chapter three
The Novelist as Political Historian
If Art imitates Nature, the political novel imitates History. In almost all these novels the starting point is a series of actual happenings. Filtered through the artist’s consciousness, they sometimes emerge in curious forms. But unless they are spun wholly from moonshine, like Crawford’s An American Politician, they usually bear some clearly discernible relation to the events of real life. Here again, the variety is great. Koestler’s The Age of Longing (1951) is set in Europe of the future. In his words, “it merely carries the present one step further in time—to the middle nineteen-fifties.” An apprehensive continent, listening with one ear for the mushrooming of atomic bombs, anxiously watches the United States and Russia, feeling that its fate may be decided at any moment by a single move of either of the giants. Although the time is the future, the running account of these opponents’ moves which accompanies the story is based upon Koestler’s interpretation of recent patterns in international affairs. Perhaps he is too gloomy, but this is the pattern he sees: Russia trumpets alarms at what it claims is aggression of a “Rabbit State”; an international crisis occurs and the people clutch their Geiger counters and anti-radioactivity umbrellas; the crisis is averted and tension relaxes; the Rabbit State is absorbed by Russia as the United States sends a printed protest form. At the other end of the scale is the roman à clef, represented by novels such as Gallico’s Trial by Terror and Shirer’s Stranger Come Home, in which the characters seem to be fictional counterparts of real people. The conventional disclaimer, “any resemblance to actual people ...,” is usually present, but the likeness is often too close to be explained by chance. A close parallel to the events in Gallico’s book is provided by the experiences of Robert Voegler and William Oatis. The ordeals of these two Americans were not related, but to fictionalize and interconnect them is a logical procedure for the writer building his novel around the subject of Americans falsely arrested for espionage by Russian satellites.
The political novelist may cover a short period of time or he may widen his canvas to accommodate a whole era. Stendhal’s The Charterhouse of Parma, covers three decades, beginning in 1796 with Napoleon’s entry into Milan and ending years later in the post-Napoleonic period. Howard Spring’s Fame Is the Spur extends from the hero’s birth in 1865 to the day when, heavy with honors, he participates as a peer in the coronation of King George VI. And Hamer Shawcross is a politician, so the novel deals with three quarters of a century of Britain’s political life. As selective as he wants to be, the novelist may comment upon any phase of political life. The subjects in these novels range from small-town corruption to international policy, from the rise and fall of men to the birth and death of parties.
Since the reader knows there is a good chance that he will get a deliberately subjective view of political history, there must be good reasons for spending time on novels rather than going directly to Commager, Beard, Macaulay, or Gibbon. Although a novelist may not make it as obvious as did Thackeray, he is a god whose characters are his creations. He looks into their minds and souls. He reveals their ambitions and exposes their doubts more completely than any historian can do, even equipped with the volumes of memoirs and apologias which appear periodically in literary rashes. Even if the writer does not deal with real people, as do Upton Sinclair and others, he may present a recognizable copy or a man so typical as to shed light upon a specific class of political beings. The historian may describe the Chartist riots or Borgia’s capture of Senigallia, but he cannot do it with the vividness one finds in the accounts of Disraeli and Maugham. Only rarely does a book like The French Revolution appear, and writers like Carlyle are even more rare. Then too, if the novelist is perceptive and detached, his description and analysis may be as acute as that of the historian. Disraeli’s known point of view may make the interpretation of history in Sybil suspect, but the aloofness and irony of Maugham’s Then and Now not only add to a tale that is sometimes droll, they help to give keen portraits of two very considerable men—Cesare Borgia and Niccolo Machiavelli. The novelist has at his disposal all the resources of the historian, as witness Sinclair’s use of the 3,900 pages of the Dedham trial testimony in the Sacco-Vanzetti case. But he can do more than research. He can follow his characters into Congress, into their offices, and into their beds. He can also enter into the secret places of the brain, where lie the ultimate springs of political action.
GREAT BRITAIN
The English political novels included in this study present a panorama of British history extending back to the early part of the nineteenth century. A reading of them creates a picture of gradual change, of a surprisingly orderly political evolution. Disraeli’s novels portray an England of immense social and economic differences. Although patents of nobility are being granted with increasing frequency, the society is much more static than dynamic, with extremely little individual or group mobility. It is an England of rotten boroughs, of voteless millions. The country’s political life goes on in accordance with carefully defined rules, and the players remain the same—the Whigs and Tories. The England of a hundred years later, seen in Fame Is the Spur, is a different land. The Monarchy and the Church, though changed, are still strong reference points in English life, but almost everything else has altered. The franchise is no longer the exclusive possession of the landed; suffrage has been extended to women. The old laissez faire economy has evolved into one with considerable state regulation. The Whigs have given way to the Liberals who, in turn, are about to be superseded by the Labour Party. Actually, a revolution has taken place, but it has occurred within the existing political framework.
George Eliot: The Early Nineteenth Century in the Midlands
George Eliot’s Felix Holt, the Radical was published in 1866, but it dealt with English politics in 1832. The plot, with its double identities, confused litigation, and secret paternities, is labyrinthine. But the description of English elections is sharp and vivid. Both the Whig and Radical candidates hire mobs of miners and navvies to demonstrate for them. The result is a bloody riot quelled by troops. Harold Transóme is a corrupt Radical; his foil is Holt, the honest Radical charged with a murder committed during the riot. The novel’s ending may seem sentimental and contrived, but this does not lessen the value of the book as a study from which emerges the political complexion of Laomshire in the English midlands.
Benjamin Disraeli and Anthony Trollope: Whigs v. Tories
In his effort to point up the need for a Young England party, Disraeli exposes the abuses of early nineteenth century England. In Coningsby one sees the millionaire Monmouth manipulate the twelve votes he owns in Commons to attain a dukedom. In Sybil Charles Egremont attempts to fit himself for public life by first investigating the conditions of the working class. Thus Disraeli shows to his reader the farm and factory workers and the miners who signed the National Petition of the Chartists. He follows the House of Commons’ rejection of the Petition and the great uprisings which follow. This author-politician does not simply offer his own partisan solution to his country’s ills; he also shows the specific events and general climate which elicit it.
