British Spy Fiction and the End of Empire

Sam Goodman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9780367869601
• eBook ISBN: 9781317678946
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

The position of spy fiction is largely synonymous in popular culture with ideas of patriotism and national security, with the spy himself indicative of the defence of British interests and the preservation of British power around the globe. This book reveals a more complicated side to these assumptions than typically perceived, arguing that the representation of space and power within spy fiction is more complex than commonly assumed. Instead of the British spy tirelessly maintaining the integrity of Empire, this volume illustrates how spy fiction contains disunities and disjunctions in its representation of space, and the relationship between the individual and the state in an era of declining British power.

Focusing primarily on the work of Graham Greene, Ian Fleming, Len Deighton, and John le Carre, the volume brings a fresh methodological approach to the study of spy fiction and Cold War culture. It presents close textual analysis within a framework of spatial and sovereign theory as a means of examining the cultural impact of decolonization and the shifting geopolitics of the Cold War. Adopting a thematic approach to the analysis of space in spy fiction, the text explores the reciprocal process by which contextual history intersects with literature throughout the period in question, arguing that spy fiction is responsible for reflecting, strengthening and, in some cases, precipitating cultural anxieties over decolonization and the end of Empire.

This study promises to be a welcome addition to the developing field of spy fiction criticism and popular culture studies. Both engaging and original in its approach, it will be important reading for students and academics engaged in the study of Cold War culture, popular literature, and the changing state of British identity over the course of the latter twentieth century.

1 Divided States

Space, Power, and Occupied Territory in Post-War Europe

The defence of territory is both an objective and a defining characteristic of espionage, in fiction and in reality. As scholars from Michael Denning to Rosie White have noted, the spy is the instrument designed to preserve the integrity of spatial borders and boundaries, most often by breaching the borders of the nation’s enemies.¹ Concern for the emplacement and maintenance of borders and boundaries was a central preoccupation of the British presence in Europe in the years immediately after the Second World War and throughout the Cold War, as the nation sought to play the role of global superpower long after it was politically or financially viable for it to do so; this desire was made visibly manifest in contemporary spy fiction, often with profoundly negative consequences.² Graham Greene, Ian Fleming, John le Carré, and Len Deighton all explore the spaces of occupied Europe within their novels, assessing the post-war states of Austria and Germany by drawing focus on Vienna, Berlin, and Bonn. Though responsive to the circumstances particular to their temporal contexts, the shared focus on British subjects adrift in the changing space of Cold War Europe unites these novels; beginning in the 1940s, each work traces a narrative of decline mirroring the British position within post-war geopolitics over the course of the following two decades.

The Cold War obsession with space and territory, in print and in practice, was a product of the Second World War. From its very beginning, spatial and territorial concerns drove the Second World War. In 1939 the British state went to war as a result of the German violation of Polish borders, bringing the abstract political concept of sovereignty into sharp and palpable focus within popular discourse. As the war drew on, this spatiality was expressed in multiple, sometimes contradictory, ways. For instance, contemporaneous to the importance placed on the physical boundaries of the white cliffs of Dover and the British coastline under threat of German invasion in 1940–1941, the Battle of Britain and the Blitz produced imaginary parallel lines in the skies above, their impermanence and permeability revealed nightly. Similarly, the diaries of Field Marshal Alan Brooke reveal how the necessity of a second front in Europe dominated Anglo-American diplomacy in 1941–1944, and, when that front finally opened on the beaches of Normandy in June of 1944, newspapers and newsreels illustrated the alternating fluidity and static emplacement of borders and boundaries in the face of the Allied advance.³

