Benjamen Walker's Theory of Everything - Louis Menand and the Cold War

Episode Date: June 10, 2021

Your host talks with Louis Menand about his new book “The Free World, Art and Thought in the Cold War” Radiotopia is a network of creators who are able to follow their curiosity and tell the stories they care about the most. Show your support for my fellow Radiotopia shows during our Spring Fundraiser. Donate today at https://on.prx.org/3wl9pWn

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Episodes every other week at neverpo.st and wherever you find pods. I've spent the pandemic hiding out on an island in France, but mentally I've been holed up in the 1950s researching a story about two critics who got caught up in the Cold War. Two critics who were both wittingly and unwittingly working for the CIA. It's a cultural Cold War story, and I hope, dear listener, to share it with you soon. In her famous 1999 book, The Cultural Cold War, Frances Stoner Saunders cracked open this secret history of how the CIA pushed cultural movements like abstract expressionism and free jazz. She's actually one of the very first people I interviewed when I started The Theory of Everything back in 2004.

But a lot of the research that's followed in her footsteps trades more in speculation and conspiracy theories. I've spent years looking for a book that could help me understand the intellectual history of the Cold War without dropping me deeper into this labyrinth of CIA rabbit holes. This is why I totally devoured Louis Manon's new book, The Free World, Art and Thought in the Cold War. It's a stunning feat of scholarship and history, but not, as he states in the introduction, a book about the cultural Cold War. If you follow Menand, who's a professor at Harvard and a staff writer at The New Yorker,

it's been obvious for some time now that he's been working on something big related to the Cold War. And his new book is very big. We're talking almost 1,000 pages big. It covers a lot of people you think you might know well, like George Orwell, Jean-Paul Sartre, Susan Sontag, Allen Ginsberg, and a number of art and intellectual movements, like post-structuralism and pop art, that you will know better when you finish the book.

I am so thrilled that Louis Menand, or Luke to everyone who knows him, had some time to talk with me about art and thought in the free world. Interestingly, it turns out, Luke also read Francis Stoner Saunders' book back when it came out. I thought it was very impressive. And so when I started thinking about writing my own book about it, I actually imagined that a lot of it would deal with the CIA and covert funding and the sort of whole cultural diplomacy aspect of the period, which, as you say, there have been a lot of books about. And then honestly, as I got into it, I began to think there's just not much there. I just found that it didn't pan out. And so then I realized that that's actually not the interesting story. The interesting story was just to do a cultural history of the period.

Obviously, we're not going to have enough time to talk about all the individuals and ideas in your book. So let's just get started with George Orwell in 1984. 1984 is where most of the world got its definition of totalitarianism. And you really make it clear just how important this book was. By the late 1950s, Big Brother is almost synonymous with Soviet communism. But you also note that Orwell never set out to write an anti-communism book. He believed there were many roads to totalitarianism. So how did this happen? How did this one particular idea or interpretation of 1984 win out over the others? Well, you're right about Orwell's intentions. He was semi-persuaded by an American writer, James Burnham, who wrote a book called The Managerial Revolution, that the future of mass societies might be some form of totalitarianism

of the kind that he fictionalizes in 1984. He was warning people, in particular left-wing intellectuals, not to go down that road, that there was a danger at the end of it. And that was an anxiety that many people had in the late 1940s. That's what Hannah Arendt's Origins of Totalitarianism is about, that it could happen here. So the warning was picked up by people who worried that the future of liberal democracies would be some kind of communist state like the Soviet Union, and also by people who worried that the future of liberal democracies, people on the left who worried that the future of liberal democracies would be some kind of fascist state like Nazi Germany.

So the general anxiety about totalitarianism spread across the political spectrum. Everybody was anxious about it with a different future in mind. And Orwell's book therefore spoke to everybody because it's very nonspecific ideologically. And then the truth is, I did not write about this much in the book, that the novel also benefited, as did Animal Farm, from heavy promotion by the American government. Okay, I have to interrupt here because most of this promotion was covert. It was the CIA that sent hundreds of thousands of copies of Orwell's novel into the world.

