“What did you think of the domination of poetics by the CIA? After all, wasn’t Angleton your friend? Didn’t he tell you his plans to revitalize the intellectual structure of the West against the so-to-speak Stalinists?” . . . “I did, yes, know of Angleton’s literary conspiracies, I thought they were petty—well meant but of no importance to literature.”
Allen Ginsberg, “T. S. Eliot Entered My Dreams”1
Allen Ginsberg’s imagined conversation with T. S. Eliot captures an important strain in US literary history. Eliot may not have been an agent working for CIA bureaucrat James Jesus Angleton, but many twentieth-century studies scholars accept as a truism the Cold War state’s co-optation of modernism.2 The evidence is persuasive, particularly in the literary arts. One only has to recall the mid-1960s scandal over the CIA’s covert sponsorship of such respected modern literary journals as Encounter and the Kenyon Review or the State Department’s deployment of Robert Frost, Allen Tate, Elizabeth Bishop, and other writers to realize that the US state sought to export US literary modernism as a propaganda tool. To be sure, many contemporary US politicians and citizens still decried modernism’s excesses, arguing that avant-garde aesthetics subverted American values. Senator McCarthy’s lieutenants burned modernist as well as “left” American works during their notorious tour of US Information Agency (USIA) libraries in 1953. But some of the state’s more savvy propagandists recognized that, if properly exploited, maverick writers and texts could both call attention to Communist oppression and highlight the distinct cultural achievements of an individualistic people. Rather than challenging the status quo, the avant-garde would end up serving the state.3
For all the importance of this narrative of co-opted modernism, it tends to leave out one valuable aspect of the story, the very aspect that Ginsberg attempted to address in his imagined encounter with Eliot: what did the modernists themselves think of the Cold War state and its relationship to literary culture? That is a relevant question for all writers embroiled in the cultural Cold War, even those who like Allen Tate and John Dos Passos subscribed openly to a conservative political agenda. But that query is particularly germane to those writers who stood in tense relation to the state even as they nonetheless worked intermittently for the State Department or the USIA. What do we make of such liberals as Robert Lowell, a conscientious objector during World War II and a State Department–sponsored literary ambassador during the 1950s? How do we understand the position of Langston Hughes, interrogated by Senator McCarthy and his aides in 1953, and then sent abroad by both the USIA and the State Department in the early 1960s? And, perhaps most challenging of all, where do we place William Faulkner, a Southern political moderate whose longstanding problems with the federal state didn’t so much vanish as intensify during a seven-year tenure as a Cold War literary diplomat?
We sometimes forget that the Bard of Oxford served as an unofficial US ambassador during the height of the Cold War. That sort of global assignment seems out of keeping for a regionalist who resisted a trip to Stockholm for the Nobel Prize ceremony and later claimed that the White House was too far to travel for dinner. Yet from 1954, when he traveled to Sao Paulo for the International Writers Congress, to his final trip to Venezuela in 1961, William Faulkner undertook repeated cultural diplomatic missions for the US government. Some of the more important assignments included his month-long stay in Nagano, Japan, in the summer of 1955, a two-week visit to Greece in the spring of 1957, the latter coinciding with an Athens production of Requiem for a Nun, and his repeated trips to Latin America. Faulkner also served as a member of the US delegation to the 1952 “Masterpieces of the Twentieth Century” festival in Paris and participated in the 1959 US National Commission for UNESCO conference.4 No other US writer of the era played so active a role in the cultural Cold War.5
Yet for all his willingness to travel the world as an American cultural ambassador, Faulkner didn’t allow his affiliation with the US government to dictate his writing or public statements. State Department authorities may have been generally pleased with Faulkner’s diplomatic work, but, as David A. Davis, Barbara Ladd, John T. Matthews, and other scholars have taught us, during the 1950s Faulkner frequently expressed his frustration with the American way of life, and he did so at home and abroad.6 Listening to Faulkner speak in Nagano, scholar Gay Wilson Allen noted how the novelist turned a question about a recent US tragedy into an acerbic commentary on American capital. “In my country,” Faulkner proclaimed, “instead of asking the artist what makes children commit suicide, they go to the chairman of General Motors and ask him. . . . If you make a million dollars you know all the answers.”7 That indictment of US capitalism might not have unsettled the readers of the Snopes trilogy, but it may well have shocked the writer’s Japanese auditors. Faulkner presented equally vociferous challenges to the authority and structure of the welfare state. In his “Address to the Delta Council” (1952), for example, Faulkner engaged in an impassioned antistatist screed that drew upon his longstanding dislike of New Deal agricultural policy and other forms of state modernization: “The enemy of our freedom . . . no longer threatens us from across an international boundary, let alone across an ocean. He faces us now from beneath the eagle-perched domes of our capitols and from behind the alphabetical splatters on the doors of welfare and other bureaus of economic or industrial regimentation.”8 In such statements, Faulkner appears less “an emissary who said all the right things,” as Frederick Karl has described him, than a vociferous critic of the very capitalist polity he represented to the world at large.9 By the 1950s, the Cold War state might have claimed modernism for its own purposes, but the nation’s most acclaimed modern novelist raged against capitalism, social welfare, US foreign policy, and, at times, state-mandated segregation in highly public forums.
That adversarial attitude informed Faulkner’s engagement with the diplomatic apparatus he served in the cultural Cold War. To be sure, Faulkner hardly railed against the State Department at every turn. Having unsuccessfully sought to serve in the US military during World War I and World War II, he clearly felt an urge to contribute to the national campaign in this new type of conflict. Faulkner’s largely respectful relationship with such low-level State Department figures as Harold E. Howland and Leon Picon reflects this attitude. But when it came to the State Department or any large governmental entity, Faulkner sometimes adopted a different perspective, criticizing not only the urge to regiment writers in a bureaucratic manner, but also the more general attempt to exploit modernist aesthetics for Cold War purposes.
