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.