Turncoats, Traitors, and Fellow Travelers: Culture and Politics of the Early Cold War

T U R N C O A T S , T R A I T O R S , A N D F E L L O W T R AV E L E R S

TU R N COAT S , TR AITO R S , AND F E LLOW TR AV E LE R S Culture and Politics of the Early Cold War

Arthur Redding

UN I VER SI T Y PR ESS OF MI SS I S S I P PI

Jackson

www.upress.state.ms.us The University Press of Mississippi is a member of the Association of American University Presses. Copyright © 2008 by University Press of Mississippi All rights reserved Manufactured in the United States of America First printing 2008 ∞ Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Redding, Arthur F., 1964– Turncoats, traitors, and fellow travelers : culture and politics of the early Cold War / Arthur Redding. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-60473-005-0 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. American literature—20th century—History and criticism. 2. Cold War in literature. 3. Politics in literature. 4. Politics and literature—United States—History—20th century. 5. Cold War in motion pictures. 6. Politics in motion pictures. I. Title. PS228.C58R43 2008 810.9’3582825—dc22 2007045717

British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data available

This book is lovingly dedicated to Natasha Barykina, fellow traveler

CONTENTS

ACK N OW L E DGM E N TS

ix

CHAPTER ONE.

CU LT U R A L FRO N TS

3

CHAPTER TWO.

CLO SE T, CO U P, A N D COL D WAR

F. O. Matthiessen’s From the Heart of Europe 37 CHAPTER THREE.

W HAT ’S B L ACK A N D WH I T E A N D RE D AL L OVE R?

The Cold War and the Geopolitics of Race 57 CHAPTER FOUR.

WH AT I T TA K E S TO B E A MAN

Masculinity, Deviance, and Sexuality 79 CHAPTER FIVE.

T HE DR E A DE D VOY AGE I N TO THE WO RL D

Nomadic Ethics 98 CHAPTER SIX.

FRO N T I E R M Y T H O G R A PHI E S

Savagery and Civilization in John Ford 133 N OT E S 153 WO R K S CI T E D 167 I N DE X 177

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This work would not have been possible without the immense support and assistance of a host of friends and allies. Seetha Srinivasan, director the University Press of Mississippi (UPM), initially encouraged me to lasso my ideas into book form. She has provided keen oversight and great encouragement throughout the writing of this work, as have others among the superb staff at University Press of Mississippi, including Walter Biggins and Anne Stascavage. Thanks as well to copyeditor Robert Burchfield. I thank James Smethurst and Bill Mullen, initial readers of the manuscript, for their generous receptiveness to these ideas and for the critical acumen of their responses to my writing, as well as for the inspiring example of their own formidable scholarship in the field. I am truly indebted to my colleagues at York University, Oklahoma State University, and the University of Silesia. I would like to thank Ross Arthur in particular for his generous managerial assistance and Lauren Dodd for her speedy and capable proofreading. William Decker and Elizabeth Grubgeld have proven for many years now to be the most loyal of friends and the most trusted of readers. Others who have offered insight, criticism, and support include Jon Beasley-Murray, Vermonja Alston, Tatiani Rapatzikou, Marcus Boon, Leslie Sanders, Lesley Higgins, Jason Sperb, Amanpreet Dhami, Tom Kerr, Eileen Schell, Simona Fojtová, Joan Redding, Douglas Shields Dix (whose Deleuzean readings of Paul Bowles and Jane Bowles have helped to inspire this work), Don Sparling, the late Karla Smith and the entire Smith family, Mischelle Booher, Thadeusz Rachwal, Agnieszka Pantuchowicz, Cary Nelson, Jonathan Arac, Ed Walkiewicz, Christine Bold, and Paul Bové. My warmest regards, of course, go out to my students in Canada, the United States, and in central and eastern Europe. Many of the ideas herein were hashed out in collaboration with York University graduate students in two seminars on the Cold War and U.S. literature. I am deeply grateful to have had the opportunity to work with so dazzling a group of students, and I am everywhere indebted to their striking responses to the materials. I would like to give special thanks John Dale for his inspired readings of Patricia Highsmith’s work. ix

ACKNOWL EDG MENTS

Chapter 2 of this book initially appeared as “Closet, Coup, and Cold War: F. O. Matthiessen’s From the Heart of Europe,” in boundary 2 33, no. 1 (Spring 2006) (Copyright 2006, by Duke University Press. All rights reserved) and is used by permission of the publisher. A portion of chapter 6 appeared as “Frontier Mythographies: Savagery and Civilization in Frederick Jackson Turner and John Ford,” in Literature/Film Quarterly 35, no. 4 (2001). I am grateful to both journals for permission to republish these materials in book form. Other portions of the book have appeared previously as articles in edited collections in Poland. Some of my comments on John Ford were translated by Pawel Je˛drzejko and appeared in Polish in Wielky tematy literatury amerika´nskiej (Great Themes in American Literature), Vol. 2, edited by Teresa Pyzik (University of Silesia Press, 2004). I thank both Pawel and Teresa for helping me to hone my ideas on the American West and for their graciousness in hosting me while I was a Fulbright lecturer in Poland during the 2001–2 academic year. Kind thanks are due as well to Kasia Wie˛ckowska, editor (along with Anna Branach-Kallas) of The Nation of the Other (Copernicus University Press, 2004) and (with Edyta Lorek-Jezi´nska) of Corporeal Inscriptions: Representations of the Body in Cultural and Literary Texts and Practices (Copernicus University Press, 2005). Essays on Ralph Ellison and Paul Bowles that formed the basis of my arguments in chapters 3 and 4 were published in these two volumes, respectively. A section of chapter 3 on W. E. B. Du Bois was first delivered as a paper at the May 2006 American Literary Association conference in San Francisco; I am grateful to Russ Pottle of the Society for American Travel Writing for his ongoing enthusiasm for my work. Portions of the introduction were delivered as a talk at the first North American conference on American radicalism, hosted by the Journal for the Study of Radicalism in January 2007. I thank the host and coeditor, Ann Larabee, for her enthusiasm about the project. An earlier version of the pages on Arthur Miller was delivered as a talk at the Canadian Association for American Studies conference on American exceptionalism in October 2006, where I was particularly lucky to have the opportunity to discuss my work with Deborah Madsen. My thoughts on On the Waterfront formed the basis of a talk at the American Studies Association annual meeting in October 2006, and those on Jane Bowles and Paul Bowles were delivered at the Popular Culture Association Conference in April 2004. I have received invaluable financial support from York University in the form of a start-up research grant as well as university and Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRCC) travel grants. Much of my thinking was formulated at the 2006 School of Criticism and Theory (SCT) at Cornell University, and I am indebted to SCT director Dominick LaCapra, and to Brent Hayes Edwards and my colleagues in his seminar on black intellectuals. Many of my concerns were likewise shaped during sojourns in eastern and x

ACKNOWL EDG MENTS

central Europe. The project was initially conceived during a stay at the John F. Kennedy Center for American Studies at the Freie Universität in Berlin, and I am grateful as well to the Fulbright Foundation for lectureships in Slovakia and in Poland, to the Salzburg Seminar in American Studies, to the Gender Studies program at Central European University in Budapest, and to the Minsk Summer School in Globalization at the now politically defunct European Humanities University in Minsk.

xi

T U R N C O A T S , T R A I T O R S , A N D F E L L O W T R AV E L E R S

CHAPTER ONE

CU LTUR AL F RO NTS The FBI knows that the bigger job lies with the free world’s intellectuals—the philosophers, the thinkers wherever they may be, the professors and scientists and scholars and students. These people who think, the intellectuals if you please, are the ones who can and must convince men that communism is evil. The world’s intellectuals themselves must see that communism is the deadliest enemy that intellectualism and liberalism ever had. They must be as willing to dedicate themselves to this cause as the communists have been to dedicate themselves to their cause. —J . EDGA R HOOV E R , Masters of Deceit

While Turncoats, Traitors, and Fellow Travelers comprises a relatively modest inquiry into the works and careers of a mere handful of mostly radical, mostly American, intellectuals during the formative years of the Cold War, between 1947 and 1963, I think it important to begin with a brief speculative outline of what might be at stake in this or any work of committed historical and cultural inquiry. Envisaged as a critical study of diverse but significant figures, this book investigates how their works variously accommodated, refused, refigured, or interrupted the increasingly globalized cultural and political logic of “containment” instantiated and performed by Cold War ideologies, a logic that decisively pitted an abstract and often nebulous “freedom” against a demonized “totalitarian tyranny.” In the late 1940s, a persistent and ubiquitous psycho-political apparatus (which is designated, in gross historiographical shorthand, McCarthyite) was spawned, which was designed to disarm, swallow up, and, most remarkably, render complicit oppositional discourses via a pervasive either/or logic. What took place in the late 1940s and early 1950s involved a rapid diminishment and subsequent eclipse of sexual, aesthetic, and political alternatives: the manufacture of consent, to apply Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman’s resonant phrase, on a bodily, national, and global scale. This consensus, which should in no way be viewed as an ironclad system of repression, can best be understood as a symptomatic but highly contested cultural logic emerging at a distinct historical juncture—a logic, I argue, that Cold War texts variously perform, critique, and betray. 3

CULTURAL F RONTS

Thus Turncoats, Traitors, and Fellow Travelers considers significant (and lesser known) cultural figures and how they participated, responded to, and resisted the construction of emergent discourses of the Cold War around and after 1948.1 As Elaine Tyler May, Alan Nadel, Stephen Whitfield, and numerous other scholars have documented, the Cold War was unique in the way cultural productions (Hollywood, publishing, television, the fine arts), social institutions (the church, the academy), and practices of everyday personal life (via policing of sexuality and gender roles, for example, or the reorganization of social life in the suburbs), as well as political ideologies and institutions, were enlisted in the production of consensus. This Cold War consensus made manifest a seemingly hegemonic, American, and nationally unified culture devoted to fostering the global spread of what Frances Stonor Saunders has termed “freedomism,” a culture marked by a remarkable, if spurious, sense of consensus, and a culture that rewarded conformity. And yet as Daniel Bell points out in The End of Ideology: On the Exhaustion of Political Ideas in the Fifties, one of the seminal contemporary works to theorize the postwar condition, “the curious fact, perhaps, is that no one in the United States defends conformity. Everyone is against it, and probably always was” (35). My own work seizes upon this paradox in order to trace out the historical contours of the culture of consent and contestation during the early years of the Cold War by critically examining a number of key thinkers and writers who understood their work to be politically and socially engaged. I argue that a fugitive culture, in part complicit but largely and in complex ways resistant, emerged as various “popular front” writers and activists fled into exile, went underground, or grudgingly accommodated themselves to the new order. Further, I contend that this complex of responses had and continues to have profound effects on American and international cultural and intellectual life. In revisiting in chapter 3 such a fellow traveler as W. E. B. Du Bois, for example, whose work so compellingly elaborates the virtues of necessary alienation, a writing and a traveling seized, so to speak, and likewise mobilized by and within the historical juncture of McCarthyite repression, I aim to unleash the fugitive powers and potentials of writing against the grain. Cultural McCarthyism, moreover, is best understood not as hysterical deviation, excess, or exceptionalism, which was to be followed by a return to political sanity; rather, McCarthyism is most productively understood to have formed a vanguard experimental technology of repression ideologically licensed to kill what Michael Denning has documented as the “Cultural Front” of the 1930s and 1940s, a period marked by labor activism and artistic commitment to the workers’ cause and by “the increased . . . participation of working-class Americans in the world of culture and the arts” (xvii) and an inclusive expansion of the culture industries and educational institutions. Insofar as the Du Bois who has come down to us has been politically bowdlerized, this effort was a success; insofar as he resisted the clampdown in his own writing and work, 4

CULTURAL F RONTS

it points to the persistence of a complex of cultural alternatives—closeted, fugitive, exiled, suicidal, but everywhere and variously resistant—linking the struggles in which he was engaged to our own today. My terrain of investigation is the nexus of emergent social technologies of ideological coercion and philosophies of consent within cultural production, and consequently targets what Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) director J. Edgar Hoover astutely understood to be the overarching struggle of the period: the minds as much as the hearts of “the intellectuals if you please,” whose work was to prove so important for the manifold ways in which it massaged the consciousness of the baby boomers. It is not merely that I want to add my voice to those calling for a reinvigorated or revisionist understanding of the complexity and variety of American intellectual and cultural production, as I assuredly do, or simply to accentuate the radical emphasis and ongoing vitality of those traditions, which I also hope to do; nor, finally, will I insist too vocally that the lives and works and struggles of such midcentury intellectuals as Du Bois, Sylvia Plath, F. O. Matthiessen, C. L. R. James, Howard Fast, Ralph Ellison, Jane Bowles, Paul Bowles, John Ford, Patricia Highsmith, Jim Thompson, or Arthur Miller will prove illustrative for contemporary writers and thinkers today and in the coming century, though I obviously believe that to be the case as well. While I will, en route, generate interpretations of their works and provide salient biographical detail as necessary, I do so in an effort to interrogate the ways in which cultural formations were embedded in and responsive to—actively participated in, in short—the rapidly changing social and political patterns of postwar American life and around the globe. In turn, then, I want to consider how such changes redefined the place, the power, and the very substance of culture and knowledge in ways that distinctively shaped the ambivalent terrain on which contemporary endeavors are carried out—to explore alternative, even underground, routes that may have gotten us from “there and then” to “here and now.” As Cary Nelson has claimed, for several decades the Cold War laid out the institutional arena and the philosophical biases of literary studies. In his now classic revisionist recovery of the radical dimensions of modern poetry, Repression and Recovery, Nelson reminds us that during the Joseph McCarthy era, “many people destroyed their copies of political books and magazines from the 1930s. The institution of literary studies cooperated and eliminated the names of political poets from the ongoing conversation of the discipline. Like the leveling movement of the sea, the weight of our cultural memory closed over this part of our heritage, turning it into a shadowed place where nothing could be seen. Only a few books worked against this tendency. Literary studies as a whole instead devoted itself to establishing the limited canon of modernism” (9–10), and, I would add, to securing a liberal vision of American studies. Consequently, Nelson argues, the ongoing labor of cultural history, while keeping faith with the times and the texts it interrogates, will also recognize the 5

CULTURAL F RONTS

limits of objective rigor and highlight our own investments: “Literary history is never an innocent process of recovery. We recover what we are culturally and psychologically prepared to recover, and what we ‘recover’ we necessarily rewrite, giving it meanings that are inescapably contemporary, giving it a new discursive life in the present” (11). What follows in this study, consequently, is less a bona fide work of historicist scholarship than a highly selective, interlinked, and, I hope, provocative set of readings, alert to the pendulous mythic weight of received and revisionist wisdom, the aim of which is to pry open the complex of muted, suppressed, wayward, or ghostly potentialities in the texts and annals. In each chapter, for example, I gesture in my comments on the contemporary scene, even as I realize how rapidly the present dims. If nothing else, I hope to contest the narrative that perceives the Cold War as historically inevitable or necessary, and in each work I read, I highlight those aspects of the materials that resist accommodation to prevailing sensibilities, then and today. To begin, we can isolate the cultural fronts on which many of the battles between freedom and totalitarianism were imagined by Hoover and others to have been fought. The postwar economic boom decisively shaped contemporary American cultural life in a variety of ways. The most glaring example of this transformation is the rapid expansion of mass consumer culture to a hitherto unimaginably large middle-class audience, an audience that, early on, was imagined to be more or less consolidated in its tastes but would prove increasingly disparate in its makeup. As Andrew Ross has argued, the “temporary success” of “the postwar political and cultural settlement, often referred to as the age of consensus, which established liberal pluralism as the ideal model of a fully democratic classless society,” depended on enlisting “the cultural authority of intellectuals” (42). As Ross has documented, intellectuals of that generation who took seriously the task of gauging and promoting the health of the national culture displayed great anxiety in the face of an expanding popular culture. In his survey of the same field, David Cochran notes there is some irony in the spectacle of such “ex-leftists” as Clement Greenberg or Dwight Macdonald seizing “upon mass culture as a means of maintaining a critical stance toward American society, seeing it as a major domestic threat to Americans’ freedom” (9). And yet just as the intellectual ambivalence toward popular culture implies that there was, paradoxically enough, a surprising amount of dissensus within American liberalism of the 1950s, so too can we understand popular culture as both a mechanism of and a threat to the hegemony of consensus. Television, for example, is a Cold War cultural technology, which in the 1950s both propagated and certified the intertwined values of consumerism, domesticity, hetero-normativity,2 racial homogenization, suburban lifestyles, and the like, as well as contested the self-same values, as Thomas Doherty has convincingly and exhaustively demonstrated in Cold War, Cool Medium. As a designated and dominating technology of propaganda, video transmission was immensely more 6

CULTURAL F RONTS

potent a cultural collaborator to hegemony than anything previously imagined, yet “it would also utter defiance and encourage resistance. The Cold War and the cool medium worked out an elastic arrangement, sometimes constricting but ultimately expanding the boundaries of free expression and relaxing the credentials for inclusion” (Doherty 3); further, television would prove instrumental to the toppling of McCarthy himself as well as contribute to the civil rights movement, feminism, and the opposition to the Vietnam War. Ultimately, for better or worse, television and its video and digital offspring sowed the seeds of the market revolutions of the 1960s, discursively shaped the financial and labor revolutions of 1970s post-Fordism,3 were instrumental in bringing about the collapse of single-party rule in the Eastern bloc states in 1989 and after, and spread and publicized the digital and financial revolutions of the 1990s, thus decisively manipulating the media stylizations and migratory patterns of diasporic cosmopolitan agency, as Arjun Appadurai and others have testified. Popular culture both disseminated consensus and worked to undermine it. The Cold War, then, came to form the horizon of collective and personal expressions of selfimagination and understanding. If, as Alan Nadel has expeditiously argued, the Cold War demonstrates “the power of large cultural narratives to unify, codify, and contain—perhaps intimidate is the best word—the personal narratives of its population” (4), it remains an open question whether and how such ideological containment techniques will “take.” The self-same ambivalence, the tension between accommodation and resistance, can be isolated in other cultural technologies of the time, and I highlight how it courses through a number of the individual works that I examine. A similarly tangled complex of paradoxes between an elitist and liberal defense of highbrow culture, on the one hand, and popularizing and democratizing tendencies of the culture industries, on the other, can be witnessed in American institutions of higher education. In his important opening chapter of Politics of Knowledge, Richard Ohmann has charted how American universities, and English departments in particular, were “substantially remade . . . along the lines of a cold war blueprint” (2).4 The national security concerns of the Cold War were one legitimating factor in the great expansion and democratization of the American academy after the Second World War; if the GI Bill was designed to be a reward to returning servicemen and women for having pulled their weight in the global struggle against fascism, it also recognized the necessity of training and enlisting a huge number of scientific technocrats as well as humanists in the fight against worldwide Communism. The southern aristocratic-Jeffersonian scholar John Crowe Ransom would repeatedly call for the “professionalization” of the discipline of literary scholarship, as in his pointedly entitled early (1937) essay, “Criticism, Inc.”5 After the war, Ransom oversaw the institutional spread of the New Criticism among English departments. The New Criticism advocated techniques of close readings for analyzing a literary genre as esoteric as 7

CULTURAL F RONTS

lyric poetry, techniques that more or less anyone could learn. Students required very little cultural capital to mount the close textual readings that were pointedly dismissive of biographical, social, political, and historical concerns. Part of the expansion and rationalization of the American university system during this period involved the full-scale transformation of the humanities into bastions of professionalization and, as Ohmann documents, commercialization, and the New Criticism itself involved a distinctly Weberian rationalization of both textual analysis and pedagogical technique. Because of the older popular front alliance between labor and literature,6 it was deemed even more necessary to engage those in English departments and other humanities programs in the work of uncoupling radical labor from intellectual production, as a burgeoning generation of undergraduate students used college education to lift themselves out of the working class; they had to be trained to think of themselves as middle-class professionals and “organization” men and women rather than as workers. I will flavor my own readings, then, with claims that the forcible and voluntary dismantling of the radical Left during the early years of the Cold War proceeded in part by way of prizing apart the sphere of culture from the sphere of work and organized activism, by separating the increasingly “professional” fields of culture and knowledge production from the fields and factories; a corollary to this process was the redefinition of leisure into entertainment, and an acceleration and expansion of the channels of circulation of cultural commodities to the point where they came to form the substratum of subjective consumer identity: Americans became, in the second half of the twentieth century, the culture they consumed, and through cultural consumption produced themselves as “free.” But the first step would be to set thinkers and workers at odds with each other. Much of the literature of the early 1950s, uncoincidentally, depicted the struggles involved in this effort by setting their plots in English departments; the denouement of Mary McCarthy’s 1952 satire, The Groves of Academe, for example, involves a “poet of the masses” hitchhiking to a conference on the campus of the “experimental” Jocelyn College, where he betrays the fact that the novel’s protagonist, the persecuted, blacklisted, and self-aggrandizing Joyce scholar Henry Mulcahy, had never been truly committed to the struggle: “He [Mulcahy] was one of those birds that are more Communist than the Communists in theory, but you’ll never meet them on the picket line. A weird, isolated figure, with a talent for self-dramatization” (246). Keogh, the proletarian poet and self-styled free spirit in the vagabond minstrel tradition of Woody Guthrie, is, for his part, merely disappointed that he will not be offered steady employment at Jocelyn: careerism always trumps bohemianism. The comic twist of plot is that Mulcahy never was a Communist, and he loses his job simply because he is a negligent teacher, not because of a political vendetta. He can, nonetheless, parade his seeming political persecution to his own advantage by enlisting the sympathy of his liberal colleagues. Mary McCarthy, whose Trotskyite inclinations hardened 8

CULTURAL F RONTS

rather easily into Cold War anti-Stalinism,7 aimed to deflate the sententiousness surrounding the campus blacklist; even so, in the chapter depicting departmental members debating whether a Marxist should be allowed space in an institution devoted to academic freedom, the novel seems to endorse the dominant opinion that membership in the Communist Party disqualified one: “Intellectual freedom—that is the usual point, isn’t it? Can a Communist under discipline have intellectual freedom? We hear that they cannot, that they are under strict orders to promote their infamous doctrine; their minds are not free as ours are” (104). The rather specious line of thinking expressed here is symptomatic of what Frances Stonor Saunders, in her remarkable and damning diagnosis of Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) infiltration into cultural production, terms the ideology of “freedomism.”8 She defines this useful concept, which I deploy at several junctures in my own study, variously as “a narcissism of freedom, which elevated doctrine over tolerance for heretical views” (415–16), and as “a kind of ur-freedom, where people think they are acting freely, where in fact they are bound to forces over which they have no control” (5). According to a logic that might delight Stanley Fish,9 one particular point of view is unequivocally forbidden in the very name of freedom. Further, the academics quarreling over the issue are almost willfully deceived insofar as they understand themselves to be debating abstract principles rather than partisan politics. The blacklisting of radical campus intellectuals during the period had nothing to do with protecting rights to academic freedom; on the contrary, as Ellen Schrecker and other historians have demonstrated, the blacklist was part of a broader effort to enlist and align American higher education to the quite specific cause of the declared national interest: defeating Russia. McCarthy’s book, like other campus novels of the time,10 takes a somewhat churlish delight in exposing the pomposity, naïveté, and hypocrisy of self-interested academics; the one character who survives her mockery turns out to be the moral hero of the novel, the liberal college president, Maynard Hoar. McCarthy deliberately apes the late style of Henry James, down to the very multidimensional perspectives of her sentence rhythms, and Hoar emerges as her ideal of an exemplary expansive, refined, self-abnegating, and generous—quite Jamesian, that is—consciousness. Unexpectedly, but inevitably, he resigns at the book’s conclusion. McCarthy’s point is that there can be no place for such broadmindedness in the rarified and petty world of academia, and she will endorse the realms of journalism and literature—not the classroom—as the rightful place for taking up the humanist cudgel. Her emulation of James, too—however arch the uses to which she puts his style—signals her ideological claims to a properly highbrow and humane American cultural tradition. The struggles to salvage, inherit, and reinvigorate American cultural traditions, to put that heritage in the service of what came to be seen as the defining and increasingly global struggle of the age—to secure freedom—are evident everywhere in postwar American life, and institutions of higher education, as 9

CULTURAL F RONTS

the foremost sites of intellectual production, were understood to form the frontlines of this effort. Even more damning that McCarthy’s novel in its depiction of the academy’s disgruntled accommodation to the age of consensus is Clancy Sigal’s mournful rendition of the collapse of radical intellectuals into the souldestroying confines of middle-class conformity and intellectual toothlessness.11 Sigal’s novelized memoir Going Away, published in 1961 but now sadly out of print, should, in spite (or perhaps because) of its bagginess, be required reading for the student of this history. Set in 1956, Going Away tells the story of an unnamed narrator who quits his job in the movie industry and drives across the United States, listening to radio broadcasts of the Hungarian uprising, drinking heavily, suffering from sporadic fits of an imminent nervous breakdown that will become crippling by the novel’s end, and intermittently revisiting old comrades from his days as a vagabond and labor organizer. His erstwhile allies have been variously sidelined by institutional or professional Red-baiting, gone into hiding, or refashioned themselves into champions of the emerging consensus. And so they are only embarrassed by his visits, not wanting to be reminded of the radical pasts they have disavowed. The saddest of this sad lot of friends with whom the narrator tries, and fails, to reconnect is an academic named Axel. Axel, whom the narrator of Sigal’s novel/memoir had earlier befriended as a Skid Row alcoholic and whose wife had committed suicide just before he returned from the war in the Pacific, has now remarried, graduated from university, and become an assistant professor of sociology at a state university in Cedar City, Iowa. As a character, Axel comes across as a particularly loathsome version of the disillusioned academic careerist. In his cups, he bemoans “the reactionary character of the American working class” and proves through statistical analysis “how fundamentally natural to the American personality and political system was McCarthyism” (243); he despises his own life in an intellectual backwater, and hopes, rather pathetically, only “to break into television . . . break into the Establishment, . . . the only thing to do is make money” (243). Axel likewise laments the lack of political idealism on the part of the Midwest students for whom he viciously lusts: “Damn pretty these corn-fed bitches, aren’t they? . . . I’d like to do some of them” (258). Axel’s academic friends, “the ‘good’ people at the University” (244), mostly progressive humanists, whom he invites over for a cocktail party, prove to be similarly burned-out cases. “Whatever their views, and they all differed, they agreed that the culminating victory of the ruling class, power elite, Establishment, or The Right, call it what you will, was in the process of achievement through the ‘mass media.’ ‘Against Fascists I would be brave unto death,’ said the instructor of Romance languages, ‘but I admit I am a coward in the face of television.’ . . . They began avidly discussing how to ‘break into the Establishment,’ one way or another” (247). “They were telling me how disgusted they were, teaching a quiescent student body. They were telling me how frustrated by the committee system 10

CULTURAL F RONTS

and pseudo democracy they were. . . . They sounded as though they hated their colleagues, their president and their students. Especially their students. . . . Above all, they unanimously hated the ‘survey’ courses, on a par with which they placed television for creating the condition of ‘facelessness’ ” (251–52). The narrator, understandably nauseated by all this, flees town as quickly as possible; ultimately he will feel compelled to flee America entirely. Signing on and then leaving Hollywood, debating the temptations and atrocities of television, listening to radio broadcasts that are gripping if not fully trustworthy, running in horror from the sad spectacle of the university: Sigal’s malaise stems from his uneasiness in the face of this radical uncoupling of cultural and intellectual production from the labor movement, from the collective efforts of working peoples to secure economic and social justice, a process that thinkers as diverse as Raymond Williams, C. L. R. James, and Tillie Olsen underscored at the time. It is disheartening to discover yourself as an intellectual more committed to the pursuit of profit than to the pursuit of the good. Yet even as they participated readily in elaborating a politically crippled culture, these industries, their denizens, did not fail to contest their own allegiances, however sporadically, even in the groves of academe. The pedagogical triumph of ostensibly “apolitical” New Critical approaches to texts during the 1950s and 1960s, for example, popularized a great tradition; further, the explication techniques New Criticism championed might be readily adapted into critical readings of the social semiotic. It was no accident that Ransom’s student and disciple, Robert Lowell, scion of the most elite family of literary New England and, during the war, a Catholic pacifist, afterward an anti-Stalinist who participated with Mary McCarthy in disrupting the Waldorf conference, would abandon the rigorously dense and difficult formalism of Lord Weary’s Castle (1946) and The Mills of the Kavanaughs (1951) and eventually “invent” confessional poetry in his 1959 volume of verse, Life Studies (a book that was “not poetry” by his friend Alan Tate’s standards, possessed of “no public or literary interest” [qtd. in Hamilton 237]). Lowell’s decision to mine his own psychic wounds and family history in his poetry signals a postwar shift in artistic emphasis away from the social, the collective, the historical, or the theological, to the personal; the now commonsensical view that the inner psyche of the artist forms the proper or fruitful terrain of artistic endeavor was perhaps the most long-lasting accomplishment of Cold War American culture. This discovery of the new continent of the self is a key part of the cultural relocation I aim to diagram throughout this book. Lowell would later go on to reroute his own politics through his encounter with the personal and, despite struggles with manic depression, become a stalwart of the New Left resistance to the Vietnam War. Before moving on to more extended readings of Cold War texts, it is worth examining in brief a few more homespun examples that demonstrate how the cultural battle lines were being hardened during these years and how culture 11

CULTURAL F RONTS

itself was being paradoxically enlisted in the cause of what I term a “market freedomism,” secured and certified by this novel twist on the old American myth of personal self-invention, even as it evacuated the political terrain. In an October 1949 Masses and Mainstream editorial, Howard Fast recounts how the riots over Paul Robeson’s Peekskill performances of August 27 and September 4 of that year renewed and transformed his own commitment to an activist stance as a writer in the face of what he viewed as a symptomatic emergent American fascism. Before Robeson’s scheduled appearance, a mob attacked concertgoers with rocks and baseball bats. Robeson’s car was prevented from getting to the Lakeland Picnic Grounds where the concert was to take place. Fast was trapped on the grounds along with “twenty-five or thirty” others (Peekskill: USA 25), who were compelled to defend themselves from the attack for several hours before the police provided safe passage. The rioters, declaring they were “Hitler’s boys!” (33) and taunting the organizers with anti-Semitic and racist slurs, managed to seriously injure thirteen people before the night was over. Fast’s detailed recollection of the riots, published in Moscow in 1954 as Peekskill: USA, depicts the struggle as a pitched battle for the very soul of America, enlisting all members of the heterogeneous populations that comprise the nation. The American Legion mob, according to Fast’s testimony, comprised a cross section of the white middle and lower middle classes of upstate New York. “The boys,” he writes, were in their thirties and forties and fifties—many of them in their fifties— and they were not lumpen either, not in the strict sense of the word. Most of them were prosperous-appearing men, well set-up, well dressed, real-estate men, grocery clerks, lunch counter attendants, filling station hands and more of the kind. Tip over any gin mill in Peekskill or Shrub Oak, and this is what you would get. Throw in a couple of hundred “decent” citizens, a hundred teen-agers whose heads were filled with anti-Communist sewage; add a hundred pillars of the local Catholic church, half a hundred college students home on vacation, half a hundred workers drawn along, and two or three hundred of the sweepings and filth of that whole Hudson river section, and you have a good idea of what we faced there that night. Liquor them up to a high point of courage, give them odds of twenty to one, put the police on their side—and you have the rest of the picture. (26–27)

An even larger riot took place after the rescheduled concert in September, when attendees driving home from the performance were compelled to run a gauntlet and pelted with stones as police watched, and on occasion participated in, the attacks. That night, over 140 people were injured. According to Fast, the Peekskill incident dramatically highlights the role of force in the manufacture of Cold War consensus. Staged during the trials of eleven Communist leaders charged with advocating violence, “it was undoubtedly planned toward a twofold 12

CULTURAL F RONTS

result, the ‘entrapment’ of numbers of progressives within a pattern of force and violence, for which they would be made to bear the burden of blame; and secondly, to arouse a number of lumpen elements throughout America toward a pattern of force and violence” (108).12 The well-orchestrated second riot at Peekskill, Fast concluded, “was one of many incidents of ‘force and violence’ against the left, and not by the left.” Both purposes, he asserts, were foiled by the combination of the progressives’ display of “dignity and discipline” and the fundamental decency of the American people (109). In such moments of crisis, the writer is compelled to set aside personal and aesthetic considerations in order to reexamine and reassert the galvanizing potential of culture to shape a national consciousness. “I discovered,” Fast recalls, that it is not enough for a writer to write of things, no matter how well he observes those things, no matter how clearly he sees those things, no matter how well he tells his tales. A point comes in the anti-fascist struggle where even the most truthful observer must take another step; this I discovered at Peekskill. I had not discovered it before, not during the war, not through any of the many things I had seen and put down on paper. (3)

Fast reads an editorial in his Peekskill Evening Star, “a dirty little sheet, typical of our corrupt and rotten press,” an editorial that he takes as a sign of the times: “ ‘The time for tolerance,’ said this miserable little rag, ‘is over’ ” (“Peekskill” 4). Fast has rented a house, ironically enough, to write “an essay on the relation of literature to reality, and I felt that a month devoted to my work and the children—and away from the political turmoil which occupied so much of my life—was not only overdue but would be very good for me in every way” (Peekskill: USA 14). “If there was trouble,” he convinces himself, “it wouldn’t be here, not here in these quiet valleys” (18). Though he opts for solidarity, a position increasingly understood to be obsolete, in his narrative Fast carefully stage manages the dramatic irruption of a violent “reality” into the writer’s pastoral landscape of sweetness and light; he debunks the fantasy of culture as a haven from a world too much with us. As in so many of the narratives from the time, we witness the stark juxtaposition of the “privileged” space of cultural and intellectual production with the space of political and social struggle. Once Fast has been engaged in helping to promote Robeson’s appearance, a comrade interrupts his bucolic retreat with the news that the local citizens are up in arms. “It appears that Peekskill is to be treated to another concert visit by Paul Robeson, renowned Negro baritone. Time was when the honor would have been ours—all ours. As things stand today, like most folks who put America first, we’re a little doubtful of that honor. . . .” 13

CULTURAL F RONTS

More of the same. “Now this,” he said, “now listen to this.” “The time for tolerant silence that signifies approval is running out.” He added, “That’s from the Peekskill Evening Star of last Tuesday. Since then, they’ve worked themselves into a lather over this thing. The American Legion is going to march and the local boys have been liquoring themselves up since this morning.” (19)

When Fast writes his detailed account of Peekskill fifteen months later, he concludes with a survey of the changes he has witnessed: “Such is the speed of history today,” he laments, that “Peekskill was a decisive step in the preparation for American fascism” (106). Mob violence, he argues, set the stage and provided the alibi for the systematic repression of labor and cultural radicals, which he goes on to catalog in detail. In the immediate aftermath of Peekskill, Fast finds the McCarran Act has legalized the police state in America. . . . The Korean war . . . has put severe penalties upon any form of protest or dissent, and thousands of “liberals” and “progressives” have run for cover. At the time of Peekskill, there was almost no political prisoner in American jails; today there are a great many. At the time of Peekskill, the leaders of the Communist Party of the United States were on trial; since then, they have been found guilty and the Communist Party has been placed under indictment by the McCarran Act. At the time of Peekskill, mass deportations of aliens had not yet begun nor was the concentration camp at Ellis Island in operation as it is today. At the time of Peekskill, this was not wholly a land of loyalty oaths, witch hunts, and terror for all who might hate war and love peace and democracy. At the time of Peekskill, the plan to divide and betray the American labor movement had not yet been brought to fruition. (105)

Fast presents himself as a naïf at the beginning of these battles, unwilling to admit that there will be genuine violence; his friend, an African American, knows from bitter experience how quickly threats can become lynchings, how quickly the battle lines can harden. For Fast, the ensuing battles at Peekskill, which he would recount in detail in his book of that name and again, unedited, in his 1990 memoir, Being Red, stand as synecdoche for larger and longer struggles over the place of radical cultural production within the horizon of the Cold War. Fast’s call to engagement, his call for writers and other intellectuals to put, as he did, their bodies as well as their voices on the line, would render him an increasingly isolated figure in the coming years, as a host of friends and colleagues jumped ship.13 What is portentous here is the repositioning of the realm of culture. The political persecutions of activists that Fast documents constituted one feint of the advancing armies on this battlefront. Culture becomes the fulcrum of that “plan to divide and betray the American labor movement,” however, indicating 14

CULTURAL F RONTS

that Cold War efforts would not be limited to the short-term goal of proscribing and defeating the Communist Party of the United States of America (CPUSA), which, as so many commentators at the time pointed out, was scarcely a threat. The longer struggle, once that battle was won, would be over the place and power of culture itself in American social and political life throughout the second half of the twentieth century. It is a struggle, moreover, that most cultural commentators understood to have been lost, at least until the emergence of a “New Left” in the early 1960s. The dismay we hear voiced in varying tones of nostalgia and frustration by so many Left intellectuals between the mid-1950s and the early 1960s involves, in part, as so many liberal theorists at the time remarked, a bewildered recognition on the part of radical intellectuals of their own obsolescence. But it was not necessarily their political ideas that were obsolete—many of the ideas would prove inspiring to the New Left,14 just as many would, despite the disavowals by Tom Hayden and others about their indebtedness to an older generation, be recast in keeping with the next generation’s own concerns about youth culture, wars of imperialist expansion in Asia and Latin America, anti-imperial struggles in the third world, and so forth. What was increasingly obsolete was rather the available models of cultural production, which would no longer prove fruitful vehicles for the dissemination of political positions. This massive reorchestration of the very place and purpose of culture itself can be charted in a variety of ways, only a few of which I have space to detail in this book: the move from Communism to existentialism in Richard Wright’s writing, for example, or in the more tempered depiction of this trajectory offered in Ellison’s Invisible Man, not to mention the various mea culpas and recantations of others among the “god who failed” bunch, led by Arthur Koestler. There were, of course, numerous deliberate attempts to target radical intellectuals, or to enlist them in the Cold War cause of freedom, an effort spearheaded, as Saunders demonstrates, by the infiltration of both the CIA and the FBI into fields of cultural production. Somehow, sticking it to Stalin was best done by overhauling American culture and scattering the coalition of the Left. Dorothy Parker heads a list of those who were fingered as Communists and blacklisted, but the long list of targets includes (in addition to most of the writers I consider at more length below) such notables as Lillian Hellman, Norman Mailer, Langston Hughes, Charlie Chaplin, Aaron Copland, Dashiell Hammett, Frank Lloyd Wright, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, and Henry Wallace. Wallace’s electoral collapse in 1948 signals the end of the political and cultural viability of the American Left, not to mention the multitude of rank-and-file intelligentsia; even Bob Kaufmann, who would go on to considerable fame as a Beat poet, was active in the National Maritime Union and claims to have been involved in the Wallace campaign.15 The journal Encounter was exposed in 1967 as the most famous of CIA fronts, but Peter Matthiessen, who with George Plimpton 15

CULTURAL F RONTS

founded the Paris Review in 1953, was a CIA agent at the time, as was Robie Macauley, who assumed editorial control of the Kenyon Review upon Ransom’s retirement, to cite just a few lesser-known examples. The campaigns of persecution were, in large part, successful, although in what follows I underscore the misfirings of consensus building and highlight various, at times even dialectical, forms of resistance. To give one more very expedient opening example of these tensions, we might notice how a curricular “American studies” paradigm was developed, institutionalized, and exported to Europe and to the third world in uneasy relationship with the State Department;16 while such pedagogical models served Cold War purposes by championing artistic expressive freedoms, a formidable Yankee artistic heritage, and models of political democracy, they also formed the basis of both utopian and nostalgic critiques of the curtailment of political, social, and aesthetic options within contemporary America and provided models for indigenous cultural revivals at home and abroad. That is, for all of the sloganeering involved, for all of its dedication to a pointless search for an “American” character, and for all its domination by the “myth and symbol” school, American studies nonetheless cleared a scholarly space for the critical dismantling of American mythologies. In many ways, as one of its founding thinkers, F. O. Matthiessen, who abhorred the narrowness and belligerence of Cold War culture, had initially hoped, even a restricted American studies curriculum legitimated the contestation of American values, and continues to provide scholarly grounds on which to do so.17 As Matthiessen reiterated in “The Responsibilities of the Critic,” his final public speech before his death, the American philosopher William James had always insisted that the first duty of a thinker is to know as much as possible about life in one’s own time. Although there is a certain Edwardian mustiness about James’s invocation to duty, the commitment to a critical engagement with the world as we find it, the world as it finds and founds us, seems every bit as pressing, if not more so, as it was a century or half a century ago. A pragmatist, James argued that the power of any concept has less to do with its veracity or theoretical elegance than with its predictive capacities and its precise effect upon the world. Truth, he conjectured, is what works. Although both the longand short-term effects of conceptual intellectual and cultural labor are precisely immeasurable, “work” might best be understood in the fullest sense of the word. If critical thinking, writing, and pedagogy are the work we at universities still engage in today, we must guard against its reduction to intellectual drudgery or sterile professionalism, on the one hand, and resist the academy’s ongoing transformation into an ideological service industry, on the other. Rather, and regardless of how compromised the rhetoric of choice has become over the last fifty years, I choose to consider my own job in writing this book as conceptual work in and upon the world, on the present as well as the past, as a productive transformation of materials and life. 16

CULTURAL F RONTS

My own scholarly field, happily enough, is life in my own time: twentiethand now twenty-first-century American culture, with a strong, but not exclusive, emphasis on U.S. literatures, and I consider those whose own work I survey in this study allies in a collective and ongoing effort. For better or worse, critical analyses of “American” cultural productions must respond to how such productions circulate and are consumed within a global economy;18 we are compelled as well to locate social analyses within considerations of immigrant social formations, market conditions of labor, international and local politics, and the like. In the coming years, as the United States positions itself as the dominant imperial player in the so-called New World Order, it will be increasingly important to cultivate a complex critical awareness of American cultural, economic, and military power and how it shapes emerging conditions of cultural production, consumption, and practice. As so many of the very writers and intellectuals I survey insisted, much of the task of critically considering contemporary culture will of necessity involve continually reassessing—and repossessing, Matthiessen would say—our history. While it is a truism of sorts that history is contested terrain, cultural historians might do well to realert ourselves to precise ways in which ideas are enlisted in emerging struggles. Culture is laced and knotted, even ensnarled, with politics, and the privilege of simply slicing those knots apart belongs to the frustrated and powerful. Scholars and teachers worth our salt are handed the painstaking task of disentangling the various threads that determine, overdetermine, or undermine any given cultural episode, text, performance, or event: in this task we must be as meticulous and patient as possible. Many commentators have been struck by the saddening and farcical manner in which contemporary public rhetoric about the “war on terror” echoes the more strident and hysterical idiolect of the Cold War, whereby the world is divided into cartoon camps of freedom and evil, and whereby vigilance is legislatively transformed into institutionalized bureaucracies of paranoia. It seems that over the past few years, the George W. Bush agenda is beginning to be grounded, as the war in Iraq has become increasingly unpopular, as congressional Democrats begin to flex their newfound political muscle, and as an array of scandals continue to discredit the administration. But when I, as I do on occasion, glance south from Canada to survey contemporary U.S. politics, I am also reminded of the Senate’s censure of Senator McCarthy in December 1954: no action was taken until immeasurable and possibly irreparable damage had already been done. By that point, what Alan Brinkley aptly terms the “illusion” of Cold War consensus had been effectively achieved, and radical thinking in the United States was largely hushed and closeted until the emergence of the New Left. If liberal Cold Warriors of the time never liked McCarthy or his methods, nonetheless they grinned and bore his doing the dirty work. So too with President Bush: if congressional Democrats never much cottoned to him, they still bear full responsibility for signing him a blank check in Iraq. 17

CULTURAL F RONTS

And tempted today as we may be to celebrate the fact that our long national nightmare might seem to be coming to a close, we should be sobered to survey just how badly it has crippled the prospects for democracy in the twenty-first century at home and abroad. Let me revisit the inescapable analogy between the early years of the Cold War and the political context and public rhetoric of post-9/11 America. Rhetorically aligning himself with the Messiah and perhaps unwittingly with Lenin and with Thomas Robert Bugeaud, the French governor-general who colonized Algeria, President Bush inaugurated the Bush Doctrine on September 20, 2001, with an appropriate, if ironic, biblical quotation: “those who are not with us are against us.”19 In his follow-up assertion, that “every nation, in every region, now has a decision to make. Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists,” and that “from this day forward, any nation that continues to harbor or support terrorism will be regarded by the United States as a hostile regime,” Bush also explicitly echoed Harry Truman’s declaration of March 12, 1947, that “at the present moment in history, nearly every nation must choose between alternative ways of life.” Truman was appealing to Congress to approve $400 million in military and economic aid to Greece and Turkey; this speech would form the basis of what would quickly come to be known as the Truman Doctrine—that “it must be the policy of the United States to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressure” (qtd. in McMahon 29)—which would underwrite U.S. foreign policy for nearly the next half-century. The obvious echoes between the early years of the Cold War and a now severely tested and floundering Bushism make for a powerful historical analogy. We witness in each case the mobilization of an either/or rhetoric that pinions entire nations on the horns of an apocalyptic dilemma. The performative oratory of both Presidents Truman and Bush bespeaks a hubristic attempt to divide the great globe itself into enemy camps, and to launch a foreign and domestic policy predicated on vigilance, one designed to distinguish between the vigorous defenders of freedom and the freedom-hating demagogues with whom they contend in order to liberate the huddled masses worldwide from a totalitarian ideological yoke. An intelligence industry dedicated to internal and external surveillance, consequently, became a key functionary within what Eisenhower famously termed the “military-industrial complex.” This sort of Manichaean overreaching, as Arthur Miller insisted in his 1953 broadside against McCarthyism, The Crucible, lends itself to a hysteria that might be—that must be, of necessity—legally and politically institutionalized. In such instances, as Miller asserts, “a political policy is equated with moral right, and opposition to it with diabolical malevolence. Once such an equation is effectively made, society becomes a congerie of plots and counterplots and the main role of government changes from that of the arbiter to that of scourge of God” (34). 18

CULTURAL F RONTS

Given the messianic claims of the Bush administration, Miller’s characterization still resonates. Miller’s The Crucible rather scandalously mined a notorious episode in American history in order to score rhetorical points in a contemporary ideological contestation, a decision justified by his strong feeling that the very Jeffersonian foundations of consensual democracy were being systematically demolished in 1953,20 and in doing so the playwright aimed to rethink and reinvigorate the very construct and political destiny of American male individuality, a point I elaborate upon in chapter 4. But as Miller’s detractors pointed out, these claims for historical parallels are largely—or merely—rhetorical, as are most sweeping historical analogies, including the one that I have posited between the Truman and Eisenhower years and George W. Bush’s presidency. If my project in this book has been partly inspired by the eerie and ominous similarities between the heated rhetoric of the Cold War and the sweepingly hubristic claims of the recent “war on terror,” there are, nonetheless, numerous important differences between the political theatrics of the late 1940s and early 1950s and the early years of the twenty-first century, just as there were between 1692 and 1953. “The analogy . . . seems to falter,” Miller admits, “when one considers that, while there were no witches then, there are communists and capitalists now” (35). For his part, Miller met this objection rather handily, by contending that there were, in fact, witches in Salem in 1692. Today, two important differences between then (the early years of the Cold War) and now (the war on terror) are strikingly significant to my own study. First, we might say, in a certain sense, there are no witches now: despite growing numbers of religious adherents in the United States and despite great sympathy among the intelli-gentsia for the Palestinian cause, radical Islamicism has very small purchase within established secular cultural and intellectual institutions. That is, circulating on the Internet and in the streets and mosques, Islamicism has, remarkably enough, secured its footing largely outside of any institutional cultural apparatus that might be subject to national controls (a feat that may, paradoxically enough, serve to explain its remarkable power). Marxism, by contrast, had been and continued to be in the late 1940s genuinely attractive to many thinkers, scholars, journalists, screenwriters, poets, and novelists in the United States. The range and productivity of the early to midcentury American cultural Left have been amply documented by such recent studies as Paula Rabinowitz’s 1991 Labor and Desire: Women’s Revolutionary Fiction in Depression America, Michael Denning’s 1997 The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the 20th Century, and Alan M. Wald’s 2002 Exiles from a Future Time: The Forging of the MidTwentieth Century Literary Left, to mention only a few.21 Wald vocally contests the common presumption that writers abandoned Marxism en masse. Denning, in turn, stresses the dominating and continuing influence of the popular front aesthetics on popular and highbrow culture, despite its putative political defeat. 19

CULTURAL F RONTS

If there is little enough people power in Washington, D.C., Denning asserts, it nonetheless “flavors” what working- and lower-middle-class Americans watch, read, and listen to. Radical ideas had, in fact, so successfully infiltrated what C. Wright Mills termed the “cultural apparatus” of modernity (Denning 38–39) that there would be a recognized need for purges. In the early 1950s, then, McCarthyism targeted a fifth column of Soviet sympathizers reputedly working subversively within the State Department as well as in Hollywood, in labor unions, in the rapidly expanding media, and on college campuses. As J. Edgar Hoover noted in his 1958 tract, Masters of Deceit: The Story of Communism in America and How to Fight It, the Cold War was to be understood as much an ideological as a military, economic, and social struggle; consequently, immense efforts were undertaken to enlist intellectuals and the culture industries to the cause of “freedom,” and much of my book is devoted to a critical analysis of the ways in which various radical intellectuals of the period responded to such pressures. By the beginning of the twenty-first century, however, the situation of intellectual and cultural production in the United States has shifted dramatically. Such vocal right-wingers as David Horowitz or David Frum, naturally, have endeavored of late to carry out fiery public attacks on “anti-American” sentiment within the academy or in Hollywood. And, to be sure, conservative talk radio habitually disparages liberals, while Ann Coulter lampoons George Clooney, in particular, with considerable relish. John Leo once claimed in the pages of U.S. News and World Report that English teachers were behind the 9/11 attacks.22 But while criticism of Bush from intellectuals has been endemic, apart from a courageous few, not many members of the American intelligentsia ever had much sympathy for radical Islam, which was patently not the case with respect to Marxism, various forms of socialism, Communism, and even Stalinism in the 1930s and 1940s. Whatever their ostensible numbers on university campuses, there are very few card-carrying members of al Qaeda or fellow-traveling jihadists to purge from Hollywood today, despite the late Jerry Falwell’s notorious accusations that Wiccans and lesbians had brought down the Twin Towers. Bush’s cohorts were too interested in feathering their own nests to ever be serious about hunting down Islamicists. The New York Times has revealed that the National Security Administration (NSA) has been tapping the phone lines of such groups as the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) and the Society of Friends.23 Neither organization, obviously, was responsible for taking out the Pentagon or the World Trade Center. The great musical satirist of Cold War sensibilities Tom Lehrer appropriately pointed out the rather obvious fact that political satire became obsolete as soon as Henry Kissinger was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize; even so, what such logical absurdities indicate is that the rhetorical distinction between “freedom-loving Americans” and “enemies of the state” has little if anything to do with protecting national security or bringing 20

CULTURAL F RONTS

terrorists to justice, just as the mobilization of Cold War shock troops had precious little to do with stopping Stalin. Variously named—the culture of consensus, the culture of containment, the culture of paranoia—the Cold War clampdown focused on promoting a new national and international “freedomloving” subject. The tactics and slogans put in play to do so were designed to circulate more or less unfettered and at large within the culture in order to realign political, social, and psychological sentiments among the populace. At issue today, then, is not “global Islam” versus the West, but rather how such demonizing figurations of the “clash of civilizations” prove both symptomatic and enabling of new social formations and reconfigured concentrations of wealth and power in the “globalized” post-Cold War world, and it is the problem of what these social formations will come to look like that has become the most pressing field for theoretical investigation as well as for active social experimentation and political organizing. This deliberate confusion about who and where the genuine enemies of freedom might be lurking points to a second striking difference between the 1950s and today: the stark difference in the role and understanding of “culture” in political rhetoric. Culture is still a battleground, but as a quick survey of the so-called culture wars of the 1990s should remind us, it has little to do with the ideological content or aesthetic merit of cultural productions: pitched battles between cultural conservatives and tenured radicals simply provided deep cover for a corporate takeover of American higher education, a process that opens the question of whether and how the American university might contribute to progressive struggles over the coming decades. Those on the Right almost instinctively lambaste cultural intellectuals; but, by and large, the Bush administration is in no way interested in what people think, which poses a difficult challenge for tastemakers and pedagogues. The largest (lest we forget) global peace movement in history, for example, didn’t slow down the invasion of Iraq for one second. The parallel between the Cold War and the contemporary situation, consequently, is more than rhetorical; it summons up a complex history that must be carefully sifted through. My own contention in the pages that follow is that culture itself was up for grabs at the advent of the Cold War. Further, the Cold War also instantiated what Daniel Bell cannily termed the “end of ideology.” Ideologues of freedomism will themselves come to understand that what people think, or claim to think, is of little consequence. What matters is what they “freely chose” to do. Performance supplants ideology, and I try to demonstrate precisely how this might have come to be. Consequently, the early years of the Cold War established the very foundational underpinnings of what half a century later would prove to be one of the key enabling features of Bushism: the structural neutrality of the knowledge and the culture industries. An implicit contention in the pages that follow, then, is that the structural neutrality of the American culture industries under an emerging corporate regime was a phenomenon carefully 21

CULTURAL F RONTS

crafted by the Cold War, and it is in this light that my more baldly outrageous claims—that Invisible Man is the “last” American novel, for example—must be considered. “Who knows,” concludes Ellison’s narrative, warily, “but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?” (581), as the frequencies on which anyone might claim to speak for anyone else were being systematically lowered. By speaking of structural neutrality, I do not want to imply that any single work or body of works is incapable of conveying and embellishing—often with considerable brilliance—ideological stances. Blackhawk Down and other works produced by Jerry Bruckheimer, for example, speak powerfully and pyrotechnically to a stout heartland patriotism that feels itself ever betrayed and undone by cynical Beltway connivers, careerists, and opportunists; the films of Steven Spielberg, reliably, seduce us to a liberal humanism that is as comforting as it is compassionate; the ham-fisted, overreaching, and at times downright hysterical mournfulness of Oliver Stone in JFK, Natural Born Killers, and Born on the Fourth of July paints the very portrait of a postmodern Left reeling in disarray; the equally nostalgic, albeit more tempered and even flinty films of Susan Sarandon and Tim Robbins are beautifully in-touch renditions of a progressive populism that will (I am confident, given my own anarchist affiliations) prove to be the sleeping giant of twenty-first century U.S. politics (the antiglobalization movement, the peace movement, the green movement are all signs of its stirring).24 That vox populi has not disappeared; it has merely been muted, which is to say it has largely been stripped of its cultural voice within established channels of discourse. In a shift that perfectly corresponds to the logic of contemporary market capitalism, culture and knowledge have been relocated, if not ghettoized, into “entertainment” and into a corporatist educational regime given over to the spurious pursuit of “excellence” in research and teaching. What we will witness increasingly over the coming century is the extrainstitutional “outsourcing” of cultural and intellectual production, a tendency already under way in the omnipresence of blogs, iPods, wikis, and so forth, a trend that may represent a democratic expansion of consumer options, but which also further consumerizes and de-concentrates the political import of culture. How so? I believe that the contemporary decentralized distribution and voluntaristic consumption of cultural commodities emerge from and are consistent with the deep history of market capitalism. As Jean Baudrillard has argued in his early writings, twentieth-century capitalism shifted under Fordist management techniques from an emphasis on production (expanding productive capacity to generate increased wealth) to a logic of consumption (expanding markets). We can isolate the emergence of a very specific mass market and the invention and manufacture of—as well as the manipulation of an organized but flexible pattern of distribution for—a radically new commodity in the early years of the Cold War. What was this commodity? The “self.” Selfhood—atomized, individuated, free, conscious, relatively articulate, market-savvy, freely chosen and 22

CULTURAL F RONTS

formed, self-styled, capable of consent—was the great cultural invention of 1950s America. We can witness the new focus on personal interiority everywhere: in confessional poetry, in existential novels, in abstract expressionist painting, in self-help literature, in Beat poetry. How was it manufactured and marketed? Through culture, or more specifically, by means of newly emergent cultural technologies. One of these, which I focus on in particular, is the confessional novel or memoir. Literature has since its invention, of course, been a complex social machine designed to form and articulate identity. But as I argue in chapter 3 with respect to Ellison’s Invisible Man, the modern novel had been primarily geared to the production of the collective identity of nations, a subjective formation that supplanted the church and that followed a teleologically scripted metanarrative into which an individual could inscribe her or his own life story. With the midcentury exhaustion of the novel’s capacity to do this, with the exhaustion of culture’s very capacity to speak on behalf of and express the desires of larger communities (and through which, in an outrageous act of performative utterance, it consequently calls them into being), literature will take up the work of manufacturing and selling a solitary self. Concomitant with the abandonment of the popular front’s collective and productive efforts to articulate classconsciousness and identity, the therapeutic memoir will take up the work of styling and marketing selfhood to newer and young audiences (the term “youth culture” will, as is obvious, come to designate this growing market for the commoditization of self-styling culture). By the 1970s and 1980s, the Cold War form of the memoir will have become the dominant genre of literary self-invention. We can find obvious, exemplary, and still powerfully affective fictional models in J. D. Salinger’s 1951 Catcher in the Rye and Jack Kerouac’s Beat epic On the Road (1957). Here the male adolescent or postadolescent protagonist feels irremediably at odds with his social surroundings, with which he may never make peace. Women of the time, as Joyce Johnson points out in her own 1983 memoir of the Beat era, had fewer options to take flight or to find release in sexual or pharmaceutical experimentation. Because of the way it both establishes and subverts its genre, then, let me turn to Sylvia Plath’s 1963 novel, The Bell Jar, which was to become a best seller upon its U.S. release in the 1970s. Though a work of fiction, The Bell Jar provides the template for the therapeutic memoir. And the formula, really, is quite simple: a female protagonist, often an adolescent, feels constrained, trapped, and misunderstood by authorities and peers, and chafes unhappily against dominant social dictates. She feels the problem is with her social surroundings, and resents others telling her she is maladjusted, deviant, or mentally ill. She will find herself in an institutional setting—a prison, a school, an asylum, a workplace, an organization—where the hand of institutional authority is felt to be most cruelly repressive, and she or the author can use this setting to expose the root hypocrisy and the hidden violence of the social order. The upshot is that both society and the protagonist are partially correct in their 23

