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Title: The political novel
Author: Blotner, Joseph
Language: English
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TRANSCRIBER'S NOTES
In the plain text version words in Italics are denoted by _underscores_
and text in bold like =this=.
In the text the author uses the word "flaunt" in this sentence:
_And these maxims are not merely empty phrases, for in the novel
the politicians who flaunt them fail._
Based on the context it is believed that the correct word should be
"flout".
A number of words in this book have both hyphenated and non-hyphenated
variants. For the words with both variants present the one more used
has been kept.
Obvious punctuation and other printing errors have been corrected.
* * * * *
THE POLITICAL NOVEL
DOUBLEDAY SHORT STUDIES IN POLITICAL SCIENCE
_Consulting Editor_
Richard C. Snyder
Associate Professor of Politics, Princeton University
=The Revolution in American Foreign Policy,
1945-1954=
By William G. Carleton, Professor of Political
Science and Head Professor of the Social
Sciences, University of Florida
=Political Community at the International Level:
Problems of Definition and Measurement=
By Karl W. Deutsch, Professor of History and
Political Science, Massachusetts Institute of
Technology
=France: Keystone of Western Defense=
By Edgar S. Furniss, Jr., Assistant Professor
of Politics, Princeton University
=The Problem of Internal Security in Great
Britain, 1948-1953=
By H. H. Wilson, Associate Professor of Politics,
Princeton University and Harvey Glickman,
Fellow, Harvard University
=Germany: Dilemma for American Foreign
Policy=
By Otto Butz, Assistant Professor of Political
Science, Swarthmore College
=The Role of the Military in American Foreign
Policy=
By Burton M. Sapin, Research Assistant,
Foreign Policy Analysis Project, Princeton
University, and Richard C. Snyder, Associate
Professor of Politics, Princeton University
=Democratic Rights Versus Communist Activity=
By Thomas I. Cook, Professor of Political
Science, The Johns Hopkins University
=The Social Background of Political Decision-Makers=
By Donald R. Matthews, Assistant Professor
of Government, Smith College
=Readings in Game Theory and Political Behavior=
By Martin Shubik, Research Associate, Economic
Analysis Project, Princeton University
=The American Vice-Presidency: New Look=
By Irving G. Williams, Associate Professor
and Chairman, Departments of History and
Social Studies, St. John’s University
=Contemporary International Law: A Balance
Sheet=
By Quincy Wright, Professor of International
Law, University of Chicago
=Modern Colonialism: Institutions and Policies=
By Thomas R. Adam, Professor of Political
Science, New York University
=Law as a Political Instrument=
By Victor G. Rosenblum, Assistant Professor
of Political Science, University of California,
Berkeley
=The Fate of the French Non-Communist Left=
By E. Drexel Godfrey, Jr., Assistant Professor
of Political Science, Williams College
=The Political Process: Executive Bureau--Congressional
Committee Relations=
By J. Leiper Freeman, Assistant Professor and
Research Associate, Graduate School of Education,
Harvard University
=German Political Theory, 1870 to the Present=
By Otto Butz, Assistant Professor of Political
Science, Swarthmore College
=The Political Novel=
By Joseph L. Blotner, Instructor in English,
University of Idaho
_Studies in Scope and Methods_
=The Study of Public Administration=
By Dwight Waldo, Professor of Political
Science, University of California, Berkeley
=The Study of Political Theory=
By Thomas P. Jenkin, Associate Professor and
Chairman, Department of Political Science,
University of California, Los Angeles
=The Study of Comparative Government=
By Roy C. Macridis, Associate Professor of
Political Science, Northwestern University
=Problems of Analyzing and Predicting Soviet
Behavior=
By John S. Reshetar, Jr., Lecturer in Politics,
Princeton University
_To order these titles and to receive forthcoming ones (none more
than 95c), enter your subscription now. All titles will be sent on
approval. COLLEGE DEPARTMENT, Doubleday & Company, Inc.,
575 Madison Avenue, New York 22, N.Y._
Doubleday Short Studies in Political Science
THE POLITICAL NOVEL
BY JOSEPH L. BLOTNER
_University of Idaho_
[Illustration]
DOUBLEDAY & COMPANY, INC.
Garden City, N.Y.
1955
COPYRIGHT ©, 1955, BY DOUBLEDAY & COMPANY, INC.
This book is fully protected by copyright, and no part of it, with
the exception of short quotations for review, may be reproduced
without the written consent of the publisher.
All Rights Reserved.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOG CARD NUMBER 55-6672
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
AT THE COUNTRY LIFE PRESS, GARDEN CITY, N.Y.
Editor’s Foreword
From time to time in the Doubleday Short Studies in Political Science
series, guest analysts from outside the formal boundaries of the
discipline will be invited to help fill certain gaps in existing
materials. In the present instance a young professional student of
literature, Dr. Joseph Blotner, has contributed a much-needed and
highly useful introduction to the political novel. Thanks largely to
the care and skill with which this analysis has been prepared, students
of English and political science, as well as general readers, should
find new and stimulating pathways open to them.
So far as the editor and author know, this is the first essay of its
kind in the English language. The fact is worth noting because, despite
the large number of political novels in all languages and despite the
obvious importance of this particular species of the novel generally,
scholars in the field of literature have not devoted systematic
attention to it. Until Dr. Blotner decided to undertake a full-scale
investigation of the political novel--of which the present essay is one
of the beginning steps--the teacher of political science could search
the modern language journals and literary periodicals in vain for help
in canvassing the possibly valuable contributions of the novelist in
describing and explaining political behavior.
_The Political Novel_ is to be welcomed on still other grounds.
It is interdisciplinary in scope and intent and it demonstrates anew
the fruitful results which can be achieved when a scholar merges his
technical competence in one branch of learning with his informed and
enthusiastic interest in another. Moreover, crude and scattered though
the bridges between pairs of the social sciences (e.g., political
psychology) are, the bridges between the social sciences and the
humanities are even more so. Collaboration--in this case between
literature and political science--should certainly take more than one
form, but whatever the form, the great need is to light up the shadowy
twilight zones which lie between major disciplines. Not only are these
unexplored areas of subject matter to be charted, there are common
purposes and joint efforts to be considered. Among others, Dr. Blotner
has raised the question: what can the experts in literature and in
politics give to each other?
The analysis of the political novel set forth in these pages makes a
variety of contributions to learning. Novels can be read two ways:
for pleasure and for profit. The latter object--as in all academic
subjects--is sometimes pursued under conditions which deny the
former. Nonetheless, the reader is reminded by Dr. Blotner that to be
alerted beforehand to the nature and significance of this type of
novel is to combine pleasure with an awareness that the content may
be very revealing of data concerning political life. Thus the words
of a writer are at once pleasure-giving and instructive--_if_
the reader is looking out for the proper clues. Second, there is
made available an original classification of political novels and
politically relevant summaries to serve as a guide to political
scientists. The bibliography, though selected, is especially useful
in this respect. Third, the headings and substance of Chapters Two
to Six actually provide a set of analytical functions which the
author believes the novel may serve in illuminating major aspects of
politics and government. This study is so cast that the transition
from thinking about novels to thinking about politics is painless
and without distortion. No one having any familiarity with the
traditional categories of political science will find Dr. Blotner’s own
presentation strange or unsophisticated.
In addition, this essay represents an attempt to establish durable
intellectual bases for probing the nature of the political novel. The
tentative definitions and criteria of identification, classification of
functions, and annotations are a substantial move in this direction.
Finally, among the data revealed in the contents of political novels
is evidence of the way a given society reacts to its own political
institutions and practices. To the extent that such novels partially
yet accurately reflect social reality, the student of politics can
draw valid inferences concerning the political beliefs--including
beliefs about the nature of politics--held by a sizeable portion of the
society’s membership at any one time. One can detect at least the broad
outlines of periodic shifts in the political concerns of a people or
any segment thereof in their literature.
Chapter One discusses some problems arising from a study of the
political novel. This is an important chapter and contains some homely
wisdom on the different approaches respectively of the novelist and
the political scientist. It should be stressed that certain crucial
points with respect to the analysis of human behavior in general can be
raised by comparing the techniques of the two kinds of observers and
reporters. The well-known remark about pictures being worth thousands
of words has occasionally been transposed to the effect that one good
story is worth a whole (and dry) textbook. This, of course, is an
attractive argument. But it does raise the fundamental question of what
analytical operations are performed by the novelist on the one hand and
the political scientist on the other. Offhand it would seem as though
there were important differences carrying beyond those of purposes
discussed by the author. Generally speaking, the novelist is primarily
concerned with a coherent story, with a whole fabric of description,
and with specific details while the political scientist is concerned
with events, processes, and factors, with abstractions from wholes and
with classes of general phenomena. The latter builds upon numerous
instances, upon gross data, and upon repeated patterns of behavior. The
former builds upon an amassing of individualized data fashioned into a
unique chronicle. The one gains richness and sacrifices capacity to
generalize, the other sacrifices detail for broad generalization. For
the novelist, Uncle Tom becomes a microcosm, a device for revealing
the tragedy of the whole Negro race in America through a portrait of
a single character. For the political scientist, Uncle Tom is lost in
what can be said of the entire group of which he is a member. Both are
limited and both pay a price accordingly. Clearly more is involved in
the different analytic techniques but it suffices to indicate one type
of issue raised in this study of the political novel.
Other issues are equally noteworthy. The main character in a novel
may be likened to a dummy--or a model--created by the author for the
purposes of expressing the author’s observations and, in effect, for
“playing out” his ideas. Though the character is pure fiction--i.e.,
any similarities to known real persons are coincidental--an effective
novel must have believable characters, recognizable through behavior
traits identified by readers from their own everyday experience. So
too the social scientist uses models--analytic dummies--to further his
purposes. Dissecting the anatomy of a political model and putting its
characters under close examination can teach something about the most
fruitful relationships between real persons and fictional characters
for purposes of describing and explaining behavior. Often the fact
that the novelist is actually building models is obscured by the
amount of detail he pours into his molds which then makes his models
seem remarkably lifelike. While the models of the social scientist are
usually much further removed from correspondence to real persons, the
properties built into them must be “believable” too.
Another area of inquiry can be opened up if one accepts the cues
offered by Dr. Blotner’s selections and analyses. Political novels
seem to reflect mostly the seamy side of political life, emphasizing
conflict as the sole theme meriting attention. Through their
characters, authors seem to place great blame for social ills on
political institutions as detached from other institutions or on
individual devils. Is this a reliable and full revelation of politics?
As a matter of fact, novels too seem caught in two opposite kinds of
explanations: the great man and the great historical force. Each has
significant limitations and accompanying fallacies yet each assumes
great plausibility at the hands of a skillful storyteller. Inevitably
the novelist dramatizes, and in real life the political actor
dramatizes too. Unfortunately, the tendency to dramatize reinforces the
neglect of the mundane factors which often influence crucial political
action and choice.
This line of thought suggests certain concrete exercises which might be
profitable for the student of politics to undertake. Since the search
for fruitful hypotheses is a backbone of any systematic discipline,
it might be useful to search these novels to see if any have been
missed. A corollary effort would be to check the knowledge of politics
exhibited in political novels against the latest agreements among
political scientists. Still another effort might be directed toward
a content analysis (in the technical sense) of the novel as medium
of communication in order to throw light on the value structure of
the society or individuals which are depicted. Finally, what aspects
of politics have been ignored by novelists and why? For example,
a novel might be an excellent way to illuminate the world of the
decision-maker, the governor, the leader. Thus far, none has really
done so.
Dr. Blotner is to be congratulated for aiding an important cause: the
use of novels as a teaching device in political science courses. Those
who have tried have been rewarded but have lacked an introductory essay
and bibliographical guidance. Novels make points which can be made in
no other way and in interesting fashion. The student’s idea of the
political realm and of approaches to its understanding will be enlarged
by following the thoughtful guide presented below.
One considerable merit of this monograph is a lighter style than is
normally characteristic of political science literature. Nonetheless,
its intellectual quality will make the reader anticipate Dr. Blotner’s
larger study.
RICHARD C. SNYDER
Contents
Editor’s Foreword v
Chapter One. THE STUDY OF THE POLITICAL NOVEL 1
The Importance of the Political Novel 1
The Nature of the Political Novel: Problems of Definition and
Selection 1
Characteristics of the Political Novel 3
The Novelist and the Political Scientist 4
The Purposes of This Study 8
Chapter Two. THE NOVEL AS POLITICAL INSTRUMENT 10
THE UNITED STATES 10
Harriet Beecher Stowe and the Civil War 10
Albion Tourgée: The Blunders of Reconstruction 11
Perennial Theme: Corruption 12
_Upton Sinclair: Corruption Plus Radicalism_ 12
Growing Political Consciousness: 1930 to 1954 13
_John Steinbeck: The Party Organizer_ 14
_Sinclair Lewis: Native Fascism_ 14
_John Dos Passos and Ernest Hemingway: Liberal Causes
Abroad_ 15
_George Weller: International Communism_ 16
_Norman Mailer: The Extreme Left_ 17
_Novels of the Cold War_ 17
GREAT BRITAIN 19
Benjamin Disraeli: Revitalized Toryism 19
Henry James: The Breakup of Victorian Tranquillity 20
Joseph Conrad: Early Cloak and Dagger 21
E. M. Forster: The Problem of Imperialism 22
Aldous Huxley and George Orwell: The Future in Perspective 23
THE CONTINENT 23
Ivan Turgenev and Fyodor Dostoyevsky: Nihilism and Its
Rejection 23
André Malraux: Pro-Communism 24
Ignazio Silone: Disillusionment on the Left 25
Arthur Koestler: The Bolshevik on Trial 26
AFRICA 26
Alan Paton: The Race Question 27
Chapter Three. THE NOVELIST AS POLITICAL HISTORIAN 28
GREAT BRITAIN 29
George Eliot: The Early Nineteenth Century in the Midlands 30
Benjamin Disraeli and Anthony Trollope: Whigs v. Tories 30
George Meredith: The Early Radical 31
Mrs. Humphrey Ward: Victorian Portraits 31
H. G. Wells: England in Transition 32
Howard Spring: Labour and the Course of Empire 32
Joyce Cary: The Edwardian Age and After 33
THE UNITED STATES 33
Edgar Lee Masters: Expansion and Conflict 34
Albion Tourgeé: Slavery and Emancipation 34
John W. De Forest: Post-War Corruption 35
Hamlin Garland: Enter the Farmer 36
Winston Churchill and David Phillips: Bosses and Lobbies 36
Jack London: Marxism v. Fascism, Early Phase 37
James L. Ford, Samuel H. Adams, and Upton Sinclair: Oil Men
and Anarchists 38
John Dos Passos and James T. Farrell: Communist Infiltration 39
Upton Sinclair and John Dos Passos: Global War and Politics 40
Post-War Directions 40
THE CONTINENT AND ELSEWHERE 42
Joseph Conrad: Colonial Politics and Revolution 42
The Soviet State: Its Roots and Growth 43
Marie-Henri Beyle [Stendhal]: Napoleonic Panorama 44
André Malraux: Comintern v. Kuomintang 44
Jean-Paul Sartre: The Shadow of Munich 45
Fascism through Italian Eyes 45
Alan Paton: The Trek of the Boers 46
Richard Kaufmann: The Third Reich 47
Chapter Four. THE NOVEL AS MIRROR OF NATIONAL CHARACTER 48
GREAT BRITAIN: A SELF-PORTRAIT 48
Peaceful Change in the Political Realm 48
The Fruits of Imperialism 50
THE UNITED STATES: A SELF-PORTRAIT 51
Forces of Corruption 52
The American Idealist 53
Responsibility at Home and Abroad 53
ITALY: A SELF-PORTRAIT 55
SPAIN: AN AMERICAN PORTRAIT 57
GREECE: AN AMERICAN PORTRAIT 58
FRANCE: A COMPOSITE PORTRAIT 58
RUSSIA: A COMPOSITE PORTRAIT 59
UNION OF SOUTH AFRICA: A SELF-PORTRAIT 61
GERMANY: A SELF-PORTRAIT 61
Chapter Five. THE NOVELIST AS ANALYST OF GROUP POLITICAL
BEHAVIOR 63
ECONOMIC GROUPS 63
The _Lumpenproletariat_ 63
Peasants 64
Labor 65
Proletarians 68
The Middle Class 68
The Rich and Well Born 69
POLITICAL GROUPS 72
Office Holders: Rules and Skills 73
The Mechanics of Control 75
International Communism 76
Analysis of Mass Phenomena 78
Chapter Six. THE NOVELIST AS ANALYST OF INDIVIDUAL
POLITICAL BEHAVIOR 79
Motivation 79
Moral Problems and Changing Values 81
The Successful Politician 82
Political Pathology: Deviates, Martyrs, and Authoritarians 84
Men Behind the Scenes 88
The Disillusioned 88
The Role of Woman 91
Chapter Seven. SOME CONCLUSIONS 93
Bibliography 96
chapter one
The Study of the Political Novel
=The Importance of the Political Novel=
In an age in which progressively more men have engaged in politics
while the politics themselves have become increasingly complex,
any means for understanding these interrelated phenomena becomes
correspondingly more valuable. The techniques of science are constantly
being brought to bear upon this problem of understanding. But one of
the best means of enlightenment has been available for more than a
hundred years. Since its beginning the political novel has fulfilled
the ancient function of art. It has described and interpreted
human experience, selectively taking the facts of existence and
imposing order and form upon them in an aesthetic pattern to make
them meaningful. The political novel is important to the student
of literature as one aspect of the art of fiction, just as is the
psychological novel or the economic novel. But it is important in
a larger context, too. The reader who wants a vivid record of past
events, an insight into the nature of political beings, or a prediction
of what lies ahead can find it in the political novel. As an art form
and an analytical instrument, the political novel, now as ever before,
offers the reader a means for understanding important aspects of the
complex society in which he lives, as well as a record of how it
evolved.
=The Nature of the Political Novel: Problems of Definition and
Selection=
The political novel is hard to define. To confine it to activity in
the houses of Congress or Parliament is to look at the top floor of
the political structure and to ignore the main floor and basement
which support it. One has to follow the novelist’s characters, on the
stump and into committee rooms--sometimes even farther. But the line
is drawn where the political element is forced into the background
by the sociological or economic. The political milieu develops in
part out of the conditions described in Upton Sinclair’s _The Jungle_
and John Steinbeck’s _The Grapes of Wrath_. Although these books are
proletarian novels, to include them would be to open the door to a
flood of books that would spread far beyond the space limitations of
this study. Of course, proletarian novels which are also political
novels are included. Two such books are André Malraux’s _Man’s Fate_
and Steinbeck’s _In Dubious Battle_. But for the purposes of this
study, a cast of characters drawn from the proletariat is not enough,
even if they are oppressed economically and socially. They must carry
out political acts or move in a political environment. Also excluded
are novels such as Herman Melville’s _Mardi_ which treat politics
allegorically or symbolically. Here a political novel is taken to mean
a book which directly describes, interprets, or analyzes political
phenomena.
Our prime material is the politician at work: legislating, campaigning,
mending political fences, building his career. Also relevant are the
people who influence him: his parents, his wife, his mistress, the
girl who jilted him, the lobbyist who courted his favor. The primary
criterion for admission of a novel to this group was the portrayal
of political acts, so many of them that they formed the novel’s main
theme or, in some cases, a major theme. These acts are not always
obvious ones like legislating. In Joseph Conrad’s _Nostromo_ a mine
owner contributes financial support to political movements which
will provide a more favorable climate for his business. _In Dubious
Battle_ presents labor organizers who manipulate a strike to serve the
political ends of the Communist Party. The terminology of the theater
can be helpful in bridging the gap between the world of actual events
and the world of fiction. It helps to show how various aspects of the
actual political process are translated into the forms of fiction.
The author may concentrate his attention upon the actors--the public
officials who make decisions and wield authority on behalf of the
community or the whole society. A good many of the actors may not be
public officials, but rather private citizens whose acts are political:
voicing opinions, helping to select candidates, voting, attempting to
influence the political process, revolting. These actors, and those
who are public officials, may demonstrate factors in the overall drama
which are predominantly political in their consequences: attitudes,
social power, social stratification. The novelist will be concerned
with the roles the actors play and the lines they speak, the purposes
they have and the strategies they employ. He may concentrate upon the
interaction between these actors or between them and the audience--the
public. An author may choose to emphasize the drama as a whole rather
than the individual actors, highlighting the stage upon which it is
played out--the country or area of national life in which the scenes
are laid. This emphasis upon the drama will throw into sharp relief the
events and decisions in which the actors participate, and the framework
of rules or custom against which they take place.
The novels considered here deal with political activity at all
levels--local, state, national, and international. If, as von
Clausewitz said, “War is merely the continuation of Politics by other
means,” one may find politics in war, too. This study, therefore,
includes works on revolutionary as well as parliamentary politics. On
the international level especially one encounters group attitudes which
are politically relevant. The groups may be the conventional social,
economic, or political strata of British and American society, or they
may be those of the rigid Marxist state. Other relevant attitudes
spring from national characteristics, and many political novels
identify some of them. This definition is wide and inclusive, but so is
political activity.
The primary sources of this study are eighty-one political novels. Over
half of them are by Americans. The next largest group is the work of
English writers. Other novels are taken from Italian, French, German,
Russian, and South African literature. These eighty-one novels are the
minimum necessary to give an understanding of the political novel. At
the same time, this is the maximum number that could be included in the
study. Only in the case of the English and American political novel has
an attempt been made to trace the development of literary genre. Some
of these novels are used because they show artistic excellence, others
because they show how the form developed historically. More American
than English novels are used because they are more readily available,
many of them in inexpensive, paper-bound editions. It was not possible
to attempt the same outline with the other literatures because of
the brevity of this study. For some of them, too, a sufficiently
representative group of political novels was not available.
Most often the authors deal with their own countries, although they
sometimes write about a foreign land. Some of them are hard to
pigeonhole: Henry James, an American expatriate writing about London
terrorists in _The Princess Casamassima_; Joseph Conrad, an Anglicized
Pole analyzing Russian revolutionaries in _Under Western Eyes_; Arthur
Koestler, an Austrian-educated Hungarian living in France, describing
the Moscow trials in _Darkness at Noon_. This is one reason why it
is more fruitful for present purposes to avoid strict concentration
on national literatures and to accept valid insights into national
characteristics and behavior patterns no matter what the language of
their source.
=Characteristics of the Political Novel=
In _The Charterhouse of Parma_ the witty and urbane Stendhal says,
“Politics in a work of literature are like a pistol-shot in the middle
of a concert, something loud and vulgar yet a thing to which it is
not possible to refuse one’s attention.” His own work contradicts
the great French novelist, yet his comment is perfectly accurate for
many other novelists. Politics in some modern novels of political
corruption, such as Charles F. Coe’s _Ashes_, do seem loud and vulgar,
and in books like Upton Sinclair’s the reader may hear not one pistol
shot but a cannonade. But this is not to say that the use of political
material must disrupt a work of literature. The trick, of course, is
all in knowing how. Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote an artistically weak,
politically successful work in _Uncle Tom’s Cabin_, while Fyodor
Dostoyevsky produced a politically unsuccessful, artistically enduring
classic in _The Possessed_.
The quality of these novels varies widely, just as would that of a
group dealing with religion, sex, or any other complex, controversial
theme. In general, the European novels considered here attain a
higher level than the American books. This is partly because only the
better European novels are treated. But they are also superior to
the best American works, except for a few comparatively recent ones,
because of the wider variety of political experience presented, the
greater concern with ideology and theory, and the deeper insight
into individual motivation and behavior. This in turn is probably due
to several factors. From the time when the United States attained
its independence until the end of the first quarter of this century,
it possessed a relatively stable set of doctrines and frames of
reference (compared to those existing in Europe) within which the
individual led his political life. Although American parties rose and
declined, although the Union was preserved, its borders expanded, and
international responsibility accepted, this evolution was orderly and
limited compared to that which occurred in Europe. The Declaration
of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights provided a
stable yet sufficiently flexible political framework. Europe during the
same period reverberated with the French Revolution, the Napoleonic
Wars, the unification of Germany and Italy, and the Russian Revolution.
These were violent changes not only in theory but in the actual form
of government. It is not unnatural then that American political novels
range over a relatively narrower area, with their main emphasis on
local or national subjects, while those of European authors delineate
changing, conflicting, and radically different ideologies and resultant
events. It is only since the 1930s, with the increase in centralized
government, the impact of international Communism, and the recent
appearance on both the Right and the Left of what seem to be threats
to traditional American freedoms, that the American political novel
has begun to approach the European in breadth of theme, concern with
political theory, and interpretation of varying political behavior
patterns.
The larger number of bad novels in the American group is also due
to the fact that more American novels are treated. Because of their
greater availability both for research and teaching, it is possible to
show the evolution of this genre in the United States. In doing this
one is able to examine the good ones, old and new, such as Henry Adams’
_Democracy_, John Dos Passos’ _District of Columbia_ trilogy, and Irwin
Shaw’s _The Troubled Air_. One pays, however, by suffering through
period pieces such as F. Marion Crawford’s _An American Politician_.
Less obtuse politically but nearly as abysmal artistically, is Paul
Leicester Ford’s _The Honorable Peter Stirling_. One is compensated,
however, not only by the view of a developing genre, but also by the
recording of significant periods in American national life and of the
people who helped shape it, as in the Dos Passos work, and by the
sensitive and penetrating analysis of central problems in contemporary
life, as in Shaw’s novel.
The English political novel is also uneven. That its depths are not
so low as those in the American novel is due in part to the political
heritage which its authors share with their colleagues on the
continent. Its authors work from a long and rich political history in
which the evolution has been less violent but no less steady.
=The Novelist and the Political Scientist=
The differences between the methods of the political novelist and the
political scientist are worth studying. Their intentions are often
at variance. Whereas the scientist is dedicated to objectivity and
statistical accuracy, the novelist is often consciously subjective; if
his work is intended as a political instrument, as were _Uncle Tom’s
Cabin_ and _The Possessed_, scrupulous attention to the claims of the
other side will invariably lessen the emotional impact and political
worth of the novel. If a scholar sets out to examine the rise of
Nazism, he will have to treat not only the Beer Hall Putsch and the
Reichstag fire, but German history and the German national character as
well. He will chronicle the effects of Versailles, the staggering of
the Weimar Republic, and the growing strength of the Brown Shirts. He
will be concerned with national attitudes, with the relative strength
of the parties that vied with the National Socialists. His study will
gauge the effects of the aging Hindenburg and the demoniac Hitler on
a people smarting from defeat, searching for a scapegoat, and longing
for a resurgence. And all this will be backed with statistics where
possible. It will be a cogently reasoned analysis with documented
references to available sources. Also, the study will be aimed at
a fairly homogeneous and well-defined audience. The appeal will be
intellectual. If emotion creeps in, the work is probably bad.
The novelist who is to examine these same events will present them
quite differently, even apart from the techniques of fiction. If he is
a rather dispassionate chronicler of human foibles and frailties such
as, say, Somerset Maugham, he will probably portray a group of people
through whose actions the rise and significance of Nazism will become
meaningful. The reader will probably observe the drifting war veteran,
the hard-pressed workman, the anxious demagogue. Out of these lives and
their interactions will emerge an objective study of the sources of
a political movement and of the shape it took. If the novelist is an
enthusiastic Nazi, the book will reflect his particular bias. The storm
troopers will become heroic Horst Wessels, the young women stalwart
Valkyries, the Führer an inspired prophet and leader. Out of the novel
will come a plea for understanding or a justification of violence and a
perverted view of German national destiny. The book will be emotionally
charged, a calculated effort to produce a specific desired response.
If this series of historical events is used by a Frenchman, they will
undergo another change. There will probably be an evocation of the
Junker mentality, of Prussian militarism, of hordes of gray-green
figures under coal-scuttle helmets. If this novel is not a call to
arms, it will be a warning cry to signal a growing danger. These three
fictional books will use the same staples of the novelist’s art, yet
each will differ from the others in motivation and attitude. They will
portray aspects of the same complex of events treated by the political
scientist, but this will be virtually their only similarity.
A disadvantage for the novelist is his need to make his book appealing
enough to sell and to make his reader want to buy his next novel.
Although the scientist too must make his work as polished and
interesting as he can, the novelist does not, like him, find his
readers among subscribers to the learned journals. He cannot rely
upon sales prompted by the need to keep abreast of research in a
specialized field. If a novelist is to stay in print, political
savoir-faire and intellectual capacity are not enough. He has to sell
copies. Perhaps this is one reason why all but a few of these novels
have a love story accompanying the political theme. Sometimes the
love story inundates it, as in _An American Politician_; in other
novels, such as Sinclair’s _Presidential Agent_, it is peripheral and
pieced out with flirtations. It may be that these novelists include
this element because love is as much a part of life as politics. Its
nearly universal presence is a reminder, however, of one aspect of the
novelist’s task and one way in which his work differs considerably from
that of the political scientist.
The advantages of the novelist’s method over the political scientist’s
compensate for the drawbacks. These advantages do not necessarily
produce a better work, one which gives more insight into a problem
or explains it better. They do, however, offer more latitude and
fewer restrictions. The novelist may use all the techniques of the
political scientist. Sinclair’s Boston is studded with as many
references to actual events, people, and documents as most scientific
studies, although it is permeated by a violent partisanship which
would make a scholarly study highly suspect. But this points up one of
the novelist’s advantages: he can use the methods of scholarship to
document his case and then supplement them with heroes and villains who
add an emotional appeal to the intellectual one. This string to the
novelist’s bow is a strong one. He can create a character like Shaw’s
Clement Archer in _The Troubled Air_, while the scientist is forced to
use opinion research, carefully documented sources, and well-verified
trends in treating the problem of deprivation of livelihood as a
penalty for suspected political unreliability. Sometimes the scientist
uses case histories, but the subjects are often identified by initials
and treated with such antiseptic objectivity that almost no emotional
impact comes through. The loss of Clement Archer’s job, because he
has employed actors blacklisted for suspected Communist activity by
a newsletter acting as a self-appointed judge, presents this general
problem with more frightening immediacy and reader-involvement than an
excellent scholarly study could ever do. Archer becomes one embodiment
of the problem--a rather naïve but courageous liberal made into a
sacrificial goat because of his fight for what he believes to be
traditional and critical American rights. If he wants to, the novelist
can use historical personages to flesh out his story. Although the
reader does not see him in its pages, Dos Passos’ _The Grand Design_
uses the figure of Franklin D. Roosevelt in the background as one of
the mainsprings of the action. An individual may appear in transparent
fictional guise. The _roman à clef_ has many representatives in the
political novel. Pyotr Verhovensky in Dostoyevsky’s _The Possessed_ has
been identified as the revolutionary Sergei Nechaev. Hamer Shawcross in
Howard Spring’s _Fame Is the Spur_ is thought to be Ramsay MacDonald.
The governor-dictators who rampage through Dos Passos’ _Number One_,
Adria Langley’s _A Lion Is in the Streets_, and Robert Penn Warren’s
_All the King’s Men_ look and act much like Huey Long. The novelist
ranges backward into time as does the scientist. Maugham’s _Then
and Now_ brings to life the wily Niccolo Machiavelli, and Samuel
Shellabarger’s _Prince of Foxes_ reexamines the sinister Cesare Borgia.
When the novelist goes forward into time he need not be confined
to a mathematical extrapolation of birth rates, trade balances, or
electoral trends. Instead, he can create, whole and entire, the world
which he thinks will grow out of the one in which he lives or which
he sees emerging. The scientist may attempt to define the group mind
or examine pressures toward enforced conformity in political thought.
But George Orwell in _1984_ creates his own terrifying vision of
the world thirty years from now. And this story is frighteningly
believable. It does not even require Coleridge’s “willing suspension of
disbelief which constitutes poetic faith.” With its three super states
perpetually at war, its Newspeak vocabulary including “thoughtcrime”
and “doublethink,” its omnipresent Big Brother, 1984 reflects aspects
of our world out of which the novelist’s vision grew. Besides the
political apparatus which Orwell builds, he creates a protagonist,
Winston Smith, one man out of all the masses of Party members and
Proles who revolts against the system, providing the reader with a
focus for personal association. The reader follows him through his
round of duties in the Ministry of Truth, into his state-forbidden love
affair, and finally down into the depths of the Ministry of Love where
he is tortured into conformity before he will be “vaporized” and poured
into the stratosphere as gas. If he likes, the author can move at
will seven centuries into the future, where Aldous Huxley erected his
_Brave New World_. From a world of mechanization, deteriorating family
ties, and ascendant pragmatic science, he can artistically extrapolate
a planet ruled cooperatively by ten World Controllers. Embryos are
conditioned within their glass flasks and then decanted into a rigidly
stratified society where stability has outlawed change and Ford has
replaced God. And there are memorable people--sensuous Lenina Crowne,
and the Savage, a “natural man” who commits suicide rather than choose
between prehistoric primitivism and soulless modernism.
Not only does the novelist have complete freedom in time and space,
he has the right to use any of the devices found attractive in
communication since the first articulate primate squatting in the
firelight gave his interpretation of experience to his hairy brothers.
The point of the story can be driven home or made more palatable
with laughter, suspense, or a cops-and-robbers chase that will make
it memorable. Ernest Hemingway’s Spanish guerrillas and Ignazio
Silone’s Italian peasants are often amusing. The reader may remember
the inspired profanity or the droll proverbs; he will also remember
the fight against Fascism and oppression. From _Darkness at Noon_ the
reader will take with him Rubashov’s midnight arrest, the wait for the
NKVD bullet in the back of the neck; he will retain, too, the irony of
the disillusioned Bolshevik destroyed by the monster he helped create.
