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Title: The political novel

Author: Joseph Blotner

Release date: May 13, 2022 [eBook #68060]
Most recently updated: October 18, 2024

Language: English

Original publication: United States: Doubleday, 1955

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE POLITICAL
NOVEL ***

TRANSCRIBER'S NOTES
In the plain text version words in Italics are denoted by
_underscores_ and text in bold like =this=.
In the text the author uses the word "flaunt" in this
sentence:
And these maxims are not merely empty phrases, for in
the novel the politicians who flaunt them fail.
Based on the context it is believed that the correct word
should be "flout"
.
A number of words in this book have both hyphenated
and non-hyphenated variants. For the words with both
variants present the one more used has been kept.
Obvious punctuation and other printing errors have
been corrected.

The Political Novel

DOUBLEDAY SHORT STUDIES IN POLITICAL SCIENCE

Consulting Editor
Richard C. Snyder
Associate Professor of Politics, Princeton University

The Revolution in American
Foreign Policy, 1945-1954
By William G. Carleton,
Professor of Political Science
and Head Professor of the Social
Sciences, University of Florida

Political Community at the
International Level: Problems of
Definition and Measurement
By Karl W. Deutsch, Professor
of History and Political Science,
Massachusetts Institute of
Technology

France: Keystone of Western
Defense
By Edgar S. Furniss, Jr.,
Assistant Professor of Politics,
Princeton University

The Problem of Internal Security
in Great Britain, 1948-1953

By H. H. Wilson, Associate
Professor of Politics, Princeton
University and Harvey
Glickman, Fellow, Harvard
University

Germany: Dilemma for American
Foreign Policy
By Otto Butz, Assistant
Professor of Political Science,
Swarthmore College

The Role of the Military in
American Foreign Policy
By Burton M. Sapin, Research
Assistant, Foreign Policy
Analysis Project, Princeton
University, and Richard C.
Snyder, Associate Professor of
Politics, Princeton University

Democratic Rights Versus
Communist Activity
By Thomas I. Cook, Professor of
Political Science, The Johns
Hopkins University

The Social Background of Political
Decision-Makers
By Donald R. Matthews,
Assistant Professor of
Government, Smith College

Readings in Game Theory and
Political Behavior
By Martin Shubik, Research
Associate, Economic Analysis
Project, Princeton University

The American Vice-Presidency:
New Look
By Irving G. Williams,
Associate Professor and
Chairman, Departments of
History and Social Studies, St.
John’s University

Contemporary International Law:
A Balance Sheet
By Quincy Wright, Professor of
International Law, University of
Chicago

Modern Colonialism: Institutions
and Policies
By Thomas R. Adam, Professor
of Political Science, New York
University

Law as a Political Instrument
By Victor G. Rosenblum,
Assistant Professor of Political
Science, University of
California, Berkeley

The Fate of the French Non-
Communist Left
By E. Drexel Godfrey, Jr.,
Assistant Professor of Political
Science, Williams College

The Political Process: Executive
Bureau—Congressional Committee
Relations
By J. Leiper Freeman, Assistant
Professor and Research
Associate, Graduate School of
Education, Harvard University

German Political Theory, 1870 to
the Present
By Otto Butz, Assistant
Professor of Political Science,
Swarthmore College

The Political Novel
By Joseph L. Blotner, Instructor
in English, University of Idaho
Studies in Scope and Methods

The Study of Public Administration
By Dwight Waldo, Professor of
Political Science, University of
California, Berkeley

The Study of Political Theory

By Thomas P. Jenkin, Associate
Professor and Chairman,
Department of Political Science,
University of California, Los
Angeles

The Study of Comparative
Government
By Roy C. Macridis, Associate
Professor of Political Science,
Northwestern University

Problems of Analyzing and
Predicting Soviet Behavior

By John S. Reshetar, Jr.,
Lecturer in Politics, Princeton
University

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COLLEGE DEPARTMENT,
Doubleday & Company, Inc.,
575 Madison Avenue, New York 22,
N.Y.

Doubleday Short Studies in Political Science

The Political Novel

BY JOSEPH L. BLOTNER
University of Idaho

DOUBLEDAY & COMPANY, INC.
Garden City, N.Y.

1955

COPYRIGHT ©, 1955, BY DOUBLEDAY
& COMPANY, INC.

This book is fully protected by copyright,
and no part of it, with the exception of short
quotations for review, may be reproduced
without the written consent of the publisher.

All Rights Reserved.

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOG
CARD NUMBER 55-6672
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF
AMERICA
AT THE COUNTRY LIFE PRESS,
GARDEN CITY, N.Y.

Editor’s Foreword
From time to time in the Doubleday Short Studies in Political Science
series, guest analysts from outside the formal boundaries of the discipline
will be invited to help fill certain gaps in existing materials. In the present
instance a young professional student of literature, Dr. Joseph Blotner, has
contributed a much-needed and highly useful introduction to the political
novel. Thanks largely to the care and skill with which this analysis has been
prepared, students of English and political science, as well as general
readers, should find new and stimulating pathways open to them.
So far as the editor and author know, this is the first essay of its kind in the
English language. The fact is worth noting because, despite the large
number of political novels in all languages and despite the obvious
importance of this particular species of the novel generally, scholars in the
field of literature have not devoted systematic attention to it. Until Dr.
Blotner decided to undertake a full-scale investigation of the political novel
—of which the present essay is one of the beginning steps—the teacher of
political science could search the modern language journals and literary
periodicals in vain for help in canvassing the possibly valuable
contributions of the novelist in describing and explaining political behavior.
The Political Novel is to be welcomed on still other grounds. It is
interdisciplinary in scope and intent and it demonstrates anew the fruitful
results which can be achieved when a scholar merges his technical
competence in one branch of learning with his informed and enthusiastic
interest in another. Moreover, crude and scattered though the bridges
between pairs of the social sciences (e.g., political psychology) are, the
bridges between the social sciences and the humanities are even more so.
Collaboration—in this case between literature and political science—should
certainly take more than one form, but whatever the form, the great need is
to light up the shadowy twilight zones which lie between major disciplines.

Not only are these unexplored areas of subject matter to be charted, there
are common purposes and joint efforts to be considered. Among others, Dr.
Blotner has raised the question: what can the experts in literature and in
politics give to each other?
The analysis of the political novel set forth in these pages makes a variety
of contributions to learning. Novels can be read two ways: for pleasure and
for profit. The latter object—as in all academic subjects—is sometimes
pursued under conditions which deny the former. Nonetheless, the reader is
reminded by Dr. Blotner that to be alerted beforehand to the nature and
significance of this type of novel is to combine pleasure with an awareness
that the content may be very revealing of data concerning political life.
Thus the words of a writer are at once pleasure-giving and instructive—if
the reader is looking out for the proper clues. Second, there is made
available an original classification of political novels and politically
relevant summaries to serve as a guide to political scientists. The
bibliography, though selected, is especially useful in this respect. Third, the
headings and substance of Chapters Two to Six actually provide a set of
analytical functions which the author believes the novel may serve in
illuminating major aspects of politics and government. This study is so cast
that the transition from thinking about novels to thinking about politics is
painless and without distortion. No one having any familiarity with the
traditional categories of political science will find Dr. Blotner’s own
presentation strange or unsophisticated.
In addition, this essay represents an attempt to establish durable intellectual
bases for probing the nature of the political novel. The tentative definitions
and criteria of identification, classification of functions, and annotations are
a substantial move in this direction. Finally, among the data revealed in the
contents of political novels is evidence of the way a given society reacts to
its own political institutions and practices. To the extent that such novels
partially yet accurately reflect social reality, the student of politics can draw
valid inferences concerning the political beliefs—including beliefs about
the nature of politics—held by a sizeable portion of the society’s
membership at any one time. One can detect at least the broad outlines of
periodic shifts in the political concerns of a people or any segment thereof
in their literature.

Chapter One discusses some problems arising from a study of the political
novel. This is an important chapter and contains some homely wisdom on
the different approaches respectively of the novelist and the political
scientist. It should be stressed that certain crucial points with respect to the
analysis of human behavior in general can be raised by comparing the
techniques of the two kinds of observers and reporters. The well-known
remark about pictures being worth thousands of words has occasionally
been transposed to the effect that one good story is worth a whole (and dry)
textbook. This, of course, is an attractive argument. But it does raise the
fundamental question of what analytical operations are performed by the
novelist on the one hand and the political scientist on the other. Offhand it
would seem as though there were important differences carrying beyond
those of purposes discussed by the author. Generally speaking, the novelist
is primarily concerned with a coherent story, with a whole fabric of
description, and with specific details while the political scientist is
concerned with events, processes, and factors, with abstractions from
wholes and with classes of general phenomena. The latter builds upon
numerous instances, upon gross data, and upon repeated patterns of
behavior. The former builds upon an amassing of individualized data
fashioned into a unique chronicle. The one gains richness and sacrifices
capacity to generalize, the other sacrifices detail for broad generalization.
For the novelist, Uncle Tom becomes a microcosm, a device for revealing
the tragedy of the whole Negro race in America through a portrait of a
single character. For the political scientist, Uncle Tom is lost in what can be
said of the entire group of which he is a member. Both are limited and both
pay a price accordingly. Clearly more is involved in the different analytic
techniques but it suffices to indicate one type of issue raised in this study of
the political novel.
Other issues are equally noteworthy. The main character in a novel may be
likened to a dummy—or a model—created by the author for the purposes of
expressing the author’s observations and, in effect, for “playing out” his
ideas. Though the character is pure fiction—i.e., any similarities to known
real persons are coincidental—an effective novel must have believable
characters, recognizable through behavior traits identified by readers from
their own everyday experience. So too the social scientist uses models—
analytic dummies—to further his purposes. Dissecting the anatomy of a
political model and putting its characters under close examination can teach

something about the most fruitful relationships between real persons and
fictional characters for purposes of describing and explaining behavior.
Often the fact that the novelist is actually building models is obscured by
the amount of detail he pours into his molds which then makes his models
seem remarkably lifelike. While the models of the social scientist are
usually much further removed from correspondence to real persons, the
properties built into them must be “believable” too.
Another area of inquiry can be opened up if one accepts the cues offered by
Dr. Blotner’s selections and analyses. Political novels seem to reflect mostly
the seamy side of political life, emphasizing conflict as the sole theme
meriting attention. Through their characters, authors seem to place great
blame for social ills on political institutions as detached from other
institutions or on individual devils. Is this a reliable and full revelation of
politics? As a matter of fact, novels too seem caught in two opposite kinds
of explanations: the great man and the great historical force. Each has
significant limitations and accompanying fallacies yet each assumes great
plausibility at the hands of a skillful storyteller. Inevitably the novelist
dramatizes, and in real life the political actor dramatizes too. Unfortunately,
the tendency to dramatize reinforces the neglect of the mundane factors
which often influence crucial political action and choice.
This line of thought suggests certain concrete exercises which might be
profitable for the student of politics to undertake. Since the search for
fruitful hypotheses is a backbone of any systematic discipline, it might be
useful to search these novels to see if any have been missed. A corollary
effort would be to check the knowledge of politics exhibited in political
novels against the latest agreements among political scientists. Still another
effort might be directed toward a content analysis (in the technical sense) of
the novel as medium of communication in order to throw light on the value
structure of the society or individuals which are depicted. Finally, what
aspects of politics have been ignored by novelists and why? For example, a
novel might be an excellent way to illuminate the world of the decision-
maker, the governor, the leader. Thus far, none has really done so.
Dr. Blotner is to be congratulated for aiding an important cause: the use of
novels as a teaching device in political science courses. Those who have
tried have been rewarded but have lacked an introductory essay and
bibliographical guidance. Novels make points which can be made in no

other way and in interesting fashion. The student’s idea of the political
realm and of approaches to its understanding will be enlarged by following
the thoughtful guide presented below.
One considerable merit of this monograph is a lighter style than is normally
characteristic of political science literature. Nonetheless, its intellectual
quality will make the reader anticipate Dr. Blotner’s larger study.
Richard C. Snyder

Contents
Editor’s Foreword v
Chapter One. THE STUDY OF
1
THE POLITICAL NOVEL
The Importance of the
1
Political Novel
The Nature of the Political
Novel: Problems of 1
Definition and Selection
Characteristics of the
3
Political Novel
The Novelist and the
4
Political Scientist
The Purposes of This Study 8
Chapter Two. THE NOVEL AS
10
POLITICAL INSTRUMENT
The United States 10
Harriet Beecher Stowe and
10
the Civil War
Albion Tourgée: The
11
Blunders of Reconstruction
Perennial Theme:
12
Corruption
Upton Sinclair:
Corruption Plus 12
Radicalism

Growing Political
Consciousness: 1930 to 13
1954
John Steinbeck: The
14
Party Organizer
Sinclair Lewis: Native
14
Fascism
John Dos Passos and
Ernest Hemingway: 15
Liberal Causes Abroad
George Weller:
International 16
Communism
Norman Mailer: The
17
Extreme Left
Novels of the Cold War 17
Great Britain 19
Benjamin Disraeli:
19
Revitalized Toryism
Henry James: The Breakup
20
of Victorian Tranquillity
Joseph Conrad: Early
21
Cloak and Dagger
E. M. Forster: The Problem
22
of Imperialism
Aldous Huxley and George
Orwell: The Future in 23
Perspective
The Continent 23
Ivan Turgenev and Fyodor
Dostoyevsky: Nihilism and 23
Its Rejection

André Malraux: Pro-
24
Communism
Ignazio Silone:
25
Disillusionment on the Left
Arthur Koestler: The
26
Bolshevik on Trial
Africa 26
Alan Paton: The Race
27
Question
Chapter Three. THE NOVELIST
28
AS POLITICAL HISTORIAN
Great Britain 29
George Eliot: The Early
Nineteenth Century in the 30
Midlands
Benjamin Disraeli and
Anthony Trollope: Whigs 30
v. Tories
George Meredith: The
31
Early Radical
Mrs. Humphrey Ward:
31
Victorian Portraits
H. G. Wells: England in
32
Transition
Howard Spring: Labour
32
and the Course of Empire
Joyce Cary: The Edwardian
33
Age and After
The United States 33
Edgar Lee Masters:
34
Expansion and Conflict

Albion Tourgeé: Slavery
34
and Emancipation
John W. De Forest: Post-
35
War Corruption
Hamlin Garland: Enter the
36
Farmer
Winston Churchill and
David Phillips: Bosses and 36
Lobbies
Jack London: Marxism v.
37
Fascism, Early Phase
James L. Ford, Samuel H.
Adams, and Upton Sinclair: 38
Oil Men and Anarchists
John Dos Passos and James
T. Farrell: Communist 39
Infiltration
Upton Sinclair and John
Dos Passos: Global War 40
and Politics
Post-War Directions 40
The Continent and
42
Elsewhere
Joseph Conrad: Colonial
42
Politics and Revolution
The Soviet State: Its Roots
43
and Growth
Marie-Henri Beyle
[Stendhal]: Napoleonic 44
Panorama
André Malraux: Comintern
44
v. Kuomintang

Jean-Paul Sartre: The
45
Shadow of Munich
Fascism through Italian
45
Eyes
Alan Paton: The Trek of
46
the Boers
Richard Kaufmann: The
47
Third Reich
Chapter Four. THE NOVEL AS
MIRROR OF NATIONAL 48
CHARACTER
Great Britain: A Self-
48
Portrait
Peaceful Change in the
48
Political Realm
The Fruits of Imperialism 50
The United States: A Self-
51
Portrait
Forces of Corruption 52
The American Idealist 53
Responsibility at Home and
53
Abroad
Italy: A Self-Portrait 55
Spain: An American Portrait 57
Greece: An American
58
Portrait
France: A Composite
58
Portrait
Russia: A Composite Portrait 59

Union of South Africa: A
61
Self-Portrait
Germany: A Self-Portrait 61
Chapter Five. THE NOVELIST
AS ANALYST OF GROUP 63
POLITICAL BEHAVIOR
Economic Groups 63
The Lumpenproletariat 63
Peasants 64
Labor 65
Proletarians 68
The Middle Class 68
The Rich and Well Born 69
Political Groups 72
Office Holders: Rules and
73
Skills
The Mechanics of Control 75
International Communism 76
Analysis of Mass
78
Phenomena
Chapter Six. THE NOVELIST
AS ANALYST OF
79
INDIVIDUAL POLITICAL
BEHAVIOR
Motivation 79
Moral Problems and
81
Changing Values
The Successful Politician 82
Political Pathology: 84
Deviates, Martyrs, and

Authoritarians
Men Behind the Scenes 88
The Disillusioned 88
The Role of Woman 91
Chapter Seven. SOME
93
CONCLUSIONS
Bibliography 96

chapter one
The Study of the Political Novel

The Importance of the Political Novel

In an age in which progressively more men have engaged in politics while
the politics themselves have become increasingly complex, any means for
understanding these interrelated phenomena becomes correspondingly more
valuable. The techniques of science are constantly being brought to bear
upon this problem of understanding. But one of the best means of
enlightenment has been available for more than a hundred years. Since its
beginning the political novel has fulfilled the ancient function of art. It has
described and interpreted human experience, selectively taking the facts of
existence and imposing order and form upon them in an aesthetic pattern to
make them meaningful. The political novel is important to the student of
literature as one aspect of the art of fiction, just as is the psychological
novel or the economic novel. But it is important in a larger context, too. The
reader who wants a vivid record of past events, an insight into the nature of
political beings, or a prediction of what lies ahead can find it in the political
novel. As an art form and an analytical instrument, the political novel, now
as ever before, offers the reader a means for understanding important
aspects of the complex society in which he lives, as well as a record of how
it evolved.

The Nature of the Political Novel: Problems of Definition and
Selection

The political novel is hard to define. To confine it to activity in the houses
of Congress or Parliament is to look at the top floor of the political structure
and to ignore the main floor and basement which support it. One has to
follow the novelist’s characters, on the stump and into committee rooms—
sometimes even farther. But the line is drawn where the political element is
forced into the background by the sociological or economic. The political
milieu develops in part out of the conditions described in Upton Sinclair’s
The Jungle and John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath. Although these
books are proletarian novels, to include them would be to open the door to a
flood of books that would spread far beyond the space limitations of this
study. Of course, proletarian novels which are also political novels are
included. Two such books are André Malraux’s Man’s Fate and Steinbeck’s
In Dubious Battle. But for the purposes of this study, a cast of characters
drawn from the proletariat is not enough, even if they are oppressed
economically and socially. They must carry out political acts or move in a
political environment. Also excluded are novels such as Herman Melville’s
Mardi which treat politics allegorically or symbolically. Here a political
novel is taken to mean a book which directly describes, interprets, or
analyzes political phenomena.
Our prime material is the politician at work: legislating, campaigning,
mending political fences, building his career. Also relevant are the people
who influence him: his parents, his wife, his mistress, the girl who jilted
him, the lobbyist who courted his favor. The primary criterion for admission
of a novel to this group was the portrayal of political acts, so many of them
that they formed the novel’s main theme or, in some cases, a major theme.
These acts are not always obvious ones like legislating. In Joseph Conrad’s
Nostromo a mine owner contributes financial support to political
movements which will provide a more favorable climate for his business. In
Dubious Battle presents labor organizers who manipulate a strike to serve
the political ends of the Communist Party. The terminology of the theater
can be helpful in bridging the gap between the world of actual events and
the world of fiction. It helps to show how various aspects of the actual
political process are translated into the forms of fiction. The author may
concentrate his attention upon the actors—the public officials who make
decisions and wield authority on behalf of the community or the whole
society. A good many of the actors may not be public officials, but rather
private citizens whose acts are political: voicing opinions, helping to select

candidates, voting, attempting to influence the political process, revolting.
These actors, and those who are public officials, may demonstrate factors in
the overall drama which are predominantly political in their consequences:
attitudes, social power, social stratification. The novelist will be concerned
with the roles the actors play and the lines they speak, the purposes they
have and the strategies they employ. He may concentrate upon the
interaction between these actors or between them and the audience—the
public. An author may choose to emphasize the drama as a whole rather
than the individual actors, highlighting the stage upon which it is played out
—the country or area of national life in which the scenes are laid. This
emphasis upon the drama will throw into sharp relief the events and
decisions in which the actors participate, and the framework of rules or
custom against which they take place.
The novels considered here deal with political activity at all levels—local,
state, national, and international. If, as von Clausewitz said, “War is merely
the continuation of Politics by other means,” one may find politics in war,
too. This study, therefore, includes works on revolutionary as well as
parliamentary politics. On the international level especially one encounters
group attitudes which are politically relevant. The groups may be the
conventional social, economic, or political strata of British and American
society, or they may be those of the rigid Marxist state. Other relevant
attitudes spring from national characteristics, and many political novels
identify some of them. This definition is wide and inclusive, but so is
political activity.
The primary sources of this study are eighty-one political novels. Over half
of them are by Americans. The next largest group is the work of English
writers. Other novels are taken from Italian, French, German, Russian, and
South African literature. These eighty-one novels are the minimum
necessary to give an understanding of the political novel. At the same time,
this is the maximum number that could be included in the study. Only in the
case of the English and American political novel has an attempt been made
to trace the development of literary genre. Some of these novels are used
because they show artistic excellence, others because they show how the
form developed historically. More American than English novels are used
because they are more readily available, many of them in inexpensive,
paper-bound editions. It was not possible to attempt the same outline with

the other literatures because of the brevity of this study. For some of them,
too, a sufficiently representative group of political novels was not available.
Most often the authors deal with their own countries, although they
sometimes write about a foreign land. Some of them are hard to pigeonhole:
Henry James, an American expatriate writing about London terrorists in The
Princess Casamassima; Joseph Conrad, an Anglicized Pole analyzing
Russian revolutionaries in Under Western Eyes; Arthur Koestler, an
Austrian-educated Hungarian living in France, describing the Moscow trials
in Darkness at Noon. This is one reason why it is more fruitful for present
purposes to avoid strict concentration on national literatures and to accept
valid insights into national characteristics and behavior patterns no matter
what the language of their source.

