BY GREG LONDE
Published: Issue 1, Summer 2009
Part of SPECIAL REPORT: The Arts & The Economy

In a 1962 editorial, Paul Blackburn, poet and then literary editor of The Nation, described a change in international letters after WWII, a change largely conditioned, by modernists such as “Pound, Yeats, and Dr. Williams.” These poets’ preoccupation with the processes and errors of translation had “grown into a climate of opinion and now [express] a real need. Now that colonialism has become an anachronism politically […] it is as though we are witnessing the sack of world literature […] by the American publishing business.”  Put differently, imperialism and the Spanish Civil War were yesterday’s headlines: Americans were finding a new way to be international, even a new way to be imperial, by bringing it all back home.

A decade earlier, in April of 1952, the Ford Foundation had announced the launch of a quarterly magazine of the arts designed, as Time magazine put it, “to show people outside the U.S. that ‘Americans can think as well as chew gum’.”  Perspectives USA—proposed and headed by globetrotting New Directions Press publisher James Laughlin— occupied newsstands in England, France, Germany, Italy and America in October, appearing simultaneously in the respective languages of each nation. Time’s description of the pilot issue further asserted that the journal gives “the flavor of a ‘little magazine’s’ fragile view of American culture, blown up      to Ford-plant size.”

Of course, one needs a heap of financial support to create an industrial-strength “little magazine”: the Ford Foundation was among the favorite laundering sources for the “Congress for Cultural Freedom,” a front organization for massive investments of CIA dollars. In the post-War period, the CIA had a strategic interest in funding cultural initiatives that would either proclaim Western cultural superiority outright, or that would operate as a kind of paradoxical propaganda: art that embodied American “freedom of expression” by dint of its non-representational, seemingly non-ideological surface. In opposition to official Soviet socialist realism, the CIA bankrolled foreign exhibitions of Abstract Expressionist painting and made an earlier mode of modernist lyricism diplomatically useful almost in spite of itself.  William Carlos Williams’s verse from the teens and ‘20s takes up a fifth of Perspectives’s inaugural issue. As such, a form that had been the preferred mode of distribution for poets like Pound, Moore and Dr. Williams thirty years prior—little magazines such as The Dial and Contact—offered a surprising design for mid-century literary expansionism.

This global gift of literary modernism was intimately and structurally tied to broader projects born of America’s post-War clout. The Marshall Plan began distributing funds to a devastated Europe in 1947; but it was also an oblique arts policy initiative, euphemizing the containment imperatives that lay behind such largesse in a flood of propaganda that accompanied the infrastructural bailout. A 1951 traveling exhibition, for instance, showed France Les Vrai Visage des U.S.A. (“The Real Face of the U.S.A.”)—displaying (read: fabricating) the untroubled prosperity of American labor relations, with a daub of local color.  Moreover, as Greg Barnhisel points out in an excellent recent overview of Perspectives USA, Paul Hoffman and Milton Katz became, respectively, the President and associate director of the Ford Foundation in 1950 fresh off of administrative positions in the implementation of the Marshall Plan.  For his part, Laughlin posed a contrary internationalism, but still couched this call in the rhetoric of advisory structures: “something should be done about sending as many American writers and artists as salesmen and technicians to the ‘undeveloped’ countries—to learn instead of teach. More of us here should realize we need the spiritual development.”

When the damning dalliances of literary fashion and state power were finally revealed in 1967, Andrew Kopkind lamented that while the “illusion of dissent was maintained” in such publications as Perspectives and, more famously, Encounter, “The catholicity and flexibility of CIA operations were major advantages. But it was a sham pluralism, and it was utterly corrupting.”  Forty years later, we know that even The Paris Review—the most catholic and flexible of them all—had state funds silently guiding its inception, a revelation that reignited the opprobrium of “corruption” and “taint” but also reminded us of how such outright condemnation is not adequate to a history blushing with awkward bluster and capable of boasting real successes of translation and international distribution.

Many contemporaries just found Laughlin’s project redundant—he often reprinted highlights of the New Directions back-catalog—or bureaucratically bland. It would be easy now—all documents declassified, all paper trails traced—to deride such a publication along the lines suggested by Time’s modernism-goes-electric critique. It is clear, that is, that we could see Laughlin’s “Intercultural Publications” as the compromised product of the so-called “Cultural Cold War,” this constellation of state-funded institutions, charitable foundations and publications that provided a veneer of aesthetic disinterest for a global power at the noontime of its neo-imperial day.

More interesting at the level of anecdote and more accurate at the level of political portraiture is a record of popular fiascos, embarrassed repudiations and frightfully sincere proclamations that can be recovered from the archive of mid-20th century covertly funded arts initiatives—the cracks and hiccups and awkward pauses that sound all the clearer on a larger stage. Every conspiracy was real; but the ubiquity of the CIA’s economic and ideological influence in the world of letters winds up, in retrospect, seeming like a murky but often mundane concoction of black-ops “persuasion” and a bookstore’s Employee Recommendation section (“recommended if you like liberal consensus,” “recommended if you like anti-Soviet diatribe”). An example, in closing:  in 1955, the US Information Services office in Paris requested from publishers their most “representative American books” for use by their Public Affairs division. What Robert MacGregor of New Directions sent in reply was Baudelaire’s echt-American Fleurs du Mal, laconically noting, “you might find FLOWERS OF EVIL a useful item for the New Year’s presentations to people of importance.”

Greg Londe is a Ph.D. candidate in English at Princeton University, interested in 20th and 21st century poetry and culture.

WORKS CITED

Barnhisel, Greg.  “Perspectives USA and the Cultural Cold War: Modernism in Service of the State.”  Modernism/modernity 14.4 (2007): 729-754.

Blackburn, Paul.  “The International Word.”  The Nation.  21 April 1962.  p. 357-360.

“Enter Perspectives USA.”  Time. 14 April 1952.

Kroen, Sheryl.  “Negotiations with the American Way: The Consumer and the Social Contract in Post-war Europe.”  In Consuming Cultures, Global Persepectives. Eds. John Brewer and Frank Trentmann.  Berg Publishers, 2006.  p. 251-278.

Kopkind, Andrew.  “CIA: The Great Corrupter.”  New Statesman.  24 February 1967.  Quoted in Frances Stonor Saunders, The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters. New York: The New Press, 2000.  p. 408-409.  (Saunders’s book published in the UK as Who Paid the Piper?).  Encounter, started in 1953, became the most infamous example of the CIA’s covert funding:  founding literary editor Stephen Spender resigned in 1967 upon the revelation of collaboration, unaware until then of the state source behind his backers at the Congress for Cultural Freedom.

Laughlin, James.  “Note by the Editors.”  New Directions 15: International Issue. New York: Meridian Books, 1955.  p. 12.

Robert MacGregor, letter to Mr. L.L. Brady, Public Affairs Officer, USIS, American Embassy in Paris, 1 July 1955.  New Directions Publishing Corp. papers, bMS Am 2077 (1681).  Houghton Library, Harvard University.  MacGregor further discussed the use of Fleurs du Mal for “end-of-the-year school prizes next June, the library loan collections and the lists of available titles circulated to the 21 French-speaking missions.”