Words, Words, Words

A Treacherous Secret Agent: How Literature Spoke Truth to Power During the Red Scare by Marjorie Garber; Yale University Press, 256 pp., $30

For three long decades, artists used literature’s “slippery language,” double meanings, and subversive codespeak to strike back against the U.S. government’s Communist hunters. In her new book, A Treacherous Secret Agent, Marjorie Garber documents how the literary classics infiltrated and confounded official committee proceedings and television broadcasts with “an uncanny counter-testimony,” often too subtle for the investigators to detect.

Garber weaves her argument together with overt and subliminal exchanges from hearings into suspected un-American activities conducted from the late 1930s until the early 1960s by members of the House and Senate and by the Atomic Energy Commission. We read testimony from J. Robert Oppenheimer, the atomic scientist with surpassing literary erudition; Pete Seeger, under attack for his lyrics, left-wing activism, and past Communist Party membership; Paul Robeson, the brilliant bass-baritone, Shakespearean actor, and essayist, stripped of his passport and most of his livelihood for his outspoken beliefs; and Joseph Papp, creator of Shakespeare in the Park, who once told interrogators, “I cannot control the writings of Shakespeare.”

The Bard’s writings, especially Julius Caesar, figure prominently in Garber’s story. In Edward R. Murrow’s closing lines for a 1953 episode of See It Now, the CBS broadcaster parroted Senator Joseph McCarthy, who had quoted Caesar at one of his infamous hearings: “On what meat doth this our Caesar feed?” Murrow then added what he considered to be a “not altogether inappropriate” rejoinder, which appears just three lines earlier in the play: “The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars but in ourselves.” Garber sees similar pointedness in the timing of a You Are There reenactment, “The Assassination of Julius Caesar,” which aired on CBS on March 7, 1953, two days after Stalin’s death. (“This man / Is not become a God?”) That June, Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s film adaptation of Julius Caesar premiered. There is more: In one of only a few connections to the present, Garber recalls the 2017 modern-dress performance of the play featuring a blond wearing a long red tie as the lead. “The power of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar,” Garber writes, “resides not in the politics of the moment but in the play itself.”

Many of Shakespeare’s other plays also appear repeatedly in these pages, unsurprising given Garber’s standing as a literary scholar. She also cites the poetry of John Dunne (a particular passion of Oppenheimer’s), T. S. Eliot’s essays, Thomas Kydd’s The Spanish Tragedy, and other classics.

Garber acknowledges that she is not the first to link Galileo’s plight to that of Oppenheimer following his 1954 appearance before the Personnel Security Board of the Atomic Energy Commission. Nor is she first to glean from Robeson’s testimony echoes of the most admirable traits of Othello, Robeson’s signature role. (“Speak of me as I am. I have done the state some service, and they know’t.”)

Transcripts from the hearings show witnesses trapping their questioners in public ridicule. On December 6, 1938, at an early hearing of the House Un-American Activities Committee, Alabama Democrat Joe Starnes questioned Hallie Flanagan, the national director of the Federal Theater Project, a branch of the Works Progress Administration. Starnes read aloud a paragraph from her 1931 article on the quest of actors and theatrical workers to create “a new social order” via a network of free theaters. This vision, Flanagan had written, “invests their undertaking with a certain Marlowesque madness.” (Here Garber explains that Flanagan was referring to Christopher Marlowe’s “do-or-die determination,” like that of two of his most memorable characters, Faustus and Tamburlaine.”)

Starnes seized not on the obvious red flag of a new social order but on the prospect of manipulating Flanagan into naming names. He demanded to know if “this Marlowe” was a Communist.

“I am very sorry,” Flanagan said. “I was quoting from Christopher Marlowe.”

Starnes pressed on. “Tell us who Marlowe is, so we can get the proper reference, because that is all we want to do.”

“Put in the record,” she replied, “that he was the greatest dramatist in the period immediately preceding Shakespeare.”

The hearing room erupted in laughter. Next-day headlines mocked Starnes, a former teacher with two college degrees, and the exchange resurfaced 24 years later in his brief New York Times obituary.

Ultimately, Garber’s fresh examination of a well-explored period provides ample evidence to support the notion that literature, acting as a secret agent, “baffled, alarmed, and spooked” the men who “attacked creative artists, belittled poetry, and boasted of their own expertise. What they did not realize,” she writes, “—what their present-day descendants still do not realize—was that literature was reading them.

The post Words, Words, Words appeared first on The American Scholar.