Of presidents and kings

by Mark H. Teeter at 03/09/2012 19:14

It’s high political season, huzzah, for the great American electorate – and about to get higher! On Thursday the final countdown begins: exactly 60 days of mind-numbing speechifying and shameless demagoguery will remain before the general election of November 6 – which will occasion, no matter who wins, a brief period of silence among U.S. political professionals before the machinery is fired up once more, the next bogus “issues” trotted out, and the whole grotesque parody of democracy begins stupefying the citizenry and dismaying the world all over again.

Thank you, I feel much better after that paragraph. Now vote for me, the Extreme Party candidate, and I promise you...

Seriously, it’s hard to imagine a better time for Russians learning English to examine the U.S. political process – and much that has gone wrong with it – by taking up the classic modern American political novel: Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men. And here’s a real promise: if Advanced and Upper Intermediate- level students will spend these upcoming two months reading a mere 10 pages daily from this work, I guarantee that by election day they will have a very good sense indeed of what makes Uncle Sammy run… and why many societies choose to run in other directions.

Warren’s novel was published to broad acclaim in 1946, and the status of All the King’s Men as an American classic was soon confirmed – in two genres: the book won the Pulitzer Prize in 1947, and the 1949 film based on it took the Oscar for Best Picture (among its seven nominations and three wins). Since then ATKM has settled onto the standard greatest-novels-in-English lists, and the movie – which Prof. Extreme encourages you to see, of course, but only after your 60-day reading regimen – has been designated for preservation in the National Film Registry.

Anything this award-laden is bound to produce “classic” editions and remakes, and ATKM has seen both a “restored version” of the novel – with the hero’s name given as “Willie Talos” (from an earlier manuscript) instead of the now-iconic “Willie Stark” most Americans know – and at least three subsequent film versions: one for U.S. television, a second major Hollywood production (2006, with Sean Penn) and yes, even a Soviet version. The novel created something of a stir when translated into Russian in 1968, and by 1971 a well-cast three-hour film (Вся королевская рать, with Georgii Zhzhyonov as Willie) had rolled off the Mosfilm lot.

But American political novels are a dime a dozen – what’s so good about this particular one, and why has it retained its relevance?

First, the tale is well told. An engaging voice emerges in the first-person narrative of Jack Burden, Stark’s chief aide – an educated Southerner whose thoughtful, standard-English exposition is enlivened by samples of authentic-sounding yet easily-decoded demotic regional speech (“Willie never wuz a drinker, wuz you, Willie?”; “’Fraid it’ll go to yore head, huh?”).

Burden is the most articulate of the Southern “king’s men” – the group that surrounds the protagonist during his ascent from rural obscurity to a state governor’s mansion – but he is more than the narrator of the rise and subsequent fall of Willie Stark: along with Willie’s story he is telling his own, that of the other Stark satellites, and, to a considerable extent, that of everyone who has ever been beguiled by a convincing politician. And the enabling Burden gradually comes to terms with a larger reality beyond his observer/chronicler role that has implications for the rest of us – that he is also responsible, in some measure, for the tragic outcome of the once-promising political career he helped to forge.

And that’s the key concept: Willie is a promising figure, an idealistic lawyer who demonstrates that democracy can actually work, even in America’s godforsaken hinterlands – which is precisely what makes his all-too-smooth segue from charismatic populist into corrupt machine politician the frightening cautionary tale it is. For Willie isn’t good or bad, Warren shows us; he’s good and bad – and most people don’t want to hear the political process laconically summed up accordingly: “Maybe a man has to sell his soul to get the power to do good.”

Put otherwise, “Politics is a matter of choices, [and] there is always a price to make a choice.” Given the high-volume inanity and unprecedented cynicism today’s Americans are certain to hear over the next two months, it’s little wonder many feel that they, in fact, are the ones paying Willie’s price – which has always been high, but somehow keeps rising.

Extreme Extra Credit. Last time: Fyodor Dostoevsky’s first published work was a translation from the French of Balzac’s Eugenie Grandet – as correctly ID’d by Arch Stanton of Tombstone, Arizona, to whom congrats. Today: Which award-winning Soviet actor played Willie during the early Mosfilm shooting – before he was replaced by Zhzhyonov?

Mark H. Teeter is an American English teacher and translator based in Moscow.

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