In 1952 James T. Farrell published a novel which also dealt with Communism in the mid-thirties. It was Yet Other Waters, the story of Bernard Carr’s attraction to Marxism and his subsequent break with it. This sometimes turgid book centers around the relation of the writer to the Communist movement. Many of the phenomena of the period are there: the magazines purveying a Marxist interpretation of literature, the writers’ councils and congresses, the attempts to generate a party literature. Never a member of the Party, Carr is torn between an attraction to its stated aims and repulsion at its rigid control of thought and art. He joins picket lines, reads a paper at a Congress, and then sees the Communists turn a Socialist meeting into a riot. When he breaks with his party friends, he is given “the treatment.” He is vilified in the left wing papers and reviews as party hacks make a concerted attempt to destroy his literary reputation. (And, of course, this attempted destruction of his means of livelihood is the same method used by the extreme Right to punish political divergency in The Troubled Air and Stranger Come Home.) Unfortunately, the charge that Farrell has a tin ear in writing dialogue is true. This long book has a considerable cumulative effect, but one pays for it by wading through many slow-moving passages. On the whole, though, it is a convincing portrait in depth, valuable also for its retroactive anticipation of the so-called “Literature of Disillusionment” which was to come from such writers as Silone and Koestler.
Like Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls, Dos Passos’ Adventures of a Young Man had in its later sections described the fight against Fascism in the Spanish Civil War. Both novels recorded the infiltration of the Loyalist forces by the Communists and the supremacy which they achieved in many sectors. In his next book, Number One, Dos Passos turned his attention to a source of growing concern to many Americans: dictatorship on the state level as exemplified by the Long machine in Louisiana. Two other novels, Adria Locke Langley’s A Lion Is in the Streets (1945) and Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men (1946), are similar to it, although the quality of the writing varies greatly. Dos Passos’s style is characteristically dispassionate and panoramic. Warren’s book, despite devices smacking of melodrama, has sweep and a highly evocative poetic prose. Langley’s novel is full of worn devices: the faithful mammy with the corn-pone accent, the deathbed message, hidden documents, and a shadowy avenger. But all three books have their primary historical source in the career of Huey Long or the forces in American political life which he typified.
Upton Sinclair and John Dos Passos: Global War and Politics
In Presidential Agent (1945), as in the rest of the voluminous Lanny Budd series, Upton Sinclair mixed imaginary characters with real ones, and fictitious events with those from last year’s newspapers. In this novel (for which any other of the series might be substituted for the present purpose), Lanny moves among the great ones of the world as their intimate and confidant. As Presidential Agent 103 with the code name Zaharoff, he sends his reports directly to President Roosevelt. Using his entree as an art expert, he further ingratiates himself into the confidence of the leading Nazis by becoming Hitler’s Kunstsachverständiger. In this role he goes to Austria ostensibly to purchase paintings for Hitler but actually to gauge Austria’s mood and its ripeness for anschluss with Germany. The incredible Lanny breaks into an SS dungeon, Indian-wrestles with Rudolph Hess, and briefs everyone about everyone else, from Lord Runciman to Kurt Schuschnigg. He also finds time to outline Roosevelt’s Chicago “quarantine” speech. All is revealed to him, from the Cagoulard conspiracy in France to the temper of the Cliveden set in England. The pages of this long novel are jammed with events and people who made news on three continents immediately before and after Munich. A journalistic, omniscient book, Presidential Agent is loaded with slang, clichés, and gauche conversation and narration. But it is an outstanding example of the novel which records current political history.
Dos Passos’s Grand Design pulls together the threads of several current themes. In this one book, the reader finds a continuation of earlier material about Communism in America, the rising labor movement, and new liberalism in government. The transition is then made to World War II, America’s world responsibilities, growing recognition of the Communist threat, and American obligations in the post-war world. The novel’s characters work out their individual destinies against a background of New Deal reforms and international events leading to war. But there is no arbitrary interlarding of the two. Dos Passos ably manipulates these two types of material. He weaves them together into one fabric so that they combine into a meaningful pattern which sets off individual action against group action. The NRA, the WPB, the fall of the Low Countries, the agitation for a second front—all of them are there. But in this artistic fusion the lives of Millard Carroll, Paul Graves, and Georgia Washburn remain individual, retaining their identity and meaning.
Post-War Directions
In the post-war years, the American political novel seems to have gone not in one direction but in three. The first is toward concern for America’s world role as seen in Grand Design. The second returns to the theme of corruption. The third leads to an exploration of domestic dangers to traditional American freedoms. Weller’s The Crack in the Column pursues the international theme, indirectly indicating, upon the basis of lessons learned in Greece, the program which has resulted in the building of American air bases from Spain to Yugoslavia. Weller’s book is also valuable as a political history of wartime and post-war Greece. Besides the working of the wartime EAM front, the novel describes the pattern of planned Communist expansion and Western moves made to counteract it. Gallico’s Trial by Terror, besides being an instrument for criticism of the foreign policy which gave no protection to American citizens jailed and tortured behind the Iron Curtain, also records one tactic of the cold war deliberately intended to ruin American prestige in Europe.
Three recent novels treat corruption on the local level. They are Charles Francis Coe’s Ashes (1952), Mary Anne Amsbary’s Caesar’s Angel (1952), and William Manchester’s The City of Anger (1953). Although the theme is old, some of the actors are new. The lobbies and trusts have been replaced by a more sinister operative—the gangster. And the power behind the city government is not a single gang led by a “Little Caesar.” In Ashes it is the Mafia, a transplanted Sicilian terrorist society. In Caesar’s Angel the ruler is a national syndicate. The hero of Ashes is given a short lecture on the economics of the ring:
It is no longer possible for our interests to keep all their money profitably occupied. It piles up too fast. It threatens to become visible to the Federal taxing authorities. We are constantly seeking, and finding, new areas in which to invest. So-called legitimate areas. It is foolhardy, perhaps, to pay such taxes as legitimate commerce requires, but our sums are so vast that our interests feel that they should be converted into capital assets.
The scale of corruption in Manchester’s book is more modest, for there the rotten façade has been undermined by a local numbers racket rather than a national group. The bought politicians are clearly drawn, as are the agents who subvert them. Once again we are dealing with fiction, but we need only turn to the findings of state and federal commissions of inquiry to see the bases in fact. The best of these rather ordinary novels is The City of Anger. The Freudian critic will be interested in Manchester’s recurrent images of decay, corruption, and physical filth which may, however, represent an attempt to buttress stylistically his basic theme of political and moral corruption. In Caesar’s Angel Mrs. Amsbary’s criminals and police are terribly hard-boiled but not completely convincing. Although her gangsters are much better done than Mrs. Langley’s in A Lion Is in the Streets, she still sounds somehow like a very nice lady trying to be very tough. With his clipped, repetitive sentences and grim-jawed men, Coe seems to be suffering from an overdose of Hemingway. Yet at times he manages to go one hundred and eighty degrees in the opposite direction with dialogue like this from “Young Tim”: “You alone, Mums, combine such true goodness of soul with such great understanding of things!”