Interview with Erin Carlston, Author of Double Agents
Spies. Espionage. National Security. Treason. University presses. English professors. What’s the connection?
I have been examining books published by academic presses over the past few months. A few weeks ago, while browsing on the website of Columbia University Press I came upon the webpage of the book Double Agents: Espionage, Literature, and Liminal Citizens by Erin G. Carlston (buy at Columbia UP or Amazon).
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“Spies” artwork (Photo credit: ocularinvasion | flickr)[/caption]
With the revelations, courtesy of Edward Snowden, in recent months of the massive intrusions by the National Security Agency into the private lives of citizens around the world and the rise of the surveillance state, it is the perfect time for a look at the way spying and espionage have been portrayed in literature. I wrote to Ms. Carlston for an interview. She graciously agreed and this is the result.
The marketing material of your book says, “Why were white bourgeois gay male writers so interested in spies, espionage, and treason in the twentieth century?” Now, my first thought was, “Who would those have been?” I mean, after all, haven’t most of the notable spy novelists (e.g., John Le Carre, Graham Greene, Ian Fleming) been heterosexual, and in the latter two cases known for active love lives with women? Why the focus on gay men?
You mention Jonathan Pollard only once in your book. He seems to have attracted little interest in terms of works of fiction about him. Also, you don’t mention spies such as Robert Hanssen or Aldrich Ames who were not Jewish or gay. Wouldn’t it have been relevant to mention them if only to contrast their cases with those of the Cambridge spies? Ames, for example, seems to have been merely a greedy slob and lacked the polish of an Anthony Blunt. Why do you think that there have been so many literary and cinematic portrayals of the Cambridge spies but hardly anything about these other spies? Are figures like Ames just too seedy to interest writers?
I should start by saying that Double Agents wasn’t intended to be a comprehensive survey of gay men’s literature, or spy fiction, or of important espionage cases in the 20th century, for that matter.
I selected both the texts I worked on and the cases I looked at because they intersected: that is, the espionage scandals involved Jewish and/or gay men and had some interesting relationship to works written by Jewish and/or gay men. As far as the second part of the question goes, it’s true that some of the spy scandals you mention — Pollard, Hanssen, Ames — haven’t generated important literary responses, or not yet, anyway. (Although I thought Breach, the 2007 film based on the Hanssen case, was excellent.) Similarly, the case of Roger Casement, the gay Irish nationalist and human rights activist hanged for treason in 1916, hasn’t yet inspired a major work of literature that I know of. Otherwise, I’d have loved to look more closely at him. It could be simply coincidence that there’s been less written about these cases, but probably what you call the “polish” of the Cambridge Spies — specifically, their upper-class status and their close connections to the literary and cultural elite — does have a lot to do with the grip they still have on the imagination of people in British literary circles.
Responding to the first part of your question: of course there’s a lot of brilliant spy fiction that isn’t by or about gay men, so I didn’t deal with that because it wasn’t relevant to my argument — heterosexual men may be interested in espionage or motivated to become spies for many reasons, but my question was about why gay men writers are drawn to espionage. Although actually in an indirect way, the whole project came together because of John Le Carré, who as you note is heterosexual. I’d been working on Proust’s treatment of the Dreyfus Affair for several years, and I was proceeding on the assumption (which I now think is wrong) that Proust was so fascinated by the Affair simply because he thought Dreyfus’s persecution as a Jew could usefully be analogized to the persecution of homosexuals. And then one day I was talking to Don Bachardy, Christopher Isherwood’s widower, about Isherwood’s connection to Guy Burgess, and Bachardy mentioned casually that Isherwood had loved spy fiction and been addicted to Le Carré. And I thought, hmmmm, that’s interesting. It got me wondering whether there was something about espionage per se that seemed especially relevant to gay men. That led me to the idea of liminal citizenship.
Can you tell us a bit more about liminal citizenship? You open your book, for example, with an anecdote about seeing a sign at a demonstration equating homosexuality with threats to national security.