Characteristics of the Political Novel

In The Charterhouse of Parma the witty and urbane Stendhal says, “Politics
in a work of literature are like a pistol-shot in the middle of a concert,
something loud and vulgar yet a thing to which it is not possible to refuse
one’s attention.” His own work contradicts the great French novelist, yet his
comment is perfectly accurate for many other novelists. Politics in some
modern novels of political corruption, such as Charles F. Coe’s Ashes, do
seem loud and vulgar, and in books like Upton Sinclair’s the reader may
hear not one pistol shot but a cannonade. But this is not to say that the use
of political material must disrupt a work of literature. The trick, of course, is
all in knowing how. Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote an artistically weak,
politically successful work in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, while Fyodor
Dostoyevsky produced a politically unsuccessful, artistically enduring
classic in The Possessed.
The quality of these novels varies widely, just as would that of a group
dealing with religion, sex, or any other complex, controversial theme. In
general, the European novels considered here attain a higher level than the
American books. This is partly because only the better European novels are
treated. But they are also superior to the best American works, except for a
few comparatively recent ones, because of the wider variety of political
experience presented, the greater concern with ideology and theory, and the

deeper insight into individual motivation and behavior. This in turn is
probably due to several factors. From the time when the United States
attained its independence until the end of the first quarter of this century, it
possessed a relatively stable set of doctrines and frames of reference
(compared to those existing in Europe) within which the individual led his
political life. Although American parties rose and declined, although the
Union was preserved, its borders expanded, and international responsibility
accepted, this evolution was orderly and limited compared to that which
occurred in Europe. The Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and
the Bill of Rights provided a stable yet sufficiently flexible political
framework. Europe during the same period reverberated with the French
Revolution, the Napoleonic Wars, the unification of Germany and Italy, and
the Russian Revolution. These were violent changes not only in theory but
in the actual form of government. It is not unnatural then that American
political novels range over a relatively narrower area, with their main
emphasis on local or national subjects, while those of European authors
delineate changing, conflicting, and radically different ideologies and
resultant events. It is only since the 1930s, with the increase in centralized
government, the impact of international Communism, and the recent
appearance on both the Right and the Left of what seem to be threats to
traditional American freedoms, that the American political novel has begun
to approach the European in breadth of theme, concern with political theory,
and interpretation of varying political behavior patterns.
The larger number of bad novels in the American group is also due to the
fact that more American novels are treated. Because of their greater
availability both for research and teaching, it is possible to show the
evolution of this genre in the United States. In doing this one is able to
examine the good ones, old and new, such as Henry Adams’ Democracy,
John Dos Passos’ District of Columbia trilogy, and Irwin Shaw’s The
Troubled Air. One pays, however, by suffering through period pieces such
as F. Marion Crawford’s An American Politician. Less obtuse politically but
nearly as abysmal artistically, is Paul Leicester Ford’s The Honorable Peter
Stirling. One is compensated, however, not only by the view of a
developing genre, but also by the recording of significant periods in
American national life and of the people who helped shape it, as in the Dos
Passos work, and by the sensitive and penetrating analysis of central
problems in contemporary life, as in Shaw’s novel.

The English political novel is also uneven. That its depths are not so low as
those in the American novel is due in part to the political heritage which its
authors share with their colleagues on the continent. Its authors work from a
long and rich political history in which the evolution has been less violent
but no less steady.

The Novelist and the Political Scientist

The differences between the methods of the political novelist and the
political scientist are worth studying. Their intentions are often at variance.
Whereas the scientist is dedicated to objectivity and statistical accuracy, the
novelist is often consciously subjective; if his work is intended as a political
instrument, as were Uncle Tom’s Cabin and The Possessed, scrupulous
attention to the claims of the other side will invariably lessen the emotional
impact and political worth of the novel. If a scholar sets out to examine the
rise of Nazism, he will have to treat not only the Beer Hall Putsch and the
Reichstag fire, but German history and the German national character as
well. He will chronicle the effects of Versailles, the staggering of the
Weimar Republic, and the growing strength of the Brown Shirts. He will be
concerned with national attitudes, with the relative strength of the parties
that vied with the National Socialists. His study will gauge the effects of the
aging Hindenburg and the demoniac Hitler on a people smarting from
defeat, searching for a scapegoat, and longing for a resurgence. And all this
will be backed with statistics where possible. It will be a cogently reasoned
analysis with documented references to available sources. Also, the study
will be aimed at a fairly homogeneous and well-defined audience. The
appeal will be intellectual. If emotion creeps in, the work is probably bad.
The novelist who is to examine these same events will present them quite
differently, even apart from the techniques of fiction. If he is a rather
dispassionate chronicler of human foibles and frailties such as, say,
Somerset Maugham, he will probably portray a group of people through
whose actions the rise and significance of Nazism will become meaningful.
The reader will probably observe the drifting war veteran, the hard-pressed
workman, the anxious demagogue. Out of these lives and their interactions
will emerge an objective study of the sources of a political movement and
of the shape it took. If the novelist is an enthusiastic Nazi, the book will

reflect his particular bias. The storm troopers will become heroic Horst
Wessels, the young women stalwart Valkyries, the Führer an inspired
prophet and leader. Out of the novel will come a plea for understanding or a
justification of violence and a perverted view of German national destiny.
The book will be emotionally charged, a calculated effort to produce a
specific desired response. If this series of historical events is used by a
Frenchman, they will undergo another change. There will probably be an
evocation of the Junker mentality, of Prussian militarism, of hordes of gray-
green figures under coal-scuttle helmets. If this novel is not a call to arms, it
will be a warning cry to signal a growing danger. These three fictional
books will use the same staples of the novelist’s art, yet each will differ
from the others in motivation and attitude. They will portray aspects of the
same complex of events treated by the political scientist, but this will be
virtually their only similarity.
A disadvantage for the novelist is his need to make his book appealing
enough to sell and to make his reader want to buy his next novel. Although
the scientist too must make his work as polished and interesting as he can,
the novelist does not, like him, find his readers among subscribers to the
learned journals. He cannot rely upon sales prompted by the need to keep
abreast of research in a specialized field. If a novelist is to stay in print,
political savoir-faire and intellectual capacity are not enough. He has to sell
copies. Perhaps this is one reason why all but a few of these novels have a
love story accompanying the political theme. Sometimes the love story
inundates it, as in An American Politician; in other novels, such as
Sinclair’s Presidential Agent, it is peripheral and pieced out with flirtations.
It may be that these novelists include this element because love is as much a
part of life as politics. Its nearly universal presence is a reminder, however,
of one aspect of the novelist’s task and one way in which his work differs
considerably from that of the political scientist.
The advantages of the novelist’s method over the political scientist’s
compensate for the drawbacks. These advantages do not necessarily
produce a better work, one which gives more insight into a problem or
explains it better. They do, however, offer more latitude and fewer
restrictions. The novelist may use all the techniques of the political
scientist. Sinclair’s Boston is studded with as many references to actual
events, people, and documents as most scientific studies, although it is

permeated by a violent partisanship which would make a scholarly study
highly suspect. But this points up one of the novelist’s advantages: he can
use the methods of scholarship to document his case and then supplement
them with heroes and villains who add an emotional appeal to the
intellectual one. This string to the novelist’s bow is a strong one. He can
create a character like Shaw’s Clement Archer in The Troubled Air, while
the scientist is forced to use opinion research, carefully documented
sources, and well-verified trends in treating the problem of deprivation of
livelihood as a penalty for suspected political unreliability. Sometimes the
scientist uses case histories, but the subjects are often identified by initials
and treated with such antiseptic objectivity that almost no emotional impact
comes through. The loss of Clement Archer’s job, because he has employed
actors blacklisted for suspected Communist activity by a newsletter acting
as a self-appointed judge, presents this general problem with more
frightening immediacy and reader-involvement than an excellent scholarly
study could ever do. Archer becomes one embodiment of the problem—a
rather naïve but courageous liberal made into a sacrificial goat because of
his fight for what he believes to be traditional and critical American rights.
If he wants to, the novelist can use historical personages to flesh out his
story. Although the reader does not see him in its pages, Dos Passos’ The
Grand Design uses the figure of Franklin D. Roosevelt in the background as
one of the mainsprings of the action. An individual may appear in
transparent fictional guise. The roman à clef has many representatives in the
political novel. Pyotr Verhovensky in Dostoyevsky’s The Possessed has
been identified as the revolutionary Sergei Nechaev. Hamer Shawcross in
Howard Spring’s Fame Is the Spur is thought to be Ramsay MacDonald.
The governor-dictators who rampage through Dos Passos’ Number One,
Adria Langley’s A Lion Is in the Streets, and Robert Penn Warren’s All the
King’s Men look and act much like Huey Long. The novelist ranges
backward into time as does the scientist. Maugham’s Then and Now brings
to life the wily Niccolo Machiavelli, and Samuel Shellabarger’s Prince of
Foxes reexamines the sinister Cesare Borgia. When the novelist goes
forward into time he need not be confined to a mathematical extrapolation
of birth rates, trade balances, or electoral trends. Instead, he can create,
whole and entire, the world which he thinks will grow out of the one in
which he lives or which he sees emerging. The scientist may attempt to
define the group mind or examine pressures toward enforced conformity in

political thought. But George Orwell in 1984 creates his own terrifying
vision of the world thirty years from now. And this story is frighteningly
believable. It does not even require Coleridge’s “willing suspension of
disbelief which constitutes poetic faith.” With its three super states
perpetually at war, its Newspeak vocabulary including “thoughtcrime” and
“doublethink,” its omnipresent Big Brother, 1984 reflects aspects of our
world out of which the novelist’s vision grew. Besides the political
apparatus which Orwell builds, he creates a protagonist, Winston Smith,
one man out of all the masses of Party members and Proles who revolts
against the system, providing the reader with a focus for personal
association. The reader follows him through his round of duties in the
Ministry of Truth, into his state-forbidden love affair, and finally down into
the depths of the Ministry of Love where he is tortured into conformity
before he will be “vaporized” and poured into the stratosphere as gas. If he
likes, the author can move at will seven centuries into the future, where
Aldous Huxley erected his Brave New World. From a world of
mechanization, deteriorating family ties, and ascendant pragmatic science,
he can artistically extrapolate a planet ruled cooperatively by ten World
Controllers. Embryos are conditioned within their glass flasks and then
decanted into a rigidly stratified society where stability has outlawed
change and Ford has replaced God. And there are memorable people—
sensuous Lenina Crowne, and the Savage, a “natural man” who commits
suicide rather than choose between prehistoric primitivism and soulless
modernism.
Not only does the novelist have complete freedom in time and space, he has
the right to use any of the devices found attractive in communication since
the first articulate primate squatting in the firelight gave his interpretation of
experience to his hairy brothers. The point of the story can be driven home
or made more palatable with laughter, suspense, or a cops-and-robbers
chase that will make it memorable. Ernest Hemingway’s Spanish guerrillas
and Ignazio Silone’s Italian peasants are often amusing. The reader may
remember the inspired profanity or the droll proverbs; he will also
remember the fight against Fascism and oppression. From Darkness at
Noon the reader will take with him Rubashov’s midnight arrest, the wait for
the NKVD bullet in the back of the neck; he will retain, too, the irony of the
disillusioned Bolshevik destroyed by the monster he helped create.

This attempt to differentiate the novelist’s approach from the scientist’s is
not meant to prove that the novelist’s is better. It is simply different,
representing another aspect of the difference between science and art. Each
discipline tries to describe and interpret experience. Where one does it by
means of well-defined, rigidly controlled techniques within generally
accepted boundaries, the other is highly flexible, embodying a view of life
shaped by an individual set of preferences and dislikes, talents and blind
spots. Each of these divergent methods offers advantages and
disadvantages. One should not go to political novels expecting to find,
except in rare cases, complete objectivity, solidly documented references,
and exhaustive expositions of political theory. He should not always
anticipate credibility. When problems are presented, the reader may not find
answers or even indications of the directions in which they may be found.
But one cannot go to a scientific monograph with the hope of meeting in its
pages someone whose life is an embodiment of a problem, or whose
survival represents the gaining of a goal, his death the losing of it.
These two approaches to the study of politics complement each other, just
as the physician and clergyman both mean to keep their identical patient
and parishioner well and whole. The novelist can, however, enter well into
the scientist’s field. When he deals with actual events, he tries to record
them as they happened. If the names and places are changed, he is usually
faithful to the manner or meaning of the events. In Bricks Without Straw
Albion W. Tourgée assures the reader that these events or others exactly like
them took place during the Reconstruction era in the South, and there is no
reason to doubt him. Sinclair’s Oil! exhaustively treats the Sacco-Vanzetti
case; it is completely opinionated, but it is a historical account, nonetheless,
of one of the most memorable political cases in American history. More
than a historian, the political novelist is also an analyst. He sees cause-effect
relationships at work, he looks into stimulus and response, motivation and
satisfaction. Stendhal is not content merely to describe military and political
events during the Napoleonic era; he goes beneath the surface to explain
what some of them meant.

The Purposes of This Study

This examination of the political novel will go beyond simply charting its
development. In order to examine it as a distinct literary form, it will be
necessary to discuss its practitioners, the literary techniques they use, the
purposes they aim at, and their success in achieving them. More than this,
there will be attention to the function of these political novels, at the time
they were written and now in our time. In the forefront will be an attempt to
show what the reader can learn, whether he approaches this body of work
from a particular discipline such as political science or literature, or whether
he goes to it as a general reader wanting either enlightenment or
entertainment.
The purposes and scope of each chapter indicate the purposes of the study
as a whole. Chapter Two, “The Novel as Political Instrument,” examines the
effect of the political novel on politics. Some novels contain heroes
presented against a political background which might just as well have been
mercantile or medical; other novels are intended to have politics as their
subject; still other novels are meant to have definite political consequences.
This chapter is chiefly concerned with novels of this last type. But it is
necessary to look at others, too, for in creating life in his novel the artist
will often reflect his own preferences, and they may affect those of his
reader. Chapter Three, “The Novelist as Political Historian,” describes the
way in which the writer may weave into his story the threads of history,
recording not only the lives of his creations, but actual events in the lives of
nations. By virtue of his special skills, he can recreate these events with a
vividness found in few scholarly histories. Chapter Four, “The Novel as
Mirror of National Character,” is devoted to an examination of the cultural
and national differences discernible in these novels. There appear to be
some denominators of political behavior which remain common no matter
what the scene of action. This chapter deals with the numerators, the
quantities which vary from culture to culture. Chapter Five, “The Novelist
as Analyst of Group Political Behavior,” demonstrates the insight the novel
can give into political actions which derive from group attitudes, pressures,
and responses rather than individual ones. The novelist may use several
indices to determine how a society is structured, which of its groups is most
homogeneous, which most apparent in the effect it has upon the body
politic. Chapter Six, “The Novelist as Analyst of Individual Political
Behavior,” shows how the basic unit in all political equations is treated. The
novelist portrays the person who moves in the main stream of politics and

the one who stands on its edges. In most cases the acts of these people are
examined—their motives, their effects. As in any other kind of fiction,
characters are created who are complete individuals, believable and unique.
But sometimes they are also typical of a number of people. Chapter Seven,
“Some Conclusions,” emphasizes the major points made in the study. It also
discusses what may be expected of the political novel in the future. The
annotated bibliography gives the author, title, and date for each novel.
In terms of organization, this study proceeds from the most direct
relationship between the novel and politics to the least direct relationship.
Chapter Two shows how this art form can actually influence the political
process. Chapter Six, on the other hand, indicates the way in which the
novel treats the individual, who, with the exception of the outstanding
leader, has far less direct influence upon politics than groups or nations.
Chapter Three deals with the way in which the novel has recorded some
major events in the political scientist’s field from the early nineteenth
century to the present. Chapters Four through Six proceed from larger to
smaller political units.
In short, the aims of this study are to indicate the gradual development of
the political novel in England and the United States, to show what it has
produced in several other countries, and to demonstrate the insights it can
give in this area of human behavior to students of literature, politics, and
related disciplines, and to the general reader.

chapter two
The Novel as Political Instrument
A political novel written from a point of view favoring a particular faction
is a political instrument in effect even if not in intent. A writer may sternly
tell himself at the outset that he will be completely impartial, only to have
the reviewers note all sorts of bias, real or imagined, of which he may not
have been conscious. This happened to Turgenev when he published
Fathers and Sons, and it continues to happen every year. The intensity of
the authors’ feelings varies from obsessive preoccupation to passing
interest. The novels in this chapter were included because they contain
definite opinions, sometimes appeals, on political subjects. Some of them
never exhort the reader or seem to lead him by the hand to the author’s
point of view. But each of them contains material capable of influencing the
reader’s opinions about some phase of political activity. If a novelist gains a
reader’s support for a cause, arouses his distaste for a course of action, or
simply produces a reevaluation of previously accepted beliefs, his work has
served as a political instrument just as surely as a pamphlet mailed by a
national committee or a handbill stuffed into the mailboxes of a sleeping
city.

THE UNITED STATES

Harriet Beecher Stowe and the Civil War
Uncle Tom’s Cabin is a prime example of the novel as political instrument
both in intent and effect. Harriet Beecher Stowe declared in her preface that

The object of these sketches is to awaken sympathy and feeling for the African race, as
they exist among us; to show their wrongs and sorrows, under a system so necessarily cruel
and unjust as to defeat and do away with the good effects of all that can be attempted for
them....

The book did more than awaken sympathy; its millions of copies helped
rouse the growing anti-slavery sentiment in the North, creating in part the
political climate out of which the Civil War grew and mustering moral
support for its prosecution. But the novel’s effects were not confined to
America. In Literary History of the United States Dixon Wecter called it
“the most influential novel in all history,” and Harold Blodgett noted that it
was used in the campaign that secured England’s Reform Act of 1867.
Raymond Weaver, in his introduction to the Modern Library edition, notes
that half a million Englishwomen signed an address of thanks to the author,
and that Russians were said to have emancipated their serfs after reading
the book. The hero of Edgar Lee Masters’ Children of the Market Place
says the book “was not really true,” but he records the praise it won from
Macaulay, Longfellow, George Sand, and Heine, and adds, “The winds of
destiny previously let loose were blowing madly now.”
Translated into nineteen languages, the novel was also dramatized. Eliza’s
flight across the ice and Simon Legree’s cruelty have become hackneyed,
but the author did not rely exclusively on such melodrama and tugging at
the heartstrings. The plot is interlarded with case histories of slavery—
mothers whose children were taken from them, women sold for “breeders,”
men taken from their families and sent down into the deep South. The
reader may feel that Legree is a villain so fiendish as to be unbelievable; he
may find the angelic Little Eva’s death scene, in which she cuts off golden
curls and distributes them to the sobbing family and retainers, cloying or
emetic. There are other characters, though, worth observing. Senator Bird of
Ohio, who had formerly supported the Fugitive Slave Act, shelters Eliza
before sending her to a Kentuckian who had freed his slaves and now runs a
stop on the Underground Railway. Artistically the novel is very bad. Its
structure sprawls, its melodrama creaks, and its sentiment oozes over
hundreds of pages peopled more often by cardboard figures than believable
human beings. This is another case, however, in which the reading public
paid no attention to critical standards. Mrs. Stowe concluded her novel with
the warning that

not surer is the eternal law by which the millstone sinks in the ocean, than that stronger
law, by which injustice and cruelty shall bring on nations the wrath of Almighty God!

Her words were prophetic, and her book helped to bring about the dies irae
of which she spoke.

Albion Tourgée: The Blunders of Reconstruction
Just as the political novel helped to prepare the way for the Civil War, so it
commented upon the events which followed it. In A Fool’s Errand (1879)
and Bricks Without Straw (1880), two awkward but intensely felt books,
Albion Tourgée criticized the tremendous blunders of the federal
government in the Reconstruction era. Using the same techniques of case
history, pathos, and melodrama as did Mrs. Stowe, Tourgée applauds the
intent of the federal Reconstruction program but is outraged and cynical at
the way it was carried out. He praises the work of the Freedmen’s Bureau
but laments its dissolution and the government’s virtual abandonment of the
Negro. Like Mrs. Stowe, Tourgée states the problem as dramatically and
appealingly as he can; then he offers his solution: education. Both of
Tourgée’s novels close with appeals for federal aid to education in the
South. The Negro is obviously in greatest need, but the aid is meant to be
spread over the entire educational system. Discarding all pretense at fiction
and writing directly to the reader, Tourgée concludes A Fool’s Errand by
telling him that “Poor-Whites, Freedmen, Ku-Klux and Bulldozers are all
alike the harvest of ignorance. The Nation can not afford to grow such a
crop.”

Perennial Theme: Corruption
In the 1880s the American political novel began to shift from the Civil War
and Reconstruction to the theme of corruption. This subject was explored
extensively during the next five decades. Whether the scene was the
national capitol, as in Henry Adams’ Democracy (1880), or a ward in New
York City, as in James L. Ford’s Hot Corn Ike (1923), the theme was the
same—the betrayal of public trust for private ends. Although many of these
novels were written in the resurgent school of Realism, all of them, in their
depiction of pervasive corruption, were capable of being political

instruments through the nature of the material which they treated if not
through their author’s intent. Whether the writer declaims through his hero
against public robbery or simply tries to present dispassionately what he
sees, the revulsion of the reader at the travesty of American political ideals
is likely to be the same.
There was one notable exception to this trend. It was Jack London’s The
Iron Heel (1908). Projecting his story into the future, he wrote of an
America under the dictatorship of an Oligarchy serving the interests of the
large corporate and industrial groups. The reader learns that the Oligarchy
was eventually overthrown, but the book concentrates upon a fictitious era
of horrors unequalled until the appearance of Orwell’s 1984 forty years
later. In his introduction to the novel, Anatole France called London a
Revolutionary Socialist. This he was, and—in the novel, at least—a devoted
Marxist as well. The book was clearly meant to be a political instrument. Its
fulfillment of this aim may be judged by a comment of Stephen Spender in
his contribution to The God That Failed (1950). He remarks that Harry
Pollitt, a high official of the English Communist Party, had told him that in
his opinion The Iron Heel was “the best revolutionary novel.” The
Communist view of the propaganda value of literature makes the comment
significant.
Upton Sinclair: Corruption Plus Radicalism. Upton Sinclair’s books
were among those which marked the beginning of a transitional phase in the
American political novel. In them a new theme was added to that of
political corruption: the rise of leftist and radical forces. Oil! (1926) focuses
on Bunny Ross’s political journey to the far Left. Bunny’s father, J. Arnold
Ross, is one of the tycoons who selects, pays for, and elects an American
president. Naming names and placing places, Sinclair sends his characters
into the campaign of 1920. Verne Roscoe says that he is negotiating with
Barney Brockway of “the Ohio gang.” Sinclair writes that “he made exactly
the right offers, and paid his certified checks to exactly the right men,” and
Warren Harding was nominated. The fifty million dollars poured into the
campaign by the oil interests (according to Sinclair) helped to finish the job.
The account of the naval reserve oil lease scandals which follows makes
Sinclair’s position on the activities of a powerful lobby very clear. More an
exposé than a work of art, the novel describes attempts to hinder the

organization of the oil workers and the strikes and strike-breaking which
follow. The book ends with an attack upon
an evil power which roams the earth, crippling the bodies of men and women, and luring
the nations to destruction by visions of unearned wealth, and the opportunity to enslave and
exploit labor.

