chapter six
The Novelist as Analyst of Individual Political Behavior
Repulsed by his party in his attempt to return to politics after the first World War, Edward Wilcher, in To Be a Pilgrim, turns to writing. He tells his brother:
No one has written a real political novel—giving the real feel of politics. The French try to be funny or clever, and the English are too moral and abstract. You don’t get the sense of real politics, of people feeling the way: of moles digging frantically about to dodge some unknown noise overhead; of worms all diving down simultaneously because of some change in the weather; or rising up gaily again because some scientific gardener has spread the right poison mixture; you don’t get the sense of limitation and confusion, of walking on a slack wire over an unseen gulf by a succession of lightning flashes. Then the ambitious side is always done so badly. Plenty of men in politics have no political ambition; they want to defend something, to get some reform—it’s as simple as that. But even then they are simple people, too, and it is the simple men who complicate the situation. Yes, a real political novel would be worth doing. I should like to do for politics what Tolstoy has done for war—show what a muddle and confusion it is, and that it must always be a muddle and confusion where good men are wasted and destroyed simply by luck as by a chance bullet.
Perhaps Edward’s insight into this aspect of politics has been sharpened by the fact that, despite his immediate denial, he has been hit by just such a bullet himself. But the impact must have been so great that it sent him into a state of shock which made him unable to see that the novel had done just what he said it hadn’t. The muddle and confusion are there, and so are the men who rise above it as well as those who are sucked under and lost.
Motivation
It is hard to draw the line between individual and group political behavior. A man may be a mirror or conductor of political forces as well as a discrete individual. His motivation is perhaps the most individual aspect of his political experience. Most of the leading characters in these political novels are strongly motivated. In only a few cases, such as that of Willis Markham in Revelry, does the individual drift into politics. The ones who, in Wilcher’s words, “want to defend something, to get some reform,” are very common. The “something” that Robert Jordan wants to defend is liberty in Spain, so that “there should be no more danger and so that the country should be a good place to live in.” Lanny Budd feels exaltation that in his role of Presidential Agent he is helping to defend democracy. The reform that brings Millard Carroll to Washington is expressed in the aims of the New Deal, and a similar response on a more emotional level is made by Glenn Spotswood. Passing the shacks of the Mexican workers they have tried to help, he exclaims, “By God, Jed, we’ve got to do something to stop this kind of thing.”
A powerful motivating force which operates on a less conscious level derives from a man’s being a bastard. Hamer Shawcross in Fame Is the Spur, like Hyacinth Robinson in The Princess Casamassima, is illegitimate. Both men are raised by people who try to give them the emotional security of which their birth deprives them, but their attempts to change the society into which they were born seem in part due to the feeling that they are among its second-class citizens. Razumov in Under Western Eyes has been raised, as far as the reader knows, without any family life at all. Yet he is motivated in exactly the opposite direction from Shawcross and Robinson. His assumption of a counter-revolutionary role is a direct result of his feeling that his nation and its existing social fabric are all he has. He tells the well-born revolutionary Haldin:
I have no domestic tradition. I have nothing to think against. My tradition is historical. What have I to look back to but that national past from which you gentlemen want to wrench away your future?... You come from your province, but all this land is mine—or I have nothing.
Generations later, another Russian reacts the same way under the new regime. Feyda Nikitin in The Age of Longing has been orphaned by childbirth and a counter-revolutionary firing squad. The last message from his father’s eyes was one of “unshakable faith in the Great Change, and of a childlike belief in the marvels and happiness which it would bring.” This was enough to start Feyda on a career whose apex is the listing of Frenchmen to be liquidated after Russian conquest.
The character of Feyda serves to bridge the gap between men like Shawcross, Robinson, and Razumov and those who are motivated by a similar but much more powerful force—spiritual bastardy. One of these is the most demoniac of all Dostoyevsky’s possessed, Pyotr Verhovensky. He publicly ridicules his father: “the man’s only seen me twice in his life and then by accident.” It would be easy to make a case basing Pyotr’s anarchistic politics upon a partial transference of his resentment of parental rejection from old Stepan, his father, to Russia, his fatherland. Tony Maggiore, the hero-villain of Caesar’s Angel, is called “the terrible child—the child who had never known childhood.” Canon Borda’s analysis of Fabrizio del Dongo’s violent behavior is also based upon childhood experiences: “He is a younger son who feels himself wronged because he is not the eldest.” There are also characters like Joe Yerkes in The Grand Design who set out to change a society in which they feel at a social and economic disadvantage. The houseboy and then protégé of a professor, Yerkes is eventually led, chiefly by his feelings of inferiority and insecurity, to join the Communist Party and to work at organizing auto workers. These activities are a means, though never acknowledged, through which he can try to change the existing society into one in which he will enjoy a higher status and more prestige. In The Secret Agent the Professor’s failure in a series of jobs had turned him into a revolutionary determined to destroy the society which had rejected him. Jim Nolan had fought “the system” as a lone, dispirited antagonist. The example of cell-mates had finally channeled this antagonism into Communism, because “the hopelessness wasn’t in them.... There was conviction that sooner or later they would win their way out of the system they hated.” Some few individuals, like Disraeli’s exemplary young men, enter politics out of a sense of noblesse oblige. But more enter from a feeling of protest. Don Paolo’s reflections in Bread and Wine emphasize the emotional nature of this motivation in revolutionaries:
He had once asked many militant members of his party what had led them to Marxism, and nearly all of them had confessed that their original impulse, as in his case, had been moral condemnation of existing society. He had read the biographies of many revolutionaries, and he had never yet discovered anyone who had become a revolutionary out of scientific conviction or economic calculation.
The pangs of unrequited love are partially responsible for Peter Stirling’s dedication to success in politics in The Honorable Peter Stirling, just as Frances Motherwell’s rejection by Vic Herres, in The Troubled Air, causes her to denounce the Communist movement to which he is devoted. Other motivating forces are just as conventional. Such dissimilar characters as Fabrizio del Dongo in The Charterhouse of Parma and Jethro Bass in Coniston are influenced by the career of Napoleon. The will to power as a basic drive is more clearly put by Old Gisors in Man’s Fate: “every man dreams of being god.” Mary McCarthy in The Oasis (1949) labels Will Taub’s motivation as basically this when she says that “dreams of power and mastery, far more than its fraternal aspect, were what had attracted him to communism....” In some cases, like those of Silone’s heroes, the motivation is quite complex. Don Nicola, in A Handful of Blackberries, says that Rocco de Donatis “was the object of the clearest call from God that I have ever witnessed.” Yet he had become a Communist and left the Church like Pietro Spina in Bread and Wine “because of the profound disgust with which he reacted to the abyss which he perceived between its practical actions and the words it preached.” Even Spina’s name—literally “rock-thorn”—is symbolic of the conflict between these forces within him. The carpenter, merchant, clergyman, or teacher may drift into his vocation through family pressure or pursuit of the line of least resistance. Almost always the politician enters his because of a powerful driving force which is just as likely to be subconscious as conscious.
Moral Problems and Changing Values
Another characteristic of the politician in the novel is the often-met change in values. Basic to this process may be the frequency with which he encounters moral problems. Some may be like Senator Ratcliffe in Democracy, whose “weakness ... lay in his blind ignorance of morals.” But usually a choice must be made between that which is right and that which is profitable. Sometimes it is as clear-cut as whether or not DeForest’s John Vane should participate in the Great Subfluvial Tunnel Road (a satire on the Crédit Mobilier) which is to run under the Mississippi and unite Lake Superior and the Gulf of Mexico. Often the politician must decide if he will check his conscience in the cloakroom while he votes on a small issue in order to keep his party in power to attain larger ends. Trollope’s heroes usually make the difficult but morally right decision, but few applaud them. When Phineas Finn votes for the Irish Reform Bill, Lord Tulla declares, “Very dirty conduct I think it was.... After being put in for the borough twice, almost free of expense, it was very dirty.”
A symptom of changing values is the rejection of the constituency for the capitol. Even the Duke of Omnium begins to abandon the idea of retirement because “the poison of place and power and dignity had got into his blood.” The career of Bradley Talcott in A Spoil of Office is a classic example. He thinks of throwing up his political life until his renomination is threatened. Then he finds that his office is the breath of life in his nostrils. Jerome Garwood’s comment on returning to Washington from campaigning in The 13th District is that “it’s worth all a fellow has to go through out in that beastly mud hole to be back here where one can really live.” This pattern is bound up, of course, with the problem of conformity. In order to retain the prize, the politician must pay its price. Hamer Shawcross puts the best possible interpretation upon his own behavior when Pen Muff asks him why more can’t be done for the Welsh miners. He replies that they will do as much as they can without running the risk of being turned out of office:
I admit ... that it’s a matter of getting the most out of the second best. If all things were working for the best—why, there’d be no need of politics at all, Pen. I suppose the very word means not what we want but what is expedient.