Disraeli and Trollope have been praised at each other’s expense. Disraeli had immensely greater political experience, but Trollope was by far the better novelist. Trollope’s books are much more readable, and the student of the political novel will find just as much information in them. Of his six parliamentary novels, three make particularly profitable reading. Phineas Finn, The Irish Member (1869) chronicles the rise and fall of a young Liberal. Standing in 186- for the Borough of Loughshane in County Clare, Finn comes in with the Liberal government which succeeds that of the Tory Lord de Terrier. A member of the new cabinet is Mr. Gresham, obviously modeled after Gladstone. The leader of the Conservative opposition is Mr. Daubeny, who bears a striking resemblance to Disraeli. The Reform Bill for England carries and Finn becomes Under Secretary for the Colonies. When his conscience forbids him to conform to party policy by voting against the Reform Bill for Ireland, he resigns his office and returns to Ireland, feeling that he has ruined his career in any case. In Phineas Redux (1874) he returns to Parliament. Now Daubeny’s Tories are in, hanging tenaciously to a dwindling advantage in order to retain patronage and power as long as possible. Daubeny’s purposes are clear. Because of his parliamentary tactics, he earns from Trollope the sobriquets “the great Pyrotechnist” and “a political Cagliostro.” The culmination of the novel’s love story, with which Trollope parallels the politics, is a spectacular trial in which Finn is acquitted of murder. He is offered his old job at the Foreign Office, but once more he retires from the field. Finn reappears in The Prime Minister (1876). When Daubeny’s government goes out, neither he nor Gresham can muster enough strength to form a new one. The result is that now familiar phenomenon, a coalition government. The new Prime Minister is the Duke of Omnium, and his Secretary for Ireland is Phineas Finn. The country prospers under the coalition. But eventually signs of strain appear, and with them the resignations of two ministers. Finally, in its fourth year, the coalition founders on the County Suffrage Bill. Winning his vote of confidence by the slim margin of nine, Omnium resigns. It is left for the next government to complete the near-assimilation of the county suffrages with those of the boroughs. The two thousand-odd pages of these novels contain close likenesses of real politicians. They also describe some of the basic issues and attitudes of this era, and detail the workings of three distinctly different types of ministries.
George Meredith: The Early Radical
In their Outline-History of English Literature Otis and Needleman describe Meredith’s Beauchamp’s Career as “a political novel suggested by the candidacy of Capt. Frederick Maxse of Southampton.” Published in 1876 and spanning the years 1850-1862, the novel highlights Commander Nevil Beauchamp’s return from distinguished service in the Crimean War to run for Parliament as a fire-eating Radical. With more descriptions of canvassing and elections, the novel also contains the frequently found criticism of the press, which is almost always regarded as an organ in which truth runs a very bad second to political expediency. Before the novel ends with Beauchamp’s tragic drowning, Meredith has given the reader his record of another aspect of English political life on the local level in the mid-nineteenth century.
Mrs. Humphrey Ward: Victorian Portraits
One of the chief values of Mrs. Humphrey Ward’s Marcella (1894) in the study of English political currents is its catalog of types. The novel follows the erratic romance of Marcella Boyce and Aldous Raeburn. Grandson of Lord Maxwell, an old Tory politician, Raeburn enjoys a successful career in Commons, eventually becoming an Under Secretary in the Home Office. But the obstacle to true love is politics. Aldous is a Tory, and Marcella is a Venturist, defined as “a Socialist minus cant.” The love triangle is completely political, for Aldous’ rival Harry Wharton sits as a Liberal. He is, however, gradually drawing closer to the rising labor movement. At one point Wharton gives the complete Socialist program for the country districts. After a transitional period, he says, land and capital will be controlled by the state. The emancipation of the laborer will mean that “the disappearance of squire, State parson, and plutocrat leaves him master in his own house, the slave of no man, the equal of all.” Wharton presides at the Birmingham Labour Conference, speaking for graduated income tax and nationalization of the land. At this conference Mrs. Ward introduces the reader to the leaders of this new movement, from the moderates to the violent radicals. In a concession to the happy ending, the author has Wharton discredited for a rascal, thereafter reuniting Marcella and Aldous.
H. G. Wells: England in Transition
In The New Machiavelli (1910) H. G. Wells dealt with Dick Remington, whose career is ruined like that of Parnell by an extra-marital affair. Before his fall, Dick changes from a Liberal to a Conservative. Reminiscent of Disraeli’s novels (which he has read), he becomes a Young Imperialist of the New Tory movement. Dick’s shifting of political allegiance is not at all uncommon. This change of loyalties appears much more often in the English novel than the American, and there is no opprobrium attaching to it. Dick’s career, in which he takes his stand on such timely subjects as woman suffrage, is the story of a journey from one political faith to another. Its background is the political milieu of late Victorian and Edwardian England.
Howard Spring: Labour and the Course of Empire
Spring’s massive Fame Is the Spur (1940) records many of the major events in English national life in the seventy-five year period ending in 1940. But one of the primary formative influences in John Hamer Shawcross’ life took place forty-six years before he was born. It was the Peterloo Massacre of 1819, in which the working people gathered in Manchester to hear Orator Hunt were attacked by dragoons. This story, related by Hamer’s great uncle, first fires his imagination and then becomes part of his stock in trade. Entering politics as “Shawcross of Peterloo,” he carries the sabre which the old man had wrenched from a dragoon. One of the founders of the Labour Party, Shawcross scorns the Fabians and writes popular books on politics. In London he sees Keir Hardie take his seat as one of Labour’s first M.P.’s. Later his marriage is disrupted when his wife estranges herself from him for his opposition to her suffragist campaigns. Spring records the turbulence of these efforts—the pickets outside Parliament, the violence, the hunger strikes, and the “Cat and Mouse Act” (a convicted suffragist was placed under police surveillance so that she could be returned to jail when she appeared to have recovered from the effects of a hunger strike). Although Shawcross’ part in the World War I coalition government is considered by many a betrayal of Labour, he becomes Minister of Ways and Means when Labour comes in again in 1924. Having lost his chance to be Prime Minister, partly because of his stand in 1914, Shawcross in 1931 puts in motion the formation of the National Labour Party, intended as part of the coalition which is to be formed to take measures against the depression. This is thought to be his final betrayal of the Labour Party and cause. As a reward he is made Viscount Shawcross of Handforth in the same year. His forty-year political career is at an end.
Joyce Cary: The Edwardian Age and After
Tom Wilcher, in Joyce Cary’s To be a Pilgrim (1942), is nearing the end of a life much involved with politics. In this acute, witty, and compassionate book, Cary follows Wilcher’s attempt to keep a representative of the family in Tolbrook, its old home, and to inculcate into his niece and her little boy the religion which has been so vital a part of his own life. Through his recollections of his own experience and that of his brother Edward, Wilcher gives a vivid record of tense moments in England’s political life. He recalls the stormy days when he and Edward were pro-Boer, and the more explosive times which followed:
There are no political battles nowadays to equal the bitterness and fury of those we fought between 1900 and 1914. It is a marvel to me that there was, after all, no revolution, no civil war, even in Ireland. For months in the years 1909 and 1910, during the last great battle with the Lords, any loud noise at night, a banging door, a roll of thunder, would bring me sitting upright in bed, with sweat on my forehead and the thought, ‘The first bomb—it has come at last.’
Ten years later, in Prisoner of Grace, Cary built a novel around the career of another Labour politician, Chester Nimmo. He secures attention and injuries through his pro-Boer agitation. Shifting his attack from the government to the landlords, he finally wins a seat in Parliament in 1902, later becoming Under Secretary for Mines. He is so intensely political that when he tells his son fairy tales, the wolf in Little Red Riding Hood has “a face just like Joe Chamberlain.” The narrator, Nimmo’s unhappy wife Nina, reflects that:
I suppose nobody now can realize the effect of that “revolution” on even quite sensible men.... But the truth is that it was a real revolution. Radical leaders like Lloyd George ... really did mean to bring in a new kind of state, a “paternal state,” that took responsibility for sickness and poverty.
Like Shawcross, Nimmo stays on in the coalition cabinet of 1914, hoping to become Prime Minister at the war’s end. But he loses his seat in the general elections of 1922. At the book’s end he is, like Shawcross, a lord, but one who looks wistfully from the sidelines upon the struggle in the political arena.
THE UNITED STATES
The American political novel does not record changes as broad as those seen in the English political novel. Some of the reasons for this variance are clear. In mid-nineteenth century America, as now, there was no titled aristocracy, no state church, no narrow and restricted suffrage. Also, there was no nearby source of revolutionary political thought and action such as that which troubled James and Conrad. What is perhaps disturbing, however, is the theme most often treated. If the subject most common in the English novel is political change or evolution ameliorating injustice, the one most common in the American political novel is corruption. Nearly half the American novels considered are written around that theme. They present a history of political misrule in which one group succeeds another. After the carpetbaggers, scalawags, and Ku-Kluxers have disappeared, the bosses who rule by mortgage holdings appear. They are succeeded by the railroad interests. Utilities groups exercise power and are followed by the oil interests. In the latest phase, corrupt political power is exercised by gangsters. Domestic politics are almost always the subject of books appearing before the 1930s. From this time on, however, the novel becomes increasingly concerned with foreign ideologies and the role of the United States in world affairs.
Edgar Lee Masters: Expansion and Conflict
Edgar Lee Masters’ Children of the Market Place (1922) takes English-born James Miles from his immigration to America in 1833 to his dotage in 1900. Despite Miles’s successive activities as farmer, broker, builder, and real estate operator, his chief function is to chronicle the career of Stephen A. Douglas. The description of Douglas’ rise is paralleled by an account of the expansion of the United States. Historical personages pass across the stage—Jackson, Clay, Polk, Webster, Calhoun, and Lincoln. The great issues of the times, such as the tariff and the bank, the Oregon dispute and the annexation of Texas, contribute to the book’s atmosphere. Miles even describes the February Revolution in France, and recounts its impact upon each European country. After describing the founding of the Republican Party, he gives his eyewitness account of the Lincoln-Douglas debates. The Civil War is about to set fire to the land, but the main narrative breaks off at this point. Masters attempted to liven the book by giving Miles an octoroon half-sister who causes him to commit murder and is herself the victim of rape and persecution. But the novel’s chief value in a study of this genre is its attempt to delineate Douglas and his political philosophy against the background of formative periods in America’s history. The literary debits include a pell-mell, unconvincing style loaded with rhetorical questions and overpowering statistics.
Albion Tourgée: Slavery and Emancipation
In Uncle Tom’s Cabin Harriet Beecher Stowe gave a vivid picture of the Underground Railway through which slaves escaped to Canada. Among her characters were abolitionists who aided them and agents hired to recapture them. The historical aspects of slavery and emancipation were treated more fully, however, by Albion W. Tourgée. A Fool’s Errand (1879) tells the story of a man with the improbable name of Comfort Servosse. A lawyer and ex-Union officer like Tourgée, he had moved to the South after the war, as did the author. Referred to by Tourgée as “The Fool,” Servosse attempts the difficult task of integrating himself and his family into the life of a Southern community while supporting the rights of the Negroes. His experience, extending from 1866 until his death in the late seventies, is one of progressive disillusionment. Thorough analyses of events support the conclusions he draws. Early in the book one reads a detailed account of President Johnson’s plan for Negro suffrage and also a statement of the supplementary Howard Amendment. Having discussed the role of the secret, pro-North “Union League” in the South during the war, Tourgée goes on to detail the rise of the Ku-Klux Klan. Later he analyzes the acts of amnesty passed by some Southern states to protect from prosecution members of secret organizations such as the Klan. By 1877 the South is in political control of its land again. Its policy of suppression has succeeded. This was the fault, Tourgée tells the reader, of stupid and foolish Federal policies:
Reconstruction was never asserted as a right, at least not formally and authoritatively. Some did so affirm; but they were accounted visionaries. The act of reconstruction was excused as a necessary sequence of the failure of the attempted secession: it was never defended or promulgated as a right of the nation, even to secure its own safety.
In 1880 Tourgée published Bricks Without Straw, which spanned a short period before the war as well as that after it. The book follows the career of a Negro named Nimbus from chattel to landowner. But the novel is no more a dispenser of sweetness and light than was its predecessor. Nimbus is driven from his farm by the same forces which had made a Southern home untenable for Comfort Servosse. The romance between Northern Mollie Ainslie and Southern Hesden LeMoyne is redolent of tears, misunderstandings, and pining hearts finally united. In spite of its melodrama and other nineteenth-century trappings, the book is valuable. The purpose and function of the Freedmen’s Bureau are examined as well as the Black Codes which counterbalanced it. Tourgée also discusses at length the township system installed in the South during the Reconstruction era and its gradual destruction by totalitarian appointee government on the county level. Near the novel’s end the reader sees the pitiful plight of Nimbus’ friends victimized by the Landlord and Tenant Act which strengthened the sharecropper system and reduced many Negroes to serfdom.
John W. De Forest: Post-War Corruption
In Honest John Vane (1875) and Playing the Mischief (1876) John W. De Forest built his stories around corruption in post-war Congress. John Vane goes to Washington with a reputation for honesty. When he succumbs to his wife’s pressure for money to finance social climbing, he is more circumspect but just as greedy as his colleagues. His tempter and mentor is Darius Dorman, called by the author “Satan’s messenger” and apparently actually meant to be one, complete with smoldering sparks and the smell of sulphur. He tells Vane not to
go into the war memories and the nigger worshipping; all those sentimental dodges are played out. Go into finance. The great national questions to be attended to now are the questions of finance. Spread yourself on the tariff, the treasury, the ways and means, internal improvements, subsidy bills, and relief bills. Dive into those things, and stick there. It’s the only way to cut a figure in politics and to make politics worth your while.
The main character in Playing the Mischief is Josephine Murray, a young widow who uses her attractiveness to secure passage of a bill which awards her $60,000 compensation for a barn burned in the War of 1812. In the process of dealing with lobbyists and corrupting Senators she loses the love of Edgar Bradford, a stalwart young Congressman who has tried to dissuade her from her scheme. Rising in the House, he denounces the lobbying and bribery he sees, declaring that “Congressional legislation will soon become a synonym for corruption, not only throughout this country, but throughout the world.”
Hamlin Garland: Enter the Farmer
Set in Iowa in the 1870s, Hamlin Garland’s A Spoil of Office (1897) deals with the role of farmers’ organizations in politics. Bradley Talcott, silent and clumsy but obviously a dark horse who will pay off handsomely, enters politics because it attracts him and because he wants to better himself “for her,” as Garland insists on referring to Ida Wilbur. Before they are married in a haze of romance and comradely devotion to the farmers’ interests, they work with the Grange and the Farmers’ Alliance. Free trade, national banks, and woman’s suffrage are discussed frequently, as well as the depredations of corporations. A sentimental and somewhat superficial book which substitutes clichés and catch-phrases for exploration in depth of causes and effects, A Spoil of Office is valuable for its recital of the farmer’s early role in politics—if one can bear the surfeit of bucolic virtues and inarticulate devotion to a fair and exalted lady.
Winston Churchill and David Phillips: Bosses and Lobbies
In his “Afterword” to Coniston (1906), Winston Churchill wrote that “many people of a certain New England state will recognize Jethro Bass.” But he denied that his book was a biography and added that “Jethro Bass was typical of his Era, and it is of the era that this book attempts to treat.” Beginning his story shortly after Andrew Jackson had entered the White House, Churchill traces Bass’s subsequent control of Coniston, Truro County, and then of the entire state (probably New Hampshire). His original lever is a sheaf of mortgages. Through this power over his mortgagers, he places his men (also mortgage holders) in office and builds his machine. By 1866 Bass has gained control of the state, which he runs from his room in the Pelican Hotel in the capital. He has transferred his devotion from his dead sweetheart, Cynthia Ware, to her child, Cynthia Wetherell. His chief source of income is the railroad lobby, which pays handsomely for the legislation it purchases through the state legislature from him.
When Cynthia leaves him on learning his political methods, the saddened Bass begins to let his power slip away. The industrial and railroad interests start to combine while the Harwich bank stands by with mortgage money to help destroy his control. But Bass returns to fight one more battle when magnate Isaac Worthington has Cynthia dismissed from her school-teaching job and disinherits his son Bob for wanting to marry her. Mustering his power in the legislature and showering Worthington with adverse decisions from supreme court judges he has made, Bass blocks Worthington’s railroad consolidation bill. After compelling him to consent to the marriage and write conciliatory letters to the lovers, Bass lets the bill go through.
In Mr. Crewe’s Career (1908), set twenty years later, Churchill described the power shift Bass had foreseen. The legislature is now owned by Augustus Flint, Worthington’s former “seneschal” who controls the Northeastern Railroad. His “captain-general” who rules from Bass’s old room in the Pelican is railroad counsel Hilary Vane. The star-crossed lovers in this novel are Victoria Flint and Austen Vane. Austen fights the railroads despite his father and foresees the day when a new generation, willing to assume its political responsibilities, will turn out the railroad group. After a quarrel, Hilary leaves Flint but agrees to stay on for the gubernatorial nomination battle. As Flint watches Vane stalk from his study he sees “the end of an era of fraud, of self-deception, of conditions that violated every sacred principle of free government which men had shed blood to obtain.” Out of loyalty to his father, Austen refuses to let his name go before the convention, but he says that it does not matter, for railroad power is doomed. The book closes with a purple passage in which Austen and Victoria tell their love to each other and watch the sunset over the river.
Harvey Sayler relates his rise to boss of the Republican Party in David Graham Phillips’ The Plum Tree (1905). His springboard is a combine, financed by a dozen companies forming the Power Trust in his own mid-western state, which will establish its own control over the state legislature rather than dealing through middlemen such as Bill Dominick, brutal saloonkeeper and politician. By placing his own men in key positions and corporation-control statutes on the state books, Sayler makes the combine completely his own. After using this combination to ruin a rebellious “robber baron,” Sayler’s rule is unquestioned. He becomes a president-maker, later allowing his creature to return to political obscurity as the price for revolt against his authority. A penitent widower at the book’s end, he is accepted by his scrupulous childhood sweetheart.
