chapter four
The Novel as Mirror of National Character
A political novel invariably reveals the attitude of its author toward the national groups from which its characters come. Often the author may seek to draw a national portrait by describing political behavior which he believes is peculiarly characteristic of Spaniards or Greeks or Englishmen. Two novels which thus portray the Russians are Under Western Eyes and The Possessed. The reader may work with a body of novels which do not deliberately attempt to delineate national character, and yet he will still arrive at some conception of national behavior patterns. He can do this by assessing the subjects treated. If most of the novels deal with underground activities, coups d’état, or revolutions, he is justified in assuming that this is a people which takes its politics seriously, and emotionally. If most of the novels concern parliamentary give and take, clever use of rules, strategic marches and countermarches, he has a right to conclude that this national group has achieved some degree of political sophistication. In dealing with the American novel one has to draw conclusions in this way. There is a great deal of close attention to tactical and strategic moves, but there is not too much scrutiny of larger behavior patterns. The appraiser must use whatever materials seem capable of giving insight: detailed discussion which is precisely in point, a recurrent basic situation, or a group of themes whose frequency of appearance is a good indication of their importance and relevance.
Enough American and English novels are included here to justify drawing some conclusions. Some of the other national literatures discussed, however, are represented by relatively few books. Since they constitute a small sample, one can draw only tentative conclusions. But almost all these novels are by very talented writers whose work is considered representative of the best in this genre within their national literatures. They are novels which offer skilled portrayals of life by artists entitled to a hearing on their own merits. In order to extract as much from the novel as possible in this area, comments on nations have been accepted from foreigners where they seem valid.
GREAT BRITAIN: A SELF-PORTRAIT
Peaceful Change in the Political Realm
The English political novel presents a people whose political processes have operated in a well-defined manner with progressively decreasing violence. England had its Wars of the Roses and its Cavaliers and Roundheads, but with the exception of the Jacobite Rebellion of 1746, resort to arms as a means of domestic change has been in the discard for the past two hundred years of English history. The Peterloo Massacre, the Chartist Riots, and the struggle against the Lords all involved bloodshed, but this form of conflict has largely subsided. The novel reflects this pattern. It is one of change within a framework of relative stability. The Right wing and the Left are the two poles between which the political ions flow. The names of the poles may vary, as may some of the elements in their chemical composition, but their function remains the same. The Tory is always the opponent of change or the advocate of slow and minimal change; the Whig, Liberal, Fabian, or Labourite is the champion of more rapid and extensive change. The extreme radical appears occasionally, the revolutionary infrequently. Almost all the English novels in this study show this basic alignment. Even when the liberals are represented by Mrs. Ward’s Venturists and the conservatives by Disraeli’s Young Englanders or Wells’s New Tories, this is the essential political structure. George Eliot’s Felix Holt and Harold Transóme, both Radicals, are set off against the Debarry family headed by Parson Jack and Sir Maximus Debarry. Meredith’s Nevil Beauchamp is another young Radical in conflict with his uncle Everard Romfrey, who calls himself a Whig but is an aristocratic reactionary. Except for Disraeli, James, and Conrad, the authors of these novels tend to present the case of the liberal or progressive. But no matter what the point of view or time, the main characters tend to range themselves on one of these two sides.
Conrad’s The Secret Agent departs from the common liberal-conservative alignment by dealing with the dangerous lunatic fringe of English political life—the revolutionary terrorists. But Verloc, the novel’s main character, and Yundt, one of the most violent members of the circle, are not native Englishmen. In using these characters, Conrad views the same political virtues the other novelists treat by contrasting them with violence. When the embassy secretary orders Verloc to blow up the Greenwich Observatory, he tells him that the English must be shocked into repressive action. “This country,” he says, “is absurd with its sentimental regard for individual liberty.” The Professor, “The Perfect Anarchist,” attempts to goad Police Inspector Heat into seizing him when they meet in an alley. Heat knows that if he does so the Professor will blow both of them up by pressing the detonator in his pocket. Undoubtedly this fact crosses his mind, but his answer is typical: “If I were to lay my hand on you now I would be no better than yourself.”
