The Political Fiction of Ward Just. David Smit

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      Names: Smit, David, 1944- author.

      Title: The political fiction of Ward Just : class, theories of representation, and imagining a ruling elite / David Smit.

      Description: Lanham : Lexington Books, 2020. | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary: "The Political Fiction of Ward Just uses literary, political, and diplomatic frameworks to demonstrate how the upper-class status of the ruling elites in Ward Just's political fiction influences the way they represent the interests of the nation's citizens domestically and the interests of the nation as a whole internationally"-- Provided by publisher.

      Identifiers: LCCN 2020007447 (print) | LCCN 202000748 (ebook) | ISBN 9781793615329 (cloth) | ISBN 9781793615336 (epub)

      Subjects: LCSH: Just, Ward S.--Criticism and interpretation. | Elite (Social sciences) in literature. | Upper class in literature. | Politics in literature.

      Classification: LCC PS3560.U75 Z65 2020 (print) | LCC PS3560.U75 (ebook) | DDC 813/.54--dc23

      LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020007447

      LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020007448

      This book is dedicated to the memory of Ward Just, who died on December 19, 2019, as I was preparing the final manuscript for submission. In the biographical sections of the book I often use the present tense to refer to information and opinions that Ward communicated to me during our interviews, conveying the sense that he is still alive. Despite his death, I decided to maintain that use of the present tense in order to distinguish Ward’s more recent thinking aloud during our interviews from what he had stated earlier in print.

       Three months before he died, Ward gave me permission to cite material from his archive and my interviews with him. I interviewed Ward in person for only two afternoons on Martha’s Vineyard in January of 2015, but we continued the interviews by telephone once or twice a month for the next three and a half years: until the fall of 2018. Our relationship was professional but congenial. Ward was a grand storyteller and a significant witness to major events in our national life, and I will always consider my conversations with him to be one of the high points of my life.

      Acknowledgments

      Many people helped me with this book, and so I would like to express my gratitude:

      To Beverly Millard, head librarian of the Waukegan Historical Society for supplying me with photocopies of the Society’s material on Ward Just and a copy of Ward’s talk at the annual meeting of the Friends of Lake Forest Library on April 28, 1985: “The Fictional Life.”

      To the staff at the Cranbrook Center for Collections and Research in the summer of 2014—Leslie Edwards, Cheri Gay, and Gina Tecos—for their unfailing consideration and thoughtfulness in helping me navigate through the Center’s Ward Just Archive for two weeks.

      To the outside reviewer of my original manuscript, who offered helpful criticism. In response to his or her suggestions, I cut an analysis of one novel, added an analysis of a short story, reorganized two chapters, and sharpened my conclusions in several chapters.

      I would also like to acknowledge that portions of chapters 1 and 3 are paraphrases of material I published earlier in Power and Class in Political Fiction, copyright 2019 by Palgrave Macmillan, New York.

      Introduction

      Despite the myth of America as a classless society, scholars, historians, and literary critics have produced a remarkable body of work on the nature of class in American culture, a literature that includes analyses of a range of classes—upper, middle, and working class—from the mid-nineteenth century to the present.^[1] In literary studies, this scholarly literature has focused on fiction by and about the working and middle classes, and with the rise of multiculturalism, an increasing number of studies also deal with the relationship of class to politics and race.^[2] However, studies that deal exclusively with politics in fiction tend to focus on political ideology and philosophy; there has been little work in literary studies on class in political fiction written about those who actually govern America, fiction devoted to what the first major theorist of political fiction, Morris Edmund Speare in The Political Novel: Its Development in England and America (1924, 22), called “the complex machinery of politics,” portraying how those who “exercise the levers of power” are influenced in their decision-making and how the consequences of those decisions affect the essential life of the country.^[3]

      One reason why we have no major studies of the class status of those who govern the United States may be the myth that America has no substantial class system. We find it difficult to think of those who govern us as a distinct class, or even as a ruling elite. However, there is substantial evidence that our ruling elites overwhelming belong to the top three classes in America—the two tiers of the upper class, commonly referred to as Old Money and New Money, and the upper-middle class—and that the class status of our ruling elites has a significant influence on how they govern.

      In this book I study eight novels by Ward Just that portray the nature of America’s ruling elite, portrayals that raise the issue of the degree to which this ruling elite adequately represents the interests of its citizens. I analyze Just’s personal vision of the ruling elite as a distinctive “imaginary,” aware of all that the term implies: existing only in the mind, lacking a factual reality. But of course, as a noun, an “imaginary” is now used by a variety of disciplines to suggest how social groups share a sense of themselves through an imagined set of values, institutions, laws, and symbols. In these disciplines the term implies that there is a fictive quality to our sense of how we belong, that a shared reality may be in some sense “socially constructed,” but that “shared reality” may not be the same for every member of the group, just as the significance of a literary text may not be shared by all of its readers. As a result, an imaginary of a ruling elite is subject to a host of competing interpretations, as all literature is. Still, I argue that Just’s imaginary has a high degree of sociological validity.

      Indeed, in his political imaginary, Just provides complex illustrations for three major theoretical frameworks of representation: literary representation, which deals with issues that arise when authors characterize or “represent” any group of people in fiction, not only members of a social class, but individuals grouped by gender, sexual orientation, race, nationality, or any other forms of human identity; political representation,