Jack London: Marxism v. Fascism, Early Phase
Jack London’s The Iron Heel (1908) is unique for three reasons. It is one of the first relatively modern American novels which preaches Marxism, warns against Fascism, and is set in the future. Set in the twenty-seventh century, four hundred years after the Brotherhood of Man had overthrown the three-century-old Oligarchy, the novel is the annotated manuscript of Avis Everhard. The wife of Socialist leader Ernest Everhard, she is executed with him after the failure of the Second Revolt, which appears to have occurred sometime after 1918. A revolutionary Socialist, London attacked the capitalistic system, making its corporations the founders of the ruthless and repressive Oligarchy. London produces quotations from Calhoun, Lincoln, and Theodore Roosevelt warning against the domination of corporations. He describes the police and strike-breaking functions of the Pinkertons in their service, specifically names eleven industrial groups said to dominate the United States in 1907, and chronicles the efforts of the labor movements for better working conditions. Sometimes maudlin and at other times vituperative, London nevertheless gives a frightening vision of a totalitarian state such as that which later became the actuality described in Silone’s novels of Italy under Mussolini. London anticipates other novels of this type even in particulars, as in the case of his “people of the abyss,” who are purposely degraded and brutalized quite as much as Orwell’s Proles.
James L. Ford, Samuel H. Adams, and Upton Sinclair: Oil Men and Anarchists
James L. Ford’s Hot Corn Ike (1923) deals with political corruption in New York City, at the same time harking back through one of its characters to the Know-Nothing Party and the assassination of Bill Poole. In 1926 Samuel Hopkins Adams’ Revelry moved on to corruption on the national scene. The novel is a roman à clef whose characters have a one-for-one correspondence to the real ones in Sinclair’s Oil! Willis Markham is Warren Harding; Dan Lurcock is Barney Brockway; Anderson Gandy is Senator Crisby. If the reader likes, he can read the latter as a key to the former. Sinclair inundates the reader with a detailed account of the corruption of the Harding era and highlights of the labor movement. He treats the impact of the Russian Revolution upon America and the political implications of American troops fighting the Bolsheviks in Siberia. Following the activities of the I.W.W., he describes the resistance to them which included such measures as California’s Criminal Syndicalism Act. This big book also treats, with the solidity Masters probably meant to achieve, an equally turbulent era in American national development. In Boston Sinclair used even more documentation to relate what he saw as the struggle between capital and labor. Through Bartolomeo Vanzetti’s active career and subsequent struggle for life, the reader meets many of the militant groups in the labor movement in America during the second and third decades of this century. The I.W.W. appears again with anarcho-syndicalists, and anarchists. Sinclair even distinguishes the communisti anarchici from the anarchico individualista. Although the book’s literary merits are submerged by the pamphleteering and passion, it is worth reading for the slice of faintly fictionalized American political history which it presents.
John Dos Passos and James T. Farrell: Communist Infiltration
Like Steinbeck’s In Dubious Battle, Dos Passos’ Adventures of a Young Man deals with Communist infiltration of the American labor movement in the thirties. Giving the reader background material on the militant role of the I.W.W., both novels follow Communist labor organizers into the field among migrant agricultural workers, miners, and industrial workers. Through their characters the novelists reveal not only the immediate goals of the organizers in terms of wages and working conditions, but also the place of these struggles in the plan for a socialistic society. Dos Passos goes even farther in showing the international aspect of these efforts—the sensitivity to the Moscow-formed party line, the submergence of local issues in terms of the overall revolutionary policy.
In 1952 James T. Farrell published a novel which also dealt with Communism in the mid-thirties. It was Yet Other Waters, the story of Bernard Carr’s attraction to Marxism and his subsequent break with it. This sometimes turgid book centers around the relation of the writer to the Communist movement. Many of the phenomena of the period are there: the magazines purveying a Marxist interpretation of literature, the writers’ councils and congresses, the attempts to generate a party literature. Never a member of the Party, Carr is torn between an attraction to its stated aims and repulsion at its rigid control of thought and art. He joins picket lines, reads a paper at a Congress, and then sees the Communists turn a Socialist meeting into a riot. When he breaks with his party friends, he is given “the treatment.” He is vilified in the left wing papers and reviews as party hacks make a concerted attempt to destroy his literary reputation. (And, of course, this attempted destruction of his means of livelihood is the same method used by the extreme Right to punish political divergency in The Troubled Air and Stranger Come Home.) Unfortunately, the charge that Farrell has a tin ear in writing dialogue is true. This long book has a considerable cumulative effect, but one pays for it by wading through many slow-moving passages. On the whole, though, it is a convincing portrait in depth, valuable also for its retroactive anticipation of the so-called “Literature of Disillusionment” which was to come from such writers as Silone and Koestler.
Like Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls, Dos Passos’ Adventures of a Young Man had in its later sections described the fight against Fascism in the Spanish Civil War. Both novels recorded the infiltration of the Loyalist forces by the Communists and the supremacy which they achieved in many sectors. In his next book, Number One, Dos Passos turned his attention to a source of growing concern to many Americans: dictatorship on the state level as exemplified by the Long machine in Louisiana. Two other novels, Adria Locke Langley’s A Lion Is in the Streets (1945) and Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men (1946), are similar to it, although the quality of the writing varies greatly. Dos Passos’s style is characteristically dispassionate and panoramic. Warren’s book, despite devices smacking of melodrama, has sweep and a highly evocative poetic prose. Langley’s novel is full of worn devices: the faithful mammy with the corn-pone accent, the deathbed message, hidden documents, and a shadowy avenger. But all three books have their primary historical source in the career of Huey Long or the forces in American political life which he typified.
Upton Sinclair and John Dos Passos: Global War and Politics
In Presidential Agent (1945), as in the rest of the voluminous Lanny Budd series, Upton Sinclair mixed imaginary characters with real ones, and fictitious events with those from last year’s newspapers. In this novel (for which any other of the series might be substituted for the present purpose), Lanny moves among the great ones of the world as their intimate and confidant. As Presidential Agent 103 with the code name Zaharoff, he sends his reports directly to President Roosevelt. Using his entree as an art expert, he further ingratiates himself into the confidence of the leading Nazis by becoming Hitler’s Kunstsachverständiger. In this role he goes to Austria ostensibly to purchase paintings for Hitler but actually to gauge Austria’s mood and its ripeness for anschluss with Germany. The incredible Lanny breaks into an SS dungeon, Indian-wrestles with Rudolph Hess, and briefs everyone about everyone else, from Lord Runciman to Kurt Schuschnigg. He also finds time to outline Roosevelt’s Chicago “quarantine” speech. All is revealed to him, from the Cagoulard conspiracy in France to the temper of the Cliveden set in England. The pages of this long novel are jammed with events and people who made news on three continents immediately before and after Munich. A journalistic, omniscient book, Presidential Agent is loaded with slang, clichés, and gauche conversation and narration. But it is an outstanding example of the novel which records current political history.