The Englishman’s often unemotional approach to politics also appears in the novels. In The New Machiavelli, Dick Remington, enthusiastic about Socialism and “the working-man,” is one of a group of students who invite Chris Robinson, “the Ambassador of the Workers,” to Cambridge to talk to them. But when Robinson speaks, they are disappointed at the excess of emotion and deficiency of content. When the Englishman does allow emotion to surge into his politics, it may be mixed with religion. It was said of Hamer Shawcross, in Fame Is the Spur, that “his platform manner was that of a revivalist parson.” Chester Nimmo has somewhat the same style in Prisoner of Grace. A former Wesleyan lay-preacher, he advocates pacifism at one point in his career. His wife Nina comments:
to a man like Chester, whose politics were mixed up with religion and whose religion was always getting into his politics, this was the situation which he was accustomed to handle. It did not prevent his religion from being “true” that he knew how to “use” it.
Both these politicians are liberals, and perhaps this is merely another means of separating the two great groups. The university man, who has had some advantages, may look upon emotionalism as bad form; the working man, for whom grade school and the church often constitute his only sources of formal education, is conditioned to respond to the stimuli he has known in one of these institutions: the emotional approach of the revivalist parson or the lay preacher.
Despite the reaction of the aristocrats to this lower group, some of the English novelists regard them as a great source of national strength. Disraeli may have felt that they needed guidance, not freedom and self-expression; Orwell found hope in them. Looking out the window of his and Julia’s rendezvous, Winston Smith sees the figure of a woman of the Proles, a “solid, unconquerable figure, made monstrous by work and childbearing, toiling from birth to death and still singing. Out of those mighty loins a race of conscious beings must one day come.”
The Fruits of Imperialism
When one thinks of the literature of imperialism he is likely to remember Kipling’s Soldiers Three, Mandalay, or Recessional. Wells’s Dick Remington remarks, “The prevailing force in my undergraduate days was not Socialism but Kiplingism.” But if Kipling emphasizes the White Man’s Burden, most other novelists emphasize the White Man’s Guilt. In Beauchamp’s Career Col. Halkett looks up from his newspaper to remark to Nevil, “There’s an expedition against the hill-tribes in India, and we’re a peaceful nation, eh? We look as if we were in for a complication with China.” And Nevil replies ironically, “Well, sir, we must sell our opium.” Forster’s A Passage to India lays prime responsibility for India’s tragedy at Britain’s doorstep. He pictures the cruel clannishness and snobbery of the English colony of Chandrapore with its Mrs. Callendar who declares, “Why, the kindest thing one can do to a native is to let him die.” India is full of red-faced Ronny Heaslops, officials who play God, a god whose thunderbolts and lightnings are infantry, cavalry, and artillery. Mrs. Moore, the single English subject in Chandrapore able to bridge the enormous gap between the two cultures, reflects about Ronny:
One touch of regret—not the canny substitute but the true regret from the heart—would have made him a different man, and the British Empire a different institution.
There is no question in this novel that Britain is the violator in this loveless union. The South African novels recall Wordsworth’s line about the makers of the French Revolution “become oppressors in their turn.” The Afrikaners may now be the malefactors; at one time they, like the Indians, were clearly the victims. Jakob Van Vlaanderen, the great stern patriarch of Too Late the Phalarope, recalls the trek into the interior to escape the repressive measures of the British. Jim Latter in Prisoner of Grace travels to London from Nigeria, where he has overseen the destinies of a tribe for years, because he is convinced that the people in the Colonial Office “want to kill off the Lugas.”
As Britain began to exchange the imperialist role for that of co-defender of the West, this deftness and high-handedness in international affairs was sometimes regarded as an asset. Major Walker assesses it for Tommy McPhail in The Crack in the Column when he says, “You’re no match for us in arranging a chain of political events, in planning several moves ahead, in making the baby be born exactly when the horoscope says, sex, weight, and appearance of innocence guaranteed.”
Like any good national literature, the English turns inward the searching light of criticism. The reader sees hypocrites, time-servers, and turncoats. Spread before him are domestic abuses and cold imperialism. But he is also given a glimpse of a people who retain a regard for the rights and dignity of the individual, a people who have turned away from violence and shown a remarkable capacity for achieving change without sacrificing stability, for combining growth with order.
THE UNITED STATES: A SELF-PORTRAIT
De Forest, in Playing the Mischief, describes Congressman Sykes Drummond as a “Robert-the-Devil” type. This complete cynic makes an interesting comment on the conditions around him: “A John Bull told me yesterday that there is no such thing known in England as a municipal ring or a thieving mayor. That is what any American of the present day would set down as a fairy story.” If the political novel has any validity as a commentary on national characteristics, one conclusion is inescapable: many Americans become criminals when they accept public office. Drummond’s comment is borne out by the two groups of novels. In the English novel individuals such as Hamer Shawcross and Chester Nimmo sell out to the opposition. Nimmo even engages in commercial activities too closely related to his official duties to be quite proper. But there is a complete absence of the corruption portrayed at all levels of government in the American political novel.
