his literary works around the world, both in English and in translation. Faulkner provides a bridge to the “Reception” section. Ochi shows how Faulkner’s 1955 trip to Japan formed part of, and in many senses culminated, the US project to use American literature to “reeducate” the Japanese after the war. In very different ways, Moore, Cobb, and Jiřina Šmejkalová look at Communist readers: for Moore, these are the members of Communist social groups in 1950s Australia who provided feedback on their comrades’ book manuscripts; Cobb is interested in readers in early Communist Cuba; and Šmejkalová’s highly original and personal essay incisively traces how readers in Communist Czechoslovakia (including herself!) responded to the American poet Robinson Jeffers, whom they knew through the idiosyncratic translations of Kamil Bednář. Ouma and Zecchini, then, examine how African and Indian writers used and transformed English literary institutions to advance their own causes, which intersected with the larger Cold War bipolar paradigm in unpredictable ways. The volume concludes with Kristin Matthews’s essay on how the political meaning of reading itself charged over the course of the Cold War and after, and has always been a space by which cultural powers not only assert their domination but are also a means for resistance to that power.

WORKS CITED Davis, K. (1984), Two-Bit Culture: The Paperbacking of America, Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin. Guilbaut, S. (1983), How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Judt, Tony (2005), Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945, New York: Penguin. Littleton, T., and Sykes, M. (1999), Advancing American Art: Painting, Politics, and Cultural Confrontation at Mid-Century, Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press. Menand, L. (2021), The Free World: Art and Thought in the Cold War, New York: Macmillan.

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PART 1

Production

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CHAPTER ONE

How the Communist Party Shaped Gwendolyn Brooks’s Early Writing MARY HELEN WASHINGTON

But I have judged important the very difficult creation of poems and fiction which even a century ago were—and are now—bearers of a hot burden. —Gwendolyn Brooks, Negro Digest, 1966 At the same time that she was workshopping her poetry at Chicago’s South Side Community Art Center (SSCAC), where race and modernism seemed to comfortably coexist, poet Gwendolyn Brooks was also negotiating with Elizabeth Lawrence, her white editor at Harper & Row, and with four manuscript readers (probably white), as she tried, from 1945 to 1951, to get her first novel Maud Martha, originally titled American Family Brown, accepted. Lawrence conveyed to Brooks the readers’ discomfort with Brooks’s treatment of race: “One reader liked the lyrical writing but was disappointed by the sociological tone and patent concern with problems of Negro life” (Melhem 1987: 81). Though Brooks proceeded to make changes, her editor and readers continued to express concern about her representations of race: “It was proposed that the unpleasant experiences with whites be balanced by a positive encounter to justify the hopefulness she [Maud Martha] retains” (Melhem 1987: 83) Lawrence preferred for the hopefulness in the novel to be tied to Maud’s “positive” experiences with whites rather than to Maud’s growing awareness of and resistance to racism. In the final letter of approval for publication, Lawrence used the coded term “universal” to warn Brooks against too much emphasis on racial issues and “possible stereotyping of whites” in her future writing: “She hoped that the poet’s future work would have a universal perspective” (Melhem 1987: 83–4). Lawrence suggested another change that confirms her narrow view of Blackness. In the chapter where Maud is reading a novel, Brooks had originally chosen a book by Henry James, one of Brooks’s favorite models for writing fiction, but Lawrence called that selection “improbable,” so Brooks changed the novel to the more popular and middlebrow novel Of Human Bondage by Somerset Maugham. Brooks intended her protagonist to be a racially

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marked, working-class, intellectual and was well aware of the way Lawrence was coding race and class in her objections to Maud reading Henry James. Rather than softening her racial critique, however, Brooks inserted a series of racially marked chapters, which show that she was refusing the Cold War racial consensus on race—that Black writers should minimize racial identity and racial strife in an effort to achieve “universality.”1 The editor’s pressure on Brooks to soften her racial critique has to be understood in the context of the late 1940s and early 1950s “official antiracist liberalism” (Melamed 2011)2—a push to stymie race radicalism and substitute an official race order that would ignore material inequalities, restrict the terms of antiracism, and promote “progress” narratives. The CIA was operating domestically as well as internationally to carry out its policies of containment and repression, diligently and deviously infiltrating and manipulating African American cultural institutions. Cold War ideologies, often disseminated through the culture industry, permeated every facet of American life, most notably the film industry. Operating through the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals (MPAPAI), the FBI investigated Hollywood in the 1940s and 1950s, filing detailed reports on movies they deemed subversive. The Bureau objected particularly to those movies that portrayed Blacks in too positive a light or attributed racism to decent white “American” characters or were concerned with changing racial dynamics. In the massive drive to ensure and justify the elimination of left-wing dissent, anticommunism and antiBlackness were installed as permanent features of US democratic structures (Noakes 2003: 728–49). When we view Brooks purely through the lens of Black nationalism, we are unable to make sense of her more expansive and eclectic left-wing radicalism—a radicalism equally concerned with the subjects of “mass culture, social hierarchies, gender oppression and the plight of workers” as with race. This work is an attempt to move beyond a restrictive Black nationalist focus and to reestablish Brooks’s participation in a long left-wing literary radicalism that extended from the 1940s into the 1970s and beyond. Although Brooks was probably never a member of the Communist Party, she was an active part of a cast of progressives, including many communists and communist-influenced groups, that formed the Black Left Cultural and Political Front in Chicago in the 1940s and 1950s. In the reports of Gwendolyn Brooks’s cultural and social activities in the 1940s and 1950s, there are always a fair number of communists and leftist radicals dotting the landscape. However minimal and provisional her early left-wing political affiliations might have been, Brooks was at the center of the Chicago Negro Left Front in the 1940s, a Cultural Front whose politics the literary historian Bill Mullen describes as “independent of the Communist Party but largely symbiotic with its popular front objectives and aspirations” (Mullen 1999: 10). The literary historian James Smethurst also situates Brooks within most of the important cultural networks of the Left—from the Left-led National Negro Congress and the League of American Writers to the Left-influenced SSCAC and the Leftled United Electrician and Machine Workers Union and to the left-wing editors and writers who promoted her early career (Smethurst 1999: 165). Even Brooks’s friend Haki Madhubuti, the Black nationalist poet and cultural critic, who disparages the significance and influence of the Left

In The American Negro Writer and His Roots, ed. John A. Davis. Cultural critic Saunders Redding minimized racism as “the actions of a few men,” producing “insupportable calamities for millions of humble folk” (2), and he predicted that when Black writers throw off their fixation on race, they would be able to ascend to the towers of “universality,” where, presumably, all white writers resided, swaddled in that all-embracing but elusive humanity. 2 She coins the term “race radicalism.” 1

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in Brooks’s life, acknowledges that the Left was at least a brief stop on her career path: “She was able to pull through the old leftism оf the 1930s and 1940s and concentrate on herself, her people and most of all her ‘writing’ ” (Madhubuti 2001: 82). The consensus among scholars оf the Left is that Brooks was a part of a broad coalition of mainly Black artists, writers, and community activists who were making their own history of radical Black struggle, which exceeded, transformed, and expanded Communist Party–approved aesthetics but could not be divorced from its influence and support (Madhubuti 2001: 81–96). In the work Brooks produced during the Cold War 1950s, mainly her 1953 novel Maud Martha and the poems in her 1960 volume The Bean Eaters, she managed to balance a Black leftist political sensibility with an investment in modernist poetics that produced what I call her leftist race radicalism.

BROOKS IN THE CHICAGO BLACK POPULAR FRONT Born in 1917, Brooks lived her entire childhood and adult life on the South Side of Chicago, which she called Bronzeville, a term invented by the Black newspaper the Chicago Defender to describe the forty blocks, which run north and south from 29th to 69th Streets, and east and west from Cottage Grove to State Street (Melhem 1987: 19). Beginning with her first volume of poetry, A Street in Bronzeville published by Harper & Row in 1945, Brooks began to be recognized as a major poet of American modernism. She was the first African American to win the Pulitzer Prize for poetry, awarded in 1950 for her second book of poetry Annie Allen. She succeeded Carl Sandburg as the poet laureate of Illinois in 1968, and in 1973, she was named poetry consultant to the Library of Congress. Despite this early recognition from mainstream American literary establishments, by 1970, Brooks had decided to publish her work only with Black publishers, mainly Broadside Press and Third World Press, and, in her first autobiography, Report from Part One, published by Broadside, perhaps not coincidentally, she began to erase or elide signs of her relationship with the Left (Brooks 1972: 314). The friends and colleagues Brooks socialized with in the 1940s and 1950s—visual artists such as Elizabeth Catlett, Charles White, Margaret Taylor Goss (later Margaret Burroughs), the sculptor Marion Perkins, and writers Ted Ward, Langston Hughes, Frank Marshall Davis, and activist Paul Robeson—leftists, communists, and fellow travelers—are remembered in one-and-a-half pages in Report as “merry Bronzevillians,” with no reference to their politics; they may be party guests and partygoers but never Party members. In an essay Brooks contributed about Bronzeville to the charter issue of the magazine Chicago in 1951, published by the Mayor’s Committee for Economic and Cultural Development, she covered a wide range of Black life in Bronzeville, beginning with the stories of the economically depressed and the consequences of poverty on children. As an epigraph she included six poems that critique poverty, war, and the assassinations of John F. Kennedy and Medgar Evers. Then she turns to “another picture of Bronzeville,” the exciting parties there, specifically noting that she did not mean the “typical” Black bourgeois ones, which she called, ironically, “soulless,” but the “mixed” parties that included whites and Blacks. Though, as in Report, she did not label them politically, many of whom, like the host, sculptor Marion Perkins, were avowed communists or deeply Left enough to be considered fellow travelers: Ed and Joyce Gourfain, writer Willard Motley, Margaret and Charles Burroughs, were progressives strongly attached to the Left or in the Party. Joyce Gourfain was a former lover of Richard Wright, and both Gourfains knew Wright from their days in the John Reed Clubs; both were certainly

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Communist Party members (Wald 2012). Both Margaret and Charles Burroughs were close to the Party, and Brooks hints at that in Report, describing Margaret’s radicalism with a dictionary definition: “a rebel, [who] lived up from the root” (Brooks 1972: 69). Lester Davis, named in the Brooks article as a Chicago teacher, photographer, and journalist, was also at the time the executive secretary of the Chicago Civil Rights Congress, a position that would have gone to a Communist Party member or close ally. Richard Orlikoff was a leftist attorney who defended an Abraham Lincoln Brigade member (Cohen) against House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) investigative committee of the House of Representatives. Also there were the African American physicist Robert Bragg, later a member of the faculty of the material science department at Berkeley, and his wife Violet. In the oral interview Bragg did for the Berkeley archives, he speaks of his attraction to communism and his early friendship with Brooks, probably through the NAACP Youth Council, describing himself as “a closet radical” (Bragg 2005). The only reference Brooks makes to the politics of these mostly leftist merrymakers is a series of ironic and mocking comments that imply but downplay the political tenor of conversations among these progressive Black and white intellectuals. In her typically elliptical commentary, Brooks reports that during those conversations, “Great social decisions were reached. Great solutions, for great problems” were debated over “martinis and Scotch and coffee.” In the photograph that accompanies the front page of the Chicago article, Margaret Burroughs is strumming her guitar “for her artistwriter friends,” and Brooks, who was often in the midst of such parties, was, as we see from these alternative “reports,” at least for a time in the late 1940s and early 1950s, comfortably situated among the Chicago Marxist bohemians (Figure 1). Brooks had many radical associations during the 1940s and 1950s. In her apprenticeship years, Brooks joined the NAACP Youth Council, which her biographer George Kent says was “the most militant organization for black youth except for organizations of the Left” (Kent 1993: 42). As a Youth Council member, Brooks was spirited along, according to Kent, by the more politically engaged members, such as her friend the artist and writer Margaret Taylor (later Goss, then Burroughs), who, along with Brooks, joined in antilynching protests, marching with the other protesters through the streets of Chicago, wearing paper chains around their necks to symbolize the racial violence of lynching (Kent 1993: 44). Brooks was close to Edward Bland, who had been part of Richard Wright’s radical South Side Writers Group in the 1930s. When Harper’s asked for Wright’s recommendations for Brooks’s first book, the 1945 volume A Street in Bronzeville, he wrote back to the editor Edward C. Aswell, on September 18, 1944, recommending the volume highly, but asking for one long poem to unify the collection. Brooks complied, producing her long anti-Prufrockian poem, “The Sundays of Satin-Legs Smith.” Wright also recognized and confirmed the poems’ engagement with Marxist aesthetics that demanded a focus on Black cultural and communal life: “They [the poems] are hard and real, right out оf the central core оf Black Belt Negro life in urban areas” (Fabre 1993: 185). Kent insists that Brooks was too thoroughly “attached to the certainties of her upbringing, Christianity, and reformist middle-class democracy” to have espoused radicalism, but he maintains that she was nonetheless still within the orbit of the Left during the 1940s, especially the circles of Left artists and writers. Her close friend Margaret Burroughs lists her among the organizers of the one-day “Interracial South Side Cultural Conference” in 1944, which included Burroughs herself, Black leftists—the poet Frank Marshall Davis, the sculptor Marion Perkins, Negro Story’s editor Fern Gayden, the playwright Ted Ward—and the white radical artists Sophie Wessell and

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FIGURE 1:  At the South Side Community Art Center, 1948: standing, left to right: Marion Perkins, Vernon Jarrett, Robert Lucas; seated, left to right: Margaret Brundage, Tom Conroy, Fern Gayden, Gwendolyn Brooks, Margaret Burroughs. Vivian G. Harsh Research Collection of Afro-American History and Literature, Chicago Public Library. Perkins Family Papers 013.

Elizabeth McCord. According to the cultural historian Bill Mullen, when Burroughs recorded her recollection of the conference, she referred to all participants as progressive, which she said in a later unpublished letter to Mullen meant “Left wing to Communist” (Mullen 1999: 101–2). Despite her long friendship with Burroughs, Mullen says Brooks “escaped” identification as a writer on the Left, and he reads Brooks’s 1940s poetry as maintaining a skeptical and anxious distance from the political and cultural currents of the Left, as Brooks herself did. While I have not been able to locate any Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) file on Brooks, the FBI had her in its sights. In the FOIA file of her friend Burroughs, agents accused Burroughs of introducing Brooks to the Left-led National Negro Congress and the National Labor Council and trying to radicalize her friend: “Margaret would later find that the FBI had kept a file on her beginning in 1937 and had labeled her as one of those attempting to influence Gwendolyn politically” (Mullen 1999: 101–2). I am skeptical of any version of Brooks as political ingénue tagging along on Burroughs’s more radical coattails. Whatever her motivations for deflecting attention to the story of her early

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leftist political life, she sustained a number of leftist affiliations in the 1940s on her own. She was mentored by leftist writers and editors, including Edwin Seaver, a founder оf the Marxist journal New Masses and a former literary editor of the Daily Worker, who included work by Brooks in his Cross Section anthologies in the middle and late 1940s (Smethurst 1999: 165). Another important left-wing connection for Brooks during the 1940s was the communist-led League of American Writers, formed when the Communist Party disbanded the John Reed Clubs. In his memoir of the League, Franklin Folsom, the league’s executive secretary and a communist, lists Brooks in his memoir as a member, along with Langston Hughes, Richard Wright, Arna Bontemps, Countee Cullen, Frank Marshall Davis, Ralph Ellison, Margaret Walker, and the openly communist Ted Ward and Claude McKay, all of whom would have been considered on the Left in the 1930s and 1940s (Folsom 1994: 75). By her own account, Brooks was deeply involved in the SSCAC, a center of the Chicago Black Left. Lawrence Jackson notes that she moved in intellectual crowds with a number of leftists: Ted Ward, Fern Gayden, Davis, and Edward Bland, all former members of the South Side Writers Club, which had been founded by Richard Wright in his Communist days (Folsom 1994: 206). When she turned to autobiography in Report from Part One, she represented her life in the 1940s and 1950s in terms of marriage, children, poetry, and parties. The only clues to her leftist life are the guests at these parties, who might well have defined themselves during this period as communists, leftists, fellow travelers, and radicals. If Brooks was simply naïve, and I doubt that she was, she certainly took her early political life on the left seriously enough to deflect attention away from it.

BROOKS’S EARLY LEFTIST POETRY If we document Brooks’s writing career from the late 1930s during her Negro Popular Front period, rather than starting with her first published volume оf poetry in 1945, the early traces of the Left in her writing are more evident. In 1937, when she was just twenty years old, Brooks submitted her first poem, “Southern Lynching,” to the NAACP journal Crisis, which, in line with 1930s Popular Front politics attacking racism, produced regular features on lynching in almost every issue in the 1930s. Published in the same year that Burroughs was allegedly “radicalizing” Brooks and when Brooks was engaged in antilynching protests, the poem is aligned, in theme and tone, with Negro Popular Front politics. In this poem, there is none of the detached narratorial consciousness that Smethurst describes as characteristic of Brooks’s poetry of the 1940s and 1950, almost no sign of the narrative distance and indirectness of her later style. The narrator describes the lynched body in detail: “dried blood on rigid legs and long / Stiff arms,” the eyes still open stare as “merry madmen” laugh and sing. The poem also anticipates Brooks’s use of irony in its intertwining of the bloody body, the lynchers singing, and the image of the soft pale evening darkening, with its night-breeze “flow[ing]” and the “first faint star” glowing “coldly” above the “strange and bloody scene.” The desecration of the body is complete when one of the lynchers “treats” his young child to “a souvenir / In form of blood-embroidered ear.” But the poem ends with the focus on another “youngster,” the son of the murdered man, waiting for his father’s return: Back in his hovel drear, a pair of juvenile eyes watch anxiously For a loved father. Tardy, he!

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Tardy forever are the dead. Brown little baby, go to bed. Here the narrator’s focus on the grisly details оf the lynching scene allows no distance between the speaker, the victim, and his attackers, and, in typical social protest style, the speaker’s emotional investment also demands the reader’s empathy and moral outrage. I can find no evidence that Brooks ever referred to this poem in commentary about her work or in her public readings. As a kind оf Brooksian representational history, however, Brooks’s lynching poems mark the movement оf her work from leftist social protest to modernist formalism. “Southern Lynching” is clearly in the vein оf 1930s social protest. Two others, “The Ballad оf Pearl May Lee,” from her first published volume, A Street in Bronzeville (1945), and “A Bronzeville Mother Loiters in Mississippi. Meanwhile a Mississippi Mother Burns Bacon,” from The Bean Eaters (1960), based on the lynching оf the fourteen-year-old Emmett Till, suggest the modernist directions оf her work. In both оf these later poems, which she regularly included in her public readings, she is thoroughly modernist, revising a conventional form—the ballad—and offering a feminist slant that takes on the almost always absent viewpoint оf the Black woman victim. “Mississippi Mother” is told from the point of view of the wife оf one оf Till’s killers, herself a mother оf two babies, somewhat stunned by her new role as the wife оf a child killer. Emmett’s mother, Mrs. Mamie Till Bradley in real life, “loiters” throughout the poem as the image the white mother cannot ignore, the mother of the killed boychild. “The Ballad of Pearl May Lee” takes the viewpoint of the Black woman whose lover is lynched because of his involvement with a white woman and includes the almost inadmissible representation of the Black woman’s sexual jealousy. Yet, even as the Pearl May Lee and “Bronzeville Mother” poems challenge the admittedly masculinist protest tradition, both recall and revise the politics оf the Black leftist cultural front. These markers of Brooks’s indebtedness to the 1930s (and 1940s) Left still remain in her work, but these connections have disappeared from nearly all Brooks commentary, including her own. The great and irretrievable loss is that we will never have Brooks’s own probing exploration of her place in a community of literary and visual artists committed both to social change and to formal experimentation within the community-based orientation of the Chicago Left Cultural Front, which turned out to be a particularly hospitable climate for an artist interested in combining artistic experimentation and a radical Black perspective. One of those artists Bernard Goss defined the SSCAC artists as self-consciously modernist. In a 1936 essay, “Ten Negro Artists on Chicago’s South Side,” Goss writes that having learned to read and write and to straighten their hair, and having discovered art schools, “we became modern.” Goss continues, “that consciousness [of modernism] gives us a greater space for romping than we had at the academic school” (Goss 1936: 17–19). Many of the friends and colleagues with whom she socialized and worked, such as the visual artists Elizabeth Catlett and Charles White and the writers Langston Hughes and Margaret Burroughs, labored to balance their political and social concerns with formal experimentation with varying degrees of success. Brooks was fortunate to have her first book оf poetry reviewed by a poet-critic Alfred Kreymborg, the socially conscious leftist imagist poet, who published a rave review of A Street in Bronzeville in the Marxist journal New Masses. Calling the volume “original, dynamic, and compelling,” “one of the most remarkable first volumes of poetry issued in many a year,” “a rare event in poetry and the humanities,” Kreymborg praised Brooks’s ability to “regard her people objectively in the face of every temptation to plead a cause in which she is deeply involved.”

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Repeatedly remarking on Brooks’s “technical skill” and “inventiveness,” Kreymborg flew in the face of Marxist orthodoxy, which disparaged 1950s art criticism as valuing “chic esthetic forms” and “formal gimmicks” that did not “inspire ‘progressive thinking’ and revolutionary social change” or “strong hopes for the working class” (Kreymborg 1945: 28). Kreymborg’s timing was auspicious: the review was published when formal experimentation was still seen favorably by New Masses critics and just before the ascendancy of socialist realist orthodoxy in the early 1950s. Brooks responded to the review in a 1945 letter to her friend and leftist activist-writer Jack Conroy, saying that she had been “very fortunate” in the reviews of the volume, noting very specifically: “There was a very generous one in New Masses, September 4, by Alfred Kreymborg.” The year 1945 was a very good one for socially conscious imagist poets like Kreymborg and Brooks, and it was a moment when Brooks could and did bask in this recognition and acclaim from the Left.

ERASING THE LEFT Why, then, besides Brooks’s own reticence, has her relation to the Left been so difficult to establish? The cultural amnesia that developed in the 1950s as the Cold War made it dangerous to acknowledge ties to the Left was not only restricted to the “disappearing” of various poets or groups of poets but also, as Smethurst notes, applies to our ability to think or rethink the legacies (and contexts) of poets, for example, William Carlos Williams, Hughes, Brooks, Kenneth Fearing, Muriel Rukeyser, Margaret Walker, and Robert Hayden, all of whom were part of the Left Popular Front in the 1930s and 1940s. For a number of reasons, Brooks’s “occluded” relationship to the Old Left is more difficult to tease out than that of most of the African American literary Left, some of whom have unusually open past and present ties to the Left and others who left behind obvious clues. But if Brooks has “escaped” identification as a writer influenced by the Left, that misconception has been most effectively facilitated by the saga of Brooks’s 1967 “conversion” to Black nationalist radicalism, one that I believe to be apocryphal and misleading (Smethurst 1999: 151). Brooks’s public movement toward Black cultural nationalism in the 1960s and the elision of her connections to the Left helped veil these earlier political affiliations and partly account for the dull conventionality of Brooks’s autobiographical narratives. But our failure to appreciate Brooks’s connections to the leftist cultural front of the 1940s means we lose a sense of the innovative relationship Brooks forged in her work between a Left-inflected ideology and a modernist formal poetics. The “rewriting” of Gwendolyn Brooks’s post-1950s political life by critics and reviewers reads as follows: an apolitical Brooks, having been highly esteemed and richly rewarded by the white literary establishment for her early work, is baptized into black cultural and political nationalism by the young black militants she meets for the first time at the Second Black Writers Conference at Fisk University in 1967; having rejected her earlier connections with and submission to the white liberal consensus, she discovers her blackness and her radicalism within the (masculine) arms of Black Power and black nationalism. Brooks herself promoted this story in her 1972 autobiography Report from Part One, describing the 1967 conference as an “inscrutable and uncomfortable wonderland” where the “hot sureness” of the Black radicals “began almost immediately to invade” her and confirmed her “queenhood in the new black sun,” finally qualifying her to enter “at least the kindergarten of new consciousness.”3 At the risk of reifying the myth of her conversion, I wish to point to some examples of its reproductive vitality. The introductory essays on Brooks in both the Norton Anthology of American Literature and the Norton Anthology of African 3

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While Brooks undoubtedly perceived the Black consciousness movements of the late 1960s and 1970s as life changing, as they were for many Blacks of that period, the continual and uncritical recitation of the “conversion” narrative disconnects Brooks from her earlier political contexts and, indeed, even from her own remarks at the 1967 conference. Brooks’s immersion in the baptismal waters of the 1967 conference may have eventually caused her to reevaluate the relationship between her art and African American political struggle, but during her time at the conference she held firm to her position, rejecting what she called “race-fed testimony” in art, insisting on the importance of formal aesthetic discipline: “I continue violently to believe [that] whatever the stimulating persuasion, poetry, not journalism, must be the result of involvement with emotions and idea and ink and paper” (quoted in Kent 1993: 199). In her prepared presentation at the conference, Brooks acknowledged the importance of race in Black art: “Every poet of African extraction must understand that his product will be either italicized or seasoned by the fact and significance of his heritage. How fine! How delightful!” In what might be considered a statement of her own poetic credo and a literary revision of Du Bois’s double consciousness, she argued for the “double dedication” of Black poets, addressing the “two-headed responsibility” they must have in order to respond not only to the “crimes” they cover but also to the “quantity and quality of their response to those crimes.” Brooks eventually expressed her annoyance with these pronouncements about the “change” in her work. In a 1983 interview with Claudia Tate, when asked if any of her early works assume an “assertive, militant posture,” Brooks says emphatically, “Yes, ma’am … I’m fighting for myself a little here because I believe it takes a little patience to sit down and find out that in 1945 I was saying what many of the young folks said in the sixties” (Tate 1983: 42). Later in the same interview Brooks repeats that she is “fighting for myself a little bit” as she moves to reshape the critical readings of her early work. Still later in that interview she says she is “sick and tired of hearing about the ‘black aesthetic,’ ” because “I’ve been talking about blackness and black people all along” (Tate 1983: 45–6).

THE EVIDENCE OF THE LEFT But if Brooks’s ties to the Left can be discerned in the friendships she developed, in her social life, and in her affiliations with Left organizations, what is less clear and more important is how to chart

American Literature open with a story of Brooks’s 1967 “shift” and thus reproduce the teleology of a “new” Brooks that emerges in the wake of the Fisk Black Writers Conference. Critics have been unable—or unwilling—to dislodge this conversion story. Dismissing the importance of race and class in Brooks’s early poetry, one critic claimed that “Brooks’s later work took a far more political stance. Just as her first poems reflected the mood of their era, her later works mirrored their age by displaying what National Observer contributor Bruce Cook termed ‘an intense awareness of the problems of color and justice’ ” Toni Cade Bambara reported in the New York Times Book Review that at the age of fifty “something happened to Brooks, a something most certainly in evidence in In the Mecca and subsequent works—a new movement and energy, intensity, richness, power of statement and a new stripped lean, compressed style. A change of style prompted by a change of mind.” “Though some of her work in the early 1960s had a terse, abbreviated style, her conversion to direct political expression happened rapidly after a gathering of black writers at Fisk University in 1967,” Jacqueline Trescott reported in the Washington Post. Brooks herself noted that the poets there were committed to writing as Blacks, about Blacks, and for a Black audience. If many of her earliest poems had not fulfilled this aim, it was not due to conscious intent.

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these ties in her work. Despite public statements that distance her from the politics and aesthetics of the Left, Brooks—like Hughes, Frank Marshall Davis, Melvin Tolson, Lorraine Hansberry, Julian Mayfield, Sarah E. Wright, John O. Killens, and many others that are rarely connected to the Left— was influenced by the aesthetics of the Popular Front, and we can see that influence most clearly in her struggling over the problem of how to negotiate a relationship between social realism and modernist experimentation. Brooks’s attempt to balance social concerns and modernism aligns her with other quite devout leftists, many of whom had “similarly complicated relationships” to “high” modernism, as they tried to balance their political and social concerns with the problems of realism versus formal experimentation. The socially conscious painter Charles White, who was close to the Party in the 1950s, faced these issues as the Communist Party began to take a more rigid stance in their demands that art adhere to principles of socialist realism. The painter and sculptor Elizabeth Catlett, on the other hand, more easily accommodated her social and political concerns with modernist art techniques, almost certainly because of her location in Mexico among Mexican muralists—Diego Rivera and Francisco Mora (her second husband)—whose communist politics did not preclude modernist experimentations. While these social realists—among them the poets and writers Frank Marshall Davis, Ann Petry, Robert Hayden, Lloyd Brown, and Gwendolyn Brooks as well as the visual artists White and Catlett—were intent on representing social change in their art and using art for social change, they were also experimenting with modern forms. Reading Brooks back into a leftist political and artistic community also enables us to track the continuities and discontinuities in her political and aesthetic development rather than being force-fed the tale оf her sudden and unprecedented conversion to Blackness and radicalism. In his analysis of the relationship between Black writers, formal experimentation, and Popular Front cultural agendas in The New Red Negro, cultural historian James Smethurst shows that Brooks’s concern with issues of class, race, and gender oppression marks her as someone working in Popular Front traditions (Smethurst 1999: 179). With the aid of the lens of a slightly Left-tilted political biography, we can see that she was working out the formal and thematic issues that were important to many Black Popular Front writers: how to represent the African American vernacular voice; how to represent African American working-class and popular culture; how to incorporate both high literary culture and social protest; and how to represent class, race, gender, and community. These are the signs оf what Bill Mullen (1999) calls the “discursive marks” of the cultural and political Left, and, even if, as Mullen insists, they are in coded and revised forms, they provide the evidence that Brooks’s political commitments were being formed at least three decades before 1967.

BROOKS’S 1951 LEFTIST FEMINIST ESSAY: “WHY NEGRO WOMEN LEAVE HOME” In March 1949, five years after her close encounters with the Left, Brooks was on her way to being recognized as a major poetic voice. She published the award-winning Annie Allen, receiving an excellent five-page review by Stanley Kunitz in the magazine Poetry (Kunitz 1950). At some point during the years 1947 to 1950, Brooks separated from her husband, Henry Blakely, also a poet, and had to consider how she would manage financially with a young child, a son Henry Jr. (Melhem 1987: 82). By 1951, she had reunited with Henry and had a second child, Nora. At thirty-four years old, the memory of that separation and what it meant to be an economically dependent wife may have motivated the essay “Why Negro Women Leave Home,” published in the

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March 1951 issue of Negro Digest. Under the bright lights of mainstream fame and praise, Brooks’s left-wing connections were hardly noticed, so it is not surprising that this little-known essay was never connected to the 1940s Communist Party debates over women’s issues, not even by leftist feminists. In the essay, Brooks cites a number of reasons that Negro women were considering leaving their marriages, among them gold-digging husbands, in-law interference, male impotence, and their husbands’ affairs with other women (or men). But the central emphasis of the essay is on the liberating experience of a woman going to work during the war, earning her own income and experiencing “the taste of financial independence”: Her employer handed her money without any hemming and hawing, lies, rebukes, complaints, narrowed eyes—and without telling her what a fool she was. She felt clean, straight, tall [a description Brooks would use later for Maud Martha], and as if she were a part of the world. She was now “a fellow laborer,” deserving of respect and tact. (Brooks 1951: 26) The language and rhetoric of the essay has the rhetorical ring of the communist movement’s position on the “Woman Question,” most ably theorized by the high-ranking Black communist Claudia Jones in her groundbreaking 1949 essay “An End to the Neglect of the Problems of the Negro Woman.” Jones hammered home the intersectional importance of the “triple exploitation” (Jones 1949) of Black women, challenging Left women to “guard against male supremacist behaviors, to adopt egalitarian gender roles, and to live out their politics in their day-to-day lives at work, in their interpersonal relationships and at home” (Weigand 2001: 113). Jones’s essay, which Brooks might very well have read, also exposed the failure of white communists to put their radical theories and ideas into action. But, in critical ways, Brooks’s essay departs from the radical leftist critique that emphasized issues of unionization, class inequalities, solidarity with other women, demands for changes in the workplace, and the ultimate goal—freeing women for political struggle. Brooks was more interested in casting her acute eye on the psychological abuses in marriages and partnerships that do not often surface in politically left-wing material. Brooks lists the things a financially independent woman is able to do: buy a pair of stockings without her husband’s curses, buy her mother or father a gift without his hysterically shouted inquiries, take a college course or buy her child an overcoat without having to plan a strategic campaign or confront his condescending handout. She is aware of the emotional and psychic cost to women of staying in loveless or disappointing marriages because of financial dependence on their male partners. Despite what leftists might have considered the bourgeois concerns of the essay, Brooks’s demand for men to treat women as “fellow laborers” is language that evokes the language and ideology of the Left, which she would continue to draw from but always in her own idiosyncratic, racialized terms as a writer, a poet, an aspiring workingclass Black intellectual woman, a figure that could only be seen as anomalous in the 1950s, as her working-class Black women neighbors often reminded her.

MAUD MARTHA ROUGHS UP THE SMOOTH SURFACES OF COLD WAR CULTURE Brooks began working on her first (and only) novel, Maud Martha, as early as 1944, shortly before A Street in Bronzeville appeared in 1945.4 Bronzeville was published in the political context of It’s important to note that Maud Martha was published three years after Brooks’s feminist manifesto “Why Negro Women Leave Home.” 4

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1940s Black civil rights activism, represented by movements such as the Double V campaign— victory in war and victory against Jim Crow at home—and the Don’t Buy Where You Can’t Work protests. Centered in an urban Black community in segregated America, Bronzeville emanates from and represents a collective Black consciousness. Most importantly, Bronzeville ends with the 12-poem sonnet sequence, “Gay Chaps at the Bar,” about Black soldiers in a segregated military during the Second World War and their humiliations as veterans returning from the battlefield to fight Jim Crow America. Writing in personae of male soldiers about institutionalized racism on the home front as well as the psychological injuries men suffer in war, Brooks shares the authority and centrality of the male voice: “The poet’s female and marginalized voice then, by cross-dressing in soldier’s garb, gains a more central position from which to speak” (Stanford 1992: 198). The subject of Maud Martha, in contrast, is Black female interiority, and, as the novelist Paule Marshall reminds us, Maud Martha is the first American novel in which a dark-skinned, working-class Black woman with a complex interior life is the main character (Washington 1987: 403–4). At the time, the Black literary landscape in the 1940s and 1950s was dominated by the mainstream literary success of Richard Wright, James Baldwin, and Ralph Ellison. Their novels and essays loomed large, and matching their prestige, the titles of their work—Native Son, Notes of a Native Son, The Outsider, Invisible Man—became symbols of a kind of racial universality. In such a context, it may have required an imaginative leap to embrace Blackness and Black dissent in the form of a woman. Maud Martha posed a second kind of difficulty to its readers: The thirty-four short, imagistic chapters of Maud Martha make extensive use of techniques like stream of consciousness, interior monologue, free indirect discourse, dreamscapes, chapter headings that frame and order the narrative, and cryptic, unresolved chapter endings. Brooks described the novel as a hybrid, part autobiography and part fiction: “Much that happened to Maud Martha has not happened to me— and she is a nicer and better coordinated creature than I am. But it is true that much in the ‘story’ was taken out of my own life, and twisted, highlighted or dulled, dressed up or down” (Brooks 1972: 191). Closely paralleling Brooks’s life, the novel covers Maud’s life from age six or seven until she is in her late twenties, roughly from 1924 to 1945, each chapter filtered through the perceptive, sometimes claustrophobic, self-consciousness of a Black female subject. The final chapter, “back from the wars!,” suggests that Brooks envisioned Maud’s life like the “Gay Chaps” as a battle against strong forces. The novel ends with Maud, disillusioned with marriage (the domestic war), awaiting her soldier brother’s return from the war overseas, and contemplating the birth of her second child—scenes that were based on Brooks’s own life.

MAUD MARTHA AS “GHETTO PASTORAL” Though Maud Martha (1953) is nearly always read as unattached to any prior left-wing contexts, the cultural historian Michael Denning suggests three reasons for the failure to recognize its radical possibilities: its apparent lack of an “explicit ‘political’ narrative,” its “ethnic or racial accents,” and the Left’s failure to recognize the changing nature of the “working-class author” (Denning 1996: 235). In an expansive theorizing of fiction he calls “ghetto pastorals,” Denning shows that Brooks’s novel fits quite comfortably in the Black cultural Left—as a novel with the proletarian outlook and by a writer socialized in a working-class family and community (as Brooks was) but aspiring to an intellectual life. Like other writers of the ghetto pastorals (Richard Wright, Tillie

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Olsen, Philip Roth, Jack Conroy, Hisaye Yamamoto, and Paule Marshall, to name a few), Brooks is resistant to old forms, dissatisfied with the demands of naturalism, and increasingly drawn to experimental modernist fiction. Struggling for independence from the realism and naturalism of the novel, these writers needed a form, Denning argues, that could accommodate the contradictions of their lives: the geographic and psychological limitations of ethnicity or race, their uncertain and enigmatic futures during a still-segregated Cold War era, the changing nature of their workingclass lives, and, increasingly salient, the relationship of women to Black community (Denning 1996: 230–58). Keep in mind that Brooks developed as a writer and activist in the leftist circles of the SSCAC, working with a group of Black writers and artists committed both to social change and to formal experimentation. In 1941 their poetry instructor was Inez Cunningham Stark, “an elegant upperclass rebel from Chicago’s ‘Gold Coast,’ ” a modernist poet herself and board member at Poetry, who obviously helped Brooks experiment in modernist directions (Melhem 1987: 9). The minutes of the 1944 board meetings of the SSCAC, where Brooks was apparently workshopping her first novel, suggests that Brooks, now formally committed to a modernism in her poetry, was working out her method and intention for her first attempt at writing a fictional narrative: The attempt is being made in these [meetings] to present the psychological story, to show what is in the minds of the persecuted or the persecuting if [sic] Jim Crowism is depicted, to get inside the mental conflict which is set up individually by this thing called race. A number of new writers are developing in this group, two men working on their first novels, a journalist or two, and the winners of both first and second prizes for poetry in this year’s Midwest poetry awards, one of whom, Gwendolyn Brooks, has her first book of poetry, A Street in Bronzeville [sic], released this last month by Harpers Brothers. (SSCAC Archives, Box 1 Folder 9) If Maud Martha was an experiment with the psychological story of race and its effects on Black psyches, the novel is also solidly grounded in the Left’s refusal of the 1950s integrationist narrative of Negro progress. The thirty-four chapters expose Black discontent, impotence, and suppressed anger over Chicago’s and the nation’s racial regime. In the chapter “the millinery,” Maud endures and repulses a racial slight at the millinery shop (a potent reminder of Black women’s treatment in downtown department stores during Jim Crow). In the chapter set in a Black beauty shop, a white saleswoman tries to make a sale in the Black beauty department and when she inadvertently says, “I worked like a nigger to earn these few pennies,” the Black women remain silent and cowed; when Maud goes to work as a domestic help during the Depression, her upper-class employer treats her like a child, but Maud’s retaliation is passive—she simply refuses to return; at the World Playhouse, she and her husband Paul experience themselves as “the only colored people here”; on the campus of the University of Chicago, she encounters and is intimidated by the elitism of university whites and Blacks; and finally, in that revered public spectacle of 1950s hegemonic whiteness—visiting Santa at the downtown department store—she finally recognizes and voices her stifled rage when the white Santa dismisses her little daughter. In what may seem only a minimal expression of her rage, Maud is overtly rude, revoking Santa’s cultural title and authority: “Mister … my little girl is talking to you.” The entire city, from the elegant multistoried downtown department store of the 1940s to the university campus and quotidian domestic spaces, serves up ammunition for Maud’s racial critique, a militant rhetorical analogue to the Black Left’s militant 1940s campaigns to “desegregate the metropolis.”

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Brooks establishes Maud’s working-class status in language that emphasizes Maud’s finely tuned aesthetic sensibility. Her childhood home has “walls and ceilings that are cracked,” tables that “grieved audibly,” doors and drawers that make a “sick, bickering sound, “high and hideous radiators,” and “unlovely pipes that coil beneath the low sink” (Brooks 1987: 180). Although her parents are buying the house, where they have lived for fourteen years, the family waits in fear to see if Maud’s father, a janitor, as Brooks’s father was, will be able to extend the mortgage from the Home Owners’ Loan Association, staffed and owned, no doubt, by whites in this Jim Crow world. What she desires and fears losing is not simply homeownership but the “shafts and pools of lights” that create the “late afternoon light on the lawn,” “the graceful and emphatic iron of the fence,” “the talking softly on the porch.” As teenagers in the early 1940s, Maud earns $10 a week as a file clerk, and her sister Helen $15 a week as a typist (176), salaries that were several dollars below the minimum wage, which, in 1940, was ¢43 per hour. As a married woman, Maud and her husband Paul move into a third-floor furnished kitchenette apartment, as Brooks did, two small rooms with an oilcloth-covered table, folding chairs, a brown wooden ice box and a three-burner stove, only one of which works, and a bathroom they share with four other families. The roaches arrive; the “Owner” will not make any changes; the couple will have to be satisfied with the apartment “as it is.” Maud’s disappointment with husband and marriage is the logical and inevitable adjunct to the gray, drab, and unsatisfying conditions of the home Paul is able to provide, so different from the traditions of “shimmering form, hard as stone” she had imagined for herself. As she thoroughly examines the ways in which working-class poverty erodes a marriage relationship, Brooks’s social concerns, aesthetically and elliptically rendered, pervade the entire novel. What distinguishes Maud from other Black proletarian fictional characters is that she is a developing intellectual (a good example of Gramsci’s “organic intellectual” (Gramsci 1971: 5–20)) as well as being a proletarian; like Brooks, she is familiar with both working-class poverty and with more intellectual and academic pursuits. Maud makes specific references to the allure of such university literary canons as Vernon Parrington’s three-volume study of American literature, Main Currents in American Thought, a fixture in US graduate schools in the 1940s and 1950s. When Maud refers to “East of Cottage Grove,” that same racial dividing line between Black and white that confines Bigger Thomas in Richard Wright’s Native Son, it is not mainly in terms of physical space. Seen through the eyes of Maud’s second beau, David McKemster, east and west of Cottage Grove signify the cultural, intellectual, physical, and imaginary spaces of Black limitation and white control that thwart the desires of an aspiring Black intellectual, including Maud, though she assigns the experience to her “second beau”: Whenever he left the Midway, said David McKemster, he was instantly depressed. East of Cottage Grove, people were clean, going somewhere that mattered, not talking unless they had something to say. West of the Midway, they leaned against buildings and their mouths were opening and closing very fast but nothing important was coming out. What did they know about Aristotle? (Brooks 1987: 187) McKemster aspires to college, to moving away from the South Side, to an intellectual life where he would not only read Parrington’s Main Currents in American Thought but could toss it around carelessly as one would a football—as he assumes privileged whites do. McKemster’s desire for access is undercut by his marginalized existence on Chicago’s South Side. He is ashamed of his mother, who takes in washing and says “ain’t” and “I ain’t stud’n you.” With ironic emphasis on

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the subtle elitism of the word “good,” the narrator tells us that McKemster wants a good dog, an apartment, a good bookcase, books in good bindings, a phonograph with symphonic records, some good art, those things that are “not extras” but go “to make up a good background” (188). In striking contrast to Carl Sandburg’s tributes to the lustiness, power, and dogged vitality of the Windy City, the narrator (always through Maud’s consciousness) informs us that McKemster’s life on the South Side is not “colorful,” “exotic,” or “fascinating” but a place where “on a windy night” he (and perhaps Maud too) feels “lost, lapsed, negative, untended, extinguished, broken and lying down too—unappeasable” (187). The poet and literary scholar Harryette Mullen reminds us that here Brooks is employing the rhetorical device of synathroesmus, which consists of piling up adjectives, often as invective, to modify a noun. Buried under this stack of adjectives, McKemster seems to lose any intrinsic qualities and is psychologically demolished by that overwhelming accumulation of negating modifiers until the final adjective. The final term, “unappeasable,” shifts the tone to focus on the need and desires of the “loser” rather than on his state of abjection, thus saving him from total annihilation. If Bigger Thomas’s crude references to white power structures more accurately describe the effects of white racial power and Black powerlessness, Brooks’s critique is aimed partly at McKemster’s own pretensions but most severely at the integration ideologies of the Cold War 1950s, which promoted the notion that as Blacks achieved sufficient intellectual and cultural weight they could become candidates for integration, even as the economics of segregation were rigidly maintained. Clearly, however, this narrator, like Brooks (whom Smethurst calls a “high-modernist”) knows the meaning of and how to deploy “synathroesmus” and thus how to assert her own power. Chapter 24, “an encounter,” the second David McKemster chapter, which suggests the story “An Encounter” in James’s Joyce’s Dubliners, aligns Brooks with a quintessential modernist. Following the pattern of the other thirty-three chapters, the chapter is elliptical, approximately six pages, narrated almost entirely in free indirect discourse, and focused relentlessly on Maud’s interior reactions, ending abruptly without conclusion or resolution. Now a young married woman and mother, Maud runs into “second beau” David McKemster on the campus of the University of Chicago, where they have both gone to hear “the newest young Negro author” speak. When McKemster sees two of his white college friends, he proposes that they go to one of the campus hangouts, and out of a sense of obligation invites Maud, whom he introduces formally as “Mrs. Phillips” to his “good good friends.” McKemster and his friends proceed to carry on a conversation, which the narrator, channeling Maud’s inner thoughts, describes caustically as “hunks of the most rational, particularistic, critical, and intellectually aloof discourse” (272), into which they weave words like “anachronism, transcendentalist, cosmos, metaphysical, corollary, integer, monarchical” (274), words noted by the third-person narrator but intended to represent Maud’s resentment as outsider as well as her own private satisfaction that she too knows these terms. The entire encounter is constructed around the question the young white woman (nicknamed Stickie) poses about the young Negro author they’ve come to hear: “Is he in school?” The question is subtle, posed in the argot of the college insiders, and intended to consolidate their intellectual superiority. It is such a loaded question that, before it can be answered, the narrator intervenes, inserting after Stickie’s question a veiled reference to the William Carlos Williams “red wheelbarrow” poem: “on the answer to that would depend—so much.” Here Brooks reveals her own knowledge of modernism and her critique of it. She adds a dash between “depend” and “so much” as if to alert the reader that she is quoting from and also rewriting the Williams poem. Remember that the poem depends on a series of material images: “a red wheel / barrow / glazed with rain / water / beside

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the white / chickens.” But there’s no concrete image in the Brooks chapter—the question evokes the elitism and snobbery through which people like Maud are excluded or included. The chapter suggests that the young woman’s question, “Is he in school?,” allows these insiders, those inside and outside the text, to consolidate their dominance, giving them the power to measure the young Negro writer’s importance. David answers “Oh, no,” and, assuming authority, assures his audience that the young Negro author “has decided” that “there is nothing in the schools for him,” that though he may be brilliant, may have “kicked Parrington or Joyce or Kafka around like a football,” “he is not rooted in Aristotle, in Plato, in Aeschylus, in Epictetus”—the classical traditionalists. (“As we are,” the narrator adds.) This interaction is channeled through Maud’s interior consciousness in order to convey Maud’s feelings of displacement in the university world and the coded terms by which her outsider status is conveyed. In this case, “so much depends” not on our appreciation of the material objects of the physical world as in the Williams poem but instead on our ability to read and critique the assumptions of hierarchical categories and vocabularies of exclusion. What we do know is that Brooks intended these narrative techniques to represent a protagonist “locked out” of white/ male/upper-class traditions. Deliberately reversing the godlike powers typical of male narrators and claiming her own insider authority, Brooks is also critiquing the male-dominated naturalistic tradition, in particular the social realism of texts like Wright’s Native Son—and Twelve Million Black Voices—with its reliance on representations of a static Black collectivity. The language of gesture in Maud Martha forces the reader to understand a face or gesture—as one is required to read Joyce or Williams—without the privileged access sanctioned by realistic traditions.5 Her silence here does indeed require us to read back to the accumulated injuries she has endured as a Black female working-class intellectual throughout her life. The chapter ends abruptly with a single sentence, unmediated by the narrator: “The waitress brought coffee, four lumps of sugar wrapped in pink paper, hot mince pie.” On the other hand, what Maud has ordered replaces silence with her hot awareness (and perhaps even her own modernist smackdown of her so-called betters) of both the confectionery condescension at the table and her own disguised, repressed (minced) anger (275). If the culture of the Cold War was designed to produce smooth surfaces for US consumption—images оf domestic family tranquility, women securely in home and family, good wars, and the harmony оf racial integration and interracial cooperation—Maud Martha disrupts on every front.

BEYOND THE 1950S: THE LEFT IN THE BEAN EATERS (191) Brooks submitted the manuscript of The Bean Eaters, her third volume of poetry, to Harpers in December 1958, and the editors “enthusiastically” accepted it for publication (Melhem 1987: 100). The Black nationalist poet-critic Haki Madhubuti dismissed The Bean Eaters in his 1966 essay on Brooks with one line, “The Bean Eaters is to be the last book of this type,” inferring that Brooks’s subsequent poetry would mark the beginning of her political and racial consciousness (Madhubuti 2001: 87). Brooks herself dubbed the book her “too social” volume because it had almost immediately been identified as “politically” charged—even “revolutionary,” and she had a hard Though Lawrence Jackson says that Brooks’s first book of poetry A Street in Bronzeville “proved that the social realists had hit their stride,” neither her poetry nor Maud Martha could be considered poster books for social realism. In fact, as I will show, Maud Martha can be read as countering the social realism of Richard Wright. 5

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time getting it reviewed (Tate 1983). In fact, Brooks says that The Bean Eaters was a “turning point ‘politically,’ its civil rights poems and its pointed critiques of class prejudice and racial violence so startlingly different from her earlier work that the reviewer for Poetry wrote that it had too much of ‘a revolutionary tendency’ and was too ‘bitter.’ ”6 Brooks’s biographer Melhem notes that fully onethird of the thirty-five poems in The Bean Eaters were “distinctly political” (Melhem 1987: 102). It is stunning, in view of the political directness of The Bean Eaters, that so many of Brooks’s critics insisted that she became “political” only after 1967 and that her poems from the 1940s and 1950s were apolitical and directed at a white audience. In The Bean Eaters, written during the 1950s and published in 1960, during the radical disruptions of the civil rights movement, Brooks initiates all the themes that critics associate with her later Black nationalist period. Moreover, she goes beyond the category of race to include issues of gender, class, and war. Brooks’s subjects in The Bean Eaters are nearly always Black and working class, and her relationship to these subjects is compassionate, though, as always, Brooks’s use of an ironic, mocking voice makes it impossible to draw any easy conclusions about the aims of her critiques (Gery 1999). Beyond that compassion is her determination to expose the way conventions of respectability, Christian norms, racism, and classism dominate and oppress working-class and racialized subjects. Her subjects in The Bean Eaters are as follows: an elderly devoted couple eating their beans in “rented back rooms” and fingering the mementos that bespeak a life of poverty and lifelong faithfulness; the racial and class violence directed at a young couple who make love in alleys and stairways; the Chicago Black working class drinking their beer in the establishments once an enclave for the rich; Emmett Till, “a blackish child / Of fourteen, with eyes too young to be dirty” and a mouth of “infant softness”; the pool players who live in urban ghettos, expecting short and brutal lives; the homemaker Mrs. Small, trying to manage breakfast for her six, an abusive husband, and the payment for the (white) insurance man; the “brownish” girls and boys of Little Rock, caught in a storm of race hatred of white mothers; “those Lovers of the Poor” who “cross the Water in June,” “Winter in Palm Beach,” and cannot endure an actual encounter with the poor; the emptiness of middle-class consumption; Rudolph Reed dying in order to protect his family and home from white racial violence; and finally, an antiwar poem that critiques the war aims of generals, diplomats, and war profiteers and assails the people’s desire for war. I list these subjects in some detail as further proof of the political, racial, and class issues Brooks took on in her late 1950s and early 1960s work. Three poems in The Bean Eaters particularly bear the signs of Brooks’s leftist sensibility, and two make specific references to the Left. The first, entitled “Jack,” I assume to be about Brooks’s leftist radical friend Jack Conroy, and the other, “Leftist Orator in Washington Park / Pleasantly Punishes the Gropers,” is the only poem in which she actually makes a direct reference to the Left. Almost nothing has been written about Brooks’s long-term friendship with Conroy, who is often referred to as “a legendary Communist” because of his dedication to the movement but whom the literary historian Alan Wald identifies very specifically as “pro-Communist” or a “fellow-traveler” (Wald 2001: 269). That friendship between Conroy and Brooks—both literary and personal—is established in the letters between the two written between 1945 and 1983. Conroy’s biographer Douglas Wixson says Brooks met Conroy at the SSCAC. Alice Browning, a student in Conroy’s Significantly, William Dean Howells, a major literary critic at the turn of the twentieth century, also used “bitter” to reject Charles Chesnutt’s The Marrow of Tradition in 1901 and, in an age of censorship of Black anger, practically destroyed Chesnutt’s publishing opportunities. 6

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writing class, asked for Conroy’s help when she started Negro Story, and Brooks was there at Browning’s house for meetings with Conroy (Wixson 1998: 426n37). Conroy’s close relationships with and support оf Black writers are almost unprecedented. His friendship with the Black writer Arna Bontemps spanned twenty years and produced several collaborative works, including the 1945 social history of Black migration, They Seek a City, as well as several books for children. He seems to have been a ubiquitous presence among Black writers and a beloved friend and colleague to many of these writers, including Bontemps, Browning, Frank Yerby, Willard Motley, Melvin Tolson, Frank Marshall Davis—and Brooks. The letters between Brooks and Conroy begin in 1945, shortly after the publication of her first volume of poetry. In the first letter of September 14, 1945, which is mentioned above, Brooks confides in Conroy that she is pleased with “a very generous” review of A Street in Bronzeville in New Masses. Brooks’s greetings change from “Mr. Conroy” in the 1945 letter to “Jack” in subsequent letters, as their friendship deepens. Wixson says that “Gwendolyn Brooks (among others) was a frequent guest at the parties given by Jack and Gladys on Green Street” (Wixson 1998: 462). In a letter from 1962, Conroy asks Brooks to autograph Maud Martha and A Street in Bronzeville and confides in Brooks about the troubles getting his books published because of his blacklisting: The trouble is they [his books] were translated and published freely several years ago and I was never paid anything. In Russia they had a huge sale. Now I see the Russians are willing to pay American authors, and I have put Pfeffer on the trail of my lost rubles. Don’t know whether I ought to accept them or not, for McCarthy is not dead but only sleepeth. Besides, Eastland and Walters seem to have taken over where the Republicans left off. 7 Brooks felt an extraordinary sense of kinship with Conroy, and he was clearly comfortable sharing his political troubles with her. She admired his devotion to the working class; his unpretentiousness; his wariness of ideology; his multicultural, multiracial friendships and collaborations; and his love of parties. While nothing in these archives proves that Brooks was a Party member, this friendship, almost totally undocumented in any critical or biographical work and strangely unremarked on in Brooks’s own work, is further evidence that Brooks was no stranger to the Left. Since the poem “Jack” appears to be about someone Brooks knew, and since it reflects qualities one might associate with Conroy, I read the poem as a description of Jack as a kind of secular saint. It opens with a typical Brooks irony, appearing at first to honor Jack in religious terms, calling him a man of “faith.” Knowing, of course, that Conroy was a Marxist, Brooks has revised “faith,” inserting instead an economic metaphor: he is not, the first line tells us, “a spendthrift of faith” but one who carefully doles out his faith with “a skinny eye,” waiting to see whether or not that faith is “bought true” or “bought false”: And comes it up his faith bought true, He spends a little more. And comes it up his faith bought false, It’s long gone from the store.

This letter, dated October 28, 1955, is at the Bancroft Library, in Box 1:28. There also is a photograph in Conroy’s papers that shows Brooks sitting next to Margaret Taylor and Conroy’s son. 7

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Not religious in any sense of a formal creed, this man’s “faith” is an ethic of integrity based on an ideal of justice whose results must be observable, not on the abstractions of traditional notions of “faith.” After Conroy’s death, Brooks took a trip to his hometown, Moberly, Missouri, where he moved in 1965 after leaving Chicago, to give a talk about him. Wixson discusses the visit in his biography of Conroy and says it clearly demonstrated Brooks’s close ties to her friend. In addition to this poem dedicated to an openly leftist radical, Brooks’s “Leftist Orator in Washington Park / Pleasantly Punishes the Gropers” suggests her familiarity with scenes in Washington Square Park, where militantly Black and Left soapbox orators regularly spoke. As a result of the demographic changes following the First World War, when African Americans moved into the area, Washington Square Park8 became a site of racial tension and conflict in the 1920s and 1930s, and by the late 1950s, the park had become the (un)official dividing line between the Black South Side and white Hyde Park. Bordering the Black Belt, Washington Square Park was the “South Side’s public flashpoint for speeches and demonstrations by Black Garveyites, Communists, unionists, and other radicals” in the early 1930s, attracting thousands of Blacks to hear its political speakers, even some Black women speakers, and attend classes on Marxism (Mullen 1999: 67). By the late 1950s, when Brooks was writing The Bean Eaters poems, the park would have attracted a mostly Black audience. There are stories of large Garvey parades in Washington Park, and the Black historian Hammurabi Robb gave soapbox oratories there. Brooks might have thought of the park as a specifically Black cultural site because it is specifically named in Richard Wright’s novel Native Son, when Bigger Thomas drives the drunken Jan Erlone and Mary Dalton around Washington Park as part of their desire to experience Black space.9 As Jan and Mary embrace, Bigger “pulled the car slowly round and round the long gradual curves” then drives out of the park and heads north on Cottage Grove.10 The leftist orator acknowledges that he or she is engaged in a thankless and hopeless task, trying to fire up the audience in this “crazy snow,” an audience that is rushing to get out of the cold, fearfully aware that “the wind will not falter at any time in the / night.” At the beginning of the poem, the speaker is compassionate toward these listeners, the “Poor Pale-eyed” (not “Paleskinned), knowing that they “know not where to go.” Aware of his (or her) own ineffectiveness, the orator seems resigned to the reality that he cannot offer enough inspiration to compete with the wintry weather nor reach this audience of “gropers” with a vision capable of stirring them. Speaking in the voice of a religious prophet, however, he blames their indifference not only on more than simply a need to get out of the cold but also on a failure of vision: “I foretell the heat

Named for the first president, the park is the largest of the four Chicago district parks surnamed Washington and was once, according to Brooks, rechristened Malcolm X Park by 1960s radicals. 9 In his introduction to the newly reissued Federal Writers Project The Negro in Illinois, the literary historian Brian Dolinar notes that although Wright knew about the park’s political significance, he did not allude to it in his project report dated March 27, 1937: 8

Wright gives considerable space in the essay to the educational and recreational activities in the park, but only makes brief mention of its significance as an open forum. Washington Park was the center of black political and social life during the 1930s. It was where debates were held between Socialists and Communists, Christians and non-Christians, nationalists and Pan-Africanists. It was where rallies, marches, and parades took place. Although Wright had spent much time there, he appears to have edited out any radical or racial commentary that would have sent up red flags indicating his own political views. To do otherwise might have cost him his job with the Writers’ Project. (Dolinar, “Introduction.”) The scene with Bigger, Mary, and Jan in a diner in Native Son is a vivid contrast to the diner scene in Maud Martha.

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and yawn of eye and the drop of the / mouth, and the screech / Because you had no dream or belief or reach.” While the poet understands these “gropers,” like the folks in Brooks’s “kitchenette building,” as people under the harsh and insistent material realities of their lives, the poet persona’s sympathy is for the leftist orator, who is committed to remaining out in the cold trying to reach the people, and perhaps she even shares the orator’s desire to punish “pleasantly” these listeners for their obstinacy. Even if the “thrice-gulping Amazed” listeners are not entirely indifferent to the speaker’s message, the pattern of threes in the poem (“thrice-gulping”; “the heat and yawn of eye,” “the drop of mouth,” and “the screech”; “no dream or belief or reach”; “were nothing,” “saw nothing,” “did nothing”) points perhaps to the three denials of Christ by Peter and a harsher rebuke of the crowd as not only indifferent and preoccupied but as betrayers of themselves and of a larger cause. As the orator tries to reach a reluctant and indifferent audience, it is striking to note that the narrator’s sympathy is evoked for both the unheeding crowd and the determined but ineffectual “leftist orator.”11 We can only speculate about what is actually said by the leftist orator, the “I” of the poem, in his address to the Washington Park crowd, since his actual speech is unnarrated, but he speaks in several registers that would appeal to a Black audience—as a political voice, as the voice of a religious prophet, and as the poetic voice. In her reading of the poem, Brooks’s biographer D. H. Melhem assumes that the audience is white and that the orator is castigating them for their apathy and lack of conviction (Melhem 1987: 118). But in the late 1950s, the park would have been a predominantly Black or interracial gathering center and that audience almost certainly not entirely white. Moreover, Brooks deliberately employs whiteness to refer to the weather, anticipating, then forestalling any easy identification with race. Though Melhem reads the audience as white people, the reference to a “Pale-eyed” audience is Brooks’s critique of people seduced into indifference and complacency and unwilling to act, a recurring theme in her poetry and not necessarily racially inflected. Two more poems from The Bean Eaters I read as representative of a “Left” sensibility because they show Brooks’s profound alignment with those disadvantaged by class and race. The first poem, entitled, with Brooksian irony, “A Lovely Love,” is about the first sexual experience of two young people whose lives are such that the encounter takes place in an alley or stairway. The poem opens with an imperative: “Let it be alleys. Let it be a hall … Let it be stairways and a splintery box.” Rather than the imaginative space of the conventional sonnet where love is accorded dignity and meaning, the space these lovers occupy for their illicit love creates a disturbance and sets off all the reversals of the poem: “Hence white, religion, law, justice, patriotism, platonic love, and other traditionally positive entities and concepts become negative, while black, free love, revolution, retribution, and other generally negative entities and concepts assume positive attributes” (Shaw 1980: 119). This “lovely love” is consummated in a place that “cheapen[s]‌hyacinth darkness,” where there is “rot” and “the petals fall.”12 The elegiac mood and bitter wisdom of the poem are created by the speaker addressing her or his lover, speaking of the way their love affair is cheapened not by their lovemaking but by ugly

Many thanks to my colleague Professor Christina Walter for this insight about the poem and for the hours she spent reading these poems through the lens of her well-trained modernist eye. 12 Here I would like to credit the excellent analysis of “A Lovely Love” in Harry B. Shaw’s literary biography, Gwendolyn Brooks. 11

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“epithet and thought” thrown by those “janitor javelins” that “rot” and “make petals fall.” As she has done repeatedly throughout this period of her “high” modernist experimentation, Brooks revises a high modernist form—the sonnet—to critique those traditions and to give to the poor the trappings of poetic form. The speaker is resistant, however, to the defamation of her experience, and to honor that experience, she endows it with the elegance and fragrance of “hyacinth” (the “hyacinth darkness that we sought”). The speaker, small enough to be “thrown” down, then “scraped” by her or his lover’s kiss and “honed” as one would sharpen a tool, is not caressed in this encounter. Nonetheless, the act entails more than the awkward and inadequate moves of a young lover; he or she smiles away their “shocks” in an attempt to be reassuring, and the poem shows that both these inexperienced young people have been unsettled by their sexuality. In the third quatrain, the poet/narrator/initiate compares this love and the possible birth it might produce to the birth of Christ and, in a caustic comparison, names Christ’s birth “that Other one,” charging religious myth with both irrelevance and otherness: this Cavern is not the mythic cave of the Christ child, and there are no “swaddling clothes,” no “wise men,” and no blessed birth. Their birthright is only the feeling that they must run before they are caught, probably by those people whose “strict” rules, both religious doctrine and social norms, would condemn their lovemaking in alleys and stairways: “Run / People are coming. / They must not catch us here / Definitionless in this strict atmosphere.” There is another reference in the couplet to the strict conventions of the sonnet form. By its repeated references to those public, dark, and indecent locales, the poem, like the couple, violates the lovelier love traditionally associated with the sonnet. In this space outside of conventions, the couple is “definitionless,” without standards or traditions reserved for those “lovelier loves” sanctioned by myth, convention, and poetic traditions. So, what to make of the title, “A Lovely Love,” and the opening tag “Lillian’s” beneath the title of the poem? Is this poem a tribute to someone named Lillian and to Lillian’s “lovely love,” perhaps her first sexual experience? Brooks is, of course, subverting the traditions that have historically omitted girls (and boys) like these two.13 “The Ghost at the Quincy Club” is a companion poem to “A Lovely Love,” in which Brooks again takes on the issue of class and the “dark folk” omitted from, marginalized by, and discarded by white patriarchal traditions. The Quincy Club is an old upper-class establishment, a genteel social club of “Tea” and “Fathers,” owned and dominated by the white male elite that excluded Black and Jewish folk, where the African American DuSable Museum is now located. The poem opens with a vision of the past, with one of the genteel (“Gentile”) daughters of the former Quincy Club fathers drifting down the staircase and wafting into the halls of “polished panels” in their “filmy stuffs and all.”

Conversation with Professor Aaron Lecklider (American Studies Association annual meeting, Puerto Rico, November 2012) to whom I am indebted for the possible queer reading of the poem. He argues that the absence of signifiers requires us to consider that Brooks’s radicalism might extend to sexuality. Since the only gender signifier is the tag “Lillian’s” that prefaces the poem, the poem invites a queer reading, with the two young lovers possibly a same-sex couple. Under the terms of a homophobic culture, two gay lovers would also be labeled “Definitionless.” This lexicon of deviance and transgressiveness in the poem suggests that in pushing against the boundaries of respectability Brooks may have intended to align the poem with sexual as well as class deviance in the narrator’s embrace of the two lovers. I would argue that a queer reading of the poem is further evidence that Brooks was clearly capable of the political deviance, boldness, and indifference to conventional norms required for an embrace of the Left. 13

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The poet-narrator is blunt and sarcastic, sneering at these “Gentile” daughters turned, presumably by their fathers, into “filmy downs,” “filmy stuff,” “Moth-soft,” and “off-sweet”—ephemeral, insubstantial, and easily snuffed out. Their “velvet voices” are described here as moving almost as though directed by a metronome (“lessened, stopped, rose”)—that imposes on them an exact and precise rhythm. The enjambment between the first and second line in this stanza forces the “velvet voices” to give way to the “Rise” of the “raucous Howdys,” those new raw sounds that now, with energy and swagger, perhaps with vulgar curse, challenge and replace the old, the privileged, and the white. In the current arrangement of things, “Tea and Father” are replaced by “dark folk, drinking beer” (Brooks 1987: 359). Both of these poems enact a kind of leftist recoding of the spaces of Brooks’s Chicago. Brooks rejects the soft, the off-sweet, the demure, the very image often imposed on her own autobiographical persona. One could read these final lines as Brooks’s silent, suppressed political voice—raw, raucous, challenging, vulgar, and coarse, rejecting the old order just as the cultural Left tried to do. Black left-wing cultural workers were under intense pressure by 1953 (the same year that her friend Langston Hughes was summoned to appear before McCarthy’s Senate Investigative Committee) to distance themselves from radical left-wing affiliations. I place Brooks as both an insider and an outsider in the Cold War literary realm, a writer aiming for literary recognition, perhaps even insider status, but also writing a novel that subverts the conservative racial politics of the Cold War 1950s. She was not immune to the allure of mainstream success. By the time of the publication of Maud Martha, Brooks had been selected by Mademoiselle as one of its ten “Women of the Year.” In 1949, she received the Pulitzer Prize, and, in 1957, she was selected by the Jesuits as one of their hundred outstanding Chicagoans, to celebrate the hundred-year anniversary of the Jesuits in Chicago. In the Chicago Times article, she is listed for the award as “Mrs. Gwendolyn Brooks Blakely, poet and author.” In the Times photograph Brooks is attired in a white floor-length formal gown, seated in the center of the front row along with the civic leaders, businessmen and businesswomen, social workers, labor leaders, lawyers, authors, an opera impresario, philanthropists, sports leaders, scientists, and educators. Dr. Percy Julian and Dr. Roscoe Giles appear to be the only other Blacks in the photo. The entire issue with photograph, which Brooks kept all of her life, is saved in the Brooks archives at the University of California, Berkeley. On the front page of that issue, Brooks wrote in her signature, strong, bold handwriting, “Save This Always.” I understand Brooks’s Black nationalism as essential to the development оf her aesthetic and critical to her own political formation, perhaps serving as Brooks’s expiation for what she considered writing for a white audience. But I want to underscore the problem of allowing Brooks’s public embrace of Black nationalism to obscure and undermine the power of her earlier political commitments and aesthetic innovations. Both Maud Martha and The Bean Eaters suggest something of what we lose in the dismissal of Brooks’s pre-Black nationalist writing. The formally experimental work Brooks produced in the 1940s and 1950s is informed by many categories of critique, not just race; it is proletarian, militantly race and class conscious, feminist, and antiwar, open to all forms of diversity, rejecting the kind оf ideological rigidity that produces the “oneness” she later advocated. Brooks herself insisted for years that Black writers have all kinds оf wonderful material in Black life to work with, but that they, like all writers, have to create and work with formal elements—in her words, they have to “cook that dough.” The effort to do that hard work—to struggle with language, to create something “linguistically and stylistically” beautiful, meaningful, and challenging—should never have been dismissed as writing for white folks or a kind of racial

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shortcoming. In the final analysis, we must take our cues from Brooks’s own political and aesthetic defense of her early archive, offered retrospectively in the 1970s: “but I have judged important the very difficult creation of poems and fiction and essays which even a quarter оf a century ago were—and are now—bearers of a hot burden” (Kent 1993: 193). That burden surfaces in Brooks’s hot, militant, leftist, poetic vocabulary and style.

WORKS CITED Bragg, Robert (2005), Oral Interview with Nadine Wilmot. Brooks, Gwendolyn (1951), “Why Negro Women Leave Home,” Negro Digest, (March): 26–8. Brooks, Gwendolyn (1972), Report From Part One, Detroit, MI: Broadside Press. Brooks, Gwendolyn (1987), Blacks, Chicago: Third World Press. Davis, John A., ed. (1959), The American Negro Writer and His Roots, New York: American Society of African Culture. Denning, Michael (1996), The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century, New York: Verso. Dolinar, Brian, ed. (2013), “Introduction” to The Negro in Illinois: The WPA Papers, Champaign: University of Illinois Press. Fabre, Michel (1993), The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright, Champaign: University of Illinois Press. Folsom, Franklin (1994), Days of Anger, Days of Hope: A Memoir of the League of American Writers, 1937–1942, Boulder: University Press of Colorado. Gery, John (1999), “Subversive Parody in the Early Poems of Gwendolyn Brooks,” South Central Review 16(1) (Spring): 44–56. Goss, Bernard (1936), “Ten Negro Artists on Chicago’s South Side,” Midwest: A Review 1(2) (December): 1719. Gramsci, Antonio (1971), “The Intellectuals,” in Quintin Hoare, ed., Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci, 5–20, New York: International Publishers. Jones, Claudia (1949), “An End to the Neglect of the Problem of the Negro Woman!” Political Affairs 28(6): 51–67. Kent, George E. (1993), A Life of Gwendolyn Brooks, Lexington: University Press of Kentucky. Kreymborg, Alfred (1945), “Notable New Poet [Review of A Street in Bronzeville],” New Masses 56(10) (September 4, 1945). Kunitz, Stanley (1950), “Bronze by Gold,” Poetry 76 (April): 52–6. Madhubuti, Haki (2001), “Gwendolyn Brooks: Beyond the Wordmaker—The Making of an African Poet,” in Stephen Caldwell (ed.), On Gwendolyn Brooks: Reliant Contemplation, 81–96, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Melamed, Jodi (2011), Represent and Destroy: Rationalizing Violence in the New Racial Capitalism, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Melhem, D. H. (1987), Gwendolyn Brooks: Poetry & The Heroic Voice, Lexington: University Press of Kentucky. Mullen, Bill (1999), Popular Fronts: Chicago and African-American Cultural Politics, 1935–46, Champaign: University of Illinois Press. Noakes, John A. (2003), “Racializing Subversion: The FBI and the Depiction of RAce in Early Cold War Movies,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 26(4) (July): 728–49. Shaw, Harry B. (1980), Gwendolyn Brooks, Woodbridge, CT: Twayne. Smethurst, James (1999), The New Red Negro: The Literary Left and African American Poetry, 1930–1946, New York: Oxford University Press.

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SSCAC (1944), “Board of Directors Minutes,” Box 1 Folder 9, Archives of the South Side Community Art Center. Stanford, Ann Folwell (1992), “Dialectics of Desire: War and the Restive Voice in Gwendolyn Brooks’s ‘Negro Hero’,” African American Review 26(2): 197–211. Tate, Claudia (1983), Black Women Writers At Work, New York: Continuum. Wald, Allen (2001), Exiles from a Future Time: The Forging of the Mid-Twentieth-Century Literary Left, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Wald, Allen (2012), “Email to Author,” November 2012. Washington, Mary Helen (1987), “‘Taming All That Anger Down’: Rage and Silence in the Writing of Gwendolyn Brooks,” in Mary Helen Washington (ed.), Invented Lives: Narratives of Black Women, 1860–1960, Garden City, NY: Doubleday. Weigand, Kate (2001), Red Feminism: American Communism and the Making of Women’s Liberation, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Wixson, Douglas (1998), Worker-Writer in America: Jack Conroy and the Tradition of Midwestern Literary Radicalism, Champaign: University of Illinois Press.

FURTHER READING Baldwin, Kate (2002), Beyond the Color Line and the Iron Curtain: Reading Encounters between Black and Red, 1922–1963, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Davies, Carole Boyce (2008), Left of Karl Marx: The Political Life of Black Communist Claudia Jones, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Gore, Dayo (2011), Radicalism at the Crossroads: African American Women Activists in the Cold War, New York: New York University Press. Kelley, Robin D. G. (1990), Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists during the Great Depression, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Maxwell, William J. (2015), F.B. Eyes: How J. Edgar Hoover’s Ghostreaders Framed African American Literature, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. McDuffie, Erik S. (2011), Sojourning for Freedom: Black Women, American Communism, and the Making of Black Left Feminism, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Mullen, Bill V. (1999), Popular Fronts: Chicago and African-American Cultural Politics, 1935–46, Champaign: University of Illinois Press. Smethurst, James (1999), The New Red Negro: The Literary Left and African American Poetry, 1930–1946, New York: Oxford University Press. Wald, Alan (2012), Exiles from a Future Time: The Forging of the Mid-Twentieth-Century Literary Left, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Washington, Mary Helen (2014), The Other Blacklist: The African American Literary and Cultural Left in the 1950s, New York: Columbia University Press.

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CHAPTER TWO

The Cold War Encyclopedic Novel JEFFREY SEVERS

Several of the major US novels of the Cold War era are, to put it simply, quite long, often between 600 and 1,000 pages. A tally of page counts from recent editions of significant works of the period includes: William Gaddis’s The Recognitions (1955), 985 pages, and J R (1975), 726; John Barth’s The Sot-Weed Factor (1960), 806, and Giles Goat-Boy (1966), 710; Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow (1973), 776; and Robert Coover’s The Public Burning (1977), 616. Norman Mailer published some massive books in this period, including Ancient Evenings (1983, 709 pages) and the CIA novel Harlot’s Ghost (1991, a whopping 1170 pages). After twenty-five years of novels on varying subcultures that mostly came to 200 to 450 pages, Don DeLillo took 827 pages in the book often regarded as his masterpiece, Underworld (1997), to document a broad history of the Cold War, from the 1951 Soviet H-bomb tests to the 1991 end of the global binarism of superpowers. Far shorter texts (Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 (1966), Mailer’s Why Are We in Vietnam? (1967), DeLillo’s White Noise (1985)) have to represent these authors on any manageable syllabus of postwar or postmodern US fiction. Why were the era’s major authors so attached to massive novels? Was it because a globalizing age required a national literature transcending boundaries of all sorts? Or because possible nuclear apocalypse and the worldwide reach of the US military and intelligence compelled liberal critics to produce verbal antidotes similar in scale? Or did these writers find the ambitious scope of Melville’s Moby-Dick, the paradigmatic “Great American Novel,” an inspiration and challenge? (Most of them also shared a preoccupation with Ahabian paranoia and authoritarianism.) In this overview essay, while touching on all these questions and themes, I argue for the ideal suitability of encyclopedic form to analyzing, in fictional terms, the vast array of interlocking scientific, technological, imperial, and cultural systems that made up Cold War US society in a perilous global context. I examine closely three important works representative of the form— Gravity’s Rainbow, The Public Burning, and Underworld—but more broadly address the generic terms that critics have used to explain the efflorescence of experimentation with size and scope that marked the major feats of post-1945 US fiction, and especially postmodernism in the 1960s and after. Cold War encyclopedism, I show, not only speaks to the ways surfeit and overload defined the

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technological, informational, and organizational phenomena endemic to the era but also expresses something fundamental about the novel’s moral response to the arrogance of massive institutional and political powers: these novels mimic those powers’ pervasiveness while also arranging for their epistemological humbling, showing readers the incompleteness, gaps, and fragility of any discourse, especially all-controlling and annihilating ones. The encyclopedic allows writers to compare totalizing, hegemonic discourses with those exhibiting incongruity, pluralism, mundanity, and the possibility of interpersonal connection and agency. Using examples ranging from the Bible to Dante’s Commedia, Erasmus’s Praise of Folly, and Goethe’s Faust, Northrop Frye shows in Anatomy of Criticism that it is not simply length that distinguishes encyclopedic narrative but a “total body of vision” (1957: 55). As Steven Weisenburger, interpreting twentieth-century US satires, helpfully summarizes, for Frye encyclopedic fictions must involve “a polyglot, ‘loose-jointed’ narrative, concerned mainly with external (social) realities treated from a single, obsessively detailed theoretical perspective” (Weisenburger 1995: 202). Such texts, Frye says, tend toward “piling up an enormous mass of erudition” or toward “overwhelming … pedantic targets with an avalanche of their own jargon” (1957: 311). Most definitions of the encyclopedic novel in Cold War literary criticism go back in some way to Frye’s structuralist, transhistorical account of abiding literary forms, before then accounting for specific post-1945 differences. Edward Mendelson brought encyclopedism into the Cold War era in 1976 with his influential essay “Encyclopedic Narrative: From Dante to Pynchon,” which used the publication of Gravity’s Rainbow three years earlier to suggest that (from Dante and Rabelais to Goethe, Melville, Joyce, and now Pynchon) “each major national culture in the west, as it becomes aware of itself as a separate entity, produces an encyclopedic author, one whose work attends to the whole social and linguistic range of his nation” as well as “all the literary styles and conventions” available (1976: 1268). In addition to this engagement with a wide range of styles and plots, Mendelson’s key features include “extensive use of synecdoche” in representing a vast range of knowledge (hence “examples from one or two sciences serve to represent the whole scientific sector of knowledge,” from Melville’s cetology to Pynchon’s rocketry), the “organizing skeleton” of epic without that form’s reliance on “a legendary past” (1976: 1269), and attention to “the complexities of statecraft” in some form (1976: 1271). Mendelson countered Frye by claiming that the latter’s “cyclical and universal schemata make it impossible for him to recognize encyclopedic narratives which appear at unique and unrepeatable points in the linear history of historical cultures” (1976: 1269n1). But a far greater historical situatedness was to come in later critics influenced by Mendelson but dedicated to analyzing unique and unrepeatable post-1945 developments and unprecedented types of scientific knowledge, not to mention discarding Mendelson’s underexplained claim that nations get only one encyclopedic narrative each (Pynchon did not supplant Melville, according to Mendelson, because the former depicted a new international order). In 1989 Tom LeClair proposed readings of long works by Pynchon, Gaddis, Barth, Joseph Heller, Joseph McElroy, and Ursula K. LeGuin under the highly useful rubrics of “excess” and “mastery,” addressing features associated with encyclopedism across history but more readily responsive to the particulars of Cold War power. LeClair is interested in systems novels, which are, in his words, “huge, dense with information, and deformed by artistic expertise because the power systems they master have these same qualities. Excess represents and critiques excess” (1989: 17). LeClair, in essence, shows that critics of works from the 1950s to 1980s should be interested in zones where too much (information, control, mastery) goes hand in hand with malignant or disastrous cultural formations.

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In more recent criticism, primary terms and timeframes have shifted, partly in acknowledgment that postmodernism’s cultural dominance has waned but some of its major forms, the encyclopedic and systems novel in particular, have thrived along new axes. Stefano Ercolino in 2014 defined a global set of “maximalist novels,” a form that he claims begins with Gravity’s Rainbow and extends into David Foster Wallace, DeLillo, Zadie Smith, Jonathan Franzen, Roberto Bolaño, and the Italian collective Babette Factory. In the most recent major overview of post-1950 encyclopedic narratives, what he calls “mega-novels,” David Letzler, author of The Cruft of Fiction, uses a term originating in computer programming to punningly explore (the cruft of fiction, not the craft) the way these books present extraneous, relatively useless information to the reader, from Coover’s catalogs of American archetypes to Wallace’s famously digressive footnotes and endnotes (2017: 1). Across various projects of social and technological critique throughout postmodernism and (in writers such as Wallace) after, the US mega-novel has always been designed to train readers in selective attention, Letzler argues. In this brief review of texts that swamp syllabi and defeat comprehensive mastery (while also thematizing this defeat), let me offer some caveats on necessary selectivity before heading into close readings. First, there are points of origin and historical spacing to consider. Scholars might point to Gaddis’s The Recognitions (1955) or Barth’s Giles Goat-Boy (1966) as important earlier Cold War examples of encyclopedic fictions: often credited with writing the first postmodern novel years ahead of Barth and Pynchon, Gaddis captures American malaise and inauthenticity in the immediate postwar with his narrative of the artist unappreciated, while Barth’s novel of gigantic computer systems (WESCAC and EASCAC) dueling for control of a university campus allegorically represents US/Soviet computers and “big science” holding the fate of the world in their distressingly automated hands. But I opt for close examination of three later examples that have the virtue not only of being able to look back on thirty to fifty previous years of US Cold War history but of zeroing in on fears of nuclear war, as well as the prominent social divisions of McCarthyism (in Coover) and the counterculture (which both Pynchon and DeLillo largely see as a political failure). Gravity’s Rainbow (1973), The Public Burning (1977), and Underworld (1997) offer in their own way a sprawling history of the Cold War era up to the point of their publication, drawing long and compelling arcs between important moments of the Red Scare, the early nuclear arms race, and the Vietnam War era in and about which Coover and Pynchon wrote. DeLillo, focused on memory and waste, is an ideal analyst of the Cold War’s aftermath and enduring legacy. A second caveat: whiteness, masculinism, and heteronormativity clearly dominate in the examples I have listed above (all but one of the American authors noted, LeGuin, are white men) and will examine closely. Without being able to offer a solution to this significant problem in this space, I will say that the prevalence of white male authors in any definition of Cold War encyclopedic novels is symptomatic of a larger trend in discussions and classifications of late twentieth-century US fiction and an undue cordoning off of the avant-garde techniques of postmodernism. As Amy Hungerford suggests in a 2008 overview of classifying and periodizing post-1960s US literature, the contemporary Americanist field into the late 1990s was susceptible to a misleading opposition between … two kinds of writing. At worst, that opposition suggested a hierarchy of value in which the writing of mainly white male authors such as Thomas Pynchon, John Barth, William Gaddis, and Don DeLillo was deemed “literary” whereas the work of writers such as Toni Morrison, Philip Roth, Louise Erdrich, Leslie Marmon Silko, Alice Walker, and Joan Didion was thought to be mainly concerned with the sociological aspects of fiction. (411)

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A more in-depth study of long Cold War–era novels than this essay could try refashioning some of the key categories in order to bring in Cynthia Ozick’s Trust (1966), Samuel Delany’s Dhalgren (1975), or Silko’s Almanac of the Dead (1991). An equally helpful development, echoing remedies Hungerford says arrived belatedly, would be for more late-twentieth-century critics to recognize all the connections in (postmodern) techniques, particularly in illustrations of fascistic tendencies, racial genocide, and violence, that could show how novels by Pynchon and DeLillo, say, are networked with fictions of varying scopes and sizes by John Edgar Wideman, Ishmael Reed, Colson Whitehead, Chang-rae Lee, Rachel Kushner, and Jennifer Egan, within the Cold War period and after. While this notorious recluse has left little available to the public in the way of an archive, Pynchon reportedly wrote his manuscript for Gravity’s Rainbow on engineer’s quadrille paper. Such a format is not just apt for a novel that often incorporates mathematical formulas and symbols but also offers a material suggestion of the technical expertise and high-end math skills that have seemed a requirement for US writers following in Pynchon’s wake (including William T. Vollmann and Wallace). Much of the knowledge of rocketry’s history in Gravity’s Rainbow Pynchon gained as a technical writer for an internal newsletter at Boeing from 1960 to 1962, where his subjects included transporting Minuteman nuclear missiles safely on Boeing aircraft. Pynchon had already, in the mid1950s, served aboard a US Navy destroyer, which involved him not just in the military-industrial complex but also in the American intervention in the 1956 Suez Crisis, an early Cold War moment he fictionalizes in the epilogue of V. (1963). In his writing he thus worked through, as the editors of The Cambridge Companion to his works argue, “personal complicity … with bureaucracies of terror and mass destruction” (Dalsgaard, Herman, and McHale 2011: 4). Pynchon’s unrelentingly surreal novel, set in Europe in the final months of the Second World War but reaching 1970s Los Angeles in its final pages, connects the V-2 rockets the Germans rained on London in 1944–5 to the intercontinental ballistic missiles that determined the Cold War of the ensuing decades. As suggested by Mendelson’s landmark critical essay, without Gravity’s Rainbow, while there still might be an encyclopedic US novel of the Cold War, the form would not obsess critics so. Gravity’s Rainbow elaborates a paradigm of paranoia that, while he had sketched it in miniature as a straining of epistemology in the detective fiction The Crying of Lot 49 (1966), became for the Pynchon of 1973 a powerful tool for analyzing seemingly every shadowy layer of a society ruled corruptly by those he (invoking Puritan theology) termed “the Elect” (Pynchon 1973: 380). Paranoia—also put in religious terms in Gravity’s Rainbow as “the discovery that everything is connected, everything in the Creation, a secondary illumination—not yet blindingly One, but at least connected”—becomes in Pynchon’s hands an encyclopedism-producing machine (1973: 717). Scene after scabrous scene, the book’s method is the constant use of catalogs and enumeration: main character Lieutenant Tyrone Slothrop considers his growing paranoia through a numbered list of “Proverbs for Paranoids” (1973: 240); in a hallucination he ponders the meaning of listing “one of each of everything” (1973: 69); and an infamous late moment in the book catalogs foods on an alliterative gross-out menu (“mucus mayonnaise,” “slime sausage,” and on and on) (1973: 730). Pynchon’s fundamental subject is not the combat or violence of the Second World War but the organizational structures, with all their bureaucracy and power plays, that war brought into being. Various forces recognize, in comic and arcane scenes playing out at an institute called the White Visitation, that defeating the Nazis is not the main issue; rather, it is obtaining resources to carry on their work after the end of the war. “This War was never political at all […] secretly, it was

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being dictated by the needs of technology” (1973: 521), reads one of many passages devoted to differentiating the Second World War from “the real War” that is “always there,” one of whose implicit reference points throughout is the Cold War (1973: 645). Pynchon’s vampiric figures fear that, as V-E Day approaches, “dawn is nearly here, I need my night’s blood, my funding, funding, ahh more, more. … The real crises were crises of allocation and priority” (1973: 521). Pynchon scrutinizes and satirizes many funding-craving research scientists who serve destruction (a major character, named Franz Pökler, is based on Wernher von Braun, who brought Nazi rocket science to the United States) and diminished human agency and freedom (Pavlovianism is also a major target, in the character of Dr. Edward Pointsman). The theme of scientific control—embodied by V-2 rockets, and undermined by the problems with keeping them on target and statistically predicting where the next will fall—leads Pynchon to mock the illusion of rational, comprehensive mastery. He depicts scientists and statesmen reliant on seances and other mysticism and at one point invokes a sort of layman’s version of Gödel’s incompleteness theorem: “And yet, and yet: there is Murphy’s Law to consider, that brash Irish proletarian restatement of Gödel’s Theorem—when everything has been taken care of, when nothing can go wrong, or even surprise us … something will” (1973: 279). This passage says that one such forever-incomplete project is General Edward Pudding’s book “Things That Can Happen in European Politics,” an attempt to predict mid-1930s changes in political leadership but implicitly Pynchon’s farcical send-up of the RAND Corporation’s attempts to game out survival (and even alleged victory) in a nuclear exchange (1973: 279). The aged First World War veteran Pudding, now in a desk job, thinks, as real events overtake his abstract projections, “it’s changing out from under me. Oh, dodgy—very dodgy” (1973: 79). Pynchon’s point is that the warriors of the last war are often unprepared to fight the next one—but also that after 1945, in the context of a killing technology that has outpaced and overwhelmed meaningful moral intention, one thing that can happen in global politics will foreclose the possibility of all others. The shocking supersonic speed of the 1940s V-2, which blows up its target before its sound alarms people below, is throughout the novel a precise illustration of this central problem of technological accelerationism in the atomic age. Pynchon’s encyclopedic novel, his own dystopian compendium of “Things That Can Happen …,” is full of plot loose ends, anticlimax, irresolution, and failed symmetries. Perhaps the most chilling way that Pynchon concedes to incompleteness and makes it an antiwar gesture is to have the whole book end on a dash, simultaneously an invitation to join in a song chorus and an identification of the countless victims of the bomb about to fall: “Now everybody—” (1973: 775). Before that ending, though, there are other modestly hopeful invocations of “everybody,” a humane, wounded community that might act as true counter to all the inhumanity Pynchon catalogs (and this in the wake of what seems like the failed guerilla resistance by what Pynchon calls “the Counterforce,” his means of exploring the thwarted possibilities of student radicalism and the counterculture (1973: 712)). Nearly 600 pages in, Gravity’s Rainbow riffs on a typically arcane Pynchon invention, a group of sentient pinballs from outer space, knocked around pinball machines by wounded veterans relieved to be home from the war, who contort their bodies as they push on the flippers. The passage ends up evoking with these objects and bodies “a single Mobility you never heard, a unity unaware of itself, a silence the encyclopedia histories have blandly filled up with agencies, initials, spokesmen and deficits enough to keep us from finding them again” (1973: 596). Collective human agency seems to have been lost in power structures

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determined by overwhelmingly large superpower agencies and other bureaucracies; and so the “encyclopedia” version of Cold War history, like the superficial history of the Second World War that has the democracies simply and nobly defeating fascism, needs rewriting. Gravity’s Rainbow offers a different encyclopedia of Cold War life, filled with unseen connections and fragmentations, designed to diversify thought in such a way that the “everybody—” at the end might be united in resistance to nuclear missiles. In this way, too, Pynchon’s literary project resembles the sociological ones of William Whyte and C. Wright Mills, who concluded that the increasing domination of American life by large bureaucratic institutions required redress. Parodic depictions of the arch-Cold Warrior Richard Nixon link Pynchon’s novel to one of its encyclopedic successors, Coover’s The Public Burning (1977). A satiric version of Nixon appears late in Gravity’s Rainbow as the character Richard M. Zhlubb, a manager of a Los Angeles movie theater where that gripping final scene of a broken film projector and a descending rocket occurs. Pynchon thus reveals American Cold War geopolitics of the 1960s and 1970s as a kind of deadly spectacle. In his own, much more expansive satire of Nixon, Coover is even more convinced that dissecting powerful spectacles is the American novelist’s mission, but his focus is on the reinforcement of the state’s violent sovereignty that arose from nuclear paranoia and scapegoating in the McCarthyite United States of the early 1950s. Power for Coover is not as shadowy as it is for paranoid Pynchon; power for Coover importantly has a face and puts on a performance to secure itself, and so the historical Nixon, at the time the novel is set vice-president to Eisenhower, narrates much of The Public Burning, often in ingratiating comical tones. Coover’s novel resurrects a key moment of the early Cold War by telling a hyperbolic, grotesque version of the story of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who in Coover’s account are executed not in a prison but in Times Square—a Salem witch trial for an age that, in Coover’s view, has not at all transcended obsolete processes of ritual purgation and sacrifice. Modern capital punishment thus becomes for Coover a gateway into the survival of premodern senses of law and justice in the halls of power. As Nixon observes early on, American politics is filled “with murder and mayhem, theft and cannibalism” (Coover 1977: 48). In fact, Coover’s thinking about all political structures is informed by anthropology, specifically Clifford Geertz’s idea that all states, across history and civilizations, are fundamentally theatrical, obsessed with “status and display” and enactment (LeClair 1989: 108). And in effect The Public Burning becomes encyclopedic by virtue of Coover’s attempt to anatomize the interlocking parts of a state and society that lose their sense of rational justice and democratic order in wave upon wave of grotesque displays of power—power that must be continually upheld by innately excessive pageantry. When The Public Burning appeared in 1977, Walter Clemons, in a Newsweek review, cited Mendelson’s recent essay on the genre and called the new novel another instance of encyclopedic narrative (1977: 75). But there are crucial differences between this novel and the others Mendelson cites: for instance, while 1940s Hollywood cinema and comic-book superheroes make up much of Pynchon’s pastiche of parodied archetypes, The Public Burning’s satire of media is more focused on print, with Time’s coverage of the Rosenbergs recast as lines in a mock epic poem. Concentrating on hegemonic print voices is appropriate to the 1950s setting, perhaps, but as his title suggests (public life is now burning?), Coover is a bit more hopeful about using his encyclopedia of media parodies to save or repair traditional institutions of the ravaged public sphere. At the same time he uses his knowledge of the media degradations to come in the next two decades to also critique TV: naturally, in Coover’s invented Times Square execution, TV cameras are ubiquitous, and

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Nixon, in line with Geertz’s ideas, is very much a performer. LeClair’s concept of excess applies to nearly every rhetorical and media formation in The Public Burning, and the book cumulatively demonstrates that every argument for American ideology ends up inherently overblown, more puffery than substance, chasing some worn-out Puritan sense of the United States as shining Christian example to the world. Nowhere is that more the case than in the verbal grotesqueries of Coover’s constantly monologuing and satanic Uncle Sam, a figure out of tall tales whose annoyingly folksy voice encapsulates the ways in which the Cold War United States, alleged protector of freedom around the world, has bought in, fatally, to its own mythic vision of itself. The catalog also structures many of Coover’s formal choices, especially in Uncle Sam’s speeches and in the Times Square execution scenes with which the novel climaxes. As Letzler notes, “As the execution [of the Rosenbergs] approaches, readers are overloaded by excessive lists,” with one chapter cataloging seventeen categories of VIPs in attendance, fifteen movie stars, and many other celebrities, and another chapter listing dozens of presidential nicknames and fifty-four American archetypes (e.g., “Roving Gamblers, lumberjacks …” (Coover 1977: 490)) (Letzler 2017: 140). Here, though, in contrast to Pynchon, and in line with Coover’s anthropological ideas, listing names and identities is more suggestive of the malign effects of primitive mob mentalities and the urge for a sadistically sexual group release: crowded into Times Square in “confusion and panic,” the “people seek—with distraught hearts and agitated loins—a final connection, a kind of ultimate ingathering, a tribal implosion.” It will either “release them from this infinite darkness and doleful sorrow or obliterate them once and for all and end their misery” (Coover 1977: 569–70). The night and crowd are “imitative of the contained agitation of the universe,” a climactic moment of Coover’s rewriting throughout of that propagandistic moniker for US communists, “agitators” (1977: 569). Weisenburger argues that the cataloging Coover diagnoses the Cold War United States as “a society which has reached critical mass—too much information, population, and paradox … [Coover] stand[s]‌a sheer mass of unassimilable but nonetheless ‘real’ data against the drive for order, for fictions” (1995: 195). Exposing the anti-Semitism that undergirded the Rosenbergs’ treatment, Coover drives toward the revelation that Cold War patriotism, in the 1950s and on into the 1970s, imposes a garish fiction of unity on the diversity of American identities. Pynchon and Coover both partake of the Dantean feature of the encyclopedic that Mendelson identifies: encyclopedic narratives often set themselves “some twenty years before the time of writing” (1976: 1269) in order to make their prophecies accurate and their satires more biting, as with Pynchon’s 1945 funding-obsessed generals and scientists forecasting military-industrial dominance, or Coover skewering Watergate and Nixon’s presidential malfeasance by depicting his rabid 1950s anticommunism (“Dishonesty is often the best policy,” Nixon says in the first section he narrates (Coover 1977: 43)). But what follows the putative end of the Cold War is what preoccupies DeLillo in Underworld, a novel concerned with the falsehoods and comforts of nostalgia, proposing protagonist Nick Shay as a kind of postmodern Proust who, sans madeleine, sits “squeez[ing] a baseball” in 1991 in a way that, early in his narration, seems to release the book’s many memories of his 1950s youth (1997: 131). The ball Nick has purchased may or may not be the one New York Giant Bobby Thomson hit for a pennant-winning homerun in 1951 (commodification, simulation, inauthenticity, and history are often intertwined for DeLillo), and as the reader of the following 700+ pages learns, lurking in Nick’s repressed memories is an act of manslaughter with a gun that DeLillo uses as a small-scale, personal means of understanding the legacy of millions of Americans living for decades with their nuclear weapons held to the world’s

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head. Since his second novel, End Zone (1972), DeLillo has been concerned with endings and apocalypses (nuclear and otherwise) awaited and barely avoided, and Underworld reflects critically on what the early 1990s end of the Cold War has really meant—whether it has truly been an end, since Nick’s waste management career leads him to confront the legacy of nuclear waste, which is buried in some of the novel’s numerous underworlds. And did the United States, or any nation or people, actually “win” the Cold War? Pointedly, Nick’s boyhood team, the Brooklyn Dodgers, lost the game the ball commemorates, and Nick thinks throughout of himself as a bad-luck loser. The implication is that a US culture of global supremacy could use a similar chastening. Catherine Morley has compared Underworld to Joyce’s Ulysses, DeLillo’s most important encyclopedic model, certainly for the Bloom-like character Albert Bronzini and the mythic resonances of the novel’s title image (2008: 125–6). But DeLillo’s direct comparison to Ulysses in one of his previous long works, Libra (1988, 468 pages), clarifies what happens with the shift of encyclopedic form toward distinctively American cataclysm in Underworld. The twentysix-volume 1964 Warren Report, overwhelmed CIA historian Nicholas Branch muses in Libra (which proposes a conspiracy theory for Kennedy’s assassination), “is the megaton novel James Joyce would have written if he’d moved to Iowa City and lived to be a hundred” (1988: 181). “Megaton,” a designation for nuclear bombs, illustrates the link that formed, across US Cold War literary production, between massive destruction and massive texts. And indeed, in Underworld, where DeLillo turns outward from the hermetically sealed CIA systems that dominate Libra, the traces of nuclear weapon production seem to pervade all of American culture and social life, with no space truly innocent or free of that complicity with mass terror that Pynchon experienced on a personal level. The most indebted to existentialism and realism of the three novelists I examine here, DeLillo, writing after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, takes interest in the long-term effects of living with the menace of death and destruction, the process of normalizing it but never really taming the fear. Underworld’s sense of encyclopedic Cold War connection is thus less about paranoia over powerful agents and secret structures than it is about the way mass death shadowed the American everyday for half a century. The encyclopedic is at heart a paratactic form (i.e., reliant on arbitrary juxtaposition rather than subordination, hierarchy, and sequence), and from its prologue, set at the Thomson homerun game in Brooklyn on October 3, 1951, Underworld builds its sense of Cold War connection through parataxis and mysterious juxtaposition—events and characters that seem, if not doubles of each other, powerful shadows and echoes. Death threatens to erupt into everyday life from a variety of underworlds in which it had seemed safely buried. Among the witnesses to Thomson’s so-called “Shot Heard Round the World” DeLillo includes FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, whose contemplations preview the next day’s newspaper, where the story of Thomson’s homer sat next to accounts of the Soviets’ first successful test of a hydrogen bomb and a new phase of the arms race. DeLillo’s prologue is titled “The Triumph of Death” after Bruegel’s apocalyptic sixteenth-century painting, Life magazine’s reproduction of which floats down from the stands to Hoover amid all the torn-up paper and on-field celebration. Death is in Life, and death on a nuclear scale is now in American life. The novel progressively stacks numerous other connections between everyday experience and world-changing geopolitics and technologies. At one point Nick’s brother Matt, a weapons specialist in the Vietnam War, notices that orange juice cans in an advertisement and the Agent Orange cans on his base look disturbingly similar; he asks a question evocative of DeLillo’s ambitions with this

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paratactic history: “How can you tell the difference between orange juice and agent orange if the same massive system connects them at levels outside your comprehension?” (465). Matt’s question is less a coherent claim than an invitation to the reader of Underworld, looking backward and forward in the text, to connect many bits of knowledge, presented in nonlinear fashion, that the characters do not share: an adman selling orange juice who bought the Thomson ball in 1951 and gave it to his son, who later conducted Agent Orange bombing raids over Vietnam that had targets planned out by Matt; and, in the 1990s, orange juice used as an alleged anti-graffiti agent in the Bronx, where a Madonna-like vision of a murdered girl connected to a graffiti artist miraculously appears on an orange juice billboard. In place of the sense that the Cold War’s alienatingly “massive system[s]‌” overwrote American culture for a half-century, DeLillo offers his readers chances to make cross-references in an encyclopedia of unexpected sacrality and what White Noise calls “the American mystery” (DeLillo 1985: 60). Stephen Whitfield notes that everyday products like cars and washing machines sold by corporations that also held defense contracts in the 1950s and 1960s, in addition to moments like Nixon and Khrushchev’s famous 1959 “Kitchen Debate,” produced a Cold War US culture that saw consumer capitalism and superpower status going hand in hand: “What enhanced the home was not unrelated to what protected the homeland,” Whitfield writes (1996: 74). Writing in one exemplary section about an Illinois housewife admiring her kitchen appliances in 1957 as the nation processes news of the USSR’s launch of the Sputnik satellite, DeLillo is interested in uncanny versions of such material connections of the domestic and far-flung as well. But DeLillo invests his ordinary objects of Cold War history with a greater mysticism—or perhaps a mysticism of the ordinary, as well as a religiosity of precise language. In a central scene of Nick’s maturation, DeLillo nods again to Joyce, but this time Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, as a priest at the reform school to which Nick is sent after his act of manslaughter teaches him a lesson that turns on cataloging the many curious names for parts of a shoe. “Everyday things represent the most overlooked knowledge,” the priest summarizes. “These names are vital to your progress. Quotidian things,” marked by “the depth and reach of the commonplace” (1997: 542). While many of Pynchon’s catalogs are rife with an abjection that speaks to his concern for the lowly victims of power, DeLillo uses the catalog form to construct something more like an encyclopedia of everyday humility, compiled as spiritual guidance in the way a different tradition (DeLillo, a syncretist, has engaged with Buddhism elsewhere) might counsel meditation on the lowest earthly things, things that militate against the likes of bombing raids in foreign skies. DeLillo’s encyclopedia, structured as a regretful look back at personal and large-scale transgressions, is thus a rather quiet and solemn project, especially when compared to the loud satiric portraits in Coover’s and Pynchon’s catalogs. DeLillo does write, though, with the benefit of retrospect on the Cold War: the threat of annihilation was, with the passing of 1989–91, not gone entirely, but markedly reduced. And in fact, DeLillo ends his novel with Nick (though he is called “you,” because he stands in for millions of Americans who lived under the bomb) watching a web video that superimposes on the image of a mushroom cloud an etymological history of the book’s last word: “Peace” (1997: 826–7). The encyclopedic novel was a signal Cold War literary form, one that proposed, in catalogs and fragmentary plot points often awaiting connection or frustrating the impulse, that readers ought not to just follow another familiar narrative but deal instead with information saturation, sharpening their ability to link object to object, plot to plot, and perhaps person to person. In this last category

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of the interpersonal might lie a hope that Cold War life was not entirely determined and subsumed by impersonal forces—overwhelmingly large institutions, overwhelmingly complex and deadly technologies that made citizenship in the United States not a matter of democratic community but of many people united by weapons ready to wield global annihilation in their name. Coover, the most focused on domestic ideology, is the least hopeful that interpersonal connection can overcome the force of America’s mythic vision of itself, that grandiose formation that compelled him to author an encyclopedic narrative in the first place. Pynchon and DeLillo are somewhat more hopeful about using fiction to serve ideals of unity. “Fasten, fit closely, bind together” is one etymological root Nick finds for “peace” (DeLillo 1997: 826–7), the sense echoed in “pact” or “compact” and a primary theme of Underworld, which contains a hopeful character who thinks that fans celebrating the legendary 1951 baseball game “will carry something out of here that joins them all in a rare way, that binds them to a memory with protective power” (1997: 59) and one who muses in 1991 that it must have been Cold War conflict that “held us together, the Soviets and us. Maybe it held the world together. You could measure things” (1997: 76). Was the only measure for life in the Cold War two distant enemies supported by massive systems, with no individual moral agency guiding technology’s dictates? Or do other compacts and bindings on a smaller scale, between people at ballgames or playing pinball across the land, better capture the social and political intricacies of the age? Must these two contrasting views of Cold War connection be held in tension? These are the questions the encyclopedic novelists and their wide-ranging forms are uniquely capable of asking.

WORKS CITED Clemons, Walter (1977), “Shock Treatment.” Review of Robert Coover, The Public Burning. Newsweek (8 August): 75–6. Coover, Robert (1977), The Public Burning, New York: Viking. Dalsgaard, Inger H., Luc Herman, and Brian McHale, eds. (2011), The Cambridge Companion to Thomas Pynchon, New York: Cambridge University Press. DeLillo, Don (1985), White Noise, New York: Penguin. DeLillo, Don (1988), Libra, New York: Viking. DeLillo, Don (1997), Underworld, New York: Scribner. Frye, Northrop (1957), Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Hungerford, Amy (2008), “On the Period Formerly Known as Contemporary,” American Literary History 20(1– 2) (Spring–Summer): 410–19. LeClair, Tom (1989), The Art of Excess: Mastery in Contemporary Fiction, Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Letzler, David (2017), The Cruft of Fiction: Mega-Novels and the Science of Paying Attention, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Mendelson, Edward (1976), “Encyclopedic Narrative: From Dante to Pynchon,” MLN 91(6) (December): 1267–75. Morley, Catherine (2008), The Quest for Epic in Contemporary American Fiction: John Updike, Philip Roth, and Don DeLillo, New York: Routledge. Pynchon, Thomas (1973), Gravity’s Rainbow, rpt. 2006, New York: Penguin. Weisenburger, Steven (1995), Fables of Subversion: Satire and the American Novel, 1930–1980, Athens: University of Georgia Press. Whitfield, Stephen J. (1996), The Culture of the Cold War, 2nd ed., Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.

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FURTHER READING Coover, Robert (1977), The Public Burning, New York: Viking. Dalsgaard, Inger H., Luc Herman, and Brian McHale, eds. (2011), The Cambridge Companion to Thomas Pynchon, New York: Cambridge University Press. DeLillo, Don (1997), Underworld, New York: Scribner. Frye, Northrop (1957), Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. LeClair, Tom (1989), The Art of Excess: Mastery in Contemporary Fiction, Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Letzler, David (2017), The Cruft of Fiction: Mega-Novels and the Science of Paying Attention, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Mendelson, Edward (1976), “Encyclopedic Narrative: From Dante to Pynchon,” MLN 91(6) (December): 1267–75. Pynchon, Thomas (1973), Gravity’s Rainbow, rpt. 2006, New York: Penguin. Weisenburger, Steven (1995), Fables of Subversion: Satire and the American Novel, 1930–1980, Athens: University of Georgia Press. Weisenburger, Steven (2006), A Gravity’s Rainbow Companion: Sources and Contexts for Pynchon’s Novel, 2nd ed., Athens: University of Georgia Press.

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CHAPTER THREE

Cold War Technology and Women Poets LINDA A. KINNAHAN

In Mina Loy’s poem “Time-Bomb,” published early in the 1960s, loaded pauses are inserted spatially between each word in each line, asserting that the  present  moment is    an   explosion  (Loy 1996: 123) (Loy 1961: 200) One of the final poems to appear in print before Loy’s death, “Time-Bomb” likely was written in the month following the dropping of atomic bombs on Japan in August 1945.1 In the interim between 1945 and 1961, pervasive news reports on Atomic Age technology covered America’s extensive testing of ever-more powerful nuclear weapons (including the hydrogen bomb) and tests on Bikini Atoll islands between 1946 and 1958; Stalin’s explosion of the USSR’s first atomic bomb in 1949; the Korean War, between 1950 and 1953, a proxy conflict between world powers; the first public release, in 1952, of images depicting the atomic bomb’s impact on Japanese civilians; the communist Cuban revolution; the space race; and on and on. By 1955, William Carlos Williams, collapsing escalating Cold War momentum into one image, would write that “The bomb speaks” and “has entered our lives / to destroy us” (Williams 1991: 324). The appearance of Loy’s war poem in 1961 suggests a choice by Loy and/or her editors to introduce this war poem as up-to-the-minute poetic “news” resonant within postwar circuits of Cold War discourses on militarized power, postnuclear anxieties, and media technologies. By the mid-1950s, as Williams’s comment suggests, radio, print, and broadcast media’s increasing pervasiveness helped inject the Cold War’s politicized technology into daily lives. The poets examined in this essay, women writing across different decades of the conflict, bring the news into their work. Poems trace Cold War tensions as they circulate as information and history to register in embodied ways. Looking at Marianne Moore, Lorine Niedecker, and Audre Lorde, the essay explores how Cold War technologies, circulated or censored in news media, shaped the national

1

Elsewhere I have analyzed Loy’s Second World War poems more fully. See Kinnahan (2017).

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stories told in support of America’s Cold War, which were enacted upon and through gendered or “othered” bodies.

MARIANNE MOORE Marianne Moore’s 1959 O to Be a Dragon, a slender volume of thirty pages, heralds the end of the decade with poems contemplating ideals of freedom embedded in national narratives of origin that intensified during the Cold War.2 Several of its poems rely on media reports shaped by Cold War politics, technologies, and ideological stances.3 “Enough: Jamestown 1607–1957” and “Combat Cultural” feature contemporaneous events that stage Cold War competition in both military and cultural technologies, together linking the seemingly disparate realms of aeronautics and ballet in thinking through the meaning of American world power.4 The first poem revisits the founding story of Jamestown’s settlement, cast in relation to widely reported military displays commemorating its 350th anniversary and framed as demonstrative proof of the country’s inevitable global destiny as a bastion of freedom, while “Combat Cultural” recalls a 1958 Russian ballet performance the poet attended in New York and explores the use of the body as a technology of ideology. Like Moore’s earlier long poem “Virginia Britannia” (1936), “Enough: Jamestown 1607–1957” records a spotted history of American freedom. Both foreground the paradox that the “liberty” sought by early settlers and proclaimed in founding national documents ended up enforcing inequality on the basis of race, gender, and economic principles of ownership and profit. “Enough” frames this paradox as a 350-year process, initiated by the first settlers and reinscribed in the 1950s as a display of military might. The poem’s commentary begins by juxtaposing the grim 1607 landing of a near-starving band of settlers with the anniversary flyover of supersonic jets heralding new technological advancements, having flown from England to Jamestown in this aircraft model’s first-ever cross-Atlantic flight. The original ships that sailed to the New World—the Godspeed, the Susan Constant, and the Discovery—lend their names to the jets to become “Their namesake ships” that “traverse the sky / as jets to Jamestown” (Moore 1959: 16).5 The development of the North American Aviation F-100 Super Sabre gave the United States a supersonic aircraft fighter force from 1954 to 1971 capable of flying at the speed of sound while carrying large loads of nuclear armaments and able to fire rockets and missiles. Introducing modern military jets into this historical narrative, and thus associating the early voyage of discovery with a show of global power, the poem evokes an image of America prevalent in news reports surrounding the anniversary celebration and its Cold War uses of spectacle. An avid reader of the news, and especially the New York Times, in the 1950s, Moore directly draws upon reports of that event and other extensive spectacles of military technology marking the anniversary.

Although conventionally considered a poet uninterested in geopolitical concerns, Moore’s keen reading and inscriptions of such concerns throughout her poetry has occupied a new wave of scholarship on the poet. 3 An avid reader of the news, Moore’s reliance especially upon the New York Times for this volume is clear in her Notes, a set of citations, quotations, paraphrases, and contexts she customarily provided. 4 “In the Public Garden” joins this group, particularly in regard to references to Eisenhower from an article dealing with women’s volunteer work and his proposed international sharing of medical research and technology as a peace-keeping endeavor. 5 In a note, Moore cites New York Times articles from May 12 and 13, 1957, on this event. 2

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The May 12 Times reported on celebrations of Armed Forces Week, with a parade, arms exhibits, and other activities commemorating the Jamestown landing. With the theme of “Power for Peace,” the massive display included “the nation’s newest defensive and offensive weapons” in a parade and “exhibits of military weapons in parks and other open areas throughout the city.” Other festivities included a Super Sabre jet “aerial acrobatics” show at Coney Island, concerts by armed services bands and dancing, and a “demonstration of infantry weapons” and drills, alongside a “historical pageant of the island” (“Military Power” 1957: 13). The city’s saturation with weaponry, alongside a theatricalization of history, speaks to the layering of Cold War military buildup as part of a performed history and destiny for the country. Indeed, the language of performance enters into the Times’ descriptions of military display. Reporting on a “mammoth” presidential review “of the naval might of the Free World,” for example, the Times describes the fourteen-mile double line of vessels arriving in Hampton Roads “to celebrate the founding of the Jamestown colony” with the largest display of naval ships ever staged, to be reviewed by Eisenhower (“Naval” 1957: 3). Along with American carriers, battleships, and guided missile cruisers, the display invited ships from countries connected to America’s founding, other Western Hemisphere countries, and NATO allies, altogether avoiding “any question of invitations to Eastern European countries” and enforcing, through visual spectacle, Cold War divisions. Military and cultural distinctions merge in this performance of American might, as other distinctively “American diversions” entertained “visiting mariners” and tourists, including performances of jazz, the Grand Ole Opry, folk songs and dances, a baseball game, a “trade show called ‘U.S. Way of Life’,” and a hot dog roast. A trip to Jamestown, “where the emphasis is on evoking past history as faithfully as possible,” was folded into the review’s display of American and Free World military technology. Colonial Williamsburg is touted as part of the “historic exhibits and restored buildings” open for tours during the naval review, side by side with the “combination of mambo, missiles, and Naval Might”—a touristic encounter with technological power framed by displays of American history and culture (“Naval” 1957: 3). The poem’s conjoining of military technologies with the voyage leading to Anglo America’s founding moment initially appears to echo public rhetoric serving to frame Cold War expressions and displays of national identity. As the poem develops beyond this opening conjunction, however, a skepticism emerges about what is performed, by whom, and to what purposes in the retelling of history. Moore likely read of the staged reenactment of the colonizing party’s 1607 arrival that culminated the May 13 events at Jamestown Festival Park, along with the flyover. A naval officer playing Captain John Smith was met by Vice President Richard Nixon, whose subsequent speech followed a Cold War script of American exceptionalism. The Jamestown celebration and attendant military display, according to Nixon, serves to exemplify to the world the opportunity for all nations which pursue the goals of freedom and opportunity which James’ pioneers sought—to show the hard-pressed peoples of Europe, Asia and Africa that they, too, may realize the benefits which Americans today enjoy if they will share the faith which motivated the settlers of Jamestown. (“John Smith” 1957: 38) As news stories reported, the day ended with a religious service in old Jamestown Church, a rebuilt version of the original church survived only by its tower, which Moore calls “the feeble tower / to mark the site that did not flower.” For the poet, the tower signifies a question she imagines the colonizers asking: “Could the most ardent have been sure / that they had done what would

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endure?” (Moore 1959: 17). As though responding skeptically to Nixon’s assumption that the “faith which motivated the settlers” has been fulfilled in the present, this penultimate stanza asks what exactly was established and what endures—and finally, what is now “enough.” Staging her own reading of history, Moore’s poem recasts foundational moments in a questionable light to reflect upon the anniversary boasts of American exceptionalism and freedom. Pointedly noting the colony’s failed experiment with “communism”—understood at the time as an even distribution of goods—and the subsequent allotment of individual responsibility for a parcel of land, the poem then shifts into a more skeptical mode (Moore 1957: 16). Individualism leads to nefarious means for gaining land and power, initiating a paradoxical pattern of gaining liberty by denying it to others. The poem’s pointed references to slavery, Native American genocide, and the exchange of women puncture more popular narratives of American liberty. The colony’s first leader, Captain Dale, “became a kidnapper” and a “master,” kidnapping Pocahontas in 1613 (“even though his victim had let her victim go—/ / Captain John Smith”) to leverage gains from her father Powhatan. While held hostage, Pocahontas undergoes “teaching,” labeled an “insidious recourse” that leads to her Anglicized and religious conversion and her 1614 marriage to John Rolfe, a tobacco planter (Moore 1959: 16). For Pocahontas, the poem notes, the marriage is a surrender of rank and power: as a result of the allegiance, “she—in rank above / / what she became—renounced her name” (Moore 1959: 16). Economically, but also symbolically in the marriage, the “Deliverance” of Jamestown is attributed to tobacco, “that now controversial weed.” In this retelling of history, “Marriage, tobacco, and slavery, / initiated liberty” precisely through economies of bodily exchange (Moore 1959: 17). The final couplet’s enjambment suggestively inserts a conditional: “It was enough; it is enough / if present faith mend partial proof.” Partial proof of what, exactly? Of liberty, of “freedom and opportunity,” and if so, how does the poem understand these words among the discourses and Cold War displays of the time, or the version of history the poem chooses to tell? Echoing its enigmatic title, the poem’s end lines query whether “enough” signifies fulfillment or, instead, utters an evocation to stop.6 To say “enough” not only recognizes the ideological blinders attending notions of American liberty but also questions justifications for the growing industrial–military complex later warned by Eisenhower in his farewell speech of 1961. The military’s display of might was not the only form of Cold War performance intriguing Moore. She was no stranger to the Cold War’s cultural battles and the era’s use of art for political means. “Combat Cultural,” the volume’s penultimate poem, recounts Moore’s attendance at the 1958 New York premiere performance by Moscow’s Moiseyev Dance Company.7 The dominance of Russian ballet, and its popularity in America, spurred one of many competitions in the arts as “alternatives” to US and USSR “military rivalry by using culture as a weapon of ‘soft-power’,” resulting in a “thriving competition … between the superpowers” (Herrala 2013: 35). The performance Moore attended came “three months after the signing of the nations’ first bilateral cultural exchange agreement,” and Moore herself served as a guest cultural ambassador at a luncheon honoring the company (Kodat 2014: 1).

Moore attributes these words to Dr. Charles Peabody, Yale chaplain in 1896, paraphrased “past gains are not gains unless we in the present complete them” (Moore 1959: 36). 7 “Combat Cultural” first appeared in The New Yorker, June 6, 1959, and was revised before its publication in O to Be a Dragon. 6

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“Combat Cultural” focuses upon one dance in particular, the athletic “Two Boys in a Fight.” The company promoted folk dance traditions and styles—what Moore calls “the quadrille of Old Russia”—and this dance featured one person using a rug to create the illusion of twins struggling. The poem’s midline adjustment of national terminology suggests the contemporary world stage: “Let me see … / Old Russia, did I say? Cold Russia / this time” (Moore 1959: 28, ellipses included).8 Detailing the physicality on the stage (The “trip-and-slug of wrestlers in a rug” “with a jab, a kick, pinned to the wall”), the poem ends with an epiphany of the staged illusion, for the “battlers, dressed identically” are “just one person” while “seeming twins.” The illusion “point[s]‌a moral” toward a prudent wisdom (the meaning of sagesse, the poem’s end word) that “we must cement the parts of any / objective symbolic of sagesse” (Moore 1959: 29). The line calls for unifying or healing fractured or fracturing representations of wisdom and to battle, like the dancer’s body, against illusion. The body, pressed into service as an ideological technology of conflict, also holds the promise of breaking the illusion, suggesting a role for art that diverges from the paradigm of the cultural fronts as a site of struggle between global powers. The poem’s appeal to the body’s technologies nonetheless creates a haunting sense of bodies shaped by illusion and ideology, the body’s performance mitigated by politics in both combat and culture. The poem’s title and narrative suggest transfiguring the combat soldier into cultural dancer, not as a matter of international competition but as a contemplation of art’s capacity to disrupt the ideological dynamics enforcing national identity and aimed at the body of the citizen within Cold War conditions. Targeting nonconformity as deviance, the decade’s wide range of homophobic, sexist, racist, and Red Scare discourses and legal definitions of sexuality sought to construct the nonconforming body as a threat (Davidson 2004: 160–2). It is tempting to read Moore’s poem as a comment on the illusions shaping the imagined body of normalcy, of American citizenry, and a queering of the Cold War body. The news-laden poems of O to Be a Dragon contemplate the spectacularized and performed dimensions of Cold War rhetoric by the late 1950s, a period of intensified demands for technological buildup. While rooted in a claimed legacy of freedom and equality, the country’s justification for Cold War power coincided with suppressions and enforced conformities of the 1950s, from the era’s McCarthyism to racial injustice to women’s diminishment—all of which are beginning to crack as Moore composes her poems. The bodies excluded from the sanctioned displays of American character, or recast (like Pocahontas or slaves raising tobacco) to promote a legacy of freedom that elides contrary histories and identities, emerge in these poems as “news” of another sort, engaging Moore’s characteristically intertextual attention to patterns and omissions to consider not what but how we are told stories of our national identity, and by and for whom these stories are performed.

LORINE NIEDECKER The body as a technology, hinted in Moore’s “Combat Cultural,” finds fuller expression in poems by Lorine Niedecker in the 1950s and 1960s. As reports on advancing technologies of destruction and their impact on human bodies intensify in these decades, Niedecker’s concerns intertwine themes of environmental destruction and economic injustice—together remapping the local Wisconsin Handwritten notes on early poem drafts include the lines “People to People / Person to Person,” referencing a “program of ‘citizen diplomacy’ that had been launched with fanfare just two years before the Moiseyev season” (Kodat 2014: 6). 8

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environment of Black Hawk Island, where the poet lived—with Cold War geographies. Often seen as part of the Objectivist school, only recently has Niedecker’s work been read as responding to geopolitics or national politics. Critics now see her corpus as “haunted by all the news” during years when “radios and newspapers carried reports of deaths, dismemberment, the horror of the atom bomb, and the constant ghost-like smash-us-all-to-smithereens tensions of the Cold War” (Sikelianos 2008: 32–3). As the Cold War gets underway, poems written in the decade following the World War continue to evoke it, alternating between some degree of relief with questions about the possibility of peace in the face of wartime atrocities and the emerging bipolar world order. America is not exempt from this questioning. Dated just after the war ended, “New! Reason explodes” connects the atomic bomb ending the Pacific war with the German holocaust: “Atomic split / shows one element / Jew” (Niedecker 2002: 125). The monstrous killing of life, whether by nuclear power or gas chambers, requires a dehumanizing capacity toward others that ultimately serves as a form of self-destruction—of not only physical humans but also a sense of humanity. Photojournalism came to dominate news media during the Second World War due to speeded-up technologies of wire distribution and printing, and Niedecker’s 1951 poem “Look close” inspects the widely circulated photograph of a Russian and American soldier meeting in the final days of the war (April 1945). In the photograph, the soldiers, Lieutenant Alexander Sylvashko and 2nd Lieutenant William Robertson, embrace and shake hands, a moment of staged camaraderie used to encourage Stalin’s continued cooperation with the allies.9 The rapid distribution of the image helped alert the world to the imminence of Germany’s defeat. Composed in the context of the Korean War, Niedecker’s poem imagines what is outside the photograph’s framing of international cooperation, the “air … loaded / and after tea vodka—” as the reported utterance takes place: “To the friendship of our countries.” “Look close” ironically notes that the sentiment is “guilty of reason,” evidence of which seems to have dissipated between the countries in the brief span of time as Cold War tensions, rhetoric, and military actions dominated the world scene (Niedecker 2002: 130). A pair of poems referencing “rays” suggests the feared consequence of those tensions, particularly as the Korean War developed and, “after 1948 … the implications of radioactivity became known to a wide public” following wide publicity about nuclear tests at Bikini Atoll (Brunner 2001: xiii). Disturbing magazine coverage of the dangers of radioactivity, suggesting a “silent and invisible enemy that struck without warning and did irreparable damage,” frightened the public (Brunner 2001: 196). Imagery of “rays” found in “Lugubre for a child” (c.1950) and “Could You Be Right” (c.1951) corresponds with the postbomb awareness of nuclear annihilation hanging over the country’s populace and motivating its weapons buildup. In 1949, the Soviet Union exploded its first atomic bomb, and the Soviet involvement in the Korean conflict intensified both the public’s fear and American commitment to an arms race. “Could You Be Right?” asks “Will man obsolesce / when he sends the rays against himself?” In “Lugubre for a child,” “life pops / from a music box / shaped like a gun” and a hummingbird becomes a “bomber in feathers” with “blurred propellers” (Niedecker 2002: 128). Envisioning the nuclear era, the poem softens the language in accord with the childhood vision regulating its imagery but nonetheless specifies a time when “man sprays / rays” on vulnerable creatures or “things.” Addressing the child as a “fiddler” who will “carry / a counter that sings” at the moment of “rays,” the poem’s conclusion is unclear or ambivalent The photograph can be accessed through the National Archives: https://www.archi​ves.gov/his​tori​cal-docs/tod​ays-doc/ index.html?dod-date=425 (accessed January18, 2022). 9

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about whether that “counter” is the technology switching on the “rays” or whether it is the acts of humanity (as in the arts) that will “counter” the technological teleology of the arms race (Niedecker 2002: 129). In other poems, technologies of Cold War power play out on the female body. In “The elegant office girl,” the young woman must organize her body to conform to expectations of the attractive female body (high breasted, well dressed), refiguring the body as weaponry constructed by and available to the corporate hierarchy. She is “power-rigged” and “carries her nylon hard-pointed / breast uplift / like parachutes / half-pulled.” Likened to a weapon of war, her deployment is rewarded by consumer power but restrained to the domestic. She can buy “new flowered rugs” to replace outworn household items and sustain a domestic space where she can “collapse” at day’s end, the body released from its corporate mold into the traditional space of femininity (Niedecker 2002: 136). That space, implicating the domestic and the feminine in systems of modern consumption, situates the figure of the consuming woman as a component of Cold War gender norms. Marriage, in another poem beginning “So you’re married, young man,” envisions a man’s wedded union “to a woman’s rich fads—/ woman and those ‘buy! buy!’ / technicolor ads.” This feminized consumer looms, like the office girl, as a body controlled by a network of consumer technologies, including the “washers and dryers” and “deep-well cookers” she needs for modern efficiency and the “bodice uplift” that will constitute a “power shift” (Niedecker 2002: 165). In yet another poem on marriage, the speaker of “I rose from marsh mud” witnesses the wedding of the “little white slave-girl” who weds “in the rich / rich silence of the church,” adorned with “diamond fronds” and “United for life to serve / silver. Possessed.” The unnamed speaker, allied with the natural environment of mud, “algae, equisetum, willows” and “birds and frogs,” contrasts the union of this marriage formed within an ethos of conspicuous consumption, the attainment and display of monetary possessions (Niedecker 2002: 170). Natural surroundings, in Niedecker’s poems, constitute not escapes from the world’s pressures but ways to interpret them. In a series of thirteen haiku-like poems, untitled and dated in January 1958, quick renderings glimpse the countryside through the seasons. Oddly decontextualized interruptions, like a radio broadcast disrupting a day’s calm, pop up among these poems to hint at danger, economic distress, and a Cold War environment seeping into the seasonal tour. An unnamed speaker proclaims in the first two lines of one poem, “I fear this war / will be long and painful,” while the five-line poem’s dispersal of its final three lines across the page and an incomplete syntax convey an uncertainty over Cold War parameters and boundaries—what is this “war,” exactly, and who wages it, and who is the enemy— and who pursue it          (Niedecker 2002: 185) Another poem warns of a general state of anxiety, chiming with the uncertainty of “who” pursues the “war” that encourages public paranoia of so-called spies among us: “No matter where you are / you are alone / and in danger” (Niedecker 2002: 185). Even the “Beautiful girl,” another poem opines, is only seeming to be innocent as she “pushes food onto her fork / with her fingers” that she can also use to “throw the switches / of deadly rockets” (Niedecker 2002: 185). After 1960, her poems depict this anxiety increasingly infiltrating everyday life. A 1964 poem refers to the “radio talk this morning” coming into the kitchen, “of obliterating / the world”

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(Niedecker 2002: 428). The poem’s attention is suspended between the radio broadcast and “fruit flies” the speaker pointedly notices, as they “rise / from the rind / of the recommended / / melon” (Niedecker 2002: 429). The stanzaic symmetry between the radio transmission and the remains of breakfast fruit underscores both the severance and the conjoining of domestic, private space with public politics—or, more accurately, it points toward the illusion of boundaries between the two realms. Built on gendered assumptions of masculine space and feminine space, the longstanding elision of the personal from the political proves untenable in Cold War poems Niedecker writes after 1965, as the war in Vietnam amps up, protests charge the country, and the antinuclear movement joins with the budding women’s movement to promote change. In other poems, an escape from media technology suggests a temporary reprieve from the weight of fears and desires that such technology helps manufacture. “Alone” finds relief in a “still state” moment with “no (TV) guns / no more coats than one / no hair lightner” (Niedecker 2002: 229). The poem “TV” heralds the technology’s capacity to teach about “the compound eye / of the insect” but remains skeptical of the medium’s growing authority in communicating expertise, citing the distanced and disembodied “forehead of the one / who speaks” (Niedecker 2002: 239). News reports further the combined sense of immediacy and distance that the relatively new broadcast media convey, bringing political figures into the living room while leaving vacant their true assessment of the moment’s topic, as when the “secretary of defence / knew precisely what / the undersecretary of state / was talking about” but the poem withholds any information as though mimicking a veiled governmental report to the public (Niedecker 2002: 243). In poems from 1965 through 1967, images of shelters and enclosures crop up amidst disembodied presences explaining the world from afar through radios and TVs. A ghostly sense of threat and the need to protect from threat, for example, attenuates “I married / in the world’s black night,” in which the speaker describes a fragmented and almost surreal sense of bodily survival: “I hid with him / from the long range guns,” lying with “leg / in the cupboard, head / in closet.” The claustrophobia is both physical and psychic, and the speaker muses upon the unrealized desire to “live unburied. / I thought—.” Ending the poem, the incomplete “thought” and dash stress a lack of closure to this existence, reversing the surety of the “unburied” state to suggest a burial by paranoia and fear in the home, within range of “guns” and “long-range missiles” appearing at any time (Niedecker 2002: 228). “Shelter,” published in Origin in 1968, echoes this fearful state, suggesting that Cold War anxiety over the bomb produces a psychological burrowing, the speaking subject like the shelter becoming “Holed damp / cellar-black” in striving to get “beyond / the main atrocities.” While seeking safety from bomb-like conflagration or incineration, “Not burned we sweat,” as the speaker imagines sinking into something worse than death, to a “water” that even “Death … disowns” (Niedecker 2002: 246–7). The suggestion of land turned to use as bomb shelters, both literally and as a metaphor for psychic pain, resonates with an environmental consciousness throughout Niedecker’s poetry, closely attentive to geographic and natural processes and to the disruptions of those processes by human hand. “Shelter” embeds a hint of this consciousness, claiming that in the shelter “my sense of property’s / adrift” (Niedecker 2002: 246). A parenthetical pair of lines intriguingly separates the predicate “Death” from its verb “disowns” in the final lines: We sink to water Death (your hand!—

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this was land) disowns       (Niedecker 2002: 247) The address to a “you,” tucked within parentheses, remains unspecified but reads as a “you” who has had a hand in turning land from a source of connection into fearful self-protection, speaking to a more collective experience of loss, anxiety, and pressure (like the damp hole) produced by international balancing acts of arms production. During the early 1960s, heightened moments of national psychic anxiety came to a head following Castro’s rise to power in Cuba in 1959 and the establishment of a communist government with Soviet ties so close to the American mainland. John Kennedy’s presidency saw the end of diplomatic relations with Cuba and focused the nation’s attention on the regime through two events, the Bay of Pigs attack in 1961 and the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962. Although the composition of a poem responding to the former incident is undated, its publication in the same 1967 issue of Origin as “Shelter” presents a pair of poems situated as though looking back at a decade of increased military buildup and the assassination of the president overseeing not only Cuban relations but also bringing the country into a “hot war” fought for Cold War purposes, Vietnam. “J.F. Kennedy after the Bay of Pigs” translates a military event into a natural metaphor. The poem begins with an image of a “black-marked tulip” that withstands a storm, “not snapped” and able “To stand up.” A quoted phrase immediately follows this opening three-line image: “ ‘I’ve been duped by the experts’,” as though voiced by Kennedy (while walking “the South Lawn”) in the face of the foreign policy embarrassment of the Bay of Pigs, in which troops of CIA-trained Cuban exiles attacked Castro’s troops, only to be outnumbered and beaten down within a mere day or two (Niedecker 2002: 246). The potential violence of the tulip’s stem snapping locates the potential violence of annihilation within a network of power that the presence of the quoted phrase throws into doubt, characterizing a network of powerful experts and leaders duping one another. The “snap” is intensified by the Cuban Missile Crisis, when Kennedy’s ability to “stand up” to Khrushchev to remove missiles from Cuba somewhat redeems the earlier failure but nonetheless intensifies the nearness of a potential “snap.” Who can be relied upon to “stand up” in a network of duplicity within and among national leaders? The poem holds this question in abeyance, while by the poem’s publication, the threat of the “snap” would grimly be read through the president’s violent death. While specifically referencing the 1961 Bay of Pigs, the poem nonetheless accumulates meaning through the 1960s as a president is assassinated, missile counts swell, the Berlin wall is built, and an ongoing Cold War policy to resist the spread of communism takes America into the battlefields of Vietnam. By 1968, Niedecker completed work on her long sequence “Wintergreen Ridge,” a poetic engagement with natural history and the human impact upon it. Through close-up inspections of plants and rocks—what critics customarily refer to as her attention to the particulars—the poem inspects the “evolution of [natural] matter” alongside man-made “road signs” and other marks of human intervention (Niedecker 2002: 247). Based on a visit to The Ridges Sanctuary, a nature preserve on Wisconsin’s northeastern coast, the poem exhibits a “critical regionalism” that Michael Davidson describes as “a use of locale to comment on global forces” (Davidson 2008: 14). Climbing the ridges, the poem’s “we” are “gawks / lusting / after wild orchids” but continually aware of human capacity to both save and destroy nature with its technologies. The speaker’s awareness of a complicity with other human interventions into nature, including her own climb and delight at finding guide signs

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along the way, extends into an homage to the historic women of 1936 who protested the destruction of the ridges’ area and led to the establishment of a nature preserve. Reversing the associations of female bodies and military technologies discussed in earlier poems, “Wintergreen Ridge” locates in these bodies a capacity to save “Evolution’s wild ones.” They are themselves likened to the landscape, “Women / of good wild stock” who place their bodies in the way of the destruction. They “stood stolid / before machines / They stopped bulldozers” (Niedecker 2002: 249). Noting an “instability created by enjambment and open punctuation” in the poem’s steppeddown tercet form, staggering lines to the right as they descend in each stanza, Davidson argues that the poem’s form contributes to “a larger thematics of Cold War disruptions” and the landscape’s vulnerability in “a world bent on annihilation” (Davidson 2008: 16). A “series of negatives” at the poem’s center conveys the “omnipresence of nuclear catastrophe” (Davidson 2008: 16), relating the unrest of American countercultures to the country’s technological advances linking the space race and weaponry development: “I see no space-rocket / Launched here” amidst ancient formations of lichen and rock that “may survive / the grand blow-up // the bomb” (Niedecker 2002: 252–3). Leaving the Ridges and driving back toward the city, the speaker notes the change in landscape, the “factory-long body” and the “smokestack— // steeple,” and hears the radio announce “More news: the war // which ‘cannot be stopped’,” the quoted phrases aping canned, manufactured language that politically and militarily justified a war much of the country protested (Niedecker 2002: 255–6). The looming loss of human life, the poem’s conclusion surmises, will be met with indifference by a wild nature that humans have not sufficiently mourned in causing its diminishment. Only pigeons mourn the loss of people no wild bird does      (Niedecker 2002: 257) The Cold War renders nature unnatural in these late poems. At the height of the Vietnam war, Niedecker’s late poem War displaces even the wild birds with “trees full of snipers” and a “tommy gun” in “each pearl-parachute” (273–4). The world’s forests fill with “Men on the hunt” in a “secret zone,” a scene of paranoia, concealment, and predatory technology. In this scene of proxy conflicts, global superpowers enact their conflict upon human bodies and environments considered disposable. Spanning the Second World War and Vietnam, Niedecker’s poems confront an environment of geopolitical and existential uncertainty, registering the permeation of anxiety attending the Cold War’s advance. Enhanced by the seeming omnipresence of news playing in the background, this anxiety reaches into daily life, transforming the realm of the ordinary into a terrain pitting bodies and natural environments against weapons and industry. Critiquing the Cold War’s “hot wars” directly, Niedecker joins a larger swell of protest marking the 1960s and 1970s that connects local systems of oppressive power—economic, racial, gendered, environmental—with global displays of Cold War logic and aggression.

AUDRE LORDE By the early 1980s, Audre Lorde’s scathing critique of Cold War politics and US involvement in “hot wars” (or conflicts arising in relation to the Cold War around the globe) relentlessly connected

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American injustices of race, class, gender, and sexuality with imperialist militarization and ruthless capitalism. The year 1981’s “Uses of Anger” foregrounds her position as a Black and queer feminist, insisting, It is not the anger of Black women which is dripping down over this globe like a diseased liquid. It is not my anger that launches rockets, spends over sixty thousand dollars a second on missiles and other agents of war and death, slaughters children in cities, stockpiles nerve gas and chemical bombs, sodomizes our daughters and our earth. It is not the anger of Black women which corrodes into blind, dehumanizing power, bent upon the annihilation of us all unless we meet it with what we have, our power to examine and to redefine the terms upon which we will love and work. (Lorde 2020: 64–5) In developing overwhelming technologies of war and using them against nonwhite Third World countries, America’s Cold War, to Lorde, also encompasses military, economic, and psychological aggression on the home front. In this, her critiques chime with those of other Vietnam-era poets such as Denise Levertov, Grade Paley, and Muriel Rukeyser. For Lorde, misogyny, racism, and classism fuel America’s Cold War policies and actions, and feminist coalitions of women, gathering across differences, offer potent resistance. Through this perspective, Lorde brings a diasporic awareness that stresses ancestral connections and attends to postcolonial structures of power manipulated by Cold War conflict (Figure 2). Lorde’s condemnation of Reagan-era aggression finds deep roots in earlier writings and activism cognizant of intersecting systems of injustice. Her 1974 volume New York Head Shop and Museum

FIGURE 2:  Portrait of Audre Lorde by Robert Giard, May 1987

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depicts New York City as diseased by capitalist consumerism and advertising technologies coercing a conformity, especially to whiteness, that kills. The values of the American dream pit a “them” against an “us,” a bifurcation along class lines she likens to military technologies that are building toward a “homemade bomb” that will destroy the vulnerable in the city and, by extension, the country (Lorde 2020: 236). Other poems from the 1970s report on migrations due to military conflicts and arms buildups (as in “Diaspora”), while also positing a resistance in coalitions of women. “Florida” characterizes Cold War space technology as a masculine competition for colonizing knowledge, encouraging alternative forms of knowledge gained through strengthening connections between women. In “Political Relations,” Lorde’s queer female speaker takes part in a bilateral meeting with Russian women that defies ideas of competition with its relational dynamics of care and respect for bodily integrity and pleasure. During the 1980s, Lorde’s writing responded with greater global urgency in the context of Reagan’s foreign relations and an intensification of her own diasporic viewpoint. The daughter of a Grenadian immigrant, Lorde visited the island in 1979, and then again in the months following the US invasion of the island in October 1983. Subsequently, Lorde’s writing, as in the poem “Equal Opportunity” and essays such as “Grenada Revisited: An Interim Report,” forcefully challenges America’s rationales for the invasion. Like other critics of the military action, Lorde accused Reagan and the military of plotting the invasion to erase the so-called “Vietnam Syndrome” shaping external and internal perceptions of America as weakened after its defeat in Vietnam. For Lorde, the choice of a small nation of Black Grenadians carried a decidedly racial component shared with other Cold War “hot wars” in Korea and Vietnam: “How better to wipe out the bitter memories of Vietnam defeats by Yellow people than with a restoration of power in the eyes of the American public—the image of American Marines splashing through a little Black blood?” (Lorde 1984: 23–4). The year 1986’s “Equal Opportunity” frames the invasion through a diasporic and feminist awareness and stresses how local and domestic spaces become battlegrounds traversed by global tensions and competitions. Moreover, positioning women in relation to this conflict, Lorde’s poem variably posits women’s bodies as battlegrounds of ideological sexism critical to Cold War successes. Overcoming and appropriating women’s bodies figures in the poem as a key technology of victory. Named “Operation Urgent Fury,” the Grenada invasion took place during the service of the first woman deputy secretary of defense, Mary Lou Sheils, and Lorde’s poem considers how the military appropriation of a token woman, with her complicity, serves to conceal sexism’s imbricated relation with the invasion’s Cold War tactics and consequences for a less powerful people. The poem begins and ends with Sheils. The first lines list her official title, noting also that she is a “home girl,” seeming at first to signify a connection to other women that the poem completely undoes. The poem goes on to note that her military uniform’s “moss-green military tailoring sets off her color / beautifully,” adopting a tone initially not unlike a chatty and sexist New York Times profile of Sheils as the first woman to serve in this high position, presenting her as a comforting but take-charge organizer taking care of the men (“Making Sure,” 1983: B10). In the poem, Sheils is speaking on the news or in an interview. She calls attention to her uniform’s importance in conveying her authority: “ ‘When I stand up to speak in uniform / you can believe everyone takes notice!’ ” The poem’s attention to the body in uniform transitions into images of Cold War–era technologies of death that crisscross it: “Superimposed skull-like across her trim square shoulders / dioxin-smear / the stench of napalm upon growing cabbage.” Environmental and war toxins morph Sheils’ body, with napalm a clear callback to Vietnam, accompanied by images of aircraft particular to the Cold War: “the chug and

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thud of Corsairs in the foreground / advance like a blush across her cheeks” (Lorde 2020: 324). The Corsair, a subsonic light attack craft used in the invasion of Grenada (and in Lebanon, as the poem later notes), was developed in the early 1960s to carry a heavier bombload, used particularly against small nations with difficult terrains. Emerging from the landscape of war projected onto Sheils’ body, another body appears as “Imelda young Black in a tattered headcloth” stands in her doorway as a “M-16 bayonet gleams” and is “slashing away” at her rural Grenadian home (Lorde 2020: 324, spaces included). The soldiers, like Sheils, are adorned in “moss-green” uniforms as they invade the domestic space looking for the Cubans the Reagan administration falsely claimed had infiltrated the island and leave a trail of “trampled” fruits and vegetables, “shattered” homes, and body parts buried, burned, or just missing. With a child by her side, Imelda thinks of “bodies strewn along Telescope Beach” and “charred bits of familiar cloth,” realizing that the soldier with his “M-16 rifle held ready / while searching her cooking shed” must be persuaded that there are “ ‘no guns, man, no guns here, we glad you come’ ” (Lorde 2020: 326). The Grenadian mother’s words to the soldier, in which she must placate his “nervous” suspicion, linger as the poem returns to Sheils. As the “american deputy assistant secretary of defense / for equal opportunity and safety,” she “pauses in her speech” for emphasis, and then says “ ‘as you can see the Department has / a very good record / of equal opportunity for our women’.” Her complicity, counterpoised with the woman suffering invasion in a power dynamic devoid of equality or opportunity, grants her—and her tokenized, uniformed-sheathed body—safety, reached by swimming “through a lake of her own blood” (Lorde 2020: 326). Like her poem, Lorde’s “Grenada Revisited” challenges official versions of the invasion. As a journalistic account, employing research, interviews, and field observations, the essay claims to redress media censorship and a subsequent manipulation of the news purporting Grenadian people’s gratefulness for American intervention. She argues that “for the first time in an American war, the American press was kept out until the stage could be set,” a “censorship” that “deflected attention from the invasion itself ” while casting its narratives through military spokespeople. Criticizing the use of sanitized and neutralized language familiar to Vietnam-era official reports on the war, Lorde takes aim at military doublespeak: Mission accomplished with “surgical precision” meant attempting to conceal the bombing and destruction of civilian homes, the destruction of a hospital and a radio station and police headquarters; attempting to conceal the American heavy transports left mangled. (Lorde 1984: 27) In “Equal Opportunity,” exposing the “body” of governmental doublespeak, through the body of the deputy assistant secretary of defense, Lorde’s critique of the Grenada invasion deftly peels back layers of racial, gendered, economic, and national politics central to technologies of power in the final decade of the Cold War. As such, her poem helps pull forward her predecessors’ attention to the body as site and source of “news” in the era’s overwhelming encounters with technology. Audre Lorde’s systemic view of white, male power sustained by Cold War technologies and her determinedly global, diasporic outlook is nourished by deep involvement in Black feminist and queer perspectives that, by the 1980s, roiled the country’s complacency. A subtler form of attention that Marianne Moore pays to nonmale and nonwhite bodies pervades her poems from the 1910s forward, and her late work operates at the cultural hinge linking but distinguishing the conformist

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pressures of the 1950s and the explosive reactions of the 1960s. Niedecker’s positioning of women’s bodies and environmental vulnerability links her feminist sensibility with both Lorde and Moore, a sensibility trained on the local and the personal to promote a global, historical consciousness. For all three poets, Cold War rhetoric and politics place pressure upon bodies, often cast as deviant or other, to be shaped, displayed, and narrated to serve as ideological technologies in direct relation to a range of technology fueling global conflict and power competition. Responding to different circumstances at different points of time in the Cold War’s development, Moore, Niedecker, and Lorde absorb and respond to the news of their moments and the histories told to serve the moment. Indeed, their responses challenge the role of knowledge technologies (media, history, public exhibits, etc.) that permeate daily, local, and global life while adopting Cold War lexicons and values. Poetry offers its own technology of language and knowledge, interrogating and revising normalized scripts to tell the news anew across Cold War generations of women poets.

WORKS CITED Brunner, E. (2001), Cold War Poetry, Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Cocola, J. (2014), “Lorine Niedecker ‘After the Bay of Pigs’,” College Literature: A Journal of Critical Literary Studies 41(2): 76–96. Davidson, M. (2004), Guys Like Us: Citing Masculinity in Cold War Poetics, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Davidson, M. (2008), “Life by Water: Lorine Niedecker and Critical Regionalism,” in E. Willis (ed.), Radical Vernacular: Lorine Niedecker and the Poetics of Place, 3–20, Iowa City: University of Iowa. Herrala, M. (2013), “Fighting for the Fiddler: The Competition for Securing David Oistrakh’s First American Concert Tour in 1955,” VJHS 20: 35–60. https://www.vjhs.ro/tag/sol-hurok/. Higashida, C. (2011), Black Internationalist Feminism: Women Writers of the Black Left, 1945–1995, Urbana: University of Illinois Press. “Jets to Fete Jamestown Landing with Ocean Hop” (1957), New York Times (May 13): 11. “John Smith Lands at Virginia Again” (1957), New York Times (May 14): 38. Kinnahan, L. (2017), Mina Loy, Photography, and Contemporary Women Poets, New York: Routledge. Kodat, C. (2014), Don’t Act, Just Dance: The Metapolitics of Cold War Culture, Rutgers, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Lorde, A. (1984), “Grenada Revisited: An Interim Report,” Black Scholar 15(1): 21–9, https://www.jstor.org/sta​ ble/41067​070. Lorde, A. (2020), The Selected Works of Audre Lorde, ed. Roxanne Gay, New York: Norton. Loy, M. (1961), “Time-Bomb,” Between Worlds: A Journal of International Creativity 1(2): 200. Loy, M. (1996), The Lost Lunar Baedeker, ed. R. Conover, New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. Loy, M. (2011), “Tuning in on the Atom Bomb,” in S. Crangle (ed.), Stories and Essays of Mina Loy, 286–99, London: Dalkey Archive Press. “Making Sure ‘There Are No Snafus’” (1983), New York Times (December 21): B10. “Military Power to Go on Display” (1957), New York Times (May 12): 13. Moore, M. (1959), O to Be a Dragon, New York: Viking. “Naval Review to Bring 125 Ships to Norfolk” (1957), New York Times (May 12): 3. Niedecker, L. (2002), Lorine Niedecker Collected Works, ed. Jenny Penberthy, Berkeley: University of California Press.

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Sikelianos, E. (2008), “Life Pops from a Music Box Shaped Like a Gun: Dismemberments and Mendings in Niedecker’s Figures,” in E. Willis (ed.), Radical Vernacular: Lorine Niedecker and the Poetics of Place, 31–40, Iowa City: University of Iowa. “Three U.S. One-Engine Jets Fly London to Los Angeles Nonstop” (1957), New York Times (May 14): 1, 38. Williams, W. C. (1991), The Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams: 1939–1962, vol. 2, ed. Christopher MacGowan, New York: New Directions.

FURTHER READING Brunner, E. (2001), Cold War Poetry, Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Cocola, J. (2014), “Lorine Niedecker ‘After the Bay of Pigs,’” College Literature: A Journal of Critical Literary Studies 41(2): 76–96. Davidson, M. (2004), Guys Like Us: Citing Masculinity in Cold War Poetics, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Kennedy-Epstein, R. (2017), “The Spirit of Revolt: Women Writers, Archives, and the Cold War,” Modernism/ Modernity Print Plus 2.2: n.p. https://mod​erni​smmo​dern​ity.org/for​ums/posts/spi​rit-rev​olt-women-writ​ersarchi​ves-and-cold-war. Kodat, C. (2014), Don’t Act, Just Dance: The Metapolitics of Cold War Culture, Rutgers, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Nichols, K. (2014), “The Cold War Gothic Poetry of Sylvia Plath,” in C. Crow (ed.), A Companion to American Gothic, Oxford: Wiley Blackwell. Peel, R. (2002), Writing Back: Sylvia Plath and Cold War Politics, Cranbury, NJ: Associated University Presses. Piette, A. (2010), “Activist Poetics in the Cold War: Grace Paley, Denise Levertov,” PN Review 192(36.4): 59–84. Roman, C. (2001), Elizabeth Bishop’s World War II—Cold War View, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Sikelianos, E. (2008), “Life Pops from a Music Box Shaped Like a Gun: Dismemberments and Mendings in Niedecker’s Figures,” in E. Willis (ed.), Radical Vernacular: Lorine Niedecker and the Poetics of Place, 31–40, Iowa City: University of Iowa.

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CHAPTER FOUR

The American Long Poem Evolves, 1945–90: Cold War, Hot War, (No War), Pure War EDWARD BRUNNER

After a detailed summary of the era’s many positives, the closing pages of historian John Lewis Gaddis’s (2005) history of the Cold War briefly turns toward some drawbacks: “The running of risks with everyone’s future; the resources expanded for useless armaments; the environmental and health consequences of massive military-industrial complexes; the repression that blighted the lives of entire generations; [and] the loss of life that all too often accompanied it” (2005: 266). That list reads like a catalog of traits examined by poets writing in the mode of the extended sequence in the same years. To the many bystanders who lived through the era, the Cold War was an emotional experience, and it needed to be confronted, described, and worked through. And since the Cold War “to a significant degree … was a stealth conflict, fought by proxies and money,” as Kenneth O’Brien explains, “the road leading from the end of World War II to the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 would be twisted, long, and very expensive” (2006: 245). Those twists would be measured by poets in extended sequences bringing fresh insights to the Cold War, because they—perhaps unlike Gaddis—considered “expense” in local, human costs. The forerunners of these post-1945 sequences were among the most prestigious works of their time: unlike epics of earlier centuries that set out to solidify a culture around heroic actions of leaders, these “modernist epics” were investigations that confronted the conflicts that troubled modern life. These foundational texts of modernism emerged in the years following the First World War: T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922), Ezra Pound’s A Draft of XXX Cantos (1930), and Hart Crane’s The Bridge (1930)—each characterized by their formal innovations, anticommercial bias, and ambivalent resolutions. Eliot recognized the degrading effect of a terrible war that had reduced its survivors to the status of refugees, and he worked at understanding the resilience needed by those, including himself, grappling with loss on a massive scale. Pound’s scholarly approach to empirebuilding drew on personal, historic, and legendary sources to launch a global translation project bent on recovering bedrock values from past civilizations, now distilled into dazzling phrases, to

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expose the limits of Anglo-Saxon monopolistic economics. Crane used New York City as a lens for admiring inventions that extended the human capacity for rapid movement, whether by canoe, frigate, clipper, streamliner, subway, or airplane, and discovered in the process that speed and mobility, while opening new horizons, left its users isolated, reducing them to helpless observers rather than vital participants. Generations of poets recognized these and other modernist epics not as texts to be followed (for they could never be reduced to blueprints) but as high-end operations that challenged others to come to terms with their own epoch. Variants on them emerged in the Depression years of the 1930s (notably Muriel Rukeyser’s The Book of the Dead in 1938) as well as in the late 1940s and early 1950s, with several sketching a postwar sensibility: an acceptance of a global overview in Melvin B. Tolson’s Libretto for the Republic of Liberia (1951), an appreciation of commercial power in Charles Olson’s initial set of Maximus Poems (1953), and a recognition of the trauma that violent actions leave behind in Hyam Plutzik’s Horatio (1961). As important as these approaches were in the forming a Cold War sensibility, it was not until the late 1950s that a cluster of sequences emerged that were related by their readiness to address the Cold War as an affliction: • the expansion (rather than contraction) of militarism after the Second World War, including an official embrace of nuclear weapons as a rational strategy for future warfare; • the belief that citizens should conform, accepting surveillance as so necessary that responsible citizens would even undertake self-surveillance; and • the conviction that while there were no limits to free speech as such, there were limits to who was entitled to speak with authority, and these limits did not apply to white male heterosexuals. These were the conflicts that troubled long poems by Allen Ginsberg, Robert Lowell, and John Berryman, each of which targeted the limits of then-fashionable psychotherapeutic solutions— solutions culturally sanctioned as both a cure for aberrant behavior and a punishment for those who dared question repressive normalization. The observations by Ginsberg, Lowell, and Berryman, as apt as they were for their own times, were only beginning steps in the road that O’Brien saw as long and twisted, and, in human terms, expensive. Later long poems, through their “mixing and recontextualizing of historical materials, perspectives, and forms,” in Anne Day Dewey’s words, demonstrated that the long poem had become “a distinct and self-transforming genre” (Dewey 2015: 75). By the late 1960s, as the war in Vietnam turned from cold to hot, Robert Duncan emphasized the uncertain terror of living in a militarized, national security state. In the late 1970s, when foreign incursions were partially checked by the rise of détente, John Ashbery offered writings that anxiously hovered in place and looked in all directions at once, reflecting a series of musical-chair presidencies that gripped the nation in a malaise (the “Vietnam syndrome”). In the 1980s, when the new broom promised by Reagan only swept together old narratives, a new generation of poets (Anne Waldman, Ron Silliman, and Rita Dove) composed sequences that spotlighted militarization, division by gender and class divisions, and racial injustice. Those in turn established a basis for works in the 1990s that laid the groundwork for a twenty-firstcentury “War against Terror.”