Two years later Sinclair threw himself into a vindication of the characters
and lives of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti. The cast of Boston
(1928) includes the fictitious Thornewell family, but they are all dwarfed by
the two Italians whose careers ended in the electric chair. Sinclair presents
the case as an effort by the city and state governments to dispose of two
representatives of the anarchist movement which was thought to threaten
society’s foundations. He maintains that the government was supported in
its attempt by representatives of organized religion as well as the socially
prominent and economically powerful classes. Although the author said that
he had tried to be a historian, that he had not “written a brief for the Sacco-
Vanzetti defense,” the novel is precisely that. It is also an indictment of
most of the immediate society in which the events took place. He accuses
the prosecution of carefully building an illegal, trumped-up case heard by
the violently prejudiced Judge Thayer. He declares that the Commission
which investigated the case, made up of Cardinal O’Connell, Bishop
Lawrence, and President Lowell of Harvard, rendered an endorsement of
the state’s actions which amounted to a whitewash. Running parallel to the
story of the Italians is that of Jerry Walker, parvenu tycoon of the New
England felt industry who is legally plundered by the old commercial and
banking interests of Boston and New York. Mr. Sinclair’s intentions to be
impartial may have been sincere, but like the exclamation points in his
prose, they got away from him.

Growing Political Consciousness: 1930 to 1954
The great wave of political consciousness which struck America in the
1930s surged over into the novel. It took several forms. There was the novel
which advocated liberal reforms in government, and the novel which,
presenting the Communist point of view, necessarily went farther. The
proletarian novel emerged. Sympathetically describing the privations of the
so-called proletariat to stimulate betterment of its living conditions, these

novels sometimes cleaved to the Communist Party line but were often the
work of non-Communist authors writing from genuine concern for their
subjects. The Communists regarded this art form as another weapon in the
class struggle. Paul Drummond, a fanatical Communist writer in James T.
Farrell’s Yet Other Waters (1952), shouts that “now the time has come for
Party literature.” Moses Kallisch, leader of a front organization starting a
Left Wing Book Club, declares, “The day is not far off when we’ll
overwhelm bourgeois culture in America!” Increasing consciousness of the
political malignancy of Fascism and Nazism appeared in the novel. With
the descriptions of these dangers came appeals for the strengthening and
defense of the best in the American political system.
John Steinbeck: The Party Organizer. Appearing in 1936, Steinbeck’s In
Dubious Battle sociologically described the violent course and tragic end of
a Communist-organized strike of apple pickers in California’s Torgas
Valley. Shortly after he applies for membership in the Party, young Jim
Nolan is taken down into the valley by McLeod, a hard-shelled, veteran
Communist organizer. The underpaid pickers, living in squalor, follow Mac
when he helps precipitate the strike. As the apprentice, Jim follows each
move carefully, learning both theory and practice from Mac, who wants
violence and a prolonged strike in order to gain wide attention and pave the
way for organizing subsequent picking operations. Adept and devoted, Jim
learns quickly despite a gunshot wound and increasing hunger. He even
assumes temporary leadership over Mac when the latter’s vitality
momentarily sags. At the book’s end, with the strike failing, Jim falls into a
trap and his face is blown off by a shotgun blast. Mac carries his body to the
strikers’ camp platform. The book’s last line is Mac’s funeral oration for
Jim: “Comrades! He didn’t want nothing for himself.” The novel may be
considered a social and political study; the picture that emerges is one of
economic oppression, embattled workers, and hard but devoted organizers.
Sinclair Lewis: Native Fascism. Sinclair Lewis’s fifteenth book also
appeared in 1936, and its title is an indication of the jolt it was meant to
give to American complacency. It Can’t Happen Here is the story of the
American republic transformed into a Fascist corporate state through a
military coup d’état made possible by an electorate which was attracted by
share-the-wealth schemes, anti-minority agitation, and primitive
emotionalism. The methods of the Nazis and Fascists are applied to

eradicate the democratic system and even the boundaries of states. The
country is divided into eight provinces, concentration camps devour the
dissenters and the suspect, and all of American life is harshly regimented.
Lewis’s hero is “bourgeois intellectual” Doremus Jessup. After he has lost
his newspaper, his daughter, and his son-in-law, he becomes a member of
the New Underground. When revolution wins back only half the country, he
enters the other half as a secret agent. This novel has most of the faults and
virtues of Lewis’s other books: character merging into caricature, complete
lack of subtlety, and embarrassingly awkward dialogue; but with this there
is accurate social criticism, a genuine if crude vitality, and—particularly in
this novel—a very earnest concern for American traditions. Lewis’s point is
made clear as Jessup reflects that
the tyranny of the dictatorship isn’t primarily the fault of Big Business, nor of the
demagogues who do their dirty work. It’s the fault of Doremus Jessup! Of all the
conscientious, respectable, lazy-minded Doremus Jessups who have let the demagogue
wriggle in, without fierce enough protest.

John Dos Passos and Ernest Hemingway: Liberal Causes Abroad.
Glenn Spotswood’s geographical and political odyssey, abruptly ended by a
rebel bullet in the Spanish Civil War, forms the central theme of Dos
Passos’ Adventures of a Young Man (1938). Politically conscious even as a
boy, Glenn becomes successively a transient worker, a cum laude college
graduate, a Communist labor organizer, and a disillusioned member of a
splinter group. Clearly and dispassionately, Dos Passos allows his story to
unfold. There are unsavory, dislikable characters such as fierce but
noncombatant Comrade Irving Silverstone and sinister Jed Farrington, an
American Communist who, as a Spanish loyalist colonel, divides his lethal
attentions between the rebels and political unreliables. But one has the
feeling that the author is not leaning in any direction. In the prose poems
interspersed throughout the novel, however, Dos Passos lectures his reader.
The concluding paragraph analyzes the growth of the American Communist
Party and explains the gullibility of the Americans deceived by it. The last
lines tell the reader that
only a people suspicious of self-serving exhortations willing to risk decisions, each man
making his own, dare call themselves free, and that when we say the people, ... we mean
every suffering citizen, and more particularly you and me.

A little less obvious was the position of Ernest Hemingway in his fine novel
For Whom the Bell Tolls (1943). Hemingway would very probably disclaim

any intent to write a political novel, but his book teaches a lesson in one of
the oldest and surest ways—by example. Robert Jordan has left his
instructorship in Spanish at the University of Montana to go to Spain as a
demolition expert for the loyalists. Although he has placed himself under
Communist discipline for military reasons, he is not a Communist. He is a
teacher who has taken a most un-sabbatical leave to fight Fascism in a
country he loves. Following the pattern of most of these books, Hemingway
sums up a few pages from the end. Badly injured and unable to make his
escape, Jordan lies waiting in the forest to fight a fatal rearguard action
which will buy time for his escaping friends. He thinks:
I have fought for what I believed in for a year now. If we win here we will win everywhere.
The world is a fine place and worth the fighting and I hate very much to leave it.

In Number One (1943), Dos Passos shifted from dictatorship abroad to
dictatorship at home. Chuck Crawford is reminiscent of the late Huey Long
of Louisiana. Magnetic, dynamic, and unscrupulous, Chuck wins the
governorship and then goes on to the United States Senate. His personal
aide is the alcoholic Tyler Spotswood, Glenn’s older brother. Served up as
the goat in an oil lease scandal which breaks about Chuck’s head, Tyler
allows himself to remain silent and be convicted. This is primarily because
of Glenn’s last letter from Spain exhorting Tyler not to let them “sell out”
the people at home. Tyler apparently feels that his conviction is an
atonement for failure to accept the responsibility which Sinclair Lewis also
said devolved upon each citizen. In the novel’s last three lines Dos Passos
looks the reader squarely in the eye: “weak as the weakest, strong as the
strongest, the people are the republic, the people are you.”
The Grand Design appeared in 1949 to complete the District of Columbia
trilogy. In this third novel, Dos Passos’ style remains the same—detached
and impersonal, straightforward and clear. His politics (in the prose poems)
seem unchanged. He appears to be liberal, to retain his sympathy for the
smaller people having a difficult time economically. Since the book covers
the war years, the danger represented by the Axis powers is evident, but the
equally pernicious influence of militant international Communism is
equally clear. Although the book is jammed with characters from many
political strata, its primary focus is the career of Millard Carroll, who leaves
his Texarcola business to join the New Deal Farm Economy Administration.
As the war progresses, Carroll comes to feel that the Four Freedoms are

being forgotten in its prosecution. He sees personal jealousies and conflicts
within the administration. By implication, the program which produced
relocation camps for Japanese-Americans helps to complete his
disillusionment. Finally, crushed by personal tragedy, he resigns. The last
line of the last prose poem tells the reader, “Today we must learn to found
again in freedom our republic.”
George Weller: International Communism. In 1949 George Weller’s The
Crack in the Column drew attention to one of the widespread areas in which
the Comintern was trying to extend Russian domination. The scene is
Greece. The novel reaches its climax when ELAS, the army of the
Communist-dominated EAM popular front group, fights the British in the
streets of Athens while the American army contains the Germans’ last great
effort in the Ardennes. Shot down earlier on a mission, American bomber
pilot Tommy McPhail decides not to be evacuated by the underground net
of British Major Walker. He remains to engage in similar behind-the-lines
work. Walker becomes McPhail’s tutor in global politics as well as
espionage. His primary subject is the need for the United States to accept
responsibility for creating international conditions favorable to the West, as
he says Britain has done. Walker tells McPhail that the United States must
learn to recognize Soviet strategy and combat it by such means as
permanent American bases in the Middle East. Once again, the most
explicit statement of the book’s message is saved for the end:
You Americans just pay your way out of the positions of the last war, then [help] your way
back into the same positions in the next. You forget that war is continuous and this
everlasting series of visits to the strategic pawnshop a wasteful streak of postponement of
the eventual showdown.

Like many other novels which can be regarded accurately as political
instruments, this one, with its accomplished delineation of a complex
situation, tangled relationships, and deep cross-currents, contains no direct
appeals to the reader. Neither does it have any scowling villains or radiant
heroes. But the portrayal of the growing political maturity of the naïve
American under the tutelage of the able but weary Englishman may perhaps
achieve the same effect, and do it better.
Norman Mailer: The Extreme Left. The voice of the extreme Left, rarely
heard in recent American novels, sounded in Norman Mailer’s Barbary
Shore, a murky mixture of obscure symbolism, endless conversation, and

political theory disguised as dialogue. Published in 1951, the novel met
with a generally unfavorable critical reception. A reading bears out this
verdict. McLeod, apparently speaking for the author as his raisonneur,
discusses what he calls revolutionary socialism at great length. Rejecting
Russian Communism as state capitalism, McLoed’s two-thousand-word,
non-stop lecture envisions a mutually destructive war between “the
Colossi.” The Lenin of tomorrow, with the surviving theorists and
proletariat, must be ready to spring to the barricades of the rubble-strewn
“hundred Lilliputs” which survive. Before he is killed, McLoed passes his
concept of Marxian revolutionary socialism like a Grail or a sword to
Mikey Lovett. He is to keep it in readiness for the day when it can be used.
This novel is intensely political. Despite its ambiguousness and withheld
secrets, its essential point emerges: the first socialist revolution was
betrayed; the true revolutionary socialism must make the second one
successful.
Novels of the Cold War. As wartime cooperation with the Russians was
superseded by a growing awareness of the nature of militant Communism
and the Moscow-oriented loyalties of American Communists, the novel
chronicled this awakening. In The Grand Design Paul Graves had told
Millard Carroll that a Russian purchasing commission or a Russian-
controlled political party meant “espionage and counter-espionage and
counter-counterespionage ad infinitum....” Novels like Irwin Shaw’s The
Troubled Air (1951) and William Shirer’s Stranger Come Home (1954)
recorded the violence of this reaction. The function of these novels as
political instruments was to rouse indignation against the forces which, in
seeking to destroy American Communism, use methods as authoritarian and
undemocratic as those of the Soviets themselves. Both novels enlist the
reader’s sympathies on the side of loyal, non-Communist Americans who
are unjustly attacked by self-appointed judges using lies and questionable
methods. These courageous protagonists are virtually ruined professionally
and economically, for their integrity forbids them salvation through
conformity forced upon them by fanatical groups. The Troubled Air
embodies the problem in the efforts of director Clement Archer to keep his
radio actors employed until they can defend themselves against charges of
Communism made by Blueprint. This magazine, like some which have
appeared on the American scene, specializes in allegations of Communist
Party membership or sympathies on the part of entertainers. Archer’s

actions, exceedingly dangerous to his own position through his lack of
awareness of the nature of his opponents, cost him his job. This novel is less
a roman à clef, more complex, and far more accomplished than Shirer’s
book. Archer is victimized not only by Blueprint and the people who
surrender to it, but by two of the people he defends. Frances Motherwell
renounces Communism and denounces Archer. Vic Herres, an old friend
and secretly a fanatical Communist, has acted for his cell in selecting
Archer as a “convenient point of attack,” one who would fight the
Communists’ battle for them. The novel thus records the painful education
of an honorable man whose naïveté about American Communists is
matched by his ignorance of their opponents who borrow Communist
methods. The book is very well done, and in the reader-association with
Archer which it produces, it provides a vicarious ordeal of arbitrarily
assumed guilt-by-association with no recourse to conventional legal relief.
Stranger Come Home is a fictionalized account of a group of similar cases
familiar to most newspaper readers. Here the spark is ignited by a
publication called Red Airwaves. Commentator Raymond Whitehead has
been blacklisted after his defense of Foreign Service officer Stephen
Burnett, accused of Communist sympathies before the investigating
committee of Senator O’Brien. Burnett is charged with conspiring to give
China to the Communists. He has actually done nothing more than follow
the foreign policy of the Roosevelt and Truman administrations and
criticize the corruption he saw in the regime of Chiang Kai-shek. Whitehead
successively loses his sponsor, his air time, and his job. While he is in
Europe he is accused by Senator O’Brien of being a Soviet agent. This
charge is based upon the testimony of two ex-Communists who have
become professional witnesses against people like Burnett and Whitehead.
To give immediacy and the personal impact of the experience, the book is
written in diary form. Although its fidelity to actual events makes it seem a
transcription and though its quality as a work of art is not outstanding, the
novel succeeds in driving its point home. The villains are quite black and
the heroes are quite white despite the peccadillo here and there meant
apparently to humanize them. Nevertheless, the reader who grants belief
and sympathy to Burnett and Whitehead will be hard put to suppress
indignation and fear at the people, methods, and events which combine to
bring near ruin to two intelligent and patriotic United States citizens.

In 1952 Paul Gallico’s Trial by Terror chronicled the ordeal of Jimmy Race,
reporter for the Paris edition of the Chicago Sentinel. Slipping into Hungary
to unearth the story behind the conviction and twenty-year sentence meted
out to an American named Frobisher, Race is arrested. Brainwashed and
tortured into a false confession at a propaganda trial, Race is sentenced to
prison. When his release is eventually secured, he is a fear-ridden,
completely disorganized personality, an animal conditioned to confession as
completely as Pavlov’s dog was to salivation. But his destruction is not the
only cause for anger. His liberation was not achieved by his government,
but by his editor, who was able to blackmail the Hungarian Minister of
Affairs because of Titoist activities. The feeling throughout the book is that
the United States embassy played a diplomatic game in which the deadliest
weapons were strongly worded notes. The final irony is that the release was
accomplished by a private citizen forced to use Communist methods of
blackmail and intimidation. This novel graphically indicts Soviet brutality.
It also criticizes American policy in a dramatic aspect of the cold war.

GREAT BRITAIN
The English political novel appeared somewhat earlier than its American
counterpart. Its subjects range over a wider area and its varieties of political
experience are more numerous. As a political instrument, however, the
English novel is very like the American.

Benjamin Disraeli: Revitalized Toryism
In the preface to the fifth edition of Coningsby, coming five years after first
publication in 1844, Benjamin Disraeli, later Prime Minister and Earl of
Beaconsfield, made no pretense about his intent:
The main purpose of its writer was to vindicate the just claims of the Tory party to be the
popular political confederation of the country.... It was not originally the intention of the
writer to adopt the form of fiction as the instrument to scatter his suggestions, but, after
reflection, he resolved to avail himself of a method which, in the temper of the times,
offered the best chance of influencing opinion.

This novel was the first of three which comprised Disraeli’s Young England
trilogy. In a somewhat unsubstantial way, the three books set forth the

principles which were to create a revitalized Tory party. In The Political
Novel Morris Speare concludes that the four major points of the program
deal with the nobility, the middle class, the working class, and the English
church. The nobility was to reassume the leadership it held before patents of
nobility were doled out freely to clever entrepreneurs and favorite retainers
of great families. An aristocracy in function as well as name, it was to be
assisted by the vigorous industrial and mercantile middle class which had
arisen in England since the industrial revolution. The lot of the working
class was to be bettered by a sympathetic government rather than by
militant movements from within its own ranks. Moral and spiritual
leadership was to be supplied by a revitalized church true to its fundamental
religious tradition. Harry Coningsby, grandson of the dissolute and
immensely powerful Lord Monmouth, is the personification of Young
England. A hero at Eton and Cambridge, he returns from a year of travel on
the continent to enter politics. Refusing to sit in Parliament for one of
Monmouth’s rotten boroughs and act as a rubber stamp for old Tory
policies, Coningsby is cut out of Monmouth’s will. Monmouth’s death and a
neatly juggled legacy eventually pave the way for Coningsby’s entry into
Parliament on his own terms. Patly, Coningsby of the nobility marries Edith
Millbank, daughter of a middle class tycoon.
A year later, Sybil followed Coningsby. Like substitutes in a football game,
Charles Egremont and Trafford go in for Coningsby and Millbank. Much of
the book is concerned with the working class. Disraeli shows the reader the
horrible conditions in which many of its members live and the violence of
their attempts to better them. Bishop Hatton, barbarous ruler of the
locksmiths of the mining district village of Wodgate, leads his “Hell-cats”
in an assault upon ancient Mowbray Castle. Unions are presented as groups
of violent men, cloaked and hooded. Supplementing this portrayal is one of
a decaying and greedy aristocracy. One can perhaps imagine the reaction of
the landed or moneyed English voter. He might well accept Disraeli’s
opinion that something had to be done.
Tancred completed the trilogy in 1847. The hero is the sheltered great-
grandson of the Duke of Bellamont, who “might almost be placed at the
head of the English nobility.” The introspective Tancred is preoccupied with
religion and the direction it can give to human affairs particularly in the
areas of politics and government. Unable to find the answers to his

questions in England and unwilling to enter Commons until he has them, he
makes a pilgrimage to the Holy Land. At this point the novel dissolves into
a panorama of kidnapings, desert intrigues, and mountain kingdoms
reminiscent of Rudolph Valentino movies. Tancred becomes absorbed with
“the great Asian mystery” which is to assist in the moral regeneration of the
West, particularly England. Overwhelmed by Emirs and Sheikhs, Turks and
Druses, the novel is the weakest of the three. But together the books are a
prime example of an art form carefully selected and used to gain a hearing
for a political program.

Henry James: The Breakup of Victorian Tranquillity
The Princess Casamassima, published by Henry James in 1886, is one of
the novels which focused upon the revolutionary currents beginning to stir
beneath the surface of English political life. Irving Howe has called it a
warning that something had to be done to alleviate the misery of the poor.
These conditions had given rise to radical groups such as that which met at
the Sun and Moon Tavern under the leadership of Paul Muniment. The
personal tragedy of his friend Hyacinth Robinson forms the novel’s central
theme. The sensitive, disinherited inhabitant of two worlds, Robinson is the
illegitimate son of a Frenchwoman who had murdered her titled lover.
Robinson’s maternal grandfather had fallen on the barricades of the French
Revolution. Raised with the help of Eustache Poupin, exiled veteran of the
French Commune, Robinson feels that he is heir to a revolutionary
background. Emotionally exalted, he declares his willingness for self-
sacrifice at a group meeting. From that time on, like the protagonist of The
Beast in the Jungle, Robinson waits for the summons to fulfill his destiny.
But meanwhile he falls under the spell of the Princess, who takes a
dilettante interest in the lives of the poor and the activities of the radical
movement. Partly under her influence and partly as a result of a trip to
Venice and Paris made possible by a small legacy, Robinson finds his
revolutionary ardor waning. In his admiration for the richness of European
civilization, he becomes reluctant to act as an agent of its eventual
destruction. When the summons comes for him to assassinate a duke, he
shoots himself instead. James presents a gallery of types: the guilty
aristocrat, a member of the decayed gentility, the professional revolutionary,

and the industrious poor. In this novel James is concerned as always with
personal relationships, backgrounds, and motivations. He also presents an
environment out of which political violence can explode. And his feelings
about the need for preventing it are clear.

Joseph Conrad: Early Cloak and Dagger
In 1907 Joseph Conrad explored this problem from the same point of view
in The Secret Agent. In the author’s note which introduced the novel,
Conrad wrote that a friend had mentioned anarchist activities. This was the
germ of the story:
I remember, however, remarking on the criminal futility of the whole thing, doctrine,
action, mentality; and on the contemptible aspect of the half-crazy pose as of a brazen
cheat exploiting the poignant miseries and passionate credulities of a mankind always so
tragically eager for self-destruction. That was what made for me its philosophical pretences
so unpardonable.

Conrad then had his point of view; his recollection of an attempt to blow up
the Greenwich Observatory gave him the outlines of his plot. A “delegate of
the Central Red Committee,” Adolf Verloc is actually an informer and agent
provocateur for many years in the pay of the embassy of a “great power”
(probably Russia). His principal function is to transmit warnings of planned
bomb-throwings to insure the safety of “royal, imperial, or grand-ducal
journeys....” Called to the embassy, Verloc is told by first secretary Vladimir
that the conference in Milan is lagging in its “deliberations upon
international action for the suppression of political crime....” England is
chiefly responsible, Vladimir tells him. He orders Verloc to provide a
stimulus in the form of an attack “with all the shocking senselessness of
gratuitous blasphemy.” Verloc is ordered to blow up the Observatory.
Always a businessman and never a terrorist, he is deeply disturbed.
Obtaining a bomb, Verloc sends his admiring half-wit brother-in-law Stevie
out with it. But Stevie stumbles and blows up himself rather than the
Observatory. When Verloc’s wife learns what has happened, she kills him
and then commits suicide. To add to the impact of the story, Conrad wove
into it the characters of Karl Yundt, an evil old terrorist, and the Professor, a
“perfect anarchist” who spends his life in experiments to develop the
perfect detonator. In The Great Tradition F. R. Leavis has rightly called this
book “one of Conrad’s two supreme masterpieces.” In its structure, its

delineation of personality, and its masterful manipulation of point of view,
the book is a classic. It is an example of the superiority of the European
political novel, one of the finest works in the entire genre.
Under Western Eyes was written from the same point of view as The Secret
Agent. Appearing in 1910, the novel dealt with the same sort of groups
Conrad had treated three years earlier. But now the area was wider, the
figures larger, and the stakes bigger. Kirylo Razumov, another illegitimate
like Hyacinth Robinson, is studying at St. Petersburg University for a career
in the civil service. His life is disrupted when Victorovitch Haldin seeks
refuge in his rooms after blowing up the President of a Repressive
Commission which had imprisoned, exiled, or hanged many Russians
considered disloyal to the Czar. Afraid of being suspected of complicity and
enraged at what he feels is gratuitous destruction of the only life he can
make for himself, Razumov, on the advice of his father, Prince K——,
betrays Haldin to the police. His life now completely disoriented, Razumov
is persuaded by the Prince and Councilor Mikulin to go to Geneva.
Regarded as a hero and the accomplice of Haldin, he enters the
revolutionary circle led by the famous Peter Ivanovitch. His job is to report
their plans to Mikulin. But then, despite himself, he falls in love with
Haldin’s sister Nathalia. He confesses his betrayal of Haldin to her and then
to the circle. Maimed by the circle’s executioner, Razumov stumbles out
onto the street and into the path of a tram car. At the novel’s end he has
returned to Russia with but a short time to live. Again, Conrad’s point of
view affects the reader through the tragedies he describes, the object-lesson
characters he creates, and the comments they make. The narrator and
Conrad’s raisonneur, an anonymous teacher of English in Geneva, is the
source of many of these comments. When he sees Nathalia about to return
to Russia as a dedicated worker, he thinks of her believing in “the advent of
loving accord springing like a heavenly flower from the soil of men’s earth,
soaked in blood, torn by struggles, watered with tears.”

E. M. Forster: The Problem of Imperialism
Out of E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India (1924) comes a compassionate
plea for British understanding of India. But even understanding is not
enough; there must also be love. This great subcontinent, divided by

geography, economics, caste, and religion, has a heritage of misery and
discord. The book’s two great themes are the divisions which sunder India
and the love which alone can make it whole. It has been taken by the British
without love in a union which is rape. In one of the parallels which inform
the theme, this action is represented on the interpersonal level by the
projected loveless marriage of Adela Quested and British civil servant
Ronny Heaslop. The novel moves to a climax when the hysterical Adela
mistakenly accuses the sensitive Dr. Aziz, a Mohammedan Indian, of
attempted rape in the sinister Marabar caves. Aziz is acquitted, but his
career is ruined and his spirit desolated. But the influence of Ronny’s dead
mother, Mrs. Moore, returns, through the memory of her and the presence
of her two other children, to dispel some of the evil. At the book’s end Aziz
achieves a partial reconciliation with Cyril Fielding, the Englishman who
has defended him at the cost of ostracism. But as they part Aziz shouts:
If it’s fifty-five hundred years we shall get rid of you, yes, we shall drive every blasted
Englishman into the sea, and then ... you and I shall be friends.

As an appeal either for love or withdrawal from India, the book is a political
instrument. It is also a revealing commentary upon one of the causes of
what Winston Churchill called “the dismemberment of the British Empire.”

Aldous Huxley and George Orwell: The Future in Perspective
Huxley’s Brave New World (1932) and Orwell’s 1984, which followed it
seventeen years later, are political instruments through the honor and
revulsion they will create in any reader whose political beliefs are formed
by the democratic tradition. Although both these fine novels are written in
the future, neither is a fairy tale spun from air. Their only resemblance to
fairy tales is a horde of enough all-too-real goblins and witches to make a
month of Walpurgisnachts. Huxley, using godlessness and immorality, and
Orwell, using totalitarian government, create nightmares well calculated to
increase resistance to tendencies in modern life which could produce the
results so strikingly conjured up in their novels.

THE CONTINENT

Ivan Turgenev and Fyodor Dostoyevsky: Nihilism and Its
Rejection
In his helpful introduction to the Modern Library edition of Fathers and
Sons, Herbert Muller writes that Ivan Turgenev’s A Sportsman’s Sketches,
which appeared in 1852, had created an effect similar to Uncle Tom’s Cabin
in America. Fathers and Sons (1862), treating revolutionaries like most of
Turgenev’s books, had an even more lasting effect. Although both the
uproar and the Nihilist movement died down, Muller declares that the novel
“helped to form the mentality of the later revolutionaries who established
the Soviet Union.” The story deals with the return from college of Arkady
Kirsanov and his friend Yevgeny Bazarov. Nihilist Bazarov dominates his
disciple Arkady. Conflict quickly erupts. Arkady’s father Nikolai is hurt by
the distance between them, and his uncle Pavel seizes upon a pretext for a
duel in which Bazarov wounds him. Bazarov’s father Vassily, pathetically
eager to be close to his son, finds the gulf between them even greater than
that separating Arkady and Nikolai. The two generations—one giving
allegiance to religion and the old regime, the other to science and
revolutionary Nihilism—have lost almost all rapport with each other.
Turgenev treats the perennial aspect of this theme, yet he particularizes it to
mid-nineteenth century Russia. Eventually the gap between the Kirsanovs is
narrowed as Arkady marries and returns to administer the estate with his
father. But before Bazarov leaves he lashes out at Arkady:
You’re not made for our bitter, rough, lonely existence.... Our dust would get into your
eyes ... you’re admiring yourselves unconsciously, you like to abuse yourselves; but we’re
sick of that—we want something else! we want to smash people!

It may be, as Muller says, that Turgenev’s mind was with the sons and his
heart with the fathers, that he tried to be fair. Here is a case in which,
regardless of intent, a novelist helped to shape a movement which disrupted
a world.
Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky reacted violently to Turgenev’s work. The former
challenged him to a duel and the latter attacked and caricatured him
mercilessly as Karamazinov in The Possessed (1872), a violent attack upon
Nihilism. In his introduction to the Modern Library edition, Avrahm
Yarmolinsky declares that
Dostoyevsky’s avowed intention in writing it was to drive home certain convictions of his,
regardless of whether or not he met the requirements of the art of fiction. He wanted to

deal a body blow to the rebels who threatened what he considered to be the foundations of
Russian life. Originally he conceived his novel as a political lampoon, a pamphlet against
the revolution.

In the massive book which he produced, Dostoyevsky fulfilled his purpose
by showing the effect upon a provincial capital of a group of revolutionaries
guided by a demoniac leader. Conspiracy, mob violence, arson, and murder
temporarily disrupt government. Pyotr Verhovensky returns from
revolutionary activity abroad to set up groups throughout Russia. He seeks
to knit together this particular group by making all of them participate in the
murder of a dissident member. Before he has fled and his group has been
caught, three more people have been killed. Nikolay Stavrogin, the book’s
perverted central figure, is meant to be the messiah of Pyotr’s movement.
The ruin of the whole structure is complete when, on the last page, Nikolay
dangles from his own silken noose. Recurring in the book and linked to its
title is the image of the biblical Gadarene swine. Pyotr’s father, estranged
from his abusive son, is dying partly because of a chain of events set in
motion by him. He asks that this passage be read to him and then exclaims:
Those devils that come out of the sick man and enter into the swine. They are all the sores,
all the foul contagions, all the impurities, all the devils great and small that have multiplied
in that great invalid, our beloved Russia, in the course of ages and ages.

The swine had plunged into the sea and destroyed themselves. Dostoyevsky
wanted to insure that his countrymen would not, like lemmings, follow each
other to destruction.

André Malraux: Pro-Communism
An index of changing times is the contrast between The Possessed and
André Malraux’s Man’s Fate. This novel represented the opposite pole of
political thought. Published in 1934, Malraux’s book sympathetically
followed the abortive Communist attempt to capture Shanghai in 1927.
Under the leadership of half-French Kyo Gisors and others like him, the
Chinese Communists wage a losing battle against the Kuomintang party of
Chiang Kai-shek. This time the gallery of revolutionary types—theorists,
assassins, hard-core Party workers—is presented in a different light. They
are heroes. The professional revolutionists and disinherited peasants are
following a vision. Even when they receive the coup de grâce or await
death in the boiler of a locomotive, eventual victory is seen transcending

temporary defeat. Having given his cyanide to wounded comrades, the
Russian Katov is still able to reflect as he awaits his horrible end that “he
had fought for what in his time was charged with the deepest meaning and
the greatest hope; he was dying among those with whom he had wanted to
live; he was dying, like each of these men, because he had given a meaning
to his life.” These words are something like Robert Jordan’s valedictory to
life. But Jordan fought to preserve Spanish democracy and Katov died to
establish Chinese Communism. The novel serves all causes.

Ignazio Silone: Disillusionment on the Left
The first of a remarkable group of modern political novels appeared in the
same year as Man’s Fate. It was Ignazio Silone’s Fontamara. “The poorest
and most backward village of Marsica,” Fontamara is the scene of
progressive encroachments of Fascism upon the life of its people. Exploited
by The Promoter—a builder, banker, and local tycoon—the uneducated
peasants successively lose most of their water supply, the profits from their
hard-raised crops, and their right to talk about politics. When the protests of
some of its people make it appear that Fontamara is resisting the Mussolini
regime, Black Shirt thugs raid the village, abusing its people and wrecking
houses. Goaded by the need for work, Berardo Viola and the son of the
nameless narrator go to Rome to seek it. Fleeced of their money, they
finally obtain the necessary certificates of moral character. But The
Promoter has written upon them that the men are politically unreliable.
Thrown into jail upon suspicion of distributing copies of The Unknown
Hand, they meet the editor of this resistance leaflet. To save him, Berardo
assumes responsibility for the paper and is beaten to death by the police.
The editor succeeds in delivering a small press to Fontamara, where the
villagers begin their secret paper, which they call What Shall We Do? This
phrase is not only the title; it is printed at the end of each story of Fascist
atrocity. At the book’s end, the nameless narrator and his family are in
hiding with Silone. The village has been wiped out by the Fascists. The
book’s last line—not in quotes and therefore Silone’s question as well as the
narrator’s—is, of course, What Shall We Do?
Three years later, in 1937, the next of Silone’s fine political novels was
published. Bread and Wine marks the beginning of the disillusionment of

Silone’s heroes with Communism which culminates in A Handful of
Blackberries (1953). Pietro Spina, the central figure of Bread and Wine,
returns to Italy although hunted there as a Communist agitator. Ill and
perplexed, he goes into hiding in the poor mountain village of Pietrasecca
disguised as a priest, Don Paolo Spada. His disguise evolves into another
self, reviving and intensifying the inner conflict he has always felt through a
dual attraction to Christianity and Marxism. Before he returns to political
action he achieves a sort of synthesis of what he thinks are the best
elements of both beliefs, necessarily rejecting Russian Communism. Don
Paolo tries to give his old teacher Don Benedetto the essence of his belief:
If a poor man, alone in his village, gets up at night and takes a piece of chalk or charcoal
and writes on the village walls: “Down with the war! Long live the brotherhood of all
peoples! Long live liberty!” behind that poor man there is the Lord.

In A Handful of Blackberries Rocco de Donatis returns to the village of San
Luca at the end of World War II. Formerly a fanatical Communist, he
breaks with the Party. The novel describes the Party’s attempt to ruin his life
and his fiancée’s. Figuring in the story is an ancient trumpet traditionally
used to call the peasants to action “when we just can’t stand things any
longer.” Rocco’s survival and the inability of the Communists to seize the
symbolic trumpet to pervert it to their own uses signalize a sort of victory.
In their total effect these novels are an indictment of both Fascism and
Communism. Simply written yet powerful, they display a deep sympathy
for the poor and oppressed.

Arthur Koestler: The Bolshevik on Trial
Like Orwell and Huxley, Arthur Koestler wrote a novel which, without one
plea or exhortation, is a political instrument through the strong emotional
and intellectual response which it can create. Darkness at Noon (1941) tells
the story of Nicolas Rubashov, an old Bolshevik once second only to “No.
1” in what is unquestionably Russia. But now this legendary hero of the
Revolution lies in a small isolation cell awaiting the ordeal which is to lead
to confession and abnegation at a public treason trial. Through the use of
flashbacks, this stark and powerful novel traces Rubashov’s career. All the
usual elements are there—the devotion to the Party, the cold betrayals, the
blind obedience. Eventually the repressed questions had risen to the surface.

In attempting to work them out Rubashov had arrived at disillusionment
and “political divergencies.” Eventually he concludes that the mistake was
that “we are sailing without ethical ballast.” The trial over, he is led down a
dark corridor deep within the prison. He reflects that Moses was allowed to
see the Promised Land. “He, Nicolas Salmanovitch Rubashov, had not been
taken to the top of a mountain, and wherever his eye looked, he saw nothing
but desert and the darkness of night.” An instant later the bullet crashes into
the back of his head. One is appalled not only at his career and those of the
thousands of Rubashovs who have helped to create the Soviet state, but at
the whole process which creates a Rubashov—and a No. 1.

AFRICA
The inclusion of novels on contemporary South Africa in this study comes
near to disregarding the limits set up by our definition of the political novel,
for certainly there is as much of the sociological and economic in these
novels as there is in The Jungle or The Grapes of Wrath. They are included,
however, because politics plays as vital a part in the South African problems
portrayed in these novels as do the other two factors. While the Blacks in
the Union of South Africa are not slaves, their treatment is an inflammatory
subject, and the repressive measures taken against them are political by
their very nature. The Nationalist Party of Prime Minister Malan owes its
tenure in no small measure to its policy of apartheid, strict segregation of
Blacks from Whites.

Alan Paton: The Race Question
One of the most eloquent opponents of apartheid is Alan Paton, a member
of the Liberal Party and author of two fine novels dealing with the general
problem of race relations in South Africa: Cry, The Beloved Country (1948)
and Too Late the Phalarope (1953). Although both books focus primarily
upon interpersonal relationships, the tragedies which they involve have
their bases in the relations of the two races from which the interacting
characters are drawn. Cry, The Beloved Country tells a moving and deeply
pathetic story of the loss of two sons. The son of the Zulu Stephen Kumalo,
an Episcopal clergyman, murders the son of James Jarvis, benefactor of old

Kumalo’s church. Ironically, in Arthur Jarvis Absalom Kumalo had killed a
man who wanted to better the lot of Kumalo’s people. In 1953 the equally
moving Too Late the Phalarope set forth the tragic story of Pieter Van
Vlaanderen, police lieutenant of Venterspan and hero to Black and White
alike. Convicted of sexual relations with the unfortunate Negress Stephanie,
he is sentenced to prison and disgrace under Act 5 of 1927, the Immorality
Act. The immediate causes of Pieter’s tragedy are his wife’s inability to
give him complete understanding and fulfillment, and the vindictive enemy
he has created in Sergeant Steyn. But the underlying causes are those which
infect the Union of South Africa with the virulent disease of racial hate and
bigotry. Paton’s books are not only compelling human documents, they are
also pleas for the eradication of the disease.
One of the reasons for the novel’s preeminence as the literary form superbly
fitted to describe and interpret life is the space it gives the writer to erect his
structure, to illumine the nature of an individual, to characterize a people, to
describe both human units in relation to the world. With his thousands of
words the novelist can impart the shape he wants to the elements which will
make his own vision of life meaningful to his reader. There is no better
example of this characteristic of the novel than these works which use its
freedom to treat that increasingly complex phenomenon of human activity
—politics in its broadest sense. And, assuming the artist’s privilege, he
often makes his work a personal thing, producing not only a work of art but
a political instrument as well.

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.

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.

chapter five
The Novelist as Analyst of Group Political Behavior
The economic criterion is one of two means used by the political novel for
classifying groups. The other index identifies groups by means of overt
political behavior—party membership, acceptance of discipline,
performance of specific acts. These two means of classification are not
parallel but complementary. The first, in a sense, serves as a background for
the second. Although the first is economic, its validity lies in the fact that
party lines tend to follow economic ones, that modern political theory,
particularly that of revolution, has been based increasingly upon economic
facts as well as political ones. The approach of this chapter differs from that
of the previous one in tracing behavior patterns which cut across national
lines.

ECONOMIC GROUPS

The Lumpenproletariat
In trying to use these indices of group behavior it is no longer possible to
deal in general terms such as “the poor.” Though “proletariat” may be
precise enough for Marxism, even this term is too inclusive for close
analysis of the material in these novels. Several gradations are possible
within this least fortunate group on the economic scale. Professor Ambrogio
Donini’s introduction to the Italian edition of The Pine Tree and the Mole
identifies the lowest group in that novel as members of the
lumpenproletariat. These people are not the workers whose taking of the
factories Taddei fleetingly mentions. They are the lowest stratum of

Livorno’s life, the drifters and criminals from whom the Fascists recruited
members for their Black Shirt squads. It is their motivation as much as their
behavior which differentiates them from the workers. While groups of
militant workers are usually presented as trying to better the lot of their
whole group, these members of the lumpenproletariat seem to be
entrepreneurs. Rubachiuchi becomes an agent provocateur for the Fascists
not to help the poverty-stricken, but simply to help himself. After he
infiltrates an anarchist group, he aids in its destruction, not because he is
personally opposed to anarchism, but because this is the job his employers
are paying him to do. Very often in these novels one encounters
Communists trying to destroy Socialists ostensibly because Socialism is
thought to be a palliative rather than a solution to the worker’s problems.
But these underworld figures do not have even this theoretical justification.
Although this group is not nearly so numerous in the novel as many others,
its representatives occasionally appear. In Fontamara, Peppino Goriano
returns to Fontamara after thirty-five years, some of them spent in a
“political career” in Rome. A good man, he had been forced by starvation to
become an agent provocateur for the police. He had earned five lire a day
plus a twenty-five lire bonus each time a job resulted in his going to the
hospital. For a brief time he had been a hero after a picture of him helping
to wreck a Communist newspaper office had appeared in a newspaper. But
the “Hero of Porta Pia” lost the honest job he had finally found when it was
decided that “fascism could no longer shelter in its bosom such delinquents
as had been convicted several times for theft.” Pablo in For Whom the Bell
Tolls is a study in deterioration. A cruel but effective anti-Fascist at the
beginning of the war, he is found by Robert Jordan to be a sotted semi-
bandit who opposes Jordan’s blowing of the bridge. Having lost control of
the band to his woman Pilar, Pablo tries unsuccessfully to forestall the
demolition by stealing part of Jordan’s equipment. Although he leads the
retreat after the bridge is blown, Pablo is no longer one of the “illusioned
ones.” He is a guerrilla who retains only his violence and a dominating
desire for survival. Old Zaccaria in A Handful of Blackberries is a bandit
first and a partisan second. He had received a decoration for a crippling
encounter with a German patrol, but the source of the battle was a truckload
of cheese which he intended for the black market rather than a desire to free
Italy. These characters are not nearly such low forms of life as some of the
members of Taddei’s lumpenproletariat, but they are a part of that group to

be found on the fringes of most political conflicts, individuals motivated by
desire for personal gain rather than by principle.

Peasants
Almost as submerged in the economic structure is the peasant class. Here
too there are extra-national similarities. The paisans of Silone and Taddei
and the muzhiks of Turgenev and Dostoyevsky have characteristics in
common. Ground down by oppression and exploitation, they engage in
political action only as a result of outside stimulation rather than as a result
of spontaneous desire among themselves. Often they may be too devitalized
even to do that. When Bazarov in Fathers and Sons tells the peasants that
they are the hope of Russia, he does not suspect “that in their eyes he was
all the while something of the nature of a buffooning clown.” In a more
subtle way Don Paolo tries to awaken the peasants of Pietrasecca in Bread
and Wine. He has a little success with parables, but a direct attack upon
issues produces nothing. When he goes to Fossa he asks the lawyer
Zabaglione about peasant participation in the now disbanded Socialist
Leagues. Zabaglione tells him:
What Socialism meant to most of them was a chance to work and eat till their stomachs
were full, to work and sleep in peace, without having to be afraid of the morrow. In the
league premises at Fossa, next to the bearded portrait of Karl Marx, there was a picture of
Christ in a red shirt. On Saturday nights the peasants came to the league to sing “Up,
brothers! Brothers, arise!” and on Sunday morning they went to Mass to say “Amen.” The
permanent occupation of a Socialist leader was writing recommendations.

The American representatives of this class seem much the same. Garland’s
A Spoil of Office follows the abortive political careers of the Grange and the
Farmer’s Alliance. Bradley Talcott sees this latter movement as “the most
pathetic, tragic, and desperate revolt against oppression and wrong ever
made by the American farmer.” His guiding star Ida puts it even more
simply: “While our great politicians split hairs on the tariff, people starve.
The time has come for rebellion.” Conditions in Iowa have changed eighty
years later, but in the deep South they are almost as bad. William Russell’s
A Wind Is Rising (1950) focuses on Negro tenant farmers charged 500 per
cent interest by the landowners and cheated of part of the cotton crop they
succeed in raising.

Whether he is Prince Torlonia or a Russian noble, the large landholder is
most often seen in the novel as the embodiment of the forces which keep
the peasant class in subjection. Men like Nikolai Kirsanov in Fathers and
Sons may attempt to improve conditions, but the predominant pattern is one
of exploitation which eventually produces violence. At the end of A Handful
of Blackberries the peasants kill a bailiff when they invade the Tarocchi
pasture lands they believe to be rightfully theirs. Debased and deprived,
lacking political awareness, and incited by members of other classes, the
peasant group turns to violence. In some areas of the world, particularly the
United States and England, a steady economic evolution has tended to
eliminate large segments of this group. The Russian peasant appears still to
be a peasant, even though he may be a Stakhanovite worker in a large
kolkhoz. But where the class still exists in a society in which violent protest
is still possible, the pattern appears unchanged.

Labor
Commenting on one of the causes of the failure of the farmers’ movements
of the seventies, Garland said: “They had made the mistake of supposing
that the interests of merchant, artisan, and mechanic were also inimical.” In
the novel these interests are not at all inimical. They are rather parallel, for
the labor movement (which includes the last two groups mentioned by
Garland) has as its natural antagonist the moneyed class to which the
peasants’ adversaries belong. And in the novel the laborer is treated as
sympathetically as the peasant, with the single exception of Disraeli’s Sybil,
which gives an antagonistic picture of the trade unions. But there are two
significant differences between the peasant class and the industrial labor
class. The latter has adopted different methods and has met with a large
degree of success.
The political behavior and history of the labor movement emerges very
clearly in the novel. This group fought its first violent battles to achieve
organization. When this was accomplished, concerted action in which the
strike was the principal weapon was begun to attain better working
standards. In societies in which unions are still free, the strike has retained
its tactical importance, but it has been accompanied by progressively less
violence. And as strife has decreased, a more effective technique has taken

its place. The labor movement has gone into politics. The most overt form
of this policy is the formation of a labor party like the one so successful in
England. Less direct but still effective is the method used by American
unions of supporting the party which seems most likely to serve labor’s
interests. Peasants’ leagues and farmers’ groups had been formed to take
direct political action, but none achieved such spectacular success as these
labor groups. Unlike the peasants, the laborers had to a large extent
provided their own leadership. Indicative of their more cohesive and
militant nature is the frequently expressed distrust of people in the
movement coming from non-labor classes. In Marcella the radical Nemiah
Wilkins is suspicious of Socialist Harry Wharton. He feels that he is too
well dressed and educated to lead a labor movement, and he looks forward
to the day when they “would be able to show these young aristocrats the
door.” Penelope Muff, a dedicated organizer in Fame Is the Spur, has the
same feeling toward two women who work actively in the Socialist cause.
They give both time and money, but to Pen they are outsiders taking a
dilettante interest in the poor.
That labor’s energies would be channeled into politics rather than violence
seemed at one time impossible. Looking back at his youth, Tom Wilcher
recalls in To Be a Pilgrim that then “the rich men were still boundless in
wealth and arrogance; the poor were in misery, and neither saw any
possibility of change without the overthrow of society.” But the labor
movement made the transition from a mob to a party. Pen Muff and Hamer
Shawcross had seen it achieved when Keir Hardie, wearing a cloth cap
rather than a top hat, drove down London’s streets in a wagonette instead of
a brougham to take his seat in the House of Commons. And labor remained
so conscious of its class origins that Shawcross seemed guilty almost of
blasphemy years later when, as a Labourite minister, he wore his
ceremonial uniform with its sword and cocked hat. Figures in the novel
recall the lines from Browning’s The Lost Leader about the man who had
betrayed his group “just for a riband to stick in his coat.” Such a one is
Hamer Shawcross. Another is Chester Nimmo. Their supposed betrayal
seems more heinous because of this class consciousness. Dick Remington
may change from Liberal to Tory with a minimum of obloquy, but when
Shawcross enters a wartime coalition government he is a Judas.

When Sinclair published Oil! in 1926 he saw the activities of the labor
movement almost completely in terms of a class struggle. But it was an
index of the relative progress of the American movement as compared with
the English that strike violence remained the chief weapon on this side of
the Atlantic. Two years later, in Boston, the situation was worse. He wrote
that Massachusetts had “evolved a complete technique of labor smashing”
in which a strike-breaking department developed in the Boston police force
was rented out to manufacturers in neighboring towns. He concluded that
Sacco and Vanzetti were not convicted and executed for a fatal armed
robbery. They were killed because they represented the forces of social
revolt to the banking and industrial interests which felt themselves critically
threatened. Even eight years later, In Dubious Battle represented large
segments of the labor group as ill-treated men whose efforts to attain better
wages and working conditions were opposed, not only by the employers,
but by the forces of the state as well. It is in Dos Passos’ books that the
American labor movement is seen making the transition from economic to
political action. In Adventures of a Young Man the pecan-shellers, the
miners, the auto-workers are organized as forces which will obtain
concessions through direct economic action rather than legislation. But The
Grand Design shows labor at work within the Democratic Party. There is no
nationwide labor party, but the votes of the labor group are marshalled in
support of candidates whose programs will provide them with legislative
relief.
The continental labor movements, particularly the Italian, are portrayed in
the novel as having a greater history of violence and misfortune than those
in either England or the United States. Taddei’s Socialist workers take over
their factories at gun point. Silone’s laborers are victimized by The
Promoter. Koestler’s Rubashov recalls his mission of telling Little Loewy
that the interests of his Belgian dock workers were to be subordinated to
those of Russia. Similarly, the Fascists had destroyed the Italian labor
movement for the purposes of the corporate state. And, of course, the
classic irony was the full name for which “Nazi” stood: National Socialist
German Workers Party.
The behavior patterns of the labor movement traced in the novel reveal
gradual change. A more homogeneous and dynamic group than the
peasants, labor has just as extensive a heritage of exploitation and strife.

Although leadership has sometimes come from outside their class, it has
been provided to a large extent by a dedicated and indigenous elite. Whole
national labor movements have been submerged under totalitarianism;
others have appeared to be sacrificed as pawns by leaders intent upon
personal aggrandizement. But as the movement has matured, old weapons
have been used with increasing moderation and new ones have been added
to the arsenal. Organs such as the CIO Political Action Committee appear in
none of the novels in this study, but such instruments typify the new tactics
by which gains are obtained through political pressure. The archetype, of
course, is England’s Labour Party, which, in assuming national power, has
had to make the final transition by directing legislation which should
benefit not only its own members but those of all classes of the nation. This
represents an evolutionary development which is a reflection of some of the
English national characteristics seen in the novel. Perhaps one ends not with
a conclusion but with a question. The conservatives and liberals, the
Republicans and Democrats, derive their strength from areas which are
fairly well defined but which to some extent cut across economic and
occupational lines. Can an instrument forged in hottest partisan conflict
discharge the responsibility which comes with the attainment of the goal of
political power? Can it legislate for a society, or will its antecedents compel
it to serve a special interest group?

Proletarians
During the thirties members of the peasant and labor groups were the
subject of a literary movement which produced the proletarian novel. This
type of novel is generally unsatisfactory for the study of group behavior
patterns considered here since its emphasis is much more sociological than
political. There are some exceptions, however. The Iron Heel, Man’s Fate,
and In Dubious Battle have been called proletarian novels. Other proletarian
novels not included in this study were written by Dos Passos, Farrell, Shaw,
and Silone. The two novels by Malraux and Steinbeck straddle the line
between the political and the proletarian. This is also true of A Wind Is
Rising, which came after the movement as such had spent itself but which
concentrated upon one of its favorite subjects, the southern sharecropper.
Some of the proletarian novels have political overtones. Sherwood

Anderson’s Beyond Desire (1932), which was meant as his contribution to
the proletarian cause, followed the career of Red Oliver as a Communist
labor organizer in southern textile mills. Like Jim Nolan, he is shot to death.
But this novel does not reveal as fully as Steinbeck’s book the part of the
Communist Party’s labor strategy in its overall plan. The men of Liam
O’Flaherty’s The Informer are proletarians, members of the Irish
Republican Army fighting the British. But in its most common form, the
proletarian novel stopped just short of political action. It would present in
dramatic fashion the conditions under which the members of this actually
diverse group lived. If they took positive action, it was usually to join a
union or the Communist Party. Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath shows the
broad scale social delineation the proletarian novel permits; it also shows
clearly that though its ultimate aim may be political, its primary textual
emphasis is not.

The Middle Class
The middle class is not as well represented as other groups in the political
novel. Of course, definition is a problem. In terms of economics, Glenn
Spotswood and Robert Jordan are members of the middle class. In terms of
politics, however, they are not bourgeois but intellectuals, Jordan a liberal
and Spotswood a radical. Perhaps the true middle class does not provide
enough drama for the novelist who deals with politics. Most of the people
in It Can’t Happen Here are middle class citizens, but they do not move and
act in their normal environment. Their apathy has permitted the rise of a
dictatorship, forcing them into the role of the persecuted or the underground
fighter. Most often a novelist using a middle class hero will work a
transformation upon him in which he changes his class identity. He will,
like Glenn Spotswood, cast his lot with the class economically below his.
Or, like Harvey Sayler in The Plum Tree, he will rise above it through
political advancement which brings him power and wealth. In rare cases,
the hero will manage to ride both horses at once. Peter Stirling, in Ford’s
novel, will obviously be a successful candidate for the governorship of New
York. But his stepping stone has been nearly twenty years of work in New
York City’s tenement-ridden Sixth Ward. Ford’s style virtually guarantees
that Stirling will be neither fish, flesh, nor fowl by the end of the book, but

his career too makes it impossible to label him a member of the middle
class from which he started. In The Grand Design Dos Passos sometimes
shows the middle class Washington office worker. Throughout District of
Columbia, particularly in his prose poems, he refers to or quotes members
of this class along with the executives and laborers. But there is such
diversity that it is difficult to draw conclusions. Perhaps this difficulty in
discerning pronounced patterns is in itself an indication of the nature of this
class. Midway between the economic and political extremes, it has a
leavening of the characteristics of both. But the political figure who comes
from the middle class most often leaves it. If he does not, he apparently has
less interest for the political novelist.

The Rich and Well Born
The economic and social upper classes appear in more different hues than
any other class. They vary all the way from “red” millionaires like Oil!'s
Bunny Ross to the same novel’s many “malefactors of great wealth.”
Except for Disraeli’s heroes, his aristocrats are very often those usually
described as “the product of exhausted loins.” Unless members of the
English aristocracy take an active interest in the welfare of the classes
below their own, they are usually portrayed as despising them. George
Meredith’s aristocrat appears to hate these occupants of a world different
from his. The Debarry family in Felix Holt has humanitarian impulses, but
its political action is directed toward maintaining its elevated position.
Trollope’s aristocratic Liberals make efforts toward legislation which will
reduce inequities, but far more typical is the old Earl, “Buck” Lostwithiel in
Fame Is the Spur. A wringer of the poor and accident-maker for
inconvenient opponents, he is deterred from horsewhipping Hamer
Shawcross only by a raised sabre.
The evil aristocrat is not so common in the American novel as in the
English. Mrs. Stowe and Tourgée portray him during the latter half of the
nineteenth century in the South. Sinclair’s Back Bay Brahmins, years later,
take violent action, sticking neither at hypocrisy nor dishonesty, to assert a
form of slavery which is more economic than legislative. But aside from
villains such as those in The Plum Tree, whose power actually comes more
from money than lineage, the villainous role is usually assigned to the

industrialist rather than the blueblood. This may be a substantiation of the
charge that the primary aristocracy of America is one of wealth rather than
breeding or cultivation. The Italian noble class is consistently portrayed as
an oppressor no matter what the form of government under which it
operates. Serfs are freed and reforms are instituted in Fathers and Sons, but
offstage are the sounds of floggings and the murmurs of oppressed victims.
The Marchesa Raversi’s Liberal Party in The Charterhouse of Parma is
anything but liberal. Individuals like the radical poet Ferrante Palla find as
little favor with her as they do with the absolutist Ernesto IV. Separated
from these nobles by time and space, Malraux’s Ferral and his backers have
as little sympathy for the Chinese on whom they thrive as does Fabio Conti
for Parma’s commoners.
There are some good aristocrats in the political novel. All of Disraeli’s
Young England heroes approach politics with high seriousness and
dedication. Coningsby is so suffused with virtue that he keeps his purity
unsullied at the expense of losing his inheritance. Tancred’s politics are
intermingled with a religious mysticism that leads him to the Holy Land.
Meredith’s Beauchamp is such an emotional firebrand in his radical
convictions that he makes Disraeli’s young men look like mild and high
minded Rover Boys. But he belongs to their class. A little farther down on
the social and economic scale is Cary’s Edward Wilcher. A politician of
entirely different kidney from these zealous young men, he is a
sophisticated and cynical careerist who writes embarrassing epigrams about
members of his own party. But he is like the others in his concern for
progressive legislation rather than perpetuation of the privileges of his own
social group. Augustine St. Clare is one of Mrs. Stowe’s better slave-
owners. He is obviously on his way to salvation, partly through the
influence of saintly Uncle Tom, when he is untimely carved by a bowie-
knife wielded in a fight he has attempted to stop. It is this accident which
prevents him from freeing Tom. Churchill’s Humphrey Crewe is an
eccentric and fatuous ass, but his intentions are pure gold. He seeks office
because he believes he can benefit the state. In The Grand Design, Jed
Farrington refers to “the Squire in the White House and his big business
friends.” But it is clear in the book that though Big Business may
conceivably have derived some benefits from the Roosevelt
administrations, this descendant of New York state patroons was politically

oriented toward less pedigreed groups. If one were to compile a balance
sheet for this class, however, the villains would far outnumber the heroes.
Good men of wealth are even harder to find in this group of novels than
good aristocrats. Disraeli’s magnates are the type who in modern America
receive awards from chambers of commerce and engraved gold watches
from deputations of employees. Elsewhere, the industrialist is a top-hatted
advocate of laissez-faire economics whose wealth is acquired more through
the sweat of his underprivileged workers than by his own acumen. Millbank
in Coningsby and Trafford in Sybil are rising merchant princes who are
considerate of their workers and industrially progressive. But either they are
ahead of their time or the industrialists who follow them in the novel are
throwbacks to a more primitive industrial era. In The New Machiavelli Dick
Remington’s uncle is presented as a reactionary beast. His Newcastle
pottery factory produces death as well as cups and saucers. He is as
unwilling to install fans that will carry off the deadly fumes from the lead
glaze as he is to concede any rights at all to his workers. The Rhondda
Valley, where Pen Muff goes as the bride of union official Arnold Ryerson,
has more than its share of Welsh women widowed by the coal mines. The
management group remains in the background of this novel, but the miners’
efforts to obtain concessions which would now seem minimal are evidence
of an attitude not dissimilar to that of Dick Remington’s uncle. In Conrad’s
Nostromo Charles Gould has justified his decisive intervention in
Costaguanan politics by declaring that he was providing order which would
benefit the natives as well as himself. Gould’s political commitment gives
rise to one of the central problems of the novel—the extent to which his
soul has been eroded to insure the undisturbed flow of the bright silver
ingots from the San Tomas mine. Gould is not the only victim of his
obsession. The other is his wife, who is all but shut out of vital areas of his
life and thought. Early in the book he gives her his rationale:
I pin my faith to material interests. Only let the material interests once get a firm footing,
and they are bound to impose the conditions on which alone they can continue to exist.
That’s how your money-making is justified here in the face of lawlessness and disorder. It
is justified because the security which it demands must be shared with an oppressed
people. A better justice will come afterwards. That’s your ray of hope.

All of the lobbying groups in the American novels are financed by
industrial wealth. Whether the checks are signed by railroaders, utilities
operators, or oil men, their purpose is the same: to apply pressure which

will gain concessions. And, of course, in many cases these concessions
cause a direct or indirect loss to citizens in lower income brackets. In The
Plum Tree Harvey Sayler uses his power to make an example of one of
these men, “the greediest and cruelest ‘robber baron’ in the West.” The lords
of Jack London’s Oligarchy specialize in the repression of workers with
frequent resort to calculated mass murder. The climate had changed by the
time Dos Passos wrote The Grand Design, but he included the lineal
descendant of these predators. Jerry Evans retains a substantial interest in
his economic welfare even as coordinator of Roosevelt’s War Procurement
Board. Columnist Ed James’s off-the-record analysis is that
All Jerry can think of in the emergency is to use it to turn things back into the business as
usual channels an’ we all know that in the southeast at least business as usual means Jerry
Evans’ business. Of course he has cleared his skirts technically by resignin’ from the
directorates of most of his corporations.... But they are still his corporations.

Individuals of wealth in the novel may derive their money from farming
rather than industry, but unenlightened self-interest is still the chief
motivating factor. This is the case with the powerful ones in A Wind Is
Rising. Mulcting their sharecroppers, they derive added revenue from
convenient prohibition laws. Other Dos Passos characters like Jerry Evans
retain their natural roles even within the New Deal. Driving through
impoverished Southern counties, Paul Graves is told that “relief is in the
hands of the politicians and the politicians are mostly landlords who save it
for their own tenants.” Steinbeck’s Fruit Growers Association serves its
own interests in a more spectacular way. After an offer of twenty cents an
hour fails to satisfy the apple pickers, the fruit growers use strikebreakers,
vigilantes, sheriff’s deputies, and then troops to insure a harvest on their
terms.
It is curious that one of the American industrialists who approaches
goodness should be found in Sinclair’s Oil! As in his other novels, the
industrialists are the blackest of the black, but J. Arnold Ross is an
exception. An independent oil tycoon who conscientiously tries to see his
workers’ point of view, his rapacity is expressed in acquisition of oil lands
by varied methods rather than iron-handed labor relations. After his death it
is discovered that his business has deteriorated and his assets have melted,
partly because of the naval oil lands scandal. But there is also a missing
bundle of one million dollars, and at one point suspicion is cast upon his
closest associate and friend. The implied moral is probably that Ross’s few

unsuppressed humanitarian instincts rendered him less able to survive in
this particular jungle. The other sympathetically portrayed man of wealth in
this novel is Arnold’s son Bunny. Like Yevgeny Bazarov and his father
Vassily, these representatives of two generations are never quite able to
bridge the gap which separates them. Bunny loves his father, but his
symbolic rejection of him appears on page after page in which he almost
frantically disposes of his share of the oil money in subsidizing a leftist
paper or attempting to found a labor college. Sinclair’s Cagoulards in
Presidential Agent are quite willing to weaken France in order to retain the
Skoda munitions works. These Frenchmen are blood brothers of Malraux’s
Ferral, who does not see the consequences of his economic interpretation of
current history. The aristocrats and the wealthy are united in the Thornewell
family in Boston. Fighting on two fronts, they eliminate anarchists and
liquidate a parvenu entrepreneur in parallel actions. Sinclair’s judgments of
these representatives of the upper class are violent and condemnatory.
Sinclair’s condemnation is not quite typical of the political novelists who
treat the rich, although more of them approach his position than Disraeli’s.
When one compares the literary treatment of the lower classes with that of
the upper, the difference is striking. One might explain this superficially on
the grounds of distortion for dramatic emphasis, or the use of ready-made
heroes and villains. But whatever the reasons, the majority of political
novelists have been impelled to sympathize with the lower classes and
condemn the upper.

POLITICAL GROUPS
The second criterion for classifying political groups mentioned at the
beginning of this chapter was that of overt political behavior. The political
novel describes the behavior of the group to which its characters belong,
that group which, while seeking office or discharging it, conforms to a set
of rules both written and unwritten. From one point of view, these seem
almost like the rules for playing a game. From another point of view, they
are the principles which must be followed if what passes for success is to be
achieved. And these maxims are not merely empty phrases, for in the novel
the politicians who flaunt them fail. An oversimplified summary of their
content would be: follow party discipline regardless of any other

considerations; use any means likely to be effective to gain an advantage
over an opponent; follow political courses which are expedient rather than
exemplary. One of the most succinct statements of this attitude is made by
Senator Ratcliffe in Adams’s Democracy:
If Washington were President now, he would have to learn our ways or lose his next
election. Only fools and theorists imagine that our society can be handled with gloves or
long poles.... If virtue won’t answer our purposes, we must use vice, or our opponents will
put us out of office....

Office Holders: Rules and Skills
Trollope’s novels constitute an excellent primer for the politician. Phineas
Finn’s political eclipses are caused primarily by his persistent habit of
voting in accordance with his conscience rather than the Liberal Party line.
Edward Wilcher in To Be a Pilgrim takes what he believes will be a
vacation from politics after losing his seat in a close election. When he is
ready to return, he finds that his party will not have him. His brother Tom
reflects, “Perhaps they were always doubtful of him. They may have felt
that he wasn’t single-minded enough. They didn’t like his writing,
especially things like essays and criticism. Just as the Tories never liked
Balfour’s writing philosophy.” When Phineas Finn’s friend the Duke of
Omnium becomes Prime Minister, he permits himself the same luxury of
being impolitic. The death of the Marquis of Mount Fidgett gives him a
chance to award the Order of the Garter, normally given as a party spoil
rather than a tribute to merit. When Omnium bestows it upon the good,
fuddled, philanthropist Lord Earlybird, he nearly deals the deathstroke to
his weakening coalition. Mr. Daubeny, on the other hand, is a consummate
artist at the game of politics. Needing a vote of confidence to remain in
office, he conjures up a seemingly foolproof and completely hypocritical
measure for the test. As the head of the Tories, he introduces a bill for the
disendowment of the Established Church. He assumes that the Liberals will
be forced to vote for it as legislation they might themselves have proposed.
But the Liberals play the expedient game, too, with the result that the Tories
support what they are against to remain in office while the Liberals oppose
what they are for in order to turn the Tories out. In other novels the
conservatives also appear just as adept at rough and tumble politics as their
opponents. Lord Lostwithiel hires Tom Hannaway to bribe Hamer

Shawcross, who is standing for Parliament against Lord Lostwithiel’s son.
When the attempt fails, Tom defames Hamer by asserting that he has done
nothing for his mother even though he has had remarkable success. Hamer’s
counterstroke is to take the night train to Manchester, pluck his mother from
the happy home she shares with another widow, and exhibit her at a rally
the next day to refute the charge. The whole atmosphere of English politics
seems permeated by vigilance against quick marches. The wife of a cabinet
minister, Nina Nimmo remembers the constant intrigues of groups within
that small circle. Quite as wary are the rank and file of the House:
Everything they do is meant to have some effect beyond itself. Indeed many ... had got so
plotty that everything that happened somewhere was “significant” of some “development.”
If you only asked them to take an ice, they looked at you knowingly as if to ask themselves
what you were “starting” and why.