The ultimate change in values, of course, is the sellout such as that of which Shawcross and Nimmo are accused. There are cases too in which the change takes the form not of deterioration but regeneration. Most of these are found in vintage American novels, however, in which the love of a good woman does the trick. Harvey Sayler, Jethro Bass, and Willis Markham all reject the spoils of unsavory careers and don penitential garments under this influence. The European treatment is much more subtle. In his cell, Rubashov finds that his interior monologues are really dialogues, “that there was a thoroughly tangible component in this first person singular, which had remained silent through all these years and now had started to speak.”
The Successful Politician
The individual who emerges most clearly from these novels is the successful politician. One can even draw a complete profile of his characteristics. And this composite illuminates not only the primary subject, but also his counterpart. In the interplay between them one sees the essence of that critical phenomenon, the leader-follower relationship. In The Prime Minister Trollope ponders these subjects:
If one were asked in these days what gift should a Prime Minister ask first from the fairies, one would name the power of attracting personal friends. Eloquence, if it be too easy, may become almost a curse. Patriotism is suspected, and sometimes sinks almost to pedantry. A Jove-born intellect is hardly wanted, and clashes with the inferiorities. Industry is exacting. Honesty is unpractical. Truth is easily offended. Dignity will not bend. But the man who can be all things to all men, who has ever a kind word to speak, a pleasant joke to crack, who can forgive all sins, who is ever prepared for friend or foe but never very bitter to the latter, who forgets not men’s names, and is always ready with little words,—he is the man who will be supported at a crisis.... It is for him that men will struggle, and talk, and if needs be, fight, as though the very existence of the country depended on his political security.
The Duchess of Omnium’s discourse upon the tasks Omnium is unwilling to perform is much more an indictment of politics in its worst sense than this comparatively restrained analysis of Trollope’s. In much the same vein Meredith’s Stukely Culbrett declares that Nevil Beauchamp has “too strong a dose of fool’s honesty to succeed....” Hamer Shawcross’s own distillate of thirty years of political experience is a bitter brew. Dissimulation is the chief element in the formula for success. The politician must be an adept psychologist appealing not to reason and intellect but to “panic, passion, and prejudice.” Shawcross cynically adds that if these factors are not present at the critical moment, the politician must know how to create them. The lesson one learns from Chester Nimmo’s career is that the successful office holder must be as agile as a gymnast, as flexible as a contortionist, and as vigilant as a radar screen. In certain instances, the politician owes success to what he does not do rather than to what he does. The ultimate in the ossification of faculties whose exercise may be dangerous is reached by the Communists. General Golz reveals his formula for survival to Robert Jordan: “I never think at all. Why should I? I am General Sovietique. I never think. Do not try to trap me into thinking.”
Peter Stirling’s list of requirements for political success is quite different. Although he mentions physical superiority and dishonesty, his lecture sounds like a naïve version of the Boy Scout oath. He mentions bosses, but his account of the way he influences his constituents suggests Socratic dialogues in Athenian meadows rather than politics in a tenement district of downtown Manhattan. The physical characteristics which he mentions briefly are noted by other authors, however. Nick Burr is a Virginia Lincoln in appearance, while Senator Ratcliffe in Democracy, and Senator Planefield in Through One Administration, represent the portly and impressive type. Dan Lurcock’s acquisition of Willis Markham is based upon precisely these qualities: “Let him get that magnificent head into the legislature, where it would be on view, and there was nothing he might not do with it.” This case appears to exaggerate the value of physical impressiveness, but it illustrates the very real advantage which it confers upon its possessor.
The leader-follower relationship can depend in part upon just such physical factors. Bill Dominick, who rules three congressional districts in The Plum Tree, cows many of his supporters with his huge, ex-prizefighter’s body. Jack London’s Ernest Everhard represents this type with the dross transmuted to gold, for he is “a superman, a blond beast such as Nietzsche has described.” Hank Martin combines this physical vitality with an oratorical “kindlin’ power” which inspires his supporters. But his appeal is also basic in another way. His theme “Divide the Riches” has an attraction for impoverished back country people which is probably more compelling than personal magnetism. The power of Michael J. Grogan in Hot Corn Ike has a completely economic basis. From city departments and corporations he obtains the green labor tickets which entitle their bearers to jobs. For each ticket Grogan receives a vote. In All the King’s Men, Willie Stark’s concern for his people’s welfare is also expressed in direct action, but he explores psychological depths in his constituents unplumbed by other politicians. He jeers at them as “suckers,” “red-necks,” and “hicks,” then allies himself with them as one victimized by the same city politicians. Losing his job because of these city bosses, he had become “symbolically the spokesman for the tongue-tied population of honest men.” His oratory is violent and emotional, full of questions which bring thunderous crowd responses like those of a question-and-answer sermon in a revival meeting. And he buttresses this primitive relationship with tangibles: an overloaded state payroll, new highways, and a magnificent free hospital. But Willie Stark’s appeal is not limited to the unlearned. The intelligent but neurotic Jack Burden works for Willie even while he allows his critical faculties full play. Anne Stanton, a governor’s daughter, becomes Willie’s mistress. Both of these people see in Willie strength where they are weak. To Jack he is a man who lives in and for the present; to Anne he is an embodiment of strength, a man who knows precisely what he wants and is willing to pay the price to get it. Another practitioner of psychology is Councilor Mikulin in Under Western Eyes. He enlists Razumov in his service through his faculty for sensing each man’s vulnerability. “It did not matter to him what it was—vanity, despair, love, hate, greed, intelligent pride, or stupid conceit—it was all one to him as long as the man could be made to serve.”