CULTURAL F RONTS

assessments of who is to blame. Society will need to be reformed, and the protagonist in turn will need to be readjusted or cured, and agree to meet, at least halfway, the demands and obligations placed upon her. There will be a series of authority figures—some bad, others not so bad—who will serve as a sequence of potential role models after whom the protagonist can model and measure herself. The role models will, eventually, be judged inadequate rather than ideal, on the one hand, or fatally flawed, on the other. As part of the healing, the protagonist will take up the task of an independent self-fashioning. At first she hates and fears the authority figures, and sees them as conspiring against her, lashing out at them in all sorts of perverse ways (but, the reader realizes, only damaging herself ). She will be ready, however, by book’s end to carve out her own distinct place in the world, having learned something (but not everything) from her elders and having witnessed and compassionately come to judge their strengths and weaknesses, but never entirely conforming to their expectations (a sure sign of her maturing independence). The plot necessitates that the protagonist also has an alter ego, or possibly several. The alter ego represents the unsalvageable aspects of the self that must be jettisoned, if the compromise-cure is to succeed. Typically, that character is sacrificed, and often dies. Generally, whether it is a work of fiction or a memoir, the story is told from a first-person perspective. Much of the energy of the writing comes from the narrator’s or the author’s ability to generate and sustain what creative writers like to call “voice”: a rhetorical modulation of sincerity with irony. So, too, must the narrator carefully orchestrate the various temporalities at play in the book, sequencing, often within a single sentence or phrase, between “then” and “now,” between the voice of innocence and that of experience, and much of the irony as well as the sincerity, paradoxically enough, comes from the writer’s ability to do this convincingly. The reader must feel the story to be “powerful” and “true”—by reading along, he or she will come to identify with the narrator (“Hey, that’s just like me! I feel misunderstood and alienated too!”) and to sympathetically undergo the same trials and, in part, the same cathartic therapy.25 The closing sign of one’s reclamation of rights over one’s own agency is generally signaled by the protagonist’s recovery of her or his own voice, in the form of an ability to write or to speak for herself or himself (or to indulge in another talent that marks the protagonist as having free domain over her or his own spirit, body, and emotions), an ability that had been blocked or frustrated early in the novel: utilizing that reborn capacity, the writer can literally come to terms with herself or himself and her or his world and “move on,” newly reconciled, to a productive “free” agency in the world. There have been, of course, a thousand and more subsequent variations on this formula,26 but all the elements are already here, and fully fleshed, in Plath’s beautifully crafted comic novel, which can be productively read as the very parable and the cultural performance or enactment of Cold War containment. 24

CULTURAL F RONTS

Esther Greenwood comes to heal herself and assume responsibility for “freely choosing” and quite literally authorizing her own selfhood and her own place in the world. At the same time, Plath is able both to indict and to redeem a patriarchy that has evil designs on women’s desire. And yet the book can also be read as actively and critically resisting and ironically undoing the self-same containment it endorses and enacts.27 The Bell Jar mocks and exposes as deceptive the very fabrication of autonomy it champions and performs. In part, this is true because it was written when Plath was in England rather than the United States, at a time (the early 1960s) when the culture of consensus was, as I argue in my closing chapter, in a state of irretrievable collapse. We might begin by comparing The Bell Jar to an earlier variation on the plot, the Academy Award-nominated 1948 film The Snake Pit, based on Mary Jane Ward’s best-selling 1946 novel. In The Snake Pit, a fairly remarkable Cold War text that suffers, rather surprisingly, from critical neglect, Virginia Cunningham (Olivia de Havilland), a writer, finds herself in an asylum. She has been suffering from a sort of schizophrenia brought on, it turns out, by her father’s early death, for which she has unresolved feelings of guilt. The anxiety comes to a crisis when she marries, and her husband, Robert (Mark Stevens), has no choice but to put his disoriented wife into the hands of the state asylum, overseen by the benevolent (and wonderfully named) Dr. Mark Kik (Leo Genn), whose treatment—a combination of Freudian psychotherapy and electroshock therapy—successfully “cures” Virginia. In the film, the conflict—between a patriarchy that wants to overcode women’s desire and secure it firmly within socially approved channels (state and marriage) and an unruly woman’s resistance—is “successfully” managed and resolved. Virginia at first feels that “daddy” is to blame, then incriminates herself for harboring such ungrateful feelings. She will be able to resolve her issues when it turns out in the end that the patriarchal institution of state medicine is benevolent, however harsh its methods. Moreover, though she is herself a writer, she cedes narrative control over her life to male authority: her story is told, in a voice-over, by her husband. When she is given the chance to speak her piece, as when she undergoes analysis with Dr. Kik, she will require a male authority to explain to her what her own story means, to interpret for her her own desires and needs. The movie is decidedly apolitical; but just after the war working women had to be told their proper place and male authority reaffirmed, and Hollywood was doing its part in this social task by offering a happy ending to an unhappy woman: an affirmative image of domesticity that generously acknowledges the torments of women’s desire but culminates and domesticates them by happily nestling them back into the now (it turns out) unthreatening narrative domain of patriarchal power. Five years later, Esther Greenwood, another fatherless female and aspiring writer who finds herself suffering from a similar mental disease and subject to the same therapeutic controls, will have none of it. She rails against the failings 25

CULTURAL F RONTS

and abuses of a patriarchal order that she perceives to have been her undoing. “You were doing fine,” she is told, “until that man got in your way” (98). As with the man into whom she crashes while speeding happily down the mountainside, Esther’s freewheeling course in life is always crashing into masculine barriers to her freedom, and the result is everywhere a shattering of her own body. Male medicine and marriage, institutions drolly combined into the person of Buddy Willard, are simply fraudulent, vicious, and ineffectual. When Esther visits Buddy at the hospital to witness a birth, she learns that the woman was on a drug that would make her forget she’d had any pain and that when she swore and groaned she really didn’t know what she was doing because she was in a kind of twilight sleep. I thought it sounded just like the sort of a drug only a man would invent. (66)

Before too long, Esther will herself be subject to a drug that will make her forget her own pain, as she suffers from increasingly severe bouts of manic depression. In the depths of her illness, she comes to feel “as if I were sitting in the window of an enormous department store. The figures around me weren’t people, but shop dummies, painted to resemble people and propped up in attitudes counterfeiting life” (141–42). Does this represent the twilight sleep of the people around her, or Esther’s own incapacity to live a genuine life? Both, it will turn out, and both Esther and the society she inhabits will need some work. She is subject to electroshock therapy at the hands of “young and good looking” Dr. Gordon, the very image of male benevolence and American heterosexual contentment, who has on his desk “a family photograph, and it showed a beautiful dark haired woman, who could have been Doctor Gordon’s sister, smiling out over the heads of two blond children” (129). But, Esther sees at once, he is conceited, and the hint of incestuous desire and narcissism in his family picture forebodes malevolence in the social order he upholds. Her treatment hurts her, and fails to take, and she attempts suicide. It turns out, however, that patriarchal institutions like medicine can be redeemed. When Esther is put in the hands of the benevolent woman physician, Dr. Nolan, she is cured, and the closing images of the novel imply that the therapy has been provisionally successful, as Esther awakes from her own twilight sleep. “I was perfectly free” (242), she exclaims, and, as if awakening from death, she triumphantly announces her burgeoning selfhood: “I am, I am, I am” (243). And marriage, motherhood, the available life-narrative that Esther has been resisting all through the novel? Esther insists repeatedly that she will never get married, and her first experience of sex leads to a massive hemorrhaging that nearly kills her. Yet each of the “independent woman” role models—Jay Cee, Philomena Guinea, Mrs. Greenwood herself—described prior to Dr. Nolan’s 26

CULTURAL F RONTS

arrival on the scene is lampooned in the book. Maternity is described throughout in the most grotesque terms, as in the vision Esther has upon returning home to the suburbs: A woman not five feet tall, with a grotesque, protruding stomach, was wheeling an old black baby carriage down the street. Two or three small children of various sizes, all pale, with smudgy faces and bare smudgy knees, wobbled along in the shadow of her skirts. A serene, almost religious smile lit up the woman’s face. Her head tilted happily back, like a sparrow egg perched on a duck egg, she smiled into the sun. I knew the woman well. It was Dodo Conway. (116)

Esther has neither the freedom to live outside the confines of socially regulated hetero-normativity nor the stomach to put up with men, and to be transformed into a housewife, she perceives, would be to make her a “doormat,” if not worse: It would mean getting up at seven and cooking him eggs and bacon and toast and coffee and dawdling about in my nightgown and curlers after he’d left for work to wash up the dirty plates and make the bed, and then when he came home after a lively, fascinating day he’d expect a big dinner, and I’d spend the evening washing up even more dirty plates till I fell into bed, utterly exhausted. This seemed a dreary and wasted life for a girl with fifteen years of straight A’s. (84)

Yet she is overburdened with an array of unformed and insatiable desires and a sexual appetite that can find no appropriate or acceptable outlet. Given the restrictive social order, heterosexuality cannot be imagined as anything but monstrous and destructive to women, but what are the alternatives? The book is also a work of lesbian dread, as the channeling of a misfit desire into woman-woman love is everywhere flirted with and ultimately rejected. Joan Giling, who had been Buddy’s prior girlfriend but who increasingly identifies as lesbian and befriends Esther, kills herself after Esther’s own botched suicide attempt. In the structure of the book, Joan serves as Esther’s alter ego and represents those aspects of Esther’s own desire that must be purged in order for Esther to be happily reassimilated to hetero-normative consensus culture. In fact, it is Joan’s grave, not her own, from which Esther imagines herself arising at the novel’s end, in an image of marital conjugation: There would be a black, six-foot-deep gap hacked in the hard ground. That shadow would marry this shadow, and the peculiar, yellowish soil of our locality seal the wound in the whiteness, and yet another snowfall erase the traces of newness in Joan’s grave. 27

CULTURAL F RONTS

I took a deep breath and listened to the old brag of my heart. I am, I am, I am. (243)

The imagistic conflation of death, marriage, and rebirth continues. In effectuating her cure, Esther is able to bypass the twin problems of heterosexualmonstrosity and lesbian desires. She ends up symbolically “marrying” herself Dr. Nolan, who has already redeemed patriarchal medicine, now comes to stand in for the absent good father, as she is relegated to the role of the father of the bride: Something old, something new. But I wasn’t getting married. There ought, I thought, to be a ritual for being born twice—patched, retreaded and approved for the road, I was trying to think of an appropriate one when Doctor Nolan appeared from nowhere and touched me on the shoulder. “All right, Esther.” I rose and followed her to the open door. Pausing, for a deep breath, on the threshold, I saw the silver-haired doctor who had told me about rivers and the Pilgrims on my first day, and the pocked, cadaverous face of Miss Huey, and eyes I thought I recognized over white masks. The eyes and the faces all turned themselves toward me, and guiding myself by them, as by a magical thread, I stepped into the room. (244)

Esther has taken the available but oppressive social dictates and rescored them to her own satisfaction. The closing scene performs a rewriting and reclaiming of the marriage ceremony, reinvigorating in quasi-feminist fashion the symbol of the consummation of every girl’s dream as it had been scripted by Harlequin romances. Marriage, of course, is the ceremony that ends the traditional comedy or romance and certifies a restoration and readjustment of the social order, and so by refashioning marriage as a marriage to self, Plath’s novel asks us to believe that “containment” has been effectively reformed and can now function more productively to accommodate Esther’s hitherto antisocial desires. She has changed, but in changing she has also changed the social order for the better. And, as at the end of nearly every therapeutic novel or memoir, a separate peace can be hashed out, at least for the time being, between a chastened but still spirited protagonist and a structuring but no longer entirely repressive social system. All eyes are upon her. The masks have all come down. Patriarchal institutions have been reformed, as women take the helm. Esther is, at least for the time being, cured, her dangerous parts cast off and symbolically, appropriately, buried in Joan’s grave, her sickness in abeyance thanks to the miracle of benign new medical technologies. She can now take possession of her own life script; she can freely write her own story. 28

CULTURAL F RONTS

And yet this has been a hasty reading. While the rich array of imagery that characterize Plath’s prose merits more detailed analysis, let me also suggest that hasty readings of this work as a protofeminist narrative of reclaiming selfauthorship from the clutches of patriarchy run the risk of missing how Esther’s hard-won freedom has been curtailed by the culture of consensus in insidious ways, even while she reforms patriarchy. She has purchased a self that has been carefully repackaged and sold back to her, and the violent coercion of her treatment has been carefully concealed to instill a sense that it was freely chosen. She has been given a drug that made her in part forget her own pain, pain that she has so carefully chronicled—which is not to say that this is a novel endorsing accommodation to a regime of consensus, either, for the book everywhere protests vocally against its own resolution. The tour-de-force satirical sections of the novel, lambasting everything in Esther’s path, simply read more convincingly than do the sections where she has been restored to health. If Esther is sane, she has certainly lost a good deal of her savage sense of humor. Let me, in closing this discussion, specifically point out two of the several ways in which The Bell Jar resists and ironizes its own happy ending. To accept the ending on its own terms would necessitate forgetting the pain of the opening: “It was a queer sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn’t know what I was doing in New York” (1). The pitch-perfect first sentence of the novel continues to haunt and contest the heavily ironic “happy ending.” Plath has pointedly named her heroine, Esther Greenberg, after Ethel Greenglass Rosenberg.28 The quick and startling shift in perspective from her acknowledgment of Ethel’s and Julius’s political executions by the state to an awareness of her own personal disorientation refuses to allow us to let go of Plath’s insistence on the conjunction: the Jewish Communist conspirator, Ethel Rosenberg, accused of giving the nuclear secret to Russia, functions as another alter ego who, like Joan, must be symbolically scapegoated—killed off in order that a “normal,” well-adjusted Esther can continue to live. Ethel Rosenberg must, quite literally, be killed if America is to resurrect its own sense of rightness and wholeness and integrity.29 If lesbian desire represents an emotional or libidinal alternative that must be repressed for consensus society to function, Ethel Rosenberg, who took great pains in public to present herself as a “good housewife,” represents the political pole of that self-same sacrificial logic, and the novel knows that the price being paid, in both cases, is too high. Returning to sanity is not simply a question of treating Esther’s manic depression, it is a question of restricting and punishing through force of institutional violence women’s political and sexual aspirations, which Plath pictures as extreme but powerfully real. We are compelled to read Esther’s later “humane” electroshock therapy within the horizon of Ethel Rosenberg’s death by electrocution, just as we have to measure Esther’s resurrection against Joan’s burial. The health of the body politic, like the physical health of Esther, is 29

CULTURAL F RONTS

purchased through violent excision of living tissue. Later, Esther says to her colleague Hilda, “Isn’t it awful about the Rosenbergs?” to which Hilda, the mouthpiece of consensus, replies, “It’s awful such people should be alive” (100). And so, too, the book recognizes, there is something deeply awful about the fact that Esther—or America—should be alive. By extension, as I have been arguing, the very rights to postwar cultural self-narration are derived from the murdering off of the political, the uncoupling of culture from its popular front roots in labor, all represented in Ethel Rosenberg, as by the tacit agreement that women’s sexuality, even if it will resist the apparatus of patriarchal and heterosexist capture, not be too flamboyantly queer. Neither the radical nor the lesbian will be allotted space in Esther’s brave new American world. Another disclaimer that undermines the novel’s conclusion can be gauged by the way in which female selfhood and authorship have been swept into the orbit of consumerist patterns of identity. Notice that a “department store window” frames the image of inauthentic life in the passage quoted earlier. Throughout the book, Esther carries on a long and uneasy relation with consumer goods, with clothes and accessories: she is always trying to destroy or discard them, for they seem to her symbolic icons of an inauthentic and confining femininity. Those consumer goods, in turn, seem to have a life of their own in the novel, and have malevolent designs upon Esther. They are always trying to clothe and costume her, to constrain and restrict and define who she is as a woman. Ultimately, they succeed, as self-expression becomes reimagined as self-adornment. Esther’s own future profession as a poet, her very path to freedom and her route out of her late-adolescent impasse, will also be co-opted by consumerist indexes of identity. Immediately after her discussion with Hilda about the Rosenbergs, Esther describes her last photo session in New York. In this juxtaposition, the older popular front model of political struggle as the primary vehicle for cultural self-claiming is discarded for an ethic of self-affirmation and self-writing through shopping. Such was the 1950s: justice was not the aim, merely a success that was achieved through amassing goods. “We were supposed to be photographed with props to show what we wanted to be,” Esther tells us as the interns prepare to say good-bye to their summer in New York City. Betsy held an ear of corn to show she wanted to be a farmer’s wife, and Hilda held the bald, faceless head of a hatmaker’s dummy to show she wanted to design hats, and Doreen held a gold-embroidered sari to show she wanted to be a social worker in India (she didn’t really, she told me, she only wanted to get her hands on a sari). When they asked me what I wanted to be I said I didn’t know. (101)

Eventually, she says she wants to be a poet, and “Jay Cee unclipped the single, long-stemmed rose from her latest hat” (101). Esther starts crying. And in one 30

CULTURAL F RONTS

of the recurrent scenes where Esther confronts a mirror image of herself, she is compelled to reckon with her own unhappiness and continued frustration and ongoing entrapment: “The face that peered back at me seemed to be peering from the grating of a prison cell after a prolonged beating” (103). Self-narration turns out to be self-commoditization, and Saunder’s “freedomism” is secured by market forces. Alan Brinkley begins his 2001 treatment of the period, “The Illusion of Unity in Cold War Culture,” with an illuminating, if perplexing, ideological paradox. Noting that contemporary revisionist scholarship has decisively dismantled the illusion of a Cold War consensus—the self-congratulatory belief that economic prosperity and liberal democracy were rapidly bringing an end to social conflict—he observes that “millions of Americans” nonetheless “believed in this effusive image of themselves.” “How was it possible,” he asks, “for so many Americans to believe in something that now seems so clearly untrue?” (62). Brinkley’s touchstone here, ironically enough, is the one-time fellow traveler, Trotskyite, and editor of the independent Partisan Review, Mary McCarthy, who in a polemical 1952 exchange with Simone de Beauvoir had trumpeted the “great change” taking place in American life. “Class barriers,” McCarthy contended, were disappearing, and “even segregation is diminishing; consumption replaces acquisition as an incentive. The America invoked by Mlle. De Beauvoir as a country of vast inequalities and dramatic contrasts is rapidly ceasing to exist” (“America the Beautiful” 25). A bit overstated, no doubt. When, exactly, did poverty and racial discrimination disappear from American life? To be sure, one of McCarthy’s favorite turns as a writer was ironically to deflate European misconceptions about the United States, misconceptions, she ventured, produced by their own fears and fascinations rather than by any candid assessment of American social realities. Further, she had an ambivalent view of the cult of middle-class prosperity, the rapid expansion of which was one of the cornerstones of the postwar consensus. Contesting the relish and horror with which a “visiting Existentialist” encounters American vulgarity and consumerism, McCarthy in 1947 put forth the “whimsical” and “perverse” claim that “the virtue of American civilization is that it is unmaterialistic” (10). In keeping with a metaphysical tradition initially endorsed by the Puritans and embellished by Jefferson and Jackson, prosperity is understood to be merely a sign or symbol of an ideal state of grace: “possessions . . . are . . . tokens of an ideal state of freedom, fraternity, and franchise” (13). Thus the comic image McCarthy develops is that of a “humanist in a bathtub”: “we are a nation of twenty million bathrooms, with a humanist in every tub”: at heart, McCarthy claims, the American is puritanical and ascetic: “the American does not enjoy his possessions because sensory enjoyment was not his object, and he lives sparely and thinly among them” (14). All of this foreshadows the famous 1959 “Kitchen Debate” between Vice President Richard Nixon and Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev, wherein Nixon attempted to prove American 31

CULTURAL F RONTS

moral superiority to the Soviet Union by pointing to the domestic convenience of washing machines and televisions. McCarthy, however, will add two provocative corollaries to her argument. First, she notes, in a more or less off-the-cuff remark, such equanimity is the privilege only of those who have already been folded into the normative model of consensus: “Among the outcasts—Jews, Negroes, Catholics, homosexuals—excluded from the communion of ascetics, the love of fabrics, gaudy show, and rich possessions still anachronistically flaunts itself. Once a norm has been reached, differing in the different classes, financial ambition seems to fade away” (“America the Beautiful” 14). Second, she establishes a curious connection between the ascetic tradition and American moral responsibility in the atomic age: “It must be admitted that there is a great similarity between the nation with its new bomb and the consumer with his new Buick. In both cases, there is a disinclination to use the product” (15). In other words, according to McCarthy’s updated refiguration of Thorstein Veblen’s indictment of conspicuous consumption, they exist simply as metaphysical signs, markers of selfhood (the Buick) and markers of right and power (the bomb): they are commodities, not important for their use-values, but insofar as they exist to take up the cultural burden of securing and articulating our personal and national identities. In this instance, might—and wealth—quite literally makes right. McCarthy poses, however, a rather intriguing problem. What, precisely, is the metaphysical equation between the obvious wealth and power of the United States and its moral superiority (for the country would never, of course, think about actually using its guns or money)? To win over the hearts and minds of skeptics around the globe, America will have to update and export the old Calvinist adage that success is a sure sign of one’s fundamental goodness. To win the Cold War, the United States will have to take up the cultural work of branding and selling Mary McCarthy’s claim that America the rich is also America the good. Let me try to tackle this last problem from another angle, through the lens of a British theorist of the Cold War, George Orwell. In closing this too lengthy introduction, I argue that the presumed accomplishment of a Cold War “consensus” was as much an accomplishment of force and coercion as it was a massaging of ideological consent. In his landmark dystopian novel, 1984, George Orwell famously coined the term “doublethink” to describe the appropriation of subjective assent to systems of state power. What is most original about Orwell’s formulation is that it obviates the problem of ideology and false-consciousness and mobilizes subjective consent as a sort of performative hypocrisy, whereby practice trumps any beliefs that have been freely arrived at, while still maintaining in its subjects their sense of their own freedom. The novel’s protagonist, Winston Smith, comes across a samizdat volume entitled The Theory and Practice of Oligarchal Collectivism, presumably penned by the shadowy and subversive figure of Emmanuel Goldstein, a character and 32

CULTURAL F RONTS

book that Orwell based on Leon Trotsky and his The Revolution Betrayed. The book within a book exposes and critiques how the party has taken Oceania hostage largely via an Orwellian linguistic swindle that has effectively insinuated the slogans of “newspeak” into the language, thereby debasing the population’s facility with words and their capacity for independent clarity of thought. Thus Orwell’s stand-in elaborates the secret meaning behind such oxymoronic party slogans as “war is peace,” “freedom is slavery,” and “ignorance is strength.” According to Goldstein, “doublethink” means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them. . . . To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just so long as it is needed, to deny the existence of objective reality and all the while to take account of the reality which one denies—all this is indispensably necessary. Even in using the word doublethink it is necessary to exercise doublethink. For by using the word one admits that one is tampering with reality; by a fresh act of doublethink one erases this knowledge; and so on indefinitely, with the lie always one leap ahead of the truth. (142–43)

Doublethink, obviously, lampoons the creeping “bureaucratese” of both totalitarian and liberal welfare states. Additionally, it points to an incipient consumerism that likewise irked Orwell, wherein the repetitive jingles of mass advertising that flood the public sphere supplant and obfuscate more sophisticated language practices. Consumer responses to radio (and, increasingly, to television) advertisements replicate the response patterns newspeak solicits and provide ample evidence of doublethink at work. No one, for example, “believes” that a specific shampoo or deodorant will make one’s life happier or increase one’s sex appeal; advertisements don’t solicit “belief.” Rather, by saturating the public sphere with their brand name, companies expect that consumers will purchase the product regardless of what they “think.” The genius of Orwell’s formulation is his awareness that postwar subjectivity had nothing to do with ideology; the problem was not to secure a population’s belief in what they were up to, but rather to enlist right behavior that entirely bypassed the problem of belief. The most obvious example of such technologies at work can be seen in the loyalty oaths that were central to securing the political allegiances of scholars, actors, scientists, government employees, and others under McCarthyism. The judicial theater placed one in a no-win situation. Only one’s integrity would prevent one from simply lying about one’s present or past affiliations, as Bertolt Brecht famously did when he was summoned before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), and a refusal to sign such oaths or to testify publicly about the political activities of yourself or your fellows simply reinforces 33

CULTURAL F RONTS

the state’s very right to judge and punish you. Far from being something with which we are endowed by our creator, freedom of conscience becomes something that could be only given or taken by the state, which thereby claims the right to regulate it.30 While in consumer economies one is never forcibly compelled to purchase any given product, in 1984 Orwell goes to considerable lengths to delineate the mechanisms of violence that work to enforce doublethink upon citizens, thereby delineating the coercive constraints of state power. Violence, as I have argued elsewhere,31 always forms the horizon of consent. In the agonizingly extended brainwashing scenes with which Winston’s ordeal concludes, he is subject to merciless physical torture and psychological manipulation by the diabolically workmanlike O’Brien. In an episode of “freedomism” fetishized, the state requires that its citizens “voluntarily” affirm their own degradation and even love for Big Brother in self-condemning public testimonials that resemble the Slansky trials in Czechoslovakia. As O’Brien explains, “We make him one of ourselves before we kill him” (169). The scenes of Smith’s torture and interrogation, capped off by the administration of electroshock, will be replicated in a variety of novels and films from the period: Sam Fuller’s B-classic Shock Corridor (1963) leaps immediately to mind, as do numerous science fiction films. In Ellison’s Invisible Man and again in Plath’s The Bell Jar, the execution of the Rosenbergs by electrocution and the supposedly humane treatment of those who are criminally insane or manic depressive by electroshock therapy will be explicitly depicted as acts of violence designed to coerce individual “consent” to national, racial, and gender hegemonies. O’Brien elaborates: “The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power” (175); “Obedience is not enough. Unless he is suffering, how can you be sure that he is obeying your will and not his own? Power is in inflicting pain and humiliation. Power is tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing” (177). Critics have taken it as a sign of Orwell’s unrelenting and bleak pessimism that he portrays Smith as coming to “love” the bullet that waits for him, but this scene actually depicts a reorchestration of the social and technological structures of consent. Coercion, then, secures the practice of consent, which is mobilized entirely by an affective rather than by a rational or intellectual relationship to power. The pressures of the Cold War have driven Orwell to this set of conclusions, as he is witness to the evaporation of the terrain for critical dissent, the ragtag “spirit of man” that is systematically demolished in Winston Smith. In his brief, arch, and insightful study of Orwell, Raymond Williams flags the writer for his disparaging treatment of the masses—the hapless and helpless “proles” of 1984, who will never demonstrate a capacity to think or act on their own account and are doomed to remain perpetual victims of state authority. Workers and thinkers no longer communicate. En route, Williams points out that Orwell’s 34

CULTURAL F RONTS

hitherto durable anti-Americanism had, by 1947, morphed into a bleak recognition that the either/or impasse of the Cold War could not be avoided. In 1943, Williams observes, Orwell insisted that “the majority of people in this country would rather be in a tie-up with Russia than with America” (qtd. in Williams 67). “By late 1947 this was reversed: . . . ‘everyone knows in his heart that we should choose America’ ” (67). Orwell’s comments were specific to the United Kingdom, whose status as a world power was largely diminished. Even so, it is—if you will pardon the pun—disheartening to reckon that so savvy and independent a critical mind as Orwell’s was, by that juncture, compelled to limit political and ethical options to a choice between the two superpowers. In both his acceptance of the either/or junction and in his dramatic separation of labor from the work of critical consciousness, Orwell’s last work, despite itself, is swept up in the Cold War formation of consciousness. Even so, it is significant that Orwell emphasizes the heart here, rather than the head: like Clancy Sigal’s academics, you have to come to love the power that destroys you. My thinking might suggest a fairly conspiratorial view of the Cold War. This is deliberate, and consonant, with my materials. The Cold War formed the very matrix of conspiracy culture, from the mobilization of paranoia in such films as Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) and other sci-fi thrillers of the time to the Chambers-Hiss conspiracies, the Bay of Pigs, the plot to poison Fidel Castro’s cigar and other shenanigans, the testing of LSD on prisoners in Canada and the United States, JFK’s assassination, and so forth. Conspiracies proliferated at a dizzying rate, particularly after 1963. Many were imagined, to be sure; most were insufferably real, at least in their consequences. However, as the interlaced novels of John le Carré, who diagrams spook culture with immense analytical precision, reiterate, the grander the conspiracy, the more it beggars the agency of those who presume themselves the manipulators, as poor schmucks like Alec Leamas in The Spy Who Came in from the Cold discover. The awakened intellect celebrated by the existential novelists of character formation of the time (Mailer, Ellison, Bellow, Salinger, and so forth) will never suffice; a recognition of one’s powerlessness, as I argue in chapter 5, offers no consolation whatsoever. A massive reconfiguration of cultural power was, almost ironically, the most revolutionary achievement of the early years of the Cold War. In many cases, as with Ellison’s Invisible Man, it formed one great theme of the era’s most striking cultural productions themselves. McCarthyism is the thin edge of the wedge in this seismic reconfiguration of cultural production in the years between 1947 and the early 1960s. Other elements of this change involve the emergence of new cultural technologies (television, pop culture), suburbanization, an expanding middle class and corporatism, reorganization of gender/family roles (as Elaine Tyler May attests) and hetero-normative strictures, the beginnings of a post-Fordist economy with what Eisenhower called the “military-industrial complex,” and so forth. Most significant, however, was the systematic purging 35

CULTURAL F RONTS

of radicals from positions of institutional leadership in the labor movement, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the American academy, and Hollywood. And though I limit myself to just a handful of case studies in what follows, I could cite hundreds or quite possibly thousands of examples to underscore my point.

36

CHAPTER TWO

C LO SET, CO U P, AND C OLD WAR F. O. Matthiessen’s From the Heart of Europe

An artist’s use of language is the most sensitive index to cultural history, since a man can articulate only what he is, and what he has been made by the society of which he is a willing or an unwilling part. —F. O. M AT T HI E SSE N, American Renaissance

“I date the beginning of the Cold war, the real beginning for people like myself,” comments the economist Kenneth Boulding with too patent a glint of melodrama, “from the moment [F. O.] Matthiessen’s body hit the sidewalk outside Boston Garden” (qtd. in White 50–51).1 Another friend concurs: “When Professor Matthiessen died, the cold war made its first martyr among scholars” (Dunham 102). Matthiessen, a Harvard professor, an untiring political activist, and a renowned literary critic whose most enduring work has proven to be his 1941 American Renaissance, jumped to his death on April 1, 1950, in the midst of repeated subpoenaed appearances before HUAC. He had tied up his affairs, drafted his will, written his friends, completed and revised the manuscript of his final book, and arranged for the care of his beloved cats, Barney and Baby. His brief last note read, in part, “I am exhausted. I have been subject to so many severe depressions during the past few years that I can no longer believe that I can continue to be of use to my profession and my friends. I hope that my friends will be able to believe that I still love them in spite of this desperate act,” and concluded in a postscript: “How much the state of the world has to do with my state of mind I do not know. But as a Christian and a socialist believing in international peace, I find myself terribly oppressed by the present tensions” (qtd. in Rackliffe 91–92). Some two decades on, a wistfully New Leftish Robert Lowell will envision the suicide as Matthiessen jumping from the North Station hotel, breaking his mania barrier to despair; ........................................ 37

F. O . MAT THIES S EN’ S FRO M T H E H E ART OF EUROPE

falling bald there like a shell. . . . Mattie, his Yale Skull and Bones on the dresser, torn between the homosexual’s terrible love of forms, and his anarchic love of man . . . then dies, unique as the many, lies frozen meat, fast colors lost to lust and prosecution. (172)

Friends and allies of Matthiessen, students, critics, and cultural historians (not to mention his enemies, whose vindictive glee at his death is shabbily obvious in their commentaries) have all struggled, more or less futilely, with his motives.2 In 1938, Matthiessen had been hospitalized for clinical depression, and he continued to wrestle with recurrent bouts of the disease. His lover and companion of twenty years, the painter Russell Cheney, had died of heart disease in 1945, and Matthiessen’s postwar hopes to sustain pedagogical (in Salzburg, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and in Gambier, Ohio) and political communities (in Czechoslovakia and in Henry Wallace’s Progressive Party) had crumbled. His death was symptomatic of the collapse of community, both in the narrow sense of friends, lovers, and companions, and in the broader sense, as the form of communal democracy espoused by Matthiessen disappeared. By 1950, the American popular front was in disarray, and utopian social and political hopes had been sacrificed on the altar of the Cold War. The progressive community of “workers with their brains and workers with their hands” (Matthiessen, From the Heart of Europe 77), a community in whose Whitmanesque bosom Matthiessen had long sought libidinal and scholarly solace (and in which context all his writing must be understood), had dissolved. One of his final and largely neglected books, From the Heart of Europe, published in 1948, both resists and recounts this dissolution. It is a text whose explicit testimony of hope tussles on every page with its own pervasive sense of dread, as when, for instance, Matthiessen so ambivalently convenes the first Salzburg Seminar in American Studies: “Our age has had no escape from an awareness of history. Much of that history has been hard and full of suffering. But now we have the luxury of an historical awareness of another sort, of an occasion not of anxiety but of promise” (13). In From the Heart of Europe, Matthiessen composes an ironic elegy to his own Emersonian conviction “that thought can be action” (65). The work stands as elegy, too, to the democratic vistas of the radical solidarity of the 1930s and 1940s: “All summer our enchanted garden had seemed on the edge of a precipice. Ever since that summer day in Hiroshima it has been almost impossible to feel that anything we do is permanent” (66). By 1950, the precipice had given way. Matthiessen died before the promise of community was restored, before the emergence of the gay rights movement associated with the Mattachine Society and the Daughters of Bilitis, and long before the New Left’s experiments in personal and political strategies of libidinal politics. Nonetheless, there remains in 38

F. O . MAT THIES S EN’ S FRO M T H E H E ART OF EUROPE

his work, muted, impermissible perhaps, an alignment to an erotic politics that can be liberated, even if that will mean reading those politics against the grain of explicit public utterance. Such alternatives were to be snuffed out by the cultural dynamics of the Cold War, which forced critics into reductive positions “for” or “against” American hegemony. The late work of Matthiessen gestures toward a radical revision and rethinking of the American cultural tradition. He aimed to elaborate a critical approach that was publicly engaged with the most urgent of social struggles during a historical moment when those struggles were in the process of being lost. It seems essential in contemporary critical discussions of the location of the intellectual to rethink—with whatever sensitivities we can muster—potential forms of engagement, to rethink in a manner that eludes the triumphal pieties of global capitalism or short-sighted dismissals of a homegrown progressive tradition that is, still, usable. My intention in revisiting Matthiessen’s final days, consequently, is neither to desecrate what Lowell terms that “frozen meat” nor to intrude upon what another friend, Wallace Stevens, termed Matthiessen’s mute and inaccessible “final intimacy” (679); I believe, as Matthiessen himself wrote of Thoreau, that “his vitality as a revolutionary is still unexhausted” (American Renaissance 77). At the heart of Matthiessen’s lifelong critical project was an overwhelming sense of the need for each generation to critically “repossess” the past, coupled with an obsessive concentration on love and politics. In a final sally in May 1949, Matthiessen began the Hopwood lectures at the University of Michigan, a broadside against conservative New Critical values, by citing William James’s dictum that the first duty of any thinker is to know about life in his time; however, Matthiessen admonishes, “Today we can take no tradition for granted, we must keep repossessing the past for ourselves if we are not to lose it altogether. The proper balance, even for the critic who considers his field to be the present, is to bring to the elucidation of that field as much of the art of the past as he can command” (“Responsibilities” 7). Matthiessen’s own critical technique, consequently, aimed to limn and elucidate the muted possibilities of a past that had largely “disappeared,” to put alternative understandings of history to play in contemporary cultural, political, and ethical struggles. Scholarship is innately activist, according to such a scheme, and Matthiessen himself was an ardent activist. One turns to the past in order to open up and mobilize radical potentials for the present, and thus the cultural historian should everywhere resist the seductions of calcified, clichéd, or conventional approaches. History is contested terrain, obviously, no less than the present, no less than the future, and in some sense contemporary struggles can be understood as battles precisely over the rights to historical and mnemonic domain, the rights to interpretively comprehend the past. Today, as the battle lines are rapidly hardening into another global conflict that farcically reprises the grotesque either/or logic of the Cold War, critical 39

F. O . MAT THIES S EN’ S FRO M T H E H E ART OF EUROPE

space is once again threatened with eclipse, and it seems necessary, even urgent, to contest schematic models. Thus the appeal of Matthiessen, whose exemplary radical potential may provide a compelling alternative genealogy for American cultural studies, a genealogy distinct from that traditionally derived from his critical work. Aside from American Renaissance, which dramatically shifted mainstream conceptions of nineteenth-century literature and subsequently became a key founding text of the burgeoning American studies movement,3 and remains a touchstone for even the most revisionist of cultural historians,4 his life and works are, sadly, little known. When his writings are mentioned, they are too often appraised with a symptomatic absence of generosity. While Matthiessen’s place in the critical canon is largely secure by virtue of American Renaissance, which remains in print, his work and his life have proved troubling for most commentators. By nearly every critic who considers him, Matthiessen is judged a failure, sometimes noble, sometimes tragic, but a failure nonetheless, on a personal, political, sexual, and aesthetic level. Such a verdict stamps an imprimatur on the foreclosure of political options within the Cold War, obviously, but it also perpetuates the same clampdown. Although his own selfproclaimed life project was a quest for integration—for integrity—according to most critics, Matthiessen failed to achieve this cohesiveness. In this view, he symptomatically failed to integrate his personal life with his political or critical comments and failed, in turn, to reconcile his activism with his historical criticism. In what follows, I contest the prevailing view and situate Matthiessen’s late work within—and in opposition to—an increasingly entrenched “Cold War consensus.” This consensus, which is, as I argued in my opening chapter, in no way an ironclad system of repression, can best be understood as a symptomatic but highly contested cultural logic emerging at a distinct historical juncture, a logic that Matthiessen variously articulates, critiques, and betrays. I am most interested in aspects of his thinking that elude that logic. In partial homage to Matthiessen’s own approach to literature, I read his later critical work against the grain, in an effort to decipher and unleash muted textual affiliations. Ultimately, my contention is that Matthiessen’s late work provides compelling alternatives for an American cultural criticism capable of addressing diverse cultural traditions within a global context, not least of which are the homoerotic politics and embodied strategies of historical affiliation at work, however covertly, throughout all his writings. As Donald Pease has argued in his work on Matthiessen, the Cold War functioned to commandeer opposition. At once a global political paradigm that divided the world between the superpowers and “economize[d] on any opposition to it by relocating all options within its frame” (“Moby Dick” 114), it also strictured the quotidian cultural arena. “As the political formation of everyday life, the Cold War effectively depoliticizes the everyday by the conversion of the situations that individuals can change into an arena in which the decision 40

F. O . MAT THIES S EN’ S FRO M T H E H E ART OF EUROPE

has already been made” (116). At this juncture of the personal and political, by thereby delimiting and foreclosing upon all manner of dissent, the enemy outside could, through rhetorical sleight of hand, be transformed into an enemy within, as evidenced by the rapid and full-scale demonization of fifth columnists and fellow travelers during these years. Sidney Hook’s magisterial speech to the Congress for Cultural Freedom in Berlin in June 1950 set the tone. Hook defined and established the consensus thus: “instead of saying ‘Neither-Nor’ and looking for other viable alternatives, we must recognize an ‘Either-Or’ and take one stand or another” (718). One was aligned, willy-nilly, in the cause of “freedom,” or condemned to the status of Stalinist dupe. In Europe, Matthiessen had ironically protested nascent Cold War simplicities, satirizing, for example, an attaché from the State Department: “It was all perfectly clear. It was either we or they, and no mistake about it” (From the Heart of Europe 64).5 No mistake: the very role of the intellectual was being radically remodeled during the immediate postwar years. Cut off from the progressive or dissident community, and increasingly entrenched within a state apparatus whose ambitions involved nothing less than global cultural hegemony, intellectual work was necessarily, inescapably, mobilized in the new war efforts. Such was to be the destiny of American studies in Europe, as many commentators have noted, severed from its radical and populist roots. Writing from Budapest, Enikö Bollobás recounts that the initial “generation of American studies scholars unmasked the underlying forces at work [in American culture] in order to prove the homogeneous, stable, uniform, and universally shared concept of America” (565). In From the Heart of Europe, Matthiessen wryly remarks on the smug naïveté of American GIs, but he might as well be commenting on his own position as cultural ambassador: How can such a group come into any real relationship with the impoverished country and the people surrounding them, living as they do entirely apart, in an imported American world, complete even with milk and orange juice, ice-cream and Coca-Cola? They bear about the same relation to the country as the British did to India. They are the civil servants of the new American empire, with no background or tradition or training to prepare them for their unaccustomed parts. (8)

He understood his own mission in Europe less as a part of a broader denazification campaign than as an opportunity to contest emerging Cold War dynamics; he came to realize, however, that intellectuals, far from maintaining any relative autonomy or critical distance, were themselves being everywhere enlisted in the cause. And systematically harassed if they dissented. Matthiessen returned from Europe “in time to find that, during my absence, many of my activities have now become ‘subversive.’ The Attorney General has apparently drawn up a 41

F. O . MAT THIES S EN’ S FRO M T H E H E ART OF EUROPE

‘list’ ” (192). The consensus was likewise shored up by an attendant rhetorical and institutional mobilization of what Jeffrey Weeks and Gayle Rubin, in different contexts, have termed “moral panic,” culminating in witch hunts for subversives and sexual perverts, whose virulent capacity for dissimulation made them so pernicious a threat.6 In reaction to a now well-documented “expansion of sexual communities and possibilities during World War II” (Sedgwick 48), the Truman administration would target the contagion of licentiousness as a menace to stability and national security. In March 1947, the same month in which he announced the policy of global “containment” of an infectious Communism, President Truman ordered loyalty investigations of three million government employees, among whom homosexuals, presumably subject to blackmail, figured as prominently suspect. By 1950, as David Bergman documents, homophobic hysteria had reached a fever pitch: “In March 1950, stories about sexual deviancy in government made the front page of the New York Times three times. . . . Between April and September 1950, the number of homosexuals fired by the Administration rose from an average of five a month to sixty, a twelvefold increase” (70). What might be termed the epistemology (or epidemiology) of the “iron closet” at work here imposed a structure of inquisition, carried out in the media and the public institutions, but also within the self, that aimed to target and root out those attempting to “pass” as “one of us.”7 We are—or should be, by now—wearily familiar with the shabby tragedy of those days: accusations and countercharges; reprisals, polemics, and recriminations; testimonials and blacklists; the agonized complicity of intellectuals who, after dramatic displays of soul-searching, sidled up humiliated to power or donned the mask of austere heroism by refusing to name names, by citing the First, later taking the Fifth, Amendment.8 All of it seems farcical enough today, however traumatic it was at the time, and we seem not to be able to leave it alone, as if the episodes were a scab we relentlessly pick at. So, too, were the players, no less than we today, condemned to live with the consequences once the dust had settled. Given the climate, Matthiessen’s own HUAC performance seems then and now stellar and stark enough; confronted with a long list of subversive organizations, he replied: “I certainly belong to these organizations . . . and I’m very proud to have belonged to them” (qtd. in Sweezy 75). During the final half-decade of his life, as erstwhile colleagues were transforming themselves into Cold Warriors, Matthiessen was struggling to articulate a radical revision and rethinking of the American cultural tradition he had largely helped to define. A lifelong activist, he adopted in his written works an increasingly public radical stance, championing the causes of unions, student rights, democratic socialism, communalism, and pacifism; reasserting and reformulating the “devotion to the possibilities of democracy” that had underwritten his popular front work, American Renaissance; and publicly advocating the social responsibility of the critic. The tone of From the Heart of Europe, then, is 42

F. O . MAT THIES S EN’ S FRO M T H E H E ART OF EUROPE

both elegiac and strident. Amid settling old debts and honoring dead friends and colleagues, Matthiessen takes time out to critique what he sees as a rather thin intellectual humanism: “no progressive party,” he argues, “can carry real weight unless it is solidly rooted in the labor movement” (27). The point may seem obvious enough, but we should remember that this was written in the twilight of American radicalism; what he witnessed in Europe is the heritage, however exhausted, of a genuine intellectual populism that was being eclipsed in America. Even so, Matthiessen persisted in what other contemporaries might have considered an atavistic stubbornness: “Whatever objective reasons compelled toward socialism in the nineteen-thirties,” he writes, “seem even more compelling now, and it is the responsibility of the intellectual to rediscover and rearticulate that fact” (79). Consequently, he threw himself into Henry Wallace’s presidential campaign, giving a seconding speech for Wallace’s nomination at the Progressive Party convention and tirelessly working the streets. He reiterated the theme in his last public lecture, by the time all of his causes might seem irretrievably lost: “The proper place for a thinker [is] at the central point where a battle is being fought” (9). “It is time for the history of American literature to be rewritten” (“New Standards in American Criticism” 181), he had insisted as early as 1929, and having done so for most of his career, he continued to sound the same theme two decades later. Openly terming himself a “radical democrat” in From the Heart of Europe, Matthiessen pointedly asserts that “much of our history needs to be rewritten” from a global, immigrants’, and indeed “multiethnic” perspective: Much of our history needs to be rewritten. Until now our immigrant groups have been studied too exclusively in terms of the problem presented by their assimilation into the dominant Anglo-Saxon society. The end point of the study has been the moment when immigrants were so assimilated and became “good Americans.” . . . There is room for the kind of history that will trace in detail what these peoples brought with them to the new world, what cultural values they cherished in their own countries, to what extent they have contributed some of those values to America—to what extent, therefore, Czechoslovakia or Poland or Ireland or Italy, however modified or transformed, are [sic] still a living part of the United States. . . . By making Americans more aware of the diversified strains from which we have come, [such history] would enable us to know more about the rest of the world, and it would help to provide us with the international understanding we so much need now in fulfilling our unaccustomed but unavoidable role as a world power. (125–26) 9

Matthiessen’s emerging project was occasioned by, and deeply critical of, America’s newfound status of world power, and he strove to articulate alternatives 43

F. O . MAT THIES S EN’ S FRO M T H E H E ART OF EUROPE

to emerging Cold War ideologies and cultural configurations of power. In 1947, in a journey crucial to the development of his late thinking, he went to a still devastated Europe—“a mound of rubble” (6)—to assist in founding the Salzburg Seminar in American Studies. The school had rented out the villa Schloss Leopoldskron, half-ruined, but even so baroque to the point of high camp and once owned by the actor Max Reinhardt (whose flamboyant tastes Matthiessen describes with amused relish: “with the ornamentation . . . things get out of hand” [12]), set on a gem of a lake beneath the impressively scalloped gray mountain Untersberg, under which Barbarossa is legendarily said to lie and on which Hitler had built his infamous Eagle’s Nest hideaway. Onto this unlikely stage Matthiessen was tossed; his task, as he saw it, was to wean a motley and to varying degrees shell-shocked crew of Europeans away from the crudities of John Steinbeck and Pearl Buck, caution them against a modish (and, he suspects, politically irresponsible) existentialism, and introduce them rather to the more refined pleasures of, for instance, Henry James (whom Matthiessen continued to treat as an anguished internationalist).10 He narrates his experiences with an impassioned humor, alive to the ever-surprising ironies of the situation and struck by the tempered, resilient naïveté of his students, whose obsessions and histories he recounts in considerable detail. He tells, for example, of Vittorio Gabrieli, a man with “a Dantesque face and an idealistic devotion to libertarian principles” who was “jailed for a year for having helped publish anti-Fascist literature and who is now at work on a book on Tom Paine.” Such a figure, Matthiessen observes, is “symptomatic of the tentative and confused nature of current European politics . . . and has much to learn about what is now politically possible.” “High-principled” European intellectuals, he concludes, are “so devoted to their abstract ideas that they are still detached from any mass base. They have not yet learned that no progressive party can carry real weight unless it is solidly rooted in the labor movement” (27). As always, in From the Heart of Europe Matthiessen stresses the painful historical burdens cultural artifacts are condemned to bear, sufferings rendered even more acute by the atmosphere in which he delivers his lessons. To Henry James, for example, he applies the author’s own late characterization of his character Ralph Touchett, “his serenity was but the array of wildflowers niched in his ruin” (45), and remarks on the poignant experience of reading James’s assertion of human dignity, “however precarious this may be in our own overwhelming sense of imminent ruin” (46). Teaching Portrait of a Lady (oddly, the only James novel available in sufficient numbers), Matthiessen is able to rediscover its deep sense of dread: I had not remembered the delicately effective use that James makes here of his special kind of ghost. When Isabel asks, so lightly, at the moment of her fascinated first glimpse of Gardencourt, “Isn’t there a ghost in this romantic old castle?” Ralph responds, yes, of course there is, but it is seen only by 44

F. O . MAT THIES S EN’ S FRO M T H E H E ART OF EUROPE

those who have suffered much, and so he hopes that she will never see it. The theme is not introduced again until the very end, when Isabel, alone in her room, has a sure premonition of the very instant of Ralph’s death. At last, with the fullest intensity of suffering, she recognizes that ghost. (45)

To some extent, Matthiessen identifies with Isabel’s anguish here, and the tone of his writing bespeaks someone who is determined to endure despite his awakened awareness: “If life is hard, we don’t escape that hardness by closing our eyes to it” (50). He emphasizes two interrelated themes throughout From the Heart of Europe. First, he insists on the importance of collective cultural and political labor; “fraternity” is a keyword. A growing distaste for the “managerial revolution” at Harvard, for example, prompts a critique of scholarly conformity and isolation that anticipates the later work of such radicals as Paul Goodman, Ivan Illich, and Paolo Freiere. Under the increasingly autocratic system of the developing mega-university, where “deans have multiplied greatly,” the “individual teacher is little more than a hired hand” (68). Matthiessen outlines an alternative ideal community that would return the responsibility for education to the hands of the educators. He writes that “the starting point would be a combined faculty and student body small enough to feel that they really could become a community concerned not merely with abstract disciplines of mind, but with a living interchange of feelings and beliefs” (70). Additionally, Matthiessen advocates bringing minority academics into such a program in order to contest an obviously WASPish cultural hegemony. What is key, if somewhat vexing in all of this, is the depth of Matthiessen’s critical awareness of the transformations taking place around him: on every front, cultural life was being systematically restructured in order to gel with Cold War priorities, as the new university of the 1950s and 1960s was already being designed to train a new technocratic elite.11 Consequently, Matthiessen remains optimistic and couples his critique with an unflagging insistence on the possibility of communal solidarity actively mobilizing effective resistance to hegemonic forces. If he excoriates an extreme Emersonian individualism, he nonetheless advocates collective self-reliance, resisting the ubiquitous temptation to despair. Collective human agency, he argues, can produce remarkable and unprecedented accomplishments. Matthiessen was most inspired by his Czech students: The Central Europeans in particular, and all those from small countries to some degree, were not so much weary of politics as they were oppressed by a feeling of the dwindling value of action, since it seemed that their destiny would not now be determined by themselves but by the great giants to the East or West. 45

F. O . MAT THIES S EN’ S FRO M T H E H E ART OF EUROPE

The Czechs were the most vivid exception. They had no trace of apathy. . . . They emanated the energy that comes from knowing where you want to go. (31)

He negotiated an invitation to lecture at Prague’s Charles University in the autumn of 1947, and subsequently journeyed south on a lecture circuit through Moravia, Slovakia, and Hungary.12 He found his privileged example of political hope in Czechoslovakia, in whose political future he prophesied a successful, even heroic, resistance to the global power of the United States, on the one hand, and the Soviet empire, on the other. Matthiessen’s trip to Central Europe, ultimately, became a somewhat mournful but still passionate homage to the increasingly vulnerable principles of collectivity and agency. His record of these experiences was published as From the Heart of Europe: “I want to write about some of the things it means to be an American today. That is the chief thing I came to Europe to think about” (3). Invigorated by the community of students, teachers, and scholars who were assembled in Salzburg from the ruined cities of Europe and who, Matthiessen imagined, could lay aside their political differences in scholarly esprit de corps, and further cheered by the coalition National Front government in Czechoslovakia, the imagined America he had in mind took shape from his own fantasies of Europe, fantasies castigated by Irving Howe, Lionel Trilling, and others as being politically naive. Taking Czechoslovakia as a political model (and glossing over the forced removal of millions of ethnic Germans from their homes and the seizure of their property), Matthiessen outlined his hopes for a third way between the murderous paranoia of postwar Stalinism and the blackmailing ultimatums of the Truman Doctrine. He recounts, for example, a conversation with the somewhat sinister translator and Communist Party MP Vladimír Procházka, in which he questions whether a homegrown but globally alert social democracy can flourish in that narrow space: I wanted to observe how his country was carrying forward its political revolution into the economic sphere, supplementing the revolution of Wilson and Masaryk with that of Marx and Lenin. The test was whether it could fuse and preserve elements of both, whether, habituated through its whole long history to looking both East and West, it could still manage to do so in our threatened times. And this would be a test for America too. The most vital creations in American culture had depended on open assimilation of ideas from all sources. . . . If America now pretended that foreign ideas were bad, if we tried to shut them off and to freeze the West into the conservative status quo of so-called free enterprise, our responsibility to the future would be grave. (105)

In sum, then, the difficulties of teaching American culture in Central Europe compelled Matthiessen to reassess his own culture and his own position within 46

F. O . MAT THIES S EN’ S FRO M T H E H E ART OF EUROPE

it, and from this point on his work involved a dangerous coming out, politically, if not exactly sexually: an open commitment to radicalism in a historical moment when the potential for democratic radicalism was disappearing. As Don Sparling has argued, the “naïveté” of the book stems less from an obeisant indifference to Soviet expansionism and more from a quasi-Orientalist romanticization of the “people,” a projection of Matthiessen’s own aspirations and obsessions onto a fantasized other. Much of the book smacks of this. In the exchange quoted above, Matthiessen is “politely corrected” by Procházka, who informs him that Czechoslovakia was not yet socialist, though moving in that direction. It could best be described as a people’s democracy. Its few wealthy property owners had been mostly Germans and these had now been expelled. Its people had taken over control of the land’s resources, and were faced once again with the problem of building their own society. But the dominating characteristic of this people—and here he tapped my arm—was its ineradicable devotion to freedom, against whatever oppressors. (106)

And however postured his equivocations, Matthiessen clearly acknowledges his own stakes in the experiment, stakes heightened by his aging radical’s sense of frustratingly diminished possibility. He concludes: “I would not pretend to prophesy what lies ahead now for the Czech people. There will be increasing pressures upon them from both sides. . . . If left to itself, Czechoslovakia gives every sign of being able to maintain its own hard-won balance. But it will not be left to itself, and may have to suffer severely from the present aggression between the U.S.A. and the U.S.S.R.” (142). Matthiessen’s manuscript was drafted before the 1948 coup, but published after the Communist takeover, largely unmodified.13 Instead, Matthiessen simply appended two lengthy footnotes, consisting primarily of somewhat mealymouthed rationalizations in letters from Czech friends. Zdeneˇk Strˇíbrný’s is typical: We have gone through a new social revolution; we have given up a good deal of democracy and individual freedom. But we have retained enough freedom for everybody to live and work either happily or contentedly, according to one’s political views. And we have retained enough democracy for our state to leave it a possibility of developing into a new, more righteous and more moral democracy. We have learned in these days to look at things with harshly realistic eyes. By an uncontrolled terrible strength ensuing from the contrast of two opposite world ideologies, we were faced with facts which we had either to accept totally or reject totally. Every one of us had to do so. There was no other way. (187)14 47

F. O . MAT THIES S EN’ S FRO M T H E H E ART OF EUROPE

Matthiessen himself alludes, rather weakly, to “the long history of the Czech’s devotion to freedom” (144), but his book, while deeply critical of American policy, can be best understood less as a choice of sides and more as an exposure of the omnipresence of Cold War logic, a playing out of the relentless impossibility of no longer taking sides. “There was no other way.” From the Heart of Europe was, predictably, savaged, both for its innocence and for its refusal to condemn Stalinism, a requirement of liberal intellectuals by 1948. According to the Nation, “perhaps mankind will have to pass through another period of slavery, but no admirer of Shakespeare and Melville ought to help us into it, however innocently” (Hollering 293–94). In the Partisan Review, Irving Howe was even more hyperbolic, accusing Matthiessen of being a relic, seduced by “ ‘comrades’ marching arm in arm, ‘by the pulpy schwärmerie of progressivist festivity,’ ” and writing in “that falsely-charged prose style of the fellow-traveller atremble before the glories of the ‘new world’—a style that might be called vibrato intime” (1125). For Howe, the Wallace campaign had been “the completely contrived creature of Stalinism” (1128), a judgment that testifies to the total collapse of popular front endeavors.15 Wallace, who stood against the rising tide of Redbaiting and continued to work with Communists throughout his 1948 campaign, was abandoned en masse by the liberals and progressives upon whom he had counted. As allies jumped ship, as the Cold War heated up, Matthiessen became increasingly isolated. Membership in the Harvard Teachers Union (which he had helped to found) declined, its politics became increasingly mainstream, and Matthiessen was perpetually embroiled in struggles with President James Bryant Conant to preserve the tutorial system and his own program in history and literature. According to friends, he became increasingly alienated from his students after the war, and failed to rediscover any sense of scholarly camaraderie at the Kenyon Summer School.16 Most tellingly, according to Louis Hyde, his lover, Russell Cheney, who had stood by him during an equally severe suicidal depression and treatment twelve years earlier, had died during the war, and other friends were to die or resign from the struggle. Two years after the defenestration of his friend Jan Masaryk, the popular foreign minister of Czechoslovakia and son of the country’s first president,17 Matthiessen, suffering, he writes, “defects of loneliness” (Rat and the Devil 3), threw himself from a twelfth-floor hotel window. If Matthiessen was among the initial victims claimed by the Cold War, there was to be an endless string—an endless stringing up—of others, on both sides of the curtain. Matthiessen’s suicide increasingly came to be viewed as stemming from his personal failings exclusively rather than as symptomatic of the disappearance of the terrain that had enabled a thinker so passionately to entwine the personal with social, aesthetic, and political commitments. As critical consensus would read it, however, Matthiessen’s failure was largely personal; he failed, ultimately, to unite the subjective dimensions of his last few books: the faux-patrician, refined, and ironical consciousness of a Henry James (of which Matthiessen 48

