If frequency of occurrence were used to determine whether or not a phenomenon is abnormal, perhaps the dictator would have to be classed as normal. Within political systems embodying the principles of representative government, however, he represents a disease just as surely as a group of cells which suddenly start overwhelming their neighbors. The novel displays not only fictitious tyrants, but real ones as well, from Caesar in Wilder’s The Ides of March (1948) to Koestler’s thinly disguised Stalin in Darkness at Noon. The authors usually describe how they act and what made them that way. Since The Ides of March uses the diaries and letters of several Roman citizens, the reader learns precisely what Caesar’s contemporaries thought of him and what Caesar thought of himself. In the accounts of his enemies, he is a profligate and pervert, a destroyer of liberty. His own writings reveal him as a man who is cold and self-centered but devoted to Rome and possessed of amazingly catholic and intelligent interests. Trying to free his countrymen from superstition, mythology, and barbarism, he rationalizes his dictatorship on the basis that the people will not assume the duties of self-government. He writes:
But there is no liberty save in responsibility. That I cannot rob them of because they have not got it.... The Romans have become skilled in the subtle resources for avoiding the commitment and the price of political freedom. They have become parasites upon that freedom which I gladly exercise—my willingness to arrive at a decision and sustain it—and which I am willing to share with every man who will assume its burden.
Like Caesar, most authoritarian rulers appear to believe that they are working in the best interests of their people. Most often this is a rationalization of an enormous drive to personal power, but whatever its source it is almost always a component of the totalitarian mentality. Some absolutists, like Stendhal’s Ernesto IV of Parma, make no pretense of extraordinary concern for their subjects. But the modern pattern is for the Duce, Führer, or Father of the People to associate himself with the masses, at least verbally. This is as true of state dictators such as Chuck Crawford, Hank Martin, and Willie Stark as it is of General Arango in The Fancy Dress Party. The three Americans also have in common their origins as members of the lower or lower middle class of southern whites. Each starts with a seemingly genuine desire to better the lot of his group. Their careers provide a study of the same infection which attacks the Duke of Omnium, “the poison of place and power and dignity.” And this transition from crusader to sick man gives insight into the process by which dictators are made.
Men Behind the Scenes
Another political type which is not quite pathological yet which occupies a position somewhat outside the main stream of normal political activity is that of the silent man, the one who often wields great power but remains nearly concealed from the public. He is found most often in American politics. Major Rann, boss of the Virginia Senate and opponent of Nick Burr in Ellen Glasgow’s The Voice of the People, “had never made a speech in his life, but ... he was continually speaking through the mouths of others.” Jethro Bass in Coniston is another silent man, figuratively and literally. This type carried to the extreme is Dan Lurcock in Revelry, President-maker, interstate lobbyist, and national salesman of patronage. A European variant of this type is represented by Karl Yundt in The Secret Agent. Described as “no man of action,” his function is to goad others into action. This catalytic role is performed by anti-fascist Professor Quadri in The Conformist. His specialty is proselytizing the young. Cold and detached, he often channels his converts into actions he knows will be fatal, “desperate actions that could be justified only as part of an extremely long-term plan and that, indeed, necessarily involved a cruel indifference to the value of human life.”
The Disillusioned
In The Age of Longing ex-Marxist poet Julien Dellatre asks Hydie Anderson:
Do you remember ‘The Possessed’? They were an enviable crowd of maniacs. We are the dispossessed—the dispossessed of faith; the physically or spiritually homeless. A burning fanatic is dangerous; a burnt-out fanatic is abject.
With these words he speaks for a constantly growing number of former political enthusiasts who have discovered that they had carried not a torch but a club. One is tempted to call this era the Age of Disillusionment. But this would in a sense be an error, for disillusionment is as old as politics. It is always present; only the number of cases varies. The literary list is a long one—Phineas Finn, the Duke of Omnium, Dick Remington, Hilary Vane, Harvey Sayler, Glenn Spotswood, and scores of others. Even the opportunist Shawcross is not immune. Near the end of his career he asks himself if statesmen are not actually “the true pests and cancers of human society.” He thinks that if he could have one wish granted, it would be that politicians would leave all the people alone for fifty years. “We might then have a better world,” he reflects. “We couldn’t have a worse one.”
The modern literature of disillusionment introduces a variation on this old theme. The discontent is localized to one ideology—Communism. Mary McCarthy states one of its basic causes in The Oasis when she says that Will Taub’s “disillusionment with the Movement had sprung largely from its concentration on narrowly nationalistic aims and its abandonment of an insurgent ideology.” In its original use, the term “literature of disillusionment” referred primarily to the body of work of a group of writers who had turned away from Communism. But for the purposes of this study it is just as fruitful to focus on the creations rather than their authors. The best of these novels is unquestionably Koestler’s Darkness at Noon. It is outstanding not only as a psychological portrait in depth, but also as an interpretation of an important phenomenon. Rubashov is at once an individual and a mirror of forces at work in modern international politics. His journey has taken him from exalted participation in revolution, through consolidation of its gains, to a final questioning of the worth of the whole agonizing process. But his life has been bound up so completely with the cause that even his final renunciation is tinged with haunting doubt. Lying in his cell, one of the last survivors of the old guard, he is unable to repress it: