Modernism at the Microphone: Radio, Propaganda, and Literary Aesthetics During World War II 9781472595072, 9781474220361, 9781472595096

Table of contents :
FC
Half Title
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Contents
Series Editors’ Preface
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction: The Voices of War
Voices of the wireless revolution
Voices of contradiction
Voices of the radio war
1. War on the Air
Radio’s fascism and the violence of the voice
It’s the end of the world as we know it
2. Militarizing the Messiah
I heard the voice of Jesus say
A Christ for World War II
3. Transatlantic Crossings
MacNeice crosses the Atlantic
Propaganda, poetry, and the radio
Conquering the new world
4. Propaganda, Literature, and New Networks
Orwell’s ambivalence
London calling
Orwell loses his radio voice
5. Clogged Communication
A hopeful transmission
Can’t get through to you
Please Mr. Postman
6. Haunted Network
Modernist hauntings
Mann’s ghosts
Extending the network
Epilogue: A Voice from the Other Side
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

Modernism at the Microphone

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Historicizing Modernism Series Editors Matthew Feldman, Professor of Contemporary History, Teesside University, UK, and Erik Tonning, Professor of British Literature and Culture, University of Bergen, Norway Assistant Editor: David Tucker, Postdoctoral Researcher, University of Chester, UK Editorial Board Professor Chris Ackerley, Department of English, University of Otago, New Zealand; Professor Ron Bush, St. John’s College, University of Oxford, UK; Dr Finn Fordham, Department of English, Royal Holloway, UK; Professor Steven Matthews, Department of English, University of Reading, UK; Dr Mark Nixon, Department of English, University of Reading, UK; Professor Shane Weller, Reader in Comparative Literature, University of Kent, UK; and Professor Janet Wilson, University of Northampton, UK. Historicizing Modernism challenges traditional literary interpretations by taking an empirical approach to modernist writing: a direct response to new documentary sources made available over the last decade. Informed by archival research, and working beyond the usual European/American avant-garde 1900–45 parameters, this series reassesses established readings of modernist writers by developing fresh views of intellectual contexts and working methods. Series Titles Arun Kolatkar and Literary Modernism in India, Laetitia Zecchini British Literature and Classical Music, David Deutsch Broadcasting in the Modernist Era, Matthew Feldman, Henry Mead, and Erik Tonning Ezra Pound’s Adams Cantos, David Ten Eyck Ezra Pound’s Eriugena, Mark Byron Great War Modernisms and The New Age Magazine, Paul Jackson Katherine Mansfield and Literary Modernism, edited by Janet Wilson, Gerri Kimber, and Susan Reid Late Modernism and The English Intelligencer, Alex Latter The Life and Work of Thomas MacGreevy, Susan Schreibman Modern Manuscripts, Dirk Van Hulle Reading Mina Loy’s Autobiographies, Sandeep Parmar Reframing Yeats, Charles Ivan Armstrong Samuel Beckett and Arnold Geulincx, David Tucker Samuel Beckett and Science, Chris Ackerley Samuel Beckett and The Bible, Iain Bailey Samuel Beckett’s “More Pricks Than Kicks,” John Pilling Samuel Beckett’s German Diaries 1936–1937, Mark Nixon T.E. Hulme and the Ideological Politics of Early Modernism, Henry Mead Virginia Woolf ’s Late Cultural Criticism, Alice Wood

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Modernism at the Microphone Radio, Propaganda, and Literary Aesthetics During World War II Melissa Dinsman

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

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Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square London WC1B 3DP UK

1385 Broadway New York NY 10018 USA

www.bloomsbury.com BLOOMSBURY and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published 2015 © Melissa Dinsman, 2015 Melissa Dinsman has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury or the author. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN: HB: 978-1-4725-9507-2 ePDF: 978-1-4725-9509-6 ePub: 978-1-4725-9508-9 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. Series: Historicizing Modernism Typeset by Fakenham Prepress Solutions, Fakenham, Norfolk NR21 8NN

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For Josh, Elijah, and Luke

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Contents Series Editors’ Preface List of Illustrations Acknowledgments

Introduction: The Voices of War Voices of the wireless revolution Voices of contradiction Voices of the radio war

ix xi xiii 1 7 18 22

1 War on the Air Radio’s fascism and the violence of the voice It’s the end of the world as we know it

31

2 Militarizing the Messiah I heard the voice of Jesus say A Christ for World War II

55

3 Transatlantic Crossings MacNeice crosses the Atlantic Propaganda, poetry, and the radio Conquering the new world

75

4 Propaganda, Literature, and New Networks Orwell’s ambivalence London calling Orwell loses his radio voice

97

5 Clogged Communication A hopeful transmission Can’t get through to you Please Mr. Postman

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35 45

60 66

78 82 86

100 105 113 121 124 131 138

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viii Contents

6 Haunted Network Modernist hauntings Mann’s ghosts Extending the network

145



171

Epilogue: A Voice from the Other Side

Notes Bibliography Index

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150 154 165

181 231 243

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Series Editors’ Preface This book series is devoted to the analysis of late nineteenth- to twentiethcentury literary modernism within its historical context. Historicizing Modernism thus stresses empirical accuracy and the value of primary sources (such as letters, diaries, notes, drafts, marginalia, or other archival deposits) in developing monographs, scholarly editions, and edited collections on modernist authors and their texts. This may take a number of forms, such as manuscript study and annotated volumes; archival editions and genetic criticism; as well as mappings of interrelated historical milieus or ideas. To date, no book series has laid claim to this interdisciplinary, sourcebased territory for modern literature. Correspondingly, two burgeoning sub-disciplines of modernism, Beckett studies and Pound studies, feature heavily as exemplars of the opportunities presented by manuscript research more widely. While an additional range of “canonical” authors will be covered here, this series also highlights the centrality of supposedly “minor” or occluded figures, not least in helping to establish broader intellectual genealogies of modernist writing. Furthermore, while the series will be weighted towards the English-speaking world, studies of non-Anglophone modernists whose writings are ripe for archivally based exploration shall also be included. A key aim of such historicizing is to reach beyond the familiar rhetoric of intellectual and artistic “autonomy” employed by many modernists and their critical commentators. Such rhetorical moves can and should themselves be historically situated and reintegrated into the complex continuum of individual literary practices. This emphasis upon the contested self-definitions of modernist writers, thinkers, and critics may, in turn, prompt various reconsiderations of the boundaries delimiting the concept “modernism” itself. Similarly, the very notion of “historicizing” Modernism remains debatable, and this series by no means discourages more theoretically informed approaches. On the contrary, the editors believe that the historical specificity encouraged

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by Historicizing Modernism may inspire a range of fundamental critiques along the way. Matthew Feldman Erik Tonning

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List of Illustrations Figure I.1: Staging The Flight Across the Ocean at Baden-Baden 11 Figure 1.1: “Surrender Dorothy” 33 Figure 1.2 (A and B): We Don’t Know Why They Listen (SO MUCH!)40 Figure 1.3: “Seems Radio is Here to Stay: A Columbia Workshop Production”42 Figure 4.1: The BBC Indian Section December 1, 1942. Seated (L to R): Venu Chitale, M. J. Tambimuttu, T. S. Eliot, Una Marson, Mulk Raj Anand, Christopher Pemberton, and Narayana Menon. Standing: George Orwell, Nancy Barrat, and William Empson 116 Figure 6.1: “Cover Photo,” Floating Thomas Mann Heads 148 Figure 6.2: Nino the Medium 156 Figure 6.3: Der Volksempfänger (The People’s Receiver)167

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Acknowledgments Although a little-known historical anecdote, it is thought that the first wireless transmissions in the United States were sent from the University of Notre Dame to St. Mary’s Academy in April 1899. Traveling a mile in distance, this achievement by Professor Jerome Green and his assistants is also remarkable because the apparatus was made by Green and his colleagues, rather than using materials from Guglielmo Marconi.1 I highlight this forgotten moment in wireless history for a number of reasons. 1) It marks a concrete tether between radio broadcasting and academia; 2) It hints at the massive amount of historical and cultural recovery that still needs to be done within the academy with regard to radio; and 3) It signals the pre-war uses of radio and emphasizes both the human desire to communicate and the experimental nature of broadcasting, aspects with which this project is very much concerned. 4) It articulates a long, albeit largely forgotten, history between the University of Notre Dame and the radio, a history that in some small way connects this book (conceived of and written entirely while at Notre Dame) and the telegraphic history of the University. Modernism at the Microphone is in large part about this desire to communicate and the failures along the way, which is, as I look back, a perfect analogy for the construction of this work. There were, however, a number of people who helped me through my incoherent moments, always pushing me to be a closer reader, a stronger writer, and all in all a better scholar. I am particularly grateful to Kate Marshall, whose belief in the value of my project was at times greater than my own. It was her thoughtful readings (and re-readings) of my work that enabled to me push through some of the most challenging moments of writing my first book. I am also thankful for the tremendous feedback and support I received from Romana Huk, whose positivity, encouragement, and friendship enabled me to find enjoyment in the writing process even on the darkest days. This work is also indebted to Maud Ellmann, whose critical eye for argument as well as style made me a more confident writer, and to Tobias Boes and Joe Buttigieg, whose doors were always open and pens were always ready.

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xiv Acknowledgments

Modernism at the Microphone benefitted tremendously from my ability to talk endlessly about radio and having my friends not only listen, but also respond. Acting as a sounding board for even my wildest ideas, my friends and colleagues both at Notre Dame and elsewhere, Sabrina Ferri, David Lummus, Lauren Rich, Denise Ayo, Stephanie Pocock Boeninger, Sonia Howell, Peter Holland, Joseph Rosenberg, Liz Evans, Kinohi Nishikawa, Hannah Zdansky, Richard Oosterhoff, Ian Whittington, Debra Rae Cohen, Neil Verma, and Elliott Visconsi, helped make this book a reality. I would also like to express my deepest gratitude to the editors of the “Historicizing Modernism” series, Matthew Feldman and Erik Tonning, for believing in the value of this project and helping me see it to fruition. I am also thankful for the tremendous amount of institutional support I received while at Notre Dame, from yearlong fellowships from the Ph.D. in Literature Program and the Notre Dame Institute for Advanced Study, to research and professionalization grants from the Notre Dame Graduate School, the Nanovic Institute for European Studies, and the Institute for Scholarship in the Liberal Arts, College of Arts and Letters. This project would also not have been possible without the help of the Deutsches Rundfunkarchiv, and in particular the aid of librarian and friend Antonia Wexler; Charles Haddix and the University of Missouri-Kansas City Marr Sound Archives; the Library of Congress’ Manuscript Division and Recorded Sound Reference Center; the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas; the BBC Written Archives Centre; and The British Library. I am also grateful to The Space Between for granting me permission to reprint sections of Chapter 2, which were published in 2015. Where needed, permissions have been sought and granted for materials and images reprinted in this book. Finally, I would like to thank my family: my siblings, Kaitlyn and Adam, and in particular my parents, Karen and Gregg Denzler, for their continuous love and support. Their ability to see an end to this project even when I couldn’t was a constant comfort. But most significantly, I would like to express my gratitude for my husband, Josh, and my sons, Elijah and Luke. They have been my supporters, my cheerleaders, my entertainers, my therapists, my wardens, my caregivers (and, in the case of Josh, at times my copy editor), and it is to them that this work is dedicated.

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Introduction

The Voices of War Artists are the antennae of the race. —Ezra Pound1

On June 4, 1948 Marshall McLuhan and Hugh Kenner visited an imprisoned Ezra Pound at St. Elizabeth’s Hospital. McLuhan, not yet the grandfather of media studies, was a professor of literature at the University of Toronto and fascinated by Pound’s poetic formalism and encyclopedic knowledge. Along with Kenner, a student at the time, the two traveled to Washington, DC in order to talk to Pound about his work and the state of contemporary literature. This conversation sparked an interest in media forms for McLuhan that would lead him to make groundbreaking claims about media’s impact on human thought and sensory processes. For Kenner, this encounter was the beginning of his lifelong interest in Pound, and in turn led him to become a leading scholar of modernism in the second half of the twentieth century. Although lasting only two hours, this meeting between the poet and two of his acolytes marks a concrete moment of intersection between modernist aesthetics and communications media, paving the way for their continued comingling in both studies of modernism and media theory today. While the scholastic genealogy connecting Kenner to McLuhan certainly links “modernism’s culture and aesthetics to a faith in communication,” as Mark Goble writes in Beautiful Circuits, it is Pound who anchors this association.2 Kenner makes this blatantly clear when, in dedicating The Poetry of Ezra Pound to McLuhan, he uses Pound’s Canto 3—his language, his form—to express this significant tri-part relationship.3 On his own, Pound united the individualist tradition of high modernism and the mass culture of radio and did so, significantly, during a time of war. In fact, Pound’s twelveyear incarceration in St. Elizabeth’s is a direct result of the poet’s fascist and

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anti-Semitic broadcasts, which he transmitted from Italy to the United States during the early years of World War II. The example of Pound as wartime broadcaster, analyzed further in Chapter 5, forces us to expand significantly the narrative of literary modernism and its intersection with media history. In his occasional transmission of the Cantos, Pound muddied the great divides between literature and propaganda, high art and mass culture—transgressions rarely associated with one of the innovators of Anglo-American free verse. But Pound’s desire to broadcast poetry to a mass audience, specifically during World War II, also challenges post-humanist and militaristic readings of mediation à la Friedrich Kittler.4 As I argue in Modernism at the Microphone, Pound’s choice to lend his voice to radio broadcasting during World War II, a decision also made by fellow modernists Archibald MacLeish, T. S. Eliot, Thomas Mann, and E. M. Forster, and late-modernists Dorothy Sayers, Louis MacNeice, George Orwell, and Mulk Raj Anand, among many others, invites a re-evaluation of McLuhan’s (“the medium is the message”) and Kittler’s (“media determine our situation”) theories of media determinism, in which human agency has little to no role.5 Instead, by recovering the transmission history of these writers’ wartime broadcasts and analyzing the broadcasts themselves, this work shows that each writer relied on the strategic interplay of aesthetic content and technical form in order to promote maximum listener comprehension. Like numerous other early twentieth-century writers, Pound’s turn to broadcasting during World War II did not spontaneously emerge. Instead, his wartime broadcasts are the result of a steady engagement with and discussion of mass communications media. Pound’s poetic career, for example, is littered with the suggestion that writers act as radios—picking up signals from their surroundings, translating them, and transmitting them through narration to a broader audience, as the epigraph to this introduction suggests. Even as early as 1911, Pound describes the writing process in terms of radio’s ability to retrieve signals from the air: “The donative author seems to draw down into the art something which was not in the art of his predecessors. If he also draws from the air about him, he draws latent forces, or things present but unnoticed, or things perhaps taken for granted but never examined.”6 In this description of the authorial process as radio reception, Pound presents readers with a very similar image to that of Rudyard Kipling in his short story “Wireless.” In this

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turn-of-the-century narrative, however, Kipling suggests that both the writing process and the authorial voice are linked to radio broadcasting, as the ailing Mr. Shaynor seemingly retrieves poetic signals from the air, vocalizing them while in a trance-like state. Early twentieth-century writers were in fact preoccupied with media and its voices. In his modernist masterpiece, Ulysses, James Joyce dedicates entire chapters to mimicking the sound of media. With its segment headings and short sentences, “Aeolus” replicates the form of print journalism, whereas “Nausicaa” imitates (and exaggerates) the narrative voice of a harlequin romance as Gerty MacDowell fanaticizes about an encounter with Leopold Bloom, the stranger on the beach. Joyce’s interest in mass mediation is hardly a surprise given his own personal history with the cinema. Not only did Joyce enjoy the filmic experience, but he actually helped finance the Volta, Dublin’s first movie theater, in 1909. For John Dos Passos, the cinema’s form (or narrative voice) provided the structure for his historical and panoramic New York novel Manhattan Transfer. “The artist,” reflects Dos Passos in the 1960s, “must record the fleeting world the way the motion picture film recorded it. By contrast, juxtaposition, montage, he could build drama into his narrative.”7 As can be seen from the near twenty different interlaced narratives of Manhattan Transfer, Dos Passos was particularly influenced by the montage—“the radical cutting or editing technique”—of early twentieth century cinema, and in particular the work of D. W. Griffith.8 The cinema also proved a significant medium for Rebecca West. In her World War I novel The Return of the Soldier, the wartime films that Jenny watches during the day invade her dreams at night, causing her to fear the worst for her cousin Christopher: By nights I saw Chris running across the brown rottenness of No Man’s Land, starting back here because he trod upon a hand, not even looking there because of the awfulness of an unburied head, and not till my dream was packed full of horror did I see him pitch forward on his knees as he reached safety—if it was that. For on the war-films I have seen men slip down as softly from the trench parapet, and none but the grimmer philosophers would say that they had reached safety by their fall.9

In West’s novel, the cinema transmits such compelling images that Jenny cannot help but bring them home with her. The medium becomes the means

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by which she understands and experiences a distant war, but it also determines her ability to narrate these experiences. West’s depiction of the cinema’s use during wartime is a significant forerunner to the way in which media (radio, film, newspaper) were used during World War II. As Mark Wollaeger writes, The Return of the Soldier “is prophetic of the influence that film and cinematic propaganda would assert in the coming decades.”10 The voices of aural media are also prominent in modern literature. In The Waste Land, Eliot merges a woman with two different recording technologies. Known only as the “typist”—the machine at which she works—Eliot syncs the woman’s movements with the gramophone after a tryst with a clerk, her “young man carbuncular.” This unloving and routine affair is emphasized by the typist’s post-coitus actions: alone once again, “She smoothes her hair with automatic hand, / And puts a record on the gramophone.”11 Like the gramophone needle, her hand has just played a pre-recorded and oft-repeated tune with the clerk. Although the gramophone’s song is never heard, it is likely that the typist’s choice would have been a popular ragtime tune, like the 1912 parody “That Shakespearean Rag” (alluded to in section 2 of the poem), which was still popular a decade later. In fact, despite our sense of Eliot as a technological curmudgeon, he used mass communications media both in his most famous poem and in daily life.12 Take, for example, a letter written by Eliot to Virginia Woolf on June 2, 1927. According to Bonnie Kime Scott, Eliot refers to a recent visit to Woolf ’s home, to which he brought along gramophone records. In the letter he offers to tell her more about popular American jazz tunes such as the “Grizzly Bear,” the “Chicken Strut,” and “The Memphis Shake.”13 The artistic value of the gramophone’s voice also appealed to Woolf. In her wartime novel Between the Acts, the gramophone provides the music for the village pageant-play, but even during inactive moments of the play the machine continues to speak with a “chuff, chuff, chuff ” or a “tick, tick, tick.”14 Woolf ’s gramophone voice acts as narrator, persistently telling both the pageant audience and the reader how to read the play and the novel respectively. The pervasiveness of the gramophone in Between the Acts, however, is strikingly different to Eliot’s allusions or Joyce’s mimicking. In its omnipresence, Woolf ’s gramophone no longer suggests simply as Michael North writes, a “significant relation between aesthetic modernism and new media,” where modernism’s focus on innovative forms naturally led

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to a mining of new technological inventions.15 Instead, the persistence of the gramophone’s voice articulates the new sonic environment of 1940s Britain in which civilians navigated the war by way of air-raid sirens, the whizzing of dropping bombs, and radio broadcasts. Evelyn Waugh also presents a wartime Britain where mass media, namely the radio, invades the private sphere and ultimately controls a person’s day-today movements. In Put Out More Flags, Angela Lyne obsessively listens to the radio: listening in is the last thing she does at night and the first thing she does in the morning. Through the radio, Angela taps into worldwide conversations—“voices … speaking in their own and in foreign tongues”— without ever leaving her apartment. As she increasingly becomes a shut-in, the radio becomes the means by which Angela learns of and understands the chaotic world around her. The voices she hears over the radio are a substitute for personal interaction. Even a telephone call from her lover, Basil Seal, goes unanswered; the rings are described as a nuisance, interrupting the safe “silence” of Angela’s flat, where the radio no longer registers as external or unwelcome sound. The radio is, in fact, so ubiquitous that Angela begins to mimic the broadcasting form: walking around town she speaks aloud and expects no answer.16 Yet Pound, Woolf, and Waugh were not breaking new literary ground when they made the connection between war and sound. Avant-garde writers, particularly the Futurists, had, decades before, already claimed the language and sounds of martial technology for art. As Douglas Kahn writes, “Noise in the avant-garde was linked to the sounds of military combat, the specter and incursion of technology and industrialism, the forms of popular culture and public demonstrations …”17 By incorporating military and technological sounds within art, Futurists attempted to liberate language from what they believed were suffocating literary traditions. The violence of war was expected to free poetry from its bourgeois shackles, what F. T. Marinetti famously refers to as “Death, domesticated” in his 1909 manifesto.18 The radio (a medium historically connected to both the transmission of language and the military) therefore proved a powerful icon for Futurism. In his 1913 lecture “Destruction of Syntax—Wireless Imagination—Words-in-Freedom” Marinetti highlights the significance of war and radio for modern literature. Radio’s wireless transmissions are depicted as the perfect metaphor for inspired poetry that was

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unencumbered by traditional images and language. As he declares, “By wireless imagination, I mean the absolute freedom of images or analogies, expressed with disconnected words, and without the connecting syntactical wires and without punctuation.”19 And where better to use this wireless imagination than when describing the spectacles of war. Marinetti even provides an example of such unconnected (or unwired) writing, where associations between images are said to have formed freely rather than find their grounding in poetic tradition (an idea remarkably similar to Pound’s description of the writing process in “I Gather the Limbs of Osiris”). Speaking of his Battle of Tripoli, Marinetti states: “I have compared a trench bristling with bayonets to an orchestra, or a machinegun to a fatal women [sic], I have intuitively introduced a large part of the universe into a brief episode of African combat.”20 Thus, for Futurism, an early “moment”21 within what would come to be known as modernism, radio was not only the metaphor for poetic inspiration, but it also acted as a material example of the militarism the avant-garde movement wanted to express within its art. The triangular relationship between radio, literature, and warfare that the Futurists imagined prior to World War I, however, did not lead to a revolution in modern writing, at least not in the way the Futurists had anticipated. Instead, the metaphorical link between radio, literary modernism, and war became a literal connection with the outbreak of World War II in 1939. From the very start of World War II, political leaders around the world, but in particular Britain, the United States, and Germany, each of which had a welldeveloped radio infrastructure, began to put radio to a new full-time use: the transmission of propaganda. With an influx of modern writers in the broadcasting stations, well-selected literature, broadcast to either a nation at home or listeners behind enemy lines, proved to be a very powerful weapon of war on the cultural front. But as Modernism at the Microphone shows, this on-air literature cannot simply be dismissed as propaganda. Instead, by lending their creative and at times literal voices to wartime radio, modern and late-modern authors living in Britain and the U.S. were able to translate high modernist modes and aesthetic principles—artistic autonomy and individualism, the cosmopolitan and trans-historical imagination, exile and alienation, eclecticism—for distribution to a mass audience during 1940s wartime radio. By doing so, these authors extended the life of modernist forms into the 1940s, a decade often neglected in modernist and media studies alike.22

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Voices of the wireless revolution The association Marinetti made between radio’s internationalism, war, and linguistic impact spoke to the history of wireless. From its earliest days Guglielmo Marconi’s invention was envisioned as both a naval tool for ship to shore communication and as an experimental communications device for the general public.23 But the realities of radio broadcasting did not live up to such an idealized unity. Instead, radio users were divided into two groups: military personnel and radio hams. Still used for point-to-point communication during the first decades of the twentieth century, radio hams (amateur enthusiasts) often built their own wireless apparatuses and tried to pick up signals that were making their way through the electromagnetic spectrum. But with the outbreak of World War I, such entertaining uses of radio came to a halt. The militaries on both sides of the conflict took command of the airwaves, banning the enthusiasts from signaling or listening in.24 It was only in the early 1920s that radio began to gain ground as a nationally regulated entertainment and information medium, abandoning its previous telegraphic model for one in which spoken words can be transmitted as news, songs, plays, and, particularly in the U.S., advertising, to a vast and diverse at-home audience.25 In the 1920s it was hoped, especially in Britain, that radio could be used to educate a mass audience on cultural and moral matters. Under John Reith, the first Director General of the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), radio was idealized as a medium that could bring the Arnoldian “best which has been thought and said in the world” to an illiterate and uneducated listening audience. Even in the U.S., where advertisers and private corporations got an early hold on broadcasting, radio was understood to have a “moral agency.” As Hadley Cantril and Gordon Allport write in their study The Psychology of Radio: “The radio is a modern substitute for the hearth-side, and a family seated before it is obedient to its own conventional habits and taboos. The radio dares not violate those attitudes fundamental in the great American home. It does not dare broadcast programs dealing too frankly with crime, rebellion, or infidelity.”26 In nations around the world, radio of the 1920s was heralded as a cultural and educational tool that would bring diverse communities together under a national identity; radio was idealized as a

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democratic medium that would allow citizens increased access to and better understanding of their government; and radio was upheld as a new medium for literature, to which numerous writers who wished to experiment in sound flocked. Two authors who firmly advocated for radio’s revolutionary and literary potential in the late 1920s and early 1930s were German playwright Bertolt Brecht and Frankfurt School theorist Walter Benjamin. Both writers created formally complex and innovative radio dramas that aimed to maximize educational outcomes through listener participation. This type of experimentation with radio form, however, also hints at the nationalist propaganda potential of the medium. As early media theorist Rudolph Arnheim argues, radio had the potential to homogenize both international and national relations: “Wireless eliminates not only the boundaries between countries but also between provinces and classes of society. It insists on the unity of national culture and makes for centralisation, collectivism and standardization.”27 In this statement, Arnheim alludes to both the democratic and autocratic possibilities of radio, possibilities that Brecht and Benjamin anticipate even in their attempts to educate listening audiences on radio’s utopian value. It is this two-sided nature of the medium that modernists will exploit during World War II. Ever the media optimist, Brecht looked to radio broadcasting’s educational potential and attempted to revolutionize the medium not only through his theoretical writings but also through practical application. Brecht’s 1929 radio play The Flight Across the Ocean (Der Ozeanflug, originally broadcasted as Der Flug der Lindberghs) is subtitled “Ein Radiolehrstück für Knaben und Mädchen” (“A radio learning play for boys and girls”) and is a perfect example of his effort to put theory into practice. In his “Explanations” to the play, Brecht claims that the broadcast was meant to be transformative—that it was “not intended to be of use to the present-day radio but to change it,” and a significant proportion of this change concerned listener reaction and participation. He wanted his audience to interact with the material of the broadcast, not to simply consume information passively, but to essentially “rebel” against traditional radio listening models and become, in his words, a “producer.”28 The Flight Across the Ocean, therefore, was Brecht’s attempt at offering German audiences a new model for listening. This model was meant to demonstrate to

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listeners and radio managers alike that radio could be used to build educated listening communities. And these participating communities, through their active involvement in the drama, would implode the hierarchy between listener and broadcaster that had become standard for radio by the late 1920s. The plot of The Flight Across the Ocean, originally written for the BadenBaden Music Festival, is simple. Described as a pedagogical enterprise (“pädagogisches Unternehmen”),29 the radio drama, like many Brechtian plays, takes up an historical topic (Charles Lindbergh’s famous flight across the Atlantic), and has political motivations (Lindbergh’s flight is described as a success due to the collective spirit, rather than an individual feat).30 Like much of Brecht’s work, politics are front-and-center in The Flight Across the Ocean, and the political message of this radio experiment fits the mold of other Brechtian learning plays—it is intended to educate the German audience on the collectivism of Communist doctrine. This is especially true of the broadcast’s conclusion, where a successful but weakened Lindbergh asks the Paris airport workers to send a message to “their” colleagues in San Diego and inform them that their (“ihre”) collective work was good and went off without a hitch.31 But it is the broadcast’s unusual form that speaks the loudest to Brecht’s political commitments and his theories on radio’s communicative potential. This play marks an attempt by Brecht to use the radio not as an outgrowth of the passive newspaper (in which Lindbergh’s flight originally made headlines), but rather as an instrument of two-sided communication. As he suggests in “The Radio as a Communications Apparatus,” the listener needs to be plugged into technology as an organic part, not just as a consumer or appendage. The complex structure of The Flight Across the Ocean centers on the collaboration between Lindbergh and the radio. According to Brecht in his “Explanations” to the play, there are two parts: the radio is meant to “introduce and interrupt” the action of the drama, a significant element of Brecht’s epic theater model in which the fourth wall is broken, and the man, Lindbergh, has a pedagogical function.32 The role of Lindbergh, however, was not meant to be played by a solitary actor or voice. Instead, Brecht introduces what he calls collective I-singing (“the collective singing of notes and reading out loud of the text”), which is performed by the listening audience. This collective singing, of course, matches the message of collectivism within the

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play.33 The collaboration between mankind and medium—both the imagined one (Lindbergh and radio) and the physical one (listeners and broadcast)— attempts to revolutionize the way in which an audience interacts with radio. However, the participation of the audience within the broadcast is not the end to Brecht’s interactive presentation. Toward the end of The Flight Across the Ocean, machine and man (“Radio und die Lindberghs”—note the plural) speak together as one voice emphasizing the fact that despite historical accounts, Lindbergh did not complete his flight across the Atlantic without assistance. Brecht’s revisionist version of Lindbergh’s achievement argues that such a feat would not have been possible without a supportive community, not to mention his airplane and the numerous technicians that made flight possible.34 But this presentation of collective triumph also speaks volumes to the very form of the play, in which the “collective I-singers” interact as Lindbergh and rely upon the radio to create the radio drama. Brecht had very specific ideas on how the collective I-singing was to be executed: Lindbergh’s lines were to be mechanically sung in unison by the listening audience, thereby emphasizing the collaboration of man and machine. (This, of course, was Brecht’s ideal performance and was modeled by actors on stage during the Baden-Baden production. See image below.) Conversely, the radio (which in the image is modeled by the actors and musicians grouped together) performed the “nature” parts of the play. Thus, in an ideal radio production, the listeners would collectively play the part of Lindbergh and the radio would fill in the dialogue and noises of meteorological characters such as the fog (Der Nebel) and the snowstorm (Der Schneesturm). The radio would also play the parts of a variety of antagonists, including Lindbergh’s environmental enemy, the sea, and his human enemy, sleep. Brecht’s purpose in creating such a formally complex broadcast was to force the audience to communicate with the radio, just as Lindbergh does in the play. He invites the audience to act in the production and through such interaction calls attention to the agency of the radio as a medium. But with The Flight Across the Ocean Brecht also illustrates the melding of man and machine—the creation of a new human and technological network—where collective mechanical singing meets the radio voice of nature. Even the term Brecht uses to describe collective singing suggests such a network—the isolated “I” is always part of a collective and the collective is composed of a

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network of individuals. The Flight Across the Ocean, then, should be understood as Brecht’s attempt at practical application of what he would come to write in “The Radio as a Communications Apparatus.” From 1929 on, Brecht’s primary goal with regard to radio was to “bring [the listener] into a network instead of isolating him.”35 But creating a collectivist spirit among his listeners was not Brecht’s only goal. This production was also meant to jolt radio audiences out of their passive listening routines. According to a letter written to Ernst Hardt in July 1929, Brecht hoped that The Flight Across the Ocean would act as a listening model, instructing a radio audience on how to listen: “It could be used for an experiment, a way of showing, at least virtually, how listener participation in the art of radio could be made possible.” In fact, as Brecht goes on to state, in

Figure I.1: Staging The Flight Across the Ocean at Baden-Baden

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order for the radio play to be considered art at all, “participation” is required, thereby suggesting that art, as well as radio, is intrinsically interactive.36 Brecht was, moreover, very specific regarding the staging of this play. In the very same letter to Hardt, he enclosed these instructions: The enclosed statement of principles concerning the use of radio is projected on a large canvas. This projection remains in place during the whole play. On one side of the stage (with the screen behind them) are the broadcasting apparatus, the singers, musicians, speakers, etc.; on the other side, screened off so as to suggest a room, a man sits at a desk in his shirt sleeves with a musical score and hums, plays and sings the part of Lindbergh. This is to be the listener. Since quite a few specialists will be present, it will probably be necessary to have on one side a sign saying “The Radio” and on the other a sign saying “Listener.”37

The Listener (“Der Hörer”) can clearly be seen sitting apart from the remaining actors and musicians. Meant to represent the audience at home, this actor speaks and sings the part of Lindbergh, a role Brecht envisioned the listening radio audience, in particular children, ultimately performing themselves.38 The group of actors and musicians clumped together on the left-hand side of the stage represents the radio network, which, like audience listening practices, Brecht wanted to revolutionize. The radio’s role is prominent throughout this broadcast, acting as both a character in the play and as a means for audience participation. Such prominence, however, is not a phenomenon unique to Brecht. In fellow Weimar writer Friedrich Wolf ’s radio play “Krassin” rettet “Italia” the performance opens with radio transmissions, which, picked up by a Russian radio ham (in this example a fictional form of audience participation), enables the rescue of a stranded Italian airship crew. And in The War of the Worlds, discussed in Chapter 1, Orson Welles and The Mercury Theatre on the Air mimic the sounds of a radio news report in order to exploit the listening audience’s internalization of radio norms and end up causing an unexpected level of participation in the form of mass panic. Despite a shared focus on materiality, Kittler exposes some difficulties in Brecht’s use of radio, noting in both “Wellenartillerie” and “The History of Communication Media” that the radio, much like the airplane (another prominent figure in Brecht’s The Flight Across the Ocean), share a common martial history: “The valve radio, developed as wireless telephony for breaking the imperial cable monopoly, first of all made the new weapons systems of

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the first World War, the aeroplane and the tank, both mobile and dirigible by remote control, and after the end of the war, was applied to the civilian populations.”39 Kittler’s critical reading of Brecht’s play results from his overall claim that communications technologies stem from war. This connection is even noted by Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels who likewise states that the radio and airplane are first and foremost weapons: “It would not have been possible for us to take power or to use it in the ways we have without the radio and the airplane.”40 But Kittler fails to take into account, especially in “The History of Communication Media,” the principal role that radio hams played in broadcast history, just as he overlooks what historian Stephen Kern refers to as the “airplane’s uplifting of human consciousness [and] its capacity to unify people and nations” from its earliest days.41 Brecht’s goal with The Flight Across the Ocean is not just to re-imagine the use of radio, but also to re-imagine Lindbergh’s achievement and the historical significance of the airplane. Kittler’s technical history of the radio, however, does not leave room for a progressive perspective such as Brecht’s. With its collective, mechanical singing and object-centered plot and form, The Flight Across the Ocean was ideally meant to force listeners into recognizing the mechanism and routine in their listening practices and thereby change the way the public responded to radio broadcasts. The institutionalized and manufactured passive listening was to be brought to a screeching halt. Like the invention of the airplane, Brecht’s revolutionary plans for the radio were meant to usher in a “new time” (“neue Zeit”).42 This anticipated collaboration between the listener and the radio is suggested not only in the form of the radio play, but also in the conclusion to the drama, where, in the final speech, the Lindberghs and the radio unite to create one voice. With this voice, the producer (radio) and the consumer (listeners) join forces to tell of their collective technological success in the modern world. The airplane is declared a triumph because it can reach speeds that surpass nature—both the winds of a hurricane and the power of one hundred horses.43 Unimaginable to previous generations, the airplane, like the radio, is a symbol of our ability to achieve the unachievable, and with this play Brecht hoped his audience would make the connection between the success of Lindbergh and the potential for a two-way system of broadcasting—if we can fly through the skies, then a progressive form of radio broadcasting should not be unobtainable

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(“Unerreichbare”). As Brecht shows in the concluding speech, he wanted producers and consumers to unite and devote their time to the realization of impossible dreams, to which, he states, this account is devoted (“Diesem ist dieser Bericht gewidmet”).44 Although The Flight Across the Ocean ultimately failed to revolutionize radio listening, in part due to the confusion between the stage model and the aural reality, not to mention the technical difficulties of ensuring listener participation, Brecht did inspire other modern writers to imagine new purposes for radio and new models for audience listening, especially when it came to children. Influenced by Brecht’s late-1920s listening plays, Benjamin also created his own listening models for radio, which helped shape his ambivalent position on radio broadcasting and the media industry as a whole. Like Brecht, Benjamin’s writings are littered with references to, and analyses of, a variety of media, such as film, photography, fashion, and architecture. But it is in his rarely discussed comic radio drama, Much Ado about Kasper (Radau um Kasperl), with its inclusion of dialectics, pedagogical instruction on radio use, and occasional images of violence, that he formally illustrates his conflicted approach to communications media, specifically the radio, that is predominant within his later critical writings.45 Although produced for a children’s program, it would be unfair to say that this radio play, meant to be the first of a series, was intended to attract children at the expense of a mature audience, for a play with Kasper (a beloved character from traditional German puppet theater) as the main character certainly held an interest for adults too.46 First broadcast on Radio Frankfurt on March 10, 1932, Much Ado about Kasper follows the adventures of the title character as he learns the pedagogical potential and civic responsibility of radio broadcasting.47 The play begins with Kasper on his way to the market to buy a flounder at the request of his wife, Puschi.48 As he makes his way, however, Kasper is interrupted by Herr Maulschmidt—the voice of the radio, where “Maul” is the German word for “muzzle”—who believes it is a “high solemn honor to speak on the radio.” Herr Maulschmidt attempts to bring Kasper to the radio station so that the voice of the popular puppet can be heard around the world.49 This proposition is a self-reflexive example of the genre mixing that this radio play achieves—taking the literary and stage tradition of Kasper and adapting it to radio—a mixing that Benjamin later endorses

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in “The Author as Producer.” Herr Maulschmidt successfully brings Kasper to the radio station; but, after learning about radio’s ability to reach a distant audience, Kasper decides to use his broadcasting time to seek revenge and verbally attacks Seppel (another character in the Puppet Theater tradition), who lives in another town. Kasper abusively takes advantage of radio’s public nature, and as a result causes chaos within the station. Once the police arrive, Kasper flees, and in the process of trying to outrun Herr Maulschmidt and local law enforcement entertains listeners with his humorous adventures.50 One of these adventures leads Kasper to the fairgrounds. Once here, he enters a tent to speak with the great Lipsuslapsus, who offers life advice to all who seek it. In this scene, Benjamin entertains his audience by exploiting the unique oral quality of the radio, but he also uses this opportunity to educate his audience, relying upon a dialectic form that would have been familiar to listeners of Benjamin’s Hörmodelle. What Kasper hears when he enters the tent, however, is not some divine spirit speaking through the air, but his own inaccurate echo. The result is a humorous interaction with Kasper and himself, in which Kasper discusses the direction of his life. Below is an example of this interchange, which I have kept in the original German so that the rhyme scheme remains intact: Kasper: Denn was ist der Mensch ohne Philosophie? Lipsuslapsus: Vieh! Kasper: Doch man hungert dabei. Kann man leben von seinem Genie? Lipsuslapsus: Nie! […] Kasper: So nehm ich mir eine reiche Witwe. Lipsuslapsus: Weh! Kasper: Dann hab ich doch Geld, was hindert mich, dass ich mich freue? Lipsuslapsus: Reue!51

In the above dialogue, Lipsuslapsus’ responses both answer Kasper’s questions and complete the rhyme. Often the rhyme is the antonym to its pair. Take, for example, the last two lines in the excerpt. Here Kasper is asking about the pleasures (“freue”) money will bring him; Lipsuslapsus (or Kasper’s echo) answers: money will bring him sorrow (“Reue”). “Freue” and “Reue” are the rhyming pair. The similar sounds of the two words, with the exception of the beginning consonant, allow the rhyme to work as an incomplete echo. Throughout this scene Benjamin

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transforms the Freudian idea of “lapsus” (hence the name Lipsuslapsus) into a radio-friendly form: whereas lapsus is usually a slip of the tongue, in Much Ado about Kasper it becomes a slip of the ear. Kasper hears what he wants to hear. However, this is complicated further by the fact that what Kasper unknowingly hears is his own voice speaking his own desires. As I briefly mentioned above, the form of the two-person exchange in Much Ado about Kasper resembles the interchanges common to Benjamin’s Hörmodelle. These non-literary radio plays consisting of two main characters (the Speaker who teaches and the Skeptic who learns) were created in order to present advice on subjects that affected the listeners’ everyday lives, such as how to ask one’s boss for a raise. The dialectical form of example followed by counter-example was intended to help audiences better navigate their way through the social norms of an increasingly complex society. As Benjamin states in reference to these broadcasts, “The basic tendency of these models is dialectic. The subject matter of the instruction deals with typical situations from everyday life. The method of instruction consists of the confrontation of example and counter-example.”52 These Hörmodelle modeled not only listening, but also the ways in which the listener could better succeed in the world. Thus the dialogue offers a learning experience for the Skeptic as well as for the radio audience, just as the comical dialogue in Much Ado about Kasper acts as a pedagogical moment for both Kasper and the listeners at home. The focus on education in the fairground scene and throughout the broadcast, however, would have been expected in a play that includes a puppet, in particular Kasper. As John Bell points out, puppets have a long history in the realm of education, one that extends back to religious and ritualistic teachings. In the modern era, puppets were often labeled as “premodern” or “outmoded.” This was especially true in Europe, where anarchistic puppets, such as Kasper, were connected to Carnival, along with “other forms of foolish, frivolous, and pagan behavior.”53 Yet despite this reputation, puppets continued to be used in modern theater in order “to successfully convey ‘modern’ ideas and stories, which are often thought to depend upon secularism, realism, and the efficacy of human performers as the most successful means of communication.”54 The disconnect between pre-modern puppets and cutting-edge radio technology served Benjamin’s purposes well. Kasper’s abuse of radio at the beginning of the broadcast matches his primitive status as puppet. But Kasper’s role as

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puppet—to communicate to his audience the significance of a sociological, historical, or even technological principle—also means that Kasper will have to learn the educational and democratic potential of radio as a mass medium. Thus, Kasper’s misuse of the medium is intended to reflect current usage, which Benjamin, like Brecht before him, wants to replace with educational broadcasting similar to this production. Ultimately, Kasper learns the educational potential of radio. After returning home and relating his adventures to his wife, Kasper realizes that Herr Maulschmidt has hidden a microphone under his bed. Everything Kasper has said has unknowingly been broadcast over the radio. (Of course, the irony that Kasper has been speaking on air the entire time, even when not in bed, is not lost on a listening audience.) Herr Maulschmidt’s monomaniacal insistence that Kasper speak on the air, while verging on institutional violence against a member of the public with its dramatic chase and eventual entrapment, also illustrates Benjamin’s theoretical position that in order to make radio a true communications apparatus, the public needs to have access to the airwaves: “A child can see that it is in the spirit of radio to put as many people as possible in front of a microphone on every possible occasion; the public has to be turned into the witnesses of interviews and conversations in which now this person and now that one has the opportunity to make himself heard.”55 Being broadcast over the radio also succeeds in changing Kasper’s opinion of the medium—the radio is now no longer a medium for abuse, but rather a means of education through entertainment. As Kasper states toward the end of the play: “Now, for the first time, I hear how the radio is.”56 This is a lesson that Benjamin wanted his own audience to learn. Despite his ambivalence, Benjamin still believed that the radio, particularly the radio play, had the ability to unite all types of listeners, not just children and adults: In short, the radio play in question seeks the most intimate contact with the latest research on the so-called sociology of the audience. It would find its strongest confirmation in its ability to capture the attention of both the expert and the layman, even if for different reasons. And thereby would also give voice to what may be the simplest definition of the concept of a new popularity.57

Like Brecht, Benjamin argues that radio’s effectiveness can only be increased through social revolution; radio needed to have a pedagogical function, to

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promote active listening rather than passive hearing, and to reach out to both intellectual and lay person. This, however, was a tall order for early radio, and one that neither Benjamin nor Brecht would see fulfilled.

Voices of contradiction This cultural honeymoon with radio did not last long. As Kahn writes, experimentation with sound technology would be halted by the “global economic collapse, the consolidation and expansion of authoritarian regimes, the exile of artists and intellectuals, the Spanish Civil War, genocide, the events leading to World War II, and the war itself.”58 By the 1930s, advocates for radio’s cultural and democratic potential had largely been shouted down by the realities of a politically changing world that saw the rise to power of Adolf Hitler and the realization through Joseph Goebbels that radio was a powerful weapon for nationalist propaganda. Goebbels lays out the new rules of radio under Nazi control in his 1933 speech “The Radio as the Eighth Great Power,” which he delivered at the tenth German Radio Exhibition: We do not intend to use the radio only for our partisan purposes. We want room for entertainment, popular arts, games, jokes, and music. But everything should have a relationship to our day. Everything should include the theme of our great reconstructive work, or at least not stand in its way. Above all it is necessary to clearly centralize all radio activities, to place spiritual tasks ahead of technical ones, to introduce the leadership principle, to provide a clear worldview, and to present this worldview in flexible ways.59

With everything broadcast over the air needing to reflect the “theme” of the Third Reich regime, there was no room for technical innovation. This assault against both medium and listener is exactly what Benjamin describes in the final pages of “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” when he states: “The logical result of Fascism is the introduction of aesthetics into political life. The violation of the masses, whom Fascism, with its Führer cult, forces to their knees, has its counterpart in the violation of an apparatus which is pressed into the production of ritual values.”60

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The narrative of radio then is one of a coin with two faces: cultural progress and violent (wartime) catastrophe. This striking dichotomy, however, is not unique to the broadcasting medium; as cultural theorist Paul Virilio shows, contradictions define twentieth-century technology. In his 2002 exhibit “Unknown Quantity” at the Fondation Cartier Pour l’art contemporain in Paris, Virilio asked visitors to confront the untold story of the past century: that increased technological progress introduced the world to new methods of destruction. Known also as the “Museum of Accidents,” this exhibit captured the dual effects of our increased interest in speed and technological invention throughout the twentieth century.61 Including the works of numerous contemporary artists, many of which depicted the negative impacts of technology through photographs and paintings of catastrophes around the world, this new type of “museum” asked its viewers to look at the underbelly of modern progress: that, for example, the invention of the airplane both connected the world in exciting new ways and also introduced it to aerial warfare and the plane crash. Although on the surface the purpose of this exhibit may seem to be the spreading of fear and the demonizing of modernization, Virilio’s goal was actually to present these incidents as part of our larger technologized system. Accidents, he argues, are not anomalies but the flipside of modernity, and we need to accept them as an “automatic” part of our daily lives.62 But what Virilio really seems to be suggesting by the term “accident” is more than simply the dual nature of radio and other communications media (film, television, Internet) to which he refers throughout the “Unknown Quantity” exhibit. Instead, Virilio’s larger body of work on the twentieth century points to the creation of a system in which contradictions are a necessary part of the structure. It is therefore normal, as Bernhard Siegert points out, that networks, especially those based in language, are plagued by “clogs,” or that “parasites” and “noise” are, as Michel Serres argues, natural parts of a functioning communications system.63 In other words we build structures that are “too big to fail,” but nevertheless do. But this failure shows that the system in place (be it communication, transportation, language, or even economic structures) is functioning as expected. Such contradictions, however, are not limited to technology. In fact the paradoxes of radio—that it is both a progressive instrument for cultural uplift and a weapon of war; that it is both public and private; that it is both a tool and an obstacle for

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communication; that it creates both national and international communities; and that it invokes both presence and absence—are strikingly similar to the contradictions found in literary modernism. The narrative of modernism, as I read it throughout Modernism at the Microphone, is filled with paradoxes. From Ezra Pound’s call to “make it new” to T. S. Eliot’s interest in “tradition,” from James Joyce’s thriving metropolis in Ulysses to Virginia Woolf ’s small English village in Between the Acts, from the experimental avant-garde theater of Bertolt Brecht to the nationalist, mystical productions of W.B. Yeats, writers in the early twentieth century covered a vast, and at times contradictory ground of subjects and forms in order to describe the chaos of the modern moment. My connecting of modernism and media, however, is far from new. Although radio did not make his cut of influential media in The Mechanic Muse, Hugh Kenner acknowledges the similar temporal origins of high modernists and new communications technology: “Ottmar Mergenthaler patented his linotype in 1885, at the center of the decade when the instigators of High Modernism were born.” And Nicholas Daly has argued that modernism is more than a result or a sign of modernity; it is instead (alongside film) “actively involved in modernization.”64 More recently, Mark Goble had linked modernism with the telegraph, telephone, phonograph, and cinema, claiming that it is not enough to note a co-flourishing of modernism and communications media or to state that modernists were influenced by technology. Instead, he suggests that modernism needs to be understood as a medium that “desired” communication and that the power of contact these new devices offered the public were already a part of modernism.65 But whereas radio is given short shrift in the above works, it is the sole focus of two recent edited collections, Broadcasting Modernism and Broadcasting in the Modernist Era. In these pivotal books for radio and modernist studies, radio’s impact upon modern writers is explored, carving out room for the radio as an influencer of modernists alongside the more established media of film and the typewriter.66 Critics of sound have also noted an affinity between modernism and aural media. For Kahn, modernism is a medium that cries out to be heard, as it “produced a greater emphasis on listening to things, to different things, and to more of them.” And this makes sense, according to Emily Thompson, because culture is more than a site of technological achievement, “it is inseparable from technology itself.”67

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But while the co-evolutionary nature of modernism and mass communication has been well established, this relationship becomes more tenuous as modernists enter World War II. This is not least because, by 1940, modernism had been declared dead many times over, first by Edmund Wilson, who sounded modernism’s death knell in 1930, and then by John Lehmann, who generously added an extra decade.68 Even established contemporary critics of modernism tend to focus narrowly on the early years; these studies range from the very specific (Michael North’s Reading 1922) to the seemingly more “arbitrary” (Lawrence Rainey’s focus on 1912–22 in Institutions of Modernism).69 But there has been a move in the past fifteen years to expand the temporal boundaries of modernism to not only include, but also celebrate the writings of the 1940s, a move upon which this book builds. Tyrus Miller paved the way for scholars interested in the later decades of modernism with his transnational study of late 1920s and 1930s political writing. Late Modernism not only widened the canon temporally, but it also helped to redefine modernism as a movement entrenched in politics rather than isolated in an ivory tower.70 A few years later, Jed Esty’s national study of British late modernism in A Shrinking Island challenged the widely accepted critical opinion that modernism in the 1940s reflected a “sinking” culture that was contracting alongside British imperial power. This anthropological study opened the door for critics to read later British modernism as partaking in an era of shifting values, where imperial concerns were replaced by national ones. Esty positioned 1940s British modernism as significant in its own right—a distinctive phase between “empire and welfare state.”71 Most recently, Marina MacKay has advocated for a discussion of what she calls the “public modernism” of the Second World War. Her readings of 1940s novels as national allegories not only tie together Esty’s insular turn and Miller’s political focus, but make a case for war writing as part of the high modernist tradition. For MacKay, late modernism should not be considered “late.” Instead, due to the civilian casualties of the conflict, she argues that the realities of World War II require us to rethink our definition of “war literature” to include those who did not fight and texts that are not directly about war, thereby necessitating “the modes of reading that the non-combatant modernisms of the Great War made possible.”72 Even the title of Ehrhard Bahr’s Weimar on the Pacific hints at the existence of a renewed modernism during World War II. In this study of German exiles

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living in Los Angeles, Bahr describes not only the reemergence of German modernism in the 1940s, but also points to the international element of this reconstruction that resulted in the continuation of the exilic theme that, to a large degree, defines our understanding of modernist writing of the 1920s.73 Bahr’s international focus is largely missing from accounts of both studies in late modernism and World War II radio broadcasting. Miller, Esty, and MacKay, for example, each confine their examples to one nation, which fits their readings of modernism as becoming increasingly interested in the national or domestic in the 1930s and 1940s. Studies of radio broadcasting have also largely restricted themselves by nation, perhaps as a way to avoid the complications that arise when comparing unique broadcasting systems. Only recently has this national focus begun to shift. Radio historian Michele Hilmes, for example, takes on the distinct but intertwined broadcasting narratives of Britain and America in Network Nations.74 Modernism at the Microphone also partakes in this new trend that seeks to engage with the internationally entangled history of broadcasting through analysis of radio plays, prose, and speeches written for a transnational audience. By doing so, I hope to invite a reevaluation of late modernism that takes into consideration the internationalism of both the historical moment and modernist tradition.

