Living With Books

...Novels of both kinds might better be regarded as variations on a single theme—the criticism of democratic reality...

...In any case, it is clear that Howe regards European experience as normal and American experience as exceptional, and this, I suggest, is a consequence of his particular political outlook...

...He is as sound and rewarding on the works of anti-revolutionaries as he is on the works of those who favored revolution...

...But the problem of power has lost none of its importance in our time, and we cannot promise ourselves that it will never again be presented to us in an urgent form...

...Whether or not a political novel begins with an ideology, it comes sooner or later to the posing of a moral issue...

...It is not so easy as it seems to say who is for and who is against...

...Although Dostovevsky had repudiated the revolutionary movement of which he had once been a part and had become a spokesman for everything it opposed, the qualities in him that had made him a revolutionary in the first place refused to die...

...Koestler's writings, Orwell's 1984—are products of various kinds of disillusionment...

...There are difficulties in the way of the contemporary American political novelist, chiefly his sense of his isolation from the centers of power, but the absence of political ideology need not be a difficulty...

...Lacking anything that could conceivably be regarded as a practical program of action, his radicalism becomes merely a gesture and sometimes, as in the article, "This Age of Conformity," that he published in Partisan Review three years ago, a gesture of thumb at nose...

...He does, however, devote one chapter to three American political novels, though they are political in a way that distinguishes them from the European fiction he writes about...

...In Hawthorne's America, of course, Hollingsworth could never have much influence, whereas in Dostoyevsky's Russia Stavrogin could, but there are resemblances just the same...

...He can reply that he is a Socialist, and that what he is for is socialism, but I am afraid that in mid-century America this simply begs the question, and the proof lies both in his own political writings and in the character of the magazine, significantly called Dissent, of which he is an editor...

...Yet I am glad that at least one able young critic is interested in politics, and my feeling, I believe, is not purely nostalgic...

...Howells and Mark Twain were shaken by the contrast between the democratic pretense and the blatant abuses of the Gilded Age...

...Ideology reflects a hardening of commitment, the freezing of opinion into system...

...LIVING WITH BOOKS By Granville Hicks Irving Howe's 'Politics and the Novel' —Intelligent, Appreciative Criticism Unlike most literary critics today, Irving Howe has an active interest in politics, and for him this means radical politics, the kind of politics that rejects the status quo...

...For most intellectuals today, politics is one of the lower forms of human activity, one to which they need pay no attention...

...Howe, I gather, believes that the problem will recur in something like the classic Marxist form, and about that I have my doubts, but his insistence that the problem has not been disposed of is salutary...

...If a 19th-century American novelist," he writes, "chose a political theme, he generally did so to expose the evils of corruption in government (America's substitute, so someone has said, for ideology) or to bemoan the vulgarities of public life that were driving sensitive men into retreat...

...Two of the three American novels Howe examines, it seems to me, are exceptions to the general rule rather than examples...

...Indeed, Howe's book suggests that the anti-revolutionary has the advantage...

...Dos-toyevsky, James and Conrad were avowed conservatives...

...Conrad, with a devotion to Polish nationalism in his background, could not maintain the detachment of his friend Henry James in writing about the revolution...

...Drawing on his own not altogether happy experiences at Brook Farm, Hawthorne sought to scrutinize the motives of the reformers...

...In speaking of the tensions of the political novel, Howe shrewdly asks, "Are we not close here to one of the 'secrets' of the novel in general—I mean the vast respect which the great novelist is ready to offer to the whole idea of opposition, the opposition he needs to allow for in his book against his own predispositions and yearnings and fantasies...

...only one, Stendhal, can be regarded as having favored the revolutionary ideas of his period, and he, writing at a time when the revolution was in abeyance, was concerned, as Howe savs...

...Whether or not as a consequence of Jack-sonian democracy, the 1840s and 1850s produced a great enthusiasm for the improvement—and, indeed, in many minds the perfection—of American society...

...Of course, the situation is not quite so simple as all that...

...Both were concerned not with those who held power but with those who proclaimed their right to hold it by virtue of moral and intellectual superiority...

...The three novels he discusses—Hawthorne's The Blithedale Romance, Henry Adams's Democracy, and Henry James's The Bos-tonians—he puts in this latter class...

...But he goes on to discuss the way political ideas enter into fiction, the way they are related to experience and tested by it...

...Political ideology in this sense of the term has not had much influence in American life, except briefly and uneasily in the 1930s, and hence Howe's kind of political novel has never been domesticated in this country...