I wanted to find a way to talk about the specific, precarious position of people who are in most regards privileged or dominant in Western societies — like middle-class/wealthy white men — but who have this one characteristic that, historically, has occasioned violence and discrimination against them. In the U.S. especially, there’s been tension within the queer community between gay white men and everybody else, provoked by the fact that affluent gay white men perceive themselves as discriminated against — which they are — but people of color and women tend to perceive them as privileged and entitled — which they also are. I felt like we needed a more complicated vocabulary for the varying ways that prejudice, oppression, and violence operate on people depending on the precise ways that they are seen as different.
Or not seen, because the idea of passing is also central to this issue as well as to the theme of espionage. People who aren’t visually perceptible as having a minority identity — “straight-acting” gay men, femme lesbians, Jews who don’t “look Jewish” or have recognizably Jewish names, etc. — have more choices about how they inhabit their identities, particularly when they also enjoy class privilege.
Along with those choices comes the question of risk: you have a certain status only because nobody can see what you “really” are. If that’s revealed, or you make the choice to reveal it, you can go from somewhere near the top of the social hierarchy to the bottom really fast. In the American context one dramatic example is the situation of what used to be called “passing Negroes,” light-skinned African-Americans who could be subjected to enslavement or murder if their racial identities were discovered. But we could also think about the hundreds, probably thousands, of gay and lesbian U.S. government employees in the 1950s who were going along comfortably holding down nice steady middle-class jobs when they were fired for being “security risks.” A lot of them lost everything; some committed suicide. And of course in Europe in many different time periods being recognized as Jewish has been potentially fatal.
So, the privilege such “invisible others” have is real, especially when we compare their situations to those of people who are visibly genderqueer, or of color, or anybody who’s poor. But the danger they’re in is real, too. It seemed to me that the idea of being a double agent was a very good way to describe the uneasy, borderline position of these people, who are indeed agents: they have agency, the power to act and shape their own life circumstances. But to protect that power they have to hide something. And that, I surmised, might be why a number of the gay men writers I liked had been so fascinated by spies and by spy novels. The idea of being a spy must have been both a very resonant, and a very romantic, representation of the way they perceived their own relationship to male privilege and power.
Now, to get back to your question about that sign at the Soulwinners rally that equated homosexual sex with threats to national security: my central argument is that “invisible difference” occupies a different place within national collectivities than visible difference does. People who are invisibly different are often fairly exempt from everyday violence and persecution simply because they’re not identifiable. But they can provoke intense anxiety in the collective consciousness. In the case of European Jewry, you had the whole phenomenon of identifying badges, clothing, and other markings, as well as strictly delimited living areas — ghettoes — intended to identify and isolate as “other” people who often looked pretty much like the Christians around them. In the U.S., again, there was the “problem” of passing Negroes. We had based an entire legal, social, and economic apparatus on the expropriated labor of enslaved people of African descent and that system insisted, ideologically, on absolute — and visible — differences between races. But after generations of miscegenation there were an awful lot of mixed-race people in this country who didn’t look very black. The 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson decision, which codified the “one-drop” rule, was among other things an attempt to shore up a racial distinction that was getting harder and harder to define or enforce.
So the anxiety around gay people, or assimilated Jews, or whatever category of “liminal citizen” we’re dealing with, is that although they’re not really the same as whatever’s being defined as the majority, they look like they are. And then you see concerns arising about so-called moles, the Fifth Column that brings a country down from within; that’s where the perceived threat to national security enters in. With the Red Scare and Lavender Panic in the 1950s, what provoked the most intense hysteria was the idea that Communists and gay people might be indistinguishable from everybody else. The amount of energy that was devoted to asserting that you really could tell the difference just by looking is astonishing, and was clearly a desperate rearguard action defending against the knowledge that actually — you really couldn’t.