This attempt to differentiate the novelist’s approach from the
scientist’s is not meant to prove that the novelist’s is better. It
is simply different, representing another aspect of the difference
between science and art. Each discipline tries to describe and
interpret experience. Where one does it by means of well-defined,
rigidly controlled techniques within generally accepted boundaries,
the other is highly flexible, embodying a view of life shaped by an
individual set of preferences and dislikes, talents and blind spots.
Each of these divergent methods offers advantages and disadvantages.
One should not go to political novels expecting to find, except in
rare cases, complete objectivity, solidly documented references, and
exhaustive expositions of political theory. He should not always
anticipate credibility. When problems are presented, the reader may not
find answers or even indications of the directions in which they may
be found. But one cannot go to a scientific monograph with the hope of
meeting in its pages someone whose life is an embodiment of a problem,
or whose survival represents the gaining of a goal, his death the
losing of it.
These two approaches to the study of politics complement each other,
just as the physician and clergyman both mean to keep their identical
patient and parishioner well and whole. The novelist can, however,
enter well into the scientist’s field. When he deals with actual
events, he tries to record them as they happened. If the names and
places are changed, he is usually faithful to the manner or meaning of
the events. In _Bricks Without Straw_ Albion W. Tourgée assures the
reader that these events or others exactly like them took place during
the Reconstruction era in the South, and there is no reason to doubt
him. Sinclair’s _Oil!_ exhaustively treats the Sacco-Vanzetti case; it
is completely opinionated, but it is a historical account, nonetheless,
of one of the most memorable political cases in American history.
More than a historian, the political novelist is also an analyst. He
sees cause-effect relationships at work, he looks into stimulus and
response, motivation and satisfaction. Stendhal is not content merely
to describe military and political events during the Napoleonic era; he
goes beneath the surface to explain what some of them meant.
=The Purposes of This Study=
This examination of the political novel will go beyond simply charting
its development. In order to examine it as a distinct literary form, it
will be necessary to discuss its practitioners, the literary techniques
they use, the purposes they aim at, and their success in achieving
them. More than this, there will be attention to the function of these
political novels, at the time they were written and now in our time.
In the forefront will be an attempt to show what the reader can learn,
whether he approaches this body of work from a particular discipline
such as political science or literature, or whether he goes to it as a
general reader wanting either enlightenment or entertainment.
The purposes and scope of each chapter indicate the purposes of the
study as a whole. Chapter Two, “The Novel as Political Instrument,”
examines the effect of the political novel on politics. Some novels
contain heroes presented against a political background which might
just as well have been mercantile or medical; other novels are intended
to have politics as their subject; still other novels are meant to
have definite political consequences. This chapter is chiefly concerned
with novels of this last type. But it is necessary to look at others,
too, for in creating life in his novel the artist will often reflect
his own preferences, and they may affect those of his reader. Chapter
Three, “The Novelist as Political Historian,” describes the way in
which the writer may weave into his story the threads of history,
recording not only the lives of his creations, but actual events in
the lives of nations. By virtue of his special skills, he can recreate
these events with a vividness found in few scholarly histories. Chapter
Four, “The Novel as Mirror of National Character,” is devoted to an
examination of the cultural and national differences discernible
in these novels. There appear to be some denominators of political
behavior which remain common no matter what the scene of action. This
chapter deals with the numerators, the quantities which vary from
culture to culture. Chapter Five, “The Novelist as Analyst of Group
Political Behavior,” demonstrates the insight the novel can give into
political actions which derive from group attitudes, pressures, and
responses rather than individual ones. The novelist may use several
indices to determine how a society is structured, which of its groups
is most homogeneous, which most apparent in the effect it has upon
the body politic. Chapter Six, “The Novelist as Analyst of Individual
Political Behavior,” shows how the basic unit in all political
equations is treated. The novelist portrays the person who moves in
the main stream of politics and the one who stands on its edges. In
most cases the acts of these people are examined--their motives, their
effects. As in any other kind of fiction, characters are created who
are complete individuals, believable and unique. But sometimes they are
also typical of a number of people. Chapter Seven, “Some Conclusions,”
emphasizes the major points made in the study. It also discusses what
may be expected of the political novel in the future. The annotated
bibliography gives the author, title, and date for each novel.
In terms of organization, this study proceeds from the most direct
relationship between the novel and politics to the least direct
relationship. Chapter Two shows how this art form can actually
influence the political process. Chapter Six, on the other hand,
indicates the way in which the novel treats the individual, who, with
the exception of the outstanding leader, has far less direct influence
upon politics than groups or nations. Chapter Three deals with the way
in which the novel has recorded some major events in the political
scientist’s field from the early nineteenth century to the present.
Chapters Four through Six proceed from larger to smaller political
units.
In short, the aims of this study are to indicate the gradual
development of the political novel in England and the United States,
to show what it has produced in several other countries, and to
demonstrate the insights it can give in this area of human behavior to
students of literature, politics, and related disciplines, and to the
general reader.
chapter two
The Novel as Political Instrument
A political novel written from a point of view favoring a particular
faction is a political instrument in effect even if not in intent.
A writer may sternly tell himself at the outset that he will be
completely impartial, only to have the reviewers note all sorts of
bias, real or imagined, of which he may not have been conscious. This
happened to Turgenev when he published _Fathers and Sons_, and it
continues to happen every year. The intensity of the authors’ feelings
varies from obsessive preoccupation to passing interest. The novels
in this chapter were included because they contain definite opinions,
sometimes appeals, on political subjects. Some of them never exhort
the reader or seem to lead him by the hand to the author’s point of
view. But each of them contains material capable of influencing the
reader’s opinions about some phase of political activity. If a novelist
gains a reader’s support for a cause, arouses his distaste for a course
of action, or simply produces a reevaluation of previously accepted
beliefs, his work has served as a political instrument just as surely
as a pamphlet mailed by a national committee or a handbill stuffed into
the mailboxes of a sleeping city.
THE UNITED STATES
=Harriet Beecher Stowe and the Civil War=
_Uncle Tom’s Cabin_ is a prime example of the novel as political
instrument both in intent and effect. Harriet Beecher Stowe declared in
her preface that
The object of these sketches is to awaken sympathy and feeling for
the African race, as they exist among us; to show their wrongs
and sorrows, under a system so necessarily cruel and unjust as
to defeat and do away with the good effects of all that can be
attempted for them....
The book did more than awaken sympathy; its millions of copies helped
rouse the growing anti-slavery sentiment in the North, creating in part
the political climate out of which the Civil War grew and mustering
moral support for its prosecution. But the novel’s effects were not
confined to America. In _Literary History of the United States_ Dixon
Wecter called it “the most influential novel in all history,” and
Harold Blodgett noted that it was used in the campaign that secured
England’s Reform Act of 1867. Raymond Weaver, in his introduction to
the Modern Library edition, notes that half a million Englishwomen
signed an address of thanks to the author, and that Russians were said
to have emancipated their serfs after reading the book. The hero of
Edgar Lee Masters’ _Children of the Market Place_ says the book “was
not really true,” but he records the praise it won from Macaulay,
Longfellow, George Sand, and Heine, and adds, “The winds of destiny
previously let loose were blowing madly now.”
Translated into nineteen languages, the novel was also dramatized.
Eliza’s flight across the ice and Simon Legree’s cruelty have become
hackneyed, but the author did not rely exclusively on such melodrama
and tugging at the heartstrings. The plot is interlarded with case
histories of slavery--mothers whose children were taken from them,
women sold for “breeders,” men taken from their families and sent down
into the deep South. The reader may feel that Legree is a villain so
fiendish as to be unbelievable; he may find the angelic Little Eva’s
death scene, in which she cuts off golden curls and distributes them
to the sobbing family and retainers, cloying or emetic. There are
other characters, though, worth observing. Senator Bird of Ohio, who
had formerly supported the Fugitive Slave Act, shelters Eliza before
sending her to a Kentuckian who had freed his slaves and now runs a
stop on the Underground Railway. Artistically the novel is very bad.
Its structure sprawls, its melodrama creaks, and its sentiment oozes
over hundreds of pages peopled more often by cardboard figures than
believable human beings. This is another case, however, in which the
reading public paid no attention to critical standards. Mrs. Stowe
concluded her novel with the warning that
not surer is the eternal law by which the millstone sinks in the
ocean, than that stronger law, by which injustice and cruelty shall
bring on nations the wrath of Almighty God!
Her words were prophetic, and her book helped to bring about the dies
irae of which she spoke.
=Albion Tourgée: The Blunders of Reconstruction=
Just as the political novel helped to prepare the way for the Civil
War, so it commented upon the events which followed it. In _A Fool’s
Errand_ (1879) and _Bricks Without Straw_ (1880), two awkward but
intensely felt books, Albion Tourgée criticized the tremendous blunders
of the federal government in the Reconstruction era. Using the same
techniques of case history, pathos, and melodrama as did Mrs. Stowe,
Tourgée applauds the intent of the federal Reconstruction program but
is outraged and cynical at the way it was carried out. He praises
the work of the Freedmen’s Bureau but laments its dissolution and
the government’s virtual abandonment of the Negro. Like Mrs. Stowe,
Tourgée states the problem as dramatically and appealingly as he can;
then he offers his solution: education. Both of Tourgée’s novels close
with appeals for federal aid to education in the South. The Negro is
obviously in greatest need, but the aid is meant to be spread over
the entire educational system. Discarding all pretense at fiction and
writing directly to the reader, Tourgée concludes _A Fool’s Errand_ by
telling him that “Poor-Whites, Freedmen, Ku-Klux and Bulldozers are all
alike the harvest of ignorance. The Nation can not afford to grow such
a crop.”
=Perennial Theme: Corruption=
In the 1880s the American political novel began to shift from the Civil
War and Reconstruction to the theme of corruption. This subject was
explored extensively during the next five decades. Whether the scene
was the national capitol, as in Henry Adams’ _Democracy_ (1880), or a
ward in New York City, as in James L. Ford’s _Hot Corn Ike_ (1923),
the theme was the same--the betrayal of public trust for private ends.
Although many of these novels were written in the resurgent school
of Realism, all of them, in their depiction of pervasive corruption,
were capable of being political instruments through the nature of the
material which they treated if not through their author’s intent.
Whether the writer declaims through his hero against public robbery or
simply tries to present dispassionately what he sees, the revulsion of
the reader at the travesty of American political ideals is likely to be
the same.
There was one notable exception to this trend. It was Jack London’s
_The Iron Heel_ (1908). Projecting his story into the future, he wrote
of an America under the dictatorship of an Oligarchy serving the
interests of the large corporate and industrial groups. The reader
learns that the Oligarchy was eventually overthrown, but the book
concentrates upon a fictitious era of horrors unequalled until the
appearance of Orwell’s _1984_ forty years later. In his introduction to
the novel, Anatole France called London a Revolutionary Socialist. This
he was, and--in the novel, at least--a devoted Marxist as well. The
book was clearly meant to be a political instrument. Its fulfillment
of this aim may be judged by a comment of Stephen Spender in his
contribution to _The God That Failed_ (1950). He remarks that Harry
Pollitt, a high official of the English Communist Party, had told him
that in his opinion _The Iron Heel_ was “the best revolutionary novel.”
The Communist view of the propaganda value of literature makes the
comment significant.
=Upton Sinclair: Corruption Plus Radicalism.= Upton Sinclair’s books
were among those which marked the beginning of a transitional phase in
the American political novel. In them a new theme was added to that of
political corruption: the rise of leftist and radical forces. _Oil!_
(1926) focuses on Bunny Ross’s political journey to the far Left.
Bunny’s father, J. Arnold Ross, is one of the tycoons who selects,
pays for, and elects an American president. Naming names and placing
places, Sinclair sends his characters into the campaign of 1920. Verne
Roscoe says that he is negotiating with Barney Brockway of “the Ohio
gang.” Sinclair writes that “he made exactly the right offers, and paid
his certified checks to exactly the right men,” and Warren Harding
was nominated. The fifty million dollars poured into the campaign by
the oil interests (according to Sinclair) helped to finish the job.
The account of the naval reserve oil lease scandals which follows
makes Sinclair’s position on the activities of a powerful lobby very
clear. More an exposé than a work of art, the novel describes attempts
to hinder the organization of the oil workers and the strikes and
strike-breaking which follow. The book ends with an attack upon
an evil power which roams the earth, crippling the bodies of men
and women, and luring the nations to destruction by visions of
unearned wealth, and the opportunity to enslave and exploit labor.
Two years later Sinclair threw himself into a vindication of the
characters and lives of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti. The cast
of _Boston_ (1928) includes the fictitious Thornewell family, but they
are all dwarfed by the two Italians whose careers ended in the electric
chair. Sinclair presents the case as an effort by the city and state
governments to dispose of two representatives of the anarchist movement
which was thought to threaten society’s foundations. He maintains that
the government was supported in its attempt by representatives of
organized religion as well as the socially prominent and economically
powerful classes. Although the author said that he had tried to be a
historian, that he had not “written a brief for the Sacco-Vanzetti
defense,” the novel is precisely that. It is also an indictment of most
of the immediate society in which the events took place. He accuses the
prosecution of carefully building an illegal, trumped-up case heard by
the violently prejudiced Judge Thayer. He declares that the Commission
which investigated the case, made up of Cardinal O’Connell, Bishop
Lawrence, and President Lowell of Harvard, rendered an endorsement of
the state’s actions which amounted to a whitewash. Running parallel
to the story of the Italians is that of Jerry Walker, parvenu tycoon
of the New England felt industry who is legally plundered by the old
commercial and banking interests of Boston and New York. Mr. Sinclair’s
intentions to be impartial may have been sincere, but like the
exclamation points in his prose, they got away from him.
=Growing Political Consciousness: 1930 to 1954=
The great wave of political consciousness which struck America in
the 1930s surged over into the novel. It took several forms. There
was the novel which advocated liberal reforms in government, and the
novel which, presenting the Communist point of view, necessarily went
farther. The proletarian novel emerged. Sympathetically describing the
privations of the so-called proletariat to stimulate betterment of its
living conditions, these novels sometimes cleaved to the Communist
Party line but were often the work of non-Communist authors writing
from genuine concern for their subjects. The Communists regarded this
art form as another weapon in the class struggle. Paul Drummond, a
fanatical Communist writer in James T. Farrell’s _Yet Other Waters_
(1952), shouts that “now the time has come for Party literature.” Moses
Kallisch, leader of a front organization starting a Left Wing Book
Club, declares, “The day is not far off when we’ll overwhelm bourgeois
culture in America!” Increasing consciousness of the political
malignancy of Fascism and Nazism appeared in the novel. With the
descriptions of these dangers came appeals for the strengthening and
defense of the best in the American political system.
=John Steinbeck: The Party Organizer.= Appearing in 1936, Steinbeck’s
_In Dubious Battle_ sociologically described the violent course
and tragic end of a Communist-organized strike of apple pickers in
California’s Torgas Valley. Shortly after he applies for membership in
the Party, young Jim Nolan is taken down into the valley by McLeod,
a hard-shelled, veteran Communist organizer. The underpaid pickers,
living in squalor, follow Mac when he helps precipitate the strike. As
the apprentice, Jim follows each move carefully, learning both theory
and practice from Mac, who wants violence and a prolonged strike in
order to gain wide attention and pave the way for organizing subsequent
picking operations. Adept and devoted, Jim learns quickly despite
a gunshot wound and increasing hunger. He even assumes temporary
leadership over Mac when the latter’s vitality momentarily sags. At
the book’s end, with the strike failing, Jim falls into a trap and
his face is blown off by a shotgun blast. Mac carries his body to the
strikers’ camp platform. The book’s last line is Mac’s funeral oration
for Jim: “Comrades! He didn’t want nothing for himself.” The novel may
be considered a social and political study; the picture that emerges
is one of economic oppression, embattled workers, and hard but devoted
organizers.
=Sinclair Lewis: Native Fascism.= Sinclair Lewis’s fifteenth book also
appeared in 1936, and its title is an indication of the jolt it was
meant to give to American complacency. _It Can’t Happen Here_ is the
story of the American republic transformed into a Fascist corporate
state through a military coup d’état made possible by an electorate
which was attracted by share-the-wealth schemes, anti-minority
agitation, and primitive emotionalism. The methods of the Nazis and
Fascists are applied to eradicate the democratic system and even the
boundaries of states. The country is divided into eight provinces,
concentration camps devour the dissenters and the suspect, and all
of American life is harshly regimented. Lewis’s hero is “bourgeois
intellectual” Doremus Jessup. After he has lost his newspaper,
his daughter, and his son-in-law, he becomes a member of the New
Underground. When revolution wins back only half the country, he enters
the other half as a secret agent. This novel has most of the faults
and virtues of Lewis’s other books: character merging into caricature,
complete lack of subtlety, and embarrassingly awkward dialogue; but
with this there is accurate social criticism, a genuine if crude
vitality, and--particularly in this novel--a very earnest concern for
American traditions. Lewis’s point is made clear as Jessup reflects
that
the tyranny of the dictatorship isn’t primarily the fault of Big
Business, nor of the demagogues who do their dirty work. It’s the
fault of Doremus Jessup! Of all the conscientious, respectable,
lazy-minded Doremus Jessups who have let the demagogue wriggle in,
without fierce enough protest.
=John Dos Passos and Ernest Hemingway: Liberal Causes Abroad.= Glenn
Spotswood’s geographical and political odyssey, abruptly ended by a
rebel bullet in the Spanish Civil War, forms the central theme of Dos
Passos’ _Adventures of a Young Man_ (1938). Politically conscious even
as a boy, Glenn becomes successively a transient worker, a cum laude
college graduate, a Communist labor organizer, and a disillusioned
member of a splinter group. Clearly and dispassionately, Dos Passos
allows his story to unfold. There are unsavory, dislikable characters
such as fierce but noncombatant Comrade Irving Silverstone and sinister
Jed Farrington, an American Communist who, as a Spanish loyalist
colonel, divides his lethal attentions between the rebels and political
unreliables. But one has the feeling that the author is not leaning in
any direction. In the prose poems interspersed throughout the novel,
however, Dos Passos lectures his reader. The concluding paragraph
analyzes the growth of the American Communist Party and explains the
gullibility of the Americans deceived by it. The last lines tell the
reader that
only a people suspicious of self-serving exhortations willing to
risk decisions, each man making his own, dare call themselves
free, and that when we say the people, ... we mean every suffering
citizen, and more particularly you and me.
A little less obvious was the position of Ernest Hemingway in his fine
novel _For Whom the Bell Tolls_ (1943). Hemingway would very probably
disclaim any intent to write a political novel, but his book teaches a
lesson in one of the oldest and surest ways--by example. Robert Jordan
has left his instructorship in Spanish at the University of Montana to
go to Spain as a demolition expert for the loyalists. Although he has
placed himself under Communist discipline for military reasons, he is
not a Communist. He is a teacher who has taken a most un-sabbatical
leave to fight Fascism in a country he loves. Following the pattern
of most of these books, Hemingway sums up a few pages from the end.
Badly injured and unable to make his escape, Jordan lies waiting in the
forest to fight a fatal rearguard action which will buy time for his
escaping friends. He thinks:
I have fought for what I believed in for a year now. If we win here
we will win everywhere. The world is a fine place and worth the
fighting and I hate very much to leave it.
In _Number One_ (1943), Dos Passos shifted from dictatorship abroad to
dictatorship at home. Chuck Crawford is reminiscent of the late Huey
Long of Louisiana. Magnetic, dynamic, and unscrupulous, Chuck wins
the governorship and then goes on to the United States Senate. His
personal aide is the alcoholic Tyler Spotswood, Glenn’s older brother.
Served up as the goat in an oil lease scandal which breaks about
Chuck’s head, Tyler allows himself to remain silent and be convicted.
This is primarily because of Glenn’s last letter from Spain exhorting
Tyler not to let them “sell out” the people at home. Tyler apparently
feels that his conviction is an atonement for failure to accept the
responsibility which Sinclair Lewis also said devolved upon each
citizen. In the novel’s last three lines Dos Passos looks the reader
squarely in the eye: “weak as the weakest, strong as the strongest, the
people are the republic, the people are you.”
_The Grand Design_ appeared in 1949 to complete the _District of
Columbia_ trilogy. In this third novel, Dos Passos’ style remains
the same--detached and impersonal, straightforward and clear. His
politics (in the prose poems) seem unchanged. He appears to be liberal,
to retain his sympathy for the smaller people having a difficult
time economically. Since the book covers the war years, the danger
represented by the Axis powers is evident, but the equally pernicious
influence of militant international Communism is equally clear.
Although the book is jammed with characters from many political strata,
its primary focus is the career of Millard Carroll, who leaves his
Texarcola business to join the New Deal Farm Economy Administration. As
the war progresses, Carroll comes to feel that the Four Freedoms are
being forgotten in its prosecution. He sees personal jealousies and
conflicts within the administration. By implication, the program which
produced relocation camps for Japanese-Americans helps to complete his
disillusionment. Finally, crushed by personal tragedy, he resigns. The
last line of the last prose poem tells the reader, “Today we must learn
to found again in freedom our republic.”
=George Weller: International Communism.= In 1949 George Weller’s _The
Crack in the Column_ drew attention to one of the widespread areas
in which the Comintern was trying to extend Russian domination. The
scene is Greece. The novel reaches its climax when ELAS, the army of
the Communist-dominated EAM popular front group, fights the British in
the streets of Athens while the American army contains the Germans’
last great effort in the Ardennes. Shot down earlier on a mission,
American bomber pilot Tommy McPhail decides not to be evacuated by
the underground net of British Major Walker. He remains to engage in
similar behind-the-lines work. Walker becomes McPhail’s tutor in global
politics as well as espionage. His primary subject is the need for
the United States to accept responsibility for creating international
conditions favorable to the West, as he says Britain has done. Walker
tells McPhail that the United States must learn to recognize Soviet
strategy and combat it by such means as permanent American bases in
the Middle East. Once again, the most explicit statement of the book’s
message is saved for the end:
You Americans just pay your way out of the positions of the last
war, then [help] your way back into the same positions in the next.
You forget that war is continuous and this everlasting series of
visits to the strategic pawnshop a wasteful streak of postponement
of the eventual showdown.
Like many other novels which can be regarded accurately as political
instruments, this one, with its accomplished delineation of a complex
situation, tangled relationships, and deep cross-currents, contains
no direct appeals to the reader. Neither does it have any scowling
villains or radiant heroes. But the portrayal of the growing political
maturity of the naïve American under the tutelage of the able but weary
Englishman may perhaps achieve the same effect, and do it better.
=Norman Mailer: The Extreme Left.= The voice of the extreme Left,
rarely heard in recent American novels, sounded in Norman Mailer’s
_Barbary Shore_, a murky mixture of obscure symbolism, endless
conversation, and political theory disguised as dialogue. Published in
1951, the novel met with a generally unfavorable critical reception.
A reading bears out this verdict. McLeod, apparently speaking for the
author as his _raisonneur_, discusses what he calls revolutionary
socialism at great length. Rejecting Russian Communism as state
capitalism, McLoed’s two-thousand-word, non-stop lecture envisions a
mutually destructive war between “the Colossi.” The Lenin of tomorrow,
with the surviving theorists and proletariat, must be ready to spring
to the barricades of the rubble-strewn “hundred Lilliputs” which
survive. Before he is killed, McLoed passes his concept of Marxian
revolutionary socialism like a Grail or a sword to Mikey Lovett. He
is to keep it in readiness for the day when it can be used. This
novel is intensely political. Despite its ambiguousness and withheld
secrets, its essential point emerges: the first socialist revolution
was betrayed; the true revolutionary socialism must make the second one
successful.
=Novels of the Cold War.= As wartime cooperation with the Russians
was superseded by a growing awareness of the nature of militant
Communism and the Moscow-oriented loyalties of American Communists,
the novel chronicled this awakening. In _The Grand Design_ Paul
Graves had told Millard Carroll that a Russian purchasing commission
or a Russian-controlled political party meant “espionage and
counter-espionage and counter-counterespionage ad infinitum....” Novels
like Irwin Shaw’s _The Troubled Air_ (1951) and William Shirer’s
_Stranger Come Home_ (1954) recorded the violence of this reaction.
The function of these novels as political instruments was to rouse
indignation against the forces which, in seeking to destroy American
Communism, use methods as authoritarian and undemocratic as those of
the Soviets themselves. Both novels enlist the reader’s sympathies on
the side of loyal, non-Communist Americans who are unjustly attacked
by self-appointed judges using lies and questionable methods. These
courageous protagonists are virtually ruined professionally and
economically, for their integrity forbids them salvation through
conformity forced upon them by fanatical groups. _The Troubled Air_
embodies the problem in the efforts of director Clement Archer to
keep his radio actors employed until they can defend themselves
against charges of Communism made by _Blueprint_. This magazine,
like some which have appeared on the American scene, specializes in
allegations of Communist Party membership or sympathies on the part
of entertainers. Archer’s actions, exceedingly dangerous to his own
position through his lack of awareness of the nature of his opponents,
cost him his job. This novel is less a _roman à clef_, more complex,
and far more accomplished than Shirer’s book. Archer is victimized not
only by _Blueprint_ and the people who surrender to it, but by two
of the people he defends. Frances Motherwell renounces Communism and
denounces Archer. Vic Herres, an old friend and secretly a fanatical
Communist, has acted for his cell in selecting Archer as a “convenient
point of attack,” one who would fight the Communists’ battle for them.
The novel thus records the painful education of an honorable man whose
naïveté about American Communists is matched by his ignorance of their
opponents who borrow Communist methods. The book is very well done, and
in the reader-association with Archer which it produces, it provides a
vicarious ordeal of arbitrarily assumed guilt-by-association with no
recourse to conventional legal relief.
_Stranger Come Home_ is a fictionalized account of a group of similar
cases familiar to most newspaper readers. Here the spark is ignited by
a publication called _Red Airwaves_. Commentator Raymond Whitehead has
been blacklisted after his defense of Foreign Service officer Stephen
Burnett, accused of Communist sympathies before the investigating
committee of Senator O’Brien. Burnett is charged with conspiring to
give China to the Communists. He has actually done nothing more than
follow the foreign policy of the Roosevelt and Truman administrations
and criticize the corruption he saw in the regime of Chiang Kai-shek.
Whitehead successively loses his sponsor, his air time, and his job.
While he is in Europe he is accused by Senator O’Brien of being
a Soviet agent. This charge is based upon the testimony of two
ex-Communists who have become professional witnesses against people
like Burnett and Whitehead. To give immediacy and the personal impact
of the experience, the book is written in diary form. Although its
fidelity to actual events makes it seem a transcription and though its
quality as a work of art is not outstanding, the novel succeeds in
driving its point home. The villains are quite black and the heroes are
quite white despite the peccadillo here and there meant apparently to
humanize them. Nevertheless, the reader who grants belief and sympathy
to Burnett and Whitehead will be hard put to suppress indignation and
fear at the people, methods, and events which combine to bring near
ruin to two intelligent and patriotic United States citizens.
In 1952 Paul Gallico’s _Trial by Terror_ chronicled the ordeal of
Jimmy Race, reporter for the Paris edition of the _Chicago Sentinel_.
Slipping into Hungary to unearth the story behind the conviction and
twenty-year sentence meted out to an American named Frobisher, Race
is arrested. Brainwashed and tortured into a false confession at a
propaganda trial, Race is sentenced to prison. When his release is
eventually secured, he is a fear-ridden, completely disorganized
personality, an animal conditioned to confession as completely as
Pavlov’s dog was to salivation. But his destruction is not the only
cause for anger. His liberation was not achieved by his government, but
by his editor, who was able to blackmail the Hungarian Minister of
Affairs because of Titoist activities. The feeling throughout the book
is that the United States embassy played a diplomatic game in which
the deadliest weapons were strongly worded notes. The final irony is
that the release was accomplished by a private citizen forced to use
Communist methods of blackmail and intimidation. This novel graphically
indicts Soviet brutality. It also criticizes American policy in a
dramatic aspect of the cold war.
GREAT BRITAIN
The English political novel appeared somewhat earlier than its American
counterpart. Its subjects range over a wider area and its varieties
of political experience are more numerous. As a political instrument,
however, the English novel is very like the American.
=Benjamin Disraeli: Revitalized Toryism=
In the preface to the fifth edition of _Coningsby_, coming five years
after first publication in 1844, Benjamin Disraeli, later Prime
Minister and Earl of Beaconsfield, made no pretense about his intent:
The main purpose of its writer was to vindicate the just claims
of the Tory party to be the popular political confederation of
the country.... It was not originally the intention of the writer
to adopt the form of fiction as the instrument to scatter his
suggestions, but, after reflection, he resolved to avail himself of
a method which, in the temper of the times, offered the best chance
of influencing opinion.
This novel was the first of three which comprised Disraeli’s _Young
England_ trilogy. In a somewhat unsubstantial way, the three books set
forth the principles which were to create a revitalized Tory party.
In _The Political Novel_ Morris Speare concludes that the four major
points of the program deal with the nobility, the middle class, the
working class, and the English church. The nobility was to reassume the
leadership it held before patents of nobility were doled out freely
to clever entrepreneurs and favorite retainers of great families. An
aristocracy in function as well as name, it was to be assisted by the
vigorous industrial and mercantile middle class which had arisen in
England since the industrial revolution. The lot of the working class
was to be bettered by a sympathetic government rather than by militant
movements from within its own ranks. Moral and spiritual leadership
was to be supplied by a revitalized church true to its fundamental
religious tradition. Harry Coningsby, grandson of the dissolute and
immensely powerful Lord Monmouth, is the personification of Young
England. A hero at Eton and Cambridge, he returns from a year of travel
on the continent to enter politics. Refusing to sit in Parliament for
one of Monmouth’s rotten boroughs and act as a rubber stamp for old
Tory policies, Coningsby is cut out of Monmouth’s will. Monmouth’s
death and a neatly juggled legacy eventually pave the way for
Coningsby’s entry into Parliament on his own terms. Patly, Coningsby
of the nobility marries Edith Millbank, daughter of a middle class
tycoon.
A year later, _Sybil_ followed _Coningsby_. Like substitutes in a
football game, Charles Egremont and Trafford go in for Coningsby
and Millbank. Much of the book is concerned with the working class.
Disraeli shows the reader the horrible conditions in which many of
its members live and the violence of their attempts to better them.
Bishop Hatton, barbarous ruler of the locksmiths of the mining district
village of Wodgate, leads his “Hell-cats” in an assault upon ancient
Mowbray Castle. Unions are presented as groups of violent men, cloaked
and hooded. Supplementing this portrayal is one of a decaying and
greedy aristocracy. One can perhaps imagine the reaction of the landed
or moneyed English voter. He might well accept Disraeli’s opinion that
something had to be done.
_Tancred_ completed the trilogy in 1847. The hero is the sheltered
great-grandson of the Duke of Bellamont, who “might almost be placed
at the head of the English nobility.” The introspective Tancred is
preoccupied with religion and the direction it can give to human
affairs particularly in the areas of politics and government. Unable
to find the answers to his questions in England and unwilling to enter
Commons until he has them, he makes a pilgrimage to the Holy Land. At
this point the novel dissolves into a panorama of kidnapings, desert
intrigues, and mountain kingdoms reminiscent of Rudolph Valentino
movies. Tancred becomes absorbed with “the great Asian mystery” which
is to assist in the moral regeneration of the West, particularly
England. Overwhelmed by Emirs and Sheikhs, Turks and Druses, the novel
is the weakest of the three. But together the books are a prime example
of an art form carefully selected and used to gain a hearing for a
political program.
=Henry James: The Breakup of Victorian Tranquillity=
_The Princess Casamassima_, published by Henry James in 1886, is one
of the novels which focused upon the revolutionary currents beginning
to stir beneath the surface of English political life. Irving Howe has
called it a warning that something had to be done to alleviate the
misery of the poor. These conditions had given rise to radical groups
such as that which met at the Sun and Moon Tavern under the leadership
of Paul Muniment. The personal tragedy of his friend Hyacinth Robinson
forms the novel’s central theme. The sensitive, disinherited inhabitant
of two worlds, Robinson is the illegitimate son of a Frenchwoman who
had murdered her titled lover. Robinson’s maternal grandfather had
fallen on the barricades of the French Revolution. Raised with the help
of Eustache Poupin, exiled veteran of the French Commune, Robinson
feels that he is heir to a revolutionary background. Emotionally
exalted, he declares his willingness for self-sacrifice at a group
meeting. From that time on, like the protagonist of _The Beast in
the Jungle_, Robinson waits for the summons to fulfill his destiny.
But meanwhile he falls under the spell of the Princess, who takes a
dilettante interest in the lives of the poor and the activities of
the radical movement. Partly under her influence and partly as a
result of a trip to Venice and Paris made possible by a small legacy,
Robinson finds his revolutionary ardor waning. In his admiration for
the richness of European civilization, he becomes reluctant to act as
an agent of its eventual destruction. When the summons comes for him to
assassinate a duke, he shoots himself instead. James presents a gallery
of types: the guilty aristocrat, a member of the decayed gentility, the
professional revolutionary, and the industrious poor. In this novel
James is concerned as always with personal relationships, backgrounds,
and motivations. He also presents an environment out of which political
violence can explode. And his feelings about the need for preventing it
are clear.
=Joseph Conrad: Early Cloak and Dagger=
In 1907 Joseph Conrad explored this problem from the same point of view
in _The Secret Agent_. In the author’s note which introduced the novel,
Conrad wrote that a friend had mentioned anarchist activities. This was
the germ of the story:
I remember, however, remarking on the criminal futility of the
whole thing, doctrine, action, mentality; and on the contemptible
aspect of the half-crazy pose as of a brazen cheat exploiting the
poignant miseries and passionate credulities of a mankind always so
tragically eager for self-destruction. That was what made for me
its philosophical pretences so unpardonable.
