Espionage and Exile: Fascism and Anti-Fascism in British Spy Fiction and Film

253 Pages·2016·5.184 MB·English

by  Lassner Phyllis Lassner

Espionage and Exile
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Espionage and Exile
Fascism and Anti-Fascism in
British Spy Fiction and Film
Phyllis Lassner
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Edinburgh University Press is one of the leading university presses in
the UK. We publish academic books and journals in our selected subject
areas across the humanities and social sciences, combining cutting-
edge scholarship with high editorial and production values to produce
academic works of lasting importance. For more information visit our
website: edinburghuniversitypress.com
© Phyllis Lassner, 2016
Edinburgh University Press Ltd
The Tun – Holyrood Road
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Edinburgh EH8 8PJ
Typeset in 10.5/13 Adobe Sabon by
Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Stockport, Cheshire
and printed and bound in Great Britain by
CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon CR0 4YY
A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 978 1 4744 0110 4 (hardback)
ISBN 978 1 4744 0111 1 (webready PDF)
ISBN 978 1 4744 1673 3 (epub)
The right of Phyllis Lassner to be identified as the author of this work
has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents
Act 1988, and the Copyright and Related Rights Regulations 2003
(SI No. 2498).
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Contents
Acknowledgments vi
Introduction: Exile – The Heart of the Secret World 1
1. Eric Ambler: Espionage Chronicler of the 1930s 16
2. Double Agency: Women Writers of Espionage Fiction 69
3. Leslie Howard: Propaganda Artist 118
4. John le Carré’s Never-ending War of Exile 166
Conclusion 217
Bibliography 223
Index 239
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Acknowledgments
I am deeply grateful to the people and institutions that have encouraged
and supported me throughout my research, writing and the produc-
tion of this book. Jackie Jones’ enthusiasm for Espionage and Exile,
the guidance of Adela Rauchova, James Dale’s meticulous instructions,
Nicola Wood’s rigorous copyediting and Rebecca Mackenzie’s brilliant
work on my cover have been models of editorial support from start to
finish. As in the past, Bob Gundlach supported my work by encourag-
ing me to create courses on espionage fiction and film and to apply for
travel grants to research libraries and conferences. Generous funding
by Northwestern University allowed me to examine the papers of Eric
Ambler at the Howard Gottlieb Research Center at Boston University,
Helen MacInnes’ papers at the Department of Rare Books and Special
Collections at Princeton University, and Leslie Howard’s radio scripts at
the BBC written archive at Reading. The help of the archivists and staff
at each of these libraries made research an enormous pleasure.
Throughout the entire process of thinking through the issues that
coalesced as Espionage and Exile, I had the great good fortune to reap
the benefits of supportive and brilliant colleagues and friends who
read various chapters and whose knowledge, insights and suggestions
enriched my thinking and writing, and nudged me to contextualise,
clarify and extend my nascent ideas. In particular, I wish to thank
Elizabeth Maslen, Allan Hepburn, Margaret Stetz, Clare Hanson, Mike
Williamson, Laurie Baron and Nathan Abrams. I am very grateful to
Clare Hanson, Will May and James Jordan for sponsoring my award
of the International Diamond Jubilee Fellowship at Southampton
University, UK. Their generous hospitality and friendship gave me ten
blissful days of scholarly activities and conversations focused on my
research and so many topics that enriched my thinking for this book,
including the symposium on espionage representation, the seminar on
Holocaust history and representation co-taught by James Jordan and
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Acknowledgments vii
Shirli Gilbert, Will May’s MA workshop on women writers and Karen
Robson’s guided tour of the Parkes Institute archives where I hope to
work during my next two visits. Other opportunities to share my work
on this book spurred me on with demonstrations of support, includ-
ing Allan Hepburn’s gracious organisation of my talk at McGill, Toby
Manning’s invitation to keynote at his ‘Spying on Spies’ conference in
London and the Space Between annual conference, my scholarly home
that has nurtured lifelong friendships.
I would like to express appreciation to Andrew Boose at Davis
Wright Tremaine LLP for permission to quote from Helen MacInnes’
letter to Mrs Enid Cosgriff. Peters Fraser and Dunlop granted non-
exclusive licence on behalf of the Estate of Rebecca West to quote
from Rebecca West’s unpublished typescript of her introduction to
Pamela Frankau’s novel Colonel Blessington, held at the Burns Library,
Boston College. Credit for images from Pimpernel Smith, 1941 goes to
Leslie Howard, British National/Anglo-Amalgamated. Many thanks to
Marika Lysandrou for granting permission to quote the untitled poem
from Charlotte Delbo’s Auschwitz and After, Copyright 1995 by Yale
University Press.
Far more than illustrative, Ava Kadishson Schieber’s remarkable
drawings express the intertwined, contradictory and multiple identi-
ties and relationships produced by an experience of exile, finding home
and homelessness everywhere ever since she went into hiding from the