The technique of buying off an opponent is more common in the American
political novel than in the English. But the attempt to purchase Jack
London’s Ernest Everhard is more subtle than that practiced on Hamer
Shawcross. Everhard is offered a job as United States Commissioner of
Labor. Even though this fee is more respectable than that offered
Shawcross, Everhard rejects the offer in order to retain his freedom of
action. The ways in which a political opponent can be embarrassed are
legion. When Paul L. Ford’s Peter Stirling is called out with his militia
regiment to protect six hundred strikebreakers, he is ordered to Grand
Central Station, the spot where it is most likely that the militia commander
will be forced to order his men to fire upon the strikers. Nick Galt in The
Voice of the People makes the Duke of Omnium’s error when he persists in
making political appointments on merit. He earns the name of “The Man
with the Conscience” but he loses important political support.
“Straws in the wind” may be a journalistic cliché, but the political novel is
littered with them. Like Nina Nimmo’s hyper-suspicious acquaintances,
they are another index of the complex behavior patterns of highly political
groups. The ability to sense the meaning behind occurrences which often
seem slight in themselves is another talent of the acute politician. When
Jethro Bass, in Coniston, learns that the postmastership of the small town of
Brampton is to go to another’s protégé, he realizes that this is the first
skirmish in a coming battle for control of the state. His riposte is to take his
candidate to Washington. An old soldier, he gains President Grant’s
sympathies and the job. The invocation of a dusty city ordinance which

pushes James L. Ford’s Hot Corn Ike and his iron kettle off the corner
traditionally marks the invasion of Mike Grogan’s ward by reform
elements. Willie Stark in All the King’s Men rightly interprets the attempt to
indict his state auditor as the first barrage in an attack against him by
resurgent opponents. In The Charterhouse of Parma the seemingly
imminent execution of Fabrizio del Dongo makes Parma’s incumbent
regime totter. The Archbishop is one of the very few acute enough to realize
that “honour forbade the Conte to remain Prime Minister in a country where
they were going to cut off the head, and without consulting him, of a young
man who was under his protection.”

The Mechanics of Control
The mechanics by which power is attained and kept require mastery for
successful execution and close observation for understanding. Proficiency
in applying these techniques is as much the hallmark of the professional
political class as are the basic attitudes of the upper, middle, and lower
economic and social classes. If possible, an opponent is thrown off stride
before the race begins. Jerome Garwood in The 13th District feels that his
renomination to Congress is assured. But he is hurriedly called home to find
that control has been wrested from his chief supporter by an opponent who
has called an early district committee meeting after taking the precaution of
securing enough proxy votes to establish his supremacy. In Number One
Dos Passos had noted the importance of seating convention delegations
nine years before the celebrated controversies at the Republican national
convention of 1952. In this novel Chuck Crawford defeats a rival in seating
his delegation to the Democratic convention partly through the offices of
friends who have influence in the White House. Often the law is scrutinized
for advantages lying buried within it. Hank Martin in A Lion Is in the
Streets is swept into office on a tide of votes cast under his “God-blessed
Grandpappy Law.” Passed at the state’s 1898 disenfranchising convention,
the statute set up educational or property qualifications for voters but made
them inapplicable to descendants of men who had voted before 1868.
Obtaining photostats of the list of these men, he parcels them out as
ancestors to his illiterate followers who would otherwise be unable to vote.
Counter-measures against a dangerous opponent include the old dodge of

conquering through division. When in All the King’s Men the Harrison city
forces want to split the rural “cocklebur vote” of MacMurfee, they see to it
that Willie Stark enters the gubernatorial primary election. Of course, if one
has sufficient magnetism, he can charm and beguile an opponent out of his
path. In The Grand Design hopeful candidate Walker Watson returns from
dinner at the White House immensely pleased that the President wants him
to “take care of his health.” This solicitude takes the form of advice for a
rest on a ranch in Montana before the convention, “and particularly no
speeches.”
The mechanics of political success must of course be applied beyond this
highly technical behind-the-scenes area. President Roosevelt tells Lanny
Budd that he is moving toward alignment with the Allies as fast as public
opinion will allow him to go. In a less admirable concern for the same
force, Governor Fuller of Massachusetts had denied a last appeal by Sacco
and Vanzetti, according to Sinclair, because he wanted the job for which
Coolidge did not choose to run. A refinement and elaboration of this
technique is used by Senator O’Brien in Stranger Come Home when he
tries to time his committee’s most sensational charges to coincide with press
time for late newspaper editions.
The organization of political machines is also refined into a science,
particularly by people like Hank Martin in A Lion Is in the Streets, who
splits his domain into territories and keeps elaborate files, one on promising
opposition men who are to be destroyed politically. Methods designed to
insure conformity include devices such as the safe deposit boxes of Ben
Erik in The City of Anger which contain documentary evidence of the
purchase of key city officials. Nor is the psychology of interpersonal
relationships forgotten. Jethro Bass in Coniston always remains silent at the
beginning of an interview in order to force the other to speak first at a
possible tactical disadvantage. Even the protocol of visits is analyzed in The
Plum Tree by Harvey Sayler, who believes
there is no more important branch of the art of successful dealing with men than the
etiquette of who shall call upon whom. Many a man has in the very hour of triumph ruined
his cause with a blunder there—by going to see some one whom he should have compelled
to come to him, or by compelling some one to come to him when he should have made the
concession of going.

International Communism
Any discussion of group political behavior would be incomplete without
mentioning international Communism. Since Stalin’s ascendancy over his
domestic opponents in the late 1920s, the Communist movement has
increasingly become an instrument of Russian national policy rather than a
worldwide movement receiving help from the Soviets. Concomitantly,
Communism and Communists in England, the United States, Germany,
France, Greece, and China have much in common. An indication of the way
in which this force cuts across national lines is the fact that nearly a quarter
of all the novels in this study deal in varying degrees with Communism.
Even though the behavior of this group is theoretically based upon
reinterpreted Marxism, it contains definite patterns which relate to Party
discipline, strategy, and tactics which seem organizational rather than
ideological. One of the primary ones is the prohibition of original political
thought outside the limits laid down in the Kremlin. Deviationism is a
cardinal sin which destroys Nicolas Rubashov and endangers Rocco de
Donatis. In a pious attempt to avoid such error, Dr. Jane Sparling in The
Grand Design immediately consults Elmer Weeks, head of the American
Communist Party, to discover the proper attitude when Hitler invades
Russia. Another pattern is the interpretation—and use—of every action not
in terms of its immediate significance, but of its place in the overall plan.
The strikes of miners, apple-pickers, or pecan-shellers are not local disputes
between management and labor but battles in the class struggle to be used
to educate the masses and provide useful martyrs. But all the while, the
pretense that Communism is an international movement must be
maintained. In Adventures of a Young Man this view is purveyed to West
Virginia miners:
Less Minot got up and said that the American Miners was affiliated with organizations all
over the country that was working to overthrow the rotten capitalistic system that kept the
working class down to starvation wages with guns and grafting officers of the law, and that
if that was being a red, he was glad to be called a red, and as for the Rooshians, he didn’t
know much about them, but so far as he could hear tell the working class had overthrown
its capitalistic oppressors over there under the leadership of the Marxist-Leninist
Communist Party and was running the country in their own interests and was ready to help
the workers in other countries to do the same.

In Darkness at Noon this diversion of Communism from the goal of
international revolution to the service of the Russian state is clothed in a
theory meant to make it both logical and necessary: when world revolution

did not follow the Russian Revolution, it was resolved that the primary task
was to preserve “the Bastion” in order to protect gains already made and to
maintain a base for later advances. Therefore in each country where its
activities are revealed, the Communist Party is found to act primarily in the
interests of the Soviet Union.
The use of racial minority groups has not been neglected by the
Communists. Several recent American novels have touched upon this
subject. The most vivid and powerful is Ralph Ellison’s The Invisible Man
(1947). The book’s nameless protagonist flees the South dogged by
discrimination and bad luck. He is drawn into The Brotherhood (a
euphemism for the Communist Party) and rises rapidly to become
“Spokesman” for the Harlem district. Despite appreciable gains he has
made in membership, the young Negro leader is shifted downtown. A
bloody riot makes it clear to him that the change in the Party line is
deliberate. He finally understands the full meaning of his ideological tutor’s
words, “your members will have to be sacrificed.” His break with the Party
is basically the same as Glenn Spotswood’s. But here the emotional
involvement and subsequent disillusionment are much greater. Farrell
makes the same point in Yet Other Waters through the speech of a Socialist
Negro labor leader directed at Communists who have come to disrupt a
meeting. In a long passage completely italicized for emphasis he says, “You
are trying to manipulate and betray my people. You are no friend of the
black man or the white man. You are the cancer of the working class. You
are the architects of defeat.”
War, no less than domestic conflict, is seen as an opportunity to extend
Communism which transcends the immediate national issues. The Spanish
Civil War was both a skirmish and a testing ground in which the full extent
of Russian intervention was concealed to prevent direct reprisals. In The
Grand Design Jed Farrington tells Georgia Washburn: “In the short term
war we’re allied to the Squire in the White House and his big business
friends but in the long-term war they are our most dangerous enemies.” The
subjugation of satellite party interests to Soviet interests is made clear in
The Crack in the Column by Moscow-trained Zachariades, who arrives to
deliver his post-mortem on the unsuccessful EAM uprisings: “Our friends
want no more premature, independent revolutions. They have Italy and
Palestine to think of.” Even the details of authorized revolutions are

foreseen and attended to. Leaders like Zachariades and Kyo Gisors in Man’s
Fate are made to order. Hemingway’s Robert Jordan reflects about the
Moscow-trained, bogus peasant leader of the Loyalists, Valentin Gomez:
“You had to have these peasant leaders quickly in this sort of war.... You
couldn’t wait for the real Peasant Leader to arrive and he might have too
many peasant characteristics when he did. So you had to manufacture one.”
These novels illustrate Communism’s diversity of character and tactics and
the rigid discipline it imposes upon its followers under pain of expulsion or
death.

Analysis of Mass Phenomena
Interest in mass political phenomena is sometimes expressed by these
authors not only through action, but in direct analysis and examination as
well. Steinbeck’s In Dubious Battle opposes two theorists: McLoed, who
thinks this particular strike is a good one because it will give him a chance
to “work out some ideas,” and Doc Burton, who serves as the strikers’
doctor to observe contagion in the social body. Sounding more like a social
psychologist than a physician, he says
Group-men are always getting some kind of infection. This seems to be a bad one. I want
to see, Mac. I want to watch these group-men, for they seem to me to be a new individual,
not at all like single men. A man in a group isn’t himself at all, he’s a cell in an organism
that isn’t like him any more than the cells in your body are like you.

Like Mac, Jim Nolan is a psychologist of mass violence. He even offers to
reopen his wound so that his blood will provide a stimulus for the group to
attack the strikebreakers. When the strikers are about to mob one strike
leader who has bloodied another, he diverts them from this assault to the
one he desires. There are other instances in which a specific theory of the
effects of violence is used for political purposes. Just as Dostoyevsky’s
Pyotr Verhovensky has his circle kill Shatov to cement them together, so
Hemingway’s Pablo had made his townsmen communal executioners of the
Fascists: “To save bullets,” explains Pilar, “and so that each man should
have his share in the responsibility.” The basic attitudes behind mass
political phenomena are analyzed by some of Koestler’s major characters.
Both Jules Commanche and Julien Dellatre discuss the ills of France and
Western man in general. Their conclusions are very similar to Rubashov’s
critique of Communist policy. Finally Koestler himself sums up this

consistent point of view when he explains the cause of Hydie’s constant and
unsuccessful search in The Age of Longing: “the place of God had become
vacant, and there was a draft blowing through the world as in an empty flat
before the new tenants have arrived.”

chapter six
The Novelist as Analyst of Individual Political
Behavior
Repulsed by his party in his attempt to return to politics after the first World
War, Edward Wilcher, in To Be a Pilgrim, turns to writing. He tells his
brother:
No one has written a real political novel—giving the real feel of politics. The French try to
be funny or clever, and the English are too moral and abstract. You don’t get the sense of
real politics, of people feeling the way: of moles digging frantically about to dodge some
unknown noise overhead; of worms all diving down simultaneously because of some
change in the weather; or rising up gaily again because some scientific gardener has spread
the right poison mixture; you don’t get the sense of limitation and confusion, of walking on
a slack wire over an unseen gulf by a succession of lightning flashes. Then the ambitious
side is always done so badly. Plenty of men in politics have no political ambition; they
want to defend something, to get some reform—it’s as simple as that. But even then they
are simple people, too, and it is the simple men who complicate the situation. Yes, a real
political novel would be worth doing. I should like to do for politics what Tolstoy has done
for war—show what a muddle and confusion it is, and that it must always be a muddle and
confusion where good men are wasted and destroyed simply by luck as by a chance bullet.

Perhaps Edward’s insight into this aspect of politics has been sharpened by
the fact that, despite his immediate denial, he has been hit by just such a
bullet himself. But the impact must have been so great that it sent him into a
state of shock which made him unable to see that the novel had done just
what he said it hadn’t. The muddle and confusion are there, and so are the
men who rise above it as well as those who are sucked under and lost.

Motivation
It is hard to draw the line between individual and group political behavior.
A man may be a mirror or conductor of political forces as well as a discrete

individual. His motivation is perhaps the most individual aspect of his
political experience. Most of the leading characters in these political novels
are strongly motivated. In only a few cases, such as that of Willis Markham
in Revelry, does the individual drift into politics. The ones who, in
Wilcher’s words, “want to defend something, to get some reform,” are very
common. The “something” that Robert Jordan wants to defend is liberty in
Spain, so that “there should be no more danger and so that the country
should be a good place to live in.” Lanny Budd feels exaltation that in his
role of Presidential Agent he is helping to defend democracy. The reform
that brings Millard Carroll to Washington is expressed in the aims of the
New Deal, and a similar response on a more emotional level is made by
Glenn Spotswood. Passing the shacks of the Mexican workers they have
tried to help, he exclaims, “By God, Jed, we’ve got to do something to stop
this kind of thing.”
A powerful motivating force which operates on a less conscious level
derives from a man’s being a bastard. Hamer Shawcross in Fame Is the
Spur, like Hyacinth Robinson in The Princess Casamassima, is illegitimate.
Both men are raised by people who try to give them the emotional security
of which their birth deprives them, but their attempts to change the society
into which they were born seem in part due to the feeling that they are
among its second-class citizens. Razumov in Under Western Eyes has been
raised, as far as the reader knows, without any family life at all. Yet he is
motivated in exactly the opposite direction from Shawcross and Robinson.
His assumption of a counter-revolutionary role is a direct result of his
feeling that his nation and its existing social fabric are all he has. He tells
the well-born revolutionary Haldin:
I have no domestic tradition. I have nothing to think against. My tradition is historical.
What have I to look back to but that national past from which you gentlemen want to
wrench away your future?... You come from your province, but all this land is mine—or I
have nothing.

Generations later, another Russian reacts the same way under the new
regime. Feyda Nikitin in The Age of Longing has been orphaned by
childbirth and a counter-revolutionary firing squad. The last message from
his father’s eyes was one of “unshakable faith in the Great Change, and of a
childlike belief in the marvels and happiness which it would bring.” This
was enough to start Feyda on a career whose apex is the listing of
Frenchmen to be liquidated after Russian conquest.

The character of Feyda serves to bridge the gap between men like
Shawcross, Robinson, and Razumov and those who are motivated by a
similar but much more powerful force—spiritual bastardy. One of these is
the most demoniac of all Dostoyevsky’s possessed, Pyotr Verhovensky. He
publicly ridicules his father: “the man’s only seen me twice in his life and
then by accident.” It would be easy to make a case basing Pyotr’s
anarchistic politics upon a partial transference of his resentment of parental
rejection from old Stepan, his father, to Russia, his fatherland. Tony
Maggiore, the hero-villain of Caesar’s Angel, is called “the terrible child—
the child who had never known childhood.” Canon Borda’s analysis of
Fabrizio del Dongo’s violent behavior is also based upon childhood
experiences: “He is a younger son who feels himself wronged because he is
not the eldest.” There are also characters like Joe Yerkes in The Grand
Design who set out to change a society in which they feel at a social and
economic disadvantage. The houseboy and then protégé of a professor,
Yerkes is eventually led, chiefly by his feelings of inferiority and insecurity,
to join the Communist Party and to work at organizing auto workers. These
activities are a means, though never acknowledged, through which he can
try to change the existing society into one in which he will enjoy a higher
status and more prestige. In The Secret Agent the Professor’s failure in a
series of jobs had turned him into a revolutionary determined to destroy the
society which had rejected him. Jim Nolan had fought “the system” as a
lone, dispirited antagonist. The example of cell-mates had finally channeled
this antagonism into Communism, because “the hopelessness wasn’t in
them.... There was conviction that sooner or later they would win their way
out of the system they hated.” Some few individuals, like Disraeli’s
exemplary young men, enter politics out of a sense of noblesse oblige. But
more enter from a feeling of protest. Don Paolo’s reflections in Bread and
Wine emphasize the emotional nature of this motivation in revolutionaries:
He had once asked many militant members of his party what had led them to Marxism, and
nearly all of them had confessed that their original impulse, as in his case, had been moral
condemnation of existing society. He had read the biographies of many revolutionaries,
and he had never yet discovered anyone who had become a revolutionary out of scientific
conviction or economic calculation.

The pangs of unrequited love are partially responsible for Peter Stirling’s
dedication to success in politics in The Honorable Peter Stirling, just as
Frances Motherwell’s rejection by Vic Herres, in The Troubled Air, causes
her to denounce the Communist movement to which he is devoted. Other

motivating forces are just as conventional. Such dissimilar characters as
Fabrizio del Dongo in The Charterhouse of Parma and Jethro Bass in
Coniston are influenced by the career of Napoleon. The will to power as a
basic drive is more clearly put by Old Gisors in Man’s Fate: “every man
dreams of being god.” Mary McCarthy in The Oasis (1949) labels Will
Taub’s motivation as basically this when she says that “dreams of power
and mastery, far more than its fraternal aspect, were what had attracted him
to communism....” In some cases, like those of Silone’s heroes, the
motivation is quite complex. Don Nicola, in A Handful of Blackberries,
says that Rocco de Donatis “was the object of the clearest call from God
that I have ever witnessed.” Yet he had become a Communist and left the
Church like Pietro Spina in Bread and Wine “because of the profound
disgust with which he reacted to the abyss which he perceived between its
practical actions and the words it preached.” Even Spina’s name—literally
“rock-thorn”—is symbolic of the conflict between these forces within him.
The carpenter, merchant, clergyman, or teacher may drift into his vocation
through family pressure or pursuit of the line of least resistance. Almost
always the politician enters his because of a powerful driving force which is
just as likely to be subconscious as conscious.

Moral Problems and Changing Values
Another characteristic of the politician in the novel is the often-met change
in values. Basic to this process may be the frequency with which he
encounters moral problems. Some may be like Senator Ratcliffe in
Democracy, whose “weakness ... lay in his blind ignorance of morals.” But
usually a choice must be made between that which is right and that which is
profitable. Sometimes it is as clear-cut as whether or not DeForest’s John
Vane should participate in the Great Subfluvial Tunnel Road (a satire on the
Crédit Mobilier) which is to run under the Mississippi and unite Lake
Superior and the Gulf of Mexico. Often the politician must decide if he will
check his conscience in the cloakroom while he votes on a small issue in
order to keep his party in power to attain larger ends. Trollope’s heroes
usually make the difficult but morally right decision, but few applaud them.
When Phineas Finn votes for the Irish Reform Bill, Lord Tulla declares,

“Very dirty conduct I think it was.... After being put in for the borough
twice, almost free of expense, it was very dirty.”
A symptom of changing values is the rejection of the constituency for the
capitol. Even the Duke of Omnium begins to abandon the idea of retirement
because “the poison of place and power and dignity had got into his blood.”
The career of Bradley Talcott in A Spoil of Office is a classic example. He
thinks of throwing up his political life until his renomination is threatened.
Then he finds that his office is the breath of life in his nostrils. Jerome
Garwood’s comment on returning to Washington from campaigning in The
13th District is that “it’s worth all a fellow has to go through out in that
beastly mud hole to be back here where one can really live.” This pattern is
bound up, of course, with the problem of conformity. In order to retain the
prize, the politician must pay its price. Hamer Shawcross puts the best
possible interpretation upon his own behavior when Pen Muff asks him why
more can’t be done for the Welsh miners. He replies that they will do as
much as they can without running the risk of being turned out of office:
I admit ... that it’s a matter of getting the most out of the second best. If all things were
working for the best—why, there’d be no need of politics at all, Pen. I suppose the very
word means not what we want but what is expedient.

The ultimate change in values, of course, is the sellout such as that of which
Shawcross and Nimmo are accused. There are cases too in which the
change takes the form not of deterioration but regeneration. Most of these
are found in vintage American novels, however, in which the love of a good
woman does the trick. Harvey Sayler, Jethro Bass, and Willis Markham all
reject the spoils of unsavory careers and don penitential garments under this
influence. The European treatment is much more subtle. In his cell,
Rubashov finds that his interior monologues are really dialogues, “that there
was a thoroughly tangible component in this first person singular, which
had remained silent through all these years and now had started to speak.”

The Successful Politician
The individual who emerges most clearly from these novels is the
successful politician. One can even draw a complete profile of his
characteristics. And this composite illuminates not only the primary subject,
but also his counterpart. In the interplay between them one sees the essence

of that critical phenomenon, the leader-follower relationship. In The Prime
Minister Trollope ponders these subjects:
If one were asked in these days what gift should a Prime Minister ask first from the fairies,
one would name the power of attracting personal friends. Eloquence, if it be too easy, may
become almost a curse. Patriotism is suspected, and sometimes sinks almost to pedantry. A
Jove-born intellect is hardly wanted, and clashes with the inferiorities. Industry is exacting.
Honesty is unpractical. Truth is easily offended. Dignity will not bend. But the man who
can be all things to all men, who has ever a kind word to speak, a pleasant joke to crack,
who can forgive all sins, who is ever prepared for friend or foe but never very bitter to the
latter, who forgets not men’s names, and is always ready with little words,—he is the man
who will be supported at a crisis.... It is for him that men will struggle, and talk, and if
needs be, fight, as though the very existence of the country depended on his political
security.

