Sherry Chandler

Rexroth on the Mandarins

The process that led to the development of a full-blown, official, bureaucratic, and academic American literature began during the Second War when hundreds of writers were employed at desk jobs in the armed services or their appanages. People who had dreamed of martyrdom and learned a set of exercises and given up cigarettes so they’d keep fit in prison or concentration camps changed their minds and crowded into the swivel chairs in Washington offices. After the war was safely over many of them transferred to the OSS, predecessor of the CIA, and took interesting trips abroad to teach the Germans and Italians and French the great truths of democracy and free enterprise. Before the onset of the Cold War many of these people were radicals in art and politics or both. Some of them were even Communists, but once relations between Russia and the United States cooled, these were ruthlessly purged.

Adapting the name of the Independent League for Cultural Freedom founded by Diego Rivera, André Breton, and a number of American Surrealists and radicals at the time of the Moscow Trials, a Congress for Cultural Freedom was called in Berlin under the auspices of the American State Department, the CIA, and Military Intelligence. A chain of magazines was established… At the same time sums of money were made available for what the Russians called “American cultural imperialism”—actually, state-subsidized intercultural relations no different from their own.

…

Given the notion of a nation state, threatened by another nation state, there is nothing wrong with this… To a certain extent CIA sponsorship was simply a device to outwit militantly mindless politicians.

Nevertheless, cultural freedom or no, twenty years of this program led to a thorough-going officialization of American writers, artists, musicians, scholars, and all other culture-bearers who were willing to lend themselves to it.

…

Sung and T’ang China would indicate that a Mandarin literature can perhaps become one of the highest of which mankind is capable, but certainly from the end of the Second War on, American literature, but especially American poetry, divides increasingly into Mandarin and non-Mandarin. If this is not understood, the literary currents of a whole generation are not comprehensible.

—American Poetry in the Twentieth Century (The Seabury Press, 1973)

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