Novels on Politics
Curtin, Anne
Novels on Politics Number Ten, by William Clark. Houghton Mifflin. 214 pp. $4.50. Washington, D.C., by Gore Vidal. Little, Brown. 377 pp. $6.95. A World Elsewhere,, by John Bow-en. Coward-McCann....
...The humanity turns out to be much like the humanity in any other venue—good, bad, and confused...
...It is evident in Clark's comments on uninformative top secret messages, on bright young men on the make, and on the egos of ministers...
...Some of it is expected: the rich, self-made newspaper editor, the smooth oil man who bought Senator Day, and images of Washington salon life, wives, and mistresses...
...He is ambitious, therefore he must be good," according to Senator Day...
...He appears on a note of triumph after a legislative victory over Franklin D. Roosevelt...
...217 pp...
...and, as is often the case, the fictional worlds are no stranger than the real ones...
...The mythical Philoctetes is brought back from Lemnos when his bow is needed to win the war...
...Despising, for you, the city, thus I turn my back: There is a world elsewhere...
...his Old Man banishes himself from London into retirement, objecting to a practical lie made on the floor of Parliament by his government...
...Why replace the loneliness of the island for the loneliness among his own people...
...But one suspects he will be caught in a hotel room somewhere in a compromising situation he can't buy his way out of...
...He is consistently an attractive, misguided self-salesman —almost a political Willy Loman...
...William Clark's Number Ten is good clean power politics...
...He is not invited to the San Francisco United Nations Charter meetings because he called President Truman a first-rate second-rater in public...
...The M.P...
...As he is banished from Rome, he berates the crowds on their ignorance and says, "I banish you...
...There is a lot of other humanity in Washington, D.C...
...Recent reports from the Senate Ethics Committee document the investigations of the novelists...
...Some might assume that the crisis—set in tropical Africa—is really Suez, but there is little evidence of this...
...Senate...
...Burden Day's contribution to the system is his administrative assistant, Clay Overbury, who is hard, unscrupulous, power hungry, and sexually insatiable...
...His attempt to crash into liberalism by voting for the United Nations flops when Arthur Vandenberg gets the press spotlight...
...The party dispatches a young M.P...
...At this point, the Old Man begins to falter in his writing...
...Burden Day is a Southern conservative whose heart belongs partly to the Confederacy, partly to his own ambition...
...His party in England is coming apart...
...Presidents now have gall bladders, prostate glands, and urinary tracts...
...Overbury takes the elder man's weaknesses, turns them into a formula for success, and usurp's Day's Senate seat in the process...
...While the layers of meaning are intriguing, there is some confusion from the interlarding of the two stories...
...Even his major crime misfires...
...His later career as diplomatic correspondent for the Observer provides a perspective from another estate...
...His fling at the Presidency is stopped when the war assures Roosevelt's third nomination...
...The contrasts between myth and modern fiction in A World Elsewhere are sometimes destructive, sometimes additive...
...The Old Man, known by the press as the Honest Man, must be brought back...
...The voice of experience is present throughout...
...The Greek hero receives the magic bow from his friend Hercules...
...Reviewed by Anne Curtin ^Phose who like to kibitz in the cor-ridors of power will find something of interest in these three political novels...
...A World Elsewhere by John Bowen is a novelist's political novel...
...Clark has been close to the seat of power...
...The mass media have flashed their lights into many hitherto dark areas in high places...
...If anything, these novelists have been less damning to the politicians' world than the legislators...
...It needs a new influence and a new image...
...The title is taken from Coriolanus, the haughty hater of the common people...
...he was public relations adviser to Sir Anthony Eden and resigned during the Suez crisis...
...The former minister writes out his future in a retelling of the story...
...The political novel should be on the increase...
...The Kennedy term of office and its posthumous revelations have turned the President of the United States into common property...
...He disappears behind a new generation, aware that he never made it...
...Whether he will make it to the top after the end of the book is anyone's guess...
...Two of the three are British, but the themes all have similarities: the struggle for power, the struggle for honesty, and the conflict of interest between power and honesty...
...A large part of A World Elsewhere is the writings of that former government minister, a reformulation of the myth of Philoctetes...
...Each describes a different real-politik...
...As party leader, he has to defend himself against the opposition as well as against other members of his government who would like his job...
...runs into an old girl friend in Athens and she follows in hot pursuit, threatening to upset the delicate negotiations...
...The procreator cannot remain in quiet on his island...
...Behind the stark facade on Downing Street at which tourists gaze, there are suddenly rooms and floors, busy typists, patient wives, harassed officials, and the prime minister reading dispatches in the garden with his slippers on...
...As a moral comment on politics, the decision on Lemnos has a Dorothy Savers' tone, rather like a tramp disappearing and reappearing as Lord Peter Wim-sey...
...But as a contribution to this topical group, it makes a point: The political novels, like the academic novels, the Madison Avenue novels, and the Hollywood novels, usually assume that the morals of their group either are worse than they should be, or are under some special pressure to be better...
...He leaves for the island of Lemnos to write...
...The struggle in this case, set in 1975, is begun by one Cabinet minister's attempt to use an international crisis for his own political ends...
...The myth as a crystallization of thought and of language jars with the unfinished banality of the day to day story...
...Perhaps this is the reason why so few have been really successful...
...with an as yet unsullied reputation to persuade the former minister to return...
...Taken together, these books make a comment on politics—what it is, what it should be...
...The assumption that some will or should behave in a manner superior to the rest of us seems a snobbish and prejudiced view of the common man, whoever he may be, and his capabilities...
...Those real figures, such as Arthur Vanden-berg, Harry Truman, and Alban Bark-ley, who walk the halls are in no way implicated in the plot...
...Its story of a certain Senator Burden Day has a familiar smell of money and influence...
...Novelist Bowen's politician is not a pure Coriolanus...
...The field is wide open for probing various inner workings...
...The fictional prime minister of Number Ten is confronted with the double challenge of the British parliamentary system...
...His conscience nags him and his career could be jeopardized by the deal, but no oil is ever discovered on the land...
...Gore Vidal's new novel, Washington, D.C., describes the corridors of the U.S...
...On the way to the Trojan War, he is wounded and is left on the island of Lemnos...
...It is depressing that William Clark's 1975 world is still frozen in the cold war reflexes of 1966, but at least there is some progress in his 1975 Africa...
...He allows oil interests to buy Indian land holdings cheaply with the usual campaign funds quid pro quo...
...He will not return...
...It is a large scene impregnated with the emotions surrounding "that man in the White House" in 1936, and continuing into the days of McCarthy...
Vol. 31 • June 1967 • No. 6