The Duchess of Omnium’s discourse upon the tasks Omnium is unwilling
to perform is much more an indictment of politics in its worst sense than
this comparatively restrained analysis of Trollope’s. In much the same vein
Meredith’s Stukely Culbrett declares that Nevil Beauchamp has “too strong
a dose of fool’s honesty to succeed....” Hamer Shawcross’s own distillate of
thirty years of political experience is a bitter brew. Dissimulation is the
chief element in the formula for success. The politician must be an adept
psychologist appealing not to reason and intellect but to “panic, passion,
and prejudice.” Shawcross cynically adds that if these factors are not
present at the critical moment, the politician must know how to create them.
The lesson one learns from Chester Nimmo’s career is that the successful
office holder must be as agile as a gymnast, as flexible as a contortionist,
and as vigilant as a radar screen. In certain instances, the politician owes
success to what he does not do rather than to what he does. The ultimate in
the ossification of faculties whose exercise may be dangerous is reached by
the Communists. General Golz reveals his formula for survival to Robert
Jordan: “I never think at all. Why should I? I am General Sovietique. I
never think. Do not try to trap me into thinking.”
Peter Stirling’s list of requirements for political success is quite different.
Although he mentions physical superiority and dishonesty, his lecture
sounds like a naïve version of the Boy Scout oath. He mentions bosses, but
his account of the way he influences his constituents suggests Socratic
dialogues in Athenian meadows rather than politics in a tenement district of
downtown Manhattan. The physical characteristics which he mentions
briefly are noted by other authors, however. Nick Burr is a Virginia Lincoln
in appearance, while Senator Ratcliffe in Democracy, and Senator

Planefield in Through One Administration, represent the portly and
impressive type. Dan Lurcock’s acquisition of Willis Markham is based
upon precisely these qualities: “Let him get that magnificent head into the
legislature, where it would be on view, and there was nothing he might not
do with it.” This case appears to exaggerate the value of physical
impressiveness, but it illustrates the very real advantage which it confers
upon its possessor.
The leader-follower relationship can depend in part upon just such physical
factors. Bill Dominick, who rules three congressional districts in The Plum
Tree, cows many of his supporters with his huge, ex-prizefighter’s body.
Jack London’s Ernest Everhard represents this type with the dross
transmuted to gold, for he is “a superman, a blond beast such as Nietzsche
has described.” Hank Martin combines this physical vitality with an
oratorical “kindlin’ power” which inspires his supporters. But his appeal is
also basic in another way. His theme “Divide the Riches” has an attraction
for impoverished back country people which is probably more compelling
than personal magnetism. The power of Michael J. Grogan in Hot Corn Ike
has a completely economic basis. From city departments and corporations
he obtains the green labor tickets which entitle their bearers to jobs. For
each ticket Grogan receives a vote. In All the King’s Men, Willie Stark’s
concern for his people’s welfare is also expressed in direct action, but he
explores psychological depths in his constituents unplumbed by other
politicians. He jeers at them as “suckers,” “red-necks,” and “hicks,” then
allies himself with them as one victimized by the same city politicians.
Losing his job because of these city bosses, he had become “symbolically
the spokesman for the tongue-tied population of honest men.” His oratory is
violent and emotional, full of questions which bring thunderous crowd
responses like those of a question-and-answer sermon in a revival meeting.
And he buttresses this primitive relationship with tangibles: an overloaded
state payroll, new highways, and a magnificent free hospital. But Willie
Stark’s appeal is not limited to the unlearned. The intelligent but neurotic
Jack Burden works for Willie even while he allows his critical faculties full
play. Anne Stanton, a governor’s daughter, becomes Willie’s mistress. Both
of these people see in Willie strength where they are weak. To Jack he is a
man who lives in and for the present; to Anne he is an embodiment of
strength, a man who knows precisely what he wants and is willing to pay
the price to get it. Another practitioner of psychology is Councilor Mikulin

in Under Western Eyes. He enlists Razumov in his service through his
faculty for sensing each man’s vulnerability. “It did not matter to him what
it was—vanity, despair, love, hate, greed, intelligent pride, or stupid conceit
—it was all one to him as long as the man could be made to serve.”

Political Pathology: Deviates, Martyrs, and Authoritarians
This topic leads directly to a very curious set of political phenomena. It can
be described as political pathology. The line between sanity and madness is
just as hazy here as it is in other areas. But one can usually distinguish
between one man who is intelligently dedicated to a goal and another who
is a fanatic. Dostoyevsky intended that all his revolutionaries should
represent very dangerous forms of madness. It is obvious that Kirillov, who
believes he can become God by killing himself, is insane. The drunken
brute Lebyadkin, like the vicious Pyotr, idolizes Stavrogin as a god, while
Stavrogin himself is a complete masochist. Erkel is described as a fanatic
who can serve a cause only through one person seen as the expression of it.
Shatov recognizes their abnormality. He tells the narrator that they would
be lost if Russia were suddenly transformed: “They’d have no one to hate
then, no one to curse, nothing to find fault with. There’s nothing in it but an
immense animal hatred for Russia which has eaten into their organism.”
Even more lethal a fanatic is the terrorist Ch’en Ta Erh in Man’s Fate. He
nerves himself for his first act of violence in the novel by driving a dagger
point into his arm. Later, in a state of exaltation, he stabs a fragment of
glass into his thigh to express to his companions the intensity he feels as he
proposes that they should throw themselves with their bombs beneath
Chiang Kai-shek’s car. Ch’en develops an almost mystical attraction toward
death which he finally satisfies by shooting himself when the attempt on
Chiang’s life fails. His opposite number is Konig, chief of Chiang’s police.
Once tortured by the Communists, he declares “My dignity is to kill them....
I live ... only when I’m killing them.” Several of Conrad’s characters,
notably Nikita the assassin in Under Western Eyes and the Professor in The
Secret Agent, are quite as ready to kill for political reasons. Warren’s Willie
Stark has a fanatical bodyguard in Sugar-Boy, a stuttering gnome of a man
who combines absolute devotion to Stark with the satisfaction he gets from
driving a high-powered car and using a .38 Special revolver.

But the fanatic need not engage in violence. He appears to channel his
drives into actions appropriate to the political framework within which he
operates. In The Troubled Air Communist Vic Herres calculatedly ruins his
old friend Clement Archer. “Because he’s a fanatic,” explains Vic’s wife
Nancy, “because he would sacrifice me and Johnny and young Clem and
himself and anybody else if he was told it was for the cause....” The
political novel also contains examples of the Communist who carries his
fanaticism intact with him in his journey from the extreme Left to the far
Right. Elsie McCabe and Frederick Newman knowingly perjure themselves
before Senator O’Brien’s committee in Stranger Come Home. And it is
clear that they have made their allegations against Whitehead with the same
disregard for truth which they found useful in their years as Party members.
Another of the same species as Dostoyevsky’s Erkel and Warren’s Sugar-
Boy is Spring’s Jimmy Newboult. “Knighted” by Shawcross with the
Peterloo sabre, he precedes him into each rally carrying it aloft. But with his
scruples and acute moral sense, Jimmy represents a mid-point between the
deadly Ch’en and Marion Crawford’s sugar-and-spice fanatic. Crawford
explains noble John Harrington’s lack of zeal in proposing to pining
Josephine Thorn in An American Politician:
He was a man, she said, who loved an unattainable, fanatic idea in the first place, and who
dearly loved himself as well for his own fanaticism’s sake. He was a man in whom the
heart was crushed, even annihilated, by his intellect, which he valued far too highly, and by
his vanity, which he dignified into a philosophy of self-sacrifice.

In Bread and Wine Luigi Murica tells Pietro Spina, “I decided that politics
was grotesque—nothing but an artificial struggle between rival
degenerates.” His comment may be taken literally as well as figuratively,
for political and sexual pathology are combined in the cases of the deviates
in these novels. There are enough to fill a textbook of abnormal psychology.
The most common is the homosexual who often seeks to achieve through
political association the sense of acceptance by his fellows which he feels is
denied him by his maladjustment. Such a one is Marcello Clerici in The
Conformist. Moravia’s detailed treatment virtually gives a case history
following a familiar pattern. Marcello’s feeling of abnormality is deepened
by a childhood traumatic experience in which he barely escapes assault by a
middle-aged man. Marcello marries, but he remains a latent homosexual
throughout his life, feeling a frightening desire to submit when he is
accosted by an old man in a situation very like the first one. He hopes to

achieve conformity through marriage and membership in the Fascist Party.
After paving the way for the political murder of a former teacher, he reflects
that the success of the regime is needful to him psychologically. “Only in
that way,” he thinks, “could what was normally considered an ordinary
crime become, instead, a positive step in a necessary direction.” This
maladjustment is found on many levels, from that of Communist General
Ares in The Crack in the Column to post-adolescent Winthrop Strang in The
Grand Design. The son of a famous author now deceased, Strang petulantly
complains that he is not receiving enough attention from his dominating
mother, a well-known newspaper columnist. In what appears to be an
attempt to obtain this affection from other sources, he has thrown himself
into Communist Party work and an affair with young Mervyn Packett,
another Party member who writes for the Negro press. Lee Sarason, who
succeeds Buzz Windrip as American dictator in It Can’t Happen Here,
surrounds himself with strong young members of the Minute Men: “He was
either angry with his young friends, and then he whipped them, or he was in
a paroxysm of apology to them, and caressed their wounds.” The parallel
between Sarason and Nazi Ernst Röhm is completed when he is shot late at
night by another American Nazi, Colonel Dewey Haik. Several brusque and
mannish women appear in these novels. Lannie Madison in Barbary Shore
is a lesbian who has denied herself everything, including love, to work for
the Communist Party. Having broken with it, she is now a completely
disorganized personality.
One of the most complex deviates is Dostoyevsky’s Nikolay Stavrogin.
Although he is capable of heterosexual relationships, he is a pervert who
has corrupted a small child and caused her suicide. A sadist, he is also an
admitted masochist. In marrying the feeble-minded Marya Lebyadkin he
had carried out his idea of “somehow crippling my life in the most repulsive
manner possible.” In the long-suppressed chapter of the novel which
contains his confession to Bishop Tihon, Stavrogin hears the Bishop tell
him: “You are possessed by a desire for martyrdom....” But the “terrible
undisguised need of punishment” is emotionally complicated because this
compulsion is a “need of the cross in a man who doesn’t believe in the cross
—” Stavrogin plays an essentially passive political role since he allows
himself to be used by Pyotr. His case represents, however, a combining of
abnormalities usually found singly.

One aspect of Stavrogin’s character also appears in men who do not deviate
from the norm. Nick Burr in The Voice of the People looks like Lincoln in
his towering stature and his “good, strong kind of ugliness.” He prepares
himself for his martyrdom by opposing powerful forces in his state, and
finally meets it by attempting to halt a lynching. To some, this self-sacrifice
carries an almost religious ecstasy. In Moravia’s The Fancy Dress Party
Saverio has been ordered to assassinate the dictator of the South American
country of Bolivar. He thinks that he now knows what the early Christians
must have felt, “the sweet, deep pleasure of sacrificing themselves for the
greater good of humanity....” Shaw’s Clement Archer and Shirer’s Raymond
Whitehead do not enter into their ordeals with the intention of becoming
martyrs. When they are deprived of their primary sources of livelihood,
however, this is precisely what they become. In most of the novels there is
an awareness of the political value of martyrs, and the Communists,
particularly, excel in their manufacture.
If frequency of occurrence were used to determine whether or not a
phenomenon is abnormal, perhaps the dictator would have to be classed as
normal. Within political systems embodying the principles of representative
government, however, he represents a disease just as surely as a group of
cells which suddenly start overwhelming their neighbors. The novel
displays not only fictitious tyrants, but real ones as well, from Caesar in
Wilder’s The Ides of March (1948) to Koestler’s thinly disguised Stalin in
Darkness at Noon. The authors usually describe how they act and what
made them that way. Since The Ides of March uses the diaries and letters of
several Roman citizens, the reader learns precisely what Caesar’s
contemporaries thought of him and what Caesar thought of himself. In the
accounts of his enemies, he is a profligate and pervert, a destroyer of liberty.
His own writings reveal him as a man who is cold and self-centered but
devoted to Rome and possessed of amazingly catholic and intelligent
interests. Trying to free his countrymen from superstition, mythology, and
barbarism, he rationalizes his dictatorship on the basis that the people will
not assume the duties of self-government. He writes:
But there is no liberty save in responsibility. That I cannot rob them of because they have
not got it.... The Romans have become skilled in the subtle resources for avoiding the
commitment and the price of political freedom. They have become parasites upon that
freedom which I gladly exercise—my willingness to arrive at a decision and sustain it—
and which I am willing to share with every man who will assume its burden.

Like Caesar, most authoritarian rulers appear to believe that they are
working in the best interests of their people. Most often this is a
rationalization of an enormous drive to personal power, but whatever its
source it is almost always a component of the totalitarian mentality. Some
absolutists, like Stendhal’s Ernesto IV of Parma, make no pretense of
extraordinary concern for their subjects. But the modern pattern is for the
Duce, Führer, or Father of the People to associate himself with the masses,
at least verbally. This is as true of state dictators such as Chuck Crawford,
Hank Martin, and Willie Stark as it is of General Arango in The Fancy
Dress Party. The three Americans also have in common their origins as
members of the lower or lower middle class of southern whites. Each starts
with a seemingly genuine desire to better the lot of his group. Their careers
provide a study of the same infection which attacks the Duke of Omnium,
“the poison of place and power and dignity.” And this transition from
crusader to sick man gives insight into the process by which dictators are
made.

Men Behind the Scenes
Another political type which is not quite pathological yet which occupies a
position somewhat outside the main stream of normal political activity is
that of the silent man, the one who often wields great power but remains
nearly concealed from the public. He is found most often in American
politics. Major Rann, boss of the Virginia Senate and opponent of Nick Burr
in Ellen Glasgow’s The Voice of the People, “had never made a speech in
his life, but ... he was continually speaking through the mouths of others.”
Jethro Bass in Coniston is another silent man, figuratively and literally. This
type carried to the extreme is Dan Lurcock in Revelry, President-maker,
interstate lobbyist, and national salesman of patronage. A European variant
of this type is represented by Karl Yundt in The Secret Agent. Described as
“no man of action,” his function is to goad others into action. This catalytic
role is performed by anti-fascist Professor Quadri in The Conformist. His
specialty is proselytizing the young. Cold and detached, he often channels
his converts into actions he knows will be fatal, “desperate actions that
could be justified only as part of an extremely long-term plan and that,

indeed, necessarily involved a cruel indifference to the value of human
life.”

The Disillusioned
In The Age of Longing ex-Marxist poet Julien Dellatre asks Hydie
Anderson:
Do you remember ‘The Possessed’? They were an enviable crowd of maniacs. We are the
dispossessed—the dispossessed of faith; the physically or spiritually homeless. A burning
fanatic is dangerous; a burnt-out fanatic is abject.

With these words he speaks for a constantly growing number of former
political enthusiasts who have discovered that they had carried not a torch
but a club. One is tempted to call this era the Age of Disillusionment. But
this would in a sense be an error, for disillusionment is as old as politics. It
is always present; only the number of cases varies. The literary list is a long
one—Phineas Finn, the Duke of Omnium, Dick Remington, Hilary Vane,
Harvey Sayler, Glenn Spotswood, and scores of others. Even the
opportunist Shawcross is not immune. Near the end of his career he asks
himself if statesmen are not actually “the true pests and cancers of human
society.” He thinks that if he could have one wish granted, it would be that
politicians would leave all the people alone for fifty years. “We might then
have a better world,” he reflects. “We couldn’t have a worse one.”
The modern literature of disillusionment introduces a variation on this old
theme. The discontent is localized to one ideology—Communism. Mary
McCarthy states one of its basic causes in The Oasis when she says that
Will Taub’s “disillusionment with the Movement had sprung largely from
its concentration on narrowly nationalistic aims and its abandonment of an
insurgent ideology.” In its original use, the term “literature of
disillusionment” referred primarily to the body of work of a group of
writers who had turned away from Communism. But for the purposes of
this study it is just as fruitful to focus on the creations rather than their
authors. The best of these novels is unquestionably Koestler’s Darkness at
Noon. It is outstanding not only as a psychological portrait in depth, but
also as an interpretation of an important phenomenon. Rubashov is at once
an individual and a mirror of forces at work in modern international
politics. His journey has taken him from exalted participation in revolution,

through consolidation of its gains, to a final questioning of the worth of the
whole agonizing process. But his life has been bound up so completely with
the cause that even his final renunciation is tinged with haunting doubt.
Lying in his cell, one of the last survivors of the old guard, he is unable to
repress it:
The horror which No. 1 emanated, above all consisted in the possibility that he was in the
right, and that all those whom he had killed had to admit, even with the bullet in the back
of their necks, that he conceivably might be in the right.

Rubashov’s disillusionment springs from the fact that the light has gone out
of the revolutionary movement, that what was to become a new paradise
has become an old hell. The dictatorship of the proletariat has evolved into
the tyranny of No. 1; the new man has grown into a Neanderthaler. Instead
of a promised land, Rubashov has returned from his foreign assignments to
find a country where factory workers are shot as saboteurs for negligence
caused by fatigue. His conclusion that the regime’s error was caused by
abandonment of ethical standards is central to the bouleversement he
undergoes. But even despite this basic departure from Communist thought,
it is important to recognize that he is still a Marxist. He even elaborates the
old dialectic in prison with his “theory of the relative maturity of the
masses.” His participation in his mock trial emphasizes the ambivalence he
feels. One passage explains this behavior and that of some of the men to
whom Koestler dedicated the novel:
The best of them kept silent to do a last service to the Party, by letting themselves be
sacrificed as scapegoats—and, besides, even the best had each an Arlova on his
conscience. They were too deeply entangled in their own past, caught in the web they had
spun themselves, according to the laws of their own twisted ethics and twisted logic; they
were all guilty, although not of those deeds of which they accused themselves. There was
no way back for them. Their exit from the stage happened strictly according to the rules of
their strange game. The public expected no swan-song of them. They had to act according
to the textbook, and their part was the howling of wolves in the night....

Where there is freedom of choice, the disillusioned one follows one of three
courses: needing an outlet for the forces which originally took him to the
Party, he engages in leftist, non-Stalinist activity; ricocheting violently in
the opposite direction, he aligns himself with the extreme Right; or
exhausted, he sinks into a melancholy, nostalgia-tinged apathy. Rocco de
Donatis throws himself into the struggle of the peasants for land. Frederick
Wellman and Elsie McCabe lie with virtuosity in the service of Senator
O’Brien. Lannie Madison retreats into neurosis. The causes of the

disenchantment vary. Glenn Spotswood makes his break because he is
interested in men as men rather than as pawns in a game. Rocco’s point of
departure is the discovery of Siberian labor camps. Both of them, however,
suffer somewhat the same aftereffects. There is a feeling of loss, the
sensation that a platform has been knocked out from under them.
This particular reaction is best portrayed through the creative artists who
appear in these novels. Julien Dellatre is one of three ex-Communists who
call themselves the Three Ravens Nevermore. A scarred veteran of the
Spanish Civil War, he refers to his poems, “Ode to the Cheka,” “Elegy on
the Death of a Tractor,” and “The Rape of Surplus Value” as “past
asininities.” His renunciation of the Movement is complete, yet his tragedy
lies in the fact that he has found nothing to replace it. He has concluded that
“Europe is going to the dogs,” that the reason is a turning away from God, a
“loss of cosmic consciousness.” Feeling that a new religion is necessary to
save twentieth-century man, he lacks a conviction which would permit him
to take the final step into faith. The great passion of his life is behind him.
In his own comment he has summed himself up: “a burnt-out fanatic is
abject.” Another man of letters in the same novel is Leo Leontiev, “Hero of
Culture and Joy of the People,” who has come from Russia to France to
address an international peace rally. The death of his wife frees him to
renounce the regime and find political asylum in France. Psychologically
ready to take this step, “he felt as if a whole drugstore of poison were
working at [his synapses]—the accumulated toxins of thirty years.” He has
become a Hero of Culture by following the Party line in literature rather
than his artistic conscience. Free at last, he feels that he must write
something truly fine, a vindication of himself that will also be worthy of his
wife, whose death he suspects may have been suicide or murder. But he is
unable even to write the projected I Was a Hero of Culture for the American
publisher who has given him a substantial advance. For him, as for Dellatre,
the light had flickered out, and it could not be rekindled.
Some artists, like novelist Bernard Carr and poet Lester Owens in Yet Other
Waters manage to rebound, to continue to work creatively. But still they
bear psychological scar tissue. Even in the process of preparing to leave the
Movement, Bernard Carr suggests from the floor that the Writers Congress
be concluded with the singing of “The Internationale.” And he is moved as
he sings. An allied phenomenon is that of the individual who is inwardly in

conflict with the Party but remains with it through a fear of these
consequences. When Bernard tells frustrated poet Sam Leventhal that he
should leave the Party, Sam turns pale. “Bernie, the Party is my life,” he
replies. “It would be spiritual death for me outside the Party.” An even more
revealing answer is made by British physicist Lord Edwards. When
Leontiev asks him why he stays, Edwards replies: “I told you there is
nothing else. You will soon find that out yourself. Besides—once you’ve
invested all your capital in a firm, you don’t withdraw it—not at our age,
not after thirty years.”

