Concern over threats to personal freedom forms the basis for Shaw’s The Troubled Air and Shirer’s Stranger Come Home. The events and characters in these novels make it clear that they too have as their starting points the contemporary history which they cloak in fiction. The blacklists of Shaw’s book are as real as Shirer’s Senator O’Brien and his Senate Committee on Security and Americanism. Shirer’s people are taken from contemporary American life. Across his stage parade General Cyrus Field Clark, a newspaper chain owner of medieval prejudices and keeper of faded ex-movie star Madeleine Marlowe; Bert Woodruff, a demented columnist; William McKinley Forbes, dictatorial tobacco tycoon; and Senator Reynolds, the committee’s representative from the Old South. The supporting roles are filled with the same accuracy. They include the professional ex-Communists and the sharp little committee counsel who puts loaded questions with ominous mentions of perjury. The commentator’s radio career is destroyed like that of his Foreign Service friend, although both are innocent men. Shirer ranges far afield, from comments upon similar periods of “hysteria” in American history to Hollywood’s refusal to film Hiawatha because his “peace efforts might be regarded as Red propaganda.” The plight of Whitehead is well imagined, but the book’s diary form is not a particularly happy choice and much of its prose is awkward. As a record of the source of some of the most spectacular domestic news of recent years, however, the novel is worth reading.
Mailer’s Barbary Shore, which is not a part of any of the three post-war trends, displays the novelist’s function as a historian in its retelling of the story of the Russian Revolution. A twenty-page account and eulogy are followed by a description of the revolution’s failure to spread and its consequent nationalization. Lovett also recounts his discipleship under Trotsky before he goes on to list the forces which created a police state instead of a promised land.
THE CONTINENT AND ELSEWHERE
Joseph Conrad: Colonial Politics and Revolution
Joseph Conrad’s Nostromo (1904) may be read as a history if one interprets it as a typical case of government-making by foreign industrial interests in late-nineteenth-century South America. With the American Holroyd as his silent partner and financial backer, British-educated Charles Gould uses the wealth of his San Tomas silver mine to finance the successful revolt of Occidental Province from the Republic of Costaguana, which is in the grip of the tyrannical Montero brothers. A good deal of actual history is injected through the reminiscences of old Giorgio Viola, who had fought under Garibaldi across South America to Italy. But it was in The Secret Agent and Under Western Eyes that Conrad recorded more memorable history. Both books give extensive accounts of revolutionary and counter-revolutionary activities. A superb artist, Conrad did not need to go to a series of actual events and people. His imaginative synthesis of the factors which produce them created, however, a true pattern of this whole complex of revolutionary activity. Besides the sensitive exploration of the characters of Razumov, Nathalia, and Victorovitch, one finds actions which characterized the movement in which they were swept up. Conrad presents the espionage and counter-espionage, the bomb plots, and the abortive revolts. Though he wrote out of revulsion at revolutionary activity, his point of view did not blind him to the miseries of Czarist Russia. With artistic integrity, he described the repressive commissions, their imprisonments, exiles, and executions. His account of the fate of Mikulin, chief of Czarist counter-espionage, makes extremely interesting reading in 1954. For Mikulin one could almost substitute Koestler’s Rubashov:
Later on, the larger world first heard of him in the very hour of his downfall, during one of those State trials which astonish and puzzle the average man who reads the newspapers by a glimpse of unsuspected intrigues. And in the stir of vaguely seen monstrosities, in that momentary, mysterious disturbance of muddy waters, Councilor Mikulin went under, dignified, with only a calm, emphatic protest of his innocence—nothing more. No disclosures damaging to a harassed autocracy, complete fidelity to the secret of the miserable arcana imperii, deposited in his patriotic breast a display of bureaucratic stoicism in a Russian official’s ineradicable, almost sublime contempt for truth; stoicism of silence understood only by very few of the initiated, and not without a certain cynical grandeur of self-sacrifice on the part of a Sybarite. For the terribly heavy sentence turned Councilor Mikulin civilly into a corpse, and actually into something very much like a common convict.
It seems that the savage autocracy, any more than the divine democracy, does not limit its diet exclusively to the bodies of its enemies. It devours its friends and servants as well.
The Soviet State: Its Roots and Growth
It was this same Czarist Russia of which Turgenev wrote in Fathers and Sons. Examining Nihilism, he also looked at contemporary events such as the emancipation of serfs and the attempts of some landowners to improve the lot of their workers despite agrarian disturbances. Violently anti-revolutionary, Dostoyevsky replied in The Possessed to what appeared to him to be Turgenev’s advocacy of revolution. In his massive and powerful novel he showed the agitation produced by groups such as the “quintets” organized by Pyotr Verhovensky, themselves the forerunners of the Communist cells.
In Koestler’s Darkness at Noon Dostoyevsky’s nightmare becomes an even more terrible actuality. In his introductory note Koestler writes: