Classic English Wilderness of Mirrors
Part 4 · The New Critics

Reading like a spy

Yale, the 1930s–1950s · close reading as a counterintelligence method

Many of the first American intelligence officers came from university English departments. Some historians argue that this was not an accident: the way they had been taught to read poems became the way they read the enemy.

Professors and spies

Norman Holmes Pearson, the Yale English professor who recruited Angleton into the OSS, edited poets for a living. Angleton in turn helped bring other literary men into the work, among them Richard Ellmann, who later wrote the great biography of James Joyce. The Yale historian Robin Winks, in a 1987 book on the university and the spy services, gave Angleton a chapter called “The Theorist” and argued that habits of close reading are useful habits for intelligence work.

Three ideas from the New Critics

1. Ambiguity. In 1930 the English critic William Empson published Seven Types of Ambiguity. His claim: the best words in poems carry several meanings at the same time, and a good reader keeps them all. Angleton admired Empson, brought him to Yale to lecture, and stayed in contact with him through his CIA years. In counterintelligence, a defector’s every sentence can also mean two things at once.

2. Paradox. In 1942 the Yale critic Cleanth Brooks wrote “The Language of Paradox”: poetry tells its truths through statements that seem to contradict themselves. William R. Johnson, a counterintelligence officer Angleton had recruited, later wrote that he told young officers to read Brooks’s essay, and argued that counterintelligence is itself a practice of .

3. The author’s intention is hidden. The New Critics said you cannot know what the poet meant in his head; you only have the words on the page. A spy hunter faces the same wall. He never sees the enemy’s intention, only the messages, defectors and documents the enemy lets him see.

The skill and the sickness

A close reader finds hidden patterns. In a poem, that is a gift: the more meanings you find in “Gerontion,” the richer it becomes. But a counterintelligence officer who finds hidden patterns everywhere stops being able to trust anything. Every friend may be a Philby; every defector may be a Nosenko sent by Golitsyn’s KGB. The historian Michael Holzman argues that New Criticism shaped Angleton’s whole method. A CIA historian, David Robarge, treats that idea with more caution. Either way, the question stands: is the habit that makes a great reader the same habit that makes a spy?

Try it: read like Empson

Read these lines from “Gerontion” slowly. Then answer question 1 below: how many meanings can you find?

In a wilderness of mirrors. What will the spider do,
Suspend its operations, will the weevil
Delay?lines 65–67

Some words to start with: operations (what does a spider do? what does a spy agency run?), suspend (stop? or hang, as a spider hangs on its thread?), spider (an insect; a weaver of webs; a man at the centre of a network).

The question under all of it

Eliot’s poem ends by telling us that everything we read was “Thoughts of a dry brain in a dry season.” Angleton’s career ended with many of his enemies, and some of his friends, believing that the great Soviet plot he chased existed mostly in his own head. A poem may live inside one mind and still be true. Can a spy hunter’s picture of the world do the same? Or does counterintelligence need something a poem does not: a world that is really there, outside the mirrors?

Study questions

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Sources

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