I was intrigued by the Dreyfus case mentioned in your book. After all, most of the major figures in it (Dreyfus himself, Émile Zola, Georges Picquart, Ferdinand Esterhazy) were heterosexual. You mention that after Picquart came to defend Dreyfus those who regarded Picquart as a traitor for doing so floated rumors about his supposed homosexuality. Did this happen to others in the case? And how does that relate to the matter of liminal citizenship?
It did happen to others; in Double Agents I mention a number of others who were tarred with that brush, including Alphonse Bard, one of the lawyers involved; General Félix Saussier, the military governor of Paris; and even the German Kaiser. As I write in the book, the Dreyfus case takes place before notions of “sexual identity” congeal into binary categories. So homosexuality, like transvestism, wasn’t attributed to people as a specific untrustworthy identity the way it would be in the UK and the USA in the 1950s. Instead, homosexuality and cross-dressing were associated with other kinds of sexually illicit behavior, like adultery or visiting brothels, as general indicators that someone was unreliable, not morally trustworthy. Often somebody would be accused of all these things at once: “He’s a cross-dressing homosexual AND he sleeps with married women!” This was true on both sides of the case. It was actually quite surprising to me that nobody seems ever to have accused Dreyfus of homosexual tendencies. Maybe they felt like they already had enough ammunition against him.
I was somewhat surprised by inclusion in the same book of Dreyfus, the Cambridge spies and the Rosenbergs. After all, Dreyfus was totally innocent of what he was accused of, whereas the Cambridge spies were indeed double agents and the consensus is that Julius Rosenberg at least (there is debate over Ethel’s role) was guilty. There was no comparable travesty of justice in their cases. How did the matter of actual guilt influence your conception of the book?
You also mention that Dreyfus’s daughter, Jeanne, was one of those who sent telegrams to the White House asking for clemency for the Rosenbergs and that she did so in her father’s name. But Dreyfus himself seems not to have been radicalized by his experience and seems simply to have longed to return to his former life as a loyal officer in the French Army, which he ultimately did. What do you think you would have thought of Dreyfus as an individual had you lived in his time?
Guilt wasn’t relevant to my selection of the cases, only whether they occurred during the time period I specialize in (the 19th and 20th centuries), and had some interesting connection to literary works I liked and had something to say about. Of course it affected my personal feelings about each of these people, but it didn’t matter to my argument, which was about how their characters and actions were construed within the governing ideological frameworks of their societies.
Also, it’s important to remember that at the time of the Dreyfus Affair, it was far from clear that Dreyfus was innocent. After all, he had been found guilty by a jury of his peers, and he’d had excellent legal representation — no one could claim he hadn’t been adequately defended. If you weren’t one of the tiny handful of people who knew that the jurors of the Court Martial had, illegally, been shown evidence that wasn’t shared with the defense, there was no reason at all to think the verdict was incorrect. Even those who became impassioned advocates of retrying Dreyfus didn’t initially have grounds for believing him innocent: all they knew for sure was that illegalities had been committed during the first trial, and it took a couple of years for that information to come out. If you consider not what we know now, but what the educated public knew about Dreyfus in 1894 versus what the educated public knew about the Rosenbergs in 1950–51, the case against Dreyfus probably looked stronger. I might very well have believed him guilty myself if I’d been around at the time.
As far as what I would have thought about Dreyfus personally, I suspect that if I’d known him I would have found him a somewhat humorless prig, based on his writing and on what others thought of him. That doesn’t make what happened to him any less tragic, of course. For me, though, the most interesting person in the Affair is not Dreyfus but Georges Picquart, the army officer who originally believed in Dreyfus’s guilt but then discovered that the evidence against him was forged, and blew the whistle. Picquart risked his career, his freedom, and his life by refusing to suppress that information.
Yet he was also anti-Semitic, and some contemporary reports describe him as cold and self-righteous. How do you put those pieces together? Well, to me the best evidence of what the characters in this drama were like were the trial transcripts, where you can “hear,” in reading them, how people actually talked. And when I read Picquart’s testimony at the legal trials that followed his revelations, what struck me was how clear, plainspoken and straightforward it was. Unlike most of the witnesses, he didn’t have any kind of personal or ideological ax to grind. He simply was not willing to say someone was guilty when he knew he wasn’t — not even a Jew. He believed that truth mattered more than expedience, national security, his personal prejudices, or his own life. That’s such a rare quality that it made him, in my eyes, the real hero of the Affair.