The CIA also secretly funded a 1984 movie that came out in 1956. But in the version that screened in the UK, Italy, and Germany, the CIA changed Orwell's ending. Yeah, in this version, Winston Smith goes out yelling down with Big Brother. The CIA turned 1984 into a warning of Soviet totalitarianism and proposed that death was better than submission. But this was just one interpretation of Orwell's book.

I'd love to get you to talk about how Orwell in 1984 aided some of the intellectuals and artists of the 1950s who wanted to express, you know, the anxiety they felt about mass culture and, you know, how they saw it as leading possibly to an Orwellian future? Yeah, the people who were worried about a totalitarian future like Hannah Arendt were generally highly critical of mass market commercial entertainment like Hollywood movies and so on. And one feature of the period that's very noticeable obviously now is the degree to which intellectuals bought into the sort of avant-garde kitsch binary. This idea that there's avant-garde art or fine art has a critical distance from the state, but that commercial culture is basically a

form of propaganda. And obviously, it can be a form of propaganda. It was in Germany. It was, to some extent, in Soviet Union. But the idea was that Hollywood is just duplicating what the Kremlin is doing to Soviet cinema. And a lot of people believe that. So there was a period in the really up until the mid-60s in which that was taken for granted that mass culture, popular culture was potentially dangerous. And then that all goes away really by 1965, it suddenly vanishes. That anxiety more or less disappears. For Menand, these anxieties disappear because a number of forms of American mass culture, like rock and roll, make their way back to the U.S. after being transformed in the cultural capitals of Europe.

It's been a hard day's night And I've been working like a dog You know, once the grown-ups started listening to the Beatles, the game was up. Hey, isn't that Malcolm there? American Pulp Fiction followed a similar path. French New Wave directors like Truffaut and Godard were obsessed with American crime novels, comic books, and movies. And then Hollywood got obsessed with the French New Wave directors like Truffaut and Godard were obsessed with American crime novels, comic books, and movies. And then Hollywood got obsessed with the French New Wave.

For Menon, Bonnie and Clyde doesn't just mark the arrival of the American New Wave, it's also the return of ideas that originated in America. The European fascination with American cinema, that's helpful because it shows American intellectuals that Hollywood cinema also has artistic merit or is seen to have artistic merit by filmmakers they can take seriously. Things like that help to change the atmosphere. So that's what Susan Sontag is picking up on in her famous essays in 1965, is this is due sensibility in which you can enjoy all this stuff. You don't have to feel moral or political compunctions about liking it. Let's talk about Paris. You really have this unique way in your writing of combining biography, history, ideas, and place. But in the free world, Paris is almost like a main character. I assume that Paris' centrality, pre-war centrality, disappears after 1945 because the country was devastated, of course, to some extent by the German occupation and by the invasion, D-Day invasion.

And it also had a kind of moral hangover from the extent to which the French were collaborationists. So I guess I just assumed that people stopped going there because between about 1890 and 1930 or 40, that was a place where artists from all over the world went to paint, writers went to write, people who wanted to live in a modern way went to live. But that continued after the war, to my surprise. So in your chapter on Sartre, post-war Paris is not just the backdrop for the story about the emergence of existentialism. Again, it's really integral. Can you talk about what it was about Paris at this moment that enabled Sartre to articulate his ideas about existentialism and freedom? So what made it possible for Sartre to kind of walk on the stage almost immediately after Paris was liberated, which was in August 1944. And I think the answer is what I just said,

which is that the French wanted a fresh start. They wanted to forget what had just happened, both for reasons having to do with trying to revive the economy and put the country back on its feet, but also, as I said, because there was a lot of moral hangover. So Archer's philosophy is, you can start over, basically. It's a philosophy of freedom. So it's just make free choices. Don't let the circumstances dictate what your choice shall be, and then you're free. So there's not a lot of baggage with that philosophy. It enables you, basically, to forget the past. The past no longer has a determining effect on what you should do. You could decide what you want to do today,