F. O . MAT THIES S EN’ S FRO M T H E H E ART OF EUROPE

stood in awe and which he mimicked) with the earthy proletarianism of a Theodore Dreiser (by which he was enraptured). Matthiessen argues explicitly that a Jamesian “humane consciousness,” alert to the whole qualitative fabric of experience, could be translated into a “social consciousness” helping to produce a “radical political economy” of equality (Henry James 151). He writes in an early letter to Cheney, at the moment when Cheney wants to renounce their sexual relationship: “Life . . . is a mighty harmony. Nothing is to be rejected, everything is to be used . . . in its fullest best way. That to me is the fundamental secret: blend together the mind, body, and soul so they are joined in a mighty symphony. . . . Can you deny the body?” (Rat and the Devil 88). For Matthiessen, such a goal could only be scored by unleashing a libidinal charge between men via physical contact. Recall Procházka’s gesture of intimacy during their conversation in Prague: “and here he tapped my arm.” In From the Heart of Europe, this is the moment, precisely, where Matthiessen’s critical acuity dissolves into a bewitched rhapsody on the freedom-loving Czech. Thus Howe’s nausea (a gesture aped by subsequent critics) in the face of Matthiessen’s eroticized (and thus necessarily immature) politics is exactly on target. For all his evident sins of omission, what is most striking about Matthiessen’s politics and aesthetics is the extent to which they were unapologetically sexualized, albeit developed in a social atmosphere that dictated discretion, as David Bergman points out. Matthiessen saw homoeroticism as having an explicitly political dimension. Commenting on Edward Carpenter’s The Intermediate Sex, Matthiessen writes Cheney in 1924 that “the Uranian [has] one of the divine gifts; . . . such as you and I are the advance guard of any hope for a spirit of brotherhood” (Rat and the Devil 47). American Renaissance is itself “a covert celebration of the homosexual artist” (72) and “virtually a gay canon of American literature” (75), as Bergman acknowledges.18 From the Heart of Europe is chock-full of passages that describe moments of highly charged political and erotic intensity, which everywhere overlap. The prose speaks to a sexualized fusion of Christianity, democracy, and brotherhood, whose literary heritage, of course, is the shared bed of Queequeg and Ishmael. Of Melville, Matthiessen writes that “his pre-occupation with Christian values is most evident in his projection of the relationship between Ishmael and Queequeg. The isolated wanderer rediscovers human brotherhood not, ironically, through companionship with one of his civilized fellow countrymen, but with a pagan savage. Melville’s sense of Christianity is most living at the point where Christianity and democracy fuse, in his belief in the ‘equality of man with man’ ” (From the Heart of Europe 36). Elsewhere, Matthiessen recalls his own political awakening, drinking with members of the New Haven Hungarian Club: “The stars seemed unusually bright as I walked back to the Yale campus. I had felt in the natural and hearty comradeship of these men a quality that I was just beginning to suspect might be bleached out of middle-class college graduates. 49

F. O . MAT THIES S EN’ S FRO M T H E H E ART OF EUROPE

It was a kind of comradeship I wanted never to lose” (73). While in Prague, a student takes him to his canoe club on the Vltava, where he is serenaded with “John Brown’s Body” and, over the course of the evening, initiated into honorary membership: “It turned out, as everyone in a Catholic country would know, though I hadn’t, that October 4 was St. Francis day, my name day. So four of them grabbed my shoulders and feet, tossed me in the air, and bounced me, gently, on the floor. After this all the men shook hands with me, I was kissed by the girls, and felt that I was really in” (98). It would be easy to read nothing more than a certain kind of class anxiety, or the scholar’s somewhat remote longing to be “one of the guys,” in such passages. But to do so would be to dismiss the very real possibility of cross-class affiliation, and to deride as well the erotic thrill of such encounters. For political solidarity itself—not to mention collaborations of any kind—emerges from the passional exchange of shared intensities, even where such intensities are laced with anxiety. For Matthiessen, politics itself is grounded within emotional and somatic passions. At each opportunity, Matthiessen emphasizes the affective over the merely abstract. Note, for a final example, his stirring tribute to a speech given by Hewlett Johnson, the dean of Canterbury, “a very tall and imposing old man,” who is in Prague to receive an honorary degree: The light was strong on his face as he spoke. He was stating a faith, many violations of which can be cynically demonstrated by partisans of East or West. But it is a faith which I share. There is only one third way that a just man should accept between present-day Russia and present-day America, between—to give them their worst names—the dictator’s corruptions of the communist ideal and the capitalists’ corruptions of the democratic ideal. It would not be a compromise but a more complete socialism which would do justice both to the individual and society. (111)

Although Matthiessen summarizes Johnson’s argument here, he defends it only as an article of faith, a faith both hard-nosed and impractical, both realistic and utopian at once. What moves Matthiessen politically is the poetry, the passion, and the intensity of the moment. As with religious conviction, a critical politics is for Matthiessen unrelentingly passionate. Rather than outlining available options and eluding genuine dilemmas, such a politics squarely faces the brutality of the human predicament under oppressive regimes and counters them with a shared human passion; fervently optimistic, it nonetheless demands a justice that it admits may not be historically available. And it thinks in loving solidarity with the community. “A journal,” Matthiessen states in his preface, “inevitably becomes a passage of autobiography. It possesses value only to the extent that it becomes representative 50

F. O . MAT THIES S EN’ S FRO M T H E H E ART OF EUROPE

also of what others are thinking” (v). Matthiessen is sometimes charged with being too impersonal a writer, too heterosexist, even, and his prose is admittedly circumspect when it comes to his own sexual liaisons. Yet From the Heart of Europe is his most deeply personal book, and the scenes he recounts are imbued with a passion that is at once erotic, literary, and political, and stands as testimony to the wholeness that was at the center of his ethics. As such, it might also help to illuminate some of his other critical comments, and help us to rethink his own continuously evolving relationship to the central texts of, for example, American Renaissance. Matthiessen recalls an early incident while he was a Rhodes scholar at Oxford, an episode that helps to shift his critical project away from British literature to his own native tradition. The scenario might be lifted from an Eakins painting: I was first rebuffed and then angered by the Oxford boys’ ignorant scorn of America, by what finally struck me as a colossal provincialism on their part. At last I could laugh at it, as on the day when I had moored a canoe under the bank of the Isis and was reading, while two English acquaintances from New College had decided to strip and have a naked swim. Just then a punt with some other English undergraduates and their girls and gramophone came unexpectedly around the bend, and the boy managing the pole cried out instinctively, “How disgusting! They must be Americans!” (23)

Immediately he segues into a discussion of American writing, and Whitman in particular. It was his early reading of Whitman’s “The Children of Adam” and “Calamus,” Matthiessen recalls, that “helped me begin to trust the body” (23). His politics are thoroughly Whitmanesque, a fact that has caused some consternation on the part of subsequent commentators. Given Matthiessen’s professed devotion to Whitman, such critics as Jay Grossman note that he neglects to treat the poet’s explicitly homoerotic “Calamus” in American Renaissance and that his remarks about homosexuality in that volume, if deeply ironic, seem somewhat disparaging. Of Hawthorne, for example, Matthiessen highlights “the tenderness mixed in with his strength, an almost feminine passivity, which many of his friends noted and Alcott expressed in his own way by asking: ‘was he some damsel imprisoned in that manly form pleading always for release?’ ” (230). Even more damningly, he writes of Whitman that “in the passivity of the poet’s body there is a quality vaguely pathological and homosexual. This is in keeping with the regressive, infantile fluidity, imaginatively polyperverse, which breaks down all mature barriers, a little further on in ‘Song of Myself,’ to declare that he is ‘maternal as well as paternal, a child as well as a man.’ Nevertheless, this fluidity of sexual sympathy made possible Whitman’s fallow receptivity to life” (American Renaissance 535). In Grossman’s rather ingenious reading of this passage (the concluding sentence of which Grossman pointedly does not quote), Matthiessen “disciplines” and “disparages” Whitman, finally displacing him with 51

F. O . MAT THIES S EN’ S FRO M T H E H E ART OF EUROPE

Thoreau as public democratic hero in the book, in order to maintain and preserve the invaluable secrecy of gay intimacy.19 Rather, for Grossman, his reserve was itself erotically charged: “The substitution of Thoreau for Whitman preserves Whitman for Cheney and Matthiessen themselves, even as the exclusion of ‘Calamus’ from American Renaissance keeps those poems safe from public scrutiny. Whitman serves as a central feature of this couple’s ‘unknown wealth, untold wealth of love,’ set apart in a closet built for two. The pathologizing of Walt Whitman in American Renaissance is itself a defense of queer marriage— Cheney’s and Matthiessen’s” (825). Further, such gestures on Matthiessen’s part accentuate a traditionally energizing, if at times highly troubling, tension within gay aesthetics, a tension at times figured as that between out and in-timacy, but often as the tension between a dramatically hypermasculinized performance of male love and a presumably passive, effeminate, or even faggish abjection (the precise contours and defining features of this tension will vary, of course, in different cultural performances within distinct historical junctures).20 In another letter, the young Matthiessen writes, forthrightly, to Cheney: Going into the cathedral this morning we passed a workman—husky broadshouldered, 40, the perfect Chaucerian yeoman. . . . Afterwards while I was standing alone in the choir he came up and said: “Fine old building, sir.” His voice was unusually gentle, his eye a dark full brown. We stood there talking a quarter of a minute, and as he went on I deliberately let my elbow rub against his belly. That was all: there couldn’t have been anything more. I didn’t want anything more. I was simply attracted by him as a simple open-hearted feller, and wanted to feel the touch of his body as a passing gesture. I had a hard on but there was no question of not wanting to keep myself for you. (Rat and the Devil 124)

The letter renders in mis-en-scène every element of Matthiessen’s singularly defining fantasmatic: the Christian timbre, the imposing and awing presence of monumental cultural achievements, constructed, Matthiessen imagines, by a community of workers as burly and lovely and simple as the specimen he has the great fortune to touch; the liminal, accordion-like collapse of past and present; and, most notably, the intimate somatic reserve with which he feels compelled to fondle such treasures. Adumbrated here are all Matthiessen’s obsessions, the complete “turn-on,” which he would later finesse into a critical historical and political campaign of democratic eroticism. Matthiessen reads the social gospel like the dirty book it is; his Christianity itself emphasized eros over agape, or, more precisely, acknowledged their mutual interdependence. “The second of the two great commandments, to love thy neighbor as thyself, seems to me an imperative to social action” (From the Heart of Europe 82). In Matthiessen’s work, cross-class and even international allegiances are dynamic, tactile, sensually homoerotic, and 52

F. O . MAT THIES S EN’ S FRO M T H E H E ART OF EUROPE

can be deployed into political affiliations, a mustering of camaraderie that sexually charges communal political activism, an activism that by 1950, in a very real sense, no longer had a place. And Whitman? In a tribute to the joyousness of his life’s work, Matthiessen concludes at length: What makes Whitman the central figure in our literature affirming the democratic faith is that he does full justice, as no one else does, to all three elements in the classic French articulation of that faith. Liberty and equality can remain intellectual abstractions if they are not permeated with the warmth of fraternity. The bleakness and the loneliness of so many American lives, at all economic levels, give ample testimony to that. Whitman knew, through the heartiness of his temperament, as Emerson did not, that the deepest freedom does not come from isolation. It comes instead from taking part in the common life, mingling in its hopes and failures, and helping to reach a more adequate realization of its aims, not for one alone, but for the community. Something like this was what Whitman had in mind when he said that his “great word,” the one that moved him most, was “solidarity.” (90)

Despite a tendency on the part of subsequent critics to disassociate sexuality from politics, a tendency that both Bergman and Grossman target, and then to lay the blame for that repression at Matthiessen’s feet, at issue here is the ubiquitous machinery of repression (aesthetically and politically hetero-normative and liberal), which inextricably linked class and sexual politics. In May Sarton’s 1955 treatment of Matthiessen, Faithful Are the Wounds, for example, we confront a fictionalized Matthiessen who is sardonic, bitter, intense, repressed, and deeply wounded. As we are never granted the perspective of the fictionalized Matthiessen, the Harvard professor Edward Caven, the novel depicts the trajectory of the life and the echo of the death more than the life itself. The only glimpse we get of Matthiessen’s sexual proclivities are politically figured: “He would go to one of those bars in Scollay Square . . . carrying his word solidarity like a banner which no one could see, drink with the sailors who called him Professor and treated him like a harmless drunk, walk the streets half the night, and then not sleep” (132).21 After Caven’s death, the character Grace Kimlock ponders: “a suicide is not a simple death, bringing peace with it. It haunts, it asks a question” (144).22 Upon Matthiessen’s death, the machinery of the Cold War swung into action, and a struggle ensued to answer that question, a struggle carried out within the confines of Cold War logic, a question that continues to haunt us. The Boston Herald published a gleefully mean-spirited list of the “subversive” organizations Matthiessen belonged to and committees on which he served or to which he lent his name; friends at the Monthly Review responded with a memorial issue of the journal he had helped to finance. 53

F. O . MAT THIES S EN’ S FRO M T H E H E ART OF EUROPE

While Matthiessen’s reputation certainly suffered from this controversy and the embarrassment occasioned by his political activism, his sexuality, and his choice to commit suicide, it might be more accurate to say that the loyalties he embodied “disappeared” from the landscape (just as an independent Czechoslovakia would be tossed into the rubbish bin of history). The complex critical, ideological, and sexual apparatus of the Cold War simply erased such options from consideration, and Matthiessen’s posthumous place in literary criticism is symptomatic of this foreclosure.23 Matthiessen is typically presented to us, even by the most sympathetic of readers, under the sign of failure, as a brief survey of more recent scholarship indicates. Jonathan Arac, writing in 1985, sums up the critical consensus, arguing that Matthiessen’s literary criticism, his leftism, and his love life “do not . . . offer an occasion for the rhetoric of ‘wholeness,’ even though that rhetoric was extremely important to Matthiessen himself ” (91).24 Matthiessen’s final years especially have been singled out as representing a decline in his critical powers: “Matthiessen finally found it impossible to maintain this balance for himself ” (193), writes Giles Gunn in one of the few book-length studies devoted to Matthiessen. In another, devoted to his politics, William Cain saddles him with the failure to integrate his political commitments with his cultural criticism, a note that resounds in virtually all commentary.25 It seems that at the heart of Matthiessen’s work was an immense set of contradictions, which, however much he strived for integrity, honesty, and wholeness, he was, tragically, unable to surmount.26 Further evidence is provided by Alfred Kazin, who had been with Matthiessen at Salzburg and who, while he initially contributed an appreciative memorial to the Monthly Review tribute, was later to revise his opinion. Matthiessen, it seemed, had gotten angry with a secretary who interrupted his class; he was, moreover, a corrupter of youth: “I have never known another teacher whose influence on students had so many harsh personal and political consequences. His suicide in 1950 was to magnify this” (168), writes Kazin in his 1978 book, New York Jew.27 Richard Pells’s recent appraisal of the same territory is infinitely more sober, although he argues that the popular front promotion of an either/or choice between freedom and totalitarianism had come home to roost in McCarthyism, and that castigated liberals were to some extent hoist by their own petard. Pease, in his lengthy article “Moby Dick and the Cold War,” has seized upon this proposition to claim that Matthiessen, rather than a Stalinoid lackey and dupe, was a proto-Cold Warrior. Here the cultural logic of the Cold War is read back against Matthiessen’s 1941 book. Pease’s reading of American Renaissance establishes that Matthiessen was forced to “silence” or “repress” specific political possibilities. His failure to combine political commitment with cultural criticism stemmed from the necessity to outline and present an American tradition that, as early as the late 1930s, dramatized and oversimplified the choice between freedom and totalitarianism. Such logic would become endemic during the Cold War 54

F. O . MAT THIES S EN’ S FRO M T H E H E ART OF EUROPE

and helped to solidify a stunningly ubiquitous—if not omnipotent—consensus, Pease points out, but was already prefigured by the popular front opposition to fascism. Matthiessen was thus compelled to mute more radical gestures of dissent, including those he might have wanted to have offered and articulated in less stressful times, by underscoring and capitulating to a nationalist sense of wholeness and purpose.28 For Pease, by “silenc[ing] his dissent” (118), Matthiessen’s self-censorship performed a kind of auto-McCarthyism on itself; a concerted attack on the enemy within, a purge of the pernicious, contagious.29 Again, Matthiessen is blamed for “closeting” himself. What’s going on in such readings? What, precisely, are the options being foreclosed here? What is going on is homophobia. More precisely, such readings transfer sexual anxiety back onto Matthiessen’s own text. Through a more or less transferential mechanism of reading, Matthiessen is rendered guilty of personifying the very forces that were mobilized against him. For William O’Neill, inevitably, “Matthiessen was a homosexual and tormented by it” (181); Kenneth Lynn, “struck by Matthiessen’s silence . . . on the subject of homosexuality,” puts forth the thesis that “Matthiessen’s own sex life was a guilt-ridden horror to him. So full of revulsion was he that he could barely pronounce the word homosexuality, let alone release his feelings through candid discussions” (116).30 In his companion piece to Pease’s essay, Jonathan Arac underlines the same: what is repressed in Matthiessen’s work is precisely his erotic politics, which are evidenced only in his private letters to Cheney. “To create the centrally authoritative critical identity of American Renaissance, much had to be scattered or disavowed. Loose elbows had to be tucked in” (92). Loose elbows, as in the caress of the workingman’s belly in the above passage.31 And thus Michael Cadden concurs that “ ‘Matthiessen lacked or resisted a critical vocabulary that could translate his democratic politics into the writing of literary history.’ . . . [He] also . . . lacked a sexual politics that could allow him to connect his many kinds of work and the life he led with Russell Cheney” (34).32 It will remain for Bergman, in “F. O. Matthiessen: The Critic as Homosexual,”33 one of the few wholly sympathetic treatments of Matthiessen available, to highlight the double bind in which gay critics and teachers were— and are—placed: “if they comment on homosexuality, they are accused of projecting their personal issues in the classroom; if they remain silent, they are accused of self-loathing.”34 Bergman concludes that Matthiessen’s “difference laid on him a special burden to advance society toward the democratic vista which awaited it” (82). It was a burden he self-consciously shouldered. Whether democratic vistas await any of us, of course, remains to be seen, and to be worked for. While it is certainly valid to raise questions about the complex relationships among Matthiessen’s sexuality, his radical politics, his aesthetic criticism, and his own historical predicament, the problem is that too often the critical reading of his work is transmuted into a personal judgment of his life. And, 55

F. O . MAT THIES S EN’ S FRO M T H E H E ART OF EUROPE

in all justice, we should be extremely cautious when it comes to judging lives. Why the harshness, why the venom? And why should tensions, turmoils, or contradictions, however irreconcilable, be “unwholesome,” be a mark of failure, or signal a lack of integrity? As John Rackliffe has suggested, contradictions might be a blessing: “Burdened, perhaps even endowed, with these inner contradictions, Matty faced an outer world equally and fiercely full of contradictions” (76). Among the other lessons we might learn from Matthiessen, at least, is that integrity, passion, and a desire for “wholeness” need in no way be opposed to heterogeneity or the complex erotic diaspora of love throughout political and cultural commitments. As I hope to have demonstrated, however, appraisals of whatever ideological stripe by Matthiessen’s contemporaries and more recently have tended to repersonalize the political; they have sought to overcome a Cold War disassociation of sensibility—the either/or logic that would police distinctions among the personal, political, sexual, and cultural—by projecting it, with relative degrees of dread, back onto Matthiessen or his writings. That is, Matthiessen is figured as the very embodiment of the Cold War distortions and evasions he contested. Matthiessen was witness, rather, to the full dissolution of the very terrain of alternative utterance, against which he cogently and candidly protested. To blame him for the endemic disfigurements of nascent McCarthyism and its aftermath is unconscionable, at best. Figured (and ineluctably judged thereby) as dupe, protagonist, victim, or even martyr, Matthiessen is reduced to nothing more than a fall guy. My own tour of the heart of Europe after the reputed end of the Cold War has convinced me that Matthiessen was right at least about this: a great deal was lost. I won’t say it need not have been; that would be a reductive dismissal of both historical necessity and contingency. Nor will I say, with Strˇíbrný, that there was no other way. Somewhere in the realm between those verdicts are myriad potentials, however, which might be repossessed. Somewhere in between, Matthiessen’s revenant ghost continues to haunt. To honor its presence and to mourn its loss are to acknowledge and to repossess and yet to suspend (lovingly, if possible) our own right to possession, our own right to judge the inevitable destiny of any life. And as Matthiessen might say, much of our history remains unwritten.

56

CHAPTER THREE

W HAT ’S BL ACK AND WH ITE AND R ED ALL OVER? The Cold War and the Geopolitics of Race

Give us a peace equal to the war Or else our souls will be unsatisfied And we will wonder what we have fought for And why the many died. Give us a peace accepting every challenge— The challenge of the poor, the black, of all denied, The challenge of the vast colonial world That long has had so little justice by its side. —L AN GSTON HU G HE S, “Give Us Our Peace”

W. E. B. Du Bois opens his posthumously published autobiography with a description of his “15th Trip Abroad,” begun in August 1958, during which he “saw something of Britain, Holland and France; then in the Fall and early Winter, I lived in the Soviet Union, resting a part of the time in a sanatorium. In the Winter and Spring I was three months in China, and then returned to Moscow for May Day. I visited the tenth session of the World Council of Peace in Stockholm, and finally stayed a month in England. On July 1, 1959, I came home.” He mentions this journey, he claims, “because it was one of the most important trips I had ever taken, and had a wide influence on my thought” (Autobiography 12). Indeed, this last of his four autobiographies is largely a paean to the character-forming and consciousness-expanding potential of travel itself; in chapter 16, “My Character,” Du Bois asserts, in a rather stiff, old-fashioned way, that “my attitude toward current problems arose from my long habit of keeping in touch with world affairs by repeated trips to Europe and other parts of the world. I became internationally minded during my four years at Harvard. . . . Since that first trip in 1892, I have made fifteen trips to Europe, one of which circled the globe. I have been in most European countries and traveled in Asia, 57

T HE COL D WAR AND THE G EOP OL ITICS O F RACE

Africa, and the West Indies. Travel became a habit” (286). With the snobbish assurance of the cultivated, Du Bois repeatedly targets American provincialism: “Of greatest importance was the opportunity which my Wanderjahre in Europe gave of looking at the world as a man and not simply from a narrow racial and provincial outlook” (158). Of his initial excursion to the American South and encounter with Jim Crow–era poverty, Du Bois, a New Englander, recalls that “the experience was invaluable. I traveled not only in space but in time” (114). Du Bois’s striking and repeated emphasis on the causal connection between his own personal mobility and his maneuverability as both public intellectual and partisan reaffirms his status, as Eric Sundquist points out, as an early theorist of diaspora (15), whose very inability to be “at home” within cultural traditions was the enabling, if oxymoronically unsettling, foundation of all his thinking. Even the classic 1903 The Souls of Black Folk, as Priscilla Wald asserts, “offers an exuberant aesthetics of uncertainty” (236) with regard to its pleas for national belonging. When, in 1967, Harold Cruse diagnosed the “crisis” of African American intellectuals as stemming from their ambivalent position vis-à-vis race and class and from their consequent incapacity to generate political and cultural affiliations organically, in Gramsci’s sense of the term, he describes precisely Du Bois’s intellectual exile: “In the detached social world of the intellectuals, a considerable amount of racial integration and ethnic intermingling does take place on a social level. While the Negro intellectual is not fully integrated into the intellectual class stratum, he is, in the main, socially detached from his own Negro ethnic world” (9).1 Cruse’s observation is verified in an incident that illustrated, as Du Bois phrases it, “the paradox of my life.” About 1950, Du Bois swallowed his pride and agreed to meet his former student, Robert Morss Lovett, at Lovett’s whites-only Harvard Club (Autobiography 288).2 The melancholy sense of multidimensional alienation is visible as early as his famed 1903 formulation of “double-consciousness”: “Why did God make me an outcast and a stranger in mine own house?” Du Bois laments. Yet “this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others” (Souls 364) necessarily results in an unappeasable, labile, critical consciousness, which will be radically transformed in his later encounters with Marxist thinking. From the 1930s, when Du Bois is “radicalized,” through to 1963, this literal and metaphorical “homelessness,” coupled with his own contrarian disposition and his lifelong fiscal precariousness, will in many ways enable his late project of formulating a singular resistance to emergent Cold War pieties.3 Even New York, the “home” to which he returned in 1959, was not to remain so for very long. After first visiting Ghana in 1960, Du Bois moved there the following year and became a citizen in 1963, the year of his death. Just before the move, he had, after long dalliance, become a member of the CPUSA. When he died, the Wall Street Journal ’s obituary pointed out that despite his celebrity and international recognition, “his former associates saw little of him and today 58

T HE COL D WAR AND THE G EOP OL ITICS O F RACE

they dismiss his communism as an eccentricity of his old age. ‘You really have to forget about the last years of Du Bois’ life,’ one of his old friends remarks” (qtd. in Horne 357).4 This “forgetting” has largely persisted in Du Bois scholarship, recent calls for a renewed and deeper appreciation of his life’s work notwithstanding. The deep connections between the radical black labor and Communist activities of the 1930s and 1940s tend to be swept under the carpet in “official” American historiography, and the Red heritage of the postwar black struggle has almost entirely “disappeared” from public memory. Though often honored for his crucial participation in Pan-African politics and the nascent peace movement he worked so hard to help inaugurate, Du Bois’s double expatriation from the United States and from the mainstream rhetoric of liberal antiracism of the 1950s and 1960s is replicated by scholarly neglect of such late works as the autobiography or his socialist-realist trilogy, The Black Flame.5 Those commentators who have critically assessed Du Bois’s Communism either do so apologetically—it is not an easy task, of course, to defend someone who ended his long life as an unregenerate Stalinist—or, as with Sundquist, tend to conclude their discussion with assessments of his pre-Marxist work. Even David Lewis’s deeply sympathetic two-volume biography grants a mere 18 pages out of over 1,100 to the last thirteen years of Du Bois’s life. A notable exception to the evasion of Du Bois’s Communism is Cedric Robinson’s monumental Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition, which itself, however, focuses entirely on the 1935 Black Reconstruction in America.6 For Robinson, Black Reconstruction represents the most theoretically innovative, definitive, and daunting of Du Bois’s scholarly productions, in which Du Bois distances himself from the petit bourgeois “racial uplift” vanguardism of his “Talented Tenth” years; injects race into Marxian historiography by asserting that “the preservation of the capitalist world system, its very expansion in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, had involved the absorption of new sources of labor power not by their conversion into wage labor, but by coercion” (Robinson 239); and consequently commits himself to the revolutionary potential of the race consciousness of the enslaved black masses. In the end of his opening chapter, Du Bois nails down “the real modern labor problem”: “Out of the exploitation of the dark proletariat comes the Surplus Value filched from human beasts which, in cultured lands, the Machine and harnessed Power veil and conceal. The emancipation of man is the emancipation of labor and the emancipation of labor is the freeing of that basic majority of workers who are yellow, brown, or black” (Black Reconstruction 16). While I am deeply indebted to Robinson’s recognition of the importance of this move on Du Bois’s part, I am likewise interested in the ways that Du Bois would finesse his own position during the Cold War, when he resisted considerable pressures to backtrack. To cite a final example of the slight to Du Bois’s 59

T HE COL D WAR AND THE G EOP OL ITICS O F RACE

later ideas, let me consider the 1986 Library of America edition of Du Bois’s writings, which is equally mum on Du Bois’s thinking after World War II. While omitting Black Reconstruction, the Library of America volume contains his equally revolutionary, if tactically anti-Communist, 1940 memoir, Dusk of Dawn, and closes with his collection of short essays, ending with his resignation letter written the first time he was drummed out of the NAACP in 1934. At this point in his thinking, recognizing that persistent race-based economic exploitation is the key problem of the second half of the twentieth century,7 Du Bois advocates Pan-African economic planning. He would later go on to point out that the Cold War was largely an ideological ruse; the postwar world order rather cemented a global system of economic exploitation, where the first world generates wealth by exploiting the labor and natural resources of third world people of color—today, a brief survey of the history of, say, Nigeria would make such claims hard to dispute. Consequently, anticolonial struggles would need to recognize the global economic stakes and would have to transcend a merely nationalist political orientation. Du Bois’s turn to Communism did not, then, mark a departure from his early ideas, but an expansion and evolution. During the Depression, standing “between paths diverging to extreme communism and violence on the one hand, and extreme reaction toward plutocracy on the other” (Dusk of Dawn 774), he recounts, “I tried to say to the American Negro: . . . you must work together and in unison; you must evolve and support your own social institutions; you must transform your attack from the foray of selfassertive individuals to the massed might of an organized body. You must put behind your demands, not simply American Negroes, but west Indians and Africans, and all the colored races of the world” (776). Understandably, such a position, which marked a clear departure from the principles of the Niagara movement, were anathema to the NAACP in 1934; when he was “rehabilitated” by the organization a decade later, the expectation, according to Lewis, was that he would “settle comfortably into the margins and say ‘a proper word now and then and give the association and its secretary [Walter White] moral support’ ” (498). Such was not to be the case, as was to prove embarrassing for the NAACP and which, seemingly, continues to embarrass. The postwar work of Du Bois was—and remains—a vexing and largely unexplored problem. The aims of my argument, then, are twofold. Initially, I suggest that much of the daunting body of Du Bois’s postwar activist, literary, and theoretical work remains compelling and might best be understood as a provocative and engaged critical response to the global Cold War, which itself can hardly be analyzed without a keen eye to its racial dimensions. Though perhaps a minor incident within the panoramic social construction of Cold War consensus in the United States between 1946 and 1951, for example, the very public ouster of Du Bois from the NAACP for the second time, in 1948, was symptomatic of the emerging global ideological and racial configurations of the Cold War.8 The Red-baiting of 60

T HE COL D WAR AND THE G EOP OL ITICS O F RACE

Du Bois and other black leaders was part of a calculated compromise on the part of the NAACP with the Truman administration, in which the NAACP promised noninterference with the U.S. policies abroad in exchange for the support of liberal Cold Warriors on civil rights measures at home. Ultimately, I argue that what might be termed the itinerant critical consciousness so deliberately cultivated by Du Bois in his travels contested the either/or logic of Cold War rhetoric that pitted an admittedly flawed “freedom” against Soviet-style “totalitarianism,” a rhetoric that would dominate the postwar struggles of colonized populations. Du Bois’s late work can also be understood as offering an alternative but equally committed and antiracist vision to the politics of identity and location that underwrote much of the civil rights movement and the early New Left. Despite an equivocal assessment of Thurgood Marshall’s decision to inform the FBI on “communist infiltration of civil rights organization” (148) and their “regrettable” treatment of Du Bois, Gilbert Jonas, in his recent celebratory history, has characterized the NAACP’s accommodation to anti-Communist hysteria as “adept,” strategically and tactically sensible, and largely successful: The NAACP’s success in separating its views, policies and membership from those of the CPUSA established the Association as a responsible, constructive force, committed to internal democracy, as well as to democracy throughout the nation and abroad. Its bona fides thus established, the NAACP was able to command the respect and the growing support of the huge middle-of-theroad electorate and of the liberals who began to listen both with open minds and hearts as the NAACP spelled out the compelling case for first-class citizenship for Negroes to the American people in the decade following the end of World War II. Its message would also resonate well with the vast majority of American Negroes who were wedded to the goals of the American Dream and the values of the Constitution. (147–48)9

Seemingly vindicating, in retrospect, the NAACP’s 1950 resolution to take “necessary steps to eradicate communist infiltration” (148) would be the Truman administration’s rather toothless support of civil rights, the remarkable 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision, the coalitions of northern support (Congress of Racial Equality, Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, Students for a Democratic Society) for the lunch-counter sit-ins, the Montgomery bus boycott, the freedom riders, other early public demonstrations of the civil rights movement, and ultimately the congressional passing of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which marked what Jonas terms the “zenith” of the NAACP’s “political influence” (201).10 By contrast, Thomas Borstelmann’s encyclopedic survey of the same history offers the inarguable verdict that when Du Bois, Paul Robeson, and William Patterson lost their passports, “a credible, coherent black left sank below 61

T HE COL D WAR AND THE G EOP OL ITICS O F RACE

the surface of American political life, as the chilly waters of the Cold War closed over it” (67). Borstelmann’s point is, of course, debatable. Even if driven underground, the black Left in America survived McCarthyism and reemerged in various ways during the Black Arts and Black Power movements of the 1960s and 1970s. And while Du Bois, like Paul Robeson, was unable to attend the 1955 Bandung Conference inaugurating the Non-Aligned movement, the alliances among the newly independent states in Africa, Asia, and parts of Latin America dramatized for many African American intellectuals the possibility of decolonization carried out apart from the aegis of the Cold War division of the globe between superpowers and provided a model for global solidarity among peoples of color; this internationalism would, in turn, become extremely important to critics of American involvement in Southeast Asia.11 For his part—and despite an initial enthusiasm for the United Nations coupled with his immeasurable surprise and delight at the Brown decision—Du Bois found it increasingly impossible to compromise with the emerging Cold War consensus. He and other black radicals continued to lock horns with Eleanor Roosevelt over the language that would go into the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights.12 His postwar position, as it crystallized very quickly, was simple enough. Du Bois begins with a condemnation of capitalism; if the postwar realignment represented the defeat of crude racist ideologies and offered the opportunities of decolonization and new global co-operative political networks, it also ran the risk of simply opening up the third world to the continual expansion of the global exploitation of “colored” labor. Thus the “basis of political life must be economic,” Du Bois asserted, again and again, in the few organs, like Masses and Mainstream, that he found willing to publish his views (“From McKinley to Wallace” 597). The second plank in his platform was the relentless advocacy of global democracy, buttressed by his impatience with Western powers’ reluctance to abandon colonialism. In the 1945 polemic Color and Democracy, Du Bois asks the rhetorical question, “How far are we working for a world where the peoples who are ruled are going to have effective voice in their governments?” (qtd. in Lewis 502). If the postwar economic boom, in which a rising tide lifted the fortunes of many segregated boats, further reinforced the color line as middle-class capital abandoned the “inner city,” the same pattern would be replicated globally according to the economic logic of the Marshall Plan. “Colonies are the slums of the world” (Color and Democracy 538), Du Bois insisted, drawing an explicit link between colonization and the postwar production of the “inner city.” Postwar processes of suburbanization redrew geographic boundaries along the lines of economic distributions of wealth and concentrations of poverty, in a similar fashion to the global North/South axis. He viewed the dwindling cooperation between the West and the Soviet Union between 1945 and 1948 as a great 62

T HE COL D WAR AND THE G EOP OL ITICS O F RACE

opportunity to come to grips with economic justice (which is to say racial justice) squandered. If, as he had argued a decade earlier, the “peculiar institution” of slavery was not an agrarian historical aberration but was rather viewed as a “microcosm of the world system,” then the primary struggle in the newly globalized postwar world could not be won merely through the extension of civil rights to African Americans (an obviously necessary politics); the struggle had to be global in turn. As Robinson points out, during the second half of the twentieth century, “the advanced sectors of the world economy could expand just so long as they could dominate and rationalize by brute force the exploitation of essentially nonindustrial agrarian labor” (239). It was this fundamental global political struggle that Cold War anti-Communism, both in its racist reactionary as well as in its progressive antiracist postures, obscured. Consequently, Du Bois argued, those in the civil rights movement were, in the 1950s and early 1960s, at least, short-sighted in placing tactical goals above the effort to link their organizing and judicial efforts to a critique of world capitalism and to third and second world struggles. Finally, Du Bois pointed out the uncomfortable truth that it would take long years of laboring in the trenches for the Brown decision to result in measurable social effects. Once again, he made a little economic determinism—a counterballast to the spurious ideology of “freedomism” that underwrote Cold War liberalism—go a long way; there would be no revolutionary change in race-consciousness, he asserted, without an accompanying project of economic justice. Du Bois understood that the battlefields of the Cold War would be primarily located in the third world, and that the majority of its victims would be people of color. As Robert McMahon reminds us, “all but 200,000 of the estimated 20 million people that died in wars fought between 1945 and 1990 were felled in conflicts that raged across various parts of the Third World” (57). The third major aspect of Du Bois’s postwar work, consequently, was pacifism. In a 1957 radio interview, Du Bois conceded, “There was a time when I thought that the only way in which progress could be made in the world was by violence. I thought that the only way that the darker people were going to get recognition was by killing a large number of white people. But I think that most of us are beginning to realize that that is not true, that the violence that accompanies revolution is not the revolution” (“Interview” 702–3). I won’t detail the shabbiness with which Du Bois was personally treated; he was largely persona non grata among Left-liberal circles, and was, somewhat sadly, compelled to witness the gratifying culmination of his lifelong work in the civil rights movement from the sidelines, although he was of far too immense a stature to ever be unequivocally blacklisted. Even so, in light of what I have said earlier about travel, it should come as no surprise that, in a society ideally determined to protect the right of freedom of speech, and committed to globalization, ideological policing assumed—and still assumes—the disciplinary function 63

T HE COL D WAR AND THE G EOP OL ITICS O F RACE

of “regulating” (in very complex ways) one’s mobility (as even the ostensibly apolitical Beats intuited at the time: the struggle was all about “movement,” in every sense of the word). In earlier Red scares, the federal government had deported such dissidents as Emma Goldman; the thinking was that firebrands and agitators were best kept at a safe distance from national labor and other social movements. While there were to be rather silly Cold War equivalents of the Palmer raids—the banning of books written by Du Bois and others such as Langston Hughes and Herman Melville at United States Information Agency (USIA) mission libraries abroad springs to mind—technologies of repression were, very quickly, to become increasingly sophisticated. The Trotskyite labor organizer, leader of the Johnson-Forest tendency, and writer C. L. R. James, who was deported, is an interesting case in point.13 James’s Mariners, Renegades, and Castaways: The Story of Herman Melville and the World We Live In makes a strong case for the revolutionary potential of the nomadic multitude by recasting Melville’s increasingly iconic American text.14 Published in 1952, penned while the author was imprisoned at Ellis Island for “passport violations,” pitting the rabble insurgency of the Pequod ’s crew against both the proto-totalitarianism of Ahab and the vacillating ineffectuality of Ishmael (whom James terms “an intellectual Ahab”), and offered to the public, in part, as a plea for U.S. citizenship, James’s populist tract reads at once as a critical diagnosis of ascendant technologies of repression mobilized by the Cold War and as a popular summons to map a detour through the increasingly sclerotic configurations of personal and political life at midcentury. James’s reading of Melville mobilizes a theoretically astute oppositional strategy to Nadel’s “culture of containment,” which policed ideological waywardness precisely through the complex regulations of space and mobility in the United States and globally. As I have argued, the critical space to negotiate a geopolitical or cultural alternative to the Cold War divide between a spurious “freedomism” and totalitarianism had been decisively whittled away by 1952; even as late as the 1980s, James would lament of his important study that “publishers don’t publish it.” Parallel to the late work of Du Bois, James’s emphasis on the transnational dimensions of Melville offers another roadmap for thinking through the perplexities of globalization and diasporic practices in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. As Donald Pease underscores in his introduction to Mariners, “the irreducible differences and inequivalent cultural features characterizing the ‘mariners, castaways and renegades’ would not conform to a state’s monocultural taxonomy and could not be integrated within a nationalizing telos” (xxviii). If an awareness of the transformational potential of these latent, mobile differences embodied in the motley crew of sailors aboard the Pequod was submerged in the shipwreck of McCarthyism, it has resurfaced, with something of a symptomatic vengeance, with the deracinated flotsam and jetsam of the New World dis-Order. 64

T HE COL D WAR AND THE G EOP OL ITICS O F RACE

And the list goes on. Paul Robeson. William Patterson. Richard Wright, in Paris, played an elaborately paranoid cat-and-mouse game with the State Department, and Du Bois, indicted in 1951 under the Foreign Agents Registration Act of 1938, was denied a passport for six years. As Hazel Rowley elaborates, The United States was now in a position of global eminence; it was impossible to leave its orbit behind. To the extent that Wright had an American passport, an American literary agent, an American publisher, American readers, and American friends and associates, he was deeply affected by the fear, conservatism, paranoia, and guilt by association generated by the McCarthyist terror of the ’50s. The tentacles of the State Department reached easily across the Atlantic. For American writers who had any association with Communism, past or present, and for American writers who insisted that they had the right to criticize their country, the term cold war proved terrifyingly apt. Publishers were cold about their books, and the threat of poverty was chilling.

This ad hoc but perversely consistent complex of policies delineates the global stakes of the Cold War in precisely the ways Du Bois felt compelled to critique. Among its other devastations, the Cold War was effective in deliberately snuffing out transnational intellectual production. Communism was something understood to be combated both abroad and at home. Second, the history delineates some of the contours of both the racial and the cultural fronts on which the Cold War was being fought. If the war pitted Stalinism and the Soviet Union against the West and freedom, then it was the hearts, minds, and bodies of third world populations of color, as Du Bois pointed out early and often, that would bear the brunt of the suffering, in Asia, in Africa, and in the Caribbean and Latin America. Finally, Du Bois’s treatment testifies to a considerable extent to the relationship between mobility and the development of acute critical consciousness. As Du Bois pointed out in Color and Democracy, “empires do not want nosy busybodies snooping into their territories and business. Visitors to colonies are, to be sure, allowed and even encouraged; but their tours are arranged, officials guide them in space and in thought, and they usually see what the colonial powers want them to see and little more. Dangerous ‘radicals’ are rigorously excluded” (540). Du Bois is speaking in literal, geographic terms; but the point holds and is even more pertinent if understood metaphorically. Alan Nadel, in Containment Culture, is entirely on target when he points to the ways in which “personal narration oscillates, situationally, between identification with and alienation from a historical order.” Further, Nadel continues, “in this regard, the American cold war is a particularly useful example of the power of large cultural narratives to unify, codify, and contain—perhaps intimidate is the best word—the personal narratives of its population” (4). If “containment” summarizes both a geo-political and social strategy of the early Cold War years, 65

T HE COL D WAR AND THE G EOP OL ITICS O F RACE

then it was to be attained through rigorous management tactics of regulating one’s theoretical and bodily mobility. Du Bois has been effectively “contained,” insofar as he is typically treated as a mythic figure today and celebrated for his earlier writings. Yet his radical ideas from the Cold War years articulate cultural and theoretical alternatives and potentials, linking (via what Gilles Deleuze terms a “disjunctive synthesis”) the “Old” Left to the New, the third world to the second and to the endocolonies and cultural ghettoes of the first, labor to the intelligentsia, white progressives to laborers of color, and the masses to the ivory towers. This resistance, this fugitive culture, can never be fully absorbed, intimidated, or assimilated into dominant cultural narratives of whatever New World Orders to which we are solicited, coerced, or bribed to subscribe. Edward Said has famously underlined the temperament of the intellectual “who, because of exile cannot, or more to the point, will not make the adjustment preferring instead to remain outside the mainstream, un-accommodated, un-co-opted, resistant” (52): The pattern that sets the course for the intellectual as outsider is best exemplified by the condition of exile, the state of never being fully adjusted, always feeling outside the chatty, familiar world inhabited by natives, so to speak, tending to avoid and even dislike the trappings of accommodation and national well-being. Exile for the intellectual in this metaphysical sense is restlessness, movement, constantly being unsettled, and unsettling others. (53)

Though Said has been faulted for overaccentuating the heroic voluntarism of this somewhat romantic figure, his description characterizes Du Bois to a T, down to Said’s comments about the “curmudgeonly disagreeableness” of such a thinker. Said’s emphasis, at least in his Reith lectures, and in keeping with his own posthumanist humanism, was on voluntarism; without devaluing the role that temperament or agency plays in anyone’s political, ethical, or intellectual activities, we should not neglect such ideological and historical wild cards as personality, temperament, passion, or volition, however overdetermined or culturally constructed they may be. Further, while it is no more than a truism to acknowledge that the personal is inextricably engaged in contemporaneous political struggles, the critical question is to unravel the precise ways in which this is so, if aspirations to liberty or justice for all are still to form the horizon of our intellectual work. In tribute, perhaps, to the inimitable relish with which Du Bois played the role of contrarian, heroic, public intellectual, I offer him the last word. His final comment crops up in his Autobiography when he is engaged in an effort to “depersonalize” his own views, with regard to his turn-of-thecentury debate with Booker T. Washington, and offers a term that is today again at the very center of our own political and intellectual struggles: “The 66

T HE COL D WAR AND THE G EOP OL ITICS O F RACE

total result was the history of our day. That History may be epitomized in one word—Empire; the domination of white Europe over black Africa and yellow Asia, through political power built on the economic control of labor, income, and ideas” (255). As Brent Hayes Edwards has argued, “attempts to articulate the ‘race problem as a world problem,’ in Locke’s phrase—to foster links among populations of African descent in order to organize the ‘darker peoples of the world’ across the boundaries of nation-states and languages—are necessarily skewed by those same boundaries. That is, the level of the international is accessed unevenly by subjects with different historical relations to the nation” (6–7). This “nationalist” confinement of intellectual and cultural practices was, rather paradoxically, enhanced by globalizing the Cold War. To demonstrate this in another way, let me turn now to Ralph Ellison’s celebrated 1952 novel, Invisible Man, a work that, as Alan Wald notes, “emerged from the contradictions of his convoluted deradicalization process” (Exiles 289). Ellison’s intellectual development,15 fictionalized and charted in this book, follows an entirely opposite trajectory to Du Bois’s: a Marxist in the 1930s, Ellison would, after 1942, increasingly champion both American pluralism and humanist existentialism, and as a novel of ideas, Invisible Man makes a compelling dramatic argument for this shift; Invisible Man provides an extensive critique of collectivism and in many ways champions mobility, even as it fulfills and exhausts the possibilities of representation and marks the collapse of a nationalized American novelistic project. In her extensive work on the anti-Communist dimensions of the novel, Barbara Foley has concluded that Ellison, while for a time a committed fellow traveler, was not a party member. In his magisterial new biography of Ellison, Arnold Rampersad follows Wald (Exiles 286–88) in concluding that Ellison probably was a member. Even so, all three concur that Ellison’s novel satirizes the party and is vitriolic in its denunciation of what Ellison saw as the Communist Party’s betrayal of African Americans when it joined the struggle against fascism.16 By the end of the novel, the narrator has become battered and disillusioned with all varieties of political action, and finds freedom rather in an expansive and refined critical consciousness, a classic move in American existential texts of the period. A universal and humanist poetic freedom—forging a form of utterance and expression adequate to one’s condition—comes to supplant political freedom—establishing one’s very right to voice within a discriminatory social terrain. Collectivism is abandoned, and the epilogue celebrates difference, diversity, spontaneity, and the uniquely American possibilities of individual self-styling, even if this endorsement of plurality is both a decidedly male privilege and is rendered as a fantasy of impotence. Though he promises a renewed commitment to “social responsibility,” the term has been undermined from the very start: in the opening “Battle Royal” chapter, the antiquated and self-serving slogans of Booker T. Washington are understood to have been compromised 67

T HE COL D WAR AND THE G EOP OL ITICS O F RACE

by what they surrender to the dominant social formation of white superiority; though he promises an end to his hibernation, Ellison never dramatizes the possibility, and the promises ring hollow. As prophet figure, the narrator, like the veteran medical doctor he has met earlier in the novel, bargains away his capacity to move freely in the world for the great prize of insight. Ellison’s point, in part, is that the game is racially rigged from the start: neither the vet nor Invisible Man ever could move freely. The specificity of racial injustice is always in tension with Ellison’s call to a universal and humanist freedom of conscience. Many critics find the ending frustrating, for this reason; any action aboveground would be a fool’s errand, for all action is compromised. An overriding moral of the novel is that once you enter the world of unjust social relations, you will inevitably be manipulated by others, and you will end up doing their bidding precisely at the moment when you feel yourself to be most free. The novel ends with affirmation, but the plot only provides evidence that, however humorously, compels us to despair, and Ellison’s existentialism only provides an uneasy way through this impasse. Yet read against the grain, so to speak, the novel also isolates and exhausts the “national” overcoding of black populations in movement. To show how this is so, and in keeping with my contention that the early years of the Cold War marked a crisis of cultural production itself, I venture again into the political history of narrative form. Read both as a text that conceptually thematizes its own historical moment and inquires into the cultural apparatus of representation, Invisible Man marks the very climax of any novel’s capacity to commandeer a national or international subject. According to anthropologist Arjun Appadurai, cultural production delineates “those differences that . . . express . . . the mobilization of group identities, [that] articulate the boundary of difference” (13). If, as such critics as Ernest Gellner, Eric Hobsbawm, and Benedict Anderson in various ways agree, modernity is indeed the work of nations, throughout the nineteenth and into the first half of the twentieth century, this cultural task has been largely shouldered by the modern novel, a genre that has been typically oriented toward the dissemination of national mores and identities; by critically “identifying” with the characters and values represented, readers come to know themselves as national subjects and citizens, as French, American, Polish, or what have you, and so align themselves within the posited regional, class, religious, linguistic, and gender codes of the emerging nation. In “The National Longing for Form,” Timothy Brennan writes that “it was especially the novel as a composite but clearly bordered work of art that was crucial in defining the nation as an imagined community” (48). The novel, he claims, “becomes a contemporary, practical means of creating a people” (50). In the United States, of course, that will mean measuring collective identity against the American narrative of individual self-creation, a point Ellison considers explicitly in his own effort to compose 68

T HE COL D WAR AND THE G EOP OL ITICS O F RACE

the great American novel. Recalling Stephen Daedalus’s determined project to take up this burden on behalf of the Irish, Ellison’s narrator rephrases his own mission according to his central trope of individuated visibility. He recalls his own English professor lecturing: “Stephen’s problem, like ours, was not actually one of creating the uncreated conscience of his race, but of creating the uncreated features of his face. Our task is that of making ourselves individuals. The conscious of a race is the gift of its individuals who see, evaluate record. . . . We create the race by creating ourselves and then to our great astonishment we will have created something far more important. We will have created a culture” (354). The passage highlights a resistance to racial stereotyping, and underscores the duties of the artist. Though the narrator has not yet arrived at a full understanding of what this project will mean, the English teacher stands as one in the novel’s long line of father figures, and when the narrator has established his birthright, his patrilineage, so to speak, he will assume the artist’s burden. According to Brennan, the novel accomplishes this nation-forming through the Bahktinian work of “heteroglossia” and “dialogism,” thereby uniting disparate regional, class, religious, and racial idioms in a common conversation. As a specifically modern form of cultural technology, the novel places an individual life-story within the dialectic of a people or nation, and so both protagonist and reader are, without sacrificing their uniqueness, embraced into the national fold: “Read in isolation, the novel was nevertheless a mass ceremony; one could read alone with the conviction that millions of others were doing the same, at the same time” (Brennan 52). Most important, readers are thereby interpellated within a historical lineage that orients individual behavior within a teleological framework; a racially oriented nineteenth-century historiography, we should recall, understood itself as describing the genius of nations as manifested in the “rise” of civilizations. The cultural mission of the modern novel was to toil in what Homi Bhabha calls the “pedagogical” project of nation-building: “the people are the historical ‘objects’ of a nationalist pedagogy, giving the discourse an authority that is based on the pre-given or constituted historical origin in the past” (145). In a polyglot country like the United States, whose artistic and political survival necessitated a balancing of homogeneity and difference, as such early theorists as William Dean Howells emphasized, the political temper of novels must therefore be democratic and inclusive, the aesthetic necessarily the deep realism of a geographically variegated vernacular. Even where these constructions are contested (and, as Bhabha insists, they always are), even when novels are deeply critical of entrenched political or social phenomena (as with the work of Charles Dickens, say, or Harriet Beecher Stowe or Mark Twain), such books tend to present progressive alternatives within an identifiably “national” framework (Huckleberry Finn serves as a prototype of the new post-Civil War American, for example, just as Nicholas Nickleby personifies a distinctively British progressive bourgeois liberalism; he is a “natural 69

T HE COL D WAR AND THE G EOP OL ITICS O F RACE

gentleman” coming of age in a society being forcibly stripped of a decadent and artificial class-system). “Every nation,” as Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri (following Deleuze and Guattari) insist, “must make the multitude into a people”: “The multitude is a multiplicity, a plane of singularities, an open set of relations, which is not homogenous or identical within itself and bears an indistinct, inclusive relation to those outside of it. The people, in contrast, tends toward identity and homogeneity internally while posing its difference from and excluding what is outside of it” (103). Even so, to remain with Bhabha’s theorizing for a moment, the performative or fugitive remains of a “splitting” (147) national subject elude narrative clampdown and slip, in Ralph Ellison’s resonant phrase, “outside the groove of history” (443). That is, a temporal disjunction emerges within modernist and nationalist narratives, so that any strategies deployed to capture a moment of time cannot fully encapsulate the heterogeneous and multitudinous “perplexity of living” (Bhabha 161) populations: We are confronted with the nation split within itself, articulating the heterogeneity of its population. The barred Nation It/Self, alienated from its eternal self-generation, becomes a liminal signifying space that is internally marked by the discourses of minorities, the heterogeneous histories of contending peoples, antagonistic authorities and tense locations of cultural difference. (Bhabha 148)

In Victorian England, to cite the most extreme case, the anxiety of the national endeavor to keep lived difference at bay betrays itself as a tendentiously imperialist hysteria (in Matthew Arnold, for example, or Rudyard Kipling, or even Joseph Conrad). By the mid-twentieth century, moreover, “the nation is no longer the sign of modernity under which cultural differences are homogenized” (Bhabha 149), and it becomes patently absurd for Westerners to assume that the nation speaks a “common language” within itself or that the writer can serve as a representative national spokesperson. The modernist “crisis of representation” can be understood to stem from the fragmentation and democratization of audiences for cultural works and the collapse of authorial privilege within the imagined community of a national literature. This is acutely the case in an immigrant and racially divided society like the United States; middlebrow books that stubbornly continue to posit an American “melting pot” are either symptomatically anxious or hysterically conservative (consider James Weldon Johnson’s The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, for example, or even Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, both of which—while deeply committed to a “national” idiom—expose the “American dream” as patently, if beautifully, fraudulent). The cosmopolitan high modernism Ellison will also draw from in his own work marks and instantiates the collapse of national aspirations in the novel form, even as nationalist cultural ideals tend to manifest themselves as an invigorating 70

T HE COL D WAR AND THE G EOP OL ITICS O F RACE

nostalgia (as in James Joyce) or be paradoxically put to the service of a utopian internationalism (as in John Dos Passos or, as we shall see, Ralph Ellison) or feminism (in Virginia Woolf, for example). And even the grandiose gestures of internationalism (in either its elite or populist garb), uprooted from the anchoring appeals to a shared language, a common religion, a manifest racial destiny, or an enclosed geographical terrain (the fatherland) that fueled earlier nationalisms, nonetheless replicate the same will to power: like nationalisms, they aim to transform the multitude into a people. And as Bhabha intimates, even an internationalist appeal to a people will reach the same impasse, compelled to reckon with that multitude within: “The threat of cultural difference is no longer a problem of ‘other’ people. It becomes a question of the otherness of the people-as-one” (150). Ellison’s brilliant, dense, and daunting Invisible Man stands as an exemplary testament to the exhaustion the novel as a representative and “nation-building” cultural enterprise. Taking on the thorny difficulties of how one might speak for the “dispossessed,” this comic bildungsroman in reverse concludes with the unnamed narrator himself violently dis-established. Ellison’s writing dazzles on several levels: at once a complex, comic, high-modernist novel of ideas and elementary passions, a coming-of-age novel and a tale of an orphan’s lonesome search for a father; it functions as well as a historical meditation on the great migration of southern blacks. The work is also an extended riff on black vernacular, blues, and Afro-Caribbean folk idiom. Finally, Invisible Man stands as a sort of last-ditch effort to compose the “great American novel.” This is so despite the “minority” perspective; Pan-African black nationalism, an ideology that would prove increasingly attractive to such thinkers as Du Bois, for example, is represented in Invisible Man in the character of Ras the Exhorter and is explicitly dismissed in Ellison’s work, which labors rather on native soil. Adopting Faulkner as a model, Ellison repeatedly insists, aptly, that his work be considered “American” rather than “black” literature. The work is self-consciously American too, despite its thematic critique of Marxism. As Ellison acknowledged, the work “drew much of its substance from the voices, idioms, folklore, traditions and political concerns of those whose racial and cultural origins I share” (xi). Stalin is never mentioned; at stake is deeply vernacular radicalism, although its international orientation will inevitably involve a betrayal of the local community in Harlem. In the second half of the novel, Invisible Man analyzes and critiques the effort to transform a multitude into a people. It satirizes at length a quasi-Marxian, progressively dialectical, and historical sequence by which “a people” might ideally achieve full historical subjectivity and agency. According to the rigorous scientism of the “Brotherhood”—a fictional organization modeled on the CPUSA, with which Ellison and other Harlem intellectuals had dealings—each stage in the four-step process hinges upon acts of violence. People first suffer violent experiences and consequently come to know themselves individually and collectively 71

T HE COL D WAR AND THE G EOP OL ITICS O F RACE

as products of specific social relations. They thereby, as Brother Jack, the narrator’s tutor, explains, enter into the domain of history. Baptizing Invisible Man into his new identity as representative spokesman, Jack tells him that “history has been born in your brain” (291). The organization “need[s] a good speaker . . . who can articulate the grievances of the people. . . . When the cry of protest is sounded, there are those who will hear it and act” (292). This process enables the people, random and suffering victims of racial and class antagonism, to assume a voice and to articulate their grievances and move finally to action, by which their lot in life, in history, might be changed. They have moved from passive victims to active and creative agents of a history they can now claim as their own. Yet the narrator, suspicious from the get-go, gradually discovers this dynamic model of historical agency to be a disciplinary fantasy, collapsing and corralling the strangeness of the world (Frantz Fanon’s “zone of occult instability where the people dwell” [Bhabha 152]) within the repressive yoke of historicism: “The world was strange, if you stopped to think about it; still it was a world that could be controlled by science. And the brotherhood had both science and history under its control” (Ellison 381). The novel charts Invisible Man’s progressive and experimental dis-infatuation with this model of popular autonomy. He completes his journey to self-definition as a negative identity: invisible, impotent, and underground, but free. In a very clear sense, Ellison’s novel testifies to the impossibility of producing an effective or just identity (a name, voice, subjective agency, sovereignty) within a national or even ethno-national or historicalinternational framework. Louis Armstrong’s plaint, “What did I do/To be so black/And blue?” (12), forms one of the book’s primary refrains. “Bear with me” (14),17 Invisible Man counsels the reader, as he begins to unfold his tale. He initially serves a long apprenticeship in the school of hard knocks; brutalized at every moment, he claims the right to speak, even if his early speeches merely mimic the conventional wisdom. In a dream, his grandfather, a self-described “spy in the enemy’s country” (16), comes to him with a message. “ ‘Read it,’ my grandfather said. ‘Out loud!’ ‘To Whom It May Concern,’ I intoned. ‘Keep This Nigger-Boy Running.’ ” It would be years, he tells us, before he would gain “insight into its meaning” (33). Later, battered and bruised by the mendacious hypocrisy of various race leaders and white liberals, he undertakes a shift from the deep solipsism of suffering to a deeper recognition of his social position. A humiliating encounter with an old man selling yams on the street forces him to a self-reckoning: “What and how much had I lost by trying to do only what was expected of me instead of what I myself had wished to do? What a waste, what a senseless waste!” (266). Just as the narrator’s individual humiliation triggers a shameful self-awareness, so, too, is the same process refigured collectively, as Ellison depicts in a dramatic vignette that adumbrates much of the novel’s rationale and launches the protagonist’s career. In 72

