Disraeli: The Romance of Politics by Robert O’Kell (review)

Robert O’Kell’s Disraeli: The Romance of Politics is a brilliant, original book that illumi-nates Benjamin Disraeli’s mind and temperament as no previous work has managed; it threatens to make many other Disraeli biographies seem superficial. It is the product of a lifetime’s research and reflection that began with O’Kell’s 1974 dissertation, “The Psychological Romance: Disraeli’s Early Fiction and Political Apprenticeship.” It is not a biography and thus not an addition to the many that have been written, beginning in Disraeli’s lifetime. Although O’Kell does not eschew the outer husk of biography, he focuses on the interior realm of imagination, feeling, emotion, sentiments, and ideas—in short, the psyche—or what he calls “the secret history of [Disraeli’s] feelings” (65). This could be an invitation to the nebulous and fanciful, but the exposition is notable for its precision and accuracy. A main axis of the book is the tension between Disraeli’s sense of his own superiority and the tremendous obstacles, particularly his Jewishness, that thwarted his recognition and acceptance. He therefore created fantasies and imaginative constructs of his persona and sought to act them out, embodying them reciprocally in his fiction and his politics; thus politics, for Disraeli, was a form of fiction, and his fiction was an expression of politics. Inevitably, he was often thwarted as he pursued his fantasies and ambitions, in an oscillation between assertiveness and stasis or even retreat that gave rise to an ambivalence about himself and his goals—or what O’Kell calls Disraeli’s long “struggle … between the claims of ‘purity’ and the claims of ‘success’” (7). O’Kell relies principally on the novels, which he values highly as literature; but no matter one’s view on that question, the scope, detail, and subtlety of O’Kell’s interpretation reveal the stability and continuity of Disraeli’s mind from early manhood to the end of his life in 1881, and thereby greatly enhance our understanding of how he rose to the top of that famous “greasy pole” (355).

In a sense the most important chapter is the first, “The Representative Affair,” when Disraeli, at age twenty, driven by towering ambition that ended in failure and debt, took over the launch of The Representative from the publisher John Murray. He intended it to rival The Times and catapult him to a commanding position in the political world. But Disraeli suddenly threw over the whole business after he antagonized all those involved with his arrogance, intrigues, and misrepresentations of their ideas. His claims and presumption are astounding—not only his haughtiness and indiscretions but the supreme self-confidence (verging on megalomania) he felt as he “revelled in the intrigue and confidentiality of his situation” (14).

The sequel came swiftly with the publication of Vivian Grey (1826), a prototype for Disraeli’s early novels: the hero is checkmated by benighted authority, resorts to desperate moves, and flees those who could not be persuaded to accept him or to recognize his superiority and purity of motive. In particular, it is the “fictional embodiment” of his frustrated Representative fantasies and political aspirations (15). Murray and others are lampooned as silly villains. Vivian, a “genius” with wit and charm but neither blood nor wealth, manipulates Carabas (Murray) in implementing his grand political design, displaces his aristocratic rival at Carabas’s side, and takes a leading role in the party (17). But on the verge of triumph, there is a falling-out, disgrace, and failure; the hero, like Disraeli, disappears. Despite Disraeli’s susceptibility to “No Popery” as a political weapon, several of his novels exemplify empathy for Catholicism and Catholics, which O’Kell interprets as “a disguise for his own ambiguous feeling about his Jewish heritage” (30). O’Kell argues that Disraeli’s best-known novels, the Young England trilogy of the 1840s, do not constitute a departure but continue the same concern over “his...