There are some events that are simply too overwhelming and terrible to confront immediately How should fiction tackle subjects as immediate as the expenses scandal or Bernard Madoff’s fraud? Which novels and plays – from Dickens to David Hare – have best captured current events? Ferdinand Mount on what makes politics work in literature

At some stage in their lives, writers of all sorts hear the call to write about the political events of their own time. They may think of it as a moral duty, an undertaking that it would be cowardly to resist, or they may think of it simply as an intriguing challenge. But for one reason or another, they take the plunge. They do not often tremble on the diving board. Is trying to make literature out of politics different from other kinds of writing? Are there peculiar dangers or interesting possibilities in tackling a subject so immediate, so familiar to your audience as the dodgy dossier or the expenses scandal? They may already have passionate views on the subject. Are there artistic dangers when you preach to the converted (preaching against the converted is more likely to endanger your personal safety)?

It is all very well to take the decision to engage, easy to choose your theme, what Henry James called your donnée. But as James never tired of pointing out to his friends and inferiors – HG Wells, Edith Wharton, Hugh Walpole – it is what you do with the donnée that counts, how you handle the material, which bits you select and which you leave out, what you are trying ultimately to achieve. The danger in choosing a political theme is always of not working it through properly, of revealing the thing in all its miserable nakedness as a book or poem or play about Iraq, or unemployment, or abortion, and nothing more than that. The audience becomes aware that the author is a kind of unlicensed intruder whose motives are too gratingly ulterior. The nest collapses under the cuckoo’s weight. The problem is not so much the bad faith which intellectuals agonise about. The problem is bad art.

Take Harley Granville Barker’s play Waste. Barker was perhaps the most intelligent English playwright of the 20th century. No one thought more deeply about stagecraft or playwriting, or especially about Shakespeare. At first sight, Waste looks like a richly wrought and carefully conceived piece. That is what entices talented directors in every generation to revive it. Yet however you produce it, it never quite comes to life, even in Sam West’s fine recent production at the Almeida. The critics were not, I think, quite able to put their finger on why it didn’t work. It certainly was not because of the actors: Will Keen was magnificent as the icy but passionate Henry Trebell and Phoebe Nicholls affecting as his sister. The themes of the play – political hypocrisy and abortion – are certainly not outdated. What several critics hazarded was that modern audiences could not be expected to warm to Trebell’s obsession with his bill to disestablish the church. This was dismissed as a fusty theme with no relevance to our lives. Yet audiences have warmed to themes no less fusty, for example the supremacy of the church in the time of Henry VIII, as tussled over in A Man for All Seasons. Disestablishment mattered intensely in 19th-century politics and it has, as a matter of fact, resurfaced in church debate today.

The fault in the play is a rather different one. Barker simply tells us too much about the Disestablishment Bill, the arguments for and against, the difficulties of getting it through parliament, all those things that are the bread-and-butter of political life. He is too conscientious. He lacks the ruthlessness of the great artist. Disestablishment needs to be treated simply as a conflict about which the characters are passionately concerned but the precise details of which need not detain us. That is the lesson that Alfred Hitchcock taught so brilliantly. What he called the McGuffin is selected as the main driving force of the film, the holy grail, the object of everyone’s frantic search, but to define it too exactly would only slow us down and might undermine our faith in the whole enterprise.

Real-life politics is full of McGuffins. That’s the trouble. What occupies the obsessive attention of the Westminster world tends to be an imbroglio so complex and in many respects so absurdly trivial that it does not translate easily into art. In 1986 the Westland affair caused Michael Heseltine to stalk out of the cabinet and set off the internal conflict that destroyed the Conservative party for two decades, perhaps the worst civil war in the party since the reform of the Corn Laws. Initially, what the argument centred on was whether Mrs Thatcher had illegitimately manipulated the cabinet agenda; then it shifted to whether her allies had leaked a letter of advice from the solicitor general in defiance of long-established convention. For days, debate revolved furiously round this point, leading eventually to the forced resignation of the home secretary. Yet it was a pure McGuffin, because apart from the relative insignificance of the letter it was doubtful whether any such convention existed. In any case, to become absorbed in the actual details, as we all were, is to become a journalist. The artist simply seizes on the McGuffin and runs with it. He is interested only in the specifics that illuminate his theme.