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THREE COLD WAR LONG POEMS, C.1962 Legal theorist Cass R. Sunstein maintains that norms shift not abruptly but through a series of small pushes from an outside influence, or what he calls “nudges,” and defines as “liberty-preserving approaches that steer people in particular directions, but that also allow them to go their own way” (2019: 62). Rather than providing a set of prescriptions, the long poem serves as a “nudge,” deflecting the mainstream of poetry away from what it had once embraced—the ahistorical personal lyric delving deeply into the writer’s interior emotions—and heralding instead a distinctly temporal public art in which the fully wide-awake and alert poet writes works that, while never entirely political, remain sharply aware of how politics enters everyday life. Such poems operate as a kind of “choice architecture”: they invite users into a textual setting that foregrounds decision-making, and in the process, by introducing material that is successfully shaped by decisions, a horizon emerges with new default values that might alter norms (Sunstein 2019: 67–8, 115–17). In the 1940s and 1950s, long poems acquire a complexity that accords with changing values in the post-1945 world. Melvin B. Tolson’s Libretto for the Republic of Liberia (1951) displays a virtuosic control of invented poetic forms as rich as Crane’s to expose what we now call “white privilege” by detailing centuries of overlooked African influence in philosophy, art, and literature. Charles Olson’s initial installment of The Maximus Poems (1953) follows a lineage from Pound as it investigates the heritage of early New England’s effort to establish communitarian life despite a plethora of commercial interests. And Hyam Plutzik’s Horatio (1961) draws on literary history with an Eliotic impetus to imagine the aftermath to Hamlet’s death in which a compatriot struggles to redeem the memory of one who had died violently while seeking his country’s ideals. In later years, Allen Ginsberg’s Howl (1956), Robert Lowell’s Life Studies (1959), and John Berryman’s The Dream Songs (1964, 1968), diverse as they were in many respects, were united by their readiness to question, regret, and expose psychotherapy as the mode of repression that a national security state might employ. Since Cold War combat occurs on ideological terrain, a nation mustering its normalcy is not only policing its citizens but actively coercing them to police themselves. Allen Ginsberg’s Howl was a central text defining the Beat movement. Beat poetry sounded as if it were made up on the spot, improvised like the jazz music that sometimes accompanied its readings; it challenged conformist demands, embraced the pleasures of waywardness, and introduced antimilitaristic value systems such as Buddhism. The first literary movement after the Second World War, as Anne Waldman wrote, “to come of age with the possibility of the complete annihilation of the world” (1996b: xxi), the Beats were widely covered by newspapers and such mass culture outlets as Life magazine. Howl was published in San Francisco in 1956 as Number Four in poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s City Lights Bookstore’s “Pocket Poets Series” (with an approving introduction by William Carlos Williams, whose own long poem Paterson had embraced the values to be found in critically examining one’s own local experience, wherever it led). Ferlinghetti’s small-size paperbacks were designed to be carried around, not consumed in a library—a poetry intended to spill into city streets. When Howl was seized as obscene in 1957, Ferlinghetti was quick to explain that “it is not the poet but what he observes which is revealed as obscene … the sad wastes of the mechanized world, lost among atom bombs and insane nationalisms” (Charters 1992: xxvii). “Ginsberg’s incantatory exposure of his own fears, transgressions, and erotic desires and those of his friends,” Stephen Fredman explains in the 2018 Cambridge History of American Poetry,

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“coupled with his denunciation of a rapacious capitalist culture in the form of the devouring god Moloch, has made ‘Howl’ an epoch-defining poem” (Fredman 2018: 828). In Howl, the madhouse is never far away, whether in its metaphorical tour of America in section one, its denunciation of “Moloch” as the essence of a malevolent commercialism in section two, or its evocation in section three of the Rockland State institute where Carl Solomon, the poem’s dedicatee (and Ginsberg’s lover), is undergoing treatment. Section four’s “Footnote to ‘Howl’ ” emerges as a result of this love for Solomon, a montage of blessings Ginsberg distributes with abundant exclamation points that find holiness in “human angels!” and even an “Angel in Moloch!” (1984: 134). The homoeroticism that flickers through section one, often violent (in part because it is suppressed), becomes in section three a saving grace, a basis for companionship and unconditional love. It is not coincidental that Sen. Joseph McCarthy, among many others, had proposed only a few years before that sexual and political deviance were congruent, and homosexuality was identical with political subversion (Kozlovsky 2004: 203). While love of any kind would surely counteract Moloch, the love between same-sex partners would challenge the sanctity of the domestic family whose hierarchical boundaries were supposed to serve as a US bulwark against foreign interventions. Ginsberg’s transformations invigorate Howl. Each section is framed by a formulaic chant (“I saw the best minds,” “Moloch is,” “I’m with you”) that prompts an improvisational response; in the process, a Buddhist formula for meditation is augmented by flurries of words that resemble notes in jazz. As outrageous as the poem surely was in 1956, thirty years later it seemed no more disruptive than The Waste Land. In 1986 Ginsberg was quick to model an edition of Howl with its drafts and variants that was constructed along lines identical to the 1971 edition of Eliot’s poem. The publication aimed, in Fredman’s words, to “demonstrate the similar stature of the two poems” (2015: 828). “Ginsberg marks one end of a continuum of critical attitudes toward somatic therapies, institutional regimes, and prescription drugs,” Michael Thurston observes, adding that the “late poems of [Robert Lowell’s] Life Studies survey a good deal of the landscape of mental illness and its treatments from the late 1940s to the end of the 1950s” (2015: 148, 149). Lowell’s earlier books featured densely woven diatribes against militarism (Lord Weary’s Castle) and intricate reconstructions of historical conflicts (The Mills of the Kavanaughs). Both won accolades for their intricacy (the 1947 Pulitzer Prize was awarded to the first). But Life Studies was a controversial departure into the autobiographical, openly acknowledging the poet’s struggles with bipolar disorder, and breaking away from verse in formal stanzas to observations in a free verse format that was out of fashion. Lowell’s decision to write more directly was guided by poetry readings on the West Coast in which he found himself dropping words and simplifying phrases as he read his verse (1987: 227, 284), and in remarks made on one occasion, he even singled out Ginsberg for admiration (Lowell 1957: 09:24–09:53). This breakthrough work appeared under the Farrar name, a New York trade publisher long associated with prestigious publication (A Draft of XXX Cantos had been first published by Farrar & Rinehart). Lowell was brought there by its newly hired editor-in-chief, Robert Giroux, who had been Lowell’s previous editor elsewhere, but the aesthetic that drove Life Studies emerged from writings that had first appeared in Ferlinghetti’s small San Francisco press. Life Studies eases its readers into its disruptive changes. Its first of four sections opens on a postwar Europe in ruins—“Now Paris, our black classic, breaking up / like killer kings on an Etruscan cup” (Lowell 1959: 4)—and that section’s final poem, “A Mad Negro Soldier Confined

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at Munich,” introduces a military hospital that uses discipline to treat mental illness: “We file before the clock, // … fancy minnows, slaves of habit” (Lowell 1959: 8). A second section is a prose memoir of a privileged childhood in Boston where the circumstances were enclosing, not liberating. A third section offers a brief respite from incarceration in four sketches of twentiethcentury writers as disturbing personalities who challenged the curative value of the “normal.” One poem serves double duty: “Words for Hart Crane,” slightly rewritten after its publication in 1953, was first titled “Epitaph for a Fallen Poet” with references that referred to a British poet, possibly W. H. Auden. On whatever continent and over various generations, the creative life is risky, irrational, and alienating. Though madness is incipient through Life Studies, what defines the era in these poems is the revelation that a psychotherapeutic establishment elicits from its patients a program of selfsurveillance that subtly underwrites the values of a national security state. In the prose of section two and poems of section four, Lowell introduces the kind of recollections that a therapist might coax forward, sifting background events for their formative powers. In “Memories of West Street and Lepke,” Lowell recalls his 1943–4 year as a conscientious objector incarcerated in the West Street jail with thugs, mobsters, and organized crime criminals like Murder Incorporated’s Czar Lepke who enjoyed privileges in a cell that included “two toy American / flags tied together with a ribbon of Easter palm” (Lowell 1959: 86). Lowell is currently respectable and living comfortably in Boston where “even the man / scavenging filth in the back-alley trash cans / … is a ‘young Republican’ ” (1959: 85), but he is still imprisoned by his knowledge of institutions that dictate who should be free and how they can show it. That image of scavenging returns in the last stanza of the book’s final poem, “Skunk Hour,” where Lowell is confronted by a “mother skunk with her column of kittens” working the backyard garbage pail. She “drops her ostrich tail / and will not scare” (1959: 90). The emergence at the last moment of a despised animal that recycles what others discard may serve as a revelation of how “the unconscious” pursued in psychotherapy appears when it leaves darkness: not enormous but small, not explosive but determined, and committed to transforming trash into food. It has been distorted into underperforming. When Life Studies was reprinted as a paperback, it appended a poem that would give its name to Lowell’s next collection (1964). A commissioned work read to a gathering at the Boston Public Garden in June 1960, “For The Union Dead,” joined a cluster of prior poems (including one published in 1947 by Berryman) that recognized Augustus St.-Gaudens’s bas-relief depicting Civil War volunteer and prominent Bostonian Robert Shaw alongside his soldiers, African Americans all, who would die alongside him at the Second Battle of Fort Wagner in 1863. The bas-relief had been temporarily removed from its location on Boston Common, protecting it from an urban renewal project that Lowell enveloped into his personal history, recalling childhood trips to an aquarium where he once watched fish swim behind glass, now replaced by an underground parking garage. St.-Gaudens’s Shaw also seems out of date, a depiction of heroism that Lowell characterizes as mixing vigilance and tautness—traits marking a willingness for self-sacrifice unlikely now. The sculpture seems young and innocent, riding on its own bubble, waiting for “the blessed break”—a break foreshadowed by a store window photograph of “Hiroshima boiling // over a Mosler Safe, the ‘Rock of Ages’ / that survived the blast” (1964: 72). What will endure from this moment, what values will carry over time? Lowell ends darkly, with a compressed vision that includes the faces of vulnerable Black schoolchildren that “rise like balloons” in racially segregated Boston as Lowell crouches before the glass of a TV screen. All around him, “giant finned cars nose forward like fish,”

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as if the aquarium’s demise has unleashed abjectness and predation at the same time: “A savage servility / slides by on grease” (1964: 72). Lowell offers sedated experience in “For the Union Dead”: distressing events are glimpsed behind glass. Yet the strength of his poem is that it reveals the insidious availability of such sedation, whether in storefront windows that naturalize mass bombing or the TV’s evening news. By contrast, the “dream songs” of John Berryman are designed to do quite the opposite: they are instruments to shatter distance, to circumvent restraints, to provoke unmannerly responses. Robert Giroux, now a partner with his name imprinted in the firm, confirmed that trade publishing could still support poetry that challenged its audience: Farrar, Straus & Giroux published Berryman’s new work in two volumes, 1964’s 77 Dream Songs (winning the 1965 Pulitzer Prize) and 1968’s His Toy, His Dream, His Rest. Berryman had been previously admired as a daring poet, entranced by the possibilities that Shakespeare exploited in the extravagance of Elizabethan English; his Homage to Mistress Bradstreet (1956), also published by Farrar, had offered “an imagined dialogue with a historical female Puritan poet [that] was muscular, daring, and dramatic, climaxing in a bravura childbirth scene that stunned readers of both genders” (Kachka 2013: 109). In the Dream Song he found a form that he could revel in—three six-line stanzas that sometimes rhymed: “a sonnet plus some, a devil’s sonnet” as described by poet Kevin Young, noting its embedded 666 (1999: 3). Dream Songs tapped into the unconscious but aimed to provide a delivery with appeal. Each one featured the exploits of “Henry,” Berryman’s alter ego as an Everyman harrowed by what Ramparts copublisher Harry Stiehl described (when he featured several in an early issue of his influential new journal whose circulation of 250,000 in 1968 was double that of The Nation) as “the frightening particularities of post-Hiroshima civilization.” Each had a “nightmarish quality,” appearing “at first, highly cryptic; then, with a kind of raw-nerved clarity as historical happenings, public and private, begin to flicker past” (1963: 6). Yet “Henry” was a not unfamiliar type to readers of contemporary authors like Kurt Vonnegut, who in such “black satire” novels as Slaughterhouse-Five and Cat’s Cradle presented over-the-top responses in rapidly shifting short chapters that amplified distressing events, using wit as a defense against despair. When Dream Songs describe historical and cultural events, they expose the tattered edges of long-time institutions. Henry discovers contradictions, finds expectations thwarted, as if the only way to learn to walk these days is by falling downstairs: “He stared at Ruin. Ruin stared straight back” (1969: 49); “Man has undertaken the top job of all, / son fin. Good luck” (1969: 50). Many Dream Songs had the quality of a psychotherapeutic encounter gone awry: “Naked the man came forth in his mask, to be” (1969: 392). Several featured exchanges between Henry and a friend who spoke in a “dis and dat” lingo and addressed Henry as “Mr. Bones,” slang for dice but also the name of one of the two characters who trade quips in (to a contemporary reader) uncomfortable blackface dialect during scene changes in minstrel shows—routines assumed to be long defunct yet whose reappearance now suggested they maintained an underground existence. Helen Vendler proposed a gracious explanation: in Berryman’s hands, Mr. Bones and his straightman interlocutor resembled the dialectic between analysand and the analyst, the Freudian Id and Superego (Vendler 1995: 35–6). With such practices, Berryman unleashes the very forces that he had been advised to restrain; readily crossing into contested territory, he becomes a figure for resistance, if not insurrection. Psychotherapy becomes a tool of disruption, opening doorways that Cold War culture had determined to keep shut. August Kleinzahler, reviewing a 2015 edition of The Dream Songs, suggests that the blackface dialect alone was offensive enough to prevent Berryman’s

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dream songs from being published today (2015: 21). But in the 1960s, scandalous poetry was coming into fashion, and The Dream Songs was right in line: M. L. Rosenthal had branded Life Studies as “confessional verse,” a term that might as easily describe Ginsberg’s Howl (Rosenthal 1960: 225, 231). Kevin Young, an African American poet selecting Berryman’s work for the Library of America in 1999, admires the dream songs as “successful failures … about an American light not as pure as we may wish: or whose purity may rely not just on success (the dream) but on failure (the song) … not a song of ‘myself ’ but a song of multiple selves, not a cult of personality but a clash of personalities” (1999: 3, 4).

HOT WAR, (NO WAR): VIETNAM AND DÉTENTE The Dream Songs had been timely from their very start. The earliest, written in 1955 but published only once, the second of twelve in a 1960 literary annual (Berryman 1960: 119, 1990: 299), included the line “One of these bombs costs a fortune.” They were fated to portray the 1960s almost perfectly, especially if that decade pivoted on November 1963. 77 Dream Songs was released in April of 1964, and a second volume would have included 84 Dream Songs. In November 1965, the Times Literary Supplement published “the last Song, Number 161” (Barbera 1976: 149). But the first volume was greeted with an array of honors and awards (including a Guggenheim) and a photograph-laden layout in Life magazine featuring a new wife and young daughter provided Berryman with minor celebrity status (Howard 1967: 68–73). The eighty-four burgeoned to 308 in a spate of creativity that reflected current events. A persistent presence is the war in Vietnam, identified by Dream Song 162 (written in April 1966) as “a war which was no war” with “an enemy that was not our enemy / but theirs whoever they are” (1969: 181)—a hot war pretending to be a cold war, with its reference to an anonymous “they” cloaked in shadow. The Vietnam War was the dark thread running through His Toy, His Dream, His Rest, undermining the three comforts mentioned in the title. Such anti–Vietnam War poetry would become central to newly popular readings by contemporary poets that resembled direct-action rallies. What had once been small-scale gatherings in settings such as the local art gallery (where Ginsberg first read Howl), and Ginsberg’s vision of poems designed to spill into the streets were being realized in poetry performances sanctioned by the academy. San Francisco poet Robert Duncan was one of a number of poets who came from different backgrounds to appear together on stage and read their verse that condemned the war. Duncan was committed to writing multipart sequences that displayed the kind of intricate linguistic texture that elevated the earliest modern epics; he advanced Pound’s heritage in multipart long poems that interwove a multitude of voices, as evidenced by his appearance in the line of New Directions books whose publisher, James Laughlin, was bound to “forward Pound as a central figure of the international modernist movement” (Barnhisel 2015: 198–9). But Duncan also spoke boldly in defense of unpopular positions, as in his personally meaningful 1944 essay “The Homosexual in Society” (which appeared in the journal politics, whose editor was the mercurial New York intellectual figure Dwight McDonald). His strengths are evident in a work that qualifies as quintessential: it could have been read at a rally and it also repays study in a classroom. “A Poem Beginning with a Line by Pindar” (from The Opening of the Field, 1960) is a poem in four sections, the second of which unleashes a diatribe with emotional appeal for an audience in the late 1960s: a denunciation of twenty US presidents by name, clustering them in groups of four and impugning

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them for their masculine arrogance: “Harding, Wilson, Taft, Roosevelt, / idiots fumbling at the bride’s door, / hear the cries of men in meaningless debt and war” (Duncan 1969: 64). For Duncan (as Pound), pentameter rhythms and rhyme were to be avoided as constraints on expression, but they became pertinent when delineating obtuseness. This parade of presidential shame was countered in the poem’s other sections: the first centers on images from Goya’s portrayal of Cupid and Psyche that reveal a “hurt voluptuous grace,” and the third cites words from Pound’s controversial Pisan Cantos as “seeds,” then in the fourth praises Rilke, “torn by a rose thorn” (1969: 62, 65, 67). These other sections feature artists as saviors and guides because they are independent, open, vulnerable. Unlike the presidents, who rule by fiat, their identity is defined by their inventive striving, the newness they make, the fields they open for others. This concept of a diverse community, so ancient its roots appear in Pindar’s fifth-century bce odes, is a direct counter to the Cold War ideology that calls for traditional gender and sexual roles as a model for domestic living. When Lowell examined home life in “Man and Wife” (husband’s view) and “ ‘To Speak of the Woe that Is Marriage’ ” (wife’s view), both poems exposed an arrangement stage-managed by unsustainable role-playing. When Duncan launches his poem by reviving a line by Pindar—“The light foot hears you and the brightness begins” (1969: 62)—he opens a space in which artistic communications are foundational practices. The message Lowell takes away from his West Coast experience is “simplify”; the message Duncan is sending is “educate.” The war in Vietnam, however, called for fervent testimony. An earlier multipart poem, “An Essay at War,” written in 1950–1, unfolded against the backdrop of the Korean War, and there he affirmed a poetry “unplanned and willingly defeated,” as Cary Nelson writes. “Yet this will be a poetry so plural that ‘the language takes fire,’ becoming thereby ‘a lantern to read war by’ (1981: 142; Duncan 1968b: 12, 11). But Vietnam is a greater disaster, and Duncan speaks unequivocally in his introduction to Bending the Bow: “War now is a monstrosity in the hands of militarists who have taken no deep thought of the art of war or its nature” (1968a: v). Passages 1, subtitled “Tribal Memories,” opens with the “poet’s voice” summoning a “company of the living” by invoking shared memory, “the dream in which all things are living” (1968a: 9, 10). But by Passages 13 the dream has become a “nightmare formula—to win the war,” a formula that is “inevitable” and originates in “Los Alamos.” Now, “Satan looks forth from men’s faces” and the lines dissolve into prose to list “Eisenhower’s idiot grin, Nixon’s black jaw, the sly glare in Goldwater’s eye, or the look of Stevenson lying in the U.N. that our nation save face” (1968a: 43, 41). Even the power of the artist is distorted under such violence: Pier de Cosimo’s greatest painting is entitled A Forest Fire and in “Bosch’s illumination / Hell breaks out” (1968a: 41, 42). By the time Passages 25, subtitled “Up Rising,” appeared in the September 13, 1965, issue of The Nation, poetry editor Denise Levertov presumed it to be so incendiary she had to run it covertly lest the publisher pull it. It began at a high pitch: Now Johnson would go up to join the great simulacra of men, Hitler and Stalin, to work his fame with planes soaring out from Guam over Asia. (1968a: 81) Levertov had presumed correctly; when publisher George Kirstein saw it in print, he “almost flipped his lid,” she recalled (Keenaghan 2008: 643). “Throughout the poem, this ‘blatant criminalization of the administration’s wartime actions,’ critic Eric Keenaghan notes, became an “incendiary scene [that] spreads globally” (2008: 643).

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Passages 22–27 were separately printed in a 1966 chapbook entitled Of the War, its cover featuring a photograph of a half-dressed man dragged behind a tank with a US star. (If Howl had ended with the triumph of Moloch in section two, it would twist in the same direction as Passages.) The whole sequence evolved “into a collage of public dialogues,” straining, Anne Day Dewey states, “the model of productive interplay” that Duncan once had followed with masterful effect. In one sense, though, Passages is powerful: it proposes an opposition between good and evil in which the two are locked in endless conflict. There is no binary to resolve; as Nelson writes, the two “are linked, opposite but inextricable, acting out a relation between history and poetry in which terror and beauty are joined” (1981: 143). The cost of such a vision was unmanageable. Duncan would literally fall silent after this publication, releasing no work for the next fifteen years, reemerging only in 1984 with the first of two collections entitled Ground Work. Duncan took himself out of commission through the 1970s, but John Ashbery’s productivity soared. One of the “New York school” poets who aligned themselves with surrealist traditions of visual art—as well as a Newsweek art critic and ARTNews editorial board member—Ashbery’s early work was experimental, excessive, often with the “camp” sensibility other gay New York poets practiced, but he entered the mainstream with the title poem of Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror (1975), focused on Italian painter Parmigianino’s 1524 painting of the same name. The central conceit of the poem is the light-bending propensity of convexity (produced by fish-eye lenses such as those used in security cameras), which exposes even the corners of a room to detailed viewing, inviting a paradoxically expansive exploration of a severely limited realm. Convexity eerily blends immense capacity with debilitating imprisonment—like a New York city apartment. Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror amassed essentially every major award for 1975, but the collection that followed, Houseboat Days (1977), seems even more attuned to “a time during which social and personal breakdown had become increasingly interwoven,” in the words of historian Andreas Hillen, who sees the 1970s as revealing “institutional failures of American society” that evoke “expressions of systemic, perhaps irreparable crisis” (2006: 261). In the years between Nixon’s leaving, Ford’s stepping in, and Carter’s presidency, Ashbery’s poems were “paradigms of common experience,” as J. D. McClatchy explained, that gave a “confused but insistent impression of the culture going on around us” (1989: 45) in which sexual and gender differences had considerably broadened. By defining a zone of pervasive disorientation, Ashbery occupied a territory midway between a buttoned-up Lowell and an unbuttoned Berryman. Indeed, Marjorie Perloff sees Ashbery as vying with Berryman to produce an alternate dream song. If a Berryman Dream Song “looks as if it had already gone through a certain amount of psychoanalytic interpretation” in Ashbery, “words that come to us in dreams are characterized by their inability to express the full meaning we wish to convey; behind each word lies a range of nonverbal meanings or inarticulate feelings” (1980: 69, 70). That quality in which the dreamlike is both dissipated but never quite dissolved appears in “Pyrography,” commissioned by the US Department of the Interior for the 1976 Bicentennial—a poem, in Ashbery’s words, that views the entire country in “a long period of adjustment” and exposes “a continuous attempt at ‘unravelling’ ” (1977: 9). This dreamish association brings looming terrors that dissolve but leave an unmistakable residue: Things that “first scared you / In the night light,” turn out to be “capable … of a narrow fidelity / To what you and they wanted you to become” (1977: 10). Ashbery almost unnoticeably slips into a reference to a “they” who somehow define that “narrow fidelity.” Here is an effortless slippage into a large terrain—the entire

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geography of the United States—that shifts entirely away from anything like the battleground that Duncan found unbearable. Ashbery can be as wayward as Berryman before curtailing himself as tightly as Lowell. The poem “Syringa” (named for a genus of lily whose stems were once used for pipe-stems, hence “syringe”) rewrites the Orpheus/Eurydice myth, shifting it from a love story of loss to a record of cataclysmic change that foregrounds the Bacchantes whom Orpheus drove mad with his singing. Nowadays, though, what had once been a descent into madness becomes, more simply, “the way music passes, emblematic / Of life and how you cannot isolate a note of it / And say it is good or bad” (1977: 70). The delivery stem in this syringe is continually absorbing the conflicts of the time into generalized emotions that appear as currents shifting just below the surface. Where Berryman used his anxieties, one against another, confronting repressive restraints with a brio that resembled Ginsberg’s chutzpah and that Lowell evaded, escaping their demands even as he defined them, Ashbery evolved an intricate patter that moves along with airy abandon, turning anxiety into a kind of white noise that simply surrounds us wherever we are. It may be called a poetry of détente at a time when détente consisted largely of endless negotiations, against which alarming possibilities continued to loom.

“PURE WAR” IN THE REAGAN YEARS “Reagan hated détente,” historian Bruce J. Shulman asserted. For him, “The cold war was not a ‘giant misunderstanding’ but a ‘struggle between right and wrong, good and evil’ ” (2006: 226). In 1983, Paul Virilio described this expanded militancy as “pure war” or “total war”—a commitment to militarism that invents tools “for war in its pure form, without worrying what happens when you use them” (2008: 35). This expansive militarism, evident in Reagan’s combative stance on multiple fronts, prompted a new generation of poets to take up a range of different counterstrategies. The long poems of the 1980s differed considerably from one another, for poets now either taught in or emerged from an expanded university and college system that had become a central site for examining, producing, and circulating poetry. In addition, foundation-supported small presses and university presses took on the project of publishing new poetry. As a result, poets (many of whom were products of university workshops) found themselves with the kind of educated readership that those who had been writing long poems had aspired to reach. Even the Beat movement had its university—the Colorado-based Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University. Its codirector (with Allen Ginsberg), Anne Waldman, stands out as a disciplined and successful artist with experience developing institutions such as the Poetry Project at St. Mark’s in New York City (she led it from 1968 to 1978). New York scene poets, energized to improvise about everyday events, found common ground with Beat writers who admired Eastern religious practices. St. Mark’s also made space for women marginalized by the original Beats, and the title poem from Waldman’s signature collection Fast Speaking Woman (1974, reissued in 1996 by Ferlinghetti with additional material as no. 33 in the Pocket Poet series) was a performance whose diversity-within-a-formula (“I’m a shouting woman / I’m a speech woman / I’m an atmosphere …”) was designed to go on well beyond its original twenty-one pages (1996a: 3). Her fecundity was evident in the sequence she began in the middle of the 1980s and completed in 2011, a three-book seventy-three-section poem entitled The Iovis Trilogy. This massive publication by a small press, the foundation-based Coffee House Press of Minneapolis,

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coincided with a celebration at the University of Michigan whose research library had just acquired Waldman’s papers demonstrated both the commercial marginality of poetry and its centrality to the academy. Reviewing an earlier version of Iovis for the Chicago Review, poet Alice Notley describes its prevailing form as “an amalgam of verse and prose, the latter including letters from others, selections from interviews, dream narratives, journalistic facts and so forth,” placed in the service of addressing “male energy and power, the fact of its dominion over all of us in both the harmful and so-called harmless forms” (1998: 117). Waldman’s drive to rescue the Beat tradition from its crude sexism and her sly erudition merge in the subtitle of the trilogy’s first book Iovis: All Is Full of Jove whose subtitle translates “Iovis omnia plena,” a phrase from the third of Virgil’s Eclogues that is spoken in a poetic “duel” where two shepherds face off: one thinks Jove is central, the other favors Apollo. Waldman watches from the sidelines; as a woman she is outside the fray, but in her Englishing of the Latin she exerts a dismissive twist. All Is Full of Jove employs a construction (“all is full of X”) in which “Jove” becomes a four-letter pile left by males that is centuries-deep. Waldman wears her erudition lightly, but it is there for whoever can see it. Like Ginsberg, she was among the entourage of Bob Dylan’s “Rolling Thunder Revue” shows of 1975–6, and in Sam Shephard’s film of the tour Renaldo and Clara (1978) she played a disaffected sex worker whose response to a customer’s inept come-on was possibly ad-libbed: “I could’ve been reading a good book” (Renaldo: 2:49.30). In the opening sections of Iovis, completed in the 1980s, Waldman reproduces documents such as the NBC (Nuclear, Biological, Chemical) Report with eight steps for recording a Ground Zero event (“1. At the instant of the ‘blue-white flash,’ hit the ground and start counting slowly, 1,000-AND-ONE, 1,000-AND-TWO, 1,000-AND-THREE, and so on until the blast-wave has passed” (Waldman 2011: 41)). In contrast, she transcribes the song her eight-year-old son had chanted in response to ongoing plutonium leakage at the Rocky Flats Plant in Colorado close to the Naropa University. The chant uses “Let’s cover up Plutonium” as an opening refrain followed by lists of objects from the mundane to the absurd: “with plastic bags,” “with what cliff dwellings are made of,” “with a graveyard,” “with playdough,” and so on (2011: 1, 69, 71). Waldman is appalled by how thoroughly American culture accommodates repressive militarization, and the Rocky Flats scandal reappears throughout later sections (2011: 458, 655, 780, 840). Waldman aims to establish “a sacred book // between us, who write our own / daily” (Waldman 1993: 65), though the events she confronts are often profane as she highlights our culture’s failure to resist militarization in her subtitle to the entire trilogy: Colors in the Mechanism of Concealment (2011). Waldman’s approach is scattershot: she draws on free verse, chants, translations, and even elegant metrical stanzas. America’s global militarism requires an on-call guardian like Waldman ready to go anywhere, use any approach, to confront a range of enemies. It is an impressive enterprise that can be exhausting; since every section of Iovis introduces its own distinct style, each one merits the commentary by Waldman that serves as a guide (though this sometimes calls for a commentary itself). Rather than testing for endurance, Ron Silliman invites us to meander, pause, and empathize. His approach is surgical, as befits a charter member of the L-A-N-G-U-A-G-E poetry, a movement that deliberately withholds expressive writing, substituting lines with words that seem incoherent or trivial unless the reader participates “with the poet/poem in bringing meaning to the community at large” (Messerli 1987: 3). Silliman’s book-length poem What (1988) is one in a series of long poems entitled The Alphabet collected and published by the University of Alabama Press in 2008. What presents itself as a stream of sentences jotting down events from the fall 1985 to July 1986,

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recording the sights and sounds of people (largely working class) observed from a San Francisco bus window: “elbows / shoulders joined together on the bus. / At each transfer point, glimpse how lives weave past” (1988: 8). To battle the estrangement of an urban environment, Silliman positions the simple sentence, as he explains in his manifesto “The New Sentence” (1989: 63–93), as a pivot between precise detail and expanding narrative. What is a series of such ever-changing “transfer points” from which we build meaning: commuters may relate to each other primarily as bodies, but Silliman directs us to shift from “elbow / shoulder joined” to “how lives weave past” and that becomes a singular amplification. With sentences precisely juxtaposed, Silliman can coax meaning out of language that remains easily accessible. Political events are sometimes present, but notice how Reagan’s announcement of his planned China trip is sandwiched between two other sentences: … “Why U.S. Reactors are Safer” piece in the wake of Chernobyl doesn’t mean they are safe. As tho he were a rock star, Reagan names Asia trip “Winds of Freedom Tour.” As tho he were a rock. (1988: 74) The piece explaining nuclear safety (possibly from a morning newspaper) sets out to calm fears but by evoking Chernobyl, it fails to decouple Russia from the United States. “Piece” echoing “peace” also complicates the train of thought. The substitution of “tho” for “though” stands out: is this just a hasty simplification, or is it the simpler orthography rock stars prefer? This may prepare us to hear critically the simplicity that exists within the name “Winds of Freedom Tour.” If the slogan is now being deflated, its gaseousness makes it seem absurd to think that whoever approved it is sturdy, strong, firm; possibly rock-headed might be true, though. What offers a politics that, whether it is lethal or not, always moves lightly and swiftly. Each “simple” sentence is apt to be complicated by its adjacency: Eyes stain the world, giving life to pigment, the lie to nature. I spy: the pentagon sits In a vast sea of parking. Museum guard leans in a doorway at the end of a long day standing. (1988: 65) Here, eyes bring dead matter to life, seeing past a neutral “nature,” so the “I spy” associated with seeing the Pentagon (place of spies) now reveals automobiles in a “vast sea,” an uncounted number of employees, many of whom must be mired in their work, like museum guards who are necessary, even as they stand in doorways, and perhaps seem exhausted by vistas composed of masterpieces. Silliman’s “transfer points” spot the overlooked figures in his settings, making each of them central, but only momentarily. Every sentence stands on its own, with a clear meaning; at the same time, every sentence serves as a rolling context for those alongside it. Each sentence comments on its own previous sentence and becomes a threshold to the following sentence. It is the experience of poetry—adjusting perspectives and offering insights—but without the dazzle of fresh words or the glamor of deft maneuvers, even as the lines are fresh and deft.

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Waldman is horrified by the ease with which militaristic acts can go unquestioned, so she foregrounds them as scandalous, often reproducing their excess to the point of testing a reader’s patience. Silliman avoids excess, speaking softly and clearly, but through juxtaposition, he supplies us with the provisions we need, through ever-shifting contexts, so we hold different perspectives that lets us perceive differently just what has been going on in a sentence, check what we are perceiving. We are coaxed, even teased into thinking critically; it is his soft bid to change our attitude: “The poem / is a pill against reason’s too-narrow logic” (1988: 97); “Distance, / not absorption, is the intended effect” (1988: 111, 125). These user-friendly tips resist any propensity to weave his sentences into the gentle and wandering reveries of Ashbery or the equivocal balancing acts of Pinsky. Lowell felt paralyzed, trapped behind glass, unable to reach a larger reality while Silliman views ordinary events outside his bus window and inside his bus as holding his attention and worthy of thought. Waldman moves effortlessly, traversing space and time, as she confronts acts of oppression to expose them in all their tangles; we are her enthralled audience. But Silliman’s What depicts a tangled social world not shaped by any one individual but partially shared by many, most notably us. Silliman’s sparse sentences resemble the compression in the poetry of Rita Dove, but Silliman clashes details together while Dove coaxes details into patterns of significance. A US poet laureate from 1993 to 1995 (and the first African American to serve in the position), editor of the Penguin Anthology of 20th Century American Poetry (with a groundbreaking number of poets of color), and a professor of creative writing at the University of Virginia, Dove occupies a central place in the nexus between poetry and the academy, a reputation that has deepened after its establishment in the 1980s. She is “a master at transforming a public or historic element,” as poet Brenda Shaughnessy wrote, “re-envisioning a spectacle and unearthing the heartfelt, wildly original private thoughts such historic moments always contain” (1999: 7). The title of her 2021 collection, Playlist for the Apocalypse, reflects her intent to transform a public moment; it is a signature trait. A section of ten poems in her second book, Museum (1983), entitled “Primer for a Nuclear Age,” is global in scope: “Parsley” features a Haitian “El General” executing any group that cannot “roll an R” as in the perejil translated in the title (2017: 110–12); “Early Morning on the Tel Aviva-Haifa Freeway” delineates violent acts on a large scale (industries fouling sea water) and a small scale (two Arab boys “drag a gull by the wings”) (Dove 2017: 105); “The Sailor in Africa” explains a Viennese card game “circa 1910” (2017: 101–4) that resembles Monopoly except money-making depends on slave-trading; and the title poem cites words ancient maps inscribed in unexplored areas—beyond this point lie monsters—to maintain these now apply everywhere and anywhere: “if you’ve / got a heart at all, someday / it will kill you” (2017: 109–10). Dove’s Pulitzer Prize–winning third book, Thomas and Beulah (1986), a double set of sequences loosely based on Dove’s maternal grandparents’ escape from a Jim Crow south to Akron, figures the Great Migration as unexplored territory where the poem’s titular characters confront, battle, and more or less conquer (or at least contain) monsters. Dove described Thomas and Beulah as “these small people, these nobodies in the course of history,” but she asserted that their lives would show “what was happening in the social structure of Midwest America at the time this couple was growing up” (Dove 1986: 236). Born in 1952 and writing in the 1980s, Dove brings to her dual sequences a lens sharpened by the crises of the Cold War years (trauma, loss of privacy, anxiety, excessive self-scrutiny), making the century’s first half a prequel to its second and, in the process, centralizing the Great Migration. Parallels between the two eras continually emerge: Thomas and Beulah remember contemporaries in the South who have died unexpectedly; their personal lives

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are complicated by a diminished sense of privacy; their future inspires dread and remains radically uncertain; and they experience repression even in the midst of mild prosperity. Poems featuring Beulah showcase her resilience, and although they often end in regret, they show her desire to find positive solutions that ultimately enable not her but others. “A Hill of Beans,” set in Akron in the 1930s, centers on a vacant lot near the couple’s house that is a pathway for tramps disembarking from freights, begging for food, which Beulah scrapes together for them, listening to bravado tales of travel. A nearly overlooked detail in the poem’s descriptions involves “Cat hairs / That came up with the dipper” in the well-water used by tramps. Beulah insists Thomas cover their well with protective boards, a small gesture that seems triumphal in the poem’s final lines: “Beyond the tracks, the city blazed / as if looks were everything” (Dove 2017: 146). What appears as clutter in the poem is a signature of Dove’s sifting process that mirrors Beulah’s honing-in on what she can improve. The extravagant hats Beulah designs as a milliner signal an overlooked creativity even as they serve as an ars poetica for Dove who builds poems much the way Beulah constructs marvel out of feathers and fabrics: from small details that, in clusters, grow explosively large. Beulah’s husband is closer to the front lines of the immigration narrative, working jobs that place him in direct contact with a larger world (including wartime factories that build bombers), he cannot be as inventive, uncertain when to take a stance and sharply aware of what its costs might be. The violence that exists on a global scale in Dove’s “Primer for a Nuclear Age” is always near to hand in an American underclass, with its “nobodies” who nevertheless appear ever larger with each of her poems. Since most poets these days have come to shelter in university or college departments with curricula that encourage progressivist questioning over status quo stability, it is not surprising that the number of extended sequences, long poems, and book-length poems began to increase in the 1990s and has grown exponentially in the twenty-first century. So numerous are the poets of the current generation who include a long poem in their publications that it has even earned a moniker, “the project book.” (The trend toward extended sequences has been further enabled by university presses that establish competitions for publication requiring the submissions of a book-length manuscript accompanied by a “reader’s fee” used to offset publication costs of the winning volume.) The project book that prompts the poet to accept a role as a culturally responsible player, using expressive means to critically analyze large issues, has roots in forerunners working within the Cold War years. Crises have defined the major poetic texts of the twentieth century in the aftermath of the First World War, and they have only increased since then. Poets since the 1990s have taken up such matters. Longs poems have been investigating history through imagining ancestors who could have been models for social justice; they have been restaging North American captivity narratives to include forgotten actors; and they have been reconsidering sites of mob violence not as necessary but voidable. They have been considering catastrophes that introduce the threat of a new normal (HIV and other epidemics, terrorism both foreign and domestic, Katrina). And most of all, they have been acknowledging the advent of the Anthropocene, the term geologists reserve for this era in which the human faces isolation in a time of mass extinction. There is more than enough subject matter—indeed, there is all too much.

WORKS CITED Ashbery, J. (1975), Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror, New York: Viking. Ashbery, J. (1977), Houseboat Days, New York: Penguin.

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Barbera, J. V. (1976), “Shape and Flow in The Dream Songs,” Twentieth Century Literature 22(2): 146–62. Barnhisel, G. (2015), Cold War Modernists: Art, Literature and American Cultural Diplomacy, New York: Columbia University Press. Berryman, J. (1960), “Twelve Dream Songs,” Noble Savage 1 (February 1960): 118–25. Berryman, J. (1969), The Dream Songs, New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux. Berryman, J. (1990), “The Jolly Old Man is a Silly Old Dumb,” in P. Mariani, Dream Song: A Life of John Berryman, 299, New York: Morrow. Charters, A. (1992), “Introduction,” in A. Charters (ed.), The Portable Beat Reader, xv–xxxvi, New York: The Viking Press. Dewey, A. D. (2007), Beyond Maximus: The Construction of Public Voice in Black Mountain Poetry, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Dewey, A. D. (2015), “The Modern American Long Poem,” in W. Kalaidjian (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Modern American Poetry, 65–76, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Dove, R. (1986), “A Conversation with Rita Dove,” in Stan Sanvel Rubin and Earl G. Ingersoll (eds.), Black American Literature Forum 20(3): 277–40. Dove, R. (2017), Collected Poems, 1974–2004, New York: Norton. Duncan, R. (1960), The Opening of the Field, London: Jonathan Cape. Duncan, R. (1966), Of the War: Passages 22-27, Berkeley: Oyez. Duncan, R. (1968a), Bending the Bow, New York: New Directions. Duncan, R. (1968b), Derivations: Selected Poems 1950–1956, London: Fulcrum. Duncan, R. (1969), “A Poem Beginning with a Line by Pindar,” in The Opening of the Field, 62–9, London: Jonathan Cape. Fredman, S. (2015), “San Francisco and the Beats,” in A. Bendixen and S. Burt (eds.), The Cambridge History of American Poetry, 823-843, New York: Cambridge University Press. Gaddis, J. L. (2005), The Cold War: A New History, New York: Penguin. Ginsberg, A. (1984), Collected Poems, 1947–1980, New York: Harper & Row. Hillen, A. (2006), 1973: Nervous Breakdown: Watergate, Warhol and the Birth of Post-Sixties America, New York: Bloomsbury. Howard, J. (1967), “Whiskey & Ink, Whiskey & Ink,” Life 63(3): 67–76. Kachka, B. (2013), Hothouse: The Art of Survival and the Survival of Art at America’s Most Celebrated Publishing House, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York: Simon & Schuster. Keenaghan, E. (2008), “Life, War and Love: The Queer Anarchism of Robert Duncan’s Poetic Action during the Vietnam War,” Contemporary Literature 49(4): 634–59. Kleinzahler, A. (2015), “All the Girls Said So,” London Review of Books 37(13): https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/ v37/n13/aug​ust-klei​nzah​ler/all-the-girls-said-s (accessed April 19, 2021). Kozlovsky, R. (2004), “Beat Spaces,” in B. Colomina, A. Brennan, and J. Kim (eds.), Cold War Hothouses: Inventing Postwar Culture from Cockpit to Playboy, 190–215, Princeton, NJ: Princeton, Architectural Press. Lowell, R. (1957), “Poetry Reading: March 27, 1957,” San Francisco State University Poetry Center Digital Archive, diva.sfsu.edu/collections/poetrycenter/bundles 191213 (accessed May 31, 2021). Lowell, R. (1959), Life Studies, New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux. Lowell, R. (1964), For the Union Dead, New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux. Lowell, R. (1987), Collected Prose, ed. Robert Giroux, New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux. McClatchy, J. D. (1989), White Paper on Contemporary American Poetry, New York: Columbia University Press.

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Messerli, D. (1987), “Introduction,” in Douglas Messerli (ed.), “Language” Poetries: An Anthology, 1–12, New York: New Directions. Nelson, C. (1981), Our Last First Poets: Vision and History in Contemporary American Poetry, Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Notley, A. (1998), “Iovis Omnia Plenta,” Chicago Review 44(1): 117–29. O’Brien, K. (2006), “The United Sates, War, and the Twentieth Century,” in C. Bigsby (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Modern American Culture, 235–55, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Perloff, M. (1980), “ ‘Fragments of a Buried Life’: John Ashbery’s Dream Songs,” in D. Lehman (ed.), Beyond Amazement: New Essays on John Ashbery, 66–86, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Renaldo and Clara (1978), [Film] Dir. Bob Dylan, USA: Circuit Films. https://vimeo.com/309422​131 (accessed April 16, 2021). Rosenthal, M. L. (1960), The Modern Poets: A Critical Introduction, New York: Oxford University Press. Schulman, B. J. (2001), The Seventies: The Great Shift in American Culture, Society and Politics, New York: Da Capo Press. Shaughnessy, B. (1999), “Rita Dove: Taking the Heat,” Publishers Weekly 245(15): April 12. https://www.publi​ sher​swee​kly.com/pw/print/19990​412/33770-rita-dove-tak​ing-the-heat.html (accessed April 14, 2021). Silliman, R. (1988), What, San Francisco, CA: The Figures. Silliman, R. (1989), The New Sentence, New York: Roof Books. Stiehl, H. (1963), “[Untitled]” Ramparts 2(1): 6–15. Sunstein, C. (2019), How Change Happens, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Thurston, M. (2012) “The Tranquilized Fifties: Forms of Dissent in Postwar American Poetry,” in C. Nelson (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Modern and Contemporary American Poetry, 487–506, New York: Oxford University Press. Vendler, H. (1995a), Soul Says: On Recent Poetry, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Vendler, H. (1995b), The Given and the Made: Strategies of Poetic Redefinition, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Virilio, P., and S. Lotringer (2008), Pure War, trans. M. Polizzotti, Cambridge: Semiotext(e). Waldman, A. (1996a), Fast-Speaking Woman; Chants & Essays, San Francisco, CA: City Lights Pocket Poets No. 33. Waldman, A. (1996b), “Introduction,” in Anne Waldman (ed.), The Beat Book: Writings from the Beat Generation, xix–xxiii, Boston, MA: Shambhala. Waldman, A. (2011), The Iovis Trilogy: Colors in the Mechanism of Concealment, Minneapolis, MN: Coffee House Press. Young, K. (1999), “Handkerchief Sandwich,” in Poetry Society of America Forum in Form https://poetry​soci​ety. org/featu​res/on-poe​try/on-form-kevin-young (accessed April 19, 2021).

FURTHER READING Bradley, John, ed. (2005), Atomic Ghost: Poets Respond to the Nuclear Age, Minneapolis, MN: Coffee House Press. Clark, Suzanne (2000), Cold Warriors: Manliness on Trial in the Rhetoric of the West, Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. Gray, Jeffrey, and Anne Keniston, eds. (2016), The News from Poems: Essays on the 21st Century American Poetry of Engagement, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

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Harrington, Joseph (2002), Poetry and the Public: The Social Form of Modern U.S. Poetics, Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. Kirsch, Adam (2005), The Wounded Surgeon: Confession and Transformation in Six American Poets, New York: Norton. Levine, Caroline (2015), Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Medovoi, Leerom (2005), Rebels: Youth and the Cold War Origins of Identity, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Metres, Philip (2007), Behind the Lines: War Resistance Poetry on the American Homefront Since 1941, Iowa City: University of Iowa Press. Nelson, Maggie (2017), Women, the New York School, and Other True Abstraction, Iowa City: University of Iowa Press. Vendler, Helen (1995), The Given and the Made: Strategies of Poetic Redefinition, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

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CHAPTER FIVE

Butler, Le Guin, and Feminist Science Fiction of the Cold War KATLYN WILLIAMS

A 1977 study of the demographics of science fiction (sf) consumption attempted, using readership data for the most popular sf magazines, as well as two studies conducted at major sf conventions, to put numbers to the frequent assumption that sf “is a literature written by males for male readers” (Berger 1977: 232). Though the results confirmed that sf ’s readership in the 1940s and 1950s was indeed dominated by men, the study also revealed that the numbers of women readers of sf had grown by more than half: women now constituted 25–29 percent of the subscribers to magazines such as Nebula, New Worlds, and The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. Astounding Science Fiction (later Analog), possibly the most famous of the pulps, boasted only 6.7 percent women readers in 1949, and only 11.9 percent nearly ten years later in 1958. By 1974, however, the number had reached 29 percent. This study and others like it confirm the common assumptions about sf ’s masculinist origins and trends, but they also show that women were always there in the margins, and that their numbers were steadily growing. However, similar information about readers of color is absent. The stories themselves, which rarely, if ever, featured protagonists other than white men, reflected these absences. But during the Cold War, shifts in readership began to lead to shifts in representation. Burgeoning talents like the African American writer Octavia Butler were growing up as avid fans of the genre, finding an inspirational spark in sf ’s radical potential while simultaneously, though perhaps unconsciously, recognizing the ways in which certain identities failed to be reflected within its pages. The effects of these absences were twofold. On the one hand, a new generation of authors were inspired to fill these absences by experimenting with more diverse plots and protagonists. On the other hand, these authors lacked narrative models for this work and, in adhering to the conventions of the genre, tended to replicate many of the same masculinist perspectives and values.1 For authors like Butler, of course, this effect was compounded, since they lacked sf models for Male sf authors have also struggled to avoid perpetuating racist or sexist stereotypes in their well-intentioned depictions of either a postracial society or critiques of violence based on difference. For example, Robert Heinlein’s 1964 post-apocalypse novel Farnham’s Freehold not only attempts a critique of racial oppression but also perpetuates a whole host of upsetting racial stereotypes in the telling. 1

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both femininity and Blackness. “We managed,” Butler said in a 1996 interview, “to get through adolescence without being introduced to any black culture” (Butler and Potts 1996: 335). Butler’s comments, directed at the educational system at large, indicate that minority readers confronted a homogenous perspective. Even so, Butler’s ruminations on her experiences as an isolated but dedicated sf fan during the mid-century are representative of those of minority scholars and authors of the field, who continue to reflect on sf ’s dual impulses: futurity without equity.2 Though the genre’s purpose is to imagine the vast possibilities of difference that might exist in the universe, its perspectives have been, ironically, strictly circumscribed. Sf and fantasy have the unique capacity to transcend the constraints of space and time, which allows the individual reader, perhaps especially one who is discriminated against or alienated, to imagine alternatives and explode the status quo. This makes the genre’s failure to realize the inherent idealism of its premise all the more ironic. This contradiction is also captured in the curious interactions between Cold War ideology and a lineage of transgressive science fictional storytelling. In the 1950s, sf was particularly well positioned to provide unique and even subversive examinations of American technological dependence, nationalism, and idealism. For example, the genre often envisioned and depicted alternative family structures, deviating sharply from the oppressive 1950s concept of ideal domesticity (May 1988). These countercultural instincts, however, competed with other sf characteristics that aligned strictly with conventional American ideals, including stoic male protagonists, passive heroines, and triumphalist individualist politics. Ultimately, the archetypal white and male protagonist of the sf novel remained hegemonic. Leading up to the 1970s, the typical sf hero remained another way of imagining the ideal patriot. Women authors like Butler and Ursula K. Le Guin spent their formative years immersed in this landscape, and much of their work attempts to redress the problem of futurity without equity while still employing the beloved conventions of the genre. Though other authors from the period were making similar attempts, Butler and Le Guin are most often cited as trailblazers for a feminist, and feminine, sf. Despite this, many critics have noted how Le Guin and Butler have failed to fully disentangle their work from its more masculinist origins. The tension remains, and continues to shape the study of the genre and its development.

THE COLLECTIVE MIND Contemporary studies of sf put into bold type the inherent contradiction that lies at the root of sf ’s gender trouble: how can a genre built and maintained on imagining alternatives to this world so consistently reproduce this world’s systemic failures? In 1975, Le Guin pointed out the genre’s plot failures, tracking the development of the typical sf plot: from “simple racism,” wherein the metaphorical “Other” is a mass of bodies to be controlled or exterminated, toward the gradual allowance within sf of the “sympathetic alien” (“American SF”: 209). The racism wasn’t only in the stories, however. Samuel R. Delany, in a well-known anecdote, recounted having his work rejected by John Campbell Jr. of Analog on the basis of his (and his character’s) Blackness: “He didn’t feel his readership would be able to relate to a black main character … Campbell had nothing against my being black, you understand … No, perish the thought!” (Delaney 2000: 387). An example of the personal narrative approach to theorizing race and sf is Isaiah Lavender III’s introduction “Coloring Science Fiction,” in Black and Brown Planets: The Politics of Race in Science Fiction (2014): 2–11. 2

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Delaney’s comments emphasize that it was not always straightforward or blatant racism that motivated the genre’s limited scope or showed up in its plots but also “the commercialized form of liberal American prejudice” (387). In this manner, the traditional demographics of the genre’s writers, editors, and readers—primarily white men—were reproduced and entrenched in the texts themselves, predetermining that the tropes, attitudes, and ideologies of the genre’s most influential works would be replicated in their imitators. Several additional factors help to explain the masculine gatekeeping culture of sf, however. In the years leading up to the Cold War, sf authors and consumers were highly sensitive to their so-called “ghettoization” by critics and by academia. Feeling sneered at by critics, authors and readers alike were on the defensive. They were right to be, as Cold War–era critics were largely dismissive of the genre. Susan Sontag, in her 1965 essay “The Imagination of Disaster,” mercilessly lambasted sf films by suggesting that they were not merely bad but also irresponsible and “inadequate” responses to the specter of looming nuclear disaster. To her, sf narratives were “a sampling, stripped of sophistication, of the inadequacy of most people’s response to the unassimilable terrors that infect their consciousness” (Sontag 1965: 48). Her analysis of sf narratives condescendingly grants their facile charm, while insisting that the narratives themselves are a kind of grotesque and unethical comfort food for viewers scared of the bomb: they were the “intersection between a naively and largely debased commercial art product and the most profound dilemmas of the contemporary situation” (48). Sontag’s comments emphasize the degenerate nature of the popular, painting genre work as a crass and empty capitalist ploy to satiate an unthinking populace. To defend against such triviality, what was needed was serious work, and Cold War intellectuals such as Dwight Macdonald sought to defend the literary canon by maintaining strict binaries such as that of “literary” and “genre” (Macdonald 1953). These sentiments simply continue a long-standing and pervasive academic assumption that popular art doesn’t merit serious critical consideration.3 This dismissiveness and derision leveled at sf then molded the burgeoning field of sf criticism that was emerging in the mid-century. Gary Westfahl’s brief history of sf criticism outlines the struggle among defenders of the genre between perceptions of disreputable literary merit and sf ’s high entertainment value and body of genuine scientific knowledge (Westfahl 1999). In the United States, the genre exploded out of the pulps, forever linking its reputation with the tolerance for bad prose that characterized those magazines. Prominent American sf critics, reviewers, and publishers of the period, like Campbell Jr., Damon Knight, and James Blish, pled for pulp editors to insist on “the minimum standards of competence that apply in the writing of all fiction” (Westfahl 1999: 198). Even sf ’s most vocal defenders tacitly if begrudgingly granted that the genre fell short in belletristic merit. So, as sf ’s critical status remained in question from without, a sea change began to take place within the sf community. Publishers insisted upon better writing, concerned with the maturation of a still-young genre, while taking a looser approach to scientific accuracy in the stories (Westfahl 1999: 198). With sf denied critical validation, sf authors and consumers created an insular community of their own. Jay Clayton offers a useful metaphor for considering the parochial dynamic that the sf community reactively developed to counter intellectual dismissal: the “collective mind” Though intellectual sentiment during the Cold War period was certainly concerned with the partitioning of the literary away and above the popular, this impulse was by no means a new development. See Andreas Huyssen’s crucial 1986 essay “Mass Culture as Woman: Modernism’s Other.” 3

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trope (Clayton 2013: 325). This trope first began to appear in novels and stories published primarily in the 1940s. Authors like Lewis Padgett, Robert A. Heinlein, A. E. van Vogt, and Theodore Sturgeon gravitated toward representations of the spontaneous (single-generation) development of telepathy, often leading to the “merging of individuals into a larger collective mind” as in Arthur C. Clarke’s Overmind.4 The trope takes on a profound resonance when considering its historical context. In the aftermath of the Second World War, the nation’s fraught relationship to both ends of the political spectrum (authoritarianism vs. democracy, communism vs. individualism) took on new significance.5 A host of anxieties, related to an unprecedented political and technological crisis and the strict intellectual sanctions against the popular, contributed to sf becoming a conceptual safe haven for nonconformists, “persecuted by an uncomprehending majority, but who paradoxically banded together in tight-knit communities of fellow believers” (327). The same contradictory impulses that colored American political life— the fear of extremism, the longing for a communal identity, and the alignment of individualism with antiauthoritarianism—were intrinsic to the genre’s development and find expression in the collective mind trope.6 In texts that feature this trope, an emergent species was typically depicted as consisting of extraordinary and relatable individuals; it was their extraordinariness that allowed the trope to speak so acutely to an otherwise palpable fear of subsumed individuality and extremist politics. The sf community became, in a sense, the collective mind in question: a group of exceptional individuals capable of brilliance and alternative methods of imagining the world. It also established a precedent for the genre’s unpreparedness to incorporate diversity or respond to identity politics by simultaneously privileging triumphant individualist trajectories for its protagonists, while collectively assuming a postracial, masculine position. These attitudes, when combined with a defensiveness against the censure of a literary elite, help to explain sf ’s contradictory impulses. Partly because critics dismissed it, the genre celebrated its allegorical and subversive capacities, giving its authors liberty to take on otherwise dangerous countercultural themes and ideologies. Asked what attracted her to sf, Butler replied, “It’s potentially the freest genre in the world” (Beal 1986: 14). Similarly, Le Guin states, “there are different ways of thinking, being, and doing things. Both science fiction and fantasy offer more options” (Justice and Le Guin 2018). The genre’s outsider, fringe mentality gave rise to much of what is essential to its success: a progressive strain that has often run provocatively counter to the status quo—and gotten away with it. As Tom Shippey puts it, The fantastic elements of the stories were a cover, or a frame, for the discussion of many real issues which were hardly open to serious consideration in any other popular medium: issues such as the nature of science, the conflict of business and government, the limits of loyalty, the power of social norms to affect individual perception. It is this which science fiction fans felt that they could not get anywhere else. (Shippey 2016: 227)

The “collective mind” theme is one that Butler would also take on in the Patternist series, which tracks the development of a network of telepaths created by coerced biological eugenics. I will discuss this series in the last section of this essay. 5 See Erich Fromm’s Escape from Freedom (1941) for a theorization of America’s ambivalent attraction to authoritarianism. 6 This is especially true considering that an embrace of the “collective,” in its communist praxis, would seem like anathema to the US/Western ideology of the period. 4

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These comments speak to the transgressive feeling shared by the sf community of readers and authors. Practitioners of the form were, in some ways, in a secret rebellion against the powers that be—a curious irony, considering how leftist critics saw popular culture such as sf as a manifestation of capitalist tyranny. In the years leading up to and throughout the Cold War, sf featured some of the most potent fictional depictions of anti-fascism and antiauthoritarianism. Pulp stories of the period exhibit the paranoiac tone sf took on as public sentiment shifted regarding the government’s handling of nuclear information. Many stories dismantled nationalist arguments about American exceptionalism, casting doubt on the American government’s ability to handle scientific discovery and development ethically. A few common themes of the period particularly reflect a general antigovernment feeling among sf authors of the Cold War, including characterizing American attempts to hoard scientific knowledge as inherently fascist, glorifying protagonists on the fringes (such as conspiracy theorists) discounted by polite society and pitted against the government officials and politicians who seek to discredit them, and conflating government with repression and stagnation. Though these themes were crucial in developing an identity for the genre, they also contributed to the “collective mind” problem. Farah Mendlesohn discusses the common trope of the “alienated, isolated individual as genius,” characterizing the protagonists of Greg Egan’s Schild’s Ladder as having “succumbed to the idea that ‘different’ is the same as superior,” believing that “their own lives were at the centre of the universal narratives” (Mendlesohn 2003: 10). This concept of difference as equivalent to superiority is crucial in theorizing the manner in which sf ’s double truth—futurity without equity—developed. On the one hand, sf attempts to remedy inequity and hierarchy by presenting future societies within worlds that have solved these problems by creating a more collective mind or a communal world, in other words, by erasing difference. Ironically, this replicates the very lack of diversity, and therefore inequity, that it supposedly resolves. Taken together, these pervasive themes from the 1940s and 1950s set the stage for the radical, potentially anarchistic ideologies that both Le Guin and Butler would take up. At the same time, the exclusivity of the genre up to that point created serious hurdles for both authors. There is a reason that sf became so exclusive and insular, but that exclusivity and insularity also resulted in a communal resistance to change or transformation, a reality starkly opposed to the transformative themes of the novels. Sf has often viewed the feminine perspective as intrusive, and women and people of color as interlopers.7 The genre reflected the worldview of white teenage boys. Butler talked about this in 1986: Editors … didn’t really think that sex or women should be mentioned other than as rewards for the hero or terrible villainesses. Blacks were not mentioned without there being any particular reason. Sex was kept out because science fiction began in this country as a genre for young boys. They were either at their girl-hating stage or they had broken out in pimples and had wonderful brains and terrible bodies so they were not wildly beset by the opposite sex. (Beal 1986: 14)

This phenomenon continues to be on disheartening display in recent years. A particularly jarring example is the 2015 Hugo Awards, wherein a splinter group of radically misogynist, homophobic, and racist sf fans and writers succeeded in gaming the audience-voted awards—much like 2014’s GamerGate—to ensure no women winners or winners of color. The incident spurred large-scale conversations about race, gender, and failures of representation in the sf community, with women sf authors of color like N. K. Jemisin facing online harassment, threats, and even doxxing. These incidents and conversations continue to the present day. 7

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Butler’s comments give a sense of what women authors were up against as women’s readership grew, and the role of women in the genre became more visible. Women authors must maintain a balance between market expectations and their own diversifying impulses; as J. Andrew Deman writes, the woman sf author must juggle “legitimate depictions of sex and sexuality” with the “same escapist element that is the benchmark of science fiction” (Deman 2005: 7). Deman’s use of the term “legitimate” speaks to the idea that women authors are tasked with producing more realistic depictions of women’s (and men’s) psychological complexity as well as realistic depictions of sexual relationships and violations of consent. But at the same time, they must be sure to incorporate enough of the genre’s familiar elements to avoid losing the bulk of sf ’s still male-dominated readership. Women characters in sf of the 1950s and 1960s were often reduced to easily digested symbols that failed to capture the complex realities of women’s lived experiences. Le Guin bluntly argued, “SF has either totally ignored women, or presented them as squeaking dolls subject to instant rape by monsters—or old-maid scientists de-sexed by hypertrophy of the intellectual organs—or, at best, loyal little wives or mistresses of accomplished heroes” (“American SF”: 208). Women authors of the 1960s and 1970s pushed back against these representations, seeking to offer more thoughtful and nuanced roles for women in the fantastic.

ON ELIMINATING GENDER Butler and Le Guin, perhaps the two most canonical women authors of sf, appear to be a natural pairing. Both are taught in schools across the country, and critics and reviewers revere them. Both are considered “literary” outliers, exemplars of the artistic achievement the genre can attain in skilled hands. By challenging “dominant representations of gender” and “stretch[ing] the limits and definitions of the genre,” Le Guin and Butler are credited as sparking the 1970s “second wave” of sf (Wolmark 1999: 231). Éva Federmayer (2000) adds that “the protagonist and the interpellated reader of sf could no longer be automatically regarded as the definitional young man” (104). As revered figures, both authors have undergone public and self-conscious examinations of the impact of their own identities on their fiction, grappling with their successes and failures in living up to the celebrated progressive and feminist projects attributed to them. They also reflected frankly on the experience of authorship within a male-dominated genre, though in markedly different ways. Le Guin’s reflections shifted in tone over time, creating a feedback loop of revision and a record of her own expanding feminist consciousness. In Le Guin’s own words, she wanted to “define and understand the meaning of gender, and the meaning of sexuality, in my life and in society,” viewing her best-known work, The Left Hand of Darkness (1969), as the “the process of my thinking” (Dancing, 1981: 8). The plot of Left Hand includes political machinations and a metaphorical, antinationalist exploration of the Cold War, depicting a mirror dilemma between the central planet of Gethen’s two territories: Karhide, a feudal monarchy, and Orgeryn, a version of a bureaucratic communist state. The protagonist Genly Ai, a Black male diplomat of the intergalactic alliance the Ekumen, must navigate this tense political standoff. The depiction of the planet’s incipient nationalism is primary to the novel’s examination of a mishmash of 1950s and 1960s anxieties. The seemingly socialistic Orgeryn’s docility is a façade for power-hungry covert agents, while Karhide’s fascism is characterized by the mad king’s high temper. These elements collide with Le Quin’s thought

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experiment to eliminate gender, as all citizens of the novel’s alien planet Gethen are ambisexual. The novel is, at once, concerned with radical depictions of love and understanding and complex explorations of masculinist politics. The occasional contradictions between Le Guin’s competing instincts represent the arc of her career as a whole. Lisa Hammond Rashley has compiled a revealing timeline of Le Guin’s shifting attitudes toward the question of gender in her fiction, laying bare Le Guin’s initial blindness to her own predetermined participation in the masculinist tropes and standards of sf (Rashley 2007: 25). In approaching the double bind of women sf authors—to appeal to the market while centering women and femininity—Le Guin reflects that, in retrospect, she simply opted out. Instead, she unconsciously embodied a masculine authorial voice. Le Guin imagines her early authorial self as an “artificial man,” the “artist who was above gender,” now “exposed as a man hiding in a raincoat” (Dancing, 11). Of the lack of women protagonists, the marginalization of women characters who did appear, and the absence of women writers in the field, Le Guin later reported, “None of this bothered me. It was my tradition, and I worked in it happily” (White 2016: 101). Similar to the postracial attitude of sf in the 1950s, Le Guin assumed a genderless position. Due to the already established formulas and markers of sf, however, that position was interpreted as masculine. Many of Le Guin’s most celebrated works, like The Left Hand of Darkness, The Wizard of Earthsea, and The Dispossessed, feature male protagonists on individualist journeys. The Left Hand of Darkness famously contains no women at all. While agreeing on its literary merit, feminist critics attacked Left Hand for centering a male protagonist, using “he/him” pronouns for the ambisexual Gethenians, and figuring the disgraced Prime Minister Estraven’s cultural status as masculine (Annas 1978: 151). These choices undeniably helped create and bolster Le Guin’s reputation as a “literary,” not merely “genre,” author. Assuming the masculine position had enormous benefits for Le Guin, both in and outside of the sf community, which intensified the critical feminist reaction against the novel. There are, however, more generous readings of the impact of these controversial choices. Though Le Guin’s treatment of gender receives much of the novel’s feminist critical attention, these critiques are complicated by the novel’s surprisingly optimistic depiction of interplanetary cooperation. The novel incorporates the era’s skepticism of proprietary scientific knowledge and the corrupting influence of nationalism, but supplants these ideas with the existence of a functioning, non-despotic alliance—the Ekumen. It is suggested that Gethen’s entrance into the Ekumen will, over time, serve as a remedy to the planet’s burgeoning patriotic aggression. Though the novel characteristically follows the sexist protagonist Ai on a successful solo mission, the mission’s success also depends upon Ai’s total ideological transformation. Alongside Ai, the reader undergoes the same journey. John Pennington asserts that Le Guin’s use of the “he/him” pronouns only aids the novel’s requirement that readers “resist a gendered reading of the narrative” (2000: 352). It does so by ensuring that readers self-consciously fall into the same traps of language as protagonist Ai. Ai is unable to read or think (or mind-speak) androgynously until the novel’s conclusion, reflecting the reader’s own failure to “read” Estraven on the novel’s terms, as both male and female. The shape of the narrative also deviates in significant ways from the triumphalist norm of the similarly antigovernment, antiextremist sf tropes of the period.8 Ai is the unremarkable and expendable For more focused analysis of anarchist themes in Le Guin’s work, see Lewis Call’s “Postmodern Anarchism in the Novels of Ursula K. Le Guin” (SubStance 36(2): 87–105). Call offers a convincing reading of Le Guin’s major novels as representing 8

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diplomat of a politically apathetic interplanetary entity, tasked with the entirely human problem of understanding and embracing difference. Le Guin, though employing the familiar prose style and subject matter of her male peers, establishes a precedent for a central tenant of feminine sf: acceptance of the unknown. Through the act of falling in love with the ambisexual prime minister and “traitor” Estraven, Ai eventually triumphs over an individualist journey not of heroism but of education. As Eric Rabkin points out, it is the love between Ai and Estraven that effectively collapses the borders between Orgeryn and Karhide, ending the simmering Gethenian Cold War by indoctrinating the entire planet into the Ekumen alliance (1979: 286). Here, cooperation with the Ekumen is portrayed not as the forfeit of Gethenian freedom but rather as a fruitful means of endorsing the galactic dissemination of knowledge. Though Ai’s narration is full of casual misogyny and small-mindedness, these traits do not represent the Ekumenical mission; in fact, they have to be repudiated for the mission to succeed. Craig and Diana Barrow write of Ai’s attraction to the philosophy of the Handdara, a fictional equivalent to Le Guin’s own preferred doctrine of Taoism, as the turning point: “from notions of masculine domination, Genly is being led to feminine participation” (1987: 89). Genly Ai learns acceptance by rejecting concepts of national hierarchy and aggression, central elements of Western characterization during the Cold War and beyond. By approaching the political and the sociocultural as one, we arrive at a more useful contemporary examination of Le Guin’s work and its legacy. Though it is true that the novel is aligned with masculinity, it also asks all readers to read against, however imperfectly, stabilized understandings of gender, citizenship, and belonging. Even when accounting for the pronoun problem, the failure of women readers to read themselves into the androgyne Estraven is, in a way, illustrative of the novel’s ideological success. Though Le Guin’s intention to “eliminate gender” (Dancing, 10) was a failure, that failure set the stage for Le Guin’s gradual awakening—a journey on which she invites her readers to accompany her, acknowledging that she needed Genly Ai as much as readers did. Though viewing Gethen through the eyes of a woman protagonist would be a worthy project, the kind of project that Le Guin would later take up in revisiting Earthsea in 1990s Tehanu, The Left Hand of Darkness is a success in its own right.9 Today, Le Guin’s novel continues to resonate, asking us to read against the traps of language and ideology that continually reproduce our damaging hierarchies.

BLACK FEMININE FUTURITY Octavia Butler and Le Quin’s careers are in conversation in many ways, but perhaps most notably in terms of their feminist progression. Across their career, both authors trace a stylistic and thematic migration from masculine mimicry to embodied femininity—and, for Butler, Blackness. Taken together, these trajectories help to construct a lineage of the impact of artistic participation as a woman in a male-dominated sphere. Their work is intimately concerned with a desire to eradicate three different modes of anarchist displacement via the representation of the Ekumen (an “alternative to the Galactic Empires so common in late 20th century fiction”). 9 Le Guin referred to her work in Tehanu as the “beginning of a genuine reconciliation” with feminism, in an interview with Nick Gevers (SF Site 2001). The interview itself provides a jarring example of the persistently sexist attitudes within sf, and the manner in which women authors are required to engage with these attitudes. Le Guin chastises Gevers at several points for his barely veiled skepticism toward her turn away from the more “traditional” sf arcs of the first three Earthsea books.

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binary ideologies, differentiating their novels from existing sf formulas. At the same time, both authors met with the double bind of women’s participation in the genre, contending with both the period’s intellectual skepticism toward the popular, as well as a lack of internal models for their work. In the struggle to find validation and belonging, they sometimes failed to write themselves out of existing hierarchies and formulas. Butler’s enormous influence as the foremost Black sf writer (epitomized by her 2021 inclusion in the prestigious Library of America series) has perhaps discouraged critics from engaging in frank discussions about the maturation of her work and style. Though Kindred (1979) likely receives the most critical attention of any of her texts, it was a major departure from the work Butler was simultaneously producing, the Patternist series. The Patternist series, published from 1976 to 1980, demonstrates the impact on Butler of a lifetime spent imbibing imaginative sf texts without value or depth for their marginal or absent women or Black characters. Butler, in retrospect, reflected on the masculine style and plotting of her earliest texts, noting that “in the early Patternist stories I more or less copied the boys’ books,” wherein women “were just waiting to be done unto” (McCaffery 1990: 58). Butler’s comments are revealing, in that unlike Le Guin, Butler was always concerned with centering women in her fiction. None of the Patternist novels lack a woman protagonist, and the series often reads like a training ground for Butler to practice fleshing out many of her core themes, such as enslavement, sexual coercion, violence, and the options available to women under conditions of oppression. Many of these themes, especially the exploration of racial difference within the novels’ past and future societies, are treated with nuance. However, in comparison to Butler’s later work, the Patternist series succumbs to sf ’s antifeminist norm in two significant ways: a nihilistic approach to exploring themes of futurity, and the pointless exploitation of woman protagonists.10 The plot of the series ultimately forms a closed loop of oppression and control, a choice that registers starkly against the hopeful futurity of sf ’s second wave. With humanity descending into an endless interspecies war, the series lacks a sustained or compelling argument about either humanity or the future. Additionally, Butler reproduces antiwoman sf arcs, making a spectacle of women’s suffering. A particularly egregious example is 1984’s Clay’s Ark, which follows its biracial, teenage protagonists through a grueling series of traumatic events used as plot devices, including rape, forced pregnancy, and torture. These events signify very little thematically, placing a high premium instead on shock value.11 Unlike Le Guin, whose early novels simply avoided femininity, Butler’s entire oeuvre includes loaded and complex themes of women’s autonomy and racial difference. The result, however, is occasionally counterproductive, exemplifying the danger of incorporating these arcs within an otherwise formulaic pastiche of masculinist sf tropes. It would not take long, however, for Butler to break out of the established mold. The Xenogenesis novels, published from 1987 to 1989 and released as the collective volume Lilith’s Brood in 2000, are especially successful correctives to Butler’s early mimicry of male sf and horror traditions.

It is worth noting that Wild Seed, published in 1980, is an outlier to these claims and is the only book in the Patternist series to have received significant critical attention. A prequel written last, the otherwise marginalized witch-healer Aanyanwu is here given her own story featuring mature and coherent explorations of Butler’s most consistent themes: migration, generational difference, enslavement, and acceptance. 11 This style is reminiscent of the highly masculine sf pulps and the style of splattergore, exemplified in the 1980s by authors like Clive Barker and Jack Ketchum. 10

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The plot of the Xenogenesis novels encapsulates the central project of Butler’s fiction: to sidestep the reproduction of binaristic ideologies without ignoring the harm that hierarchical thinking has already done to our species (Ramírez 2002). Butler has cited conservative Reaganite politics as the generative influence on the novels, pointing toward the discourse of nuclear war as representative of humanity’s conflicting impulse toward intelligence and hierarchical behavior, with, ultimately, Cold War–era ideology as indicative of the latter’s likelihood to win out. Rachel Greenwald Smith writes, “the novels engage with the specific catastrophic imagination of Reagan-era nuclear fears while insisting on the symptomatic nature of this particular expression of human progressive imagination” (2009: 556). Though the depiction of nuclear apocalypse is intrinsic to the novel’s premise, Butler also sees it as simply one of many potential endings for our species and treats the theme with profound complexity in her graphic and repetitious depiction of the power struggle between humans and the alien gene traders, the symbiotic and generative Oankali. Having been protected by the Oankali from nuclear annihilation, the human species is awakened 250 years later in hopes of resettling Earth with communities of Oankali/human hybrids. Though the Oankali’s project is philosophically hopeful, intended to benefit both species, its methodology is unceasingly traumatic. The Oankali’s ambiguous ethics and practices set Butler’s fiction apart from her forebears, depicting the seismic change of humanity’s necessary rebirth as an experience of great trauma and loss. Though the Oankali’s intentions are pacifistic, their biological superiority ensures that humans are powerless within the Oankali/human dynamic. The aliens are incapable of comprehending the human impulse that necessitates resistance to species transformation, since interbreeding represents the “cure” to the hierarchical tendencies that doom humanity. The gene trade is, thus, utopic in intention. However, the Oankali’s methods are often inarguably horrific, activating the collective memory of Nazi experimentation and American chattel slavery. In successfully achieving symbiosis, the Oankali engage in practices identical to the most aggressive and domineering of human acts, such as eugenics, drugging, imprisonment, forced pregnancy, coercive mating, and the nonconsensual copying and editing of human genes. Federmayer has compared the plot of the first novel, Dawn (1987), to a slave narrative, wherein Lilith attempts to teach her resistant awakened pupils to “learn and run” toward freedom (113). In the subsequent novels, this arc is reimagined as one of mediation: it is Lilith and her half-Oankali offspring, Akin and Jodahs, who will ultimately take on the role of navigator and intermediary between species, ultimately protecting the success of the gene trade. Though the basic plot of the Xenogenesis novels align readers with Lilith, thus asking us to consider the hopefulness of species change, it also squarely levels its gaze upon the violence and pain wrought upon humans by the Oankali. Still, the postapocalyptic setting of the novels ultimately validates the Oankali and their project. Butler is able to navigate this dialectic, the tension between violence and newness, through the centering of a woman protagonist who engages in genuinely progressive thinking. The development of Lilith across the Xenogenesis novels represents a mélange of sf tropes that would come to be strongly associated with the feminist “second wave” of sf following the 1960s, including acceptance of artificial reproduction, the struggle for human rights, tolerance as a moral strength, and positively valued hybridity. The triumph of the alien/human hybrid and the reframing of the borders of humanity is, ultimately, another way of deconstructing the meaning of citizenship. Lilith admires the speciesist loyalty of the resisters because it is inextricable from humankind’s stubborn nature. Yet, this loyalty to an obsolete society is a hollow victory. The Oankali’s methods are morally ambiguous, but Butler presents their desire for collaboration over dominion as preferable.

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Their species is endlessly mutable; change and transformation are crucial to their survival and their acquisition of knowledge.12 Butler never wavers in the novel’s core premise: humanity must transform or be annihilated. Lilith is the genesis of this transformation, and her construct Oankali offspring symbolize new directions for the species. The hope that the pair embody lies in two directions, with the allowance of a colony on Mars for resister humans, and the space-traveling future of the new Oankali–human race. The existence of the Mars community validates the necessity of the freedom to choose, while human acquiescence to the gene trade allows the reader to contemplate a future version of humankind without the desire to destroy what is different. While Le Guin’s feminist universes tend toward the specific, an individual’s trajectory of emotional and intellectual discovery, Butler’s narratives offer a wider lens in their attempts to imagine the unimaginable—the displacement of present systems and inequities. Butler’s work, taken as a whole, offers us an alternative framework outside the realist for understanding the experience of Blackness and womanhood in this country. Because her worlds directly confront the spectral violence of gender and racial discrimination, Butler is credited with expanding sf ’s literary prestige, worldbuilding, and universality. Ruth Salvaggio emphasizes the layered morality of Butler’s heroines, who privilege autonomy and freedom of choice over moral righteousness or purity, inhabiting roles and even committing acts of violence that would typically be reserved for men (Salvaggio 1984: 78). Butler overcame her early work’s occasional reproduction of misogyny by self-consciously fashioning subsequent, complicated female heroines that changed perceptions about what sf could be and offer to its readers. Butler’s most celebrated protagonists, Wild Seed’s (1980) witch-healer Aanyanwu, Kindred’s (1979) Edana, and Lilith, are contradictory at their core, exhibiting Butler’s attention to the pressure and demands of gender as an embodied concept. Each of these women wrestles with personal fealty to cultural feminine ideologies like structurally traditional marriages, the maternal impulse, and pleasure in sexual submission, even as they each exceed traditional boundaries of “womanhood” in their science fictional powers: shapeshifting, time travel, and, for Lilith, both super strength and enhanced cognitive abilities. Their exceptionalism is capable of occasionally minimizing the full impact of male violence, but it does not insulate them from harm.13 It is this attention to the lived experience of women, and Black women specifically, that sets Butler’s fiction apart from her peers and paved the way for many authors who would follow in her footsteps, like Nnedi Okorafor, N. K. Jemisin, Nisi Shawl, Tannarive Due, Junot Díaz, and Nalo Hopkinson—many of whom have been the targets of backlash from sf readers who resent the presence of women and writers of color in a genre that still retains much of its original white-male identity. The sea change in sf catalyzed by authors like Le Guin and Butler began radically refiguring entrenched ideas about who writes sf and for what purpose. It also began remedying the field’s critical inattention, connecting sf ’s traditional thematic focus on the limits of humanity and the visceral possibilities therein with enhanced, complex character-building and metaphor. Pamela Sargent or a closer look at Butler’s take on deterritorialization, fluid economies, and hybridity, see Schwab (2012). F Even, sometimes, in instances where it could; Butler’s women are always cognizant of the interplay between the benefits of navigating a situation by force or by strategy, a trait that is associated with the feminine. Lilith is careful not to show off or leverage her super strength to the Oankali’s other captives, lest she increase their hatred of her complicity with the aliens. Like the Oankali, she is only violent when her life is endangered. Similarly, the danger of existing within antebellum slavery necessitates that Dana mask her knowledge and abilities whenever possible. The small-mindedness of humans and the violence of systemic cultural institutions is always capable of overwhelming the superhuman. 12 13

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published her well-known first anthology featuring twelve women sf authors, Women of Wonder, in 1974, and in 1981, Marleen S. Barr published Future Females, the first critical anthology on sf focused expressly on women authors. These publications both achieved significant impact, emphasizing that the genre’s feminist awakening since the 1960s had made meaningful progress. The strict conventions that Le Guin and Butler, early women outliers in a marginalized field, had met began to feel increasingly malleable, as authors of the “feminist turn” and beyond approached their work with experimentation and complexity. However, the contradictory impulses of the Cold War period—sf ’s internal struggle between its masculinist roots and its inherent promise of futurity—continue to influence the tension between sf and gender and racial equality. Today, that impact continues to be felt in many ways: in persistent publishing disparities, in sustained critical skepticism toward the popular from mainstream arts and culture magazines and newspapers, through still-defensive masculine communities of gatekeeping sf fans, and through the vocal social movements inspired by sf authors sharing their experiences of discrimination. The achievements of pioneering authors like Le Guin and Butler were not the end of the story but helped to provide women in sf with a beginning.

WORKS CITED Annas, Pamela J. (1978), “New Worlds, New Words: Androgyny in Science Fiction Feminism,” Science Fiction Studies 5: 143–55. Barr, Marleen S. (1981), Future Females: A Critical Anthology, Bowling Green, KY: Bowling Green State University Popular Press. Barrow, Craig and Diana (1987), “The Left Hand of Darkness: Feminism for Men,” Mosaic 20(1): 83–96. Beal, Frances M., and Octavia Butler (1986), “Black Scholar Interview with Octavia Butler: Black Women and the Science Fiction Genre,” Black Scholar 17(2): 14–18. Berger, Albert I. (1977), “Science Fiction Fans in Socioeconomic Perspective: Factors in the Social Consciousness of a Genre,” Science Fiction Studies 4(13): 232–46. Butler, Octavia (1980), Wild Seed, New York: Warner Books. Butler, Octavia (1984), Clay’s Ark, New York: Grand Central. Butler, Octavia (1989), Lilith’s Brood, New York: Warner Books. Butler, Octavia E., and Stephen W. Potts (1996), “We Keep Playing the Same Record:’ A Conversation with Octavia E. Butler,” Science Fiction Studies 2(3): 331–8. Call, Lewis (2007), “Postmodern Anarchism in the Novels of Ursula K. Le Guin,” SubStance 36(2): 87–105. Clayton, Jay (2013), “The Ridicule of Time: Science Fiction, Bioethics, and the Posthuman,” American Literary History 25(2): 317–43. Delaney, Samuel R. (2000), “Racism and Science Fiction,” in Sheree R. Thomas (ed.), Dark Matter: A Century of Speculative Fiction in the African Diaspora, 383–97, New York: Warner Books. Deman, J. Andrew (2005), “Taking Out the Trash: Octavia E. Butler’s Wild Seed and the Feminist Voice in American SF,” FemSpec 6(2): 6–14. Federmayer, Éva (2000), “Octavia Butler’s Maternal Cyborgs: The Black Female World of the Xenogenesis Trilogy,” Hungarian Journal of English and American Studies 6(1): 103–18. Fromm, Erich (1941), Escape from Freedom, New York, Farrar & Rinehart. Justice, Faith L., and Ursula K. Le Guin (2018), “A 2001 Conversation with Sci-Fi and Fantasy Titan Ursula K. Le Guin (1929–2018),” Writer’s Digest. Available online: https://www.writer​sdig​est.com/be-inspi​red/2001-interv​ iew-urs​ula-k-le-guin (accessed December 29, 2020).

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Macdonald, Dwight (1953), “A Theory of Mass Culture.” Diogenes 1 (3): 1–17. May, Elaine Tyler (1988), Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era. New York: Basic Books. McCaffery, Larry (1990), “Octavia E. Butler,” in Larry McCaffery (ed.) Across the Wounded Galaxies: Interviews with Contemporary American Science Fiction Writers, 54–70, Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Mendlesohn, Farah (2003), “Introduction: Reading Science Fiction,” in Edward James and Farah Mendlesohn (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to Science Fiction, 1–14, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pennington, John (2000), “Exorcising Gender: Resisting Readers in Ursula K. Le Guin’s Left Hand of Darkness,” Extrapolation 41(4): 351–8. Rabkin, Eric S (1979), “Determinism, Free Will, and Point of View in Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness,” Extrapolation 20(1): 5–19. Ramírez, Catherine (2002) “Cyborg Feminism: The Science Fiction of Octavia Butler and Gloria Anzaldúa,” in Mary Flanagan and Austin Booth (eds.), Reload: Rethinking Women + Cyberculture, 374–402, Cambridge: Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Rashley, Lisa Hammond (2007), “Revisioning Gender: Inventing Women in Ursula K. Le Guin’s Nonfiction,” Biography 30(1): 22–47. Salvaggio, Ruth (1984), “Octavia Butler and the Black Science-Fiction Heroine,” Science Fiction 18 (2): 78–81. Sargent, Pamela (1974), Women of Wonder, New York: Vintage. Schwab, Gabriele (2012) “Ethnographies of the Future: Personhood, Agency, and Power in Octavia Butler’s Xenogenesis,” in Gabriele Schwab (ed.) Imaginary Ethnographies: Literature, Culture, and Subjectivity, 134– 56. New York: Columbia University Press. Shippey, Tom (2016), “The Cold War in Science Fiction, 1940–60,” in Tom Shippey (ed.) Hard Reading, 209–28, Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. Smith, Rachel Greenwald (2009), “Ecology Beyond Ecology: Life After the Accident in Octavia Butler’s ‘Xenogenesis’ Trilogy,” Modern Fiction Studies 55(3): 545–65. Sontag, Susan (1965), “The Imagination of Disaster,” Commentary (October 1): 42–8. Ursula K. Le Guin (1969), The Left Hand of Darkness, New York: Penguin Group. Ursula K. Le Guin (1975), “American SF and the Other,” Science Fiction Studies 2(3): 208–10. Ursula K. Le Guin (1989), Dancing at the Edge of the World, New York: Grove/Atlantic. Westfahl, Gary (1999), “The Popular Tradition of Science Fiction Criticism, 1926–1980,” Science Fiction Studies 26(2): 187–212. White, Jonathan (2016), “Ursula Le Guin—Coming Back from the Silence,” in Talking on the Water: Conversations about Nature and Creativity, 99–120, San Antonio, TX: Trinity University Press. Wolmark, Jenny (1999), “Postmodern Romances of Feminist Science Fiction,” in Jenny Wolmark (ed.) Cybersexualities: A Reader in Feminist Theory, Cyborgs, and Cyberspace, 230–8, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

FURTHER READING Barr, Marleen S. (1981), Future Females: A Critical Anthology, Bowling Green, KY: Bowling Green State University Popular Press. Francis, Consuela (2009), Conversations with Octavia Butler, Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. Greene, Martin H., and Joseph D. Olander, eds. (1979), Ursula K. LeGuin, New York: Taplinger. James, Edward, and Farah Mendlesohn, eds. (2003), The Cambridge Companion to Science Fiction, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Ketterer, David, and Ursula K. Le Guin (1975), “Ketterer on the ‘Left Hand of Darkness’ (with Response),” Science Fiction Studies 2(2): 137–46. LeFanu, Sarah (1989), Feminism and Science Fiction, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. McCaffery, Larry (1990), Across the Wounded Galaxies: Interviews with Contemporary American Science Fiction Writers, Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Shippey, Tom (2016), Hard Reading, Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. Thomas, Sheree R. (2000), Dark Matter: A Century of Speculative Fiction in the African Diaspora, New York: Warner Books. Ursula K. Le Guin (1989), Dancing at the Edge of the World, New York: Grove Atlantic.

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CHAPTER SIX

Cold War Spy Fiction: The Ethics of Fighting Fire with Fire SKIP WILLMAN

Spy fiction emerged in Great Britain around the turn of the twentieth century, propelled by the First World War–era fears of German invasions and anarchists (Cawelti and Rosenberg 1987: 38; Denning 1987: 40). Indeed, the establishment of the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS or later MI6) in 1909 was a response to these “widespread concerns about British vulnerability among public and government alike” (Jeffery 2010: 4). According to Michael Denning, the Cold War saw “the espionage thriller coming to dominate the entire field of popular fiction,” aided by the worldwide success of the James Bond novels and films in the 1960s (Denning 1987: 90). Denning argues the Bond novels serve as compensatory fantasies for a British nation in decline: “Though the Zeitgeist is easier to invoke than to define, the spy novel is in a sense the war novel of the Cold War, the cover story of an era of decolonization and, particularly after the débâcle at Suez in 1956, the definitive loss of Britain’s role as a world power” (92). In the United States, the genre emerged later and followed a different trajectory, one steeped in Cold War anxieties, although the common Soviet enemy and “special relationship” between Great Britain and the United States encouraged a large American audience for British writers (including Ian Fleming, Graham Greene, John le Carré, and Len Deighton). Following the Second World War, the United States emerged as the preeminent superpower, but a series of historical setbacks raised anxieties about the spread of communism in the late 1940s and early 1950s: the Soviets acquiring the atomic bomb, China going communist, and the stalemate in the Korean War. The exposure of communist spies in the Manhattan Project (Alan Nunn May and Klaus Fuchs), the British Foreign Office (Donald Maclean and Guy Burgess), the British SIS (Kim Philby), and the US State Department (Alger Hiss) intensified these anxieties. Not surprisingly, Cold War spy fiction plies these fears about communism while exploiting the real historical threats faced by MI6 and the CIA. The success of intelligence during the Second World War fueled hopes that it would prove decisive in the battle against communism, but the ethical compromises involved in espionage operations precipitated social anxieties that were imaginarily resolved in Cold War spy fiction.1 The allure of spy fiction certainly involves the vicarious thrills of dispensing with traditional morality Nor were such concerns regarding the ethics of espionage new. Secretary of State Henry Stimson shut down the Cipher Bureau in 1929, contending that “Gentlemen do not read each other’s mail.” The claim that spy fiction provides imaginary 1

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in the higher cause of defending the nation: James Bond’s “license to kill” enables him to behave as a “wicked angel,” to borrow Norman Mailer’s apt formulation for spies (Mailer 1991: 192). Nevertheless, Anglo-American Cold War spy fiction was dogged by this ethical contradiction. In this regard, Cold War spy fiction should not be viewed as purely escapist, no matter how ludicrous the plot of a James Bond novel may be, but should be seen, following Fredric Jameson’s theory of mass culture, “as a transformational work on social and political anxieties and fantasies which must then have some effective presence in the mass cultural text in order subsequently to be ‘managed’ or repressed” (Jameson 1990: 25). Since spy fiction emerged as a response to social fears of German invasions and wore its ideological heart on its sleeve, these anxieties tend to be obvious, such as Great Britain’s worries about its lagging nuclear program and rocket technology in Fleming’s Moonraker ([1955] 2003). Nevertheless, Cold War spy fiction consistently engages with the ethical dilemmas raised by the questionable means employed in espionage, providing fictional defenses in the case of Ian Fleming, expressing skepticism of these dubious methods in John le Carré, or synthesizing these positions in Robert Littell. In all of these cases, however, the fundamental ends of the West are reaffirmed, so that in practice, if not in theory, the ends justify the means. This ethical turn involving the contemplation of the relationship between means and ends in the conduct of the Cold War should be greeted with some suspicion. Jameson warns, “the displacement of political and historical analysis by ethical judgments and considerations is generally the sign of an ideological maneuver and of the intent to mystify” (32).2 Denning also distrusts the ethical turn, arguing that spy fiction responds to the increasing inscrutability of the modern world by displacing history onto “secret conspiracies and secret agents, from politics to ethics” (Denning 1987: 14). What I will argue, then, is that Cold War spy fiction ruminates obsessively on ethical questions in a way that validates the West through the agonies of conscience represented in its protagonists. If the Cold War was a battle for the hearts and minds of people across the globe, the fundamental difference between the West and the East was limited to the hearts and minds since both sides adopted brutal means to achieve their foreign policy objectives.

ASHES AND FIRE: THE ETHICAL DILEMMAS OF WESTERN INTELLIGENCE The ethical parameters of the Cold War were forged during the Second World War, although Great Britain’s antagonism toward Russia stretches back to the “Great Game,” the competition between the two countries for control of parts of Asia, including the Indian subcontinent, from 1830 to 1895.3 Fearful of communist influence in Great Britain, SIS launched espionage operations against resolutions of social contradictions has achieved widespread consensus across various critical schools of thought, including structuralism in John G. Cawelti and Bruce A. Rosenberg’s The Spy Story, Marxism in Michael Denning’s Cover Stories: Narrative and Ideology in the British Spy Thriller, and Cultural Studies in Tony Bennett and Janet Woollacott’s Bond and Beyond: The Political Career of a Popular Hero. 2 In his analysis of The Godfather, for instance, Jameson identifies this problem of the ethical turn as obfuscation in “the substitution of crime for big business”: “The function of the Mafia narrative is indeed to encourage the conviction that the deterioration of daily life in the United States today is an ethical rather than economic matter, connected, not with profit, but rather ‘merely’ with dishonesty, and with some omnipresent moral corruption whose ultimate mythic source lies in the pure Evil of the Mafiosi themselves” (32). Jameson contends elsewhere “it is ethics itself which is the ideological vehicle and the legitimation of concrete structures of power and domination” (The Political Unconscious, 114). 3 Rudyard Kipling immortalized this imperial struggle with a spy narrative, Kim ([1901] 2002).

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the USSR shortly after the Bolshevik Revolution, culminating in efforts by Sidney Reilly and Robert Bruce Lockhart in 1918 to overthrow Lenin (Jeffery 2010: 137). However, the Cheka, the secret police in the early years of the USSR, outplayed the British by running an elaborate fake resistance organization of White Russians called “The Trust” that captured many enemy agents, including Reilly, who was executed on November 5, 1925 (183). The lesson was not lost on Great Britain, which skillfully played back captured German agents with the Double-Cross System (XX), feeding disinformation to the Nazis and evaluating its effectiveness by reading German signals via Ultra, the intelligence culled from decrypted messages from the Enigma code-breaking operation at Bletchley Park (396). Great Britain reevaluated the role of intelligence on a wartime footing as the primary target shifted from the Soviet Union to Nazi Germany. The Hankey Report, a review of SIS delivered on March 11, 1940, acknowledged that Great Britain might have to adopt the dubious methods of its enemy, particularly in terms of covert action: At first sight … the natural instinct of any human person is to recoil from this undesirable business as something he would rather know nothing about … [but the Germans] have brought the development of sabotage and kindred subterranean services to a high pitch of efficiency and it is unavoidable to maintain them ourselves unless we are to be placed at a serious disadvantage. (qtd. in Jeffery 2010: 342) MI6 historian Keith Jeffery notes that John Godfrey, the head of the Naval Intelligence Division (NID), contributed a paper to the report in which he argued that he was open to the idea of a British Gestapo: “We may … have to use their own methods, but I am convinced that in this, as in other realms, we can beat the Germans at their own game and improvise where they rely on years of preparation” (qtd. in Jeffery 2010: 338).4 In order to conduct sabotage and propaganda operations, Great Britain created the Special Operations Executive (SOE) to “set Europe ablaze,” as Prime Minister Winston Churchill famously charged them to do (353). While the state of war adjusted the ethical calculus of means and ends, SIS conducted operations that invited censure during the Cold War, such as assassinating Reinhard Heydrich and negotiating with Admiral Wilhelm Canaris to eliminate Hitler and establish a new government in Germany. Near the end of the Second World War, the Bland Report, completed in October 1944, considered the postwar future of SIS (599). The report advocated for SIS to remain under the supervision of the Foreign Office, rather than the military, and the SOE to be absorbed into SIS so that special operations and intelligence were better coordinated. Peter Loxley, the primary author of the report, provided a familiar justification for the adoption of questionable means in espionage since the Soviets were “pursuing covert aims and activities in contradiction to the overt policy of the Soviet government, but with the latter’s blessing.” If the enemy does it, then so should we, a rationale Loxley contends is self-evident: “The Russians would surely think that we were fools not to do so when it is absolutely certain that they have a wide network of agents here” (611). These ethical compromises included employing former Nazis with “counter-intelligence expertise on Communist

In “Narrative Structures in Fleming,” Umberto Eco argues that James Bond represents “Chance” versus the villain’s “Planning.” Godfrey’s formulation of British “improvisation” versus German “preparation” represents a version of this binary opposition. Since Fleming served as an assistant to Godfrey during the Second World War, perhaps he picked up this formulation from his boss. 4

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networks and techniques” (654). In the case of Soviet intelligence expert Major Horst Kopkow, SIS requested that war crime charges (for executing American airmen and British prisoners) be dropped against him and faked his death in order to protect him (654). Richard Aldrich contends that Great Britain eventually grew “cold feet” about working with former Nazis and turned some of them over to the United States to be exploited for their knowledge of the Soviets (Aldrich 2001: 186). Like the contemporary practice of rendition, the ethical responsibility remains with the British even if they tried to keep their hands clean. The establishment of a centralized American intelligence service was driven by Great Britain, and the fledgling Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the precursor to the CIA, learned its trade from SIS during the Second World War. The unprecedented “special relationship” of intelligence sharing that developed between the “cousins” flipped during the Cold War due to American military and economic power. In Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA, Tim Weiner argues that the early years of the CIA were marked by grand ambitions, staggering incompetence, and profound ethical compromises that were rationalized by the necessity of stopping Soviet expansion. On September 24, 1947, George Kennan, the leading American Cold War strategist of containment, sent the new Secretary of Defense James Forrestal a policy paper that argued that despite the presumed disapproval of the American public, “it might be essential to our security to fight fire with fire” (qtd. in Weiner 2007: 25–6), an argument that became the guiding principle of CIA operations throughout the Cold War. Kennan’s vision shaped the Truman Doctrine to “support free peoples who are resisting subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures” (Andrew 2018: 677), so from this point on covert actions, many of which conflicted with the democratic principles espoused by the United States, came to be employed in the fight against communism. This effort began in 1948 when the CIA funneled millions to Italy’s Christian Democratic Party in an attempt to block the communists from winning that year’s national election (Weiner 2007: 26–7). When the CIA was not trying to influence the outcome of foreign elections, it overthrew democratically elected governments in Iran (1953), Guatemala (1954), Chile (1973), and elsewhere.5 The directive to fight fire with fire even led Western intelligence to work with former Nazis, most notably Reinhard Gehlen, the one-time leader of the Abwehr, a military intelligence organization (42). Gehlen offered a buried archive of intelligence and a network of agents in East Germany, so the United States accepted the deal and financed Gehlen’s organization. The CIA took over the Gehlen group in July 1949, despite many officers expressing “revulsion” at the prospect (42).6 Working with Nazi war criminals made “Operation Paperclip,” a project to snatch up hundreds of German scientists (including Werner von Braun) to lead the American rocket program, seem only modestly troubling. President Eisenhower reaffirmed the strategy of fighting fire with fire in 1954 when he tasked General Jimmy Doolittle and William Pawley “to assess the CIA’s capabilities for covert action” (Weiner 2007: 108). The Doolittle Report excoriated the CIA for its incompetent personnel and questionable leadership under director of Central Intelligence Allen Dulles but recommended the adoption of any means necessary to undermine the communist foe:

DCI Allen Dulles orchestrated a three-part series in The Saturday Evening Post entitled “The Mysterious Doings of the CIA” that publicized the CIA’s role in the overthrow of Mossadegh in Iran and Arbenz in Guatemala (Kinzer 2013: 175). 6 DCI Dulles evidently did not share these moral qualms regarding working with Gehlen. See David Talbot’s The Devil’s Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA and the Rise of America’s Secret Government. 5

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It is now clear that we are facing an implacable enemy whose avowed objective is world domination by whatever means and at whatever cost. There are no rules in such a game. Hitherto acceptable norms of human conduct do not apply. If the United States is to survive, long-standing American concepts of “fair play” must be reconsidered. We must develop effective espionage and counterespionage services and must learn to subvert, sabotage and destroy our enemies by more clever, more sophisticated and more effective methods than those used against us. It may become necessary that the American people be made acquainted with, understand and support this fundamentally repugnant philosophy. (qtd. in Weiner 2007: 109) The CIA enshrined this “repugnant philosophy” thereafter as 1973’s so-called “Family Jewels”— an internally compiled list of the Agency’s history of potentially illegal activities, which was later released to the public—attest.7 By the 1970s such justifications as Kennan’s admonition and the Doolittle Report started to meet with resistance from within the Agency, as well as from investigative journalists in a post-Watergate world. In 1974 and 1975, former CIA officers Victor Marchetti and Philip Agee published exposés of the Agency despite a flurry of lawsuits seeking to stop their publication on national security grounds. Agee criticized not only the means employed by the CIA but also the foreign policy ends the Agency served. Domestic spying allegations reported in 1974 by Seymour Hersh (and fundamentally confirmed by director of Central Intelligence William Colby) provoked a firestorm of controversy. Hersh’s New York Times article highlighted the CIA’s illegal activities, such as a long-standing mail opening operation and the infiltration of radical domestic groups, and provoked three high-profile investigations in early 1975: the Rockefeller Commission convened by President Gerald R. Ford, the Church Committee in the Senate, and the Pike Committee in the House. These committees’ investigations produced troubling and sensational revelations including the Agency’s experimentation with LSD on unwitting subjects as part of its MKULTRA program, explorations into mind control in response to the reported brainwashing of American soldiers in the Korean War, and assassination plots against Fidel Castro and other foreign leaders. The Church Committee’s Report explicitly repudiates the Doolittle Report: “We do not think that traditional American notions of fair play need to be abandoned when dealing with our adversaries. It may well be ourselves that we injure most if we adopt tactics ‘more ruthless than the enemy’ ” (US Senate Select Committee 1975: 260). The Church Committee concludes its report on alleged assassination plots with a reassertion of the American principles the CIA abandoned during the Cold War: “The United States must not adopt the tactics of the enemy. Means are as important as ends. Crisis makes it tempting to ignore the wise restraints that make men free. But each time we do so, each time the means we use are wrong, our inner strength, the strength which makes us free is lessened” (287). The Church Committee vented the nation’s moral outrage at the violations of American ideals in the CIA’s activities and ushered in more strenuous efforts at congressional oversight. Cold War spy fiction attempts to resolve these ethical conundrums as it explores the intelligence battle between the West and East.

7

For a detailed history of “the Family Jewels,” see Prados’s The Family Jewels: The CIA, Secrecy, and Presidential Power.

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Ian Fleming: In Defense of “Rough Justice” Cold War spy fiction followed the paths established by the work of Ian Fleming and John le Carré, the pen name of David Cornwell. Both writers served as intelligence officers for Great Britain, and their real-life experiences significantly shaped their antithetical representations of MI6 and the ethical dilemmas of espionage: Fleming opted for romantic adventure, while le Carré adopted a cynical realism. During the Second World War, Fleming served as the assistant to Admiral John Godfrey, head of the NID, although he gained some operational experience with his 30 Assault Unit, a commando group that captured German intelligence after battles (Lycett 1995: 138–9). Fleming then accompanied Godfrey to the United States in 1941 in order to lobby for a “unified American intelligence service” and stayed in the United States to help General “Wild Bill” Donovan create a blueprint for the OSS, which became the American wartime covert intelligence and operations service (127, 131).8 After the war, Fleming used his position as a journalist for The Sunday Times to maintain high-level contacts with government officials, and also did so through his wellconnected wife, Ann. British Prime Minister Anthony Eden recuperated at Goldeneye, Fleming’s estate in Jamaica, after the disastrous Suez crisis of 1956 (302–7). Fleming also hobnobbed in elite American political and intelligence circles. During a trip to the United States in 1960, he dined with presidential candidate John F. Kennedy and brainstormed ideas (facetiously on his end) for overthrowing Castro (367–8). John Bross, a CIA official in attendance at the dinner, then took Fleming’s ideas to Director Allen Dulles. It is tempting to think that the Agency’s hare-brained plots to assassinate Castro took some inspiration from Fleming and the fantastical plots of the Bond novels. The first James Bond adventure, Casino Royale (1953), was met with “generally enthusiastic” reviews and its initial printing of 4,750 copies sold out within two months, requiring a third printing only a year later (Lycett 1995: 243–4). The 1957 serialization of From Russia with Love in Britain’s popular Daily Express tabloid—along with a comic strip in the same newspaper—did much to make Bond a household name even before he became one of Hollywood’s most popular and lucrative franchises (Bennett and Woollacott 1987: 24). In 1957, Jacqueline Kennedy sent Allen Dulles a copy of From Russia with Love, and Dulles was hooked, returning the favor with subsequent releases and striking up a correspondence with Fleming (Grose 1994: 491). The Kennedy connection proved enormously beneficial to Fleming’s career; in 1961, President Kennedy included From Russia with Love on his ten favorite books list for Life magazine, an endorsement that propelled sales of the Bond novels in the United States. The film adaptation of Dr. No (1962) was a commercial success, but Goldfinger (1965) became a global sensation. The films fueled sales of the books during the height of the “Bond phenomenon” between 1963 and 1966, with 19,673,000 copies sold in Great Britain alone (Bennett and Woollacott 1987: 31, 26–7). The paperback revolution certainly contributed to Bond’s success; the publisher Pan reports that “Bond novels accounted for ten of the first eighteen titles in paperback to sell over a million copies in Britain” (12). The film franchise has produced twenty-six films in sixty years of existence, and the Bond novels have purportedly sold over 100 million copies.

In Wedge: From Pearl Harbor to 9/11, Mark Riebling offers an account that places Fleming at the center of the British efforts to create a centralized intelligence service in the United States. 8

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The Bond who has become a staple of Western culture seems unperturbed by ethical considerations, and the freedom from such moral constraints might be viewed as one of the appeals of his adventures, but Fleming’s work betrays nagging doubts held both by the title character and, perhaps, by Fleming himself about the wisdom of “fighting fire with fire.” Umberto Eco notes that James Bond abandons “the treacherous life of moral meditation and psychological anger, with all the neurotic dangers they entail” (1979: 145) near the end of Casino Royale. Mathis, his French intelligence counterpart, encourages Bond to focus on friends rather than ideologies after Bond expresses some qualms regarding the morality of his violent work fighting communism: “Surround yourself with human beings, my dear James. They are easier to fight for than principles” (Fleming [1953] 2002: 139). Eco contends that from that moment on, Bond “ceases to be a subject for psychiatry and remains at most a physiological object,” who “does not meditate upon truth and justice, upon life and death, except in rare moments of boredom,” although he includes a disclaimer that Bond “does indulge in such intimate luxuries in the short stories” (1979: 145–6).9 In these departures, Fleming frequently ruminates on the ethical conundrums of spying. These rare moments of reflection in “the author’s pillow fantasy” of sex and violence, self-deprecatingly characterized by Fleming as “bang, bang, bang, kiss, kiss” (Lycett 1995: 220), represent the “return of the repressed”—namely, the social contradiction between the ends of Western democracies and the questionable means used to achieve foreign policy objectives. Perhaps the most revealing moment of these ethical reflections occurs in the short story “The Living Daylights” (1962) in which M. orders Bond to assassinate a Soviet sniper to protect a defector “loaded with stuff ” attempting to cross into West Berlin (Fleming [1966] 2012: 66). Bond bristles at the assignment of killing in cold blood: “This was going to be bad news, dirty news, and he didn’t want to hear it from one of the Section officers, or even from the Chief of Staff. This was to be murder. All right. Let M. bloody well say so” (67). Bond studies his superior’s face and notes the “effort of will” required to send an agent on such a distasteful job: “M. didn’t like sending any man to a killing. But, when it had to be done, he always put on this fierce, cold act of command. Bond knew why. It was to take some of the pressure, some of the guilt, off the killer’s shoulders” (67). The ideological ramifications are quite clear: the West agonizes over every ethically questionable act it “must” do in its defense, in sharp contrast to the Soviets who coldly commit brutal acts of violence. As Bond waits for the defector to make the crossing, he snaps at his colleague, Captain Sender, who objects to Bond having a drink before the operation: “Look, my friend,” said Bond wearily, “I’ve got to commit a murder tonight. Not you. Me. So be a good chap and stuff it, would you? … Think I like this job? Have a Double-O number and so on? I’d be quite happy for you to get me sacked from the Double-O section” (81). On the night of the defection, Bond realizes that the sniper is the female cello player he has admired from afar the previous two nights and deliberately avoids killing her; instead, he shoots the Kalashnikov from her hands. When Bond admits the reason for altering his shot, Captain Sender upbraids him: “So what? K.G.B. have got plenty of women agents—and women gunners … You should have killed the sniper whoever

Fleming biographer Andrew Lycett argues, “What raises Casino Royale out of the usual run of thrillers was Ian’s attempt to reflect the disturbing moral ambiguity of a post-war world that could produce traitors like Burgess and Maclean” (1995: 221). While Fleming was certainly troubled by the Cambridge spies, his work cuts through the “moral ambiguity” of the Cold War to defend the dominant ideology of the West through a simplified Manichean framework of good versus evil, although Eco sees Fleming’s Manichean framework as merely a cynical ploy for “rhetorical purposes” (1979: 161–3). 9

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it was” (85). British intelligence fights fire with fire by pitting its sniper against the Soviet sniper, but Bond shows pity (and sexism, too), thereby demonstrating the moral superiority of the West. Eco argues that the Bond novels are governed by a series of binary oppositions operative in Cold War ideology that differentiate West from East, good from evil, but he notes at least one deviation from this pattern: “Bond … does not disdain overcoming a cheating enemy by a deceitful trick and blackmailing him” (1979: 147, 153). These games or “play situations” replicate the Cold War battle between nations on an individual level and, therefore, promote the rationale of “fighting fire with fire” advanced by Kennan. The first time Bond cheats a cheater in a “play situation” occurs in Moonraker. The novel develops the “paranoid style” motif of “the enemy within” in the figure of Sir Hugo Drax, a patriot giving his entire stockpile of Columbite and £10,000,000 in order to produce a “super atomic rocket with a range that would cover nearly every capital in Europe” (Fleming [1955] 2003: 20).10 The only problem with this generous offer lies in the fact, as M. informs Bond, “Sir Hugo Drax cheats at cards” (21). M. asks Bond to help him uncover the method of Drax’s cheating at bridge at his exclusive club, Blades, which Bond dutifully discovers: a “shiner,” a “highly polished” (41) cigarette case that reflects the cards Drax deals, thereby giving him a distinct advantage every fourth hand. Bond does not try to outplay Drax, as he does with le Chiffre in Casino Royale. Nor does he simply report the cheating to Basildon, the club’s manager, and have Drax exposed and expelled from polite society, a course that might upset the Moonraker project. Rather, Bond suggests “paying him out of his own coin” (43), or “fighting fire with fire,” and sending him a message: “I could show him I’d spotted him and at the same time flay the hide off him at his own game” (43). M. expresses distaste for the ploy but assents on instrumental grounds: “ ‘Alright,’ he said. ‘What must be, must be. Don’t like the idea, but I can see Basildon’s point. So long as you can bring it off,’ he smiled” (43–4). Bond feels his cheating is fully justified: “He somehow felt that the ghosts were friendly, that they approved of the rough justice that was about to be done” (63). In the final rubber, Bond dexterously switches the deck of cards to one prearranged to give him “a laydown Grand Slam … against any defense” (68). When the hand is complete, a furious Drax begins to accuse Bond of cheating, but Basildon interrupts him. Appearances must be maintained at Blades for the social system to continue functioning. Moonraker isn’t usually classified as one of the primary Cold War novels in the Fleming oeuvre, since the villain, Hugo Drax, is a former Nazi seeking revenge against England by launching a nuclear rocket into Buckingham Palace. However, a topical allusion to Operation Paperclip, the West’s concerted effort after the Second World War to pick up as many German scientists as possible and deprive the USSR of their expertise, reveals Fleming’s ambivalence concerning the questionable Cold War alliances driving the narrative: “ ‘Fifty of these [Drax’s engineers] are Germans,’ continued M. ‘More or less all the guided missile experts the Russians didn’t get. Drax paid for them to come over here and work on the Moonraker. Nobody was very happy with the arrangement but there was no alternative’ ” (Fleming [1955] 2003: 84). M. reluctantly defends the move as fighting fire with fire, but the novel bristles at the Faustian bargain and confirms the worst fears about working with former Nazis as Drax collaborates with the Soviet Union to acquire a nuclear warhead for the Moonraker rocket. Great Britain isn’t the only nation utilizing former The “paranoid style” was a term coined by Richard Hofstadter in The Paranoid Style in American Politics and Other Essays in order to characterize the hyperbolic rhetoric of McCarthyism. He also argues that this form of conspiratorial thinking has a long history in American life. 10

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enemies to fight the Cold War. The novel foregrounds these ethical qualms when Drax divulges his background and the origins of his fortune. He praises Reinhard Heydrich, a high-ranking SS official and one of the architects of the Final Solution, as “a good man” and relishes his own wartime activities of terrorism and sabotage that “brought many an Englishman to book” (207). After being mistaken for a wounded English soldier following a bombing undertaken by his own unit, Drax takes advantage of his new identity and murders a “Jewish moneylender” for £15,000 startup capital and escapes to Tangier “where you could do anything, buy anything, fix anything” (211). Fleming mobilizes anti-Semitic stereotypes in an effort to use the Holocaust against Drax. Simply put, you can’t trust the Germans for all of the chauvinistic reasons for which Fleming is notorious. Drax’s tirade against England while he has a captive audience in Bond and Gala Brand, the Scotland Yard plant, not only looks backward to the Second World War but also comments on the declining status of Great Britain in the Cold War: “I loathe and despise you all. You swine! Useless, idle, decadent fools, hiding behind your bloody white cliffs while other people fight your battles. Too weak to defend your colonies, toadying to America with your hats in your hands. Stinking snobs who’ll do anything for money” (210). Bond and Brand turn the tables on Drax by retargeting the Moonraker, and Drax is paid “out of his own coin” once again when he is blown up by the rocket while making his escape in a Russian submarine. Thus, Bond saves Great Britain from itself in its headlong rush to compete in the Cold War. In this regard, Moonraker represents a good example of the ideological work Bennett and Woollacott attribute to the Bond novels at a historical moment in the Cold War in which Britain was felt to be vulnerable: “Bond puts England back on top at the same time as he places ‘the girl’ back in place beneath him” (141). In a rare departure from the formula, Bond doesn’t get “the girl” in Moonraker, but she is nevertheless returned to her traditional gender role through marriage. The Bond novels embrace Kennan’s charge to “fight fire with fire,” even if Bond occasionally grumbles about “dirty jobs.” However, his assignments share a curious trait that demonstrates some reluctance to engage with the ethical implications of espionage work or, rather, a desire to bypass these considerations altogether: Bond almost inevitably responds to Soviet (SMERSH) or SPECTRE provocation. These “dirty jobs” are committed in self-defense. Kennan’s original admonition frames Western Cold War strategy in the same defensive way that delivers the West from bearing responsibility for its actions. The history of the Cold War provides ample evidence of Anglo-American offensive operations, with the CIA-led coups representing the most egregious examples, although the catastrophic failures from Albania to the Bay of Pigs testify as well. One might consider this a blind spot of Fleming’s oeuvre and the ideological work of repression. John le Carré: The Cost of Sleeping Safely John le Carré, whose books (according to his obituaries) sold over 60 million copies (Mayer and Tresman 2020), approached the international success and influence of Fleming by offering a very different spy story: a cynical portrait of the intelligence apparatus that critically explored the ethics of espionage. Fourteen of his twenty-five novels have been adapted for film or television, including several that have been adapted twice. But unlike Fleming, le Carré generally enjoyed a more prestigious reputation as a “literary” author due to his “realistic” portrait of the espionage world drawn from his experiences in British intelligence and his embrace of moral ambiguity and oblique narration. In his memoir, The Pigeon Tunnel (2016), he writes that he was “formally inducted into

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MI5 [the equivalent of the FBI] as a junior officer” in 1956 but transferred to MI6 (the equivalent of the CIA) in late 1960 (Le Carré 2016: 20, 21). In 1964, he resigned from MI6 after making a “negligible contribution” (177) in order to make a career of writing, and adopted his pen name. Le Carré spent much of his MI6 time in Bonn attached to the British embassy, a period culminating with the construction of the Berlin Wall, the triggering event for his classic early novel, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold ([1963] 2001). Early in his career, le Carré acknowledged his debt to Fleming for increasing the popularity of espionage fiction but admitted, “I despise Bond” (Watson 2004: 12–13). For le Carré, Bond represents a “consumer goods hero … who developed a pretty hard-nosed cynicism towards any sense of moral obligation,” which was nonetheless a “pretty accurate reflection of some of the worst things of western society” (Crutchley 2004: 7). His first novel, Call for the Dead ([1961] 2001), differentiates his most famous character, George Smiley, from Fleming’s epitome of masculine mastery: “Short, fat, and of a quiet disposition, he appeared to spend a lot of money on really bad clothes, which hung about his squat frame like skin on a shrunken toad” (Le Carré [1961] 2002: 1). To emphasize the distinction, the opening sentence describes Smiley as “breathtakingly ordinary” (1) and a cuckold. What truly distinguishes le Carré from Fleming, however, is how he frames intelligence work as pure mundanity—reviewing reports, digging through personnel files, and conducting interrogations—rather than as adventures filled with sex and violence in exotic locales. Smiley is a bureaucrat with an academic background, while Bond is a man of action. Furthermore, le Carré’s repudiation of Fleming’s darkly romantic portrait of espionage condemns, by extension, the entire spy world and embodies le Carré’s cynicism about his former profession. “What do you think spies are: priests, saints, and martyrs?” asks the grubby Alec Leamas, a British spy handler in The Spy Who Came in from the Cold. “They’re a squalid procession of vain fools, traitors too, yes; pansies, sadists and drunkards, people who play cowboys and Indians to brighter their rotten lives” (Le Carré [1963] 2001: 203). Le Carré’s cynicism represents a distinct departure from Fleming’s jingoism, but his critique does not necessarily constitute a step outside of ideology, a claim that the work of Slavoj Žižek on ideology will help us to explore. To begin, le Carré explicitly tackles what Fleming typically ignores, represses, or addresses only implicitly: the relationship between means and ends, and what he sees as the moral equivalency of East and West, notwithstanding the stories the “Free World” tells itself about its moral righteousness, as le Carré states in an early interview: “One tragedy of our age is the fact that we have been forced into a position where we have to adopt the methods of the aggressors. There seems no way around this. But it does raise the question of how long we can go on defending ourselves by these methods and remain a society worth defending” (Deindorfer 2004: 16). Early in The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, Leamas returns to London after his last agent, Karl Riemeck, is killed by Hans-Dieter Mundt, a former Nazi and current East German intelligence chief, and he muses on the guiding principle of his job: “Intelligence work has one moral law—it is justified by results” (Le Carré [1963] 2001: 8). During his debriefing with Leamas, Fiedler (the Jewish East German intelligence official investigating Mundt) confirms that the West mirrors the East insofar as an instrumental rationale governs intelligence operations: “But it was a good operation. It satisfied the only requirement of our profession: it worked” (106). These results come through questionable means, but Control, the head of MI6, justifies those means in the terms of the Cold War ideology governing the intelligence services of the West:

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“Thus we do disagreeable things, but we are defensive. That, I think, is still fair. We do disagreeable things so that ordinary people here and elsewhere can sleep safely in their beds at night. Is that too romantic? Of course, we occasionally do very wicked things,” he grinned like a schoolboy. “And in weighing up the moralities, we rather go in for dishonest comparisons; after all, you can’t compare the ideals of one side with the methods of the other, can you, now? … I mean you can’t be less ruthless than the opposition simply because your government’s policy is benevolent, can you now?” (15) Three points leap out from this passage. First, Control insinuates that “policy” and practice are two different things. What a government says it stands for and what it does in practice do not necessarily align, nor should they. Second, the rationale relies upon the presumption of an innocent subject. The “ordinary people” must not know the “wicked things” the intelligence services are doing on their behalf; their ignorance must be maintained for the social order to function effectively, or society breaks down, as Slavoj Žižek argues: “We can indulge in our secret wars only as long as the Other does not take cognizance of them, for at the moment the Other can no longer ignore them, the social bond dissolves itself … The Other must not know all” (Žižek 1991: 72–3).11 Third, Control betrays with his youthful grin the enjoyment (in the Lacanian sense of jouissance) of doing “wicked things.” Espionage work grants permission to engage in transgressive activities—stealing, killing, torturing, lying, and seducing—that provide thrills.12 To his credit, le Carré acknowledges the illicit appeal of espionage but critiques that motivation, rather than embrace it as Fleming does. Near the end of the novel, Leamas bitterly reiterates Control’s rationale for the less savory aspects of spying in discussing the operation to protect Mundt: “They need him [Mundt] so that the great moronic mass that you admire can sleep soundly in their beds at night. They need him for the safety of ordinary crummy people like you and me” (Le Carré [1963] 2001: 203–4). Control’s version of this mantra cajoles Leamas into participating in the operation under false pretenses, while Leamas’s repetition of the line registers his indignation and, ultimately, resignation that he was a pawn. In persuading Leamas to join an operation against Mundt, Control acknowledges the difficulties of living the life of the spy: “We have to live without sympathy, don’t we? That’s impossible of course. We act it to one another, all this hardness; but we aren’t like that really, I mean … one can’t be out in the cold all the time, one has to come in from the cold” (Le Carré [1963] 2001: 14). Control posits a cynical distance between the warm-hearted internal self and the brutal external self that is an ideological ruse, one that pervades the work of le Carré. Dismissing the “wicked things” Control and Leamas do because they are “acting” does not deliver them from responsibility; objectively, they are defined by what they do publicly in the service of their nation. The “authentic” self, what we are really like off the clock, serves merely as a convenient alibi that separates our public and private lives. The unraveling of the scheme to indict Mundt, which was always part of Control’s plan, involved Leamas’s own humanity, his inability to keep up the act of hardness all of the time:

In this regard, plausible deniability, the fundamental principle of any secret service operation, represents not just an effort to avoid detection from the foreign adversary or target and obfuscate responsibility but also to evade public scrutiny at home and maintain the moral coherence of public policy and actual practice. 12 The horrifying treatment of detainees at the Abu Ghraib facility betrays a similar enjoyment in sadistic activities that were officially outlawed but nevertheless institutionally permitted. 11

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He [Mundt] was looking, you see, for some human error in a scheme of almost superhuman subtlety. Somewhere, he [Mundt] thought, in Leamas’ long sojourn in the wilderness, he would have to break faith with his oath of poverty, drunkenness, degeneracy, above all of solitude. He would need a companion, a mistress perhaps; he would long for the warmth of human contact, long to reveal a part of the other soul within his breast. (Le Carré [1963] 2001: 171) Control persuades Leamas with the promise of a return from the cold but exploits that very human impulse for connection to spring the trap on Fiedler and rescue Mundt. The ends justify the means, even if it means manipulating and sacrificing your own people. After almost thirty years and dozens of novels, in The Secret Pilgrim (1990), le Carré attempted “to make a last farewell of the Cold War, of George Smiley and all his people, and of certain elusive themes that had been nagging at me” (Le Carré 1990: 379). Smiley’s postmortem on the Cold War clarifies his position vis-à-vis the moral equivalence between West and East in terms of the means of waging that war and defending the ends of Western democracy. The “virtues” of the West are touted as “right”: “Our respect for the individual, our love of variety and argument, our belief that you can only govern fairly with the consent of the governed, our capacity to see the other fellows’ view” (127). Where the West went wrong, according to Smiley, lay in the betrayal of those virtues in conducting foreign policy: In our supposed ideological rectitude, we sacrificed our compassion to the great god of indifference. We protected the strong against the weak, and we perfected the art of the public lie. We made enemies of decent reformers and friends of the most disgusting potentates. And we scarcely paused to ask ourselves how much longer we could defend our society by these means and remain a society worth defending. (127) Smiley’s remarks come during a training course for new MI6 recruits and exemplify what Žižek calls “cynical reason”: “Cynical reason is no longer naïve, but is a paradox of an enlightened false consciousness: one knows the falsehood very well, one is well aware of a particular interest hidden behind an ideological universality, but still one does not renounce it” (Žižek 1989: 29). Thus, Smiley acknowledges the violation of democratic principles by the West but nevertheless professes his belief in the West. More importantly, he knows very well that Western intelligence has made its deals with the devil and undermined its moral authority but nevertheless he continues to perpetuate this system. In order to emphasize Smiley’s point regarding distasteful friends and dubious means, Ned acerbically comments on the “intelligence bordello” (Le Carré 1990: 130) known as Pullach, the West German base established for “an unlovely assembly of old Nazi officers under a former general of Hitler’s military intelligence [Reinhard Gehlen] … to pay court to other old Nazis in East Germany and, by bribery, blackmail or an appeal to comradely sentiment, procure them for the West” (129). (Weiner and others, including many within the Agency, have seen the CIA’s collaboration with Gehlen as its original sin.) Cynical distance enables skeptical subjects to entertain doubts about the dominant ideology while still performing their duties, and this particular subject-position constitutes Smiley’s ethical stance near the end of The Secret Pilgrim: “You see,” he explained—replying, as so often, to the spirit rather than the letter of the question—“it really is essential in a free society that the people who do our work should remain unreconciled. It’s true that we are obliged to sup with the Devil, and not always with a very long

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spoon. And as everyone knows—” a sly glance at Maggs produced a gust of grateful laughter— “the Devil is often far better company than the Godly, isn’t he? All the same, our obsession with virtue won’t go away. Self-interest is so limiting. So is expediency.” He paused again, still deep inside his own thoughts. “All I’m really saying, I suppose, is that if the temptation to humanity does assail you now and then, I hope you won’t take it as a weakness in yourselves, but give it a fair hearing.” (Le Carré 1990: 274–5) Smiley owns the enjoyment of “wicked things” earlier attributed to Control and espouses a position that Myron Aronoff describes as a “skeptical balance” (1999: 15) between idealism and realism, or between humanity/virtue and devilry/self-interest. Nevertheless, the devilry appears to be so ingrained within MI6 that the “temptation” lies in expressing one’s “humanity.” Smiley maintains a cynical distance between public actions and private belief that delivers individuals from the full responsibility of their actions. In A Legacy of Spies (2017), le Carré returns to the scene of his earliest success and offers a “reckoning” (257) of Western intelligence’s record of fighting fire with fire. Responding to a wrongful death case filed by the children of Alec Leamas and Liz Gold, MI6 calls Peter Guillam, Smiley’s right-hand man, out of retirement to rehash the Circus’s handling of Windfall, the operation designed to protect Mundt. Early in the novel, Guillam recalls Smiley’s recruitment pitch that espouses the position that the ends justify the means: “We don’t pay a lot, and careers tend to be interrupted. But we do feel it’s an important job, as long as one cares about the end, and not too much about the means” (Le Carré 2017: 8). In the closing pages, Smiley appears to accept the responsibility for the deaths of Leamas and Gold: “Windfall haunts me to this day. It will always haunt me. I blame myself entirely. I counted on Mundt’s ruthlessness, but I underrated it. The temptation to kill off the witnesses was simply too much for him” (260). When Guillam tries to comfort Smiley by pointing out that it was Control’s operation and Smiley merely “went along with it,” Smiley reclaims his moral superiority through private guilt: “Which is by far the greater sin, I fear” (260). Nevertheless, Smiley defends British (and Western) intelligence: “We were not pitiless, Peter. We were never pitiless. We had the larger pity. Arguably, it was misplaced. Certainly it was futile. We know that now. We did not know it then” (261). Smiley then responds to a question regarding his personal motivation, one that is implied but not asked explicitly by Guillam. Smiley answers that “world peace” drove him to intelligence work, not capitalism or Christendom, and he clarifies his motive in terms that respond to Brexit: “So was it all for England, then?” he resumed. “There was a time, of course there was. But whose England? Which England? England all alone, a citizen of nowhere? I’m a European, Peter. If I had a mission—if I was ever aware of one beyond our business with the enemy, it was to Europe. If I was heartless, I was heartless for Europe. If I had an unattainable ideal, it was of leading Europe out of her darkness towards a new age of reason. I have it still.” (262, emphasis in original) As Toby Manning succinctly explains, “Smiley’s role is therefore once again to express moral misgivings about the collateral damage resulting from state actions, but ultimately to endorse those actions for the greater good of upholding British power and defeating the established anathema of communism” (2018: 72). Heartlessness for an “unattainable ideal” sounds like a justification for communism, as well. The difference lies in pity. As long as we are not “pitiless,” the ends justify the means.

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Robert Littell: The Virtue of Doing Things Badly The fall of the Soviet Union precipitated a triumphant celebration in the West with declarations of “the end of history” (Francis Fukuyama). Spy fiction, it seemed, could finally make sense of the Cold War that had been its dominant topic for forty years. Robert Littell’s sprawling historical novel, The Company: A Novel of the CIA (2002), represents an ambitious attempt to do precisely that, while having its characters reflect on the classics of spy fiction by authors such as Fleming and le Carré. The 894-page secret history follows the story of three Yale graduates, Jack McAuliffe, Leo Kritsky, and E. Winstrom Ebbitt II, recruited by the fledgling Agency in 1950 to fight the Cold War in its storied battlegrounds of Berlin, Budapest, and the Bay of Pigs. These fictional characters rub shoulders with real-life figures of the Company such as Allen Dulles, Frank Wisner, Richard Bissell, James Jesus Angleton, and a thinly veiled William K. Harvey appearing as Harvey Toritti (“The Sorcerer”). The Company is a compendium of spy fiction plots and tropes, including infiltrations, exfiltrations, defectors, false defectors, moles, covert operations, and labyrinthine conspiracies, and nearly all of these narrative elements have some historical foundation. The Company establishes its verisimilitude by sticking closely to historical events, such as the Hungarian uprising and brutal Soviet crackdown in 1956. Far from touting the CIA’s efficacy, The Company foregrounds its disastrous failures but still celebrates the spirit of the heroic struggle against the odds, articulated in McAuliffe’s family motto: “Once down is no battle” (Littell 2002: 21). While the novel’s focus on the Agency’s fiascos might suggest a literary debt to le Carré’s cynicism, the novel rejects that position explicitly, as McAuliffe complains about the distortion inherent to spy stories by quoting le Carré: “They’ll turn it into melodrama … They’ll make it sound as if we played cowboys and Indians to brighten our dull lives” (15). Later, Toritti offers a slightly more generous critique of The Spy Who Came in from the Cold but dispenses with the cynicism: He gets the mood right—he understands that Berlin was a killing field. He understands that those of us who lived through it were never the same again. People could learn more about the Cold War reading le Carré than they can from newspapers. But he loses me when he says spies are people who play cowboys and Indians to brighter their rotten lives. What a load of bullshit! (651) In The Company, the stakes of the Cold War are desperately real, as Toritti exclaims more than once: “I’m here [Berlin] because the goddamn Goths are at the goddamn gate … Someone has to man the goddamn ramparts” (15). In what is almost an explicit rebuttal of le Carré, the novel reconciles the history of the Agency’s failures and its ethical lapses to the noble ends of the Western world. Here, the ends really do justify the means, as Ebbitt explains to his son (who also works for the CIA): “We’re doing a dirty job and we get it right most of the time. But there’s no way you can get it right every time … What keeps us going, what keeps us sane … is the conviction that if something is worth doing, it’s worth doing badly” (649). The Company utilizes a strategy of containment that directly confronts the Agency’s ethical lapses and resolves them through a pragmatic lens. For instance, the novel addresses the unsavory working relationship between the Gehlen organization and the CIA but rationalizes the partnership on instrumental grounds, as Toritti explains: “Fucking Gehlen gives good value for the bucks we provide” (Littell 2002: 45). Ebbitt, an idealistic recruit and OSS veteran, expresses his outrage at working with former Nazis when he must gather Russian documents from Gehlen’s organization

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for an infiltration: “The only thing left of your thousand-year Reich, Herr Doktor Uppmann, is the memory of the crimes you committed—and the memory will last a thousand years. It makes me sick to my stomach to be in the same room with you” (124). When his outburst is reported, Ebbitt defends himself by arguing that Gehlen broke his agreement with the United States by hiring “ex-Nazis, all of whom are listed on his masthead under false identities” (125). Wisner, the real-life deputy director of Plans, sets Ebbitt straight on the bottom line with Gehlen: Let me fill you in on some facts of life—you know who the OSS officer was who negotiated with Gehlen to get hold of his goddamned microfilms? It was me, Ebby, I negotiated with him. I swallowed my pride and I swallowed my bile and I swallowed whatever scruples the weakkneed crowd came up with and I made a deal with one devil to fight another devil. Do you really believe that we don’t know that Gehlen employs ex-Nazis? … You gonna go all out for your Joe or you gonna fill our ears with slop about the occasional ex-Nazi in the woodpile? (126) In this scene, Littell depicts the spectrum of reactions of CIA officers to working with former Nazis as documented in the historical record. Ebbitt’s disgust registers the moral superiority of the West, while Toritti and Wisner dismiss any misgivings as “slop,” thereby claiming that the ends do indeed justify the means in the Cold War. In its penultimate section, The Company tackles the thorny ethical questions raised by the history of the Cold War. The novel reveals that the Soviets recruited Kritsky as a long-term penetration agent to work his way into the upper echelons of American power (a plot point echoing the realworld Cambridge spies). Kritsky succeeded admirably and became the head of the Soviet division in the CIA, a role that corresponds to the position Philby attained within British intelligence. As a result, Kritsky informed the Soviet Union about every CIA covert operation launched against them for almost three decades. When McAuliffe confronts his friend regarding his suspicions that Leo is SASHA, the suspected Soviet mole, Leo confesses, and they engage in a bitter argument about the methods of their respective intelligence agencies. Jack mockingly accuses the KGB of political assassination, to which Leo responds with a lengthy laundry list of American abuses: Don’t be so pious, Jack! Your stations trained the secret police in Vietnam, Argentina, the Dominican Republic, Chile, Iraq, Iran—the list is as long as my arm. You looked the other way when your clients arrested and tortured and assassinated their political opponents. The Phoenix Operation in Vietnam, with its tiger cases on Con Son Island, killed or crippled some twenty thousand Vietnamese suspected—only suspected, Jack, not convicted—of being pro-communist. (Littell 2002: 763, emphasis in original) Jack defends the CIA’s record by reciting Kennan’s admonition regarding Cold War strategy: “The Company was fighting fire with fire.” Leo interrupts with his list of CIA betrayals: “ ‘Fire with fire!’ Leo repeated scornfully. ‘You financed and equipped and trained armies of agents and abandoned them—the Cubans in Miami, the Khambas in Tibet, the Sumatran colonels in Indonesia, the Meos in Laos, the Montagnards in Vietnam, the National Chinese in Burma, the Ukrainians in Russia, the Kurds in Iraq’ ” (763). The novel acknowledges the CIA’s truly appalling failures but nevertheless champions the Company. In the end, McAuliffe reunites with Toritti on his deathbed, and “the last of the Cold War Mohicans” (Littell 2002: 884) reminisce about the Cold War, whose moral McAuliffe sums up: “It was about the good guys beating the bad guys.” Toritti, the ardent Cold Warrior with his guilt

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weighing heavily on him, is less sure: “We sure screwed up an awful lot in the process.” McAuliffe pacifies him, offering an explanation of the failure of the Soviet Union that has become doxa in the West: “Russia wasn’t a country … It was a metaphor for an idea that may have looked good on the drawing boards but in practice was deeply flawed. And flawed metaphors are harder to slay than flawed countries” (894). Like Fleming, Littell ultimately resorts to the Manichean view of good and evil to justify the means employed to fight the Cold War, even depicting Starik, the Soviet spymaster, as an over-the-top, Bond-type villain characterized by asceticism, fanaticism, pedophilia, and anti-Semitism. Like le Carré, Littell explicitly grapples with the ethical dilemmas of espionage in the West without the British colonial baggage but dismisses “pity” as a luxury for the “weakkneed crowd.” In this way, The Company synthesizes the very different Cold War positions in the work of Fleming and le Carré. Conclusion: Ideology and the Ethical Turn The cinematic adaptations of spy thrillers have increasingly become the terrain of garish special effects and stunts. However, the plots of these extravagant productions derive from anxieties percolating in the public sphere. Spy fiction not only amplifies these fears but also manages them. The Cold War offered numerous threats that leapt to the pages of spy fiction—nuclear weapons, biological warfare, the funding of terrorism—and that’s just a smattering of Fleming’s topics. During the Cold War, Great Britain and the United States employed “repugnant” means to fight communism, and these questionable practices conflicted with the West’s liberal values. Cold War spy fiction tackled this ethical dilemma, sometimes obliquely (Fleming), sometimes explicitly (le Carré), and while it could not necessarily absolve the West, it could express doubts about these espionage practices and guilt for the lives lost or damaged in the process. Today, we might call these complaints “virtue signaling.” History will give le Carré credit for inventing this cynicism of the intelligence world, as indeed it should. However, such moral reflections do not alter the facts about the Cold War and how the West waged it, justifying its conduct by pointing to the other side’s dirty tricks. In Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, Karla (the Soviet spymaster) manipulates Smiley through his hopeless love for the unfaithful Ann; in Smiley’s People, Smiley flips the script and exploits Karla’s love for his psychologically damaged daughter, Tatiana, to spur him to defect. Žižek offers a valuable lesson on ideology in insisting that our ideological beliefs inhere in our actions, not our thoughts.13 Cynical distance insulates us from the full impact of doing distasteful things, but we still do them. Smiley may hate himself for what he has done, as the ambiguous ending of the Karla trilogy suggests, but he performed ruthlessly and effectively. And, as Cold War spy fiction teaches us, that’s exactly how he should play the game.

WORKS CITED Agee, P. (1975), Inside the Company: CIA Diary, New York: Stonehill.

For an in-depth discussion of “the objectivity of belief,” see the first chapter of Žižek’s The Sublime Object of Ideology. Louis Althusser makes a similar point in discussing the “material existence” of ideology. Our actions reflect our true ideological beliefs whatever we claim about them. See his essay, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses.” 13

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Aldrich, R. J. (2001), The Hidden Hand: Britain, America and Cold War Secret Intelligence, Woodstock, NY: Overlook Press. Althusser, L. ([1971] 2001), “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, Ben Brewster (trans.), 85–126, New York: Monthly Review Press. Andrew, C. (2018), Secret World: A History of Intelligence, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Aronoff, M. J. (1999), The Spy Novels of John Le Carré: Balancing Ethics and Politics, New York: St. Martin’s. Bennett, T., and J. Woollacott. (1987), Bond and Beyond: The Political Career of a Popular Hero, New York: Methuen. Buchan, J. ([1915] 1994), The Thirty-Nine Steps, New York: Dover. Cawelti, J. G., and B. Rosenberg (1987), The Spy Story, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Crutchley, L. (2004), The Fictional World of Espionage,” in M. Bruccoli and J. S. Baughman (eds.), Conversations with John le Carré, 6–9, Jackson: University of Mississippi Press. Deindorfer, R. G. (2004), “A Conversation with John le Carré,” in M. Bruccoli and J. S. Baughman (eds.), Conversations with John le Carré, 15–17, Jackson: University of Mississippi Press. Denning, M. (1987), Cover Stories: Narrative and Ideology in the British Spy Thriller, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Dr. No (1962), [Film] Dir. Terence Young, UK: United Artists. Eco, U. (1979), ‘Narrative Structures in Fleming’, in The Role of the Reader: Explorations in the Semiotics of Texts, 144–72, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Fleming, I. ([1953] 2002), Casino Royale, New York: Penguin. Fleming, I. ([1955] 2003), Moonraker, New York: Penguin. Fleming, I. ([1957] 2003), From Russia with Love, New York: Penguin. Fleming, I. ([1958] 2002), Dr. No, New York: Penguin. Fleming, I. ([1959] 2002), Goldfinger, New York: Penguin. Fleming, I. ([1960] 2012), For Your Eyes Only, Las Vegas: Thomas & Mercer. Fleming, I. ([1966] 2012), Octopussy and the Living Daylights, Las Vegas: Thomas & Mercer. Fukuyama, F. (1992), The Last Man and the End of History, New York: Avon Books. Goldfinger (1965), [Film] Dir. Guy Hamilton, UK: United Artists. Grose, P. (1994), Gentleman Spy: The Life of Allen Dulles, Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. Hersh, S. (1974), “Huge C.I.A. Operation Reported in U.S. against Antiwar Forces, Other Dissidents in Nixon Years,” New York Times (December 22): 1. Hitz, F. P. (2004), The Great Game: The Myth and Reality of Espionage, New York: Knopf. Hofstadter, R. (1965), The Paranoid Style in American Politics and Other Essays, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Jameson, F. (1990), Signatures of the Visible, New York: Routledge. Jeffery, K. (2010), The Secret History of MI6, 1909–1949, New York: Penguin. Kinzer, S. (2013), The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles, and Their Secret World War, New York: St. Martin’s Griffin. Kipling, R. ([1901] 2002), Kim, New York: Norton. Le Carré, J. ([1961] 2002), Call for the Dead, New York: Pocket. Le Carré, J. ([1963] 2001), The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, New York: Pocket. Le Carré, J. ([1974] 2002), Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, New York: Pocket. Le Carré, J. (1990), The Secret Pilgrim, New York: Knopf. Le Carré, J. (2016), The Pigeon Tunnel: Stories from My Life, New York: Viking. Le Carré, J. (2017), A Legacy of Spies, New York: Viking.

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Littell, R. (2002), The Company, New York: Penguin. Lycett, A. (1995), Ian Fleming: The Man Behind James Bond, Atlanta, GA: Turner. Mailer, N. (1991), Harlot’s Ghost, New York: Random House. Manning, T. (2018), John le Carré and the Cold War, London: Bloomsbury Academic. Marchetti, V., and J. D. Marks. (1975), The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence, New York: Dell. Mayer, P., and R. Tresman. (2020), “Spy Novelist John le Carré Dies at 89,” npr.org (December 13). Available online: https://www.npr.org/2020/12/13/946105​256/spy-chr​onic​ler-john-le-carre-dies-at-89 (accessed August 1, 2021). Prados, J. (2013), The Family Jewels: The CIA, Secrecy, and Presidential Power. Austin: University of Texas Press. Riebling, M. (2002), Wedge: From Pearl Harbor to 9/11, How the Secret War between the FBI and the CIA Has Endangered National Security, New York: Touchstone. Talbot, D. (2015), The Devil’s Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America’s Secret Government. New York: HarperCollins. US Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities (1975), Alleged Assassination Plots Involving Foreign Leaders, Washington, DC: US GPO. Watson, A. (2004), “Violent Image,” in M. Bruccoli and J. S. Baughman (eds.), Conversations with John le Carré, 10–14, Jackson: University of Mississippi Press. Weiner, T. (2007), Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA, Garden City, NY: Doubleday. Žižek, S. (1989), The Sublime Object of Ideology, New York: Verso. Žižek, S. (1991), Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

FURTHER READING Aldrich, R. J. (2001), The Hidden Hand: Britain, America and Cold War Secret Intelligence, Woodstock, NY: Overlook Press. Aronoff, M. J. (1999), The Spy Novels of John Le Carré: Balancing Ethics and Politics, New York: St. Martin’s. Black, J. (2001), The Politics of James Bond: From Fleming’s Novels to the Big Screen, Westport, CT: Praeger. Cawelti, J. G., and B. Rosenberg. (1987), The Spy Story, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Denning, M. (1987), Cover Stories: Narrative and Ideology in the British Spy Thriller, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Hepburn, A. (2005), Intrigue: Espionage and Culture, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Hitz, F. P. (2004), The Great Game: The Myth and Reality of Espionage, New York: Knopf. Lycett, A. (1995), Ian Fleming: The Man Behind James Bond, Atlanta, GA: Turner. Manny, T. (2018), John le Carré and the Cold War, New York: Bloomsbury. Weiner, T. (2007), Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA, Garden City, NY: Doubleday.

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CHAPTER SEVEN

American Jewish Writers and the Eastern Bloc: The Dissident Generation BRIAN K. GOODMAN

At the end of the Cold War, the American novelist Philip Roth reflected back on his misadventures in the Eastern bloc during the 1970s: “There nothing goes and everything matters; here everything goes and nothing matters” (1990: 14–22). Roth made this remark to the Czech writer Ivan Klíma in an interview published in The New York Review of Books in 1990, just months after the Velvet Revolution.1 Roth first met Klíma in Prague in 1973, during one of Roth’s first visits to latecommunist Czechoslovakia. At the time, Klíma was banned from publishing due to his previous involvement in the socialist reform and liberalization movement that came to be known as the “Prague Spring”—which in turn prompted a Soviet-led invasion of Czechoslovakia in August of 1968. Roth wasn’t the only American writer who visited Klíma in Prague during the subsequent period of neo-Stalinist cultural repression known, euphemistically, as “normalization.” But as Klíma later recalled, “I don’t think any other [American] author has written with such understanding and earnestness about the oppressive fate of Czech writers and Czech culture.”2 For Klíma, a survivor of the “model” concentration camp at Terezín during the period of Nazi occupation, what set Roth apart was his awareness that, as an American Jew, he had escaped “one of the most fundamental Jewish experiences: persecution.” As a result, “he harbored a feeling of solidarity with those being persecuted in a country that had been deprived of its freedom” (Klíma 2013: 309). But Roth also clearly felt an attraction to a place where, for better or worse, literature still mattered. Back home, Roth was a member of the generation of Jewish writers who had broken into the mainstream of American literary culture at the height of the Cold War era. Between 1954 and

Roth was reiterating, in pithier form, a comment that first appeared in print as part of his Paris Review interview with Hermione Lee in 1984. 2 Klíma writes “americký spisovatel” (American writer) in the original Czech-language edition of his memoir. The English translation omits the adjective “American” from this passage. For the original version, see Klíma (2010: 170). 1

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1960, Roth, Saul Bellow, and Bernard Malamud all won the National Book Award.3 Even if their remarkable success was made possible by a range of contingent factors, in subsequent decades the literary–historical narrative of this generation’s breakthrough has taken on an almost impossible representational weight: they came to embody the culmination of a Jewish immigrant success story.4 Indeed, many of the most well-known breakthrough writers were second-generation—or, as in Roth’s case, third-generation—Jewish immigrants to the United States. But even this demographic coincidence has created an exaggerated sense of coherence. Generally speaking, their ancestors were “Eastern European Jews,” Ashkenazim who hailed from across a vast and diverse region stretching from the Austro-Hungarian Empire in the west to the Pale of Settlement on the periphery of the Russian Empire in the east. By midcentury, however, waves of emigration, Nazi genocide, and postwar ethnic cleansing had left behind homogenized nation-states with vanishingly small Jewish populations. During the long Cold War years, much of this region was then consigned to the so-called “Eastern bloc,” an alliance of Communist Party–dominated socialist states that were all subject to varying degrees of Soviet ideological influence, economic control, and military interference, as with the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. Even if “Eastern Europe” had always been a political fiction, the postwar generation of American Jewish writers whose families emigrated from this region did share a more proximate cultural background.5 To a remarkable extent, their cultural and political sensibilities were shaped by, or formed in response to, the arguments that appeared in one small-circulation New York City literary magazine called Partisan Review. In 1968, critic Irving Howe helped assign the circle of predominantly (though not exclusively) Jewish writers who published in Partisan Review a collective identity in a retrospective essay called “The New York Intellectuals: A Chronicle and a Critique.” According to Howe’s insider account, most of the New York Intellectuals “stem from the world of the immigrant Jews,” but they also “come at a moment in the development of immigrant Jewish culture when there is a strong drive not only to break out of the ghetto but also to leave behind the bonds of Jewishness entirely” (1968: 30). This drive for disaffiliation also extended to their politics. If their generation’s youthful familiarity with socialism had given way to a fractious Trotskyism in the 1930s, by the end of the 1940s the left-wing anti-Stalinism of the New York Intellectuals was already shading into liberal anticommunism. But by the end of the 1960s, Howe believed that the American politics of anticommunism had reached a dead end. As evidence of this impasse, Howe cites the recent events in Czechoslovakia, where, as with Hungary in 1956, even the most conservative New York Intellectuals didn’t advocate US military intervention. At this point in the Cold War, “there was simply no way out” (Howe 1968: 37). For Howe, the signal achievement of the New York Intellectuals was therefore literary. As he puts it, “the main literary contribution of the New York milieu has been to legitimate a subject and tone we must uneasily call American Jewish writing” (Howe 1968: 42). As examples, Howe lists four works of fiction by Jewish writers that first appeared in Partisan Review: Delmore Schwartz’s “In Dreams Begin Responsibilities” (1937), Norman Mailer’s “The Man Who Studied Yoga” (1952), Malamud’s “The Magic Barrel” (1954), and Bellow’s “Seize the Day” (1956). But even here the

Bellow first won the National Book Award for Augie March in 1954; Malamud for The Magic Barrel in 1959; and Roth for Goodbye, Columbus a year later in 1960. 4 For a trenchant critique of this narrative’s “self-evidence” see Schreier (2015a: 124–43). See also Schreier (2015b). 5 On the longer history of “Eastern Europe” as a cultural idea dating back as far as the Enlightenment era, see Wolff (1994). 3

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New York Intellectuals were a victim of their own success. By the end of the 1960s, according to Howe, Jewish-American vernacular modernism “was no longer a literature of opposition, and thereby had begun that metamorphosis signifying its ultimate death” (1968: 34). Howe believed that the radicalism of the New York Intellectuals had been following a terminal trajectory since the 1930s: “From a doctrine it became a style, and from a style a memory” (1968: 32). But memories can also be generative. As I will discuss in this chapter, a wider rediscovery of Eastern Europe among American Jews, fueled in part by shifts in Holocaust memory, would help motivate a generation of Jewish-descended writers in the United States—from Roth and Bellow to Arthur Miller and Allen Ginsberg—to travel beyond the Iron Curtain. Their journeys into the Eastern bloc generated new creative experiments and also produced new insight into their cultural situation at home. When Roth first reflected that “everything goes and nothing matters” in American literary culture during the 1970s, he was in part lamenting the passing of a cultural situation during an earlier phase of the Cold War when the cultural stakes of his own writing had seemed much higher. For Roth and many of his peers—including non-Jewish writers like John Updike—that sense of consequence was briefly recovered in the Eastern bloc, where American writers formed new solidarities with their communist-world counterparts. In the final decades of the Cold War, US literary culture was reanimated by a new concern for the Eastern bloc “dissident” writer. To understand how this situation came to be, we must first return to a much earlier era, when the New York Intellectuals were just beginning to turn their left-wing dissidence into a new cultural doctrine.

