This chapter explores the politicisation of literature during the period of the Cold War. It argues that literature became a key coin in the cultural cold war, invested with the power to represent working-class subjectivity and class struggle by the Soviets, and construed as embodying and igniting individual liberty by the US. Literary writers and literature, during the cultural cold war, were both censored and funded as never before. While the Soviets took control of book production by both censoring and funding writers, the US pumped enormous sums of money into funding global literature deemed representative of individual freedoms. The literary dissident, stifled by the East and lionised by the West, was a key figure in cultural cold war politics. The chapter focuses on two very different kinds of writers, Stephen Spender and Doris Lessing, who were shaped by the conditions of the cultural cold war. Both writers viewed their literary writing in the light of the politics of the Cold War, and used their writing to explore the political issues of censorship, freedom, and dissidence.

Chapter 7, “Lessing on Generations and Freedom,” notes that while other English novelists – Lawrence, Woolf – wrote about characters mired in uncertainty about having children, none produced anything like the sequences of protracted vexation in Doris Lessing’s “Children of Violence” novels. This chapter takes in Lessing’s long career, from her first novel (The Grass Is Singing) to her last (Alfred and Emily), but it focuses on those 1950s and 1960s masterpieces, which track the heroine Martha Quest from adolescence to old age. Martha is riven by incompatible attitudes: a curiosity about motherhood is stymied by her antipathy toward becoming a mother. She cannot shake the conviction that in giving life to a new being she is shackling that being to a state of unfreedom. Martha, like her creator Lessing, is forced to ask whether only abandonment of one’s children can provide some small liberty to that next generation. In Lessing’s novels it is not only the mother who, encumbered by a baby, loses her freedom: it is also the child, beholden to the parent, who enters existence as an already subjected being.