The post-war administration of Germany and Austria, the core of the Third Reich since the Anschluss of 1938, was similarly spatial in composition. Britain, the Soviet Union, and the United States formally determined the treaty that directed the division of Germany at the Potsdam conference of July-August 1945, confirming tentative proposals made at Yalta earlier that same year.⁴ The decisions taken at Potsdam, made in the circumstance of conflict characterised by the conjunction of space and sovereignty, effectively set the tone of the Cold War that followed. The power sharing agreement implemented in Austria and Germany, under the control of their respective Allied Control Commission or Council, juxtaposed the competing sovereignties of three fundamentally different interpretations of governance, bringing their natural conflicting differences into close contact with one another. The British, American, and French military delegations arrived in their respective sovereign zones between the end of April and late May 1945, and the official four-power rule came into effect three months later on 1 September.⁵ However, while the Second World War was characterised by mobility and rapidly changing borders as the Allied forces advanced through Europe, the Cold War developed into a static conflict concerned with the strict emplacement of boundary zones and territory. The initial arbitrary divisions marked by notice boards, common to both occupied Vienna and also Berlin, would later develop into the strict zonal divisions more commonly associated with popular memory of the Cold War. Potsdam represents an appropriate coda to the Second World War, preserving its spatial and sovereign character and forming a bridge to the next phase of conflict; instead of liberating Europe, the Allied powers divided it through occupation.

1. GOING UNDERGROUND: VIENNA

The military nature of de facto rule in Austria and Germany in place from 1945 created a competitive, and suspicious, atmosphere that influenced all future relations between the ruling powers, and it was in this fractious context that Graham Greene set The Third Man (1949). Greene’s work remains for many the quintessential Cold War story of intrigue and espionage, largely as a result of Carol Reed’s highly successful film version of The Third Man released in 1949.⁶ Depicting a stark landscape wreathed in an impoverished, wintry atmosphere, Reed’s vision would have seemed all too familiar to a British audience well acquainted with wartime devastation and deprivation, further exacerbated by two of the harshest winters since records began.⁷ The commanding presence of Orson Welles portraying a charmingly sinister Harry Lime also ensured that the film reached a large audience, while the distinctive zither-led soundtrack remains just as well known.

As a result of these qualities, the film attracted a far greater degree of attention than its source material, published after the film’s release as a short novella. Compact, fast-paced, and not given to the introspective detail of many of his other novels, Greene’s novella was, in his own words, ‘never intended to be more than raw material for a picture’.⁸ The plot of The Third Man is a fairly straightforward one, and focuses on writer Rollo Martins, who is invited to Vienna by old school friend Harry Lime, only to discover on his arrival that Lime recently died under a cloud of suspicion related to his criminal activities on the black market. Resolving to clear his friend’s name, Martins uncovers the extent of Lime’s involvement in the penicillin trade between the Allied and Soviet zones and becomes determined to stop him with the assistance of Colonel Calloway, the head of the British military authorities in Vienna. In comparison to Greene’s other work from the same period and in the geopolitical themes it explores, the significance of The Third Man in the development of Greene’s political position and the scope of his subject matter is abundantly clear. Neil Sinyard argues that ‘The Third Man is as richly resonant a comment on the aftermath of World War Two as is Eliot’s The Waste Land on World War One’.⁹

Despite a somewhat dismissive appraisal by its author, The Third Man remains of particular contextual relevance to both post-war British politics and the development of Greene’s espionage fiction. Greene sets the events of The Third Man inextricably within a Cold War context, informed by the settlements of Yalta and Potsdam but also by the prevailing rhetoric of containment that had taken root since the end of the war. The Truman Doctrine of 1947, though ostensibly a measure to effect the security of Greece, Cyprus, and Turkey, was instead designed to contain the influence and spread of “aggressive” Communism in Europe and the near east; it was responsible for shaping the general operative conduct of American and British forces throughout the occupied zones and along the borders between Western and Eastern allied states.¹⁰ The measures of the Truman Doctrine were directly informed by the observations and opinions of American diplomat George Kennan in his ‘Long Telegram’ of 1946.¹¹ Kennan, a representative of the State Department in Moscow since 1933, gave an extensive assessment of Russian intentions in Europe that indicated a protracted struggle for influence and power, polarising in the formulation of two centres of dominance: a socialist sphere and a capitalist sphere. Kennan’s assessment of the coming political turmoil was at once bleak and militant: Kennan wrote that ‘[b]attle between these two centers for command of world economy will decide fate of capitalism and of communism in entire world’ (sic), and advocated a form of subterranean war through espionage.¹²

Kennan’s document militarised the growing divisions within the wartime alliance between the Western allies and the Soviet Union already noted at Potsdam.¹³ Additionally, Kennan’s observations and the Truman government’s efforts to translate them into policy illustrate more acutely British and American attitudes towards their involvement in Europe. Beyond the concerns of protecting Greece and Turkey, the Truman Doctrine reduces the complications of ideological struggle to stark, basically adversarial terms. In stating that the spread of Communist influence would be thus contained and the inviolability of borders enforced militarily, the spatial and sovereign dimensions of the Second World War were again reiterated in a Cold War context.¹⁴ As a consequence of the Truman Doctrine and its influence upon the Western allies, the fragile nature of political sovereignty, established through agreements already reneged upon by the Soviet Union, would have to be backed by the flexing of covert muscle.