Political Pathology: Deviates, Martyrs, and Authoritarians
This topic leads directly to a very curious set of political phenomena. It can be described as political pathology. The line between sanity and madness is just as hazy here as it is in other areas. But one can usually distinguish between one man who is intelligently dedicated to a goal and another who is a fanatic. Dostoyevsky intended that all his revolutionaries should represent very dangerous forms of madness. It is obvious that Kirillov, who believes he can become God by killing himself, is insane. The drunken brute Lebyadkin, like the vicious Pyotr, idolizes Stavrogin as a god, while Stavrogin himself is a complete masochist. Erkel is described as a fanatic who can serve a cause only through one person seen as the expression of it. Shatov recognizes their abnormality. He tells the narrator that they would be lost if Russia were suddenly transformed: “They’d have no one to hate then, no one to curse, nothing to find fault with. There’s nothing in it but an immense animal hatred for Russia which has eaten into their organism.” Even more lethal a fanatic is the terrorist Ch’en Ta Erh in Man’s Fate. He nerves himself for his first act of violence in the novel by driving a dagger point into his arm. Later, in a state of exaltation, he stabs a fragment of glass into his thigh to express to his companions the intensity he feels as he proposes that they should throw themselves with their bombs beneath Chiang Kai-shek’s car. Ch’en develops an almost mystical attraction toward death which he finally satisfies by shooting himself when the attempt on Chiang’s life fails. His opposite number is Konig, chief of Chiang’s police. Once tortured by the Communists, he declares “My dignity is to kill them.... I live ... only when I’m killing them.” Several of Conrad’s characters, notably Nikita the assassin in Under Western Eyes and the Professor in The Secret Agent, are quite as ready to kill for political reasons. Warren’s Willie Stark has a fanatical bodyguard in Sugar-Boy, a stuttering gnome of a man who combines absolute devotion to Stark with the satisfaction he gets from driving a high-powered car and using a .38 Special revolver.
But the fanatic need not engage in violence. He appears to channel his drives into actions appropriate to the political framework within which he operates. In The Troubled Air Communist Vic Herres calculatedly ruins his old friend Clement Archer. “Because he’s a fanatic,” explains Vic’s wife Nancy, “because he would sacrifice me and Johnny and young Clem and himself and anybody else if he was told it was for the cause....” The political novel also contains examples of the Communist who carries his fanaticism intact with him in his journey from the extreme Left to the far Right. Elsie McCabe and Frederick Newman knowingly perjure themselves before Senator O’Brien’s committee in Stranger Come Home. And it is clear that they have made their allegations against Whitehead with the same disregard for truth which they found useful in their years as Party members. Another of the same species as Dostoyevsky’s Erkel and Warren’s Sugar-Boy is Spring’s Jimmy Newboult. “Knighted” by Shawcross with the Peterloo sabre, he precedes him into each rally carrying it aloft. But with his scruples and acute moral sense, Jimmy represents a mid-point between the deadly Ch’en and Marion Crawford’s sugar-and-spice fanatic. Crawford explains noble John Harrington’s lack of zeal in proposing to pining Josephine Thorn in An American Politician:
He was a man, she said, who loved an unattainable, fanatic idea in the first place, and who dearly loved himself as well for his own fanaticism’s sake. He was a man in whom the heart was crushed, even annihilated, by his intellect, which he valued far too highly, and by his vanity, which he dignified into a philosophy of self-sacrifice.