A DISSIDENT GENERATION When Partisan Review was relaunched as an anti-Stalinist journal in 1937, the editors publicly committed themselves to “represent a new and dissident generation in American letters” (“Editorial Statement” 1937: 4). The statement signaled an important break: three years earlier, Philip Rahv and William Phillips had founded Partisan Review as the in-house magazine of the John Reed Club of New York, an affiliate organization of the Communist Party, United States, that promoted the development of proletarian literature.6 Following the revelations of the Moscow show trials of 1936, however, Rahv and Phillips broke with the Communist Party and invited anti-Stalinist writers and critics like Clement Greenberg, Dwight Macdonald, Mary McCarthy, and George L. K. Morris to join the editorial board of their reconstituted magazine a year later. In their 1937 manifesto, the editors of Partisan Review announced that they were “unequivocally independent” from “the Party literary critics” who, under the direction of Stalin’s chief ideologue Andrei Zhdanov, now sought “to outlaw all dissenting opinion” (“Editorial Statement” 1937: 3). Their use of the term “dissident” in the magazine’s editorial manifesto therefore signaled a dual commitment: first, to provide a forum—a “medium of democratic controversy,” as they put it—for radical political thought that departed from the official Stalinist line; and, second, in stark contrast to Zhdanovist socialist realism, to promote radically independent forms of avant-garde and modernist literature (“Editorial Statement” 1937: 4). For the Partisan Review crowd, there was one Jewish literary figure from the recent European past who seemed to combine both these commitments: Franz Kafka. This was partly a coincidence John Reed, the poet-journalist who traveled to St. Petersburg to witness the October Revolution of 1919, was in some ways a forerunner of the American writers who would later travel to the Eastern bloc. 6

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of timing. Kafka’s novel The Trial was first translated into English in 1937, just as news of Stalin’s Great Terror was dividing the American cultural left. As the intellectual historian David Hollinger has written, “It was precisely in the context of Stalin’s betrayal of socialist humanism that Kafka began to eclipse Marx in the interests of Philip Rahv” (Hollinger 1989: 87). But it wasn’t only Rahv turning to Kafka after the relaunch of the magazine. According to the New York critic Leslie Fiedler, Kafka also became the central writer for the new “generation of writers” who came up along with Partisan Review in the 1940s, including Schwartz, Bellow, Alfred Kazin, Karl Shapiro, Isaac Rosenfeld, and Paul Goodman (Fiedler 1948: 872). As Fiedler points out, these writers were all “urban, second-generation Jews, chiefly anti-Stalinist, ambivalently intellectual, but for all their anguish insolently at home with ideas.” And Kafka helped them reimagine their alienated (male) Jewishness as a universal “condition of the Artist” (Fiedler 1948: 872). But a key question loomed: could the dissident commitments of the New York Intellectuals survive their search for a more universal audience? Beginning in the 1940s, no living writer embodied the cultural ambitions of the New York Intellectuals more than Saul Bellow. Born in Quebec in 1915 to Jewish immigrants from St. Petersburg, Russia, Bellow would become, in Fielder’s words, “the first Jewish-American novelist to stand at the center of American literature” (Fiedler 1967: 3). After publishing early Kafkaesque novels like The Dangling Man (1944) and The Victim (1947), Bellow found a new voice with the publication of The Adventures of Augie March (1953), his picaresque entry into the postwar competition to write the Great American Novel.7 From its famous, Melville-, Whitman-, and Twainechoing opening line (“I am an American, Chicago born—Chicago, that somber city—and go at things as I have taught myself, free-style, and will make the record in my own way: first to knock, first admitted; sometimes an innocent knock, sometimes a not so innocent” (Bellow 2006: 1)), Augie March was Bellow’s attempt to translate a Yiddish-inflected vernacular modernism into something more universal—or at least, more “American.” Bellow was hardly alone among postwar Jewish writers in his national ambitions. In the early years of the Cold War, two of his contemporaries, Miller and Malamud, both published classic works that left behind the Jewish immigrant milieu and reached the status of American allegory: Miller’s conspicuously de-ethnicized play Death of a Salesman (1949), and Malamud’s Arthurian baseball epic The Natural (1952). The late 1950s also saw the rise of a slightly younger cohort of Jewish-descended writers in the United States, including such distinctive voices as Grace Paley (b. 1922), Philip Roth (b. 1933), and Allen Ginsberg (b. 1926). The year 1959 saw the publication of both Paley’s The Little Disturbances of Man and Roth’s Goodbye, Columbus, two debut collections that, each in their own way, pushed back against the dominant Cold War–era narrative of successful Jewish assimilation into the white American mainstream. Ginsberg, meanwhile, would continue to celebrate all of his own marginal identities (Jewish, queer, politically radical), which he claimed as a Whitmanian poetic resource. Although he rose to fame as the poetic spokesman of the Beat generation in the late 1950s, as Louis Menand has shown, Ginsberg’s dissident sensibilities were significantly formed through his complex relationship with Lionel Trilling, the author of The Liberal Imagination (1950), who served on the editorial board of Partisan Review at the peak of its influence.8 Trilling was the first For an excellent discussion of Bellow in relation to the aspirational genre of the Great American Novel, see Buell (2014: 169–74). 8 For an illuminating portrait of the Ginsberg–Trilling relationship, see Menand (2021: 171–96). 7

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Jewish tenured professor in Columbia University’s English department, where Ginsberg had been one of his students. But like the writing of Kafka before him, Ginsberg tested the boundaries of Trilling’s liberal modernism.9 Despite their many aesthetic and political differences, the rise of this new cohort—along with the increased cultural influence of New York–based magazines like Partisan Review—seemed to further confirm the arrival of a new generation of Jewish writers and intellectuals at the height of the Cold War era. The relationship of many Jewish writers to the dominant political culture in the United States was clearly evolving, as the New York Intellectuals’ embrace of outsiderness gave way to a tentative (or even fierce, in the case of Bellow) sense of belonging. In contrast to Partisan Review’s editorial of 1937, there was now more talk of affirmation than there was of dissent. In 1945, an editorial statement titled “An Act of Affirmation” had announced the creation of Commentary magazine, the official magazine of the American Jewish Committee (Cohen 1945: 1). By the early 1950s, even Partisan Review was cautiously embracing the “affirmative attitude toward America which has emerged since the Second World War” as a “necessary corrective of the earlier extreme negation” (“Our Country and Our Culture” 1952: 284). In the introduction to their famous 1952 symposium “Our Country and Our Culture,” the editors of Partisan Review acknowledged, “For better or worse, most writers no longer accept alienation as the artist’s fate in America; on the contrary, they want very much to be a part of American life” (“Our Country and Our Culture” 1952: 284). Here, it’s difficult not to read the reference to “most writers” as being ethnically coded as Jewish. Literary historians now cite this symposium as evidence of the New York Intellectuals’ drift toward the liberal consensus politics of the early Cold War years—and, for many Jewish writers and critics, even further to the right. In 1960, Norman Podhoretz, a protégé of Trilling and rival of Ginsberg, took over as editor of Commentary, inaugurating the magazine’s enduring shift to the conservative end of the American political spectrum. The example of Bellow’s own political evolution from youthful Trotskyite to neoconservative fellow traveler seemed to confirm this narrative of rightward development. It’s a familiar story, and examples of prominent Jewish leftists who made a sharp right turn aren’t hard to find: Bellow and Podhoretz, but also Irving Kristol, Gertrude Himmelfarb, Daniel Bell, and even Allan Bloom. But literary scholars, including Benjamin Schreier, now push back against “the stock narrative of Jewish American political transformation: from early twentieth-century immigrant socialism to midcentury deradicalization and liberalism to post-’67 Zionism” (2015: 104). Building on the scholarly work of Alan Wald, Schreier has argued that the “neoconservative vector is neither the only line that can be drawn from the immensely productive ferment of the New York intellectuals to the present nor, importantly, an inevitable one” (2015: 104).10 Here, Irving Howe might help us identify an alternative trajectory for the American Jewish writers influenced by the dissident commitments of Partisan Review—this one pointing back toward a collective memory of Eastern Europe. While few writers from the “breakthrough” generation ever became advocates of Howe’s liberal brand of democratic socialism—the political viewpoint associated with Dissent magazine, which Howe cofounded in 1954—Howe was also hard at work on another cultural project during the 1950s: bringing Yiddish literature to an English-language audience. In the mid-1950s, Howe also 9

See Suchoff (1992: 137–61). See Wald (1987).

10

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edited (with Eliezer Greenberg) A Treasury of Yiddish Stories (1954). Included in the anthology was Bellow’s translation of Isaac Bashevis Singer’s classic story, “Gimpel the Fool,” which had first appeared in Partisan Review a year earlier, launching Singer’s American career. Written in 1944 just as Yiddish culture was being destroyed across Eastern Europe, stories like “Gimpel” helped consolidate a fantastic image of the Jewish shtetl past in postwar America. Howe later worried these fantasies were further evidence that American Jewish writing was entering an “advanced state of decomposition” (1968: 42). He wondered about the surprising popularity of Singer, “who, coming to the American literary scene precisely at the moment when writers composing in English had begun to exhaust the Jewish subject, could, by dazzling contrast, extend it endlessly backward in time and deeper in historical imagination?” (1968: 43). By the 1970s, Howe’s cultural pessimism had begun to converge with that of his neoconservative antagonists. In the introduction to his 1977 anthology of Jewish American Stories, Howe suggested that a literary tradition once defined by the “distinctiveness” of the Jewish immigrant milieu had “probably moved past its high point” (Howe 1977: 16). He agreed with Ruth Wisse’s judgment, published in Commentary a year earlier, that young Jewish writers in the United States now had little alternative but to “ship their characters out of town by Greyhound or magic carpet, to an unlikely shtetl, to Israel … to other times and other climes, in search of pan-Jewish fictional atmospheres” (Wisse 1976: 45). Wisse’s implication was that there were only two choices left for the assimilated, post-immigrant Jewish writer: a nostalgic search for a lost Eastern European past or a Zionist embrace of the Israeli future. But the former course also contained a third possibility: the Eastern bloc present. Indeed, many of the American Jewish writers who would attempt to revisit the vanished world of their Eastern European ancestors would also discover dissident subcultures that held up a distorted mirror to their own experiences as writers in the United States. These literary encounters across the Iron Curtain were as artistically rich as they were politically ambiguous. Because no sooner had many Jewish-descended writers arrived into the American literary mainstream at the height of the Cold War era than they were already plotting their next escape—in some cases, with the help of the US State Department.

THAT MOSTLY IMAGINARY ACTIVITY TERMED CULTURAL EXCHANGE Saul Bellow departed for the Eastern bloc at the end of 1959. He had been invited by the State Department to take part in a three-month lecture tour as part of the US Information Agency’s (USIA) “Experts and Specialists” program. Struggling to start a new writing project after the publication of Henderson the Rain King earlier in the year, and with his second marriage falling apart, Bellow accepted. The first stop on the tour was Poland. Bellow arrived in Warsaw in midDecember, accompanied by the New York Intellectual and novelist Mary McCarthy, author of The Group (1963). Their official itinerary was packed, but Bellow found time for a side trip to Auschwitz. “I can’t tell you what an impression Poland makes on me,” he wrote to his editor back in the United States. “It’s too deep. As deep as death, and more familiar than I can admit at the top of my mind. It’s family history” (qtd. in Atlas 2000: 289). The second stop on the tour, in early 1960, was General Josip Broz Tito’s nonaligned Yugoslavia, a Communist nation that had broken from the Soviet orbit in 1948. From Belgrade, Bellow wrote to his friend Ralph Ellison, admitting that

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all “this cultural functionary bullshit” did have its “consolations.” He added, “Eastern Europe has taught me a lot about my family—myself, even. It’s made a Slavophile of me” (Bellow 2010: 427). There was another consolation: during his trip, Bellow began work on a new novel, partly inspired by his failing marriage. The final version of this novel would be published in 1964 as Herzog. Moses Herzog, Bellow’s protagonist, is an American Jewish academic who has just returned from a “cultural tour” abroad, with lecture stops in Warsaw, Cracow, and Belgrade (Bellow 2003: 10). Once back in the United States, he promptly suffers a mental breakdown. Bellow’s semi-epistolary form forces the reader to participate in Herzog’s struggle to trade in his intellectual alienation for a new kind of moral responsibility. As Herzog’s life unravels, his experiences in Eastern Europe remain conspicuously in the background. “Still, he had been continually aware of drab Poland,” Bellow writes, “in all directions freezing, drab, and ruddy gray, the stones still smelling of wartime murders” (Bellow 2003: 30). Even if Poland is a harbinger of Herzog’s spiraling neurosis in the novel, Eastern Europe was closer to a site of regeneration for Bellow, both personally and professionally. As the literary scholar Saul Noam Zaritt has argued, “Bellow, among many Jewish American writers of the postwar period, very much wanted to be ‘worlded’ in the various ways such a verb can be defined: they wanted their works to circulate globally; they wanted to be canonized as literary figures who had achieved universal status; they wanted to escape the anxiety of seeming provincial” (2016: 544). Herzog helped him accomplish this ambition. By October of 1964, Herzog was a runaway bestseller. Bellow was no longer just the critical darling of the New York Intellectual scene, or even just a National Book Award–winning author—he was now world famous. Even if Bellow wouldn’t win the Nobel Prize until 1976 (followed two years later by Singer, the second American Jewish writer to be so honored), his literary rivals in the United States had already taken notice. In the mid-1960s, John Updike—by then one of the most celebrated non-Jewish novelists in the United States—introduced a new fictional alter ego in the pages of The New Yorker: a Jewish writer named Henry Bech. One of Updike’s longest-running characters (alongside Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom), Bech is often pointed to as evidence of the WASP establishment’s uneasy recognition of American Jewish literary success.11 In a metafictional foreword to the story collection Bech: A Book (1970), Bech pens a letter to Updike in which he admits a certain resemblance to other Jewish writers of the breakthrough era: Mailer, Malamud, Roth (or, rather, the latter Roth’s fictional creation Alexander Portnoy), Salinger, Singer, and—of course—the “glamorous Bellow” (Updike 2001: 5). As Malcolm Bradbury points out in his introduction to The Complete Henry Bech (2001), Updike even created a mock bibliography to help him further situate Bech “in the tradition of Jewish-American modernism, in line with the fiction of angst, alienation and protest.” Bradbury elaborates, “His literary culture is the world of Partisan Review and Commentary; he comes from the counter-strand of American fiction, the dissenting, immigrant, anguished, and extreme” (Updike 2001: xii). Was Updike’s New York Intellectual schtick just envy expressed as ethnic cliché? Such jealous sentiments (or, in some cases, resentments) certainly weren’t hard to find among WASP writers in the late 1960s. For instance, in 1968, the novelist Edward Hoagland published an essay in Some scholars, including Benjamin Schreier, resist the scholarly tendency to read Bech “as merely another epiphenomenal literary representation of breakthrough, albeit at one further remove, as an expression of Gentile literary reaction to a multigenerational assimilation story.” See Schreier (2020: 160). 11

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Commentary called “On Not Being a Jew,” in which he admitted to feeling like “a museum piece, like some State-of-Mainer, because I could field no ancestor who had hawked tin pots in a Polish shtetl” (1968: 62). But the fictional Bech was much more than just an envious exercise in Jewish passing. In 1989, Updike would publish his own essay in Commentary, under a title that conspicuously echoes Hoagland’s earlier piece in the magazine: “On Not Being a Dove.” In the essay, which is mostly an apologia for his cautious support of the Vietnam War, Updike describes how his literary rivals who had served in the military, including Jewish writers like Mailer and Roth (if only briefly in a clerical position), had earned “the privilege of dissent” (Updike 1989: 28). Updike, however, had claimed 4-F status during the Korean War. And, so, he explains, “When asked, in 1964, to go to the Soviet Union for a month as part of a cultural-exchange program, I consented partly because this would constitute a small patriotic service, a wearing abroad, at last, of my country’s color” (Updike 1989: 28). Bech is better understood as the ambivalent creation of a non-Jewish writer who felt himself caught between the poles of Jewish dissent and American affirmation. Like Herzog, Henry Bech was first conceived on a USIA cultural diplomacy tour of the Eastern bloc. In 1964, the same year that Herzog was published, Updike traveled to the Soviet Union, Romania, Bulgaria, and Czechoslovakia, “at the expense of our State Department for a month of that mostly imaginary activity termed ‘cultural exchange’ ” (Updike 2001: 8). This is how Updike put it in his story “Rich in Russia,” which recounts Bech’s experiences in Moscow during a period of relative “thaw” in cultural relations between the United States and the Soviet Union. In total, three of the stories collected in Bech: A Book were inspired by Updike’s own experiences as “an ambassador of the arts, to the other half of the world, the hostile, mysterious half ” (Updike 2001: 40). Updike was perceptive enough to realize that the exaggerated geopolitical import of these cultural–diplomatic visits only heightened their comedic potential. Take the story “Bech in Rumania; or, the Rumanian Chauffeur.” Soon after arriving in Bucharest, Bech receives a phone call from a “Mr. Phillips” at the US Embassy. Mr. Phillips (“Princeton ‘51”) is likely a CIA spook (Updike 2001: 21). In hushed tones, he explains to Bech, “I know damn well this line is bugged, but here goes. This country is hot. Anti-Socialism is busting out all over. My inkling is they want to get you out of Bucharest, away from all the liberal writers who are dying to meet you.” “Are you sure they’re not dying to meet Arthur Miller?” “Kidding aside, Bech, there’s a lot of ferment in this country, and we want to plug you in.” (Updike 2001: 22–3) Mr. Phillips provides a list of high-value contacts to Bech’s Romanian handler, a low-level Party member and the “chauffeur” of the story’s title. Bech unwittingly spends an evening with one of these “liberal writers” whom Mr. Phillips later describes as “the hottest Red writer this side of Solzhenitsyn” (Updike 2001: 38). Bech sarcastically assures Mr. Phillips that this “Red hot” writer will surely “defect to the West as soon as his shirts come back from the laundry” (Updike 2001: 38). Although Updike plays this Romanian episode for laughs, these kinds of literary contacts between American Jewish writers and their dissenting Eastern bloc counterparts sometimes had very real consequences. But it was usually unofficial exchanges, rather than the “small patriotic service” of a government-sponsored diplomacy tour, that had a much bigger impact on the evolution of literary dissidence across the Iron Curtain.

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If both Updike and Bellow had moved rightward on the American political–cultural spectrum by the end of the 1960s, writers like Ginsberg and Miller had become prominent opponents of the American war in Vietnam and would soon be actively involved in solidarity campaigns with persecuted writers caught on either side of an increasingly globalized Cold War. In the winter of 1965, for instance, Ginsberg was expelled from Castro’s Cuba, in part for speaking out against the persecution of Havana’s gay poets, and put on a plane bound for Czechoslovakia (see Russell Cobb’s essay elsewhere in this collection for more on Ginsberg in Cuba). Ginsberg would remain behind the Iron Curtain for more than two months, visiting Poland, including Auschwitz, and the Soviet Union. Like the fictional Henry Bech, Ginsberg met with outspoken writers like Andrei Voznesenski and Yevgeny Yevtushenko in Moscow. Back in Prague, he also met with a young playwright named Václav Havel. Ginsberg soon became a celebrity among the city’s burgeoning youth counterculture, which was already beginning to flower a full three years before the Prague Spring. On May 1, 1965, Ginsberg was elected “King of May” in a massive student festival, called “Majáles,” that had been banned since 1956. But this was a step too far even for liberalizing Czechoslovakia: within days, the American poet had been deported from his second socialist country in three months. Even if his visit was cut short by the Czechoslovak authorities, the episode accelerated Ginsberg’s transformation from Beat poet to global countercultural icon. Back in Czechoslovakia, Majáles would be remembered as an important cultural milestone on the road to the Prague Spring, and an early manifestation of the youth movement’s demand for “socialism with a human face.” In 1969, on the other side of the Soviet-led invasion that crushed the Prague Spring, Arthur Miller also traveled to Czechoslovakia in his capacity as president of PEN International. Miller had been elected to the position four years earlier in the hope that his experiences under McCarthyism would give him credibility as an advocate of free expression on both sides of the Iron Curtain. (Updike’s joking reference to Miller in “Bech in Rumania” was not incidental.) One of Miller’s guides in Prague in 1969 was Havel, who within a decade would become one of the most prominent dissidents in the entire Eastern bloc (and, after the 1989 “Velvet Revolution” that brought down the Communist government, the first president of post-socialist Czechoslovakia). Miller’s active support of fellow dramatist Havel would continue for the rest of the Cold War period, particularly after Havel was imprisoned for “subversion” against the state in 1979. In the early 1980s, Miller helped bring much-needed international attention to Havel’s worsening condition in prison, which would eventually lead to his early release in 1983. In the meantime, Havel distracted himself by reading works of literature and philosophy in his jail cell. According to his prison letters, he particularly enjoyed one novel in Czech translation, which he described as being “about the crisis of intellectuality in conditions of complete intellectual freedom.” The novel, as he noted in a letter to his wife on April 10, 1982, was called “Herzog, by Saul Bellow” (Havel 1988: 123).

A RETURN TO THE OTHER EUROPE By the time Philip Roth visited Prague for the first time in 1972, a great deal had changed in American literary culture since the late 1950s. It had been more than a decade since Roth had won the National Book Award for Goodbye, Columbus, and by the end of the 1960s he had also been liberated from nearly all legal constraints on what could be written about in an American work of fiction. Over the course of the decade, the Supreme Court and a liberalizing culture struck down or eroded most laws against obscenity, blasphemy, and profanity in literature and film, and mainstream

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publishers and movie studios (not just the underground) were now putting out much more daring material. Many Jewish writers and publishers, not to mention directors and film executives, had been pushing the envelope for years. And as the literary scholar Josh Lambert has shown, for much of the twentieth century, “American Jews played crucial roles in obscenity controversies not just as defendants but also as lawyers, judges, and witnesses” (Lambert 2013: 7). Their motives, of course, were varied in the fight for free expression; for some Jewish writers, experiments with obscenity were a way of accruing cultural prestige, particularly after the rise of literary modernism. Lambert provides the example of the long-neglected writer Henry Roth (no relation to Philip), author of the belated modernist classic Call It Sleep (1934), which was revived by the New York Intellectuals, including Howe, in the late 1950s. Around the same time, in 1957, a legal case involving yet another Roth—this time, the “Zionist-poet-turned-literary-pirate-and-pornographer” Samuel Roth (again, no relation)—led the Supreme Court to rethink its definition of obscenity in works of literature, paving the way for many of the landmark anti-censorship rulings of the 1960s (Lambert 2013: 8). In 1969, Philip Roth took advantage of all this newfound freedom by publishing Portnoy’s Complaint, which immediately transformed him into one of the most notorious literary celebrities in the United States. The novel is floridly obscene and sexual (although demure compared to some of Roth’s later works like Sabbath’s Theater), and unabashedly embraces, and satirizes, one of the most enduring anti-Semitic images in American culture: a Jewish man lusting after the pristine blond shiksa (gentile woman).12 But after publishing a provocative bestseller as obscene as Portnoy’s Complaint, where could a boundary-pushing author like Roth go next? The standard narrative of Roth’s career focuses on his self-imposed exile in the wilds of New England, where with monk-like discipline he turned out more than twenty books from the standing desk in his austere backyard writing shed. But, in fact, the midcareer crisis brought on by the publication of Portnoy’s Complaint also led Roth to visit late-communist Czechoslovakia. Roth was inspired to make this journey because of his intense fascination with the Prague writer whom Partisan Review had championed after its relaunch in the late 1930s. “It was Franz Kafka who was responsible for getting me to Prague to begin with,” Roth would write in an essay for The New York Times after his fifth trip to Czechoslovakia in 1976 (Roth 1976). Later in the essay, he continues, But within the first few hours of walking in these streets between the river and the Old Town Square, I understood that a connection existed between myself and this place: here was one of those dense corners of Jewish Europe which Hitler had emptied of Jews, a place which in earlier days must have been not too unlike those neighborhoods in Austro-Hungarian Lemberg and Czarist Kiev, where the two branches of my family had lived before their emigration to America at the beginning of the century. (Roth 1976) As this quote suggests, Roth’s travels behind the Iron Curtain in the 1970s occurred amid a broader Jewish American rediscovery of “Eastern Europe,” a region encountered first as a cultural memory and only then as a geopolitical reality. This rediscovery was motivated, in part, by shifts in Holocaust

As Lambert puts it, “Thanks to changes in obscenity law, the trope of the attraction of the shikse could be rendered with considerably more explicit detail in the 1960s and could reflect the growing anxiety about Jewish cultural reproduction through a more powerful set of sexual metaphors just as intermarriage, which had not previously been a serious demographic phenomenon, increased in popularity.” See Lambert (2013: 123). 12

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remembrance that had occurred in the United States since the 1960s. The arrival of the Cold War in the late 1940s, along with a concept of “totalitarianism” that collapsed many of the distinctions between Nazi and Soviet terror, had marginalized what little discussion of the Holocaust existed in the immediate postwar years. And as the historian Peter Novick has argued, “the popular association of Jews and communism” that had existed since the first Red Scare acted as a further “constraint on public Jewish discourse about the Holocaust and Nazism in the early cold war years” (Novick 1999: 92). However, in the 1960s, this situation began to change. Prominent American Jewish writers like Bernard Malamud, who published The Fixer in 1966, were finally beginning to address the violent anti-Semitism of the Eastern European past. These shifts in Holocaust memory coincided with a period of white ethnic revival in the 1970s. Few Jewish writers were more influential in this development than Howe, who published World of Our Fathers: The Journey of the East European Jews to America and the Life They Found and Made in 1976.13 Howe had become one of Roth’s most biting critics in the years since the publication of Portnoy’s Complaint, accusing him in 1972 of possessing a “thin personal culture” divorced from Jewish tradition (Howe 1972: 73).14 But Howe’s estimation of Roth would soon change once again thanks to Roth’s considerable efforts on behalf of Eastern bloc writers. While retracing Kafka’s footsteps in Prague, Roth had also discovered a living Czech literary culture shaped (and, in many cases, deformed) by decades of shifting state censorship policies. Kafka, who couldn’t be published in Czechoslovakia between 1948 and 1957, was once again banned. Not only did the ruling regime proscribe Kafka’s works in his home city, but, as Roth discovered, many of Czechoslovakia’s most talented writers—including Klíma, Havel, Ludvík Vaculík, and Milan Kundera—had also been banned from publishing since 1968.15 During his first trip, Roth’s translators informed him that a Czech-language version of Portnoy’s Complaint had long been completed but had no chance of being approved for publication under conditions of “normalization,” the euphemism the regime used to describe the reimposition of political and cultural repression. (See Jiřina Šmejkalová’s essay elsewhere in this collection for further discussion of Czech cultural and literary life during the “normalization” period.) Ironically enough, Roth also learned that the USIA library in Prague refused to stock Portnoy’s Complaint—it was, apparently, too “kinky” (Roth 1976). The thwarted Czech version of Portnoy only heightened Roth’s interest in the comparative politics of censorship across the Iron Curtain. Roth soon threw himself into advocacy on behalf of the banned writers he had befriended in Prague, writing an anonymous report for PEN and setting up a clandestine financial scheme to support dissident Czech intellectuals. (Roth invited prominent American authors, including Bellow, Updike, Ginsberg, and Miller, to participate.) All these activities finally caught up with Roth in 1976, when he was approached in Prague by two uniformed policemen (who had joined the plainclothes agents who always followed him on his meetings with outlawed Czech writers). As Roth would later dramatize in his novel Deception

or more on Howe in relation to the white ethnic revivals of the 1970s, see Jacobson (2008). F Howe made this charge against Roth in Commentary magazine in December of 1972, in an essay titled “Philip Roth Reconsidered.” For a very useful discussion of Roth’s travels in Czechoslovakia in the context of Howe’s criticism, see Nadel (2021: 267–86). 15 For more on the cultural, political, and personal contexts that shaped the literary dissidence of these Czech writers, see Bolton (2012). 13 14

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(1990), he jumped on a passing tram and made immediate plans to fly back to the United States. Roth would not return to Czechoslovakia until after the Velvet Revolution. But this was hardly the end of Roth’s engagement with Eastern bloc writers. Two years before his tourist visa was canceled, Roth had inaugurated a new paperback series at Penguin called “Writers from the Other Europe.” The Other Europe series, for which Roth served as general editor, went on to become one of the great transnational publishing projects of the late Cold War era.16 Not only did the Other Europe series help introduce many of the banned Czech writers Roth had met in Prague to a much wider readership outside of the Eastern bloc but the series also helped establish an entire alternative canon of Central and Eastern European literature in English translation. By the end of the Cold War, the Other Europe series had expanded both geographically and chronologically to include seventeen works by eleven authors who wrote in four different languages (Czech, Polish, Hungarian, and Serbo-Croatian). To help inoculate these works from reductive Cold War political interpretations, Roth commissioned introductions from some of the most celebrated writers in contemporary world literature, including Updike, Heinrich Böll, Carlos Fuentes, Joseph Brodsky, and Angela Carter. Notably, Updike wrote the introduction for Bruno Schulz’s The Street of Crocodiles, one of the most influential works included in the Other Europe series. Schulz, a Polish Jew rumored to be killed by a Gestapo agent during a pogrom in 1942, hadn’t lived to witness the absorption of his native Galicia into the Soviet-dominated Eastern bloc, but his fiction would nonetheless influence generations of American Jewish writers well beyond the Cold War period, particularly as they grappled with the impossible challenge of writing about the Holocaust.17 But the Other Europe series was not entirely divorced from Cold War geopolitics. Several of the dissenting literary intellectuals published in the series, including Milan Kundera, Danilo Kiš, and György Konrád, became important participants in transatlantic debates about the cultural fate of the region they preferred to call “Central Europe.” Kundera, in fact, became the cynosure of the dissident Eastern bloc writer and a genuine literary celebrity in the West when his novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being became a major 1988 Hollywood film.18 The success of the Writers from the Other Europe series signaled a new phase in the literary politics of the Cold War era. Beginning in the mid-1970s, US literary institutions were becoming increasingly entangled with new international human rights organizations that were advocating for dissident writers across the Eastern bloc. Take the example of Robert Bernstein, the longtime president of Random House who founded the human rights organization Helsinki Watch (later renamed Human Rights Watch) in 1978, with the help of the activist Jeri Laber. Seizing on the human rights language of the 1976 Helsinki Accords, Bernstein recruited many prominent American authors—including E. L. Doctorow, Arthur Miller, Toni Morrison, John Updike, and Kurt Vonnegut—to his various initiatives in the late 1970s. (Rósa Magnúsdóttir and Birgitte Beck Pristed’s essay on Soviet publishing, in this anthology, details how Bernstein’s efforts on behalf of censored Eastern bloc writers almost derailed several international literary fairs.) One of Helsinki Watch’s first projects was to become the American distributor of Index on Censorship, a

I have written more extensively about Roth’s relationship to Czech writers and his creation of the “Other Europe” series in Goodman (2015: 717–40). 17 On Schulz’s influence, see Burdick (2015: 343–61). 18 For much more on these debates, including how both Jewishness and anti-Semitism figured in the construction of a new Central European ideal, see Labov (2019). 16

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publication that specialized in publishing writers who were banned in their home countries. Index on Censorship would soon be joined in this mission by other publications specializing in Central and Eastern European writing like Cross Currents and Formations, founded by Roth’s friend Jonathan Brent. Several writers from Roth’s series, including Kundera and Konrád, also reached a receptive audience through the pages of The New York Review of Books, which had been founded by Robert Silvers and Barbara Epstein as a kind of successor to Partisan Review. With their aesthetic tastes and political commitments shaped by the New York Intellectuals, figures like Silvers, Laber, Epstein, and Bernstein formed a close network of writers, publishers, and activists who enabled the circulation of underground literature beyond the borders of the Iron Curtain.19 That all these figures, including Roth, were members of the same generation of American Jews— born in the 1920s and early 1930s, beginning their careers in the early decades of the Cold War— was not by itself determinative. However, influenced by earlier battles against literary censorship, they did carry a much longer tradition of Jewish advocacy for freedom of expression with them into the late Cold War years—providing a political edge to the American Jewish rediscovery of Eastern Europe. And with their active encouragement, by the 1980s, many of the most influential voices in US literary culture had turned their full attention to the cause of the persecuted Eastern bloc dissident writer.

CONCLUSION: THREE PRAGUE STORIES In the decade and a half before the Velvet Revolution, Philip Roth, Arthur Miller, and John Updike all produced literary works based on their experiences in “normalized” Prague. All three of these works—Miller’s play The Archbishop’s Ceiling (1977, revised in 1984–5), Roth’s novella The Prague Orgy (1985), and Updike’s short story “Bech in Czech” (1987)—feature as their protagonist a famous Jewish author from the United States who comes face-to-face with his dissident counterparts in an Eastern bloc country. Taken together, we can draw several tentative conclusions from these works about the origins and the fate of the American Jewish literary encounter with the Eastern bloc during the Cold War era. First of all, this encounter was never a unitary phenomenon. As The Archbishop’s Ceiling does an excellent job of dramatizing, the motivations of the American Jewish writers who traveled behind the Iron Curtain were often as ambiguous as they were diverse. The protagonist of Miller’s play is Adrian Wallach, teasingly referred to by several of the intellectuals he is visiting in an unnamed Eastern bloc capital as the “very important American writer” (Miller 1989: 28). Despite Adrian’s status as a national literary eminence, he still occasionally breaks into the Yiddish-inflected speech of his youth. As one of his hosts, a formerly imprisoned writer named Marcus, comments, “Every now and then you sound like Brooklyn” (Miller 1989: 69). All of the action of the play takes place inside Marcus’s apartment, the former residence of an archbishop that was requisitioned for Marcus soon after he was politically rehabilitated. Throughout the play, Miller usefully complicates the Western image of the “dissident” writer, drawing a sharp contrast between Marcus and another writer named Sigmund, who stubbornly refuses to make any compromises with the ruling regime. Now unable to publish in his native country, Sigmund spends more and more of his time sending

See Kind-Kovács (2014: 176–80).

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open letters to the Western European press and the United Nations. The resemblance to Havel is not accidental: Miller has acknowledged that the premise of Archbishop’s Ceiling was inspired by an anecdote he once heard from Havel about a listening device discovered in the chandelier of his Prague apartment (Miller 1989: ix). Near the end of the play, Sigmund asks Adrian, “Why have you come here? What do you want in this country?” (Miller 1989: 100). For much of the play, Adrian’s hosts have been trying to tease out Adrian’s real motivation for traveling back to the Eastern bloc. Early in the play, Adrian admits, “I’ve become obsessed with this place, it’s like some Jerusalem for me” (Miller 1989: 13). One of the play’s characters, Maya, proposes her own theory, which closely echoes Roth’s quotation about the impossibility of writing in a literary culture in which everything goes and nothing matters. Adrian clearly wants to use his literary celebrity for good ends, perhaps by helping Sigmund recover a manuscript that has been seized by the local authorities. But later, when Marcus suggests that Adrian is a member of the “lucky generation” in the United States who missed the horrors of the Second World War, Adrian admits, “History came at us like a rumor. We were never really there” (Miller 1989: 76). Marcus replies by asking once again, “Is that why you come here?” (Miller 1989: 76). Throughout, Adrian dances around the implication that he has also come to the Eastern bloc in search of material for a new novel. It gradually becomes clear that the visiting American writer is the play’s true listening device: “To whom am I talking, Adrian,” Marcus wonders at one point, “the New York Times, or your novel, or you?” (Miller 1989: 81). Roth’s novella The Prague Orgy has much in common with The Archbishop’s Ceiling. Indeed, the “orgies” of Roth’s title are a fictionalized reference to the infamous sex parties hosted by the rehabilitated Czech writer Jiří Mucha, a secret police collaborator who was allowed to live in a former archbishop’s palace near Prague Castle. But Zuckerman’s motives for traveling to the Eastern bloc are much clearer than Adrian’s: he has come to track down a lost Yiddish-language manuscript of a writer who bears a conspicuous biographical resemblance to Bruno Schulz. Unlike Roth’s real-life attempts to promote tamizdat (underground texts published abroad) in the West, Zuckerman’s quest ends in failure. As Joseph Benatov has persuasively argued, “the novella’s central structuring plot device of a failed tamizdat mission embodies Roth’s resistance to the appeal of a homogeneous image of Eastern Europe” (Benatov 2009: 107). As for the orgies, Zuckerman speculates that his Czech hosts may be exaggerating their own sexual depravity in order to throw “a little cold water on free-world fantasies of virtuous political suffering” (Roth 1996: 26). For Zuckerman, Prague serves as a perverse mirror, reflecting back on his own native literary scene. At one point, Zuckerman imagines himself and other prominent American writers being subjected to small-scale acts of repression like their Czech counterparts, including being forced into new careers as manual laborers: “[William] Styron washing glasses in a Penn Station barroom, Susan Sontag wrapping buns at a Broadway bakery, Gore Vidal bicycling salamis to school lunchrooms in Queens—I look at the filthy floor and see myself sweeping it” (Roth 1996: 61). In The Prague Orgy, then, Roth is also ironizing his own literary generation’s dissident obsessions. By the mid-1980s, those dissident obsessions had once again taken hold of American literary culture. But the word “dissident” itself, which had first caught on with the New York Intellectuals after Stalin’s Great Terror in the 1930s, was now becoming more controversial as a label for describing banned Eastern bloc writers. While neoconservative intellectuals like Podhoretz, hostile

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to socialist governments everywhere, continued to uncritically describe writers like Kundera as dissidents (without scare quotes), left-liberal critics like Irving Howe were increasingly shying away from this politically reductive label.20 Notably, both Roth and Miller also avoid the term entirely in their Prague narratives. Not Updike, however. “Bech in Czech,” first published in The New Yorker in 1987, marks Henry Bech’s return to the cultural–diplomatic circuit, this time in the waning years of the Cold War. The literary scholar Harilaos Stecopoulos has usefully described “Bech in Czech” as a prime example of what he terms “Cold War postmodernism,” a final extension of the US government’s deployment of modernist literature and art in its propaganda battles with the Soviet Union throughout the early Cold War.21 Updike, who himself visited Prague as an official guest of the US Embassy in 1986, was hardly alone among American writers in his “increased willingness to champion the cause of the beleaguered writer trapped in the iron cage of the communist state” (Stecopoulos 2016: 75). Stecopoulos also cites Joyce Carol Oates’s story “Warszawa: 1980,” another “culturaldiplomatic tale” about a Sontag-esque intellectual who travels to Poland and confronts her own Jewish ancestry. By the 1980s, Sontag had herself embraced a more strident anticommunism, “rejecting left-liberal political naïveté (‘illusions’ and ‘misconceptions’) in a manner reminiscent of her New York Intellectual predecessors” (Stecopoulos 2016: 77). As Stecopoulos points out, many other American writers besides Sontag “found in the cause of the Eastern European intellectual a new way of shoring up the declining position of the literary intellectual in the United States” (Stecopoulos 2016: 78). But could this special dispensation possibly last once the cultural conditions of the Cold War had passed into historical memory? If the fictional Henry Bech is a reliable barometer, then the answer would appear to be no. At the conclusion of “Bech in Czech,” we find the exhausted American author, nearing the end of his cultural–diplomatic journey behind the Iron Curtain, lying awake in his bedroom at the US Embassy. Updike describes the moon, rising from behind Prague Castle, as “drenching in silver, like the back of a mirror” (Updike 1987: 48). This arresting image is a callback to the earliest Bech story, “The Bulgarian Poetess,” written after Updike’s first tour of the Eastern bloc in the mid-1960s. The working title had been “Through the Looking Glass.” Early in that story, Updike writes, “At times, indeed, Bech felt he had passed through a mirror, a dingy flecked mirror that reflected feebly the capitalist world” (Updike 2001: 42). By the end of Bech’s first Bulgarian adventure, “the mirror had gone opaque and gave him back only himself ” (Updike 2001: 54). Now, more than twenty years later, Updike returns to this image. Lying in his bed at the Prague Embassy, Bech fantasizes about a “one of those sexy female dissidents” who had “braved the inscrutable Kafkaesque authorities” to attend his ironically titled lecture “American Optimism as Evinced in the Works of Melville, Bierce, and Nathanael West” (Updike 1987: 48). But Bech can conjure little more than the panicked sense of his own impotence. As Updike puts it in the final line of the story, “His panic felt pasty and stiff and revealed a certain shape: he feared that once he left his end of the gentle arc of the Ambassador’s Residence, he would, like millions and millions before him, cease to exist” (Updike 1987: 49).

Contrast Podhoretz (1984: 34); and Howe (2002: 263). In his 1987 epilogue to the latter book, Howe writes, “To be typecast as a ‘dissident’ of ‘political’ novelist is to suffer insinuations of narrowness.” Here, he was echoing the wishes of many Eastern bloc writers, including both Kundera and Havel. 21 For the definitive account of this earlier period in the so-called “cultural Cold War,” see Barnhisel (2015). 20

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Perhaps—but, as we’ve already seen, such predictions have been wrong before. Already in 1968, Howe had argued that the generation of American Jewish writers influenced by the New York Intellectuals “was almost at the end of a historical experience” (1968: 43). At the same time, he acknowledged, “What cannot yet be estimated is the extent to which the styles and values of the New York world may have left a mark on the work of American writers who never came directly under its influence or have been staunchly hostile to all of its ways” (1968: 43). If the Prague stories of Miller, Roth, and Updike are any indication, the dissident generation of Jewish writers and intellectuals that first coalesced at the end of the 1930s continued to leave its mark on American literary culture right up until the final years of the Cold War.

WORKS CITED Atlas, James (2000), Bellow: A Biography, New York: Modern Library. Barnhisel, Greg (2015), Cold War Modernists: Art, Literature, and American Cultural Diplomacy, New York: Columbia University Press. Bellow, Saul (2006), The Adventures of Augie March, New York: Penguin Classics. Bellow, Saul (2010), Saul Bellow: Letters, ed. Benjamin Taylor, New York: Viking. Bellow, Saul, and Philip Roth (2003), Herzog, New York: Penguin Classics. Benatov, Joseph (2009), “Demystifying the Logic of Tamizdat: Philip Roth’s Anti-Spectacular Literary Politics,” Poetics Today 30(1): 107–32. Bolton, Jonathan (2012), Worlds of Dissent: Charter 77, The Plastic People of the Universe, and Czech Culture under Communism, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Buell, Lawrence (2014), The Dream of the Great American Novel, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Burdick, Emily Miller (2015), “The Ghost of the Holocaust in the Construction of Jewish American Literature,” in Hana Wirth-Nesher (ed.), The Cambridge History of Jewish American Literature, New York: Cambridge University Press. Cohen, Elliot E. (1945), “An Act of Affirmation: ‘Editorial Statement’,” Commentary 1(1): 1–2. “Editorial Statement” (1937), Partisan Review 3(1): 3–4. Fiedler, Leslie (1948), “The State of American Writing, 1948: A Symposium,” Partisan Review 15(8): 855–93. Fiedler, Leslie (1967), “Saul Bellow,” in Irving Malin (ed.), Saul Bellow and the Critics, 1–9, New York: New York University Press,. Havel, Václav (1988), Letters to Olga: June 1979-September 1982, New York: Knopf. Hoagland, Edward (1968), “On Not Being a Jew,” Commentary 45(4): 58–62. Hollinger, David A. (1989), In the American Province: Studies in the History and Historiography of Ideas, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Howe, Irving (1968), “The New York Intellectuals: A Chronicle & a Critique,” Commentary 46(4): 29–51. Howe, Irving (1972) “Philip Roth Reconsidered,” Commentary 54(6): 69–77. Howe, Irving (1977), “Introduction,” in Irving Howe (ed.), Jewish American Stories, 1–17, New York: Mentor. Howe, Irving (2002), Politics and the Novel, Chicago: Ivan R. Dee. Jacobson, Matthew Frye (2008), Roots Too: White Ethnic Revival in Post–Civil Rights America, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Kind-Kovács, Friederike (2014), Written Here, Published There: How Underground Literature Crossed the Iron Curtain, New York: Central European University Press. Klíma, Ivan (2010), Moje šílené století II: 1967–1989, Praha: Academia.

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Klíma, Ivan (2013), My Crazy Century: A Memoir, trans. Craig Cravens, New York: Grove Press. Labov, Jessie (2019) Transatlantic Central Europe, New York: Central European University Press. Lambert, Josh (2013), Unclean Lips: Obscenity, Jews, and American Culture, New York: New York University Press. Menand, Louis (2021), The Free World: Art and Thought in the Cold War, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Miller, Arthur (1989), The American Clock & The Archbishop’s Ceiling: Two Plays, New York: Grove Press. Nadel, Ira (2021), Philip Roth: A Counterlife, New York: Oxford University Press. Novick, Peter (1999), The Holocaust in American Life, Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. “Our Country and Our Culture: A Symposium” (1952), Partisan Review 19(3): 282–327. Podhoretz, Norman (1984), “An Open Letter to Milan Kundera,” Commentary 78(4): 34. Roth, Philip (1976), “In Search of Kafka and Other Answers,” New York Times Book Review (February 15, 1976). Roth, Philip (1990), “A Conversation in Prague,” New York Review of Books 37(6): 14–22. Roth, Philip (1996), The Prague Orgy, New York: Vintage Books. Schreier, Benjamin (2015a) “Making It Into the Mainstream 1945–1970,” in Hana Wirth-Nesher (ed.), The Cambridge History of Jewish American Literature, 124–43, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Schreier, Benjamin (2015b), The Impossible Jew: Identity and the Reconstruction of Jewish American Literary History, New York: New York University Press. Schreier, Benjamin (2020), The Rise and Fall of Jewish American Literature: Ethnic Studies and the Challenge of Identity, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Stecopoulos, Harilaos (2016), “Cold War Postmodernism,” in Jason Gladstone, Andrew Hoberek, and Daniel Worden (eds.), Postmodern/Postwar and After: Rethinking American Literature, 73–80, Iowa City: University of Iowa Press. Suchoff, David (1992), “New Historicism and Containment: Toward a Post-Cold War Cultural Theory,” Arizona Quarterly: A Journal of American Literature, Culture, and Theory 48(1): 137–61. Updike, John (1987), “Bech in Czech,” New Yorker (April 13). Updike, John (1989), “On Not Being a Dove,” Commentary 87(3): 22–30. Updike, John (2001), The Complete Henry Bech, New York: Everyman’s Library. Wisse, Ruth R. (1976), “American Jewish Writing, Act II,” Commentary 61(6): 40–5. Wolff, Larry (1994), Inventing Eastern Europe: The Map of Civilization on the Mind of the Enlightenment, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Zaritt, Saul Noam (2016), “Maybe for Millions, Maybe for Nobody: Jewish American Writing and the Undecidability of World Literature,” American Literary History 28(3): 542–73.

FURTHER READING Bellow, Saul (2003), Herzog, New York: Penguin Classics. Bellow, Saul (2006), The Adventures of Augie March, New York: Penguin Classics. Goodman, Brian K. (2015), “Philip Roth’s Other Europe: Counter-Realism and the Late Cold War,” American Literary History 27(4): 717–40. Kind-Kovács, Friederike (2014), Written Here, Published There: How Underground Literature Crossed the Iron Curtain, New York: Central European University Press. Lambert, Josh (2013), Unclean Lips: Obscenity, Jews, and American Culture, New York: New York University Press. Miller, Arthur (1989), The American Clock & The Archbishop’s Ceiling: Two Plays, New York: Grove Press. Roth, Philip (1996), The Prague Orgy, New York: Vintage Books.

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Schreier, Benjamin (2015), “Making It into the Mainstream 1945–1970,” in Hana Wirth-Nesher (ed.), The Cambridge History of Jewish American Literature, 124–43, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Updike, John (2001), The Complete Henry Bech, New York: Everyman’s Library. Wald, Alan M. (1987), The New York Intellectuals: The Rise and Decline of the Anti-Stalinist Left from the 1930s to the 1980s, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.

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CHAPTER EIGHT

Writing the Cold War in the American Academic Novel IAN BUTCHER

COLD WAR ACADEMIC FICTION IN CONTEXT Academic novels have rarely been considered serious literature, but as the genre most concerned with campus life they offer a temperature check on both local and national attitudes toward higher education over time. Tending to focus on the careers of individual professors as they navigate professional and personal challenges, academic novels are distinct from college novels (focused on a student’s or students’ growth to adulthood while on campus) and academic mysteries, in which a professor typically solves a murder case tied to academic life.1 While all three tend to be realist, ostensibly transparent reflections of the world as it is without speculative or fantastic elements, the academic novel is perhaps slightly closer to the novel of ideas than is the college novel or the academic mystery. Criticized by some as an “insider” genre of interest primarily to other academics, enjoyed by others as “a spiritual, political, and psychological guide to the profession,” critics have long agreed on the academic novel’s “general lack of excellence” as literature (Showalter 2005: 118; Lyons 1962: xiii).2 In recent years, though, the academic novel’s critical standing has improved through a reassessment of its incorporation into the body of literary fiction more generally and a repudiation of earlier charges of insularity.3 While some contemporary critics lament what they see

A similar division is noted by Jeffrey J. Williams in his “The Rise of the Academic Novel” (2012) and by John E. Kramer in his The American College Novel: An Annotated Bibliography (2004), the definitive bibliography on the topic, containing citations for 650 novels. 2 Similarly, Dennis Baron states, “I learned the most about being a department chairman not from the campus orientation or from what other administrators told me, but from reading two academic novels: Richard Russo’s Straight Man … and Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim” and Jeanne Marie Rose argues that the genre encourages professors to “consider their professional identities” (Baron 2004: C1; Rose 2009: 56). In addition to Lyons’s The College Novel in America (1962), early negative assessments of the genre can be found in Richard C. Boys’s “The American College in Fiction” (1944), Benjamin De Mott’s “How to Write a College Novel” (1962), Leslie A. Fiedler’s “The War against the Academy” (1964), and J. P. Kenyon’s “Lucky Jim and After: The Business of University Novels” (1980). 3 For early examples of this, see Gyde C. Martin’s “The New University Novel: A Mirror Not Just of Academe” (1988) and John R. Thelin and Barbara K. Townsend’s “Fiction to Fact: College Novels and the Study of Higher Education” (1988). 1

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as the genre’s embrace of relevance and trendy politics over its more traditionally modest concerns, the idea of the academic novel as a valuable historical and/or sociological register, “a microcosm reflecting the great world,” is now widely accepted (Fiedler 1964: 5).4 More than just guidebooks or gossip columns, academic novels can offer significant insight into their period. The Cold War academic novel charts two related phenomenon: the growing centrality of higher education to American society in the postwar period, and the shifting and competing definitions of freedom found on campus during this time. Novels like Mary McCarthy’s The Groves of Academe (1951) and May Sarton’s Faithful Are the Wounds (1955) show the distance between professors, campuses, and “real life” collapsing, with liberals seeing academic freedom as a stand-in for the Red Scare’s challenges to civil liberties in the broader debates about freedom and national security during the Cold War. By the 1960s, novels like Bernard Malamud’s A New Life (1961) and John Williams’s Stoner (1965) introduce more personal, rather than institutional, concerns, paving the way for an exploration of the rise of student activism and academe’s role in ongoing civil rights struggles in 1970s novels like Alison Lurie’s The War between the Tates (1974) and David Lodge’s Changing Places (1975). Reflecting a more secure middle-class position for professors, these novels give way in the 1980s to novels like Lodge’s Small World (1984) or Don DeLillo’s White Noise (1985), which emphasize cultural criticism and academic careerism. Ultimately, the fraught relationship between academe and society introduced in the early Cold War period continues to modulate through the genre over the next three decades, taking in the major social concerns of the time as they spread on campuses. During this time, two intertwined factors drove increased interest in higher education as both a resource to be used and a space to be monitored. First, the utility of universities (and academics) in the Second World War created a desire for more permanent and controlled use of these institutions and their employees in service of the state. Second, continued evolution of the institutional form of universities in the postwar period—and of their social function—created more opportunities for institutional oversight. Following the success of not only the Manhattan Project but also wartime sociological research into “American soldiers’ loyalty, Japanese culture, the destruction of German cities, and the odds that the USSR could withstand Nazi invasion,” both the idea of research and its products were mobilized as weapons in the nascent Cold War (Engerman 2009: 2).5 Vannevar Bush, head of the Office of Scientific Research and Development during the Second World War, championed “the publicly and privately supported colleges, universities, and research institutes [that] are the centers of basic research” not only as both engines of a new postwar economy and powerful propaganda pieces (Bush 1945). For American policymakers, the scientific research conducted at these institutions was viewed as apolitical, even as it served state or military ends, because “scientific

More recent examples include Robert F. Scott’s “It’s a Small World, after All: Assessing the Contemporary Campus Novel” (2004), Elaine Showalter’s Faculty Towers: The Academic Novel and Its Discontents (2005), Williams’s “The Rise of the Academic Novel” (2012), and Christopher Findeisen’s “The One Place Where Money Makes No Difference: The Campus Novel from Stover at Yale through The Art of Fielding” (2016). 4 Claims of the genre’s decline can be found in Adam Begley’s “The Decline of the Campus Novel” (1997), J. Bottum’s “The End of the Academic Novel” (1997), Sarah Boxer’s “Satire in the Ivory Tower Gets Rough” (2000), Charles Green’s “The Droves of Academe” (2008), and Andrew Kay’s “Academics Are Too Scared to Laugh: The Joke’s Over” (2018). 5 University faculty mobilized in service of the war effort was not new—it had occurred during the First World War, for example—but was more widespread and more sustained in the Second World War. See, for a detailed overview of earlier involvement, Carol S. Gruber’s Mars and Minerva: World War I and the Uses of Higher Learning in America (1975).

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freedom [w]‌as essential to winning the global Cold War” and further distinguishing the United States from the Soviet Union as a beacon of liberty (Wolfe 2018: 13).6 Less interested in being apolitical, “a growing network of social scientists in government, foundations, and universities … belie[ved] that social scientists could and should serve their country” and worked with the State Department, CIA, and military on foreign and domestic policy issues (Engerman 2009: 44).7 While many of these relationships would fail by the 1970s, they established that the university, whatever else it might be, was an instrument of the “national security state.”8 This new approach to research was emblematic of how the university changed as it grew in the postwar period, when the so-called “Golden Age” of American higher education from 1945 to 1970 saw enrollments triple and an explosion of new faculty positions.9 Where Johns Hopkins University and the nineteenth-century European research university had provided a template for the American research university into the twentieth century, new needs and relationships in the postwar period called for a different institution. Emerging alongside the National Defense Education Act (1958) and the Higher Education Act (1965) with an expanded mission and multiplicity of functions, this “multiversity” was increasingly aligned with local business and regional economic development plans connecting it to society as never before. However, during the early Cold War, as this transition took place, many nonelite institutions “on the verge of bankruptcy” were vulnerable to “misguided zealots [who] shout ‘Communist’ at every college professor who ventures a new idea or selects a different text book” (Halsey [1951] 2007). As the multiversity both “serves society almost slavishly” and “criticizes [it] sometimes unmercifully,” this increased scrutiny exacerbated tensions between its mandate of support to the state and new developments in teaching and research that were critical of the state and its goals, which would continue throughout the Cold War and beyond (Kerr 1964: 18). By the 1980s, the university would again be changing along with American society, but for most of the Cold War, the multiversity helped define social understanding of higher education and its intended function.

MCCARTHYISM AND THE PROBLEM OF FREEDOM ON CAMPUS During the Second Red Scare, a period of intense anticommunist fervor in the United States between the mid-1940s to the late 1950s, several academic novels focused on communists on campuses and academic freedom as a proxy for national freedom in a time of inquisition. The American

Audra J. Wolfe’s Freedom’s Laboratory: The Cold War Struggle for the Soul of Science (2018) is indispensable on this topic, but see also Jessica Wang’s American Science in an Age of Anxiety: Scientists, Anticommunism, and the Cold War (1999) and Lawrence Badash’s “Science and McCarthyism” (2000). 7 For a detailed account of this collaboration, see David C. Engerman’s Know Your Enemy: The Rise and Fall of America’s Soviet Experts (2009) and David H. Price’s Cold War Anthropology: The CIA, the Pentagon, and the Growth of Dual Use Anthropology (2016). 8 For a useful overview of the concept of the national security state and its history, see Daniel Yergin’s Shattered Peace: The Origins of the Cold War and the National Security State (1977). As an example of covert government involvement coming to light, by the late 1960s, “the CIA had covertly funded the publication of thousands of books from apparently mainstream American presses,” along with “over a thousand academic books,” focusing on those “that undermined or attacked communism or communist positions” (Price 2011: 45, 48). Frances Stonor Saunders’s The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters (1999) is the best overview in terms of humanities scholarship and cultural production. 9 See John R. Thelin’s A History of American Higher Education (2019), particularly Chapter 7, “Gilt by Association: Higher Education’s ‘Golden Age,’ 1945 to 1970,” for the standard account. 6

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Association of University Professors (AAUP) held that “intellectual freedom is the breath of life of a democratic society” and cautioned that it was “greatly imperilled” by the anticommunists who derided academic freedom as rhetorical cover for communists and subversives working at universities (AAUP 1956: 54). President Truman’s 1947 Executive Order requiring federal employees to swear loyalty to the United States and renounce communism, and Supreme Court decisions in First Amendment cases that “deem[ed] protection of the nation as sufficient cause to restrict an individual’s free speech rights,” helped to define the terms—freedom vs. security, dissent vs. loyalty—that framed this debate on campuses (Eads 2016: 47).10 The earliest, and most influential, academic novel to treat these themes is Mary McCarthy’s The Groves of Academe (1951). Already a celebrated novelist when it was published, McCarthy was also a close associate of the New York Intellectuals, who epitomized the American anticommunist left during the 1940s and 1950s. A satire based loosely on McCarthy’s time teaching at Bard College and Sarah Lawrence College in the 1940s, the novel’s setting and characters are recognizable composites of progressive colleges of the time. Full of well-meaning rhetoric about academic freedom, the faculty and administration at these schools are in an impossible situation, the novel suggests, as the realities of anticommunism’s influence make their principles absurd and impracticable. In The Groves of Academe, Jocelyn College instructor Henry Mulcahy, whose contract will not be renewed, attempts to save his job by fabricating a political motivation for his dismissal. Claiming Communist Party membership, Mulcahy seeks to blackmail Jocelyn’s president, Maynard Hoar, a prominent defender of academic freedom (based on the University of Chicago’s celebrity president Robert Maynard Hutchins). When new evidence briefly suggests that Mulcahy may actually be a communist, Hoar’s attempted investigation appears hypocritical and he resigns, realizing he can never fire Mulcahy without damaging his own reputation. A timely satire, the novel reflects both the rapidly accelerating movement to purge communists from academic life and the resistance to it. In 1949–50, as organized hearings against communist teachers began in several states, what had been “a brief, and now forgotten, efflorescence of political radicalism at many of the nation’s colleges and universities” gave way to an era of paranoia and suspicion (Schrecker 1986: 84). Many smaller, less prestigious colleges and universities could scarcely afford a decline in enrollment in the lean years immediately following the war, so defending academic freedom proved too controversial and “academics … readily accommodated themselves, both in theory and practice, to the demand that they expel Communists from their faculties” (Schrecker 1986: 93).11 At fictional Jocelyn, though it is a progressive college, the small-town provincialism of its rural Pennsylvania setting and the conservatism of its student body, drawn from the children of “the new plutocracy of fivepercenters, car-dealers, black-market slaughterers, tire-salesmen, and retail merchants,” translate to little tolerance for radicalism (McCarthy 1951: 63).

National security, as a concept, was fairly new in the early 1950s, “not common in American political discourse” prior to the Cold War (Yergin 1977: 194). President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s “Four Freedoms” speech, which highlighted freedom from fear as a necessary component of a free society (alongside freedom of speech, freedom of religion, and freedom from want and poverty) provided a framework for many of these debates about national security and its role in national freedom. 11 One infamous example of this assault on academic freedom is Louis Budenz’s “Do Colleges Have to Hire Red Professors?” for the American Legion magazine. Maintaining that academics were “too easily buffaloed by the communists with the cry of ‘academic freedom,’ ” Budenz urged “a full-dress investigation of certain colleges, so far as the communist influence and infiltration go” (1951: 41). 10

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Seventy years later, Mulcahy’s audacity remains striking, the absurdity of his success no less apparent. Fully cognizant that no “man in his right mind would run the risk of proclaiming himself a Communist when the facts were the other way,” he reasons that his plan will be successful because “who had the more to lose by publicity, he himself or the college?” (McCarthy 1951: 90, 17). Though his communist credentials are thin—“a state legislature [citation] for ‘Communistic, atheistic tendencies,’ as evidenced by a few book reviews in the Nation, of all places, a single article in the old Marxist Quarterly (‘James Joyce, Dialectical Materialist’), and a two-dollar contribution to the Wallace campaign”—the idea plays to widespread fears about communist infiltration in academe, and of the 1948 Henry Wallace presidential campaign as a popular front for communists (McCarthy 1951: 17). What is more, Mulcahy’s supposed Party membership forces any defense of his academic freedom to explicitly endorse the rights of communists and dissidents to teach. That this was the public opinion of the AAUP, which stated in 1948 that “so long as the Communist party in the United States is a legal political party, affiliation with that party in and of itself should not be regarded as a justifiable reason for exclusion from the academic profession,” the position is unpalatable at Jocelyn, given its own precarious financial situation (Shannon 1948: 126). Perjury had sunk Alger Hiss the previous year, but at Jocelyn, lying about being a communist allows Mulcahy to keep his job, a paradox the reader is intended to see as emblematic of academe’s dysfunction. If Mulcahy’s audacity remains striking, Hoar’s entrapment remains simply absurd, the kind of situation he should easily avoid but for Jocelyn’s (and academe’s) eccentricities. Hoar, as “the first of Jocelyn’s presidents who was a political progressive,” brings the credentials of a staunch defender of academic freedom to the college: “author of a pamphlet, ‘The Witch Hunt in Our Universities’ … evangelist of the right to teach,” and critic of “the loyalty oath … [and] ‘thought control’ ” (McCarthy 1951: 148, 17). However, his politics seems unnecessary at the fairly apolitical Jocelyn, whatever the situation outside, where the scandals are drawn from “the ordinary trivia of college life” and there is “no loyalty oath, no violation of academic freedom” to be found (McCarthy 1951: 62). Further, as “enrollment has been dropping” and Hoar has “been told to cut down to the bone,” he cannot help but be a pragmatist about such issues, regardless of his very public politics (McCarthy 1951: 153). Thus, Mulcahy “gambl[es] … on Maynard’s reputation as a liberal,” recognizing that Hoar’s reputation is a sore point for the president because of his inability to wield fully that reputation at the college (McCarthy 1951: 90). In this context, that Hoar would overextend himself when given the opportunity seems almost inevitable, and one could imagine a serious drama focused on Hoar’s internal struggles. Instead, the novel’s humor stems from the way the faculty’s and Hoar’s actions obscure the seemingly straightforward task of responding to Mulcahy’s claim, in a particularly “academic” way. When Hoar attempts to avoid a scandal by identifying the budget as the primary factor in Mulcahy’s dismissal rather than anything political—the instructor is paid from “a special stipend, borrowed from the emergency reserve”—the faculty counter that Mulcahy’s dismissal “will be a sort of vindication for the critics of your stand on the rights of the dissident to teach” (McCarthy 1951: 152, 155). Hoar, in turn, defers to the AAUP’s position on the issue, requiring evidence of Mulcahy’s competence as a teacher, but the faculty lie when offering their evidence due to their personal affection for Mulcahy. Indeed, one of Mulcahy’s supporters admits that “Hen doesn’t belong here, doesn’t share our objectives … He ought, long since, discovering his hostility to us, to have looked for another connection,” and no one can deny it (McCarthy 1951: 113). Finally, having accepted that his principles require him to at least seem to protect Mulcahy, regardless of

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his own lack of belief, Hoar attempts to determine the extent of Mulcahy’s communist ties when it appears that he may actually be a Party member, only to be accused of “personal molestation, spying, surveillance, [and] corruption of students by faculty stool-pigeons” (McCarthy 1951: 252). The structure of the narrative, with Mulcahy’s ambitions and deception revealed up-front, creates a vertiginous effect on readers as reason and truth seemingly disappear at Jocelyn throughout this process, divorced as it is from the reality of Cold War politics and their daily significance. Though The Groves of Academe positions Jocelyn as a world apart, Mulcahy’s gambit relies on the fact that it is anything but, and that academic freedom might resonate as an issue because of the way it mirrors the status of civil liberties more generally. Anticommunism, as practiced in the early Cold War, had tremendous consequences beyond the dismissal of any particular professor. Higher education, with its notoriously low salaries, had traditionally allowed for (if not required) a certain element of bohemianism among the faculty. The rise of Joseph McCarthy and the increasing professionalism of faculty during this period of expansion, though, offered professors “a genteel, manicured-lawn, middle-class life” largely at the expense of the “seasoned non-conformists and dissenters, sexual deviants, feather-bedders, alcoholics, impostors” who had previously been among their number (Williams 2000: 27; McCarthy 1951: 77). After the war, Americans “rush[ed] … into marriage, parenthood, and traditional gender roles,” encouraged by government policies designed to “bolster the American home … [as] the best bulwark against the dangers of the cold war” (May 1988: 5, 9). Beyond the chilling of dissent through loyalty oaths and congressional hearings, this emphasis on domestic conformity made concepts like subversion intensely personal for those who chose not to live this “American” life. Mulcahy and his wife cultivate an “anti-bourgeois ethic” in response to the “dozen faculty-wives of their acquaintance” who embody the social conformity of time (McCarthy 1951: 166). The Mulcahys, though, “tortured by debt, doctor bills, coal bills, small personal loans never paid back, four children outgrowing their clothes, patches, darns, tears, the threatening letters of a collection-agency,” could not embody bourgeois respectability even if they had wanted to. Indeed, Mulcahy reflects bitterly as he schemes that his domestic disorder, as much as any dissent, means that “to them … he was a Communist already or worse, just as to Maynard Hoar he was a Communist or worse” (McCarthy 1951: 88). Given community policing of conformity, academic freedom seems like an exceptionalism that cannot be sustained and cannot secure the rights of the dissident on or off campus. In this way, The Groves of Academe captures a deferral of and encroachment on civil liberties in this period that also underscores the rationale for the defense of academic freedom in the face of militant anticommunism. May Sarton’s Faithful Are the Wounds (1955) is almost an inverted twin of McCarthy’s novel, replacing provincial Jocelyn with iconic Harvard, and the absurdity of defenses of academic freedom with their absolute necessity, reflecting how much had changed in the four years between their publications. Set in fall 1949, as warnings of McCarthyism appear with increasing regularity, Sarton’s novel offers a fictionalized account of Harvard English professor and Catholic Socialist F. O. Matthiessen’s death, who committed suicide in 1950 feeling “depressed over world conditions” (“F. O. Matthiessen” 1950). In Faithful Are the Wounds, Edward Cavan, who teaches poetry at Harvard, finds himself isolated and depressed in the week before his death. Active in left-wing politics (including, once again, the Wallace campaign), Cavan breaks with his remaining friends following disagreements at a meeting of their local American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) chapter over an anticommunist loyalty test and at Harvard over the need to protest the firing of a suspected communist from another university. He takes his own life, prompting reflection in all who knew

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him about their own politics in the face of an uncertain future. While both The Groves of Academe and Faithful Are the Wounds are quite “talky,” with characters establishing their positions in long speeches, Sarton’s novel has none of McCarthy’s archness, offering instead an almost sentimental view of academe recalling Willa Cather’s The Professor’s House. In McCarthy’s novel, people suffer because they forget that academe is not the real world, but Sarton’s novel suggests this is a myth that disguises the ways academe is very much of a piece with society at large. Wounds to academic freedom are “faithful,” then, in the sense that they are a wound to freedom more generally. Where Henry Mulcahy makes for a ridiculous communist, unbelievable in the role even to his most fervent defenders, Cavan is in many ways a stereotypical communist: dour, humorless, perpetually criticizing others. His sister, for example, dislikes his habit of “digging under everything I believed,” and Cavan seems both unwilling to compromise and fond of sermons in his interactions with his friends (Sarton [1955] 1985: 19). Discussing the ACLU meeting with his closest friend, a physics professor named Damon Phillips, Cavan insists, “if you begin to compromise you’re lost, when it comes to a matter of principle” and rejects an appeal to friendship by claiming “friendship without solidarity isn’t possible” (Sarton 1955: 130, 131). Similarly, when he finds no support for his protest from his colleague Ivan Goldberg, Cavan excoriates him for “being an ostrich” and “escap[ing] into your ivory tower,” charging that “scholarship of the only kind I respect will have a hard time existing from now on” due to attitudes like this (Sarton 1955: 106–8). His friends frequently try to dismiss Cavan’s concerns as extreme or unfounded, but the novel uses dramatic irony—where characters’ statements in 1949 (when the novel is set) seem naïve in 1955 (when it was published)—to deflate their criticism. While Cavan can seem virtually prophetic in the novel as a result, his politics have hardly made him more popular or successful. His friends pay tribute to him as one of the “guardians of conscience” that society needs, or as “a scholar … unmatched for fervor, understanding and integrity” and a teacher who “challenged the better students … because he was involved actively and bitterly in the life outside the college,” but this assessment is not shared by the university as a whole (Sarton 1955: 210). Students speak of his brilliance as a literary mind but criticize his tendency to “stand up and fight on every liberal issue,” as most are “not interested in politics and fe[el] slightly bewildered … by this side of Cavan” (Sarton 1955: 34). Similarly, Goldberg makes distinctions between Cavan’s intellect, his work (which he devalues as too focused on “what he calls the periphery of literature—economics, history, all that could be rolled up in the term ‘cultural historian’ ”), and his political activity, in which Cavan “ma[d]‌e a fool of himself … [and] it reflected on the University” (Sarton 1955: 104). The administration follows suit: having fielded “letters of complaint from old grads” because of Cavan’s activities, they label him “a maverick … not entirely sound for political reasons” and doom him to be “something of an outsider in college affairs” (Sarton 1955: 33–4, 152). Cavan’s sister Isabel offers the most direct form of their common critique, wondering “why didn’t he stick to what he knew about?” (Sarton 1955: 7). Behind this seemingly innocuous question, the novel suggests, lies the rationale for assaults not just on academic freedom but on all freedom. Isabel represents something of a limit on the possibility of progressive politics in the university (and beyond), much like the families of Jocelyn’s students. Unlike Cavan (or Mulcahy), Isabel has worked hard to be the picture of domesticity, with her and her husband “voting the straight Republican ticket, secure behind the walls of their life” (Sarton 1955: 247). Her brother is a source of embarrassment, “doing crazy things like campaigning for Wallace, being a Socialist,”

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and working as a professor (Sarton 1955: 19). Isabel and her husband (and their social circle, it is implied) are disdainful of academics, dismissing them as “unreal, noble no doubt, oh yes, touching, even important in their way,” joking that “they build their own mazes and get lost in them,” and comparing them to “precocious children who did not know anything about life” (Sarton 1955: 231–2). Forced to travel to Boston for Cavan’s funeral, she contrasts Harvard (and academe generally) with the “busy, grimy … world she could understand … lawyers’ offices and firms of all kinds … [where] the business of the world got done” (Sarton 1955: 231–2). When a professor like Cavan self-consciously enters that world, as he does through his political activities, he interferes with its smooth functioning. In Isabel’s mind, they should recuse themselves from the business and the grime and stick to their poetry. Before his death, Cavan complains of “feeling locked in, locked up, stifled,” limited by such injunctions to restrict himself to “the strict little field[s]‌[academics] have shut [themselves] up in” (Sarton 1955: 121, 107). Early in the novel, one of Cavan’s students imagines him as an avatar of the university, “intangible … bent over his own work, fighting out a book alone, the long arduous lonely work” (Sarton 1955: 31). Cavan attempts to combat this fantasy, a cousin to Isabel’s views on academics, by noting “that professors in our colleges and universities are being fired for nonconformist ideas, that it’s becoming a crime to subscribe to the Nation, that everywhere in this country fear is taking the place of reason”; in short, that professors cannot recuse themselves from the world, even if they want to (Sarton 1955: 40). To retreat behind campus walls, or to a lonely library carrel, is to invite the forced exclusion of anyone who differs from (and thus impedes) what Isabel and those like her think is the real world. Much as Mulcahy bitterly speculates that his nonconformity makes it easier for people to believe he could be a communist, Isabel’s relationship to Cavan demonstrates the terrifying need to continually enact conformity in this period. After hearing of Cavan’s death, Isabel reflects on how “she had been fighting off the sensation that she was walking on very thin ice, that just below was darkness, black despair” (Sarton 1955: 1). Should his politics now gain increased attention, she worries how it might reflect on her, a real fear in an era dominated by guilt by association and awash in surveillance for any sign of subversion. She imagines “hundreds of faces peering in through the great glass windows, pointing at her and at Henry … sneering faces and accusing faces, or just curious faces” (Sarton 1955: 6). Though she can point to their home—“with its swimming pool, its deep freeze … [its] cocktails for Henry when he came home”—as stereotypically American, Cavan’s death causes her to see how precarious the ability to symbolize this kind of conformity is and, conversely, how precarious a freedom based on it must be (Sarton 1955: 246–7). Cavan is homosexual (like Matthiessen), the novel implies, and so is doubly aware of the dangers of nonconformity as a confirmed bachelor who is repeatedly described as being or acting “queer.”12 Homosexuality was the initial target of McCarthyism and the impetus behind his list of subversives in government, linked to an idea of lax morals that jeopardized national security, increasing the danger of Cavan’s outspoken politics.13

Queer was in use as a slang term for homosexual since the First World War and gained wide currency sometime between 1949 and 1965 (Perlman 2019). 13 See, for more details, Randolph W. Baxter’s “ ‘Homo-Hunting’ in the Early Cold War: Senator Kenneth Wherry and the Homophobic Side of McCarthyism” (2003) and David K. Johnson’s The Lavender Scare: The Cold War Persecution of Gays and Lesbians in the Federal Government (2004). 12

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In a somewhat uncharacteristic move for an academic novel, Faithful Are the Wounds spends relatively little time on campus, moving its characters throughout Boston, from meeting rooms and houses to gardens and coffeeshops. Ultimately, hope is to be drawn from this, as while Cavan might despair of finding solidarity, these scenes suggest that it exists and can be built even in the darkest hours. Further, in the novel’s epilogue set in 1954, Cavan’s memory prompts a renewal of his friend Damon Phillips’s conscience and a willingness to fight back against those structures that Cavan saw as threatening the university and freedom more generally. Called before a senate investigatory committee and questioned about his friendship with Cavan, Phillips refuses to deny it, reaffirming his belief that the intellectual must stand on the frontier of freedom of thought, especially in such times as these when that frontier is being narrowed down everyday … [by] the increasing apathy and retreat of the American people before such encroachments of fundamental civil rights as are represented by this committee. (Sarton 1955: 279) Rather than closing with despair, the novel sees in the waning of McCarthyism an opportunity to push for greater freedom and to reevaluate the balance between security and civil liberties. In an academe that is of society, as opposed to distinct from it, defending academic freedom is an expansive gesture that encompasses those inside and outside of dominant political and social relations.

COLD WAR ACADEMIC FICTION AFTER MCCARTHYISM While McCarthyism ended formally in the mid-1950s, its political concerns would carry over on the periphery of later academic novels even as they introduced new, more libertarian, and individualistic conceptions of freedom. Documenting the growing dissatisfaction with “containment culture,” the emphasis on traditional family life and conservative values dominant in the 1950s, these novels also reflect the professoriate’s incorporation into the professional-managerial class (PMC), that group of “cultural workers, managers, engineers and scientists, etc. … whose major function in the social division of labor may be described broadly as the reproduction of capitalist culture and capitalist class relations” (Ehrenreich and Ehrenreich 1979: 12).14 Though not typically known as an author of academic fiction, Isaac Asimov’s story “Spell My Name with an ‘S.’ ” ([1958] 1990) demonstrates both ongoing political tensions related to academic freedom and the new types of freedom (and involvement with the state) for faculty in this period. In keeping with his reputation as one of science fiction’s “Big Three” (along with Arthur C. Clarke and Robert Heinlein), Asimov’s somewhat fantastic story involves a disillusioned government scientist, Marshall Zebatinsky, who changes his last name to Sebatinsky on the advice of a numerologist who assures him this will improve his professional fortunes. That a nuclear scientist has changed his name triggers a security review and Sebatinsky is quietly shipped off to Princeton, where he rejoices in the newfound freedom and the government can keep tabs on him, the whole scenario orchestrated by an alien (the numerologist) to prevent nuclear war. That academe can seem like a beacon of freedom, a chance to be creative and work independently, points to the growing dissatisfaction many Americans felt in this period about their ability to Alan Nadel’s Containment Culture: American Narrative, Postmodernism, and the Atomic Age (1995) provides a useful discussion of the concept of containment culture and its legacy. 14

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be individuals. Sebatinsky laments being “thirty-four and without a future … drowning in an anonymous crowd of nuclear physicists’ ” for the rest of his career (Asimov [1958] 1990: 271). The PMC understood itself as a meritocracy facilitated by technical knowledge and mastery achieved through education and training, but sheer numbers (in the two decades following the war, “the employment of professional and technical workers in the United States more than doubled” as “54 specializations in the sciences” grew to “over 900 distinct scientific and technical specializations”) and a culture of the “organization man” who struggled against “a belief in ‘belongingness’ as the ultimate need of the individual” ate away at the possibility of individual fulfillment (Bell 1973: 271, 246; Whyte [1956] 2002: 1, 4). Significantly, Sebatinsky longs for “success” and “recognition,” an important pairing of concepts at a time when individual accomplishments were less celebrated and which he feels academe can offer, excitedly telling his wife of the Princeton offer, “my professional life will be my own finally. I’ll make my mark” (Asimov [1958] 1990: 271, 282). Looming behind this newfound freedom is the spectre of national security, though, as the Princeton position created for Sebatinsky to provide “enough nonsensitive areas to keep him occupied” will also “keep him in close view” (Asimov [1958] 1990: 281). Unaware of this surveillance, Sebatinsky is not about to campaign for greater academic freedom. After the 1950s the academic novel focuses on the quest for tenure and the balancing of personal obligations like marriage and family life against competing demands for professional success, domesticity winning out over politics in some ways. Bernard Malamud’s A New Life (1961) exemplifies this new direction for the academic novel. Sy Levin arrives at conservative Cascadia College (modeled on Oregon State University, where Malamud taught for many years) in 1950 to teach freshman composition feeling, like Sebatinksy, that “my life … has been without much purpose to speak of ” and that academe offers him the chance at fulfillment (Malamud 1961: 20). Discovering he has been hired to replace a recently dismissed left-wing teacher who “had placed an order for one hundred and twenty-five copies of The Communist Manifesto as supplementary reading matter,” Levin inquires about whether the man’s reputation as a “disagreeable radical” refers to “the political connotation … or the odd-ball,” given his own very public liberalism (Malamud 1961: 41, 43, 60). Politics remains around the edges of the novel but does not drive the plot in the same way as in The Groves of Academe and Faithful Are the Wounds, emerging primarily when Levin advocates for more liberal arts classes at the conservative college. Science programs, for example, are defended over an enhanced liberal arts curriculum “because we have the Russkies to think about,” literary readings are dropped if parents complain because “we have to watch our step nowadays, or the next thing you know they’d be accusing us of something a lot worse than teaching sexy stories,” and Levin worries about being labeled “a communist propagandist, homosexual, [or] corrupter of youth” because he urges students “to study more of the liberal arts before they became technicians” (Malamud 1961: 29, 195, 237). Like Cavan, Levin cautions that “these are dangerous times,” a position that makes him similarly unpopular (Malamud 1961: 247). Ultimately, though, East Coast vs. West Coast culture clashes and the psychological effects of Levin’s own affair with a colleague’s wife dominate the narrative. In the end, Levin leaves academe for a different, ambiguously hopeful future, like Maynard Hoar in The Groves of Academe, or the title characters in Kingsley Amis’ Lucky Jim (1954) and Vladimir Nabokov’s Pnin (1957). The promise of academe that drew Levin west is not quite illusory, but he is more cynical about academics, their motivations, and their politics, with little of the romanticism found in Sarton’s novel. John Williams’s Stoner (1965), in contrast, is more romantic about academe but is set almost entirely before the Second World War and bears virtually no trace of the politics of

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its day, leaving its narrative feeling more dated than those of novels published ten or fifteen years earlier. By the 1970s, academic novels continued to get more personal rather than professional in their concerns, reflecting both the politics of the day—the rise of second-wave feminism, civil rights, and gay and lesbian activism during the previous decade helped to popularize the idea that the personal is political—and the relative stability of the professoriate’s class position at this point. Indeed, despite the New Left’s association with campuses, where counterculture radicals were said to be housed among the faculty in order to corrupt and indoctrinate the youth (a carryover of McCarthyist fears), academic novels of this period document the increasing importance of offcampus groups in the circulation of political ideas and the shifting of political energy on campus from faculty to students. Alison Lurie’s The War between the Tates (1974) satirizes this new situation, taking on student politics and its influences (particularly feminism and the counterculture) alongside the discontents of now middle-aged professors who entered academe during the 1950s and 1960s. Set in 1969–70 at Corinth University, a fictionalized Cornell, the novel follows the dissolution of Brian and Erica Tate’s marriage after Brian, a professor of political science who specializes in Cold War foreign policy, has an affair with a student. Mirroring the turmoil in their marriage, Corinth faces changes as “a campus discussion group called Women for Human Equity Now,” colloquially referred to as “the Hens,” and female students who argue for “equal pay, equal educational and vocational opportunities, free day-care centres, and abortion on demand” informed by “Simone de Beauvoir and other lady authors” point toward the emergence of Women’s and Gender Studies as an academic discipline (Lurie 1974: 18, 211).15 As an additional complication, the Krishna Bookstore, which functions as “an outlet for texts on Eastern religion, a centre for lectures on astrology and Yoga,” begins to step on Corinth’s toes, “assigning homework and papers in competitions with the University,” with students “absorbing ideas and bring them back to clutter up … professors’ seminars” (Lurie 1974: 57). Attempting to adapt, Brian Tate positions himself among these students as a guide with “greater knowledge of university procedures … [and] greater experience of the world,” advising a group of female students who complain about his colleague’s sexism to moderate their demands and tactics (Lurie 1974: 267). When this fails to achieve results, the students occupy his colleague’s office, demanding “a public apology … plus equal class time for a speaker of their choice” to serve as a corrective to the official university curriculum (Lurie 1974: 287). A common plot point in academic novels of the period, student occupations also appear in Amanda Cross’s Poetic Justice (1970), Gil Scott Heron’s The N***** Factory (1972), and Alice Walker’s Meridians (1976), along with the most well-known academic novel of the 1970s, British author David Lodge’s Changing Places (1975), set in part at a fictionalized University of California, Berkeley.16 In each

For an overview of this history, see Marilyn Jacoby Boxer’s When Women Ask the Questions: Creating Women’s Studies in America (1998), Women’s Studies on Its Own: A Next Wave Reader in Institutional Change, ed. Robyn Wiegman (2002), and The Evolution of American Women’s Studies: Reflections on Triumphs, Controversies, and Change, ed. Alice E. Ginsberg (2008). 16 An extended discussion of Heron’s and Walker’s novels in the content of the “blackademic” novel tradition can be found in Lavelle Porter’s The Blackademic Life: Academic Fiction, Higher Education, and the Black Intellectual (2019). The role of student occupations in the formation of Black and Ethnic Studies is covered in Fabio Rojas’s From Black Power to Black Studies: How a Radical Social Movement Became an Academic Discipline (2007), Martha Biondi’s The Black Revolution on Campus (2012), and Ibram H. Rogers’s The Black Campus Movement: Black Students and the Racial Reconstruction of Higher Education, 1965–1972 (2012). 15

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case, academe’s promise has curdled in the eyes of students, with the campus another front in the struggle by the counterculture (and by liberation-based politics more generally) against conformity and large, hierarchical structures. As with A New Life, the end of The War between the Tates recalls earlier moments in the genre. Having failed to diffuse the office occupation, Brian Tate attempts to organize a peace march to rehabilitate his image. Less than a quarter century earlier, Maynard Hoar compares “appear[ing] at a ‘peace’ rally” to “playing strip poker on Sunday in a whorehouse” in The Groves of Academe, which suggests how optics had shifted on campus political activities (McCarthy 1951: 19). However, the peace march also exposes the limits of respectable politics in this era; if peace had previously meant “communism,” there is now a grudging acceptance of “liberal anti-war protest” provided it can exclude the associated “freakish, violent, and socially disruptive elements” (Lurie 1974: 355). The approved groups at the march, including “long-haired, noisy undergraduates … pretty girls in flowered and pastel jeans, from Home Ec … solemn and rather formally dressed law students … [and] a small contingent from the Africana Centre, all dashikis and afros, and another of Asians in turbans and saris,” reflect establishment liberalism and its emerging multiculturalism (Lurie 1974: 331). The excluded groups, including more militant members of WHEN and “a large group of Maoists,” are filled with students from the university whose political activities are increasingly directed off campus, as academe seems less likely to incubate and facilitate radical change (Lurie 1974: 355). Notably, faculty are largely absent from this picture, joining “the establishment” once absorbed by the PMC. The ongoing struggle by these diverse student groups either to integrate with the campus community or to resist the offered terms of integration then becomes the primary question regarding campus freedom and politics through the remainder of the Cold War and beyond. Despite the ramping-up of hostilities between the United States and USSR in the 1980s, academic novels from that decade largely ignore this context, with Lodge’s Small World (1984) focusing instead on the newly ascendant “star system,” in which professors at major universities achieved a kind of celebrity both inside and outside of academe bolstered by a growing international conference circuit. Reflecting the increased prominence of cultural studies and popular culture as respectable forms of academic inquiry, Don DeLillo’s White Noise (1985) satirizes both this trend and the place of higher education as one more product within consumer culture writ large. Though lacking the overt political dimension of earlier Cold War academic novels, they do help to voice renewed concerns about academic freedom and academic labor in post–Cold War academic novels stemming from the casualization accompanying academe’s increasingly market-driven logic and the creation of formal multiculturalism and diversity initiatives often derided as “political correctness.” That academic novels in the 1980s restrict themselves to such limited engagements with politics raises the question behind all Cold War academic novels: in an undeniably political institution, to what extent are professors obligated to be political actors? In its drift toward narratives of “small p” politics after the 1970s, mirroring popular concerns about faculty radicals and student indoctrination, the genre has largely failed to satisfactorily address new challenges to academic freedom (and freedom more broadly) posed by declining labor conditions and conservative culture wars. If there is any path for renewal for the genre (contra those who have already proclaimed its death), though labor conditions make that feel unlikely, then a significant reengagement with this question of freedom on campus seems an essential first step.

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WORKS CITED American Association of University Professors (1956), “Academic Freedom and Tenure in the Quest for National Security: Report of a Special Committee of the American Association of University Professors,” AAUP Bulletin 42(1): 49–107. Asimov, Isaac ([1958] 1990), “Spell My Name with an ‘S.’,” in Robot Dreams, 270–84, New York: Ace. Badash, Lawrence (2000), “Science and McCarthyism,” Minerva 38: 53–80. Baron, Dennis (2004), “Avoiding the Role of Straight Man,” Chronicle of Higher Education 50(41) (June 18): C1, C4. Baxter, Randolph W. (2003), “Homo-Hunting’ in the Early Cold War: Senator Kenneth Wherry and the Homophobic Side of McCarthyism,” Nebraska History 84 (2003): 119–32. Bell, Daniel (1973), The Coming of Post-Industrial Society: A Venture in Social Forecasting, New York: Basic Books. Biondi, Martha (2012), The Black Revolution on Campus, Berkeley: University of California Press. Bottum, J. “The End of the Academic Novel.” Weekly Standard 46(2) (1997): n.p. Boxer, Marilyn Jacoby (2001), When Women Ask the Questions: Creating Women’s Studies in America. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Boxer, Sarah. “Satire in the Ivory Tower Gets Rough.” New York Times, October 21, 2000: B9. Budenz, Louis Francis (1951), “Do Colleges Have to Hire Red Professors?” American Legion 51(5) (November): 11– 13, 40–3. Bush, Vannevar (1945), Science: The Endless Frontier, National Science Foundation, https://www.nsf.gov/od/lpa/ nsf50/vbush1​945.htm (accessed March 23, 2021). Cather, Willa (1990), The Professor’s House. 1921. New York: Vintage Classics. De Mott, Benjamin. “How to Write a College Novel,” Hudson Review 15(2) (1962): 243–52. Eads, Linda (2016), “Freedom of Speech,” in Jeffrey A. Engel (ed.), The Four Freedoms: Franklin D. Roosevelt and the Evolution of an America Idea, 39–72, New York: Oxford University Press. Ehrenreich, Barbara, and John Ehrenreich (1979), “The Professional-Managerial Class,” in Pat Walker (ed.), Between Labor and Capital, 5–45, Boston, MA: South End Press. Engerman, David C. (2009), Know Your Enemy: The Rise and Fall of America’s Soviet Experts, New York: Oxford University Press. “F. O. Matthiessen Plunges to Death from Hotel Window” (1950), Harvard Crimson April 1, https://www.the​ crim​son.com/arti​cle/1950/4/1/f-o-matt​hies​sen-plun​ges-to-death/ (accessed April 3, 2021). Fiedler, Leslie A. (1964), “The War against the Academy,” Wisconsin Studies in Contemporary Literature 5(1): 5–17. Ginsberg, Alice E., ed. The Evolution of American Women’s Studies: Reflections on Triumphs, Controversies, and Change. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. Green, Charles (2008), “The Droves of Academe.” Missouri Review 31(3): 177–88. Gruber, Carol S. (1975), Mars and Minerva: World War I and the Uses of Higher Learning in America. Baton Rough: Louisiana State University Press. Halsey, Jazzes H. ([1951] 2007), “Higher Education’s Appalling Responsibilities: Correcting the Cultural Lag,” Literature & Culture of the American 1950s (May 31), www.writing.upenn.edu/~afilreis/50s/education.html (accessed March 22, 2021). Johnson, David K. (2004), The Lavender Scare: The Cold War Persecution of Gays and Lesbians in the Federal Government. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

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Kay, Andrew. “Academics Are Too Scared to Laight: The Joke’s Over,” Chronicle of Higher Education 64.28 (23 Mar. 2018). Kenyon, J. P. “Lucky Jim and After: The Business of University Novels,” Encounter (June 1980) : 81–3. Kerr, Clark (1964), The Uses of the University, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Lurie, Alison (1974), The War between the Tates, New York: Vintage. Lyons, John O. (1962), The College Novel in America, Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. Malamud, Bernard (1961), A New Life, New York: Penguin. Martin, Gyde Christine. “The New University Novel: A Mirror Not Just of Academe,” Conference of College Teachers of English Studies 53 (1988): 52–9. May, Elaine Tyler (1988), Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era, New York: Basic Books. McCarthy, Mary (1951), The Groves of Academe, New York: Signet. Nadel, Alan (1995), Containment Culture: American Narrative, Postmodernism, and the Atomic Age, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Perlman, Merrill (2019), “How the Word ‘Queer’ Was Adopted by the LGBTQ Community,” Columbia Journalism Review (January 22), https://www.cjr.org/lang​uage​_cor​ner/queer.php (accessed May 28, 2021). Price, David (2011), “Uninvited Guests: A Short History of the CIA on Campus,” in Philip Zwerling (ed.), The CIA on Campus: Essays on Academic Freedom and the National Security State, 33–60, Jefferson, NC: Jefferson, McFarland and Company. Price, David H. (2016), Cold War Anthropology: The CIA, the Pentagon, and the Growth of Dual Use Anthropology, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Rogers, Ibram H. (2012), The Black Campus Movement: Black Students and the Racial Reconstruction of Higher Education, 1965–1972, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Rojas, Fabio (2010), From Black Power to Black Studies: How a Radical Social Movement Became an Academic Discipline, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Rose, Jeanne Marie (2009), “Managing Writing: Composition in the Academic Novel,” Modern Language Studies 39(1): 56–65. Sarton, May ([1955] 1985), Faithful Are the Wounds, New York: Norton. Saunders, Frances Stonor (1999), The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters, New York: New Press. Schrecker, Ellen W. (1986), No Ivory Tower: McCarthyism and the Universities, New York: Oxford University Press. Scott, Robert F. “It’s a Small World, after All: Assessing the Contemporary Campus Novel,” Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association 37(1) (2004): 81–7. Shannon, George Pope (1948), “Academic Freedom and Tenure: Report of Committee A for 1947,” Bulletin of the American Association of University Professors 34(1): 110–33. Showalter, Elaine (2005), Faculty Towers: The Academic Novel and Its Discontents, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Thelin, John R. (2019), A History of American Higher Education, 3rd ed. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Wang, Jessica (1999), American Science in an Age of Anxiety: Scientists, Anticommunism, and the Cold War. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Whyte, William H. ([1956] 2002), The Organization Man, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Wiegman, Robyn, ed. (2002), Women’s Studies on Its Own: A Next Wave Reader in Institutional Change. Durham: Duke University Press.

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Williams, Jeffrey J. (2000), “The Posttheory Generation,” in Peter C. Herman (ed.), Day Late, Dollar Short: The Next Generation and the New Academy, 25–43, Albany, NY: SUNY Press. Williams, John (1965), Stoner, New York: NYRB Classics, 2006. Wolfe, Audra J. (2018), Freedom’s Laboratory: The Cold War Struggle for the Soul of Science, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Yergin, Daniel (1977), Shattered Peace: The Origins of the Cold War and the National Security State, Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin.

FURTHER READING Begley, Adam (1997), “The Decline of the Campus Novel,” Lingua Franca 7(7): 39–47. Boys, Richard C. (1946), “The American College in Fiction,” College English 7(7): 379–87. Findeisen, Christopher (2016), “‘The One Place Where Money Makes No Difference’: The Campus Novel from Stover at Yale through The Art of Fielding,” American Literature 88(1): 67–91. Kramer, John E. (2004), The American College Novel: An Annotated Bibliography, 2nd ed., Lanham, MD: Scarecrow. Lyons, John O. (1962), The College Novel in America, Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. Porter, Lavelle (2019), The Blackademic Life: Academic Fiction, Higher Education, and the Black Intellectual, Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Showalter, Elaine (2005), Faculty Towers: The Academic Novel and its Discontents, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Thelin, John R., and Barbara K. Townsend (1988), “Fiction to Fact: College Novels and the Study of Higher Education,” in John C. Smart (ed.), Higher Education: Handbook of Theory and Research, vol. 4, 183–211, New York: Agathon. Williams, Jeffrey J. (2012), “The Rise of the Academic Novel,” American Literary History 24(3): 561–89. Womack, Kenneth (2002), Postwar Academic Fiction: Satire, Ethics, Community, New York: Palgrave.

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CHAPTER NINE

Anglo-American Propaganda and the Transition from the Second World War to the Cultural Cold War JAMES SMITH AND GUY WOODWARD

Over the past two decades—as the introduction to this volume lays out in more detail—a wave of scholarship has transformed our understanding of the covert campaigns in the cultural sphere mounted by Western governments during the Cold War. This “cultural Cold War” was waged by agencies such as the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and Britain’s Information Research Department (IRD), through a series of clandestinely state-backed foundations, conferences, lecture tours, art exhibitions, and, above all, cultural magazines, with the CIA-funded Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF) and its journal Encounter taking center stage in both the scholarly history and public mythology of this activity. In Who Paid the Piper? (1999, US title The Cultural Cold War), Frances Stonor Saunders described the CIA’s efforts to build an international intellectual consortium as a means of contesting communism, promoting liberal–democratic values, and enhancing the cultural prestige of the United States and its allies in this new global situation. Consequently, Saunders claimed that “whether they liked it or not, whether they knew it or not, there were few writers, poets, artists, historians, scientists or critics in post-war Europe whose names were not in some way linked to this covert enterprise” (1999: 2). Encounter has since provided a focal point for critical studies, and its story has also seeped into wider cultural narratives. Andrew N. Rubin, for example, identifies Encounter and other CCF organs as some of the core Cold War institutions in which “new regimes of consecration” were established and where “certain authors became specifically identifiable as world authors in a new kind of international literary system” (2012: 9). In Ian McEwan’s Sweet Tooth (2012), a novel fictionalizing Cold War literary operations during the 1970s, British intelligence officers observe that “the CIA has been backing its own highbrow notion of culture since the end of the forties” but that this “American way” was a “busted flush” “since the Encounter affair” (a reference to the 1967

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revelation that the journal had been in receipt of CIA funding) (2012: 90–1). After noting prior attempts by the now-foundering IRD to deploy works by authors such as George Orwell, McEwan’s intelligence officers decide to launch their “own scheme,” something “pinpointed, long-term and cheap,” to promote “suitable young writers, academics and journalists” who would articulate desired political messages but keep their government support hidden (McEwan 2012: 91–2).1 McEwan’s novel and other cultural histories of the period identify the arrival of Encounter and “the American way” as a singular moment in the cultural propaganda game—a perspective that, while convenient, obscures both the much longer history of such operations and the fact that it was Britain that took the lead in many of these earlier campaigns. Without disputing the importance of Encounter and other similar endeavors, this chapter seeks to expand and complicate this popular understanding of covert Western efforts in the cultural Cold War, by showing how some techniques, networks, and themes evolved from British and Anglo-American propaganda operations during the Second World War. Cultural diplomacy had grown in scope and significance since the late nineteenth century, demonstrated by the establishment of national agencies such as France’s Alliance Française (founded 1883), Italy’s Società Dante Alighieri (1889), the Soviet Union’s Comintern (1919), and the British Council (1934). Propaganda meanwhile emerged as a major field of conflict during the First World War, which saw the establishment in Britain of the War Propaganda Bureau (commonly known as Wellington House), which employed the services of a wide range of literary writers and covertly distributed material at home and abroad under the imprint of commercial publishing houses—a practice which, as we shall see, was revived during the Second World War and Cold War (Buitenhuis 1989). Advances made by the Comintern during the interwar period were also influential: under propaganda guru Willi Münzenberg the Soviet-backed organization developed an international network of front groups to promote communist ideology in the cultural sphere, a technique similar to that later adopted by the CIA and IRD. Münzenberg’s impact on British wartime covert propaganda was pronounced and direct. Wartime propagandists such as Richard Crossman, Sefton Delmer, and Arthur Koestler had all associated or worked with him during the 1930s and would go on to employ his techniques in print and over the airwaves during the Second World War. The young socialist Crossman had lived for a time in Münzenberg’s Berlin flat in 1930, when the older man was director of agitprop toward the end of Weimar period (Stenton 2000); although he rejected Münzenberg’s “Communist appeal,” Crossman recalled that he found himself “captivated by his remarkable personality” (Crossman 1949: 7). Koestler worked with Münzenberg in various initiatives across the decade, eventually coediting the anti-Nazi newspaper Die Zukunft (1938–40), founded after both men broke from Stalinism and the Comintern in 1938 (Koestler 1949: 64; Nogarède-Grohmann 2019). In a post-war memoir describing his time as a foreign correspondent, Delmer recalls Münzenberg telling him over dinner in Paris in autumn 1939 about his work running a “Freedom Station” outside Paris, and suggests that his own plans for “black” radio developed the following year sought to supersede this model (Delmer 1962: 40). As this chapter discusses, Crossman and Koestler would then go on to play leading roles as spokesmen for the West in the cultural Cold War. For many writers, propaganda work seemed to offer the most meaningful way of contributing to the fight against Nazism: as the Bloomsbury novelist (and future PWE officer) David Garnett observed to the author T. H. White in 1938, “the most important work in this [imminent]

1

For an engaging wider account of Sweet Tooth and its depiction of the cultural Cold War, see Wilford (2014).

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war is propaganda,” offering an obvious “writer’s job” in the conflict and a “wonderful opportunity” to shape the tone of the British campaign (1968: 34). Allied propaganda techniques developed during the Second World War were, therefore, far more sophisticated than popular images of sloganeering posters or leaflets scattered from planes might suggest. British and Anglo-American wartime propaganda agencies produced an array of publications featuring material commissioned from leading literary figures or reprinted from influential contemporary periodicals and books. These projected positive impressions of Allied cultural life and values to populations in the conflict zones, using techniques which prefigured the state-backed cultural initiatives that became widespread in the cultural Cold War.2 Government agencies also recruited a range of influential writers and thinkers as administrators or contributors. Some prominent writers were engaged in order to give credibility to a propaganda message: J. B. Priestley and George Orwell, for example, were courted as radio propagandists on the BBC due to their reputations for independence. Elsewhere, writers such as Graham Greene and C. Day-Lewis held less public roles, deploying their intellectual skills and cultural contacts behind the scenes as editors. In many cases, networks and connections between intellectual and government spheres were established that would endure into the Cold War: figures such as Crossman, Koestler, and Stephen Spender made speedy transitions from anti-Nazi to anti-communist propaganda work. In a period when the United States outstripped Britain in military and economic power, the most forward-thinking propagandists understood cultural diplomacy as an effective and affordable means of projecting prestige and retaining influence—particularly in the European sphere. A report entitled “The Projection of Britain,” produced in late 1942 under the supervision of Ivone Kirkpatrick, controller of the BBC’s European Services and “PWE Manager” at the corporation,3 argued that convincing European audiences that “Britain has a big part to play” in shaping the post-war continental social and political order would require a campaign of indirect propaganda, articulating the British national character and national achievements in the fields of science and culture (“The Projection of Britain,” FO 898/413). Elaborating these claims, this chapter examines a series of cultural publications produced by Britain’s Ministry of Information (MOI) and Political Warfare Executive (PWE) and the US Office of War Information (OWI), and suggests that the approaches taken by these wartime agencies prefigured some of the most prominent Cold War campaigns by the IRD and CIA.

THE EVOLUTION OF THE WARTIME PROPAGANDA APPARATUS If, as Philip M. Taylor claimed, “the Second World War witnessed the greatest propaganda battle in the history of warfare,” it is clear that the six years of the conflict also saw one of the most remarkable evolutions in propaganda techniques and methods (2003: 208). In 1939, in contrast with the sophisticated German machinery overseen by Joseph Goebbels, British propaganda operations were amateurish and patchy at best, split between rival agencies and reliant on a limited understanding of psychological warfare. “Truth be told,” British propaganda officer John Baker White admitted in a post-war memoir, the first leaflets dropped by the RAF over Germany “were For example, Giles Scott-Smith and Charlotte A. Lerg argue that the Congress for Cultural Freedom’s “stable of culturalpolitical journals” was one of the organization’s most “far-reaching and lasting legacies” (2017: 1–2). 3 This description appears in a PWE memo dated March 20, 1942 (FO 898/10), 2

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pretty bad” (1955: 78). At home the MOI, formed on the outbreak of war and responsible for censorship and government publicity, had a particularly poor reputation and was openly satirized and mocked as the “Ministry of Dis-information” and “Ministry of Muddle” (Chapman 1998: 13). Meanwhile, beyond the public eye, a confusing welter of civilian and military agencies were quite separately developing their own propaganda campaigns, often unaware of similar operations being concocted by other agencies in neighboring streets. As the importance of informational and psychological warfare grew, British operations quickly evolved in scope and sophistication, in part due to the consolidation and professionalization of the propaganda bureaucracy itself. Factional disputes would continue, but a major reorganization in mid-1941 more clearly distributed the responsibilities between the two main agencies: the MOI was tasked with censorship and propaganda operations at home and in neutral or friendly countries, while the PWE oversaw subversive operations and campaigns in enemy and occupied territories. The entry of the United States into the war in December 1941 soon brought a new set of propaganda agencies to the Allied cause, such as the OWI and the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), both founded in 1942. Formal collaboration between British and US agencies began in late 1942 with the foundation of the Anglo-American Psychological Warfare Branch (PWB/AFHQ), which later became the Psychological Warfare Division of the Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force (PWD/SHAEF). The Allies’ respective contributions to the organization have been crudely characterized as “the provision of personnel and machinery by the Americans, and political savvy by the British” (Hench 2010: 57). Attempts to coordinate propaganda operations with the Soviet Union were generally fraught and unsuccessful.4

THE GROWTH OF CULTURAL PROPAGANDA PUBLICATIONS IN THE SECOND WORLD WAR Judging from the wartime production of printed propaganda, the Allied agencies increasingly came to recognize the value of the “literary” during the course of the war. This can be observed most obviously in the recruitment of writers and intellectuals as administrators, intelligence officers, editors, and copywriters. The PWE counted several notable writers on its staff including Quentin Bell, David Garnett, Graham Greene, Kathleen Raine, Antonia White, and the future editor of Encounter, Stephen Spender; as well as younger individuals such as Muriel Spark who would go on to literary fame after the war. For its part, the MOI was staffed by an “uneasy mix of novelists, journalists, advertising professionals, and civil servants” (Holman 2005: 204); from 1939 to 1945 the Ministry’s publications division provided employment for Greene, Day-Lewis, Laurie Lee, and Dylan Thomas, among many others. The United States also recruited several prominent writers as propagandists; John Steinbeck, for example, served in several US government intelligence and information agencies between 1940 and 1942, while Humphrey Cobb, Jane Jacobs, and Charles Olson are among those who found roles at the OWI during the war. The British agencies also leveraged the fame and prestige of prominent literary writers to lend credibility to cultural campaigns. Produced in collaboration between the MOI and Collins, the Britain in Pictures series of illustrated hardbacks drew on the services of some of the era’s most A file entitled “Territorial: Co-ordination of Propaganda Relations with Russia” in the PWE papers documents some of the tensions between the Allied propaganda agencies and their Soviet counterparts from 1942 to 1945 (FO 898/261). 4

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prominent authors, including John Betjeman (English Cities and Small Towns (1943)), Elizabeth Bowen (English Novelists (1942)), and Edith Sitwell (English Women (1942)). Greene contributed British Dramatists (1942), written on board a ship bound for West Africa (Holman 2005: 214). The MOI’s involvement in this series was kept secret, reviving a practice successfully employed during the First World War whereby state-sponsored propaganda books and other materials were published in the guise of independent and commercial imprints.5 At the start of the war, for example, the Ministry collaborated with Oxford University Press on the “Oxford Pamphlets on World Affairs” series, in which “some pamphlets would examine the mistaken ideas and policies of totalitarian states, and some the causes and prospects of war”; by 1943 the series had sold 4.5 million copies and had been translated into numerous languages (Holman 2005: 201–3). Many other books, pamphlets, and leaflets appeared (often with a reduced selling price due to MOI pressure) under the auspices of august publishers such as Collins, Faber, Heinemann, the Hogarth Press, Hutchinson’s, Murray, Odhams, and Thornton Butterworth (Holman 2005: 206–7). During the Cold War the IRD and CIA took this approach even further, establishing dummy publishing houses to disseminate pro-Western or anti-communist studies in history and politics, while the Department of State and United States Information Agency supported initiatives such as the Franklin Book Programs, “a private, not-for-profit organization that worked to help publish American books in translation in countries of interest to the United States and to help establish ‘indigenous’ book industries in these countries” (Laugesen 2010: 168). The PWE necessarily operated under very different conditions. Prior to D-Day, practical considerations severely limited the opportunities for disseminating cultural material in conflict zones: on the ground in enemy and occupied European territories citizens faced potentially fatal consequences if caught in possession of prohibited foreign propaganda, while at home the RAF was initially reluctant to risk air crews and planes on dangerous missions to drop printed material.6 Propaganda that addressed the war directly accordingly received priority. However, in addition to basic leaflets and booklets, the PWE did produce some “indirect” literary propaganda, like the “French leaflet edition” of John Steinbeck’s 1942 novel of European resistance, The Moon Is Down.7 The agency also developed a series of monthly magazines—De Wervelwind for the Netherlands, Die Andere Seite for Germany, La Revue du Monde Libre for France, Le Messager de la Liberté for Belgium, and Vi Vil Vinde for Denmark—intended to keep audiences across Europe apprised about life beyond the immediate conflict and featuring articles by prominent authors such as T. S. Eliot, E. M. Forster, André Gide, and Rebecca West.8 To aid clandestine circulation these magazines were small, measuring just 11 × 14 cm, but openly advertised themselves as British publications: La Revue du Monde Libre identified itself on the cover as “Apportée par le RAF” (“Brought to You by the Royal Air Force”). The Revue and its companion magazines established the ideological and aesthetic parameters that later guided the production of liberation publications; although these On the covert publication of propaganda using commercial imprints during the First World War see Peter Buitenhuis (1989: 15–16) and Wollaeger (2006: 16). 6 These matters are addressed in Tim Brooks (2007: 37–41), David Garnett (2002: 188–90), and Paul Linebarger (1948: 57). 7 A 1944 PWE report makes a useful distinction between “escapist” or “indirect” propaganda and material with “direct and obvious political content” (“Regional Organization and the Conduct of Printed Propaganda,” c. January 3, 1944, FO 898/430). A note dated February 1943 records a request by the Ministry of Information for sample copies of the PWE’s “French leaflet edition” of the novel (FO 898/445). 8 For wider discussion of these magazines, see Woodward and Smith (forthcoming). 5

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were British productions, the PWE also turned to their American counterparts for contributions, requesting US material for inclusion in Die Andere Seite shortly after its first publication in August 1942, and using OWI-provided content in De Wervelwind (Minutes of Leaflet Meeting, August 28, 1942, FO 898/102; “Anglo-American Leaflet Co-operation Already Effected,” January 6, 1944, FO 898/430). By January 1944 OWI representatives were serving on the PWE’s Editorial Committees for the regional departments for Italy and the Low Countries (“Anglo-American Leaflet Co-operation Already Effected,” FO 898/430). Some operations supported the cultural publication ventures of European exile groups. Fontaine, a journal founded by French exiles in Algiers and at “the literary vanguard” of the French Resistance, received various forms of assistance from the Anglo-American agencies (Morin 2017: 140–1). Published with the approval of the Free French government-in-exile, the magazine was edited by the poet Max-Pol Fouchet, who occasionally broadcast for the BBC and was certainly known to British officials: PWE employees Raine and White helped put together a special 1944 number of the journal on English literature, and after the Allies took control of North Africa the PWB allowed Fontaine’s printer in Algiers to continue printing the journal (“D-Day Leaflet Campaign for Anvil: Appendix A,” June 30, 1944, FO 898/456). De Wervelwind, meanwhile, was produced by the PWE as a “joint venture” with the Dutch government (Harman to Leeper, October 20, 1942, FO 898/449). A spin-off entitled Het Handvest Van De Vrijheid (The Charter of Freedom) developed the magazine into an extended 200-page anthology. Featuring short extracts of material ranging from the Bible, Thomas Aquinas, and Dante to George Bernard Shaw, as well as recent speeches by Roosevelt and Churchill (among others), its leveraging of the Western intellectual tradition of “freedom” prefigures one of the key refrains of the cultural Cold War, in which intellectual and artistic “freedom” became a “trope” deployed by the West in simplistic campaigns, which sought to suggest that writers behind the Iron Curtain were mere “puppets or victims of a repressive system” (Barnhisel 2015: 28). As D-Day approached the need for cultural propaganda became particularly acute. The PWE’s Editorial Unit, a body that often operated in close coordination with the OWI, was formed to produce magazines and booklets to update liberated European citizens on cultural, scientific, and political developments that had occurred during occupation (Woodward and Smith forthcoming). Allied propagandists were tasked with assembling “material with which to restock bookstalls and kiosks that will have been stripped of German and Quisling productions … the moment Allied armies land” (McMillan to the Director of Plans, c. October 1943, FO 898/474). One series of illustrated booklets planned by the PWE aimed to cover thirteen or fourteen aspects of the British war effort, [… prepared as] separate volumes, approximately the size of Picture Post, containing 5,000 words of text, together with a “repeat” of the story in photographs, headlines and captions. In this way it is hoped that the volumes will appeal not only to those who are most affected by pictures, but also to those who are prepared to study the text with some attention. (McMillan to Dowling, March 16, 1944, FO 898/474) Suggested priority volumes for this series (many of which appear never to have materialized) included “The Battle of Britain and the Blitz” by David Garnett, “The Incisive Naval Battles of the War” by society columnist Ivor Lambe, and other texts written by military officers. V. S. Pritchett was nominated to produce “The Citadel of Liberty,” described as a “somewhat lighter volume than the others, telling of British hospitality to the many peoples in exile, and of their impact upon

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Britain at war” (McMillan to Dowling, March 16, 1944, FO 898/474). Such aims indicate a shift in emphasis also evident at the MOI, where “official booklets illustrating the extent of Britain’s war effort” were increasingly supplemented by “material that showed the kind of democratic Britain that would be building the peace.” By October 1943 the MOI’s Publications Division began to undertake a much-expanded book program, encompassing “official publications for sale in the UK, foreign language versions of these, and books in French, Italian, and Dutch in preparation for the reoccupation of Europe” (Holman 2005: 216). At this stage the MOI also developed a number of cultural periodicals particularly “for the Middle East and for France,” such as the illustrated French-language magazine Cadran (“Dial”), launched in 1944 to provide “a picture of everyday life in the UK and show the extent of the British war effort” (Holman 2005: 216–19). These initial “impact” publications, the propagandists recognized, would soon need to give way to more substantial intellectual productions, offering longer-term and positive projections of Allied cultural life. At the PWE, these ambitions were embodied in the “International Review-Digest Project,” which gave rise to Choix (“Choice,” for France and Francophone regions), Il Mese (“The Month,” for Italy), and other similar digests aimed at Denmark, Greece, the Netherlands, and Norway.9 Rather than commissioning new contributions, the digests followed the approach of La Revue du Monde Libre, collecting and reprinting recent essays and reviews on cultural topics by a range of prominent Anglophone and European writers and critics. The project appears to have been initiated in mid-1944 between the PWE’s Editorial Unit and the OWI’s Publications Division; the digests were jointly financed and edited, with some editorial input by representatives of the nation for which each publication was intended. An OWI report produced in early 1945 states that “the overall purpose of these magazines is to bring the liberated countries up to date on social and political thought, scientific, literary and artistic achievements, through articles from leading magazines and extracts from important books, broadcasts, and other documents. The American interest in this is to give the American story its proportionate weight” (OWI 1945: 17). Beyond any benign desire to enhance the range of reading material available in Europe, however, the project had more focused ambitions: a PWE report stated that “this great publishing enterprise—probably the greatest ever known to Europe” was conducted toward a wider goal, of developing “potential influence, in the post-war European settlement” (“Regional Organization and the Conduct of Printed Propaganda,” c. January 3, 1944, FO 898/430). At first glance this claim appears hyperbolic, but the print runs of Choix were truly staggering: by the end of 1944 its circulation had reached 311,000 copies, almost thirty times that of leading contemporary literary magazines such as Horizon (Collini 2016: 160), showing the extent to which government-backed literary magazines projected Anglo-American influence into Europe well before the foundation of the CCF.

CONTINUITIES AND CHANGES BETWEEN SECOND WORLD WAR AND COLD WAR CULTURAL PROPAGANDA Ideologically, aesthetically, and tactically, the Allied cultural propaganda campaigns surveyed above laid important groundwork for later Cold War activities. Some cultural publications initiated by government agencies during the Second World War simply carried on, giving weight to Andrew

9

This International Review-Digest Project is the subject of sustained analysis in Woodward and Smith (forthcoming).

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Defty’s observation that “the ease and speed with which post-war propaganda was instituted and expanded suggests that the dissolution of wartime information agencies was largely superficial” (the OWI was wound up in September 1945 and the PWE was finally disbanded the following year) (Defty 2004: 29). Some of these publications advertised their continuities with wartime operations relatively openly. Produced in London by the Central Office of Information (COI; the post-war successor to the MOI), and seemingly published into the late 1940s, the French “revue internationale” Echo, one of several related post-war digests published in various European languages, closely followed the wartime digests in its form and content (Koutsopanagou 2017: 393). Its first number reprinted an essay by George Orwell, as well as other pieces sourced from the Listener, New Republic, New Statesman, and New Yorker. At home Britain in Pictures also continued after the war with its 100th volume, Orwell’s The English People, appearing in 1947, and the final (132nd) volume, the Earl of Portsmouth’s British Farm Stock, in 1950. Certain publications, originally founded as independent enterprises, were conscripted by government propaganda agencies during the Second World War and then redeployed covertly in the post-war era. An important case here is the magazine Twentieth Century, founded in 1877 as the Nineteenth Century, and later renamed the Nineteenth Century and After before adopting its final name in 1951. Identifying this publication as the key forerunner of Encounter, Saunders and Hugh Wilford both note that the Paris office of the CIA-funded CCF had provided a series of financial subsidies during 1951 on the understanding that Twentieth Century’s editor Michael Goodwin would use the magazine to attack neutralist positions taken by the left-leaning New Statesman (Saunders 1999: 109–10). Twentieth Century’s use in covert propaganda campaigns predates this CIA-backed operation, however. At its inception, this popular monthly offered a liberal platform for contributors from across the political spectrum, but, according to Perry Anderson, it moved inexorably in a conservative and imperialist direction over the early decades of the twentieth century (Anderson 2018). In 1938 its editorship passed to F. W. Voigt, a journalist who espoused anti-fascist and anti-communist convictions with equal vigor. Voigt’s own involvement in direct propaganda was fraught and brief; from 1940 to 1941 he combined his editorial duties at the Nineteenth Century and After with a role at the PWE’s predecessor organization SO1 advising on campaigns to Germany, but resigned after clashing with section head Crossman (Bruce Lockhart 1960: 92). Bitterly resentful, Voigt would go on to wage rhetorical war on the PWE and was scathing about British propaganda campaigns in the pages of the Nineteenth Century and After. This proved no barrier to the PWE’s deployment of his magazine, however: several articles extracted from the publication ran in little magazines dropped over France and Yugoslavia, and one was featured in the inaugural edition of Choix.10 Copies of the Nineteenth Century and After were then included on a list of publications chosen for “infiltration” into Yugoslavia in spring 1945 following the country’s liberation (“Infiltration Report for Period Dec 26th 1944 to Jan 10th 1945,” FO 898/142). In 1947, the editorship passed to Goodwin, who combined his work on the magazine with undercover roles at the nascent IRD (Wilford 2003: 198). Under Goodwin the magazine adopted a combative

La Revue du Monde Libre reprinted articles extracted from the Nineteenth Century and After in April, May, and November 1943, addressing topics as various as the French writer Charles Maurras, the Warsaw Ghetto, and the experiences of women in Yugoslavia (these issues can be found in FO 898/521). The inaugural 1944 issue of Slovenian-language journal Londonsko Pismo reprinted extracts from a Nineteenth Century article addressing the British declaration of war on Germany (FO 898/503). 10

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role in the cultural Cold War, defending the CCF against Hugh Trevor-Roper’s public criticism, and giving office space to the British Society for Cultural Freedom, the CCF’s national affiliate in the UK, following the group’s foundation in 1951 (Wilford 2003: 205). The renamed Twentieth Century published and leaked materials for the CCF and the Foreign Office; in return, the CCF cleared the magazine’s debts and ensured its financial stability. But as Wilford explains, CCF’s Paris headquarters questioned the magazine’s commitment to tackling “the threat of neutralism” in Britain, while closer to home literary intellectuals began to grumble at its perceived dullness and lack of stimulating cultural content (2003: 206). A clutch of PWE alumni, including Crossman, Fyvel, and Spender, began to hatch plans to found a new transatlantic left-of-center cultural magazine to replace the Twentieth Century, and following a series of bitter wrangles Encounter duly appeared under Spender’s stewardship in 1953. Tribune, the British socialist weekly founded in 1937, and which employed Orwell as literary editor and regular columnist from 1943, offers a further example of a left-leaning magazine distributed in Europe immediately following liberation and later repurposed toward propaganda aims. Along with Horizon and the Times literary and educational supplements, the magazine appears on a 1945 list of publications requested by Allied Information Services for use in information campaigns in Trieste, a contested city on the border of Italy and Slovenia in which the propaganda conflict between the nascent Yugoslav communist regime and the Allied military government marked one of the earliest Cold War confrontations (“Report by Lt. Col. Pemberton-Pigott,” August 12–15, 1945, FO 898/142). In the earliest years of the IRD, the Foreign Office supplied Tribune to its posts abroad for covert use in anti-communist operations; the agency’s head and PWE alumnus Ralph Murray aimed to use the publication as an aid in exposing the iniquities of communist regimes (Lashmar and Oliver 1998: 37). The plans formulated by the PWE and other bodies for German reconstruction also show how denazification programs were speedily rebooted as anti-communist campaigns. Here literature, and the novel specifically, played a key role. In March 1945, Duncan Wilson, the head of the PWE’s German region, put forward a paper for discussion, which argued that ideological reconstruction required an indirect “informational” approach rather than any appearance of propaganda: “We do not contemplate writing books specially for a German public to drive home certain conclusions which we think that they should attain. We want the widest possible public in Germany to draw these conclusions for themselves, from the sort of book which they would normally read” (“Information and Publicity to Germany in the Post-Surrender Period,” March 19, 1945, FO 898/415). “The German public reads novels, biographies and books of travel more than works about political and economic theory,” the paper continued, noting that these types of books were a “large proportion” of the titles that the agency was taking steps to have published in Germany. To those who suggested that such works merely “entertained” German readers, the paper observed that “no book can edify a man who refuses to read it … the lessons contained in novels etc. often make a deeper impression on the educated public and a wider impression on the public in general than lessons contained in books of more obviously didactic intent” (“Information and Publicity to Germany,” FO 898/415). Accordingly, and in concert with the OWI, the PWE had been drawing up a list of a series of books by one hundred prominent British authors, to be published in Germany in the early stages of occupation. The agency was wound up before it could bring these to fruition, but the deployment of literary works continued through the “selected Book Scheme” which operated in the British Zone of Occupation from 1945 to 1950, with the aim of denazifying and re-educating the defeated

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German civilian population. At the first meeting of the scheme’s Book Selection Committee in January 1946 it was decided that “Cultural subjects” should be prioritized; fiction was also accorded considerable importance, and titles selected in the early months of the scheme included works by Elizabeth Bowen, T. S. Eliot, Aldous Huxley, Vita Sackville-West, and Evelyn Waugh (Williams 1997: 114–16). As Rhys W. Williams observes, the presence on a November 1946 progress report of Arthur Koestler’s Arrival and Departure (1943) and George Orwell’s Animal Farm (1945) “suggests that the cold-war virtues of these texts were just beginning to be appreciated” (1997: 116). John B. Hench similarly observes that the OWI’s wartime book schemes, initially designed to “denazify … European thought,” ended up “providing a foil to the spread of communist propaganda during the ensuing cold war”; moreover, he argues, the OWI book programs “significantly influenced post-war U.S. international relations by serving as precedents for important elements in the diplomacy of the cold war, sometimes effectively, sometimes not” (2010: 7–8). Following its creation in 1948, the IRD revived the PWE’s plans to become involved in the reproduction, translation, and circulation of books in a more sophisticated form. Saunders notes that the agency, in collaboration with publishers Hamish Hamilton, circulated Koestler’s Darkness at Noon (1940) in post-war Germany (1999: 60). Lashmar and Oliver suggest that the IRD was particularly attracted to Orwell’s novels Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) since these “did not directly mention Communism [and] could not be dismissed out of hand as propaganda”; they go on to explain that archival documents released in 1996 show that Ralph Murray was involved in plans to publish Animal Farm in Arabic and Russian in 1949 (1998: 95–6). Aside from fiction, over the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s the IRD established the front publishing house Ampersand and covertly worked with a series of existing firms, including Phoenix House and the Bodley Head, to produce nearly one hundred titles in the “Background Books” series, many written by figures with wartime records in intelligence, propaganda, and special operations: R. H. Bruce Lockhart, former director general of the PWE, produced an account of his experiences in Russia during the 1917 revolutions, for example (Lashmar and Oliver 1998: 100–1). The topics covered by these IRD ventures spanned numerous fields, ranging from basic works introducing political or philosophical topics through to textbooks and significant reference works covering aspects of Soviet politics and culture. The IRD also continued its involvement in the production of magazines, such as the “general projection magazine” Anglia, produced for distribution in the Soviet Union with “significant input” from the agency (Davies 2013: 315, 298). Interestingly, when the cost of Anglia came under hostile scrutiny toward the end of the 1960s, Duncan Wilson (by now serving as British Ambassador to the Soviet Union) argued against pursuing a more obvious political slant, suggesting that “to allow the magazine to start pointing the moral would be to encourage the readers to cease doing so” (Davies 2013: 316). The echo with his earlier work for the PWE indicates the continuity between IRD publications and earlier forms of cultural propaganda. Furthermore, Anglia’s “unusual” pocket size format, designed to aid concealment and circulation, recalled that of air-dropped magazines such as De Wervelwind, suggesting that practical lessons had also been learned from the war years. As the examples of Wilson and Lockhart indicate, many of the same figures involved in wartime propaganda operations either continued in such roles or were re-employed during the Cold War. The head of the IRD, Ralph Murray, had come through the BBC during the 1930s, and after entering the Foreign Office in 1939 oversaw a series of wartime Balkan campaigns for the PWE. Cecil Parrott, who worked on behalf of the PWE in neutral Sweden during the war, joined the IRD in 1948; later,

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as minister at the British Embassy in Moscow during the 1950s, he would advocate “injecting … western ideas” through cultural publications as a means of fomenting rebellion by Soviet youths and intellectuals (Davies 2013: 300). Crossman, former Oxford academic and assistant editor of the New Statesman from 1938, headed the PWE’s German section before moving to Algiers in May 1943 to coordinate Anglo-American propaganda operations—in 1944–5 he served as assistant chief of PWD/SHAEF. Crossman was elected a Labour MP in 1945 and served on Harold Wilson’s front bench from 1963 to 1970 but would also become a prominent Cold Warrior, contributing to Encounter and editing the landmark anti-communist essay collection The God That Failed (1949), which featured contributions by fellow PWE alumni Koestler and Spender and was distributed abroad by British and US information agencies (Barnhisel 2015: 116; Defty 2004: 154). Patrick Gordon Walker, another PWE alumnus elected for Labour in the 1945 landslide General Election, meanwhile headed the Colonial Official Information Policy Committee, which oversaw much of the IRD’s output (Lashmar and Oliver 1998: 33–4). By far the most prominent writer to make this transition was Stephen Spender. A member (with W. H. Auden, Louis MacNeice, and Day-Lewis) of the prominent “MacSpaunday” circle of young 1930s leftist writers, Spender was a poet, critic, editor, co-founder and associate editor of Horizon, and co-editor of Encounter from the journal’s establishment in 1953 until 1967. Scholars debate how much Spender knew about the CIA’s financial support of Encounter, as Spender insisted he was entirely unaware of it.11 But what has become clearer is the nature of his experience in the field of state-backed propaganda before he took on his role at Encounter. In his journals published in 1985 Spender coyly notes that in late 1944 he was transferred to “a subsidiary branch of Political Intelligence” at Bush House, where he was engaged in “compiling information about the history of Italian fascism, as background material for the British force occupying Italy. Nothing secret,” before traveling to Germany in 1945, ostensibly to write a report at the behest of the Civilian Military Forces of the Control Commission but mainly for the “private reason” of tracking down an old friend (Spender 1986: 58–9). Documents in the PWE papers clarify that in fact Spender was attached to the agency’s Italian Region in April 1945, and furthermore went on to serve as a “reporter on German intellectuals” for the agency in September 1945, showing that he completed a significant phase of service directly with the PWE and then moved to become a roving representative pursuing enquiries amid the ruins of occupied Germany (minutes, April 18, 1945, FO 898/406; “Current Reduction in P.I.D. German & Austrian Intelligence,” September 8, 1945, FO 898/406). The careers of other writers followed similar trajectories. Having worked on various wartime campaigns for the PWE, Tosco Fyvel succeeded his friend George Orwell as literary editor of Tribune in 1945; he later contributed to the IRD’s Background Books series and, perhaps most significantly, was one of the driving forces behind the conception of Encounter, acting “as a link between British and US propaganda” (Defty 2004: 204).12 After a series of roles in the Allied wartime propaganda machine—involving activity with the BBC, MOI, and PWE—the Anglo-Hungarian Koestler likewise became a key player in the opening salvos of the cultural Cold War, as a consultant to the

For example, Stephen Spender’s son, Matthew Spender, recently stated that the question “Was the conspiracy apparent at the time?” was still one of the “key questions of the Encounter story,” and one that is among the “hardest to answer” (2017: v). 12 A memo from Crossman to Calder dated August 28, 1942, for example, suggests that Fyvel was working under Crossman on propaganda to Germany (FO 898/286); Fyvel’s IRD career is addressed in Barnet Litvinoff ’s obituary of him (1985: 59). 11

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CIA and IRD, a contributor to The God That Failed, and a central presence in the founding of the CCF, until his stridency saw him cut out of the organization in 1950 (Saunders 1999: 90; see also Scammell 2010 for a biographical overview of this stage of Koestler’s life). Despite his ejection, Koestler’s anti-communist writings remained useful in the battle of ideas: his essay “A Guide to Political Neuroses” appeared in the second issue of Encounter in November 1953. Taking into account these various continuities, Encounter appears less audacious and innovative than some have suggested. The journal’s content supports this view: indeed, the first issue featured contributions from four writers who had also appeared in Choix or Il Mese (Day-Lewis, Virginia Woolf, Denis de Rougement, and Edith Sitwell). Encounter also inherited from Choix and the digests a perceptible cosmopolitan ambition to break down boundaries between national reading communities. The first issue’s contributor notes ‘About Our Authors’ observed that while “Americans read British magazines, and the British read American ones,” Europeans actually knew little about the true intellectual sophistication of the United States, and that although a British person might have heard of the “Partisan Review, Commentary, Kenyon Review, Hudson Review, and a dozen others,” very few “have actually read them” (80). In other respects, however, Encounter differed substantially from the wartime PWE publications: as a journal, rather than a digest, its active editorial voice was much more reminiscent of Horizon. Indeed, Wilford characterizes Encounter as a “platform for those Bloomsbury literati who had been deprived of one when Horizon folded” (Wilford 2003: 271).13 Notwithstanding this distinction, Encounter and the wartime digests were both underpinned by the ideological conviction that liberal–democratic cultural production was a powerful weapon in the battle of ideas, first as a means of wooing an intelligentsia recovering from European war and occupation, and then to contest the intellectual gravitational pull of international communism. These continuities, and the wider progression of publishing operations traced in this chapter, therefore complicate any neat claim that the Cold War provided the origin point of this evolution. In fact, many of the tactics of Cold War cultural propaganda had been used a full decade earlier. Whether in the pages of miniature magazines air-dropped by the RAF, or in the cosmopolitan literary digests the Allied information agencies circulated en masse across the continent, the Second World War provided a persuasive argument for the propaganda value of literary works, and an incubator for many of the techniques and personalities that this volume traces across the Cold War cultural sphere.

WORKS CITED The files of the Political Warfare Executive are held at the UK National Archives (Kew, London) in the FO 898 series and have been digitized by Gale in the “Archives Unbound” database, available online at: https://www. gale.com/intl/c/all​ied-pro​paga​nda-in-world-war-ii-and-the-brit​ish-politi​cal-warf​are-execut​ive. Anderson, P. (2018), “The Missing Text,” New Left Review (November–December). Available online: https:// newlef​trev​iew.org/iss​ues/ii114/artic​les/perry-ander​son-the-miss​ing-text (last accessed August 13, 2021). Anon. (1953), “About our Authors,” Encounter (October): 80–6.

See Barnhisel (2015: 136–78) for a detailed reading of the relationship of Encounter to its modernist predecessors.

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Anon. (1945), OWI in the ETO: A Report on the Activities of the Office of War Information in the European Theater of Operations: January 1944–January 1945, London: OWI. Available online: https://arch​ive.org/deta​ ils/owi​inet​orep​orto​n00u​nit/mode/2up (last accessed August 3, 2021). Baker White, J. (1955), The Big Lie, London: Evans Brothers. Barnhisel, G. (2015), Cold War Modernists: Art, Literature, and American Cultural Diplomacy, New York: Columbia University Press. Brooks, T. (2007), British Propaganda to France, 1940–1944: Machinery, Method and Message, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Bruce Lockhart, R. H. (1960), Giants Cast Long Shadows, London: Putnam. Buitenhuis, P. (1989), The Great War of Words: Literature as Propaganda 1914–18 and After, London: Batsford. Chapman, J. (1998), The British at War: Cinema, State and Propaganda, 1939–1945, London: I.B. Tauris. Collini, S. (2016), Common Writing: Essays on Literary Culture and Public Debate, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Crossman, R. (1949), “Introduction,” in R. Crossman (ed.), The God That Failed, 1–11, New York: Harper and Brothers. Davies, S. (2013), “The Soft Power of Anglia: British Cold War Cultural Diplomacy in the USSR,” Contemporary British History 27(3): 297–323. Defty, A. (2004), Britain, America and Anti-Communist Propaganda 1945–53: The Information Research Department, London: Routledge. Delmer, S. (1962), Black Boomerang: An Autobiography: Volume Two, London: Secker & Warburg. Garnett, D., ed. (1968), The White/Garnett Letters, New York: Viking. Garnett, D. (2002), The Secret History of PWE: The Political Warfare Executive 1939–1945, London: St Ermin’s Press. Hench, J. B. (2010), Books as Weapons: Propaganda, Publishing, and the Battle for Global Markets in the Era of World War II, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Holman, V. (2005), “Carefully Concealed Connections: The Ministry of Information and British Publishing, 1939–1946,” Book History 8: 197–226. Koestler, A. (1949), “Untitled,” in R. Crossman (ed.), The God That Failed, 15–75, New York: Harper and Brothers. Koutsopanagou, G. (2017), “Moulding Western European Identity,” Media History 23(3–4): 391–404. Lashmar, P., and J. Oliver (1998), Britain’s Secret Propaganda War 1948–1977, Stroud: Sutton. Laugesen, A. (2010), “The Franklin Book Programs, Translation, and the Creation of a Modern Global Publishing Culture, 1952–1968,” Princeton University Library Chronicle 71(2): 168–86. Linebarger, P. M. A. (1948), Psychological Warfare, Washington, DC: Infantry Journal Press. Litvinoff, B. (1985), “Tosco R. Fyvel, 1908–1985,” Jewish Quarterly 32(4): 58–9. McEwan, I. (2012), Sweet Tooth, London: Jonathan Cape. Morin, E. (2017), Beckett’s Political Imagination, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Nogarède-Grohmann, A. (2019), “The Weekly Newspaper Die Zukunft (1938–1940): The Intellectual Weapons of the Fight against Nazism,” Revue Historique 690(2): 371–404. Rubin, A. N. (2012), Archives of Authority: Empire, Culture, and the Cold War, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Saunders, F. S. (1999), Who Paid the Piper? The CIA and the Cultural Cold War, London: Granta Books. Scammell, M. (2010), Koestler: The Indispensable Intellectual, London: Faber.

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Scott-Smith, G., and C. A. Lerg (2017), “Introduction: Journals of Freedom?” in C. A. Lerg and G. Scott-Smith (eds.), Campaigning Culture and the Global Cold War: The Journals of the Congress for Cultural Freedom, London: Palgrave Macmillan. Spender, M. (2017), “Preface,” in C. A. Lerg and G. Scott-Smith (eds.), Campaigning Culture and the Global Cold War: The Journals of the Congress for Cultural Freedom, v–x, London: Palgrave Macmillan. Spender, S. (1986), Journals 1939–1983, New York: Random House. Stenton, M. (2000), Radio London and Resistance in Occupied Europe: British Political Warfare 1939–1943, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Taylor, P. M. (2003), Munitions of the Mind: A History of Propaganda from the Ancient World to the Present Era, 3rd ed., Manchester: Manchester University Press. Wilford, H. (2003), The CIA, the British Left, and the Cold War: Calling the Tune?, London: Frank Cass. Wilford, H. (2014), “‘I Too Could Be a Spy’: Literature and the Secret State in Cold War Britain and America,” paper delivered at “Modern Literature, Culture, and the Archives of the Secret State” conference, Durham University, March 28–29, 2014. Available online: https://www.mixcl​oud.com/REA​DDur​ham/i-too-could-be-a-spy-lit​erat​ ure-and-the-sec​ret-state-in-cold-war-brit​ain-and-amer​ica/ (last accessed July 21, 2021). Williams, R. W. (1997), “ ‘The Selections of the Committee Are Not in Accord with the Requirements of Germany’: Contemporary English Literature and the Selected Book Scheme in the British Zone of Germany (1945–1950),” in A. Bance (ed.), The Cultural Legacy of the British Occupation in Germany: The London Symposium, 110–38, Stuttgart: Hans-Dieter Heinz. Wollaeger, Mark (2006), Modernism, Media, and Propaganda: British Narrative from 1900 to 1945, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Woodward, G., and J. Smith, “ ‘A Sort of Secret, Hidden Propaganda of a Cultural Kind’: The Political Warfare Executive, Choix, and Literary Propaganda in the Second World War,” forthcoming article.

FURTHER READING Barnhisel, G. (2015), Cold War Modernists: Art, Literature, and American Cultural Diplomacy, New York: Columbia University Press. Davies, S. (2013), “The Soft Power of Anglia: British Cold War Cultural Diplomacy in the USSR,” Contemporary British History 27(3): 297–323. Defty, A. (2004), Britain, America and Anti-Communist Propaganda 1945–53: The Information Research Department, London: Routledge. Hench, J. B. (2010), Books as Weapons: Propaganda, Publishing, and the Battle for Global Markets in the Era of World War II, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Holman, V. (2005), “Carefully Concealed Connections: The Ministry of Information and British Publishing, 1939–1946,” Book History 8: 197–226. Koutsopanagou, G. (2017), “Moulding Western European Identity,” Media History, 23(3–4): 391–404. Lashmar, P., and J. Oliver (1998), Britain’s Secret Propaganda War 1948–1977, Stroud: Sutton. Lerg, C., and G. Scott-Smith (2017), Campaigning Culture and the Global Cold War: The Journals of the Congress for Cultural Freedom, London: Palgrave Macmillan. Saunders, F. S. (1999), Who Paid the Piper? The CIA and the Cultural Cold War, London: Granta Books. Taylor, P. M. (2003), Munitions of the Mind: A History of Propaganda from the Ancient World to the Present Era, 3rd ed., Manchester: Manchester University Press. Wilford, H. (2003), The CIA, the British Left, and the Cold War: Calling the Tune?, London: Frank Cass.

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CHAPTER TEN

Book Diplomacy: Soviet–American Publishing Relations and the Moscow Book Exhibitions in the Late Cold War BIRGITTE BECK PRISTED AND RÓSA MAGNÚSDÓTTIR

INTRODUCTION During the Cold War, book publishing in the Soviet Union was a state monopoly. The State Committee for Publishing (Goskomizdat) negotiated with the governmental planning and supply authorities and determined how (politically approved) publishing programs would receive resources and also, through inconsistent censorship, decided which titles would be available to Soviet readers (Reisch 2013; Richmond 2003: 136; Stukalin 2002; Vladimirov 1972). In the last decades leading up to perestroika, the annual output of book titles stagnated, with publishers producing enormous print runs of official Soviet classics and textbooks, while increasingly educated urban readers searched for foreign novelties in literary journals or black-market copies (Gudkov and Dubin 1988; Lovell 2000: 56; Pristed 2017: 55–7). The Soviet Union censored its own writers and blocked the publication of foreign authors, controlling and limiting the availability of American and English-language literature to these “book hungry” Soviet readers (e.g., Reisch 2013; Richmond 2003: 136). Despite these restrictions, “acceptable” American authors were largely available in the Soviet Union, both in translation and in the original language. Soviet publishers, though, did not recognize any international copyright agreements, thus making it almost impossible for American publishers operating on the free market to conduct business with the Soviet state publishing houses (Ironside 2021; Richmond 2003). Soviet–American publishing relations developed gradually over several decades, but in this chapter, we focus on the ideological, political, and economic dilemmas that faced American and Soviet publishers wishing to exchange books in the late 1970s and the early 1980s. We examine the diplomatic role of these publishers, who in the late 1970s were instrumental in advocating for the exchange of books across the Iron Curtain, albeit with different goals in mind.

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For American publishers, the Soviet Union was a potentially untapped market of more than 250 million educated readers eager for American literature (Levin 1978). Unfortunately, the Soviet market was inaccessible to free market Western publishers. As publishing relations increased, some American publishers’ concerns about the status of human rights in the Soviet Union made them wary of participating in book fairs, while Soviet state publishers were more receptive to the commercial aspects of the transnational book trade market as it emerged in the late 1970s. By analyzing publishers’ memoirs, political hearings, exhibition catalogues, and press materials, our study reveals how from 1977, the biennial Moscow International Book Exhibition and Fair became a catalyst for increased book trade and personal contacts across the Iron Curtain. Years before perestroika, the fair, and other cultural exchange programs between American and Soviet publishers, became a “training ground” for Soviet officials and publishers to acquire a language of book commerce hitherto not used in the state publishing system.

THE ROLE OF BOOKS IN SOVIET AND AMERICAN CULTURAL RELATIONS, 1947–59 There is no shortage of research on the illegal circulation of books and literature in the Soviet Union, also known as samizdat, that is, “self-published” (von Zitzewitz 2020), and its relations to the dissidence movement (Komaromi 2015), as well as the publication of underground Soviet literature abroad, also known as tamizdat, that is, “published over there” (Kind-Kovács 2014; Klots et al. 2017–21). But relatively little has been written about the availability and reception of officially published American books in the Soviet Union (Ruggles 1961). The story of how Soviet–American publishing relations unfolded in the late 1970s and the early 1980s is best understood in relation to earlier book exchange efforts between the two superpowers. In the period of high Stalinism, from 1947 to 1953, the former allies had very little cultural contact. Few Americans visited the Soviet Union and Soviet travel abroad came to a complete halt. In the United States, the 1948 Smith–Mundt Act called for a strong information program to counter Soviet propaganda, but the Soviet authorities went to great lengths to limit people’s access to American sources of information. As the propaganda war escalated, the US government made sure that foreign readers had access to American books through private channels such as the Informational Media Guaranty (IMG) program, and government programs such as the United States Information Agency’s libraries and reading rooms (Barnhisel 2015). None of these programs, though, reached the Soviet Union. Some Soviet people could hear the illegal radio broadcasts of Voice of America, and with Soviet permission the US Embassy published and distributed a glossy magazine (Amerika) from 1945, although the Soviet printers (Soiuzpechat) and distributers (Mezhkniga) limited access to it considerably. But, as the Cold War escalated in 1946 and 1947, the Soviet authorities jammed the radio broadcasts, limited access to the magazine, and generally did everything in their power to limit and control available information about the United States (Magnúsdóttir 2019). In both countries, books became an important weapon in the ideological fight that was starting to define the emerging bipolar world. Under Stalin’s leadership, the Central Committee Department of Agitation and Propaganda issued measures for the strengthening of anti-American propaganda, and the Soviet Writers’ Union denounced “antipatriotic” works of literature. In addition to making Soviet authors incorporate anti-American themes in their works, the Soviet regime used old and new books by Soviet writers and American “progressive” authors to denounce what they perceived

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as the downsides of American society: racial and social injustice and inequality, imperialism, and bourgeois individualism (Magnúsdóttir 2019). Many of the American writers deemed acceptable for publication in the postwar Soviet Union had at some point found socialist ideology and Soviet modernity appealing, but for most this fascination faded. In 1949, Soviet readers learned that many of their favorite American authors (including Jack London, Mark Twain, Theodore Dreiser, Sinclair Lewis, and the later blacklisted Howard Fast) were to be republished, but there were no plans to compensate them financially for their works (Magnúsdóttir 2019: 34). This, in fact, contributed to Fast’s ultimate disillusionment with the Soviet Union and the Communist Party (Ironside 2021: 201), and more broadly, not adhering to international copyright law damaged the relationships of Soviet publishers to their foreign authors (Gilburd 2006; Ironside 2021). Soviet publishers were also dismayed at the lack of interest American readers showed in Soviet literature and books in the postwar years. American readers liked Russian classics, not socialist–realist literature or science driven by Marxist analysis (Richmond 2003; Stukalin 1979). In the early 1960s, Melville J. Ruggles, vice president of the Council of Library Resources in the United States, visited the Soviet Union to research the state of Soviet publishing. In his study of American books in the Soviet Union from 1918 to 1959, Ruggles found that the top five American authors, in terms of copies printed, were London, Twain, Dreiser, Upton Sinclair, and James Fenimore Cooper. In his evaluation of American authors available to Soviet readers, Ruggles concluded that only the most left-wing (London and Sinclair) or socially critical (Twain, Dreiser) American writers were translated. One of the most widely distributed American books was Harriet Beecher Stowe’s antislavery classic Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which was read in schools and was readily available in the Soviet Union (Magnúsdóttir 2019; Ruggles 1961). Soviet books’ portraits of the United States, moreover, were dated in their depictions of American social and racial conflicts. When Soviet–American cultural relations slowly started to improve in the mid-1950s, it became clear that in general, Soviet knowledge about America was outdated. As part of the “revival of Soviet-American relations,” Khrushchev started pushing for an official accord with the United States on “exchanges in cultural, technical and education fields,” which became known as the Lacy–Zarubin Agreement. For Soviet officials, one of the incentives behind this 1958 treaty was to gain better access to American knowledge and facilitate economic and technological agreements between the two superpowers, but it also meant that the American government had a say in what American cultural products they would offer Soviet audiences (Kozovoi 2016; Magnúsdóttir 2019: 78). The Lacy–Zarubin agreement was renegotiated every two years, paving the way for exchanges in fields such as science, technology, agriculture, radio and television, film, government, tourism, publication, and exhibitions. In 1959, the first full year of official cultural exchanges climaxed with the American National Exhibit in Moscow (site of the famed “kitchen debate”) and the Soviet National Exhibit in New York. Both included elaborate book exhibits that received considerable attention, mostly because the Soviets disapproved of the American books about Russia included in the US exhibit, claiming that they violated the agreement that allowed representations only of one’s own country. The American organizers withdrew books such as Adlai Stevenson’s Friends and Enemies, but in return demanded Soviet books that negatively displayed American society (such as Negroes in America Fight for Freedom) be removed from the Soviet book exhibit in New York (Magnúsdóttir 2019: 134).

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Even if the years since Stalin’s death had seen a thaw in the Soviet Union and the end of McCarthyism in the United States, the displayed books at the 1959 exhibits were still scrutinized for perceived propaganda and/or ideological infiltration. But, as a result of the cultural exchange agreement and the changing international book trade environment, Soviet and American publishers started a dialogue in the 1960s that allowed for other aspects, such as commerce and trade, to gain in importance, while the Soviet state publishing industry gradually distanced itself from a purely ideological presentation of books.

SOCIALIST AND CAPITALIST ATTEMPTS AT “INTERNATIONALIZING” THE BOOK TRADE In the early 1960s, the United States and the Soviet Union navigated the international book market very differently. Under Khrushchev’s leadership, the USSR had joined the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) in 1954, gradually developing close diplomatic ties with UNESCO headquarters in Paris. UNESCO membership allowed the Soviet Union to influence the book policy of the organization and its notion of an international readership in a decolonized world. While the CIA program for circulating information in Eastern European countries primarily regarded books as a supplement to mass media communication such as the US radio broadcasters’ Voice of America, Radio Liberty, and Radio Free Europe (Johnson and Parta 2010; Reisch 2013), UNESCO elevated the status of the book as a special means of communication and universal cultural heritage. While the UNESCO program celebrated Russian classic authors (such as the Chekhov centenary in 1960 (Giton 2016: 57)), the USSR had to accept a certain influx of UNESCO international publishing data and uncensored circulation of its popular translated illustrated magazine The Courier that for many Soviet readers became a window to the outside world (Porter 2018: 402–52). In 1964, the adoption of the UNESCO statistical standards for publishing established a “common language” for American and Soviet publishers and enabled a better comparison of international publishing data (Bernstein et al. 1971: 2). While the United States advocated an allegedly “free flow of information,” UNESCO echoed Soviet critique by pointing to the one-way traffic of copyrighted materials from the Western publishers to the developing countries and the global gap in information, knowledge, and education access between a dominating first-world and dominated third-world countries (Giton 2016: 53–7). By 1962, the International Publishers Association (IPA) (whose main objectives are to promote international copyright and the freedom to publish) moved to Geneva to establish closer connections to UNESCO. As part of the renewed Soviet–American exchange agreement for 1962–3, the American Book Publishers Council and the American Textbook Publishers Institute sent its first delegation to Moscow, led by Bradford Wiley from John Wiley & Sons (Bernstein et al. 1971: 1). Apart from studying the Soviet publishing system during their four-week stay, the main goal of the American organizations was to pressure Soviet authorities to accept the Geneva Universal Copyright Convention (UCC). From an American perspective, Soviet publications of Western literature were best defined as a kind of state-authorized mass piracy, since Soviet copyright law provided “freedom of translation,” as long as the author of the original work was informed about the translation and the meaning and integrity of the work was conserved (Elst 2004: 80). Soviet state publishers did not recognize world intellectual property rights, as they did not consider literary works to belong to the individual creators but rather to the public and society as a whole (Ironside 2021).

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Soviet state publishing authorities rarely chose to compensate Western writers, and when they did, it was in the form of soft currency or vouchers that these authors could use only during travels to the USSR. Typically, these writers were of Communist or left-wing political orientation. The payments were issued to compensate them for the “exploitation” they were subject to in the capitalist system of publishing and also as a token of appreciation if the writers had written works that were either critical of a capitalist modernity or had portrayed the Soviet way of life positively. However, some nonideological American authors had their works distributed in the USSR, most notably the physicist and crime story writer Mitchell Wilson (1913–73), whose books enjoyed an enormous Soviet popularity in the 1950s and 1960s. He based his 1961 novel Meeting at the Far Meridian on interviews with Soviet scientists, conducted during a five-month trip to the USSR. The novel was translated into Russian in the same year and the author was successful in obtaining royalties from his Soviet publishers, who also paid his stay at a writer’s resort in Yalta (Ruggles 1961: 426). Apart from ideological considerations, the economic imbalance between the two superpowers was also a matter of concern. By 1961, Soviet publishers imported books worth a total of 423,000 rubles from the United States, but exported to the United States books worth only 290,000 rubles (Bernstein et al. 1971: 102–4). Soviet state publishers did not have any “marketing” or “advertising” sections as they operated outside profit and consumer-demand criteria. But, after a reorganization and further centralization of the state publishing system in 1964, the Press Committee under the Soviet Council of Ministers now sought to expand its efforts into organizing the display and propaganda of books from the USSR and the socialist world at international book exhibitions for both domestic and foreign audiences. Celebrating the 50th anniversary of the Russian Revolution, the first International Book Exhibition in Moscow took place in 1967 at the Sokolniki Exhibition Center, which had previously been the venue for the 1959 American National Exhibition. The “international” in the book exhibition title seemed to refer to the “Communist International,” since the book exhibition only included participants from other Soviet-aligned socialist nations and excluded China, North Korea, and North Vietnam, all of which had broken with the USSR. However, its slogan “The Book Is a Leader of the Idea of October, Peace and Progress”1 (Ovsiannikov and Solonenko 2008: 14) clearly responded to the motto of the 1951 American Books in Translation program “Books Are Weapons in the War of Ideas” (Barnhisel 2015: 110)—reversing the war and weapon metaphor into the counter-discourse of the international peace movement. In spring 1970, another propagandistic international book exhibition in Moscow, celebrating the 100th anniversary of Lenin’s birthday, expanded the number of participating countries to thirty-five by inviting a number of small left-wing publishers from Anglophone countries, including the United States, the UK, India, and Canada, leading a pamphlet to tout the USSR as a “Great Power of the Book” (Glukhov 1970). In autumn 1970, the newly established Association of American Publishers (hereafter AAP) sent a second delegation to the USSR, headed by Wiley, with the main purpose of convincing Soviet publishing authorities to sign the UCC (Bernstein et al. 1971; Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe 1977, vol. III: 145). The negotiations were complicated, because the “Kniga—provodnik idei Oktiabria, mira i progressa.” This wording was also echoed in the names of the Soviet state publishers, specialized in translated literature after the 1964 reorganization, namely, “Mir” (peace/world), which published translated science and technical literature, and “Progress,” which published translated fiction. 1

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American side linked Soviet acceptance to the UCC to two other high-level political demands that were brought up at all meetings: namely, freedom for Soviet Jews to emigrate from the USSR, and the Soviet payment of debts to its wartime allies from the lend-lease program, the second of which was resolved in 1972 (Stukalin 2002: 216). The Soviet side continued to have reservations about the possible negative impact of the UCC on the USSR’s balance of payments in hard currency, and concerns that their access to scientific and technical publications from the United States would be curtailed for either ideological or economic reasons (Bernstein et al. 1971: 37–8). The Soviet publisher of foreign fiction, Progress, proudly presented to the delegation its new Russian translation of John Cheever’s 1969 novel Bullet Park, with its plot that turns the dream of American suburban life into a nightmare. In contrast, the Random House delegate, Robert L. Bernstein, recalled how he was met with hostility for his company’s publication of Philip Roth’s 1969 novel Portnoy’s Complaint. The Soviet representatives found its sexually explicit language distasteful and accused Bernstein of being driven by entertainment and profit goals only (Bernstein 2016: 121). This perception of allegedly immoral Western literature reflected an internal Soviet debate of the early 1970s about the “uncritical” feuilleton translations of foreign popular fiction that could not be published in book form but appeared especially in peripheral Soviet journals and usually flared up during subscription campaigns (Pristed 2017: 158–60). But rather than profit motives, Bernstein’s engagement in Soviet–American publishing relations seemed driven by idealism. For the future human rights activist and founder of the Helsinki Watch, the Moscow visit became a starting point for lifelong personal connections to famous Soviet and East European dissidents, most notably Andrei Sakharov and his wife Elena Bonner (Bernstein 1977: 39, 2016). The USSR needed to improve its international image not only to further the politics of détente but also to improve its economic development, and it was highly dependent on boosting knowledge, scientific and cultural exchange with Western countries. In 1972, Moscow hosted the UNESCO International Book Year symposium, and finally, in 1973, the USSR entered into a multilateral copyright agreement that included Western countries by joining the UCC (Ovsiannikov and Solonenko 2008: 17). Notably, it was not the Soviet Ministry of Foreign Trade but head of Goskomizdat and the press committee under the Soviet Council of Ministers (1970–82), Boris Stukalin, who drafted the law proposal of Soviet acceptance of the UCC, which points to the importance of the state publishing industry within international relations (Stukalin 2002: 216– 17). Soviet authorities formed an All-Union Agency of Author Rights (Vsesoiuznoe Agenstvo po Avtorskim Pravam, VAAP) to secure and administer the state monopoly on the import and export of all intellectual rights. From 1973 to 1982, VAAP was headed by Boris Pankin, a journalist and reformer, who internally challenged the power of the apparatchiks Stukalin and Goskomizdat by promoting the translation of more critical Soviet writers abroad (Stukalin 2002: 218). Pankin later became an ally of Gorbachev, and his diplomatic skills earned him popularity as Soviet ambassador in Sweden in the late 1980s and, subsequently, to Czechoslovakia during the Velvet Revolution. The formalization of a Soviet copyright institution established a direct negotiation partner for Western publishers and thus became an important step forward for US–USSR book exchange (Elst 2004: 93–110). The history of the international book exhibitions and fairs shows that Soviet publishing authorities—both Goskomizdat and VAAP—actively pursued an increased international book trade on capitalist market conditions, aiming to increase the number of translation contracts with Western publishers. The Soviet acceptance of the UCC increased the number of meetings between USSR

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and US publishers, not only during the reciprocal delegation visits but also during negotiations on “neutral” ground, at the annual Frankfurt book fair (Levin 1983: 149). The AAP formed a special Committee of Soviet–American Publishing Relations, chaired by Bernstein, who, like other Western publishers engaging with Soviet state publishers, was frustrated that VAAP prevented them from any individual contracts or direct contact with dissident authors whose works they wished to publish (Levin 1983: 147). VAAP paid foreign authors much better than they did domestic authors, and Soviet writers only received a symbolic share of the remunerations foreign publishers paid VAAP for the rights to their works. The official explanation was the Soviet authors received social privileges through the Writers’ Union and were provided for by the socialist state (Elst 2004). However, this frustrated the Americans who were especially invested in making contacts with Soviet authors and who wished to create better conditions for dissidents. From his early 1970s visits to not only the United States but also West Germany, UK, and Sweden, Stukalin recalled how activists often ensured the Soviet delegations a warm welcome by protesting against Soviet human rights abuses on the streets, while American journalists confronted him with difficult questions about Soviet anti-Semitism. Stukalin considered such “anti-Soviet” attitudes an expression of double standards. During his travels across the United States, his hosts accommodated him in Waldorf Astoria luxury hotels where the convinced communist could observe racial and class divides from the African American janitors’ hard handling of his suitcase downstairs to the unfamiliar swallowing of oysters upstairs (Stukalin 2002: 351, 374–5). Although book export only took up a minor economic place in Soviet foreign trade, the symbolic status of the book within cultural exchanges contributed to publishing representatives’ political impact on Soviet–American diplomacy. During Stukalin’s first 1973 visit to the United States (invited by the AAP), his host Bradford Wiley unexpectedly phoned his old college friend, US Secretary of State William P. Rogers, and arranged a meeting. Stukalin, unprepared to discuss the US–USSR cultural exchange program at this high level, cleared the situation with the Soviet ambassador Dobrynin, and on Wiley’s advice presented an English translation of Tolstoy to Rogers’s wife, who reportedly liked the Russian classics. Stukalin did not meet Nixon personally on this occasion but gave him two albums by the Soviet historicist book illustrator Ilya Glazunov, and later received a personal letter of thanks from the president (Stukalin 2002: 346–7). The Soviet delegation used the ritual exchange of book gifts to change the enemy image of communists as uncivilized barbarians and demonstrate the Russian cultural heritage of classic education and humanitarian values. Such “book diplomacy” also suggests that at that time, leading publishers on both sides possessed powerful positions with a strong political network, which to a certain extent resembles the role of the tech giants today.