Conrad then had his point of view; his recollection of an attempt to
blow up the Greenwich Observatory gave him the outlines of his plot. A
“delegate of the Central Red Committee,” Adolf Verloc is actually an
informer and agent provocateur for many years in the pay of the embassy
of a “great power” (probably Russia). His principal function is to
transmit warnings of planned bomb-throwings to insure the safety of
“royal, imperial, or grand-ducal journeys....” Called to the embassy,
Verloc is told by first secretary Vladimir that the conference in Milan
is lagging in its “deliberations upon international action for the
suppression of political crime....” England is chiefly responsible,
Vladimir tells him. He orders Verloc to provide a stimulus in the
form of an attack “with all the shocking senselessness of gratuitous
blasphemy.” Verloc is ordered to blow up the Observatory. Always a
businessman and never a terrorist, he is deeply disturbed. Obtaining
a bomb, Verloc sends his admiring half-wit brother-in-law Stevie out
with it. But Stevie stumbles and blows up himself rather than the
Observatory. When Verloc’s wife learns what has happened, she kills him
and then commits suicide. To add to the impact of the story, Conrad
wove into it the characters of Karl Yundt, an evil old terrorist, and
the Professor, a “perfect anarchist” who spends his life in experiments
to develop the perfect detonator. In _The Great Tradition_ F. R.
Leavis has rightly called this book “one of Conrad’s two supreme
masterpieces.” In its structure, its delineation of personality, and
its masterful manipulation of point of view, the book is a classic. It
is an example of the superiority of the European political novel, one
of the finest works in the entire genre.
_Under Western Eyes_ was written from the same point of view as _The
Secret Agent_. Appearing in 1910, the novel dealt with the same
sort of groups Conrad had treated three years earlier. But now the
area was wider, the figures larger, and the stakes bigger. Kirylo
Razumov, another illegitimate like Hyacinth Robinson, is studying
at St. Petersburg University for a career in the civil service. His
life is disrupted when Victorovitch Haldin seeks refuge in his rooms
after blowing up the President of a Repressive Commission which had
imprisoned, exiled, or hanged many Russians considered disloyal to
the Czar. Afraid of being suspected of complicity and enraged at what
he feels is gratuitous destruction of the only life he can make for
himself, Razumov, on the advice of his father, Prince K----, betrays
Haldin to the police. His life now completely disoriented, Razumov is
persuaded by the Prince and Councilor Mikulin to go to Geneva. Regarded
as a hero and the accomplice of Haldin, he enters the revolutionary
circle led by the famous Peter Ivanovitch. His job is to report their
plans to Mikulin. But then, despite himself, he falls in love with
Haldin’s sister Nathalia. He confesses his betrayal of Haldin to her
and then to the circle. Maimed by the circle’s executioner, Razumov
stumbles out onto the street and into the path of a tram car. At the
novel’s end he has returned to Russia with but a short time to live.
Again, Conrad’s point of view affects the reader through the tragedies
he describes, the object-lesson characters he creates, and the comments
they make. The narrator and Conrad’s raisonneur, an anonymous teacher
of English in Geneva, is the source of many of these comments. When
he sees Nathalia about to return to Russia as a dedicated worker, he
thinks of her believing in “the advent of loving accord springing like
a heavenly flower from the soil of men’s earth, soaked in blood, torn
by struggles, watered with tears.”
=E. M. Forster: The Problem of Imperialism=
Out of E. M. Forster’s _A Passage to India_ (1924) comes a
compassionate plea for British understanding of India. But even
understanding is not enough; there must also be love. This great
subcontinent, divided by geography, economics, caste, and religion,
has a heritage of misery and discord. The book’s two great themes are
the divisions which sunder India and the love which alone can make it
whole. It has been taken by the British without love in a union which
is rape. In one of the parallels which inform the theme, this action
is represented on the interpersonal level by the projected loveless
marriage of Adela Quested and British civil servant Ronny Heaslop. The
novel moves to a climax when the hysterical Adela mistakenly accuses
the sensitive Dr. Aziz, a Mohammedan Indian, of attempted rape in the
sinister Marabar caves. Aziz is acquitted, but his career is ruined
and his spirit desolated. But the influence of Ronny’s dead mother,
Mrs. Moore, returns, through the memory of her and the presence of her
two other children, to dispel some of the evil. At the book’s end Aziz
achieves a partial reconciliation with Cyril Fielding, the Englishman
who has defended him at the cost of ostracism. But as they part Aziz
shouts:
If it’s fifty-five hundred years we shall get rid of you, yes, we
shall drive every blasted Englishman into the sea, and then ... you
and I shall be friends.
As an appeal either for love or withdrawal from India, the book is a
political instrument. It is also a revealing commentary upon one of
the causes of what Winston Churchill called “the dismemberment of the
British Empire.”
=Aldous Huxley and George Orwell: The Future in Perspective=
Huxley’s _Brave New World_ (1932) and Orwell’s _1984_, which followed
it seventeen years later, are political instruments through the honor
and revulsion they will create in any reader whose political beliefs
are formed by the democratic tradition. Although both these fine novels
are written in the future, neither is a fairy tale spun from air. Their
only resemblance to fairy tales is a horde of enough all-too-real
goblins and witches to make a month of _Walpurgisnachts_. Huxley, using
godlessness and immorality, and Orwell, using totalitarian government,
create nightmares well calculated to increase resistance to tendencies
in modern life which could produce the results so strikingly conjured
up in their novels.
THE CONTINENT
=Ivan Turgenev and Fyodor Dostoyevsky: Nihilism and Its Rejection=
In his helpful introduction to the Modern Library edition of _Fathers
and Sons_, Herbert Muller writes that Ivan Turgenev’s _A Sportsman’s
Sketches_, which appeared in 1852, had created an effect similar to
_Uncle Tom’s Cabin_ in America. _Fathers and Sons_ (1862), treating
revolutionaries like most of Turgenev’s books, had an even more lasting
effect. Although both the uproar and the Nihilist movement died
down, Muller declares that the novel “helped to form the mentality
of the later revolutionaries who established the Soviet Union.” The
story deals with the return from college of Arkady Kirsanov and his
friend Yevgeny Bazarov. Nihilist Bazarov dominates his disciple
Arkady. Conflict quickly erupts. Arkady’s father Nikolai is hurt by
the distance between them, and his uncle Pavel seizes upon a pretext
for a duel in which Bazarov wounds him. Bazarov’s father Vassily,
pathetically eager to be close to his son, finds the gulf between
them even greater than that separating Arkady and Nikolai. The two
generations--one giving allegiance to religion and the old regime,
the other to science and revolutionary Nihilism--have lost almost all
rapport with each other. Turgenev treats the perennial aspect of this
theme, yet he particularizes it to mid-nineteenth century Russia.
Eventually the gap between the Kirsanovs is narrowed as Arkady marries
and returns to administer the estate with his father. But before
Bazarov leaves he lashes out at Arkady:
You’re not made for our bitter, rough, lonely existence.... Our
dust would get into your eyes ... you’re admiring yourselves
unconsciously, you like to abuse yourselves; but we’re sick of
that--we want something else! we want to smash people!
It may be, as Muller says, that Turgenev’s mind was with the sons and
his heart with the fathers, that he tried to be fair. Here is a case
in which, regardless of intent, a novelist helped to shape a movement
which disrupted a world.
Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky reacted violently to Turgenev’s work. The
former challenged him to a duel and the latter attacked and caricatured
him mercilessly as Karamazinov in _The Possessed_ (1872), a violent
attack upon Nihilism. In his introduction to the Modern Library
edition, Avrahm Yarmolinsky declares that
Dostoyevsky’s avowed intention in writing it was to drive home
certain convictions of his, regardless of whether or not he met
the requirements of the art of fiction. He wanted to deal a body
blow to the rebels who threatened what he considered to be the
foundations of Russian life. Originally he conceived his novel as a
political lampoon, a pamphlet against the revolution.
In the massive book which he produced, Dostoyevsky fulfilled his
purpose by showing the effect upon a provincial capital of a group of
revolutionaries guided by a demoniac leader. Conspiracy, mob violence,
arson, and murder temporarily disrupt government. Pyotr Verhovensky
returns from revolutionary activity abroad to set up groups throughout
Russia. He seeks to knit together this particular group by making all
of them participate in the murder of a dissident member. Before he has
fled and his group has been caught, three more people have been killed.
Nikolay Stavrogin, the book’s perverted central figure, is meant to be
the messiah of Pyotr’s movement. The ruin of the whole structure is
complete when, on the last page, Nikolay dangles from his own silken
noose. Recurring in the book and linked to its title is the image of
the biblical Gadarene swine. Pyotr’s father, estranged from his abusive
son, is dying partly because of a chain of events set in motion by him.
He asks that this passage be read to him and then exclaims:
Those devils that come out of the sick man and enter into the
swine. They are all the sores, all the foul contagions, all the
impurities, all the devils great and small that have multiplied in
that great invalid, our beloved Russia, in the course of ages and
ages.
The swine had plunged into the sea and destroyed themselves.
Dostoyevsky wanted to insure that his countrymen would not, like
lemmings, follow each other to destruction.
=André Malraux: Pro-Communism=
An index of changing times is the contrast between _The Possessed_ and
André Malraux’s _Man’s Fate_. This novel represented the opposite pole
of political thought. Published in 1934, Malraux’s book sympathetically
followed the abortive Communist attempt to capture Shanghai in 1927.
Under the leadership of half-French Kyo Gisors and others like him,
the Chinese Communists wage a losing battle against the Kuomintang
party of Chiang Kai-shek. This time the gallery of revolutionary
types--theorists, assassins, hard-core Party workers--is presented in
a different light. They are heroes. The professional revolutionists
and disinherited peasants are following a vision. Even when they
receive the coup de grâce or await death in the boiler of a locomotive,
eventual victory is seen transcending temporary defeat. Having given
his cyanide to wounded comrades, the Russian Katov is still able to
reflect as he awaits his horrible end that “he had fought for what in
his time was charged with the deepest meaning and the greatest hope; he
was dying among those with whom he had wanted to live; he was dying,
like each of these men, because he had given a meaning to his life.”
These words are something like Robert Jordan’s valedictory to life. But
Jordan fought to preserve Spanish democracy and Katov died to establish
Chinese Communism. The novel serves all causes.
=Ignazio Silone: Disillusionment on the Left=
The first of a remarkable group of modern political novels appeared in
the same year as _Man’s Fate_. It was Ignazio Silone’s _Fontamara_.
“The poorest and most backward village of Marsica,” Fontamara is
the scene of progressive encroachments of Fascism upon the life of
its people. Exploited by The Promoter--a builder, banker, and local
tycoon--the uneducated peasants successively lose most of their water
supply, the profits from their hard-raised crops, and their right to
talk about politics. When the protests of some of its people make
it appear that Fontamara is resisting the Mussolini regime, Black
Shirt thugs raid the village, abusing its people and wrecking houses.
Goaded by the need for work, Berardo Viola and the son of the nameless
narrator go to Rome to seek it. Fleeced of their money, they finally
obtain the necessary certificates of moral character. But The Promoter
has written upon them that the men are politically unreliable. Thrown
into jail upon suspicion of distributing copies of _The Unknown Hand_,
they meet the editor of this resistance leaflet. To save him, Berardo
assumes responsibility for the paper and is beaten to death by the
police. The editor succeeds in delivering a small press to Fontamara,
where the villagers begin their secret paper, which they call _What
Shall We Do?_ This phrase is not only the title; it is printed at the
end of each story of Fascist atrocity. At the book’s end, the nameless
narrator and his family are in hiding with Silone. The village has been
wiped out by the Fascists. The book’s last line--not in quotes and
therefore Silone’s question as well as the narrator’s--is, of course,
What Shall We Do?
Three years later, in 1937, the next of Silone’s fine political
novels was published. _Bread and Wine_ marks the beginning of the
disillusionment of Silone’s heroes with Communism which culminates in
_A Handful of Blackberries_ (1953). Pietro Spina, the central figure of
_Bread and Wine_, returns to Italy although hunted there as a Communist
agitator. Ill and perplexed, he goes into hiding in the poor mountain
village of Pietrasecca disguised as a priest, Don Paolo Spada. His
disguise evolves into another self, reviving and intensifying the inner
conflict he has always felt through a dual attraction to Christianity
and Marxism. Before he returns to political action he achieves a sort
of synthesis of what he thinks are the best elements of both beliefs,
necessarily rejecting Russian Communism. Don Paolo tries to give his
old teacher Don Benedetto the essence of his belief:
If a poor man, alone in his village, gets up at night and takes a
piece of chalk or charcoal and writes on the village walls: “Down
with the war! Long live the brotherhood of all peoples! Long live
liberty!” behind that poor man there is the Lord.
In _A Handful of Blackberries_ Rocco de Donatis returns to the village
of San Luca at the end of World War II. Formerly a fanatical Communist,
he breaks with the Party. The novel describes the Party’s attempt to
ruin his life and his fiancée’s. Figuring in the story is an ancient
trumpet traditionally used to call the peasants to action “when we just
can’t stand things any longer.” Rocco’s survival and the inability of
the Communists to seize the symbolic trumpet to pervert it to their own
uses signalize a sort of victory. In their total effect these novels
are an indictment of both Fascism and Communism. Simply written yet
powerful, they display a deep sympathy for the poor and oppressed.
=Arthur Koestler: The Bolshevik on Trial=
Like Orwell and Huxley, Arthur Koestler wrote a novel which, without
one plea or exhortation, is a political instrument through the strong
emotional and intellectual response which it can create. _Darkness at
Noon_ (1941) tells the story of Nicolas Rubashov, an old Bolshevik
once second only to “No. 1” in what is unquestionably Russia. But now
this legendary hero of the Revolution lies in a small isolation cell
awaiting the ordeal which is to lead to confession and abnegation at
a public treason trial. Through the use of flashbacks, this stark
and powerful novel traces Rubashov’s career. All the usual elements
are there--the devotion to the Party, the cold betrayals, the blind
obedience. Eventually the repressed questions had risen to the surface.
In attempting to work them out Rubashov had arrived at disillusionment
and “political divergencies.” Eventually he concludes that the mistake
was that “we are sailing without ethical ballast.” The trial over, he
is led down a dark corridor deep within the prison. He reflects that
Moses was allowed to see the Promised Land. “He, Nicolas Salmanovitch
Rubashov, had not been taken to the top of a mountain, and wherever
his eye looked, he saw nothing but desert and the darkness of night.”
An instant later the bullet crashes into the back of his head. One is
appalled not only at his career and those of the thousands of Rubashovs
who have helped to create the Soviet state, but at the whole process
which creates a Rubashov--and a No. 1.
AFRICA
The inclusion of novels on contemporary South Africa in this study
comes near to disregarding the limits set up by our definition of the
political novel, for certainly there is as much of the sociological and
economic in these novels as there is in _The Jungle_ or _The Grapes of
Wrath_. They are included, however, because politics plays as vital
a part in the South African problems portrayed in these novels as do
the other two factors. While the Blacks in the Union of South Africa
are not slaves, their treatment is an inflammatory subject, and the
repressive measures taken against them are political by their very
nature. The Nationalist Party of Prime Minister Malan owes its tenure
in no small measure to its policy of _apartheid_, strict segregation of
Blacks from Whites.
=Alan Paton: The Race Question=
One of the most eloquent opponents of _apartheid_ is Alan Paton, a
member of the Liberal Party and author of two fine novels dealing
with the general problem of race relations in South Africa: _Cry, The
Beloved Country_ (1948) and _Too Late the Phalarope_ (1953). Although
both books focus primarily upon interpersonal relationships, the
tragedies which they involve have their bases in the relations of
the two races from which the interacting characters are drawn. _Cry,
The Beloved Country_ tells a moving and deeply pathetic story of the
loss of two sons. The son of the Zulu Stephen Kumalo, an Episcopal
clergyman, murders the son of James Jarvis, benefactor of old Kumalo’s
church. Ironically, in Arthur Jarvis Absalom Kumalo had killed a man
who wanted to better the lot of Kumalo’s people. In 1953 the equally
moving _Too Late the Phalarope_ set forth the tragic story of Pieter
Van Vlaanderen, police lieutenant of Venterspan and hero to Black and
White alike. Convicted of sexual relations with the unfortunate Negress
Stephanie, he is sentenced to prison and disgrace under Act 5 of 1927,
the Immorality Act. The immediate causes of Pieter’s tragedy are his
wife’s inability to give him complete understanding and fulfillment,
and the vindictive enemy he has created in Sergeant Steyn. But the
underlying causes are those which infect the Union of South Africa
with the virulent disease of racial hate and bigotry. Paton’s books
are not only compelling human documents, they are also pleas for the
eradication of the disease.
One of the reasons for the novel’s preeminence as the literary form
superbly fitted to describe and interpret life is the space it gives
the writer to erect his structure, to illumine the nature of an
individual, to characterize a people, to describe both human units
in relation to the world. With his thousands of words the novelist
can impart the shape he wants to the elements which will make his own
vision of life meaningful to his reader. There is no better example
of this characteristic of the novel than these works which use its
freedom to treat that increasingly complex phenomenon of human
activity--politics in its broadest sense. And, assuming the artist’s
privilege, he often makes his work a personal thing, producing not only
a work of art but a political instrument as well.
chapter three
The Novelist as Political Historian
If Art imitates Nature, the political novel imitates History. In almost
all these novels the starting point is a series of actual happenings.
Filtered through the artist’s consciousness, they sometimes emerge
in curious forms. But unless they are spun wholly from moonshine,
like Crawford’s _An American Politician_, they usually bear some
clearly discernible relation to the events of real life. Here again,
the variety is great. Koestler’s _The Age of Longing_ (1951) is
set in Europe of the future. In his words, “it merely carries the
present one step further in time--to the middle nineteen-fifties.” An
apprehensive continent, listening with one ear for the mushrooming of
atomic bombs, anxiously watches the United States and Russia, feeling
that its fate may be decided at any moment by a single move of either
of the giants. Although the time is the future, the running account
of these opponents’ moves which accompanies the story is based upon
Koestler’s interpretation of recent patterns in international affairs.
Perhaps he is too gloomy, but this is the pattern he sees: Russia
trumpets alarms at what it claims is aggression of a “Rabbit State”;
an international crisis occurs and the people clutch their Geiger
counters and anti-radioactivity umbrellas; the crisis is averted and
tension relaxes; the Rabbit State is absorbed by Russia as the United
States sends a printed protest form. At the other end of the scale is
the roman à clef, represented by novels such as Gallico’s _Trial by
Terror_ and Shirer’s _Stranger Come Home_, in which the characters
seem to be fictional counterparts of real people. The conventional
disclaimer, “any resemblance to actual people ...,” is usually present,
but the likeness is often too close to be explained by chance. A close
parallel to the events in Gallico’s book is provided by the experiences
of Robert Voegler and William Oatis. The ordeals of these two Americans
were not related, but to fictionalize and interconnect them is a
logical procedure for the writer building his novel around the subject
of Americans falsely arrested for espionage by Russian satellites.
The political novelist may cover a short period of time or he may widen
his canvas to accommodate a whole era. Stendhal’s _The Charterhouse
of Parma_, covers three decades, beginning in 1796 with Napoleon’s
entry into Milan and ending years later in the post-Napoleonic period.
Howard Spring’s _Fame Is the Spur_ extends from the hero’s birth in
1865 to the day when, heavy with honors, he participates as a peer in
the coronation of King George VI. And Hamer Shawcross is a politician,
so the novel deals with three quarters of a century of Britain’s
political life. As selective as he wants to be, the novelist may
comment upon any phase of political life. The subjects in these novels
range from small-town corruption to international policy, from the rise
and fall of men to the birth and death of parties.
Since the reader knows there is a good chance that he will get a
deliberately subjective view of political history, there must be
good reasons for spending time on novels rather than going directly
to Commager, Beard, Macaulay, or Gibbon. Although a novelist may not
make it as obvious as did Thackeray, he is a god whose characters are
his creations. He looks into their minds and souls. He reveals their
ambitions and exposes their doubts more completely than any historian
can do, even equipped with the volumes of memoirs and apologias which
appear periodically in literary rashes. Even if the writer does
not deal with real people, as do Upton Sinclair and others, he may
present a recognizable copy or a man so typical as to shed light upon
a specific class of political beings. The historian may describe the
Chartist riots or Borgia’s capture of Senigallia, but he cannot do it
with the vividness one finds in the accounts of Disraeli and Maugham.
Only rarely does a book like _The French Revolution_ appear, and
writers like Carlyle are even more rare. Then too, if the novelist is
perceptive and detached, his description and analysis may be as acute
as that of the historian. Disraeli’s known point of view may make
the interpretation of history in _Sybil_ suspect, but the aloofness
and irony of Maugham’s _Then and Now_ not only add to a tale that
is sometimes droll, they help to give keen portraits of two very
considerable men--Cesare Borgia and Niccolo Machiavelli. The novelist
has at his disposal all the resources of the historian, as witness
Sinclair’s use of the 3,900 pages of the Dedham trial testimony in the
Sacco-Vanzetti case. But he can do more than research. He can follow
his characters into Congress, into their offices, and into their beds.
He can also enter into the secret places of the brain, where lie the
ultimate springs of political action.
GREAT BRITAIN
The English political novels included in this study present a panorama
of British history extending back to the early part of the nineteenth
century. A reading of them creates a picture of gradual change, of a
surprisingly orderly political evolution. Disraeli’s novels portray an
England of immense social and economic differences. Although patents
of nobility are being granted with increasing frequency, the society
is much more static than dynamic, with extremely little individual
or group mobility. It is an England of rotten boroughs, of voteless
millions. The country’s political life goes on in accordance with
carefully defined rules, and the players remain the same--the Whigs
and Tories. The England of a hundred years later, seen in _Fame Is
the Spur_, is a different land. The Monarchy and the Church, though
changed, are still strong reference points in English life, but almost
everything else has altered. The franchise is no longer the exclusive
possession of the landed; suffrage has been extended to women. The old
laissez faire economy has evolved into one with considerable state
regulation. The Whigs have given way to the Liberals who, in turn, are
about to be superseded by the Labour Party. Actually, a revolution
has taken place, but it has occurred within the existing political
framework.
=George Eliot: The Early Nineteenth Century in the Midlands=
George Eliot’s _Felix Holt, the Radical_ was published in 1866,
but it dealt with English politics in 1832. The plot, with its
double identities, confused litigation, and secret paternities, is
labyrinthine. But the description of English elections is sharp and
vivid. Both the Whig and Radical candidates hire mobs of miners and
navvies to demonstrate for them. The result is a bloody riot quelled
by troops. Harold Transóme is a corrupt Radical; his foil is Holt,
the honest Radical charged with a murder committed during the riot.
The novel’s ending may seem sentimental and contrived, but this does
not lessen the value of the book as a study from which emerges the
political complexion of Laomshire in the English midlands.
=Benjamin Disraeli and Anthony Trollope: Whigs v. Tories=
In his effort to point up the need for a Young England party, Disraeli
exposes the abuses of early nineteenth century England. In _Coningsby_
one sees the millionaire Monmouth manipulate the twelve votes he owns
in Commons to attain a dukedom. In _Sybil_ Charles Egremont attempts
to fit himself for public life by first investigating the conditions
of the working class. Thus Disraeli shows to his reader the farm and
factory workers and the miners who signed the National Petition of the
Chartists. He follows the House of Commons’ rejection of the Petition
and the great uprisings which follow. This author-politician does not
simply offer his own partisan solution to his country’s ills; he also
shows the specific events and general climate which elicit it.
Disraeli and Trollope have been praised at each other’s expense.
Disraeli had immensely greater political experience, but Trollope
was by far the better novelist. Trollope’s books are much more
readable, and the student of the political novel will find just as
much information in them. Of his six parliamentary novels, three make
particularly profitable reading. _Phineas Finn, The Irish Member_
(1869) chronicles the rise and fall of a young Liberal. Standing in
186- for the Borough of Loughshane in County Clare, Finn comes in with
the Liberal government which succeeds that of the Tory Lord de Terrier.
A member of the new cabinet is Mr. Gresham, obviously modeled after
Gladstone. The leader of the Conservative opposition is Mr. Daubeny,
who bears a striking resemblance to Disraeli. The Reform Bill for
England carries and Finn becomes Under Secretary for the Colonies.
When his conscience forbids him to conform to party policy by voting
against the Reform Bill for Ireland, he resigns his office and returns
to Ireland, feeling that he has ruined his career in any case. In
_Phineas Redux_ (1874) he returns to Parliament. Now Daubeny’s Tories
are in, hanging tenaciously to a dwindling advantage in order to retain
patronage and power as long as possible. Daubeny’s purposes are clear.
Because of his parliamentary tactics, he earns from Trollope the
sobriquets “the great Pyrotechnist” and “a political Cagliostro.” The
culmination of the novel’s love story, with which Trollope parallels
the politics, is a spectacular trial in which Finn is acquitted of
murder. He is offered his old job at the Foreign Office, but once more
he retires from the field. Finn reappears in _The Prime Minister_
(1876). When Daubeny’s government goes out, neither he nor Gresham
can muster enough strength to form a new one. The result is that now
familiar phenomenon, a coalition government. The new Prime Minister is
the Duke of Omnium, and his Secretary for Ireland is Phineas Finn. The
country prospers under the coalition. But eventually signs of strain
appear, and with them the resignations of two ministers. Finally,
in its fourth year, the coalition founders on the County Suffrage
Bill. Winning his vote of confidence by the slim margin of nine,
Omnium resigns. It is left for the next government to complete the
near-assimilation of the county suffrages with those of the boroughs.
The two thousand-odd pages of these novels contain close likenesses
of real politicians. They also describe some of the basic issues and
attitudes of this era, and detail the workings of three distinctly
different types of ministries.
=George Meredith: The Early Radical=
In their _Outline-History of English Literature_ Otis and Needleman
describe Meredith’s _Beauchamp’s Career_ as “a political novel
suggested by the candidacy of Capt. Frederick Maxse of Southampton.”
Published in 1876 and spanning the years 1850-1862, the novel
highlights Commander Nevil Beauchamp’s return from distinguished
service in the Crimean War to run for Parliament as a fire-eating
Radical. With more descriptions of canvassing and elections, the
novel also contains the frequently found criticism of the press,
which is almost always regarded as an organ in which truth runs a
very bad second to political expediency. Before the novel ends with
Beauchamp’s tragic drowning, Meredith has given the reader his record
of another aspect of English political life on the local level in the
mid-nineteenth century.
=Mrs. Humphrey Ward: Victorian Portraits=
One of the chief values of Mrs. Humphrey Ward’s _Marcella_ (1894) in
the study of English political currents is its catalog of types. The
novel follows the erratic romance of Marcella Boyce and Aldous Raeburn.
Grandson of Lord Maxwell, an old Tory politician, Raeburn enjoys a
successful career in Commons, eventually becoming an Under Secretary in
the Home Office. But the obstacle to true love is politics. Aldous is a
Tory, and Marcella is a Venturist, defined as “a Socialist minus cant.”
The love triangle is completely political, for Aldous’ rival Harry
Wharton sits as a Liberal. He is, however, gradually drawing closer
to the rising labor movement. At one point Wharton gives the complete
Socialist program for the country districts. After a transitional
period, he says, land and capital will be controlled by the state.
The emancipation of the laborer will mean that “the disappearance
of squire, State parson, and plutocrat leaves him master in his own
house, the slave of no man, the equal of all.” Wharton presides at the
Birmingham Labour Conference, speaking for graduated income tax and
nationalization of the land. At this conference Mrs. Ward introduces
the reader to the leaders of this new movement, from the moderates to
the violent radicals. In a concession to the happy ending, the author
has Wharton discredited for a rascal, thereafter reuniting Marcella and
Aldous.
=H. G. Wells: England in Transition=
In _The New Machiavelli_ (1910) H. G. Wells dealt with Dick Remington,
whose career is ruined like that of Parnell by an extra-marital affair.
Before his fall, Dick changes from a Liberal to a Conservative.
Reminiscent of Disraeli’s novels (which he has read), he becomes
a Young Imperialist of the New Tory movement. Dick’s shifting of
political allegiance is not at all uncommon. This change of loyalties
appears much more often in the English novel than the American, and
there is no opprobrium attaching to it. Dick’s career, in which he
takes his stand on such timely subjects as woman suffrage, is the story
of a journey from one political faith to another. Its background is the
political milieu of late Victorian and Edwardian England.
=Howard Spring: Labour and the Course of Empire=
Spring’s massive _Fame Is the Spur_ (1940) records many of the major
events in English national life in the seventy-five year period ending
in 1940. But one of the primary formative influences in John Hamer
Shawcross’ life took place forty-six years before he was born. It was
the Peterloo Massacre of 1819, in which the working people gathered in
Manchester to hear Orator Hunt were attacked by dragoons. This story,
related by Hamer’s great uncle, first fires his imagination and then
becomes part of his stock in trade. Entering politics as “Shawcross of
Peterloo,” he carries the sabre which the old man had wrenched from
a dragoon. One of the founders of the Labour Party, Shawcross scorns
the Fabians and writes popular books on politics. In London he sees
Keir Hardie take his seat as one of Labour’s first M.P.’s. Later his
marriage is disrupted when his wife estranges herself from him for his
opposition to her suffragist campaigns. Spring records the turbulence
of these efforts--the pickets outside Parliament, the violence, the
hunger strikes, and the “Cat and Mouse Act” (a convicted suffragist
was placed under police surveillance so that she could be returned
to jail when she appeared to have recovered from the effects of a
hunger strike). Although Shawcross’ part in the World War I coalition
government is considered by many a betrayal of Labour, he becomes
Minister of Ways and Means when Labour comes in again in 1924. Having
lost his chance to be Prime Minister, partly because of his stand in
1914, Shawcross in 1931 puts in motion the formation of the National
Labour Party, intended as part of the coalition which is to be formed
to take measures against the depression. This is thought to be his
final betrayal of the Labour Party and cause. As a reward he is made
Viscount Shawcross of Handforth in the same year. His forty-year
political career is at an end.
=Joyce Cary: The Edwardian Age and After=
Tom Wilcher, in Joyce Cary’s _To be a Pilgrim_ (1942), is nearing
the end of a life much involved with politics. In this acute, witty,
and compassionate book, Cary follows Wilcher’s attempt to keep a
representative of the family in Tolbrook, its old home, and to
inculcate into his niece and her little boy the religion which has been
so vital a part of his own life. Through his recollections of his own
experience and that of his brother Edward, Wilcher gives a vivid record
of tense moments in England’s political life. He recalls the stormy
days when he and Edward were pro-Boer, and the more explosive times
which followed:
There are no political battles nowadays to equal the bitterness
and fury of those we fought between 1900 and 1914. It is a marvel
to me that there was, after all, no revolution, no civil war, even
in Ireland. For months in the years 1909 and 1910, during the last
great battle with the Lords, any loud noise at night, a banging
door, a roll of thunder, would bring me sitting upright in bed,
with sweat on my forehead and the thought, ‘The first bomb--it has
come at last.’
Ten years later, in _Prisoner of Grace_, Cary built a novel around
the career of another Labour politician, Chester Nimmo. He secures
attention and injuries through his pro-Boer agitation. Shifting his
attack from the government to the landlords, he finally wins a seat in
Parliament in 1902, later becoming Under Secretary for Mines. He is so
intensely political that when he tells his son fairy tales, the wolf in
_Little Red Riding Hood_ has “a face just like Joe Chamberlain.” The
narrator, Nimmo’s unhappy wife Nina, reflects that:
I suppose nobody now can realize the effect of that “revolution”
on even quite sensible men.... But the truth is that it was a real
revolution. Radical leaders like Lloyd George ... really did mean
to bring in a new kind of state, a “paternal state,” that took
responsibility for sickness and poverty.
Like Shawcross, Nimmo stays on in the coalition cabinet of 1914, hoping
to become Prime Minister at the war’s end. But he loses his seat in the
general elections of 1922. At the book’s end he is, like Shawcross, a
lord, but one who looks wistfully from the sidelines upon the struggle
in the political arena.
THE UNITED STATES
The American political novel does not record changes as broad as
those seen in the English political novel. Some of the reasons for
this variance are clear. In mid-nineteenth century America, as now,
there was no titled aristocracy, no state church, no narrow and
restricted suffrage. Also, there was no nearby source of revolutionary
political thought and action such as that which troubled James and
Conrad. What is perhaps disturbing, however, is the theme most often
treated. If the subject most common in the English novel is political
change or evolution ameliorating injustice, the one most common in
the American political novel is corruption. Nearly half the American
novels considered are written around that theme. They present a history
of political misrule in which one group succeeds another. After the
carpetbaggers, scalawags, and Ku-Kluxers have disappeared, the bosses
who rule by mortgage holdings appear. They are succeeded by the
railroad interests. Utilities groups exercise power and are followed
by the oil interests. In the latest phase, corrupt political power is
exercised by gangsters. Domestic politics are almost always the subject
of books appearing before the 1930s. From this time on, however, the
novel becomes increasingly concerned with foreign ideologies and the
role of the United States in world affairs.
=Edgar Lee Masters: Expansion and Conflict=
Edgar Lee Masters’ _Children of the Market Place_ (1922) takes
English-born James Miles from his immigration to America in 1833 to
his dotage in 1900. Despite Miles’s successive activities as farmer,
broker, builder, and real estate operator, his chief function is to
chronicle the career of Stephen A. Douglas. The description of Douglas’
rise is paralleled by an account of the expansion of the United States.
Historical personages pass across the stage--Jackson, Clay, Polk,
Webster, Calhoun, and Lincoln. The great issues of the times, such
as the tariff and the bank, the Oregon dispute and the annexation
of Texas, contribute to the book’s atmosphere. Miles even describes
the February Revolution in France, and recounts its impact upon each
European country. After describing the founding of the Republican
Party, he gives his eyewitness account of the Lincoln-Douglas debates.