In Bread and Wine Luigi Murica tells Pietro Spina, “I decided that politics was grotesque—nothing but an artificial struggle between rival degenerates.” His comment may be taken literally as well as figuratively, for political and sexual pathology are combined in the cases of the deviates in these novels. There are enough to fill a textbook of abnormal psychology. The most common is the homosexual who often seeks to achieve through political association the sense of acceptance by his fellows which he feels is denied him by his maladjustment. Such a one is Marcello Clerici in The Conformist. Moravia’s detailed treatment virtually gives a case history following a familiar pattern. Marcello’s feeling of abnormality is deepened by a childhood traumatic experience in which he barely escapes assault by a middle-aged man. Marcello marries, but he remains a latent homosexual throughout his life, feeling a frightening desire to submit when he is accosted by an old man in a situation very like the first one. He hopes to achieve conformity through marriage and membership in the Fascist Party. After paving the way for the political murder of a former teacher, he reflects that the success of the regime is needful to him psychologically. “Only in that way,” he thinks, “could what was normally considered an ordinary crime become, instead, a positive step in a necessary direction.” This maladjustment is found on many levels, from that of Communist General Ares in The Crack in the Column to post-adolescent Winthrop Strang in The Grand Design. The son of a famous author now deceased, Strang petulantly complains that he is not receiving enough attention from his dominating mother, a well-known newspaper columnist. In what appears to be an attempt to obtain this affection from other sources, he has thrown himself into Communist Party work and an affair with young Mervyn Packett, another Party member who writes for the Negro press. Lee Sarason, who succeeds Buzz Windrip as American dictator in It Can’t Happen Here, surrounds himself with strong young members of the Minute Men: “He was either angry with his young friends, and then he whipped them, or he was in a paroxysm of apology to them, and caressed their wounds.” The parallel between Sarason and Nazi Ernst Röhm is completed when he is shot late at night by another American Nazi, Colonel Dewey Haik. Several brusque and mannish women appear in these novels. Lannie Madison in Barbary Shore is a lesbian who has denied herself everything, including love, to work for the Communist Party. Having broken with it, she is now a completely disorganized personality.
One of the most complex deviates is Dostoyevsky’s Nikolay Stavrogin. Although he is capable of heterosexual relationships, he is a pervert who has corrupted a small child and caused her suicide. A sadist, he is also an admitted masochist. In marrying the feeble-minded Marya Lebyadkin he had carried out his idea of “somehow crippling my life in the most repulsive manner possible.” In the long-suppressed chapter of the novel which contains his confession to Bishop Tihon, Stavrogin hears the Bishop tell him: “You are possessed by a desire for martyrdom....” But the “terrible undisguised need of punishment” is emotionally complicated because this compulsion is a “need of the cross in a man who doesn’t believe in the cross—” Stavrogin plays an essentially passive political role since he allows himself to be used by Pyotr. His case represents, however, a combining of abnormalities usually found singly.
One aspect of Stavrogin’s character also appears in men who do not deviate from the norm. Nick Burr in The Voice of the People looks like Lincoln in his towering stature and his “good, strong kind of ugliness.” He prepares himself for his martyrdom by opposing powerful forces in his state, and finally meets it by attempting to halt a lynching. To some, this self-sacrifice carries an almost religious ecstasy. In Moravia’s The Fancy Dress Party Saverio has been ordered to assassinate the dictator of the South American country of Bolivar. He thinks that he now knows what the early Christians must have felt, “the sweet, deep pleasure of sacrificing themselves for the greater good of humanity....” Shaw’s Clement Archer and Shirer’s Raymond Whitehead do not enter into their ordeals with the intention of becoming martyrs. When they are deprived of their primary sources of livelihood, however, this is precisely what they become. In most of the novels there is an awareness of the political value of martyrs, and the Communists, particularly, excel in their manufacture.
If frequency of occurrence were used to determine whether or not a phenomenon is abnormal, perhaps the dictator would have to be classed as normal. Within political systems embodying the principles of representative government, however, he represents a disease just as surely as a group of cells which suddenly start overwhelming their neighbors. The novel displays not only fictitious tyrants, but real ones as well, from Caesar in Wilder’s The Ides of March (1948) to Koestler’s thinly disguised Stalin in Darkness at Noon. The authors usually describe how they act and what made them that way. Since The Ides of March uses the diaries and letters of several Roman citizens, the reader learns precisely what Caesar’s contemporaries thought of him and what Caesar thought of himself. In the accounts of his enemies, he is a profligate and pervert, a destroyer of liberty. His own writings reveal him as a man who is cold and self-centered but devoted to Rome and possessed of amazingly catholic and intelligent interests. Trying to free his countrymen from superstition, mythology, and barbarism, he rationalizes his dictatorship on the basis that the people will not assume the duties of self-government. He writes:
But there is no liberty save in responsibility. That I cannot rob them of because they have not got it.... The Romans have become skilled in the subtle resources for avoiding the commitment and the price of political freedom. They have become parasites upon that freedom which I gladly exercise—my willingness to arrive at a decision and sustain it—and which I am willing to share with every man who will assume its burden.
Like Caesar, most authoritarian rulers appear to believe that they are working in the best interests of their people. Most often this is a rationalization of an enormous drive to personal power, but whatever its source it is almost always a component of the totalitarian mentality. Some absolutists, like Stendhal’s Ernesto IV of Parma, make no pretense of extraordinary concern for their subjects. But the modern pattern is for the Duce, Führer, or Father of the People to associate himself with the masses, at least verbally. This is as true of state dictators such as Chuck Crawford, Hank Martin, and Willie Stark as it is of General Arango in The Fancy Dress Party. The three Americans also have in common their origins as members of the lower or lower middle class of southern whites. Each starts with a seemingly genuine desire to better the lot of his group. Their careers provide a study of the same infection which attacks the Duke of Omnium, “the poison of place and power and dignity.” And this transition from crusader to sick man gives insight into the process by which dictators are made.
Men Behind the Scenes
Another political type which is not quite pathological yet which occupies a position somewhat outside the main stream of normal political activity is that of the silent man, the one who often wields great power but remains nearly concealed from the public. He is found most often in American politics. Major Rann, boss of the Virginia Senate and opponent of Nick Burr in Ellen Glasgow’s The Voice of the People, “had never made a speech in his life, but ... he was continually speaking through the mouths of others.” Jethro Bass in Coniston is another silent man, figuratively and literally. This type carried to the extreme is Dan Lurcock in Revelry, President-maker, interstate lobbyist, and national salesman of patronage. A European variant of this type is represented by Karl Yundt in The Secret Agent. Described as “no man of action,” his function is to goad others into action. This catalytic role is performed by anti-fascist Professor Quadri in The Conformist. His specialty is proselytizing the young. Cold and detached, he often channels his converts into actions he knows will be fatal, “desperate actions that could be justified only as part of an extremely long-term plan and that, indeed, necessarily involved a cruel indifference to the value of human life.”
The Disillusioned
In The Age of Longing ex-Marxist poet Julien Dellatre asks Hydie Anderson:
Do you remember ‘The Possessed’? They were an enviable crowd of maniacs. We are the dispossessed—the dispossessed of faith; the physically or spiritually homeless. A burning fanatic is dangerous; a burnt-out fanatic is abject.
With these words he speaks for a constantly growing number of former political enthusiasts who have discovered that they had carried not a torch but a club. One is tempted to call this era the Age of Disillusionment. But this would in a sense be an error, for disillusionment is as old as politics. It is always present; only the number of cases varies. The literary list is a long one—Phineas Finn, the Duke of Omnium, Dick Remington, Hilary Vane, Harvey Sayler, Glenn Spotswood, and scores of others. Even the opportunist Shawcross is not immune. Near the end of his career he asks himself if statesmen are not actually “the true pests and cancers of human society.” He thinks that if he could have one wish granted, it would be that politicians would leave all the people alone for fifty years. “We might then have a better world,” he reflects. “We couldn’t have a worse one.”
The modern literature of disillusionment introduces a variation on this old theme. The discontent is localized to one ideology—Communism. Mary McCarthy states one of its basic causes in The Oasis when she says that Will Taub’s “disillusionment with the Movement had sprung largely from its concentration on narrowly nationalistic aims and its abandonment of an insurgent ideology.” In its original use, the term “literature of disillusionment” referred primarily to the body of work of a group of writers who had turned away from Communism. But for the purposes of this study it is just as fruitful to focus on the creations rather than their authors. The best of these novels is unquestionably Koestler’s Darkness at Noon. It is outstanding not only as a psychological portrait in depth, but also as an interpretation of an important phenomenon. Rubashov is at once an individual and a mirror of forces at work in modern international politics. His journey has taken him from exalted participation in revolution, through consolidation of its gains, to a final questioning of the worth of the whole agonizing process. But his life has been bound up so completely with the cause that even his final renunciation is tinged with haunting doubt. Lying in his cell, one of the last survivors of the old guard, he is unable to repress it:
The horror which No. 1 emanated, above all consisted in the possibility that he was in the right, and that all those whom he had killed had to admit, even with the bullet in the back of their necks, that he conceivably might be in the right.
