Book review - Unreliable comrades: writers and the Cold War
Duncan White: Cold Warriors:
Writers Who Waged the Literary Cold War
Reviewed by DJ Taylor
Hastening through New
York sometime in the late 1950s, the Marxist critic Isaac Deutscher was
approached by a news-vendor, who pressed a paperback copy of George
Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four into his hands: “You must read
it sir. Then you will know why we must drop the atom bomb on the bolshies!” It
is not known whether Deutscher bought the book. But this odd little vignette
reveals something of the way in which the international power politics of the
pre-Kennedy era were being played out literally at street level, the responses
stirred in ordinary people and the tools—in this case a bestselling novel
weaponised by the CIA—employed to shunt politics into the public imagination.
If newspaper headlines
tend to suggest that the Cold War was a clash of binary opposites—democrat
versus tyrant, liberty versus oppression, Eisenhower versus Khrushchev—then
from the angle of cultural politics, the view was always that much more
occluded: a matter of confusion and equivocation, often extending into downright
duplicity. It was all very well signing up to be a Cold Warrior, to borrow the
title of Duncan White’s compendious new book. What you next had to establish
was whether your notional allies shared your views; what they might be
concealing behind their ideological skirts; whether, in fact, they were your
allies in the first place.
Post-war political
memoirs are full of this kind of hoodwinking. Michael Foot, a young MP in the
1945 intake, used to say that the greatest difficulty facing a Labour
-backbencher lay in working out precisely where some of your shiftier
parliamentary colleagues stood. A left-wing yet democratic socialist? A Marxist
masquerading as a moderate? A crypto-Stalinist? At the dawning of the Attlee
government it was hard to tell. It has of course been alleged—by Oleg
Gordievsky, a Russian agent working for the British—that Foot himself was in
the pay of the KGB, something that Foot angrily denied. In much the same way,
Orwell’s first biographer Bernard Crick once told me about a conversation he
had around this time with the sister of the Labour MP Ian Mikardo. “Of course,
Mik’s got two cards,” she confided, thereby revealing that her brother was
secretly a member of the Communist Party as well as Labour.
Anthony Powell’s
novel Books Do Furnish a Room (1971), set in the bitter winter
of 1946-7, recreates Foot’s confusion in the person of the newly-elected Labour
MP Kenneth Widmerpool. Ideologically, Widmerpool proves impossible to pin down.
“From time to time I detect signs of fellow-travelling,” the novel’s journalist
Lindsay Bagshaw observes. “Then I think I’m on the wrong tack entirely, he’s
positively right-wing Labour. Again, you find him stringing along with the far,
but anti-communist, left. You can’t help admiring the way he conceals his
hand.” Bagshaw’s final judgment—one that might easily apply to several of the
hand-concealing subjects of Cold Warriors—is that Widmerpool is
“playing ball with the Comrades on the quiet for whatever he can get out of it,
but trying to avoid the appearance of doing so.”
In trying to reproduce
the atmosphere in which these attitudes were forged, White’s deft and
wide-ranging book is a study in complicity, of inches given and received, of
dogma subverted by individualism, caprice or—at times—sheer bloody-mindedness.
It is also a study that begins before the Cold War’s formal inauguration in the
late 1940s. As he reminds us, the Soviet Union alighted on the value of
literary propagandising many years before the west, and the Communist
International (Comintern) was making its presence felt in the 1920s. Here,
though, something resembling a binary opposition does declare itself. While the
east believed in infiltration—convincing writers that their (and the Soviet
Union’s) interests were best served by joining local Communist parties—the west
was keener on the inspirational power of unmediated print. Hence the spectacle,
in the spring of 1955, of the CIA organising balloon-drops of Orwell’s Animal
Farm over the Polish border.
White’s locus
classicus is Civil War Spain. It was here that Orwell, who had made
the mistake of joining a Trotskyist militia rather than the Marxist
International Brigades, found himself on a Soviet death-list and narrowly
escaped over the border into France with his life. Arthur Koestler ended up on
death row in a Nationalist prison, where one night he heard the priest bidden to
visit condemned men mistakenly rattle his door handle. As White shows, these
experiences had both an immediate result—in the shape of Koestler’s Spanish
Testament (1937) and Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia (1938)—and
a kind of delayed fuse effect. It was in Spain that Orwell first came up
against totalitarian propagandising, read accounts of battles that had not
taken place and troops condemned for cowardice who he knew had fought
bravely—all of which shaped the media manipulations imagined in Nineteen
Eighty-Four.
A month before that
book was published, Orwell sent the Foreign Office’s International Research
Department (IRD) a list of 35 -fellow-travellers he suspected of Communist
sympathies. White chastises Orwell for this “surprising act of complicity,” but
that seems a bit harsh. It’s true that one or two of Orwell’s selections could
be put down to paranoia. On the other hand, it would have been worth White
enlarging on the very difficult circumstances in which Celia Kirwan, Orwell’s
contact at the IRD, was forced to operate. Her brief, after all, was to
commission pamphlets for distribution in Communist countries in Eastern
Europe—this at a time when the IRD itself had been infiltrated by the extreme
left. The colleague sitting next to Kirwan as she went about this task was none
other than the Soviet spy Guy Burgess.
