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