In what follows, I focus on what was by any estimation Faulkner’s most difficult experience with US cultural diplomacy: his participation in the People-to-People (PTP) program. An idealistic attempt to connect ordinary Americans to the world without state interference, the PTP program took shape as a series of committees dedicated to particular professions and interests. Faulkner chaired the literary committee, a responsibility that placed the acclaimed modernist in vexed relation to the program’s middlebrow internationalism. I first examine the absurd, yet pointed, letter with which Faulkner began his official duties for the PTP program, and then turn to his wry commentary on the very idea of Cold War literary propaganda, included in The Mansion (1959).10 Through a reading of these two linked texts, I argue that Faulkner’s work for the PTP program prompted an attempt to reclaim from the Cold War state the very modernist aesthetic he was meant to wield on behalf of the anti-Communist struggle. That attempt took fragmented and at times incoherent shape, but in its very messiness, Faulkner’s riposte to the state made manifest the writer’s refusal to surrender his aesthetic to those cold warriors who found in modernism little more than a propagandistic symbol of freedom. For Faulkner, as we shall see, literary modernism had the capacity to bind together different peoples, to underwrite what he might have called an international confederation, but only if its energies exceeded the grasp of any state, East or West.11
The literary aspects of US cultural diplomacy have not had a long history. While American writers served as US ministers, ambassadors, and consuls from the earliest days of the republic—Benjamin Franklin, Washington Irving, and James Fenimore Cooper come to mind—such figures didn’t undertake explicitly cultural missions until well into the twentieth century. With the advent of the Good Neighbor Policy during the 1930s, the state began recruiting US writers to serve specifically as American cultural emissaries.12 Sinclair Lewis, Thornton Wilder, and other prominent US writers traveled to Latin America to challenge international fascism and win hearts and minds for the United States. In perhaps the most important example, Wilder conducted a three-month-long series of literary readings and public appearances in Colombia, Ecuador, and Peru during the spring of 1941.13
That state interest in the writer as ambassador overlapped with and informed another nascent strain in US literary diplomacy: the writer as cultural diplomacy bureaucrat. The Good Neighbor Policy helped inspire the state’s creation of new cultural diplomatic institutions in the late 1930s, and various litterateurs were called upon almost immediately to help manage them. The Roosevelt administration appointed playwright Robert Sherwood to serve as the first director of the US Foreign Information Service, director John Houseman to the first directorship of the Voice of America, and poet Archibald MacLeish to the post of assistant secretary of state for cultural affairs. Such filiations of the literary and the bureaucratic continued through the 1940s and expanded considerably during the 1950s with the advent of the cultural Cold War. The US Information Agency (1953) would inadvertently testify all the more to this persistent literary presence when the new government office took as its slogan the tagline “Telling America’s Story to the World.” For all its surprising investment in innovative writing, the state’s conscription of prominent modernists was in many ways a new wrinkle of an ongoing and complicated relationship between literary culture and government propaganda.
When President Eisenhower invited William Faulkner to create a literary committee for the People to People program in 1955, he gestured to the potential importance of writers in a new campaign to shore up the nation’s global image. Inspired in large part by public literary figures and backed by the White House, the PTP program attempted to create global community through a private-public network that could both draw on President Eisenhower’s support and also deny direct affiliation with the US state.14 Its nongovernmental status proved particularly important, for the PTP program was designed to encourage an emphatically quotidian version of what international relations scholar Joseph Montville has called “track two diplomacy,” a citizens’ diplomacy that stands apart from the official version pursued by the state.15 During the 1950s, the dominant form of US “track two diplomacy” took shape as what Christina Klein has called Cold War integrationism: an eclectic mix of anti-Communism, missionary tradition, New Deal discourse, and sentimentalism that stressed the importance of cultivating benevolent American connections with the world at large. Rather than emphasizing how the United States would contain communism through military and economic means, Cold War integrationism emphasized how ordinary Americans could through global outreach ensure that foreign peoples had a more accurate, which is to say positive, image of the United States. Highlighting the value of international “contact and connection,” the PTP program asked and answered what contemporary USIA director Arthur Larson claimed was the pressing question confronting Cold War–era Americans: not “what are we against?” but “what are we for?”16
For all his longstanding dislike of bureaucracy, Faulkner well understood the Cold War integrationist goals of the PTP program and how writers might contribute to them. As he explained at one point, his task was to “to organize American writers to see what we can do to give a true picture of our country to other people.” Yet having writers “give a true picture of our country” in a largely middlebrow manner created a potentially difficult situation for modernists, Faulkner included. If savvy propagandists in the CIA and the State Department found in modernism a new way of making the West’s case against Communism, the PTP program and many of its adherents sought a less aesthetically challenging path that left modernism in an odd position, at once celebrated for its global standing and castigated for its off-putting, if not elitist, aesthetic. For some middlebrow internationalists, modernism seemed more of a liability than a boon inasmuch as it seemed to encourage a rarefied mentality that might clash with the very idea of global community relations. That the proponents of the PTP program included some of the very figures (Saturday Review editor Norman Cousins, poet Robert Hillyer) who had seven years earlier vehemently opposed the awarding of the Bollingen Prize to modernist Ezra Pound makes all the more palpable the likely conflict between two competing forms of literary globalism.
