Joseph Blotner

“ 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. ”

“ If a novelist gains a reader’s support for a cause, arouses his distaste for a course of action, or simply produces a reevaluation of previously accepted beliefs, his work has served as a political instrument just as surely as a pamphlet mailed by a national committee or a handbill stuffed into the mailboxes of a sleeping city. ”

“ 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. ”

“ I suppose one must be a Russian to understand Russian simplicity, a terrible, corroding simplicity in which mystic phrases clothe a naïve and hopeless cynicism. I think sometimes that the psychological secret of the profound difference of that people consists in this that they detest life, the irremediable life of the earth as it is, whereas we Westerners cherish it with perhaps an equal exaggeration of its sentimental value. ”

“ The Lenin of tomorrow, with the surviving theorists and proletariat, must be ready to spring to the barricades of the rubble-strewn “hundred Lilliputs” which survive. Before he is killed, McLoed passes his concept of Marxian revolutionary socialism like a Grail or a sword to Mikey Lovett. He is to keep it in readiness for the day when it can be used. This novel is intensely political. Despite its ambiguousness and withheld secrets, its essential point emerges: the first socialist revolution was betrayed; the true revolutionary socialism must make the second one successful. ”

“ The great national questions to be attended to now are the questions of finance. Spread yourself on the tariff, the treasury, the ways and means, internal improvements, subsidy bills, and relief bills. Dive into those things, and stick there. It’s the only way to cut a figure in politics and to make politics worth your while. ”

“ When the novelist goes forward into time he need not be confined to a mathematical extrapolation of birth rates, trade balances, or electoral trends. Instead, he can create, whole and entire, the world which he thinks will grow out of the one in which he lives or which he sees emerging. The scientist may attempt to define the group mind or examine pressures toward enforced conformity in political thought. But George Orwell in 1984 creates his own terrifying vision of the world thirty years from now. ”

“ Even if the writer does not deal with real people, as do Upton Sinclair and others, he may present a recognizable copy or a man so typical as to shed light upon a specific class of political beings. The historian may describe the Chartist riots or Borgia’s capture of Senigallia, but he cannot do it with the vividness one finds in the accounts of Disraeli and Maugham. Only rarely does a book like The French Revolution appear, and writers like Carlyle are even more rare. Then too, if the novelist is perceptive and detached, his description and analysis may be as acute as that of the historian. ”

“ The technique of buying off an opponent is more common in the American political novel than in the English. But the attempt to purchase Jack London’s Ernest Everhard is more subtle than that practiced on Hamer Shawcross. Everhard is offered a job as United States Commissioner of Labor. Even though this fee is more respectable than that offered Shawcross, Everhard rejects the offer in order to retain his freedom of action. The ways in which a political opponent can be embarrassed are legion. ”

“ In Malraux’s words one catches, under their cynicism, echoes of the declining power reflecting upon vanished days of affluence:
The threat of bankruptcy brings to financial groups an intense national consciousness. When their enterprises in distant corners of the world are suddenly threatened with disaster they remember with mingled pride and gratitude the heritage of civilization which their country has given them and which they in turn have helped to pass on to colonial peoples. ”

“ The press has always been acknowledged as a major factor in influencing political opinion. A close look at the phenomenal success of Uncle Tom’s Cabin reveals that the right novel appearing at the critical time can exercise wide and lasting influence. With his freedom to place a quarter of a million words between two covers, the novelist can present more information and achieve more reader involvement than any newspaper using columns of factual accounts, brilliant editorials, and four-color Sunday supplements. ”

“ The economic and social upper classes appear in more different hues than any other class. They vary all the way from “red” millionaires like Oil!'s Bunny Ross to the same novel’s many “malefactors of great wealth.” Except for Disraeli’s heroes, his aristocrats are very often those usually described as “the product of exhausted loins.” Unless members of the English aristocracy take an active interest in the welfare of the classes below their own, they are usually portrayed as despising them. ”

“ An apprehensive continent, listening with one ear for the mushrooming of atomic bombs, anxiously watches the United States and Russia, feeling that its fate may be decided at any moment by a single move of either of the giants. ”

“ Jules Verne’s novels were science fiction, but in the society in which he wrote, his work was likely to remain fiction for some time. Modern technology makes it possible for the best science fiction to achieve a greater relevance, to present what may shortly be fact. The world of the future in modern novels tends more often to be a hell than a utopia. And the space ships, robots, and other electronic devices emphasize the godless, mechanistic aspect of modern society which writers like Orwell and Koestler see in it. The better writers of science fiction use this technique. ”

“ Before they are married in a haze of romance and comradely devotion to the farmers’ interests, they work with the Grange and the Farmers’ Alliance. Free trade, national banks, and woman’s suffrage are discussed frequently, as well as the depredations of corporations. A sentimental and somewhat superficial book which substitutes clichés and catch-phrases for exploration in depth of causes and effects, A Spoil of Office is valuable for its recital of the farmer’s early role in politics—if one can bear the surfeit of bucolic virtues and inarticulate devotion to a fair and exalted lady. ”

“ A reading of them creates a picture of gradual change, of a surprisingly orderly political evolution. Disraeli’s novels portray an England of immense social and economic differences. Although patents of nobility are being granted with increasing frequency, the society is much more static than dynamic, with extremely little individual or group mobility. It is an England of rotten boroughs, of voteless millions. The country’s political life goes on in accordance with carefully defined rules, and the players remain the same—the Whigs and Tories. ”