Voices of the radio war Despite our present-day obsession with the screen and our own tendency to think of World War II in terms of cinematic images (in large part due to old newsreel footage played on the History Channel and sweeping wartime dramas like Saving Private Ryan), most people experienced the war through sound in the comfort of their own living rooms. In the U.S. alone, one or more radios were found in 90 percent of homes during World War II, and listening in accounted for three to four hours each day. Radio, as Gerd Horton describes it, was, like other media (cinema, newspapers) “an early recruit to [the war] campaign,” and its main purpose was to broadcast propaganda that would unite a nation of people behind its government and the war effort.75 The radio was deemed so effective at reaching and persuading a large audience that world leaders took to the microphone to make more personal appeals

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for the public’s support. Thus listeners around the world heard the powerful oratory of Hitler, the impassioned speeches of Winston Churchill, and the seductive calm of Franklin Roosevelt’s fireside chats. For both the Allied and the Axis Powers, the airwaves became an area of conquest, just as important as the battlegrounds in Europe and Africa or the waters of the Pacific. While propaganda had been used prior to the twentieth century to support national and social concerns, it was not until its wide-scale use during World War I, in large thanks due to new mass communications media, that governments realized propaganda’s true potential as a manipulator of public opinion. Thus, our current definition of propaganda has taken on a distinctly war- and media-based perception, where what was previously understood as a method of persuasion is now a means to manipulate the unassuming masses. As Brett Gary writes, Although its uses were ancient, post-WWI critics conceived of propaganda as an industrial-era, even a distinctly twentieth-century problem: it combined the aggressive passions of nationalism and revolution with machine-age scales of mass production and distribution (employing powerful new communications technologies), targeted uprooted, dislocated, and allegedly violent mass publics, was buttressed by the increasingly widespread perception that irrational impulses govern human behavior, and was practiced by an emerging coterie of professionalized experts who understood (and celebrated) the commercial or political efficacy of manipulating those irrational forces for concealed purposes.76

Even by World War II the term propaganda had distasteful connotations. Governments and radio stations working in collusion on both sides of the war worked to disguise national and international broadcasts as cultural edification, where “information” rather than “propaganda” was transmitted. Some nations, of course, were better at this disguise than others. In fact it was the BBC’s ability to sell its international wartime programming as information that, to this day, makes the corporation a worldwide leader in trusted news. Thus radio broadcasting during World War II cannot strictly be understood in terms of manipulation. Rather, wartime radio became a place of cultural and educational programming, where “radio correspondents became reporters and teachers, providing essential instruction in geography and in how to read and deconstruct government communiqués.”77

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The relationship of writers to the war, especially in Britain, also shifted during World War II. There was no return to the jingoism of the Great War. But writers also softened their largely anti-war positions of the 1920s and 1930s, especially once the Battle of Britain was in full swing. This war, unlike the last, which took place largely on the Continent, affected British civilians who became targets of German air raids. This war was described as being necessary for British survival, or as writer and critic Cyril Connolly put it: But they [the writers] must also realize that their liberty and security are altogether threatened, that Fascism is against them, and that the war, although not as anti-fascist as they could wish, is much more anti-fascist than anything else that has happened. The Anglo-French artist and the intellectual are lucky to be alive. They must celebrate by creating more culture as fast as they can.78

Connolly presents World War II as a cultural conflict. And writers, he argues, have a duty to fight in the best way they know how—with language. This was an argument with which Eliot also agreed. As he states in a conversation with Stephen Spender, “‘It doesn’t seem to me to matter very much whether, at the moment, it [writing] is or isn’t very good. The important thing is to keep going.”79 For Eliot, then, language was indeed a mighty weapon of war with which writers, by continuing to publish, could deliver cultural blows to the enemy. There was, however, one major problem that many authors faced during World War II: the question of where and how to publish. Due to rationing, there was a significant paper shortage, which meant that fewer books were being published than before the war.80 This was a particular burden on newer writers, who, being less established, had difficulty finding a press that would take a chance on an un-tested author. Writers, both new (W. H. Auden, Dylan Thomas, Arthur Miller) and established (Eliot, Thomas Mann, Dorothy Sayers), therefore, found new ways of publishing their work. While some turned to journal and newspaper writing, others decided to try their hand at a completely new medium—the radio. This was, of course, a major departure for a number of authors, who discovered that they had to adjust their typographic aesthetics and forms for a strictly oral medium. Successful writers found, however, that not only were their contributions helping the war effort, but they were also reaching a much larger audience than their print

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works ever had, thereby creating a new level of interest for their writing once the war ended. Yet it was not only authors who brought new and exciting dramas to listening audiences. Radio correspondents who reported on the conflict from the front lines made the war itself a drama in which all of humankind was involved. This was in large part due to the peculiarity of radio listening. It seems that more than written or pictorial images, images created via sound appeal directly and more powerfully to the listener’s imagination. Thus on-site Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS) news reports from H.V. Kaltenborn were disturbingly described by listeners as soap operas of which they couldn’t get enough: “‘I am now waiting to listen to Hitler’s speech. I feel the keenest excitement and romance in being able to hear directly from Europe.’”81 Perhaps the most famous narrative about radio’s ability to create powerful and persuasive images is the story of Edward R. Murrow’s coverage of the London Blitz for CBS. Reporting from the ground in Britain’s capital, Murrow recalled the horror of bombings upon the British public. His goal, as Susan Douglas describes it in Listening In, was “to create concrete mental images” of daily life in London, “of what shopping for food was now like, or sleeping, or crossing the street,” in order to encourage U.S. sympathy for the British war effort.82 But Murrow’s real success was that he achieved this without melodrama. His use of precise details in his news reports painted a vivid and immediate picture in the minds of U.S. listeners. Murrow brought the war in Britain into American homes, making living rooms across the U.S. terrifying sites of destruction, where listeners could almost feel the dropping of bombs and the heat of the fires that raged through London. The radio, therefore, like all mass communications media, presented listeners with a carefully constructed reality of wartime events. But only the radio allowed listeners to imagine the devastation and chaos as it was actually happening. For radio listeners, World War II was a story that unfolded in real time, and for Americans, it brought a narrative thousands of miles away much closer to home. Radio broadcasting’s crucial role in the fourth front of the Second World War, therefore, engendered the creation of new networks—among listeners from around the world, between broadcasters and their audiences (both at home and abroad), and even among broadcasters themselves. With all these new connections made possible by technology and war, the question begs

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asking: Is there something inherently different about networks in the first half of the twentieth century or during the war itself? Or rephrased with a more literary bent, is there such a thing as a “modernist” network? Certainly, the advent of communications technology, in particular radio, which for the first time connected disparate peoples across the globe simultaneously, is a significant feature of what I am labeling a modernist network. In fact, for propagandist theorist Jacques Ellul, mass media networks fundamentally altered connectivity and the transmission of information. It is the ubiquity of modern technology—radio, film, television—that allows information as propaganda to come into its own as a cultural influencer. The significance of this for wartime is apparent. But a modernist network is more than just technological connection; it also involves human connectivity. In their writings on and for radio, Brecht and Benjamin made a case for communications media as being educational and democratic tools—a far cry from the attempt “to drive out the ‘human’” in more recent media theory by Kittler and Bernhard Siegert.83 Thus, modernist networks are centered on both technological and human connectivity. As in modernist literature, there is still belief in human agency, where control and purpose are exerted upon the medium. There is also a fundamental interest in using networks for interpersonal connection, which mirrors the thin attaching threads in Woolf ’s Mrs. Dalloway and Forster’s call in Howards End to “only connect.” Part of what makes a modernist network so “modern” is also its ability to aid geographical conquest. Radio, as Michele Hilmes points out, has the unique ability to “transgress national borders, to defy barriers of both time and space.” Described as a “circulatory system,” radio can transmit key national images both to audiences at home and abroad, thereby making it a perfect medium for improving imperial connections, which for Britain were waning with the onset of the war.84 Due to its spatiality, radio was also deemed a perfect medium for propaganda. In fact, recent theories of propaganda focus on spatial dimension. In The Oxford Handbook of Propaganda Studies, Jonathan Auerbach and Russ Castronovo make a convincing case for propaganda being connected to conquest. Using the terms “global” and “worldwide,” the authors define propaganda as “connot[ing] the extension of territory.” But if, as Mark Wollaeger argues, modernism is the flip side of propaganda, then modernism too must be concerned with spatial advancement. For modernists and

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propagandists alike, the desire for expansion made the broadcasting houses an ideal space. It is within the walls of these studios that new networks could be forged that expanded artistic and/or political influences, particularly beyond the Western world.85 My exploration of these modern wartime networks—technological and human, literary and propagandistic, national and international—begins with a look at the years leading up to World War II, specifically Theodor Adorno’s groundbreaking work on and in radio broadcasting and his concern over the medium’s use as a perpetuator of war and capitalism. For Adorno, it is the Nazi’s weaponizing of radio, alongside the capitalist control of broadcasting in the U.S., which leads him to despair over the future of radio and argue that any hope for this medium as a revolutionary force has been replaced by its role within the wartime propaganda machine. Pairing Adorno’s American writings on broadcasting with Orson Welles’ The War of the Worlds, which famously caused widespread panic in the U.S., I argue that in both their writings on and for radio Adorno and Welles were tapping into a socio-historical correlation between radio and war of which the American public was already well familiar by the late 1930s. From the widespread panic of The War of the Worlds, I cross the Atlantic in the second chapter to discuss the protests against Dorothy Sayers’ BBC serial drama The Man Born to Be King. This twelve-part radio drama—an allegory that tells the story of the Gospels and the lead-up to World War II—attempted to rebrand wartime Britain as a Christian society, and, I argue, was part of a larger national marketing campaign that was intended to encourage continued U.S. support of the British war effort. Not all British subjects, however, were comfortable with the branding method. Religious protesters believed that the voicing of God over the airwaves was a blasphemy, and feared divine retribution in the form of an Allied defeat. In this chapter, I discuss these protests and argue that while the religious concerns were ungrounded, their unease regarding the power of the radio voice was in fact justified. It was the voices of the characters that invited listeners to imagine the Gospels and asked their audience to draw specific, and, at times, nationalistic, conclusions about Britain’s role in the current global conflict. By giving Christ a voice during World War II, I argue that this religious play-cycle meant to unify Britain through the suffering of Christ was instead effective because of

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its militarization of the Savior. My discussion of national and transatlantic unification continues in Chapter 3, wherein I focus on one of the most famous BBC wartime radio plays: Louis MacNeice’s Christopher Columbus. Intended for both American and British listeners, this broadcast celebrated the 450th anniversary of Columbus’ discovery of America. In order to appeal to an international audience, MacNeice picked a popular topic and wrote a highly entertaining program. But despite his claim that Christopher Columbus is far removed from the modernist stylings of Proust and Joyce, I contend that this transatlantic broadcast translated modernist eclecticism and complexity for both entertainment and propaganda purposes. In fact, rather than masking the propaganda messages, the inclusion of modernist form in Christopher Columbus enhanced them. When read alongside MacNeice’s other wartime writings, the broadcast shows remarkable similarities in message to the poet’s larger mission to improve cross-cultural understanding between Britain and the U.S. My focus on transatlantic broadcasting continues in Chapter 4 with a discussion of George Orwell’s work with the BBC. Working alongside writers such as E. M. Forster, T. S. Eliot, and Mulk Raj Anand, Orwell’s work within the BBC’s Indian Section offers readers a concrete example of wartime radio’s network-creating potential. Writing on daily British life during the war, Orwell’s broadcasts were meant to garner sympathy in order to keep South Asian listeners loyal to the crown while also combatting concurrent Axis broadcasts and the growing Indian nationalist movement. But while Orwell actually had little success reaching an Indian audience due to a wide array of technical factors, these Indian Section broadcasts were successful in forging new cosmopolitan alliances within the BBC station. The creation of new authorial linkages is also the focus of Chapter 5. In this chapter, I return to American broadcasting to look at a different modernist network, this time forged not within a station, but through the exchange of radio broadcasts and letters. Taking Bernhard Siegert’s description of “clogged” communication networks in Relays as my inspiration, I argue, through the somewhat unorthodox pairing of Archibald MacLeish’s and Ezra Pound’s radio broadcasts, that each author’s inability to send completely clear messages to their wartime radio audiences should be read as analogous to the larger communication problems of modernism. I consider both the modernist form of

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the broadcasts (namely the poetry of MacLeish’s The Fall of the City and the non-linearity of Pound’s fascist radio talks) and the functional impediments of 1930s and 1940s radio (which included weak transmitters and atmospheric interruptions) as reasons for why these aural networks failed. Ironically, however, it is the failures of these communications systems that suggest their functionality. Combining my focus on the local and spatial networks of Sayers, MacLeish, and Orwell and the temporal paradox of MacLeish’s and Pound’s unsuccessful broadcasts, I turn, in the final chapter, to a discussion of the past’s return within Thomas Mann’s exilic BBC radio speeches. Building from Bruno Latour’s analysis of temporality and multi-nodal networks in We Have Never Been Modern, I explore Mann’s Los Angeles broadcasts to Allied supporters in Nazi-controlled Germany. These transmissions required a combining of human and technological networks, including the airplane, telephone, and radio, in order to reach sympathizers living behind enemy lines. The necessary physical interruptions needed in order to transmit these broadcasts meant that by the time Mann’s voice reached German listeners’ ears his messages were already part of the past. Mann’s broadcasts, which spoke of a pre-Nazi Germany, therefore, both literally and metaphorically haunted German listeners. But this reemergence of the past within the present is, I argue, also an essential part of the modern condition, where the perpetual move forward paradoxically involves the resurgence of the past in unexpected ways. Finally, in lieu of a conclusion, Modernism at the Microphone ends with some preliminary thoughts on a question that often comes up when I discuss this project with colleagues and friends, namely: “What about British and American modernists who broadcasted for Nazi Germany?” While my usual answer is, “Perhaps I will write about this rich topic in a later book,” I’d like to at least gesture toward the complexity of Nazi broadcasting by citizens of Allied countries through an analysis of P.G. Wodehouse’s Berlin Broadcasts. With these readings I hope to highlight the striking similarities between Allied and Axis propaganda written by modern Anglophone writers. These similarities, I believe, challenge any pretense modernists held that there is a distinction between literature and propaganda in a time of war, especially when that literature is broadcasted to listeners around the world.

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War on the Air Europe has reached the point where all the highly developed means of communication serve constantly to strengthen the barriers “that divide human beings”; in this, radio and cinema in no way yield the palm to airplane and gun. —Max Horkheimer1 Radio, the first abuse, [led] from World War I to II, rock music, the next one, from II to III. —Friedrich Kittler2 In August 1939, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer released The Wizard of Oz, a film that showcased the technological advances in cinematography and spoke to the power of film in the modern age.3 Known for its introduction of Technicolor to audiences around the world, The Wizard of Oz draws attention to its achievements in the visual medium through the inclusion of such self-reflexive objects as the Wicked Witch of the West’s crystal ball and the doorframe of Dorothy’s Kansas home. But it is what you cannot see in this iconic film that hints at the undertones of violence throughout the movie and the tumultuous inter-war period from which it emerged. Despite being a significant film about sight, The Wizard of Oz is also a film about sound, in particular radio sound,4 and it is in these sonic moments that the violence of the early twentieth century materializes.5 Although this technically superior film offered audiences a distraction from thoughts of the coming war and the breaking news reports heard daily over the radio, it also subtly reconfirmed the historical relationship between radio and war, which had emerged from the military’s use of the medium in World War I. It is this relationship that media critic Theodor Adorno and radio legend Orson Welles emphasize in their radio writings, both critical and fictional. As a brief look at The Wizard

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of Oz will illustrate, the connection between radio and war was so ingrained in the American public’s mind that the references to radio went largely unnoticed. However, as I discuss in this chapter, it is the comparable violence of radio industry standardization and fascist government control, alongside the historical association between radio and war, that haunts the radio and culture industry writings of Adorno and encourages Welles to panic a nation. The first notable instance of war and radio’s conflation in The Wizard of Oz comes once Dorothy, along with her dog Toto and her newly acquired friends (Scarecrow, Tin Man, and Cowardly Lion) arrive at the Emerald City in an attempt to “see the Wizard,” who has, they are told, never before been seen. Before they can receive an audience with the great and powerful Oz, however, the Wicked Witch of the West appears and writes the words “Surrender Dorothy” in the sky with her broom. In this cinematic moment, the Wicked Witch of the West achieves more than simply issuing a warning to Dorothy, thereby setting into motion her own eventual demise; the Witch also physically enacts what radio essentially is: language on the air. And the message the Witch chooses to write, or rather send, on the air is none other than one of war, emphasized by the bomber-like trail of smoke in which it is written. This message reaches a vast Emerald City audience, and, unlike cinema (which required public viewing) and television (which was still in its infancy), could reach attentive citizens in their homes. Yet this image of war on the air, which leads to mass panic in the Emerald City, is not the only portrayal of radio and war’s conflation in the film.6 Once Dorothy meets the Wizard, we witness the true power of radio in a time of conflict. When Dorothy and the other weary travelers first meet the great and powerful Oz, he is a green gaseous face flickering in and out like a bad visual transmission and positioned over a giant throne. At times, he is only a voice booming like artillery through the flames and red smoke. The Wizard is certainly meant to remind us of the voice of God (for he is indeed “great”) and his voice coming through the flames conjures up an image of God speaking as a burning bush to Moses (another weary traveler). But the Wizard’s phantasmal image and actions are also reminiscent of the devil speaking out of a pyrotechnic hell, a Faustian Mephistopheles promising his travelers their hearts’ desires. The Wizard uses his powerful acousmatic voice (what we later realize is created by a radio-like device) to command, or rather to blackmail,

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Figure 1.1: “Surrender Dorothy”

Dorothy into battle.7 In order to have their wishes granted, the friends must retrieve the broom of the Wicked Witch of the West, and, as the Tin Man points out, the only way to succeed in this mission is to kill the Witch. And, of course, kill the Witch they do, with the help of a little bucket of water. Upon returning to the Emerald City with the Witch’s broomstick in hand, the travelers make a startling discovery—the Wizard is no more than a technologically savvy man behind a curtain. It is evident that the Wizard is operating a ruse from a radio booth, complete with flashing lights, dials, and a 1930s microphone. Thus it was not God, or the devil, or even a green vaporous head that ordered Dorothy into battle; it was a man and his radio voice. The magic of radio is disclosed in this film—the man behind the curtain (or the radio station) is revealed. It is in this scene that the two-fold relationship between radio sound and sight is demonstrated. At first, the green head surrounded by fire intensifies the message of the Wizard’s booming voice, but, as the exposure of the “real” Wizard reveals, this cooperation of sight and sound is a fiction. Instead, tension exists between the aural and visual mediums as the Wizard in human form fails to match his own powerful voice.8

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My choice to introduce the opening chapter of a book on radio by way of an extended radio-centric reading of a classic Hollywood film might seem out of place. But my analysis of The Wizard of Oz shows that the connection between radio and war was so prevalent by World War II that movie-going audiences accepted without comment this correlation, one not included in L. Frank Baum’s original The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900). Perhaps this is because in 1939 radio was the central communications medium, and when one thought of a booming voice leading a people or commanding an army, movie-going audiences naturally thought of radio that was, at this time, filled with the voices of numerous politicians from Roosevelt’s relatively innocuous “fireside chats” to Hitler’s fascist diatribes.9 These small but crucial moments in The Wizard of Oz illustrate the significance of radio in the early twentieth century, not just as a source of entertainment (the film is meant to be enjoyed), but also as a public service (the Wizard grants the travelers’ wishes), a news source, and a mouthpiece for war. For 1930s radio listeners, there still existed a cloak of mystery and magic around the radio voice that came over the air and into their homes every day without fail. This mystery and reliability lent the new medium a sense of authority that other media (newspapers and cinema) lacked, a uniqueness that was not lost upon radio networks such as the National Broadcasting Company (NBC) and the Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS), the latter of which referred to radio as “magic[al],” a “Genii” that is here to grant the listeners’ every wish.10 But while major broadcasting networks and their advertisers worked to capitalize upon the naiveté of its listening audience, radio critics and writers in the U.S. attempted to call attention to the smoke and mirrors that kept the American public from participating more astutely with the new medium.11 Yet for all the entertainment, culture, education, advertising, and politics that American radio had to offer in the late 1930s and early 1940s, it was radio’s reports of war, so colorfully brought to life in The Wizard of Oz, that kept Americans listening. Theodor Adorno, a German–Marxist intellectual who fled Europe for the United States in 1938, also could not help but be captivated by the news about the war. He experienced firsthand the power of the radio, as Hitler and the German fascists used the medium to help indoctrinate the German population throughout the 1930s. Although best known for his dialectical materialism and his work on the culture industry, Adorno’s years

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in America were also spent analyzing the radio and its programming. While his radio writing is becoming increasingly known and discussed, critics have often overlooked the strong ties Adorno’s radio work has to his experience of fascism and the war. The war, I argue, informs his opinion of radio, and, in particular, his critical response to Orson Welles’ broadcast of The War of the Worlds. In this chapter I re-examine Adorno’s writings on radio, showing how his criticisms of the new mass communications medium are grounded in the chaotic historical time in which he is writing. I pair this discussion of Adorno with perhaps the single-most famous American radio broadcast, Welles’ The War of the Worlds, in order to illustrate the dangers Adorno perceived in radio.12 This broadcast, which caused a nation to panic, did so largely because of the troubles in Europe, and, as will be shown, just as Adorno’s radio work was informed by global conflict, so too is Welles’ play mired in references to fascism’s advance, suggesting that even at the height of nationalist movements, authors were responding to transnational concerns within their work.13

Radio’s fascism and the violence of the voice Adorno is often depicted as a kind of Wicked Witch of the West for mass communications, a characterization that is not without footing. Like the Witch, Adorno wrote (and spoke) “on the air,” issuing a warning to all those who would pay heed. From his metaphorical home in an ivory tower, Adorno, like the Witch from her grey castle, casts aspersions on those below. In particular, the Witch sets her sights on the fun-loving, all-American Dorothy, who dances her way through Oz singing catchy tunes, including one titled “The Jitterbug.” Although cut from the final film, it is not hard to imagine Adorno including “The Jitterbug,” with its quick, steady beat and American slang, among his list of standardized music examples and criticizing it as cultural rubbish, or “canned food” as he called it, right alongside jazz and other popular musical forms. My playful comparison of Adorno and the Witch is meant to highlight a misconception within the American academy that paints Adorno as a scholarly curmudgeon and European snob. In the classroom he is often used as a foil to Walter Benjamin, who has been embraced by cultural and media theorists alike for his largely revolutionary

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view of cinema technology in “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” Adorno, on the other hand, is dismissed for being critical of jazz and for stating of film that “Every visit to the cinema leaves me, against all my vigilance, stupider and worse.”14 Yet an extreme statement on the cinema and hasty interpretations of Adorno’s theories about jazz should not discourage investigation into his media work, as his oeuvre is filled with essays and books on everything from the gramophone to radio, cinema to television.15 During his on-andoff residence in the United States from 1938 to 1953, Adorno produced an abundance of work on media culture, specifically the film and radio industries. Given Adorno’s frequent criticism of the culture industry in his essays and, in particular, Dialectic of Enlightenment, it is not surprising that he has been categorized as a cultural snob, or, as Andreas Huyssen writes, “the theorist par excellence of the Great Divide.”16 But this image of Adorno has also led critics to ignore the historical factors contributing to his media assessments and overlook his involvement in the institutions of the very media forms he critiqued.17 He is reported to have been “fascinated by the illustrated episodes ‘from the Edgar Bergen/Charlie McCarthy radio programmes’” and while in Los Angeles he involved himself in Hollywood, enjoying the company of a fellow exile, director Fritz Lang, and such big-name stars as Charlie Chaplin.18 Far from making Adorno “stupider,” the cinema and the radio were in fact the fodder for his work. Rather than residing in an ivory tower, a more accurate depiction would show Adorno working from below in an attempt to topple the growing empires of the biggest media industries in the world. Although his interest in musical culture was well established by the time he reached New York in February 1938, it is Adorno’s residence in the United States that sparks a bevy of writings on the radio industry; this is in part due to his employment at the Princeton Radio Research Project (PRRP), which was directed by the sociologist Paul Lazarsfeld along with the famous psychologist Hadley Cantril and the former research director for CBS, Frank Stanton.19 Due to his extensive musical knowledge, Adorno was hired as the director of the music division to work on a project entitled “The Essential Value of Radio to All Types of Listeners.” The purpose of this project and the Institute on the whole was to use empirical research in order “to discover the role of the radio in people’s everyday life, the motives underlying their

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listening habits, the types of programmes that were popular and unpopular, and whether groups of listeners could be targeted by broadcasts specifically aimed at them. What stood at the centre of attention was the need to establish data that could be of use to administrators.”20 Understandably, this type of research did not sit well with Adorno, whose European theoretical approach did not meld with Lazarsfeld’s empirical model.21 What made the research even more distasteful to Adorno was the fact that the PRRP was funded by the Rockefeller Foundation, which, as part owner of NBC, was far from an unbiased donor. Despite these difficulties, Adorno threw himself into his new research, producing four essays on radio while at the PRRP; these included “The Radio Symphony,” “A Social Critique of Radio Music,” “On Popular Music,” and “Analytical Study of the NBC Music Appreciation Hour.” After the music division was cut from the PRRP, in part because the Rockefeller Foundation felt that Adorno’s theoretical reports had no utilitarian value, Adorno was hired by the Institute for Social Research. And in November 1941, he left the East Coast, journeying West to join Horkheimer and other Frankfurt School associates already in Los Angeles. It is here that Adorno wrote his famous essay on the culture industry for the collaborative work Dialectic of Enlightenment, synthesizing both his suffocating experiences with the radio industry and his opinions of an ongoing and catastrophic war. For Adorno, culture, including media culture, was shaped by what he and Horkheimer termed the “dialectic of enlightenment.” Using this term as the title for their famous 1947 study of Western civilization, the two theorists question the linear narrative of Marxism and instead offer an alternative conception of history whereby the brutalities of fascism arise from democracy and the rationalism of the Enlightenment. The result being that the values of the Enlightenment are turned upon their heads. In Germany this extreme rationalism had had violent and horrific consequences, including excessive militarism, concentration camps, and the resulting World War. Thus the rationality of the Enlightenment became irrationality when pushed to its limits. According to Adorno, this irrationality and tendency toward autocratic violence was also present in the culture industries, especially those in the U.S. Here, radio and cinema transformed technologies that could potentially be used for education into apparatuses of domination and exploitation. Thus rather than combat capitalist structures, the media industries reflected

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and reproduced capitalism. It is in this reading of the culture industry that Adorno departs furthest from the revolutionary hopes that Benjamin and Brecht had held for film and radio. But what Dialectic of Enlightenment clearly illustrates is Adorno’s belief that the radio industry was partaking in a larger media violence that mirrored the authoritarianism of fascist regimes.22 While Adorno makes this argument more subtly throughout his earlier radio writings, his concerns regarding radio appear to conform to three intersecting areas: the violence of standardization, cultural dictatorship and degradation, and the dangers of the radio voice. In Dialectic of Enlightenment and throughout his essays on radio, Adorno warns that the increased standardization of the radio industry is an act of violence imposed upon an unaware listening audience. Radio, along with film and magazines, forms a cultural system, which, like a disease, “infect[s] everything with sameness.” This system, according to Adorno, keeps radio from acting democratically despite superficial appearances to the contrary. As he argues, radio “democratically makes everyone equally into listeners, in order to expose them in authoritarian fashion to the same programs put out by different stations. No mechanism of reply has been developed, and private transmissions are condemned to unfreedom.”23 The language of violence and control Adorno uses to describe the radio industry (“disease,” “authoritarian,” “unfreedom”) reveals his dismay with the sonic medium’s one-way format, a format Brecht unsuccessfully attempted to disrupt with his Flight Across the Ocean. Unlike the telephone, which allows subjects the freedom to respond, Adorno describes the radio as a mouthpiece of fascist dictators and the capitalist system, providing them with a means to speak to the public without inviting response. Through radio’s homogenizing network, political and cultural standardization spreads throughout a nation, and this, Adorno argues, is a violent act. According to Adorno, all music played over the radio is strikingly similar, in particular popular music. This music, with its repetitive sounds and rhythmic patterns, is constantly played over the airwaves to the point where listeners do not choose which music they like; rather the radio (read: the radio industry and its advertisers) instructs listeners on what to like. This instruction, however, has to be done without listeners knowing, lest they rebel. Thus, radio makes people feel as if they have a choice. In the NBC propaganda

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publication What Goes on Behind Your Radio Dial?, “choice” is described as one of the four radio freedoms: “American listeners may listen if they choose or they may not listen. American broadcasters provide a wealth of program variety. If the American listener doesn’t like the program he is hearing, he simply tunes in other stations until he finds a program that suits his mood.”24 But this choice, Adorno claims, is a false one: The standardization of production in this field, as in most others, goes so far that the listener virtually has no choice. Products are forced upon him. […] The less the listener has to choose, the more is he made to believe that he has a choice: and the more the whole machine functions only for the sake of profit, the more must he be convinced that it is functioning for him and his sake only or, as it is put, as a public service.25

Because American radio is run under the free market system, advertisers, especially in the golden age of radio, had considerable say over what went on the air. Companies would buy entire radio hours (e.g. The Chase and Sandborn Hour and The Kraft Music Hall) and if the show’s Crossley, Hooper, or Nielsen ratings were not sufficiently high, meaning that it had not reached enough listeners, the format of the program swiftly changed to mimic the more successful ones. In CBS’s We Don’t Know Why They Listen (SO MUCH!), the need to appeal to the most listeners is whimsically depicted as a fishing contest. Yet beneath this whimsy is the very violence and “force[fullness]” that Adorno suggests goes hand-in-hand with radio standardization. According to CBS’s propaganda publication, the network is entering this fishing contest with an edge—a loaded gun—that will beat out all the other networks and their more traditional methods of catching listeners. The result, as the next image of the text shows, is that CBS has caught itself a giant fish disturbingly composed of listeners’ faces. Figure 1.2 suggests that the violence and authoritarianism Adorno sees and hears in network radio is far from imagined; instead it seems that the networks were not only aware, but promoted such violence when it came to radio. The standardizing phenomenon in radio due to the interests of big business results in a mirroring effect: the radio, which is meant to entertain, educate, and act as a source of relief from the listener’s daily labors, in reality mimics those very same modes of production. Listeners’ “spare time serves only to

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Figure 1.2 (A and B): We Don’t Know Why They Listen (SO MUCH!)

reproduce their working capacity. […] their leisure is an escape from work and at the same time is molded after those psychological attitudes to which their workaday world exclusively habituates them.”26 Radio programming, then, has a soporific effect on the listener. Its pretext as entertainment and cultural edification disguises the radio industry’s standardization and keeps the listener content with his/her socio-economic reality. But this standardization also causes a decline in listener agency. One of Adorno’s main complaints about the radio is its tendency to create passive listeners, who are the objects and not the subjects of the radio broadcasts: “Thus, although the culture industry undeniably speculates on the conscious and unconscious state of the millions towards which it is directed, the masses are not primary, but secondary, they are an object of calculation; an appendage of the machinery. The customer is not king, as the culture industry would have us believe, not its subject but its object.”27 Here, Adorno makes explicit the connection between the listeners and the culture industry; the relationship between the two is envisaged as physical—the masses and the machine are now one, but the machine is the primary actor, the listeners are simply the arms that turn the dials. But it is not just within the larger radio industry that Adorno locates violence toward the listener; at times individual programs find themselves the subject of Adorno’s studies and are criticized for promoting cultural dictatorship and degradation. In his “Analytical Study of the NBC Music Appreciation Hour,” Adorno examines Walter Damrosch’s highly popular children’s pedagogy program that lasted from 1928 to 1941. In this study, Adorno evaluates the NBC publications NBC Music Appreciation Hour Conducted by Walter Damrosch along with the Teacher’s Guide and Student Worksheets in order to

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prove “that radio, at its ‘benevolent’ best, in a nation-wide, sustaining program of purely educational character, fails to achieve its aim—namely, to bring people into an actual living relationship with music.”28 Adorno criticizes the popular show for promoting “musical Babbittry” and fostering a “pseudoculture” that enables recognition of classical compositions without engaging with the material. The quiz mentality of the program, according to Adorno, is nowhere more noticeable than in the multiple-choice structure of the testing material; an unfortunate occurrence, as it is the testing material that had the best opportunity of creating a “living relationship of actual, spontaneous understanding between the music it offers and its pupils.”29 Instead, the program severely limits the child’s ability to interact with the music, only allowing him/her prescribed choices, an act that reiterates the standardization of the radio industry as a whole.30 Adorno’s criticism of radio even extends to the very quality of the music being played, which is, according to Adorno, deteriorated through transmission.31 In his PRRP contribution, “The Radio Symphony,” Adorno claims that a Beethoven symphony played over the radio is muted—the highs and lows are flattened—thereby altering the composition. Because of this deterioration, he argues that listeners would be better off not hearing Beethoven at all than hearing this water-downed version.32 Adorno turns to Benjamin’s discussion of “aura” to better position himself on the subject of deterioration. While in his earlier essays on radio, namely “On the Fetish Character in Music and the Regression of Listening,” he argues that radio music destroys the aura of the symphony, in later writings, Adorno alters his position, claiming instead that the original aura of the symphony is not entirely destroyed through transmission, but lingers as a “decaying” and “foggy mist.”33 Thus the original aura, deteriorated by radio, remains, but is ultimately supplanted by a new aura, which emerges around the mystery of the radio industry. This new aura has a particularly strange effect on older cultural contributions broadcast over the air, simultaneously “mummify[ing]” and “magiciz[ing]” them.34 An example of this is found in the CBS verse brochure “Seems Radio is Here to Stay,” which champions CBS’s ability to bring cultural programming such as Beethoven’s symphonies and Shakespeare’s plays, to a mass audience. The brochure includes an image of Shakespeare sitting on a tree stump addressing working-class Americans (figure 1.3). This image is meant to promote CBS as

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a station that encourages cultural democracy. (Note the inclusion of multiple races and a lone female sitting on the ground.) The brochure suggests that only CBS brings Shakespeare to the people, offering not only better seats, but a free show: “The seats of Radio are Row A Center, / And the tickets always complimentary.”35 For Adorno, a radio broadcast of Shakespeare “mummifies” the ur-text by taking it out of its historical time, thereby allowing listeners to associate it with the present. As David Jenemann notes, the image of Shakespeare speaking to contemporary Americans suggests “both [the] radio’s capacity to bring culture to the working class and [its] ability to homogenize history.”36 But the radio also “magicizes” the broadcast by casting its own spell. When the listener hears Hamlet over the radio, the play is given cultural credibility not because of its quality as literature, but because Shakespeare’s Hamlet is “cultural” enough to be read on air. In the process of transmission, Hamlet becomes part of twentieth-century radio culture. Thus, rather than creating Adorno’s “living relationship” with culture, the radio acts as a museum that adds its own aura to its collection of cultural artifacts. Adorno is also concerned by the very way in which the radio speaks to its audience: the mechanized voice emitted from a mechanical face into the

Figure 1.3: “Seems Radio is Here to Stay: A Columbia Workshop Production”

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private rooms where radio is listened to. Allusions to dictators and authoritarianism are often not far behind when Adorno writes about the “radio voice.” It is a voice that gives the “illusion of closeness” as it permeates the listener’s space. The radio appears to speak to its listeners directly and without mediation, thereby suggesting reliability. As Adorno remarks, “Attributing the sound of radio to the real, present radio set may make people who are not concentrating attentively forget the unreality of what they are hearing. Thus they may be inclined to believe that anything offered by the ‘radio voice’ is real, because of this ‘illusion of closeness.’”37 It is the “illusion” that radio is speaking to the individual, when in fact it is the broadcaster speaking to the multitudes, that enables Adorno to argue for radio as a medium sympathetic to authoritarianism. Moreover, because the voice appears to emanate from a machine rather than a person, the listener awards the radio voice a level of infallibility that is not awarded to print or even direct speech.38 Like the Wizard of Oz’s translucent alter-ego, radio’s authority is also a fiction made more powerful because it transmits information over the air. This fiction is made possible by the radio voice, which, according to Adorno, has a tendency to shout at its audience. And the more the radio shouts, the more the illusion takes hold that the person behind the radio is powerful. This disconnect between the imagined power of the acousmatic voice and the physical reality of the speaker, leads to listeners incorrectly associating the radio voice with authority; as Adorno writes, the “commentator shouting through his loudspeaker […] makes the radio voice the bearer of the potentialities, acoustic as well as social, of dictatorship.”39 This situation is exacerbated as listeners are unable to immediately respond to what they hear. The listener’s small voice is no match for the booming radio speaker. And while the listener could certainly turn the dial, broadcasters and dictators alike know that the radio voice alone can cast a spell that keeps the listeners tuned in. The image of a powerful dictator speaking over the air, however, is often only an illusion; as Adorno writes, “The actual owner of the terrific voice may be quite a humble person. In the studio he may speak quite normally, while the overemphasis of his voice is brought about by amplification only.”40 Once the broadcaster comes out from “behind the curtain,” so to speak, the aura of the radio voice is shattered; with radio, however, this quick reveal rarely happens.

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For Adorno, radio was a technology that could only experience a boom in the post-World War I era of monopoly capitalism. It is this very same environment, one Adorno hints at in Dialectic of Enlightenment, which allowed fascism to flourish and thereby led to World War II. Thus the golden age of radio and the atrocities of World War II are not, according to Adorno, haphazardly entwined; rather, the two are a product of the same historical conditions. The catastrophic effects of the war, along with his own experiences of the culture industry, soured Adorno’s opinion of radio, but understanding the historical and sociological links Adorno forms between radio and war helps to explain the moments in his work where he seems to arbitrarily connect the two. Take, for example, the following passage from Dialectic of Enlightenment: “Chesterfield is merely the nation’s cigarette, but the radio is its mouthpiece. In the total assimilation of culture products into the commodity sphere radio makes no attempt to purvey its products as commodities. In America it levies no duty from the public. It thereby takes on the deceptive form of a disinterested, impartial authority, which fits fascism like a glove.”41 The inclusion of fascism at the end of a discussion on American radio advertising at first appears to be a digression. But for Adorno, who had seen the Nazis come to power with the help of the radio, and, in particular, the creation of the Volksempfänger, which allowed listeners to tune in only to German government controlled stations, the false appearance of “disinterested[ness]” and “authority” that the radio gave its speakers in both Germany and the U.S. was cause for concern. Adorno’s linking of war and radio is certainly not unique, as the next five chapters show, and has since been observed by such media giants as Marshall McLuhan, Friedrich Kittler, and Raymond Williams. Williams, more than any other media theorist, has continued Adorno’s sociological approach to communications media. Unlike Kittler, whose poststructuralist focus on materiality aligns him with Brecht’s interest in the radio as object, Williams reads radio as a medium that is not fixed by its form but rather subject to historical and cultural change. Like Adorno, he acknowledges that the radio has “been abused, for political control (as in propaganda) or for commercial profit (as in advertising).” But this “abuse,” as I discuss below, does not mean that radio can only ever be a wartime tool, for radio is, like all media according to Williams, dependent upon the uses to which human society puts

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it.42 In 1938, Welles—a contemporary of Adorno—put the sociological bond that exists between radio and war to an entertaining test, and in his infamous The War of the Worlds broadcast demonstrated that in a society embattled by messages of war, an amusing radio play can easily frighten a population when it exploits listeners’ internalization of radio’s current and historical uses.

It’s the end of the world as we know it When Welles and his theater troupe, the Mercury Theatre, joined CBS in summer 1938, they were already celebrated for their radical stage productions in New York. Welles was known for his modern-day interpretations of Shakespeare and his cultural celebrity made him a valuable hire for CBS, which was attempting to improve its reputation with more cultural broadcasts. His program, The Mercury Theatre on the Air, aired Monday nights at 9 p.m. and was composed of hour-long reenactments of famous literary works, including Dracula, Treasure Island, A Tale of Two Cities, and, most famously, The War of the Worlds, broadcasted on October 30, 1938. Under Welles and John Houseman’s direction, Howard Koch (who would later help write Casablanca) transformed H. G. Wells’ original novel about Martians in Britain into a strikingly realistic radio broadcast about aliens invading the U.S.’s north-eastern states, particularly New Jersey.43 By doing so, Welles tapped into radio’s history as an explorer of the extraterrestrial, where as early as August 1924 attempts had been made to receive communications from Mars.44 Yet this fictional invasion, broadcasted in the same year as the Anschluss and only a month after the Munich Agreement, terrified an estimated one million listeners, who took the performance as both a figurative and literal message about war. In his famous analysis of The War of the Worlds, Hadley Cantril notes that one of the main reasons listeners panicked was because they believed the broadcast was about a German, and not a Martian, invasion. Listener testimonials such as “‘I never believed it was anyone from Mars. I thought it was some kind of a new airship and a new method of attack” and “‘I knew it was some Germans trying to gas all of us. When the announcer kept calling them people from Mars I just thought he was ignorant and didn’t know yet that Hitler had sent them all’” are peppered throughout Cantril’s study.45 Although

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the listeners who experienced extreme panic and believed the invasion to be the work of Hitler were very few, the association these listeners made—that the radio is the source for war information—is exactly what Welles and the Mercury Theatre had wanted. In an ever-increasing attempt at realism, Welles and his troupe made a concerted effort to capitalize on CBS’s reputation as a reliable news source, mimicking the emergency news reports that had flooded the air only a month earlier due to the Munich crisis.46 More than ever before, Americans were turning to the radio to hear the news from Europe. But even those listeners who knew they were experiencing a piece of science fiction could not help but be reminded of America’s weakness in the event of an air invasion. As Welles’ biographer Simon Callow suggests, “[the U.S.] alone of all Western nations had failed to devise a system of civil defence against attack from the air,” and the media were reminding the public of this fact on almost a daily basis.47 Those listeners who supposed Welles’ famous broadcast to be about fascism and war, however, were not wrong. In fact, listeners had good reasons to make such assumptions, one of which includes Welles’ own theatrical history. As Michael Denning notes, by the time Welles joined CBS, he and the Mercury Theatre were already deeply involved in the Popular Front movement, and the stage plays Welles produced, in particular the highly successful Caesar, were extremely critical of the anti-Semitism in Germany and the continued oppression of African Americans in the U.S.48 In his contemporary approach to Shakespeare’s classic tale of political upheaval, Welles stole heavily from the historical realities and the pageantry of the Nazi movement and its rallies. The performance of Caesar included Nuremburg lighting, where lights were projected “upward and forward to form a double light curtain,” military costumes that resembled those worn by fascists, and a powerful mob scene where the poet Cinna is lynched, which simultaneously represented the violence in Germany and America’s deep South.49 According to Denning, the anti-fascist motif that runs throughout Welles’ oeuvre is also noticeable in The War of the Worlds. With its invasion plot, Welles was partaking in a new radio trend that included anti-fascist broadcasts such as Archibald MacLeish’s The Fall of the City and Air Raid (Chapter 5).50 Although Welles’ The War of the Worlds was the major media event of the late 1930s (and perhaps radio’s most significant event ever), Adorno remains

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relatively silent on the broadcast. To Adorno, the broadcast and the public’s reaction was proof that reason and positivism had infiltrated the work of art, and the result was pure “lunacy”: The affair of Orson Welles’ broadcast “Invasion from Mars” was a test performed by the positivistic spirit to determine its own zone of influence and one which showed that the elimination of the distinction between image and reality has already advanced to the point of a collective sickness, that the reduction of the work of art to empirical reason is already capable of turning into overt lunacy at any moment.51

Adorno lumps Welles’ broadcast with the insidious effects of the radio industry in general, arguing that The War of the Worlds was infected, like a “sickness,” with the same extreme rationalism Adorno associated with the rise of the Nazis. This sickness had spread to its listeners, which, with regard to Welles’ broadcast, meant the six million who had tuned in and the estimated one million who became “frightened or disturbed.” But Adorno’s dismissiveness of the radio drama as a “test” of positivism is an oversimplification of Welles’ true achievement.52 Read alongside Adorno’s radio writings it is evident that Welles’ anti-fascist broadcast reiterates the connection between war and radio that influenced Adorno’s media writings in the coming decade, thereby anticipating the militarization or invasion correlations made by more recent media and network theorists like Kittler, Bernhard Siegert, Alexander Galloway, and Eugene Thacker. But The War of the Worlds is more than an anti-fascist play; it is a performance that both toyed with and, as a result of listener panic, led to a physical enactment of the association that many Americans of the time were making between radio and war. In large part, this was due to the drama’s self-reflexive structure—not only did the play mimic radio’s content with on-site music hall performances and eyewitness reporting, but it also accurately mimicked emergency news reports, which, as discussed above, were being broadcast more frequently as the tensions in Europe grew. The War of the Worlds begins with a brief and ominous forty-second introduction by Welles, which is quickly followed by programming resembling a traditional 1930s radio broadcast: a weather report and a live music-hall performance. Within the first four minutes, however, there is a very realistic-sounding interruption of the

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fictional scheduled programming. This is the first breaking news report about strange activities on Mars. These intermittent news bulletins occur frequently for the next fifteen minutes, ensuring that dozing and channel-surfing listeners would pick up on the broadcast.53 Cantril’s research on listener panic suggests that it was the realism of these news reports that triggered most of the misunderstandings. And this, according to Houseman, was exactly the Mercury Theatre’s intent. The realism achieved by Koch’s inclusion of actual places and institutions was emphasized by the voices the players gave to their characters. Kenneth Delmar, for example, attempted to make his Secretary of the Interior sound like Roosevelt, and Frank Readick researched the live reporting of the Hindenburg disaster so that he could accurately capture the shock that came with eyewitness reporting.54 In fact, the Hindenburg catastrophe of May 1937 would have been front and center in listeners’ minds as they thought of flying German airships and explosions over New Jersey. With the voices, content, and very structure of the news report copied so well, it is therefore no wonder that some listeners took the play for a real invasion. However, the very fact that listeners believed, even for a moment, that these news reports were real is evidence of the criticisms Adorno lobbies against the radio industry’s standardization. As Jeffrey Sconce writes in Haunted Media, Welles’ radio drama “exploited a certain social knowledge in the audience to create its realistic effect by skillfully mimicking the already conventionalized features of the emergency news broadcast.”55 For Sconce, it is not the looming war that causes panic to ensue; rather it is the public’s new relationship with radio and its homogenizing national network, a different—but, I would argue, nonetheless violent—type of invasion of American communities. Like Adorno, Sconce portrays 1930s radio as an authoritarian power; but by disregarding the brutal historical realities of 1938, Sconce ignores the potential physical violence that critics like Adorno and to a certain extent Benjamin see as inherent in mass communications media. While Welles’ broadcast certainly illustrates the degree to which Americans had already internalized the conventions of radio and its programming, an internalization made possible by a radio industry that relied upon repetition of programs and sounds, The War of the Worlds also suggests the public’s internalization of the violence of the historical moment that Adorno discusses in Dialectic of Enlightenment. Thus, when the broadcast broke away for its first news report—“Ladies

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and gentlemen, we interrupt our program of dance music to bring you a special bulletin from the Intercontinental Radio News”—listeners ignored the mention of a fictional organization, focusing instead on the form of the report, which, according to their past listening experience, meant that important information (often about the conflict in Europe) was being delivered.56 The audience’s confidence in the reality of the emergency broadcasts, despite the inclusion of erroneous information, suggests radio’s significance as both a news source and a trustworthy medium. Listeners believed in the unbiased nature of radio, largely because the voice that came over the air appeared unmediated. As Adorno observes, this apparently unmediated voice filled the listener’s room, making it seem as if his/her very furniture were echoing the sentiments of the broadcast. The result, Adorno argues, is an “illusion of closeness” that especially impacts those listeners not concentrating on the radio as a mediated object.57 (As noted above, Cantril’s study found that it was largely passive listeners of the broadcast that were alarmed by the news bulletin format.) But the public also believed in the neutrality of radio due to the medium’s history as news broadcaster; radio was, according to Cantril, an “accepted vehicle for important announcements” because its first wide-scale use in the U.S. was to report the 1920 election returns.58 But if radio was turned to for political news because of its history, then radio’s role as a communications weapon in the First World War also made the medium a major source for war information. Add to this the violent connotations of the word “report,” which etymologically means “to fire” a weapon, and it is not surprising that the use of the news report technique in The War of the Worlds led listeners to believe that the U.S. was really at war.59 Thus the news bulletins reporting on military fire and alien heat rays suggested to listeners, both through the play’s action and structure, where the news reports “fired” critical war information at its listeners, that the U.S. was in imminent danger. As Michele Speitz argues, Welles’ inclusion of fictional emergency radio reports “exposes how a mass radio audience can train its ears to receive the abrupt shots of information and how an audience can (over)react according to these powerfully-suggestive, technologically-mediated narratives.”60 But it is not only the use of the emergency report that triggers thoughts of war. Throughout the play, there is significant emphasis on radio’s role during combat, and this is illustrated when the broadcast station hands over

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its control of the airwaves to Trenton’s state militia. According to the fictional Vice President of Broadcasting Operations, it is radio’s “responsibility to serve in the public interest at all times,” and in the case of war, this apparently means relinquishing control of broadcasting power.61 After power is transferred to Captain Lansing, the program shifts between reports from military personnel on the ground and in the air, and offers the audience at home access to the private communications of the military. At this point in the program it seems as if the medium, once filled with music and entertainment, has regressed back to its World War I roots. But the result of this eyewitness military reporting is simultaneously fantastic and believable: Planes circling, ready to strike. A thousand yards and we’ll be over the first— eight hundred yards … six hundred … four hundred … two hundred … There they go! The giant arm raised … Green flash! They’re spraying us with flame! Two thousand feet. Engines are giving out. No chance to release bombs. Only one thing left … drop on them, plane and all. We’re diving on the first one. Now the engine’s gone! Eight …62

The first person account of the battle is presented as part of the military’s internal communications to which listeners are conveniently privy. With its countdown to target, pauses and fragmented sentences, not to mention the dead air that follows the crash of the airplane, the military commander’s account appears unmediated. This guise of unmediation continues as the audience listens to its last line of defense, the ground units, cough and choke as a gas attack wipes them out. In both scenes the realistic sound effects and eyewitness reporting serve to recall the memories of the aerial dogfights and the horrific gas attacks of World War I, and thereby helped to exacerbate listener panic.63 Ironically, however, it is the very fact that the account appears unmediated, that we are given such uncensored access to military maneuvers, that marks this moment in the play as mediated, and anticipates Adorno’s complaints about the radio’s “illusion of closeness.” The Mercury Theatre added to this “illusion” by exploiting the listener’s expectations regarding interviews and the radio voice. As Adorno’s analysis of Damrosch’s Music Appreciation Hour demonstrates, the American public was accustomed to hero-worship. And just as Americans accepted a symphony by Beethoven solely because of his prestige, they also listened a little more closely

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to Welles’ broadcast when speakers with impressive titles confirmed the horrible news of an attack. Included in this program are esteemed characters from the professional sectors, including military officials (Brigadier General Montgomery Smith), politicians (Secretary of the Interior), broadcasters (Vice President in Charge of Operations, Harry McDonald), and academics (Princeton’s Professor Pierson).64 Each of these men describes what he sees in detail, and it is these precise descriptions, exacerbated by the prestigious titles of the speakers, that again causes the illusion of reliability that Adorno claims is produced by radio’s amplification. The horrific scenes of invasion, and indeed the reputable characters themselves, are imagined by the listeners, which, in turn added to their anxiety. But while the detailed descriptions capture the listener’s imagination, the truly terrifying moments occur when speakers know and say very little. Because radio is relied on for information, statements of uncertainty spoken by those on the air add to listener angst. Take for example Professor Pierson’s declarations: “Mr. Phillips, I cannot account for it” and “I don’t know what to think.”65 In these moments, the listener turns to the expert for information. If the expert can explain the unfolding events, then there is less reason to fear. But because Pierson is baffled, he mirrors the experience of the listener. The result is that there is no one to whom the listener can turn. Pierson’s bafflement, however, is only the beginning, for once the radio ceases to speak altogether real fear sets in. According to Adorno, the radio voice always speaks, even when we are not listening. Whether or not we turn the dial, the radio is always on, ready to enter and invade the listener’s space. This consistency adds to radio’s image as reliable. But what happens when the radio voice ceases to speak? Welles plays with this horrific possibility twice in The War of the Worlds. In the first instance the terrifying silence occurs close to the twenty-minute mark of the broadcast. The reporter, Carl Phillips, is broadcasting from Grover’s Mill, New Jersey, the site of the first Martian landing. At this point in the play, no definitive answer as to what has landed has been given; even Professor Pierson cannot identify the object in the ground. Suddenly, the creature begins to move and, using a heat ray, sets Grover’s Mill on fire: “Now the whole field’s caught fire. The woods … the barns … the gas tanks of automobiles … it’s spreading everywhere. It’s coming this way. About twenty yards to my right …”66 Then, for six long seconds, the listener hears nothing—dead air—until the studio

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breaks in and returns listeners to some soft and soothing music. Like the aerial dogfight scene to come, this eyewitness report is fragmented; but this time the fragments do not reflect military terseness. Instead they add to the level of disbelief and discomfort the listener experiences. Ultimately, this dead air symbolizes the death of Phillips and countless others, but it also suggests the radio network’s vulnerability, which from this point on becomes a major theme of the broadcast.67 Although I have been arguing throughout this chapter that there is an historical and sociological correlation between radio and war, at a certain point this connection (like all connections) breaks down. Ironically, the moment that communications break down is also the moment that the war has come too close. In war, the destruction of communication networks is one of the first strategic maneuvers performed by the invading army. And its appearance in Welles’ radio drama adds to the realism of the broadcast. The Martians, like any invading force, sever all media and transport networks: “they stop to uproot power lines, bridges, and railroad tracks. Their apparent objective is to crush resistance, paralyze communication, and disorganize human society.”68 In Welles’ production, human resistance comes to an end when the broadcasting building is destroyed. Standing on top of what is assumed to be the CBS building, the announcer of the program continues to broadcast “to the end,” which comes swiftly. Mirroring the catastrophic bomber pilot scene, a countdown is heard: “Now the smoke’s crossing Sixth Avenue … Fifth Avenue … one hundred yards away … it’s fifty feet …” Then there is nothing but silence until a lonely voice interrupts to ask: “Isn’t there anyone on the air?”69 This voice, a reference to radio’s early radio ham days, receives no answer. The ultimate fear with regard to radio communications is that there is no one on the air. Radio acts as a lifeline assuring listeners that there is someone else out there, that power systems are still in place, that they are not alone. Thus Welles’ destruction of the media alongside humanity reminds us of the predicament that Adorno presents in his radio writings, that the radio and socio-political structures cannot be separated. While the extreme listener reaction to The War of the Worlds seems to prove that Adorno’s pessimism regarding radio is well founded, it bears remembering that the majority of those listening to the broadcast did not fall into the trap of listener passivity and experience panic. Welles’ production

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exploited the radio forms listeners had come to recognize and presented listeners with material that, in its exact mimicry, formally deviated from the standard radio fare that Adorno criticizes. The self-reflexivity of Welles’ play and the latent connections made between the survival of media and the survival of humankind invites a comparison to Adorno’s radio theories, but it also facilitates comparisons to the work of Brecht (with whom Welles had hoped to produce an English version of Galileo). As in Brecht’s The Flight Across the Ocean, the radio in The War of the Worlds is a main character. But whereas Brecht wanted to revolutionize the act of radio listening by focusing on the communal response, Welles’ play affected the individual listening at home on a Monday evening. This is why responses to the broadcast were so uneven. Ironically, the fact that listeners reacted individually to Welles’ broadcast both confirms Adorno’s theory on the isolated listener, and challenges his fear that radio propaganda would affect all listeners in the same way. Despite his dire descriptions of radio’s present, however, Adorno maintains a glimmer of hope for the medium’s future if the listener can escape the routine of passive listening. As Adorno says in “On Popular Music,” the power to change the culture industry lies with the listener: “He can switch off his enthusiasm as easily and suddenly as he turns it on. He is only under a spell of his own making.”70 This is a sentiment Williams echoes two decades later when, speaking of the possibility of a truly “democratic” radio system, he writes that while this system will be a long time coming, the only means we have of making such a shift is by first imagining that democratic radio is possible and what we want.71 By reading Welles’ The War of the Worlds alongside Adorno’s radio writings, we can begin to understand the connection between war and radio that existed during radio’s golden age and into World War II. The utopian dreams of Brecht and Benjamin that welcomed the medium into the 1930s are lost by the end of the decade. In their place stand government-controlled structures that enthusiastically greeted the Volksempfänger and capitalist monopolies that made the advertiser, and not the customer, king. Although both Welles and Adorno hope that radio will at some point become truly democratic (for Adorno this requires an entire overhaul of the American system), radio’s involvement with war and its propaganda throughout the 1940s leaves little opportunity for this development before the advent of television. But not all writers for radio, even

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when partaking in wartime broadcasts, bought into the gloomy depiction of the radio industry that Adorno presents. Writers such as Dorothy Sayers, Louis MacNeice, George Orwell, Archibald MacLeish, and Thomas Mann wrote radio broadcasts with the hope that their words would have a positive impact on national and international audiences, both in bringing the war to a peaceful end and beginning the process of reconstruction. Throughout the remainder of this book I discuss these writers’ contributions to the war effort via broadcasting and explore how they fought against radio’s authoritarianism, and, in the process, brought literary modernism to a newer and much broader audience. For each, I illustrate how modernists who took to the microphone complicated the destructive network that exists between radio and war, opting instead to create new, often international connections on the air that extended the cosmopolitanism of the modern era.