Faulkner’s first effort at organizing writers speaks to the clash between the middlebrow humanitarianism of the new cultural diplomatic effort and his modernist impulse to épater le bourgeois. Having decided to contact potential contributors individually, Faulkner and his cochair (in reality, factotum), journalist Harvey Breit, sent two documents to some of the nation’s finest writers, among them Robert Lowell, Marianne Moore, Lewis Mumford, Katherine Anne Porter, John Steinbeck, and William Carlos Williams. The first document was the official PTP program statement drawn from a September 1956 White House conference attended by President Eisenhower, Vice President Nixon, Secretary of State Dulles, and the program committee chairs including Faulkner. Entitled “A Program for People-to-People Partnership,” the statement emphasized that the point of the initiative was “to encourage American citizens to develop their contacts with the people of other lands as a means of promoting understanding, peace, and progress.” And the statement stressed as well that various forms of public and cultural diplomacy could contribute to this goal: “Friendship between peoples is built on understanding and understanding is nurtured by exchange of information and ideas and by neighborly association.” One couldn’t ask for a better illustration of the integrationist thrust of the president’s new public diplomacy initiative.17
Faulkner’s accompanying cover letter constituted an example of how one writer might respond to the president’s entreaty, but the document also functioned as a provocative riposte to the very idea of enlisting modernists in such a decidedly middlebrow project. I quote the letter here in its entirety:
Dear___________________:
The President has asked me to organize American writers to see what we can do to give a true picture of our country to other people. Will you join such an organization?
Pending a convenient meeting, will you send to me in a sentence or a paragraph, or a page, or as many more as you like, your private idea of what might further this project? I am enclosing my ideas as a sample.
1. Anesthetize, for one year, American vocal chords.
2. Abolish, for one year, American passports.
3. Commandeer every American automobile. Secrete Johnson grass seed in the cushions and every other available place. Fill the tanks with gasoline. Leave the switch key in the switch and push the car across the iron curtain.
4. Ask the Government to establish a fund. Choose 10,000 people between eighteen and thirty, preferably Communists. Bring them to this country and let them see America as it is. Let them buy an automobile on the installment plan, if that’s what they want. Find them jobs in labor as we run our labor unions. Let them enjoy the right to say whatever they wish about anyone they wish, to go to the corner drugstore for ice cream and all the other privileges of this country which we take for granted. At the end of the year they must go home. Any installment plan automobiles or gadgets which they have undertaken would be impounded. They can have them again if and when they return or their equity in them will go as a down payment on a new model. This is to be done each year at the rate of 10,000 new people.18
Several of Faulkner’s correspondents commented favorably on the letter, but Faulknerians have generally speaking treated it as a quirky oddity or, to borrow from poet and PTP literature committee participant Donald Hall, an “absurd proposal.” Yet Faulkner’s ideas are in fact more significant than we have been willing to allow. Faulkner insists on rendering his satire of cultural diplomacy more absurdist than cogent—it almost qualifies as a prank—but this decision doesn’t so much eviscerate its critical components as suggest that it is only through avant-garde aesthetics that a writer can offer a proper response to the power of the state, West or East.19 One might claim in fact that Faulkner’s collection of “ideas” is less an insignificant joke than an ad hoc poem prompted by the Cold War state’s attempt to harness literature for its own geopolitical ends.
Let us look at Faulkner’s suggestions. The first two set an outrageous tone by urging the year-long silencing of Americans (“Anesthetize . . . American vocal chords”) and the end to American travel abroad (“Abolish . . . passports”). In this starkly dystopian scenario, the state compels Americans to limit their attempt at either national or international communication; your average American emerges as mute and isolationist. That these suggestions mock the idea of global outreach goes without saying. Rather than affirming the middlebrow internationalism informing the official White House document accompanying his own proposal, Faulkner suggests that the United States would enjoy a much better reputation if Americans suppressed their impulses to connect to others.
To be sure, in those two ideas, Faulkner doesn’t comment only on what writers Eugene Burdick and William Lederer would soon dub “the ugly American” in the novel of the same name.20 Faulkner’s reference to silencing and immobilization also recalls the fact of contemporary domestic censorship and oppression during the 1950s. Various filmmakers, writers, and artists had been silenced during the ongoing Red Scare, and many others were denied their passports because of charges of un-Americanism. As Caroline Henze-Gongola and Jeb Livingood have argued, many of the writers involved with the literary committee “repeatedly questioned the treatment of artists like Charlie Chaplin and Arthur Miller” and stressed that internal censorship did little to improve the nation’s image abroad.21 Chaplin, Miller, and other leftist modernists would not figure prominently in subsequent committee discussions, however. Thanks largely to an impassioned speech by William Carlos Williams, the poet Ezra Pound, imprisoned in St. Elizabeth’s since 1948, would be the only silenced and immobilized US citizen discussed at length by the committee. Indeed, even Faulkner, no great intimate of Pound’s, would write in the official PTP’s literary committee report that “We should free Ezra Pound. While the chairman of this committee, appointed by the President, was awarded a prize for literature by the Swedish government . . . the American government locks up one of its best poets.”22 The irony is palpable. For Faulkner, the need to reclaim modernism from the US state urged the liberation of a poet notorious for putting at fascist Italy’s disposal his own avant-garde voice—a policy recommendation that incensed some members of the PTP committee, most notably Saul Bellow.
The third suggestion in Faulkner’s letter continues the theme of American immobilization—“commandeer every American automobile”—but it transforms this theme into a surrealist version of propaganda. To push all American automobiles across the Iron Curtain suggests an attempt to lure Eastern Europeans from the frugality and asceticism of Communism with the temptations of US automotive culture. Americans will deny themselves their beloved cars in order to woo their Communist counterparts over to the side of capitalism and freedom. Yet Faulkner takes what seems to be a propaganda proposal, however extravagant, and renders it outrageous—something closer to a proposal for a massive mobile art installation than an attempt to win Eastern European hearts and minds. The language of sculpture and installation suggests Faulkner’s interest in the role of the visual arts in Cold War modernism—a topic he would take up in The Mansion. He recognizes as well the ridiculous aspects of Cold War propaganda in his suggestion that Johnson grass seed be secreted throughout each car. As Faulkner well knew, Johnson grass is a species of fast-growing weed found throughout the US Southeast; it is often referred to as the weed that ate the South. To offer Communists millions of cars stocked with this seed suggests an attempt to invade and conquer the Communist bloc not with US troops or ideology or goods, but with plants of a distinctly Southern variety. The Johnson grass would in theory spread throughout Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, disseminated by the movement of the cars in which the seed had been secreted. The result would be an ironic Americanization of the Eastern bloc, not in terms of politics but rather in pastoral and visual terms. Poland and the Ukraine would now look like the US South even if they remained in thrall to the Communist regime.
