In the 1950s, the CIA believed books could change the world. The organization gave millions of dollars to publishers and literary magazines. They printed special lightweight copies of George Orwell’s Animal Farm, which were then loaded onto balloons and sent across borders. They sent Nabokov’s Speak, Memory and James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man through the mail to specially-chosen addresses around the world.
On the other side of the Iron Curtain, 700 of the Soviet Union’s most famous writers gathered in a grand auditorium to listen to speeches denouncing modernist literature in general, and the work of James Joyce in particular. Soviet Realism was the only acceptable style in which novelists can work, and praise for the state literary technique was effusive. Across the street from the conference, an enormous banner read: “Writers are the engineers of human souls,” a phrase coined by Stalin himself.
Cold Warriors, the historian Duncan White’s definitive new account of the literary personalities who fought the Cold War, is full of anecdotes like these, which tend to sound more like the fever dreams of a delirious librarian than historical fact. Art has always been political. Books change the world. As literary culture has shrunk in size and influence, those sentiments sound more like pedantic tweets than concepts most human beings actually believe. Nevertheless, Cold Warriors is an exhaustively researched defense of those principles, which half-a-century ago were broadly embraced by both writers and the governments happy to fund their work.
The book, out August 27 from Custom House, describes how writers like Mary McCarthy, John Le Carré, and Graham Greene fought on the front lines of the ideological battle between capitalism and communism. White’s narrative, which follows writers as they fight, write, spy and give speeches through the latter part of the 20th century, begins in 1937 with Orwell catching a bullet in the neck fighting fascists in Spain and doesn’t quit until well after the dissolution of the USSR.
White shows us a world in which politically significant novels can’t be printed fast enough to keep up with demand, so popular that they’re sold secondhand like tickets to the first run of Hamilton, at “seven or eight times the cover price.” When new editions come out, people line up around the block to get them.