FROM EXHIBITION TO TRADE FAIR: COMMERCIALIZATION OF THE SOVIET BOOK By the early 1970s, the Soviet–American cultural exchange agreement had proven its value, although according to Yale Richmond, “the language on exhibitions was the last to be resolved” every time the cultural agreement was renegotiated (Richmond 2003: 214). In 1975, the Helsinki Final Act, devoted to advancing security and cooperation in Europe, also committed all signatory states to increase cultural exchanges and a free information flow across the East–West Cold War divide. Furthermore, the Helsinki Accords encouraged a focus on international human rights and

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provided a context for “informal diplomacy” and activism that contributed to institutional and individual cooperation in international relations (Scott-Smith 2015: 25). The implementation of the Helsinki Accords influenced the field of book publishing and trade, as they required publishers and authorities to increase the number and title diversity of works by authors from the other participating states, and to support the availability of these works in public libraries, bookstores, and sales outlets. The International Book-75 exhibition in Moscow, which opened only three weeks after the Helsinki conference, was not a direct result of the Helsinki Accords (preparations had been going on for more than a year), but its success certainly benefited from the high hopes and the “Helsinki spirit” to which Brezhnev also referred in his opening address (Arbuzov 1976: 149). Later book fairs of the 1970s all made obligatory references to the Helsinki Accords (Stukalin 1979). The 1975 exhibition took place in the enormous exhibition complex VDNKh (“Exhibition of Achievements of the National Economy”), with the participation of five hundred companies and 25,000 books on display from forty-four countries including the United States and the UK (Ovsiannikov and Solonenko 2008: 17). The emblem of the exhibition resembled the UN logo, adding a hand with a book to a background of a globe and the olive branch peace symbol. Its slogan “The Book Serves Peace and Progress” echoed the motto of the 1967 exhibition but omitted the loaded ideological phrase “Idea of October.” Likewise, a huge globe of flying books dominated the exhibition design of the central hall (Kapr 1975: 177–80). The 1975 book exhibition was conceptualized primarily as an exhibition, rather than a fair for international book trade. A bookart competition awarded gold to a Soviet publication of Brezhnev’s memoirs and silver medals to the publishers of other socialist countries. The books, including those Western books on display, were only show-objects to admire: Soviet visitors were not allowed to buy and read them. With no less than 750,000 guests during the one-month display, the exhibition was considered a great international success (Arbuzov 1976: 149), and it encouraged the USSR Council of Ministers to establish a unit within Goskomizdat to prepare a future biannual International Book Exhibition and Fair in Moscow starting in September 1977. Iurii Torsuev, the head of Progress Publishers, was appointed director of the fair as he had experience in dealing with foreign publishers. In his 1976 Book Trade in the Soviet Union, Mikhail Arbuzov, an old Communist Party veteran and former chief editor of the journal Soviet Book Trade, claimed that international book exhibitions on Soviet ground did not serve any commercial goals but only human ideals, including cultural exchange and the strengthening of the international unity of the Socialist world (Arbuzov 1976: 149). But at the 1977 fair, the Soviet organizers introduced a much more modern vocabulary of commerce, most notably in the title “vystavka-iarmarka” (exhibition-fair), which in English was simply rendered as “The First Moscow International Book Fair,” eliding the “exhibition” part of the title (Ovsiannikov and Solonenko 2008: 22). The year before the fair, an American delegation, including Martin Levin from the Times Mirror Company, met Stukalin in Moscow to discuss the conditions for the foreign participants, with questions spanning from currency to censorship (Levin 1983: 150). By March 1977, VAAP sent a reciprocal delegation to the United States, partly to promote the fair and Soviet books but also to study capitalist copyright and publication principles. The American publishers were disappointed that there were not any authors and dissidents among the Soviet delegates but only officials. However, upon the return of the delegation to the USSR, VAAP held a seminar for the generally inexperienced Soviet state publishers in Moscow about how to negotiate rights with

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capitalist partners and, at the fair, organized a “business club” where VAAP officials could mingle with foreign publishers (Ovsiannikov and Solonenko 2008: 22–3). During the May 1977 congressional hearings on the implementation of the Helsinki Accords, Leo Albert, director of Prentice Hall Publishers and head of the Washington Liaison Committee of the AAP, requested State Department technical assistance and economic support for American publishers participating in the Moscow fair. In contrast to the participation of many developing countries, which were fully sponsored from the Soviet side (Ovsiannikov and Solonenko 2008: 44), the American publishers lacked funding for their transport and interpreter costs. However, the idea of governmental involvement met considerable resistance among congressional representatives and senators, who were reluctant to legitimize Soviet propaganda events and censorship or—in the words of Senator Clifford P. Case—did not want to “please the Russians” (Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe 1977, vol. III: 162). In contrast to other capitalist countries such as the UK and West Germany, the United States therefore did not send any joint national exhibit to the 1977 Moscow fair. As a diverse group of private publishers operating under free market conditions, the AAP was thus put in an unusual, difficult, and power-asymmetrical negotiation situation, as they had to negotiate a legitimate book trade protocol with a Soviet state apparatus without any official support from the side of American government (Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe 1977, vol. III: 159). In the congressional hearings, Leo Albert downplayed the significance of Soviet censorship for US–USSR book trade but emphasized instead that American publishing businesses had to accept what was in demand by the Soviet customers: primarily scientific and technical literature. He claimed that ideologically controversial literature was “not in demand” by the Soviet publishing authorities (Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe 1977, vol. III: 144). Bernstein referred to the lack of transparency and seeming arbitrariness of Soviet censorship, since the selection criteria were not explicitly presented to the American publishers. He suggested that instead of staying away from the Moscow book fair, it would be much more effective to be present and send a list of book exhibits for approval in advance by the Soviet fair organizers and then “expose” the Soviet control by publishing a list of “banned” books (Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe 1977, vol. III: 162). Internal disagreements within AAP further complicated things as the educational publishers, represented by Levin, and the trade book publishers, represented by Bernstein, disagreed on how to approach the Soviet negotiation partners. On the one side, the educational publishers were seeing high Soviet interest in translations of scientific, technical, and socioeconomic literature that made up roughly 60 percent of book titles imported from the United States (Stukalin 1979: 54), and thus had a strong commercial interest in “starting to do business with the Russians” (Levin 1978). These publishers pursued a vision of “an international marketplace of ideas” where increased trade and cooperation with Soviet publishers would gradually lead to more openness and peaceful coexistence (Levin 1978, 1983). On the other side, Winthrop Knowlton from Harper & Row, publisher of Nobel Prize winner Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago (an exposé of the Soviet prison camp system), and Bernstein, Sakharov’s publisher, defended the rights of Soviet dissident authors, and openly and harshly criticized the representatives of the Soviet publishing industry (Levin 1983: 154). Levin realized that Stukalin was not able to influence Soviet top-level policies toward imprisoned dissidents but instead acknowledged that the Moscow fair organizers had made

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major concessions to the Americans—for example, by admitting Israeli publishers, although the USSR had cut off all other diplomatic contact to Israel after the Six-Day War in 1967. The Israeli book display eventually became a highlight for the Soviet Jewish audience at the fair (Levin 1978). Bernstein, however, could not agree to celebrating books at the fair, while members of the Moscow Helsinki Group were imprisoned. Ultimately, he decided to cancel the participation of Random House, when he received the official guidelines from the fair organizers (Bernstein 2016: 146–7). The organizers had issued a multilanguage pamphlet for participators with very loose guidelines about which books would not be tolerated on display, such as books promoting “militarism,” “racism,” “Fascism,” and “antimoral” publications (which included most popular entertainment literature, containing sex, violence, and other appeals to “lower instincts”). Apart from this, the Soviet censoring agency did not maintain a preapproval list of foreign books at the exhibitions, so Bernstein’s idea of exposing an index prohibitorum was not an option. Instead, until 1989, books from foreign exhibitors went through two stages of control. First, the customs and border control unceremoniously confiscated undesired books upon arrival, amounting to a couple of thousand copies before every fair (Ovsiannikov and Solonenko 2008: 39). Second, the censorship agency, popularly known as Glavlit (although its official name and goal changed after 1966 from a focus on literature to “Safeguarding State Secrets in the Press”), had an office at the fair site (Vladimirov 1972). The more subtle on-site censors additionally removed and stored some hundreds of books in a special room before officially sending them for destruction—in reality, though, many of these confiscated books ended up on the black market. KGB officers were stationed both at the customs office and at the fair itself, and consulted with the foreign publishers who protested against the confiscations (Ovsiannikov and Solonenko 2008: 38–40). Ahead of the first fair in Moscow in 1977, the participating American publishers were met by considerable public critique at home for “selling out” to the Russians (“Selling out at the Moscow’s Book Fair,” July 11, and “U.S. Books Sell at Moscow Fair,” September 9, 1977). However, according to the notes of AAP chairman Martin Levin, who headed the American delegation to the fair in 1977, Soviet customs confiscated only twelve book titles out of the five thousand American books on display (Di Camillo 2015: 1767). Confronted with such dilemmas, only a relatively modest total of twenty-five American trade publishing houses (plus forty-nine university publishers) participated in the 1977 fair. Out of the sixty-seven participating capitalist countries, with 1,535 companies and organizations, West Germany had the strongest representation with 193 publishing houses, followed by Spain and Italy. Western publishers from these countries had previous experience in trading with the Soviet state publishers at the large international book fairs in Europe, both on the Western side (e.g., Frankfurt and Bologna) and on the Socialist side (e.g., Leipzig and Sofia) (Ovsiannikov and Solonenko 2008: 22–3). Among the 100,000 books on display, the Soviet exhibitors gave special attention to translated titles of foreign literature into Russian. Visually, the new Soviet translations of American books certainly did not qualify as show objects. American titles like Thornton Wilder’s The Eighth Day (1967) and African American writer Richard Wright’s The Long Dream (1958) and Black Boy (1945) were included in Progress’ book series “Masters of Contemporary Prose” 1970–82 (Mastera sovremennoi prozy). The series consisted of an endless, universal library of global writers, mostly early-twentieth-century classics, presented in dull, monochrome, non-illustrated hardcovers. Slightly less uniform were the illustrated volumes of the Progress series “The Foreign Novel about

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the Workers’ Class” (Zarubezhnyi roman o rabochem klasse), which included a 1976 Russian translation of Lars Lawrence’s Old Father Antic about miners’ class struggle, originally published in 1961 by International Publishers in New York, a publishing firm associated with the Communist movement in the United States (Tarasenko 1978: 189). Symptomatically, Progress rendered the name of Lawrence (who like Howard Fast belonged to the group of blacklisted Hollywood screenwriters) incorrectly as “Lawrense” in their retransliteration into bold Latin letters on the bilingual title page. The examples illustrate how “American” books were not published or displayed as creations by outstanding “US authors” but included in a larger framework of unspecified foreign literature. The Soviet selection and presentation of American books were characterized not only by their lack of familiarity with individual authors, resulting in misspelled author names, but also by an international ambition of Communist solidarity and identification with repressed writers all over the world. The book fair enabled both publishing professionals and readers to compare book design and diversity, and the Soviet book products may have seemed fusty to the domestic audience (Ovsiannikov and Solonenko 2008: 50). The Moscow 1977 fair proved a commercial success for both sides and resulted in more than a thousand international contracts (Ovsiannikov and Solonenko 2008: 22). The participating American publishers signed 196 contracts for translation of American books and journals, and sold publications for an amount corresponding to $650,000 (Di Camillo 2015: 176). For the first time, the Soviet audience was also able to buy the books on display, but still theft of books represented a considerable problem to the organizers (Ovsiannikov and Solonenko 2008: 22–3). Within a nine-day display period, the fair attracted more than 200,000 visitors. The Soviet readers queued up, curious to see not only Western books but also rare tamizdat sensations in Russian that were not available to them in ordinary bookstores or in state libraries. Most notably, the stand of the Ann Arbor publishing house Ardis, founded in 1971 by Carl and Ellendea Proffer, displayed books, spanning from their 1976 Russian re-edition of Vladimir Nabokov’s 1955 Lolita (1st Russian edition by Phaedra publishers in New York, 1967) to a richly photo-illustrated edition of the Siberian poet Sergey Esenin. At the fair, the Proffers realized that their Russian-language books had a wide and diverse Soviet audience and for the first time were able to exchange directly with some of these readers (Komaromi 2013: 38). However, the real sensation of the fair was not American publications of Russian dissident and émigré writers. Instead, the broader Soviet readership was thrilled that the state publisher for belles lettres, Khudozhestvennaia literatura, closed a contract with Harper & Row for a Russian translation of the American publication of the Australian author Colleen McCullough’s 1977 bestseller The Thorn Birds. In a Soviet context, the unusual combination of a romance novel in an exotic Catholic Church/Australian outback setting was an ideological rarity. When the renowned translator Nora Gal’s Russian version came out three years later in 1980 (which, considering Soviet conditions, was a relatively short lag) the book introduced a hitherto unknown genre of women’s entertainment literature that grew tremendously popular among Russian female readers in the following decades. Such pioneering publication projects showed the future direction for the state publisher of translated fiction, Raduga (The Rainbow), founded in 1982 when it was broken off from Progress. As the only Soviet fiction book publisher, Raduga survived the 1990s transition to a market economy through its successful joint agreement with the Canadian Harlequin Publishers for Russian translations of Barbara Cartland’s popular romance novels, while reader interest in Soviet dissident writers faded after 1991 (Becker 2003: 178–82).

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This example shows that the alleged “Americanization” of late socialist consumers’ taste preferences did not necessarily have anything to do with American writers per se but resulted from a thirst after previously unavailable popular literature from a vaguely defined “imagined West” and escapist elsewhere (Lovell and Menzel 2005; Yurchak 2006). By introducing a new principle of international commerce, the Moscow book fair contributed to a changing notion of the book from an educational-symbolic object of culture to a trade object, made for “Western-style” consumption without differentiation between American, Australian, Canadian, and British books and publishers. While some AAP members had initially expressed fear that VAAP might misuse the UCC agreement to sue American publishers of Soviet dissident works for copyright infringement, this scenario did not materialize. Soviet state publishers tolerated Harper & Row publishing The Gulag Archipelago so long as they could obtain the rights to The Thorn Birds. The Moscow fair thus resulted in a rather odd role reversal of capitalist and socialist stereotypes: the American dissident publishers stood out as ideological warriors, fighting for human dignity and international solidarity with the repressed, while the Soviet publishing officials were primarily concerned about currency questions and cold, commercial gain. The situation culminated at the post-fair follow-up visit of Stukalin and his delegation to the US–USSR publishing seminar in New York in November 1977, where Bernstein and Knowlton, protesting Soviet human rights abuses, blocked an American– Soviet publishing trade protocol. This frustrated the APP representatives, who had put considerable efforts into preparing the protocol (Bernstein 2016: 145–6; Levin 1983: 154). Despite the great confusion at the failed signature ceremony in a Yale University guesthouse, Stukalin seemed tactically conscious of the split among the American publishers and retrospectively claimed, “I can now confess that I deliberately used and sometimes even fueled internal contradictions in the association in order to squeeze out and neutralize opponents of bilateral cooperation … But I always felt the solidarity of the ‘silent majority,’ intimidated by the demagogic speeches and threats of the minor, but powerful anti-Soviet wing” (Stukalin 2002: 370). Thus, in his own perception of the event, Stukalin claimed he won a moral victory in his response to Bernstein. Stukalin stated that his door remained open to all publishers who wanted to develop business relations on equal terms and made a passionate appeal to a continued development of closer cultural ties and mutual understanding between the Soviet and American people, for which the audience applauded him enthusiastically (Stukalin 2002: 371–2). Indeed, despite its internal controversies, at the September 1979 fair in Moscow, AAP sent an official representation and the number of participating US publishers rose considerably to 251 companies, while 144 companies represented the UK companies. This time, even Bernstein intended to participate. To revise the distorted image of America among ordinary Soviet visitors at the fair, he initiated an American exhibit with three hundred diverse and visually appealing books. Together with the exhibit, the New York Times Foundation funded a free bilingual and illustrated 125-page catalogue, America through American Eyes, edited by Kurt Vonnegut, and printed 100,000 copies (Bernstein 2016: 155; Vonnegut 1979). Both were great successes, although Bernstein did not see the result of his work himself, as the Soviet authorities denied him a travel visa. In total, as a direct result of the contracts and agreements established at the 1977 and 1979 fairs, Souizpechat legally bought 2.5 million book copies with hard currency from capitalist countries in the period 1977–80. These copies were circulated for sale in twenty-two special bookstores across sixteen larger Soviet cities and made available for expert readers in special holdings of scientific libraries (Ovsiannikov and Solonenko 2008: 49). Another direct result of the fairs was the proposal for a

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Soviet fifty-volume series of American literature (Biblioteka literatury SShA) that eventually came out from state publishers Progress, Raduga, and Khudozhestvennaia literatura in the years 1981–91. However, soon after the 1979 fair, the political winds changed as the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan cooled US–USSR relations, and the Carter administration terminated the Soviet– American exchange agreements. In line with the official boycott of other major Soviet events such as the 1980 Olympics in Moscow, AAP boycotted both the 1981 and 1983 fairs, while the UN and UNESCO continued to be officially represented at the Moscow fairs. Instead, in September 1981, AAP held an alternative Moscow “exile fair” for Soviet dissident authors at the New York Public Library (Di Camillo 2015: 176). Nevertheless, 391 individual American publishers participated in the 1983 Moscow fair, along with 283 companies from the UK (Ovsiannikov and Solonenko 2008: 28). This points to the fact that US publishers actually had business interests to pursue in the new Soviet “market” despite political tensions, and possibly also adhered to the ideals of détente encouraging a cultural dialogue with the Cold War enemy. In fact, according to both Arthur Hartman, who served as American ambassador in Moscow from 1981 to 1987, and Anatoly Dobrynin, Soviet ambassador to the United States during 1962–86, Goskomizdat remained the only official Soviet state organization that kept up international diplomatic ties with the United States during these difficult years. Hence, the Goskomizdat offices also began receiving daily visits from foreign diplomats and business representatives from outside the field of publishing (Ovsiannikov and Solonenko 2008: 52).

CONCLUSIONS This study of Soviet–American publishing relations has investigated the clashes between a private publishing and a state system in which publishers were government agencies, who at the beginning refused to recognize, but then gradually accepted, capitalist principles of copyright and trade. In the late Cold War, Soviet publishing authorities still aimed to restrict “anti-Soviet” or immoral “foreign” content but at the same time strived to meet late socialist consumers’ increasingly diversified reading preferences. Such pragmatic and economic considerations contributed to the gradual development of the Moscow book exhibitions, from the Leniniana displays of the 1960s to the 1977 introduction of the Moscow international book fair, with its focus on commerce instead of ideology. As Stukalin asserted, Soviet publishers did not aim to turn the American publishers into convinced communists (Bernstein 2016: 120). Rather, as he claimed, “readers in both countries can only gain from the development of business contacts between American and Soviet publishers” (Stukalin 1979: 54). For Soviet state publishers, Gorbachev’s glasnost (openness) and perestroika (restructuring) reforms in the mid-1980s involved a liberalization of information exchange, increased Soviet book trade with capitalist countries, and prompted a more direct orientation toward a market economy. Historians have sometimes referred to Gorbachev’s reforms as “a revolution from above,” but as this study shows, Soviet–American publishing relations had been developing ever since the Lacy– Zarubin Agreement opened up avenues of cultural exchanges, including a focus on book exchanges from below. The Soviet acceptance of the UCC in 1973 and the 1975 Helsinki Final Act intensified the pressing question of capitalist access to the socialist book market, but ultimately, US publishers were reluctant to engage in any official-legal book export to the Soviet Union, which prevented them from becoming first movers at the international Soviet book exhibitions and fairs.

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The Moscow book fairs became a catalyst for Gorbachev’s reforms. From 1985 and beyond, AAP returned to the fairs and now, the American participants met less censorship at the fairs, although they may have executed self-censorship in their preselection of books for the exhibition. During perestroika, a second American exhibit (including a new edition of the catalogue America through American Eyes) was displayed at the 1987 fair. By then, a complete change of leadership had taken place both within Goskomizdat and the fair itself. The perestroika fair boomed with more than one hundred participating countries and sensational displays of hitherto unofficial authors, no longer only at the Ardis booth but now also exhibited and sold by Soviet publishers (Ovsiannikov and Solonenko 2008: 30–1). A series of US–USSR book trade meetings and several publishing corporations followed the 1987 fair. Soviet–American publishing relations developed gradually in the framework of the official exchange agreement, which allowed for the maintenance of cultural contacts even when political relations soured, as in the early 1980s. The official book exchanges not only saw American publishers’ increasing participation in the new international Moscow book fairs but also saw the Cold War book redefined: no longer an ideological weapon, cultural symbol, and diplomatic gift object, the book was now an exchange and trade object.

WORKS CITED Arbuzov, Mikhail (1976), Knizhnaia torgovlia v SSSR, Moscow: Kniga. Barnhisel, Greg (2015), Cold War Modernists: Art, Literature, and American Cultural Diplomacy, New York: Columbia University Press. Becker, Petra (2003), Verlagspolitik und Buchmarkt in Russland: (1985 bis 2002); Prozess der Entstaatlichung des zentralistischen Buchverlagswesens, Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz. Bernstein, Robert L. et al. (1971), Book Publishing in the USSR: Reports of the Delegations of US Book Publishers Visiting the USSR, October 21-November 4, 1970, August 20-September 17, 1962, 2nd ed., enlarged, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Bernstein, Robert L. (1977), “A Publisher Looks at Helsinki,” Index on Censorship 6(6): 39–43. Bernstein, Robert L. (2016), Speaking Freely: My Life in Publishing and Human Rights, New York: New Press. Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe (1977), Testimonies of Leo N. Albert and Robert L. Bernstein, May 19, 24, and 25, 1977. Hearings: Implementation of the Helsinki Accords, vol. III. Information flow, and Cultural and Educational Exchanges, Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 128–64; 177–89. Di Camillo, Kevin (2015), “Moscow Book Fair: A Brief History Lesson from Martin P. Levin,” Publishing Research Quarterly 31(3): 175–7. Elst, Michiel (2004), Copyright, Freedom of Speech, and Cultural Policy in the Russian Federation, Leiden: Brill. Gilburd, Eleonory (2006), “Books and Borders: Sergei Obraztsov and Soviet Travels to London in the 1950s,” in Anne Gorsuch and Diane P. Koenker (eds.), Turizm: The Russian and East European Tourist under Capitalism and Socialism, 227–47, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Giton, Céline (2016), “Weapons of Mass Distribution: UNESCO and the Impact of Books,” in Poul Duedahl (ed.), A History of UNESCO: Global Actions and Impacts, 49–72, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Glukhov, Aleksei (1970), SSSR—knizhnaia derzhava, Moscow: Kniga. Gudkov, Lev, and Boris Dubin (1988), “Literaturnaia kul’tura. Protsess i ratsion,” Voprosy literatury 2: 168–89. Ironside, Kristy (2021), “‘A Writer Deserves to Be Paid for His Work’: American Progressive Writers, Foreign Royalties and the Limits of Soviet Internationalism in the Mid-to-Late 1950s,” in Jessica Reinisch and

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David Brydan (eds.), Internationalists in European History: Rethinking the Twentieth Century, 198–214, London: Bloomsbury. Johnson, A. Ross, and R. Eugene Parta, eds. (2010), Cold War Broadcasting: Impact on the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe—A Collection of Studies and Documents, Budapest: Central European University Press. Kapr, Albert (1975), “Kniga 75: Internationale Buchausstellung für Frieden und Fortschritt in Moskau,” Papier und Druck 24(12): 177–80. Kind-Kovács, Friederike (2014), Written Here, Published There: How Underground Literature Crossed the Iron Curtain, Budapest: Central European University Press. Klots, Yasha, Alla Roylance, Anna Bespyatykh, and Martin Nekola (2017–21), Tamizdat Project, online Archive: http://tami​zdat​proj​ect.org/en. Accessed January 16, 2022. Komaromi, Ann (2015), Uncensored: Samizdat Novels and the Quest for Autonomy in Soviet Dissidence, Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Komaromi, Ann (2013), “Ardis Facsimile and Reprint Editions: Giving Back Russian Literature,” in Friederike Kind-Kovács (ed.), Samizdat, Tamizdat, and Beyond: Transnational Media during and after Socialism, 27–50, Jessie Labov, NY: Berghahn Books. Kozovoi, Andrei (2016), “A Foot in the Door: The Lacy Zarubin Agreement and Soviet-American Film Diplomacy during the Khrushchev Era, 1953–1963,” Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 36(1): 21–39. Levin, Martin (1978), “How to Start Doing Business with the Soviet Union,” Publishers Weekly (September 18): 122–5. Levin, Martin (1983), “Soviet International Copyright: Dream or Nightmare,” Journal of the Copyright Society of the U.S.A. 31(2): 127–62. Lovell, Stephen and Birgit Menzel, eds. (2005), Reading for Entertainment in Contemporary Russia: Post-Soviet Popular Literature in Historical Perspective, Munich: Sagner. Lovell, Stephen (2000), The Russian Reading Revolution: Print Culture in the Soviet and Post-Soviet Eras, Basingstoke: Macmillan. Magnúsdóttir, Rósa (2019), Enemy Number One: The United States of America in Soviet Ideology and Propaganda, 1945–1959, New York: Oxford University Press. Ovsiannikov, N. F., and V. K. Solonenko (2008), Razvitie knigoizdaniia v kontekste iarmarochnoi deiatel’nosti: K 30-letiiu Moskovskoi Mezhdunarodnoi Knizhnoi Vystavki-Iarmarki, Moscow: Nauka. Porter, Louis H. (2018), Cold War Internationalism: The USSR in UNESCO, 1945–1967. PhD Dissertation. University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Pristed, Birgitte Beck (2017), The New Russian Book: A Graphic Cultural History, London: Palgrave Macmillan. Reisch, Alfred (2013), Hot Books in the Cold War: The West’s CIA-Financed Secret Book Distribution Project Behind the Iron Curtain, Budapest: Central European University Press. Richmond, Yale (2003), Cultural Exchange & the Cold War: Raising the Iron Curtain, University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press. Ruggles, Melville J. (1961), “American Books in Soviet Publishing,” Slavic Review 20(3): 419–35. Scott-Smith, Giles (2015), “Opening Up Political Spaces: Informal Diplomacy, East-West Exchanges, and the Helsinki Process,” in Simo Mikkonen and Pia Koivunen (eds.), Beyond the Divide: Entangled Histories of Cold War Europe, 23–43, New York: Berghahn Books. “Selling out at the Moscow’s Book Fair” (1977), unsigned editorial, New York Times (July 11): 18. Stukalin, Boris (interview) (1979), “Exchange of Books Guided by Helsinki Spirit,” Soviet Life 275(8): 52–7. Stukalin, Boris (2002), Gody, Dorogi, Litsa … [Vospominaniia], Moscow: Fond Im. I. D. Sytina.

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Tarasenko, I. N. (1978), “Pervaia moskovskaia mezhdunarodnaia knizhnaia vystavka-iarmarka,” Kniga: issledovania i materialy 36: 187–94. “U.S. Books Sell at Moscow Fair” (1977), unsigned article, New York Times (September 9): 67. Vladimirov, Leonid (1972), “Glavlit: How the Soviet Censor Works,” Index on Censorship 1 (3–4): 31–43. Vonnegut, Kurt, ed. (1979), America through American Eyes: An Exhibit of Recent Books That Reflect Life in the United States. Moscow International Book Fair, September 1979, New York: Association of American Publishers. Yurchak, Alexei (2006), Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Zitzewitz, Josephine von (2020), The Culture of Samizdat: Literature and Underground Networks in the Late Soviet Union, London: Bloomsbury.

FURTHER READING Bernstein, Robert L. (2016), Speaking Freely: My Life in Publishing and Human Rights, New York: New Press. Kind-Kovács, Friederike (2014), Written Here, Published There: How Underground Literature Crossed the Iron Curtain, Budapest: Central European University Press. Komaromi, Ann (2015), Uncensored: Samizdat Novels and the Quest for Autonomy in Soviet Dissidence, Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Lovell, Stephen (2000), The Russian Reading Revolution: Print Culture in the Soviet and Post-Soviet Era, New York: St. Martin’s Press. Magnúsdóttir, Rósa (2019), Enemy Number One: The United States of America in Soviet Ideology and Propaganda, 1945–1959, New York: Oxford University Press. Pristed, Birgitte Beck (2017), The New Russian Book: A Graphic Cultural History, London: Palgrave Macmillan. Rebecchini, Damiano, and Raffaella Vassena, eds. (2020–1), Reading Russia. A History of Reading in Modern Russia, Milan: Ledizioni, 3 vols., open-access. Vol. 3: http://www.lin​gue.unimi.it/extfi​les/unimid​ire/182​801/ att​achm​ent/read​ing-rus​sia-vol3-web.pdf. Accessed January 16, 2022. Reisch, Alfred A. (2013). Hot Books in the Cold War: The CIA-Funded Secret Western Book Distribution Program Behind the Iron Curtain, Budapest: Central European University Press. Remnek, Miranda, ed. (2011), The Space of the Book: Print Culture in the Russian Social Imagination, Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Walker, Gregory (1978), Soviet Book Publishing Policy, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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CHAPTER ELEVEN

Closets, Pulps, and the Gay Internationale: The “Homintern” JAIME HARKER

American Cold War culture is generally understood to be hostile to gender and sexual nonconformity. Foregrounding normality, virility, and masculine Americanness, Cold War critics created a literary and public culture that understood homosexuality, like Communism, as a betrayal of the nation. Persecuted and vilified, the story goes, LGBTQ+ writers hid in the shadows, normed their public selves, and left explicit discussions of queer life and sex in the margins of cultural capital—in pulp, in pornography, in anonymity.1 The 1950s, in particular, have become a kind of cautionary tale for the dangers of the closet (D’Emilio 1983). There is, of course, some truth in this characterization. The purging of queer people in federal employment and the military was commonplace, and the emerging nationalist literary culture of the early Cold War largely eschewed open and positive depictions of queer life. An obsessive concern with “normal” development made previously unremarkable partnerships and coalitions suddenly suspect. However, as scholars like George Chauncey and Michael Bibler have pointed out, the closet wasn’t a term used by queer people during the Cold War (Bibler 2015; Chauncey 1994). “Coming out,” in the 1950s, was a term that primarily described a queer person’s understanding of themselves as queer, not a public declaration. “Coming out of the closet” only became a commonplace phrase in the early days of gay liberation in the 1970s, when “the closet” became of symbol of the failures of queer life before Stonewall. That standard has made the actual contours of Cold War queer culture and queer writing difficult to see. More recent scholarship shows the inadequacy of the trope of the “closet” as applied to the early Cold War. The homophobic campaign of that period, it turns out, was in fact a backlash against

A note on terminology: in mainstream publications during the Cold War, such writers would have been referred to as “homosexual” or (if less sympathetic) “perverts” or some other Freudian diagnosis of arrested development. “Queer” was an epithet (“gay” was used within queer communities during this time). In the 1980s and 1990s “queer” became a defiant label of resistance, used by activist groups like ACT UP and Queer Nation, to indict mainstream homophobia. Queer theory emerges in the academy around the same time. In contemporary usage, “queer” has lost its edge and is generally a neutral umbrella description of a number of sexual and gender identities. I use queer here in a similar way, while building on a growing scholarly interest in queer print culture. 1

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the increased visibility of queer culture and especially of queer artists in the late 1940s.2 Alfred Kinsey’s 1948 report on “the sexual behavior of the human male” became a cultural sensation, demonstrating—through seemingly irrefutable facts—that queer sex was much more common than anyone had previously supposed (Kinsey 1998). “The Kinsey Report” spurred magazine cover stories, pulp adaptations, and was even referenced in popular songs. Queerness periodically emerged in the Cold War in multiple forms of print culture—pulp paperback racks, the bestseller list, and in the emerging modernist literary canon. Two recent studies, in fact, celebrate Cold War– era queer artists as trailblazers and forerunners to gay liberation (Bram 2012; Wood 2016). Mainstream literary critics noticed this queer presence and frequently denounced it as an “imagined conspiracy” of gay artists against American culture, as Michael Sherry (2007) notes. Auden cheekily queered the “Comintern” (a nickname for the “Communist International”) into the “Homintern,” appropriating the name of the Soviet-led organization that advocated for world communism to playfully poke fun at the equation of Communist agents and a queer underground. Once the term was appropriated by Cold Warriors, Sherry notes, the irony vanished; the “homosexual menace” was perceived to be as real a threat to the American Way of Life as communism. The idea of the “Homintern,” which I use here to analyze queer print culture during the Cold War, casts doubt on conventional wisdom about miserable, closeted Cold War queers. Cold War queer writers weren’t closeted, but neither were they out in the way that gay liberation would later demand. They were not a powerful, secret society, but neither were they abject and powerless. Queer writers during the Cold War were resourceful, varied, brilliant, and, as they say, everywhere. Writing that queer abundance back into our critical narratives of Cold War literary culture is essential.

QUEER PULP To start, let’s consider a queer culture of letters that was simultaneously underground and public: queer pulp. Modestly priced paperback books began to increase in popularity as Armed Services Editions, and after the Cold War, paperback book companies became enormously lucrative businesses (Davis 1984; Earle 2009; Hench 2016). Such paperbacks were distributed not through bookstores but through newsstands and magazine stands in drugstores and department stores. Their distribution and reach far exceeded that of so-called “trade” books (as bookstores were scarce in most areas of the nation) and made books available in rural areas and working-class neighborhoods, at much more affordable prices; if a hardback sold for $2 at the time, a pulp paperback would sell between 10 and 25 cents. Unlike today, with the same company controlling the hardcover and paper versions of a title, in the 1950s paperback publishing firms would pay a flat rate for the rights to reprint a hardback, with the cost split equally between publisher and writer. At that point, however, the paperback publisher made virtually all the decisions—about book covers, about editing and condensing the books, and

The literary movement from the late 1880s until the Second World War that is generally described as “modernism” placed sexual transgression at the center of its aesthetic rebellion, and so was a hospitable place for queer writers. Early modernism fostered queer visibility (Djuna Barnes’s Ladies Almanack and Nightwood, for example), and those resonances informed Cold War queerness. Scholarship on queer modernism is a growing field; two examples include Jaime Hovey’s A Thousand Words: Portraiture, Style, and Queer Modernism and Hannah Roche’s The Outside Thing: Lesbian Modernist Romance. 2

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about marketing and distribution. Sensationalism and sex generally sold paperback books, and their covers quickly became notorious (and today, collectible) for their buxom heroines and salacious cover copy. In addition to reprints, these paperback book companies sold paperback originals, with a diverse array of genres, settings, and styles. Michael Bronski notes that these paperback originals feature “illegal or taboo sex—adultery, prostitution, rape, interracial relationships, lesbianism, male homosexuality” (2003). Among these multiple categories of voyeuristic delight, queer pulp quickly became a popular genre, particularly stories of queer women. Scholars generally agree that lesbian pulp begins with Marijane Meaker’s Spring Fire, a tragic love story about two girls who fall in love with each other in a sorority. These books proved to be wildly popular, and a formula—of forbidden desire and tragic ends—became required to avoid the censors. Yvonne Keller estimates that of the many lesbian pulps sold from the 1940s to the 1960s, only a handful were written by lesbians for lesbians, and even those were circumscribed by the same conventions (1999). Yet those books created intense devotion among their lesbian readers, who saw their lives reflected in print, often for the first time. Meaker, Valerie Taylor, Ann Bannon, and (for one novel) Patricia Highsmith placed women’s passionate desire at the center of their novels; and despite sexual assault, abuse, incest, job discrimination, alcoholism, and the violence of the carceral state, lesbian pulp heroines carve out lives free of the nuclear family, monogamy, and middle-class respectability. Beebo Brinker, the attractive butch at the center of Ann Bannon’s pulp series, became a symbol of the attraction and dangers of gay life, and her endurance through melodrama that puts afternoon soaps to shame is its own kind of triumph. Such titles also provided surprisingly practical information: about where to find lesbian neighborhoods, and how to recognize the butches who would bring one’s initiation into “the life.” It may be only anecdotal or an urban myth that Cold War lesbians skipped the last chapter of these books—enjoying the wild sex and avoiding the punishment—but it is an idea that speaks to the power of queer reading practices during the Cold War. Cold War cultural critics found this vibrant, transgressive, queer culture of letters profoundly unsettling. Malcom Cowley gave perhaps the most detailed analysis of the paperback market in an essay in which he both catalogued the various subgenres of pulp (including “proletarian sex” and “well of loneliness”). Ultimately, however, what disturbed him was (as we might say today) their absence of “curating”: “It was personal, friendly egalitarian, and it proclaimed as dogmas its lack of discrimination. ‘Here we are,’ the books in the big racks seemed to be saying, ‘the mud and sapphires of our time, and for one or two pieces of silver you can take your pick of us’ ” (qtd. in Harker 2013: 47). This is the central irony of queer pulp: these books were on the margins culturally but at the center of American culture in their ubiquitous presence in newsstands, magazine racks, and drugstores. This is what made pulp, largely outside of the broader cultural hierarchies, a place in which queer readers and writers could create their own sustaining cultures, in print and in queer neighborhoods. The dominant literary culture of the Cold War, by contrast, increasingly attempted to police queer artists out of existence by the end of the 1950s.

MAINSTREAM QUEER LITERATURE IN THE 1940s AND 1950s Queer writers took advantage of the relative freedom of pulp paperbacks to reach queer readers— freer because the newly emergent cadre of Cold War cultural critics usually saw popular culture in

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general, and pulps in particular, as unworthy of their critical attention (Cowley being the interesting exception). That group of cultural critics saw themselves as warriors on the vanguard of the cultural front, establishing the superiority of American, and Western, democratic values against the threat of Communism. They also sought to sustain the “virility” of American culture against the twinned threats of homosexuality and Communism. The Homintern ceased to be a campy joke for these critics and became a deadly earnest cultural battle (Sherry 2007). The casual homophobia of so much literary criticism during this period suggests how axiomatic the “dangers” of homosexuality were for such critics. And yet, despite this cultural paranoia, it wasn’t just on the pulp racks that queer writing was thriving (though it would continue to be the ultimate resting place for all of it, in its affordably priced reprints). Queer themes also emerged in mainstream print culture. One, which I discuss in my study Middlebrow Queer, is the gay “social problem” novel. Dozens of books, published by mainstream presses, focused on gay protagonists in a range of regions and styles (Harker 2013; Hutner 2011). The two most well-known today are Gore Vidal’s The City and the Pillar (1948) and James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room (1954). The 1940s gay problem novel is remarkably diverse, featuring novels set in urban and rural spaces, in the military, and in virtually every profession and region. Its writers included Charles Jackson, Willard Motley, Hubert Creekmore, Hal Thomas Phillips, James Barr, John Hope Burns, and many more. If such gay protagonists were framed as a “problem,” and analyzed with crude Freudian concepts emphasizing immaturity and arrested development, they were also, in these books, everywhere, from “normal” families, and hardly confined to the urban vice and foreign influence upon which so many narratives insist. It is the very banality, the ordinariness, of the homosexual “cases” that made these novels—published by mainstream New York presses and reviewed in mainstream journals—so subversive. If such a problem is so widespread, so ubiquitous in middle-class communities, so recognizably American, is it really a problem at all? The middlebrow realism of such novels potentially neutralized the melodramatic stories that populated queer pulp. Cold War cultural critics attempted to police these queer eruptions, not only in literary trends but also in their creation of literary canons, both interwar and mid-century. The academic modernism that critics like Lionel Trilling were establishing was firmly rooted in American “freedom,” “normality,” and “virility,” and sought to embrace experimental aesthetics while erasing its rebellious (often queer) anarchism. Some of those highbrow modernist texts even appeared in the wire pulp racks. The Cold War pulp version of modernism, as opposed to its academic version, foregrounded sexual nonconformity and cultural rebellion over linguistic experimentation. William Faulkner provides an excellent example of this highbrow/pulp split, and how it manifested itself in the same writer’s work. When Malcolm Cowley rescued Faulkner’s reputation in his 1948 anthology, The Portable Faulkner, he foregrounded Yoknapatawpha and Faulkner’s mythic exploration of “universal” themes and archetypical struggle. On the pulp rack, by contrast, his oeuvre was represented by Sanctuary, The Wild Palms, and Pylon, three novels generally left out of today’s survey courses. That Signet pulp version of Faulkner contained some of Faulkner’s most notorious and transgressive sexual images: the rape of Temple Gowan by a corncob in Sanctuary; the polyamorous couple in Pylon; the extramarital affair and illegal abortion in Wild Palms. The rape scene in Sanctuary was so notorious that Faulkner was often referred to, derisively, in Oxford as the “corncob man.” This sexually transgressive version of Faulkner would be scrubbed as the 1950s went on. Faulkner was drafted as the US answer to Tolstoy, and was rehabilitated as a

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“benevolent patriarch” representing traditional values (Harker 2015; Schwartz 1988). If this new incarnation required State Department handlers to ensure that Faulkner didn’t appear shit-faced drunk in public while representing America abroad (as Deborah Cohn details in her contribution to this anthology), this was a price that the establishment seemed willing to pay. Faulkner is emblematic of a larger trend during the Cold War: the dequeering of modernism. In English departments and CIA-supported literary journals, modernism was transforming from the anarchic queer cultural, sexual, and linguistic revolution it was, to the universal, implicitly straight and male, New Critical vehicle it would become (Barnhisel 2015; Saunders 2001). And the process of creating this modernist canon shut out many of the movement’s writers because they were simply too queer to make the cut: Gertrude Stein, Hart Crane, H. D., and Djuna Barnes—out; James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway, T. S. Eliot, and Ezra Pound—in. It’s not so easy, it turns out, to pull the queer threads out of a modernist tapestry in which they provide essential foundational colors. Critics can, and did, dismiss Gertrude Stein as ridiculous and exclude her writing from the emerging canon of modernism; but those other American modernists who were safely in the club kept writing about her, and her salon, all the same. There she is, in her cropped-headed, genderqueer glory, with the wifely Alice B. Toklas at her side. Hemingway’s posthumously published memoir A Moveable Feast may have been his attempt to settle scores with Stein, but her sexual kinkiness (including Toklas’s performance as a top) is also forever enshrined there (Hemingway 1964). Queer modernism continued to disrupt and destabilize, waiting to rematerialize. Transnational modernism was equally enmeshed with the Homintern. England, framed during the Cold War as a democratic ally that had stood up to fascism, had an interwar roster of writers that was already thoroughly queer—including Virginia Woolf, E. M. Forster, and Lytton Strachey. France was no help, either. Proust? Gide? Both queer as a three-franc note. Transnational queer networks congregated in Paris, centering on the salons of expatriates Gertrude Stein and Natalie Barney. Even worse, those interwar English modernists wouldn’t stay neatly upon the page in the past; they continued to write and camp and cruise during the Cold War. English writers W. H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood had emigrated to the United States in 1939, and they continued their queer literary networks in an American context—one in New York, the other in Los Angeles. W. H. Auden became a kind of oracle in English letters during the Cold War, but he was also, unrepentantly, part of a vibrant queer New York City network, friends with Lincoln Kirstein, Glenway Wescott, Paul Cadmus, and the many queer men who embraced painting, photography, music, opera, ballet, and literature. These writers and artists, and the queer audiences who supported them, embedded queer sensibilities into their writing while keeping just enough distance to allow deniability. Such was the influence of queer cultural workers in New York that it inspired a bout of homosexual panic in Cold War cultural critics—even as pinning down the queer sometimes proved elusive to their critical analysis (Sherry 2007). On the West Coast, Isherwood immersed himself in American queer print culture and built transgenerational queer networks with his own younger lover, the painter Don Bachardy. Isherwood wrote queer characters in his American novels, including one of the earliest definitions of “camp” in modern fiction (in The World in the Evening) (Harker 2013). He also became friends with a younger generation of queer writers, including Truman Capote and Tennessee Williams, who embedded queerness into their own artistic productions, which gained widespread critical acclaim.

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Writers defined by the Southern Gothic took up Faulkner’s recently abdicated crown of Southern decadence. Carson McCullers began with 1940s The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, which became a critical darling and bestseller and launched McCullers to literary stardom. She published three more books in the 1940s, including Reflections in a Golden Eye and Ballad of the Sad Café; haunting queerness inhabited deaf mutes, Black communists, genderqueer adolescents, gay servicemen, mannish moonshiners, and campy dwarves. On Broadway, Tennessee Williams brought his own queer visions to the mainstream. The 1947 A Streetcar Named Desire won a Pulitzer Prize, as did his 1955 Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, in which the queer alliances and thwarted desires of his characters put the queer uncanny front and center. Both plays were turned into movies starring some of the most famous actors of the day, including Marlon Brando, Paul Newman, and Elizabeth Taylor. Truman Capote launched his own writing career with the 1948 Other Voices, Other Rooms, merging surreal Southern visions with his own campy performance as screaming queen, and, like Williams, became a fixture of the middlebrow mainstream through the 1961 Hollywood film of Breakfast at Tiffany’s and the serialization of In Cold Blood in the New Yorker magazine in 1965. The queerness of these Southern Gothic writers seemed barely encoded, and it won all three the highest literary accolades of their day. The Beat movement was another queer literary eruption. Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg were writing their individual rebellion against Cold War Americanness in a decidedly queer register. If Kerouac wasn’t explicit about his queerness in On the Road, his rejection of the nuclear family, capitalist productivity, and sexual monogamy marked his queer rebellion from the Cold War obsession with normality. By contrast, Ginsberg didn’t hide his queerness in his breakthrough poem Howl or in any other part of his life, and when federal prosecutors sued Howl’s publisher City Lights Books for obscenity, that queer vision became a cause célèbre. City Lights’ victory expanded the leeway literature would be given to explore transgressive sexuality, opening up the more oppositional queer explorations of the 1960s (Morgan and Peter 2006). Queer writers kept finding space in a Cold War literary culture that was keen to mute them. But the volume was about to go all the way up in the 1960s. Anti-assimilationist queerness was about to be embraced by the zeitgeist, which first undermined the binary between highbrow and pulp.

THE 1960s: OBSCENE, AVANT-GARDE, QUEER Cold War literary critics tried desperately to build an absolute wall between the tasteful aesthetic of the avant-garde and the mindless, voyeuristic distraction of the popular. The public debate surrounding the so-called “middlebrow” reflects prominent critics’ anxiety about cultural productions that couldn’t be placed clearly within “art” or “trash” (Harker 2007). And although the middlebrow is most often associated with unchallenging middle-class literature that watered down highbrow content with features of popular culture, hybrids of all sorts were suspect, particularly a queerness that insinuated itself into the heart of Western culture (Harker 2013). But 1960s writers pushed back against these binaries; avant-garde artists consciously incorporated popular forms in their writing and, following the lead of the Beats, were drawn to the margins, not the mainstream, of culture. This meant that the avant-garde began to identify with the criminal, the outsider, and the queer. Susan Sontag’s famous 1964 essay “Notes on Camp,” for example, placed “homosexual

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taste” at the vanguard, even as it undermined conventional notions of aesthetic taste. Queer writers took advantage of this sudden trendiness to reach wider audiences (Harker 2013). No one did more to bring this new ethos into being than Barney Rosset. Born into privilege, Rosset was a courageous contrarian who would publish some of the most lauded voices of the Cold War era, including Beat poets, German expressionists, and absurdist playwrights. He bought Grove Press in 1951, and then, in 1957, started the Evergreen Review literary magazine (Glass 2013). He made his name publishing sexually explicit material, reprinting modernist underground classics like D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1959) and then buying the rights to Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer (1934), happily defending both against obscenity charges in court. According to his New York Times obituary, “Life magazine in 1969 titled an article about him ‘The Old Smut Peddler’. That same year a cover illustration for The Saturday Evening Post showed him climbing out of a sewer” (Douglas 2012). Grove Press didn’t just publish queer writers, but queer writers were a key part of its anti-Puritan brand. Ginsberg’s “Howl” appeared in the second edition of the Evergreen Review, and he would publish William Burroughs’s Naked Lunch in 1962 (reprinted from a paperback original, “Junky”) and the works of Jean Genet, whose explicit association of homosexuality and criminality had won the praise of Jean-Paul Sartre, king of the French intellectuals, as a model of the individual’s quest for freedom. Perhaps Grove Press’s most successful queer writer, however, was John Rechy, whose novel City of Night would become the runaway bestseller of 1963. One wouldn’t expect a late-Beat experimental novel about a male hustler to command such cultural interest, but Rechy’s triumph was a harbinger of sorts for the transgressive hybrid of the obscene avant-garde that would dominate literary culture in the 1960s. Rechy first published two short pieces in the Evergreen Review, including “Miss Destiny’s Fabulous Wedding,” which earned him a dinner invitation and come-on from Christopher Isherwood, whose refined Santa Monica seemed a world away from the Pershing Square cruising of Rechy’s hustlers. Grove Press offered him a contract for a novel, and City of Night took readers on a cross-country hustler’s journey from New York to Los Angeles to New Orleans. If Rechy depicted homosexuals as haunted, isolated, and suffering, he did so with intense sympathy and titillating details of sexual encounters in seedy locations. He also portrayed drag queens, in particular, as heroic outsiders, resisting a world that sought to mock and erase them (Harker 2013). City of Night proved to mainstream publishers that American readers welcomed a prurient walk on the wild side, mediated through the pages of a book. Farrar, Straus, & Giroux published queer writer Violet Leduc in translation, and James Baldwin’s Another Country, which featured a gay man and an explicit gay sex scene, came out as a paperback original by Dell Books. The sexual revolution infused the avant-garde with transgressive sexuality, opening up new possibilities for queer writers. Both June Arnold and Bertha Harris, who would later earn fame through the feminist publishing house Daughters Inc. and their own feminist works, first published “experimental” novels in the 1960s in the same category as such pillars of postmodern literature as John Barth, Donald Barthelme, and Thomas Pynchon. The linkage of the queer and the obscene became trendy in avant-garde circles even as underground pulp publishing became ever more explicit and lucrative. Gay pulp emerged in 1966 as a subgenre of the rise of adult bookstores, which sold much more explicit erotica than the first generation of Cold War pulp presses could include (Gunn and Harker 2013). In 1964, Grove

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Press won a key ruling from the Supreme Court: Tropic of Cancer could not be banned as obscene because it had literary merit. This ruling allowed for more leeway in avant-garde presses, but still left pornographic publishers at risk of prosecution. Small pornographic publishers supplied the stock for adult bookstores, constantly shutting down and reopening under new names. The bestselling gay pulp of the 1960s was Richard Amory’s Song of the Loon, which imagined an all-male homoerotic tribe in rural Oregon, and featured the journey of a young man whose exploration of various communities included explicit sexual adventures (Bouloukos 2013). But perhaps the revolutionary potential of the “fuck books” is best embodied by Victor Banis’s hilarious send-up of James Bond and 1960s spy shows in The Man from C.A.M.P. series. In the opening book, undercover agent Jackie Holmes poses as a fey screaming queen, cruising the bars of Los Angeles, while really working for an international homosexual organization to defend and protect the rights of gay people everywhere. His organization’s office is hidden behind a urinal in the men’s restroom of a local gay bar, and he travels with a white trained attack poodle. Banis’s spoof of spy culture and his playful invocation of queer in-jokes makes the book a delight to read, even as it portrays a world in which queer people are powerful, resourceful, funny, and irresistible (Ivey 2013). Banis gave these “fuck books” and the adult bookstores that housed them credit for the queer political revolution to come. Looking back on his experience in the 1960s, he wrote, “I do believe that it was here, as much as anywhere—among the beefcake covers and the campy titles and the astonishing variety of stories and themes that were suddenly there for us—that the sense of community, of oneness, that would soon lead to Stonewall and the Castro and the entire gay revolution, first took seed” (Gunn and Harker 2013). Queer pulp, once again, led the way for the broader culture to experience queer culture, while it inspired queer readers to create in the real world what they had only dreamed of between the pages of a book. That new world was about to emerge, inspired by a revolt at a small queer bar in Greenwich Village.

WOMEN’S LIBERATION, GAY LIBERATION, UNDERGROUND/ INDEPENDENT PRESSES Gay liberation and women’s liberation grew out of the larger political, cultural, and sexual revolution of the 1960s, and more specifically out of the emergence of Black power and the Black Arts movement, which fused identity and aesthetic experimentation into a potent new political tool. Queer writers focused on the creation of a “gay aesthetic,” explicit and explicitly political, and rejected one of the foundational principles of the New Criticism and of Cold War cultural commentary—that true art was not political and only could be created in the freedom of the West. Queer artists in the 1970s rejected this vision as insufficiently radical; they sought not Cold War freedom but radical liberation. Key to this emergence was the rise of feminist print culture, known as the Women in Print Movement. Feminist bookwomen created an autonomous ecosystem of print; as June Arnold, founder of Daughters, Inc., described it, the Women in Print Movement was “a circle of media control with every link covered: a woman writes an article or book, a woman typesets it, a woman illustrates and lays it out, a woman prints it, a woman’s journal reviews it, a woman’s bookstore sells it, and women read it—from Canada to Mexico and coast to coast” (qtd. in Harker 2018). From authors to presses to periodicals to bookstores to readers, this new system of publishing freed authors from the editorial control of condemning literary criticism and voyeuristic pulp editors

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(Harker 2018). A new kind of queer writing was now possible, one that also could foreground the experiences of queer women of color. Anthologies by queer women of color—notably This Bridge Called My Back: Writers by Radical Women of Color (1981) and Home Girls (1983)—were first published by bootstrap feminist presses. Queer women of color founded and ran Boston’s Kitchen Table Press (associated with Black poet Audre Lorde) and San Francisco’s Aunt Lute Books. And queer women of color published books of poetry, essays, and novels, many of which have become feminist classics: Sister/Outsider by Audre Lorde (1984), Womanslaughter by Pat Parker (1978), The Color Purple by Alice Walker (1982), The Gilda Stories by Jewelle Gomez (1990), Borderlands/ La Frontera by Gloria Anzaldúa (1987), Loving in the War Years (1983) by Cherrie Moraga, and many more. The diversity, ambition, and moxie of this explosion of feminist writing was truly a literary renaissance, and queer women—as authors, publishers, and bookstore owners—were at the center of it (Hogan 2016). One of the most famous of these new texts was Rita Mae Brown’s Rubyfruit Jungle (1973), published in Daughters, Inc.’s inaugural list. Here was a novel with a self-described “devil-may-care” lesbian, whose coming of age story is told with humor, panache, and raunchy charm. Molly Bolt must overcome obstacles, but she is never self-hating, never beaten, and never tamed. She is a kind of lesbian superhero whose irresistible self-confidence is infectious. The novel sold tens of thousands of copies in feminist bookstores and inspired many more lesbian publishers and authors to enter the fray. The Women in Print Movement truly believed it could create a better, queerer world through print, and it fostered queer women’s authorship far beyond the pulpy melodrama and sensational 1960s sexual outsiderness that was available previously. Of course, pulp paperbacks continued to thrive in the 1970s. In fact, they made key books of both women’s liberation and gay liberation available to a much broader readership than the mimeographed manifestos and feminist presses could hope to reach. From Sappho Was a Right-On Woman (1972) to Kate Millet’s Sexual Politics (1970), such paperbacks mainstreamed radical politics, placing them in wire racks in every small town that had a drugstore, following the path of queer pulp. In fact, Bantam Books, the largest paperback publisher in the United States, bought the rights to Rubyfruit Jungle in 1979, turning the book into the best-known and best-selling lesbian novel of the decade. In the 1970s, writers with deep ties to the queer print cultures of the interwar and Cold War period were rediscovered and reinterpreted, creating the foundation for queer literary canons to emerge. Some even took their rebranding into their own hands. Isherwood re-queered British modernism in his memoir Christopher and His Kind (1976), showing a queer lineage from E. M. Forster to himself and Auden, whom he revealed to be both gay and an occasional fuck-buddy. If his belated coming-out prompted bemused mockery from his contemporaries, the gay liberation generation was enrapt. Hundreds of gay men waited in line at the Oscar Wilde Memorial Bookshop in New York City to have Isherwood sign their copies of his memoir, and became a self-appointed grandfather of the gay rights movement (Harker 2013). Prestige publishers also took note of this new gay literary ethos; Isherwood had moved from Simon and Schuster to Farrar, Straus, & Giroux (the most prestigious literary publishing house in the United States) to publish Christopher and His Kind, for example. Younger gay writers were quick to take advantage. In 1980, Edmund White had formed a queer reading club named the Violet Quill, which had sought to imagine what an authentic queer literature would look like (Bergman 2004). White would become the ringleader of this new group of literary gay writers,

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including Felice Picano and Andrew Holleran, whose Dancer from the Dance (1978) was the iconic chronicle of 1970s gay liberation, even if White’s A Boy’s Own Life (1982) would be the group’s most lauded publication. Though the official end of the Cold War is usually marked by the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, in literary terms, the wall had already fallen with the rise of gay liberation and women’s liberation in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The queer subcurrents present in Cold War pulp emerged thoroughly into the mainstream by the 1970s. If the Homintern was dead, a new, out, self-confident queer Internationale had taken its place, one less invested in cultural hierarchy and queer sensationalism. Whatever gay utopia this new movement imagined (and the title of the new periodical Gay Sunshine embodied its optimism), it had grown out of the independent publishers and queer networks of the Homintern.

WORKS CITED Barnhisel, Greg (2015), Cold War Modernists: Art, Literature, and American Cultural Diplomacy, New York: Columbia University Press. Bergman, David (2004), The Violet Hour: The Violet Quill and the Making of Gay Literature, New York: Columbia University Press. Bibler, Michael (2015), “The Cold War Closet,” in Scott Herring (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to American Gay and Lesbian Literature, 122–38, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bouloukos, Beth (2013), “Shepherds Redress: Richard Amory’s Song of the Loon and the Reinvigoration of the Spanish Pastoral Novel,” in J. Harker (ed.), 1960s Gay Pulp Fiction, 212–28. Bram, Christopher (2012), Eminent Outlaws: The Gay Writers Who Changed America, New York: Twelve. Bronski, Michael (2003), Pulp Friction: Uncovering the Golden Age of Gay Male Pulps, New York: St. Martin’s Press. Chauncey, George (1994), Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Makings of the Gay Male World, 1890–1940, New York: Basic Books. Davis, Kenneth C. (1984), Two-Bit Culture: The Paperbacking of America, New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. D’Emilio, John (1983), Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities: The Making of a Homosexual Minority in the United States, 1940–1970, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Douglas, Martin (2012), “Barney Rosset Dies at 89; Defied Censors, Making Racy a Literary Staple,” New York Times (February 12). Earle, David (2009), Re-Covering Modernism: Pulps, Paperbacks, and the Prejudice of Form, New York: Routledge. Glass, Loren (2013), Counterculture Colophon: Grove Press, the Evergreen Review, and the Incorporation of the Avant Garde, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Gunn, Drewey Wayne, and Jaime Harker (2013), 1960s Gay Pulp Fiction: The Misplaced Heritage, Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. Harker, Jaime (2007), America the Middlebrow: Women’s Novels, Progressivism, and Middlebrow Authorship between the Wars, Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. Harker, Jaime (2013), Middlebrow Queer: Christopher Isherwood in America, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Harker, Jaime (2015), “Queer Faulkner: Whores, Queers, and the Transgressive South,” in John T. Matthews (ed.), The New Cambridge Companion to William Faulkner, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Harker, Jaime (2018), The Lesbian South: Southern Feminists, the Women in Print Movement, and the Queer Literary Canon, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.

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Hemingway, Ernest (1964), A Moveable Feast: Sketches of the Author’s Life in Paris in the Twenties, New York: Charles Scribner & Sons. Hench, John (2016), Books as Weapons: Propaganda, Publishing, and the Battle for Global Markets in the Era of World War II, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Hogan, Kristen (2016), The Feminist Bookstore Movement: Lesbian Anti-Racism and Feminist Accountability, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Hovey, Jaime (2006), A Thousand Words: Portraiture, Style, and Queer Modernism, Columbus: Ohio State University Press. Hutner, Gordon (2011), What America Read: Taste, Class, and the Novel, 1920–1960, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Ivey, Randall (2013), “Guerilla Literature: The Many Worlds of Victor J. Banis,” in Gunn and Harker (eds.), 1960s Gay Pulp Fiction, 190–211. Keller, Yvonne (1999), “Pulp Politics: Strategies of Vision in Pro-Lesbian Pulp Novels, 1955–1965,” in Patricia Juliana Smith (ed.), The Queer Sixties, 1–25, New York: Routledge. Kinsey, Alfred (1998), Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Morgan, Bill, and Nancy J. Peter (2006), Howl on Trial: The Battle for Free Expression, San Francisco, CA: City Lights Press. Roche, Hannah (2019), The Outside Thing: Modernist Lesbian Romance, New York: Columbia University Press. Saunders, Frances Stonor (2001), The Cultural Cold War: The C.I.A. and the World of Arts and Letters, New York: New Press. Schwartz, Lawrence (1988), Creating Faulkner’s Reputation: The Politics of Modern Literary Criticism, Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press. Sherry, Michael (2007), Gay Artists in Modern American Culture: An Imagined Conspiracy, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Wood, Gregory (2016), Homintern: How Gay Culture Liberated the Modern World, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

FURTHER READING On Cold War Literary Culture Barnhisel, Greg (2015), Cold War Modernists: Art, Literature, and American Cultural Diplomacy, New York: Columbia University Press. Earle, David (2009), Re-Covering Modernism: Pulps, Paperbacks, and the Prejudice of Form, New York: Routledge. Menand, Louis (2021), The Free World: Art and Thought in the Cold War, New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. Nadel, Alan (1995), Containment Culture: American Narratives, Postmodernism, and the Atomic Age, Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

On Cold War Queer Culture Harker, Jaime (2013), Middlebrow Queer: Christopher Isherwood in America, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Johnson, David K. (2019), Buying Gay: How Physique Entrepreneurs Sparked a Movement, New York: Columbia University Press.

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Leddick, David (2020), Intimate Companions: A Triography of George Platt Lynes, Paul Cadmus, Lincoln Kirstein, and Their Circle, New York: White Lake Press. Moser, Benjamin (2019), Sontag: Her Life and Work, New York: Allen Lane. Sherry, Michael (2007), Gay Artists in Modern American Culture: An Imagined Conspiracy, Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press. Wood, Gregory (2016), Homintern: How Gay Culture Liberated the Modern World, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

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CHAPTER TWELVE

Librarians, Library Diplomacy, and the Cultural Cold War, 1950–70 AMANDA LAUGESEN

The visitor books held in the archives of the American Library Association (ALA) record the signatures and details of visitors to the professional organization’s International Relations Office (IRO). The 1965 book includes the names and signatures of visitors (most of them fellow librarians) from countries such as Japan, Nigeria, New Zealand, Indonesia, India, Thailand, South Africa, Tanzania, Iran, Ghana, and Mexico (ALA-IRO 1965). While librarianship became international before the Second World War, in the years following 1945 it became truly globalized, as these visitor books attest. Through the years of the Cold War, libraries were established in many countries—and the story of the making of these libraries and their collections, and the people that worked in them, is one intimately bound up with Cold War politics. The history of libraries and librarianship in the Cold War remains largely overlooked, despite the increasing amount of scholarship focused on the period’s literary and print culture. But librarians were critical in connecting readers to print, and especially important in countries where Western nations were seeking to win over “hearts and minds” to liberal democracy—many located in the “developing world,” or what we would today refer to as the Global South, including countries in Asia, Africa, and the Pacific. Some of these countries were undergoing a process of decolonization from European empires, and many were aiming to rapidly develop industry and other vital infrastructure—including print infrastructure. Librarians from the United States, Britain, and Australia became involved in international library work in the post–Second World War years to help these developing nations build up a library infrastructure and a library profession. Their work included undertaking surveys of existing infrastructure, writing reports and giving advice as to potential future activities, assisting with the building of library collections, and training librarians. Their motivations ranged from a desire to help, to the adventure of traveling and working abroad, to patriotism, to a desire to advance “Free World” values. Library professionals sought to support the broader foreign policy goals of their countries (especially the case for the United States), but many librarians also saw their profession

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as an international one, where relationships across nations could help promote their professional values and forge international understanding. For Western nations involved in this kind of development, however, the work was also infused with the political values of the Cold War: efforts in the sphere of print, publishing, and libraries were invested in particular with notions of intellectual freedom and the furthering of democracy. This chapter focuses on the work of Western nations, specifically the United States, Britain, and Australia, but it is important to acknowledge that there were Soviet efforts to distribute books and print in developing nations. Indeed, during the Kennedy administration, the United States bemoaned a “book gap” with the Soviet Union. Fearing the effectiveness of Soviet efforts to get procommunist literature, often in translation, into circulation in developing nations, greater government support was forthcoming for the kind of activities examined here. Cold War anxiety was not the only motivator for international library work in this period, however. It is essential to consider the diverse motivations and effects of Western international library development work. It was at once “library diplomacy”—using books and libraries to establish international relationships—and “library imperialism,” the imposition of Western library institutions, methods, and professional norms on other cultures. It was an effort in “library internationalism,” aiming to foster greater global understanding through the promotion of knowledge, at the same time as it was “library modernization,” part of a broader process of attempting to modernize countries considered to be “underdeveloped.” It is difficult to disentangle these various ways of understanding international library work, all of which can be applied as interpretive frames to the diverse international library projects of the period. As many scholars have demonstrated in their work on Cold War cultural diplomacy, studying these kinds of efforts rarely reveals a straightforward story (see, e.g., Foster-Lussier 2015; Von Eschen 2012). Rather, close examination of on-the-ground efforts shows the many different currents—political, social, cultural, and economic—at work. If, for example, modernization was imposed from without, it was also often pursued from within. A library might be regarded as a symbol of cultural imperialism by some, while fully embraced and used by others for their own personal ends. Librarians might have multiple motivations in getting involved in international library work, and their work might have unintended consequences and effects (see Laugesen 2019). Ultimately the distinctive contours of print infrastructure and the particular role of Western librarians were at least in part determined by the demands, concerns, and preoccupations of Cold War politics. Western librarians, through programs fostered in part or in whole by Cold War concerns, played a critical role in aiding the creation of library collections, especially in school and university libraries, in the Global South. They worked in important ways to “globalize” the book in this period, but this largely happened along Western lines, with American and British books exported to other parts of the world, rather than vice versa. This international library work also created a library profession across many countries, with library professionals whose understandings of, and work with, print were often inspired by Anglo-American library models and techniques. The Cold War years, therefore, were vitally important ones for the development of library infrastructure in the Global South, and this development was shaped by the politics of the Cold War and modernization. In turn, such library work and infrastructure went a considerable way to determining how people read, and what print they accessed, during the Cold War.

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IMAGINING THE LIBRARY IN THE COLD WAR In 1947, the ALA’s International Relations Board put out a statement in support of the goals of UNESCO (the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization), an organization active in promoting library development work: “It is indeed in the minds of men that lasting peace is to be assured. It is with minds of men that librarians work” (ALA 1947: 198). Libraries, books, and reading were central to ensuring the horrors of the Second World War were not repeated. But librarians also came to more generally address the challenges of the Cold War as tensions between the United States and USSR intensified. During the Cold War, the book became a valuable tool in the propaganda arsenal of both the United States and the Soviet bloc. Print culture was caught up in the battle for “hearts and minds.” This struggle extended to developing and decolonizing nations, countries seen as especially important to bring over to the West lest they fall under the influence of communism. Libraries therefore formed part of the efforts of the cultural Cold War, especially information libraries such as those of the United States Information Agency (USIA) (see Arndt 2005; Osgood 2006) and the British Council (see Coombs 1988). Professional librarians had to position themselves within this accelerating appropriation of print and the book for Cold War ends, and carefully negotiate the sometimes-tricky relationship between the profession and government. The profession could not be seen as compromising its dedication to intellectual freedom and objectivity through too closely following the dictates of the state’s foreign policy aims. For example, in 1958, a draft article by Theodore Waller, a publisher active in international book development activities, sparked a heated debate in the ALA’s International Relations Committee over whether the ALA was involved with “national policy in the cold war and whether ALA’s international relations are thus part of US cultural diplomacy” (ALA-IRC 1958). The committee ultimately called for Waller to excise passages that the ALA feared implicated the organization in US government foreign policy objectives. Western librarians actively embraced a rhetoric of reading as integral to intellectual freedom, democracy, and good citizenship. These concepts became politicized during the Cold War, but at the time they were imagined as universal. British librarian Lionel McColvin, for example, commented in 1956 that the “primary purpose of any worthy public library is that of facilitating and promoting individual freedom” and even went as far as to call the librarian an “apostle of freedom” (McColvin 1956: 228). Librarians were also careful to position themselves as professional “experts” who could export that expertise and experience to other countries. Expertise, especially within the many projects that intersected with modernization efforts that sought to accelerate developing nations’ societies and economies along Western lines, has since been seen as a fraught concept. Indeed, Michael Adas (2003: 35) notes that modernization “supplanted the beleaguered civilizing mission as the pre-eminent ideology of Western dominance.” But at the time, expertise was viewed as a largely neutral concept. Modernization was embraced as something worthy of pursuing as it could help all people reach an idealized end goal of modernity, and even the Soviets touted how they were helping “underdeveloped” regions within the USSR and communist satellite states “modernize.” A variety of agencies oversaw or were involved in international library development work in this period. The ALA established its International Relations Office (ALA-IRO) in 1943 with funds from the Rockefeller Foundation. ALA-IRO resumed its work after the war with renewed

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support from Rockefeller, operating from 1956 through to the 1970s. It engaged in activities such as supplying professional literature to other countries, assisting in library exchanges, and working to survey and assist in the building of libraries around the globe. The office saw its role as being that of “catalytic agent,” connecting people, stimulating support for library work, and helping to facilitate library development projects (Asheim 1962a: 6). Much international library work at the time suffered from a lack of reliable funding, but the ALA-IRO collaborated with government agencies and philanthropic foundations including the USIA, the Peace Corps, the Rockefeller and Ford Foundations, and the Carnegie Corporation. Foundation funding often supported particular projects within countries of interest, with the ALA often playing a role as adviser in, for example, developing library collections. Much of the work that the British undertook abroad in library development work was either a continuation of colonial-era efforts in countries that had been part of the British Empire and/or was facilitated through the British Council. British librarians also actively participated in UNESCO library programs. The British professional body, the Library Association (LA), never created a dedicated office for international library work as did its US counterpart, but it took an interest in international library concerns, including the training and accreditation of librarians in colonies or newly independent countries formerly under British control. The Australian Library and Information Association (ALIA) similarly had no specific office dedicated to international library work, but individual librarians were involved in UNESCO work. ALIA also worked with the Australian and Commonwealth government’s Colombo Plan that was focused on aiding development in the AsiaPacific region, and engaged in various exchange programs that brought librarians to Australia and sent Australian librarians abroad. The library profession therefore took an active role in international library development work through the Cold War years. This work, insofar as it was imagined as being about developing a global library infrastructure and profession, existed separately from the geopolitical imperatives of the Cold War, but it was never independent of the Cold War. Funding—whether from governments or foundations—was often driven by Cold War priorities; the language of modernization and expertise reflected Western thinking about how developing nations should advance within a Cold War paradigm; and library collections overwhelmingly embodied and conveyed the views, knowledge, and culture of Western nations to their readers.

EMPLOYING EXPERTISE: SURVEYING AND BUILDING LIBRARIES Experts were the midwives of development, helping nations become more modern; the citizens of these nations would as a result, it was argued, be integrated into the economic and political circuits of the West. Librarians helped to survey existing library infrastructure in a number of countries and provided detailed advice and recommendations for how to build such infrastructure. Such reports helped developing nations, as well as potential funding bodies, to make judgments as to what projects might be worth supporting. And while these surveys and reports were vital to international library development work, they also helped determine Western understandings of the developing world, often through the framework of modernization. This framework explicitly linked a lack of library infrastructure to underdevelopment and asserted that the Anglo-American library model should be imposed on these nations. This “modernization” paradigm also homogenized developing countries, offering one-size-fits-all solutions to wildly diverse nations.

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Anglo-Australian librarian Harold V. Bonny’s international work illustrates how this kind of work took place on the ground. His career was perhaps exceptional in terms of its global dimensions, but the kind of work he did was typical of that done by the “library expert” in this period. Bonny began his career in Britain before traveling to Australia to take up a position at the State Library of Tasmania. He was subsequently appointed as a UNESCO consultant in the 1950s to advise the government of Afghanistan on the establishment of the Kabul Public Library; on a subsequent contract, he helped the same library with the classification of the English books held in the library collection (“Libraries in Afghanistan” 1968: 112). Bonny also worked as a library consultant in Iraq, spending a year helping to train library personnel. His reports helped to publicize the issues faced in Iraq: the shortage of qualified library personnel, the lack of professional literature in translation, and the lack of a professional association. Teaching librarianship in Iraq was, Bonny observed, difficult for a number of reasons, including the varying levels of experience among his students, the lack of a library “laboratory” for demonstration purposes, and no good textbook on librarianship being available in Arabic (UNESCO 1958: 123, 125). While Bonny took an Anglo-American model of librarianship to Iraq, he noted that librarians there wanted to take the opportunity “to develop services in accordance with their own culture and tradition” (UNESCO 1958: 126). Bonny also consulted with schools and governments in Jordan, Kuwait, Libya, and Lebanon (UNESCO 1961: 129, 46). For Bonny, “books are an essential part of education, but the effectiveness of books is limited unless they are organized in a well-conducted library” (Bonny 1959). In 1962, Bonny was assigned to the South Pacific at the request of the South Pacific Commission. He reported that services were generally limited, but that providing services to people who lived in rural areas would “help restrict the flow to urban areas, decimating the necessary rural labour force on which the country’s economy is based” (Bonny 1963: 151). He also argued that the information contained within books and periodicals could help improve production, and hence boost prosperity (Bonny 1963: 151). His advice here was thus not just limited to library work but intersected with other discussions around the appropriate path of development for the region. Bonny’s advice in this case, perhaps surprisingly, was not to develop Pacific area libraries along Western lines but rather to work through organizations such as cooperatives or women’s institutes. Community centers were important, he argued, because “these can be organized by the community spirit which is inherent in tribal or village life … But the library must be the heart of the community centre work, not a shelf of books added as an afterthought” (Bonny 1963: 152). He also stressed that books in vernacular languages were especially necessary, as there was “a danger of the loss of national cultures, legends and traditions” (Bonny 1963: 156). In August 1960 Bonny worked in Ceylon. He called for the establishment of a National Library and argued for a public library system. “Public library services are an economic, social and cultural necessity,” he wrote. “Money spent on public libraries—which reach the mass of the people irrespective of class or creed—pays a great dividend by way of increasing knowledge, efficiency and morale” (Bonny n.d.: 5). The year 1965 found Bonny in Africa working on a pilot school library project. From February 1964, the UNESCO-sponsored project aimed to build up a school and college library service in Nigeria (Bonny 1966). Demonstration libraries were opened in February 1965 at a boys’ school, the Baptist Academy, and one at the Methodist Girls’ High School, each with a collection of 1500 books. An education library was also created and made available to education officers, university students, teachers, and teachers-in-training.

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Bonny’s influence on international library development was thus significant. He was able to recognize that the Anglo-American model of librarianship might not fit every situation, but at the same time he brought with him the cultural and professional baggage of his training and assumptions. Further, his work fed into, and was informed by, the broader development goals of the time, shaping ideas about how and why people should read. His story highlights the kinds of endeavors undertaken by the “library expert” in this period and their contribution to “library imperialism” as well as “library modernization.”

BUILDING COLLECTIONS In the countries of the Global South, Western librarians assisted with the development of library collections, particularly university and school library collections, often with the assistance of funding from government and philanthropic foundation sources. This constituted an essential part of their international library work, but also reflected the preoccupations and concerns of countries like the United States in the areas of development, education, and publishing. At Haile Selassie I University in Ethiopia, for instance, the Ford Foundation and the ALA also worked to supply and organize its library collection as part of a two-year project (ALA 1965a). The ALA purchased material with Ford funds; University librarian Rita Pankhurst, an American, helped to identify suitable material and develop bibliographies, as well as encouraging greater use of the purchased material by allowing for open book stacks (Ford Foundation 1966: 1–5). She also developed the collections through participating in a USAID-sponsored Science Book Program that made books in the sciences and social sciences cheaply available to institutions in developing countries; obtained gift books donated from the Peace Corps, USAID, and from American University Presses through a special project; and also received book donations from Australia, Canada, and some European countries (Haile Selassie I 1964–5: 11–13). Collections were therefore shaped by the particular funding, support, and expertise that a library might have available. Foundation funds were often criticized as sometimes leaning too much toward developing specialized collections for universities, while basic material for public libraries went lacking (Asheim 1962b: 11). Collections in this period were very much a reflection of the products of the Anglo-American publishing world. Books were nearly always obtained from British or American publishers, as local publishing in many countries was not adequate (or, in some cases, even existent) for publishing the kind of material deemed suitable to meet the needs of developing nations, although in some cases this was changing. While programs such as the International Media Guarantee (IMG), which assisted certain nations to purchase print material with US dollars, helped those nations acquire books from overseas, they also reinforced the dominance of imported books. This was a time of considerable commercial expansion for British and US publishers. American educational publishers grew enormously in the post–Second World War decades, fueled not only by the baby boom but also by the growing international market for educational books (Luey 2010: 53). Unsurprisingly, there was a desire to get this product into libraries globally, not just domestically. International library work thus underpinned this expansion of the Western book trade. Education was a key priority of the Cold War, particularly for the Americans, who channeled large amounts of money into education after the launch of Sputnik made them fear lagging behind in the technology and science race with the USSR. Education was a central element of modernization and development efforts abroad.

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The United States actively worked in these years to make inroads into the book market of the Global South, often using government cultural diplomacy and development projects as a means to enter markets that were otherwise difficult to access (see Laugesen 2017). Without active intervention, it was hard for American books to enter the market in many areas of the world, especially in Africa, where many countries were dominated by British publishers even after independence. British publishers continued to take an active interest and involvement in their former empire and had a considerable hold on the educational publishing market in these countries. They also dominated the literary publishing market, even gaining support from the CIA for some of their literary work in places like Africa (see Davis 2020). Americans visiting the continent frequently commented on the dearth of American books, and the dominance of British books in collections and British publishers in the market. Lester Asheim (1962c), head of the ALA’s IRO, visiting Africa in the early 1960s, believed it was important for American books to become more available and actively recommended this. American librarians thus assisted in a broader commercial and state push to circulate American books in the developing world; similarly, British librarians assisted British Council efforts to support the continuing presence of British books and publishers in areas of the former empire. Collections and building a user base were fundamentally hampered by a lack of material in vernacular languages, however. This prevented reaching a larger local readership. It was a major issue for the development of libraries in many countries, as well as in the development of a broader book and publishing industry. The question of print in translation was fraught as well, not least because of the difficulty (economic as well as logistical) of publishing work in translation. Britain preferred to support the teaching of English (primarily through the British Council) rather than focus on books in translation. UNESCO worked to promote translation of material into various languages, but had limited funds by which to do so (Gardner 1957: 11). The American government did support translation programs (as did the Soviets), but primarily to buttress its cultural diplomacy program. They also tended to focus on languages with wide reach, such as Arabic. Little of this did much to ensure the development of local publishing, especially in languages with smaller readerships. Library collections in nations of the Global South thus continued to feature many books in English, most often published in Britain or the United States.

TRAINING AND EXCHANGE A lack of qualified librarians was a major challenge for many developing nations seeking to bolster their library infrastructure. Trained librarians were seen as being absolutely essential for a successful library system; British and US librarians thus were actively involved in helping to train librarians abroad through establishing library schools and exchange programs that brought librarians to Western nations. Such efforts, similar to student- and scholar-exchange endeavors like the Fulbright program, further buttressed the export of Anglo-American library techniques to various countries of the Global South, as well as being a valuable form of person-to-person diplomacy during the Cold War. Nigeria and Indonesia provide good examples of the development of library schools and the involvement of US and British librarians, and funding, in such work. British librarians helped establish some of the first library training schools in West Africa, which predated decolonization. In 1945, the British Council, along with the colonial governments of the Gold Coast (Ghana), Nigeria,

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and Sierra Leone, financed a library training school at Achimota College in Accra, Ghana, run by a British librarian, Ethel Fegan (formerly librarian to Girton College, Cambridge). The school only lasted a year, however (Akinyotu 2003: 130). Subsequently, in Ibadan, Nigeria, a library training course was established in 1950 at the University College, run by British-trained librarians Joan Parkes and John Harris, followed in 1960 by a proper library school, the Institute of Librarianship, which resulted from Harris’s recommendations and Carnegie Corporation funding (Akinyotu 2003: 131, 139). The Carnegie Corporation underwrote the Institute through much of the 1960s (UNESCO 1966: 151). Director John Dean’s 1965 report on the Institute noted that in its first five years it had “contributed increasingly to the development and expansion of libraries in Nigeria,” raise the status of librarians in Nigeria, and improve the acceptance of libraries as a “vital service” (Dean 1965). The Ibadan school was one of the most active in West Africa, and a center for much professional library activity. It provided the model for a similar library school in Zaria, Nigeria. Indonesia established its first library training school in 1952, in Jakarta. After independence, Indonesia had developed a strong interest in mass literacy, education, and library programs as part of a broader effort to develop industry, as well as to increase nationalist sentiment. The Indonesian government recognized the value of training librarians in Indonesia rather than abroad, but there were significant challenges, such as language: foreign-language books still predominated, and language skills placed an extra demand on both librarian and library user (Vreede-de Stuers 1953: E99). In 1958, a UNESCO report noted the ongoing problem of a lack of suitable material, including textbooks and teaching materials. Indonesian library training was supported by Australia and the United States, and agencies such as the USIA, the British Council, the Asia Foundation, and the Australian Embassy provided books (Kartadiredja 1958: 4–5). Lester Asheim traveled to Indonesia in 1964 to investigate how the library school could be further assisted, as it was still the only one in the country. He subsequently called for greater American support for Indonesian library training, and recommended that USAID assist visiting professors from the United States to go to Indonesia to improve the quality of teaching (Asheim 1964a: 3). Training abroad was also a possibility for some librarians (or aspiring librarians). Britain and the Commonwealth offered a variety of opportunities for travel and study, including internship opportunities. From 1958, the LA provided internships for students from other countries, but even before this had offered places for library students from different parts of the globe (Plumbe 1960: 272). In the Pacific region, the South Pacific Commission funded several students to undertake training abroad. For example, Salim Baksh, a Fijian librarian, traveled to the National Library in Australia for twelve months of training; he later compiled numerous bibliographies of Fijian-related material. The Commission also sponsored training courses for library assistants in Guam in 1964 and Western Samoa in 1966 (Plumbe 1987: 262). The Multi-National Group Librarians Program brought overseas librarians to the United States, including participants from Europe, the Caribbean, Asia, Africa, and Latin America. It commenced operation in 1961, run by the ALA using funds from the Department of State (ALA 1965b: 3). After candidates were selected for the program, they traveled to the United States, where they spent a week in Washington, DC (which included information about and orientation to American life), three weeks at a library school undergoing a training course, and six weeks working in a library as an intern. They then spent six weeks traveling around the United States to inspect libraries suited to their professional interests. At the end of their program, they met as a group at the annual ALA conference (ALA n.d.: 2).

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Other programs were sponsored by foundations such as the Asia Foundation. For example, from 1960 through to 1968, the Asia Foundation provided funds for students in American library schools from Asia to attend library association meetings (ALA 1965b: 4). In 1964, under this program, Indian librarian Y. M. Mulay was given funding to cover the expense of a sixty-day tour of American libraries (ALA-IRO 1964). In the financial year 1963–64, grants were given to students from countries such as Indonesia, India, Malaysia, Pakistan, and Afghanistan to support study at American universities (Kortendick 1963–4: 1). In 1965–66, there were some three hundred Asian students enrolled in thirty-four institutions across the United States (Asia Foundation 1965–6). The Asia Foundation also supported the visits of library professions for US study tours. For example, in 1961, Miss Suthalik, chief librarian for Chulalongkorn University in Thailand, visited the United States for six months supported by an Asia Foundation grant (Weber 1961). Librarians from Southeast Asia also worked in Australia through support from the Colombo Plan. In 1952, ALIA reported that a number of librarians from Southeast Asia, including India, Indonesia, and the Philippines, were working in Australia, “portents of a shift from cultural isolation in Australia, of a change from an attitude that was all too common with us, that we had nothing to learn, to a sense of regional responsibility for peace and mutual understanding” (ALIA 1952: 75). Librarians in Australia for the library training work were introduced to Australian life through talks, films, and excursions along with actual training in librarianship (White 1952: 100). The program was deemed an “outstanding success” (White 1952: 101). Through the Colombo Plan, experts and advisers from Australia were also sent abroad. It was evident, it was argued, that “a permanent solution to the problems of the area could be found only in the improvement of technical equipment and skills of the people themselves” (White 1952: 102).

USIS AND BRITISH COUNCIL LIBRARIES The USIS and British Council libraries are probably most identified with cultural diplomacy—and thus with the politicized work of libraries—during the Cold War, but as this chapter has shown, they were only a small part of the much broader work being done in international library development work. Their mission was to represent and extend the cultural power of the United States and Britain, and this constrained their impact. Nevertheless, they did play a role, sometimes a significant one, in the library infrastructure of many countries, and therefore constitute an important component of Cold War efforts in the library sphere. The British Council was created in 1934 and formally established by Royal Charter in 1940 “for the purpose of making known in other countries British cultural and intellectual achievements and activities” (Glaister 1952: 329). Books in these libraries were intended to highlight British arts and sciences, and British institutions, with value placed on classic works of English literature (ibid.). From 1948, the British Council was active in the colonies and was intended not only to project the British way of life but also to promote “closer relations in cultural matters” (Donaldson 1984: 154). In 1950, there were some ninety-five Council libraries, and fourteen years later 124, with many of the new ones in China, Africa, India, and Pakistan (Adams and Hickman 1965: 361). In 1955, it was suggested that Council libraries held over 750,000 volumes across fifty countries. British Council library collections varied considerably. Stock was chosen to match the needs of particular countries, and choices were made from books authored by British writers and produced by British publishers. Typical titles included books by writers such as Shakespeare and George

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Orwell; the Dictionary of National Biography; periodicals such as the Illustrated London News; and nonfiction works such as G. M. Trevelyan’s English Social History (Adams and Hickman 1965: 364). Books were supplied by a Books Department in London, with selections determined both by local needs and preferences, as well as guidance and directives from Britain (Adam 1955: 8). Keeping collections up-to-date was an ongoing challenge, especially when it came to scientific and technical material (British Council 1964: 5). Reader preferences in Council libraries tended to be for practical and educational reading. A 1965 article on the British Council libraries noted that there was also “an insatiable appetite for practical manuals written in clear, simple terms on such subjects as engineering and agriculture” (Adams and Hickman 1965: 365). European readers preferred English history, biography, and fiction. In India, some of the most popular books in 1958 included W. W. Bigg’s Cost Accounts, W. R. Anson’s Principles of the English Law of Contract, and Harold Laski’s Grammar of Politics (British Council 1958a: 5). Nigerian readers in the 1950s sought out materials in subjects such as Political Science, Economics, Law, Engineering, Business Methods, and the English language; their fiction preferences were “the classics and semi-classics of the late nineteenth century” (British Council 1956: 5). Authors included Arthur Conan Doyle, Charles Dickens, and Jane Austen, but there were also readers for titles by national authors such as Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart and Amos Tutola’s The Brave African Huntress. Periodicals and magazines were also popular reading choices in many British Council libraries. In India, popular periodicals in the Bombay Council library included The Economist, Good Housekeeping, Vogue, and The Illustrated London News (British Council 1958b: 3). In Nigeria, illustrated weekly magazines were particularly popular, including The Economist, The West African Journal of Education, The New Scientist, The Spectator, The Illustrated London News, and The Journal of African Law (British Council 1956: 8, 1958: 6, 1960: 8). The end of the 1950s saw a notable increase in Nigerian British Council library users requesting access to technical and scientific periodicals, matching the increased interest and desire to study these areas (British Council 1957). The United States used libraries as a means of promoting American literature and culture abroad, and the USIA regarded books as a major conduit for information about the United States (Green 1988: 67). By 1948, there were US information libraries in Europe, the Middle East, Africa, Asia, Central and South America, and the Pacific. By 1962, there were 176 USIS libraries in eighty countries, with over two and a quarter million volumes being accessed by some 26 million people (ALA 1962: 24). In 1967, it was estimated that there was a total of more than two million volumes across USIS libraries, with about 20 percent of these collections being in local languages and the rest in English (ALA-IRO 1967: 3). These libraries were essential conduits for US information work and cultural diplomacy, but they were not without controversy—most notably in the early 1950s when Senator Joseph McCarthy led an attempt to censor purportedly “subversive” material held in these libraries written by socialist and communist writers. Unlike British Council libraries, USIS book and library programs were focused on achieving what were described at the time “program aims”—that is, the focus on books that would be circulated (whether through libraries or through publishing programs) was to ensure their anti-communist and pro-American content. From the beginning of the USIA’s creation in 1953, USIS libraries’ selection of material was undertaken by USIA staff, not the ALA (Arndt 2005: 156). Nor were book selections much driven by local requests, needs, or preferences. Typical USIS library collections

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included books, daily newspapers, and magazines such as The Nation, Reader’s Digest, and the Saturday Evening Post (Sussman 1973: 8). Books were to provide what the USIA considered to be a “balanced reflection of American thought and life,” although, as one scholar has pointed out, collections more often tended “to reflect the political ideology of the USIA director and, to some extent, the President.” She cites the example of Edwin O. Reischauer’s book Beyond Vietnam: The United States and Asia (1967), a book by a former US ambassador that explained how the United States become involved in Vietnam, being prohibited from USIS collections by President Lyndon Johnson, due to controversy over the war (ibid.: 9). The ALA’s IRO worked with USIS libraries and traveled to them regularly to report on and participate in their activities. Lester Asheim, for example, visited USIS libraries while undertaking his survey and advisory trips. Overall, while Asheim had praise for individual USIS libraries, he expressed concerns about the USIA’s general approach, noting to a fellow IRO librarian that in his opinion most readers did not use USIS libraries to read up on the United States, as was the intention of the libraries. He argued that the “USIS would actually accomplish its aims better if it concentrated on giving a bang-up library service representative of what libraries in the United States provide, instead of being so flat footedly a propaganda outlet for books favorable to the USA or by US writers only” (Asheim 1964b). Asheim’s comments vividly illustrate the tensions between the professed values of the profession and the demands of foreign policy. Like British Council libraries, USIS libraries played a valuable role in library training work. The USIS library in Bangkok was used as a demonstration library for library training in Thailand. It also was very active, with three trained American librarians and a staff of fifteen Thai employees; it had a collection of nearly 10,000 books and sent book packets out into provincial areas (Spain 1952: 260). The USIS also provided library training in Burma (Griffith 1956: 123–4). In Malaya, the USIS library in the early 1960s promoted school librarianship and encouraged teachers to support the idea of the library (Asheim 1963: 2). British Council and USIS institutions were the most clearly instrumentalist libraries in the Cold War in their efforts to directly convey the culture and values—and advance the political objectives— of the countries they represented. Yet they also played a role in library activities, such as training, and for readers they offered an additional and significant resource. Librarians worked with these libraries, but the aims and nature of such libraries did lead some to worry about the effect of foreign policy on their work, and how that might impact use of the library.

CONCLUSION Libraries were essential for connecting readers to print in the years of the Cold War. This chapter has touched on just a few of the activities undertaken by British, American, and Australian librarians to help build libraries, collections, and a trained library profession in the period. Cold War concerns mattered in this work, although they were not always readily apparent; yet at the very least, the Cold War dictated the particular paths that libraries and books took in this period. Foreign policy concerns—winning hearts and minds, or guiding the process of development—often dictated funding. Collections not only were dominated by Anglo-American publishing but also reflected the expansion of the publishing industry into parts of the world where they hitherto had limited or no presence. That publishing industry, especially the US educational one, was boosted by Cold War investments in education and global development. And the efforts to create a global library

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profession along Anglo-American lines was certainly an exercise in Cold War internationalism, functioning as an excellent example of person-to-person on-the-ground cultural diplomacy. The effects of all this international library work were not always clear-cut, however. For the library profession, it was necessary to find a position that both amplified the importance of the library and the librarian in a Cold War world, while not compromising (at least in principle) professional values. Effects on readers were not always what was intended by Cold War institutions. Libraries and the print contained therein could be, and were, used for multiple purposes. The acceptance of aid and development did not guarantee that hearts and minds had been won. Yet the Cold War undoubtedly facilitated a very particular remaking of the world and the Global South in this period, and the story of libraries should be understood as forming a small but vital part of that broader story.

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Southern Historical Collection, Louis Round Wilson Special Collections Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Asheim, L. (1962b), Memorandum to Ford Foundation, IRO New Office Subject Files, Record Series 7/2/6, Box 1, Folder: Ford—Asheim Reports to Foundation on Foreign Trips, ALA Archives. Asheim, L. (1962c), Letter to Harry Krould, “Book and Library Needs in Africa,” May 15, IRO New Office Subject Files, Record Series 7/2/6, Box 4, Folder: US AID—Agency for International Development 1961–7, ALA Archives. Asheim, L. (1963), “Memo to USIA Washington,” October 21, IRO New Office Subject Files, Record Series 7/2/6, Box 1, Folder: Asheim Report to USIA on Foreign Trips, ALA Archives. Asheim, L. (1964a), “Memo to Dr T. C. Clark and Dr Sal C. Hall,” October 12, IRO New Office Correspondence, by Country, 1953–69, Record Series 7/2/56, Box 3, Folder: Indonesia—US Aid, ALA Archives. Asheim, L. (1964b), Letter to D. Donovan, March 27, IRO New Office Correspondence, by Country, 1953–69, Record Series 7/2/56, Box 3, Folder: India—Correspondence 1962–4, ALA Archives. Asia Foundation (1965–6), “Report of the Asia Foundation Grant Committee, 1965–66,” IRO New Office Subject Files, Record Series 7/2/6, Box 31, Folder: Asia Foundation Grant Annual Reports 1963–8, ALA Archives. Bonny, H. V. (1959), “A National Plan for Library Services and Its Place in the Educational and Cultural Life of the country,” UNESCO National Seminar on Library Development in the Arab States, August 31, UNESCO/ LBA/Sem. 6 [available online]. Bonny, H. V. (1963), “Libraries in the South Pacific,” UNESCO Bulletin for Libraries 17(3) (May–June). Bonny, H. V. (1966), “Nigeria: Pilot Project on School Libraries in Africa, October 1963 to May 1966,” Paris: UNESCO. Bonny, H. V. (n.d.), Library Services for Ceylon, Ceylon Government Press. British Council (1956), “Annual Report, Books Department, 1956,” The National Archives (UK): BW128/2. Nigeria: Books, Library Reports 1948–60. British Council (1957), “Annual Report of the Librarian, January-December 1957,” The National Archives (UK): BW128/2 Nigeria: Books, Library Reports 1948–60. British Council (1958a), “Annual Report of the Librarian, January-December 1958,” The National Archives (UK): BW128/2 Nigeria: Books, Library Reports 1948–60. British Council (1958b), “British Council Library, Bombay, Annual Report 1958,” The National Archives (UK): BW 38/21 India, Books: Library Reports 1957–61. British Council (1960), “Annual Report of the Librarian, January-December 1960,” The National Archives (UK): BW128/2 Nigeria: Books, Library Reports 1948–60. British Council (1964), “British Council Libraries in Pakistan, Report for 1964,” 5, The National Archives (UK): BW 113/11 Pakistan. Coombs, D. (1988), Spreading the Word: The Library Work of the British Council, London: Mansell. Davis, C. (2020), African Literature and the CIA: Networks of Authorship and Publishing, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Dean, J. (1965), “Achievements and Future of the Institute of Librarianship,” September 20, 1965, IRO New Office Correspondence, by Country, 1953–69, Record Series 7/2/56, Box 5, Folder: Thailand—correspondence 1959–61, ALA Archives. Donaldson, F. (1984), The British Council: The First Fifty Years, London: Jonathan Cape. Ford Foundation (1966), Grant Report, Haile Selassie University Library, July, IRO New Office Subject Files, Record Series 7/2/6, Box 32, Folder: Haile Selassie University Reports, ALA Archives. Foster-Lussier, D. (2015), Music in America’s Cold War Diplomacy, Oakland: University of California Press.

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Gardner, F. M. (1957), “Lowering the Barriers: Ten Years of UNESCO,” Library Association Record (January): 10–12. Glaister, G. A. (1952), “A British Council Librarian Abroad,” Library Association Record (October): 329–32. Green, F. (1988), American Propaganda Abroad, New York: Hippocrene Books. Griffith, C. E. (1956), “American Books in Southeast Asia,” Library Trends 5 (July). Haile Selassie I (1964–5), University Library Annual Report 1964–5, IRO New Office Subject Files, Record Series 7/2/6, Box 32, Folder: Haile Selassie University Reports, ALA Archives. Kartadiredja, S. (1958), “The Indonesian Library School,” UNESCO Bulletin for Libraries 12(1) (January). Kortendick, J. J. (1963–4), “Report of Activities, 1963–4, IRO New Office Subject Files, Record Series 7/2/6, Box 31, Folder: Asia Foundation Grant Annual Reports 1963–8, ALA Archives. Laugesen, A. (2017), Taking Books to the World: American Publishers and the Cultural Cold War, Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. Laugesen, A. (2019), Globalizing the Library: Librarians and Development Work 1945–1970, London: Routledge. “Libraries in Afghanistan” (1968), in Allen Kent and Harold Lancour (eds.), Encyclopedia of Library and Information Science: Volume 1, New York: Marcel Dekker. Luey, B. (2010), Expanding the American Mind: Books and the Popularization of Knowledge, Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. McColvin, L. R. (1956), The Chance to Read: Public Libraries in the World Today, London: Phoenix House. Osgood, K. (2006), Total Cold War: Eisenhower’s Secret Propaganda Battle at Home and Abroad, Lawrence: University of Kansas Press. Plumbe, W. J. (1960), “British Librarianship Overseas,” Library Association Record (September): 272–4. Plumbe, W. J. (1987), Tropical Librarianship, Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press. Spain, F. L. (1952) “Some Notes on Libraries in Thailand,” Library Quarterly 22(3) (July). Sussman (1973), “United States Information Service Libraries,” “United States Information Service Libraries,” University of Illinois Graduate School of Library Science Occasional Papers, no. 111 (December): 1–24. UNESCO (1958), “Library Training in Iraq,” UNESCO Bulletin for Libraries 12(5–6) (May–June). UNESCO (1960), “Library Services in Arabic-Speaking States,” UNESCO Bulletin for Libraries 14(3) (May–June). UNESCO (1961), “Benghazi Builds,” UNESCO Bulletin for Libraries 15(1) (January–February). UNESCO (1966), “Grant for Ibadan Institute of Librarianship,” UNESCO Bulletin for Libraries 20(3) (May–June). Von Eschen, P. M. (2012), Satchmo Blows Up the World: Jazz Ambassadors Play the Cold War, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Vreede-de Stuers, C. (1953), “The First Library School in Indonesia,” UNESCO Bulletin for Libraries 7(8–9) (August–September). Weber, D. C. (1961), Letter to L. Asheim, August 31, IRO New Office Correspondence, by Country, 1953–69, Record Series 7/2/56, Box 6, Folder: Thailand—Correspondence 1959–61, ALA Archives. White, H. L. (1952), “Australian Library Seminar: Librarians Enter the Colombo Plan,” Australian Library Journal 1(5) (July).

FURTHER READING Anghelescu, H. G. B., and M. Poulain (2001), Books, Libraries, Reading and Publishing in the Cold War, Washington, DC: Library of Congress. Arndt, R. (2005), The First Resort of Kings: American Cultural Diplomacy in the Twentieth Century, Washington, DC: Potomac Books.

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Barnhisel, G., and C. Turner, eds. (2010), Pressing the Fight: Print, Propaganda, and the Cold War, Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. Coombs, D. (1988), Spreading the Word: The Library Work of the British Council, London: Mansell. Fraser, R., and M. E. Hammond, eds. (2008), Books without Borders, Volume 1: The Cross-National Dimension in Print Culture, Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan. Latham, M. E. (2011), The Right Kind of Revolution: Modernization, Development, and US Foreign Policy from the Cold War to the Present, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Laugesen, A. (2019), Globalizing the Library: Librarians and Development Work 1945–1970, London: Routledge. Laugesen, A. (2020), “Remaking the World through Reading: Books, Readers and the Global Project of Modernity, 1945–70,” in M. Hammond (ed.), The Edinburgh History of Reading: Modern Readers, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Nord, D. P., J. S. Rubin, and M. Schudson (2009), A History of the Book in America Volume 5: The Enduring Book: Print Culture in Postwar America, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Osgood, K. (2006), Total Cold War: Eisenhower’s Secret Propaganda Battle at Home and Abroad, Lawrence: University of Kansas Press.

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CHAPTER THIRTEEN

The Transcription Centre and the Coproduction of African Literary Culture in the 1960s ASHA ROGERS

Sub-Saharan African literary producers working in the 1960s faced a bipolar landscape characterized by the intersecting pressures of the Cold War and decolonization against which they built networks, cultivated audiences, and created new outlets for their work in ways not always immediately reducible to ideological determinants. This chapter revisits one space in which creative work was being produced at the time: the London-based Transcription Feature Service, or Transcription Centre (1962–77). Established in early 1962, the Centre recorded English-language radio programs on topics related to African literature, art, and culture for sale, distribution, and broadcast in newly independent African countries, and elsewhere in the world.1 Founded and directed by Dennis Duerden, a former BBC employee, and produced by the South African, and London-based writer, critic, and journalist Lewis Nkosi, the Transcription Centre created one-off features and series, and regular shows like the weekly magazine program Africa Abroad (1962–6), which combined interviews with African or West Indian artists or writers passing through London with a lively mix of review pieces and performances. Within a few short years the Centre had produced over five hundred radio programs, recordings of which found their way beyond English-speaking African stations to the Caribbean and North America, with radio networks extending to India, France, Canada, and Australia. One of the lesser-known cultural hubs of the period, the Transcription Centre adds several important strands to discussions of Cold War literary culture. It illustrates the issues of mobility, diaspora, patronage, and hospitality that undergird the political and cultural affiliations structuring the period; offers evidence of the many negotiations and maneuvers embarked upon by African writers, institutions, and their funders; and expands our sense of the media that facilitated the production, circulation, and reception of literature and criticism during the Cold War.

See Bailkin (2014) for a fuller historical overview of the Transcription Centre in the context of decolonization, independence, and the Cold War. 1

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The Transcription Centre supported Anglophone African letters and the writing of the Black diaspora in the United States, Caribbean, and Britain more generally, at an important period in its historical development as art. The Centre provided an institutional support infrastructure in the form of income and encouragement that provided paid review and radio work for writers like Nkosi, the Ugandans John Nagenda and Robert Serumaga, and the Ghanaian Frances Ademola. It gave early exposure and a global profile to well-known writers like Andrew Salkey, Ama Ata Aidoo, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Christopher Okigbo, and Nobel Prize winner Wole Soyinka. The Centre’s physical headquarters in the postcolonial metropolis capitalized on the burgeoning English-speaking African diasporic scene in Britain during the 1960s and 1970s and housed a community of literary producers, serving as a studio, a library and reading room, a cultural center, and an informal social space, granting members access to a convivial network of literary peers who might offer feedback and critique. Although only a comprehensive study of the Centre’s back catalogue can answer definitively how the Centre influenced the trajectory of African literature, it clearly contributed to a “radiogenic” literature, the kind of writing that anticipated and imagined its own listening public. The Transcription Centre profiled many registers of voice: from Duerden’s BBC English to Nkosi’s well-rounded intonations and Frances Ademola’s fluid eloquence to the spectrum of West Indian Englishes voiced by the Guyanese Wilson Harris and the Trinidadian Samuel Selvon. These voices traveled along and inhabited a range of different spoken forms such as the carefully scripted studio feature, literary readings and dramatizations, interviews, and free-flowing discussions, reflecting a literature that would take voice and a diversity of Englishes seriously. At the same time, the Centre also embodied the conditions of its literary moment. The principle of casual conversation, for instance, was borne out in its interviews, while the cut-and-paste format of the major 1960s literary magazines was captured in audio form in Africa Abroad. What does the Transcription Centre bring to our understanding of Cold War literary culture’s intersections with the process of decolonization? The Centre was operating at a time when writers were wrangling about what the political, cultural, and economic effects of decolonization meant for literature, ideas, and the situation of the writer in or from these nations. The Centre’s activities coincided with and spoke to the conceptual question of what “African literature” came to mean and who was involved in its definition—questions not easily separable from pressing political questions. Indeed, the specter of external interference in Africa was often tagged on to the fierce debate about the languages of African literature, specifically the legitimacy of ex-imperial languages and the fate of African languages themselves. In 1963 the Nigerian Obi Wali decried the English-language African literature produced by and supposedly limited to “European-oriented college graduates in the new universities of Africa” and “their Western midwives” in his polemic “The Dead End of African Literature” (Wali 1997: 332). He decried Soyinka’s English-language Dance of the Forest, a play staged as part of the Nigerian Independence celebrations in 1960, as readily comprehensible to “less than one per cent of the Nigerian people.” These points about the linguistic materials of African literature, and the pretensions of his colonially educated peers, as he saw them, showed how these two sets of political pressures intersected: in Wali’s eyes, “a true culture of the African peoples” “would not rely on slogans and propaganda, nor on patronage of doubtful intentions” (Wali 1997: 334). Wali’s fears about suspicious patronage were well-founded, because both sides in the Cold War were actively seeking to court the decolonizing world—African writers and intellectuals in particular—through soft power. Some of the Transcription Centre’s own funding was traceable to

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the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) through the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF), a wellknown cultural organization set up in the 1950s to support broadly pro-Western, non-Communist leftist ventures in literary, artistic, and intellectual culture. By offering African writers work, the Transcription Centre underwrote their economic freedom, but it also made them reliant upon Cold War–era state institutions. The Transcription Centre’s programming embodied Cold War pressures and priorities: on the one hand, the CCF elided some of the more obvious forms of ideological determination and stopped short of leveraging a specific idea of “culture” from above. On the other hand, the Congress was much more interested in political than it was on literary discussion. Although the CCF tended to observe rather than interfere, they kept a close eye on the financially overstretched Centre’s activities, which was regularly forced to negotiate a position for itself. However, the Transcription Centre also helps us understand how Cold War–era literature appeared and circulated in the form of prerecorded programs for radio broadcast, and not just in individually authored print publications or the little magazines, periodicals, and anthologies with which we are familiar. The simultaneity of radio across a range of spaces enables community formation at the local, national, and transnational level, negotiating distance and intimacy. A publicmaking technology, radio is an “aural ‘eye’ ” through which the world “saw” the African continent and its diaspora (Gunner, Ligaga, and Moyo 2011: 1). Radio was particularly valuable—and particularly contested—in the context of the Cold War, and sub-Saharan Africa was a populated and cosmopolitan landscape: Aminu Abdullahi, the Nigerian critic who took over from Nkosi as producer on Africa Abroad, records the “Eastern European and Chinese advisors working feverishly at Tanzania Broadcasting Corporation,” the “East German engineers crafting a powerful transmitter to beam broadcasts to the rest of East Africa,” and the “Israeli engineers working with West Germans” in Malawi to set up medium-wave transmitters dispatched from the United States to mark independence (Bailkin 2014: 237). Such collective endeavors tend to complicate any easy picture of Cold War literary relations as just grubby exchanges between romantic individuals and monolithic state institutions governed by an insidious incorporative logic. Instead, radio represents “a process of culture involving an exchange of meanings … rather than a mere instrument of power” (Gunner, Ligaga, and Moyo 2011: 5). The Transcription Centre routes Cold War literary culture through histories of media production, circulation, and reception, even as the mediascapes of Cold War radio broadcast speak to the unevenness of media ownership, creation, and control in a period where Euro-American organizations sold intellectual content back to African stations within nascent local media infrastructures.2 The radio’s “political and cultural purposing in the age of the Cold War” indicates something of its possibilities under such conditions, and the Transcription Centre saw itself as doing important cultural—rather than crudely political—work (Pinto 2012). Rather than promulgate a carefully controlled program of cultural propaganda, it aimed to promote Africa and the culture of its diaspora across the globe. The 250 hours or so of radio programs recorded at the Transcription Centre, and now held at the British Library Sound Archive, invite us to take “sound as [an] analytical point of departure” for interpreting its creative production (Sterne 2012: 2). The soundscapes of these programs

The term “mediascapes” register “both the distribution of the electronic capabilities to produce and disseminate information” and “the images of the world created by these media” with all their contingencies of mediation and reception, “depending on their mode (documentary or entertainment), their hardware (electronic or pre-electronic), their audiences (local, national or transnational) and the interests of those who own and control them” (Appadurai 1990: 299). 2

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include signature musical “bumpers” such as Cannonball Adderley’s “African Waltz” in Africa Abroad, as well as the stillness and apparent emptiness of studio sound versus the scratchier on-site recordings. Attention to the aural soundscape of the recordings—what Gunner calls “Africa on the rise and talking, making, remembering”—sharpens attention to the cultural politics of the programs and allows us to hear the forms of subjectivity, affect, and sociability they instituted within encoded hierarchies of generation, ethnicity, gender, geography, and class (Gunner 2010: 268; Pinto 2012). Consider the differences between two Transcription Centre features on Nigerian literature in English: the first, a discussion on recent West African writing in English, contained all the conversational rapidity of the salon, as the two peers Nkosi and Donatus Nwoga compared Amos Tutuola’s folkloric narrative The Palm-Wine Drinkard (widely considered the first anglophone Nigerian novel published in England) with Achebe’s “College English” and Cyprian Ekwensi’s “racy, urban” Lagos pidgin (Nwoga and Nkosi n.d.). The second, Nkosi’s interview with Tutuola himself, was all evasion, hesitation, and nervous laughter. The older, rural-dwelling Tutuola managed to avoid being drawn out on almost everything, leaving Nkosi to work with the unspoken gaps and silences. Nkosi, ever the erudite professional critic, asked whether Tutuola had read much vernacular Nigerian literature, to which Tutuola—the enigmatic amateur—said no: “I prefer everything that happens in the jungle” (Nkosi and Tutuola n.d.). The Centre is thus an example of creative coproduction, as writers interviewed other writers, peers appeared in conversation with one another, and programs combined major names with emerging figures, and writers resident in the African continent talked with those in exile abroad.

THE CONGRESS FOR CULTURAL FREEDOM AND AFRICAN LITERARY CULTURE In keeping with this handbook’s focus on the organizations and practices surrounding literary production during the Cold War, we need to begin with the Centre’s origins under the aegis of the well-known pro-Western, non-Communist left group: the CCF. Formed in Berlin in 1950, the Congress rapidly became one of the leading sponsors of literature and culture across the postwar world of the 1950s and 1960s. Its ideal of “cultural freedom”—articulated in both classically liberal and vehemently anticommunist terms—motivated the financing of a range of quasi-independent literary and cultural ventures across the globe. By the end of the 1950s the CCF had national affiliates in countries across the world, and its subsidies linked some of the most influential sites of intellectual, critical, and literary production: Encounter in Britain, Preuves in France, Forum in Germany, Cuadernos in Latin America, Quadrant in Australia, Quest in India. The CCF was active in the Indian subcontinent and in South-East Asia, particularly India, Pakistan, and Japan, from the 1950s, motivated by anxieties about the ambivalence of nonaligned states. By the mid-1950s the Congress concentrated increasingly on fortifying liberal outlooks in Africa and Asia. Colonies and emerging nations in West and North Africa were viewed as undergoing particularly swift transformation in the media, educational, and political structures. In 1959 the Congress targeted Tunis, Tunisia (which had become independent from France in 1956), and Ibadan, Nigeria (which would not gain its independence from Great Britain until 1960), as locations for its first large-scale conferences on the African continent and imagined plans for African counterparts to Encounter and Preuves. It was particularly keen to diffuse the fraught discussions around colonialism that had taken center stage at the 1955 Bandung Conference of nonaligned nations. The CCF regarded

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lingering grievances against colonialism as a vast gulf separating intellectuals in the so-called Third World from those in the West, impeding meaningful cultural and political contact. Advised by the University of Chicago sociologist Edward Shils, the CCF thus rebranded itself from an organization that defended culture from forces of political repression to one that actively enabled literary and artistic creativity by funding the infrastructure for its production, dissemination, and consumption in the so-called underdeveloped world. Though clearly strategic, adopting the role of cultural patron was also part of a wider shift in which “Free World” national governments shouldered the responsibility of securing literature, art, and culture’s right to exist. The Congress would become one of the best-known and influential institutions creating a space for African literary writing and criticism to flourish during the 1960s. Directed by South African activist, writer, and public intellectual Es’kia Mphahlele, the CCF’s Africa program created important new openings for print cultures to emerge on the continent, governed by a principle of local invitation. The African program’s purview was the former English-speaking colonies in the West, East, and South, and it underwrote a critical stage in the development of African anglophone literary cultures through funding the magazines Black Orpheus in Ibadan, Transition in Kampala, The Classic in Johannesburg, and The New African in Cape Town. It also underwrote, and to some extent helped conceptualize, key conferences about the languages of a postimperial African literature in Makerere in 1962, and the languages of university literature teaching in Dakar and Freetown the following year. In February 1967 American journalists revealed that CIA funds had underpinned the activities of the supposedly independent Congress through a series of private American trusts, notably the Farfield Foundation. Scholars have long debated the sinister versus benign role of the CIA in this peculiar—or peculiarly characteristic—scenario, and recent scholarship has positioned the CCF as part of a wider generation of quasi-autonomous cultural mediators that sought to saturate the global public sphere through the “transatlantization” of works, the reputation-building of individual writers and the making of world literary careers, and the sponsorship of apparently autonomous cultural products such as periodicals and little magazines (Rubin 2012: 20). Of course, the CCF was also an institution in its own right, with its own governing interests, protocols, and methods, even as it colluded with and rivaled more official kinds of Cold War propaganda. Energized by the steady stream of disillusioned former communists and organized on a voluntary basis in order to satisfy its liberal principles, the CCF was deeply committed to reaching the world’s cultural and intellectual elites—among whom writers of literature held esteemed status. Its decentralized and ostensibly separate appearance rivaled the propaganda machines of the Soviet Cominform and Britain’s Information Research Department. The CCF’s ventures in the incipient postcolonial world, specifically in sub-Saharan Africa, are instructive here. Given the likelihood with which foreign organizations in this wider landscape would be regarded as neocolonial foreign stooges, the Congress went a considerable distance to derive its legitimacy through relatively independent individuals through whom it could support worthwhile cultural ventures. While some critics have been animated by the CIA’s secret infiltration of African publishers and literary magazines, editors rarely consulted with CCF executives in Paris regarding the literary contents of their journals. Mphahlele, who had moved on by the time of the CIA revelations, was himself an important and judicious mediator of its efforts. A prominent writer in his own right, banned and in exile from South Africa, Mphahlele linked the CCF’s desire to protect freedom of expression to wider social issues of racial inequality and injustice.

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Mphahlele lamented how the West was itself “continually surrendering intellectual honesty and freedom,” pointing to the censure and discontinued patronage of the African American communist Paul Robeson and Russian writer and Nobel Prize winner Boris Pasternak for “say[ing] things that offend authority in their respective countries,” but added that artistic autonomy had as much to do with the “race, colour and religious discrimination, intellectual dishonesty and the inequality of privilege” of which apartheid South Africa was exemplary (Mphahlele 1960: 63). In the midst of a polarized and polarizing Cold War context, Mphahlele brought counterthought to the CCF by questioning its typically universalist premises while simultaneously putting its money to good use by funding African writers, magazines, and cultural centers. He frequently punctured the CCF’s lofty liberal–humanist ideas about freedom, about itself, and about the “world” beyond Euro-America by asking what it meant to talk about freedom from an African perspective, rather than the privileged position of Western liberal modernity. The meaning of “cultural freedom” “depend[ed] on the socio-political conditions of any territory” and had to be worked out in the urban, industrialized, and multiracial settings of modern Africa to be worth its salt (Mphahlele 1967). Above all else, “Africa should not be turned into another theatre of the Cold War” by such organizations as the CCF. The supremacy of the individual in Western thought was also at odds with African notions: culture was “not a performance for the few who can get into formal dress and afford a ticket to watch it,” he wrote in Encounter, but “part of the very process of living” in which a much larger community participated (Mphahlele 1960: 62). In other words, the African sensibility existed on a different plane than “the competitive economics of the West.” Mphahlele was motivated by his own concerns about the deep loss of focus, selfhood, and confidence that had affected African creativity under European colonialism. This made him more concerned with local literary developments over what he regarded as the sweepingly ideological and essentialist character of the négritude movement, associated with onetime assimilated Francophone writers Aimee Césaire and Leopold Senghor, the Paris-based Présence Africaine and its editor Alioune Diop, and the Society of African Culture. The négritude movement was to some extent framed as the philosophical and creative accompaniment to an African socialism and its leftist associations certainly made it less palatable to the CCF and the Transcription Centre. Thus the Transcription Centre program Africa Abroad had to continually find ways to discuss Pan-Africanism without invoking négritude; its rejection was in keeping with “the political investments of the U.S. funding sources behind the Transcription Centre” (Cyzewski 2016: 212). For Mphahlele’s part, by contrast, négritude’s concepts of racial brotherhood were “too preoccupied with anthropological creepycrawlies” to attend to the “cultural crosscurrents that characterize artistic expression in multiracial societies” like South Africa, “a country where paradoxes overlap most painfully” (Mphahlele 1962: 27, 39).

BROADCAST BEGINNINGS In 1961 the CCF commissioned BBC employee Dennis Duerden to survey future broadcasting opportunities in several newly independent African states such as Ghana, Sierra Leone, Nigeria, and Zambia. The ultimate goal was to produce and broadcast short CCF radio programs at local radio stations and counter the “free material from Moscow, Beijing, and even Pyongyang” being channeled to the radio and television stations of those nations (Moore 2002: 168). Duerden was a former education officer in Northern Nigeria who produced Hausa-language broadcast materials

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for the BBC and who felt that his side-work for the CCF would serve the interests of culture: the Congress wished to encourage African writers, intellectuals, and university workers in their own culture and in sound radio as a field in its own right.3 Introduced by the BBC to radio station directors on the continent as a member of the BBC African Service, Duerden brought with him a series of sample programs: a panel on “The unity of African culture” featuring William Abrahams and Tayeb Salih, then a BBC Arabic Features producer; a talk on “African Marxism” by Batchelor Folson, a research fellow from Ghana at Oxford; and a discussion on “Vernacular poetry and its translation” between Abrahams and Bloke Modisane. Once on the ground, however, Duerden quickly realized the need to avoid being seen to “drag [the African listener] into the maelstrom of tensions created by the ideological division between East and West” and issued sharp warnings about the content, tone, and character of future programs back to Paris. The Congress should “not behave like a Dutch uncle”—that is, offer blunt criticisms—“showing him dangers ahead which he believes to be imaginary.”4 Folson’s piece was an interesting test case here: on the one hand, the CCF hoped it might offer a criticism of Marx from an African perspective, which it did to some extent in arguing that it was “increasingly rare to come across a Marxist who is not also a Communist.” On the other hand were concerns about how it might go down in Ghana given that it directly addressed the Pan-Africanist, socialist, and nationalist Kwame Nkrumah, who was elected president of Ghana in 1960 following the end of British rule in 1957 and would turn the country into a one-party state. Nkrumah was an original theorist of neocolonialism and helped found the Non-Aligned Movement (he famously declared “we face neither East, nor West; we face Forward”) and yet Ghana had deep political and economic ties with the Soviet Union, and Nkrumah himself toured Eastern bloc countries in the early 1960s (Popescu 2020: 136–7). In the end, Folson’s program was deemed ill-suited for broadcast in Ghana itself, lest he ruin the chances for future Centre programs to make it in the country. Contrary to the CCF’s original intention for these programs to focus on social and political life, Duerden recommended they prioritize art, literature, music, and architecture, at least at first. In the event, it was vernacular poetry, not Marx, that caught the attention of the director of Programs at the Nigerian Broadcasting Company: Chinua Achebe, who commissioned a sixpart series of poetry recordings in Acholi, Akan, Zulu, Hausa, and Somali, and ten programs on Nigerians living in Britain (Figure 3). Achebe (who had already published his novels Things Fall Apart and No Longer at Ease, but still maintained his day job in radio) also strongly preferred the snappy fifteen-minute format because it didn’t tax the audience’s attention. Another early consumer of Transcription Centre programs was Tanzania; the Tanganyika Broadcasting Corporation commissioned a twelve-part series on African literature, the scripts also transcribed for study and discussion in university Extra-Mural Departments. By 1963 Africa Abroad would be broadcast weekly on German radio and in Sierra Leone, and monthly in Uganda. Duerden was particularly conscious of the fact that the consumption of programs differed according to country and location; there were inevitably different desires and demands, not least for some direct reference to the specific country in which each program aired. Africa Abroad was thus originally envisaged as a way

See Dennis Duerden, Letter to West African Programme Organiser, May 5, 1961, Box 16. Transcription Centre Archives, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin. 4 Dennis Duerden, “Broadcasting in Africa: a report prepared for the Congress for Cultural Freedom,” September 1961. Box 21, folder 1. Transcription Centre Archives, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin. 3

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of getting news out about a whole range of different topics in order to funnel as much as possible into a show that could broadcast in as many places as possible. Deeply excited by the possibilities of radio and television, Duerden’s vision for the Transcription Centre saw beyond Africa. He envisaged the African wing as part of a network that included offices in Asia and South America in order that programs would “ultimately contain contributions from all the other places and become ‘cross-cultural’.”5 Duerden did not adhere to the conventional imperial or Cold War geographies that his profile as a former-BBC-man-turned-cultural-Cold-Warrior might imply (Bailkin 2014: 239). His larger view was also borne out in his early plans to treat African literature as a diverse and varied phenomenon. The twelve-part series on African literature, featuring segments on “African Short Story Writers,” “Nigerian Novelists,” and “African Poets and Dramatists,” grew to twenty-five to take in a greater range of subjects, including “West Indian Novelists,” ‘FrenchAfrican Novelists,” “Haitian Novelists,” “Afro-American Poets,” “South American Literature,” “Vernacular Literature,” with additional programs specifically on Langston Hughes and Leopold Senghor.6 This selection still privileged English over other languages (African and European) and was heavily male-dominated. In practice, both Duerden’s vision and the practical reality of the Transcription Centre’s precarious finances ran up against the reality of the CCF’s patronage, which totaled only £12,000 in 1963. Financial restrictions often limited what the Transcription Centre could achieve, and when Duerden’s ambitions got too expansive, Paris always steered him back to the core task of building a solid reputation for the CCF on the African continent. The broadly literary and cultural orientation of the Centre’s programming, and the reality of income generation, also posed a continual source of tension with its patron. The CCF’s John Hunt advised the Centre to pivot toward political, economic, and social topics to avoid the programs being too literary. (The preponderance of book reviews in Africa Abroad was partly a compromise with Paris to increase the quantity of this kind of content.) The CCF also urged Duerden to continue pressing sales to drum up revenue for future projects and advised the Centre to circulate to radio stations appealing imaginative brochures about what the Transcription Centre was doing and the media products it had to sell.7 All in all, the CCF kept a gentle eye on things, following up on delayed pieces of work, though it avoided reviewing content on a program-by-program basis. The CCF was touchier about receiving public credit for its sponsorship of the Centre. One particularly sniffy letter, griping about Nkosi’s failure to mention the Congress in a feature on the Mbari Club in Ibadan, reflected one of the great ironies of the CCF: on the one hand, the CCF deliberately showcased African-led literary, broadcasting, and cultural work about sub-Saharan Africa, where the impression of such autonomy could yield favorable attention on the group for doing so; on the other hand, it was clearly anxious to receive good press, no doubt in order to justify to its (overt and covert) funders the return-on-investment of bankrolling the group’s work in the first place. Duerden was not above pointing out these tensions and contradictions to his sponsors. One letter calmly explained that he had deliberately avoided mentioning the CCF in a Transcription Centre Dennis Duerden letter to John Hunt, June 28, 1962. Box 21, folder 6. Transcription Centre Archives, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin. 6 Dennis Duerden letter to Ezekiel Mphahlele, March 2, 1962. Box 17, Folder 15. Transcription Centre Archives, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin. 7 John Hunt to Dennis Duerden, June 26, 1962. Box 21, Folder 6. Transcription Centre Archives, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin. Though the programs were roughly ten guineas each, the Centre deployed different pricing regimes depending on what it could reasonably extract, while still ensuring their use. 5

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FIGURE 3:  A photograph of Chinua Achebe is used to promote the “African Writers of Today” series, featured on the US National Educational Television network in the mid-sixties. Achebe, then employed at the Nigerian Broadcasting Corporation, was also a member of the Transcription Centre advisory committee. The Transcription Center Records, Manuscript No. 04266, box 24.5, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin.

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program on the 1962 Kampala African Writers conference in order to “preserve the image of encouraging work done by Africans for Africans.”8 When it came to these structuring imperatives what was needed was “a balance between the two.”

AFRICA IN BLOOMSBURY The CCF sought to capitalize on the increasingly transnational literary scene, as creative writers, artists, and activists took hold of opportunities abroad. Ironically, the Transcription Centre’s metropolitan London location was central to the character of the Pan-African literary culture it desired, expressed, and helped produce. Duerden strongly preferred London as a cosmopolitan and transnational base for broadcasting work to and about Africa over what he regarded as the narrower, nationalistic orientation of content produced in African countries themselves. Initially located at 135 Oxford Street, the Transcription Centre moved to 38 Dover Street just off Piccadilly, before relocating to less well-sited offices nearer Paddington. The Transcription Centre archive documents a near flood of visiting writers, artists, intellectuals, politicians, and employees of broadcasting firms who streamed through the Centre’s doors. Other similar London-based organizations acted as “clearing houses” for African and Caribbean diaspora writing at mid-century, and like the BBC Caribbean Voices program in the 1950s and the Heinemann African Writers Series in the 1960s and 1970s, the Centre kept cash-strapped expatriate writers and artists afloat with freelance radio work. Diaspora writers implored Duerden to help them navigate the postimperial state by deploying his personal charisma and insistence on the officials of the Home Office. The Transcription Centre thus brings to life the friendship and mentorship that characterized relationships across the lines of power during independence (Bailkin 2014: 231). Linked to this is the Transcription Centre’s metropolitan London location itself, which played a big part in the Centre’s status as a buoyant social hub. From here, the Centre shared in the literary cosmopolitanism of the 1960s; it was part of a circuit of literary, artistic, broadcasting, and publishing institutions, including the Institute for Contemporary Arts, the publishers Faber & Faber and Oxford University Press, and quasigovernmental organizations such as the Commonwealth Institute and the British Council. African diaspora writers, artists, and critics traveled this circuit as they built reputations and made careers, formed friendships and antagonisms, leveraged opportunity against economic necessity, crafted new work, undertook formal study, and engaged in necessary activism (Low 2020). The Transcription Centre thus engages the complex issues of mobility, hospitality, and diaspora that undergirded the political and cultural affiliations structuring the Cold War period, an era in which state maneuvers belied the movements of individuals internationally, all of which had a bearing on the degrees of conviviality the Centre afforded in practice. Duerden’s early investigations for the new broadcasting venture showed him that a dedicated physical space in central London was imperative. Because of the practical difficulties of getting contributors together to record sample programs, Duerden urged the Congress to fund a professional studio that would also act as a “social center,” “common room,” and “clearing house” that would not only put the Centre at the heart of a critical and creative scene and present rich pickings for future programs but also symbolize the free exchange of ideas about African topics as Dennis Duerden letter to John Hunt, September 19, 1962. Box 21, Folder 6. Transcription Centre Archives, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin. 8

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per the CCF’s wider agenda.9 It seems almost overdetermined that Duerden wanted to locate the Centre in Bloomsbury, with its modernist literary, intellectual, and publishing heritage, and this location also strongly appealed to the CCF who primarily sought to reach a cultivated audience of influential figures. But this was all about fitting African literary production into an Anglo-American framework. Hunt urged Nkosi to write a puff piece for the Guardian “along the lines of ‘Africans produce their own Third Programme [the BBC’s cultural-aimed network] for Africa’.”10 Such wellmeaning but patronizing suggestions, envisioning African literary production only as a reflection of European models, recalled earlier attempts to foster “African” equivalents to Encounter, a wrongheaded push that initially informed CCF sponsorship of journals like Black Orpheus and Transition. As Monica Popescu notes, the CCF regularly steered its various African initiatives to “look up to … Encounter as a paragon of intellectual rigor” (Popescu 2020: 43). Although the Transcription Centre was originally intended to record interviews, its remit grew to something much larger: it branched out into commissioning radio plays, music recordings, and television programs, and sponsored cultural events including the 1965 Commonwealth Arts Festival (Moore 2002: 167). The Transcription Centre building ended up hosting formal events, activities, interviews, and was at the heart of an altogether lively social scene. At the same time, it was the site of serious radio work: prescripted studio recordings, script drafting and composition, editing and transcribing recordings, and the preparation of publicity sheets to pump for sales. Nkosi had a portable recording device with which he could make recordings in as many places as possible and engage overseas correspondents to record special reports. He also spearheaded one of the Centre’s forms of literary sociability, an African Writers Circle that brought writers in the city together on Wednesday nights for informal discussion with the explicit aim of building a literary network around the Centre in the hope it would yield valuable content for future programming. In this respect, the Writers Circle echoed the Mbari franchise of artists and writers clubs in Nigeria. Initially formed as the “Ibadan Writers Group” by Ulli Beier, Soyinka, and Mphahlele, Mbari evolved to comprise a cultural club, exhibition space, library, and publishing house. Nkosi’s profile of the Ibadan Mbari Club described a “literary atmosphere … of crowded intellectual disorder, the sweltering heat of talk, of discovery, of experiment, and of the candour of criticism” in which English graduates from the same elite Nigerian universities would “deliver themselves freely of literary judgements on one another with an absolute lack of sentimentality” (Nkosi 1962). The Transcription Centre was, for a time, at the center of excited plans for a volunteer-run Mbari London, connecting it more firmly to a transnational family of local hubs creating generative conditions for new African writing, art, criticism, and theatre. Another node in the Mbari network was the Chemchemi Centre in Nairobi, which Mphahlele set up with space for offices, art galleries, reference libraries, and creative writing workshops to stimulate locally grown literary material, including fiction and drama for radio. As opposed to expensive London, cheap Nairobi offered an altogether higher degree of civilization, Mphahlele joked.11 In the end neither plan came to fruition; Nkosi refused to take on the directorship on top of his work as a producer, and Chemchemi shut down partly because of the

Duerden, “Broadcasting in Africa.” John Hunt letter to Dennis Duerden, September 25, 1962. Box 21, Folder 6. Transcription Centre Archives, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin. 11 Ezekiel Mphahlele letter to Dennis Duerden, October 30, 1963. Box 17, Folder 15. Transcription Centre Archives, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin. 9

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xenophobia Mphahlele received as a South African in Kenya, illustrating this difficulty of working across ethnic and national groups. The Transcription Centre also fostered literary–political activism typically associated with the international writers’ and free expression group Poets, Essayists, and Novelists (PEN). This was true at the level of the Centre’s programs and sales—some of its more consciously anti-apartheid programming aired on stations in Denmark, Sweden, Czech Republic, and even the USSR. That a CCF-sponsored group had its programs run on radio stations in the Eastern bloc may seem surprising but spoke to the way apartheid and other anticolonial struggles taking place in Southern Africa had acquired a Cold War valence (see Christopher Ouma’s piece elsewhere in this volume for a more expansive discussion of this). That the virulently anticommunist apartheid regime was supported by Britain and the United States opened the door for the USSR to step into South African affairs through the (banned) South African Communist Party’s strong links with the African National Congress. The CCF was keenly aware of this and was worried by the appeal of communism among South Africa’s politically committed writers and intellectuals. It responded with its own flagship news bulletin South Africa: Information and Analysis, produced by Mphahlele and Nkosi, featuring information and analysis as seen from the inside. Despite the CCF’s objection to its quashing of cultural freedoms, apartheid South Africa challenged the CCF’s desire to not to be seen to work for or against established governments. By way of compromise, it supported beleaguered individuals pursue their artistic—rather than political—interests, reflected in financed stints for the writer Richard Rive and composer Todd Matshikiza abroad, among others. The Transcription Centre powerfully expressed its own anti-apartheid commitments in the networks it mobilized to defend the poet Dennis Brutus, shot by a white South African policeman in 1963. That year, the Centre published a joint letter in The Times, signed by the great and the good of mid-century literary and intellectual culture including V. S. Naipaul, Herbert Read, Iris Murdoch, Colin MacInnes, J. B. Priestly, Andrew Salkey, Harold Pinter, Angus Wilson, C. L. R. James, Richard Hoggart, and others. Similar international campaigns were organized to support Soyinka and the Ugandan editor of Transition, Rajat Neogy. The Transcription Centre’s physical and cultural space also sustained creativity in the midst of other fraught political circumstances. The poet Christopher Okigbo, for instance, contrasted the moments of creative inspiration he experienced at the Centre to the fiercely policed conditions leading up to the secession of the Republic of Biafra from Nigeria in May 1967. It was no accident that Okigbo wrote to request help from the Farfield Foundation to subsidize production runs for The Citadel Press, the independent publishing house he set up with Achebe, a fellow supporter of the Biafran cause. The Centre’s cosmopolitan literary geography thus registered the “the intensely convivial energy of post-war London’s cultural (and multicultural) life” and voiced “a transnational black solidarity” in a city with a long history of Pan-Africanist, anticolonial, and anti-apartheid activism (Bailkin 2014: 231, 234). Still, the Cold War–inflected politics of the Centre’s patronage had a distinct bearing on the kind of hospitality it offered. Gail Low notes that the Centre mirrored Caribbean Voices “as a transnational metropolitan nexus of cultural activity” but “less influentially and more problematically” than the BBC, given the sources of its funding (Low 2020: 280). Of course we can also read the fact that writers “dropped in” to the Transcription Centre’s offices as the halfway point in longer journeys to or from the United States as “a telling sign of the decentring of Britain on the world stage” as the United States successfully courted writers from the decolonizing world (Cyzewski 2016: 211).

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LA GUMA AND THE TRANSCRIPTION CENTRE The political tenor of the Transcription Centre programs in the context of Cold War political developments and decolonization bears out interestingly in relation to Alex La Guma, another South African the apartheid regime viewed as a danger for his openly Marxist and Black liberation politics. In an example of how the Centre’s literary activism worked at the level of employment, in 1966 the Centre retained La Guma as a drama adviser, partly in a bid to get him out of South Africa. Leaflets and other documents in the archive highlight the extent to which La Guma and his sponsors were forced to negotiate the demands of the British Ministry of Labour, which distributed work permits to foreign nationals and afforded little space outside the hospitality and catering industries. The Labour office required documentary evidence for skilled occupations such as literary advising and La Guma’s explicitly political writing—or writing explicitly positioned in fiercely political contexts—didn’t seem to fit. The Transcription Centre stressed his artistry: La Guma needed to advise on an upcoming recording project that put his 1962 short novel A Walk in the Night to music. A Walk in the Night itself indexes a characteristically Cold War–inflected publication history: the novel was first published by Mbari through funding from the Farfield Foundation and the Merrill Foundation in the United States; CCF networks then helped distribute La Guma’s writing in the United States at the same time as interest in his work burgeoned in the Soviet Union in translation. La Guma’s subsequent novel The Stone Country (1967) appeared with Stefan Heym’s East German–funded Seven Seas Books. Such examples thus highlighted the contingency with which African literary voices negotiated and acquired recognition through the different ideological, aesthetic, and economic concerns of publishers in a geopolitically inflected global marketplace (Van der Vlies 2007). Of course, writers like La Guma were aware of the attention their writing was receiving overseas, and its mediation. Indeed, the Transcription Centre’s organizational support for (and in some senses protection of) La Guma’s position as a writer made the work he produced for them all the more interesting. In 1967 he scripted a six-part political satire called “How an African Government Works,” later recorded at the Transcription Centre with performances by Cosmo Pieterse, Valerie Murray, and Lionel Ngkane, the South African director of the important 1966 film about Notting Hill, Jonny + Jemima. Set in an invented African nation at the point of independence called the Republic of Kilibasi, the series followed the various antics of Mr. Mungo, a minister of public works who largely does no work and who can extract no essential supplies from the Ministry of Supply. “How an African Government Works” sent up the question of who is influencing whom in the prevailing conditions of postcolonial Africa. Mungo works under the prime ministership of one Mr. Tombola, part hapless buffoon, part nationalist stooge. “Tombola” is also the name of a popular game of chance, underscoring La Guma’s point that good governance in Africa happens only by chance, and his wry skepticism about how new postcolonial regimes took after their abusive or capricious colonial predecessors. In the opening episode, Mungo loudly decries the defective intercom on his desk as “silent as the grave of imperialism!” before discovering that it turns out to be a gift from the country’s overseas benefactors who donate electrical equipment but forget the wiring (“another plot of the neocolonists!”) (La Guma 1967). Later, Mungo is forced to deal with a state tax on citizens who do not own washing machines, a measure designed to push up the sale of imported luxury goods. Life in the Republic can be read as loosely mapped onto postcolonial

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Kenya, yet La Guma’s satire is clearly designed to apply more broadly.12 A vocal nationalist in cahoots with the British (themselves depicted in the scripts through the blustering Colonel Sabrean Hagglebotham), Mungo is perpetually concerned with keeping up appearances. Rejecting his cup of tea as “a non-African beverage,” he insists on the national product—cocoa—even if it is supplied by the English company Bourneville. If La Guma’s political writing had made it more difficult for him to show that he was indeed a desirable foreign national to the British state, his satire of postcolonial African governments also proved problematic. Feedback from the West German state broadcaster Deutsche Welle, which regularly broadcast Africa Abroad, demonstrated how easily some overseas buyers were thrown off by tone. The African readers employed by Deutsche Welle found the scripts for the early episodes “rather heavily laden with satire which could be interpreted as being against African Governments in general!” while Mungo himself looked “like a pale reflection of the Colonial powers which he is anxious to replace. Perhaps this is intentional?”13 The Transcription Centre did not request edits to the script and rationalized that the humor and “lightness of touch” would gain at least some listeners compared to “something too ponderous and heavy-going.” Nonetheless, La Guma was advised to dilute the satire for the remaining five parts to avoid damaging sales by putting the political neutrality of purchasing stations in doubt. Deutsche Welle was particularly concerned about being “accused of sending out programmes which could be misconstrued in their political content or comment.” On first glance, the feedback loop within the production cycle for “How An African Government Works” demonstrates how Transcription Centre’s media products helped construct an image of Africa, which was then developed further in feedback from consumers (Bailkin 2014: 238). Writers like La Guma were effectively steered away from the ambiguous (and potentially dubious) literary ground of comedy and satire toward radio content about Africa that was “more straightforwardly ‘informative’.” For his part, La Guma was remarkably untroubled by the response—he knew he was some distance from the censors back in South Africa—and his reply offered the briefest of acknowledgments before cracking on to the more urgent issue of his unpaid fees from the Centre. Nor did the warnings convince him to mute his cutting satire. The sixth and final episode, “Here Comes the Bride,” rounded off the series by using the forthcoming nuptials of Mungo’s secretary to stage a series of ministerial gaffes about the position of women in modern African society. (Cue Mungo airing suspicions about the import of second-wave feminist thinking from “our benefactors overseas”). The audio recordings of later episodes appear only to manage expectations by introducing the fifteen-minute dramatizations as “a light-hearted series by Alex La Guma.”

CONCLUSION The Transcription Centre expands what we know about Cold War radio, typically framed as the “weapon of choice” used by national information agencies positioned either side of a crude ideological dividing line between the East and West (Risso 2013: 145). In the Transcription Centre, however, we find a more politically diffuse transnational situation, located atop complex

Note the play on the Kenyan town and Mungo’s own passionate interest in Africanization and the concept of the “African personality.” 13 Howard Tucker letter to Alex La Guma, April 17, 1967. Box 17, Folder 9. Transcription Centre Archives, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin. 12

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postimperial and Cold War geographies, and one that encompassed a wider range of players. The Transcription Centre was steered at arm’s length by the CCF, an organization motivated by the possibilities of exporting a Euro-American liberal–individualist worldview to the global South. The CCF achieved its vision of a cultural sphere free of obligations temporarily and with partial success, but in the process made cultural agencies like the Transcription Centre heavily dependent on the most clandestine and shrouded subdivision of the US government. The Transcription Centre’s literary media products reflected the changing course of the Cold War in that it didn’t simply aim at antagonists behind the Iron Curtain but instead actively courted intellectuals and cultural workers in or from Africa who might be enticed by Soviet ideology instead. In eschewing a tightly controlled program of “crusading” cultural propaganda, it opted for programs that promoted a positive, dynamic, and outward-facing image of Africa and the culture of its diaspora. The fact that the Transcription Centre was observed carefully, rather than rigidly micromanaged, by its patron meant it was able to pass on a certain amount of freedom to writers from decolonizing nations to produce their own kinds of literary content, reminding us that African writers navigated the Cold War world strategically and pragmatically through processes of creative coproduction and negotiation. The freedom to write as one liked might come under pressure—think of the discomfort with which La Guma’s ambiguous radio play was received—yet it was also these same literary figures who, in the contexts of decolonization and the Cold War, helped transform abstract political visions into creative forms of realpolitik.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I am grateful to the Harry Ransom Center for supporting research in the Transcription Centre Archives through a fellowship in 2012 and to Julie Cyzewski, who generously shared her unpublished PhD thesis containing important new work on this topic.

WORKS CITED Appadurai, Arjun (1990), “Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy,” Theory, Culture & Society 7(2–3): 295–310. Bailkin, Jordanna (2014), “The Sounds of Independence? Lessons from Africa and Beyond at the Transcription Centre Archive,” History Workshop Journal 78: 229–45. https://doi.org/10.1093/hwj/dbu​019. Cyzewski, Julie (2016), “Broadcasting Friendship: Decolonization, Literature, and the BBC,” PhD Thesis, Ohio State University. Gunner, Liz (2010), “Reconfiguring Diaspora: Africa on the Rise and the Radio Voices of Lewis Nkosi and Bloke Modisane,” Social Dynamics 36(2): 256–71. https://doi.org/10.1080/02533​952.2010.489​329. Gunner, Liz, Dina Ligaga, and Dumisani Moyo, eds. (2011), Radio in Africa: Publics, Cultures, Communities, Johannesburg: Wits University Press. La Guma, Alex (1967), “Situations Vacant,” African Writers Club. British Library Sounds Archive. https://sou​ nds.bl.uk/Arts-lit​erat​ure-and-perf​orma​nce/Afri​can-Writ​ers-Club/024M-C0134​X012​5XX-010​0V0. Accessed January 13, 2022. Low, Gail (2020), “The Lure of Postwar London: Networks of People, Print, and Organisations,” in Mark U. Stein and Susheila Nasta (eds.), The Cambridge History of Black and Asian British Writing, 278–95, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/978110​8164​146.019.

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Moore, Gerald (2002), “The Transcription Centre in the Sixties: Navigating in Narrow Seas,” Research in African Literatures 33(3): 167–81. Mphahlele, Ezekiel (1960) “Out of Africa: A Negro Writer’s Reply,” Encounter (April). Mphahlele, Ezekiel (1962), The African Image, London: Faber and Faber. Mphahlele, Ezekiel (1967), “Mphahlele on the CIA,” Transition (December). Nkosi, Lewis (1962), “White Words,” The Guardian (September 13). Nkosi, Lewis, and Amos Tutuola (n.d. [c. 1960s]), Interview with Amos Tutuola. C134/404. https://sou​nds.bl.uk/ Arts-lit​erat​ure-and-perf​orma​nce/Afri​can-Writ​ers-Club/024M-C0134​X040​4XX-020​0V0. Accessed January 13, 2022. Nwoga, Donatus, and Lewis Nkosi (n.d.), “Three Nigerian Novelists,” African Writers Club. British Library Sounds Archive. https://sou​nds.bl.uk/Arts-lit​erat​ure-and-perf​orma​nce/Afri​can-Writ​ers-Club/024M-C0134​ X002​2XX-010​0V0. Accessed January 13, 2022. Pinto, Samantha (2012), “Decolonizing the Radio: Africa Abroad in the Age of Independence,” Sounding Out! December 17, 2012. https://sound​stud​iesb​log.com/tag/the-transc​ript​ion-cen​tre/. Accessed January 13, 2022. Popescu, Monica (2020), At Penpoint: African Literatures, Postcolonial Studies, and the Cold War, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Risso, Linda (2013), “Radio Wars: Broadcasting in the Cold War,” Cold War History 13(2): 145–52. Rubin, Andrew (2012), Archives of Authority: Empire, Culture, and the Cold War, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Sterne, Jonathan, ed. (2012), The Sound Studies Reader, New York: Routledge. Van der Vlies, Andrew (2007), South African Textual Cultures: White, Black, Read All Over, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Wali, Obiajunwa (1997), “The Dead End of African Literature,” Transition, no. 75/76: 330–5. https://doi. org/10.2307/2935​427.

FURTHER READING Bailkin, Jordanna (2014), “The Sounds of Independence? Lessons from Africa and Beyond at the Transcription Centre Archive,” History Workshop Journal 78: 229–45. https://doi.org/10.1093/hwj/dbu​019. Benson, Peter (1986), Black Orpheus, Transition, and Modern Cultural Awakening in Africa, Berkeley: University of California Press. Cyzewski, Julie (2021), “The ‘Tribal Drum’ and Literary Radio: The Postcolonial Poetics of the Transcription Centre’s Africa Abroad,” Modernism/Modernity Print Plus, https://mod​erni​smmo​dern​ity.org/artic​les/cyzew​skiliter​ary-radio-postc​olon​ial-poet​ics-transc​ript​ion-cen​tre-afr​ica-abr​oad (accessed August 16, 2021). Gunner, Liz (2010), “Reconfiguring Diaspora: Africa on the Rise and the Radio Voices of Lewis Nkosi and Bloke Modisane,” Social Dynamics 36(2): 256–71. https://doi.org/10.1080/02533​952.2010.489​329. Kalliney, Peter (2015), “Modernism, African Literature, and the Cold War,” Modern Language Quarterly 76(3): 333–68. Low, Gail (2020), “The Lure of Postwar London: Networks of People, Print, and Organisations,” in Mark U. Stein and Susheila Nasta (eds.), The Cambridge History of Black and Asian British Writing, 278–95, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/978110​8164​146.019. Moore, Gerald (2002), “The Transcription Centre in the Sixties: Navigating in Narrow Seas,” Research in African Literatures 33(3): 167–81.

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Pinto, Samantha (2012), “Decolonizing the Radio: Africa Abroad in the Age of Independence,” Sounding Out! December 17, 2012. https://sound​stud​iesb​log.com/tag/the-transc​ript​ion-cen​tre/. Popescu, Monica (2020), At Penpoint: African Literatures, Postcolonial Studies, and the Cold War, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Risso, Linda (2013), “Radio Wars: Broadcasting in the Cold War,” Cold War History 13(2): 145–52. Rubin, Andrew (2012), Archives of Authority: Empire, Culture, and the Cold War, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

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CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Creative Writing and the Cold War: Rebels with Transcripts ERIC BENNETT

In the United States during the early Cold War, many writers and scholars in the humanities sustained two big ideas in tension. One was that the best culture was culture against culture: adversarial, critical, avant-garde, difficult, and serious. The other was that only a universal vision for the human race could prevent the Third World War and nuclear apocalypse. On the one hand, people should be different. On the other, people had to be the same. Certain manifestations of the contradiction have received significant scholarly attention, including the use of difficult modern art as a diplomatic tool in the early Cold War,1 the championing of individualistic American literature as a cooling influence on an inflamed Europe,2 and the editorial vision of Henry Luce and his publishing empire.3 Another often overlooked but also quite significant factor was the institutionalization of what had come to be known as “creative writing” in university academic departments. In the late 1940s and 1950s, creative writing programs, then new and few, nurtured the image of the poet or novelist as a rebellious outsider, a voice of culture against culture. Meanwhile, they partook in a global project of cultural peacemaking. Program founders such as Wallace Stegner (at Stanford) and Paul Engle (at Iowa) spoke two institutional argots, one of good citizenship and another of lone artistic consciousness; they spoke both while fostering international literary diplomacy through exchanges and publications based at their home universities. Their faculty and students wrote about rebels while attending class on time. Esteemed American critics debated in influential little magazines the question of literary dissent and patriotism (most famously in a Partisan Review feature from 1952, “Our Country and Our Culture”) while making cameos at creative writing programs as lecturers and visiting faculty. Glossy magazines ran stories that framed the avant-garde tableaux of writers at college in bourgeois terms amid bourgeois advertisements. And philanthropic foundations, most notable the Rockefeller Foundation, boosted the programs

S ee Barnhisel (2015); Guilbaut (1983); Saunders (2000); and Wilford (2008). See Blaustein (2018). 3 See Brinkley (2010). 1 2

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financially, persuaded that American-style free expression, combined with international literary exchange, would advance US interests in the postwar period. Far from a glitch in the code, rebelliousness was a value embraced with a grand sense of importance by the liberal establishment. Today, more than three decades after the end of the Cold War, creative writing programs still embody the tension between the rebel and the community. This continuity with the past is belied by what otherwise look like sea changes—from a narrow canon to a diverse one, from adjacent literature departments that revere literature to ones that study it as deconstructed culture, and from graduate student cohorts and faculties almost exclusively white and male to groups more diverse. The early Cold War had far-reaching consequences for the institutional containment of adversarial culture in creative writing programs. Even today, affiliates of such programs in many cases maintain that old grand sense of importance—believing that creative writing matters hugely to America, within and against its institutions.4 The rise of creative writing programs cleaves largely to the broader story of the United States at mid-century.5 Under the G. I. Bill, colleges and universities ingested millions of new students and adopted new mandates and priorities. In literary studies, the central innovation was the New Criticism, whose story has been told many times. Creative writing, related but distinct, has traditionally received less attention, although in recent decades that has changed. D. G. Myers’s The Elephants Teach, a definitive history of the field from 1880 to the twenty-first century, shows that creative writing existed at colleges long before its post–Second World War boom in graduate programs, but its Cold War proliferation was the defining event. From a handful of graduate programs in the 1940s, to forty-four by 1970, to over a hundred by 1980, the early Cold War witnessed boom upon boom—graduates founding new programs whose graduates then founded more new programs. The University of Iowa minted at least twenty-five such founders. Wallace Stegner, the first, established the seminars at Stanford by 1947. The numerical expansion reflected a change in essence. “Creative writing reached its full growth as a university discipline,” Myers writes, “when the purpose of its graduate programs (to produce serious writers) was uncoupled from the purpose of its undergraduate courses (to examine writing seriously from within)” (Myers 2006: 149). In this uncoupling lay the seeds of the tension to be discussed here.6 At Iowa, creative writing was the brainchild of the conservative New Humanist Norman Foerster, founder of the School of Letters in 1930. Though patriotic about contemporary American writing, Forster, like his mentor Irving Babbitt, detested the antinomian spirit of most modernist literature. He believed that higher education could stand against it by training critics of sound moral principle. Courses in creative writing would make for stronger, less bookish critics, whose criticism would hold together a fragmenting modern culture. Foerster did not worry, particularly, that creative In his seminal study, Mark McGurl (2009) provides deft analysis of the discontents of the rebel on campus, including Vladimir Nabokov’s aversion to teaching at Cornell, Raymond Carver’s working-class blues at the University of Iowa, and Ken Kesey’s countercultural sparring with the institutionalist Wallace Stegner at Stanford. The Cold War, though, stands mostly in the background, as McGurl mostly cracks other nuts. More complementary to this chapter is Kindley (2017), which illuminates the transformations wrought on literary activity by its absorption by bureaucracies between the 1920s and the 1950s. Crucial to the larger picture stuff has been Greif (2015), which reveals the seriousness with which writers and critics projected a social function for literature after the Second World War and is mentioned in the main text, below. 5 It cleaves, in fact, to a much larger story of intellectual culture pitted against itself and against the institutions that sustain it, one beyond the scope of this chapter or collection. A useful trio of readings for deep context are Alvin G. Gouldner’s (1979) terse, forceful sociological treatise, Ross (1994), and Schryer (2011). 6 For an illuminating study of a parallel development—training in visual art—see Singerman (1999). 4

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writers, attracted to his program, would rebel against the norms he wanted to defend. He dreamed of a new age of Longfellows and Lowells—poets as respectable university dons. Foerster’s great protégé, Paul Engle, went on to direct the writing program that nurtured Engle’s own development as a poet in the early 1930s. From the late 1940s through the mid-1960s, Engle boosted writing at Iowa with audacity and genius, branding creative writing as a bulwark of American free expression in contrast to programmatic Soviet art. He recognized the rising power of middle-class institutions and made hay with it. Crucially, though, he also understood rebellion. As a Rhodes Scholar in the 1930s, he had lived D. H. Lawrence’s influence in his sex life and Karl Marx’s in his politics. At the height of his administrative career, then, he fed both beasts, those of the country club and those of the cold water flats. From businessmen, philanthropic foundations, and government coffers, Engle raised impressive sums for his program, often by publicly sanitizing the dirty image of the writer. He had a knack for media promotion, and used it to this end. For instance, a 1955 Life editorial begged American writers to write more affirmatively and lambasted recent best sellers as “a parade of war novels which mostly read like the diary of a professional grievance collector” and “literature which sounds sometimes as if were written by an unemployed homosexual living in a pack-box shanty on the city dump.” The Depression was over and “a decade of unparalleled prosperity” had drawn to a close. Life complained that ten years after victory, amid industry and empire, American writers were failing to capture “the primeval rivers” or to dramatize “a yea-saying to the goodness and joy of life” (“Wanted” 1955: 48). Early the next year, Engle hosted Time-Life chairman Henry Luce on a tour of the Iowa campus. The publisher then dispatched reporters to cover a Palm Sunday memorial service in Iowa City for soldiers fallen in the war. Engle presided, reading original poetry about good soldiers. It sounded like this: They knew death as a family dog knows men, By whistle, touch, familiar smell of men, But still were cheerful, still could ask each morning, What do you know for sure on a new morning? (“On This Wall’ ” 1956: 95) Hedging on the science of the larynx, Engle extolled “love’s live stammer in the breathing throat” (“On This Wall’ ” 1956: 95). Life raved about the event and printed seven sonnets, breaking its usual policy not to run poetry. A photo of the square-jawed impresario in academic gown under dramatic lighting, shot heroically from below, accompanied the text. Life deemed Engle’s sonnets “lucid … as though the poet had spent a long time examining and thinking about the world around him and not his own viscera” (“ ‘On This Wall’ ” 1956: 105). Engle then mailed the clipping to potential donors. In this case, as in many others from Engle’s career, the sanitizing of the image of the campus writer looked solemn and grave—or, depending on your sensibility, staged and turgid. Just as often, though, Engle was blithe, jocular, and minimizing. In the introduction to an anthology of Iowa writing from its first twenty-five years, he disarmed conservative critics by raising their objections for them. “Would there not be fire, violence in the streets, and, most criminal of all, loafing in the classroom?” (1961: xxii). The answer, Engle reported, turned out to be no. He disarmed critics from the opposite side, too, in no small part through humor: “An English novelist, V. S. Pritchett, laments that the American university may induce ‘an unnatural hostility to vulgarity’ in the writer. I have

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seen twenty-five years of American writers at a university. Have no fear. They will not lose their vulgarity” (1961: xxxi). In the same representative introduction, Engle offered justifications that any salt-of-the-earth businessman could get his head around. Creative writing deserved a place on campus as much as “chicken-sexing, which calls for extreme acuteness of eye, and weaving, which can be a matter of the most gracious taste in design” (1961: xxii). Engle identified imagination as a faculty as worthy as intellect of being cultivated. He cited the complementary role creative writing programs would play for academic literary study, asking how the booming discipline of English could really “find enough fresh material to equal its massive arrangements” without institutionalized poets and novelists to feed it (1961: xxix). Engle, finally, made a nationalistic appeal, praising an America not cramped by Europe’s “ancient and rigid structures,” an America that had the horse sense to do the obvious, train writers (1961: xxii). Over the long term, Engle’s most successful sanitizing pitch was not at all tongue-in-cheek and was even more directly ideological than the sonnets for the Iowa dead. Engle had attracted many foreign writers to Iowa, and he boasted about it—“these articulate people from the far islands and continents of the earth,” who would depart with the “conviction that this country cherishes their talent.” Visitors came from “Japan, Formosa, South Korea, the Philippines, Ireland, England, Canada, Sweden, India” and across the United States (1961: xxvii). Such students would rebel, the thinking went, not against liberalism, capitalism, and democracy during their months in the United States but against the pro-Communist figures back home upon their return. Iowa could have its cake and eat it too. From the 1940s through the 1960s, Engle’s rhetoric and accomplishments attracted significant philanthropic support. The Rockefeller Foundation, trying to figure out how to bolster the arts without bankrolling deadbeats, gave Iowa $40,000 in the early 1950s. In the 1960s the Ford Foundation supported Engle’s international travels to hunt for more foreign writers to train. The State Department was on board by the Johnson years.7 Along the way, scores of smaller-scale donors were wooed by the same scrubbing clean of the image of the writer. On the campus, the rebel would be somewhat indulged, somewhat nurtured, and largely contained. Engle’s pitches worked reliably on the country club set. On the cold water flat types, not so much. Flannery O’Connor—Engle’s most famous student from the late 1940s—also responded to the Life editorial, but quite differently. She did not write fiction, she made clear in “The Fiction Writer and His Country,” in order to bolster consumeristic, materialistic, patriotic optimism. Material indices of prosperity said nothing about spiritual wellness. “We are asked to form our consciences in light of statistics,” the Life editors suggested by their very premise, “which is to establish the relative as absolute” (O’Connor 1970: 30). GDP was relative; only truth was immutable. Against the Luce boosterism, O’Connor wrote as a dogmatic Catholic, yet, even so, she threw in her lot with those unemployed homosexuals living in pack-box shanties on the city dump. Given the choice, she would take her stand with the rebels. Other important onlookers agreed. Already by the mid-1950s, the literary critic Alfred Kazin perceived danger where Engle, Stegner, and their colleagues heralded opportunity. “What we are seeing now is more than the university’s friendly hospitality to writers; it is an attempt to play the active role of patron—to support the creation of literature, to take writers into the academic For a full account of these collaborations, see Bennett (2015). The account of Luce’s visit to Iowa, below, also summarizes research first presented in this volume. 7

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community, and thus to show it regards them as assimilable, harmonious—and necessary” (1955: 244). Such support, warned Kazin, threatened the very function of the writer. “Above all, the writer does not work with anyone; he is not a collaborator, he is not co-operative, and it can be to his very peril as a writer if he sacrifices the excruciating precision of his vision and his unrelenting impatience of mediocrity in order to please, to accommodate himself, to fit in” (1955: 250).8 Kazin had made his name as the author of On Native Grounds (1942), a critical study of American prose since the nineteenth century that centered the nation’s literary vitality largely on the words of outsiders. To keep this vitality alive, Kazin believed, the writer should stay off campus. Yet what complicated the matter was that living writers were entering the canon whether or not they were entering the faculty club or graduate student lounge. Ironically, this was in no small part because of virtuosic critical performances like Kazin’s own. Kazin noted that as recently as 1938 Theodore Dreiser (still alive that year) would have been off-limits in a dissertation; before the Second World War, scholarship had preserved the idea of a tradition. “It was not always possible to say where this tradition began, but so far as literature was concerned, it ended at the cemetery” (1955: 244). Only recently had contemporary authors received a sustained academic welcome. The war was the point at which the tradition broke down among the professors themselves, when they became “modern” and “creative,” ashamed above all of seeming dull—it was exactly at this point that the writer was welcomed in a university whose proper study came to seem not the past, in its closed historic shape, but the constant interflow of “life,” of contemporary experience. (1955: 246–7) It helped (or hurt) that so many of those who presided over the change were both critics and creative writers: Engle, for sure, but also Robert Penn Warren, Mark Van Doren, Yvor Winters, John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, and Lionel Trilling—the kind of figures who, as Evan Kindley has argued in PoetCritics and the Administration of Culture, acted as “village explainers,” teaching bureaucrats in the federal government and at the philanthropic foundations which cultural movements to underwrite. Kazin himself had benefited from patronage, having lectured at the first Salzburg Seminar for American Civilization in postwar Austria on Harvard’s dime and with the tacit sponsorship of the Department of State. Unlike Engle, though, he feared for his soul and the nation’s. Trilling did too. At book length, the Columbia professor diagnosed the clash between the antibourgeois spirit of modern literature and the undeniably bourgeois nature of postwar higher education. Beyond Culture (1965), which collected essays published from the late 1950s to the early 1960s in journals like the Partisan review, Encounter, and Commentary, wrote the contradictions large. Trilling observed that modern writers often took aim at “specious goods”—the aspirational complacencies of a dull middle class. Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground was a prime example, for Trilling, its antihero stultified by comfort and progress, against which he made his self-destructive “affirmation of spiritual freedom” (1965: 76). Like D. H. Lawrence, T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and Franz Kafka, Dostoevsky limned an intolerable bourgeois reality: “its order achieved at the cost of extravagant personal repression, either that of coercion or that of acquiescence; its repose otiose; its tolerance either flaccid or capricious; its material comfort corrupt and corrupting; its taste a

Cf. Nelson Algren c. 1973: “The University of Iowa is a good place to go if you want to become a journalist, a linguist, a zoologist, a jurist or a purist,” he wrote. “Its Creative Writers Workshop is a good place to go to become a tourist. For it provides sanctuary from those very pressures in which creativity is forged. If you want to create something of your own, stay away” (1997: 76). 8

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manifestation either of timidity or of pride; its rationality attained only at the price of energy and passion” (1965: 16–17). College students in the 1950s, aspiring to careers at Ford or IBM and new homes in the suburbs, could read all about it—which they did with unnerving complacency. “When the term-essays come in,” Trilling lamented, “it is plain to me that almost none of the students have been taken aback by what they have read: they have wholly contained the attack” (1965: 26). To do justice to the material, a professor had to teach about “losing oneself to the point of self-destruction,” about “surrendering oneself to experience without regard to self-interest or conventional morality,” about “escaping wholly from the societal bonds.” But how do you grade a student on such lessons? Grades are bonds. Yet the academization of the rebellious spirit was not—or not simply—a instance of incoherent opportunism on the part of subversives or of philanthropists and bureaucrats playing stupidly with fire. A broad consensus urged it forward. “Dr. J. Robert Oppenheimer,” Kazin observed, “closing the celebration of Columbia’s two-hundredth anniversary with a survey of ‘Prospects in the Arts and Sciences,’ noted, as part of the transformation of the American scene in the last years, that now the artist ‘needs to be part of the community, and the community can only, with loss and peril, be without him.’ ” Kazin quoted Oppenheimer at length: Thus it is with a sense of interest and hope that we see a growing recognition that the creative artist is a proper charge on the university, and the university a proper home for him; that a composer or a poet or a playwright or a painter needs the toleration, the understanding, the rather local and parochial patronage that a university can give; and that this will protect him to some extent from the tyranny of man’s communication and professional promotion. … For here there is an honest chance that what the artist has of insight and of beauty will take root in the community and some human bonds can mark his relations with his patrons. (1955: 244) It might appear odd that a Manhattan Project heavyweight would care that writers come to campus. But as a technician of mass annihilation—and a good scientist—Oppenheimer doubted that scientists could be looked to save humankind. He and countless others like him regarded the crisis of the era to be fundamentally spiritual. Facing it successfully would require help above all from those most attuned to humankind’s demonic potential and resources for grace. The creative writer embodied the tensions, shortcomings, drives, desires, vanity, irrationality, contradictions, ambivalences, excesses, darkness, and paradoxes that modern intellectual hubris had permitted the civilization to ignore at catastrophic expense. Poets and novelists could now speak of bitter realities with unprecedented sanction from society. Joseph Wood Krutch’s The Measure of Man: On Freedom, Human Values, Survival and the Modern Temper (1953) captures a mood that lasted through the 1950s. “We have engineered ourselves into a position where, for the first time in human history, it has become possible for man to destroy his whole species.” Like Oppenheimer Krutch believed that technological change raised urgent nontechnological questions. “May we not at the same time have philosophized ourselves into a position where we are no longer able to manage successfully our mental and spiritual lives?” (1953: 28). Despairing of world governance, harrowed by atomic nightmares, desperate for signs of their own significance, thinkers like Krutch brandished the humanities as the skeleton key to the black box of the future. In Values of Survival (1946), Lewis Mumford fused the question of humanity’s fate to the question of postwar education directly: “The re-education of man,” he wrote, “is the key to his

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immediate safety and his ultimate salvation” (1946: 117).9 It had become “impossible to see the interrelation of details within a narrower frame or against a shallower background” than a total one (1946: 145). Scientific research alone solved nothing. Meaningful education “would multiply the number of anthropologists, sociologists, and psychologists, while it would diminish their opposite numbers in the physical sciences: it would endow Schools of the Humanities and curtail Schools of Technology” (1946: 122). Religion also deserved a central place, serving “to redress man’s pride in his intellect, to reduce his conceit and his complacence, so that he will be better fortified to face the ordeal of reality” (1946: 125). Schemes of revolutionary change must give way to exercises in self-restraint, though it would not be easy. “Perhaps the hardest thing for us Americans to realize is that we are no longer confronted by external enemies: the most dangerous enemy we face lies within us.” This was nothing new to theologians, and “modern psychology has unearthed the same foe. In the depth of man’s unconscious life lie the forces of destruction he projects outside himself and externalizes” (1946: 99). Mumford invoked Irving Babbitt, who had insisted after the First World War that modern crises in the social order stemmed from personal failures and could best be rectified by personal discipline and humanistic learning. Mumford spoke like Babbitt when he insisted that “the place where the controlling transformation must take place is in the individual personality. When society is in danger, it is the individual who first must be saved” (1946: 117). Of course, Babbitt had trained Foerster, who, in turn, had trained Stegner and Engle. And nothing— nobody—so much as the self-aware, self-contradictory individual was at the heart of the discipline of creative writing. On the heroic lone voice, capturing the indomitable, messy, and paradoxical human spirit, rested the destiny of humankind. As such, creative writing programs played a real role in what Mark Greif has compellingly dubbed “The Age of the Crisis of Man” in his 2015 study of that title.10 Engle, as we have seen, often gently mocked the subversive spirit of the writer while making room for it on campus. Stegner, the better writer, took it more seriously. At Stanford he became a major voice for both the wild potency of the writer’s soul and the value of containing it with the help of rigor at the writing desk. He revived Babbitt’s notion of the “inner check,” the self-restraint that would save us: Everything potent, from human love to atomic energy, is dangerous; it produces ill about as readily as good; it becomes good only through the control, the discipline, the wisdom with which we use it. Much of this control is social, a thing which laws and institutions and uniforms enforce, but much of it must be personal, and I do not see how we can evade the obligation to take full responsibility for what we individually do. (1982: 4) Stegner acknowledged the contradictions of institutionalized writing and presented them as a virtue: I have never known a serious writer who wasn’t as responsible, in his way, as any priest or professor or public servant. The difference is that a writer is responsible not to a tradition or a church or any sort of social stability and conformity, but to his personal vision of truth and social justice, to his gift. That often sets him at odds with the ‘adults’ of his system, but it also makes him indispensable. His vision and the integrity with which he pursues and promotes it are

9

The volume aggregates Mumford’s wartime journalism and adds new material to address the postwar moment. See footnote 4.

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elements needed for a larger and more humane synthesis, which in the nature of things will again harden and will need once more the services of iconoclasts. (1982: 38) Poets and novelists at the university might in fact achieve some self-control. Or they might simply put on eloquent display the dimensions of the human personality that need to be tamed. In either case, lawful or chaotic, writers in the 1950s stood proxy for the postwar individual, the being at the heart of postwar recipes for survival. I have to admit that recapturing the mindset requires serious exertion of historical imagination. Case studies help, and the novelist and story writer R. V. Cassill offers a vivid one. Cassill studied and taught at Iowa before moving to Brown University. He was a beneficiary of Rockefeller Foundation largesse in 1954. He presided over the founding of the AWP in 1967. Over the course of a long career, he taught thousands of students and wrote dozens of books. His writing and life were representatively institutional, emblematically rebellious, and typically grandiose. At mid-century, Cassill doubted that “literature and literary education” had been “as nearly adequate to their task as science and scientific education” had been to theirs, but regarded the former as the place where “the development of a modern consciousness” would be “centered.” Literature, he avowed, “has not been superseded by any other endeavor that can better study what should be studied or that is more likely to tell us what we want to know” (1969: 7). What we wanted to know, and what literature was to teach us, was not how social class related to social class, or gender to gender, or race to race, but how Man related to the universe—or to the impersonal forces Man had unleashed. Cassill worked at the gap between abstract ways of knowing and concrete ways of being, which grew wide because of the inherent irrationality created by ostensibly rational systems. More than any other discipline creative writing allowed for the “rational examination of the irrational components, social, cultural, and personal, that condition theoretical positions, the application of methodology, or the modes and media through which the rational opinion is disseminated” (1969: 18).11 In 1961, Cassill published a novel that still today evokes the culture of institutionalized creative writing in the 1940s and 1950s more vividly and comprehensively than any other. Clem Anderson vests its eponymous protagonist with the ambitions and shortcomings, the virtues and vices, the bravado and preposterousness of the bohemian with a transcript. In the front story, Clem Anderson is dead, having dazzled the world with poems in the 1940s and fiction in the 1950s before crashing and burning as a dramatist in New York. An old classmate recounts the brief, full life. Dick Hartsell is a middle-aged professor and failed writer, a good citizen who once lived in close proximity to the philandering, alcoholic, unruly, arrogant, destructive, late great Anderson. In six hundred plus pages, Hartsell renders Anderson in living color. To the credit of the text, Anderson never saves humankind from nuclear war. Cassill handles the salvific theme with irony. But, even in irony, the text endows the postwar writer with all the seriousness of the actual case. Anderson envisions himself as “another Noah who could repopulate the earth with a human stock when the other humanoids had become the soulless debris of the aftermath.” On behalf of others he carries, he thinks, something too sacred to be lost. He just has to write it down right. “He

Cf. Wallace Stegner from the same time: “It is preposterous to stand up seriously and assert the validity of the arts as a means to truth; and yet one probably needs to, at least against those who do not think but whose collective thoughtlessness is made, by stochastic processes, to represent and even guide public opinion” (1982: 5–6). 11

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was elected if he could find this way to seal himself and the human essence in, like jelly under paraffin, like a space explorer frozen in an ice block for the long journey from nebula to nebula” (1990: 297). For years Anderson teeters a mere draft or two away from messianic status. Hartsell plays free with mythologizing. He and Anderson—not to mention Cassill standing behind them—bask in allusions. “Clem,” we are told, wore one of his lovers “like the albatross hung on his neck by superstitious comrades, a symbol of destruction and deliverance, dangling in sleek caricature of Peter’s crucifixion, her fiery tuft burning under his chin like the beard he might have worn, red as the great thoracic wound of the Prometheus he was beginning to rehearse” (1990: 568). A writer today would be less inclined to conjoin the Ancient Mariner, St. Peter, and Prometheus in a sentence about cunnilingus. But Clem Anderson plays the game it dramatizes, even as it dramatizes it wryly. Workshoppers of the 1950s aimed to bind myths to egos in little works of great geopolitical significance—even as they neglected politics for interiority, ideology for psychology. Myth rather than ideology was, in fact, the bridge between ego and world, according to the paradigm. Myth was the arcane wellspring whose waters could reconcile adversarial culture (the darkness, messiness, irrationality, and violence of individual desires) with universal culture (the common lot of all of us). T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land had shown the way; Joyce’s Ulysses had too. Eliot’s sources— James Frazer’s The Golden Bough and Jessie Weston’s From Ritual to Romance—anticipated Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949), which reads in the twenty-first century as a striking companion piece to Cassill’s Clem Anderson. Combining Jungian and Freudian psychology with studies in religion, literature, and mythology, Campbell posited a “grammar of symbols,” a common currency for humankind (1949: vii). Campbell believed the grammar lay permanently behind reality, guaranteeing its oneness and perdurance; for “the symbols of mythology are not manufactured; they cannot be ordered, invented, or permanently suppressed. They are spontaneous productions of the psyche, and each bears within it, undamaged, the germ power of its source” (1949: 4). The differences between various cultures mattered less than the intersecting archetypes familiar to all. “The latest incarnation of Oedipus,” he wrote, “the continued romance of Beauty and the Beast, stand this afternoon on the corner of Forty-second Street and Fifth Avenue, waiting for a traffic light to change” (1949: 4). Cassill thought so too. Here’s Hartsell describing Anderson at work: “The schema of literature, the beautiful relationships between various forms in which the same thing might be known and repeated endlessly without monotony, was opening for him.” (1990: 442). Invoking older instances from that schema— alluding to the canon—might vouchsafe the eternal significance of a writer in the present. And allude Clem Anderson does. Here’s a nonexhaustive tabulation of allusions from its pages: Alfred Tennyson’s “The Lady of Shalott” (3) Oedipus (3) Peter Paul Rubens (5) “an English water-colorist of the eighteenth century” (5) John Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale” (6) Prometheus Bound (6) William Butler Yeats’s “The Circus Animals’ Desertion” (14) The Bible in general (19) James Joyce in general (19)

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Geoffrey Chaucer & Erasmus (25) Plato’s Allegory of the Cave (42) Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain (54) William Shakespeare’s Sonnet 116 (54) Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio (99) Sinclair Lewis’s Main Street (99) Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (114) “Proustian languors” (125) Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov (125) Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex (125) William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury (126) “Joyce, Pound and Eliot” (127) Paul Elmer More and Irving Babbitt (128) “Sophocles, Dante, Shakespeare, Racine and Goethe” (128) Theodore Dreiser (128) Fyodor Dostoevsky (137) Hart Crane’s “Powhatan’s Daughter” (139) Randolph Bourne: “War is the health of the state” (156) Ezra Pound (156) Archibald MacLeish (157) Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (157) Eve from the Bible (158) Miranda from Shakespeare’s The Tempest (158) Adam from the Bible (158) Ferdinand from The Tempest (158) André Malraux’s Man’s Fate (173) Dante and Beatrice (173) “MacLeish or Hart Crane or Lawrence” (177) D. H. Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers (178) John Milton’s Samson Agonistes (189) Fyodor Dostoevsky (190) Judas (204) Edgar Allan Poe (204) The “nunnery” from Shakespeare’s Hamlet (216) Occam’s razor (217) Thomas Mann’s Tonio Kröger (218)

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Socrates (218) Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure (221) Edgar Lee Masters’s Spoon River Anthology (223) Matthew Arnold’s “Empedocles on Etna” (225) D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover (225) Shakespeare’s The Tempest (227) Thalassa (238) John Milton (242) Fyodor Dostoevsky (243) Shakespeare’s The Tempest (246) Richard Wagner’s The Valkyrie (246) Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Poor People (252) Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther (252) James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (252) Goethe’s Faust (252) Ezra Pound’s “River Merchant’s Wife: A Letter” (253) Arthur Rimbaud (264) Thomas Chatterton (264) Jean Paul Sartre (269) Virginia Woolf (270) Sigmund Freud’s Oedipus Complex (271) Anthony Trollope (283) “Joyce, Crane, Porter, Hemingway and Faulkner” (284) Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (287) Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov (288) Friedrich Nietzsche (295) Blaise Pascal (298) T. S. Eliot (298) Shakespeare’s Sonnet 55 (306) “the Baudelairean travel where we go ‘berçant notre infini sur le fini des mers’ ” (307) Ernest Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls Ariadne and Theseus (310–311) D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover (313) Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure (313) Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve (314) “Stephen Crane and Conrad” (314)

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E. M. Forster (316) The “country matters” from Shakespeare’s Hamlet (318) Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (325) Hart Crane (328) Shakespeare’s The Tempest (328) Shakespeare’s Hamlet (329) George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion (339) Perseus, Andromeda, and Medusa (339) Charles Baudelaire’s À une passante (345) Shakespeare’s The Tempest (346) Gertrude Stein and Pablo Picasso (355) Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (356) O. Henry (356) Charles Dickens (356) Archimedes (362) Aristotle (362) “… the slings and arrows of outrageous editors” (366) “Every time that inwit twanged” (366) Pablo Picasso (368) Shakespeare’s Richard III (369) Anton Chekhov’s “The Darling” (372) Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov (373) Ovid’s Metamorphoses (373) William Wordsworth’s Prelude (373) Horace’s odes (373) “Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Christina Rossetti and Andrew Marvell, not to mention John Donne …” (374) Henry James (381) Anton Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard (382) Greek tragedy’s Electra (382) “the avatar of a Negro Young Man Carbuncular” (383) Andrew Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress” (386) Saturn eating his children (386) Arthur Rimbaud’s Une Saison en Enfer (391) Homer’s The Iliad (391) Baudelaire (395)

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Alfred Tennyson’s In Memoriam (400) Alexander Pope’s An Essay on Man (400) Dante’s “In la sua volontade e nostra pace” (400) Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises (406) Henry James’s The Wings of the Dove (406) Diogenes (407) Aristide Maillol (410) Plato (449) Shakespeare’s The Tempest (467) Gertrude Stein, van Gogh, Cézanne (476) Imitation James Joyce (482) Samuel Johnson (505) Thomas Mann’s stories (506) William Butler Yeats (506) Sir Philip Sidney’s “Apologie for Poetrie” and Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “Defence of Poetry” (510) “Rimbaud’s personal misbehavior and his decision to run guns rather than continue as a poet” (510) Thomas Mann’s Tonio Kröger Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice “Hart Crane’s intense habit of smoking a cigar and chewing a plug at the same time” (511) “Keats’s odes and Yeats’s mighty modern song” (529) Longinus, Horace, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Valéry, the New Critics, Stendhal, Balzac’s Père Goriot, and Machiavelli’s The Prince (530) Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea (530) Henry James’s The Golden Bowl (530) Walk Whitman, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and Fulke Greville (530) T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (530) Thomas Hardy’s Wessex Poems (530) Henry James (534) Henry James (536) Henry James, Marcel Proust, William Faulkner, and Ernest Hemingway (541) Shakespeare (547) Faust (553) Andrew Marvell’s “The Garden” (555) Henry James’s The Golden Bowl (556)

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Proserpine & Dis (562) “the White Goddess herself, Athena in the guise of Aphrodite, Medusa in the lineaments of Andromeda …” (583) Matthew Arnold’s “The Scholar Gypsy” (583) Herakles (584) Aphrodite (585) “Swift’s relation to Stella” (587) Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy (590) Alain-René Lesage’s Gil Blas (590) The judgment of Paris (597) Plato, Moses, Pharaoh, Pan, Adonis (598) Colette and the Marquis de Sade (599) Baudelaire (609) Writing programs arose in an atmosphere where Campbell, Frazer, Weston, Eliot, Joyce, and the culture of mythological modernism had come to reign. This strain of modernism fortified the prevailing belief that poetry and fiction anchored civilization, not by impelling political action but by tying individuals everywhere to a common pool of references. The belief facilitated the arrival of writers on campus. In such a canon as listed above, newly recruited writers actually had something to study. Rather than a tradition to subordinate oneself to, however, the canon provided ingredients for endless new articulations of postwar individuality. That, in any case, was the Clem Anderson method. Cassill captured a general fear when he argued that the human race was “in the midst of a power shift whose ultimate objective is to move all intellectual authority from the individual to the collectivity” (1969: 23). Writers would have to fight back alone—collectively—using that paradoxically collective thing, the individualistic modernist canon. But even as Clem Anderson posits a plausible universality, it commits the sins of its era. Ambitious women are ridiculed, patronized, and sidelined when they aren’t being leered at or groped. Writers of color are nowhere. The novel offers a lot to substantiate twenty-first-century critiques: that mid-century programs hosted a cis, white, ablest male game with little room for others. In respect to this most unfortunate truth, it was a matter of art reflecting life. If women and minorities were allowed to play at writing on campus at all, it was as second-class citizens. Rita Dove, a student at Iowa in the mid-1970s, befriended international writers because the domestic ones shamelessly marginalized her.12 Sandra Cisneros and Joy Harjo, also there, were simply ignored

12

I was the only Black person in the Iowa workshop at the time, and I think many Black writers who have been in workshops will have had the same experience: you’re always the only one. There falls the burden—and it is always a burden, whether you choose to bear it or not—the burden of other people’s guilt. I discovered in that workshop, though I did get some valuable comments on some poems, that the poems dealing specifically with my heritage always got the worst comments, because people could not find a way around the guilt; they couldn’t quite figure it out. (Ingersoll 2003: 98)

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by Donald Justice, their instructor, until they complained. Even then, their classmates greeted their submitted work with unkind silence.13 Such standing up for oneself was not the rebellion the writing programs extolled. Women from the mid-century workshops (like women in general at the time) lived in an atmosphere of rampant sexual harassment.14 Machismo prevailed.15 Jane Smiley recalled that “the teachers tended to be men of a certain age, with the idea that competition was somehow the key, the Norman Mailer period. The story was that if you disagreed with Norman, or gave him a bad review, he’d punch you in the nose. You were supposed to get in fights in restaurants”16 (Olsen and Schaeffer 2011: 186). Later accounts reflect small, slow progress. Junot Díaz has recalled workshops at Cornell in the mid-1990s in which race was the unfortunate condition of nonwhite people that had nothing to do with white people [and] was not a natural part of the Universal of Literature, and anyone that tried to introduce racial consciousness to the Great (White) Universal of Literature would be seen as politicizing the Pure Art and betraying the (White) Universal (no race) ideal of True Literature. (Díaz 2014: online) The theme resounds through to more recent times, as Juliana Spahr and Stephanie Young recount in “The Program Era and the Mainly White Room” in the Los Angeles Review of Books in 2015.17 Everything from Stegner’s love of the G.I. Bill writers to Cassill’s misogyny to the unreconstructed self-hagiography of soft reminiscences of the good old days at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop makes clear that the postwar scene did indeed have an identity problem. The white guys won. Yet a historical portrait of the workshops of the 1940s and 1950s offers something more interesting than simply the origin story for an eight-decade history of misogyny and exclusion. George Hutchinson’s recent study of the 1940s, Facing the Abyss, unearths, in context after context, by marginalized voice after marginalized voice, engagements with political identity that were as sophisticated as today’s. He shows that “black, queer, and Jewish authors in particular resisted minoritizing discourses in favor of universalizing ones” under the belief that “in an era shadowed by fascism … all forms of minoritization and oppression interconnect and that the battle for liberation must always be fought on broader grounds than identity politics alone provides” (2018: 4). Intense preoccupation with identity, before and after the war, occurred on the right, not the left. “Who, after all, were the greatest exponents of identity politics in the 1930s and

S ee David O. Dowling’s (2019) account in ­chapter 9. In 1973 R. V. Cassill published in Esquire a vindication of the rights of predators, “Up the Down Coed: Notes on the Eternal Problem of Fornication with Students.” For an account of how it felt to read this as a female student and live through the next forty-five years of feeble change, see McMillen (2017). 15 Louis Menand’s (2021) cultural history of the Cold Waroffers a devastating montage of American sexism at mid-century. See chapter fifteen, “Vers la Libération” (542–600). 16 Olsen and Schaeffer’s collection of reminiscences from workshop alumni from the 1970s captures, probably without meaning to, the stark division between the white boys who loved their pugilistic vacation and others who found the atmosphere alienating, masculinist, and silly. 17 Mura (2018) and Salesses (2021) are discussed at some length in the conclusion to this chapter. See also Adsit and Byrd (2019). 13 14

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early 1940s? Mussolini, Hirohito, Hitler. At home: Father Coughlin, the German Bund, Southern senators, nativists, racists, and anti-Semites” (2018: 163). Influential Jewish writers regarded Jewishness not as “a particularist identity but a pathway to a universal subject position, a crossroads, made ethically obligatory in an age of global catastrophe, in which the extermination of the Jews takes on planetary significance” (2018: 172). Leslie Fiedler shed fresh light on Charles Dickens’s Fagin along these lines. “In this apocalyptic period of atomization and uprooting, of a catholic terror and a universal alienation, the image of the Jew tends to become the image of everyone and we are perhaps approaching the day when the Jew will come to seem the central symbol, the essential myth of the whole Western world” (2018: 173). Black authors also felt they could contribute to a universalist project by chronicling their experiences. Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man asks readers of any color, “Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?” (1995: 581). In a famous exchange with Irving Howe, Ellison doubled down on his insistence that a kind of universal writing was possible.18 Ellison praised Faulkner’s postwar Black characters, Hutchinson reminds us, after having found little to admire in earlier ones. The war awakened many. Hutchinson has also resuscitated the mostly long-forgotten experiments of Black writers writing white characters. The belief in the universality of “human qualities”—in the years when the historic Universal Declaration of Human Rights was drafted and passed by the United Nations—lies behind the impulse of black authors to write texts that were not centered on “the black experience,” texts that are rarely discussed in scholarship let alone reprinted or anthologized. Never before or since has the impulse been so common. (2018: 216) Engle, directing the Iowa program, did not refine a theory. He simply built a program that presupposed one quite like this. As the years advanced, he invited more and more writers from abroad, although they came as soon as the late 1940s, when Engle recruited Edilberto and Edith Tiempo from the Philippines.19 Engle’s international emphasis gathered steam throughout the 1950s and 1960s. As a result of nasty departmental politics, however, Engle retired from (or was ousted from) the domestic workshop to found with Hualing Nieh a freestanding International Writing Program (IWP) by 1967—at which point the masculinist and America-centric excesses of the original program lost the salutary check of writers from elsewhere (see Yihung Liu’s essay in this collection for a more extensive discussion of Nieh and her own work). Engle pitched writing workshops as culturally neutral spaces that welcomed all and fostered understanding. Engle and Nieh promoted their institution as a haven for those still anticipating the world order that so many had hoped for after 1945. Writers abroad, they wrote, were “an endangered species, often punished with prison, internal exile, or harsh labor for writing views, or even in styles, resented by the ruling party” (1987: xxiv). Iowa City provided freedom. It also served as a staging ground for reconciliation, the finding of common ground. “East and West Germans came, drank beer together,” and joked about the Wall. After the Camp David Accords in 1978, writers from Israel and Egypt were seen “embracing each other in the corridor.” Chinese

S ee in particular Ellison (1964). The Tiempos absorbed American norms at Iowa and exported them home again, on a massive scale, via the Silliman University National Writers Workshop. That institution preserved them for decades. Conchitina Cruz convincingly argues that this was and remains to the detriment of contemporary literature in the Philippines. See Cruz (2017: 3–34). 18 19

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from the mainland ate with Chinese from Taiwan, “kept their tempers, and were sad when they left, knowing they could never meet again” (1987: xxi). After the Vietnam era, few American intellectuals, especially on the left, continued to speak the language of harmonious internationalism with anything like the urgency and sense of purpose of the first postwar years. Dream had curdled into nightmare. But precisely because the IWP favored practice over theory, it survived the change. Meanwhile, theoreticians of literary internationalism moved from liberal capitalistic pluralism to new visions for the role literature would play for global citizens.20 Again, the IWP’s genius was to reconcile the tension between rebel and campus geographically. A writer visiting from China could oppose policies back home while conducting herself with the polite quiescence of a foreign guest in Iowa City. In any case, the IWP was an anomaly. The main course of creative writing—the mid-century explosion of programs—was domestic. And, by the 1990s, it had indulged generations of men dedicated to emulating Ernest Hemingway and later to emulating him and Norman Mailer. Once upon a time, Lewis Mumford had argued that peace would depend on “a dynamic, self-renewing social order that shall remain, through all its changes and adjustments, in a state of balance: an order in which harmony shall be achieved by the expression, rather than the repressive regimentation, of social diversity, and in which co-operation will take the place of one-sided dominance by despotic individuals, classes, or nations” (1946: 145). But ensuring social diversity and curtailing one-sided dominance has never been easy for people emulating Norman Mailer. Today, most writers have inherited from the original creative writing programs—and the deeper history of literary sensibility—a taste for the adversarial. The rebellious posture has not changed. Only the adversary has changed. In the immediate postwar period, the enemy was bourgeois stultification (as per Trilling); an irrationally rational mass society (as per Cassill and Stegner); or the specter of left-wing and right-wing totalitarianisms abroad. Since the 1970s, the enemy lives closer to home, in demographic exclusion and systemic racism, including in the institutions of creative writing themselves. Two recent book-length reconsiderations of MFA culture lay this bare. One is David Mura’s A Stranger’s Journey: Race, Identity, and Craft in Writing (2018); the other, Matthew Salesses’s Craft in the Real World: Rethinking Fiction Writing and Workshopping (2021). Both combine nuts-andbolts writing advice with political critique. Both underscore the default whiteness of creative writing programs. Both argue that white writers often disavow the relevance of politics to literature and gun for an aesthetic vision that is “colorblind.” The programs establish whiteness as the invisible norm and silence those whose experiences differ. “To ask people of color to write outside politics,” argues Mura, “is, in many instances, to ask them to write in a way that denies who they are, that denies their people and those who came before them” (2018: 44). The stigmatization of politics often sneaks in under cover of aesthetics, of craft. But craft, as Salesses writes, “is never neutral.” In fact, it’s “the cure or injury that can be done in our shared world when it isn’t acknowledged that there are different ways that world is felt” (2021: 22). Yet Mura and Salesses have written very different books. Mura offers white writers advice for how to join the universal conversation. By 2040, Mura argues, whites will be one minority among many and they should learn to write like it. “Artists of color, who are re-creating the past, exploring

For a compelling periodization of what came after, see Brouillette (2019).

20

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the present, and creating the future, know what it means to be a racial minority in America.” That knowledge, the birthright and cultivated wealth of contemporary minorities, can be shared. Minority status—in a formulation straight out of Hutchinson’s study of the 1940s—will become the new universal. But whether white writers “will avail themselves of that knowledge is another question, one they’ll have to answer if they’re going to prepare themselves for the America that is surely coming and is, in many ways, already here” (2018: 2). Salesses aims instead to overturn pernicious power dynamics. “In many workshops, in many craft books, the dominance of one tradition of craft, serving one particular audience (white, middleclass, straight, able, etc.), is essentially imperialism, a term that should make us wary of the danger especially to emerging minority and marginalized voices” (2021: 5–6). He pointedly defends the value of different writing for different groups. “The real danger is not a single style, it’s a single audience. It is effectively a kind of colonization to assume that we all write for the same audience or that we should do so if we want our fiction to sell” (2021: 120). Better to be honest about our niches than to pretend they don’t exist. Pretending that, a writer hurts the already injured ones. Where Mura dreams of a universal audience, Salesses vindicates a sectarian one. Mura and Salesses both invoke Joseph Campbell, and here the contrast between them becomes crystalline. Campbell, recall, was the great popularizer of the modernist vision for mythology at mid-century—the idea that a shared pool of archetypes suggest the fundamental unity of the human race. To Mura, Campbell was what he aimed to be, an archaeologist of deep truths. Mura believes that “myths—and thus stories—are integral to all human creatures,” that the literary record shows “certain universal structural similarities, certain basic principles” that “have been used by human beings over and over throughout history,” and that the principles that “served our ancestors” will also “serve us, if we let them, if we have the patience and fortitude to learn our craft” (2018: 89). Salesses, on the other hand, finds in Campbell (as in Aristotle and E. M. Forster) yet one more voice of specious universality: Campbell famously theorized a “monomyth” story shape common to all cultures. In reality, his theory is widely dismissed as reductionist—far more selective than universal and unjustly valuing similarity over difference. It has been especially criticized for the way its focus on the “hero’s journey” dismisses stories like the heroine’s journey or other stories in which people do not set off to conquer and return with booty (knowledge and/or spirituality and/or riches and/ or love objects). It is important to recognize Campbell’s investment in masculinity as universal. (2021: 18–19) To paraphrase Salesses in the language of this chapter: Campbell helps Mailers be Mailers, Cassills be Cassills, Andersons be Andersons. Do we tell stories for all? Or do we tell them for allies and kin? Does literature offer a respite from the exercise of raw power, as the founders of creative writing hoped? Or just more raw power in thin disguise? Is the writer a rebel on behalf of all people? Or on behalf of a local subset living under contingent and particular duress? These are questions for the present and future. They are firmly grounded in a relevant past. A recuperation of the norms of creative writing c.1945 might amount to a recuperation of liberalism itself. This work, if it happens, must belong to all writers, including those most harmed by the failures of liberalism. Barring this, some still-hazy alternative theory will have to be made to serve. Until it comes into focus, though, the operatic self-seriousness of the early Cold War will live a

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subterranean afterlife in one of the most discursive and still thriving institutions that it helped to shape.

WORKS CITED Adsit, Janelle, and Renée M. Byrd (2019), Writing Intersectional Identities: Keywords for Creative Writers, London: Bloomsbury. Algren, Nelson (1997), The Last Carousel, New York: Seven Stories Press. Blaustein, George (2018), Nightmare Envy and Other Stories: American Culture and European Reconstruction, New York: Oxford University Press. Brinkley, Alan (2010), The Publisher: Henry Luce and His American Century, New York: Knopf. Brouillette, Sarah (2019), UNESCO and the Fate of the Literary, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Campbell, Joseph (1949), The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Cassill, R. V. (1969), In An Iron Time: Statements and Reiterations, West Lafayette, IN: Perdue University Studies. Cassill, R. V. (1990), Clem Anderson, New York: Pushcart Press. Cruz, Conchitina (2017), “The (Mis)Education of the Filipino Writer,” Kritika Kultura 28: 3–34. Díaz, Junot (2014), “MFA vs. POC,” New Yorker. https://www.newyor​ker.com/books/page-tur​ner/mfa-vs-poc. Accessed January 21, 2022. Dowling, David O. (2019), A Delicate Aggression: Savagery and Survival in the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Ellison, Ralph (1964), Shadow and Act, New York: Random House. Ellison, Ralph (1995), Invisible Man, New York: Vintage International. Engle, Paul, ed. (1961), Midland: Twenty-five Years of Fiction and Poetry from the Writing Workshops of the State University of Iowa, New York: Random House. Engle, Paul, Rowena Torrevillas, and Hualing Nieh Engle, eds. (1987), The World Comes to Iowa: Iowa International Anthology, Ames: Iowa State University Press. Gouldner, Alvin G. (1979), The Future of Intellectuals and the Rise of the New Class, New York: Oxford University Press. Guilbaut, Serge (1983), How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art: Abstract Expressionism, Freedom, and the Cold War, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Greif, Mark (2015), The Age of the Crisis of Man: Thought and Fiction in America, 1933–1973, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Hutchinson, George (2018), Facing the Abyss: American Literature and Culture in the 1940s, New York: Columbia University Press. Ingersoll, Earl G., ed. (2003), Conversations with Rita Dove, Jackson: University of Mississippi Press. Kazin, Alfred (1955), The Inmost Leaf, New York: Harcourt, Brace. Kindley, Evan (2017), Poet-Critics and the Administration of Culture, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Krutch, Joseph Wood (1953), The Measure of Man: On Freedom, Human Values, Survival and the Modern Temper, Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill. Mark McGurl (2009), The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. McMillen, Sheila (2017), “Dirty Old Men on the Faculty,” Chronicle of Higher Education. https://www.chroni​cle. com/arti​cle/dirty-old-men-on-the-facu​lty/. Accessed December 6, 2017. Menand, Louis (2021), The Free World, New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux.

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Mumford, Lewis (1946), Values for Survival: Essays, Addresses, and Letters on Politics and Education, New York: Harcourt, Brace. Mura, David (2018), A Stranger’s Journey: Race, Identity, and Narrative Craft in Writing, Athens: University of Georgia Press. Myers, D. G. (2006), The Elephants Teach: Creative Writing since 1800, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. O’Connor, Flannery (1970), Mystery and Manners, New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux. Olsen, Eric and Glenn Schaeffer, eds. (2011), We Wanted to Be Writers: Life, Love, and Literature at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, New York: Skyhorse. “ ‘On This Wall, in This Town, in Their Own State’: Paul Engle’s Memorial Sonnets Salute the War Dead of Iowa” (1956) Life 40(22): 95–105. Ross, Dorothy (1994), Modernist Impulses in the Human Sciences 1870–1930, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Salesses, Matthew (2021), Craft in the Real World: Rethinking Fiction Writing and Workshopping, New York: Catapult. Saunders, Frances Stonor (2000), The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters, New York: W.W. Norton. Schryer, Stephen (2011), Fantasies of the New Class: Ideologies of Professionalism in Post-World War II American Fiction, New York: Columbia University Press, 2011. Singerman, Howard (1999), Art Subjects: Making Artists in the American University, Berkeley: University of California. Stegner, Wallace (1982), One Way to Spell Man, Garden City, NY: Doubleday. Trilling, Lionel (1965), Beyond Culture: Essays on Literature and Learning, New York: Viking Press. “Wanted: An American Novel” (1955), Life 39(11): 48. Wilford, Hugh (2008), The Mighty Wurlitzer: How the CIA Played America, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

FURTHER READING Barnhisel, Greg (2015), Cold War Modernists, New York: Columbia University Press. Bennett, Eric (2015), Workshops of Empire: Stegner, Engle, and American Creative Writing During the Cold War, Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2015. Brouillette, Sarah (2019), UNESCO and the Fate of the Literary, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Dowling, David O. (2019), A Delicate Aggression: Savagery and Survival in the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Greif, Mark (2015), The Age of the Crisis of Man: Thought and Fiction in America, 1933–1973, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Hutchinson, George (2018), Facing the Abyss: American Literature and Culture in the 1940s, New York: Columbia University Press. Kindley, Evan (2017), Poet-Critics and the Administration of Culture, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. McGurl, Mark (2009), The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Myers, D. G. (2006), The Elephants Teach: Creative Writing since 1800, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Schryer, Stephen (2011), Fantasies of the New Class: Ideologies of Professionalism in Post-World War II American Fiction, New York: Columbia University Press.

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CHAPTER FIFTEEN

How Chinese Letters Traveled to Iowa City: Hualing Nieh’s Transpacific Crossings YI-HUNG LIU

In the summer of 1961, The Daily Iowan announced that the then-director of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop (IWW), Paul Engle, had received a $10,000 travel grant from the Rockefeller Foundation (August 17, 1961). According to the report, Engle would devote his time to searching for young writers and poets in Asian countries, achieving “a mutual exchange of idea” (The Daily Iowan, August 17, 1961). Later in 1963, with help from the United States Information Agency (USIA), Engle traveled to Pakistan, India, the Philippines, Hong Kong, Taipei, and Japan, spending time with local writers while enjoying himself as a tourist. During his three-day stay in Taipei, Engle met Hualing Nieh, his future second wife, with whom he would cofound the International Writing Program (IWP) in 1967. Their encounter not only changed their lives but also would have a major impact on American and Chinese letters (Figure 4). Scholars in literary studies and cultural Cold War history have taken note of Engle’s 1963 Asian trip. Richard Jean So described how the trip inspired the IWW director to envision a global creative writing program, and Eric Bennett’s investigation of the IWW in the context of the cultural Cold War unearthed how the same trip secured funding from the USIA and the State Department for the IWW and, shortly after, the IWP (So 2017; Bennett 2015; also see Bennett’s piece on the IWW elsewhere in this volume). Mark McGurl’s magisterial The Program Era, while analyzing the IWW in relation to postwar American literature, highlights Engle’s internationalist endeavors. According to McGurl, the “regionalist-poet-turned-liberal-internationalist” Engle transformed the Workshop into “a prestigious international center for writers” and brought about the formation of the IWP (2009 150). Like Bennett, McGurl points out that the IWP was funded by the USIA but mentions only in passing its other founder, Hualing Nieh, whom McGurl calls a “transplanted Chinese novelist” (2009: 150). Even compared to Engle, the “transplanted” writer Nieh is far from a minor figure in the history of Iowa’s writing programs. In October 2007, to commemorate the fortieth anniversary of the IWP, the University of Iowa Libraries presented a month-long exhibition, “East Asia in the

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FIGURE 4:  Hualing Nieh and Paul Engle met in Taipei, 1963. Xinhua / Alamy Stock Photo.

Midwest: 40 Years of East Asian Writers at the International Writing Program.” The exhibition pamphlet especially celebrated Nieh’s contribution: because of her, “ ‘Iowa’ is a privileged name in the world of modern Chinese letters.” As the cofounder of the IWP, Nieh’s engagement with the Iowa writing programs and how she became “transplanted” from Taiwan to Iowa City in 1963 are the key to understanding Iowa City as a City of Literature.1 In this essay, I offer a portrait of Nieh’s life and work, set against the backdrop of the Chinese Civil War and the global Cold War, to detail her significance to the IWW and the IWP, and argue that her transpacific crossings changed the course of American and Chinese letters. In 1964, Nieh joined the IWW and settled in Iowa City. Before long, with the foundation of the IWP, she invited foreign writers to the United States, remolding Engle’s internationalist endeavors with strong Chinese contours, and transformed the literary scene in Iowa City. Nieh’s emphasis on the virtues of creative writing and writers’ autonomy, in turn, influenced the Chinese literary scene, especially after she traveled across the Pacific back to Taiwan and mainland China in the 1970s. By analyzing Nieh’s writings about her pre-1964 life, her transpacific travels, and her magnum opus Mulberry and Peach, this essay demonstrates how she framed literature as nonpolitical while advocating the freedom to write. What Nieh highlighted was in line with the US Cold War rhetoric about artistic freedom and the New Criticism notion that only nonpolitical, self-contained aesthetic object would be considered good literature. Through this approach, Nieh successfully brought Chinese letters and writers to Iowa City; simultaneously, ideas about literary autonomy and nonpolitical aesthetics were translated for readers in the Chinese-speaking world.

Iowa City was designated by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) as a City of Literature in November 2008. 1

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BEFORE IOWA CITY Due to the geopolitics of the global Cold War and the Chinese Civil War, Nieh was able to join the IWW under Paul Engle’s directorship, then a quasi-exchange program of the Unites States. In 1949, Nieh’s relocation from mainland China to Taiwan made her a writer of “Free China”—a self-designation used by the government of the Republic of China (ROC) to contrast itself with “Red China,” the People’s Republic of China (PRC)—and hence a candidate for the US cultural diplomacy. As the United States did not maintain a cultural–diplomatic presence in China from the 1950s to the 1970s, had Nieh stayed in mainland China, the United States Information Service (USIS) in Taipei would not have been able to introduce her to Engle. Her youth in mainland China in the 1930s and the 1940s, however, was pivotal in shaping her contribution to Iowa’s writing programs. The exploitation of China by Imperial Japan, and the left–right politics that she lived through, particularly shaped how Nieh remained attached to Chinese culture while detaching herself from the nation’s political conflicts. Such a politicocultural stance would characterize her later IWP directorship and overall literary achievement. Born in 1925 in Wuhan, Hubei Province, Nieh had spent her childhood and adolescence entirely in mainland China. In a newly founded ROC, Nieh witnessed a series of foreign violations of Chinese sovereignty and territory. She was also familiar with domestic clashes between warlord factions because her father had been a chief of staff for the Gui faction and later a Nationalist officer. In her autobiography, Nieh recalled the turbulence of her childhood in Hankou: Our house was in the retrieved Russian concession adjacent to the French concession. There, the Annam [Vietnamese] police wore a French-style hat; his yellow teeth would be exposed when he smiled. I was not afraid of him. In the British concession, the red-headed [Sikh] foreigners waved their short sticks in hand to play with kids. They did not look like police at all. The German concession was retrieved, but the compradors for the Germans still walked loudly— kua-ta kua-ta—in the street. Their necks tightened up, not looking at others. The police in the Japanese concession, when noticing a rickshaw without passengers, would pull off the driver and beat him with sticks. The driver would scream—“Ow! Ow!”—while hauling his rickshaw running outward from the concession. But the Japanese police would kick down the driver and seize the rickshaw, cursing, “Bakayarou! Bakayarou!” The driver would kneel down begging woefully for mercy. (2011: 48)2 Illustrating a scrambled Hankou under the control of foreign powers such as Russia, France, Britain, Germany, and Japan, Nieh depicted the operation of empires in their colonies in China. The “Annam police” with a French-style hat and the friendly “foreigners” wearing red turbans bespeak the colonial networks of French and British empires in Asia. The Vietnamese and the Sikhs came to China with two respective but similar trajectories: the former from a French protectorate in Indochina named Annam, and the latter the British Raj in the Indian subcontinent. In more detail, Nieh described the violence of the Japanese police against the Chinese rickshaw driver, hinting at Japanese empire’s more intense brutality a few years later. Before she turned ten, her father was killed fighting the Red Army of the Chinese Communist Party (Nieh 2011: 73). 2

Unless indicated otherwise, all translations from Nieh’s writings are mine.

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Among the powers that intertwined with Nieh’s childhood, Imperial Japan and the Communist Party had the greatest impact on her life. The Japanese occupation of Manchuria since 1931 culminated in the outbreak of the Second Sino-Japanese War in 1937. The war brought the Nationalist Army and the Communist Red Army to form the Second United Front against Imperial Japan, and forced Nieh to move westward to a small town. Although she enjoyed her life there, Nieh was on the move again to attend high school and college in Chongqing.3 As the war against Japanese invasion escalated, southwest China was made into a political center and an educational haven. Chongqing in particular became home to the Chinese government, the office of the Ministry of Education, and more than thirty colleges and universities (Li 1995). For Nieh and thousands of “students in exile,” southwest China was at first their destination and then their home throughout the war. Decades later, “exile” would become Nieh’s keyword to characterize not only her teenage days but also the writers in Iowa City. In her memoirs, Nieh called the twentieth century as one of “people in exile” and indicated that the IWP was meant for all writers in exile (Nieh 2011: 490). In this sense, her internationalist vision, as rooted in her own experiences, differed from Engle’s internationalist endeavors based on Cold War liberalism. The two however could be easily interchangeable when it came to administering an exchange program that aimed to contain writers from every corner of the world. As the war against Japan continued, the confrontation between the Nationalist Party and the Communist Party affected Nieh and her peers in Chongqing. Despite their alliance, the political competition and power struggles between the Nationalists and the Communists never subsided. But while many of Nieh’s peers were debating their political viewpoints, she was disengaged: They were talking about the Nationalist Party and the Communist Party, about where to go and what to follow. Left? Or right? At that moment, many youngsters were at the crossroads of turning left or right. Caught within the political tides of the Republic [of China], my family had been turned over and over, shattered into pieces and deaths. It seemed that yet another tide would be coming soon. A misty night, I thought of my mother living in a lodge in the mountains, and I missed my brother undergoing his air force training in India. (2011: 137) As Nieh recalled, the Nationalist–Communist alliance did not erase the gap between left and right; rather, more and more young students were brought to a political crossroads. That said, what occupied Nieh’s mind was her mother and brother, and the hardship that her family had experienced. Nieh portrayed herself as neither left nor right, indifferent to the political tension around her. The way that she depoliticized her relation to politics would become her stance throughout her career as a writer and the founder and director of the IWP. Shortly after the end of the Second Sino-Japanese War and the Second World War, the left–right confrontation intensified. The end of the war against Japan marked the beginning of the Chinese Civil War. Amid the Nationalist–Communist agitation, Nieh graduated with a bachelor’s degree in English from the National Central University in Nanjing in 1948. As the Nationalist troops were

In her autobiography, Nieh described herself in the small town called Sandouping as “hanging around and having fun without any constraint” (2011: 92). Her life in Sandouping would become the setting and content of her first novel, The Lost Golden Bell (1960). 3

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isolated by the Communist forces in Beijing, Nieh married her college classmate. In January 1949, the People’s Liberation Army entered Beijing and gained the upper hand. Nieh and her husband left the capital and moved southward. In mid-1949, relocated from Guangzhou, Nieh and her family arrived in Taipei along with a million migrants from mainland China. These migrants, including Chinese Nationalist officials, soldiers, and commoners, substantially changed the demographics of the island of Taiwan. Nieh was aware of her newcomer identity: “When I arrived in Taiwan, I was of course a waishengren” (2011: 12). Literally meaning “extra-provincial person,” waishengren mainly refers to the Han Chinese who relocated to Taiwan from the mainland after the Second Sino-Japanese War and during the Chinese Civil War, as in contrast to benshengren (lit. “original-provincial person”), the Han Chinese who had migrated to and lived in Taiwan since the Qing dynasty or earlier. Thanks to Nieh’s connections with the waishengren community, she soon started working for the literary section of Free China journal, an anticommunist journal launched by a group of Chinese liberals in Taipei in November 1949. The relationship between Free China and the Nationalist regime indirectly caused Nieh’s second relocation. In the early 1950s, Free China aligned itself with Nationalists; editor-in-chief Lei Chen, then a member of the Nationalist Party, often called for saving China from the Communist Party (Lei 1978). Yet, around the mid-1950s, the Free China liberals tried to instigate political reforms by organizing an opposition party in Taiwan. In 1954, Lei Chen was expelled from the Nationalist Party, and the journal’s relationship with the Nationalist regime turned sour. In charge of Free China’s literary section, Nieh did not resign from the politically sensitive journal but neither did she participate in Free China’s political movement. On September 4, 1960, Lei Chen and a number of editorial members were arrested. Nieh was spared possibly because of her distance from the political action or perhaps due to her father’s Nationalist standing. Nonetheless, Nieh and her household came under surveillance. Finally, in the spring of 1963, during Paul Engle’s three-day visit to Taipei, Nieh received a ticket out of the political control at home. She accepted Engle’s offer and began life anew in Iowa City in 1964. Nieh’s 1964 transpacific crossing from Taipei to Iowa City was not just a romantic journey—it was also a product of Cold War cultural exchange. She was one of the writers recommended by the USIS post in Taipei to study creative writing in the United States. In the early 1960s, with an intention to compete with the Foreign Languages Press in Beijing, the USIS Taipei sponsored young writers and translated their works into English to be distributed through commercial channels and USIS posts worldwide (McCarthy and O’Brien 1998). In order to counter Communist propaganda, the American agency, complacent about the universality of American styles of cultural expression and creative writing, recruited Chinese writers in Taiwan to help it win over “hearts and minds.” Chinese writers in Taiwan were obviously patronized, but they also took advantage of the institutional and financial assistance provided by the USIS. By enrolling in the IWW, writers including Pai Hsien-yung, Ouyang Tzu, and Wang Wen-Hsing were able to rid themselves of the martial law regulations in Taiwan that restricted the mobility of commoners from traveling abroad. Likewise, as Nieh was introduced to Engle by a then-official of USIS Taipei, Richard McCarthy (also an Iowan), she was provided with a chance for change. At that time in Taiwan’s literary circles, the word “Iowa” had come to mean more than a place, or even a reputable program: it was also a precious opportunity to leave Taiwan for the United States and study creative writing.

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Intentionally or not, Nieh proved a capable agent of US cultural diplomacy. Around the time she joined the IWW, Nieh had devoted herself to “modernize” Chinese letters in Taiwan, and her engagement with “Iowa” had fashioned American creative writing as a more modern form of literature. Soon before Nieh left for the United States, she hosted a reading session at National Taiwan University, introducing works of “modern fiction” that highlighted the techniques of streamof-consciousness and literary symbolism (Wei 1964). When she became a student at the IWW, Nieh started translating her first novel, The Lost Golden Bell, into English and received a grant from the Mary Roberts Rinehart Foundation (Wang 1966).4 In the meantime, Nieh helped Engle with international business such as arranging scholarships for foreign writers and reviewing their works, and laid the basis for the setup of the IWP. Soon after the IWP was founded, Nieh was interviewed by Ya Hsien (pen name of Ching-lin Wang), a major poet and significant cultural figure in Taiwan, to elaborate on the IWP and her role in it (Wang [1968] 2013). In September 1970, the very first creative writing workshop in Taiwan, following the example of Iowa’s programs, was instituted at National Taiwan University (Mei-Xin 1970). In Taiwan, Nieh had become a spokesperson for modern literature as embodied by American creative writing; meanwhile, her linguistic capability and connections with Chinese literary circles assisted Engle to internationalize the literary scene of Iowa City. As Nieh dedicated herself to the organizational activities in the latter half of the 1960s, she managed to write and experiment with modernist techniques in her most acclaimed work, Mulberry and Peach. Mulberry and Peach Mulberry and Peach not only recounts Nieh’s experiences of wartime displacement, migration, and being surveilled but also exemplifies her insistence on literary modernism and creative autonomy. In Nieh’s interview with Ya Hsien, she described the novel as one that she was “destined to write,” to express herself, her life, and ideas about writing (Wang [1968] 2013). In December 1970, Mulberry and Peach first appeared in sections in Taiwan’s United Daily News; in 1976, it was published in book form in Hong Kong. The novel is composed of two separate narratives: Mulberry’s diary-like notes about her days in 1940s mainland China, late 1950s Taiwan, and late 1960s United States, and Peach’s four letters dated between January and March 1970 to an agent of the US Immigration and Naturalization Service. The two narratives are merged into one in the setting of the United States in 1970. The reckless Peach and the reticent Mulberry, represented through two separate genres and styles of writing, turn out to be one Chinese woman. By juxtaposing and eventually combining Mulberry’s memoirs and Peach’s letters, Nieh offered a history of wars fought in modern China, and illustrated a trajectory of moving across the Pacific: from China to Taiwan and then to the US. Mulberry and Peach is an account of a Chinese woman’s surviving, moving, living, and writing, all of which resemble Nieh’s own experiences. In both its original version and English translation, Mulberry and Peach made an impact on the literary circles on both sides of the Pacific. Written in Mandarin Chinese after Nieh settled in Iowa City, the novel was first serialized in Taiwan from December 1, 1970, to February 6, 1971. The

Students of the Iowa Writers Workshop, including the Korean American novelist Richard E. Kim and American poet Robert Dana, also received grants from the Mary Roberts Rinehart Foundation (New York Times, December 14, 1961). 4

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serialization abruptly stopped, as literary critics in Taiwan found Nieh’s avant-garde techniques unappealing, and the Nationalist government officials condemned the work’s political allusions. Not until 1976 was the novel published in its complete book form in Hong Kong by the Union Press, a Chinese publishing house founded in 1951 by Hong Kong opinion makers and sponsored by the CIA-funded Asia Foundation (Shen 2017). In 1980, China Youth Press published Mulberry and Peach in Beijing, possibly due to Nieh’s “return” to China in 1978 and her hosting of the Chinese Weekend in 1979 in Iowa City (see below). Finally, in 1988, the novel was published in Taiwan. These Chinese versions varied—some were severely edited, some slightly modified, and some relatively intact—as a result of the political climate at the moment in each location.5 In the English-speaking world, Mulberry and Peach was translated into English and published under the title Mulberry and Peach: Two Women of China in 1981. In 1990, the English rendition earned Nieh an American Book Award. Literary critics often considered Mulberry and Peach a national allegory of modern China, a reading that would be enriched by a feminist critique and a diaspora approach after the early 1990s. Indeed, Nieh’s novel possesses what Asian American literature scholar Sau-ling C. Wong calls “the characteristic inexhaustibility of powerful literature”; as the novel is assigned to a number of “discursive locations,” it has produced a variety of “critical practice” (2001: 137).6 Nieh’s own discussion of Mulberry and Peach also demonstrates a “discursive location.” With an emphasis on humanity and the freedom to write, Nieh’s approach worked in tandem with the mission of the IWP that extolled writers’ autonomy. When Nieh was writing the novel in Iowa City in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the IWP thrived as an official cultural exchange program of the United States. In 1973, the USIA commissioned a documentary about the IWP, Community of the Imagination, which focused on writers’ interaction with each other and portrayed the IWP as a sanctuary for “writers of all sorts.” According to the documentary, the IWP writers were able to “nurture the highest forms of human expression,” to live and write as they saw fit (Krell 1973). Nieh reiterated this message when she recalled the writing process of Mulberry and Peach. As she said, because she was “far away in Iowa,” she could write what she wanted to and “control the life of the work” ([1997] 2020: 320). Appreciating her freedom, Nieh might have thought of her time in Taiwan when the Nationalist regime censored literary works. She might have also thought of her teens in early 1940s China, when writers and intellectuals on the left produced politicized literature to serve the nation and the people.7 Nieh undoubtedly preferred the literary climate of the IWP, where literature was believed to be not political but rather “the highest form of human expression.” She emphasized that Mulberry and Peach was written of her own volition in Iowa City and declared that the novel was “not about politics but ‘human beings’,” about “the fate of ‘human beings’— not just about the fate of the Chinese” ([1997] 2020: 319–20). Highlighting all of humanity and writers’ autonomy to write, Nieh in effect downplayed the political specificities of modern Chinese history represented in Mulberry and Peach.

See Nieh’s own account in the prologue to the 1997 Chinese edition of Mulberry and Peach [桑青與桃紅]. See also Sau-ling C. Wong’s “The Stakes of Textual Border-Crossing: Hualing Nieh’s Mulberry and Peach in Sinocentric, Asian American, and Feminist Critical Practices” (2001). 6 See Yu-Fang Cho’s reading as an example of critical practice, “Rewriting Exile, Remapping Empire, Re-Membering Home: Hualing Nieh’s ‘Mulberry and Peach’ ” (2004). 7 This principle was established mainly by Mao Zedong at the Yenan Forum on Literature and Art on May 2, 1942. 5

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Nevertheless, to Nieh, Mulberry and Peach was also a specifically Chinese novel that affirmed her own attachment to cultural China. It was particularly through the means of Mandarin Chinese that Nieh found roots for her diasporic life: I wrote the novel in Iowa in the 1970s. I came to Iowa from Taiwan in 1964. For years, I could not write a word, because I did not know where my roots were; my pen was drifting between Chinese and English without any whereabout. In those years, I had been reading, living, experiencing, thinking, and exploring. Then, I realized that only by using Chinese to write about Chinese people and Chinese things could I be like a fish in the water, carefree and unconstrained. Only then did I know that my mother tongue is my roots. China is my native homeland. Iowa is my home. ([1997] 2020: 319–20) By writing in Mandarin Chinese, Nieh found a solution to reconcile the split between two languages. The split also applied to the division between her American present and her Chinese past, between two cultures and two ways of lives, as suggested by Peach’s letters at the moment and Mulberry’s memoir of the bygone days. Caught within these divisions, Nieh dealt with the split by using Mandarin Chinese to write about Chinese people and Chinese things, and eventually found her Chinese roots. Before acknowledging Iowa City as “home,” Nieh adhered to cultural China as her roots. In the postscript of Mulberry and Peach, Nieh employed a story from a Chinese classic text Shanhaijing (lit. Classic of Mountains and Seas) that tells about the daughter of Yendi (Emperor of Flame), Nuwa, who transforms herself into a bird called Jingwei after drowning into the Eastern Sea. Nuwa/Jingwei tries to fill the sea by carrying pebbles with her beak into the water. In Mulberry and Peach, Nieh kept the storyline but illustrated more vividly a determined “Princess Bird” aspiring to take revenge on the sea. The resurrected Princess Bird might have reminded Nieh of how she herself survived the past hardship and lived afresh in Iowa City. The postscript further indicates that Nieh’s transpacific journey has not come to an end. Instead, the Princess Bird’s determination suggests an imperative of traveling back and forth between Nieh’s Chinese roots and her home in Iowa City. As Nieh wrote, “To this day, Princess Bird is flying back and forth between the Sea and the Mountain” ([1981] 1998: 207). While Nieh did not reveal what or whom she tried to revenge, she persevered—like the unwavering Princess Bird—in her attempt to be associated with cultural China and connect it to the other side of the Pacific.

TRANSPACIFIC CROSSINGS IN THE 1970S The publication of Mulberry and Peach in Hong Kong in 1976 occurred between Nieh’s first two transpacific crossings from the United States to the Chinese cultural sphere: 1974 to Taipei and 1978 to mainland China. The 1974 one was a part of the Asian trip funded by the State Department’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs. From March to June, Engle and Nieh, as the director and associate director of the IWP, traveled to Asian countries including the Philippines, Indonesia, Thailand, India, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Korea, and Japan (Engle and Nieh 1974). The 1978 trip was more a homecoming for Nieh (Nieh [1980] 1988). Although the two trips meant different things to her, in both Nieh reconnected herself with her Chinese roots and, as Engle did in his 1963 Asian trip, managed to bring Chinese writers to Iowa City where they could be taught about creative writing and literary autonomy.

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Officially sponsored by the United States, the Engles’ 1974 Asian journey was a business trip that aimed to prove the success of the IWP as an exchange program of the State Department. In their report, Engle and Nieh illustrated how local writers who were once in Iowa City welcomed them heartily; according to them, when foreign writers leave the IWP, they “go away with a strong personal attachment to Iowa City, to us, and to the USA” (Engle and Nieh 1974). To demonstrate this point, the report describes that a Bengali poet was beaten by communists because he praised the United States, and then declares that “he was at the airport [welcoming the Engles]” as if certifying the poet’s attachment, if not loyalty, to the IWP and the United States (Engle and Nieh 1974). While showcasing the IWP’s diplomatic effectiveness, the report at the same time neutralizes such a political significance by highlighting writers’ freedom to write in Iowa City. In line with the USIAcommissioned documentary Community of the Imagination and Nieh’s reflections on Mulberry and Peach, the report states, “For many, [the Iowa experience] was the only chance they would ever have to be wholly free to write their own books with leisure” (Engle and Nieh 1974). Differing from the official report, Nieh’s memoirs revealed that her travel to Asia was more than a business trip. For Nieh, this trip allowed her to be closer to her roots, and their stop in Taipei was especially significant. Whereas the report, with a complacent tone, says that Taiwan was not in their itinerary but “people from there telephoned [the Engles] in Hong Kong begging so hard that [they] decided to go,” Nieh’s autobiography offers a conflicting account (Engle and Nieh 1974). According to Nieh, they planned to stop by Taiwan in order to visit Lei Chen, the editor-in-chief of Free China: In 1974, Mr. Lei Chen had been released from prison for four years, and I had settled down in Iowa for ten years. Paul and I were about to travel in Asia for two months, and decided to go to Taiwan to visit Lei Chen. When we arrived in Hong Kong, we applied for an entry visa with both sides across the Taiwan Strait. The mainland did not respond. Taiwan allowed us to enter, but Paul worried about my safety and called the U.S. Embassy for further information. The Embassy said that there should not be any problems and would arrange someone to pick us up at the airport. (2011: 244) Unlike the report that celebrated the congenial relationship between writers and the IWP, Nieh revealed the actual action that they had to take due to the ongoing tensions between Taiwan and mainland China: apply for entry permits with both Chinese authorities, the PRC and the ROC in Taiwan. The PRC’s lack of response hinted at the domestic upheavals of the Cultural Revolution and the not-yet-established diplomatic relations between the United States and China. On the other hand, despite the stringent border control under martial law in Taiwan, the ROC permitted the Engles’ entry, perhaps considering the role of the US government, a major patron of Taiwan, behind their trip. As the ROC’s international status weakened in the early 1970s, Nationalist Taiwan (a de facto US protectorate) would have treated any application for a visa from the US side with delicacy. Moreover, the Engles, as US citizens and the directors of an official US cultural exchange program, were eligible for assistance from the US Embassy. At the same time, Nieh’s writing suggests how she appropriated the US fund to her own ends. In her Chinese prose about the meeting with Lei Chen, not even once did Nieh mention the IWP. Instead, she recorded in depth their conversation about the shared past and Lei Chen’s life. The English report, to the contrary, focuses superficially on the devious route that they had to take to Lei Chen’s house under surveillance and concludes the passage in an almost exotic-seeking tone with a single word: “Spooky.”

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Before their brief stay in Taipei, the Engles had also visited Hong Kong. Nieh devoted herself to research for one of the most ambitious IWP cotranslation projects that culminated in the publication of Literature of the Hundred Flowers in March 1981 by Columbia University Press. As the report describes, “Hualing was especially happy in Hong Kong … because she was at last back in Chinese culture” (Engle and Nieh 1974). Besides reuniting with her friends, Nieh diligently collected and made copies of Chinese writings during the Hundred Flowers Movement from 1956 to 1957. After she returned to Iowa City, Nieh supervised a group of writers/translators at the IWP to translate the materials into English.8 According to the report, the Asia Foundation also sent a translator to Iowa City for this project. The result was two volumes of translated pieces that cover a wide range of genres including poetry, criticism, and fiction. The publication of Literature of the Hundred Flowers was coupled with Nieh being acknowledged nationwide in the United States. In 1981, she was conferred two honorary Doctor of Humane Letters degrees from the University of Colorado and the University of Dubuque. Next year, Nieh was awarded by the National Association of Governors for her distinguished service to the arts. Around the same time, along with the changes in the China policy of the United States, Nieh and the IWP became well-known in US society. Then the director of the IWP, Nieh played the role of an American cultural diplomat, facilitating cultural exchange between the United States and the PRC; nonetheless, she made use of the IWP and its relations with the US government, connecting Chinese writers with each other in the midst of political divisions. Based on her belief in cultural China, Nieh had become a diplomat of “Chinese literature” broadly defined. In September 1979, a few months after the United States and the PRC established official diplomatic relations, the IWP hosted an event called the “Chinese Weekend” to welcome the first two Chinese writers from the PRC. The New York Times reported on the Chinese Weekend and interviewed the Engles. Whereas Engle talked about “entertaining” the Chinese, Nieh aspired to enable the communication between writers of Chinese descent, especially those from mainland China and Taiwan (Mitgang 1979). To make sure that the event would not be interfered by either the Nationalist or Communist authority, Nieh depoliticized the event, passionately asserting that “we are all Chinese, we are happy to be Chinese,” and her passion was fully dedicated to “the future of Chinese writing” (Nieh 1979). The exhibition that celebrated the fortieth anniversary of the IWP also highlighted the 1979 Chinese Weekend to note Nieh’s contribution: “In 1979, Iowa City was the very first place where an encounter between the Mainland and the Taiwanese writers and intellectuals could occur, after three decades of mutual isolation.” The exhibition pamphlet, however, did not indicate that the Chinese Weekend was made possible by the changes in US foreign policy. Neither did it mention Nieh’s trip to mainland China in 1978. An apparently personal trip notwithstanding, Nieh’s 1978 transpacific crossing might have endorsed the landmark event in the history of the IWP and the US–PRC cultural exchange. As an American in charge of a state-sponsored writing program in Iowa City, Nieh was able to fulfill her homecoming across the Pacific. The PRC–US rapprochement that continued to deepen in the late 1970s eased Nieh and Engle’s traveling to China, and the end of the Cultural Revolution in 1976 led to China opening itself to the world. In other words, Nieh’s homecoming These IWP translators were Y. W. Wong, Domonic Cheung, John Hsu, Stewart Yuen, Dennis Johnson, Daniel Webb, and Peter Nazareth, as mentioned in Nieh’s acknowledgments to Literature of the Hundred Flowers Volume I Criticism and Polemics (1981), vi–vii. 8

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trip was aptly timed. On May 20, 1978, with her two daughters and Engle, Nieh crossed the Pacific from San Francisco to Hong Kong, from which she moved to Guangzhou and reentered mainland China (Nieh [1980] 1988). She stayed until June 18 and recorded her sojourn in detail. Her memories would be published as a collection of essays entitled After Thirty Years. During her stay, she spent a week in Wuhan and almost three weeks in Beijing. In her hometown, Nieh’s authentic Wuhan dialect surprised the locals. She introduced herself as “a Wuhanite coming from the U.S.,” combining her Chinese roots with her Iowa home with ease (Nieh [1980] 1988: 39). In Beijing, she visited the Summer Palace and the Great Wall of China, enjoyed several performances of Beijing opera, and met with a number of Chinese artists and writers, including poets Bing Xin and Cai Xijiao, playwrights Xia Yan and Cao Yu. Two days before she returned to Iowa City, she finally met with Ai Qing whom she greatly admired (Nieh [1980] 1988: 211–40). In the spring of 1980, Nieh and Engle traveled to China for the second time. Nieh again endeavored to meet with mainland Chinese writers such as Ba Jing and Shen Congwen. In the early 1980s, thanks to her effort, mainland Chinese writers including Wang Meng, Ding Ling, and Liu Binyan visited Iowa City. Ai Qing, too, became an IWP writer in residence in the fall of 1980. Nieh’s 1978 homecoming as well as the IWP Chinese Weekend and her 1980 visit were all conditioned by the normalization of the US–PRC relations on the one hand and, on the other, by the conflict between the PRC and the ROC. The United States’ new China policy and the changing Sino–US relationships made her transpacific crossing easier. At the same time, had she remained a national of the ROC rather than a US citizen, Nieh would not have been able to travel to mainland China. The Chinese Civil War, after all, was ongoing. In the midst of these intricate diplomatic relations, political factors largely determined where she could travel, whom she could talk to, which writers she could meet with, and whom she could invite to Iowa City. Yet, just as she framed Mulberry and Peach as a novel “not about politics but ‘human beings’,” Nieh characterized her transpacific crossings as being in the cause of humanity. In the postscript of After Thirty Years, she stated, “I returned to mainland China for the sake of ‘human beings’; I returned to Taiwan also for the sake of ‘human beings’ ” ([1980] 1988: 321). Caught within a political context in which the shifting Cold War geopolitics intertwined with the ongoing Chinese Civil War, Nieh might have intentionally distanced herself from politics while highlighting the universally shared humanity. Perhaps, only by depoliticizing herself, her activities, and her writings could Nieh negotiate with state governments and hence connect with her Chinese roots and her fellow Chinese writers. It might also have been her strategy to navigate among writers whose political viewpoints often varied. The ways that Nieh neutralized herself, however, indicated a political position premised on a homogenized cultural China. At the end of her homecoming memoir, she declared, “No matter where I am, I identify myself with Chinese culture, Chinese homeland, Chinese history, and Yan Huang Zisun (descendants of Han Chinese)” ([1980] 1988: 321). For Nieh, Chinese culture, landscape, and history—that is, her Chinese roots—were defined through and subsumed under the Han Chinese ethnicity and cultural tradition. How Nieh attached herself to her Chinese roots suggested a political position that homogenized “China.” Her presumption of a China that was culturally, linguistically, and ethnically homogenous would have affected the kind of Chinese literature that she chose to translate and arranged to travel to Iowa City. In other words, with her sensitivity to Chinese literature and culture and her status as IWP director, Nieh mediated what kind of Chinese letters would be transmitted—how Americans at Iowa would understand Chinese

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literature, and what Chinese-language writers would receive these precious advantages. Whereas she tried to downplay political factors to ensure the literary exchange between the two shores of the Pacific and among Chinese writers, Nieh’s effort could have contributed to disregarding the complexity of “China” and perpetuating the unresolved conflicts in the Chinese-speaking world. Nieh’s opening remarks at the 1979 Chinese Weekend exemplified such a position, based on which she distanced herself from contemporary political conflicts while promoting a homogenous cultural Chineseness: This meeting is completely without political motivation or intent. It is beyond all governments. They may like this meeting or not, but it doesn’t matter. We are writers, we are friends, we want to get together, we want to talk, face to face, heart to heart. On behalf of the International Writing Program, of the University of Iowa, of all Americans who love the Chinese culture, and especially on behalf of all the Chinese who are happy we are here together at this moment—on behalf of all such Chinese in every part of the world, on the mainland, in Taiwan, in Hong Kong, in Singapore, in the Philippines, in the United States, we welcome you and thank you for coming. (1979) Nieh was aware that not all Chinese liked the meeting, but she said, “it doesn’t matter.” What mattered was to meet and talk with writers and friends “face to face, heart to heart,” and Nieh emphasized that the event was “completely without political motivation or intent.” To ensure that an event highly charged with Cold War and regional politics could be held without political interruption, she strategically employed her triple identities as the IWP director, a Chinese American living in Iowa City, and an overseas Han Chinese adhering to her cultural roots. Kicking off the Chinese Weekend that was constituted by Chinese writers but held on US soil, Nieh accentuated “Chinese culture” as loved by Americans and shared by all Chinese. She confidently represented both groups, and further presumed a homogenous Chineseness “in every part of the world, on the mainland, in Taiwan, in Hong Kong, in Singapore, in the Philippines, in the United States.” The ways that Nieh framed the Chinese Weekend was not only of necessity to keep the event undisturbed by politics but also of her belief in a homogenous cultural Chineseness. Such Chineseness overshadowed Nieh’s tactful maneuvering of her identities and her negotiations with political powers. Moreover, this Chineseness that Nieh asserted glossed over continuous confrontation between the PRC and the ROC, as well as the power relations between the Chinese and the local communities in Singapore and the Philippines. Forty years later, as aforementioned, the Chinese Weekend was remembered as a reunion of Chinese writers, a narrative that Nieh would agree with. Her transpacific crossings and the consequences that entailed, however, imply more nuances and dissonances.

CONCLUSION Nieh’s participation in the IWW and her role as the cofounder and director of the IWP reveal the transpacific aspect of the cultural Cold War, in which Nieh acted as an US cultural diplomat while advancing Chinese literature in ways that she thought it should be. Her teenage days in mainland China explain why she adhered to cultural China and why she distanced herself from the political divide between left and right. Her fifteen-year stay in Taipei reinforced her indifference to politics. Nieh’s Mulberry and Peach captures how she employed modernist techniques to narrate her life in

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wartime China and Taiwan under martial law. The novel also suggests how she concerned herself with the Cold War and regional politics by depoliticizing her standpoint and writings. Nieh often emphasized “humanity” and avoided political interpretation when discussing her literary output and reminiscing her transpacific crossings in the 1970s. Since the late 1970s, Nieh had shaped the IWP through the Cold War transpacific where cultural activities and geopolitical arrangement were closely entangled. Nieh often portrayed herself as “roots in the mainland, trunk in Taiwan, and leaves in Iowa.” Her identification with the Han Chineseness, her cultural and linguistic capability, and her position as the director of a prestigious cultural exchange program of the United States allowed her to transform the literary landscapes of Iowa City and the Chinese-speaking world in the prime of her career. The ways in which she told the story of “Iowa” to the world illuminate how the transpacific exchange had been integral to the formation of Iowa City as a City of Literature. Yet, framed by her cultural China and the IWP’s emphasis on writers’ freedom to write, Nieh’s narrative might have concealed as much as it has revealed.

WORKS CITED Bennett, Eric (2015), Workshops of Empire: Stegner, Engle, and American Creative Writing during the Cold War, Iowa City: University of Iowa Press. Cho, Yu-Fang (2004), “Rewriting Exile, Remapping Empire, Re-Membering Home: Hualing Nieh’s ‘Mulberry and Peach’,” Meridians 5(1): 157–200. “Engle Gets $10,000 Travel Grant” (1961), The Daily Iowan (August 17): 9. Engle, Paul, and Nieh Hualing (1974), “Report on Asian Trip March-June, 1974,” Paul Engle Papers (Box 22), Special Collections, University of Iowa Libraries. Accessed August 11, 2017. Krell, Gerald (1973), Community of the Imagination (film). Lei, Chen (1978), Lei Chen Memoir: A Sequel to My Mother [雷震回憶錄：我的母親續篇], Hong Kong: Seventies Press. Li, Dingkai (1995), Education in Chongqing during the War of Resistance [抗戰時期重慶的教育], Chongqing: Chongqing Publishing House. McCarthy, Richard M., and Jack O’Brien. Interview (December 28, 1998), Foreign Affairs Oral History Collection, Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training, Arlington, VA. McGurl, Mark (2009), The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Mei-Xin (1970), “On Creative Writing Workshop,” [談文藝創作研究班], United Daily News (October 7): 9. Mitgang, Herbert (1979), “Publishing: Chinese Weekend in Iowa,” New York Times (August 17): C24. Nieh, Hualing ([1960] 1969), The Lost Golden Bell [失去的金玲子], Taipei: Dalin. Nieh, Hualing (1979), “The Future of Chinese Writing: Opening Remarks to the Chinese Weekend,” Paul Engle Papers (Box 25), Special Collections, University of Iowa Libraries. Accessed August 15, 2017. Nieh, Hualing, ed. (1981), Literature of the Hundred Flowers, New York: Columbia University Press. Nieh, Hualing ([1980] 1988), After Thirty Years [三十年後], Taipei: Hann Colour Culture Co. Nieh, Hualing ([1981] 1998), Mulberry and Peach, trans. Jane Parish Yang and Lunda Lappin, New York: Feminist Press at the City University of New York. Nieh, Hualing (2011), Three Lives [三輩子], Taipei: Linking Publishing Company.

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Nieh, Hualing ([1997] 2020), “A Note to Mulberry and Peach in Exile” [桑青與桃紅流放小記], prologue to Mulberry and Peach [桑青與桃紅], reprinted, Taipei: China Times. Shen, Shuang (2017), “Empire of Information: The Asia Foundation’s Network and Chinese-Language Cultural Production in Hong Kong and Southeast Asia,” American Quarterly 69(3): 589–610. So, Richard Jean (2017), “The Invention of the Global MFA: Taiwanese Writers at Iowa, 1964–1980,” American Literary History 29(3): 499–520. Wang, Ching-lin ([1968] 2013), “Interview Nieh Hualing: Introducing the ‘International Writers’ Workshop’ ” [聶華苓訪問記——介紹「國際作家工作室」], Compilation of Contemporary Writers in Taiwan Vol. 23 Nieh Hualing [台灣現當代作家研究資料彙編23聶華苓] (edited by Feng-Hunag Ying), 121–30. Wang, Lan-Lan (1966), “Wreaths in Iowa” [衣阿華的花環], United Daily News (June 17): 7. Wei, Zi-Yun (1964), “On Fiction: Read Aloud” [談小說——朗誦], United Daily News (June 12): 7. Wong, Sau-ling C. (2001), “The Stakes of Textual Border-Crossing: Hualing Nieh’s Mulberry and Peach in Sinocentric, Asian American, and Feminist Critical Practices,” in Kandice Chuh and Karen Shimakawa (eds.), Orientations: Mapping Studies in the Asian Diaspora, 130–52, Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

FURTHER READING Bennett, Eric (2015), Workshops of Empire: Stegner, Engle, and American Creative Writing during the Cold War, Iowa City: University of Iowa Press. Chen, Kuan-Hsing (2010), Asia as Method: Toward Deimperialization, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Da, Nan Z. (2018), Intransitive Encounter: Sino-U.S. Literatures and Limits of Exchange, New York: Columbia University Press. Hsu, Madeline Y. (2015), The Good Immigrants: How the Yellow Peril Became the Model Minority, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Lin, Hsiao-ting (2016), Accidental State: Chiang Kai-shek, the United States, and the Making of Taiwan, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Liu, Yi-hung (2017), “The World Comes to Iowa in the Cold War: International Writing Program and the Translation of Mao Zedong.” American Quarterly 69(3): 611–31. McGurl, Mark (2009), The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Patterson, Christopher B. (2018), Transitive Cultures: Anglophone Literature of the Transpacific, New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. So, Richard Jean (2017), “The Invention of the Global MFA: Taiwanese Writers at Iowa, 1964–1980,” American Literary History 29(3): 499–520. Wang, Xiaojue (2013), Modernity with a Cold War Face: Reimagining the Nation in Chinese Literature across the 1949 Divide, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Xiang, Sunny (2020), Tonal Intelligence: The Aesthetic of Asian Inscrutability during the Long Cold War, New York: Columbia University Press. Yang, Dominic Meng-Hsuan (2020), The Great Exodus from China: Trauma, Memory, and Identity in Modern Taiwan, New York: Cambridge University Press.

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CHAPTER SIXTEEN

William Faulkner as Cold War Cultural Ambassador: “In between propaganda and escapism” DEBORAH COHN

In November of 1950, a New York Times editorial noting that William Faulkner had been awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature declared that the writer’s  field of vision is concentrated on a society that is too often vicious, depraved, decadent, corrupt. Americans must fervently hope that the award by a Swedish jury and the enormous vogue of Faulkner’s works in Latin America and on the European Continent … does not mean that foreigners admire him because he gives them the picture of American life they believe to be typical and true. … Incest and rape may be common pastimes in Faulkner’s “Jefferson, Miss.” but they are not elsewhere in the United States. Nevertheless, the editorial begrudgingly concluded that “Faulkner is a great artist and deserves the award, and the United States can be proud that one of its artists has earned the Nobel prize again” (“Nobel” 1950). For the editors of the New York Times, Faulkner, like his native South, constituted a deviation from the national norm and therefore did not offer a “picture of American life” that was “typical and true.” Certainly, novels such as The Sound and the Fury (1929), As I Lay Dying (1930), and Absalom, Absalom! (1936) depicted an impoverished region that was marginalized within the national body (the South was, after all, deemed “the nation’s problem” by President Roosevelt in 1938). These and works such as Sanctuary (1931) and The Wild Palms (1939) also represented behaviors   This essay first appeared in Diplomatic History 40(3) (2016). I am indebted to the following people for feedback on this project and on earlier drafts of this essay, as well as for opportunities to share my research: Martyn Bone, John T. Matthews, Michael Grossberg, Noel Polk, Leigh Anne Duck, Susan Castillo, Peter Hulme, Richard H. King, Mark Millington, Sharon Monteith, Liam Kennedy, Brian Ward, Patrick O’Donnell, Patricio N. Abinales, Jennifer Fleissner, and Scott Herring.

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considered by some to be unacceptable within the national body (even if they might have been seen as acceptable for a supposedly aberrant South). The elitist views of the Times editors reflected those of the literary establishment, which, for the most part, similarly dismissed Faulkner through the late 1940s. Thus it was that in 1950, quite a few of Faulkner’s novels were out of print, though his more sensationalistic works were quite successful in paperback. Internationally, however, he was widely read and translated (Earle 2015: 231–2). Between 1954 and 1961, the State Department capitalized on Faulkner’s international appeal, sending him as goodwill ambassador to Latin America (1954, 1961), Asia (1955), and Europe (1955, 1957), where he met with enthusiastic audiences in both allied countries and those where the US government was seeking to improve foreign relations. Faulkner’s transformation from a reclusive writer regarded by many as “a minor, obscurantist novelist who worked primarily in the Gothic tradition, creating cruel grotesqueries of race and violence and sex” into a globe-trotting cold warrior took place in tandem with a reevaluation of his fiction and of the role of the arts in general in the United States during the Cold War (Barnhisel 2015: 124). As Lawrence Schwartz has detailed, in the late 1940s, literary critic Malcolm Cowley, writer Robert Penn Warren, and others worked to retool and sanitize Faulkner’s reputation. On the one hand, they swept aside the image of him as a southern nationalist and deliberately overlooked his potboilers. On the other, they cultivated the image of an American writer and mythologist who wrote on timeless and universal themes and whose work spoke broadly to the human condition (Schwartz 1988: 9–37, 200).1 This makeover formed part of a contemporary reconsideration of literary modernism, which, Schwartz argues, was cast as an instrument of anti-Communism and an ideological weapon with which to battle the “totalitarianism” of the Soviet Union. In the arts, so the argument went, the United States encouraged individual expression and experimentation, while the Soviet Union accepted only the monolithic, the banal, and the propagandistic. The United States represented freedom, democratic institutions, and an open society promoting diversity and tolerating dissent; but the Soviet Union stood for fanatical authoritarianism, unquestioning obedience, and stupefying bureaucratic control. (Schwartz 1988: 201) The retooling of modernism was, in turn, in keeping with broader trends in US Cold War cultural activity. Greg Barnhisel (2015), Serge Guilbaut (1985), Catherine Gunther Kodat (2015b), Michael Krenn (2005), and Penny M. von Eschen (2004), among others, have demonstrated how modernism, abstract expressionism, jazz, and modern dance were celebrated—and subsidized—in the United States during the postwar years by government agencies, and private philanthropies and patrons, because the refutation of realism and representation by these genres was seen as emblematic of the freedom of expression and, by extension, freedom in general, that was enjoyed by artists in a democratic society. The publicity generated by the Nobel Prize facilitated the critical reinvention of Faulkner as a simultaneously American and universal writer. The Prize also made him attractive to State Department officials, who wanted to showcase his work as evidence of US cultural achievement and freedom of expression. As one official observed, “In this day when the Communist theme See also Urgo (1989: 4–10). Contemporary interpretations of Faulkner in Europe similarly depoliticized his work and emphasized its transcendence of both region and nation (see, e.g., articles by Peter Nicolaisen and Daniel Göske, François Pitavy, and Ana-Karina Schneider in The Faulkner Journal 24(1) (Fall 2008)). 1

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abroad is that ‘America has no culture’, to have produced a Nobel prize winner in literature is a refutation in itself of that Communist line.”2 Faulkner’s tours formed part of a contemporary surge in public diplomacy programs that included cultural exchanges and other efforts to promote US culture abroad.3 Such programs were inspired in part by the belief that greater understanding of and respect for US cultural production would ultimately benefit the national interest. They also shared the goals of spreading Western democratic values and swaying public opinion toward the United States in a time of rising anti-US sentiment. As a writer who appealed to the cultural elite as well as to the general public and media, Faulkner had the power to affect the attitudes of multiple groups toward the United States. The strategic use-value of his trips was further increased by his willingness not just to speak of literature but to champion US values and the democratic system. This chapter’s analyses of the writer’s official travels interweave contemporary strains in Faulkner studies, as well as US Southern studies more broadly, with scholarship on cultural diplomacy and Cold War racial politics. Over the past two decades, the New Southern studies has moved away from more traditional and exceptionalist approaches that located the US South on the margin of national culture. Scholars increasingly approach the region transnationally, situating it in particular within the context of the Global South, asking questions whose answers transcend national and regional boundaries, as well as assessing the extent to which the South can be considered postcolonial. Recent research on Faulkner likewise situates his work within hemispheric and transnational contexts in order to foreground the global and postcolonial dimensions of his work and its reception.4 As John T. Matthews observes, Faulkner’s representations of rural modernization and resistance to imperialism appeal to readers in the Middle East, Africa, and elsewhere, while his work in general speaks to the Global South “from double positions within ‘New World’ plantation history: as at once national colonizer and peripheral colonized, at once racial sovereign and regional subaltern” (2015: 2). Recent scholarship has also examined constructions of the public, post-Nobel Faulkner, as well as the politics of the translation, publication, and reception of his work abroad within the context of the Cold War and the rise of US global hegemony.5 Along these lines, several authors have written about Faulkner’s travels for the State Department. Faulkner’s biographer Joseph Blotner discusses the trips extensively, but he does not analyze how they affected or were affected by contemporary politics and foreign relations (1974). Helen Oakley (2004), Harilaos Stecopoulos (2008), and I (2006) have studied the political dimensions of the writer’s trips to Latin America and Asia, while Stecopoulos has also parsed how the writer’s representation of the struggle between democracy and Communism was inflected by his ideas about the color line and efforts to eradicate racism in the US South.6

Hal Howland, memo to Esther Hawkins, October 14, 1955, Hal Howland-William Faulkner Papers, 1954–76, Accession #11615, Dept. of State Papers re: William Faulkner’s foreign travel (1955 Oct.–1957), Special Collections Department, University of Virginia Library, Charlottesville, Va. (henceforth “Howland-Faulkner Papers, #11615: DS Papers 1955–1957”). 3 For additional sources on US and Soviet Cold War cultural diplomacy efforts, see Caute (2003), Gienow-Hecht and Schumacher (2003), and Gienow-Hecht and Donfried (2010). 4 See Aboul-Ela (2007); Cartwright (2004); Cohn (1999); Handley (2000); Loichot (2007); Stecopoulos (2008). See also the essays in Trefzer and Abadie (2009); Smith and Cohn (2004; section on “William Faulkner and Latin America”); and The Faulkner Journal 24(1) (2008; special issue on “Faulkner: Beyond the United States”). 5 See Hönnighausen (1997); Kodat (2015a); Kreyling (1998: 126–47); and Polsgrove (2001: 4–21). 6 See also Kodat (2015a) and Barnhisel (2015: 124–33) for brief discussions of Faulkner’s trips. 2

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It should be noted that the fiction that Faulkner published during the period of his State Department tours leveled direct critiques at capitalist democracy, US neocolonial expansionism, and consumerism, and thus was strikingly at odds with the stance that he took on his trips and the new image of him as a nationalist.7 Requiem for a Nun (1951), for example, as Spencer Morrison has shown, critiques the effects of the imposition of Northern free market capitalism on both the US South and post–Second World War Europe (2013). Scholars such as Matthews (2009), Richard Godden (2002), and Noel Polk (1996: 259–62) have discussed Faulkner’s concerns about the growth of the military–industrial complex, as well as the writer’s more general distrust of the political establishment, in the Pulitzer Prize–winning A Fable (1954), a Christ-ian allegory, set in the First World War, of a failed uprising by a French regiment trying to stop both sides from fighting. In turn, the novels known as the Snopes trilogy (The Hamlet (1940), The Town (1957), and The Mansion (1959)) narrate the havoc wrought by the predatory Snopes clan, focusing on Flem Snopes’s rise to power as a bank president. As Matthews (2009) demonstrates, the trilogy offers a strong critique of commodification, class conflicts, and the entrenchment of injustice and inequality in US imperial capitalism. This chapter explores the construction and interaction on Faulkner’s official tours of conflicting aspects of the writer: the representative of the center and its hegemonic designs; the vocal proponent and sometime critic of the United States and its democracy; and the author whose work resonated in postcolonial nations and those facing US encroachment. It also goes beyond previous work to explore how desegregation struggles and Cold War internationalism intersected on these trips, which took place after Brown vs. Board of Education and as Cold War tensions in Europe, Asia, and Latin America were on the rise. This context directly influenced the writer’s pronouncements and reception, as well as the machinations of the diplomats who hosted him. I focus on how the writer championed US-style democracy even as he challenged official messages on progress against racism, revealing tensions between the US promotion of democracy abroad and its domestic struggles with racism. I explore, too, how Faulkner’s roots in the US South occasionally played into his efforts to foster Cold War alliances. I also analyze how officials constructed the writer as a representative of both the United States and of democracy, while audiences in Latin America and Asia in particular welcomed him because he addressed issues such as the effects of racism, US imperialism, underdevelopment, and, in the case of Japan, wartime devastation that were close to their own hearts. I further study how US diplomats downplayed the risks associated with hosting an unpredictable, alcoholic author whose views on race and politics did not always align with official positions because the political capital gained from his visits—and, paradoxically, from his espousal of contrary perspectives—furthered their efforts at containment. Faulkner’s performance and reception on his State Department trips, as well as official representations of his impact abroad, show him both to be an ardent spokesperson for democracy and to exercise an unusual amount of freedom to criticize the United States and its color line. Studying his tours offers insights into the power of Cold War cultural diplomacy to sway public opinion toward the United States in both allied and ambivalent audiences. At the same time, it reveals the complexity of the writer’s execution of his role as cultural ambassador, on the one hand adhering to the official line regarding the value of democracy and, on the other, going against official Given the dates of publication and the lag time involved in translation, most of these works would not have been available to foreign audiences at the time of Faulkner’s tours. 7

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narratives of progress against institutionalized racism, as well as against his own doubts about the democratic system. This complexity, in turn, speaks to some of the challenges of public diplomacy, in that cultural ambassadors do not stick to a given script, and while their freelancing may prove disastrous, it may also enhance US prestige—even when it is at odds with official messages.

FROM RELUCTANT PUBLIC FIGURE TO COLD WARRIOR The State Department first took note of Faulkner’s potential as an emissary at the Nobel Prize award events. Although he initially refused to go to Stockholm, once there, he interacted extremely well with dignitaries, the press, and the public alike, causing US officials to label him one of the “stars” of the festivities.8 In particular, his foregrounding of Cold War fears in his acceptance speech captured the attention of State Department officers. “There are no longer problems of the spirit,” he declared, “There is only the question: When will I be blown up? Because of this, the young man or woman writing today has forgotten the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing.” Faulkner affirmed his refusal “to accept the end of man” and urged other writers to do so as well (Faulkner 1967: 120). One State Department official described the speech as voicing “the free world’s challenge to all forces that would enslave the human spirit”; he further observed that it “has been quoted on the floor of Parliament, in both Houses of Congress, etc., etc., as a [n]‌oble summing-up of free man’s determination to stay free.”9 Beyond the literary content of the speech, then, US officials were drawn to its embedded advocacy of democracy. And so, when the opportunity arose, the International Educational Exchange Service (IEES) pressed the writer into service to represent the United States abroad. Faulkner was often a challenging guest on these trips. Indeed, he was hardly an ideal candidate for cultural diplomat. Notoriously antisocial and harboring a strong dislike for travel, journalists, and public social engagements, Faulkner required careful managing. (So, too, did his alcoholism, which increased during the 1950s, on several visits setting his embassy hosts on high alert in order to avert political fallout.) As his fame escalated in the years after receiving the Nobel Prize, he went to great lengths to protect his privacy from ever more frequent intrusions. His refusal to give interviews, in fact, prompted Newsweek in 1954 to deem him “one of the most-talked-about writers of our time. Talked about, but not talked to” (Mueller 1954: 7). At the same time, though, he struggled with a sense of social responsibility that he believed came with his fame. As Michael Kreyling argues, as Faulkner’s public profile rose, his readers, the press, and US officials looked to him as an authority on issues such as the US South, race relations, and democracy (1998: 130). During these years, he voiced his opinions in essays in Holiday, Harper’s, Life, and Ebony, as well as letters to the editor of local and national newspapers.10 Direct engagement with the public, however, was a different matter, and time and again, when asked to lend his voice to a cause, he declined (or agreed, but

US Embassy, Stockholm, to the Department of State, Washington, DC, December 21, 1950; 090.5811/12-2150; Central Decimal Files (henceforth CDF), 1950–1954; General Records of the Department of State (henceforth DS), Record Group (henceforth RG) 59; National Archives at College Park, College Park, MD (henceforth NARA). 9 Philip Raine, memo to Mr. Riley, June 22, 1954, Blotner Papers, The Brodsky Collection, Center for Faulkner Studies, Southeast Missouri State University, Box 9, Folder 11 (henceforth “Blotner Papers”). Here and elsewhere in Faulkner’s rhetoric, as in contemporary discourse, freedom is associated with democracy, while slavery and enslavement constitute figures for Communism. 10 These pieces are collected in Faulkner (1967). 8

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did as little as possible to fulfill his responsibilities). Faulkner’s State Department contacts thus often faced resistance—or, simply, no response—when asking him to undertake official trips. Astute diplomats such as Harold Howland (IEES) and, in particular, Muna Lee, cultural coordinator of the State Department’s Office of Public Affairs (and a fellow Mississippi writer who held special sway with Faulkner), generally prevailed by appealing to his sense of patriotism and to what Polk describes as his interest in being a “responsible citizen,” which stemmed from the awareness of the public platform that he occupied (2007: 419). Faulkner’s remark to a friend that “‘When your president asks you to do something … you do it’ ” seems to apply to his travels for the State Department as well (cited in Blotner 1974: 1629). Despite his ambivalence about these tours, though, Faulkner understood their strategic importance, including the likelihood that his interactions with foreign audiences might foster positive opinions of the United States during a time of high political stakes. At the same time, his sense of the urgency of the need to resist Communism took precedence over his concern that domestic racism undermined the democratic system. These factors seem to have trumped his dislike for public roles and his antisocial tendencies alike. On his best days abroad, he waxed loquacious, charming local audiences and critical journalists alike. USIS reports from his 1961 trip to Venezuela, for instance, noted that journalists had taken to calling him “el hombre simpático” [“the nice man”], something that their US counterparts would have found incomprehensible.11 Faulkner also proved adept at navigating delicate political situations, and his smooth responses to challenges posed by journalists helped to turn the tide of public opinion in his favor on a number of occasions. This alone paid public relations dividends for the United States, but Faulkner’s defense of US policies, his excoriation of Communism, and his proclaiming democracy to be the only viable system of government additionally helped to cultivate what Jarol Manheim calls a “supportive symbolic environment” within which the United States could pursue its foreign policy objectives (1994: 101). Time and again, official reports to the State Department noted how Faulkner’s visits and political remarks had served to further the interests of the United States, gaining respect and prestige for the nation, and fostering better relations with the countries that he visited. Thus did the reluctant public figure become a highly effective, if often difficult, cultural ambassador. The writer’s first official trip, in 1954, to Brazil, Peru, and Venezuela, was part success and part debacle, with staff at the US Embassy in São Paulo, where he participated in the International Congress of Writers, working overtime to contain the fallout caused by his drinking.12 The trip took place from August 6 to 14, during a moment of heightened anti-Americanism in Latin America, just weeks after the US-backed coup d’état in Guatemala and in the midst of political and economic tensions with Brazil. Initially reluctant to travel, Faulkner went because Lee convinced him that the trip would be “an important contribution to inter-American cultural relations.”13 And so it

harles Harner, letter to Lee, April 4, 1961, Blotner Papers, Box 9, Folder 28. C Faulkner made other trips to Europe, as well as to Egypt, during the 1950s, but I do not discuss them here as they were not undertaken in an official capacity. He did make one earlier, unofficial trip abroad in the service of Cold War cultural diplomacy. In 1952, he was invited to participate in the Oeuvres de XXe Siècle festival in Paris, which was sponsored by the Congress for Cultural Freedom. Faulkner carefully delimited his participation in the festival, however, declining funding for his travel and refusing to attend as a delegate in order to preserve his status as a “free agent” (cited in Blotner 1974: 1414). His participation in the festival foreshadowed several of his official trips: he gave a very brief (if well-received) speech and otherwise spent much of his time inebriated (Blotner 1974: 1421–2). 13 Lee, office memo to Thomas Driver, July 26, 1954, Blotner Papers, Box 9, Folder 11. 11 12

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was—for the most part. Faulkner spent a day in Lima on his way to Brazil. It was an auspicious beginning that included a museum visit and other events where he was mobbed by Peruvian writers and admirers. He also gave a press conference where even journalists who had planned to challenge him left calling it “the finest press interview within their memory.”14 Lee declared Faulkner’s short visit to be “a complete Public-Relations success,” and USIS officials were so excited by the response to the visit that they suggested that the writer consider spending a year in Peru and visiting other US posts.15 The visit to Brazil—the centerpiece of the trip—was, however, another matter. The public affairs officer (PAO) in Lima rather thoughtlessly gave Faulkner a parting gift of two bottles of pisco. The writer started to drink heavily and missed most of his official engagements for the first few days of his stay, prompting embassy officials to chaperone him almost around the clock “to avoid any untold incidents and any unfavorable press coverage by the Communist newspapers.”16 He later participated in a number of well-received events, so the publicity for his visit was generally positive. US officials were ultimately disappointed, though, for he interacted little with the other intellectuals attending the conference—that is, with the opinion molders who US officials hoped would influence their compatriots’ attitudes toward the United States. A short stopover in Caracas on the way home, where an impromptu meeting with enthusiastic reporters generated tremendous positive publicity, helped Faulkner to get back into the USIA’s good graces. In the end, then, despite mixed results, the trip did generate a great deal of symbolic capital for the United States and gained Faulkner a number of devotees among Washington officials. It also opened the writer’s eyes to the political usefulness of his visits and awoke his interest in participating in other IEES activities (see Faulkner 1977: 369). An opportunity for this arose in 1955, with a USIS-organized seminar on US literature in Nagano, Japan. In a recent essay on Cold War public diplomacy efforts between Germany and the United States, Brian C. Etheridge argues that in the 1950s and early 1960s, “the Cold War remained the decisive prism through which Americans understood the world around them. Indeed, the onset of the Cold War, more so than any public diplomacy work, was responsible for the rehabilitation of the Germans in the eyes of many Americans” (2007: 88). Japan, which was politically aligned with the United States at this time, but also pursuing relations with China and the Soviet Union, had similarly ceased to be viewed as the wartime enemy. Instead, US officials cultivated common ideological ground and hoped that the nation would “become a valuable adjunct to free world power in the Far East.” Officials were concerned, though, by the prevalence of “leftist or neutralist thought especially among many influential persons in academic, cultural and press circles who are too inclined to accept leftist propaganda at face value.”17 To address these concerns and heighten pro-US sentiment, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles emphasized cultural exchange with the United States (Aoki-Okabe et al. 2010: 221). USIS focused on cultivating “Japanese support for the American alliance and … undermining the positions of Communist strength in the Japanese

homas Driver, letter to Lee, August 9, 1954, Blotner Papers, Box 9, Folder 10. T Lee, note to Harold H. Tittman, Jr., September 2, 1954, Papers regarding William Faulkner’s Travels. Accession #7258-a, Special Collections Department, University of Virginia Library, Charlottesville, Va. (henceforth “Faulkner’s Travels Papers”). 16 John Campbell to Department of State, September 17, 1954; 511.203/9-1754; CDF 1950-1954; RG 59; NARA. 17 National Security Council, Progress Report on US Policy toward Japan by the Operations Coordinating Board, October 19, 1955, Declassified Documents Reference System (henceforth DDRS) 298664-i1-10. 14 15

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labor movement and in intellectual and educational circles.”18 The seminar in Nagano formed part of this effort. It was initially organized by the State Department’s Exchange of Persons Branch in 1952 as a means of “improv[ing] the status of American literature in Japan and the quality of its instruction in the universities.” Prior to the Second World War, US literature had not been widely taught in Japanese universities, but the postwar years brought a rise in interest in US culture. There were, however, few faculty members in Japan with expertise in the field. The USIA was at this time engaged in a general campaign to promote American studies abroad, so organizing the seminar fit within its mission for the country. The goals of the seminar were thus at once academic, cultural, and political. They included “conduct[ing] a first-class cultural event that will add to the prestige of all the Embassy’s cultural activities in Japan” and “bring[ing] together Japanese and Americans with similar interests … where they can become acquainted … and develop a feeling of mutual respect.”19 According to Kiyoyuki Ono, the Japanese were surprised by Faulkner’s being awarded the Nobel Prize for they viewed his work as sensationalistic. The award prompted a reconsideration of the writer, and Japanese publishers quickly issued translations (1985: 4–5). By 1955, Faulkner was well known in Japan, and his nomination for the seminar was welcomed by the Japanese. Organizers felt strongly that Faulkner’s participation could “contribute a great deal, not only to the seminar but to better Japanese-American relations as well.”20 When Faulkner initially hesitated to accept the invitation, Howland clearly identified the political stakes of his visit: “I definitely believe that your presence there would be of tremendous value in enhancing our cultural prestige in Asia and would help off-set some of the rising anti-Americanism there.”21 Faulkner acquiesced, and on July 29 he headed to Japan. Faulkner spent almost two weeks in Nagano and several days in Tokyo and Kyoto, interacting with hundreds of people and giving lectures and press conferences that reached many more. The Japanese welcomed him enthusiastically and the press lionized him. Events such as a meeting with physicist Hideki Yukawa, Japan’s first Nobel laureate, only increased the writer’s prestige in the public eye. The positive reaction to Faulkner, in turn, affected the Japanese impressions of Americans and the United States. One observer, for example, wrote that the writer’s trip “has enabled the people of Japan to obtain a better insight into many aspects of American life.”22 To further such effects, USIS implemented a full-scale publicity campaign: it provided information on and recordings of his appearances to local media; distributed over 100,000 copies of an essay, “To the Youth of Japan,” that Faulkner wrote during his stay; and prepared a fourteen-minute film, “Impressions of Japan” (based on an eponymous essay written by Faulkner), that was shown in theaters and on television following his departure.23 Robert Jelliffe, a Fulbright scholar who was in Japan during Faulkner’s visit, published Faulkner at Nagano, a

SC 5611, Part 6—The USIA Program (Prepared by the US Information Agency), p. 14, DDRS 252009-i1-18. N USIS Tokyo, Despatch to DS, Washington, September 27, 1955, Blotner Papers, Box 9, Folder 13. 20 Howland, letter to Faulkner, March 1, 1955, Blotner Papers, Box 9, Folder 13. 21 Howland, letter to Faulkner, May 16, 1955, Hal Howland-William Faulkner Papers, Dept. of State Papers re: William Faulkner’s foreign travel (1954–5 September), #11615, Special Collections Department, University of Virginia Library, Charlottesville, VA (henceforth “Howland-Faulkner Papers: DS Papers 1954–1955”). 22 “Faulkner Ends Japan Trip,” Japan News, August 23, 1955, in “William Faulkner Japan Visit, August 1–23, 1955” (scrapbook), n.p., Hal Howland-William Faulkner Papers, #11615, Special Collections Department, University of Virginia Library, Charlottesville, VA (henceforth Howland-Faulkner Papers: William Faulkner Japan Visit). 23 G. Lewis Schmidt, USIS-Tokyo, Despatch to DS/USIA, Washington, September 22, 1955, Blotner Papers, Box 9, Folder 13. 18 19

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collection of interviews and statements issued by the writer during his stay. Faulkner also granted rights to the State Department to use what he wrote on the trip “to further whatever work in int. [sic] relations they might do” (Faulkner 1977: 384). At the seminar in Nagano, Faulkner met daily with a group of professors, talking about his work and that of other writers. He interacted with his students outside the classroom as well, cultivating a convivial atmosphere that won him the respect of all. He met with others, too. When, for example, he noticed students waiting to use the library at the city’s Japanese American Cultural Center, where the seminar was held, he arranged on the spot to meet with them, telling them to ask about youth in the United States, offering his thoughts on writing and the atomic bomb, and asking them questions himself (Blotner 1974: 1553–4). The meeting generated tremendous goodwill among the students and with his interpreter.24 In Nagano and elsewhere, Faulkner’s interlocutors were interested in his impressions of Japan and Japanese authors. They asked him for messages for their compatriots, and how he felt about the atomic bomb, the reference to which in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech had clearly touched a chord with them. Faulkner linked Japan to his native South, further endearing the writer to his audiences; he invoked as commonalities what Blotner described as “the idea of the family and the process of recovery after a devastating military defeat and occupation” (1974: 1563). Faulkner often took his affirmation of commonalities to an even more inclusive level, downplaying transregional and transnational connections in favor of the broadest implications of his work. “ ‘People are the same all over the world,’ ” he told one audience. “‘Though I wrote only about American people in the South, I hope I am writing about problems of mankind that are universal.’ ”25 His rhetoric here sought to bring people together under a common, ostensibly universal umbrella—a strategy that the writer believed, as other examples make clear, would help to resist the advance of Communism. When asked in Kyoto for his thoughts on the “political responsibility” of the writer, Faulkner responded, “ ‘My way is to reveal truth to everybody, and leave the judgment to each. It can be said that I’m walking the middle of the road, in between propaganda and escapism.’ ”26 Nevertheless, Faulkner’s responses to direct political questions were often closer to propaganda than escapism. According to a USIS report, “On the two occasions when political matters were brought up at Nagano, he hit hard against Communism, Socialism, and any form of radicalism in general, defending Democracy as the best system yet devised by man for all of its faults.”27 He also expressed similar views in his widely disseminated essay, “To the Youth of Japan,” which, like “Impressions of Japan,” identifies similarities between the postbellum US South and postwar Japan. The politics of the piece are at first subsumed under the seemingly generic rhetoric of universality and commonality. Faulkner suggests that a shared history of defeat and devastation allows white southerners, at least, to sympathize with what he perceives to be a sense of hopelessness about the future among Japanese youth. He further predicts that “good writing” will arise from the disaster,

Jun’ichi Nakamura, William Faulkner with high school students [translation], The Youth’s Companion (October 1955), Howland-Faulkner Papers: William Faulkner Japan Visit. 25 “Man and His Problems William Faulkner’s Aim,” The Mainichi, August 18, 1955, Howland-Faulkner Papers: William Faulkner Japan Visit. 26 Kajiura, “Mr. Faulkner, the great writer, talks” [translation], Shin Osaka Shimbun, August 20, 1955, Howland-Faulkner Papers: William Faulkner Japan Visit. 27 G. Lewis Schmidt, USIS-Tokyo, Despatch to DS/USIA, Washington, September 22, 1955, Blotner Papers, Box 9, Folder 13. 24

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as it had in the US South, in the form of “a group of Japanese writers whom all the world will want to listen to, who will speak not a Japanese truth but a universal truth” (1967: 83–4). There is a strategic sleight of hand in this assertion in that Faulkner presents the specific historical examples of southerners and the Japanese moving beyond the experience of defeat in war as “universal.” This slippage is compounded when Faulkner subsumes an anti-communist position under the rhetoric of universality. He argues that the “universal truth” to be articulated by Japanese writers would itself be both a function of and a testament to democracy: The basis of the universal truth which the writer speaks is freedom in which to hope and believe … And that Freedom must be complete freedom for all men; we must choose now not between color and color … nor between ideology and ideology. We must choose simply between being slave and being free. … We think of the world today as being a helpless battleground in which two mighty forces face each other in the form of two irreconcilable ideologies. I do not believe they are two ideologies. I believe that only one of them is an ideology because the other is simply a human belief that no government shall exist immune to the check of the consent of the governed; that only one of them is a political state or ideology, because the other one is simply a mutual state of man mutually believing in mutual liberty, in which politics is merely one more of the clumsy methods to make and hold good that condition in which all man shall be free. A clumsy method … But until we do find a better, democracy will do. (Faulkner 1967: 84) Even as Faulkner denies here that democracy is an ideology at all, instead casting it as a universal truth, his statement is imbued with the rhetoric of what Volker Berghahn has labeled an “emergent totalitarianism paradigm,” which pit the freedom enjoyed by democratic societies against a vision of stifling Soviet authoritarianism (2001: 115). His use in this passage of slavery thus performs ideological work. Faulkner’s declaration that “our country is one now” speaks to how the US South, once demonized for its “peculiar institution,” has been folded into the nation and, further, linked with all peoples who now must come together as part of a “mutual state of man” in support of the “mutual liberty” guaranteed by the democratic system (Faulkner 1967: 82). In “Impressions of Japan,” Faulkner’s identification of commonalities linking the US South and Japan was offset by an orientalizing rhetoric that underscored a sense of Japan’s otherness. Similar rhetoric is absent in “To the Youth of Japan,” which instead foregrounds the common humanity of the former wartime enemies, along with their presumably shared goal of defending freedom and liberty. The Japanese response to Faulkner was effusive. As one journalist noted, “Few persons have come to these islands for such a short length of time and left so much that is to be cherished.”28 A brief to the National Security Council affirmed that his visit “aroused a most sympathetic response and brought new prestige to U.S. cultural programs in Japan. Under USIA management Faulkner’s vigorous defense of democracy and the U.S. received unprecedented nationwide endorsement in the Japanese press, newsreels, books and radio.”29 The trip had an effect on the writer, too. Faulkner had originally begged off traveling to Japan, but he came to view himself as a bridge

“ Faulkner’s Gift to Japan,” Nippon Times, August 25, 1955, Howland-Faulkner Papers: William Faulkner Japan Visit. National Security Council, Progress Report on U.S. Policy toward Japan by the Operations Coordinating Board, October 19, 1955, DDRS 298664-i1-10. 28 29

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between cultures whose role was to ensure that “conditions that we have known in the last ten years will never happen again” (quoted in Meriwether and Millgate 1980: 166). Faulkner’s initial itinerary included three weeks in Japan and several short stops in Europe, but as news of his warm reception in Japan spread throughout the US diplomatic community, more stops were added to what eventually became an almost three-month journey. US Ambassador to the Philippines Homer Ferguson, for example, “urgently request[ed]” a visit, and Secretary of State Dulles himself cabled the US Embassy in Tokyo to arrange it.30 Faulkner agreed, and on August 24, he flew to Manila. Here, Faulkner gave interviews and spoke to audiences numbering in the thousands about his work, the challenges faced by writers, and what he knew about the culture and history of the Philippines. The idea, broached in Japan, of a shared tragedy as offering a means through which different populations could come to understand one another became a leitmotif here as well. So, too, did the image of the writer as a universal figure. As one newspaper reported, Faulkner and the world he created were “American,” but his work showed that “the act of creation has no origin and that the creator belongs to all humanity.”31 This sublimation of regional and national origins echoed Faulkner’s own universalizing and supposedly nonideological language in Japan as he worked to unite people under a purportedly common humanity as a means of resisting Communism. Faulkner’s own political pronouncements in the Philippines further advanced the message of shared (political) interests and a common (ideological) cause. As he told one audience, “We, in my country, know that the Filipino is a friend: we know that there is a mutual dependence between our two nations, our two peoples … we would defend that friend—all people—who believe as we believe” (Meriwether and Millgate 1980: 213). His meeting with President Ramon Magsaysay, an ally of the United States and a firm opponent of Communism, underscored this message and was widely reported on in the local press. Audiences and reporters alike warmed to him, and local papers covered his activities enthusiastically. The fact that the movie “The Land of the Pharaohs,” for which he had coauthored the screenplay, was then playing in Manila heightened his appeal. In a testament to his popularity, posters for his lecture at the University of the Philippines that featured his famous map of Yoknapatawpha County disappeared as soon as they were hung, only to reappear on the walls of student residences.32 Faulkner’s encouragement of his interlocutors to write in Tagalog, which had just been recognized as a national language, in addition to English, which had been imposed during the US occupation of the Philippines (1898–1946) and which still served as the language of higher education and government, also struck a chord (Rafael 2000: 167–70). Additionally, his audiences appreciated his willingness to criticize the United States. As one newspaper noted, they

Dulles, WIROM to US Embassy Tokyo, August 5, 1955, Box 144, Folder 17, Special Collections, University of Arkansas Libraries, Fayetteville (henceforth “CU Collection”). Dulles also suggested that tours to Western Europe and the Middle East be added to Faulkner’s itinerary. J. Graham Parsons, telegram to Dulles, August 22, 1955, Box 144, Folder 17, CU Collection. Stops in Paris and Iceland were added, but none in the Middle East, although Faulkner had worked on “Land of the Pharaohs” in Egypt in 1954, and the State Department had put considerable effort into “exploit[ing] the popularity of American cinema for the benefit of U.S. interests in the Middle East” since the end of the Second World War (Vaughan 2010: 172). 31 “William Faulkner,” The Manila Chronicle, August 24, 1955, Newspaper Clippings re: William Faulkner, August–September 1955, Folders 1 and 2, Hal Howland-William Faulkner Papers, #11615, Special Collections Department, University of Virginia Library, Charlottesville, VA (henceforth Howland-Faulkner Papers: Faulkner Newspaper Clippings). 32 Article (title missing) in Manila Times, August 25, 1955, Howland-Faulkner Papers: Faulkner Newspaper Clippings. 30

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found comfort in the knowledge that criticism of the American way of life and of the American attitude is not as subversive a crime as the local carpetbaggers would have it to be. We are afraid it is only Americans of the type of Mr. Faulkner … who are capable of discoursing intelligently … on such obvious evils of One Hundred Percent Americanism as are personified by the carpetbaggers in the Philippines. It is, therefore, only Mr. Faulkner and his kind who can save the United States from the total disrepute she is heading for in Asia.33 Blotner describes Faulkner on this visit as conscientiously working at his self-chosen double role: to speak for himself as an individual artist, and to speak for his country as a representative of part of its culture … The more he traveled, apparently, the more the conviction grew upon him that America needed all the friends it could get, both at home and abroad, and he would do his best to that end. (1974: 1569) Faulkner’s best was considerable, and his visit was a public relations boon for the US Embassy. He received superlative write-ups in newspapers that were often critical of the United States. An editorial in the Manila Chronicle, for example, welcomed the State Department’s presentation of “the best of American culture and civilization.” Also of note is the paper’s assertion that having witnessed the writer’s greatness, “perhaps the more critical of Filipinos will be convinced that in the United States the voice of the artist and the writer can still be heard above the rantings of the bureaucrat and the trader.”34 Faulkner here is seen to represent the nation—“American culture and civilization”—at its best and, as such, he constitutes a living refutation of Soviet propaganda that cast the United States as lacking in cultural accomplishments. The polarization of, on the one hand, the nation’s spiritual and cultural values, as embodied in the writer, and, on the other, its perceived materialism, as represented by the bureaucrat and trader, is further underscored in the paper’s assertion that “the State Department program of sending out the best exponents of American culture all over the world has gained more real friends for America than the economic and technical-aid program.”35 Such appraisals in a newspaper often critical of the United States attest to the power of cultural diplomacy in swaying public opinion and, in the words of one official, helping to “create a climate of respect in the small but articulate circle of journalists, writers, and intellectuals [i.e., opinion makers] among whom unfortunately are some of the severest critics of American mores and policies.”36 After two days in Manila, Faulkner spent six weeks visiting Rome, Munich, Paris, and London, interspersing successful official events with personal time. USIS officials in Germany, for example, asserted that “the effects of Faulkner’s personal appearance will be of lasting benefit in helping to advance American cultural prestige in the Munich area.” Faulkner also did a radio broadcast that was transmitted to the USSR and several Soviet bloc countries that was described as making “The best of American culture,” The Manila Chronicle, August 24, 1955, Howland-Faulkner Papers: Faulkner Newspaper Clippings. As USIS officials explain elsewhere (see John A. Malley, US Embassy, Manila, Despatch to DS/USIA, September 14, 1955, Blotner Papers, Box 9, Folder 19), the term “carpetbagger” is used to denote US businessmen and officials residing in the Philippines. 34 “The best of American culture,” The Manila Chronicle, August 29, 1955, Howland-Faulkner Papers: Faulkner Newspaper Clippings. 35 Cited in progress report on activities of the OCB Cultural Presentation Committee covering period 2/1-10/4/56, October 4, 1956, DDRS 248311-i1-5. 36 John A. Malley, September 14, 1955, Blotner Papers. 33

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“a valuable contribution through several strong statements about the rights of the individual, the importance of freedom of expression and the necessity for resistance to oppression and any form of totalitarianism.”37 On October 12, Faulkner went to Iceland, where he spent six days. Though off the beaten track, there were strategic reasons for arranging the visit. In 1951, after the beginning of the Korean War, Iceland, which was a founding member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), signed a bilateral defense agreement with the United States that authorized the latter to station military forces in Iceland to provide defense on behalf of NATO. Membership in NATO and the presence of US forces in a nation that prided itself for not having its own armed forces were met with some resistance. Tensions were heightened in the weeks prior to Faulkner’s visit. In September, the Soviet Union relinquished control of its naval base at Porkkala in Finland. The move toward Soviet demilitarization and Nikita Khrushchev’s cultivation of neutralism in Europe prompted the Icelandic parliament to request that Keflavik, the US air base in Iceland, be closed as well (Mastny 2010: 319). Also at this time, the level of US representation in the nation was being upgraded from a diplomatic Legation to an Embassy. Faulkner’s visit thus came at a strategic time for swaying public opinion toward the US presence in Iceland. Although this was the last stop on a long journey, Faulkner’s energy—and nationalism—did not flag. He met with political leaders, including the president of Iceland; university groups, writers, and journalists; and US armed forces at Keflavik and other US diplomats. According to one official, Faulkner received publicity “of a more favorable kind, than any other American brought to Iceland under the visiting artists program, and there is good reason to believe that he had a very wholesome effect on the thinking of all Icelanders, including the very important laboring segment of the Icelandic population.” He had a similar impact on the opinion molders, such as the “university circles, which often have been peculiarly subject to influences cool or even hostile to the United States.” US officials were pleased by the coverage of his visit in Althydubladid, the social democratic newspaper associated with the Labor party, which they viewed as “highly important in the coming fight to regain democratic control of the Icelandic Federation of Labor.” They were even more enthusiastic about the coverage by Morgunbladid, the Conservative party newspaper, which was the nation’s most widely circulating periodical. The USIS postvisit report identified an interview with the periodical as “the most effective single piece of information material arising from Mr. Faulkner’s visit,” foregrounding how the writer acknowledged concern about the US military presence in Iceland while affirming that neither of our nations is responsible for the circumstances that cause American forces to be here. And people must remember that they are not here under the auspices of the United States, but the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. … Is it not better to have American forces here in the name of freedom, than a Russian one in the name of aggression and violence, as in the Baltic States? Faulkner thus sought to mollify Icelanders by reminding them that the US presence did not represent national power but, rather, was part of the effort to contain Communism that was a common cause for NATO members. Diplomatic personnel were buoyed by the effect that the author’s visit had on

Joseph B. Phillips, USIS-Bonn, to USIA-Washington, October 6, 1955, Howland-Faulkner Papers: DS Papers 1955–7.

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developing Icelandic respect for American culture and, less directly, the policies of the United States Government … The extent to which he altered anyone’s views is impossible to measure, but if anyone could alter them it was this shy, modest man, commanding the enormous reservoir of respect and good will that was demonstrated every day during his stay in Iceland.38 Faulkner’s next trip came in March of 1957, when Greek theater director Dimitri Myrat prevailed on the US Embassy in Athens to invite Faulkner to Greece for the opening night of his production of Requiem for a Nun. Duncan Emrich, the embassy’s cultural attaché, affirmed, “It would be in the best interests of the United States if William Faulkner could visit.”39 With remarkably little fuss, Faulkner agreed to the trip. In addition to seeing the performance, he was honored by the Greek Academy with its Silver Medal. Faulkner’s speech accepting the honor offered an affirmation of democracy (qua freedom and civilization) that his US hosts broadcast widely. “ ‘I accept this medal,’ ” he declared, “ ‘as one chosen by the Greek Academy to represent the principle that man shall be free … When the sun of Pericles cast the shadow of civilized man around the earth, that shadow curved until it touched America. So when someone like me comes to Greece he … has come back to the cradle of civilized man’ ” (Faulkner 1967: 152). Proclamations such as these no doubt influenced Emrich to assert that Faulkner had “won the hearts of all Athens and Greece”— an assessment corroborated by embassy staff, who reported observing in numerous private homes autographed pictures of Faulkner placed next to those of the king and queen.40 In 1958, the Soviet and US governments set up an official cultural exchange program in which Faulkner was asked to participate.41 He declined the request, though, asserting that his refusal to go would be of more value in the “cold war” of human relationships than my presence in Russia would … If I, who have had freedom all my life in which to write truth exactly as I saw it, visited Russia now, the fact of even the outward appearance of condoning the condition which the present Russian government has established, would be a betrayal, not of the giants [writers such as Dostoievsky and Tolstoy] … but of their spiritual heirs who risk their lives with every page they write. (Faulkner 1977: 413)42 Previously, State Department officials had been able to circumvent Faulkner’s reluctance to travel by appealing to his sense of patriotism. This time, though, it was his patriotism that led him to refuse to participate, making what was, for him, as much a public gesture of support for democracy and a condemnation of Communism as his earlier trips had been. Faulkner’s final trip for the State Department took place in April of 1961, when he went to Venezuela to participate in the 150th anniversary celebration of the nation’s independence. The visit came at a pivotal time in US–Venezuelan relations: leftist activism and support for Cuba were on the rise in Venezuela, and President Rómulo Betancourt, despite an anti-communist platform and rapprochement with President Kennedy, had not yet broken off diplomatic relations with William Gibson, US Legation, Reykjavik, Despatch to DS, Washington, October 25, 1955, Howland-Faulkner Papers: DS Papers 1955–7. The official report translates this quotation from Faulkner from Icelandic (as it had been published in the interview) back into English. 39 Duncan Emrich, US Embassy, Athens, memo to DS, Washington, January 9, 1957, Box 9, Folder 23, Blotner Papers. 40 Emrich, Letter to Howland, n.d., group IV, series 1, subseries 1, Box 114, Folder 14, CU Collection; Emrich, US Embassy, Athens, Despatch to DS, Washington, May 13, 1957, Howland-Faulkner Papers: DS Papers 1955–7. 41 Frederick A. Colwell, letter to Faulkner, May 2, 1958, group IV, series 1, subseries 1, Box 144, Folder 18, CU Collection. 42 Faulkner also declined an invitation to travel to Communist China in 1955 (Blotner 1974: 1579). 38

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Cuba. Just weeks before Faulkner’s visit, rebels attempted to capture the military school and police barracks; they were unsuccessful, but they did take over an important Caracas radio station through which they announced that Betancourt’s government had been overthrown (“Venezuela” 1961). The New York Times responded with an editorial that was unabashedly pro-Betancourt, and that positioned the event in relation to the United States’ own efforts to defend democracy: “The supreme importance of the Betancourt Government is that it is trying to make a social revolution by democratic and evolutionary methods … The United States must, and surely will, help all it can” (“More Trouble” 1961). Muna Lee orchestrated the writer’s return to the region. Her assessment that “United States-Venezuelan relations seem to need the greatness transcending all baseness which is characteristic of William Faulkner’s genius” acknowledged both the tense relations between the two countries and the public relations benefits that were expected to accrue from the writer’s visit.43 That Lee viewed Faulkner’s visit as part of the “help” urged by the New York Times is evident in the fact that she sent the editorial to the writer, adding that Betancourt himself had “expressed his gratification that you will be visiting his country.”44 The three-week trip exceeded all expectations. Faulkner met several times with President Betancourt and former President Rómulo Gallegos, both writers and admirers of his work, as well as with other leading intellectuals. Gallegos decorated him with the Order of Andrés Bello, Venezuela’s highest civilian honor. Faulkner delighted his audience by replacing his Legion of Honor rosette with the one that he had just received and by reading his acceptance speech in Spanish. USIS publicized Faulkner’s activities widely, and the enthusiastic reception was a boon to the United States as much as it was to Betancourt, with glowing local coverage of the visit overshadowing that of the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion, which took place during his stay, as well as of Russia’s launching of an astronaut.45 The PAO reported, “The Embassy and all of the North Americans in Venezuela will draw for a long period of time upon the increased understanding and appreciation of United States cultural achievements which William Faulkner engendered in person here.”46 The visit was so successful that there was talk of his returning, but this ended up being his last official trip, for he died in the summer of 1962.47 Before his death, however, Faulkner did complete one last, if unofficial, mission. His sympathy engaged by stories about the difficulties publishing in Latin America, he used funds from his Nobel Prize award to found the Ibero-American Novel Project, which sought to assist with the publication in the United States of recent novels from Latin America. The competition gained publicity for Latin American literature during a period when interest in authors such as Julio Cortázar, Carlos Fuentes, Gabriel García Márquez, and Mario Vargas Llosa was rising in the United States and Europe. The enthusiasm that it generated, as well as the dialogue that it helped to establish between intellectuals from the North and South, made the project itself a form of cultural diplomacy—only this time conducted on Faulkner’s terms. ee, letter to John Vebber, July 18, 1960, Box 9, Folder 28, Blotner Papers. L Lee, letter to Faulkner, February 21, 1961, Box 9, Folder 28, Blotner Papers. 45 Harner to DS/USIA, April 27, 1961, Latin America, FSD 1954–65, Records of the USIA, RG 306, NARA. Also, Harner to USIA, January 17, 1962, Latin America, FSD 1954–65, RG 306, NARA. 46 Harner to DS/USIA, April 27, 1961, RG 306, NARA. 47 Lee also cabled her ex-husband, Luis Muñoz Marín, then governor of Puerto Rico, to urge him to invite Faulkner to stop by on his return trip (Arturo Morales Carrion to Muñoz Marín, Latin America, April 3, 1961, FSD 1954–65, RG 306, NARA. The cable was instigated by Lee, whose initials appear on the document). 43 44

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NAVIGATING THE COLD WAR AND CIVIL RIGHTS STRUGGLES ON AN INTERNATIONAL STAGE Faulkner’s official trips took place between 1954 and 1961, a critical period for the civil rights movement, when progress was watched carefully abroad. As Mary Dudziak observes, The story of civil rights and the Cold War is in part the story of a struggle over the narrative of race and democracy. The U.S. government tried to project a story of progress … U.S. government effort to contain and manage the story of race in America was a component of the government’s broader Cold War policy of containing communism. (2000: 250) Faulkner’s first tours took place in the immediate wake of Brown vs. Board of Education, and he visited a number of countries that were of non-European origin, had struggled with colonialism and US hegemony, and had active pro-communist forces. Foreign audiences, who were familiar with the depictions of racial strife in his works, probed him about contemporary race relations in the United States. While his support for the democratic system largely followed the official line, his remarks about racism did not project a straightforward narrative of progress. Indeed, his critiques reflected the widely shared concern that racism could be construed as evidence of US hypocrisy about freedom and democracy and thus threatened the nation’s moral and political authority in its efforts to promote democracy in the global arena. In a letter included in a 1952 amicus curiae brief on Brown vs. Board of Education, for example, Secretary of State Dean Acheson affirmed that the “continuance of racial discrimination in the United States remains a source of constant embarrassment to this Government in the day-to-day conduct of its foreign relations; and it jeopardizes the effective maintenance of our moral leadership of the free and democratic nations of the world.”48 Racism, discrimination, and desegregation were the subject of many questions on these trips. Faulkner’s fiction had always depicted the tragic consequences of racism, but as the writer’s public stature rose in the 1950s, he also took a public platform against racism that was more progressive than that of many other white southerners. His publicly stated views were far from straightforward, though; nor were they as nuanced as in his fiction. Some, such as his rejection of federal intervention in desegregation efforts and his insistence on letting the process take place slowly, garnered hostility from fellow southerners and northerners alike, as well as scathing criticism from African American intellectuals such as James Baldwin, W. E. B. DuBois, and Ralph Ellison. So, too, did his infamous declaration (repudiated by Faulkner and most likely made while he was intoxicated) that “if it came to fighting I’d fight for Mississippi against the United States even if it meant going out into the street and shooting Negroes” (Meriwether and Millgate 1980: 261). Nevertheless, Faulkner ultimately believed that the defense of equality and freedom played a key role both in establishing equal rights for African Americans in the United States and in defending the world from Communism, and many of his nonfiction writings and speeches from the mid-1950s condemn the Jim Crow system for undermining both the democratic system at home and US efforts to promote democratic ideals abroad. In a 1956 letter on desegregation, for example, he wrote, “We are steadily losing ground against the powers which decree that individual freedom must perish. We must have as many people as possible on the side of us who believe in individual freedom. There are seventeen Brief for the United States as Amicus Curiae, Brown v. Board of Education, 347. US 483 (1954) (No. 8).

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million Negroes. Let us have them on our side, rather than on that of Russia” (Faulkner 1977: 395). Faulkner could also be counted among those who, in Stecopoulos’s words, “understood that the newly decolonized nations … heeded reports of racist violence from the Jim Crow South as they weighed the competing overtures of the United States and the USSR” (2008: 127). Thus he proposed in a 1956 article in Harper’s a parallel strategy of harnessing strength in numbers in the international arena: “we had better take in with us as many as we can get of the non-white peoples of the earth who are not completely free yet but who want and intend to be, before that other force which is opposed to individual freedom … gets them.” But, he added, “We, America, have the best opportunity to do this because we can begin here, at home” (Faulkner 1967: 103, 104). During the 1950s, as Stecopoulos describes, those who were “willing to highlight the moral and the strategic failings of U.S. race relations had to contend with a Cold War culture that linked forthright discussions of race and racism to Communist subversion. In some circles, to criticize the Jim Crow regime was to run the risk of red-baiting, or worse” (2008: 126). Dudziak similarly has shown how civil rights activists “who spoke out of turn, especially to an international audience, were silenced” (2000: 250). Faulkner was an anomaly in this regard: even as he used his position as Cold War cultural ambassador to speak out in favor of democracy, he also used it to highlight the damage wrought by racism on the United States and its international reputation. He told an audience in Japan, for example, that if Americans are to “talk to other people around the world about freedom, let us practice it … so nobody can say, ‘Well, you talked to us about freedom, look at your own country’ ” (Meriwether and Millgate 1980: 144). Faulkner’s prestige, to say nothing of the fact that his critiques of racism were offset by his promotion of democracy, seems to have afforded him the ability to speak without repercussions. The combination of cold warrior and critic was a stance not often taken by other US government-sponsored speakers, and it was one that not only increased his appeal but also left audiences with a positive attitude toward the United States, for they felt that they were receiving an honest picture of the nation, rather than just propaganda. On August 28, 1955, while Faulkner was in Rome, Emmett Till, a 14-year-old African American boy from Chicago, was kidnapped and brutally murdered by two white men, ostensibly for whistling at a white woman, when he was visiting Mississippi. The killing drew national and international attention, and the United Press contacted Faulkner for a comment. The writer issued a statement, widely circulated by the UP and USIS,49 in which he asks how can we hope to survive the next Pearl Harbor, if there should be one, with not only all peoples who are not white, but all peoples with political ideologies different from ours arrayed against us—after we have taught them (as we are doing) that when we talk of freedom and liberty, we not only mean neither, we don’t even mean security and justice and even the preservation of life for people whose pigmentation is not the same as ours? (Faulkner 1967: 223) Stecopoulos argues that for Faulkner, “the Till murder offers both a reminder of the pressing need for social change in the U.S. South and a warning to white Americans about the global consequences of domestic racist violence” (2008: 144). What Faulkner sought, then, was a way of uniting African Americans and whites under the umbrella of democracy, for “if we Americans are to survive, it will have to be because we choose and elect and defend to be first of all Americans to present to

Ned Nordness, US Embassy-Rome, Despatch to Department of State, October 18, 1955, Box 9, Folder 18, Blotner Papers.

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the world one homogeneous and unbroken front, whether of white Americans or black ones or purple or blue or green” (Faulkner 1967: 223). The shared “front” of democracy thus is to bring all Americans, regardless of color, together with a common cause: not becoming red. According to the US Embassy in Rome, Communist periodicals used Faulkner’s statement to condemn the United States for its racism.50 During these years, as Nicholas Cull details, the USIA was working to “downplay America’s reputation for racism”: news of the Brown decision, for instance, was broadcast widely, while officials conveyed additional information about progress against racism in the United States to friendly local journalists (Cull 2008: 113). Faulkner’s statement did not—and, given the circumstances, could not—deemphasize the racism motivating the tragic event, but USIS did not underscore this in its postvisit report to the State Department. Instead, here (as elsewhere), State Department officials downplayed Faulkner’s comments on race: they acknowledged the criticism, reported on audience reaction, noted how the “hostile” and “Communist” press used the criticism to condemn the United States, and assessed whether or not this had been effective (not surprisingly, they concluded that it was not). Just as importantly, they emphasized how his presence and even his critical assessments of US race relations served the national interest. For example, two complaints were brought to the IEES (by southerners) that objected both to Faulkner’s criticism of southerners for their racism and to his criticism of the United States before foreign audiences while on an official tour.51 Rather than addressing Faulkner’s criticism of racism directly, the IEES response foregrounded Faulkner’s prominence and the fact that he was chosen by the Japanese for the seminar because he was the most popular contemporary US writer in Japan. It further notes that reports from the embassy in Tokyo “point out, among other things, that Mr. Faulkner, through his personal appearances, was able to negate some of the untrue interpretations of our country gained by thousands of Japanese who read his works but did not put what he had written into true perspective.”52 In the official view, then, by giving additional details that contextualized his literary depictions of the United States and its race relations, Faulkner neutralized their effects. An intraoffice memorandum stressed the public relations benefits of Faulkner’s explanations, arguing that such remarks, “heard and read by literally hundreds of thousands abroad—in a day when America sorely needs friends and understanding—can only win added prestige for our land.”53 Rather than a liability, then, Faulkner’s remarks on race were construed as gaining understanding for the nation, and the complaints seem to have gone no further. Faulkner faced fewer questions about race relations in the United States on his later official trips, but officials remained aware of his power to offset the effects of discrimination on the US reputation abroad and to serve as a weapon in the battle against Communism. Thus, soon after Faulkner’s death in 1962, the US Embassy in Mexico organized a “William Faulkner Week.” The embassy was motivated to organize the event as a means of demonstrating “official U.S. government interest in the accomplishments of a great American who, in the process of becoming a worldfamous literary figure, never lost his identification with his country and his people.” The timing of

ed Nordness, US Embassy-Rome, Despatch to Department of State, October 18, 1955, Box 9, Folder 18, Blotner Papers. N See Howland, letter to Neil Griffin, September 9, 1955, Howland-Faulkner Papers: DS Papers 1954–5; and MD, note to Howland, October 10, 1955, group IV, series 1, subseries 1, Box 144, Folder 17, CU Collection. 52 Florence Kirlin, letter to Representative Clifford Davis, October 10, 1955, group IV, series 1, subseries 1, Box 144, Folder 17, CU Collection; see also Howland to Griffin, September 9, 1955, Howland-Faulkner Papers: DS Papers 1954–5. 53 Howland to Esther Hawkins, October 14, 1955, Howland-Faulkner Papers: DS Papers 1955–7. 50 51

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“William Faulkner Week” coincided with the riots surrounding the enrollment of the first African American student, James Meredith, at the University of Mississippi, on September 30. In an effort to offset the international fallout from the turbulence, US officials eagerly laid claim to the writer as a national (and nationalist) symbol. “By thus identifying itself publicly and proudly with Faulkner,” one official wrote, the Embassy sought to avoid what often appears through lack of official attention to be a surrender of its cultural and intellectual assets to the Marxist opposition. The Embassy feels that, in light of recent developments in Mississippi, a specific effort to “capture” this particular asset–to turn Faulkner and his work into a leftist or anti-American symbol–might well have been made by this opposition, which has not been reluctant in the past to attempt such distortion of the work of U.S. literary figures. … it is felt that such an attempt has in this case been fortuitously avoided.54 This summation seems to me to be a sad coda to the story of Faulkner’s Cold War cultural diplomacy. In effect, the report celebrates having co-opted Faulkner first: in the wake of an internationally broadcast racist incident, the embassy proudly claimed the southerner as a symbol of US cultural accomplishment and the democratic system alike, preemptively neutralizing criticism of Jim Crow policies that the “Marxist opposition” might have leveled had it been able to claim Faulkner first. Faulkner may thus have been seen as a universal figure, and his southern roots may at times have helped him to forge connections with his interlocutors abroad, but for many State Department officials, Faulkner was, above all, a “great American,” a champion of democracy who fostered mutual understanding for his country when it was sorely needed. Indeed, President John F. Kennedy’s declaration after Faulkner’s death that the writer was “A Mississippian by birth, an American by virtue of those forces and loyalties which guided his work, a guiding citizen of our civilization by virtue of his art” neatly summarized the trajectory of Faulkner’s reputation in the United States from marginalized Southern writer to quintessential American author to universal and supposedly apolitical artistic figure who nevertheless could guide his civilization toward democracy (“Kennedy” 1962).

FAULKNER VERSUS FAULKNER: THE COLD WARRIOR, THE CRITIC, AND THE RISKS OF CULTURAL DIPLOMACY The language used in the report on “William Faulkner Week” speaks to the State Department’s instrumentalization of Faulkner. Time and again, officials literally calculated the value of his visits in terms of what one deemed the “propaganda mileage” that could be gained from them.55 One official in Reykjavik, for example, stressed the importance of planning high-quality cultural projects when he noted “that the Icelanders clearly recognize that a cultural tug-of-war over Iceland is going on between the United States and Russia, and that one William Faulkner is worth in Iceland innumerable lesser lights.”56 Such assessments showed the US officials who hosted Faulkner to be Saxton Bradford, cable to unspecified recipient, October 9, 1962, Papers of William Faulkner, 1932 and 1960–1, Accession #7258-f, Special Collections Department, University of Virginia Library, Charlottesville, VA (henceforth Papers of William Faulkner). 55 Harner to USIA, January 17, 1962, RG 306, NARA. 56 Mary Vance Trent, memo to Douglas Batson, March 15, 1956, Howland-Faulkner Papers: DS Papers 1955–7. 54

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oblivious to the critiques of the commodification of humans and human values that characterized the writer’s literary production. Indeed, had they been made public, they would have served as fodder for the Communist critique of US materialism and lack of appreciation for high culture. Similar calculations drove efforts to plan additional tours, though some officials did raise concerns about the risks of hosting Faulkner. The US ambassador to Japan, for example, ordered that the writer be sent home after the first two days of his visit out of concern that his drinking and sullenness could prove a public relations disaster (Blotner 1974: 1546–7).57 And, indeed, the institutional memory of Faulkner’s drinking was so vivid for some officials that a proposal for the 1961 trip to Venezuela was at first turned down because “the possible difficulties outweigh the very considerable advantages that might accrue from the grant.”58 But while Faulkner left disappointed fans (and exhausted officials) behind on some trips, State Department officers largely glossed over these experiences because the cultural capital from his visits proved so great and the local reception so overwhelmingly positive. The risks were not limited to adverse publicity from Faulkner’s drinking habits. As was noted above, his statements on race often pushed up against the official message that US officials were promoting about progress against racism. Additionally, officials paid very little attention to the contrast between Faulkner’s public pronouncements abroad in support of democracy and the strong doubts about the United States that he expressed in his contemporary fiction, public speeches, and writings. In effect, the positions that Faulkner espoused in his imaginative work and in his public declarations were often at odds with each other. On the one hand, as cultural ambassador and public citizen, he promoted US democracy and believed, according to Polk, that “America, with all its problems, offered better alternatives for individual achievement than the Soviet Union” (1996: 262). (His work on “Land of the Pharaohs,” the story of what Melani McAlister calls an “implicitly democratic” people’s fight to overcome empire, totalitarianism, and slavery, would seem to convey a similar message [2005: 61, 64].) His criticism of racism, in fact, could be read as part of this stance for he believed that redressing it was indispensable to the long-term survival of democracy. At the same time, though, Faulkner expressed strong reservations about the United States and capitalism (Polk 1996: 262–4). For the most part, he did so outside of his official tours, but he did admit on some of these to harboring unspecified doubts about democracy. As Catherine Gunther Kodat has observed, “admiration for Faulkner’s novels hardly guaranteed admiration for the United States” (2015a: 159). Her statement is applicable to much of the writer’s fiction, but it is particularly apt regarding his Cold War fiction, which, as noted previously, sharply criticized US capitalist democracy and consumerism. A number of Faulkner’s published essays and letters during his public phase likewise expressed criticism of US foreign policy, segregation, increasing federal intervention into local affairs, and the infringements on privacy in a free market society. As far as I can tell, though, Faulkner’s State Department contacts had not read his later fiction; and while Faulkner

USIS officer Leon Picon, however, was able to turn the situation around and adeptly chaperoned Faulkner through the rest of his stay. Picon later wrote a memorandum, “Recommendations for Handling Mr. William Faulkner during Official tours,” that was used to help other embassies hosting the writer (memo mentioned in Frank Snowden, memo to State Department, October 18, 1955, Faulkner’s Travels Papers). 58 John N. Hayes, memo to Richard I. Phillips, June 30, 1960, group IV, series 1, subseries 1, Box 144, Folder 18, CU Collection. 57

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read drafts of a projected book, The American Dream: What Happened to It?, on his 1955 trip, for the most part, officials did not address the potential for his criticism to be used against the United States.59 While this possibility was evident in the official report on “Faulkner Week” in Mexico, and in the fact that leftist periodicals, including the Marxist Masses & Mainstream, reprinted some of Faulkner’s critical pronouncements on race, most officials were largely unconcerned with it, or with the prospect of backlash from other quarters (Polsgrove 2001: 5–6, 8). This was very different from the outcry surrounding the State Department–organized “Advancing American Art” exhibition of 1946–7, which was sent abroad to showcase US talent and the freedom of expression for artists in democratic societies but which was shut down early due to criticism (and the threat of funding cuts) for including artists with leftist inclinations and works deemed foreign and subversive.60 Although Faulkner, too, was viewed by some as grotesque and not representative of the United States, as the response to his receiving the Nobel Prize demonstrates, the contemporary reevaluation and depoliticization of modernism, coupled with his successes (overall) when abroad, resulted in the construction of a public figure who was at once American and universal, and whose warm reception provided benefits that overshadowed any potential fallout from his missteps. Alcoholic episodes were swept under the rug and doctors’ bills were quietly paid as local missions basked in the glory brought on by Faulkner’s visits. Indeed, even his occasional criticism of the United States could be helpful to his hosts, for audiences viewed it as a testament to the freedom of expression that he enjoyed in a democratic society. Faulkner, of course, made this success possible by whitewashing his doubts about democracy in his statements abroad. Nevertheless, his correspondence with State Department officials does reveal a deep-seated patriotism that manifested itself as a willingness to do his best to promote freedom, democracy, and the United States, and that even trumped his deeply rooted antisocial inclinations. Thus does Blotner assert that Faulkner’s “advocacy of American-style democracy … demonstrated that if his trips had created an effect upon his foreign hearers, they had also had a profound effect upon him as well” (1974: 1566). Official functions could be risky undertakings for his hosts, but the writer generally shone in informal interactions with local audiences because he felt that it was there that he was doing what he should be doing, for literature and the United States alike. Cold warrior or not, then, the conflicting views of democracy offered by Faulkner as writer, Faulkner as public persona, and Faulkner as cultural diplomat speak to a figure who must be viewed from many lenses, and who resisted being reduced to the function that the State Department would have had him serve, let alone reconciled with himself. In the end, then, it was not just, as State Department officials wanted to believe, the representative of the triumphalist democracy of the United States who captured the imagination of his audiences. Rather, on his trips to Latin America and Asia in particular, Faulkner’s interlocutors warmed to the southerner who spoke about a region that was troubled by racism, poverty, underdevelopment, and an imperial North, and in which, in Thomas Borstelmann’s words, “human relations along the color line conflicted most sharply with the nation’s pursuit of a ‘free world’ abroad” (2001: 3).

The exception is the Manila report, which indicated that “It is noteworthy that Mr. Faulkner’s discussion of the lost ‘American Dream’ of freedom and individual dignity was not exploited by any of the papers even though it would have lent itself easily to it.” John A. Malley, US Embassy, Manila, Despatch to DS/USIA, September 14, 1955, Box 9, Folder 19, Blotner Papers. 60 For a discussion of the exhibition, see Krenn (2005: 9–49). 59

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Faulkner’s identification of parallels between the US South’s past and the histories of the countries that he visited, as well as his open critique of the region’s, and nation’s, racial problems thus served to heighten both his popularity and the reputation of the United States abroad, an effect that speaks to skewed lines of cause and an effect that allowed Cold War operations to be understood far differently than their sponsors intended, and—in some cases, at least—still prove successful. As Hugh Wilford has observed regarding the CIA’s covert funding of artists through organizations such as the Congress for Cultural Freedom, “the CIA might have tried to call the tune … but the piper did not always play it, nor the audience dance to it” (2008: 10). The State Department thought that it was using “an old-fashioned, heart-and-soul patriot” as a weapon on its Cold War missions, and in many instances Faulkner thought that he was complying with this.61 Neither, however, could control his response to or reception by his audiences, who saw him both as a representative of the United States and as a critic of the nation’s shortcomings, which, on a number of occasions, ultimately strengthened the case that he made for democracy.

WORKS CITED Aboul-Ela, H. (2007), Other South: Faulkner, Coloniality, and the Mariátegui Tradition, Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press. Aoki-Okabe, M., Y. Kawamura, and T. Makita (2010), “ ‘Germany in Europe’, ‘Japan and Asia’: National Commitments to Cultural Relations within Regional Frameworks,” in J. C. E. Gienow-Hecht and M. C. Donfried (eds.), Searching for a Cultural Diplomacy, 212–37, New York: Berghahn Books. Barnhisel, G. (2015), Cold War Modernists: Art, Literature, & American Cultural Diplomacy, New York: Columbia University Press. Berghahn, V. (2001), America and the Intellectual Cold Wars in Europe: Shepard Stone between Philanthropy, Academy, and Diplomacy, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Blotner, J. (1974), Faulkner: A Biography, vol. 2, New York: Random House. Borstelmann, T. (2001), The Cold War and the Color Line: American Race Relations in the Global Arena, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Cartwright, K. (2004), Reading Africa into American Literature: Epics, Fables, and Gothic Tales, Lexington: University Press of Kentucky. Caute, D. (2003), The Dancer Defects: The Struggle for Cultural Supremacy during the Cold War, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Cohn, D. (1999), History and Memory in the Two Souths: Recent Southern and Spanish American Fiction, Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press. Cohn, D. (2006), “Combating Anti-Americanism during the Cold War: Faulkner, the State Department, and Latin America,” Mississippi Quarterly 59(3–4): 396–413. Cull, N. (2008), The Cold War and the United States Information Agency: American Propaganda and Public Diplomacy, 1945–1989, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Dudziak, M. (2000), Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Lee, letter to John Vebber, September 1, 1960, Papers of William Faulkner.

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Earle, D. M. (2015), “Faulkner and the Paperback Trade,” in J. T. Matthews (ed.), William Faulkner in Context, 231–46, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Etheridge, B. C. (2007), “Die antideutsche Welle: The Anti-German Wave, Public Diplomacy, and Intercultural Relations in Cold War America,” in Jessica C. E. Gienow-Hecht (ed.), Decentering America, 73–106, New York: Berghahn Books. Faulkner, W. (1967), Essays, Speeches & Public Letters, ed. J. B. Meriwether, London: Chatto & Windus. Faulkner, W. (1977), Selected Letters of William Faulkner, ed. J. Blotner, New York: Random House. Gienow-Hecht, J. C. E., and M. C. Donfried, eds. (2010), Searching for a Cultural Diplomacy, New York: Berghahn Books. Gienow-Hecht, J. C. E., and F. Schumacher, eds. (2003), Culture and International History, New York: Berghahn Books. Godden, R. (2002), “A Fable … Whispering about the Wars,” Faulkner Journal 17(2): 25–88. Guilbaut, S. (1985), How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Handley, G. B. (2000), Postslavery Literature in the Americas: Family Portraits in Black and White, Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press. Hönnighausen, L. (1997), Faulkner: Masks and Metaphors, Jackson: University of Mississippi Press. “Kennedy Leads Nation’s Tributes to ‘Great Creator’” (1962), New York Times (July 7): 7. Kodat, C. G. (2015a), “Unsteady State: Faulkner and the Cold War,” in J. T. Matthews (ed.), William Faulkner in Context, 156–65, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kodat, C. G. (2015b), Don’t Act, Just Dance, New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Krenn, M. L. (2005), Fall-Out Shelters for the Human Spirit: American Art and the Cold War, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Kreyling, M. (1998), Inventing Southern Literature, Jackson: University of Mississippi Press. Loichot, V. (2007), Orphan Narratives: The Postplantation Literature of Faulkner, Glissant, Morrison, and SaintJohn Perse, Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press. Manheim, J. (1994), Strategic Public Diplomacy and American Foreign Policy: The Evolution of Influence, New York: Oxford University Press. Mastny, V. (2010), “Soviet Foreign Policy, 1953–1962,” in M. P. Leffler and O. A. Westad (eds.), Cambridge History of the Cold War, vol. 1, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Matthews, J. T. (2009), “Many Mansions: Faulkner’s Cold War Conflicts,” in A. Trefzer and A. J. Abadie (eds.), Global Faulkner: Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha, 2006, 3–23, Jackson: University of Mississippi Press. Matthews, J. T. (2015), “Introduction,” in J. T. Matthews (ed.), William Faulkner in Context, 1–9, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. McAlister, M. (2005), Epic Encounters: Culture, Media, and U.S. Interests in the Middle East since 1945, Berkeley: University of California Press. Meriwether, J. B., and M. Millgate, eds. (1980), Lion in the Garden: Interviews with William Faulkner 1926– 1962, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. “More Trouble in Venezuela” (1961), New York Times (February 21): 34. Morrison, S. (2013), “Requiem’s Ruins: Unmaking and Making in Cold War Faulkner,” American Literature 85(2): 303–31. Mueller, T. (1954), “For Your Information,” Newsweek (August 30): 7. Nicolaisen, P., and D. Göske (2008), “William Faulkner in Germany: A Survey,” Faulkner Journal 24(1): 63–81. “Nobel Bedfellows” (1950), New York Times (November 11): 12.

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Oakley, H. (2004), “William Faulkner and the Cold War: The Politics of Cultural Marketing,” in J. Smith and D. Cohn (eds.), Look Away!: The U.S. South in New World Studies, 405–18, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Ono, K. (1985), “Faulkner Studies in Japan: An Overview,” in T. L. McHaney, K. Ohashi, and K. Ono (eds.), Faulkner Studies in Japan, 1–12, Athens: University of Georgia Press. Pitavy, F. (2008), “The Making of a French Faulkner: A Reflection on Translation,” Faulkner Journal 24(1): 83–97. Polk, N. (1996), Children of the Dark House: Text and Context in Faulkner, Jackson: University of Mississippi Press. Polk, N. (2007), “Faulkner’s Non-Fiction,” in R. Moreland (ed.), A Companion to William Faulkner, 410–19, Oxford: Blackwell. Polsgrove, C. (2001), Divided Minds: Intellectuals and the Civil Rights Movement, New York: W.W. Norton. Rafael, V. (2000), White Love and Other Events in Filipino History, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Schneider, A. (2008). “William Faulkner and the Romanian ‘Criticism of Survival,’” Faulkner Journal 24(1): 99–117. Schwartz, L. (1988), Creating Faulkner’s Reputation: The Politics of Modern Literary Criticism, Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press. Smith, J., and D. Cohn, eds. (2004), Look Away!: The U.S. South in New World Studies, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Stecopoulos, H. (2008), Reconstructing the World: Southern Fictions and U.S. Imperialisms, 1898–1976, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Trefzer, A., and A. J. Abadie, eds. (2009), Global Faulkner, Jackson: University of Mississippi Press. Urgo, J. R. (1989), Faulkner’s Apocrypha: A Fable, Snopes, and the Spirit of Human Rebellion, Jackson: University of Mississippi Press. Vaughan, J. R. (2010), “The United States and the Limits of Cultural Diplomacy in the Arab Middle East, 1945– 1957,” in J. C. E. Gienow-Hecht and M. C. Donfried (eds.), Searching for a Cultural Diplomacy, 162–86, New York: Berghahn Books. “Venezuela Quells Rebel Outbreak” (1961), New York Times (February 21): 10. von Eschen, P. M. (2004), Satchmo Blows Up the World: Jazz Ambassadors Play the Cold War, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Wilford, H. (2008), The Mighty Wurlitzer: How the CIA Played America, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

FURTHER READING Aboul-Ela, H. (2007), Other South: Faulkner, Coloniality, and the Mariátegui Tradition, Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press. Barnhisel, G. (2015), Cold War Modernists: Art, Literature, & American Cultural Diplomacy, New York: Columbia University Press. Blotner, J. (1974), Faulkner: A Biography, vol. 2, New York: Random House. Cohn, D. (1999), History and Memory in the Two Souths: Recent Southern and Spanish American Fiction, Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press. Cohn, D. (2006), “Combating Anti-Americanism during the Cold War: Faulkner, the State Department, and Latin America,” Mississippi Quarterly 59(3–4): 396–413. Handley, G. B. (2000), Postslavery Literature in the Americas: Family Portraits in Black and White, Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press. Kodat, C. G. (2015), Don’t Act, Just Dance, New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press.

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Loichot, V. (2007), Orphan Narratives: The Postplantation Literature of Faulkner, Glissant, Morrison, and SaintJohn Perse, Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press. Matthews, J. T., ed. (2015), William Faulkner in Context, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ono, K. (1985), “Faulkner Studies in Japan: An Overview,” in T. L. McHaney, K. Ohashi, and K. Ono (eds.), Faulkner Studies in Japan, 1–12, Athens: University of Georgia Press. Schwartz, L. (1988), Creating Faulkner’s Reputation: The Politics of Modern Literary Criticism, Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press. Stecopoulos, H. (2008), Reconstructing the World: Southern Fictions and U.S. Imperialisms, 1898–1976, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Trefzer, A., and A. J. Abadie, eds. (2009), Global Faulkner, Jackson: University of Mississippi Press.

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Reception

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CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

The Distribution and Reception of American Literature in Cold War Japan HIROMI OCHI

During the postwar occupation of Japan and in the period just after the occupation ended in 1952, as part of their cultural reorientation and reeducation program, US authorities came to consider American literature an effective vehicle for disseminating the notion of democracy to the Japanese public.1 Various cultural institutions were involved in this endeavor, including the Culture, Information and Education (CI&E) section of the General Headquarters, the Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers (GHQ/SCAP), the American Embassy after the occupation, and private groups like the Rockefeller Foundation. Their various programs ranged from translation programs to gift book programs to exchange programs to American Studies seminars. If we can call these programs as a whole “institutional American literature,” they culminated in William Faulkner’s (1955) and critic R. P. Blackmur’s (1956) visits to Japan. The 1959 publication of Blackmur’s New Criticism in America then clinched its direction. This chapter examines how the modernist turn in American literature was institutionally imported and how translation accordingly facilitated and negotiated with this newly institutionalized American literary studies, by mapping the ways that official institutions as well as private or informal ones introduced and translated American literature for Japanese readers and students. The initial policies of occupation are documented in “United States Initial Post-Surrender Policy Relating to Japan” (SWNCC150/3) August 22, 1945, GHQ/SCAP Records, Top Secret Records of Various Sections. Administrative Division Box No. CI-1 (21). (Reproduction of US National Archives RG331.) The idea of reorientation and reeducation is shown in State-War-Navy Coordinating Committee (SWNCC) 162/D, July 10, 1945, “Positive Policy for Reorientation of the Japanese,” National Archives, Record Groups (RG) 165, ABC014 Japan (April 13, 1944), SFE series 116, early August to December 1945 (National Archives, Microfilm Publication, T 1205); and in a revised version forwarded to General MacArthur by the Joint Chiefs of Staff as SWNCC162/2, January 1946. Tsuchiya (2005, 2009) examines how these policies were developed at the very last stage of the war. Many of the basic documents concerning the official policies of GHQ/ SCAP were also referred to in my article “The Reception of American Literature in Japan during the Occupation” in Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Literature (2017). Also for CI&E libraries and books of and on American literature held by those libraries, see Ochi (2010: 89–111). 1

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Such an exploration involves what John Carlos Rowe defines American Studies: “the circulation of ‘America’ as a commodity of the new cultural imperialism” (Rowe 2000: 28). The first section overviews the impact of the so-called “Salzburg Seminar” on the US cultural program on postwar Japan. In particular, Salzburg’s Japanese counterpart, the Stanford University–Tokyo University American Studies seminars, showcases the modernist turn of the US literary canon inculcated directly through the founding fathers of American Studies. The following section explores how leading scholars in the emerging field of American literary studies, with the sponsorship of the US Embassy, collectively produced a series of translations of introductory books called “Hyoronsha series” and a collection of canonical works titled “Arechi Publishing House Collection.” Independent projects joined these official governmental ones, including an African American literature collection published by Hayakawa Publishing Company (whose main translator conceived of the project as an oblique comment on racism in Japan). The final section situates Faulkner’s visit to Japan in 1955 in this context of the institutionalization of American literary studies in Japan. Louis D. Rubin, Jr.’s Southern Renaissance: The Literature of the Modern South (1953), the founding text of Southern literary studies, was particularly important in this, as it marked the incorporation of Southern literary studies into American literary studies especially in Japan through the shared notion of defeat. If, as US National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy declared in 1964, “the first great center of area studies … [was] in the Office of Strategic Services” (Kai Bird 1998: 171), postwar Japan was one of the most successful laboratories for the collaboration between the military and the cultural agencies, as Bruce Cumings argues (Cumings 2002: 261).2 In Japan, as well as in another occupied area, Austria, American Studies was propagated through various financial assistance and exchange programs, as well as through the development of infrastructure such as libraries. The situation of occupation, which meant a highly controlled discursive space, and the interest of the postwar generation around the world in up-to-date scientific and academic information, made possible these official cultural initiatives—some of them overt, some covert.3

THE IMPACT OF THE STANFORD–TOKYO UNIVERSITY AMERICAN STUDIES SEMINARS ON THE INSTITUTIONALIZATION OF AMERICAN LITERATURE The Stanford University–Tokyo University American Studies seminars, sponsored by the Rockefeller Foundation, exemplified how a cultural program operated in tandem with military occupation policies that encompassed the political, economic, and cultural fields. The goal of occupation—demilitarization and especially democratization—was, in a sense, conceived as a cultural refashioning process. As Takeshi Matsuda points out, US cultural policy for Japan at the early stage of the Cold War was figured as “soft power,” which operated not as coercion but rather an apparatus for the voluntary cooperation of a subjugated people (Matsuda 2007: 10–11). This blueprint was already clear in Fortune magazine’s (1944) special issue on Japan, coedited by Bundy (1964: 1–3), cited in Bird (1998: 171) and Cumings (2002: 261). Bruce Cumings argues that “the American state and especially the intelligence elements in it shaped the entire field of postwar area studies” after the Cold War 2002), 261. 3 For an overview of American studies in postwar Europe, see Cunliffe (1975: 46–52). Wagnleitner (1994) details cultural programs in postwar Austria. 2

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poet/cultural diplomat Archibald MacLeish and OWI officer Claude A. Buss, a State Department official who had been held as a prisoner by the Japanese from 1942 to 1943 after the surrender of the Philippines (“Memorial Resolution” 1999). Japan proposed that the postwar occupation policy should aim at “cultural reorganization” and be realized by the voluntary engagement of Japanese people: “only the Japanese can do the work” (Fortune 1944: 183). It anticipated the StateWar-Navy Coordinating Committee’s July 1945 plan for the Japanese people’s “reeducation” and “reorientation” with the goal of facilitating “major changes in ideologies and attitudes of mind” in order for the former enemy country not to be “a menace to international security” (Takamae 2003: 349). This idea continued to frame postwar US foreign policy with respect to Asia. NSC 48/1, a 1949 policy statement of the National Security Council (NSC), stated that in helping Japan with democratization and economic development, and pledging to offer protection against “external aggression” against Japan, the United States should avoid “the appearance that its policies in Japan are dictated solely by considerations of strategic self-interest,” and NSC 48/2 issued the following week concluded that the accomplishment of such goals should entail a cooperative operation “on the basis of mutual aid and self-help” (Etzold and Gaddis 1978: 255, 270). In 1951, after visiting his old friend Shigeharu Matsumoto, John D. Rockefeller III submitted a report on “United States-Japanese Cultural Relations” to John Foster Dulles, whom President Truman had tasked with negotiating the peace treaty between the two nations. This so-called “Rockefeller Report” not only emphasized Japan’s democratization and economic development but also drew up a blueprint for how cultural policies could be designed to contain communism. The report emphasized two key notions: “voluntary” efforts on the side of the Japanese, and the necessity of a “two-way street” instead of a “unilateral” approach (“Rockefeller Report” 1951: 2, 77; Matsuda 2007: 155–88). It is notable that Rockefeller’s report extended the policy of soft power into the postoccupation cultural strategy, even while the United States was faced with the pressing Korean War (Takamae 2003: 349; Tsuchiya 2007: 82). John D. Rockefeller’s involvement in the postwar military occupation policy planning in 1945 and his report on cultural programs in 1951 attests to how military and cultural policies under the occupation were intertwined.4 Salzburg Seminar in 1947, organized and funded by Harvard University students and faculty and held in occupied Austria, brought European students together with eminent US academics such as literary critic F. O. Matthiessen and anthropologist Margaret Mead to study American culture. The seminar also marked the start of the US Cold War efforts to disseminate American national culture through a new academic field, “American Studies.” In his famous opening address, Matthiessen declared how the notion of democracy accompanied the emerging field of American Studies. His stress on the character of democracy also contained “a sharp critical sense of both its excesses and its limitations,” and Henry Nash Smith, in his essay on the second seminar in 1948 (which opened the

John D. Rockefeller III was deeply involved in the process of postwar policy planning in cooperation with the SWNCC special committee members including East Asian specialists Hugh Borton, Gordon Bowles, and George Taylor. See John D. Rockefeller III’s letter to Assistant Secretary of State William Benton, December 13, 1945 (RG5, Rockefeller Family Archives, Series 1, Box 46, Folder 420, Rockefeller Archive Center). George Taylor, a professor of the University of Washington, later in the late 1950s proposed an American Studies seminar modeled after the Tokyo–Stanford Seminar. For details, see “Statement of Account: Summer Seminar on American Studies Operated under The Plan of Cooperation between the University of Washington and the National Taiwan University for Promoting American Studies in Taiwan” (September 18, 1959), RF Records, RG1.2, Series 605, Box 1, Folder 3 and “Report on the Summer Program of American Studies” (September 30, 1960), RF Records, RG1.2, Series 605, Box 1, Folder 4. 4

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very first issue of American Quarterly), boasted of democratic, relaxed attitudes among American scholars at the seminar and discussions that symbolized freedom (Matthiessen 1948: 14; Smith 1949: 35).5 Covertly connected with military objectives, American Studies seminars functioned as democratic cultural education. Even before the success of the Salzburg Seminar, Stanford’s George H. Kerr had already envisioned an American Studies seminar in Japan to contain anti-US sentiment after the peace treaty (Kerr 1947).6 Buss (MacLeish’s coauthor on the 1944 Fortune issue) presented Kerr’s plan to General MacArthur directly, before consulting with Charles B. Fahs of the Rockefeller Foundation (Fahs 1949). Although the project was undergirded by the military, it was carried out in the guise of a private sector cultural event (like Salzburg) through the “three-way cooperation” of Stanford, GHQ/SCAP, and the Rockefeller Foundation (Matsuda 2007: 166–84). Such concerted efforts upstaged “bilateral” or “two-way” cultural programs. The first Stanford–Tokyo American Studies seminar, largely underwritten by the Rockefeller Foundation, started in 1950, with Japan still under occupation and the number of imported American literary works (as well as information on American literature) limited, except on the bookshelves of libraries run by the CI&E section of GHQ/SCAP. The war had prevented newly published American literature from reaching Japan, so this seminar (and the encounter with leading American scholars and major books) was a crucial opportunity for Japanese scholars to obtain updated knowledge of American literature.7 Considered from the vantage point of American literary history, this seminar was an early example of the Cold War consensus on American literature, conducted in the midst of publication of the foundational texts of American Studies including Perry Miller’s two-volume work The New England Mind (1939, 1953) F. O. Matthiessen’s American Renaissance (1941), Henry Nash Smith’s Virgin Land (1950), R. W. B. Lewis’s The American Adam (1955), and Richard Chase’s The American Novel and Its Tradition (1957). Smith, Lewis, and Matthiessen taught at Salzburg. Stanford–Tokyo also invited the vanguard of American Studies scholars including Miller (Harvard University, 1952), Smith (University of Minnesota, 1953), Harry Levin (Harvard, 1955), and Mark Schorer (University of California, 1956) in the field of literature, and also the historian C. Vann Woodward (Johns Hopkins, 1953) and the anthropologist and advocator of the framework of “culture and personality” Clyde Kluckhorn (Harvard University, 1954)—who, as a scholar on national character, along with Columbia’s Ruth Benedict, has been an adviser on occupation policies to General MacArthur (Development 1998: 31, 131–3; “American Studies in Japan” 1955: 4) (Figure 5).

or details of the early years of the Salzburg Seminar, see Blaustein (2018). F About the initial plan by G. H. Kerr, I am thankful to Professor Yukari Yoshihara, Tsukuba University, for information on the document. 7 For detailed information, see Sengo Nihon no Amerika Kenkyū Seminar no Ayumi—Amerika Kenkyū Sougou Chousa Kenkyūsha Yousei Puroguramu Chousa Bukai Houkokusho [Development of American Studies Seminars: Report of Survey Group of Educational Program for Researchers, Comprehensive Research of American Studies] (Tokyo: International House of Japan, 1998). This survey reports the enthusiasm of the participants, including economist Masao Fukuoka, who said that in a society far from affluent, their admiration of the United States was intense (p. 39). For detailed information, also see The Bulletin of the Center for American Studies of the University of Tokyo [in Japanese], 4 (1981); Matsuda (2007), pp. 161–84, and specifically for literature, Ochi, “The Reception of American Literature in Japan during the Occupation,” pp. 12–14. The report “American Studies in Japan” (March 1955) submitted by the Rockefeller Foundation staff to the trustees of the Foundation is also very informative. 5 6

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FIGURE 5:  Perry Miller at his seminar. Harvard University Archives.

But these eminent scholars weren’t just teaching in their fields of expertise: they were also teaching, and modeling, how democracy works. As in Salzburg, faculty employed class discussion to inculcate democratic values in their students. The visiting professors “invited discussion” and they declared that “every person was expected to express his opinion regardless of what had been said. In fact they added, this was part of the democratic way.” Though embarrassed at first, as such an equal relationship was unknown in Japanese education, students gradually accepted the role of equal participants (“American Studies in Japan” 1955: 7). Another feature borrowed from Salzburg was a library. The 1955 report says that “American books were scarce in Japanese universities in 1950, and the pioneering group of professors who went over to inaugurate the seminars carried a collection of reference works in their respective fields … As a result of these annual purchases substantial libraries have been built up at both university centers” (“American Studies in Japan” 1955: 19). In 1954, according to Goheen’s report, “the number of books accumulated since 1950 in the American Seminar Library” was 1,244, which were transferred to the Komaba campus in 1967 to establish The Center for American Studies of the University of Tokyo (now the Center for Pacific and American Studies of the University of Tokyo) (Goheen 1954: 6; “American Studies in Japan” 1955: 38). Merrill Jensen, who was involved with the Kyoto American Studies seminar from 1951 to 1987, highly esteemed the Stanford–Tokyo University seminars in that they trained scholars who would lead the discipline, and emphasized the importance of libraries and translations for the further development of American Studies in Japan (Jensen 1975: 136).

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Additionally, what made the Stanford–Tokyo seminars outstanding as a Cold War cultural program was the involvement of participants in the process of the formation of Cold War consensus. In the field of American literature, this came through the employment of the New Critical technique of close reading and the new, American Studies–influenced canon that stressed Puritanism, Romanticism (the period now being called, due to Matthiessen’s influential (1941) book, the “American Renaissance”), Henry James, and then modernism. What to be taught was still in the process of being worked out. Materials used in the Stanford–Tokyo seminars were similar to those used in Salzburg in 1947, when Matthiessen and Kazin collaborated to “sift out the best” for their program.8 According to the report by Hikaru Saito, Howard in 1951 set his theme for the seminar as “Problems of Scholarship in American Literature” and lectured on the trajectory of American literary studies (The Bulletin 1981: 28). In 1952, Perry Miller titled his seminar “History of the American Novel” and taught Melville, Hawthorne (The Scarlet Letter), Faulkner, and Sinclair Lewis, and lectured on “Emerson and Democracy” and “ ‘Puritanism’ in Recent American Literature” (Miller 1953: 65; The Bulletin 1981: 78). Smith in 1953 took up Emerson’s Essays, The Scarlet Letter, and Huckleberry Finn and gave a public lecture titled “Reconstruction of Literary Values in the United States, 1900–1950.” One of the participants recollects how Smith emphasized the pessimist genealogy of American literature including Hawthorne, Melville, Dickenson, James, Eliot, Hemingway, and Faulkner, and dismissed progressivism and realism in literary works (The Bulletin 1971: 28, 81; K.T. 1953: 462). Schorer’s choices in 1956 included Dreiser’s Sister Carrie, Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, and Sinclair Lewis’s Babbitt (reflecting his interest in Lewis as he was preparing his biography of the novelist) (The Bulletin 1981: 28). These scholars focused on the canonical nineteenth-century works of American literature and how they led to the work of modernists like Eliot, Faulkner, and Hemingway—a genealogy that most of those modernists (Eliot in particular) would likely reject but that was coming to be widely accepted in American Studies. The most symbolic work was the textbook adopted for Harry Levin’s seminar. When Hikaru Saito of Tokyo University asked Levin to teach poetry or criticism, as they had not been taught in the previous seminars, Levin proposed Oscar Williams’s A Little Treasury of American Poetry (1948), like Williams’s A Little Treasury of Modern Poetry (1946) a popular classroom text at Harvard.9 These two exemplify the modernist turn in the American literary canon. According to one of the Tokyo seminar participants, Levin selected Edgar Allan Poe, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost, Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, Edgar Lee Masters, Hart Crane, Wallace Stevens, Marianne Moore, e. e. Cummings, Stephen Crane, William Carlos Williams, John Crowe Ransom, Archibald MacLeish, W. H. Auden, and so on—mostly modern, and modernist, poets—of the twentieth-century writers, only Frost and Masters are not widely considered modernists (Kiuchi 1955: 453). Levin put a special emphasis (and spent more than one day) on Whitman, Dickinson,

In Saltzburg in 1947, Matthiessen, who was astonished to see European people only knew American literature since the 1930s and they read “the best” and “the worst” “indiscriminately,” worked with Alfred Kazin to “sift out the best” by showing … American literature did start before 1930.” The result was: Thoreau, Hawthorne, Whitman, Melville, James, Twain, Henry Adams, Dreiser, Hemingway, Dos Passos, Eliot, and e. e. Cummings. Matthiessen (1948: 24, 28). 9 See the correspondence from Saito to Levin, February 2, 1955 and Levin to Saito February 28, 1955, Harry Levin Papers, 1920–95 (MS Am 2461), 860, Houghton Library, Harvard University. The twentieth-century poetry classes in the years 1950–5 regularly designated either A Little Treasury of Modern Poetry or A Little Treasury of American Poetry. HUC 8534.5.1. Sillabi, course outlines and reading lists in English, 1894–1980, Box 5. Harvard University Archives, Pusey Library, Harvard University. 8

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and Eliot, those poets who constituted the American Renaissance–modernism canon that scholars like Matthiessen and Levin were constructing (The Bulletin 1981: 28). He also familiarized the seminar participants with close reading, or New Critical reading. He demonstrated explicatory reading of poems line by line, giving detailed explanations on meter and other techniques (Kiuchi 1955: 453). For Japanese scholars whose major sources of American literary studies were the Kenyon Review and Sewanee Review, or the Virginia Quarterly Review on the shelves of CI&E libraries, the term “New Criticism” was not yet familiar. The term was introduced by Shigehisa Narita in 1949, when he contributed an essay to Eigo Seinen (The Rising Generation) and outlined the New Criticism as gaining importance after the war by its method of reading poems as they are, in contrast to the previous criticism practiced by V. F. Calverton, Max Eastman, or Upton Sinclair that emphasized the social and cultural significance of literary works (Narita 1949: 253–5). By introducing the notion of reading poems as autonomous, he introduced the apolitical politics of Cold War cultural programs. The Stanford–Tokyo University American Studies seminars attracted 598 scholars in seven years and had a long-standing impact on American Studies in Japan (The Bulletin 1981: 1). In the case of American literary studies, the revised canon (attuned to Cold War cultural politics and the New Criticism), together with the “democratic” seminar style, transformed American literary studies in Japan. The newly employed open-shelf system of the library that was supposed to be “open” to the readers and the “democratic” seminar style illustrate how the American project of democratizing Japanese culture manifested in such small everyday practices. The teaching materials of one of the seminar organizers, Hikaru Saito, exemplify the transformation of the canon and the development of the Japanese academic library as well. The “Bibliography of American Literature” distributed to students in his 1950 “American Literature” lecture course at Tokyo University lists Russell Blankenship’s American Literature (1937), a standard literary history book owned by the university. But the other two texts standard at that time in the United States—Vernon Parrington’s Main Currents in American Thought (1928), and the Literary History of the United States (1948) edited by Robert Spiller et al.—were only accessible at the CI&E libraries in Tokyo. Many of the other books in his list were available at CI&E libraries. Saito served as a member of the Executive Committee on the Seminar in American Studies in 1952 and 1953, and was then sent to Harvard University as an exchange scholar in 1953–4 by the Rockefeller Foundation. His bibliography for the same lecture course in 1954–5 (after returning from Harvard) was completely updated: it featured Spiller’s Literary History of the United States (at that time the official literary history of the United States in the sense that it was commissioned by the American Literature Group of the Modern Language Association (Vanderbilt 1986: 499–531)), now available at Tokyo University, and deleted the books by Parrington and Blankenship. While Parrington’s book might have been considered slightly out-of-date by this time, it also takes a highly cultural and historical lens to literature, and is thus uncongenial to the New Critical–oriented approach that was coming to dominate. (Parrington’s outspoken Progressivism also colored his literary judgments, and this also helped his work go out of fashion.) Saito also listed Alfred Hoffman’s Modern Novel in America 1951) and William Van O’Connor’s An Age of Criticism (1952), both of which would soon be translated into Japanese (The Bulletin 1981: 6).10 The void of new information during the I would like to thank Professor Kunio Shin atTokyo University, who found Professor Saito’s notebooks in the office of the English department at Aoyama Gakuin University and kindly transferred them to me. They register the transformation of 10

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war and the craving for knowledge on the recipient side facilitated the updating of the knowledge and methodology almost all at once.

DISSEMINATING AND TRANSLATING CONSENSUS ON THE AMERICAN LITERARY CANON What was most instrumental in the promotion of American literary studies in Japan was translation, which was deeply enmeshed in the cultural Cold War in Japan. As long as American literature was an integral part of the Cold War cultural politics, the concept of translation included not only linguistic practices but also, as Meaghan Morris suggests, “the resources people commonly draw on to respond to the effects of economic, social, and cultural change in their lives” (Morris 1997: xviii). Translation thus constituted one of the fields of hegemonic negotiation in postwar Japan. The immediate postwar days were marked by a “craving for words” after the devastating war years, which saturated the Japanese public with propaganda and military censorship. Despite paper shortages and a new form of censorship imposed by the GHQ/SCAP, publishing was “one of the first commercial sectors to recover in defeated Japan” (Dower 1999: 168–94). Since the Meiji era, translation had functioned as a significant conduit for disseminating new knowledge. In the field of literature, most of the translated works had been by writers from Russia, France, and Germany; American literature was not popular (Miyata 2017: 105–6). As soon as the war was over, many Japanese sought out writing that “addressed abiding issues of human nature and social responsibility” (Dower 1999: 188). Besides the blockbuster success of the 1946 retranslation of Theodoor Hendrik van de Velde’s love and sexuality manual Ideal Marriage, the top ten best-selling publications of 1946 in the Japanese market included three other translated works: Nausée by Jan Paul Sartre, Intervues Imaginaires by André Gide, and Arc de Triomphe by Erich Maria Remarque (Dower 1999: 163, 190). In the wake of their devastating defeat, Japanese intellectuals turned to the notion of world peace, and the term “world literature” was closely connected to that notion. Hermann Hesse, awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1946, occupied a symbolic status in postwar Japan’s canon of world literature, as his works had been banned by the Nazis because he would not submit to their oppressive power (Akikusa 2020: 96). Indeed, Shinchosha Publishing Co, Ltd.’s collections of world literature published after the war reflected this renewed literary canon. Works by newer American writers such as Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, Norman Mailer, Pearl Buck, and Margaret Mitchell replaced those of Russian socialist–realist authors including Nikolai Ostrovsky and Aleksey Tolstoy, and those of progressive American writers like Dreiser and Jack London (Akikusa 2020: 95–106). The CI&E of the GHQ/SCAP launched a translation program in 1948 to circulate more American literature to the people, most of whom could not read English. Most titles were technical books on

American literary studies. On how the Literary History of the United States (LHUS) was conceived and finally published, see Vanderbilt (1986: 412–531). It is notable that books by Van O’Connor and Hoffman were both published by the Henry Regnery Company, known for its publication of conservative writers such as William Buckley, Jr. and also known for its series of publications that promoted literary modernism in the 1950s, including Ezra Pound’s (1960) Impact, a collection of polemical essays that the disgraced poet’s usual publisher had declined to put out. About his career, see Robert McG. Thomas, Jr.’s obituary in 1996.

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engineering, agriculture, and other fields to facilitate the economic recovery of Japan. The literary works included were expected to bolster the emerging Cold War framework of democracy versus totalitarianism: Huck Finn, for example, was considered a model democratic hero who embodied individual freedom (CIE Bulletin 1948: 13; Ishihara 2005: 65–6). After the occupation ended, this translation program of American literature and literary studies became the responsibility of the American Embassy. Two free monthly magazines published by the US Embassy are worthy of notice: Beisho Dayori (Monthly Review of American Books), first issued in March 1953, and Amerikana (Americana), launched in October 1955. Both aimed at promoting “proper knowledge” of what to read and academic knowledge to be shared by Japanese scholars. The first was a monthly book guide that introduced books suitable for translation with suggestions for possible Japanese titles. The preface reiterated the postoccupation policy of “mutual understanding”: “it is necessary for both Japan and the United States to have a deep understanding of each other’s culture in order for both countries to work together to realize world peace,” and to achieve this goal, a systematic, instead of sporadic, selection of American books, especially literature and social science books for translation, was an imperative (“Beisho Dayori Hakko ni Yosete (Preface) 1953: 1). Amerikana aimed to provide Japanese scholars and students easy access to representative academic journal papers at a time when American research journals were still often unavailable. The periodical contained around ten translated journal essays originally in “50 highly evaluated academic journals that range from humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences” (“Hakkan no Kotoba (On the Publication of the Magazine)” 1955: inside cover). In literary studies, Amerikana ran translated essays on representative writers including Melville, Pound, Eliot, James, Twain, Faulkner, and Hemingway that had originally appeared in journals such as American Literature, Kenyon Review, PMLA, and Sewanee Review. Accompanying these translations were original essays on American academic trends by leading Japanese scholars. The two periodicals shared an apolitical, detached attitude to American literature and American Studies. Amerikana asserted its academic essays were “selected on a purely academic basis regardless of the diplomatic policy of the U.S.” (“Hakkan no Kotoba (On the Publication of the Magazine)” 1955: inside cover). This assertion of being apolitical and free from ideology typified mainstream US Cold War politics, in sharp contrast to the Soviet policy of “Zhdanovism” that advocated explicit party politics in literature. In the schema of the “Free World” versus the totalitarian Soviet Union, Greg Barnhisel contends, these concepts of “free” and “independent” constituted “the heart of Cold War modernism, which framed modernist art and literature as the epitome of Western—in particular American—cultural values … modernism was an expression of freedom, individualism, self-motivated enterprise, and the end of ideologies—in other words, an expression of Cold War liberalism itself ” (Barnhisel 2015: 28, 33). Coinciding with this cultural tendency was what we could call the professionalization of American literary studies in the United States (Graff 1987: 145–8; Guillory 1993: 134–74; Schryer 2011: 40–53). The expansion of American literary studies and translation of literary works went in tandem with their institutionalization and professionalization. Amerikana was intended to facilitate that move, and Beisho Dayori, which introduced books recommended for translation, contained essays concerning the standard for translation. Many leading scholars and translators such as Shiho Sakanishi, Naotaro Tatsunokuchi, and Masami Nishikawa voiced the necessity of systematic and correct translation of canonical works by trained professionals (often university professors) based on proper appreciation, and denounced the unsystematic translation of best sellers without any

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standard of selection (Nishikawa 1955: 29–31; Sakanishi 1953: 22–4; Tatsunokuchi 1953: 20–3).11 This move was a response to the fact that translations of American popular fiction like Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind or Mickey Spillane’s “Mike Hammer” series of pulp detective novels had become national best sellers in Japan. If these programs led by the US cultural agencies can be called “official” or “institutional,” American literary studies in Japan proceeded with the process of institutionalization in liaison with those US agencies such as the USIS, the US Embassy, and the Rockefeller Foundation, even as American literature was belatedly receiving the approval of English and European critics. Amid the scarcity of resources, even the contributors to Japan’s most prestigious magazine of English literature, Eigo Seinen (The Rising Generation), turned to literary magazines housed in the CI&E libraries (later American Centers). Major literary magazines such as Kenyon Review, Partisan Review, and Hudson Review made it possible for those scholars to stay attuned to the latest scholarly trends, and those journals were also high-profile advocates of the conjunction of the New Criticism and modernist literature. For most Japanese readers, magazines that provided pieces in translation—including Beisho Dayori and Amerikana—functioned as a more accessible and understandable medium than those little magazines and literary works in English. In the November 1954 issue of Beisho Dayori, Norman Smith asserted that a September 1954 TLS special issue on “American Writing Today” was proof that American literature was finally recognized in Britain, and it was another example of what Langdon Hammer calls “a shared enterprise” on both sides of the Atlantic (Hammer 2004: 127; Smith 1954: 30–2). In the February 1955 issue of Eigoseinen, “K.T.” (a pseudonym for a Japanese scholar) reiterated the importance of that prestigious magazine’s endorsement of modern American literature as distinctive and independent from English literature (K.T. 1955: 77).12 The September 1955 issue of Beisho Dayori published Faulkner’s “To the Youth of Japan,” an address delivered just before his departure from Japan in August (Faulkner 1955: 27–31). Besides these close relationships between publications, public lectures from the Tokyo University–Stanford University American Studies seminars were translated after 1953, and from the US Embassy’s Nagano program Faulkner’s seminar and essays and Blackmur’s lectures were published in English by the Kenkyusha Publishing Company.13 The close connection between the emergent American Literature Society of Japan (ALSJ) and the US Embassy produced a series of translated literary works and literary studies that had a Nishikawa, who would be the founder of the course in American literature in the English Department of the University of Tokyo, expressed similar thoughts in his Amerikabungaku Oboegaki (Notes on American Literature) (Kenkyusha, 1959: 280– 1). Tatsunokuchi attacked the translation of The Old Man and the Sea by a famous writer Tsuneari Fukuda as “incorrect” in his essay (1953: 20–3). 12 It is highly conceivable that this regular contributor K.T. is Katsuji Takamura. As one of the leading scholars on American literature, Takamura published in Beisho Dayori serial essays on twentieth-century American literature from issue number 30 (October 1955) to 36 (March 1956). 13 Lectures in 1952 and 1953 were compiled into Gendai Amerika no Kadai (Problems of the United States Today) edited by Hideo Kishimoto (University of Tokyo Press, 1954); Gendai America no Tembo—Amerika Kenkyu Seminar Kōukai Kougi 1954 (Prospects of the United States Today: American Studies Seminar Public Lectures 1954) edited by Sanji Suenobu (University of Tokyo Press, 1955); Amerika teki Shii no Tenkai—Tōdai Amerika Kenkyu Seminar Kōkai Kougi (Development of American Thought: Tokyo University American Studies Seminar Public Lectures) edited by Takeyasu Kimura (University of Tokyo Press, 1955); Tetsugaku to Rekishi—Tōdai Amerika Kenkyu Seminar Kōkai Kougi (Philosophy and History: Tokyo University American Studies Seminar Public Lectures) edited by Hideo Kishimoto (University of Tokyo Press, 1956). Books of Nagano Seminars are: Robert A. Jelliffe, ed., Faulkner at Nagano (Tokyo: Kenkyusha, 1956); R. P. Blackmur, New Criticism in the United States (Tokyo: Kenkyusha, 1959). 11

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decisive influence on the establishment of American literary studies in postwar Japan from the mid-1950s to the mid-1960s. The Office of Cultural Exchange of the US Embassy commissioned the Japanese publisher Hyoronsha to translate contemporary scholarly books (many of which were published by Henry Regnery) under the supervision of the ALSJ, and oversaw the publication in translation of The Modern Novel in America by Frederick J. Hoffman, The Short Story in America, 1900–1950 by Ray B. West, Jr., and other books covering various literary fields. The translators were the core members of the Society, such as Naotaro Tatsunokuchi, Katsuji Takamura, Masaru Ōtake, Kenzaburo Ōhashi, and Kichinosuke Ōhashi (Ōhashi Kichinosuke and Ōhashi Kenzaburō Sensei ni Kiku, 1988: 17).14Another commission of the embassy was the “University of Minnesota Pamphlets on American Writers” series (1963–9), assigned to the publisher Hokuseido Shoten (again under the supervision of the ALSJ). The embassy also funded the Arechi Publishing Company’s twenty-volume series of translated representative modern American literary works by Hemingway, Faulkner, London, Lewis, Pearl S. Buck, Sherwood Anderson, Thornton Wilder, Willa Cather, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Eugene O’Neill, Tennessee Williams, William Saroyan, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, Truman Capote, Robert Penn Warren, John Steinbeck, Henry James, Saul Bellow, Carson McCullers, Katherine Ann Porter, Edith Wharton, John Dos Passos, Eudora Welty, Lionel Trilling, Thomas Wolfe, Erskine Caldwell, and James Thurber. Kenzaburō Ōhashi and Kichinosuke Ōhashi, recollecting the formative years of the ALSJ, recall that they really did not like the idea of getting involved in Cold War cultural politics and controlling the translation under the name of the Society, and finally succeeded in persuading the senior scholars not to crown the Arechi series with the name of the Society (Ōhashi Kichinosuke and Ōhashi Kenzaburō Sensei ni Kiku, 1988: 8, 17). American Studies scholars also completed the seven-volume Genten Amerika Shi (Documentary History of the American People) (Iwanami Shoten, 1950–7) under the name of the Japan American Studies Association. There were, of course, other translation projects and series beyond those official, institutional ones: Hayakawa Shobō, or Hayakawa Publishing Corporation, was established just after the war and published translated mysteries and detective novels, hiring poets and novelists as translators.15 One

The Hyoronsha series is as follows: The Modern Novel in America by Frederick J. Hoffman (Chicago: Henry Regnery Company, 1951, translated by Katsuji Takamura and Kenzaburo Ōhashi as Amerika no Gendai Shosetsu, Tokyo: Hyōronsha, 1955), The Short Story in America, 1900–1950 by Ray B. West, Jr. (Chicago: Henry Regnery Company, 1952, translated by Naotarō Tatsunokuchi and Kichinosuke Ōhashi as Amerika no Tanpen Shosetsu, Tokyo, Hyōronsha, 1955), An Age of Criticism: 1900–1950 by William Van O’Connor (Chicago: Henry Regnery Company, 1952, translated by Masaru Ōtake and Sōichi Minagawa as Hihyō no Jidai: Gendai Amerika no Hihyō Bungaku, Tokyo: Hyōronsha, 1955), Achievement in American Poetry, 1900–1950 by Louise Bogan (Chicago: Henry Regnery Company, 1951, translated by Ichirō Nishizaki and Masao Nagata as Amerika no Gendaishi, Tokyo: Hyōronsha, 1957), Highlights of Modern Literature edited by Francis Brown (New York: New American Library, 1954, translated by Katsuji Takamura et al. as Gendai Bungaku no Shōten: Eibei Bungaku wo Chūshintoshite, Tokyo: Hyōronsha, 1959), The Liberal Imagination by Lionel Trilling (New York: Viking Press, 1950, translated by Masaru Ōtake as Bungaku to Seishinbunseki, Tokyo: Hyōronsha, 1959), Fifty Years of American Drama, 1900–1950 by Alan S. Downer (Chicago: Henry Regnery Company, 1951, translated by Shigehisa Narita and Kuniaki Suenaga as Amerika no Gendaigeki, Tokyo: Hyōronsha, 1957), and The Psychological Novel: 1900–1950 by Leon Edel (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1955, translated by Naotarō Tatsunokuchi and Michitomo Takahashi as Gendai Shinri Shosetsu Kenkyū, Tokyo: Hyoronsha, 1959). 15 About translation publishing in private sectors in postwar Japan, see the books written by Noboru Miyata, who worked for Hayakawa, then Tuttle as a copyright agent, including Shōwa no Honyaku Shuppan Jikenbo (Casebooks of Publishing Translation in Shōwa Era) (Sōgensha, 2017); Higashi wa Higashi, Nishi wa Nishi: Sengo Honyaku Shuppan no Hensen (East Is East and West Is West: Trajectory of Post-war Translation Publishing in Japan) (Hayakawa Shobō, 1968). 14

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remarkable fruit of such publishing was their twelve-volume collection Kokujin Bungaku Zenshū (Collection of African American Literature) (1961–8). The collection included Langston Hughes, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, Richard Wright, and Jean Toomer. Its editor Fukuo Hashimoto, inspired by Scott Nearing’s Black America (1929), associated African Americans under segregation with members of minority groups in Japan who were themselves marginalized and victimized by racism and class discrimination, imagining his society as a colonizer (Interview with Fukuo Hashimoto 1981: 14).16 Although containing dissenting voices, American literary studies in Japan were as a whole institutionalized and standardized with the aid of cultural agencies like the US Embassy and the Rockefeller Foundation and the voluntary cooperation of emerging academic societies like the ALSJ and the Japanese Association for American Studies, bolstered by updated translations of basic works, author guides, and literary studies. The limited amount of information facilitated the effective influx of an updated American literary canon and that limitation and craving for information effectively disseminated current trends in American literature through various literary journals and magazines.

THE PECULIAR IRONY OF AMERICAN LITERATURE IN POSTWAR JAPAN: BECOMING A GOOD PARTNER OF THE VICTOR COUNTRY What made it possible for American literature and American literary studies to be established so promptly in spite of the intellectual void caused by years of warfare and craving for information? How was it that the updated literary canon came to be accepted by Japanese institutions in such a short time? Is it true, as John Dower puts it, that “the losers wished both to forget the past and to transcend it”? Was there “historical amnesia” generated by “victim consciousness” (Dower 1999: 23)? As Yoshizo Miyazaki warns, the experience that English teachers went through during the Second World War was never simple. Learning English language and literature as a modernizing measure before the war was suddenly deemed to be engagement with an enemy language, which should be suppressed. Indeed, many teachers lost their jobs because of radical alterations to a curriculum attuned to the war. Some kept silent, while some were vocal, presenting English literary studies as an effective tool for winning the war (Miyazaki 1999: 5–10, 39–40, 98–110). When the war was over, many of them were recruited by the Occupation Army to serve the former enemy and occupier as translators, and various feelings—liberation, curiosity, envy, repulsion— bombarded them, as Kenzaburo Ōhashi, who would later become a leading Faulknerian, says in his memoir (Ohashi 2004: 238–42, 293). Another leading Americanist, Shunsuke Kamei, recollecting how radically Japanese people (including himself, a former militarist boy) were converted into worshippers of the new slogan of a cultured nation, says he has never forgotten the memory of that radical change in his nation and himself (Kamei 2017: 3–6). Whether or not it resolved those scholars’ inner conflicts, William Faulkner’s visit to Japan and his speech “To the Youth of Japan,” in which he proposed that the US South and Japan shared an important commonality in

Tokyo Daigaku Amerika Kenkyū Shiryou Sentā (The Center for American Studies, Tokyo University). Interview with Fukuo Hashimoto (American Studies in Japan Oral History Series 12), p. 14. 16

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that both were defeated in war, were widely disseminated through major papers and magazines, offering another opportunity to “embrace defeat.” Japanese intellectuals emphasized how Faulkner embodied universal humanity.17 The Nobel Prize–winning American author arrived in Japan to serve as the honored guest at the American Literature Seminar in Nagano only a year after nuclear fallout from a US hydrogen bomb test in the Bikini Atoll, which contaminated the Japanese fishing boat Daigo Fukuryū Maru (Lucky Dragon 5) and sickened its crew with acute radiation poisoning, ignited repulsion and resentment among the Japanese populace. He was, however, warmly welcomed by the Japanese scholars at the seminar and his presence was of intense interest to the national press. His essay “Impressions of Japan” conveys the enigmatic foreign country of Japan, exhibiting an Orientalist view when comparing Japanese faces to those drawn by “Van Gogh and Manet,” depicting geisha wrapped in kimono covering her fecundity, her “mammalian femaleness,” and leaving Japan with the three words he learned there: “Gohan; Sake: Arrigato” (Jeliffe 1956 178–84). Totally attuned to what Christina Klein called “Cold War Orientalism,” his depiction could be counted among the series of Japanese representations shown in Yasunari Kawabata’s “Snow Country” (translated in 1956 by Edward Seidensticker) and James Michener’s Sayonara (1954). At the same time he personified what was expected of him: “the postwar moralist and symbol of solitary literary genius” (Schwartz 1988: 28–9). When he addressed young Japanese people he rhetorically identified the victor country and the defeated country by using the analogy between the defeated South and defeated Japan, and defines Japan as an ally, a “mutual state of man mutually believing in mutual liberty” (Jeliffe 1956: 188). But he wasn’t the first one to make this analogy: two years before Faulkner’s address, the Johns Hopkins historian and Arkansas native C. Vann Woodward had already impressed Japanese Americanists with the notion of shared defeat. In Tokyo as one of the scholars at the 1953 Tokyo– Stanford American Studies seminar, Woodward, a member of what Texan Henry Nash Smith called the “Southern contingent” in that seminar teaching team (Smith 1981: 17), sensed that the seminar participants knew the significance of his being a Southerner: “his people had been defeated by the Yankees, … their states had been occupied by Yankee armies, and … they had undergone a reconstruction under Yankee rule.” Also sensing that his students had seen the film Gone with the Wind, which had had a long run since the fall of 1952, he “gathered” that they “tended to identify with the South,” and then adopted a pedagogy based on the analogy of the US South and Japan (Woodward 1981: 16, 1986: 104–5) One of the seminar participants, Hiroshi Shimizu, also remembers Woodward’s implicit encouragement not to shy away from mentioning Southerners’ experience of defeat (Shimizu 1981: 25–7). The previous year, in his presidential speech “The Irony of Southern History” to the Southern Historical Association, Woodward attempted to legitimize “the eccentric position of the south” by arguing that the South had learned an “un-American lesson Major Japanese papers conveyed Faulkner’s activity almost daily. In the article in the August 4th issue of Asahi Shimbun about Faulkner’s talk with major Japanese novelists at the International House of Japan, Shohei Ōoka is reported to have said that Faulkner had an almost outdated trait of honesty and goodness. The speech “To the Youth of Japan” was featured in the August 24th issue of Mainichi Shimbun with a comment by the translator of the speech Naotaro Tatsunokuchi, saying that the speech was the warmest-hearted words that were addressed to the young people hopeless after the defeat. This speech was later reprinted in the September issue of Beisho Dayori (Monthly Review of American Books), pp. 27–32. Fumiko Fujita’s Amerika Bunka Gaikō to Nihon: Reisenki no Bunka to Hito no Koryū (U.S. Cultural Diplomacy and Japan in the Cold War Era) (Tokyo: University of Tokyo Press, 2015) spends a whole chapter on Faulkner’s visit to Japan. 17

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of submission” (Woodward 1968: 189–190). This peculiar experience—“the experience of military defeat, occupation, and reconstruction”—could be shared with “nearly all the peoples of Europe and Asia” (Woodward 1968: 189–90).18 This address anticipated Faulkner’s address two years later, when he also used the analogy between the US South and Japan through the historical fact of defeat, saying, “Our land, our homes were invaded by a conqueror … we were not only devastated by the battles which we lost, the conqueror spent the next ten years after our defeat and surrender,” depriving them of “what little war had left” just ten years after Japan’s own surrender (Jelliffe 1956: 185). While in Tokyo, Woodward delivered a public lecture that similarly connected the South and Japan. It is worth noting that Woodward’s “Irony” essay was included in Louis D. Rubin, Jr. and Robert Jacobs’s Southern Renascence: The Literature of the Modern South (1953). This anthology marks a decisive moment in promoting Southern literature as part of Cold War modernism, or the Cold War consensus of American literature. Already in 1942, depoliticized Partisan Review intellectuals and depoliticized former Southern agrarians, now New Critics, argued in Partisan Review against the wartime politicization and mobilization of literature advocated by Archibald MacLeish and Van Wyck Brooks. The two parties, Southern intellectuals (represented by Allen Tate and John Crowe Ransom) and New York Intellectuals (Lionel Trilling and Dwight McDonald), now joined to form, as it were, a literary “vital center.”19 This joining forces of progressives and conservatives characterized Southern Renascence. As John Herbert Roper, Sr. and Richard King point out, it meant the establishment of a reconciliation between “progressives/Chapel Hill scholars” and “conservatives/Nashville scholars.”20 This friendly relationship constructed a Southern vital center, a Southern version of Cold War consensus, although Roper Jr. and King don’t mention that reconciliation in the context of the Cold War. When visiting Japan in 1955, Faulkner, who described himself as “stronger and tougher and more enduring than even his mistakes and blundering,” came across as both a literary giant and a very ordinary (and in this sense universal) human being in the context of Cold War culture (Jeliffe 1956: 188). “To the Youth of Japan,” by relating Faulkner and the South to Japanese defeat, contributed to modifying the popular image of the United States as an arrogant victor. When we consider Jordan J. Dominy’s argument that establishment of Southern literary studies was relevant to Cold War culture and that Woodward’s “The Irony of Southern History” contributed to forging a discipline that embraced modernism and Faulkner as representative by way of its experience of defeat as a universal human experience, Japan was an ideal stage for the construction of “Faulkner’s reputation” by presenting him as burdened with the irony of southern history. The notion of defeat functioned to promote the South and Southern literature as exceptional paradoxically because it was universal, thus incorporating Southern literature with Faulkner at its top into American literary canon as an integral and indispensable part of it (Dominy 2020: 31–6). Together with Gone with The speech, delivered at the Southern Historical Association, was published in 1953 in The Journal of Southern History, XIX and then in Louis D. Rubin, Jr., and Robert D. Jacobs, eds., Southern Renascence (1953). 19 See (38–47). Serge Guilbaut (1983: 52–4) describes this symposium in his description of the depoliticizing trajectory of the Partisan group. In tracing how Nashville Agrarians drove the suspect of Fascism away, Robert H. Brinkmeyer, Jr. (2009: 255–6) mentions the symposium. This symposium is significant in that this confluence of the conservative New Critics and the leftist New York Intellectuals to endorse depoliticization of literary works paves the way for the Cold War literary consensus. 20 See Roper, Sr. ed. (1997), 5–6 and King (1980: 276). 18

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the Wind, Woodward paved the way for the reception of Faulkner in the context of “embracing defeat,” offering a way for Japanese people and scholars to form an alliance with the former enemy, as if catering to Perry Miller’s warning against possible “repulsion” on the part of the Japanese (Miller 1953: 65).

CONCLUSION Before the Second World War, as in the United States, American literature constituted only a small part of English literary studies in Japan. A few pioneering books appeared in the 1930s, but warfare halted this process of Japan catching up to the United States in terms of modernizing literary studies. It was into this cultural wasteland, then, that US literature was transplanted as part of the military occupation’s cultural program to democratize the Japanese people. “American literature” as an orchestrated program to promote democratization consisted of building up library collections, organizing American Studies seminars that promoted not only the contemporary scholarly knowledge but also “discussions” themselves as a democratic practice, and translating properly selected literary works and scholarly books. The Stanford University–Tokyo University seminars in particular exemplify the concerted effects to institutionalize American literature in Japanese educational institutions as part of inculcating democracy. This process was a hegemonic negotiation in the sense that the program was not imposed but rather presented to Japanese scholars as a generous opportunity provided by the grant of a private foundation. The official inculcation of an American literary canon, and the New Critical reading processes used to teach it, facilitated the systematic translation of literary works and scholarly books, often sponsored by the US Embassy. The first postwar generation of Japanese Americanists earnestly absorbed American teachers and promptly founded the ALSJ. Paradoxically, “embracing defeat” contributed to the successful import of American literature in postwar Japan. Southern literary studies took its own stand in American literary studies by inventing the New Critical, apolitical reading of Southern modernist literature and by universalizing Faulkner by way of C. Vann Woodward’s notion of the “irony” of Southern defeat. The analogical schema that connected the US South and Japan through defeat functioned effectively in Japan. Woodward’s claim that Southern exceptionalism was at once eccentric in the United States and thus universal in the world helped to propel American literary studies in Japan, making invisible “the asymmetrical relationship” between Japanese scholars and US scholars that “American exceptionalism installed” (Pease 2010: 49). By making it possible to translate that asymmetrical, indeed vertical relation into a seemingly horizontal, friendly relation as in the Security Treaty between the United States and Japan signed in 1952 (after 1960 known as the Treaty of Mutual Cooperation and Security between the United States and Japan), American literature and literary studies may have facilitated what Dower calls a “historical amnesia” that was generated by “victim consciousness” (Dower 1999: 23) but in which “a victim” identified somehow with the victor, forgetful of its own colonial past. The systematic development of American literary studies—the institutionalization of the ALSJ (1962) and Japan American Studies Association (originally founded in 1947 but reorganized in 1966)21 and the establishment of American literature courses in Japanese universities—gave a Preceding the 1966 establishment was the first Amerika Gakkai (American Studies Association) in 1947. It was made up of several Japanese Americanists including Yasaka Takagi, Shigeharu Matsumoto, Hiroshi Shimizu, Kenichi Nakaya, who 21

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strong foothold to later Japanese scholarship even after the cultural programs of the early Cold War were transmitted in 1962 to the CULCON (Conference on Cultural and Educational Interchange), which does not put a special emphasis on literature. To this day, many Japanese Americanists are avid readers of American scholarly journals and in this sense still in step with American Americanists, well attuned to up-to-date scholarly trends including literary theories. At the same time, there are some peculiar developments as well. Many scholars who were taught by the Stanford–Tokyo seminars generation valued close reading, which facilitated so-called “sakka kenkyu (author studies),” generating numerous, still active societies of individual authors such as Poe, Melville, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Twain, Faulkner, Fitzgerald, and Hemingway (the latest one is the Henry James Society of Japan, established in 2021). As well, a thriving translation industry has made it possible for Japanese readers to catch up with contemporary literary works, generating hard-core American literature fans. It is likely that the aggressive, and arguably culturally imperialist, “democratization” programs of the occupation and early Cold War and Japanese scholars’ negotiation with them are at least in part responsible for this.

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Shimizu, Hiroshi (1981), “Rekishi-bumon (1953): Shutaiteki Nambushi no Shoukai (Report of the History Seminar, 1953: Southern History by Southerners),” Bulletin of the Center for American Studies of the University of Tokyo 4: 25–7. Smith, Henry Nash (1949), “The Salzburg Seminar,” American Quarterly 1(1): 30–7. Smith, Henry Nash (1981) “A Note on the Stanford-University of Tokyo Seminar in American Studies,” Bulletin of the Center for American Studies of the University of Tokyo 4: 17. Smith, Norman (1954), “London Times shi no ‘Konnichi no Amerika Bungaku’ and Gendai Amerika Shijin ni tsuite (‘American Writing Today’ in London Times Literary Supplement and Contemporary American Poets),” Beisho Dayori (Monthly Review of American Books) 20: 30–2. State-War-Navy Coordinating Committee (SWNCC) 150/3, August 22, 1945, “United States Initial Post-Surrender Policy Relating to Japan,” GHQ/SCAP Records, Top Secret Records of Various Sections. Administrative Division Box No. CI-1 (21), Reproduction of U.S. National Archives RG331, National Diet Library, Japan. State-War-Navy Coordinating Committee (SWNCC) 162/D, July 10, 1945, “Positive Policy for Reorientation of the Japanese,” RG.165, ABC014 Japan (13 April 1944), SFE series 116, early August to December 1945 (National Archives, Microfilm Publication, T 1205), National Archives, College Park, MD. “Statement of Account: Summer Seminar on American Studies operated under The Plan of Cooperation between the University of Washington and the National Taiwan University for Promoting American Studies in Taiwan” (September 18, 1959), Rockefeller Foundation Records, RG1.2, Series 605, Box 1, Folder 3, Rockefeller Archive Center. Takamae, Eiji (2003), The Allied Occupation of Japan, New York: Continuum Intl Pub Group. Tatsunokuchi, Naotaro (1953), “Kotoba no Ensouka (Player of the Language),” Beisho Dayori (Monthly Review of American Books) 3: 20–3. Thomas, Jr., Robert McG. (1996), “Henry Regnery, 84, Bround-Breaking Conservative Publisher,” New York Times (June 23), https://www.nyti​mes.com/1996/06/23/us/henry-regn​ery-84-gro​und-break​ing-conse​rvat​ivepublis​her.html, accessed July 1, 2021. Times Literary Supplement (TLS) (1954), “American Writing Today: Its Independence and Vitality.” September 17. Tsuchiya, Yuka Moriguchi (2005), Military Occupation as Pedagogy: the U.S. re-education and reorientation policy for occupied Japan, 1945–1952, PhD diss., University of Minnesota. Tsuchiya, Yuka Moriguchi (2007), “Tainichi Senryoseisaku Ritsuan Katei ni okeru ‘Saikyoiku, Saihoukouzuke Seisaku’ no Seiritsu: Shinnichiteki Fukainyushugi to no Koubou Ni Shoten wo Atete (U.S. Wartime Planning for the Re-education and Reorientation of Policy for Occupied Japan: Friction and Fusion of Pro-Japan Noninterventionism and Interventionism),” Ehime Diagaku Houbungakuburonshū Sougouseisakugakka hen (The Bulletin of the Faculty of Law and Letters (Comprehensive Policy Making)) 23: 61–93. Tsuchiya, Yuka Moriguchi (2009), Shinbei Nihon no Kouchiku: Amerika no Tainichi Joho Kyoikuseisaku to Nihon Senryo (Constructing a Pro-U.S. Japan: U.S. Information and Education Policy and the Occupation of Japan), Tokyo: Akashi Shoten. Vanderbilt, Kermit (1986), American Literature and the Academy: The Roots, Growth, and Maturity of a Profession, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Wagnleitner, Reinhold (1994), Coca-Colonization and the Cold War, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Woodward, C. Vann (1968), “The Irony of Southern History,” in The Burden of Southern History, rev. ed., 187–211, Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press. Woodward, C. Vann (1981), “Recollections of Tokyo-Stanford Seminar in 1953,” Bulletin of the Center for American Studies of the University of Tokyo 4: 16.

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Woodward, C. Vann (1986), Thinking Back: The Perils of Writing History, Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press.

FURTHER READING Barnhisel, Greg (2015), Cold War Modernists: Art, Literature, and American Cultural Diplomacy, New York: Columbia University Press. Blaustein, George (2018), Nightmare Envy and Other Stories: American Culture and European Reconstruction, New York: Oxford University Press. Cumings, Bruce (2002), “Boundary Displacement: The State, the Foundations, and Area Studies during and after the Cold War,” in Masao Miyoshi and H. D. Harootunian (eds.), Learning Places: The Afterlives of Area Studies, 261–302, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Jelliffe, Robert A., ed. (1956), Faulkner at Nagano, Tokyo: Kenkyusha. Matsuda, Takeshi (2007), Soft Power and Its Perils: U.S. Cultural Policy in Early Postwar Japan and Permanent Dependency, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Matthiessen, F. O. (1948), From the Heart of Europe, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ochi, Hiromi (2017), “The Reception of American Literature in Japan during the Occupation,” in Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Literature. doi:10.1093/acrefore/9780190201098.013.163. Pease, Donald (2010), “American Studies after American Exceptionalism?” in Brian T. Edwards and Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar (eds.), Globalizing American Studies, 47–83, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Vanderbilt, Kermit (1986), American Literature and the Academy: The Roots, Growth, and Maturity of a Profession, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Woodward, C. Vann (1968), “The Irony of Southern History,” in The Burden of Southern History, rev. ed., 187–211, Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press.

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CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

Making a Literary Working Class in the Cultural Cold War: The Australasian Book Society NICOLE MOORE

“Perhaps in no other English-speaking country,” the Russian-Jewish Australian author Judah Waten declared, “are there such active groups of social realist writers as in Australia nor is there anything equivalent to the Australasian Book Society [with its] huge percentage of [members who] are workers” (qtd Ashbolt and Cahill 2017: 46). As described in its own mission statement, the Australian Book Society (ABS) “encourage[d]‌mass participation in and responsibility for the publication of progressive Australian literature.” It sought to find readers who did not read literature and to develop writers who did not yet write it. And viewed in the context of the global Cold War, it is a revealing antipodean example of books used as “weapons in the war of ideas” (Hench 2010). From 1952 to 1981, the publisher produced eighty-three books by left, working-class, and progressive Australian authors. A book-club-style cooperative effort with a subscription model, the ABS promised four books a year to members, with further distribution through unions, industry associations, women’s organizations, and the structures of the organized left in Australia, including the Communist Party of Australia (CPA). Seeking to develop working-class literary capacity, it involved members actively in editorial work and policy, and thus differed notably from its model, the UK’s earlier and much larger Left Book Club, which limited editorial decisions to a small and elite group (Samuels 1966: 71). The ABS collapsed the Left Book Club’s distinction between club membership and publisher—it was registered as a “Society” but always operated primarily as a publisher. And in producing writing for a settler nation that was seeking to slough off the influence of the British canon, unlike the LBC it focused on fiction. Within Australia’s import-dominated publishing market, the ABS’s reach was significant: in 1961 it “released one third of the Australian fiction titles published” (Carter 2003: 101) and subscriptions peaked at 3,000 (Beasley 1979: 141). In addition, it was a conduit to publishers in communist Eastern Europe, selling rights to East Berlin’s English-language imprint Seven Seas and negotiating on behalf of its authors with nonEnglish-language publishers behind the iron curtain.

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An influential cultural agent, the ABS facilitated “an unprecedented entry into literacy, imagination and self-expression” for working-class writers (Gardiner 1998: 51). It fostered the careers of well-known settler Australian writers such as Katharine Susannah Prichard, Frank Hardy, Judah Waten, Jack Lindsay, John Morrison, Dorothy Hewett, Gavin Casey, David Martin (born Ludwig Detsinyi in Hungary), and Alan Marshall. Others, many of them women, however, have dropped out of history. These unremembered writers were often workers in poorly paid industries who came to writing only through the structured encouragement and forms of practice created by the communist-supported Realist Writers Groups and the ABS. Their work, while often shaped by a broad socialist aesthetic, was nevertheless diverse, often unpredictable, and has been relatively unknown to literary history. Against the repressive climate of Cold War politics in mid-century Australia, the ABS has been described as “an achievement of heroic proportions” (Hocking 2005: 102) and as “an exemplary story of the relations in the period between literature, communism and nationalism” (Carter 1997: 113), but little is now known about how it operated over the thirty years of its existence. Much remains to be established about both the publisher’s business model of production and distribution and the readership it mobilized. Understanding the first of these will allow insight into a unique publishing venture in Australia, seeking to confirm the degree of support from political organizations such as the CPA, for example, and the ultimate success or otherwise of its nonprofit model. The second question—the degree to which the aim of “mass participation and responsibility” in a new remit for progressive literature created a literary working-class readership as such—is illuminating not just for histories of Australian reading but also for global understandings of demotic readerships, especially as they were defined within the ideological frames of the Cold War. This chapter thus examines the ABS as an Australian example of a modeled working-class reading formation. It seeks to measure the impact of this formation both within Australia and within international and/or transnational Cold War frames, via the interest of the new Cold War studies in looking beyond the bipolar superpower model, particularly to the much hotter Asia Pacific region, and through expanding interest in the material production and reception of the cultural Cold War’s soft diplomacy and its literary intercessions. In 1997, the long postwar period, 1945–70, was called the “Golden Age” of Australian workingclass writing (Syson 1997: 78), but this large body of work is disappearing from cultural memory. Contemporary discussion of mid-century literature in Australia, as elsewhere, can be dominated by the purview of the new planetary modernisms, focusing critical attention between the wars or on the few big names whose belated postwar modernism fits the global paradigm (White, Stow, Wright, Harrower). Attention to Cold War contexts reminds us that, after the Second World War, modernism was far from dominant globally. Rather, writers were required to choose sides between realism and modernism, while “literature became a Cold War battlefield” (Lahusen and McGuire 2020: 209). At stake, indeed, were definitions of modernity. The Eastern Bloc banned Kafka, Beckett, and the Australian modernist writer Patrick White not for avant-gardism but for retrograde degeneracy (Moore 2020b: 52); in Australia, as elsewhere in the Global South, left-wing realist writing claimed the ideological mantle of progress, much of it pushing explicitly for political and social change (Buckridge 1998; Carter 2003; Denning 2004). Defined explicitly against modernism, realism was the most common literary mode for mid-century postcolonial socialism, particularly so in the Asia Pacific, where writing often spoke in resistance to US-backed forms of nationalist modernization that shut down dissent.

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Renewed interest in the aesthetics of revolution is also revelatory for reviewing Cold War literary debates (Barraclough, Bowen-Struyk, and Rabinowitz 2015; Davies, Sorace, and Saussy 2020; Jennison and Murphet 2019; Xiang 2016), especially in China and the Asia Pacific, given the ABS’s reach into those hotly contested Cold War markets. The CPA’s interest and association with communist parties in the region included a pro-Mao position that meant that most Australian cadres were sent to China for training and indoctrination in communist principles (Piccini, Smith, and Worley 2018: 4). These important political and cultural connections, forged despite the language barrier, remain little understood—might a revolutionary Chinese aesthetic be discerned in nationalist Australian work? New research by Li Jianjun of Beijing Foreign Studies University is demonstrating that the ABS was likely the principal distributor of Australian books into the restricted, mid-century Chinese market, via Moscow—what image of Australia did the ABS list export? More broadly, Australian historians are renewing attention to the print culture of communism and organized labor, cognizant of its disproportionate influence on mid-century public debate (Ashbolt and Cahill 2017). For a white, Anglophone, Commonwealth country seeking a modern identity separate to its British colonial origins, postcolonial settler nationalism was the motivating keynote of mid-century Australian literature (Carter 2003), including for the ABS, but the nationalist tone of the list belies the global understanding at work in its operations. Importantly, the nationalist cultural endeavors of the Cold War Australian labor movement were fueled by internationalist and anticolonial political outlooks—including support for Malayan insurgents, Indonesian independence from the Dutch and the British, and Mao’s New China—even before the broad alliance opposing the war in Vietnam coalesced. As a settler project, the ABS forged a postcolonial nationalism that was actively and exceptionally antiracist in white Australia, sustaining non-Anglophone writers and promulgating Indigenous self-determination (Hollier 1999a). The first published poem of Quandamooka writer Oodgeroo Noonuccal, then Kath Walker, appeared in the ABS’s sister journal The Realist Writer in 1961—her 1964 collection We Are Going is recognized as the first published collection of Australian First Nations poetry. Further, the ABS fostered white working-class women writers, such as Sally Bannister and Betty Collins, whose breakthrough work is now little recalled (Syson 1993). Insofar as the new Cold War Studies are disrupting superpower polarities to review this period through the lens of decolonization and the murderous hot wars sponsored in the Global South (Day and Liem 2010; Djagalov 2020; Duara 2011; Kwon 2010; Popescu 2020), the ABS can contribute a useful cultural instance. Similar studies of the distinctive cultural forums, institutions, and endeavors fostered by superpower support in the postcolonial world, from the Bandung conference to the influence of the CIA-funded Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF), and the Afro-Asian Writers Association to the Anglo-American “library diplomacy” discussed by Amanda Laugesen elsewhere in this volume, highlight the interdependence of postcolonial identity with the Cold War. Reconstructing the operations and readership of the ABS can help us understand its transformative potential in the mid-century global conflicts that still determine our political futures.

WORKER READERS, WORKER CRITICS, WORKER WRITERS The ABS was initiated “with very little involvement by non-Communists,” as Allan Gardiner strikingly phrases it (2003: 43), and therefore was quickly of interest to Australia’s domestic

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intelligence agency, the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO). Australia’s cultural Cold War was arguably at its hottest point in the early 1950s and ASIO quickly couched the ABS as a communist front. This was despite the fact that the ABS’s early publicity material did not assert any explicit political dogma, primarily expressing a desire to publish quality Australian and (notably, though this proved not to be a priority) New Zealand literature (Gardiner 2003: 43–4). ASIO’s definition of a “front” did encompass most of the Australian organizations structured similarly to the ABS, nevertheless—with an agenda of greater access for identified working-class writers and readers to Australian cultural and political life, and with many of its key roles filled by communists. Certainly the generally hostile reception in the mainstream Australian press betrayed little doubt about the publisher’s allegiances (Gardiner 2003: 43). An article by high-profile communist novelist Frank Hardy, published in the Australian Communist Review in 1952 and tellingly titled “Make Literature a Mass Question for the Party and the Working Class,” was a template for the ideals of the ABS (Gardiner 2003: 36). Hardy’s 1950 novel Power without Glory had been the subject of an extraordinary criminal trial in Melbourne, charged and then acquitted of libel for its damning portrait of the life of powerful industry magnate John Wren. Conducted during the hard-fought campaigns leading up to the 1951 referendum in which Australians rejected a federal Bill to outlaw the CPA, Hardy’s trial was perhaps the peak expression of Australian-style McCarthyism. The book itself had had to be printed and bound surreptitiously by a chain of volunteers and party workers under cover of darkness, so Hardy knew first-hand about the importance of partisan control over the means of cultural production. On a visit to promote an East German edition of his book in the German Democratic Republic in 1951, he bought a bookbinding machine, with his soft currency advance from Volk und Welt, and helped his friend, the internationally prominent, communist journalist Wilfred Burchett, buy a high-speed printer for his brother Clive. To the consternation of ASIO Hardy had both machines shipped home to Melbourne (Moore 2016: 105–6). The Party had already launched the Realist Writers Groups—informal groups in Melbourne and Sydney, later in Brisbane and Perth—supporting leftwing writing. Hardy’s bookbinder and the Burchetts’ printer would help them be “independent,” wrote Burchett to Hardy, thanking him for his efforts, which was “our only chance to beat the publishers” (qtd Moore 2016: 105–6). Feted in the socialist world, Hardy returned home to have his passport confiscated, and with a strongly proletarian vision for the development of Australian literature. “Literature must become part and parcel of the general proletarian cause,” he declared in the Communist Review, while the Party should “develop worker readers, worker critics and worker writers” (1952b: 375). He was a leading figure at the meeting at which the Society was established, with Clive Burchett and a group of writers and labor organizers, including George Seelaf, secretary of the Victorian Butchers Union and later organizing secretary of the ABS itself (Gardiner 2003: 42–3; McLaren 1996: 35). Initial promotional efforts were substantial, but the ABS was met with some skepticism in literary circles. Commentator and publisher Andrew Fabinyi in Melbourne’s liberal and modernist-friendly Meanjin questioned whether such a venture could protect the “basic intellectual right of free choice” from “regimentation,” perhaps looking to the political situation in his native Hungary (qtd. in Lambert 1952: 294–5). As it grew, ABS then attracted more moderate liberals and left-wing nationalists, who ultimately exerted greater influence over the Society (Gardiner 2003: 43–4). Gardiner argues that this was in part because these more moderate nationalist writers were, in the postwar years, before the

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expansion of domestic Australian publishing in the 1960s, otherwise “without an infrastructure or adequate literary institutions” and so were willing to work with the CPA and its organizations (2003: 45). The ABS’s impact in defining Australian literature can be demonstrated by comparing its readership to other, more commercial outlets of the period and drawing on historical evidence of its social and political impact. Alongside newly established literary journals such as Meanjin, The Realist Writer, and later Overland, the ABS was launched as part of a politically charged, postwar investment in settler Australian cultural nationalism. The cultural Cold War manifested more mundanely too in what Brian Matthews characterized as the “literary gang warfare” of the postwar period in Australia (1988: 317), in which hoaxes, inflammatory rhetoric, and savage reviewing demarcated political divides, while the polarized receptions of experimental modernism and radical realism were debated vigorously in the press and in the key national forum of the Bulletin magazine. The most prominent literary magazines fought for newly instituted and politicized public funding, with ASIO actively vetoing applications, while Quadrant (established in 1956) continued to hide the fact that it was supported by the CCF—which itself had been created precisely to counter international communist-influenced cultural groups such as the ABS (McKernan 1989; McLaren 1996; Pybus 2001). In Australia, in fact, the CCF’s cultural sponsorship was more virulently anti-communist than elsewhere, principally because of the political conservatism of its Australian agents, including Catholic poet James McAuley, Quadrant’s founding editor (McKernan 1989: 53–64). The fervency of such counterefforts by anti-communist cultural formations starkly demonstrates the impact of the ABS and its sister publication the Realist Writer. The ABS’s nationalist pitch and serious realist aesthetics distinguished it markedly from the other low-priced material available at railway stations and on newsstands, but importantly, this did not mean that the titles failed to appeal to the lower-waged or unskilled worker reader. The ABS’s readership did not replicate any other readership already in the Australian market, and it did bring, in some segments, new readers to literary books that they were otherwise unlikely to encounter. Promoting the ABS in the CPA’s national newspaper, the Tribune, in the months before it released its first title in 1952, Hardy identified targeted readers primarily among the trade unions and quoted an enthused letter from the Amalgamated Engineering Union: “a dozen of us, including fitters, boilermakers, electricians and laborers, have formed a Book Club to subscribe to your society.” Another letter added, “on all types of jobs wherever I go it is a crying shame to see grown men reading … rubbish. One man of 32 years of age that I had occasion to visit a few months ago told me he spends 25/- a month on comics and you should see the contents of some of them” (1952a: 7). Echoing the moral panic about pulp and comic books convulsing other Western nations such as the United States and Great Britain, this exemplifies how in Australia the organized left, too, lined up against the “degradation” of mass culture (Matthews 2019: 321; Moore 2012: 210–16). The ABS had highbrow aims, as Hardy detailed: “Writers interested in the Society aim to develop discussion groups around the books and to conduct readings in factories, libraries and halls seeking criticism of their work. Most of the books will be valuable social documents as well as good literature; all of them will be in the true Australian tradition” (Hardy 1952a: 7) (Figures 6 and 7). It is not useful to discuss the ABS solely in industrial terms, moreover—as a determinedly left book club, of course, it sought to circumvent the capitalist marketplace. While a portion of the print runs made it to stores, books were sold to members through the mail at special rates, “well below bookshop prices” (“Book Society’s” 1952: 7). Furthermore, it sought to collaborate with

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FIGURE 6:  Both sides of a 1958 Australasian Book Society promotional leaflet. Photograph by author.

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FIGURE 7:  Both sides of a 1958 Australasian Book Society promotional leaflet. Photograph by author.

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rather than profit from its readers, and to seek members’ direction about what titles to publish, rather than operating in the Left Book Club’s model in which titles were selected by a small standing committee or even by Victor Gollancz alone. And it didn’t make a profit. By 1960, toward the height of its reach, and the year in which Dorothy Hewett’s Bobbin Up sold out its print run, it recorded running a deficit of £5,057, with a loss for the year of £746 (Australasian Book Society Papers, Box 10). The tenor of the ABS’s instructions for manuscript evaluators reflects the group’s practice of seeking reports from readers outside established literary circles and sometimes with little experience with writing. These were often people with strongly personal interest in the titles, so they were very active readers in that regard; but rather than literary expertise, they held positions in left organizations, journalism, unions, and the CPA itself, or had no organizational affiliations beyond their membership. Many were orthodox communists whose primary investment in culture was in its ability to contribute to the struggle against capitalism. This meant the measures of success brought to manuscripts were often at least generically instrumentalist and at most prescriptively ideological. The ABS guide suggests: Reports should, first, present a very brief outline of the story and/or subject indicating the main characters and plot. This should be followed by an evaluation of: (a) Construction: Plot—characterisation—dialogue—action—coherence (b) Australian Significance: About or of special interest to Australians? (c) Social Content: Does the work touch on some aspect of the life of the community and is it forward looking in the broadest sense? Has it a humanist appeal? (d) Freshness of Theme: Have similar works been published before by A.B.S.? e.g. the Aboriginal question—Vickers’ “Mirage,” “Yandi” and “Yaralie” by Donald Stuart. … In making the final judgment, the reader should ask him/herself: Is it for A.B.S.? Is it acceptable in its present form? Is it acceptable if revised and, if so, HOW? If not acceptable, why? The third question may be difficult for readers who have not had a great deal of experience. Nevertheless, the answer should be attempted. This way, experience will be gained and a body of readers will develop (not just one or two) capable of giving positive advice and assistance to writers who show promise. (Australasian Book Society Papers, Box 10) “Forward looking in the broadest sense” was code for the Marxist model of history, seeking a portrait of social or economic change driven by the class struggle. And “humanist appeal” continued the international socialist insistence on reclaiming this universalist formulation from the capitalist West, as an interest in everyday social experience, while in the Australian context it also flagged a specific refusal of the metaphysical interests of the period’s prominent modernists, especially Patrick White. Explicit encouragement to less experienced readers sought “positive advice” for revisions, but it was a risky experiment, as at least some of the archival evidence shows.

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GENERAL OPINION: EXTRA GOOD BOOK The ABS released communist writer Dorothy Hewett’s Sydney factory girl novel Bobbin Up in the first week of September 1959, being alerted to it after the book had been a runner-up for the Mary Gilmore prize sponsored by Sydney and Newcastle Trades Halls. Hewett learned about the prize listing over the radio in late 1958, at her family’s holiday house in Albany on the West Australian south coast: the judges described it as “by far the most successful novel of the militant labour movement that we have read, as well as being an outstanding work in its own right” (Bobbin Up ABS book jacket). In receipt soon after of the ABS readers’ reports on her typescript manuscript, Hewett wrote to one of the judges, former communist Stephen Murray-Smith, editor of the leftleaning literary journal Overland, to whom she had been submitting poems through 1957, asking for advice. The correspondence regarding her novel’s production reveals a set of conflicts between the author and the ABS manuscript readers over the definition of literary fiction and socialist literature that illuminates the publisher’s position on these Cold War cultural debates. One dispute rehearsed the socialist debate about genre conventions requiring programmatic representations of workers and industrial action, while a second involved the classed question of transgressive forms of speech and content. The anonymous ABS readers required the removal of dialogue, behaviors, and episodes defined as obscene, in a broader Australian context of severe federal and state obscenity censorship (Moore 2012), on the charge of ‘naturalism’. Detailed by the ABS, Bobbin Up’s main shortcomings were: a. The work contains strong elements of naturalism and, in places, tends to shock with realism. b. It is, to some extent, disproportionately pre-occupied with the lives of the de-classed sections of the working people and is inclined to present a picture of weariness and hopelessness. c. By the same token it fails to depict an honest-to-goodness class conscious worker who, whilst displaying ordinary weaknesses “knows the score” and shows signs of political usefulness (with the possible exception of Nell). (Stephen Murray-Smith papers, Box 176 Folder 1–1) Besides legal objections, there were “strong aesthetic objections to the constant use of obscene words and phrases.” Twenty-nine separate pages were identified where words or phrasing should be eliminated. “Bad language should be suggested in the way Dostoevsky does in the House of the Dead. Not once does he use a foul word although he is writing about the most backward and demoralised people in Czarist Russia.” And an overall mood of bitterness and defeat provoked concern. “There is very little joy or success” for the characters, some of whom are “completely crushed.” To alleviate this, the readers suggested allowing Shirl, a vivid young woman character who appears on the opening page, to leave the factory to get married, instead of having her stay with her fellow women textile workers in the sit-in strike out of loyalty—the bittersweet note that best tempers the novel’s formula socialist ending. “This would help bring a little relief to the narrative, a little more light and shade” (Stephen Murray-Smith papers, Box 176, Folder 1–1). A novel ending with a wedding was so far from what Hewett was trying for that we can sympathize with her exasperation. She wrote to Murray-Smith that the criticism that “grated the most,” however, was the insistence on a communist hero, “who I believe does not exist in life.” And she was perturbed by the charge of defeatism. “In depicting tragedy have I gone to the extreme and failed to depict courage. … I am wondering if my own rather desperate and bitter life over

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the past ten years has overcolored the picture, or at least slanted the picture towards morbidity” (Stephen Murray-Smith papers, Box 176, Folder 1–1). She worked hard to revise the manuscript, though, with Murray-Smith’s encouragement. He urged her to ignore as much as possible the “puritan” push to eliminate the bad language. “The run of the dialogue and the working class rhythm of language” were, to him, among the book’s greatest virtues. Her union organizer Nell was “a magnificent character” and the charge that the book’s proletariat was too “lumpen” missed the point—that Hewett had drawn a “CONVINCING” picture of the Australian working class. The only charge he validated was that of “weariness and hopelessness.” He hoped she could do something about this, but it must “NOT be rectified by any false, superimposed tinkerings designed to make the characters more ‘positive’ in the socialist realist way.” He urged her to leave the novel substantially the way it was and to resist above all making it more conventional (Dorothy Hewett papers, NLA MS6184 Series 4, subseries 4, Folder 9). Still inescapably a socialist-realist novel, Bobbin Up rejects the genre’s requisite heroic male, working-class intellectual protagonist responsible for organizing the genre’s culminating strike. Instead, the book presents a cast of more than ten women characters, each given their own life, plot, background, politics, and passions. This inspired idea freed Hewett to work within a loose but dynamic “episodic form,” as she called it, in which the city stars as much as the characters and the shifting narrative tracks their different points of view (“Books and Writing” n.d.). She did follow the advice of the ABS readers by redeveloping the ending, however, and by tempering the dialogue of her characters: “I have left a couple of expressions like ‘all piss and wind like a barber’s cat’ because I consider them salty, humourous, comic workers’ language and not objectionable,” she told her editor. “I have mostly eliminated ‘bugger’ even in places where I felt it was the better word.” She considered it the commonest swear word in Australian working-class families, with no relation to its actual meaning (Dorothy Hewett papers, NLA MS6184 Series 4 subseries 4, Folder 9). But the outcome was not formulaic or didactic. With its innovative form and lively observational realism, incorporating the lyrics of popular songs and advertisements, Bobbin Up remains an appealingly confident vehicle for a highly localized, feminist socialist aesthetic, made of inner Sydney’s mid-century working lives. Its articulation of the gendered and sexual experiences of the women characters, even in a tempered form, is a particularly significant aspect of what was clearly a new voice. In Melbourne’s premier broadsheet, the Age critic Allan Nicholls welcomed Hewett’s book as a revelatory portrait of people otherwise “strangers to the average middle class novel reader, who is being introduced perhaps for the first time to the other half of his country” (Nicholls 1959). On sale for 17s and 6p (for nonsubscribers), Bobbin Up sold out within eight weeks. Its enthused reception among ABS readers included prominent launches and speeches, special reading groups, long letters to the author, and further acclaim in the mainstream press, before English-language rights were sold on to Seven Seas Press in East Berlin—foreclosing the possibility of an Australian reprint, extraordinarily. Labor Party politician Leslie Haylon, the ABS patron president, launched the book in Sydney and declared it “a magnificent book by a new great Australian writer, who has tackled one of the many dynamic themes available in Australian life with the courage of the crusader.” Roger Millis of the CPA-supported New Theatre read Hewett’s folkloric, activist poem “Clancy and Dooley and Don McLeod,” while Haylon called for public subsidy of literary authors. “If it is good enough to subsidise the dairying industry to the extent of £13 million to give some security to farmers it shouldn’t be too much to expect that the Commonwealth Government would

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provide £1 million to assist Australian writers” (Common Cause 1959: 7). To promote her book and the ABS, Hewett toured town halls, trade union meetings, women’s organizations, factories, and was the special guest at parties and local Realist Writers Groups, with much of her time in regional Victoria (avoiding her estranged ex-partner in Sydney), including at another spinning mill. She gave ten radio talks and thirty lectures and appeared on television. Bobbin Up received acclaim from both the mainstream and left-wing press, with polarized reception of both its strike ending (questioned or pilloried by mainstream reviewers; praised and welcomed by union and CPA reviewers) and its frank language (lauded by the mainstream; mainly questioned or refused by the left) (Hollier 1999b). Other, more anecdotal and informal traces of its reading reception broaden our understanding of the character of its readership. The ABS reading events were small scale but highly structured, including reading groups, “cottage lectures” and led discussion groups in members’ houses; debates in local branches of the CPA; meetings of women’s and community organizations; and more developed discussions, such as the high-profile debate held about Bobbin Up at Party headquarters in Sydney to which “about fifty or sixty people came and took heated sides” (Letter from Betty Collins to Hewett, Dorothy Hewett Estate; Beasley 1979: 178; Carter 1997). Because of its popular success, Hewett’s novel provoked substantial engagement from both the grassroots ABS members and the cultural infrastructure of the organized left, leaving for us now an extraordinary record of a readership mostly unrepresented in Australia’s cultural memory. Revealingly, high-level committees of the CPA read and assessed the book (notably only after publication). The CPA’s State Committee for Western Australia (Hewett’s own state), for instance, “regarded it as substantially correct” (Dorothy Hewett Estate). The Union of Australian Women, a Soviet-supported feminist organization for whose journal Hewett had served as the founding editor, held a working women’s evening meeting about Bobbin Up in Sydney in June 1960, with a talk from the ABS editor Jack Beasley, which “went over big” (Dorothy Hewett Estate). Exceptionally, individual CPA branches held their own discussions, with rank-and-file members contributing opinions on its realism and the question of sex. The overall impression reported by the branch in the Sydney suburb of San Souci was “very favourable,” but in a summary sent to Hewett—perhaps for her political education—Comrade A thought it was “down to earth” but with a “slight overemphasis on sex” while Comrade B agreed about the sex but thought it very “true to life.” Comrade C thought it “a very true picture about young people” but Comrade D disliked the word “bum.” Comrade E thought it “absolutely marvellous,” while Comrade F was very impressed by the details of the bus trip to the working-class suburb of Erskineville in particular. “General Opinion: Extra good book. All looking forward to the next one” (Dorothy Hewett Estate). In Hewett’s absence from her own small suburban branch meeting in Perth’s Victoria Park in September 1959, ASIO’s attending undercover agent reported that it was “criticized very harshly by some comrades and A.C. LEE said it was just a lot of sexy trash. B.Z. SMITH and M. LEE did not agree and said it was typical of the way women had to live under capitalism” (Dorothy Hewett ASIO file Vol. 2). These comments reflect both the formulaic nature of much Communist-leaning literature, which was influenced by Soviet-style socialist realism, and the response of these working-class readers to Hewett’s challenge to the strictly policed conventions of the genre. Hewett had known CPA organizer Jack Beasley since the early 1950s, and his 1957 Socialism and the Novel: A Study of Australian Literature laid down some of these rules. Rather than a survey, it was a pamphlet-style

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polemic that argued, via the commitments of socialist realism to typicality (Dobrenko 2011: 3–4), for the importance of a set of Australian “types,” new to literature. The right-wing union official obedient to the wishes of his monopolist masters; the far seeing union official or worker who believes that socialism can be achieved by nationalising the big monopolies; the Catholic worker, torn between his religion and his class; the working class wife and mother, battling to rear her family while the pay slips through her fingers; the brutally arrogant big capitalist, driving for profits and political reaction, prepared to make war, to do anything except something of benefit to the people. (Beasley 1957: 13) In Beasley’s hands these were a set of ham-fisted stereotypes. The Realist Writers Groups studied his piece, with Hewett among its readers, but her and others’ interest in women quickly exposed the hollowness of such an approach to the relationship between character and economics: the flat fallacies that there could be only one type of working-class woman and that a heroic unionist was always a man. Letters arrived from many of Hewett’s friends congratulating her and reporting on its reception, especially among working-class readers. Writer Betty Collins, whose novel The Copper Crucible about industrial conflict in the Mount Isa mines would be published in 1966, wrote with opinions (especially about its language and sex) from women in the factory Hewett had worked in, including the real-world models for her characters, and from Hewett’s old CPA Branch in Sydney’s workingclass suburb of Redfern. Collins described a house meeting in Redfern in your old house, where the old (and ex) guard turned up and defended themselves. And where Ev stood up and said, “There’s nothing wrong with the language in the book. It’s just that we don’t listen to ourselves. For instance, when Dorothy made me say, ‘I busted me guts’, I was a bit hurt. I thought, I might say ‘busted me boiler’, but not guts! But last night our Section Secretary was getting a bit impatient with me, and he asked can’t I do two things at once. ‘Sure,’ I told him, ‘Shit and read the paper.’ ” Collins was a working-class writer herself. Dorothy, I lived for seven years in Sydney; and always, because I had kids to keep and generally no help, we had to live on my wages; so I never moved out of the slums. East Sydney, Surry Hills, Redfern, Waterloo. … the people I knew in Sydney were the people in your book; and the first chapters, which some people were prepared to criticise most, were the ones that thrilled me most. Because I knew everyone in them. (Dorothy Hewett Estate) Ron and Vi, friends from the Sydney Realist Writers Group, wrote to Hewett in Perth reporting the opinion of another young friend from Redfern, who “preferred the meat in yours” to Mena Calthorpe’s novel The Dyehouse (1961), set in a dye factory, which they reported had been heavily censored by its publisher Ure Smith (Dorothy Hewett Estate). Writing about the CPA’s cultural work, David Carter finds that “sheer prudishness” does not explain the broad communist reaction to Bobbin Up’s sexual content, or only insofar as such prudishness “presented itself to communist readers and writers as a solemn political and historical responsibility” (Carter 1997: 132). Comrades could feel strongly the need for Party respectability, without necessarily articulating it as such. Hewett’s old friend and journalistic comrade Joy Alcorn tutored her on their obligations to fight the belittling of working-class identity: “Readers, particularly

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those on the left, need to be helped to recognise the constructive elements in the characters of those who bear the full brunt of society’s exploitation” (Dorothy Hewett papers, NLA). As the vanguard of the revolution, the Party also had a role in protecting the working class from the condescension of history. And a regime of severe national censorship is the other explanation. In 1958, just as Bobbin Up was being prepared, the Australian federal government was undertaking the first review of its secret (but very extensive) list of banned books, prompted by the discovery of a copy of The Catcher in the Rye in the Parliamentary Library (Moore 2012: 223).

A COLD WAR READING FORMATION Bobbin Up’s archive records a set of highly structured and shared readings that are otherwise invisible to history. Such archival evidence of the ABS allows for what James Machor describes as an “historical hermeneutics,” enabling us to “reconstruct the shared patterns of interpretation” specific to its time and place (2011: 7). These shared patterns show how such fine-grained history can qualify and fill out larger categories of reading and readers, as inhabited forms of shared life—in this case as highly considered and developed practices at work across class boundaries, pushing the limits of marginalized readerly and writerly involvement in a culture. The ABS, though, doesn’t fit intuitively within the categories generally used to describe the cultural institutions that teach, promote, and govern reading—was it infrastructure, an institution, a company, a community, or a “reading formation” (Bennett 1983, 1985)? The ABS’s membership can be analyzed ethnographically, as Janice Radway analyzed small-town women readers for Reading the Romance, for instance, but its records show it to have been more formal, rigorous, and intentional in practice. The structures supporting the ABS demonstrate exceptional coherence around civic voluntarism, cultural identification, and class-based activism, and its organizing principles and ideological aesthetics were policed conscientiously in forums such as the Realist Writer. In this regard, even in its exceptionalism, the ABS was a paradigmatic Cold War reading formation, echoing the period’s larger, state-sponsored “reading regimes” (Frow 1986; cf. Moore and Spittel 2016: 22–3) characteristic of the highly mediated and politicized book and reading infrastructures of the cultural Cold War. These reading regimes militated powerfully for consonant reading at the scale of the nation, on the one hand, and rendered other forms, such as that rehearsed and practiced within left-wing cultural endeavors in capitalism, as well as the reverse, of course, as problematically dissonant. A Cold War context thus orients reception theory away from what can be a focus on the singular reader toward, on one hand, a collective “freedom to read,” as mid-century North American anti-censorship advocates described it (Glass 2015: 178; also see Matthews elsewhere in this volume), and, on the other, guided, censored, and ideological reading formations with a shared and/or circumscribed practice. In bringing Cold War contexts to bear on both a “reading formation” and a “reading regime,” examples such as the Australasian Book Society, with its broader, less exceptional models, have the potential to extend international understanding of perhaps the most important concepts in the field of reading and reception studies (Willis 2021). Within Australian Cold War publishing structures and reading formations, the ABS enabled a dissenting or alternative institutionality—whose characteristic is worth emphasizing: its status as infrastructure—sustained and informed by an ideological polarity opposed in its home context: by the second world in the postcolonial first. Its marginalized position within the industry in Australia—even as it refused the capitalist industrial model—made it a forum for dissent, or for

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alternative versions of both the nation and community, or identity. Demonstrably, this position was not produced within the national economy alone, at the scale of the state, but rather reflected synchronous and profoundly contested global structures of conflict on a scale mapped across much of the world. As a postcolonial Cold War venture, its confidence derived from a sense that a whole second world was at its back; and perhaps paradoxically, this was why, rather than seek subversive dissent and critique as a tonality for the publishing list, the ABS could directly pitch to the nation. It could purport a consensus on belonging, identity, difference, and economic justice that was barely in evidence in wider Australian culture, if at all. Revealingly, this consensus was the opposite of the version of Australia that translated into book markets behind the iron curtain: the East German, Seven Seas version in which Bobbin Up’s animated, affectionate portrait of Australian slums was a reinforcing indictment of capitalist failures (Moore and Spittel 2012). It is possible to think that the confidence of this manufactured consensus—this purporting in itself—is what instantiated and made realizable newly durable formations of reading and cultural consumption as such, and that these in turn shifted the character of the other, more actual postwar and mid-century consensus on Australian reading and literary identity, and in fundamentally distinct ways. This is part of thinking through the ways in which the exceptional affordances of the ABS— outside Australian capitalism but not autonomous; indebted to socialist superpower but not finally orthodox; reflecting unequal and contested global structures of cultural conflict in an oppressive domestic context—formed something greater than a structure of “mere” dissent. Beyond protest, beyond content or literary knowledge, the ABS was able to make new and enabling forms of literary life. By bringing this revealing case to international attention, particularly its work in making an antipodean, postcolonial, Cold War reading formation, explicitly understood as working class, we can broaden our view of the dreams, risks, mistakes, and often undocumented transformations at work in the utopic agendas of the cultural Cold War.

WORKS CITED Ashbolt, Anthony, and Rowan Cahill (2017), ‘“And the Lives Are Many’: The Print Culture of Australian Communism,” Twentieth Century Communism 12: 37–61. Australasian Book Society Papers, State Library of New South Wales, MLMSS3398 ADD-ON 1443/BOX 10. Barraclough, Ruth, Heather Bowen-Struyk, and Paula Rabinowitz, eds. (2015), Red Love Across the Pacific: Political and Sexual Revolutions of the Twentieth Century, London: Palgrave Macmillan. Beasley, Jack (1979), Red Letter Days: Notes from Inside an Era, Sydney: Australasian Book Society. Beasley, Jack (1957), Socialism and the Novel: A Study of Australian Literature, Jack Beasley: Sydney. Bennett, Tony (1983), “Texts, Readers, Reading Formations,” Bulletin of the Midwest Modern Languages Association 16(1): 3–17. Bennett, Tony (1985) “Texts in History: The Determination of Readings and Their Texts,” Journal of the Midwest Modern Languages Association 18(1): 1–16. “Book Society’s new selections” (1952), Tribune (November 19): 7. “Books and Writing: Interview with Dorothy Hewett” (n.d.), [Radio program] Australian Broadcasting Corporation. National Archives of Australia, Series C100/281, Control 86/10/464 M. Buckridge, Patrick (1988) “Intellectual Authority and Critical Traditions in Australian Literature 1945–75,” in Brian Head and James Walter (eds.), Intellectual Movements and Australian Society, 188–213, Oxon: Oxford University Press.

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Carter, David (1997), A Career in Writing: Judah Waten and the Cultural Politics of a Literary Career, Canberra: Association for the Study of Australian Literature. Carter, David (2003), “The Story of Our Epoch, A Hero of Our Time: The Communist Novelist in Postwar Australia,” in Paul Adams and Christopher Lee (eds.), Frank Hardy and the Literature of Commitment, 89– 111, Melbourne: Vulgar Press. Common Cause [Australian Miners Federation journal] (1959) (September 12): 7. Davies, Gloria, Christian Sorace, and Haun Saussy (2020), “Political Enchantments: Aesthetic Practices and the Chinese State,” Critical Inquiry 46(Spring): 475–81. Day, Tony, and Maya H. T.Liem, eds. (2010). Cultures at War: The Cold War and Cultural Expression in South East Asia, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Denning, Michael (2004), Culture in the Age of Three Worlds, London: Verso. Djagalov, Rossen (2020), From Internationalism to Postcolonialism: Literature and Cinema between the Second and Third Worlds, Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press. Dobrenko, Evgeny (2011), “Socialist Realism,” in Evgeny Dobrenko and Marina Balina (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to Twentieth-Century Russian Literature, 97–113, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Dorothy Hewett ASIO file (n.d.), National Archives of Australia, Series A6119, Item 6895, “Dorothy Coade Davies Vol. 2.” Dorothy Hewett Papers (n.d.), National Library of Australia. MS6184 Series 4 Subseries 4.4 Folder 9. Dorothy Hewett Estate (n.d.), Private Collection, Bag 1, Folder 2. Duara, Pransenjit (2011), “The Cold War as an Historical Period: An Interpretative Essay,” Journal of Global History 6: 457–80. Frow, John (1986), Marxism and Literary History, Oxford: Blackwell. Gardiner, Allan (1998) “Rediscovering a Constituency: Overland beyond the Liberal Sphere,” Overland 150: 51–5. Gardiner, Allan (2003) “Frank Hardy and Communist Cultural Institutions,” in Paul Adams and Christopher Lee (eds.), Frank Hardy and the Literature of Commitment, 35–52, Melbourne: Vulgar Press. Glass, Loren (2015). “Freedom to Read: Barney Rosset, Henry Miller and the End of Obscenity,” in Nicole Moore (ed.), Censorship and the Limits of the Literary, 177–88, New York: Bloomsbury. Hammond, Andrew (2011), “On the Frontlines of Writing: Introducing the Literary Cold War,” in Andrew Hammond (ed.), Global Cold War Literature: Western, Eastern and Postcolonial Perspectives, 1–16, New York: Routledge. Hardy, Frank (1952a), “Frank Hardy on the New Book Society,” Tribune (July 9): 7. Hardy, Frank (1952b), “Make Literature a Mass Question for the Party and the Working Class,” Communist Review (December): 374–9. Hench, John B. (2010), Books as Weapons: Propaganda, Publishing and the Battle for Global Markets in the Era of World War II, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Hocking, Jenny (2005), Frank Hardy: Politics, Literature, Life, Melbourne: Lothian Books. Hollier, Nathan (1999a), “Racism, the Realist Writers’ Movement and the Katharine Susannah Prichard Award,” Australian Literary Studies 19(2): 213–23. Hollier, Nathan (1999b), “The Critical Reception of Bobbin Up,” Hecate 25(1): 152–64. Jennison, Ruth, and Julian Murphet, eds. (2019), Communism and Poetry: Writing against Capital, London: Palgrave. Kwon, Heonik (2010), The Other Cold War, New York: Columbia University Press. Lahusen, Thomas, and Elizabeth McGuire (2020). “The Spread of Socialist Realism: Soviet and Chinese Developments,” in Andrew Hammond (ed.), The Palgrave Handbook of Cold War Literature, 205–22, London: Palgrave.

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Lambert, Eric (1952), “Why We Need This Book Society,” Meanjin 11: 293–5. Laugesen, Amanda (2017), Taking Books to the World: American Publishers and the Cultural Cold War, Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. Laugesen, Amanda (2020), Globalizing Libraries: Librarians and Development Work, 1945–1970, New York. Machor, James L. (2011), Reading Fiction in Antebellum America: Informed Response and Reception Histories 1820–1865, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Matthews, Brian (1988), “Literature and Conflict,” in Laurie Hergenhan (ed.), Penguin New Literary History of Australia, 301–18, Melbourne: Penguin. Matthews, Kristin (2019), “Making Reading Popular: Cold War Literacy and Classics Illustrated,” Book History 22: 320–41. McKernan, Susan (1989), A Question of Commitment: Australian Literature in the Twenty Years after the War, Sydney: Allen & Unwin. McLaren, John (1996), Writing in Hope and Fear: Literature as Politics in Postwar Australia, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Moore, Nicole (2012), The Censor’s Library: Uncovering the Lost History of Australia’s Banned Books, Brisbane: University of Queensland Press. Moore, Nicole (2016) “Sedition as Realism: Frank Hardy’s Power with Glory parts the Iron Curtain,” in Nicole Moore and Christina Spittel (eds.), Australian Literature in the German Democratic Republic: Reading through the Iron Curtain, 93–116, London: Anthem Press. Moore, Nicole (2020a), “Australia,” in Stefan Helgesson, Birgit Neumann, and Gabriele Rippl (eds.), Handbook of Anglophone World Literatures, 511–30, Berlin: De Gruyter. Moore, Nicole (2020b), “Print Censorship and the Cultural Cold War: Books in a Bounded World,” in Andrew Hammond (ed.), Palgrave Handbook of Cold War Literature, 43–61, London: Palgrave. Moore, Nicole, and Christina Spittel (2012), “Bobbin Up in the Leseland: Australian Literature in the German Democratic Republic,” in Peter Kirkpatrick and Robert Dixon (eds.), Republics of Letters: Literary Communities in Australia, 113–26, Sydney: Sydney University Press. Nicholls, Alan (1959), The Age (September 5) 20. Piccini, Jon, Evan Smith, and Matthew Worley (2018), “Introduction,” in Jon Piccini, Evan Smith and Matthew Worley (eds.), The Far Left in Australia since 1945, 1–18, New York: Routledge. Popescu, Monica (2020), At Penpoint: African Literatures, Postcolonial Studies and the Cold War, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Pybus, Cassandra (2001), The Devil and James McAuley, Brisbane: University of Queensland Press. Samuels, Stuart (1966), “The Left Book Club,” Journal of Contemporary History 1(2): 65–86. Stephen Murray-Smith papers (n.d.), State Library of Victoria, MS8272 Box 176, Folder 1–1. Syson, Ian (1993), “The Problem was Finding the Time: Working-Class Women’s Writing in Australasia,” Hecate 19(2): 65–82. Syson, Ian (1997), “Fired from the Canon: The Sacking of Australian Working-Class Literature,” Southerly 57(3): 78–89. Willis, Ika (2021), “Reception Theory, Reception History, Reception Studies,” in Paula Rabinowitz (ed.), Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Literature, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Xiang, Cai (2016), Revolution and Its Narratives: China’s Socialist Literary and Cultural Imaginaries, 1949– 1966, Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

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FURTHER READING Ashbolt, Anthony and Rowan Cahill (2017), ‘“And the Lives are Many’: The Print Culture of Australian Communism,” Twentieth Century Communism 12: 37–61. Carter, David (2003), “The Story of Our Epoch, A Hero of Our Time: The Communist Novelist in Postwar Australia,” in Paul Adams and Christopher Lee (eds.), Frank Hardy and the Literature of Commitment, 89– 111, Melbourne: Vulgar Press. Gardiner, Allan (2003) “Frank Hardy and Communist Cultural Institutions,” in Paul Adams and Christopher Lee (eds.), Frank Hardy and the Literature of Commitment, 35–52, Melbourne: Vulgar Press. Hollier, Nathan (1999a), “Racism, the Realist Writers’ Movement and the Katharine Susannah Prichard Award,” Australian Literary Studies 19(2): 213–23. Hollier, Nathan (1999b), “The Critical Reception of Bobbin Up,” Hecate 25(1): 152–64. McKernan, Susan (1989), A Question of Commitment: Australian Literature in the Twenty Years after the War, Sydney: Allen & Unwin. McLaren, John (1996), Writing in Hope and Fear: Literature as Politics in Postwar Australia, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Moore, Nicole, and Christina Spittel (2012), “Bobbin Up in the Leseland: Australian Literature in the German Democratic Republic,” in Peter Kirkpatrick and Robert Dixon (eds.), Republics of Letters: Literary Communities in Australia, 113–26, Sydney: Sydney University Press. Moore, Nicole, and Christina Spittel, eds. (2016), Australian Literature in the German Democratic Republic: Reading through the Iron Curtain, London: Anthem Press. Munro, Craig, and Robyn Sheehan-Bright, eds. (2005). Paper Empires: A History of the Book in Australia, 1946– 2005, Brisbane: University of Queensland Press. Syson, Ian (1997), “Fired from the Canon: The Sacking of Australian Working-Class Literature,” Southerly 57(3): 78–89.

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CHAPTER NINETEEN

Anti-Apartheid Imagination, the Cold War, and African Literary Magazines CHRISTOPHER E. W. OUMA

The 2019 documentary By All Means Necessary (produced by Bhekizizwe Peterson and Ramadan Suleiman and edited by Vuyani Sondlo) opens on a youthful Miriam Makeba, who prefaces her performance with a narrative about the encounter between European settlers seeking a “new life” and the history of violence that came with that encounter (Sondlo 2019). This narration is interspersed with the voice of Oliver Reginald Tambo, the prominent leader-in-exile of the African National Congress (ANC), predicting the “bitter struggle” that resulted from this violent encounter, in response to the “torment” of colonial occupation.1 A montage of scenes of colonial violence runs on the screen during both Makeba’s narration/performance and Tambo’s voice-over: Africans being shot at; images of bodies hanging; the voice of someone saying Africans “must be made to work” as Africans till the land under the supervision of gun-wielding colonial policemen; combat zones with tankers firing; and images of dead bodies in the battlefield. At the end of the first sequence can be heard the voice of Mozambican anti-colonial leader Eduardo Mondlane saying, “A luta continua! [‘the struggle continues,’ the Portuguese-language slogan of his independence movement].”2 A history of anti-colonial movements across Africa from the Algerian struggle against the French to the anti-apartheid resistance in South Africa, By All Means Necessary’s preface— Makeba’s performance and Tambo’s voice—frames the narrative border not only by way of a filmic paratext but also as a signal of the centrality of anti-apartheid struggles within both the movements of anti-colonialism after the Second World War and the beginning of decolonization in mid-century Africa. The film deploys detailed archival footage and the commentary of a generation of people involved in anti-colonial resistance through liberation movements in exile, specifically in Algeria. Referred to as the “Mecca of liberation movements” and African anti-colonial resistance, Algeria played 1 2

his sequence takes place between 0:54 and 2:56. T See the sequence between 2:56 and 3:06.

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a pivotal role in supporting these movements across the colonial world, bringing Anglophone, Francophone, and Lusophone anti-colonial resistance together.3 This context quickly morphed into a militant transcolonial public sphere in which anti-colonial nationalism became the wind beneath the sails of mid-century continental Pan-Africanism. By All Means Necessary represents Algeria in the wake of the sixth Pan-African conference, held in 1945 in Manchester, England, a conference significant for how many more continental leaders participated than in previous conferences, as well as for its increasingly voluble call for militant responses to colonialism in the aftermath of the Second World War.4 In addition to the legacy of this conference is the Algerian War of Independence in 1954, around the time that a state of emergency had been declared in Kenya over the Mau Mau uprising against British rule. In South Africa, apartheid’s promulgation in 1948 and the raft of legislations that led to the Sharpeville massacre of anti-apartheid protesters in 1960 resulted in the banning of the ANC and the beginning of its exiled anti-apartheid imagination and activism. By All Means Necessary’s first sequence captures these temporal intersections and represents the 1950s as a decade of revolutions that also brought militant anti-colonial nationalisms to encounter the global inspiration provided by the Cuban Revolution of 1958. Throughout the film, the voice of Miriam Makeba serves as a refrain—a sonic motif—that underwrites the spirit of revolution. Makeba’s refrain captures not only the positionality of the narrative direction in the film but also the centrality of anti-apartheid activism and imagination within the political economy of this moment of revolution. The resistance to apartheid, the film makes clear, was intimately linked to anti-colonial struggles happening across the continent. I start with this film because it documents a period that I am revisiting in this chapter. The film captures not only the zeitgeist of this moment but also how the imagination of resistance built solidarities in the continent and its diasporas. This period—mid-century Africa, and more specifically the late 1950s to the late 1960s—witnessed the convergence of various contexts of anti-colonial activism, which intersected with the legacies of Pan-Africanism and Black Internationalism shifting in the direction of the continent from multiple imperial metropolises. By All Means Necessary’s focus on Algeria enfolds anti-apartheid activism within the broader political economy of anticolonial imagination, Black Internationalism, and decolonization to a very specific context: it captures anti-apartheid struggles in the transnational context of Algeria, while mobilizing Makeba’s sonic iconicity to consolidate anti-apartheid activism and struggles into a veritable anti-colonial imagination. Indeed, Makeba embodies the “restless itineraries” of anti-apartheid imagination: its channeling “through local paradigms of reception in the taut negotiation with aesthetic, institutional, linguistic, and political considerations” (Bethlehem 2018: 50). Makeba’s iconicity is produced at the intersection of various struggles taking place in the 1950s and 1960s—anti-apartheid in South Africa, anti-colonial struggles across the Global South, and the civil rights movement in the United States. Such an intersectional logic of transnationality informed the localized context of anti-apartheid reception in the performances of Makeba in various independence celebrations around the continent. In other words, Makeba’s performances (such as the ones depicted in the documentary) embodied the convergence of transnational anti-apartheid imagination with local processes of decolonization. The end of apartheid became the “dream” that would be “deferred” for decades even as the rest of the continent was achieving political independence. This deference 3 4

his formulation is apparently used by Amilcar Cabral. See sequence between 11:25 and 11:50. T For a greater analysis of this militant response, see Adi (2018).

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intensified the imagination of the struggles of South Africans among continental Africans, most of who had already gained independence, as well as those in the diaspora who were busy fighting their own political battles. Tsitsi Jaji’s (2013) book Africa in Stereo opens by describing how Bob Marley’s performance of “Buffalo Soldier” at Zimbabwe’s April 17, 1980, independence feat enacted “a sense of solidarity with black diasporic subjects in the Caribbean and the U.S” (Jaji 2013: 2). Jaji reads diasporic music as a platform that renewed Pan-Africanist ideals through its modes of transnational circulation. Following this, we can read Makeba’s iconicity, the transnationality of her life, and circulation of her music in similar light. While her “restless itineraries,” constituting and constituted in her personal life, connected Black diasporic struggles with those of anti-colonial Pan-Africanism, her performances across the continent and around the world generated solidarity with anti-apartheid activism and fostered its imagination within various circuits of cultural production. Makeba’s performances in the independence feats of Kenya, Angola, Mozambique, among other African countries would continue to do this kind of political work (Makeba and Hall 1988). By All Means Necessary revisits this archive and makes visible the political economy of anti-apartheid imagination, in its specific itineraries in Algeria and in its encounter with anti-colonial struggles from various parts of the continent. Makeba represents this exilic, struggle experience and the imagination it engenders in mid-century Africa. Algeria was one of the first major ideological geographies for these movements and for militant anti-apartheid political activists. It was one of their first destinations before other political journeys that came to characterize the Cold War as it reached a crescendo in the 1960s and 1970s. Makeba’s itineraries brought an intersectional logic to the cultural imagination of struggle. Moreover, we can draw genealogical connections with a figure like Paul Robeson, whose journeys in the first half of the twentieth century brought global Black struggles in concert with each other through various kinds of cultural production. Robeson brought his work for civil rights in the United States to speak to anti-colonial resistance within the context of the rise of communism and eventually in confrontation with the new ideological imperium championed by the United States during the Cold War. Robeson’s performances constituted their own form of what Getachew has called elsewhere and in a different context “worldmaking,” because of the way they globalized civil rights and America’s domestic imperial project by calling attention to the international dimensions of justice beyond the nation-state. As Getachew argues, worldmaking entailed a form of “selfdetermination that articulated itself at an international realm” (Getachew 2020: 2). Therefore, if Robeson’s renown generated its own dimensions of the anti-colonial and civil rights world, then Makeba’s did the same for anti-apartheid activism, struggle, and imagination within the realm of internationalism. After the Second World War, anti-apartheid activism and the imagination it engendered became a singularly globalized phenomenon because of how (in Nixon’s words) apartheid “contravened the global impulse toward decolonization, desecrated memories of the Holocaust, and offended the spirit of the Civil Rights Movement” (Nixon 1994: 7). This impulse came to define the period of Makeba’s dominance. It created conditions that put South Africa in the “global imaginary” (de Kock 2001) in specific ways and enabled the transnational circulation of various political figures, artists, and intellectuals. These exiles became part of a network of continental internationalists in the aftermath of the Second World War, who contributed to the project of decolonization. However, while the documentary makes visible the network of South African exiles within the ANC, Makeba’s sonic footprint foregrounds how the anti-apartheid

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cultural imagination generated its own spatiotemporal itineraries, its own forms of circulation and political economies: in other words, its inflection of “worldmaking.” Recently Chimurenga Chronic, a Pan-African publication started in 2002 by Ntone Edjabe and based in Cape Town, captured Makeba’s world-making project in a graphic map of her itineraries prefaced with this statement: In her 30 years of exile, Miriam Makeba redefined pan-Africanism—performing and speaking around the world, informing the Black Power movement, forwarding the liberation struggle, and participating in events that shaped public cultures on the continent and around the world. She was a woman with nine passports and honorary citizenship in 10 countries.5

Itineraries of the Word as Anti-Apartheid Internationalism Reinforcing the itineraries of political organizations such as the ANC and prominent musicians such as Makeba and the imaginaries that they generated, the small magazine and broadly speaking Black print cultures across the African continent and diaspora established their own imaginaries, especially in the rising context of the Cold War. The exilic, anti-apartheid imagination circulated via various small/literary magazines in the form of poetry, short fiction, and other literary texts, and political and cultural commentary. These print cultures produced imaginative ecosystems, linked to cultural organizations and the specific movement of artists and intellectuals within and without the continent. In the case of South Africa, the exilic imagination that was finding transnational visibility was coming into contact with projects of national culture that inaugurated decolonization in the 1960s across the continent. The anti-apartheid imagination was thus mediated—translated—by specific people through the small magazine into global but more specifically continental circuits of cultural exchange and value during this crucial period, in which the project of establishing modern African literary and cultural institutions was also being influenced by Cold War patronage. Small magazines have constituted an “assemblage” (Shringarpure 2019) within the technologies of Cold War cultural production.6 Defined broadly as part of print cultures—periodicals, journals, newspapers, among others—small magazines have also created their own ecosystems of imagination in the continent. They have generated publics and fostered specific logics of circulation and transnational visibility for artists, poets, writers, and public intellectuals. They have been platforms that have articulated and helped to translate, as Edwards (2003) has argued of periodicals in the interwar, different contexts of Black struggles brought together by the inauguration of empire. Their “littleness” has belied their globality as a literary form, according to Bulson (2017). Above all, small magazines have played a substantial documentary role at specific junctures of political history and therefore have defined their zeitgeist. In this way anti-apartheid imagination found transnational visibility through various magazines in mid-century Africa. It is important to remember that while South Africa long inhabited the global imaginary through efforts by pioneering Pan-Africanists like Henry Sylvester Williams at the first Pan-African conference of 1900, the establishment and promulgation of apartheid in 1948 inaugurated a new frontier of struggle that intensified the image of South Africa in the continent and abroad. These struggles came to define mid-century 5 6

See https://chimur​enga​chro​nic.co.za/no-pass-but-nine-passpo​rts/, visited July 13, 2021. See particularly the chapter “The Cold War Paradigm: A Trajectory of Literary Canons.”

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anti-colonial imagination in the continent, as South African exiles (in the wake of a raft of new laws, the banning of the ANC, and the Sharpeville Massacre) began to filter through the continent and constitute a demographic of exilic imagination that made significant contributions to cultural and political life during the period of decolonization, as we will soon see. These contributions, however, came in the aftermath of an exilic, extroverted imagination that intensified with Drum magazine. Founded in 1951 by Bob Crisp and Jim Bailey, Drum brought together a group of writers and artists through urban networks centered in Johannesburg and specifically Sophia Town. Sophia Town was a neighborhood that attracted Blacks and so-called “colored” people into Johannesburg, congealing into a multiracial neighborhood that became a center for Black urbanity. It cultivated a dynamic cultural life that brought together music, art, and literature, and therefore incubated a Black cultural renaissance compared to that of Harlem in the 1920s.7 Its growth and proximity to the racialized geographies of apartheid Johannesburg became vital in the imagination that founded Drum and brought to greater transnational focus the effects of the Group Areas Act of 1950 and the Native Resettlement Act of 1954, which led to the forced removals of Blacks from Sophia Town to Meadowlands in Soweto. Referring to this period as the “Drum Decade,” Michael Chapman (1989) put together pieces from the magazine that generated a specific imagination of anti-apartheid struggles in South Africa in the midst of thriving Black urbanity, the ANC’s Defiance Campaign, and the treason trial.8 This “Drum Decade”—the 1950s—intensified the extroversion of anti-apartheid imagination while generating a group of writers whose work later acquired transnational and specifically transcontinental visibility. This visibility, Tom Odhiambo (2011) has argued, was Drum’s “pan-African vision of transnational cultural and political interconnection” (159). Drum became the premier publication capturing Black urban livelihoods in their cultural and political dimensions. Drum’s vision therefore connected to emerging forms of Black urbanity embodied in Sophia Town’s artistic and cultural renaissance. What began as forms of literary journalism within the magazine yielded an entire generation of writers and artists like Es’kia Mphahlele, Henry Nxumalo, Can Temba, Nat Nakasa, Todd Matshikiza, Lewis Nkosi, Ernest Cole, Arthur Maimane, Dolly Rathebe, Richard Rive, and Bessie Head, among many others. But out of this group, Mphahlele became the most influential and well-known figure within literary and cultural circuits on the continent during the period of decolonization. He played a singularly exceptional role in the establishment of networks of exchange across the continent. Having come into Drum after his activist work around Bantu Education as a teacher in Orlando Soweto, he went on to exile, first in Lesotho, then Nigeria, and afterward to Nairobi after a stint in Paris. Mphahlele’s itineraries left a significant footprint on the anti-apartheid imagination, in the various cultural organizations he helped to found and fund, and especially in the small magazines whose sustenance relied partially on his influential support.9

S ee NW Visser (1976) and more recently Julius Bailey and Scott Rosenberg (2016). The treason of 1956 was an extended trial of about 156 people (by the apartheid government) who had been accused of treason for drawing up the Freedom Charter of 1955. Among these were prominent figures like Nelson Mandela, Ahmed Kathrada, Walter Sisulu, Ruth First, Alex La Guma, among others. It was during this trial that a figure like Oliver Tambo fled to exile. 9 Mphahlele’s (1984) autobiography narrates these journeys into the continent. 7 8

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Mid-century anti-apartheid imagination would likely never have reached its transnational status without Es’kia Mphahlele,10 more specifically, the ecology of small magazines that clustered around this crucial period—between the Bandung Conference in 1955 and the late 1960s, the end of the first decade of decolonization in Africa that led to what has often been referred to as a period of “disillusionment.”11 Three key magazines were central to the continental imagination of this period: Black Orpheus, Transition, and Lotus, which covered West, East, and North Africa, respectively. Mphahlele, on the other hand, was involved in helping sustain these magazines. His activist work in literary education, which precedes his time at Drum, began with his publication of a community newspaper titled The Voice (1947–9), in the context of a new apartheid policy on education for Africans, which became the Bantu Education Act of 1953. Having lost his teaching certification, Mphahlele then began his long exile in the continent. Beginning with Lesotho, he proceeded to Nigeria in 1957 under the auspices of the Department of Extra-mural Education at the University of Ibadan in Nigeria.12 During his time in Nigeria Mphahlele helped found the Mbari Writers and Artist Clubs, which became the basis for the journal Black Orpheus. This journal documented and sparked not only a significant literary renaissance for West Africa but also a new Pan-African imagination occasioned by the independence of Ghana in 1957 and the event of the All-African Peoples’ Conference in Accra in 1958. Black Orpheus and the Mbari clubs were a platform for not only what Okeke-Agulu (2015) has termed “transacting the modern” (131) through the period of decolonization but also translating the legacy of diasporic Pan-Africanism across what were emerging as divisions between Anglophone and Francophone postcolonial worlds. As a platform for Pan-African translatability, Black Orpheus pioneered the small magazine as a genre for modern African literary imagination. Founded in 1957 by German expatriate and cultural activist Ulli Beier, it represented what Peter Benson (1986) has called a “modern cultural awakening” for West Africa—a literary renaissance that would become a sort of commons for African and African diasporic exchange, and also a space of translation between the emergent Francophone and Anglophone postcolonial modernities. Okeke-Agulu has also argued that Black Orpheus and the Mbari clubs “produced within the space of a few years the most important theatre of postcolonial modernism on the African continent during the midcentury” (132). One of the key successes of Black Orpheus during its existence, and as anticipated in the vision spelled out in the first editorial, was the exchange platform the magazine set up between continental and diasporic cultural production. In this inaugural editorial the magazine seeks to give young African writers a platform to create a “literary public” as well as expose its readers to “great black writers like Leopold Sedar Senghor or Aime Cesaire” in “translation.”13 In addition, the magazine promises to “publish the works of Afro-American writers because many of these are involved in similar cultural and social situations and their writings are therefore highly relevant to Africans.” Moreover, exchanges between African American artists Jacob Lawrence and William H. Johnson and Mbari artists for instance became highlights of this vision of Atlantic “transaction and translations” (Okeke-Agulu 2015: 3). While the magazine established the careers of a clutch of major West African writers like Wole Soyinka,

S ee Asha Rogers’s essay elsewhere in this collection for a discussion of Mphahlele’s work on the radio. See for instance Ravenscroft’s (1968) “Novels of Disillusion.” 12 See his piece titled “The burdens of an extra-mural donkey” in Transition 11. 13 See “Editorial” of Black Orpheus, issue no. 1, 1957. 10 11

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J. P. Clark, and Kofi Awonoor, it also published translations of important Francophone writers like Leopold Sedar Senghor, Camara Laye, Aime Cesaire, among others, and helped to create transcontinental audiences. Black Orpheus folded in 1975. Mphahlele’s role in founding the Mbari clubs, and by extension his support of Black Orpheus, translated his anti-apartheid imagination into this crucial Pan-African print platform. This imagination begins with his short story “The Suitcase” in the October 1958 issue, a fascinating tale about a young man who appropriates a suitcase left by a woman in a bus, gets arrested, and finds out in the police station that the suitcase contained an aborted fetus. Mphahlele’s contributions to the earliest issues of Black Orpheus include a number of book reviews (No. 6, 7, and 9) as well as a poem (“The Immigrant” in issue no. 6) in the manner of a lamentation about the “painful south of the south” in relation to the “savage Harmattan” of West Africa. In this poem the figure of the immigrant draws juxtapositions between exile and settlement: Morning New Dawn tells me that void can never last for the immigrant’s journey is a long road Over centuries They scrambled for my mother From across the frontiers of snowbound decay stale wine and bodies clawed down her green innocence mauled her limbs sold her shrines (27) Alongside Mphahlele’s work were also a number of short stories from Alex La Guma (“A Glass of Wine” (issue no. 7); “Slipper Satin” (issue no. 8); and “At the Portagees” (issue no. 11)). La Guma’s short stories present the landscapes of interracial intimacy in an apartheid South Africa that legislated against these. His short stories therefore made visible these landscapes of interracial desire and encounter that span everyday township spaces to contexts of political solidarity and patronage. (See Asha Rogers’s chapter on the BBC’s Translation Service elsewhere in this volume for more on both La Guma and Mphahlele.) While still in Nigeria, Mphahlele joined the editorial team of Black Orpheus for issue no. 7, in which we see Alex La Guma beginning to appear more regularly. Mphahlele’s move to Paris in 1961–3 to join the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF) office marked a decade in which Cold War cultural patronage in Africa reached a crescendo. Mphahlele used his role as director of the Congress’s Africa programs to secure and extend funding to Black Orpheus, Transition, Lotus, The New African, and another magazine The Classic, which was founded by Nat Nakasa of the Drum generation group of writers. While Black Orpheus primarily focused on literary and cultural genres, paying particular attention to poetry, short fiction, art criticism, and history, Transition provided a mixed platform that included various kinds of political commentary. Transition was founded in 1961 by Rajat Neogy, a Ugandan Indian, and went on to establish itself as East Africa’s premier magazine of political commentary and public debate. Published in Uganda in the late 1960s, it had to go into

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exile after Neogy’s incarceration for sedition in 1968. From 1971 it was published in Ghana and was subsequently edited by Wole Soyinka who changed its name to Ch’indaba. The magazine folded in 1976 but was resuscitated again in 1991 and taken across the Atlantic to the Hutchins Centre at Harvard University by Henry Louis Gates, Jr., where its strapline “the magazine of Africa and the Diaspora” explains its current mission.14 Lotus, like Transition and Black Orpheus, published creative work as well as reports of the gatherings of Afro-Asian writers who formed the bureau that started the journal. It was formed by the Permanent Bureau of Afro-Asian Writers in 1967 and folded in the late 1980s. Lotus published in English, French, and Arabic out of Cairo. Its first volume, encompassing the first three issues, includes work by Mazisi Kunene and Alex la Guma, who was in the editorial committee of the magazine. Through 1971, La Guma was a prominent contributor, as well as Mazisi Kunene, while Mphahlele’s first appearance is in issue no. 10 with a short story (“The Location”). In Transition, Mphahlele began what he called the “South Africa Report” (Transition no. 4), which became a recurring feature of the journal. Such features provided the magazine audiences the state of affairs in apartheid South Africa. These magazines, produced in different regions of the continent, circulated locally and transnationally, based on their Pan-African contributors. Aurelie Journo has eloquently detailed the ways by which the paratexts of these magazines (advertisements, editorials, epilogues, forewords, blurbs, etc.) offer a sense of how they “postured” as transnational, Pan-African, and “worldly,” and therefore an idea of the global scale of their audiences (Journo 2021). Such strategies included publishing of the addresses of various individuals and distribution desks across the continent and abroad. The breadth of their networks of readers can be gleaned from their letters to the editor, coming from across Africa and other continents as well. The “South Africa Report” preceded another feature that Mphahlele (and, later, Lewis Nkosi) edited during his time in Nairobi. While in Paris with the CCF, Mphahlele was tasked to establish an organization, similar to the Mbari Clubs in Nigeria, intended to provide support for Transition. This organization was Chemchemi. It is in this organization’s newsletter that Mphahlele published what he called the South African Bulletin. These reports and bulletins circulated not just among the local audiences of East and West Africa at the time but also among South Africans in exile in those countries via the small magazines in which they were published. The small magazine platform helped to generate anti-apartheid imagination through these mixed genres, translating it through the transnational networks generated by the magazines and the cultural organizations that published them. Mphahlele’s role at the CCF enabled him to begin fashioning a Pan-African literary public through what looks here like a magazine/journal “commons,” in which material could be syndicated, cross-referenced, and shared among other CCF-funded publications like Encounter and Quest. Around the same time, Mphahlele’s influence begins to show in the increasing number of South African writers and poets appearing in Transition, Black Orpheus, and Lotus. Issue no. 12 (1963) of Black Orpheus, for instance, features a short story by Bloke Modisane (“The Situation”), poetry by Dennis Brutus (“Kneeling Before You” and “A Troubadour”), poetry by K. Arthur Nortje (“Nothing Unusual” and other poems), and a short story by Arthur Maimane (“A Kaffer Woman”). Most of these are Drum generation writers. Across the continent in East Africa that same year,

See https://hut​chin​scen​ter.fas.harv​ard.edu/tra​nsit​ion, accessed September 1, 2018.

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Transition published short fiction, critical pieces, poetry, and reviews by Mphahlele, Nkosi, Brutus, Richard Rive, and James Matthews. Transition’s 1963 issues contain some literary highlights of the early anti-apartheid struggle such as Brutus’s poem on the 1962 Sabotage Act (“Sabotage ‘62’ ”) and James Matthew’s short story “The Party,” which critiques white liberal artistic and political circles and the pressure for Black political activists to assimilate into these circles.15 An earlier issue contains Rive’s short story “moon over district six” which at the time portended the forced removals of Black residents of this neighborhood (District Six, in Cape Town) in the late 1960s, in the aftermath of Sophia Town removals. It is quite apposite then that Matthews and Rive both grew up in this neighborhood and at the same time contributed to Drum magazine. In this way, Sophia Town and District Six frame the temporal borders between the establishment of Drum and its ascendance in the 1950s and the intensification of exile over anti-apartheid activities in the late 1950s and early 1960s for many in this generation of writers. While these magazines gave the anti-apartheid imagination its global and transnational dimensions, they also made significant contributions to the debates around what African literature as a discipline would look like during the era of decolonization. After the 1962 Makerere University Conference, Mphahlele, Nkosi, and Bloke Modisane posted commentaries on the conference. This conference was significant because it inaugurated what has come to be defined as modern African literature. Its convenorship of the first generation of modern African writers of English-language expression set the agenda for establishing a canon of African writing. Recently Mukoma wa Ngugi’s The Rise of the African Novel has labeled these writers as the “Makerere Generation.” Mphahlele, who had played a major role in convening the conference through support from the CCF, helped to curate a focus in Transition about the role of African literature in universities. Debates around the foundations of modern African literature after the conference found expression in Transition issues 6–12. These debates were initiated by Obi Wali’s polemic “The Dead End of African Literature?” (issue 10), which argued that writing in colonial languages in the continent could not be considered African literature. Wali’s piece evoked a response from Mphahlele (issue 11) as well as from a number of other prominent writers including Chinua Achebe. Mphahlele’s rejoinder sought to draw attention to the ways in which Wali’s critique conflated African creative writers with the critical industry, while singling out specific writers and critics as dominating the production of the canon. These debates set the stage for what became a modern African literary canon that began with decolonization. Mukoma wa Ngugi (2018) attributes these debates and particularly the conference of 1962 as “setting in motion a literary tradition that would engulf subsequent generations in debates around the definition and category of African literature” (2). Wa Ngugi’s broader argument is about the flawed conditions of this context being read as foundational in the periodization of modern African literature. Wa Ngugi’s focus on the question of language allows him to argue for a different genealogy that includes very early South African writers like Solomon Plaatje, R. R. R. Dhlomo, A. C. Jordan, Nontsizi Mqwetho, among others. He refers to this generation as “early South African modernists” and as a generation that is a “precursor to decolonization” (6). Wa Ngugi’s argument (even though focused on the question of language) makes visible the globality of Black Brutus’s first collection of poetry was published by the Mbari collective. For more information on this see Tyrone Russell August (2014). 15

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South African literary imagination before the mid-century period that is this chapter’s subject. Wa Ngugi’s argument is important to bring into the discussion here, though, because of its focus on the question of language that began in Transition’s mid-century issues outlined above. While it is the latest iteration of this long-standing debate inaugurated in small magazines, its focus on the novel as a genealogical platform for canon formation eventually misses the nuance and complexity that the small magazine as a genre provides. Following wa Ngugi above, therefore, Es’kia Mphahlele, the Drum generation, and their transnational itineraries proceed from those established by a figure like Solomon Plaatje, whose forays into periodicals and other print cultures establish earlier versions of South Africa in the global imaginary.16 Early twentieth-century periodicals like the Bantu World, for instance, become precursors to the mid-century’s Drum. In a sense, then, the anti-apartheid imagination was building up from the transnationality of the activist work that Plaatje and the early ANC were doing in relation to and against the exclusionary establishment of the union in 1910, which denied the franchise to Blacks in South Africa, and the Natives Land Act of 1913, which set forth legalized land dispossession of Black South Africans across the country.

COLD WAR PATRONAGE AND GENEALOGIES OF PAN-AFRICANISM It is interesting therefore that Transition issue no. 15 (1964) features a clutch of responses from prominent names such as Nadine Gordimer, Nkosi, and Mphahlele about an article published in the CCF’s flagship magazine, Encounter, regarding the union of South Africa in 1910.17 These responses make obvious the connection between empire, colonialism, and apartheid in mid-century South Africa. However, they also bring to focus the network of CCF-funded small magazines that were setting the agenda for the global and particularly the African literary imagination. Shringarpure conceptualizes this period and the magazines as products of an imperial “assemblage” that bring together “power, aesthetics and narratives” to produce a “Cold War paradigm” of “literary canons” (Shringarpure 2019: 134). Her argument about Cold War imperialism reflects the ironies that play out in cultural patronage as the “soft” power that is also currency in exchange for a more violent disruption of postcolonial regimes and radical left paradigms of political and cultural practice. These ironies constitute the existential questions that preoccupy Frances Stonor Saunders’s important book about the CIA and the Cold War. I will quote at length here: To what degree was it admissible for another state to covertly intervene in the fundamental processes of organic intellectual growth, of free debate and the uninhibited flow of ideas? Did this not risk producing, instead of freedom, a kind of ur-freedom, where people think they are acting freely, when in fact they are bound to forces over which they have no control? (Saunders 1999: 5) Saunders’s question above is what these magazines indeed put to the test and in relation to our engagements with the archives that emerge from them. Peter Kalliney argues that the logic of or more on Plaatje’s imagination see Brian Willan (1984). F See Nadine Gordimer “Tweedle Dee (English, White) and Tweedle Dum (Afrikaans, white)”; Lewis Nkosi, “Carlin, Mander and all that Jazz”; Es’kia Mphahlele “Partition and Guilt,” pp. 8–10. 16 17

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aesthetic freedom and ideological neutrality fronted and pushed by the CCF produced conditions of visibility for particular writers, artists, and intellectuals at the very foundations of modern African literature (Kalliney 2015). While this is important to note, in relation to the general/intended effect of this kind of patronage, the visibility of certain writers is also partly due to networks that preexisted CCF’s incursion into the continent, as well as the genealogies of Pan-African solidarity that preceded the imperial incursions of the United States after the Second World War. When an article about CIA ties to the CCF appeared in The New York Times on May 10, 1967, the fallout came swift and fast in the small magazine world sponsored by the CCF. Mphahlele’s role at the CCF in Paris and his work with small magazines and cultural organizations came under critical scrutiny. Mphahlele’s response was equally swift in Transition issue no. 34 (1967), published as a letter to Transition’s editor Neogy. He argues that before taking the job he made clear three premises to the CCF: that cultural freedom has multiple interpretations based on what he said were the “socio-political conditions of any territory,” and that Africa “should not be turned into another theatre of the Cold War.” Mphahlele’s third and most important premise was that intellectual cultures in the continent were going to grow organically based on what was happening on the ground and not because of what he called “Western reflexes.”18 Mphahlele’s response is reflected in the archives of these organizations, in his correspondence and reports to the CCF and in the programs established with communities of artists, writers, and intellectuals in various parts of the continent. Mphahlele addresses the crucial dimension of the meanings that were drawn from the cultural activity supported by the CCF, and argues that these meanings were negotiated at the intersection of national and Pan-African visions for the continent. While putting faith in the project of nationalism during decolonization would soon realize its pitfalls, given the imperial footprints of the nation-state as a modern concept, the logic of PanAfricanist meaning and vision signaled in his response is worth reflecting on here. A Pan-Africanist logic of relations enabled by this funding speaks to the immediate history of Bandung in 1955, in which African and Asian nations set out a “nonaligned” agenda. Most importantly it speaks to a much longer history of solidarity between the continent and its historical diasporas. This history has much more consequence for the organic intellectual cultures that inaugurated and inspired decolonization than for the ideological binarism of the Cold War and the direction of the “soft power” of cultural patronage. To argue that cultural patronage overdetermined the ideological agenda of the period of decolonization is to lose sight of the contradictions of the Cold War itself. America’s own agenda of a “new global order” with itself as the champion of democracy and free thinking was of course contested by the continuing fight for civil rights. The patronage extended by the state department, for instance, to jazz musicians, as Von Eschen brilliantly demonstrates, had to deal with the contradiction staged between the fight for civil rights and the freedom of musical and artistic expression by African Americans being sponsored to travel the world (Dudziak 2000; von Eschen 2004). The anti-apartheid imagination itself was already building from a longer history of solidarity in early-twentieth-century Pan-Africanism. The work of Henry Sylvester Williams in this regard, in concert with South Africa’s Anne Kinlock, inaugurated the internationalist phase of political struggles for Black South Africans in the new century (Hooker 1975). The internationalist phase

Es’kia Mphahlele, in Transition no. 34:5.

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of anti-colonial imagination in South Africa proceeds in earnest after the formation of the South African Native National Congress (SANNC) in 1912 and the delegations led by Solomon Plaatje and others to petition the British monarchy before, during, and after the First World War. The interwar, a period like no other, created interphases across Pan-African political activity and anticolonialism with such a figure as Peter Abrahams emerging during this period, which Marc Matera brilliantly documents in his conceptualization of the “imperial metropolis” as a location that convened a transcolonial public sphere. Abrahams, a contemporary of Mphahlele whose novel Wild Conquest (1950) was serialized in Drum, also published A Wreath for Udomo (1956), a novel dramatizing Pan-African political networks in interwar London and then in a fictional African country called “Panafrica.” The importance of Abrahams’s novel for my purposes here is in its drawing on imaginative connections between neocolonial relationships constituting Panafrica and its ex-colonial master, and the beginnings of a Cold War ideological order that compromised the support that Panafrica was giving to other anti-colonial movements of its neighboring countries still under colonial rule. Abrahams’s novel therefore had its finger on the pulse of what would become relationships of dependency later theorized by Walter Rodney but also narrativized as that period of disillusionment that began with the overthrow of Ghana’s president Kwame Nkrumah in 1966. Abrahams is an important figure for the ways in which he embodies that bridge between what wa Ngugi has called “early south African modernists” and the mid-century generation whose work becomes more prominent within continental circuits initiated by the Drum generation and then leading to the continental magazines I have discussed here. While Abrahams’s location in London partially coincided with the statist logic of Pan-Africanism, which is represented by the W. E. B. Du Bois–led congresses of the 1920s and the famed sixth conference in Manchester in 1945, Mphahlele’s contexts in Nigeria and Kenya took on that small “p” pan-Africanism defined by George Shepperson (1962) as scattered and diffuse—not reliant on normative platforms of identity formation/organization like the nation-state. Such a logic was apposite for transitioning South Africa’s anti-colonial imagination to an anti-apartheid one in which the fictions of state were more visible in not only the promulgation of apartheid in 1948 (and the repressive legislations that followed) but also the collapse of state institutions during the early phases of decolonization in the 1960s.

CONCLUSION The importance of the small magazine as a form, its generic possibilities, the networks it curated, the publics and audiences it convened, engineered the transnationality of anti-apartheid imagination. Most importantly, the cultural and political organizations that produced these magazines expanded their scalability: their potential to scale up the itineraries of anti-apartheid imagination in a way to allow it to not only coincide and intersect with civil rights, decolonization, and the broader project of Pan-Africanism but also to curate these toward a continental and global appreciation and solidarity with this struggle. Such a logic of scalability also meant scaling down, as it were, to speak to specific contexts in which anti-apartheid struggles intersected with localized processes of decolonization in the continent, as demonstrated by the work of Es’kia Mphahlele. Mphahlele’s itineraries in Nigeria as part of the extramural program, his founding of Mbari and of Chemchemi, and his work in Nairobi as director of Africa programs in the CCF all generated an understanding

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on his part of this logic of scalability. This involved creating platforms from which imagination traveled multidimensionally to capture both the local contexts of decolonization and also the traveling dimensions of anti-apartheid activism and struggle. The small magazines discussed here created an imaginative “commons” from which anti-apartheid imagination inflected debates on decolonization, civil rights, and Pan-Africanism. Perhaps we can venture to conclude by way of Nkosi who said, in his review of the Ghanaian magazine Okyeame, “The history of literary movements is more often written in some long-forgotten dead little magazine” (Transition no. 12, 1964:28).

WORKS CITED Abrahams, P. (1950), Wild Conquest, New York: Harper. Abrahams, P. (1956) A Wreath for Udomo, New York: Harper. Adi, H. (2018), Pan-Africanism: A History, London: Bloomsbury Academic. August, R. T. (2014), “Out of Place: A Re-Evaluation of the Poetry of Dennis Brutus,” Unpublished Dissertation, University of the Western Cape. Baily, J., and Rosenberg, S. (2016), “Reading twentieth Century Urban Black Cultural Movements through Popular Periodicals: A Case Study of the Harlem Renaissance and South Africa’s Sophiatown,” Safundi 17(1): 63–86. Benson, P. (1986), Black Orpheus, Transition and Modern Cultural Awakening in Africa, Los Angeles: University of California Press. Bethlehem, L. (2018), “Restless Itineraries: Antiapartheid Expressive Culture and Transnational Historiography,” Social Text 36 (3(136)): 47–69. Bulson, E. (2017), Little Magazine, World Form, New York: Columbia University Press. By All Means Necessary (2019), [film] Dir. Vuyani Sondlo, SA: Natives at Large Production. Chapman, M. (1989), The “Drum” Decade: Stories from the 1950s, KZN: University of Natal Press. De Kock, L., L. Bethlehem, and S. Laden (2004), South Africa in the Global Imaginary, Pretoria: University of South Africa Press. Dudziak, M. (2000), Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Edwards, B. (2003), The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation and the Rise of Black Internationalism, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Getachew, A. (2020), Worldmaking after Empire: The Rise and Fall of Self-Determination, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Hooker, J. R. (1975), Henry Sylvester Williams: Imperial Pan-Africanist, London: Collins. Jaji, T. (2013), Africa in Stereo: Modernism, Music and Pan-African Solidarity, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Journo, A. (2021), “Reading the Paratext: Posture and Self-fashioning in African ‘Little Magazines’,” Social Dynamics (April). doi:10.1080/02533952.2021.1958300. Kalliney, P. (2015), “Modernism, African Literature and the Cold War,” Modern Language Quarterly 76(3): 333–68. Makeba, M., and J. Hall (1988), Makeba: My Story, London: Bloomsbury. Matera, M. (2015), Black London: The Imperial Metropolis and Decolonization in the Twentieth Century, Berkeley: University of California Press. Mphahlele, E. (1984), Afrika my Music: An Autobiography, Cape Town: NB Books. Nixon, R. (1994), Homelands, Harlem and Hollywood: South African Culture and the World Beyond, New York: Routledge.

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Odhiambo, T. (2011), “Inventing Africa in the Twentieth Century: Cultural Imagination, Politics and Transnationalism in Drum Magazine,” African Studies 65(2): 157–74. Okeke-Agulu, C. (2015), Postcolonial Modernism: Art and Decolonization in Twentieth-Century Nigeria, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Ravenscroft, A. (1968), “African Literature V: Novels of Disillusion,” Journal of Commonwealth Literature 3(2): 120–37. Saunders, F. S. (1999), Who Paid the Piper: The CIA and the Cultural Cold War, London: Granta. Shepperson, G. (1962), “Pan-Africanism and ‘Pan-Africanism’: Some Historical Notes,” Phylon 23(4): 346–58. Shringarpure, B. (2019), Cold War Assemblages: Decolonization to Digital. New York: Routledge. Visser, N. W. (1976), “South Africa: The Renaissance that Failed,” Journal of Commonwealth Literature 11(1): 42–57. von Eschen, P. (2004), Satchmo Blows up the World; Jazz Ambassadors Play the Cold War, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Wa Ngugi, M. (2018), The Rise of the African Novel: Politics of Language, Identity, and Ownership, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Willan, B. (1984), Sol Plaatje: A Biography, Johannesburg: Ravan Press.

FURTHER READING Benson, P. (1986), Black Orpheus, Transition and Modern Cultural Awakening in Africa, Berkeley: University of California Press. Bethlehem, L. (2018), “Restless Itineraries: Antiapartheid Expressive Culture and Transnational Historiography,” Social Text 36(3(136)): 47–69. Dudziak, M. (2000), Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Kalliney, P. (2015), “Modernism, African Literature and the Cold War,” Modern Language Quarterly 76(3): 333–68. Masilela, N. (2017), A South African Looks at the Diaspora: Essays and Interviews, Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press. Nixon, R. (1994), Homelands, Harlem and Hollywood: South African Culture and the World Beyond, New York: Routledge. Popescu, M. (2020), At Penpoint: African Literatures, Postcolonial Studies and the Cold War, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Saunders, F. S. (1999), Who Paid the Piper: The CIA and the Cultural Cold War, London: Granta. Shringarpure, B. (2019), Cold War Assemblages: Decolonization to Digital, New York: Routledge. von Eschen, P. (2004), Satchmo Blows up the World; Jazz Ambassadors Play the Cold War, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

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CHAPTER TWENTY

Cuban Revolutionaries Read US Writers: Bohemian Mondays RUSSELL COBB

Historians and literary critics have been attracted to the hothouse atmosphere of post-1959 Cuba as a place for experimentation and conflict. Revolutionary Cuba was a destination for beatniks, Marxists, fellow travelers, and Black nationalists, all of whom returned to North America with different takes on “los barbudos” (the bearded ones, as the Cuban revolutionaries were popularly called) and the possibilities for armed struggle to remake society. For some, like Amiri Baraka, the Revolution was a turning point toward a politically engaged form of Black nationalism. For others, like Allen Ginsberg, revolutionary Cuba simply reconstituted the patriarchal, homophobic authoritarianism of former political regimes. And in the case of Ernest Hemingway, Cuban readers recognized an old friend whose reputation was reconfigured to become part of a revolutionary project. The travels, foibles, and triumphs of North American travelers in Cuba have been subjected to a number of treatments over the years, but most default to the US perspective. Because writers ventured to Cuba expressly to document the Revolution, there are dozens—if not hundreds—of paper trails for researchers to pursue. The cumulative effect of so much researching and reporting from the US point of view has been a sort of one-way mirror into Cuban cultural life in which the North American gazes upon a Caribbean island to see what fits a preconceived agenda. At best, this gaze reflects a complex interpretation of events on the island; at worst, it can devolve into a sort of “Latinism,” in which a dark, exotic Other stands in for the fears and desires of the North American subject. In any case, leaders of the Cuban Revolution believed that literary writers (poets, playwrights, and journalists) would be key to shaping the US imagination of events in Cuba. Cuban leader Fidel Castro cultivated relationships with journalists like Herbert Matthews of the New York Times, as well as Hemingway and Waldo Frank. The revolutionaries held US literary writers in high regard, but may have overestimated their ability to sway popular opinion and public policy. We know a great deal about how American writers responded to the Cuban Revolution. But how did Cubans read, interpret, and digest US writers? Cubans—before and after the Revolution— took a keen interest in hosting the writers themselves, reading them in English, and translating their best works into Spanish for distribution in periodical literature. We know, for example, that

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C. Wright Mills adopted the voice of Cuban revolutionaries in his best-selling broadside against American intervention, Listen, Yankee! Scant attention has been paid, however, to how the Cubans understood Mills and why this book was reproduced on the island. Cuba was experiencing its own revolution-within-a-revolution in the 1960s, reorienting its literary production from Eurocentric modernism into a populist literature based on social commitments and consciousness-raising about the “Third World.” It is worth noting that although Cuba fell under the sway of the Soviet Bloc beginning in 1960, its cultural production focused on homegrown and folkloric arts, eschewing any doctrinaire formulations of “socialist realism.” The informal name for the blend of socialist commitment, Afro-Cuban folklore, and popular culture was deemed “revolución con pachanga” (roughly translated: revolution as a street party), which recognized that the Cuban people would never accept the dour propagandistic aspects of socialist realism (Moore 2001). A low-cost editorial house (Ediciones Cubanas) was set up to provide cheap copies of books for the newly literate working class. The state-run Writers’ Union (UNEAC) and the Film Institute (ICAIC) shifted from high-modern experimentalism to grassroots literature and film, sponsoring ethnographies of Afro-Cuban people and documentaries of social change. Following Batista’s departure on January 1, 1959, a host of newspapers and magazines (literary and otherwise) had sprung up, many of them staking out different political positions. The years 1960 and 1961, however, saw a nationalization of the cultural sphere, as literary magazines, prizes, and institutes became part of a political project. In 1961, the National Writers Union (UNEAC) became the de facto arbiter of who would be published and where in Cuba, forcing visiting writers from the United States to adopt a more explicit ideological commitment if they sought to participate in Cuban cultural life (Candiano 2018). The formation of a host of nationalized institutions of culture initially cultivated a popular enthusiasm for what had been restricted to elites, but, after two years of experimentation, these institutions became political gatekeepers. Indeed, as we will see, the decline in the translation and participation of US American writers was a direct result of the CIAbacked invasion by Cuban dissidents at the Bay of Pigs in April 1961. Nevertheless, US writers continued to play pivotal roles at all levels of cultural and literary production, even as Cuba and the United States found themselves on the verge of all-out war. Cuban-US relations in the sphere of culture, then, represent a fascinating paradox. The Cuban state, and Fidel Castro specifically, denounced US imperialism at every turn. Defying the “Monstruo del Norte” (the monster of the North) was the key ideological component of the Revolution’s appeal to the rest of Latin America and a way to rationalize repression of dissent and solicit support from the Soviet Union. At the same time, Castro deliberately sought out support from US writers at all levels of publishing. Revolutionary Cuba welcomed workaday newspaper journalists, avantgarde poets, public intellectuals, and the towering figure of Ernest Hemingway into its fold from 1959 until 1971, when an extraordinary event known as the “Padilla Affair” bookended foreign fascination with the Cuban experiment. A poet named Heberto Padilla had been awarded the prestigious Casa de las Américas prize in 1968. The prize recognized writing in the Americas as a whole, and quickly became a beacon to Latin American writers, as it came with publication in the literary journal of the same name. Padilla, however, became a lightning rod for controversy, as his poetry expressed the alienation of a person who did not fit within the new rules of a revolutionary society. Padilla was part of a cohort of writers who had fallen out with the leaders of cultural institutions after 1961. Nevertheless, Padilla continued to write and publish in Cuba, until his prize from Casa was revoked. In 1971, to the shock of the international intelligentsia, Padilla

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was arrested and forced into an “autoconfesión” (self-confession) of his “crimes” against Cuba (Fuschini 2001). The televised spectacle of a writer reading a forced confession for his sin of writing bourgeois poetry struck outsiders as a grave violation of intellectual freedom. This time, the regime’s meddling in literary matters had gone too far; a coalition of intellectual heavy hitters, including Jean-Paul Sartre, protested Padilla’s treatment in an open letter to Castro (Fay 2011). After 1971, Cuban state cultural institutions closed ranks and literary production sank into a bleak period of dogmatism, which even regime apologists such as Lisandro Otero later repudiated. The period of 1959 to 1971, then, offers a window into a period of experimentation, revolution, and unlikely solidarity that might be unparalleled in twentieth-century cultural history. In what follows, I’ll examine how Cuba sparked the imaginations of US writers, who also served as (at times) unwitting players in constructing a new cultural field in the 1960s. This period breaks down into two waves: one from 1959 to mid-1961, and the other from 1961 to 1971. I will conclude by examining the disillusionment of many of these same writers, and how their changes in attitudes were reflected—or silenced—in Cuba’s new cultural institutions.