The Role of Woman
When women engage in political activity in these novels they are usually
cast in one of four roles: man’s guide, the reformer, the dedicated
Communist, or the patriot. In the years before suffrage was extended to
women, one of the few opportunities afforded them for engaging in political
activity was to influence or guide a man who was politically active. Emily
Harkness performs this function for Jerome Garwood in The 13th District.
At the beginning of his career he is her intellectual protégé as she channels
his reading and thinking. His rejection of this relationship is coupled with
his political degeneration and ruin. In Hot Corn Ike Molly McMurdo
counsels Mike Grogan with acuteness and insight. Since she is a procuress,
she supplies very little moral guidance, but her analyses of the factors at
work in the district are penetrating if not intellectual. Peter Ivanovitch,
leader of the Geneva revolutionary circle in Under Western Eyes, preaches
the cult of woman as well as revolution. He had been aided by a woman in
making his legendary escape across Siberia. The devotion he felt toward her
is also bestowed upon Madame de S——, who contributes not only
inspiration but also her chateau to Peter’s activities. Fancying herself
another Madame de Staël, this “Egeria of the ‘Russian Mazzini’” appears
more like a witch than a prophetess. Possessed of a garishly painted, mask-
like face whose outstanding features are extraordinarily brilliant eyes and
obviously false teeth, she contributes to one conversation by screaming that
they must “spiritualize the discontent.”
The intellectual guide of man par excellence is Ida Wilbur in A Spoil of
Office. She remains stolid Bradley Talcott’s ideal and teacher even after he

has attained the House of Representatives. But she is also an active field
worker for the farmers. A pamphleteer and lecturer, she represents the
woman reformer who enters into direct action rather than stand once
removed from activity. Mrs. Ward’s Marcella acts for herself, but to a lesser
degree than DeForest’s Squire Nancy Appleyard and Spring’s three
feminists—Lizzie Lightowler, Anne Shawcross, and Pen Muff. Lawyer
Nancy Appleyard is a ridiculous figure with her trousers and pistols, but in
her feminist agitation she is a precursor of the others. These women are
distinguished by conviction, perseverance, and willingness to engage in
violent action under pain of brutality and imprisonment to attain their goals.
In strong contrast to Madame de S—— in Under Western Eyes is Sophia
Antonovna, an influential veteran revolutionary. A striking woman with her
gray-white hair and bright red blouse, she is “the true spirit of destructive
revolution.” Shawcross’s daughter-in-law Alice is a direct descendant of
Sophia Antonovna. Shortly after her return from Moscow, a letter is
published addressed by Zinoviev to the Communists of Britain urging
uprisings in the Army and Navy. Implying that Ramsay MacDonald had
been pushed into treaties with Russia by Communist pressure, it helps cause
the fall of his government. Noting the time of Alice’s visit and the intensity
of her devotion to Communism, Shawcross suspects that she had helped
Zinoviev to plan and write the letter. Dos Passos’ militant women
Communists such as Jane Sparling throw themselves into Party activities
almost more zealously than the men. One of the women in Yet Other Waters
might be listed under political pathology as well as here. She is Alice
Robertson, a nymphomaniac and frustrated novelist whose regard for her
current lover does not prevent her from reporting on him to the Party.
There is no Joan of Arc in these political novels, but in Hemingway’s book
one hears about the fiery La Pasionaria, and in The Age of Longing and
Nostromo the actions of two women evoke mention of the name of
Charlotte Corday. In Conrad’s novel Antonia Avellanos is as fierce a patriot
as her father Don José, who had nearly died in inhuman captivity by
dictator Guzmán Bento. Her fierce anger against General Montero, a
modern Bento, is one of the forces which brings cynical dilettante Don
Martin Decoud to throw himself into the struggle which leads to his death.
She suggests Charlotte Corday to him, as does Hydie Anderson indirectly to
Jules Commanche when she asks that Feyda Nikitin be expelled from

France. But Hydie’s patriotism does not have the fire of Antonia’s. She has
come to recognize Feyda’s brutality and immorality, but the immediate
cause of her action is his humiliation of her which breaks off their affair.
This gesture is the first positive one she has made. Up to this point she has
seemed about to apply for membership in the Ravens Nevermore. Her
disillusionment, like theirs, has come from rejection of a strong and
disciplined system which answered all her questions and assuaged all her
doubts. Her break with the Roman Catholic Church has left her quite as
adrift as Dellatre or his companions. And when her gesture fails, she feels
herself slipping back into the old despondency, the craving for sureness, for
a set of positive values.
Although treated in lesser detail than the men (except for Hydie), these
women offer the reader the same opportunity for intimate acquaintance with
people who can become more real than those one meets on the street or in
the office. Their reality and complexity vary with the skill of their creators,
but one is able to follow their actions and thoughts more closely than those
of individuals in “real life.”

chapter seven
Some Conclusions
In some areas of this study only the main outlines have been sketched in.
Good books have probably been omitted, particularly in European
literatures. Some mediocre ones, especially American novels, have been
included. This was done to give some idea of the development of this form
in the United States, but with the fervent hope that a gain in historical
continuity would not produce too great a loss through exclusion of more
quality. But if a few major points have emerged, this study has fulfilled its
purpose.
The press has always been acknowledged as a major factor in influencing
political opinion. A close look at the phenomenal success of Uncle Tom’s
Cabin reveals that the right novel appearing at the critical time can exercise
wide and lasting influence. With his freedom to place a quarter of a million
words between two covers, the novelist can present more information and
achieve more reader involvement than any newspaper using columns of
factual accounts, brilliant editorials, and four-color Sunday supplements.
The novelist can vie with Gibbon and Macaulay if he chooses, ranging
freely from century to century, turning from Caesar to modern man, or from
Machiavelli to a politician of the twenty-sixth century. Just as the writer
treats the rise and decline of empires, so he portrays the flowering and
withering of movement. Evoking the past, the novelist can people it with
living beings and bring to life its tensions, its climaxes, its meanings. One
can gain some understanding of the factors which make men like one
another despite national and cultural factors which differentiate them.
Silone’s peasants, like Garland’s farmers, crave enough to keep them
sheltered and fed, to give them the feeling that they can work in peace with
a feeling of security. One senses differences, however, in political

hierarchies. The Prime Ministers of Disraeli and Trollope are masters, but
the Presidents of Adams and Ford are badgered servants. There are insights
into the small niceties, the little peculiarities that distinguish varying
political usages. The American politician’s life is exposed to glaring
publicity, but the Englishman is spared unless he is brought to court. In To
Be a Pilgrim Tom Wilcher notes that “Gladstone’s missing finger appeared
in all caricatures,” but “the newspapers never referred to the continuous
drunkenness of Mr. A., a cabinet minister, or to even more scandalous
liaisons than Edward’s.”
The novelist is able to hold his subject close or at a distance, and to
examine it from any point of the compass. He can slice through the body
politic and peel back its layers, stopping to scrutinize the one that interests
him. He can follow the early struggles that preceded the English
Labourites’ rise to power or trace the collateral decline of the Liberals. Even
in his treatment of individuals, he can provide a sense of continuity with
men of antiquity by presenting modern Caesars. They may dress differently,
talk differently, and get their death wounds with bullets rather than daggers.
But they are members of the same tradition, followers of the same
principles of political action. Nor is the new man neglected. In a sense,
Rubashov, with his gnawing conflicts, is as much a new type as is Gletkin
with his mentality which precludes conflict. And, of course, one gets much
more than history. Tourgée interlards the Reconstruction story in Bricks
Without Straw with analyses of causative factors. In a long passage he
elaborates his theory that “the town-meeting—the township system or its
equivalent—in the North and South, constituted a difference not less vital
and important than that of slavery itself.” Generally the European novelist
places more stress upon theory than does the American, but in each
literature close examination of causes is hardly ever excluded by
concentration upon effects.
The political novel has a well demonstrated vitality as a literary form. The
indications are that it will continue to grow. At the same time it will
probably display a continuity in the phenomena and ideas it treats. The
political novel will continue to chronicle movements. Just as Dostoyevsky
and Conrad dealt with Communism’s origins and Koestler and Silone with
its schisms and apostates, so other authors will follow its eventual destiny.
The minutiae of political experience will provide material just as much as

the major facets. One example is the “whitewash,” the investigation which
begins with grim determination and implacable intent only to end with
confusing or ineffectual conclusions. Such investigations are directed
toward election frauds in Phineas Redux, the Great Subfluvial Tunnel Road
in Honest John Vane, and oil lease scandals in Revelry. It is also likely that
the political novel will treat a wider variety of subjects. Some of the
attention which corruption has received, particularly in the American novel,
may well be directed toward other aspects of the political process which
have so far been explored little or not at all. The love story or love interest
will continue to parallel the political story. But there will probably be more
novels in which the relationship will be symptomatic of the same drives or
needs operative in the political sphere. This is the sort of treatment given
the relationship between Hydie and Feyda in The Age of Longing. If one
interprets the word “love” loosely, this approach may be seen in the
description of Nikolay and Marya in The Possessed. The latter novel and
The Conformist will be followed by more novels in which the author
concentrates upon intensive psychological studies of individuals
representative of particular political mentalities or groups.
The novel set in the future will probably retain the vitality displayed by
such books from the time of Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward (1888)
to Orwell’s 1984. It is in this area that science fiction may make a
contribution to the political novel. Jules Verne’s novels were science fiction,
but in the society in which he wrote, his work was likely to remain fiction
for some time. Modern technology makes it possible for the best science
fiction to achieve a greater relevance, to present what may shortly be fact.
The world of the future in modern novels tends more often to be a hell than
a utopia. And the space ships, robots, and other electronic devices
emphasize the godless, mechanistic aspect of modern society which writers
like Orwell and Koestler see in it. The better writers of science fiction use
this technique. Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 (1953), perhaps the best of
these novels, portrays a post-atomic war America two decades hence in
which technology has been used to kill freedom and make its subjects love
their bondage. Guy Montag’s revolt against his role in this society may not
be completely believable, but Bradbury’s three-wall television sets and
book-burning fire brigades bring home the horror of a possible totalitarian
society of the future with an impact matched only by Orwell’s telescreens
and Ministry of Love.

The future should bring more political novels than the past because this age
is so permeated with politics. The Napoleonic era and the late nineteenth
century may have been just as political in their ways as this one, but with
modern mass communication media, more people are now involved in and
aware of politics than ever before. And, of course, politics has become more
complex, more in need of interpretation than ever before. Only a relatively
small number of Disraeli’s and Trollope’s novels concentrate on politics. By
contrast, most of the output of Koestler and Silone lies within this field.
Each good novelist, no matter what his age, finds the particular subject
matter which allows his talents freest range. But his material is life, unless,
like James Branch Cabell and others, he creates a reflection of life in a
special land of his own which never was in time or space. But as life grows
more political the novelist must inevitably reflect this fact, even if only
casually.
All this means that the reader who wants to learn about political phenomena
from the novel will have a greater mass of material to work with than ever.
Overall quality will be at least as good as it has been and probably better as
proportionately more good novelists work in this genre. All of the fictional
histories, analyses, and interpretations will require the same reader value-
judgments as ever. Prejudice will still intrude; partisanship will still distort.
But these same judgments are necessary, in a measure, when the reader
picks up the book of a historian or a political scientist. And the novelist may
use all of the tools in their workrooms while he adds to them his own
resources—imagination, dramatic form, and the freedom and scope given
him by the versatile art of fiction.

Bibliography

AMERICAN NOVELS
Adams, Henry: Democracy (1880). Madeleine Lee goes to Washington to
learn about democracy and government. Disillusioned by its state and
by Senator Ratcliffe.
Adams, Samuel: Revelry (1926). Fictionalized version of Harding era’s
corruption.
Amsbarry, Mary Anne: Caesar’s Angel (1952). Rise and fall of a tainted
young politician who tries to deal with criminal element in a state
adjacent to Illinois.
Bradbury, Ray: Fahrenheit 451 (1953). A book-destroying Fireman turns
against the post-atomic war regime of a horrific, cultureless,
totalitarian United States.
Burnett, Frances Hodgson: Through One Administration (1914). Innocent
Bertha Amory’s husband uses her charm to lobby for his schemes in
late nineteenth-century Washington.
Churchill, Winston: Coniston (1906). Jethro Bass’s rise to control of a
New England state through mortgage holdings and political deals in
the post-Jacksonian era.
——: Mr. Crewe’s Career (1908). Twenty years after Bass’s death the
railroads exercise tighter control. Signs of public opinion being
marshalled for action.
Coe, Charles Francis: Ashes (1952). Contemporary politics and corruption
plus murder.

Crawford, F. Marion: An American Politician (1884). Reformer John
Harrington’s excursion into politics of the late eighties under Marquis
of Queensberry rules.
DeForest, John William: Honest John Vane (1875). A weak congressman
seduced into corruption by a satanic lobbyist and a money-hungry wife
during Reconstruction.
——: Playing the Mischief (1876). Attractive Josie Murray gets a
fraudulent relief bill passed by a corrupt Congress amidst unsavory
Washingtonians.
Dos Passos, John: Adventures of a Young Man (1938). Glenn Spotswood’s
development into Communist organizer and his death for Trotskyism
in the Spanish Civil War.
——: Number One (1943). Huey Long-like Chuck Crawford carries on as
Tyler Spotswood goes to jail for him in atonement for his collusion in
a corrupt career.
——: The Grand Design (1949). Panoramic novel of New Deal and
wartime Washington. Conflicts of personalities, ideals, and politics—
national and international.
Ellison, Ralph: The Invisible Man (1953). A young Negro’s crack-up under
prejudice in North and South and disillusionment after whole-souled
Communist Work.
Farrell, James T.: Yet Other Waters (1952). Novelist Bernard Carr learns
that the Communists dictate to artists too, then leaves despite twinges
and “the treatment.”
Ford, James L.: Hot Corn Ike (1923). Local politics with national
implications in two areas of late nineteenth-century New York.
Ford, Paul Leicester: The Honorable Peter Stirling (1894). Poor Man’s
Friend to Governor of New York despite vicissitudes as love and virtue
triumph.
Gallico, Paul: Trial by Terror (1952). Blackmail frees an American
conditioned into a robot for a Hungarian spy trial while American
diplomats send notes of protest.

Garland, Hamlin: A Spoil of Office (1897). Iowans Bradley Talcott and Ida
Wilbur fight for the farmers in and out of Congress in the seventies.
Glasgow, Ellen: The Voice of the People (1900). Lincolnesque Governor
Nick Burr fights a corrupt organization and meets his death in post-
Reconstruction Virginia.
Hemingway, Ernest: For Whom the Bell Tolls (1943). Conflict of ideologies
in Spain as anti-Fascist, non-Communist Robert Jordan dies fighting
for what he believes in.
James, Henry: The Princess Casamassima (1886). Suicide frees displaced
Hyacinth Robinson from serving London revolutionaries whose cause
he no longer supports.
Lancley, Adria Locke: A Lion Is in the Streets (1945). Another Huey Long
novel.
Lewis, Sinclair: It Can’t Happen Here (1936). The horrors of a Fascist
America.
London, Jack: The Iron Heel (1908). America under the Fascist Oligarchy
seen in retrospect from the 26th century when near-Utopia is well-
established.
McCarthy, Mary: The Oasis (1949). The founding of a seemingly
successful utopian colony which begins to wither from lack of feeling
of relevance and conviction.
Mailer, Norman: Barbary Shore (1951). A special revolutionary socialism
to be saved for “the day” is passed from one to another of a group of
weird characters.
Masters, Edgar Lee: Children of the Market Place (1922). Spirited
biography and defense of Stephen A. Douglas set against a growing
America by a shadowy narrator.
Manchester, William: City of Anger (1953). A series of tragedies growing
out of the “numbers racket” and corruption in a city that looks and
sounds like Baltimore.
Phillips, David Graham: The Plum Tree (1905). Harvey Sayler gains
control of a huge lobby and becomes a President-maker before

disillusionment sets in.
Russell, William: A Wind Is Rising (1950). On the fringes of the political
novel. Negro sharecroppers dominated by a hostile socio-political
economic system.
Shaw, Irwin: The Troubled Air (1951). One man crushed between self-
appointed judges and unscrupulous Communists in a fight against
blacklists and guilt by association.
Shellabarger, Samuel: Prince of Foxes (1947). Running duel of wits and
weapons between Borgia and one of his captains. Melange of romance,
swordplay, and politics.
Shirer, William L.: Stranger Come Home (1954). A radio commentator and
a Foreign Service career man are ruined by Senator O’Brien and
perjured testimony.
Sinclair, Upton: Oil! (1926). The making of a millionaire radical, son of an
oil tycoon destroyed by oil scandals in the Harding era he helped to
create.
——: Boston (1928). Defense of Sacco and Vanzetti with admixture of
fiction.
——: Presidential Agent (1945). Everybody’s confidante, Lanny Budd
helps make and interpret modern political history up to and through
Munich.
Steinbeck, John: In Dubious Battle (1936). A glimpse of Communist aims
and methods in organizing and directing strike violence for Party
purposes.
Stowe, Harriet Beecher: Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852). The most effective
political instrument in the history of the novel.
Tourgée, Albion W.: A Fool’s Errand (1879). A Northerner tries to buck the
tide of a resurgent South during Reconstruction. Acute criticism of the
Federal program.
——: Bricks Without Straw (1880). More of the same with greater violence
and more analysis of the political structure of the pre-war and post-war
South.

Warren, Robert Penn: All the King’s Men (1946). The hectic life and
violent death of a Southern dictator with sharp portraits of his effect
upon those around him.
Weller, George: The Crack in the Column (1949). An American flier is
introduced to global politics as Communist Greeks fight the British
during World War II.
Whitlock, Brand: The 13th District (1902). The progressive moral and
political decline of a mid-western moth fascinated by the illuminated
capitol dome.
Wilder, Thornton: The Ides of March (1948). Caesar’s career through
Roman eyes.

ENGLISH NOVELS
Cary, Joyce: To Be a Pilgrim (1942). Fading Tom Wilcher recreates turn of
the century politics for his niece as he tries to perpetuate the old solid
values.
——: Prisoner of Grace (1952). Chester Nimmo’s 30-year rise from lay
preacher to cabinet minister through determination, astuteness, and a
political sixth sense.
Conrad, Joseph: Nostromo (1904). The rise and fall of Costaguanan
governments with help from a British mine-owner who ends up owned
by his mine.
——: The Secret Agent (1907). Informer Adolf Verloc schemes to blow up
the Greenwich Observatory for a foreign power wanting to prod the
British into repression.
——: Under Western Eyes (1910). A monarchist Russian is destroyed by
chance involvement in revolutionary acts. The work of Red circles in
and out of Russia.
Disraeli, Benjamin: Coningsby (1844). Enlightened nobleman at last
becomes an M.P.

——: Sybil (1845). A less harried Young Englander does the same.
Panorama of England c. 1837-1852 with great popular uprisings
emphasizing national discontent.
——: Tancred (1847). The hero recoils from politics, finding spiritual and
political insights amidst comic opera imbroglios in the deserts of the
Holy Land.
Eliot, George: Felix Holt, the Radical (1866). Provincial politics in the
1830s. Gallery of types from the extreme radical to granite
conservative. Complicated plot.
Forster, E. M.: A Passage to India (1924). Personal tragedies emphasize
national tragedy of divided and unhappy India governed by inflexible
and unfeeling Britain.
Huxley, Aldous: Brave New World (1932). A totalitarian world of the
future in which stability has been achieved through destruction of
freedom and the soul.
Maugham, Somerset: Then and Now (1946). Niccolo Machiavelli learns
more about his profession negotiating with Borgia. Time out for
dalliance and teaching a novice.
Meredith, George: Beauchamp’s Career (1876). A fiery young radical’s
political excursions end in family disruption, failure, and death. More
portraits of types.
Orwell, George: 1984 (1949). Chilling world of the future in which the
regime can control past and present, literally make two and two equal
five for its slaves.
Spring, Howard: Fame Is the Spur (1940). Over sixty years of British
politics with emphasis on the rise of the Labor Party and the kinds of
men who made it.
Trollope, Anthony: Phineas Finn (1869). The education of a young Liberal
in Commons. Disraeli v. Gladstone under other names. Phineas’s
conscience politically expensive.
——: Phineas Redux (1874). More of the same with a murder trial added.

——: The Prime Minister (1876). The three-year tenure of the Duke of
Omnium’s coalition. The Duke, like Phineas, now infected by the virus
of disillusionment.
Ward, Mrs. Humphrey: Marcella (1894). Liberals v. Conservatives as the
scales drop from Venturist Marcella’s eyes leading her from bad
Wharton to good Raeburn.
Wells, H. G.: The New Machiavelli (1910). An illicit affair destroys Dick
Remington as Parnell had been destroyed. Early 20th century political
currents.

ITALIAN NOVELS
Moravia, Alberto: The Conformist (1951). Marcello Clerici’s attempt to
escape abnormality leads him to a career in the Fascist secret police
and political murder.
——: The Fancy Dress Party (1952). Political and amorous intrigue
involving a South American dictator, his secret police, and
revolutionaries. Ends in murder.
Silone, Ignazio: Fontamara (1934). Growing political awareness and
resistance to Fascism destroy a poor village. Peasants v. landowners
and the regime. An appeal.
——: Bread and Wine (1937). A revolutionary torn between Communism
and religion. Pietro Spina seeks the best of the two while underground
from the Fascists.
——: A Handful of Blackberries (1953). Rocco de Donatis’ post-war break
with Communism, his survival of its attack, and his re-entry into pro-
peasant activity.
Taddei, Ezio: The Pine Tree and the Mole (1945). The top and bottom strata
of Livorno society as Fascism uses the underworld to aid in its rise to
power.

FRENCH NOVELS

Malraux, André: Man’s Fate (1934). Attempted Communist coup in
Shanghai in 1927.
Sartre, Jean-Paul: The Reprieve (1945). Many strata of French society
during the ten weeks ending with Munich agreement. Impact on them
and other Europeans.
Stendhal, Marie-Henri: The Charterhouse of Parma (1839). Careers of
Fabrizio del Dongo, his aunt and her lover, Minister to Prince of Parma
in and after Napoleonic era.

GERMAN NOVELS
Kaufman, Richard: Heaven Pays No Dividends (1951). The rise and fall of
Hitler’s Reich seen through the eyes of a German reluctantly drawn
into Nazism.
Koestler, Arthur: Darkness at Noon (1941). Superb account of the
destruction of one of the Bolshevik old guard, with penetrating
analysis of his life and conflicts.
——: The Age of Longing (1951). Disillusioned Europeans under Russia’s
threatening shadow await atomic destruction through conflict of East
and West.

RUSSIAN NOVELS
Dostoyevsky, Fyodor: The Possessed (1872). Deranged revolutionaries
bring destruction and death to a provincial city in a book meant to
show the danger they represent.
Turgenev, Ivan: Fathers and Sons (1862). Two generations separated by
ideas and ideologies. Nihilist prototype dies unyielding as his pupil
accepts the old order.

SOUTH AFRICAN NOVELS

Paton, Alan: Cry, The Beloved Country (1948). A poignant double tragedy
arising out of political, economic, and social repression of the Black
population by Whites.
——: Too Late the Phalarope (1953). The personal tragedy of a hero
destroyed by lack of understanding and repressive racial legislation for
white supremacy.

SUGGESTED READING
Crossman, Richard (ed.): The God That Failed (1950). Writers Arthur
Koestler, Ignazio Silone, Richard Wright, André Gide, Louis Fischer,
and Stephen Spender discuss the events in their lives which led them
to Communism and the factors which caused them to break with it. An
extremely valuable book.

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