T HE COL D WAR AND THE G EOP OL ITICS O F RACE

Harlem, immediately after asserting his own identity as socially framed and structured, the narrator stumbles upon a police eviction of an elderly couple and begins to exercise his newfound assertiveness. The police action exposes the racist and class-biased brutality of social relations and mirrors to the crowd their own common dispossession. “Hell, they been dispossessed, you crazy sonofabitch, get out of the way,” yells one of the crowd, to which Invisible Man retorts, “So who’s being dispossessed? Can it be us?” (279). In the suffering of others, the witnesses to violence recognize themselves as collective victim: “now I recognized a self-consciousness about them, as though they, we, were ashamed to witness the eviction” (270). This self-recognition, in turn, licenses a representative to speak, to articulate a common discontent: “ ‘No wait,’ I yelled. ‘Let’s follow a leader, let’s organize. Organize. We need someone like that wise leader, you read about him, down in Alabama’ ” (276). According to representational logic, the spokesperson engages in the pedagogical function of educating the multitude and disciplining them into a people, thus enabling collective action: the achievement of a full historical subjectivity. The process by which the passive victims of history become its active agents has come full circle. Invisible Man is taken under the protective wing and tutelage of the Brotherhood, and is appointed spokesperson for Harlem. Over the course of his disillusionment with the teachings of the Brotherhood, however, the sporadic race and class violence he suffers initiates Invisible Man into an alternate theory of history, teaches him “how the world moves: Not like an arrow but a boomerang. (Beware of those who speak of the spiral of history; they are preparing a boomerang. Keep a steel helmet handy.) I know; I have been boomeranged across my head so much that I can see the darkness of lightness” (6). That is, Invisible Man comes to recognize that, like the national, “the male collective of the working class [is a] disciplinary concept” (Kapur 207). “Ask your wife to take you around to the gin mills and barber shops and the juke joints and the churches . . . and the beauty parlors on Saturdays when they’re frying hair. A whole unrecorded history is spoken then, Brother” (Ellison 471), he tells the Brotherhood during a confrontation with his handlers. To which Brother Jack bluntly replies: “Now hear this: we do not shape our policies to the mistaken and infantile notions of the man in the street. Our job is not to ask them what they think but to tell them” (473). At last the intrinsically autocratic nature of the Brotherhood’s disciplinary “science” unveils itself. Ellison is rehearsing a rather shabby historical episode, that marked his own distance from the radical Left. During the days of the popular front, the CPUSA united in coalition with a variety of other progressive organizations to battle the common enemy of fascism. The Hitler-Stalin nonaggression pact of 1939, of course, sent some shock waves through the coalition, and when that collapsed, such policies were abandoned upon orders from Moscow. Rather than emphasize racial injustice on the home front, the party dictated that its members mute criticism of American policy in the cause of presenting a united front in 73

T HE COL D WAR AND THE G EOP OL ITICS O F RACE

the global struggle against fascism. This change of policy seemed to abandon a central plank of the party’s platform and exposed a hypocrisy that Harlem leaders understood as simple betrayal, motivated by an entrenched racism within the white Communist leadership: “As for the loss of membership and influence, it was a result of a new program which had called for the shelving of our old techniques of agitation. There had been, to my surprise, a switch in emphasis from local issues to those more national and international in scope, and it was felt that for the moment the interests of Harlem were not of first importance” (428–29). Invisible Man recognizes that Brother Jack is blind in one eye: “So that is the meaning of discipline, I thought, sacrifice . . . yes, and blindness; he doesn’t see me. He doesn’t even see me” (475). At this point, Invisible Man embraces “unrecorded history,” accepts and claims as his birthright his very invisibility, various hints of which he had been subjected to over the entire course of the novel: “I was just awakening from a dream. I had boomeranged around” (476). Purchasing dark glasses and a fedora, he is mistaken on the street for the shadowy con man Rinehart, and in a remarkable passage, discovers the freedoms and potentials of invisibility, outside of history: You could actually make yourself anew. The notion was frightening, for now the world seemed to flow before my eyes. All boundaries down, freedom was not only the recognition of necessity, it was the recognition of possibility. . . . I looked at the polished lenses of the glasses and laughed. I had been trying to turn them into a disguise but they had become a political instrument instead; for if Rinehart could use them in his work, no doubt I could use them in mine. It was too simple, and yet they had already opened up a new section of reality for me. What would the committee say about that? I recalled a report of a shoeshine boy who had encountered the best treatment in the South simply by wearing a white turban instead of his usual Dobbs or Stetson, and I fell into a fit of laughing. Jack would be outraged at the very suggestion of such a state of things. And yet there was truth in it; this was the real chaos which he thought he was describing—so long ago it seemed now. . . . Outside the Brotherhood we were outside history; but inside of it they didn’t see us. It was a hell of a state of affairs, we were nowhere. (499–500)

Invisible Man dwells “nowhere,” or precisely within what Hardt and Negri aptly term the “crisis of modernity”: “The crisis of modernity, which is the contradictory co-presence of the multitude and a power that wants to reduce it to the rule of one—that is, the co-presence of a new productive set of free subjectivities and a disciplinary power that wants to exploit it—is not finally pacified or resolved by the concept of nation, any more than it was by the concept of sovereignty or state” (97). Or, I might add, with Ellison, by brotherhood. 74

T HE COL D WAR AND THE G EOP OL ITICS O F RACE

To be sure, as Geeta Kapur insists, there is a tenacious gender dimension to the privileged “autonomy” proffered by the Brotherhood. Agency manifests itself primarily as a much-vaunted “manhood,” one systematically and deliberately denied black Americans under Jim Crow. While I haven’t space here to delineate the acutely sexual hysteria underwriting American racism, suffice it to say that the dispossession Invisible Man has been systematically subject to involves a deliberate “un-manning.” As a black man in the American South, Invisible Man learns early that physical violence is the gateway into his very membership in the social contract. Before he can “earn” even the right to speak before a civic assembly, he will first be physically beaten, sexually shamed, and financially humiliated, when the carpet on which the prize for the black fighters is laid out turns out to be electrified. In the North, the same scene repeats itself, when he finds that his rights to personhood devolve not from his own consent but rather from a violence that enforces his submission to social mores. In the hospital scene, the recurrent site wherein postwar literature typically exposes the iron fist of coercion hidden underneath the velvet glove of choice, Invisible Man is humanely “lobotomized” through electroshock therapy: “The result is as complete a change of personality as you’ll find in your famous fairy-tale cases of criminals transformed into amiable fellows after all that bloody business of a brain operation” (236), the doctor boasts. As a guinea pig for such experimental procedures in social control, the narrator lies passively upon a table while the medical practitioners jest. “Look, he’s dancing,” someone calls out as the electricity shoots through him: “An oily face looked in. ‘They really do have rhythm, don’t they? Get hot, boy! Get hot!’ it said with a laugh” (237). He recognizes that his being broken into a new docility constitutes a symbolic emasculation: “ ‘Why not castration, doctor?’ a voice asked waggishly, causing me to start, a pain tearing through me” (236). Such scenes certify that his existence is rooted in a history of explicitly racial violence; the consciousness he will attain by the book’s end comes not just at the expense of a generalized disembodiment but also through being unmanned. Later, the subjectivity offered by the Brotherhood involves a reclamation of Invisible Man’s masculine identity; over the course of the novel, he repossesses his claims to violence and to heterosexual empowerment. Ironically, then, as he goes underground, his disillusionment with the Brotherhood comes to him again as a vision of castration, a mimicry on the part of his erstwhile comrades of the archetypical theater of lynching: But now they came forward with a knife, holding me; and I felt the bright red pain and they took the two bloody blobs and cast them over the bridge, and out of my anguish I saw them curve up and catch beneath the apex of the curving arch of the bridge, to hang there, dripping down through the sunlight into the dark red water. And while the others laughed, before my pain-sharpened eyes the whole world was turning red. 75

T HE COL D WAR AND THE G EOP OL ITICS O F RACE

“Now you’re free of illusions,” Jack said, pointing to my seed wasting upon the air. “How does it feel to be free of illusions?” And I looked up through a pain so intense now that the air seemed to roar with the clanging of metal, hearing HOW DOES IT FEEL TO BE FREE OF ILLUSION. . . . And now I answered, “painful and empty.” (569)

Painfully emptied, emasculated, invisible, violated, Invisible Man ultimately casts his lot with those who are doubly dispossessed, outside history in what Bhabha terms the “nonsynchronic,” in “the signifying position of the minority that resists totalization” (Bhabha 162). The anomalous, the improvisational, the incalculable, the a-rhythmic, with whom Invisible Man will finally cast his own lot, everywhere perturb and disrupt the scientism of the Brotherhood: What did they ever think of us transitory ones? Ones such as I had been before I found Brotherhood—birds of passage who were too obscure for learned classification, too silent for the most sensitive recorders of sound; of natures too ambiguous for the most ambiguous words, and too distant from the centers of historical decision to sign or even applaud the signers of historical documents? We who write no novels, histories or other books. What about us, I thought. (Ellison 439)

Ideally, what might be claimed is an act of cultural authorization: the power of self-naming. Yet the novel’s trajectory exhausts the process of affirmative selfdetermination that is at the heart of American narratives of manhood attained, even as it traduces collectivism. Invisible Man discovers that the entrance into history will involve one in complicity with power: to establish identity will mean, ineluctably, to mute alternative potentials. And so he concludes, in the prologue and again in the epilogue, where Ellison renders Bhabha’s “liminal signifying space” as the underground haven into which Invisible Man is ultimately submerged. Despite all, the narrator claims, he believes in action. His exile, his hibernation, is an interregnum of sorts: “A hibernation is a covert preparation for a more overt action” (13). He accentuates diversity, possibility, movement, an embrace of action: “My world has become one of infinite possibilities. . . . Until some gang succeeds in putting the world in a straight jacket, its definition is possibility. Step outside the narrow borders of what men call reality and you step into chaos—ask Rinehart, he’s a master of it—or imagination. That too I’ve learned in the cellar, and not by deadening my sense of perception; I’m invisible, not blind” (576). If, as I’ve argued, the novel originates as a cultural production yoked to the twin ventures of nationality and modernity and functions (however haphazardly) according to a disciplinary dynamic whereby the protagonist figures as 76

T HE COL D WAR AND THE G EOP OL ITICS O F RACE

representative “everyman” (or woman), then Ellison’s Invisible Man founders upon its concluding question, “Yes, but what is the next phase?” (576). Ellison himself will never answer this question, never complete another novel. In some sense, while the novel flirts with the sort of vaunted individualism that will mark most Cold War cultural production in the United States, Ellison is too austere and canny a thinker to relent to an individualism that cannot sustain its integrity, least of all before the great civil rights movements of the 1950s and 1960s. Ellison never moves beyond the impasse he has so passionately articulated. He doesn’t solve the problem of identity, he merely unravels it, in large part because the cultural authority of the modern (and modernist) novel—its claim to speak on behalf of a people—has largely been eclipsed. Debates in the 1950s and 1960s about the so-called death of the novel certainly were temperamentally keyed to this effective dissolution, though most commentators failed to see the novel as a distinct cultural production embedded within its precise historical location. Novels persist, of course, although their social function has radically shifted: the dominant form of cultural training for global citizenship has been handed over to Hollywood. The modernist irony of the hero is increasingly shadowed in solipsism (a trajectory we might trace out in the lifework of a writer like Hemingway, for example); any further efforts to produce the “great American novel” (as with Philip Roth) will be undertaken with tongue firmly in cheek. In some sense, after Ellison, as an increasingly minor cultural formation, literature asks its audiences to think and act affirmatively, actively, outside the novel itself, outside the popular or the people—even, one might say, outside time, insofar as the temporal functions to meld the historical people: wrenched out of its temporal melancholy, what has been termed “postmodern” literary cultural production solicits our imagination of multiplicities, of silences, potentials, invisibilities in the affirmative. Invisible Man’s final words throw down this very challenge: “Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?” (581). How is it possible to speak outside of available narratives, corralled and overcoded as they are by the national, the therapeutic, and the masculine? Contemporary and consciously postnational writers have taken up the challenge, recognizing that this will necessitate the elaboration of entirely new forms and genres. “The possibilities are numerous, once we decide to act and not react” (Anzaldúa 101). And so such speech will be, as Bhabha intimates, a dislocation, a deformation of the modern cultural domain, a matter, as Gloria Anzaldúa writes, of putting “history through a sieve” (104). In the contemporary world, as Appadurai argues, emerging “culturalist movements draw frequently on the fact or possibility of migration or secession. . . . They are self-conscious about identity, culture and heritage. . . . [They] tend to be counternational and metacultural” (13). As Stuart Hall has argued, the mobilization of hybrid and multiple identities signals a relocation of cultural domain outside the vise of the national. In closing, then, I give the last word to the influential contemporary 77

T HE COL D WAR AND THE G EOP OL ITICS O F RACE

writer Gloria Anzaldúa, who takes up the challenge of poignantly envisioning a cultural production of identity outside or apart from ethno-nationalism. “I am visible—see this Indian face—yet I am invisible” (108), she writes. Her 1987 manifesto, Borderlands/La Frontera, opens with a self-conscious acceptance of the double bind Ellison has described (invisibility and presence), and experiments with alternative cultural mobilizations of difference. Anzaldúa’s depiction and formulation of mestiza consciousness announce “a new mythos—that is, a change in the way we perceive reality, the way we perceive ourselves, and the ways we behave—la mestiza creates a new consciousness” (102): “As a mestiza, I have no country, my homeland cast me out; yet all countries are mine because I am every woman’s sister or potential lover. (As a lesbian I have no race, my own people disclaim me; but I am all races because there is the queer of me in all races.) I am cultureless because, as a feminist, I challenge the collective cultural/ religious male-derived beliefs of Indo-Hispanics and Anglos; yet I am cultured because I am participating in the creation of yet another culture, a new story to explain the world and our participation in it, a new value system with images and symbols that connect us to each other and to our planet” (102–3).

78

CHAPTER FOUR

WHAT I T TAKES TO B E A MAN Masculinity, Deviance, and Sexuality The American ideal, then, of sexuality, appears to be rooted in the American ideal of masculinity. This ideal has created cowboys and Indians, good guys and bad guys, punks and studs, tough guys and softies, butch and faggot, black and white. It is an ideal so paralytically infantile that it is virtually forbidden—as an unpatriotic act—that an American boy evolve into the complexity of manhood. —J AM ES B A L DW I N, “Freaks and the American Ideal of Manhood”

Alan Brinkley remarks on how curiously successful the Cold War consensus was at consolidating a “culture that reflected an essential unity of interests and values widely shared by Americans of all classes, regions, races, and creeds”(62). “How was it possible,” he asks, “for so many Americans to believe in something that now seems clearly untrue?”(62). It was made possible, I have been arguing, in part through a complex mechanism of sexual policing. The Cold War consensus—which I understand to constitute from around 1947 onward an entirely novel social technology of power that relied upon American subjects’ “consensual” affiliation to democracy and liberal individualism—was established by rhetorical and institutional mobilizations of “moral panic,” culminating in witch hunts for subversives, Reds, deviants, and sexual perverts, whose virulent capacity for dissimulation made them so pernicious a threat. The taunting epithet “pinko” neatly and pointedly conflated political radicalism and effeminacy, and serves to demonstrate how fag-baiting and Red-baiting worked hand in glove during the time. As Elaine Tyler May summarizes, national security relied on maintaining and enforcing rigorous standards of male power: “ ‘normal’ heterosexual behavior culminating in marriage represented ‘maturity’ and ‘responsibility’; therefore, those who were ‘deviant’ were, by definition, irresponsible, immature, and weak. It followed that men who were slaves to their passions could easily be duped by seductive women, who worked for the communists. Even worse were the ‘perverts’ who, presumably, had no masculine backbone” (94). 79

MAS CUL INIT Y, DEVIANCE, AND SEXUALIT Y

As Alan Nadel elaborates, George Kennan’s geopolitical strategy of Soviet bloc containment during the Cold War demonstrates the viability of a national narrative into which personal histories and self-narratives might be neatly inserted, even while energies that had to be repressed by such efforts continued to circulate around the body politic. As we have seen with Sylvia Plath, for example, life-writing became in the postwar period a technology for cathartically recalibrating, censoring, or excising deviant and dangerous aspects of the self into therapeutic narratives in order to establish détente between social values and productive, workaday personhood. In the postwar climate, then, cultural production largely becomes the work of conscious self-production, a process that, as we have seen, productively misfires in Ellison’s Invisible Man; such endeavors everywhere performed and reiterated the virtues of conformity, which became a kind of widely available public knowledge at the time. One was encouraged to be vigilant for deviance both in others and within one’s self, and the either/or logic of freedomism devolved into to a series of polarized options for self-inscription. One was either with us or against us, normal or deviant, straight or queer, an advocate of freedom or a dupe of totalitarian thought control, and so forth. In 1949, for example, Arthur Schlesinger penned the manifesto for liberal Cold Warriors, The Vital Center: The Politics of Freedom. Like other liberals of the time, Schlesinger disdained McCarthyite hysteria and aimed to avoid chestthumping jingoism. Nonetheless, he insisted that the political and cultural impasse arrived at by “Western Man in the middle of the twentieth century” (1) necessitated recognizing and acting upon such polarized options: We can act, in consequence, only in terms of imperfect alternatives. But though the choice of alternatives present may be imperfect, it is nonetheless a real choice. Even if capitalism and Communism are both the children of the Industrial revolution, there remain crucial differences between the USA and the USSR. These can be defined as basically the difference between free society and totalitarianism. This is a choice we cannot escape. (8)

Why not? Schlesinger doesn’t say. As early as 1949, the idea that the East and the West could never peaceably—or uneasily—coexist had become certified as commonsensical; that this choice of alternatives would be faced by every nation on earth followed inevitably; that it was a choice that confronted each individual on the planet was a truism. Further, he presents the making of choices as a kind of challenge to pass through the current phase of historical adolescence (with its attendant sexual anxiety) and establish one’s mature manhood. Schlesinger presents progressives in sexually coded language as being, as homosexuals were thought to be at the time, arrested in infantile formations and sentimental attachments, for being soft rather than hard: “The type of the progressive today 80

MAS CUL INIT Y, DEVIANCE, AND SEXUALIT Y

is the fellow-traveler or the fellow-traveler of the fellow-traveler: see the Wallace movement or (until fairly recently) the columns of The New Republic or the Nation. His sentimentality has softened up the progressive for Communist permeation and conquest” (37). A bit later, in language that is no longer coded, we are told that “the weakness of impotence is related to a fear of responsibility—a fear, that is, of making concrete decisions and being held to account for concrete consequences” (41). Such psychobabble became the privileged rhetorical idiom for a political message that endorsed America to reclaim its manhood. And so, too, the most popular storyline to circulate in popular culture was a variant on Hamlet, scripting the sentimental temptations of vacillation against duty, responsibility, and rigor, as male protagonists were compelled to reclaim their threatened manhood, typically, as Richard Slotkin has demonstrated, through an act of performative violence that both vanquishes the enemy and transforms the self by purging it of effeminate doubt or sentimentality. High Noon (1952), with Grace Kelly playing the part of the Wallace-ite dupe, is obviously the paradigmatic example dramatizing Schlesinger’s political program in the setting of a mythicized American West. Curiously, the writer and producer, Carl Foreman, was a fellow traveler himself, whose name did not appear in the credits because he was currently blacklisted by the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) following a HUAC summons; Foreman intended the film as an explicit indictment of McCarthyism, symbolically yoking the cowardly men of Hadleyville with those intellectuals who failed to contest HUAC and thereby became complicit in its crimes, while rebuking those in Hollywood who refused to come to the aid of the blacklisted. That is, the film both resisted and accommodated the ascendant politics of consensus, which might place it, with Schlesinger, in the liberal-centrist camp—rejecting McCarthyite extremism, but acceding to a political narrative that dictated we recognize hard choices and act upon them. In any case, the drama threw down the challenge of reclaiming one’s manhood. The western provided the perfect dramatic form for such dramas of masculine and national anxiety, a point I will return to in chapter 6. Within this complex mediation of nation and masculinity, my own investigation concerns the precise ways in which cultural production (and circulation) participated in the remarkable and dramatic reconfiguration of power relations—at both an institutional and a personal level—that licensed the emergent consensus, and how, if at all, changing cultural practices may have contributed to its subsequent downfall. This chapter considers two interrelated but contrasting dramatic treatments of the reclamation of manhood that, paradoxically, portray masculine desire as a censored and fugitive sexuality: Elia Kazan’s 1954 film, On the Waterfront, and Arthur Miller’s The Crucible. In Kazan’s film, the twin pillars of church and family work to “transvaluate” working-class homosocial rebelliousness and selfreliance into socially acceptable channels of upwardly mobile conformity, under 81

MAS CUL INIT Y, DEVIANCE, AND SEXUALIT Y

the protective patronage of a benevolent state. On the Waterfront ambivalently endorses the political and social pillars of the Cold War consensus even as it mourns the consequent eclipse of an edenic blue-collar homosocial culture. As with the postwar reorchestration of suitable gender life trajectories into which women might narrate and come to understand and generically satisfy their own unruly desires, a focus on containing, defining, and properly positioning “masculinity” was central to the cultural technology of consensus I diagram. After the war, a huge number of more or less shell-shocked veterans had to be reintegrated into domestic life and assimilated into an expanding managerial and technocratic class capable of shouldering the geopolitical burden in a revamped postwar economy. “Re-entry,” as Michael Kimmel points out, “proved more difficult than many men had anticipated” (223–24). Numerous social historians have in various ways located a “crisis of masculinity,” or at least white middle-class masculinity, in post–World War II America, a crisis largely stemming from the development of an increasingly globalized and incipient postFordist economy, and with the formation of the military-industrial complex, which combined to privilege domestic consumerism and an expanding middle class. Despite assumptions to the contrary, it was no easy task to channel the standard variants of the story of an American dream of independence and selffashioning into suburbanization. Nearly all of the dominant popular cultural narratives of the time took up the daunting task of “naturalizing” male desire into hetero-normative models, and resistance to integration took on a variety of forms. In many cases, cultural narratives aimed to reinvigorate the possibility of male prerogatives of initiative and independence within a landscape of sterile and emasculating conformity. Typically, such works enfold the libertarian ethics of rebelliousness within acquiescence to a new familial and communal order. In William Whyte’s classic 1956 indictment of postwar corporate establishmentarianism, The Organization Man, for example, he contrives to let the American male have his cake (individual rebellion) and eat it too (outward conformism): “The man who drives a Buick Special and lives in a ranch-type house just like hundreds of other ranch-type houses can assert himself as effectively and courageously against his particular society as the bohemian against his particular society. He usually does not, it is true, but if he does, the surface uniformities can serve quite well as protective coloration” (11).1 Steven Cohan quotes Louis Lyndon’s astute, if rhetorically loaded, diagnosis of “The Paradox of the American Male,” which was published in Women’s Home Companion in 1956: Remember that a man in a gray flannel suit is also a man and that for two or three years he was away from you in one or another war. For two or three years he lived as undomesticated men do live: without the bills and taxes perhaps, living among other men and not inhibiting man’s natural impulse 82

MAS CUL INIT Y, DEVIANCE, AND SEXUALIT Y

to obscene language and obscene storytelling, seeing men die and perhaps expecting to die himself, free in the sense that he often had no idea what the next day would bring. And free, if he wished, to lie on his bunk evenings, to think and to dream. There are certain deep and perfectly normal masculine drives that were “permitted” during a war as they are not permitted in a suburban back yard. They are an inborn attraction to violence and obscenity and polygamy, an inborn love of change, an inborn need to be different from the others and rebel against them, a strong need for the occasional company of men only and an occasional need for solitude and privacy. Certainly all men do not feel these drives to the same degree. And certainly all these drives shouldn’t be permitted in that clean, green, happy back yard. But if they are always and completely inhibited—the man in the gray flannel suit will stop being a man. (34)

Like-minded, if more rhetorically sophisticated, plaints against conformist culture from such ideologically distinct public intellectuals as C. Wright Mills, Arthur Schlesinger, Dwight Macdonald, David Riesman, Paul Goodman, and even Ayn Rand that targeted the emasculating effects of suburban lifestyles, mass culture, and corporate bureaucracy were typical of the times. As we have seen, literary productions by such celebrated writers as J. D. Salinger, Norman Mailer, Saul Bellow, John Cheever, and Clancy Sigal were peopled by male characters adrift in existential malaise, supremely and elegantly disenchanted by available models of masculine behavior. Male maladjustment, alienation, and downright viciousness motivated the ethical perversity of postwar Hollywood film noir as well, as might be evidenced by even a cursory viewing of Billy Wilder’s The Lost Weekend (1945) or Sunset Boulevard (1950), or John Huston’s The Asphalt Jungle (1950), or the remarkable 1955 collaboration between James Agee and Charles Laughton, The Night of the Hunter, to mention just a few of the more well known examples of the genre. Violent alienation was also recognized as a social problem. Consider how the postwar discourse surrounding “juvenile delinquency” anxiously examined aggressive behaviors presumed to be male, adolescent, antisocial, and working class, and, if coded white (rock and roll, marijuana use, hooliganism, for example), then too threateningly derivative of the stereotypical behavior of minorities’ behavior (urban black and Latino, predominantly). The preeminent aim of a revamped postwar sociology and therapy—Skinnerism and gestalt—was to generate social and medical technologies that might effectively tame recalcitrant white youth and lead them into the homogenous fold of middle-class normalcy. With the realignment of cultural institutions, patience and therapy supplanted older coercive techniques. In On the Waterfront, Terry Molloy (Marlon Brando) recalls how parochial school nuns “thought they could beat an education into 83

MAS CUL INIT Y, DEVIANCE, AND SEXUALIT Y

me—I foxed ’em.” “Maybe they just didn’t know how to handle you,” his love interest, Edie Doyle (Eva Marie Saint), responds. As a teacher, she would handle a problem child like Terry “with a little more patience and kindness. That’s what makes people mean and difficult. Nobody cares enough about them” (Schulberg 49). Edie’s pedagogical mission, to humanize brutal institutions of social regulation by substituting compassion for coercion, will overlap with her romantic one: to redeem a dissolute, aging Irish delinquent. Minority cultural behaviors, at the time, were increasingly criminalized; the machinery of consensus building, unsurprisingly, modified the time-honored American technology of race prejudice.2 According to Robert Corber, this crisis would be partially resolved through a complex ideological process of massaging and readjusting hetero-normative standards, as evidenced by the GI Bill of 1944 or the Interstate Highway Act of 1956, which, he asserts, “subsidized” the “domestication of masculinity” (5). Corber summarizes: “In the 1950s a model of masculinity that stressed domesticity and cooperation gradually became hegemonic. Men were no longer encouraged to show initiative or exert their independence from the domestic sphere. Rather, they were expected to define themselves through their identities as consumers—an expectation hitherto confined to women” (5–6). For Corber, consequently, the gay cultural productions of Tennessee Williams, Gore Vidal, and James Baldwin decisively resisted the Cold War consensus (and one might add to this list the work of several of the Beats, Patricia Highsmith, and even the heroic resistance with which Alfred Kinsey opposed a “normative” sexual regime). But the elaboration and preservation of a hegemony of “domesticated” white, heterosexual, middle-class men were no easy tasks. While complicating our understanding of this crisis in order to limn the myriad practices and representations of 1950s masculinity, James Gilbert has more recently arrived at a somewhat contrary conclusion. “To put this complex argument as simply as possible,” he writes, “the effects of conformity, suburban life and mass culture were often depicted as feminizing and debasing, and the proposed solution often lay in a renewal of traditional masculine vigor and individualism” (4), as in the paradoxical efforts of Billy Graham to align a revised “muscular” Christian evangelicalism with a theology that demonized the Soviet Union. My own hypothesis is that the popular culture of the period aimed, rather delicately, to domesticate a presumably “unruly” or “uncouth” working-class masculinity into consensual middle-class hetero-normativity while at the same time championing the possibility of anticonformist autonomous individualism within that new order; the Cold War consensus aimed to have its manliness and eat it too. On the Waterfront pictures this process quite explicitly, when Terry Molloy is beaten senseless by Johnny Friendly (Lee J. Cobb). Father Barry (Karl Malden) urges him to get up and stand on his own two feet, and refuses to let Edie Doyle support him: “Terry, did you hear that? You lost the battle but 84

MAS CUL INIT Y, DEVIANCE, AND SEXUALIT Y

you have a chance to win the war. All you gotta do is walk” (137). The narrative challenge faced by such films as The Wild One (1953), Rebel without a Cause (1955), the bowdlerized Hollywood version of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958), or On the Waterfront was to domesticate the rebel and therapeutically “cure” the potentially homosexual male, without thereby castrating him. Each of these productions is deeply alert to the high social stakes involved. In Kazan’s film, Terry Molloy’s violent initiation into the codes of middle-class respectability is occasioned precisely by his “voluntary” refusal to accommodate himself to a quite literal “mob” rule. In Kazan and screenwriter Budd Schulberg’s accommodationist and assimilationist fantasy of upward mobility, domesticity is itself championed as the highest and purest form of nonconformist rebellion. Contrary to a mythicized view of the hegemonic status of an American dream of upward mobility, the postwar consensus, as I argued in my opening chapter, had likewise to go to considerable lengths to demolish a nascent solidarity among American workers, a solidarity that had been reinforced during the Great Depression and celebrated by a widespread popular front culture. The immediate postwar years signaled the beginning of the end of American organized labor, a decline precipitated in no small measure by this massive reorchestration of publicly valorized models of masculinity. Under McCarthyism, Communist Party members and other radicals were systematically purged from labor leadership, and drummed out of other social and cultural institutions, of course, and white workers were drawn to the suburbs in large numbers. Further, as Stephen Norwood notes, male violence—the traditional ideological signature of American individualism—had itself to be reorchestrated in concert with the new order. “The increasingly bureaucratized workplace required individuals to suppress their intense feelings in the interests of group harmony” (Norwood 228), and thus anger management policies and personality testing become increasingly favored as management strategies. At the same time, Norwood notes, suburbanization “undermined the all male leisure institutions, like the pool hall and the boxing club, that had encouraged male combativeness” (229). Notwithstanding Schulberg’s lifelong allegiance to labor causes and his own romanticized fixation on working-class male violence, all of these processes are dramatized and endorsed—if not unambiguously celebrated—in On the Waterfront. Terry Molloy, after all, is a former boxer. When he steals a revolver from a pawnshop in order to wreak vengeance on the mobster, Johnny Friendly, he is given a stern lecture on social responsibility by Father Barry: You want to be brave? Firing lead into another man’s flesh isn’t brave. Any bum who picks up a .45 in a pawnshop can be that brave. You want to hurt Johnny Friendly? You want to fix him for what he did to Charley—and a dozen men who were better than Charley? Don’t fight him like a hoodlum down here in the jungle. That’s just what he wants. He’ll hit you in the head 85

MAS CUL INIT Y, DEVIANCE, AND SEXUALIT Y

and plead self-defense. Fight him tomorrow in the courtroom—with the truth as you know it—Truth is the gun—Drop that thing and tell the truth— a more dangerous weapon than this—little cap pistol. (Schulberg 118)

In his famous New York Times advertisement defending and explaining his HUAC testimony, Kazan reiterates this emphasis on truth being the best weapon; he uses the word “facts” seven times in the ad. Paradoxically enough, though an immigrant himself, he castigates Communism as an “alien” doctrine, to which he was attracted, he claims, because he had been resentful of WASP privilege. Now fully assimilated, he can take up the task of policing the borders of America’s ideological shores. Because of the way On the Waterfront defends courtroom testimony, the Cold War classic has aptly been called Kazan’s own apologia pro vita sua, an elaborate and dramatically compelling defense of his decision to name names before HUAC in 1952. As Victor Navasky says in his extensive treatment of Kazan, the film “creates a context in which the naming of names is the only honorable thing to do—the maximum case for informing” (210). Though Schulberg strenuously objects to the contention that the film’s Mafia hoodlums are metaphorical stand-ins for villainous Communists, or that Terry Molloy’s interjection “I’m glad what I done today, see?” can be taken as a defiant defense of Kazan’s or his own friendly testimony before HUAC (Schulberg xxi), Kazan defends his own version of active citizenship in no uncertain terms: “On the Waterfront was my own story; every day I worked on that film, I was telling the world where I stood and my critics to go and fuck themselves” (529). The complex personal, political, and institutional genesis of the production is one of the better known but most vexing stories of cultural McCarthyism. Without detailing this episode in full, I do want to stress how the production and content of the film highlight the antipathy of a reinvigorated mode of Cold War individualism to working-class sensibilities. As a key to manufacturing consensus, “individual conscience” becomes the privileged subjective mode of ethical behavior, marking a withdrawal from social and political commitments. The performance of one’s antitotalitarian “freedom” is always measured against loyalty to class comrades. As Arthur Miller tells the story of his break with his close friend and collaborator, Kazan, in Timebends, Molly Kazan’s defense of her husband’s decision depended on his realization that “the United Electrical Workers union is entirely in the hands of Communists” (334), a point that seems wholly irrelevant to the befuddled Miller. Molly’s point, of course, is that her husband required a proximate enemy; the exercise of political freedom pits one inevitably against the menace of collectivism, and a masculinity in crisis is best resolved through a performance of individual initiative and resistance, however spurious. Loyalty, consequently, is staged as loyalty to one’s inner convictions, even if you characteristically sign loyalty oaths to protect and ensure your own career 86

MAS CUL INIT Y, DEVIANCE, AND SEXUALIT Y

advancement. Ever devoted to his craft, Schulberg researched the project extensively, drinking with longshoremen, and the film was famously shot on the cold harbor-front docks of Hoboken, New Jersey, but Kazan, an “actor’s director” and one of the celebrated innovators of Method acting, highlights the subjective dimensions of Terry Molloy’s struggle. He reminds himself in his script annotations to “PHOTOGRAPH/the Inner Experience/of Terry/Don’t be Objective! This is not a documentary/Be Subjective, Be Terry!” (qtd. in Neve 29). Here, the privileged scene of agonistic ethics makes for the good stagecraft of the isolated inner subjectivity of the hero, magnified to cosmic proportions, and involves him in a deliberate withdrawal from the active political and social engagements that had marked popular front cultural productions. Brian Neve notes that as proponents of Method acting, Kazan and Brando “shifted the balance toward the central character’s inner conflict and redemption” (38), an emphasis that implied a direct attack on the collective solidarity of trade unionism (Aronowitz 106–7). Peter Biskind’s provocative reading of On the Waterfront emphasizes how Terry Molloy has been manipulated by Father Barry, aided and abetted by Edie Doyle and Glover (Leif Ericson), the investigator from the Waterfront Crime Commission, throughout the course of the film, so that by the end “he has betrayed his own class as well. The values that replace his old ones are mainstream, middle class values disguised as morality, and the lesson the film teaches is that it is smart to climb out of your class. There’s nothing at the bottom but long hours and low pay” (182). Importantly, however, Terry must seem to have come to these decisions entirely on his own, a key feature of the ideology of “freedomism” that underwrites the liberal Cold War defense of the Western democracies. According to Biskind, “Terry has to feel like his ‘own conscience’ is ‘doing the askin’,’ which is to say, he has to internalize social control, experience his choices as coming from within, and expression of his own deepest desires, not imposed from without by moral and psychological pressure. Social directives must be perceived as freedom, not domination” (175, my emphasis). Such astute but rather one-dimensional readings present the Hollywood film as an efficiently streamlined ideological technology, scanting the complex resistance to consensus that persists in On the Waterfront. To my mind, the film incorporates at least two, somewhat muted, “deconstructive” gestures, which combine to work quietly but subversively against its larger narrative of containment. First, we must reckon with the ambiguity of the narrative and the iconography of the film’s conclusion. To begin with, Terry’s ethical dilemma entirely disappears when Johnny Friendly’s thugs murder his brother, Charley (Rod Steiger). He no longer has any reason whatsoever to remain loyal to the Mafia-controlled Longshoreman’s Union, and it is scarcely believable that any of his friends would consider his testifying against his own brother’s murderers to be a sort of betrayal. Additionally, as various critics have pointed out, while 87

MAS CUL INIT Y, DEVIANCE, AND SEXUALIT Y

Friendly and his thugs are heading to jail, the deeper criminality of the social order remains unaffected. The shadowy patrician manipulator, “Mr. Upstairs,” the Mafia’s link to city hall, cuts his ties to Friendly and remains at large. Insofar as this film is prolabor, this brief scene might suggest that workers will continue to be exploited by the alliance of big business and American politicians; insofar as the Mafia is a stand-in for the CPUSA, Mr. Upstairs is representative of Moscow, upon whose directives Communists were presumably acting. In either case, as Kazan reiterates, the drama is solely concerned with Terry’s redemptive transformation from “bum” to man; it is Terry’s dignity that is everywhere at stake, not a more just social order. That dignity certainly triumphs when Terry rises to his feet unassisted and leads the men back to work on the docks—but it is immediately undercut by the film’s final image of the hangar door slamming shut, a puzzling choice of shot that seems to betoken an end rather than a new dawn. This door slamming down is, however, symptomatic of the film’s overt nostalgia for the socially obsolete working-class society of men that Terry’s actions and his consummated romance with Edie will bring to an end. Terry is an orphan, raised by his brother and his cousin, Johnny Friendly. The harbor front is a linked network of all-male space: the bar, the union hall, the gymnasium and the boxing ring, the workplace, the hold of the ships, even the rooftop pigeon-houses where the Golden Warrior gang convenes. All of these spaces represent a corrupted homosocial ideal, implying that the heterosexist alignment to the new moral order is necessary, right, and just, but, even so, to be deeply regretted. From its opening scene of an unconsummated rooftop assignation between Terry and Joey Doyle (Elia Kazan), the film is rife with depictions of a homosocial circulation of desire that are repeatedly interrupted. The male domain is constantly being disrupted by the presence of women; and, vice versa, men press their claims on other men whenever heterosexual lust threatens to lead their brothers astray. Terry is constantly interrupted when he attempts to make love to Edie by being recalled to his fraternal duties. Later, J. P. (Barry Macollum) tells Johnny Friendly that he has seen Terry and Glover, from the Crime Commission, “walking along and smiling like a pair of lovers” (Schulberg 97). Not only does the film end with Terry choosing to remain with his fellow workers rather than embracing his sweetheart, signaling his own split desires and allegiances, the happy ending of heterosexual consummation is explicitly lampooned, in the comic scene of the wedding ceremony Terry and Edie stumble upon. After he testifies, Terry’s loneliness and isolation are palpable and painfully felt. He has not only lost his friends, but a link to an entire culture as well. If, as Biskind, argues, Terry “and Edie will follow the middle-class migration to the suburbs” (182), they will not go happily. What is seldom stressed in readings of On the Waterfront is how the staged dialectic of an upwardly mobile postwar subjective complex of acquisitive individualism that strives to revitalize and 88

MAS CUL INIT Y, DEVIANCE, AND SEXUALIT Y

renegotiate its own illusory and threatened sense of American male autonomy is also pressured publicly to purge “deviant” homoerotic and homosocial desires. Such, no doubt, was the dilemma faced by nearly every “leading man” in postwar Hollywood, who felt compelled for the sake of his career to reaffirm his own unambiguously straight family values through a variety of ritualized loyalty oaths. Here Steven Cohan’s intuitions about Brando’s bisexual appeal and his performance as “male masquerade” are of use. Speaking of Brando, along with Paul Newman, Montgomery Clift, and James Dean, Cohan notes “the new stars’ interiorization of masculinity, the signal effect of their distinct performance style, which translated the social non-conformity connoted by their rebel pose into psychological terms of inner torment and emotional excess”; what all of this translated into, he argues, were “strong hints of sexual uncertainty” (203). Of Brando’s breakout performance in Kazan’s film version of Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire (1951), Cohan notes that “Brando always appears to be impersonating his virility, rather than embodying it” (249). Even Brando’s highly cultivated, Method-schooled “authenticity” “could cross the binarized axes of masculinity/femininity, straight/gay, authentic/theatrical, young/old” (252). While he never takes his shirt off in On the Waterfront, Brando is still Brando. Even in heavy makeup, he never “reads” as an effeminate pretty boy, but remains nonetheless marked by a public image of eroticized virility and “hep” devil-may-care rebelliousness: a nonconformist to the end, and an embodied performative resistance to sexual consensus. Arthur Miller’s classic 1953 analysis of McCarthyism, The Crucible, another drama of inner conflict and redemption, asserts that an American exceptionalist imperative,3 from its beginnings, aimed effectively to split the world into warring camps of good and evil; such crude Manichaeanism underwrites a dangerously tempting rhetoric that sadly persists in American political theater. Puritans, Miller explains, “believed, in short, that they held in their steady hands the candle that would light the world. We have inherited this belief ” (Crucible 5). Under Cold War conditions of “contemporary diabolism,” he continues, “a political policy is equated with moral right, and opposition to it with diabolical malevolence. Once such an equation is made, society becomes a congerie of plots and counter-plots, and the main role of government changes from that of arbiter to that of the scourge of God” (34). While Miller and other Cold War liberals viewed McCarthyism as an “excessive” act of overreaching, or a hysteria (just as Bushism is commonly viewed by liberals and some conservatives in the United States today), in the remainder of this chapter I argue that McCarthyism functioned as a vanguard social technology key to the installation of emergent configurations of power. In response, Miller’s play presents us with the inspiring and tragic spectacle of a ideal masculinity reborn in a cathartic act of dissent, a reclamation of individualized male power over one’s own personhood that throws a monkey wrench into the bureaucracies of state oppression. 89

MAS CUL INIT Y, DEVIANCE, AND SEXUALIT Y

Given the sort of moral absolutism Miller describes, and the supremely high stakes involved (which are nothing less than the redemption of humankind), if you are not with us, you are—diabolically—against us. In his 1987 memoir, Timebends, Miller reminisces along the same lines: “As in Salem, a point arrived, in the late forties, when the rules of social intercourse quite suddenly changed, or were changed, and attitudes that had merely been anti-capitalist–anti-establishment were now made unholy, morally repulsive, and if not actually treasonous, then implicitly so. America had always been a religious country” (341–42). Miller’s self-conscious political parable—he drives to Salem to research the play immediately after his famous confrontation with his friend and erstwhile theatrical collaborator Elia Kazan, who has told Miller that he has decided to name names before HUAC—implies that the inquisition that has usurped the place of the public sphere aimed to target and root out “witches”—those dissemblers attempting to “pass” as “one of us”—and it is the changing relationship between selfh ood and state power that I interrogate here, with Miller’s help. In his hero, John Proctor, Miller depicts what he sees as an increasingly Jeffersonian resistance to theocracy in American public life; the resurrected persona of the Jeffersonian republican, he implies, will be necessary as well to confront contemporary abuses of power on the part of an elite in the grips of anti-Communist hysteria and so help reconstruct a diminished public sphere. Of course, the production of character that would take up Miller’s theatrical proposition of reconciling a public with a private self—according to a logic of Method acting that reconciles the disjunction between “inner” emotion with “outer” performance—will, as so many of the texts of the period do likewise, both contest and instantiate the Cold War consensus. In keeping with postwar assumptions, the struggle for “freedom” is no longer conceived of in class terms or with a view to overcoming economic inequities; rather, the problem of justice is diminished into a more modest demand for an individualized and socially ineffectual right to freedom of “conscience.” Proctor will reject external social and moral controls in favor of secular republican political action, but will also learn over the course of the play to effectively practice an ideological selfpolicing.4 The best government is self-government. The danger that motivates witch hunts is that the external enemies are no longer “outside” the body politic. It is no accident that the first accused witch in The Crucible is Tituba, a slave from Barbados, a racial, social, and religious alien whose difference from the community of good citizens in Salem is readily perceptible; her crime, inevitably, involves the sexual corruption of children. Eventually, following Miller’s precise structural diagram of social hysteria, a crisis of “contamination” is reached when it becomes impossible to distinguish the good from the bad, the sinners from the saved, the “us” from the “them,” which is precisely the point at which the legal machinery of slaughter kicks into high gear. “Witchcraft,” says Miller’s inquisitor Danforth, “is ipso facto, on its face, 90

MAS CUL INIT Y, DEVIANCE, AND SEXUALIT Y

and by its nature, an invisible crime, is it not?” (100). Ultimately, one’s devout loyalty becomes a paradoxical emblem of one’s enmity; one’s very “goodness” establishes visible proof that one is in league with Satan (just as virtue might be the sure sign of a Communist), which is why in Miller’s play the inquisition is compelled to target the saintly Rebecca Nurse. Finally, and this is the key to my most provocative argument—that Proctor’s very resistance to the regime is ironically complicit with the extension of its domain of influence—one “internalizes” the inquisition; that is, in such an atmosphere of paranoia, one is compelled to public soul-searching, to a publicly staged ritual of self-purification in order to expose and root out the enemy within one’s very soul. The central dramatic tension in The Crucible has to do with the wrestling Proctor engages in with his own guilty conscience, for he has committed adultery with Abigail: Will he be true to a corrupted social contract and kowtow to authority? Or will he be true to his own better self ? The drama echoes precisely the ethical dilemma of Terry Molloy. In social terms, however, Miller argues that the Salem witch trials involved a more or less dialectical struggle between Protestant theocracy and an equally Calvinist individualism; Proctor’s “victory,” then, represents for Miller the historical emergence of an assertive liberal individualism, which will lay the ideological foundations of an American enlightenment that will within a short century produce the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. From the sane, humane, and liberal political viewpoint of Miller, the public hanging of patently innocent victims, then, must be the last straw; an outraged public will at long last exercise its own slumbering democratic privilege, throw the scoundrels out of office, and assert a gradual return to normalcy; he concludes in an epilogue entitled “Echoes Down the Corridor”: “Not long after the fever died, Parris was voted from office. . . Twenty years after the last execution, the government awarded compensation to the victims still living, and to the families of the dead. . . . To all intents and purposes, the power of theocracy in Massachusetts was broken” (146). And so, too, Miller implies, McCarthyism will one day be a distant and dimly remembered dream, once cooler heads prevail. My own contention, by contrast, is that inquisitorial power is primarily engaged in the production of new subjectivities that will, in a Foucaultian manner, ensure the consent of the governed through their voluntary alliance to state formations, and therefore obviate transparently coercive, or totalitarian, techniques of social control. Proctor is set against McCarthyite terror, but, via his very struggle against autocracy, is transformed into a prototypically liberal Cold Warrior. McCarthyism, as liberal Cold Warriors pointed out, was excessive; even so, it functioned as a kind of vanguard power that cleared the ground for what Frances Stonor Saunders terms a liberal and rather spurious ideology of “freedomism” that supplanted force and coercion with a “voluntary” allegiance to and alignment with the New World Order. As with Terry Molloy in 91

MAS CUL INIT Y, DEVIANCE, AND SEXUALIT Y

Kazan’s film, one must come to feel that one has freely chosen the decisions one has made. What is most compelling, still, about Miller’s play is that he diagnoses the ways in which hysteria can speedily become institutionalized and risks being transformed from a fleeting outbreak of paranoia within the life of crowds or communities into an integrated part of the state bureaucracy. Likewise, in the figure of Proctor, he stages “emancipation” as an authentic act of declared freedom of individual conscience and thus restages the role of the dissident intellectual. Proctor’s symptomatic American twist on existentialism pits the nonconformist equipped with a cultivated free mind against “mass society” in all its forms, and supplants earlier conceptions of emancipatory struggles as carried out according to a logic of class solidarity, even as it foreshadows the libidinal personal and social experiments in revolution of the late 1950s and 1960s or the consumerist oppositional politics of the 1990s and beyond. That is, while I emphasize here the ways in which liberal individualism paradoxically abetted the culture of consensus, I recognize that it likewise comprised an available form of resistance that would come to fruition among the New Left and subsequent struggles, whereby personal freedoms became—and must remain—the litmus test for democracies. As I noted above, Biskind insists that in such works “social directives must be perceived as freedom, not domination” (175). Terry Molloy’s moral dilemma in Kazan and Schulberg’s remarkable defense of “naming names” is, as we have seen, a masterly dramatic exposition of a solitary male wrestling with his conscience. The emphasis on masculinity, the struggle of conscience, and the problem of names in On the Waterfront merit close comparison with those concerns as depicted in Miller’s The Crucible ; with his testimony, Kazan had irreparably sacrificed his friendship with Miller, who had earlier been involved in the project. What both scripts have in common, of course, despite the opposing conclusions at which their protagonists arrive, is a shared existential solipsism, which is also deeply symptomatic of American postwar cultural production (as in confessional poetry, for example, or New York school painting, or the popular auteur film theory): the privileged scene of agonistic ethics is the isolated inner subjectivity of the male hero, magnified to cosmic proportions, and involves him in a deliberate withdrawal from the active political and social engagements that had marked earlier popular front cultural productions (including previous work by Miller and Kazan). In this regard, Miller’s 1953 character Proctor becomes the exemplary—even the model—citizen of Cold War America. This is not to say that the play does not, as Miller proudly attests, speak “for people against tyranny” (qtd. in Martine 14); merely that Proctor’s struggle is an enabling factor for the sea change in state power that I am trying to diagram here. During the time, as Miller’s dramatic investigation into such social pandemics outlines, the pervasiveness of an either/or logic regulated “normal” models 92

MAS CUL INIT Y, DEVIANCE, AND SEXUALIT Y

of behavior by appealing to the “free” choices of individuals. As a key to manufacturing consensus, “individual conscience” becomes the privileged subjective mode of ethical behavior, marking a withdrawal from social and political commitments. The Cold War consensus—which I have argued to constitute from around 1948 onward an entirely novel social technology of power that relied upon American subjects’ “consensual” affiliation to democracy and liberal individualism—was, as Miller’s play insists, secured by witch hunts for anyone whose virulent capacity for dissimulation made them so pernicious a threat. Miller’s play is able to condemn, resist, and perform consensus. Just as a Marcusian line of thinking was able to isolate a logic “repressive tolerance” at work in American postwar social economies, Miller stages Proctor’s resistance as a kind of dissenting acquiescence. What I would like to consider here is Miller’s astute diagnosis of this seismic shift in the social technology of state power and its legacy—to interrogate how, precisely, the “main role of government changes,” and with what long- and short-term effects. At stake is the state’s capacity to see and judge the individual soul, which is why a public confession is so central to the process: to repeat, the threat to power presented by a witch, or a Communist, stems from that person’s capacity for dissemblance: he or she constitutes an enemy “within,” walking among us effectively disguised as one of us. Consequently, such people cannot be “judged” either by their actions or by their looks; rather, the state must construct a judicial mechanism that enables spiritual transparency: in a struggle of absolutes, judicial power must find a means to look inside the hearts and minds of its subjects, to ferret out that enemy within. Such inquisitorial policies as surveillance, extraordinary rendition, and torture follow almost automatically, and to read or watch The Crucible today, as my students point out, is to understand Miller as an uncanny prophet of what the Cold War spy novelist John le Carré today perceptively has called yet another of America’s “periods of historical madness.” When I teach The Crucible, my students typically point to a counterintuitive logic underpinning the legal practice of Puritan theocracy as the most glaring instance of this madness; as Miller envisions it, those who steadfastly maintain their innocence are hanged, while those who “confess” to their own guilt are given reduced sentences. Under such a paradoxical judicial regime, the “innocent” are condemned, while the “guilty” are let off the hook, a situation that rightly offends our workaday assumptions about justice and the legal system’s role in applying it. If you confess to a crime, your sentence will be commuted; if you maintain your innocence, this merely proves your guilt (and if you refuse either option, as Giles Corey does in the play, you will be tortured to death). Consequently, a confession—and who wouldn’t confess, to save one’s life?— proves the state in the right, and a protest of innocence likewise legitimates state claims and serves to expand state dominion. Proctor points out the double bind 93

MAS CUL INIT Y, DEVIANCE, AND SEXUALIT Y

the accused face. “Tituba, Sarah Good, and numerous others have confessed to dealing with the Devil. They have confessed it” (68), asserts Rev. Hale, trying to shore up his own flagging convictions in the justice of the witch hunt to which he has committed himself. “And why not,” Proctor states, “if they must hang for denyin’ it? There are them that will swear to anything before they’ll hang; have you never thought of that?” (69). Such seeming hypocrisy, however, is not a question of bureaucratic legal power run amok; rather, it is the lynchpin of the state’s claim for what Anthony Giddens terms a “monopoly on violence.” It is no coincidence, for example, that Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger of California recently used the very evangelical rhetoric of Miller’s villainous inquisitor Danforth in refusing clemency to Stanley (Tookie) Williams: “Is Williams’s redemption complete and sincere, or is it just a hollow promise? . . . Stanley Williams insists he is innocent, and that he will not and should not apologize or otherwise atone for the murders of the four victims in this case. Without an apology and atonement for these senseless and brutal killings there can be no redemption. In this case, the clearest indication of complete remorse and full redemption is the one thing Williams will not do” (qtd. in Kershaw). Williams’s response, for the record, also echoed Proctor’s: I’m plenty guilty; just not of this particular crime. Moreover, for Miller, the moral blackmail of the gesture handily exposes the motivations behind legal power: the court is not interested in arbitrating guilt or innocence, much less in preserving public safety, meting out just retribution, or even, except in the most cynical of senses, rehabilitating criminal offenders. All of these are mere alibis or retrospective rationalizations for law itself. As Miller’s contemporary Walter Benjamin asserted in his 1921 “Critique of Violence,” it is not simply a question of the state justifying itself through claiming a monopoly on violence. More urgently, the law, in order to preserve itself, perpetually reiterates its founding act of violence: it institutes guilt as the binding mechanism between the legal subject (defined by his or her relationship to law) and the state. Unlike Schwarzenegger, Miller’s Deputy Governor Danforth is under no illusions about what is happening. Power is obliged to “stay the course” not because it is the just course, or even because it is a productive course, but because state violence has no other function than to perpetuate the legitimacy of power itself: Now hear me, and beguile yourselves no more. I will not receive a single plea for pardon or postponement. Them that will not confess will hang. . . . Postponement now speaks a floundering on my part; reprieve or pardon must cast doubt upon the guilt of them that died till now. While I speak God’s law, I will not crack its voice with whimpering. If retaliation is your fear, know this—I should hang ten thousand that dared to rise against the law, and an ocean of salt tears could not melt the resolution of the statutes. (129) 94

MAS CUL INIT Y, DEVIANCE, AND SEXUALIT Y

In the dramatic terms of Miller’s play, the audience is faced with the choice between outright revolution and—in the character of Hale—reform; for his part, Proctor chooses between denying the very premises of the state’s right to judge citizens and withdrawing into an inner struggle to maintain his own integrity. “He’s come to overthrow the court,” warns Rev. Parris, when Proctor appears to present Mary Warren’s deposition asserting that the whole conspiracy is a fabrication of the girls. Danforth questions him closely: “Now sir, what is your purpose?” Proctor: Why, I—I would free my wife, sir. Danforth: There lurks nowhere in your heart, nor hidden in your spirit, any desire to undermine this court? Proctor, with the faintest faltering : Why, no, sir. (89–90)

As Miller’s play insists, the sole motivation of the judicial apparatus itself is to establish its own rights to power via ritualized displays of individual acquiescence and consent; after he is himself accused, Proctor initially agrees to confess and to condemn others. When pressed for his signature, he refuses, and therefore redeems “some shred of goodness in John Proctor. Not enough to weave a banner with, but white enough to keep it from such dogs” (144), thus reclaiming his integrity and summoning the self-respect to face the gallows like a man. For Miller, the obvious parallel with the HUAC hearings, which compelled “friendly witnesses” to name the names of those people whom the committee already knew to have once been members of the Communist Party (and the witnesses could ease their own conscience by rationalizing that they didn’t betray any secret information; Miller’s own strategy, when brought before HUAC in 1956, was identical to Proctor’s; he happily implicated himself, but refused to bear witness—false or true—against others). By reclaiming his “name,” Proctor admittedly sacrifices his social obligations to his wife and children. Miller broadly hints, and both the 1996 film and many stage productions pointedly suggest, that the example of Proctor’s nobility inspires the citizenry to resist the court’s abuse of power.5 Yet the equation between a heroic individual integrity in the face of tyranny and effective social change cannot be staged, precisely: it functions according to an entirely metaphysical logic. Here, a more or less religious assumption ironically creeps into Miller’s argument: that inner resistance to power will somehow, guided by Providence, perhaps, translate into political reform. More properly, I might say, this is a rhetorical conceit of drama itself. Not only do such unrealistically happy endings only happen in Hollywood and very seldom in history, but “nobility” itself demands and constructs an audience to which martyrdom can appeal. The key to freedom, in this instance, is simply good acting, if we read the play in part as self-reflexive dramaturgy. In keeping with the very psychological 95

MAS CUL INIT Y, DEVIANCE, AND SEXUALIT Y

premises of Stanislavski’s Method acting, Proctor holds to an ethical model of performance in which the public or on-stage role one plays can be honestly and truly aligned with one’s inner feelings, and in so doing he is shriven of his earlier hypocrisy (when he had tried to keep his feelings for Abigail hidden). Now he can act publicly what he feels intuitively, and so reclaims his goodness and his name. For Miller, this is what constitutes truth and integrity, an organicity of conscience. By contrast, Proctor continues to criticize the more flamboyant theatricality of the girls. “It were pretense,” he reiterates, referring to their seizures, in essence accusing them of being unpolished thespians. Such Orwellian reversals make for powerful melodrama, especially within a deeply entrenched American dramatic idiom that pits the yeoman Yankee individualist—the personification of America’s most treasured national characteristic—against the collective powers of a corrupt, bamboozled, sluggishly inefficient, indifferent, legally hamstrung, or just plain sinister bureaucracy. Miller stacks his deck in just such a nativist fashion when he takes on the Cold War myth of “un-Americanism” that, like Kazan in the ad he took out in the New York Times to defend his actions, stressed the “alien” nature of the Communist menace. Proctor is the embodiment of time-honored frontier virtues: the story of the natural, rural, commonsensical individual versus the elite urban bureaucracy is one that every “American” will immediately recognize and respond to. Miller thus writes both within and against a Cold War logic, espousing liberal humanism as a panacea for political and theological overreaching. The drama inevitably involves individual freedom versus collective totalitarianism, and the thinly disguised members of HUAC are portrayed as proto-totalitarian zealots. “Justice” is never truly at issue, but simply the timeworn Hollywood trick of dramatizing the capacity of the collective powers of the court to demolish the human freedom of the individual. Miller, of course, is no hack. Proctor is presented with genuine, complex, and vexing choices, and his “triumph” comes at an immense cost. Furthermore, as Victor Navasky notes, the audience is not simply asked to condemn informers; indeed, when Mary Warren is tempted to rat out her friends, we want to applaud the act. Despite the charges of melodrama a variety of critics have made against this play, the audience can, moreover, question Proctor’s motives and his decisions, and the moral ambiguity involved in such ethical decisions can be parsed at length (many of my students, for example, read his character as that of a narcissistic and self-serving egoist, quick to abandon his wife and family for some fairly spurious and overly theatrical imposture of personal honor). In sum, however, Miller’s drama advertises itself as a timely and convincingly profound meditation on a struggle for the American soul; Proctor, though tempted to take the easy way out, inevitably rises to the occasion, and Miller’s ultimate, optimistic moral is crystal clear. Even if one loses the battles in the short run, heroic individual moral resistance to the totalitarian perversions of collective power 96

MAS CUL INIT Y, DEVIANCE, AND SEXUALIT Y

will ultimately restore a saner democracy and so preserve what is still worth preserving in the American tradition. Again, the self-same “exceptionalism” that Miller initially targeted sneaks in through the back door. There is nothing new in all of this; we could read the bulk of American political culture in precisely the same rhetorical terms: the struggle over America’s soul is presented as the struggle to save certain distinctly American values from other, distorted versions of the selfsame values: let America be America again, as Langston Hughes so eloquently sloganizes. But perhaps America never was America. Perhaps rather than nostalgically aiming to revitalize a once vital and once energizing democratic constitutional tradition understood to have been buried under the rubble of political expediency, opportunism, zealotry, chicanery, and mercenary thuggery, political thinkers would do well to embrace even more radical propositions. I’m sure you’ll realize by now that, like Arthur Miller, I have revisited an earlier episode in order to score some cheap rhetorical points about life in my own time. However, rather than lamenting our current American decline into a new theocracy, or hoping to simply inspire opposition through our own comically heroic intellectual resistance, it strikes me that the most pressing theoretical task at the beginning of this century will be critically to consider precisely what new formations of power Bushism has enabled; to evaluate, as Bushism collapses, precisely what damages have been done, and to whom; and to elaborate and mobilize whatever new possibilities of opposition are emerging today.

97

CHAPTER FIVE

T H E D R EADED VOYAGE I NTO THE WORLD Nomadic Ethics

You leave the gate of the fort or the town behind, pass the camels lying outside, go into the dunes, or out onto the hard, stony plain and stand awhile, alone. Presently, you will either shiver and hurry back inside the walls, or you will go on standing there and let something very peculiar happen to you, something that everyone who lives there has undergone and which the French call le baptême de la solitude. It is a unique sensation, and it has nothing to do with loneliness, for loneliness presupposes memory. Here, in this wholly mineral landscape lighted by stars like flares, even memory disappears; nothing is left but your own breathing and the sound of your heart beating. A strange, and by no means pleasant, process of reintegration begins inside you, and you have the choice of fighting against it, and insisting on remaining the person you have always been, or letting it take its course. For no one who has stayed in the Sahara for a while is quite the same as when he came. —PAUL B OW L E S, Their Heads are Green and their Hands are Blue

An alert reader will discern a deep and vexing mournfulness at the heart of Daniel Bell’s zeitgeist-defining 1961 book, The End of Ideology: On the Exhaustion of Political Ideas in the Fifties, which narrates American intellectuals’ passage from the aesthetic and political radicalism that marked the 1920s and 1930s to the sobering realities of the Cold War as a traumatizing journey from innocence to experience. The ache in Bell’s writing is most evident when he endeavors to pit the battle-weary political maturation of his own “sadder but wiser” generation of intellectuals against the soul-stirring vitality of earlier generations. On the one hand, thinkers of the 1950s are perfectly right, Bell argues, to endorse caution, moderation, pragmatism, restraint, common sense, pluralism, and, not least, a recognition of the virtues of a mixed economy—all of which makes perfect sense when measured against the murderous consequences of ideological zealotry and the failed social experiments of the first half of the twentieth century. 98

NOMADIC ETH ICS

Criticizing the ease with which aging leftists almost unanimously targeted the philistinism of an expanding middle class and an emerging consumer society, for example, and thus to some extent undermined their old populist allegiances, Bell points out sagely that the verdict is not yet in. Consumer society does not necessarily imply cultural homogenization—quite the contrary: “modern society, with its possibilities for mobility, occupational choice, theater, books, and museums, is more differentiated, variegated, and life-enhancing” (313). As Andrew Ross has documented, the anxious debate about the prospects and limitations of so-called mass culture emerged at a time when intellectuals were being enlisted in the cause of helping to secure “liberal pluralism as the ideal model of a fully democratic classless society,” and “many of them helped to underwrite and legitimize the new rules of consent, which demanded . . . the containment, absorption, and enfranchisement in ‘power-sharing’ of an expanded range of social and cultural groups” (42). In this effort, Bell was more than willing to pull his weight. Even so, in the collapse of political extremism and an awakening to the “dawn of reality” (312), Bell laments an eclipse of radical enthusiasm, as if Americans of the times had traded the promise of a just society for the limited personal emancipations of relative prosperity withered of both intellectual passion and affective intensity: if radical emancipation was an illusion and consumer society traded the promise of a just society for a limited freedom to choose, then, politically, “what is left is the un-heroic, day-to-day, routine of living” (302), “the prosaic, yet necessary questions, of school costs, municipal services, the urban sprawl, and the like” (312). The stoical good cheer with which he surveys the contemporary landscape is leavened by his own tragic sensibility, as evidenced in such recognitions that “ours, a ‘twice-born generation,’ finds its wisdom in pessimism, evil, tragedy, and despair” (300). If joy or, more modestly even, delight has been dimmed, and consumers are increasingly obliged to settle for the spurious and short-lived pleasures of shopping, then Bell poses the existential problem of an affirmative despair; further, he insists that “these problems are essentially cultural and not political, and the problem of radical thought today is to reconsider the relationship of culture to society” (313). If, that is, culture had been relieved of the onerous duty of contributing to the political struggle for the emancipation of the subjugated, then how and to whom could it be made to matter? How would culture, in the time-honored Arnoldian sense of the word, compete in a consumer-oriented market? How could Shakespeare be valued against Buicks? As Ross and other cultural historians demonstrate, this question, most pointedly posed in Clement Greenberg’s 1939 “Avant-Garde and Kitsch,” dominated every single work of critical commentary in the decades to follow. With the postwar expansion of middle-class prosperity and concomitant philistinism, culture itself seemed to have reached an impasse. If the consensus ideal of consumer prosperity implied that the material emancipation of each 99

NOMADIC ETH ICS

person would result in the ideological emancipation of most, how did the compelling cultural productions of the time work to calibrate and recast the tensions between personal fulfillment and social processes? And how was one to describe this apocalyptic mundane, this bomb-haunted consensus? In his notorious 1957 celebration of the white American existentialist hipster’s mimicry of what he imagines to be the joyful, un-self-consciously authentic life of African Americans, The White Negro, Norman Mailer describes this anomie thus: One could hardly maintain the courage to be individual, to speak with one’s own voice, for the years in which one could complacently accept oneself as a part of an elite by being a radical were forever gone. A man knew that when he dissented, he gave a note upon his life which could be called in any year of overt crisis. No wonder then that these have been the years of conformity and depression. A stench of fear has come out of every pore of American life, and we suffer from a collective failure of nerve. The only courage, with rare exceptions, has been the isolated courage of isolated people. (2)

In this chapter, consequently, I revisit the vexing problem of postwar solitude, which I have interrogated thus far as a problem of a distinctly masculine quest for productive ways to produce, perform, and publicly certify one’s self-worth. While not abandoning those concerns, I would like further to complicate the cultural and political dimensions of isolation, typically understood at the time to be an existential dilemma—which, in an American context, implies that the politics will be muted at best. As always, my hope is to give a semblance of voice— an echo, at least—to what has been muted. While it is easy enough to satirize or scold Mailer for his racial envy, he poses in the passage above an ethical question undergirding most American writing of the 1950s: how, writers of the time asked themselves, is it possible to live well and narrowly at the same time? Attending the forcible postwar breakup of the popular front culture of the 1930s and 1940s, cultural historians can trace a concomitant shift in the ethical concerns of American novels, poems, paintings, films, and plays away from the political and toward the personal. The cultivation of “personality” as a response to social pressures of a mind-numbingly sterile American conformity and to the evacuation of the political was understood as potentially liberating, for many writers of the time, or as potentially soul destroying. In Howl, Allen Ginsberg’s seminal Cold War epic, a profligate selfhood managed to be both, as the “best minds” of the generation achieve erotic and intellectual ecstasy and, in so doing, both consent and contribute to their own inescapably ravishing destruction. While in an earlier chapter I considered how Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man selfconsciously theorizes and dramatizes the trajectory of this concerted shift by exhausting the ethical potential of collective enunciation and celebrating a paradoxically muted pluralism, I might equally as well map the equivalent social and 100

NOMADIC ETH ICS

aesthetic disjunction in the evolution of the careers of numerous artists as well known and as diverse as Saul Bellow, Langston Hughes, Chester Himes, and Mailer, to mention only a few of the big names of the era. In each case, we witness a turn away from the complex social mapping of characters shaped by and, ultimately, consciously responsive to their class location toward an existential, meditative complex of reflections on the absurd fate of individual consciousness and the—often admittedly solipsistic—terrain of interior subjectivity. If James Baldwin’s novels and short stories stand as the most pointed exception to this tendency toward the solipsistic, his depictions of the thwarted sojourns of altruistic love in and among the community of exiles no doubt assume a tragic cast: in Baldwin, fellow-feeling is both necessary and in many ways unavoidable, even where it makes impossible demands on his characters. But, at least in his earlier works, love solves no social or even individual problems; aesthetically sublimated into intense forms of cultural expressiveness, it merely offers the consolation of mutually shared intensities. As the narrator of his 1957 story “Sonny’s Blues” acknowledges, “The tale of how we suffer, and how we are delighted, and how we may triumph is never new, it always must be heard. There isn’t any other tale to tell, it’s the only light we’ve got in all this darkness” (139). The formal challenge of contemporary artistic production, for Baldwin, is to discover and transmit innovative ways of making humans experience and acknowledge our fellow suffering and fellow capacity for joy. By contrast, well-known apostates of the Left, including Richard Wright, John Dos Passos, Sidney Hook, and Arthur Koestler, famously endorsed the cultivation of individuality, paradoxically enough, as a complex kind of social duty, a process I have mapped in the anti-McCarthysim of Arthur Miller, while writers who aimed to stay the Communist course—Nelson Algren and Howard Fast leap to mind—were dismissed as antiquated and rather unsophisticated relics of a cruder age. Such libertarian fanaticists as Ayn Rand argued that virtually all forms of social commitment were potentially totalitarian, staging, in both the novel and film version of The Fountainhead, a dramatic and relentless social war between individual aspirations of genius against the resentful clutching and scheming of the envious rabble. Other dramatizations of the antagonism between individualism and collectivism were variously more tempered. Such former Trotskyites as Mary McCarthy, for example, leavened their bemusement with studied irony; her 1952 satire of McCarthyism on campus, The Groves of Academe, as we have seen, emulates the modulations of Jamesian irony in an effort to set the cultivation of nuanced consciousness above—if not entirely against—collective social formations, whose occasional descents into hysteria and panic must be weathered by critical intellectuals. Arthur Miller, as we have also seen, dramatized a heroic liberal martyrdom in the face of social panic, figuring individual consciousness itself as resistant; by contrast, other humorists of the time, as did Sylvia Plath, implicitly recognized that individualism was 101

NOMADIC ETH ICS

itself viciously constrained by the sexual, gender, and class strictures of consensus society: the effort to cultivate a uniquely liberating consciousness would lead only to madness and social ostracism. Class tension, of course, never disappeared from American life, and the popular or mass culture of the time is redolent with both mournful and exuberant expressions of class sentiment; the postwar country-and-western music of Hank Williams, for example, might best be described as the lament of a rural population displaced into an alienating urban environment, and both rhythm and blues and an increasingly white rock and roll often expressed blue-collar allegiances. The liberal intelligentsia, consequently, could not help but be alarmed by the emergence of a mainstream mass culture. As I have argued, the uncoupling of labor from cultural production placed the burden on “culture,” as understood by elite intellectuals, to cultivate the unfettered consciousness of the freedomloving individual, whose felt incapacity to exercise that freedom was rendered as an existential rather than a social crisis. Yet the expanding market for popular culture had several consequences. Alan Wald has charted the ways in which many left-leaning writers sought refuge by making their livings churning out work in the various “subliterary” popular genres (science fiction, romance, youth fiction, and children’s literature) that offered them an audience for their work with the revolution in paperback publishing. And certain writers on the Left, as David Cochran has also persuasively argued, were forced more or less underground when “the numerous paths—political and cultural—that had lain before Americans in the immediate postwar period had been largely closed off by the early fifties, leaving the Cold War consensus dominant” (13). Cochran’s primary examples of this process are the noir writers Jim Thompson, a one-time stalwart of the popular front commitments to proletarian writing, whose garish postwar variations on hard-boiled fiction deploy a degeneratively schizophrenic narrative and gothicize the existential relish of absurdity in the face of social amorality, and another ambivalent leftist, Patricia Highsmith, whose pseudo-intellectual murderers are saved from mental collapse only by virtue of expatriation.1 In different ways, both Thompson and Highsmith render flights out of rational structures of outwardly conforming selfhood. In Thompson’s 1952 The Killer Inside Me, for example, the protagonist and narrator, Lou Ford, a deputy sheriff in Central City, Texas, dissimulates a “good ole boy” banality in order to remain in the good graces of those pillars of the local citizenry upon whom his livelihood depends: Sheriff Bob Maples, whose job it is to maintain and regulate the values of middle-class America (the plot of the book is launched when Maples dispatches Ford to “gently” prod the prostitute Joyce Lakeland outside county limits); Ford’s presumptive fiancée, Amy Stanton, who conceals her sadomasochistic sexual relations with Ford from her family and the town; and the corrupt labor organizer, Joseph Rothman, who collaborates with the local oligarch, Chester Conway, to cut costs on building contracts and conceal evidence of 102

NOMADIC ETH ICS

shoddy workmanship by murdering potential whistleblowers like Ford’s foster brother, Mike Dean. Central City itself is an oil town, booming with postwar prosperity. All of the townsfolk are hypocrites themselves, crafting respectable social personas that allow them to maintain their own positions of relative security within a corrupt social order. “We’re living in a funny world, kid,” Ford explains to one of his victims, “a peculiar civilization. The police are playing crooks in it, and the crooks are doing police duty. The politicians are preachers, and the preachers are politicians” (118). A partial exception is the skeptical county attorney, Howard Hendricks, who, as a newcomer to Central City, is naively unaware of how the game is played. Suspicious of Lou Ford from the beginning, Hendrickson is convinced, initially, that his job is to prosecute crime, rather than to hide corruption from public view, for lurking behind Ford’s guise of easygoing redneck is both an intellectual—a trained medical practitioner capable of diagnosing his own mental illness—and a schizophrenic misogynist and multiple murderer. Ford’s public presentation of himself as a dull-witted rube—“a typical Western-county peace officer, that was me. Maybe friendlier looking than average. Maybe a little cleaner cut. But on the whole typical” (29)—allows for him to go into “hiding” (28) from his own sickness: “a disease, or a condition, rather. Called dementia praecox. Schizophrenia, paranoid type. Acute recurrent, advanced. Incurable” (219).2 Ford’s efforts to conceal and manipulate the evidence of his own guilt set him on a spree of murders, and he eventually draws various members of the town into the circle of his conspiracy. Ultimately, they are compelled either to come to terms with their own complicity or to arrest Ford, who has been able to keep them in line because he is in possession of the truth about their own dirty little secrets; indeed, Ford was paid to be their hired muscle, and he had hitherto displayed no discomfort with his job. After being released from incarceration through the inspired scheming of his lawyer, Ford drives back to his home to confront his first beating victim, Joyce Lakeland, who had earlier been spirited off to a hospital in Fort Worth. Conway, who suspects that Ford is behind the murder of his son, has kept her alive in the hopes that she will recover and testify against him, but had instructed Maples to tell Ford earlier that Joyce had died on the operating table. Maples, aware of the depths of his betrayal and his own involvement in protecting a murderer, commits suicide, and in an apocalyptic and surreal climax, Ford rigs his own home to explode with himself and all his enemies and co-conspirators inside, and the reader realizes the entire story has been told by a dead narrator.3 The Central City cannot hold. Thompson stages this ending as an act of revenge; if others are complicit in Ford’s crimes insofar as they wittingly perpetrate an unjust and rather mercenary social order, they will not be so easily allowed to scapegoat Ford, who is nothing more and nothing less than a pure product of America gone crazy. Ford has been hoping to “settle scores” in Central City from the opening pages, and, as is typical in Thompson’s plot, Ford’s “disease” flares up 103

NOMADIC ETH ICS

upon his meeting with Joyce: “I was staring open-mouthed like a country boy. This was three months ago, remember, and I hadn’t had the sickness in almost fifteen years. Not since I was fourteen” (8). And so the novel ends with Ford’s disembodied narrative voice trailing off in a rather desperate attempt to solicit sympathy, or at least a concession to the poetic justice of his final act of purgation, from his audience of readers: Yeah, I reckon that’s all unless our kind gets another chance in the Next Place. Our kind. Us people. All of us that started the game with a crooked cue, that wanted so much and got so little, that meant so good and did so bad. All us folks. Me and Joyce Lakeland and Johnny Pappas and Bob Maples and big ol’ Elmer Conway and little ol’ Amy Stanton. All of us. All of us. (244)

The reiterated, almost hypnotic incantation of collective guilt tars the reader with complicity as well, of course, and the narrative failure to resolve its own contradictions or find a reliable Horatio figure to deliver an unvarnished record implies the failure of containment narratives to offer solace or to deliver the ideological goods: in the end, we are unable to sort out the guilty from the innocent, to distinguish between the law-abiding citizens and the criminal types, distinctions upon which consensus culture had rested. The principal proponent of law and order, Lou Ford, is the very source of the “disease” here, and as a deputy sheriff, Ford’s position is rightly liminal. He is called upon to defend through force and through rhetoric a criminal social pact, a covenant to which he is enough of an insider to recognize as completely fraudulent, while at the same time he is so far down the ladder of corruption that he does not much benefit materially himself, unless he is himself on the take. “I don’t make very much,” Ford tells Conway’s son, Elmer, angling for a bribe before he kills him (43–44). Only a dupe would remain content in such a role, and Ford is no fool, though he believes he has successfully dissembled one in his public demeanor. Such is the plight of the deputy sheriff, poorly paid defender of an institutionalized system of graft that excludes him. Mistaking him for a bit of a simpleton, the pillars of Central City never figured Ford would comprehend the devious manner in which he was being played, let alone demand his slice, or that he would lick the wounds of his envy until the opportunity presented itself to take them all down with him. The Killer Inside Me is complex, compelling, and bewildering, in all sorts of ways. In the book’s critique of the media state apparatus, for example, Ford knows that the newspapers are more interested in flattering power than they are in peddling sensationalism as he lies to them about the murders he has committed; because he is an authority, they simply accept his word as accurate. The book 104

NOMADIC ETH ICS

also targets medicine, conceiving of psychiatry as a state-sponsored fraud as well, one that enlists enlightened and humane science in a project of regulating norms of behaviors. When a “Dr. John Smith” shows up, Ford charges him with medical fraud; later, in an insane asylum, Ford is tortured incessantly with slide projections of his victim, Amy Stanton, presumably in an effort to instill a sense of guilt in the sociopath and compel him to confess to her murder. The asylum is the central dramatic space of postwar literature, a social microcosm, as we saw in Plath and in Ellison, whereby unruly subjects are manipulated, via a blend of coercion and consent, into willing conformity; psychiatry is depicted as a Foucaultian institutional and discursive regime charged with instilling compliance within docile subjects to the point where they will hunt down and prosecute any deviance they find within the self; the figuration of the breakdown of the Cold War consensus in the early 1960s will also be set in the asylum; both Ken Kesey’s notorious 1962 satire, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, and Sam Fuller’s 1963 film, Shock Corridor, tell the stories of patients engaged in uprisings against such treatment. The Killer Inside Me, like most of Thompson’s books, is not an overtly political satire, though there are signs of the times scattered throughout; the straightarrow Hendricks is “one of those professional patriots, always talking about what a great hero he’d been in the war” (65), and his spurious—Ford thinks— wound seems to move mysteriously to different parts of his body. The labor leader, Rothman, jokes about the possibility of sex and bullshit being declared “un-American” and realizes that he and the union he runs must compromise left-wing principles and collaborate with management to survive the purges; it is Rothman who secures Ford’s attorney, Billy Boy Walker, a Rabelaisian master of political theater. Even so, Thompson’s book is a brilliantly rendered, almost Deleuzean diagnosis of socially enforced systems of structural paranoia, whereby capitalism both exceeds and morally overcodes its own regulatory limits. As I argued in my opening chapter, such a work as Plath’s The Bell Jar functions as an emergent social technology of the memoir, or the therapeutic or confessional novel, assuming, however uneasily, the important responsibility of realigning a deviant subjective desire of women for women to correspond with a repressively hetero-normative social order through an act of self-writing; by contrast, in Thompson’s novel, staged quite literally as a confession, the therapeutic work of making an ill self ultimately conform to dominant social values—by both retuning misfiring mechanisms in the psyche and readjusting and reforming social imbalances via an act of self-narration—fails utterly. An amateur literary critic, among other things, Lou Ford understands that narrative works to contain, control, and resolve ambiguity; consequently, he excoriates a surrealism that abdicates its representational duties: In a lot of books I read, the writer seems to go haywire every time he reaches a high point. He’ll start leaving out punctuation and running his words 105

NOMADIC ETH ICS

together and babble about stars flashing and sinking into a deep dreamless sea. And you can’t figure out whether the hero’s laying his girl or a cornerstone. I guess that kind of crap is supposed to be pretty deep stuff—a lot of the book reviewers eat it up, I notice. But the way I see it, the writer is just too goddam lazy to do his job. And I’m not that lazy, whatever else I am. I’ll tell you everything. (179–80)

Ironically, of course, the same mimetic breakdown occurs in Thompson’s novel, as Ford loses the struggle to control and contain his sickness. Early, his narrative breaks off abruptly as he is describing himself “laying his girl”—molesting and abusing a two-year-old: up overhead in the loft, where the rats now scampered and scurried, Mike had found me with the little gi— A rat screamed suddenly on a high note. (26)

By the conclusion, the “cornerstone”—that bedrock selfhood that Lou had aimed to secure through the act of therapeutic confessional—has crumbled, and the “sickness” has broken through, overriding Ford’s voice just as it had dictated his murderous actions. Thompson betrays his cultural red-diaper origins insofar as The Killer Inside Me rather pointedly depicts the failure of narrative strategies to effectively contain and coordinate the split between a system of social responsibility committed to a public good and an antisocial ethic of single-minded, dog-eat-dog acquisitiveness. Among Thompson’s ironic metaphysical points in this work is that the unassuming bastions of behavioral norms are themselves diseased and monstrous. Early in the book, Ford begins to suspect that everyone around him is playing a role as hypocritical as his own: “A crazy notion came over me. Maybe I hadn’t fooled ’em. Maybe they were putting on an act, just like I was” (70). This turns out to be the case, figuratively as well as literally, insofar as his associates are conspiring to conceal the truth about Joyce’s survival from Ford. That this exposé hinges upon perverse sexuality is key as well. Ford is profoundly, and proudly, misogynist: women, he confesses, bring out the “sickness” within him and threaten his self-integrity, insofar as they upset the balancing act he has fashioned between his hidden inner life and the face he presents to the public, “old dumb Lou from Kalamazoo” (66). He savagely beats both Amy and Joyce, who both confess to him their masochistic sexual thrills, which he understands, both in his sickness and in his “healthy” frame of mind, to be what all women want and what they deserve; his foster brother, Mike, takes the blame for Ford’s earlier molestation of a two-year-old child; and he learns from a dirty photograph tucked into the family Bible that his own father, whom he had considered the sanest and most tolerant of men, had also indulged in a sadomasochistic relationship with their 106

NOMADIC ETH ICS

housekeeper, Helene. The apple didn’t fall too far from the tree in this case; Helene had initiated young Lou into the pleasures of sexual violence, and had been turned out of the home by his father, a doctor. Recognizing that his offspring had inherited his own misogynist “disease,” he had, as both a doctor and a patriarch should, taken great pains to shelter Lou from the consequences of discovery. But the strategy of containment is in vain, as both domesticity and the bodies go up in flames. The failure of family strictures and institutionally enforced codes of behavior to successfully regulate sexual deviance inaugurates a different line of flight for Patricia Highsmith’s notorious character, Tom Ripley. From its famously paranoid opening line—“Tom glanced behind him and saw the man coming out of the Green Cage, heading his way” (3)—to its equally paranoid conclusion— “even if there were policemen on the pier, it wouldn’t necessarily mean—” (290), Highsmith’s 1955 The Talented Mr. Ripley highlights the postwar production of the guilty subject. The book targets the ubiquitous perception of the dispiriting hollowness of postwar American life and can likewise be read as an indictment of the pernicious murderousness of conformism. Ripley, who feels he has “a real conformist’s face” (34), is, like Lou Ford, a man without qualities, another dissimulator of the inoffensive middle class, whose project over the course of the novel involves transforming himself from a “nobody” into a “somebody” by means of fraud and murder. Like Ford, he is a snob, condemning “the riffraff, the vulgarians, the slobs” (30) who surround him; like Ford, he is an orphan, spurred by sexual shame; and, like Ford, he has inherited these proclivities from his father: “Sissy! He’s a sissy from the ground up. Just like his father!” (38). Unlike Ford, however, who gets found out and who stages the demolition of centrism, Ripley moves out of his environs and, once ensconced in postwar Europe where the dollar is strong, is successful at ensuring that his crimes go undiscovered. Highsmith’s comic twist is that, ultimately, Ripley is rewarded with wealth and freedom. In The Talented Mr. Ripley, he kills his friend Dickie Greenleaf, whose life of leisure he envies, then loafs around Europe impersonating Dickie for a while; kills a mutual friend who discovers him; deceives the police, a private investigator, and Dickie’s suspicious friends and family members; and finally,

triumphantly, inherits Dickie’s wealth. As Slavoj Ziz ek has argued, Ripley is not in love with Dickie; rather he wants to become him.4 “All right, he may not be queer,” Dickie’s girlfriend, Marge, writes, “he is just a nothing, which is worse. He isn’t normal enough to have any kind of a sex life” (123). Over and over again, Ripley insists he is “not queer,” that “as people went, he was one of the most innocent and clean-minded he had ever known.” He insists that “I can’t make up my mind whether I like men or women, so I’m thinking of giving them both up” (81), only to be humiliated when a friend points out how banal the sentiment is. Ripley repeatedly checks himself out in mirrors, in an effort to secure a sense of his own existence 107

NOMADIC ETH ICS

and importance; he feels empty and hollow when others fail to recognize him. Unlike the typical existential hero of Gide or Camus,5 Ripley is desperate to engage socially, if narcissistically, in mutually satisfying reciprocal relations with beloved others, but his gestures of camaraderie are always blocked. When his offer of friendship and love is rejected by Dickie, Ripley is shocked into the recognition of his utter isolation: You were supposed to see the soul through the eyes, to see love through the eyes, the one place you could look at another human being and see what really went on inside, and in Dickie’s eyes Tom saw nothing more now than he would have seen if he had looked at the hard bloodless surface of a mirror. Tom felt a painful wrench in his breast, and he covered his face with his hands. It was as if Dickie had been suddenly snatched away from him. They were not friends. They didn’t know each other. It struck Tom like a horrible truth, true for all time, true for the people he had known in the past and for those he would know in the future: each had stood and would stand before him, and he would know time and time again that he would never know them, and the worst was that there would always be the illusion, for a time, that he did know them, and that they were completely in harmony and alike. For an instant the wordless shock of his realization seemed more than he could bear. He felt in the grip of a fit, as if he would fall to the ground. It was too much: the foreignness around him, the different language, is failure, and the fact that Dickie hated him. He felt surrounded by strangeness, by hostility. (89)

“I want to die” (90), he responds weakly when Dickie questions him. Instead, he decides to lash out and murder the one who has recognized him in his emptiness and failure, who has, in a sense, seen through him. What Ripley fears most, what shames him, is not that his homicides or his homosexuality be revealed: he fears the revelation of an essential and shameful banality and inner emptiness. He is afraid that others will find him boring, and so he cultivates the compensatory persona of a man of mystery. At the climactic moment, when he murders Dickie while they are out in a motorboat, Ripley recognizes that “he could have hit Dickie, sprung on him, or kissed him, or thrown him overboard, and nobody would have seen him from this distance” (103). Adrift, and lacking any essential selfhood, Ripley is a talented mimic: “Oh, I can do a number of things,” he tells Dickie, hoping to impress him at their first meeting, “valeting, baby-sitting, accounting—I’ve got an unfortunate talent for figures. No matter how drunk I get, I can always tell when a waiter’s cheating me on a bill. I can forge a signature, fly a helicopter, handle dice, impersonate practically anybody, cook and do a one-man show in a nightclub in case the regular entertainer’s sick. Shall I go on?” (58). As a confidence trickster, his talent is the innate capacity to dissimulate, and to manipulate the ways in which 108

NOMADIC ETH ICS

other people’s perceptions of him are structured by their own desires, biases, and expectations. While impersonating Dickie, Tom had at first amused himself with an eyebrow pencil—Dickie’s eyebrows were longer and turned up a little at the outer edges—and with a touch of putty at the end of his nose to make it longer and more pointed, but he abandoned these as too likely to be noticed. The main thing about impersonation, Tom thought, was to maintain the mood and temperament of the person one was impersonating, and to assume the facial expressions that went with them. The rest fell into place. (131)

He learns, too, the secrets of performative affect, how the simulation of behaviors will not only convince others of your mood but will indeed transform your own emotions: “If you wanted to be cheerful, or melancholic, or wistful, or thoughtful, or courteous, you simply had to act those things with every gesture” (193). In contradistinction to Method-acting’s proposition that external performance will, if played correctly, match up with inner emotions and thus produce a credible authenticity of expression, Ripley here asserts that pretense or dissemblance will transform one’s inner condition. Reversing and parodying the American dream of mobility and self-invention, Highsmith shows Ripley sailing to Europe in the hopes of starting over: “He was starting a new life. Goodbye to all the second rate people he had hung around and let hang around him in the past three years in New York. He felt as he had imagined immigrants feel when they left everything behind them in some foreign country, left their friends and relations and their past mistakes, and sailed for America. A clean slate!” (34–35). As with Ellison’s Invisible Man, new headgear convinces him that the world is one of infinite sartorial possibility: “A cap was the most versatile of headgear, he thought, and wondered why he had never thought of wearing one before? He could look like a country gentleman, a thug, an Englishman, a Frenchman, or a plain American eccentric, depending on how he wore it. Tom amused himself with it in his room in front of the mirror” (34). Everywhere selfhood is, in a deeply eroticized way, secured and anchored in material possessions, not simply wealth, but the rich accoutrements with which he can surround and adorn himself. In an important scene, jealous of Dickie’s girlfriend, Marge, Ripley goes to Dickie’s room and puts on his clothes, and, imagining himself rebuking Marge, perceives in the mirror “how much he looked like Dickie with the top part of his head covered” (79). Once he has finished Dickie off, Ripley experiences a blissful transformation on the train: The white, taut sheets of his berth on the train seemed the most wonderful luxury he had ever known. He caressed them with his hands before he turned the 109

NOMADIC ETH ICS

light out. And the clean blue-grey blankets, the spanking efficiency of the little black net over his head—Tom had an ecstatic moment when he thought of all the pleasures that lay before him now with Dickie’s money, other beds, tables, seas, ships, suitcases, shirts, years of freedom, years of pleasure. Then he turned the light out and put his head down and almost at once fell asleep, happy, content, and utterly confident as he had never been before in his life. (111–12)

Later, when he has to dispose of Dickie’s elegant clothes in order to avoid detection, he begins to cry. Such props and goods and fancy dress serve to establish his existence: “He loved possessions, not masses of them, but a select few that he did not part with. They gave a man self-respect. Not ostentation, but quality, and the love that cherished that quality. Possessions reminded him that he existed, and made him enjoy his existence” (252–53). By moving to Europe, Ripley transvaluates the deeply American strategy of self-invention in which upward mobility is steered into absorption within the middle classes; Ripley trades gauche arriviste consumerism for the rarified tastes of the epicure. He constructs and pursues a cosmopolitan self-image: “He imagined the speculations of the passengers. Is he an American! I think so, but he doesn’t act like an American, does he? Most Americans are so noisy. He’s terribly serious, isn’t he, and he can’t be more than twenty-three. He must have something very important on his mind” (40). Once he can effectively impersonate Dickie, he feels “completely comfortable. . . . He behaved as he had always wanted to behave at a party. This was the clean slate he had thought about on the boat coming over from America. This was the real annihilation of his past and himself, Tom Ripley, who was made up of that past, and his rebirth as a completely new person” (127). By contrast, Paul Bowles, who like Ripley styles himself a “detached observer of life” (Highsmith 186), along with most of his fictional characters, confesses to a desire to flee the traps of America and the western modernity entirely: “Each day I lived through on this side of the Atlantic,” he tells us of his first trip to North Africa, “was one more day spent outside prison” (165). In keeping with my own argument about the fugitive energies of social commitment within the cultural productions of refugees from the Cold War consensus, I would like to further complicate that constellation of expatriation, madness, and the narrowing political possibilities of the Cold War consensus by considering the fiction of Jane Bowles and Paul Bowles, whose writing elaborates a systematic and deliberate demolition of personal subjectivity, rather than a celebration of the pleasures of consciousness or an accusatory indictment of the social pressures that will wear it down. Like Highsmith and Thompson, Paul Bowles was a wayward Communist. At the time of his first trip to Mexico, in 1937, the twenty-six-year-old writer and composer was so hard-line a Stalinist that he prepared and distributed 110

NOMADIC ETH ICS

among the students there flyers in Spanish declaring “Trotsky must die!” (Carr 116; Bowles, Without Stopping 202; Sawyer-Laucanno 173). Describing a heated exchange with the former editor of the Masses, Max Eastman,6 Bowles later remembered that, at the time, “I knew nothing save what I learned in party publications” (Without Stopping 21). Yet by his own account, if it can be trusted, Bowles was never a very ardent member of the Communist Party, which he and his wife, Jane, joined in December 1938 (Carr 134). In later years, Bowles would explain his party membership as a rebellion against his conservative upbringing: “I did it as a gesture of defiance, really. Whom was I defying? My family. Yeah. Because they were very anti-communist. They were anti-Semitic. And so the girl I married was Jewish. One’s parents often plot one’s life for one, negatively” (Alenier et al. 167). In his autobiography, Bowles will claim that the party’s very earnestness and relative legitimacy during the 1930s rendered it paradoxically toothless: The Communist Party USA, it seemed to me, could serve only as a harassing instrument; all attempts to give it the air of an American institution were doomed to failure. It was legal and thus absurd; for it to have any meaning it would have to be driven underground. I had no faith in any political procedure save conspiracy. Nevertheless, this was the era of the Popular Front and “Communism is twentieth-century Americanism”; one pretended to agree. (186)

Here Bowles’s reiteration of the oxymoronic popular front slogan implies that what he faced in 1948 was not a choice between Communism and the United States, between, that is, depersonalized submission to totalitarian authority, on the one hand, and the cultivation of a highly stylized individual freedom, on the other, as dominant Cold War rhetoric would have dictated. Rather, in Bowles’s work, the either/or constraints of the Cold War set in motion a counterimperative to flee and to abandon both subjective formations: Bowles’s novels effectively refuse and dismantle the very project of subjective complicity with statist ideology. And Bowles has been best understood as the novelist of abandonment. As Marilyn Adler Papayanis has persuasively argued, “his narratives [bear] witness over and over to the self ’s undoing” (140). My aim in the final portion of this chapter, consequently, is to interrogate at more length the nomadic ethic of “the self ’s undoing” (cultivated in distinct ways by both Jane Bowles and Paul Bowles) within a Cold War context. Like many of his contemporaries, including Thompson and Highsmith, Paul Bowles’s deliberate, impostured dismissal of “American” values—“I hate America,” he had written to his musical mentor, Aaron Copland, in 1933, “because I feel attached to it” (In Touch 117)— overlapped with his abandonment of an overt politics, and was secured by his studied cultivation of detachment. Politics, according to this formulation, must 111

NOMADIC ETH ICS

be “underground” in order to be generative. Following Bowles’s own lead, few critics credit his leftist commitments to anything beyond the follies of youth, an incipient bohemianism, or the temper of the times. As Brian T. Edwards argues, Bowles might also be most fruitfully read as a “postnational” writer, as I have been endeavoring to understand Du Bois, Matthiessen, and Highsmith. Most critical interpretations of Bowles’s work are caught between an overly appreciative celebration and critical readings that “simply extrapolate his texts as orientalist.”7 To damn Bowles with this term, Edwards asserts, will mean “repressing the question of empire that lies at the foundations of American Studies” as a discipline (308). Rather, reading Bowles from a Moroccan and poststructuralist point of view, Edwards discovers that “Bowles’ early work refuses the neocolonialist/anti-imperialist polarity that has emerged as the choice critics make about his writing and exhibits a potentiality for an alternative engagement across national boundaries, literatures, and subjectivities” (308–9). Thus, in Edwards’s incisive reading of the work, the perpetual nomadic transgression of limits in his fiction is, as I have argued is the case with Highsmith’s Ripley, “an interruption to the American project of reordering American national identity in the empty space of the frontier” (324). Referring to Giorgio Agamben’s argument that the “state of exception” both constrains and excludes “bare life” within the dominant political order, Edwards points out that The Sheltering Sky’s “emphasis on movement at once connects it to a postwar sense of American mobility and permits an opening into the idea that American mobility has a limit” (308). Taking Edwards’s insistence on the necessity to reflect back on the potentialities suppressed by Cold War reading practices, I find it most fruitful to read Bowles’s work against the Cold War grain as well and to think through how Bowles depicts encounters with people and with landscapes that mark the limitations of imperial power. To situate the existential problem within a complex cultural, social, and political history involves considering that precise juncture that marks an exhaustion and an evacuation of the political in his life and writing within the horizon of the formative years of the Cold War, during which Bowles, inspired by his wife, transformed himself from a poet and composer into a writer of fiction, abandoned political commitments, and became a more or less permanent expatriate. If, as Alan Nadel and Elaine Tyler May persuasively argue, Cold War narratives of ideological “freedomism” and hetero-normativity enforce what might be called a “geo-sexual” containment through policing ideological and sexual behavior and by establishing “codes of proper conduct” and disciplining “those who violated them” (May 114), then the sometimes collaborative (if very different) works of Jane Bowles and Paul Bowles, by contrast, enact an experimental “line of flight” within and beyond what Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari term the “overcoding” of subjects and territories in modern or state societies.8 What Paul Bowles’s and Jane Bowles’s writings offer us, by contrast, is the exiles’ effacement of 112

NOMADIC ETH ICS

containment; they elude the doctrinaire either/or injunction of Cold War sexual and political practices, and map and depict a complex of sexual, psychological, and geographical displacements that everywhere frustrate the moralizing effort to distinguish between the normal and the deviant. As Papayanis has posited in a series of brilliant readings of expatriate narratives, Bowles’s expatriate ethics, while motivated by disillusionment and “a quest for the exotic” (5), also offer “a means to undo the culturally determined structural apparatus of consciousness altogether and to explore different modes of being, of perception, and of social intercourse . . . through profound attention to the local and the locale” (37). Discovering how this is so will, as Papayanis insists, complicate understandings of exoticism and eroticism; it will also mean ferreting out the links and disjunctions between nomadic traveling and political fellow traveling. “While the tourist generally hurries back home at the end of a few weeks or months,” writes Bowles in an oft-cited passage from The Sheltering Sky, “the traveler, belonging no more to one place than the other, moves slowly, over periods of years, from one part of the earth to another” (14). With characteristic reserve, Bowles articulates in the passages above a Deleuzean molecular or “micropolitics” of deception and dissemblance over and against the often dreary but explicitly political work of organized—Deleuze and Guattari would say “molar”—campaigns: “From the viewpoint of micropolitics, a society is defined by its lines of flight, which are molecular. There is always something that flows or flees, that escapes the binary organizations, the resonance apparatus, and the overcoding machine: things that are attributed to a ‘change in values,’ the youth, the woman, the mad, etc.” (Deleuze, Thousand Plateaus 216).9 In Deleuze and Guattari’s complex conception, “everything is political, but every politics is simultaneously a macropolitics and a micropolitics.” Notions of “class” and “sex,” for example, are “binary aggregates” that crystallize and segment populations according to a logic of molar formations; however, they “also cross over into molecular assemblages of a different nature.” The “two sexes imply a multiplicity of molecular combinations . . . a thousand tiny sexes”; so, too, in a formulation that Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri have seized upon, must the molar segmentarity of class be distinguished from the molecular notion of mass: “masses are constantly flowing or leaking from class” (213). Significantly, Deleuze and Guattari develop their understanding of micropolitics in a triad of terms that precisely locate Bowles in the late 1940s: not only are they derived from experimental sexual practices that traverse both male/female and hetero/ homo binaries, micropolitics also emerge out of a passage through and beyond Marxist understandings of class struggle and are occasioned by an encounter with “primitive” desert nomads. Todd May explains that flows of life are coded, they are constrained into precise networks which act like gullies to divert them along specific routes and in specific directions. . . . 113

NOMADIC ETH ICS

And “overcoding,” a state process, is a way of making the various codes in different sectors of a given society “resonate” together. Finally, in capitalist societies, flows which are no longer subject to traditional forms of coding are axiomatized, administered by broad constraints that regulate whole areas of experience rather than specific flows. . . . Lines of flight are flows that break with both the axioms and the codes of a given society in order to create new forms of life that are subversive to the repressions of that society. (32)

Though Jane Bowles and Paul Bowles pointedly joined the Communist Party under their own names, Paul Bowles emphasizes that party affiliation involved an elaborate “pretense.” He subscribes to a subversive, even revolutionary, political tactics of subterfuge, operating of necessity under the deep cover of cautious restraint. The ploy here is entirely consistent with Bowles’s rarified aesthetic of disguise and dissimulation. Bowles was himself famously circumspect about his personal life; according to William Burroughs, his memoir, Without Stopping, had been better entitled “Without Telling” (Baichwal). Bowles dressed as the most dapper of beatniks; he coolly cultivated an unruffled and gentlemanly demeanor, and his own lapidary and pristine prose betrays nothing of a superficially flamboyant gothic excess. For her part, Jane Bowles, who claimed never to have understood the principles of the Marxist-Leninist tracts she was compelled to read at the Workers’ School in Manhattan (Sawyer-Laucanno 206), would in 1958 sign an official deposition disavowing her membership. According to her FBI dossier, she declared, “I was willingly dropped from the Party because it was stated I was not serious enough. I attended a possible eight meetings before leaving the Party. After this I had no further contacts with any of the other members. I completely lost all belief in any of the ideals or promises of the Party” (qtd. in Carr 135). Such retractions, delivered under duress—Jane Bowles needed her passport renewed when she signed the document—should likewise be taken with a grain of salt, of course, as should the notoriously circumspect and carefully guarded public recollections of her husband; even so, neither Jane nor Paul seems to have ever been a trusted comrade. Though Paul immersed himself in his theoretical studies and, for a time, read the New Masses and other socialist periodicals religiously, his enthusiasm also waned quickly. He had never been a particularly astute political thinker; once, in 1931, following an afternoon of drinking with Ezra Pound in Paris, he had dashed off an offensively profascist letter to The Left: A Quarterly Review of Radical and Experimental Art, which the editors dutifully published: “I prefer to spit on you from a Fokker, and I believe sincerely that all workers are born to be crushed, and that it is a form of snobbery, and a virulent form at that, to think otherwise” (In Touch xi). His commitments to Communist Party discipline seem to have been nearly as thin 114

NOMADIC ETH ICS

and as immature—and almost as fleeting—as his allegiance to Hitler; by 1940, he requested that he also be “expelled” (Without Stopping 230), though there is no evidence that he ever was (Sawyer-Laucanno 224). Bowles’s novels and his short stories published after the Second World War are as decidedly apolitical as his public comments, apart from expressing a rather nebulous, strained, and highly sentimental anti-imperialism that takes sharp issue with the generalized destructiveness of modernity. In Bowles’s 1949 debut novel, The Sheltering Sky, the American couple, Kit and Port Moresby, travel deep into the Sahara in search of a place that has not yet been “ruined” by the war and the encroach of Western civilization. Early on in the book, Kit laments the seeming cultural homogenization on display in North Africa: “The people of each country get more and more like the people of every other country. They have no character, no beauty, no ideals, no culture—nothing, nothing” (16). Later, Port declaims that “Europe has destroyed the whole world” (95). Such laments are commonplace enough, and indeed the couples’ desert sojourn seems motivated by little more than their privileged and rather anxious search for a genuine sense of “authenticity,” of which, they feel, modern life has starved them. Highly urbane and sophisticated, desperately clinging to one another despite the passionless sexual and emotional shambles their marriage has become, and grieving, in short, their own paradoxically intense incapacity for human feeling, Port and Kit both hope and fear to find something irreducibly “real” in their encounters with the various denizens and tribespeople—Berbers, Arabs, Turks, French, Targui, Negroes—of the Sahara. Port, certainly, is a resolute exoticist. “Some places’ll withstand the malady longer than you think,” Port reassures Kit. “You’ll see, in the Sahara here” (16). For Bowles, the immediate and unshakeable appeal of the Sahara lay in its unsparing mockery of human aspirations. Anticipating the major themes of his novel, he writes in a 1948 letter to Peggy Glanville-Hicks that “Man is hated in the Sahara . . . one feels it in the sky, in the stones, in the air. It might as well be written in the stars: God Hates Man. . . . But of course, that can be exciting. Where life is prohibited, it becomes a delectable forbidden fruit, and that is the feeling one gets here: each instant is begrudged one by an implacable tyrant” (In Touch 189). Later, in “Baptism of Solitude,” he will elaborate on the immense appeal of the Sahara landscape and the history and customs of its inhabitants, which all seem to shatter the consolation one takes in one’s own subjectivity. Though Bowles is, as Richard Patteson asserts in his 1987 study, “the most resolutely expatriate American writer since Henry James” (ix), he tends to be read as a writer of a generalized “alienation,” as an idiosyncratic existentialist. Bowles’s deft and elegant rendering of an obsessively cultivated homelessness, his portraits of urgent and disaffected exiles, and the clarity with which he depicts, over and over again in his fiction, the self-destructive pursuit of a threatening journey outward are typically understood as symptomatic of a deeply modern, 115

NOMADIC ETH ICS

if, in Bowles’s case, strikingly personalized, malaise. Patteson, for instance, writes that Bowles is one of those writers on whom the twentieth century has bestowed an uncanny sense of what it is like never to feel “at home.” The political context of this intense apprehension of dislocation has to do with the realignment of boundaries, the shifting of peoples around the globe, and the collapse of traditional customs as newly independent governments rush to modernize. But there is a larger dimension too. The long decline of faith throughout the Christian west and the increasing secularization of life nearly everywhere have contributed to an intuition of exposure and nakedness that transcends politics. And it is this perception of ultimate homelessness that . . . Bowles . . . most powerfully images in his fiction. (x–xi)

In keeping with Bowles’s own expressed views, moreover, few critics consider his leftist political allegiances as anything more than a youthful dalliance, although his cultivation of solitude is often understood to result from his political disillusion: “My interest in the party,” Bowles claimed later, “was strictly personal and neurotic. I thought it was a nice slap at my family. I liked the ideology because it was destructive of the given order. That fit in with my nineteenthcentury romanticism” (qtd. in Dillon, Original Sin 64). Bowles’s friend Millicent Dillon goes so far as to suggest that his inevitable disappointment with Communism reinforced the pointed isolation that characterizes his writing, asserting that “the party betrayed his hopes as fully as his family had ever done. In that disillusion, for him as for many other artists who joined the party then, some permanent fracture was to take place, some final loss of hope of reconciling their inner creative life and the outer ‘real’ world” (64–73). By the time of the Red Scare of the late 1940s and 1950s, during the repressions certified by the Smith and McCarran acts, Bowles will be afraid to return to New York lest his passport get confiscated, although “the days in which I had political leanings of any sort whatever are long since past” (In Touch 225). The Sheltering Sky, like Ellison’s Invisible Man, can be read as a painful farewell to all that Marxist nonsense. On his journey into the desert, Port—a rather caricatured self-portrait of Bowles himself—strives to outgrow his own sentimental populism: For years it had been one of his superstitions that reality and true perception were to be found in the conversation of the laboring classes. Even though now he saw clearly that their formulas of thought and speech are as strict and as patterned, and thus as far removed from any profound expression of truth as any other class, often he still found himself still in the act of waiting, with the unreasoning belief that gems of wisdom might yet issue from their mouths. (23) 116

NOMADIC ETH ICS

Here, despite the fascination biographers and fans have expressed in the exotic and glamorous life Paul Bowles and Jane Bowles led in Tangiers, critics have refrained from reading either of their works as complex social commentary.10 Yet even if Paul Bowles’s work eloquently dramatizes a modern and severe crisis of faith—the metaphysical undercurrents of his works certainly contest Gore Vidal’s provocative claim that Bowles “writes as if Moby Dick had never been written”(6)11—it nonetheless seems disingenuous to minimize the importance of the political context of such dislocations and upheavals. Certainly the vexed history of third world “decolonization” and the often and still violent struggles of newly emerging states to mark their cultural and political independence cannot be understood outside of the framework imposed by the global struggle between superpowers after 1947 or so. No less, as I have been arguing, can we begin to comprehend the reorientation— the demolition, in the case of both Paul Bowles’s and Jane Bowles’s fiction—of personal subjectivity apart from a psycho-social history that calibrates the very manufacture of alienated “interiority” as a distinctly postwar cultural production. My own reading of their variously elegant, gothic, and often surprisingly humorous fugitive pieces maintains that what Jane Bowles terms “the dreaded voyage into the world” (“Camp Cataract” 175) describes and maps what the philosopher Gilles Deleuze calls a “line of flight” within and beyond the cultural horizon of the early Cold War. Their writing is both an interrogation and a rejection of the either/or dictates of hegemonic “freedomism,” and thereby pries open a host of experimental alternatives to the rigidities of consensus or containment culture. As Norman Mailer has claimed in an oft-cited passage from Advertisements for Myself, “Bowles opened the world of Hip. He let in the murder, the drugs, the incest, the death of the Square . . . the call of the orgy, the end of civilization” (468). The passages his characters traverse, of course, open up in acute consciousness of the apocalyptic dimensions of the atomic age: “Our civilization is doomed to a short life” opens what is perhaps Paul Bowles’s most radically perverse story; “its components are too heterogeneous. I personally am content to see everything in the process of decay. The bigger the bombs, the quicker it will be done” (119). As Paul Boyer has noted, “Pages from Cold Point” was “one of the earliest literary works to reflect a distinctly post-Hiroshima consciousness. . . . In an allusive and indirect way, Bowles suggests the interplay of the atomic threat and the other forces shaping his characters’ consciousness and behavior” (255). “Pages” is a first-person account by a professor who leaves his secure and boring life in the United States behind to move with his son, Racky, to a Caribbean island. Racky runs a bit wild, once there, and gets in trouble for carrying on increasingly dissolute affairs with boys from the island. He ends up “seducing” his father—at least according to the narrator’s recounting of their sexual affair—and subsequently blackmailing him into signing over funds 117

NOMADIC ETH ICS

so that Racky can go off and live the high life in Havana. While the narrator excoriates the fraudulence of academia—“the English quacks, the Philosophy fakirs, and so on” (119)—his greatest ire is reserved for his big brother, Charlie, an embodiment of American philistinism and smug self-righteousness: “ ‘Fat brother C.,’ a successful lawyer. His thick red face and hands, his back-slapping joviality, and his fathomless hypocritical prudery, these are the qualities which make him truly repulsive to me. There is also the fact that he once looked not unlike the way Racky does now. And, after all, he is still my big brother, and disapproves openly of everything I do” (120). Aware of the narrator’s predilection for pedophilia and, it is hinted, for incest, Charlie attempts to intervene to prevent their trip; after Racky begins sleeping with his father, he threatens to invite Uncle Charlie down and expose their affair. If sexual relations between father and son constitute the absolute horizon of bourgeois disapproval, it is typical that it forms a threshold to be crossed in Bowles’s fiction; his characters incessantly pursue their own undoing by dismantling structural taboos and transgressing moral limits. The violation of the incest taboo marks the threshold of becoming in Jane Bowles’s more apprehensive and comic depiction of nomadic lines of flight as well. The title of this chapter is drawn from a crucial sentence in Jane Bowles’s 1948 novella, “Camp Cataract,” which depicts an encounter between two sisters, Harriet and Sadie. In order to relieve her nerves, Harriet has fled her claustrophobic family apartment in the city to stay for a spell at Camp Cataract. Her sister Sadie, a “great lover of security” (145), writes Harriet a letter in which she attempts to lure Harriet home by expressing her trepidation about “the lost souls of the earth.” “I fear nomads,” Sadie writes, “I am afraid of them and afraid for them too. I don’t know what I would do if any of my dear ones were seized with wanderlust” (144). Harriet’s own position is ambivalent. She declares to her infatuated friend, Beryl, that she, in contradistinction to Sadie, is “a great admirer of the nomad, vagabonds, gypsies, seafaring men. I tip my hat to them; the old prophets roamed the world for that matter too, and most of the visionaries” (145). And yet, Harriet admits, she is overly concerned with keeping up appearances, confessing to her own shallowness: “I am afraid of scandal. . . . I despise anything that smacks of a bohemian dash for freedom. . . . I . . . refuse to make an unseemly dash for freedom. I refuse to be known as ‘Sadie’s wild sister Harriet’ ” (145–46). Camp Cataract, which she calls her “tree house,” is for Harriet an elegant compromise. She can pretend to flee the circumstances that suffocate her, without risking anything like a genuine independence, just as Camp Cataract offers a highly sanitized and safe retreat into an unthreatening “wilderness.” In Deleuzean terms, this is a limit to be observed rather than a threshold to be transgressed. Back in the city, the third sister, Evelyn (who shares their apartment, along with her boorish husband, Bert Hoffer), accuses Sadie of planning to “go crazy.” Sadie instead improvises a plan to steal away on a mission to retrieve Harriet. 118

NOMADIC ETH ICS

When she arrives at Camp Cataract, however, she finds Harriet aloof, flustered, cruel, and standoffish. Sadie is given a bed in another part of the camp, and the two make a lunch date for the following afternoon. The next section of Bowles’s story describes the following day from Sadie’s point of view. In a fit of panic, Sadie arrives at the dining terrace several hours early in order not to miss Harriet: “She feared that if her sister did not arrive shortly some terrible catastrophe would befall both of them before she’d had a chance to speak. In truth all desire to convince her sister that she should leave Camp Cataract and return to the apartment had miraculously shriveled away, and with the desire, the words to express it had vanished too” (168). Instead, when Harriet appears, Sadie takes her off for a private assignation in a nearby grove of trees. “Come with me,” she commands Harriet, “I’ve got something to tell you” (170). What she says to her sister is nothing short of a declaration of love, an offer of a kind of romantic escape: “ ‘Let’s not go to the apartment,’ Sadie said, hearing her own words as if they issued not from her mouth but from a pit in the ground. ‘Let’s not go back there. . . . Let’s you and me go out in the world . . . just the two of us’ ” (171). Unsurprisingly, Sadie’s clumsy proposition is rejected, and for the first time, she sees herself clearly through Harriet’s eyes: “A second before covering her face to hide her shame Sadie glimpsed Harriet’s eyes, impossibly close to her own, their pupils pointed with such a hatred as she had never seen before” (171). Having risked a confession of her incestuous love for her sister, Sadie, the most timid and xenophobic of the three sisters, now finds herself intolerably alone: “Sadie knew now that this agony she was suffering was itself the dreaded voyage into the world—the very voyage she had always feared Harriet would make. That she herself was making it instead of Harriet did not affect her certainty that this was it” (171–72). Obviously shaken, Sadie returns from the grove to buy some souvenirs at a nearby kiosk. “I’m leaving,” she tells the attendant, an Irishman made up to look like an American Indian, “so I want some souvenirs” (172). Struck by the incongruity of his blue eyes, and overwhelmed by her sense of suffering and shame, she asks him to accompany her over a bridge to the edge of the waterfall from which the camp takes its name: “They’ll see it,” she said to herself in a panic. “They’ll see it and they’ll know that I’ve seen it too.” Somehow this latter possibility was the most perilous of all. “They must never know I’ve seen it,” she said, grinding her teeth, and she leaned over the counter, crushing some canoes under her chest. “Quickly,” she whispered. “Go out your little door and meet me back of the booth. . . .” A second later she found him there. “Listen!” She clutched his hand. “We must hurry . . . I didn’t mean to see you. . . . I’m sorry . . . I’ve been trying not to look at you for years.” (173) 119

NOMADIC ETH ICS

At the cliff ’s edge, “she turned around and smiled at him kindly. He too smiled and she no longer saw in his face any trace of the incongruity that had shocked her so before. The foaming waters were beautiful to see. Sadie stepped forward, holding her hand out to him” (173). And this is the end—or the beginning—of Sadie’s dreaded journey into the world. As a kind of epilogue, however, Bowles renders the same day’s events from Harriet’s perspective. When she and Beryl arrive to lunch, twenty minutes late, Sadie is nowhere to be found. Harriet asks the Irish-Indian if he has seen her. He tells her that a woman had stayed all morning near his booth, then abruptly bought a “whole bunch of souvenirs from me . . . said something I couldn’t understand—it sounded like Polish—and then she lit out for the bridge” (175). We might be reminded of Brother Jack’s lapse into the “language of the future”—Russian, no doubt—in Ellison’s Invisible Man. Here, however, the Slavic foreignness of her utterance simply indicates her passage into a syntactic and semiotic “beyond” that eludes the Irish-Indian’s understanding and the representational capacities of the text itself: this babble suspends and resists the sense-making capacities of Harriet’s will to narrative power over Camp Cataract. Harriet sends Beryl behind the waterfall to see if this was Sadie. “When Beryl returned her face was dead white; she stared at Harriet in silence, and even when Harriet finally grabbed hold of her shoulders and shook her hard, she would not say anything” (175). The commonsensical reading of the story aligns Harriet’s point of view, with which Bowles completes her tale, with “what really happened.” The preceding episode, we figure out, must have all taken place in Sadie’s diseased imagination. Mad, Sadie had fantasized her encounter with Harriet, then, in a self-imposed delirium of shame and insanity, had leaped to her probable death. It is her corpse, then, that Beryl presumably sees on the far side of the cataract. This reading, therefore, contains and thus renders inert Sadie’s line of flight by judging the story told from her point of view to be merely the fantasy of a diseased mind; if she has moved, as will Paul Bowles’s character Kit Moresby, beyond the representational limits of the story itself, we are relieved of the burden of attempting to decipher the garbled message she sends back from beyond that border. But there are two immediate problems with such a reading. To begin with, we should ask why Beryl is so shocked into silence. What has she seen behind the waterfall? Sadie’s body, dead or terribly injured in the waters below? Or something truly unspeakable, something, that is, utterly beyond speech? Something, perhaps, that eludes narration? Something, even, that eludes the confines of Bowles’s own story? For (and here is the second problem with our commonsense interpretation) there is absolutely nothing in the text itself that encourages us to privilege Harriet’s version of the day over Sadie’s point of view, except for the fact that it comes after. So who is to say which version is real? Only our own readerly habit of trusting the sequential tendency of 120

