During the 20th century intelligence agencies in Britain and America spent countless hours investigating “dangerous” authors. But most snoops are not very good readers
thought his phone was tapped. Doris Lessing reckoned that British spies were following her every move. Claude McKay suspected that the FBI was monitoring his travel in Europe. Their instincts were right. During the 20th century intelligence agencies in Britain and America spent countless hours investigating “dangerous” authors. This was in part an alternative to censoring orthe work of troublesome writers, which dictatorships do more readily than democracies.
Most snoops are not very good readers. They sometimes get basic facts wrong. In one file MI5, Britain’s domestic-intelligence agency, adds an extra “e” to “Orwell” and mistitles his book “Down and Out in Paris and London” as “A Down and Out in London and Paris”. The FBI’s assessment of McKay, a important figure in the Harlem renaissance, is true but unenlightening: he “is apparently a poet, or at least he has written considerable verse”.
J. Edgar Hoover, director of the FBI from 1924 to 1972, assumed that left-leaning writers were radicals and communists. His agents snooped on American authors from Allen Ginsberg to Susan Sontag. They listened in on phone calls, followed writers to meetings and spoke to their associates. Sometimes agents read and annotated their books. They targeted authors who were socialists, civil-rights activists or critical of the government, or who had friends with those attributes. This volume explores the intelligence files of 16 prominent writers, acquired with freedom-of-information requests.
Britain’s domestic intelligence agencies kept secret records on many left-wing writers after the first world war. James Smith has written a comprehensive account of the clandestine surveillance of British literary culture, which encompassed artists from W. H. Auden, a poet, to Joan Littlewood, a theatre director. Mr Smith describes how MI5 intercepted their letters, followed their families and recruited their close friends to be informants.
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