Apropos of the comparison between the Rosenbergs and Dreyfus, does it matter at all in your analysis that the Dreyfus case basically involved only the national security of France and the honor of the French army, whereas the Rosenberg case involved the matter of transmitting knowledge of atomic weapons technology to the USSR, which at that point had murdered millions of people (many of the victims being in Poland, for example) and within its own borders and which was an ally of Mao’s China, where millions more would die. Does it make sense to equate the two cases in terms of gravity?
Obviously, on one level the invention of the atomic bomb has changed the terms of all geopolitical questions forever. Once humans had the capacity to destroy the entire world, then in a sense you can’t compare any political conflict that has arisen since then to anything that happened before.
But in another sense, the threat to any nation of its own annihilation is always going to be fundamental even if it doesn’t entail blowing up half the planet. And make no mistake, annihilation is what France thought it could be facing at the time when the Affair erupted. I suggest in Double Agents that we try to conceive of the U.S. being in France’s position in 1894. Here’s what that would look like: let’s imagine our entire northern border is shared not with friendly Canada, but with our worst enemy — the USSR in the 1950s, or maybe Iran or North Korea today, if either of them were a wealthy industrialized nation with a larger population and better military than ours. We’ll call this country Northern Enemy. Now imagine that twenty years ago, this hypothetical enemy on our northern border won a war against us and seized a big piece of our territory — let’s say all of New England. In just the last few months, terrorists who may or may not be backed by Northern Enemy have set off bombs in Congress and, in a separate attack, assassinated our President. And then we learn that somebody high up within our own military forces is passing classified information about our border defenses to Northern Enemy. Even absent the existence of nuclear weapons, don’t you think we would feel, in these hypothetical circumstances, that the situation was of the utmost gravity?
You write, fascinatingly, in your discussion of the Cambridge spies, “There has been a certain amount of contention about how well the writers and the spies actually knew one another; given the prestige of one group and the infamy of the other, it is unsurprising that whereas the biographers of the spies and the spies themselves have tended to emphasize the social and psychological background they shared with the writers, partisans of the writers are more apt to downplay the connections.”
Is the opposite sometimes the case, such as in the case of Graham Greene? Why the differences? Is it because of Greene’s service and connections in the intelligence services is something his biographers have to address versus Auden’s minor involvement in such matters?
That could be it, and/or the fact that Greene wrote espionage fiction, I would think. Knowing Philby — claiming to understand Philby — may have helped give Greene a kind of credibility or aura of expertise in his spy novels. In contrast, Auden, Isherwood, Louis MacNeice and Stephen Spender — who all knew one or more of the Cambridge spies, though not Philby — weren’t billing themselves as experts on the world of intelligence. And in any case the writing they did about spies came out well before the Cambridge spy scandal erupted, so even if they’d wanted to, they couldn’t very well have used those connections as a marketing device (if we assume that that was what Greene was up to).
You write, “among writers of the future to make full use of the theme of double agency, at least one will be a bourgeois Muslim man, born in the West, socially assimilated, and formally a citizen but liable at any moment to be moved abruptly into the category of the alien.” What do you think, for example, of Mohammed Moulessehoul, (who, interestingly writes under the female pseudonym, Yasmina Khadra) and his novel, The Attack and of the film based on it? Is that the kind of literature you foresee? In this case, it is the wife of the main character who is the actual radical. Will women start to figure more in the literature of espionage and terrorism?