Crawford attempted to differentiate the English from the American early in An American Politician. The novel’s political naïveté renders any of its judgments suspect, but in this Crawford appears to come close to the truth. His opinion is that
English people ... love to associate with persons of rank and power from a disinterested love of these things themselves, whereas in most other countries the society of notable and influential persons is chiefly sought from the most cynical motives of personal advantage.... But politics in England and politics in America, so far as the main points are concerned, are as different as it is possible for any two social functions to be. Roughly, Government and the doings of Government are centripetal in England, and centrifugal in America. In England the will of the people assists the working of Providence, whereas in America, devout persons pray that Providence may on occasion modify the will of the people. In England men believe in the Queen, the Royal Family, the Established Church, and Belgravia first, and in themselves afterwards. Americans believe in themselves devoutly, and a man who could “establish” upon them a church, a royalty, or a peerage, would be a very clever fellow.
His diagnosis of cynicism and self-interest as leading American characteristics is echoed in the other novels. Good politicians do appear, but for every Lincoln there are ten Boss Tweeds. Henry Adams’ Democracy also contains passages in which American political life is compared unfavorably with that of England. Madeleine Lee attends an immensely boring White House reception. Not only are the guests dull, but to her the President and his wife appear as automatons aping royalty.
Forces of Corruption
Complete responsibility for corruption does not always rest with the politician. Some office holders, like Honest John Vane, sincerely try to stay clean. The corrupt politician usually has a collaborator in the person of the man who buys him. In Garland’s A Spoil of Office Bradley Talcott’s illusions are shattered in the legislature and in Congress. Looking around him he finds that “to rob the commonwealth was a joke.” State legislatures are often described as assemblages of brigands. The “Woodchuck Session” of the legislature in Coniston is arrant banditry, and the ones in The Plum Tree and Mr. Crewe’s Career are only a little less obvious. The industrialist is usually co-villain with his politician hireling. When he does not appear in person, he is represented by his middleman, the professional lobbyist. The lobbyist’s unscrupulous use of his trusting wife is the subject of Frances Hodgson Burnett’s Through One Administration (1914). Jacob Pike, in Playing the Mischief, regards the institution with pride:
From his point of view, it was a kind of public life; it was more completely “inside politics” than even electioneering or legislation; it was, as he believed, the very germ and main-spring of statesmanship. A leading lobbyist knew exactly how the world is governed, and for what purpose....
This whole aspect of the American governmental process in the novel is a very unsavory one. The industrialists are predatory robber barons who purchase dishonest politicians in order to obtain special privilege. In The Charterhouse of Parma the Contessa dissuades Fabrizio from going to America by explaining to him “the cult of the god Dollar.” In several of his novels Sinclair declares that American foreign policy has been determined by the industrial interests. He portrays Dollar Diplomacy with a vengeance. In Oil! he contends that the United States joined with Britain and France to fight the Bolsheviks not because of political ideology, but because “the creditor nations meant to make an example of Soviet Russia, and establish the rule that a government which repudiated its debts would be put out of business.” He also tells the reader that the same oil interests which backed Harding had turned in and out of office a succession of Mexican governments to suit their own commercial purposes. And it is not hard to see in Nostromo the influence of the American tycoon Holroyd at work when the American cruiser Powhatan appears to salute the Occidental flag and “put an end to the Costaguana-Sulaco War.”
If the perverters of power are not demagogues with messianic complexes, they may be gangsters who rule by ballots when bribery fails. These subjects in the novel did not go out of vogue with the Muckraking Era or with Prohibition. A new rash of novels about gangsters in politics has appeared in recent years. The gunman who is concerned about investing his money may be replacing the one who writes his name with machine gun bullets, but his influence in politics is the same.
The American Idealist
The reverse side of this particular coin shows the idealist at work. He may come out of the political wringer with his ideals mangled and his illusions full of holes, but still he retains something of the impulse which created the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. Millard Carroll in The Grand Design is such a one, but he emerges as an old man at the end of his ordeal. Nick Burr in Ellen Glasgow’s The Voice of the People (1900) is another, but his end is violent death. In recent years this idealistic aspect of the American political character has often found expression in heroes who engage in the direct struggle for liberty. Both Robert Jordan and Glenn Spotswood spill their blood on Spanish earth fighting against Franco. Were it not for the crusading district attorneys of books such as Ashes and Caesar’s Angel, the implication would be that the American girds on his armor abroad but avoids conflict in his own back yard. Even so, something of this impression may remain with the reader.
