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The Administrative Novel*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 September 2013

Rowland Egger
Rowland Egger
Affiliation:
The University of Virginia
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Extract

Dwight Waldo, Stephen Bailey, and I, among others who have from time to time expressed admiration for certain litterateurs as sources of wisdom and understanding of the art and science of public administration, will undoubtedly ponder at length a statement in W. Somerset Maugham's latest collection of imponderabilia, Points of View. Maugham says:

Only the very ingenuous can suppose that a work of fiction can give us reliable information on the topics which it is important to us for the conduct of our lives to be apprised of. By the nature of his creative gifts the novelist is incompetent to deal with such matters; his not to reason why, but to feel, to imagine, and to invent. He is biased. The subjects the writer chooses, the characters he creates, and his attitude toward them are conditioned by his bias. What he writes is the expression of his personality and the manifestation of his instincts, his emotions, his intuitions, and his experience. He loads his dice, sometimes not knowing what he is up to, but sometimes knowing very well; and then he uses such skill as he has to prevent the reader from finding him out. Henry James insisted that the writer of fiction should dramatize. That is a telling, though perhaps not very lucid, way of saying that he must so arrange his facts as to capture and hold his reader's attention. This, as everyone knows, is what Henry James consistently did, but, of course, it is not the way a work of scientific or informative value is written. If readers are concerned with the pressing problems of the day, they will do well to read, as Chekhov advised them to do, not novels or short stories, but the works that specifically deal with them.

Type
Research Article
Information
American Political Science Review , Volume 53 , Issue 2 , June 1959 , pp. 448 - 455
Copyright
Copyright © American Political Science Association 1959

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References

1 Maugham, W. Somerset, Points of View (Doubleday, 1959)Google Scholar, quoted in Saturday Review (April 25, 1959), p. 13Google Scholar.

2 “In Human Bondage to Books,” ibid.

3 “The Art of Fiction,” in Partial Portraits (Macmillan, 1905), p. 378Google Scholar.

4 Ibid., p. 384.

5 Ibid., pp. 394–395.

6 Essays in London and Elsewhere (Harper, 1893), p. 149Google Scholar.

7 “Preface to ‘The Aspern Papers,’” quoted in The Art of the Novel (Scribners, 1950), pp. 161–162Google Scholar.

8 (Houghton Mifflin, 1943).

9 (McGraw-Hill, 1945).

10 (Harcourt, Brace, 1946).

11 (Macmillan, 1908).

12 (Boni, 1927).

13 Edwin O'Conner (Little Brown, 1956).

14 (University of Alabama Press, 1956), pp. 90–91.

15 (Knopf, 1945), p. 43.

16 (Knopf, 1944).

17 (Random House, 1948).

18 Supra, n. 14. The quotations are at pp. 80–89.

19 Stein, Harold, Public Administration and Policy Development: A Casebook (Harcourt, Brace, 1952)Google Scholar. The cases of the Inter-University Case Program are published by the University of Alabama Press.

20 Oeuvres de Blaise Pascal (Paris, 1908), Vol. II, p. 130Google Scholar.

21 American Humanism: Its Meaning for World Survival (Harpers, 1957), p. 76Google Scholar. The distinction drawn here is not dissimilar in kind to that argued most persuasively by Mr. David G. Smith in this Review, Vol. LI, p. 735 et seq. (September, 1957). While the “nomothetic” sciences—following Windelband and Rickert—seem to correspond very closely to the notion of mensurative learning, it is doubtful whether the concept of the “ideographic” sciences can be stretched to include the humanities, although Mr. Smith does point out (p. 746) that “If well done, a political philosophy does have much in common with a thoughtful novel.” So, one hopes might also a well-done administrative philosophy.

22 Ibid., p. 81.

23 The Public Service and University Education, McLean, Joseph E., ed. (Princeton University Press, 1949), p. 222Google Scholar.

24 Supra, n. 21, pp. 101–104.

25 “Are the Humanities Worth Saving—II,” Saturday Review (June 11, 1955), pp. 22–23Google Scholar.