Occasional Prose (26 page)

Though I did not yet realize it, it was the Book of Lancelot for me: “Quel giorno più non vi legemmo avante” (That day we read in it no farther) or, putting it in Manzonian terms, “La sventurata rispose”—I responded. It was the title, I think, that captured me because I did not understand at first what the author meant by it. Then there was the unusual weaving of forms: the biographies, the newsreels, the Camera Eye (who was the author but treated in a wry, slightly embarrassed manner that I found very sympathetic), and finally the individual stories themselves: Mac, Eleanor Stoddard, J. Ward Moorhouse, Eveline Hutchins. ... The one I most took to was Mac, who became a Wobbly or at any rate a socialist and was killed young. Best of all, I loved Debs, among the biographies, and disliked J. P. Morgan most.

I do not remember what I thought about a figure like Big Bill Haywood, the IWW leader who finished in Russia; I do remember what I did. I went to the library and looked up every line that Dos Passos had published that was in the card catalogue. I read them all. The last was a pamphlet on the Sacco-Vanzetti case, which I found and read in the library basement, feeling tremendously stirred by Vanzetti’s famous words, brand-new, of course, to me, and by the whole story. But we were in 1933, I realized, and they had been executed in 1927. So there was nothing to be done. But I was moved to read up on the Tom Mooney case too (he at least was still alive) and to become aware of the
New Republic
. One thing leading to another, soon after graduation, I was writing little book reviews for the
New Republic
, then for the
Nation
, and I never looked back. Like a Japanese paper flower dropped into a glass of water, my political persona unfolded, magically, from Dos Passos, though he would have been saddened in later years to hear what his energy, enthusiasm, and sheer unwary talent had brought about.

So what do we mean generally when we speak of political novels? Some people—Marxists—will say that all novels are political, especially those, like Jane Austen’s, that avoid the subject, thus lending tacit support to the status quo. This may be true, insofar as no experience (even the solitary dialogue with the self) is without a political dimension, and to ignore this is to tell a falsehood. But awareness of that dimension varies greatly from person to person and no doubt from one civilization to another. I would guess that ours, democracy-haunted, equality-haunted, was especially sensitive to the political (i.e., the power games) in personal relationships: See
The War Between the Tates
or
Portnoy’s Complaint
and compare Moravia’s
Io e lui
. As a nation of lawyers (Tocqueville), we would be bound to have a talent for injustice-collection. But if one forgets the tense politics of personal relations and thinks of political novels in the common ordinary sense of the word—meaning political parties, voting, legislation, courts of justice, armies—one will nevertheless find that the term “political” can refer to several distinct types of story.

First, there are stories that engage in the highly political art of persuasion, aiming to convince a reader to take certain stands in a national or international debate—the simplest example is
Uncle Tom’s Cabin
. But here
The Book of Daniel
may also be relevant insofar as, at one remove, it can affect a reader’s attitude toward the Pershing missile. A second type of story deals with politicians, examples being
The Last Hurrah
,
All The King’s Men
, Dos Passos’
District of Columbia
(whose weakness is to be biased), a good deal of Gore Vidal; I do not think this type is often found in combination with the first, since novels about politicians tend, like their heroes, to a worldly realism that would never change one’s voting habits, except maybe to discourage one from voting at all. A third type ponders large political questions—essentially the nature and effects of power. The setting may be a village, a family house, a monastic community, a hospital, an air base, a hiring hall, an imaginary country such as those Gulliver visited or
Animal Farm
; the politics may be in the play between man and Nature, man and the universe, man and God. This third type too, being long-sighted, cannot coexist with the first, and not, I think, with the second either; a fascination with the corridors of power is always anecdotal, not reflective. Such anecdotes as appear in
War and Peace
, a supreme instance of Type Three, are there for illustrative purposes, to serve as
examples
in the ancient rhetoricians’ sense of the term. This third and noblest type may be fully represented in our fiction only by
Moby-Dick
.

What we find most often, I believe, in American fiction is the first type, though we may not recognize it or, when we do, call it propaganda, which for us is a negative word, without any of the original wholesome connotations of missionary work (
de propaganda fide
, spreading the faith) implicit for the Roman Church. Actually the great majority of novels in this country—maybe everywhere—have been faith-spreaders. Those are the ones we name when we are asked what books have influenced or changed us.

Main Street
was such a book, and
Babbitt
another.
Babbitt
was a generalized warning of what as an American one would not want to happen to oneself. (Type One, as I should have said, includes warnings—all sorts of wake-up calls, sirens, alerts.) When, with
Elmer Gantry
,
Arrowsmith
, and so on, Sinclair Lewis ceased to issue those wake-up calls to his fellow citizens and turned, instead, to cataloguing American social types by professions—preacher, scientist, businessman, social worker—he became a simple indexer, and nobody listened any more. Surprisingly, though, years after
Main Street
, he came out with an explicit warning to the nation under the ironic title
It Can’t Happen Here
. It was Lewis doing his bit to alert his readers to the possibility of a native fascism, which of course would look different from Hitler’s. The title was misunderstood even at the time, as a reassurance rather than the alarm-bell it was, which is perhaps a fate that lies in wait for such ironically titled, minatory books. Something of the kind happened with Eugene Burdick and William J. Lederer’s
The Ugly American
—a clear lesson in the Do’s and the Don’ts for the United States in southern Asia. The ugly American of the title was a homely simple fellow who knew the right way to win hearts and minds; in other words, he was
good
. But by those who did not read the actual story and doubtless through contamination from Graham Greene’s
The Quiet American
, he was taken to embody the
bad
side of the USA, to the point where the term “ugly American” became proverbial, meaning someone suspected of being a CIA agent or, finally, just any American on neocolonial soil.

Is it an exaggeration to call
Main Street
and
Babbitt
propaganda? Certainly in 1921, when
Main Street
came out, it was understood to be a rejection of the values of Main Street, seen as narrow, rectilinear, conformist, deadly dull. And along with that was a notion that Main Street was a mistake, made with good intentions, which could be corrected, or repealed, like the Volstead Act—a product of just such prairie towns. Main Street could
not
be eternal, written in the natural order of things; thanks to Lewis and his readers, it could be just temporary. It is the underlying sense of something to be corrected in the American heartland that tells us that Lewis’s novel is political, in comparison, say, with
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
. The wrongs done to Tess by the world surrounding her are infinitely greater than any injury done to Carol Kennicott in
Main Street
, who at worst could be said to be suffering from a slight personality impairment due to cultural deprivation. Tess is not a social fact, capable of multiplication to give a satirical picture, but the plaything of a cruel destiny. She is hanged at Winchester, like any common murderess, yet our knowledge that she is an uncommon, even a superior, person cannot let us fall on the book as a condemnation of capital punishment (see Mailer’s
The Executioner’s Song
), though that could be a side-effect on certain readers of a passionate response to the book. That she is not changed—coarsened—by her misfortunes (as in real life she almost surely would be) is the clue to the supra-political dimension of Hardy’s story. Politics, the art of the possible, hopes to change the rules of society (or restore a former good order in the place of a bad); at the same time, it induces change—for worse as well as better—in individual subjects viewed as samples.

Naturally, the propaganda that works on us through fictions does not effect conversions (i.e., transformations) in ways that can necessarily be charted. If our vote on ERA or a nuclear-power amendment is changed by a novel we are reading, that is only the tip of the iceberg. Probably in the twenties there were more converts made to hedonism than to any other faith, and that still may be the “message” of the most influential fiction of today, from Mailer to Updike and back, even when the evangel of self-expression is relayed through fears of getting cancer (Mailer) by bottling oneself up. But if we look at thirties fiction, it can be said, surely with truth, that Cesar Chavez’s grape and lettuce pickers unions were helped, though with a delay of two generations, by
The Grapes of Wrath
. And the Joad family,
Of Mice and Men
, even the less accessible
In Dubious Battle
, had already had consequences for the national psyche in a less evidently causal way.

That American novels can be and often are political is demonstrable. There was Mailer’s second novel, for instance,
The Barbary Shore
, laid in Brooklyn with an FBI man for the villain. Not to mention the “proletarian novels” of the thirties, or Upton Sinclair, not to mention
Mr. Sammler’s Planet
and
The Dean’s December
. Or Bellow’s first book,
Dangling Man
, the “alienated” cry of a character waiting to be drafted. Or his second,
The Victim
: isn’t
any
novel about anti-Semitism political and almost any novel about race? Maybe novels about the lot of women, such as
A Lost Lady
, were “domestic” at the time of writing, but they have been drafted into the service of feminism, along with their modern sisters,
Fear of Flying
and
The Group
.

In a different vein, we have had the Boston pols of
The Last Hurrah
and their descendants in George V. Higgins. Good heavens, I was nearly forgetting
Gone With the Wind
. On the conservative side too, there was Cozzens’s
By Love Possessed
—a goyish
Mr
.
Sammler
. Robert Penn Warren’s
All the King’s Men
was a political novel if there ever was one, being a highly recognizable picture of the career of Huey Long. If Updike’s
Couples
was decidedly “domestic,” what about
The Coup
, his study of an African leader? And
Bech: A Book
, where literary politics is never far from the other kind.

Most of our war novels have been pacifist in their general slant—enough to count as political. I am not sure of
The Red Badge of Courage
or
A Farewell to Arms
, but there is no doubt
of Three Soldiers
,
The Naked and the Dead
,
From Here to Eternity
,
Catch-22
(!). And the many works of Vietnam veterans such as
Dispatches
by Michael Herr.

Anyone who is in the mood can continue the list. To make the point there is no need to seek to prove (as some academic recently did) that
Moby-Dick
is an allegory of capitalism. What is interesting is that so many of the novels I have been naming have been high on the best-seller lists. The political novel in this country is certainly no fringe phenomenon. And it strikes me that we have almost more than our share of them, in comparison with England and Western Europe, just as we have had more war novels (in fact, a notable case of Type One) than our allies or adversaries, and this despite the fact that we entered both World Wars late and were never exposed to mainland attack or invasion.

In the First War, the English had war poetry, and the Germans had
All Quiet on the Western Front
; the French had part of Roger Martin du Gard’s
Les Thibault
, Henri Barbusse’s
Under Fire
, and a film,
La Grande Illusion
. Out of that war, the English, as far as I remember, produced only a single novel, though that was a masterpiece, first published, in expurgated form, as
Her Privates We
and written in fact by an Australian, Frederic Manning. It was reissued uncut a few years ago as
The Middle Parts of Fortune
. A curious aspect of this pure and beautiful work, dealing with trench warfare and behind-the-lines billet life on the Somme in 1916, is the absence of politics from it, as remarkable in its way as the same absence in
The Iliad
, and I mean politics of any kind—there is neither glorification nor condemnation of war, still less of “our” side in contrast to the enemy beyond the barbed wire, and, most unusual of all, no idealization of the class of privates as opposed to the officer class that made up the basic politics of American war fiction. We will not find that neutrality in our war literature, which has a strong accusatory ring; none of our soldier-authors could have written these two sentences (from the prefatory note to
Her Privates We
, 1929): “War is waged by men, not by beasts, or by gods. To call it a crime against mankind is to miss at least half of its significance; it is also a punishment for a crime.”