NOMADIC ETH ICS

narrative enables us to decide that this closing version is what really happened in the story. But given the free indirect discourse with which Bowles recounts experiences, narrative authority is as much on Sadie’s side as on Harriet’s; in fact, because we are so powerfully inside Sadie’s head during her dreaded voyage, Bowles’s story seems to privilege the subjective, interior truth of her experience over and above any “objective” recounting of events from Harriet’s point of view. Finally, then, the reader’s claim to be able to definitively name (insanity, suicide), and so to determine the final meaning of Sadie’s journey, seems unjust to that sojourn’s own becoming. Rather, Bowles asks us to suspend definitive judgment, to encounter Sadie’s experience in its own incomprehensible—and utterly foreign—terms. We are compelled to take Sadie’s hand, so to speak, and accompany her at least to the edge of the precipice. To do so is only ethical. In this sense, then, what Bowles accomplishes in “Camp Cataract” is the suspension of imperial overcoding of the realist narrative (what really happened) in favor of an ethical interrogation for an encounter that takes place beyond what Alphonso Lingis terms the “rational” social contract (Community 10). In short, the writing of Paul Bowles and Jane Bowles rejects and eludes the either/or imperative of the Cold War consensus. In their work, it is not merely that conventional moral strictures are transgressed, or that the choice between “freedom” and “totalitarianism” is exposed as spurious; rather, the entire social apparatus of containment is radically overthrown. The Cold War construct of the “free” subject is systematically dismantled, as their characters relentlessly pursue the project of subjective self-demolition and immolation; the highly fetishized Cold War ideal of free choice, understood as a moral calculus capable of weighing and measuring anticipated risks wherein one’s actions retroactively proved and licensed one’s very freedom and profits, is transmuted into an ethics of abandonment that gestured beyond the confines of representation itself; and politics is given over to the perilous ethics of the incalculable encounter. “Everything is simply an encounter in the universe,” stipulates Gilles Deleuze, “a good or bad encounter” (Dialogues 60). In order to make my case and to suggest how the writing of Paul Bowles and Jane Bowles both marks a distinct trajectory within Cold War culture and inaugurates a line of flight beyond it, I will make a short excursion into the ethical philosophy of Gilles Deleuze. While a detailed critical reading of his daunting philosophy obviously remains beyond the scope of this volume, I want to inscribe certain of his notions within that fugitive history of resistance to the commonsensical dictates of Cold War containment. Encounters, according to this line of thinking, beggar certainty and propel us outside the binarized imperial inscriptions that would reduce freedom to a choice between two options. According to Deleuze’s reading of Spinoza’s Ethics, the universe is entirely composed of bodies in collision with one another, that is, encounters. Ethical philosophy, therefore, involves an experimental analysis of encounters to determine if they are good or bad; what is key, however, 121

NOMADIC ETH ICS

is that the precise outcome of encounters cannot be known in advance. Every encounter between bodies, however formalized or ritualized, is a staggering surprise, an invitation, a radical experimentation. Spinoza asks, “What can a body do?” And Deleuze answers that we cannot yet know. “The surprising thing is the body . . . we do not know yet what a body is capable of ” (Dialogues 61). The philosopher Alain Badiou likewise describes the production of new truths: “Every singular truth has its origin in an event. Something must happen in order for there to be something new. Even in our personal lives, there must be an encounter, there must be something which cannot be calculated, predicted or managed, there must be a break based only on chance” (Badiou and Hallward 124, my emphasis).12 Those unpredictable collisions of bodies that produce new things, new possibilities, new truths, can be understood as good. For example, digesting nutritious foods involves a combination of bodies that produces caloric energy, as when the amino acids in my stomach encounter the ham sandwich I’ve downed; an unplanned or anonymous sexual collision might produce pleasure, and possibly an embryo; a surgeon’s scalpel cutting through one’s gut might result in a successful operation. Those encounters that block up or diminish possibilities can be understood as bad. If I swallow arsenic rather than a ham sandwich, the encounter between my stomach and poison results in sickness or death. If another knife, say that of assailant, slices into my gut, I will begin to hemorrhage. An unwanted sexual encounter is rape. Yet in open encounters, the outcome of any collision cannot be predicted. Deleuze writes: “We know nothing about a body until we know what it can do, in other words, what its affects are, how they can or cannot enter into composition with other affects, with the affects of another body, either to destroy that body or be destroyed by it, either to exchange actions and passions with it, or to join with it in composing a more powerful body” (Thousand Plateaus 257). Every encounter, good or bad, involves an incalculable exchange, wherein energies and intensities are shared and mutually circulate in new combinations, potentially productive or destructive. This flies in the face of that model of freedom and autonomy that had formed the matrix of Cold War understandings of selfhood. In some sense, for any encounter to be potentially, joyfully productive, the autonomous “selfhood” of bodies must be shed and abandoned. According to Deleuze, the self should not be defined by its identity (or what we commonly assume to be its “subjectivity”) but by a process of becoming. This does not mean simply that the self is always growing and in flux; rather, Deleuze suggests that we must never think of bodies and subjectivities as coextensive. What liberal consensus has traditionally understand as an autonomous human being, then, replete with subjective selfconsciousness and a coherent self-contained body, endowed, perhaps, with a soul, is nothing more than conventional arrangement: a humanist’s way of slicing the world into parts—as in the Herculean efforts to distinguish freedom-loving 122

NOMADIC ETH ICS

Americans from subversives. In fact, the delineated self swarms with populations, intensities. Deleuze and Guattari insist that a body can be measured not by its form and composition, but only by considering its “relations of movement and rest, speed and slowness” as well as by the “sum total of the intensive affects it is capable of ” (260). Further, an alternative way of slicing up the universe involves distinguishing and honoring the accumulation of encounters in their singular distinctiveness: “There is a mode of individuation very different from that of a person, subject, thing, or substance. . . . A season, a winter, a summer, an hour, a date have perfect individuality lacking nothing, even though this individuality is different from that of a thing or a substance” (261). “How myopic is the notion,” scolds Lingis, echoing Deleuze and Guattari, that form is the principal of individuation, or that a substance occupying a place to the exclusion of other substances makes an individual, or that inner organization, or the self-positing identity of a subject is an entity’s principal of individuation! A season, a summer, a wind, a fog, a swarm, an intensity of white at high noon have perfect individuality, though they are neither substances nor subjects. (Dangerous Emotions 27–28)

According to Daniel W. Smith’s elegant summary of these ideas, ethics must subsume what we solipsistically and jealously cling to as our unique “selves” to an evaluation of syncretic becomings: The notion of becoming . . . refers to an objective zone of indistinction or indiscernability that always exists between any two multiplicities, a zone that immediately precedes their respective natural differentiation. . . . A multiplicity is defined not by its center but by its limits and borders where it enters into relations with other multiplicities and changes nature, transforms itself, follows a line of flight. The self is a threshold, a door, a becoming between two multiplicities. . . . In a becoming, one term does not become another; rather each term encounters the other, and the becoming is something between the two, outside of the two. This “something” is what Deleuze calls a pure affect or percept, which is irreducible to the affections or perceptions of a subject. (xxx)

In the writing of both Jane Bowles and Paul Bowles, a “line of flight” marks a creative departure, a movement that finds itself always in the middle, a becoming unleashed, that has crossed an absolute threshold: the cataract, for Sadie. Becomings involve both indulging (and renouncing) one’s power to affect and to be affected. I say “renouncing” because selfhood and power must be surrendered to the unpredictable, incalculable, threatening, and chancy nature of the encounter itself. A self must be given over to the event. Experimentation, therefore, involves placing as many and as various affects into play as possible, 123

NOMADIC ETH ICS

in order to see what happens. To live ethically or well, for Deleuze, means to give oneself over to life, to encounters. What must be avoided, at all costs, are any efforts to “manage” such volatile relationships or to impose a predetermined form upon the vivid, fluctuating, incalculable potential of encounters. To be sure, one risks annihilation, as with Port and Kit Moresby, as with Sadie. “The most moving human encounters I have had in my life are situations where you have nothing in common with this person and you find yourself dependent on this person for your life,” explains Lingis, elaborating his notion of the community of those who have nothing in common. For Lingis, an encounter involves the mutual exposure of suffering bodies: Eyes without weeping, throats without sobs, eyes turning into scar tissue, hands turning into rheumatic stumps in the cold fog. Each wound, each scar, each laceration left by the storms, the brush, the stumblings, the falls, the infections, and the blows stiffens the flesh, making it more mute and inexpressive. The wounds are only the endurance, the ineffaceability of pain. They open only upon themselves and upon more pain. They open upon a body that is a lesion in the tissue of words and discourses and the networks of powers. These wounds expose the body. (Abuses 59)

In the two stories I have looked at so far, and particularly with Sadie’s confession of her love for her sister, incestuous desire involves this mutual exposure. Lingis insists that our mortal nature gives us no choice but to meet the other in mutual suffering and abandonment. In the face, or more accurately, the body, of the dying other, we are given our imperative: to care or to kill, to produce or to annihilate. On the one hand, in order to maintain our sense of power, we busy ourselves in the highly orchestrated everyday routines in which social contracts are prearranged. This “rational discourse and practice,” as Lingis terms it, aims to minimize the radical unpredictability of encounters (Community 10). The social contract or rational community establishes itself in order to dictate how encounters will be negotiated, so that only a handful of possibilities can emerge, which can be measured, weighed, and assessed. A lunch should be less a culinary indulgence than a job interview, from which one can emerge only with a job or disappointed. One can marry this potential lover, but not that one. Only one team will emerge victorious from a basketball tournament, which must first and foremost be a competition. This extends the logic of the loyalty oath: winners must be distinguished from losers, friends from enemies, men from women, subversives from patriots, and so forth. Such distinctions and differentiations subdue the universe and render it comprehensible, controllable, and nonthreatening. Through such orchestrated interactions we communally rationalize the world and distance ourselves from the cruel chanciness of encounters. Such formal communities allow us to maintain our own mistaken sense of power over our 124

NOMADIC ETH ICS

lives, our bodies, our emotions, and ultimately, others. They are complex mechanisms of control and containment in which the potential of self and other and the terrain on which they interact is subdued and regulated. The rational community, in Deleuzean terms, is an immense and complex “apparatus of capture” that ensures a world and a life of diminished possibility. We wish to distance ourselves from what we everywhere and innately comprehend; we distance ourselves from the lived world of immeasurable potential. Lingis argues: Before the rational community, there was the encounter with the other, the intruder. The encounter begins with the one who exposes himself to the demands and contestation of the other. Beneath the rational community, its common discourse of which each lucid mind is but the representative and its enterprises in which the efforts and passions of each are absorbed and depersonalized, is another community, the community that demands that the one who has his own communal identity, who produces his own nature, expose himself to the one with whom he has nothing in common, the stranger. This other community is not simply absorbed into the rational community; it recurs, it troubles the rational community, as its double or shadow. This other community forms not in a work, but in the interruption of work and enterprises. (Community 10)

Elsewhere, Lingis concludes that we are irrevocably, magnetically drawn to such encounters: “The ethical sense in us is elaborated not by concepts and reasons, but by a sensibility attracted to those who are artists of their lives” (Abuses 137). As a further illustration, let me give another extended literary example. Literature, according to Deleuze, should not be considered merely as representation of something that has happened (history, biography) or might have happened (fiction). Rather, literature is itself an ethical experimentation in the possibilities of life. “The multiple must be made.” “To write is certainly not to impose a form (of expression) on the matter of lived experience. Literature moves rather in the direction of the ill-formed or incomplete, as Gombrowicz said as well as practiced” (“Literature and Life” 1). “Writing is very simple,” he explains. “Either it is a way of reterritorializing oneself, conforming to a code of dominant utterances, to a territory of established states of things. . . . Or else, on the other hand, it is becoming, becoming something other than a writer, since what one is becoming at the same time becomes something other than writing. . . . Everything which becomes is a pure line which ceases to represent whatever it may be” (Dialogues 74). Deleuze’s approach to literature is in keeping with his adaptation of a pragmatist philosophical tradition associated with William James and Charles Saunders Peirce, which defines an entity or event by its consequences (rather than its essence). “By their fruits shall ye judge them.” 125

NOMADIC ETH ICS

Truth, according to this line of thinking, is in no way something inner or hidden or essential but is rather a measure of how the world changes (God exists, for example, because people believe in God, because of the blood shed in God’s name). Thus, instead of asking “What is it?” we ask “What does it do?” (and consequently, “How does it work?”). “The question Deleuze poses to a literary work is not ‘What does it mean?’ (interpretation) but rather ‘How does it function?’ (experimentation)” (Smith xxii). In his 1945 story “A Distant Episode,” Paul Bowles depicts a journey into the Sahara desert undertaken by an unnamed American professor of linguistics. He has arrived, he claims, to take a survey of variations on Moghrebi. “There are no languages here,” his chauffeur tells the Professor, “only dialects” (39), marking what Deleuze will term a “zone of indiscernibility” (Thousand Plateaus 101), where the imperial language ceases to dominate. As David Spurr has written of colonizing discourse, “the very process by which one culture subordinates another begins in the act of naming and leaving unnamed, of marking on an unknown territory the lines of division, of boundary and continuity” (4). Here the chauffeur affiliates himself with the imperial power of the colonizing French. As Spurr argues, “for Western thought, one of the fundamental measures of a culture is the quality of its language. Language comes to be judged according to its richness and complexity, its refinement from mere cry and gesture, its capacity to make distinctions, its multiplicity of names, its range from particularity to abstraction, and its organization of time and space” (102). Deleuze comments that the discipline of linguistics itself involves an inordinate effort to seize and stratify the full range of human communication according to a rigid model of standard measures and norms that constitute a “major language.” Such an endeavor everywhere involves the denigration of barbarous dialects. On the trajectory of the Professor’s distinct line of flight, however, his colonial privilege, distinguished by his authority to demarcate and thereby possess the language and culture of the Arab tribes, is in the process of breaking down as he moves progressively into this interzone. In a café once owned by his late friend Hassan Ramani, the Professor encounters a qaouaji, who promises to obtain a box made of a camel’s udder. Instead, he leads the Professor out of the city to the edge of a cliff and abandons him there. Descending into the “abyss,” the Professor is captured by Reguibat, members of a nomadic desert tribe with a reputation for criminality, who beat and rob him. In the morning, his tongue is cut out: The man looked at him dispassionately in the gray morning light. With one hand he pinched together the Professor’s nostrils. When the Professor opened his mouth to breathe, the man swiftly seized his tongue and pulled on it with all his might. The Professor was gagging and catching his breath; he did not see what was happening. He could not distinguish the pain of the brutal yanking 126

NOMADIC ETH ICS

from that of the sharp knife. Then there was an endless choking and spitting that went on automatically, as though he were scarcely a part of it. (45)

Later, the Reguibat dress him in a comic suit of armor, fashioned of “a series of curious belts made of the bottoms of tin cans strung together” (45), and he is forced to perform as a dancing clown. For a full year he entertains them in their wanderings across the desert. The story elegantly encapsulates the constellation of obsessive themes that characterize all of Bowles’s writing. The journey into the Sahara will be retold in various ways in his work, most insistently in his 1949 masterpiece, The Sheltering Sky. The protagonist of this journey, usually an American traveler, sometimes a woman, sometimes a man, crosses a threshold, often symbolically represented in Bowles’s work by a cliff, a cemetery, or, in this case, a pack of snarling dogs that recall the three-headed beast Cerberus. She or he leaves “civilization” behind and enters into another dimension, the desert or the night sky, where all the entrenched fortifications of security, identity, and self-mastery are stripped away. In The Sheltering Sky, the hero, Port, will first have his passport stolen, significantly; after he dies, his wife, Kit, in a fit of grief, will wander into her own desert of madness and sexual slavery. On this journey, one’s name, wealth, power, sense, and language—one’s entrenched subjectivity—will be systematically, violently demolished. In his first novel, Bowles approvingly cites Kafka: “From a certain point onward there is no longer any turning back. That is the point that must be reached” (Sheltering Sky 265). In his coldly dispassionate prose, Bowles analyzes precisely what Deleuze theorizes as becoming, what Lingis considers the entrance into the other community. Critics of Bowles describe him as cultivating the point of view of “an invisible spectator,” pointing to his strangely dispassionate and clinically objective language, his pointed refusal to allow the reader a glimpse into his own inner life and the lives of his fictional characters. As Spurr argues, such a point of view would seemingly empower and ally Bowles with an imperial vantage point: “the commanding view is an originating gesture of colonization itself, making possible the exploration and mapping of territory which serves as the preliminary to a colonial order” (16). To be sure, Bowles participates in a certain voyeuristic eroticisation of North Africans, and has been accused even, with some justice, of colonial nostalgia (Mullins 20–48). And yet as Spurr concedes, echoing Foucault: Discourse may be understood . . . as a series of discontinuous segments that combine in various ways in the service of power. But power should no more be conceived as a monolithic structure than discourse. Foucault asks us to think of power not simply as the privilege of law, prohibition, and sovereignty, but as a “multiple and mobile field of force relations, wherein far reaching, but never completely stable, effects of domination are produced.” 127

NOMADIC ETH ICS

Would it be possible to create a discourse that avoids the violence of the letter and thus the imposition of power? (11–12)

Spurr’s question is worth taking up, at least provisionally, because it is no small part of my argument to suggest that the ethical writing, committed to the perplexity and unpredictability of the encounter shorn of authorial claims, the commitment to life envisioned by Deleuze, Lingis, and both Jane Bowles and Paul Bowles, aims precisely at such a project, although the relative success of their experimentation remains open to question. Of course, Paul Bowles’s own lifelong strategic and committed evasion of the Western world depends on the global expansion of a Western-dominated “postcolonial” economy and its cultural agents, a moral double bind of which he was surely aware. Though no longer a political creature by temperament and calculation, despite—or perhaps because of—that rather serious fling with organized Communism in his youth, Bowles did strive to put his own cultural authority in the service of his Arab friends as a translator, musician, and committed patron. However Bowles, equally assuredly, is not a self-reflexive writer, by any stretch of the imagination. Rather than interrogate his privileged position of spectator or subject himself to an agonizing meditation on the extent of his own complicity, Bowles cultivates the Deleuzean disciplines of anonymity and invisibility. If his right to surveillance emerges from the prospect of European and, increasingly, American cultural hegemony in Africa, there is little self-congratulatory or proprietorial regard in Bowles’s gaze. He would rather disappear into the desert than farm it or exploit its wealth of minerals or labor. And so, too, the Professor in “A Distant Episode,” granted passage to Africa exactly because he is a professor, becomes desert clown. What is more striking than the lack of interiority on the part of Bowles’s persona or his characters, moreover, is the way such a deterritorialization of the traditional prerogatives of selfhood must be mounted, and one’s rights to freedom and choice must be surrendered. Bowles’s characters seem to cultivate a suspension of affirmative consciousness. Bowles’s protagonists surrender their own willpower and decision-making capacity precisely at such crucial moments. On the threshold of such momentous transformations, they become “swept up”—more or less passively—in the events that befall them. Eventually, for example, the Professor interrupts his important professional work—cataloging the varieties of dialect in the region—and abandons himself to the encounter. As Lingis insists, the “other community” interrupts and suspends the imperial order of work. This interruption is marked by the insignificance and the arbitrary nature of the professor’s quest into the abyss. A box made of a camel’s udder is the last thing he desires. Desire is moved, rather, not by its goals or clearly defined objects, but by the arbitrary and the insignificant. What the professor desires is surely nothing more than “encounter” itself, anonymous on both sides. Such erotic pacts are 128

NOMADIC ETH ICS

often fetishized by items that have no especial significance in and of themselves, but acquire libidinal charges by their alignment and proximity with the desired (in Masochism, Deleuze has highlighted the fetishistic nature of the contractual suspension of normative obligations in masochistic contracts). Upset by hearing of his friend’s death, the Professor becomes disoriented and seemingly desperate for conversation and contact: “Tell me,” he said, as the others started away. “Can one still get those little boxes made from camel udders?” The man looked angry. “Sometimes the Reguibat bring in those things. We do not buy them here.” Then insolently, in Arabic: “And why a camel udder box?” “Because I like them,” retorted the Professor. And then because he was feeling a little exalted, he added, “I like them so much I want to make a collection of them, and I will pay you ten francs for every one you can get me.” (40)

Later, seemingly resolute in his decision to return to town, the Professor, for example, pauses on the threshold of the cliff, deliberating what to do: “A sudden violent desire to run back to the road seized him, and he turned and looked in the direction the qaouaji had taken. At the same time he felt softly for his wallet in his breast pocket. Then he spat over the edge of the cliff. Then he made water over it and listened intently, like a child. This gave him the impetus to start down the path into the abyss” (43). What is important here is that the Professor does not make this decision “freely.” It is no longer a question of choice; rather, the encounter sweeps him into its orbit. His “will,” his control over the situation, his determination to discern and subjugate the world around him, is surrendered. His wallet, a last reassuring token of his official identity, will shortly be taken from him, and the violent excision of his tongue will sever his connection with speech, mastery, and authority. The same scenario is repeated in The Sheltering Sky, when Port haphazardly and seemingly against his own will follows a pimp over the city walls to the nomad tents. En route, he will lose both his capacity for mastery over language and his wallet. Returning from this descent into the underworld, he passes through a group of “Moslem tombstones” (41). While in the desert, the prostitute Mahrnia tells Port the story of tea in the Sahara, in which three love-struck “girls from the mountains” (37) save their earnings and travel out into the desert. They climb higher and still higher dunes, eventually ascending the highest, where they fall asleep: “Many days later another caravan was passing and a man saw something on the top of the highest dune there. And when they went up to see, they found Outka, Mimouna, and Aïcha; they were still there, lying the same way as when they had gone to sleep. And all three of the glasses . . . were full of sand. That was how they had their 129

NOMADIC ETH ICS

tea in the Sahara” (39). The story prefigures Port’s own, and Kit’s. In fact, the novel is structured as a series of nesting versions of the same story. A protagonist moves—or is moved—across a threshold and into the Sahara; on the first journey, he or she panics in the face of the threatened loss of selfhood and scurries back to the safety and security of the known world; ultimately the protagonist undergoes a second, deeper journey into the desert and ultimately finds his or her heart’s desire in self-dissolution. Kit, for instance, first loses herself in a fourth-class train carriage, where she encounters the most hideous human face she has ever seen. The tall man wore cast off European clothes, and a burlap bag over his head like a haïk. But where his nose should have been was a dark triangular abyss, and the strange flat lips were white. For no reason at all, she thought of a lion’s muzzle; she could not take her eyes away from it. The man seemed neither to see her nor to feel the rain; he merely stood there. As she stared she found herself wondering why it was that a diseased face, which basically means nothing, should be so much more horrible to look at than a face whose tissues are healthy but whose expression reveals an interior corruption. (85–86)

On her first trip into the unknown, horror trumps fascination, and so she returns to the security of her friend’s arms and the warmth of the first-class carriage. Alain Badiou conceives of truths as emerging from commitments to the random, excessive, and incalculable encounter that befalls one. The affirmation of unsaying commitment transforms the encounter retrospectively into a singular “event” that dictates a truth. For Badiou, as for Deleuze, to produce new possibilities in the world, one must initially give oneself over to the transformative potential of the encounter, whose outcome can never be known in advance. Thus an “acceptable” ethics answers to a single imperative: “This maxim proclaims, in its general version, ‘Keep going!’ Continue to be this ‘some-one,’ a human animal among others, which nevertheless finds itself seized and displaced by the eventual process of a truth. Continue to be that active part of the subject of a truth that you have happened to become” (Ethics 90–91). In all of Paul Bowles’s writing, the indeliberate but affirmative suspension of one’s subjective capacity to determine one’s own fate, this process of seizure and displacement, involves two steps. Initially, one is carried over the threshold, as the Professor descends to his encounter with the Reguibat. There comes a point in every story, however, when the protagonist, who no longer is or resembles himself or herself, having been caught up in the whirlwind of becoming, has the chance to return. More precisely, there comes a point where he or she might be captured and brought safely back to the confines of reason and “civilization.” And yet one always keeps going. That is, initially shorn of the capacity to 130

NOMADIC ETH ICS

decide for oneself, one ultimately eludes capture, and becomes imperceptible, as Deleuze would say, moving outside the confines of representation itself. Bowles’s characters have a singular habit of disappearing from the confines of the narrative in which they are situated: they can no longer be distinguished. The most famous instance of this is the remarkable conclusion of The Sheltering Sky. Kit, having made her escape from sexual slavery, finds herself wandering from the desert back into the city, Tesalit, in the Sudan. For a moment, in a temporary reemergence of what we would call the dormant but “sane” part of her personality, she becomes seized by the desire to reconnect with her old life. She attempts to send a telegram with the paradoxical epigram “Cannot get back” and then realizes the danger: “Now that she had betrayed herself, established contact with the other side, every minute counted. They would spare no effort in seeking her out, they would pry open the wall she had built and force her to look at what she had buried there. She knew . . . she had set in motion the mechanism that would destroy her” (304–5). And in fact, “they” do exactly as she fears. Kit is found and brought in a taxi to a hotel in Algiers. Her escort goes in the hotel for assistance, leaving Kit in the taxi. When she returns, however, the taxi is empty. And so, too, is the book. Bowles closes the novel with a description of a crowded streetcar, which Kit may or may not be on, that wends its way through the city. “At the edge of the Arab quarter the car, still loaded with people, made a wide U-turn and stopped; it was the end of the line” (318), outside, with Sadie, the narrative containment of the novel itself. Deleuze stresses that “becomings begin on the . . . molecular level, with lines of supple segmentarity. There are molecular fluxes with thresholds or quanta. A threshold is crossed. . . . Many things happen on this second kind of line— becomings, micro-becomings, which don’t even have the same rhythm as our ‘history.’ This is why family histories, registration, commemorations, are so unpleasant, whilst our true changes take place elsewhere—another politics, another time, another individuation.” And there is “yet another line, a third, which he [the American writer F. Scott Fitzgerald] calls rupture. It might be thought that nothing has changed, and nevertheless everything has changed. . . . There is now only an abstract line, a pure movement which is difficult to discover, he never begins, he takes things by the middle, he is always in the middle” (Dialogues 127). In a similar way, the Professor keeps going down this abstract line to the point where he, too, becomes indiscernible. The Reguibat conceive of a plan to sell their dancing clown, and take him to a home in the city of Fogara, where he overhears a discussion of the Koran. Returned partly to his senses by hearing snatches of recognizable words and phrases in classical Arabic, the Professor, like Kit, sends his own message back to the world. He refuses to dance for his new owner. In a fit of anger, the new owner leaves the Professor locked in his home and chases down the men who have swindled him. He murders one of them and is in turn arrested and carried off by the French military 131

NOMADIC ETH ICS

police. Abandoned and enraged, the Professor becomes violent, breaks down the door, and escapes into the street: Still bellowing and shaking his arms in the air to make as loud a jangling as possible, he began to gallop along the quiet street toward the gateway of the town. A few people looked at him with great curiosity. As he passed the garage, the last building before the high mud archway that framed the desert beyond, a French soldier saw him. “Tiens,” he said to himself, “a holy maniac.” Again it was sunset time. The Professor ran beneath the arched gate, turned his face toward the red sky, and began to trot along the Piste d’In Salah, straight into the setting sun. Behind him, from the garage, the soldier took a potshot at him for good luck. The bullet whistled dangerously near the professor’s head, and his yelling rose into an indignant lament as he waved his arms more wildly, and hopped high into the air at every few steps, in an access of terror. (48)

132

CHAPTER SIX

F RO NT I ER M Y THO G RAPHIE S Savagery and Civilization in John Ford

The heroes nobody believes in—except as movie stars—are the result of a corrupted art form. Going to a Western these days for simplicity or heroism or grandeur or meaning is about like trying to mate with an ox. —PAULI NE KA E L , “Saddle Sore”

The Cold War was locked into place in 1948; 1952, I have argued, marks its acme. By the early 1960s, the consensus was in crisis; it no longer served as an adequate narrative model to explain and contain its own contradiction. Culturally, the breakup of the consensus can be witnessed in the series of works published between 1961 and 1964 that explicitly lampooned Cold War paranoia, the military-industrial complex, McCarthyism, sexual and gender conformity, and the politics of Red-baiting. Notable among these works were two landmarks of postmodern satire, Ken Kesey’s antiauthoritarian epic, One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1962), and Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 (1961). The period also sees the emergence of a new wave of philosophically inclined science-fiction writers in the United States and Britain—Kurt Vonnegut, J. G. Ballard, Ray Bradbury, Philip K. Dick, and (to some extent) Anthony Burgess—whose writings deploy sustained metaphorical analyses of the costs and consequences of the Cold War, rather than merely exemplifying its hegemonic assumptions or affectively exploiting its fears and anxieties. The early work of the British spy novelist John le Carré brilliantly diagnosed the politics of paranoia by depicting characters in the paid service of containment whose loyalties—and, consequently, whose sense of integral selfhood—become eviscerated as they discover the extent to which they are being duped; his 1963 best seller, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, provides damning testimony of the radical incoherence and workaday brutality of the Cold War. Two important works that critically revisit and either explicitly or implicitly lament the formation of consensus and the curtailing of viable political and sexual alternatives also appeared: Sigal’s Going Away came out in 1961, and Plath’s The Bell Jar was published in Great Britain in 1963.1 133

SAVAG ERY AND CIVIL IZ ATION IN JO HN FORD

Television and Hollywood also signaled the breakdown of consensus. Rod Serling’s Twilight Zone series, which aired between 1959 and 1965, typically involved plots that exposed the groundlessness of fears of contamination and infiltration. The rigid paranoia that features in the 1962 film The Commies Are Coming, the Commies Are Coming would be, in a few short years, gently parodied in The Russians Are Coming! The Russians Are Coming! (1966), which makes an early case for détente insofar as the comically inept Communist invaders are more or less benign, and in which dismayed Americans are challenged to overcome their biases. Most famous among these attacks was Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964), a brilliant collaborative piece of outraged gallows humor that combined the over-the-top scatological recklessness of Terry Southern with the steely coldness of Stanley Kubrick’s camera and the inspired impersonations of Peter Sellers. Dr. Strangelove, whose release date was pushed back to 1964 following the assassination of Kennedy, deflated nearly every aspect of Cold War institutions, bureaucracy, and ideology. A thornier cinematic example of the collapse of Cold War pieties was The Manchurian Candidate (1962), which, as Greil Marcus notes, “floats free of the busy cycle of American Cold War films, be they gross propaganda or auterist touchstones. It’s too daring, too stylish, in the contexts of its time too nihilistic” (34). A dazzlingly weird adaptation of Richard Condon’s earlier novel, John Frankenheimer’s production figures McCarthyites as themselves dupes of devious Communist conspiracies, and their undercover agent is the most highly decorated veteran of the Korean War, Raymond Shaw, who only manages to kill his own mother when he realizes he has been played. Meditating symbolically on the political heritage of Lincoln’s republic among a corrupted public sphere, the film deploys a scapegoating sleight of hand that manages to evacuate the perception of Communist menace and recode that hysteria as deeply misogynistic. But, as I suggested in chapter 4, it was the Hollywood western that had provided the most compelling mythic landscape and narrative of American power during the Cold War, by reinscribing the time-honored myth of heroic frontier individualism into the demands of uniting to defeat a common enemy, and thereby both proving and effectuating the nation’s moral right to victory. In John Ford’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, we witness the crumbling of the mythic props of American exceptionalism and foundering of the enabling structures of cowboy containment. Though his FBI file conceded in 1943 that Ford’s “political activities ‘were of a mild nature, and in all probability he is innocent’” (McBride 472), Ford had long “considered himself a radical” (Wills 461) and had established his popular front credentials with such films as 1940’s populist masterpiece, The Grapes of Wrath. He made films for the military during the war, and, as Gary Wills describes his postwar career, became “an honorary member of the Cold War elite” (162) of liberal anti-McCarthyites, who, like Arthur Schlesinger, saw in 134

SAVAG ERY AND CIVIL IZ ATION IN JO HN FORD

the American frontier a basis for revitalizing American mythologies and rededicating America to the global mission of expanding freedom.2 In his postwar westerns with Ford and with Howard Hawks, however, John Wayne became the living and mythic embodiment of American power and justice, and, quite literally, a larger than life hero to the Far Right. Enumerating the numerous repressive measures justified by the struggle for freedom during the early years of the Cold War, Wills elaborates: Wayne’s time of maximum popularity coincided with this immense societal effort, and he internalized its demands in his own life as well as in his films. He joined the hunt for sympathizers with the foe, and helped expel them from Hollywood. He tied his own greatest financial project, the making of The Alamo, to the electoral struggle of 1960, in which he felt that real patriots should support Richard Nixon. He defended the war in Vietnam and made The Green Berets as a personal statement on that conflict. Though the mystique of some westerns has been one of freedom and individualism, of a creative anarchy, Ford’s movies stressed the need for regimentation as necessary to survival under threat. (24)

More precisely, what Wayne’s western films tend explicitly to demonstrate, beginning with the classics Red River (made with Hawks in 1946 but released in the fateful year of 1948) and particularly Ford’s Fort Apache (also 1948), was the need for libertarian individualism to recognize the full measure of that threat and to commit itself freely to the service of social order. As we have seen, by means of the social and cultural apparatus that had emerged by 1948, the Cold War paradigm dictated, paradoxically enough, that freedom was both the guarantee and the enforcer of social order, and the scripts Ford adapted from James Warner Bellah “have a hero who must disobey commands in order to save the command structure. Bellah was a rebellious authoritarian” (Wills 166). By the early 1960s, however, that order itself was wobbling badly, and critical reception of Wayne’s more hysterically right-wing films of the decade suggested that his act had become a self-parody. Bellah’s self-same plot device is at work in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, insofar as the hero must act alone to preserve social order. Yet this defiance can in no way be narrated as a noble or honorable act, and so his heroism, necessary for the preservation of freedom and for the imperial expansion of the rule of law and democracy into the Wild West, goes entirely unrecorded. For the new social order to be accepted, the criminal foundations of world democracy must be hidden, and it is the designated work of the media to do so. Yet the film also unveils the deceptive mechanisms of myth making. The man who personifies freedom in Ford’s 1962 film by committing what he confesses is “cold-blooded murder” is expelled from the social contract he had himself established through an act of violence; in a more radical 135

SAVAG ERY AND CIVIL IZ ATION IN JO HN FORD

testimony to the collapse of the Cold War consensus, however, the film indicts the American democracy and inclusiveness it celebrates as duplicitous, and exposes the very mythos of frontier exceptionalism as fraudulent. No longer could the ends of freedom justify the means of repression. “This is the West, sir,” declares the newspaperman Maxwell Scott (Carleton Young), editor of the Shinbone Star, toward the conclusion of The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. “When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.” In this iconic and iconographic scenario, Scott tears up his notes and decides not to print the “true story” of Liberty Valance, thus accentuating the media’s complicity in defining and perpetuating the myth of the American frontier. As Catherine Ingrassia notes, “the film demonstrates the unreliability of categories like ‘news,’ ‘history,’ and even ‘identity’ while affirming the power of language to construct a reality based on deception” (5). Legend becomes fact. On the frontier, myth or legend usurps the place and power of history; we might even say that the frontier exists fundamentally as myth. And it is a myth that is at the very core of American self-understanding, as such different thinkers as Henry Nash Smith, Patricia Nelson Limerick, and Richard Slotkin insist. For Smith, whose 1950 classic, Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth, virtually defined the “myth and symbol school” of American studies that was to dominate Cold War representations of American identity, competing thematic understandings of the frontier—as the key to international trade, as the crucible forming the American character, and as the “garden of the world”—dominated nineteenth-century efforts to build and defend the nation. Such struggles, mythologized in works of literature, film, and history, continue to provide the defining materials within an evolving repertoire of American self-conceptions. Limerick writes: “As a mental artifact, the frontier has demonstrated an astonishing stickiness and persistence. . . . Packed full of nonsense and goofiness, jammed with nationalist self-congratulation and toxic ethnocentrism, the image of the frontier is nonetheless universally recognized and laden with positive associations. . . . Somewhere in the midst of this weird hodgepodge of frontier and pioneer imagery lie important lessons about the American identity, sense of history, and direction for the future” (94). Limerick, a historian of the American West, wants to repeal the mythic stature of the frontier and replace it with a clearer sense of what actually happened—and still happens—in the American West. But the legend is already in print. The West was written as myth; that is, any deployment of the language of the frontier resurrects an entire mythic apparatus of American genesis, character, and values. Even today, Limerick writes, “the scholarly understanding formed in the late nineteenth century still governs most of the public rhetorical uses of the word ‘frontier’” (94). The scholar she indicts as the primary mythmaker is Frederick Jackson Turner. Turner’s notorious and troubling 1893 paper, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” set out the fundamental structural tensions 136

SAVAG ERY AND CIVIL IZ ATION IN JO HN FORD

underlying these myths of American genesis. His famous “frontier thesis,” which makes the extravagant and sweeping claim that the frontier, given “its continuous recession, and the advance of American settlement westward, explain[s] American development” (55), places the frontier at the heart of the American self-imagination. The frontier, which he defines variously as “the existence of an area of free land” (55) and “the meeting point of savagery and civilization” (56), furnishes the environmental conditions under which “Americans” come into being. In his methodological synopsis, Turner insists that the historian’s task is to reveal the underlying “vital forces” “behind constitutional forms and modifications” that determine the “evolution” of social, economic, political, religious, and cultural institutions from simple into “complex organs” (56). In keeping with the great nineteenth-century endeavor of transforming history into a “science,” Turner reveals himself as a rigorously Darwinian thinker; he applies the same systematic approach to explain the evolution of new social and historical species—the American—as Darwin applied to natural history: natural selection and the struggle for survival, survival of the fittest under conditions of scarcity, adaptation, and the development from primitive to complex organisms. The agonistic, dynamic model of complex evolution traces out the genesis of the American as a new organism, a new historical species, in a very real sense: The wilderness has been interpenetrated by lines of civilization growing even more numerous. It is like the steady growth of a complex nervous system for the originally simple, inert continent. If one would understand why we are today one nation, rather than a collection of isolated states, he must study this economic and social consolidation of the country. In this progress from savage conditions lie topics for the evolutionist. (62–63)

The uniqueness of American development, according to Turner, lies in the manner in which society and social beings were perpetually compelled to readapt themselves to ever-changing environmental conditions; pioneers were forced to “adapt or perish” (53). This openness to adaptation, for Turner, “this fluidity of American life,” is what distinguishes “a new product that is American” (57). Dominant among the features of this new “American” was a cherished system of American values, which still figure largely in political and cultural discussions of American life. Two of these values are tolerance and individualism, which, according to Turner’s framework, must be understood as evolving from the conditions of frontier settlement rather than merely being transplants of Enlightenment ideas originally developed in Europe. According to one distinct strain of Jeffersonian thinking, for example, a functioning republican democracy demands vast quantities of space, a notion that in part underwrote the western expedition of Lewis and Clark. In 1803, Jefferson’s administration insisted upon making the Louisiana Purchase, which he considered not simply an investment 137

SAVAG ERY AND CIVIL IZ ATION IN JO HN FORD

in land and natural resources, but equally a broad experiment in the national character building necessary to produce a healthy and functioning citizenry. The virtuous citizen must, like the virtuous nation itself, be independent, self-reliant; Jefferson’s ideal yeoman farmer, an archetypal figure that Arthur Miller had refashioned to his own purposes in John Proctor, was envisioned as the male head of a household who could produce enough food to feed his own family and household, effectively training him in the frugal but strenuous exercise of responsibly administering one’s own freedom. Such landowners would be wise and effective statesmen and legislators, it followed. But individual land ownership—and the desire to own one’s own home was certified during the 1950s as being the core of the “American dream”—also formed the moral basis for enhancing what we today would call an acceptance of diversity. “The larger our association,” explains Jefferson in his second inaugural address as he defends his expansionist policies, “the less will it be shaken by local passions” (318). Freedom of speech and of thought, freedom of the press, and certainly freedom of religion depended on people living far enough apart so that their differences would not lead to bloodshed. All are free to think and practice pretty much anything they like, as long as they do it “over there,” out of my sight and, preferably, out of earshot. As long as each group had its own turf, and as long as there was enough space between the different neighborhoods, freedom of religion, for example, could be accommodated (the process repeats itself in the history of American urbanization, as different religious and ethnic groups mark their own geographical neighborhoods and their own cultural and labor territories as well). A nation could tolerate even mutually hostile viewpoints if there was a frontier, if there was free land, according to Jeffersonian thinking. Jefferson—whom Smith terms “the intellectual father of the American advance to the Pacific” (15), and whose political lineage he traces in such subsequent advocates of western mobility as Thomas Hart Benton, Asa Whitney, William Gilpin, and even Walt Whitman—and Turner were early advocates of what would come to be known as the “safety-valve” theory of American development.3 According to the “safety-valve” argument, the existence of the frontier allowed the United States to cultivate a functioning democracy by avoiding full-scale violent conflicts between competing social and economic forces. As long as there was open territory into which antagonists might expand, final conflict between contending forces might be avoided: “so long as free land exists, the opportunity for competency exists” (Turner 73). In America, for example, labor and capital confronted each other in a long series of struggles. However, the revolutions that shook Europe all through the nineteenth century and into the twentieth century never took place in the United States. The idea was that the expanding labor force, composed increasingly of European immigrants by the end of the nineteenth century, did not have to confront capital in an enclosed territory. Tensions and working conditions were as dismal in 138

SAVAG ERY AND CIVIL IZ ATION IN JO HN FORD

the company towns of New England as in Manchester, England, of course, but immigrants unhappy with their lot could simply pack up and move west, transforming themselves into homesteaders and farmers. Their right to avail themselves of land in the territories was secured by the Homestead Act of 1862; the life and conditions of Slavic and German plains settlers are perhaps best described in the novels of Willa Cather. My Ántonia (1918), for example, envisions a progressive and functioning “multicultural” society overseen by the benevolent patronage of tolerant aristocrats (embodied primarily in the character of Jim Burden), where the economic and political power of the elite East Coast trusts is reinvigorated by the spiritual and cultural resources of Midwest immigrant populism. (Despite Turner’s contention that the frontier closed in 1890, the government, in collusion with the railroads, kept bringing displaced Europeans to the plains well into the twentieth century.) The frontier promotes individualism; if arms and munitions were the means to self-sufficiency (and the frontier was a violent place), open land and space nonetheless ensured that differences can be tolerated with a minimum of bloodshed, according to this logic. At the same time, however, Turner points to the “nationalizing tendency of the West” (71). “The legislation which most developed the powers of the national government . . . was conditioned on the frontier” (68). The need to regulate commerce and administer land in the newly opened territories necessitated the construction of a strong federal government, whose power would ultimately be secured by Lincoln’s administration when the North won the Civil War. The federal government legislated internal improvements in the West and the distribution of the lands, while it also secured the power of the railroad; the federal government regulated interstate and interterritorial commerce; the federal government ultimately appropriated the right to adjudicate between competing social groups and to police the West. Once the federal army had become, under Lincoln, a constitutional fait accompli, once the nation-state had secured for itself what the sociologist Anthony Giddens terms a “monopoly on violence,” troops were sent to the plains and the Northwest to settle the “Indian” question in a series of wars that effectively ended with the massacre of the Teton Sioux at Wounded Knee in 1890. It is in 1890, argues Turner, that the frontier was closed. The nation was effectively finished, and the new species, an American, had evolved. “And now, four centuries from the discovery of America, at the end of a hundred years of life under the Constitution, the frontier has gone, and with its going has closed the first period of American history” (77). While most commentators underline Turner’s optimism about the continuing vitality of frontier virtues, Turner in fact closes his essay with a series of prophetic and rather pessimistic speculations about the shape of the future. Tolerance and individualism, he points out, are perpetually in conflict. What he warns of, precisely, are the dangers that will follow once the safety valve has been sealed, for the two great achievements of the 139

SAVAG ERY AND CIVIL IZ ATION IN JO HN FORD

frontier, the construction of a libertarian American individual and the production of centralized federal power, are directly opposed to one another. The western individual fears and distrusts federal authority; in turn, the national government, for the sake of social harmony, seeks to limit unregulated individualism. Once the frontier is closed, Turner implies, Americans must find ways to live with our differences in an enclosed space. Too much liberty cannot be tolerated. Turner is explicit about the dangers. “The most important effect of the frontier,” he writes, “has been in the promotion of democracy. . . . As has been indicated the frontier is productive of individualism” (72), or what Ralph Waldo Emerson had so famously termed “self-reliance.” But the same values that ensured survival under frontier conditions could now constitute a menace. “Complex society is precipitated by the wilderness into a kind of primitive organization based on the family. The tendency is anti-social. It produces antipathy to control and particularly to any direct control. The tax-gatherer is viewed as a representative of oppression” (72). Thus “the democracy born of free land, strong in selfishness and individualism, intolerant of administrative experience and education, and pressing individual liberty beyond its proper bounds, has its danger as well as its benefits” (73). Turner lists several examples of the dangers of unregulated individualism in the nineteenth century. For my purposes, however, I want to demonstrate how Turner’s systematic theories dominate the mythic tensions of the American self-imagination throughout the twentieth century, and specifically in the early years of the Cold War. Turner, as revisionist historians have pointed out repeatedly, is a dismal historian. His primary failure, perhaps, is that his method is far too schematic and reductive, and, though Turner was no bigot, his ideas consequently harbor the systemic racism endemic to the nineteenth century. He views the frontier as merely the dramatic struggle between “savagery and civilization,” that is, between indigenous or primitive Native Americans and a superior Anglo-American culture. But the historical record is infinitely more complex, and there were various other folks about, as contemporary western historian Sarah Deutsch points out. Neither do the civilized and the savage constitute distinctly homogenized social groups. In any social struggle, and particularly in the American West, historical shifts not only occurred in relations between majority and minority groups but affected relations among minority groups. Spanish Americans and Mexicans also constructed definitions of “otherness.” All of the groups called the intimate connections among race, sex and gender systems into play in this process of reshaping cultural and social boundaries. They embedded this constellation of issues in a particularly western heritage of conquest and territoriality. (Deutsch 111)

Turner offers not a history of the West but a damned good story of its settlement. For all his aspirations to scientism, Turner is primarily a spinner of yarns, 140

SAVAG ERY AND CIVIL IZ ATION IN JO HN FORD

compressing the complexity of historical factions and struggles into a tight dramatic narrative of a struggle between protagonist and antagonist, between savagery and civilization. The teleological thrust of narrative ensures there will be a winner and a loser, that there is a moral dimension to the tale, that values can be assigned to various characters, and so forth. Americans are produced, we might say, not simply through historical experiences but more powerfully through the stories that we tell about ourselves; cultural myths and stories enable us to locate our destiny and fabricate our collective and individual identities from the chaos and complexity of lived history. Who we are is less a product of our raw experience than the narrative structure that delimits and describes our experience; where Turner fails as a historian, he succeeds brilliantly as a mythmaker. While “experience” itself is never innocent of a narrative structure, the compelling political question involves the variety of ways in which a nation narrates itself and the ways in which those historical and mythic narratives are enlisted in contemporary struggles. The challenge of Cold War westerns was to redeploy the weapons in the mythic American arsenal for purposes of propaganda, to hash out a separate peace between an individualized masculinity that was threatened by conformist culture and a state power that might exceed its own regulatory limits; in large part, as we have seen, this was accomplished by posing totalitarianism as an external threat against which individual vigilance was necessary, on the one hand, and maintaining the perceived threat of an internal corrupting deviance, on the other. The American political and social imagination is still underwritten by the mythicized frontier in exactly the terms Turner lays out. The struggle between federalism and libertarianism virtually defines our national elections, for example. When a male presidential candidate wants to “get big government off our backs,” he dresses up like a cowboy, as did Ronald Reagan, who twice ran successfully on an antifederalist platform. In the West, “tax-and-spend” liberals are demonized as Washington insiders and ignorant bureaucrats, as tax collectors, and, ultimately, as effeminate. Libertarian values are strong in the heartland; we think of ourselves as self-reliant, fiercely independent, and competent. We like guns, and we like settling things for ourselves. Membership in the National Rifle Association is high; lawyers and legislators are frowned upon. Consider the two most recent presidential elections: the South and most of the plains states west of the Mississippi were won by George W. Bush, posing as a rugged entrepreneur and oilman, as a westerner, as a “good old boy.” His opponents, Al Gore, who set himself up as an efficient legislator, and John Kerry, by contrast, won in New England, the Atlantic seaboard, and the West Coast. During the Cold War, of course, this mythic apparatus was typically applied in Hollywood offerings of a heroic individual successfully confronting quasi-totalitarian dictators. Turner’s mythic vision of federal power versus individualism describes these tensions.4 141

SAVAG ERY AND CIVIL IZ ATION IN JO HN FORD

So, too, can the mythicized language of a struggle between savagery and civilization describe the mythic dimensions of American economic and social life. The rugged individualism of the frontier serves as a metaphor for unregulated entrepreneurial capitalism. On the frontier, individual speculation can threaten the social good, and Turner describes the wildcat banking scandals of the nineteenth century in terms that prophesy the savings and loans scandals of the 1980s. During those oil-boom years, unregulated savings and loans institutions (not banks, which are under federal supervision) in Texas and Louisiana loaned money to shady venture capitalists for all sorts of shady schemes; when the market went bust, billions of dollars were simply lost. The federal government stepped in and protected the institutions. Consider another example. Timothy McVeigh was libertarian and hated the national government. He blew up the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building on April 19, 1995, in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. The event that had most spurred McVeigh’s wrath was the 1993 standoff between the Clinton administration and the Branch Davidians in Waco, Texas. David Koresh did something as American as apple pie: just like the Puritans, just like the Mormons, he founded his own religion and moved west, where he supposed that no one would bother him. And he protected his right to do so with guns: he was initially targeted by the federal government for illegal possession of firearms. On April 19, when the federal forces moved in after a long standoff, a fire was started, and the Branch Davidian compound burned to the ground. As Americans, we live out our mythic dramas in terms supplied by Turner’s frontier thesis: “the democracy born of free land, strong in selfishness and individualism, intolerant of administrative experience and education, and pressing individual liberty beyond its proper bounds, has its dangers” (73). In his encyclopedic cultural analysis of frontier mythologies, Richard Slotkin defines myths as “those stories drawn from a society’s history that have acquired through persistent usage the power of symbolizing that society’s ideology and of dramatizing its moral consciousness—with all the complexities and contradictions that consciousness may contain” (5). Further, he argues, the Myth of the Frontier is our oldest and most characteristic myth, expressed in a body of literature, folklore, ritual, historiography, and polemics produced over a period of three centuries. According to this myth-historiography, the conquest of the wilderness and the subjugation or displacement of the native Americans who originally inhabited it have been the means to our achievement of a national identity, a democratic polity, an ever-expanding economy, and a phenomenally dynamic and “progressive” civilization. (10)

Perhaps the purest proponent of frontier mythologies is the film director John Ford, whose various westerns in different ways dramatize the emergence of America from the struggles between savagery and civilization. His 1939 142

SAVAG ERY AND CIVIL IZ ATION IN JO HN FORD

Stagecoach defines both the iconography of the West (Ford filmed this and many subsequent westerns in Monument Valley, Utah) and the quintessential western character: Stagecoach introduces the John Wayne persona, a figure whose relentless and larger-than-life individualism—the embodiment of the frontiersman—is starkly defined. Never after will Wayne play anything else apart from “John Wayne.” According to Slotkin, Wayne is the cinematic version of the classic frontiersman, the “man who knows Indians.” Borrowing from James Fenimore Cooper, Slotkin defines the archetype: “As the ‘man who knows Indians,’ the frontier hero stands between the opposed worlds of savagery and civilization, acting sometimes as mediator or interpreter between races and cultures but more often as civilization’s most effective instrument against savagery— a man who knows how to think and fight like an Indian, to turn their own methods against them” (16). On the frontier, one must be somewhat savage in order to secure and defend civilization. Wayne is the successor to a long lineage of this figure (Leatherstocking or Hawkeye, in Cooper’s romances, Daniel Boone, Davy Crockett, Huckleberry Finn, and others). In Turner’s terms, the frontiersman is both savage and civilized; he exists at the cusp of settlement. He has learned enough from American Indians to survive in the wilderness, and yet he puts his considerable skills to use in the service of civilization. What is key, however, is that the civilization he fights for will have no place for him; he is himself too primitive, too savage, to fit comfortably in the new social order. In cultural terms, as Smith has suggested in his genealogy of types, it is the tension between the civilized, genteel hero, who conforms to the conventions of the genteel romance and who represents civilization, and the potentially subversive character of the anarchic frontiersman that underpins the history of the Western genre. Once the frontier is closed, as Turner acknowledges, self-reliance becomes dangerous, and the frontiersman risks “pressing individual liberty beyond its proper bounds” (73). Leatherstocking, Crockett, and Finn continually light out for the territories, seek new frontiers, new adventures. There is no place for them in a newly civilized society. And so, too, will Wayne’s character, Tom Doniphon, be sacrificed in Ford’s film The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence. This movie represents a Kennedy-esque tweaking of the mythic frontier heritage, and best dramatizes the tensions between an imagined communal consensus—overseen, administered, and protected by a benign federal power—and a menacing western libertarianism that must be subdued if the community is to survive.5 At a primary level, this film, like almost every western ever produced in Hollywood, imagines a compromise between individualism and communalism (the violent sacrifice of the savage is usually the way in which the compromise is effected). Yet The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance ironically confesses to the very limits of this vision of harmony. The mythic apparatus more or less collapses in on itself; and the film confesses that the myth is simply that: a lie that is trying to pass itself off as genuine history. “This is the 143

SAVAG ERY AND CIVIL IZ ATION IN JO HN FORD

West, sir,” Scott announces. “When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.” Until that point, the press, as embodied in the figure of Dutton Peabody (Edmond O’Brien), had served as the purveyor of truth; here the third estate confesses itself to be in the service of mythic propaganda. And not only does the film self-consciously confess that Turner’s frontier historiography amounts to legend rather than “truth,” it exposes the very limits of the legend. That is, Ford’s 1962 work acknowledges that the frontier struggle between savagery and civilization no longer provides mythic sustenance for the America of the 1960s. The film is beautifully structured around the theme of doubles, each symbolically aligned with either “savagery” or “civilization.” The story takes place somewhere in the American Southwest when, in Turner’s terms, the “ranchers’ frontier” is being definitively replaced by “the farmers’ frontier.” The political backdrop is the struggle between the lawless cattle barons, who want the region to remain a territory (the Wild West, which they rule by force) and the newly arrived population of smaller farmers (many Mexican or immigrant), who wish to fence in and cultivate the land and who seek to enter the federal republic as a state. The cattle barons, in an irony that Vice President Dick Cheney might appreciate, represent corporate power, in an unholy alliance with lawless “savagery”; they are associated with guns, wilderness, brute power, the desert. Their hired goon is the aptly named Liberty Valance (Lee Marvin), a character who is savagery personified. Liberty Valance, as his name implies, represents in Turner’s language the menace of unregulated liberty. In the town of Shinbone, on the other side of the Pickaxe River, the forces of civilization are arrayed: the town, the law, technological progress in the form of the railroad, representative democracy, a free press, racial tolerance, and so forth, all championed by the greenhorn from the East, Ransom Stoddard (James Stewart), a stereotypically vacillating Cold War liberal. The stagecoach in which he arrives is held up by Liberty Valance. A gentleman, Stoddard comes to assist one of the women Valance is terrorizing, and he is viciously beaten and left for dead in the desert. His law books, representing both an orderly society and literacy, are the central targets of Valance’s savagery: “I’ll teach you the law of the West,” Valance screams sadistically. Stoddard is rescued by Tom Doniphon, who finds him lying prone in the desert and carries him to town. Doniphon is both savage and civilized, ruthless and gentlemanly. He can read, for example, but not very well. He owns cattle, but his ranch is small. He lives in the desert, but sympathizes with the townsfolk. He can handle a gun, but puts his gun in the service of the law. He brings a wild desert rose to his lover, Hallie (Vera Miles). “Ever seen a real rose, Hallie?” asks Stoddard. Stoddard represents law and order. He wants to arrest the outlaw Valance, not to kill him. He hangs his shingle out as a lawyer, but ends up a schoolteacher, giving lessons on the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights. Under Doniphon’s tutelage, Stoddard’s task is to “civilize” the savage territory. 144

SAVAG ERY AND CIVIL IZ ATION IN JO HN FORD

Yet the rights to civilization must be secured through violence; even the new West must be won. Like many westerns, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance is a drama of masculinity. If eastern civilization is too effeminate, then the West is too driven by testosterone. A compromise must be achieved, a social balance. Law and order can only be secured, according to the myth, when one is capable of violence. Civilization depends upon a small homeopathic injection of savagery. To civilize the West, then, Stoddard must take a page from Doniphon’s book and become a little bit savage himself. In other words, he must learn to “be a man.” The gender dynamics of the film are remarkable. Stoddard spends most of the film trying to stand erect. He is flaccid, passive, castrated at the beginning of the film, and is challenged to reclaim his manhood. He must prove his right to paternal power in the new West. Early in the film he appears more or less in drag (an apron) and does women’s work (dishwashing and waiting tables). He is harassed, in a flirtatious, sexually aggressive manner, by Liberty Valance, and Tom Doniphon must come to save and defend his honor. Ultimately, Stoddard must learn to shoot, and be ready to kill Liberty Valance. Doniphon takes him to the desert, and instructs him in savagery. Not only does the lawyer learn to shoot, but he learns to cheat. When Doniphon plays a trick on him, he tells Stoddard: “I don’t like cheating either, but that’s what you’ll have to do to beat Liberty Valance.” And Stoddard sucker punches Doniphon. With this act of violence, Stoddard has symbolically crossed the line into savagery. Because of this, he merits civilization. He has demonstrated his own capacity for violence and his own “lawlessness.” He has proven himself a man and thus secured his right to patriarchal privilege. With this act of violence, Ransom Stoddard becomes the new man in town; indeed, he will earn the epithet “the man who shot Liberty Valance.” From here on in, the roles of Stewart and Wayne are reversed. Ransom Stoddard learns to stand on his own two feet, and Tom Doniphon is increasingly supine: Doniphon drinks and staggers, he falls over, he burns down the house he is building for his fiancée, and finally he dies. As Stoddard stands up, Doniphon lies down. And Doniphon concedes power to Stoddard willingly and deliberately. The town hopes to elect Doniphon a delegate to the territorial assembly to decide the question of statehood; he persuades them instead to send Stoddard. He gives up his wooing of Hallie so that she might marry Stoddard, who has taught her to read, who civilizes her and takes her east to Washington, D.C., when he becomes senator. Doniphon’s ultimate act ceding patriarchal power to Stoddard is this: he compels Stoddard to take credit for killing Liberty Valance. Valance beats and tortures the newspaperman, Dutton Peabody. Incensed, Stoddard picks up a gun and calls Valance out in the street for a showdown. Valance, drunk, teases Stoddard, toying with him. As Valance finally gets a bead on Stoddard, Stoddard lifts his own weapon and fires wildly. Valance falls and dies, apparently killed by Stoddard’s lucky shot. And so Ransom Stoddard 145

