Academia Meets Spycraft in Biography of Little-Known Yale Professor

‘Code Name Puritan: Norman Holmes Pearson at the Nexus of Poetry, Espionage, and American Power’By Greg BarnhiselUniversity of Chicago Press, 392 pagesNorman Holmes Pearson (1909-1975), a Yale University professor, American counterintelligence agent, champion of modernists such as H.D. and Ezra Pound, one of the originators of American studies as an academic discipline, spent much of his life in an ivory tower that seemed to belie the stereotype of the teacher as Ichabod Crane — Washington Irving’s ineffectual schoolmaster who disappears after a terrifying encounter with a headless horseman.I thought of the spindly Crane while reading Greg Barnhisel’s description of a figure he likens to Woody Allen’s Zelig, a character capable of assuming many different identities — improbably, in Pearson’s case, promoting, for example, the treasonous Pound while at the same time exposing foreign agents intent on subverting American power. Like Irving’s Ichabod, Crane disappeared, uncelebrated after his death, overshadowed by contemporaries such as McGeorge Bundy, Kingman Brewster, and Averell Harriman.Unlike those illustrious peers, Pearson did not seek fame. Poor health made such a quest for renown unlikely, but more importantly, as Mr. Barnhisel points out, Pearson was an organization man. What mattered to him was the infrastructure of the national security state and concomitant institutions such as the universities experiencing explosive post-World War II growth.The ivory tower, in Mr. Pearson’s view, had to modernize insofar as it would have to lean on government power and become indispensable to that power, even as he pursued a seemingly contradictory course in touting, for example, the imagist poetry of H.D. that appeared wrought right out of the ancient Greek, and even while practicing the modern aesthetic propounded by poet/doctor William Carlos Williams: “No ideas but in things.”Pearson was no great scholar, Mr. Barnhisel concedes, but he knew how to connect the academy to, first, the OSS (Office of Strategic Services) that became the CIA (Central Intelligence agency), dominated in its early years by Ivy League types such as William F. Buckley, who created a character based on Pearson in one of his novels. Pearson was a “behind-the-scenes” operative who kept systems and institutions running, Mr. Barnhisel shows. So masterly was Pearson at this sort of surreptitious activity that one of his Yale colleagues, Alan Trachtenberg, said to Mr. Barnhisel: “Why would you want to write about him?” Pearson was an introducer, an editor, a kind of buccaneering proponent of what many academics then thought of as a rather amorphous program of American studies. “Whatever you do,” one of my professorial advisers told me, “don’t go into American studies. It’s not really a discipline.”Such academic narrowness mistook what Pearson was up to. American studies dovetailed with his intelligence work because, as Mr. Barnhisel puts it, he believed the “United States had a civilization to be proud of.” That truth may seem self-evident now, but in the academic culture Pearson sought to transform, the study of English literature predominated.If America was to dominate the postwar world, the academy should be a vital part of showing it had much to offer the very Europe that was its supposed superior. If you want to understand Pearson’s infiltration of modern American academic life with the concerns of the national security state, you can’t do better, Mr. Barnhisel notes, than to read Don DeLillo’s “Libra” and Norman Mailer’s “Harlot’s Ghost.” These are grand suggestions that situate the importance of Mr. Barnhisel’s own work.Mr. Banhisal connects Pearson’s interest in Pound and H.D. to his privileged Puritan background, with its desire for “renewal, for spiritual cleansing” coupled with an “intense drive for self-criticism and self-improvement.” In other words, the employment of the term puritanism is a universe away from H.L. Mencken’s famous depiction of the Puritan obsessed with the “haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.”It is often said against literary biography that it deals with figures who don’t do much — that is, don’t lead lives of action and are not very dramatic. That would seem to be the case with Pearson, but Mr. Barnhisel makes several astute moves, including a “structural shift” in the last five chapters that eschew the “day-to-day, or even year-to-year” professional life of an academic in favor of a wider aperture focusing on how integral Pearson was to the development of an “American Cold War cultural consensus.” Mr. Rollyson is the author of “American Biography.”

Academia Meets Spycraft in Biography of Little-Known Yale Professor

Academia Meets Spycraft in Biography of Little-Known Yale Professor

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