Dos Passos’s Grand Design pulls together the threads of several current themes. In this one book, the reader finds a continuation of earlier material about Communism in America, the rising labor movement, and new liberalism in government. The transition is then made to World War II, America’s world responsibilities, growing recognition of the Communist threat, and American obligations in the post-war world. The novel’s characters work out their individual destinies against a background of New Deal reforms and international events leading to war. But there is no arbitrary interlarding of the two. Dos Passos ably manipulates these two types of material. He weaves them together into one fabric so that they combine into a meaningful pattern which sets off individual action against group action. The NRA, the WPB, the fall of the Low Countries, the agitation for a second front—all of them are there. But in this artistic fusion the lives of Millard Carroll, Paul Graves, and Georgia Washburn remain individual, retaining their identity and meaning.
Post-War Directions
In the post-war years, the American political novel seems to have gone not in one direction but in three. The first is toward concern for America’s world role as seen in Grand Design. The second returns to the theme of corruption. The third leads to an exploration of domestic dangers to traditional American freedoms. Weller’s The Crack in the Column pursues the international theme, indirectly indicating, upon the basis of lessons learned in Greece, the program which has resulted in the building of American air bases from Spain to Yugoslavia. Weller’s book is also valuable as a political history of wartime and post-war Greece. Besides the working of the wartime EAM front, the novel describes the pattern of planned Communist expansion and Western moves made to counteract it. Gallico’s Trial by Terror, besides being an instrument for criticism of the foreign policy which gave no protection to American citizens jailed and tortured behind the Iron Curtain, also records one tactic of the cold war deliberately intended to ruin American prestige in Europe.
Three recent novels treat corruption on the local level. They are Charles Francis Coe’s Ashes (1952), Mary Anne Amsbary’s Caesar’s Angel (1952), and William Manchester’s The City of Anger (1953). Although the theme is old, some of the actors are new. The lobbies and trusts have been replaced by a more sinister operative—the gangster. And the power behind the city government is not a single gang led by a “Little Caesar.” In Ashes it is the Mafia, a transplanted Sicilian terrorist society. In Caesar’s Angel the ruler is a national syndicate. The hero of Ashes is given a short lecture on the economics of the ring:
It is no longer possible for our interests to keep all their money profitably occupied. It piles up too fast. It threatens to become visible to the Federal taxing authorities. We are constantly seeking, and finding, new areas in which to invest. So-called legitimate areas. It is foolhardy, perhaps, to pay such taxes as legitimate commerce requires, but our sums are so vast that our interests feel that they should be converted into capital assets.
The scale of corruption in Manchester’s book is more modest, for there the rotten façade has been undermined by a local numbers racket rather than a national group. The bought politicians are clearly drawn, as are the agents who subvert them. Once again we are dealing with fiction, but we need only turn to the findings of state and federal commissions of inquiry to see the bases in fact. The best of these rather ordinary novels is The City of Anger. The Freudian critic will be interested in Manchester’s recurrent images of decay, corruption, and physical filth which may, however, represent an attempt to buttress stylistically his basic theme of political and moral corruption. In Caesar’s Angel Mrs. Amsbary’s criminals and police are terribly hard-boiled but not completely convincing. Although her gangsters are much better done than Mrs. Langley’s in A Lion Is in the Streets, she still sounds somehow like a very nice lady trying to be very tough. With his clipped, repetitive sentences and grim-jawed men, Coe seems to be suffering from an overdose of Hemingway. Yet at times he manages to go one hundred and eighty degrees in the opposite direction with dialogue like this from “Young Tim”: “You alone, Mums, combine such true goodness of soul with such great understanding of things!”
Concern over threats to personal freedom forms the basis for Shaw’s The Troubled Air and Shirer’s Stranger Come Home. The events and characters in these novels make it clear that they too have as their starting points the contemporary history which they cloak in fiction. The blacklists of Shaw’s book are as real as Shirer’s Senator O’Brien and his Senate Committee on Security and Americanism. Shirer’s people are taken from contemporary American life. Across his stage parade General Cyrus Field Clark, a newspaper chain owner of medieval prejudices and keeper of faded ex-movie star Madeleine Marlowe; Bert Woodruff, a demented columnist; William McKinley Forbes, dictatorial tobacco tycoon; and Senator Reynolds, the committee’s representative from the Old South. The supporting roles are filled with the same accuracy. They include the professional ex-Communists and the sharp little committee counsel who puts loaded questions with ominous mentions of perjury. The commentator’s radio career is destroyed like that of his Foreign Service friend, although both are innocent men. Shirer ranges far afield, from comments upon similar periods of “hysteria” in American history to Hollywood’s refusal to film Hiawatha because his “peace efforts might be regarded as Red propaganda.” The plight of Whitehead is well imagined, but the book’s diary form is not a particularly happy choice and much of its prose is awkward. As a record of the source of some of the most spectacular domestic news of recent years, however, the novel is worth reading.
Mailer’s Barbary Shore, which is not a part of any of the three post-war trends, displays the novelist’s function as a historian in its retelling of the story of the Russian Revolution. A twenty-page account and eulogy are followed by a description of the revolution’s failure to spread and its consequent nationalization. Lovett also recounts his discipleship under Trotsky before he goes on to list the forces which created a police state instead of a promised land.