Responsibility at Home and Abroad
The pattern in which a nation allows its liberties to be subverted and destroyed is a familiar one. It is often thought that certain peoples, like the Germans and Russians, are more susceptible to authoritarianism than others. One stereotype of the American—descendant of Minute Men, the man who hates cops, the fan who cherishes his right to boo the umpire—has contributed to the impression that this submissiveness to authority has never been a part of the American character. Lewis’s It Can’t Happen Here, Dos Passos’s District of Columbia, and the novels about dictators in southern states raise some doubts about the validity of this fundamental assumption. Each of these novelists seems to feel that the American citizen could well wake up one morning to find his rights gone as did the German citizen of the early thirties. Lewis dramatizes this catastrophe on a national scale, while Dos Passos, Warren, and Langley present it on the state level. Dos Passos, all through his trilogy, writes such frequent exhortations to vigilance that there is little doubt that he too has worries on this score. In Stranger Come Home Shirer centers his fire on McCarthyism, but he also goes back into history to recall the passage of the Alien and Sedition Acts and the domestic anti-German violence of World War I. The popular press and magazines may represent the American as one who hearkens to the great voices on each Fourth of July and understands what he is doing when he raises his banner on Flag Day. The novelist often has serious doubts that he does.
Europeans have called the United States immature in world affairs. At least one of the novels in this group examines this accusation, and two others consider the same theme of irresponsibility on the national level. In both A Fool’s Errand and Bricks Without Straw Tourgée accused the federal government of irresponsibility. There is a close parallel between this case and the one Europeans have made. Pursuing an ideal, at least in part, the United States musters its enormous industrial and economic potential, puts its great strength into the field, and wins military victory. After talking a great deal about what should be done, it sets up committees which write many reports. Then the nation promptly forgets the problems of victory and happily returns to consideration of the tariff question or who is going to win the World Series. In the latter of his two books, Tourgée writes that the Northern statesmen and political writers seemed always to assume that the destruction of slavery would cure all the ills of the Negro. With a typical flourish, he adds:
The Nation gave the jewel of liberty into the hands of the [Negroes], armed them with the weapons of self-government, and said: “Ye are many; protect what ye have received.” Then it took away its hand, turned away its eyes, closed its ears to every cry of protest or of agony, and said: “We will not aid you nor protect you. Though you are ignorant, from you we will demand works of wisdom. Though you are weak, great things shall be required at your hands.” Like the ancient taskmaster, the Nation said: “There shall no straw be given you, yet shall ye deliver the tale of bricks.”
Nearly seventy years later, in The Crack in the Column, Weller said virtually the same thing. But this time both the problem and the stakes were global.
The picture of American politics which emerges from the political novel is an unflattering one. Although the “smoke-filled room” may be a cliché in the newspapers, it is a fact in the novel. The deck of candidates is shuffled, cut, and dealt—often from the bottom. The national conventions are a combination of circus spectacle and cynical chicanery. And after campaigns financed by funds from special interest groups, the people’s chosen representatives get down to the serious business of paying off their debts while lining their pockets. The crusaders for liberty and justice who appear can be set off against these political liabilities. But the electorate in whose behalf they struggle often seems unaware of the importance of the fight. Inheritors of a tradition of dissent and individual freedom, they are fair game for demagogues. They are also easy marks for the revolutionaries who, for perverted purposes, exploit their sincere but naïve desire for social and economic reform. Although the Republic somehow seems to weather periods of internecine violence and reversion to authoritarian rule, its citizens have a bad case of myopia in the field of foreign affairs. There are indications, though, that the corrective lenses bought in two world wars are beginning to bring distant events into focus. The American novelist’s view of his own political arena agrees surprisingly well with many foreign estimates of it. The American seems like an immature giant who tolerates much rough behavior but rushes into conflict when he feels that his basic security is threatened. Now the giant seems to be settling down. Still likely to make violent moves, he is acquiring some of the political sophistication that was, perhaps, too early expected of him.
ITALY: A SELF-PORTRAIT
After a quarrel with Jean Colbert, Tony Maggiore in Caesar’s Angel berates her friend Al Piazza: “You talk so big about it making no difference between American and Italian girls. You ever hear a good Italian girl open her mouth about politics? You hear her insulting the men?” This assertion is contradicted by Stella in Silone’s A Handful of Blackberries, but even were it completely true, it would be one of the minor differences between American and Italian political behavior patterns. Immensely different historical antecedents separate the two peoples. The Italian, with a background of autocratic rule except for comparatively short intervals, has played his political role on a far different stage from that of the American. But there is more to it than just politics. The economic bases which help to form political groups have produced in Italy a stratification in which the layers are more widely separated than any in America. The migrant fruit pickers, the dust-blown Okies, the exploited miners in America seem well off beside the systematically persecuted peasants and submerged city lumpenproletariat of Italy. The Italians at the other end of the scale are just as far from the norm. Gould, Fisk, and Vanderbilt may have owned railroads, but Prince Torlonia owns immense ranges of the Roman and Tuscan countryside, together with 35,000 acres of the Fucino basin worked by eleven thousand farmers. But this great gulf between classes is only one of the factors which appear responsible for Italy’s political ills.
Silone concentrates mainly upon the peasantry in his novels. His heart is close to them, and his description is sympathetic. But he does more than set forth their sufferings. His books also diagnose the cause of their problems and suggest solutions. Many of his peasants appear like credulous, superstitious children. The four-day thunder and lightning storm which nearly sweeps Pietrasecca off its mountain in Bread and Wine is blamed upon two lovers who have gone to live in a house considered damned. Don Paolo watches the gathering of a crowd which is swept into such a hysteria by its roar of “CHAY DOO! CHAY DOO! CHAY DOO!” that it forgets to listen to the oracular radio voice it has come to hear. Silone pities them: “a people whose wisdom was summed up in a few proverbs passed down from generation to generation, had been literally submerged and overwhelmed by propaganda.” Don Paolo also blames this ignorance upon the Church in Italy. Like his teacher Don Benedetto, who was said to have called the reigning pontiff “Pope Pontius XI,” Don Paolo feels that Italy needs
A Christianity denuded of all mythology, of all theology, of all Church control; a Christianity that neither abdicates in the face of Mammon, nor proposes concordats with Pontius Pilate, nor offers easy careers to the ambitious, but rather leads to prison....
Silone’s hero is equally dissatisfied with a religious vocation which withdraws from life. He talks with the beautiful and spiritual Christina, who devoutly waits to enter the convent:
Do you not think that this divorce between a spirituality which retires into contemplation and a mass of people dominated by animal instincts is the source of all our ills? Do you not think that every living creature ought to live and struggle among his fellow-creatures rather than shut himself up in an ivory tower?
Although A Handful of Blackberries contains more scenes set in Rome than the other two Silone novels discussed here, a better view of the Italian city dweller is given by Taddei and Moravia. Taddei’s The Pine Tree and the Mole is built about citizens of Livorno who are as widely separated by wealth and position as are Silone’s Old Zaccaria and the Tarocchi family. The circle of lawyers and politicians who exchange wives and party labels are a different breed of men from the jailbirds, pimps, and informers at the opposite extreme of Livorno’s social structure. But both groups are equally adrift, both caught in the same wave of post-World War I exhaustion and economic derangement which sent so many Italians in search of the answer that Mussolini seemed to provide. Taddei emphasizes poverty and depression as the main factors which prepared the way for the Fascist regime, but one senses something else, particularly among his representatives of the educated class. They seem to be seeking some sort of order, a stabilizing force in their political life. Taddei says that the Italian Socialist Party seemed to offer the solution. But the Socialists failed because
overwhelmed by the favorable-seeming course of events and overlooking the most important phase of the matter, they lacked the time to think of many things and, instead, viewed the period with optimistic eyes; everything appeared to them to depend upon the number of adherents that any particular event brought into their ranks. Political expediency thus became, in a manner of speaking, epidemic, and the deepening crisis in all its amplitude became apparent in the form of a spiritual crisis that was its reflection.
Marcello Clerici in The Conformist finds his solution in Fascism. Taddei’s hero turns at last to the same source of strength which Silone singles out—the land and its people. They both feel, rather like Orwell, that the masses are the ultimate source of their country’s salvation. Old Lazzaro, shouting defiance at the Communists, epitomizes these people: “There’ll always be someone that refuses to sell his soul for a handful of beans and a piece of cheese.” In this he is like Conrad’s Giorgio Viola, “the Garibaldino,” an old expatriate whose divinities are Garibaldi and Liberty.
This small group of Italian novelists portray their countrymen as members of widely separated economic and social classes. There are the well-to-do who seem to seek order and get it with a vengeance. And there are the poor of the cities and villages who are the victims of this order, squeezed by poverty, by powerful landowners, and harnessed by a church which renders more than is his to Caesar, a church which brings politics into the confessional and divorces religion from everyday life. Something of the spirit of Garibaldi still lives, however, nourished by the deprived ones who are close to the soil. Perhaps this is a modern political parable in which the last shall be first.
SPAIN: AN AMERICAN PORTRAIT
Robert Jordan’s love of Spain is not an abstract emotion. He has a deep feeling for its people, but he is still able to see their faults. Throughout For Whom the Bell Tolls he makes conscious estimates of their national character. He says they are a truly thoughtful and considerate people who are not merely formally polite as are the French. But they are also treacherous:
Of course they turned on you. They turned on you often but they always turned on everyone. They turned on themselves, too. If you had three together, two would unite against one, and then the two would start to betray each other. Not always, but often enough for you to take enough cases and start to draw it as a conclusion.
These characteristics cut across party lines. The Rebel slaughter which left Jordan’s Maria orphaned and violated had an equally brutal counterpart in the Republican massacre supervised by the guerrilla chief Pablo in which twenty Fascists were beaten between two lines of men and then flung over a cliff. Jordan thinks that killing “is their extra sacrament.” Loving them, he tries to understand them:
There is no finer and no worse people in the world. No kinder people and no crueler.... Forgiveness is a Christian idea and Spain has never been a Christian country. It has always had its own special idol worship within the Church.... The people had grown away from the Church because the Church was in the government and the government had always been rotten. This was the only country that the reformation never reached. They were paying for the Inquisition now, all right.
Occasionally one finds a Spaniard who seems almost a moderate, like Frankie Perez in Adventures of a Young Man, but the most persistent impression is one of a people who have a history of misrule and violence, and who tragically turn to these very weapons as the instruments of release from their consequences.
GREECE: AN AMERICAN PORTRAIT
George Weller’s Greeks in The Crack in the Column appear surprisingly like Latins: “Each Greek is a volcano, and when he may erupt no man knows, not even his friends who must quake with him, not even himself.” In the number and complexity of their political parties they resemble the French, yet in one way they seem to retain something of the Greeks of antiquity viewing Imperial Rome. Small and impoverished in the shadow of newly-risen giants, they cherish their role as inheritors and transmitters of a great culture. At the book’s end, Nitsa, like Molly Bloom in Joyce’s Ulysses, retires with her reflections:
The whole world is philhellene, as proved by the retreating Germans leaving a wreath on the Tomb of Ignotos before they roared north to die in the ambushes of the Slavs. But most self-surrendering of the philhellenes are the Americans. These young antiques deserve the most utter respect, the kindest care.
FRANCE: A COMPOSITE PORTRAIT
The novels by Frenchmen in this study reveal relatively little about national character and behavior. Stendhal deals with Italians and Malraux primarily with Chinese. However, the ambitious Ferral, head of the Franco-Asiatic Consortium in Man’s Fate may be revealing. He hopes to make enough money in China to return home and buy the leading French news-gathering and publicity syndicate. With this power he hopes to regain office and “pit the combined forces of the cabinet and a bought public opinion against the Parliament.” In Malraux’s words one catches, under their cynicism, echoes of the declining power reflecting upon vanished days of affluence:
The threat of bankruptcy brings to financial groups an intense national consciousness. When their enterprises in distant corners of the world are suddenly threatened with disaster they remember with mingled pride and gratitude the heritage of civilization which their country has given them and which they in turn have helped to pass on to colonial peoples.
In Presidential Agent Sinclair presents the French as a people who have installed a rotten government to manage their affairs, a government eager to join with Britain in obtaining temporary surcease from German threats to its financial holdings by hypocritically sacrificing Czechoslovakia. They had decided upon “a compromise with Hitler as the cheapest form of insurance.” M. Denis admits the resultant loss of power in Central Europe, but consoles himself with the thought that “we still have North Africa and the colonies, and we are safe behind our Maginot Line. Above all, we don’t have to make any more concessions to revolution at home.”