...One thing does seem clear—that the kind of political novel Howe is interested in has not flourished in America...

...According to this interpretation, a man who rejects an ideology may be able to deal with it in fiction as effectively as the man who accepts it...

...As I have said on occasion in The New Leader and elsewhere, his radicalism seems to me chiefly of a negative sort...

...Not until Malraux wrote Man's Fate and Silone wrote Fontamara did we have novels of stature written out of revolutionary commitments and passions...

...As for Malraux and Silone...

...That there are certain fine novels of which this is true his book is sufficient demonstration, but ideology may be less important even in these novels than he supposes...

...Abstraction," he writes, "is confronted with the flux of experience, the monolith of program with the richness and diversity of motive, the purity of ideal with the contamination of action...

...Most of our 19th-century novelists favored democracy in theory, but they had their various sorts of uneasiness...

...Turgenev, Howe points out, was a more political writer than is generally admitted, but Howe's verdict is that "he speaks to us for the right to indecision...

...Cooper, pulled this way by his strong nationalism and that way by his affiliation with the landowning class, was one of the most ambivalent...

...But The Princess, whatever its qualities, is one of James's novels that lie almost wholly within the European tradition...

...Though they may have shared with Henry Adams a certain sense of loss, both were closer to the European tradition...

...Henry Adams, indeed, did have a sense of political loss, as well he might have with three generations of eminence in national affairs behind him, but most of the political novelists of the century were concerned with the demonstrable fact that the promises of democracy were not being fulfilled...

...If he weren't capable of doing justice to men who were against what they thought of as the revolution, the book wouldn't be worth much, for it is with such men that he is principally concerned...

...In discussing particular novels, Howe writes not as a political theorist with a dogma to sustain but as an intelligent, appreciative, discriminating reader, and my personal measure of his success is the fact that he leaves me with ,. compelling desire to reread almost every one of the books he talks about...

...The growth of ideology," Howe suggests, "is closely related to the accumulation of social pressures...

...some of the tensions that ultimately drove them away from Communism are apparent in the books they wrote as devout Communists...

...I can understand this, too, for the range of political possibilities is narrow at the moment and the practical choices to be made are both rather uninteresting and quite easy to make...

...Howe describes the political novel as one "in which political ideas play a dominant role or in which the political milieu is the dominant setting...

...Of the five 19th-century European novelists Howe examines...

...one knows what he is against but not very well what he is for...

...Coming Soon: Reviews by Milton Hindus, Richard C. Hottelet, Keith Irvine, W W Kulski, Seon Manley, Philip E. Mosely, R. G. Ross, I. Salwyn Schapiro, Ben B. Seligman, Ramon Sender, John Unterecker, David C. Williams, Anita M. Wincelherg...

...And this continued to be the great complaint of most of the muckraking novelists of the early years of the present century...

...Brook Farm, though uncommitted in its origins to any particular social dogma, was a reflection of the widespread Utopian sentiment, and in time it was reorganized on a Fourieristic basis...

...Henry James, it is true, wrote The Princess Cassimassima, a political novel with great virtues and, as Howe justly observes, considerable faults...

...He is far too intelligent to judge a novel by its ideology, but he feels that ideology must play a dominant part in a political novel, whether it is accepted or opposed...

...And James, much more successfully, repeated the process with a later generation...

...they were hospitable, as they rarely have been, to ideas from Europe, including the ideas of the Utopian Socialists...

...with strategies for survival...

...There is a tradition that he can work in, and it is the fundamental tradition of the great political novels...

...Novels of the first kind he finds too journalistic to have more than transient interest, but he sees in "the novel colored by the emotions of political loss" a certain value for today...

...This is the spirit in which the great novelist approaches all moral issues, whether or not politics is involved...

...In the successful novel, the moral issue is never raised in an abstract fashion and is never solved in terms of the absolutely right or the absolutely wrong, even though the novelist may himself be an absolutist...

...The recent political novels of which Howe speaks—Dos Passos's U.S.A., Warren's All the King's Men, and Trilling's The Middle of the Journey—display, as he says, a sense of loss, but in their more important aspects they raise questions about the morality of power and the morality of opposition...

...Not only were Americans hatching all sorts of ideas for universal reform...

...The more recent political novels of which Howe speaks—Silone's later works...

...and one touches the man quite as much in the characters he deplores as in those he admires...

...His radical opinions naturally manifest themselves in his new book, Politics and the Novel (Horizon, $3.50), but they do not corrupt his literary judgments...