“I think you must distinguish between a passage which says that homosexuals are sometimes happy and a passage which says: come and be a homosexual,” Frank Kermode argued at the 1967 obscenity trial in London for Hubert Selby Jr.’s novel Last Exit to Brooklyn. In a later essay, he elaborated: “We have not always believed that poems, plays, and novels should carry the label ‘No road through to action,’ but we have believed it for a long time.” Well, we don’t seem to believe it any more, judging by the success of Oprah’s Book Club and Alain de Botton, or by the ubiquity of biblio-memoirs and testaments about “the book that changed my life.” And did we really believe it then? Although the Selby trial coincided with the battle for gay rights—homosexual acts were legalized the same year—and formed part of the story later charted in John Sutherland’s book Offensive Literature: Decensorship in Britain 1960-1982, the broader context for Kermode’s remarks was the ongoing cultural cold war, in which the CIA and the Kremlin and, for that matter, a large contingent of professional critics believed strongly in the relationship between writing and advocacy, reading and action, as Kermode knew all too well.

Earlier in 1967, Kermode had resigned from the co-editorship of Encounter magazine over revelations—which came as news to just about no one—that its original backer, the Congress for Cultural Freedom, was in turn being funded by the CIA. Kermode later noted that his own business had mainly been with “the non-political part of the magazine,” the arts and books pages, but the aim of the Congress for Cultural Freedom was not to liberate culture from politics but to emphasize the connection between culture and liberal politics at a time of legitimate fears that literature was seen as a far-left pursuit. As Frances Stonor Saunders writes in her formidable book Who Paid the Piper?: “The whole premise of the cultural cold war, of the Congress for Cultural Freedom, was that writers and artists had to engage themselves in the ideological struggle.”

The CIA had made its most direct and best-known intrusion into cultural matters almost a decade before Kermode appeared at the Old Bailey, in what Peter Finn and Petra Couvée, in their new book, call “the Zhivago affair”—when agents energetically distributed copies of Boris Pasternak’s novel, denied publication in the Soviet Union. (Its first publisher was based in Italy.) The cultural cold war wasn’t an argument over whether literature had something to do with politics; it was a competition. The kind of book that the Soviets banned because it criticized the revolution—both semi-directly by exposing its bad products, and more implicitly, in its embrace of un-Soviet “individualism”—was the kind of book the CIA wanted Russians to be reading. The belief underpinning such activities is that contemplation and action are closer than Kermode believed—or believed that “we” believed. Finn and Couvée quote a CIA spokesman who talked about literature’s ability to “reinforce dispositions,” to say, in essence, “yes, you can be a homosexual,” or “cultivate your bourgeois instincts.”

The Iranian critic Azar Nafisi, in her memoir Reading Lolita in Tehran, recalls the experience of having her disposition as a secular feminist in 1990s Iran reinforced by nothing more direct than the “multivocal­ity” of Pride and Prejudice: “We needed no message, no outright call for plurality. ... All we needed was to read and appreciate the cacophony of voices to understand its democratic imperative. This was where Austen’s danger lay.” One of the narratives in Philip Hensher’s new novel, The Emperor Waltz, about a gay bookshop, offers a nuanced picture of what homosexual literature might be saying to the reader. The Big Gay Bookshop isn’t in the business of conversion exactly, but it likes the idea that novels provide consolation or comfort, assuring “one person after another ... that you could live your life openly.”

For Nafisi and Hensher, literature’s capa­city to communicate ideas and even messages is not a betrayal of its subtlety, but one of its greatest virtues—and one that depends on “literary” qualities. (Nafisi’s heroes are Austen, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Henry James, and Vladimir Nabokov; Hensher’s are Angus Wilson, Edmund White, Robert Liddell, and Alan Hollinghurst.)