`The Age of Anxiety" was the name W.H. Auden, in a long poem of 1947, gave the post-war world. For the 1950s, the shadows of very recent history lay blackly over that newly "post-war world", which in the event would go on for another 40 years or so. If this was a time of peace following one of the worst, globally most extended wars in history, it was a peace that was tense, tainted, uneasy and restless. The European order that had been in increasing disorder ever since August 1914 seemed shattered. It was now a world of Iron Curtains, occupied zones, divided cities, military build-up, eyeball confrontations, toppled regimes and puppet dictators.
"Hot war" had created not peace but "Cold War", a military and ideological division which not only split Europe from top to bottom but divided East from West and sectioned the politics of the globe. With European regimes unstable, frontiers and nationhoods obscure, cities flattened and economies fragile or non-existent, the second World War handed history over to two new superpowers, Russia and the US. Their actions, conflicts, fears and crises would not simply shape the future of the world; they would decide if it had a future at all.
War left a huge legacy of horrors the 1950s had to reckon with. The dropping of the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima in August 1945 initiated the age of nuclear anxiety. But it was in 1949, when Russia tested an atomic bomb of its own, using technology gleaned through espionage in the West, (and China went communist), that the age of mutually assured destruction began. Meantime, the discovery of the massive scale of Nazi genocide - the slowly dawning realisation that, besides all the bloodshed and ruin, five or more million had perished in the "Final Solution" - pointed to a crime beyond imagining.
And yet imagining what had happened over the wartime years was the great initiation for many, as the second half of the century started. The imaginings of the 1950s were mostly disturbed and often desperate. Two of the decade's marker novels were George Orwell's 1984, which appeared in 1949, just before Orwell's death, and Gunther Grass's The Tin Drum, which came out 10 years later (and has just been honoured with a belated Nobel prize for literature). Both are books abut an age of militarism and total disorder - where the clocks strike 13, or the young do not grow older or bigger, politics unfold to the sounds of despair and mockery, the familiar and orderly are there only for history to destroy.
The age felt terrifying, conspiratorial, dangerous, phobic. It was a time of intricate and corrupt infiltrations, cunning deceptions, strange alliances of opposites (old Marxists and new conservatives, spooks in Washington and spooks in Moscow). Unsurprisingly, the spy-thriller became the most popular form of literature. Graham Greene and Carol Reed made the great "noir" film The Third Man, set in occupied and battered Vienna in 1949. The spy genre flourished, and by the 1960s the age of John Le Carre, Len Deighton and the Cold War spying game was here to stay, certainly until October 1989. Nor is it surprising that, using another popular genre, the boys' book, William Golding wrote Lord of the Flies (1954), which is a meditation not only on survival after the nuclear holocaust but on the infinite corruptions in "innocent" or boyish human nature.
The philosopher for the 1950s was Jean-Paul Sartre; the philosophy in question was existentialism, with its portrait of existence without essence, its vision of eternal anxiety and the absurd. It, too, was a noir philosophy which reached maximum intensity when Sartre's Being and Nothingness, written in wartime, was translated into English in 1957. As Iris Murdoch said in her 1953 book on Sartre, he has "the style of the age". If the movement had a literary laureate, it was Beckett, whose fictional trilogy artistically dominated the early 1950s, whose Waiting for Godot, staged in London in 1956, was (far more than Look Back in Anger) the play of the age.
A recent book by Frances Stonor Saunders, Who Pays the Piper, does a fine job of capturing the remarkable cultural politics of the age, when the great ideological divide touched, illuminated, sometimes seriously tainted those who tried to understand the prospects of history and the divide between liberal democracy and collectivist and totalitarian communism that split the minds of the European intelligentsia. Many had been left-wing in the 1930s and cut their teeth on the Marxist dialectic - only to find far deeper ambiguities when the great God of History failed, or wore Stalin's moustache, and the Iron Curtain started to descend.
Saunders shows these post-war years as a Kulturkampf - an extended conflict over cultural values and ideologies between the West and Russia, in which the post-war literary community and the intelligentsia were deeply involved, whether conspiratorially or otherwise. The decision by the United States - the land that in the 1930s had been associated as much with the Depression as Hollywood movies - to accept its new status as the war's outright victor and a land of plenty was as much an internal as a global question. But once the political decision had been made to reject isolationism, revive flattened Europe and develop, through massive injections of aid, troops and commercial influence, the re-emergence or emergence of democratic institutions, the game was on.
In the ruins of flattened Berlin in 1945, US personnel devised a cultural as well as political strategy to win artistic, intellectual and literary hearts and minds against the no less determined campaigns of communism. In 1947 the CIA was founded, using wartime alliances to secure a cultural campaign of influence. This coincided with a widespread intellectual defection from communism, the God that failed. In the years that followed, the land across the Atlantic that seemed to have produced only chewing gum and Mickey Mouse became a cultural dream. Saunders's book looks at the massive input of CIA funding - to congresses and foundations, publishing houses and magazines - that encouraged this process, and its impact on the 1950s cultural climate.