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Militarizing the Messiah Two shocks broke on us this past week: Pearl Harbour and The Man Born to be King. —Frederick Ogilvie, Director-General of the BBC1 On 10 December 1941, only a few days after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Dorothy L. Sayers, best known for her Lord Peter Wimsey detective novels, spoke at a press conference held at the Berners Hotel, London. Here, she read an excerpt from the fourth installment of her forthcoming radio play-cycle on the story of Christ, The Man Born to Be King. The first play, based on the nativity, was to be broadcast on the BBC the Sunday before Christmas, and this press conference was meant to give the listening public a taste of what was to come. Instead, following a reading of a dialogue where the disciple Matthew speaks in a working-class Cockney accent and uses American slang, a firestorm broke out among the press. The Daily Mail ran the sensational headline “BBC Life of Christ Play in U.S. Slang” and the Daily Herald falsely reported “Gangsterisms in Bible Play.”2 After reading the newspaper accounts of the forthcoming broadcasts, extreme Protestant groups such as the Lord’s Day Observance Society (LDOS) and the Protestant Truth Society began protesting Sayers’ play-cycle, writing letters to the BBC, the Ministry of Information (MOI), and the Archbishop of Canterbury, and running an advert in The Times with the heading “Radio Impersonation of Christ!”3 Due to the public outcry and the desire to avoid any unnecessary religious controversy, the MOI’s Brendan Bracken requested that Sayers’ radio plays be reviewed by the Central Religious Advisory Committee (CRAC), who, after reading the scripts, overwhelmingly approved the productions. Even those committee members who raised doubts about the broadcasts ruled in favor of Sayers’ play-cycle as they neither wanted to set a precedent of appeasing fringe religious organizations like the LDOS nor offend Britain’s

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main ally and newcomer to the war by suggesting that American English was beneath the dignity of the disciples.4 While this second reason may initially seem irrelevant, given that Sayers’ broadcasts were intended for a national audience, this point actually gets at the heart of a larger British self-marketing problem that impacted mass media and cultural productions. As Marina MacKay notes, one of the biggest propaganda battles Britain faced at the outset of the war was a national “rebranding” campaign, which, bolstered by MOI-propaganda, depicted Britain’s struggles as a “‘people’s war’” that relied upon the “mythology of classless civilian solidarity.”5 Standing somewhere between MOI-sanctioned and independent art, Sayers’ year-long (December 21, 1941–October 18, 1942) radio serial The Man Born to Be King offered the BBC a tremendous opportunity to recast Britain in favorable terms, these being that the nation was historically egalitarian and Christian (much like the U.S.). Promoting such a positive, albeit fictional, image of Britain to its national listeners was an important step in a larger propaganda campaign that aimed to court U.S. support of Britain’s war effort and show Americans that they were, in the words of radio broadcaster J. B. Priestley, “like us.”6 Mass media such as radio and film were particularly important for the national and transnational transmission of this rebranding campaign. One of Britain’s main intended audiences during the war’s early years was the U.S., whose isolationism Britain hoped to bring to an end.7 Priestley, one of wartime Britain’s most famous national broadcasters, epitomized this new image. With his West Yorkshire accent, he took to the BBC’s North American Service airwaves and described a unified British population fighting a “total war.” He depicted a Britain in transition: as the bombs dropped, entrenched class lines were destroyed, making way for a new “People’s” Britain. As he describes in his opening broadcast on May 30, 1940: At odd times we’ve heard a sound like the distant banging of doors, which was, of course, the noise of bombs and anti-aircraft guns. It hasn’t worried anybody very much. At the Star Inn just down the road, the regular customers in the taproom, sitting over their half pints of bitter, have been telling each other that we’ve all to set about stopping this Hitler. We’ve formed a local detachment of local defence volunteers or parashots, and I’ve joined them myself. […] It’s not the first time men have kept guard on these downs, for they did it in Queen Elizabeth’s time and then in Napoleon’s.8

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Priestley’s Britain, where citizens carry on with “business as usual” and talk of the war as everyone’s fight, is prepared for battle not only because its people recognize the war as just, but also because they have been in this position before, at first with “Queen Elizabeth’s time and then in Napoleon’s.” History, for Priestley and for Britain, repeats itself. And these motifs of a resilient, egalitarian, and historically established nation find themselves reiterated throughout wartime literature and art, creating what is now referred to as the “myth” of the Blitz.9 The depiction of Britain doing “business as usual” despite the war’s interruptions was an oft-recycled theme. Pushed by the Churchill government and the MOI as a means to “normaliz[e] the air-raid experience,” this message often found its way into British films of the early 1940s.10 In Harold French’s Unpublished Story (1942), for example, a pub owner insists that patrons use the door to his establishment, despite the fact that the wall next to the door had been bombed open not five minutes before in an air raid. Perhaps the most famous British propaganda film to find its way on to British and American screens is London Can Take It (1940). Created by the MOI, this short documentary film famously shows the effects of a “total war” with images of the king and queen of England walking along the rubble of a London building beside working-class citizens. World War II, according to London Can Take It, affected nobility and worker alike. The numerous films on the London bombings that emerged in the early years of the war have enabled historians like Mark Connelly to argue that the Second World War, and in particular the Blitz, is “very definitely a visual memory.”11 But while films suggest a visual war, victims of the Blitz and radio listeners in America experienced the war largely through sound and not sight. Even in her work on wartime British and German cinema, Jo Fox acknowledges the power of sound and cites the “‘soundtrack of a night raid’” as one of the most powerful moments of London Can Take It.12 This “soundtrack” (the motor of planes, the whizzing of dropping bombs, machine gun fire, and explosions) determined how Britons navigated the Blitz while inside a shelter. Such a focus on sound, even in a visual medium, indicates a larger cultural movement that stressed listening as a means by which the war created shared experiences across class, gender, and even racial lines.13 For Sayers, rebranding Britain as egalitarian required a nationwide lesson in Christian doctrine through the broadcasting of God’s word. These religious

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radio plays, however, did not sit well with all listeners, particularly marginal Protestant groups. One of the main factors leading to these groups’ extreme response was the assumption that radio broadcasting and war were linked. In Sayers’ broadcasts, however, religion, or—more accurately—a fear of divine retribution, was infused into this correlation: some of the public believed that broadcasting the play-cycle was such a blasphemy that Britain’s defeat in Singapore in February 1942 was a punishment from God. As the BBC’s former Director of Religious Broadcasting J. W. Welch recalls, some critical responses to The Man Born to Be King claimed “that Singapore fell because these plays were broadcast, and [critics] appealed for them to be taken off before a like fate came to Australia.”14 Although responses like these were in the minority, they were frequent and vehement enough that the Director General of the BBC equated the shock value of The Man Born to Be King with the astonishing attack on Pearl Harbor. Most of the public outrage regarding The Man Born to Be King revolved around voice and language. But it was not only the use of accents and slang in the productions (the major complaint of newspaper headlines) that caused religious conservatives to fear the worst for Britain’s war efforts; it was also the voicing of Jesus on air, and in contemporary language. For Sayers, however, voice and language were key to making the plays successful. Before she began writing, Sayers received assurance from Welch and the BBC that she would be able to present Jesus as historical and human, and that she would be allowed to use present-day language rather than have characters “talk Bible.”15 Sayers was particularly adamant that Christ’s role be a speaking part in order to emphasize his humanity and historicity. As she writes to Welch, I feel very strongly that the prohibition against representing Our Lord directly on stage or in films […] tends to produce a sense of unreality which is very damaging to the ordinary man’s conception of Christianity. The device of indicating Christ’s presence by a “voice off ”, or by a shaft of light, or a shadow, or what not, tends to suggest to people that He was never a real person at all, and this impression of unreality extends to all the other people in the drama, with the result that “Bible characters” are felt to be quite different from ordinary human beings.16

For Sayers, giving a voice to Jesus over the radio was an entertaining means of educating the public on Christian dogma, thereby strengthening the religious

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and cultural values of Britain at a time when these values were being assaulted by Nazi Germany. Like the high modernist poet-turned-Anglican convert T. S. Eliot, with whom she sometimes worked at the BBC, Sayers understood religion and culture as co-evolutionary partners.17 But by attempting to strengthen what she believed to be British values, Sayers also participated in a larger re-narration of Britain’s national identity, to which a number of writers (including Eliot), directors, and artists (both MOI sanctioned and not) were contributing. In reading Sayers’ The Man Born to Be King as part of Britain’s larger re-branding campaign, I argue that the mythical image of a Britain unified through the trans-historical radio voice of Christ speaks to more than the British public. Building upon the work of Mia Spiro, who writes in Anti-Nazi Modernism that “British […] writers and intellectuals were in conversation with European politics, and their works were far more integrated with international concerns” than they may at first appear,18 I show Sayers to be an example of a larger movement within British late-modernism toward transnationalism. In order to create a national “Christian” image, Sayers defined other national cultures through the language of opposition. The division between ally and enemy in the play-cycle, however, is complicated by Britain’s imperial past and Sayers’ militaristic presentation of the Gospels. This martial depiction of Christ is partly due to what Siân Nicholas refers to as the BBC’s “‘military’ character,” but it is also due to the play-cycle’s allegorical structure.19 In effect, Sayers’ plays invited listeners to imagine Christ as a religious leader who eschewed military conflict in the first century; yet by giving Christ and his message a voice during World War II, Sayers also contradicts the traditional image of a pacifist Christ. Instead, under Sayers’ direction, Jesus was transformed into a militarized Messiah promoting a Britain unified by the Christian faith as an antidote to German Nazism. Before discussing The Man Born to Be King as partaking in Britain’s larger rebranding campaign, however, Sayers’ polarizing decision to have Jesus voiced on air needs addressing. I am specifically concerned with the criticism of the Lord’s Day Observance Society (LDOS), whose confused mixing of visual and aural language to describe the blasphemy of voicing Christ has yet to be fully considered. The LDOS’s mixing of senses not only questions the long-held philosophical division between the aural and the

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visual,20 but also calls attention to the symbiotic relationship between sight and sound that emerges with radio broadcasting, thereby enabling propaganda, and specifically The Man Born to Be King, to become a more effective wartime tool.21

I heard the voice of Jesus say When the LDOS published its complaints against The Man Born to Be King in The Times on December 30, 1941, Sayers’ Jesus had not yet spoken on air. With the first play, the nativity scene, already broadcast (in which the character of Christ had no speaking lines), the LDOS was making one last attempt to outrage the public and convince the BBC that Sayers’ play-cycle was an assault against the Christian religion. Throughout this advertisement, the LDOS makes a fascinating claim about the medium of radio, a claim that was overlooked when CRAC and the BBC approved the plays for production. Specifically, the LDOS’s protest argues that Sayers’ broadcast amounted to an “impersonation of Christ,” thereby implying that when a voice is heard over the radio, the character and appearance of the voice is also suggested to a listening audience. For the LDOS, this personification of Christ on air was “blasphemous” and “irreveren[t]” and broke the Third Commandment (taking the Lord’s name in vain), by speaking on behalf of God. Strangely, the LDOS did not choose to mention the Second Commandment (not making a carven image or likeness of God), which would have been more appropriate with their use of the term “impersonation.” This confusion of sight and sound continues throughout the advertisement, and toward the end of Revd H. H. Martin’s letter to the BBC, which is included in the protest, he states that the BBC should “refrain from staging on the wireless this revolting imitation of the voice of our Divine Saviour and Redeemer.” From this line it is apparent that Martin and the LDOS were confused by more than just the senses; they were also puzzled by the medium of radio itself, and suggest that a physical production in a theater is akin to a play created for radio. Luckily for Sayers and the BBC, the Lord Chamberlain’s Office made a more decisive distinction between the stage and radio—between the mediums

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of sight and sound. It was determined that because the character of Jesus was to be heard on the air, no impersonation was taking place. However, the Lord Chamberlain warned that if the productions were to be translated for the stage or screen (be it film or television) the ruling would be very different.22 Thus, in order for The Man Born to Be King to be broadcast, a division had to be made between sight and sound; the radio had to be declared strictly an aural medium. This is certainly a distinction that has been made since the playcycle’s production, most famously perhaps by Marshall McLuhan, who notes a difference between television as a “cool” medium that stimulates multiple senses and radio as a “hot” medium “that extends one single sense in ‘high definition.’”23 But the claim that radio is exclusively an aural medium at the expense of the visual sense is an inaccurate depiction of the way the medium really works. In fact, that radio listening required audiences to both hear and see had been well established by the time Sayers presented The Man Born to Be King. Seven years prior to the play-cycle’s first broadcast, American psychologists Hadley Cantril and Gordon W. Allport argued in “Judging Personality from Voice” that the radio voice conveys correct information about its speaker’s personality, although no listener receives a 100 percent accurate image.24 Regardless of accuracy, it is significant to note that as early as the mid-1930s radio theorists recognized that the medium did not abide by an aural/visual split. Instead, radio required both senses. This was certainly the case for the audience of Sayers’ first biblical radio drama He That Should Come (1938). In their letters to the BBC, listeners emphasized the role that sight played in their listening experience. As one listener remarked, “None of us realized before how much we had just accepted the story without properly visualizing it. It gave us a new vision of it all and the tiny infant’s cry brought home to us as never before the real humanity of Jesus.”25 This visualizing process was only exacerbated in The Man Born to Be King, where listeners not only heard the cry of the infant Jesus, but also received the message of the Gospels from their source. Even Sayers, who once wrote to Val Gielgud that radio is a medium of “speech-without-sight,” seemed aware of radio’s ability to draw both aural and visual responses.26 Throughout The Man Born to Be King there are numerous references to blindness and seeing, which is in large part an allusion to Christ

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as “the light of the world.” But Sayers also uses Jesus’ scene with Jacob the Blind Man in the seventh play, “The Light and the Life,” to emphasize the significance of voice when one does not know, and cannot see, the speaker. Jacob, who is cured of his blindness by Christ, attempts to describe to the Elders of the synagogue just how this miracle came to pass. He explains that he followed a speaker’s command to wash himself in the Pool of Siloam because “voices mean a lot when you’re blind,” and that he knew “that voice meant well by [him].”27 Jacob’s belief in the goodness of Christ based on voice alone serves him well, for it is his faith that cures him. More striking, however, is that upon seeing Jesus a few pages later Jacob is able to identify the miracle worker without introduction; as Jacob exclaims, “Here, I say! I ought to know that voice … Sir, speak again. For God’s sake, speak again … I never set eyes on your face before—faces mean nothing to me—but you look the way you ought to look if you’re the man I take you for.”28 Through Jacob, Sayers presents the very same phenomenon as Cantril and Allport in “Judging Personality from Voice”: the speaker’s voice leads the attentive listener to accurately determine both inner (that Jesus has a good nature) and outer (Jesus’ physical attributes) characteristics. The characters’ physical attributes were in fact so important to Sayers that she included detailed descriptions of their physical features in her extensive notes for the cast and the plays’ producer Val Gielgud. These notes, which contain the ages of the characters, back-stories, psychological profiles, voice descriptions, and even a seating chart for the Last Supper, were intended to help the cast gain a mental image of the roles they were portraying, even though they would never be seen live by a public audience. Take, for example, Sayers’ description of Ephraim in the first play: “He has a peevish, bleating voice like an agitated goat, and (if we could see him) a little thin beard, and an expression of permanent anxiety.”29 From descriptions such as these, it would seem that Sayers had a very distinct idea as to the voice and look of each of her characters, and it was her intent that both actors and listeners should visualize them as she imagined. Thus, the LDOS was not wrong when it used the term “impersonate” to protest the broadcasting of The Man Born to Be King. In fact, the religious Society was in many ways right to be concerned, for as Mladen Dolar points out, the acousmatic voice has the ability to leave a more powerful impression

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on its listeners than a strictly visual image: “the voice, as opposed to the gaze, does not conceal, it is given in a seeming immediacy and immediately penetrates interiority, it cannot be quite held at bay.”30 Dolar’s argument for the radio voice as an uninhibited presence, was, by World War II, already well established. In fact it is this immediacy that seems to have attracted high modernists like Eliot to the BBC.31 With the disembodied voice, there is no impediment to the message: the absence of a physical body speaking to the audience gives the words of the speaker unhindered access to an active listener. But it is the listener’s own process of imagination that gives the disembodied voice its power—the radio listener re-embodies the voice internally, thereby increasing the influence of the spoken words. Part of the reason the radio voice resonates so strongly among its listeners is due to the private spaces in which radio is listened to. Unlike the cinema or theater, which the public attends outside the home, radio enters the private sphere, creating what appears to be an intimate connection between broadcaster and listener, what Theodor Adorno famously calls an “illusion of closeness.”32 This connection, however, is not as personal as the listener believes, for the radio’s voice is being heard in homes around the country. Thus the radio acts as both public and private medium. With regard to The Man Born to Be King, this meant that Jesus’ voice was additionally effective because it reached the listener at home— his message became part of the private environment, rather than say a shared public experience in a church. But while the individual listener or family heard Jesus’ voice in the private sphere, two million other Britons were duplicating this listening experience. Thus the BBC was able to reach a large, but private audience—the perfect recipe for effective wartime propaganda aimed at rebranding Britain’s national image among Britons themselves. Yet Sayers’ intention was not to create a mass listening audience. Instead, her radio plays were meant to start a religious conversation (and conversion) with the active individual listener.33 For Sayers, conversion (and therefore British unification) was to be achieved through the power of Christ’s voice, which commands the blind to see and quiets the seas. In fact, Sayers and Gielgud’s astute awareness of the similarities between the Gospels and the radio added to The Man Born to Be King’s effectiveness. Just like the radio, which casts voices into the air, the Gospels (originally oral tales) feature a multitude of disembodied (or

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acousmatic) voices. In both Old and New Testaments, God often speaks in an acousmatic voice, whose power exists precisely because its source cannot be seen. (Oz’s all-powerful Wizard and the alien invasion reporters are also obvious examples of this.) This disembodied voice is paradoxically both “lessthan-presence” and “more-than-presence,” and this omnipresence leads to what Dolar calls “divine effects.”34 The radio shares many of the attributes that make the divine voice so powerful. The choice of radio as the medium for the plays also lends itself to the dual nature of Christ (human/divine): the voicing of Jesus certainly made the character more human than a shaft of light on the stage, but it is this very voicing on the air that also implied Jesus’ divinity to listeners at home. Speaking on radio’s unique attributes in Broadcasting Modernism, Debra Rae Cohen et al. also expose the medium’s value for religious broadcasting: Radio was present even where it was absent, which is, of course, the paradox at the very heart of the medium. Despite its precise reproduction and breathtaking range, radio opened up a void. To scatter words abroad in space, either through auditory sign or lonely inscription, serves as a reminder of the absent other, as well as of the dissolving of the individual into massed ranks.35

For Sayers, Christ was the ultimate “absent other,” and thus perfect for radio. In its presence-absence paradox, the radio mirrors the message of Christianity: God is near even when there is no physical sign. The very form of radio, therefore, emphasized Sayers’ religious message.36 Some aspects of Jesus’ message, however, were muddled or lost when the plays were translated from written script to oral broadcast. For example, a dozing or distracted listener could have easily mistaken any reference Jesus makes to the heavenly Father as a reference to his earthly patriarch, Joseph, as the capitalization that distinguishes between the two fathers cannot be heard over the air. Take, for instance, the phrase “Just as my Father knows me and I know Him.” By reading we know that Jesus is speaking of God the Father, but by context alone (and without the printed script) a listener could easily have mistaken this line as a reference to Joseph.37 The same difficulty arises when Jesus provides his divine name “I AM” in response to Simon’s question: “In the name of God, what are you? Who’s there?”38 Contextually, answering Simon’s query with “I am” makes sense, but the divinity claim that

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Jesus makes by using the phrase “I AM” is lost upon the listening audience just as it was lost upon the disciples, a point Sayers insists upon throughout the broadcasts.39 The skepticism and confusion of the disciples throughout The Man Born to Be King reflects what Sayers believed to be an epidemic of disbelief and disillusion among her fellow Britons. Therefore, when Jesus speaks to his disciples in the play-cycle, Sayers also intended that he speak to the listening audience at home. Sayers, who makes numerous analogies between the time of Christ and 1940s Europe, positions the audience as the new disciples, who, after hearing these broadcasts and the Gospel of Christ, are meant to go and share the good news. But this play-cycle was not only meant to be religious instruction; instead, the broadcasts had a very specific wartime function: Britain’s literal and spiritual rebirth. Sayers believed that the future of Britain depended upon a resurgence of Christianity and a belief in and understanding of the Christian doctrine. World War II was an opportunity to re-imagine the world—“not an end,” according to Sayers, “but a beginning.”40 Yet for Sayers, the beginning could only emerge if British citizens recognized that the war being fought was, at its core, a holy war. Sayers’ interpretation of the war as a religious struggle was shared by many, including perhaps most famously, T. S. Eliot. As early as 1937, Eliot argued for a resurgence of Christian faith and morality as a means to combat the rise of Fascism and Communism, which were “ideas […] incompatible with Christianity.”41 In his broadcast “The Church’s Message to the World,” Eliot claims that the only means to prevent war is through the spreading and consequent adopting of Christian values and beliefs. As he states, “modern war is chiefly caused by some immorality of competition which is always with us in times of ‘peace’; and that until this evil is cured, no leagues or disarmaments or collective security or conferences or conventions or treaties will suffice to prevent it.” Eliot’s solution to the escalating European tension and Britain’s cultural and socio-political deterioration, which he saw as two sides of the same coin, was religious intervention.42 Such religious interpretations of the war found a sympathetic home in the BBC’s religious department, whose goal, according to the 1942 BBC Handbook was “‘to expound the Christian faith in terms that [could] easily be understood by ordinary men and women,

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and to examine the ways in which that faith [could] be applied,’” especially in a time of war.43

A Christ for World War II It is likely that The Man Born to Be King was always intended to be political propaganda. In 1940, one year before the BBC began broadcasting the playcycle, Sayers published the wartime essay, Begin Here, which illustrates just how intertwined she believed religion and politics to be. Throughout this essay, Sayers claims that Germany and Britain belong to very different histories —Germany’s being Anglo-Saxon and pagan, and Britain’s being “Western, Mediterranean, and Christian”—and therefore, she states, it is no surprise that the two nations are at war.44 Although she fails to argue convincingly for the religious divisions between the two nations, not least because she ignores Germany’s role in the Protestant Reformation, this essay is pivotal to understanding Sayers’ interpretation of World War II as a religious struggle.45 Even the language she uses to describe the impact the war was having on Britain’s cultural foundations mixes images of aerial bombings (an event with which the London-based Sayers was all too familiar) and the language of the Gospels. As she writes: “War, by dropping a metaphorical bomb into the structure of our lives, puts our foundations to a critical test, and offers an unequalled opportunity for finding out whether our house was built upon rock or upon sand.”46 By referencing Matthew 7.24-27 here, Sayers suggests that the Second World War is a religious trial for the British population, a time to discover whether or not the nation is built upon the Christian ideals that will keep its foundations strong. It is her position that the only means of saving British culture is to fight for Christianity, upon which she insists, British culture was built. As noted above, Sayers was not alone in depicting the war in religious terms. Phyllis Lassner suggests that this viewpoint was common among British women writers, including Phyllis Bottome, Ethel Mannin, and Vera Brittain. For Bottome in particular, Christianity was at the root of the conflict: “The really stubborn core of what Hitler is fighting against in Great Britain is the unconscious Christianity of the British people.”47 Such religious positioning was also used by the MOI and members of Churchill’s cabinet,

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namely the Minister of Information, Duff Cooper. As Ian McLaine indicates, the MOI felt little concern about bringing religion into their representation of the conflict. In fact, they viewed it as necessary: Germany’s claim to be the sole bulwark of Christian Europe against Bolshevism was reason enough for the Ministry to insist that a true reading of the situation pitted Christian Britain against pagan Germany. But the constant theme of Britain as a Christian nation, and a nation of Christians, also derived from the received opinion which stated that belief in Christianity informed the country’s secular virtues. There seem to have been few qualms about pressing religion into the service of propaganda.48

Films also depicted the war as a religious struggle, often through indirect means. Take, for example, Leslie Howard’s Pimpernel Smith (1941), in which a Nazi officer exclaims, “In Nazi Germany, no one can hope to be saved by anybody.” Although speaking about the rescue of prisoners from concentration camps, this line takes on religious implications when, at the end of the film, the protagonist declares that Germany is “pagan.”49 But The Man Born to Be King also needs to be understood as an attempt to reimagine British religiosity for political purposes, especially since Sayers’ interpretation of the Gospels heavily relies upon claims for an analogous political climate in first-century Jerusalem and early 1940s Britain. Sayers believed that the same historical situations kept occurring, and this included Britain’s role in the current war. In a letter to her son, she remarks upon this phenomenon: “England is back in the centre stream of her tradition—she is where she was in 1588 and 1815. Spain held all Europe, France held all Europe; they broke themselves upon England; we have to see that the same thing happens to Germany.”50 However, this time it seemed as if Britain’s future was less secure. Sayers was extremely sensitive to the fact that her own time was a defining moment in the course of the Western world; this naturally made it perfect for comparison to the era of the Gospels, which she referred to as “the turning-point of history.”51 And radio, with its ability to encourage imaginative listening, was the perfect medium to create such trans-historical connections. As Jonathan Sterne asserts, radio was part of a larger group of sound-reproduction technologies that enabled “people’s ears [to] take them into the past or across vast distances.”52 Thus, it was hoped that Britons listening in to Sayers’ play-cycle would mentally visit Christ’s

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Jerusalem and conflate figures from the past with present-day political leaders. Sayers, it seems, was well aware of the current political climate’s influence upon her writing. As she writes in the introduction to her play-cycle, This question, which supplied the title for the series and dictated the emphasis and line of approach throughout, was just as acute for the men of the first century as it is for us; under the pressure of the Roman Imperium, their minds were exercised as ours are by problems about the derivation of authority, the conflict between centralised and decentralised government, the sanctions behind power-politics, and the place of national independence within a worldcivilisation. No force of any kind was needed to bring the story into a form that was sharply topical.53

Because Sayers interpreted the war as essentially a struggle for Christianity, The Man Born to Be King should also be read as propaganda. The plays were part of the BBC’s “white” propaganda campaign that sought to “influence hearts and minds” and “foster […] the British people’s innate will to win.”54 With the play-cycle, therefore, the radio, already a mouthpiece for wartime propaganda, also became the site where religious and political interests mixed. This politicization of religion, however, was Sayers’ intent. Within both the broadcasts and her accompanying notes there are numerous references to the rise of Nazism, Britain’s disastrous appeasement policy, and the contentious relationship between church and state. Although The Man Born to Be King is littered with references to World War II, I will limit my discussion to the main characters: Jesus, Pontius Pilate, and Caiaphas. With each of these characters, Sayers clearly communicates her faith in Christian dogma; but, more importantly, she expresses her dismay with current political leadership and presents a future democratic path for a Britain grounded in the Gospels. For Sayers, the core focus of Britain’s rebranding needed to be nation-wide religious education; only those fortified in Christianity could, she believed, truly lead Britain in a successful war and post-war campaign. This education involved relearning Christ’s peaceful message, which she believed to be as misunderstood in the first century as it was in the twentieth. For Baruch the Zealot, an invented character who Sayers describes as the “pure politician,” Jesus is the leader for whom the political factions have been waiting. As Baruch states: “The party is ready, as you know. All we need is a figurehead,

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a leader, a spell-binder to fire the imagination of the masses and make them fall in to march behind the party … Brains aren’t enough. You’ve got to appeal to the emotions—stir these peasants out of their slave mentality and give ’em something to fight and die for.”55 It is easy to see the correlation between Baruch’s rebellious party and the early formation of National Socialism. Sayers comments upon this similarity in her notes to the fifth play: “Baruch sees Jesus as the Nazi party may have seen Hitler—the Heaven-sent spell-binder, rather mad but a valuable political tool in the right hands.”56 Like Baruch, the disciples also fail to understand that Jesus’ rebellion is spiritual rather than martial; only at the crucifixion do they begin to realize that Christ’s revolution will not lead to the physical overthrow of Rome. In one telling dialogue between Jesus and Andrew, the disciples’ lack of understanding is made blatantly apparent, with Andrew encapsulating what many thought Christ’s arrival would bring: “armies and banners, and a big procession.”57 Like Baruch, this was the military action the disciples expected (action that would have resonated with a British audience, who watched Nazi Germany march into Paris on June 14, 1940). Throughout the notes and the broadcasts, Sayers consistently equates the political environment of the first century with the present, thereby ensuring that her audience never forgets to connect the message of the Gospels to their own lives. But by making such comparisons, Sayers also invokes the message and voice of Christ for military purposes. With The Man Born to Be King, Sayers broadcasted a peaceful Christian message to millions of Britons, who in the process also heard about Britain’s Christian duty to win the war. The clearest representation of World War II within the plays, however, emerges around the struggle for rule between Pontius Pilate and the Jewish Elder, Caiaphas. This analogy blurs the line between ally and enemy, and by the end of the twelfth broadcast, it still remains unclear as to whether: a) Pilate represents Nazi Germany or the British Empire; and b) Caiaphas represents the Chamberlain government or the Nazi appointed clergy. Although Sayers depicts Pilate as the lesser of two evils in comparison to Caiaphas, his position as the Roman Prefect of Judaea, a leading member of an expanding Empire, certainly ties him to the Nazis and their march across Europe. The image of the golden eagle, a symbol of Caesar and later

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Hitler, emphasizes this correlation when it appears in the first play. The likeness between Rome and Nazi Germany becomes more apparent when one considers the role of Caiaphas as the appeaser of the Roman government.58 His response to Rome’s rule in Judaea is strikingly similar to Neville Chamberlain’s policy of appeasement in the 1930s. Caiaphas, like Chamberlain, wants peace by any means necessary; this includes crucifying a man of no political threat. As he says to Joseph of Arimathea, “Accept the inevitable. Adapt yourselves to Rome. It is the curse of our people that we cannot learn to live as citizens of a larger unit. We can neither rule nor be ruled; for such the new order has no place. Make terms with the future while you may, lest in all the world there be found no place where a Jew may set foot.”59 Caiaphas’s “adaption” is done out of a desperate desire to keep in Rome’s good graces; but the second half of this statement on Jewish wandering is also disturbing, given the current Jewish persecution and systematic elimination in Nazi-occupied Europe. Sayers, however, who was extremely critical of Chamberlain’s policy of appeasement, most likely meant this as a criticism of Britain’s prior political strategy which had allowed the war to escalate. Thus Caiaphas’s statement is most effectively read as a warning to the British public that the consequence of “peace at any cost” is that one is never given peace. But Sayers also describes Caiaphas as an official who uses this peace to further his own political and religious career, thereby equating him to the Nazi appointed clergy. Take, for example, his exclamation that “it is the duty of statesmen to destroy the madness which we call imagination. It is dangerous. It breeds dissension. Peace, order, security—that is Rome’s offer—at Rome’s price.”60 Sayers presents Caiaphas as weary of new religious interpretations, which Jesus represents, viewing them as a challenge to the religious order, and thus ultimately a challenge to the Imperial status quo. In her introduction to the plays, she describes Caiaphas as an “ecclesiastical politician” who is “appointed, like one of Hitler’s bishops, by a heathen government, expressly that he might collaborate with the New Order and see that the Church toed the line drawn by the State.”61 Although not directly compared to the Nazis, which would have been an even more troubling depiction of the Jewish leader, Caiaphas is shown to be sympathetic to Rome, which has allowed him to maintain his puppet-religious power. In this reading, then, Rome again represents Nazi Germany. However, the fact that it is Caiaphas and his fellow

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Elders and not Pilate who want Jesus crucified, a representation that borders on anti-Semitism, complicates this allegorical version. A final possibility is that Rome represents the British Empire. This correlation is certainly plausible given Sayers’ claim in Begin Here that Britain stems from the “Western, Mediterranean, and Christian” culture of Rome. Throughout the plays there is frequent mention of the British Empire, especially in the notes to the actors. Sayers compares the role of the soldier Proclus to an Anglo-Indian, Herod to an Indian Maharajah “exercising sovereignty within the British Raj,” and Barabbas the murderer to a member of a nationalist organization like the Irish Republican Army.62 In all of these descriptions, Sayers aligns Britain with Roman power. She even describes Pilate in terms of the British Empire: “There is nothing remarkable about his ratifying a Jewish sentence. He is in the position of a British magistrate in, say, Kenya. The natives are encouraged to administer their own law, and the foreign government will uphold the findings, if the trial has been properly conducted according to the native code, and if the over-riding Government code is not infringed.”63 This note to the actors helps explain why Sayers makes Pilate a more sympathetic character than Caiaphas. Pilate, like Sayers and the British public, is subject to the laws of the Empire. Caiaphas is not. Or at least this is how she understands the inner workings of an imperial system in which she had never fully participated. Sayers, however, was fully aware of Britain’s guilt when it came to imperial atrocities such as fostering the transatlantic slave trade, mass imprisonment of native peoples, and the destruction of local environments and economies for its own gain. As she states in Begin Here, “We must remember while we wage [war] that we ourselves have in time past often been the oppressors. Our hands are not clean—the hands of no man are clean.”64 Thus the confused allegorical images of Rome as both the British Empire and Nazi Germany as they appear in The Man Born to Be King are understandable in light of Sayers’ own ambivalent view on British imperialism. Ultimately, however, such analogies between Britain and Rome were meant to bring the story of Christ closer to the British public. Sayers wanted her listeners to understand that “God was executed by people painfully like us, in a society very similar to our own—in the over-ripeness of the most splendid and sophisticated Empire the world has ever seen.”65

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Despite being a national broadcast, The Man Born to Be King has a transnational legacy. Due to its wartime success among British listeners, the plays were rebroadcast in Canada, South Africa, Australia, and New Zealand.66 Even without these rebroadcasts, however, Sayers’ play-cycle needs to be understood as a transnational production for both its international subjectmatter and its part in the national campaign to court U.S. sympathy, a campaign I discuss more fully in the next chapter. With the airing of The Man Born to Be King, the voicing of Jesus was no longer simply religiously divisive—it was nationally divisive. The radio representation of Christ and his message set against the backdrop of political upheaval was certainly meant to remind Britons of their nation’s religious history and martial power; but this play-cycle also belongs to the larger tradition of late-modernist literature and propaganda that sought to culturally unify the British nation. Sayers, therefore, achieved what Baruch could not: she successfully made Jesus into a weapon of war, where emotional pleas to remember Christian dogma ultimately function as a wartime claim for Christian right over heathen (German) wrong. Thus, in her effort to re-educate the British public about Christian doctrine, Sayers also participated in the larger wartime rebranding campaign that worked to revise the national image and better define the differences between Britain and Germany. Even today, Britain during the Blitz is remembered (or rather romanticized) in the cultural memory as resilient and egalitarian, a struggling nation that fought a People’s War. But Sayers’ vision for Britain does not entirely comply with the Blitz myth. While she presents a historically stable nation and a “total war,” Sayers also undercuts the notion of a single wartime representation by presenting individual responses to Jesus’ message and by extension the wartime experience. This presentation of the war coincides with more recent historical accounts. As Kristine Miller argues, the Blitz was ultimately experienced individually and therefore “different civilians imagined the People’s War in very different ways.”67 These more recent dismantlings of the Blitz myth also resonate with the anticipated response to Sayers’ plays. Although she desired to educate the British public about Christianity, it bears remembering that it was not Sayers’ intent to create a single mass listening response (what one might find in church via the frequent use of call-and-response). Instead, she hoped

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that the plays would encourage the individual listener to better understand his or her own political environment though an analogous presentation of the Gospels, and therefore join the war in both the name of Britain and Christ.

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Transatlantic Crossings What they [the British Left] ought to do is reassess their position as intellectuals; it is worth remembering that there are more than the two alternatives of the Ivory Tower and the political tub. —Louis MacNeice1 Whereas Sayers maintained transatlantic sensitivity during her Home Service broadcasts of The Man Born to Be King, the poet and literary critic Louis MacNeice faced a more daunting challenge. Throughout his tenure as a wartime broadcaster for the BBC, MacNeice repeatedly wrote for two distinct audiences: those tuning in on the Home Front and American listeners, who, living across an ocean, were still not convinced of the United States’ involvement in the war. Christopher Columbus (1942), one of MacNeice’s earliest and most successful radio plays, provides a quintessential example of the difficulties transatlantic broadcasters faced, in part because the two-hour long production was transmitted simultaneously to British and American audiences. As I have already shown, the MOI and the BBC were attuned to the changing dynamic in the war that came with the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. But by the fall of 1942, the stakes of transatlantic cooperation and understanding were even higher, and productions like Christopher Columbus were commissioned with the express purpose of honoring the U.S., Britain’s newest ally. Written to commemorate the 450th anniversary of Columbus’ discovery of America, MacNeice’s October 1942 radio play, starring the world-famous Laurence Olivier in the title role, bridged an ocean and “created a sensation in artistic circles on both sides of the Atlantic.”2 MacNeice began working for the BBC in the spring of 1941 by writing primarily dramatic documentaries for the Features and Drama Section. Little did he know that this wartime work would lead to a twenty-two-year career as a broadcast writer and producer. During his time in radio, MacNeice

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showcased an astonishing breadth of creative expertise, broadcasting on “everything from American poetry to Norse legends, and in an astounding range of modes—from translations of the classics to straight documentaries, from radio dramatic masterpieces to April Fool skits.”3 For MacNeice, the radio served as a significant creative outlet that allowed him to put into practice some of his poetic theories. Central to his broadcasting aims were finding a balance between what Clair Wills refers to as “the language of political commitment” popular in the 1930s and “the tower” of modernist aesthetes. Finding a middle ground, or an “open space” as Wills calls it, between politics and aesthetics, as the epigraph to this chapter also suggests, was the primary focus of both MacNeice’s poetry and broadcasts.4 In fact, the need to forge communication and connection between the artist and society is what directed MacNeice toward radio broadcasting in the first place. Yet, his desire for clear communication with both reader and listener did not lead him to sacrifice his high modernist aesthetics. Instead, MacNeice utilizes modernist motifs, in particular allegory, the anti-hero, and eclecticism to open up new lines of communication and reach a larger, international audience. Due to his belief in poetry’s ability to cross national boundaries and traditions, MacNeice’s decision to work in wartime radio is less surprising than most of the authors discussed in this book. This faith in poetry’s migratory potential stems from his own experience as a poet between lands—another modernist trait—and paves the way for his broadcasting turn. Fran Brearton and Edna Longley write of MacNeice as being simultaneously an English, Irish, and northern Irish poet, and Maria Johnston adds to this list by including America as a primary influence upon his print and radio work.5 Throughout the 1930s directness and clarity increasingly became key features of MacNeice’s writing (features also necessary for radio broadcasting), but this ease of communication also required a very keen eye for form. Take for example his Autumn Journal (1939), which MacNeice described as being “something halfway between the lyric and the didactic poem.”6 The poem’s quatrain form is flexible but still highly controlled in order to meet two distinct needs: it creates unity while avoiding uniformity. As Glyn Maxwell notes, this diverse form, which “sometimes […] rhymed, sometimes […] did not; [and] appeared to elongate and truncate at will” had to accurately reflect a wide array of events from preparation for the coming war, political treaties,

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Greek literature, modern technology, failed relationships, and meandering through the city.7 It is his eclecticism in national influence, poetic form, and subject that leads literary critics to categorize MacNeice’s career as having “artistic plurality,”8 a plurality that is simultaneously a marker of his modernity and a characteristic that made MacNeice a natural fit for radio. In MacNeice’s radio oeuvre, the poet’s aptitude for diversity is on full display, and this is perhaps most true of his wartime drama Christopher Columbus. This massive radio undertaking consisted of forty-nine speaking parts and featured the BBC Symphony Orchestra conducted by Adrian Boult, the BBC Chorus, three soloists, a guitarist, and an intricate score by William Walton. The production’s complexity is even noted by MacNeice, who, in the appendix to the text, writes of the play’s unusual length (the play was two hours long) and its atypical reliance upon vocal music.9 Even the creation of the script, a reworking of Samuel Eliot Morison’s extensive biography of Columbus titled Admiral of the Ocean Sea, reflects his modernist sensibilities and recalls other attempts to destabilize historical and myth-creating narratives. Notable examples include, of course, James Joyce’s reimagining of the Odyssey in Ulysses, T. S. Eliot’s pastiche of numerous Western foundational narratives in The Waste Land, and Ezra Pound’s rewriting of political history in The Cantos.10 In fact, the script and the production, not to mention Walton’s musical score, were so complex that the original date of the broadcast had to be moved from March to October 12, 1942. Yet despite this level of difficulty in its composition, MacNeice claims in the introduction to Christopher Columbus that his wartime masterpiece is far removed from the modernist stylings of Marcel Proust and Joyce. Instead, according to the poet, his drama better matches “the old-fashioned storyteller” due to its inclusion of plot—the “what people do” part of the story.11 I contend, however, that MacNeice, in his attempt to carve out a space for radio drama within the literary world, creates an erroneous “great divide” between his own work and that of his high modernist predecessors.12 Because he was creating a broadcast for a diverse listening audience of both British and American listeners, MacNeice picked a popular topic and presented an entertaining program. And while he certainly focused on creating a comprehensible narrative for his listeners, he did not, despite his claims, achieve this at the expense of his formalist sensibilities. Rather than avoid eclecticism

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and complexity, MacNeice instead translated these modernist topoi in order to entertain a mass audience. But this broadcast also served a much larger cultural propaganda purpose that is underscored when read together with MacNeice’s other wartime writings, including magazine articles, a propaganda pamphlet, radio features, letters, poems, and his unfinished autobiography. These writings, produced alongside Christopher Columbus, paint a much more comprehensive picture of MacNeice as a propagandist whose larger mission was to improve cross-cultural understanding between Britain and the U.S., a mission that ultimately opened up new networks not only between the Allies but also between the Anglo-American modernist tradition and mass media.

MacNeice crosses the Atlantic MacNeice’s history of transatlantic crossing, specifically from England to the United States, is a story that has only recently been introduced into the criticism by Jon Stallworthy, his biographer (1995), and more pointedly by Maria Johnston in her 2008 article “‘This Endless Land’: Louis MacNeice and the USA.”13 MacNeice first traveled to the U.S. in March 1939 while Europe was under the threat of war. Having gone to give a short lecture tour, thanks to the guidance of his Faber & Faber editor, T. S. Eliot, MacNeice became captivated by this world away from international turmoil as well as by a new love interest, the American writer Eleanor Clark. Thus, after briefly returning to England, MacNeice once again departed for the U.S. in January 1940, under the peril of U-boats and naval mines, this time for a much longer stay as a lecturer at Cornell. These dangerous passages across the Atlantic mark a fundamental moment of transition for both MacNeice’s poetry and politics, so much so that he begins his autobiography, The Strings are False, with his second return journey from the U.S. back to war-torn Europe: “Yet I am not so gloomy as I might be. I am going back to a past which is not there (that England—or Europe for that matter—will never be the same again is already a cliché) but, though that past had its charm, I am glad to see it evaporate […]. The world for me had become inverted; America is the known and England the unknown.”14 While Johnston takes this scene in The Strings to suggest that it was MacNeice’s time in the U.S. that was a “transitional

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moment, bridging his so-called ‘thirties’ phase and his career in BBC radio,”15 I would argue that the transition comes also with the transatlantic crossings themselves. Certainly MacNeice’s time in the U.S. allowed him to reflect upon his complicated relationship with England as a northern Irishman as well as his potential role in the war effort, but it is in the passing from the old to the New World and back to the old again, that MacNeice recognizes the political shift happening within himself and in Britain. Like fellow writers and radio broadcasters J. B. Priestley and George Orwell, MacNeice believed England to be evolving from a rigid class system to a more recognizable democracy. And this “evaporat[ing]” of England’s past gives MacNeice a reason to fight not only against Nazi Germany but also for a newly imagined Britain. Yet MacNeice’s decision to return to England and broadcast propaganda for the BBC was not made overnight, nor was it without complication. For although MacNeice was an early opponent of fascism, serving on the Association of Writers for Intellectual Liberty committee which sought to educate the public about the threat of fascist regimes and war, he was also a critic of the Chamberlain-led government. In a November 1939 letter to E. R. Dodds, MacNeice writes of a “choice of evils,” stating that while “Mr. Chamberlain’s England is preferable to Nazi Germany” he finds it “quite feasible to be agin the govmt. & still support the war.”16 Yet as the war in Europe progressed, his position on his own involvement softened. Although far from claiming any sort of patriotic duty to England, he does make a larger case for his involvement as an artist. In his essay “Traveller’s Return” for Horizon, MacNeice notes his self-serving motivations for returning to England: “My chief motive thus being vulgar curiosity, my second motive was no less egotistical: I thought that if I stayed another year out of England I should have to stay out for good, having missed so much history, lost touch.” He also asserts that he writes “better” in England than in the U.S., and that, if the opposite were true, he would have remained an expatriate.17 These quips, however, should not be taken entirely at face value. Writing in defense of those writers who chose to relocate to the U.S. during the war, such as W. H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood, MacNeice places the focus on artistic significance. But the poet also valued human life, and it is this humanist side that emerges in a letter of explanation to Clark: “but I have the feeling that it’s important that, while things are in such a mess here & just because they are

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in such a mess, people—especially people like me who have plenty to lose— should be in the mess continuing to be more or less human.”18 “Traveller’s Return,” and indeed his larger print journalism work in the early 1940s, also paves the way for his turn to transatlantic radio propaganda. Part of MacNeice’s main goal in his writings for Horizon and his “London Letters” for the U.S.-published Common Sense is articulating and deemphasizing British and American difference, as it was his belief that a mutual understanding between the two countries’ peoples was imperative and “would not only reinvigorate the culture of both, [but] would ensure the existence of both.”19 Thus, while “Traveller’s Return” explains the draw of the U.S. to British writers, his “London Letters” articulate the British experience of the war to American readers. Similar in message to Priestley’s Britain Speaks broadcasts, MacNeice’s “Letters” present Britain as an evolving nation that is down but not out. Thus in letter two, he claims that he “cannot see that the old caste system can survive the war” and by letter four he speaks of actual “plans” among the intelligentsia for a new Britain.20 MacNeice hoped to do more than convince Americans that Britain was changing for the better; he also wanted to challenge cultural misconceptions on both sides of the Atlantic and call attention to cultural and individual similarities between the two nations: “Neither the U.S.A. nor Great Britain is either a zoo or a museum or a midsummer night’s dream; they are both just countries with a good deal in common and composed of individual human beings.”21 This type of cultural translation work became a main feature of his BBC radio broadcasts and was the subject of his propaganda pamphlet Meet the U.S. Army (1943), which attempted to explain the cultural and linguistic differences between the British public and American soldiers. Ultimately, MacNeice believed that it was “high time that ordinary individuals on both sides of the Atlantic should realize what their counterparts on the other side are like,” and to relay this message to the biggest transatlantic audience possible, he knew that radio broadcasting was the best available mass medium.22 Almost immediately upon his return to England, MacNeice began broadcasting for the BBC’s Home Service, focusing heavily upon his experiences in the U.S. This freelance work included a feature on American poetry (“A Word from America”) and a more personal piece titled “Person to Person: Impressions of a poet returning to England after a year in the United States.”23

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Even before joining the BBC, MacNeice realized the international power of radio. In Autumn Journal, for example, he writes of a “howling radio” through which “Hitler yells” to British listeners and the world.24 But despite the Nazi use of the wireless, and even his own previous distaste for the BBC,25 MacNeice believed that Britain could harness this aural power for a different type of propaganda. In fact, it was the BBC’s hope that they would find in MacNeice a writer who could create political radio dramas similar to the American poet Archibald MacLeish. This desire is explicitly laid out in a letter to MacNeice from T. Rowland Hughes of the Features and Drama Section: “What I have in mind, of course, is something in the style of MacLeish’s ‘Fall of the City’ and ‘Air Raid.’ We in this country have not yet been able to secure a first class poet for such radio programmes and I feel convinced that your lines would speak well.”26 Yet it was not only the BBC that would benefit from MacNeice’s participation. In actuality, the collaboration between the poet and the broadcasting corporation was mutually beneficial. For MacNeice, broadcasting meant steady work and a chance to use his extensive knowledge of the U.S. to aid the war effort. For the BBC, MacNeice’s involvement opened upon a new network between Britain and the American public, many of whom still needed convincing that Britain was worth their trouble. Throughout his early broadcasts to America, including “The Stones Cry Out,” “Freedom’s Ferry,” “Britain to America,” and “Halfway House,” MacNeice makes his genuine affection for Britain’s newest ally apparent. “The Stones Cry Out,” his first transatlantic radio series, was exactly the type of program MacNeice hoped to broadcast when he applied to the BBC. In these broadcasts, MacNeice gave a voice to the bombed buildings of London, and by doing so articulated the devastation being done to both the physical spaces and the traditional values Britain and America shared. For example, in the May 27, 1941 broadcast on Westminster Abbey, MacNeice mixes images of the May 10 air raid with biblical passages in order to draw a connection for listeners between the current war, in which Nazis bombed iconic churches, and Britain and America’s shared religious history. This method of analogy, especially with regard to religion as I argued in the previous chapter, was a common feature of BBC broadcasts.27 The BBC and the MOI, however, wanted to do more than educate the American public on the London Blitz; they also wanted to express gratitude for their continued financial and martial

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support. Broadcasts like “Freedom’s Ferry” (July 1941), written to thank the U.S. for the gift of fifty destroyers, was another program well suited to MacNeice, who, having travelled back and forth across the Atlantic, understood the dangers faced by Allies willing to make the transatlantic journey. MacNeice’s early broadcasts on and for America apparently pleased the BBC, and, after a three-month trial period, the corporation made his employment official in the summer of 1941.28

Propaganda, poetry, and the radio Like many other writers of the time, MacNeice had a complicated understanding of and relationship with the term “propaganda,” which helped determine his creative output for the BBC. In his 1938 critical study of modern poetry, the author began exploring the connection between literature and propaganda, noting that his objection to “surrealism” and to “pure propaganda-verse” was that the poet lost power over the work in both: “The poet,” he writes, “must not completely surrender control of his poem—or his poem’s control of itself.”29 But while MacNeice draws parallels between propaganda and a modernist avant-garde writing style, he does not, as Orwell does, suggest that all literature is propaganda (Chapter 4). Instead, MacNeice argues for a more balanced view of the role propaganda plays in literature, stating that while propaganda should certainly not be the sole aim of poetry, this does not mean the two are fundamentally opposed. On the contrary, he firmly believes that poetry can be a great vehicle for successful propaganda: The fact that a poem in which a belief is implicit may convert some whom direct propaganda does not touch, far from proving that that poem is propaganda, only proves that propaganda can be beaten on its own ground by something other than itself, so that we can admit that poetry can incidentally have effects like those of propaganda though its proper function is not propagandist.30

Thus for MacNeice, literature, and in particular poetry, has the potential to be more effective than a direct propaganda approach. And while his phrasing here seems to categorically divorce poetry from propaganda, MacNeice was in actuality well aware of the potential literature held as a persuasive tool.

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In this thinking he was firmly in line with the powers that be at the BBC and the MOI. In fact, part of what made MacNeice such a great propagandist was his inclusive definition of poetic subjects and forms, an inclusiveness that increased with the war. Speaking on the function of modern poetry for the BBC in 1939, he states that anything can be the subject of a poem so long as the subject “interests his mind” and he “records these things with integrity and with as much music as he can compass or as is appropriate to the subject.”31 Yet MacNeice’s generosity when it came to poetic topic should not be confused with an indifference to topic. Unlike the Imagists, who he critiques in Modern Poetry, he did not privilege form over content. Rather, he wanted poetry to once again “become functional”—to serve a purpose in the larger world, which meant writing about all the things (people, politics, war, technologies) that made up that world. War, MacNeice believed, was actually a catalyst for improved poetry; if crisis made poets more “solid” in their beliefs, then the war would certainly have a transformative impact on their output.32 Nothing is perhaps more telling of this belief than MacNeice’s own anthologizing of his poetry in Poems: 1925–1940. In the forward to this volume, he speaks of the coming war as a type of death for his previous life and poetic style. Thus, while he states that he will continue writing, an act MacNeice understood as a form of fascist resistance, he also notes that his “writing will presumably be different.” Part of this difference would involve actively trying to understand the world—“great poetry,” he writes, will not be possible “until we [poets] have made sense of our world” and, as a result, actively attempt to communicate this world through poetry.33 According to Wills, this type of communication, or what she refers to as “‘truthful connections between art and society,” was MacNeice’s main goal with the advent of the war.34 With public comprehension key to MacNeice’s poetic mission, it makes sense that he would turn to radio broadcasting. In Modern Poetry, the poet makes clear that radio, and in particular radio plays, should be a medium that poets explore. In this call to the microphone, MacNeice taps into a larger historical movement toward sound technology that has been detailed by Douglas Kahn in Noise, Water, Meat. Yet, where Kahn writes primarily of the avant-garde involvement, MacNeice highlights the fact that there was also a simultaneous move toward the sonic by writers

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we typically think of as high modernists.35 MacNeice was aware, however, that the radio was far from the perfect medium for all types of art or discussion. For example, while he concedes that radio might “preclude the higher mathematics and the more erudite nuances of symbolist poetry,” he also argues that in its ability to tap into human emotion the radio “does not […] preclude the broader forms of poetry.”36 This desire to communicate, matched by his desire to contribute to the war effort, unsurprisingly led MacNeice to the BBC. As Terence Brown notes, the poet’s ability to translate his vast “highbrow” knowledge of the classics and English literature for a potentially less-learned audience, and to do so in an entertaining way that could balance a Greek chorus with working-class colloquialisms, made MacNeice the suitable transatlantic spokesperson for a BBC still under the influence of John Reith’s public service and educational mission.37 Like Reith, MacNeice refused to believe that the working-class individual was incapable of artistic sensitivity. In his introduction to the print version of Christopher Columbus, he makes his positions on the purpose of radio and the potential of the radio audience clear. This introduction marks the author’s most substantial articulation of his radio philosophies, which align him far more with the earlier hopes of Brecht and Benjamin than with the contemporaneous theories of Adorno. As MacNeice writes: I refuse to believe that men and women in the street are as insensitive or as emotionally atrophied as is sometimes assumed by the intelligentsia. The trouble with “ordinary people” is not that they have innately bad taste but that they can be easily conditioned to admire what is vulgar and emotionally false. Give them a year of the Wurlitzer Organ and they will not stomach a symphony orchestra. Write down to them and they will never look up.38

Aside from the poet’s belief in radio’s potential as a cultural enlightening tool, this passage also serves as evidence of MacNeice’s divided position between high modernism (that there is a sharp divide between high art and the popular) and the political writers of the 1930s (that this divide can be overcome through education and increased opportunity). Thus, MacNeice argues, in much the same divided tone as above, that any highbrow subject needs to be palatable to a broad radio listening audience by making it “intelligible” or “at least interesting” to the “simple man sitting by his fireside.” This

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does not mean, however, that a listener should be “written down” to, a process which involves a writer betraying his/her own artistic standards. Rather, MacNeice sees a fine line between the popular and the vulgar, the latter of which he believes does not belong on the air.39 Like many of his American counterparts (Chapter 5), MacNeice paid attention to his invisible listening audience and looked to radio as a form of communication more than a tool for expressing artistic individualism.40 MacNeice’s interest in communication, however, did not lead the poet to eschew the challenging forms often associated with high modernism. On the contrary, he understood modernism as being particularly well suited for broadcasting, especially in its ability to highlight introspection. Speaking on his radio adaptation of The Waves, MacNeice states that while “listeners might not accept Virginia Woolf ’s long-windedness, her preciousness, the sameness of her characters, the lack of a ‘story,’ [that] in no way proves them ‘allergic’ to subjectivity.” This comment on Woolf ’s original text is certainly far from flattering, which makes his choice to adapt the novel rather surprising. MacNeice, however, zeroes in on a key feature of modernism when discussing The Waves, namely “subjectivity,” a characteristic of modernism that Woolf also celebrates throughout her oeuvre and defines as one of the leading principles of early twentieth-century literature in her manifestolike essay “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown.” By doing so, MacNeice makes an important connection between print modernism and radio broadcasting, specifically that both are interested, and indeed built on, capturing interiority. Yet focusing on the mental state of characters does apparently preclude an entertaining narrative, a feature he rightly or wrongly associates with Woolf. Instead, he argues, a radio writer “can get away with anything so long as you entertain.”41 This blending of modernist forms (the internal struggles of the artistic individual and the eclectic source material) with an entertaining plot became a staple of MacNeice’s radio plays and is notably found in his two most famous broadcasts, Christopher Columbus and The Dark Tower. Even his description of his writing process is influenced by his modernist sensibility; rather than focus solely on the written or literary aspect of language when composing, MacNeice pays attention to the sounds of language.42 In this method we can draw comparisons to the avant-garde movements such as Dadaism and Futurism, to James Joyce’s tribute to noise in “Aeolus,” or even to

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William Faulkner’s fun with homonyms in The Sound and the Fury, in which the sonic lays claim to half the title. MacNeice fully believed that the BBC, despite being a large public institution run by bureaucrats, could be an advocate and creator of innovative art. In his introduction to The Dark Tower he lauds his broadcasting colleagues as comparatively intelligent “with almost any contemporary salon of literati” and, in many respects, more fully realized human beings: “my radio colleagues would be found on the whole quicker-witted, more versatile, less egocentric, less conventional, more humane.”43 While this excitement for his BBC colleagues might be an overstatement—he is, after all, trying to sell radio drama as a valid art form—one does get the sense from his letters and long career in radio broadcasting that MacNeice really did value the communal aspect of radio drama as well as the potential for creative output and increased audience. At the center of his passion for broadcasting was radio’s ability to communicate with the public in fundamentally different ways than allowed by print. This includes an increased and more diverse audience, a streamlining of message due to the oral nature of the medium, and the flexibility in form that allowed the author to mix prose, poetry, sound effects, and music in order to bring a story to life. And to achieve a clear message, especially in Christopher Columbus where the international relations stakes were so high, MacNeice interestingly chose to draw from his modernist education and translate the forms he knew so well for a transnational listening audience.

Conquering the new world A number of critics have claimed that MacNeice’s approach to literature underwent a fundamental shift upon his return from America.44 However, any division made between MacNeice’s pre-war poetry and his wartime broadcasting simplifies his literary biography. As I show in this third and final section, it is the modernist qualities of Christopher Columbus that make the radio drama such a successful piece of political propaganda. In fact, the complexity in scale and form of his broadcast not only delayed the production by five months, thereby syncing the radio broadcast with the month in which Columbus landed in the Americas, but it also required a seasoned producer

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in the form of Dallas Bower. Bower and MacNeice had collaborated previously on Alexander Nevsky, another complex radio adaptation, which, like Christopher Columbus, was meant to salute a British ally as well as improve the British population’s opinion of Russia.45 It was hoped that Christopher Columbus would have a similar impact on American and British listeners. For MacNeice, the first step in creating a successful radio broadcast— both artistically and as propaganda—involved establishing the form, which he believed was necessarily complex. As he writes in the introduction to Christopher Columbus: “If radio drama is poetic, its poetry—like poetry in general—must consist of a great deal more than rhythmical patterns of words; it presupposes a wider and deeper pattern beginning with a careful and intuitive selection of material and culminating in a large architectonic. The first virtue of a radio script is construction.”46 And while MacNeice was a fervent advocate of making radio dramas entertaining, such entertainment was not to be had at the expense of the broadcast’s form. Thus, rather than model his plays on the best Hollywood melodramas—and given his time in the U.S. as well as his American listening audience this would be a valid source of influence—he preferred to create broadcasts that could rival “Soviet art-cinema.” Such artistic “heights,” MacNeice claims, could only be achieved with a large and simple subject that is “stylised” through complex composition.47 With such a modernist claim for form over content introducing Christopher Columbus it is not surprising to find that the production is constructed on three modernist motifs: allegory, the artist-adventurer as hero, and eclecticism.48 Like Sayers’ The Man Born to Be King, MacNeice’s wartime radio play is also an allegory that responds to the current political crisis. This stylistic response, according to Stephen Sicari in his study of allegory in Joyce, is a common modernist reaction to the pressures of history. These “pressures,” Sicari writes, “leads the poet to discover allegory as the only viable solution to the dilemma that history has forced upon his desire for ideals and heroism.” Thus allegory becomes for high modernists such as Eliot, Pound, and even Wallace Stevens, the way in which they merge their desires for the ideals of the past with the realities of modernity.49 This evaluation of modernist allegory is particularly true for MacNeice, who repeatedly used the form throughout his wartime radio broadcasts, perhaps most notably in Christopher Columbus.50 This play,

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which focuses on Columbus’ emotional struggle to first finance his expedition across the ocean and then to maintain his faith in his journey, illustrates the long and turbulent history between Europe and the U.S. Intended as a salute to the U.S.’s entry into the war, this broadcast had to remind both American and British listeners that the two nations share a common history, a task not easily done with a play set largely in late-1400s imperial Spain. The goal was to celebrate America as an ally while also suggesting that the U.S. owes its very existence to Europe, and is therefore indebted. This debt is established in an early scene of the production: Columbus: My new world, Father Prior, might help the old. Prior: My son, you are younger than I am. You must forgive me if in my old age My vision is narrower than yours. All I can see is Europe and that is enough— Quarrels within the state and quarrels without And, about all, the threat of the false gods. It is only thirty years since Constantinople.51

With this short dialogue between Columbus and the Prior, a soon-to-be ally of the adventurer, listeners are explicitly provided a connection between the narrative of Columbus’ expedition in 1492 and the present day struggles in 1942. Columbus unambiguously states that the New World was founded in order to “help the old,” which, much like its present state, is also in turmoil. Strikingly, MacNeice depicts the young protagonist as a visionary in comparison to the holy man, thereby lending gravity to his claims. The elderly Prior, who admits that his “vision is narrower” than Columbus’, aligns himself with Europe, a continent filled with “quarrels” between nations and “the threat of the false gods.” Such charged language would have been easily picked up by listeners on both sides of the Atlantic, many of whom would have made the connection between these past troubles and Hitler’s march across Europe. Yet MacNeice resists presenting Columbus as a man certain of his destiny, as this would have been a false representation of a human hero and an inaccurate representation of the U.S., which Columbus, in part, symbolizes. From the opening scene of the radio play listeners are given a Columbus torn between his faith in his mission and doubt in his chance at success. The doubt

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surrounding this mission is, in fact, so ubiquitous that Doubt personified speaks first repeating that “it [Columbus’ mission] cannot be done,” and this is because “West of Europe all is dark.” Faith speaks second and challenges doubt by claiming “it can be done,” because beyond Europe’s western shores “lies a world / Never heard of, never seen.” 52 Paying homage to his classical education, MacNeice utilizes a type of Greek chorus to set up the play’s action and Columbus’ internal daemons.53 But this scene also depicts America’s own domestic battle between isolationists and interventionists over joining the war and Britain’s perception of U.S. involvement as a result. Thus MacNeice depicts the New World as absent (“dark”) and silent, but offers a glimmer of hope that it is still to be “seen” and “heard” from. The internal struggles of Columbus also reflect MacNeice’s own uncertainty of the war’s outcome and his hope that with the U.S.’s entry the tides would turn. Doubt and Faith continue to follow Columbus throughout the radio drama and even afflict him as he is on the open seas traveling toward success. It is here, in the midst of the Atlantic Ocean, between Europe and the Americas, that Columbus’ and MacNeice’s anxieties merge. As Bower reflects, “MacNeice’s sense of situation is very evident when he gives a soliloquy to Columbus who, in the full cycle of doubt and optimism, is somewhere in mid-Atlantic.”54 Reminiscent of MacNeice’s own uncertainty of Europe’s future as he traveled back to Britain in 1940, this scene ends with Columbus announcing his intention to fight on despite the growing doubt and potential mutiny of the crew: “Better turn back? Turn back! / Who dares tell me that?”55 The radio play’s allegorical moments only intensify once land is discovered. For example, upon seeing the New World (although MacNeice makes a point of emphasizing the fact that Columbus believes he has reached the East), Columbus shouts, “Stand by for the dawn!”56 There is a tremendous political implication to this order, for with this line Columbus speaks to the future of his crew and the subsequent reshaping of the world in 1492 as well as the coming of the war’s turning tides in 1942. Moreover, for the U.S., the fall of 1942 was still the “dawn” of America’s entry into World War II. MacNeice frequently repeats this motif of the West as Europe’s future. For example, only a few minutes after the discovery of land, Columbus remarks, “News’, Señor! The word is too weak; / What I shall tell them in Spain is more than news,

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it’s a gospel / The epilogue to the previous history of Man, / The prelude to his future.”57 Time and again, MacNeice emphasizes the connection between Europe and the U.S., between the past and the future. Even the final moments of the production highlight the intense exchange (of culture, goods, religion, and now war supplies) between Britain and the U.S., as Columbus speaks of the “blessings” that “May flow from thence to Europe.”58 This emphasis on exchange is underscored by the alteration in the script to some of the closing lines of the 1942 broadcast. MacNeice’s printed version of the play has Columbus saying “I have brought you a new world,”59 while in the actual production Columbus exclaims “Behold, I bring you a new world.” This begs the question: Why change this line, and more specifically why change the tense? One possible answer in keeping with the allegorical structure the play sets up is that the decision to alter the line to the present tense suggests the continued open exchange between the U.S. and Europe (by now an understood stand-in for Britain). And it is MacNeice, by creating this cross-cultural radio drama, who offers the most recent version of this exchange. With Christopher Columbus, he “bring[s] a new world” (in the form of a shared transatlantic listening experience) to the BBC, a British audience, and the Allied war effort. Finally, it is worth taking a moment to discuss MacNeice’s use of religion in Christopher Columbus, especially given that the BBC’s other smash hit, The Man Born to Be King, was also produced in 1942. Throughout much of the radio play, MacNeice seems to be following a similar propaganda line to Sayers: suggesting that the U.S. and Britain share a Christian history. Take for example these lines spoken by Columbus early in the play: “My name is Christopher—that is the Bearer of Christ. / My name is Columbus— that is the Dove.”60 MacNeice makes a point of emphasizing Columbus’ proclaimed Christianity and presents him as a man who believes himself to be on a mission from God, a prophet similar to Isaiah, Esdras, Job, and John. Exacerbated by Olivier’s grave delivery during the broadcast, this radio play on one level implies that God intended the New World to be found. Even the alterations made to the closing lines to include the words “behold, I bring you” as discussed above, increase the religiosity of the play and evokes the angels speaking to the shepherds in Luke 2.10 from The King James Bible: “behold, I bring you good tidings.”61 Such similarity in language equates the discovery

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of America with the announcement of Christ’s birth. Both, MacNeice implies, have come to save a fallen Christian Europe. Columbus, however, is far from angelic, which suggests that the “good tidings” America brings may not be as heavenly or idyllic as the British public expect. Such an ambiguous reading of religion within Christopher Columbus is supported by MacNeice’s complicated relationship with Christianity and his own atheism. Indeed, as Zelda Lawrence-Curran points out, “cracks begin to appear in this edifice of piety at a relatively early stage in his script;” such cracks include the antagonistic and provincial behavior of the Queen’s confessor, the Most Revered Ernesto de Talavera. Once Talavera is confirmed as the narrative’s antagonist, Columbus’ own reasons for traveling west “shift from evangelism to the acquisition of wealth.”62 Although the reason for this shift remains unclear throughout the broadcast, MacNeice’s own comments in his fifth “London Letter” on the religious evolution of Britain during the war sheds some light on his complicated relationship with religion. As he writes: There is, in some quarters, an understandable swing-back to religion but the revival of religion (with its ordinary connotations) is something that I neither expect nor desire. What is being forced upon people is a revival of the religious sense. And after the hand-to-mouth ethics of 19th century liberalism and the inverted and blinkered quasi-religion of Marxism and the sentimentality of the cynical Lost Generation—after all that, we need all the senses we were born with; and one of those is the religious.63

If we take this letter as representative of MacNeice’s wartime religious opinion, then his presentation of Columbus as an evangelist who is turned off by the close-minded views of institutionalized Christianity fits his own desire for a “religious sense” without religion. This portrayal of Columbus as an evangelist without a church both confirms Britain’s larger propaganda position around the Christian religion (Chapter 2) and denies it. If Columbus is not the Christian hero MacNeice originally sets him up to be, then what type of hero is he? Or is he a hero at all? MacNeice does not offer easy answers to either of these questions. For Lawrence-Curran, the play is “essentially about a hero,” a theme, she argues, which fit audience expectations during wartime. But while Lawrence-Curran is correct in describing Christopher Columbus as “a formidable heroic narrative,” it does not follow

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that Columbus is a hero in the traditional epic sense of the word, despite MacNeice’s pulling from his classical education.64 Instead, MacNeice presents the famed explorer as a modernist anti-hero, who is as obsessed with remapping the world as Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus and Proust’s unnamed narrator are with recreating the world through their art. MacNeice’s choice to make his protagonist an anti-hero seems to have been an early one. In an initial schema for Christopher Columbus, he describes the primary qualities of his protagonist which read like a definition of the “modern” hero: Columbus is “(a) as permanently motivated by a mystical idee fixe, (b) as an egotist, uncompromising and difficult in his dealing with other people.”65 Throughout the broadcast, MacNeice depicts Columbus as a man fixated on his destiny to the exclusion of everything else, including his mistress and unborn child. This fixation makes Columbus incomprehensible to those around him and ultimately isolates him from the world he wants so desperately to explore.66 Of course, Olivier’s frenzied and rant-filled portrayal of Columbus emphasizes the protagonist’s obsessive, mad-artist quality, as does Walton’s score, which Lawrence-Curran notes was inspired by “the concept of heroic behaviour.”67 One imagines that listening to Olivier shout into the microphone like a dictator must have also caused listeners to connect MacNeice’s anti-hero to a certain present-day madman. Take, for example, the following lines: “Silence, you knock-kneed trash. You’re wasting your time. / I am Christopher Columbus. I do not turn back.”68 Spoken by Columbus while at sea and delivered in an impassioned shout by Olivier, audiences on both sides of the Atlantic could not have helped but think of Hitler’s militaristic campaign and frequent propaganda radio speeches. Olivier’s Columbus, however, shouts at people indiscriminately, even yelling at Queen Isabella in an attempt to convince her to finance his trip. This particular scene highlights the extent of Columbus’ passion, but it also subtly suggests the breakdown of class lines, which is the same propaganda narrative MacNeice addressed in his journalism and J. B. Priestley famously broadcasted to America. Ultimately, Columbus succeeds in discovering the New World and brings back its riches (and people) to Spain. But MacNeice is very careful not to overemphasize Columbus’ success. Realizing that Columbus was already a controversial historical figure by the 1940s, MacNeice chooses to expose some of the myths surrounding the adventurer, most notably that Columbus divined

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his discovery. Instead, MacNeice presents Columbus as a man so filled with passion that he could not even fathom what he had found. Choosing to believe that he had discovered Marco Polo’s islands almost to the very end of the play, this representation debunks the myth of Columbus as a prophetic Discoverer and presents him instead as a fallible man.69 This demythologizing, however, also made MacNeice’s Columbus more akin to the everyday heroes who were fighting in World War II. What solidifies Christopher Columbus as a true modernist radio play, however, is the amount of work MacNeice required his listening audience to do. Like the writers of the 1920s, the apex of high modernism, MacNeice showcases his own eclectic knowledge within the broadcast’s script, while also taxing listener senses with a plot that moves quickly through time and space and the largest vocal cast the BBC had ever used. Aside from MacNeice’s references to classical epic voyages and adventurer-heroes and his not-so-subtle analogies to current-day political leaders, the poet also pulls from historical material of the 1400s. For example, in the notes to the play, he writes that the Marquesa’s song is “a deliberate pastiche of fifteenth century Spanish Romance poetry.”70 He even requested, through the help of his producer, the designs of the Santa Maria from the Science Museum.71 Examples of MacNeice’s desire to make the production as historically accurate as possible appear throughout the text. However, these faithful representations of fifteenth-century Spain also clash with his borrowings from both older and more recent eras. It is this type of eclectic blending of historical eras that marks Christopher Columbus as modernist and invites the listener to make comparisons to the poems of his mentor and editor, Eliot. MacNeice also asked his audience to perform mental acrobatics when it came to the spatial aspects of the play. Spatial and temporal traveling is, of course, a unique feature of radio broadcasting. As radio historian Susan Douglas writes, “Radio provided out-of-body experiences, by which you could travel through space and time mentally while remaining physically safe and comfortable in your own house.”72 (Of course for British listeners during the war, the safeness of the home was becoming an increasingly tenuous notion.) For many listeners, especially American listeners, wartime radio became a way to psychologically experience the dangers of war without being in any real physical harm. There are, however, few productions that skip

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through time (nine years in total) and space like Christopher Columbus. By page two of the script, the broadcast has already shifted in space three times, from the unknown realm of Doubt and Faith, to a room in Lisbon, to a tavern with sailors. It is as if MacNeice wants to mimic Columbus’ explorer status through the spatial manipulation of his broadcast; the listener, like Columbus, is supposed to go on a taxing journey. Even the varying forms MacNeice chose for the play’s dialogue mimic the spatial flexibility. In a manner similar to a Shakespearean play—and indeed MacNeice’s Columbus shares many of the same qualities as a protagonist in a Shakespeare tragedy—Christopher Columbus is written in both prose and poetry. Of his style, MacNeice states, “I used for the dialogue an irregular blank verse based upon the rhythms of ordinary speech but capable of being heightened or tightened, flattened or bepurpled to requirements. The lyrics on the other hand I wrote in a regular form and made very simple in sentence structure and imagery because they were designed to be sung.”73 MacNeice’s assessment of his formal adaptability in this broadcast points to an interesting aspect of working for radio: that his form changed not only because of the content of the radio play, but also because of its vocality. MacNeice, more than perhaps any other author of this study, thought the sounds of language were the key to a successful radio broadcast, a point that serves as his main thesis in his introduction to Christopher Columbus: “while in radio drama words are of the utmost importance, the radio dramatist must think in terms of sound rather than of words alone.”74 This emphasis on a radio play’s sonic qualities led him to create the most complex vocal production the BBC had produced to date. The poet was well aware of the way radio worked—that voices reached listeners one at a time and that these listeners needed to be able to distinguish between different characters by voice alone. Thus he worked to provide different identities for his fortynine speaking parts through tone, rhythm, and most importantly accent. Like Sayers, MacNeice used a variety of accents in Christopher Columbus to distinguish between characters, many of which are working class. In fact, the scenes of Columbus’ travels to America are filled with colorful “non-BBC” voices, which has interesting ramifications for a transatlantic broadcast that was also meant to be propaganda. It is worth noting that although the play is set largely in Spain, listeners did not hear Spanish voices. Instead, American

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listeners heard a full range of British accents not often heard over BBC shortwave. Such variety would have echoed the larger propaganda message that writers like MacNeice, Priestley, and Orwell wanted U.S. listeners to hear—that Britain was evolving into a democracy in which each person’s individual voice (regardless of class) is heard. Even the music, according to Lawrence-Curran, confirmed that sonically this was a propaganda play about British–U.S. relations: “its purpose was to honor America, not Spain, and thus on artistic grounds Walton probably deemed it sufficient to add a few splashes of a generally ‘foreign’ nature rather than weight the score with more specific cultural references.”75 From its very inception, MacNeice and Bower knew that Christopher Columbus could have “considerable propaganda value,” but this would only be the case if the broadcast was, in Bower’s words, “handled in the right way.”76 But just because a broadcast was propaganda did not mean that it could not also be art. MacNeice fully believed that literature had the potential to be more effective propaganda than a direct approach, an opinion he shared with numerous other modern writers turned BBC broadcasters including Orwell, who I discuss in the next chapter. In his Christopher Columbus notes, MacNeice even alludes to this position when he writes, “most great projects are achieved through the use of unlikely instruments.”77 Although speaking more specifically about radio here, this statement is as true of his work in wartime propaganda. In more recent scholarship on MacNeice critics have begun to acknowledge the high level of artistic value in his radio plays despite their origin in propaganda. Simon Workman notes that even in the early 1960s, MacNeice still thought radio “was a unique art form that could do things that ‘no other medium’ could.” This echoes Bower’s own assessment of MacNeice’s radio writing, much of which, he states, “show[s] a high quality of good verse.”78 But I would argue that the artistic value of MacNeice’s radio plays cannot be separated from the propaganda, as it is the rich layering of past and present through allegory and the complex narrative constructed for the cultural tastes of two nations that could only emerge due to the broadcast’s propaganda goals.

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Propaganda, Literature, and New Networks There is no more powerful weapon than the unseen echo that encircles the earth and passes from one point into the hearts of millions. —Andrew MacLaren MP, October 11, 19391 All writing nowadays is propaganda. —George Orwell2 In Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell writes of a world controlled by a weaponized system of networks. The protagonist, Winston Smith, is constrained by a web of human informants, an aggressive propaganda campaign, and a government that institutes violence against its own public. But while these networks pose a threat to Winston’s thirst for a freer life, it is the communications system of telescreens, from which voices speak and spy on the citizens of Oceania, that Winston fears the most. Described as “an oblong metal plaque like a dulled mirror” from which “a fruity voice” reads facts and figures regarding Oceania’s productivity and wartime triumphs, the telescreen is at once a nod to both the television, the 1940’s newest medium, and the radio, which by 1949 had proved itself to be the medium for war news. It is the telescreen that allows the Thought Police to “plug in [Winston’s] wire whenever they wanted,” enabling the state to both hear and see his every sound and movement.3 This fictional communications medium can both transmit and receive messages: it is the two-way system envisioned by Bertolt Brecht in “The Radio as a Communications Apparatus,” but taken to a frightening extreme, where Brecht’s desire for interaction between man and machine is transformed into a world where humankind is perpetually “wired” to the government-run communications network.4 Orwell’s depiction of communications networks as weapons systems, however, is not simply fictional exaggeration. Instead, the hyper-networked society of Nineteen

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Eighty-Four is based on Orwell’s own experiences as a wartime broadcaster for the BBC and reflects the darker-side of the British government’s perception of radio as the ultimate “powerful weapon.” With the outbreak of war in 1939, the BBC, along with the British population and infrastructure, went to war. Various networks, including martial, political, industrial, and mass media, were employed to work in conjunction in order to combat the growing fascist power in Europe. It was hoped that this increased connectivity would propel the British to victory in not only military scrimmages, but industrial productivity and the propaganda war as well. The militarization of the BBC provides a specifically modernist instance of the correspondence between medium and weapon, a connection that has emerged in current media theory by critics such as Friedrich Kittler and more recently by Alexander Galloway and Eugene Thacker, who observe “Connectivity is a threat. The network is a weapons system.”5 It was expected that the BBC and its “unseen echo” would prove an especially dangerous weapons system due to its invisibility and extensive reach.6 This expectation, however, fell short. Yet while the BBC and British government’s faith in wartime radio’s ubiquity was ultimately misplaced, its understanding of the power of networks was not. In its attempt to combat Axis radio propaganda abroad, the BBC employed a number of well-known authors to deliver international radio broadcasts, and thereby engendered the creation of new networks among previously disconnected modern writers.7 Orwell’s work with the BBC’s Indian Section offers a concrete example of wartime radio’s network-creating potential and challenges his own presentation of communications media as weapons in Nineteen Eighty-Four. During his tenure at the BBC, Orwell moved within a variety of contradictory but interconnected networks, including on the one hand the imperial demands that came with broadcasting to India and the governmental bureaucracy that came with the war, and on the other his association with socialism and Britain’s literary community. These various networks influenced Orwell’s broadcasts to India, which were meant to combat concurrent Axis transmissions and the growing Indian nationalist movement, what Galloway and Thacker term “symmetrical” and “asymmetrical” conflicts.8 But the BBC’s faith in the combative and destructive power of radio networks was misguided. Instead, wartime radio generated new connections, not only

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among listeners, but among broadcasters as well. Thus the BBC’s use of a network (radio) to combat other networks (Axis and nationalist) ultimately facilitated the formation of an unlikely new transnational network, as the BBC, and more specifically the Indian Section with its mixture of British, American, and South Asian writers and intellectuals, became a cosmopolitan site. The formation of transnational networks in an era of extreme nationalism asks us to rethink our perception of late modernism, in particular British late modernism of the 1930s and 1940s, as increasingly insular. This is an image Jed Esty proposes in A Shrinking Island, in which he writes of an artistic inward turn to the “nationalism of shared experiences” as a response to the political nationalism of the “imperial mission.”9 Instead, media, and specifically the radio, with its instantaneous and worldwide connection, created greater opportunity for communication without national(ist) borders, thereby continuing the cosmopolitan narrative of modernism.10 More than MacNeice’s broadcasts to America, Orwell’s Indian Section work proves a material instance of the extreme inter-connectedness of modernist networks made possible by media, connections that facilitated increased cosmopolitan encounters among writers and intellectuals in war-torn Europe.11 For a little over two years (August 18, 1941 to November 24, 1943), Orwell worked for the BBC, first as a Talks Assistant for the Empire Service, then later, in the newly re-casted Overseas Service, as a Talks Producer for the Eastern Service’s Indian Section. Working in London under Z. A. Bokhari, Orwell’s primary task was to write, produce, and at times even deliver educational, cultural, and political broadcasts to an educated and English-speaking Indian audience. The goal of these broadcasts was to keep India, the jewel in the British crown, loyal during World War II, a task that was becoming increasingly difficult with rising anti-British sentiment and a growing Indian nationalist movement led by Jawaharlal Nehru and Mahatma Gandhi.12 Orwell, along with like-minded broadcasters, thought that if the British war effort could gain the support of the intellectual Indian community, then the nationalist tide could be abated, the result being both an avoidance of civil unrest in India and a continued supply of troops and other resources necessary for war. Orwell’s main target among Indian intellectuals was university students. Broadcasts, especially those of a literary nature, were selected based on required reading for examinations in English literature.

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However, as I show, these broadcasts largely failed to achieve the BBC’s, and indeed Orwell’s, goals.13 Like MacNeice, Orwell had a complex relationship with propaganda and the British Empire that is often oversimplified when scholars look only to his later writings such as Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four. In his work for the BBC’s Indian Section, Orwell found himself weaving fictions about Britain’s cultural cohesiveness, like Sayers, and presenting mixed propaganda messages through literature, like MacNeice. But while Sayers had only to convince a national audience and MacNeice an Allied one, both of which were already predisposed toward Britain over Nazi Germany, Orwell was given the task of promoting a new kind of non-imperial Britishness to an Indian audience far less sympathetic to Britain’s current crisis. In this chapter, I explore Orwell’s literary broadcasts for the Indian Section, namely an experimental on-air magazine called Voice, and complicate Galloway and Thacker’s proposition that “Connectivity is [always] a threat,” a proposition that Orwell anticipates in Nineteen Eighty-Four. I show how Orwell’s radio magazine enabled him to make new transnational connections both with listeners in India and authors in the broadcast station while simultaneously combating Axis propaganda. This paradox of aural media networks as concurrent constructors and destructors also extends to the broadcasts themselves. Written and spoken as a collaborative effort between primarily British and South Asian writers, I argue that the BBC Indian Section broadcasts sent competing messages to India. On the surface, the content of these transmissions implored India to postpone revolution. But by sharing the microphone with his South Asian colleagues, Orwell’s Voice also sent a powerful message of equality, and at times even revolt, to his student listeners. Before turning to Voice, however, I will quickly trace Orwell’s ambivalence prior to World War II toward propaganda, radio, and Indian independence, as his vacillating opinions on such pivotal subjects help explain the contradictions in his broadcasts as well as his contentious interactions with the BBC.

Orwell’s ambivalence Although he is now known for his dystopic descriptions of propaganda in Nineteen Eighty-Four, before World War II, Orwell’s opinions were less fixed.

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Prior to the Battle of Britain in the summer of 1940, Orwell often matched outright criticism of propaganda with the acknowledgment that it is, at times, a necessary and unavoidable evil. Both of these opinions are front and center in his 1938 novel Homage to Catalonia, which recounts the author’s stint as a POUM soldier in Spain during the Spanish Civil War. One of the central themes of Homage is Orwell’s disdain for journalistic propaganda, which he describes as “One of the most horrible features of war,” not least because “all the screaming and lies and hatred, comes invariably from people who are not fighting.”14 But as in Nineteen Eighty-Four, it is not propaganda at the center of his criticism in Homage, so much as the uses to which it is put by journalists and the government, uses which include the falsification of battle results. Therefore, when Orwell writes in Homage that soldiers’ dissemination of propaganda by shouting across No Man’s Land “was a legitimate manoeuvre,” he is not contradicting himself, but rather distinguishing between types of propaganda: On the Government side, in the party militias, the shouting of propaganda to undermine the enemy morale had been developed into a regular technique. […] Generally they shouted a set-piece, full of revolutionary sentiments which explained to the Fascist soldiers that they were merely the hirelings of international capitalism, that they were fighting against their own class, etc., etc., and urged them to come over to our side.15

Orwell admits to being “scandalized” by this process of conversion through words rather than guns, but his acceptance of this class-consciousness propaganda suggests that by the late 1930s Orwell draws a distinction between propaganda as lies and propaganda as information. Despite his largely negative depiction of propaganda in Homage, Orwell acknowledges its place within a writer’s career. In an essay on Charles Dickens, whose focus on themes of social injustice he admired, Orwell notes that “every writer, especially every novelist, has a ‘message’, whether he admits it or not, and the minutest details of his work are influenced by it. All art is propaganda. […] On the other hand, not all propaganda is art.”16 This comment on Dickens explains why Orwell chose to write literary and cultural broadcasts for the BBC’s Indian Section instead of participating in more direct forms of propaganda being broadcast to Europe. But the irony of working at the BBC did not

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escape Orwell. In an entry of his wartime diary, he mentions the discrepancy between his opinions in Homage and his current work: “Here I am in the BBC, less than five years after writing that. I suppose sooner or later we all write our own epitaphs.”17 Yet when looking at his earlier novels, it becomes apparent that Orwell largely exaggerated this discrepancy. In the anti-Fascist/ anti-Communist Homage, the anti-capitalist The Road to Wigan Pier, and the anti-Imperialist Burmese Days, Orwell argues from and for a democratic– socialist position. Thus, despite Orwell’s ambivalence toward propaganda prior to the Second World War, he actually “devoted more attention to propaganda than any British writer of his generation,”18 this being true both of his wartime radio work and his earlier writings. Orwell’s frequent criticism of radio also makes his choice to work for the BBC a surprising one. In The Road to Wigan Pier, he bemoans the influx of radios among the working class, claiming that they anesthetized the population: “Of course the post-war development of cheap luxuries has been a very fortunate thing for our rulers. It is quite likely that fish and chips, art-silk stockings, tinned salmon, cut-price chocolate (five two-ounce bars for sixpence), the movies, the radio, strong tea and the Football Pools have between them averted revolution.”19 Rather than see the democratic and educational potential in broadcasting like Brecht and MacNeice, Orwell believed the radio was a tool of the ruling class meant to distract workers from larger social and political concerns, thereby avoiding a socialist uprising. The BBC broadcasting voice, which Orwell referred to as “plummy,” also failed to escape criticism, as is evident in his wartime diary where he hopefully writes that the removal of this standard BBC accent from the air would be a sign that revolution was imminent.20 Orwell’s disdain for radio as a revolutionary sedative was, in fact, in line with his larger complaint against modern technology: “In a healthy world there would be no demand for tinned foods, aspirins, gramophones, gaspipe chairs, machine guns, daily newspapers, telephones, motor-cars, etc., etc.”21 For Orwell, the radio, like other modern conveniences, represented the evils of an increasingly capitalist Britain and, as seen in his review of Bertrand Russell’s Power: A New Social Analysis, caused Orwell some concern regarding the possible totalitarian uses of radio in the future. By the early 1940s, however, Orwell begins to acknowledge radio’s positive impact on British society, although these moments are few prior to

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his employment at the BBC. While Orwell complained that the production of cheap goods, especially the radio, pacified the public, he also recognized its homogenizing impact on British culture, in particular the declining difference between the classes—a positive side effect for a democraticsocialist. As he observes in The Lion and the Unicorn, “to an increasing extent the rich and the poor read the same books, and they also see the same films and listen to the same radio programmes.”22 Orwell also remarks on the relative truthfulness of broadcasting in a “London Letter” for the Partisan Review dated April 15, 1941, only a few months before he began working at the BBC. He notes that the availability of international broadcasting and listening in has made overt lying more difficult. Of the BBC in particular, he offers a tempered compliment, but a compliment nonetheless: “I believe that the B.B.C., in spite of the stupidity of its foreign propaganda and the unbearable voices of its announcers, is very truthful. It is generally regarded here as more reliable than the press.”23 Most noteworthy here is Orwell’s separating of the BBC from other journalistic pursuits, thus setting the stage for his decision to write for radio rather than another news medium. When it comes to the British Empire, however, Orwell’s position is even more difficult to pinpoint. Born in Northern India, Orwell felt a natural bond with the subcontinent, and while his service in the Indian Imperial Police in Burma from 1922 to 1927 deepened this connection, it also gave him first-hand knowledge of the racism and classism of British imperialism. This experience informed two short stories, “A Hanging” and “Shooting an Elephant,” and a novel, Burmese Days, which was banned in India for its seditious image of British imperialism. All of these works center on a protagonist struggling with his position as an imperial official. In “A Hanging,” Orwell pairs the narrator’s disgust for a system that hangs with sympathy for the imperial officers who turn to gallows humor as a survival mechanism. In Burmese Days, he represents this internal conflict through Flory’s facial birthmark and fascination with Burmese culture, which “mark” Flory as the literal and figurative non-English and non-Burmese other. Yet this division is perhaps best represented in “Shooting an Elephant,” as the main character reflects on his complex position as mediator between the British Empire and Indian population:

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All I knew was that I was stuck between my hatred of the empire I served and my rage against the evil-spirited little beasts who tried to make my job impossible. With one part of my mind I thought of the British Raj as an unbreakable tyranny, as something clamped down, in saecula saeculorum, upon the will of prostrate peoples; with another part I thought that the greatest joy in the world would be to drive a bayonet into a Buddhist priest’s guts.24

Ultimately, the protagonist’s violent feeling toward both Empire and native population leaves him impotent and keeps the main character from purposely acting in any way that would ultimately serve one side or the other. Yet while Orwell’s ambivalence toward India is prevalent in his early writings, by the end of the 1930s he shifts to an unambiguous anti-imperial position and in The Road to Wigan Pier claims that India’s independence is a necessity for a socialist revolution in Britain.25 This shift, however, would be short lived. With the outbreak of World War II, Orwell’s anti-imperial stance was tested. In The Lion and the Unicorn, he sets forth his six-step plan for England’s transformation into a socialist state, a plan he believed necessary if Britain was to win the war, for only government-run manufacturing could produce the amount of war materials needed to defeat Nazi Germany. Step four of this tract concerns India’s imperial position and reads: “Immediate Dominion status for India, with power to secede when the war is over.” Despite his previous anti-imperial declaration in the late 1930s, by the early 1940s Orwell’s ambivalence had returned, but this time with a clear purpose. Orwell understood the necessary role India would play in a war against Germany as both a supplier of troops and raw materials; but he was also concerned about India’s economic and military self-sufficiency if Britain were to withdraw. As he states a few pages later: “a complete severance of the two countries would be a disaster for India no less than for England.”26 Orwell’s conflict with regard to Indian independence during the war is complex; it is, as Douglas Kerr describes, a struggle between loyalty to his home country “in a moment when its values and indeed its life were threatened by a totalitarian and militaristic Germany” and disgust for its imperial thirst, believing that Britain had “no right to cling on, as it seemed determined to do, to an Empire exploited for profit and controlled by force.”27 In 1941, Orwell’s internal struggle over Indian independence and propaganda were temporarily set aside. The historical moment and the realities of

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the war forced Orwell to make a choice, and he decided that he was “a patriot after all.”28 For Orwell, patriotism was not to be confused with nationalism, as patriotism involved loving an evolving Britain and not a stagnant idea of what Britain should be. Yet Orwell’s decision to work for the BBC was not an entirely patriotic one. Economic necessity also forced his hand. In June 1941, Orwell wrote to Dorothy Plowman about the need for more stable work and income: “One can’t write books with this nightmare going on, and though I can get plenty of journalistic and broadcasting work, it is rather a hand-to-mouth existence.”29 Working for the BBC, therefore, was, for Orwell, simultaneously a chance to aid the British war effort and one of the only means of publishing available to him. And this was true for numerous authors living in Britain during the war, including established literary giants like T.S. Eliot and E. M. Forster, up-and-coming poets such as Dylan Thomas, and writers from the Empire like Mulk Raj Anand and Una Marson. Although part of the BBC’s larger propaganda war, the creation of Voice was also envisioned as an alternative to the publishing industry. This on-air journal, therefore, became a significant, albeit short-lived means by which authors could continue their craft, collaborate with international writers, and, in the process, reach a larger audience than their written works ever had.

London calling With the December bombing of Pearl Harbor and the subsequent fall of Hong Kong, Malaya, Singapore, and finally Burma in early 1942, a Japanese advance into India appeared imminent. Rather than sit idly by, Orwell willingly chose to participate in the dissemination of British propaganda to India in order to “help hold things together against the perceived threats of Marxism, fascism, and Nazism.”30 Yet, as he does in Homage, Orwell notes a distinct difference between the “white” propaganda (or information) that he and the BBC broadcasted, which focused on maintaining morale, and the “black” propaganda (or fabrications) of the Indian nationalist Subhas Chandra Bose and the Axis powers, which directly aimed to undermine British rule in India.31 As Orwell explains in his Talking to India introduction, “there is a difference between honest and dishonest propaganda, and Bose’s speech, with its enormous

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suppressions, obviously comes under the latter heading.”32 Even the word “propaganda” was forbidden in BBC broadcasts, unless used to describe Axis practices. As John MacKenzie observes: “Continuing anxiety about the word emerged in many BBC documents and its use in broadcasting, particularly in the Second World War, was banned. No reference to ‘our propaganda’ was permitted although the word was freely used in internal documents discussing propagandist activities.”33 This pattern is present throughout Orwell’s broadcasts, especially in his newsletters, and went a long way toward branding the BBC as a trusted news source that transmits trusted “information” rather than distasteful “propaganda.”34 Yet this “information,” as the BBC liked to brand its news and cultural programming, was carefully crafted, as Orwell well understood. He knew his work was to package and disseminate propaganda in the hope of keeping the Indian students from revolt. Part of what made the BBC such a propaganda powerhouse was that the organization was technically not a branch of the government. As a publicly funded enterprise, the BBC had risen to fame for its objectivity. Thus, even though the BBC cooperated with the government during wartime and found itself subject to guidelines set by the MOI, it largely maintained its prior reputation. Under the MOI, a Monitoring Service was created, which gathered, transcribed, and even translated information obtained from other radio broadcasts around the world.35 It was this vast amount of material that Orwell synthesized in order to create his weekly newsletters. These broadcasts, along with his cultural and literary scripts, were carefully censored in a two-fold process. As Kerr explains, “every broadcast script was vetted in advance, twice, once for Policy and once for Security. Improvisation on air was not allowed.” In fact, a switch censor monitored all broadcasts and shut the transmission off when speakers veered from the script.36 Even the broadcasts that were meant to sound like discussions were carefully scripted, vetted, and monitored. This censorship policy proved at times to be both an artistic and political challenge for Orwell, who intended to maintain his largely pro-India stance. Orwell’s cultural and, in particular, literary broadcasts, however, managed to maintain his interest in radio work during his toughest political moments at the BBC.37 He believed, as did the BBC, that political propaganda (direct propaganda) was powerless, or in the case of the BBC, distasteful. Orwell

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thought cultural broadcasts would be more effective.38 While the effectiveness of Orwell’s cultural broadcasts is now in doubt, for reasons I discuss below, what is significant is Orwell’s belief in their value for the war effort. In a July 1943 letter to Alex Comfort, Orwell confidently writes about the importance of cultural work on the air: “It is tremendously important from several points of view to try to promote decent cultural relations between Europe and Asia. Nine tenths of what one does in this direction is simply wasted labour, but now and again a pamphlet or a broadcast or something gets to the person it is intended for, and this does more good than fifty speeches by politicians.” Although aware that the odds of his work reaching its target were slim, Orwell still deemed cultural broadcasting worthwhile, even in his private letters to Comfort, a man openly critical of the BBC and its propaganda. Yet, lest his comments be confused for wholeheartedly supporting the BBC, Orwell includes this parting quip: “God knows I have the best means of judging what a mixture of whoreshop and lunatic asylum it is for the most part.”39 It seems that even while under contract at the BBC, Orwell remained highly critical of the broadcast corporation. Orwell certainly had reason to defend his radio work and that of his many colleagues and contributors, including Anglo-American authors Forster, Eliot, Thomas, Herbert Read, Stevie Smith, Stephen Spender, and Edmund Blunden, as well as left-wing South Asian intellectuals and writers, such as Anand, Venu Chitale, Narayana Menon, and M. J. Tambimuttu. Together, these writers and intellectuals broadcasted a variety of cultural material, much of which focused on literature. This included more traditional broadcasts such as talks on a writer or a literary work, radio adaptations of short stories, and more experimental programs including imagined interviews, such as Orwell’s with Jonathan Swift, as well as the serial “Story by Five Authors,” to which Orwell and Forster contributed. Yet of all Orwell’s radio broadcasts, the radio magazine Voice was the most experimental. This six-part broadcast was Orwell’s personal answer to the wartime paper shortage and expressed the best of his optimism regarding radio’s potential. Unable to publish novels himself, and aware that other novelists and poets faced similar difficulties, Orwell created an on-air literary magazine in the hopes of educating an Indian audience on British writing and customs.40 Voice was transmitted monthly with each edition focusing on a different topic, including war poetry, representations of childhood in literature, and

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famous American writers, such as Mark Twain and Archibald MacLeish.41 But of primary importance to Orwell was that his on-air magazine bring attention to contemporary poets, a point he underscores in the magazine’s very first broadcast: “[Voice] will contain prose but will make a specialty of contemporary poetry, and […] it will make particular efforts to publish the work of the younger poets who have been handicapped by the paper shortage and whose work isn’t so well known as it ought to be.”42 Orwell thought radio the perfect medium to revitalize poetry’s public perception—to take poetry from the “highbrow” to the popular. Yet he understood that popularizing poetry wouldn’t occur overnight, and saw the disjunction between broadcasting a highbrow, aesthetic form like poetry and the brutal realities of the war, noting, “this is the worst possible moment to be starting a magazine.”43 Aware that he was broadcasting to a select and educated audience, Orwell took the opportunity to read and discuss Western literary classics, such as the writings of Milton, Wordsworth, and Whitman, but he made sure to pair these writers with the work of contemporary poets like Dylan Thomas and W. H. Auden. The wide selection of British and American literature meant that the broadcasts appeared as entertainment rather than as direct propaganda. In fact, the words “propaganda” and “India” are not even used in Orwell’s October 1942 invitation to Eliot to take part in Voice 4. Instead, Orwell focuses on the purpose of this magazine as a way to showcase one’s work and as a site of cosmopolitanism. He not only refers to the various British and South Asian writers that are scheduled to partake in this broadcast, but he also emphasizes the fact that he would like to have an even larger number of Americans participating, stating “we will try to dig up some American writers if we can.”44 Despite his restraint in referring to Voice as propaganda in both the broadcasts and in his soliciting of authors, Orwell was always aware of his on-air magazine’s propaganda potential; as he later explains, Voice was “a small and remote outflanking movement in the radio war.”45 Voice, in fact, had the potential to be a powerful propaganda weapon, especially in its aim to create a community of Indian students sympathetic to the British war effort. Part of what made Voice such a potential cultural unifier was its reliance upon, and direct references to, aural images. In the first episode of Voice, Orwell repeatedly suggests that the audience visualize material objects from oral cues heard over the radio. He asks his audience

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to visualize a magazine: to imagine its cover art as “light blue or a nice light grey,” to notice the quality of the twenty pages of paper, and to look at the Table of Contents. He even directs his audience to “turn the page,” and refers to his listeners as readers.46 Orwell, here, takes advantage of the power of the “unseen image,” a contradiction in terms. Yet radio images, as philosopher Samuel Weber argues, “often [exceed] in [their] emotional intensity the visual images that [appear] in the light of day.” The paradox of the aural image that allows it to be both seen and unseen by the listener, or as Weber states, “involves both the ‘visibility of the invisible’” and “‘the invisibility of the visible,’” empowers the aural image beyond that of the ocular image.47 These unseen images stimulate the listeners’ senses, both ocular and aural, and invite audience members to participate in the radio broadcast by way of their imagination. Yet more importantly, the synchronized hearing and imagining of these images, even if the images vary slightly from one listener to another, form a connection among members of a disparate audience. When all listeners imagine turning the page at the same time, a new community or network is built, one that is even stronger (for radio listening is practically simultaneous), but perhaps more imaginary (as it is built on unseen images) than Benedict Anderson’s “imagined community,” which relies on the printed page.48 Thus the connecting capabilities of the aural image—both in the network formed between radio voice and listener, and the network forged amidst a distinct listening audience—are a powerful weapon in a war of propaganda. Orwell, however, was not primarily concerned with creating a network among his listeners. In fact, he preferred to think of his audience as isolated from one another. As he argues in “Poetry and the Microphone,” In broadcasting your audience is conjectural, but it is an audience of one. Millions may be listening, but each is listening alone, or as a member of a small group, and each has (or ought to have) the feeling that you are speaking to him individually. More than this, it is reasonable to assume that your audience is sympathetic, or at least interested, for anyone who is bored can promptly switch you off by turning a knob. But though presumably sympathetic, the audience has no power over you.49

By viewing the audience as composed of single sympathetic listeners, or at most a small group, Orwell suggests that the power in broadcasting lies

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with the speaker. As he states, even though the audience can ultimately turn off the radio, this has no impact or “power” over the broadcaster. Orwell’s individual listener is isolated and largely passive, the opposite of the radio community envisioned by Brecht in the early 1930s.50 But Orwell’s denial of a radio community’s existence and power contradicts all that he attempted to achieve by broadcasting to India. The disconnect between Orwell’s theory of an audience and his practical goals in broadcasting to the Indian intellectual community, however, can perhaps be explained by the fact that he wrote “Poetry and the Microphone” in the fall of 1943, toward the end of his radio career. Disillusioned by his time at the BBC and his inability to reach his target audience, as I discuss in the final section, Orwell may have taken comfort in the idea that one’s goal as a radio broadcaster was to reach the individual (rather than a community), thereby lessening his failure. Despite Orwell’s optimism regarding Voice, the broadcasts faced a variety of technical setbacks, not the least of them being transmission difficulties. In letters to both Vida Hope and Henry Treece, on August 11, 1942, Orwell complains that there were technical problems with the broadcast, that it was, in Orwell’s words, “a complete muck-up” which “consist[ed] largely of scratching noises and so forth.”51 But this technical difficulty was nothing new to Orwell, who earlier that year commented in his war diary that there was always “a great deal of background noise which it is impossible to take out in recordings.”52 Orwell also encountered difficulty when deciding which literary pieces should be broadcast on Voice. Faced with limited broadcast time, an audience with possible language difficulties, and the restrictions of an aural medium, Orwell had to be very discerning when it came to picking which poems and passages were transmitted. These literary selections not only had to fit the theme of the monthly journal, but also had to be relatively short and, as Orwell states, “fairly easily intelligible” while maintaining highbrow appeal.53 Yet perhaps the biggest challenge Orwell faced with regard to Voice was finding the perfect combination of art and politics, which included disguising BBC propaganda and Orwell’s conflicting political opinions as entertainment. The literary focus of Voice and the transnational broadcasting panels that Orwell convened aided him in his goal to blend art, war-related propaganda, and, at times, inflammatory reflections. An example of this blending is found

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in Voice 2, which Orwell dedicated to war writing. In this second issue of Voice, broadcasted on September 8, 1942, there is considerable discussion of the World War I poets, and a debate as to whether or not war poetry, like that written during the Great War, is being produced today. This was a popular topic among modern writers who had witnessed first-hand war poetry’s boom during World War I and is even the focus of Eliot’s “Poetry and the War” broadcast only a few months earlier.54 It seems both were responding to the claim by various newspapers and the Times Literary Supplement that the present lacks war poetry. In Voice 2, Orwell provides evidence to the contrary with readings by Auden and the new apocalyptic poet G. S. Fraser, comparing them to World War I writers T. E. Lawrence and Edmund Blunden, the latter of whom partakes in this broadcast. This edition of Voice illustrates that war poetry comes in many forms, from jingoism, to pacifism, to the acceptance of war as a reality. Orwell, however, selects poems that avoid these first two extremes, and opts to broadcast writers that present war as a necessary evil. Not expecting India to be pro-war, Orwell’s goal, at minimum, was to make his audience aware that the on-going conflict was inescapable, even for the subcontinent. Thus whereas World War I, a war that left both Indians and Europeans devastated and disillusioned, is described as “meaningless,” World War II is depicted as a necessity if fascism is to be defeated.55 The selection of current poems, which includes an excerpt of Fraser’s “A Letter to Anne Ridler,” and Auden’s “September 1, 1939” (mistakenly referred to as “September 1941” throughout this broadcast), was well calculated and intended to demonstrate to Orwell’s Indian listeners that this war, unlike the last, was not being fought for imperial purposes. In fact this Voice panel, consisting of Orwell, Anand, W. M. Empson, Herbert Read, Edmund Blunden, and Godfrey Kenton, emphasizes the necessity of this war by picking out the phrase “just and necessary servitude” from the following lines of Fraser’s poem: “Let time forgive me, if I fall apart, / And fall, as many souls have fallen from grace, / Through just and necessary servitude.”56 These lines reflect Orwell’s own opinions on the war, suggesting that although fighting is at times “just” and “necessary,” it is less than an ideal solution. Thus through service to one’s country, one can “fall” from the “grace” of God, or in the case of Orwell, the grace of one’s liberal ideals. Empson describes this fall as a willingness “to cripple his own personality for the sake of a cause he believes in.”57 The

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focus on this phrase was meant to encourage Indian students to postpone independence, and thereby “cripple” their “personalities” for a greater good. But this description of war service also reflects the current situation of many Voice broadcasters, who, by writing and delivering BBC propaganda, sacrificed their personal and political beliefs. While the Voice 2 broadcast appears to tow the BBC propaganda line, especially with its focus on war poetry, Orwell, who is largely credited for the script, includes subtle hints of sympathy for Indian nationalism. Take, for example, Anand’s remark that “there is such a thing as recognising that war may be necessary, just as a surgical operation may be necessary. Even an operation which may leave you mutilated for life.”58 This seemingly innocuous comment could be interpreted as a call for an immediate Indian revolution, especially when Anand, a committed Indian nationalist, delivers the line. The possibility of a pro-nationalist interpretation on the part of the audience seems even more likely when one considers Orwell’s follow-up: “but there can be actual enthusiasm for war when it’s for some cause such as national liberation.”59 This remark, seemingly about the French freedom movement in Vichy France, would easily have been interpreted by Orwell’s audience as supportive of Indian resistance; this being true not only because of Orwell’s pro-India reputation, but also because of the revolutionary climate which existed in India at the time of the broadcast. Even the last poem selected, Lord Byron’s “The Isles of Greece,” a poem about Greek independence, can be interpreted as emphasizing Indian independence, especially as Anand says of the selection that the poem “comes very near home nowadays.”60 Although this poem ends the broadcast and remains undiscussed, leaving the listeners to discern its meaning, Orwell understood the power of his selection as propaganda and as implying Indian freedom. Reviewing a book on Byron in 1932, Orwell states that Byron’s “The Isles of Greece” is “almost the only good English patriotic poem, though the patria in the case happens not to be England.”61 Thus, while the patriotism of the Byron poem satisfies the BBC censors, it also subtly supports an Indian revolution. The complex mixture of art and politics present in just one broadcast of Voice illustrates the political punch these literary broadcasts could pack and prove an example of Gayatri Spivak’s claim that literature makes excellent propaganda because it “buys your assent in an almost clandestine way.”62 Voice 2 highlights Orwell’s ability

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to include both BBC propaganda and his own political opinions within one broadcast while simultaneously meeting the BBC’s demand that broadcasted material sound like “information.” Ultimately, the BBC hoped that Voice, and literary and cultural broadcasts like it, would create a link between East and West that consisted of an Eastern understanding and sympathy for Britain’s current plight. These cultural pieces, often broadcasted on a program entitled Through Eastern Eyes, were, like Voice, penned by Orwell, but spoken by an Indian colleague. Talks such as “Money and Guns” and “British Rations and the Submarine War” were meant to convince an Indian audience that despite Britain’s suffering, the British people were enduring, thereby reconfirming the persisting power of both the British nationals and the Empire.63 Yet any sympathy from an Indian audience gained through these programs was, some critics argue, artificial at best, for while it was an Indian voice speaking over the air, it was an Englishman’s remembrances and impressions that were being transmitted.

Orwell loses his radio voice Addressing his Indian listeners on the future programming of Through Eastern Eyes in February 1942, Orwell states that the program’s purpose was to “interpret the West, and in particular Great Britain, to India, through the eyes of people who are more or less strangers” and, that in doing so, the BBC’s Indian Section hoped to bring “the East and the West a little nearer together.”64 Orwell’s claim that Indians were “interpreting the West […] to India,” however, needs addressing, as it was often Orwell penning these broadcasts. Thus significant questions arise regarding voice and the imperial subject, such as: through whose eyes, and indeed, whose voice, was Britain being portrayed? Is this yet another case of the colonial elite speaking for the subaltern?65 Andrew Hill also invokes Spivak’s famous question in his essay “The BBC Empire Service,” arguing that while the voice of the Indian is heard over the air, the fact that Orwell scripted the broadcast is reminiscent of a master controlling his ventriloquist puppet. According to Hill, the power of the broadcasts largely lies in Orwell’s hands: “The discourse of the master (filtered through the rather unlikely medium of Orwell) has already

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determined what the subaltern can say.”66 Yet Hill’s image of Orwell and the BBC controlling the speech of the South Asian broadcasters (like a puppeteer controlling his puppets) fails to fully articulate the complexities of Orwell’s work in the Indian Section. Although Orwell wrote a number of scripts for Through Eastern Eyes, he is not the only “master” at work; ultimately, Orwell reported to Bokhari (Indian Programme Organizer), the BBC, the MOI, and fellow contributing writers.67 While at the BBC, Orwell worked in conjunction with numerous South Asian intellectuals and authors, some who, like Bokhari, were more supportive than Orwell of the British Empire.68 Recent criticism on the Indian Section by Ruvani Ranasinha and Peter Kalliney argues that the BBC was not represented by a single voice, but by a plethora of international voices. (This is especially true once foreign language broadcasting to India begins to be phased in between 1941 and 1942, thereby making broadcasts available in Hindustani, Bengali, Marathi, and Gujarati.) Rather than viewing the BBC as the center of imperial discourse, it is more accurate to see it as the site of cosmopolitan difference and transnational contact, a place where, as Ranasinha suggests, “intellectual networks” were fostered and “diasporic Indian nationalism could be debated and critiqued.”69 The collaboration within the Indian Section of South Asian writers and intellectuals, such as Anand, a staunch anti-imperialist, and Bokhari, who would become the first general director of Radio Pakistan, with British writers like Orwell created a new network between East and West, one that was more successful than the connection Orwell hoped to foster between Indian students and the London-based BBC. The formation of this new network within the BBC challenges Hill’s image of Orwell as the puppet master of the Indian Section, pulling the strings of various South Asian speakers. As Michel Foucault observes, “networks both empower and disempower. They offer exciting new relationships and relative knowledge even as they destroy obsolescent fantasies of autonomy.”70 This is not to suggest, however, that networks are inherently democratic. The BBC certainly was not. Rather, networks have a way of subsuming an individual into a larger network. Thus when Orwell’s voice was heard, there were other voices influencing and creating a network that composes Orwell’s broadcast material. In Commonwealth of Letters, Kalliney reads this cosmopolitan BBC network

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as part of a much longer narrative of cooperation between metropolitan modernists and colonial intellectuals that begins in the 1930s as a way of extending the life of modernism through geographical expansion to the colonies. Voice is a prime example of this. And while Kalliney correctly argues that Voice, which the BBC hoped would present Indian listeners with the image of a “culturally integrated British Empire,” ultimately presented a message of imperial dissent, he does not go so far as to explore the interconnectedness of these opposing positions and how Voice in particular presents two contradictory messages simultaneously.71 A selection of the writers who helped form the cosmopolitan network within the Indian Section can be seen in the figure below. This photograph captures Voice’s mixing of the British modernist elite and South Asian intellectuals who made possible the complex messaging system than emerges in the Voice broadcast I discuss above. But with the Jamaican poet Una Marson seated in the center of the photograph and sandwiched between Eliot and Anand, clear representatives of the Indian Section’s extremes, this image also presents the BBC as a surprising site of inter-colonial collaboration. Such collaboration became a legacy of the Voice program, as Marson would go on to create the BBC’s very successful Caribbean Voices series. Of all the writers who worked for the Indian Section, Anand asserted the most influence on the Voice broadcasts. Although initially refusing Orwell’s offers of broadcasting work, Anand eventually accepted and ultimately played a significant role in the studio. This role included recommending speakers (especially South Asian), helping to arrange the programs, and participating in aired discussions.72 In fact, Anand played a crucial part from the very beginning of the Voice broadcasts, and was asked to not only speak on the first broadcast but also plan its production.73 The inclusion of Anand’s influence and voice in the Voice broadcasts makes a seemingly imperial broadcast also anti-imperial, as the combination of British and South Asian broadcasters on the air together sent a message of equality and thus the real possibility of independence to its Indian audience. Through Orwell’s collaboration with Anand, the BBC’s Indian Section, and in particular Voice, due to its panel of transnational speakers, was subtly critical of Empire despite its otherwise imperial appearance. Thus, despite Kerr’s claim that “for all its gestures towards Indian empowerment, Orwell’s propaganda does not, obviously, relax

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Figure 4.1: The BBC Indian Section December 1, 1942. Seated (L to R): Venu Chitale, M. J. Tambimuttu, T. S. Eliot, Una Marson, Mulk Raj Anand, Christopher Pemberton, and Narayana Menon. Standing: George Orwell, Nancy Barrat, and William Empson

its grip on the microphone,” Orwell’s collaborative efforts with Voice suggest instead that the Indian Section complicated the center/periphery binary and exposed a mutually influential environment within imperial London.74 The figurative power of Orwell’s voice—in reality his radio voice was considered weak—is muffled by the influx of other voices fighting to be heard. And this is true both of the challenge Orwell faced inside the BBC, as well his challenge to out-broadcast Axis radio propaganda to India. Orwell, however, always knew that his audience in India would be small. Writing to George Woodcock on December 2, 1942, he states: I would be surprised if it is listened-in to by 500 people. In any case there is no question of getting to the Indian masses with any sort of b’cast, because they don’t possess radios, certainly not shortwave sets. In our outfit we are really only b’casting for the students, who, however, won’t listen to anything except news & perhaps music while the political situation is what it is.75

When Lawrence Brander issued his report in January 1943 (known now as the

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Brander Report) on the effectiveness of BBC broadcasting to India, Orwell’s worst fears with regard to his audience were realized. The Indian Section was reaching an even smaller audience than anticipated, largely due to the preference among Indian listeners for the lively broadcasts from Germany and Japan. Thus, despite their efforts to disguise British propaganda as entertainment, Orwell and the BBC were losing the propaganda war to the Axis powers. While Brander offers suggestions for better programming, the real issue the BBC faced was an incomplete radio infrastructure in India and an immense lack of, and access to, radio sets for such a large population.76 This report certainly contributed to Orwell’s disillusionment with his war work, but was not solely responsible for his departure from the BBC, as he continued his tenure there for another ten months after the report was issued, a considerable amount of time for someone who only worked at the BBC for two years. Instead, Orwell’s most vocalized complaint against the BBC was its lack of organization. As Orwell writes in his wartime diary, BBC policy was “ill-defined” and “disorganized,” making it impossible to put anything but “sheer rubbish on the air.”77 With its lack of infrastructure and organization, Brander was correct to report that “the BBC has not been equipped to fight in this battle.”78 Yet Orwell’s reasons for leaving the BBC are due to more than an unorganized institution and a small listening audience. Despite the inordinate amount of critical attention paid to the phrase “wasting my own time,” which Orwell gave as his reason for his resignation in a letter to L. F. RushbrookWilliams on September 24, 1943, it seems that a more likely reason for Orwell’s retirement from radio work stems from his increasingly failing health and a need to return to novel writing while still able. In a private letter to Philip Rahv in October 1943, Orwell claims that becoming editor of the Tribune would leave him “some time to do a little of my own work as well, which the BBC doesn’t.”79 This work included Animal Farm, a story Orwell had been mulling over throughout his tenure at the BBC. His declining health, paired with his failure to connect with an Indian audience, as specified in the Brander Report, caused Orwell to sever his ties with the Indian Section and leave the BBC in November 1943. Orwell’s departure from the Indian Section, however, did not completely expel him from the newly created networks. For starters, Orwell continued to broadcast for the BBC: in June 1944 Orwell gave a talk entitled “Political

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Theories and European Literature” for the Latin-American Service; in 1946 he wrote The Voyage of the “Beagle” and an adaptation of “Little Red Riding Hood” for the Home Service; in January 1947 he created a radio version of Animal Farm. Moreover, he maintained interest in India and Indian writers, reviewing Anand’s Coolie and The Sword and the Sickle and at times corresponding with Bokhari. Unfortunately, more extensive knowledge of Orwell’s continued contact with Voice writers is, as Kristin Bluemel notes, difficult to discern. BBC contract records, diary entries, and biographies can only tell a partial story, and in the case of Orwell, information on his continued interaction with his Indian Section colleagues is scarce. The same is true for Anand, who interestingly wrote about his Bloomsbury contacts, but not those from the BBC.80 Likewise, Orwell’s later fiction, namely Nineteen Eighty-Four, which suggests that Orwell reflected on his time at the BBC with painful remembrances, fails to tell the whole story. While the BBC’s censorship policies and use of propaganda in various forms certainly affected Orwell’s creative broadcasting output, upon leaving the BBC Orwell also expresses a new level of faith in radio’s future as a literary powerhouse. As shown through his broadcasting of Voice, Orwell hoped that radio would be the medium by which poetry was reunited with a larger listening population, and that cultural and literary programming would replace the broadcasting of mindless propaganda by the likes of Goebbels.81 Thus, in “Poetry and the Microphone” he claims: I have suggested the radio as a more hopeful medium, and I have pointed out its technical advantages, particularly from the point of view of the poet. The reason why such a suggestion sounds hopeless at first hearing is that few people are able to imagine the radio being used for the dissemination of anything except tripe. People listen to the stuff that does actually dribble from the loudspeakers of the world, and conclude that it is for that and nothing else that the wireless exists. Indeed the very word “wireless” calls up a picture either of roaring dictators or of genteel throaty voices announcing that three of our aircraft have failed to return.82

Orwell wanted creative thinkers and writers to challenge the uses to which radio was put during the war. This includes, in part, his own participation in wartime broadcasting. However, through his cultural and literary experiments on air, Orwell was, even while at the BBC, suggesting a future path for radio,

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a path of education and integrity, rather than explicit propaganda for solely political ends. In the process of blending propaganda and literature for the BBC, Orwell also participated in a number of new modernist networks, which are overlooked in the current conversations about late-modernism’s insular turn. The unlikely collaboration of the political Orwell with Anand (an Indian nationalist), Forster (an elderly-statesman of Bloomsbury), and Eliot (an Anglican convert), among others, suggests the seductive power of the British war-effort’s fight against fascism. Multi-voiced broadcasts like Voice, which invited a variety of authors to speak, encouraged new connections between writers, some of which were transnational and multi-ethnic. Thus, whereas the BBC ultimately failed to create an effective network between themselves and India, the Indian Section, a small cosmopolitan site in a historic British institution, certainly succeeded. Regardless of whether a connection failed or succeeded, however, the attempt to create transnational or cosmopolitan networks complicates the perception of communications media as a destructive weapons system. While the BBC certainly used the radio as a weapon in its propaganda war, the Voice broadcasts show that this weapon could be severely undermined depending on who had access to the microphone. But Orwell was not the only writer to create new authorial networks via wartime radio. As I discuss in the next chapter, networks facilitated by broadcasting were prominent within the United States too and were meant to shape the American public’s outlook with regard to the war. This, according to MacLeish in a speech given on March 19, 1942, was the true wartime struggle: “The principal battle ground of this war is not the South Pacific. It is not the Middle East. It is not England or Norway, or the Russian steppes. It is American opinion.”83 But these networks, much like Orwell’s broadcasts to India, faced technical challenges that prohibited complete listener comprehension, thereby undercutting the very reasons famous American poets took to the airwaves.

