All the King's Men

This was not at all what I expected it to be. It seemed everyone I know had read this book in college, but I am many many many years past that time and had just not gotten around to it. I thought it would be like Confederacy of Dunces (a book I loved) but it was not at all. Yes, an insular and corrupt state government lead by a man of outsize personality is at the center of things, but that is not what this book is about. It is about what it is to be a good person. It is about costs of going with the flow rather than taking decisive actions and taking responsibility for those actions. It is about love, in its many forms. It is very much about honor. These are big themes, and this is no beach read. The book is complicated and show more challenging. It is also one of the most beautifully written books I have ever read and I will be thinking about it for a long time to come. show less

Corruption by inches, that’s how it works. Willie Stark sets out to do the right thing, to represent people who are under-represented, who don’t get what they need, to whom no one pays attention. But he finds that he must work in a system so bent that he has to wink or nod instead of stand firm and honest. Each time he succeeds, he slips a little further into himself until he has lost sight of his beginning.

Though Robert Penn Warren admitted that he was influenced by Louisiana’s Huey Long in writing [All the King’s Men], he also maintained that the story was a bigger story than about only one corrupt politician. The story is more about how corruption set in and takes hold, and it’s timeless.

Warren’s prose is mesmerizing, show more from the first page. As he describes driving down a humid, sun-blinding road in the first few paragraphs, he captivates you for the duration.

Bottom Line: A tale of corruption by inches.

5 bones!!!!! show less

I'm not entirely sure how it came about that I hadn't ever read Robert Penn Warren's masterpiece novel All the King's Men (1946), which is of course loosely based on the life of Louisiana's "Kingfish," Huey Long. For a long time it was one of those books that I knew I'd get to someday, but that day just had't arrived yet. A nice copy came through the store the other day and I picked it up to read ... and then just that very evening I saw the t.v. ad for the new film adaptation that's coming out shortly with Sean Penn as Willie Stark. I'd like to think that the trailer hadn't slipped into my subconscious and prompted me to grab the book, but I'm not sure that's the case.

Either way, I really enjoyed this book, and can't help but think it show more is, in fact, one of the best, if not the single best, American political novel. Beautifully written, with a narrative flavor distinctly its own, All the King's Men is a tale of politics at its worst, and of one man's struggle to come to grips with his role in a political arena which at once repulses him and ensnares him. Also, this book is the model for Joe Klein's Primary Colors (1996), which mirrors many of the themes in All the King's Men.

I'm sure that this will be a book I come back to many times, and I recommend it highly.
http://philobiblos.blogspot.com/2006/09/book-review-all-kings-men.html show less

A serious, ambitious, somewhat overwritten classic political novel. The first five hundred pages pass in a blur as Warren follows the rise to power of Willie Stark and the moral conflicts of Jack Burden, his right-hand man. The last few chapters devolve into operatic melodrama - over-the-top tragedy, whiplash-inducing plot developments, poetic passages in which our intrepid narrator tries to make sense of it all.

I'm getting ready to read Faulkner again and am constantly reminded of the "Burden" of history in the South, of the desire for goodness in a world mired in sin. The original sin of our country was slavery - the South was Eve, the beautiful sensual wife who brought the fruit of knowledge to the lips of the Union. We were cast show more out of the Garden with the Civil War - our own innocence and ideals were stained and we began the long process of living with each other, a fallen people in a vast land who have little in common.

Southern writers understand that nothing is pure, that an attempt to keep up appearances only causes the poison under the surface to roil more violently.

Near the end of All the King's Men, Jack's supposed father says that "the creation of evil is therefore the index of God's glory and His power." This is the paradox of the world that Willie Stark knew in his deepest instinctual fiber - that we are constantly being made to sin against ourselves and each other, but that this sin can also lead to redemption. show less

It's a long read but surprisingly very readable. Captivating dialogue - not stilted at all and it's just what normal people will say. A study of power, how it is wielded and how it corrupts. Seen through the eyes of Jack Burden (personal aide to Stark), Willie Stark was an unassuming lawyer before he rose to be governor and built a political machine by patronage and intimidation. His son took on his swagger and was sadly paralysed in a football game. The denouement was very quick and perhaps not surprising (no spoilers).

