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.
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.