The Civil War is about to set fire to the land, but the main narrative
breaks off at this point. Masters attempted to liven the book by giving
Miles an octoroon half-sister who causes him to commit murder and is
herself the victim of rape and persecution. But the novel’s chief
value in a study of this genre is its attempt to delineate Douglas
and his political philosophy against the background of formative
periods in America’s history. The literary debits include a pell-mell,
unconvincing style loaded with rhetorical questions and overpowering
statistics.
=Albion Tourgée: Slavery and Emancipation=
In _Uncle Tom’s Cabin_ Harriet Beecher Stowe gave a vivid picture of
the Underground Railway through which slaves escaped to Canada. Among
her characters were abolitionists who aided them and agents hired to
recapture them. The historical aspects of slavery and emancipation were
treated more fully, however, by Albion W. Tourgée. _A Fool’s Errand_
(1879) tells the story of a man with the improbable name of Comfort
Servosse. A lawyer and ex-Union officer like Tourgée, he had moved to
the South after the war, as did the author. Referred to by Tourgée as
“The Fool,” Servosse attempts the difficult task of integrating himself
and his family into the life of a Southern community while supporting
the rights of the Negroes. His experience, extending from 1866 until
his death in the late seventies, is one of progressive disillusionment.
Thorough analyses of events support the conclusions he draws. Early
in the book one reads a detailed account of President Johnson’s plan
for Negro suffrage and also a statement of the supplementary Howard
Amendment. Having discussed the role of the secret, pro-North “Union
League” in the South during the war, Tourgée goes on to detail the
rise of the Ku-Klux Klan. Later he analyzes the acts of amnesty passed
by some Southern states to protect from prosecution members of secret
organizations such as the Klan. By 1877 the South is in political
control of its land again. Its policy of suppression has succeeded.
This was the fault, Tourgée tells the reader, of stupid and foolish
Federal policies:
Reconstruction was never asserted as a right, at least not formally
and authoritatively. Some did so affirm; but they were accounted
visionaries. The act of reconstruction was excused as a necessary
sequence of the failure of the attempted secession: it was never
defended or promulgated as a right of the nation, even to secure
its own safety.
In 1880 Tourgée published _Bricks Without Straw_, which spanned a
short period before the war as well as that after it. The book follows
the career of a Negro named Nimbus from chattel to landowner. But
the novel is no more a dispenser of sweetness and light than was its
predecessor. Nimbus is driven from his farm by the same forces which
had made a Southern home untenable for Comfort Servosse. The romance
between Northern Mollie Ainslie and Southern Hesden LeMoyne is redolent
of tears, misunderstandings, and pining hearts finally united. In
spite of its melodrama and other nineteenth-century trappings, the
book is valuable. The purpose and function of the Freedmen’s Bureau
are examined as well as the Black Codes which counterbalanced it.
Tourgée also discusses at length the township system installed in the
South during the Reconstruction era and its gradual destruction by
totalitarian appointee government on the county level. Near the novel’s
end the reader sees the pitiful plight of Nimbus’ friends victimized by
the Landlord and Tenant Act which strengthened the sharecropper system
and reduced many Negroes to serfdom.
=John W. De Forest: Post-War Corruption=
In _Honest John Vane_ (1875) and _Playing the Mischief_ (1876) John W.
De Forest built his stories around corruption in post-war Congress.
John Vane goes to Washington with a reputation for honesty. When he
succumbs to his wife’s pressure for money to finance social climbing,
he is more circumspect but just as greedy as his colleagues. His
tempter and mentor is Darius Dorman, called by the author “Satan’s
messenger” and apparently actually meant to be one, complete with
smoldering sparks and the smell of sulphur. He tells Vane not to
go into the war memories and the nigger worshipping; all those
sentimental dodges are played out. Go into finance. The great
national questions to be attended to now are the questions of
finance. Spread yourself on the tariff, the treasury, the ways and
means, internal improvements, subsidy bills, and relief bills. Dive
into those things, and stick there. It’s the only way to cut a
figure in politics and to make politics worth your while.
The main character in _Playing the Mischief_ is Josephine Murray, a
young widow who uses her attractiveness to secure passage of a bill
which awards her $60,000 compensation for a barn burned in the War of
1812. In the process of dealing with lobbyists and corrupting Senators
she loses the love of Edgar Bradford, a stalwart young Congressman
who has tried to dissuade her from her scheme. Rising in the House,
he denounces the lobbying and bribery he sees, declaring that
“Congressional legislation will soon become a synonym for corruption,
not only throughout this country, but throughout the world.”
=Hamlin Garland: Enter the Farmer=
Set in Iowa in the 1870s, Hamlin Garland’s _A Spoil of Office_ (1897)
deals with the role of farmers’ organizations in politics. Bradley
Talcott, silent and clumsy but obviously a dark horse who will pay off
handsomely, enters politics because it attracts him and because he
wants to better himself “for her,” as Garland insists on referring to
Ida Wilbur. Before they are married in a haze of romance and comradely
devotion to the farmers’ interests, they work with the Grange and the
Farmers’ Alliance. Free trade, national banks, and woman’s suffrage
are discussed frequently, as well as the depredations of corporations.
A sentimental and somewhat superficial book which substitutes clichés
and catch-phrases for exploration in depth of causes and effects, _A
Spoil of Office_ is valuable for its recital of the farmer’s early
role in politics--if one can bear the surfeit of bucolic virtues and
inarticulate devotion to a fair and exalted lady.
=Winston Churchill and David Phillips: Bosses and Lobbies=
In his “Afterword” to _Coniston_ (1906), Winston Churchill wrote that
“many people of a certain New England state will recognize Jethro
Bass.” But he denied that his book was a biography and added that
“Jethro Bass was typical of his Era, and it is of the era that this
book attempts to treat.” Beginning his story shortly after Andrew
Jackson had entered the White House, Churchill traces Bass’s subsequent
control of Coniston, Truro County, and then of the entire state
(probably New Hampshire). His original lever is a sheaf of mortgages.
Through this power over his mortgagers, he places his men (also
mortgage holders) in office and builds his machine. By 1866 Bass has
gained control of the state, which he runs from his room in the Pelican
Hotel in the capital. He has transferred his devotion from his dead
sweetheart, Cynthia Ware, to her child, Cynthia Wetherell. His chief
source of income is the railroad lobby, which pays handsomely for the
legislation it purchases through the state legislature from him.
When Cynthia leaves him on learning his political methods, the saddened
Bass begins to let his power slip away. The industrial and railroad
interests start to combine while the Harwich bank stands by with
mortgage money to help destroy his control. But Bass returns to fight
one more battle when magnate Isaac Worthington has Cynthia dismissed
from her school-teaching job and disinherits his son Bob for wanting
to marry her. Mustering his power in the legislature and showering
Worthington with adverse decisions from supreme court judges he has
made, Bass blocks Worthington’s railroad consolidation bill. After
compelling him to consent to the marriage and write conciliatory
letters to the lovers, Bass lets the bill go through.
In _Mr. Crewe’s Career_ (1908), set twenty years later, Churchill
described the power shift Bass had foreseen. The legislature is
now owned by Augustus Flint, Worthington’s former “seneschal” who
controls the Northeastern Railroad. His “captain-general” who rules
from Bass’s old room in the Pelican is railroad counsel Hilary Vane.
The star-crossed lovers in this novel are Victoria Flint and Austen
Vane. Austen fights the railroads despite his father and foresees
the day when a new generation, willing to assume its political
responsibilities, will turn out the railroad group. After a quarrel,
Hilary leaves Flint but agrees to stay on for the gubernatorial
nomination battle. As Flint watches Vane stalk from his study he sees
“the end of an era of fraud, of self-deception, of conditions that
violated every sacred principle of free government which men had shed
blood to obtain.” Out of loyalty to his father, Austen refuses to let
his name go before the convention, but he says that it does not matter,
for railroad power is doomed. The book closes with a purple passage in
which Austen and Victoria tell their love to each other and watch the
sunset over the river.
Harvey Sayler relates his rise to boss of the Republican Party in
David Graham Phillips’ _The Plum Tree_ (1905). His springboard is a
combine, financed by a dozen companies forming the Power Trust in
his own mid-western state, which will establish its own control over
the state legislature rather than dealing through middlemen such as
Bill Dominick, brutal saloonkeeper and politician. By placing his own
men in key positions and corporation-control statutes on the state
books, Sayler makes the combine completely his own. After using this
combination to ruin a rebellious “robber baron,” Sayler’s rule is
unquestioned. He becomes a president-maker, later allowing his creature
to return to political obscurity as the price for revolt against his
authority. A penitent widower at the book’s end, he is accepted by his
scrupulous childhood sweetheart.
=Jack London: Marxism v. Fascism, Early Phase=
Jack London’s _The Iron Heel_ (1908) is unique for three reasons. It
is one of the first relatively modern American novels which preaches
Marxism, warns against Fascism, and is set in the future. Set in the
twenty-seventh century, four hundred years after the Brotherhood of
Man had overthrown the three-century-old Oligarchy, the novel is the
annotated manuscript of Avis Everhard. The wife of Socialist leader
Ernest Everhard, she is executed with him after the failure of the
Second Revolt, which appears to have occurred sometime after 1918.
A revolutionary Socialist, London attacked the capitalistic system,
making its corporations the founders of the ruthless and repressive
Oligarchy. London produces quotations from Calhoun, Lincoln, and
Theodore Roosevelt warning against the domination of corporations. He
describes the police and strike-breaking functions of the Pinkertons
in their service, specifically names eleven industrial groups said to
dominate the United States in 1907, and chronicles the efforts of the
labor movements for better working conditions. Sometimes maudlin and
at other times vituperative, London nevertheless gives a frightening
vision of a totalitarian state such as that which later became the
actuality described in Silone’s novels of Italy under Mussolini. London
anticipates other novels of this type even in particulars, as in the
case of his “people of the abyss,” who are purposely degraded and
brutalized quite as much as Orwell’s Proles.
=James L. Ford, Samuel H. Adams, and Upton Sinclair: Oil Men and
Anarchists=
James L. Ford’s _Hot Corn Ike_ (1923) deals with political corruption
in New York City, at the same time harking back through one of its
characters to the Know-Nothing Party and the assassination of Bill
Poole. In 1926 Samuel Hopkins Adams’ Revelry moved on to corruption on
the national scene. The novel is a roman à clef whose characters have a
one-for-one correspondence to the real ones in Sinclair’s _Oil!_ Willis
Markham is Warren Harding; Dan Lurcock is Barney Brockway; Anderson
Gandy is Senator Crisby. If the reader likes, he can read the latter
as a key to the former. Sinclair inundates the reader with a detailed
account of the corruption of the Harding era and highlights of the
labor movement. He treats the impact of the Russian Revolution upon
America and the political implications of American troops fighting
the Bolsheviks in Siberia. Following the activities of the I.W.W.,
he describes the resistance to them which included such measures as
California’s Criminal Syndicalism Act. This big book also treats, with
the solidity Masters probably meant to achieve, an equally turbulent
era in American national development. In Boston Sinclair used even more
documentation to relate what he saw as the struggle between capital
and labor. Through Bartolomeo Vanzetti’s active career and subsequent
struggle for life, the reader meets many of the militant groups in
the labor movement in America during the second and third decades of
this century. The I.W.W. appears again with anarcho-syndicalists, and
anarchists. Sinclair even distinguishes the communisti anarchici from
the anarchico individualista. Although the book’s literary merits are
submerged by the pamphleteering and passion, it is worth reading for
the slice of faintly fictionalized American political history which it
presents.
=John Dos Passos and James T. Farrell: Communist Infiltration=
Like Steinbeck’s _In Dubious Battle_, Dos Passos’ _Adventures of a
Young Man_ deals with Communist infiltration of the American labor
movement in the thirties. Giving the reader background material on
the militant role of the I.W.W., both novels follow Communist labor
organizers into the field among migrant agricultural workers, miners,
and industrial workers. Through their characters the novelists reveal
not only the immediate goals of the organizers in terms of wages and
working conditions, but also the place of these struggles in the plan
for a socialistic society. Dos Passos goes even farther in showing
the international aspect of these efforts--the sensitivity to the
Moscow-formed party line, the submergence of local issues in terms of
the overall revolutionary policy.
In 1952 James T. Farrell published a novel which also dealt with
Communism in the mid-thirties. It was _Yet Other Waters_, the story of
Bernard Carr’s attraction to Marxism and his subsequent break with it.
This sometimes turgid book centers around the relation of the writer
to the Communist movement. Many of the phenomena of the period are
there: the magazines purveying a Marxist interpretation of literature,
the writers’ councils and congresses, the attempts to generate a party
literature. Never a member of the Party, Carr is torn between an
attraction to its stated aims and repulsion at its rigid control of
thought and art. He joins picket lines, reads a paper at a Congress,
and then sees the Communists turn a Socialist meeting into a riot.
When he breaks with his party friends, he is given “the treatment.” He
is vilified in the left wing papers and reviews as party hacks make a
concerted attempt to destroy his literary reputation. (And, of course,
this attempted destruction of his means of livelihood is the same
method used by the extreme Right to punish political divergency in _The
Troubled Air_ and _Stranger Come Home_.) Unfortunately, the charge that
Farrell has a tin ear in writing dialogue is true. This long book has a
considerable cumulative effect, but one pays for it by wading through
many slow-moving passages. On the whole, though, it is a convincing
portrait in depth, valuable also for its retroactive anticipation of
the so-called “Literature of Disillusionment” which was to come from
such writers as Silone and Koestler.
Like Hemingway’s _For Whom the Bell Tolls_, Dos Passos’ _Adventures
of a Young Man_ had in its later sections described the fight against
Fascism in the Spanish Civil War. Both novels recorded the infiltration
of the Loyalist forces by the Communists and the supremacy which they
achieved in many sectors. In his next book, _Number One_, Dos Passos
turned his attention to a source of growing concern to many Americans:
dictatorship on the state level as exemplified by the Long machine in
Louisiana. Two other novels, Adria Locke Langley’s _A Lion Is in the
Streets_ (1945) and Robert Penn Warren’s _All the King’s Men_ (1946),
are similar to it, although the quality of the writing varies greatly.
Dos Passos’s style is characteristically dispassionate and panoramic.
Warren’s book, despite devices smacking of melodrama, has sweep and
a highly evocative poetic prose. Langley’s novel is full of worn
devices: the faithful mammy with the corn-pone accent, the deathbed
message, hidden documents, and a shadowy avenger. But all three books
have their primary historical source in the career of Huey Long or the
forces in American political life which he typified.
=Upton Sinclair and John Dos Passos: Global War and Politics=
In _Presidential Agent_ (1945), as in the rest of the voluminous Lanny
Budd series, Upton Sinclair mixed imaginary characters with real
ones, and fictitious events with those from last year’s newspapers.
In this novel (for which any other of the series might be substituted
for the present purpose), Lanny moves among the great ones of the
world as their intimate and confidant. As Presidential Agent 103 with
the code name Zaharoff, he sends his reports directly to President
Roosevelt. Using his entree as an art expert, he further ingratiates
himself into the confidence of the leading Nazis by becoming Hitler’s
_Kunstsachverständiger_. In this role he goes to Austria ostensibly to
purchase paintings for Hitler but actually to gauge Austria’s mood and
its ripeness for _anschluss_ with Germany. The incredible Lanny breaks
into an SS dungeon, Indian-wrestles with Rudolph Hess, and briefs
everyone about everyone else, from Lord Runciman to Kurt Schuschnigg.
He also finds time to outline Roosevelt’s Chicago “quarantine” speech.
All is revealed to him, from the Cagoulard conspiracy in France to the
temper of the Cliveden set in England. The pages of this long novel
are jammed with events and people who made news on three continents
immediately before and after Munich. A journalistic, omniscient
book, _Presidential Agent_ is loaded with slang, clichés, and gauche
conversation and narration. But it is an outstanding example of the
novel which records current political history.
Dos Passos’s _Grand Design_ pulls together the threads of several
current themes. In this one book, the reader finds a continuation of
earlier material about Communism in America, the rising labor movement,
and new liberalism in government. The transition is then made to World
War II, America’s world responsibilities, growing recognition of the
Communist threat, and American obligations in the post-war world.
The novel’s characters work out their individual destinies against a
background of New Deal reforms and international events leading to war.
But there is no arbitrary interlarding of the two. Dos Passos ably
manipulates these two types of material. He weaves them together into
one fabric so that they combine into a meaningful pattern which sets
off individual action against group action. The NRA, the WPB, the fall
of the Low Countries, the agitation for a second front--all of them
are there. But in this artistic fusion the lives of Millard Carroll,
Paul Graves, and Georgia Washburn remain individual, retaining their
identity and meaning.
=Post-War Directions=
In the post-war years, the American political novel seems to have gone
not in one direction but in three. The first is toward concern for
America’s world role as seen in _Grand Design_. The second returns to
the theme of corruption. The third leads to an exploration of domestic
dangers to traditional American freedoms. Weller’s _The Crack in the
Column_ pursues the international theme, indirectly indicating, upon
the basis of lessons learned in Greece, the program which has resulted
in the building of American air bases from Spain to Yugoslavia.
Weller’s book is also valuable as a political history of wartime and
post-war Greece. Besides the working of the wartime EAM front, the
novel describes the pattern of planned Communist expansion and Western
moves made to counteract it. Gallico’s _Trial by Terror_, besides
being an instrument for criticism of the foreign policy which gave no
protection to American citizens jailed and tortured behind the Iron
Curtain, also records one tactic of the cold war deliberately intended
to ruin American prestige in Europe.
Three recent novels treat corruption on the local level. They are
Charles Francis Coe’s _Ashes_ (1952), Mary Anne Amsbary’s _Caesar’s
Angel_ (1952), and William Manchester’s _The City of Anger_ (1953).
Although the theme is old, some of the actors are new. The lobbies and
trusts have been replaced by a more sinister operative--the gangster.
And the power behind the city government is not a single gang led
by a “Little Caesar.” In _Ashes_ it is the Mafia, a transplanted
Sicilian terrorist society. In _Caesar’s Angel_ the ruler is a national
syndicate. The hero of _Ashes_ is given a short lecture on the
economics of the ring:
It is no longer possible for our interests to keep all their money
profitably occupied. It piles up too fast. It threatens to become
visible to the Federal taxing authorities. We are constantly
seeking, and finding, new areas in which to invest. So-called
legitimate areas. It is foolhardy, perhaps, to pay such taxes as
legitimate commerce requires, but our sums are so vast that our
interests feel that they should be converted into capital assets.
The scale of corruption in Manchester’s book is more modest, for there
the rotten façade has been undermined by a local numbers racket rather
than a national group. The bought politicians are clearly drawn,
as are the agents who subvert them. Once again we are dealing with
fiction, but we need only turn to the findings of state and federal
commissions of inquiry to see the bases in fact. The best of these
rather ordinary novels is _The City of Anger_. The Freudian critic will
be interested in Manchester’s recurrent images of decay, corruption,
and physical filth which may, however, represent an attempt to buttress
stylistically his basic theme of political and moral corruption. In
_Caesar’s Angel_ Mrs. Amsbary’s criminals and police are terribly
hard-boiled but not completely convincing. Although her gangsters are
much better done than Mrs. Langley’s in _A Lion Is in the Streets_, she
still sounds somehow like a very nice lady trying to be very tough.
With his clipped, repetitive sentences and grim-jawed men, Coe seems
to be suffering from an overdose of Hemingway. Yet at times he manages
to go one hundred and eighty degrees in the opposite direction with
dialogue like this from “Young Tim”: “You alone, Mums, combine such
true goodness of soul with such great understanding of things!”
Concern over threats to personal freedom forms the basis for Shaw’s
_The Troubled Air_ and Shirer’s _Stranger Come Home_. The events
and characters in these novels make it clear that they too have as
their starting points the contemporary history which they cloak
in fiction. The blacklists of Shaw’s book are as real as Shirer’s
Senator O’Brien and his Senate Committee on Security and Americanism.
Shirer’s people are taken from contemporary American life. Across
his stage parade General Cyrus Field Clark, a newspaper chain owner
of medieval prejudices and keeper of faded ex-movie star Madeleine
Marlowe; Bert Woodruff, a demented columnist; William McKinley Forbes,
dictatorial tobacco tycoon; and Senator Reynolds, the committee’s
representative from the Old South. The supporting roles are filled
with the same accuracy. They include the professional ex-Communists
and the sharp little committee counsel who puts loaded questions
with ominous mentions of perjury. The commentator’s radio career is
destroyed like that of his Foreign Service friend, although both are
innocent men. Shirer ranges far afield, from comments upon similar
periods of “hysteria” in American history to Hollywood’s refusal to
film _Hiawatha_ because his “peace efforts might be regarded as Red
propaganda.” The plight of Whitehead is well imagined, but the book’s
diary form is not a particularly happy choice and much of its prose
is awkward. As a record of the source of some of the most spectacular
domestic news of recent years, however, the novel is worth reading.
Mailer’s _Barbary Shore_, which is not a part of any of the three
post-war trends, displays the novelist’s function as a historian in its
retelling of the story of the Russian Revolution. A twenty-page account
and eulogy are followed by a description of the revolution’s failure
to spread and its consequent nationalization. Lovett also recounts his
discipleship under Trotsky before he goes on to list the forces which
created a police state instead of a promised land.
THE CONTINENT AND ELSEWHERE
=Joseph Conrad: Colonial Politics and Revolution=
Joseph Conrad’s _Nostromo_ (1904) may be read as a history if one
interprets it as a typical case of government-making by foreign
industrial interests in late-nineteenth-century South America. With
the American Holroyd as his silent partner and financial backer,
British-educated Charles Gould uses the wealth of his San Tomas silver
mine to finance the successful revolt of Occidental Province from
the Republic of Costaguana, which is in the grip of the tyrannical
Montero brothers. A good deal of actual history is injected through
the reminiscences of old Giorgio Viola, who had fought under
Garibaldi across South America to Italy. But it was in _The Secret
Agent_ and _Under Western Eyes_ that Conrad recorded more memorable
history. Both books give extensive accounts of revolutionary and
counter-revolutionary activities. A superb artist, Conrad did not
need to go to a series of actual events and people. His imaginative
synthesis of the factors which produce them created, however,
a true pattern of this whole complex of revolutionary activity.
Besides the sensitive exploration of the characters of Razumov,
Nathalia, and Victorovitch, one finds actions which characterized the
movement in which they were swept up. Conrad presents the espionage
and counter-espionage, the bomb plots, and the abortive revolts.
Though he wrote out of revulsion at revolutionary activity, his
point of view did not blind him to the miseries of Czarist Russia.
With artistic integrity, he described the repressive commissions,
their imprisonments, exiles, and executions. His account of the fate
of Mikulin, chief of Czarist counter-espionage, makes extremely
interesting reading in 1954. For Mikulin one could almost substitute
Koestler’s Rubashov:
Later on, the larger world first heard of him in the very hour
of his downfall, during one of those State trials which astonish
and puzzle the average man who reads the newspapers by a glimpse
of unsuspected intrigues. And in the stir of vaguely seen
monstrosities, in that momentary, mysterious disturbance of muddy
waters, Councilor Mikulin went under, dignified, with only a calm,
emphatic protest of his innocence--nothing more. No disclosures
damaging to a harassed autocracy, complete fidelity to the secret
of the miserable _arcana imperii_, deposited in his patriotic
breast a display of bureaucratic stoicism in a Russian official’s
ineradicable, almost sublime contempt for truth; stoicism of
silence understood only by very few of the initiated, and not
without a certain cynical grandeur of self-sacrifice on the part
of a Sybarite. For the terribly heavy sentence turned Councilor
Mikulin civilly into a corpse, and actually into something very
much like a common convict.
It seems that the savage autocracy, any more than the divine
democracy, does not limit its diet exclusively to the bodies of its
enemies. It devours its friends and servants as well.
=The Soviet State: Its Roots and Growth=
It was this same Czarist Russia of which Turgenev wrote in _Fathers
and Sons_. Examining Nihilism, he also looked at contemporary events
such as the emancipation of serfs and the attempts of some landowners
to improve the lot of their workers despite agrarian disturbances.
Violently anti-revolutionary, Dostoyevsky replied in _The Possessed_ to
what appeared to him to be Turgenev’s advocacy of revolution. In his
massive and powerful novel he showed the agitation produced by groups
such as the “quintets” organized by Pyotr Verhovensky, themselves the
forerunners of the Communist cells.
In Koestler’s _Darkness at Noon_ Dostoyevsky’s nightmare becomes an
even more terrible actuality. In his introductory note Koestler writes:
The characters in this book are fictitious. The historical
circumstances which determined their actions are real. The life of
the man N. S. Rubashov is a synthesis of the lives of a number of
men who were victims of the so-called Moscow Trials. Several of
them were personally known to the author. This book is dedicated to
their memory.
Through flashbacks the reader sees Stalin, Lenin, and the members of
the First International Congress. Not only does he witness the breaking
of Rubashov for his trial, but also the series of cold and merciless
acts of expediency which have eroded the soul of the old Bolshevik
and left him ready for his final service to the Party. Koestler
describes the agonizing process by which the confession is extracted.
Gletkin, his interrogator, supplies the rationale for the whole
performance and for most of the repressive acts of the state as well.
In some ways, Rubashov is reminiscent of Trotsky, with his pince-nez,
his record as a commander in the Revolution, his extensive service
outside Russia, and his onetime rank as a top Communist. (A closer
resemblance to Trotsky is that of the Party’s fictitious scapegoat in
1984. Emmanuel Goldstein, with his fuzzy hair and small goatee, is the
arch counter-revolutionary, the author of _The Theory and Practice
of Oligarchical Collectivism_.) _Darkness at Noon_ is a stark and
brilliant book. Artistically satisfying, it also presents a record of a
characteristic phenomenon of Russian Communism.
=Marie-Henri Beyle [Stendhal]: Napoleonic Panorama=
Thirty-nine years after he followed Napoleon’s armies into Italy,
Stendhal published a sweeping novel of that era. _The Charterhouse of
Parma_ follows the career of Fabrizio Valserra, Marchesino del Dongo,
from birth to death. It shows the influence upon his life of his
beautiful, devoted, and scheming aunt, the Contessa Gina Pietranera.
We meet her lover, Conte Mosca della Rovere Sorezana, Minister to
Prince Ernesto IV of Parma and politician extraordinary, and become
privy to the intrigues of the court. This large novel is crammed with
incident--duels, assignations, affairs, prison-breaks, and even the
assassination of a monarch. Besides all this, Stendhal relates some of
the major events in French and Italian history during nearly thirty
years. In particular, we see Napoleon’s triumphal entries into Italy
in 1796, 1801, and 1815. Fabrizio even participates on the fringes of
the battle of Waterloo. With each arrival and departure, Napoleon’s
adherents and those of the Austrian Emperor play musical chairs
for the positions of power. Even after Napoleon has been banished
to Elba a struggle goes on between Liberals (or Jacobins) and the
proponents of absolute monarchy. The Liberal cause is perverted in
Parma by the rascally General Fabio Conti, who ironically serves as
Ernesto’s political jailer, but the temper of this movement in Europe
is reflected in the thoughts and actions of many of the characters.
Describing authoritarian government and the struggles against it, as
well as the interrelation of a corrupt church and a corrupt state,
Stendhal’s classic successfully fuses the lives of his people with the
times in which they lived.
=André Malraux: Comintern v. Kuomintang=
Nearly a hundred years later André Malraux wrote of a time of
political chaos in _Man’s Fate_. But the span of his novel was four
months rather than thirty years. Malraux gives a detailed account
of Chiang Kai-shek’s military victory of 1927 in Shanghai and his
subsequent crushing of the Chinese Communist forces which fought him.
Not only does he examine the roles of the immediate participants--the
White Guards, the governmental army, the “Reds” and “Blues” of the
Kuomintang--but also the intervention of outside forces as well--the
Russian Communists, the Shanghai bankers, the French Chamber of
Commerce, and the Franco-Asiatic Consortium. Malraux explores both the
military and economic aspects of the struggle. Kyo Gisors feels that
triumph here will mean “the U.S.S.R. increased to six hundred million
men.” Ferral, head of the Chamber and the Consortium, realizes that it
will also mean the end of his group’s commercial penetration of the
Yangtze basin. _Man’s Fate_ may be read for these insights into the
uprising of 1927 and also for background on the formulation of the
Communist decision which kept the armies of Mao Tse-tung, Chu Teh,
and others within the Kuomintang until they gained enough strength to
defeat it.
=Jean-Paul Sartre: The Shadow of Munich=
Jean-Paul Sartre’s technique in _The Reprieve_ (1947) may remind one of
a photographer whose camera mechanism has gone awry. What he is trying
to do is clear, but it does not quite come off. Covering the week of
September 23-30, 1938, the novel is kaleidoscopic. Using more than nine
distinct couples or groups, Sartre jumps from the activities of one
to another with no transition. The scene may change from sentence to
sentence or even within a sentence. He obviously does this to portray
events which are happening simultaneously. He also uses this technique,
apparently, to give some sense of the chaos that reigned during the
week when Europe was on the verge of war. To show the impact of these
events upon France, he has selected his people from many strata
of French society. Interspersed between all these semi-fragmented
stories and incidents are dialogues between the politicians: Hitler
and his aides, Daladier and Bonnet, Chamberlain and Halifax, Sir
Nevile Henderson and Sir Horace Wilson. Through its characters the
novel ranges over Europe from England to the Sudetenland, finally
arriving at Munich. The book’s last two paragraphs serve as an example
of this technique which has a cumulative effect but which can be
extremely troublesome to a reader accustomed to conventional narration.
Daladier’s plane lands at Le Bourget as Milan Hlinka, a loyal Sudeten
Czech, hears of his country’s dismemberment:
A vast clamor greeted [Daladier], the crowd surged through the
cordon of police and swept the barriers away; Milan drank and said
with a laugh: “To France! To England! To our glorious allies!” Then
he flung the glass against the wall; they shouted: “Hurrah for
France! Hurrah for England! Hurrah for peace!” They were carrying
flags and flowers. Daladier stood on the top step and looked at
them dumbfounded. Then he turned to Leger and said between his
teeth:
“The God-damned fools!”
=Fascism through Italian Eyes=
Collectively, the novels of Ezio Taddei, Alberto Moravia, and Ignazio
Silone present a history of Italy during the years that saw Mussolini’s
rise, reign, and ruin. Taddei’s _The Pine Tree and the Mole_ (1945)
is set in Livorno in 1919. On one social level the novel follows
the career of Michele Pellizari, whose political odyssey leads him
from the Italian Socialist Party to the Fascist Party, and eventually
to a return to the land of his peasant people. On another level the
novel relates the rise of Rubachiuchi from jailbird to Fascist agent
provocateur and party official. There are many long passages throughout
the book in which Taddei drops his characters to go directly to a
recital of the events which led to the triumph of the Fascists. He
describes the return of war veterans filled with unrest and plagued
with unemployment. He records the failure of the Socialists as the
Fascists deliberately fill their Black Shirt squads with convicted
criminals. He sets down the workers’ capture of the factories and
finally the Fascist march on Rome.
In _The Conformist_ (1951) Alberto Moravia is more concerned with
a psychological portrait of Marcello Clerici than he is with the
description of the period. But in analyzing the trauma-inspired desire
for conformity which led to his job in Mussolini’s secret police,
Moravia tells a good deal about the political climate of Italy of
yesterday--from the palmy days of the Ethiopian campaign to the time
of the retribution which leaves Marcello and his family dead by the
roadside from the bullets of a strafing Allied plane.
Three of Ignazio Silone’s powerful novels, _Fontamara_, _Bread and
Wine_, and _A Handful of Blackberries_, deal with Italian political
history from the middle thirties to the years immediately following
World War II. Writing from exile when the Fascists were in power,
Silone consistently dealt with the repression of the Italian peasant.
Although he always focuses on small places such as Fontamara,
Pietrasecca, and San Luca, his characters are in a sense generic,
representing the non-Fascists who want only enough bread and wine to
live life decently with a little comfort and security. Silone describes
the regimentation of Italian life in the city as well as the village.
He also shows, as does Koestler in _Darkness at Noon_, the destruction
of the Communist Party after the rise to power of a dictatorship of the
Right. _A Handful of Blackberries_ has as its background the resurgence
of the Italian Communist Party after the fall of Mussolini. But Silone
preserves a continuity with his earlier books by a continuing account
of the struggle of the peasants against the landed families. In this
book the Tarocchi family is the equivalent of Prince Torlonia in
Fontamara. Fascism has been crushed, but the great landowner is still
the force which the peasant must fight to keep his small plot.
=Alan Paton: The Trek of the Boers=
Alan Paton’s _Cry, the Beloved Country_ and _Too Late the Phalarope_
detail the bases of South Africa’s explosive contemporary political
life. The anti-Negro legislation, the segregation, the police control
of the native peoples are all set forth. Paton’s moving novels record
the individual tragedies which transpire in this climate of tears and
violence. They also show their historical antecedents. The red flashes
which Pieter Van Vlaanderen wore on his shoulders during the war meant
that he would fight anywhere in Africa. To some this made him
a Smuts man, a traitor to the language and struggle of the
Afrikaner people, and a lickspittle of the British Empire and the
English King, fighting in an English war that no true Afrikaner
would take part in.
Here is a historical fact that illustrates the division between the
peoples of South Africa. Another is the Immorality Act of 1927, which
typifies another great source of conflict and causes Pieter’s ruin.
=Richard Kaufmann: The Third Reich=
Richard Kaufmann’s _Heaven Pays No Dividends_ (1951) is one of the
better books to come out of post-war Germany although it is not, as
its cover enthusiastically declares, the “modern _All Quiet on the
Western Front_.” Roderich Stamm is a completely non-political young
art historian who drifts into Nazi organizations because life is made
rather unpleasant for one outside them. His father, however, is an
economist who becomes attracted to the Nazi movement, lectures at
meetings, and eventually rises to an important post in Hitler’s Foreign
Ministry. As a gunner in a flak battery, Stamm fights in France,
Russia, and Germany. He emerges from the war minus several teeth,
an arm, and all his illusions. Each of the girls he has loved has
married or died. Through his eyes the reader sees the events leading
to victory in Paris and defeat on the road from Stalingrad. But one
also meets Gestapo men like Alfred Karawan and officials like Heinrich
Himmler. This novel chronicles the sound and fury of politics and war
as it explores the effects on the German people of the rise and fall
of the Third Reich. Less political than most novels in this study,
Kaufmann’s book has a good deal in common with many of them. The lives
of its people are played out against a backdrop of local, national, and
international affairs. And the novelist records not only the comings
and goings of the individuals he creates, but also the events of the
world in which they live.
chapter four
The Novel as Mirror of National Character
A political novel invariably reveals the attitude of its author toward
the national groups from which its characters come. Often the author
may seek to draw a national portrait by describing political behavior
which he believes is peculiarly characteristic of Spaniards or Greeks
or Englishmen. Two novels which thus portray the Russians are _Under
Western Eyes_ and _The Possessed_. The reader may work with a body
of novels which do not deliberately attempt to delineate national
character, and yet he will still arrive at some conception of national
behavior patterns. He can do this by assessing the subjects treated. If
most of the novels deal with underground activities, coups d’état, or
revolutions, he is justified in assuming that this is a people which
takes its politics seriously, and emotionally. If most of the novels
concern parliamentary give and take, clever use of rules, strategic
marches and countermarches, he has a right to conclude that this
national group has achieved some degree of political sophistication.
In dealing with the American novel one has to draw conclusions in this
way. There is a great deal of close attention to tactical and strategic
moves, but there is not too much scrutiny of larger behavior patterns.
The appraiser must use whatever materials seem capable of giving
insight: detailed discussion which is precisely in point, a recurrent
basic situation, or a group of themes whose frequency of appearance is
a good indication of their importance and relevance.
Enough American and English novels are included here to justify drawing
some conclusions. Some of the other national literatures discussed,
however, are represented by relatively few books. Since they constitute
a small sample, one can draw only tentative conclusions. But almost
all these novels are by very talented writers whose work is considered
representative of the best in this genre within their national
literatures. They are novels which offer skilled portrayals of life by
artists entitled to a hearing on their own merits. In order to extract
as much from the novel as possible in this area, comments on nations
have been accepted from foreigners where they seem valid.
GREAT BRITAIN: A SELF-PORTRAIT
=Peaceful Change in the Political Realm=
The English political novel presents a people whose political processes
have operated in a well-defined manner with progressively decreasing
violence. England had its Wars of the Roses and its Cavaliers and
Roundheads, but with the exception of the Jacobite Rebellion of 1746,
resort to arms as a means of domestic change has been in the discard
for the past two hundred years of English history. The Peterloo
Massacre, the Chartist Riots, and the struggle against the Lords all
involved bloodshed, but this form of conflict has largely subsided. The
novel reflects this pattern. It is one of change within a framework
of relative stability. The Right wing and the Left are the two poles
between which the political ions flow. The names of the poles may vary,
as may some of the elements in their chemical composition, but their
function remains the same. The Tory is always the opponent of change
or the advocate of slow and minimal change; the Whig, Liberal, Fabian,
or Labourite is the champion of more rapid and extensive change. The
extreme radical appears occasionally, the revolutionary infrequently.
Almost all the English novels in this study show this basic alignment.
Even when the liberals are represented by Mrs. Ward’s Venturists and
the conservatives by Disraeli’s Young Englanders or Wells’s New Tories,
this is the essential political structure. George Eliot’s Felix Holt
and Harold Transóme, both Radicals, are set off against the Debarry
family headed by Parson Jack and Sir Maximus Debarry. Meredith’s Nevil
Beauchamp is another young Radical in conflict with his uncle Everard
Romfrey, who calls himself a Whig but is an aristocratic reactionary.
Except for Disraeli, James, and Conrad, the authors of these novels
tend to present the case of the liberal or progressive. But no matter
what the point of view or time, the main characters tend to range
themselves on one of these two sides.
Conrad’s _The Secret Agent_ departs from the common
liberal-conservative alignment by dealing with the dangerous lunatic
fringe of English political life--the revolutionary terrorists. But
Verloc, the novel’s main character, and Yundt, one of the most violent
members of the circle, are not native Englishmen. In using these
characters, Conrad views the same political virtues the other novelists
treat by contrasting them with violence. When the embassy secretary
orders Verloc to blow up the Greenwich Observatory, he tells him that
the English must be shocked into repressive action. “This country,” he
says, “is absurd with its sentimental regard for individual liberty.”
The Professor, “The Perfect Anarchist,” attempts to goad Police
Inspector Heat into seizing him when they meet in an alley. Heat knows
that if he does so the Professor will blow both of them up by pressing
the detonator in his pocket. Undoubtedly this fact crosses his mind,
but his answer is typical: “If I were to lay my hand on you now I would
be no better than yourself.”
The Englishman’s often unemotional approach to politics also appears
in the novels. In _The New Machiavelli_, Dick Remington, enthusiastic
about Socialism and “the working-man,” is one of a group of students
who invite Chris Robinson, “the Ambassador of the Workers,” to
Cambridge to talk to them. But when Robinson speaks, they are
disappointed at the excess of emotion and deficiency of content. When
the Englishman does allow emotion to surge into his politics, it may
be mixed with religion. It was said of Hamer Shawcross, in _Fame Is
the Spur_, that “his platform manner was that of a revivalist parson.”
Chester Nimmo has somewhat the same style in _Prisoner of Grace_. A
former Wesleyan lay-preacher, he advocates pacifism at one point in his
career. His wife Nina comments:
to a man like Chester, whose politics were mixed up with religion
and whose religion was always getting into his politics, this was
the situation which he was accustomed to handle. It did not prevent
his religion from being “true” that he knew how to “use” it.
Both these politicians are liberals, and perhaps this is merely another
means of separating the two great groups. The university man, who
has had some advantages, may look upon emotionalism as bad form; the
working man, for whom grade school and the church often constitute
his only sources of formal education, is conditioned to respond to
the stimuli he has known in one of these institutions: the emotional
approach of the revivalist parson or the lay preacher.
Despite the reaction of the aristocrats to this lower group, some
of the English novelists regard them as a great source of national
strength. Disraeli may have felt that they needed guidance, not freedom
and self-expression; Orwell found hope in them. Looking out the window
of his and Julia’s rendezvous, Winston Smith sees the figure of a woman
of the Proles, a “solid, unconquerable figure, made monstrous by work
and childbearing, toiling from birth to death and still singing. Out of
those mighty loins a race of conscious beings must one day come.”
=The Fruits of Imperialism=
When one thinks of the literature of imperialism he is likely to
remember Kipling’s _Soldiers Three_, _Mandalay_, or _Recessional_.
Wells’s Dick Remington remarks, “The prevailing force in my
undergraduate days was not Socialism but Kiplingism.” But if Kipling
emphasizes the White Man’s Burden, most other novelists emphasize the
White Man’s Guilt. In _Beauchamp’s Career_ Col. Halkett looks up from
his newspaper to remark to Nevil, “There’s an expedition against the
hill-tribes in India, and we’re a peaceful nation, eh? We look as if we
were in for a complication with China.” And Nevil replies ironically,
“Well, sir, we must sell our opium.” Forster’s _A Passage to India_
lays prime responsibility for India’s tragedy at Britain’s doorstep.
He pictures the cruel clannishness and snobbery of the English colony
of Chandrapore with its Mrs. Callendar who declares, “Why, the
kindest thing one can do to a native is to let him die.” India is
full of red-faced Ronny Heaslops, officials who play God, a god whose
thunderbolts and lightnings are infantry, cavalry, and artillery. Mrs.
Moore, the single English subject in Chandrapore able to bridge the
enormous gap between the two cultures, reflects about Ronny:
One touch of regret--not the canny substitute but the true regret
from the heart--would have made him a different man, and the
British Empire a different institution.
There is no question in this novel that Britain is the violator in this
loveless union. The South African novels recall Wordsworth’s line about
the makers of the French Revolution “become oppressors in their turn.”
The Afrikaners may now be the malefactors; at one time they, like the
Indians, were clearly the victims. Jakob Van Vlaanderen, the great
stern patriarch of _Too Late the Phalarope_, recalls the trek into the
interior to escape the repressive measures of the British. Jim Latter
in _Prisoner of Grace_ travels to London from Nigeria, where he has
overseen the destinies of a tribe for years, because he is convinced
that the people in the Colonial Office “want to kill off the Lugas.”
As Britain began to exchange the imperialist role for that of
co-defender of the West, this deftness and high-handedness in
international affairs was sometimes regarded as an asset. Major Walker
assesses it for Tommy McPhail in _The Crack in the Column_ when he
says, “You’re no match for us in arranging a chain of political events,
in planning several moves ahead, in making the baby be born exactly
when the horoscope says, sex, weight, and appearance of innocence
guaranteed.”
Like any good national literature, the English turns inward the
searching light of criticism. The reader sees hypocrites, time-servers,
and turncoats. Spread before him are domestic abuses and cold
imperialism. But he is also given a glimpse of a people who retain a
regard for the rights and dignity of the individual, a people who have
turned away from violence and shown a remarkable capacity for achieving
change without sacrificing stability, for combining growth with order.
THE UNITED STATES: A SELF-PORTRAIT
De Forest, in _Playing the Mischief_, describes Congressman Sykes
Drummond as a “Robert-the-Devil” type. This complete cynic makes an
interesting comment on the conditions around him: “A John Bull told me
yesterday that there is no such thing known in England as a municipal
ring or a thieving mayor. That is what any American of the present
day would set down as a fairy story.” If the political novel has any
validity as a commentary on national characteristics, one conclusion is
inescapable: many Americans become criminals when they accept public
office. Drummond’s comment is borne out by the two groups of novels. In
the English novel individuals such as Hamer Shawcross and Chester Nimmo
sell out to the opposition. Nimmo even engages in commercial activities
too closely related to his official duties to be quite proper. But
there is a complete absence of the corruption portrayed at all levels
of government in the American political novel.
Crawford attempted to differentiate the English from the American early
in _An American Politician_. The novel’s political naïveté renders any
of its judgments suspect, but in this Crawford appears to come close to
the truth. His opinion is that
English people ... love to associate with persons of rank and power
from a disinterested love of these things themselves, whereas
in most other countries the society of notable and influential
persons is chiefly sought from the most cynical motives of personal
advantage.... But politics in England and politics in America, so
far as the main points are concerned, are as different as it is
possible for any two social functions to be. Roughly, Government
and the doings of Government are centripetal in England, and
centrifugal in America. In England the will of the people assists
the working of Providence, whereas in America, devout persons pray
that Providence may on occasion modify the will of the people. In
England men believe in the Queen, the Royal Family, the Established
Church, and Belgravia first, and in themselves afterwards.
Americans believe in themselves devoutly, and a man who could
“establish” upon them a church, a royalty, or a peerage, would be a
very clever fellow.
His diagnosis of cynicism and self-interest as leading American
characteristics is echoed in the other novels. Good politicians do
appear, but for every Lincoln there are ten Boss Tweeds. Henry Adams’
_Democracy_ also contains passages in which American political life
is compared unfavorably with that of England. Madeleine Lee attends
an immensely boring White House reception. Not only are the guests
dull, but to her the President and his wife appear as automatons aping
royalty.
=Forces of Corruption=
Complete responsibility for corruption does not always rest with the
politician. Some office holders, like Honest John Vane, sincerely try
to stay clean. The corrupt politician usually has a collaborator in
the person of the man who buys him. In Garland’s _A Spoil of Office_
Bradley Talcott’s illusions are shattered in the legislature and in
Congress. Looking around him he finds that “to rob the commonwealth
was a joke.” State legislatures are often described as assemblages
of brigands. The “Woodchuck Session” of the legislature in Coniston
is arrant banditry, and the ones in _The Plum Tree_ and _Mr. Crewe’s
Career_ are only a little less obvious. The industrialist is usually
co-villain with his politician hireling. When he does not appear in
person, he is represented by his middleman, the professional lobbyist.
The lobbyist’s unscrupulous use of his trusting wife is the subject of
Frances Hodgson Burnett’s _Through One Administration_ (1914). Jacob
Pike, in _Playing the Mischief_, regards the institution with pride:
From his point of view, it was a kind of public life; it was
more completely “inside politics” than even electioneering or
legislation; it was, as he believed, the very germ and main-spring
of statesmanship. A leading lobbyist knew exactly how the world is
governed, and for what purpose....
This whole aspect of the American governmental process in the novel is
a very unsavory one. The industrialists are predatory robber barons who
purchase dishonest politicians in order to obtain special privilege.
In _The Charterhouse of Parma_ the Contessa dissuades Fabrizio from
going to America by explaining to him “the cult of the god _Dollar_.”
In several of his novels Sinclair declares that American foreign policy
has been determined by the industrial interests. He portrays Dollar
Diplomacy with a vengeance. In _Oil!_ he contends that the United
States joined with Britain and France to fight the Bolsheviks not
because of political ideology, but because “the creditor nations meant
to make an example of Soviet Russia, and establish the rule that a
government which repudiated its debts would be put out of business.” He
also tells the reader that the same oil interests which backed Harding
had turned in and out of office a succession of Mexican governments
to suit their own commercial purposes. And it is not hard to see in
_Nostromo_ the influence of the American tycoon Holroyd at work when
the American cruiser _Powhatan_ appears to salute the Occidental flag
and “put an end to the Costaguana-Sulaco War.”
If the perverters of power are not demagogues with messianic complexes,
they may be gangsters who rule by ballots when bribery fails. These
subjects in the novel did not go out of vogue with the Muckraking Era
or with Prohibition. A new rash of novels about gangsters in politics
has appeared in recent years. The gunman who is concerned about
investing his money may be replacing the one who writes his name with
machine gun bullets, but his influence in politics is the same.
=The American Idealist=
The reverse side of this particular coin shows the idealist at work. He
may come out of the political wringer with his ideals mangled and his
illusions full of holes, but still he retains something of the impulse
which created the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.
Millard Carroll in _The Grand Design_ is such a one, but he emerges
as an old man at the end of his ordeal. Nick Burr in Ellen Glasgow’s
_The Voice of the People_ (1900) is another, but his end is violent
death. In recent years this idealistic aspect of the American political
character has often found expression in heroes who engage in the direct
struggle for liberty. Both Robert Jordan and Glenn Spotswood spill
their blood on Spanish earth fighting against Franco. Were it not for
the crusading district attorneys of books such as _Ashes_ and _Caesar’s
Angel_, the implication would be that the American girds on his armor
abroad but avoids conflict in his own back yard. Even so, something of
this impression may remain with the reader.
=Responsibility at Home and Abroad=
The pattern in which a nation allows its liberties to be subverted and
destroyed is a familiar one. It is often thought that certain peoples,
like the Germans and Russians, are more susceptible to authoritarianism
than others. One stereotype of the American--descendant of Minute Men,
the man who hates cops, the fan who cherishes his right to boo the
umpire--has contributed to the impression that this submissiveness to
authority has never been a part of the American character. Lewis’s _It
Can’t Happen Here_, Dos Passos’s _District of Columbia_, and the novels
about dictators in southern states raise some doubts about the validity
of this fundamental assumption. Each of these novelists seems to feel
that the American citizen could well wake up one morning to find his
rights gone as did the German citizen of the early thirties. Lewis
dramatizes this catastrophe on a national scale, while Dos Passos,
Warren, and Langley present it on the state level. Dos Passos, all
through his trilogy, writes such frequent exhortations to vigilance
that there is little doubt that he too has worries on this score. In
_Stranger Come Home_ Shirer centers his fire on McCarthyism, but he
also goes back into history to recall the passage of the Alien and
Sedition Acts and the domestic anti-German violence of World War I.
The popular press and magazines may represent the American as one who
hearkens to the great voices on each Fourth of July and understands
what he is doing when he raises his banner on Flag Day. The novelist
often has serious doubts that he does.
Europeans have called the United States immature in world affairs. At
least one of the novels in this group examines this accusation, and
two others consider the same theme of irresponsibility on the national
level. In both _A Fool’s Errand_ and _Bricks Without Straw_ Tourgée
accused the federal government of irresponsibility. There is a close
parallel between this case and the one Europeans have made. Pursuing
an ideal, at least in part, the United States musters its enormous
industrial and economic potential, puts its great strength into the
field, and wins military victory. After talking a great deal about what
should be done, it sets up committees which write many reports. Then
the nation promptly forgets the problems of victory and happily returns
to consideration of the tariff question or who is going to win the
World Series. In the latter of his two books, Tourgée writes that the
Northern statesmen and political writers seemed always to assume that
the destruction of slavery would cure all the ills of the Negro. With a
typical flourish, he adds:
The Nation gave the jewel of liberty into the hands of the
[Negroes], armed them with the weapons of self-government, and
said: “Ye are many; protect what ye have received.” Then it took
away its hand, turned away its eyes, closed its ears to every cry
of protest or of agony, and said: “We will not aid you nor protect
you. Though you are ignorant, from you we will demand works of
wisdom. Though you are weak, great things shall be required at your
hands.” Like the ancient taskmaster, the Nation said: “_There shall
no straw be given you, yet shall ye deliver the tale of bricks._”
Nearly seventy years later, in _The Crack in the Column_, Weller said
virtually the same thing. But this time both the problem and the stakes
were global.
The picture of American politics which emerges from the political
novel is an unflattering one. Although the “smoke-filled room” may be
a cliché in the newspapers, it is a fact in the novel. The deck of
candidates is shuffled, cut, and dealt--often from the bottom. The
national conventions are a combination of circus spectacle and cynical
chicanery. And after campaigns financed by funds from special interest
groups, the people’s chosen representatives get down to the serious
business of paying off their debts while lining their pockets. The
crusaders for liberty and justice who appear can be set off against
these political liabilities. But the electorate in whose behalf they
struggle often seems unaware of the importance of the fight. Inheritors
of a tradition of dissent and individual freedom, they are fair game
for demagogues. They are also easy marks for the revolutionaries who,
for perverted purposes, exploit their sincere but naïve desire for
social and economic reform. Although the Republic somehow seems to
weather periods of internecine violence and reversion to authoritarian
rule, its citizens have a bad case of myopia in the field of foreign
affairs. There are indications, though, that the corrective lenses
bought in two world wars are beginning to bring distant events into
focus. The American novelist’s view of his own political arena agrees
surprisingly well with many foreign estimates of it. The American seems
like an immature giant who tolerates much rough behavior but rushes
into conflict when he feels that his basic security is threatened.
Now the giant seems to be settling down. Still likely to make violent
moves, he is acquiring some of the political sophistication that was,
perhaps, too early expected of him.
ITALY: A SELF-PORTRAIT
After a quarrel with Jean Colbert, Tony Maggiore in _Caesar’s Angel_
berates her friend Al Piazza: “You talk so big about it making no
difference between American and Italian girls. You ever hear a good
Italian girl open her mouth about politics? You hear her insulting the
men?” This assertion is contradicted by Stella in Silone’s _A Handful
of Blackberries_, but even were it completely true, it would be one of
the minor differences between American and Italian political behavior
patterns. Immensely different historical antecedents separate the two
peoples. The Italian, with a background of autocratic rule except for
comparatively short intervals, has played his political role on a far
different stage from that of the American. But there is more to it
than just politics. The economic bases which help to form political
groups have produced in Italy a stratification in which the layers are
more widely separated than any in America. The migrant fruit pickers,
the dust-blown Okies, the exploited miners in America seem well off
beside the systematically persecuted peasants and submerged city
_lumpenproletariat_ of Italy. The Italians at the other end of the
scale are just as far from the norm. Gould, Fisk, and Vanderbilt may
have owned railroads, but Prince Torlonia owns immense ranges of the
Roman and Tuscan countryside, together with 35,000 acres of the Fucino
basin worked by eleven thousand farmers. But this great gulf between
classes is only one of the factors which appear responsible for Italy’s
political ills.
Silone concentrates mainly upon the peasantry in his novels. His heart
is close to them, and his description is sympathetic. But he does more
than set forth their sufferings. His books also diagnose the cause of
their problems and suggest solutions. Many of his peasants appear like
credulous, superstitious children. The four-day thunder and lightning
storm which nearly sweeps Pietrasecca off its mountain in _Bread and
Wine_ is blamed upon two lovers who have gone to live in a house
considered damned. Don Paolo watches the gathering of a crowd which is
swept into such a hysteria by its roar of “CHAY DOO! CHAY DOO! CHAY
DOO!” that it forgets to listen to the oracular radio voice it has
come to hear. Silone pities them: “a people whose wisdom was summed
up in a few proverbs passed down from generation to generation, had
been literally submerged and overwhelmed by propaganda.” Don Paolo
also blames this ignorance upon the Church in Italy. Like his teacher
Don Benedetto, who was said to have called the reigning pontiff “Pope
Pontius XI,” Don Paolo feels that Italy needs
A Christianity denuded of all mythology, of all theology, of all
Church control; a Christianity that neither abdicates in the face
of Mammon, nor proposes concordats with Pontius Pilate, nor offers
easy careers to the ambitious, but rather leads to prison....
Silone’s hero is equally dissatisfied with a religious vocation
which withdraws from life. He talks with the beautiful and spiritual
Christina, who devoutly waits to enter the convent:
Do you not think that this divorce between a spirituality which
retires into contemplation and a mass of people dominated by
animal instincts is the source of all our ills? Do you not think
that every living creature ought to live and struggle among his
fellow-creatures rather than shut himself up in an ivory tower?
Although _A Handful of Blackberries_ contains more scenes set in Rome
than the other two Silone novels discussed here, a better view of the
Italian city dweller is given by Taddei and Moravia. Taddei’s _The
Pine Tree and the Mole_ is built about citizens of Livorno who are as
widely separated by wealth and position as are Silone’s Old Zaccaria
and the Tarocchi family. The circle of lawyers and politicians who
exchange wives and party labels are a different breed of men from the
jailbirds, pimps, and informers at the opposite extreme of Livorno’s
social structure. But both groups are equally adrift, both caught in
the same wave of post-World War I exhaustion and economic derangement
which sent so many Italians in search of the answer that Mussolini
seemed to provide. Taddei emphasizes poverty and depression as the main
factors which prepared the way for the Fascist regime, but one senses
something else, particularly among his representatives of the educated
class. They seem to be seeking some sort of order, a stabilizing force
in their political life. Taddei says that the Italian Socialist Party
seemed to offer the solution. But the Socialists failed because
overwhelmed by the favorable-seeming course of events and
overlooking the most important phase of the matter, they lacked the
time to think of many things and, instead, viewed the period with
optimistic eyes; everything appeared to them to depend upon the
number of adherents that any particular event brought into their
ranks. Political expediency thus became, in a manner of speaking,
epidemic, and the deepening crisis in all its amplitude became
apparent in the form of a spiritual crisis that was its reflection.
Marcello Clerici in _The Conformist_ finds his solution in Fascism.
Taddei’s hero turns at last to the same source of strength which Silone
singles out--the land and its people. They both feel, rather like
Orwell, that the masses are the ultimate source of their country’s
salvation. Old Lazzaro, shouting defiance at the Communists,
epitomizes these people: “There’ll always be someone that refuses to
sell his soul for a handful of beans and a piece of cheese.” In this he
is like Conrad’s Giorgio Viola, “the Garibaldino,” an old expatriate
whose divinities are Garibaldi and Liberty.
This small group of Italian novelists portray their countrymen as
members of widely separated economic and social classes. There are the
well-to-do who seem to seek order and get it with a vengeance. And
there are the poor of the cities and villages who are the victims of
this order, squeezed by poverty, by powerful landowners, and harnessed
by a church which renders more than is his to Caesar, a church which
brings politics into the confessional and divorces religion from
everyday life. Something of the spirit of Garibaldi still lives,
however, nourished by the deprived ones who are close to the soil.
Perhaps this is a modern political parable in which the last shall be
first.
SPAIN: AN AMERICAN PORTRAIT
Robert Jordan’s love of Spain is not an abstract emotion. He has a
deep feeling for its people, but he is still able to see their faults.
Throughout _For Whom the Bell Tolls_ he makes conscious estimates of
their national character. He says they are a truly thoughtful and
considerate people who are not merely formally polite as are the
French. But they are also treacherous:
Of course they turned on you. They turned on you often but they
always turned on everyone. They turned on themselves, too. If you
had three together, two would unite against one, and then the two
would start to betray each other. Not always, but often enough for
you to take enough cases and start to draw it as a conclusion.
These characteristics cut across party lines. The Rebel slaughter
which left Jordan’s Maria orphaned and violated had an equally brutal
counterpart in the Republican massacre supervised by the guerrilla
chief Pablo in which twenty Fascists were beaten between two lines of
men and then flung over a cliff. Jordan thinks that killing “is their
extra sacrament.” Loving them, he tries to understand them:
There is no finer and no worse people in the world. No kinder
people and no crueler.... Forgiveness is a Christian idea and Spain
has never been a Christian country. It has always had its own
special idol worship within the Church.... The people had grown
away from the Church because the Church was in the government and
the government had always been rotten. This was the only country
that the reformation never reached. They were paying for the
Inquisition now, all right.
Occasionally one finds a Spaniard who seems almost a moderate, like
Frankie Perez in _Adventures of a Young Man_, but the most persistent
impression is one of a people who have a history of misrule and
violence, and who tragically turn to these very weapons as the
instruments of release from their consequences.
GREECE: AN AMERICAN PORTRAIT
George Weller’s Greeks in _The Crack in the Column_ appear surprisingly
like Latins: “Each Greek is a volcano, and when he may erupt no man
knows, not even his friends who must quake with him, not even himself.”
In the number and complexity of their political parties they resemble
the French, yet in one way they seem to retain something of the Greeks
of antiquity viewing Imperial Rome. Small and impoverished in the
shadow of newly-risen giants, they cherish their role as inheritors and
transmitters of a great culture. At the book’s end, Nitsa, like Molly
Bloom in Joyce’s Ulysses, retires with her reflections:
The whole world is philhellene, as proved by the retreating Germans
leaving a wreath on the Tomb of Ignotos before they roared north to
die in the ambushes of the Slavs. But most self-surrendering of the
philhellenes are the Americans. These young antiques deserve the
most utter respect, the kindest care.
FRANCE: A COMPOSITE PORTRAIT
The novels by Frenchmen in this study reveal relatively little about
national character and behavior. Stendhal deals with Italians and
Malraux primarily with Chinese. However, the ambitious Ferral, head
of the Franco-Asiatic Consortium in _Man’s Fate_ may be revealing. He
hopes to make enough money in China to return home and buy the leading
French news-gathering and publicity syndicate. With this power he hopes
to regain office and “pit the combined forces of the cabinet and a
bought public opinion against the Parliament.” In Malraux’s words one
catches, under their cynicism, echoes of the declining power reflecting
upon vanished days of affluence:
The threat of bankruptcy brings to financial groups an intense
national consciousness. When their enterprises in distant corners
of the world are suddenly threatened with disaster they remember
with mingled pride and gratitude the heritage of civilization which
their country has given them and which they in turn have helped to
pass on to colonial peoples.
In _Presidential Agent_ Sinclair presents the French as a people
who have installed a rotten government to manage their affairs, a
government eager to join with Britain in obtaining temporary surcease
from German threats to its financial holdings by hypocritically
sacrificing Czechoslovakia. They had decided upon “a compromise
with Hitler as the cheapest form of insurance.” M. Denis admits the
resultant loss of power in Central Europe, but consoles himself with
the thought that “we still have North Africa and the colonies, and we
are safe behind our Maginot Line. Above all, we don’t have to make any
more concessions to revolution at home.”
In _The Age of Longing_ Hydie Anderson reports Feyda Nikitin’s deadly
activities to Jules Commanche of the French Home Security Department.
A scholar and hero of the Resistance, he is one of a new type, but
there are not enough of them to fill “the sclerotic veins of French
bureaucracy with fresh blood.” Their effect amounts merely to “the
injection of a stimulant into a moribund body.” In _The Reprieve_
Sartre had presented France as unaware and unready before the Nazis,
already bled white from great wars. After another conflict, the patient
is almost in extremis. Playing the recurrent part of American pupil to
European teacher, Hydie listens to Commanche’s bitter lecture:
Our last message to the world was those three words which are on
our stamps and coins. Since then, we no longer have anything to
give to the spirit, only to the senses--our novelists, our poets,
our painters, all belong to an essentially sensualist world, the
world of Flaubert, and Baudelaire and Manet, not to the world of
Descartes, Rousseau and St. Just. For several centuries we were the
inspiration of Europe; now we are in the position of a blood donor
dying of anemia. We can’t hope for a new Jeanne d’Arc, not even for
a young First Consul, not even for a Charlotte Corday....
He has told Hydie that the French Revolution substituted its slogan
for the Holy Trinity, that the scalpel which excised autocracy from
the body politic also removed its soul. The French thus seem to be
suffering from a malady which, in somewhat different form, infects
the Spaniards, Italians, and Greeks. Their splinter parties, their
disorganization, their pervasive political cynicism are a legacy of
centuries of conflict, inequities, and colonial misrule. But beyond
this there is exhaustion, a vitality sapped by past efforts and a
sadness increased by awareness of faded glories.
RUSSIA: A COMPOSITE PORTRAIT
Assessing Russian national character or behavior from the novels
presents a greater problem than that found in any other national
literature. One must first separate Russian Communism from the Russian
people. In the same way one must distinguish the old Russian from the
new. And this dichotomy has to be made after the Revolution as well as
before it. Turgenev’s fathers are hardly more different from their sons
than are Koestler’s Old Guard from the Neanderthalers they have sired.
When Rubashov’s old comrade Ivanov is shot, Gletkin replaces him as
interrogator. Rubashov looks at the shaven skull, appraising the huge
ominous figure in the stiff heavy uniform: “You consequential brute in
the uniform we created--barbarian of the new age which is now starting.”
The pattern of Russian political behavior which emerges from the novel
is filled with more violence, more misery, more oppression than that
of any other national group. The dying Stepan Verhovensky described
Russia in _The Possessed_ as a “great invalid” inhabited by devils
and plagued with impurities, sores, and foul contagions. This Czarist
Russia is a land in which “harmless ... higher liberalism” is possible,
but it is also a country in which serfs live in incredible poverty and
aristocrats live in oriental splendor. Within this social structure,
whose opposite ends are separated by an even greater distance than the
rich and poor of Italy, the forces of destruction are already at work.
The basic situation reveals opposed characteristics: authoritarianism
on the ruling level, immense capacity for dumb suffering in the
submerged masses, and an intense drive toward a reorientation of the
social structure on the part of the militant intellectuals. These
factors, on a smaller scale, are to be found in other literatures. But
Dostoyevsky also portrays a conflict peculiar to Russia. It is the
struggle between those culturally oriented toward the West and the
Slavophiles who reject its influence. A Slavophile himself, Dostoyevsky
seems to speak through Shatov, who says that the Russians are “the only
‘god-bearing’ people on earth, destined to regenerate and save the
world in the name of a new God, and to whom are given the keys of life
and of the new world....” This extreme national consciousness pervades
these novels, whether it is expressed in terms of a messianic mission
or a deep sympathy for a people with a tragic history.
Conrad, in _Under Western Eyes_, made a definite effort to assess
the Russian character. He felt, though, that this was an extremely
difficult task in which the language barrier was the least of the
obstacles which stood in the way of understanding. He describes
Russians as great players with words, manipulators of abstract ideas.
He feels that in other areas their behavior, like that of Nathalia
Haldin, is sometimes almost incomprehensible. His narrator says:
I knew her well enough to have discovered her scorn for all the
practical forms of political liberty known to the Western world.
I suppose one must be a Russian to understand Russian simplicity,
a terrible, corroding simplicity in which mystic phrases clothe
a naïve and hopeless cynicism. I think sometimes that the
psychological secret of the profound difference of that people
consists in this that they detest life, the irremediable life of
the earth as it is, whereas we Westerners cherish it with perhaps
an equal exaggeration of its sentimental value.
Nathalia tells the old teacher that “the shadow of autocracy”
hangs over each Russian, much as does its more substantial modern
counterpart, the Soviet MVD. Razumov is another Slavophile who believes
that Russia is sacred. But later Conrad returns to the subject of
Russian incomprehensibility when he says that Western ears “are not
attuned to certain tones of cynicism and cruelty of moral negation, and
even of moral distress already silenced at our end of Europe.”
Koestler’s two novels considered here describe Russia after the deluge.
The bloodbaths have changed the names and faces, but the same moral
negation is there. More accurately, there is not even a negation,
for there is no positive assertion of moral values to negate. The
doctrine that history has no conscience had removed for the Soviets
the need for moral reference points. As a result, they had sailed
without the ethical ballast that Rubashov, at the end of his life,
decided was essential. In his judgment this was the fatal break in
the logical chain which caused the betrayal of the revolution which
Mailer mourned in _Barbary Shore_. In this case, perhaps, history is
character. The span of events covered by these novels might even be
graphed. The line would form itself into two low plateaus separated by
a single tremendous peak. This eminence would represent the ill-fated
revolt against tyranny. On either side would be the depths in which a
people was submerged with not quite passive suffering under a rigid,
repressive rule made possible by a long historical pattern and the mass
conditioning to obedience which it produced.