Essünk túl a rosszon. Ha a címen múlt volna, én lehet, nem is kezdek bele a könyvbe. Vajda Endre ugyanis úgy döntött, hogy az eredeti címet (All the King's Men), ami egy közismert angolszász versike sora, hazai ismeretlenségére való hivatkozással behelyettesíti egy Toldi-sorral, merthogy értelmileg hasonlóak. Na persze. Bizonyos aspektusból persze értelmileg az is hasonló, hogy Kertek alatt a ludaink megfagynak, meg az is, hogy Nem vagyok én apáca… feltéve persze, hogy tágan értelmezzük azt a bizonyos aspektust. Pedig különben Vajda fordítását kifejezetten erősnek éreztem – egyszerre lendületes és sűrű, sokat hozzátesz a mű élvezetéhez – már ha eltekintünk a sok „teringetté”-től show more meg „a keservit”-től (lövésen sincs, az eredetiben milyen indulatszavak voltak, de azért gyanítom, életszerűbbek), illetve a korszak állandó, bár megbocsátható tévedésétől (egyszerűsítésétől), miszerint a rögbi egyenlő amerikai foci. A cím viszont sajnálatos.

Pedig ha létezik olyan kategória, hogy Nagy Amerikai Regény, ez a könyv oda tartozik: a populizmus kiemelkedő irodalmi ábrázolása. Willie Stark krónikája a ’30-as évek derekáról, aki idealista farmergyerekből előbb ügyvéddé, majd gátlástalan kormányzóvá küzdi fel (le?) magát – ő a Gazda*, aki zsebre vág mindenkit. Azért lép politikai pályára, hogy megtisztítsa az államot a velejéig korrupt elittől, igazságos adózást ígér, kórházakat, utakat, tejet, mézet, kánaánt – és komolyan is gondolja. Bombasztikus beszédei az unortodox retorika mesterfogásai – csupa érzelmekre hatás, csupa „én közétek tartozom”, de olyan bravúrral megjelenítve**, hogy az olvasó már rohanna is az urnákhoz. Stark szilárdan hiszi (vagy hinni akarja), hogy jót tesz, és azt is, hogy jót csak a rosszból lehet felépíteni – csak hát ki mondja meg, mi a jó? És hogy kinek jó? És ha az a picike jó, amit ki lehet szedni a rossz hatalmas halmából, már nem éri meg az egészet, akkor mi van? Az odáig rendben van, hogy Stark az emberek érdekeit nézi – de mi van, ha a végén összetéveszti magát az emberekkel? „A ti akaratotok az én erőm.” – mondja. És ezt is: „A ti szükségetek az én igazságom.” Bizonyára. De vajon jó ez nekünk?

A regény első ránézésre azt az elbeszélői stratégiát követi, amit A nagy Gatsby-ből vagy a Sophie választ-ból ismerhetünk: az író valódi főszereplője és az olvasó közé még beiktat egy kívülálló E/1-es elbeszélőt, megfelelő távolságot teremtve ahhoz, hogy magunk alakíthassuk ki koncepciónkat a valódi kulcsfigura jelleméről és életeseményeiről. Ez a lehetőségünk itt is megmarad, mert Stark rendkívül komplex csávó (megosztó személyiség, ahogy manapság mondanák), de jobban megvizsgálva a központi alak mégis maga az elbeszélő, Jack Burden, ez a filozofikus hajlamú, intelligens és szarkasztikus, ám mélyen nihilista figura. Legalább annyira fontos az ő motivációja, mint a kormányzóé – vajon miért marad mellette még akkor is, amikor már térdig kell miatta gázolnia a fekáliában? Mi készteti arra, hogy megtegye azt, amit maga is bűnnek gondol? A válasz itt sincs a szánkba rágva, ám talán nem elhamarkodott kijelenteni, az „írástudók árulásának” motívuma jelenik meg itt a könyvben: amikor a végletekig passzív értelmiség hagyja magát megvezetni a karakteres és tetterős, éppen ezért vonzó populizmus által.

