The political novel

by Joseph Blotner

There are some good aristocrats in the political novel. All of Disraeli’s Young England heroes approach politics with high seriousness and dedication. Coningsby is so suffused with virtue that he keeps his purity unsullied at the expense of losing his inheritance. Tancred’s politics are intermingled with a religious mysticism that leads him to the Holy Land. Meredith’s Beauchamp is such an emotional firebrand in his radical convictions that he makes Disraeli’s young men look like mild and high minded Rover Boys. But he belongs to their class. A little farther down on the social and economic scale is Cary’s Edward Wilcher. A politician of entirely different kidney from these zealous young men, he is a sophisticated and cynical careerist who writes embarrassing epigrams about members of his own party. But he is like the others in his concern for progressive legislation rather than perpetuation of the privileges of his own social group. Augustine St. Clare is one of Mrs. Stowe’s better slave-owners. He is obviously on his way to salvation, partly through the influence of saintly Uncle Tom, when he is untimely carved by a bowie-knife wielded in a fight he has attempted to stop. It is this accident which prevents him from freeing Tom. Churchill’s Humphrey Crewe is an eccentric and fatuous ass, but his intentions are pure gold. He seeks office because he believes he can benefit the state. In The Grand Design, Jed Farrington refers to “the Squire in the White House and his big business friends.” But it is clear in the book that though Big Business may conceivably have derived some benefits from the Roosevelt administrations, this descendant of New York state patroons was politically oriented toward less pedigreed groups. If one were to compile a balance sheet for this class, however, the villains would far outnumber the heroes.

Good men of wealth are even harder to find in this group of novels than good aristocrats. Disraeli’s magnates are the type who in modern America receive awards from chambers of commerce and engraved gold watches from deputations of employees. Elsewhere, the industrialist is a top-hatted advocate of laissez-faire economics whose wealth is acquired more through the sweat of his underprivileged workers than by his own acumen. Millbank in Coningsby and Trafford in Sybil are rising merchant princes who are considerate of their workers and industrially progressive. But either they are ahead of their time or the industrialists who follow them in the novel are throwbacks to a more primitive industrial era. In The New Machiavelli Dick Remington’s uncle is presented as a reactionary beast. His Newcastle pottery factory produces death as well as cups and saucers. He is as unwilling to install fans that will carry off the deadly fumes from the lead glaze as he is to concede any rights at all to his workers. The Rhondda Valley, where Pen Muff goes as the bride of union official Arnold Ryerson, has more than its share of Welsh women widowed by the coal mines. The management group remains in the background of this novel, but the miners’ efforts to obtain concessions which would now seem minimal are evidence of an attitude not dissimilar to that of Dick Remington’s uncle. In Conrad’s Nostromo Charles Gould has justified his decisive intervention in Costaguanan politics by declaring that he was providing order which would benefit the natives as well as himself. Gould’s political commitment gives rise to one of the central problems of the novel—the extent to which his soul has been eroded to insure the undisturbed flow of the bright silver ingots from the San Tomas mine. Gould is not the only victim of his obsession. The other is his wife, who is all but shut out of vital areas of his life and thought. Early in the book he gives her his rationale:

I pin my faith to material interests. Only let the material interests once get a firm footing, and they are bound to impose the conditions on which alone they can continue to exist. That’s how your money-making is justified here in the face of lawlessness and disorder. It is justified because the security which it demands must be shared with an oppressed people. A better justice will come afterwards. That’s your ray of hope.

All of the lobbying groups in the American novels are financed by industrial wealth. Whether the checks are signed by railroaders, utilities operators, or oil men, their purpose is the same: to apply pressure which will gain concessions. And, of course, in many cases these concessions cause a direct or indirect loss to citizens in lower income brackets. In The Plum Tree Harvey Sayler uses his power to make an example of one of these men, “the greediest and cruelest ‘robber baron’ in the West.” The lords of Jack London’s Oligarchy specialize in the repression of workers with frequent resort to calculated mass murder. The climate had changed by the time Dos Passos wrote The Grand Design, but he included the lineal descendant of these predators. Jerry Evans retains a substantial interest in his economic welfare even as coordinator of Roosevelt’s War Procurement Board. Columnist Ed James’s off-the-record analysis is that

All Jerry can think of in the emergency is to use it to turn things back into the business as usual channels an’ we all know that in the southeast at least business as usual means Jerry Evans’ business. Of course he has cleared his skirts technically by resignin’ from the directorates of most of his corporations.... But they are still his corporations.