This absurdist yet biting approach to the propaganda question informs the next and longest suggestion on the list: the idea that 10,000 young Communists should spend a year in the United States. One might expect such a plan to endorse dominant Cold War values, but in the PTP program letter, Faulkner describes his idea in terms far more critical than they are supportive of the United States. If young Communists are to see “America as it is,” much of what they should do is take full advantage of a capitalist economy that locates freedom in one’s right to indulge consumer taste. Faulkner does include a reference to freedom of speech (“the right to say whatever they wish about anyone they wish”), thus participating in a typical American act of self-affirmation, if in a manner that recalls his well-known concern over the diminution of privacy in a media-saturated nation. That qualified citation of Americans’ freedom of speech then leads to the invocation of a far lesser “privilege”: the right “to go to the corner drugstore for ice cream.” Faulkner’s absurd equation of freedom of speech with the right to buy ice cream is of a piece with his deliberately cynical comment on the situation of the American worker. He suggests that the government find the visiting Communists “jobs in labor as we run our labor unions”—a critique of labor that will resurface in subsequent committee meetings—only to then imply that “jobs in labor” are in the United States nothing more than a way to purchase large commodities “on the installment plan.” The list of ideas concludes with a wry reminder that such consumer bliss can be enjoyed only in the land of the free and the home of the brave. Upon leaving the United States, the foreign guests must relinquish their cars and gadgets.
Given this list of ideas, it comes as no surprise that Faulkner grew so frustrated with the People-to-People program that he decided to abjure the very committee “distillate” or overview that he, John Steinbeck, and Donald Hall had signed. Rejecting the document, the PTP program, and all such attempts to organize writers for geopolitical purposes, Faulkner reputedly told Breit, his cochair, that the idea of a literary diplomatic project was unnecessary because “writers all over the world understand each other.”23 Plumbers and lawyers might need such an organization, but writers did not. The only suggestion Faulkner could offer the PTP program was to stamp every US book “True” or “Not True” prior to export. When Breit asked who would determine the veracity of the books, Faulkner replied in a telling way indeed: “a committee of writers.”24 A writers’ committee dedicated to middlebrow internationalism becomes in Faulkner’s imagination a modernist writers’ committee that claims for itself the right to determine and name truth for the world at large. Faulkner’s outrageous response to Breit’s query gives us a sense of how the novelist viewed the state’s attempted co-optation of modern writers. Instead of endorsing or rejecting that co-optation, Faulkner imagines the converse: the writers’ co-optation of the state and its functions. Rather than allowing the state to monopolize communication, law, and ideology, the writers assume those duties themselves. Faulkner’s closing response to the PTP’s literary initiative recalls the absurdist letter with which we began, but it also looks ahead to his more mediated commentary on questions of aesthetics and propaganda in his fiction.
Those few scholars who have commented on Faulkner’s involvement with the PTP program have tended to focus on its aftermath in the form of a spring 1958 speech Faulkner gave to the University of Virginia English club. That lecture is without a doubt a relevant statement from the author, one that reiterates his longstanding antipathy to statist group-think and his affirmation of literary individualism. Commenting on the program, Faulkner explained to his auditors, “What doomed it in my opinion was . . . [the assumption that] man himself can hope to continue only by relinquishing and denying his individuality into a regimented group of his arbitrary factional kind, arrayed against an opposite opposed arbitrary factional regimented group.”25 As crucial as that English Club lecture is, it’s important as well to consider how Faulkner’s vexed experience with the PTP program may have affected his late novels. Faulkner was finishing The Town (1957) when he accepted President Eisenhower’s invitation, and one finds in that novel language and imagery reminiscent of the writer’s scandalous letter. Consider, for example, how Gavin Stevens tries to broaden Linda Snopes’s mind by introducing her to poetry over ice cream at the local drugstore.26 Thanks to Stevens’s efforts, the possibilities of free speech as represented by poetry emerge in and through the lowly referent of dessert; the scene stages in narrative terms Faulkner’s claim in the letter that freedom of speech (“the right to say whatever they wish”) is comparable to going “to the corner drugstore for ice cream.” Yet even as The Town may have the most compelling temporal claim on Faulkner’s PTP experience, The Mansion, a novel still in progress when Faulkner delivered the Virginia postmortem, provides the most significant evidence of how the abortive cultural diplomatic project may have incited his imagination and inspired him to comment on the place of modernism, both literary and visual, in the cultural Cold War.
The Mansion makes no direct reference to the People-to-People program or indeed to any other US cultural diplomatic initiative. One will not find references to the USIA or the US State Department in this novel; yet as John T. Matthews has argued, The Mansion “engages at every level with the defining geopolitical condition of its era” not only through critical commentary on such contemporary phenomena as blacklisting but also through a complex engagement with themes of imprisonment and freedom.27 The story of Mink Snopes, exploited, manipulated, driven to violence, and then incarcerated, exemplifies the largest themes of the Cold War moment—as does the life narrative of Mississippi-born Communist and Spanish Republican Linda Snopes Kohl. Moving up and down the scales of Cold War experience, the final chronicle of the avaricious Snopes clan makes manifest how Americans understood the great Manichean conflict as both an ideological clash of sprawling global scope and a national crisis that impacted everyday life.