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5

Clogged Communication What we’ve got here is failure to communicate. Cool Hand Luke1

In the conclusion of “Bartleby,” Herman Melville’s tale of a lethargic and frustratingly uncommunicative scrivener, we learn that the title character used to work in the Dead Letter Office in Washington, DC. This unexpected snippet on Bartleby’s past employment, which is thematically and structurally divorced from the preceding story, is, however, symbolic of Bartleby’s narrative existence. He, like the letters that arrive at the Dead Letter Office, fails to communicate, and, as Welles’ The War of the Worlds shows, when communication ceases, death shortly follows. Even the narrator comments on the eerie connection between failed communication and dying when he exclaims: “Dead letters! does it not sound like dead men?”2 This is certainly true for Bartleby, whose increasingly curt replies to the narrator eventually become total silence. As a result, Bartleby’s corporality, which is marked by his, albeit sparing, use of voice, is no longer certain, and the narrator decides that the term “ghost” more aptly applies to Bartleby than does “man.”3 Of course, Bartleby’s haunting of the narrator begins before the scrivener’s untimely demise. Like the letters he once sorted through, which were the lingering, disembodied voices of their writers, Bartleby is frequently only a voice. Even the spatial plan of the law office in which he works isolates Bartleby so that only auditory responses can be heard. As the narrator states: “I procured a high green folding screen, which might entirely isolate Bartleby from my sight, though not remove him from my voice. And thus, in a manner, privacy and society were conjoined.” This screen, however, works both ways, and more often acts as a barrier that keeps the narrator from seeing Bartleby respond to his requests with “I would prefer not to.”4

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Although Melville’s story pre-dates the invention of wireless by almost half a century, the portrayal of Bartleby as an acousmatic, or disembodied, voice that “conjoins” both the public and private worlds of the law office presents the reader with an auditory network that seems to anticipate the technological innovation to come. Not to mention that the green screen dividing Bartleby from the working world could be seen as a prototype for the curtain that isolates the Wizard from the rest of Oz (Chapter 1). Thus, with “Bartleby,” Melville portrays two different networks (one written and one auditory) that are perpetually breaking down. The promise of communication implied by a letter or a radio transmission is broken when the letter fails to reach its destination or when no one hears (or in the case of Bartleby, when the hearer ignores) the broadcast. However, this interruption or “clogging” of communications networks is, according to Bernhard Siegert, the historic norm: Noise and wrangling on all channels: that was the situation to begin with. Language was a pipeline that constantly was clogged with the ambiguities of rhetoric. Philosophers were its plumbers. Thus began an epoch of the postal system that equated transmission channels with language, language with communication, communication with understanding, and understanding with the salvation of humanity.5

The “noise and wrangling” of which Siegert writes was all too familiar to modernist poets Archibald MacLeish and Ezra Pound, both of whom took to the airwaves during World War II. With their vastly different broadcast styles and political perspectives (MacLeish wrote verse drama and was a progressive liberal whereas Pound preferred ranting speeches to further fascism), each poet used the radio to communicate with listening Americans in order to help the public at home understand the current political climate. Both MacLeish and Pound believed that it was only through successful communication that “the salvation of humanity,” as Siegert so aptly puts it, could be achieved.6 However, these dueling radio broadcasters quickly found that clear radio communication with listeners was not easily attained. The breakdown in networks, as exemplified in Melville’s “Bartleby,” also bears on the larger communication problems confronted by literary modernists. This is hardly a surprise given that communications technology and modernism arose almost simultaneously. Modernism is known for being

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notoriously abstruse and impenetrable, and “when it deigns to communicate at all,” as Mark Goble humorously notes, it does so “with great difficulty and ambivalence.”7 This statement is especially fitting when applied to Pound. The encyclopedic allusions and challenging syntax of his poetry keep readers at bay and often hinder communication to all but the most critical and wellversed audience. High modernists such as Pound, T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, and Virginia Woolf, among others, challenge their readers not only with difficult forms, but also make the inability to communicate the subject of their work. Take, for example, the awkward silences between the domineering academic Mr. Ramsay and the artistic Lily Bart in To the Lighthouse, or the cacophonous but infertile conversations in The Waste Land. But when modernists chose to take to the airwaves during World War II, they soon found that the complexities of their forms and references were not the only blockage in the network. Taking Melville’s presentation of failed aural and written networks as my inspiration, in this chapter I argue, through the unorthodox pairing of MacLeish and Pound, that each author’s inability to send completely clear messages to their wartime radio audiences should be read as an example of the larger communication problems of modernism. I consider both the modernist form of the broadcasts—MacLeish’s verse play The Fall of the City made frequent reference to ancient American myth and Pound’s fascist radio rants have been called “the poor man’s Cantos”—and the functional obstacles that plagued 1930s and 1940s radio, such as an inattentive audience and adverse atmospheric conditions, as reasons for why these aural networks failed. Yet, while the radio networks were clogged by both human and technical malfunction, Pound’s treasonous broadcasts, which resulted in the poet’s twelve-year confinement in St. Elizabeth’s hospital, helped forge a new written network: a letter exchange between MacLeish, Eliot, Robert Frost, and Ernest Hemingway. This epistolary interchange, which spanned over a decade, included these authors’ disavowal of Pound’s broadcasts, acceptance of his incarceration for treason, and an eventual shift toward ending Pound’s sentence in a mental hospital. This new authorial channel of communication, however, was not without its own blockages. During World War II, letters underwent extreme censorship; during the subsequent Cold War, MacLeish and company had to contend with both government bureaucracy and Pound’s often unintelligible and insulting letters.

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The present chapter, then, concerns what Goble calls “relationships made possible by technology.”8 Yet it is also a chapter about the technological impediments to such relationships. This contradiction regarding the effectiveness of radio and postal networks for purposes of communication during wartime operates as a fitting analogy for the contradictions endemic to modernism. Michael North explores this contradiction in The Political Aesthetic of Yeats, Eliot, and Pound, where he defines “aesthetic modernism” as “at once part of the larger modern project of enlightenment, emancipation, and progress and a reaction against that project.”9 Thus modernism, an era known for its artists’ individual and identifiable styles, is also an art meant for, in Pound’s words, “the whole people”; it is a form of writing that is defined as free from political interest, yet both MacLeish and Pound, and numerous others, include within their work references to war and economic conditions;10 it is an art obsessed with communication, but its ability to communicate is hindered by its own esoteric style. The image that Siegert evokes of blocked transmissions and channels filled with noise and breakages, then, provides an apt metaphor for modernist writing, where the attempt to communicate with the public is often thwarted by the attempt itself. This was certainly the case for MacLeish’s and Pound’s wartime radio broadcasts, where the modernist tropes prevented complete listener comprehension and the technical malfunctions hindered clear transmission. The results were indeed examples of communication failure; but this failure was, ironically, the sign that radio and postal systems, not to mention literary modernism, were, in fact, functioning.

A hopeful transmission Unlike Pound, whose name, thanks to Hugh Kenner, has become synonymous with modernism, MacLeish’s claim to this exclusive literary club is still under some debate.11 Known for aligning himself with high modernism in his early writing career, MacLeish titled his first collection of poems Tower of Ivory, and famously states in his most anthologized poem, “Ars Poetica,” that “A poem should not mean / But be.”12 Yet in the recent Cambridge Companion to Modernist Poetry, there is only one reference to MacLeish, and this minimal citation has become the norm rather than the exception over the years, despite

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the fact that scholars of modernist studies continue to claim that the definition of modernism is expanding.13 Part of the reason MacLeish’s poetry has fallen by the critical wayside is that by the early 1930s MacLeish had begun testing the aesthetic boundaries of modernism to include liberal politics. Due to his experience chronicling the Great Depression for Fortune magazine, and then later his concern regarding the unchecked threat of fascism in Europe, MacLeish turned away from the intensely private themes of high modernism. Instead, his poetry and critical writings began grappling with the crises of the day: “the Depression, poverty, the exploitation of the land, the shrinking democratic promise, the rising tide of reaction at home, the menace of fascism abroad.”14 By 1931, MacLeish was preaching the values of “public speech” and writing for the community rather than the individual. As he writes in “Nevertheless One Debt,” “It is no longer A MAN against the stars. It is Mankind: that which has happened always to all men, not the particular incidents of particular lives.”15 For MacLeish, however, this new artistic direction was not inconsistent with modernism; on the contrary, he believed that due to the current political crises, public poetry was the next logical step for modern poetry.16 Yet, while MacLeish’s shift toward public poetry, and in particular poetry that presented a pro-democratic position, may exclude him from some of the stricter definitions of modernism, it also firmly establishes him within the American poetic tradition. Following in the canonized footsteps of Walt Whitman, who famously speaks of the individual and the democratic mass in “One’s-Self I Sing,” MacLeish frequently writes about individualism and collectivism as quintessential elements of a successful democracy, and, like Whitman, declares that only “poetry” has the power to be “the one deliverer of the people.”17 For MacLeish, there was no separation between the public and private spheres, which made his segue into radio unsurprising: the radio made it possible for MacLeish to speak to a vast audience and to each listener individually at the same time. However, such power had to be used judiciously. He was adamant that the radio, along with the newspapers and cinema, should broadcast what he termed “information” instead of giving in to the evils of propaganda as the Germans had. Like Orwell and the BBC, MacLeish believed that arming the American public with information (or white propaganda) was a much more powerful weapon: “They [Germany] will discover before

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this war is over that truth is in truth more powerful than deceit, and that with the radio, as with many other instruments whose use our enemies have perverted, those who use them for freedom and for humanity can use them more effectively than those who use them for slavery and death.”18 This faith in radio’s potential as an information network, however, was tested by MacLeish’s increasing involvement in government, in particular his time in the Office of Facts and Figures (OFF), and by his reading transcripts of Pound’s own perverted version of the “truth,” which Pound broadcasted bi-weekly over Rome Radio. Even MacLeish’s earliest radio play, The Fall of the City, first broadcast over CBS’s Workshop on April 11, 1937, was intended to both entertain and provide the American public with “information” regarding fascism’s war on democracy.19 Set in 1500s Mexico, this play (the first verse play made for U.S. radio) uses an ancient Aztec myth—that just before the Spanish conquered the city of Tenochtitlán a woman rose from her grave to warn the city of the coming conquest—as an allegory for the fall of present day Spain to Franco’s army.20 MacLeish’s joining of ancient myth with present day events is comparable to the treatment of myth in Joyce’s Ulysses, as well as Pound’s Cantos and Eliot’s The Waste Land, and aligns The Fall of the City with the high modernist tradition. Yet the play’s political warning and call for action against fascism also firmly entrenches this radio broadcast within the public poetry tradition.21 Unfortunately for MacLeish, his use of modern aesthetic techniques for political purpose did not communicate well on the air. And rather than educate the public on the dangers of the Spanish example, as he had hoped, the critical and public response to the broadcast praised MacLeish mainly for introducing a new poetic form to radio.22 The Fall of the City begins with a form of broadcasting with which the American public would have been familiar: A direct plea from the studio director, who asks the listening audience to pay close attention to the events unfolding in a distant land. Presented in real time, this play is the first of a series of invasion and air raid dramas that mimic the on-site reporting form. As is usual with this form, the broadcast is quickly turned over to an on-site reporter (played, incidentally, by Orson Welles), whose booming voice narrates the mystery and the horror as the events unfold. Part of this horror, according to Neil Verma, is exacerbated by the narrator’s unusual position as

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being simultaneously “closely miked, alone, and seem[ing] to occupy a small enclosure, one designed perhaps to be not so different in ambiance from the living rooms of his listeners” and also being part of the action of the story. As the narrator “falls into” the story’s intensifying events, so too do the listeners, which, for Verma, “puts unusual pressure on [Schiller’s] living wall.”23 This is something Welles will intensify in The War of the Worlds in the following year. Like Welles’ famous broadcast, the narrator’s report for The Fall of the City does not start with war, or at least not directly; instead, the announcer comments on the supernatural phenomenon of a woman who has returned from her grave: “Each day for three days there has come / To the door of her tomb at noon a woman buried! // The terror that stands at the shoulder of our time.”24 This “terror,” of course, refers not only to the resurrected woman, but also to the emergence of fascist regimes in Franco’s Spain and Hitler’s Germany, which MacLeish believed threatened to destroy democratic ideals and nations. Thus, within the first few moments of the play, MacLeish has presented his audience with all of his conflicting cards: this is a play that presents a narrator both inside and outside of the plot, experiments with verse over a mass-entertainment medium, and utilizes an esoteric myth to investigate present-day politics. After three days of silence, however, the resurrected woman speaks and delivers a prophecy of doom, as if someone were speaking through her: The city of masterless men Will take a master. There will be shouting then: Blood after!25

This woman, whose corporal body ceased to be days before, is a supernatural receiver bringing the unnamed city a message of war. She essentially acts as a radio, which (as previously discussed in Chapter 1) brought American listeners news of the escalating conflicts in Europe on almost a daily basis. The inclusion of a dead/mechanical woman places this radio play within the literary tradition of E. T. A. Hoffmann’s The Sandman and even G. B. Shaw’s Pygmalion; like Olimpia and Eliza Doolittle, the resurrected woman lacks agency and is spoken through. Yet in the case of The Fall of the City, the actual information or operational source is unknown—the resurrected

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woman is akin to the Wizard of Oz’s gaseous head, but in a version where the man behind the curtain is never revealed. The lack of an original information source, however, aligns the resurrected woman more firmly with radio broadcasting, where the voice of the broadcaster is separated from a body that is rarely exposed. MacLeish’s motif of a resurrected woman also highlights the parallels between spiritualism and the radio (which I discuss fully in Chapter 6), a parallel that has likewise been noted by Steven Connor, who likens the tuning of a radio to find a signal to the inability of getting a clear message through a psychic medium: You may have a very wonderful radio set and by turning to any given number on the dial, you are able to “tune in” and listen to almost anything that is being broadcast, BUT if your radio is out of good working order, or if there is too much static on the air, what you hear is disconnected and most of the time you hear imperfectly. Now that is just exactly the same operation of the psychic machinery through which the messages of our loved ones come.26

Like the voices of the dead, which often speak obscurely through a human medium to groups of rapt listeners, the voice that comes over the radio and into the homes of the attentive public is not always clear. The messages that travel through the medium, be it human or technical, are sometimes blocked by other voices interrupting the channel, or by the obscurity of the message itself. In The Fall of the City, it is the vagueness of the resurrected woman’s message that, in part, causes the city’s destruction, and like any medium, the woman is uncertain as to the meaning of her own words: “Do not ask what it means: I do not know: / Only sorrow and no hope for it.”27 But if the content of the message is unclear, as is the case with the message the resurrected woman brings, then perhaps it is the form of the message that delivers meaning. Perhaps MacLeish’s The Fall of the City can be read as an early model for McLuhan’s famous phrase “the medium is the message.” As a modernist, MacLeish gave considerable attention to his form. Pair this with McLuhan, who began his academic career as a modernist who studied and knew Pound, and this modernist-favoring interpretation of MacLeish’s radio play is a firm possibility. Within MacLeish’s play, the fictional city and the global community, which has sent radio reporters to cover the supernatural

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event, understand that the resurrected woman’s appearance is a harbinger of a coming catastrophe, just as an American public understood that the radio brings news of war. Even before the woman speaks the announcer declares (in a manner reminiscent of a Greek tragedy chorus) that change is in the air: “We have smelled the wind in the street that changes the weather. / We have seen the familiar room grow unfamiliar.” This is a city that is literally “crack[ing]” under the pressures of the time, and all this is noted before a word of the prophesy is spoken.28 Yet although these fictional listeners fail to comprehend the message of doom, it was MacLeish’s sincere hope that his radio audience would understand this play as a criticism of continued U.S. and European appeasement in the face of a new fascist threat. And while in hindsight this message should have clearly come through, the original audience largely failed to grasp the political implications of a play set in ancient Mexico. Listening to this broadcast today, it seems remarkable that the critics and public alike focused on the aesthetic form rather than the political message, as politics and warnings of war resonate throughout this production.29 Take, for example, this omen from the resurrected woman: Be warned of this conqueror! This one is dangerous! […] All taken— Every country. No men are free there.30

Yet even a current audience might be confused by this prophecy, thinking that it is written about Hitler rather than Franco. (In fact, The Fall of the City struck many as a prophetic play, as only a year later, on March 12, 1938, Austria was annexed to Nazi Germany.) Intended as an exercise in public poetry, however, the play is filled with references to the current conflict in Spain: MacLeish criticizes the U.S.’s isolationist and appeasement policies when the Orator calls for the city to refrain from taking arms and states, “Force is a greater enemy than this conqueror”; he challenges the intellectual’s disdain of politics when the Orator exclaims, “Suffer his flag and his drum! / Words…win!”; and he condemns the Catholic Church’s sympathy for the nationalists when the Priests shout, “Let the world be saved by surrendering

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the world: / Not otherwise shall it be saved.”31 Only the General implores the masses to turn and fight the invading army to ensure their continued freedom; this suggestion, however, comes too late and the town begins to panic as the invader draws near. In the final moments of the broadcast we hear the city’s quick capitulation and joyous cheers when the conqueror, dressed as a conquistador, climbs the steps of the pyramid to face his new subjects. Without saying a word, the conqueror lifts his helmet to reveal that there is no one underneath the armor. Only the announcer observes the absence of a body, as the citizens are too busy bowing to their new ruler to notice: There’s no one at all! …    No one! …     The helmet is hollow!32

If this play were purely a formal exercise, MacLeish could have easily concluded with this descending line, which mimics the fall of the city and leaves the significance of the empty helmet for the listeners to interpret. MacLeish, however, knowing the difficulties of radio listening, interprets the absent conqueror for his audience, hoping to leave them in little doubt about his own position on U.S. intervention: The people invent their oppressors: they wish to believe in   them. They wish to be free of their freedom: released from their   liberty:— The long labor of liberty ended!33

For MacLeish, fascism was the ultimate oppressor, and, like the bodiless conquistador, was an enemy that did not require a face. Although Franco and Hitler posed threats to democracy, the real threat was the people’s faith in fascist ideals—a faith that allowed them to relinquish the responsibility of making the difficult choices that freedom requires. MacLeish feared that in the Western world people would decide that fascism offered them a release from the “labor of liberty.” As The Fall of the City illustrates, MacLeish ultimately believed that the war in Europe was an attack on “the spirit of the West,” and in order to fight for this democratic spirit, he used all available channels of communication,

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including poems, essays, plays, a film, and even the U.S. government, for which he worked as the Librarian of Congress and the director of OFF.34 But only the radio offered him the unique opportunity of reaching a large audience at once and at little cost. CBS estimated that the audience for The Fall of the City reached one million listeners when the numbers from the New York and Hollywood broadcasts were combined. In October 1938 MacLeish turned once again to radio, creating his second invasion-themed play, Air Raid. Like The Fall of the City, this production combined modernist form with radio theatrics, producing a montage of vignettes similar to the “Wandering Rocks” episode of Ulysses and, for the first time, realistic sounds of an aerial attack on shrieking, unarmed women.35 By 1939, however, MacLeish was willing to try a new network and took office as the Librarian of Congress. With all of Europe now involved in full-scale war, MacLeish found himself deep within the U.S. government’s information network. And while his time as a government official was spent articulating a pro-democracy propaganda line already familiar to his radio play audience, this time he was not hoping the U.S. government would listen, but was speaking for it.36 Yet this new network did not completely remove MacLeish from the literary world; he continued to write verse drama for radio, including The States Talking (1941) for the New Company and The America Story: Ten Broadcasts (1944). But more importantly for my purposes, as the remainder of this chapter will show, MacLeish’s government work opened up a new epistolary network, which aimed to first make sense of and then deal proactively with Pound’s fascist radio broadcasts and subsequent confinement in St. Elizabeth’s hospital.

Can’t get through to you Unlike MacLeish, who sporadically wrote radio dramas between the late 1930s and mid-1940s, Pound took to the microphone (or had his broadcasts read in absentia) twice a week beginning in late 1940 and ending in July 1943.37 During these two and a half years, Pound delivered heated broadcasts that praised Mussolini and Hitler’s fascism and viciously attacked Roosevelt and progressive liberals like MacLeish. (Pound made a number of attacks on MacLeish and his poem “America was Promises,” and, on April

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23, 1942, Pound actually titled his broadcast “MacLeish” and charged the poet with working for criminals.) These talks, broadcast over Rome Radio to an American and sometimes British audience under a program titled The American Hour, were delivered in English and meant to encourage Americans to stay out of the war.38 At first, Pound’s pro-fascist and anti-Semitic rants were of little concern to the U.S. government; but, as U.S. involvement in the war escalated, and their monitoring of foreign broadcasts increased, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) began transcribing Pound’s broadcasts, and in April 1942 the Justice Department started an investigation that would eventually lead to the charge of treason. While there are no exact figures on the popularity of his broadcasts within the U.S. or Britain, it is known that Pound was successful in reaching a small part of the American public.39 However, as I discuss below, due to a variety of human, technical, and natural phenomenon, the clarity of this connection is debatable. While the use of the radio to reach a mass and potentially uneducated audience seems fitting for MacLeish, a self-proclaimed poet of the public, it was also an apt choice for Pound, a poet whose reputation has been built around the aura of high modernism and an avant-garde interest in images. With radio came the ability to collapse the distinction between time and space, an ability that modernists, and in particular Imagists and Vorticists like Pound, failed to achieve with the written word. As Daniel Tiffany argues, for Pound there was a direct correlation between his fascist radio images and his earlier interest in imagery: By “radio images” I mean images whose invisibility corresponds directly to the magical effects of transmission, translation, and exchange (which stem from the “decay” of the body). In Pound’s case, the discourse of radio images, which emerges fully only in the context of fascism, can be traced directly to his earliest speculations concerning the nature of poetic imagery.40

As I noted in Chapter 2 with reference to Sayers and her aural depictions of Christ, the radio image has the potential to be a more powerful weapon for propaganda than a strictly visual image. But the images transmitted over the air are not ideal images. Instead, the images are more akin to the living dead. Once the image is broadcast (or in the usual case with the living dead, the life-regenerating, body-degenerating virus enters the general population) the

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process of bodily decay begins. Pound’s radio images were sent across the Atlantic and into the minds of the American public, which mentally translated them in a variety of ways, thus leading to further decay. The power of even a decayed image, however, can still be substantial, as while each listener might receive a different image of a chair (or in Pound’s case fascism), the ideal message of the decayed image (that one pictures a chair and not a table, fascism and not democracy) is still getting through. Thus, Pound’s theory of radio images nicely matches MacLeish’s choice of a resurrected/living-dead medium to deliver the message of invasion in The Fall of the City. This process of image decay, which takes place during the transmission from broadcast producer to listening receiver, is also due to audience inattention. Although faithful listeners would have already been familiar with the political and economic, not to mention racist, themes of Pound’s Cantos, which permeate his already fragmented broadcasts, they would have found his transmission on February 12, 1942 particularly difficult to follow. This is because rather than merely discussing common themes of the Cantos, Pound chose to read directly from it. In a broadcast titled “Canto 46,” Pound declares that he is reading from his epic work in order to educate his American audience in “things that [they] will have to know sooner or later.”41 Of course these “things” turn out to be the classic themes of Pound’s speeches: they are pro-fascist, anti-Semitic, highly critical of Roosevelt and his fellow New Dealers, and terrified of a return to the gold standard in banking. Regardless of the content, however, the form of this broadcast suggests that, like MacLeish, Pound believed the radio could be used for educational purposes, but that a radio education required a different kind of delivery from an education in print. Thus, rather than plunge directly into a recitation of “Canto 46,” Pound begins by “feedin’ [the listeners] the footnotes first in case there is any possible word that might not be easily comprehended.”42 Pound then provides a list of words and their meanings, including The Decennio and The MacMillan Commission, a brief who’s who of names mentioned, such as John Marmaduke and Antonius Pius, and a few helpful translations of Latin and Greek phrases. Yet, unless his audience had pen and paper in hand, ready to take rapid transcription of Pound’s footnotes, it is unlikely that the average listener would have retained much from this short and pithy list. And, even if the

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retention of the average radio listener were high, and notes were not necessary, it is unlikely that, given the poetic format of the Cantos, the listener could apply his/her new knowledge to the poem quickly enough to comprehend Pound’s “educational” message. Filled with an encyclopedic knowledge of Western history that would already make complete aural comprehension near impossible, Pound intensifies the level of difficulty by jumping back and forth in time, presenting the listener with fragments, or images, of, among other things, 1800s banking, Martin Luther’s Protestant Reformation, and Roosevelt’s New Deal, which Pound considers a crime. The clearest image Pound provides for his listeners comes at the end of the broadcast. Here, Pound reflects on the current state of the American public (a thematic interest he shared with MacLeish): FIVE million youths without jobs FOUR million adult illiterates 15 million “vocational misfits”, that is with small chance for jobs NINE million persons annual, injured in preventable industrial accidents.43

Pound’s use of paralleled numbers mixed with well-known images of the American Depression is the most powerful moment of this broadcast, a moment that could have potentially reached the “youth” and “adult illiterates” of which Pound speaks. Compared to MacLeish’s verse poetry, which was enhanced by plot, simple language, and sound effects, however, Pound’s “Canto 46” would have been largely incomprehensible to a listening audience. And Pound, it seems, was aware of this problem. Throughout his radio broadcasts, he makes several allusions to the fact that his own language is clogging the communications channel, noting, in particular, that his disorganization and incoherence are the main blockages. As he states in a February 1943 broadcast: “Sometimes I try to tell you too much. I suspect I talk in a what-is-called incoherent manner: ’cause I can’t (and I reckon nobody could) tell where to begin.”44 Even here, as he ponders his own “incoherent” delivery, Pound supplies his listeners with excessive information. The fragmented structure of this complaint, which uses contracted forms of speech, mirrors Pound’s main communication problems: he both tries to say “too much” and paradoxically also doesn’t know where to begin. Thus, his difficulty arises from both too much verbiage and not enough.

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The result is that a few lines later he begins “wonderin’ if anybody listened to what [he] said on Rome Radio.”45 But Pound is also aware that the difficulty in radio communication is not only a result of his incoherent language and esoteric allusions; it is also due to the electronic medium itself. So much so, in fact, that he declares that were heaven to speak into the microphone, complete listener comprehension would still be impossible: “Had I the tongue of men and angels I should be unable to make sure that even the most faithful listeners would be able to hear and grasp the whole of a series of my talks.” “That,” he says, “is the disadvantage of the radio form.”46 What “that” is, is not immediately discernable from the previous sentence. But as he continues to talk about the eventual printing of these broadcasts, it becomes clear that for Pound the disadvantage of radio broadcasting is the immediacy of the medium. There is no pause, no ability to repeat or revisit a previous page. To return to “Canto 46,” then, the difficulty with this broadcast is not only the fragmented and compacted style, but also the inability of the listener to spend time with the material—to study the footnotes and reflect on their meaning for the text. Thus, the problem is one of decay, where the listener fails to remember the transmitted images. But there were external blockages in this network as well. Even though Pound had determined a specific order for the broadcasts, when it came to recorded speeches, the Italian officials did not always follow Pound’s plan. This meant that news items and references were not always as topical as they should have been.47 Thus, when his broadcasts were delivered to listeners out of sequence, another clog was added to an already noisy communications channel. U.S. officials, namely the FCC, also had difficulty with the broadcasts for a variety of reasons, disorder being only one of them. As Leonard Doob writes, “There were egregious errors and omissions in these FCC transcripts because recording equipment in those days was crude, because atmospheric conditions interfered with the monitoring, and because, I assume, the transcribers sometimes did not recognize Pound’s references.”48 Like a dead letter that has failed to reach its receiver, the interference in Pound’s broadcasts—his incoherence, the listener’s inability to recognize references, disordered broadcasts, rudimentary technology, and natural interruptions— meant that few, if any, listeners would have received a completely clear transmission. These broadcasts were largely sent into the air and remained

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in a state of unheard or misunderstood limbo. In fact, it was so difficult to find people who could actually prove they had heard and understood Pound’s broadcasts that the U.S. government had great difficulty proving Pound’s sedition.49 The paradox that Pound attempted to communicate with the American public using two mediums (language and radio) but failed with both to the point where the Justice Department feared it might not have a case for treason, speaks to the larger paradox within modernism, where high modernist writers bemoaned the current state of interpersonal communication, but chose forms which inhibited their message from reaching a large audience. But the connection between modernist aesthetics and communications media should not surprise us, given that Pound’s work with literature and radio was a tremendous influence on both McLuhan (a central figure in media theory) and Kenner (one of the most famous modernist scholars). In a letter to Pound McLuhan comments upon the technological influence in the Cantos, asking if the montage, imagery, and flashbacks of the poems were a print translation of the cinematograph’s capabilities.50 The magical and tribal elements in Pound’s poetry also fascinated both critics and exercised an important influence on McLuhan’s work. Whereas Kenner remarks on the “magical power” of Pound’s poetry, McLuhan incorporates Pound’s tribal understanding of the radio in his canonical studies, Understanding Media and The Gutenberg Galaxy.51 Thus, where Pound spoke of radio as a collective medium that “produced a new outbreak of ancient speculations,” McLuhan writes that radio, as “a profound, archaic force, a time bond with the most ancient past and long-forgotten experience,” creates a world “village.”52 Even Walter Ong’s description of radio as “secondary orality”—a throwback to pre-literacy—can be traced to the modernism and media studies conduit, as Ong, too, studied under McLuhan. As a result, our conflicting understanding of radio as both a community builder and a medium for individual free speech stems from Pound’s own conflicting views of the medium. And it is this conflict between individualism and collectivism that is also at the heart of modernism. In fact, it was Pound’s continued belief in individual rights, even when using a communal medium, that made his treason charge and confinement in St. Elizabeth’s unsettling to fellow writers. Although Pound spoke of reaching an American public in the hopes of persuading them into inaction with regard

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to the war, he also repeatedly declared that he was exercising his right to free speech. As he writes in a letter to his broadcast sponsor Adriano Ungaro, “Even if America declares war on the Axis, I see no reason (from my point of view) why I should not continue to speak in my own name, so long as I say nothing that can in any way prejudice the results of American military or naval (or navel) action, the armed forces of the U.S.A. or the welfare of my native country.”53 While I do not wish to enter into a debate about whether or not Pound should have been tried for treason, it is important to note that Pound fervently believed that he was speaking as an American. This belief aligns the high-modernist poet with MacLeish in a striking new way. Like MacLeish, Pound thought that his broadcasts could educate the public; he wanted to “persuade [listeners] to direct a little serious attention to a few serious subjects.”54 And while the subject of Pound’s broadcasts is on the opposite end of the political spectrum from MacLeish’s pro-democracy verse plays, the fact that Pound believed his speeches to be of educational value also marks him as a “public poet.” The Justice Department, however, did not recognize Pound’s broadcasts as protected under the First Amendment, and in November 1945 the official indictment was handed down. Pound was accused of treason, and, in particular, of “giving to the said enemies of the United States aid and comfort within the United States and elsewhere.”55 Although it is uncertain whether his broadcasts had a following within the U.S., and it is even more uncertain if any potential listeners would have understood Pound’s message if the transmissions were clear, the intent to broadcast fascist propaganda was enough for the U.S. government to press criminal charges. But while Pound’s radio network was repeatedly clogged, his broadcasts did lead to the formation of a new literary network. In the wake of his legal troubles, Pound sought the opinion of one writer in particular—MacLeish, the man he had eviscerated in his radio broadcasts. Like Pound, MacLeish was a poet and had written for radio; but MacLeish was also a former lawyer and extremely well connected within the U.S. government. Thus, while the two blocked radio networks of MacLeish and Pound came to their end in the mid-1940s, they ultimately led to the creation of an epistolary network, of which MacLeish was the hub. But, as I discuss in the next section, the letter writing campaign of MacLeish and Pound, like their radio communications, also had to contend with human and bureaucratic clogs.

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Please Mr. Postman As early as October 1941, before the U.S. had officially declared entry into the war, Pound commented on air about the clogged nature of the postal networks: “And in the mornings I write letters to and read letters from the most intelligent of my contemporaries, and Mr. Churchill and the brute Rosefield, and their kike postal spies and obstructors, kikarian and/or others annoy me by cuttin’ off my normal mental intercourse with my colleagues.”56 These comments, filled with the anti-Semitism and Roosevelt-bashing that was common in Pound’s broadcasts, sound like the ravings of a madman. He is suggesting that there is an intentional blockage in the postal system targeting his continued intellectual pursuits. And, for Pound, this blockage only worsened as the war progressed. By July 1943, Pound complained of the absence of letters from fellow writers Eliot and e.e. cummings, stating, “if they write anything, we got to wait for it.”57 Yet what sounds like a paranoid suspicion that his letters are being intercepted was not far from the truth. Even Hemingway remarks in a letter to MacLeish on June 30, 1943 that their correspondence is being intercepted: “I suppose anything written to you gets into the intercepts the reading of which have probably delayed our wa[r] effort as many hours as formerly was taken up b[y] peeping toms.”58 The irony that Hemingway’s letter exposes—that the “intercept” or clog in the communication network actually makes the U.S. less safe by taking valuable hours away from real war work, when the interception is supposed to make the nation more safe—is the same paradox facing radio broadcasting. Like the radio, which was meant (under wartime conditions) to provide listeners with only government-sanctioned information (a problem faced by each of the writers in this book), epistolary networks meant to facilitate communication also experienced blockages due to extreme wartime censorship. But not all epistolary clogs were caused by government interference. In the case of the letter exchange between MacLeish, Hemingway, Eliot, and Frost, which was a direct result of Pound’s radio broadcasts and emerged well before the poet was tried for treason, a significant portion of the blockage was due to MacLeish’s role as both author and bureaucrat and the continued esoteric and jumbled style of Pound’s correspondence. By 1943 Hemingway and MacLeish

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were already expressing concern over Pound’s post-war future and began preparing for the worst. Part of this preparation involved reading transcriptions of Pound’s broadcasts, to which MacLeish, as Librarian of Congress, had access. In a May 1943 letter, Hemingway requests that MacLeish send him copies of the transcribed broadcasts, stating “Whenever the damned business comes up we will probably be called on, or should be called on, and I think should know what it is all about.” This letter is more than the beginning of an epistolary network about Pound; it also lays the groundwork for the poet’s insanity plea, which Hemingway addresses in his usual dry manner, claiming that Pound’s broadcasts are a “pathological business” and that “If Ezra has any sense he should shoot himself.”59 It is clear from this early letter exchange that MacLeish’s literary friends viewed his position within the government as advantageous. Not only could MacLeish supply his fellow writers with valuable information regarding Pound’s broadcasts, but he was also able to lend his legal expertise to Pound’s case. Thus, with his letter on September 10, 1943, MacLeish establishes himself as the hub of this new communications network, as he writes to Hemingway with news of his exchange with the Solicitor General regarding Pound.60 By the summer of 1945, after learning of Pound’s incarceration by the U.S. military, Eliot entered this literary network and sent MacLeish a frantic two-line telegram from London expressing his concern about Pound’s welfare and asking for MacLeish’s advice: “JUST RETURNED FROM PARIS STOP ANXIOUS DO EVERYTHING POSSIBLE MITIGATE TREATMENT OF EZRA POUND STOP PLEASE ADVISE ME.”61 Over the next few months Eliot and MacLeish were in frequent contact, but this contact was always the same: Eliot was requesting information regarding Pound’s status. Such information included Pound’s general well-being and his address, which MacLeish obtained from the Department of Justice.62 What is remarkable about these letters and telegrams is MacLeish’s simultaneous movement within two seemingly incongruous networks—one literary and one governmental—in order to acquire and dispense knowledge regarding Pound. By October 1945, MacLeish’s literary network grew to include Pound himself. Although the imprisoned poet had been extremely critical of MacLeish’s government work within his broadcasts, his forthcoming treason trial enabled him to see the value in MacLeish’s bureaucratic ties. Thus, in a letter to his legal advisors

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Shakespear and Parkyn, Pound insists that he be placed in contact with MacLeish; for only he—a man who was both poet and lawyer—would be able to understand and assist him in this time of crisis. MacLeish, for his part, assisted Pound to the best of his ability, despite being personally disgusted by his former friend’s broadcasts. Through both his literary and government networks, MacLeish was able to secure Pound’s return to the U.S., convincing those in Washington that this was a matter for the Justice Department and not the U.S. military. Upon his return to the States, Pound was found to be unfit to stand trial. Thus, although he was never convicted of treason, he was sentenced to St. Elizabeth’s Hospital in Washington, DC, where he remained for the next twelve years. This new multi-nodal epistolary network, forged from Pound’s point-topoint radio network, remained largely dormant for the next decade, although Pound and MacLeish continued to correspond on occasion. But after a 1955 visit with Pound in St. Elizabeth’s, MacLeish reactivated this literary network, this time adding Frost into the mix.63 For the next three years, MacLeish worked to get Pound released from St. Elizabeth’s. His reasoning? Pound had already served more time than he would have had he actually been convicted.64 In this revitalized communications system, however, censorship and MacLeish’s divided loyalties were no longer the primary hindrances; instead, the central clog in this new channel was none other than Pound. In a letter to MacLeish on July 13, 1956, Eliot comments upon the difficulty of communicating with Pound, even when it is for his own benefit: “it is depressing to find that we are always up against the same difficulty. Ezra seems to be prepared to give his blessing to the most ill-advised or unthought out schemes in advance, but to find objections to make to any scheme which offers any reasonable possibility of success.”65 MacLeish, of course, was by this time familiar with the obstacles of working with the imprisoned poet. In his letters to MacLeish, Pound repeats many of the same offensive opinions from his broadcasting days. But new complaints also emerge, as Pound berates MacLeish for teaching at Harvard and repeatedly asks him if he reads anything of consequence. These letters, which were written and sent in quick succession, often went unanswered, so much so that Pound began referring to MacLeish as “Arcimbaldo the silent.”66 Yet what is striking about this new clog, where the poets are either speaking at cross-purposes or not responding at all,

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is that it once again resembles the difficulties they faced in radio transmission. Just as they questioned if their radio broadcasts reached American listeners, so too do Pound and MacLeish wonder if their letters are being understood. Thus, both poets repeatedly ask the other for a straight answer, and neither of them feels as if they ever receive one.67 Pound believed, however, that the failure of his epistolary communications with MacLeish was due to a blockage on the receiving end and was not the result of his own production. In a letter dated June 30, 1956, Pound again chastises MacLeish for not knowing “MORE” and claims that until MacLeish learns the “history” Pound is interested in (a history that reflects the fascist opinions of his radio broadcasts) “there will be failure of complEAT comprehension between the Archie and the Ez.”68 The use of partial capitalization is common throughout Pound’s letters, broadcasts, and poetry; but in this instance the use of “EAT” emphasizes Pound’s position that the failure lies with the consumer of the communication. Ironically, one of Pound’s main grievances with MacLeish was that MacLeish could not see (or would not admit to seeing) that politics were of equal importance to Pound as art: When are YOU going to git roun’ to seein’ that what I have said re/ blackout of history    AND re/ econ      is just as serious as wot I said re/ potry and language back in yr/ salad days ???69

Pound’s use of descending lines here (a form frequently used in his poetry as well as MacLeish’s) in order to discuss his penchant for politics emphasizes his position that art and politics were of equal import, and more significantly, that what he had to say on politics was just as valuable as what he had to say on and in poetry. MacLeish, however, never acknowledged Pound as a political savant; instead, he merely responded to Pound’s taunts by calling his understanding of history “just about as wrong as views can be.”70 In fact, it was only MacLeish’s unyielding support of free speech (even when the speech disgusted him) and his constant literary respect for Pound that allowed MacLeish to continue advocating on behalf of his imprisoned friend. Despite the fundamental differences in political positions and the abundant difficulties in communication, MacLeish continued to work on Pound’s behalf

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and helped Hemingway, Eliot, and Frost write letters that would be effective with the Attorney General and the Justice Department. Although Frost would later claim to be the primary actor in Pound’s release, in part because as the more politically conservative member he had more sway with the Eisenhower administration than MacLeish, who had openly supported Adlai Stevenson in the 1956 election, the letters exchanged among these writers tell a different story. Just as Hemingway and Eliot relied on MacLeish for the information and drafting of their letters, so too did Frost, who writes “I shall be acting largely on your judgment. I can’t bear that anyone’s fate should hang too much on mine.”71 The literary community, however, recognized MacLeish as the “hub” of this epistolary web, and this was confirmed by the poet Harry Meacham, who sent MacLeish a photograph of himself with Pound with the inscription “For Arch M—The man who ‘sprung’ EP.”72 Thus, while this epistolary network faced many of the same blockages as Pound’s and MacLeish’s radio transmissions, the outcome of this vigorous letter writing campaign was strikingly different. Whereas the two poets were never certain of their political effect on radio listeners, MacLeish and his fellow authors succeeded in getting the U.S. government to pay attention, the result being that Pound’s treason charge was dismissed on April 18, 1958. In a January 1945 radio interview, MacLeish spoke of the dual nature of communications technology. According to MacLeish, “modern electric communication” has put people “in touch with each other on a day to day and even an hour to hour basis,” but that these same mediums can also be dangerous if they are “misused, creat[ing] misunderstanding and, worse that [sic] misunderstanding—creat[ing] suspicion and ill-will.”73 Although it is probably not MacLeish’s intent, it is easy to read this quotation as a comment on the differences between MacLeish’s and Pound’s broadcasting and epistolary styles. Whereas clear communication with the audience was always MacLeish’s primary goal, both in his radio plays and his letters to fellow writers, Pound’s fragmented and aggressive style often hindered complete comprehension among his listeners and the recipients of his letters. Yet, as this chapter has shown, both poets faced similar human and technical challenges when choosing to use communications networks. The wartime environment within which these modern authors were writing provides us with literal examples of the clogs theorized by media scholars

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like Siegert and Serres (with his study of parasites and noise). MacLeish and Pound, along with fellow wartime radio writers, are part of a media history that is essential for understanding early-twentieth-century communications. The irony that two systems meant to facilitate clear transmissions (broadcasting and postal) are also the very systems that impede these processes is, however, fitting in a study of modern writing. Like these communication channels, modernist forms also prohibited the clear transmission of messages despite an obsessive focus on communication within the message itself. Thus, the letters and radio recordings by modern writers during World War II are part of an essential but untapped archive for understanding the blockages in communication networks, and they also provide literal manifestations of the larger contradictions within literary modernism and modernity more broadly. By revisiting this neglected archive of communications material we can solidify the correlation between modern literature and media studies and suggest that modern art, much like the systems that transmitted this art, was subject to the same social, political, and technical contradictions that plagued modernity on the whole. As we shall see, MacLeish was not the only member of the Library of Congress to turn his attention to radio broadcasting, nor was Pound the only high modernist. These two worlds collided once again in the figure of Thomas Mann, Germany’s most prestigious novelist and the Consultant in Germanic Literature in the Library of Congress. More than MacLeish and Pound, Mann was able to combine the roles of high modernist and public writer while in exile in Los Angeles. In the next and final chapter, I examine Mann’s concurrent roles as radio broadcaster and author in the mid-1940s. And while his combining of aesthetics and politics with electronic and print networks aligns him with MacLeish and Pound, Mann’s employment of transportation, telephone, and radio channels for his broadcasts from Los Angeles to Germany suggests just how interconnected and international modern wartime radio could be.

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Haunted Network I Who live in Los Angeles and not in London Find, on thinking about Hell, that it must be Still more like Los Angeles. —Bertolt Brecht1 Beginning with a close-up shot of a telegraph operator’s finger frantically sending a message and then cutting away to a new frame of a train rapidly traveling through the British countryside, the opening scenes from the first episode of television’s modernist melodrama Downton Abbey introduces its audience to a world that is (for better or worse) dependent upon networks— communications and transport. The train is carrying the mysterious John Bates, and his gaze upon the telegraph wires, from which we hear the ghostly tapping and beeping of the operator’s signaling, suggests that he, like the telegraph’s message, is heading to Downton. The simultaneous arrival of the war-wounded Mr. Bates and the telegram, which brings news of the Titanic’s fate in the North Atlantic, causes both the family and staff of Downton to question the stability of the modern world, for not only are they reminded of the heavy British losses of the Boer War, but the unsinkable gem of modernity has sunk, taking with it the estate’s future master. Such immediate knowledge of the luxury ocean liner’s sinking in the midst of the Atlantic on April 14, 1912, however, would not have been possible had it not been for mass communication’s newest technological toy: the wireless.2 Because of radio technology, the Titanic was able to call for assistance from ships in the near vicinity, namely the Carpathia and Californian. Having turned off its wireless for the night, the Californian failed to hear the SOS. The Carpathia, however, responded, and after picking up survivors sent messages to shore, causing a firestorm of telegraph and radio activity that clogged media networks and

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produced misinformation. Thus the radio plays a pivotal, albeit controversial role in the Titanic’s tragic history, acting as both savior and impediment, where the inability to make contact and transmit accurate information led to a larger loss of life.3 As the Downton Abbey opening suggests, the sinking of the Titanic was a transformative event, introducing the modern age to the multi-media communications network. This event also acts as a symbol of the strengthening political and cultural ties between the U.S. and Britain that would be solidified over the course of the next three decades and two World Wars. Wireless transmissions carried the fatal narrative transatlantically from sea to land, and then spread via telegraph and newspaper to smaller towns and private homes on two coastlines and beyond. Yet, as Jeffrey Sconce argues, this tragedy also needs to be understood as a modern ghost story, where the messages the Titanic and Carpathia transmitted carried within them the staggering loss of life, forever marking the Atlantic as a haunted site where literal cries for help were sent from the ocean into the mysterious wireless ether.4 While in the last chapter I discussed the seeming contradiction of communication networks failing to communicate, the dramatized and historical recoveries of the Titanic’s sinking bring to light another paradox of radio communication: the mingling of the antiquated (namely occultist language and images) within descriptions of modern technological networks and events. Thomas Mann’s World War II broadcasts provide a more complex example of this modern condition: advancements in technological interconnectivity allowed Mann to broadcast from his exilic home in Los Angeles into Nazi Germany. But the subject matter and the intricacy of transmitting messages across the Atlantic portray Mann more as a ghost warning listeners from the great beyond than a modern writer using cutting-edge technology. Mann’s official exile began in 1936, when, after making public anti-fascist statements, the Nazi government revoked his citizenship. After receiving a Czechoslovakian passport, Mann moved to the United States in 1938 where he spent the next two years teaching at Princeton. By 1941, Mann had settled in California, making a home for himself in the Pacific Palisades, where he finished Joseph and His Brothers and wrote Doctor Faustus.5 Mann’s tenure in the U.S. also created a new literary opportunity for the exiled author. Between 1940 and 1945, he wrote and voiced fifty-five radio talks for the BBC. These

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monthly, and then later semi-monthly, broadcasts were recorded at a NBC studio in Los Angeles, and, through a complex multi-nodal network system (that included planes, telephones, radio, three cities, and two broadcasting companies) were transmitted from London to German listeners behind enemy lines. On the surface, Mann’s transatlantic broadcasts brought Germany war-related information from an Allied perspective. But these high-tech transmissions also contain within them the ghosts of Germany’s past and possible future, allowing the author to essentially haunt his former homeland. Filled with references to death (of troops, civilians, and Jews), Mann’s broadcasts, spoken from his exile in L.A., a site of sweltering heat and sinful excess (and a metaphorical death, according to Brecht), ask that Germans remember their enlightened past and move forward into the future as a peaceful nation. Even the cover of Listen, Germany! (figure 6.1), an English translation of Mann’s earliest radio broadcasts, emphasizes the otherworldliness of these transatlantic transmissions. The image of three floating Mann heads, each unique and enshrined by auras, encapsulates the ghostly quality of Mann’s radio work. The symbolic decapitations highlight the separation of voice and thought from the body that defines the radio broadcasting process; but it also provides us with an image of Mann’s figurative death while in exile, an image I will return to throughout this chapter. On this cover, Mann is an emblematic Cerberus. But instead of the three-headed hound guarding the gates of the ancient Underworld, the tri-headed Mann protects the traditions of high modernism and culture. With one head for each nation—Germany, Britain, and the U.S.—this image represents not only the nations involved in Mann’s radio broadcasts, but also suggests a shared literary and historical trajectory, of which Mann is without doubt a central part. While a discussion of Mann’s radio broadcasts in terms of ghosts may seem counter-intuitive with regard to both radio technology and Mann’s reputation as a skeptical high modernist, a tremendous amount of historical and literary evidence exists which suggests that haunting is a central element of modernity.6 Take for example the use of the terms “stream” and “flow” in talking about psychological processes, literature, and radio transmissions. As Sconce points out, the term “stream of consciousness” was coined by the psychologist William James, who argued that “‘river’ and ‘stream’ are the metaphors that ‘most naturally describe’ the human thought process.”

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Figure 6.1: “Cover Photo,” Floating Thomas Mann Heads

These metaphors are prominent in descriptions of both high modernist form and spiritualist séances. But this language is also used to explain electrical current and the flow of transmissions from sender to receiver.7 Be it a literary, spiritual, or technical medium, the process of transmission is the same: the sender (author, ghost, or broadcast station) transmits information through the medium (book, human, or radio) to its audience. Or, as Friedrich Kittler famously writes, “A medium is a medium is a medium.”8 It is not just a similarity in terminology that aligns moderns like Mann with the spiritualist tradition. Due to the catastrophic loss of life and disruption of modern progress during World War I, attending séances (both during the war and in its immediate aftermath) became a fashionable activity, one in which many modern authors partook. In Ghostwriting Modernism, Helen Sword uncovers this ignored ghostly strain within modernism and finds that not only did high-modern authors attend spiritualist meetings, but even the most

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cynical of the bunch included references to ghosts and hauntings within their work: [T. S.] Eliot, Ezra Pound, and Mina Loy, seemingly unlikely acolytes of the other world, all attended seances during or just after the war years. And even confirmed skeptics such as [James] Joyce, D. H. Lawrence, and Virginia Woolf, while shunning spiritualist practice, routinely filled their fiction, poetry, and essays with mediums, ghosts, seances, disembodied voices, and other invocations of the living dead [sic].9

Mann could have easily been included in both of the above lists. Having attended several séances in Munich in the early 1920s, the author wrote about his experiences in an essay entitled “An Experience in the Occult,” and included two fictionalized accounts in The Magic Mountain. Despite the inclusion of spiritualism in his writings and life, however, Mann remained a skeptic at heart. But his “vexed attraction” to the occult, as Sword calls it, illustrates an essential tension within literary modernism, in which the need to fulfill Pound’s call to “make it new” results in the return of the past in often unexpected and deathly forms.10 For Bruno Latour, whose work on network extension will be the theoretical map for this final chapter, haunting is a modern condition. As he claims in We Have Never Been Modern, “The past remains, therefore, and even returns.”11 In this final chapter, I explore the interconnection of the past’s return within two quintessentially modern mediums: literary modernism and radio broadcasting. Mann’s transatlantic BBC broadcasts offer an intriguing example of this phenomenon, for not only does his literary history, and in particular his most famous novel, The Magic Mountain, dabble in the occult, but radio itself, as I discuss in the next section, has an uncanny historical parallel to the occult’s more popular form: spiritualism.12 These eerie literary and technological histories allow us to read Mann’s wartime broadcasts as hauntings, where the exiled writer can only speak to Germany as a spirit from its past. This is exacerbated by the multi-nodal transmission of the broadcasts; the necessary interruptions by other transport and media networks challenge the notion that Mann is present within the listeners’ current time. He is always speaking from a literal and metaphorical before. Thus, by reading Mann’s World War II broadcasts alongside other great modernist ghost stories, such

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as Joyce’s Ulysses and Bram Stoker’s Dracula, the disruption of linear time within modern fiction is brought to the foreground. Through the figure of the specter, both literal and fictional, the modern era becomes a contradictory site of progression and regression, a phenomenon that infiltrates both Anglo-American modernism and transatlantic media networks. Time, as it is presented in modern literature and modern history, begins to look like a “great hotchpotch,” where, “a fine laminary flow” is replaced by the more accurate “turbulent flow,” or in other words the concept of linear time is disrupted by the violent resurgence of the past within the present.13

Modernist hauntings In one of the earliest critical works on modernist hauntings, The Ghosts of Modernity, Jean-Michel Rabaté writes that it is modernism’s “refutation of specters [that] has always served as the very background for its formation.”14 The denial—or in Freudian terms, repression—of the occult in modern literature, however, means that ghosts often materialize in unexpected places, most notably in moments where technological progress is celebrated. This is certainly true in Rudyard Kipling’s “Wireless,” first published in 1902. In this short story, Kipling examines ghostly transmissions through two parallel narratives. The first follows Mr. Cashell Jr., who attempts to send messages from his uncle’s pharmacy to a receiver across Britain; the second explores an evening in the life of John Shaynor, a pharmacist dying of tuberculosis, who happens to receive poetic messages from the beyond while in a “medically” induced trance. Although the narrator enters the shop in order to partake in the wireless experiments, his focus quickly shifts to Shaynor, whose illness and doomed relationship with a local woman named Fanny Brand intrigues and saddens him. Toward the end of the evening, but before the wireless experiment begins, Shaynor settles down in a chair with a hot toddy. While waiting for the station at Poole to ready itself for the experiment, the narrator notices that Shaynor has fallen into a trance, and has begun to recite and write scraps of poetry by Keats, seemingly unaware that he is doing so. Shaynor’s broadcasting of poetry from England’s past, transmitted either from the ghostly Keats (whom he will soon join) or his unconscious, marks him as a

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medium, while his “machine-like” movements make him a substitute for the non-transmitting wireless in the next room. When Shaynor wakes, it becomes clear that the poetic transmissions were indeed ghostly, for Shaynor tells the narrator he “ha[s]n’t much time to read poetry.”15 But Shaynor is not the only medium to transmit messages from the beyond. The wireless also picks up fragments from two war ships at sea: “It’s a couple of men-o’-war working Marconi signals off the Isle of Wright. They are trying to talk to each other. Neither can read the other’s messages, but all their messages are being taken in by our receiver here. […] Their transmitters are all right, but their receivers are out of order, so they only get a dot here and a dash there. Nothing clear.” Like Shaynor, these warship wirelesses work as one-way mediums, producing incomplete messages that cannot be understood. The process is, as Cashell states, similar to the practice of spiritualism: “Have you ever seen a spiritualistic séance? It reminds me of that sometimes—odds and ends of messages coming out of nowhere—a word here and there—no good at all.” Shaynor ironically responds, “But mediums are all imposters.”16 The assessment that mediums are frauds, which the reader assumes is directed toward the spiritualist medium rather than the technological one, is turned on its head as the Keats transmission takes center stage in the narrative. By introducing Keats into the narrative, however, Kipling also draws a connection between spiritualism and modern authorship. Thus even the most progressive stories (Kipling is, after all, writing about new technology) are filled with literary ghosts from the past, and their continued presence in modern writing is enough to make any innovative modernist feel like an imposter. Kipling is not the only modern writer to notice a connection between spiritualism, communications media, and authorship. In fact, he is not even the first. In 1897, Bram Stoker’s Dracula introduced the reading public to a new world networked by trains, newspapers, phonographs, and telegrams; but within this mechanized modernity also lay the forgotten past, which, in its suppressed state, reemerges with a vengeance in the form of the Undead. In the novel’s climax, the vampire-infected Mina Harker, Dr. Van Helsing, and friends hurry to Transylvania in order to kill Count Dracula and free Mina from her vampiric fate. Although the group makes use of modern transport and guns in their battle with the Count, their real weapon is Mina’s telepathic connection with Dracula, which allows them to spy on their target when he

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is unaware. As Van Helsing remarks, “That terrible baptism of blood which he give you makes you free to go to him in spirit, as you have as yet done in your times of freedom, when the sun rise and set.”17 Mina’s spiritual visitation upon Dracula allows her to report his movements, which the psychiatrist Dr. Seward transcribes in the book of notes Mina had been writing. While this otherworldly communication may seem more akin to the telephone or even telegraphy (as the final result is written), Kittler suggests that Mina be compared to a “radio transmitter,” where “hypnosis” acts as a prototype of what Marconi and his fellow engineers were in the process of creating. For Kittler, Mina Harker is an example of radio’s future martial power: “the telepathic radio transmitter in the coffin of an un-British despot, is as good an asset to the Secret Service as the BBC would be 30 years later.”18 Yet Mina is more than a weapon. She is also simultaneously a ghost from Europe’s occult past and a sign of progress in communications technology, as symbolized by her position as medium between the old-world Dracula and medical professionals Van Helsing and Seward. The scientific interest in telepathy has been well documented. And, as Maud Ellmann notes, the histories of telepathic study and the creation of aural technologies are intertwined: “Telepathy, a word invented in 1882 by the Society for Psychical Research, represents the spooky fringe of newly developed communication technologies, such as the telephone and phonograph—technologies in which the ‘undead’ voice acquires a mechanical afterlife.”19 In fact, the history of modern spiritualism shares a striking resemblance to the development of communications technologies: from popular spiritualism’s birth in 1848 (where New York’s Fox sisters decoded table rappings from the otherworld) only a few years after the first Morse code telegraph line from Washington, DC to Baltimore had been completed, to the later enthusiasm for spirit photographs and trance speaking with the emergence of the camera and telephone. “Spiritualism, the art of communication with the dead, explicitly modeled itself on the telegraph’s ability to receive remote messages,”20 and it would seem that the methods of reception evolved once people were able to imagine and understand the workings of new communications media. With the invention of radio, real telepathic communication with both the living and the dead seemed an actual possibility. In a letter to the editor in the August 1913 edition of Scientific American, a Houston man hopefully

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writes that telepathic “communications are not any more wonderful than the communications received over the wireless telegraph. In both instances, the force transmitted is the same—magnetic or electric.” And thus, “with proper experiments […] a method will be found by which communication may be effected, at will, at any time, between human beings separated by great distances.”21 Although the editor seriously challenges this line of reasoning and draws a distinction between sending messages and sending thoughts, by 1922 Scientific American asks one of its associate editors, Malcolm Bird, to write a series of articles on the scientific study of spiritualism. This results in a 1924 experiment, which boasted a panel of doctors and the participation of the great escape artist and spiritualist skeptic Harry Houdini. For this study, multiple mediums were tested for authenticity; but despite the fact that no substantial proof of spiritualist activity was found, Bird concludes that the possibility of communication with the dead could not be completely discounted. In describing the ways in which this communication may take place, the author offers familiar technological media as way of an analogy: “the phenomena are produced by an externalization of energy rather than of matter, the obvious analogies being the light wave and the radio impulse.”22 Four months later, Bird advances his study in telepathy by evaluating the use of radio as a psychic medium. Although the results of this experiment note the failure of the radio as a medium for mental messages, the inclusion of this and similar studies in a mainstream scientific journal suggests that the correlation between radio and telepathy was well established by the 1920s.23 But what of Mina Harker’s role as author in Dracula? Although Mina’s telepathic mediumship only begins once she is infected by the Count’s bite (which shares some similarities to the ailing Shaynor, who becomes a medium once inebriated), her function as the text’s medium, by this point in the novel, is firmly established. Before she is bitten, Mina takes upon herself the task of collating all the documents she can find concerning Dracula (diary entries, newspaper articles, letters, psychological records) and fills in the gaps with her own knowledge. Mina even functions as her own printing press, using her “New Woman” typing skills to make three copies of her book.24 Her construction and publication of this collage-text reveals Dracula’s story for both the band of friends and the reader, and ultimately leads to Dracula’s defeat. In this way, Mina-as-author acts in a similar manner to a spiritualist

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medium, “giving voice and substance to […] characters we cannot see but nonetheless believe to be real.”25 Perhaps the most famous fictional haunted author, however, is Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus, who ponders in the “Scylla and Charybdis” episode of Ulysses (1922) on the nature of ghosts, in particular those of William Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Stephen’s focus on Shakespeare’s most haunted play is fitting, for Ulysses is a text littered with ghosts, be they literary (such as Shakespeare’s visage appearing in the brothel mirror in “Circe” and Joyce’s re-writing of literary history in “Oxen of the Sun”) or familial (Stephen is haunted by the recent death of his mother and his absent father, and Bloom frequently muses on Paddy Dignam’s funeral, which reminds him of his son’s death). Even technology in Ulysses is haunted by the past. In “Proteus,” Stephen imagines a telephone that connects him (via an umbilical cord) to the Edenic past: “The cords of all link back, strandentwining cable of all flesh. […] Hello! Kinch here. Put me on to Edenville. Aleph, alpha: nought, nought, one.”26 In Ulysses, as in Dracula and “Wireless,” the past haunts both aural communications networks and the fictional author. It seems, then, that wherever there is communication there is also haunting, where the past reemerges to interrupt the present network of transmission. For modernists, the inclusion of these ghostly returns rips the progressive fabric of their narratives— what Luke Thurston refers to as a “fracture of narrative consistency”—and challenges the modern perception of linear time.27 These ghosts refute the notion that there is a definitive past, present, and future, suggesting instead a perception of time more in line with Latour’s polytemporality, where “the past is not surpassed but revisited, repeated, surrounded, protected, recombined, reinterpreted and reshuffled.”28 Thus, despite their desire to break with the past, modern radio networks and modernist literature cannot escape its repeated return.

