Living With Books
HICKS, GRANVILLE
LIVING WITH BOOKS New Novels on Current Politics by Edwin O'Connor, Richard Llewellyn By Granville Hicks Edwin O'Connor's The Last Hurrah (Atlantic-Little Brown, $4.00) deals with one phase of...
...he dwells on his good deeds and solid achievements...
...When he goes to Geneva on a diplomatic mission, he finds the Emyenkovs there, and is lavishly entertained by a friend of theirs, Professor Arkhiv, a learned philologist from Russia...
...And this class will be restored to power by a Communist revolution, whereupon Hamish, having been trained for the task in Moscow, will take over...
...O'Connor assures his readers that his characters are "fictional," Llewellyn protests that his are "fictitious," and both agree that any resemblance to persons living or dead is "purely coincidental...
...Now he has picked up a cause celebre, the case of Donald Duart MacLean and Guy Francis de Money Burgess, two British diplomats who vanished behind the Iron Curtain in 1950...
...O'Connor's publishers are more circumspect, and he himself takes pains not to name the city over which his boss rules...
...After all, it is being presented to the public by a respectable publisher as an explanation of the Burgess-MacLean case, and some people may be taken in by it...
...I am charitable enough to assume that Llewellyn is honestly seeking to explain the defection of men like Burgess and MacLean, that he is trying to be fair...
...This kind of disclaimer is frequently ludicrous, but it seems particularly meaningless in the case of Mr...
...O'Connor is concerned with a rather old-fashioned subject, the rise and especially the fall of a political boss...
...He encounters some adherents of Moral Re-Armament who are obviously feeble-minded...
...He has acquired a mistress, a glamorous young woman of mysterious antecedents named Myril...
...Hamish Gleave, for the publishers say on the jacket that the novel "takes its inspiration from the Burgess-MacLean case...
...He is not a Communist, and has never had the least interest in Communism...
...The Last Hurrah is a lively novel, based on a sound knowledge of political methods...
...He is courted by a charming couple, Bejian and Frolla Emyenkov, "cultural attaches, ostensibly from Hungary," who have plenty of money to spend...
...It may be said at the outset that O'Connor has done rather well, whereas Llewellyn leaves the reader in confusion and dismay...
...But it is an entertaining book, and one that throws much light on what has been going on in our cities...
...As for Hamish, even if one could take his dissatisfaction at face value, one could not believe that it would lead to treason, and the fact is that one is suspicious about his grudges because Llewellyn has so obviously loaded the dice, with his dreadful Americans, his dreadful MRA people, his dreadful business man, his dreadful Conservatives...
...Since we have seen the campaign through the eyes of Skeffington, his nephew and some of his followers, we are as surprised as they when he is beaten...
...Llewellyn's qualifications for the job seem to include neither a knowledge of the British diplomatic service nor an understanding of Communism...
...One of his colleagues takes him to a meeting of quasi-fascist Conservatives who are proposing, in the most fatuous way, to take over the Government...
...So we have a man who is full of grudges...
...Meanwhile, a friend of his, Kevin Chalmers, who has been kicked out of the diplomatic service because of a homosexual escapade in Washington, tells Hamish that he is going over to the Russians...
...Hamish, at least as he is first presented to us, is both stolid and stupid...
...Arkhiv is not the kind of Communist who quotes Marx, Lenin and Stalin...
...For it is his last campaign that the book tells about, the campaign in which he is finally defeated...
...A few little things like Social Security, Unemployment Insurance, and the like-that's what shifted the gears, sport...
...We end up by liking Skeffington very much, and we are sorry for him in his defeat...
...At the same time, however, his interest in politics has been aroused, and he begins to look around for alternatives to the status quo...
...In Paris, he is taken in hand by Dr...
...Hamish Gleave (Doubleday, $3.95) with another...
...It will now be apparent that Mr...
...Llewellyn was not so far wrong as he doubtless thought when he announced that his characters were fictitious...
...But fairness, when coupled with wilful ignorance, can lead a man as far from truth as the most outrageous bias...
...The calmness with which the British have regarded the problem of Communism is preferable to the hysteria that still can be found in many parts of the United States, but the calmness, unfortunately, is often associated with an unwillingness to face the facts...
...Chiefly because there is a possibility that it may be taken seriously...
...Otherwise known as a social revolution...
...I do not think that Llewellyn is advocating Communism, although his account of it is anything but accurate and is calculated to give a favorable impression...
...Finally, O'Connor deliberately walks around the moral problem raised by Skeffington's methods...
...Skeffington's nephew, from whose point of view much of the story is told, doesn't acquire much substance until near the end...
...Lewellyn's theme is more modish...
...Indeed, he seems in the first part of the book to have no political philosophy whatever...
...The Americans become more and more offensive, and so does Mr...
...Hamish finds this an interesting idea, and a little later, when he discovers that he is in trouble because of his associations with a lot of dubious people, he gathers up all the valuable documents he can lay his hands on and makes his getaway...
...Beyond that, the novel is an interesting phenomenon...
...Hamish Gleave throws no light on anything...
...O'Connor, on the other hand, wants us to like Frank Skeffington...
...If anybody wanted anything-jobs, favors, cash-he could only go to the boss, the local leader...
...It is hard to find anything in the book but ignorance and melodrama...
...It is because he believes bossism is passing that O'Connor can write about the boss with so much sympathy...
...The reader, especially if he has ever been a reader of E. Phillips Oppenheim and his host of successors, knows what is happening to Hamish long before he does...
...Hamish resents the fact that he and his wife have to pinch pennies while the nouvenux riches-represented in the novel by a heel named George Calton-Islip-are thriving...
...The Communist agents who gang up on Hamish are like nothing one has read about in the revelations of Gouzenko or Petrov or the various Americans who belonged to Soviet networks...
...There is an extraordinary scene when he goes to Myril's apartment and finds his wife there, but the payoff comes after he has reached France...
...Calton-Islip...
...On the debit side, it must be said that there is too much talk, though some of it is very good...
...As a career diplomat...
...he glosses over, though he does not deny, his crimes...
...MacLean, by all accounts, was a brilliant but exceedingly unstable person...
...The book has two climaxes-Skeffington's defeat and then his death-and both are moving...
...He makes him a charmer...
...In his late thirties...
...Llewellyn, who once wrote a moving book about life in Wales, has been trying ever since to find another theme that would lend itself to his talents...
...Professor Arkhiv, who is the master mind of the spy ring that has been focusing its attention on Hamish, joins him on the train to Paris...
...Rodolphe Mavritz, a high official in the French Government...
...It has equally little relevance to any other realities that one can think of...
...I do not think he is justifying treason, although he does his best to make a case for Hamish Gleave...
...The whole situation looks pretty black to Hamish...
...Skeffington is somewhat romanticized, but for the most part he is credible, and certainly he is appealing...
...Few of the minor characters are well developed, and O'Connor has to use tags-tricks of speech or other mannerisms-to keep them straight...
...Like most of his associates, he dislikes the Americans he encounters, and he dislikes the idea that England is playing second fiddle...
...Hamish does not get violent when he has had a few drinks, as MacLean did, nor has he any of MacLean's homosexual tendencies...
...LIVING WITH BOOKS New Novels on Current Politics by Edwin O'Connor, Richard Llewellyn By Granville Hicks Edwin O'Connor's The Last Hurrah (Atlantic-Little Brown, $4.00) deals with one phase of politics and Richard Llewellyn's Mr...
...Though it deals with an old theme, The Last Hurrah deals with it in a new way...
...But we soon perceive that influences are being brought to bear on Hamish...
...No need now to depend on the boss for everything...
...Now his dissatisfaction becomes more acute, partly because of his feeling that British foreign policy is being dictated by Washington...
...he deals with treason...
...It was this class, we learn, that ruled England for many centuries and made it great...
...the Federal Government was getting into the act...
...The details of the campaign are admirably portrayed, and there are dozens of good scenes...
...He also is bitter because the Government is raising the standard of living of the masses while his standard of living, by comparison goes down...
...his only article of faith is that he and his family have had a raw deal...
...A young lawyer who belongs to the opposition offers the nephew an explanation: "The old boss was strong simply because he held all the cards...
...Hamish has done his job conscientiously, but he is far from satisfied with the politicians who are his superiors...
...The reader cannot be blamed, however, if he is reminded of Boston and James M. Curley...
...And Hamish, who turns out to be quite a political philosopher at this point, unfolds his theory of the British middle class, by which he means the class that "ranked below the aristocracy only in precedence at Court...
...Why, then, is the book worth talking about...
...The novel, then, has little relation to the realities, so far as they are known, of the MacLean-Burgess case...
...In Coming Issues Reviews and essays by James T. Farrell, Louis Filler, Robert E. Fitch, Milton Hindus, Hans Kohn, Seon Manley, Harvey Curtis Webster...
...So far as Hamish can see, these are merely nice people...
...he might be an engaging villain, he was more likely to be a despicable one, but in any case he was a villain...
...Unlike Hamish Gleave and Kevin Chalmers, MacLean and Burgess were converted to Communism while they were students at Cambridge and presumably served as Soviet agents for a long period of time...
...for his grandfather had lots of money but lost it...
...He is, on the contrary, an avowed aristocrat, like Hamish...
...Look at the story as he tells it...
...In the muckraking novels of forty and fifty years ago, the political boss was a villain...
...Hamish Gleave, an official in the Foreign Office, is intensely conscious of the fact that he might have been and is not a rich man...
...What Roosevelt did was to take the handouts out of the local hands...
Vol. 39 • February 1956 • No. 6