Considered as literature, the perfect text is often one that offers no clear answers. In Little Dorrit, for example, what exactly is the nature of the debt which William Dorrit is imprisoned for non-payment of? What precisely does Mr Merdle do to make his mountains of money? What is Daniel Doyce’s brilliant invention that the Circumlocution Office refuses to support? Dickens offers us the barest minimum of information about such things. Indeed, we are told that “nobody knew with the least precision what Mr Merdle’s business was, except that it was to coin money”. It is his marvellous mysteriousness that makes all his investors feel so privileged to be allowed to put their money with him, from his fellow millionaires down to Pancks the rent collector, who assures Arthur Clennam: “I tell you, Mr Clennam, I’ve gone into it. He’s a man of immense resources – enormous capital – government influence. They’re the best schemes afloat. They’re safe. They’re certain.” The point is that Pancks has not gone into it, any more than the just-sentenced Bernie Madoff’s willing victims went into his business. The suspension of disbelief is the first secret of the fraudster’s art. And it is precisely by denying the reader all those financial details that you would find in a modern bestseller about Wall Street that Dickens breaks through to a finer truth.

Merdle is based on the real-life Madoff or Maxwell of his day, John Sadleir, an Irish banker and MP, who took poison after his enormous swindles had been exposed and was found dead near the Spaniards’ Inn on Hampstead Heath while Little Dorrit was being written. What fascinated Dickens was Sadleir’s utter lack of flamboyance or personal magnetism: he was a cold, sallow-faced, wrinkled bachelor who appeared to take no pleasure in his fortune or in human company. Merdle too, we are told, did not shine in company. Just like Madoff in Florida, he seems to have reassured investors by his combination of relentless hospitality and personal inconspicuousness.

Dickens’s urge to fictionalise and politicise real contemporary events was both immediate and passionate. While he was writing Little Dorrit, he wrote to Angela Burdett-Coutts that he remained “a Reformer heart and soul. I have nothing to gain – everything to lose (for public quiet is my bread) – but I am in desperate earnest because I know it is a desperate case”. Not only does the book satirise the appalling ease with which fraudsters could relieve the public of huge sums, it is also directed against two other scandals of the day: the injustice of imprisonment for debt and the maladministration in Whitehall which was responsible for hardship and delay at home and disease and death in the Crimea. All three scandals were red-hot at the time – the Crimean war was still going on – and although specific prisons reserved for debtors no longer exist, all three issues remain red-hot today, substituting only Madoff for Merkle and Iraq for the Crimea.

Dickens’s techniques were much resented by the Sir Humphreys of the time. His satire was said to be unfair and exaggerated and to take no account of the real problems of governing the country. I remember, when I first read Little Dorrit, feeling that the Circumlocution Office was a rather crude caricature. That was before I had any direct experience of the higher bureaucracy. Re-reading Little Dorrit now, I am struck rather by the brilliance of the description of Clennam storming the Circumlocution Office to try to find out why William Dorrit is still in the Marshalsea after so many years. After several false starts, he is directed to the room of Mr Wobbler in the Secretarial Department: “He entered the apartment, and found two gentlemen sitting face to face at a large and easy desk, one of whom was polishing a gun-barrel on his pocket-handkerchief, while the other was spreading marmalade on bread with a paper knife.” I might have found this fanciful if I had not once entered a private secretaries’ room in Whitehall at a quiet time in the parliamentary recess and found one of the inmates with his ear to Test Match Special while another in his braces was aiming paper darts into a waste-paper basket.

In a larger sense, Dickens communicates his political message by transcending it. We never lose the sense of the Marshalsea as a grim, enclosing institution, but what anchors it in our minds are the ways in which the inmates have made a home and a society out of a prison. We share Dickens’s exasperated affection for all Dorrit’s pompous self-deception, just as we too are carried away along with the punters by Mr Merdle’s air of knowing the secrets of the financial universe.

Here perhaps we begin to glimpse an essential condition for turning politics into literary art: that our affections have to be engaged, even against our best intentions. If the monsters are to be real, they must seduce us a little. I remember one or two complaints that either David Hare and Howard Brenton or Anthony Hopkins, or a combination of the three of them, had made the monstrous colonial press baron Lambert Le Roux in Pravda too devilishly attractive. To mount an effective attack on press corruption, the argument went, he should have been unmitigatedly repellent. But, like it or not, in real life the Beaverbrooks and the Murdochs are attractive, albeit in a piratical, reptilian way. It is often only this menacing charm that conceals the tycoon’s inner dullness. That is partly how they got where they were, and that is why Pravda succeeds so brilliantly and in its heightening is truer to life. To fail to see this is to fail to see the boundary that separates agitprop both from literature and from life.