SAVAG ERY AND CIVIL IZ ATION IN JO HN FORD

becomes the town hero, “the man who shot Liberty Valance,” and rides his fame from political triumph to political triumph, eventually becoming one of the most powerful men in the country. He returns from Washington years later to attend the funeral of Tom Doniphon, who has died penniless and obscure. What actually happened, as the audience is shown in a flashback sequence, is that Doniphon had saved Stoddard’s life. As Stoddard and Valance faced off, Doniphon, hidden in a back alley, had killed Valance with his rifle. Doniphon is the man who shot Liberty Valance, but he ensures that no one knows. This is the story Stoddard tells Maxwell Scott years later; this is the story Scott refuses to print. When the legend becomes fact, print the legend. As I have mentioned, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance rewrites the myth from Kennedy’s perspective. Kennedy, who spoke famously of a “New Frontier” when he accepted the Democratic nomination in 1960, positioned himself as both military hero and statesman, both frontiersman and tax collector. Like Ransom Stoddard, he could and would use violence to protect himself and society, but his primary commitments were not to himself but rather to community and nation. What the film points to is an ideological ideal in which excessive liberty can be purged and we can find ways to live in harmony. Dutton Peabody gives a nomination speech for Stoddard that is cribbed almost verbatim from the pages of Turner, even as it consciously echoes Kennedy’s rhetoric. African Americans are welcomed into the social compact in the film (in the character of Pompey [Woody Strode]), as are immigrants and Mexican Americans. The myth of the frontier argues that an effective community can only be sustained provided it maintains contact with frontier virtues (violence and self-reliance). This, in fact, is the very purpose of the Hollywood western during the Cold War years: to reconnect Americans mythically to the virtues of the frontier. One only has the right to community if one is willing to defend it, and, for Americans, our capacity to successfully defend ourselves has been tempered and proven in the frontier experience. In westerns, we return there, at least imaginatively, to rediscover our strengths and renew ourselves for the global struggle against international Communism. And yet, the film also insists, we never “had” the frontier experience, only its legend. Our experience is simply a legend, a lie. Ransom Stoddard had the courage to face the bad guy, but he didn’t have the skills to defeat him. Hollywood works its ideological magic by conflating virtue with individual power: the good guy always wins. It is not that “might makes right”; nor is it, simply, a question of right eventually making might, although this phenomenon is always appealed to. In Ford’s film, the people are encouraged to come together collectively to defeat the evil cattle barons, but they never do so. The hero has to face the bad guy alone. In Hollywood’s version of the frontier myth, rather, might and right become embodied in the person of the frontiersman. In most westerns, the hero has the courage to take on the bad guy and the capacity to defeat him because he 146

SAVAG ERY AND CIVIL IZ ATION IN JO HN FORD

has been forced, under frontier conditions, to evolve both virtue and skill: he has had to adapt or die, as Turner points out. And the frontier promotes both virtue and skill with guns in the figure of John Wayne. But in this film Wayne is sacrificed; his story is never told. All of western literature poses the same question: how might the community honorably bury its dead? Doniphon is buried dishonorably and unrecognized, however. The hero is someone willing to “die with his boots on”; significantly, in Liberty Valance, the undertaker has stolen Doniphon’s boots. The stand-in hero, Stoddard, is exposed as a little more than a good-hearted fraud. The idea that goodwill has prevailed is admitted to be merely a legend, a lie. What the ending of the film exposes, ultimately, is a kind of ideological exhaustion: not only can the old myths no longer sustain us, but we would be foolish to suppose that they ever could have. The myth of the frontier is simply a hoax. The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance was made at the beginning of the 1960s, a decade that would see all myths of American virtue crumble. By 1963, Kennedy himself would fall victim to a kind of frontier violence in Dallas, Texas; the “cowboys versus Indians” screenplay would look laughable in a Vietnam landscape; and My Lai would turn the encounter between savagery and civilization backward, forward, sideways, and down. The problem, as Slotkin sees it, is not simply that myth has supplanted history, but that the prevailing myth no longer works as myth. Speaking of the Reagan administration’s efforts to resuscitate a bankrupt Cold War version of frontier mythologies, Slotkin writes: Myth is the language in which a society remembers its history, and the reification of nostalgia in the mass culture and politics of the 1980s is a falsification of memory. If a new mythology is to fulfill its cultural function, it will have to recognize and incorporate a new set of memories that more accurately reflect the material changes that have transformed American society over the last forty years. The historical adventure of our national development will have to be reconceived to incorporate our experience of defeat and disappointment, our acquired sense of limitation, as well as the fabulous hopefulness that has perennially transformed and energized our culture. (655)

Sadly, we’ve seen little sign of this. In the face of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, American public discourse has been saturated with the same tired myth of savagery versus civilization. The war in Afghanistan was packaged as a frontier drama: the savages were the Taliban and al-Qaeda; the Americans and our allies were civilized. We had to be a little savage, of course, to defeat the savages in guerrilla warfare; in Afghanistan, we even had our half-wild Tom Doniphon character: the Northern Alliance. But such mythic language will seem shopworn and tired in the global struggle against Islamicist and third world discontent, a struggle that will have to be carried out in the real world rather than on the silver screen, genuinely, rather than mythically. Myth is 147

SAVAG ERY AND CIVIL IZ ATION IN JO HN FORD

available to all parties in these struggles, of course, and will everywhere be enlisted in the cause. As Douglas McReynolds has noted, “the Old western myth is still viable. . . . What we see is not a new myth or a debunked one, but changing perspectives [and] increased self-consciousness in movie-making” (47).6 But however much such filmic celebrations of stoicism as Blackhawk Down (2001) or Jarhead (2005) protest to the contrary, Baghdad will never be Dodge City. What remains to be seen is whether it will be Shinbone, where a fraudulent and murderous triumph over “evil” is served up in an accommodating press as the legend of American triumph. Observers in my adoptive country of Canada, alongside critics from Latin America, Europe, Asia, and Africa, have long expressed bemusement with two indisputable but puzzling corollaries that perplex available understandings of the “American century” so recently concluded. The first is the relative thinness and inefficacy of the American political Left, when measured against the centrality of leftist traditions to the pitched struggles of modernity elsewhere around the globe. The second is the dazzling and ongoing appeal of American cultural exports, from jazz and more recent forms of popular music (disco, country-and-western, hip-hop) to Hollywood cinema and television, not excluding, at one pole, serious literature (eastern Europeans, for example, are diligent and disciplined readers of everyone from Jack Kerouac and John Updike to Paul Auster and Toni Morrison), or, at the other, a semiotic merchandise that informs and shapes both dominant and subcultural appropriations of—as well as revolutionary resistance to—western lifestyles. Sandinistas drink Coca-Cola; al-Qaeda operatives patronize strip clubs. In this study, I have endeavored to reconnect these two phenomena, by focusing on a small but singularly important historical window, the early years of the Cold War, a time when, I contend, the spheres of cultural and intellectual production and those of progressive politics and labor were effectively severed. The radical Left was put on the run, and cultural and intellectual production was increasingly enlisted in the cause of manufacturing new social subjects: individuated, anxious, self-policing, consumerist, and therefore “free.” There are, of course, many contributing factors that explain, in part, the weakness of the American Left. Because of the factionalism and internecine warfare among its proponents, the difficulty of maintaining solidarity among the Left has long been lamented. The Left has limited ability to offer political platforms responsive locally and nationally to the varied and often competing interests of the disenfranchised in so large a country. At the same time, historians point out, the American institutions cobbled together in the nineteenth century and earlier have proven themselves remarkably flexible and durable, pointing to the resiliency of the U.S. Constitution itself, which has so far managed to stave off catastrophe in the face of political, economic, or social crises; the putative success of the New Deal and subsequent government initiatives that have, it is 148

SAVAG ERY AND CIVIL IZ ATION IN JO HN FORD

argued, encompassed the working classes within the fold of the American dream of prosperity, an effort bolstered by the post–World War II financial boom; the need to train a technocratic and bureaucratic elite to fight the Cold War and serve global capitalism; the powerful moral suasion of the civil rights movement and of second-wave feminism; and so forth. Through to the 1970s, one could even argue that many social initiatives once the province of wild-eyed radicals were effectively and rather easily incorporated into the program of U.S. corporate capitalism: universal suffrage and education, a wealth of antidiscrimination and affirmative actions laws, rights to collective bargaining, an end to child and slave labor, the introduction of a forty-hour workweek, and government regulations on business practices, medicine, and the environment. But for its monumental lip service to the virtues of the free market, one could even make the claim that, for most of the past century, the United States has been the most effectively socialist country on earth. Certainly the U.S. military, until recently, has been the most perfectly developed and expertly choreographed “Communist” institution imaginable: fully nationalized in both economic and social terms, fully devoted to disciplined solidarity and to working on behalf of the collective effort rather than to the pursuit of profit or individual power. Yet it is sobering to realize that, with the solitary and somewhat surprising exception of the Supreme Court’s 2003 decision to overturn state antisodomy laws in Lawrence and Garner v. Texas, American progressives have hardly won a single nationwide victory in twenty-five years, not since the withdrawal of American troops from Southeast Asia, not since Roe v. Wade, not since the hesitant and cautious legislation of environmental regulations during the Carter years. For all of its resistance to Cold War fear-mongering and for all its sometimes hypocritical devotion to establishing instead a foreign policy based on human rights, the Carter administration was no friend to organized labor. Carter foresaw that the future of capitalism lay in globalization of both production and consumption, and helped to ensure that the domestic economic sector would, consequently, be de-industrialized and largely transformed according to the dictates of an expanding service and information economy. Indeed, many of the amply documented rollbacks to progressive social and economic initiatives during the Reagan and Bush years, as well as during what might best be termed the ideological stagflation of the Clinton interregnum, can be attributed to the metamorphosis of a classically Keynesian economics into a postmodern scenario wherein the state has become almost entirely an instrument of global corporate welfare, as many observers have pointed out. Even so, we will do well to recall that a primary reason for the diminishment of the American Left is that it has been repeatedly targeted for persecution and harassment, policies that have reached their apex in times of ostensible crisis, often during wartime, or in the run-up to war or during its immediate aftermath. At such times, leftist thought has been criminalized; leftist thinkers and activists have 149

SAVAG ERY AND CIVIL IZ ATION IN JO HN FORD

been oppressed, imprisoned, deported, and at times murdered. In 1919, the Palmer raids targeted immigrants and radicals, helping to ensure that racialized nativism be afforded a dominant place in American cultural life of the 1920s; COINTELPRO serves as shorthand to name the attack on the American Left during the late 1960s and 1970s, an effort that effectively cleared the ground of any organized opposition that might have slowed or effectively combated the developments of the last three decades briefly sketched in the paragraphs above; as I indicated in my opening chapter, even as the political misfortunes and military catastrophes of Bushism signal its decline, the damage done to prospects for twenty-first-century democracy in the United States and across the globe are staggering (which is not to say that ground has been irretrievably lost; these have merely been the opening salvoes in a long struggle, and I remain wholeheartedly optimistic). McCarthyism, of course, names the most notorious, pernicious, and well publicized of these periodic purges of the American Left. Though the excesses of McCarthyism have been amply documented, just as the geopolitical ramifications of the Cold War continue to be spun out and refined at length by historians and other scholars of varying disciplines, methodologies, and ideological allegiances, the long-term effects of McCarthyism on American culture have only been scantily theorized. My contention throughout has been that cultural McCarthyism, for better or for worse, inaugurated what might be termed the postmodern and highly consumerist regime of the “personal,” a complex and resilient affective formation that underwrites the spectacular worldwide success of American culture itself. In more detail, I have aimed in the preceding chapters to mount readings that might unearth and highlight the variety of ways in which cultural and intellectual productions of the period in different but distinct ways elaborated, resisted, and dramatized these changes, and how particular individual exiles and fugitives coped and, in places, crafted the affirmative, or, as with the writing of Paul Bowles, pursued and exhausted the trajectory of the personal. Even the existential flight from the political into the cultivation of consciousness, marked in radically different ways by the writings of Ralph Ellison, Sylvia Plath, or Paul Bowles, bears the mournful traces of this predicament, and gestures, as well, to inchoate if not fully graspable utopian alternatives. The Right has a good point when it bemoans the liberal bias of much of American culture, both popular and elite; it is wrong, however, to suppose that such cultural productions have much short-term political heft. Between 1948 and the early 1950s, culture, in short, became ideologically ghettoized at the same time, as Fredric Jameson reiterates, it became ubiquitous; the revolutionary Jeffersonian slogan that dedicated political practice wholly to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness was deposed, and the pursuit of happiness, no longer a matter of social transformations and renewals, became abortively sequestered within the confines of one’s personal life. Society itself was delivered over to new professional disciplines of management and therapy, which 150

SAVAG ERY AND CIVIL IZ ATION IN JO HN FORD

have largely colonized the American academy, as F. O. Matthiessen foresaw they would, and as C. L. R James realized in his midcentury writings, this bureaucratic overcoding and expansion of what Max Weber once termed “rationalization” marked the most pernicious threat to human capacity for joy in the second half of the twentieth century. At the same time, recent inquires into various forms of popular culture have stressed the wide spectrum of recuperative and utopian possibilities embedded there; however sophisticated post-Gramscian and post-Althusserian analyses of ideology and hegemony have become in the hands of such thinkers as Žižek, for example, we should be alert to the Jamesian possibility that audiences and consumers of popular culture may be perfectly aware of the manifold and complex ways that their pleasures and desires are being played upon, and be wary of patronizing approaches. Culture does make things happen, though seldom in expected or easily traceable ways. Personalism itself also marked a new point of political and cultural departure, for civil rights activists, for the New Left, for the women’s movement, for gay and lesbian struggles, and for popular third and second world resistance to colonizers old and new; there is nothing to lament in these developments. They suggest, rather, that a primary task is acknowledging and endorsing the experimental politics of culture, which may in no way resemble what we have become accustomed to, just as it will remain in the decades and centuries ahead the old privilege of imaginative cultural and intellectual productions both to recall the old and to invent, elaborate, and mobilize the new possibilities of joy.

151

NOTES

1 . CU LT U R AL F RON TS 1. In its own quiet way, and though it has never been understood to have equivalent symbolic resonance, the year 1948 was as central a defining year in modern world history as 1848 had been, or as 1968 would prove to be. Nineteen forty-eight was the year in which the Cold War was ideologically and politically matriculated. 2. See Michael Warner’s introduction to Fear of a Queer Planet: Queer Politics and Social Theory, ed. Michael Warner (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), for an elaboration of the useful concept of “heteronormative culture,” no doubt one of the signal accomplishments of the 1950s. 3. On post-Fordism, see Part 2 of David Harvey’s The Condition of Postmodernity. 4. The essay was originally published as “English and the Cold War” in another important collection, The Cold War and the University, ed. Andre Schiffrin (New York: New Press, 1997), 73–106. 5. For a fuller discussion of Ransom’s position, see Vincent Leitch’s chapter on the New Criticism in American Literary Criticism from the Thirties to the Eighties (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988). 6. The designation “popular front,” of course, is a highly contentious and freighted term to describe the coalition of left-leaning activists, organizers, intellectuals, scholars, and writers in the 1930s and 1940s, though, as will be clear in what follows, I am largely persuaded by and indebted to Michael Denning’s emphasis on the “laboring” of American culture, designating a common commitment to social and economic justice and an effort to root cultural production in the lives of laborers and the underclasses, even where liberal-leaning or Christian participants expressed wariness about the Soviet Union or the potential of an American political revolution; so, too, such epithets (and shibboleths) as “liberal,” “radical,” “revolutionary,” “engaged,” “committed,” “Communist,” “Trotskyite,” “pink,” “Red,” “fascist,” “fellow traveler,” and so forth (equally vexed today are slurs about “anti-Americanism,” “anti-Semitism,” “political correctness,” “postmodernism,” “poststructuralism,” “moral relativism,” “liberal,” and the like). Adding to the difficulty of establishing watertight definitions of such phrases is the fact that not only was the Left notoriously factionalized and contentious, many intellectuals refused to align themselves with available “isms,” or when they did, carefully recalibrated their own terms as their thinking evolved and changed (Paul Goodman, for example, preferred to term his politics “Libertarian” early in his career, until that word became co-opted by followers of Barry Goldwater, when Goodman began openly to fly the black flag of anarchism; yet his thinking can also be justly classified as pacifist, decentralist, humanist, left-libertarian, communalist, free-love, bisexual, pederast, and so forth). Wherever possible, I indicate contextually how I understand these terms to be used (and how I use them myself ); during the Cold War, however, culture is deliberately “unlabored,” and terms like “social justice” and “economic justice” drop out of the mainstream American lexicon. After 1947, positions on the Left quickly crystallized around the question of whether one was anti-Stalinist, a hardening of debate into the either/or rigidities that characterized cultural, social, and political debate of the time and, I will argue, helped to effectuate that “unlaboring.” 7. Along with such luminaries as Robert Lowell, Arthur Schlesinger, Dwight MacDonald, Philip Rahv, and Nicolas Nabokov, she participated in the delegation led by Sidney Hook that famously disrupted

153

NOTES

the “Cultural and Scientific Conference for World Peace” at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York in 1949. Official delegates from the United States included F. O. Matthiessen, Arthur Miller, Howard Fast, and Clifford Odets. Full comic details of this episode, in which the lines were decisively and dramatically drawn between the fellow travelers and the anti-Stalinists among the literati, can be found in the third chapter of Frances Stonor Saunders’s The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters (New York: New Press, 2000). 8. The evidence of the extent of CIA involvement keeps growing. The writer Peter Matthiessen, for example, has very recently acknowledged that he was employed as a covert CIA agent when he helped to found the celebrated and highly influential expatriate journal of letters, the Paris Review. See Gina McGee, “The Burgeoning Rebirth of a Bygone Literary Star,” New York Times, January 1, 2007, http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html. Peter Matthiessen, incidentally, is F. O. Matthiessen’s nephew. 9. During the height of the so-called culture wars about political correctness on campus, Fish’s notorious There’s No Such Thing as Free Speech, and It’s a Good Thing, Too (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994) argued persuasively that all academic institutions have both the duty to understand and the right to decide the limits of what they can tolerate within their own discursive communities. Rhetoric about absolute freedom of inquiry, according to Fish, amounts to little more than the flimsiest form of ideological whitewash. 10. In this context, I should mention both Plath’s The Bell Jar (1963; reprint, New York: Harper, 1999), discussed below, and Randall Jarrell’s remarkable Pictures from an Institution (New York: Knopf, 1954), which soft-peddles the broader ideological scope of campus infighting. 11. Sigal, by the way, is one of the few intellectual figures from this time still alive and, as of this writing, still kicking. After moving, like his protagonist, to Europe, he became somewhat notorious for being the model for the American writer Saul Green in Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook, and for his involvement with R. D. Laing’s Philadelphia Association. His long-dormant Hollywood career was resurrected with the writing of the 2002 Selma Hayek vehicle, Frida, about the life of the radical Mexican painter Frida Kahlo. He has also published Zone of the Interior (West Yorkshire: Pomona, 2005) and A Woman of Uncertain Character (New York: Carroll and Graf, 2006) about his mother, a radical labor organizer, and is featured in the British documentary television series The Trap. And he still dispatches the occasional fiery letter to the Nation, Counterpunch, or the Guardian. 12. Charged under the Smith Act with conspiring to overthrow the government “by force or violence.” Transcripts from the trial, including Eugene Dennis’s defense statement, can found in Ellen Schrecker, The Age of McCarthyism: A Brief History with Documents (Boston: St. Martin’s, 1994), 174–78. Before the law was eventually declared unconstitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court, more than 140 Communist Party leaders and many others would be prosecuted. Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, one of those later arrested (in 1951) and imprisoned, tells her version of these events in My Life as a Political Prisoner: The Anderson Story (1963; reprint, New York: International, 1972). 13. Fast would do time in prison for his involvement in the peace movement and would leave the party in 1956 upon learning of Kruschev’s revelations about Stalin. 14. I have the writing of Paul Goodman in mind here particularly. Goodman’s opposition to the Second World War, he felt, had cost him his audience as early as 1941, and he was no doubt as surprised as anyone to discover how popular Growing Up Absurd quickly became when it appeared in 1960. He used his newfound celebrity among the younger generation of the New Left to continue to push his cases for de-centralization, pacificism, free love, and poetry. 15. For information on Kaufmann, I am indebted to James Smethurst, who also points out that he has been able to find no corroboration of Kaufmann’s claim to have been a leader in the Wallace campaign, though he suspects Kaufman was probably a CPUSA member at the time. 16. In 1953, Senator McCarthy’s underlings, Roy Cohn and David Schine, demanded the removal of 30,000 books by “pro-Communist” writers at USIA libraries abroad, a request with which the State Department complied. See Saunders, Cultural Cold War, (192–93).

154

NOTES

17. For better or worse, the very field of American studies originated and was developed according to Cold War dictates. In the past few decades, however, scholars have begun to critically reassess our national cultural history and to consider their own scholarly work in relation to global politics and ideologies. Victor Navasky’s oral history, Naming Names (Penguin, 1980), and Ellen Schrecker’s beautifully researched No Ivory Tower: McCarthyism and the Universities (New York: Oxford 1986) remain indispensable critical guides to the cultural politics of the 1950s. Though I disagree with many of his readings and methodological assumptions, historian Stephen J. Whitfield’s The Culture of the Cold War, 2nd ed. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), is the standard survey of the field. Whitfield’s book, along with Larry May, ed., Recasting America: Culture and Politics in the Age of The Cold War (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), helped launch an understandable post-1989 reappraisal of Cold War culture, as represented in Peter J. Kuznick and James Gilbert, eds., Rethinking Cold War Culture (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian, 2001). Book-length studies include Alan Nadel’s seminal Containment Culture: American Narratives, Postmodernism, and the Atomic Age (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1995) and Keith Booker’s Monsters, Mushroom Clouds and the Cold War: American Science Fiction and the Roots of Postmodernism, 1946–1964 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 2001), both of which see the Cold War era as the crucible of postmodern condition, and Paul S. Boyer’s By the Bomb’s Early Light: American Thought and Culture at the Dawn of the Atomic Age (New York: Pantheon, 1985). More specific studies consider the Cold War– inflected politics of Hollywood, such as Peter Biskind’s Seeing Is Believing: How Hollywood Taught Us to Stop Worrying and Love the Fifties (New York: Pantheon, 1983), and the CIA’s interference in literature, Saunders’s Cultural Cold War; painting, Christine Lindey’s Art in the Cold War (London: Herbert, 1990); literary criticism, Tobin Siebers’s Cold War Criticism and the Politics of Skepticism, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993); and noir and hard-boiled fiction, Woody Haut’s Pulp Culture: Hardboiled Fiction and the Cold War (London: Serpent’s Tail, 1995). Michael Denning’s exemplary and encyclopedic The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the 20th Century (London: Verso, 1997) exhaustively documents the connections between culture and politics from the Depression through World War II, and demands an entire overhaul of our contemporary understanding of American cultural history, a project to which my book will contribute. Another inspirational study, Elaine Tyler May’s Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era (New York: Basic, 1990), uses a theoretical approach to cultural practices in order to delineate the connection between ideology and everyday experience. Both volumes revisit the American Cold War with critical, discerning eyes and elaborate connections between that history and our contemporary conditions of existence. Together, they may also be said to broaden and deepen the project of cultural history and to help inaugurate a new, post-Cold War paradigm in American studies itself. 18. A lesson I continue to learn the hard way, as a teacher who has spent most of his working life teaching American literature at institutions outside the United States. 19. Ironically enough, the New Testament offers contrasting versions of this doctrine. In both Matthew 12:30 and Luke 11:23, Christ is quoted as saying, “He who is not with me is against me.” More generously, Mark 9:40 gives us “He who is not against us is for us,” and Luke 9:50, “He who is not against us is for us.” The conservative evangelism of Bush, needless to say, ensures that the preferred biblical quotation be laced with apocalyptic paranoia. 20. Again, the parallels are simply too close for comfort; many civil libertarians today believe that the passage of the Patriot Act marks an attempt to legislate and institutionalize the suspension of constitutionally guaranteed rights. 21. Here I should also pay homage to the ground-breaking work of Cary Nelson, along with that of Bill Mullen, Barbara Foley, and William Maxwell, which has deepened our understanding of the racial, sexual, and gender dimensions of radical literary production. 22. In “Learning to Love Terrorists” and elsewhere. For years, Leo made his living as a pundit by reiterating in such “legitimate” and “mainstream” venues as U.S. News and World Report the right-wing claim that a campus regime dedicated to “moral relativism,” “political correctness,” and “anti-Americanism” made the country a soft target for Muslim extremists.

155

NOTES

23. In James Risen and Eric Lithblau, “Bush Lets U.S. Spy on Callers without Courts,” New York Times, December 16, 2005, http://www.commondreams.org/headlines 05/1216-01.htm. 24. Robbins, in particular, forms an important link in Hollywood to older political and cultural collective sensibilities. His 1999 film Cradle Will Rock, which takes its name from the famously Brechtian 1939 musical by Marc Blitzstein and Orson Welles, revisits the buried history of American popular front culture in an effort to provide some political heft for culture today. 25. My thinking here is obviously indebted to Phillippe Lejeune’s notion of an “autobiographical pact” between writer and reader, although the distinction between autobiography, memoir, and novel is less relevant to my reading. I would insist, for my part, that the ostensible “referentiality” of the text is no more than an ideological side effect of the felt “authenticity” of the text; if the story is affectively “powerful” and convincing, then it stands to reason that it must be factually accurate. See Phillippe Lejeune, On Autobiography, trans. Katherine Leary (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989). 26. The recent James Frey/Oprah Winfrey flap over the questioned “authenticity” of Frey’s A Million Little Pieces is interesting in this regard, insofar as the book violates the necessary social contract involved. That social contract forms both the internal plot of such books (the unruly and unreformable protagonist finds a way to “make peace” with an unjust society, and society softens its harsh demands) and what might be called an external “generic” contract, binding author to audience (I’ll be straight with you, says the writer to his or her readers, if you will meet me halfway by suspending your biases and maybe learn to be a bit more tolerant of those who threaten you). Whether the narrative markets itself as memoir or fiction is beside the point. Factual or not, it must be “authentic.” When Frey’s “memoir” turned out to be a pack of lies, the very fictiveness of the model of reciprocal sincerity on which that contract rested was exposed, and Oprah and her fans understandably felt themselves to have been betrayed. 27. Kate Baldwin’s “The Radical Imaginary of The Bell Jar,” Novel 38, no. 1 (2004): 21–42, likewise argues that the novel, above and beyond being a critique of domesticity and gender, is critically engaged in geopolitics and racial ideologies of the Cold War. 28. For this observation, I am indebted to several of the students in my York University graduate course on the Cold War and U.S. literature. 29. One could even make the case that, according to the sacrificial logic of substitution outlined by René Girard, the execution of the Rosenbergs constitutes a scapegoating mechanism designed to expiate America of its own collective guilt for Hiroshima and Nagasaki. 30. Such holdovers from McCarthy’s times as loyalty oaths continue to exist, incidentally, right up to the present. To my surprise, and somewhat to my delight, I had to sign a loyalty oath when I was employed by Oklahoma State University in 1999. 31. See Arthur Redding, Raids on Human Consciousness: Writing, Anarchism, and Violence (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1998).

2. CLOSE T, COU P, AND CO L D WA R 1. The work of George Abbot White, a tireless Matthiessen advocate for three decades now, has been invaluable. Though White has not yet produced a long-promised critical biography, his various essays on Matthiessen’s life and work were assembled into a Ph.D. dissertation submitted to Charles University in Prague in 1992. This dissertation, which includes detailed analyses of Matthiessen’s lengthy FBI files and an exhaustive investigation of his will (which was contested by his family), is a devoted disciple’s testimony to the currency of Matthiessen’s political radicalism. 2. In his introduction to F. O. Matthiessen and Russell Cheney’s Rat and the Devil: Journal Letters of F. O. Matthiessen and Russell Cheney, ed. Louis Hyde (Hamden, Conn.: Archon, 1978), for example, Louis Hyde insists that the “root cause” of Matthiessen’s depression “lay elsewhere” (3) than political despair, and might rather be found in the loneliness he felt after the death of Cheney. While I want in

156

NOTES

no way to ascribe causes or assign motives, I would suggest that the inescapable configurations of the nascent Cold War make it impossible to extricate the personal from the political in this manner. 3. Eric Cheyfitz has argued persuasively that American Renaissance was in no way revolutionary: “The force of American Renaissance . . . resided not in any striking originality, but in its ability to consolidate what was already the growing consensus of this largely white, male, middle-class, and Protestant oriented audience” (“Matthiessen’s American Renaissance: Circumscribing the Revolution,” American Quarterly 41, no. 2 [June 1989]: 349). For Cheyfitz, Matthiessen, despite his radical politics, remained true to this mainstream nationalist aesthetic his entire life. While it is true that the nationalist internationalism of the popular front had its limitations, Matthiessen’s final works provide an attempt to rethink his own orientation along with a deliberate resistance to increasingly calcified Cold War ideologies. As I argue, however, it was the damage wrought by the Cold War, which rapidly diminished the terrain to stake out any kind of unaligned critical stance, that foreclosed upon the revolutionary potential of his thinking. 4. See, for example, James H. Justus’s insistence in a 1994 review that “even those critics passionately guided by a self-righteous social agenda are still closer to Matthiessen than they are to Derrida” (“The Way We Read Now: The Americanist Legacy of the 1980s,” Sewanee Review 102, no. 4 [1994]: 664). Justus’s point is that revisionist scholarship, including David S. Reynolds’s Beneath the American Renaissance: The Subversive Imagination in the Age of Emerson and Melville (New York: Knopf, 1988) and David Leveranz’s Manhood and the American Renaissance (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1989), echoes and emulates Matthiessen’s method and approach, even as it quibbles with his oversights. See also Marc Dolan’s “The ‘Wholeness’ of the Whale: Melville, Matthiessen, and the Semiotics of Critical Revisionism,” American Quarterly 48, no. 3 (1992): 27–57. Additionally, in her effort to salvage a usable past, Myra Jehlen closes her American Incarnation: The Individual, the Nation, and the Continent (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1986) by appealing to Matthiessen’s “humanism” as a historical opportunity that would be lost during the Cold War years (228–35). I want simply to underscore Matthiessen’s currency; his life and work should be radically reconsidered in any revisionist attempt to rethink (and even recover from) the many distortions intellectual and sexual life suffered during the Cold War. 5. World War II was itself an “us versus them” sort of struggle, but it strikes me as involving distinctly different positions than those staked out in the subsequent Cold War. First, the “us” permitted—necessitated, in fact—a broad “popular front” coalition of antifascist positions; there were no loyalty oaths, for example, although the forced internment of Japanese Americans betrays a somewhat hysterical fear of an “enemy within.” Gays, though harassed and closeted, were not openly targeted for potential breaches of national security. And while there was an intellectual opposition to the war on the part of pacifists and others (an opposition much broader than is often acknowledged), there were few American intellectuals sympathetic to fascist ideology (a situation that was quite different than in Europe, for example). Rather, fascist sympathies emerged on the part of those businesses and politicians with investments in Germany. While the antifascist struggle was important to Matthiessen in ways that anti-Stalinism was not, he did not attempt to measure a “good” war against a “bad” one. If Matthiessen himself was initially supportive of World War II, his poignant awareness of the devastation involved later tempered that enthusiasm. 6. See in particular John D’Emilio’s “The Homosexual Menace: The Politics of Sexuality in Cold War America,” in Passion and Power: Sexuality in History, ed. Kathy Peiss and Christina Simmons (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989), 226–40. As he observes, “the Cold War era’s preoccupation with the homosexual menace [was] an integral component of post-war American society and politics” (236). 7. See also Stephen J. Whitfield’s The Culture of the Cold War, 2nd ed. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 43–45; and Robert J. Corber’s Homosexuality in Cold War America: Resistance and the Crisis of Masculinity (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1997). 8. In her exhaustively detailed No Ivory Tower, Schrecker carefully outlines the evolving legal distinctions between witnesses’ strategies of invoking the First Amendment and the Fifth Amendment. The Supreme Court upheld “that HUAC did not violate the First Amendment by asking suspected

157

NOTES

Communists about their political activities” (128). Thus “the only way that a witness could refuse to answer a committee’s question and still be protected against a contempt citation and possible jail sentence was to invoke the Fifth Amendment on the basis that answering the questions would tend to incriminate him” (129), a tactic increasingly adopted during the 1950s. 9. A significant part of the emerging Cold War rhetoric at the time involved the effort to link immigrants, homosexuals, and other minorities to the Communist menace within. A typical, if extreme, example can be found in Marilyn R. Allen’s Alien Minorities and Mongrelization (Boston: Meador, 1949), which begins: “Alien dissident discordant minorities are an unassimilable, disruptive, incompatible element in an otherwise largely homogonous Anglo-Saxon population. . . . These discordant minorities are composed of Negroes, Jews, Communists” (9). Historical approaches at the time were largely dominated by the influential work of Matthiessen’s colleague at Harvard, Oscar Handlin, director of the Center for the Study of the History of Liberty in America. His The Uprooted won the Pulitzer Prize for history in 1952. 10. The international theme, already pronounced in Matthiessen’s Henry James: The Major Phase (London: Oxford University Press, 1944), is even more pronounced in his The James Family: A Group Biography (New York: Knopf, 1948). See in particular the chapter entitled “Europe and/or America” (286–314). 11. For Matthiessen, the sense of betrayal at the hands of his own discipline and his own institution hit particularly close to home. He saw Harvard as not only complicit in academic blacklisting but, consequently, as leading the charge in the diminishment of engaged humanist critical thinking into a managerial-professional ethos and the expansion and rationalization of the American university system that blacklisting accommodated, as I argued in my opening chapter. 12. Matthiessen’s full itinerary—Salzburg, Prague, Brno, Bratislava, and Budapest—in the advent of the Cold War was thus identical to my own much slower clamber across the region at its presumed close. 13. After the 1946 elections, the largest party in the National Front Government was the Communist Party, headed by Klement Gottwald. When President Benesˇ unexpectedly accepted the resignation of opposition ministers, the stage was set for “Victorious February,” a “bloodless” takeover of the state by the Communist Party. Unfortunately, there are very few thorough histories of Czechoslovakia available in English. One recent cultural history is Derek Sayer’s The Coasts of Bohemia: A Czech History (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1998). 14. Strˇíbrný would go on to a successful career as a Shakespearean scholar. He is now professor emeritus at Charles University in Prague. 15. It seems hard to imagine that the book could have been understood as “soft on Communism,” as Matthiessen is relentlessly critical of Stalinism throughout. Indeed, a central tension of From the Heart of Europe (New York: Oxford University Press, 1948) is “the conflict between my enduring belief in socialism and some of the grave shortcomings of the present Soviet state” (50), a dilemma with which Irving Howe, at least, should sympathize. Given the climate of the times, however, it was impossible not to choose sides: Matthiessen is simply not critical enough of the Soviets; moreover, he presumes to criticize “the free world.” 16. Ellen Schrecker delivers the rather grim verdict that there was simply no “meaningful opposition” (No Ivory Tower 282) to McCarthyism on the part of university administrators and academics, and, moreover, that this failure to resist was by no means preordained; it resulted from a variety of factors, among them bureaucratic ineptness and personal cowardice. Richard Ohmann’s survey of “English and the Cold War” argues that, in the early years, English departments benefited from a sort of noninterference pact between their discipline and global politics and economics. Aside from sporadic grumblings over McCarthy’s philistinism, therefore, no significant opposition was mounted, or, it was thought, merited. On the situation at Harvard University, see, for example, chapter 7 of Seymour Martin Lipset and David Riesman’s Education and Politics at Harvard: Two Essays Prepared for the Carnegie Commission on Higher Education (New York: McGraw Hill, 1975). 17. On the morning of March 10, 1948, Masaryk’s body was found outside the foreign ministry building, where he had fallen from a bathroom window. It is unclear whether his death was a suicide or a political assassination.

158

NOTES

18. Critics of the project have pointed to Matthiessen’s neglect of Poe, and, more pointedly, to the inexplicable omission of Emily Dickinson, both oversights no doubt inexcusable. Yet the contours of what might be termed Matthiessen’s “homotopian democracy” seem to suggest a brotherhood, precisely, of men. Nor is it accurate to argue his misogyny or aversion to lesbians; his “group biography” of the James family grants significant space to Alice James, and his first published book, Sarah Orne Jewett (1929; reprint, Gloucester, Mass: Peter Smith, 1965), was in homage to Sarah Orne Jewett, wherein he characterized her and Dickinson as “the two principal women writers America has had” (152). If he was circumspect regarding the explicitly lesbian cast to Jewett’s own life and fiction, he lost no opportunity in this study to accentuate her “mannishness” and love for Annie Fields (72–76). His portrait of a distinctly “mannish” Jewett also makes sense, however, for Matthiessen’s aesthetic and political vision of democracy was intractably virile. Although Jewett scholars often cite Matthiessen’s book as the first key critical study of her work, critics of Matthiessen have little to say about his reading in the context of her own crossgender identifications and Matthiessen’s emerging homoerotic cultural republicanism, a line of investigation that merits further research. 19. Matthiessen, who lived openly with Cheney in what he considered “the most beautiful house in the world” in Kittery, Maine, was never closeted, exactly, though he confessed at times to fear of exposure: “have I any right in a community that would so utterly disapprove of me if it knew the facts?” (Rat and the Devil, 200). 20. While I haven’t space to discuss Matthiessen’s treatment of Whitman at any length here, I should point out Whitman’s uneasy place (and the vexed problems of male homoerotic politics) in the history of the American Left. For a rather brilliant detailed reading of Whitman’s political legacy, see Bryan K. Garman’s “ ‘Heroic Spiritual Grandfather’: Whitman, Sexuality and the American Left, 1890–1940,” American Quarterly 52, no. 1 (2000): 90–126. 21. On bar culture, see, for example, Charles Kaiser’s The Gay Metropolis: 1940–1996 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997) and George Chauncey’s Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890–1940 (New York: Basic Books, 1994). On gays and lesbians in Boston, see History Project, comp., Improper Bostonians: Lesbian and Gay History from the Puritans to Playland (Boston: Beacon Press, 1998), which includes a picture of Matthiessen and Cheney. 22. There are at least two (and possibly three) fictional renderings of Matthiessen. Mark Merlis’s genealogy of the American closet, American Studies (1994; reprint, New York: Penguin, 1996), transforms Matthiessen into the somewhat predatory Tom Slater, driven to suicide when the university threatens to expose his liaison with a vengeful student. As Grossman points out, however, both Sarton’s novel and Merliss’s novel portray Matthiessen as fundamentally alone, thereby slighting the importance of queer “marriage.” According to William Cain, Matthiessen was also the model for the character of Theodore Parker (whose tragic flaw is his inflexible idealism) in Truman Nelson’s historical novel, The Sin of the Prophet (Boston: Little, Brown 1952), which was dedicated to his memory. 23. He merits a sympathetic, if cursory, paragraph in Vincent Leitch’s American Literary Criticism from the Thirties to the Eighties (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), 89, but is entirely overlooked in Frank Lentricchia’s After the New Criticism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), for example. Gerald Graff, in Professing Literature: An Institutional History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), argues that the very “comprehensiveness” of American Renaissance replicated the sort of pedantic obscurantism that Matthiessen had warned against (219–20). 24. Citing Matthiessen’s book on T. S. Eliot, Russell Reising argues in a similar vein that “seeing life whole may well be what Matthiessen endeavored, yet his inherited formalist framework made a denial of his social orientation a convenient option” (Unusable Past: Theory and the Study of American Literature [New York: Methuen, 1986], 173). For Larzer Ziff, Matthiessen is quite simply an aesthete (Literary Democracy: The Declaration of Cultural Independence in America [New York: Viking, 1981], vii). 25. The only other full-length study of Matthiessen is Frederick Stern’s F. O. Matthiessen: Christian Socialist as Critic (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1981). A fairly thorough survey of

159

NOTES

Matthiessen’s work can also be found in Richard Ruland’s The Rediscovery of American Literature: Premises of Critical Taste, 1900–1940 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1967). 26. Ironically, however, Cain, after insisting that Matthiessen was “uncomfortable” with his sexual orientation, nonetheless stresses that “the facts of Matthiessen’s sexual . . . life . . . do not have much bearing at all” on his work (F. O. Matthiessen and the Politics of Criticism 48). While Gunn is disappointed in him as a Christian, and Cain attacks him from the left, William O’Neill, in A Better World: Stalinism and the American Intellectuals (1982; reprint, New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction, 1990), digs in from the right in his study of Stalinism and American intellectuals: Matthiessen’s “politics were the opposite of his scholarship, being immature, sentimental, partisan, and wrong” (175), and “his politics were a betrayal of everything he stood for otherwise” (179). O’Neill’s reasoning here is rather astounding; Matthiessen had always distanced himself, methodologically, from scientific Marxism and had never been tempted to join the Communist Party, in large part because he remained a devout Christian. And thus, says O’Neill, “because the appeal of Stalinism was religious” (183), Matthiessen was the quintessential Stalinist apparatchik: “Matthiessen approached the Soviets on his knees” (183). 27. Kazin is commenting partly in reaction to the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia by Warsaw Pact forces. See O’Neill, Better World, 408 n.31. For Eric Cheyfitz, however, the obverse is true; he complains of the “continual circumspection of Marxism by Christianity or of content by form or of history by literature” (“Matthiessen’s American Renaissance” 351) in Matthiessen’s writing. 28. Such a line of reasoning relies on a conception of the popular front that conspiratorially narrows an individual’s capacity to choose. Pease is tellingly indifferent to the matrix of Matthiessen’s book. Michael Denning’s The Cultural Front should help overturn the general perception of the period as offering merely a homogenized middlebrow set of cultural and political options. Denning’s impressive volume testifies to the range and richness of popular front critical activity, much of which has been simply forgotten. Although American Renaissance is a centerpiece, Denning repeats the charge that Matthiessen’s concern with the formal aspects of literature provided a framework for the “overestimation of literature” (Cultural Front 446) on the part of scholars during the Cold War, a tendency that itself justified the denigration of earlier work. 29. Elsewhere, Pease modifies his position. He repeats his reading more or less verbatim in a slightly modified version of his essay that appeared in 1986 as “Melville and Cultural Persuasion,” in Ideology and Classic American Literature, ed. Sacvan Bercovitch and Myra Jehlen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 384–417. In “New Americanists: Revisionist Interventions into the Canon,” boundary 2 17, no. 1 (1990): 1–37, however, Pease castigates Lionel Trilling (in 1946) and Frederick Crews (in 1988) for aligning Matthiessen with “totalitarian ideology” (10). This points to what he terms a “disciplinary unconscious” in the field of American studies itself, which initially insisted upon consensus, and subsequently, dissensus. What New Historicists and revisionists now offer, according to Pease, is a political unconscious that “embodies both the repressed relationship between the literary and the political and the disenfranchised groups previously unrepresentable in this relationship” (31), and potentially a return of what had been repressed, willy-nilly, in Matthiessen. 30. There is no evidence whatsoever that this was the case. The tone of Matthiessen’s very beautiful letters to Cheney indicates that quite the contrary was true. 31. As Michael Cadden notes, however, Arac himself bowdlerizes the text: “What’s missing is the Whitmanesque hard on” (“Engendering F. O. M.: The Private Life of American Renaissance,” in Engendering Men: The Question of Male Feminist Criticism, ed. Joseph A. Boone and Michael Cadden [New York: Routledge, 1990], 29). 32. For William Cain, Matthiessen’s sex life was simply not an aspect of his politics or his criticism. Sexuality is, and presumably should remain, irrelevant. Yet as David Bergman points out: “Cain’s critical language is full of the worst masculine coding” (“F. O. Matthiessen: The Critic as Homosexual,” Raritan 9, no. 4 [1990]: 71). 33. Though I am citing the essay that appeared in Raritan, Bergman republished “F. O. Matthiessen: The Critic as Homosexual” in his Gaiety Transfigured: Gay Self-Representation in American Literature (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991).

160

NOTES

34. Challenging heterosexist assumptions in various readings of Matthiessen, Grossman points out that Bergman’s gesture is grossly anachronistic, given the shifting configurations of power and sexuality in and out of the classroom over time. Terms such as “gay” and “homosexual” in no sense define stable entities, but chart highly variable intersections of sexual practices according to shifting ideological configurations of power and identity. As Eve Sedgwick sagely points out, “what counts as the sexual is . . . variable and itself political” (Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire [New York: Columbia University Press, 1985], 15). Since 1941, gays and lesbians have indeed become increasingly “visible,” and so the silence surrounding sexual orientation in the late 1980s is hardly comparable to that forty years earlier. Nonetheless, I find Bergman’s rhetorical point here compelling. Matthiessen has been accused of self-loathing; he has been faulted for avoiding the issue.

3. WH AT ’ S BL ACK AND WHIT E AN D RED A L L OV ER? 1. Cruse, of course, contends that this situation left black intellectuals open to exploitation at the hands of the Communist Party, which seemingly offered them a home. For a discussion and refutation of Cruse, see Alan Wald’s “Narrating Nationalisms: Black Marxism and Jewish Communists through the Eyes of Harold Cruse,” in Left of the Color Line: Race, Radicalism, and Twentieth Century Literature of the United States, ed. Bill V. Mullen and James Smethurst (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003), 141–62. 2. While his criticism, fiction, and drama are neglected today, Du Bois’s contemporary Lovett was a central figure in the establishment of the popular front in Chicago in the first half of the twentieth century. Leaving Harvard in 1893 to help establish the University of Chicago, he was a leader of the pacifist opposition to the First World War, was editor of the Dial and subsequently the New Republic, and lived for sixteen years with his family at Jane Addams’s Hull House. Between 1939 and 1944, he worked for the government in the Virgin Islands, ultimately becoming government secretary of those possessions. Harassed in the mid-1930s by the Illinois Senate for his “outside activities” and “extra-campus affiliations,” Lovett was hauled before the Dies Committee (a special House investigating committee that was a precursor to HUAC) in 1943 and forced to resign, later successfully suing the U.S. government for his unconstitutional loss of salary. Lovett’s biography, All Our Years (New York: Viking, 1948), a breezy but impassioned apologia of an unrepentant radical, curiously neglects to mention Du Bois at all. 3. In a related context, Michelle M. Wright, in “ ‘Alas, Poor Richard!’: Transatlantic Baldwin, the Politics of Forgetting, and the Project of Modernity,” in James Baldwin Now, ed. Dwight A. McBride (New York: New York University Press, 1999), 208–32, discusses James Baldwin’s mobility as another instance of African American subjectivity in transit. I am also deeply indebted to two long conversations with William Decker, whose work on Baldwin’s travel is forthcoming. 4. During the civil rights movement, Du Bois continued to find a U.S. audience in the radical leftwing journal Freedomways, which continued to highlight the transnational dimension of the struggle from a Marxist perspective. In 1970, Freedomways published a tribute anthology of his work, Black Titan: W. E. B. Du Bois; an Anthology by the Editors of Freedomways, ed. John Henrik Clarke et al. (Boston: Beacon Press, 1970). Freedomways was inaugurated in 1961 by Esther Jackson, who was at the time living with Shirley Graham and W. E. B. Du Bois in New York City. Jackson had earlier been active in the Southern Negro Youth Congress (SNYC), some of whose members, as Ian Rocksborough-Smith points out, “managed to survive the repression of the Cold War in the late 1940s and early 1950s, and carried forth the radical and progressive ideals of these movements—what Robert Korstad called civil rights unionism and what Martha Biondi called the Black Popular Front—into the best known period for civil rights activism, . . . the 1950s and 60s” (“Bearing the Seeds of Struggle: Freedomways Magazine, Black Leftists, and Continuities in the Freedom Movement” [Master’s thesis, Simon Fraser University, 2003], 12). Rocksborough-Smith’s thesis is an extensive history of Freedomways; in 2001, Westview Press published Esther Cooper Jackson and

161

NOTES

Constance Pohl, eds., Freedomways Reader: Prophets in Their Own Country (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 2001). For a history of the organization, see C. Alvin Hughes, “We Demand Our Rights: The Southern Negro Youth Congress, 1937–1949,” Phylon 48, no. 1 (1987): 38–50. 5. For a rare but thorough genre analysis of the trilogy, see Lily Phillips’s “W. E. B. Du Bois and Soviet Communism: The Black Flame as Soviet Realism,” South Atlantic Quarterly 94, no. 3 (1995): 837–64. 6. Another important exception is the important criticism of Bill Mullen, although in such pieces as “W. E. B. Du Bois, Dark Princess, and the Afro-Asian International,” in Left of the Color Line: Race, Radicalism, and Twentieth Century Literature of the United States, ed. Bill V. Mullen and James Smethurst (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003), 87–106, he also focuses on Du Bois’s prewar literary production, in this case his 1928 novel, Dark Princess. 7. He will, in his final Autobiography, concede that his earlier differences with Booker T. Washington on this score were largely tactical. 8. Gerald Horne’s beautifully researched Black and Red: W. E. B. Du Bois and the Afro-American Response to the Cold War, 1944–1963 (Albany, N.Y.: SUNY Press, 1986) provides exhaustive details of this episode. 9. Jonas cannot be fully trusted on this score. As with so many of the critics and historians I survey in this book, his anti-Communist bias runs so deep that it interferes with his scholarly rigor. Jonas claims, for example, that “one of the most regrettable aspects of this period was the NAACP’s disassociation from Robeson and Du Bois. In 1948 and in response to federal government harassment, Du Bois moved to Ghana to map out a strategy for Pan-Africanism” (Freedom’s Sword: The NAACP and the Struggle against Racism in America, 1909–1969 [New York: Routledge, 2005], 149). But neither Du Bois nor Robeson was a Communist at the time. Ghana, of course, did not exist as an independent nation until 1957, and Du Bois first visited in 1960, moving there in 1961, the year he also joined the CPUSA. Though pro-Stalinist, Robeson, for his part, took considerable pride in the fact that he never joined the party. Like Du Bois, he was subject to incessant government harassment and lost his passport, which was taken in 1950 and not returned until 1958. 10. A detailed analysis of the relation of the civil rights movement to the Cold War can be found in John Skrentny’s “The Effect of the Cold War on African-American Civil Rights: America and the World Audience,” Theory and Society 27 (1998): 237–85. Skrentny is careful to document the precise ways in which Du Bois and White collaboratively appealed to the United Nations early on as a platform that would reach a world audience, though the United Nations had no binding legal authority. In this endeavor, they were assisted by the U.S. State Department; up until the Johnson administration, U.S. foreign policy was often more progressive on race issues than its domestic policy. After 1948, of course, the State Department likewise targeted for harassment individuals and “Communist-front” organizations that appealed directly to the United Nations. 11. I am indebted here to James Smethurst for his gloss of this history. On the relation between the nonaligned movement and African American intellectuals, see also Kevin Gaines, “E. Franklin Frazier’s Revenge: Anticolonialism, Nonalignment, and Black Intellectuals’ Critiques of Western Culture,” American Literary History 17, no. 3 (2005): 506–29. 12. For a detailed description of these struggles, see Skrentny, “Effect of the Cold War,” 256–58. 13. The Johnson-Forest tendency designates a faction within Trotskyism that theorized the Soviet Union as a form of state capitalism. The name is derived from the pen names of C. L. R. James (J. R. Johnson) and Raya Dunayeuskaya (Freddie Forest). 14. With the 1949 publication of Richard Chase’s monumental Herman Melville: A Critical Study (New York: MacMillan, 1949), Moby Dick, along with Twain’s Huckleberry Finn, was to become the flagship text of a burgeoning liberal model of American studies. In this work, Chase makes no bones about his political orientation and intention and indicts the popular front values at length; he writes his book, he claims in the preface, as his scholarly contribution to the “new” liberalism, “which, whatever our cultural wreckage and disappointment, now begins to ransom liberalism from the ruinous sell-outs, failures

162

NOTES

and defeats of the thirties. The new liberalism must . . . present a vision of life capable, by a continuous act of imaginative criticism, of avoiding the old mistakes: the facile ideas of progress and ‘social realism,’ the disinclination to examine human motives, the indulgence of wish-fulfilling rhetoric, the belief that historical reality is merely a question of economic or ethical values, the idea that literature should participate directly in the economic liberation of the masses, the equivocal relationship to communist totalitarianism or power politics” (vii). 15. In her extensive archival investigations into the composition of this novel, Barbara Foley has amply documented the shift in Ellison’s thinking between 1946 and 1952. 16. Rampersad, in Ralph Ellison: A Biography (New York: Knopf, 2007), argues that Ellison’s split with Communism stemmed as much from his increasing sense that alliances on the Left would no longer serve the purpose of his development as a writer as from his political disillusionment, and Ellison’s complex love-hate relations with Richard Wright, undergoing his own change of heart in the early 1940s, suggest that this may indeed be the case. Particularly in its investigations of Wright, William J. Maxwell’s New Negro, Old Left: African-American Writing and Communism Between the Wars (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999) remains the most thorough and convincing history of the Communist involvements of radical black intellectuals in the Harlem Renaissance. In closing his history, Maxwell seconds Alan Wald in stressing that Wright’s anti-Communist turn was not necessary typical of all black writers, despite obvious pressures to recant. Wright himself, even while he continued to have vexed relations with the State Department, became an FBI informer and went so far as to endorse colonialism. James Campbell’s Exiled in Paris: Richard Wright, James Baldwin, Samuel Beckett, and Others on the Left Bank (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003) provides an interesting account of Wright’s final years in Paris and interrogates at some length the long-standing rumor that Wright was assassinated. 17. As Ellison would have known, the lyrics were written by the poet Andy Razaf—a lifelong radical himself—and the music by Fats Waller and Harry Brooks. “What Did I Do?” was performed as part of the burlesque show “Connie’s Hot Chocolates” for Waller’s productions at Connie’s Inn, the Harlem nightclub owned by mobster Dutch Schultz. In the original lyrics, the singer is a woman who laments that her man has left her for a lighter-skinned woman: “Browns and yellers, all have fellers/Gentlemen prefer them light.” Armstrong’s version, recorded in 1929, edits out the sexual plaint, reimagining the song as a more general protest against racial discrimination. Even so, the lyrics still are not particularly “politically correct” by today’s standards: “I’m white inside . . . /My only sin is in my skin.” It is hard to find a copy of the work on any popularly available collection of his music. For a full discussion, see Robert O’Meally’s “Checking Our Balances: Ellison on Armstrong’s Humor,” boundary 2 30, no. 2 (2003): 115–36.

4 . WHAT IT TAKE S TO BE A M A N 1. In chapter 5, I return to this problem of how “normal” models of behavior provide deep cover for subversion. 2. The racial politics of On the Waterfront, incidentally, are relatively progressive, in keeping with antiStalinist liberalism. One of the longshoremen, Luke, played by Budd Schulberg’s friend Don Blackman, is black; another mention of blacks in the film is when a bartender notes that “Jackie [Robinson] just stole home” (Schulberg 59). See Jeffrey Chown’s “Visual Coding and Social Class in On the Waterfront,” in On the Waterfront, ed. Joanna E. Rapf (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 106–23. 3. In her compelling cultural genealogy of American exceptionalism, Deborah Madsen highlights the Manichaean dimensions of this logic, the insistent, yawning, and apocalyptic divide between the damned and the saved that undergirds the conviction that “America and Americans are special, exceptional, because they are charged with saving the world from itself and, at the same time, America and Americans must sustain a high level of spiritual, political, and moral commitment to this exceptional

163

NOTES

destiny” (American Exceptionalism [Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1998], 2). It is easy to see how such a tradition can be rewritten and mobilized during the Cold War and, again, during the so-called war on terror; the attendant religious revivals during these times are central to the entire mythic construct. 4. Though I do not cite her work explicitly in this chapter, my thinking has been deeply influenced by the conjectures of Lauren Berlant about the importance of constructing an “intimate” public sphere in order to guide the production of national subjects. See especially the related essays in The Queen of America Goes to Washington City (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1997). 5. Miller wrote the film’s screenplay.