Rubashov’s disillusionment springs from the fact that the light has gone out of the revolutionary movement, that what was to become a new paradise has become an old hell. The dictatorship of the proletariat has evolved into the tyranny of No. 1; the new man has grown into a Neanderthaler. Instead of a promised land, Rubashov has returned from his foreign assignments to find a country where factory workers are shot as saboteurs for negligence caused by fatigue. His conclusion that the regime’s error was caused by abandonment of ethical standards is central to the bouleversement he undergoes. But even despite this basic departure from Communist thought, it is important to recognize that he is still a Marxist. He even elaborates the old dialectic in prison with his “theory of the relative maturity of the masses.” His participation in his mock trial emphasizes the ambivalence he feels. One passage explains this behavior and that of some of the men to whom Koestler dedicated the novel:
The best of them kept silent to do a last service to the Party, by letting themselves be sacrificed as scapegoats—and, besides, even the best had each an Arlova on his conscience. They were too deeply entangled in their own past, caught in the web they had spun themselves, according to the laws of their own twisted ethics and twisted logic; they were all guilty, although not of those deeds of which they accused themselves. There was no way back for them. Their exit from the stage happened strictly according to the rules of their strange game. The public expected no swan-song of them. They had to act according to the textbook, and their part was the howling of wolves in the night....
Where there is freedom of choice, the disillusioned one follows one of three courses: needing an outlet for the forces which originally took him to the Party, he engages in leftist, non-Stalinist activity; ricocheting violently in the opposite direction, he aligns himself with the extreme Right; or exhausted, he sinks into a melancholy, nostalgia-tinged apathy. Rocco de Donatis throws himself into the struggle of the peasants for land. Frederick Wellman and Elsie McCabe lie with virtuosity in the service of Senator O’Brien. Lannie Madison retreats into neurosis. The causes of the disenchantment vary. Glenn Spotswood makes his break because he is interested in men as men rather than as pawns in a game. Rocco’s point of departure is the discovery of Siberian labor camps. Both of them, however, suffer somewhat the same aftereffects. There is a feeling of loss, the sensation that a platform has been knocked out from under them.
This particular reaction is best portrayed through the creative artists who appear in these novels. Julien Dellatre is one of three ex-Communists who call themselves the Three Ravens Nevermore. A scarred veteran of the Spanish Civil War, he refers to his poems, “Ode to the Cheka,” “Elegy on the Death of a Tractor,” and “The Rape of Surplus Value” as “past asininities.” His renunciation of the Movement is complete, yet his tragedy lies in the fact that he has found nothing to replace it. He has concluded that “Europe is going to the dogs,” that the reason is a turning away from God, a “loss of cosmic consciousness.” Feeling that a new religion is necessary to save twentieth-century man, he lacks a conviction which would permit him to take the final step into faith. The great passion of his life is behind him. In his own comment he has summed himself up: “a burnt-out fanatic is abject.” Another man of letters in the same novel is Leo Leontiev, “Hero of Culture and Joy of the People,” who has come from Russia to France to address an international peace rally. The death of his wife frees him to renounce the regime and find political asylum in France. Psychologically ready to take this step, “he felt as if a whole drugstore of poison were working at [his synapses]—the accumulated toxins of thirty years.” He has become a Hero of Culture by following the Party line in literature rather than his artistic conscience. Free at last, he feels that he must write something truly fine, a vindication of himself that will also be worthy of his wife, whose death he suspects may have been suicide or murder. But he is unable even to write the projected I Was a Hero of Culture for the American publisher who has given him a substantial advance. For him, as for Dellatre, the light had flickered out, and it could not be rekindled.
Some artists, like novelist Bernard Carr and poet Lester Owens in Yet Other Waters manage to rebound, to continue to work creatively. But still they bear psychological scar tissue. Even in the process of preparing to leave the Movement, Bernard Carr suggests from the floor that the Writers Congress be concluded with the singing of “The Internationale.” And he is moved as he sings. An allied phenomenon is that of the individual who is inwardly in conflict with the Party but remains with it through a fear of these consequences. When Bernard tells frustrated poet Sam Leventhal that he should leave the Party, Sam turns pale. “Bernie, the Party is my life,” he replies. “It would be spiritual death for me outside the Party.” An even more revealing answer is made by British physicist Lord Edwards. When Leontiev asks him why he stays, Edwards replies: “I told you there is nothing else. You will soon find that out yourself. Besides—once you’ve invested all your capital in a firm, you don’t withdraw it—not at our age, not after thirty years.”