“It was in Spain
that Orwell first came up against totalitarian propagandising”
As White’s trail
begins to wind on to Graham Greene’s adventures in Malaya and Vietnam, to the
Kremlin’s efforts to anaesthetise Soviet dissidents such as Babel, Pasternak
and Solzhenitsyn, another of his themes begins to declare itself. This is the
extreme difficulty that all writers, whether of right or left, have in
accommodating themselves to a party line or sticking to any prescription that
limits their room for manoeuvre. One can clearly see this in Hemingway’s
exploits in continental Europe after the fall of France. As a known Communist
sympathiser, he was given the Moscow Centre code name Argo. “How seriously
Hemingway took this is not known,” White drily glosses. Allied intelligence,
also bent on adding this distinguished cultural paladin to their ranks, had
-similar doubts. “We may be wrong,” an internal report concluded, “but feel
that, although he has conspicuous ability for this type of work, he would be
too much of an individualist to work under military supervision.”
For the
African-American novelist Richard Wright, the problem lay in the suspicion,
hardening into certainty, that the racial equality preached by the Communist
Party concealed shibboleths that would end up restricting his freedom as a
writer. Wright began by assuming that “the warning about the Soviet Union’s
trouble with intellectuals… simply did not apply to me,” only to be ticked off
for liking “bourgeois books” by modernists like TS Eliot and James Joyce.
Disillusioned with a Party that considered him a “smuggler of reaction,” he was
equally appalled by the McCarthyite witch-hunts of the 1950s: “There is more
freedom in one square block of Paris than there is in the entire United States
of America,” he eventually decided.
Cold Warrior contains
several pivotal moments in which writers’ autonomy is either edged aside or,
alternatively, leads to a decisive shift in the wider political terrain. One of
them comes in October 1945 and the appearance of Orwell’s prophetic Tribune essay
“You and the Atom Bomb,” which, in forecasting a long-drawn out hegemony of
territorial blocks kept in place by the threat of nuclear war, established the
context of the developing Cold War.
Another is a highly
effective chapter in which White ranges over Solzhenitsyn’s career between
1968-74 to consider both the détente that had begun to affect east-west
relations in the later 1960s, and also the damage that a solitary maverick
could wreak on governments of either side. In 1962, a thaw in Soviet attitudes
to dissident writers had seen Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of
Ivan Denisovich sell nearly 200,000 copies in book form and another
750,000 in the Russian literary magazine Roman-Gazeta. By 1968,
hard at work on Cancer Ward as the Soviet tanks headed into
Czechoslovakia, Solzhenitsyn was aware that much of this licence would now be
denied him. At the same time, the concentration of media interest and world
opinion meant that the Politburo hesitated to make an example of him: the
Gulag, to put it starkly, was no longer an option. In 1958, the authorities had
bullied Boris Pasternak into declining the Nobel Prize. Solzhenitsyn’s award in
1970 was harder to gainsay, and the writer himself a much more awkward
customer.
Once the authorities
decided to deport him to western Europe, Solzhenitsyn turned out to be one of
détente’s most convinced opponents. But neither was he impressed by western
popular culture: he wrote off Hollywood and rock and roll as “manure.” As White
notes, “being an enemy of the Soviet Union did not necessarily make him a
friend of the west.” Visiting Washington in the summer of 1975, he was at first
invited to the White House, and then disinvited, by Gerald Ford. If
Solzhenitsyn had managed to leverage his fame, then his cross-border transfer
hardly amounted to a victory for the Free World.
White ends his mammoth
enterprise in 1993, four years after the collapse of the Berlin Wall, with
another Cold War writer—John le Carré—returning to Yeltsin’s Moscow to have his
worst fears confirmed about the dark path down which post-Soviet Russia was
going. He quotes George Smiley’s aphorism about “the right people losing the
Cold War and the wrong people winning it,” reminding us that this is a story of
“what happens when writers resist, when they fight back…” Le Carré has in his
subsequent novels become an excoriating critic of the west’s War on Terror.
This substantial book
still leaves out some important writers. In particular, White could have
developed his chronicle to take in those British and American novels that,
though not specifically framed as “Cold War” novels, operate in its substantial
shadow. In this framing, Powell’s Books Do Furnish a Room, parts of
which take place in the offices of the left-wing monthly magazine Fission,
is just as much a Cold War novel as Le Carré’s The Spy Who Came in from
the Cold (1963), and so is Malcolm Bradbury’s Rates of
Exchange (1983), set in the imaginary yet highly plausible Eastern
European state of Slaka. Powell, Bradbury, Piers Paul Read and Kingsley Amis
are all Cold War warriors in their fashion, and the conflict’s implications for
their art could often reveal itself in unexpected ways.
The second volume of
Powell’s Journals, for example, covers a discussion with his
literary agency’s foreign rights specialist about a proposed Polish translation
of his 12-novel series A Dance to the Music of Time. Powell is told
of the apparent “impossibility” of mentioning the Katyn massacre of Polish
officers by Russian troops in volume nine, The Military
Philosophers (1968). The author, though allowing the difficulty of
preserving “passages Communists find politically embarrassing,” is determined
to keep it in. Solzhenitsyn and Le Carré may have been operating on the Cold
War’s main literary battlefields, but some of the skirmishes fought on the Home
Front were no less sharply contested.
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