right now. So I think that was hugely appealing in France. And he comes on the scene in 1945. He gives this talk in Paris called Existentialism as a Humanism in October, and it just begins what Beauvoir called the existentialist offensive. And it kind of sweeps the cultural field for quite a period of time, both in France and in the US. They're really dominant figures for three or four years, Sartre and Beauvoir. So I think that's the reason that Paris is the right place for that to happen. I guess thinking about how this myth of Paris liberating itself, you know, I've tried to understand some existentialist ideas, you know, from my own youth to adulthood. And I just, you know, just thinking of how central that might be

to the idea of existentialism itself, it's really fascinating. You talk about that in your book, about how this is a myth that a lot of people were happy to keep propagating, even though they knew it wasn't true. And Sartre did too, that's right. I mean, he knew better, but he felt he wanted to make people feel somehow they'd been resistant when many times they hadn't. Yeah. In a way that almost seems more consequential than the other myth that he was a member of the resistance. Yeah. It's amazing that his reception in... Susan Suleiman wrote a good book about this. His reception in the United States was as a kind of freedom fighter who was on the barricades and

so on, which really wasn't true at all. Paris is also the setting for one of the most tragic stories in your book, the encounter between Richard Wright and James Baldwin, two African-American writers who both came to Paris in search of freedom. I don't think I ever realized how central the Cold War was to this tragedy. I think most people know the story that Wright was a kind of sponsor or mentor for James Baldwin in the late 1940s when Baldwin was just 20 years old and just starting out. And Wright met with him, helped him get a fellowship so he could work on his first novel. And then Wright moved to Paris around 1947 permanently, and shortly after, Baldwin moved to Paris, and the first thing he

does when he gets to Paris is write an article attacking Richard Wright's big novel, Native Son, in a little English-language magazine in Paris, to whose editors Richard Wright had introduced him. And then a year after that, he published, I think a year or two years after that, he publishes another attack on Native Son and Partisan Review. And perversely, from the point of view of anybody trying to say, what's a smart thing for a young black writer to do? It actually works for him. And then he publishes his first collection of essays, Notes of a Native Son, appropriating the title of Richard Wright's famous novel as if to say, I of a Native Son, appropriating the title of Richard Wright's famous novel as if to say, I'm the native son, not Richard Wright. I can explain Black experience

in America better than this guy can. And by the end of the 60s, Wright dies in 1960. In 1962, a French writer, Michel Fabre, is trying to write a biography of Richard Wright. He comes to the United States. Everybody says, nobody cares about Richard Wright anymore. It's all about James Baldwin now. You used the word overdetermined to sum up the relationship between Wright and Baldwin, which I just love so much. But I want to talk about a moment when they are in agreement.

This was at the Congress of Black Writers and Artists, which took place in Paris in September of 1956. And a number of the speakers at this Congress were advancing a concept, negritude, that was in many ways not just a turn towards Africa, but also a rejection of the West. Can you talk about why both Baldwin and Wright rejected this idea. And did they have the same reasons? I think they did, actually. And at the conference, one line that was taken was, I guess we would call it pan-Africanist line, which is that all black people around the world share a certain culture that originates in Africa. The term negritude dates from the 1930s. It was coined by Aimé Césaire.

It was from Martinique, who was of course an important figure after the war in the post-colonial era. And both Baldwin and Wright rejected that because they felt whatever you could say about Martiniquans or West Africans and so on, it just wasn't true of American blacks. That the black American experience was just different from the experience of colonized peoples.

And they didn't want to be identified with that. It's complicated because, of course, decolonization as a post-war phenomenon, which is sort of the big story here, was the force behind the American Civil Rights Movement, got the federal government more engaged than it wanted to get in that. But Baldwin and Wright felt that the black experience was different in America, and they also were both modernists. They both believed that the answer to oppression is to, you know, use the tools of the West, which are tools of reason and technology. And they both believe that. And they both identified with the West in the Cold War,

Baldwin as well as Wright. So I think their reasons are actually quite similar. I mean, that's what makes the whole feud so bizarre is that they aren't really that far apart. They did see eye to eye on on the pan-africanist thing the american james baldwin present i recently watched a documentary on the congress called lumiere noirs and in it the writer carol phillips said something pretty intriguing about baldwin the conference is important to most people, I think, in the classroom in America, in universities, because of Baldwin's essay, Princes in Power. I'm not sure without Baldwin's essay, to be honest, whether that many people would be aware of the conference.

You know, it was completely uncovered in the American press. I couldn't find a single story about it. So it's true. I think that that essay Baldwin wrote, which was published in Encounter, was how most people in the U.S. heard about it. I mean, I don't think that Baldwin and Wright's views had a lot of impact on people like Fanon, who's sort of the important figure at the conference. But yeah, Baldwin did have a lot of influence on shaping perceptions of the conference. But yeah, Baldwin did have a lot of influence on shaping perceptions of

the conference. Here's where I feel like we just have to mention that the magazine that Baldwin was reporting on the conference for, Encounter, was a CIA front. Just as I think we need to point out that the CIA also funded Richard Wright on his reporting trip to the Bandung conference in 1955, because as you note in your book, Wright was extremely hostile and dismissive of the post-colonial ideas that were discussed at Bandung. He also, I think, wildly misrepresented some of these things that he covered. He was anti-racist and he couldn't tolerate the idea of a kind of racially based nationalism, which he felt a lot of these decolonizing states were adopting. I don't think that was really fair, but that was the line that he took. So he's a complicated

figure. There's a whole, which I don't get into because I couldn't get to the bottom of it if I tried, but there's a sort of conspiracy theory that his early death was a result of some kind of nefarious poisoning or something. I don't know. His daughter believes that he was killed. Many of his friends and colleagues did. And as you know, Island of Hallucinations, the unfinished novel that Wright was working on at the time of his death. It was all about the CIA trying to infiltrate and destroy African-American expats or exiles in Paris. But I guess at this point, we might as well just talk about the last chapter in your book where you do take us behind the scenes, where you do show us the CIA octopus in the rabbit hole, so to speak. I'm just going

to quote you here. The CIA owned or subsidized more than 50 newspapers, news services, radio stations, and periodicals, most of them abroad. American publishing houses, including Putnam's, Ballantyne, and Doubleday, unknowingly published books that had CIA involvement. The CIA seems to have funneled money to the Iowa Writers Workshop. Now, all this was revealed in a number of exposés in the late 60s, not just in underground magazines like Ramparts, but the New York Times as well. And I'm really curious what your memories of this time were and how your initial reactions informed or didn't inform how you decided to approach this stuff in your book. Yeah.

So I was, I guess, 15 years old in 1967, but I was sort of plugged into what was going on just because my parents were very interested in politics. They were very liberal. So they were all over the CIA stuff when it started coming out. It actually started coming out in 1965. That's when the New York Times outed the Congress for Cultural Freedom as a CIA creature. Interestingly, nothing really came of

that story until the Ramparts piece in 1967, which was about the National Student Association. And that's the story that pulled the thread that unraveled the whole tapestry of covert funding, which turned out to be, as I said, incredibly elaborate and global. They just funded all kinds of political and cultural organizations that people assumed were independent. And I end the book with that, along with Vietnam, because that's really the moment when you look back and you think, what was really going on here? Yeah, after I finished your book, I finally realized what my problem with all the CIA stuff is. It's that the revelations are just too massive. You know what I mean?

They don't just reveal truths. They also obscure truths, which makes it super frustrating if you want to pin down what some of these writers and artists and critics were doing when they were working for the CIA during the Cold War. Yeah. You know, what conclusion can you draw? That it was all a sham? That doesn't seem right. That they were all puppets? That doesn't quite seem right either. I list all the people, both American and British intellectuals, most of whom are liberal or left people who contributed to Encounter, and they didn't have to be told what

to say because they were saying exactly what the government wanted them to say. And that just exposed the sham of American intellectual culture, that these people, imagine they had some distance from capitalism and militarism and anti-communism in the American state and so forth, which they must have regarded sort of as crude entities. And it turned out that they were actually playing on the team with them. Louis Menand is the author of The Free World, Art and Thought in the Cold War. Get it wherever you get your books. The Theory of Everything is produced by me, Benjamin Walker. Special thanks this time around to David Levine.

The Theory of Everything is a proud founding member of Radiotopia, home to some of the world's best podcasts. Find them all at radiotopia.fm. Radiotopia. From PRX.