The US had been plunged into world history as never before. The landscape was one of international crisis and political upheaval, as old empires dissolved (the British, the French, the Dutch, the Portuguese), new independence movements and wars started and fresh alliances were forged. In 1946, Churchill had seen the Iron Curtain descending; by 1947 the "Cold War" had begun. In 1949, a whole new concern over espionage issues arose, and the Alger Hiss case opened. As the 1950s started, US troops were again in action, in Korea.
US - and many European - intellectuals now often found their old allegiances an embarrassment. As Lionel Trilling put it in the preface of The Liberal Imagination (1950), the connection between literature and politics was "an immediate one" - but "it is no longer possible to think of politics except as the politics of culture". For "the literature of the modern period . . . has been characteristically political", meaning it had to do with the moral value of life and the search for the self. Politics was a human necessity, but ideology was the curse: hence the liberal imagination.
The question of hearts and minds dominated the 1950s. According to Sen Joseph McCarthy, a US Republican senator from Wisconsin, the "enemies from within" were to be found among the "eggheads", "the bright young men who are born with silver spoons in their mouths" who were sapping the nation's strength in a new kind of war that could not end "except in victory or death for this civilisation".
"McCarthyism" said much about the United States in the 1950s: the popular anxiety over intellectuals, national engagement in foreign aid, and the role of global superpowers. Arthur Miller's play, The Crucible (1953), about the Salem Witch Trials, captured the atmosphere of "witch-hunt" that enveloped the hearings of Congress and Senate committees, as the concept of "Un-American activities" came to embrace all leftwing allegiance, past or present.
Yet for all the anxiety, things were getting better - as the US book titles showed. In White Collar (1951), C. Wright Mills charted the rise of a new service class - which by 1956 was forming the ranks of William H. Whyte's The Organisation Man. These were, as David Potter put it in his book of 1954, People of Plenty, who lived, as J.K. Galbraith observed in 1958, in The Affluent Society, a land of private wealth and public squalor. On the other hand, said David Riesman, Americans now felt robbed of traditional values and were The Lonely Crowd.
Annihilation was the terror, affluence the dream of the 1950s. It was the reward that came after the grim pattern of the century's first half: war-boom-crash-war again. Even in Europe, affluence slowly came. In Britain a decade that started with rationing and austerity, only partly alleviated by the public celebrations of the Festival of Britain, advanced through the Suez Crisis, which sharply divided nation and generation, through to the spirit of "You've Never Had It So Good". Even the wave of anger that so closely coincided with Suez had much to do with the transformed meritocratic opportunities of an expanding, far less class-bound welfare state.
Europeans were divided in their allegiances, but, CIA funding or not, the great court of appeal was going to be the United States. Twenty years ahead of any other nation in terms of innovation, technological resource, lifestyles, fashions, personal possessions and individual opportunities, it was the land of iceboxes, finned cars, Elvis Presley, rebels without a cause, teenagers, and the smartest international corporations. The US had good claim to being seen as the artistic and intellectual capital of the world as well. Its older writers (Faulkner, Hemingway, Steinbeck) were dutifully awarded Nobel prizes. Its younger writers (Mailer, Bellow, Salinger, Welty, McCullers, Baldwin, Ellison, Robert Lowell) captured the tone of the times. The issues they explored - the experience of war in Europe and the Pacific, the Jewish and the African-American experience; the strains of racial discrimination and urban alienation that came from the lonely crowd cities - touched home everywhere.
The 1950s in the US were a period of great cultural energy. The New York art scene dominated through the movement of Abstract Expressionism, the great new playwrights (Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams) hailed from the United States too. US movies caught the flavour of the age; the very look of the country's skyline showed that the Bauhaus spirit of European architectural modernism had fulfilled itself in a post-war merger of European theory and US technology and investment; American jazz was world music. The irony is that the great Americanisation of European culture the CIA so busily financed would surely have happened anyway through classic laws of cultural influence.
By the end of the 1950s it was possible to claim the western world had reached an "Eisenhower Equilibrium", an age of US-led capitalist affluence and "The End of Ideology". It was not quite so. The notion that the 1950s were straight and conformist and the 1960s radical is far from true. Much that was considered part of the radicalism of the 1960s, including much passionate anti-Americanism, developed in the 1950s. The Beat Movement came to its peak then, with Howl (1956) and On the Road (1957). And as some declared the Eisenhower equilibrium as the decade ended, the people were (only just) electing a new, generation-youth president, John F. Kennedy.
The 1950s began feeling like an austerely post-war time; but as the decade developed it soon nurtured the 1960s in embryo. It was the bridge between the hard ideologies of the 1930s and the Counter-Culture. War and Cold War brought other changes: rapid technological innovation, the growth of modern media and communications, international travel, prospects in space. Futurologists began to scout the year 2000, mostly getting it severely wrong (we are not living on the moon). And for a young writer like myself, trying to write a novel that caught as much of it as possible, it was a tense, contradictory, anxious, existential and a rather wonderful world.
Novelist Malcolm Bradbury is professor in emeritus of American Studies at the University of East Anglia. His new novel, To The Hermitage, will be published by Picador next spring
