A TREACHEROUS SECRET AGENT: How Literature Spoke Truth to Power During the Red Scare, by Marjorie Garber
“You are quoting from this Marlowe. Is he a Communist?”
That question was put by Joe Starnes, a congressman from Alabama, to Hallie Flanagan, director of the Federal Theater Project, at a hearing in 1938. At issue was un-American activity in organizations like Flanagan’s, one of the cultural jewels of the New Deal. “This Marlowe” was Christopher, the Elizabethan poet and playwright, who had died in 1593.
Twenty years after Flanagan’s appearance, the chairman of a subcommittee of the House Un-American Activities Committee asked Joe Papp, the New York producer whose legacy would include the Public Theater and Shakespeare in the Park, if his Shakespearean productions included Communist propaganda. When Papp responded that “the plays speak for themselves,” a member of the committee staff, perhaps anxious to prevent a replay of Starnes’s humiliation, asserted that “there is no suggestion here by this chairman or anyone else that Shakespeare was a Communist. That is ludicrous and absurd. That is the Commie line.”
These two moments of congressional comedy bookend “A Treacherous Secret Agent,” Marjorie Garber’s enlightening inquiry into the literary dimensions of the second Red Scare. While many familiar characters from the political drama of the McCarthy era appear in her pages — including Edward R. Murrow, J. Robert Oppenheimer and Senator Joseph McCarthy himself — they share the stage with long-dead luminaries of poetry and prose like Marlowe, Shakespeare, Aesop and John Donne.
The protagonist — the “secret agent” of Garber’s title — isn’t any of these authors, but rather literature itself, which she presents as a wily, duplicitous foil to the blunt, heavy operations of the state. “Words possess multiple meanings and associations,” she explains. “They contain mysterious allusions and references to other works, unnamed but apparently recognizable. Literature is replete with slippery language; it is a kind of speaking in code.”
Garber, a professor at Harvard and a prolific Shakespeare scholar who has also written learned books about fashion, real estate and dogs, is an expert decoder. Some of her best chapters unpack moments — like Flanagan’s and Papp’s testimony — when a literary reference pops into the public record and reveals a hidden pocket of historical meaning.
Starnes’s blunder, for instance, inspires a brisk excursion through the short life and mysterious career of Christopher Marlowe, whose “Doctor Faustus” was staged by the Federal Theater Project about two years before Flanagan’s testimony, with a young Orson Welles in the title role.
Marlowe, who shares his name with Raymond Chandler’s cynical private eye, turns out to be a figure well suited to the moral shadows and ideological contortions of the late 1930s and the early Cold War. He lived in an age of skulduggery, conspiracy and religious discord, and may have been a double agent in the conflict between English Catholics and the Protestant monarchy. Garber quotes one of her Harvard predecessors, the critic Harry Levin, who wrote in 1952 that “no other poet has been, so fully as Marlowe, a fellow traveler with the subversive currents of his age.”
This doesn’t mean that Starnes was right — or, for that matter, that Marlowe and other writers are unambiguous heroes of progressive resistance in their time or ours. Garber’s argument is more nuanced: “that literature plays the role of the cultural unconscious.” It is also “an agent of revenge.” Reading through the transcripts of HUAC and other, similar bodies, she examines how “the voices from the literary past … rise up in the course of the hearings to refute, denounce or expose the interrogators.”
It is mostly — or most persuasively — the writers of the English Renaissance who do this, Shakespeare most of all. Chapters on the folk singers Pete Seeger and Woody Guthrie and on the revisions made to the Pledge of Allegiance revisit telling episodes in the history of the cultural cold war without really advancing Garber’s argument about the power of classic literary texts to intervene in modern politics.
But when she places such texts alongside passages of public testimony — from Oppenheimer, Flanagan, Papp and, especially, Paul Robeson — that power comes to uncanny life.
Robeson, in addition to his other accomplishments as a singer, actor and activist, was one of the great modern interpreters of Othello. Garber holds up the Moor’s tragedy as a mirror of Robeson’s experience as a prominent, politically engaged Black artist ensnared by the racial intolerance, sexual neurosis and ideological paranoia of his country. Robeson’s struggles, in turn, reflect back onto Shakespeare’s play, causing its psychological insights into pride and prejudice to seem freshly acute.
This two-way mirror effect brings other Shakespeare characters — Julius Caesar and his assassins; Prospero and Falstaff; Henry V and Richard III — into the committee rooms and television studios of mid-20th-century America, where they sit like ghosts alongside players strutting their brief hour on the historical stage. And that real-life drama, in turn, casts its shadow on our own time.
Garber is confident that literature continues to lie in wait for demagogues and authoritarians, who will eventually “fall victim to time’s poetic revenge.” Much as I admire this sentiment, I also fear that it arises from nostalgia for a culture that, however divided it may have been in other ways, held literature in common as a source of value and an object of reverence.
“Literary allusions are dangerous things in Washington,” Hallie Flanagan remarked after her run-in with the witch-hunting congressional committee. Those were the days.
A TREACHEROUS SECRET AGENT: How Literature Spoke Truth to Power During the Red Scare | By Marjorie Garber | Yale | 245 pp. | $30
A.O. Scott is a critic at large for The Times’s Book Review, writing about literature and ideas. He joined The Times in 2000 and was a film critic until early 2023.
The post When Shakespeare Took On Joe McCarthy appeared first on New York Times.
