In 1954, The Adventures of Augie March (1953), a darkly comic picaresque novel by Montreal-born writer Saul Bellow, won the National Book Award for American fiction. The novel opens, famously, breezily,
Augie is a Yankee ingénue, a Horatio Alger for the smart existential set, a self-fashioning, happy-go-lucky man-about-the-world, a consummate individualist who will make his own way and who suffers the blows of fate with good-humoured pluck and innate resourcefulness. In Canada, that same year, the prestigious Governor General’s Award for Literature went to The Fall of a Titan (1954), a now largely forgotten anti-communist spy novel penned by a onetime cipher clerk at the Soviet Embassy in Ottawa, Igor Gouzenko, who had defected to Canada in 1945. Gouzenko’s tone is somewhat more strident than Bellow’s, his characters in the grip of a brutal history from which there will be no deliverance:I am an American, Chicago-born – Chicago, that somber city – and go at things as I have taught myself, freestyle, and will make the record in my own way: first to knock, first admitted; sometimes an innocent knock, sometimes a not so innocent. But a man’s character is his fate, says Heraclitus.1
Given these ironies of location, style and authorship, this chapter will discuss American and Canadian literature of the Cold War in tandem. As the Cold War heated up, American cultural policy (much of it covert) was engaged in efforts to export ‘freedom’ by marketing American cultural products in Europe, the Soviet Bloc and the Third World. During the same years, Canadian cultural policy was engaged in a deliberate, concerted effort to define, promote and sustain a distinctly Canadian national culture and to ensure that it would be fully embedded within the nation’s cultural institutions and industries. Assessing recent scholarship and focusing on key writers from both countries, the chapter develops a comparative, hemispheric analysis of such Cold War phenomena as the varying endorsement and articulation of ‘national’ literary and cultural identities, the expansion of mass and consumer culture and the critique of that culture as refracted in literature.This was a hard time for the Russian people. Against their wishes, Stalin was imposing collectivization on the country. The horror, the sorrow, the humiliation for millions of peasants and workers which this policy wrought exceeded in awfulness all the calamities that history had ever seen. This history will remain everlastingly the darkest blot on the human conscience.2
Cold War Culture in the US and Canada
Since 1989, there has been a widespread interest in reassessing the cultural dimensions of the Cold War, and numerous investigations into the Cold War matrix of US literature have emerged over the past few decades. In his seminal study, The Culture of the Cold War (1991), Stephen Whitfield demonstrates the ways in which an exaggerated fear of communist infiltration motivated efforts (McCarthyite purges, the Hollywood blacklisting of party members and fellow travellers in the film industry) to shore up a 1950s cultural and political consensus that endorsed conformity, private industriousness, political centrism and obedience to authority. Frances Stonor Saunders’s The Cultural Cold War (1999), an investigation into CIA interference in cultural production, shows how a certain mindset that she terms ‘freedomism’ took hold, which ‘elevated doctrine over tolerance for heretical views’ and led social agents to confuse constraint and obedience for existential and conscientious acts of free expression.3 Alan Nadel’s Containment Culture (1995) shows how the popular stories about freedom and democracy being told on television, on the silver screen and in novels formed narratives of containment, reviling dissenters and outsiders, emphasising the need for domestic security and posing sexual deviance and unbridled women’s sexuality as threat. In 1946, in his notorious ‘long telegram’ from Moscow, diplomat George F. Kennan laid out the case for the Western powers, led by the US, to develop a geopolitical strategy to contain the spread of communism internationally; for Nadel, the logic of containment aptly describes as well the overt policing of ideological, social and sexual behaviours during the period.
Everywhere, of course, cultural practice resisted such clampdowns. The culture of consent was hardly consensual. Such critics as Alan Wald and Michael Denning have stressed the ongoing cultural resistance to hegemonic narratives of freedomism, compiling the persistence of dissident, radical and even revolutionary strains in American literature and popular culture.4 Some American writers, like Bellow, transitioned rather seamlessly from an early enthusiasm for Trotskyism into an accessible Cold War humanism; his celebrated books include the bestselling Herzog (1964) and Humboldt’s Gift (1975) and he won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1976. Such fellow Trotskyites as Robert Lowell and Mary McCarthy also published prolifically during the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, although some writers, especially those whose politics had been more hard-line communist or Stalinist, found the challenges of the Cold War somewhat more difficult to navigate. Richard Wright, Bellow’s colleague in the Chicago branch of the Works Progress Administration Writers’ Project and author of the much celebrated Native Son (1940), publicly renounced communism in an essay he published alongside other disillusioned ex-communists in Richard Crossman’s The God that Failed (1949). Relocating to France in 1946, Wright wrote several works with existential themes, attended the Bandung conference in 1955 and aligned himself with global anti-colonialism and Pan-Africanism. Another one-time doctrinaire communist turned expat, Paul Bowles, settled in Tangier in 1947 with his wife, Jane Bowles. Bowles’s existential writing, including The Sheltering Sky (1949), found a cult following and transformed him into a godfather figure of sorts to the Beat generation.
By contrast, another radical Chicago writer, Nelson Algren, remained effectively true to his proletarian aesthetic, chronicling the lives of working-class immigrants and poor whites and finding success with The Man with the Golden Arm (1949), which won a National Book Award. His A Walk on the Wild Side (1956), set in the Depression, was less successful and would be the last work Algren published during his lifetime. Some writers associated with the far left, such as Lillian Hellman, who was compelled to testify before the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) in 1947, and Langston Hughes, who faced Joseph McCarthy’s Senate subcommittee in 1953, successfully navigated the shifting political terrain and were able to resuscitate their careers. Others had less luck. Mike Gold effectively stopped publishing, while Dashiell Hammett and some perhaps less overtly political writers, such as Jane Bowles and Delmore Schwartz (after whom Bellow later modelled the protagonist of Humboldt’s Gift), battled alcoholism and mental illness, making it difficult for them to continue producing.
As popular front culture dissolved into the ethic of individualism that would come to characterise Cold War American sensibilities, alternative collective formations emerged. In Poetic Community (2013), for example, Steven Voyce has shown how, in an era of cultural conservatism, many self-organising communities emerged as viable countercultures. Voyce’s focus on communities of writers rather than individuals demonstrates how creative interplay and collaborative aesthetic conversation were key to generating resistant aesthetic discourse for Black Mountain College writers (Charles Olsen, Robert Duncan, John Cage), the Women’s Liberation movement (Audre Lorde, Maya Angelou, Adrienne Rich) and the Toronto Research Group (Steve McCaffrey, bpNichol). Such communities dedicated themselves collectively to avant-garde practices and to alternative experiments in sexual and political dissent, rejecting the standard post-industrial organisation of social production, explicitly critiquing corporate culture and—above all else—aiming to renounce the hyper-individualism and competitive solipsism that underwrote dominant templates of male subjectivity from the 1950s to the 1980s. Similar arguments about the communal dimensions of resistant cultural production can be made about the Beats (Allen Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Gregory Corso, Gary Snyder), who rejected heteronormative models of masculinity and opened the door to the counterculture’s wholesale rejection of establishment norms in the 1960s, and even about the Black Arts Movement (LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka, Nikki Giovanni, Maya Angelou), who rejected white bourgeois aesthetic models.
With whatever degree of resistance, though, American culture, for better or worse, was everywhere embroiled in Cold War concerns. As Timothy Melley summarises, the massive ...