The Duchess of Omnium’s discourse upon the tasks Omnium is unwilling to perform is much more an indictment of politics in its worst sense than this comparatively restrained analysis of Trollope’s. In much the same vein Meredith’s Stukely Culbrett declares that Nevil Beauchamp has “too strong a dose of fool’s honesty to succeed....” Hamer Shawcross’s own distillate of thirty years of political experience is a bitter brew. Dissimulation is the chief element in the formula for success. The politician must be an adept psychologist appealing not to reason and intellect but to “panic, passion, and prejudice.” Shawcross cynically adds that if these factors are not present at the critical moment, the politician must know how to create them. The lesson one learns from Chester Nimmo’s career is that the successful office holder must be as agile as a gymnast, as flexible as a contortionist, and as vigilant as a radar screen. In certain instances, the politician owes success to what he does not do rather than to what he does. The ultimate in the ossification of faculties whose exercise may be dangerous is reached by the Communists. General Golz reveals his formula for survival to Robert Jordan: “I never think at all. Why should I? I am General Sovietique. I never think. Do not try to trap me into thinking.”
Peter Stirling’s list of requirements for political success is quite different. Although he mentions physical superiority and dishonesty, his lecture sounds like a naïve version of the Boy Scout oath. He mentions bosses, but his account of the way he influences his constituents suggests Socratic dialogues in Athenian meadows rather than politics in a tenement district of downtown Manhattan. The physical characteristics which he mentions briefly are noted by other authors, however. Nick Burr is a Virginia Lincoln in appearance, while Senator Ratcliffe in Democracy, and Senator Planefield in Through One Administration, represent the portly and impressive type. Dan Lurcock’s acquisition of Willis Markham is based upon precisely these qualities: “Let him get that magnificent head into the legislature, where it would be on view, and there was nothing he might not do with it.” This case appears to exaggerate the value of physical impressiveness, but it illustrates the very real advantage which it confers upon its possessor.
The leader-follower relationship can depend in part upon just such physical factors. Bill Dominick, who rules three congressional districts in The Plum Tree, cows many of his supporters with his huge, ex-prizefighter’s body. Jack London’s Ernest Everhard represents this type with the dross transmuted to gold, for he is “a superman, a blond beast such as Nietzsche has described.” Hank Martin combines this physical vitality with an oratorical “kindlin’ power” which inspires his supporters. But his appeal is also basic in another way. His theme “Divide the Riches” has an attraction for impoverished back country people which is probably more compelling than personal magnetism. The power of Michael J. Grogan in Hot Corn Ike has a completely economic basis. From city departments and corporations he obtains the green labor tickets which entitle their bearers to jobs. For each ticket Grogan receives a vote. In All the King’s Men, Willie Stark’s concern for his people’s welfare is also expressed in direct action, but he explores psychological depths in his constituents unplumbed by other politicians. He jeers at them as “suckers,” “red-necks,” and “hicks,” then allies himself with them as one victimized by the same city politicians. Losing his job because of these city bosses, he had become “symbolically the spokesman for the tongue-tied population of honest men.” His oratory is violent and emotional, full of questions which bring thunderous crowd responses like those of a question-and-answer sermon in a revival meeting. And he buttresses this primitive relationship with tangibles: an overloaded state payroll, new highways, and a magnificent free hospital. But Willie Stark’s appeal is not limited to the unlearned. The intelligent but neurotic Jack Burden works for Willie even while he allows his critical faculties full play. Anne Stanton, a governor’s daughter, becomes Willie’s mistress. Both of these people see in Willie strength where they are weak. To Jack he is a man who lives in and for the present; to Anne he is an embodiment of strength, a man who knows precisely what he wants and is willing to pay the price to get it. Another practitioner of psychology is Councilor Mikulin in Under Western Eyes. He enlists Razumov in his service through his faculty for sensing each man’s vulnerability. “It did not matter to him what it was—vanity, despair, love, hate, greed, intelligent pride, or stupid conceit—it was all one to him as long as the man could be made to serve.”
Political Pathology: Deviates, Martyrs, and Authoritarians
This topic leads directly to a very curious set of political phenomena. It can be described as political pathology. The line between sanity and madness is just as hazy here as it is in other areas. But one can usually distinguish between one man who is intelligently dedicated to a goal and another who is a fanatic. Dostoyevsky intended that all his revolutionaries should represent very dangerous forms of madness. It is obvious that Kirillov, who believes he can become God by killing himself, is insane. The drunken brute Lebyadkin, like the vicious Pyotr, idolizes Stavrogin as a god, while Stavrogin himself is a complete masochist. Erkel is described as a fanatic who can serve a cause only through one person seen as the expression of it. Shatov recognizes their abnormality. He tells the narrator that they would be lost if Russia were suddenly transformed: “They’d have no one to hate then, no one to curse, nothing to find fault with. There’s nothing in it but an immense animal hatred for Russia which has eaten into their organism.” Even more lethal a fanatic is the terrorist Ch’en Ta Erh in Man’s Fate. He nerves himself for his first act of violence in the novel by driving a dagger point into his arm. Later, in a state of exaltation, he stabs a fragment of glass into his thigh to express to his companions the intensity he feels as he proposes that they should throw themselves with their bombs beneath Chiang Kai-shek’s car. Ch’en develops an almost mystical attraction toward death which he finally satisfies by shooting himself when the attempt on Chiang’s life fails. His opposite number is Konig, chief of Chiang’s police. Once tortured by the Communists, he declares “My dignity is to kill them.... I live ... only when I’m killing them.” Several of Conrad’s characters, notably Nikita the assassin in Under Western Eyes and the Professor in The Secret Agent, are quite as ready to kill for political reasons. Warren’s Willie Stark has a fanatical bodyguard in Sugar-Boy, a stuttering gnome of a man who combines absolute devotion to Stark with the satisfaction he gets from driving a high-powered car and using a .38 Special revolver.
But the fanatic need not engage in violence. He appears to channel his drives into actions appropriate to the political framework within which he operates. In The Troubled Air Communist Vic Herres calculatedly ruins his old friend Clement Archer. “Because he’s a fanatic,” explains Vic’s wife Nancy, “because he would sacrifice me and Johnny and young Clem and himself and anybody else if he was told it was for the cause....” The political novel also contains examples of the Communist who carries his fanaticism intact with him in his journey from the extreme Left to the far Right. Elsie McCabe and Frederick Newman knowingly perjure themselves before Senator O’Brien’s committee in Stranger Come Home. And it is clear that they have made their allegations against Whitehead with the same disregard for truth which they found useful in their years as Party members. Another of the same species as Dostoyevsky’s Erkel and Warren’s Sugar-Boy is Spring’s Jimmy Newboult. “Knighted” by Shawcross with the Peterloo sabre, he precedes him into each rally carrying it aloft. But with his scruples and acute moral sense, Jimmy represents a mid-point between the deadly Ch’en and Marion Crawford’s sugar-and-spice fanatic. Crawford explains noble John Harrington’s lack of zeal in proposing to pining Josephine Thorn in An American Politician:
He was a man, she said, who loved an unattainable, fanatic idea in the first place, and who dearly loved himself as well for his own fanaticism’s sake. He was a man in whom the heart was crushed, even annihilated, by his intellect, which he valued far too highly, and by his vanity, which he dignified into a philosophy of self-sacrifice.
In Bread and Wine Luigi Murica tells Pietro Spina, “I decided that politics was grotesque—nothing but an artificial struggle between rival degenerates.” His comment may be taken literally as well as figuratively, for political and sexual pathology are combined in the cases of the deviates in these novels. There are enough to fill a textbook of abnormal psychology. The most common is the homosexual who often seeks to achieve through political association the sense of acceptance by his fellows which he feels is denied him by his maladjustment. Such a one is Marcello Clerici in The Conformist. Moravia’s detailed treatment virtually gives a case history following a familiar pattern. Marcello’s feeling of abnormality is deepened by a childhood traumatic experience in which he barely escapes assault by a middle-aged man. Marcello marries, but he remains a latent homosexual throughout his life, feeling a frightening desire to submit when he is accosted by an old man in a situation very like the first one. He hopes to achieve conformity through marriage and membership in the Fascist Party. After paving the way for the political murder of a former teacher, he reflects that the success of the regime is needful to him psychologically. “Only in that way,” he thinks, “could what was normally considered an ordinary crime become, instead, a positive step in a necessary direction.” This maladjustment is found on many levels, from that of Communist General Ares in The Crack in the Column to post-adolescent Winthrop Strang in The Grand Design. The son of a famous author now deceased, Strang petulantly complains that he is not receiving enough attention from his dominating mother, a well-known newspaper columnist. In what appears to be an attempt to obtain this affection from other sources, he has thrown himself into Communist Party work and an affair with young Mervyn Packett, another Party member who writes for the Negro press. Lee Sarason, who succeeds Buzz Windrip as American dictator in It Can’t Happen Here, surrounds himself with strong young members of the Minute Men: “He was either angry with his young friends, and then he whipped them, or he was in a paroxysm of apology to them, and caressed their wounds.” The parallel between Sarason and Nazi Ernst Röhm is completed when he is shot late at night by another American Nazi, Colonel Dewey Haik. Several brusque and mannish women appear in these novels. Lannie Madison in Barbary Shore is a lesbian who has denied herself everything, including love, to work for the Communist Party. Having broken with it, she is now a completely disorganized personality.
One of the most complex deviates is Dostoyevsky’s Nikolay Stavrogin. Although he is capable of heterosexual relationships, he is a pervert who has corrupted a small child and caused her suicide. A sadist, he is also an admitted masochist. In marrying the feeble-minded Marya Lebyadkin he had carried out his idea of “somehow crippling my life in the most repulsive manner possible.” In the long-suppressed chapter of the novel which contains his confession to Bishop Tihon, Stavrogin hears the Bishop tell him: “You are possessed by a desire for martyrdom....” But the “terrible undisguised need of punishment” is emotionally complicated because this compulsion is a “need of the cross in a man who doesn’t believe in the cross—” Stavrogin plays an essentially passive political role since he allows himself to be used by Pyotr. His case represents, however, a combining of abnormalities usually found singly.
One aspect of Stavrogin’s character also appears in men who do not deviate from the norm. Nick Burr in The Voice of the People looks like Lincoln in his towering stature and his “good, strong kind of ugliness.” He prepares himself for his martyrdom by opposing powerful forces in his state, and finally meets it by attempting to halt a lynching. To some, this self-sacrifice carries an almost religious ecstasy. In Moravia’s The Fancy Dress Party Saverio has been ordered to assassinate the dictator of the South American country of Bolivar. He thinks that he now knows what the early Christians must have felt, “the sweet, deep pleasure of sacrificing themselves for the greater good of humanity....” Shaw’s Clement Archer and Shirer’s Raymond Whitehead do not enter into their ordeals with the intention of becoming martyrs. When they are deprived of their primary sources of livelihood, however, this is precisely what they become. In most of the novels there is an awareness of the political value of martyrs, and the Communists, particularly, excel in their manufacture.