UNION OF SOUTH AFRICA: A SELF-PORTRAIT
The Boers of South Africa are presented, especially in Paton’s novels,
as a simple and stern people who are also good fighters and good
haters. Subduing part of a continent and making it their own, they
regard themselves as the elect among the children of men quite as much
as do the Slavophiles. Yet these Afrikaners suffer from a curious case
of schizophrenia. Singled out by the Almighty, they are nonetheless so
fearful of the colored population that they repress them as harshly as
any European nation ever did its colonial peoples. Early in _Too Late
the Phalarope_ Paton epitomizes this national group:
they had trekked from the British Government with its officials and
its missionaries and its laws that made a black man as good as his
master, and had trekked into a continent, dangerous and trackless,
where wild beasts and savage men, and grim waterless plains, had
given way before their fierce will to be separate and survive.
Then out of the harsh world of rock and stone they had come to the
grass country, all green and smiling, and had given to it the names
of peace and thankfulness. They had built their homes and their
churches; and as God had chosen them for a people, so did they
choose him for their God, cherishing their separateness that was
now his Will. They set their conquered enemies apart, ruling them
with unsmiling justice, declaring “no equality in Church or State,”
and making the iron law that no white man might touch a black
woman, nor might any white woman be touched by a black man.
This is a patriarchal society, ruled by men such as Jakob Van
Vlaanderen, a political leader who privately calls the members of
Parliament “his span of oxen.” Fiercely nationalistic, they hate the
British, and as they fought them so they fight any force, even a
sociological one, which threatens their hard-won supremacy. In the
Union of South Africa there are willing British subjects and British
sympathizers, but they have not been represented by a group of novels
as fine as these of Paton’s. This is perhaps due to the fact that they
do not form so homogeneous a cultural and ethnic group as do the Boers
and their descendants. For another thing, the political star of the
Boers has been in the ascendant in the past few decades, while that of
the pro-British has seemed about to set as it did in India.
GERMANY: A SELF-PORTRAIT
When Sinclair’s Lanny Budd goes to the week-long Nazi Party orgy at
Nüremberg, he sees before him a people who have surrendered personal
responsibility to a father image quite as fully as did Silone’s simple
peasants. A people smarting from humiliating defeat had accepted the
dream of a thousand year Reich. And it had been sold to them by a man
as possessed as any of Dostoyevsky’s characters. Roderich Stamm in
_Heaven Pays No Dividends_ is oblivious to much of the transition that
takes place in Germany during the late twenties and early thirties.
Through his father’s conversations, however, he senses some of the
problems soon to be expressed in political action: “They contained
the whole uncertainty of our age. There was something intangible and
threatening in the air. It had all started with the world crisis and
the huge unemployment figures, and then the Nazis had come, and then
the Communists.” These forces and the movements which they precipitate
are too strong for a republic barely fifteen years old. A people used
to authoritarian rule reverts to it. When war comes Roderich realizes
“we were all involved, because all of us had capitulated before HIM
during all these years. We had all given HIM permission to start a war
at HIS discretion, when HE decided it was necessary.” One is justified
in distrusting stereotypes as inaccurate generalizations. But in this
case the stereotype is borne out and emphasized in the novel.
Many areas of these national portraits are only roughed in, with the
fine-line detail missing. In other places there are gaps. This is
partly because some of the groups of novels are small. It is also
due to the fact that the novelist does not exhaustively examine
voting trends, statistically analyze attitudinal changes, or plot the
frequency of government realignments. Sinclair frequently approaches
this method and Dos Passos gives some of the raw data upon which such
estimates can be made. But generally the novelist tends to proceed from
individuals to groups, extrapolating group behavior from individual
behavior. This is the method used by Koestler and Conrad. While it
does not have the statistical validity of the political scientist’s
work, it has advantages which complement it. The novelist, with his
artistic insight and his ability to shape his material as he wishes,
can highlight his concept of a particular national character with drama
and human interest to make this hard-to-define quality come memorably
alive on the printed page.
chapter five
The Novelist as Analyst of Group Political Behavior
The economic criterion is one of two means used by the political novel
for classifying groups. The other index identifies groups by means of
overt political behavior--party membership, acceptance of discipline,
performance of specific acts. These two means of classification are
not parallel but complementary. The first, in a sense, serves as a
background for the second. Although the first is economic, its validity
lies in the fact that party lines tend to follow economic ones, that
modern political theory, particularly that of revolution, has been
based increasingly upon economic facts as well as political ones. The
approach of this chapter differs from that of the previous one in
tracing behavior patterns which cut across national lines.
ECONOMIC GROUPS
=The Lumpenproletariat=
In trying to use these indices of group behavior it is no longer
possible to deal in general terms such as “the poor.” Though
“proletariat” may be precise enough for Marxism, even this term is
too inclusive for close analysis of the material in these novels.
Several gradations are possible within this least fortunate group on
the economic scale. Professor Ambrogio Donini’s introduction to the
Italian edition of _The Pine Tree and the Mole_ identifies the lowest
group in that novel as members of the _lumpenproletariat_. These people
are not the workers whose taking of the factories Taddei fleetingly
mentions. They are the lowest stratum of Livorno’s life, the drifters
and criminals from whom the Fascists recruited members for their Black
Shirt squads. It is their motivation as much as their behavior which
differentiates them from the workers. While groups of militant workers
are usually presented as trying to better the lot of their whole group,
these members of the _lumpenproletariat_ seem to be entrepreneurs.
Rubachiuchi becomes an agent provocateur for the Fascists not to
help the poverty-stricken, but simply to help himself. After he
infiltrates an anarchist group, he aids in its destruction, not because
he is personally opposed to anarchism, but because this is the job
his employers are paying him to do. Very often in these novels one
encounters Communists trying to destroy Socialists ostensibly because
Socialism is thought to be a palliative rather than a solution to the
worker’s problems. But these underworld figures do not have even this
theoretical justification.
Although this group is not nearly so numerous in the novel as many
others, its representatives occasionally appear. In _Fontamara_,
Peppino Goriano returns to Fontamara after thirty-five years, some of
them spent in a “political career” in Rome. A good man, he had been
forced by starvation to become an agent _provocateur_ for the police.
He had earned five lire a day plus a twenty-five lire bonus each time a
job resulted in his going to the hospital. For a brief time he had been
a hero after a picture of him helping to wreck a Communist newspaper
office had appeared in a newspaper. But the “Hero of Porta Pia” lost
the honest job he had finally found when it was decided that “fascism
could no longer shelter in its bosom such delinquents as had been
convicted several times for theft.” Pablo in _For Whom the Bell Tolls_
is a study in deterioration. A cruel but effective anti-Fascist at
the beginning of the war, he is found by Robert Jordan to be a sotted
semi-bandit who opposes Jordan’s blowing of the bridge. Having lost
control of the band to his woman Pilar, Pablo tries unsuccessfully
to forestall the demolition by stealing part of Jordan’s equipment.
Although he leads the retreat after the bridge is blown, Pablo is no
longer one of the “illusioned ones.” He is a guerrilla who retains only
his violence and a dominating desire for survival. Old Zaccaria in
_A Handful of Blackberries_ is a bandit first and a partisan second.
He had received a decoration for a crippling encounter with a German
patrol, but the source of the battle was a truckload of cheese which he
intended for the black market rather than a desire to free Italy. These
characters are not nearly such low forms of life as some of the members
of Taddei’s _lumpenproletariat_, but they are a part of that group
to be found on the fringes of most political conflicts, individuals
motivated by desire for personal gain rather than by principle.
=Peasants=
Almost as submerged in the economic structure is the peasant class.
Here too there are extra-national similarities. The _paisans_ of
Silone and Taddei and the _muzhiks_ of Turgenev and Dostoyevsky have
characteristics in common. Ground down by oppression and exploitation,
they engage in political action only as a result of outside stimulation
rather than as a result of spontaneous desire among themselves. Often
they may be too devitalized even to do that. When Bazarov in _Fathers
and Sons_ tells the peasants that they are the hope of Russia, he
does not suspect “that in their eyes he was all the while something
of the nature of a buffooning clown.” In a more subtle way Don Paolo
tries to awaken the peasants of Pietrasecca in _Bread and Wine_. He
has a little success with parables, but a direct attack upon issues
produces nothing. When he goes to Fossa he asks the lawyer Zabaglione
about peasant participation in the now disbanded Socialist Leagues.
Zabaglione tells him:
What Socialism meant to most of them was a chance to work and eat
till their stomachs were full, to work and sleep in peace, without
having to be afraid of the morrow. In the league premises at Fossa,
next to the bearded portrait of Karl Marx, there was a picture of
Christ in a red shirt. On Saturday nights the peasants came to
the league to sing “Up, brothers! Brothers, arise!” and on Sunday
morning they went to Mass to say “Amen.” The permanent occupation
of a Socialist leader was writing recommendations.
The American representatives of this class seem much the same.
Garland’s _A Spoil of Office_ follows the abortive political careers of
the Grange and the Farmer’s Alliance. Bradley Talcott sees this latter
movement as “the most pathetic, tragic, and desperate revolt against
oppression and wrong ever made by the American farmer.” His guiding
star Ida puts it even more simply: “While our great politicians split
hairs on the tariff, people starve. The time has come for rebellion.”
Conditions in Iowa have changed eighty years later, but in the deep
South they are almost as bad. William Russell’s _A Wind Is Rising_
(1950) focuses on Negro tenant farmers charged 500 per cent interest by
the landowners and cheated of part of the cotton crop they succeed in
raising.
Whether he is Prince Torlonia or a Russian noble, the large landholder
is most often seen in the novel as the embodiment of the forces which
keep the peasant class in subjection. Men like Nikolai Kirsanov
in _Fathers and Sons_ may attempt to improve conditions, but the
predominant pattern is one of exploitation which eventually produces
violence. At the end of _A Handful of Blackberries_ the peasants kill a
bailiff when they invade the Tarocchi pasture lands they believe to be
rightfully theirs. Debased and deprived, lacking political awareness,
and incited by members of other classes, the peasant group turns to
violence. In some areas of the world, particularly the United States
and England, a steady economic evolution has tended to eliminate
large segments of this group. The Russian peasant appears still to
be a peasant, even though he may be a Stakhanovite worker in a large
_kolkhoz_. But where the class still exists in a society in which
violent protest is still possible, the pattern appears unchanged.
=Labor=
Commenting on one of the causes of the failure of the farmers’
movements of the seventies, Garland said: “They had made the mistake of
supposing that the interests of merchant, artisan, and mechanic were
also inimical.” In the novel these interests are not at all inimical.
They are rather parallel, for the labor movement (which includes the
last two groups mentioned by Garland) has as its natural antagonist the
moneyed class to which the peasants’ adversaries belong. And in the
novel the laborer is treated as sympathetically as the peasant, with
the single exception of Disraeli’s _Sybil_, which gives an antagonistic
picture of the trade unions. But there are two significant differences
between the peasant class and the industrial labor class. The latter
has adopted different methods and has met with a large degree of
success.
The political behavior and history of the labor movement emerges very
clearly in the novel. This group fought its first violent battles to
achieve organization. When this was accomplished, concerted action
in which the strike was the principal weapon was begun to attain
better working standards. In societies in which unions are still
free, the strike has retained its tactical importance, but it has
been accompanied by progressively less violence. And as strife has
decreased, a more effective technique has taken its place. The labor
movement has gone into politics. The most overt form of this policy is
the formation of a labor party like the one so successful in England.
Less direct but still effective is the method used by American unions
of supporting the party which seems most likely to serve labor’s
interests. Peasants’ leagues and farmers’ groups had been formed to
take direct political action, but none achieved such spectacular
success as these labor groups. Unlike the peasants, the laborers had
to a large extent provided their own leadership. Indicative of their
more cohesive and militant nature is the frequently expressed distrust
of people in the movement coming from non-labor classes. In _Marcella_
the radical Nemiah Wilkins is suspicious of Socialist Harry Wharton.
He feels that he is too well dressed and educated to lead a labor
movement, and he looks forward to the day when they “would be able to
show these young aristocrats the door.” Penelope Muff, a dedicated
organizer in _Fame Is the Spur_, has the same feeling toward two women
who work actively in the Socialist cause. They give both time and
money, but to Pen they are outsiders taking a dilettante interest in
the poor.
That labor’s energies would be channeled into politics rather than
violence seemed at one time impossible. Looking back at his youth,
Tom Wilcher recalls in _To Be a Pilgrim_ that then “the rich men were
still boundless in wealth and arrogance; the poor were in misery,
and neither saw any possibility of change without the overthrow of
society.” But the labor movement made the transition from a mob to a
party. Pen Muff and Hamer Shawcross had seen it achieved when Keir
Hardie, wearing a cloth cap rather than a top hat, drove down London’s
streets in a wagonette instead of a brougham to take his seat in the
House of Commons. And labor remained so conscious of its class origins
that Shawcross seemed guilty almost of blasphemy years later when, as
a Labourite minister, he wore his ceremonial uniform with its sword
and cocked hat. Figures in the novel recall the lines from Browning’s
_The Lost Leader_ about the man who had betrayed his group “just for a
riband to stick in his coat.” Such a one is Hamer Shawcross. Another
is Chester Nimmo. Their supposed betrayal seems more heinous because
of this class consciousness. Dick Remington may change from Liberal to
Tory with a minimum of obloquy, but when Shawcross enters a wartime
coalition government he is a Judas.
When Sinclair published _Oil!_ in 1926 he saw the activities of the
labor movement almost completely in terms of a class struggle. But
it was an index of the relative progress of the American movement as
compared with the English that strike violence remained the chief
weapon on this side of the Atlantic. Two years later, in _Boston_,
the situation was worse. He wrote that Massachusetts had “evolved
a complete technique of labor smashing” in which a strike-breaking
department developed in the Boston police force was rented out to
manufacturers in neighboring towns. He concluded that Sacco and
Vanzetti were not convicted and executed for a fatal armed robbery.
They were killed because they represented the forces of social
revolt to the banking and industrial interests which felt themselves
critically threatened. Even eight years later, _In Dubious Battle_
represented large segments of the labor group as ill-treated men whose
efforts to attain better wages and working conditions were opposed, not
only by the employers, but by the forces of the state as well. It is in
Dos Passos’ books that the American labor movement is seen making the
transition from economic to political action. In _Adventures of a Young
Man_ the pecan-shellers, the miners, the auto-workers are organized as
forces which will obtain concessions through direct economic action
rather than legislation. But _The Grand Design_ shows labor at work
within the Democratic Party. There is no nationwide labor party, but
the votes of the labor group are marshalled in support of candidates
whose programs will provide them with legislative relief.
The continental labor movements, particularly the Italian, are
portrayed in the novel as having a greater history of violence and
misfortune than those in either England or the United States. Taddei’s
Socialist workers take over their factories at gun point. Silone’s
laborers are victimized by The Promoter. Koestler’s Rubashov recalls
his mission of telling Little Loewy that the interests of his Belgian
dock workers were to be subordinated to those of Russia. Similarly,
the Fascists had destroyed the Italian labor movement for the purposes
of the corporate state. And, of course, the classic irony was the full
name for which “Nazi” stood: National Socialist German Workers Party.
The behavior patterns of the labor movement traced in the novel reveal
gradual change. A more homogeneous and dynamic group than the peasants,
labor has just as extensive a heritage of exploitation and strife.
Although leadership has sometimes come from outside their class, it
has been provided to a large extent by a dedicated and indigenous
elite. Whole national labor movements have been submerged under
totalitarianism; others have appeared to be sacrificed as pawns by
leaders intent upon personal aggrandizement. But as the movement has
matured, old weapons have been used with increasing moderation and new
ones have been added to the arsenal. Organs such as the CIO Political
Action Committee appear in none of the novels in this study, but such
instruments typify the new tactics by which gains are obtained through
political pressure. The archetype, of course, is England’s Labour
Party, which, in assuming national power, has had to make the final
transition by directing legislation which should benefit not only its
own members but those of all classes of the nation. This represents an
evolutionary development which is a reflection of some of the English
national characteristics seen in the novel. Perhaps one ends not with
a conclusion but with a question. The conservatives and liberals, the
Republicans and Democrats, derive their strength from areas which are
fairly well defined but which to some extent cut across economic and
occupational lines. Can an instrument forged in hottest partisan
conflict discharge the responsibility which comes with the attainment
of the goal of political power? Can it legislate for a society, or will
its antecedents compel it to serve a special interest group?
=Proletarians=
During the thirties members of the peasant and labor groups were the
subject of a literary movement which produced the proletarian novel.
This type of novel is generally unsatisfactory for the study of group
behavior patterns considered here since its emphasis is much more
sociological than political. There are some exceptions, however. _The
Iron Heel_, _Man’s Fate_, and _In Dubious Battle_ have been called
proletarian novels. Other proletarian novels not included in this study
were written by Dos Passos, Farrell, Shaw, and Silone. The two novels
by Malraux and Steinbeck straddle the line between the political and
the proletarian. This is also true of _A Wind Is Rising_, which came
after the movement as such had spent itself but which concentrated
upon one of its favorite subjects, the southern sharecropper. Some of
the proletarian novels have political overtones. Sherwood Anderson’s
_Beyond Desire_ (1932), which was meant as his contribution to the
proletarian cause, followed the career of Red Oliver as a Communist
labor organizer in southern textile mills. Like Jim Nolan, he is shot
to death. But this novel does not reveal as fully as Steinbeck’s book
the part of the Communist Party’s labor strategy in its overall plan.
The men of Liam O’Flaherty’s _The Informer_ are proletarians, members
of the Irish Republican Army fighting the British. But in its most
common form, the proletarian novel stopped just short of political
action. It would present in dramatic fashion the conditions under
which the members of this actually diverse group lived. If they took
positive action, it was usually to join a union or the Communist
Party. Steinbeck’s _The Grapes of Wrath_ shows the broad scale social
delineation the proletarian novel permits; it also shows clearly that
though its ultimate aim may be political, its primary textual emphasis
is not.
=The Middle Class=
The middle class is not as well represented as other groups in the
political novel. Of course, definition is a problem. In terms of
economics, Glenn Spotswood and Robert Jordan are members of the middle
class. In terms of politics, however, they are not bourgeois but
intellectuals, Jordan a liberal and Spotswood a radical. Perhaps the
true middle class does not provide enough drama for the novelist who
deals with politics. Most of the people in _It Can’t Happen Here_ are
middle class citizens, but they do not move and act in their normal
environment. Their apathy has permitted the rise of a dictatorship,
forcing them into the role of the persecuted or the underground
fighter. Most often a novelist using a middle class hero will work a
transformation upon him in which he changes his class identity. He
will, like Glenn Spotswood, cast his lot with the class economically
below his. Or, like Harvey Sayler in _The Plum Tree_, he will rise
above it through political advancement which brings him power and
wealth. In rare cases, the hero will manage to ride both horses at
once. Peter Stirling, in Ford’s novel, will obviously be a successful
candidate for the governorship of New York. But his stepping stone has
been nearly twenty years of work in New York City’s tenement-ridden
Sixth Ward. Ford’s style virtually guarantees that Stirling will be
neither fish, flesh, nor fowl by the end of the book, but his career
too makes it impossible to label him a member of the middle class from
which he started. In _The Grand Design_ Dos Passos sometimes shows
the middle class Washington office worker. Throughout _District of
Columbia_, particularly in his prose poems, he refers to or quotes
members of this class along with the executives and laborers. But there
is such diversity that it is difficult to draw conclusions. Perhaps
this difficulty in discerning pronounced patterns is in itself an
indication of the nature of this class. Midway between the economic and
political extremes, it has a leavening of the characteristics of both.
But the political figure who comes from the middle class most often
leaves it. If he does not, he apparently has less interest for the
political novelist.
=The Rich and Well Born=
The economic and social upper classes appear in more different hues
than any other class. They vary all the way from “red” millionaires
like _Oil!_'s Bunny Ross to the same novel’s many “malefactors of
great wealth.” Except for Disraeli’s heroes, his aristocrats are very
often those usually described as “the product of exhausted loins.”
Unless members of the English aristocracy take an active interest in
the welfare of the classes below their own, they are usually portrayed
as despising them. George Meredith’s aristocrat appears to hate these
occupants of a world different from his. The Debarry family in _Felix
Holt_ has humanitarian impulses, but its political action is directed
toward maintaining its elevated position. Trollope’s aristocratic
Liberals make efforts toward legislation which will reduce inequities,
but far more typical is the old Earl, “Buck” Lostwithiel in _Fame Is
the Spur_. A wringer of the poor and accident-maker for inconvenient
opponents, he is deterred from horsewhipping Hamer Shawcross only by a
raised sabre.
The evil aristocrat is not so common in the American novel as in the
English. Mrs. Stowe and Tourgée portray him during the latter half of
the nineteenth century in the South. Sinclair’s Back Bay Brahmins,
years later, take violent action, sticking neither at hypocrisy nor
dishonesty, to assert a form of slavery which is more economic than
legislative. But aside from villains such as those in _The Plum
Tree_, whose power actually comes more from money than lineage, the
villainous role is usually assigned to the industrialist rather than
the blueblood. This may be a substantiation of the charge that the
primary aristocracy of America is one of wealth rather than breeding
or cultivation. The Italian noble class is consistently portrayed
as an oppressor no matter what the form of government under which
it operates. Serfs are freed and reforms are instituted in _Fathers
and Sons_, but offstage are the sounds of floggings and the murmurs
of oppressed victims. The Marchesa Raversi’s Liberal Party in _The
Charterhouse of Parma_ is anything but liberal. Individuals like the
radical poet Ferrante Palla find as little favor with her as they do
with the absolutist Ernesto IV. Separated from these nobles by time and
space, Malraux’s Ferral and his backers have as little sympathy for the
Chinese on whom they thrive as does Fabio Conti for Parma’s commoners.
There are some good aristocrats in the political novel. All of
Disraeli’s Young England heroes approach politics with high seriousness
and dedication. Coningsby is so suffused with virtue that he keeps his
purity unsullied at the expense of losing his inheritance. Tancred’s
politics are intermingled with a religious mysticism that leads him
to the Holy Land. Meredith’s Beauchamp is such an emotional firebrand
in his radical convictions that he makes Disraeli’s young men look
like mild and high minded Rover Boys. But he belongs to their class.
A little farther down on the social and economic scale is Cary’s
Edward Wilcher. A politician of entirely different kidney from these
zealous young men, he is a sophisticated and cynical careerist who
writes embarrassing epigrams about members of his own party. But
he is like the others in his concern for progressive legislation
rather than perpetuation of the privileges of his own social group.
Augustine St. Clare is one of Mrs. Stowe’s better slave-owners. He
is obviously on his way to salvation, partly through the influence
of saintly Uncle Tom, when he is untimely carved by a bowie-knife
wielded in a fight he has attempted to stop. It is this accident
which prevents him from freeing Tom. Churchill’s Humphrey Crewe is an
eccentric and fatuous ass, but his intentions are pure gold. He seeks
office because he believes he can benefit the state. In _The Grand
Design_, Jed Farrington refers to “the Squire in the White House and
his big business friends.” But it is clear in the book that though
Big Business may conceivably have derived some benefits from the
Roosevelt administrations, this descendant of New York state patroons
was politically oriented toward less pedigreed groups. If one were to
compile a balance sheet for this class, however, the villains would far
outnumber the heroes.
Good men of wealth are even harder to find in this group of novels
than good aristocrats. Disraeli’s magnates are the type who in modern
America receive awards from chambers of commerce and engraved gold
watches from deputations of employees. Elsewhere, the industrialist
is a top-hatted advocate of _laissez-faire_ economics whose wealth is
acquired more through the sweat of his underprivileged workers than
by his own acumen. Millbank in _Coningsby_ and Trafford in _Sybil_
are rising merchant princes who are considerate of their workers and
industrially progressive. But either they are ahead of their time
or the industrialists who follow them in the novel are throwbacks
to a more primitive industrial era. In _The New Machiavelli_ Dick
Remington’s uncle is presented as a reactionary beast. His Newcastle
pottery factory produces death as well as cups and saucers. He is as
unwilling to install fans that will carry off the deadly fumes from
the lead glaze as he is to concede any rights at all to his workers.
The Rhondda Valley, where Pen Muff goes as the bride of union official
Arnold Ryerson, has more than its share of Welsh women widowed by the
coal mines. The management group remains in the background of this
novel, but the miners’ efforts to obtain concessions which would now
seem minimal are evidence of an attitude not dissimilar to that of Dick
Remington’s uncle. In Conrad’s _Nostromo_ Charles Gould has justified
his decisive intervention in Costaguanan politics by declaring that he
was providing order which would benefit the natives as well as himself.
Gould’s political commitment gives rise to one of the central problems
of the novel--the extent to which his soul has been eroded to insure
the undisturbed flow of the bright silver ingots from the San Tomas
mine. Gould is not the only victim of his obsession. The other is his
wife, who is all but shut out of vital areas of his life and thought.
Early in the book he gives her his rationale:
I pin my faith to material interests. Only let the material
interests once get a firm footing, and they are bound to impose the
conditions on which alone they can continue to exist. That’s how
your money-making is justified here in the face of lawlessness and
disorder. It is justified because the security which it demands
must be shared with an oppressed people. A better justice will come
afterwards. That’s your ray of hope.
All of the lobbying groups in the American novels are financed by
industrial wealth. Whether the checks are signed by railroaders,
utilities operators, or oil men, their purpose is the same: to apply
pressure which will gain concessions. And, of course, in many cases
these concessions cause a direct or indirect loss to citizens in lower
income brackets. In _The Plum Tree_ Harvey Sayler uses his power to
make an example of one of these men, “the greediest and cruelest
‘robber baron’ in the West.” The lords of Jack London’s Oligarchy
specialize in the repression of workers with frequent resort to
calculated mass murder. The climate had changed by the time Dos Passos
wrote _The Grand Design_, but he included the lineal descendant of
these predators. Jerry Evans retains a substantial interest in his
economic welfare even as coordinator of Roosevelt’s War Procurement
Board. Columnist Ed James’s off-the-record analysis is that
All Jerry can think of in the emergency is to use it to turn things
back into the business as usual channels an’ we all know that
in the southeast at least business as usual means Jerry Evans’
business. Of course he has cleared his skirts technically by
resignin’ from the directorates of most of his corporations.... But
they are still his corporations.
Individuals of wealth in the novel may derive their money from farming
rather than industry, but unenlightened self-interest is still the
chief motivating factor. This is the case with the powerful ones in
_A Wind Is Rising_. Mulcting their sharecroppers, they derive added
revenue from convenient prohibition laws. Other Dos Passos characters
like Jerry Evans retain their natural roles even within the New
Deal. Driving through impoverished Southern counties, Paul Graves
is told that “relief is in the hands of the politicians and the
politicians are mostly landlords who save it for their own tenants.”
Steinbeck’s Fruit Growers Association serves its own interests in a
more spectacular way. After an offer of twenty cents an hour fails
to satisfy the apple pickers, the fruit growers use strikebreakers,
vigilantes, sheriff’s deputies, and then troops to insure a harvest on
their terms.
It is curious that one of the American industrialists who approaches
goodness should be found in Sinclair’s _Oil!_ As in his other novels,
the industrialists are the blackest of the black, but J. Arnold Ross
is an exception. An independent oil tycoon who conscientiously tries
to see his workers’ point of view, his rapacity is expressed in
acquisition of oil lands by varied methods rather than iron-handed
labor relations. After his death it is discovered that his business has
deteriorated and his assets have melted, partly because of the naval
oil lands scandal. But there is also a missing bundle of one million
dollars, and at one point suspicion is cast upon his closest associate
and friend. The implied moral is probably that Ross’s few unsuppressed
humanitarian instincts rendered him less able to survive in this
particular jungle. The other sympathetically portrayed man of wealth in
this novel is Arnold’s son Bunny. Like Yevgeny Bazarov and his father
Vassily, these representatives of two generations are never quite able
to bridge the gap which separates them. Bunny loves his father, but his
symbolic rejection of him appears on page after page in which he almost
frantically disposes of his share of the oil money in subsidizing
a leftist paper or attempting to found a labor college. Sinclair’s
Cagoulards in _Presidential Agent_ are quite willing to weaken France
in order to retain the Skoda munitions works. These Frenchmen are
blood brothers of Malraux’s Ferral, who does not see the consequences
of his economic interpretation of current history. The aristocrats
and the wealthy are united in the Thornewell family in _Boston_.
Fighting on two fronts, they eliminate anarchists and liquidate a
parvenu entrepreneur in parallel actions. Sinclair’s judgments of
these representatives of the upper class are violent and condemnatory.
Sinclair’s condemnation is not quite typical of the political novelists
who treat the rich, although more of them approach his position than
Disraeli’s. When one compares the literary treatment of the lower
classes with that of the upper, the difference is striking. One might
explain this superficially on the grounds of distortion for dramatic
emphasis, or the use of ready-made heroes and villains. But whatever
the reasons, the majority of political novelists have been impelled to
sympathize with the lower classes and condemn the upper.
POLITICAL GROUPS
The second criterion for classifying political groups mentioned at
the beginning of this chapter was that of overt political behavior.
The political novel describes the behavior of the group to which
its characters belong, that group which, while seeking office or
discharging it, conforms to a set of rules both written and unwritten.
From one point of view, these seem almost like the rules for playing a
game. From another point of view, they are the principles which must
be followed if what passes for success is to be achieved. And these
maxims are not merely empty phrases, for in the novel the politicians
who flaunt them fail. An oversimplified summary of their content would
be: follow party discipline regardless of any other considerations; use
any means likely to be effective to gain an advantage over an opponent;
follow political courses which are expedient rather than exemplary. One
of the most succinct statements of this attitude is made by Senator
Ratcliffe in Adams’s _Democracy_:
If Washington were President now, he would have to learn our ways
or lose his next election. Only fools and theorists imagine that
our society can be handled with gloves or long poles.... If virtue
won’t answer our purposes, we must use vice, or our opponents will
put us out of office....
=Office Holders: Rules and Skills=
Trollope’s novels constitute an excellent primer for the politician.
Phineas Finn’s political eclipses are caused primarily by his
persistent habit of voting in accordance with his conscience rather
than the Liberal Party line. Edward Wilcher in _To Be a Pilgrim_
takes what he believes will be a vacation from politics after losing
his seat in a close election. When he is ready to return, he finds
that his party will not have him. His brother Tom reflects, “Perhaps
they were always doubtful of him. They may have felt that he wasn’t
single-minded enough. They didn’t like his writing, especially things
like essays and criticism. Just as the Tories never liked Balfour’s
writing philosophy.” When Phineas Finn’s friend the Duke of Omnium
becomes Prime Minister, he permits himself the same luxury of being
impolitic. The death of the Marquis of Mount Fidgett gives him a
chance to award the Order of the Garter, normally given as a party
spoil rather than a tribute to merit. When Omnium bestows it upon the
good, fuddled, philanthropist Lord Earlybird, he nearly deals the
deathstroke to his weakening coalition. Mr. Daubeny, on the other hand,
is a consummate artist at the game of politics. Needing a vote of
confidence to remain in office, he conjures up a seemingly foolproof
and completely hypocritical measure for the test. As the head of the
Tories, he introduces a bill for the disendowment of the Established
Church. He assumes that the Liberals will be forced to vote for it
as legislation they might themselves have proposed. But the Liberals
play the expedient game, too, with the result that the Tories support
what they are against to remain in office while the Liberals oppose
what they are for in order to turn the Tories out. In other novels the
conservatives also appear just as adept at rough and tumble politics
as their opponents. Lord Lostwithiel hires Tom Hannaway to bribe Hamer
Shawcross, who is standing for Parliament against Lord Lostwithiel’s
son. When the attempt fails, Tom defames Hamer by asserting that he has
done nothing for his mother even though he has had remarkable success.
Hamer’s counterstroke is to take the night train to Manchester, pluck
his mother from the happy home she shares with another widow, and
exhibit her at a rally the next day to refute the charge. The whole
atmosphere of English politics seems permeated by vigilance against
quick marches. The wife of a cabinet minister, Nina Nimmo remembers the
constant intrigues of groups within that small circle. Quite as wary
are the rank and file of the House:
Everything they do is meant to have some effect beyond itself.
Indeed many ... had got so plotty that everything that happened
somewhere was “significant” of some “development.” If you only
asked them to take an ice, they looked at you knowingly as if to
ask themselves what you were “starting” and why.
The technique of buying off an opponent is more common in the American
political novel than in the English. But the attempt to purchase Jack
London’s Ernest Everhard is more subtle than that practiced on Hamer
Shawcross. Everhard is offered a job as United States Commissioner
of Labor. Even though this fee is more respectable than that offered
Shawcross, Everhard rejects the offer in order to retain his freedom
of action. The ways in which a political opponent can be embarrassed
are legion. When Paul L. Ford’s Peter Stirling is called out with his
militia regiment to protect six hundred strikebreakers, he is ordered
to Grand Central Station, the spot where it is most likely that the
militia commander will be forced to order his men to fire upon the
strikers. Nick Galt in _The Voice of the People_ makes the Duke of
Omnium’s error when he persists in making political appointments on
merit. He earns the name of “The Man with the Conscience” but he loses
important political support.
“Straws in the wind” may be a journalistic cliché, but the political
novel is littered with them. Like Nina Nimmo’s hyper-suspicious
acquaintances, they are another index of the complex behavior patterns
of highly political groups. The ability to sense the meaning behind
occurrences which often seem slight in themselves is another talent
of the acute politician. When Jethro Bass, in _Coniston_, learns that
the postmastership of the small town of Brampton is to go to another’s
protégé, he realizes that this is the first skirmish in a coming battle
for control of the state. His riposte is to take his candidate to
Washington. An old soldier, he gains President Grant’s sympathies and
the job. The invocation of a dusty city ordinance which pushes James L.