These increasingly militarised circumstances shape the events of Greene’s The Third Man, and it is not incidental that the novella opens with a three-page introductory chapter narrated by Colonel Calloway, the voice of British authority in Vienna. Though Rollo Martins is the ostensible protagonist of the novel, it is nonetheless significant that Greene begins by having Calloway effectively brief the reader on the background to the story and the military situation in Europe. Calloway’s introduction depicts the volatility of post-war Vienna, and the extent to which the security of the British position is based on the changeable spatial power relationships between Russia and America, and, in turn, America and Britain. The chapter begins with a declaration of uncertainty and a caveat to the events that are to follow. The opening line of ‘[o]ne never knows when the blow may fall’ sets the tone for the novel and reflects the context that produced it, indicating the constant uncertainty, latent threat of attack, and possible escalation that hang over the events of The Third Man and the Cold War at large.¹⁵ Calloway reveals the truth of the Allied position in occupied Austria, that despite the supposed mechanisms of control in place, the ‘blow’ of enemy action could occur at any point. The ostensible deterrent force that Britain has in Austria, at this point totalling some 60,000 men of the British Army of the Rhine, is not enough to ensure that British sovereign space is secure.¹⁶

This opening line is a revealing example of spatial-sovereign shortcomings in Vienna and occupied Europe. While Calloway’s narrative attempts to convey the appearance of British control, especially through his mention of ‘security police files’, four-way power sharing, and physical indications of power such as the military police, the British position is of a far more tenuous nature.¹⁷ The official line on the perpetuation of Allied sovereignty in Europe sought to present itself with a degree of permanence and necessity; the chiefs of staff of the British military stated as late as March 1950 that the defence of Western Europe was ‘vital to the security of these islands’ (Britain).¹⁸ Greene’s novel, however, reveals the reverse; Calloway’s limited perception of his surroundings relays the temporary nature of the British mission in Austria. He states that he ‘hasn’t enough imagination’ to picture a Vienna restored any more than he ‘can picture Sacher’s Hotel as other than a transit hotel for English Officers’.¹⁹ British authority’s position on Austria is reminiscent of the old-fashioned colonial one; despite the rhetoric behind their presence, liberating Austria from the Nazi Anschluss, British self-interest is to be found at the heart of the occupation. However, the British presence in Austria is defined by a crucial difference from traditional territorial control; it is dictated by American policy. Calloway fails to recognise that his position is no longer based on pre-war imperial pre-eminence but rather that the actions of the British forces will now be relative to those of their American allies. Calloway cannot imagine the hotel as anything other than a transitory space because, for the British and Americans in Austria, that is all it will be; they are just guests, and their sovereignty over occupied Vienna only temporary.²⁰

Greene’s description of the city in the opening chapter reinforces the temporary status of the British sovereign presence. The landscape of Vienna is one of a ‘smashed, dreary city’ of ruins overgrown with weeds.²¹ Calloway’s narrative returns repeatedly to these descriptions of smashed buildings, landscape, and objects indicating a disorderly situation at odds with the inte...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Hiding in Plain Sight: Locating the Spy in the British Cultural Imaginary
• 1 Divided States: Space, Power and Occupied Territory in Post-War Europe
• 2 Between Battleground and Fairground: British Espionage Fiction and the Post-War City
• 3 Safe as Houses: The Spy and Domestic Space
• 4 One-Way Ticket: Travel, Identity and Espionage
• 5 Winds of Change: Colonial Space and Clandestinity
• Conclusion: British Spy Fiction: The End of Empire & The End of an Era
• Select Bibliography
• Index