It turns out that Garet Garrett wrote one last novel called Harangue, published in 1926. It tells the story of a socialist workers movement and its control of a North Dakota town (see the Wikipedia entry on the Non-Partisan League). I nearly got in a car crash on the way to work because I couldn’t stop reading it.
Anyway, I just have to pass on this interesting and strangely family description of a socialist salon from the 1920s, which seems to read like a scene from Mozart was a Red, except that this is rather serious:
In the room Fitzjerald entered on the second floor were three women and five men, all but one seated in various postures at a long refectory table of beautiful medieval design, reproduced by craftsmen in the shop below. The linen upon it was craft woven. The candles that lighted it were in iron holders, hand wrought. Around it instead of chairs were benches of the same design, each one long enough for two to be seated.
At the head of the board, sideways to it, was Jael Saint-Leon. She had finished eating and was smoking a cigarette through a long blue tube held in a clenched hand. Her elbow rested on the table and her forearm was rigidly vertical; when she thought of the cigarette she moved her head to reach it. Otherwise than in this arm her body seemed quite relaxed. She was gazing idly through her smoke at the second figure on her right.
That was a spherical little man with small features in a large face and an immense head perfectly. bald. He was eating and had no perception of lesser things. His face hung low over his plate and he made murmuring, cajoling sounds to his food, as if it were alive. Dr. Rabba, writer of histories. He had written scores. Of them—histories of the world, of religion, of races, of science, and lately in ten volumes a history of history—all perfectly sound and empty. He was a prodigious hack containing millions of facts. He had no fame at all on the literary plane. One of his several pseudonyms was better known than his own name. His recreation was a passionate interest in talk of revolution. He was useful in this company as a self-reciting encyclopedia, and was neglected as all encyclopedias are. To the conversation he had nothing but historical facts to contribute, and as everyone had learned not to start that torrent and as he was too shy to break it unasked, his role was that of listener, which was very agreeable, for very often the talk was about revolution.
He had, however, one amusing office. When the mysterious power had been present that did sometimes lift them high above their cynicism, their boredom, their sophisticated despair, their weariness of facts, and when the human instrument of this power, usually a visitor, had revealed a vision of perfectible man living in a perfect state, a state of nature perhaps, delivered from his wicked institutions, there came after the climax always an embarrassing moment. There was no curtain; no way of theatrical exit. There they sat staring helplessly at one another. Then it was Dr. Rabba who let them down. They would hear him saying in gentle voice, the same in which he addressed his food: “Massacre! Massacre! A little blood. It is ugly. It is soon over. They are not so many after all. You laugh. It is history. I know.”
... The other woman was a Russian, a refugee, princess somebody, whose name no one could pronounce or spell twice the same way. The remedy was to call her Madame, with a strong French accent, and that did very well. She was tall, very thin and spoke only in a fever of excitement, no matter what the subject was She had come to her English roundabout, through German and French, and made the sound “zee” for “the” incurably. Voluble, yet she might be silent through an entire evening, merely turning her hot black eyes quickly from one speaker to another, maybe not listening at all, just gazing Her experiences had been melodramatic, some in her imagination and some really. She got them mixed up. She had faced a firing squad. If she forgot to say she had been shot and left there for dead and was reminded of the omission by one who had hear it before she would say, “Oh, yes; zat ozer time,” and go right on. She had killed a man. She got part way out of Russian on a troop train, riding with the soldiers, and walked the rest of it. Many times she had slept in trenches. Having somehow some money, she kept a very nice apartment up-town....
