Uncontained: New Directions for Cold War Poetics

Michael Davidson, Guys Like Us: Citing Masculinity in Cold War Poetics. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2004. ix + 281 pp. $22.50 paper.

Michael Davidson's Guys Like Us: Citing Masculinity in Cold War Poetics should be required reading for anyone interested in cold war culture, gender studies, or poetry and poetics, but in two different ways. For those entering these areas of study, Davidson's generous and voluminous reference of secondary material makes the book a valuable primer on the fields circa 2004. Davidson navigates virtually all the literature on cold war American culture, its most productive paradigms (like "containment"), and its most familiar signposts (like the Nixon-Khrushchev "kitchen debate"). In gender studies, he cites the considerable scholarship on cold war domesticity (though very little on studies of masculinity) and blends feminist literary criticism and feminist/queer theory in astute and novel ways. Finally, Davidson's vast knowledge of twentieth-century poetry allows him to range over the work of a great number of poets, some within the literary communities at the center of his argument, but happily many outside of or peripheral to them. For scholars already established in these fields, however, Guys Like Us offers a more difficult but no less satisfying reward in the way that it exceeds its own frame without quite acknowledging that it does so.

The title and the introduction organize the book around the "guys like us" from Jack Kerouac's Dharma Bums who will lead a "great world revolution" (14). Davidson demonstrates that the liberatory politics of various progressive literary communities were compromised by their policies, formal and social, of masculine exclusivity. The "boy gang" was so taken for granted that it formed the antecedent to any "us," he says, and who "we" are was very much a topic of cold war American self-scrutiny. Davidson finds this aspect of literary bohemia congruent with more conventional forms of masculine community, arguing that these social entities constituted a significant feature of cold war social life, as important to gender formation in the period as domestic ideology. Violating the consensus norm of the dominant culture, literary bohemia left a record of the disruptive elements in this powerful form of intimacy: disagreement, dissension, erotic play, and panic. Nonetheless, from the Beats to the Rotary club, homosocial community generated new forms of masculinity that, however different in style, cemented group membership by excluding women. Two important interventions flow from this initial argument: (1) a new area of investigation supplements the story of domestic containment, making visible the variety and instability of masculinity in the period as well as the overlaps and disjunctions between queer and heterosexual communities; and (2) the isolation of women in the arts is perceptible once again, but with a sharper logic, one that imprints itself on aesthetic experimentation, social intimacies, and political world-building.

This brief summary of the general argument does not, however, predict the heterogeneity of Davidson's seven chapters, where homosociality, gender, the cold war, and literary bohemia shift in emphasis in unpredictable ways. To return to the introduction, Davidson also describes his intervention as an extension of historicist work in poetry, focusing on "the intersection of cold war geopolitical issues with gender, while returning to the important aesthetic issues raised by poetic immanence" (21). At this intersection, he will "complicate an expressivist reading of contemporary poetry," "see [poetry] as a site or matrix of competing tendencies—some progressive, some reactionary—within the period covered by the Truman and Eisenhower administrations," and "focus for the most part on poets and literary communities" but "test [his] theses" by looking "at other forms of cultural production." Such a description lays out a field of inquiry within a historical period (and he does not actually limit himself to the Truman and Eisenhower administrations) rather than an overarching argument about the relationship between cold war geopolitics, gender, and poetics. This looser idea of how the book operates...