Mann’s ghosts In the same year that Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus asks “What is a ghost?” Mann attended a séance in Munich.29 In “An Experience in the Occult,” Mann writes

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of his time in “the hands of the occultists,” specifically the famed physician Dr. Albert Freiherr von Schrenck-Notzing and his medium Willy S.30 Like Scientific American’s Malcolm Bird, Mann presents himself in this short essay as a skeptic ready to believe if proof is provided: “As for me, I have always stood, theoretically, rather far left in this business of the occult; holding, in the sense of the thoroughgoing skepticism I just defined, that all sorts of things are quite possible; but not boasting any personal or practical experience in suprasensual realms.” His motto of “I am a skeptic, but I want something to happen” sounds like a precursor to the slogan “I want to believe,” made famous by the science-fiction drama The X-Files. Of course this desire to believe is, as Mann notes, perhaps “the most fundamental and extreme form of skepticism” as one is always on guard against believing too quickly.31 Like Bird, and indeed the fictional Dr. Seward in Dracula, Mann throws himself into the occult experience and acts as the “control” (containing Willy and relaying his responses) for the séance. The details Mann provides are strikingly similar to those in Scientific American, suggesting that this account is remarkably accurate. As Mann reports: “I sat opposite to the young man, with my chair close to his, his two knees between mine. I held both his hands and my assistant both his wrists.” Near them stands a little table with “a lamp in a red shade, the table-bell, a plate of flour, a little slate and piece of chalk” placed upon it.32 These details return in Mann’s The Magic Mountain. They also appear in Bird’s “Our Psychic Investigation Advances”: “Nino is clothed in garments which have been searched, and tied into a chair with the idea of making it impossible for him to get effective freedom of hands or legs. In the cabinet [the séance room], half a yard or so from him, is placed a table or another chair with bells, tambourines, trumpet, etc. A faint red light is in the room.”33 Due to the scientific nature of Bird’s study, non-human controls were used, as can be seen in figure 6.2. And to ensure that Nino could not escape, the ropes were tied by none other than Houdini. In this image, Nino stares directly at the camera, his pensiveness suggesting his unshakable belief in his abilities. The camera has become part of the control, returning his gaze and documenting Nino’s performance as medium. In Mann’s case, however, we are privy to his human experience as control and are provided with detailed descriptions of the signals given through hand pressure and the “quick, loud, thick-tongued whisper” in which the

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Figure 6.2: Nino the Medium Copyright: Malcolm Bird, “Our Psychic Investigation Advances,” Scientific American 130.2 (February 1924): 86.

somnambulist speaks to him.34 After some labor, Willy brings forth one of his spiritual personalities, Minna (perhaps not accidentally named). Minna performs some tricks with a handkerchief before turning to the typewriter

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(again, an interesting choice given the name). The séance ends with a quick materialization of a hand flashing before Mann’s eyes. Although Mann’s experience with the occult left him feeling ill and uncertain, it was ultimately not enough to confirm the presence of an aptly named ghost. Instead, Mann chalks this supernatural event up to telekinesis, which, while also a bizarre phenomenon, does not challenge the accepted perception of time as linear. It is thus not a return from the past, but rather “the partly exteriorized medium himself.”35 (Bird comes to a similar conclusion at the end of his experiments.) Despite Mann’s continued skepticism regarding everything spiritualist, he incorporates his séance experiences into The Magic Mountain (1924). In a chapter entitled “Highly Questionable,” Mann depicts two séances in order to explore the division between death and life, a division of extreme importance for the tuberculosis-ridden patients at the sanatorium, specifically the protagonist Hans Castorp. As Sword notes, “the possibility of spirit survival becomes a crucially important issue, and the dangerous ‘luxations’ of Castorp’s brain specifically involve his questioning of the rationalist assumption that there can be no life after death.”36 The division of life and death therefore becomes a division of sanity and insanity inside the sanatorium, a site depicted as out of step with modern time throughout the novel. With an unorthodox narrative tempo that emphasizes Castorp’s first years at the sanatorium for the majority of the novel and then rushes through the remaining five in the last two chapters, Castorp and his fellow patients are essentially exiled from the flow of time. The two séances depicted in the third-to-last chapter, then, act as a metaphor for the larger temporal disruption caused by the slow moving pace of life inside the sanatorium. The chapter opens with an introduction to the new spiritualist craze at the sanatorium, which is led by Dr. Edhin Krokowski and his suggestion that illness, or being not quite whole, is a pathway to the spirit world: Of late, however, although the transition had been so gradual his audience had scarcely noticed, his interests had moved in a new direction, toward magical, arcane matters; and his fortnightly lectures in the dining hall […] no longer dealt with masked forms of love in action or the transformation of illness back into conscious emotion, but with the abstruse oddities of hypnotism and somnambulism, the phenomena of telepathy, prophetic dreams, and second

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sight, the wonders of hysteria; and as he discussed these topics, philosophic horizons expanded until suddenly his audience beheld great riddles shimmering before their eyes, riddles about the relationship between matter and the psyche, indeed, the very riddle of life itself, which, so it appeared, might be more easily approached along very uncanny paths, the paths of illness, than by the direct road of health.37

The new otherworldly focus in the sanatorium allows the patients to celebrate their illnesses rather than seek cures. (The motif of illness and its connection to the occult also shows that Mann was in step with other modern thinkers on the subject, where Kipling’s Shaynor is also impaired by TB, Stoker’s Mina is infected by a vampire, and Joyce’s Stephen suffers from melancholia and inanition.) Once Ellen Brand enters the novel, however, the talks on spiritualism morph into occult practice, where Ellen-as-medium is tested in a series of “empirical experiment[s].”38 The descriptions of these experiments are taken directly from Mann’s “An Experience in the Occult,” a comparison Sword makes in Ghostwriting Modernism.39 More striking about these séance scenes, however, are Mann’s decisions to make the spirit a poet named Holger and to have Castorp see a materialization of a soldier suffering from anachronisms in costume. Throughout this chapter, Mann depicts Castorp as conflicted when it comes to spiritualism—perhaps a nod to the author’s own struggles—“he had no practical experience of it, and the aversion he felt to such experiences […] was almost equal to the curiosity they aroused in him.”40 Castorp pushes aside his rationalism, however, and freely partakes in the first séance, from which Dr. Krokowski is excluded. During this first occult experience, Castorp and the other sanatorium patients meet Holger, who, during the connection through Ellen and a Ouija board, writes a lengthy poem letter-by-letter, which his listeners then ventriloquize. As a poet, whose words are brought to life by others, Holger certainly invites comparisons to Kipling’s Keats, whose poems Shaynor recites in “Wireless.” But this repeated motif of poet as ghost (or poet/dramatist as ghost in the case of Shakespeare’s haunting of Stephen in Ulysses) implies that moderns like Kipling and Mann understood their roles as writers in terms of otherworldly, mystical, or even divine revelation. They are perpetrating the myth that great art is inspired, not laboriously created. Instead, the labor of art falls upon the reader or interpreter. In “Wireless,” it is

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the narrator who attempts to interpret (albeit unsuccessfully) the fragments of poetry broadcasted by Shaynor. Likewise, in The Magic Mountain, it is the séance audience that must work through each individual letter to form words and meanings, thereby implying that the reader or audience plays both a creative and interpretive part in the writing process. Without an audience, communication would fail, as the writer (or ghost or radio broadcaster) would go unheard. By the second séance, this time run as a scientific experiment by Dr. Krokowski, Holger has learned new tricks, including materialization. After finally being convinced to participate in the name of science by Krokowski, Castorp joins the séance group in the X-ray room, and acts, as Mann once did, as the “control.” Castorp, however, has another motive for participating in this séance, namely to see if Holger can produce his cousin, Joachim Ziemssen, who died of tuberculosis earlier in the novel. Whereas Mann claims to have possibly seen a materialized hand in “Experience,” Holger is more successful, producing Joachim in a military uniform from the sixteenth century.41 The anachronism of Joachim in a uniform from a period hundreds of years before his own death is striking to both Castorp and the reader. The presence of an anachronism within a process that already brings the past into the present emphasizes the temporal abnormalities found throughout The Magic Mountain, where time moves more slowly in the sanatorium. For Castorp, the sight of Joachim causes him to flee the séance, and with this ghost exercised from his conscience, time in the novel begins to move rapidly. But the brief materialization of Joachim’s spirit serves a greater narrative purpose: it acts as a metaphor for Castorp’s own ghostliness, where he, in his sickness, lives outside of, but not completely removed from, modernity. In the conclusion to The Magic Mountain, Castorp leaves the sanatorium to fight in World War I. Like Holger and Joachim before him, Castorp is a ghost retuning to the present, and like these materialized ghosts of the sanatorium séances, it is understood that Castorp’s time in the modern world will also be fleeting. Despite Mann’s skepticism toward the practice of spiritualism, his inclusions of ghosts and other temporal abnormalities within his writing are fundamental markers of his modernity. Set in the years leading up to the First World War, The Magic Mountain is, by 1924, a narrative about a distant past—a past only faintly recognizable to a politically restructured and economically

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devastated 1920s Germany. Thus The Magic Mountain is more than a ghost story; it is itself a ghost. Like Ulysses, it asks its readers to recall an already bygone era, and similarly does so without romanticization. With a narrative form of confused temporality and lengthy, complex sentences, The Magic Mountain is, however, also essentially of its time. This being both in and out of time simultaneously is, in essence, the marker of ghostliness, and will come to define Mann’s time in exile and, more specifically, his BBC broadcasts. With these broadcasts, Mann no longer only writes about temporal interruptions. Instead, he becomes the interruption—the “noise” in the fascist channel—that calls to Germany outside of her time, while being in-step with modernity. Like his protagonist in The Magic Mountain, Mann also found himself removed from modern German history when he was forced into exile. Yet where Castorp chose the serenity of a sanatorium in the Alps, Mann retreated to the bustling city of Los Angeles, joining a number of other German exiles, including Brecht and Adorno. For many German artists and intellectuals the move to L.A. required a staggering adjustment. For Brecht, who was not as successful in the city of angels as he had hoped to be, the transition was particularly difficult and inspired the poem that serves as the epigraph to this chapter. Although Mann found more success in L.A. than Brecht, Brecht’s poem suggests a larger truth about living in exile that touches upon Mann’s condition. Describing L.A. as a city of otherness in which the poet merely “live[s],” Brecht’s poem articulates the non-belonging status of exiles, where, dispossessed from their homeland, they work to create a new life within a culture and land that is not their own. Despite Mann’s creative success within the U.S. and eventual granting of citizenship, he too understood Brecht’s conflict, frequently describing himself as both a German and an American.42 Thus, there seems to be something inherently ghostly about being in exile, where one is simultaneously present and absent within two distinct cultures. (It is interesting to note that both Stoker and Joyce also wrote their haunting tales while in exile.) Mann’s transatlantic broadcasts from L.A. to Germany offer an intriguing example of his simultaneous presence and absence within German culture. With the radio, Mann found a means of vocal materialization within German homes, where groups of rapt listeners could, if they dared, tune in to hear the spirit of Germany speaking to them from beyond. The idea that one person can represent a nation, or in this case an alternate and more culturally aware German nation, was one that Mann embraced.

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Speaking of his exile upon his arrival to the U.S., Mann states that he and his German perception of the world act as the physical embodiment of his lost homeland: “‘What is homelessness? My home is in the works that I bring with me. Absorbed in them, I experience all the coziness of being at home. They are language, German language and form of thought, personally developed traditional ware of my country and my people. Wherever I am, Germany is!’”43 Mann, here, lays a defensive claim to Germany, arguing that his continued effort to think and write in German preserves a pre-Nazi culture. Forty-five years later, another famous German writer and theorist would make similar claims, this time, however, for a fictional character. Writing on Dracula in 1982, Kittler argues that within the Count’s blood lay the cultural memory of Transylvania: “He [Dracula] tells of Draculas as crusaders against the Turks, Draculas as betrayers of the crusaders to the Turks—the race of the Count is the history of Transylvania, his blood a different sort of memory than reference works.”44 In his Un-death, a paradoxical non-existence that required the feasting on Transylvanian blood for hundreds of years, Dracula has literally consumed his nation’s history, thereby becoming the carrier of it. Mann too, in his exile, also exists as a metaphorical Undead, carrying Germany’s literary past with him to L.A. But whereas Dracula drained the history from his victims, Mann takes to the radio (ironically a device that “sucks” the voice from the body) in order to not only remind Germans of who they once were but to also present them with an idea of who they could be. In his exilic state, Mann is a prototype for the Kittlerian storage medium—he becomes a human gramophone, film, or typewriter consuming and replaying German culture on Allied demand. My discussion of Mann as the figurative Undead (both incorporeal/ghostly and corporeal/vampire) is bolstered by the content of the author’s radio speeches, which often focused on death and included warnings from across the Atlantic. Mann even spoke of his radio talks in occultist terms, stating in the introduction to Listen, Germany! that he could not pass up “the opportunity of making contact, however loose and precarious, with the German people and also with the inhabitants of the subjugated territories.”45 One of the messages Mann wanted most to impress upon his listeners concerned the significant loss of life both within Germany and its conquered territories at the hands of the National Socialists. This importance of “death” as topos is emphasized

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by its inclusion in Mann’s first BBC talk, in which he reports on Germany’s invasion of the Netherlands and the extensive loss of life due to the Rotterdam Blitz.46 While Mann goes on to speak of the deaths of German soldiers and civilians due to unnecessary German aggression, his primary focus is the killing of Jews, which he begins reporting on as early as November 1941.47 In this broadcast, Mann shows that he is aware of Nazi war crimes, which included human experimentation, and chastises the German public for failing to speak up: “You know the unspeakable crimes which have been and are being committed in Russia, against the Poles and the Jews, but you prefer not to know them because of your justified horror of the equally unspeakable.”48 This becomes a recurring theme for Mann, who, believing that German civilians know nothing of the deaths that will eventually be known as the Holocaust, feels obligated to enlighten his former compatriots. In January 1942, he relays a new horrific narrative, this time about Jews from the Netherlands: “Four hundred young Dutch Jews have been brought to Germany to serve as objects for experimentation with poison gas.”49 By the spring of 1942, he returns to this story once again, this time reporting a death count of eight hundred. This “correction” of the details, as he calls it, shows both the immediacy with which Mann reported war-related events, and highlights the complex system by which information was learned and disseminated. Doubting that German listeners had heard the “exact number,” he discloses the complicated network from which he accessed this information—a network that involved an exiled Dutch government, private communications, and the reporting back into Germany on crimes that happened close to home.50 Like the omniscient narrator of The Magic Mountain who reveals the secrets of the sanatorium patients, Mann gives a voice to the murderous epidemic in Germany, of which he believed so few knew. Although Mann spoke at great length on the growing atrocities in Europe throughout his radio talks, the author also discussed his own metaphorical death. In fact, this is how he begins his opening broadcast in October 1940: A GERMAN writer speaks to you whose work and person have been outlawed by your rulers, and whose books, even if they deal with the most German matters, with Goethe, for example, can only speak to foreign, free nations, in their language, while for you they must remain silent and unknown. Some day my work will return to you, I know that, even if I myself cannot return.51

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While the opening phrase “A GERMAN writer speaks to you” is technically untrue, given that Mann did not start broadcasting in his own voice until March 1941, the use of a BBC proxy makes Mann’s musings on his figurative death all the more profound. Both Mann and his writings had been excised from Germany; but, like any determined ghost, Mann predicts a return, if not of him corporeally, then of his writing—or spirit. Mann, however, is aware that this return has already begun. Although no longer found in print, the author’s ideas can, with the help of radio, contact a people and a land he left years ago. By the fifth broadcast, Mann and the BBC had worked out a new transmission system, which ended the need for a substitute speaker in Britain. Now, German listeners could hear the author speak to them “from afar” in his “own voice.”52 But this new closeness between Mann and the listener was a façade. In reality, his radio broadcasts were recorded twice, once in L.A. and then once in Britain. Thus, German listeners were now doubly removed from Mann, where they heard a recording of a recording of his voice. While these broadcasts were meant to detail the brutality of the Nazi regime that Mann believed German listeners were either not hearing, or turning a deaf ear to, they were also meant as warnings.53 Like Jacob Marley who, in Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, returns from the grave to warn his former friend Ebenezer Scrooge of his coming demise, Mann’s “warning voice” traveled through the mystical ether alerting the German population to their current deplorable state and bleak future if they continue to ignore him. As Mann cautions, It is the voice of a friend, a German voice; the voice of a Germany which showed, and will again show, a different face to the world from the horrible Medusa mask which Hitlerism has pressed upon it. It is a warning voice—to warn you is the only service which a German like myself is able to render you today; and I do this serious and heartfelt duty although I know that no warning can be issued to you which is not long familiar to you, which has not long been alive in your own fundamentally uncheatable knowledge and conscience. To warn you means to confirm you in your own dark premonitions.54

Mann, aware of his physical disconnect with Germany, performs his ghostly role admirably and haunts the German public to the best of his ability—“the only service” that he as exile “is able to render.” But in this warning (as in the warning Marley brings Scrooge or the resurrected woman brings the town in

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MacLeish’s The Fall of the City), there is a paradoxical focus on the past as well as the future. As the voice of German history and an alternate present, Mann asks his listeners to both remember what the land of Goethe once represented and envision a peaceful future free from Hitler’s rule.55 Thus Mann’s warnings are also a call for Germany’s rebirth through rebellion: “Would it be your end, the end of Germany, if not he [Hitler], but reason and decency gain the victory? It will be Germany’s new beginning, its rebirth, its winter solstice, new hope, new happiness, and new life!”56 But it was essential that this rebirth should happen internally and not be imposed upon the nation. As Mann states in his January 1942 broadcast, “It must come from within, for from without only revenge and punishment can come, not purification.”57 Yet as the years go by and war continues to rage on, Mann’s faith in Germany’s ability to rebel recedes. Instead of viewing the German public as the victims of an oppressive regime, as he does at the war’s onset, he begins to argue for a single Germany that shares collective responsibility for the war’s atrocities. This shift in position is clear in a 1945 lecture for the Library of Congress, in which Mann asserts, “there are not two Germanys, a good one and a bad one, but only one, whose best turned into evil through devilish cunning. Wicked Germany is merely good Germany gone astray, good Germany in misfortune, in guilt, and ruin.”58 Although Mann continued to hope for a return to humanism with the war’s end, his unheeded calls to rebellious action left him in doubt of Germany’s ability to shape its own future. Mann’s description of modern Germany as containing within it the potential for both good and bad—both democratic progress and National Socialist regression—owes its formation to his friendship with Adorno. In fact, his dialectical argument in “Germany and the Germans” can be summarized by one line from Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment: “The curse of irresistible progress is irresistible regression.”59 This is the essential paradox of modernity, and one that I examine more fully with regard to Adorno in Chapter 1. But where Mann speaks of this contradiction in terms of national politics, theorists like Paul Virilio note a similar paradox in modern technology: Every technology produces, provokes, programs a specific accident. For example: when they invented the railroad, what did they invent? As an object

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that allowed you to go fast, which allowed you to progress […]. But at the same time they invented the railway catastrophe. The invention of the boat was the invention of shipwrecks. The invention of the steam engine and the locomotive was the invention of the derailments. The invention of the highway was the invention of three hundred cars colliding in five minutes. The invention of the airplane was the invention of the plane crash.60

And so on and so on. The radio’s role in the Titanic rescue, as I discuss above, is a prime example of this paradox. So too is radio’s use as both weapon and peacemaker during World War II, as is evidenced by Mann’s messages of death and reconstruction in his radio talks. But there is also a spatial way of looking at this modern paradox of progression and regression.

Extending the network While modernity is often thought of in terms of globalization and homogenization (progress), this expansion would not be possible without local foundations. In We Have Never Been Modern, Latour emphasizes such localization when he asks “Is a railroad local or global?” His answer: “Neither.” Instead, Latour argues that the railroad (and by extension all networks) are “local at all points, since you always find sleepers and railroad workers, and you have stations and automatic ticket machines scattered along the way. Yet it is global, since it takes you from Madrid to Berlin or from Brest to Vladivostok. However, it is not universal enough to be able to take you just anywhere.”61 Thus for Latour, a network is not simply a universal system of channels or lines; instead, it is a list: a series of nodes—localized points— through which channels can pass if, and only if, the necessary infrastructure is in place. The spreading of networks, then, needs to be thought of with regard to the local as well as the global. Orwell’s failure to reach an Indian audience through his broadcasts (Chapter 4) can certainly be thought of in these terms, but so too can Mann’s BBC broadcasts. In fact, this dichotomy is found throughout modernist literature, where Joyce’s Dublin and Mann’s Alpine sanatorium act as microcosms of the modern world. As Latour writes, “There are continuous paths that lead from the local to the global, from the circumstantial to the universal, from the contingent to the necessary.”62 By

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way of a conclusion to this chapter, then, I would like to briefly turn to the materiality of Mann’s broadcasting system. This multi-nodal system, which required a uniquely complex joining of networks, shows that it is the form of this network, as much as it is the content of the broadcasts, which gives the radio-Mann a ghostly, even non-human, quality. Mann’s super-network began with the recording of his radio talks at the local NBC affiliate in L.A. These recordings were then transported via airplane to New York, where they were played over a telephone to the BBC station in London. Recorded once again from the phone, these talks were finally replayed over BBC long-wave so that they could be heard over the Volksempfänger (the Nazi-sanctioned radio) in Germany. The Volksempfänger, or people’s receiver, was an inexpensive radio created at the request of Goebbels and manufactured so that it could only receive regional and national broadcasts. This meant that short-wave transmissions from Britain and the U.S. (the type of broadcast Mann would have needed if his talks had been transmitted from L.A.) were not likely to have been heard. However, with the increased transmitting power of British long-wave during the war, German listeners willing to break the law were able to, with some difficulty, tune into Mann’s broadcasts. An example of a Volksempfänger can be seen in figure 6.3. In this propaganda publication from 1936, which states “All of Germany listens to the Führer with the Volksempfänger,” the primary use of this radio as a means of mass localized listening and national propaganda promotion is evident. The Volksempfänger, oversized and centrally located within the publication, serves as the national unifier. But, through this unification (notice all the people are facing the radio) the Volksempfänger also exacerbated international divisions. This Nazi-created radio purposely limited aspects of wireless functionality central to the tool’s original creation, which had been celebrated by Brecht less than a decade before. In Latourian terms, the use of the Volksempfänger in Nazi Germany meant that the nation lacked the radio infrastructure to receive foreign short-wave broadcasts, despite the perception of radio broadcasting as universal. Thus when it comes to understanding Mann’s radio transmissions in terms of networks, the local (or node) played a key role and determined the very shape the network took. By requiring the combination of various transport and communication networks in order to broadcast to Germany, Mann’s radio

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Figure 6.3: Der Volksempfänger (The People’s Receiver)

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transmissions are events both dependent upon the local (L.A., New York, London, Volksempfängers) and the universal. This expansion is, for theorists like Latour as well as Alexander Galloway and Eugene Thacker, an essential element of modern networks, and requires the inviting of “nonhumans” or “unhumans” into the networked system as equal players.63 Thus Mann’s transmissions to Germany are dependent upon the radio, phone, plane, and recording technology as much as they are upon the author, studio workers, pilots, and German listeners. The material history of Mann’s broadcasting, by which I mean the physical reality of the technological mediums transporting these broadcasts, acts as an interesting counter-narrative to the perception of radio transmission as taking place in a mystical and invisible ether. The example of Mann’s broadcasts as a result of both material and immaterial networks, however, pinpoints a fundamental contradiction of radio technology, which is that radio broadcasting is concerned with presence as much as it is with absence. Or as Sconce writes, “although [the wireless] provided the miracle of distant contact through the open atmosphere, wireless also threatened a sad estrangement that could occur even within the most intimate of communications.”64 In this state of simultaneous presence and absence, contact and distance, the radio speaker (in this case Mann) can no longer be solely described in terms of his humanness. Instead, the radio, which divorces the voice from the body and substitutes a mechanical box for physical presence, presents Mann as the literal ghost in the machine. The co-existence of the non-human and the human, often within the same location or even form, is not only a result of technologization. Occultism, with its séances and spirit materializations, also asks that non-humans interact and share the same physical space with human beings, while spirit mediums like Willy and Nino act as a reminder of the thin line between life and death, presence and absence. Hauntings from beyond the grave, then, are more than just the reemergence of the past into the present; they are also supernatural networks, which, like modern networks, “show us the unhuman in the human, that the individuated human subject is not the basic unit of constitution but a myriad of information, affects, and matters.”65 Mann’s broadcasts from L.A. are therefore more than an example of modernism’s immersion in popular culture and propaganda. These transmissions act as a reminder of one of modern literature’s, and indeed modernity’s, greatest paradoxes:

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that despite the progress made toward universalization, the local continues to play a pivotal role. This is, as I have discussed, true of modernism, but this is also true of our conception of time. Like his conclusion in The Magic Mountain, which foretells the physical death of Castorp on the battlefield after regaining his metaphorical life, Mann’s radio broadcasts show that just because we believe we have excised a ghost or the past does not mean that we can move forward without interruption. Instead, the past continues to infiltrate the present thereby complicating our perception of time as fluid. Thus Mann’s voice, speaking from the literal and figurative past, asks Germans to remember who they once were, just as archaic spiritualism continues to, even today, define the ways we think about modern technological progress.

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Epilogue

A Voice from the Other Side

In these final pages, I would like to address a question that I am frequently asked by insightful colleagues: “What about British and American writers who broadcasted for the other side?” My answer to this question has thus far been to say that that is a whole other kettle of fish, and one that requires its own book-length analysis. This, of course, was my way of sidestepping a very important question that I was not yet prepared to answer. While I do make gestures toward addressing this question in the previous pages, most notably in my discussion of Pound, I never fully articulate any position on modern writers at the Nazi microphone. To rectify this absence, albeit in a very limited capacity, I would like to spend these final pages discussing the interesting case of the English humorist P. G. Wodehouse’s Berlin broadcasts. By taking Wodehouse as my example of broadcasting for the other side, I am consciously focusing on a very specific type of Nazi radio propaganda that aligns, in many ways, with the radio work of authors discussed throughout this book. In doing so, I am not aiming to ignore the more vitriolic broadcasts of famous Axis propagandists like William Joyce (better known as Lord Haw Haw), Mildred Gillars (Axis Sally), and Fred W. Kaltenbach (Lord Hee Haw), but am rather looking to further complicate the divisions between propaganda and literature in wartime. I am also less interested in the political controversy surrounding Wodehouse’s broadcasts. My goal is to neither vilify nor defend his actions in broadcasting for Nazi Germany. The British government has of course already done both, having first investigated Wodehouse for treason and then later knighting him. Although the general consensus seems to be that Wodehouse made a very naïve decision when he agreed to broadcast

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from Berlin into America, it does not necessarily follow that these broadcasts were “innocuous” or any less propagandistic than those of Lord Haw Haw.1 On the contrary, in their narrativity and humorous tone, Wodehouse’s broadcasts about his time in internment posed, in many ways, a greater threat to American and British morale than more obviously rancorous propaganda.2 In his five broadcasts made from Berlin, Wodehouse tells the story of his experience as a German prisoner. As a resident of Le Touquet, France, when war broke out in 1939, Wodehouse, being still under the age of sixty, was classified as an “enemy national” and interned in France alongside other expats.3 In these short narratives, meant, according to Wodehouse, to assure his American fans of his safety, he recounts his imprisoned journey moving from freedom in France to a series of makeshift penitentiaries: two in Belgium (Loos and Liège) and then finally to Tost, Upper Silesia (now Poland). Released a few months before his sixtieth birthday, Wodehouse was invited by the German Foreign Office to deliver broadcasts to the U.S. about his time as a German prisoner of war. For Wodehouse, this was, as he claims, a chance to speak to his supporters across the Atlantic.4 For the German government, however, this was a unique opportunity to encourage a still-neutral America to stay out of the war. Thus, from their very inception, Wodehouse’s Berlin broadcasts were viewed as powerful pieces of propaganda by the German government—propaganda that relied upon the author’s stories being received by listeners as “information” rather than as sympathetic pleas in support of Nazism. (These broadcasts were, of course, recorded and, supposedly unbeknownst to Wodehouse, later broadcasted into Britain.) But even from this description of aims, a claim for complete innocence on the part of Wodehouse and his broadcasts seems a stretch. Although not explicitly supporting the Nazi regime, his narrative about his life under German guard paints a surprisingly generous depiction of his captors as cultured and well mannered. German occupation is described as being an inconvenience, but an inconvenience that ultimately encouraged British culture and artistry to flourish. But perhaps most problematic about these broadcasts from today’s point-of-view is their disturbing counterpoint to narratives of Jewish Holocaust survivors. Wodehouse’s lighthearted (even callous) description of all aspects of imprisonment, from riding in boxcars to not being provided with a sufficient quality (not quantity) of food, in retrospect makes light of

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the plight of millions of people in an even more disturbing way than direct propaganda ever could.5 From the earliest broadcasts, it is clear that Wodehouse’s description of captivity is not a story of survival, but rather a story of inconvenience. Throughout the broadcasts there are no moments of concern for his safety or the safety of his fellow internees; instead, the whole series of events is described as a thrilling page-turner. As he claims in his second broadcast: “My last waking thought, I remember, was that while this was a hell of a thing to have happened to a respectable old gentleman in his declining years, it was all pretty darned interesting, and I could hardly wait to see what the morrow would bring forth.”6 Such excitement in these circumstances seems out of place, an emotion more appropriate for pulp novels and radio serials such as The Shadow. And while one might claim, as Wodehouse did, that he was attempting to keep the English “stiff upper lip” in the face of danger, his lighthearted approach to being a prisoner is incongruous with the gravity of the historical moment. In fact, the description Wodehouse provides of his treatment in the hands of the Nazis suggests that he had no reason to fear for his life, especially in the earliest days of his internment. Filled with details of his packing the Complete Works of William Shakespeare, a pleasant car ride in which the sergeant in charge was in a “holiday mood […] infusing into the expedition something of the pleasant atmosphere of a school treat,” and his daily routine inside Loos Prison that included three meals a day (albeit not to his culinary liking) and the freedom to roam around, the biggest complaint Wodehouse makes amounts to a lament regarding his falling in class status due to a lack of passport.7 In an attempt at humor more appropriate to fiction than documentary, Wodehouse even remarks that he and his fellow internees were sympathetic to the plight of the guards who at most “rebuked [them] warmly,” stating that they allowed the guards to lock them up at night in order to create an atmosphere of peace and understanding.8 This description of a reversal of power, although historically inaccurate, would have suggested to listeners in the U.S. that the Nazi regime was far from the brutal invaders Allied propaganda suggested them to be, but rather welcomed and acknowledged an equality of status between America, Britain, and the Third Reich. Wodehouse’s description of his German captors is also rather striking for its mixture of sympathy and ridicule. The message is not that Nazi Germany

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is to be feared, but that these men and women are just like us and are also caught in an impossible situation. Indeed, Wodehouse even complains that the guards did not pay sufficient attention (either good or bad) to the British prisoners. The disinterest on the part of the Germans, what one might consider a blessing, is described by Wodehouse as leading to a “dull, depressing life.” As he states in his third broadcast, the prisoners “had the impression that the Germans didn’t really want us, but couldn’t quite bring themselves to throw us away.”9 Even in his sketch of the strictest Kommandant with which he came in contact during his internment, Wodehouse is able to rationalize and humanize his treatment. Despite being given extra marching parades and facing restrictions in daily activities, the British humorist states that he “can find excuses for” the Kommandant’s actions. In a comical anecdote, he imagines a situation in which the Kommandant starts each day “all sweetness and light, toddling along with the milk of human kindness sloshing about inside him and his heart full of love for all created things,” only to have his day become increasingly cumbersome and frustrating as he makes his long walk from his home in the local town to the camp. His revenge for this long walk is to make the British prisoners feel the same pain.10 The degree of levity of the internment camp commander’s characterization erases any potentiality these broadcasts had at being labeled “innocuous.” Although one might argue that they highlight the absurdity of Wodehouse’s situation, such nuances (if they exist) are likely to have been lost on a listening audience. The Kommandant’s characterization as understandably irascible also plays into Wodehouse’s larger stereotypical depiction of German officers as obsessed with order and punctuality. Take for example the fictional conversation between the Kommandant at Loos and a German Sergeant about transporting the British prisoners: One can picture the interview between him and the Sergeant when the latter returned. “Did those boys catch that train all right?” “Yes, sir. By eight hours and twenty minutes.” “Whew! Close thing. Mustn’t run it so fine another time.”11

As in the narrative of the Kommandant’s walk to work, the comedic effect of this imagined interview is more akin to schoolhouse jest than it is to any

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serious criticism of the Nazi regime. Far from Adorno and Horkheimer’s claim in Dialectic of Enlightenment that the extreme efficiency in German history enabled the rise of Nazism, Wodehouse depicts this aspect of German culture as endearing, and even compares it to the way movies are produced in Hollywood. (In this comparison, Wodehouse actually anticipates Adorno.) But Wodehouse’s comparison of Nazi Germany and a still-neutral U.S., being broadcast from Germany to the U.S., has far different ramifications from that of Adorno’s. Whereas Adorno is openly and undeniably critical of a system that gave rise to both fascism and a mass-produced culture industry, Wodehouse’s tone expresses at most exasperation with different cultural processes. Despite noting some cultural idiosyncrasies, Wodehouse is, on the whole, complimentary of his German guards and accommodations. A particular highlight, especially by the fifth broadcast, seems to be the cultural and educational opportunities afforded by internment. In Tost, for example, Wodehouse describes an environment where British culture and religion flourished: “where our musicians practised and gave their concerts, where church services were held on Sundays, and where—after I had been given a padded cell to myself for working purposes—I eventually wrote a novel.”12 This depiction of a culturally sensitive Germany is a far cry from the claims made by broadcasters like MacLeish, Sayers, Orwell, and Priestley. But more than this, it is a naïve contradiction of the events of history, in which Nazi Germany invaded and bombed foreign lands, imprisoned Jews and foreign nationals, and destroyed cultural objects, such as books and paintings, that were deemed degenerate. In the final moments of his last broadcast, Wodehouse leaves his listeners with the distinct impression that internment, far from being an inconvenience, is in fact an educational blessing. As a quick aside, he suggests that prison camps were cosmopolitan sites where a variety of European languages could be learned. Referring to his fellow prisoners as “not so much internees as a student body,” who are even able to publish a bimonthly newspaper entitled “The Tost Times,” Wodehouse completely attenuates the significance of the historical moment and the plight of all German prisoners across Europe.13 Wodehouse’s famed humor, on full display in these broadcasts, retrospectively presents the author as callous. Even the title he gives these narratives, “How to be an Internee in Your Spare Time without Previous Training,” sounds like a self-help guide rather than a survivor’s tale. But, of course, that

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was the goal. Wodehouse was not meant to be seen as a survivor (although we might argue that he is), nor was he meant to be seen as a prisoner (which he certainly was). These broadcasts were part of a much larger Nazi propaganda machine, one of the most sophisticated propaganda machines of the war, and were just as calculated and controlled as anything the BBC might have produced for its foreign listeners. Thus it is little surprise that as the internees travel closer to Germany throughout the broadcasts, the treatment of the prisoners improves and the mood of the broadcasts lighten. In fact, by the end of the fifth broadcast Wodehouse’s time as British Civilian Prisoner 796 seems less like an inconvenience and more like an opportunity for collaboration and communion: “the morale of the men at Tost was wonderful. I never met a more cheerful crowd, and I loved them like brothers.”14 Yet while the Berlin broadcasts were far from harmless, it would also be inaccurate to say that they were simply puff-pieces for the Nazi regime. Wodehouse’s detailing of his travel in cattle cars under the SS is a particularly memorable moment of the third broadcast. In his description of the cramped quarters, which left no room for stretched legs, and the holes on the car floor, which caused cold winds to freeze the inmates, one is reminded of the transportation of Jewish prisoners to the concentration camps. The inclusion of these moments in a radio series that is supposed to keep America out of the war seems counterintuitive. But in reality, this is one of the strongest moments for the Nazi propagandists. By including these small humorless moments that cast Nazi Germany in a less-than-favorable light throughout the broadcasts, Wodehouse’s narrative remains in the realm of “information.” Indeed, for Wodehouse, these broadcasts were literature—“the story of [his] adventures”—and far removed from the realm of propaganda.15 In his ability to criticize his treatment at the hands of the Nazis, Wodehouse creates a type of informational propaganda akin to Orwell’s and Anand’s broadcasts for the Indian Section of the BBC. Wodehouse’s radio work, however, lacks the levels of complexity that the Indian Section achieved, a complexity that allowed the cosmopolitan group to praise the British war effort while simultaneously criticizing Britain’s imperial policies. Such calls for neutrality were common among American and British citizens who broadcasted on behalf of the Axis powers. Pound’s broadcasts to the U.S., as discussed in Chapter 5, sent a similar message to American

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listeners, albeit in a more direct talk form. Modern writer and Irish republican Francis Stuart also took to Nazi controlled airwaves to encourage neutrality, this time among Irish listeners. While I do not want to delve into, in these concluding pages, Ireland’s complex political and broadcast history during World War II, noting the similarities between Stuart’s broadcasts and those of Wodehouse highlights the need for a reevaluation of propaganda and its place within modernist history. Between March 1942 and February 1944, Stuart made over 100 broadcasts from Germany to Ireland. These broadcasts revolved around a few common themes: 1) that these broadcasts were not propaganda; 2) that Ireland must remain neutral during the war; 3) that Ireland must tether itself to Europe in order to regain its six counties from the British Commonwealth; and 4) that Ireland must remove itself from “the great world financial system” represented by the U.S. and Britain, a point that should also be understood as coded in the language of anti-Semitism.16 All of these talking points were part of the larger Nazi propaganda campaign to Ireland. But what is also remarkable about these points is how many of them apply to other broadcasts discussed throughout this book on both Allied and Axis sides. Certainly Stuart’s concern over the capitalist system and its “international financiers” resembles Pound’s anti-Semitic rants in his Rome broadcasts.17 Likewise, his calls for Irish neutrality match the German government’s intent in broadcasting Wodehouse’s narrative to America. This desire to keep America out of the war was also the goal of Pound’s broadcasts. Even the notion of creating a unified European culture is found in Allied broadcasts by Orwell, Sayers, and Eliot, although in these instances Britain is described as leading the cultural unification, rather than impeding it. But perhaps the most common claim among modernist broadcasters discussed in this book is one that Stuart addresses in the opening of his very first broadcast, namely that these broadcasts did not fall under the category of propaganda: “I am not trying to make propaganda. […] my only desire is to put before you very simply my idea of Ireland’s place in the world and her future.”18 But Stuart’s claim to and for neutrality during the war is, like all the other broadcasters I’ve discussed, far from accurate. In his introduction to Stuart’s broadcasts, Brendan Barrington makes an astute observation on the nature of wartime broadcasting: space matters. Speaking from Germany over Nazi airwaves,

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Stuart’s broadcasts had no possibility of ever being neutral. They were always a part of the Nazi propaganda machine. The same is true of Wodehouse’s broadcasts.19 But the same is also true of the modernists who broadcasted on behalf of the Allies. While some writers, like Mann, MacLeish, Sayers, and Eliot, were more upfront about their political goals in taking to the microphone on behalf of Britain and America, others, like Orwell, Anand, and MacNeice were less inclined to celebrate their new propaganda roles. And while none of the aforementioned authors, with the exception of perhaps MacLeish, directly stated the need for literary propaganda, all those I’ve discussed certainly understood that their informational broadcasts were far from innocent. Yet it was not only content and space that defined BBC and CBS broadcasts as propaganda, it was also the medium and the time. In their recent collection on propaganda, Jonathan Auerbach and Russ Castronovo suggest that the analysis of propaganda depends as much on content as it does on the medium through which the propaganda is transmitted.20 This differentiation, I would argue, is heightened in a time of war. Take for example Wodehouse’s captivity narrative. Had this been published in print after the war had ended, an audience would have been more likely to read his story as an exaggerated and humorous account of his wartime experience. But because Wodehouse delivered this narrative from a non-neutral space during the war, the reception of his broadcasts, both during the war and after, were very different. The porousness between propaganda and information is further intensified by the literariness of the broadcasts I’ve discussed. The pleasurable properties that connect propaganda and literature is a key reason why many of these broadcasts were originally produced and why some have remained relevant long after World War II’s end.21 Once again, Wodehouse’s broadcasts provide an example of this connection. Like that of each author in this study, Wodehouse’s radio work proves that we need to find a new description for the relationship between literature and propaganda, as the “fine line” that previously divided the two has been all but erased. Propaganda, like literature, relies on pleasure in order to reach its audience and to ensure that its dissemination is perpetuated. Such similarities have naturally led many critics to call for a redefinition of the term propaganda. Modernism at the Microphone,

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however, asks that we take this redefinition one step further. In the process of rearticulating the boundaries of propaganda, we also need to reevaluate our definition of literature, and nowhere is this truer than in the field of modernism.

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Notes Acknowledgments 1. Notre Dame Archives, “Wireless Transmission at Notre Dame,” http://www. archives.nd.edu/about/news/index.php/2010/wireless-transmission-atnotre-dame/#.VG5A71fF-zt (accessed October 2, 2014).

Introduction: The Voices of War   1. Ezra Pound, “The Teacher’s Mission,” The English Journal 23.8 (October 1934): 630.   2. Mark Goble, Beautiful Circuits: Modernism and the Mediated Life (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), 3.   3. The dedication reads: “To Marshall McLuhan ‘A catalogue, his jewels of conversation.’” Kenner also credits McLuhan for “getting [him] in touch with Ezra Pound in the first place” in the acknowledgments to The Pound Era.   4. Friedrich Kittler, “The History of Communication Media,” http://www.hydra. umn.edu/kittler/comms.html (accessed May 24, 2012) and “Wellenartillerie,” Kunstradio, www.kunstradio.at/1988B/ 27_10_88/drei.html (accessed February 21, 2012).   5. Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994), 7; Friedrich Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, trans. Geoffrey Winthrop-Young and Michael Wutz (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1999), xxxix.   6. Ezra Pound, “I Gather the Limbs of Osiris,” in Selected Prose: 1909–1965, eds Ezra Pound and William Cookson (New York: New Directions, 1975), 25.   7. John Dos Passos, “What Makes a Novelist,” in John Dos Passos: The Major Nonfictional Prose, ed. Donald Pizer (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1988), 272.   8. Although critics commonly associate the cinematic form of Manhattan Transfer with the montage of Eisenstein, Donald Pizer shows that such a connection

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  9. 10. 11. 12.

13.

14.

15. 16. 17. 18. 19.

is ahistorical as Dos Passos would not become acquainted with Eisenstein’s work until after he finished the novel. Rather, Griffith is the filmic model for the novel. Toward a Modernist Style: John Dos Passos (New York: Bloomsbury, 2013), 31–2. Rebecca West, The Return of the Soldier (New York: Penguin, 1998), 5. Mark Wollaeger, Modernism, Media, and Propaganda: British Narrative from 1900–1945 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), 217. T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land, in The Waste Land, Prufrock and Other Poems (Mineola, NY: Dover, 1998), 37. Michael North reveals Eliot’s interest and participation in mass culture in Reading 1922: A Return to the Scene of the Modern (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). Wyndham Lewis has a similarly Luddite reputation, largely due to his criticism of Charlie Chaplin and the cinema in Time and Western Man. Yet by the 1930s, Lewis’s perception on the cinema and mass culture had shifted, so much so, in fact, that he claims Vorticism as the predecessor to Chaplin. Scott W. Klein, “Modern Times against Western Man: Wyndham Lewis, Charlie Chaplin and Cinema,” in Wyndham Lewis and the Cultures of Modernity, eds Andrzej Gasiorek et al. (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011), 142. Bonnie Kime Scott, “The Subversive Mechanics of Woolf ’s Gramophone in Between the Acts,” in Virginia Woolf in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, ed. Pamela L. Caughie (New York and London: Garland Publishing, 2000), 102. Virginia Woolf, Between the Acts (San Diego, New York, and London: Harcourt, 1970), 76, 154. Melba Cuddy-Keane argues that despite Woolf ’s relative silence about technology, it had a “pervasive presence throughout her work.” “Virginia Woolf, Sound Technologies, and the New Aurality,” in Virginia Woolf in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, ed. Pamela L. Caughie (New York and London: Garland Publishing, 2000), 74. Michael North, Camera Works: Photography and Twentieth-Century Word (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), v. Evelyn Waugh, Put Out More Flags (New York, Boston and London: Little, Brown & Co., 1942), 151, 191. Douglas Kahn, Noise, Water, Meat: A History of Sound in the Arts (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1999), 21. F. T. Marinetti, “The Founding and the Manifesto of Futurism,” in Modernism: An Anthology, ed. Lawrence Rainey (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2005), 3. F. T. Marinetti, “Destruction of Syntax—Radio Imagination—Words-in-Freedom,” in Modernism: An Anthology, ed. Lawrence Rainey (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2005), 30. In a footnote, Lawrence Rainey explains that the phrase “wireless imagination”

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is translated from the Italian, imaginazione senza fili, which can be literally translated as “imagination without strings.” Senza fili, which can also be translated as “without wires,” became a common name for radio in Italian. See Lawrence Rainey, ed., Modernism: An Anthology (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2005), 19. 20. Ibid., 31. 21. In The Futurist Moment, Marjorie Perloff positions Futurism as the forerunner to modernism when, in her second-to-final chapter, she discusses Pound and Vorticism. The Futurist Moment: Avant-Garde, Avant Guerre, and the Language of Rupture (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1986). James G. Mansell also argues for a connection between Vorticism (namely Wyndham Lewis) and Futurism. He suggests that despite Lewis’s criticism of Futurism and its Bergsonian favoring of temporarlity and sound over space and image, the “self-contradiction and conflict” inherent in Vorticism means that the two movements were more similar than Lewis’s writing at first suggests. “Sound and the Cultural Politics of Time in the Avant-garde: Wyndham Lewis’s Critique of Bergsonism,” in Wyndham Lewis and the Cultures of Modernity, eds Andrzej Gasiorek et al. (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011), 123. 22. There is a growing movement among literary scholars to extend modernism into the 1940s. This is one of the suggestions made by Douglas Mao and Rebecca Walkowitz in their 2008 PMLA article “The New Modernist Studies.” Authors who have recently offered extensive analysis of World War II modernism include: Patrick Deer, Culture in Camouflage: War, Empire, and Modern British Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009); Kristin Bluemel, George Orwell and the Radical Eccentrics: Intermodernism in Literary London (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004); Jed Esty, A Shrinking Island: Modernism and National Culture in England (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004); Marina MacKay, Modernism and World War II (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007); and Mia Spiro, Anti-Nazi Modernism: The Challenges of Resistance in 1930s Fiction (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2013). 23. On December 11, 1901 Marconi successfully transmitted the first international signal (a Morse code letter “S”) from Cornwall to St John’s, Newfoundland. Seán Street, A Concise History of British Radio, 1922–2002 (Devon: Kelly Publications, 2002), 14. By this time, Marconi has already given several lectures to the general public (“Telegraphy without Wires” [1896] and “Signalling through Space without Wires” [1897]) on the use of the wireless for the public. 24. See Street, A Concise History of British Radio as well as Asa Briggs, The History of Broadcasting in the United Kingdom: Volume 1: The Birth of

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25.

26. 27. 28. 29.

30.

31.

32. 33.

Broadcasting (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995); Daniel Gilfillan, Pieces of Sound: German Experimental Radio (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009); Jonathan Sterne, The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003). As early as 1916 David Sarnoff of the Marconi Wireless Telegraph Company of America famously conceives of radio as a “Radio Music Box.” And in 1918 Arthur Burrows of the Marconi Company in Britain writes in the Yearbook of Wireless Telegraphy and Telephony that radio will be used “as a means of transmitting news, live concerts and advertising.” Street, A Concise History of British Radio, 17. Hadley Cantril and Gordon W. Allport, The Psychology of Radio (Salem: Ayer Co., 1986), 15. Rudolf Arnheim, Radio: An Art of Sound, trans. Margaret Ludwig and Herbert Read (London: Faber & Faber, 1971), 238. Bertolt Brecht, “Explanations,” in Bertolt Brecht on Film and Radio. trans and ed. Marc Silberman (Methuen: London, 2000), 39. The radio play was initially performed on July 27, 1929 at Baden-Baden. However, this production was not broadcast. The final rehearsal was broadcast in Breslau on the same day, and was later broadcast in Frankfurt on July 28 and Köln on July 29. In 1950, the title of the play was changed to Der Ozeanflug due to Lindbergh’s sympathy with National Socialism. Brecht did not want the person to be more significant than the message of the play. See Wolfram Wessels, “Das Lehrstück aus der Katastrophe: Von der ‘Sintflut’ zum ‘Ozeanflug’ Brecht als Pionier des Radios. Ein Essay mit Tondokumenten,” Alles was Brecht ist … (Südwestfunk: Baden-Baden, 1998), 18–19, 21. For original German see Bertolt Brecht, Der Flug der Lindberghs, in Bertolt Brecht Ausgewählte Werke in sechs Bänden, Band 1 (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1997). Bertolt Brecht, The Flight Across the Ocean (Der Ozeanflug), from Brecht: Collected Plays 3 (London: Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, 2014). Used by permission of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. Brecht was not the only author to write a radio drama about Lindbergh’s flight. Ivan Goll’s “Ode an Charles Lindbergh” (1927) and Schirokauer’s “Ozeanflug” (1928), among others, came before. “Aber meldet meinen Kameraden in den Ryanweken von San Diego / Daß ihre Arbeit gut war. / Unser Motor hat ausgehalten / Ihre Arbeit war ohne Fehler.” Brecht, The Flight Across the Ocean, 301. Brecht, “Explanations,” 39. “das gemeinsame / Absingen der Noten / Und das Ablesen des Textes.” Brecht, The Flight Across the Ocean, 287.

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34. This revisionist account also aimed to challenge the perception (largely American) that Lindbergh’s success was due to luck, rather than collective work. Brecht mentions the propensity towards luck in the play, as one of the headings reads “WÄHREND DES GANZEN FLUGES SPRACHEN ALLE AMERIKANISCHEN ZEITUNGEN UNAUFHÖRLICH VON LINDBERGHS GLÜCK.” (“During the entire flight all the American newspapers spoke continuously about Lindbergh’s luck.”). Ibid., 296. Even songs (such as the famous “Lucky Lindy”) focused on Lindbergh’s good fortune. 35. Bertolt Brecht, “The Radio as a Communications Apparatus,” in Bertolt Brecht on Film and Radio, trans. and ed. Marc Silberman (London: Methuen, 2000), 42. 36. Bertolt Brecht, Letters 1913–1956, trans. Ralph Manheim, ed. John Willett (New York: Routledge, 1990), 125. 37. Ibid. 38. After its earliest production, The Flight Across the Ocean became a play for school children. This new version was broadcast on March 31, 1931 in Frankfurt. It was imagined that the play would be broadcast a first time, so that children could listen, and if they wanted to participate in the play there would be an encore production, in which the children would sing the role of Lindbergh while listening to the broadcast. See Wessels, “Das Lehrstück aus der Katastrophe,” 22. 39. Kittler, “The History of Communication Media,” 8. 40. Joseph Goebbels, “The Radio as the Eighth Great Power,” German Propaganda Archive, ed. and trans. Randall Bytwerk et al., http://www.calvin.edu/academic/ cas/gpa/goeb56.htm (accessed February 9, 2012). 41. Stephen Kern, The Culture of Time and Space 1880–1918 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003), 244. 42. Brecht, The Flight Across the Ocean, 293. 43. Ibid., 301. 44. Ibid., 302. 45. The sporadic availability of translations in English is a major setback for Anglo-American critics interested in Benjamin’s radio work. However, with the growing interest in radio studies, more of Benjamin’s radio work is being translated. See, for example, Lecia Rosenthal’s recent book Radio Benjamin, translated by Jonathan Lutes (London: Verso, 2014). Texts in English written on Benjamin’s broadcast work include: Graeme Gilloch, Walter Benjamin: Critical Constellations (Cambridge: Polity, 2002); Jeffrey Mehlman, Walter Benjamin for Children: An Essay on His Radio Years (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1993); Lecia Rosenthal, Mourning Modernism: Literature,

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46.

