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.