Nazis in 1941 and emerged four years later to build a new life, a family
and to become an artist and writer in Israel and in Chicago. Ava’s art
offers a way of seeing what I could only suggest in a scholarly study. I
will always be grateful for the gift of her art, her wisdom and friend-
ship. Years of sharing the murky pleasures of decoding spy thrillers with
Jacob Lassner has been one of the great pleasures of thinking, research-
ing and writing this book.
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Introduction
Exile – The Heart of the Secret
World
On 9 July 2010, the FBI completed an investigation called ‘Operation
Ghost Stories’ and arrested ten Russian spies acting as sleeper agents in
the United States.1 The FBI Illegals Program discovered that these agents
were trying to acquire secret intelligence by masquerading as ordinary
Americans while socialising with corporate executives, academics and
government officials. Newspaper stories highlighted the agents’ disguise
as middle-class suburban families, upsetting popular images of spies as
turbo-driven loners in covert wars against megalomaniac enemies. The
‘Ghost’ story, with its bizarre but reality-based context, combining famil-
iar tropes of the spy thriller with a defamiliarising political narrative, has
been transformed into an acclaimed American TV series, The Americans.
As I write, the series is going into its fourth season, continuing to entice
viewers as the 1980s KGB protagonists/antagonists become ever more
sympathetic to viewers, even while committing their dastardly deeds.
One of the series’ key surprises is its focus on romantic and family
tensions in the protagonists’ marriage of political convenience. While
casting women in spy thrillers as protagonists and antagonists has
become more prominent in recent years,2 the intensity with which
Elizabeth commits her assassinations compared to Philip’s increasing
doubts calls attention to gender as a category of espionage and exile, and
in so doing, unsettles the genre’s contrasting representations of mascu-
linity and femininity. With the possibility of returning to Russia an ever-
receding promise and premise, the conflicting responses of Elizabeth and
Philip Jennings to being Americans heighten their gendered differences
as well as the series’ suspense. The focus has shifted from the genre’s
high speed chases to the couple’s working and domestic roles and trou-
bled responses to their irrevocable exile. For Elizabeth, exile threatens
her devout Russian identity and politics, while for Philip, exile incites
his critical questioning. Kader Konuk offers an analytical framework for
viewing the place of exile in espionage fiction: ‘Exile has typically been
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2 Espionage and Exile
analysed not as a site for the contestation of hegemonic identity forma-
tions, but as a site for the development of critical consciousness. More so
than diaspora, exile has served as an epistemological category, drawing
attention to the ways in which knowledge is produced and transformed
under exilic conditions’ (31). For these Soviet spies in America, as with
so many British agents in the fictional field, there can be no diaspora,
no reconstruction, adaptation, or construction of a community with
shared values, history and customs − no celebratory cosmopolitanism.
There is only displacement, conceptual and cultural disorientation, the
loss of native languages and cultural traditions.3 As season three ended,
no heroes emerged, begging a critical question of the genre: will the
liminal position of the KGB protagonist spies solidify into villainy or
victimisation or will exile revise this dichotomy by creating conflicted,
complicated spies who have more in common with those created by
Eric Ambler and John le Carré than with Jason Bourne and his evil
adversaries?
Spy Thrillers and the Question of Political Art
This book will examine the narrative interweave of spy fiction and
exile to show how each is a political discourse and critically heuristic
perspective that illuminates the other. The pervasive presence of exiled
conditions and characters in British spy fictions from the 1930s onwards
demonstrates the historical and political importance of spy thrillers to
modern literature and to the genre’s formalist innovations, as proffered
by Clive Bloom: ‘In many respects the spy genre like the world it depicts
is a form attempting to exist in disguise’ (1). As recent scholarship dem-
onstrates, the forms of the genre are being integrated into major literary
trends, including modernism and the middlebrow.4 The interchange
of espionage and exile will also refute Michael Denning’s claim that
although spy fiction is ‘one of the most “political” of pop fiction genres’,
dealing with ‘the Empire, fascism, communism, the Cold War, terror-
ism’, its ‘political subject is only a pretext to the adventure formulas and
the plots of betrayal, disguise, and doubles [. . .]’ (2).
Espionage and Exile brings together six British writers of spy fiction
whose plots are constituted as Britain’s political and ethical relation
to Europe and North America from the 1930s through World War II
and the Cold War. My rationale for this selection derives from my own
reading and film-going experiences, when I began to notice that the
figure of the exiled Jew and other refugees kept appearing in the 1930s
fictions of Eric Ambler and Pamela Frankau, the 1940s fictions by Helen
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