In David Hare’s most recent play, Gethsemane, the characters again appear to be based on recognisable real-life models: the cabinet minister whose husband is in trouble with the law, the minister’s rebellious daughter, the oily fixer who thinks he is running the prime minister like a puppetmaster. But the characters don’t seem to have much juice in them, or to have been conceived with any affection, even of the unwilling sort. The satire seemed rather inert. Is this perhaps because it is difficult to denounce Tony Blair and New Labour for betraying the party’s old ideals, when the whole point of Blair’s successful pitch for power was that this would be the first Labour administration which would not try to impose the party’s ideals on the public? Or is it rather that the problems of defining and delivering the didactic message prevent the play from breathing its own air?

How exactly should a “political” playwright conceive his mission? Ibsen, we know, took it as an insult when he was congratulated and thanked for the help he had given to the women’s cause. He told the Norwegian Association for Women’s Rights in 1898: “I have never written a poem or a play to further a social purpose. I have been more of a poet and less of a social philosopher than most people seem inclined to believe.” He added in characteristically grumpy vein: “I am not even very sure what women’s rights really are.” I am indebted for this quotation to an essay in these pages by AS Byatt who said, it seemed with some surprise, that each time she reads A Doll’s House, she finds Nora less and less sympathetic. But that surely is why it is a great play. The cramping social restrictions which deny women a proper life operate all the more perniciously upon a wilful, difficult temperament. The play is about Nora, not about woman’s place in modern society, just as Macbeth is about Macbeth and not about kingship in 11th-century Scotland. Nora needs to be played not by someone who instantly rouses our sympathy but by one of those actresses who are so good at playing irritating women, like Peggy Ashcroft and Juliet Stevenson. The same is true of Hedda Gabler, superbly done by Eve Best in a recent production.

The word to describe what I think must be avoided is “portentous”. That word is derived from “protendere”, to stretch forth, and it’s that effortful stretching forward to bring out the politics which pulls the work out of shape. The leading American novelists of the past 30 years are much admired in Britain for their willingness to tackle what Melville called “mighty themes”, especially what they see as the mightiest of all, which is the state of America. Every time they sit down to write, they have their sights set on the Great American Novel, described by the literary editor John Walsh as “the big one, the single perfect work of fiction that would encapsulate the heart of the US, interpret its history through the light of a single, outstanding consciousness, unite the private lives of the characters with the public drama of its politics”.

But is this what a novel should be doing? Over the years, I have certainly enjoyed most of the novels of John Updike and Philip Roth and Richard Ford, and quite a few of Saul Bellow and Norman Mailer. Yet I cannot disguise the sensation that creeps over me halfway through most of these novels, that the message is being over-inked. Something is being said about American society – its racism, or its anti-semitism, or its solitary bleakness, or its greed – but it is being said too loudly and too often to allow the book to breathe. Something is also being said about the Kennedy years, or the Nixon years, or the Reagan years, as though human life and culture took its cue from whoever happened to get elected president. There is not enough sense of human existence going on independently of political events or social trends, little sense in particular of human relationships; for relationships, especially those between men and women, appear to have the life smothered out of them by that “single outstanding consciousness”, invariably a man’s.

Let me offer, by way of contrast, Alice Munro, Jane Smiley, Anne Tyler, Annie Proulx. As Elaine Showalter points out, “serious women writers are much less likely than their male counterparts to celebrate themselves”, and as a result they are much less likely to be celebrated as Great Writers. Yet their reach is no less large, their wit no less wicked, and their sympathies no less broad. There is nothing “domestic” about their scale. I would argue that their best books are more fully realised as works of art because they manage to deal with all the big themes without being overwhelmed by them. And I find more human relating in a single short story by Munro, recently awarded the international Booker prize, than in 500 pages inflated by the great Bellows.

A couple of years ago I happened to read no fewer than three American novels about estate agents: Ford’s The Lay of the Land, Smiley’s Good Faith and Tyler’s Digging to America. You can see why the theme occurred to them all: the restlessness and impermanence of a people always on the move, the eating up of the land, the churning of homes into money. All three novels are highly readable, yet in the Ford the theme seemed too relentlessly forced, whereas Tyler and Smiley managed to deliver the message, if message there was, without being enslaved by it. I do not mean to imply merely that the women’s novels achieve lightness, though they do. They are not just soufflés that have risen. They are aircraft that fly with a full payload.

At first sight, the theatre of Bertolt Brecht might seem to defy my contention that the politics must somehow be absorbed for the piece to succeed as a work of art. Surely the whole point of Brecht is to disdain artifice and give us the political message full-frontally. But Brecht simply takes another route to a similar destination. Yes, he puts his political anger nakedly before us, but he also presents it in a highly stylised way, like a Japanese play. This famous Verfremdungseffekt is only another way of transforming, a variant of the art that conceals art. It is certainly not to be belittled because it is a different way.