“ It is their motivation as much as their behavior which differentiates them from the workers. While groups of militant workers are usually presented as trying to better the lot of their whole group, these members of the lumpenproletariat seem to be entrepreneurs. Rubachiuchi becomes an agent provocateur for the Fascists not to help the poverty-stricken, but simply to help himself. After he infiltrates an anarchist group, he aids in its destruction, not because he is personally opposed to anarchism, but because this is the job his employers are paying him to do. ”

“ 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. ”

“ A man in a group isn’t himself at all, he’s a cell in an organism that isn’t like him any more than the cells in your body are like you.
Like Mac, Jim Nolan is a psychologist of mass violence. He even offers to reopen his wound so that his blood will provide a stimulus for the group to attack the strikebreakers. When the strikers are about to mob one strike leader who has bloodied another, he diverts them from this assault to the one he desires. There are other instances in which a specific theory of the effects of violence is used for political purposes. ”

“ The function of these novels as political instruments was to rouse indignation against the forces which, in seeking to destroy American Communism, use methods as authoritarian and undemocratic as those of the Soviets themselves. Both novels enlist the reader’s sympathies on the side of loyal, non-Communist Americans who are unjustly attacked by self-appointed judges using lies and questionable methods. These courageous protagonists are virtually ruined professionally and economically, for their integrity forbids them salvation through conformity forced upon them by fanatical groups. ”

“ 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. ”

“ It is the struggle between those culturally oriented toward the West and the Slavophiles who reject its influence. A Slavophile himself, Dostoyevsky seems to speak through Shatov, who says that the Russians are “the only ‘god-bearing’ people on earth, destined to regenerate and save the world in the name of a new God, and to whom are given the keys of life and of the new world....” This extreme national consciousness pervades these novels, whether it is expressed in terms of a messianic mission or a deep sympathy for a people with a tragic history. ”

“ One can gain some understanding of the factors which make men like one another despite national and cultural factors which differentiate them. Silone’s peasants, like Garland’s farmers, crave enough to keep them sheltered and fed, to give them the feeling that they can work in peace with a feeling of security. One senses differences, however, in political hierarchies. The Prime Ministers of Disraeli and Trollope are masters, but the Presidents of Adams and Ford are badgered servants. ”

“ Just as the writer treats the rise and decline of empires, so he portrays the flowering and withering of movement. Evoking the past, the novelist can people it with living beings and bring to life its tensions, its climaxes, its meanings. ”

“ If, as von Clausewitz said, “War is merely the continuation of Politics by other means,” one may find politics in war, too. This study, therefore, includes works on revolutionary as well as parliamentary politics. On the international level especially one encounters group attitudes which are politically relevant. The groups may be the conventional social, economic, or political strata of British and American society, or they may be those of the rigid Marxist state. ”

“ Since the reader knows there is a good chance that he will get a deliberately subjective view of political history, there must be good reasons for spending time on novels rather than going directly to Commager, Beard, Macaulay, or Gibbon. Although a novelist may not make it as obvious as did Thackeray, he is a god whose characters are his creations. He looks into their minds and souls. ”

“ Whether the writer declaims through his hero against public robbery or simply tries to present dispassionately what he sees, the revulsion of the reader at the travesty of American political ideals is likely to be the same. ”

“ He has become a Hero of Culture by following the Party line in literature rather than his artistic conscience. Free at last, he feels that he must write something truly fine, a vindication of himself that will also be worthy of his wife, whose death he suspects may have been suicide or murder. But he is unable even to write the projected I Was a Hero of Culture for the American publisher who has given him a substantial advance. ”

“ But this time both the problem and the stakes were global.
The picture of American politics which emerges from the political novel is an unflattering one. Although the “smoke-filled room” may be a cliché in the newspapers, it is a fact in the novel. The deck of candidates is shuffled, cut, and dealt—often from the bottom. The national conventions are a combination of circus spectacle and cynical chicanery. And after campaigns financed by funds from special interest groups, the people’s chosen representatives get down to the serious business of paying off their debts while lining their pockets. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Collaboration—in this case between literature and political science—should certainly take more than one form, but whatever the form, the great need is to light up the shadowy twilight zones which lie between major disciplines. ”

“ If a novelist is to stay in print, political savoir-faire and intellectual capacity are not enough. He has to sell copies. Perhaps this is one reason why all but a few of these novels have a love story accompanying the political theme. Sometimes the love story inundates it, as in An American Politician; in other novels, such as Sinclair’s Presidential Agent, it is peripheral and pieced out with flirtations. It may be that these novelists include this element because love is as much a part of life as politics. ”

“ The political novel is hard to define. To confine it to activity in the houses of Congress or Parliament is to look at the top floor of the political structure and to ignore the main floor and basement which support it. One has to follow the novelist’s characters, on the stump and into committee rooms—sometimes even farther. But the line is drawn where the political element is forced into the background by the sociological or economic. The political milieu develops in part out of the conditions described in Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle and John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath. ”

“ The reader will probably observe the drifting war veteran, the hard-pressed workman, the anxious demagogue. Out of these lives and their interactions will emerge an objective study of the sources of a political movement and of the shape it took. If the novelist is an enthusiastic Nazi, the book will reflect his particular bias. The storm troopers will become heroic Horst Wessels, the young women stalwart Valkyries, the Führer an inspired prophet and leader. Out of the novel will come a plea for understanding or a justification of violence and a perverted view of German national destiny. ”