Perhaps the most significant aspect of The Mansion’s historicism is its critique of the aesthetic and political presumptions that underwrote the People-to-People program and other cultural diplomatic initiatives. That critique emerges most vividly in the 1930s New York scenes revolving around Linda Snopes and Barton Kohl’s wedding, a historical moment that recalls both the heyday of American Communism and the beginning of the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). From that historical vantage point, the New York section of The Mansion responds to some of the issues at stake in Faulkner’s vexed relationship to US propaganda, most centrally, the place of modernism in the US state’s attempt to win hearts and minds overseas. Faulkner has Linda Snopes Kohl challenge an emerging anti-Communist vision of modernism by telling the young Chick Mallison about the left modernists who fought against Spanish fascism—“Ernest Hemingway and Malraux, and . . . a Russian, a poet that was going to be better than Pushkin only he got himself killed”—but the novelist’s main illustration of an alternate and politically subversive modernism is Linda’s husband, Barton Kohl.28 In the words of John T. Matthews, “associating the communist Kohl with experimental nonrepresentational sculpture may be part of Faulkner’s resistance to cold war cooptation [sic] of modernist aesthetics.”29 Sensitive, perhaps, to the important place of abstract expressionism in the Cold War state’s attempt to win foreign hearts and minds, Faulkner devotes most of his attention to the visual not the literary arts.
We will attend to Barton Kohl’s sculpture as an example Faulkner’s “resistance” to Cold War modernism, but we shall also examine that artwork as it figures in the forging of what we might call people-to-people relations in a universalist mode. As we shall see in our analysis of V. K. Ratliff’s encounters with both the Communist Kohl and the Russian clothing designer Myra Allanovna, Faulkner’s commentary on Cold War modernism proves more than reactive; the novelist’s critique also speaks to the place of modernism in precipitating productive intercultural connection, whether in the 1930s or in the 1950s. Ratliff’s encounters with Kohl and Allanovna enact a scene in which an ethnic American speaks across a significant divide to two figures whose Communist and Russian identities recall the enemy most hostile to the postwar American way of life. Indeed, we might say that while all the principals involved in these New York scenes are nominally American, significant ethnic and political differences render Ratliff’s meetings with first Allanovna and then Kohl a rough approximation of the sort of intercultural communication at the center of the PTP program’s integrative vision. Ratliff’s ability to communicate and bond with strangers well illustrates the broad goodwill of the American citizenry.
Faulkner seems to endorse in an unironic manner Ratliff’s forthright encounters with the Russian Allanovna and the Communist and Jewish Kohl. The satiric conceits of the novelist’s PTP program letter don’t obtain here. Instead, Faulkner takes up the place of modernism in such encounters by having Ratliff’s capacity to engage with these strangers depend on innovative and unsettling visual art—a reminder, perhaps, that a once shocking Beardsley aesthetic played an important role in the novelist’s early career. If the People-to-People program tended to envision an unmediated encounter between Americans and “the citizens of other lands,” Faulkner focuses on how modernist art provides a third term by and through which Ratliff can find common ground with his Russian and his Communist interlocutors.
Modernism’s mediating capacities first come to the fore when Ratliff meets Allanovna, a famous clothing designer of avant-garde sensibilities. One might expect the Russian American Ratliff (the V. K. stands for Vladimir Kyrilytch) to bond easily with a person of Russian birth, but the Cold War demonization of all things Russian suggests otherwise. As Gavin Stevens suggests at one point, Russian names and Russian ancestry prove more a liability than a boon in nativist America, and Ratliff’s ethnicity, while indisputably important, seems a largely suppressed sign of his intercultural potential rather than a visible indicator of his urge to forge bonds with the Cold War other.30 That the Mississipian and Allanovna manage to forge even an aesthetic connection seems an unlikely result at the outset of the encounter. Ratliff first meets the Russian designer at her store, when Stevens takes him there to buy a necktie for the wedding. The elite establishment seems more an art gallery than a haberdashery, with the ties priced accordingly, and circumstances bear out this impression. When Allanovna asks her Mississippi customer for a sense of his taste, Ratliff replies by describing a cravat adorned with an image of a sunflower on a red background, a pleasant image well in keeping with middlebrow art. But Allanovna rejects Ratliff’s vision. The designer instead gives the Mississippian a tie that defies such realist expectations and instead forces Ratliff to think acutely about visual perception: “It was jest dusty. No, that was wrong; you had looked at it by that time. It looked like the outside of a peach, that you know that in a minute, providing you can keep from blinking, you will see the first beginning of when it starts to turn peach. Except that it dont do that. It’s still jest dusted over with gold, like the back of a sunburned gal” (482). A Southerner eager for pleasant images of home, Ratliff attempts to see peaches and girls in the tie, but Allanovna’s art object resists easy figural interpretation. Like the abstract expressionist paintings promoted and sent abroad by the State Department in the late 1940s and 1950s, Allanovna’s tie offers the viewer pure color—something like a Rothko on a vastly reduced scale—and thus demands a great deal of the viewer. The Mississippian twice rejects his own perception (“No, that was wrong”; “It dont do that”) as he struggles to understand the tie. Ratliff attempts to render the abstract “dust” and “gold” comprehensible by turning color into an anthropomorphized fragment (“the back of a sunburned gal”), but one suspects that in due course this image will give way to yet another interpretation.
Neither Ratliff nor Allanovna offers more commentary on the tie’s aesthetic, but we later learn that the sewing-machine salesman comes to prize highly that unusual object; as he tells Chick Mallison much later, the tie “is a private matter”—and thus not available for viewing, let alone use, after the New York trip (539). What might have been a seemingly minor encounter between an avant-garde designer and a sewing-machine salesman from Mississippi, the state at “the lowest rung of culture” (466), takes on singular importance. As Jon Smith has argued, Ratliff recognizes in Allanovna’s ties an aesthetic that exceeds both the status consumerism associated with Flem Snopes and the haute bourgeois investment in realistic representation ascribed to Gavin Stevens and Chick Mallison. For Smith, Ratliff takes from this encounter the knowledge that form can convey a sense of “experiential newness.”31 Yet perhaps Faulkner’s emphasis on the meaning of abstract form in the Allanovna scenes speaks to more than the tension between country and city, Mississippi and Manhattan, or, in Smith’s reading, gemeinschaft and gesellschaft—perhaps Faulkner also expresses through Ratliff’s scenes of abstract aesthetic education an openness to hermeneutic possibilities that informs the sewing-machine salesman’s willingness to accept and bond with the Cold War other.