47.

48.

49.

50.

51.

52.

Catastrophe, and the Politics of Consolation (New York: Fordham University Press, 2011); and Gerhard Schulte, “Walter Benjamin’s ‘Lichtenberg,’” Performing Arts Journal 14.3 (1992): 33–6. The figure of Kaspere is a clown-like character that has been popular in Germanic nations from the seventeenth century. Associated with puppet theater, Kaspere is very similar to the figure of Mister Punch from “Punch and Judy.” Much Ado about Kasper was broadcast a second time on September 9, 1932 on Jugendfunk des Westdeutschen Rundfunks in Köln under Carl Heil’s direction. The second broadcast was noticeably shorter than the first. Benjamin also wrote a revised version of this broadcast called Kasper and the Radio (Kasper und der Rundfunk), which now only exists in outline form. Erik Granly Jensen’s analysis of this revised production, which shares many similarities with the original, can be found in “Collective Accoustic Space: LINGA and Radio in the Weimar Republic (Brecht, Benjamin),” in Radio Territories, eds Erik Granly Jensen and Brandon LaBelle (Los Angeles and Copenhagen: Errant Bodies Press, 2007), 163–7. This opening scene is most likely a nod to Brecht’s Man Equals Man, on which Benjamin had previously written, where Galy Gay also begins his adventure by searching for a fish. The duplication of this act immediately marks Benjamin’s radio play as a didactic broadcast, as Man Equals Man is categorized as one of Brecht’s learning plays. “Die hohe feierliche Ehre, im Rundfunk zu sprechen” / “Dann hört man dich auf der ganzen Welt.” Walter Benjamin, Radau um Kasperl, in Gesammelte Schriften 4.2, ed. Tillmann Rexroth (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1972), 677–8. Michael North argues that Benjamin, who wrote essays on Charlie Chaplin and Mickey Mouse, was fascinated by comedy. There was something intrinsically funny about the processes of mechanical reproduction that Benjamin taps into in his critiques of film. Machine-Age Comedy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). Thus, it makes sense that Benjamin would attempt to connect the comic figure of Kasper with the reproducibility of radio. The following translation lacks the rhyme scheme apparent in the German version: “Then what is man without philosophy? / Livestock / For that matter man is also hungry. Can man live from his genius? / Never […] So I will take a rich widow / Oh no / Then I have money, what stops me from enjoying? Sorrow.” Benjamin, Radau um Kasperl, 685. Quoted by Schulte, “Walter Benjamin’s ‘Lichtenberg,’” 33. “Die Grundabsicht dieser Modelle ist eine didaktische. Gegenstand der Unterweisung sind typische dem Alltagsleben entnommene Situationen. Die Methode der Unterweisung

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besteht in der Konfrontation von Beispiel und Gegenbeispiel.” Walter Benjamin, “Hörmodelle,” in Gesammelte Schriften 4.2, ed. Tillmann Rexroth (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1972), 628. There is evidence that Benjamin wrote at least five Hörmodelle, but only three remain in written form: Gehaltserhohung?! Wo denken Sie hin! (A raise?! Whatever gave you that idea!), Der Junge sagt einem kein wahres Wort (The boy is always telling lies), and Kannst du mir bis Donnerstag aushelfen? (Can you help me out ‘til Thursday?). Schulte, “Walter Benjamin’s ‘Lichtenberg,’” 33. 53. John Bell, American Puppet Modernism: Essays on the Material World in Performance (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 8–9. 54. Ibid. 55. Walter Benjamin, “Reflections on Radio,” in The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility and Other Writings on Media, trans. Edmund Jephcott et al. and eds Michael W. Jennings et al. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2008), 391. 56. “Jetzt hab ich zum ersten Mal gehört, wie der Rundfunk ist.” Benjamin, Radau um Kasperl, 695. 57. Walter Benjamin, “Two Types of Popularity,” in The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility and Other Writings on Media, trans. Edmund Jephcott et al. and eds Michael W. Jennings et al. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2008), 405. 58. Kahn, Noise, Water, Meat, 10. 59. Goebbels, “The Radio as the Eighth Great Power.” 60. Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn and ed. Hannah Arendt (New York: Schocken Books, 1968), 241. 61. Paul Virilio’s The Great Accelerator, trans. Julie Rose (Cambridge: Polity, 2012) and Unknown Quantity (New York: Thames & Hudson, 2002). 62. Virilio, Unknown Quantity, 7. 63. Bernhard Siegert, Relays: Literature as an Epoch of the Postal System, trans. Kevin Repp (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1999), 1; Michel Serres, Parasite, trans. Lawrence R. Schehr (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007). 64. Hugh Kenner, The Mechanic Muse (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), 6; and Nicholas Daly, Literature, Technology, and Modernity, 1860–2000 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 2. See also Tim Armstrong, Modernism, Technology, and the Body (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). 65. Goble, Beautiful Circuits, 3.

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188 Notes 66. Debra Rae Cohen, Michael Coyle, and Jane Lewty, eds, Broadcasting Modernism (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 2009); Matthew Feldman, Henry Mead, and Erik Tonning, eds, Broadcasting in the Modernist Era (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2014). 67. Douglas Kahn, Noise, Water, Meat, 9; Emily Thompson, The Soundscape of Modernity: Architectural Acoustics and the Culture of Listening in America, 1900–1933 (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2002), 9. 68. Edmund Wilson, Axel’s Castle: A Study of the Imaginative Literature of 1870–1930 (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1931), and John Lehmann, New Writing in Europe (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1940). 69. Lawrence Rainey, Institutions of Modernism: Literary Elites and Public Culture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), 6 and North, Reading 1922. See also Christopher Butler, Early Modernism: Literature, Music, and Painting in Europe, 1900–1916 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994); Kern, The Culture of Time and Space; and Jean-Michel Rabaté, 1913: The Cradle of Modernism (Malden, MA: Wiley Blackwell, 2007). Even Kern’s most recent book on modernism only discusses literature between the dates of 1900 and 1940: The Modernist Novel: A Critical Introduction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011). 70. Tyrus Miller, Late Modernism: Politics, Fiction, and the Arts Between the World Wars (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999). 71. Esty, A Shrinking Island, 3. Esty’s text is a response to Hugh Kenner’s A Sinking Island: The Modern English Writers (New York: Knopf, 1988). 72. MacKay, Modernism and World War II, 21, 6. 73. Ehrhard Bahr, Weimar on the Pacific: German Exile Culture in Los Angles and the Crisis of Modernism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007). 74. Michele Hilmes, Network Nations: A Transnational History of British and American Broadcasting (New York: Routledge, 2012). Some more recent nation-focused accounts of radio broadcasting include Briggs, The History of Broadcasting in the United Kingdom; Susan J. Douglas, Listening In: Radio and the American Imagination, from Amos’ n’ Andy and Edward R. Murrow to Wolfman Jack and Howard Stern (New York: Random House, 1999); John Drakakis, ed., British Radio Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981); Michele Hilmes, Radio Voices: American Broadcasting, 1922–1952 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997); Gilfillan, Pieces of Sound; Neil Verma, Theater of the Mind: Imagination, Aesthetics, and American Radio Drama (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012). 75. Gerd Horten, Radio Goes to War: The Cultural Politics of Propaganda during

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World War II (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 2–3. For a discussion of World War II as a radio war see also Douglas, Listening In and Marianna Torgovnick, War Complex: World War II in Our Time (Chicago: University Chicago Press, 2005). 76. Brett Gary, The Nervous Liberals: Propaganda Anxieties from World War I to the Cold War (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), 1. See also John M. MacKenzie, Propaganda and Empire: The Manipulation of British Public Opinion, 1880–1960 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984); Holly Cowan Shulman, The Voice of America: Propaganda and Democracy, 1941–1945 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990); and Wollaeger, Modernism, Media, and Propaganda. 77. Douglas, Listening In, 179. 78. Cyril Connolly, “Comment,” Horizon 1.5 (May 1940): 314. 79. Stephen Spender, “September Journal,” Horizon 1.5 (May 1940): 356. 80. Jeffrey Meyers, Orwell: Wintry Conscience of a Generation (New York and London: W. W. Norton, 2000), 197. George Orwell even gave a radio talk entitled “Paper is Precious” for the Indian Section on January 8, 1942. 81. Quoted in Horten, Radio Goes to War, 23. For a discussion of the radio image’s power see Alec Nisbett, The Sound Studio, 5th edn (Oxford and Boston: Focal Press, 1993), 330–5. 82. Douglas, Listening In, 180. 83. Jussi Parikka, interview by Michael Dieter, “New Materialism and Non-Humanisation,” Speculative Realities, 23–4, http://v2.nl/files/2013/ebooks/ speculative-realities-blowup-reader-6-pdf (accessed October 14, 2010). 84. Michele Hilmes, “‘The New Vehicle of Nationalism’: Radio Goes to War,” in The Oxford Handbook of Propaganda Studies, eds Jonathan Auerbach and Russ Castronovo (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 203. The Empire Service was inaugurated on December 19, 1932 in order to provide radio service to the far reaches of the British Empire. In 1942, this service was renamed the Overseas Service, a name which reflected, as John MacKenzie observes, the “changing circumstances in Britain’s world situation.” “Propaganda and the BBC Empire Service, 1932–42,” in Propaganda, Persuasion and Polemic, ed. Jeremy Hawthorn (London: Edward Arnold Publishers, 1987), 52. 85. Wollaeger, Modernism, Media, and Propaganda, xi–xii. Cohen et al. point out that key modernists participated in and wrote material specifically for broadcasting. The essays in this edited collection focus on modernist

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190 Notes experiences with radio and suggest that the modernist relationship with audience/readers was in part shaped by broadcast culture.

Chapter 1: War on the Air   1. Max Horkheimer, “Art and Mass Culture,” Studies in Philosophy and Social Science 9.2 (1941): 295.   2. Friedrich Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, trans. Geoffrey WinthropYoung and Michael Wutz (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1986), 111.   3. Like most Hollywood films, The Wizard of Oz had numerous premieres and release dates. The studio presented the film to test audiences on August 11 and 12 with the Hollywood (15) and New York (17) premieres following shortly after. The film was finally released to the public on August 25, only one short week before war broke out in Europe on September 1, 1939.   4. Mladen Dolar also discusses the acousmatic voice in The Wizard of Oz, but does not connect the Wizard’s voice to radio. A Voice and Nothing More (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006), 61.   5. “Violence” here is not only a reference to historical events such as two World Wars, an economic depression, and the battles for and against the Progressive movement’s various initiatives, such as labor laws, trust-busting, and women’s suffrage. I am also thinking about violence in a manner similar to Walter Benjamin, who, as I discuss in the Introduction, suggests that violence is associated with aural technologies, such as the telephone in “A Berlin Chronicle” and the destruction of an art object’s aura due to mechanical reproduction in “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” As I discuss below, Adorno builds off of Benjamin’s theories and explicitly combines the violence of war with the violence of sound technology.   6. The mass panic in the Emerald City is easily associated with the Martian invasion in The War of the Worlds, which caused fictional and real panic in the Empire City and surrounding areas.   7. Dolar defines the acousmatic voice as “simply a voice whose source one cannot see, a voice whose origin cannot be identified, a voice one cannot place” and that with the advent of the radio, along with other early twentieth-century acoustic technologies, the acousmatic voice became both “universal” and “trivial.” A Voice and Nothing More, 60, 63. In The Voice in Cinema, Michel Chion also discusses the acousmatic voice, writing: “the radio is acousmatic by nature. People speaking on the radio are acousmêtres in that there’s no

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  9.

10.

11.

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possibility of seeing them.” The Voice in Cinema, ed. and trans. Claudia Gorbman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), 21. Philosophers have been fascinated with the division between sight and sound since Plato. See, for example, Plato, Phaedrus (Oxford: Oxford World Classics, 2009); René Descartes, Treatise of Man, trans. Thomas Steele Hall (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1972), 49; Guichard Joseph Duverney, A Treatise of the Organ of Hearing: Containing the Structure, the Uses, and the Diseases of all the Parts of the Ear, Eighteenth Century Collections Online, May 26, 2012, http://mlr.com/DigitalCollections/products/ecco/ (accessed February 1, 2012); Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994); Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974); Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (London: Methuen, 1982); Jonathan Sterne, The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003); Don Ihde, Listening and Voice: Phenomenologies of Sound, 2nd edn (New York: State University of New York Press, 2007); Veit Erlmann, Reason and Resonance: A History of Modern Auralilty (New York: Zone Books, 2010). According to Michele Hilmes, by the late 1930s U.S. radio had become institutionalized and highly profitable. Twenty-six million homes were on record as owning at least one radio and spent on average five hours a day listening in. There were three main national networks: NBC’s Red Network and Blue Network (the latter of which would become ABC in 1943) and CBS. See Radio Voices: American Broadcasting, 1922–1952 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 183. Radio was the most popular modern convenience of its day, beating out automobiles, telephones, electricity, and plumbing. Hadley Cantril with Hazel Gaudet and Herta Herzog, The Invasion from Mars: A Study in the Psychology of Panic (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1966), xii. Columbia Broadcasting System, “Seems Radio is Here to Stay: a Columbia Workshop Production”: A Columbia Workshop Production by Norman Corwin, illustrations by Rudolph Charles von Ripper (New York: Columbia Broadcasting System, 1939), 1. NBC put forth a publication entitled It’s Not Done with Mirrors in 1940 in order to deemphasize the sense of magic surrounding the radio through a discussion of the significance of market research for the medium. But as David Jenemann notes, the manuscript has the opposite effect: “It’s Not Done with Mirrors manages to mystify the relationship between empiricism and profits

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12.

13.

14. 15.

by suggesting that the process of data gathering is so organizationally complex that comprehending it is beyond the grasp of mere mortals.” See Adorno in America (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), 96 and National Broadcasting Company, It’s Not Done with Mirrors (New York: National Broadcasting Company, 1940). While Adorno did speak over the radio, his contributions were limited to talks and discussions, a notable difference from the creative pieces produced by Bertolt Brecht and Walter Benjamin. In fact, Adorno’s first time speaking over the radio was in the United States. Stefan Müller-Doohm, Adorno: A Biography, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Cambridge: Polity, 2005), 261. A comparison of Adorno’s exilic radio writings alongside Welles’ invasion-plot broadcast also challenges larger claims made about modern American literature as partaking in a “nationalist phase,” as Paul Giles argues in The Global Remapping of American Literature. Giles argues that from 1865 to 1981, U.S. literature reflected national concerns, and that this is related to the relative stability of the nation’s “geographical boundaries.” In contrast, the U.S. is currently in a transnational phase, which has more in common with America’s formative era, than it does with the decades directly preceding it. The Global Remapping of American Literature (Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2011), 21, 1. Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life, trans. E. F. N. Jephcott (London: Verso, 1974), 25. In the essay “On Jazz,” Adorno does not completely dismiss the new style of music. Instead, his essay is a response to critics who romanticize jazz as a form of “neue Sachlichkeit” (new objectivity) without analysis. Although Adorno is less than complimentary about jazz, viewing it as standardized and a product of monopoly capitalism, he argues that jazz needs to be studied and not simply praised: “For the purpose of providing a crude orientation, one could concede that it is that type of dance music—whether it be used in an unmediated or slightly stylized form—that has existed since the war and is distinguished from what preceded it by its decidedly modern character, a quality which itself, however, is sorely in need of analysis.” See “On Jazz,” Essays on Music, ed. Richard Leppert (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 470. But it also bears remembering that the “jazz” Adorno writes about is not AfricanAmerican jazz, but a jazz that has been appropriated by Europeans and white middle-class culture. Katherine Biers discusses a similar point in relation to “ragtime” music in “Syncope Fever: James Wheldon Johnson and the Black Phonographic Voice,” Representations 96 (Autumn 2006): 99–125.

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16. Andreas Huyssen, After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), ix. In his famous critique of “the great divide” between modernism and mass culture, Huyssen claims that our perception of modernism as “high art” largely evolves from Adorno’s theories on literature and the culture industry. Adorno wanted “to save the dignity and autonomy of the art work from the totalitarian pressures of fascist mass spectacles, socialist realism, and an ever more degraded commercial mass culture in the West.” Ibid. 17. A recent exception is Thomas Wheatland’s The Frankfurt School in Exile, which offers readers a comprehensive study of Adorno and fellow Frankfurt School members’ institutional interaction with Columbia University in the late 1930s and early 1940s. The Frankfurt School in Exile (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009). See also Thomas Y. Levin and Michael von der Linn, “Elements of a Radio Theory: Adorno and the Princeton Radio Research Project,” The Musical Quarterly 78.2 (1994): 316–24; Müller-Doohm, Adorno: a Biography; and Jenemann, Adorno in America. Jenemann’s is the most thorough study of Adorno’s engagement with the culture industry and in Adorno in America he warns that, “To dismiss Adorno as politically and socially detached is also to misunderstand how thoroughly he immersed himself in America’s myriad forms of entertainment and communication. Despite Adorno’s genuine horror at many elements of the culture industry, during his stay in the United States he nonetheless dedicated himself to its study from top to bottom, learning the principles of broadcasting, production, and transmission as well as the economic and technological conditions under which mass-culture texts were consumed” (p. xvii). 18. Müller-Doohm, Adorno: A Biography, 312–13. 19. Due to his exile status, Adorno needed employment in order to join his fellow Frankfurt School colleagues already established on the East Coast. With no available space at the Institute for Social Research, Max Horkheimer found Adorno work in research alongside fellow émigré Lazarsfeld at the PRRP, which later became the Office of Applied Social Research once its affiliation was transferred from Princeton to Columbia. 20. Müller-Doohm, Adorno: A Biography, 245. Thomas Levin and Michael von der Linn discuss Adorno’s early work on “light music” for the German journal Anbruch in “Elements of a Radio Theory: Adorno and the Princeton Radio Research Project,” The Musical Quarterly 78.2 (Summer 1994): 316–24. 21. A debate between the empirical and theoretical models of research takes place in Studies in Philosophy and Social Science 9.1 put forth by the Institute for

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22.

23.

24. 25.

26.

27. 28. 29. 30.

Social Research. Although this journal issue was supposed to be about mass media, with publications by both Lazarsfeld and Adorno included, the focus shifts to a debate on the merits of empiricism versus theory, which the two battled out daily at the PRRP. See also Jenemann, Adorno in America. Although Benjamin is often interpreted as celebrating the revolutionary power of radio and film, he also suggests that there is violence in this media. In his radio drama, Much Ado about Kasperl, Kasperl is hunted down by the radio industry and tricked into speaking on the air. It is this inherent violence that exists in one-way communications media like cinema and radio that is exploited by fascism. See the final pages of “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn and ed. Hannah Arendt (New York: Schocken Books, 1968). Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, ed. Gunzelin Schmid Noerr and trans. Edmund Jephcott (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2002), 94–6. Twenty years later Marshall McLuhan described radio in a strikingly similar manner, calling it a “hot” medium and “therefore, low in participation.” See Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994), 23. National Broadcasting Company, What Goes on Behind Your Radio Dial? (New York: National Broadcasting Company, 1943), 26. Emphasis Added. Theodor Adorno, “A Social Critique of Music,” Current of Music: Elements of a Radio Theory (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2006), 214. Adorno also describes this fatal circle in “On the Fetish Character in Music and the Regression of Listening,” in The Culture Industry, ed. J. M. Bernstien (London and New York: Routledge, 1991). Theodor Adorno, “On Popular Music,” Studies in Philosophy and Social Science 9.1 (April 1941): 38. Again, McLuhan will make a similar observation in Understanding Media: “the ‘content’ of a medium is like the juicy piece of meat carried by the burglar to distract the watchdog of the mind. The effect of the medium is made strong and intense just because it is given another medium as ‘content’” (p. 18). Theodor Adorno, “Culture Industry Reconsidered,” in The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture, ed. J. M. Bernstein (London: Routledge, 1991), 99. Theodor Adorno, “Analytical Study of the NBC Music Appreciation Hour,” in Current of Music (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2006), 249. Ibid., 251, 309, 284. It should be noted that in this essay Adorno offers extensive suggestions for improvements to the NBC Music Appreciation Hour, hinting at an optimistic

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side to Adorno. But these suggestions would have unrealistically required a complete overhaul of the U.S. broadcasting system, and thus also emphasize Adorno’s overall pessimism when it came to radio broadcasting. 31. This deterioration was largely eliminated with the invention of FM and, more recently, satellite radio. 32. Theodor Adorno, “The Radio Symphony: An Experiment in Theory,” Radio Research 1941, eds Paul F. Lazarsfeld and Frank N. Stanton (New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1941), 110–39. 33. Adorno, “Culture Industry Reconsidered,” 102. Adorno argues a similar position in “The Radio Voice.” 34. Theodor Adorno, “The Radio Voice,” Current of Music (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2006), 526. 35. CBS, Seems Radio is Here to Stay, 16. 36. Jenemann, Adorno in America, 78. 37. Theodor Adorno, “Radio Physiognomics,” in Current of Music (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2006), 81. 38. Ibid. 39. Adorno, “The Radio Voice,” 541–2. 40. Ibid., 540. 41. Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 129. 42. Raymond Williams, Communications (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1962), 10–11. 43. Much has been made of Koch’s writing The War of the Worlds and Welles’ claim to the contrary. Although Koch did write the script, it was brought to life by Welles and is known more commonly as his production. It is Welles who insisted on realism, and the anti-fascist elements throughout the play are most likely influenced by Welles’ theater history. 44. Robert Graves and Alan Hodge, The Long Week End: A Social History of Great Britain 1918–1939 (New York: The Macmillan Co., 1941), 81. 45. Cantril et al., The Invasion, 99–100. 46. According to Paul Heyer, by the late 1930s CBS had proclaimed itself “‘the news network’” and interrupted scheduled broadcasting for emergency news reports more often than its competitors. With news correspondents such as Edward R. Murrow and William Shirer already reporting from Europe by 1938 (including the recent events in Munich), CBS was well known as the network for all war related news. See The Medium and the Magician: Orson Welles, the Radio Years, 1934–1952 (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2005), 102. In fact, the Munich Crisis is, according to historian Gerd Horten, the event that marks American radio’s transition into “the preeminent medium for foreign news.” Radio Goes

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196 Notes to War: The Cultural Politics of Propaganda during World War II (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 22. 47. Simon Callow, Orson Welles: The Road to Xanadu (New York: Viking, 1995), 400. 48. Michael Denning, The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century (London: Verso, 1996), 362–84. 49. John Houseman, Run-Through (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1972), 297, 317. 50. It is also interesting to note that Welles was the narrator of The Fall of the City; and Air Raid, which was broadcasted only days before The War of the Worlds, used Mercury Theatre’s Ray Collins for its narration. 51. Theodor Adorno, “The Schema of Mass Culture,” The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture, ed. J. M. Bernstein (London: Routledge, 1991), 64. 52. Although there have been various estimates as to how many people listened to The War of the Worlds and how many of these listeners became frightened, most critics turn to Cantril’s famous PRRP study, The Invasion from Mars (1940). This empirical study suggests that one to two million people at some point believed the broadcast to be real. Only in extreme cases did panic ensue. More recently, academics have begun to challenge Cantril’s calculations. See, for example, Jefferson Pooley and Michael J. Socolow, “The Myth of the War of the Worlds Panic,” Slate, http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/history/2013/10/orson_welles_ war_of_the_worlds_panic_myth_the_infamous_radio_broadcast_did.html (accessed November 29, 2014). It is likely that Adorno’s dismissive positivist claim about the broadcast is a response to the fact that Cantril, his former boss, authored the study. This also explains why Adorno refers to the broadcast as “Invasion from Mars,” the title of Cantril’s study, rather than The War of the Worlds. 53. Heyer claims that a significant reason listeners panicked was due to “channel surfing” or dial twirling. Mercury Theatre on the Air was up against NBC’s extremely popular The Chase and Sanborn Hour, which featured ventriloquist Edgar Bergen and his dummy Charlie McCarthy. Listeners regularly tuned in to hear the banter between Bergen and McCarthy. But on this occasion, many turned their dial after the opening due to a boring singing act that followed. See The Medium and the Magician, p. 82 and Housemann, Run-Through, 395–6. Many who landed on CBS never turned their dials back to NBC, as they caught The War of the Worlds right at a news report, which, after the first few minutes, cleverly lessened the use of the word “Martian” in its broadcast. 54. Houseman, Run-Through, 393, 399, 401. 55. Jeffrey Sconce, Haunted Media: Electronic Presence from Telegraphy to Television (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000), 112.

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56. Orson Welles, The War of the Worlds, The Ultimate Orson Welles, Master Classics, 2005 [compact disc]. For reader ease, I have included the page numbers from the print edition: Howard Koch, The Panic Broadcast (Boston and Toronto: Little, Brown & Co., 1970), 37. 57. Adorno, “Radio Physiognomics,” 81. 58. Cantril et al., The Invasion, 68. 59. See Oxford English Dictionary Online, “report,” http://dictionary.oed.com (accessed January 21, 2012), and Michele Speitz, “Aural Chiaroscuro: The Emergency Radio Broadcast in Orson Welles’ The War of the Worlds,” English Language Notes 46.1 (2008): 193. 60. Speitz, “Aural Chiaroscuro,” 194. 61. The War of the Worlds in Koch, The Panic Broadcast, 55. 62. Ibid., 64. 63. Those listeners familiar with H. G. Wells’ oeuvre might also have thought of The War in the Air (1908), which anticipated the hazards of aerial warfare. 64. Pierson, played by Welles, was said to be so convincing that many listeners could not recognize his voice. This, of course, added to the panic. 65. The War of the Worlds in Koch, The Panic Broadcast, 40, 48. 66. Ibid., 51–2. 67. Dolar also connects silence and death in A Voice and Nothing More when he writes “The absence of voices and sounds is hard to endure; complete silence is immediately uncanny, it is like death, while the voice is the first sign of life” (pp. 13–14). 68. The War of the Worlds in Koch, The Panic Broadcast, 59. 69. Ibid., 67. This scene quickly ends with an announcement that listeners are hearing a production of The War of the Worlds. This is only the second announcement of its type and occurs forty minutes into the play. The late position of this announcement exacerbated the fears of the listeners. 70. Adorno, “On Popular Music,” 47. 71. Williams, Communications, 133–4.

Chapter 2: Militarizing the Messiah   1. Quoted in Kenneth M. Wolfe, The Churches and the British Broadcasting Corporation 1922–1956: The Politics of Broadcast Religion (London: SCM Press, 1984), 226.

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198 Notes   2. Asa Briggs, The History of Broadcasting in the United Kingdom, vol. 3 (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1995), 567.   3. The LDOS advertisement also ran in The English Churchman on December 18, 1941, the Church of England Newsletter on December 19, 1941, and the Sunday Dispatch on December 28, 1941. See Wolfe, The Churches and the British Broadcasting Corporation, 588 and Briggs, The History of Broadcasting, 567. The BBC, however, was used to complaints lodged against its religious programming. Often these complaints came from Protestants and Catholics who claimed that broadcasts by the other denomination were equivalent to religious propaganda. (This complaint was lodged more frequently by Protestants against Catholic broadcasts.) See Robert S. Fortner, Radio, Morality, and Culture: Britain, Canada, and the United States, 1919–1945 (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 2005), 57.   4. James Brabazon, Dorothy L. Sayers: A Biography (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1981), 204. See also Briggs, The History of Broadcasting, vol. 3.   5. Marina MacKay, Modernism and World War II (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 23. By reading Sayers’ play-cycle as participatory in the national wartime rebranding campaign, I complicate Patrick Deer’s presentation of wartime writers as resisting the dominant government image of the war. While I agree that modern authors like Sayers complicated “official visions” of war culture, such as “partiotic Englishness, fortified masculinity, and compliant feminimity,” and “challenge[d] its grand narrative productions,” this does not mean that other aspects of war culture, such as recycled time and “total” war, were not present. Patrick Deer, Culture in Camouflage: War, Empire, and Modern British Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 5.   6. J. B. Priestley, Britain Speaks (New York and London: Harper & Brothers, 1940), 13. Promoting American–British goodwill through radio was common practice, especially following Pearl Harbor. As Siân Nicholas notes, in the weeks after the U.S.’s entry into the war, tributes to the U.S. replaced normal broadcasting on the BBC. See The Echoes of War: Home Front Propaganda and the Wartime BBC, 1939–45 (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1996), 174. Even radio dramas participated in transatlantic solidarity; Louis MacNiece’s Christopher Columbus (1942), played over the North American Service, celebrates the U.S.’s founding on its 450th anniversary (see Chapter 3).   7. See Nicholas John Cull, Selling War: The British Propaganda Campaign Against American ‘Neutrality’ in World War II (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 69–125 and Michele Hilmes, Network Nations: A Transnational

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History of British and American Broadcasting (New York and London: Routledge, 2012), 87–104 on the transatlantic wartime relationship.  8. Priestley, Britain Speaks, 1.   9. The Blitz myth, that Britons (particularly Londoners) had a homogenous experience of the war, has been exploded by Agnus Calder in Myth of the Blitz and Kristine Miller, who writes, “the experience of the Blitz itself was not the same across classes, since people had very different routines and sheltering practices depending on social background.” Sara Wasson notes specific instances of inequality that have been erased from Blitz memory, such as struggles to find shelters in the East End. See Kristine A. Miller, British Literature of the Blitz: Fighting the People’s War (Houndsmills: Palgrave MacMillan, 2009), 14 and Sara Wasson, Urban Gothic of the Second World War: Dark London (Houndsmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 17. See also Cull, Selling War, 105. 10. Jo Fox, Film Propaganda in Britain and Nazi Germany: World War II Cinema (Oxford: Berg, 2007), 112. See also Deer’s Culture in Camouflage; Ian McClaine, Ministry of Morale: Home Front Morale and the Ministry of Information in World War II (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1979). 11. Mark Connelly, We Can Take It! Britain and the Memory of the Second World War (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2008), 131. 12. Fox, Film Propaganda, 113. 13. Although not focusing on sound, Mia Spiro disputes the Blitz’s “myth of equality” and shows that even authors who challenged the Nazi’s anti-Semitism, homophobia, and misogyny also included these features in their work. 14. J. W. Welch, “Forward,” in The Man Born to Be King: A Play-Cycle on the Life of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ (London: Victor Gollancz, 1946), 33. Supporters of the broadcasts made a similar claim with regard to the victories in Libya and Russia. 15. Dorothy L. Sayers, The Letters of Dorothy L. Sayers, vol. 2, ed. Barbara Reynolds (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996), 147. 16. Ibid., 146–7. 17. As Eliot writes in Notes Towards the Definition of Culture: “The first important assertion is that no culture has appeared or developed except together with a religion […] the culture will appear to be the product of the religion, or the religion the product of the culture.” Both writers believed that religion, and therefore British culture, was in decline; thus plays such as The Man Born to Be King were welcomed antidotes. See Notes Towards the Definition of Culture (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1949), 13. See also Eliot’s April 1941 talk, “Towards a Christian Britain,” for Sayers’ radio series “The Church Looks Ahead.”

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200 Notes 18. Mia Spiro, Anti-Nazi Modernism: The Challenges of Resistance in 1930s Fiction (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2013), 4. 19. Nicholas, The Echoes of War, 109. Nicholas describes the BBC as an “instrument of war.” Not only did the BBC work alongside the government and the MOI, but it also worked “independently [and] was responsible for fostering a more pervasive image of the Home Front, everyone making her or his vital contribution to the war effort” (pp. 2, 108). 20. See, for example, René Descartes’ Treatise of Man where Descartes divides the body from the soul and privileges vision over hearing. This continues throughout the Enlightenment, whose very name favors sight. But this division, which persists through to Derrida’s phonophobia in Of Grammatology, is a false dichotomy, as recent scholars such as Veit Erlmann in Reason and Resonance and Michel Serres in The Five Senses have asserted. 21. In Theater of the Mind, Neil Verma argues that radio drama should be understood as a “positive” medium, rather than one that “fabricates lack,” as it “evok[es] scenes through speech, reverb, filter, segue, and other devices directed at an imaginary allowing itself to be instructed.” See Theater of the Mind: Imagination, Aesthetics, and American Radio Drama (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2012), 9. 22. The Lord Chamberlain also asked that no audience be present at the broadcast, as this would blur the line between stage and radio where a voicing might become an impersonation. Welch, “Foreword,” 33. 23. Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994), 23. 24. G. Allport and H. Cantril, “Judging Personality from Voice,” Journal of Social Psychology 5.1 (1934): 49. Seventy years later, Mladen Dolar makes an even stronger claim for accuracy in identifying a speaker from his or her voice: “We can almost unfailingly identify a person by the voice, the particular individual timbre, resonance, pitch, cadence, melody, the peculiar way of pronouncing certain sounds. The voice is like a fingerprint, instantly recognizable and identifiable.” A Voice and Nothing More (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), 22. 25. Quoted in Brabazon, Dorothy L. Sayers: A Biography, 171–2. 26. Sayers, The Letters of Dorothy L. Sayers, 238. 27. Dorothy L. Sayers, The Man Born to Be King: A Play-Cycle on the Life of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ (London: Victor Gollancz, 1946), 208. 28. Ibid., 212. 29. Ibid., 62. Sayers’ description of Matthew in the notes as having “oily black hair and rapacious little hands” (ibid., 131) has added to the charge of anti-Semitism against her.

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30. Dolar, A Voice and Nothing More, 78. 31. Michael Coyle suggests that Eliot “valued radio for its capacity to project pure voice—speech unmediated by writing.” Sayers too plays with the idea of radio as projecting “pure voice” and its resulting visual implications throughout her play-cycle. See “T. S. Eliot on the Air: ‘Culture’ and the Challenges of Mass Communication,” in T. S. Eliot and Our Turning World, ed. Jewel Spears Brooker (New York: St. Martin’s, 2001), 144. 32. Theodor Adorno, “Radio Physiognomics,” in Current of Music (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2006), 81. 33. Coyle argues that, like Sayers, Eliot also turned to radio in order to build a community, but that such outreach did not require pandering to the baser interests of the population. See “Radio” in T. S. Eliot in Context, ed. by Jason Harding (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 149. While David E. Chinitz, suggests that it is radio’s “intimate” nature that attracted Eliot to the BBC in T. S. Eliot and the Cultural Divide (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 156–7. See also Robert S. Fortner’s Radio, Morality, and Culture: Britain, Canada, and the United States, 1919–1945 and Bill Kirkpatrick’s “Sounds Local: The Competition for Space and Place in Early U.S. Radio” in Sound in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011), 199–220 for a discussion of space and radio broadcasting. 34. Steven Connor, Dumbstruck: A Cultural History of Ventriloquism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 25 and Dolar, A Voice and Nothing More, 62. 35. Debra Rae Cohen, Michael Coyle, and Jane Lewty, eds, Broadcasting Modernism (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 2009), 3. 36. See Friedrich A. Kittler’s Discourse Networks 1800/1900, trans. Michael Metteer with Chris Cullens (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1990), John Duhram Peters’s Speaking into the Air: A History of the Idea of Communication (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), and Jeffrey Sconce’s Haunted Media: Electronic Presence from Telegraphy to Television (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000) on the supernaturalism of radio broadcasting. 37. Sayers, The Man Born to Be King, 213. 38. Ibid., 169–70. 39. “I AM” is a reference to John 8.58, where Jesus states: “In very truth I tell you, before Abraham was born, I am.” This is taken from “I AM that I am,” which is the English translation of the answer God gave to Moses when Moses asked his name. See Exodus 3.14. Thus, by stating “I AM” Jesus declares his divinity, but this declaration is lost upon a listening audience. Oxford Study Bible,

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202 Notes

40.

41.

42. 43.

44.

45.

eds M. Jack Suggs, Katharine Doob Sakenfeld, and James R. Mueller (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992). Dorothy L. Sayers, Begin Here: A War-Time Essay (London: Victor Gollancz, 1940), 11. Priestley and George Orwell also spoke of Britain’s re-birth, but in political terms. Priestley spoke about a “new world order” and a “new democracy” for Britain and her colonies post-war. Orwell, who broadcasted for the BBC’s Indian Section, wrote of England’s democratic–socialist future in The Lion and the Unicorn. See Priestley, Britain Speaks, 200. T. S. Eliot, “The Church’s Message to the World,” broadcasted February 1937. Published in the Appendix to The Idea of a Christian Society (London: Faber & Faber, 1939), 94. This talk was originally part of Revd F. A. Iremonger’s BBC series “Church, Community and State.” In an April 1941 broadcast on the Home Service, Eliot argued, like Sayers, that is was not enough to have “Christian feeling”; to win the war and create a better Britain, knowledge of “the dogmas of our faith” was needed. This broadcast was, in fact, part of a larger series on the Christian Church put together by Sayers for the BBC. See “Toward a Christian Britain,” The Listener XXV.639 (April 10, 1941): 524. Eliot, “The Church’s Message to the World,” 98. Quoted in Suzanne Bray, “Introduction,” in The Christ of the Creeds & Other Broadcast Messages to the British People during World War II (Hurstpierpoint: Dorothy L. Sayers Society, 2008), 29. Bray, “Introduction,” 31. Sayers’ war work extends beyond Begin Here and The Man Born to Be King. Before the war broke, Sayers worked as a writer for the Director of Public Relations for the War Office. She also found employment with the MOI, acted as an air-raid warden, and wrote a variety of published letters and articles about the war. See Barbara Reynolds, Dorothy L. Sayers: Her Life and Soul (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1993), 295–8. Sayers’ claims for Germany’s paganism at the expense of Christianity need to be questioned in light of recent historical studies. Although some Christian leaders were persecuted under Nazism, new historical evidence shows that Germany’s Protestant Church “actively supported the regime and fought for a Germanically sanitized version of Christianity that dispensed with the Old Testament on the grounds that is was ‘Jewish’, and rebranded Jesus Christ as a proto-nazi Nordic hero.” Paganism, it seems, was a less effective recruiting tool than the Protestant Church’s “Nazified Christianity” (Richard J. Evans, “Nazism, Christianity and Political Religion: A Debate,” Journal of Contemporary History 42.1 (January 2007): 6). See also Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke’s The Occult Roots of Nazism: Secret Aryan Cults and Their Influence on Nazi Ideoloy (New York:

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New York University Press, 1993); Richard Steigmann-Gall’s The Holy Reich: Nazi Conceptions of Christianity, 1919–1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); Susannah Heschel’s The Aryan Jesus: Christian Theologians and the Bible in Nazi Germany (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008); and the special issue of the Journal of Contemporary History in which Evans’s introduction can be found. 46. Quoted in Bray, “Introduction,” 20–1. 47. Quoted in Phyllis Lassner, British Women Writers of World War II: Battlegrounds of their Own (London: Macmillan, 1998), 42. 48. McLaine, Ministry of Morale, 151. 49. Pimpernel Smith, direct by Leslie Howard, 1941, Timeless Multimedia, 1997 [VHS]. Religion and morality were also central to Britain’s American propaganda: “They stressed that Britain fought for Christian civilisation against an enemy bent on restoring the heathen pantheon of Wagnerian fantasy” (Cull, Selling War, 163). 50. Quoted in Reynolds, Dorothy L. Sayers, 342. 51. Sayers, The Man Born to Be King, 55. 52. Jonathan Sterne, The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), 1. 53. Sayers, The Man Born to Be King, 48. 54. Nicholas, The Echoes of War, 2–3. 55. Sayers, The Man Born to Be King, 160. 56. Ibid., 154. It is worth noting that the name “Baruch” means “blessed” in Hebrew. Sayers’ choosing of this name for a character she aligns with Nazism is extremely problematic. Not only does this choice suggest that Nazism was sanctified by God (the antithesis of her larger argument), but it also adds validity to the claim that Sayers was anti-Semitic. Much has been written on Sayers’ ambiguous anti-Semitism. See, for example, Brabazon’s biography; Adele Reinhartz, “‘Rewritten Gospel’: The Case of Caiaphas the High Priest,” New Testament Studies 55.2 (2009): 160–78; Robert Kuhn McGregor with Ethan Lewis, Conundrums for the Long Week-End (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2000). I would like to thank The Space Between readers for bringing this to my attention. 57. Sayers, The Man Born to Be King, 105. 58. Although Sayers uses this analogy to critique the British government’s appeasement policy leading up to World War II, her failure to acknowledge the Jewish Elders as victims of Roman persecution once again reveals her highly questionable position on Judaism. This is especially true given that during the

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204 Notes same months that the play-cycle was broadcast, Thomas Mann was broadcasting on the persecution, internment, and death of Jews in occupied Europe via the BBC Overseas Service to Germany. 59. Sayers, The Man Born to Be King, 320. 60. Ibid. 61. Ibid., 41. 62. Ibid., 132–3, 63, 285. 63. Ibid., 258. 64. Sayers, Begin Here, 90. 65. Sayers, The Man Born to Be King, 41. 66. BBC Yearbook, 1945, BBC Online Archives, 43, www.britishonlinearchives.co.uk (accessed April 22, 2011). 67. Miller, British Literature of the Blitz, 11.

Chapter 3: Transatlantic Crossings   1. Louis MacNeice, “American Letter,” Horizon 1.7 (July 1940): 464.   2. Asa Briggs, The History of Broadcasting in the United Kingdom, vol. 3. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 529.   3. Simon Workman, “Pure Sound,” The Poetry Ireland Review 93 (March 2008): 62. The Features and Drama Section was headed up by Section Director Val Gielgud and Assistant Director of Features Laurence Gilliam.   4. Clair Wills, “The Parrot’s Lie: Autumn Sequel and the BBC,” in Incorrigibly Plural: Louis MacNeice and his Legacy, eds Fran Brearton and Edna Longley (Manchester: Carcanet, 2012), 199.   5. Fran Brearton and Edna Longley, “Preface,” in Incorrigibly Plural: Louis MacNeice and his Legacy, eds Fran Brearton and Edna Longley (Manchester: Carcanet, 2012), ix–xvi. Maria Johnston, “‘This Endless Land’: Louis MacNeice and the USA,” Irish University Review 38.2 (Autumn–Winter 2008): 243–62.   6. Barbara Coulton, Louis MacNeice in the BBC (London and Boston: Faber & Faber, 1980), 33.   7. Jon Stallworthy, Louis MacNeice (London: Faber & Faber, 1995), 233 and Glyn Maxwell, “Turn and Turn Against: The Case of Autumn Journal,” in Incorrigibly Plural: Louis MacNeice and his Legacy, eds Fran Brearton and Edna Longley (Manchester: Carcanet, 2012), 172.   8. Brearton and Longley, “Preface,” xvi.

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  9. Louis MacNeice, Christopher Columbus (London: Faber & Faber, 1944), 89. Recording found at British Library, C1398/0900 C1, 5. 10. It is bears remembering that such complexity and historical subjects were common in MacNeice’s radio drama. Alexander Nevsky (December 1941), an adaptation of the 1938 Sergei Eisenstein film, also used the BBC Symphony Orchestra, the BBC Chorus, and the BBC Theatre Chorus, and for his 1949 reworking of Goethe’s Faust MacNeice translated 8,000 lines of the original poem for radio. R. D. Smith, “Castle on the Air,” in Time Was Away: The World of Louis MacNeice, eds Terence Brown and Alec Reid (Dublin: The Dolmen Press, 1974), 93. 11. MacNeice, Christopher Columbus, 14–15. 12. Andreas Huyssen, After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986). 13. Johnston chronicles MacNeice’s relationship to/with the U.S. starting with a letter the poet wrote at age four, which detailed his plan to run away to the New World. 14. Louis MacNeice, The Strings are False: An Unfinished Biography (London: Faber & Faber, 1965), 17. 15. Johnston, “This Endless Land,” 243. 16. Louis MacNeice, Letters of Louis MacNeice, ed. Jonathan Allison (London: Faber & Faber, 2010), 366. A few months earlier, in a July letter to Clark, MacNeice makes his distaste of Chamberlain clear writing that he does not see the point in dying for Britain “to bring about that a Europe which is now say 80% rotten should be 85% rotten, supposing H. is checked, instead of say 89% supposing he isn’t” (p. 348). 17. Louis MacNeice, “Traveller’s Return,” Horizon 3.14 (February 1941): 110, 114. 18. Quoted in Stallworthy, Louis MacNeice, 294. 19. MacNeice, “Traveller’s Return,” 114–15. 20. Louis MacNeice, “London Letter 2,” Common Sense 10.4 (April 1941): 110 and “London Letter 4,” 10.6 (June 1941): 174. In this fourth “Letter,” MacNeice also offers a favorable review of Orwell’s postwar plan for Britain in The Lion and the Unicorn. MacNeice was also a fan of Priestley’s radio broadcasts to America, writing in his third “London Letter” that while Priestley had become one of the most powerful men in Britain thanks to the radio, he also proved that this power could be used for good if the speaker is not, like Hitler, “a born demagogue or power-addict.” See Common Sense 10.5 (May 1941): 143. Like Orwell and Priestley, MacNeice also incorporated suggestions of post-war reconstruction in Columbus. See: Ian Whittington, “Archaeologies of Sound:

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206 Notes Reconstructing Louis MacNeice’s Wartime Radio Publics,” Modernist Cultures 10.1 (2015): 44–61. 21. MacNeice, “London Letter 2,” 111. 22. Ibid. 23. Louis MacNeice, WAC, Copyright File 1, 1934–62, February 2, 1941. 24. Louis MacNeice, Autumn Journal (New York: Random House, 1940), 32, 30. MacNeice’s working relationship with the BBC actually began before he travelled to the U.S. In December 1937, he gave a short talk, “In Defense of Vulgarity,” and in 1938 he wrote in a piece for The Listener that poets should not only write plays, but that they should write plays specifically for the purpose of radio broadcasting. See Stallworthy, Louis MacNeice, 292. 25. In his letters, MacNeice makes a number of references to the BBC as a cut-rate institution and complains of the bureaucracy and censorship. See for example his l941 letters to Clark on March 15 and April 20 and Dodds on May 26. 26. Stallworthy, Louis MacNeice, 287. 27. Coulton, Louis MacNeice in the BBC, 48–9. 28. It is interesting to note that, given his own storied history with the BBC, MacNeice asks T. S. Eliot to write a letter of recommendation. See Stallworthy, Louis MacNeice, 297. 29. Louis MacNeice, Modern Poetry (New York: Haskell House, 1969), 200. 30. Ibid., 201. 31. Quoted in Stallworthy, Louis MacNeice, 257. 32. MacNeice, Modern Poetry 3, 204. The war also led MacNeice to revisit earlier criticisms of modernist poets. For example, he revises his opinion of Yeats’ as found in his The Poetry of W. B. Yeats after realizing that the war threatened all poetry. This threat made MacNeice a champion of poetry carte blanche, as any poetry was better than none. See Richard Danson Brown, “Neutrality and Commitment: MacNeice, Yeats, Ireland and the Second World War,” Journal of Modern Literature 28.3 (Spring 2005): 109–29. 33. Louis MacNeice, Poems 1925–1940 (New York: Random House, 1940), xiii. 34. Wills, “The Parrot’s Lie,” 199. 35. Douglas Kahn, Noise, Water, Meat: A History of Sound in the Arts (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999). 36. MacNeice, Christopher Columbus, 10. 37. Terence Brown, “MacNeice and the Puritan Tradition” in Louis MacNeice and His Influence, eds Kathleen Devine and Alan J. Peacock (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe Limited, 1998), 31. 38. MacNeice, Christopher Columbus, 9–10.

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39. Ibid., 9. 40. In fact one of the draws of radio for MacNeice was the potential for artistic collaboration, which is more frequently experienced in the theater. See Coulton, Louis MacNeice in the BBC, 55–6. This in part explains his own participation in Orwell’s “Voice” broadcasts as well as his tendency to write productions that depended on large casts and contributions from other artistic sources. 41. Louis MacNeice, The Dark Tower (London: Faber & Faber, 1947), 10. 42. MacNeice, Christopher Columbus, 10. 43. MacNeice, The Dark Tower, 15. 44. Brown, “MacNeice and the Puritan Tradition”; Richard Danson Brown, “Neutrality and Commitment: MacNeice, Yeats, Ireland and the Second World War,” Journal of Modern Literature 28.3 (Spring 2005): 109–29; Alan Heuser, “Tracing MacNeice’s Development in Drama: A Commentary on the Published and Unpublished Plays,” in Louis MacNeice and His Influence, eds Kathleen Devine and Alan J. Peacock (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe Limited, 1998); and Johnston, “This Endless Land,” 243–62. 45. Immediately before the broadcast of Alexander Nevsky, news of the attack on Pearl Harbor broke. Stallworthy notes that the shock of this event exacerbated the propaganda value of the production for both cast and listening audience (Louis MacNeice, 305). 46. MacNeice, “Introduction,” Christopher Columbus, 11. 47. Ibid., 15. 48. Unless otherwise noted, I will quote from the printed version of the 1942 broadcast, which includes scenes and dialogue that were cut from the original broadcast for time and propaganda reasons, but have been reinserted in subsequent productions. The October 1942 broadcast cut dialogue between non-essential characters, such as the Court lackeys, and trimmed some of the religious debate. The result is more streamlined, but it also takes away some of the historical complexity of Columbus as a fringe religious figure. 49. Stephen Sicari, Joyce’s Modernist Allegory: Ulysses and the History of the Novel (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2001), 193. In his conclusion on “Allegory and High Modernism,” Sicari offers the above definition of allegory and argues that Eliot (Four Quartets), Pound (The Pisan Cantos), and Williams (Notes toward a Supreme Fiction) all turned to allegory as a response to the turbulence of World War II. 50. For example, in his Xenophon radio play “The March of the 10,000” the Athenian general’s retreat symbolizes the evacuation of British Expeditionary Force from Dunkirk. See Stallworthy, Louis MacNeice, 293. And in The Dark

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208 Notes Tower, MacNeice explicitly states that the play is an allegory inspired by Browning’s poem “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came.” See MacNeice, The Dark Tower, 21. 51. MacNeice, Christopher Columbus, 28. 52. Ibid., 21. In an interesting casting note, Robert Speaight played the roles of Doubt, Observer, and Onlooker. The casting of Speaight as Doubt is particularly striking given he was also simultaneously voicing Christ for The Man Born to Be King. It is possible that producers did not want listeners to confuse Speaight’s role in Sayers’ play with his part in Columbus, and so cast him in a vastly different type of part. 53. The Greek chorus was also already familiar to radio listeners, with MacLeish’s The Fall of the City mimicking the form through a radio announcer (see Chapter 5). 54. Dallas Bower, “MacNeice: Sound and Vision,” in Time Was Away: The World of Louis MacNeice, eds Terence Brown and Alec Reid (Dublin: The Dolmen Press, 1974), 100. 55. MacNeice, Christopher Columbus, 70. 56. Ibid., 75. 57. Ibid., 79. 58. Ibid., 86. 59. Ibid., 87. 60. Ibid., 27. 61. Thanks to Stephanie Pocock Boeninger for pointing out this interesting connection. 62. Zelda Lawrence-Curran, “‘All the things that might have been’: Christopher Columbus,” in William Walton: Music and Literature, ed. Stewart R. Craggs (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1999), 163–4. 63. Louis MacNeice, “London Letter 5,” 10.7 (July 1941): 207. 64. Lawrence-Curran, “All the things that might have been,” 135, 133. 65. Louis MacNeice, “Approximate Scheme for Programme on Christopher Columbus,” WAC, R19/174, Entertainment, Christopher Columbus, 1941–9. 66. MacNeice, Christopher Columbus, 46. 67. Lawrence-Curran, “All the things that might have been,” 137. According to Lawrence-Curran, Walton often wrote scores for productions about heroic men, such as Henry V. Likewise, MacNeice also frequently returned to the subject of the hero. In The Dark Tower, he focuses on the artist-hero’s struggle against the world in order to obtain the unobtainable ideal. 68. MacNeice, Christopher Columbus, 72. 69. Ibid., 79.

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70. MacNeice, “Notes,” Christopher Columbus, 91. 71. Louis MacNeice, “Letter from Dallas Bower to the Director of the Science Museum,” WAC, R19/174, Entertainment, Christopher Columbus, 1941–9, January 12, 1941. 72. Susan J. Douglas, Listening in: Radio and the American Imagination (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004), 75. See also Jeffrey Sconce, Haunted Media: Electronic Presence from Telegraphy to Television (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000), 63. 73. Quoted in Smith, “Castle on the Air,” 91. 74. MacNeice, “Introduction,” Christopher Columbus, 16. 75. Lawrence-Curran, “All the things that might have been,” 167–9. 76. Louis MacNeice, “BBC Memo from Dallas Bower,” WAC, R19/174, Entertainment, Christopher Columbus, 1941–9, January 28, 1942. 77. MacNeice, “Notes,” Christopher Columbus, 91. 78. Workman, “Pure Sound,” 63; Bower, “MacNeice: Sound and Vision,” 97. See also Wills, “The Parrot’s Lie.” MacNeice’s wartime radio work also had an impact on his print career, which has already been traced by critics such as Workman, Terrence Brown, and Maria Johnston. Changes to his poetry after joining the BBC include an increased use of parable, an increased focus on dreams and memory (two subjects for which the visual element is not needed), and a tendency to experiment more with rhythm, as can be seen, according to Workman, in his 1963 poetry volume The Burning Perch. He also included more dialogue and everyday speech in his poetry, such as “The Taxis,” but “twisted and repackaged” these “for artistic effect” (“Pure Sound,” 64–5).

Chapter 4: Propaganda, Literature, and New Networks   1. Siân Nicholas, The Echoes of War: Home Front Propaganda and the Wartime BBC, 1939–45 (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1996), 1.   2. George Orwell, Collected Works of George Orwell, ed. Peter Davison, 20 vols, vol. 13 (London: Secker & Warburg, 1998), 39.   3. Ibid., vol. 9, 3, 5.   4. Bertolt Brecht, “The Radio as a Communications Apparatus,” in Bertolt Brecht on Film and Radio, trans. and ed. Marc Silberman (London: Methuen, 2000), 42.   5. Kittler notes in both “Wellenartillerie” and “The History of Communication Media” that the radio, much like the airplane, shares a common martial history.

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  6.

  7.

  8.

  9.

Alexander Galloway and Eugene Thacker, The Exploit: A Theory of Networks (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), 16. The correspondence between medium and weapon is explored most famously by Friedrich Kittler, Discourse Networks 1800 / 1900, trans. Michael Metteer with Chris Cullens (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1990) and Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994); as well as by Geoffrey Winthrop-Young, “Drill and Distraction in the Yellow Submarine,” Critical Inquiry 28 (2002): 825–54; and Patrick Jagoda, “Terror Networks and the Aesthetics of Interconnection.” Social Text 105 28.4 (2010): 65–89. Modernist networks have also recently been examined by Armand Mattelart, Networking the World: 1794–2000, trans. Liz Carey-Libbrecht and James A. Cohen (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000); Nicholas Daly, Literature, Technology, and Modernity, 1860–2000 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004); Maud Ellmann, The Nets of Modernism: Henry James, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, and Sigmund Freud (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010); and Mark Goble, Beautiful Circuits: Modernism and the Mediated Life (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010). In fact, the connection between war and radio was explicitly stated in a memo by the European Services Controller Eric Newsome in June 1940: “The principle has been accepted in the highest quarters that the European Service shall act as an entity, as an army attacking clearly defined objects, and using a strategy laid down broadly by the Commanding Officer, and not as a series of guerrilla bands or group of partisans, with no cohesion and entirely self-ordained plans and aims.” Quoted in Julian Hale, Radio Power: Propaganda and International Broadcasting (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1975), 55. This is not to say that all the connections made via the BBC were entirely new. In the case of the Indian Section in particular, Orwell invited writers to the station with whom he was already friendly (such as Mulk Raj Anand, Stevie Smith, Inez Holden, E. M. Forster, and many others). Moreover, a number of these writers were already acquainted. For example, by the time Anand started broadcasting for the BBC, he had already worked as a Criterion editor for T. S. Eliot, an experience he recounts in Conversations in Bloomsbury. Although Galloway and Thacker label asymmetrical conflicts as a post-WWII phenomenon, India’s nationalist movement is undoubtedly asymmetrical in form, as its grassroots network fought against one of the world’s most powerful centers, Britain. The Exploit, 14. Jed Esty, A Shrinking Island: Modernism and National Culture in England (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), 90. It is worth noting that

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11.

12.

13.

