Literary agent: Pittsburgh biographer recalls scholarly spy

Norman Holmes Pearson was far from the only college professor to practice espionage for the U.S. government during and after World War II. But in some ways, he might be the most notable.

The Yale-based academic who lent his literary skills to the war effort — and who also played a key role in promoting modernist poetry — is the subject of a new biography by a fellow scholar, Duquesne University English professor Greg Barnhisel.

"Code Name Puritan: Norman Holmes Pearson at the Nexus of Poetry, Espionage, and American Power" (University of Chicago Press) tracks Pearson from his birth in 1909 in Gardner, Massachusetts, through his early years in academia, his days as a spy, and his Cold War efforts promoting American culture overseas, often in the employ of the U.S. State Department and within the penumbra of the CIA.

Along the way, Barnhisel also makes a case for reclaiming the term "Puritan" — Pearson's military code name — from its associations with small-mindedness and prudery.

"Skills very useful to spies"

Barnhisel first heard of Pearson because his name kept popping up in the author's research for two earlier books , one on noted Pittsburgh-born publisher James Laughlin and another titled "Cold War Modernists: Art, Literature, and American Cultural Diplomacy."

Pearson stood out as, on one hand, a typical Ivy League academic who also, on the other, ran "one of the most important spy agencies" during the war, Barnhisel said. Pearson co-founded X-2, the counterintelligence arm of the Office of Strategic Services, a precursor to the CIA. In England during the war, X-2 trained spies and found German spies; after the war, it ferreted out spies and saboteurs in liberated Europe.

All of this despite a lifelong disability resulting from a terrible childhood accident that left Pearson with one fused hip and a serious susceptibility to infection.

After the war began, the OSS recruited Pearson, not in spite of him being a tweedy prof who studied Nathaniel Hawthorne, but because of it: The agency's founder, Gen. "Wild" Bill Donovan, believed "humanities, literature, history professors had these skills that could be very useful to spies," said Barnhisel. "So, archival research, finding documents, teasing all of the meaning out of archival documents."

Since at least the 1970s, and revelations about the CIA's role in spying on U.S. citizens and destabilizing and even overthrowing leftist governments overseas, the agency has been widely viewed as the embodiment of the conservative Cold War mentality.

But in the years immediately after the war, Barnhisel said, its reputation was nearly the opposite. Though tasked with advancing American interests, the CIA was "filled with Yale literature majors and Yale history majors. And it was considered to be a very leftist and, in fact, sort of overly intellectual agency."

Pearson, Barnhisel shows, was also unusually adept socially. His graduate-study days at Oxford, for instance, gave him experience with the British upper classes that proved invaluable during the war. Pearson was also a born networker who seemed to know everyone worth knowing in his era, from espionage types such as notorious double-agent Kim Philby to literary sorts from novelist Thomas Wolfe ("Look Homeward, Angel") to journalist and author Tom Wolfe ("The Right Stuff").

Puritan revival

Then there was Pearson's relationship with modernist poets and writers, avant-garde pioneers such as Gertrude Stein, H.D. and Ezra Pound.

"What he really loves is experimental poetry," Barnhisel said.

Pearson played a vital role in introducing these artists to American academia, where they had previously been spurned. He taught their works at Yale, collected their papers for the school, and in the case of Pound and H.D. acted as their literary agents in the U.S.

He was also known for promoting queer poets, like H.D., "at a time when we just didn't talk about that," Barnhisel said.

Similarly, Pearson got in on the early days of what's now known as American Studies, the idea that American literature was as worthy of study as the classics of antiquity and the great British writers. As a Yale undergrad, he took the very first American Studies class, in the late 1920s, and the discipline would resonate throughout his career.

And yes, Pearson was literally of Puritan stock, with ancestors who were 17th-century Pilgrims. But the scholarly spy, who came of age around the time "Puritan" began to be an insult, viewed the term differently.

"He saw people like H.D. and Ezra Pound as kind of modern-day Puritans in that they were seeking to purify these calcified and corrupted institutions such as modern literature or the literary establishment in the United States, and purifying them the same way that the Puritans that he was descended from were trying to purify the Church of England back in the 1600s," said Barnhisel.

"Soft power"

Postwar, Pearson (who died in 1975) continued teaching at Yale, but he also aided CIA recruitment there and traveled extensively — Japan, Korea, Australia — to promote American literature and culture at overseas universities as part of the government's "soft power" efforts to woo the world away from Soviet influence.

It all might sound a bit odd in 2024, when global politics have changed so much. But Barnhisel noted that politically, Pearson himself was a type that scarcely still exists: the liberal Republican, a man of small-town merchant stock who was "very pro-capitalist and very, very anti-Communist" but also someone who believed in high culture and was "ahead of his time in seeking out diversity in both of the writers that he admired and in the way he taught them."

At once, he saw both espionage and literature "as expressing and defending key parts of American civilization."