5 . T HE DR E ADE D VOYAG E INTO T H E WO RL D 1. Both writers, for reasons that have yet to be fully accounted for, have undergone something of a renaissance since their deaths, at which point their works were out of print. In part, I believe this renaissance stems from an ongoing reconsideration of the history of American popular culture; both are increasingly treated as serious “psychological” novelists, whose schizoid protagonists depict affective sensibilities that continue to resonate with contemporary audiences. Though at least two biographies of Thompson appeared in the 1990s and Andrew Wilson’s Beautiful Shadow: A Life of Patricia Highsmith (New York: Bloomsbury, 2003) shortly thereafter, few critical treatments apart from Cochrane’s have considered their literary production within the matrix of the American Left. Wilson, for example, dismisses Highsmith’s involvement in the Young Communist League as little more than an outbreak of youthful rebelliousness (67–70). Michael J. McCauley’s biography of Jim Thompson, Jim Thompson: Sleep with the Devil (New York: Warner, 1991), implies that Thompson’s life as a writer begins with his 1939 resignation from the Oklahoma Writer’s Project and his abandonment of radical politics; in Savage Art: A Biography of Jim Thompson (New York: Knopf, 1995), Robert Polito is more sympathetic to Thompson’s involvement in Oklahoma’s party politics, despite Thompson’s own disillusionment. Polito claims, persuasively, to my mind, that “nearly everything good that happened to Jim Thompson as a writer . . . came about as a result of his involvement with the radical left” (204). My own argument follows Cochrane in asserting that the schizoid dimension of their writing can be best understood vis-à-vis the exhaustion of the popular front with its subsequent demonization of fellow travelers, and from the forcible evacuation of the political from consensus culture of the 1950s. 2. On self-diagnosis, see Kenneth Payne, “The Killer Inside Them: The Schizophrenic Protagonist in John Franklin Bardin’s Devil Take the Bluetail Fly and Jim Thompson’s The Killer Inside Me,” Journal of Popular Culture 36, no. 2 (Fall 2002): 250–63. 3. The same narrative conceit characterizes such postwar noir films as Billy Wilder’s 1950 Sunset Boulevard, another anxious melodrama of beset postwar American manhood, whose misogynist fury also becomes self-directed when the protagonist recognizes that his own failure to perform cannot entirely be blamed on others. 4. In Slavoj Žižek’s “Not a Desire to Have Him, but to Be Like Him,” a review of Beautiful Shadow: A Life of Patricia Highsmith, by Andrew Wilson (London Review of Books, August 21, 2003). Žižek, for whom Highsmith is simply the “best” writer of the century, is perhaps the most vociferous and theoretically astute champion of Highsmith’s work, most extensively in Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1991). While his rigorous Lacanian analysis is richer and more complex than I have space to detail here, he shows in sum how her work “exemplifies the way fantasy space functions as an empty surface, as a kind of screen for the projection of desires: the fascinating presence of its positive contents does nothing but fill out a certain emptiness” (8). In Žižek’s reading of Lacan, “fantasy” refers to “the frame that determines the field of social meaning, the ideological self-understanding of a given society” (140) by working to conceal or smooth over the fundamental emptiness of our understandings of truth; the appeal of work, like Highsmith’s, that focuses upon “the alien disturbing intrusion” of the symptom, is that it traumatically, joyously, disrupts the ideological logic of that

164

NOTES

strives to contain “the otherwise hidden truth of the existing social order” (140). In his London Review of Books essay, Žižek claims that Ripley is less a covert homosexual whose sexual desires could not be explicitly described in the 1950s than a “male lesbian,” whose typical response to sexuality is one of cold disgust. 5. I am indebted to John Dale for this insight into the distinction between Ripley and the protagonists of classic European works of existential fiction. 6. Eastman was, at the time, a close friend of Trotsky’s and later a leftist apostate who supported McCarthyism. His 1948 autobiography, Enjoyment of Living (New York: Harper, 1948), references his friendship with Claude Bowles, whose “son is the well-known composer Paul Fredric Bowles” (275). 7. In William Schouppe’s “Orientalist Visions and Revisions: Edward Said’s Orientalism and Representations of the Orient in Paul Bowles,” in Oriental Prospects: Western Literature and the Lure of the East, ed. Theo D’Haen (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1998), 209–23, for example. In “Constructing the Postwar Art Novel: Paul Bowles, James Laughlin, and the Making of The Sheltering Sky,” PMLA 121, no. 1 (2006): 186–99, Evan Brier points out how anti-Americanism itself might be commandeered by the marketplace, arguing that Bowles’s advertised distance from American culture fed into a growing market for avantgarde detachment. 8. I am indebted to Douglas Shields Dix for his inspired readings of the work of both Jane Bowles and Paul Bowles as undertaking a Deleuzean line of flight; curiously (or not), the most compelling and sustained Deleuzean analysis of Bowles in print is Simon Bischoff ’s study of his photography, “How Could I Send a Picture into the Desert?” Photographs, ed. Simon Bischoff (Zurich: Scalo, 1994). For Bischoff, Bowles’s photography is a product of his notorious voyeurism, certifying his status as “invisible spectator,” and forms part of a Deleuzean “machinic assemblage” triggering a de-territorialization, “thus linking a libidinous machine and a technical machine and creating a line of flight, a line of escape” (13), rather than forming an apparatus of capture that would contain exotic landscape and peoples within a rationalized or scientific Western gaze. In his photographs, as always in Bowles, the tension between the Orientalist dimensions of desire and the flight from the privileges of Western subjectivity gives the work its energy. 9. For Deleuze and Guattari, “molar” formations are the dominant forms of expression that impose standards, regulations, rules, and first principles, formations that standardize, reductively explain, and therefore arrest or imprison the flows of desire, claiming to know the limits of the possible in advance (mastery, regulatory laws and codes, determinate moralities, and so forth). For example, in Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), Deleuze and Guattari argue that psychoanalysis seeks to explain and confine all of human desire within the scheme of the Oedipal complex (lack, castration, envy, prohibition, and so forth), therefore “policing” desire. Such treatments of life result in stasis. If a box has two self-contained chambers and a door is opened between them, the gases will mix and achieve equilibrium. But it is impossible to predict the behavior of any given molecule. “Why are there so many becomings of men, but no becoming-man? First because man is a majoritarian par excellence whereas all becomings are minoritarian: all becoming is becoming-minoritarian. When we say majority we are referring not to a greater relative quantity but to the determination of a state or standard in relation to which larger quantities, as well as the smallest, can be said to be minoritarian: white-man, adult-male, etc. Majority implies a state of domination” (Deleuze, Thousand Plateaus 291). 10. Understandably, Bowles’s exotic life in North Africa seems to generate more enthusiastic commentary than his works; typical examples of compelling books describing the almost magical dimensions of the land and the resonant attractions of sexual freedoms to be found there are Michelle Green’s The Dream at the End of the World: Paul Bowles and the Literary Renegades in Tangier (New York: HarperCollins, 1991) and Allen Hibbard’s Paul Bowles: Magic and Morocco (San Francisco: Cadmus, 2004). 11. Bowles can be seen discussing Moby Dick in Baichwal’s documentary, Let It Come Down: The Life of Paul Bowles (Zeitgeist Films, 1999). 12. This is so despite Badiou’s insistence in his recent book on Deleuze that the two philosophers have nothing in common.

165

NOTES

6. F RONT IE R M Y T HOG RA PH I ES 1. The novel was not published in the United States until 1971; for details, see Frances McCullough’s foreword to the Harper Perennial edition. 2. The verdict is still out on the extent to which Ford dedicated himself personally to the Hollywood blacklisting of Communists and fellow travelers. In Print the Legend: The Life and Times of John Ford (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1999), for example, Scott Eyman stresses the personal assistance he provided to friends of his who were being persecuted; in Searching for John Ford (New York: St. Martin’s, 2001), Joseph McBride paints a much more nuanced picture of his liberal anti-Communism, emphasizing his involvement as an executive with the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals, which orchestrated the blacklist and collaborated with HUAC (472–73). 3. See chapter 11 of Robert V. Hine and John Mack Faragher’s The American West: A New Interpretive History (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2000) for an elegant synopsis of the safety-valve approach to the West. 4. Obviously, race is the other dominant factor in national elections, as many Republicans rather callously mobilize white fears of blacks for easy votes, while Democrats aim to mobilize black voters; even so, the connections between a cultural logic of racial dread and libertarian fantasies of individualism and self-reliance are easy enough to trace. The genius of Reaganism, for example, was Reagan’s good-natured insistence that “welfare cheats” are manipulating and abusing the national bureaucracy of the welfare state; the “savagery” against which the individualist National Rifle Association member must contend is everywhere figured as the “criminal (read black) element.” 5. Both Stanley Corkin, Cowboys and Cold Warriors: The Western and U.S. History (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2004), and Alan Nadel, Containment Culture, have offered readings of Liberty Valance that explicitly reference the Kennedy administration and the Cuban missile crisis. For Nadel, Ford’s film is an explicit example of “imperialist nostalgia” that laments that masculine heroism and a clear national moral purpose have been consigned to the past. Bob Beatty and Mike Yawn, “The American Frontier in Film: John Ford’s Vision of the Closing West: From Optimism to Cynicism,” Film and History 26, no. 1 (1996): 6–19, document Ford’s cynicism about reviving such heroism (although they find the roots of Ford’s pessimism in his personal life rather than in politics). Mark Roche, “Vico’s Age of Heroes and the Age of Men in John Ford’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance,” Clio 23 (1994): 131–48, sees the film as ambivalently documenting the historical transition from Vico’s age of “heroes” (Wayne/Doniphon) to an age of men (Stewart/Stoddard). Nadel’s political interrogation is perhaps the most subtle, emphasizing the film’s implicit if ambiguous endorsement of the values represented by Stoddard, who personifies Kennedy’s rather fraudulent and even postmodern politics. Stoddard, Nadel argues, is a figure of continuity between a “golden age” of the frontier and the present, rather than rupture. “That continuity is based not on the triumph of law over brute force but rather by the co-optation of legal means by physical, of direct action by covert, of self-defense by murder, of speech by action. It is also the co-optation of event by legend, that is, by writing” (Containment Culture 196–97). Finally, in an important essay on Dorothy Johnson and John Ford, “Have You Written a Ford Lately? Gender, Genre, and the Film Adaptations of Dorothy Johnson’s Western Literature,” Literature/Film Quarterly 31 (2003): 209–20, Walter Metz has demonstrated how auteur theory, itself resonant with Cold War ideologies of masculine heroism, has served to erase the author of the short story on which Liberty Valence was based, adding yet another layer of irony to the film’s insistence on how mythic realities are textually constructed . 6. McReynolds is writing in 1998, prior to the September 11, 2001, attacks, about such works as the TV miniseries Lonesome Dove (1989) and the films City Slickers (1991), Unforgiven (1992), and others. While the genres of action-adventure thriller and the war film are flourishing, there have been curiously few westerns produced since the attacks. Interestingly, since 2006, this has been changing, as a number of westerns are now appearing on television and in film.

166

WORKS CITED

Alenier, Karen LaLonde, Francine Geraci, and Ken Pottiger. “An Interview with Paul Bowles.” In Conversations with Paul Bowles, ed. Gena Dagel Caponi, 157–79. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1993. Allen, Marilyn R. Alien Minorities and Mongrelization. Boston: Meador, 1949. Anzaldua, Gloria. Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. 2nd ed. San Francisco: Aunt Lute, 1999. Appadurai, Arjun. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996. Arac, Jonathan. “F. O. Matthiessen: Authorizing an American Renaissance.” In The American Renaissance Reconsidered: Selected Papers from the English Institute, 1982–83, ed. Walter Benn Michaels and Donald Pease, 90–112. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985. Aronowitz, Stanley. False Promises: The Shaping of Working Class Consciousness. New York: McGraw Hill, 1973. Badiou, Alain. Deleuze: The Clamor of Being. Trans. Louise Burchill. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000. ———. Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil. Trans. Peter Hallward. London: Verso, 2001. Badiou, Alain, and Peter Hallward. “Politics and Philosophy: An Interview with Alain Badiou.” Angelaki 3, no. 3 (1998): 113–33. Baldwin, James. “Freaks and the American Ideal of Manhood.” In Collected Essays, 814–29. New York: Library of America, 1998. ———. “Sonny’s Blues.” In Going to Meet the Man, 101–42. New York: Dial, 1965. Baldwin, Kate A. “The Radical Imaginary of The Bell Jar.” Novel 38, no. 1 (2004): 21–42. Beatty, Bob, and Mike Yawn. “The American Frontier in Film: John Ford’s Vision of the Closing West: From Optimism to Cynicism.” Film and History 26, no. 1 (1996): 6–19. Bell, Daniel. The End of Ideology: On the Exhaustion of Political Ideas in the Fifties. 1961. Reprint, New York: Macmillan, 1962. Benjamin, Walter. “Critique of Violence.” In Reflections, 277–300. Trans. Edmund Jephcott. New York: Schocken, 1986. Bergman, David. “F. O. Matthiessen: The Critic as Homosexual.” Raritan 9, no. 4 (1990): 62–82. Republished in Gaiety Transfirgured: Gay Self-Representation in American Literature. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991. Berlant, Lauren. The Queen of America Goes to Washington City. Durham, N. C.: Duke University Press, 1997. Bhabha, Homi K. “DissemiNation: Time, Narrative and the Margins of the Modern Nation.” In The Location of Culture, 139–70. London: Routledge, 1994. Bischoff, Simon. “The Serpent’s Eye: Paul Bowles as Photographer.” In “How Could I Send a Picture into the Desert?” Photographs, ed. Simon Bischoff, 7–60. Zurich: Scalo, 1994. Biskind, Peter. Seeing Is Believing: How Hollywood Taught Us to Stop Worrying and Love the Fifties. New York: Pantheon, 1983.

167

WORKS CITED

Bollobás, Enikö. “Dangerous Liaisons: Politics and Epistemology in Post-Cold War American Studies.” American Quarterly 54, no. 4 (2002): 563–79. Borstelmann, Thomas. The Cold War and the Color Line: American Race Relations in the Global Arena. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001. Bowles, Jane. “Camp Cataract.” In The Portable Paul and Jane Bowles, ed. Millicent Dillon, 143–75. New York: Penguin: 1994. Bowles, Paul. “A Distant Episode.” In Collected Stories, 1939–1976, 39–49. Santa Rosa: Black Sparrow, 1997. ———. In Touch: The Letters of Paul Bowles. Ed. Jeffrey Miller. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1994. ———. “Pages from Cold Point.” In The Portable Paul and Jane Bowles, ed. Millicent Dillon, 119–37. New York: Penguin: 1994. ———. The Sheltering Sky. 1949. Reprint, New York: HarperCollins, 1998. ———. Their Heads Are Green and Their Hands Are Blue. 1963. Reprint, New York: Harper, 2006. ———. Without Stopping: An Autobiography. New York: Putnam’s, 1972. Boyer, Paul S. By the Bomb’s Early Light: American Thought and Culture at the Dawn of the Atomic Age. New York: Pantheon, 1985. Brennan, Timothy. “The National Longing for Form.” In Nation and Narration, ed. Homi Bhabha, 44– 70. London: Routledge, 1990. Brier, Evan. “Constructing the Postwar Art Novel: Paul Bowles, James Laughlin, and the Making of The Sheltering Sky.” PMLA 121, no. 1 (2006): 186–99. Brinkley, Alan. “The Illusion of Unity in Cold War Culture.” In Rethinking Cold War Culture, ed. Peter J. Kuznick and James Gilbert, 61–73. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian, 2001. Cadden, Michael. “Engendering F. O. M.: The Private Life of American Renaissance.” In Engendering Men: The Question of Male Feminist Criticism, ed. Joseph A. Boone and Michael Cadden, 26–35. New York: Routledge, 1990. Cain, William E. F. O. Matthiessen and the Politics of Criticism. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1988. Campbell, James. Exiled in Paris: Richard Wright, James Baldwin, Samuel Beckett, and Others on the Left Bank. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003. Carr, Virginia Spencer. Paul Bowles: A Life. New York: Scribner’s, 2004. Chase, Richard. Herman Melville: A Critical Study. New York: MacMillan, 1949. Chauncey, George. Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890– 1940. New York: Basic Books, 1994. Cheyfitz, Eric. “Matthiessen’s American Renaissance: Circumscribing the Revolution.” American Quarterly 41, no. 2 (June 1989): 341–61. Chown, Jeffrey. “Visual Coding and Social Class in On the Waterfront.” In On the Waterfront, ed. Joanna E. Rapf, 106–23. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Cochrane, David. American Noir: Underground Writers and Film-makers in the Postwar Era. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian, 2000. Cohan, Steven. Masked Men: Masculinity and Movies in the Fifties. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997. Corber, Robert J. Homosexuality in Cold War America: Resistance and the Crisis of Masculinity. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1997. Corkin, Stanley. Cowboys and Cold Warriors: The Western and U.S. History. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2004. Cradle Will Rock. Dir. Tim Robbins. Touchstone Pictures, 1999. Cruse, Harold. The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual: From Its Origins to the Present. New York: William Morrow, 1967.

168

WORKS CITED

Deleuze, Gilles. “Literature and Life.” In Essays Critical and Clinical, 1–6. Trans. Daniel W. Smith and Michael A. Greco. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997. ———. Masochism: An Interpretation of Coldness and Cruelty. Trans. Jean McNeil. New York: George Braziller, 1971. ———. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987. Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983. Deleuze, Gilles, and Claire Parnet. Dialogues. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam. New York: Columbia University Press, 1987. D’Emilio, John. “The Homosexual Menace: The Politics of Sexuality in Cold War America.” In Passion and Power: Sexuality in History, ed. Kathy Peiss and Christina Simmons, 226–40. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989. ———. Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities: The Making of the Homosexual Minority in the United States, 1940–1970. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983. Denning, Michael. The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the 20th Century. London: Verso, 1997. Deutsch, Sarah. “Landscape of Enclaves: Race Relations in the American West, 1870–1940.” In Under an Open Sky: Rethinking America’s Western Past, ed. William Cronon, 110–31. New York: Norton, 1992. Dillon, Millicent. A Little Original Sin: The Life and Work of Jane Bowles. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1981. Doherty, Thomas. Cold War, Cool Medium: Television, McCarthyism and American Culture. New York: Columbia University Press, 2003. Dolan, Marc. “‘The Wholeness’ of the Whale: Melville, Matthiessen, and the Semiotics of Critical Revisionism.” American Quarterly 48, no. 3 (1992): 27–57. Du Bois, W. E. B. The Autobiography of W. E. B. Du Bois: A Soliloquy on Viewing My Life from the Last Decade of Its First Century. New York: International, 1968. ———. Black Reconstruction in America, 1860–1880. 1935. Reprint, New York: Simon and Schuster, 1992. ———. Black Titan: W. E. B. Du Bois; an Anthology by the Editors of Freedomways. Ed. John Henrik Clarke et al. Boston: Beacon Press, 1970. ———. Color and Democracy. 1945. In The Seventh Son: The Thought and Writings of W. E. B. Du Bois, 2:537–44. Ed. Julius Lester. New York: Random House, 1971. ———. “From McKinley to Wallace.” 1948. In The Seventh Son: The Thought and Writings of W. E. B. Du Bois, 2:587–97. Ed. Julius Lester. New York: Random House, 1971. ———. “Interview with Dr. W. E. B. Du Bois.” 1957. In The Seventh Son: The Thought and Writings of W. E. B. Du Bois, 2: 700–708. Ed. Julius Lester. New York: Random House, 1971. ———. The Seventh Son: The Thought and Writings of W. E. B. Du Bois. Vol. 2. Ed. Julius Lester. New York: Random House, 1971. ———. Writings: The Suppression of the African Slave Trade; The Souls of Black Folk; Dusk of Dawn; Essays and Articles. Ed. Nathan Huggins. New York: Library of America, 1986. Dunham, Barrows. “Statements by Friends and Associates.” In F. O. Matthiessen (1902–1950): A Collective Portrait, ed. Paul M. Sweezy and Leo Huberman, 102–3. New York: Henry Schuman, 1950. Eastman, Max. Enjoyment of Living. New York: Harper, 1948. Edwards, Brent Hayes. The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2003. Edwards, Brian T. “Sheltering Screens: Paul Bowles and Foreign Relations.” American Literary History 17, no. 2 (2005): 307–34. Ellison, Ralph. Invisible Man. 1952. Reprint, New York: Vintage, 1980.

169

WORKS CITED

Eyman, Scott. Print the Legend: The Life and Times of John Ford. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1999. Fast, Howard. Being Red: A Memoir. Armonk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe, 1990. ———. “Peekskill.” Masses and Mainstream 2, no. 10 (October 1949): 3–7. ———. Peekskill: USA. Moscow: Foreign Languages, 1954. Fish, Stanley. There’s No Such Thing as Free Speech, and It’s a Good Thing, Too. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994. Foley, Barbara. “From Communism to Brotherhood: The Drafts of Invisible Man.” In Left of the Color Line: Race, Radicalism, and Twentieth Century Literature of the United States, ed. Bill V. Mullen and James Smethurst, 163–82. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003. ———. “The Rhetoric of Anti-Communism in Invisible Man.” College English 59, no. 5 (1997): 530–47. Flynn, Elizabeth Gurley. My Life as a Political Prisoner: The Anderson Story. 1963. Reprint, New York: International, 1972. Gaines, Kevin. “E. Franklin Frazier’s Revenge: Anticolonialism, Nonalignment, and Black Intellectuals’ Critiques of Western Culture.” American Literary History 17, no. 3 (2005): 506–29. Garman, Bryan K. “‘Heroic Spiritual Grandfather’: Whitman, Sexuality, and the American Left, 1890– 1940.” American Quarterly 52, no. 1 (2000): 90–126. Giddens, Anthony. The Nation State and Violence. Vol. 2. of A Contemporary Critique of Historical Materialism. 3 vols. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985. Gilbert, James. Men in the Middle: Searching for Masculinity in the 1950s. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005. Graff, Gerald. Professing Literature: An Institutional History. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987. Green, Michelle. The Dream at the End of the World: Paul Bowles and the Literary Renegades in Tangier. New York: HarperCollins, 1991. Greenberg, Clement. “Avant-Garde and Kitsch.” In Art and Culture: Critical Essays, 3–21. Boston: Beacon, 1959. Grossman, Jay. “The Canon in the Closet: Matthiessen’s Whitman, Whitman’s Matthiessen.” American Literature 70, no. 4 (1998): 799–832. Gunn, Giles. F. O. Matthiessen: The Critical Achievement. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1975. Hamilton, Ian. Robert Lowell: A Biography. New York: Random House, 1982. Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri. Empire. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000. Harvey, David. The Condition of Postmodernity. Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1990. Hibbard, Allen. Paul Bowles: Magic and Morocco. San Francisco: Cadmus, 2004. Highsmith, Patricia. The Talented Mr. Ripley. 1955. Reprint, New York: Vintage, 1992. Hine, Robert V., and John Mack Faragher. The American West: A New Interpretive History. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2000. History Project, comp. Improper Bostonians: Lesbian and Gay History from the Puritans to Playland. Boston: Beacon Press, 1998. Hollering, Franz. “The Head and the Heart.” Nation, September 1, 1948, 293–94. Hook, Sidney. “The Berlin Congress for Cultural Freedom.” Partisan Review 17 (1950): 718. Hoover, J. Edgar. Masters of Deceit: The Story of Communism in America and How to Fight It. 1958. Reprint, New York: Pocket Books, 1959. Horne, Gerald. Black and Red: W. E. B. Du Bois and the Afro-American Response to the Cold War, 1944– 1963. Albany, N.Y.: SUNY Press, 1986. Howe, Irving. “The Sentimental Fellow-Traveling of F. O. Matthiessen.” Partisan Review 15 (1948): 1125, 1128–29. Hughes, C. Alvin. “We Demand Our Rights: The Southern Negro Youth Congress, 1937–1949.” Phylon 48, no. 1 (1987): 38–50. Hughes, Langston. The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes. Ed Arnold Rampersad. New York: Random House, 1994.

170

WORKS CITED

Ingrassia, Catherine. “‘I’m Not Kicking, I’m Talking’: Discursive Economies in the Western.” Film Criticism 20, no. 1 (1996): 4–14. Jackson, Esther Cooper, and Constance Pohl, eds. Freedomways Reader: Prophets in Their Own Country. Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 2001. James, C. L. R. Mariners, Renegades, and Castaways: The Story of Herman Melville and the World We Live In. 1953. Reprint, Hanover, N. H.: University Press of New England. 2001. Jefferson, Thomas. “Second Inaugural Address, 1805.” In The Portable Thomas Jefferson, ed. Merrill D. Peterson, 316–21. New York: Viking Penguin, 1975. Jehlen, Myra. American Incarnation: The Individual, the Nation, and the Continent. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1986. Johnson, Joyce. Minor Characters: A Beat Memoir. New York: Viking Penguin, 1983. Jonas, Gilbert. Freedom’s Sword: The NAACP and the Struggle against Racism in America, 1909–1969. New York: Routledge, 2005. Justus, James H. “The Way We Read Now: The Americanist Legacy of the 1980s.” Sewanee Review 102, no. 4 (1994): 653–65. Kael, Pauline. “Saddle Sore: El Dorado, The War Wagon, The Way West.” In For Keeps: Thirty Years at the Movies, 133–41. New York: Dutton, 1994. Kaiser, Charles. The Gay Metropolis, 1940–1996. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997. Kapur, Geeta. “Globalization and Culture: Navigating the Void.” In The Cultures of Globalization, ed. Fredric Jameson and Masao Miyoshi, 191–217. Durham, N. C.: Duke University Press, 1998. Kazan, Elia. Elia Kazan: A Life. New York: Knopf, 1988. Kazin, Alfred. New York Jew. New York: Knopf, 1978. Kershaw, Sarah. “Governor Rejects Clemency for Inmate on Death Row.” New York Times, December 13, 2005. http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/13/national/13tookie.html. Kimmel, Michael. Manhood in America: A Cultural History. New York: Free Press, 1996. le Carré, John. “The United States of America Has Gone Mad.” Times (London), January 15, 2003. http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,1072-543296,00.html. Leitch, Vincent. American Literary Criticism from the Thirties to the Eighties. New York: Columbia University Press, 1988. Lejeune, Phillippe. On Autobiography. Trans. Katherine Leary. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989. Lentricchia, Frank. After the New Criticism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980. Leo, John. “Campus Hand-wringing Is Not a Pretty Sight.” September 30, 2001. http://www.uexpress. com/johnleo/?uc_full_date=20010930. ———. “Learning to Love Terrorists.” U.S. News and World Report, September 30, 2001. http://www. usnews.com/usnews/opinion/articles/011008/archive/. Let It Come Down: The Life of Paul Bowles. Dir. Jennifer Baichwal. Zeitgeist Films, 1999. Leveranz, David. Manhood and the American Renaissance. Ithaca, N. Y.: Cornell University Press, 1989. Lewis, David Levering. W. E. B. Du Bois: The Fight for Equality and the American Century, 1919–1963. New York: Henry Holt, 2000. Limerick, Patricia Nelson. “The Adventures of the Frontier in the Twentieth Century.” In The Great Plains: Writing Across the Disciplines, ed. Brad Gambill et al., 78–99. Fort Worth, Tx.: Harcourt, 2001. Lindey, Christine. Art in the Cold War. London: Herbert, 1990. Lingis, Alphonso. Abuses. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994. ———. The Community of Those Who Have Nothing in Common. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994. ———. Dangerous Emotions. Berkeley: University of California Press, 200. Lipset, Seymour Martin, and David Riesman. Education and Politics at Harvard: Two Essays Prepared for the Carnegie Commission on Higher Education. New York: McGraw Hill, 1975.

171

WORKS CITED

Lovett, Robert Morss. All Our Years. New York: Viking, 1948. Lowell, Robert. Notebook. London: Faber and Faber, 1970. Lynn, Kenneth. “F. O. Matthiessen.” In Masters: Portraits of Great Teachers, ed. Joseph Epstein, 103–18. New York: Basic Books, 1981. Madsen, Deborah L. American Exceptionalism. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1998. Mailer, Norman. Advertisements for Myself. New York: Putnam, 1959. ———. The White Negro: Superficial Reflections on the Hipster. San Francisco: City Lights, 1957. The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. Dir. John Ford. Paramount, 1962. Marcus, Greil. The Manchurian Candidate. London: British Film Institute, 2002. Martine, James J. The Crucible: Politics, Property, and Pretense. New York: Twayne, 1993. Matthiessen, F. O. American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman. New York: Oxford University Press, 1941. ———. From the Heart of Europe. New York: Oxford University Press, 1948. ———. Henry James: The Major Phase. London: Oxford University Press, 1944. ———. The James Family: A Group Biography. New York: Knopf, 1948. ———. “The Responsibilities of the Critic.” In The Responsibilities of the Critic, ed. John Rackliffe, 3–18. New York: Oxford University Press, 1952. ———. Sarah Orne Jewett. 1929. Reprint, Gloucester, Mass: Peter Smith, 1965. Matthiessen, F. O., and Russell Cheney. Rat and the Devil: Journal Letters of F. O. Matthiessen and Russell Cheney. Ed. Louis Hyde. Hamden, Conn.: Archon, 1978. Maxwell, William J. New Negro, Old Left: African-American Writing and Communism Between the Wars. New York: Columbia University Press, 1999. May, Elaine Tyler. Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War. New York: Basic, 1990. May, Todd. “The Politics of Life in the Thought of Gilles Deleuze.” Substance 20, no. 3 (1991): 10–23. McBride, Joseph. Searching for John Ford. New York: St. Martin’s, 2001. McCarthy, Mary. “America the Beautiful: The Humanist in the Bathtub.” 1947. In The Humanist in the Bathtub: Selected Essays from Mary McCarthy’s Theatre Chronicles 1937–1962 and On the Contrary, 7–19. New York: Signet, 1964. ———. The Groves of Academe. 1952. Reprint, New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1963. McCauley, Michael J. Jim Thompson: Sleep with the Devil. New York: Warner, 1991. McCullough, Frances. Foreword to The Bell Jar, by Sylvia Plath, vii–xv. 1963. Reprint, New York: Harper Perennial, 1999. McMahon, Robert J. The Cold War: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003. McReynolds, Douglas J. “Alive and Well: Western Myth in Western Movies.” Literature/Film Quarterly 26 (1998): 46–52. Merlis, Mark. American Studies. 1994. Reprint, New York: Penguin, 1996. Metz, Walter. “Have You Written a Ford Lately? Gender, Genre, and the Film Adaptations of Dorothy Johnson’s Western Literature.” Literature/Film Quarterly 31 (2003): 209–20. Miller, Arthur. The Crucible. Ed. Gerald Weales. 1953. Reprint, New York: Penguin, 1996. ———. Timebends: A Life. New York: Harper, 1987. Mullen, Bill V. “W. E. B. Du Bois, Dark Princess, and the Afro-Asian International.” In Left of the Color Line: Race, Radicalism, and Twentieth Century Literature of the United States, ed. Bill V. Mullen and James Smethurst, 87–106. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003. Mullins, Greg. Colonial Affairs: Bowles, Burroughs, and Chester Write Tangier. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2002. Nadel, Alan. Containment Culture: American Narratives, Postmodernism, and the Atomic Age. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1995. Navasky, Victor S. Naming Names. New York: Penguin, 1980.

172

WORKS CITED

Nelson, Cary. Repression and Recovery: Modern American Poetry and the Politics of Cultural Memory, 1910–1945. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1992. Nelson, Truman. The Sin of the Prophet. Boston: Little, Brown 1952. Neve, Brian. “The Personal and the Political: Elia Kazan and On the Waterfront.” In On the Waterfront, ed. Joanna E. Rapf, 20–39. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Norwood, Stephen H. Strikebreaking and Intimidation: Mercenaries and Masculinity in Twentieth Century America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002. Ohmann, Richard. Politics of Knowledge: The Commercialization of the University, the Professions, and Print Culture. Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 2003. O’Meally, Robert G. “Checking Our Balances: Ellison on Armstrong’s Humor.” boundary 2 30, no. 2 (2003): 115–36. O’Neill, William L. A Better World: Stalinism and the American Intellectuals. 1982. Reprint, New Brunswick, N. J.: Transaction, 1990. Orwell, George. 1984: Text, Sources, Criticism. 2nd ed. Ed. Irving Howe. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1982. Papayanis, Marilyn Adler. Writing in the Margins: The Ethics of Expatriation from Lawrence to Ondaatje. Nashville, Tenn.: Vanderbilt University Press, 2005. Patteson, Richard F. A World Outside: The Fiction of Paul Bowles. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1987. Payne, Kenneth. “The Killer Inside Them: The Schizophrenic Protagonist in John Franklin Bardin’s Devil Take the Bluetail Fly and Jim Thompson’s The Killer Inside Me.” Journal of Popular Culture 36, no. 2 (Fall 2002): 250–63. Pease, Donald E. Introduction to Mariner’s Renegades, and Castaways, by C. L. R. James. 1953. Reprint, Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 2001. ———. “Melville and Cultural Persuasion.” In Ideology and Classic American Literature, ed. Sacvan Bercovitch and Myra Jehlen, 384–417. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986. ———. “Moby Dick and the Cold War.” In The American Renaissance Reconsidered: Selected Papers from the English Institute, 1982–83, ed. Walter Benn Michaels and Donald Pease, 113–55. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985. ———. “New Americanists: Revisionist Interventions into the Canon.” boundary 2 17, no. 1 (1990): 1–37. Pells, Richard H. Not Like Us: How Europeans Have Loved, Hated, and Transformed American Culture since World War II. New York: Basic, 1997. Phillips, Lily Wiatrowski. “W. E. B. Du Bois and Soviet Communism: The Black Flame as Soviet Realism.” South Atlantic Quarterly 94, no. 3 (1995): 837–64. Plath, Sylvia. The Bell Jar. 1963. Reprint, New York: Harper, 1999. Polito, Robert. Savage Art: A Biography of Jim Thompson. New York: Knopf, 1995. Rackliffe, John. “Notes for a Character Study.” In F. O. Matthiessen (1902–1950): A Collective Portrait, ed. Paul M. Sweezy and Leo Huberman, 76–92. New York: Henry Schuman, 1950. Rampersad, Arnold. Ralph Ellison: A Biography. New York: Knopf, 2007. Ransom, John Crowe. “Criticism, Inc.” In The World’s Body, 328–29. New York: Scribner’s, 1938. Rapf, Joanna E., ed. On the Waterfront. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Redding, Arthur. Raids on Human Consciousness: Writing, Anarchism, and Violence. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1998. Reising, Russell J. Unusable Past: Theory and the Study of American Literature. New York: Methuen, 1986. Reynolds, David S. Beneath the American Renaissance: The Subversive Imagination in the Age of Emerson and Melville. New York: Knopf, 1988. Robinson, Cedric J. Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition. 1983. Reprint, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000. Roche, Mark. “Vico’s Age of Heroes and the Age of Men in John Ford’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance.” Clio 23 (1994): 131–48.

173

WORKS CITED

Rocksborough-Smith, Ian. “Bearing the Seeds of Struggle: Freedomways Magazine, Black Leftists, and Continuities in the Freedom Movement.” Master’s thesis, Simon Fraser University, 2003. Ross, Andrew. No Respect: Intellectuals and Popular Culture. New York: Routledge, 1989. Rowley, Hazel. “The ‘Exile’ Years? How the 50s Culture Wars Destroyed Richard Wright.” Bookforum (December/January 2006). http://www.bookforum.com/archive/dec_05/rowley.html. Rubin, Gayle. “Notes for a Radical Theory of the Politics of Sexuality.” In Pleasure and Danger: Exploring Female Sexuality, ed. Carol S. Vance, 267–319. Boston: Routledge and Keegan Paul, 1984. Ruland, Richard. The Rediscovery of American Literature: Premises of Critical Taste, 1900–1940. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1967. Said, Edward W. Representations of the Intellectual: The 1993 Reith Lectures. New York: Pantheon Books, 1994. Sarton, May. Faithful Are the Wounds. 1955. New York: Norton, 1985. Saunders, Frances Stonor. The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters. New York: New Press, 2000. Sawyer-Laucanno, Christopher. An Invisible Spectator: A Biography of Paul Bowles. New York: Ecco, 1989. Sayer, Derek. The Coasts of Bohemia: A Czech History. Princeton, N. J.: Princeton University Press, 1998. Schiffrin, Andre, ed. The Cold War and the University. New York: New Press, 1997. Schlesinger, Arthur M., Jr. The Vital Center: The Politics of Freedom. 1949. Reprint, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1962. Schouppe, William. “Orientalist Visions and Revisions: Edward Said’s Orientalism and Representations of the Orient in Paul Bowles.” In Oriental Prospects: Western Literature and the Lure of the East, ed. Theo D’Haen, 209–23. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1998. Schrecker, Ellen W. The Age of McCarthyism: A Brief History with Documents. Boston: St. Martin’s, 1994. ———. No Ivory Tower: McCarthyism and the Universities. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986. Schulberg, Budd. On the Waterfront: A Screenplay. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1980. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire. New York: Columbia University Press, 1985. Shock Corridor. Dir. Samuel Fuller. Janus Films, 1963. Sigal, Clancy. Going Away: A Report, a Memoir. New York: Carroll and Graf, 1961. Skrentny, John David. “The Effect of the Cold War on African-American Civil Rights: America and the World Audience.” Theory and Society 27 (1998): 237–85. Slotkin, Richard. Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-Century America. 1992. Reprint, Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1998. Smith, Daniel W. “Introduction: ‘A Life of Pure Immanence’: Deleuze’s ‘Critique et Clinique’ Project.” In Essays Critical and Clinical, xi–liii. Trans. Daniel W. Smith and Michael A. Greco. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997. Smith, Henry Nash. Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth. 1950. Reprint, New York: Random House, 1970. The Snake Pit. Dir. Anatole Litvak. Twentieth Century Fox, 1948. Sparling, Don. “Under Western Eyes: Closely Watched Czechs.” In Images of Central Europe in Travelogues and Fiction by North American Writers, ed. Waldemar Zacharasiewicz, 292–304. Sonderbruck: Stauffenburg Verlag, n.d. Spurr, David. The Rhetoric of Empire: Colonial Discourse in Journalism, Travel Writing, and Imperial Administration. Durham, N. C.: Duke University Press, 1993. Stern, Frederick C. F. O. Matthiessen: Christian Socialist as Critic. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1981. Stevens, Wallace. Letters of Wallace Stevens. Ed. Holly Stevens. 1966. Reprint, New York: Knopf, 1977. Sundquist, Eric J. To Wake the Nations: Race in the Making of American Literature. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993.

174

WORKS CITED

Sunset Boulevard. Dir. Billy Wilder. Paramount, 1950. Sweezy, Paul M. “Labor and Political Activities.” In F. O. Matthiessen (1902–1950): A Collective Portrait, ed. Paul M. Sweezy and Leo Huberman, 61–75. New York: Henry Schuman, 1950. Sweezy, Paul M., and Leo Huberman, eds. F. O. Matthiessen (1902–1950): A Collective Portrait. New York: Henry Schuman, 1950. Thompson, Jim. The Killer Inside Me. 1952. Reprint, New York: Vintage, 1991. Turner, Frederick Jackson. “The Significance of the Frontier in American History.” In Rereading Frederick Jackson Turner, ed. John Mack Faragher, 31–60. New York: Holt, 1994. Vidal, Gore. “Introduction.” In Paul Bowles: Collected Stories, 1939–1976, 5–9. Santa Rosa: Black Sparrow, 1997. Wald, Alan W. “Communist Writers Fight Back in Cold War Amerika.” In Writing from the Left: New Essays on Radical Culture and Politics, 85–99. London: Verso, 1994. ———. Exiles from a Future Time: The Forging of the Mid-Twentieth Century Literary Left. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002. ———. “Narrating Nationalisms: Black Marxism and Jewish Communists through the Eyes of Harold Cruse.” In Left of the Color Line: Race, Radicalism, and Twentieth Century Literature of the United States, ed. Bill V. Mullen and James Smethurst, 141–62. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003. Wald, Priscilla. Constituting Americans: Cultural Anxiety and Narrative Form. Durham, N. C.: Duke University Press, 1995. Warner, Michael. “Introduction.” In Fear of a Queer Planet: Queer Politics and Social Theory, ed. Michael Warner, vii–xxxi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993. Weeks, Jeffrey. Sex, Politics, and Society: The Regulation of Sexuality since 1800. New York: Longman, 1981. White, George Abbott. “Teaching America: The Critical Vision of F. O. Matthiessen.” Ph.D. diss., Charles University, Prague, 1992. Whitfield, Stephen J. The Culture of the Cold War. 2nd ed. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996. Whyte, William H., Jr. The Organization Man. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1956. Williams, Raymond. George Orwell. New York: Viking, 1971. Wills, Gary. John Wayne’s America: The Politics of Celebrity. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1997. Wilson, Andrew. Beautiful Shadow: A Life of Patricia Highsmith. New York: Bloomsbury, 2003. Wright, Michelle M. “‘Alas, Poor Richard!’: Transatlantic Baldwin, the Politics of Forgetting, and the Project of Modernity.” In James Baldwin Now, ed. Dwight A. McBride, 208–32. New York: New York University Press, 1999. Ziff, Larzer. Literary Democracy: The Declaration of Cultural Independence in America. New York: Viking, 1981. Žižek, Slavoj. Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1991. ———. “Not a Desire to Have Him, but to Be Like Him.” Review of Beautiful Shadow: A Life of Patricia Highsmith, by Andrew Wilson. London Review of Books, August, 21, 2003. http://www.lrb. co.uk/v25/n16/ziz01_.html.

175

INDEX

Advertisements for Myself (Mailer), 117 Agamben, Giorgio, 112 Agee, James, 83 Alamo, The, 135 Alcott, Bronson, 51 Algren, Nelson, 101 al-Qaeda, 20, 147, 148 American exceptionalism, 89, 163–64n3 American Renaissance (Matthiessen), 37, 39, 40, 42, 49, 51–52, 54, 55 American Studies, 16, 155n17 Anderson, Benedict, 68 Anzaldúa, Gloria, 77–78 Appadurai, Arjun, 7, 68, 77 Arac, Jonathan, 54, 55 Armstrong, Louis, 72, 163n17 Arnold, Matthew, 70 Auster, Paul, 148 auteur theory, 92 Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (Johnson), 70 Autobiography of W. E. B. Du Bois, The, 57–58, 66–67

Benjamin, Walter, 94 Benton, Thomas Hart, 138 Bergman, David, 42, 49, 53, 55 Bhabha, Homi, 69, 70, 71, 72, 76 Biskind, Peter, 87, 88, 92 Black Arts Movement, 62 Black Flame, The (Du Bois), 59 Black Marxism (Robinson), 59 Black Power, 62 Black Reconstruction (Du Bois), 59 Blackhawk Down, 22, 148 Bollabás, Enikö, 41 Boone, Daniel, 143 Borderlands/La Frontera (Anzaldúa), 77–78 Born on the Fourth of July, 22 Borstelmann, Thomas, 61–62 Boston Herald, 53 Boulding, Kenneth, 37 Bowles, Jane, 5, 110, 111, 112, 113, 114, 117, 118–21, 123, 128 Bowles, Paul, 5, 110–18, 121, 123, 126–32, 150 Boyer, Paul, 117 Bradbury, Ray, 133 Branch Davidians, 142 Brando, Marlon, 83, 87, 89 Brecht, Bertolt, 33 Brennan, Timothy, 68, 69 Brinkley, Alan, 17, 31, 79 Brown v. Board of Education, 61, 63 Bruckheimer, Jerry, 22 Buck, Pearl, 44 Bugeaud, Thomas Robert, 18 Burgess, Anthony, 133 Burroughs, William, 114 Bush, George H. W., 149

Badiou, Alain, 122, 130 Baldwin, James, 84, 101 Ballard, J. G., 133 Barbarossa, 44 Baudrillard, Jean, 22 Bay of Pigs incident, 35 Beat movement, 15, 23, 64, 84 Being Red (Fast), 14 Bell, Daniel, 4, 21, 98–99 Bell Jar, The (Plath), 23–31, 34, 101, 105, 133 Bellah, James Warner, 135 Bellow, Saul, 35, 83, 101

177

INDEX

Bush, George W., 17–20, 141, 149 Bush Doctrine, 18

Crockett, Davy, 143 Crucible, The (Miller), 18–19, 81, 89–97 Cruse, Harold, 58, 161n1 Cultural Front, The (Denning), 19 Czechoslovakia, 46–48, 158n13

Cain, William, 54 “Camp Cataract” (Bowles), 117, 118–21, 124 Camus, Albert, 108 Carpenter, Edward, 49 Carter, Jimmy, 149 Castro, Fidel, 35 Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, 85 Catcher in the Rye (Salinger), 23 Catch-22 (Heller), 133 Cather, Willa, 139 Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), 9, 154n8 Chambers, Whittaker, 35 Chaplin, Charlie, 15 Cheever, Jon, 83 Cheney, Dick, 144 Cheney, Russell, 38, 48, 49, 52 Cheyfitz, Eric, 157n3 Chomsky, Noam, 3 Civil Rights Act of 1964, 61 Civil War, 139 Clift, Montgomery, 89 Clinton, Bill, 142, 149 Clooney, George, 20 Cobb, Lee J., 84 Cochran, David, 6, 102 Cohan, Steven, 82, 89 Cold War, Cool Medium (Doherty), 6–7 Color and Democracy (Du Bois), 62, 65 Commies Are Coming, the Commies Are Coming, The, 134 Communist Party of the United States of America (CPUSA), 9, 14, 15, 58, 61, 67, 71, 73, 85, 88, 111, 114, 116 Conant, James Bryant, 48 Condon, Richard, 134 confessional poetry, 11, 92 Congress for Cultural Freedom, 41 Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), 61 Conrad, Joseph, 70 Containment Culture (Nadel), 65 Cooper, James Fenimore, 143 Copland, Aaron, 15, 111 Corber, Robert, 84 Coulter, Ann, 20 Counter Intelligence Program (COINTELPRO), 150

Darwin, Charles, 137 Daughters of Bilitis, 38 De Beauvoir, Simone, 31 De Havilland, Olivia, 25 Dean, James, 89 Deleuze, Gilles, 66, 70, 112, 113, 117, 121–24, 125, 128, 129, 130, 131, 165n9 Denning, Michael, 4 Deutsch, Sarah, 140 Dick, Philip K., 133 Dickens, Charles, 69 Dillon, Millicent, 116 “Distant Episode, A” (Bowles), 126–27, 128–29, 131–32 Doherty, Thomas, 6–7 Dos Passos, John, 71, 101 Dr. Strangelove, 134 Dreiser, Theodore, 49 Du Bois, W. E. B., 4, 5, 57–67, 71, 112 Dusk of Dawn (Du Bois), 60 Eakins, Thomas, 51 Eastman, Max, 111 Edwards, Brent Hayes, 67 Edwards, Brian T., 112 Eisenhower, Dwight D., 19, 35 Ellis Island, 64 Ellison, Ralph Waldo, 5, 15, 23, 34, 67–77, 78, 80, 100, 105, 109, 116, 120, 150 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 53, 140 Encounter, 15 End of Ideology, The (Bell), 4, 21, 98–99 Ericson, Leif, 87 Ethics (Spinoza), 121 Exiles from a Future Time (Wald), 19 Faithful Are the Wounds (Sarton), 53 Falwell, Jerry, 20 Fanon, Frantz, 72 Fast, Howard, 5, 12–15, 101, 154n13 Faulkner, William, 71 Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), 3, 5, 61, 114, 134

178

INDEX

Fish, Stanley, 9, 154n9 Fitzgerald, F. Scott, 70, 131 Flynn, Elizabeth Gurley, 15 Foley, Barbara, 67 Ford, John, 5, 134–36, 142–47 Foreign Agents Registration Act of 1938, 65 Foreman, Carl, 81 Fort Apache (Ford), 135 Fountainhead, The (Rand), 101 Frankenheimer, John, 134 Freedomways, 161–62n4 Freiere, Paolo, 45 From the Heart of Europe (Matthiessen), 38, 41, 42–51, 52 frontier thesis, 137 Frum, David, 20 Fuller, Sam, 105

Hardt, Michael, 70, 113 Harvard teachers union, 48 Hawks, Howard, 135 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 51 Hayden, Tom, 15 Heller, Joseph, 133 Hellman, Lillian, 15 Hemingway, Ernest, 77 Herman, Edward S., 3 High Noon, 81 Highsmith, Patricia, 5, 84, 102, 107–10, 111, 112 Himes, Chester, 101 Hiss, Alger, 35 Hitler, Adolf, 44 Hitler-Stalin Non-Aggression Pact (MolotovRibbentrop Pact), 73 Hobsbawm, Eric, 68 Homestead Act, 139 Hook, Sidney, 41, 101 Hoover, J. Edgar, 5, 6, 20 Horowitz, David, 20 House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC), 33, 37, 42, 81, 86, 90, 95, 96 Howe, Irving, 46, 48 Howells, William Dean, 69 Howl (Ginsberg), 100 Hughes, Langston, 15, 64, 97 Hyde, Louis, 48

Gabrieli, Vittorio, 44 Gellner, Ernest, 68 Genn, Leo, 25 Gestalt Therapy, 83 GI Bill, 7, 84 Giddens, Anthony, 94, 139 Gide, André, 108 Gilbert, James, 84 Gilpin, William, 138 Ginsberg, Allen, 100 Glanville-Hicks, Peggy, 115 Going Away (Sigal), 10–11, 35, 133 Goldman, Emma, 64 Gombrowicz, Witold, 125 Goodman, Paul, 45, 83, 154n14 Gore, Al, 141 Graham, Billy, 84 Gramsci, Antonio, 58 Grapes of Wrath, The (Ford), 134 Great Gatsby, The (Fitzgerald), 70 Green Berets, The, 135 Greenberg, Clement, 6, 99 Grossman, Jay, 51–52, 53 Groves of Academe, The (McCarthy), 8–9, 10, 11, 101 Guattari, Félix, 70, 112, 113, 123 Gunn, Giles, 54 Guthrie, Woody, 8

Illich, Ivan, 45 Ingrassia, Catherine, 136 Intermediate Sex, The (Carpenter), 49 Interstate Highway Act, 84 Invisible Man (Ellison), 15, 23, 34, 67–77, 80, 100, 116, 120 Iraq, 17 Islam, 20, 21 Jackson, Andrew, 31 James, C. L. R., 5, 11, 64, 151 James, Henry, 9, 44, 48–49, 115 James, William, 16, 39, 125 Jameson, Fredric, 150 Jarhead, 148 Jefferson, Thomas, 31, 137, 138 JFK (film), 22 Johnson, Hewlett, 50 Johnson, James Weldon, 70 Johnson, Joyce, 23

Hall, Stuart, 77 Hamlet (Shakespeare), 81

179

INDEX

Johnson-Forest tendency, 64, 162n13 Jonas, Gilbert, 61, 162n9 Joyce, James, 71

Lowell, Robert, 11, 37, 39 Lyndon, Louis, 82 Lynn, Kenneth, 55

Kafka, Franz, 127 Kapur, Geeta, 75 Kaufmann, Bob, 15 Kazan, Elia, 81, 85, 86, 87, 88, 89, 90, 92, 96 Kazan, Molly, 86 Kazin, Alfred, 54 Kelly, Grace, 81 Kennan, George, 80 Kennedy, John F., 35, 146, 147 Kenyon Review, 16 Kenyon Summer School, 48 Kerouac, Jack, 23, 148 Kerry, John, 141 Kesey, Ken, 105, 133 Keynesian economics, 149 Killer Inside Me, The (Thompson), 102–7 Kimmel, Michael, 82 Kinsey, Alfred, 84 Kipling, Rudyard, 70 Kissinger, Henry, 20 Koestler, Arthur, 15, 101 Korean War, 134 Koresh, David, 142 Khruschev, Nikita, 31 Kubrick, Stanley, 134

Macauley, Robie, 16 Macdonald, Dwight, 6, 83 Macollum, Barry, 88 Mailer, Norman, 15, 83, 100, 101, 117 Malden, Karl, 84 Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, The (Ford), 134, 135, 136, 143–47 Manchurian Candidate, The, 134 Marcus, Greil, 134 Marcuse, Herbert, 93 Mariners, Renegades, and Castaways (James), 64 Marshall, Thurgood, 61 Marshall Plan, 62 Marvin, Lee, 144 Marx, Karl, 46 Masaryk, Jan, 48 Masaryk, Tomáš, 46 Masochism (Deleuze), 129 Masses, 111 Masses and Mainstream, 12, 62 Masters of Deceit (Hoover), 20 Mattachine Society, 38 Matthiessen, F. O., 5, 16, 17, 37–56, 112, 151 Matthiessen, Peter, 15–16 May, Elaine Tyler, 4, 35, 79, 112 May, Todd, 113–14 McCarran Act, 14, 116 McCarthy, Joseph, 5, 7, 17 McCarthy, Mary, 8–9, 10, 11, 31–32, 101 McCarthyism, 4, 10, 18, 20, 33, 35, 62, 64, 81, 85, 86, 89, 91, 101, 133, 150, 158n16 McMahon, Robert, 63 McReynolds, Douglas, 148 McVeigh, Timothy, 142 Melville, Herman, 48, 49, 64 memoir, 23, 156n25 method acting, 87, 89, 90, 96, 109 micropolitics, 113 Miles, Vera, 144 Miller, Arthur, 5, 18–19, 81, 86, 89–97, 101, 138 Mills, C. Wright, 20, 83 Mills of the Kavanaughs, The (Lowell), 11 Moby Dick (Melville), 117 Modernism, 70–71 Montgomery Bus Boycott, 61

Labor and Desire (Rabinowitz), 19 Laughton, Charles, 83 Lawrence and Garner v. Texas, 149 Le Carré, John, 35, 93, 133 Left, The, 114 Lehrer, Tom, 20 Lenin, Vladimir, 46 Leo, John, 20 Lewis, David, 59, 60 Lewis and Clark expedition, 137 Life Studies (Lowell), 11 Limerick, Patricia, 136 Lincoln, Abraham, 139 Lingis, Alphonso, 121, 124, 125, 127, 128 Locke, John, 67 Lord Weary’s Castle (Lowell), 11 Lost Weekend, The (Wilder), 83 Louisiana Purchase, 137 Lovett, Robert Morse, 58, 161n2

180

INDEX

Monthly Review, 53 Morrison, Toni, 148 Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), 81 Murrah Federal Building bombing, 142 My Ántonia (Cather), 139 My Lai massacre, 147

“Pages from Cold Point” (Bowles), 117–18 Paine, Tom, 44 Palmer Raids, 64, 150 Pan-Africanism, 71 Papayanis, Marilyn Adler, 111, 113 Paris Review, 16 Partisan Review, 31, 48 Patterson, William, 61, 65 Patteson, Richard, 115, 116 Pease, Donald, 40–41, 54–55, 64, 160n29 Peekskill Riot, 12–14 Peekskill: USA (Fast), 14 Peirce, Charles Saunders, 125 Pells Richard, 54 People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), 20 Plath, Sylvia, 5, 23, 25, 28, 29, 80, 101, 105, 133, 150 Plimpton, George, 15 Politics of Knowledge (Ohmann), 7 popular front, 8, 85, 153n6 Portrait of a Lady (James), 44–45 Pound, Ezra, 114 Procházka, Vladimír, 46, 47, 49

Nadel, Alan, 4, 7, 64, 65, 80, 112 Nation, The, 48, 81 National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), 36, 60, 61 National Rifle Association (NRA), 141 National Security Administration (NSA), 20 Natural Born Killers, 22 Navasky, Victor, 86, 96 Negri, Antonio, 70, 74, 113 Nelson, Cary, 5–6 Neve, Brian, 87 New Criticism, 7–8, 11, 39 New Deal, 148 New Frontier, 146 New Left, 11, 15, 66, 92, 151 New Masses, 114 New Republic, The, 81 New York Jew (Kazin), 54 New York School painting (abstract expressionism), 92 New York Times, 20, 86 Newman, Paul, 89 Niagara Movement, 60 Night of the Hunter, The (Agee and Laughton), 83 1984 (Orwell), 32–35 Nixon, Richard, 31 Non-Aligned Movement, 62 Northern Alliance, 147 Norwood, Stephen, 85

Quakers (Society of Friends), 20 Rabinowitz, Paula, 19 Rackliffe, John, 56 Rampersad, Arnold, 67 Rand, Ayn, 83, 101 Ransom, John Crowe, 7, 11, 16 Reagan, Ronald, 141, 147, 149 Rebel without a Cause, 85 Red River (Hawks), 135 Reinhardt, Max, 44 Repression and Recovery (Nelson), 5–6 Riesman, David, 83 Robbins, Tim, 22, 156n24 Robeson, Paul, 12, 13, 61, 62, 65 Robinson, Cedric, 59, 63 Roe v. Wade, 149 Roosevelt, Eleanor, 62 Rosenberg, Ethel, 29–30, 34 Rosenberg, Julius, 29 Ross, Andrew, 6, 99 Roth, Philip, 77 Rowley, Hazel, 65 Rubin, Gayle, 42

O’Brien, Edmond, 144 Ohmann, Richard, 7, 8 Olsen, Tillie, 11 On the Road (Kerouac), 23 On the Waterfront (Kazan), 81–82, 83–89, 92 One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest (Kesey), 105, 133 O’Neill, William, 55 Organization Man, The (Whyte), 82 Orwell, George, 32–35

181

INDEX

Russians Are Coming! The Russians Are Coming!, The, 134

Stevens, Wallace, 39 Stewart, James, 144, 145 Stone, Oliver, 22 Stowe, Harriet Beecher, 69 Streetcar Named Desire, A (Williams), 89 Strˇíbrný, Zdeneˇk, 47, 56 Strode, Woody, 146 Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), 61 Sundquist, Eric, 58, 59 Sunset Boulevard (Wilder), 83

“safety valve” argument, 138 Said, Edward, 66 Saint, Eva Marie, 84 Salinger, J. D., 23, 83 Salzburg Seminar in American Studies, 38, 44–45 Sarandon, Susan, 22 Sarton, May, 53 Saunders, Frances Stonor, 4, 9, 15, 91 savings and loans scandals, 142 Schlesinger, Arthur, 80–81, 83, 134 Schrecker, Ellen, 9 Schulberg, Budd, 85, 86, 92 Schwarzenegger, Arnold, 94 Sellers, Peter, 134 September 11, 2001 (9/11), 18, 147 Serling, Rod, 134 Shakespeare, William, 48, 99 Sheltering Sky, The (Bowles), 112, 113, 115, 124, 127, 129–31 Shock Corridor (Fuller), 105 Sigal, Clancy, 10–11, 35, 83, 133, 154n11 “Significance of the Frontier in American History, The” (Turner), 136–41 Skinnerism, 83 Slansky Trials, 34 Slotkin, Richard, 81, 136, 142–43, 147 Smith, Daniel, 123 Smith, Henry Nash, 136, 138, 143 Smith Act, 116, 154n12 Snake Pit, The (Ward), 25 “Sonny’s Blues” (Baldwin), 101 Souls of Black Folk (Du Bois), 58 Southern, Terry, 134 Soviet Union, 62, 65 Sparling, Don, 47 Spinoza, Baruch, 121, 122 Spurr, David, 126, 127–28 Spy Who Came in from the Cold, The (Le Carré), 35, 133 Stagecoach (Ford), 143 Stalin, Joseph, 21 Stalinism, 65 Stanislavski, Constantin, 96 Steiger, Rod, 87 Steinbeck, John, 44 Stevens, Mark, 25

Talented Mr. Ripley, The (Highsmith), 107–10 Taliban, 147 Tate, Alan, 11 Thompson, Jim, 5, 102–6, 110, 111 Thoreau, Henry David, 39, 52 Timebends (Miller), 86, 90 Trilling, Lionel, 46 Trotsky, Leon, 33 Truman, Harry S., 18, 19, 42, 61 Truman Doctrine, 18, 46 Turner, Frederick Jackson, 136–41, 142, 144, 146, 147 Twain, Mark, 69 Twilight Zone (Serling), 134 United Nations, 62 United States Information Agency (USIA), 64, 154n16 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, 62 Updike, John, 148 U.S. News & World Report, 20 Veblen, Thorstein, 32 Vidal, Gore, 84, 117 Vietnam War, 11, 135 Virgin Land (Smith), 136 Vital Center, The (Schlesinger), 80–81 Vonnegut, Kurt, 133 Wald, Alan, 19, 67, 102 Wald, Priscilla, 58 Waldorf Conference, 11, 153–54n7 Wall Street Journal, 58 Wallace, Henry, 15, 38, 43, 48, 81 Ward, Mary Jane, 25 Washington, Booker T., 66, 67 Wayne, John, 135, 143, 145, 147

182

INDEX

Weber, Max, 151 Weeks, Jeffrey, 42 White, Walter, 60 White Negro, The (Mailer), 100 Whitfield, Stephen, 4 Whitman, Walt, 51, 52, 53, 138 Whitney, Asa, 138 Whyte, William, 82 Wild One, The, 85 Wilder, Billy, 83 Williams, Hank, 102 Williams, Raymond, 11, 34–35 Williams, Stanley (Tookie), 94

Williams, Tennessee, 84, 89 Wills, Gary, 134, 135 Wilson, Woodrow, 46 Without Stopping (Bowles), 114 Woolf, Virginia, 71 World War II, 149, 157n5 Wounded Knee massacre, 139 Wright, Frank Lloyd, 15 Wright, Richard, 15, 65, 101 Young, Carleton, 136 Žižek, Slavoj, 107, 151, 164–65n4

183