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 As wartime cooperation with the Russians was superseded by a growing awareness of the nature of militant Communism and the Moscow-oriented loyalties of American Communists, the novel chronicled this awakening.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.