A SHORT NOVEL, just under a hundred pages, included in a volume titled Stratagems and Spoils, published by Scribner's in 1901. I obtained a copy to read through the good offices of interlibrary loan (thank you, Sioux Falls College Library).
I know about this thanks to Thomas Frank's The People, No, which I hope to be blogging about before too long. Frank's book argues that the the term "populism" is routinely misused and that the American political movement known as Populism has been routinely misunderstood. Case in point: this work of fiction by legendary Kansas journalist William Allen White. It was news to me that White wrote fiction, so Frank inspired me to check it out.
The main character in "A Most Lamentable Comedy" is Dan Gregg, a village atheist type who discovers an ability to articulate popular resentment of bankers and financiers, despite a very slender understanding of how banking and finance actually work. Gregg's Will-Rogers-as-Marxist schtick gets him elected governor, at which point he soon finds himself involved with a crowd of corrupt fixers who take advantage of his naïveté. He is turned out at the next election, which he is convinced was fraudulent, and returns to his village and his wife.
Frank cites the novel as an example of how the Populists were caricatured as ignorant and demagogic even though they were nothing of the kind. It's an excellent example.
As a journalist's fiction, "A Most Lamentable Comedy" put me in mind of the fiction of the late Tom Wolfe: full of sharply-drawn representative types, satire of fashionable ideas, and an interest in the turning of the wheels of power, without much nuance as to character or setting or narrative modalities. The book's preface, in which White sees his fiction, in its attention to the actual, as a departure from prevailing models of romance and domestic realism, likewise reminded me of the essays Wolfe occasionally published about why the contemporary novel should devote itself more to the mechanics of power, social and political, and less to the sort of thing they were encouraging in MFA writing programs.
I wouldn't call Wolfe's fiction insightful about its times, though, entertaining though it often was, and I think Frank is right that White's fiction is not that insightful either.
Still, White was famous for his opposition to the KKK--I wonder whether he wrote any fiction about that?
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