National Post (National Edition)
WEAPONS-GRADE NOVELS
NEW BOOK PROVIDES FASCINATING INSIGHT INTO THE ROLE OF COLD WAR LITERATURE
Aliterary quiz: Which author and poet wrote the inspirational line, “Writers are the engineers of human souls?” The answer is Josef Stalin, which is probably why it doesn’t crop up among the quotes about the power of literature that writers are always posting on social media.
Stalin believed that novelists and poets had a profound influence on the way people thought, and so ensured that all professional writers in the Soviet Union faced ruin at best, unless they produced pious works hymning collectivism — the “boy meets girl meets tractor” genre. In these circumstances, writer’s block could become a terminal condition — most famously in the case of Isaac Babel, who could not write to a formula and so was executed. The poet Anna Akhmatova declared that under Stalin’s rule “not a single piece of literature” was printed.
This prescriptivism may have been just one of many manifestations of the control freakery of a paranoid tyrant, but that does not mean that Stalin was wrong to think that imaginative literature played a crucial role in directing the way ordinary people thought. As Duncan White’s fascinating new book on the role of literature in the Cold War shows, governments on the other side of the Iron Curtain arrived at the same conclusion by a different route. For the college-educated generation who staffed the CIA in the 1950s, the “assumption that books had the capacity to change people in ways that other methods could not... underpinned the liberal arts ethos that was fundamental to the way they had been educated.” So they thought it well worth their while to spend money and effort on wheezes such as finding a way to bankroll the left-leaning but anti-Communist literary journal Encounter without the distinguished writers on its editorial board getting a whiff of their involvement.
Meanwhile, the U.S. government found ways to subsidize modernist poets on the grounds that their work was denounced
as decadent in the USSR. Auden wrote that “poetry makes nothing happen”, but here were the people whose job it was to make things happen assuring poets that it did.
In 1955 the CIA funded a scheme to print a special lightweight edition of Orwell’s Animal Farm, copies of which could be carried by balloon into eastern Europe from West Germany. This would beg the question of which of today’s novelists we ought to be inflicting on the Taliban by drone, if it were possible to think that the western governments of today believed in the educative power of literature.
As well as telling the story of how literature was weaponized during the Cold War, White’s book rattles through a series of biographical studies of a dozen or so authors whose lives were affected by the conflict. For the Western writers, the stories often follow the same pattern of initial enthusiasm for Communism followed by disillusion: they range from Stephen Spender (“Faced with the brutal reality of placing ends over means, he began shuffling backward to liberalism”) to the African-American novelist Richard Wright, whose belief that the USSR would become a model of a society in which everybody was treated equally ended in bitter disappointment. The chapters on the Soviet writers, meanwhile, are harrowing accounts of persecution and humiliation.
White mostly writes in a neutral, functional prose, which is well-suited to deadpan comedy — he is especially funny on Ernest Hemingway’s self-aggrandizing attempts to muscle in on the centre of the action whenever possible, and the discrepancies between Hemingway’s accounts of his exploits and the mundane reality — but his style really comes into its own when dealing with more emotionally charged material. His account of Boris Pasternak’s funeral, which hundreds of mourners attended despite official prohibition and the presence of the secret police, is all the more moving for being unshowy.
As in all the best works of non-fiction, comedy and tragedy rub up against each other with wonderful inappropriateness. I laughed out loud when I read that Isaiah Berlin, in the course of a momentous meeting with Akhmatova in Leningrad, spent most of the evening desperate for the lavatory. But within half a page, there is a heartbreaking account of how Akhmatova would write deeply personal poems and then burn them almost straight away in case the authorities came calling.
One would need a very sturdy balloon to carry this whopper of a book any distance, but then a volume that begins with Orwell being shot in the throat during the Spanish Civil War and ends with John le Carré meeting Russian plutocrats after the fall of the Berlin Wall, and ranges geographically from Accra to Nicaragua, must necessarily be a big beast. It is perhaps inevitable that the topic of literature often has to disappear for pages at a time while White fills in the political background, but his grounds for choosing Kim Philby as one of his biographical subjects (“Philby did not write fiction; he lived it”) seem slightly spurious.
On the other hand, the sections on Philby are among the most fascinating in the book, and rather emphasize the fact that some of White’s other subjects are not really interesting enough to justify their space (Spender was, from White’s point of view, always in the right place at the time, but he never struck me as doing anything very fascinating while he was there). Despite the book’s length, there are a few sections that seem hurried, all narrative and no colour. White must be the first writer ever to miss the opportunity, when discussing the feud between Lillian Hellman and Mary McCarthy, to quote the latter’s judgment on the former: “every word she writes is a lie, including ‘and’ and ‘the.’”
One might conclude, then, that the book is too short rather than too long — it is certainly not inflated by waffle. It frequently grips like a thriller, even in the sections in which White is dealing with intellectual ideas rather than blackmail and violence. It will serve, too, to remind writers of how lucky they are to live in a free society — and perhaps induce a little nostalgia for the days when people thought they were worth shooting.
The Daily Telegraph