Although this group is not nearly so numerous in the novel as many others, its representatives occasionally appear. In Fontamara, Peppino Goriano returns to Fontamara after thirty-five years, some of them spent in a “political career” in Rome. A good man, he had been forced by starvation to become an agent provocateur for the police. He had earned five lire a day plus a twenty-five lire bonus each time a job resulted in his going to the hospital. For a brief time he had been a hero after a picture of him helping to wreck a Communist newspaper office had appeared in a newspaper. But the “Hero of Porta Pia” lost the honest job he had finally found when it was decided that “fascism could no longer shelter in its bosom such delinquents as had been convicted several times for theft.” Pablo in For Whom the Bell Tolls is a study in deterioration. A cruel but effective anti-Fascist at the beginning of the war, he is found by Robert Jordan to be a sotted semi-bandit who opposes Jordan’s blowing of the bridge. Having lost control of the band to his woman Pilar, Pablo tries unsuccessfully to forestall the demolition by stealing part of Jordan’s equipment. Although he leads the retreat after the bridge is blown, Pablo is no longer one of the “illusioned ones.” He is a guerrilla who retains only his violence and a dominating desire for survival. Old Zaccaria in A Handful of Blackberries is a bandit first and a partisan second. He had received a decoration for a crippling encounter with a German patrol, but the source of the battle was a truckload of cheese which he intended for the black market rather than a desire to free Italy. These characters are not nearly such low forms of life as some of the members of Taddei’s lumpenproletariat, but they are a part of that group to be found on the fringes of most political conflicts, individuals motivated by desire for personal gain rather than by principle.
Peasants
Almost as submerged in the economic structure is the peasant class. Here too there are extra-national similarities. The paisans of Silone and Taddei and the muzhiks of Turgenev and Dostoyevsky have characteristics in common. Ground down by oppression and exploitation, they engage in political action only as a result of outside stimulation rather than as a result of spontaneous desire among themselves. Often they may be too devitalized even to do that. When Bazarov in Fathers and Sons tells the peasants that they are the hope of Russia, he does not suspect “that in their eyes he was all the while something of the nature of a buffooning clown.” In a more subtle way Don Paolo tries to awaken the peasants of Pietrasecca in Bread and Wine. He has a little success with parables, but a direct attack upon issues produces nothing. When he goes to Fossa he asks the lawyer Zabaglione about peasant participation in the now disbanded Socialist Leagues. Zabaglione tells him:
What Socialism meant to most of them was a chance to work and eat till their stomachs were full, to work and sleep in peace, without having to be afraid of the morrow. In the league premises at Fossa, next to the bearded portrait of Karl Marx, there was a picture of Christ in a red shirt. On Saturday nights the peasants came to the league to sing “Up, brothers! Brothers, arise!” and on Sunday morning they went to Mass to say “Amen.” The permanent occupation of a Socialist leader was writing recommendations.
The American representatives of this class seem much the same. Garland’s A Spoil of Office follows the abortive political careers of the Grange and the Farmer’s Alliance. Bradley Talcott sees this latter movement as “the most pathetic, tragic, and desperate revolt against oppression and wrong ever made by the American farmer.” His guiding star Ida puts it even more simply: “While our great politicians split hairs on the tariff, people starve. The time has come for rebellion.” Conditions in Iowa have changed eighty years later, but in the deep South they are almost as bad. William Russell’s A Wind Is Rising (1950) focuses on Negro tenant farmers charged 500 per cent interest by the landowners and cheated of part of the cotton crop they succeed in raising.
Whether he is Prince Torlonia or a Russian noble, the large landholder is most often seen in the novel as the embodiment of the forces which keep the peasant class in subjection. Men like Nikolai Kirsanov in Fathers and Sons may attempt to improve conditions, but the predominant pattern is one of exploitation which eventually produces violence. At the end of A Handful of Blackberries the peasants kill a bailiff when they invade the Tarocchi pasture lands they believe to be rightfully theirs. Debased and deprived, lacking political awareness, and incited by members of other classes, the peasant group turns to violence. In some areas of the world, particularly the United States and England, a steady economic evolution has tended to eliminate large segments of this group. The Russian peasant appears still to be a peasant, even though he may be a Stakhanovite worker in a large kolkhoz. But where the class still exists in a society in which violent protest is still possible, the pattern appears unchanged.
Labor
Commenting on one of the causes of the failure of the farmers’ movements of the seventies, Garland said: “They had made the mistake of supposing that the interests of merchant, artisan, and mechanic were also inimical.” In the novel these interests are not at all inimical. They are rather parallel, for the labor movement (which includes the last two groups mentioned by Garland) has as its natural antagonist the moneyed class to which the peasants’ adversaries belong. And in the novel the laborer is treated as sympathetically as the peasant, with the single exception of Disraeli’s Sybil, which gives an antagonistic picture of the trade unions. But there are two significant differences between the peasant class and the industrial labor class. The latter has adopted different methods and has met with a large degree of success.
The political behavior and history of the labor movement emerges very clearly in the novel. This group fought its first violent battles to achieve organization. When this was accomplished, concerted action in which the strike was the principal weapon was begun to attain better working standards. In societies in which unions are still free, the strike has retained its tactical importance, but it has been accompanied by progressively less violence. And as strife has decreased, a more effective technique has taken its place. The labor movement has gone into politics. The most overt form of this policy is the formation of a labor party like the one so successful in England. Less direct but still effective is the method used by American unions of supporting the party which seems most likely to serve labor’s interests. Peasants’ leagues and farmers’ groups had been formed to take direct political action, but none achieved such spectacular success as these labor groups. Unlike the peasants, the laborers had to a large extent provided their own leadership. Indicative of their more cohesive and militant nature is the frequently expressed distrust of people in the movement coming from non-labor classes. In Marcella the radical Nemiah Wilkins is suspicious of Socialist Harry Wharton. He feels that he is too well dressed and educated to lead a labor movement, and he looks forward to the day when they “would be able to show these young aristocrats the door.” Penelope Muff, a dedicated organizer in Fame Is the Spur, has the same feeling toward two women who work actively in the Socialist cause. They give both time and money, but to Pen they are outsiders taking a dilettante interest in the poor.
That labor’s energies would be channeled into politics rather than violence seemed at one time impossible. Looking back at his youth, Tom Wilcher recalls in To Be a Pilgrim that then “the rich men were still boundless in wealth and arrogance; the poor were in misery, and neither saw any possibility of change without the overthrow of society.” But the labor movement made the transition from a mob to a party. Pen Muff and Hamer Shawcross had seen it achieved when Keir Hardie, wearing a cloth cap rather than a top hat, drove down London’s streets in a wagonette instead of a brougham to take his seat in the House of Commons. And labor remained so conscious of its class origins that Shawcross seemed guilty almost of blasphemy years later when, as a Labourite minister, he wore his ceremonial uniform with its sword and cocked hat. Figures in the novel recall the lines from Browning’s The Lost Leader about the man who had betrayed his group “just for a riband to stick in his coat.” Such a one is Hamer Shawcross. Another is Chester Nimmo. Their supposed betrayal seems more heinous because of this class consciousness. Dick Remington may change from Liberal to Tory with a minimum of obloquy, but when Shawcross enters a wartime coalition government he is a Judas.