The Literary Cold War, 1945-Vietnam: Sacrificial Logic and Paranoid Plotlines

255 Pages·2009·1.45 MB·English

by  Adam Piette

THE
T THE LITERARY
LITERARY H
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1945 to Vietnam
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Adam Piette
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1945 to Vietnam

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This is a ground-breaking study of the psychological and cultural impact of the Cold War on the imaginations of citizens in the UK and US. A
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The Literary Cold War examines writers working at the hazy borders between aesthetic project and political allegory, with specific

attention being paid to Vladimir Nabokov and Graham Greene as Cold War writers. The book looks at the special relationship as 1 Adam Piette
a form of paranoid plotline governing key Anglo-American texts from Storm Jameson to Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, as well as 9
examining the figure of the non-aligned neutral observer caught up in the sacrificial triangles structuring cold war fantasy. The 4
book aims to consolidate and define a new emergent field in literary studies, the literary Cold War, following the lead of prominent
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historians of the period.

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Key Features:

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One of the first influential monographs to look at leading Anglo-American writers, 1945 to Vietnam, in terms of the Cold War
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as psychological and fantasy phenomenon e
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Exemplary form of literary criticism combining close reading and new historical forms of research n
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Significant readings of key postwar writers, including Sylvia Plath, Ted Hughes, Mary McCarthy, Graham Greene and
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Vladimir Nabokov
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A major contribution to twentieth-century war studies, especially of the special relationship between the US and the UK
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Adam Piette, Professor of Modern Literature at the University of Sheffield, is the author of Remembering and the Sound of Words:
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Mallarmé, Proust, Joyce, Beckett (1996) and Imagination at War: British Fiction and Poetry, 1939–45 (1995). He helps run the Cold m
War Cultures network and is co-editor of the poetry journal Blackbox Manifold.
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Jacket image: © Gilson Pereira, 2008
Jacket design: Cathy Sprent E
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Edinburgh University Press i
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22 George Square
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Edinburgh EH8 9LF u
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www.euppublishing.com g
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ISBN 978 0 7486 3527 6
THE LITERARY COLD WAR,
1945 TO VIETNAM
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In memoriam Lena Piette, who escaped Russia in 1917
For Diane, Jessica and Lauriane
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THE LITERARY COLD WAR,
1945 TO VIETNAM
Adam Piette
EDINBURGH UNIVERSITY PRESS
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© Adam Piette, 2009
Edinburgh University Press Ltd
22 George Square, Edinburgh
Typeset in Sabon and Gill Sans
by Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Stockport, Cheshire, and
printed and bound in Great Britain by
CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham and Eastbourne
A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 978 0 7486 3527 6 (hardback)
The right of Adam Piette
to be identifi ed as author of this work
has been asserted in accordance with
the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
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CONTENTS
Acknowledgements vii
Introduction 1
1 The Special Relationship and the British Hypothesis: 19
The Black Laurel, The Third Man, Cold War Vienna and Berlin
2 Cold War on the 1930s and Sacrifi cial Naming: 47
John Dos Passos and Josephine Herbst
3 DEW Line, Uranium and the Arctic Cold War: 74
Ginsberg’s Kaddish and Nabokov’s Lolita
4 Cold War Sex War, Or the Other Being Inside: Burroughs, Paley, 106
Plath, Hughes
5 The Sacrifi cial Logic of the Asian Cold War: Greene’s The Quiet 152
American and McCarthy’s The Seventeenth Degree
Conclusion 209
Bibliography 215
Index 234
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This book would not have seen the light of day without the support, advice
and example of a number of colleagues at the Universities of Glasgow and
Sheffi eld, in particular John Coyle, John Gardner, Richard Cronin, the late
Stephen Johnson, David Pascoe, Alex Houen and Duco Van Oostrum. I
would also like to thank Holger Nehring and Erica Sheen for their help
in creating the Cold War Cultures network, which energized the last year
or so of the research. My greatest gratitude is to Neil Corcoran and Mark
Rawlinson, who helped me selfl essly with the fi nal stages of the project at a
critical time.
The Leverhulme Foundation generously funded three years’ research leave
and gave me the chance to travel to the States to pursue research crucial to the
book. The Major Research Fellowship was fundamental to the project.
I would also like to thank the librarians and staff of the research libraries
consulted for the book, in particular the team at the Harry Ransom Humanities
Research Center (University of Texas) for their superb effi ciency and for-
bearance over two visits, the last as Mellon fellow. I am also grateful to the
librarians at the Berg collection at the New York Public Library, the Beinecke
Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale, the National Security Archives
at Washington, the Library of Congress, and the Ginsberg collection at the
University of Columbia.
I would like to thank the publishers Faber & Faber, Weidenfeld &
Nicolson and Harcourt Trade Publishers for their consideration. Every effort
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THE LITERARY COLD WAR, 1945 TO VIETNAM
has been made to trace copyright holders and the publisher would be pleased
to rectify any errors.
A broader debt is to the women who ran Women Strike for Peace through
the dark days of the 1960s. I dedicate this book to their activism.
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INTRODUCTION
In June 2004, I took my daughters down ‘Scotland’s Secret Bunker’ at
Troywood, Anstruther, in Fife. Disguised as a Scottish farmhouse, and con-
cealed underground at the end of a 150m tunnel, it was built in the 1950s as one
of the regional government HQs for the Scottish secretary and his ministry in
case of nuclear emergency. As we walked through the spooky bunkered spaces
with their antique machinery of war communications, my young daughters
shrank from the sinister horror of it all. They refused to leave the only sunny
space down there, a concrete room given over to the anti-nuclear movement,
with colourful Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) posters, rainbows
and chains of friendly hands. Their reaction made me ashamed of the boyish
thrill that had led me to lure my family down there in the fi rst place, all the
allure of wartime technology, the rockets and guns on display, the blastproof
doors, the Ops room intricacies, the labyrinthine underworld with its concrete
imagining of survival by the very few.
By strange coincidence, the week of our visit saw a spectral enactment
of my own shame in the form of Ronald MacDonald, a homeless paranoid
schizophrenic. On 8 June he used a JCB digger to crash into the bunker after
midnight – he stayed down there, in what the papers were to call the Bunker
Siege, for two whole days and nights. He dressed in the display uniforms,
played with the weapons, caused £100,000 of damage before being coaxed out
by police. Inspector Jenks of the local constabulary said ‘the complex nature of
the building was creating operational issues for the police, who were playing
1
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