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

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COLLEGE DEPARTMENT, Doubleday & Company, Inc.,
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Doubleday Short Studies in Political Science

The Political Novel

BY JOSEPH L. BLOTNER

University of Idaho

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.

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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

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