The Role of Woman
When women engage in political activity in these novels they are usually cast in one of four roles: man’s guide, the reformer, the dedicated Communist, or the patriot. In the years before suffrage was extended to women, one of the few opportunities afforded them for engaging in political activity was to influence or guide a man who was politically active. Emily Harkness performs this function for Jerome Garwood in The 13th District. At the beginning of his career he is her intellectual protégé as she channels his reading and thinking. His rejection of this relationship is coupled with his political degeneration and ruin. In Hot Corn Ike Molly McMurdo counsels Mike Grogan with acuteness and insight. Since she is a procuress, she supplies very little moral guidance, but her analyses of the factors at work in the district are penetrating if not intellectual. Peter Ivanovitch, leader of the Geneva revolutionary circle in Under Western Eyes, preaches the cult of woman as well as revolution. He had been aided by a woman in making his legendary escape across Siberia. The devotion he felt toward her is also bestowed upon Madame de S——, who contributes not only inspiration but also her chateau to Peter’s activities. Fancying herself another Madame de Staël, this “Egeria of the ‘Russian Mazzini’” appears more like a witch than a prophetess. Possessed of a garishly painted, mask-like face whose outstanding features are extraordinarily brilliant eyes and obviously false teeth, she contributes to one conversation by screaming that they must “spiritualize the discontent.”
The intellectual guide of man par excellence is Ida Wilbur in A Spoil of Office. She remains stolid Bradley Talcott’s ideal and teacher even after he has attained the House of Representatives. But she is also an active field worker for the farmers. A pamphleteer and lecturer, she represents the woman reformer who enters into direct action rather than stand once removed from activity. Mrs. Ward’s Marcella acts for herself, but to a lesser degree than DeForest’s Squire Nancy Appleyard and Spring’s three feminists—Lizzie Lightowler, Anne Shawcross, and Pen Muff. Lawyer Nancy Appleyard is a ridiculous figure with her trousers and pistols, but in her feminist agitation she is a precursor of the others. These women are distinguished by conviction, perseverance, and willingness to engage in violent action under pain of brutality and imprisonment to attain their goals.
In strong contrast to Madame de S—— in Under Western Eyes is Sophia Antonovna, an influential veteran revolutionary. A striking woman with her gray-white hair and bright red blouse, she is “the true spirit of destructive revolution.” Shawcross’s daughter-in-law Alice is a direct descendant of Sophia Antonovna. Shortly after her return from Moscow, a letter is published addressed by Zinoviev to the Communists of Britain urging uprisings in the Army and Navy. Implying that Ramsay MacDonald had been pushed into treaties with Russia by Communist pressure, it helps cause the fall of his government. Noting the time of Alice’s visit and the intensity of her devotion to Communism, Shawcross suspects that she had helped Zinoviev to plan and write the letter. Dos Passos’ militant women Communists such as Jane Sparling throw themselves into Party activities almost more zealously than the men. One of the women in Yet Other Waters might be listed under political pathology as well as here. She is Alice Robertson, a nymphomaniac and frustrated novelist whose regard for her current lover does not prevent her from reporting on him to the Party.
There is no Joan of Arc in these political novels, but in Hemingway’s book one hears about the fiery La Pasionaria, and in The Age of Longing and Nostromo the actions of two women evoke mention of the name of Charlotte Corday. In Conrad’s novel Antonia Avellanos is as fierce a patriot as her father Don José, who had nearly died in inhuman captivity by dictator Guzmán Bento. Her fierce anger against General Montero, a modern Bento, is one of the forces which brings cynical dilettante Don Martin Decoud to throw himself into the struggle which leads to his death. She suggests Charlotte Corday to him, as does Hydie Anderson indirectly to Jules Commanche when she asks that Feyda Nikitin be expelled from France. But Hydie’s patriotism does not have the fire of Antonia’s. She has come to recognize Feyda’s brutality and immorality, but the immediate cause of her action is his humiliation of her which breaks off their affair. This gesture is the first positive one she has made. Up to this point she has seemed about to apply for membership in the Ravens Nevermore. Her disillusionment, like theirs, has come from rejection of a strong and disciplined system which answered all her questions and assuaged all her doubts. Her break with the Roman Catholic Church has left her quite as adrift as Dellatre or his companions. And when her gesture fails, she feels herself slipping back into the old despondency, the craving for sureness, for a set of positive values.
Although treated in lesser detail than the men (except for Hydie), these women offer the reader the same opportunity for intimate acquaintance with people who can become more real than those one meets on the street or in the office. Their reality and complexity vary with the skill of their creators, but one is able to follow their actions and thoughts more closely than those of individuals in “real life.”