Ám ez a könyv nemcsak fifikás politikai tanmese a jó megrontásáról, hanem több ennél: időtálló történet egy nagyon sokszínű, szinte pulzáló nyelven elbeszélve. Penn Warren bőven használ lírai futamokat és ráérősen végigírt retrospektív betoldásokat, néhol a Dél érzékletes ábrázolásával kényeztet minket, szimbólumkezelése pedig kellemesen harsány (lásd azok a beszélő nevek: Burden, Stark). De a legbámulatosabbak azok a jóféle, bikaerős, Hugo-t idéző drámai jelenetei, amiből nem ritkán kettőt-hármat is elpottyant egy ötvenoldalas fejezetben. Nem finomságáról vagy eleganciájáról lesz számomra emlékezetes ez a regény, hanem ezekről a jobbhorgokról, amiket az író magabiztosan bevisz az olvasónak. Jól van megcsinálva, na.

* Ez Vajda másik fordítói leleménye: így oldja meg az eredetiben szereplő Boss behelyettesítését. Megmondom őszintén, nekem tetszik, bár a kifejezés bennem áthallásokat teremt Sztálin személyéhez – de ez aligha a fordító hibája.
** Már közvetlenül az első fejezetben ízelítőt kapunk Stark emberfeletti verbális képességeiből, amikor szülővárosába visszatérve a mélyen tisztelt egybegyűlteknek szónoklatot rögtönöz. „Nem akarok semmiféle beszédet tartani” – kezdi, megidézve ezzel egy másik trükkös szónokot, Shakespeare Antoniusát („Temetni jöttem Caesart, nem dicsérni”). Aztán persze olyan monológot rittyent nekik, hogy még az aszfaltot is felkaparják gyönyörűségükben. show less

This is commonly billed as a "political novel", but much like its close spiritual successor, Billy Lee Brammer's The Gay Place, much of it doesn't really have anything to do with politics at all in the sense of policy. This is understandable, because the technical vocabulary of statutes, subclauses, and ad valorem taxes is essentially antithetical to most people, and also because the book is more about the effect of politics on people's lives and behavior, especially the seedier types of behavior, which are always the most interesting. Warren packed some great character studies of ambitions, infidelities, and aspirations inside a great big sprawling tome of a novel that contains some epic plot twists and soaring language, only very show more rarely ever feeling less than grandiose and all-encompassing in its examinations of the life of a politician who chased his dreams at all costs.

The novel is told through a frame story of journalist Jack Burden recounting his life with Governor Willie Stark. Despite Stark disappearing from the book for several long stretches, it's fair to call him the center of the story and the most important hook for readers, since it's his ambitions that drive the action. After all, an adulated orator is on the front cover of my edition and the back cover promises a tale of the rise and fall of a populist Depression-era governor who "resembles" infamous Louisiana Governor Huey Long. Though the book is very carefully set in an unnamed Southern state with no discernible Cajun identity at all - no Desautels or LeBlanc or Breaux characters show up, and all the towns have perfectly generic names like "Mason City" - many elements of Stark's background do resemble those of Long's even if this isn't quite a roman à clef. Even his nickname of "the Boss" echoes Long's own "Kingfish" sobriquet. One portion of Stark's backstory that vividly recall Long's also shows off the kind of sweeping Steinbeckian meditations/psychoanalysis that Warren engages in from time to time:

"He was a lawyer now. He could hang the overalls on a nail and let them stiffen with the last sweat he had sweated in them. He could rent himself a room over the dry-goods store in Mason City and call it his office, and wait for somebody to come up the stairs where it was so dark you had to feel your way and where it smelled like the inside of an old trunk that's been in the attic twenty years. He was a lawyer now and it had taking him a long time. It had taken him a long time because he had had to be a lawyer on his terms and in his own way. But that was over. But maybe it had taken him too long. If something takes too long, something happens to you. You become all and only the thing you want and nothing else, for you have paid too much for it, too much in wanting and too much in waiting and too much in getting."

So Stark starts off small and gradually rises in importance over time, using every weapon he can to get his ambitious program of public works and infrastructure investment accomplished. To do this he uses the services of Burden, a nihilistic, somewhat directionless journalist who he meets early in his career and whose personal life becomes ever more entwined with that of the Boss who rescued him from his previously aimless existence. Burden's role as a journalist/researcher/fixer for Governor Willie Stark requires him to recruit his childhood friend Adam Stanton, a gifted yet ethically over-rigid doctor, to run a new hospital the Governor is having built. He also does odd jobs for the Boss like digging up dirt on political opponents, including Judge Irwin, a close family friend of both Burden and the Stantons. The entire middle third of the book is centered on Burden and his turbulent love affair with Adam's sister Anne Stanton, for whom he has a complicated series of emotions that take up big chunks of time. I found Burden's rhapsodizing on his infatuation with her interesting for a bit, but dangerously dilatory until the plot picked back up again, although Warren does deploy some more good prose that keeps it from being too slow:

"So maybe she was up in the room trying to discover what her new self was, for when you get in love you are made all over again. The person who loves you has picked you out of the great mass of uncreated clay which is humanity to make something out of, and the poor lumpish clay which is you wants to find out what it has been made into. But at the same time, you, in the act of loving somebody, become real, cease to be a part of the continuum of the uncreated clay and get the breath of life in you and rise up. So you create yourself by creating another person, who, however, has also created you, picked up the you-chunk of clay out of the mass. So there are two you's, the one you yourself create by loving and the one the beloved creates by loving you. The farther those two you's are apart the more the world grinds and grudges on it axis. But if you loved and were loved perfectly then there wouldn't be any difference between the two you's or any distance between them. They would coincide perfectly, there would be a perfect focus, as when a stereoscope gets the twin images on the card into perfect adjustment."

The turning point of the novel arrives when a girl that the Governor's hot-shot football star son Tom has been fooling around with gets knocked up, and one of his political opponents tries to use it as leverage in an upcoming race for the Senate. The price for the scandal being kept quiet is that the contract to build that new hospital has to be awarded to an ally of his enemy. The Governor has Burden try to use evidence of a long-ago bribe to convince the Judge to help him out, however it's revealed that the Governor has also been cheating on his wife with, among others, Anne Stanton, and also that the Judge's relationship to Burden's family is much more complicated than he had known. The end of the book is basically one long string of corpses as Jack and Anne are about the only two people left standing and Stark's career follows roughly the same path that Huey Long's did in real life.

One interesting point in the book is that while Stark is portrayed by his enemies as being awash in graft, he's actually about as clean as could be expected in a fairly corrupt environment. In fact, the climactic scandal of the book doesn't involve much actual wrongdoing on his part at all, really. He's had to crush his opponents, but only so that they didn't stand in the way of his efforts to improve people's lives, such as with the hospital. It's a common pattern for popular politicians with populist/left-wing economic policies to set the terms of the debate so completely that using tawdry scandals is the only way for their opponents to fight back at all after being crushed at the ballot box. Meanwhile, the lesser people involved have to weigh their own senses of morality and loyalty - are they following their own consciences, the leader's goals, or simply the leader himself? One of the most riveting sections of the book that deals with loyalty and humanity has basically nothing to do with the main story at all. It's the story of a research project that Burden abandoned years ago, a history of Civil War-era plantation owner Cass Mastern, who gets involved in an affair that ends in the suicide of the wronged husband. Burden's early inability to finish the story says a lot about his own immaturity, which gets highlighted even more by his reaction to his discovery of Anne's sleeping with the Boss. Do Burden's efforts at the end to get rid of painful parts of his past show his growth?

While I, and evidently most readers, enjoyed Warren's treatment of those questions, I don't like that the book dodges the question of whether the Governor's actions were "worth it" overall, and that it treats Burden's personal fulfillment or lack thereof at the end as the main yardstick by which to judge everything preceding it. In The Passage of Power, the fourth volume of Robert Caro's biography of Lyndon Johnson, there's a section describing how, very early in his Presidency, Johnson has to decide whether to expend his precious political capital on pushing civil rights legislation. During one particularly contentious late-night debate, his advisers tell him it's a bad move, and LBJ replies with "Well, what the hell's the presidency for?" That's a brilliant response - the point of being elected is to improve people's lives. Stark is certainly portrayed as trying to do that, yet seemingly all anyone can talk about is irrelevant trivialities. This exactly same thing happens in real life too, so I can't blame Warren for writing the book that he did. I won't call it the "ultimate" political novel, since there's certainly room for more, but it's certainly worthy of all the acclaim it's been given. show less