THE CONTINENT AND ELSEWHERE
Joseph Conrad: Colonial Politics and Revolution
Joseph Conrad’s Nostromo (1904) may be read as a history if one interprets it as a typical case of government-making by foreign industrial interests in late-nineteenth-century South America. With the American Holroyd as his silent partner and financial backer, British-educated Charles Gould uses the wealth of his San Tomas silver mine to finance the successful revolt of Occidental Province from the Republic of Costaguana, which is in the grip of the tyrannical Montero brothers. A good deal of actual history is injected through the reminiscences of old Giorgio Viola, who had fought under Garibaldi across South America to Italy. But it was in The Secret Agent and Under Western Eyes that Conrad recorded more memorable history. Both books give extensive accounts of revolutionary and counter-revolutionary activities. A superb artist, Conrad did not need to go to a series of actual events and people. His imaginative synthesis of the factors which produce them created, however, a true pattern of this whole complex of revolutionary activity. Besides the sensitive exploration of the characters of Razumov, Nathalia, and Victorovitch, one finds actions which characterized the movement in which they were swept up. Conrad presents the espionage and counter-espionage, the bomb plots, and the abortive revolts. Though he wrote out of revulsion at revolutionary activity, his point of view did not blind him to the miseries of Czarist Russia. With artistic integrity, he described the repressive commissions, their imprisonments, exiles, and executions. His account of the fate of Mikulin, chief of Czarist counter-espionage, makes extremely interesting reading in 1954. For Mikulin one could almost substitute Koestler’s Rubashov:
Later on, the larger world first heard of him in the very hour of his downfall, during one of those State trials which astonish and puzzle the average man who reads the newspapers by a glimpse of unsuspected intrigues. And in the stir of vaguely seen monstrosities, in that momentary, mysterious disturbance of muddy waters, Councilor Mikulin went under, dignified, with only a calm, emphatic protest of his innocence—nothing more. No disclosures damaging to a harassed autocracy, complete fidelity to the secret of the miserable arcana imperii, deposited in his patriotic breast a display of bureaucratic stoicism in a Russian official’s ineradicable, almost sublime contempt for truth; stoicism of silence understood only by very few of the initiated, and not without a certain cynical grandeur of self-sacrifice on the part of a Sybarite. For the terribly heavy sentence turned Councilor Mikulin civilly into a corpse, and actually into something very much like a common convict.
It seems that the savage autocracy, any more than the divine democracy, does not limit its diet exclusively to the bodies of its enemies. It devours its friends and servants as well.
The Soviet State: Its Roots and Growth
It was this same Czarist Russia of which Turgenev wrote in Fathers and Sons. Examining Nihilism, he also looked at contemporary events such as the emancipation of serfs and the attempts of some landowners to improve the lot of their workers despite agrarian disturbances. Violently anti-revolutionary, Dostoyevsky replied in The Possessed to what appeared to him to be Turgenev’s advocacy of revolution. In his massive and powerful novel he showed the agitation produced by groups such as the “quintets” organized by Pyotr Verhovensky, themselves the forerunners of the Communist cells.
In Koestler’s Darkness at Noon Dostoyevsky’s nightmare becomes an even more terrible actuality. In his introductory note Koestler writes:
The characters in this book are fictitious. The historical circumstances which determined their actions are real. The life of the man N. S. Rubashov is a synthesis of the lives of a number of men who were victims of the so-called Moscow Trials. Several of them were personally known to the author. This book is dedicated to their memory.
Through flashbacks the reader sees Stalin, Lenin, and the members of the First International Congress. Not only does he witness the breaking of Rubashov for his trial, but also the series of cold and merciless acts of expediency which have eroded the soul of the old Bolshevik and left him ready for his final service to the Party. Koestler describes the agonizing process by which the confession is extracted. Gletkin, his interrogator, supplies the rationale for the whole performance and for most of the repressive acts of the state as well. In some ways, Rubashov is reminiscent of Trotsky, with his pince-nez, his record as a commander in the Revolution, his extensive service outside Russia, and his onetime rank as a top Communist. (A closer resemblance to Trotsky is that of the Party’s fictitious scapegoat in 1984. Emmanuel Goldstein, with his fuzzy hair and small goatee, is the arch counter-revolutionary, the author of The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism.) Darkness at Noon is a stark and brilliant book. Artistically satisfying, it also presents a record of a characteristic phenomenon of Russian Communism.
Marie-Henri Beyle [Stendhal]: Napoleonic Panorama
Thirty-nine years after he followed Napoleon’s armies into Italy, Stendhal published a sweeping novel of that era. The Charterhouse of Parma follows the career of Fabrizio Valserra, Marchesino del Dongo, from birth to death. It shows the influence upon his life of his beautiful, devoted, and scheming aunt, the Contessa Gina Pietranera. We meet her lover, Conte Mosca della Rovere Sorezana, Minister to Prince Ernesto IV of Parma and politician extraordinary, and become privy to the intrigues of the court. This large novel is crammed with incident—duels, assignations, affairs, prison-breaks, and even the assassination of a monarch. Besides all this, Stendhal relates some of the major events in French and Italian history during nearly thirty years. In particular, we see Napoleon’s triumphal entries into Italy in 1796, 1801, and 1815. Fabrizio even participates on the fringes of the battle of Waterloo. With each arrival and departure, Napoleon’s adherents and those of the Austrian Emperor play musical chairs for the positions of power. Even after Napoleon has been banished to Elba a struggle goes on between Liberals (or Jacobins) and the proponents of absolute monarchy. The Liberal cause is perverted in Parma by the rascally General Fabio Conti, who ironically serves as Ernesto’s political jailer, but the temper of this movement in Europe is reflected in the thoughts and actions of many of the characters. Describing authoritarian government and the struggles against it, as well as the interrelation of a corrupt church and a corrupt state, Stendhal’s classic successfully fuses the lives of his people with the times in which they lived.
André Malraux: Comintern v. Kuomintang
Nearly a hundred years later André Malraux wrote of a time of political chaos in Man’s Fate. But the span of his novel was four months rather than thirty years. Malraux gives a detailed account of Chiang Kai-shek’s military victory of 1927 in Shanghai and his subsequent crushing of the Chinese Communist forces which fought him. Not only does he examine the roles of the immediate participants—the White Guards, the governmental army, the “Reds” and “Blues” of the Kuomintang—but also the intervention of outside forces as well—the Russian Communists, the Shanghai bankers, the French Chamber of Commerce, and the Franco-Asiatic Consortium. Malraux explores both the military and economic aspects of the struggle. Kyo Gisors feels that triumph here will mean “the U.S.S.R. increased to six hundred million men.” Ferral, head of the Chamber and the Consortium, realizes that it will also mean the end of his group’s commercial penetration of the Yangtze basin. Man’s Fate may be read for these insights into the uprising of 1927 and also for background on the formulation of the Communist decision which kept the armies of Mao Tse-tung, Chu Teh, and others within the Kuomintang until they gained enough strength to defeat it.