Moulessehoul doesn’t really fit my model because he’s an Algerian living in France, not a native-born Frenchman. And although he writes in French his name — or rather his wife’s name, which is his pseudonym — identifies him as someone from the Arab world, an “outsider.” I’m thinking more of American Muslims I know personally who live in affluent suburban communities and work in elite careers — doctors, professors, scientists and businessmen. It’s a small, unscientific sample, admittedly. But what strikes me about them is how often they just don’t register as “Muslim” in the public eye at all. Their names often aren’t recognized as being Arabic or Farsi, and if they’re not bearded or wearing turbans or headscarves, they don’t conform to the prevailing idea of what a Muslim looks like. So I’m interested in what happens when an American like that suddenly, somehow, is identified as a Muslim where he hasn’t been before. Would you see the same kind of estrangement, the sudden loss of privilege, the threat of marginalization, violence or imprisonment that hung over middle-class gay men through much of the twentieth century? One can imagine a situation where being recognized as Muslim might be quite dangerous, particularly for a Muslim man, who’s still much likelier to be perceived as a threat than a woman. How would that man, if he were a writer, project his dilemma into fiction or poetry?
Michael Wolfe, the poet, could be interesting to think more about in this context; he’s a white adult convert to Islam, which complicates his rôle but might make it even more relevant, because white American-born Muslims are surely the ultimate double agents in our culture at the moment — think of the figure of Nicholas Brody on the TV show “Homeland.” I’ve just started exploring Wolfe’s work and look forward to seeing whether it resonates with the texts I looked at in Double Agents or not.
One of the authors who was both a homosexual and who served in the intelligence services was W. Somerset Maugham, who fictionalized his experiences as Ashenden: Or the British Agent in a 1928 collection of stories. Maugham was an extremely closeted gay man for much of his life, but in his later years his sexual orientation was an open secret. Where does he fit into your framework? Is there any evidence that Auden read Ashenden?
Maugham might have been a fun example to add to the book, and I think it’s extremely likely that Auden had read “Ashenden.”
I must admit that sometimes I found it hard to summon up much sympathy for Auden and co. After all, the Moscow show trials had taken place in the late 1930s. Many of Auden’s generation — Orwell notably among them — recognized Soviet tyranny for what it was. And as you yourself write of the Auden circle, “It was not just the public that thought of them as spies and traitors; they thought of themselves that way, too.” Isn’t there something a little twisted about finding treason appealing and glamorous? Was it really unreasonable for intelligence agencies in the middle of a Cold War to question people who held such attitudes?
Your question presupposes that Auden and his circle were ardent defenders of Soviet tyranny, which they were not. Auden and Spender were baffled, upset, and incredulous when their friend Guy Burgess disappeared and was accused of being a Soviet agent. Louis MacNeice, who was very close to Anthony Blunt, died years before Blunt was unmasked and almost surely never knew that his friend was a spy. So I’m not sure what we’re supposed to be unsympathetic to: the group’s intellectual engagement with Marxism? Their desire to see England become a fairer, more economically just country? Their opposition to Franco’s coup against the democratically elected government of Spain?
You quoted Rebecca West several times in your book. Do you think she would have taken issue with any of your arguments? Do you with any of hers? She did, after all, not shy away from accusing many on the intellectual left of “pimping for Stalin” and detested people like Anthony Blunt. Do you feel an intellectual kinship with her?
Ultimately, I suspect that Rebecca West and Auden felt much the same way about treason: that something like what Kim Philby did is despicable, but that blind submission to authority, unquestioning acceptance of the status quo, are in the end more damaging to the social fabric. In the book I use quotes from both of them that express very similar sentiments: In 1939 Auden wrote that “Loyalty and intelligence are mutually hostile….There must always be a conflict between the loyalty necessary for society to be, and the intelligence necessary for society to become.” And just a few years later West wrote that “All men should have a drop or two of treason in their veins, if the nations are not to go soft like so many sleepy pears.” In other words, a little bit of treason — in the sense of people having the willingness to think intelligently and critically about the political and social orders of their own nation, and to dissent from them if necessary — is essential to keep democracies evolving and functioning healthily.
Does your book have any relevance to current events? Would it help readers make sense of the respective mindsets of Edward Snowden and Bradley Manning, for example?
