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.