In The Age of Longing Hydie Anderson reports Feyda Nikitin’s deadly activities to Jules Commanche of the French Home Security Department. A scholar and hero of the Resistance, he is one of a new type, but there are not enough of them to fill “the sclerotic veins of French bureaucracy with fresh blood.” Their effect amounts merely to “the injection of a stimulant into a moribund body.” In The Reprieve Sartre had presented France as unaware and unready before the Nazis, already bled white from great wars. After another conflict, the patient is almost in extremis. Playing the recurrent part of American pupil to European teacher, Hydie listens to Commanche’s bitter lecture:
Our last message to the world was those three words which are on our stamps and coins. Since then, we no longer have anything to give to the spirit, only to the senses—our novelists, our poets, our painters, all belong to an essentially sensualist world, the world of Flaubert, and Baudelaire and Manet, not to the world of Descartes, Rousseau and St. Just. For several centuries we were the inspiration of Europe; now we are in the position of a blood donor dying of anemia. We can’t hope for a new Jeanne d’Arc, not even for a young First Consul, not even for a Charlotte Corday....
He has told Hydie that the French Revolution substituted its slogan for the Holy Trinity, that the scalpel which excised autocracy from the body politic also removed its soul. The French thus seem to be suffering from a malady which, in somewhat different form, infects the Spaniards, Italians, and Greeks. Their splinter parties, their disorganization, their pervasive political cynicism are a legacy of centuries of conflict, inequities, and colonial misrule. But beyond this there is exhaustion, a vitality sapped by past efforts and a sadness increased by awareness of faded glories.
RUSSIA: A COMPOSITE PORTRAIT
Assessing Russian national character or behavior from the novels presents a greater problem than that found in any other national literature. One must first separate Russian Communism from the Russian people. In the same way one must distinguish the old Russian from the new. And this dichotomy has to be made after the Revolution as well as before it. Turgenev’s fathers are hardly more different from their sons than are Koestler’s Old Guard from the Neanderthalers they have sired. When Rubashov’s old comrade Ivanov is shot, Gletkin replaces him as interrogator. Rubashov looks at the shaven skull, appraising the huge ominous figure in the stiff heavy uniform: “You consequential brute in the uniform we created—barbarian of the new age which is now starting.”
The pattern of Russian political behavior which emerges from the novel is filled with more violence, more misery, more oppression than that of any other national group. The dying Stepan Verhovensky described Russia in The Possessed as a “great invalid” inhabited by devils and plagued with impurities, sores, and foul contagions. This Czarist Russia is a land in which “harmless ... higher liberalism” is possible, but it is also a country in which serfs live in incredible poverty and aristocrats live in oriental splendor. Within this social structure, whose opposite ends are separated by an even greater distance than the rich and poor of Italy, the forces of destruction are already at work. The basic situation reveals opposed characteristics: authoritarianism on the ruling level, immense capacity for dumb suffering in the submerged masses, and an intense drive toward a reorientation of the social structure on the part of the militant intellectuals. These factors, on a smaller scale, are to be found in other literatures. But Dostoyevsky also portrays a conflict peculiar to Russia. It is the struggle between those culturally oriented toward the West and the Slavophiles who reject its influence. A Slavophile himself, Dostoyevsky seems to speak through Shatov, who says that the Russians are “the only ‘god-bearing’ people on earth, destined to regenerate and save the world in the name of a new God, and to whom are given the keys of life and of the new world....” This extreme national consciousness pervades these novels, whether it is expressed in terms of a messianic mission or a deep sympathy for a people with a tragic history.
Conrad, in Under Western Eyes, made a definite effort to assess the Russian character. He felt, though, that this was an extremely difficult task in which the language barrier was the least of the obstacles which stood in the way of understanding. He describes Russians as great players with words, manipulators of abstract ideas. He feels that in other areas their behavior, like that of Nathalia Haldin, is sometimes almost incomprehensible. His narrator says:
I knew her well enough to have discovered her scorn for all the practical forms of political liberty known to the Western world. I suppose one must be a Russian to understand Russian simplicity, a terrible, corroding simplicity in which mystic phrases clothe a naïve and hopeless cynicism. I think sometimes that the psychological secret of the profound difference of that people consists in this that they detest life, the irremediable life of the earth as it is, whereas we Westerners cherish it with perhaps an equal exaggeration of its sentimental value.
Nathalia tells the old teacher that “the shadow of autocracy” hangs over each Russian, much as does its more substantial modern counterpart, the Soviet MVD. Razumov is another Slavophile who believes that Russia is sacred. But later Conrad returns to the subject of Russian incomprehensibility when he says that Western ears “are not attuned to certain tones of cynicism and cruelty of moral negation, and even of moral distress already silenced at our end of Europe.”
Koestler’s two novels considered here describe Russia after the deluge. The bloodbaths have changed the names and faces, but the same moral negation is there. More accurately, there is not even a negation, for there is no positive assertion of moral values to negate. The doctrine that history has no conscience had removed for the Soviets the need for moral reference points. As a result, they had sailed without the ethical ballast that Rubashov, at the end of his life, decided was essential. In his judgment this was the fatal break in the logical chain which caused the betrayal of the revolution which Mailer mourned in Barbary Shore. In this case, perhaps, history is character. The span of events covered by these novels might even be graphed. The line would form itself into two low plateaus separated by a single tremendous peak. This eminence would represent the ill-fated revolt against tyranny. On either side would be the depths in which a people was submerged with not quite passive suffering under a rigid, repressive rule made possible by a long historical pattern and the mass conditioning to obedience which it produced.
UNION OF SOUTH AFRICA: A SELF-PORTRAIT
The Boers of South Africa are presented, especially in Paton’s novels, as a simple and stern people who are also good fighters and good haters. Subduing part of a continent and making it their own, they regard themselves as the elect among the children of men quite as much as do the Slavophiles. Yet these Afrikaners suffer from a curious case of schizophrenia. Singled out by the Almighty, they are nonetheless so fearful of the colored population that they repress them as harshly as any European nation ever did its colonial peoples. Early in Too Late the Phalarope Paton epitomizes this national group:
they had trekked from the British Government with its officials and its missionaries and its laws that made a black man as good as his master, and had trekked into a continent, dangerous and trackless, where wild beasts and savage men, and grim waterless plains, had given way before their fierce will to be separate and survive. Then out of the harsh world of rock and stone they had come to the grass country, all green and smiling, and had given to it the names of peace and thankfulness. They had built their homes and their churches; and as God had chosen them for a people, so did they choose him for their God, cherishing their separateness that was now his Will. They set their conquered enemies apart, ruling them with unsmiling justice, declaring “no equality in Church or State,” and making the iron law that no white man might touch a black woman, nor might any white woman be touched by a black man.
This is a patriarchal society, ruled by men such as Jakob Van Vlaanderen, a political leader who privately calls the members of Parliament “his span of oxen.” Fiercely nationalistic, they hate the British, and as they fought them so they fight any force, even a sociological one, which threatens their hard-won supremacy. In the Union of South Africa there are willing British subjects and British sympathizers, but they have not been represented by a group of novels as fine as these of Paton’s. This is perhaps due to the fact that they do not form so homogeneous a cultural and ethnic group as do the Boers and their descendants. For another thing, the political star of the Boers has been in the ascendant in the past few decades, while that of the pro-British has seemed about to set as it did in India.
GERMANY: A SELF-PORTRAIT
When Sinclair’s Lanny Budd goes to the week-long Nazi Party orgy at Nüremberg, he sees before him a people who have surrendered personal responsibility to a father image quite as fully as did Silone’s simple peasants. A people smarting from humiliating defeat had accepted the dream of a thousand year Reich. And it had been sold to them by a man as possessed as any of Dostoyevsky’s characters. Roderich Stamm in Heaven Pays No Dividends is oblivious to much of the transition that takes place in Germany during the late twenties and early thirties. Through his father’s conversations, however, he senses some of the problems soon to be expressed in political action: “They contained the whole uncertainty of our age. There was something intangible and threatening in the air. It had all started with the world crisis and the huge unemployment figures, and then the Nazis had come, and then the Communists.” These forces and the movements which they precipitate are too strong for a republic barely fifteen years old. A people used to authoritarian rule reverts to it. When war comes Roderich realizes “we were all involved, because all of us had capitulated before HIM during all these years. We had all given HIM permission to start a war at HIS discretion, when HE decided it was necessary.” One is justified in distrusting stereotypes as inaccurate generalizations. But in this case the stereotype is borne out and emphasized in the novel.
Many areas of these national portraits are only roughed in, with the fine-line detail missing. In other places there are gaps. This is partly because some of the groups of novels are small. It is also due to the fact that the novelist does not exhaustively examine voting trends, statistically analyze attitudinal changes, or plot the frequency of government realignments. Sinclair frequently approaches this method and Dos Passos gives some of the raw data upon which such estimates can be made. But generally the novelist tends to proceed from individuals to groups, extrapolating group behavior from individual behavior. This is the method used by Koestler and Conrad. While it does not have the statistical validity of the political scientist’s work, it has advantages which complement it. The novelist, with his artistic insight and his ability to shape his material as he wishes, can highlight his concept of a particular national character with drama and human interest to make this hard-to-define quality come memorably alive on the printed page.