Cold Warriors: Writers Who Waged the Literary Cold War by Duncan White (review)

Duncan White’s Cold Warriors is an ambitious undertaking. It seeks to trace the role of writers and intellectuals who (as the subtitle puts it) “waged the literary Cold War.” In fact, the first 200 pages of the book deal with events before the Cold War began, following the tangled involvement of George Orwell, Stephen Spender and Arthur Koestler with the Spanish Civil War, which led each of these authors to a fervent anti-Communism. White also explores responses to Stalin’s Great Purges in the 1930s through discussions of Isaac Babel, who was shot by the NKVD in a Moscow prison one morning in January 1940, and of Mary McCarthy, who shot to fame as a novelist of American socialites and an opinionated friend of the Viet Cong during the Vietnam War. A further section introduces the colorful wartime experiences of Kim Philby, Graham Greene, and Ernest Hemingway.

The question arises, then, what sort of critical study are we presented with in Cold Warriors? It is not a history of the Cold War, although it draws on able summaries of the research of historians; nor is it intellectual history, since the narrative devotes greater attention to the personalities of writers than to an analysis of their ideas per se. It is not clear if the cast list has been chosen for their representative function as barometers of fluctuations in the pressures of the Cold War or as the most insightful proponents of key debates and controversies. White describes the book as literary history although the description of T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets as “obscurely brilliant” (124) is one of the closest passes to literary criticism. Reviewers have noted that the style of White’s prose imitates the tension of a thriller—opening gambits include “The bullet that entered George Orwell’s neck . . .” (17); “Sitting in his isolation cell, what Koestler needed . . .” (63); “They came for Babel before dawn . . .” (130); “Kim Philby woke to the hammering on his Cordoba hotel . . .” (149); “The German antitank shell exploded close enough to hurl Ernest Hemingway . . .” (179)—and the appeal may ultimately be more to non-specialist readers rather than scholars and academic critics of the Cold War. This study presents no hitherto unpublished archival research and contains no bibliography.

Having said that, Cold Warriors is a hugely enjoyable and thought-provoking tour de force, displaying a considerable wealth of intelligence and erudition. The 400 pages dealing with the Cold War between 1948 and 1991 reveals that the opening sections were an essential foundation, since the personal testimony of writers would be a crucial weapon in the ideological struggle for hearts and minds that intensified once Stalin had drawn an Iron Curtain across Europe. In this light, White is very good on Orwell’s credentials as a truth-telling survivor of Communist left-wing purges in Spain and on the repurposing of his books as Cold War propaganda. None of this will be new to students of the period but weaving this familiar material with the stories of other 1930s fellow-travelers—Spender, Koestler, McCarthy and Greene—together with the sinister duplicities of the charming double agent Philby, extends and deepens the gravity of the issues at stake. Whereas Spender’s gullible flirtation with the Communist Party and then the Western intelligence services temporarily damaged his career, Philby’s commitment sacrificed the lives of Western agents and assets on the altar of Communist ideology.

Cold Warriors gives ample space to the fate of writers inside the Soviet bloc. Again, the cast of figures are familiar—Akhmatova, Pasternak, Solzhenitsyn, Sinyavsky, and Havel—but White powerfully conveys a sense of the oppressive conditions under which they wrote. Each of these authors punctured the glacial surface of state-sponsored socialist realism in ways that threatened the cultural and political status quo and were eagerly embraced by intellectuals in the West as well as by covert engineers of Western cultural...