When I argue that the work needs to escape from the message or to transcend it, I am not seeking to erase the message or to deny that it may be perfectly valid. I see here twin fallacies that mirror one another. The first is what might be called the “agitprop fallacy”: that the work is of value only in so far as it promotes the message and that a work which lacks any political purpose is worthless because it evades our moral responsibility for the state of the world. That, I think most people now agree, is a narrow and misguided view of both life and literature.

The mirror image of the agitprop fallacy is the belief that art should steer clear of politics and that any work which is inspired by political passion is flawed and lessened. We might call it the “art-for-art’s-sake fallacy”. This seems to me to relegate politics to a uniquely underprivileged role, reminiscent of the convention supposed to operate at Victorian dinner tables that certain topics, such as women and religion, were not to be mentioned. Political themes and passions surely have every right to muscle in on the act. The question remains what role they are to perform? What effect do they have or should they have on the world?

One point of view is that baldly expressed by Shelley in the closing sentence of his Defence of Poetry: “Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.” That famous phrase appears to assert that it is poets who are the advance guard of reform, the trumpeters at the head of the column. Yet the sentences just before this thumping conclusion qualify it. Shelley tells us that “an energetic development of the literature of England . . . has ever preceded or accompanied a great and free development of the national will.” So poetry doesn’t always come first, it may happen alongside. Nor is it necessarily the case that poets think up the new stuff all by themselves. “The electric life which burns within the words” of the most celebrated writers of the present day may not be all their own work. In fact, “they are themselves perhaps the most sincerely astonished at its manifestations, for it is less their spirit than the spirit of the age.” Poets are “the mirrors of the gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present.” In Shelley’s formulation, they sound almost like spirit mediums, not responsible for the messages they give voice to.

At first sight, Shelley appears to be contradicted by Auden’s equally famous axiom in his “In Memory of WB Yeats”: “for poetry makes nothing happen: it survives in the valley of its making”. Which sounds as if poetry is and should be cut off from the real world. Yet Auden too qualifies his utterance. At the end of the verse, he tells us that poetry “survives, / A way of happening, a mouth”. So ultimately Shelley and Auden are not that far apart. What poetry does is give voice to the spirit of the age. It speaks for our hopes and fears, our sense of outrage or despair. I rather like the medieval poet’s term “my plaint” – from plango, I beat, hence I beat my breast, hence I lament. The poet is the village breast-beater, the counsel for the plaintiff.

This giving-voice may have consequences in the real world. It may incite people to do things, it may unify them, give them hope or consolation. In old age, Yeats himself looked back on a public life sporadically concerned with political causes:

Did that play of mine send out

Certain men the English shot?

Did words of mine put too great

strain

On that woman’s reeling brain?

Could my spoken words have

checked

That whereby a house lay

wrecked?

And all seems evil until I

Sleepless would lie down and

die.

But this insomniac reverie is a medley of the public and the private. Yeats is thinking not only about his responsibility for helping to incite the Easter Rising but also about his affair with the mentally unstable actress Margaret Ruddock and about the abandonment and loss of his beloved Coole. Life of all sorts flows through literature; there is no special reserved status for politics.

Nor is there any standard time-relation between the political cause and the literary outflow. Political passion may flow hot and strong and instant, notably in writing about war. The war poems of Sassoon and Owen came straight from the western front. Their disillusion and disgust were as direct and unmediated as had been the enthusiasm of Julian Grenfell and Rupert Brooke at the outset of the war. Tennyson wrote “The Charge of the Light Brigade” in only a few minutes after reading the account of the disaster in the Times. There was a similar instant response to unemployment and hardship, in both the 1930s and the 1980s. The anti-Thatcher songs were not slow in coming.

Sometimes those who might seem best qualified to write directly about politics feel under no compulsion at all to do so. Goethe was for 10 years and more chef de cabinet to the Duke of Weimar, more or less prime minister of the little duchy. Yet his political experience does not find much immediate reflection in his work. Certainly he does not tell us a great deal about his encouragement of the textile and mining industries in Weimar or his reforms of the school system there. I do not mean that as a writer he was impervious to the outside world. On the contrary, as a young man he was a leader in the passionate romantic movement across Europe, patented in Germany as Sturm und Drang. In later life, he was a leader in the rediscovery of classicism which also spread across Europe in architecture and painting as well as in poetry and drama. His attitude towards Germanness developed in parallel with his stylistic development, all these sides of him being brought together in that extraordinary broken-backed masterpiece, Faust. Yet you would not think of Goethe primarily as a political poet or playwright, and you would not be surprised to be told that he had spent his whole life living by a millstream and had taken no part in politics at all.

