COLD WARRIORS
WRITERS WHO WAGED THE LITERARY COLD WAR
Starting with the Spanish Civil War and ending after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Harvard lecturer Duncan White ‘tells the story of how literature was weaponised during the Cold War’, wrote Jake Kerridge in the Daily
Telegraph. ‘White mostly writes in a neutral, functional prose, which is well-suited to deadpan comedy – he is especially funny on Ernest Hemingway’s self-aggrandising 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.’ Another attribute is that his book ‘frequently grips like a thriller, even in the sections in which White is dealing with intellectual ideas rather than blackmail and violence’.
Laura Freeman, in her review for the Times, echoed this observation. ‘ Cold Warriors reads like a thriller. Here is Greene peeling leeches off his neck on a jungle ambush with the Gurkhas in Malaya in 1950. Here is Mccarthy landing in Saigon with her best Chanel suit to cover the Vietnam War in 1967... However, this is also a book about personal and political liberty; about the freedom to write, mock and dissent; about truth, lies and wilful ignorance... White argues that the existence of the nuclear bomb meant that the Cold War, more than any other previous conflict, forced the antagonists into nonmilitary combat. This was... a war fought with pen, paper, typewriter and words scratched on to prison walls with a wire snapped off the bed frame.’