Jean-Paul Sartre: The Shadow of Munich
Jean-Paul Sartre’s technique in The Reprieve (1947) may remind one of a photographer whose camera mechanism has gone awry. What he is trying to do is clear, but it does not quite come off. Covering the week of September 23-30, 1938, the novel is kaleidoscopic. Using more than nine distinct couples or groups, Sartre jumps from the activities of one to another with no transition. The scene may change from sentence to sentence or even within a sentence. He obviously does this to portray events which are happening simultaneously. He also uses this technique, apparently, to give some sense of the chaos that reigned during the week when Europe was on the verge of war. To show the impact of these events upon France, he has selected his people from many strata of French society. Interspersed between all these semi-fragmented stories and incidents are dialogues between the politicians: Hitler and his aides, Daladier and Bonnet, Chamberlain and Halifax, Sir Nevile Henderson and Sir Horace Wilson. Through its characters the novel ranges over Europe from England to the Sudetenland, finally arriving at Munich. The book’s last two paragraphs serve as an example of this technique which has a cumulative effect but which can be extremely troublesome to a reader accustomed to conventional narration. Daladier’s plane lands at Le Bourget as Milan Hlinka, a loyal Sudeten Czech, hears of his country’s dismemberment:
A vast clamor greeted [Daladier], the crowd surged through the cordon of police and swept the barriers away; Milan drank and said with a laugh: “To France! To England! To our glorious allies!” Then he flung the glass against the wall; they shouted: “Hurrah for France! Hurrah for England! Hurrah for peace!” They were carrying flags and flowers. Daladier stood on the top step and looked at them dumbfounded. Then he turned to Leger and said between his teeth:
“The God-damned fools!”
Fascism through Italian Eyes
Collectively, the novels of Ezio Taddei, Alberto Moravia, and Ignazio Silone present a history of Italy during the years that saw Mussolini’s rise, reign, and ruin. Taddei’s The Pine Tree and the Mole (1945) is set in Livorno in 1919. On one social level the novel follows the career of Michele Pellizari, whose political odyssey leads him from the Italian Socialist Party to the Fascist Party, and eventually to a return to the land of his peasant people. On another level the novel relates the rise of Rubachiuchi from jailbird to Fascist agent provocateur and party official. There are many long passages throughout the book in which Taddei drops his characters to go directly to a recital of the events which led to the triumph of the Fascists. He describes the return of war veterans filled with unrest and plagued with unemployment. He records the failure of the Socialists as the Fascists deliberately fill their Black Shirt squads with convicted criminals. He sets down the workers’ capture of the factories and finally the Fascist march on Rome.
In The Conformist (1951) Alberto Moravia is more concerned with a psychological portrait of Marcello Clerici than he is with the description of the period. But in analyzing the trauma-inspired desire for conformity which led to his job in Mussolini’s secret police, Moravia tells a good deal about the political climate of Italy of yesterday—from the palmy days of the Ethiopian campaign to the time of the retribution which leaves Marcello and his family dead by the roadside from the bullets of a strafing Allied plane.
Three of Ignazio Silone’s powerful novels, Fontamara, Bread and Wine, and A Handful of Blackberries, deal with Italian political history from the middle thirties to the years immediately following World War II. Writing from exile when the Fascists were in power, Silone consistently dealt with the repression of the Italian peasant. Although he always focuses on small places such as Fontamara, Pietrasecca, and San Luca, his characters are in a sense generic, representing the non-Fascists who want only enough bread and wine to live life decently with a little comfort and security. Silone describes the regimentation of Italian life in the city as well as the village. He also shows, as does Koestler in Darkness at Noon, the destruction of the Communist Party after the rise to power of a dictatorship of the Right. A Handful of Blackberries has as its background the resurgence of the Italian Communist Party after the fall of Mussolini. But Silone preserves a continuity with his earlier books by a continuing account of the struggle of the peasants against the landed families. In this book the Tarocchi family is the equivalent of Prince Torlonia in Fontamara. Fascism has been crushed, but the great landowner is still the force which the peasant must fight to keep his small plot.
Alan Paton: The Trek of the Boers
Alan Paton’s Cry, the Beloved Country and Too Late the Phalarope detail the bases of South Africa’s explosive contemporary political life. The anti-Negro legislation, the segregation, the police control of the native peoples are all set forth. Paton’s moving novels record the individual tragedies which transpire in this climate of tears and violence. They also show their historical antecedents. The red flashes which Pieter Van Vlaanderen wore on his shoulders during the war meant that he would fight anywhere in Africa. To some this made him
a Smuts man, a traitor to the language and struggle of the Afrikaner people, and a lickspittle of the British Empire and the English King, fighting in an English war that no true Afrikaner would take part in.
Here is a historical fact that illustrates the division between the peoples of South Africa. Another is the Immorality Act of 1927, which typifies another great source of conflict and causes Pieter’s ruin.
Richard Kaufmann: The Third Reich
Richard Kaufmann’s Heaven Pays No Dividends (1951) is one of the better books to come out of post-war Germany although it is not, as its cover enthusiastically declares, the “modern All Quiet on the Western Front.” Roderich Stamm is a completely non-political young art historian who drifts into Nazi organizations because life is made rather unpleasant for one outside them. His father, however, is an economist who becomes attracted to the Nazi movement, lectures at meetings, and eventually rises to an important post in Hitler’s Foreign Ministry. As a gunner in a flak battery, Stamm fights in France, Russia, and Germany. He emerges from the war minus several teeth, an arm, and all his illusions. Each of the girls he has loved has married or died. Through his eyes the reader sees the events leading to victory in Paris and defeat on the road from Stalingrad. But one also meets Gestapo men like Alfred Karawan and officials like Heinrich Himmler. This novel chronicles the sound and fury of politics and war as it explores the effects on the German people of the rise and fall of the Third Reich. Less political than most novels in this study, Kaufmann’s book has a good deal in common with many of them. The lives of its people are played out against a backdrop of local, national, and international affairs. And the novelist records not only the comings and goings of the individuals he creates, but also the events of the world in which they live.