Cold War Correspondents: Ginsberg, Kerouac, Cassady, and the Political Economy of Beat Letters - Allen Ginsberg - Jack Kerouac - Neal Cassady - Brief Article

Twentieth Century Literature, Summer, 2000 by Oliver Harris

Ross is surely right here, and his comments suggest an inviting link back to Ginsberg. But this link demands historical specificity: we have to understand the early 1950s as fixing a very particular epistolary context for poet-prophets as well as for atom spies.

The Rosenbergs could be found guilty of living their private lives politically because this was a period proclaiming the end of ideology: any alternatives to a hegemonic national narrative were necessarily false. And so Warshaw derides "their absolute and dedicated alienation from truth and experience" (43) while, as Molly Hite puts it when analyzing Robert Coover's fictionalization, The Public Burning, "If one is functioning freely and out of the authentic core of one's being, one will oppose Communism" (90). Now, given the series of guilt-by-association equations that characterized the Paranoid style of American Cold War politics, opposition to communism could require other apolitically "authentic" and natural "functioning," such as homophobia, resistance to equal rights, and in the realm of a massively expanding consumer culture, the love of full iceboxes that showed loyalty to "economic nationalism" (Ewan 211) and so befitted the national character of David Potter's People of Plenty (1954). But the disco urse of homogeneity only manufactures difference, always enlarges the field of the Other: this supposedly desirable and authentic national identity, invisibly constructed in such absolute terms and imposing equally invisible and absolute disciplinary limits on experience, inevitably produced self-alienation.

When the stakes for failing to coincide fully with an identity coded as natural are so high, in terms of personal anxiety and national security, it is a short step from falsifying oneself in public to falsifying oneself in private--which is why the epistolary scene is so resonant in the Cold War context. The letter exchange is vulnerable to incriminating interception and authoritarian state censorship, a liability that makes the postal system, as Wilhelm Reich argued, an emblematic site for the "arbitrary practices" of a bureaucratic apparatus exercising power (307). The exchange of personal letters becomes an exemplary field of private expression and communication that can either confirm by reproducing or betray by contradicting the public discourses of loyalty and authenticity. And as I have been implying, the death-house letters of Julius and Ethel conformed to a "false consciousness" in ways that fulfilled the highest expectations of anticommunist ideology. Bearing the stamp of a wider economy of self-mi srepresentation, these letters were premeditated and staged for publication in ways that echoed the self-control and self-surveillance demanded by Cold War discourse, which makes them contrived and fabricated equally by the closed world of their authors' communism and by the free world of their authors' jailers. Ironic then, but no coincidence, that Fiedler should have indicted the Rosenbergs for their "refusal of candor" (xi), since Walt Whitman's ideal of open communication stood, for Ginsberg, as the definitive indictment of Cold War culture.