211

scholars have not reached a consensus on the term for 1940s modernism. Kristin Bluemel refers to these war years as “intermodernism” and uses this term to refer specifically to writers focused on class conditions (like Orwell) and whose experimental style still echoes the realist tradition, as compared to say Bloomsbury modernists. See George Orwell and the Radical Eccentrics: Intermodernism in Literary London (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 2–6. See for example, Pascale Casanova, The World Republic of Letters, trans. M.B. Debevoise (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004); Astradur Eysteinsson and Vivian Liska, eds, Modernism, vols 1 and 2 (Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing, 2007); and Rebecca Walkowitz, Cosmopolitan Style: Modernism Beyond the Nation (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006). Recently, scholars have begun to explore these cosmopolitan encounters between metropolitan modernists and colonial writers and intellectuals. See, for example, Bluemel, George Orwell and the Radical Eccentrics and Peter J. Kalliney, Commonwealth of Letters: British Literary Culture and the Emergence of Postcolonial Aesthetics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). In the edited collection India in Britain, Susheila Nasta goes a step further by arguing that “empire was always inherently diasporic, a cosmopolitan web of cross-cultural interlinks and global networks,” and shows that it was not only the Indian elite that influenced British culture, but also the ayahs (nannies), lascars (sailors), and soldiers. India in Britain: South Asian Networks and Connections, 1958–1950 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 4–5. It bears noting that Orwell was far from an enthusiastic broadcaster. For him, radio work was equivalent to his stint in the Home Guard: it represented his last remaining chance to contribute to the war effort after being rejected from military service for poor health. Unlike other leftist intellectuals who chose pacifism as a response to the war, like physician and author Alex Comfort, Orwell believed that the only means to defeat fascism was by force. Although unfit for military service, Orwell soon realized that, at its best, radio, especially during war and when used to its optimum potential, could be as powerful a weapon as any other tool of combat. And this was certainly the case for the wartime BBC. There was also talk of publishing these literary broadcasts for the Indian students, but this plan failed miserably. In July 1943, in an Eastern Service meeting, a discussion concerning these pamphlets took place and it was stated that two pamphlets had been completed (Books and Authors and Landmarks in American Literature) with two more to be published shortly. The goal was to have a pamphlet published every six to eight weeks.

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212 Notes However, the reality of the situation was vastly different. The two pamphlets listed above were published, but not until after the war in October 1946. Afterwards, no more pamphlets were produced (Orwell, Collected Works, vol. 15, 164). 14. Orwell, Collected Works, vol. 6, 208. 15. Ibid., vol. 6, 42–3. 16. Ibid., vol. 12, 47. 17. Ibid., vol. 13, 257. 18. Mark Wollaeger, Modernism, Media, and Propaganda: British Narrative from 1900–1945 (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2006), 4. 19. Orwell, Collected Works, vol. 5, 83. 20. Ibid., vol. 12, 197. After leaving the BBC, Orwell colorfully refers to the BBC voice as “Stripetrouser” (vol. 16, 124), a remark which, like “plummy,” refers to its imitated upper-class accent that was quickly being labeled as the national accent (vol. 16, 225). 21. Ibid., vol. 5, 102. 22. Ibid., vol. 12, 407. 23. Ibid., vol. 12, 472. 24. Ibid., vol. 10, 501–2. 25. In Wigan Pier Orwell remarks that the largest number of working class society lived outside of Britain. Thus for Britain to undergo a complete socialist revolution, Orwell believed that the revolution would have to spread throughout the Empire. 26. Orwell, Collected Works, vol. 12, 422, 424. Orwell lays out a similar plan in “India Next” published in The Observer on February 22, 1942 (vol. 13, 189). 27. Douglas Kerr, “In the Picture: Orwell, India and the BBC,” Literature and History 13.1 (2004): 44. 28. This phrase is the title of volume 12 of the Collected Works. Orwell discusses the necessity of patriotism in The Lion and the Unicorn and “My Country Left or Right.” Much has been written on Orwell’s patriotism as a reason for his war-work, and will therefore not be fully addressed in this chapter. See Stephen Lutman, “Orwell’s Patriotism,” Journal of Contemporary History 2.2 (1967): 149–58; John P. Rossi, “George Orwell’s Concept of Patriotism,” Modern Age 43.2 (2001): 128; John P. Rossi, “‘My country, right or left’: Orwell’s Patriotism,” in The Cambridge Companion to George Orwell, ed. John Rodden (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 87–99; Peter Lowe, “Englishness in a Time of Crisis: George Orwell, John Betjeman, and the Second World War,” Cambridge Quarterly 38.3 (2009): 243–63.

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29. Orwell, Collected Works, vol. 12, 515. Here Orwell refers to the scattered broadcasts he gave prior to his permanence at the BBC. His inability to “write books,” however, is due to more than interrupting air raids and a general malaise that the world was changing for the worse. What Orwell fails to mention in this letter is that paper publishing had been dramatically minimized during the war, leaving him little choice but to turn to journalism and broadcasting for income. It also bears remembering that the BBC was not Orwell’s sole source of income during the war. Orwell also wrote for the Partisan Review, the Horizon, and the Tribune, as well as film reviews for Time and Tide. 30. Wollaeger, Modernism, Media, and Propaganda, 6. 31. After his escape to Germany and later Japan, Bose creates the radio station Radio Azad Hind (Free India), which broadcasted nationalist and anti-British propaganda to India. As the war continued, his broadcasts attempted to incite violence, claiming that independence is only forcefully taken. Later, Bose becomes the voice of the Indian National Liberation Army. Orwell’s broadcasts often respond to Bose, without naming him directly. See Subhas Chandra Bose, Azad Hind: Writings and Speeches 1941–1943, eds Sisir K. Bose and Sugata Bose (London: Anthem Press, 2004) and Chalo Delhi: Writings and Speeches 1943–1945, eds Sisir K. Bose and Sugata Bose (Calcutta: Netaji Research Bureau, 2007). For a discussion of the difference between “white” and “black” propaganda, see Nicholas, The Echoes of War, 2–3. 32. Orwell, Collected Works, vol. 15, 323. 33. John MacKenzie, “Propaganda and the BBC Empire Service, 1932–42,” in Propaganda, Persuasion and Polemic, ed. Jeremy Hawthorn (London: Edward Arnold Publishers, 1987), 45–6. 34. An example of this use of the term “propaganda” in the war newsletters to refer only to Axis broadcasts occurred on February 20, 1943: “What Goebbels says to the German people is not of great importance to us but it is important to examine the propaganda line which is being handed out to the world at large because this propaganda is intended to deceive and weaken us and it is as well to be armed against it in advance” (Orwell, Collected Works, vol. 14, 350). It is important to note the distinction the BBC makes between German propaganda, which is meant to “deceive,” and the “information” the BBC offers its listeners to combat this propaganda. The use of war language (“armed”) is also significant, as it emphasizes both that radio work is war-work, and that the radio is a powerful weapon. 35. Asa Briggs details the history of the wartime BBC in The History of Broadcasting in the United Kingdom, vol. 3 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995).

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214 Notes 36. Kerr, “In the Picture,” 47. 37. Such political tests came in a multitude of forms: the failed Cripps mission to India, the imprisonment of Nehru and Gandhi, and Britain’s increasingly close ties to Russia. 38. W. J. West, Orwell: The War Broadcasts (London: Gerald Duckworth & Co., 1985), 39. 39. Orwell, Collected Works, vol. 15, 166. This letter is a private response to a public poem Comfort wrote under the pseudonym Obadiah Hornbrooke, which criticized the BBC and its broadcasters, calling them “bookie, pimp and vet.” See vol. 15, 138–45 and 165–6 for the exchange of both public poems and private letters. 40. By targeting the Indian student, Orwell and his collaborators also participated in a larger trend in educational radio broadcasting that took hold in Britain in the 1930s. The Voice broadcasts were, therefore, both propaganda and a continuation of a larger BBC educational program that promoted radio talks by experts as a “supplement [to] the ordinary curriculum” for school-age British children. Robert Graves and Alan Hodge, The Long Week End: A Social History of Great Britain 1918–1939 (New York: The Macmillan Co., 1941), 203. 41. There were six broadcasts from August 11, 1942 to December 29, 1942. Voice was broadcasted twice in December. 42. Orwell, Collected Works, vol. 13, 459–60. 43. Ibid., vol. 13, 459. 44. George Orwell, “Memo from Orwell to Eliot,” WAC, Rcont 1, Eliot, T. S. Talks file 2, 1938–1943, October 16, 1942. 45. Orwell, Collected Works, vol. 17, 75. 46. Ibid., vol. 13, 460. Whereas in Voice 1 Orwell treats the magazine as already complete, in the following issues Orwell presents the magazine in the editorial process; thus the discussions focus on what should go in the magazine, rather than what is already within the magazine. This shift in presentation may explain why the physical descriptions decrease after the first issue (vol. 14, 14). 47. Weber suggests the term “divisibility” to describe this link. Samuel Weber, “What is a Literary Image? Remarks on Visibility, Invisibility and Divisibility” (transcript of talk given at RedCat Theatre, Los Angeles, May 14, 2001), 4–5. Cohen et al. also articulate this key aspect of radio in Broadcasting Modernism: “Radio was present even where it was absent, which is, of course, the paradox at the very heart of the medium” (Broadcasting Modernism [Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 2009], 3).

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48. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London and New York: Verso, 1991). 49. Orwell, Collected Works, vol. 17, 76–7. “Poetry and the Microphone” is the closest Orwell comes to radio theory. 50. Bertolt Brecht’s “Explanations [about The Flight of the Lindberghs]” and “The Radio as a Communications Apparatus” in Bertolt Brecht on Film and Radio, ed. and trans. Marc Silberman (London: Methuen, 2000). 51. Orwell, Collected Works, vol. 13, 470–1. 52. Ibid., vol. 13, 270. 53. Ibid., vol. 13, 432. 54. “Poetry and the War” was originally broadcast on July 1942 for the Swedish Service. Reprinted as “T. S. Eliot on Poetry in Wartime” in Common Sense (New York) 11.10 (October 1942), 351. 55. Orwell, Collected Works, vol. 14, 19. 56. Ibid., vol. 14, 18–19. 57. Ibid., vol. 14, 22. 58. Ibid. 59. Ibid. 60. Ibid. 61. Ibid., vol. 10, 264–5. For Eliot, a frequent Indian Section broadcaster, such national ambiguity was a quality to which British poets should also aspire. A poet’s duty, according to Eliot, was first and foremost to “his native language” and secondly “to write the best poetry he can.” If this is done well, he argues, the poet will speak beyond nation and to “the whole of Europe” (or in Eliot’s case, also India). Ibid. See also Michael Coyle’s essay on Eliot’s Indian Section broadcasts in which he argues that one of the ways Eliot paradoxically attempted to preserve British culture was by broadcasting it overseas. “‘We Speak to India’: T. S. Eliot’s Wartime Broadcasts and the Frontiers of Culture,” in Cohen et al., Broadcasting Modernism, 176–95. 62. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “The Burden of English,” in Postcolonial Discourses: An Anthology, ed. Gregory Castle (Oxford and Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2001), 56. 63. “Money and Guns” was spoken by B. Sahni and “British Rations” by I. B. Sarin. 64. Orwell, Collected Works, vol. 13, 163. 65. For Spivak and Ranajit Guha, Anand would have certainly represented the “elite” or “dominant” culture alongside his English counterparts. In subaltern studies there are levels of dominance. And while Orwell was part of the first level (the dominant foreign power), Anand, an educated, Marxist, modernist

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216 Notes writer, would have been considered a member of the dominant indigenous group. By placing these groups in hierarchical order, Guha implies that Anand, even as a member of an elite group, had less of a voice than Orwell. What Guha and Spivak fail to account for, however, is the complexity of collaborative writing and the power of vocalization even when the words are not yours. See Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?,” in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, eds C. Nelson and L. Grossberg (Basingstoke: Macmillan Education, 1988), 271–313 and Ranajit Guha and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Selected Subaltern Studies (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998). 66. Andrew Hill, “The BBC Empire Service: the Voice, the Discourse of the Master and Ventriloquism,” South Asian Diaspora 2.1 (2010): 35. 67. Douglas Kerr discusses a similar situation with Orwell’s newsletters, stating that there are no less than five voices at work in each of Orwell’s broadcasts. These include: the State via MOI’s censorship and monitoring, the BBC, the reports from the Monitoring Service, Axis propaganda broadcasted to India to which Orwell responded, and what Kerr calls Orwell’s “paratexts”—the writing Orwell did publicly and privately during his time at the BBC, including the Partisan Review and his wartime diary. “Orwell’s BBC broadcasts: Colonial Discourse and the Rhetoric of Propaganda,” Textual Practice 16.3 (2002): 473–90. 68. Sharika Thiranagama, “Partitioning the BBC: From Colonial to Postcolonial Broadcaster,” South Asian Diaspora 2.1 (2010): 39–55. 69. Ruvani Ranasinha, “South Asian Broadcaster in Britain and the BBC: Talking to India (1941–1943),” South Asian Diaspora 2.1 (2010): 57. See also Kalliney, Commonwealth of Letters. 70. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Random House, 1979), 217. 71. Kalliney, Commonwealth of Letters, 4–5. 72. From the BBC Written Archives it is apparent that Anand was a pivotal player in the Indian Section. His letter exchange with Orwell and his BBC booking forms suggest that Orwell heavily relied on Anand’s expertise in literature, politics, and the Indian experience. See Mulk Raj Anand, WAC, Talks File 1, 1942–1962 and Mulk Raj Anand, WAC, Copyright, 1942–62. Also see the various Talks Booking Forms in Orwell’s Collected Works. Anand’s diverse influences, both European (Bloomsbury and Joyce) and Indian (Ghandi) were, of course, very beneficial to the BBC. More than this, however, Jessica Berman suggests that Anand’s “life and work thus blur the distinction between what is cosmopolitan and what is Indian, and they ask us to question the

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assumption that the writer committed to a region and to developing its national consciousness must turn away from the world.” See “Toward a Regional Cosmopolitanism: The Case of Mulk Raj Anand,” Modern Fiction Studies 55.1 (2009): 144. 73. Mulk Raj Anand, “Talks Booking Requisition,” WAC, Talks File 1, 1942–62, August 4, 1942. 74. Kerr, “In the Picture,” 54. See also Emma Bainbridge and Florian Stadtler, “Calling from London, Talking to India: South Asian Networks at the BBC and the Case of G.V. Desani,” in India in Britain: South Asian Networks and Connections, 1958–1950, ed. Nasta Susheila (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 164–78. 75. Orwell, Collected Works, vol. 14, 214. 76. Alasdair Pinkerton notes that at the end of 1939 there were 85,000 radios in India for a population of approximately 400 million. See “Radio and the Raj: Broadcasting in British India (1920–1940),” JRAS series 3, 18.2 (2008): 178 as well as Partha Sarathi Gupta, Radio and the Raj, 1921–47 (Calcutta: Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, 1995), 3, 34–9. 77. Orwell, Collected Works, vol. 13, 366–7. 78. Ibid., vol. 15, 343. 79. Ibid., vol. 15, 274. Orwell expresses a similar sentiment in a letter to Leonard Moore (vol. 16, 17–18). 80. Bluemel, George Orwell and the Radical Eccentrics, 140–1. Mulk Raj Anand, Conversations in Bloomsbury (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995). 81. As Orwell notes in Wigan Pier, the largest portion of Britain’s working-class population lived outside of Britain in countries like India. Thus, Voice is Orwell’s first attempt at broadcasting poetry to what he considered a working-class population. 82. Orwell, Collected Works, vol. 17, 79. 83. Quoted in Gerd Horten, Radio Goes to War: The Cultural Politics of Propaganda during World War II (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 52.

Chapter 5: Clogged Communication  1. Cool Hand Luke, DVD, directed by Stuart Rosenberg (1967, Burbank, CA: Warner Home Video, 2008).   2. Herman Melville, “Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street,” in Billy Budd and Other Tales (New York: Signet Classic, 1998), 143.

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218 Notes   3. Ibid., 135.   4. Ibid., 114, 115. This is the first time Bartleby’s famous reply is given and acts as a passive refrain throughout the story.   5. Bernhard Siegert, Relays: Literature as an Epoch of the Postal System, trans. Kevin Repp (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1999), 1.   6. Despite the fascism and anti-Semitism in Pound’s Radio Rome broadcasts, he often insisted that his work was “sav[ing] the world.” J. J. Wilhelm, Ezra Pound: The Tragic Years 1925–1972 (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994), 179.   7. Mark Goble, Beautiful Circuits: Modernism and the Mediated Life (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), 7.   8. Ibid., 12.   9. Michael North, The Political Aesthetic of Yeats, Eliot, and Pound (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 1. 10. Ezra Pound, Guide to Kulchur (New York: New Directions Publishing, 1970), 29. 11. Hugh Kenner, The Pound Era (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971). 12. Due to a variety of authors, the phrase “ivory tower” has become synonymous with modernism. Perhaps the most famous usages are Henry James’s last novel, The Ivory Tower, and Yeats’ 1928 collection The Tower. In his essay “The End of the Line” (1942), Randall Jarrell essentially coins the phrase when he argues that modern poetry needs to come down from its “Ivory Tower,” by which he meant the individualistic obscurity of the form and references, if it wants to remain relevant. “Ars Poetica” can be found in The Collected Poems of Archibald MacLeish (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1962), 50–1. 13. Significant poetry anthologies and the number of MacLeish poems included are as follows: The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry, vol. 1, eds Richard Ellmann and Robert O’Clair (3 poems); Poems, Poets, Poetry, Helen Vendler (1 poem); Anthology of Modern American Poetry, ed. Cary Nelson (2 poems); The Norton Anthology of Poetry (2 poems). “Ars Poetica” is included in each of the above. Rebecca Walkowitz and Douglas Mao claimed in the 2008 PMLA that we had entered an era of “The New Modernist Studies,” which involved an expanding of the literary canon. However, as can be seen from the above list, when MacLeish is included, the focus is on his “high modernist” contribution, rather than the pubic poetry which ultimately made MacLeish one of the most popular and most read U.S. poets ever. 14. Brett Gary, The Nervous Liberals: Propaganda Anxieties from World War I to the Cold War (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), 135.

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15. Archibald MacLeish, “Nevertheless One Debt,” in A Time to Speak: The Selected Prose of Archibald MacLeish (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1940), 57. MacLeish expresses similar sentiments in his essays “Public Speech and Private Speech in Poetry” and “The Poetry of Karl Marx,” also found in A Time to Speak. 16. Other critics that have commented on MacLeish’s literary evolution include: David Barber, “In Search of an ‘Image of Mankind’: The Public Poetry and Prose of Archibald MacLeish,” American Studies 29 (1988): 31–56; Peter Buitenhuis, “Prelude to War: The Interventionist Propaganda of Archibald MacLeish, Robert E. Sherwood, and John Steinbeck,” Canadian Review of American Studies 26.1 (1996): 1–30; John Timberman Newcomb, “Archibald MacLeish and the Poetics of Public Speech: A Critique of High Modernism,” The Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association 23.1 (1990): 9–26. 17. MacLeish, “In Challenge, Not Defense,” 7. In Chapter 4 of Poetic Justice, Martha C. Nussbaum discusses Whitman’s poetry as public poetry, agreeing with Whitman’s own claim that poets make the best judges of society. See Poetic Justice: The Literary Imagination and Public Life (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995). MacLeish was also not the only author to turn to public poetry in the 1930s. Michael Szalay argues that a number of modern writers, including Ernest Hemingway, Robert Frost, Gertrude Stein, and Richard Wright, also imagined and responded to the terms of the New Deal. See New Deal Modernism: American Literature and the Invention of the Welfare State (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000). 18. “This is War,” Container 42, Archibald MacLeish Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, DC. “Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.” will henceforth be shortened to L.C. 19. For MacLeish, the Spanish Civil War was part of World War II. In “The Communists, The Writers, and the Spanish War,” written in June 1937, MacLeish criticizes those writers who refused to see the Spanish war as part of a larger conflict. See A Time to Speak: The Selected Prose of Archibald MacLeish (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1940), 101–2. By MacLeish’s reasoning, The Fall of the City is a World War II play. 20. This was not the first nor last time that MacLeish used Aztec myth in his writing. One of his most famous poems, Conquistador (1932), which won him the Pulitzer, takes as its inspiration the meeting of Hernán Cortés and the Aztec Empire. More than a decade later, he returns to this theme in The America Story broadcasts. 21. While I read The Fall of the City as an allegory of international tensions, other scholars, such as Neil Verma, suggest that the play should be understood as

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220 Notes concerned with national events, such as the New Deal, and current political rhetoric being broadcast over American airwaves. This reading certainly ties in with MacLeish following the Whitman tradition, but it also ignores the poet’s increasing concerns regarding Europe. See Theater of the Mind: Imagination, Aesthetics, and American Radio Drama (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 50–5. 22. In fact, the experimental nature of this broadcast was deemed so successful that in August 1937 the BBC adopted the CBS Workshop, creating its own “Experimental Hour” on which Val Gielgud (the director of Sayers’ play cycle) introduced MacLeish’s The Fall of the City. See Michele Hilmes, Network Nations: A Transnational History of British and American Broadcasting (New York: Routledge, 2012), 125–6. 23. Verma, Theater of the Mind, 50–1. 24. Archibald MacLeish, The Fall of the City, sound recording from Goldin 46,232, Miller Nichols Library Marr Sound Archives, University of Missouri-Kansas City. For convenience, I have also provided the page numbers from the printed version. See Archibald MacLeish, The Fall of the City: A Verse Play for Radio (New York and Toronto: Farrar & Rinehart, 1937), 3. 25. Ibid., 7. 26. Quoted in Steven Connor, Dumbstruck: A Cultural History of Ventriloquism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 368. 27. MacLeish, The Fall of the City, 7. 28. Ibid., 4. 29. There was a tremendous written response to this play and in their letters to MacLeish and CBS, listeners largely reflected upon the aesthetic qualities of the performance, writing, for example, that The Fall of the City “was the most enjoyable half-hour I have spent before the radio” and “The MacLeish broadcast Sunday was the best thing of its genre I’ve heard.” See letters from George Zabriskie and Louise Braden in Container 42, Archibald MacLeish Papers, L.C. See also Howard Blue, Words at War: World War II Era Radio Drama and the Postwar Broadcasting Industry Blacklist (Lanham, MD: The Scarecrow Press, 2002), 82. 30. MacLeish, The Fall of the City, 11. 31. Ibid., 15, 16, 22. This is not the only time that MacLeish criticizes the passivity of the intellectual. This is the main topic for his 1940 essay “The Irresponsibles.” 32. Ibid., 32. 33. Ibid. 34. Gary, The Nervous Liberals, 133.

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35. Although MacLeish gives full credit to the efforts of Sylvia Beach, he remarks in Reflections that he had a small role to play in the publishing of Ulysses, namely getting the book in the hands of the right critics in order to get publicity and funding. See Archibald MacLeish, Reflections, eds Bernard A. Drabeck and Helen E. Ellis (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1986), 60. 36. In the early 1940s, MacLeish also worked as the deputy director of the Office of War Information (OWI) when OFF was dismantled. Government work, however, proved difficult for MacLeish, who firmly believed in the American public’s right to information. This belief did not always reconcile itself with the U.S. government’s sensitive position in a time of war that required the restriction of information, especially when it came to military gains and losses. See Chapter 4 of Gary, The Nervous Liberals for a further discussion of MacLeish’s precarious position with the government’s information network. See also Frederick J. Stielow, “Librarian Warriors and Rapprochement: Carl Milam, Archibald MacLeish, and World War II,” Libraries & Culture 25.4 (1990): 513–33 and Sydney Weinberg, “What to Tell America: The Writers’ Quarrel in the Office of War Information,” The Journal of American History 55.1 (1968): 73–89. 37. There was one lengthy break in Pound’s broadcasting schedule. This break followed Pearl Harbor, but after convincing himself that his broadcasts were of little harm to the American war effort, he resumed his bi-weekly schedule in late January 1942. See Wilhelm, Ezra Pound: The Tragic Years 1925–1972, 183–4, 193–4. 38. Although he was not technically an employee of the Italian state, Pound was paid for his broadcasts (approximately $18 per broadcast) and was given a special rail pass that cut down his expenses. Wilhelm speculates that it was the rail pass that tied him most to the Italian government. See Wilhelm, Ezra Pound: The Tragic Years 1925–1972, 179. 39. For more on Pound’s broadcasting history, see Wilhelm, Ezra Pound: The Tragic Years 1925–1972 and Leonard W. Doob, “Introduction” to “Ezra Pound Speaking”: Radio Speeches of World War II, ed. Leonard W. Doob (Westport, CT and London: Greenwood Press, 1978). 40. Daniel Tiffany, Radio Corpse: Imagism and the Cryptaesthetic of Ezra Pound (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995), 223. 41. Ezra Pound, “Ezra Pound Speaking”: Radio Speeches of World War II, ed. Leonard W. Doob (Westport, CT and London: Greenwood Press, 1978), 34. 42. Ibid.

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222 Notes 43. Ibid., 38. 44. Ibid., 227. Not knowing “where to begin” was a concern Pound had voiced previously in a July 6, 1942 broadcast (p. 192). 45. Ibid., 227. 46. Ibid., 191. 47. Doob, “Introduction,” xi. Siegert comments on the same communication blockage in his discussion of the disordered delivery of Franz Kafka and Felicia Bauer’s letters. Of this disorder he writes, “Emerging from the depths of time, it gave the lie to ‘correspondence’ as the name for an exchange of letters that were anything but co-responding (if ‘correspondence’ means that letters make reference to each other in a shared context).” Although Pound’s radio broadcasts cannot be described as “correspondence,” because there was no return from the listeners, there is in broadcasting the same promise of order that exists in letter writing. Siegert, Relays, p. 239. 48. Ibid., xii. 49. Wilhelm, Ezra Pound: The Tragic Years 1925–1972, 189. In The Pound Era, Kenner provides an example of an inaccurately transcribed Pound broadcast, 466–7. 50. Marshall McLuhan, Letters of Marshall McLuhan, eds Matie Molinaro et al. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), 193. 51. Kenner, The Pound Era, 51. In fact, Kenner even dedicates his book The Poetry of Ezra Pound to McLuhan. 52. Pound, Guide to Kulchur, 75; Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994), 301, 306. See also Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2011), 26–38. For a further discussion of the influence of Pound on McLuhan, see Tiffany, Radio Corpse. 53. Quoted in Wilhelm, Ezra Pound: The Tragic Years 1925–1972, 184. This is a sentiment Pound repeats in his October 5, 1945 letter to the law firm of Shakespear and Parkyn, where he writes “I was not sending axis propaganda but my own.” See Container 53, Archibald MacLeish Papers, L.C. 54. Pound, “Ezra Pound Speaking,” 292. 55. Quoted in Wilhelm, Ezra Pound: The Tragic Years 1925–1972, 188. 56. Pound, “Ezra Pound Speaking,” 7. 57. Ibid., 374. 58. Hemingway to MacLeish, June 30, 1943, Container 10, Archibald MacLeish Papers, L.C. 59. Hemingway to MacLeish, ca. May 1943, Container 10, Archibald MacLeish

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60. 61. 62. 63.

64.

65. 66. 67.

68. 69. 70.

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Papers, L.C. See also MacLeish’s letters to Hemingway on April 17, 1943 and 17 August 17, 1943. MacLeish to Hemingway, September 10, 1943, Container 10, Archibald MacLeish Papers, L.C. Telegram from Eliot to MacLeish, May 17, 1945, Container 53, Archibald MacLeish Paper, L.C. Eliot to MacLeish, June 11, 1945 and MacLeish to Eliot, August 13, 1945, Container 53, Archibald MacLeish Papers, L.C. There were numerous other people involved in this network, including family members, lawyers, and government officials. Also found in Container 53 of the MacLeish Papers at the Library of Congress were letters from Milton S. Eisenhower, Achilles Fang, Robert M. Furniss Jr., Felicia Geffen, Douglas Hammon, Christian A. Herter, James Laughlin, Robert M. MacGregor, Sheri Martinelli, Harry M. Meacham, Miscellany, Arthur V. Moore, Winfred Overholser, William P. Rogers, Vanni Scheiwiller, and Pound’s daughter Mary de Rachewiltz. However, the primary literary figures were MacLeish, Hemingway, Eliot, and Pound. In a letter to Pound, MacLeish explains that his belief in free speech is the reason he is helping the imprisoned poet: “I think your views of the history of our time are just about as wrong as views can be. But I won’t sit by and see you held in confinement because of your views. Which is what is really happening now. I am doing what I am doing partly because I revere you as a poet and partly because I love this Republic and can’t be quiet when it violates its own convictions.” MacLeish to Pound, October 16, 1957, Container 18, Archibald MacLeish Papers, L.C. Eliot to MacLeish, July 13, 1956, Container 53, Archibald MacLeish Papers, L.C. Pound to MacLeish, February 18, 1956, Container 18, Archibald MacLeish Papers, L.C. See MacLeish to Pound, July 5, 1956 in Letters of Archibald MacLeish 1907–1982, ed. R. H. Winnick (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1983), 384–5, and Pound to MacLeish, July 21, 1956, Container 18, Archibald MacLeish Paper, L.C. Pound to MacLeish, June 30, 1956, Container 18, Archibald MacLeish Paper, L.C. Pound to MacLeish, August 24, 1957, Container 18, Archibald MacLeish Paper, L.C. MacLeish to Pound, October, 26, 1957, Container 18, Archibald MacLeish Paper, L.C.

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224 Notes 71. Frost to MacLeish, June 25, 1957, Container 53, Archibald MacLeish Papers, L.C. See also Hemingway to MacLeish, May 13, 1957 and Eliot to MacLeish, July 2, 1956 in Container 53. 72. Meacham to MacLeish, Photo of Pound and Meacham with caption, “For Arch M—The man who ‘sprung’ EP.” See the Meacham File, Container 53, Archibald MacLeish Papers, L.C. Meacham also writes of MacLeish’s role in Pound’s freeing in The Caged Panther: Ezra Pound at St. Elizabeth’s (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1967). See also Scott Donaldson, Archibald MacLeish an American Life (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1992). 73. Johannes Steel broadcast, January 5, 1945, Container 42, Archibald MacLeish Papers, L.C.

Chapter 6: Haunted Network   1. Bertolt Brecht, “On Thinking About Hell,” Bertolt Brecht Poems 1913–1956, eds John Willett and Ralph Manheim (New York: Methuen, 1979), 367.   2. In an interesting coincidence, Marconi was expected to be a passenger on the Titanic, but had decided instead to take passage aboard the Lusitania that sailed three days earlier. Strikingly, Marconi avoided another maritime tragedy in April 1915, when he again took the Lusitania, this time on the voyage before it was sunk by a German U-boat. See Greg Daugherty, “Seven Famous People Who Missed the Titanic,” Smithsonian, March 1, 2012, http://www. smithsonianmag.com/history-archaeology/Seven-Famous-People-Who-Missedthe-Titanic.html (accessed June 1, 2012).   3. For a more detailed history on the radio’s role in the Titanic disaster see Neil Schlager, ed., When Technology Fails: Significant Technological Disasters, Accidents, and Failures of the Twentieth Century (Detroit: Gale Research, 1994), 540–6 and Jeffrey Sconce, Haunted Media: Electronic Presence from Telegraphy to Television (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000), 73. See also Stephen Kern, The Culture of Time and Space 1880–1918 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003).   4. As Sconce notes, the Titanic was “forever imprint[ed] on the mind’s eye the image of unfortunate souls spread across the icy void of the Atlantic, struggling to stay above the surface. Above this tragic scene, in turn, hovered the eerie ocean of wireless, which had provided the agonizingly immediate account of the catastrophe even as it powerfully reiterated the gulf separating sender and receiver, victim and savior.” Sconce, Haunted Media, 74.

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  5. Although Mann commented on being an American in his 1940 “I am an American” radio interview, he would not become a U.S. citizen until June 23, 1944. Despite his new loyalty to the U.S., Mann always considered himself a German, as he makes clear in his radio broadcasts and his Library of Congress lecture “Germany and the Germans.”   6. See, for example, Sconce, Haunted Media, as well as Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, The Work of Mourning & the New International (New York: Routledge, 1994); Friedrich A. Kittler, Discourse Networks 1800/1900, trans. Michael Metteer with Chris Cullens (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1990); Friedrich A. Kittler, “Dracula’s Legacy,” Literature Media Information Systems, ed. John Johnston (Amsterdam: Overseas Publishers Association, 1997), 50–84; John Durham Peters, Speaking into the Air: A History of the Idea of Communication (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999); Jean-Michel Rabaté, The Ghosts of Modernity (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1996); Helen Sword, Ghostwriting Modernism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2002); and Luke Thurston, Literary Ghosts from the Victorians to Modernism: The Haunting Interval (New York and London: Routledge, 2012).  7. Sconce, Haunted Media 8.  8. Kittler, Discourse Networks, 229.  9. Sword, Ghostwriting Modernism, x. 10. Ibid., 78. Also Todd Kontje, The Cambridge Introduction to Thomas Mann (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 72. 11. Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993), 69. 12. Since I will be speaking about both spiritualism and occultism in this chapter, it is important to distinguish between the two. Sword writes on this distinction in Ghostwriting Modernism: “Spiritualism is not the same as occultism, with which it is often confused; whereas the latter promises ancient, esoteric knowledge to a select group of initiates, the former is accessible to anyone who can construct a homemade Ouija board or hire a storefront medium” (p. xi). 13. Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, 73. 14. Rabaté, The Ghosts of Modernity, 216. 15. Rudyard Kipling, “Wireless,” in Traffics and Discoveries (New York: Doubleday, Page & Co., 1904), 211, 219. 16. Ibid., 220. Sconce reads this story as being about communication failure, where each medium speaks but fails to listen and respond. The result is estrangement, where connection was the goal. Haunted Media, 69–70.

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226 Notes 17. Bram Stoker, Dracula, ed. John Paul Riquelme (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2002), 337. 18. Friedrich A. Kittler, “Dracula’s Legacy,” in Literature Media Information Systems, ed. John Johnston (Amsterdam: Overseas Publishers Association, 1997), 79. For media readings of Dracula see also Maud Ellmann, The Nets of Modernism: Henry James, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, and Sigmund Freud (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010) and Jennifer Wicke, “Vampiric Typewriting: Dracula and its Media,” ELH 59 (1992): 467–93. 19. Ellmann, The Nets of Modernism, 20. See also Peters’ Speaking into the Air and Sconce’s Haunted Media. 20. Peters, Haunted Media, 94. 21. Scudday Richardson, “The Law of Magnetic Communications Between Human Beings,” Scientific American 109 (August 16, 1913): 127. 22. Malcolm Bird, “Our Psychic Investigation Advances,” Scientific American 130.2 (February 1924): 86. 23. Malcolm Bird, “Telepathy and Radio,” Scientific American 130.6 (June 1924): 382. 24. Stoker, Dracula, 230. 25. Sword, Ghostwriting Modernism, 7. 26. James Joyce, Ulysses, ed. Hans Walter Gabler (New York: Vintage Books, 1986), 32. 27. Thurston, Literary Ghosts from the Victorians to Modernism, 128. 28. Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, 75. 29. Joyce, Ulysses, 154. 30. Thomas Mann, “An Experience in the Occult,” Three Essays, trans. H. T. Lowe-Porter (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1929), 220. It is likely that Mann based Dr. Edhin Krokowski in The Magic Mountain on Dr. Schrenck-Notzing. 31. Ibid., 227, 232. 32. Ibid., 234–5. 33. Bird, “Our Psychic Investigation Advances,” 86. 34. Mann, “An Experience in the Occult,” 237. 35. Ibid., 256. 36. Sword, Ghostwriting Modernism, 90. 37. Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain, trans. John E. Woods (New York: Vintage International, 1995), 644. 38. Ibid., 645. 39. See Sword, Ghostwriting Modernism, 89–93. 40. Mann, The Magic Mountain, 648.

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41. Ibid., 671–2. 42. See note 5. In fact, in his BBC broadcasts he would often refer to Germany as “our nation.” See, for example, broadcast XVIII in Thomas Mann, Listen, Germany!: Twenty-five Radio Messages to the German People over BBC (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1943), 78. 43. Quoted in Herman Kurzke, Thomas Mann: Life as a Work of Art (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002), 422. 44. Kittler, “Dracula’s Legacy,” 57. 45. Mann, Listen, Germany!, v (my emphasis). I will also refer to a German recording of Mann’s broadcasts, but will use the official English translation when available. 46. Ibid., 4. 47. Mann, however, knew of the Jewish persecution as early as 1930 and signs the appeal “Against Anti-Semitism.” There is also some evidence to suggest that Mann was aware of the work camps as early as 1933, but by 1936 his knowledge is made evident when he writes the proclamation “Down with the Concentration Camps.” See Kurzke, Thomas Mann, 426. 48. Mann, Listen, Germany!, 61. 49. Ibid., 69. 50. Ibid., 98. 51. Ibid., 3. 52. Ibid., 21. 53. In his January 1943 broadcast, on the occasion of the ten-year anniversary of National Socialism, Mann states “die Geschichte wird ausführliche sein” (History will be detailed). Throughout this broadcast the author lists the achievements claimed by Hitler’s regime, such as lower unemployment and ending the corruption of government, and, one by one, debunks each of these claims. Thomas Mann, Thomas Mann spricht Deutsche Hörer!: BBC—Reden 1941-1945, 2004, originally 1986 by der Hörverlag, compact disc. 54. Mann, Listen, Germany!, 21. 55. Part of the original German can be heard on track 4 of Mann, Thomas Mann spricht Deutsche Hörer! This is also the subject of a letter written to F. W. Bradley on April 11, 1945. Mann writes, “I have appealed to the young people of Germany and to the whole German nation to get rid of their nefarious regime which has brought such great misfortune upon their country, and I have tried to reawaken those of their tendencies and traditions which in former times have earned the German people the sympathy and love of the whole world.” Thomas Mann, Letters of Thomas Mann 1889–1955, vol. 2 (London: Secker &Warburg, 1970), 471–2.

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228 Notes 56. Mann, Listen, Germany!, 14–15. 57. Ibid., 72. 58. Thomas Mann, Germany and the Germans (Washington, DC: Library of Congress, 1945), 18. For a discussion of Mann’s dialectical reading of Germany see Ehrhard Bahr, Weimar on the Pacific: German Exile Culture in Los Angeles and the Crisis of Modernism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007) and Evelyn Cobley, Temptations of Faust: The Logic of Fascism and Postmodern Archaeologies of Modernity (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002). 59. Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, ed. Gunzelin Schmid Noerr (Palo Alto, Stanford University Press, 2002), 28. 60. Paul Virilio and Sylvère Lotringer, Pure War, trans. Mark Polizzotti (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2008), 46. 61. Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, 117. 62. Ibid. See also Bruno Latour, “Networks, Societies, Spheres: Reflections of an Actor-Network Theorist,” Keynote speech for the International Seminar on Network Theory: Network Multidimensionality in the Digital Age (Los Angeles, February 19, 2010). 63. Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, 117; Alexander R. Galloway and Eugene Thacker, The Exploit: A Theory of Networks (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), 155. Jane Bennett also discusses the problematic phenomenon of nonhuman agency within modern networked systems when she speaks of the power grid in terms of living and dying. See “The Agency of Assemblages and the North American Blackout,” Public Culture 17.3 (2005): 445–65. 64. Sconce, Haunted Media, 15. 65. Galloway and Thacker, The Exploit, 155.

Epilogue: A Voice from the Other Side   1. The U.K.’s P. G. Wodehouse Society repeatedly states in its documents about the Berlin Broadcasts that Wodehouse’s comments were “innocuous” and were not propaganda in any sense of the word, but were rather celebrated for their humor. See http://www.pgwodehousesociety.org.uk/controversy.html (accessed September 22, 2014). Even Wodehouse claims that there was nothing “very subversive” about his broadcasts in a letter to the Editors extracted for the introduction to his Berlin Broadcasts. P. G. Wodehouse, Berlin Broadcasts (London: Secker and Warburg, 1954), 17.

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  2. Roderick Easdale has recently complicated the perception of Wodehouse as being a head-in-the-clouds writer, naïve to the workings of the world around him. By reading Wodehouse’s biography alongside his literature, Easdale suggests that Wodehouse’s broadcasts might not be as innocent as Wodehouse and his supporters might want us believe. See The Novel Life of P. G. Wodehouse (Luton: Andrews UK, 2014).   3. For further details on Wodehouse’s time as an expat in France and his stint as a German prisoner see Robert McCrum, Wodehouse: A Life (New York and London: W. W. Norton, 2004); Sophie Ratcliffe, P. G. Wodehouse: A Life in Letters (London: Hutchinson, 2011).   4. Wodehouse had a long career in America both as a writer and a screenwriter. See Brian Taves, P. G. Wodehouse and Hollywood: Screenwriting, Satires, and Adaptations (Jefferson, NC and London: McFarland & Co., 2006).   5. Under the Geneva Convention of 1929, the treatment of prisoners (and eventually civilian prisoners) was pre-determined, and was on the whole much better than the treatment of those in concentration camps. Although Wodehouse’s treatment as a civilian internee is considered typical for World War II, his fictional exaggerations and comedic tone make light of a situation that left many prisoners emotionally and physically scarred. McCrum, Wodehouse: A Life, 277.  6. Wodehouse, Berlin Broadcast 2, 22.  7. Wodehouse, Berlin Broadcast 1, 19–20; Berlin Broadcast 2, 22.  8. Wodehouse, Berlin Broadcast 1, 21.  9. Wodehouse, Berlin Broadcast 3, 42. 10. Ibid., 43–4. 11. Wodehouse, Berlin Broadcast 2, 24. 12. Wodehouse, Berlin Broadcast 5, 45–6. 13. Ibid., 47. 14. Ibid. 15. Ibid. 16. Francis Stuart, The Wartime Broadcasts of Francis Stuart 1942–1944, ed. Brendan Barrington (Dublin: Lilliput Press, 2000), 107. 17. Ibid., 72. 18. Ibid., 69. 19. Brendan Barrington, ed., “Introduction,” The Wartime Broadcasts of Francis Stuart 1942–1944 (Dublin: Lilliput Press, 2000), 39. Stuart’s neutrality is also called into question by his work as a scriptwriter for Lord Haw Haw and for his role in German espionage in Ireland.

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230 Notes 20. Jonathan Auerbach and Russ Castronovo, “Introduction: Thirteen Propositions about Propagnada,” The Oxford Handbook of Propaganda Studies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 8. 21. For a discussion on the intertwined nature of propaganda, literature, and pleasure see Mark Wollaeger, “Propaganda and Pleasure: From Kracauer to Joyce,” in The Oxford Handbook of Propaganda Studies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013).

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Index acousmatic voice see disembodied voice Adorno, Theodor 27, 31–2, 34–54, 63, 84, 160, 164, 175 see also Dialectic of Enlightenment allegory 21, 27, 59, 68–71, 76, 87–90, 95, 126 Anand, Mulk Raj 2, 28, 105, 107, 111–12, 114–16, 118–19, 176, 178 anti-Semitism 2, 46, 71, 132–3, 138, 177 appeasement 68, 70, 129 Auden, W. H. 24, 79, 108, 111 avant-garde 5–6, 20, 82–3, 85, 132 Axis powers 23, 28, 29, 98–100, 105–6, 116–17, 137, 171, 176–7 BBC as advocate and creator of innovative art 86 Empire Service 99, 113 Features and Drama Section 75, 81 Home Service 75, 80, 118 Indian Section 28, 98–101, 113–19, 176 as international site 98–9, 107, 114–16 North American Service 56 organization of 106, 117 Overseas Service 99 voice of 55–6, 58, 94–5, 102 Benjamin, Walter 8, 14–18, 26, 35, 38, 41, 48, 53, 84 Much Ado about Kasper / Radau um Kasperl 14, 16 “Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, The” 18 Blunden, Edmund 107, 111 Bokhari, Z. A. 99, 114, 118 Bose, Subhas Chandra 105 Bottome, Phyllis 66 Brander Report 117 Brecht, Bertolt 8–14, 17–18, 20, 26, 38, 44, 53, 84, 97, 102, 110, 145, 147, 160, 166

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Flight Across the Ocean, The / Der Ozeanflug / Der Flug der Lindberghs 8–14, 38, 53 “Radio as a Communications Apparatus, The” 9, 11, 97 Britain empire/imperialism 21, 26, 59, 69, 71, 99–100, 102–5, 111, 113–16, 176 national rebranding campaign 27, 56–7, 59, 63, 68, 72 political and societal transition 95 bureaucracy 98, 123 camera 152, 155 Cantril, Hadley 7, 36, 45, 48–9, 61–2 censorship 106, 118, 123, 138, 140 center/periphery 116 Central Religious Advisory Committee (CRAC) 55, 60 Chamberlain, Neville 60–1, 69–70, 79 Chitale, Venu 107, 116 Churchill, Winston 23, 57, 66, 138 cinema 3–4, 20, 22, 31–2, 34, 36–7, 57, 63, 87, 125, 136 see also film clog see interruption (clog) Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS) 25, 34, 36, 39, 41–2, 45–6, 52, 126, 131, 178 communication (failure of) 19–20, 28–9, 52, 121–4, 134–8, 140–3, 146, 159 communications media see media (communications) Communism 65 concentration camps 37, 67, 175–6 see also Holocaust cosmopolitanism 54, 108 culture industry 32, 34, 36–8, 40, 44, 53, 175 Dialectic of Enlightenment 36–8, 44, 48, 164, 175

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244 Index disembodied voice 32, 43, 62–4, 121–2, 149 divine retribution 27, 58 Dos Passos, John: Manhattan Transfer 3 Eliot, T. S. 2, 4, 20, 24, 28, 59, 63, 65, 77–8, 87, 93, 105, 107–8, 111, 115–16, 119, 123–4, 126, 138–40, 142, 149, 177–8 Waste Land, The 4, 77, 123, 126 Empson, W. M. 111, 116 exile 6, 18, 21, 36, 76, 143, 146–7, 149, 157, 160–2 expatriate/expat 79, 172 fascism 18, 24, 35, 37, 44, 46, 65, 79, 105, 111, 119, 122, 125–6, 130–3, 175 Faulkner, William: The Sound and the Fury 86 Federal Communication Commission (FCC) 132, 135 film 3–4, 14, 19–20, 26, 31–6, 38, 56–8, 61, 67, 103, 131, 161 see also cinema Forster, E. M. 2, 26, 28, 105, 107, 119 fourth front (radio’s role) 25 Frankfurt School 8, 37 free speech/First Amendment 136–7, 141 Frost, Robert 123, 138, 140, 142 Futurism 5–6, 85 ghosts see haunting Gielgud, Val 61–3 Gillars, Mildred (Axis Sally) 171 global/globalization 26–7, 35, 128, 165 Goebbels, Joseph 13, 18, 118, 166 Gospels, The 27, 59, 61, 63, 66–9, 73 gramophone 4–5, 36, 102, 161 haunting 29, 121, 145–54, 157–61, 163, 168–9 Hemingway, Ernest 123, 138–9, 142 high art 2, 84 history (repetition of) 57 Hitler, Adolf 18, 23, 25, 34, 45, 56, 66, 69–70, 81, 88, 92, 127, 129–31, 164 Holocaust 70, 147, 162, 172 see also concentration camps

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Home Front 75 Horkheimer, Max 31, 37, 164, 175 see also Dialectic of Enlightenment Houdini, Harry 153, 155 Houseman, John 45, 48 image decay 41, 132–3, 135 radio/aural 108–9, 132–3 Imagist/Imagism 83, 132 India independence of 100, 104–5, 112, 115 Indian nationalist movement 28, 98–9, 105, 112, 119 radio infrastructure 117 internment camp / internee 172–6 interruption 29, 47, 57, 122, 135, 149, 160, 169 clog 19, 28, 121–3, 134–5, 137–8, 140, 142, 145 noise 19, 110, 122, 124, 143, 160 Isherwood, Christopher 79 James, William 147 Jesus Christ 58–65, 68–72 Joyce, James 3–4, 20, 28, 77, 85, 87, 92, 123, 126, 149–50, 154, 158, 160, 165 Ulysses 3, 20, 77, 85, 92, 126, 150, 154, 158 Joyce, William (Lord Haw Haw) 171–2 Kaltenbach, Fred W. (Lord Hee Haw) 171 Kenner, Hugh 1, 20, 124, 136 Kenton, Godfrey 111 Kipling, Rudyard: ”Wireless” 2–3, 150–1, 158 Kittler, Friedrich 2, 12–13, 26, 31, 44, 47, 98, 148, 152, 161 Koch, Howard 45, 48 Latour, Bruno 29, 149, 154, 165–6, 168 Lazarsfeld, Paul 36–7 listener comprehension 2, 119, 124, 135 local/localization 165–9 London Blitz 25, 57, 72, 81 London Can Take It 57 Lord’s Day Observance Society (LDOS) 55, 59, 60, 62

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Index MacLeish, Archibald Air Raid 46, 81, 131 America Story, The 131 as Director of OFF 133 Fall of the City, The 29, 46, 81, 123, 126–31, 133, 164 as Librarian of Congress 131, 139 progressive liberalism 122, 125, 131 as public poet 125–6, 129 States Talking, The 131 MacNeice, Louis Alexander Nevsky 87 Autumn Journal 76, 81 Christopher Columbus 28, 75, 77–8, 84–7, 90–5 Dark Tower, The 85–6 Meet the U.S. Army 80 Modern Poetry 83 Poems (1925–40) 83 Strings are False, The 78 transnational broadcasts as cultural translation 78, 80, 84 Mann, Thomas “Experience in the Occult, An” 149, 154, 158 Doctor Faustus 146 Joseph and His Brothers 146 Listen, Germany! 147, 161 Magic Mountain, The 149, 155, 157, 159–60, 162, 169 Marconi, Guglielmo xiii, 7, 151–2 Marinetti, F. T. 5–7 Marson, Una 105, 115–16 Marxism 37, 91, 105 mass culture 1–2 mass mediation 3 McLuhan, Marshall 1–2, 44, 61, 128, 136 media archive 143 communications 1–2, 4, 14, 19–20, 23, 25–6, 44, 48, 98, 119, 136, 151–2 culture 36–7 history 2, 143 industries (and capitalism) 14, 27, 36–8, 44 studies 1, 6, 136, 143 violence 38 medium author as 2, 113, 148, 158–9, 161

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spiritual 128, 133, 148–9, 151–8, 168 Melville, Herman: “Bartleby” 121–2 Menon, Narayana 107, 116 Mercury Theatre on the Air 12, 45–6, 48, 50 Ministry of Information (MOI) 55–7, 59, 66–7, 75, 81, 83, 106, 114 modernism aesthetics 1, 24, 76, 136, 143 contradictions of 19–20, 124, 143 high 1, 6, 20–1, 59, 63, 76–7, 84–5, 93, 124–6, 132, 136–7, 143, 147–8 individualism vs. collectivism 6, 85, 125, 136 late 21–2, 59, 99, 119 redefinition of 21–2, 125, 178–9 Morse code 152 Mussolini, Benito 131 myth 56, 59, 77, 92–3, 123, 126–7, 158 National Broadcasting Company (NBC) 34, 37–8, 40, 147, 166 nationalism 23, 99, 105, 112, 114 Nazism 59, 68, 105, 172, 175 network communication 97, 122, 139, 142, 146, 154 epistolary/postal 123–4, 131, 137–42 hyper 97–8 informational 126, 131 literary 98–9, 114–15, 119, 123, 137–42, 148 modernist 26, 28, 99, 119 multi-nodal 29, 140, 147, 149, 166–8 radio 10, 12, 29, 34, 52, 98, 123, 137, 140, 146, 148, 154 spiritual 148, 151–2 as a weapon 97–8, 119, 151 neutrality 49, 172, 175–8 noise 5, 10, 19, 56, 83, 85, 110, 122, 124, 143, 160 see also interruption (noise) Olivier, Laurence 75, 90, 92 Ong, Walter 136 Orwell, George Animal Farm 100, 117–18 Burmese Days 102–3 “Hanging, A” 103

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246 Index Homage to Catalonia 101–2, 105 Lion and the Unicorn, The 103–4 Nineteen Eighty-Four 97–8, 100–1, 118 “Poetry and the Microphone” 109–10, 118 Road to Wigan Pier, The 102, 104 “Shooting an Elephant” 103–4 Talking to India 105 Voice broadcasts 100, 105, 107–8, 110–13, 115–16, 118–19 wartime diary 102, 117 patriotism 104–5, 112 Pearl Harbor 55, 58, 75, 105 phonograph 151 Pimpernel Smith 20, 151–2 Popular Front movement 46 post-war reconstruction 54, 165 Pound, Ezra as anti-semitic 2, 132–3, 138, 177 Cantos, The 2, 77, 123, 126, 133–4, 136 as fascist 1, 29, 123, 131–3, 137, 141 “make it new” 20, 149 Rome Radio 126, 132, 135 St. Elizabeth’s Hospital 1, 123, 131, 136, 140 treason investigation 132, 136–42 Priestley, J. B. 56–7, 80, 92, 95, 175 Princeton Radio Research Project (PRRP) 36–7, 41 private sphere 5, 63, 125 propaganda Allied 29, 173, 177 Axis 28–9, 98–100, 105–6, 116–17, 171, 176–7 and conquest 23, 26 as forbidden word 106 as information 23, 26, 101, 105–6, 113, 125, 176, 178 journalism 80, 92 and literature/poetry 2, 6, 29, 72, 82–6, 112, 119, 171, 178 relationship to art 2, 4, 6, 26, 29, 78, 82, 87, 95, 97, 100–1, 110, 112, 118–19, 168, 171, 176, 178–9 white vs. black 68, 105, 125 Proust, Marcel 77 public poetry 125–6, 129, 137

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radio active listening v. passive hearing 8–13, 18, 40, 49, 53, 63, 110 advertising 7, 34, 38–9, 44, 53 aiding the war effort 22, 24–5, 27, 34, 54, 56, 68, 81, 90, 105 and aura 41–3 as an authoritarian power 38–9, 43, 48, 54 communty of listeners 109–10, 136 as a democratic medium 8, 17–18, 26, 38, 53, 102 educational 7, 8, 17, 23, 26, 41, 84, 99, 102, 133–4, 137 as entertainment 7, 17–18, 28, 34, 40, 50, 87, 108, 110, 117, 127 hams 7, 12–13, 52 immediacy of 63, 135 industry 32, 36–8, 40–1, 47–8, 54 link to socio-political structures 52 as a military weapon 6, 12–13, 18, 19, 27, 47, 49, 73, 97–8, 108–9, 119, 125, 132, 165 as a national unifier 7–8, 18, 20, 22, 28, 48, 72, 166 as a news/information source 7, 12, 23, 25, 31, 34, 46–9, 97, 103, 106, 116, 127, 129, 135 presence-absence paradox 20, 63–4, 160, 168 and the private sphere 5, 63, 125 transmission difficulty 110, 124, 135, 137, 141–3, 149 as a trustworthy medium 23, 49, 106 two-sided communication 8–9 as a visual medium 59–62, 108–9 voice 10, 27, 33–4, 38, 43, 50–1, 59, 61, 63, 109, 113, 116 Read, Herbert 107, 111 Roosevelt, Franklin D. 23, 34, 48, 131, 133–4, 138 Sayers, Dorothy Begin Here 66, 71 He That Should Come 61 Man Born to Be King, The 27, 55–73, 75, 87, 90 Shakespeare, William 4, 41–2, 45–6, 94, 154, 158, 173

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Index Siegert, Bernhard 19, 26, 28, 47, 122, 124, 143 Smith, Stevie 107 socialism 98 space 26–7, 43, 51, 63–4, 76–7, 81, 93–4, 132, 168, 177–8 Spanish Civil War 18, 126–7, 129–30 Spender, Stephen 24, 107 spiritualism/occultism 128, 149, 151–2, 159, 168 Stanton, Frank 36 Stevens, Wallace 87 Stoker, Bram: Dracula 150–1, 158, 160 Stuart, Francis 177–8 Tambimuttu, M. J. 107, 116 technology 5, 9, 16, 18–20, 25–6, 36, 44, 77, 83, 102, 122, 124, 135, 142, 145–7, 151–2, 154, 164, 168 contradictions within 16, 19, 124, 142, 145–6, 164–5, 168 progress 5, 146, 151–2 telegraph xiii, 7, 20, 145–6, 152–3 telepathy 152–3, 157 telephone 5, 20, 29, 38, 102, 143, 147, 152, 154, 166 television 19, 26, 32, 36, 53, 61, 97, 145 Thomas, Dylan 24, 105, 107–8 Titanic, The 145–6, 165 transnational 21–2, 35, 56, 59, 72, 86, 99–100, 110, 114–15, 119

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Unpublished Story 57 Volksempfänger 44, 53, 166–8 Waugh, Evelyn: Put Out More Flags 5 Welch, J. W. 58 Welles, Orson: The War of the Worlds 12, 27, 35, 45–53, 121, 127 Wells, H. G. 45 West, Rebecca: The Return of the Soldier 3–4 Whitman, Walt 108, 125 Williams, Raymond 44, 53 wireless imagination 5–6 Wizard of Oz, The 31–4, 43, 128 Wodehouse, P. G. 29, 171–8 Berlin broadcasts 29, 171–2, 176 Wolf, Friedrich: ”Krassin” rettet “Italia” 12 Woolf, Virginia 4–5, 20, 26, 85, 123, 149 Between the Acts 4, 20 Mrs. Dalloway 26 To the Lighthouse 123 Waves, The 85 World War I 3, 6–7, 13, 23, 31, 44, 49–50, 111, 148, 159 World War II 2, 4, 6, 8, 18, 21–4, 27, 34, 44, 53, 57, 63, 65–9, 89, 93, 99–100, 104, 111, 122–3, 143, 146, 149, 165, 177–8 as a cultural conflict 24 as a holy war / religious struggle 65–7 as the “people’s war” 56, 72

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