Sometimes, too, one is struck by the complete absence of literary reaction to great events, by a silence that may seem more awesome than speech. The two greatest Italian poets of the 20th century, Eugenio Montale and Giuseppe Ungaretti, both fought in the first world war on the Italian front, which was just as horrific as the western front, the trenches just as muddy, the slaughter as terrible, the senselessness even more evident, and the mountain terrain infinitely harsher. Yet Montale published only one, rather elegiac and personal, poem about the front, and Ungaretti’s war verse, which remains very popular in Italy, tends to look for lyrical transcendence in the moonlight over the mountains and soldiers bathing in the river.

In prose too, the horrors of the Italian front were passed over in near-total silence, until Mark Thompson’s wonderful history, The White War, came out last year. There was one glorious exception to this long silence, and that too was written by a non-Italian, Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms. I thought, in a superior way, that I had grown out of Hemingway, but when I re-read the book recently I was recaptured from the first page. What I now know from reading Thompson is that A Farewell to Arms also gives a pretty good account of the war, being closely based on Hemingway’s experiences as a volunteer ambulance driver. When the narrator comes to his famous denunciation of the cruel and senseless nature of the war, it is not glib but fully earned.

There are some events that are simply too overwhelming and terrible to confront immediately. That may be more or less what Theodor Adorno meant by his well-known declaration that “writing poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric”. For some unlucky nations, writing recent history is too raw, too painful, too embarrassing. It may take years for writers who have been through such terrible times to find the proper voice to write about them. Often the literature does not “accompany or precede”, as Shelley claimed. It lags a long way after. A Farewell to Arms was not published until 1929, more than 10 years after the events it describes, and the same year as other classics of the Great War: Goodbye to All That and All Quiet on the Western Front. Sassoon’s Memoirs of an Infantry Officer came out the following year.

The horrors of the Holocaust were known and undeniable as soon as the camps were liberated and the living skeletons stumbled out in front of the newsreel cameras. But it was years before memoirs and novels began to explore those horrors. Sometimes this was because the writers could not face reliving the experience. Sometimes it was because publishers thought that their readers did not want to face it. Primo Levi wrote most of If This Is a Man in 1946, only a year after being freed from Auschwitz, but only an amateur publisher would take the book and it sold a mere 1,500 copies. It was not until 1958 that Giulio Einaudi brought it to a wider audience.

It has taken longer still for German writers to confront the Hitlerzeit. In the end, the task has been left to the generation who were either children or not born at all in those years, so that the sins they are writing about are not their own but those of their fathers and grandfathers.

In Britain, we have been energetic in writing about the misdeeds of other peoples, but we have had our own Great Silence. During the years immediately after the union flag was hauled down, first in India then across the rest of the British empire, there was a remarkable reluctance to think or write about the imperial experience. It was old hat, an embarrassing joke. We told ourselves that the whole thing had really had remarkably little impact on us. Then, quite without warning, the outpouring began, in novels and memoirs, and radio reminiscences and huge TV series. The outpouring seemed to be all the more heartfelt for having been so long delayed. Our sudden eagerness to recall the Raj and every other outpost of empire was also pushed on by the appearance, equally unexpected, of writers of brimming talent from every quarter of the imperial diaspora. In some years, it seemed there was scarcely a native British writer on the Booker shortlist. In fact, native British writers began to look rather dowdy and provincial, as though excluded from (if not actually deaf to) a globalised culture that revelled in diversity and displacement. It was almost like a reverse colonisation.

There is something rather impressive about these Great Silences. They seem to be observed by some mutual agreement that is itself tacit. They are like the silences observed on Remembrance Sunday, except they last 10 years rather than two minutes.

And the silences teach us something that is useful beyond their immediate context. They teach us that in whatever sense you choose, broad or narrow, local or global, politics is as fit and necessary a subject for writing about as anything else in life. But it is not therefore an easier subject. On the contrary, it is often much more difficult and requires reserves of tact and ingenuity and imagination. You do not score any points simply for being “political”. You certainly do not score any for trying to make a text more relevant to the politics of your own times. Art is difficult, and it is not made easier or more accessible or more valuable by turning it into a subdivision of or a surrogate for politics. That is merely to engage in a form of polemical journalism, and not good polemical journalism at that.

Politics in literature does its business best when we are least aware of its presence: when we are watching Little Dorrit scurrying to reach the Marshalsea before lock-up, or when we hear Nora announcing that she has a greater duty than her duty towards her children which is her duty to herself, when we see Hemingway’s bersaglieri marching off down the dusty white road to attack another hill they will never take. Politics works when it is lost in art.