Micro-Review: Ceci n'est pas un livre sur la guerre froide
Book: Louis Menand, _The Free World: Art and Thought in the Cold War_ (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021)
Perhaps the most immediate thing to say about a book subtitled “Art and Thought in the Cold War” is that its temporal scope is not bounded by the Cold War in total (i.e., something like 1947-1991), nor is the book as a whole about the Cold War as such (despite an opening chapter on the intellectual formation of George F. Kennan that sustains this impression for a few pages, counterpoint to a closing chapter in which Kennan’s condemnation of the Vietnam War is paired with the revelation of CIA involvement in funding culture to mark the end of an age of pseudo-innocence). Rather, this is a book about the transatlantic intellectual and artistic history of the nearly-three-decade-long economic boom that followed World War II in the titular Free World. Hence its geographic scope is limited to the U.S.A., occasionally Britain, and even more rarely such elements of French thought as made it to American universities. Its temporal remit is a “Cold War,” but its turning point (and ending point) is neither the Hungarian revolt nor the Vietnam War nor even the usual cultural history mile-marker, the student revolt of 1968, but the energy crisis of 1973, which put an end to the economic boom that funded so much creative activity. The narration taken to this point, the book knows next to nothing of the world after 1973. This is not a criticism—the book is long enough as it is. The restricted scope was absolutely necessary to avoid straining the wrists of its readers. Assume the subtitle is “Art and Thought in 1945-1973, Narrated from the Point of View of an American Ivy League English Professor Born in 1952” (which is what, in fact, this book is), and all will be well.
Enough about the subtitle. Now, to the book itself.
Unlike his Pulitzer Prize-winning The Metaphysical Club (2004), Louis Menand’s latest contribution to intellectual history, The Free World (2021) lacks a coherent narrative structure. The former book grews out of the premise that William James, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., John Dewey, and others of the pragmatist generation were formed by their nurture among a minority of abolitionists and other moral absolutists, only to have their certainties upended by the nature of a bloody ideologically driven Civil War. This pushed them to become anti-foundationalists committed to plucking tentative truths from uncertain realities. In this latter book, the organizing theme is not a thesis but a motif—freedom, aesthetic and intellectual—which is constantly threatened by the very attempts to make and keep it a reality. This motif appears most clearly in Menand’s account of Black existentialist and anti-colonial writers caught between the CIA’s enforcement of a certain narrative of cultural freedom among American writers who sought integration into the U.S. mainstream versus the freedom sought by African and Caribbean writers who sought to define themselves in opposition to the old colonial metropole.
Rather than a page-turning narrative, The Free World offers itself as a textbook for the type of survey course that appears in university catalogs as “Special Topics in History: U.S. Arts and Ideas, 1945-1973.” For this latter purpose it would in fact be excellent, as even its most meandering chapters’ long parades of names and titles would in fact serve as useful jumping-off points for students seeking topics for their own seminar papers.
By far, the book’s best chapters are those where Menand is in his own wheelhouse: the intellectual history of English departments and the politics of poetry anthologies in the postwar United States. These chapters could stand on their own as a history of the rise of the English department from the status of awkward refugee from the little magazines to great power within the American university imperium. Along the same lines, Menand uses the rise of the feminist movement primarily as a reason to discuss Betty Friedan and Susan Sontag as writers, with Norman Mailer playing the role of sexist foil. The same pattern plays out in Menand’s the discussion of the Civil Rights movement, which is narrated insofar as it impinged on the trajectories of Richard Wright, James Baldwin, and Ralph Waldo Ellison; this time, the reactionary counterpoint is William Faulkner.
The book’s chosen endpoint—the 1973 energy crisis, which halted the postwar economic boom and began the dismantling of institutional structures shelters for the intelligentsia in the U.S.—precludes Menand’s having to continue these stories into our own century of the subsequent decline and fall of the English department, identity, politics, #metoo, and so on. The book is probably the better for it, as the perspective afforded by distance not only helps avoid anachronism in relating the events of the ‘50s and ‘60s, but also (precisely by the absence of making these connections) helps cast into sharper relief what is new in the cultural peculiarities of our own era.
The overall tone of the book, then—as Menand himself admits—is therefore nostalgia. Read and remember, if you can; we of the younger generations of academics can read and weep!