Individuals of wealth in the novel may derive their money from farming rather than industry, but unenlightened self-interest is still the chief motivating factor. This is the case with the powerful ones in A Wind Is Rising. Mulcting their sharecroppers, they derive added revenue from convenient prohibition laws. Other Dos Passos characters like Jerry Evans retain their natural roles even within the New Deal. Driving through impoverished Southern counties, Paul Graves is told that “relief is in the hands of the politicians and the politicians are mostly landlords who save it for their own tenants.” Steinbeck’s Fruit Growers Association serves its own interests in a more spectacular way. After an offer of twenty cents an hour fails to satisfy the apple pickers, the fruit growers use strikebreakers, vigilantes, sheriff’s deputies, and then troops to insure a harvest on their terms.

It is curious that one of the American industrialists who approaches goodness should be found in Sinclair’s Oil! As in his other novels, the industrialists are the blackest of the black, but J. Arnold Ross is an exception. An independent oil tycoon who conscientiously tries to see his workers’ point of view, his rapacity is expressed in acquisition of oil lands by varied methods rather than iron-handed labor relations. After his death it is discovered that his business has deteriorated and his assets have melted, partly because of the naval oil lands scandal. But there is also a missing bundle of one million dollars, and at one point suspicion is cast upon his closest associate and friend. The implied moral is probably that Ross’s few unsuppressed humanitarian instincts rendered him less able to survive in this particular jungle. The other sympathetically portrayed man of wealth in this novel is Arnold’s son Bunny. Like Yevgeny Bazarov and his father Vassily, these representatives of two generations are never quite able to bridge the gap which separates them. Bunny loves his father, but his symbolic rejection of him appears on page after page in which he almost frantically disposes of his share of the oil money in subsidizing a leftist paper or attempting to found a labor college. Sinclair’s Cagoulards in Presidential Agent are quite willing to weaken France in order to retain the Skoda munitions works. These Frenchmen are blood brothers of Malraux’s Ferral, who does not see the consequences of his economic interpretation of current history. The aristocrats and the wealthy are united in the Thornewell family in Boston. Fighting on two fronts, they eliminate anarchists and liquidate a parvenu entrepreneur in parallel actions. Sinclair’s judgments of these representatives of the upper class are violent and condemnatory. Sinclair’s condemnation is not quite typical of the political novelists who treat the rich, although more of them approach his position than Disraeli’s. When one compares the literary treatment of the lower classes with that of the upper, the difference is striking. One might explain this superficially on the grounds of distortion for dramatic emphasis, or the use of ready-made heroes and villains. But whatever the reasons, the majority of political novelists have been impelled to sympathize with the lower classes and condemn the upper.

POLITICAL GROUPS

The second criterion for classifying political groups mentioned at the beginning of this chapter was that of overt political behavior. The political novel describes the behavior of the group to which its characters belong, that group which, while seeking office or discharging it, conforms to a set of rules both written and unwritten. From one point of view, these seem almost like the rules for playing a game. From another point of view, they are the principles which must be followed if what passes for success is to be achieved. And these maxims are not merely empty phrases, for in the novel the politicians who flaunt them fail. An oversimplified summary of their content would be: follow party discipline regardless of any other considerations; use any means likely to be effective to gain an advantage over an opponent; follow political courses which are expedient rather than exemplary. One of the most succinct statements of this attitude is made by Senator Ratcliffe in Adams’s Democracy:

If Washington were President now, he would have to learn our ways or lose his next election. Only fools and theorists imagine that our society can be handled with gloves or long poles.... If virtue won’t answer our purposes, we must use vice, or our opponents will put us out of office....