Ford’s Hot Corn Ike and his iron kettle off the corner traditionally
marks the invasion of Mike Grogan’s ward by reform elements. Willie
Stark in _All the King’s Men_ rightly interprets the attempt to indict
his state auditor as the first barrage in an attack against him by
resurgent opponents. In _The Charterhouse of Parma_ the seemingly
imminent execution of Fabrizio del Dongo makes Parma’s incumbent regime
totter. The Archbishop is one of the very few acute enough to realize
that “honour forbade the Conte to remain Prime Minister in a country
where they were going to cut off the head, and without consulting him,
of a young man who was under his protection.”
=The Mechanics of Control=
The mechanics by which power is attained and kept require mastery
for successful execution and close observation for understanding.
Proficiency in applying these techniques is as much the hallmark of the
professional political class as are the basic attitudes of the upper,
middle, and lower economic and social classes. If possible, an opponent
is thrown off stride before the race begins. Jerome Garwood in _The
13th District_ feels that his renomination to Congress is assured. But
he is hurriedly called home to find that control has been wrested from
his chief supporter by an opponent who has called an early district
committee meeting after taking the precaution of securing enough proxy
votes to establish his supremacy. In _Number One_ Dos Passos had noted
the importance of seating convention delegations nine years before
the celebrated controversies at the Republican national convention
of 1952. In this novel Chuck Crawford defeats a rival in seating his
delegation to the Democratic convention partly through the offices
of friends who have influence in the White House. Often the law is
scrutinized for advantages lying buried within it. Hank Martin in _A
Lion Is in the Streets_ is swept into office on a tide of votes cast
under his “God-blessed Grandpappy Law.” Passed at the state’s 1898
disenfranchising convention, the statute set up educational or property
qualifications for voters but made them inapplicable to descendants
of men who had voted before 1868. Obtaining photostats of the list of
these men, he parcels them out as ancestors to his illiterate followers
who would otherwise be unable to vote. Counter-measures against
a dangerous opponent include the old dodge of conquering through
division. When in _All the King’s Men_ the Harrison city forces want
to split the rural “cocklebur vote” of MacMurfee, they see to it that
Willie Stark enters the gubernatorial primary election. Of course, if
one has sufficient magnetism, he can charm and beguile an opponent out
of his path. In _The Grand Design_ hopeful candidate Walker Watson
returns from dinner at the White House immensely pleased that the
President wants him to “take care of his health.” This solicitude
takes the form of advice for a rest on a ranch in Montana before the
convention, “and particularly no speeches.”
The mechanics of political success must of course be applied beyond
this highly technical behind-the-scenes area. President Roosevelt tells
Lanny Budd that he is moving toward alignment with the Allies as fast
as public opinion will allow him to go. In a less admirable concern
for the same force, Governor Fuller of Massachusetts had denied a last
appeal by Sacco and Vanzetti, according to Sinclair, because he wanted
the job for which Coolidge did not choose to run. A refinement and
elaboration of this technique is used by Senator O’Brien in _Stranger
Come Home_ when he tries to time his committee’s most sensational
charges to coincide with press time for late newspaper editions.
The organization of political machines is also refined into a science,
particularly by people like Hank Martin in _A Lion Is in the Streets_,
who splits his domain into territories and keeps elaborate files,
one on promising opposition men who are to be destroyed politically.
Methods designed to insure conformity include devices such as the
safe deposit boxes of Ben Erik in _The City of Anger_ which contain
documentary evidence of the purchase of key city officials. Nor is
the psychology of interpersonal relationships forgotten. Jethro Bass
in _Coniston_ always remains silent at the beginning of an interview
in order to force the other to speak first at a possible tactical
disadvantage. Even the protocol of visits is analyzed in _The Plum
Tree_ by Harvey Sayler, who believes
there is no more important branch of the art of successful dealing
with men than the etiquette of who shall call upon whom. Many a man
has in the very hour of triumph ruined his cause with a blunder
there--by going to see some one whom he should have compelled to
come to him, or by compelling some one to come to him when he
should have made the concession of going.
=International Communism=
Any discussion of group political behavior would be incomplete without
mentioning international Communism. Since Stalin’s ascendancy over
his domestic opponents in the late 1920s, the Communist movement
has increasingly become an instrument of Russian national policy
rather than a worldwide movement receiving help from the Soviets.
Concomitantly, Communism and Communists in England, the United States,
Germany, France, Greece, and China have much in common. An indication
of the way in which this force cuts across national lines is the fact
that nearly a quarter of all the novels in this study deal in varying
degrees with Communism. Even though the behavior of this group is
theoretically based upon reinterpreted Marxism, it contains definite
patterns which relate to Party discipline, strategy, and tactics which
seem organizational rather than ideological. One of the primary ones
is the prohibition of original political thought outside the limits
laid down in the Kremlin. Deviationism is a cardinal sin which destroys
Nicolas Rubashov and endangers Rocco de Donatis. In a pious attempt to
avoid such error, Dr. Jane Sparling in _The Grand Design_ immediately
consults Elmer Weeks, head of the American Communist Party, to discover
the proper attitude when Hitler invades Russia. Another pattern is the
interpretation--and use--of every action not in terms of its immediate
significance, but of its place in the overall plan. The strikes of
miners, apple-pickers, or pecan-shellers are not local disputes
between management and labor but battles in the class struggle to be
used to educate the masses and provide useful martyrs. But all the
while, the pretense that Communism is an international movement must
be maintained. In _Adventures of a Young Man_ this view is purveyed to
West Virginia miners:
Less Minot got up and said that the American Miners was affiliated
with organizations all over the country that was working to
overthrow the rotten capitalistic system that kept the working
class down to starvation wages with guns and grafting officers
of the law, and that if that was being a red, he was glad to
be called a red, and as for the Rooshians, he didn’t know much
about them, but so far as he could hear tell the working class
had overthrown its capitalistic oppressors over there under the
leadership of the Marxist-Leninist Communist Party and was running
the country in their own interests and was ready to help the
workers in other countries to do the same.
In _Darkness at Noon_ this diversion of Communism from the goal of
international revolution to the service of the Russian state is clothed
in a theory meant to make it both logical and necessary: when world
revolution did not follow the Russian Revolution, it was resolved that
the primary task was to preserve “the Bastion” in order to protect
gains already made and to maintain a base for later advances. Therefore
in each country where its activities are revealed, the Communist Party
is found to act primarily in the interests of the Soviet Union.
The use of racial minority groups has not been neglected by the
Communists. Several recent American novels have touched upon this
subject. The most vivid and powerful is Ralph Ellison’s _The Invisible
Man_ (1947). The book’s nameless protagonist flees the South dogged
by discrimination and bad luck. He is drawn into The Brotherhood
(a euphemism for the Communist Party) and rises rapidly to become
“Spokesman” for the Harlem district. Despite appreciable gains he has
made in membership, the young Negro leader is shifted downtown. A
bloody riot makes it clear to him that the change in the Party line is
deliberate. He finally understands the full meaning of his ideological
tutor’s words, “your members will have to be sacrificed.” His break
with the Party is basically the same as Glenn Spotswood’s. But here the
emotional involvement and subsequent disillusionment are much greater.
Farrell makes the same point in _Yet Other Waters_ through the speech
of a Socialist Negro labor leader directed at Communists who have come
to disrupt a meeting. In a long passage completely italicized for
emphasis he says, “You are trying to manipulate and betray my people.
You are no friend of the black man or the white man. You are the cancer
of the working class. You are the architects of defeat.”
War, no less than domestic conflict, is seen as an opportunity to
extend Communism which transcends the immediate national issues. The
Spanish Civil War was both a skirmish and a testing ground in which the
full extent of Russian intervention was concealed to prevent direct
reprisals. In _The Grand Design_ Jed Farrington tells Georgia Washburn:
“In the short term war we’re allied to the Squire in the White House
and his big business friends but in the long-term war they are our
most dangerous enemies.” The subjugation of satellite party interests
to Soviet interests is made clear in _The Crack in the Column_ by
Moscow-trained Zachariades, who arrives to deliver his post-mortem on
the unsuccessful EAM uprisings: “Our friends want no more premature,
independent revolutions. They have Italy and Palestine to think of.”
Even the details of authorized revolutions are foreseen and attended
to. Leaders like Zachariades and Kyo Gisors in _Man’s Fate_ are made to
order. Hemingway’s Robert Jordan reflects about the Moscow-trained,
bogus peasant leader of the Loyalists, Valentin Gomez: “You had to have
these peasant leaders quickly in this sort of war.... You couldn’t
wait for the real Peasant Leader to arrive and he might have too many
peasant characteristics when he did. So you had to manufacture one.”
These novels illustrate Communism’s diversity of character and tactics
and the rigid discipline it imposes upon its followers under pain of
expulsion or death.
=Analysis of Mass Phenomena=
Interest in mass political phenomena is sometimes expressed by these
authors not only through action, but in direct analysis and examination
as well. Steinbeck’s _In Dubious Battle_ opposes two theorists: McLoed,
who thinks this particular strike is a good one because it will give
him a chance to “work out some ideas,” and Doc Burton, who serves as
the strikers’ doctor to observe contagion in the social body. Sounding
more like a social psychologist than a physician, he says
Group-men are always getting some kind of infection. This seems to
be a bad one. I want to see, Mac. I want to watch these group-men,
for they seem to me to be a new individual, not at all like single
men. A man in a group isn’t himself at all, he’s a cell in an
organism that isn’t like him any more than the cells in your body
are like you.
Like Mac, Jim Nolan is a psychologist of mass violence. He even offers
to reopen his wound so that his blood will provide a stimulus for the
group to attack the strikebreakers. When the strikers are about to
mob one strike leader who has bloodied another, he diverts them from
this assault to the one he desires. There are other instances in which
a specific theory of the effects of violence is used for political
purposes. Just as Dostoyevsky’s Pyotr Verhovensky has his circle kill
Shatov to cement them together, so Hemingway’s Pablo had made his
townsmen communal executioners of the Fascists: “To save bullets,”
explains Pilar, “and so that each man should have his share in the
responsibility.” The basic attitudes behind mass political phenomena
are analyzed by some of Koestler’s major characters. Both Jules
Commanche and Julien Dellatre discuss the ills of France and Western
man in general. Their conclusions are very similar to Rubashov’s
critique of Communist policy. Finally Koestler himself sums up this
consistent point of view when he explains the cause of Hydie’s constant
and unsuccessful search in _The Age of Longing_: “the place of God had
become vacant, and there was a draft blowing through the world as in an
empty flat before the new tenants have arrived.”
chapter six
The Novelist as Analyst of Individual Political Behavior
Repulsed by his party in his attempt to return to politics after
the first World War, Edward Wilcher, in _To Be a Pilgrim_, turns to
writing. He tells his brother:
No one has written a real political novel--giving the real feel of
politics. The French try to be funny or clever, and the English
are too moral and abstract. You don’t get the sense of real
politics, of people feeling the way: of moles digging frantically
about to dodge some unknown noise overhead; of worms all diving
down simultaneously because of some change in the weather; or
rising up gaily again because some scientific gardener has spread
the right poison mixture; you don’t get the sense of limitation
and confusion, of walking on a slack wire over an unseen gulf by
a succession of lightning flashes. Then the ambitious side is
always done so badly. Plenty of men in politics have no political
ambition; they want to defend something, to get some reform--it’s
as simple as that. But even then they are simple people, too, and
it is the simple men who complicate the situation. Yes, a real
political novel would be worth doing. I should like to do for
politics what Tolstoy has done for war--show what a muddle and
confusion it is, and that it must always be a muddle and confusion
where good men are wasted and destroyed simply by luck as by a
chance bullet.
Perhaps Edward’s insight into this aspect of politics has been
sharpened by the fact that, despite his immediate denial, he has been
hit by just such a bullet himself. But the impact must have been so
great that it sent him into a state of shock which made him unable to
see that the novel had done just what he said it hadn’t. The muddle and
confusion are there, and so are the men who rise above it as well as
those who are sucked under and lost.
=Motivation=
It is hard to draw the line between individual and group political
behavior. A man may be a mirror or conductor of political forces as
well as a discrete individual. His motivation is perhaps the most
individual aspect of his political experience. Most of the leading
characters in these political novels are strongly motivated. In only
a few cases, such as that of Willis Markham in _Revelry_, does the
individual drift into politics. The ones who, in Wilcher’s words,
“want to defend something, to get some reform,” are very common. The
“something” that Robert Jordan wants to defend is liberty in Spain, so
that “there should be no more danger and so that the country should be
a good place to live in.” Lanny Budd feels exaltation that in his role
of Presidential Agent he is helping to defend democracy. The reform
that brings Millard Carroll to Washington is expressed in the aims of
the New Deal, and a similar response on a more emotional level is made
by Glenn Spotswood. Passing the shacks of the Mexican workers they have
tried to help, he exclaims, “By God, Jed, we’ve got to do something to
stop this kind of thing.”
A powerful motivating force which operates on a less conscious level
derives from a man’s being a bastard. Hamer Shawcross in _Fame Is
the Spur_, like Hyacinth Robinson in _The Princess Casamassima_, is
illegitimate. Both men are raised by people who try to give them the
emotional security of which their birth deprives them, but their
attempts to change the society into which they were born seem in part
due to the feeling that they are among its second-class citizens.
Razumov in _Under Western Eyes_ has been raised, as far as the reader
knows, without any family life at all. Yet he is motivated in exactly
the opposite direction from Shawcross and Robinson. His assumption of
a counter-revolutionary role is a direct result of his feeling that
his nation and its existing social fabric are all he has. He tells the
well-born revolutionary Haldin:
I have no domestic tradition. I have nothing to think against.
My tradition is historical. What have I to look back to but that
national past from which you gentlemen want to wrench away your
future?... You come from your province, but all this land is
mine--or I have nothing.
Generations later, another Russian reacts the same way under the new
regime. Feyda Nikitin in _The Age of Longing_ has been orphaned by
childbirth and a counter-revolutionary firing squad. The last message
from his father’s eyes was one of “unshakable faith in the Great
Change, and of a childlike belief in the marvels and happiness which it
would bring.” This was enough to start Feyda on a career whose apex is
the listing of Frenchmen to be liquidated after Russian conquest.
The character of Feyda serves to bridge the gap between men like
Shawcross, Robinson, and Razumov and those who are motivated by a
similar but much more powerful force--spiritual bastardy. One of these
is the most demoniac of all Dostoyevsky’s possessed, Pyotr Verhovensky.
He publicly ridicules his father: “the man’s only seen me twice in
his life and then by accident.” It would be easy to make a case
basing Pyotr’s anarchistic politics upon a partial transference of
his resentment of parental rejection from old Stepan, his father, to
Russia, his fatherland. Tony Maggiore, the hero-villain of _Caesar’s
Angel_, is called “the terrible child--the child who had never known
childhood.” Canon Borda’s analysis of Fabrizio del Dongo’s violent
behavior is also based upon childhood experiences: “He is a younger
son who feels himself wronged because he is not the eldest.” There
are also characters like Joe Yerkes in _The Grand Design_ who set
out to change a society in which they feel at a social and economic
disadvantage. The houseboy and then protégé of a professor, Yerkes is
eventually led, chiefly by his feelings of inferiority and insecurity,
to join the Communist Party and to work at organizing auto workers.
These activities are a means, though never acknowledged, through
which he can try to change the existing society into one in which he
will enjoy a higher status and more prestige. In _The Secret Agent_
the Professor’s failure in a series of jobs had turned him into a
revolutionary determined to destroy the society which had rejected him.
Jim Nolan had fought “the system” as a lone, dispirited antagonist.
The example of cell-mates had finally channeled this antagonism into
Communism, because “the hopelessness wasn’t in them.... There was
conviction that sooner or later they would win their way out of the
system they hated.” Some few individuals, like Disraeli’s exemplary
young men, enter politics out of a sense of _noblesse oblige_. But
more enter from a feeling of protest. Don Paolo’s reflections in
_Bread and Wine_ emphasize the emotional nature of this motivation in
revolutionaries:
He had once asked many militant members of his party what had led
them to Marxism, and nearly all of them had confessed that their
original impulse, as in his case, had been moral condemnation
of existing society. He had read the biographies of many
revolutionaries, and he had never yet discovered anyone who had
become a revolutionary out of scientific conviction or economic
calculation.
The pangs of unrequited love are partially responsible for Peter
Stirling’s dedication to success in politics in _The Honorable Peter
Stirling_, just as Frances Motherwell’s rejection by Vic Herres, in
_The Troubled Air_, causes her to denounce the Communist movement to
which he is devoted. Other motivating forces are just as conventional.
Such dissimilar characters as Fabrizio del Dongo in _The Charterhouse
of Parma_ and Jethro Bass in _Coniston_ are influenced by the career of
Napoleon. The will to power as a basic drive is more clearly put by Old
Gisors in _Man’s Fate_: “every man dreams of being god.” Mary McCarthy
in _The Oasis_ (1949) labels Will Taub’s motivation as basically this
when she says that “dreams of power and mastery, far more than its
fraternal aspect, were what had attracted him to communism....” In
some cases, like those of Silone’s heroes, the motivation is quite
complex. Don Nicola, in _A Handful of Blackberries_, says that Rocco
de Donatis “was the object of the clearest call from God that I have
ever witnessed.” Yet he had become a Communist and left the Church like
Pietro Spina in _Bread and Wine_ “because of the profound disgust with
which he reacted to the abyss which he perceived between its practical
actions and the words it preached.” Even Spina’s name--literally
“rock-thorn”--is symbolic of the conflict between these forces within
him. The carpenter, merchant, clergyman, or teacher may drift into
his vocation through family pressure or pursuit of the line of least
resistance. Almost always the politician enters his because of a
powerful driving force which is just as likely to be subconscious as
conscious.
=Moral Problems and Changing Values=
Another characteristic of the politician in the novel is the often-met
change in values. Basic to this process may be the frequency with which
he encounters moral problems. Some may be like Senator Ratcliffe in
_Democracy_, whose “weakness ... lay in his blind ignorance of morals.”
But usually a choice must be made between that which is right and
that which is profitable. Sometimes it is as clear-cut as whether or
not DeForest’s John Vane should participate in the Great Subfluvial
Tunnel Road (a satire on the Crédit Mobilier) which is to run under the
Mississippi and unite Lake Superior and the Gulf of Mexico. Often the
politician must decide if he will check his conscience in the cloakroom
while he votes on a small issue in order to keep his party in power to
attain larger ends. Trollope’s heroes usually make the difficult but
morally right decision, but few applaud them. When Phineas Finn votes
for the Irish Reform Bill, Lord Tulla declares, “Very dirty conduct I
think it was.... After being put in for the borough twice, almost free
of expense, it was very dirty.”
A symptom of changing values is the rejection of the constituency for
the capitol. Even the Duke of Omnium begins to abandon the idea of
retirement because “the poison of place and power and dignity had got
into his blood.” The career of Bradley Talcott in _A Spoil of Office_
is a classic example. He thinks of throwing up his political life until
his renomination is threatened. Then he finds that his office is the
breath of life in his nostrils. Jerome Garwood’s comment on returning
to Washington from campaigning in _The 13th District_ is that “it’s
worth all a fellow has to go through out in that beastly mud hole to
be back here where one can really live.” This pattern is bound up, of
course, with the problem of conformity. In order to retain the prize,
the politician must pay its price. Hamer Shawcross puts the best
possible interpretation upon his own behavior when Pen Muff asks him
why more can’t be done for the Welsh miners. He replies that they will
do as much as they can without running the risk of being turned out of
office:
I admit ... that it’s a matter of getting the most out of the
second best. If all things were working for the best--why, there’d
be no need of politics at all, Pen. I suppose the very word means
not what we want but what is expedient.
The ultimate change in values, of course, is the sellout such as that
of which Shawcross and Nimmo are accused. There are cases too in which
the change takes the form not of deterioration but regeneration. Most
of these are found in vintage American novels, however, in which the
love of a good woman does the trick. Harvey Sayler, Jethro Bass, and
Willis Markham all reject the spoils of unsavory careers and don
penitential garments under this influence. The European treatment
is much more subtle. In his cell, Rubashov finds that his interior
monologues are really dialogues, “that there was a thoroughly tangible
component in this first person singular, which had remained silent
through all these years and now had started to speak.”
=The Successful Politician=
The individual who emerges most clearly from these novels is the
successful politician. One can even draw a complete profile of his
characteristics. And this composite illuminates not only the primary
subject, but also his counterpart. In the interplay between them one
sees the essence of that critical phenomenon, the leader-follower
relationship. In _The Prime Minister_ Trollope ponders these subjects:
If one were asked in these days what gift should a Prime Minister
ask first from the fairies, one would name the power of attracting
personal friends. Eloquence, if it be too easy, may become almost
a curse. Patriotism is suspected, and sometimes sinks almost to
pedantry. A Jove-born intellect is hardly wanted, and clashes with
the inferiorities. Industry is exacting. Honesty is unpractical.
Truth is easily offended. Dignity will not bend. But the man who
can be all things to all men, who has ever a kind word to speak,
a pleasant joke to crack, who can forgive all sins, who is ever
prepared for friend or foe but never very bitter to the latter, who
forgets not men’s names, and is always ready with little words,--he
is the man who will be supported at a crisis.... It is for him that
men will struggle, and talk, and if needs be, fight, as though the
very existence of the country depended on his political security.
The Duchess of Omnium’s discourse upon the tasks Omnium is unwilling to
perform is much more an indictment of politics in its worst sense than
this comparatively restrained analysis of Trollope’s. In much the same
vein Meredith’s Stukely Culbrett declares that Nevil Beauchamp has “too
strong a dose of fool’s honesty to succeed....” Hamer Shawcross’s own
distillate of thirty years of political experience is a bitter brew.
Dissimulation is the chief element in the formula for success. The
politician must be an adept psychologist appealing not to reason and
intellect but to “panic, passion, and prejudice.” Shawcross cynically
adds that if these factors are not present at the critical moment, the
politician must know how to create them. The lesson one learns from
Chester Nimmo’s career is that the successful office holder must be as
agile as a gymnast, as flexible as a contortionist, and as vigilant as
a radar screen. In certain instances, the politician owes success to
what he does not do rather than to what he does. The ultimate in the
ossification of faculties whose exercise may be dangerous is reached by
the Communists. General Golz reveals his formula for survival to Robert
Jordan: “I never think at all. Why should I? I am General Sovietique. I
never think. Do not try to trap me into thinking.”
Peter Stirling’s list of requirements for political success is quite
different. Although he mentions physical superiority and dishonesty,
his lecture sounds like a naïve version of the Boy Scout oath.
He mentions bosses, but his account of the way he influences his
constituents suggests Socratic dialogues in Athenian meadows rather
than politics in a tenement district of downtown Manhattan. The
physical characteristics which he mentions briefly are noted by other
authors, however. Nick Burr is a Virginia Lincoln in appearance, while
Senator Ratcliffe in _Democracy_, and Senator Planefield in _Through
One Administration_, represent the portly and impressive type. Dan
Lurcock’s acquisition of Willis Markham is based upon precisely these
qualities: “Let him get that magnificent head into the legislature,
where it would be on view, and there was nothing he might not do
with it.” This case appears to exaggerate the value of physical
impressiveness, but it illustrates the very real advantage which it
confers upon its possessor.
The leader-follower relationship can depend in part upon just such
physical factors. Bill Dominick, who rules three congressional
districts in _The Plum Tree_, cows many of his supporters with his
huge, ex-prizefighter’s body. Jack London’s Ernest Everhard represents
this type with the dross transmuted to gold, for he is “a superman, a
blond beast such as Nietzsche has described.” Hank Martin combines this
physical vitality with an oratorical “kindlin’ power” which inspires
his supporters. But his appeal is also basic in another way. His theme
“Divide the Riches” has an attraction for impoverished back country
people which is probably more compelling than personal magnetism. The
power of Michael J. Grogan in _Hot Corn Ike_ has a completely economic
basis. From city departments and corporations he obtains the green
labor tickets which entitle their bearers to jobs. For each ticket
Grogan receives a vote. In _All the King’s Men_, Willie Stark’s concern
for his people’s welfare is also expressed in direct action, but he
explores psychological depths in his constituents unplumbed by other
politicians. He jeers at them as “suckers,” “red-necks,” and “hicks,”
then allies himself with them as one victimized by the same city
politicians. Losing his job because of these city bosses, he had become
“symbolically the spokesman for the tongue-tied population of honest
men.” His oratory is violent and emotional, full of questions which
bring thunderous crowd responses like those of a question-and-answer
sermon in a revival meeting. And he buttresses this primitive
relationship with tangibles: an overloaded state payroll, new highways,
and a magnificent free hospital. But Willie Stark’s appeal is not
limited to the unlearned. The intelligent but neurotic Jack Burden
works for Willie even while he allows his critical faculties full play.
Anne Stanton, a governor’s daughter, becomes Willie’s mistress. Both
of these people see in Willie strength where they are weak. To Jack he
is a man who lives in and for the present; to Anne he is an embodiment
of strength, a man who knows precisely what he wants and is willing
to pay the price to get it. Another practitioner of psychology is
Councilor Mikulin in _Under Western Eyes_. He enlists Razumov in his
service through his faculty for sensing each man’s vulnerability. “It
did not matter to him what it was--vanity, despair, love, hate, greed,
intelligent pride, or stupid conceit--it was all one to him as long as
the man could be made to serve.”
=Political Pathology: Deviates, Martyrs, and Authoritarians=
This topic leads directly to a very curious set of political phenomena.
It can be described as political pathology. The line between sanity
and madness is just as hazy here as it is in other areas. But one can
usually distinguish between one man who is intelligently dedicated to
a goal and another who is a fanatic. Dostoyevsky intended that all his
revolutionaries should represent very dangerous forms of madness. It
is obvious that Kirillov, who believes he can become God by killing
himself, is insane. The drunken brute Lebyadkin, like the vicious
Pyotr, idolizes Stavrogin as a god, while Stavrogin himself is a
complete masochist. Erkel is described as a fanatic who can serve a
cause only through one person seen as the expression of it. Shatov
recognizes their abnormality. He tells the narrator that they would be
lost if Russia were suddenly transformed: “They’d have no one to hate
then, no one to curse, nothing to find fault with. There’s nothing in
it but an immense animal hatred for Russia which has eaten into their
organism.” Even more lethal a fanatic is the terrorist Ch’en Ta Erh
in _Man’s Fate_. He nerves himself for his first act of violence in
the novel by driving a dagger point into his arm. Later, in a state of
exaltation, he stabs a fragment of glass into his thigh to express to
his companions the intensity he feels as he proposes that they should
throw themselves with their bombs beneath Chiang Kai-shek’s car. Ch’en
develops an almost mystical attraction toward death which he finally
satisfies by shooting himself when the attempt on Chiang’s life fails.
His opposite number is Konig, chief of Chiang’s police. Once tortured
by the Communists, he declares “My dignity is to kill them.... I live
... only when I’m killing them.” Several of Conrad’s characters,
notably Nikita the assassin in _Under Western Eyes_ and the Professor
in _The Secret Agent_, are quite as ready to kill for political
reasons. Warren’s Willie Stark has a fanatical bodyguard in Sugar-Boy,
a stuttering gnome of a man who combines absolute devotion to Stark
with the satisfaction he gets from driving a high-powered car and using
a .38 Special revolver.
But the fanatic need not engage in violence. He appears to channel his
drives into actions appropriate to the political framework within which
he operates. In _The Troubled Air_ Communist Vic Herres calculatedly
ruins his old friend Clement Archer. “Because he’s a fanatic,”
explains Vic’s wife Nancy, “because he would sacrifice me and Johnny
and young Clem and himself and anybody else if he was told it was
for the cause....” The political novel also contains examples of the
Communist who carries his fanaticism intact with him in his journey
from the extreme Left to the far Right. Elsie McCabe and Frederick
Newman knowingly perjure themselves before Senator O’Brien’s committee
in _Stranger Come Home_. And it is clear that they have made their
allegations against Whitehead with the same disregard for truth which
they found useful in their years as Party members. Another of the same
species as Dostoyevsky’s Erkel and Warren’s Sugar-Boy is Spring’s Jimmy
Newboult. “Knighted” by Shawcross with the Peterloo sabre, he precedes
him into each rally carrying it aloft. But with his scruples and acute
moral sense, Jimmy represents a mid-point between the deadly Ch’en and
Marion Crawford’s sugar-and-spice fanatic. Crawford explains noble John
Harrington’s lack of zeal in proposing to pining Josephine Thorn in _An
American Politician_:
He was a man, she said, who loved an unattainable, fanatic idea
in the first place, and who dearly loved himself as well for his
own fanaticism’s sake. He was a man in whom the heart was crushed,
even annihilated, by his intellect, which he valued far too
highly, and by his vanity, which he dignified into a philosophy of
self-sacrifice.
In _Bread and Wine_ Luigi Murica tells Pietro Spina, “I decided that
politics was grotesque--nothing but an artificial struggle between
rival degenerates.” His comment may be taken literally as well as
figuratively, for political and sexual pathology are combined in the
cases of the deviates in these novels. There are enough to fill a
textbook of abnormal psychology. The most common is the homosexual
who often seeks to achieve through political association the sense
of acceptance by his fellows which he feels is denied him by his
maladjustment. Such a one is Marcello Clerici in _The Conformist_.
Moravia’s detailed treatment virtually gives a case history following
a familiar pattern. Marcello’s feeling of abnormality is deepened by
a childhood traumatic experience in which he barely escapes assault
by a middle-aged man. Marcello marries, but he remains a latent
homosexual throughout his life, feeling a frightening desire to submit
when he is accosted by an old man in a situation very like the first
one. He hopes to achieve conformity through marriage and membership
in the Fascist Party. After paving the way for the political murder
of a former teacher, he reflects that the success of the regime is
needful to him psychologically. “Only in that way,” he thinks, “could
what was normally considered an ordinary crime become, instead, a
positive step in a necessary direction.” This maladjustment is found
on many levels, from that of Communist General Ares in _The Crack in
the Column_ to post-adolescent Winthrop Strang in _The Grand Design_.
The son of a famous author now deceased, Strang petulantly complains
that he is not receiving enough attention from his dominating mother,
a well-known newspaper columnist. In what appears to be an attempt to
obtain this affection from other sources, he has thrown himself into
Communist Party work and an affair with young Mervyn Packett, another
Party member who writes for the Negro press. Lee Sarason, who succeeds
Buzz Windrip as American dictator in _It Can’t Happen Here_, surrounds
himself with strong young members of the Minute Men: “He was either
angry with his young friends, and then he whipped them, or he was in a
paroxysm of apology to them, and caressed their wounds.” The parallel
between Sarason and Nazi Ernst Röhm is completed when he is shot late
at night by another American Nazi, Colonel Dewey Haik. Several brusque
and mannish women appear in these novels. Lannie Madison in _Barbary
Shore_ is a lesbian who has denied herself everything, including love,
to work for the Communist Party. Having broken with it, she is now a
completely disorganized personality.
One of the most complex deviates is Dostoyevsky’s Nikolay Stavrogin.
Although he is capable of heterosexual relationships, he is a pervert
who has corrupted a small child and caused her suicide. A sadist,
he is also an admitted masochist. In marrying the feeble-minded
Marya Lebyadkin he had carried out his idea of “somehow crippling my
life in the most repulsive manner possible.” In the long-suppressed
chapter of the novel which contains his confession to Bishop Tihon,
Stavrogin hears the Bishop tell him: “You are possessed by a desire
for martyrdom....” But the “terrible undisguised need of punishment”
is emotionally complicated because this compulsion is a “need of the
cross in a man who doesn’t believe in the cross--” Stavrogin plays an
essentially passive political role since he allows himself to be used
by Pyotr. His case represents, however, a combining of abnormalities
usually found singly.
One aspect of Stavrogin’s character also appears in men who do not
deviate from the norm. Nick Burr in _The Voice of the People_ looks
like Lincoln in his towering stature and his “good, strong kind of
ugliness.” He prepares himself for his martyrdom by opposing powerful
forces in his state, and finally meets it by attempting to halt a
lynching. To some, this self-sacrifice carries an almost religious
ecstasy. In Moravia’s _The Fancy Dress Party_ Saverio has been ordered
to assassinate the dictator of the South American country of Bolivar.
He thinks that he now knows what the early Christians must have felt,
“the sweet, deep pleasure of sacrificing themselves for the greater
good of humanity....” Shaw’s Clement Archer and Shirer’s Raymond
Whitehead do not enter into their ordeals with the intention of
becoming martyrs. When they are deprived of their primary sources of
livelihood, however, this is precisely what they become. In most of the
novels there is an awareness of the political value of martyrs, and the
Communists, particularly, excel in their manufacture.
If frequency of occurrence were used to determine whether or not a
phenomenon is abnormal, perhaps the dictator would have to be classed
as normal. Within political systems embodying the principles of
representative government, however, he represents a disease just as
surely as a group of cells which suddenly start overwhelming their
neighbors. The novel displays not only fictitious tyrants, but real
ones as well, from Caesar in Wilder’s _The Ides of March_ (1948) to
Koestler’s thinly disguised Stalin in _Darkness at Noon_. The authors
usually describe how they act and what made them that way. Since _The
Ides of March_ uses the diaries and letters of several Roman citizens,
the reader learns precisely what Caesar’s contemporaries thought of him
and what Caesar thought of himself. In the accounts of his enemies, he
is a profligate and pervert, a destroyer of liberty. His own writings
reveal him as a man who is cold and self-centered but devoted to Rome
and possessed of amazingly catholic and intelligent interests. Trying
to free his countrymen from superstition, mythology, and barbarism, he
rationalizes his dictatorship on the basis that the people will not
assume the duties of self-government. He writes:
But there is no liberty save in responsibility. That I cannot rob
them of because they have not got it.... The Romans have become
skilled in the subtle resources for avoiding the commitment and
the price of political freedom. They have become parasites upon
that freedom which I gladly exercise--my willingness to arrive at a
decision and sustain it--and which I am willing to share with every
man who will assume its burden.
