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The
Sunday Times, August 11 2019
Cold
Warriors by Duncan White review — writers who went to war
Literature was used as a weapon
in the Cold War. This study looks at the authors who got caught up in
the fight. Cold
Warriors: Writers Who Waged the Literary Cold War by Duncan White
Little, Brown £25 pp752
Review by Dominic Sandbrook In
the summer of 1934, more than 700 writers made their way to the vast
House of the Unions building in Moscow for the First Congress of the
Union of Soviet Writers. Inside, in the majestic Hall of Columns, hung
giant posters of Shakespeare, Cervantes, Gogol and Pushkin, while the
assembly’s president was the Soviet Union’s most respected living
writer, Maxim Gorky. But
the man who set the tone was not a writer. An old ally of Lenin, Karl
Radek was the head of the Communist Party’s International Information
Bureau. In his welcoming address, he did not pull his punches.
Capitalist literature, he said, was worthless: James Joyce’s Ulysses,
for example, was “a heap of dung, crawling with worms, photographed by a
cinema apparatus through a microscope”. Soviet writers must realise that
“there is no such thing as neutrality in that struggle which is now
taking place on the arena of history”. To hammer home the point, a
banner carried the motto: “Writers are the engineers of human souls.”
The slogan’s author was Stalin. When
we think of the Cold War, we think of bombers and missiles, spies and
secrets. But as the critic Duncan White points out, the Cold War was
nothing if not a literary conflict. At its heart was the vision of a
Victorian writer, Karl Marx, who believed he had found the blueprint for
human progress. His most influential disciples, Lenin and Stalin, were
experienced writers who poured out endless tracts amplifying their
hero’s ideas. As their supposed utopia turned into a blood-soaked
nightmare, it was writers such as Arthur Koestler and Alexander
Solzhenitsyn who alerted the West to the horrors of the Soviet system,
just as it was the novelist John le Carré who best captured the paranoid
insanity of the Berlin Wall, and the playwright Vaclav Havel who became
the personification of Eastern European resistance in the 1980s. And it
was George Orwell, in a column in Tribune in October 1945, who gave the
Cold War its name.
Orwell dominates the opening chapters of White’s breezily readable
“group biography” of more than a dozen British, American and Soviet
writers who wrestled with the political pressures of the East-West
rivalry. Like
many of the fiercest critics of the communist dystopia, Orwell was at
first vaguely sympathetic, but learnt the truth about Stalinism the hard
way as a volunteer for a rival left-wing militia during the Spanish
Civil War. As White shows, Orwell’s Animal Farm (1945) and Nineteen
Eighty-Four (1949) did more than any number of politicians’ speeches to
open people’s eyes to the reality of the Soviet system. Indeed, they
were so effective that, in the spring of 1955, the CIA floated hundreds
of thousands of balloons across the Iron Curtain, each carrying a copy
of Animal Farm. As the Americans saw it, the pen might not have been
mightier than the H-bomb, but it was a pretty decent weapon nonetheless.
Orwell’s story is hardly unfamiliar, and although White retells it with
gusto, he has nothing new to say. Similarly well known are the stories
of, say, Koestler, a former communist whose book Darkness at Noon (1940)
became the defining fictional evocation of Stalin’s Great Terror, or
Solzhenitsyn, whose One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (1962)
remains a chillingly effective description of life in the gulag. But
some of White’s characters are more surprising. A nice example is the
New York-born novelist Howard Fast, a committed communist who was
imprisoned for three months in 1950 for refusing to cooperate with the
notorious House Un-American Activities Committee. It was while Fast was
in jail that he had the idea for his most successful novel, Spartacus
(1951), the story of a slave revolt against Ancient Rome, which White
describes as “class struggle... with lashings of sex and violence”. In
the conformist climate of the 1950s, however, nobody would publish it.
So Fast not only published it himself, he also paid for a full-page
advert in The New York Times and produced a special edition for trade
union members, costing just $1. Many American libraries refused to stock
it, but the Kremlin awarded him the Stalin peace prize. The
obvious question is whether any of this really mattered. White thinks it
did, and plenty of people in Washington and Moscow, not to mention the
dissident theatres of Prague and Budapest, clearly believed that the
written word could shape the destiny of millions. The CIA, in
particular, spent tens of millions of dollars on cultural activities,
sponsoring Koestler’s anti-Communist Congress for Cultural Freedom as
well as the poet Stephen Spender’s magazine Encounter, which at its peak
in the 1960s was one of Britain’s most influential serious periodicals.
When the CIA’s backing was exposed in the late 1960s, many bien-pensant
western intellectuals were horrified, or pretended to be. But
there were worse crimes than taking money from the CIA. White has a good
deal of fun, for example, with the American novelist and world-class
prig Mary McCarthy. Passionately opposed to the Vietnam War, McCarthy
flew to the communist capital Hanoi, where she produced a shamefully
sycophantic essay entitled, without irony, North Vietnamese Bucolic. In
a particularly ghastly moment, she interviewed two captured American
pilots and found them so vacant as to be “childish”. This she attributed
to the fact that they had been “robotised” by the militaristic American
education system. It never occurred to her that they had, in fact, been
tortured by her hosts. As a
study of literary culture during the Cold War, White’s book is a mixed
bag. He enjoys biographical gossip, but has surprisingly little to say
about what his chosen characters actually wrote. All the same, his book
raises some haunting questions. What would you and I have done? After
all, few of his characters escaped complicity with their political
masters. Under Stalin, in particular, non-cooperation meant an early
appointment with a firing squad. And even Orwell, despite his saintly
reputation as a teller of truth to power, was happy to prepare a list of
cultural figures he considered “unreliable”, among them the historian EH
Carr, the actor Charlie Chaplin and the future Labour leader Michael
Foot. But
there was a world of difference between an Orwell, who retained his
sense of decency and humility in a dangerously ambiguous world, and a
McCarthy, who was blinded by her own preening self-righteousness to the
evidence of her own eyes. So which of them was more typical, and how
would today’s writers measure up? White does not say. Even so, anybody
familiar with the literary intelligentsia can guess the answer. Cold
Warriors: Writers Who Waged the Literary Cold War by Duncan White
Little, Brown £25 pp752 |