Jesse Kornbluth takes an escape with Robert Penn Warren’s novel.
___
More politics? Yes. But more: no. Robert Penn Warren’s long novel will take you far away from this election. Think of it as relevant escape…
This 1946 novel, which won the Pulitzer Prize for Robert Penn Warren, is generally considered the greatest of all American political novels.
Check out the book on Amazon here.
It asks two questions. Can an honest politician stay honest and succeed? Can good come from evil? Put another way, can a politician who wants to help his people do corrupt things to gain and maintain power without corrupting himself and tainting whatever he does manage to accomplish?
These are heady questions. And, for us, unfamiliar. We’re cynical. We believe life is deals and everyone’s compromised. But these were timely questions in l943, when Robert Penn Warren started his meditation on Willie Stark, who was based on Huey Long, the governor of Louisiana who inspired both admiration and revulsion.
Lord knows, Willie started out honest. Indeed, it’s his political opponents who are crooked; they have run this tiny Southern county for years and see no reason why the arrangement shouldn’t be permanent. Willie has other ideas. Better, finer ideas. Useless ideas — in the election, Willie is soundly defeated. But he isn’t wrong. His opponents are crooks. This is the stuff of great movies — and “All the King’s Men” won the Best Picture Oscar. [To buy the paperback from Amazon, click here. For the Kindle download, click here. To buy or stream the movie, click here.]
When a school stairway collapses due to shoddy workmanship and children die, Willie’s career is revived. He’s too dumb to notice that his new backers are his old opponents; he’s been set-up, he’s supposed to lose this governor’s race. When he finds out, he’s furious. He exposes the set-up, calls the voters “hicks” and says he too is a hick. These incendiary speeches have an effect — the voters fall in love with Willie.
By the time Willie makes a successful run for governor, he’s no longer the back country lawyer with simple intentions. Now he’s made deals, often with his adversaries. Not that it matters, he insists — he’ll take money from the devil if he can build a hospital. And does it matter that he now drinks all day? And is no longer faithful to his wife or much of a father to his son?
And then, as you may suspect, it all starts falling apart for Willie.
The novel is beautifully written. It has great, brawling scenes; it also meanders like a Southern stream and explores quiet eddies along the way. Not so the Robert Rossen movie — it’s a freight train powered by Broderick Crawford’s rough, raspy sprint of a performance. Crawford plays Willie like an animal; he’s all mouth and muscle. It’s a terrifying tour de force.
If you don’t have time for the pleasures the book provides, a couple of hours with Broderick Crawford will give you a portrait of a politician so in love with his own good intentions he doesn’t even care when he breaks the law. Sounds almost familiar. Almost.
_____
This article originally appeared on The Head Butler
Photo credit: Getty Images