Anxiety of Influence in the age of the CIA

 

Ron Rosenbaum wrote a journalistically celebrated article about James Angleton for Harpers. Angleton, in his exile, with his bourbons and his cigs, hunkered down at the Navy Club and told a lot of pups the true gospel of anti-communism, where it flourished in the Reagan years. Rosembaum was not as, shall we say, vulnerable as Edward Jay Epstein, who was possessed with the vision and even believed that the Sino-Soviet split and glasnost were decoys for dupes. Rosenbaum, at least back then, hadn’t succumbed to the intellectual arthritis that eventually caught up with him post 9/11. With the old vulture-spy, Rosenbaum traded some quips about Empson. Angleton, when he was a young modernist whippersnapper, met Empson at Yale, where Angleton and his roommate had founded a litmag: Furioso.

“Empson had made the case that instances of poetic ambiguity were not to be scorned as fuzzy self-contradiction but were, in fact, compressed expressions of the conflicting forces at the heart of a poem. Angleton praised Empson’s investigation of the varieties of ambiguity as a model for counterintelligence technique: valuable in decrypting the ambiguous intentionality of double agents and suspect defectors.”

This yoking together of modernism and the CIA was Angleton’s schtick, and it was sure to please writers. It made those classes in close reading seem important, somehow.

However, I don’t think of Empson or Wimsatt or Cleanth Brooks as portals to the explanation for such enterprises as Angleton’s. For that, I think we should turn to Harold Bloom’s best, in my opinion, book: The Anxiety of Influence. A book that bears the anxiety, I think, of Northrop Frye’s Anatomy of Criticism.

But that is an aside – I do have the bad habit of letting my asides in the front door of my theses, don’t I? Sorry in advance.

What the anxiety of influence offers is the romantic ethos under which Western Foreign policy, among its secret policemen and institutions, pursued their practical politics. A politics that was an anti-democratic defence of democracy, with the latter being something more akin to the common sense wisdom of the political elites than anything so socialistic as some combination of  pluralism, equality, freedom and solidarity. But the counterintelligence people did have a sense that they were engaged in a tragic struggle. A struggle within a romantic décor – twilight, by preference. And this struggle envisioned the enemy as a conspiracy. To envision the enemy as a plausible alternative to the managerial capitalism they succeeded in was to let the enemy through the back door.

In Bloom’s story, the ephebe poet – the poet who has entered, as a candidate, in a rite de passage – must find a way of misunderstanding the strong poets before him – before not necessarily in a chronological sense, but in the sense of a certain plane of standing – to shape them to his own purposes. Influence, then, is both called for and resisted. A critique of influence is at the center of the book – and at the center of the convulsions that, from the counter-intelligence point of view, had thrown off balance the Western side in the great struggle.

“The word "influence" had received the sense of "having a power over another" as early as the Scholastic Latin of Aquinas, but not for centuries was it to lose its root meaning of "inflow," and its prime meaning of an emanation or force coming in upon mankind from the stars. As first used, to be influenced meant to receive an ethereal fluid flowing in upon one from the stars, a fluid that affected one's character and destiny, and that altered all sublunary things. A power-divine and moral-later simply a secret power-exercised itself, in defiance of all that had seemed voluntary in one.”

In Rosenbaum’s article about Angleton, there is a concentration on that odd duo, Kim Philby – who Angleton knew very well, and trusted all too well – and the James Angleton after Philby. The man who had created an entire cosmology around the KGB, convinced that the entire meaning of the Soviet Union was its secret police, its intelligence agencies – which conveniently transformed the other side into its own intelligence agencies. The U.S. is reduced to the CIA, and that reduction produces the parody Paradise Lost in which Angleton and his like wandered, looking for moles, and seeding by every action and deed a mindset that has taken over the American libido in this, our odd inglorious crawl through the 21^st century.