The Politics of Despair

...And whatever the failures of the rest of the book, Humes does leave us with the overall impression of the individual's isolation and despair in the face of the monolithic political forces contending for power in the modern world...

...Most earlier American political novels, dealing with the isolation of the intelligent individual from the world of practical politics, stopped short of despair...

...Unfortunately, Buechner THE REVIEWERS FREDERICK J. HOFFMAN is a professor of English at the University of Wisconsin...

...Ro has come to Cuba with a redheaded doxy and a wallet into which he has stuffed every cent he has...

...He comes to prominence as a witness against a collaborator who instigated a massacre of Resistance prisoners...

...I suspect that in this confrontation we can see the very heart of the dilemma facing the rational man of good will who crawls down into the mucky political arena...

...It is as if John Dos Passos himself cannot quite say what his heart knows, that the terrible sacrifices of the last two decades have been in vain...

...He finally resigns his position rather than fight the nightmare charges...

...312 pp...

...The pained cry which Ro Lancaster should make is never uttered...

...It concerns an American named John Stone who worked with the Resistance during the war, then stayed on in France as a minor civilian employee of the American army there...

...is a political innocent, so there is an air of almost complete unreality about his book...

...They merely registered fastidious disgust...

...308 pp...

...She is hounded out of her job on trumped up security risk charges, becausq her decent, tolerant, ambivalent past activities, she learns, are capable of double meaning—especially to a security officer with a quota to fill...

...Shocked, the Senator replies: "I call you the worst kind of cynic...

...It is in his sophisticated handling of this material that Humes proves that an American can write the almost classical European political novel, full of action motivated by political philosophy...

...Its plot is much too sprawling, and again there has been a failure by the novelist to bring his theme to a proper focus...

...It is by no means totally deserved...

...Perhaps all the Ellen Simons will shortly be restored to their government jobs...

...And, unfortunately, Humes does not quite have the skill to handle the vast amounts of material he has chosen to use...

...By this he means that the basic premises of our democracy are rarely questioned in our political novels...

...For their own purposes the Communists now want the collaborator to be freed, so they plant the notion, among the Americans, that Stone is a security risk...

...There is a striking parallel between their novels...

...3.75...

...Gibbs, if he really existed, might care to reflect, before taking his appointment, on yet a fourth fictional character, a woman named Ellen Simon who is the heroine of an unpretentious little novel called The Care of Devils by Sylvia Press (Beacon...

...We may not be heroes, but by and large we aren't villains...

...One feels that Buechner and Miss Press, in stating their faith in the American democracy —however heart-warming the statement of that faith is to us—have falsified their material, have robbed their protagonists of the dignity of tragedy...

...Its best section is the middle, a flashback to Stone's days in the Resistance...

...In the inquisition scenes there is a remarkable air of sheer madness...

...Rather, attention is called in them to some minor failing of the system...

...3.95...

...The Great Days is not an hysterical book, it is not a screed from the Radical Right...

...RICHARD SCHICKEL reviews fiction regularly for The Progressive...

...On a less superficial level, issues are heightened and dramatized a good deal in a cloak and dagger atmosphere...

...Call us what you will...

...Both Humes and Dos Passos have taken the final step to despair...

...Of course, everything goes badly with the girl, and Ro loses his wallet, too...

...755 pp...

...The Saturnalia he has planned is, in his view, his last chance to rediscover the meaning his life has lost...

...Frederick Buechner has brought a figure similar to the two suicides to the foreground of his new novel, The Return of Ansel Gibbs (Knopf...

...Of course, there have been few first-rate conspiracies in American cellars...

...He, like Ro Lancaster, is isolated, a man betrayed by his own dreams, with no political home left...

...This is at times refreshing, but it occasionally results in some rather awesome bloopers...

...You don't quite believe in what you stand for, and you don't quite disbelieve in what you're opposed to...

...RUSSEt B. NYE is chairman of the department of English at Michigan State College...

...Now and then Dos Passos seems about to read out his Jeremiad against our times, but he does not...

...But, like Buechner, Miss Press is convinced that things are still not past saving in our democracy...

...ADAM YARMOLINSKY, a lawyer who edited "Case Studies in Personnel Security," is now public affairs editor for Doubleday & Co...

...That something is despair, and despair is not a common thing in American political novels...

...NORMAN THOMAS, long the nation's Socialist leader, has watched developments in Spain first-hand for many years...

...Tolerant...

...Both of these men are patricians and idealists...

...Who, regardless of his place on the political spectrum, has not seen his bright dreams of the brave new world blown to dust...

...In each of these one sees the seeds of his final isolation ripen a little more...

...The American substitute for ideology, says Howe, is corruption...

...He finds in Compton's end, as in the ends of the protagonists of All the King's Men and The Middle of the Journey that "the image raised...

...At the end of her novel her heroine is setting forth to get her job back, convinced that someone will hear—and heed—her plea for sanity...

...She, too, is a rational, sensible person, a little too tolerant, a little too ambivalent for her own good, but a highly competent employee of a government intelligence agency...

...Late in his book, Irving Howe notes that "the Twentieth Century political novel moves along a line of descent, an increasingly precipitous fall into despair...

...In both, the protagonists are befriended by men of power who represent to both writers the ideal political man...

...They obviously feel that Dos Passos has given in to despair...

...Loose ends are left dangling throughout The Underground City...