I didn’t have the cases of Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning, formerly Pfc Bradley Manning, in mind when writing the book simply because of timing. The Wikileaks/Manning situation was just beginning to unfold when I was in the last stages of writing the book, and information about her gender identity and sexuality, which would have made her example more relevant to my claims, didn’t come out until the book was in press. The Snowden case didn’t blow up until after Double Agents was published. Are the two cases relevant to the historical events I discuss in the book? I don’t know enough about either Manning or Snowden to comment on them extensively, but let me just say that I think parallels between those two on the one hand, and the Rosenbergs or the Cambridge spies on the other, don’t hold up very well. Burgess, Maclean, Philby and Blunt, and probably Julius Rosenberg, were spies covertly providing information about their own governments to a foreign and hostile government. Manning and Snowden were whistle-blowers trying to provide information about their government to their fellow citizens through public forums like the media. Now, you can argue that in doing this they endangered national security, that they made decisions they didn’t have the authority to make, and so on. But the motivations are simply not the same. One group of people, the spies, wanted to enable a foreign power to overthrow their government. Manning and Snowden wanted the nation’s citizens to know what their own government was up to. It’s apples and oranges.
In terms of the books’ relevance to current events, what I was actually thinking about while I was writing was Guantánamo, José Padilla, drone strikes, and other phenomena of the post-9/11 world and particularly America, where fears about national security have consistently outweighed concerns about the legality of measures that have been taken in the name of combating terrorism. There’s a passage in the book where I write, “If we should take anything from the Dreyfus Affair, it is not that France convicted an innocent man or even that prejudice should not be allowed to sway the outcome of trials. It is that the conviction of the innocent is always a possibility whenever prosecutors rely on closed tribunals, ex parte submissions to the court, or the invocation of state secrets as grounds for the refusal to present the case against a defendant fully and transparently.” Guantánamo was very much on my mind when I was writing about Dreyfus, who was exiled to Devil’s Island off the coast of French Guiana and kept in conditions not dissimilar to those at our detention facility in Cuba — another island where Western nations sequester people they perceive as too threatening to keep within the physical and legal boundaries of the nation. We have often been told that the men held at Guantánamo can’t be released because they’re too dangerous, and can’t be tried because that would require providing the evidence against them which, we’re assured, exists but can’t be revealed because, again, it would endanger national security. And that may be completely true. It is not unlikely that some of the men being imprisoned are hostile to the United States, that they were a threat to the U.S. and would be again if they were released. I can also believe that there could be evidence against them which, if revealed, would compromise intelligence-gathering programs we have or other security interests.
On the other hand, these are precisely the arguments that were used during the Dreyfus Affair: the evidence against him exists, the Army insisted, but we can’t tell anybody what it is because it would immediately involve us in another war with Germany. But in fact, there wasn’t any real evidence against him: what there was had been faked. Very few people knew that, so that many of the government officials who swore he was guilty honestly believed it themselves — they accepted what their colleagues told them, and they thought that this evidence was so explosive that it really would provoke another war if it came out, and if Dreyfus’s legal rights had to be violated to keep that from happening, well, that was too bad. And as a result a completely innocent man spent five years rotting on an island.
As much as I can believe that some of the men at Guantánamo were and would continue to be a dangerous threat to the U.S., I can also easily believe that there are Dreyfuses being held there. Without a transparent legal process, we’re simply never going to know. We seem to have decided as a nation that that’s OK: we can live with the idea that there are guys at Guantánamo who did absolutely nothing, who just happened to be at the wrong place at the wrong time, and who in consequence will never see their families or homes again. In contrast, during the course of the Affair, the French decided that it was not OK to incarcerate for life a man who might be innocent, even if re-opening the case could jeopardize national security. Zola and Proust and the other Dreyfusards argued that if you have to sacrifice national ideals like justice and equality in order to preserve “national security,” then you’ve already forfeited a nation worth having. I have to say, I think they got that right.
Thank you for your time.
Thank you.
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