The inclusion of novels on contemporary South Africa in this study
comes near to disregarding the limits set up by our definition of the
political novel, for certainly there is as much of the sociological and
economic in these novels as there is in _The Jungle_ or _The Grapes of
Wrath_. They are included, however, because politics plays as vital
a part in the South African problems portrayed in these novels as do
the other two factors. While the Blacks in the Union of South Africa
are not slaves, their treatment is an inflammatory subject, and the
repressive measures taken against them are political by their very
nature. The Nationalist Party of Prime Minister Malan owes its tenure
in no small measure to its policy of _apartheid_, strict segregation of
Blacks from Whites.
=Alan Paton: The Race Question=
One of the most eloquent opponents of _apartheid_ is Alan Paton, a
member of the Liberal Party and author of two fine novels dealing
with the general problem of race relations in South Africa: _Cry, The
Beloved Country_ (1948) and _Too Late the Phalarope_ (1953). Although
both books focus primarily upon interpersonal relationships, the
tragedies which they involve have their bases in the relations of
the two races from which the interacting characters are drawn. _Cry,
The Beloved Country_ tells a moving and deeply pathetic story of the
loss of two sons. The son of the Zulu Stephen Kumalo, an Episcopal
clergyman, murders the son of James Jarvis, benefactor of old Kumalo’s
church. Ironically, in Arthur Jarvis Absalom Kumalo had killed a man
who wanted to better the lot of Kumalo’s people. In 1953 the equally
moving _Too Late the Phalarope_ set forth the tragic story of Pieter
Van Vlaanderen, police lieutenant of Venterspan and hero to Black and
White alike. Convicted of sexual relations with the unfortunate Negress
Stephanie, he is sentenced to prison and disgrace under Act 5 of 1927,
the Immorality Act. The immediate causes of Pieter’s tragedy are his
wife’s inability to give him complete understanding and fulfillment,
and the vindictive enemy he has created in Sergeant Steyn. But the
underlying causes are those which infect the Union of South Africa
with the virulent disease of racial hate and bigotry. Paton’s books
are not only compelling human documents, they are also pleas for the
eradication of the disease.
One of the reasons for the novel’s preeminence as the literary form
superbly fitted to describe and interpret life is the space it gives
the writer to erect his structure, to illumine the nature of an
individual, to characterize a people, to describe both human units
in relation to the world. With his thousands of words the novelist
can impart the shape he wants to the elements which will make his own
vision of life meaningful to his reader. There is no better example
of this characteristic of the novel than these works which use its
freedom to treat that increasingly complex phenomenon of human
activity--politics in its broadest sense. And, assuming the artist’s
privilege, he often makes his work a personal thing, producing not only
a work of art but a political instrument as well.
chapter three
The Novelist as Political Historian
If Art imitates Nature, the political novel imitates History. In almost
all these novels the starting point is a series of actual happenings.
Filtered through the artist’s consciousness, they sometimes emerge
in curious forms. But unless they are spun wholly from moonshine,
like Crawford’s _An American Politician_, they usually bear some
clearly discernible relation to the events of real life. Here again,
the variety is great. Koestler’s _The Age of Longing_ (1951) is
set in Europe of the future. In his words, “it merely carries the
present one step further in time--to the middle nineteen-fifties.” 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. Although the time is the future, the running account
of these opponents’ moves which accompanies the story is based upon
Koestler’s interpretation of recent patterns in international affairs.
Perhaps he is too gloomy, but this is the pattern he sees: Russia
trumpets alarms at what it claims is aggression of a “Rabbit State”;
an international crisis occurs and the people clutch their Geiger
counters and anti-radioactivity umbrellas; the crisis is averted and
tension relaxes; the Rabbit State is absorbed by Russia as the United
States sends a printed protest form. At the other end of the scale is
the roman à clef, represented by novels such as Gallico’s _Trial by
Terror_ and Shirer’s _Stranger Come Home_, in which the characters
seem to be fictional counterparts of real people. The conventional
disclaimer, “any resemblance to actual people ...,” is usually present,
but the likeness is often too close to be explained by chance. A close
parallel to the events in Gallico’s book is provided by the experiences
of Robert Voegler and William Oatis. The ordeals of these two Americans
were not related, but to fictionalize and interconnect them is a
logical procedure for the writer building his novel around the subject
of Americans falsely arrested for espionage by Russian satellites.
The political novelist may cover a short period of time or he may widen
his canvas to accommodate a whole era. Stendhal’s _The Charterhouse
of Parma_, covers three decades, beginning in 1796 with Napoleon’s
entry into Milan and ending years later in the post-Napoleonic period.
Howard Spring’s _Fame Is the Spur_ extends from the hero’s birth in
1865 to the day when, heavy with honors, he participates as a peer in
the coronation of King George VI. And Hamer Shawcross is a politician,
so the novel deals with three quarters of a century of Britain’s
political life. As selective as he wants to be, the novelist may
comment upon any phase of political life. The subjects in these novels
range from small-town corruption to international policy, from the rise
and fall of men to the birth and death of parties.
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. He reveals their
ambitions and exposes their doubts more completely than any historian
can do, even equipped with the volumes of memoirs and apologias which
appear periodically in literary rashes. 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. Disraeli’s known point of view may make
the interpretation of history in _Sybil_ suspect, but the aloofness
and irony of Maugham’s _Then and Now_ not only add to a tale that
is sometimes droll, they help to give keen portraits of two very
considerable men--Cesare Borgia and Niccolo Machiavelli. The novelist
has at his disposal all the resources of the historian, as witness
Sinclair’s use of the 3,900 pages of the Dedham trial testimony in the
Sacco-Vanzetti case. But he can do more than research. He can follow
his characters into Congress, into their offices, and into their beds.
He can also enter into the secret places of the brain, where lie the
ultimate springs of political action.