Cold Warriors: Manliness on Trial in the Rhetoric of the West (review)

In this valuable if somewhat narrowly conceived book, Suzanne Clark explores the effects of anticommunist suppression in the United States upon American literature during the 1940s and 1950s. Placing much emphasis on the term “the West,” she sees a revealing conflation of the nostalgic ideology of the American frontier with that of anticommunist civilization in Europe and the United States. Among the effects of the resulting unitary concept of national identity as white manliness was the exclusion from the literary canon of white women as well as African Americans, Native Americans, and the poor. Clark also considers the pressures that the insistence on a simplified national identity exerted on the work of many white male writers.

The chapter on Hemingway effectively questions the emphasis biographers have placed on his supposedly declining skills when explaining the paucity of published work during the 1950s. Clark instead considers the savaging of Across the River and into the Trees (1950) by Cold War liberals who found his critique subversive. The effect of their disciplining, she argues, was “not only to severely limit the political or social impact of much of what [Hemingway] wrote, but to keep a great deal of his work from being published.” By contrast, Clark views Malamud’s A New Life (1961) as a valuable refusal “to participate in the normalizing of discourse represented by anticommunist liberalism” (109). She examines his book, and the historical incident of the firing of a faculty member upon which it is based, to illustrate her belief that “the anticommunism of the Right was less immediately responsible for the assault on academic freedom than the positions staked out by the Left” (128). The chapter on Sandoz emphasizes this writer’s revision of the frontier of white American mythology in works such as Crazy Horse (1961) and Cheyenne Autumn (1953) and asserts that although Sandoz’s stories present “a powerful rhetorical means to communicate witnessing, literary formalism pretended not to hear” (167). Finally, the author turns to Le Guin as an exemplar of how stories in the 1960s broke through the “hypermasculine consensus” to provide an alternate history that put the reigning discourses in perspective.

Clark’s book brings important attention to the role of liberal intellectuals in the suppression of thought during the first major phase of the Cold War. Her argument is, however, limited by the spotty examination she offers. For instance, too little attention is paid in the chapter on Hemingway to the author’s own responsibility for allowing a simplistic public image in Life and other popular magazines to substitute for completion and publication of his subversive works-in-progress. In devoting the second half of the book to rather formalistic studies of Sandoz and Le Guin, Clark fails to take up the more compelling challenge of how the Cold War consensus of the 1950s gave way to the creative eruptions of the 1960s; certainly she puts a misleading emphasis on these two authors. Clark addresses a major phase of our cultural and political history, but her four-author study makes one wish for a far more comprehensive approach.