In stressing the tie’s challenging visual aesthetic and its universalist implications, Faulkner inadvertently comments on the role of interpretation in the Cold War co-optation of modernism. As Lawrence Schwartz, Christina Klein, and other scholars have argued, US propagandists’ claim on modernism was in many ways hermeneutic. Rejecting the traditional primacy of social realism in state propaganda, US cultural cold warriors found in the very opacity of modernism an unlikely means of shoring up the West’s indictment of Communism.32 Unlike realist representation and its leftist adherents, the argument went, the formal challenge posed by an Eliot poem or a Faulkner novel or, indeed, a Pollack painting tended to inspire a host of particular aesthetic responses and that very interpretive multiplicity testified to the West’s abiding commitment to individual freedom. The freedom enjoyed by the reader or viewer of modernism reflected and drew from the freedom enjoyed by all the fortunate citizens of Western capitalist democracies. That modernism’s formal complexity was often of a piece with its deracinated qualities, its distance from national affiliation and thus national propaganda, rendered it an even more valuable tool for the United States in the cultural Cold War.33 Here was an aesthetic lingua franca that affirmed US values and improved the nation’s cultural reputation in one fell swoop.
In Faulkner’s version, however, modernism challenges the viewer not only to forge his or her own response to a difficult artwork and thus to assert individualism, but also to use that moment as an opportunity to connect to the Other and recognize the importance of community and collectivity. Indeed, it is their shared investment in the tie’s multiple hermeneutic meanings that eventually leads Allanovna and Ratliff to recognize that they both believe in an aesthetic that exceeds everyday “needs” (490). The tie becomes a tie—a connection that binds the Mississippian and the Russian together in a collective manner that recalls Faulkner’s contemporary investment in the confederation of all peoples.
Faulkner drives that point home by placing this seemingly small objet d’art at the intersection of a still more important person-to-person encounter: Ratliff’s unlikely bonding not with a Russian, but with a Communist—Linda Snopes’s fiancé, Barton Kohl. During the Greenwich Village party sequence that follows the discussion about sunflowers and abstract aesthetics, Kohl approaches Ratliff and wonders aloud if the tie is indeed an “Allanovna” (486). Ratliff confirms his host’s assumption and their conversation soon turns to the art filling the loft, particularly those pieces that are neither “sculpture” nor “pictures . . . hanging on the wall” but some other form “made outen pieces of wood or iron or strips of tin and wires.” Faulkner doesn’t offer a detailed description of this genre-confounding artwork—The Mansion only dabbles in ekphrasis—but Kohl’s comments reveal that the pieces are meant to challenge and disturb in predictable modernist manner. “Shocked? Mad?” queries Kohl of Ratliff as the latter gazes upon them (487), the sculptor’s comments recalling the many times in which avant-garde visual and literary arts have scandalized the bourgeoisie.
Kohl’s expectations are warranted. Stevens and Mallison later will confirm the disturbing qualities of the artwork as they debate whether one piece depicts an Italian boy engaged in risqué behavior (514). (The fact that the two Harvard men can’t determine precisely what it is the boy is doing is part of the scandal.) Yet Ratliff doesn’t respond to that artwork in the manner of his more highborn fellow Mississippians. Instead of raging against Kohl and the obscenity of the avant-garde, the sewing-machine salesman responds by telling Kohl, “Do I have to be shocked and mad at something jest because I have never seen it before?” (487). That sensitive riposte to Kohl engenders Ratliff’s most important comment on modernism and alterity:
So he leaned against the wall . . . while I taken my time to look: at some I did recognise and some I almost could recognise and maybe if I had time enough I would, and some I knowed I wouldn’t never quite recognise, until all of a sudden I knowed that wouldn’t matter neither, not jest to him but to me too. Because anybody can see and hear and smell and feel and taste what he expected to hear and see and feel and smell and taste, and wont nothing much notice your presence nor miss your lack. So maybe when you can see and feel and smell and hear and taste what you never expected to and hadn’t never even imagined until that moment, maybe that’s why Old Moster picked you out to be one of the ones to be alive.
Ratliff’s encounter with the challenge of modernism doesn’t provoke a conservative reaction, a hasty retreat to what he knows and thinks. To the contrary, Kohl’s nonrepresentational sculptures, like Allanovna’s tie, elicit from him a range of aesthetic responses—some figures he recognized, some he did not, some he never would—that testify to his sensory acceptance of the strange and the unknown: “when you can see and feel and smell and hear and taste what you never expected to and hadn’t never even imagined until that moment.” Ratliff’s willingness to engage with aesthetic otherness transmutes into a willingness to accept all sensations no matter how alien, not because of an obligation or an imperative (after all “anybody can see and hear and smell and feel and taste”) but because devotion to the full range of experience stands at the center of a divinely created lifeworld.
By representing such moments in an emphatically phenomenological manner, Faulkner suggests, if only inadvertently, that the hallmarks of the People-to-People program—“understanding,” “contact,” “communication”—never function as transparently and bilaterally as the White House and the program’s middlebrow partisans claimed. For Faulkner, those commendable international ideals depend upon and work through a cultural presence that renders the moment of contact a scene of complex and provocative sensation. International exchange succeeds to the extent that it’s mediated, shaped, skewed by discomfiting aesthetics. And those unsettling aesthetic mediations redound to local and global politics in complicated ways. Modernism’s rich and productive relation to the experiential doesn’t only oppose the PTP program’s facile assertion of “contact” and “communication.” Modernism also generates through variegated sensory experience the possibility of new ideological attachments. For Ratliff to “see and feel and smell and hear and taste what [he] never expected to and hadn’t never even imagined until that moment” when interacting with Kohl, the “red” modernist, subtends a potential willingness to approach Communism itself with the same open spirit. If modernism incited an individual aesthetic response, that response might potentially contribute to a politics considered subversive by many Americans of the 1950s.
