chapter seven

Chapter 163,193 wordsPublic domain

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.