Notes 1 Missing in Action: Repression, Return, and the Post-War Uncanny 1. The First World War is commonly pointed to as a pivotal event that prompted writers to search for new literary forms and modes of expres- sion. Hazel McNair Hutchinson suggests that wartime themes of “anxiety, futility, fragmentation and introspection would extend into post-war writing and would become hallmarks of American Modernist literature.” The first world conflict produced novels such as John Dos Passos’ One Man’s Initiation: 1917 (1920) based on his experi- ences as a volunteer ambulance driver and Three Solders (1921), which investigates the war’s psychological impact. Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms (1929) includes sparse yet graphic depictions of bat- tle, and his first novel Fiesta: The Sun Also Rises (1927) chronicles the aftermath of the war for those who were physically or emotion- ally wounded. Many major American authors of the 1920s and 1930s were personally impacted by the war, and it continually surfaces in the works of writers such as Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, e. e. cum- mings, and F. Scott Fitzgerald. For a brief discussion of American literature influenced by the First World War, see Hazel McNair Hutchison, “American Literature of World War One,” The Literary Encyclopedia (July 2, 2007), http:// www.litencyc.com/ php/ stop- ics.php?rec=true&UID=1735. 2. Maxwell Geismar, “The Shifting Illusion,” in American Dreams, American Nightmares, ed. David Madden (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1970), 53. 3. Richard Bessel and Dirk Schuman, eds., Life After Death: Approaches to a Cultural and Social History of Europe during the 1940s and 1950s (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 7. 4. John Whittier Treat points out that in October 1945, just two months after the bomb’s detonation, Toyoshima Yoshia urged Japanese writers to utilize literature in order to assimilate what science had wrought. See Treat, Writing Ground Zero: Japanese Literature and the Atomic Bomb (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 11. John T. Dorsey reveals that Ôta Yôko published her notes on the atomic bombing of Hiroshima during the brief window between 194 NOTES the end of Japanese war censorship and the start of American occu- pation censorship on September 19, 1945. Her novel based on her experience, Shikabane no machi (City of Corpses), was published in 1948. See Dorsey, “Atomic Bomb Literature in Japan and the West,” Neohelicon 14, no. 2 (September 1987): 326. 5. Many British poets actually composed their work on the battle- field. Siegfried Sassoon’s The Old Huntsman and Other Poems was published in 1917 and Counter-Attack and Other Poems appeared in 1918. Wilfred Owens’s war poetry was all composed during the last years of the war. He was killed in battle on November 4, 1918. 6. Irving Howe, “Man Underground,” review of Invisible Man, by Ralph Ellison, The Nation 174, no. 19 (May 10, 1952): 454. 7. R. W. B. Lewis, “Recent Fiction: Picaro and Pilgrim,” in A Time of Harvest: American Literature 1910–1960, ed. Robert E. Spiller (New York: Hill and Wang, 1962), 144. 8. Geismar, “Shifting Illusion,” 54. 9. Edmund Wilson, Classics and Commercials (New York: Farrar Strauss and Co., 1950), 318. 10. Jack Kerouac, letter to Alfred Kazin (February 20, 1951), transcript in the Berg Collection, New York Public Library, New York. 11. Geismar, “Shifting Illusion,” 54. 12. John Aldridge, “The Search for Values,” in The American Novel Since World War II, ed. Marcus Klein (New York: Fawcett World Library, 1969), 42. 13. Ibid., 43. 14. John Aldridge, The Devil in the Fire: Retrospective Essays on American Literature and Culture 1951–1971 (New York: Harper’s Magazine Press, 1972), 9. Sociologists such as Daniel Bell declared the 1950s “the end of ideology.” World War II and the Cold War were seen as discrediting both the right and the left, leaving political ideas gener- ally exhausted. See Bell, The End of Ideology: On the Exhaustion of Political Ideas in the Fifties (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1960). 15. Marcus Klein, ed. The American Novel Since World War II (New York: Fawcett World Library, 1969), 13. 16. Phillip Roth, Reading Myself and Others (New York: Penguin, 1985), 90. 17. Many thought that the economic downturn after World War I would be repeated after World War II. After a few rocky years following 1945, however, America’s economy strengthened and continued to grow throughout the 1950s. 18. Elaine Tyler May argues that the Cold War ideology of containment and the domestic revival were “two sides of the same coin: post-war Americans’ intense need to feel liberated from the past and secure in the future.” See May, Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era (New York: Basic Books, 1999), 10. NOTES 195 19. Alan Brinkley, “The Illusion of Unity in Cold War Culture,” in Rethinking Cold War Culture, ed. Peter J. Kuznick and James Gilbert (Washington, D. C. and London: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2001), 66. 20. Frederic Wakeman, The Hucksters (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1954), 90. 21. Ibid., 96. 22. Harvey Swados, “The Image in the Mirror,” in The Living Novel: A Symposium, ed. Granville Hicks (New York: Macmillan, 1957), 190. 23. Andrew Hoberek points out that by the end of World War II there were over 500,000 fewer small businesses than at its start and over 1,600 mergers had taken place, about one-third of which involved corporations worth $50 million or more taking over smaller enter- prises. See Hoberek, The Twilight of the Middle Class: Post-World War II American Fiction and White-Collar Work (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2005), 7. 24. Richard Pells, The Liberal Mind in the Conservative Age: American Intellectuals in the 1940s and 1950s (New York: Harper Row, 1985), 187. 25. Deborah E. Lipstadt describes a 1953 episode of This is Your Life devoted to the story of Hanna Kohner, a Holocaust survivor whose husband, father, and mother were all killed at Auschwitz. She settled in America with her second husband who escaped from Germany prior to the war. Lipstadt points out that this show was one of the earliest treatments by American television of the Holocaust, and its portrayal “eschewed gloom and doom and ended on a note of ‘good overcomes all’—particularly if that good is American in origin.” The episode ends with the host’s reassuring conclusion: “The nev- er-to-be-forgotten tragic experiences of your life, Hanna, have been tempered by the happiness you’ve found here in America . This is your life, Hanna Block Kohner. To you in your darkest hour America held out a friendly hand.” See Lipstadt, “America and the Memory of the Holocaust: 1950–1965,” Modern Judaism 16, no. 3 (1996): 197. 26. Duck and Cover, directed by Anthony Rizzo (Archer Productions), 1952. 27. D. Purcell, “The People are Afraid,” Time, July 15, 1946, http:// www.time.com/time/ magazine/ article/ 0,9171,803812,00.html. 28. Survival Under Atomic Attack (Washington, D. C.: United States Government Printing Office, 1950), 3. 29. Ibid. 30. Quoted in Thomas Doherty, Cold War, Cool Medium (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), 11. 31. Quoted in Paul Boyer, By the Bomb’s Early Light: American Thought and Culture at the Dawn of the Atomic Age (New York: Pantheon, 1985), 23. 196 NOTES 32. Ibid. 33. “Survival: Are Shelters the Answer?” Newsweek, November 6, 1961, 19. 34. James Agee, “The Bomb,” Time, August 20, 1945, http:// www.time.com/time/magazine/article/ 0,9171,797639,00. html?internalid=ACA. 35. Martin Halliwell, American Culture in the 1950s (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007), 3. 36. Margot A. Henriksen, Dr. Strangelove’s America: Society and Culture in the Atomic Age (Berkeleyand Los Angeles: University of California Press), 85. 37. J. Edgar Hoover quoted in Albert Fried, McCarthyism: The Great American Red Scare (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 17. 38. Cardinal Spellman quoted in Eric Goldman, The Crucial Decade: America 1945–1960 (New York: Vintage, 1961), 130. 39. T. Douglas Miller and Marion Nowack, The Fifties: The Way We Really Were (New York: Doubleday, 1977), 10. 40. Fried, McCarthyism, 4. 41. Goldman, Crucial Decade, 122. 42. Hugo Ernst, “Labor Views the Campaigns,” The Nation, May 10, 1952, 447. 43. George Sokolsky quoted in Doherty, Cool Medium, 31. 44. Quoted in Doherty, Cool Medium, 61. 45. Ernst, “Labor Views,” 447. 46. Pells, Liberal Mind, 262. 47. For an in-depth discussion of post-war anti-Communism, see Ellen Schrecker, “McCarthyism: Political Repression and the Fear of Communism,” Social Research 71, no. 4 (Winter 2004): 1041–86. 48. In the same letter, Holmes relates: “A friend who works in the record department at Columbia comes to me and tells me this little vignette. As soon as word reached the busy little archivists in this department, word that Allen had been arraigned with some ‘unsavory characters’, his file-folder was taken from the drawer with two careful fingers, as though it was contagious, and dropped into the ‘deadfile.’ My friend protested: ‘After all, he hasn’t been tried yet, it hasn’t been proved. Isn’t this a bit hasty?’ His colleagues look askance at him, a sign of sympathy with the rebel casts suspicion on him as well. ‘From now on,’ they tell him, ‘Columbia University denies that Allen Ginsberg exists. For us, he is a dead issue!’ ” See Holmes, letter to Jack Kerouac (July 3, 1949), transcript in the Berg Collection, New York Public Library, New York. 49. Arthur Miller, Timebends: A Life (London: Methuen, 1999), 262. 50. This explains the often ludicrous forms anti-Communism took. In West Virginia, a vigilant policeman discovered tiny candies bearing geography lessons, and to his horror, some of these lollies bore the NOTES 197 hammer-and-sickle Soviet flag and the information that the U.