Unlike the Finns and Linda Snopes Kohl, Ratliff never joins the Communist Party. No FBI agents come snooping around Ratliff’s home to locate a party card as they do with Linda. And with good reason: such an investigation would be more likely to discover an enshrined Allanovna tie and Kohl sculpture in the museum-like parlor than any evidence of subversive political affiliation (539). Yet even as Faulkner does not have Ratliff join the card-carrying left, he does have the sewing-machine salesman play a surprising role in “eliminat[ing]” white segregationist politician Clarence Egglestone Snopes (595). “Cla’nce,” a sort of Mississippi Strom Thurmond, represents the Dixiecrat figures that rose to prominence in the South during the immediate post–World War II era. Ratliff doesn’t challenge Snopes’s political vision or work on behalf of his competitor’s campaign. Instead, the sewing-machine salesman counters Snopes with a “down-home” prank: he gets two boys to rub the politician’s pants legs with switches taken from trees popular with urinating dogs. The resulting canine assault on “Cla’nce” shames him to the degree that he no longer constitutes a viable candidate and leaves the race. As Ratliff puts it, “He figgered that to convince folks how to vote for him and all the time standing on one foot trying to kick dogs away from his other leg, was a little too much to expect of even Missippi voters” (615). An ordinary white Southerner trumps a Jim Crow politician and in the process suggests newfound willingness to adopt a liberal perspective on politics and American life.
In its ribald humor and folksy appeal, the Clarence Snopes episode suggests a grassroots response to a political problem. Ratliff disciplines a local who has transgressed against community values and good sense. Yet for all its regional qualities, Ratliff’s theatrical defeat of the segregationist also recalls both the aesthetic and the political consequences of his New York encounters with modernism. As Jay Watson has noted, the transformation of Clarence—or, more accurately, his leg—into a canine urinal before a crowd of Jefferson citizens recalls the sort of agitprop performance associated with the Dadaists, the surrealists, and other practitioners of a highly public “street” form of modernism.34 Such argument must remain speculative. However outrageous, Ratliff’s spectacle is no Duchampian “readymade” capable of articulating Jefferson to Greenwich Village. At the same time, one cannot doubt that Ratliff’s openness to modernist art bears upon his surprising refusal to countenance Clarence’s version of Jim Crow—that the sewing–machine salesman’s willingness to experience what he’s “never expected” and hasn’t “even imagined” subtends a new approach to social relations in his native region. Aesthetics have consequences where Ratliff is concerned—and those consequences have the potential to reverberate in the 1950s South.
Modernism played no comparable role in Faulkner’s attitude toward white segregationists and segregation itself. The great modernist maintained a moderate stance with respect to the race question that frustrated liberals and infuriated racists. Yet that failure hardly means that Faulkner turned a blind eye to modernism’s universalist capacities, particularly in the international frame. Cold warriors might seek to deploy modernist works as aesthetic allegories of the freedom available in the capitalist West and denied in the Communist East, but Faulkner found in modernism a means of expressing another sort of internationalism, one that resisted the middlebrow sentiment of the People-to-People program even as it stressed cultural exchange. Most notably, perhaps, Faulkner’s engaged modernism underwrote a commitment to an unusual transnational publishing venture: the Ibero-American Novel Project. An attempt to use Faulkner’s reputation as a means of convincing US presses to promote, translate, and publish Latin American novels, the Ibero-American Project was, as Deborah Cohn has argued, “like Faulkner’s overseas missions . . . ‘meant to contribute to a better cultural exchange between the two Americas and [to] foment ameliorations in human relation and understanding.’”35 But if the Ibero-American Novel Project recalled the language and spirit of the People-to-People program, it also stood apart from President Eisenhower’s cultural diplomacy initiative in its dedication to literary innovation. Faulkner’s novel project may not have fulfilled his desire to have a literary committee declare texts “True” or “Not True,” but it did suggest one way in which a writer might attempt his own nonstatist and distinctly literary version of cultural diplomacy. An American novelist promoting Latin American novelists, many of whom tended toward the experimental: with the Ibero-American Novel Project, Faulkner instantiated his vision of modernist internationalism outside the parameters of the Cold War state.
Thanks are due Kathy Lavezzo, Jack Matthews, and Jay Watson for their many helpful comments on earlier drafts of this essay.
1. Allen Ginsberg, “T. S. Eliot Entered My Dreams,” in Poems All Over the Place, Mainly Seventies (Cherry Valley: Cherry Valley Editions, 1978), 46.
2. See, for two representative examples, Alan Nadel, Containment Culture: American Narratives, Postmodernism, and the Atomic Age (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995), and Frances Stonor Saunders, The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters (New York: New Press, 2001).
3. I borrow my wording from Greg Barnhisel. See Barnhisel, “Perspectives USA and the Cultural Cold War: Modernism in Service of the State,” Modernism/Modernity 14 (2007): 729–54.
4. The “Masterpieces” festival was sponsored by the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF), a CIA “front” that sought to promote anti-Communism among artists and intellectuals throughout the world. Faulkner most likely would not have known about the CIA connection.