Like Caesar, most authoritarian rulers appear to believe that they
are working in the best interests of their people. Most often this
is a rationalization of an enormous drive to personal power, but
whatever its source it is almost always a component of the totalitarian
mentality. Some absolutists, like Stendhal’s Ernesto IV of Parma, make
no pretense of extraordinary concern for their subjects. But the modern
pattern is for the Duce, Führer, or Father of the People to associate
himself with the masses, at least verbally. This is as true of state
dictators such as Chuck Crawford, Hank Martin, and Willie Stark as it
is of General Arango in _The Fancy Dress Party_. The three Americans
also have in common their origins as members of the lower or lower
middle class of southern whites. Each starts with a seemingly genuine
desire to better the lot of his group. Their careers provide a study
of the same infection which attacks the Duke of Omnium, “the poison of
place and power and dignity.” And this transition from crusader to sick
man gives insight into the process by which dictators are made.
=Men Behind the Scenes=
Another political type which is not quite pathological yet which
occupies a position somewhat outside the main stream of normal
political activity is that of the silent man, the one who often wields
great power but remains nearly concealed from the public. He is found
most often in American politics. Major Rann, boss of the Virginia
Senate and opponent of Nick Burr in Ellen Glasgow’s _The Voice of
the People_, “had never made a speech in his life, but ... he was
continually speaking through the mouths of others.” Jethro Bass in
_Coniston_ is another silent man, figuratively and literally. This type
carried to the extreme is Dan Lurcock in _Revelry_, President-maker,
interstate lobbyist, and national salesman of patronage. A European
variant of this type is represented by Karl Yundt in _The Secret
Agent_. Described as “no man of action,” his function is to goad others
into action. This catalytic role is performed by anti-fascist Professor
Quadri in _The Conformist_. His specialty is proselytizing the young.
Cold and detached, he often channels his converts into actions he knows
will be fatal, “desperate actions that could be justified only as part
of an extremely long-term plan and that, indeed, necessarily involved a
cruel indifference to the value of human life.”
=The Disillusioned=
In _The Age of Longing_ ex-Marxist poet Julien Dellatre asks Hydie
Anderson:
Do you remember ‘The Possessed’? They were an enviable crowd of
maniacs. We are the dispossessed--the dispossessed of faith; the
physically or spiritually homeless. A burning fanatic is dangerous;
a burnt-out fanatic is abject.
With these words he speaks for a constantly growing number of former
political enthusiasts who have discovered that they had carried
not a torch but a club. One is tempted to call this era the Age
of Disillusionment. But this would in a sense be an error, for
disillusionment is as old as politics. It is always present; only the
number of cases varies. The literary list is a long one--Phineas Finn,
the Duke of Omnium, Dick Remington, Hilary Vane, Harvey Sayler, Glenn
Spotswood, and scores of others. Even the opportunist Shawcross is not
immune. Near the end of his career he asks himself if statesmen are
not actually “the true pests and cancers of human society.” He thinks
that if he could have one wish granted, it would be that politicians
would leave all the people alone for fifty years. “We might then have a
better world,” he reflects. “We couldn’t have a worse one.”
The modern literature of disillusionment introduces a variation on this
old theme. The discontent is localized to one ideology--Communism.
Mary McCarthy states one of its basic causes in _The Oasis_ when she
says that Will Taub’s “disillusionment with the Movement had sprung
largely from its concentration on narrowly nationalistic aims and its
abandonment of an insurgent ideology.” In its original use, the term
“literature of disillusionment” referred primarily to the body of work
of a group of writers who had turned away from Communism. But for the
purposes of this study it is just as fruitful to focus on the creations
rather than their authors. The best of these novels is unquestionably
Koestler’s _Darkness at Noon_. It is outstanding not only as a
psychological portrait in depth, but also as an interpretation of an
important phenomenon. Rubashov is at once an individual and a mirror of
forces at work in modern international politics. His journey has taken
him from exalted participation in revolution, through consolidation of
its gains, to a final questioning of the worth of the whole agonizing
process. But his life has been bound up so completely with the cause
that even his final renunciation is tinged with haunting doubt. Lying
in his cell, one of the last survivors of the old guard, he is unable
to repress it:
The horror which No. 1 emanated, above all consisted in the
possibility that he was in the right, and that all those whom he
had killed had to admit, even with the bullet in the back of their
necks, that he conceivably might be in the right.
Rubashov’s disillusionment springs from the fact that the light has
gone out of the revolutionary movement, that what was to become a new
paradise has become an old hell. The dictatorship of the proletariat
has evolved into the tyranny of No. 1; the new man has grown into a
Neanderthaler. Instead of a promised land, Rubashov has returned from
his foreign assignments to find a country where factory workers are
shot as saboteurs for negligence caused by fatigue. His conclusion that
the regime’s error was caused by abandonment of ethical standards is
central to the _bouleversement_ he undergoes. But even despite this
basic departure from Communist thought, it is important to recognize
that he is still a Marxist. He even elaborates the old dialectic in
prison with his “theory of the relative maturity of the masses.” His
participation in his mock trial emphasizes the ambivalence he feels.
One passage explains this behavior and that of some of the men to whom
Koestler dedicated the novel:
The best of them kept silent to do a last service to the Party,
by letting themselves be sacrificed as scapegoats--and, besides,
even the best had each an Arlova on his conscience. They were too
deeply entangled in their own past, caught in the web they had spun
themselves, according to the laws of their own twisted ethics and
twisted logic; they were all guilty, although not of those deeds
of which they accused themselves. There was no way back for them.
Their exit from the stage happened strictly according to the rules
of their strange game. The public expected no swan-song of them.
They had to act according to the textbook, and their part was the
howling of wolves in the night....
Where there is freedom of choice, the disillusioned one follows one
of three courses: needing an outlet for the forces which originally
took him to the Party, he engages in leftist, non-Stalinist activity;
ricocheting violently in the opposite direction, he aligns himself
with the extreme Right; or exhausted, he sinks into a melancholy,
nostalgia-tinged apathy. Rocco de Donatis throws himself into the
struggle of the peasants for land. Frederick Wellman and Elsie McCabe
lie with virtuosity in the service of Senator O’Brien. Lannie Madison
retreats into neurosis. The causes of the disenchantment vary. Glenn
Spotswood makes his break because he is interested in men as men rather
than as pawns in a game. Rocco’s point of departure is the discovery of
Siberian labor camps. Both of them, however, suffer somewhat the same
aftereffects. There is a feeling of loss, the sensation that a platform
has been knocked out from under them.
This particular reaction is best portrayed through the creative
artists who appear in these novels. Julien Dellatre is one of three
ex-Communists who call themselves the Three Ravens Nevermore. A
scarred veteran of the Spanish Civil War, he refers to his poems,
“Ode to the Cheka,” “Elegy on the Death of a Tractor,” and “The Rape
of Surplus Value” as “past asininities.” His renunciation of the
Movement is complete, yet his tragedy lies in the fact that he has
found nothing to replace it. He has concluded that “Europe is going
to the dogs,” that the reason is a turning away from God, a “loss of
cosmic consciousness.” Feeling that a new religion is necessary to save
twentieth-century man, he lacks a conviction which would permit him
to take the final step into faith. The great passion of his life is
behind him. In his own comment he has summed himself up: “a burnt-out
fanatic is abject.” Another man of letters in the same novel is Leo
Leontiev, “Hero of Culture and Joy of the People,” who has come from
Russia to France to address an international peace rally. The death of
his wife frees him to renounce the regime and find political asylum in
France. Psychologically ready to take this step, “he felt as if a whole
drugstore of poison were working at [his synapses]--the accumulated
toxins of thirty years.” He has become a Hero of Culture by following
the Party line in literature rather than his artistic conscience.
Free at last, he feels that he must write something truly fine, a
vindication of himself that will also be worthy of his wife, whose
death he suspects may have been suicide or murder. But he is unable
even to write the projected _I Was a Hero of Culture_ for the American
publisher who has given him a substantial advance. For him, as for
Dellatre, the light had flickered out, and it could not be rekindled.
Some artists, like novelist Bernard Carr and poet Lester Owens in
_Yet Other Waters_ manage to rebound, to continue to work creatively.
But still they bear psychological scar tissue. Even in the process
of preparing to leave the Movement, Bernard Carr suggests from the
floor that the Writers Congress be concluded with the singing of “The
Internationale.” And he is moved as he sings. An allied phenomenon is
that of the individual who is inwardly in conflict with the Party but
remains with it through a fear of these consequences. When Bernard
tells frustrated poet Sam Leventhal that he should leave the Party,
Sam turns pale. “Bernie, the Party is my life,” he replies. “It would
be spiritual death for me outside the Party.” An even more revealing
answer is made by British physicist Lord Edwards. When Leontiev asks
him why he stays, Edwards replies: “I told you there is nothing else.
You will soon find that out yourself. Besides--once you’ve invested
all your capital in a firm, you don’t withdraw it--not at our age, not
after thirty years.”
=The Role of Woman=
When women engage in political activity in these novels they are
usually cast in one of four roles: man’s guide, the reformer, the
dedicated Communist, or the patriot. In the years before suffrage was
extended to women, one of the few opportunities afforded them for
engaging in political activity was to influence or guide a man who was
politically active. Emily Harkness performs this function for Jerome
Garwood in _The 13th District_. At the beginning of his career he is
her intellectual protégé as she channels his reading and thinking.
His rejection of this relationship is coupled with his political
degeneration and ruin. In _Hot Corn Ike_ Molly McMurdo counsels Mike
Grogan with acuteness and insight. Since she is a procuress, she
supplies very little moral guidance, but her analyses of the factors
at work in the district are penetrating if not intellectual. Peter
Ivanovitch, leader of the Geneva revolutionary circle in _Under Western
Eyes_, preaches the cult of woman as well as revolution. He had been
aided by a woman in making his legendary escape across Siberia. The
devotion he felt toward her is also bestowed upon Madame de S----,
who contributes not only inspiration but also her chateau to Peter’s
activities. Fancying herself another Madame de Staël, this “Egeria of
the ‘Russian Mazzini’” appears more like a witch than a prophetess.
Possessed of a garishly painted, mask-like face whose outstanding
features are extraordinarily brilliant eyes and obviously false teeth,
she contributes to one conversation by screaming that they must
“spiritualize the discontent.”
The intellectual guide of man par excellence is Ida Wilbur in _A Spoil
of Office_. She remains stolid Bradley Talcott’s ideal and teacher even
after he has attained the House of Representatives. But she is also
an active field worker for the farmers. A pamphleteer and lecturer,
she represents the woman reformer who enters into direct action rather
than stand once removed from activity. Mrs. Ward’s Marcella acts for
herself, but to a lesser degree than DeForest’s Squire Nancy Appleyard
and Spring’s three feminists--Lizzie Lightowler, Anne Shawcross,
and Pen Muff. Lawyer Nancy Appleyard is a ridiculous figure with
her trousers and pistols, but in her feminist agitation she is a
precursor of the others. These women are distinguished by conviction,
perseverance, and willingness to engage in violent action under pain of
brutality and imprisonment to attain their goals.
In strong contrast to Madame de S---- in _Under Western Eyes_ is Sophia
Antonovna, an influential veteran revolutionary. A striking woman with
her gray-white hair and bright red blouse, she is “the true spirit
of destructive revolution.” Shawcross’s daughter-in-law Alice is a
direct descendant of Sophia Antonovna. Shortly after her return from
Moscow, a letter is published addressed by Zinoviev to the Communists
of Britain urging uprisings in the Army and Navy. Implying that Ramsay
MacDonald had been pushed into treaties with Russia by Communist
pressure, it helps cause the fall of his government. Noting the time of
Alice’s visit and the intensity of her devotion to Communism, Shawcross
suspects that she had helped Zinoviev to plan and write the letter.
Dos Passos’ militant women Communists such as Jane Sparling throw
themselves into Party activities almost more zealously than the men.
One of the women in _Yet Other Waters_ might be listed under political
pathology as well as here. She is Alice Robertson, a nymphomaniac and
frustrated novelist whose regard for her current lover does not prevent
her from reporting on him to the Party.
There is no Joan of Arc in these political novels, but in Hemingway’s
book one hears about the fiery La Pasionaria, and in _The Age of
Longing_ and _Nostromo_ the actions of two women evoke mention of the
name of Charlotte Corday. In Conrad’s novel Antonia Avellanos is as
fierce a patriot as her father Don José, who had nearly died in inhuman
captivity by dictator Guzmán Bento. Her fierce anger against General
Montero, a modern Bento, is one of the forces which brings cynical
dilettante Don Martin Decoud to throw himself into the struggle which
leads to his death. She suggests Charlotte Corday to him, as does
Hydie Anderson indirectly to Jules Commanche when she asks that Feyda
Nikitin be expelled from France. But Hydie’s patriotism does not have
the fire of Antonia’s. She has come to recognize Feyda’s brutality and
immorality, but the immediate cause of her action is his humiliation of
her which breaks off their affair. This gesture is the first positive
one she has made. Up to this point she has seemed about to apply for
membership in the Ravens Nevermore. Her disillusionment, like theirs,
has come from rejection of a strong and disciplined system which
answered all her questions and assuaged all her doubts. Her break with
the Roman Catholic Church has left her quite as adrift as Dellatre or
his companions. And when her gesture fails, she feels herself slipping
back into the old despondency, the craving for sureness, for a set of
positive values.
Although treated in lesser detail than the men (except for Hydie),
these women offer the reader the same opportunity for intimate
acquaintance with people who can become more real than those one meets
on the street or in the office. Their reality and complexity vary with
the skill of their creators, but one is able to follow their actions
and thoughts more closely than those of individuals in “real life.”
chapter seven
Some Conclusions
In some areas of this study only the main outlines have been sketched
in. Good books have probably been omitted, particularly in European
literatures. Some mediocre ones, especially American novels, have
been included. This was done to give some idea of the development of
this form in the United States, but with the fervent hope that a gain
in historical continuity would not produce too great a loss through
exclusion of more quality. But if a few major points have emerged, this
study has fulfilled its purpose.
The press has always been acknowledged as a major factor in influencing
political opinion. A close look at the phenomenal success of _Uncle
Tom’s Cabin_ reveals that the right novel appearing at the critical
time can exercise wide and lasting influence. With his freedom to
place a quarter of a million words between two covers, the novelist
can present more information and achieve more reader involvement than
any newspaper using columns of factual accounts, brilliant editorials,
and four-color Sunday supplements. The novelist can vie with Gibbon
and Macaulay if he chooses, ranging freely from century to century,
turning from Caesar to modern man, or from Machiavelli to a politician
of the twenty-sixth century. Just as the writer treats the rise and
decline of empires, so he portrays the flowering and withering of
movement. Evoking the past, the novelist can people it with living
beings and bring to life its tensions, its climaxes, its meanings.
One can gain some understanding of the factors which make men like
one another despite national and cultural factors which differentiate
them. Silone’s peasants, like Garland’s farmers, crave enough to keep
them sheltered and fed, to give them the feeling that they can work in
peace with a feeling of security. One senses differences, however, in
political hierarchies. The Prime Ministers of Disraeli and Trollope are
masters, but the Presidents of Adams and Ford are badgered servants.
There are insights into the small niceties, the little peculiarities
that distinguish varying political usages. The American politician’s
life is exposed to glaring publicity, but the Englishman is spared
unless he is brought to court. In _To Be a Pilgrim_ Tom Wilcher notes
that “Gladstone’s missing finger appeared in all caricatures,” but “the
newspapers never referred to the continuous drunkenness of Mr. A., a
cabinet minister, or to even more scandalous liaisons than Edward’s.”
The novelist is able to hold his subject close or at a distance, and
to examine it from any point of the compass. He can slice through the
body politic and peel back its layers, stopping to scrutinize the one
that interests him. He can follow the early struggles that preceded
the English Labourites’ rise to power or trace the collateral decline
of the Liberals. Even in his treatment of individuals, he can provide
a sense of continuity with men of antiquity by presenting modern
Caesars. They may dress differently, talk differently, and get their
death wounds with bullets rather than daggers. But they are members
of the same tradition, followers of the same principles of political
action. Nor is the new man neglected. In a sense, Rubashov, with
his gnawing conflicts, is as much a new type as is Gletkin with his
mentality which precludes conflict. And, of course, one gets much more
than history. Tourgée interlards the Reconstruction story in _Bricks
Without Straw_ with analyses of causative factors. In a long passage
he elaborates his theory that “the town-meeting--the township system
or its equivalent--in the North and South, constituted a difference
not less vital and important than that of slavery itself.” Generally
the European novelist places more stress upon theory than does the
American, but in each literature close examination of causes is hardly
ever excluded by concentration upon effects.
The political novel has a well demonstrated vitality as a literary
form. The indications are that it will continue to grow. At the same
time it will probably display a continuity in the phenomena and ideas
it treats. The political novel will continue to chronicle movements.
Just as Dostoyevsky and Conrad dealt with Communism’s origins and
Koestler and Silone with its schisms and apostates, so other authors
will follow its eventual destiny. The minutiae of political experience
will provide material just as much as the major facets. One example is
the “whitewash,” the investigation which begins with grim determination
and implacable intent only to end with confusing or ineffectual
conclusions. Such investigations are directed toward election frauds
in _Phineas Redux_, the Great Subfluvial Tunnel Road in _Honest John
Vane_, and oil lease scandals in _Revelry_. It is also likely that the
political novel will treat a wider variety of subjects. Some of the
attention which corruption has received, particularly in the American
novel, may well be directed toward other aspects of the political
process which have so far been explored little or not at all. The love
story or love interest will continue to parallel the political story.
But there will probably be more novels in which the relationship will
be symptomatic of the same drives or needs operative in the political
sphere. This is the sort of treatment given the relationship between
Hydie and Feyda in _The Age of Longing_. If one interprets the word
“love” loosely, this approach may be seen in the description of Nikolay
and Marya in _The Possessed_. The latter novel and _The Conformist_
will be followed by more novels in which the author concentrates upon
intensive psychological studies of individuals representative of
particular political mentalities or groups.
The novel set in the future will probably retain the vitality displayed
by such books from the time of Edward Bellamy’s _Looking Backward_
(1888) to Orwell’s _1984_. It is in this area that science fiction
may make a contribution to the political novel. Jules Verne’s novels
were science fiction, but in the society in which he wrote, his work
was likely to remain fiction for some time. Modern technology makes it
possible for the best science fiction to achieve a greater relevance,
to present what may shortly be fact. The world of the future in modern
novels tends more often to be a hell than a utopia. And the space
ships, robots, and other electronic devices emphasize the godless,
mechanistic aspect of modern society which writers like Orwell and
Koestler see in it. The better writers of science fiction use this
technique. Ray Bradbury’s _Fahrenheit 451_ (1953), perhaps the best of
these novels, portrays a post-atomic war America two decades hence in
which technology has been used to kill freedom and make its subjects
love their bondage. Guy Montag’s revolt against his role in this
society may not be completely believable, but Bradbury’s three-wall
television sets and book-burning fire brigades bring home the horror of
a possible totalitarian society of the future with an impact matched
only by Orwell’s telescreens and Ministry of Love.
The future should bring more political novels than the past because
this age is so permeated with politics. The Napoleonic era and the
late nineteenth century may have been just as political in their
ways as this one, but with modern mass communication media, more
people are now involved in and aware of politics than ever before.
And, of course, politics has become more complex, more in need of
interpretation than ever before. Only a relatively small number of
Disraeli’s and Trollope’s novels concentrate on politics. By contrast,
most of the output of Koestler and Silone lies within this field. Each
good novelist, no matter what his age, finds the particular subject
matter which allows his talents freest range. But his material is life,
unless, like James Branch Cabell and others, he creates a reflection of
life in a special land of his own which never was in time or space. But
as life grows more political the novelist must inevitably reflect this
fact, even if only casually.
All this means that the reader who wants to learn about political
phenomena from the novel will have a greater mass of material to work
with than ever. Overall quality will be at least as good as it has been
and probably better as proportionately more good novelists work in this
genre. All of the fictional histories, analyses, and interpretations
will require the same reader value-judgments as ever. Prejudice
will still intrude; partisanship will still distort. But these same
judgments are necessary, in a measure, when the reader picks up the
book of a historian or a political scientist. And the novelist may
use all of the tools in their workrooms while he adds to them his own
resources--imagination, dramatic form, and the freedom and scope given
him by the versatile art of fiction.
Bibliography
AMERICAN NOVELS
ADAMS, HENRY: _Democracy_ (1880). Madeleine Lee goes to Washington
to learn about democracy and government. Disillusioned by its state
and by Senator Ratcliffe.
ADAMS, SAMUEL: _Revelry_ (1926). Fictionalized version of Harding
era’s corruption.
AMSBARRY, MARY ANNE: _Caesar’s Angel_ (1952). Rise and fall of a
tainted young politician who tries to deal with criminal element in
a state adjacent to Illinois.
BRADBURY, RAY: _Fahrenheit 451_ (1953). A book-destroying
Fireman turns against the post-atomic war regime of a horrific,
cultureless, totalitarian United States.
BURNETT, FRANCES HODGSON: _Through One Administration_ (1914).
Innocent Bertha Amory’s husband uses her charm to lobby for his
schemes in late nineteenth-century Washington.
CHURCHILL, WINSTON: _Coniston_ (1906). Jethro Bass’s rise to
control of a New England state through mortgage holdings and
political deals in the post-Jacksonian era.
----: _Mr. Crewe’s Career_ (1908). Twenty years after Bass’s death
the railroads exercise tighter control. Signs of public opinion
being marshalled for action.
COE, CHARLES FRANCIS: _Ashes_ (1952). Contemporary politics and
corruption plus murder.
CRAWFORD, F. MARION: _An American Politician_ (1884). Reformer John
Harrington’s excursion into politics of the late eighties under
Marquis of Queensberry rules.
DEFOREST, JOHN WILLIAM: _Honest John Vane_ (1875). A weak
congressman seduced into corruption by a satanic lobbyist and a
money-hungry wife during Reconstruction.
----: _Playing the Mischief_ (1876). Attractive Josie Murray gets a
fraudulent relief bill passed by a corrupt Congress amidst unsavory
Washingtonians.
DOS PASSOS, JOHN: _Adventures of a Young Man_ (1938). Glenn
Spotswood’s development into Communist organizer and his death for
Trotskyism in the Spanish Civil War.
----: _Number One_ (1943). Huey Long-like Chuck Crawford carries
on as Tyler Spotswood goes to jail for him in atonement for his
collusion in a corrupt career.
----: _The Grand Design_ (1949). Panoramic novel of New Deal
and wartime Washington. Conflicts of personalities, ideals, and
politics--national and international.
ELLISON, RALPH: _The Invisible Man_ (1953). A young Negro’s
crack-up under prejudice in North and South and disillusionment
after whole-souled Communist Work.
FARRELL, JAMES T.: _Yet Other Waters_ (1952). Novelist Bernard Carr
learns that the Communists dictate to artists too, then leaves
despite twinges and “the treatment.”
FORD, JAMES L.: _Hot Corn Ike_ (1923). Local politics with national
implications in two areas of late nineteenth-century New York.
FORD, PAUL LEICESTER: _The Honorable Peter Stirling_ (1894). Poor
Man’s Friend to Governor of New York despite vicissitudes as love
and virtue triumph.
GALLICO, PAUL: _Trial by Terror_ (1952). Blackmail frees an
American conditioned into a robot for a Hungarian spy trial while
American diplomats send notes of protest.
GARLAND, HAMLIN: _A Spoil of Office_ (1897). Iowans Bradley Talcott
and Ida Wilbur fight for the farmers in and out of Congress in the
seventies.
GLASGOW, ELLEN: _The Voice of the People_ (1900). Lincolnesque
Governor Nick Burr fights a corrupt organization and meets his
death in post-Reconstruction Virginia.
HEMINGWAY, ERNEST: _For Whom the Bell Tolls_ (1943). Conflict of
ideologies in Spain as anti-Fascist, non-Communist Robert Jordan
dies fighting for what he believes in.
JAMES, HENRY: _The Princess Casamassima_ (1886). Suicide frees
displaced Hyacinth Robinson from serving London revolutionaries
whose cause he no longer supports.
LANCLEY, ADRIA LOCKE: _A Lion Is in the Streets_ (1945). Another
Huey Long novel.
LEWIS, SINCLAIR: _It Can’t Happen Here_ (1936). The horrors of a
Fascist America.
LONDON, JACK: _The Iron Heel_ (1908). America under the Fascist
Oligarchy seen in retrospect from the 26th century when near-Utopia
is well-established.
MCCARTHY, MARY: _The Oasis_ (1949). The founding of a seemingly
successful utopian colony which begins to wither from lack of
feeling of relevance and conviction.
MAILER, NORMAN: _Barbary Shore_ (1951). A special revolutionary
socialism to be saved for “the day” is passed from one to another
of a group of weird characters.
MASTERS, EDGAR LEE: _Children of the Market Place_ (1922). Spirited
biography and defense of Stephen A. Douglas set against a growing
America by a shadowy narrator.
MANCHESTER, WILLIAM: _City of Anger_ (1953). A series of tragedies
growing out of the “numbers racket” and corruption in a city that
looks and sounds like Baltimore.
PHILLIPS, DAVID GRAHAM: _The Plum Tree_ (1905). Harvey Sayler
gains control of a huge lobby and becomes a President-maker before
disillusionment sets in.
RUSSELL, WILLIAM: _A Wind Is Rising_ (1950). On the fringes of
the political novel. Negro sharecroppers dominated by a hostile
socio-political economic system.
SHAW, IRWIN: _The Troubled Air_ (1951). One man crushed between
self-appointed judges and unscrupulous Communists in a fight
against blacklists and guilt by association.
SHELLABARGER, SAMUEL: _Prince of Foxes_ (1947). Running duel of
wits and weapons between Borgia and one of his captains. Melange of
romance, swordplay, and politics.
SHIRER, WILLIAM L.: _Stranger Come Home_ (1954). A radio
commentator and a Foreign Service career man are ruined by Senator
O’Brien and perjured testimony.
SINCLAIR, UPTON: _Oil!_ (1926). The making of a millionaire
radical, son of an oil tycoon destroyed by oil scandals in the
Harding era he helped to create.
----: _Boston_ (1928). Defense of Sacco and Vanzetti with admixture
of fiction.
----: _Presidential Agent_ (1945). Everybody’s confidante, Lanny
Budd helps make and interpret modern political history up to and
through Munich.
STEINBECK, JOHN: _In Dubious Battle_ (1936). A glimpse of Communist
aims and methods in organizing and directing strike violence for
Party purposes.
STOWE, HARRIET BEECHER: _Uncle Tom’s Cabin_ (1852). The most
effective political instrument in the history of the novel.
TOURGÉE, ALBION W.: _A Fool’s Errand_ (1879). A Northerner tries
to buck the tide of a resurgent South during Reconstruction. Acute
criticism of the Federal program.
----: _Bricks Without Straw_ (1880). More of the same with greater
violence and more analysis of the political structure of the
pre-war and post-war South.
WARREN, ROBERT PENN: _All the King’s Men_ (1946). The hectic life
and violent death of a Southern dictator with sharp portraits of
his effect upon those around him.
WELLER, GEORGE: _The Crack in the Column_ (1949). An American flier
is introduced to global politics as Communist Greeks fight the
British during World War II.
WHITLOCK, BRAND: _The 13th District_ (1902). The progressive moral
and political decline of a mid-western moth fascinated by the
illuminated capitol dome.
WILDER, THORNTON: _The Ides of March_ (1948). Caesar’s career
through Roman eyes.
ENGLISH NOVELS
CARY, JOYCE: _To Be a Pilgrim_ (1942). Fading Tom Wilcher recreates
turn of the century politics for his niece as he tries to
perpetuate the old solid values.
----: _Prisoner of Grace_ (1952). Chester Nimmo’s 30-year rise from
lay preacher to cabinet minister through determination, astuteness,
and a political sixth sense.
CONRAD, JOSEPH: _Nostromo_ (1904). The rise and fall of Costaguanan
governments with help from a British mine-owner who ends up owned
by his mine.
----: _The Secret Agent_ (1907). Informer Adolf Verloc schemes to
blow up the Greenwich Observatory for a foreign power wanting to
prod the British into repression.
----: _Under Western Eyes_ (1910). A monarchist Russian is
destroyed by chance involvement in revolutionary acts. The work of
Red circles in and out of Russia.
DISRAELI, BENJAMIN: _Coningsby_ (1844). Enlightened nobleman at
last becomes an M.P.
----: _Sybil_ (1845). A less harried Young Englander does the same.
Panorama of England c. 1837-1852 with great popular uprisings
emphasizing national discontent.
----: _Tancred_ (1847). The hero recoils from politics, finding
spiritual and political insights amidst comic opera imbroglios in
the deserts of the Holy Land.
ELIOT, GEORGE: _Felix Holt, the Radical_ (1866). Provincial
politics in the 1830s. Gallery of types from the extreme radical to
granite conservative. Complicated plot.
FORSTER, E. M.: _A Passage to India_ (1924). Personal tragedies
emphasize national tragedy of divided and unhappy India governed by
inflexible and unfeeling Britain.
HUXLEY, ALDOUS: _Brave New World_ (1932). A totalitarian world of
the future in which stability has been achieved through destruction
of freedom and the soul.
MAUGHAM, SOMERSET: _Then and Now_ (1946). Niccolo Machiavelli
learns more about his profession negotiating with Borgia. Time out
for dalliance and teaching a novice.
MEREDITH, GEORGE: _Beauchamp’s Career_ (1876). A fiery young
radical’s political excursions end in family disruption, failure,
and death. More portraits of types.
ORWELL, GEORGE: _1984_ (1949). Chilling world of the future in
which the regime can control past and present, literally make two
and two equal five for its slaves.
SPRING, HOWARD: _Fame Is the Spur_ (1940). Over sixty years of
British politics with emphasis on the rise of the Labor Party and
the kinds of men who made it.
TROLLOPE, ANTHONY: _Phineas Finn_ (1869). The education of a young
Liberal in Commons. Disraeli v. Gladstone under other names.
Phineas’s conscience politically expensive.
----: _Phineas Redux_ (1874). More of the same with a murder trial
added.
----: _The Prime Minister_ (1876). The three-year tenure of the
Duke of Omnium’s coalition. The Duke, like Phineas, now infected by
the virus of disillusionment.
WARD, MRS. HUMPHREY: _Marcella_ (1894). Liberals v. Conservatives
as the scales drop from Venturist Marcella’s eyes leading her from
bad Wharton to good Raeburn.
WELLS, H. G.: _The New Machiavelli_ (1910). An illicit affair
destroys Dick Remington as Parnell had been destroyed. Early 20th
century political currents.
ITALIAN NOVELS
MORAVIA, ALBERTO: _The Conformist_ (1951). Marcello Clerici’s
attempt to escape abnormality leads him to a career in the Fascist
secret police and political murder.
----: _The Fancy Dress Party_ (1952). Political and amorous
intrigue involving a South American dictator, his secret police,
and revolutionaries. Ends in murder.
SILONE, IGNAZIO: _Fontamara_ (1934). Growing political awareness
and resistance to Fascism destroy a poor village. Peasants v.
landowners and the regime. An appeal.
----: _Bread and Wine_ (1937). A revolutionary torn between
Communism and religion. Pietro Spina seeks the best of the two
while underground from the Fascists.
----: _A Handful of Blackberries_ (1953). Rocco de Donatis’
post-war break with Communism, his survival of its attack, and his
re-entry into pro-peasant activity.
TADDEI, EZIO: _The Pine Tree and the Mole_ (1945). The top and
bottom strata of Livorno society as Fascism uses the underworld to
aid in its rise to power.
FRENCH NOVELS
MALRAUX, ANDRÉ: _Man’s Fate_ (1934). Attempted Communist coup in
Shanghai in 1927.
SARTRE, JEAN-PAUL: _The Reprieve_ (1945). Many strata of French
society during the ten weeks ending with Munich agreement. Impact
on them and other Europeans.
STENDHAL, MARIE-HENRI: _The Charterhouse of Parma_ (1839). Careers
of Fabrizio del Dongo, his aunt and her lover, Minister to Prince
of Parma in and after Napoleonic era.
GERMAN NOVELS
KAUFMAN, RICHARD: _Heaven Pays No Dividends_ (1951). The rise
and fall of Hitler’s Reich seen through the eyes of a German
reluctantly drawn into Nazism.
KOESTLER, ARTHUR: _Darkness at Noon_ (1941). Superb account of the
destruction of one of the Bolshevik old guard, with penetrating
analysis of his life and conflicts.
----: _The Age of Longing_ (1951). Disillusioned Europeans under
Russia’s threatening shadow await atomic destruction through
conflict of East and West.
RUSSIAN NOVELS
DOSTOYEVSKY, FYODOR: _The Possessed_ (1872). Deranged
revolutionaries bring destruction and death to a provincial city in
a book meant to show the danger they represent.
TURGENEV, IVAN: _Fathers and Sons_ (1862). Two generations
separated by ideas and ideologies. Nihilist prototype dies
unyielding as his pupil accepts the old order.
SOUTH AFRICAN NOVELS
PATON, ALAN: _Cry, The Beloved Country_ (1948). A poignant double
tragedy arising out of political, economic, and social repression
of the Black population by Whites.
----: _Too Late the Phalarope_ (1953). The personal tragedy of
a hero destroyed by lack of understanding and repressive racial
legislation for white supremacy.
SUGGESTED READING
CROSSMAN, RICHARD (ed.): _The God That Failed_ (1950). Writers
Arthur Koestler, Ignazio Silone, Richard Wright, André Gide, Louis
Fischer, and Stephen Spender discuss the events in their lives
which led them to Communism and the factors which caused them to
break with it. An extremely valuable book.
*** End of this LibraryBlog Digital Book "The political novel" ***
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