THE REVOLUTION ON MONDAYS The Cuban writer and critic José Rodriguez Feo once remarked, “before the Revolution no one queued to buy a book” (Johnson 1988: 103). Literary production centered around a well-heeled, white elite that may have followed European avant-garde movements but had little interest in broad-based popular movements. The Revolution, needless to say, changed all that. Carlos Franqui served as the editor for the July 26 Movement’s official publication, Revolución, which relied on a network of underground printers to distribute news about the barbudos and defy Batista’s censors. Censorship of the rebellion was a key tactic of Batista’s regime. As soon as copies of Revolución appeared on the streets of Havana, police confiscated them. Franqui, however, had a large base of support in the capital and it is possible that a network of mimeograph machines helped print thousands of copies, even though most of the rebellion occurred on the eastern end of the island. Franqui also had connections to Cuban exiles in Miami who were willing to fund journalism critical of Batista, so the editor helped direct technology and funds from the United States to Cuba to support the rebellion’s fledgling newspaper, Revolución, and radio station, Radio Rebelde. Mainstream journalistic outlets like Bohemia and Diario de la Marina were prohibited from printing news of torture under Batista, so Cubans were eager to consume information from Franqui’s newspaper and radio station, even though both were inconsistent in their schedules and were often shut down by censors. As the new regime took power in January 1959, Cuban artists and writers looked eagerly to a new dawn of freedom of expression. An old newspaper friendly to Batista was shut down and Revolución moved into its building and used its presses. Franqui, something of a poet himself, sought to launch a cultural supplement to the daily newspaper, which quickly went from being an underground publication to one of the most popular newspapers in the country. Throughout 1959, dozens of rival newspapers still existed, including some openly hostile to Castro, but in 1960 they were forced to publish short annotations, or coletillas, written by the government as an official counterweight to any claims critical of the new regime. For the literary crowd, however, March 1959 represented a brave new beginning. Lunes de Revolución, a new magazine founded that month, was a cultural experiment folded into a political

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experiment, and would eventually reveal the fissure between the Cuban Revolution and the North American New Left. William Luis has written that Lunes was the most widely read literary magazine of its kind in all of Latin America. At its height, the magazine claimed a circulation of 250,000 copies per week throughout Cuba, giving it a broader reach than the magazine that would become its intellectual peer in the United States, The New York Review of Books (founded in 1963) (Luis 2002). The first few issues of Lunes de Revolución established its avant-garde bona fides, as well as a cosmopolitan attitude toward culture atypical of most global Communist publications. The inaugural edition serves as an artistic manifesto, proclaiming that the magazine—and the editors used the English word “magazine,” not the Spanish “revista,” to describe Lunes—would represent a “revolution in art and literature” as an accompaniment to the political revolution (“Una posición” 1959: 1). Lunes delved into Hollywood pop culture, French theater of the absurd, and Afro-Cuban folklore, blurring lines between the “First” and “Third Worlds” as well as distinctions between “high” and “low” culture. The subjects were disparate, but the attitude was nonconformist, a prefiguration of 1960s counterculture. The aesthetic of the revolutionaries—shaggy beards, disheveled fatigues, an overall anti-bourgeois mien—may have appealed to emergent New Left in the United States, but the feeling was not exactly mutual. As the 1960s progressed, the Cuban Revolution adopted a progressively more orthodox nationalist Marxism just as hippies, yippies, and radicals repudiated established political ideologies. The editors of Lunes differentiated themselves from those of previous Cuban literary magazines by proclaiming that they did not represent a particular group, aesthetic movement, or even political point of view. They did, however, note that artists in Cuba had been “alienated from national life,” and that Lunes would not be directed at a “rarified minority” but at any Cuban interested in the arts. It was a precarious position from the start, radical and nonconformist in its relationship to both bourgeois and revolutionary Cuban society. The first issue also demonstrated that Lunes, in addition to its emphasis on national cultural production, would keep abreast of US culture. A translated Evergreen Review profile of James Dean, set in a two-page spread, examined the cult of rebelliousness around the dead actor. Another piece analyzed ideology in the work of the playwright Maxwell Anderson, sharing a page with literary critic Lydia Cabrera’s feature on the Afro-Cuban secret society known as “los ñañigos.” The magazine was intellectually rigorous, creative, and heterodox. Whereas Cuban literary magazines of the past had a decidedly highbrow preference for modernist poetry and lyrical essays, Lunes plunged into African American and Afro-Cuban vernacular culture. A piece called “El Negro en la literatura norteamericana” (again translated from a US publication, New World Writing) critiqued stereotypes about African American writers. This article somewhat naïvely noted a “general improvement among the races” in the United States, while also celebrating new Black writers who challenged white stereotypes of “Uncles, aunties … and sambos” (“El Negro” 1959: 10). Throughout the spring and summer of 1959, Lunes continued in a similar fashion, mixing critical reportage on Latin American affairs with excerpts from absurdist theater, poetry, and Afro-Cuban folklore. The eclectic nature of the magazine reflected the three distinct personalities behind the magazine: Revolución editor Carlos Franqui, film critic Guillermo Cabrera Infante, and poet Pablo Armando Fernández. All three began as fervent supporters of Castro, but only one—Armando— would remain in the good graces of the regime after 1963. Zooming out from the pages of Lunes de Revolución in the spring of 1959, we can see a larger movement by the regime to push forward with a radical political program domestically, while

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Castro continued to court US Americans through various media, even appearing on the Ed Sullivan Show, where he charmed the leading entertainment host in America. Then, one month after the launch of Lunes, Castro traveled to Washington, DC on a diplomatic mission. In the first of many snubs, President Eisenhower did not invite Castro to the White House, but this did not stop the bearded revolutionary from pulling off a series of public appearances aimed at impressing US Americans. In April at the Cuban Embassy, Castro presented special medals to thirteen reporters who had covered the Revolution. The medals were made of gold and read “Sierra Maestra Press Mission. To our American friend with gratitude” and embossed with Castro’s signature (Teel 2015: 2). While the American public was still generally sympathetic to the image of young, rugged revolutionaries who had fought a corrupt tyrant, only months after Batista’s surrender signs were emerging that Castro wasn’t just a scrappy freedom fighter aiming to restore democracy. Even before Batista fled the country, a CIA report warned Eisenhower that Castro’s victory would be in the best interests of the Soviet Union. Still, for most of 1959, relations between Washington and Havana were generally good, despite some rumblings from a few diplomats that Castro was secretly a communist (Luxenburg 1988). Historians of Cuba–US relations have engaged in a long-running (some might say interminable) debate about whether Castro had been a committed Marxist all along or whether he was pushed into the Soviet sphere by Cold War hawks. Even if Castro hid his communist agenda during the first year of the Revolution, it is evident that he still sought out validation and affirmation from US writers, even those unsympathetic to the Marxist–Leninism the regime would shortly adopt. Primary among these figures was Ernest Hemingway, who had a favorable attitude toward the Revolution. Hemingway is unique among US writers in Cuba in that his reputation on the island was as formidable before the Revolution as afterward. “In Cuba, it is often said that Hemingway loved Cuba, and Cuba loved him back,” biographer Andrew Feldman has written (Feldman 2019: xiii). Hemingway had long-established friendships with a variety of Cuban characters—bartenders, writers, and fishermen—alongside an enmity toward the Batista dictatorship. Hemingway recognized that Cuba, the setting for The Old Man and the Sea, had been good to him, and, when he won the Nobel Prize, he showed his gratitude by handing off the literary medal to the Catholic Church, which agreed to display it in Cuba’s cathedral to La Virgen de la Caridad outside Santiago. Hemingway feared that his medal would fall into the hands of Batista, but insisted that it remain in Cuba. Hemingway was not on the island after Batista fell but followed the struggle avidly through newspaper reports and TV coverage (Feldman 2019: xiii). Speaking to reporters after January 1, 1959, Hemingway was supportive of Castro, who must have been delighted as he counted Hemingway among his favorite writers. Castro did more than just appropriate the image of the old American novelist as a public relations move; the revolutionary studied Hemingway’s prose for ideas and even tactics. The guerillas passed around For Whom the Bell Tolls, Hemingway’s novel about the Spanish Civil War, while they hid out in the Sierra Maestra, and not simply for entertainment. “That book became a familiar part of my life,” Castro told the journalist Ignacio Ramonet. “And we always went back to it, consulted it, to find inspiration” (Perrottet 2020: 187). Castro read the novel at least three times, according to Tony Perrottet, once in school and twice while fighting in the Sierra Maestra. Although the story revolves around the fictional American journalist Robert Jordan’s fight against fascists in the Spanish Civil War, Castro believed the protagonist’s experience could help reframe the rebels’ sense of their mission.

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In fact, the image of Castro and Guevara as idealistic freedom fighters was a decidedly literary creation whose genealogy could be traced to Hemingway’s Jordan, Pablo Neruda’s Latin American poetry, and various adventure stories. Che and Fidel have functioned as source material for dozens of fictionalized accounts in literature and film, some closer to the historical record than others. The journalist Anthony DePalma has gone so far as to call the rugged, bearded, and intellectual image of “Fidel” an “invention” of New York Times writer Herbert L. Matthews from his 1957 profile of the revolutionary leader. While there may be some truth to DePalma’s claim, it overlooks the degree to which the self-fashioning of the “barbudo” was conducted in symbiosis with US literature. Indeed, Matthews himself may have been channeling the notoriously macho Hemingway in his legendary profile of Fidel Castro. At a time when Castro was believed to be dead in the Sierra Maestra, Matthews reintroduced an almost literary figure as a powerful six-footer, olive-skinned, full-faced, with a straggly beard. [Fidel] was dressed in an olive gray fatigue uniform and carried a rifle with a telescopic sight, of which he was very proud … The personality of the man is overpowering. It was easy to see that his men adored him and also to see why he has caught the imagination of the youth of Cuba all over the island. Here was an educated, dedicated fanatic, a man of ideals, of courage and of remarkable qualities of leadership. (Matthews 1957: 1) Matthews’s portrait of Castro complemented Hemingway’s character of Santiago in The Old Man and the Sea. Both demonstrated a toughness that appealed to not only a sort of American notion of rugged individualism but also a selflessness that had no ideological baggage. Both figures were, of course, modern myths that said as much about the authors as they did about the places they purported to represent. The cost of such myth-making would soon manifest itself as Cuban reality clashed with US idealism. Ernest Hemingway made plans to head back to Havana at the same time the US Embassy started to issue dire warnings about Castro in 1959. The widespread enthusiasm for the Revolution in the US press started to wane as reports of extrajudicial killings and show trials started to appear in US newspapers. Journalists sought Hemingway’s response, but for weeks, the writer was incommunicado in his Ketchum, Idaho, retreat. A reporter named Emmet Watson finally caught up with Hemingway at an Idaho ski lodge in March, and pressed the writer for his opinion on the Castro government. Hemingway was resolute in his defense of the events in Cuba as the “first revolution that is really a revolution.” When Watson brought up the killings of ex-officials of the Batista regime, Hemingway defended them as necessary: I believe in the cause of the Cuban people they have had changes in government before in Cuba but these were just changes of the guard when the new ones got in they went right on stealing from the people some of Batista’s officials and political police were good honest men but a lot of them were thieves sadists and torturers they tortured kids sometimes so badly they would have to kill them. (Feldman 2019: 421) The interview made its way onto the pages of many US newspapers, including the front page of the Richmond Times-Dispatch, which ran the headline, “Cuba Trials, Executions Necessary, Hemingway Says,” above the fold on March 19 (“Cuba Trials” 1959: 1A). Hemingway formed part of a first wave of prominent and established US American writers who enthusiastically lent their academic or literary prestige to the Revolution. On the one hand,

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Hemingway represented a public relations boon for the revolutionary government. The old writer allowed himself to be photographed fishing on a yacht with Che Guevara and Castro, boosting their campaign to promote Cuba as a safe and alluring tourist destination for Americans (if without the Batista-era prostitution and gambling). The US ambassador to Cuba pressured Hemingway to denounce Castro and then asked him to leave Cuba in 1960 or be labeled a traitor (Hutchisson 2016: 243). By 1960, Cuban officials had begun expropriating US property, but Hemingway was assured that his house, Finca La Vigia, would remain in his possession. It is unclear what Hemingway made of this difficult situation as he was suffering from paranoia and severe depression, according to multiple biographers. In any case, in 1960 Hemingway accepted an assignment from Life on bullfighting in Spain, and left Cuba, never to return. Hemingway had been perfectly comfortable writing at La Vigia during the Batista dictatorship and had not spoken out against the despot when he could have. This, combined with the fact that he was a wealthy US landowner, might have made him a target for Castro. But, in the literary production of the new regime, Hemingway was a symbol of solidarity, and his opus was reinterpreted as a tacit critique of the capitalist American way of life. Cabrera Infante, for example, recast Hemingway not as a rugged individualist with a touch of cosmopolitanism but as a living rebuke to American society, laying out his case in an issue titled “USA against USA”: Hemingway’s literature is one of a voluntary expatriate who has taken a position against the United States. The pretext for his travels may be Paris or bullfighting or fishing in the Gulf, but he simply cannot live in the United States. In The Sun Also Rises his characters live an alienated, anguished, and vacuous existence that is not far from the documented biographical details of Henry Miller, another expatriate … Hemingway gives a vision of the incompetence, snobbery and abuse maintained by the professional American Army. I think Hemingway would not be well received at the Pentagon. (Cabrera Infante 1960: 6–7) Hemingway, in Cabrera Infante’s vision, embodies American alienation and loneliness. In the April 16, 1960, issue, he returns to these themes, the title of his editorial (“Los escritores contra USA,” or “Writers Against the USA”) setting the tone. American society is vacuous and empty of cultural value. The American Army is an instrument of imperialism. Toxic ideologies of racism, capitalism, and fundamentalism have penetrated so deeply into every aspect of life that the best US American writers are always seeking inspiration elsewhere—Paris, Mexico, and, of course, revolutionary Cuba. The “USA versus USA” issue features reviews of Henry Miller, Jack Kerouac, and Arthur Miller (all widely known for their critiques of America’s sexual Puritanism, conformism, bourgeois self-satisfaction, and McCarthyism) as well as a short anthology of poetry in translation. Headed “Five Nonconformist Poets,” this selection offered work by US poets (ranging from Beatniks like LeRoi Jones and Allen Ginsberg to folklorists), many of whom had never been translated into Spanish before. Lunes often omitted the names of the translators, so it is impossible to know who translated Ginsberg’s “Howl” (“Alarido” in Spanish), but its publication in a Cuban magazine in 1960 is particularly notable. “Howl” had been subject to a sensational trial in 1957 in San Francisco, after the publisher Lawrence Ferlinghetti and a bookstore clerk, Shigeoshi Murao, were arrested and charged with distributing obscene material. Although the pair were later acquitted, the underlying conformism of 1950s American society had been displayed to the world. It is remarkable, then, that a poem at one time banned in the United States was published in a Cuban magazine just as the first wave of Cuban migrants to Florida had begun to emit the first cries of

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“communist censorship!” Again, Cuba’s literary press adopted a posture of intellectual superiority to US middlebrow conformism. But Lunes’s radical free-speech attitude would eventually lead to dire consequences. And Ginsberg’s complicated relationship with the Revolution was just getting started. During what we might call the “Honeymoon Period” of literary production after the Revolution (1959–61), two other giants of the US American intellectual scene, C. Wright Mills and Waldo Frank, traveled to Cuba as journalist-travelers, later publishing books about the experience. Both published brisk, lyrical, hybrid works of literary reportage and analysis in 1960 and 1961. Mills’s Listen Yankee! was a publishing sensation in the United States, selling roughly half a million copies within two years (Treviño 2017: 145). Javier Treviño estimates that Listen, Yankee! was among the top five most circulated works of sociology printed in the twentieth century, and it did much to shape early leftist intellectual opinion about the Cuban Revolution. Interestingly, the volume was also extremely popular in Latin America in Spanish translation. There was an official translation in Mexico, and a pirated edition from Peru became widely available. Parts of the book made their way into the Cuban press as well. Under the title, “Escucha, Yanqui,” Mills’s book was serialized in the magazine Bohemia. This publication exemplifies the dramatic nature of cultural change during the first two years of the Revolution. Bohemia is a long-standing magazine of current affairs, literature, events, and fashion that began publication in 1908. As of 2021, it was still in circulation, but the Revolution marked a definitive rupture in its coverage of Cuba. Pre-1959, Bohemia resembled Life magazine in many ways. In-depth stories about international conflict coexisted with lighthearted articles on recipes, entertainment, and parenting. Because of censorship in Batista-era Cuba, however, Cubans had little exposure to the true nature of the Revolution unfolding in the countryside. As the rebels neared the capital in late 1958, Bohemia continued to cover wars and conflicts abroad but not the one at home. When the magazine did touch on domestic politics, it took an anti-communist line. One issue in November 1958 translated an article by the US American liberal politician Adlai Stevenson about the rapid industrialization in the Soviet Union, which concluded that Western capitalism still offered the best option for underdeveloped countries and their workers (Stevenson 1958). Pre-1959 Bohemia did publish poetry and short stories, but its editors preferred Anglocentric middlebrow fare such as Agatha Christie to the sort of writing that would soon come to dominate its pages: politically committed social literature from Cuba. Contemporary critics of the Revolution such as Yoani Sánchez have noted that pre-1959 Bohemia was a long magazine, with editions that ran over one hundred pages. By 1961, Bohemia had slimmed down dramatically, purging much of its coverage of fashion and celebrities (Sanchez 2017). While Sánchez points to the page counts as an indicator of the higher quality of the prerevolutionary version of the magazine, one cannot fail to notice the drastic differences in advertising. Editions before 1960 are chock-full of advertisements for US companies: Pepsi, Pan-Am Airlines, Firestone, Colgate, Esso (now Exxon) are just a few companies whose ads, many of them full-page, graced Bohemia well into 1959. Such ads dwindled rapidly after 1960. While Bohemia’s coverage of Cuban politics swerved immediately after the Revolution, its middlebrow coverage of lifestyle, arts, and culture remained unchanged for about a year and a half. Well into 1960, photographs of fashion models in bathing suits, recipes for slimming diets, and articles on parenting continued to dominate the second half of the magazine. Many of the photographs were shot by a fashion photographer named Alberto Korda, who claimed to have

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become interested in photography as a way to meet young women. Once Korda left the capital and started photographing revolutionaries, he became a convert to the cause and completely changed his approach to his art. A man once responsible for shooting bikini-clad women produced one of the most iconic photographs in the world, “Guerrillero Heroico,” a portrait of Che Guevara. Korda spotted Guevara at a memorial for the victims of an explosion of a French ship, La Coubre, which had brought munitions to the Cubans after a US arms embargo. During the memorial, Castro claimed that the explosion was due to US sabotage, and a stoic Guevara stood by, his long locks of hair flowing from his beret, and his eyes fixed on the horizon. Korda immediately realized the power of the image, one that continues to be reproduced as a symbol of rebellion on everything from energy drinks to key rings. No matter how orthodox and austere the Cuban state became in its approach to Marxist–Leninism, some part of the initial appeal of the Revolution remained in that image. Reading a Spanish translation of such a text in a magazine that, only a few years before, had been noted mostly as a lifestyle publication for bourgeois Cubans characterizes the roller-coaster nature of the Revolution. The third instalment of “Escucha, Yanqui,” published in February 1961, addresses the backlash to Castro that had emerged among his former supporters. In Listen, Yanqui!, Mills writes that these former revolutionaries are part of an inevitable “counterrevolution” of people with impure motives. “Most of the counter revolutionaries lack the necessary revolutionary valor,” Mills writes. They have either been corrupted by CIA influence, US corporate money, or have been unable to attain a post in the revolutionary regime (Mills 1961).

ADIOS, NEW YORK INTELLECTUALS The new Cuban cultural establishment post-1959 welcomed the presence of “New York intellectuals” and published translations of their work in two major publications. This was not the most revolutionary stance; prominent white writers had been traveling back and forth between Cuba and the United States since the nineteenth century, giving lectures and publishing a variety of works. Beginning in 1960, however, for the first time the most important literary magazines in Cuba began printing African American writers whose work was intricately tied to the Civil Rights and Black Power struggles. In the case of Lunes de Revolución, its entire July 4, 1960, issue was given over to literary essays, photographs, book reviews, and poetry by African American writers. Many of these poems or articles would become canonical, but Lunes introduced many for the first time in Spanish. At the time of the Cuban Revolution, James Baldwin had already established himself as a public intellectual, with essays in Commentary, Harper’s, and other prestige publications. His 1948 essay, “The Harlem Ghetto,” exposed the climate of claustrophobia, fear, and oppression in Harlem. To his contemporary white readers in New York City, Baldwin’s Harlem was worlds away from the swanky hotels and spacious lounges that still made midtown Manhattan a destination for local elites and tourists. Baldwin’s Harlem resembled Havana’s densely packed Centro Habana during the 1950s. Baldwin may as well have been speaking for an Afro-Cuban neighborhood of Cayo Hueso when he wrote the following: Harlem, physically at least, has changed very little in my parents’ lifetime or in mine. Now as then the buildings are old and in desperate need of repair, the streets are crowded and dirty, there are too many human beings per square block. Rents are 10 to 58 per cent higher than

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anywhere else in the city; food, expensive everywhere, is more expensive here and of an inferior quality; and now that the war is over and money is dwindling, clothes are carefully shopped for and seldom bought. (Baldwin 1960) Addressing just such a situation had been one of the Cuban revolutionary government’s first priorities, as housing was at the heart of Cuban society’s pre-1959 radical inequality. Havana was one of the, if not the, wealthiest cities in Latin America in the 1950s. Cuba’s neocolonialist relationship with the United States flooded the island with modern consumer goods and tourists flush with US dollars. Well-to-do residents of Havana had access to a rapidly developing network of suburbs west of Central Havana, from Vedado to Miramar. Wealth was concentrated in urban areas, mainly in Havana, and the rural poor who flocked to the city found similar conditions to what Baldwin described for Black people in New York City. Unlike New York City, however, Havana witnessed the flourishing of informal slums, especially in the east of the city. One of the most notable aspects of Baldwin’s essay, however, is its treatment of anti-Semitism in Harlem. Here, again, there were strong resonances with Cuba in the midst of a massive social upheaval. Baldwin draws attention to a surface-level anti-Semitism in the Black community that may, he states, lead the outsider to conclude that Blacks despise Jews more than other white communities. Jews, Baldwin notes, are more closely tied to Harlem than white elites but suffer discrimination as well; they are, as Baldwin states, “caught in the American crossfire” (Baldwin 1960: 11). While Fidel Castro never engaged in public anti-Semitism, the revolutionaries were quick to denounce “el gansterismo,” and no one figure embodied that corrupt rule more than Meyer Lansky. Born to a Polish Jewish family in New York, Lansky built a gambling empire centered in Cuba. And while Jews had enjoyed wealth and privilege in Batista’s Cuba, Castro never targeted them for their religion or ethnicity but rather the previous system in which the dictator had allowed Jewish gangsters such as Lansky to call the shots. Indeed, much of the Jewish community, which held noncommunist, socialist leanings, lent early support to Castro. Baldwin’s understanding of anti-Semitism and the plight of the ghetto, then, dovetails with the noncommunist leftist orientation of Lunes de Revolución. Baldwin’s complaints about high rent from absentee landlords in Harlem would have been instantly recognizable to Afro-Cubans in Centro Havana, as well as to revolutionaries directing new policies. Under Batista, there were no rent controls and nothing to prevent evictions. Slums dominated the city’s outskirts. Urban reform sought to remake the very foundations of the modern, Western city, yet another ideal that attracted the likes of Baldwin and other leftist intellectuals to Cuba. Baldwin’s essay appeared during what many have called the “Honeymoon Period” of the Revolution, when support for Castro was felt well beyond the circles of committed leftists in the United States. That period came to an end shortly after the Lunes issue on US writers, and the magazine itself became one of the many casualties of the Revolution’s shift to Marxist–Leninist orthodoxy. The trouble started when Lunes editor Guillermo Cabrera Infante and his brother Sabá conceived of a short documentary film to be broadcast on Cuban state television. P.M. was a thirteen-minute cinema-verité window into Havana’s nightlife. Without much actual plot, P.M. showcased a primarily Afro-Cuban crowd dancing, drinking, and engaging in general merrymaking in bars across the city. The sexually suggestive nature of the dancing was not anything that the average Cuban would not have seen many times, but the timing of P.M.’s release spelled disaster. The film debuted on television in May 1961, shortly after an invasion force of Cuban exiles and

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CIA operatives threatened to topple the Revolution. What might have otherwise been a little-noted experiment in documentary filmmaking became a flashpoint in culture and politics. To understand how this happened, it is important to examine the larger political trajectory of the Revolution from 1960 to 1961. As soon as Castro’s revolution triumphed, people loyal to Batista took to the mountains to start a rebellion. Although this insurgency had little popular support, some in the media expressed concern about the Cuban military’s use of summary executions and psychological torture. The press published editorials against the perceived excesses, and Castro retaliated, forcing newspapers to print “clarifications” (coletillas). Editors, of course, resented the pressure to print government-sponsored content attached to their own point of view. Some of the more conservative media personalities left Cuba, convinced that Castro needed to be overthrown in a counterrevolution. Toward the end of 1960, relations between the United States and Cuba deteriorated quickly. The United States imposed a partial embargo in October, and Castro retaliated by seizing US businesses. The United States, toward the end of the year, stopped importing Cuban sugar. The CIA started planning various scenarios for assassinations of Castro and Che Guevara, as well as invasions that would use a combination of Cuban expats, mercenaries, and US forces. How and when to intervene in Cuba was a point of contention as Eisenhower turned over the White House to Kennedy. On April 17, 1961, barely three months into Kennedy’s administration, the notorious “Bay of Pigs” invasion began and, almost immediately, became a fiasco for the counterrevolutionaries. A fierce battle ensued. Castro rushed to the battlefront and directed the counterattack. Within a few days, the invasion was repelled, and Castro emerged as a hero of the national defense. The incident solidified his grasp on power and proved that the dissident Cubans were intent on reversing the Revolution with the support of the US government. In the aftermath of the invasion, Castro pronounced the official Marxist–Leninist character of the Revolution and forged closer ties to the Soviet Union. Castro’s official alignment with the USSR starkly ensconced Cuba on one side of the Cold War polarity, but in the realm of culture, the island continued to be unpredictable. P.M. had initially been broadcast only a few weeks after the Bay of Pigs invasion, and its producers also sought distribution in cinemas. But officials at ICAIC, the national film board, ruled that the film “impoverishes, disfigures and diverts the attitude maintained by the Cuban people against the cunning attacks of counter-revolutionaries and the dictates of Yankee imperialism” (Luis 2010: 223). The Bay of Pigs invasion created an atmosphere of fear that resulted in the repression of any cultural production not fully committed to the Revolution. P.M. was the first victim of this new climate, which would soon be consolidated into a policy in line with those of the USSR and its East Bloc satellites. The atmosphere for intellectual and cultural expression changed rapidly. In late June 1961, Castro convened writers and intellectuals to the National Library in Havana to remind them that their work must fall “inside the Revolution.” If their work was deemed outside, it would receive no government funding—which, in the new cultural reality, meant it would not be shown to or read by the public. Characteristically, Castro orated for hours on the subject of arts and freedom of expression, but the speech would be remembered for one definitive line: “dentro de la Revolución, todo; contra la Revolución, ningún derecho” [“Within the Revolution, everything; against the Revolution, not one right”] (Castro Ruz 1961). It is a phrase that has been parsed thousands of times by its audience of artists and intellectuals, but the speech was virtually ignored by foreign visitors.

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Guillermo Cabrera Infante advocated for his brother’s film P.M. but then found himself scrambling to confirm the revolutionary bona fides of his own magazine. In Lunes de Revolucion’s last weeks, it published tributes to Pablo Picasso (a committed communist) and Romania (an Eastern Bloc state). No longer would the magazine translate bohemian US American poets or Black activists. The commandment to be “inside the Revolution” made US culture—not only literature but music and art as well—suspect. Despite Lunes’s turn toward more “committed” literature, Revolución discontinued its magazine in November 1961. Although Revolución continued to put out a newspaper, its editor, Franqui, had become disenchanted with the direction of the regime as well. Franqui was sent abroad, first as a roving reporter and then as a diplomat. His encounters with Soviet bureaucracy and repression solidified his view that the Revolution had turned away from a spontaneous, sui generis manifestation of Caribbean democracy. After the Soviet Union’s invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, Franqui officially broke with the Cuban government and went into exile. Castro rebranded Revolución as Granma, the official voice of the PCC (the Communist Party of Cuba). The entire literary cohort of Lunes de Revolución was literally blotted out of official culture, as photographs of Franqui were altered to erase his figure from the historical record. For many in the US Old Left, the call for absolute commitment to a political cause was a step too far, reminiscent of the dilemma facing them after the 1939 Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, when Communists were ordered to bury their animosity toward Nazi Germany in the interests of the advancement of the USSR. For others, the politicization of the arts only demonstrated the radical nature of social change taking place in Cuba and furthered their desire to travel and participate in the movement. After the Bay of Pigs invasion and the crackdown on dissenters in the wake of Castro’s “Words to Intellectuals” speech, fewer US writers ventured to Cuba as curiosity seekers. In addition, Hemingway and Mills had died before they had a chance to reconsider the turn toward Sovietization of Cuban cultural politics. Nevertheless, a trickle of New Left writers continued to participate in Cuban cultural life. An understudied example of this second wave is the playwright Jack Gelber’s presence in Cuba. Gelber had achieved some measure of success with “The Connection” (1959), about drug-addicted jazz musicians. The play won multiple Obie awards and Gelber was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1963. Cuban officials invited him to the island to be a part of a theater workshop, and he found himself transfixed by rapid changes in politics and culture. He was an active participant in discussions around theater and politics, even finding himself cast in the 1968 classic Cuban film, Memorias del subdesarrollo. In the film, Gelber plays himself, a radical US playwright who interjects himself into a discussion about the arts and politics in revolutionary society. Gelber even goes so far as to interrupt a panel discussion among Cuban intellectuals to question the platform of a roundtable discussion: Why is that if the Cuban Revolution is a total revolution, they have to resort to an archaic form of discussion such as a roundtable and treat us to an impotent discussion of issues I’m well informed about and most of the people here are well informed about, when there could be another, more revolutionary way to reach an audience like this? (Memorias 1968)1

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Memorias del subdesarrollo, Online video, directed by Tomás Gutiérrez Alea (1968; Havana, Cuba; ICAIC).

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That such a moment was not only tolerated but also captured on film and featured as a scene by Cuba’s leading film director, Tomás Gutiérrez Alea, demonstrated that criticism was still possible, but only if done “inside the Revolution.” Gelber was so moved by the experience that he went on to write his own play about the alienation of the Cuban bourgeoisie called “The Cuban Thing” (1968), which was victim of another kind of censorship: Cuban exiles protested the play and managed to have it shut down after opening night in New York City. Allen Ginsberg was another pivotal figure in the second wave of US authors intervening in the Cuban cultural sphere. He was recruited to serve as a judge on the Casa de las Americas poetry jury. His trip was a debacle, but it also illustrates the fissures of geopolitics, particularly the Cuban state’s increasing adherence to the Soviet line and cultural nationalism. During the first wave of the Cuban solidarity movement in the United States, the Fair Play for Cuba Committee gathered together leading intellectuals to protest against US meddling in the island’s affairs. Although the group was careful not to explicitly endorse the new regime (anticommunist hawks saw it as Castro’s mouthpiece), most of the writers expressed a positive view of the Revolution. For all of his countercultural explorations, Ginsberg had considered himself “apolitical” for most of the 1950s, but the radicalization of the 1960s and the parallel radicalization of Cuba’s government intrigued him. Ginsberg had already experienced government censorship with the publication of “Howl,” and so he kept the Revolution’s, or any, political regime at an arm’s distance. “I’m NOT down on the Cubans or anti-their revolution,” he wrote in a 1961 lettermanifesto. “It’s just that it’s important to clear, in advance, in front, what I feel about life. Big statements about Viva Fidel are/would be meaningless and just two-dimensional politics” (Ginsberg Project 2019). Ginsberg’s letters of increasing ambivalence toward Cuba did not appear in Lunes de Revolución or Bohemia, even though he continued to be seen favorably on the island. Ginsberg heard Castro’s “Words to Intellectuals” speech and became concerned about the Revolution’s crackdown on free expression. Nevertheless, Ginsberg remained keenly interested in developments on the island and went back to serve as a juror for a literary prize in 1965. After the shutdown of Lunes, the brightest star on the Cuban literary scene was Casa de las Américas (although Bohemia did publish major works of literature, it cannot be considered a strictly “literary” magazine). Casa, as an institution, was under the direction of Haydée Santamaria, a longtime activist within the July 26 Movement. The institution published a journal, awarded prizes, and hosted readings and talks. Casa was—and remains—at the center of Cuban intellectual life. It is a physical space in an art deco building in the Vedado neighborhood of Havana, with room for art exhibitions, seminars, and lectures. More importantly, Casa is a cultural space that cultivates a two-way movement between Cuba and the rest of the Americas, especially the Greater Caribbean. It grants prestigious literary prizes and hosts writers from all over the Americas, bringing them into dialogue with their Cuban peers. Historically, Casa’s promotion of Latin American literature in the early to mid-1960s played a key role in launching the “Boom” of Latin American literature, when novels by Gabriel García Márquez, Mario Vargas Llosa, Julio Cortázar, and others captured the attention—and marketplace— of the global literary world. The place of North American writers in a space primarily dedicated to Latin American solidarity has always been a curious problem for the editors and directors of Casa, and Ginsberg’s tumultuous relationship with the institution illustrates the dilemma. Heading Casa’s eponymous journal was Antón Arrufat, who had been on the periphery of the avant-garde experiments at Lunes de Revolución. Arrufat, along with many of the leading Cuban

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writers of the time (Virgilio Piñera, José Lezama Lima, Reinaldo Arenas, etc.), was gay and not entirely in the closet. In fact, gay male writers were visible enough to inspire another literary magazine, El Puente, to publish works that were distinctly homoerotic. Although El Puente was not a gay journal per se, it attracted the attention of Guevara, who perceived it as a decadent vehicle for homosexuality. Arrufat sought out Ginsberg as a juror for the 1965 Casa de las Americas poetry prize. Ginsberg’s trip to Cuba that year is often misconstrued as Haydée Santamaria’s idea, when, in fact, Santamaria quickly realized that the Beat poet’s presence on the island represented a public relations nightmare, because of Ginsberg’s advocacy for gay visibility. Ginsberg’s short trip to Cuba in 1965 was a fiasco. Ginsberg, by this time proudly and unapologetically out, had heard rumors of homophobia in Cuba and met with two young gay writers associated with El Puente to discuss the topic. The timing of the conversation could not have been worse. In 1965, the Cuban government launched a notorious program called UMAP (Military Units to Help Production) to “rehabilitate” people unconforming to the model of the socialist New Man. UMAP was, in essence, a forced-labor program targeting homosexuals (along with a few religious minorities). Ginsberg, already on the FBI’s watchlist for subversive activities dating to the 1950s, now found himself surveilled by Cuban intelligence. Ginsberg quickly became disenchanted with the political situation he found in Cuba in 1965, but ever the provocateur, he decided to challenge the status quo. When he was not judging the poetry at Casa de las Américas, he traveled around Havana with Manuel Ballagas and José Mario, the editors of El Puente. He told the Cubans that he had laid awake masturbating to the image of Guevara and postulated that Raúl Castro, Fidel’s brother, was gay. At Casa de las Américas, Ginsberg reportedly pinched Haydée Santamaria on the buttocks. Santamaria did her best to protect gay writers in an unofficial capacity, but she quickly tired of Ginsberg’s antics. Ginsberg became even more determined to challenge homophobia and invited Ballagas to his hotel room at the formerly swanky Hotel Riviera. On February 16, 1965, Ginsberg spent the night at Manuel Ballagas’s apartment, and the two had sex. Early in the morning, the pair received a rude awakening. Recalling the incident in a letter to the Chilean poet Nicanor Parra in July 1965, Ginsberg wrote that he “woke up with a knock on my door and 3 milicianos [security agents] entered and scared me … Told me to pack my bags the immigration chief wanted to talk to me, and wouldn’t let me make a phone call … told me they were putting me on the first plane out” (Ginsberg 2015). While the island may have attracted intellectuals, poets, and activists during the first few years of the Revolution, Cuba’s increasing Marxist–Leninist dogmatism of the late 1960s attracted few leading cultural figures, even as other Latin American nations such as Mexico, Argentina, Colombia, and Peru developed vibrant youth movements and fostered a fertile experimental literary scene that came to be known as the “Boom.” Casa de las Américas found itself in a feud with a Parisbased literary magazine, Mundo Nuevo, which threatened to become the new center of Boom writers from 1966 to 1968. Literary stars like Carlos Fuentes and García Márquez published in the decidedly anti-community Mundo Nuevo, but Casa regained its stature as Mundo Nuevo was revealed to be among the journals receiving funding from the CIA-sponsored Congress for Cultural Freedom (Cobb 2010). In a twist that demonstrated the interconnectedness of Cuba and the United States even at a moment of extreme political antagonism, Casa de las Américas relied on, and reproduced, reports from the New York Times and Ramparts to expose the CIA’s role in promoting exiled Cuban writers (including Lunes’s own Cabrera Infante) in a Latin American literary journal.

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The Mundo Nuevo affair led the Cubans to believe that US imperialism tainted all intellectual or cultural exchanges, no matter how couched the efforts were in the rhetoric of “dialogue” or “cultural freedom.” The Cuban writers behind Casa targeted the most prominent living Latin American poet at the time, Pablo Neruda. Anti-communists in the US government had denied Neruda a US visa many times, but in 1966, he received another invitation to a gathering of the PEN Club. With influential policy makers sensing a public relations victory, and with the voice of Arthur Miller advocating for him, Neruda was admitted for entry to the United States. It had required some convincing: Neruda was a member of the Communist Party of Chile and had been vocal in his opposition to US imperialism. Now, however, it was the Cubans who led the efforts to stop Neruda’s visit. Dozens of Cuban intellectuals signed an “Open Letter to Pablo Neruda” published in Granma (formerly Franqui’s Revolución) on August 7, 1966. Any visit to New York, the authors contended, would only serve as propaganda for a government intent on destroying Third World solidarity and revolution. The Cubans and their Marxist allies in Latin America believed any attempt to divorce literature from the revolutionary armed struggle would only provide cover for US imperialists. The letter stated that “For us, Latin Americans: for us, men of the Third World, the road to true coexistence … must pass through guerrilla warfare and national liberation, and not through impossible reconciliation” (“Open Letter” 1966). In this new reality, even The Beatles were considered “ideological diversionism” (Reuters 2000). The lowest point in the culture war came in 1971, in an affair that led to the exile of the poet and essayist Heberto Padilla. Padilla had been awarded a 1968 poetry prize for a manuscript called “Fuera del juego” (Out of Bounds), which lyricized a darkened atmosphere of repression and fear. It was, in the opinion of many Cuban officials, most definitely, outside the Revolution. Whereas other dissident writers were denied space in journals or literary conferences, Padilla was subjected to outright political persecution. He was arrested and held without charge for thirty-seven days. Some feared he was being tortured, and when he emerged, he pronounced a forced self-confession that conjured up images of Stalinism. Among his “crimes”: conceptualizing history as cyclical instead of linear, as dialectical materialist orthodoxy held it to be. The self-confession was so farcical that it horrified previous defenders of the Revolution, such as Jean-Paul Sartre, who pleaded with Castro to rescind the charges against Padilla. The state, and the state alone, would control cultural flows until the late 1980s, when the Revolution, not for the last time, would reinvent itself for a post–Cold War world.

CONCLUSION If the cultural Cold War pitted a Western model protecting artistic freedom versus an Eastern model of politically engaged social realism, Cuba, in many ways a classic Communist state, doesn’t quite fit. The early years of the Revolution fostered wildly experimental Cuban avant-garde figures as well as attracting politically radicalized US writers like C. Wright Mills, and all were welcomed by some sector of the new cultural infrastructure. Cuban writers themselves found inspiration in the poetry of English-language writers such as Allen Ginsberg, the fiction of Ernest Hemingway, and the essays of James Baldwin. The period of 1959 to the middle of 1961 represented a rare moment of genuine cultural exchange across two nations defined by a neocolonial relationship. This moment could not, however, escape the broader conflicts of the Cold War, and the Cuban cultural sphere felt the pressures of an anti-communist campaign that culminated in the Bay of Pigs invasion, and resulted in a political and cultural crackdown.

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Only thirty years after that event did the authorities in charge of state-run cultural institutions start to rethink their siege mentality vis-à-vis North American culture. By the late 1990s, Cuba had begun to rehabilitate many of the gay writers who had invited Ginsberg and others to the island. Castro himself expressed regret for the persecution of writers, while continuing to reaffirm the socialist character of the island’s government. By 2021, Casa de las Américas itself had published a retrospective of its first years with a photo spread featuring the image of Allen Ginsberg discussing poetry with leading Latin American writers in 1965. The best minds of a generation were alive in the pages of a Cuban magazine once again. For US writers, revolutionary Cuba inspired utopian dreams that often veered from nonfiction reportage into tropicalist fantasies. During the “Honeymoon Period” of 1959 to 1961, US writers were encouraged to indulge those fantasies, as writers like C. Wright Mills and Waldo Frank wrote paeans to Castro and unnamed Cuban peasants. Castro himself had always been deeply invested in literature, especially as it pertained to his Ernest Hemingway. He, along with other leaders, understood the power of myth-making in literary journalism, fiction, and poetry. When US writers contributed to the heroic narrative of a plucky band of outsiders ridding a nation of a tyrant, they were welcomed into the fold of the nation. After the honeymoon, when those writers assumed the position of contrarians, cranks, and provocateurs, they found themselves, in the words of Heberto Padilla, kicked out of the game.

WORKS CITED Alea, Tomás Gutierrez (1968), Memorias del subdesarrollo, online video, Havana, Cuba; ICAIC. Allen Ginsberg Project (2019), “Fidel Castro’s Birthday,” The Allen Ginsberg Project, October 26, https://alleng​ insb​erg.org/2011/08/fidel-cast​ros-birth​day/. Baldwin, James (1960), “El Ghetto De Harlem,” Lunes De Revolución (July 4): 9–11. Cabrera Infante, Guillermo (1960), “Los Escritores Contra U.S.A.,” Lunes De Revolución (April 16): 6–7. Candiano, Leonardo (2018), “Fomentar la herejía, combatir el dogma: Polémicas culturales en la Revolución Cubana (1959–1964),” Sociohistórica 41. https://doi.org/10.24215/18521​606e​043. Accessed January 18, 2022. Castro Ruz, Fidel (1961), “ ‘Palabras a Los Intelectuales,’ ” speech delivered June 16, 23, and 30. http://www. cuba.cu/gobie​rno/discur​sos/1961/esp/f3006​61e.html. Cobb, Russell (2010), “Promoting Literature in the Most Dangerous Area in the World: The Cold War, the Boom, and Mundo Nuevo,” in Greg Barnhisel and Catherine Turner (eds.), Pressing the Fight: Print, Propaganda, and the Cold War, 231–50, Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. “Cuba Trials, Executions Trials Necessary, Hemingway Says” (1959), Richmond Times-Dispatch (March 18): 1A. “El Negro en la literatura negra” (1959), Lunes de Revolucion 1 (March 23). Fay, Stephen (2011), “Liminal Visitors to an Island on the Edge: Sartre and Ginsberg in Revolutionary Cuba,” Studies in Travel Writing 15(4): 407–25, https://doi.org/10.1080/13645​145.2011.617​969. Feldman, Andrew (2019), Ernesto: The Untold Story of Hemingway in Revolutionary Cuba, Brooklyn, NY: Melville House. Fuschini, Germán Alburquerque (2001), “El caso Padilla y las redes de escritores latinoamericanos,” Revista Universum 16: 307–20. Ginsberg, Allen (2015), “Beat Reporter,” Harper’s (March 12). https://harp​ers.org/arch​ive/2015/04/beat-repor​ ter/. Accessed January 18, 2022.

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Hutchisson, James M. (2016), Ernest Hemingway: A New Life, University Park: Penn State University Press. Johnson, Peter (1988), “Cuban Academic Publishing and Self-Perceptions,” Cuban Studies 18: 103–22. Luis, William (2002), “Exhuming Lunes de Revolucion,” CR: The New Centennial Review 2(2): 253–83. doi:10.1353/ncr.2002.0031. Luis, William (2010), Lunes De Revolución: Literatura y Cultura En Los Primeros años De La Revolución Cubana, Madrid: Verbum. Luxenberg, Alan H. (1988), “Did Eisenhower Push Castro into the Arms of the Soviets?” Journal of Interamerican Studies and World Affairs 30(1): 37–71. https://doi.org/10.2307/165​789. Accessed May 15, 2021. Matthews, Herbert (1957), “Cuban Rebel Is Visited in Hideout,” New York Times (February 24): 1. Mills, C. Wright (1961), “Escucha, Yanqui,” Bohemia (February 5): 52–3. Moore, Robin (2001) “¿Revolución con Pachanga? Dance Music in Socialist Cuba,” Canadian Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Studies / Revue canadienne des études latino-américaines et caraïbes 26(52): 151–77. “Open Letter to Pablo Neruda” (1966), World Outlook (September 9): 28. Perrottet, Tony (2020), Cuba Libre!: Che, Fidel, and the Improbable Revolution That Rocked the World, New York: Blue Rider Press. Reuters (2000), “From One Revolutionary to Another,” New York Times (December 9). https://www.nyti​mes. com/2000/12/09/world/from-one-revolu​tion​ary-to-anot​her.html. Accessed January 18, 2022. Sanchez, Yoani (2017), “Bohemia, Latin America’s Oldest Magazine, Destroyed by Censorship,” HuffPost (December 7). https://www.huffp​ost.com/entry/latin-ameri​cas-old​est-mag_b​_831​747. Accessed January 18, 2022. Stevenson, Adlai (1958), “Stevenson Hable Sobre Rusia,” Bohemia (November): 308. Teel, Leonard Ray (2015), Reporting the Cuban Revolution: How Castro Manipulated American Journalists, Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press. Treviño, A. Javier (2017), C. Wright Mills and the Cuban Revolution: An Exercise in the Art of Sociological Imagination, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. “Una posición” (1959), Lunes De Revolución 1 (March 23): 1.

FURTHER READING Alea, Tomás Gutiérrez, Edmundo Desnoes, and Michael Chanan (1990), Memories of Underdevelopment, Rutgers, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Diez Años De La Revista Casa De Las Américas, 1960–1970 (1970), Habana: Instituto Del Libro. Frank, Waldo David (1961), Cuba: Prophetic Island, New York: Marzani & Munsell. Gronbeck-Tedesco (2015), Cuba, the United States, and Cultures of the Transnational Left, 1930–1975, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Luis, William (2010), Lunes De Revolución: Literatura y Cultura En Los Primeros años De La Revolución Cubana, Madrid: Verbum. Matthews, Herbert Lionel, and Fidel Castro. Fidel Castro. Guardian, 2007. Mills, C. Wright (1961), Listen, Yankee! The Revolution in Cuba, New York: Ballantine Books. Padilla, Heberto (1998), Fuera De Juego: Edición Conmemorativa 1968–1998, Miami, FL: Ediciones Universal. Saunders, Frances Stonor (2001), The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters, New York: New Press. Tietchen, Todd F. (2017), The Cubalogues: Beat Writers in Revolutionary Havana, Gainesville: University Press of Florida.

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CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

Struggles for “Cultural Freedom” in Cold War India: Fostering a Critical Spirit in the Liberal Journals of the 1950s–1970s LAETITIA ZECCHINI

During the Cold War, literature became globalized as it was used as a “soft weapon” of sorts to win hearts and minds. A “vast arsenal of cultural weapons” (Saunders [1999] 2013: 2) such as books, festivals, conferences, exhibitions, journals, radio, film and book programs then disseminated this literature in order to counter, depending on which side one was on, the opposing side’s “propaganda.”1 Transnational literary circulation was, at least in part, conditioned by powerful ideologies that ensured the publication, translation, distribution, and consecration of certain writers. Many books that circulated on a global scale were deemed ideologically correct or compatible by either bloc—even digestible, since “digests” were an important format through which literatures of the world were disseminated and consumed. The impressive range of cultural and literary resources channeled to press the fight (Barnhisel and Turner 2010) had a tremendous impact not only on both sides of the Iron Curtain but in what we now designate as the “Global South.” As Monica Popescu has argued, battles for intellectual allegiance (and intellectual emancipation) were, there as well, fought “at penpoint” (Popescu 2020). The Cold War was one of the shaping elements of decolonizing struggles, and so with that background in mind, we must consider afresh stories of postcolonial literatures and literary/print cultures. India especially, because of its proclamation of neutrality and nonalignment, became a strategic battlefield for the “competitive courtship” (Sabin 2002: 139) of the two superpowers. The United The inaugural conference of the Indian branch of the Congress for Cultural Freedom (ICCF) in Bombay noted, for instance, the dangers of “totalitarian propaganda being spread in India through foreign subsidized literature” (ICCF Proceedings 1951: 59). Yet the ICCF itself was actually singled out by Nehru as a front group “covering for American covert propaganda activities in India” (Pullin 2011: 378). 1

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States in the 1950s, which (correctly) felt that India was in fact leaning toward the Soviets, devoted significant energy and money to woo Indian intellectuals. Yet, although famed Hindi writer Mohan Rakesh (1925–1972) talked about his country as having been “a chess board … between the United States’ ideologists and the USSR’s ideologists” (Rakesh 1973: 25), Indian writers were far from mere puppets or “pawns” (a term used by Rakesh) caught between the “American Shadow” (Natarajan 1952) and “Moscow’s Hand” (Sager 1966), nor were they mere passive recipients of ideologies, forms, and terms dictated from outside. Some of the intellectual spaces whose genealogy is a direct product of America’s “courtship”—the journals and the conferences that fell under the umbrella of the Indian branch of the Congress for Cultural Freedom (ICCF), for instance—helped many writers clear a space for themselves and their writing outside of expected alignments, and give voice to their own struggles. These spaces were far less univocal, directive, or regulated than commonly assumed. They served as forums of debate and platforms of critical intervention where writers expressed their ideas about decolonization, independence, culture, or ideology; shaped their own versions and understandings of liberalism, individualism, and modernism; and wrestled with the meanings, implications, and practice of freedom. “Cultural freedom” was an imperative in India at the time, and it was threatened not only by communism and imperialism but by forces of repression and authoritarianism in India itself. CCF-sponsored journals often became venues for Indian writers to express their concerns about these threats and champion cultural freedom against its many (local, national, and international) opponents. Recovering and contextualizing the significance of these struggles is one of the objectives of this essay. The liberal lineage of the Cultural Cold War in the Indian subcontinent has been largely overlooked compared to its communist-leaning counterpart and the well-documented “Marxist cultural movement in India” (Pradhan 1979). Countless neglected figures, documents, and publications associated with this history need to be recovered. It is also essential to reconsider postcolonial Indian modernisms in the Cold War era, when “modernism” was championed by the so-called “free world” and redefined as an expression of Cold War liberalism (Barnhisel 2015) and when significant postindependence Indian writers not only self-identified as modernists but proclaimed their affiliations with American culture, including its counterculture.2 What’s more, many key modernist writers and editors in various Indian languages such as Nissim Ezekiel in English, Dilip Chitre in English and Marathi, or Agyeya in Hindi gravitated to the constellation of the ICCF and were active in the journals it sponsored. If Bombay appears as a focal point of this essay, and the principal location from which some of this history can be recovered, it’s partly because the city was a springboard for activities of the ICCF (which was founded in Bombay) and because many of the journals discussed below (such as Freedom First or Imprint, and Quest especially) were published from Bombay as well. But the city was also a cradle for cross-cultural exchanges and creativity in literature, the visual arts, architecture, cinema, theatre, advertising; a breeding ground for modernisms in India; and the center of Indian publishing in the postindependence period.

Bombay seemed to have so much of “America” in it, including jazz and blues (Zecchini 2014). For a discussion of these American affiliations and an attempt to reconsider Indian “modernisms” in a Cold War context also see Zecchini (2020). 2

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TRANSNATIONAL LITERARY TRAFFIC IN INDIA “the strange fruits of cross-pollination” (Dilip Chitre) Of the different governmental agencies and government-supported organizations that promoted this vast “cultural arsenal” in India, two were particularly important: the Indian Committee for Cultural Freedom (ICCF) and the United States Information Service (USIS). The ICCF was founded in the aftermath of the founding of the Congress for Cultural Freedom in Berlin in 1950 and of the first Asian conference sponsored by the journal Thought in Bombay in 19513 (see Coleman 1989 and Saunders [1999] 2013). The Congress, indirectly and covertly funded by the CIA through a network of foundations (such as the Ford, Farfield, and Asia Foundations, all extremely active in India), was especially influential through the magazines it encouraged or sponsored across the world (Scott-Smith and Lerg 2017). In India, the ICCF held meetings and seminars, sponsored publications, distributed books and pamphlets, and published cultural journals such as Quest (which was supported by a Ford Foundation grant until 1971) and the more straightforwardly political Freedom First.4 The CCF’s “Office of Asian Affairs,” headed by the English-Marathi writer, critic, and editor Prabhakar Padhye,5 also opened in Delhi and was tasked with the organization of regional conferences, such as one in Rangoon in 1955, where forty intellectuals from across South, East, and Southeast Asia came together to discuss cultural freedom.6 USIS (also known as USIA) was founded in 1953 with a mandate to build understanding of and confidence in the United States (Sussman 1973). It bought foreign rights to American titles, subsidized publishers and translations, and, like the ICCF, organized lectures, seminars, and conferences. It also took over the management of overseas American libraries and cultural institutes.7 USIS founded its first Indian “Information Center” in 1943 in Calcutta, and a year later opened an “American Cultural Center” in Bombay. “No capital city lacks its USIS or Palace of Culture,” wrote English-born and Bengal-based scholar David McCutchion (Quest January– March 1960: 12), in an essay where he criticized the political and institutional (mis)uses of a globalized culture. Although his irony is inescapable, countless Indian writers have testified to the formative influence of these foreign centers and their libraries, which often served as windows to the worlds of other literatures. The poet Arvind Krishna Mehrotra, for instance, remembers looking like a “hungry child” at the USIS library books in Bombay—“to my 19-year-old eyes a slice of America that I could not get enough of ”—and occasionally stealing books from the library.8 Where else, reminisced the poet and critic Adil Jussawalla, “could we find certain poets, certain Thought was a weekly journal on the arts (and politics) started in 1949 from New Delhi and initiated by British art collector Martin Russell. Poets Agyeya and Keshav Malik were its first literary editors, and many major Indian writers and critics wrote for Thought. 4 Freedom First, subtitled “the liberal monthly,” was founded by Masani in 1952. Both Quest and Freedom First have been digitalized: http://www.freed​omfi​rst.in/defa​ult.aspx. A selection of texts published in Quest has also been brought out (Futehally, Prabhala, and Sattar 2011). 5 A regular contributor to ICCF journals, Prabhakar Padhye edited many ICCF publications and founded the “Center for Indian Writers” that brought out the largely forgotten journal Indian Writing Today (1967–71). 6 See Cultural Freedom in Asia: Report of the Rangoon Conference (1956). 7 On the USIS libraries and more generally the overseas book program of the US government, see Dan Lacy (1954). 8 Personal email. This habit of pocketing books from the “American Cultural Center” was shared by other writers. Arun Kolatkar, for instance, describes the piles of books lying around him, and looks “guiltily at the bald eagle / at the usis sticker on the selected poems of Theodore Roethke the book is 30 years overdue” (unpublished papers). 3

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novelists, certain critics, certain films?” Jussawalla also recalled the importance of America’s PL 480 programs, which brought affordable editions of American books to India (Nerlekar and Zecchini 2017: 228–9).9 American magazines such as Life, Time, and National Geographic, as well as Reader’s Digest (whose first Indian edition was published in 1954), were widely read in India even before the 1950s. But other magazines inseparable from the Cold War arrived on the scene, such as Perspectives USA (1952–6), headed by New Directions Books founder James Laughlin. Distributed in American Embassies across the world, like Quest, it was initially sponsored by a major grant from the Ford Foundation.10 USIS also produced Span, a lavishly illustrated journal focusing on India and the United States and still published by the American Embassy in Delhi. Describing itself in the inaugural issue as a “span of words and images to link our common hopes, our common delights and pleasures, our common goals and values,” its articles highlighted America’s achievements in science, technology, public policy, and education, as well as in cultural, artistic, and literary matters (November 1960: 4). The February 1969 issue, for example, fully devoted to American magazines, emphasized the sheer number and variety of these magazines that not only cover “every subject” but also enjoy “the fullest freedom to comment and criticize.” These magazines—Span explicitly included—are the “true mirror of a free, democratic society” (4–6). “Freedom” was obviously one of the central catchwords enlisted by the United States to rally against communism. The Congress for Cultural Freedom is hence described, in the first issue of Quest (1955), as an “association of free men bound together by their devotion to the cause of freedom” (italics mine). In many ways, the efflorescence of art, literature, and modernism (redefined during the Cold War as the embodiment of “freedom,” with its valorization of individualism framed as the best defense against totalitarianism), like the efflorescence of magazines of the “free world,” was used as evidence of the alleged freedom enjoyed by Western intellectuals, artists, and citizens. This freedom alone was said to enable their creativity. Another Indian magazine in the USIS-CIA constellation was the monthly Imprint, started in 1961 from Bombay, which aimed at publishing “digested,” condensed, or serialized versions of “the newest as well as the best” books of the world, thereby providing Indian readers with four or five best sellers within the pages of a single inexpensive journal issue. In order to overcome nationwide distribution problems, Imprint solicited subscriptions by direct mail and met with immediate curiosity (there were more than 20,000 subscriptions to the first issue). The global simultaneity of literary experience engendered by the Cold War, as well as the speed and scale of the process, has been highlighted by Andrew Rubin (2012). This excitement, palpable (and staged) in Imprint, comes precisely from the thrill of taking part in an almost simultaneous global reading experience, and enjoying books in India at the same time as readers in other parts of the world. The idea of enjoyment is key. Like the Reader’s Digest (or Span), Imprint’s aim was not to unsettle or provoke but to feed readers with “moving” or “exciting” stories that provided

“PL 480” commonly refers to America’s wheat loans to India in the 1950s. India paid back its debts in local currency, and part of the interest on the loan was “returned” to India in the form of Indian editions of American books, also used to expand the collection of libraries, universities, and other educational institutions in India. 10 James Laughlin wanted the journal to be purely centered on matters of literature and aesthetics. The first issue of Perspectives USA distributed in US Embassies included Faulkner’s Nobel speech, poems by William Carlos Williams, and translations by Marianne Moore. On Perspectives USA see especially Barnhisel (2015), and on the Ford Foundation, see Leela Gandhi (2001). 9

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“enjoyable” and “stimulating” reading (terms that recurred in the pages of Imprint): to delight, entertain, and educate. The inaugural issue, for instance, included the first part of Trustee for the Toolroom, a novel by Nevil Shute, introduced as “the prince of storytellers,” whose preferred theme is said to be the “ordeal of an ordinary man who is plunged into extraordinary circumstances but emerges with his personal values unshaken” (April 1961: 9). You can’t get much more mainstream than that! Since the journal aimed at publishing so-called best sellers of the world, most of the writers present in the journal had received earlier critical acclaim. When first novels were featured in Imprint, they were authored by fairly conventional and well-known political or cultural figures. Of course, the literature circulated by Imprint was digestible in another sense. Effortlessly consumed, it was also meant to be an unobtrusive vehicle of ideology. The Australian journalist Phillip Knightley, briefly responsible for condensing books for Imprint in the 1960s, later realized that many of the books he condensed had a subtle “pro-American slant” (1997: 87–91).11 This may explain why Adil Jussawalla chose the metaphor of castration to deride the curtainfiltered or state-sanctioned literature circulated in India: “What filters through the curtain is only fit for nothing but the international shit-pot” (1972). In the same article (“Boys and Girls in Purdah”), he dismissed the material disseminated by international agencies like USIS “as simply art with its balls removed,” and argued that in a “continuingly Anglo-American colony like India” the “gutwrenching and the morally painful” (which also stands for a radicalism defined both in political and aesthetic terms) are kept at bay. The article also paints a devastatingly ironic portrait of Jussawalla’s students coming home from college and finding “Daddy reading Life and Mummy reading Span.” Jussawalla’s diagnosis in fact echoes the work of Serge Guilbaut (1983) and Barnhisel (2015), both of whom have argued that by using modernism (known as abstract expressionism in the visual arts) as a cultural–diplomatic weapon, American cultural authorities also purged modernism of its radicalism. By recovering and taming that hallowed medium of modernism, the little magazine, they also turned the avant-garde into the establishment. The Cold War did contribute to a certain co-optation of dissent and, perhaps, a “flattening of literature,” to use Eric Bennett’s expression on the Cold War American creative writing programs (2015; also see Bennett’s contribution to the present volume).12 What’s more, the formidable publishing artillery that ensured the publication or distribution of certain writers in India did not always help sustain local book industries and publishing infrastructures, since many of the books and part of the knowledge were imported from abroad.13 Thanks to ICCF and USIS programs,

Knightley’s job was also to write short stories of American folk heroes (such as Davy Crocket or Casey Jones) in part to counter the beautifully produced Soviet children’s books that flooded the Indian market. 12 Bennett focuses on the Iowa Writers Workshop. Significant modernist Indian writers such as Dilip Chitre, Arvind Krishna Mehrotra, Adil Jussawalla, Jayanta Mahapatra, or Nirmal Verma participated in Iowa’s International Writing Program. 13 See especially Philip Altbach, Publishing in India, An Analysis (1975), and Sarah Brouillette, “UNESCO and the Book in the Developing World,” Representations (2014): 33–54. This diagnosis is in fact echoed by the sociologist Edward Shils, principal adviser of the CCF on the Indian program, who published his “The Culture of the Indian Intellectual” in serialized form in Quest. Since Macaulay’s time, he argued, and although the names have changed, “the distribution of attention” has remained the same and India remains an “intellectually dependent country”: “Keats, Shelley, Byron are recalled with distant honour. T. S. Eliot, Wystan Auden and Ezra Pound replace them. Dickens and Thackeray are supplanted by Aldous Huxley, Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, Sartre, Camus, Mann, and Moravia” (Quest January–March 1960: 37). Interestingly, he also seems to hold CCF’s journals like Encounter (which brings a “continuous flow” of new names) accountable for this dependency. 11

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books like Czeslaw Milosz’s Captive Mind, George Orwell’s Animal Farm, and Richard Crossman’s influential anti-Communist anthology The God That Failed were widely translated in different Indian languages. ICCF-affiliated and nonaffiliated journals reprinted anti-Communist articles such as Sydney Hook’s “Bread and Freedom,” which ran in Freedom First’s inaugural 1952 issue, and was subsequently translated and published by the ICCF in newspapers in Marathi, Tamil, Malayalam, and other Indian languages. Likewise, many of the essays published by non-Indian writers (such as Arthur Koestler, Sidney Hook, Stephen Spender, Henry Miller, Denis de Rougemont, Raymond Aron, Paul Tabori, etc.) in the first two decades of Quest’s existence belong to the intellectual constellation of the Congress, and Quest, like other CCF journals, regularly reprinted articles from sister publications Encounter, Transition, Quadrant, Der Monat, and Soviet Survey. And yet, I would argue that the allegedly “defanged” (Barnhisel 2015) or trivialized Cold War literature is only one side of the story. Even the book reviews published in Imprint, for instance, signal something else. From 1961 to 1968, they were written by Nissim Ezekiel—prominent figure of Bombay modernisms, canonical Indian poet, and prolific English-language critic, who became the first editor of Quest (and later its reviews editor), and also briefly edited Freedom First. If his reviews (forty to fifty a year, on a wide range of subjects and genres) varied in length, the longer ones were on books that had provoked his admiration or irritation, and many were actually far from aligned, consensual, or innocuous. For the inaugural issue of Imprint, Ezekiel reviewed CCF founding member Arthur Koestler’s The Lotus and the Robot in an extraordinary exercise in critical demolition.14 He lambasted Koestler’s intellectual “impoverishment,” his hyperbolic statements, his biased and prejudiced views, his pedantic details “inflated” into insulting generalizations: “Everything in India and in Japan is more something than in any other country … here is the knock-out blow, ‘Indians hate what they love and love what they hate’—here it comes— ‘but more so than any other people’” (italics ours) (April 1961: 159–60). Ezekiel seemed to have all the independence he needed to select the books he wanted to write about and admitted that he chose some books solely because he would like them to be read. He used this critical space not only to champion (or castigate) certain writers but also to sharpen his own ideas about literature, criticism, and style: nuanced and thorough; specific and limpid; weary of sentimentalization, simplification, or abstractions; and devoid of stylistic flourishes. Hence, while Rubin eloquently shows how “formidable structures of cultural domination” (2012: 51) have shaped a whole mode and ideology of world literature during the Cold War, and while it is indeed essential to consider the means of literary reproduction, transmission, and translation “by which a culture reproduces itself,” the CCF’s journals and activities did not only reflect or reinforce these structures of domination and authority, nor did they stifle “alternative and dissenting discourses” (Rubin, ibid). Considering the story of transnational literary circulations at the time purely through the lens of subjection and manipulation, propaganda and compromise would be tremendously reductive.15 These cultural traffics were also transformative and enabling. The Cold War, as Justin Quinn has argued in a different context (2015), brought into unprecedented contact and conversation a

he book was in fact swiftly banned in India, in part for its negative portrayal of Gandhi. T As scholars have more recently started to acknowledge, emphasizing the relative independence of many of the postcolonial or Third World intellectuals engaged in these projects. See Burke (2016); Iber (2015); Kalliney (2015); Pullin (2011); ScottSmith and Lerg (2017). 14 15

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wide range of writers and literatures that were changed in the process. Indian modernisms, for one, were crucially nurtured by the transnational and translational traffics, the immense broadening of literary horizons, made possible by the Cold War (Zecchini 2020, 2022). In his preface to his groundbreaking anthology of modern Marathi poetry, Dilip Chitre, famed modernist poet and member of the executive committee of the ICCF,16 credited the influx of foreign literature on an unprecedented scale and the “paperback revolution” for the ebullient creativity of the time.17 Cross-pollination between literatures of the world and Indian literatures (both classic and modern) “bears strange fruits,” as he suggested. From this “fantastic conglomeration” of cross-influences and clashing realities emerged “truly major poets” who have “hit upon the new and crashed into the unknown” (1967). It is worth mentioning that this anthology, prefaced by Prabhakar Padhye, was edited by the ICCF (under its new moniker, the “International Association for Cultural Freedom”).18 As Jussawalla remarked in his review, the poets in the anthology were often deemed violent and irreligious (one of them, B. S. Mardhekar, was even tried for obscenity), and their emergence “shook the Palgravianbased academicism of Marathi poetry to the roots” (Quest April–June 1968: 108–10). In addition to promoting conventional anti-communism, Cold War–era American cultural organizations were hence funding or clearing a space for radical or dissenting Indian voices. Even Arvind Krishna Mehrotra, one of the “firebrands” of the 1960s and 1970s poetry scene, described the USIS as the place to visit for aspiring Indian writers with an editorial project in mind and no cash!19 Journals like Quest also supported, both in English and in translation, some of the most important Indian writers and intellectuals of the time, who used its pages to publish their creative texts and hone their critical skills in essays and reviews.20 The 1955 inaugural issue, for instance, included not only a long self-portrait by founding CCF figure (and editor of Tempo Presente) Ignazio Silone but also iconic figures of Indian modernisms: the very first published poems in English by EnglishMarathi poet Arun Kolatkar and reproductions of drawings by M. F. Husain.21 Hence, both the

From the late 1960s until the Emergency, when Dilip Chitre left India for Iowa, he was also assistant to A. G. Shah, director of Programmes in India for the CCF. 17 Adil Jussawalla also gives a vivid picture of the reading and print culture in Bombay in the 1960s, recalling for instance not only the importance of the “corner-lending libraries” on the streets of the metropolis for Indian and foreign paperbacks and castaway journals but also, on the other side of the Cold War divide, the Soviet book fairs and the events organized by the House of Soviet Culture (Zecchini interview 2018). 18 The CCF changed its name after CIA’s involvement was exposed in 1966–7. See then editor of Quest, Abu Sayeed Ayyub’s defensive “Instead of an Editorial” where he not only asserted his ignorance of this “wholly repellent association” with the CIA but also stood by the values of the journal, which, he argued, had “always been free of outside control” (Quest July– September 1967). 19 Mehrotra opened the first letter he wrote to poet and small press founder Howard McCord, with the following line: “It was six months ago that I went to the USIS, Delhi and met R. R. Brooks who is in charge of its cultural side and asked him for funds to help me take out an anthology of Indian students writing in English” (October 16, 1966). 20 Creative writers like Asha Bhende, Gieve Patel, Mulk Raj Anand, Kamala Das, Buddhadeva Bose, Krishna Baldev Vaid, Arun Kolatkar, Indira Sant, Amrita Pritam, Jibananda Das, P. S. Rege, A. K. Ramanujan, Eunice de Souza, Agha Shahid Ali, Adil Jussawalla, Agyeya, Dom Moraes, Keki Daruwalla, Georges Keyt, Gauri Deshpande, Farrukh Dhondy, Anita Desai, Kamleshwar, U. R. Ananthamurthy, Kiran Nagarkar, Keki Daruwalla, Dilip Chitre, etc. In the pages of Quest you also find the names of important future critical voices and scholars: Ashish Nandy, Sudhir Chandra, Alok Bhalla, Meenakshi and Sujeet Mukherjee, Mushirul Hasan, etc. 21 M. F. Husain was already a fairly celebrated artist at the time, who had conducted his first solo exhibition (1952), but he wasn’t the modernist icon (and arguably the most famous Indian painter abroad) he became later, while Kolatkar would only become canonical after his death in 2004. 16

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worldliness made possible by the Cold War, and sometimes American indirect patronage, gave some of these Indian writers the means to develop their voices and the possibility to bring out texts without obvious publishing outlets. Ezekiel, for instance, noted the “disbelief and disdain” editors expressed about Indian poetry in English when he went from publisher to publisher with his manuscripts or “looked in vain for review space.”22 Quest, Imprint, and Thought provided him and many other writers with that space. These journals were also a venue for other minor or marginal forms of Indian writing at the time: long book, film or art reviews, modern Indian poetry in English, texts translated from Indian languages, and many “new” or modernist voices. Finally, it is important to understand that the institutional co-optation of culture in the Cold War was often seen as the persistence, in postcolonial contexts, of colonial processes of cultural imperialism. This could, in reaction, trigger a quest for self-determination and self-expression, for untrivialized or unofficial literatures and countercultures (Zecchini 2020). Jussawalla’s “Boys and Girls in Purdah” precisely illustrates the struggle on the part of many Indian writers at the time to escape “Little Englands and Little Americas.” And this struggle was all the more acute for those who wrote in the erstwhile “colonial” language. In the same text Jussawalla called for the “living acid” of literature and language to dissolve the curtain, and for Indian writers to reject the dreadfully “moralist,” “correct,” or trivialized English idiom often used in India. If Quest or Thought were not particularly or consistently “acidic,” a journal like Quest, as Ezekiel made clear in its first editorial, did aim at achieving a “high standard of thought and style” (1955: 1) or, in the words of Achal Prabhala, at “creating a writership” (with Vazquez 2011).23 The journal was meant to be a “bulwark against further deterioration of the English language” (cited in Coleman 1989: 92). Raising the standards of Indian publishing, Indian criticism, and of course of English (critical and creative) prose and style in India were paramount objectives.

ARCHIVES OF MINORITY—STANDING UP TO AUTHORITY, RESISTING CENSORSHIP If these literary traffics and publications do not fit neatly into narratives of domination, it’s also because I would argue that these so-called “archives of authority” (Rubin) could in fact partly represent “archives of minority” in India. Journals affiliated with the ICCF remained “little” in their limited distribution and readership, and so did the ICCF itself, whose membership was equally limited. The ideological sympathies of most postcolonial Indian intellectuals and newspaper editors at the time in fact leaned toward Marxism and even the Soviets.24 J. S. Saxena, a member of the ICCF and regular contributor to Quest and Thought, referred to the liberal intellectual in India as a “small and insignificant minority” (Quest July–September 1959). What’s more, if a journal such as Quest did nurture modernism and help “make modern Indian poetry part of contemporary Indian culture,” as Bruce King suggested

“ Poetry in the Time of Tempests” first published in Times of India in 1997 (in Anklaseria and Rodrigues 2008: 222). Linguistic correction (if not correctness) was one of the chief concerns of Quest. The more radical, anti-commercial and antiestablishment “little magazines” that flourished in English and other Indian languages from the 1950s to 1970s at the hands of writers like Mehrotra in English or Ashok Shahane in Marathi were the privileged medium of the avant-garde (see Zecchini 2020 and 2022 for a comparison of these “little” magazines). 24 See, for instance, McGarr (2014). 22 23

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insightfully (2001: 15), this modernism was everything but the “dominant tradition” it came to represent in the West. Modernism remained a fraught, even a contested terrain. Not only was it widely perceived as a Western product but cultural nationalism was virtually required of writers and artists during the struggle against colonial rule and in the decades following independence. As Yashodhara Dalmia has claimed, the powerful individualistic possibilities of modernism could be considered a betrayal in India (2001: 47). But in their dismissal of dominant, mainstream, or even nationalist modes, this minority was also dissenting. In fact, “opposition to authority” (which, Quest asserted, “cannot exist in a totalitarian state”) and opposition to all those authoritarian forces that aimed at encroaching on the independence of the writer or artist were what liberalism often seemed to stand for in the eyes of most Indian intellectuals associated with the ICCF. They would no doubt have recognized themselves in parts of the “Freedom Manifesto,” which defined freedom as both “the right to say no” and the right to express opinions differing from those of rulers.25 If American cultural diplomacy and the CCF in particular championed the idea of (cultural and artistic) autonomy, as an emblem of ideological freedom and a bulwark against totalitarianism, Third World/postcolonial writers also used this ideal of autonomy as an instrument for emancipation and a weapon to confront or criticize power.26 Amanda Anderson’s understanding of liberalism as a “situated response to historical challenges” (2016: 21) seems particularly relevant for Indian writers and intellectuals. These challenges certainly included not only communism and fascism but also repression and authoritarianism local to India. Hence, although it would be difficult to maintain the position, like Rajat Neogy on the journal Transition, that Quest was “not published with an eye to Cold War interests,” yet the priority and function of the journal was indeed to discuss matters of Indian relevance for discussion in an Indian context (Hall 1967: 314).27 “Cultural freedom,” which cannot be reduced to a doctrinal issue or to anti-communism, was unquestionably one of the most relevant—and urgent—matters in India at the time. For many Indian writers, artists, and intellectuals in the 1950s and 1960s, this cultural freedom was imperative to complete the political freedom that had been achieved ten years earlier. As Jayaprakash Narayan argued, “political freedom was only a means to an end,” the end being a “fuller life to the people,” which he connected to “cultural freedom” (CCF 1956: 16). This perceived continuity with the anti-colonial freedom struggle was all the more important since many of the foundational members of the ICCF in India had been prominent figures of the “Quit India” movement against the British. These freedom fighters saw their anti-communism as consistent with their earlier anti-colonialism, and ICCF publications in the 1950s were alert to the threats posed by what they called a “new imperialism” (including by the Indian state). Cultural freedom was also crucial in thwarting both present and future suppression of other freedoms. In his initial statement at the inaugural ICCF conference, Agyeya explained that the he “Freedom Manifesto” is reprinted in Coleman (1989: 249–51). T As Scott Smith (2002) and Bennett (2015), among other scholars, make clear, however, the idea of artistic autonomy and the championing of a literature of radical individuality was itself an ideology. Kalliney (2015) also shows that the idea of modernist autonomy was repurposed by postcolonial African intellectuals to declare their freedom from colonial and postcolonial bondage, and from Cold War alignments. 27 “I would like to repeat that the magazine is not published with an eye to Cold War interests. Our primary aim and function is to discuss matters of African relevance for discussion in an African context” (Naogy in Hall 1967: 314). 25 26

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Congress had been convened in order for Indian intellectuals to express their “joint resolve to assert, preserve and enhance the freedoms they had attained” (ICCF Proceedings: 284, italics mine). And it is essential to keep in mind that, as Jussawalla remarked, people who grew up in postindependence India were constantly faced with restrictions and bans: “It was a culture of banning things, whether it was films, or writing, or even foreign-imported goods” (Zecchini 2018). This censorship, moreover, was closely linked to a “suspicion” of purportedly alien or decadent foreignness, foreign culture, or foreign art. According to these writers, asserting, preserving, and defending “cultural freedom” was a condition of India’s survival—at least, of its survival as a democracy. In Quest in 1956, Ezekiel asked what exactly do we mean when we call a society free? … The question … cannot be answered merely by asserting that the communist society is the perfect antithesis of the free society. … We must probe, doubt, question, question, question. As soon as freedom is taken for granted, it is already diminished. Before freedom is destroyed a state of mind must be popular to which freedom does not matter … Some other value is more important—the welfare of all, security, a national emergency … there may be more censorship in India during the years to come and it will not be an accident. (Quest April–May 1956: 3–4) Later, in his 1997 essay “Poetry in the Time of Tempests,” Ezekiel acknowledged that part of the answer to the pressing question that haunted him at the cusp of independence (“To be free: what did it mean?”) only came to him during the National Emergency imposed by Prime Minister Indira Gandhi from 1975 to 1977. The Emergency gave her authority to lead by decree and resulted in the suspension of civil liberties and constitutional rights, censorship of the press, and the mass arrests of political dissidents (including Jayaprakash Narayan) throughout the country. As Ezekiel suggested, the Emergency taught him that freedom was never to be taken for granted: “Even in Independent India, we would always have to be on the alert for the insidious ways in which those in power try to suppress the inconvenient voices from the margin, the angry voices of the dispossessed and even the quiet voice of poetry” (in Anklaseria and Rodrigues 2008: 222). The opposition of leading ICCF figures such as Narayan and Masani to Indira Gandhi, and of journals such as Freedom First and Quest to the Emergency, shows the relevance and urgency of these struggles for cultural freedom in the Indian context at the time. In these journals, recurring threats to free speech and attacks to free press in India were in fact recorded with increasing alarm,28 and often correlated, thanks to excerpted articles, “fillers” or quotations taken from world publications, with attacks outside the Indian context. An issue of Quest headlined by a piece on “Killing the Press” in India, for instance, opened with long excerpts from The Gulag Archipelago and an editorial by A. B. Shah warning that “totalitarianism comes in many shades” (March-April 1974: 8). What was the point in combating totalitarianism globally, if you could not fight (and acknowledge) it locally?

Especially from the early 1970s onward. See the November–December 1971 issue of Quest, with the title “Right to Freedom” on its cover and an editorial about the importance of “criticism”; the July–August 1972 issue on “the tragedy of the Indian Press,” with a cover featuring Indira Gandhi carving her own sculpture; the July–August 1974 issue on “The Statesman Case” with the title “What Price a Free Press?”; the March–April 1976 issue with an editorial “On Censorship,” etc. 28

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“THE ALTERNATIVE IS A CRITICAL SPIRIT” In his 1963 essay “Censorship and the Writer,” Ezekiel throws additional light on the vital role of writers, editors, and journals in exercising and sustaining cultural freedom: Writers must act as a pressure group in favour of freedom … Since such agreement cannot be assumed or taken for granted, it becomes essential for writers to debate it among themselves, freely and frequently … I would like to make a plea here for a persistent debate of this kind … It clears the ground for action against censorship in all its forms, without which specific freedoms for the writer are not likely to be conceded.29 Since, as Ezekiel believed, political reaction and cultural repression are two faces of the same coin, “the alternative” is a critical spirit (in Anklaseria 2008: 74) that was cultivated in editorial spaces where books and ideas could be discussed and debated, where contributors could openly disagree, and where a “ferment of ideas” could displace the “coexistence of ideologies” (Quest February– March 1957: 9). The promotion of “inconvenient,” “angry,” or marginal voices and of “vigorously written articles of a provocative nature” (Quest August 1955: n.p.) seemed the antidote to “many shades” of totalitarianisms and authoritarianisms. The discussion, the probing, and the questioning (“we must probe, doubt, question, question, question”) were also directed toward unexamined notions such as “freedom” or “peace.” This was manifest at the 1951 ICCF conference in Bombay, which many Indian writers used as a forum for debate, a platform to stage both their differences and their independence, and at times even their defiance. Not only did many writers stubbornly flaunt their refusal to partition the globe between the “enslaved world” and “the free world,” but they also probed, questioned, and challenged the meanings and implications of these words, refusing, in Agyeya’s words, to be forced to commit to the “false choice” between “peace” and “freedom.” In Chairman Jayaprakash Narayan’s gripping address, “democracy” and “freedom,” “anti-fascism” and “anti-totalitarianism” were exposed as “mere talk” that left millions of nonwhites in subordination. “Over a hundred million Negroes of Africa and millions of Arabs are being ruled today by the free nations of the world” (Congress for Cultural Freedom 1951: 38). Yet the questioning or denunciation of these tropes of domination (to borrow Rubin’s term) were in effect taking place in spaces that seemed originally designed to endorse or champion them.30 In the first issue of Quest, Ezekiel defined “peace” as a “method of destroying freedom or an excuse for acquiescing in its destruction” (Quest 1955: 1). Of course, “peace” was, along with “freedom,” the other key trope of the Cold War, and a rhetorical device deployed by the Soviets against the “warmongering” West. Yet, there is, once again, a very specific Indian context and struggle behind the discussion and challenge of the notion. In India, the apparatus of censorship was largely inherited from the British Raj, which assumed Indians’ fundamentally religious (and vulnerable) sensibilities and emphasized “hurt” as the basis for criminal offence. A lot of the “ Censorship and the Writer” was initially published in 1963 (reprinted in Anklaseria and Rodrigues 2008: 213). For the same kinds of denunciation, see the proceedings of the Rangoon Conference (1956). The liberal genealogy of the “Third World” and of Third World struggles is starting to be recovered. See in particular Lisandro E. Claudio (2015), and Roland Burke (2016) who claims that the “variegated ideological texture” of Third Worldism has been washed away by the more obvious narratives of non-alignment and anti-colonialism associated with the Afro-Asian movement and what he calls the “mythology of Bandung.” I discuss Jayaprakash Narayan’s speech in “The Meanings” (2022). 29 30

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censorship and the repression of criticism in different forms was (and still is) being carried out for the sake of preserving peace and harmony, and not wounding communal sensibilities. In “Censorship and the Writer” Ezekiel argued that the Indian writer had to suffer far less criticism than his Western counterpart. “Respectability” made him “incapable of hitting hard and hitting persistently at the things that he dislikes” (in Anklaseria 2008: 215). Interestingly, Rajat Naogy also associated Indian magazines with a tone of “syrupy” gentility, “where everyone is quietly patting everyone else on the back” (1966: 31). We understand why it seemed imperative for journals like Quest to privilege opiniated and at times provocative or “hard-hitting” essays, editorials, and reviews. Dissent needed to “be deliberately nursed, not muzzled and driven underground (as antisocial or inspired by forces bent on harming the nation …),” as the editors of Quest argued just before the journal shut down during the Emergency (Quest March–April 1976: 7). Dilip Chitre vigorously advanced the same opinion. In Transition, he praised Neogy’s editorial work for championing irreverence (as “antidote to comatose academism and servile decay”) and argued that no intellectual magazine can survive without “encouraging biting, tearing apart and other types of intellectual savagery” (Quest April–June 1969: 68–70). He also praised the lively controversies and intellectual brawls that Transition provoked. Chitre himself courted the critical and controversial spirit in his essays and reviews and in the regular column he started publishing in 1971 for Quest (under the pseudonym “D.”). Designed to counterbalance the seriousness of the journal by focusing on popular culture (music, film, television, magazines, classified ads, school textbooks, etc.) the column also intended to do some serious “lampooning.”31 The mass marketing of religion, art, journalism, or politics, and the obscurantism of the establishment were among his privileged targets. His irreverence also comes out in the collage-like delight with which he discussed (and equated) in the same pages pornography and politics, chauvinism and cricket, elections and bhang (a popular beverage made with cannabis), or “sex and samadhi.”32 His first column, entitled “The Obscenity of Politics,” is characteristic of his style and his polemical range—moving from the “obscenity of politics” (by which he targeted both the Shiv Sena33 and the ruling Congress “selling an obsolete brand of socialism”), to the “politics of obscenity” under which he lampooned both a recent report on pornography in the United States and the “stink of communalism” emanating from Hindus and Muslims alike, and from the cultural and political elite in India. No one is spared.

CONCLUSION The few scholars who have looked at the publications and activities of the ICCF have been mostly dismissive of the achievements of the organization and its journals. Peter Coleman, for instance, in the few pages he devotes to the “niche” Quest, downplayed its importance; the historian Eric Pullin, in his otherwise subtle account of the history of the ICCF, argues that its collusion with American intelligence S ee “I was D.” (in Futehally, Prabhala, Sattar 2009: 659–60). “Samadhi” is a high state of meditative consciousness often understood as a form of union with god. “Sex and Samadhi” is the title of a column Chitre published in 1972 (October–November). 33 The Shiv Sena (literally “The Army of Shivaji”) is a far-right, aggressively regionalist Hindu organization in Maharashtra founded in 1966 to defend the rights of Maharashtrians and Marathi-speakers (the so-called “sons of the soil”). Here as elsewhere in Quest, Chitre intentionally designated the Shiv Sena by its SS initials. 31 32

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undermined any claims to the organization’s autonomy (2011: 398),34 and that Quest neither exerted a lasting influence nor contributed to the “cultural revitalization” it had hoped for (2017: 297). Even Margary Sabin, while acknowledging the exceptional articles published in the journal, still talked about the “cautionary value of Quest’s failure as a collective enterprise (2002: 139).” The immediate successes of these publishing and cultural ventures may not be obvious, and perhaps—at least from the point of view of American cold warriors at the time—“meagre,” in Ezekiel’s own (highly ironic) words: “the Americans are notorious for getting meagre results in proportion to the colossal expenditures they incur on political and cultural projects outside America, particularly in Asia.”35 By delving into some of the archives of the cultural Cold War in India, specifically twenty years of Quest; by putting “cultural freedom” in both global and Indian context; and by shifting the lens of analysis from a somewhat binary or definitive focus on “results,” “successes,” or alignment to a focus on the “struggles” that many Indian writers, poised “between imperial and postcolonial authoritarianisms” (Burke 2016: 85), were waging at the time, I hope in this essay to restore the importance and the relevance of this history. The freedom of tone, discussion, and criticism manifest in essays and reviews published in ICCF journals, as well as the extraordinary literary texts and new creative voices that found a home in these publications, show that some of the intellectual spaces that were a direct product of America’s courtship during the Cold War were also, indeed, enabling. They evidence the agency of many of these intellectuals, who bent the available spaces, funds, and even ideas/ideologies to their own projects and needs—and, in the journals originally instigated or sponsored by powerful institutions and organizations, often ended up criticizing power and institutions. In their struggles to sustain a vibrant, independent, and at times irreverent, critical culture; and in their struggles to resist the many threats to cultural freedom in India, these writers foreshadowed the challenges faced by writers, artists, and intellectuals in India today. They were also extraordinary prescient in their conviction that sustaining a literary and a critical culture was a prerequisite for other kinds of freedoms, and the only way to “clear the ground for action against censorship in all its forms.”

WORKS CITED Altbach P. (1975), Publishing in India, an Analysis, Delhi: Oxford University Press. Anderson, A. (2016), Bleak Liberalism, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Anklaseria H., and Santan Rosario Rodrigues, eds. (2008), Nissim Ezekiel Remembered, New Delhi: Sahitya Akademi. Barnhisel, G. (2015), Cold War Modernists: Art, Literature and American Cultural Diplomacy, New York: Columbia University Press. Barnhisel, G., and Catherine Turner, eds. (2010), Pressing the Fight: Print, Propaganda and the Cold War, Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press.

I emphasize the word “undermine” here, because the term is often used to (dis)qualify many of the publishing and intellectual ventures that received foreign funding: Hala Halim, for instance, in her otherwise insightful article on Lotus, which, she says, was “inevitably undermined by the Cold War configuration” (2012: 570). 35 In the February 1957 issue of The Indian PEN, Ezekiel wrote a short and very humorous note about the new American periodical The American Review, which he compares disparagingly to Perspectives USA (n.p.). 34

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Bennett, E. (2015), Workshops of Empire: Stegner, Engle, and American Creative Writing During the Cold War, Iowa City: University of Iowa Press. Brouillette, S. (2015), “US–Soviet Antagonism and the ‘Indirect Propaganda’ of Book Schemes in India in the 1950s,” University of Toronto Quarterly 84(4) (Fall): 170–88. Burke, R. (2016), “‘Real Problems to Discuss’: The Congress for Cultural Freedom’s Asian and African Expeditions 1951–59,” Journal of World History 27(1): 53–85. Chitre, D., ed. (1967), An Anthology of Marathi Poetry (1945–1965), Bombay: Nirmala Sadanand. Claudio E. L. (2015), “The Anti-Communist Third World: Carlos Romulo and the Other Bandung,” Southeast Asian Studies 4(1): 125–56. Coleman, P. (1989), The Liberal Conspiracy, The Congress for Cultural Freedom and the Struggle for the Mind of Postwar Europe, New York: Free Press. Congress for Cultural Freedom (1951), Indian Congress for Cultural Freedom Proceedings, March 28–31, 1951, Bombay: Kanada Press for the Indian Congress for Cultural Freedom. Congress for Cultural Freedom (1956), Cultural Freedom in Asia: Report of the Rangoon Conference, Tokyo: Charles E. Tuttle. Dalmia, Y. (2001), The Making of Modern Indian Art, the Progressives, New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Ezekiel, N. (1992), Selected Prose, Delhi: Oxford University Press. Freedom First, Organ of the Indian Committee for Cultural Freedom, Bombay: Kannada Press, June 1952. Futehally, Laeeq, Achal Prabhala, and Arshia Sattar, eds. (2011), The Best of Quest, Chennai: Tranquebar Press. Gandhi, L. (2001), The Ford Foundation and Its Arts and Culture Program in India: A Short History (unpublished document), New York: Ford Foundation Archives. Guilbaut, S. (1983), How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art, Abstract Expressionism, Freedom and the Cold War, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Halim, H. (2012), “Lotus, the Afro-Asian Nexus, and Global South Comparatism,” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 32(3): 563–83. Hall, T. interview (1967), “Rajat Neogy and the CIA,” Transition 32 (August–September): 44–7. Iber, P. (2015), Neither Peace nor Freedom: The Cultural Cold War in Latin America, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Imprint, The Best of Books Every Month, ed. Glorya Edwards Hale and Phillip Knightley, Bombay: Karnatak Printing Press, April 1961. Jussawalla, A. (1972), “Boys and Girls in Purdah,” The Campus Times, n.p. Kalliney, P. (2015), “Modernism, African Literature and the Cold War,” Modern Language Quarterly 76(3): 333–68. King, B. (1985), “Modern Indian and American Poetry: Some Contacts and Relations,” Indian Journal of American Studies 15: 5–17. King, B. (2001), Modern Indian Poetry in English, rev. ed., New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Knightley, P. (1997), A Hack’s Progress, London: Jonathan Cape. Lacy, D. (1954), “The Overseas Book Program of the United States Government,” The Library Quarterly: Information, Community, Policy 24(2): 178–91. McGarr, P. (2014), “Quiet Americans in India”: The CIA and the Politics of Intelligence in Cold War South Asia, Diplomatic History 38(5): 1046–82. Natarajan, L. (1952), American Shadow over India, Bombay: People’s Publishing House. Neogy, R. (1966), “Do Magazines Culture?” Transition 24: 30–2.

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Nerlekar, A., and Laetitia Zecchini (2017), “‘Perhaps I’m Happier Being on the Sidelines’: An Interview with Adil Jussawalla,” Journal of Postcolonial Writing 53(1–2): 221–32. Orsini, F., Neelam Srivastava, and Laetitia Zecchini, eds. (2022), The Form of Ideology and the Ideology of Form: Cold War, Decolonization and Third World Print Cultures, Cambridge: Open Book Publishers. Popescu, M. (2020), At Penpoint: African Literature, Postcolonial Studies, and the Cold War, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Pradhan, Sudhir, ed. (1979), Marxist Cultural Movement in India: Chronicles and Documents (1936–1947), Calcutta: National Book Agency. Pullin, E. (2011), “Money Does Not Make Any Difference to the Opinions That We Hold: India, the CIA and the Congress for Cultural Freedom, 1951–58,” Intelligence and National Security 26(2–3): 377–98. Pullin, E. (2017), “Quest: Twenty Years of Cultural Politics,” in Scott-Smith Giles and Charlotte Lerg (eds.), Campaigning Culture and the Global Cold War: The Journals of the Congress for Cultural Freedom, 285–302, London: Palgrave Macmillan. Quest, a Bi-monthly of Arts and Ideas, ed. Nissim Ezekiel, Bombay: August 1955; April–May 1956; February– March 1957. Quest, a Quarterly of Inquiry, Criticism and Ideas, ed. Abu Sayeed Ayuub, Calcutta; July–September 1959; January–March 1960; July–September 1967; April–June 1968. Quest, a Quarterly of Inquiry, Criticism and Ideas, eds. V. V. John, G. D. Parikh, Bombay: July–August 1972; March–April 1974; July–August 1974 (Parikh); March–April 1976. Quinn, J. (2015), Between Two Fires: Transnationalism and Cold War Poetry, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Rakesh, M. (1973), “Interview with Mohan Rakesh,” Journal of South Asian Literature 9(2/3): 15–45. Rubin, A. (2012), Archives of Authority: Empire, Culture and the Cold War, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Sabin, M. (2002), Dissenters and Mavericks: Writings about India in English, 1765–2000, New York: Oxford University Press. Sager, P. (1966), Moscow’s Hand in India: An Analysis of Soviet Propaganda, Berne: Swiss Eastern Institute. Saunders, F. S. ([1999] 2013), The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters, New York: New Press. Scott-Smith, G. (2002), The Politics of Apolitical Culture, London: Routledge. Scott-Smith Giles, and Charlotte Lerg, eds. (2017), Campaigning Culture and the Global Cold War: The Journals of the Congress for Cultural Freedom, London: Palgrave Macmillan. Span, United States Information Service, New Delhi: The American Embassy November 1960, February 1969. Sussman, J. (1973), “United States Information Service Libraries,” University of Illinois Graduate School of Library Science occasional papers, University of Illinois, December 1973, No. 111. Vazquez, M. (2011), “The Bequest of Quest,” Bidoun https://www.bid​oun.org/artic​les/the-beques​tof-quest, accessed May 8, 2021. Zecchini, L. (2014), Arun Kolatkar and Literary Modernism in India, London: Bloomsbury. Zecchini, L. (2018), “ ‘We Have All a Genuine Fear of Violence Erupting in a Most Savage and Uncontrollable Way’: An Interview with Adil Jussawalla” https://write​rsan​dfre​eexp​ress​ion.files.wordpr​ess.com/2018/07/ interv​iew-with-adil-bom​bay-febru​ary-2018.pdf. Zecchini, L. (2020), “‘What Filters through the Curtain’: Reconsidering Indian Modernisms, Travelling Literatures, and Little Magazines in a Cold War Context,” Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies, 22: 2 : 172–194.

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Zecchini, L. (2022), “The Meanings, Forms and Exercise of ‘Freedom’: The Indian PEN and the Indian Committee for Cultural Freedom (1930s–1960s),” in Francesca Orsini, Neelam Srivastava, and Laetitia Zecchini (eds.), The Form of Ideology and the Ideology of Form: Cold War, Decolonization and Third World Print Cultures, Cambridge: Open Book Publishers.

FURTHER READING Anklaseria, H., and Santan Rosario Rodrigues, ed. (2008), Nissim Ezekiel Remembered, New Delhi: Sahitya Akademi. Burke, R. (2016), “ ‘Real Problems to Discuss’: The Congress for Cultural Freedom’s Asian and African Expeditions 1951–59,” Journal of World History 27(1): 53–85. Futehally, L., Achal Prabhala, and Arshia Sattar, eds. (2011), The Best of Quest, Chennai: Tranquebar Press. Kalliney, P. (2015), “Modernism, African Literature and the Cold War,” Modern Language Quarterly 76(3): 333–68. Orsini, F, Neelam Srivastava, and Laetitia Zecchini, eds. (2021), The Form of Ideology and the Ideology of Form: Cold War, Decolonization and Third World Print Cultures, Open Book Publishers. Pullin, E. (2011), “Money Does Not Make Any Difference to the Opinions that we Hold: India, the CIA and the Congress for Cultural Freedom, 1951–58,” Intelligence and National Security 26(2–3): 377–98. Sabin, M. (2002), “The Politics of Cultural Freedom: India in the 1950s,” in Dissenters and Mavericks: Writings about India in English, 1765–2000, 139–55, New York: Oxford University Press. Scott-Smith Giles, and Charlotte Lerg., eds. (2017), Campaigning Culture and the Global Cold War: The Journals of the Congress for Cultural Freedom, London: Palgrave Macmillan. Zecchini, L. (2020), “What Filters through the Curtain: Reconsidering Indian Modernisms, Travelling Literatures, and Little Magazines in a Cold War Context,” Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies 22(2): 172–94. Zecchini , L. (2022), “The Meanings, Forms and Exercise of ‘Freedom’: The Indian PEN and the Indian Committee for Cultural Freedom (1930s–1960s),” in Francesca Orsini, Neelam Srivastava, and Laetitia Zecchini (eds.), The Form of Ideology and The Ideology of Form, 177–214, Cambridge: Open Book Publishers.

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CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

Robinson Jeffers’s Pilgrimage through the Iron Curtain: The Beloved Shepherd JIŘINA ŠMEJKALOVÁ

Little girl gets up in the morning, looks out the window, and goes like—“hmmm … not today,” Then next morning—“today perhaps?” and the next one—“well, this looks like it!” As it gets repeated for several days, her mum asks—“what are you doing up there at the window every morning?” And the girl replies—“well, grandpa said that one beautiful day the Commies will be gone. So I’m looking out for it!” (Czech schoolchildren joke, approx. 1980s)1 The question of relations between American literature and the former Czechoslovakia during the Cold War tends to evoke references to a few well-known works by Anglo-American authors that depict life in Communist-era Prague: Arthur Miller’s play The Archbishop’s Ceiling (1970) and Philip Roth’s novel The Prague Orgy (1985), with Moravian-born Tom Stoppard’s Professional Foul (1977) part of the story too. But this history leaves out the place and agency of translations from American literature for readers in the countries behind the Iron Curtain. Here I focus on one case study: the appropriation of Czech translations of American poet Robinson Jeffers’s poems in former Czechoslovakia, which were published in numerous editions and print run of tens of thousands during the 1950s–1980s. In addition to my previous scholarly research in Cold War book production and reception (Šmejkalová 2011), this chapter is primarily inspired by my own encounter with Robinson Jeffers’s work as a student of literature in the early 1980s, which culminated in our theatre group producing and staging of Jeffers’s “The Loving Shepherdess.” Drawing also on archival resources, oral history interviews, local media coverage, and previous research on the reception of Jeffers in Czechoslovakia (Arbeit 2019; Kopecký 2012) I shall focus on the principal role of Jeffers’s main Czech promoter, interpreter, and translator Kamil Bednář in Jeffers’s introduction to the cultural Unless otherwise stated all translations are mine. I remain in awe especially to Dr. Greg Barnhisel whose help and assistance in completing this text has gone far beyond anything that one might imagine as standard editorial support. 1

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scene of the 1950s and beyond, while also discussing the specific features of the centrally controlled publishing context of the Cold War that paradoxically made possible his stature as the most widely read American poet in Czech translation. Any account of Cold War culture is clearly driven by the irresistible “gravitational force” of the political. The examples of Boris Pasternak, Paul Robeson, Louis Armstrong, and many others have become familiar. But the links between the American poet Robinson Jeffers’s reputation in Czechoslovakia and the political context of the era is another vivid but little-known example. On the one hand there was a widespread admiration of his work by the general reading public, literary and cultural periodicals were favorable to it, and Czech authors frequently referred to and quoted from it. On the other hand, the anti-Western and particularly anti-American moods in official propagandistic discourse combined with the significantly limited channels of information through which Czechoslovakians could obtain reliable information about the world behind the Iron Curtain to nurture curiosity about the worlds he represented. Properly promoted by a tireless translator, one (American) poet was able to fill this gap between official cultural prestige and institutional hostility toward the West. The relatively liberal “Prague Spring” setting of the second half of the 1960s, when the Jeffers boom culminated, then became a perfect environment for the general acceptance of his universalistic themes: the celebration of nature, a humanitarian mission, and even sympathy with marginalized and oppressed groups, mainly the “Blacks” and “Indians” as Czechs would have referred to them at the time.2 The period from the end of the 1950s through the 1960s is widely considered the “the golden age of literature in translation in the Czech lands” (Arbeit 2000: 33). Besides the Beat Generation authors (e.g., Allen Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Gregory Corso, Jack Kerouac, and Gary Snyder) and other contemporary writers including John Ashbery, LeRoi Jones, Robert Creeley, Robert Duncan, Galway Kinnell, Denise Levertov, and Richard Wilbur, the period saw new translations of American classics by Mark Twain, Whitman, Masters, Sandburg, and others appear in the Czech literary and media scene. American authors occupied a place of honor in local literary journals, publishing houses, and theatres. In addition to American works appearing in Czech translation, notable literati such as Edward Albee, Philip Roth, Robert Stone, William Styron, John Updike, and Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. paid personal visits to the “communist” country (Arbeit 2019: 336). “Their own creative work and their interest in the situation in our country during the totalitarian decades meant so much to us,” noted Josef Jařab (19973: 402). And yet, it was Robinson Jeffers who “at the end of the 1950s and in the 1960s [was] one of the best-loved foreign poets ever in Czechoslovakia” (Arbeit 2019: 307). Numerous factors account for this, related both to the personal effort of his translator and mediator and to the general sociopolitical and cultural situation in the country at that time. But in addition to these forces, as historians of the book are well aware, other elements of the “book communication circuit” (Darnton 1982) along with the important additional dimension of book “survival” (Adams and Barker 1993) also played central roles in the establishment and persistence of Jeffers’s popularity in Czechoslovakia.

For example, Jeffers’s translator Kamil Bednář emphasized Jeffers’s friendship with Langston Hughes. See Kopecký (2012: 161). 3 Josef Jařab (*1937) is a literary historian and translator, professor of English and American literature at the Palacký University (PU), Olomouc, Czech Republic, former rector of the PU and of the Central European University in Budapest. 2

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Certainly, Jeffers’s books were widely available in Communist Czechoslovakia, in part because they were produced in considerable quantities. The massive print runs of Czech editions of Jeffers’s volumes may indeed appear impressive from the perspective of book production in the contemporary Czech Republic or other similar markets today.4 However, one must keep in mind that the key operating principle of the entire Czech publishing industry following the coup d’état of 1948 (and indeed those of most so-called “East Bloc” nations) was to print huge numbers of a strictly limited, carefully selected set of approved titles.5 In other words, a print run way above the current standards was not unusual, and this didn’t just apply to politically favorable volumes by Marxists and pro-regime authors. Moreover, the very size of a print run does not necessarily indicate the number of volumes sold to individual buyers in a “free market,” as a significant portion would have been distributed through book clubs and allocated to public libraries and various state institutions. As an example, the total combined print run of books by the well-known travel-writing duo Hanzelka and Zikmund surpassed 5 million copies—awe-inspiring for a nation (and language community) of only about 15 million people in 1970 (Šmejkalová 2015). Similarly to these “command celebrities,” while the power of the “Jeffers brand” was unquestionable, his hefty print runs in Czech editions were the product of readers’ spontaneous interests as well as state-driven priorities. And finally, the persistent and highly unpredictable East Bloc oscillation between “shortages and storages” (of any items, including books) in a system driven by the allocation of resources rather than consumers demand also fueled Jeffers’s “popularity”6 and—paradoxically—made it possible (Šmejkalová and Lishaugen 2019 in ref. to Kornai 1980 and Oushakine 2014).

THE COLD WAR REVISITED One of many troubles with studying the Cold War is the assumed obviousness of the conceptual framework we use today to write about it. Can one at all contemplate the Cold War condition without the notions of censorship, dissent, samizdat, or the very term “Cold War” as such? It is worth reminding ourselves that the way we now speak and think about the post–Second World War era, even the way we narrate our memoirs of the era, is taking place within the winners’ discourse. If we were to join Doctor Who in the blue London police box to travel back in time, and landed in Prague of the era euphemistically referred to as “normalization,” the discourse of everyday life (as I knew it back then) would mostly lack those terms.7 My own dissertation was crypto-titled While here I focus on the Czech part of the former Czechoslovakia and translations of Jeffers to Czech, it must be noted that readers of the country were generally bilingual and it is safe to assume that Czech editions would have found wide readership across the area. However, there were also Slovak editions of Jeffers’s verse released during the 1960s–80s translated by distinguished poets Ľubomír Feldek (*1936; Grošovaný žrebec, 1975) and Vojtech Mihálik (1926–2001; Prirodzená hudba, 1967; Okolo Galaxie za osemdesiat týždňov, 1988). 5 According to the available statistics, just in the first two years of Communist rule the number of published titles in Czechoslovakia dropped by almost a half (from 6,640 to 3,797), with an even more dramatic decrease in Czech book production (from 5,446 to 2,737), while the total number of copies printed almost doubled (from 44,176,000 to 84,358,000) (Šmejkalová 2011: 116). 6 It must be noted, however, that applying the “quantitative index” (Storey 2001: 6) as a measure of “popularity” of any publicly distributed phenomena as commonly applied in a competitive commercial environment may be misleading in the context of centrally controlled print run’s production and distribution. 7 The term “normalization” refers to the twenty years lasting restoration of the hard-line political regime that followed the military invasion of the Warsaw Pact to Czechoslovakia in August 1968. As a result of massive political repressions, dismissals in all areas of public sphere, and forced exiles, the country experienced in the 1970s and 1980s unprecedented 4

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The Sociology of Literary Taste, even though a significant part of my work was already back then devoted to the analyses of the “centrally controlled” (wording I would not dare to use, of course!) “book communication circuit” (a term not known to me in the late 1980s, as we had no access to Robert Darnton’s seminal essay “What Is the History of Books?”). And yet, the concept of “censorship” was missing in the entire text as a dissertation acknowledging its very presence would have been censored and not pass the examiners. Nor was the Cold War the “Cold War,” at least in communist Czechoslovakia. The Czech National Library lists only thirty-seven records (out of 773) published prior to 1989 for the keyword “studená válka” [Cold War]. And these are largely titles published in West Germany referring to what is called in German the “Kalten Krieg.” Only about five pre-1989 publications in Czech, including translations from Russian and books released abroad, mention this “Cold War” term that shaped the entire Western understanding of that time. The Czech National Language Corpus— despite its inaccuracies—shows that the wording “studená válka” was used in Czech only randomly through the 1960s, with a significant decrease during the 1970s and 1980s, and not until the 1990s did it start being used in Czech historiography with a meaning matching today’s international academic context8 (Jaromír Mrňka, email communication, June 23, 2021). According to Czech scholars of the period, the term did not have much place in local public and/or media language. Instead, the preferred formulation was “fighting for peace” or “against imperialism,” wording that also served as its source of legitimacy (Mikuláš Pešta, email communication, June 24, 2021).9 In this way of looking at things, the Cold War was thus largely a “Western” invention, an expression of aggression against the “peaceful” establishment of the “East.”10 Even more so, for the Sovietstyle policy to admit the importance of any “soft” or “cold” confrontation with the major enemy would have meant to prioritize the forces of “superstructure” over the “base” and thus invert the key Marxist premise about their hierarchy. I would thus suggest that despite the fact that a significant part of post–Second World War arts and cultural production has been recently analyzed within the framework of Cold War US–Soviet “cultural diplomacy” (Searcy 2020), it is important to note that actual actors (in both Latourian and literal terms) of the era, at least those located east of the Berlin Wall, did not articulate their place in the obviously and often painfully divided world according to the terminology that today goes almost unquestioned among scholars. Thus similarly to—as, for example, Jonathan Bolton argued convincingly—the notions of “dissent” or “samizdat” (Bolton 2016), the term “Cold War” was certainly not a dominant part of Czech public or academic discourse prior to 1989. To put it even more bluntly, had the USSR and its subjugated allies won the “Cold War,” we would be now talking about the victory of the world proletariat over the destructive forces of capitalism. And statements (such as a post-1989 witticism

loss of human resources, which took decades, and indeed an entire generation, to replace (Otáhal 2002; Skilling 1976; Šmejkalová 2011: 97–9). 8 I would like to thank Dr. Jaromír Mrňka of the Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes, Prague, for his insightful comments. 9 I would like to thank Dr. Mikuláš Pešta of the Institute of World History, Charles University, for his helpful comments. 10 A telling similar example was the usage of “Caribbean crisis” in the countries of former Eastern bloc to emphasize the involvement of the United States as opposed to the “Cuban Missile Crisis,” that is, a term used in the West in order to stress the Soviets’ decision to place nuclear missiles on the island. I would like to thank Dr. Jan Koura of the Institute of World History, Charles University, for this note and other helpful comments on that matter.

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had it) that the American blue jeans, rock and roll, and fast-food outlets were much more pivotal in undermining Communist Eastern Europe than direct anti-communist propaganda and military operations would be meaningless.

AN AVERAGE POET AND HIS LESS THAN MEDIOCRE TRANSLATOR? Thus during this war without a war, let alone the cold one, in an effort to protect “our peace” from the outside “aggressors,” one American poet stood on a pedestal: Robinson Jeffers.11 Why Jeffers? He was a poet (1887–1962) who devoted much of his work to the central California coast where he lived in Carmel more or less in isolation after 1913, and along with his wife Una built the stone Tor House and the Hawk Tower. Jeffers was widely popular in the United States during the 1920s and 1930s particularly for his long narrative epic verse (Tamar, 1924; Roan Stallion, 1925), and his popularity led, for example, to a staging of his adaptation of Euripides’ Medea on Broadway (1947). Nonetheless, his reputation deteriorated during the Second World War and beyond when he criticized the US involvement in the war and the state policy in general (Be Angry with the Sun, 1941; The Double Axe and Other Poems, 1948). And his work was also, beyond Czechoslovakia, published in Japan and translated into Polish by the Nobel Prize laureate Czesław Miłosz. One man in effect served as the head gatekeeper and designer of the unprecedentedly extensive circulation of Jeffers’s poetry within virtually the entire Czech media multiverse, including print, theatre, radio, TV, and photo shows (Kopecký 2012: 166)—and, needless to say, across the spheres of both official state-controlled and alternative cultures in former Czechoslovakia. This man was the poet, editor, children’s literature author, and translator Kamil Bednář (1912–1972). In his own editorial and creative writing career, pursued in the nation’s leading literary journals and publishing houses, he apparently managed to slip through the turbulence of the transformation of Czechoslovakia’s flourishing prewar liberal private publishing scene, to the restrictions of wartime, to the government-directed post-1948 system of confiscated and state-owned publication outlets (Šmejkalová 2011: 115–72). He did this by making what compromises he felt he had to: one of his younger contemporaries severely persecuted by the regime, Jan Zábrana (1931–1984), himself also an eminent translator of Ginsberg, Greene, Plath, Ferlinghetti, Corso, and others, flatly referred to Bednář as a person “terribly and repulsively collaborating [with the Communist power]” (Arbeit 2019: 331). Thus the position of both Bednář and Jeffers on the local cultural scene was certainly not as uncontroversial as Bednář might have presented it and perhaps even assumed. However, it was mainly due to his translator’s diligence, commitment, and (as I would even suggest) obsession that the Californian poet was “perhaps better known in Czechoslovakia … than he is in many parts of America” (Vardamis 1991: 59). Bednář himself emphasized this issue in one of several obituaries in Czech media following Jeffers’s demise in 1962, the same year that his acclaimed Loving Shepherdess

Paraphrased from a statement made in reference to Jeffers in Bednář’s translation by Aloys Skoumal (1904–1988), himself a distinguished translator of Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, James Joyce’s Ulysses and Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland (Arbeit 2019: 330–1; Kopecký 2012: 157, n.24). 11

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appeared in Czech bookstores.12 As if highlighting the superiority of his local reading public over the American one, Bednář stated that “Czech readers understood Jeffers perhaps better than his fellow countrymen, which hasn’t happened over here since Mozart” (Kopecký 2012: 159). Arbeit sees four reasons that Bednář came to devote such a significant part of his life to Jeffers’s promotion and turn this “missionary” work into his major source of income (Arbeit 2019: 326– 35). First, Jeffers’s work offered the hint of an exotic—and back in the 1940s and 1950s for the vast majority of Czechoslovakians physically unreachable—country. Jeffers’s fictional as well as actual landscape was even more striking than those of other US writers, as it was located by the seaside. Bednář’s only experience of a sea vista was one childhood trip to the Adriatic Sea, and thus in his memoirs he devoted a significant amount of space to comparing his humble existence near the Vltava river to the (indeed assumed and imaginary) vivid life at the Pacific coast (Bednář 1971: 46). Similarly, Jeffers and his related poetic networks offered Bednář an “escape from mundane reality, first that of Nazism and then that of socialism.” He also acknowledged Jeffers “as a poet with roots in European culture” and even “made Jeffers his surrogate parent, ‘his father by spirit’ ” and “took Jeffers as his alter ego, looking in his works for the motifs and themes of his own poetry,”13 with the motive of stones being among the most noticeable ones.14 According to Bednář’s Memoirs, tellingly entitled Přátelství přes oceán [Friendship across the Ocean], a major resource of data and personal observations on his “lifelong destiny” (Bednář 1971: 152), his first encounter with Jeffers’s work took place in the shadow of the war. The first instrument of this complex relationship was the 1941 volume Be Angry at the Sun, that is, the book that—paradoxically—stood at the cliff of Jeffers’s decline (Vardamis 1991). Bednář writes, The war … created a psychic vacuum, all around us as well as inside individuals … our outside reality was … wrapped in remains of concentration camps’ barbed wires. And suddenly—that book in black binding—Jeffers—a tin packed with radiant, full-blooded, un-barbed harsh reality … [the] reality of that strong man—a poet who endowed it with a magic of his mighty hawks and so humanly sensitive spirit. I entered t h a t [sic] reality timidly, shakily but even more so allured as the heroes of fairy-tales used to be in the enchanted gardens … this far-distanced poet, through his exemplary brave life was taking me back to life. (Bednář 1971: 16, 17) Though a friend of his had borrowed it for him from the University (now National) Library, Bednář claimed that the “book was brought to me by an angel” (Bednář 1971: 46, 20). In his account Bednář combines touches of spiritual ecstasy with ornamental references to the materiality of his crush on Jeffers: “For me it was not a book, it was a revelation, a saintly revelation, hard to decipher. It had large, readable dapperly cut fonts, lovely paper and despite the large layout it looked like a bibliophile edition” (Bednář 1971: 19). As the book was on loan, he made his own typewritten copy of the volume, and these would have been for a long time the only pages of Jeffers’s texts he possessed (Bednář 1971: 46).

Jeffers (1961). Needless to say, the latest Czech edition of the poem in bilingual version (Jeffers 2020) was released at the time of researching for this project and was hailed as a “timeless story touching on the very essence on humanity.” See Herman (2021). 13 Cited in Arbeit (2019: 326–5) from Bednář (1971: 19, 23, 30). Translations by Arbeit. 14 Bednář’s own volumes of poetry include Kámen v dlažbě, 1937 [Stone in the Pavement]; Kamenný pláč, 1939 [Stony Cry]; Kamenný anděl, 1949 [The Stone Angel]. 12

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Bednář was not the first one to introduce Jeffers to Czech readers, as that had been done in the 1930s and 1940s already.15 But he soon monopolized the Californian poet and became his major promoter and advocate. At first he started translating Jeffers’s verses “to sock it away of course. I didn’t think of publishing at that moment. But manuscripts of my translations circulated among a few friends of mine, those who expressed an interest in the unknown poet” (Bednář 1971: 35). At another point he noted that back in the 1950s “Jeffers’s personality cult had a flavour of forbidden fruit” and also, as Bednář’s “own voice could not be heard, the faith or the muses sent Robinson Jeffers to me … he is not a random translation job. I myself speak through him.”16 The year 1958 marked a major turning point in the Jeffers and Bednář story. Bednář published a translation of Jeffers’s long poem Hungerfield (Silák Hungerfield) in the prestigious and influential literary journal Světová literatura [World’s Literature], a bimonthly periodical with a considerable circulation of 15,000 (Arbeit 2019: 329). Following the isolationist 1950s, this journal played a key role in opening up a window for Czech readers to international cultural and intellectual developments. Particularly during the 1960s it presented au courant trends in the world literature, arts, and philosophy, and (with the support of top local editors and translators) became a vital intellectual platform for the liberal tendencies in society and culture that were leading toward the Prague Spring. Even more importantly, the first printed volume of Bednář’s Jeffers translations, Mara, appeared in 1958. Following the long-standing local tradition of exquisitely designed books17 it was published hardbound with color illustrations, in a print run of seven thousand copies, which certainly made the volume distinctive—if only just in terms of its physical appearance—from an average US edition (Arbeit 2019: 324). Although he likely suspected that the authorities would check any mail going to the United States (or any other Western country for that matter), Bednář took the risk of sending the book to Jeffers in California and “she [the book] did work—through the place of origin and illustration”18 (Bednář 1971: 151). This also resulted in what certainly Bednář felt was a dream coming true: “America entered my house for the first time in a form of a letter dated 7th of July 1958” (Bednář 1971: 7) (Figure 8). One cannot help but join Arbeit in his curiosity regarding Bednář’s actual linguistic competence, which apparently was not sufficient even to write letters in English (Arbeit 2019: 332). Bednář’s archives do include Czech copies of letters addressed to the United States that he apparently had According to Arbeit, it was the poet and journalist Jan Tumlíř whose translations of “I Shall Laugh Purely” and “Rearmament” were published in the Catholic literary magazine Kvart already in 1947 (Arbeit 2019: 324). Kopecký noted that the first introduction of Jeffers’s personality to the Czech context can be traced already in a survey of American literature by Otakar Vočadlo: Současná literatura Spojených států: od zvolení presidenta Wilsona po velkou hospodářskou krisi [Contemporary Literature of the United States: From the Election of president Wilson up to the Great Depression] published in 1934 (Kopecký 2012: 157). 16 Vladimír Budra (1967), “Pevný bod Kamila Bednáře” [The Fixed Point of Kamil Bednář], Literární noviny 13, 4–15. Cited in Kopecký (2012: 157). 17 Strong emphasis on the concept of (Czech) “beautiful book” (krásná kniha) was developed at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, mainly under the influence of English book design and illustration (William Morris), and later on of the French decadents’ and symbolists’ books. It was promoted by writers and critics with leading artists involved in illustrations, while books of poetry served as a shop window of these trends and efforts (Zdenka Braunerová, 1858–1934; František Kupka, 1871–1957; Ota Janeček, 1919–1996, et al.). See, for example, Šalda, František Xaver (1951), Kniha jako umělecké dílo [Book as a work of art], in: Kritické projevy [Critical Addresses] 6. 1905–7, Praha, or Čapek, Karel (1984), O umění a kultuře I [On Arts and Culture]. Praha: Československý spisovatel. 18 Czech language has gendered nouns: thus the word “book”—“kniha”—is of a feminine gender. 15

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FIGURE 8:  Image of Jeffers’s letter to Kamil Bednář of July 7, 1958, reprinted as an illustration in Jeffers, Robinson, Básně z Jestřábí věže [Poems from the Hawk Tower], Praha: Československý spisovatel, 1964. Frontispiece of first Czech edition of Robinson Jeffers’s Pastýřka putující k dubnu [The Loving Shepherdess], Praha: Mladá fronta, 1961, illustration by Ludmila Jiřincová and Mara, Praha: Československý spisovatel, 1958, illustration by Miloslav Troup. Photo courtesy of Pavel Tichý.

translated to English. The reason to doubt his command of English is not just related to a story (even mentioned in his memoirs) about a poem he wrote for Jeffers that was apparently so poor that Jeffers’s personal assistant at that time, Melba Berry Bennett, refused to share it with the poet, as it might have undermined his high opinion about Bednář’s English and consequently his

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translations (Bednář 1971: 40). As a matter of fact, Bednář also noted in his memoirs that his wife Emilie translated the texts and he only “clumsily assisted,” giving his wife’s rough Czech translations proper poetic qualities (Bednář 1971: 21). It is perhaps safe to suggest that the issue of language and particularly its genre nuances must have had an impact on Bednář’s literal interpretation of the legendary Jeffers letter (handwritten with the correct diacritical marks over Bednář’s name!), which he quotes in original English extensively in his memoirs.19 What at least at first sight appears as a routine epistolary phrase—“I am eager to send you my greetings and good wishes”—Bednář reads as “a balm on my by then confused and tangled life, sometimes still sinking under the weight of remaining tremors and delusions of the war” (Bednář 1971: 9). Jeffers further thanked him for sending the Czech edition of Mara and complimented its illustrations. In a fashion common to native speakers of English who tend to lack knowledge of any other languages, Jeffers regretted that he couldn’t read it. Yet his phrase “Perhaps I shall see you someday … in spite of the present distances between us” generated for Bednář “an unspeakable excitement, this was not a banal phrase, something was true and alive in it … what an honour for me. A poet’s soul is like incredibly sensitive nebula, imperceptible touches may cause pain, subtle shade of a friendly word can multiply all that labile luminosity of sensation” (Bednář 1971: 10). Bednář went on: “What could have attracted the poet’s attention, this poet who has experienced a true cult of his own personality in the past, to the extent that he wrote lines from which I sense such an honest interest? That mystery will remain unsolved for me” (Bednář 1971: 12). Formal or not, this letter exploded into Bednář’s life—at least from the perspective of the Cold War separateness of the two worlds and its repercussions and aftereffects—and generated an unprecedented network of human interactions and mutual visits.20 But this letter was also the original node of a sprawling network of nonhuman agents and events and artifacts, including letters, verses, stage productions, stones, cliffs, oceans, and even a pine tree and a flower bed in Bednář’s north Bohemian garden he devoted to Robin (as he referred to Jeffers) and Melba. Jeffers didn’t just explode into Bednář’s life; he became almost omnipresent in the Czech literary world. Between 1958 and 1971, nine volumes of his poetry and plays were released in Bednář’s Czech translation (Arbeit 2019: 324).21 Beyond Mara’s already noteworthy print run, Cawdor (1979) came out in an edition of 55,000, and books with translations of Jeffers’s poetry continued to appear in print, even during the “normalization” era, in 1971, 1975, 1976, 1979, and 1983 (Arbeit 2019: 324–5). According to Bednář’s wife Emilie, the total print run of Jeffers’s translated works published in Czechoslovakia (with its population of 15 million) was approximately 120,000. Robinson Jeffers: “Dear Mr. Kamil Bednář …” June 7, 1958, in Literární archiv Památníku národního písemnictví, Praha (LAPNP—Literary Archive of the Muzeum of Czech Literature, Prague), Inventory Bednář Kamil, Folder 2. “Korespondence a) přijatá (R. Jeffers)” In print, see Robinson Jeffers (2015) The Collected Letters of Robinson Jeffers: With Selected Letters of Una Jeffers, vol. 3, 1940–62, edited by James Karman, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 883. 20 Melba Berry Bennett and her husband visited Prague in 1963. As Bednář admitted in his memoirs (1971: 93–6), despite the very high expectations and his patriotic effort to present his homeland as a “no backward country (whose) history includes moments of supreme glory, the visit essentially ended up as a disaster as the Americans were confronted with realities of the command public services, including shabby hotel, ridiculous taxi drivers etc.” (translation by Arbeit, cited in Arbeit 2019: 333). Other Americans who visited Bednář in Prague included Jeffers’s son Donnan, who came with his wife Lee in 1965. 21 For a full bibliography of Czech translations of Jeffers’s work, see Arbeit (2000: 807–11). I also would like to thank Prof. Arbeit for his support in researching this project. 19

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Considered per capita, this probably exceeded their circulation in the United States (Kopecký 2012: 165). As a result, “he turned into one of the most widely read poets in the Czech language from 1958 to the end of the 1980s” (Arbeit 2019: 328). One reason Jeffers struck a chord with Czech readers is that his poetry crossed the ideological and political boundaries that shaped the Czech postwar literary scene’s sharp division into “spheres” demarcated by the authors’ relation to the regime. This division between the state-supported domain and the “alternative” textual circuits of so-called “samizdat,” as well as literati active in exile, became even more exaggerated during the post–Prague Spring era. And yet, Jeffers made his way to the verses of Jaroslav Seifert,22 the only Czech poet awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature (1984, and who had a rather fraught relationship with the regime), as well as to those of the guru of the Czech literary underground, Egon Bondy.23 According to Bondy’s editor, Jeffers stood for him “as one of his teachers … in the ‘prosaisation’ of poetry, in revealing magic in what appears as profane and routine everydayness.”24 Thus Bondy, a master of an inexhaustible and often harsh and bitter capacity to grasp the mediocre and smeared commonness of life under the “Old Regime,” contrasted his world with the (assumed) grandiosity of Jeffers’s: Robinson Jeffers with his own hands piling up blocks of granite was able to build a house for his woman all I can do is hoeing chives as a part-timer or with my own hands piling up blocks of granite in order to build a new dam an energy supply to a few dim light bulbs in country houses or a to new armaments factory … He was still better off after all and therefore had a few more illusions About nature, eternity, ease, bare livelihood All of that was given by the fact, that he was still able with his own hands carry blocks of granite from the sea shore to build a house for his woman and all I can do is to join volunteers in cleaning up our street.25

Jaroslav Peprník (2002) Amerika očima české literatury od vzniku USA po rok 2000 II [American in through the Eyes of Czech Literature since the Establishment of the USA up to 2000], Olomouc: Univerzita Palackého, 676–7. Referred to in Arbeit (2019: 328 n.73). 23 Egon Bondy born Zbyněk Fišer (1930–2007) was a Czech novelist, poet, and philosopher, a prominent persona of the underground whose enormous work of about twenty novels, thirty books of poetry and philosophical texts were circulating mainly in samizdat editions. See, for example, Ken Hunt (2007), “Egon Bondy. Dissident Czech writer and lyricist for Plastic People of the Universe,” The Guardian, 20. April. In https://www.theg​uard​ian.com/news/2007/apr/20/gua​rdia​nobi​tuar​ies. obi​tuar​ies (accessed May 16, 2021). 24 Martin Machovec, email communication, May 17, 2021. 25 From an untitled poem dated March 24, 1960, in Bondy (2009: 111). I would like to thank Dr. Machovec for his support in this research. 22

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Jeffers’s controversial attitudes in the 1930s and 1940s (his lack of social criticism and his isolationism that some suspected tended even toward fascist sympathies (Vardamis 1991: 47–9)) were certainly not part of Bednář’s descriptions of Jeffers’s work and life. This may have been an intentional silencing, part of his attempt to create a spotless persona of Jeffers as a poet of universal humanity. But at the same time, he—and even more importantly the editors and supervisors of local publishing houses—might have not even been fully aware of the critical debates on Jeffers’s work, as such critical discussion took place in American outlets during the 1930s–1970s and as such were simply not available to him. At the same time, Bednář did exclude Jeffers’s most controversial poems from Czech collections. Thus, “The Day Is a Poem” from Be Angry with the Sun (1941; a poem that seems callous to the war and its suffering, and almost to praise Hitler) never appeared in Czech translation but led Bednář to admit that Jeffers “watched the second war from the top of a mountain like a Biblical prophet,” a statement he counterbalanced with the claim that “it is so easy to condemn humankind when one does not consider himself a part of it” (Bednář 1971: 14).26 Bednář’s memoirs make it clear that he was prepared to use any discursive means and institutional tools available to him to bring Jeffers closer to his readers’ imagination, the majority of whom had close to no chance to experience Jeffers’s far-distant spaces and people through their own hands and eyes. To accomplish this, Bednář used popular culture to mold his image of the American poet, as in this careful description of Jeffers’s physical appearance: “he was used to not moving a muscle in his face, looking like a Vinnetou; he must have had Indian blood” and “Robin’s figure erected at the cliff like a young Vinnetou” (Bednář 1971: 12, 140). At the center of this prevalent “American” fantasy was the fictional Apache chief character “Winnetou,” familiar to generations of European readers (including Hitler and Einstein). Winnetou was a protagonist of a series of Western novels (1875–1910) by the widely published German author Karl May (1842–1912) who did not visit the United States until 1908 and never saw the West. West German movie versions of his books only increased the massive popularity of his fictional world. The first, Der Schatz im Silbersee (1962), was released in Czechoslovakia in 1964, three years after the successful publication of the Czech Shepherdess (1961).27 In Bednář’s relationship to Jeffers—at least the one that can be traced from his published memoirs and print media presentations of the time—there was something unrelenting and possessive, something close to an unrequited love affair. While in Czechoslovakia he solely and fully possessed his beloved poet, when encountering those not from such isolated locales he could not lay sole claim to him. During Beat poet Allen Ginsberg’s 1965 visit to Prague, Bednář tried to launch a conversation about Jeffers with him.28 Apparently nobody really knows what exactly they were ranslated by Arbeit, cited in Arbeit (2019: 332). T The films were mainly filmed in Croatian national parks of former Yugoslavia featuring French actor Pierre Brice in the leading “Indian” role and Czech-born Brit Herbert Lom as the chief villain. Beyond both Germanys, it was Central Europe and the USSR where the films attracted not just wide audience but also, like in Czechoslovakia, even the attention of the highest levels of the Party structure. According to the archives its representatives complained about widespread sale of “kitschy souvenirs with Winnetou-inspired motives … which have little to do with our country, its nature and cultural traditions and life and labour of our people … and fail to respect all the measures of ideological and political values of socialism in the sphere of culture.” Cited in Pospíšil and Blažek (2010: 335). 28 As a part of the Prague student’s rag Ginsberg was elected the King of May but expelled from the country six days later. The event that represented an expression of freedom against the ruling power motivated Ginsberg’s poem “Kral Majales“ (King of May). See Ginsberg (1988: 353–4). On the event see Arbeit 2019: 335; Jařab (2011), and https://alleng​insb​erg. org/2018/05/may-day-kral-maja​les/. 26 27

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talking about, and it is perhaps safe to say that this was not just a generational crash or a conflict of a very different kind of poetic undertakings. Bednář does refer to this meeting briefly in his memoirs but without mentioning Ginsberg’s name, which may be somewhat puzzling for a reader unaware of the cultural setting of the time. Perhaps coincidentally, but very much in line with official propaganda, in Bednář’s memoirs he referred to Ginsberg’s contemporaries as “the young ones, who call themselves beatniks—maybe the beaten?” And Bednář comes to a conclusion that “He does not belong to my adventure, unless as a warning exclamation mark in the margin of a manuscript” (Bednář 1971: 122, cited in Arbeit 2019: 335–6).

APPROPRIATING ROBIN The Shepherdess was a classic—still by the 1970s our high school teacher used to read it to us aloud with this sacred sound of worship in his voice, we knew parts of the poem by heart. Jeffers was considered over here one of the greatest American poets. … at one point incidentally I spoke about him with an (American) friend at Santa Cruz and he was amazed that I knew him since hardly any American did so. (Ex-fellow student, now interpreter and translator, email interview, May 19, 2021) It seems difficult, if not impossible, to draw a clear line between Bednář’s intentional or unintentional attempts at self-promotion and his genuine fascination with Jeffers’s poetry. But as the recollection above suggests, Bednář’s Jeffers “worked” across local political and cultural strata despite the fact that both of them had rather controversial histories and public personae. As the reception of Jeffers’s Czech translations within the local literary-critical circles has already been addressed elsewhere (Kopecký 2012), on the basis of this account we can just summarize that similarly to any other cultural phenomena of the Cold War era its development seemed have more or less echoed the intensity of geopolitical tensions both locally and internationally. Perhaps not surprisingly, the insertion of any North American poet into the Czech cultural scene of the late 1950s and beyond required particular editorial and discursive strategies pursued within the Cold War binary of “either pro-Communist or anti-American traits.”29 Those would have been adopted regardless of their actual manifestations in the respective texts under review. Critical reception to the publication of Bednář’s (1958) translation of Jeffers’s Mara still carried the traces of this dogmatic rhetoric. Speaking from the common rhetorical stance of superiority to “Western” nations and cultures, one Czech critic explained that along with Jeffers we discover the psyche of people who, over here in Europe, are known for their immaturity. It’s a soul of children, a soul fed by primitive religious upbringing, narrowminded morals, just forced to earn and profit … they do desire something better but do not know what … that is the reason why they get so frantic and even dangerous when they encounter cultured Europe … or face something so cultured and scientific as Marxism.30 The same literary critic put it quite bluntly a few years later in his discussion of Jeffers’s exceptional reputation in the country rather tellingly entitled “Giant poet of a translucent controversy”: “we opecký (2015: 226) cited in Arbeit (2019: 324 n.62). K Fleischmann (1958: 4). Cited in Kopecký (2012: 158).

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shall read Jeffers in our own fashion … everything that is valuable in the treasury of human culture does belong to the constructors of the future in the end.”31 Jiří Šotola’s review, by contrast, exhibits a milder tone still compliant with the dominant proto-pacifist anti-American discourse of the times. Himself a reputable writer with a rather tense personal relationship with the ruling regime, he acknowledged Jeffers as “one of the greatest poets of the twentieth century” but reminded Czech readers that he “insistently doubts American civilisation: that civilisation which leads to wars.”32 While the brief examples of Jeffers’s reception among Czech literary professionals during the late 1950s and throughout the 1960s demonstrate—among other things—the gradual weakening of the state and Party control, the two “normalization” post-68 decades produced lists of thousands of titles “subversive to the socialist state” to be removed from editorial plans of the state publishers and from bookshelves of public libraries. Simultaneously, hundreds of authors went to either an actual or internal exile (Šmejkalová 2011: 90). Even with the crackdowns and general grimness of an era that Louis Aragon excoriated as the “Biafra of the spirit,”33 Jeffers retained his place in the Czech literary scene—beloved, widely read, unavoidable. And the essentially respectful attitude toward the poet, the move to cement or at least tolerate his already strong position on the local cultural scene despite the political turmoil of the era, persisted through the early 1980s. Such intentions can be traced, for example, in the records of the approval procedure of the major publishing house Československý spisovatel [The Czechoslovak Writer] accompanying the release of Maják v bouři (Lighthouse in a Storm, 1983), a volume of reprinted and unpublished translations edited by Bednář’s wife Emilie. The publisher’s external review asserts that “the current collection … persuades the Czech reader even now, ten years after the Jeffers fad, that the poet’s mission remains alive and imperative … a new collection of Jeffers’s poems will inevitably find many readers, particularly of the new succeeding generation for whom this might be a revelation.”34 The reviewer continues, suggesting that “primitive interpretation might consider Jeffers to be a solitary and misanthropic poet … (therefore) it is really appropriate that Bednář’s reprinted Foreword interprets the poet in his dialectic ambivalence and in his essential routing towards critically and polemically tuned humanism.” At first glance this review by Josef Peterka (himself a poet favored by the post-68 regime) might appear (particularly in translation!) simply as empty language for its own sake. But Peterka here highlights the key role of “paratexts” like forewords, which serve to correct potentially unsuitable meanings and give readers guidance.35 However, as it would have been close leischmann (1960: 4). Cited in Kopecký (2012: 159). F Šotola (1960: 4). Cited in Kopecký (2012: 159). 33 However, it is important to note that, for example, Václav Havel in his 1984 infamous essay “Six Asides about Culture” heavily criticized this metaphor arguing that while this may have applied to the official cultural policy, theatres packed with audiences and readers queuing up in front of bookshops demonstrated the actual dynamic spiritual life of society under “normalization.” See Havel (1991: 272–84) discussed in Šmejkalová (2011: 103). 34 Peterka, Josef, “Robinson Jeffers: Maják v bouři. Přeložil Kamil Bednář.” [Robinson Jeffers: Lighthouse in a Storm. Translated by Kamil Bednář] 11.1. 1981. In LAPNP, Inventory Bednář Kamil, File “Čs. Spisovatel. Dokumentační materiál: Jeffers, Robinson.” 35 Kopecký also stresses the role of forewords in Czech editions of Jeffers’s work written by Bednář (2012: 160). However, forewords and sleeve notes were not only an important part of the individual editions in the context of the command publishing and circulation practices. Particularly in the 1950s, there were even special manuals issued with instructions for conducting discussions on “proper reading” (čtenářské besedy) held in public libraries on particular titles. See, for example, Šmejkalová (2015: 78) for a discussion of Methodické poznámky pro uspořádání besedy o knize Afrika snů a skutečnosti od Jiřího Hanzelky a Miroslava Zikmunda [Guidelines for conducting readers’ meeting on a book Africa: The Dream and the Reality by Jiří Hanzelka a Miroslav Zikmund] (1953) Praha: Výzkumný osvětový ústav. 31 32

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to impossible to release a US literary work without some interventions or alterations, he adds that “one passage in a poem … might be politically exploitable—here the term revolution is being used as an equivalent of totalitarian system. It seems as if the poet’s spirit was getting trapped in the net of anti-communist propaganda.”36 The publisher’s internal reviewer, poet, and translator Vladimír Janovic praised the volume for its presentation of the “poet’s personal and professional development in its thematic and genre richness.” Janovic, too, emphasizes the crucial importance of Bednář’s foreword and supports the editors’ choice to erase verses “reflecting the author’s temporary submission to the psychosis of the Cold War” as well as poems that referred to “the author’s pessimism, fatalism, and a questionable or class-less view of the current civilisation.”37 A final review by Jaromíra Nejedlá, an actively procommunist literary scholar, identified another set of poems to be omitted while asking the editorin-chief to consider the extent to which those texts “meet the demanding ideological criteria of publishing poetry in Československý spisovatel.”38

STAGING THE SHEPHERDESS In the 1980s, late in the so-called era of “normalization” following the crackdown on the Prague Spring in 1968, my own generation, too young to benefit from the poet’s publishing and theatrical production boom of the 1960s, was left with a kind of Jeffers “after-play.” But few acknowledge that this time was anything more than just the petering-out of what had happened in the 1960s. Despite references to reprints and collections of poetry still being released in the 1970s and early 1980s, critics even today deem that “the period of normalisation did not bring much new to Jeffers’s readers” (Kopecký 2012: 167). I would, however, strongly argue against such assumptions as they ignore what Adams and Barker (1993: 14) have called the “survival” aspect of the book. The same text, the same book, the same copy of a book may have—and more often than not does have—generations of readers, all of them with different agendas, interpretations, and indeed appropriations. Given the large print runs for Jeffers’s translations, the volumes were readily available: on bookshelves in home libraries, in the collections of public libraries, in used book shops (where I acquired my own copy of Cawdor), and in state theatres, where they were used as scripts for stage productions. Most importantly, Jeffers’s reputation as the prime (American) poet endured. As one interviewee told me, “I much preferred, and perhaps still do, the introverted, solitary, serious and somewhat antique Jeffers to the rollicking beatniks. I was reading him on and on, copied down long passages, as I was never really interested in socio-political dances but in the depth of the soul.”39 Thus for my generation’s own encounter with Jeffers, his “survival” on the Czech cultural scene was essential, but even more so was the specific cultural and political context of Faculty of Arts

eterka in LAPNP: Ibid. P Janovic, Vladimír, “Robinson Jeffers: Maják v bouři (lektorský posudek)” [Robinson Jeffers: Lighthouse in a Storm— appraisal review] October 1, 1981. In LAPNP, Inventory Bednář Kamil, File “Čs. Spisovatel. Dokumentační materiál: Jeffers, Robinson.” 38 Nejedlá, Jaromíra “Vyjádření k rukopisu výboru z lyriky Robinsona Jefferse” [Statement on the manuscript of selected lyrical poetry by Robinson Jeffers], October 9, 1981. In LAPNP, Inventory Bednář Kamil, File “Čs. Spisovatel. Dokumentační materiál: Jeffers, Robinson.” 39 Ex-fellow student, now psychotherapist, personal email interview, May 13, 2021. 36 37

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of Charles University during the 1980s, the peak era of “normalization.”40 It may not come as a surprise that this (at least in those days) elite academic institution was under strict control of the representatives of the Communist Party, the secret police (many of whom were also staff and postgraduate students), and the so-called Socialist Youth Union. While membership in the Union was rather formal and more or less compulsory for all university students, as it was meant to be a hatchery for future Party members, it also served as an umbrella organization and approving body for all extracurricular activities. Though not without hesitation and feelings of guilt for unnecessary loyalty to the regimes’ institutions, I joined a group of my fellow students in setting up a small theatrical company with a prime mission of staging poetry. Were we trying to move beyond the stale routines and rituals of our alma mater and the performative omnipresence, in shop windows, of Communist posters and slogans no one took seriously any longer?41 Or did we simply desire to find a meaningful space for a creative “life in truth,” to use the Patočkian notion famously elaborated by then-dissident playwright, later President Václav Havel? Certainly they were both involved. Any presentation my theatre group could have staged that included references to banned or exiled poets, or any unapproved concert performed by our musician friends, or even any trivial “subversive” witticism at an official event would have led to our interrogation by the secret police and potential expulsion from Charles University. So finding texts that appealed to us, engaged our audience, and still failed to irritate the “others up there above” was essential. One solution was to use “antique” literary pieces: thus we produced Sebastian Brant’s satirical allegory Das Narrenschiff (Ship of Fools, 1494) or a canonical work of Czech literature, Romantic poet Karel Hynek Mácha’s dramatic poem Máj (May, 1836). Jeffers’s verse and poetic stories, far distanced and yet so nearby, eternal and proven through many previous Czech productions with (seemingly) zero explicit political undertones, came next. Jeffers’s 1929 narrative poem “The Loving Shepherdess,” inspired by Sir Walter Scott, follows the course of young Clare Walker’s condemned journey up the coast between Big Sur and the Bixby Creek canyon. Devoted to protecting her sheep, she suffers physical and emotional distress, offering herself to men she encounters in an effort to please and show gratitude for help and shelter. At the end she refuses to terminate her pregnancy, which might have saved her life, as she cannot bear to cause the suffering of anything including her own baby. The essential moral appears to be that universal love excludes the idea of happiness.42 As our productions’ initiator and director recalls about our staging of Jeffers’s The Shepherdess, back then under socialism … it felt as if we were shepherded by Jeffers (and other American writers too). I loved that piece, got the books from a friend and also developed my admiration for Jeffers via local small theatres … Even by that time, the theatrical posters for a provincial-city production of the Shepherdess … had a huge impact on me. All of this served as a kind of “back For a closer look at the situation in academia during the respective era, see, for example, a book of memoirs, Holý, Jiří ed., 2009, Tato fakulta bude rudá [This Faculty Will Be Red], Praha: Akropolis. 41 This is a reference to Havel’s imaginary figure of greengrocer he introduced in his infamous essay “The Power of the Powerless” of 1978. Similarly to countless of his contemporaries, this common man by placing posters with “politically correct” slogans along with onions and carrots in his shop window was de facto reproducing the world of appearances the regime was built on and thus took part in approving its legitimacy. See Havel (1986: 45, 46) discussed in Šmejkalová (2011: 202). 42 Original in Jeffers (1929). For a brief content of the poem see also https://www.eno​tes.com/top​ics/lov​ing-shep​herd​ess; https://inh​uman​ist.kaw​eah.com/dear-judas/shep​herd​ess. Accessed May 23, 2021. 40

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brace” for us [preventing us from bending our spines to the authorities]. Jeffers was as if almost naturally with us, nobody was prohibiting him, and he was being staged by small theatres. While all our productions had to receive an official approval, we never had any trouble with Jeffers. For me personally, Jeffers represented freedom—he was its personification, he offered me the fantasy of a takeoff towards the Pacific coast.43 One more point deserves attention here: Bednář’s rephrasing of the poem’s title into— literarily translated—The Shepherdess on Her Pilgrimage towards April [Pastýřka putující k dubnu]. Intentionally or not, the Czech title of the poem was stripped of the Christian connotations of the loving shepherd [milující pastýř] with an emphasis put on the journey, on moving and passing in both physical and metaphorical terms. With a minimalistic stage cleared of any distractions, we focused on declamation of the dramatic turns in Klárka’s [Clare] journey. Music had an exceptional role in the production. “Informal networks” or “social and information bubbles” (to put it in current parlance) are not just a creation of the internet age: they were a key condition of survival back then. We borrowed a copy of the British folk group Steeleye Span’s 1975 album All Around My Hat, and we used it to accompany our Jeffers, even though American-style country square-dance fiddlers would have been more fitting. Fortunately, due to the scarcity of information from the West we didn’t even know that the record had been a hit on the UK album charts, or else we would have found it too cheap and pandering to include in our alternative and innovative show. But to us and to our audiences, Steeleye Span’s unfamiliar melodies and chorus sounded like a perfect match—it was in English (not Californian, but we would have been unable to distinguish between the two anyway), like Jeffers it felt exotic, was associated with an unspoilt landscape, and was mysterious and even somewhat ancient enough to give our story a veneer as detached from our world (or any other one for that matter) as possible. Perhaps it was cowardly, but in this production there was no explicit intention to take sides in any particular hot or cold conflict—and anyway, at this time there was no prospect we could discern of the conflict that we did not call the “Cold War” ever coming to an end. Rather, we were just seeking to take ourselves and our audience beyond, to be somewhere else, if only just for a couple of hours, and by doing so, to stake out a space for survival. Just like Brant’s Ship of Fools pointing toward “the world that wanted to be deceived” or the Czech baroque murderer “darkly complaining of a secret pain” in Mácha’s Byronic cantos, Jeffers certainly offered that pathway. As after all the already cited Prof. Josef Jařab noted, “What we will be willing and able to accept from America will always be a reflection on our capabilities and the level of our own cultural advancement. Just like in the past, also in the future will our image and our story of American literature be primarily an image and story of ourselves” (1997: 405).

WORKS CITED Adams, Thomas R., and Nicolas Barker (1993), “A New Model for the Study of the Book,” in Nicolas Barker (ed.), A Potencie of Life: Books in Society: The Clark Lectures 1986–1987, 5–43, London: British Library. Arbeit, Marcel (2000), “American Literature in Czech Translation: A Very Brief History,” in Arbeit, Marcel (gen. ed.), Bibliografie americké literatury v českých překladech: Knihy, neperiodické publikace, periodika s

Ex-fellow student, now professor of psychology, personal email interview, May 11, 2021.

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nejvýše dvanácti čísly ročně, samizdatové a exilové časopisy a fanziny do roku 1997. Bibliography of American Literature in Czech Translation: Books, Non-Periodical Publications, Periodicals with up to Twelve Issues a Year, Samizdat and Exile Periodicals and Fanzines to 1997, 29–37, 3 vols., compiled by Marcel Arbeit and Eva Vacca, Olomouc: Votobia, 2000. Arbeit, Marcel (2019), “Without Meeting Each Other: Czech Mediators of Willa Cather and Robinson Jeffers,” in Hans Bak and Céline Mansanti (eds.), Transatlantic Intellectual Networks, 1914–1964, 305–39, Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars. Bednář, Kamil (1971), Přátelství přes oceán [Friendship across the Ocean], Praha: Československý spisovatel. Bolton, Jonathan (2012), Worlds of Dissent: Charter 77, the Plastic People of the Universe, and Czech Culture under Communism, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Bolton, Jonathan (2016), “Palmy za polárním kruhem: o nesamozřejmosti samizdatu v Ledererových Českých rozhovorech” [Palms beyond the Arctic Circle: unobvious samizdat in Lederer’s Czech interviews] in Česká literatura: časopis pro literární vědu Praha: Ústav pro českou literaturu AV ČR, 64, 6, 895–905. Bondy, Egon (2009), Ve všední den i v neděli …: Výbor z básnického díla 1950–1994. [On Weekday and on Sunday: Selected Poetic Works 1950–1994], Martin Machovec (ed.), Praha: DharmaGaia. Budra, Vladimír (1967), “Pevný bod Kamila Bednáře” [The Fixed Point of Kamil Bednář], Literární noviny 13: 4–5. Darnton, Robert (1982), “What Is the History of Books?” Daedalus 111(3): 65–83. Fleischmann, Ivo (1958), “Amerika minulých let” [America of the Past Times], Literární noviny 43: 4. Fleischmann, Ivo (1960), “Velký básník průhledného rozporu” [Giant Poet of a Transparent Controversy], Literární noviny 5: 6. Ginsberg, Allen (1988), Collected Poems 1947–1980, New York: Harper & Row. Havel, Václav (1986), “The Power of the Powerless,” in Jan Vladislav (ed.), Living in Truth, London: Faber and Faber. Havel, Václav (1991), “Six Asides about Culture,” in Paul Wilson (ed. and trans.), Open Letters: Selected Prose 1965–1990, 272–84, London: Faber. Herman, Mik (2021), “Jeffersova Pastýřka putující k dubnu je nadčasovým příběhem jdoucím na samou podstatu lidství” [Jeffers’s Loving Shepherdess Is a Timeless Story Touching on the Very Essence of Humanity]. In Čítárny.cz https://www.cita​rny.cz/nove-knihy/poe​zie/poe​zie-klasi​cka/jef​fers​ova-pasty​rka-putuj​ici-k-dubnu-jenad​caso​vym-pribe​hem-jdo​uci-na-samou-podst​atu-lids​tvi (accessed May 29, 2021). Holý, Jiří, ed. (2009), Tato fakulta bude rudá [This Faculty Will Be Red], Praha: Akropolis. Jařab, Josef (1997), “Americká literatura jako výpověď o novém a jiném světě i jako naše zrcadlo” [American Literature as a Testimony on the New and Different World as well as Our Own Mirror] Afterword in Bradbury, Malcolm and Richard Ruland, Od puritanismu k postmodernismu: Dějiny americké literatury [From Puritanism to Postmodernism: A History of American Literature], 393–407, Praha: Mladá fronta. Jařab, Josef (2011), “The Transnational American Identity of Allen Ginsberg,” in , Ada Böhmerová (ed.), Slovak Studies in English III—Identity in Intercultural Communication, 28–9, Bratislava: ŠEVT. Jeffers, Robinson (1941), Be Angry at the Sun, New York: Random House. Jeffers, Robinson (1958), Mara, Kamil Bednář (trans.), Praha: Československý spisovatel. Jeffers, Robinson (1961), Pastýřka putující k dubnu [The Loving Shepherdess], Kamil Bednář (trans.), Praha: Mladá fronta. Jeffers, Robinson (1979), Cawdor, Kamil Bednář (trans.), Praha: Práce. Jeffers, Robinson (1983), Maják v bouři [Lighthouse in a Storm], Kamil Bednář (trans.) Emilie Bednářová (ed.), Praha: Československý spisovatel.

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Jeffers, Robinson (2015), The Collected Letters of Robinson Jeffers: With Selected Letters of Una Jeffers, vol. 3, James Karman (ed.), Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Jeffers, Robinson (2020), Pastýřka putující k dubnu. Nové dvojjazyčné vydání básníka z Jestřábí věže [The Loving Shepherdess: New Bilingual Edition of a Poet from the Hawks Tower], Staré Město pod Landštejnem: Dauphin. Kopecký, Petr (2012), Robinson Jeffers a John Steinbeck: Vzdálení a blízcí [Robinson Jeffers and John Steinbeck: Faraway and Yet Close to Each Other], Brno: Host. Kopecký, Petr (2015), “The Warm Reception of Robinson Jeffers’s Poetry in Cold War Czechoslovakia,” in Shaun Anne Tangney (ed.), The Wild That Attracts Us: New Critical Essays on Robinson Jeffers, 223–54, Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. Kornai, János (1980), Economics of Shortage. Amsterdam: North-Holland. Otáhal, Milan (2002), Normalizace 1969–1989: Příspěvek ke stavu bádání [Normalisation—1969–1989. The State of Research], Praha: Sešity Ústavu pro soudobé dějiny AVČR. Oushakine, Serguei A. (2014), “‘Against the Cult of Things’: On Soviet Productivism, Storage Economy, and Commodities with No Destination,” Russian Review 73(2): 198–236. Peprník, Jaroslav (2002), Amerika očima české literatury od vzniku USA po rok 2000 II [America through the Eyes of Czech Literature since the Establishment of the USA up to 2000], Olomouc: Univerzita Palackého, 676–7. Pospíšil, Filip, and Petr Blažek (2010), “Vraťte nám vlasy!” První máničky, vlasatci a hippies v komunistickém Československu. [Give Us Back Our Hair! First Long-Haired Men and Hippies in Communist Czechoslovakia], Praha: Academia. Searcy, Anne (2020), Ballet in the Cold War: A Soviet-American Exchange, New York: Oxford University Press. Skilling, Gordon H. (1976), Czechoslovakia’s Interrupted Revolution, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Šmejkalová, Jiřina (2011), Cold War Books in the “Other” Europe and What Came After, Leiden: Brill. Šmejkalová, Jiřina (2015), “Command Celebrities: The Rise and Fall of Hanzelka and Zikmund,” Central Europe 13(1–2): 72–86. Šmejkalová, Jiřina, and Roar Lishaugen (2019), “Reading East of the Berlin Wall,” PMLA 134(1): 178–87. Šotola, Jiří (1960), “Objev Ameriky v poezii” [Discovery of America in Poetry], Kultura 4(4): 4. Storey, John (2001), Cultural Theory and Popular Culture: An Introduction, New York: Routledge. Vardamis, Alex A. (1991), “Robinson Jeffers: Poet of Controversy,” in Robert Zaller (ed.), Centennial Essays for Robinson Jeffers, 48–9, Newark: University of Delaware Press; Cranbury, NJ: Associated University Presses.

FURTHER READING Arbeit, Marcel (2019), “Without Meeting Each Other: Czech Mediators of Willa Cather and Robinson Jeffers,” in Hans Bak and Céline Mansanti (eds.), Transatlantic Intellectual Networks, 1914–1964, 305–39, Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars. Bažant, Jan, and Nina Bažantová, eds. (2010), The Czech Reader: History, Culture, Politics, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Bolton, Jonathan (2012), Worlds of Dissent: Charter 77, the Plastic People of the Universe, and Czech Culture Under Communism, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Hammond, Andrew, ed. (2006), Cold War Literature: Writing the Global Conflict, Milton Park: Routledge. Hammond, Andrew, ed. (2020), The Palgrave Handbook of Cold War Literature, London: Palgrave Macmillan. Havel, Václav (1991), “Six Asides about Culture,” in Paul Wilson (ed. and trans.), Open Letters: Selected Prose 1965–1990, 272–84, London: Faber. Heimann, Mary (2009), Czechoslovakia: The State That Failed, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

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Jeffers, Robinson (1929), Dear Judas and Other Poems, New York: Boni & Liveright. Jeffers, Robinson (2015), The Collected Letters of Robinson Jeffers: With Selected Letters of Una Jeffers, vol. 3, 1940–62, James Karman (ed.), Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Kopecký, Petr (2015), “The Warm Reception of Robinson Jeffers’s Poetry in Cold War Czechoslovakia,” in Shaun Anne Tangney (ed.), The Wild That Attracts Us: New Critical Essays on Robinson Jeffers, 223–54, Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. McDermott, Kevin (2015), Communist Czechoslovakia, 1945–89: A Political and Social History, Basingstoke: Palgrave. Oushakine, Serguei A. (2014), “‘Against the Cult of Things’: On Soviet Productivism, Storage Economy, and Commodities with No Destination,” Russian Review 73(2): 198–236. Šmejkalová, Jiřina (2011), Cold War Books in the ‘Other’ Europe and What Came After, Leiden: Brill. Vardamis, Alex A. (1991), “Robinson Jeffers: Poet of Controversy,” in Robert Zaller (ed.), Centennial Essays for Robinson Jeffers, 48–9, Newark: University of Delaware Press; Cranbury, NJ: Associated University Presses.

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CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

Reading for Freedom in Cold War America KRISTIN L. MATTHEWS

“In our country’s first year of war, we have seen the growing power of books as weapons,” asserted President Franklin D. Roosevelt in a much-heralded 1941 address. He claimed that “through books we have appraised our enemies and discovered our allies. We have learned something of American valor in battle. We have, above all, come to understand better the kind of war we must fight and the kind of peace we must establish.” In these remarks, the president identified books as icons of “man’s eternal fight against tyranny,” invoking Americans’ history as a bookish people while also calling citizens to embrace his vision in which reading preserves freedom and makes peace (Council of Books 1942: front matter; “Books are Weapons” 1942).1 Ultimately, he stressed that reading is a national privilege and duty. At the Second World War’s close, many Americans moved into a Cold War world convinced, as was reading educator Jean Grambs, that “an informed citizenry is basic to a healthy democratic community, and books play an indispensable role in the continuous project of education” (Grambs 1954: iv). Politicians, educators, publishers, writers, and everyday citizens drew from wartime reading initiatives such as those of the Council on Books in Wartime (CBW), as well as prewar reading and educational programs, and deployed wartime production and distribution mechanisms to ensure Americans read. Undergirding these initiatives was a growing belief that a set of texts, called the “Great Books” or the “canon,” contained timeless values and universal truths that fortified individuals, communities, and America itself in the battle against “foreign” ideologies. University of Chicago president and Great Books Program (GBP) cofounder, Robert Hutchins, declared that “if we want to educate our students for freedom, we must educate them … in the great books” (Hutchins 1943: 14). He and other professors, public intellectuals, and library organizations created strikingly similar lists of philosophical, poetic, and literary texts that promised to help everyday Americans protect democracy. So convinced were reading advocates of the power of this canon that they believed that (in Hutchins’s words) “it is unpatriotic not to read great books”

I use “America” instead of the “United States” in this chapter to refer to the idea or imagined nation-state promoted in the Cold War period as opposed to the internationally recognized country, the United States of America. 1

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(Hutchins 1954: 22). Accordingly, they did their patriotic duty by creating, teaching, and, at times, policing a particular brand of “Americanness,” buoyed by their faith in the power of “good reading” to make “good citizens” (Solberg 1953: 127). The “Great Books” brand framed America as both the inheritor of Western European culture—“the wisdom of the ages … becom[es] the common property of Americans” (Strubbe 1953: 217)—and as its future, for having just “saved” Western Europe from itself during the Second World War, postwar America saw itself as the “champion of democracy” (Lacy and Hill 1953: 131) and guardian of all books great and good. As this chapter will demonstrate, however, the reading education promoted in the immediate Cold War period didn’t reflect America’s diverse needs and beliefs but rather those of people in power—“Western,” middle to upper class, and male. Preserving democracy through reading, therefore, often functioned to reinforce existing systems of power. Throughout the Cold War, working Americans, white women, and Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) challenged exclusionary narratives of “good readership,” and advocated for reading’s power to extend democracy to those previously disenfranchised, seeing it as a revolutionary mechanism for political and social change. Through reading, discussing, writing, and disseminating print, these groups “appraised [their] enemies and discovered [their] allies” and came “to understand better the kind of war [they] must fight and the kind of peace [they] must establish” (Council of Books 1942: front matter). They too saw books as weapons—not against external political threats, however, but against the very ideologies propping up Cold War nationalism: xenophobia, white supremacy, patriarchy, imperialism, and heterosexism. In so doing, they deployed the aims of the CBW against it and similar nationalistic programs in the hopes of creating a more inclusive America and a more perfect union. What this chapter ultimately demonstrates is that Cold War American readers from all races, creeds, genders, classes, nationalities, and political parties shared a faith in the power of the word to set or keep one free as a citizen of the United States. While they may have framed what constituted “good books,” “good reading,” or “good readers” differently, these reader-citizens believed selfdetermination came from being literate—whether literally, politically, or socially. Americans were told that reading constituted a significant front in the Cold War battle against the Soviet Union, but many realized that reading could also be a powerful weapon against America’s oppressive power structure itself. The story of reading in Cold War America is a progressive narrative—one that is characterized by continual movement and one that reflects the perpetual debate over what constitutes “freedom” in the latter half of the twentieth century.

DRAFTING BOOKS INTO SERVICE When it came to reading advocacy, Cold War Americans could tap into the successful reading infrastructure left over from the Second World War: library programs, reading lists, book groups, radio adaptations, and Armed Services Editions (ASE).2 And it was a good thing too, for postwar anxieties about America’s perceived or real cultural inadequacy on the global stage heightened the urgency to make reader-citizens soldiers for freedom. Harvard University’s 1945 report General Education in a Free Society warned of the nation’s need for increased reading education because

2

For excellent discussions of these programs, see: Hench (2010) and Travis (1999: 353–99).

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“some two hundred thousand ‘functional illiterates’ were inducted into the armed forces” after June of 1942 (Harvard 1945: 255). The report’s authors feared the impact this illiteracy could have on national security at home and the reputation of the United States abroad. These concerns were seemingly confirmed in 1947 when New York Times reporter Raymond Daniell warned that the efficacy of the Marshall Plan could be jeopardized by European shock over “the ignorance of some of our visiting statesmen” and servicemen, as well as by Americans’ perceived lack of culture: “they [Europeans] think there is something wrong with the country, the majority of whose citizens prefer swing music to Beethoven and Bach” (Daniell 1947: 69). Although Daniell dismissed a good portion of this criticism as either communist propaganda or postwar economic jealousy, his article pointed toward an underlying anxiety in America’s public sphere about how the nation compared to these “older culture[s]‌and civilization[s]” (Daniell 1947: 71) and how its cultural immaturity could pose a threat to national security. Hutchins later echoed these ideas, noting that while the United States is now the most powerful country in the world … [i]‌t has not had centuries of experience in which to learn how to discharge the responsibilities of a position into which it was catapulted against its will. Nor has it had the kind of education, in the last fifty years, that is conductive to understanding its position or to maintaining it with balance, dignity, and charity. As a result, he claimed, the United States hasn’t “the kind of maturity that the present crisis demands of the most powerful nation in the world” (Hutchins 1954: 97). The urgency about keeping old and attracting new allies resulted from the Soviet Union’s “defection” from American ally to enemy. The allies’ failure to “read” the USSR—its intentions and purported threat—spawned what Hutchins called “the present crisis.” Many politicians and reading advocates feared poor reading would lead to democracy’s demise because, as ex-Communist Whittaker Chambers wrote in his best-selling 1952 book, Witness, “In the war between capitalism and Communism, books are weapons, and, like all serviceable weapons, loaded” (Chambers [1952] 1980: 79). As I have written elsewhere, “the United States and the Soviet Union battled to narrate their political ideologies in ways that demonstrated how each system of government—democracy or communism—could best serve the citizen-reader. A ‘winning’ articulation of political philosophy or national values would capture the most readers and help win the war” (Matthews 2016: 5). Poor readers could be seduced by Communist literature to the dark side, unable to critically distinguish between what is “good” and “true” from what is “bad” and “propagandistic.” Psychologist Erich Fromm articulated a common concern when he warned that “in spite of the fact that everybody reads the daily paper religiously, there is an absence of understanding of the meaning of political events which is truly frightening” (Fromm 1955: 172). Columbia University sociologists Drs. Paul Lazarfeld and Robert K. Merton similarly stressed that “large numbers of people have acquired what might be termed ‘formal literacy,’ that is to say, a capacity to read, to grasp crude and superficial meanings, and a correlative incapacity for full understanding of what they read. There has developed, in short, a marked gap between literacy and comprehension. People read more but understand less” (Lazarfeld and Merton [1948] 1957: 467). Cold War leaders in the White House and the schoolhouse believed that poor book selection, interpretation, and comprehension skills would create easy targets for Communism and its agents, transforming independent thinking Americans who exercised their rights in the name of democracy into members of a godless, groupthinking, totalitarian horde.

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Books including Rudolph Flesch’s Why Johnny Can’t Read (1955) and Arthur S. Trace, Jr.’s Why Ivan Can Read but Johnny Can’t (1961) fed that fear, claiming that America’s inadequate reading education was “gradually destroying democracy in this country” (Flesch 1955: 132) and would “do as much to bring about the destruction of the free world as any weapon in the Communist arsenal” (Trace 1961: 187). And while many scholars and educators criticized these texts for fanning hysteria, others like pioneering University of Chicago reading researchers William Gray and Bernice Rogers echoed the sentiments. In Maturity in Reading (1956), Gray and Rogers warned “that a large proportion of the population is relatively immature in reading,” underscoring “the magnitude of the adult reading problem which this country faces” (Gray and Rogers 1956: 231). These popular and academic reading advocates feared that what they saw as America’s inability or unwillingness to read was a threat to America’s security at home and abroad. Despite this panic, the reality was that postwar America and Americans accessed books and reading programs at unprecedented rates. The various reading endeavors created by the CBW had brought more Americans to books than ever before both at home (through the above-mentioned programs) and overseas. On the battlefront and in the training centers, “functionally illiterate” soldiers accessed literacy programs to great success (“General Education” 1945: 255). Others took advantage of initiatives like the ASE that furnished 122,951,031 adaptations of “classic” and contemporary literature to frontline GIs, many of whom got “hooked” on reading (Jamieson 1948: 3). One serviceman wrote, “On the ship, everywhere one looked, one saw soldiers eagerly devouring these books” (Van Der Voort 1945: 19), and an air force lieutenant tied this reading to freedom: “fellows are delving into some fine literature which they might never have done otherwise were it not for [these editions] … it has certainly put good literature on a democratic (small ‘d’) level that it has never enjoyed before” (“SRL Award” 1945: 18). These readerly veterans then came home to the Servicemen’s Readjustment Act (1944), otherwise known as the GI Bill, which made higher education more “small ‘d’ democratic” than ever before. Included in the GI Bill were subsidies for education, and “by 1953, of 7,800,000 eligible veterans, half had undertaken some form of education, two million odd of these in higher education” (Adams 2000: 65). Of this legislation, Harvard University president and (later) ambassador to West Germany James Bryant Conant wrote, “There can be no doubt that in terms of equalizing opportunity the GI Bill was a revolutionary step forward” (Conant [1948] 1969: 195). During the 1939–40 academic year, student enrollment in American institutions of higher learning was around 1.5 million. Just ten years later, enrollments had increased approximately 80 percent to around 2.7 million (Thelin 2004: 261). Working-class veterans who might not have been able to access both a university education and the social mobility it afforded now had opportunities inconceivable to their parents. Expressing concern that first-generation university students lacked the skills to select the “Great Books,” understand them correctly, and identify undemocratic narratives when encountered within them, Cold War universities revamped their general education programs for freedom’s sake. The Harvard report professed, “general education is especially required in a democracy where the public elects its leaders and officials; the ordinary citizen must be discerning enough so that he will not be deceived by appearances and will elect the candidate who is wise in his field” (1945: 54). The President’s Commission on Higher Education further argued that general education exists to fortify international relations (President’s Commission 1947:15). While universities debated what should be included in general education—standardized, vocational, or “Great Books” curricula— all agreed that change was needed so “every citizen, youth, and adult is enabled and encouraged

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to carry his education, formal and informal, as far as his native capacities permit” (President’s Commission 1947: 101). The language in these reports frames reading as a defense, teaching people to be alert and “discerning” so they be “not deceived” by undemocratic texts and ideologies, communist or otherwise. At the same time, it implied different classes of readers and, by extension, citizens—“as far as his native capacities permit”—to be educated into correct ways of reading and thinking about the world. University extension programs similarly expanded in the postwar period to ensure that this Cold War educational mobilization reached older citizens, too. Extension programs underscored the “democratic” nature of education in their aims and curriculum, distinguishing the “learning” they proffered from what they deemed Soviet models of “indoctrination.”3 To Columbia University Dean James E. Russell, extension coursework fostered a “better understanding of the rights and duties of one’s fellow men” (Burrell 1954: viii). The Harvard report concurred, calling “adult education” an “important key to the health of the body politic” (1945: 256). Universities developed local and correspondence courses in order to reach a broad constituency, seeking to fortify cultural literacy in the belief “that the average man is educable, that he has his rights, that when educated he can be trusted to exercise those rights” (Burrell 1954: 32). These reports evidence a tension between the universalism of their educative aim and the paternalism in their belief that “average” Americans must be educated into a certain status before they “can be trusted” to exercise their rights. These programs sought to direct a new class of learners to “greater” and “better understanding” of their role in American democracy; yet, it was often a role determined by their supposed intellectual superiors. Bridging the gap between institutions of higher learning and the public were organizations like the GBP, which worked to cultivate good readers and citizens. Begun by Hutchins and University of Chicago philosophy professor Mortimer Adler in 1947, this program drew upon Columbia professor John Erskine’s “Great Works” course meant to educate “the whole man” with the “greatest” works of Western literature. Unlike the Modern Library, which published more avantgarde work, and the Book-of-the-Month Club, which published middlebrow-leaning contemporary literature, the GBP looked backward, asserting “the classics” “were the books that had endured and that the common voice of mankind called the finest creations … of the Western mind” (Hutchins 1952: xi). An adult education program, the GBP invited Americans to form small book groups that would gather to discuss the “Great Books” with one of the program’s trained discussion leaders. GBP leaders modeled and guided participants toward “good reading” methods so they, as readercitizens, might unearth the timeless ideas central to a functioning democracy.4 Within one year of its founding, the GBP had over 80,000 members following its reading regimen (Rubin 2009: 413). The GBP tapped into leftover wartime civic connection and duty, promising the program was “not simply a means of self-improvement but also an opportunity to join the community of the well-read” (Strubbe 1953: 217). The GPB prescribed a particular type of individual development and community enhancement, helping individual readers come to understand what “great books” meant, what “good reading” looked like, and what these approved practices meant for Western

or a terrific example of postwar American depiction of Soviet systems, see Colgrove (1959). F Tim Lacy’s book, The Dream of a Democratic Culture: Mortimer J. Adler and the Great Books Idea (2013), does a tremendous job of telling the larger story of postwar America’s fascination with “Great Books” and the GPB. 3 4

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civilization within a group setting, modeling the e pluribus unum celebrated by the program’s founders. The Book-of-the-Month Club too capitalized on this postwar reading push. Founded in 1926 and boasting 362,585 subscribers by the late 1930s, the club’s numbers exploded during and after the war as Americans sought to do their part and read for freedom. The Club’s profits grew 200 percent during the war and “its finances continued to yield excellent harvests” in the postwar period (Lee 1958: 70, 77). Why? For one, mail-service subscription clubs made books available to readers in the many regions of the country that had no bookstores and only minimal library services. Book-of-the-Month Club founder Harry Scherman “believed many more people could be persuaded to become readers if they were given better access to books as well as to the kind of advice that would explain not the particulars of a book’s content but how it would address readers interests, desires, or needs” (Radway 2007: 236). Subscription book clubs The Literary Guild, The Dollar Book Club, The Book Find Club, and People’s Choice Club, and Reader’s Digest editions also drew on the increased reader market, employed their own editorial boards of experts, and finetuned their mechanisms for book distribution. All of these ventures benefited from the “paperback revolution” that made reading more affordable and convenient, with books sold in drug stores and other nontraditional book-selling places. Between 1947 and 1952, paperback sales increased from 95 to 270 million copies (Epstein 2001: 61), suggesting many Americans heard and responded to national calls to read. (Jaime Harker also discusses the “paperback revolution,” particularly as it helped foster the growth in queer literature, in her contribution to this anthology.) The ideals of universal readership and democracy preservation were noble; however, the postwar reality reflected more exclusionary practices that reinforced the social status quo. Advocates of universal reading assumed whiteness and maleness as the norm and then created policies, curricula, reading lists, and publishing catalogs that reflected that norm while implying anything else was neither a “Great Book” nor a “good” reading method. Decision-makers at universities, publishing houses, and commercial ventures were “convinced that the West needs to recapture and re-emphasize and bring to bear upon its present problems the wisdom that lies in the works of its greatest thinkers” (Hutchins 1952: xii). “Great Works” general education curricula included only the white, male authors who constituted what had come to be known as “the Western canon,” and those teaching these courses were almost exclusively white and male. Neither a woman nor a BIPOC had a work included in the fifty-four volumes the GBP enshrined as The Great Books of the Western World. And although the Book-of-the-Month Club offered a slightly more diverse reading selection, its inclusion of contemporary minority, female, and middle-brow authors made it a target of “mass culture” critiques that dismissed the club as something to be “survived” (Berelson 1957: 122) rather than celebrated.5 Many postwar reading advocates also failed to recognize structural barriers to reading. Prejudicial policies denied many would-be reader-citizens access to education, libraries, and government programs. American education in the south continued to be racially segregated, with African Americans primarily attending historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs)—institutions created under “separate but equal” mandates. Northern universities weren’t subject to the same de jure segregation, but de facto racial and gender discrimination was a reality. Until 1969, many of

5

See https://www.ocf.berke​ley.edu/~immer/boo​ks19​40s for a list of books published in the 1940s. Accessed March 24, 2021.

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the most prestigious universities in the United States (including Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Virginia, Duke, Brown, Amherst, and Williams) did not admit women, who were directed to separate but purportedly equal “sister schools,” or all women’s universities.6 When northern universities did begin to integrate in terms of race and gender, many alumni, students, and faculty felt threatened, demanding the administration return to limiting admissions. Additionally, the GI Bill’s implementation discriminated against women, racial minorities, and LGBTQ+ veterans, therein curtailing the “freedom” and “equalizing” this legislation promised. Approximately “350,000 women served in uniform but of these only 64, 728, or 2.9 percent of the total veteran enrollment used the educational portion of the GI Bill in its first decade,” one reason being the Veterans Administration (VA) denied their claims, stating “the Women’s Army Corps were not properly enlisted soldiers” (Adams 2000: 69–70). The VA similarly kept Black veterans from accessing their full educational benefits under the GI Bill. Administrators in charge of dispensing benefits were overwhelmingly white and often pushed Black veterans away from higher education and toward either vocational training (Herbold 1994–5: 106; Humes 2006: 97) or HBCUs that had neither the space nor the money to handle the influx of so many new students.7 The GI Bill also was the first federal policy that explicitly excluded gays and lesbians from its economic benefits (Canaday 2003: 936). During the Second World War, soldiers suspected of homosexuality were given a “section eight,” “blue,” or “undesirable” discharge, and in April 1945, VA head Frank Hines decreed such “generally will be considered … a bar to entitlement” (Canaday 2003: 943). Despite their lofty rhetoric about reading’s power to liberate, elevate, and create citizens prepared to exercise their democratic rights in defense of freedom, postwar reading advocates fashioned programs that reinforced the same exclusionary ideologies and practices that had prevented America from realizing its democratic ideals since before its founding: namely racism, sexism, classism, and homophobia. In response, postwar social movements reimagined reading’s function and power, challenging oppressive systems and offering a vision of America and American reader-citizenship that extended liberty and justice to all.

THE LIMITS OF “GREAT” Throughout the Cold War, America’s minority populations challenged status-quo ideas of what made for good readers, good reading, and “Great Books,” calling for more inclusive definitions and access. They rejected claims that broadening them would threaten the “excellence” of the canon, college, or country, countering that diverse reading materials and methods were truer to American democracy than “the classics.” In many cases, students and young people led the charge and moved America’s ideas about good readership and citizenship forward. At the heart of these discussions about reading, greatness, and freedom was what Professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr. called the struggle “for the very soul of America” (Gates 1992: 176). The exclusionary list includes Amherst, Boston College, Bowdoin, Brown, Carnegie Mellon, Claremont McKenna, Colgate, Columbia, Dartmouth, Duke, Fordham, Georgetown, Hamilton, Harvard, Johns Hopkins, Notre Dame, University of Pennsylvania, Princeton, Rutgers, Trinity, Tulane, University of Virginia, West Point (and other military schools), Williams, and Yale. Perkins (2019: 8). 7 According to historian Keith Olson, “postwar enrollment at the Negro colleges, which in 1940 was 43,003 and 10 years later 76,600, reached the breaking point. Limited facilities forced the colleges, during 1946 and 1947, to turn away an estimated 20,000 veterans” (Herbold 1994–5: 108). 6

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Postwar African Americans drew from a long history of reading activism as they advocated for their right to read. Before Emancipation, it was illegal to teach slaves to read in many southern states, and this suspicion of educated Black people—who would demand social mobility, political participation, and economic independence—persisted and motivated paltry state and county funding for schools and libraries serving African Americans. A. D. Beittel, the president of Mississippi HCBU Tougaloo College, called the segregation of schools and libraries a “direct challenge to the American democratic ideal” (1951: 141).8 Other civil rights leaders pointed to the disconnect between the US promises of extending freedom abroad and its practices of restricting it at home through segregation, and American cultural diplomats agreed.9 United Nations ambassador Ralph Bunche warned, “The position of world leadership which our nation now enjoys is made vulnerable and morally undefensible by the harsh rattling of the race-relations skeletons in our closet” (Bunche 1950: 436–7). Thus, advocates called for legislation that would dismantle segregation and other Jim Crow apparatuses denying African Americans access to the freedoms promised in the nation’s foundational documents. Civil rights organizers believed that education in general, and books in particular, worked “to advance our causes” as people became “informed through reading” (Josey 1967: 16). “Informed” reading would allow African Americans “to participate in the great social debates of our time” (Josey 1967: 17) and assume “an integral part of the leadership of the New Democratic South” (Josey 1967: 16). This focus on reading and consciousness-raising spurred African American youth (students of HBCUs, in particular) to be “the risk takers and leaders in numerous civil rights demonstrations, especially in efforts to integrate restaurants, stores, and bus stations throughout the South” (Thelin 2004: 306). As members of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), and Congress for Racial Equality (CORE), students recognized that books “are powerful weapons” (Josey 1965: 159) and staged read-ins in local “white” libraries, exposing the lie of “separate yet equal” access to knowledge and power.10 Of course, that is what status-quo preservers feared—that Black political leadership, and the structural changes mandated by civil rights legislation, would divest white supremacy of its power. Like the great abolitionist and orator Frederick Douglass, Black organizers recognized that efforts to deny or depress Black literacy were key to “the white man’s power to enslave the black man,” and that reading constituted “the pathway from slavery to freedom” (Douglass [1845] 1987: 275). African American reading advocates recognized that white-dominated institutions wouldn’t cede power willingly, so they drew from and extended the literacy traditions of their ancestors to fortify themselves while they fought segregation in the courts. Some postwar African Americans created local book clubs, including the Chat-an-Hour Social and Cultural Club (Long 2009: 459) and The Book Circle (Unger 2019), which hearkened to early Negro literary societies like the Bethel Historical and Literary Association, the Boston Literary and Historical, New York’s Phoenix Society, and Philadelphia’s Colored Reading Society in their efforts to educate, build community,

Although a popular president, Beittel was infamously fired from Tugaloo College in 1960 for being a vocal proponent of the civil rights movement and encouraging students to participate in acts of civil disobedience. 9 See Dudziak (2000). 10 See “The Read-In” (1961: 27–8); “Read-in Demonstration at Jackson (Miss.) Public Library” (1961: 1751); “Negroes Enter Library” (1960); Wayne and Wiegand (2018); Knott (2015); and Eberhart (2017). 8

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and organize for freedom. African Americans created their own subscription book clubs, with the Frederick Douglass Book Club, the Negro Book Club, and the Progressive Book Club extending “a selection of books each month by and about Negroes” (Crisis 1946: 284) to readers in hopes of building upon a culture of reading. Readers could also subscribe to “The Negro Book Club News,” which was, according to an ad in The Crisis, “a monthly of reviews and comments on books of all publishers by, about and of special interest to Negroes” (Crisis 1946: 284). These reading advocates believed, as did Douglass, that once Black Americans accessed the power to read and the knowledge that sprang forth from it, “Freedom [would appear], to disappear no more forever,” because it would be “heard in every sound, and seen in every thing,” revealing to the oppressed both the nature of their oppression and giving them mechanisms for their liberation (Douglass [1845] 1987: 279). All of these efforts to bring books and literacy to a wider African American population were rooted in the belief that reading created free subjects—the same belief undergirding programs that oft denied African Americans access. As Van Gosse and Kenneth Heineman have argued, the freedom movements of the postwar period weren’t discrete entities but instead overlapped in their aim to extend the rights and empowerment of citizenship to all. Many involved in the New Left were activated by the civil rights movement, participating in sit-ins, freedom rides, and voter registration efforts.11 Schooled by African American organizers and activists who challenged structural limitations to “freedom and justice for all” and proposed alternative modes of reading in and of America, the predominantly white members of the Free Speech Movement (FSM), Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), Yippies, Diggers, and other New Left groups called for “old definitions, goals, and tactics [to] be reappraised” (SDS 1964: 4) in order to “save” a nation from narratives that were “ambiguous and tradition-bound instead of informed and clear” (Spence [1965] 1969: 41). They blamed “tradition-bound” values and institutions for racism, nuclear proliferation, mass consumption, and American imperialism. They argued that calls for “preserving” freedom were rooted in “policies and style [which] flow from necessary commitment to the preservation of the going system” (SDS 1963: 13) rather than a commitment to democracy. New Left groups sought “for truly democratic alternatives to the present, and a commitment to social experimentation within them” (SDS [1962] 1964: 5) and promised that “no existing mode of thought, nor entrenched institution will remain unchallenged” (SDS [1962] 1964: 4). To the various groups of the New Left, America’s status-quo politics were anything but democratic, and new ways of reading and thinking were required to provide “alternatives.” Similar to the civil rights movement, New Left groups viewed reading as key to “understanding the oppressive class structures now developing in American society,” claiming oppression “is found less in the maldistribution of the nation’s property than in the maldistribution of knowledge” (McDermott [1969] 1970: 343). They believed, as Todd Gitlin writes, that they “must find their way out of the restricted perspectives imposed by their condition,” for if they didn’t, “the alternative is the perpetuation ... of minority rule and mass powerlessness” (Gitlin [1964] 1967: 133). Organizers were confident that they could shift the balance of power by challenging “the endless repressions of free speech and thought” (Hayden [1961] 1966: 3) wrought by those in power and by creating and distributing “living documents” (SDS [1962] 1964: 2). Unlike the governing

See Gosse (2005) and Heineman (1993).

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powers’ “dead” letters, “living documents,” the New Left claimed, adapted to meet the needs of individuals and groups awakening to new democratic possibilities. Foundational to many New Left groups was the Port Huron Statement (PHS) of 1962 of which more than 100,000 copies were distributed in SDS’s first five years. The PHS proposed a radical rethinking of the current political system called “participatory democracy” (SDS [1962] 1964: front cover). “Participatory democracy” encouraged Americans to read, think critically, and “create an informed group, rather than a single informed person with power over others” (Keniston [1968] 1969: 51). Rather than the “closed,” prescriptive methods of reading offered by “great” lists and programs, the New Left promoted “open” methods, inviting readers to “embark on a shared adventure of political discovery” (Miller 1987: 80). Student radicals professed that “we have no sure formulas, no closed theories” (SDS [1962] 1964: 6) and modeled a form of inquiry that (ideally) gave individual readers the authority to examine and interpret ideas in ways meaningful to them. Port Huron’s Tom Hayden argued this “new way” of reading “finds no rest in conclusions; answers are seen as provisional, to be discarded in the face of new evidence or changed conditions … to be willing always to reconstruct our social views” (Hayden [1961] 1966: 6). Despite these expansive aims, the Left’s predominantly male leadership often failed to recognize the diverse needs and talents of its members and resisted efforts made by working-class, BIPOC, white female, and LGBTQ+ members to “reconstruct [the leadership’s] social views,” ultimately substituting one top-down system for another. For instance, male members of SNCC, FSM, and SDS railed against institutional segregation and paternalism in their organizing, but failed to see how they treated movement women in those ways. In particular, while they critiqued America’s power structures that denied people the right to read, write, and thereby create liberation narratives borne out of their own experiences, these male leaders regularly denied female members the opportunity to read, write, and create living documents borne out of their experience. Female activists charged that “women were usually consigned to traditional female roles—typing, cooking, housekeeping, providing sexual companionship. How could supposedly egalitarian movements replicate such unequal sex roles?” (Malkiel 2016: 18). Mary King and Casey Hayden echoed this question in a position paper about their experiences organizing with SNCC, noting, “Women seem to be placed in the same position of assumed subordination” (Hayden and King [1965] 1995: 49). When women did try to read and write themselves into the movement, they were sometimes met with paternalistic condescension. For instance, when legendary organizer, writer, and activist Shulamith Firestone attempted to read women’s liberation into the movement’s “living documents” at the 1967 New Left National Conference, her efforts were met with a head pat and “move on, little girl … We have more important issues to talk about here than women’s liberation” (Malkiel 2016: 19).12 Ironically, this New Left sexism just replicated the same paternalism student leaders scorned in their universities. The male New Left leaders who believed “we have more important issues to talk about here than women’s liberation” (Malkiel 2016: 19) echoed leaders in higher education who believed that it was “more important” to “prepare leaders” and preserve the institution’s “excellence” (Malkiel 2016: 156) by educating men solely. For both, reading was central to educating people for freedom, yet both believed women participated only to find a husband and that “most young women are likely to lose touch with books, ideas, and current events on the far For an in-depth view into women’s impact on the movement despite exclusionary practices, see Sara Evans’s Personal Politics (1979). 12

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side of the altar” (Barzun 1945: 287). By denying women access to reading, books, education, and the authority of authoring, they reinforced an oppressive gendered caste system. During the college boom years of 1947–55, male students outnumbered female students by more than two to one (Goldin, Katz, and Kuziemko 2006: 139). When universities did begin to admit women on an equal basis, administrators and professors often treated them as if they were invisible (Perkins 2019: 15) or, worse, as a threat to the university’s reputation. For example, one early Yale student noted how her professor “felt attacked” when she commented in class, another detailed how her psychology papers often returned with “Not bad for a woman,” and yet another recounted how when she “talked to the chair of the department about giving a course in women’s history … he said, ‘That would be like teaching the history of dogs’ ” (Perkins 2019: 148, 149, 150). Both “the Man” and those fighting against “the Man” reserved the right to read solely to men, reinforcing status-quo politics. Thus, many movement women agreed with Toward a Female Liberation Movement’s charge: “If [women] want freedom, equality, and respect, they are going to have to organize and fight for them” (Jones and Brown 1968: 3). Queer feminist leader Charlotte Bunch wrote, “reading and writing are vital” to that fight, and early feminist leaders worked to print and disseminate as much reading material as possible “to give individuals more information about their oppression and to assist their ability to think about and choose alternative[s]‌” (Bunch 1987: 219). Feminists’ faith in the power of reading to bring about change echoed other social movements and was symbolized by their first purchase: a mimeograph machine (Bunch 1987: 218) (Onosaka 2006: 18, 19). “In the early years of this movement—when women’s words were largely not accessible through mainstream sources,” writes feminist education and literacy scholar Mev Miller, “our desire for them resulted in the creation of feminist publishers of books, magazines, newspapers, and development of bookstores, libraries, and resource centers” (Miller). Carol Seajay, editor of the Feminist Bookstore Newsletter and cofounder of legendary women’s bookstore Old Wives Tales, recalls that these institutions worked “so that no man could ever again tell women what was true, what was relevant to our lives, or what we could publish and read” (Onosaka 2006: 17). Women established what Junko Onosaka has termed a “feminist publishing ecosystem,” with 136 feminist publishing houses in operation by 1983 (Onosaka 2006: 133, 29).13 Women from Olivia Records founded Women in Distribution (WIND) in 1974 to provide a centralized clearing house to receive and distribute feminist books to a growing number of women’s bookstores around the country more efficiently (Bunch 1987: 226; Onosaka 2006: 37).14 Women also founded feminist journals and newspapers with total circulation surpassing 300,000 by 1977 (Onosaka 2006: 22).15 These women-authored

Publishing ventures included Feminist Press, Calyx Press, Cleis Press, Women’s Press Collective, Diana Press, Daughters, Inc., Aunt Lute Books, HerBooks Feminist Press, Persephone Press, and many others. 14 These bookstores included foundational stores A Woman’s Place in Oakland (1972), Labyris Books in NYC (1972), Womanbooks in NYC (1972), Charis in Atlanta (1973), Amazon Bookstore in Minneapolis (1972), New Words in Cambridge (1974), and A Room of One’s Own in my hometown, Madison, WI (1975). 15 Some representative journals include Women: A Journal of Liberation, and Ain’t I a Woman; more academic journals, such as Signs: A Journal of Women and Culture in Society, Feminist Studies, Frontiers: A Journal of Women’s Studies; and those journals in-between—Quest, Hecate: A Women’s Interdisciplinary Journal, and others. Significant feminist newspapers include Off Our Backs, It Ain’t Me Babe, Voice of Women’s Liberation Movement, Lilith, Notes from the First Year, and No More Fun and Games (FRIL 22, 20). 13

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texts, organizations, and businesses sought to give all women the freedom to read and participate in the systems governing their lives. Sometimes the women’s movement “made an assumption of literacy” (Miller) that replicated the class issues that plagued the New Left.16 In response, some women’s organizations created schools and primers to reach those unable to afford a college education in Women’s Studies (a field of study that had begun to find a home in universities at the start of the 1970s). Grassroots schools including Breakaway (Flannery 2005: 198), National Congress of Neighborhood Women, Califia, Sagaris, and Women’s Writing Center (Bunch and Pollack 1983: 49, 138, 114, 200) worked to “provide the opportunity for neighborhood women to define themselves as thinkers, doers and powerful people; to come together to both preserve and change their world” (Gnann et al. 1978: 58). Central to their mission was ensuring that women possessed “the basic skills of how to read, analyze, and think about ideas” (Bunch 1979: 255). These schools also taught feminist cultural literacy, with Califia creating The Feminist Primer to help women understand feminist concepts and to prevent the “alienation” and “isolation” some women felt encountering feminism for the first time. Many alternative feminist schools’ mantra was “Support, Educate, Action,” linking reading with the struggle for freedom once again (Murphy 1983: 145, 152). Feminist publishers, bookstores, journals, schools, and clubs attempted to be inclusive in their educative efforts to “unite and empower” (Onosaka 2006: 119, 121), but sometimes they fell into the same trap as those movements from which they separated: not being able to see beyond their own privilege and positionality. Too often Black, Indigenous, and Women of Color (BIWOC) found themselves encountering “psychological signs saying white women only” (emphasis original) (Davenport 1983: 89). They grew weary of being included either as “tokens” or with the implication that “it is your responsibility as Third World women to teach us [white women]” (Yamada 1983: 72) about racism. They contended that the civil rights, New Left, women’s, and various nationalist movements “denied self-definition, self-realization … denied self-hood” (Cliff 1990: 272) to BIWOC. Poet, essayist, and scholar June Jordan asserted, “my Black feminism means that you cannot expect me to respect what somebody else identifies as the Good of the People if that so-called Good (often translated as manhood or family or nationalism) requires the deferral or diminution of my self-fulfillment” (Jordan 1990: 175). Excluded from meaningful participation in movements, publishing, and education, BIWOC in the late 1970s and 1980s echoed what poet Donna Kate Rushin wrote in “The Bridge Poem”: “Forget it / I’m sick of it / I’m sick of filling in your gaps” (Rushin 1983: xxi). They rejected calls to “Be a good American” (Parker [1980] 1983: 239) when that meant reinforcing the raced, gendered, and sexual status quo. Ironically, BIWOC echoed the social movements from which they’d split in their work to combat “cultural tyranny” (Anzaldúa 1999: 38) and author “a new framework” (Woo [1980] 1983: 147) that was both institutional and grassroots so they might empower themselves on their own terms (hooks 1984: 47). Once again, reading was essential to this program. Some, like the Combahee River Collective, formed study groups, sharing “our reading with each other … [and] discussing the possibility of starting a Black feminist publication” because they believed it was through reading, “writing and distributing our work” that “individual Black feminists . . . living in isolation all over As I discuss in Pressing the Fight: Print, Propaganda, and the Cold War (2010), New Left groups were often beleaguered by an us/them division with white, college-educated leaders producing print for “the people,” and the working poor often referred to as “these people” and “these communities” as the receptacles—never the authors (42). 16

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the country” could be organized to do political work (Combahee River Collective 1986: 17). Others called for or participated in grassroots literacy programs (Quan 1990: 216–17) rooted in the conviction that “through feminist-headed literacy programs, illiterate women from all classes, and especially those from poor and working-class backgrounds, could learn to read and write in conjunction with learning how to think critically and analytically” (hooks 1984: 108). Reading advocates called for reading education that taught BIWOC how to question and ponder (Brant 1990: 111), to challenge stories that equated “dark” and “feminine” with evil (Moraga 1983a: 32), and to question how a text’s ideas reinforce or destabilize power (Sandoval [1982] 1990: 66). Doing the work of “decolonizing minds” involved, as Chicana, lesbian, feminist Gloria Anzaldúa wrote, “teach[ing] ourselves … to read in nonwhite narrative traditions—traditions which, in the very act of writing, we try to recoup and to invent” (Anzaldúa 1990: xxv). It was recognizing “that our language is legitimate and valid. It comes from our families, our cultures, our class backgrounds, our experiences of different and conflicting realities” (Quan 1990: 216). For this to happen, BIWOC “had to create a readership and teach it how to ‘read’ our work” (Anzaldúa 1990: xviii). Still others worked to get books by BIWOC published and distributed not just to empower themselves but also to educate those benefiting from white supremacy, patriarchy, and heterosexism (should they choose to read them). In her preface to the anthology This Bridge Called My Back, Chicana, lesbian, feminist Cherríe Moraga argued that BIWOC need texts “by radical women of color. The Left needs [them], with its shaky and shabby record of commitment to women, period … The feminist movement needs [these books], too. Do I dare speak of the boredom setting in among the white sector of the feminist movement?” (Moraga 1983b: xiii). BIWOC opened their own publishing houses, the most famous being Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press.17 The editors of the groundbreaking anthology All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men, But Some of Us Are Brave, Gloria T. Hull and Barbara Smith, called the publishing of work by, about, and for “Black/ Third World women” “Phase One” of this liberation project, and many other anthologies appeared at this time highlighting the works and experience of BIWOC (Hull and Smith 1982: xxvii).18 Armed with these texts, readers could do the work writer Toni Cade Bambara attributed to reading: “To make revolution irresistible” (Bambara 1983: viii). More diverse Americans accessed education, literary representation, and political standing during the 1970s and 1980s; in response, conservatives struck back, claiming moves toward greater inclusion undermined national unity and calling for Americans to make reading “great” again. In what are now known as the culture wars of the 1980s–1990s, conservative politicians, educators, and reading advocates sought to keep multiculturalist “barbarians” from invading temples that were largely the bastion of white, straight, middle-to-upper-class males: politics, schools, and publishing. These gatekeepers believed their first duty was to protect the Western canon and preserve traditional criteria of what made for a “Great Book” so that they might anchor readers in “their democratic heritage” (Cheney 1989: 13). The urgency with which they fought this “battle” is

or a history of the organization and its mission, see https://www.kitc​hen-table.org/. Accessed March 25, 2021. F Sample texts include Black-Eyed Susans (1970), Time to Greez! (1975), Ordinary Women, Mujeres Comunes (1978), American Born and Foreign (1979), The Remembered Earth (1979), The Black Woman: An Anthology (1980), The Third Woman (1980), Unbound Feet: A Collective of Chinese American Writers (1981), This Bridge Called My Back (1983), Home Girls (1983), Cuentos: Stories by Latinas (1983), The Forbidden Stitch: An Asian American Women’s Anthology (1989), Making Face/Making Soul (1990), and Sowing Ti Leaves: Writings by Multicultural Women (1991). 17 18

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perhaps best captured in the title of Richard Bernstein’s (1994) “culture wars” classic: Dictatorship of Virtue: Multiculturalism and the Battle for America’s Future. For some, their efforts were fueled by the belief that American students had “squandered the gains in student achievement made in the wake of the Sputnik challenge” and could no longer compete on a global economic stage (National Commission on Excellence 1984: 5, 6–7). For these educators and policy-makers, “Great Books,” with their focus on “basic information” (Hirsch 1987: 22), “common learning” (Bennett 1984: 10), and “universal values,” would help restore students to “excellence” and global leadership. For others, the Great Books’ “shared goals or vision of the public good” (Bloom 1987: 27, 344–5) underscored the “natural rights” granted to each human being and which culminated in America’s founding (Bennett 1984: 30; Bloom 1987: 27). They reverenced, as did literary scholar Harold Bloom, how the “old view was that, by recognizing and accepting man’s natural rights, men found a fundamental basis of unity and sameness. Class, race, religion, national origin or culture all disappear or become dim when bathed in the light of natural rights” (27). “Great Books,” he professed, would inspire students—“our innocents” (344)—with a “spiritual yearning” (49) for family, hard work, and universal brotherhood. Lists of “Great Books” invariably included the Bible, Greek philosophers, Augustine, Shakespeare, Dante, Milton, Wordsworth, Rousseau, and Dickens, as well as Franklin, the Federalist Papers, Lincoln’s addresses, Hawthorne, Melville, Twain, and Faulkner; or to put it another way, white male writers with the accepted exceptions, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Emily Dickenson, and George Sand, sometimes included. At the same time, conservative concerns also signaled their reaction to encountering “the novel experience of being in a minority and having to argue for one’s beliefs instead of taking them for granted” (Graff 1992: 8). Those clutching their canonical pearls expressed horror at texts and curricula they claimed substituted works of “literary excellence” with inclusive literature they mockingly said was “produced by an approved victim group” (“Heath Travesty” 1990: 4). These critics mourned what they believed to be the “damage done to the quality of higher education” (Little 1977: B12) by “egalitarian and experimental trends of the protest period” (Shor 1986: 4). Texts including Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind (1987), E. D. Hirsch, Jr.’s Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know (1987), and National Endowment for the Humanities director William Bennett’s To Reclaim a Legacy (1984), as well as Reagan-era reports Excellence in Our Schools (1982), A Nation at Risk (1984), and Action for Excellence (1983) demanded a return to “the classics” in order to remedy the “unbridgeably separate ‘cultures’ ” wrought by “identity politics” (Bloom 1987: 48). While late Cold War defenders of “great works” offered a reading list modeled after the GBP of the immediate postwar period, the ends to which they envisioned reading differed. Reading advocates in the immediate postwar period framed reading the “Great Books” as a means by which individual reader-citizens gained a civic education that would enable them to participate in the working of the nation, as was their right. Proponents for the civil and civic rights of minoritized Americans used these reading aims against their creators in the 1960s–1980s, emphasizing that particular identities should not be excluded from reading’s freedom-making power. In a backlash, conservative reading advocates of the 1980s and 1990s changed the ends of “Great Books” from helping individuals understand their rights to instilling universal “values” that allegedly cut across difference and erased the need of political, educational, or cultural institutions to acknowledge harm or make changes. What the “Great Books” offer, Bloom asserts, is the opportunity to create “the real community of man … those who seek the truth” (381). He concludes that a return to “the

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classics” and “Great Books” helps “men” to “live more truly and fully … because then they are participating in essential being and are forgetting their accidental lives” (Bloom 1987: 380). Of course, these critics failed to recognize that assuming a white male canon to be “universal” was political and that that identity had long determined the “politics” and “cultures” of literature and what constituted “essential being.” Further, when they dismiss as “accidental lives” the very real joys, struggles, and material consequences that accompany identities other than white and male, they double down on the belief undergirding systemic oppression: that the only “full” life is one that looks like theirs. Their calls for “tradition”—a time when America and culture was “great”— relied upon “a deeply nostalgic effort to revive the consensus and curriculum of the 1950s” (Lauter 1991: 226). But no such consensus ever existed. Since the Cold War began, reading advocates wrestled over what, how, and why Americans read. The tale of “unity” and “universalism” was a fiction told to the many and benefiting the few, and conservative Americans resurrected this fiction in the waning hours of the Cold War to recoup the losses they allegedly incurred when more Americans accessed the freedom to read.

CONCLUSION In the wake of the 2020 state murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, reading for freedom once again occupied the spotlight. The graphic video of Officer Derek Chauvin killing Floyd spurred many Americans to begin educating themselves about anti-Black racism, seeking texts that map out how racism has and continues to structure the supposedly democratic institutions of the United States. These antiracist books addressed a dual audience: a BIPOC audience seeking ways to heal and/or speak with white Americans about white supremacy; and a white audience seeking to confront its privilege so it might change. Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (2010), Ijeoma Oluo’s So you want to talk about race? (2018), Austin Channing Brown’s I’m Still Here: Black Dignity in a World Made for Whiteness (2018), Layla Saad’s Me and White Supremacy (2020), and Ibram X. Kendi’s How to Be an Antiracist (2019) dominated best-seller lists,19 “to read” lists,20 library waitlists, and book club selections.21 Antiracist books were hyped on mainstream daytime talk shows,22 required on college campuses,23 and cited by organizations calling for antiracist laws in the wake of international Black Lives Matter demonstrations. During a time of highly visible anti-Black racial injustice, Americans turned to reading in hopes of “awakening” themselves to America’s racist past and present so they might “unify a divided world and ensure the future of humxnity as a whole” (Ricketts 2021: xx). The organizers of today’s freedom struggle have tapped into the theories and practices of Cold War social movements, adapting them to meet the current challenges of police brutality, mass incarceration, environmental racism, and the disproportionate murders of trans-BIWOC.

ttps://www.nyti​mes.com/books/best-sell​ers/2020/08/30/. Accessed April 2, 2021. h https://nymag.com/str​ateg​ist/arti​cle/anti-rac​ist-read​ing-list.html. Accessed April 2, 2021. 21 https://www.pen​guin​rand​omho​use.com/artic​les/dis​cuss​ion-gui​des-for-ant​irac​ist-book-clubs;  https://read​ingg​roup​choi​ces.com/ books/me-and-white-suprem​acy/; https://www.womenf​orwo​men.org/blogs/book-club-ser​ies-so-you-want-talk-about-race-ije​omaoluo. Accessed April 2, 2021. 22 https://www.today.com/tmrw/9-gro​undb​reak​ing-books-rac​ism-amer​ica-read-right-now-t182​928. Accessed April 2, 2021. 23 My own university read Kendi’s How to Be An Antiracist as part of its initiative to make BYU a more inclusive space for BIPOC. https://kenn​edy.byu.edu/eve​nts/book-of-the-semes​ter/. Accessed April 2, 2021. 19 20

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Like their forbearers, today’s organizers recognize that reading alone isn’t going to create lasting structural change—reading must spur action. Antiracist primers tell readers, “it’s your job to figure out how you can best leverage your knowledge and skills to help humanity” (Fleming 179), and many offer suggestions on how readers might do so. Like Cold War reading proponents of all stripes, today’s antiracist organizers, writers, and readers see reading as foundational to first extending and then preserving the rights of citizenship to all Americans. They see reading as a way of connecting individual readers into antiracist communities, which can then enact change. They recognize that not all can afford books or college, so they use social media to form book clubs (@ wellreadblackgirl), to create subscription book clubs (@noirreads and @candlelitbooks), to review works by BIPOC (@thisbrowngirlreads), and to publish their own work, most notably instapoetry (Matthews 2019). Today’s social justice movements have adopted and adapted Cold War America’s belief that “a good citizen is a good reader” (Solberg 1953: 127) as they work to make the United States a more just, equitable, and free society.

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Canaday, M. (2003), “Building a Straight State: Sexuality and Social Citizenship Under the 1944 GI Bill,” Journal of American History 90(3): 935–57. Chambers, W. ([1952] 1980), Witness, Washington, DC: Regnery. Cheney, L. (1989), 50 Hours: A Core Curriculum for College Students, Washington, DC: National Endowment for the Humanities. Cliff, M. (1990), “Object into Subject: Some Thoughts on the Work of Black Women Artists,” in G. Anzaldúa (ed.), Making Face, Making Soul / Haciendo Caras, 271–90, San Francisco, CA: aunt lute books. Colgrove, Kenneth (1959), Democracy versus Communism, New York: Van Nostrand. Combahee River Collective (1986), The Combahee River Collective Statement: Black Feminist Organizing in the Seventies and Eighties, Albany, NY: Kitchen Table. Conant, J. B. ([1948] 1969), Education in a Divided World, New York: Greenwood Press. Council on Books in Wartime (1946), A History of the Council on Books in Wartime, 1942–1926, New York: Country Life Press. Daniell, R. (1947), “What the Europeans Think of Us,” New York Times (November 30): 69, 71. Davenport, D. (1983), “The Pathology of Racism: A Conversation with Third World Wimmin,” in C. Moraga and G. Anzaldúa (eds.), This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, 85–90, New York: Kitchen Table. Douglass, F. ([1845] 1987), Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, in H. L. Gates, Jr. (ed.), The Classic Slave Narratives, 243–331, New York: Mentor. Dudziak, Mary (2000), Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Eberhart, George M. (2017), “The Tougaloo Nine Remembered,” American Libraries (June 26). https://americ​ anli​brar​iesm​agaz​ine.org/blogs/the-scoop/touga​loo-nine-rem​embe​red/. Accessed March 25, 2021. Epstein, J. (2001), Book Business: Publishing Past Present and Future, New York: W. W. Norton. Evans, S. (1979), Personal Politics, New York: Knopf. Excellence in Our Schools (1982), Washington, DC: National Education Association. Flannery, K. T. (2005), Feminist Literacies, 1968–75, Chicago: University of Illinois Press. Fleming, C. (2018), How to Be Less Stupid About Race, Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Flesch, R. (1955), Why Johnny Can’t Read—And What You Can Do About It, New York: Harper. Friedan, B. ([1963] 1997), The Feminine Mystique, New York: Norton. Fromm, E. (1955), The Sane Society, New York: Rinehart. Gates, H. L., Jr. (1992), Loose Canons, New York: Oxford University Press. General Education in a Free Society (1945), Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Gitlin, T. ([1964] 1967), “The Battlefields and the War,” in M. Cohen and D. Hale (eds.), The New Student Left, 125–37, Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Gnann, D., I. Krzystek, K. McDermott, and A. Tiger (1978), “All-Women Classes and the Struggle for Women’s Liberation,” in C. Bunch and S. Pollack (eds.), Learning Our Way: Essays in Feminist Education, 59–77, Trumansburg, NY: Crossing Press. Goldin, C., L. F. Katz, and I. Kuziemko (2006), “The Homecoming of American College Women: The Reversal of the College Gender Gap,” Journal of Economic Perspectives 20(4): 133–56. Gosse, V. (2005), Rethinking the New Left: An Interpretive History, New York: Palgrave. Grambs, J. (1954), The Development of Lifetime Reading Habits: A Report of a Conference Called by the Committee on Reading Development in New York, June 25–26, 1954, New York: Bowker. Gray, W. S., and B. Rogers (1956), Maturity in Reading, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

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Hayden, C., and M. King ([1965] 1995), “Sex and Caste: A Kind of Memo,” in A. Bloom and W. Breines (eds.), “Takin’ it to the Streets: A Sixties Reader, 48–51, New York: Oxford University Press. Hayden, T. ([1961] 1966), “A Letter to the New (Young) Left,” in M. Cohen and D. Halen (eds.), The New Student Left, 2–9, Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Heineman, K. J. (1993), Campus Wars, New York: New York University Press. Hench, J. B. (2010), Books as Weapons: Propaganda, Publishing, and the Battle for Global Markets in the Era of World War, New York: Cornell University Press. Herbold, H. (1994–5), “Never a Level Playing Field: Blacks and the GI Bill,” Journal of Blacks in Higher Education 6: 104–8. Hirsch, E. D., Jr. (1987), Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know, Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin. hooks, b. (1984), Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center, Boston, MA: South End Press. Hull, G. T., and B. Smith (1982), “Introduction: Politics of Black Women’s Studies,” in G. T. Hull, P. B. Scott, and B. Smith (eds.), All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men, But Some of Us Are Brave, xvii–xxxii, New York: Feminist Press. Humes, E. (2006), “How the GI Bill Shunted Blacks into Vocational Training,” Journal of Blacks in Higher Education 53: 92–104. Hutchins, R. M. (1943), Education for Freedom, Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press. Hutchins, R. M., ed. (1952), Great Books of the Western World, Vol. 1, The Great Conversation, Chicago: Encyclopedia Britannica. Hutchins, R. M. (1954), Great Books: The Foundation of a Liberal Education, New York: Simon and Schuster. Jamieson, J. (1948), Editions for the Armed Services, Inc.: A History, New York: Editions for the Armed Services. Jones, B., and J. Brown (1968), Toward a Female Liberation Movement, Boston, MA: New England Free Press. Jordan, J. (1990), “Where Is the Love?” in G. Anzaldúa (ed.), Making Face, Making Soul/Haciendo Caras, 174–6, San Francisco, CA: aunt lute books. Josey, E. J. (1965), “Reading and the Disadvantaged,” Negro History Bulletin 28(7): 156–7, 159. Josey, E. J. (1967), “Reading Is What’s Happening,” Negro History Bulletin 30(5): 14–17. Keniston, K. ([1968] 1969), “Young Radicals and the Fear of Power,” in Michael Brown (ed.), The Politics and Anti-Politics of the Young, 50–7, London: Glencoe Press. Lacy, D., and P. Hill (1953), “America, Democracy, and the Free World,” in A. Stefferud (ed.), The Wonderful World of Books, 128–31, Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin. Lacy, T. (2013), The Dream of a Democratic Culture: Mortimer J. Adler and the Great Books Idea, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Lauter, P. (1991), Canons and Contexts, New York: Oxford University Press. Lazarfeld, P., and R. Merton ([1948] 1957), “Mass Communication, Popular Taste, and Organized Social Action,” in B. Rosenberg and D. M. White (eds.), Mass Culture: The Popular Arts in America, Glencoe, IL: Free Press. Lee, C. (1958), The Hidden Public: The Story of the Book-of-the-Month Club, Garden City, NY: Doubleday. Little, D. R. (1977), “Legacy of the ‘60s—Declining Quality,” Christian Science Monitor (January 17). Long, E. (2009), “The Chat-an-House Social and Cultural Club: African American Women Readers,” in D. P. Nord, J. S. Rubin, and M. Schudson (eds.), A History of the Book in America, Vol. 5: The Enduring Book, Print Culture in Postwar America, 459–71, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Malkiel, N. W. (2016), “Keep the Damned Women Out”: The Struggle for Coeducation, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

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Matthews, K. L. (2010), “The Medium, the Message, the Movement: Print Culture and New Left Politics,” in G. Barnhisel and C. Turner (eds.), Pressing the Fight: Print, Propaganda, and the Cold War, 31–49, Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. Matthews, K. L. (2016), Reading America: Citizenship, Democracy, and Cold War Literature, Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. Matthews, K. L. (2019), “ ‘Woke’ and Reading: Social Media, Reception, and Contemporary Black Feminism,” Participations: Journal of Audience and Reception Studies 16(1): 390–411. McDermott, J. ([1969] 1970), “Knowledge Is Power,” in M. Goodman (ed.), The Movement toward a New America, 343–6, New York: Knopf. Miller, J. (1987), Democracy is in the Streets: From Port Huron to the Siege of Chicago, New York: Simon & Schuster. Miller, M. (n.d.), “Feminism and Literacy for Women: Politics and Resources,” Feminist Collections, https:// minds.wiscon​sin.edu/bitstr​eam/han​dle/1793/22173/FCLIT​ERA.HTM?seque​nce=2&isAllo​wed=y. Accessed April 2, 2021. Moraga, C. (1983a), “La Güera,” in C. Moraga and G. Anzaldúa (eds.), This Bridge Called My Back, 27–34, New York: Kitchen Table. Moraga, C. (1983b), “Preface,” in C. Moraga and G. Anzaldúa (eds.), This Bridge Called My Back, xiii–xx, New York: Kitchen Table. Murphy, M. (1983), “Califia Community,” in C. Bunch and S. Pollack (eds.), Learning Our Way: Essays in Feminist Education, 138–53, Trumansburg, NY: Crossing Press. “Negro Book Club” (1946), The Crisis (September): 284. “Negroes Enter Library,” Piedmont News (July 16, 1960). Accessed March 25, 2021. Onosaka, J. (2006), Feminist Revolution in Literacy: Women’s Bookstores in the United States, London: Routledge. Parker, P. ([1980] 1983), “Revolution: It’s Not Neat or Pretty or Quick,” in C. Moraga and G. Anzaldúa (eds.), This Bridge Called My Back, 238–42, New York: Kitchen Table. Perkins, A. G. (2019), Yale Needs Women: How the First Group of Girls Rewrote the Rules of an Ivy League Giant, Naperville, IL: Sourcebooks. President’s Commission of Higher Education (1947), Higher Education for American Democracy, Vol. I: Establishing the Goals, Washington, DC. Quan, K. Y. (1990), “The Girl Who Wouldn’t Sing,” in G. Anzaldúa (ed.), Making Face, Making Soul/Haciendo Caras, 212–20, San Francisco, CA: aunt lute books. Radway, J. (2007), “The Library as Place, Collection, or Service: Promoting Book Circulation in Durham, North Carolina at the Book-of-the-Month Club, 1925–1945: The Social Life of Libraries in the United States,” in T. Augst and K. Carpenter (eds.), Institutions of Reading: The Social Life of Libraries in the United States, 231–63, Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. “Read-in Demonstration at Jackson (Miss.) Public Library,” Library Journal 86 (1961): 1751. Ricketts, R. (2021), Do Better! Spiritual Activism for Fighting and Healing from White Supremacy, New York: Atria Books. Robbins, Louise (1996), Censorship and the American Library, Westport, CT: Greenwood. Rubin, J. S. (2009), “The Enduring Reader,” in D. P. Nord, J. S. Rubin, and M. Schudson (eds.), A History of the Book in America, Vol. 5: The Enduring Book, Print Culture in Postwar America, 412–31, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Rushin, D. K. (1983), “The Bridge Poem,” in C. Moraga and G. Anzaldúa (eds.), This Bridge Called My Back, xxi–xxii, New York: Kitchen Table.

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Sandoval, C. ([1982] 1990), “Feminism and Racism: A Report on the 1981 National Women’s Studies Association Conference,” in G. Anzaldúa (ed.), Making Face, Making Soul/Haciendo Caras, 55–71, San Francisco, CA: aunt lute books. Sapinsley, B. C. (1955), “Book-of-the-Month Club: Culture is Paying Off for This Unique Venture,” Barron’s National Business and Financial Weekly (November 14): 15, 35, 46. Shor, I. (1986), Culture Wars, Boston, MA: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Solberg, C. (1953), “You, Citizen-Reader in a Democracy,” in A. Stefferud (ed.), The Wonderful World of Books, 125–7, Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin. Spence, L. D. ([1965] 1969), “Berkeley: What It Demonstrates,” in M. Brown (ed.), The Politics and Anti-Politics of the Young, 36–42, London: Glencoe. “SRL Award” (1945), Saturday Review of Literature (August 11): 18. Strubbe, C., Jr. (1953), “The Great Books Program,” in A. Stefferud (ed.), The Wonderful World of Books, 215– 17, Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin. Students for a Democratic Society ([1962] 1964), The Port Huron Statement, New York: SDS. Students for a Democratic Society (1963), America and the New Era, New York: SDS. “The Heath Travesty of American Literature” (1990), New Criterion 9 (October): 4. “The Read-In” Newsweek (April 10, 1961: 27–8). Thelin, J. R. (2004), A History of American Higher Education, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Trace, A. S., Jr. (1961), What Ivan Knows That Johnny Doesn’t, New York: Random House. Travis, Trysh (1999), “Books as Weapons and ‘The Smart Man’s Peace’,” Princeton University Library Chronicle 60: 353–99. Unger, M. (2019), “The Book Circle: Black Women Readers and Middlebrow Taste in Chicago 1943–1953,” Reception: Texts, Readers, Audiences, History 11: 4–20. Van Der Voort, J. L. (1945), “Armed Services Editions,” Saturday Review of Literature (May 26): 19. Wiegand, W. A., and S. A. Wiegand (2018), The Desegregation of Public Libraries in the Jim Crow South, Baton Rouge: LSU Press. Woo, M. ([1980] 1983), “Letter to Ma,” in C. Moraga and G. Anzaldúa (eds.), This Bridge Called My Back, 140–7, New York: Kitchen Table. Yamada, M. (1983), “Asian Pacific American Women and Feminism,” in C. Moraga and G. Anzaldúa (eds.), This Bridge Called My Back, 71–5, New York: Kitchen Table.

FURTHER READING Danky, J. P., and W. A. Wiegand, eds. (1998), Print Culture in a Diverse America, Champaign: University of Illinois Press. Emre, M. (2017), Paraliterary: The Making of Bad Readers in Postwar America, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Hench, J. B. (2010), Books as Weapons: Propaganda, Publishing, and the Battle for Global Markets in the Era of World War, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Knott, C. (2015), Not Free for All: Public Libraries in the Age of Jim Crow, Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. Lacy, T. (2013), The Dream of a Democratic Culture: Mortimer J. Adler and the Great Books Idea, New York: Palgrave. Long, E. (2009), “The Chat-an-House Social and Cultural Club: African American Women Readers,” in D. P. Nord, J. S. Rubin, and M. Schudson (eds.), A History of the Book in America, Vol. 5: The Enduring Book, 459–71, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.

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Matthews, K. L. (2010), “The Medium, the Message, the Movement: Print Culture and New Left Politics,” in G. Barnhisel and C. Turner (eds.), Pressing the Fight: Print, Propaganda, and the Cold War, 31–49, Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. Matthews, K. L. (2016), Reading America: Citizenship, Democracy, and Cold War Literature, Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. Nord, D. P., J. S. Rubin, and M. Schudson, eds. (2009), A History of the Book in America, Vol. 5: The Enduring Book, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Radway, J. (1999), A Feeling for Books, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.

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CONTRIBUTORS

EDITOR Greg Barnhisel is Professor of English at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He is the author of Cold War Modernists: Art, Literature, and American Cultural Diplomacy (2015) and James Laughlin, New Directions, and the Remaking of Ezra Pound (2005). He is an editor of the scholarly journal Book History and, with Catherine Turner, coeditor of the collection Pressing the Fight: Print, Propaganda, and the Cold War (2010). He is currently completing a biography of the Yale professor and spy Norman Holmes Pearson.

CONTRIBUTORS Eric Bennett is the author of Workshops of Empire: Stegner, Engle, and American Creative Writing during the Cold War (2015) and the novel A Big Enough Lie (2015). He is Professor of English at Providence College in Rhode Island. Edward Brunner is Emeritus Professor at Southern Illinois University, Carbondale. He has published books on Hart Crane, W. S. Merwin, and Cold War poetry, and essays on long poems, comics art, and literary hoaxes. Ian Butcher is a research facilitator in the Centre for Research and Innovation at Fanshawe College in London, Ontario (Canada). He has a PhD in English from Duquesne University. His article “Student Evaluations, Neoliberal Managerialism, and Networks of Mistrust” appeared in the journal Works & Days/Cultural Logic, and he is at work on a manuscript on the forms of contemporary academic fiction. Russell Cobb is Associate Professor at the University of Alberta (Canada) in Modern Languages and Cultural Studies and Creative Writing. His work bridges the worlds of creative nonfiction and traditional cultural histories of the Greater Caribbean, including the American South. He is the author of The Great Oklahoma Swindle: Race, Religion, and Lies in America’s Weirdest State (2020) and the editor of The Paradox of Authenticity in a Globalized World (2014). His journalism has appeared in New York Times, The Guardian, This American Life, and elsewhere. Deborah Cohn is Provost Professor of Spanish and Portuguese at Indiana University Bloomington. She is the author of The Latin American Literary Boom and U.S. Nationalism during the Cold War (2012) and History and Memory in the Two Souths: Recent Southern and Spanish American Fiction (1999), as well as coeditor, with Jon Smith, of Look Away! The U.S. South in New World Studies (2004). She has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities,

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Contributors

the Rockefeller Archive Center, the American Philosophical Society, and the Harry Ransom Center, among other sources. Her current research project is “Cold War Humanities: American Studies, Foreign Language Study, and the U.S. National Interest.” Brian K. Goodman is an assistant professor in the Department of English at Arizona State University, where he is also an affiliated faculty member at the Center for Jewish Studies and the Melikian Center for Russian, Eurasian and East European Studies. His academic writing has been published by American Literary History and Humanity: An International Journal of Human Rights, Humanitarianism, and Development. His first book, a history of literary dissent between the United States and Czechoslovakia during the Cold War, is forthcoming from Harvard University Press. Jaime Harker is a professor of English and the director of the Sarah Isom Center for Women and Gender Studies at the University of Mississippi, where she teaches American literature, LGBTQ literature, and gender studies. She has published essays on Japanese translation, popular women writers of the interwar period, Oprah’s book club, William Faulkner, Cold War gay literature, and women’s liberation and gay liberation literature. She is the author of America the Middlebrow: Women’s Novels, Progressivism, and Middlebrow Authorship between the Wars (2007), Middlebrow Queer: Christopher Isherwood in America (2013), and The Lesbian South: Southern Feminists, the Women in Print Movement, and the Queer Literary Canon (2018). She is the coeditor of The Oprah Affect: Critical Essays on Oprah’s Book Club (2008), 1960s Gay Pulp Fiction: The Misplaced Heritage (2013), This Book Is an Action: Feminist Print Culture and Activist Aesthetics (2015), and Faulkner and Print Culture (2017). She is the founder of Violet Valley Bookstore, a queer feminist bookstore in Water Valley, Mississippi. Linda A. Kinnahan is Professor of English at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh. She is the editor of Cambridge History of 20th Century American Women’s Poetry (2016), and the author of Mina Loy, Photography, and Contemporary Women Poets (2017). She has published on modernist and contemporary poetry, including Poetics of the Feminine: Literary Tradition and Authority in William Carlos Williams, Mina Loy, Denise Levertov, and Kathleen Fraser (1994) and Lyric Interventions: Feminist Experimental Poetry and Contemporary Social Discourse (2004). She is the coauthor of the digital humanities project “Mina Loy: Navigating the Avant-Garde” and the digital book Mina Loy: Scholarly Book for Digital Travelers (2020). Her forthcoming monograph is Feminist Modernism, Poetics, and the New Economy: Mina Loy, Lola Ridge, and Marianne Moore. Amanda Laugesen is a historian and lexicographer and currently director of the Australian National Dictionary Centre at the Australian National University. She is chief editor of the Australian National Dictionary and the author of a number of books and articles on US and Australian history. She has published extensively on Cold War publishing and libraries. Yi-hung Liu holds a PhD in American Studies from the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa. She is working on a manuscript about Cold War exchange and the institution of creative writing. Rósa Magnúsdóttir is Professor of History at the University of Iceland. She holds a PhD from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She is the author of Enemy Number One: The United States of America in Soviet Ideology and Propaganda, 1945–1959 (2019), a forthcoming biography

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of Icelandic Stalinists published in Icelandic in 2021, and numerous articles on Soviet–American cultural relations, the cultural Cold War, and Communist lives. Her current research focuses on Soviet–American intermarriage during the late Cold War. Kristin L. Matthews is Professor of English at Brigham Young University. Her monograph Reading America: Citizenship, Democracy, and Cold War Literature was published in the series “Studies in Print Culture and History of the Book.” Nicole Moore is Professor of English and Media Studies at the University of New South Wales in Canberra, Australia. Her books include the edited collections Teaching Australian and New Zealand Literature (2017), Australian Literature in the German Democratic Republic (2016), and Censorship and the Limits of the Literary: A Global View (2015), as well as her award-winning history of literary censorship in Australia, The Censor’s Library (2012). She is working on a biography of the Australian writer Dorothy Hewett. Hiromi Ochi is Professor of American Literature at Senshu University, Tokyo (Japan). Her interest is in the literature of the American South, the political aspects of New Criticism, and Cold War cultural politics. She has published Truman Capote: His Life and Works (2005, in Japanese), The Southern Moment of Modernism: Southern Poets and Cold War (2012, in Japanese), and her publication includes: “Democratic Bookshelf: American Libraries in Occupied Japan” in Barnhisel and Turner (eds.) Pressing the Fight: Print, Propaganda, and the Cold War (2010), “Kawabata and the Discovery of ‘Snow Country’ ” in Fuhito Endo (ed.) On the Pacific Waterfront: Geopolitics in Cultural Formations of “Japan” (2014, in Japanese), “The Reception of American Literature during the Occupation” in the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Literature (2017), and “Translations of American Cultural Politics into the Context of Post War Japan” in Routledge Companion to Transnational American Studies (2019). Christopher E. W. Ouma is Associate Professor in the departments of English and African Studies at the University of Cape Town in South Africa. He is the author of Childhood in Contemporary Diasporic African Literature: Memories and Futures Past (2020) as well as coeditor of The Spoken Word Project: Stories Travelling through Africa (2014). He is also currently coeditor of Social Dynamics: A Journal of African Studies. Birgitte Beck Pristed is Associate Professor in Russian Studies at the Department of Global Studies, Aarhus University, Denmark. She holds a Ph.D. from the Johannes-Gutenberg-University of Mainz, Germany, awarded with distinction in 2014. She is author of an illustrated monograph on contemporary Russian book design and print culture The New Russian Book. A Graphic Cultural History (New Directions in Book History, 2017). Her main research areas are print and media history, visual and material cultures of the Soviet and post-Soviet eras with a second strand in Russian children’s books. Her current research project focuses on the history of Soviet paper. Asha Rogers is the author of State Sponsored Literature: Britain and Cultural Diversity after 1945 (2020) and Associate Professor of Contemporary Postcolonial Literature at the University of Birmingham in the UK.

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Jeffrey Severs is Associate Professor of English at the University of British Columbia (Canada), the author of David Foster Wallace’s Balancing Books: Fictions of Value (2017), and the coeditor of Pynchon’s Against the Day: A Corrupted Pilgrim’s Guide (2011). His essays have appeared or are forthcoming in Thomas Pynchon in Context (2019), Don DeLillo in Context (2022), and several other journals and edited collections. Jiřina Šmejkalová currently teaches book history and cultural studies at the Institute of Information Studies and Librarianship, Charles University, Prague (Czech Republic). She worked at academic institutions in the United States, Hungary, Austria, and for sixteen years the UK (Durham, Lincoln). The author of numerous essays in academic journals and books, her key work includes Cold War Books in the “Other” Europe and What Came After (2011) and the first anthology of seminal scholarly texts in book studies translated into Czech, Co jsou dějiny knihy?: Antologie textů k dějinám a teorii knižní kultury (2021) coedited with Lenka Pořízková. Her current project, coinvestigated with Roar Lishaugen of the University of Oslo, examines the agency of wastepaper in totalitarian cultures and societies during the Cold War. James Smith is Professor in the Department of English Studies at Durham University (UK). His publications include British Writers and MI5 Surveillance, 1930–1960 (2013) and various articles and chapters on the interactions between surveillance, intelligence, propaganda, and modern culture. He currently leads the Leverhulme Trust–funded project “The Political Warfare Executive, Covert Propaganda, and British Culture.” Mary Helen Washington is Distinguished University Professor Emerita, University of Maryland, College Park. Her monograph, The Other Blacklist: The African American Literary and Cultural Left of the 1950s (2014) received Honorable Mention for the William Sanders Scarborough Prize from The Modern Language Association. She has edited three collections of African American literature: Memory of Kin: Stories about Family by Black Writers (1991); Black-eyed Susans and Midnight Birds: Stories by and about Black Women (1990); and Invented Lives: Narratives of Black Women, 1860–1960 (1987). She was president of The American Studies Association from 1996 to 1997 and in 2015 was awarded the American Studies Association’s Carl Bode-Norman Holmes Pearson Prize for lifetime achievement. Her current project is Paule—Like a Man: A Biography of Paule Marshall. Katlyn Williams is Rhetoric Lecturer and Graduate Pedagogy Coordinator at the University of Iowa. She studies the intersections—and firm boundaries—between literariness/prestige and gender, with an emphasis on the speculative and the fantastic. Recently, she has been especially interested in questions of historical merit and influence in relation to genre, which have always been of crucial import to the culture of humanities departments across academia. Skip Willman is Associate Professor of English at the University of South Dakota, where he teaches courses on contemporary American literature and critical theory. He has published essays on the work of Don DeLillo, Stanley Elkin, Ian Fleming, and Thomas Pynchon, as well as the ideologies of conspiracy theory, in journals including Contemporary Literature, Modern Fiction Studies, Critique, and Arizona Quarterly. With Edward P. Comentale and Stephen Watt, he edited Ian Fleming and

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James Bond: The Cultural Politics of 007 (2005). He is currently completing a book-length project entitled Cold War Catastrophes: Western Intelligence Failures in Post-World War Two Fiction. Guy Woodward is Post-Doctoral Research Associate on the Leverhulme Trust–funded project “The Political Warfare Executive, Covert Propaganda and British Culture,” based in the Department of English Studies, Durham University. He has written the book Culture, Northern Ireland, and the Second World War; he has contributed articles to the Irish University Review, Literature and History, Modern Fiction Studies, and the Review of English Studies. He is currently working on a book exploring Irish and British writing and Yugoslavia. Laetitia Zecchini is a senior research fellow at the Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS) in Paris and currently visiting scholar at Boston University. She writes on contemporary Indian poetry, postcolonial modernisms, and the politics of literature.

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INDEX

Abbott, Sidney Sappho Was a Right-On Woman 187 Abrahams, Peter Wild Conquest 336 A Wreath for Udomo 336 Abrahams, William 213 Absalom, Absalom! (Faulkner) 259 Abwehr (military intelligence organization) 98 Academics Are Too Scared to Laugh: The Joke’s Over (Kay) 132 n.4 Achebe, Chinua 5, 210, 215, 218, 333 No Longer at Ease 213 Things Fall Apart 200, 213 Acheson, Dean 274 Acker, Kathy 4 Action for Excellence 406 Adas, Michael 193 Adderley, Cannonball “African Waltz” 210 Ademola, Frances 208 Adler, Mortimer 397 The Adventures of Augie March (Bellow) 116 Africa Abroad 207, 208, 212, 213–14, 220 Africa in Stereo (Jaji) 327 African literary culture 207–21 Alex La Guma 219–20 in Bloomsbury 216–18 broadcast 212–16 Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF) 210–12 Transcription Centre 219–20 African National Congress 218 African Writers Circle 217 After: The Business of University Novels (Kenyon) 131 n.2 After Thirty Years (Engle) 255 Agee, Philip 99 An Age of Criticism (Van O’Connor) 293 Agyeya 358, 365–7 Ai, Genly 86–8 Aidoo, Ama Ata 208 Ai Qing 255 Albee, Edward 374

Albert, Leo 171 Alcorn, Joy 318–19 Aldrich, Richard 98 Alea, Tomás Gutiérrez 351 Alexander, Michelle The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness 407 Alex La Guma 219–20 Alfred A. Knopf 4 Algren, Nelson 229 n.8 Alighieri, Dante Commedia 36 All Around My Hat (Steeleye Span) 388 Alliance Française 150 All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men, But Some of Us Are Brave (Hull and Smith) 405 All-Union Agency of Author Rights (Vsesoiuznoe Agenstvo po Avtorskim Pravam, VAAP) 168 Almanac of the Dead (Silko) 38 “Alone” (Niedecker) 54 Althydubladid 271 The American Adam (Lewis) 290 The American Association of University Professors (AAUP) 133–5 American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) 136–7 The American College in Fiction (Boys) 131 n.2 The American College Novel: An Annotated Bibliography (Kramer) 131 n.1 The American Dream: What Happened to It? (Faulkner) 279 American Family Brown (Brooks) 11 American Legion (magazine) 134 n.11 American Library Association (ALA) 191, 196 International Relations Board 193 American Literature (Blankenship) 293, 295 American National Exhibit in Moscow 165 The American Negro Writer and His Roots (Davis) 12 n.1 The American Novel and Its Tradition (Chase) 290 American Renaissance (Matthiessen) 290 American Science in an Age of Anxiety: Scientists, Anticommunism, and the Cold War (Wang) 133 n.6

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America through American Eyes (Vonnegut) 174, 176 Amerika (magazine) 164 Amerikana (magazine) 295–6 Amis, Kingsley 1, 131 n.2, 140 Lucky Jim 131 n.2, 140 Amory, Richard Song of the Loon 186 Analog (Campbell) 82 Anatomy of Criticism (Frye) 36 Ancient Evenings (Mailer) 35 Anderson, Amanda 365 Anderson, Clem 232–3 Anderson, Maxwell 342 Anderson, Sherwood 297 Angleton, James Jesus 108 Anglo-American propaganda 149–60 continuities and changes 155–60 evolution 151–2 growth of cultural 152–5 Anglo-American Psychological Warfare Branch (PWB/AFHQ) 152 Animal Farm (Orwell) 158, 362 Annie Allen (Brooks) 13 Another Country (Baldwin) 185 Anson, W. R. Principles of the English Law of Contract 200 anti-apartheid movement 325–37 anticommunism 12, 41, 114, 127, 134, 136 Anzaldúa, G. This Bridge Called My Back: Writers by Radical Women of Color 187, 405, 405 n.18 Anzaldúa, Gloria 187, 405 Borderlands/La Frontera 187 Arbeit, Marcel 378, 379 Arbuzov, Mikhail Book Trade in the Soviet Union 170 Arc de Triomphe (Remarque) 294 The Archbishop’s Ceiling (Miller) 125–6, 373 Armed Services Editions 180 Armstrong, Louis 374 Arnold, June 185 Arrival and Departure (Koestler) 158 Arrufat, Antón 351–2 ARTNews 71 Ashbery, John 64, 75, 374 Houseboat Days 71 Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror 71 “Syringa” 72 Asheim, Lester 197, 201 Ashkenazim Jews 114 Asia Foundation 199 As I Lay Dying (Faulkner) 259, 294

INDEX

Asimov, Isaac 139 Association of American Publishers (AAP) 167, 169 Astounding Science Fiction (magazine) 81 Aswell, Edward C. 14 “At the Portagees” (La Guma) 331 Auden, W. H. 67, 183, 292 Augie March (Bellow) 114 n.3, 116 Augustine 406 Austen, Jane 200 Australia 2 Awonoor, Kofi 331 Babbitt (Lewis) 294 Babbitt, Irving 226, 231 Bach, Johann Sebastian 395 Bachardy, Don 183 Badash, Lawrence “Science and McCarthyism” 133 n.6 Bailey, Jim 329 Ba Jing 255 Baksh, Salim 198 Baldwin, James 3–4, 22, 182, 185, 274, 298, 347–8, 353 Another Country 185 Giovanni’s Room 182 “The Harlem Ghetto” 347 Notes of a Native Son 22 Ballad of the Sad Café (McCullers) 184 Ballagas, Manuel 352 Bambara, Toni Cade 19, 405 This Bridge Called My Back: Writers by Radical Women of Color 187, 405, 405 n.18 Banis, Victor The Man from C.A.M.P. 186 Bannister, Sally 309 Bannon, Ann 181 Bantu World (newspaper) 334 Baraka, Amiri 339 Barker, Clive 89 n.11 Barnes, Djuna 183 Ladies Almanack 180 n.2 Nightwood 180 n.2 Barney, Natalie 183 Barnhisel, Greg 260, 295, 361 Baron, Dennis 131 n.2 Barr, James 182 Barr, Marleen S. Future Females 92 Barth, John 36, 185 Giles Goat-Boy 35, 37 The Sot-Weed Factor 35 Barthelme, Donald 185

INDEX

Batista, Fulgencio 341–6, 348–9 Baxter, Randolph W. ‘Homo-Hunting’ in the Early Cold War 138 n.13 The Bean Eaters (Brooks) 13, 17, 26–33 Be Angry at the Sun (Jeffers) 378, 383 Beasley, Jack Socialism and the Novel: A Study of Australian Literature 317–18 Beat movement 65, 72, 184 Beat poetry 65 “Beautiful girl” (Niedecker) 53 Bech, Henry 119–20 Bech: A Book (Updike) 119–20 Beckett, Samuel 4 Bednář, Emilie 381, 385 Bednář, Kamil 7, 373–4 Přátelství přes oceán 378 The Shepherdess on Her Pilgrimage towards April 388 Beethoven, Ludwig van 395 Begley, Adam The Decline of the Campus Novel 132 n.4 Beier, Ulli 217 Beisho Dayori 295–6 Beittel, A. D. 400 Bell, Daniel 117 Bell, Quentin 152 Bello, Andrés 273 Bellow, Saul 1, 4–5, 114–21, 123, 297 The Adventures of Augie March 116 Augie March 114 n.3 The Dangling Man 116 Henderson the Rain King 118 Moses Herzog 119 Seize the Day 114 The Victim 116 Bending the Bow (Duncan) 70 Benedict, Ruth 290 Bennett, Eric 361 Bennett, Melba Berry 380 Bennett, Tony Bond and Beyond: The Political Career of a Popular Hero 96 n.1 Bennett, William To Reclaim a Legacy 406 Berghahn, Volker 268 Bernstein, Richard Dictatorship of Virtue: Multiculturalism and the Battle for America’s Future 406 Bernstein, Robert 124, 168 Berryman, John 64, 71–2 77 Dream Songs 68–9

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84 Dream Songs 69 The Dream Songs 65, 68–9 His Toy, His Dream, His Rest 68–9 Homage to Mistress Bradstreet 68 Bertlesmann 4 Betancourt, Rómulo 272–3 Betjeman, John 153 “Beyond the tracks, the city blazed/as if looks were everything” (Dove) 76 Beyond Vietnam: The United States and Asia (Reischauer) 201 Bibler, Michael 179 Bigg, W. W. Cost Accounts 200 Bing Xin 255 Biondi, Martha The Black Revolution on Campus 141 n.16 Bissell, R. 108 The Blackademic Life (Porter) 141 n.16 Black America (Nearing) 298 Black and Brown Planets: The Politics of Race in Science Fiction (Lavender) 82 n.2 Black Boy (Wright) 172 The Black Campus Movement (Rogers) 141 n.16 Black community 23 Black cultural nationalism 18 Black Left Cultural and Political Front 12 Blackmur, R. P. New Criticism in America 287 Black nationalism 32 Blackness 11, 18–20, 22, 82, 88, 91 Black Orpheus (movie) 211, 217, 330–2 Black poets 19 Black publishers 13 The Black Revolution on Campus (Biondi) 141 n.16 Black writers 12, 12 n.1, 20, 23, 28, 32, 240, 342 Bland, Edward 14, 16 Blankenship, Russell American Literature 293, 295 Blish, James 83 Bloom, Allan 117 The Closing of the American Mind 406 Bloomsbury 216–18 Blotner, Joseph 261, 267, 270, 279 Bobbin Up (Hewett) 314–20 Bohemia 341, 346, 351 Bolaño, Roberto 37 Böll, Heinrich 124 Bolt, Molly 187 Bolton, Jonathan 396 Bombay Council library 200

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Bond and Beyond: The Political Career of a Popular Hero (Bennett and Woollacott) 96 n.1 Bondy, Egon 382 Bonny, Harold V. 195–6 Bontemps, Arna 16 They Seek a City 28 Book Trade in the Soviet Union (Arbuzov) 170 Borderlands/La Frontera (Anzaldúa) 187 Borstelmann, Thomas 279 Bottum, J. The End of the Academic Novel 132 n.4 Bowen, Elizabeth 153, 158 Boxer, Marilyn Jacoby When Women Ask the Questions 141 n.15 Boxer, Sarah 132 n.4 Boys, Richard C. The American College in Fiction 131 n.2 “Boys and Girls in Purdah” (Jussawalla) 364 A Boy’s Own Life (White) 188 Brace 4 Bradbury, Malcolm 119 Bradley, Mamie Till 17 Bragg, Robert 14 Brando, Marlon 184 Brant, Sebastian Das Narrenschiff 387 Ship of Fools 388 The Brave African Huntress (Tutola) 200 “Bread and Freedom” (Hook) 362 Breakfast at Tiffany (Capote) 184 The Bridge (Crane) 63–4 “The Bridge Poem” (Rushin) 404 Brinker, Beebo 181 British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) 3, 212–13 Transcription Centre 5 British Council 5, 150 libraries 199–201 British Foreign Office 95 British Isles 2–3 British SIS 95 broadcast 212–16 Broadside Press 13 Brodsky, Joseph 124 Bronski, Michael 181 Brooks, Gwendolyn 6, 11–33 American Family Brown 11 Annie Allen 13 The Bean Eaters 13, 17, 26–33 Chicago Black Left 13–16 childhood 13 early leftist poetry 16–18 friends and colleagues 13

INDEX

“The Ghost at the Quincy Club” 31 Left Popular Front 18–20 “A Lovely Love” 31 Maud Martha 11, 13, 21–6 Report from Part One 13–14, 16, 18 A Street in Bronzeville 13–14, 17, 21, 26 n.5, 28 “Why Negro Women Leave Home” 20–1 Brooks, Tim 153 n.6 Bross, John 100 Brown, Austin Channing 407 Brown, Lloyd 20 Brown, Rita Mae Rubyfruit Jungle 187 Browning, Alice 27–8 Brown vs. Board of Education 262, 274, 276 Brutus, Dennis 218, 332, 333 Buck, Pearl S. 294, 297 Budenz, Louis Do Colleges Have to Hire Red Professors? 134 n.11 “Buffalo Soldier” (Marley) 327 Bullet Park (Cheever) 168 Bulson, E. 328 Bunch, Charlotte 403 Bunche, Ralph 400 Bundy, McGeorge 288 Burchett, Clive 310 Burchett, Wilfred 310 Burns, John Hope 182 Burroughs, Charles 13–14 Burroughs, Margaret 13–14, 17 Burroughs, William Naked Lunch 185 Bush, George H. W. 2 Bush, Vannevar 132 Buss, Claude A. 289, 290 Butcher, Ian 6 Butler, Octavia 81–2, 84–6, 88–92 Clay’s Ark 89 Kindred 89, 91 Lilith’s Brood 89 Patternist 84 n.4, 89 Wild Seed 89 n.10, 91 By All Means Necessary (movie) 325–7 Cabrera, Lydia 342 Cadmus, Paul 183 Cai Xijiao 255 Caldwell, Erskine 297 Call for the Dead (le Carré) 104 Call It Sleep (Roth) 122 Calthorpe, Mena The Dyehouse 318

INDEX

Calverton, V. F. 293 The Cambridge Companion 38 Cambridge History of American Poetry 65 Campbell, John Jr. 82–3 Analog 82 Campbell, Joseph 238, 242 The Hero with a Thousand Faces 233 Canaris, Wilhelm 97 Cao Yu 255 Capote, Truman 183, 297 Breakfast at Tiffany 184 In Cold Blood 184 Other Voices, Other Rooms 184 Captive Mind (Milosz) 362 Carnegie Corporation 4, 194, 198 Carter, Angela 124 Carter, David 318 Cartland, Barbara 173 Carver, Raymond 226 n.4 Case, Clifford P. 171 Casey, Gavin 308 Casino Royale (film) 100–2 Cassill, R. V. 233, 239, 239 n.14 Clem Anderson 232–8 Castro, Fidel 55, 99–100, 121, 186, 339–45, 347–54 Castro, Raúl 352 The Catcher in the Rye (Salinger) 319 Cather, Willa 137, 297 Catlett, Elizabeth 13, 17 Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (Williams) 184 Cavan, Edward 136–40 Cawdor (Jeffers) 381 Cawelti, John G. The Spy Story 96 n.1 “Censorship and the Writer” (Ezekiel) 367 Central Intelligence Agency 3 Césaire, Aimee 212, 330–1 Československý spisovatel 386 Chambers, Whittaker 395 Changing Places (Lodge) 132, 141 Chapman, Michael “Drum Decade” 329 Chase, Richard The American Novel and Its Tradition 290 Chauncey, George 179 Chauvin, Derek 407 Cheever, John Bullet Park 168 Cheung, Domonic 254 n.8 Chicago (magazine) 13–14 Chicago Black Left 13–16 Chicago Civil Rights Congress 14

425

Chicago Defender (newspaper) 13 Chicago Left Cultural Front 17 Chicago Review 73 Chicago Times 32 Chile 98 Chimurenga Chronic 328 Ch’indaba 332 Chinese letters 245–57 Chitre, Dilip 358–9, 363, 368 Christian Democratic Party (Italy) 98 Christopher and His Kind (Isherwood) 187 Churchill, Winston 97 Cisneros, Sandra 238–9 The City and the Pillar (Vidal) 182 City Lights Books 4 City of Night (Rechy) 185 civil rights struggles 274–7 “Clancy and Dooley and Don McLeod” (Hewett) 316 Clark, J. P. 331 Clarke, Arthur C. Overmind 84 The Classic 211, 331 Clay’s Ark (Butler) 89 Clayton, Jay 83 Clemons, Walter 40 The Closing of the American Mind (Bloom) 406 Cobb, Humphrey 152 Cobb, Russell 5, 7 Cohn, Deborah 261 Cold War 225–42 Cold War Anthropology: The CIA, the Pentagon, and the Growth of Dual Use Anthropology (Price) 133 n.7 Cole, Ernest 329 Coleman, Peter 368 The College Novel in America (Lyons) 131 n.2 Collins, Betty 309 The Copper Crucible 318 The Color Purple (Walker) 187 Columbus (Roth) 116, 121 “Combat Cultural” (Moore) 48, 51 Comintern 150 Commedia (Alighieri) 36 Commentary (magazine) 117–20, 160, 229, 347 commercialization of the Soviet book 169–75 Communist Czechoslovakia 7 Communist Party 11–33. See also Brooks, Gwendolyn Communist Review (journal) 310 Community of the Imagination (documentary) 251, 253 The Company: A Novel of the CIA (Littell) 108 The Complete Henry Bech (Updike) 119 Conant, James Bryant 396

426

Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF) 5, 149, 209, 210–12 “The Connection” (Gelber) 350 Conroy, Jack 23, 27–8, 28 n.7 Consolidated Cigars 4 Containment Culture: American Narrative, Postmodernism, and the Atomic Age (Nadel) 139 n.14 Cook, Bruce 19 Cooper, James Fenimore 165 Coover, Robert 6, 44 The Public Burning 35, 37, 40–1 The Copper Crucible (Collins) 318 Corinth University 141 Cornwell, David 100 Corso, Gregory 377 Cortázar, Julio 273, 351 Cost Accounts (Bigg) 200 “Could You Be Right” (Niedecker) 52 The Courier (magazine) 166 Cover Stories: Narrative and Ideology in the British Spy Thriller (Denning) 96 n.1 Cowley, Malcom 181, 182, 260 Crane, Hart 183, 292 The Bridge 63–4 Crane, Stephen 292 creative writing 225–42 Creekmore, Hubert 182 Creeley, Robert 374 The Crisis (magazine) 16, 401 Crisp, Bob 329 Cross, Amanda Poetic Justice 141 Crossman, Richard 150–1 The God That Failed 362 The Cruft of Fiction (Letzler) 37 The Crying of Lot 49 (Pynchon) 35, 38 Cuadernos 210 Cuban Revolution 339–54 “The Cuban Thing” (Gelber) 351 Cull, Nicholas 276 Cullen, Countee 16 The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters (Saunders) 133 n.8 cultural diplomacy 5, 277–80 cultural freedom 210–12, 357–69 cultural institutions 6, 12, 91 n.13, 287, 319, 328, 340–1, 354, 406 Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know (Hirsch) 406 cultural organizations 3, 5, 209, 328–9, 332, 335, 363 Cumings, Bruce 288

INDEX

Cummings, E. E. 292 Cunningham, Inez 23 Czechoslovakia 113–14, 121, 124 Daily Express 100 The Daily Iowan 245 Daily Worker 16 Dalmia, Yashodhara 365 Dana, Robert 250 n.4 Dancer from the Dance (Holleran) 188 The Dangling Man (Bellow) 116 Daniell, Raymond 395 Dante 36, 154, 406 Darkness at Noon (Koestler) 158 Das Narrenschiff (Brant) 387 Davidson, Michael 55–6 Davis, Frank Marshall 13–14, 16, 20, 26, 28 Davis, John A. The American Negro Writer and His Roots 12 n.1 Davis, Lester 14 Dawn (Federmayer) 90 “The Day Is a Poem” 383 Day-Lewis, C. 151 “The Dead End of African Literature?” (Wali) 208, 333 Dean, James 342 Dean, John 198 Death of a Salesman (Miller) 116 The Decline of the Campus Novel (Begley) 132 n.4 de Cosimo, Pier A Forest Fire 70 Defty, Andrew 155–6 Delaney, Samuel R. 82–3 Dhalgren 38 DeLillo, Don 6, 38 End Zone 42 Libra 42 Underworld 35, 37, 41–4 White Noise 132, 142 Delmer, Sefton 150 Deman, J. Andrew 86 De Mott, Benjamin How to Write a College Novel 131 n.2 Denning, Michael 95–6 Cover Stories: Narrative and Ideology in the British Spy Thriller 96 n.1 DePalma, Anthony 344 Der Monat (journal) 362 Der Schatz im Silbersee (May) 383 Deutsche Welle 220 De Wervelwind (magazine) 153–4 Dewey, Anne Day 64, 71 Dhalgren (Delaney) 38

427

INDEX

Dhlomo, R. R. R. 333 Diario de la Marina 341 “Diaspora” (Lorde) 58 Díaz, Junot 91, 239 Dickens, Charles 200, 240, 292, 406 Dickinson, Emily 292–3, 406 Dictatorship of Virtue: Multiculturalism and the Battle for America’s Future (Bernstein) 406 Dictionary of National Biography 200 Didion, Joan 4, 37 Die Andere Seite (magazine) 153–4 Die Zukunft (newspaper) 150 Ding Ling 255 Diop, Alioune 212 The Dispossessed (Le Guin) 87 Dissent (magazine) 117 Do Colleges Have to Hire Red Professors? (Budenz) 134 n.11 Doctorow, E. L. 124 Dolinar, Brian 29 n.8 domesticity, ideal 82 Dominy, Jordan J. 300 Doolittle, Hilda 183 Doolittle, Jimmy 98 Dostoevsky, Fyodor 229, 315 House of the Dead 315 Notes from Underground 229 Double-Cross System (XX) 97 Douglass, Frederick 400, 401 Dove, Rita 64, 238 “Beyond the tracks, the city blazed/as if looks were everything” 76 “Early Morning on the Tel Aviva-Haifa Freeway” 75 “A Hill of Beans” 76 Museum 75 Playlist for the Apocalypse 75 “Primer for a Nuclear Age” 76 Thomas and Beulah 75–6 Dower, John 298 Doyle, Arthur Conan 200 Drax, H. 102–3 77 Dream Songs (Berryman) 68–9 84 Dream Songs (Berryman) 69 The Dream Songs (Berryman) 65, 68–9 Dreiser, Theodore 165, 229, 294 Sister Carrie 292 Dr. No (film) 100 The Droves of Academe (Green) 132 n.4 Drum 329–34, 336 “Drum Decade” (Chapman) 329 Du Bois, W. E. B. 19, 274, 336 Dudziak, Mary 274

Due, Tannarive 91 Duerden, Dennis 207, 212–14, 216–17 Dulles, Allen 98, 98 n.5, 98 n.6, 100, 108 Dulles, John Foster 265, 289 Duncan, Robert 64, 70, 374 Bending the Bow 70 “An Essay at War” 70 Ground Work 71 “The Homosexual in Society” 69 The Opening of the Field 69 Passages 1 70 Passages 13 70 Passages 22–27 71 Passages 25 70 “A Poem Beginning with a Line by Pindar” 69 The Dyehouse (Calthorpe) 318 Dylan, Bob “Rolling Thunder Revue” 73 “Early Morning on the Tel Aviva-Haifa Freeway” (Dove) 75 Earthsea (Le Guin) 88 n.9 Eastman, Max 293 Ebbitt, E. Winstrom 108 Ebony (magazine) 263 Eco, Umberto 97 n.4, 101 The Economist (magazine) 200 Eden, Anthony 100 Edjabe, Ntone 328 Ed Sullivan Show 343 Edwards, B. 328 Egan, Greg Schild’s Ladder 85 The Eighth Day (Wilder) 172 Eigo Seinen (The Rising Generation) (magazine) 293, 296 Eisenhower, Dwight D. 40, 49–50, 70, 98, 343, 349 “The elegant office girl” (Niedecker) 53 Eliot, T. S. 63, 66, 153, 158, 183, 229, 233, 238, 292–3, 295 The Waste Land 63, 66, 233 Ellison, Ralph 3–4, 16, 274, 298 Invisible Man 22, 240 “El Negro en la literatura norteamericana” 342 El Puente 352 Emerson, Ralph Waldo Essays 292 Emrich, Duncan 272 Encounter (magazine) 149–50, 152, 156–7, 159–60, 210, 212, 217, 229, 332, 334, 362 encyclopedic author 36 encyclopedic novel 35–44

428

The End of the Academic Novel (Bottum) 132 n.4 End Zone (DeLillo) 42 Engerman, David C. Know Your Enemy: The Rise and Fall of America’s Soviet Experts 133 n.7 Engle, Nieh Hualing 240, 245–57 After Thirty Years 255 autobiography 247, 248 n.3 childhood 248 Literature of the Hundred Flowers 254 The Lost Golden Bell 248 n.3, 250 Mulberry and Peach 246, 250–2, 251 n.5, 255–6 Engle, Paul 225, 228, 231, 240, 246, 250, 252–4 “On This Wall’ ” 227 English-language writing 3 English Social History (Trevelyan) 200 “Enough: Jamestown 1607–1957” (Moore) 48 “Epitaph for a Fallen Poet” (Lowell) 67 “Equal Opportunity” (Lorde) 58–9 Erasmus, Desiderius Praise of Folly 36 Ercolino, Stefano 37 Erdrich, Louise 37 Erskine, John 397 Escape from Freedom (Fromm) 84 n.5 Esquire 239 n.14 “An Essay at War” (Duncan) 70 Essays (Emerson) 292 Etheridge, Brian C. 265 Euripides Medea 377 Evergreen Review (magazine) 4, 185, 342 Evers, Medgar 13 The Evolution of American Women’s Studies (Ginsberg) 141 n.15 Excellence in Our Schools (report) 406 Ezekiel, Nissim 358, 362, 364, 366–9 “Censorship and the Writer” 367 “Poetry in the Time of Tempests” 366 Fabinyi, Andrew 310 Faculty Towers: The Academic Novel and Its Discontents (Showalter) 132 n.3 Fahs, Charles B. 290 Family Jewels 99, 99 n.7 Farfield 5 Farrar 4 Faulkner, William 5, 7, 182–4, 240, 259–80, 264 n.12, 287, 288, 292, 294–302, 406 Absalom, Absalom! 259 The American Dream: What Happened to It? 279 A Fable 262

INDEX

As I Lay Dying 259, 294 Intruder in the Dust 184 The Portable Faulkner 182 Pylon 182 Requiem for a Nun 262, 272 Sanctuary 182, 259 The Sound and the Fury 259 The Wild Palms 182, 259 Faulkner at Nagano (Jelliffe) 266–7 Faust (von Goethe) 36 Fearing, Kenneth 18 Federmayer, Éva 86 Dawn 90 Fegan, Ethel 198 Feldman, Andrew 343 femininity 82, 87–9 Feminist Bookstore Newsletter 403 The Feminist Primer 404 Feo, José Rodriguez 341 Ferguson, Homer 269 Ferlinghetti, Lawrence 65–6, 72, 345, 374, 377 “Pocket Poets Series” 65 Fernández, Pablo Armando 342 Fiedler, Leslie 116, 240 The War against the Academy 131 n.2 Findeisen, Christopher The One Place Where Money Makes No Difference 132 n.3 Finn, Huck 295 Finnegans Wake (Joyce) 1 Firestone, Shulamith 402 Fitzgerald, F. Scott 297 The Fixer (Malamud) 123 Fleming, Ian 96, 97 n.4, 100–1, 101 n.9, 103–5 Flesch, Rudolph Why Johnny Can’t Read 396 “Florida” (Lorde) 58 Floyd, George 407 Foerster, Norman 226–7, 231 Folsom, Franklin 16 Ford, Gerald R. 99 Ford Foundation 4, 194, 196, 228 A Forest Fire (de Cosimo) 70 Forrestal, James 98 Forster, E. M. 153, 183 “For The Union Dead” (Lowell) 67–8 Fortune (magazine) 288–9 Forum 210 For Whom the Bell Tolls (Hemingway) 343 Frank, Waldo 339, 346, 354 Franklin, Benjamin 406 Franqui, Carlos 341–2, 350

INDEX

Franzen, Jonathan 37 Frazer, James 238 The Golden Bough 233 Fredman, Stephen 65–6 Free China (journal) 249, 253 Freedom First (journal) 359, 362, 366 “Freedom Manifesto” 365 Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) 15 Freedom’s Laboratory: The Cold War Struggle for the Soul of Science (Wolfe) 133 n.6 The Free World (Menand) 6 Friends and Enemies (Stevenson) 165 From Black Power to Black Studies (Rojas) 141 n.16 Fromm, Erich 395 Escape from Freedom 84 n.5 From Ritual to Romance (Weston) 233 From Russia with Love (film) 100 Frost, Robert 292 Frye, Northrop Anatomy of Criticism 36 Fuentes, Carlos 124, 273, 352 Future Females (Barr) 92 futurity without equity 82, 84 Gaddis, John Lewis 63 Gaddis, Williams 36 The Recognitions 35, 37 Gal, Nora 173 Gallegos, Rómulo 273 Gandhi, Indira 366 Gardiner, Allan 309–11 Garnett, David 150, 152, 153 n.6, 154 Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. 332, 399 gay aesthetic 186 Gayden, Fern 16 Negro Story 14, 28 gay liberation 186–8 Geertz, Clifford 40 Gehlen, Reinhard 98 Gelber, Jack “Howl” 351 “The Connection” 350 “The Cuban Thing” 351 General Education in a Free Society 394–5 Genet, Jean 185 Genten Amerika Shi 297 Germany 97 Getachew, A. 327 ghettoization 83 “The Ghost at the Quincy Club” (Brooks) 31 G.I. Bill 226, 239

429

Gide, André 153, 294 Intervues Imaginaires 294 The Gilda Stories (Gomez) 187 Giles, Roscoe 32 Giles Goat-Boy (Barth) 35, 37 Ginsberg, Allen 64–6, 69, 72–3, 115–17, 121, 184–5, 339, 345–6, 351–4, 377, 383–4 Howl 65–6, 69, 71, 184 Ginsberg, Allen E. 115–17, 121, 123 The Evolution of American Women’s Studies 141 n.15 Giovanni’s Room (Baldwin) 182 Giroux, Robert 66, 68 Gitlin, Todd 401 Godden, Richard 262 The Godfather (Jameson) 96 n.2 Godfrey, John 97, 100 The God That Failed (Crossman and Koestler) 159– 60, 362 Goebbels, Joseph 151 Goheen, John 291 Gold, Liz 107 Goldberg, Ivan 137 The Golden Bough (Frazer) 233 Goldfinger 100 Gollancz, Victor 314 Gomez, Jewelle The Gilda Stories 187 Gone with the Wind (Mitchell) 296, 299–301 Goodbye (Roth) 116, 121 Good Housekeeping (periodical) 200 Goodman, Paul 116 Goodwin, Michael 156 Gordimer, Nadine 334 Goss, Bernard 17 Goss, Margaret Taylor 13 Gosse, Van 401 Gourfain, Ed 13 Gourfain, Joyce 13 Grambs, Jean 393 Grammar of Politics (Laski) 200 Granma 350, 353 Gravity’s Rainbow (Pynchon) 35–8, 40 Gray, William Maturity in Reading 396 The Great Books of the Western World 398 Great Britain 95–8, 100, 102–3, 110, 311 bureaucracies created by 5 Green, Charles The Droves of Academe 132 n.4 Greenberg, Clement 115 Greene, Graham 151–3, 377

430

Greif, Mark 226 n.4, 231 “Grenada Revisited: An Interim Report” (Lorde) 58–9 Ground Work (Duncan) 71 Grove Press 4 The Groves of Academe (McCarthy) 118, 132, 134, 136–7, 140, 142 Gruber, Carol S. Mars and Minerva: World War I and the Uses of Higher Learning in America 132 n.5 Guardian 217 “Guerrillero Heroico” 347 Guevara, Che 344, 345, 347, 349, 352 Guilbaut, Serge 260, 361 Guillam, Peter 107 The Gulag Archipelago (Solzhenitsyn) 171, 174, 366 Gulf + Western 4 Hachette 4 Hagglebotham, Sabrean 220 Hansberry, Lorraine 20 Hanzelka, Jiří 375 Harcourt 4 Hardy, Frank 308, 310–11 Power without Glory 310 Harjo, Joy 238–9 “The Harlem Ghetto” (Baldwin) 347 Harlot’s Ghost (Mailer) 35 Harper & Brothers 4 HarperCollins 4 Harper & Row 13 Harpers Brothers 23 Harris, Bertha 185 Harris, John 198 Harris, Wilson 208 Hartsell, Dick 232, 233 Harvey, William K. 108 Hashimoto, Fukuo 298 Havel, Václav 121, 123, 387 Hawthorne, Nathaniel 302, 406 The Scarlet Letter 292 Hayden, Casey 402 Hayden, Robert 18, 20 Hayden, Tom 402 Haylon, Leslie 316 H. D. see Doolittle, Hilda Head, Bessie 329 The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter (McCullers) 184 Heineman, Kenneth 401 Heinlein, Robert A. 84 Heller, Joseph 36 Helsinki Accords 169–71

INDEX

Helsinki Final Act 169, 175 Helsinki Watch 124 Hemingway, Ernest 183, 241, 292, 294–5, 297, 302, 339–45, 350, 353–4 A Moveable Feast 183 The Old Man and the Sea 343, 344 The Sun Also Rises 237, 245, 292, 294, 345 For Whom the Bell Tolls 343 Hench, John B. 158 Henderson the Rain King (Bellow) 118 Heron, Gil Scott The N***** Factory 141 The Hero with a Thousand Faces (Campbell) 233 Hersh, Seymour 99 Herzog, Moses 119 Hesse, Hermann 294 Het Handvest Van De Vrijheid 154 Hewett, Dorothy 308, 314–19 Bobbin Up 314–20 “Clancy and Dooley and Don McLeod” 316 Heydrich, Reinhard 97, 103 Higher Education Act 133 Highsmith, Patricia 181 Hill, Notting Jonny + Jemima 219 “A Hill of Beans” (Dove) 76 Himmelfarb, Gertrude 117 Hines, Frank 399 “Hiroshima boiling//over a Mosler Safe, the ‘Rock of Ages’/that survived the blast” (Lowell) 67 Hirsch, E. D., Jr. Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know 406 A History of American Higher Education (Thelin) 133 n.8 His Toy, His Dream, His Rest (Berryman) 68–9 Hitler, Adolf 97 Hoar, Maynard 134–5, 140, 142 Hoffman, Alfred Modern Novel in America 293, 297 Hofstadter, Richard The Paranoid Style in American Politics and Other Essays 102 n.10 Hoggart, Richard 218 holding companies 4 Holiday 263 Holleran, Andrew Dancer from the Dance 188 Hollinger, David 116 Hollywood 12, 100 Homage to Mistress Bradstreet (Berryman) 68

431

INDEX

Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology (Smith) 187, 405 n.18 Home Owners’ Loan Association 24 “Homintern,” 180 ‘Homo-Hunting’in the Early Cold War (Baxter) 138 n.13 homosexual 179 n.1 “The Homosexual in Society” (Duncan) 69 Hook, Sydney “Bread and Freedom” 362 Hoover, J. Edgar 42 Hopkins, Johns 299 Hopkinson, Nalo 91 hot war 69–72 Houghton Mifflin 4 Houseboat Days (Ashbery) 71 House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) 14 House of the Dead (Dostoevsky) 315 Hovey, Jaime A Thousand Words: Portraiture, Style, and Queer Modernism 180 n.2 Howe, Irving 117–18 Jewish American Stories 118 “The New York Intellectuals: A Chronicle and a Critique” 114 A Treasury of Yiddish Stories 118 World of Our Fathers 123 Howells, William Dean 27 Howl (Ginsberg) 65–6, 69, 71, 184, 185, 345 Howland, Harold 264 How to Be an Antiracist (Kendi) 407 How to Write a College Novel (De Mott) 131 n.2 Hsu, John 254 n.8 Huckleberry Finn (Twain) 292 Hudson Review (journal) 160, 296 Hueso, Cayo 347 Hughes, Langston 13, 16–18, 20, 32, 214, 298 Hugo Awards 85 n.7 Hull, Gloria T. All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men, But Some of Us Are Brave 405 Hungerfield (Jeffers) 379 Hungerford, Amy 37, 38 Hunt, John 214 Husain, M. F. 363 Hutchins, Robert 393, 395, 397 Hutchinson, George 240 Facing the Abyss 239 Huxley, Aldous 158

Huyssen, Andreas Mass Culture as Woman: Modernism’s Other 83 n.3 “Hyoronsha series” 288 Ibadan Writers Group 217 ideal domesticity 82 idealism 82 Ideal Marriage (van de Velde) 294 identity politics 1, 84, 239, 406 Illustrated London News (periodical) 200 The Imagination of Disaster (Sontag) 83 Imprint (magazine) 360–2, 364 I’m Still Here: Black Dignity in a World Made for Whiteness (Brown) 407 In Cold Blood (Capote) 184 Indian writers 7 In Dreams Begin Responsibilities (Schwartz) 114 Infante, Guillermo Cabrera 342, 345, 348, 350 Informational Media Guaranty (IMG) program 164 Information Research Department (IRD), Britain 149 International Book Exhibition and Fair in Moscow 167, 170 internationalizing book trade 166–9 International Media Guarantee (IMG) 196 International Publishers Association (IPA) 166 International Relations Office (IRO) 191, 193 International Review-Digest Project 155, 155 n.9 International Writing Program (IWP) 240–1 Intervues Imaginaires (Gide) 294 Intruder in the Dust (Faulkner) 184 Invisible Man (Ellison) 22 Iowa City 247–50 Isherwood, Christopher 183, 185 Christopher and His Kind 187 The World in the Evening 183 It’s a Small World, after All: Assessing the Contemporary Campus Novel (Scott) 132 n.3 Jackson, Charles 182 Jackson, Lawrence 16 Jacobs, Jane 152 Jacobs, Robert 300 Jaime, Harker Middlebrow Queer: Christopher Isherwood in America 182 Jaji, Tsitsi Africa in Stereo 327 James, C. L. R. 218 James, Henry 11–12, 291, 292, 297 Jameson, F. 96 The Godfather (Jameson) 96 n.2 Janovic, Vladimír 386

432

Jařab, Josef 374, 388 Jeffers, Robinson 7, 373–88 Be Angry at the Sun 378, 383 Cawdor 381 Hungerfield 379 The Loving Shepherdess 373–88 Maják v bouři 385 Mara 379, 381, 384 Jeffers, Una 377 Jeffery, Keith 97 Jelliffe, Robert 266–7 Jemisin, N. K. 85 n.7, 91 Jensen, Merrill 291 Jewish American Stories (Howe) 118 Jianjun, Li 309 Jocelyn College 134–7 John Reed Clubs 13, 16 Johns Hopkins University 133 Johnson, David K. The Lavender Scare 138 n.13 Johnson, Dennis 254 n.8 Johnson, Lyndon 201 Johnson, William H. 330 Jones, Claudia 21 Jones, LeRoi 374 Jordan, A. C. 333 Jordan, June 404 Jordan, Robert 343 The Journal of African Law (magazine) 200 Joyce, James 183, 238 Finnegans Wake 1 Ulysses 42, 233 Judt, Tony 1 Julian, Percy 32 Jussawalla, Adil 359–61, 363–4, 366 “Boys and Girls in Purdah” 364 Justice, Donald 239 Kabul Public Library 195 Kafka, Franz 115–17, 122, 229 The Trial 116 Kalliney, Peter 334–5 Kamei, Shunsuke 298 Karhide 86, 88 Kawabata, Yasunari “Snow Country” 299 Kay, Andrew Academics Are Too Scared to Laugh: The Joke’s Over 132 n.4 Kazin, Alfred 116, 228–30, 292 “Dr. J. Robert Oppenheimer” 230 On Native Grounds 229

INDEX

Keenaghan, Eric 70 Keller, Yvonne 181 Kendi, Ibram X. How to Be an Antiracist 407 Kennan, George 98 Kennedy, John F. 13, 55, 100, 192, 272–3, 277, 349 Kent, George 14 Kenyon, J. P. After: The Business of University Novels 131 n.2 Kenyon Review 160, 293, 295, 296 Kerouac, Jack 72, 184, 345 On the Road 184 Kerr, George H. 290 Kesey, Ken 226 n.4 Ketchum, Jack 89 n.11 Khrushchev, Nikita 43, 271 Killens, John O. 20 Kim (Kipling) 96 n.3 Kim, Richard E. 250 n.4 Kindley, Evan 226 n.4 Poet-Critics and the Administration of Culture 229 Kindred (Butler) 89, 91 King, Bruce 364–5 King, Martin Luther, Jr. 406 King, Mary 402 King, Richard 300 Kinnahan, Linda 6 Kinnell, Galway 374 Kinsey, Alfred 180 Kipling, Rudyard Kim 96 n.3 Kirkpatrick, Ivone 151 Kirstein, George 70 Kirstein, Lincoln 183 Kiš, Danilo 124 Kitchen Table Press 4 Klein, Christina 299 Klíma, Ivan 113, 123 Kluckhorn, Clyde 290 Knight, Damon 83 Knightley, Philip 361 Know Your Enemy: The Rise and Fall of America’s Soviet Experts (Engerman) 133 n.7 Kodat, Catherine Gunther 260, 278 Koestler, Arthur 150–1 Arrival and Departure 158 Darkness at Noon 158 The God That Failed 159–60 The Lotus and the Robot 362 Kokujin Bungaku Zenshū 298 Kolatkar, Arun 363 Konrád, György 124

INDEX

Kopkow, Horst 98 Korda, Alberto 346–7 Korean War 95, 99 Kramer, John E. The American College Novel: An Annotated Bibliography 131 n.1 Krenn, Michael 260 Kreyling, Michael 263 Kreymborg, Alfred 17–18 Kristol, Irving 117 Kritsky, Leo 108–9 Krutch, Joseph Wood The Measure of Man: On Freedom, Human Values, Survival and the Modern Temper 230 Krutch, Oppenheimer 230 Kundera, Milan 123–4 The Unbearable Lightness of Being 124 Kunene, Mazisi 332 Laber, Jeri 124 Lacy–Zarubin Agreement 165, 175 Ladies Almanack (Barnes) 180 n.2 Lady Chatterley’s Lover (Lawrence) 4, 185 La Guma, Alex 219–21, 331–2 “At the Portagees” 331 “Slipper Satin” 331 The Stone Country 219 A Walk in the Night 219 Lambe, Ivor 154 Lambert, Josh 122, 122 n.12 “The Land of the Pharaohs” (movie) 269 L-A-N-G-U-A-G-E poetry 73 Lansky, Meyer 348 La Revue du Monde Libre (magazine) 153 Larkin, Philip 1 Lashmar, P. 158 Laski, Harold Grammar of Politics 200 Laugesen, Amanda 309 Laughlin, James 69, 360 Lavender, Isaiah Black and Brown Planets: The Politics of Race in Science Fiction 82 n.2 The Lavender Scare (Johnson) 138 n.13 Lawrence, D. H. 227, 229 Lady Chatterley’s Lover 4, 185 Lawrence, Elizabeth 11 Lawrence, Jacob 330 Lawrence, Lars Old Father Antic 173 Laye, Camara 331 Lazarfeld, Paul 395

433

League of American Writers 12 Leamas, Alec 104–5, 107 le Carré, John 96, 100, 103–10 Call for the Dead 104 Lecklider, Aaron 31 n.13 LeClair, Tom 36 Leduc, Violet 185 Lee, A. C. 317 Lee, Hermione 113 n.1 Lee, Muna 264, 273, 317 The Left Hand of Darkness (Le Guin) 86–8 Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA (Weiner) 98 A Legacy of Spies (le Carré) 107 Le Guin, Ursula K. 36, 82–8, 87 n.8, 91–2 The Dispossessed 87 Earthsea 88 n.9 The Left Hand of Darkness 86–8 Tehanu 88, 88 n.9 The Wizard of Earthsea 87 Lei Chen 249, 253 Le Messager de la Liberté (magazine) 153 Lerg, Charlotte A. 151 n.2 Letzler, David The Cruft of Fiction 37 Levertov, Denise 57, 70, 374 Levin, Harry 290, 292–3 Levin, Martin 172 Levin, Sy 140 Lewis, R. W. B. The American Adam 290 Lewis, Sinclair 165, 292 Babbitt 294 LGBTQ+ writers 179 The Liberal Imagination (Trilling) 116 Libra (DeLillo) 42 librarians 191–202 library British Council libraries 199–201 building 196–7 in the Cold War 193–4 diplomacy 191–202 surveying and building 194–6 training and exchange 197–9 USIS 199–201 Life (magazine) 42, 65, 69, 100, 227–8, 263, 346, 360 Life Studies (Lowell) 65–7 Lilith’s Brood (Butler) 89 Lincoln, Abraham 14, 406 Lindsay, Jack 308 Linebarger, Paul 153 n.6 Listen, Yankee! The Revolution in Cuba (Mills) 340, 346

434

Listen, Yanqui! (Mills) 347 Literary History of the United States (Spiller) 293 Literature of the Hundred Flowers (Engle) 254 Littell, Robert 96, 110 The Company: A Novel of the CIA 108 Little 4 The Little Disturbances of Man (Paley) 116 A Little Treasury of American Poetry (Williams) 292 A Little Treasury of Modern Poetry (Williams) 292 Liu, Yihung 240 Liu Binyan 255 The Living Daylights (film) 101 Llosa, Mario Vargas 273, 351 Lockhart, Robert Bruce 97 Lodge, David 132, 141 Changing Places 132 Small World 132, 142 Lolita (Nabokov) 173 London, Jack 165, 294, 297 The Long Dream (Wright) 172 long poems 65–9 “Look close” (Niedecker) 52 Lorde, Audre 6, 47, 56–60 “Diaspora” 58 “Equal Opportunity” 58–9 “Florida” 58 “Grenada Revisited: An Interim Report” 58–9 New York Head Shop and Museum 57–8 “Political Relations” 58 Sister/Outsider 187 “Uses of Anger” 57 Lord Weary’s Castle (Lowell) 66 Los Angeles Review of Books 239 The Lost Golden Bell (Engle) 248 n.3, 250 Lotus 330–2 The Lotus and the Robot (Koestler) 362 “A Lovely Love” (Brooks) 31 Loving in the War Years (Moraga) 187 The Loving Shepherdess (Jeffers) 373–88 Low, Gail 218 Lowell, Robert 1, 64, 72, 75 “Epitaph for a Fallen Poet” 67 “For The Union Dead” 67–8 “Hiroshima boiling//over a Mosler Safe, the ‘Rock of Ages’/that survived the blast” 67 Life Studies 65–7 Lord Weary’s Castle 66 “A Mad Negro Soldier Confined at Munich” 66–7 “Man and Wife” 70 “Memories of West Street and Lepke” 67 The Mills of the Kavanaughs 66

INDEX

“Now Paris, our black classic, breaking up/like killer kings on an Etruscan cup” 66 “ ‘To Speak of the Woe that Is Marriage’ ” 70 “Words for Hart Crane” 67 Loxley, Peter 97 Loy, Mina “Time-Bomb” 47 Luce, Henry 225, 227 Lucky Jim (Amis) 131 n.2, 140 “Lugubre for a child” (Niedecker) 52 Luis, William 342 Lunes de Revolución 341–3, 345–53 Lurie, Alison 141 The War between the Tates (Lurie) 132, 141–2 Lycett, Andrew 101 n.9 Lyons, John O. The College Novel in America 131 n.2 MacArthur, General 290 Macdonald, Dwight 83, 115 Mácha, Karel Hynek Máj 387 Machor, James 319 MacInnes, Colin 218 MacLeish, Archibald 288–9, 292, 300 Macmillan 4 Madhubuti, Haki 12, 26 Madison Square Garden 4 “A Mad Negro Soldier Confined at Munich” (Lowell) 66–7 The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction (magazine) 81 The Magic Barrel (Malamud) 114 Magsaysay, Ramon 269 Mailer, Norman 4, 96, 114, 119, 120, 239, 241, 294 Ancient Evenings 35 Harlot’s Ghost 35 The Man Who Studied Yoga 114 Why Are We in Vietnam? 35 Maimane, Arthur 329, 332 Main Currents in American Thought (Parrington) 24, 293 Máj (Mácha) 387 Maják v bouři (Jeffers) 385 Makeba, Miriam 325–8 Malamud, Bernard 114, 116, 123, 132, 140 The Fixer 123 The Magic Barrel 114 The Natural 116 A New Life 132, 140, 142 Malcolm X Park 29 n.8

INDEX

“Man and Wife” (Lowell) 70 The Man from C.A.M.P. (Banis) 186 Manhattan Project 95 Manheim, Jarol 264 Manila Chronicle 270 Manning, Toby 107 The Man Who Studied Yoga (Mailer) 114 Mara (Jeffers) 379, 381, 384 Marchetti, Victor 99 Mardhekar, B. S. 363 Mario, José 352 Marley, Bob “Buffalo Soldier” 327 Márquez, Gabriel García 273, 351, 352 Mars and Minerva: World War I and the Uses of Higher Learning in America (Gruber) 132 n.5 Marshall, Alan 308 Marshall, Paule 23 Martin, David 308 Marx, Karl 227 Marxist Quarterly (magazine) 135 Masani, Minoo 366 Mass Culture as Woman: Modernism’s Other (Huyssen) 83 n.3 Masses & Mainstream (journal) 279 Masters, Edgar Lee 292, 374 Matera, Marc 336 Matshikiza, Todd 218, 329 Matsuda, Takeshi 288–9 Matsumoto, Shigeharu 289 Matthews, Brian 311 Matthews, Herbert Lionel 339, 344 Matthews, James “The Party” 333 Matthews, John T. 261, 262 Matthiessen, F. O. 136, 289–90, 292–3 American Renaissance 290 Maturity in Reading (Gray and Rogers) 396 Maud Martha (Brooks) 11, 13, 21–6 Maugham, William Somerset Of Human Bondage 11 maximalist novels 37 May, Karl Der Schatz im Silbersee 383 Mayfield, Julian 20 McAlister, Melani 278 McAuley, James 311 McAuliffe, Jack 108–10 McCarthy, Joseph 66, 136–7, 200 McCarthy, Mary 4, 115, 118, 132, 134 The Groves of Academe 118, 132, 136–7, 140, 142

435

McCarthy, Richard 249 McClatchy, J. D. 71 McColvin, Lionel 193 McCord, Elizabeth 15 McCullers, Carson 297 Ballad of the Sad Café 184 The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter 184 Reflections in a Golden Eye 184 McCullough, Colleen The Thorn Birds 173–4 McDonald, Dwight 69 McElroy, Joseph 36 McEwan, Ian 149–50 McGurl, Mark 226 n.4 The Program Era 245 McKay, Claude 16 McKemster, David 24–5 Mead, Margaret 289 Meaker, Marijane Spring Fire 181 Me and White Supremacy (Saad) 407 Meanjin 310, 311 Medea (Euripides) 377 mediascapes 209 n.2 Meeting at the Far Meridian (Wilson) 167 Mehrotra, Arvind Krishna 363 Melhem, D. H. 30 Melville, Herman 116, 292, 295, 302, 406 Moby-Dick 35 Memorias del subdesarrollo 350 “Memories of West Street and Lepke” (Lowell) 67 Menand, Louis 116, 239 n.15 The Free World 6 Mendelson, Edward 36 Mendlesohn, Farah 85 Meredith, James 277 Meridians (Walker) 141 Merton, Robert K. 395 Michener, James Sayonara 299 Middlebrow Queer: Christopher Isherwood in America (Jaime) 182 “Mike Hammer” (Spillane) 296 Miller, Arthur 3, 115–16, 121, 124, 125, 345, 353 The Archbishop’s Ceiling 125–6, 373 Death of a Salesman 116 Miller, Henry 4, 345, 362 Tropic of Cancer 4, 185, 186 Miller, Mev 403 Miller, Perry 291, 292, 301 The New England Mind 290

436

Millet, Kate Sexual Politics 187 Mills, C. Wright 40, 339–40, 346–7, 350, 353–4 Listen, Yankee! The Revolution in Cuba 340, 346 Listen, Yanqui! 347 The Mills of the Kavanaughs (Lowell) 66 Milosz, Czeslaw Captive Mind 362 Miłosz, Czesław 377 Milton, John 406 Mitchell, Margaret 294, 296 Gone with the Wind 296, 299–301 Miyazaki, Yoshizo 298 Moby-Dick (Melville) 35 Modern Library 397 Modern Novel in America (Hoffman) 293, 297 Modisane, Bloke 213, 332, 333 Mondlane, Eduardo 325 The Moon Is Down (Steinbeck) 153 Moonraker (film) 96, 102–3 Moore, Marianne 6, 47, 48–51, 59, 292 “Combat Cultural” 48, 51 “Enough: Jamestown 1607–1957” 48 O to Be a Dragon 48, 51 “Virginia Britannia” 48 Moore, Nicole 5, 7 Mora, Francisco 20 Moraga, C. This Bridge Called My Back: Writers by Radical Women of Color 187, 405, 405 n.18 Moraga, Cherríe 405 Loving in the War Years 187 Morgunbladid 271 Morley, Catherine 42 Morris, George L. K. 115 Morris, Meaghan 294 Morrison, John 308 Morrison, Spencer 262 Morrison, Toni 4, 37, 124 Moscow Helsinki Group 172 Moscow International Book Exhibition and Fair 164 Moses Herzog (Bellow) 119 Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals (MPAPAI) 12 Motley, Willard 13, 28, 182 A Moveable Feast (Hemingway) 183 Mphahlele, Es’kia 5, 211–12, 217–18, 329–36 “The Suitcase” 331 Mqwetho, Nontsizi 333 Mulay, Y. M. 199 Mulberry and Peach (Engle) 246, 250–2, 251 n.5, 255–6

INDEX

Mulcahy, Henry 134–8 Mullen, Bill 12, 15 Mullen, Harryette 25 Multi-National Group Librarians Program 198 Mumford, Lewis 241 Values of Survival 231 Mundo Nuevo 352–3 Münzenberg, Willi 150 Mura, David 239 n.17, 241–2 A Stranger’s Journey: Race, Identity, and Craft in Writing 341 Murao, Shigeoshi 345 Murdoch, Iris 218 Murray, Ralph 158 Murray, Valerie 219 Murray-Smith, Stephen 315–16 Museum (Dove) 75 Myers, D. G. The Elephants Teach 226 Myrat, Dimitri 272 NAACP Youth Council 14 Nabokov, Vladimir 226 n.4 Lolita 173 Pnin 140 Nadel, Alan Containment Culture: American Narrative, Postmodernism, and the Atomic Age 139 n.14 Nagenda, John 208 Naipaul, V. S. 218 Nakasa, Nat 329, 331 Naked Lunch (Burroughs) 185 Naogy, Rajat 368 Narayan, Jayaprakash 365–7 Narita, Shigehisa 293 The Nation (magazine) 68, 70, 201 National Book Award 114, 114 n.3 National Defense Education Act 133 National Geographic (magazine) 360 nationalism 82 National Labor Council 15 National Negro Congress 12, 15 National Observer 19 A Nation at Risk 406 Native Son (Wright) 22, 24, 26, 29 The Natural (Malamud) 116 Naval Intelligence Division (NID) 97 Nazareth, Peter 254 n.8 Nearing, Scott Black America 298 Nebula (magazine) 81 Negroes in America Fight for Freedom (book) 165

437

INDEX

The Negro in Illinois 29 n.8 Negro Popular Front 16 Negro Story (Gayden) 14, 28 Nejedlá, Jaromíra 386 Nelson, Cary 70–1 Neogy, Rajat 218, 228, 331–2, 335, 365, 368 Neruda, Pablo 344, 353 The New African 211, 331 New Criticism in America (Blackmur) 287 New Directions Books 4 The New England Mind (Miller) 290 New Jersey Zinc 4 The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (Alexander) 407 A New Life (Malamud) 132, 140, 142 Newman, Paul 184 New Masses (journal) 16–18, 28 The New Scientist (magazine) 200 NewsCorp 4 Newsweek 40, 71, 263 New Worlds (magazine) 81 New York City 3–4 The New Yorker (magazine) 119, 184 New York Head Shop and Museum (Lorde) 57–8 “The New York Intellectuals: A Chronicle and a Critique” (Howe) 114 The New York Review of Books (magazine) 113, 125, 342 New York Times (newspaper) 48–9, 48 n.5, 58, 99, 112, 122, 126, 185, 254, 259, 273, 335, 339, 344, 352, 395 New York Times Book Review 19 The N***** Factory (Heron) 141 Ngkane, Lionel 219 Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o 208 Nicholls, Allan 316 Niedecker, Lorine 6, 47, 51–6 “Alone” 54 “Beautiful girl” 53 “Could You Be Right” 52 “The elegant office girl” 53 “Look close” 52 “Lugubre for a child” 52 “No matter where you are / you are alone / and in danger” 53 “Shelter” 54 “So you’re married, young man” 53 War 56 “Wintergreen Ridge” 55–6 Nightwood (Barnes) 180 n.2 Nineteen Eighty-Four (Orwell) 158 Nineteenth Century (magazine) 156

Nishikawa, Masami 295 Nixon, Richard 40–1, 49, 71 Nkosi, Lewis 207–8, 207–10, 209–10, 214, 217–18, 329, 333–4, 337 Nkrumah, Kwame 213, 336 “No matter where you are/you are alone/and in danger” (Niedecker) 53 Noonuccal, Oodgeroo We Are Going 309 Nortje, K. Arthur 332 Notes of a Native Son (Baldwin) 22 “Notes on Camp” (Sontag) 184 Notley, Alice 73 no war 69–72 “Now Paris, our black classic, breaking up/like killer kings on an Etruscan cup” (Lowell) 66 Nwoga, Donatus 210 Nxumalo, Henry 329 Oakley, Helen 261 Oates, Joyce Carol 4 O’Brien, Kenneth 63 Ochi, Hiromi 4 Odhiambo, Tom 329 Office of Strategic Services (OSS) 98, 100, 152 official antiracist liberalism 12 Of Human Bondage (Maugham) 11 Ōhashi, Kenzaburō 297, 298 Ōhashi, Kichinosuke 297 Okeke-Agulu, C. 330 Okigbo, Christopher 208, 218 Okorafor, Nnedi 91 Okyeame 337 Old Father Antic (Lawrence) 173 The Old Man and the Sea (Hemingway) 343, 344 Oliver, J. 158 Olsen, Eric 239 n.16 Olsen, Tillie 23 Olson, Charles 152 Maximus Poems 64–5 Oluo, Ijeoma So you want to talk about race? 407 O’Neill, Eugene 297 The One Place Where Money Makes No Difference (Findeisen) 132 n.3 Ono, Kiyoyuki 266 Onosaka, Junko 403 On the Road (Kerouac) 184 The Opening of the Field (Duncan) 69 Operation Paperclip 98, 102 Orgeryn 86, 88 Origin 54–5

438

Orlikoff, Richard 14 Orwell, George 150, 151, 156, 199–200 Animal Farm 158, 362 Nineteen Eighty-Four 158 Osborne, John 1 Ostrovsky, Nikolai 294 Ōtake, Masaru 297 Otero, Lisandro 341 Other Voices, Other Rooms (Capote) 184 O to Be a Dragon (Moore) 48, 51 Ouma, Christopher 5, 7, 218 The Outsider (Wright) 22 The Outside Thing: Lesbian Modernist Romance (Roche) 180 n.2 Ouyang Tzu 249 Overland (journal) 311, 315 Overmind (Clarke) 84 Ozick, Cynthia Trust 38 Padgett, Lewis 84 Padhye, Prabhakar 359, 363 Padilla, Heberto 340–1, 353–4 Pai Hsien-yung 249 Paley, Grace 57 The Little Disturbances of Man 116 Pan-Africanism 326, 328, 334–7 Pankin, Boris 168 paperback revolution 3 Paramount Pictures 4 The Paranoid Style in American Politics and Other Essays (Hofstadter) 102 n.10 Parker, Pat Womanslaughter 187 Parkes, John 198 Parmigianino (Italian painter) 71 Parra, Nicanor 352 Parrington, Vernon Main Currents in American Thought 24, 293 Parrott, Cecil 158 Partisan Review 3, 114–18, 114–19, 122, 125, 160, 225, 229, 296, 300 “The Party” (Matthews) 333 Passages 1 (Duncan) 70 Passages 13 (Duncan) 70 Passages 22–27 (Duncan) 71 Passages 25 (Duncan) 70 Passos, John Dos 297 Pasternak, Boris 212, 374 Patternist (Butler) 84 n.4, 89 Pawley, William 98 Peace Corps 194, 196

INDEX

Penguin Anthology of 20th Century American Poetry 75 Penguin Random House 4 Perkins, Marion 13–14 Perloff, Marjorie 71 Perrottet, Tony 343 Perspectives USA 360 Peterka, Josef 385 Petry, Ann 20 Phillips, Damon 137, 139 Phillips, Hal Thomas 182 Phillips, William 115 Picano, Felice 188 Picasso, Pablo 350 Pieterse, Cosmo 219 The Pigeon Tunnel (le Carré) 103 Pinter, Harold 4, 218 Plaatje, Solomon 333, 334, 336 Plath, Sylvia 1, 377 Playlist for the Apocalypse (Dove) 75 Plutzik, Hyam Horatio 64–5 P.M. 348–50 PMLA 295 Pnin (Nabokov) 140 “Pocket Poets Series” (Ferlinghetti) 65 Podhoretz, Norman 117 Poe, Edgar Allan 292, 302 “A Poem Beginning with a Line by Pindar” (Duncan) 69 Poetic Justice (Cross) 141 “Poetry in the Time of Tempests” (Ezekiel) 366 Poets, Essayists, and Novelists (PEN) 218 “Political Relations” (Lorde) 58 Polk, Noel 262, 264, 278 Popescu, Monica 217, 357 The Portable Faulkner (Faulkner) 182 Porter, Katherine Ann 297 Porter, Lavelle The Blackademic Life 141 n.16 Port Huron Statement (PHS) 402 Portnoy’s Complaint (Roth) 122, 168 Pound, Ezra 65, 69–70, 183, 229, 292, 295 A Draft of XXX Cantos 63, 66 Pisan Cantos 70 Power without Glory (Hardy) 310 The Prague Orgy (Roth) 125–6, 373 Praise of Folly (Erasmus) 36 Přátelství přes oceán (Bednář) 378 Présence Africaine 212 Preuves 210 Price, David H. Cold War Anthropology: The CIA, the Pentagon, and the Growth of Dual Use Anthropology 133 n.7

439

INDEX

Prichard, Katharine Susannah 308 Priestley, J. B. 151, 218 “Primer for a Nuclear Age” (Dove) 76 Principles of the English Law of Contract (Anson) 200 Pritchett, V. S. 154, 227 Professional Foul (Stoppard) 373 professional-managerial class (PMC) 139–40, 142 The Professor’s House (Cather) 137 Psychological Warfare Division of the Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force (PWD/ SHAEF) 152 The Public Burning (Coover) 35, 37, 40–1 Pullin, Eric 368–9 pure war 72–6 Pylon (Faulkner) 182 Pynchon, Thomas 6, 185 The Crying of Lot 49 35, 38 Gravity’s Rainbow 35–40 Quadrant 210, 311, 362 queer 138, 138 n.12, 179 n.1 literature in 1960s 184–6 literature in the 1940s and 1950s 181–4 pulp 180–1 queerness 180 Quest 210, 332, 359–60, 362–9 Quincy Club 31 Quinn, Justin 362–3 Rabkin, Eric 88 race radicalism 12 n.1 racial identity 12 radical democracy 1 radio programs 209 Radway, Janice Reading the Romance 319 Rahv, Philip 115–16 Raine, Kathleen 152 Rakesh, Mohan 358 Ramonet, Ignacio 343 Ramparts 68, 352 Random House 4 Ransom, John Crowe 229, 292 Rashley, Lisa Hammond 87 Rathebe, Dolly 329 Rawlings, Marjorie Kinnan 297 Read, Herbert 218 Reader’s Digest (magazine) 201, 360, 398 Reading the Romance (Janice) 319 Reagan, Ronald 64, 72–6 The Realist Writer 309, 311, 319 Rebelde, Radio 341

rebels with transcripts 225–42 Rechy, John City of Night 185 The Recognitions (Gaddis) 35, 37 Redding, Saunders 12 n.1 Reed, John 115 n.6 Reflections in a Golden Eye (McCullers) 184 Reilly, S. 97 Reischauer, Edwin O. Beyond Vietnam: The United States and Asia 201 Remarque, Erich Maria Arc de Triomphe 294 Report from Part One (Brooks) 13–14, 16, 18 Requiem for a Nun (Faulkner) 262, 272 Revolución 341–2, 350 Rich, Adrienne 1 Richmond, Yales 169 Richmond Times-Dispatch (newspaper) 344 Riebling, Mark Wedge: From Pearl Harbor to 9/11 100 n.8 The Rise of the Academic Novel (Williams) 131 n.1, 132 n.3 The Rise of the African Novel (Wa Ngugi) 333 Rive, Richard 218, 329, 333 Rivera, Diego 20 Robb, Hammurabi 29 Robertson, William 52 Robeson, Paul 13, 327, 374 Roche, Hannah The Outside Thing: Lesbian Modernist Romance 180 n.2 Rockefeller, John D. III 289–90 Rockefeller Foundation 4, 193–4, 225, 228, 232 Rodney, Walter 336 Rogers, Bernice Maturity in Reading 396 Rogers, Ibram H. The Black Campus Movement 141 n.16 Rojas, Fabio From Black Power to Black Studies 141 n.16 “Rolling Thunder Revue” (Dylan) 73 Roosevelt, Franklin Delano 134 n.10, 154, 393 Roper, John Herbert, Sr. 300 Rose, Jeanne Marie 131 n.2 Rosenberg, Bruce A. The Spy Story 96 n.1 Rosenfeld, Isaac 116 Rosset, Barney 185 Roth, Henry Call It Sleep 122 Portnoy’s Complaint 122

440

Roth, Philip 4–5, 23, 37, 113–16, 113 n.1, 119–28, 123 n.14, 124 n.16, 374 Columbus 116, 121 Goodbye 116, 121 Portnoy’s Complaint 168 The Prague Orgy 125–6, 373 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 406 Rowe, John Carlos 288 Royal Charter 199 Rubin, Andrew N. 149, 360, 362 Rubin, Louis D., Jr. 288, 300 Rubyfruit Jungle (Brown) 187 Ruggles, Melville J. 165 Rukeyser, Muriel 18, 57 The Book of the Dead 64 Rushin, Donna Kate “The Bridge Poem” 404 Russell, James E. 397 Russo, Richard 131 n.2 Saad, Layla Me and White Supremacy 407 Sabin, Margary 369 Sackville-West, Vita 158 Saito, Hikaru 292–3 Sakanishi, Shiho 295 Saleh, Tayeb 213 Salesses, Matthew 239 n.17, 241–2 Craft in the Real World: Rethinking Fiction Writing and Workshopping 341 Salinger, J. D. 4, 119 The Catcher in the Rye 319 Salkey, Andrew 208, 218 Salvaggio, Ruth 91 samizdat 164 Sánchez, Yoani 346 Sanctuary (Faulkner) 182, 259 Sand, George 406 Sandburg, Carl 13, 25, 374 Santamaria, Haydée 351–2 Sappho Was a Right-On Woman (Abbott) 187 Sargent, Pamela 91 Women of Wonder 92 Saroyan, William 297 Sarton, May Faithful Are the Wounds (Sarton) 132, 136–7, 140 Sartre, Jean-Paul 185, 341, 353 Nausé 294 Satire in the Ivory Tower Gets Rough (Boxer) 132 n.4 The Saturday Evening Post (magazine) 98 n.5, 201 Saunders, F. Stoner 149, 156, 158, 334

INDEX

The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters 133 n.8 Who Paid the Piper? 149 Saxena, J. S. 364 Sayonara (Michener) 299 The Scarlet Letter (Hawthorne) 292 Schaeffer, Glenn 239 n.16 Scherman, Harry 398 Schild’s Ladder (Egan) 85 Schorer, Mark 290, 292 Schreier, Benjamin 117, 119 n.11 Schulz, Bruno The Street of Crocodiles 124 Schwartz, D. 116 In Dreams Begin Responsibilities 114 Schwartz, Lawrence 260 Science and McCarthyism (Badash) 133 n.6 science fiction (sf) 81–92 antifeminist norm in 89 assumption about 81 community 83–5 criticism 83 development of 82 fantasy and 82 feminine perspective 85 futurity without equity 82, 85 gender problem 82 impulses 82, 84 male authors 81, 81 n.1 masculine gatekeeping culture of 83 narratives 83 postracial attitude of 87 women characters in 86–8 women readers of 81 Scott, Robert F. It’s a Small World, after All: Assessing the Contemporary Campus Novel 132 n.3 Scott, Walter 387 Scott-Smith, Giles 151 n.2 Scribner’s 4 Seajay, Carol 403 Seaver, Edwin 16 Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) 95–8 The Secret Pilgrim (le Carré) 106 Seelaf, George 310 Seifert, Jaroslav 382 Seize the Day (Bellow) 114 Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror (Ashbery) 71 Selvon, Samuel 208 Senghor, Leopold Sedar 212, 214, 330, 331 Serumaga, Robert 208 Sewanee Review (magazine) 293, 295

441

INDEX

Sexual Politics (Millet) 187 Shah, A. B. 366 Shakespeare, William 68, 199–200, 406 Shapiro, Karl 116 Shattered Peace: The Origins of the Cold War and the National Security State (Yergin) 133 n.8 Shaughnessy, Brenda 75 Shaw, Robert 67 Shawl, Nisi 91 Sheils, Mary Lou 58–9 “Shelter” (Niedecker) 54 Shen Congwen 255 Shephard, Sam Renaldo and Clara 73 The Shepherdess on Her Pilgrimage towards April (Bednář) 388 Shepperson, George 336 Sherry, Michael 180, 183 Shils, Edward 211 Shimizu, Hiroshi 299 Ship of Fools (Brant) 388 The Short Story in America (West) 297 Showalter, Elaine Faculty Towers: The Academic Novel and Its Discontents 132 n.3 Shulman, Bruce J. 72 Shute, Nevil Trustee for the Toolroom 361 Silko, Leslie Marmon 37 Almanac of the Dead 38 Silliman, Ron 64 The Alphabet 73 What 73–5 Simmons Bedding 4 Simon & Schuster 4 Sinclair, Upton 165, 195, 293 Singer, Isaac Bashevis 118 Sister Carrie (Dreiser) 292 Sister/Outsider (Lorde) 187 Sitwell, Edith 153 “Slipper Satin” (La Guma) 331 Small World (Lodge) 132, 142 Šmejkalová, Jiřina 7 Smethurst, James 12 Smiley, George 104, 106–7 Smiley, Jane 239 Smith, Barbara All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men, But Some of Us Are Brave 405 Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology 187, 405 n.18 Smith, B. Z. 317

Smith, Henry Nash 289–90, 292, 299 Virgin Land 290 Smith, Rachel Greenwald 90 Smith, Zadie 37 “Snow Country” (Kawabata) 299 So, Richard Jean 245 Socialism and the Novel: A Study of Australian Literature (Beasley) 317–18 Società Dante Alighieri 150 The Sociology of Literary Taste 375–6 Solomon, Carl 66 Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr The Gulag Archipelago 171, 174, 366 Solzhenitsyn, Alexander Gulag Archipelago 171, 174 Song of the Loon (Amory) 186 Sontag, Susan 4 The Imagination of Disaster 83 “Notes on Camp” 184 The Sot-Weed Factor (Barth) 35 The Sound and the Fury (Faulkner) 259 South Africa : Information and Analysis 218 South African Bulletin 332 “South Africa Report” 332 Southern Renaissance: The Literature of the Modern South (Rubin and Jacobs) 288, 300 South Side Community Art Center (SSCAC) 11–12, 16 Soviet and American cultural relations books role in 164–6 Soviet National Exhibit in New York 165 Soviet Survey 362 Soviet Union 97, 163 untapped market of American literature 164 Soviet Writers’ Union 164 Soyinka, Wole 208, 217, 218, 330–2 Dance of the Forest 208 “So you’re married, young man” (Niedecker) 53 So you want to talk about race? (Oluo) 407 Spahr, Juliana “The Program Era and the Mainly White Room” 239 Spark, Muriel 152 Special Operations Executive (SOE) 97 The Spectator (magazine) 200 Spender, Matthew 159 n.11 Spender, Stephen 151–2, 159 Spillane, Mickey “Mike Hammer” 296 Spiller, Robert Literary History of the United States 293 Spring Fire (Meaker) 181

442

spy fiction 95–6 n.1, 95–110 Anglo-American 96 ethical dilemmas 96–103 in Great Britain 95 as a social fears of German 96 The Spy Story (Cawelti and Rosenberg) 96 n.1 The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (le Carré) 104, 108 Stanford University 4 Stax Records 4 Stecopoulos, Harilaos 172, 261, 275 Steeleye Span 388 Stegner, Wallace 225, 226, 226 n.4, 231, 232 n.11, 239 Stein, Gertrude 183 Steinbeck, John 152, 297 The Moon Is Down 153 Stevens, Wallace 292 Stevenson, Adlai 70, 165, 346 Friends and Enemies 165 Stiehl, Harry 68 Stimson, Henry 95 n.1 Stone, Robert 374 Stoner (Williams) 132, 140 Stoppard, Tom 4 Professional Foul 373 storytelling, transgressive science fictional 82 Stowe, Harriet Beecher Uncle Tom’s Cabin 165 Strachey, Lytton 183 Straus 4 A Streetcar Named Desire (Williams) 184 A Street in Bronzeville (Brooks) 13–14, 17, 21, 26 n.5, 28 The Street of Crocodiles (Schulz) 124 Stuart, Donald 314 Stukalin, Boris 169–71, 174–5 Sturgeon, Theodore 84 Styron, William 374 “The Suitcase” (Mphahlele) 331 The Sun Also Rises (Hemingway) 237, 245, 292, 294, 345 The Sunday Times 100 Sunstein, Cass R. 65 Suthalik, Miss 199 Světová literatura 379 Sweet Tooth (McEwan) 149 Sylvashko, Alexander 52 sympathetic alien 82 “Syringa” (Ashbery) 72 Takamura, Katsuji 297 Tambo, Oliver Reginald 325

INDEX

tamizdat 164, 173 Tate, Allen 229 Tate, Claudia 19 Tatsunokuchi, Naotaro 295, 297 Taylor, Breonna 407 Taylor, Elizabeth 184 Taylor, Margaret 14, 28 n.7 Taylor, Philip M. 151 Taylor, Valerie 181 technology and women poets 47–60 Tehanu (Le Guin) 88, 88 n.9 Temba, Can 329 Thelin, John R. A History of American Higher Education 133 n.8 theory of mass culture 96 The Wild Palms (Faulkner) 182 They Seek a City (Bontemps) 28 Things Fall Apart (Achebe) 200 Third World 2 Third World Press 13 This Bridge Called My Back: Writers by Radical Women of Color (Bambara, Moraga and Anzaldúa) 187, 405, 405 n.18 Thomas, Dylan 152 Thomas and Beulah (Dove) 75–6 Thomson, Bobby 41 The Thorn Birds (McCullough) 173–4 Thought 359, 364 A Thousand Words: Portraiture, Style, and Queer Modernism (Hovey) 180 n.2 Thurber, James 297 Thurston, Michael 66 Tiempo, Edilberto 240, 240 n.19 Till, Emmett 17, 27, 275 Time (magazine) 218, 360 “Time-Bomb” (Loy) 47 Times Literary Supplement 69 Tito, Josip Broz 118 Toklas, Alice B. 183 Tolson, Melvin B. 20, 28 Libretto for the Republic of Liberia 64–5 Tolstoy, Aleksey 294 Toomer, Jean 298 To Reclaim a Legacy (Bennett) 406 Toritti, Harvey 108–9 Torsuev, Iurii 170 “ ‘To Speak of the Woe that Is Marriage’ ” (Lowell) 70 totalitarianism 123 Toward a Female Liberation Movement 403 Trace, Arthur S. Jr. Why Ivan Can Read but Johnny Can’t 396 trade paperback 3

443

INDEX

Transcription Centre 207, 219–20 funding of 208 support for Anglophone African letters 208 transcripts, rebels with 225–42 transgressive science fictional storytelling 82 Transition (journal) 211, 217, 218, 330–5, 362, 365, 368 transpacific crossings 252–6 A Treasury of Yiddish Stories (Howe) 118 Trescott, Jacqueline 19 Trevelyan, G. M. English Social History 200 Treviño, Javier 346 The Trial (Kafka) 116 Tribune 157, 159, 311 Trilling, Lionel 116–17, 182, 230, 297 Beyond Culture 229 The Liberal Imagination 116 Tropic of Cancer (Miller) 4, 185, 186 Truman, H. S. 134 Trust (Ozick) 38 Trustee for the Toolroom (Shute) 361 Tutuola, Amos The Brave African Huntress 200 The Palm-Wine Drinkard 210 Twain, Mark 116, 165, 295, 302, 374, 406 Huckleberry Finn 292 Twelve Million Black Voices (Wright) 26 Twentieth Century (magazine) 156–7 Ulysses (Joyce) 42, 233 The Unbearable Lightness of Being (Kundera) 124 Uncle Tom’s Cabin (Stowe) 165 underground/independent presses 186–8 Underworld (DeLillo) 35, 41–3 United Daily News (newspaper) 250 United Electrician and Machine Workers Union 12 United States 2–3, 83, 98 bureaucracies created by 5 Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) 149, 209 Cold War anxieties in 95 government agencies 3 Jewish immigrants to 114 obscenity laws 4 State Department 95 United States Information Agency (USIA) 5, 193–4 University of California 141 Updike, John 1, 4, 115, 119–21, 123–4, 374 Bech: A Book 119–20 The Complete Henry Bech 119 “Uses of Anger” (Lorde) 57

US Information Agency (USIA) 118–20 USIS 199–201 Vaculík, Ludvík 123 Van Brooks, Wyck 300 van de Velde, Theodoor Hendrik 294 Ideal Marriage 294 Van Doren, Mark 229 Van O’Connor, William An Age of Criticism 293 van Vogt, A. E. 84 Velvet Revolution 113 Viacom 4 The Victim (Bellow) 116 Vidal, Gore The City and the Pillar 182 Viking Press 4 Virgil Eclogues 73 “Virginia Britannia” (Moore) 48 Virginia Quarterly Review 293 Virgin Land (Smith) 290 Virilio, Paul 72 Vi Vil Vinde 153 Vogue (periodical) 200 The Voice 330 Voigt, F. W. 156 Vollmann, William T. 38 Von Eschen, Penny M. 260, 335 von Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Faust 36 Vonnegut, Kurt 124 America through American Eyes 174, 176 Cat’s Cradle 68 Slaughterhouse-Five 68 Vonnegut, Kurt, Jr. 374 Voznesenski, Andrei 121 Wald, Alan 27, 117 Waldman, Anne 64, 65, 75 Fast Speaking Woman 72 Iovis: All Is Full of Jove 73 The Iovis Trilogy 72–3 Wali, Obi 208 “The Dead End of African Literature?” 208, 333 Walker, Alice 37 The Color Purple 187 Meridians 141 Walker, Clare 387 Walker, Kath 309 Walker, Margaret 16, 18 Wallace, David Foster 37

444

Wallace, Henry 135 Waller, Theodore 193 Walter, Christina 30 n.11 Wang, Jessica American Science in an Age of Anxiety: Scientists, Anticommunism, and the Cold War 133 n.6 Wang Meng 255 Wa Ngugi, Mukoma 333–4, 336 The Rise of the African Novel 333 Wang Wen-Hsing 249 War (Niedecker) 56 The War against the Academy (Fiedler) 131 n.2 The War between the Tates (Lurie) 132, 141–2 Ward, Ted 13–14, 16 Warren, Robert Penn 229, 260, 297 Washington Post 19 The Waste Land (Eliot) 63, 66, 233 Waten, Judah 307, 308 Watson, Emmet 344 Waugh, Evelyn 158 We Are Going (Noonuccal) 309 Webb, Daniel 254 n.8 Wedge: From Pearl Harbor to 9/11 (Riebling) 100 n.8 Weiner, Tim Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA 98 Weisenburger, Steven 36 Welty, Eudora 297 Wescott, Glenway 183 Wessell, Sophie 14 West, Ray B., Jr. The Short Story in America 297 West, Rebecca 153 The West African Journal of Education (magazine) 200 Westfahl, Gary 83 West Germany 169, 171, 172, 376, 396 Weston, Jessie 238 From Ritual to Romance 233 Wharton, Edith 297 When Women Ask the Questions (Boxer) 141 n.15 White, Antonia 152 White, Charles 13, 17, 20 White, Edmund 187 A Boy’s Own Life 188 White, John Baker 151 White, Patrick 308, 314 White, T. H. 150 White Noise (DeLillo) 132, 142 Whitfield , Stephen J. 43 Whitman, Walt 116, 292–3, 374 Who Paid the Piper? (Saunders) 149 Why Are We in Vietnam? (Mailer) 35

INDEX

Why Ivan Can Read but Johnny Can’t (Trace) 396 Why Johnny Can’t Read (Flesch) 396 Whyte, William 40 Wiegman, Robyn Women’s Studies on Its Own 141 n.15 Wilbur, Richard 374 Wild Conquest (Abrahams) 336 Wilder, Thornton 297 The Eighth Day 172 The Wild Palms (Faulkner) 182, 259 Wild Seed (Butler) 89 n.10, 91 Wiley, Bradford 166 Wilford, Hugh 280 William, Henry Sylvester 328, 335 William Faulkner Week 276–7, 279 Williams, Jeffrey J. 132, 140 The Rise of the Academic Novel 131 n.1, 132 n.3 Stoner 132, 140 Williams, Katlyn 6 Williams, Oscar A Little Treasury of American Poetry 292 A Little Treasury of Modern Poetry 292 Williams, Rhys W. 158 Williams, Tennessee 3, 183, 297 Cat on a Hot Tin Roof 184 A Streetcar Named Desire 184 Williams, William Carlos 18, 25–6, 47, 292 Paterson 65 Willman, Skip 6 Wilson, Angus 218 Wilson, Duncan 157 Wilson, Harold 159 Wilson, Mitchell Meeting at the Far Meridian (Wilson) 167 “Wintergreen Ridge” (Niedecker) 55–6 Winters, Yvor 229 Wisner, Frank 108 Wisse, Ruth 118 Witness (Chambers) 395 Wixson, Douglas 27–8 The Wizard of Earthsea (Le Guin) 87 Wolfe, Audra J. Freedom’s Laboratory: The Cold War Struggle for the Soul of Science 133 n.6 Wolfe, Thomas 297 Womanslaughter (Parker) 187 women liberation 186–8 poets 47–60 Women in Print Movement 186 Women of Wonder (Sargent) 92

445

INDEX

Women’s Studies on Its Own (Wiegman) 141 n.15 Wong, Y. W. 254 n.8 Woodward, C. Vann 290, 299–301 Woolf, Virginia 183 Woollacott, Janet Bond and Beyond: The Political Career of a Popular Hero 96 n.1 “Words for Hart Crane” (Lowell) 67 Wordsworth, William 406 The World in the Evening (Isherwood) 183 World of Our Fathers (Howe) 123 A Wreath for Udomo (Abrahams) 336 Wren, John 310 Wright, Richard 13–14, 16, 29 n.8, 298 Black Boy 172 The Long Dream 172 Native Son 22, 24, 26, 29 The Outsider 22 Twelve Million Black Voices 26 Wright, Sarah E. 20 Xia Yan 255

Ya Hsien 250 Yamamoto, Hisaye 23 Yerby, Frank 28 Yergin, Daniel Shattered Peace: The Origins of the Cold War and the National Security State 133 n.8 Yevtushenko, Yevgeny 121 Young, Kevin 68–9 Young, Stephanie “The Program Era and the Mainly White Room” 239 Yuen, Stewart 254 n.8 Yukawa, Hideki 266 Zábrana, Jan 377 Zaritt, Saul Noam 119 Zebatinsky, Marshall 139 Zecchini, Laetitia 5, 7 zeitgeist 95, 184, 326, 328 Zhdanov, Andrei 115 Zikmund, Miroslav 375 Žižek, Slavoj 104–6

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446