Modern Literature under Surveillance: American Writers, State Espionage, and the Cultural Cold War

One of the more romantic figures in twentieth-century literature was that of the spy: daring, sophisticated, a maverick operating by his own rules, even if nominally in the service of a government. James Bond is the most iconic incarnation of this figure, but the world-weary secret agents in W. H. Auden's poetry, and the novels of Graham Greene and John Le Carré, contributed something to the spy's mystique as well. The reality of espionage, and its relationship to literature, has been somewhat different. In the course of the twentieth century, surveillance and spycraft increasingly became highly professionalized, bureaucratized instruments of national power throughout the industrialized world. During this time, the connections between the business of writing and the business of spying grew both close and exceptionally tense. In the US, particularly during World War II and then the Cold War, writers, critics, editors, and publishers of literature sometimes found themselves acting as operatives or informants for state agencies like the FBI, the OSS, and its successor, the CIA; more frequently, they ended up, often without knowing it, the targets of surveillance by these same agencies. We have long known of the damage that harassment, purges, and blacklisting did to the careers of individual writers, especially Hollywood screenwriters; but in the last few decades, scholars have also begun to examine the way that Cold War politics and state surveillance influenced whole fields of cultural production in the US.

Several valuable books have recently joined this conversation. Arthur Redding's Turncoats, Traitors, and Fellow Travelers: Culture and Politics of the Early Cold War (2008) is an elegantly written account of the way literature and literary criticism were shaped by, but also had their own effects on, McCarthyite efforts to divorce cultural production from radical and prolabor politics. Redding's study ranges over work from F. O. Matthiessen's criticism to novels by Ralph Ellison and the Westerns of John Ford, investigating interesting biographical details and producing some wonderfully suggestive textual readings as he argues "that Cold War texts variously perform, critique, and betray" the dogmatic consensus that pitted idealized values of freedom and individualism against "totalitarian tyranny" in the 1950s (3).

Carefully avoiding such Manichaean oversimplifying himself, Redding acknowledges the complex political valences of, for example, New Criticism. New Criticism in the US was promulgated by reactionary Southern Agrarians and has long been attacked as inherently conservative for dismissing historical and political context. Yet it was also a profoundly democratic endeavor, providing the tools with which to analyze and enjoy complex works of modern art to virtually anyone who could read. On the third hand, as it were, that very democratizing tendency could itself serve a conservative end: Redding explains how, post-World War II, the GI Bill aimed to enlist returning soldiers in a culture war against communism, partly by teaching them to divorce their new professional identities and intellectual interests from the concerns of the working class from which many of them had originally come—an effort in which, he suggests, New Criticism was complicit:

[I]f the GI Bill was designed to be a reward to returning servicemen and women for having pulled their weight in the global struggle against fascism, it also recognized the necessity of training and enlisting a huge number of scientific technocrats as well as humanists in the fight against worldwide Communism. … The New Criticism advocated techniques of close readings for analyzing a literary genre as esoteric as lyric poetry, techniques that more or less anyone could learn. Students required very little cultural capital to mount the close textual readings that were pointedly dismissive of biographical, social, political, and historical concerns.

(7–8)

So millions of working- and lower-middle-class white Americans—including members of previously marginalized ethnic groups like Italians, Poles, and Jews—were welcomed into the [End...