5. There isn’t much scholarship on Faulkner’s cultural diplomatic work. The most important items are Joseph Blotner, “William Faulkner, Roving Ambassador,” International Educational and Cultural Affairs (Summer 1966): 1–22; Deborah Cohn, “William Faulkner’s Ibero-American Novel Project: The Politics of Translation and the Cold War,” Southern Quarterly 42.1 (Winter 2004): 5–18; Cohn, “Combating Anti-Americanism during the Cold War: Faulkner, the State Department, and Latin America,” Mississippi Quarterly 59.3–4 (Summer–Fall 2006): 396–413; Catherine Gunther Kodat, “High Art in Low Times,” Boston Review 29.5 (October–November 2004): 37–39; and Helen Oakley, “William Faulkner and the Cold War: The Politics of Cultural Marketing,” in Look Away! The U.S. South in New World Studies, ed. Jon Smith and Deborah Cohn (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004), 405–18.
6. See David A. Davis, “A Fable of the Cold War” (unpublished essay); Barbara Ladd, Resisting History: Gender, Modernity, and Authorship in William Faulkner, Zora Neale Hurston, and Eudora Welty (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2007), 79–107; and John T. Matthews, “Many Mansions: Faulkner’s Cold War Conflicts,” in Global Faulkner: Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha, 2006, ed. Annette Trefzer and Ann J. Abadie (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2009), 3–23.
7. See Gay Wilson Allen, “With Faulkner in Japan,” American Scholar 31 (Autumn 1962): 567.
8. See William Faulkner, “To the Delta Council, 1952,” in Essays, Speeches, and Public Letters, ed. James B. Meriwether (1965; New York: Modern Library, 2004), 132.
9. See Frederick Karl, William Faulkner: American Writer (New York: Wiedenfeld and Nicolson, 1989), 891.
10. While most Faulkner biographers chronicle this experience, Joseph Blotner provides the best overview. See “William Faulkner, Committee Chairman,” in Themes and Directions in American Literature, ed. Ray B. Browne and Donald Pizer (West Lafayette: Purdue University Studies, 1969), 200–19.
11. The fact that Faulkner never undertook a diplomatic mission behind the Iron Curtain suggests a certain unwillingness to play a role at the front lines of the cultural Cold War.
12. It’s important to note as well that while the Committee on Public Information didn’t send US writers overseas during World War I, the Committee did hire many literary men and women to serve as propagandists for the Division of Syndicated Features.
13. For more information on Wilder’s tour, see Amy Spellacy, “Neighbors North and South: Literary Culture, Political Rhetoric, and Inter-American Relations in the Era of the Good Neighbor Policy, 1928–1948” (PhD diss., University of Iowa, 2006), 125–28.
14. Liam Kennedy and Scott Lucas have argued that such private-public hybrids were in certain respects emblematic of Cold War culture’s incapacity to respect the division of civil society and the state. See their “Enduring Freedom: Public Diplomacy and U.S. Foreign Policy,” American Quarterly 57.2 (June 2005): 309–33.
15. The idea of “track two diplomacy” is first defined in W. D. Davidson and J. V. Montville, “Foreign Policy According to Freud,” Foreign Policy 45 (Winter 1981–82): 145–57.
16. For more information about the People-to-People program, see Christina Klein, Cold War Orientalism: Asia in the Middlebrow Imagination, 1945–1961 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 49–60, and Andrew Falk, Upstaging the Cold War: American Dissent and Cultural Diplomacy (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2010).
17. I take these passages from a recently published document collection tracing Faulkner’s involvement with the literary committee of the People-to-People program. See “Lost Classic: William Faulkner and the People-to-People Program,” Meridian 18 (January 2007): 55.
18. Ibid., 54.
19. In certain ways, Faulkner’s decision to satirize the very committee he was organizing can be seen as a deliberate way of rendering his literary correspondents comfortable with the idea of serving on such a body. Yet the fact that he proved a recalcitrant chairman who ultimately abandoned the entire project suggests otherwise.
20. See Eugene Burdick and William Lederer, The Ugly American (1958; New York: Norton, 1999).
21. See Caroline Henze-Gongol and Jeb Livingood’s introduction to “Lost Classics: William Faulkner and the People-to-People Program,” Meridian 18 (January 2007): 51. Faulkner himself didn’t comment on these examples, but, as David A. Davis has recently reminded us, the novelist disliked Senator McCarthy and the House Un-American Activities Committee and found repulsive the national hysteria over communism. See Davis.
22. Quoted in Blotner, “William Faulkner, Committee Chairman,” 212.
23. Ibid., 213.
24. Ibid., 214.
25. Faulkner, Essays, Speeches, and Public Letters, 161.
26. See William Faulkner, The Town (New York: Vintage, 1957), 189–91. Thanks are due Jack Williams for this reference.
27. Matthews, 4.
28. William Faulkner, The Mansion (1959), in Novels 1957–1962 (New York: Library of America, 1999), 526. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text.
29. Matthews, 22n30.
30. See Faulkner, The Mansion, 473. For an interesting but very different take on Russian ethnicity in The Mansion, see Randy Boyagoda, “From Revolutionary through Cold War: The Russian Outlanders of Faulkner’s South” (unpublished essay).
31. See Jon Smith, “Faulkner, Metropolitan Fashion, and ‘The South,’” in Faulkner’s Inheritance: Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha, 2005, ed. Joseph R. Urgo and Ann J. Abadie (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2007), 96.
32. See Alan Sinfield, “The Migration of Modernism: Remaking English Studies in the Cold War,” New Formations 2 (Summer 1987): 107–26; Lawrence H. Schwartz, Creating Faulkner’s Reputation: The Politics of Modern Literary Criticism (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1988), 199; and Klein, 66–67.
33. Modernism in this scenario plays an integral role in what we might call the Cold War version of Kantian aesthetics: the cultivation of detachment through aesthetic response doesn’t so much produce responsible national citizens as contribute to the making of responsible anti-Communists throughout the world.
34. Personal communication.
35. Cohn, “William Faulkner’s Ibero-American Novel Project,” 99.