...The Senator keeps asking for a simple statement of belief of the home-motherhood-flag variety, and Gibbs finally replies, in part: "For the civilized man there aren't apt to be any absolute principles or holy causes...

...That is to say, time and time again we find men of intelligence isolated from the political arena by their very intelligence and sensitivity, and yearning for a return of "the humane imagination of a Jefferson, the rectitude of a John Adams...

...Dos Passos has received from the reviewers a most grievous beating about the head for this effort...

...4.50...

...These books are in the American tradition, yes, but they are also very much the children of our times...

...243 pp...

...It is Humes' achievement that he is one of the rare American novelists with the courage to attempt to go into those cellars for his material...

...ALFRED WERNER is the well-known art critic...

...Among his books are "A Baker's Dozen: Thirteen Unusual Americans" and "Midwestern Progressive Politics...

...His hero, Ro Lancaster, is a used up journalist whose wife has died, whose children have turned out badly, whose best friend has committed suicide...

...For, despite their optimism, they, too, deal with "the isolation of the wounded intelligence...

...And our times have bred despair—especially among the literary men who write political novels...

...At one point Humes has one of his characters say, "Conspiracy is the obverse side of diplomacy . . . More history has been made in cellars than in chancelleries...

...It is a fascinating study in the politics of the cellar, where men of all political faiths sought a modus vivendi to fight their common enemy...

...Yet, who in these late post-war years is not bitter...

...In his disillusion and isolation Ro speaks bitterly of the mistakes he feels were made by American policymakers during and after World War II...

...They are as horrifying as anything in recent fiction...

...That's what makes civilized life possible...

...Both commit suicide when they find that they are no longer capable of rational action in today's political world...

...This heightening is one of the many good things about The Underground City...

...is one of isolation, an isolation that a wounded intelligence is trying desperately to transform into the composure of solitude...

...He wrote "Freudianism and the Modern Mind" and "The Modern Novel in America, 1900-1950...

...But one doubts it...

...Certainly Dos Passos' style is, in this instance, uneven, but that is not what is really bothering the reviewers...

...One cannot help but wonder, since Gibbs gets a Cabinet appointment (over the Senator's objection) at the book's end, if there won't be a sequel in a couple of years—something like The Suicide of Ansel Gibbs...

...There is simply too much material in this book, and what is important in it is all too often lost in a mass of local color which is merely trivial, if often interesting in and of itself...

...The smoke-filled room is our substitute for the conspirator's cellar, and to a novelist a Warren G. Harding is surely a poor substitute for a good bomb plot...

...Humes apparently knows French politics (and the French scene in general) very well, but he has a somewhat distorted view of American issues...

...Howe traces this theme from Hawthorne's Blithe-dale Romance right up to the figure of John Dos Passos' Ben Compton, "a shattered revolutionary, walking the streets of New York, without belief or hope or self-regard...

...He wants desperately for his affair with the girl to turn out to be something meaningful...

...JACK MENDELSOHN is the pastor of All Souls Unitarian Church in Indianapolis...

...There is only a stifled, almost self-pitying sob...

...The Underground City (Random House...

...The symbolism here is too obvious to labor...

...Maybe someone will...

...One must wonder, however, if optimism isn't out of place, if the apocalyptic vision of Dos Passos and Humes isn't the true one...

...His book is flawed by a curious failure to bring to a focus the bitterness, the disillusion, the isolation which hang like a fog over its central figure...

...There can be no doubt that Ro Lancaster is John Dos Passos, former radical, more recently the wistful biographer of Thomas Jefferson...

...In his book's central— and best—scene his Ansel Gibbs confronts a yahoo Midwestern Senator on a TV program and the conflict between the civilized man who is constitutionally unable to see things in blacks and whites, and the man who wants only a simple cause to fight for, is sharply etched...

...There is something deeper than mere disgust, deeper than mere "wounded intelligence" in their books and in the feeling one carries away from Miss Press' book, despite its ending...

...Our serious political novels, he notes, are full of isolation and yearning...

...He does, however, grasp the central problem just as do Dos Passos and Humes...

...Alternating with the story of the sour Cuban idyl are chapters dealing with Lancaster's New Deal and war experiences...

...Hence, one has an American writer interpreting American politics in a manner usually reserved to European intellectuals...

...Let us begin with John Dos Passos' The Great Days (Sagamore Press...

...It is a painfully honest, terribly weary book...

...It is striking that all four of the political novels which have recently been published fit, with uncanny neatness, the basic formulation which Howe has made...

...Howe indicates that in those few cases where our novelists have sought to go beyond this relatively limited form, they have still not cast their books in the form of ideological debate...

...These, too, have been attacked by the reviewers...

...Ambivalent...

...In the end it is clear that there is to be no salvation for Ro—only the isolation of which Howe speaks...

...Perhaps it is still possible for a lonely, righteous man like Ansel Gibbs to serve in the Cabinet...

...4.95), a massive first novel by H. L. Humes, is also about loss and isolation...

...But surely their books, like those of Dos Passos and Humes, are in the tradition of the American political novel...

...What we have had instead of political novels in the European tradition have been journalistic problem novels calling attention to, and seeking to alleviate, specific social ills...

...At the end of the book he is a drunkard, and there is considerable doubt that he will ever again be anything more than that, for he is now totally disillusioned...