chapter six
The Novelist as Analyst of Individual Political Behavior
Repulsed by his party in his attempt to return to politics after the first World War, Edward Wilcher, in To Be a Pilgrim, turns to writing. He tells his brother:
No one has written a real political novel—giving the real feel of politics. The French try to be funny or clever, and the English are too moral and abstract. You don’t get the sense of real politics, of people feeling the way: of moles digging frantically about to dodge some unknown noise overhead; of worms all diving down simultaneously because of some change in the weather; or rising up gaily again because some scientific gardener has spread the right poison mixture; you don’t get the sense of limitation and confusion, of walking on a slack wire over an unseen gulf by a succession of lightning flashes. Then the ambitious side is always done so badly. Plenty of men in politics have no political ambition; they want to defend something, to get some reform—it’s as simple as that. But even then they are simple people, too, and it is the simple men who complicate the situation. Yes, a real political novel would be worth doing. I should like to do for politics what Tolstoy has done for war—show what a muddle and confusion it is, and that it must always be a muddle and confusion where good men are wasted and destroyed simply by luck as by a chance bullet.
Perhaps Edward’s insight into this aspect of politics has been sharpened by the fact that, despite his immediate denial, he has been hit by just such a bullet himself. But the impact must have been so great that it sent him into a state of shock which made him unable to see that the novel had done just what he said it hadn’t. The muddle and confusion are there, and so are the men who rise above it as well as those who are sucked under and lost.
Motivation
It is hard to draw the line between individual and group political behavior. A man may be a mirror or conductor of political forces as well as a discrete individual. His motivation is perhaps the most individual aspect of his political experience. Most of the leading characters in these political novels are strongly motivated. In only a few cases, such as that of Willis Markham in Revelry, does the individual drift into politics. The ones who, in Wilcher’s words, “want to defend something, to get some reform,” are very common. The “something” that Robert Jordan wants to defend is liberty in Spain, so that “there should be no more danger and so that the country should be a good place to live in.” Lanny Budd feels exaltation that in his role of Presidential Agent he is helping to defend democracy. The reform that brings Millard Carroll to Washington is expressed in the aims of the New Deal, and a similar response on a more emotional level is made by Glenn Spotswood. Passing the shacks of the Mexican workers they have tried to help, he exclaims, “By God, Jed, we’ve got to do something to stop this kind of thing.”
A powerful motivating force which operates on a less conscious level derives from a man’s being a bastard. Hamer Shawcross in Fame Is the Spur, like Hyacinth Robinson in The Princess Casamassima, is illegitimate. Both men are raised by people who try to give them the emotional security of which their birth deprives them, but their attempts to change the society into which they were born seem in part due to the feeling that they are among its second-class citizens. Razumov in Under Western Eyes has been raised, as far as the reader knows, without any family life at all. Yet he is motivated in exactly the opposite direction from Shawcross and Robinson. His assumption of a counter-revolutionary role is a direct result of his feeling that his nation and its existing social fabric are all he has. He tells the well-born revolutionary Haldin:
I have no domestic tradition. I have nothing to think against. My tradition is historical. What have I to look back to but that national past from which you gentlemen want to wrench away your future?... You come from your province, but all this land is mine—or I have nothing.
Generations later, another Russian reacts the same way under the new regime. Feyda Nikitin in The Age of Longing has been orphaned by childbirth and a counter-revolutionary firing squad. The last message from his father’s eyes was one of “unshakable faith in the Great Change, and of a childlike belief in the marvels and happiness which it would bring.” This was enough to start Feyda on a career whose apex is the listing of Frenchmen to be liquidated after Russian conquest.
The character of Feyda serves to bridge the gap between men like Shawcross, Robinson, and Razumov and those who are motivated by a similar but much more powerful force—spiritual bastardy. One of these is the most demoniac of all Dostoyevsky’s possessed, Pyotr Verhovensky. He publicly ridicules his father: “the man’s only seen me twice in his life and then by accident.” It would be easy to make a case basing Pyotr’s anarchistic politics upon a partial transference of his resentment of parental rejection from old Stepan, his father, to Russia, his fatherland. Tony Maggiore, the hero-villain of Caesar’s Angel, is called “the terrible child—the child who had never known childhood.” Canon Borda’s analysis of Fabrizio del Dongo’s violent behavior is also based upon childhood experiences: “He is a younger son who feels himself wronged because he is not the eldest.” There are also characters like Joe Yerkes in The Grand Design who set out to change a society in which they feel at a social and economic disadvantage. The houseboy and then protégé of a professor, Yerkes is eventually led, chiefly by his feelings of inferiority and insecurity, to join the Communist Party and to work at organizing auto workers. These activities are a means, though never acknowledged, through which he can try to change the existing society into one in which he will enjoy a higher status and more prestige. In The Secret Agent the Professor’s failure in a series of jobs had turned him into a revolutionary determined to destroy the society which had rejected him. Jim Nolan had fought “the system” as a lone, dispirited antagonist. The example of cell-mates had finally channeled this antagonism into Communism, because “the hopelessness wasn’t in them.... There was conviction that sooner or later they would win their way out of the system they hated.” Some few individuals, like Disraeli’s exemplary young men, enter politics out of a sense of noblesse oblige. But more enter from a feeling of protest. Don Paolo’s reflections in Bread and Wine emphasize the emotional nature of this motivation in revolutionaries: