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The Space Between: Literature and Culture 1914-1945

Volume 13, 2017 | International Intrigue: Plotting Espionage as Cultural Artifact

A Special Topics Issue
Phyllis Lassner, Northwestern University & Will May, University of Southampton

Editors' Introduction

ARTICLES

Trial by Genre

Rebecca West and the "Radio Traitor": The 1351 Treason Act in 1945
David Glover

Spyography: Compton Mackenzie, Modernism, and the Intelligence Memoir
Mark David Kaufman

"Now you’re one of us": Postwar Surveillance in Billy Wilder's A Foreign Affair
Paula Derdiger

Intelligent Forms

Snoop-Women with Notebooks: Naomi Mitchison, Mass Observation, and the Gender of Domestic Intelligence
Megan Faragher

Intelligence and Information in the Espionage Fiction of Dennis Wheatley
Rebecah Pulsifer and Slaney Chadwick Ross

Archiving the Spy

Pearl S. Buck’s FBI File, 1938–1945
Stuart Christie

Three Layers of Ambiguity: Homosexual Spies and International Intrigue in Fascist Italy
Benedetta Carnaghi

“The Ends of a State”: James Angleton, Counterintelligence and the New Criticism
John Kimsey

Dancing with Boatmen, or the Retirement of the Spy: Espionage and Community in W. H. Auden's Poetry
Erin G. Carlston

REVIEW ESSAY

Memory and Prophecy in the Space Between
Alex Belsey

BOOK REVIEWS

Espionage and Exile: Fascism and Anti-Fascism in British Spy Fiction and Film
Phyllis Lassner
Reviewed by Robin Feenstra

Around 1945: Literature, Citizenship, Rights
Allan Hepburn, ed.
Reviewed by Eleni Coundouriotis

Modernism at the Microphone: Radio, Propaganda, and Literary Aesthetics during World War II
Melissa Dinsman
Reviewed by Ian Whittington

At the Mercy of Their Clothes: Modernism, the Middlebrow, and British Garment Culture
Celia Marshik
Reviewed by Sarah Cornish

Conceiving Strangeness in British First World War Writing
Claire Buck
Reviewed by Ann Rea

Mourning and Mysticism in First World War Literature and Beyond: Grappling with Ghosts
George M. Johnson
Reviewed by Marlene Briggs

CONTRIBUTORS
Biographies

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This essay examines a major shift in Rebecca West’s status as a public intellectual in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, focussing upon her reports on a series of treason trials in London, notably that of the German propagandist William Joyce, known as “Lord Haw-Haw”. Despite the widespread fear that Joyce’s broadcasts evoked, including the belief that his programmes were fed by a large network of spies and fifth columnists, his conviction and subsequent execution was controversial, largely because his defence counsel was able to prove that he was an American citizen and not a subject of the British Crown. West’s bestselling book The Meaning of Treason (1947) has been cited as the definitive argument that Joyce was morally guilty, even though his punishment effectively rested upon a legal technicality. To assess the validity of this claim, the essay considers West’s dissection of Joyce’s character, his past, and his politics, and especially her uncanny suggestion that “a drop or two of treason in their veins” helps to inoculate patriotic subjects against the temptation of disloyalty. This essay examines a major shift in Rebecca West’s status as a public intellectual in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, focussing upon her reports on a series of treason trials in London, notably that of the German propagandist William Joyce, known as “Lord Haw-Haw”. Despite the widespread fear that Joyce’s broadcasts evoked, including the belief that his programmes were fed by a large network of spies and fifth columnists, his conviction and subsequent execution was controversial, largely because his defence counsel was able to prove that he was an American citizen and not a subject of the British Crown. West’s bestselling book The Meaning of Treason (1947) has been cited as the definitive argument that Joyce was morally guilty, even though his punishment effectively rested upon a legal technicality. To assess the validity of this claim, the essay considers West’s dissection of Joyce’s character, his past, and his politics, and especially her uncanny suggestion that “a drop or two of treason in their veins” helps to inoculate patriotic subjects against the temptation of disloyalty.
This article traces the interwar emergence of the spyography, a mode of life-writing that shares much in common with literary modernism, including a fraught legal history. More specifically, this essay focuses on Compton Mackenzie, the Scottish novelist turned SIS agent who violated the UK Official Secrets Act by writing about his experiences in his WWI intelligence memoir, Greek Memories (1932). Taking into consideration Mackenzie’s wartime experiences, his subsequent legal battle, and his vindictive spy-farce, Water on the Brain (1933), this paper argues that spyography is a modernist genre in its own right, a contested narrative that trades on the pleasures of secrecy and revelation, blurs the line between fact and fiction, and redefines the relationship between literature and national security. This article traces the interwar emergence of the spyography, a mode of life-writing that shares much in common with literary modernism, including a fraught legal history. More specifically, this essay focuses on Compton Mackenzie, the Scottish novelist turned SIS agent who violated the UK Official Secrets Act by writing about his experiences in his WWI intelligence memoir, Greek Memories (1932). Taking into consideration Mackenzie’s wartime experiences, his subsequent legal battle, and his vindictive spy-farce, Water on the Brain (1933), this paper argues that spyography is a modernist genre in its own right, a contested narrative that trades on the pleasures of secrecy and revelation, blurs the line between fact and fiction, and redefines the relationship between literature and national security.
This essay examines Billy Wilder’s film A Foreign Affair (1948) in the context of Germany’s political, ethical, and cinematic reconstruction after World War II. It argues that the film is set apart from other films of the immediate postwar era by its unsettling ambivalence and also by its thorough meditation on surveillance as a political activity, artistic strategy, and tool for existential investigation. Through its espionage plot, its hybrid and meta-cinematic approach to genre, and its production history, A Foreign Affair suggests that surveillance is both the activity that most characterizes daily life in postwar Germany as well as the fundamental practice of postwar filmmaking and film viewing as the world tries to process and move beyond the horrific events of the recent past. Wilder’s position as exile-surveyor, moreover, combined with the spy thriller tropes of the film, reveal the instability and ambivalence of the immediate postwar period in Europe in a way that was not always visible in more propagandistic or didactic films. This essay examines Billy Wilder’s film A Foreign Affair (1948) in the context of Germany’s political, ethical, and cinematic reconstruction after World War II. It argues that the film is set apart from other films of the immediate postwar era by its unsettling ambivalence and also by its thorough meditation on surveillance as a political activity, artistic strategy, and tool for existential investigation. Through its espionage plot, its hybrid and meta-cinematic approach to genre, and its production history, A Foreign Affair suggests that surveillance is both the activity that most characterizes daily life in postwar Germany as well as the fundamental practice of postwar filmmaking and film viewing as the world tries to process and move beyond the horrific events of the recent past. Wilder’s position as exile-surveyor, moreover, combined with the spy thriller tropes of the film, reveal the instability and ambivalence of the immediate postwar period in Europe in a way that was not always visible in more propagandistic or didactic films.
Novelist Naomi Mitchison and Home Intelligence head Mary Adams were crucial supporters of Mass Observation’s qualitative approach to public opinion collection, but their efforts were significantly curtailed when the public denounced observers as internal spies. This article traces the backlash against MO’s methodology, both bureaucratically and publicly, uncovering that MO critics were partially fueled by the gendering of its unique methodology. While some considered interviews and surveys tantamount to domestic espionage, the subsequent turn towards quantitative data devalued women’s experiences by favoring institutionalized patriarchal approaches to analyzing public opinion. Within this context, Mitchison’s novel We Have Been Warned similarly presents a clash between these two gendered methods of understanding public opinion. Through its advocacy of subjective epistemology against the fetish for so-called objective data, Mitchison’s interwar novel suggests the importance of gender to debates over data collection and polling. Novelist Naomi Mitchison and Home Intelligence head Mary Adams were crucial supporters of Mass Observation’s qualitative approach to public opinion collection, but their efforts were significantly curtailed when the public denounced observers as internal spies. This article traces the backlash against MO’s methodology, both bureaucratically and publicly, uncovering that MO critics were partially fueled by the gendering of its unique methodology. While some considered interviews and surveys tantamount to domestic espionage, the subsequent turn towards quantitative data devalued women’s experiences by favoring institutionalized patriarchal approaches to analyzing public opinion. Within this context, Mitchison’s novel We Have Been Warned similarly presents a clash between these two gendered methods of understanding public opinion. Through its advocacy of subjective epistemology against the fetish for so-called objective data, Mitchison’s interwar novel suggests the importance of gender to debates over data collection and polling.
This article examines the spy novels of Dennis Wheatley as exemplars of espionage fiction's desire to grapple with changing understandings of the role of the individual in the field of intelligence services. Wheatley's crackerjack spy, Gregory Sallust, is adept at both mastering and synthesizing information, and this skill set puts him at odds with prevailing mid-century trends in information theory, which tended to view human intelligence as incapable of effectively analyzing the large amounts of data that technological advances made available for the first time. Wheatley's Sallust, a prototype of James Bond who blends analytical brilliance with intense personality, is a striking example of the ways in which espionage fiction between the wars negotiated a desire to privilege human experience against new understandings of both human intelligence and intelligence gathering. This article examines the spy novels of Dennis Wheatley as exemplars of espionage fiction's desire to grapple with changing understandings of the role of the individual in the field of intelligence services. Wheatley's crackerjack spy, Gregory Sallust, is adept at both mastering and synthesizing information, and this skill set puts him at odds with prevailing mid-century trends in information theory, which tended to view human intelligence as incapable of effectively analyzing the large amounts of data that technological advances made available for the first time. Wheatley's Sallust, a prototype of James Bond who blends analytical brilliance with intense personality, is a striking example of the ways in which espionage fiction between the wars negotiated a desire to privilege human experience against new understandings of both human intelligence and intelligence gathering.
This article analyses data selected from declassified, public-access FBI files on American writer Pearl S. Buck compiled before and during the Second World War. The argument establishes a crux between literary production and Cold War ideology, such that the FBI, backed by emerging technologies of surveillance, sought to create near-evidentiary “realities” out of what were merely literary tastes and ideological propensities. I call this powerful, period curtailment of literary interpretive range, in the context of the Second Red Scare, evidentiary realism. As privileged readers who constructed their own canons out of published materials, deemed acceptable or unacceptable, FBI case managers “close-read” literary materials for evidence of political subversion. Where they could not locate direct and actionable evidence of subversion in Buck's literary texts or pronouncements, case managers activated otherwise latent data by providing crucial interpretive links joining disparate signifying chains. Likewise buoyed by the ad hoc submission of data delivered along networks of enthusiastic volunteer informants nationwide, such government-backed interpretive communities, formal and informal, imposed strikingly narrow (statist) regimes of literary preference. At the same time, officials at the FBI enforced modes of censorship—alternating between the selective suppression of pertinent information and its opportune release—when delivering classified, confidential, or otherwise inaccessible information to the public. This article analyses data selected from declassified, public-access FBI files on American writer Pearl S. Buck compiled before and during the Second World War. The argument establishes a crux between literary production and Cold War ideology, such that the FBI, backed by emerging technologies of surveillance, sought to create near-evidentiary “realities” out of what were merely literary tastes and ideological propensities. I call this powerful, period curtailment of literary interpretive range, in the context of the Second Red Scare, evidentiary realism. As privileged readers who constructed their own canons out of published materials, deemed acceptable or unacceptable, FBI case managers “close-read” literary materials for evidence of political subversion. Where they could not locate direct and actionable evidence of subversion in Buck's literary texts or pronouncements, case managers activated otherwise latent data by providing crucial interpretive links joining disparate signifying chains. Likewise buoyed by the ad hoc submission of data delivered along networks of enthusiastic volunteer informants nationwide, such government-backed interpretive communities, formal and informal, imposed strikingly narrow (statist) regimes of literary preference. At the same time, officials at the FBI enforced modes of censorship—alternating between the selective suppression of pertinent information and its opportune release—when delivering classified, confidential, or otherwise inaccessible information to the public.
This article delves into the stories of two foreign queer spies in Fascist Italy, the Swiss Roberto Hodel and the German Gerhard Dobbert. The Fascist regime cultivated a dual relationship with homosexuals: it exploited them for their contacts, but persecuted them as “enemies of the new man” who undermined the Fascist understanding of morality. This article aims at illustrating this relationship, by focusing on these two cases and ultimately proving that the Fascist surveillance—like any other—is doomed to fail, because these double agents are “imperfect” tools. Spies live in a gray zone of blurred agencies and conflicting incentives. Like in fiction, where characters play a deceitful role, the archival documents analyzed in this essay replicate that deception in three layers of ambiguity. Just as spy novels become open-ended trajectories of several stages of suspicion, these layers of ambiguity are multiplied in the spies’ surveillance reports, where the distrust of the foreign alien is combined with the rejection of homosexuality to designate an extremely ambiguous “other” that the Fascists both reject and take advantage of. This article delves into the stories of two foreign queer spies in Fascist Italy, the Swiss Roberto Hodel and the German Gerhard Dobbert. The Fascist regime cultivated a dual relationship with homosexuals: it exploited them for their contacts, but persecuted them as “enemies of the new man” who undermined the Fascist understanding of morality. This article aims at illustrating this relationship, by focusing on these two cases and ultimately proving that the Fascist surveillance—like any other—is doomed to fail, because these double agents are “imperfect” tools. Spies live in a gray zone of blurred agencies and conflicting incentives. Like in fiction, where characters play a deceitful role, the archival documents analyzed in this essay replicate that deception in three layers of ambiguity. Just as spy novels become open-ended trajectories of several stages of suspicion, these layers of ambiguity are multiplied in the spies’ surveillance reports, where the distrust of the foreign alien is combined with the rejection of homosexuality to designate an extremely ambiguous “other” that the Fascists both reject and take advantage of.
Before becoming CIA counterintelligence chief during the high Cold War, James Angleton was an acolyte of Modernist poetry and booster of the New Critics, many of whom he cultivated pre-World War II when, as an undergraduate at Yale, he co-founded the avant-garde journal Furioso. Recruited into the OSS by Yale’s Norman Pearson, Angleton recruited individuals associated with the New Criticism into postwar counterintelligence work, which he described, adapting Eliot, as “a wilderness of mirrors.” Detailing such connections, this essay further argues that certain principles – as well as contradictions – of New Critical thought inform Angelton’s counterintelligence practice. I.A. Richards’ notion of poetry as “pseudo-statement,” i.e., a form of deception that is morally defensible because it affirms life in the face of dehumanizing mechanism (the latter being seen as a force which menaces the modern West) is key, as is John Crowe Ransom’s call for a criticism that will be formalist, objective and ontological, which is to say abstracted from that which is “merely” personal, political and/or sociohistorical. In this connection, I show that the New Critics’ persistent practice of opposing poetry to rhetoric – with the former seen as solitary spiritual quest and the latter as mass manipulation for political ends – echoes Plato’s quarrel between philosophy and rhetoric, but with the binary reframed as a contrast/contest between language arts. I contend that, for a figure such as Angleton, disinformation and deception – supposed hallmarks of rhetoric and totalitarianism – are necessary if democracy, which Ransom compares to a beautiful poem, is to survive. Before becoming CIA counterintelligence chief during the high Cold War, James Angleton was an acolyte of Modernist poetry and booster of the New Critics, many of whom he cultivated pre-World War II when, as an undergraduate at Yale, he co-founded the avant-garde journal Furioso. Recruited into the OSS by Yale’s Norman Pearson, Angleton recruited individuals associated with the New Criticism into postwar counterintelligence work, which he described, adapting Eliot, as “a wilderness of mirrors.” Detailing such connections, this essay further argues that certain principles – as well as contradictions – of New Critical thought inform Angelton’s counterintelligence practice. I.A. Richards’ notion of poetry as “pseudo-statement,” i.e., a form of deception that is morally defensible because it affirms life in the face of dehumanizing mechanism (the latter being seen as a force which menaces the modern West) is key, as is John Crowe Ransom’s call for a criticism that will be formalist, objective and ontological, which is to say abstracted from that which is “merely” personal, political and/or sociohistorical. In this connection, I show that the New Critics’ persistent practice of opposing poetry to rhetoric – with the former seen as solitary spiritual quest and the latter as mass manipulation for political ends – echoes Plato’s quarrel between philosophy and rhetoric, but with the binary reframed as a contrast/contest between language arts. I contend that, for a figure such as Angleton, disinformation and deception – supposed hallmarks of rhetoric and totalitarianism – are necessary if democracy, which Ransom compares to a beautiful poem, is to survive.
This article questions and complicates the argument previously made by critics of W.H. Auden’s work—including myself—that Auden’s early poetry participates in the discourse of espionage through encryption, concealment, or masquerade, and that it is therefore peculiarly difficult in a way that Auden’s later work is not. In this piece I pinpoint Auden’s 1936 collection Look, Stranger! as the publication in which the trope of espionage is first turned to a new and different purpose, and then virtually abandoned for the rest of Auden’s life, and argue that there is greater thematic and political continuity between Auden’s pre-war and post-war poetry than I and others have previously suggested. This article questions and complicates the argument previously made by critics of W.H. Auden’s work—including myself—that Auden’s early poetry participates in the discourse of espionage through encryption, concealment, or masquerade, and that it is therefore peculiarly difficult in a way that Auden’s later work is not. In this piece I pinpoint Auden’s 1936 collection Look, Stranger! as the publication in which the trope of espionage is first turned to a new and different purpose, and then virtually abandoned for the rest of Auden’s life, and argue that there is greater thematic and political continuity between Auden’s pre-war and post-war poetry than I and others have previously suggested.

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