Stephen Donoghue is impressed by the insights of Robert P. O’Kell’s book on the life of Benjamin Disraeli, gleaned from the cringe-inducing novels of the former British prime minister:
[T]here’s a method to the utter madness of plumbing [the novels’] depths; the genius of
O’Kell’s book is the way it gently prompts a re-assessment not of the merits of Disraeli’s fiction but rather its motivations. O’Kell holds that the books represent “an embodiment of [Disraeli’s] fantasies about himself,” that fiction offered “a form of compensation for failure or defeat by imagining transcendent success.”
It’s nothing short of a revelation in insight, and it carries this marvelous book from beginning to end, throwing entirely new light on the frail heroisms of this ungainly, irresistible figure. Disraeli was a vocal Anglican, but he was also a proud Jew, famously retailing stories of how his ancestors, heroic Sephardim, fled from Spain rather than submit to the Inquisition, and O’Kell rightly points out the entrenched opposition that could greet a politician of Jewish descent in a Parliament that had excluded Jews until 1858 unless they swore an oath proclaiming the Christian faith. That Disraeli might have been in part using his fiction as an emotional release-valve for the pressure of his eternal outsider status in British society and politics is a stunning stroke of interpretation. On the one hand, O’Kell explains, “the novels are means of rationalizing the past and reshaping the formative experiences of his identity; on the other, they are a way of keeping the question of identity open by exploring imaginatively the possibilities of further commitment.”
(Photo of Disraeli via Wikimedia Commons)
The Dish 
