Exploring the seeds of moral corruption in the American Dream. On Penn’s All the King’s Men.
Not to be mistaken with All the President’s Men starring Robert Redford, and even though both of them deal with American politics, the two titles couldn’t be anymore different. But I won’t juxtapose between the two. All the King’s Men is perhaps one of the most important books that had been published in America in the 20th century. Yet, I don’t think it’s talked about enough when the label classics are mentioned.
Like many other great American novels, it is messy, often overwritten and explores grounds it probably should leave alone. Think Moby Dick, Sophie’s Choice or Invisible Man. These novels seem to lack focus, but at the same time they have every intention to answer the most ambiguous questions about life. What is man? How does being an American man relate to being this very man. What are ethics and how should man abide by them, or should he not? What is the value of industry? Where are we headed with the American Dream?
These are similar questions answered, or at least explored, in vastly different ways by these authors. All the King’s Men (I’ll shorten this to ATKM from now) follows the narration of Jack Burden as he serves as a politician’s lackey, but his vantage point is from the present looking at the distant past where things have rotted out of recognition, but he is still making sense of it. Jack Burden, though not the core of the story, is a narrator with a lot of agency. His waywardness in his reflections of Willy Stark’s life, of his own life, of those who in some way are connected in the ever tangling web of Willie Stark’s octopus-like reach, at the end construct a devastating image of one man’s pursuit of the American Dream.
When politics get personal: The making and unmaking of Willie Stark
Willie Stark came out of nothing to be one of the meanest, grimiest governors known to American political fiction. But he never really started out like that. Willie started out as many of us did — idealistic, naïve and having that bit of gravel that we can take for a go-getter attitude. But he learned quickly that there are other forces beyond his grit, and toppled by those forces, he decided to go back to working in his parent’s farm and finish his bar exam.
That force was the shoddy construction of a primary school which ended up killing three children. Stark initially lost out when the builders of the school were chummy to his political opposite, even though the contract was set at a higher price and people were convinced that this translates to better quality. Besides, the selected contractor have no reputation of hiring African Americans, taking away jobs from the hicks. But the accident which led to the deaths of the student provided Willie Stark a bouncing pad to ignite his political career, as .
Now armed with the help of our narrator, Jack Burden, he’s about to make his way to the governor’s office and remove any impediments in the way. With Jack’s help, he’s able to wean his way to win support for his camp using methods which may or may not be kosher, such as finding dirt on political opponents. This is all well and good until Jack had to find dirt on Judge Irwin, who he had known all his life and played a father figure. The personal and political space get all muddled up very quickly as Jack finds more about his own history in uncovering the judge’s skeletons.
Gatsby versus Stark: the two prototypes of the chinks in the American Dream
The great American classics have always been obsessed with the idea of the American Dream, what it is and how in the end it inevitably corrupts. In this regard, ATKM is similar in vein and its introspection with another American classic with a flawed central character: The Great Gatsby. In both texts, we view the story from an outsider’s perspective — In ATKM through Jack Burden and in the latter through Nick Carraway. We say “central character” as the figure of Stark and Gatsby looms large in both stories, but we can also argue that the narrators themselves are really the central character, with the “alpha” characters as the vehicle for their character development.
But in both characters we see the American Dream embodied in its fullest and also at its most broken, most debased. The American Dream is to outperform the previous generation as much as it is a rags to riches story that we see à la The Great Gatsby. It is the dream of overcoming the odds, but through what means, nobody really had written a guidebook for that.
In Gatsby we see the consequences of the dream with its shallow relationships, moral deprivation and nihilistic void. Stark fared no better as in “achieving” his dream, he also fell victim to moral corruption, blind vanity and loss of his idealism. Yet, unlike Gatsby, whose mind is set in hooking up with that tart Daisy, Stark still retains that bit of idealism as he was obsessed in the creation of the best of hospital in the country.
The body politic: it’s nothing personal, but it is.
One shouldn’t really mix work and personal life together, but for Jack Burden, he might as well wait for kingdom come. There are prime examples of mixing the personal and the political worlds together, to the detriment of well, everybody. Just ask Mantel’s Henry VIII in Wolf Hall and its sequels. In the cases where politics got personal, the leaders are blind to the needs of his / her subjects in order to pursue personal objectives.
Henry VIII, under the advise of Thomas More, changed an entire religion so that he was able to Mary Anne Boleyn, who he ironically would decapitate later. Stark, in taking up Anne Stanton as his mistress, would undermine her brother’s position as the head of Stark’s hospital. When Adam discovered the affair, his intent to murder Stark (of which he succeeded) also cost his own life.
But perhaps the real victim here is Jack Burden, who uncovered that the very judge who was his mentor from his youth, and of whom he was tasked to find skeletons to further Stark’s agenda, was his own father. The judge, who committed suicide when Jack uncovered his jaded past, was a further consequence of Stark’s unbridled thirst for political power.
Yet, how can one separate the personal from the political? Penn suggests to us perhaps, that it’s against our nature to pursue our ideals relentlessly, that at some point, our principles give way to the weakness of our physiology. We are confined within the limits of our minds and bodies — Burden who cannot break the mental barrier of his pursuit of truth; and Stark himself who it seems, just can’t take his hands off women. This inevitability of one’s nature is perfectly captured under the exchange between Burden and Stark:
“So you work for me because you love me,” the Boss said.
“I don’t know why I work for you, but it’s not because I love you. And not for money.”
“No,” he said, standing there in the dark, “you don’t know why you work for me. But I know…”
“Why?” I asked.
“Boy,” he said, “you work for me because I’m the way I am and you’re the way you are. It is an arrangement founded on the nature of things.”
— —
Penn would not pen (ehem) another finer novel. Some novelists would only have space for one novel in their life that would define their career and perhaps their lives, and for Penn ATKM was it. Yet it remains, like any great classic, an important novel in the age where political leaders and their public relations team would always portray the best of the politician’s personal image. But there is always dirt and in this age and time, it is far, far easier to dig this dirt.
Not that it matters anymore. Trump, with his brashness of style and shady history which should have put him in prison, has been re-elected. It is too much for America to accept a woman with a foreign background into office. America is still largely a xenophobic country, the type that Penn portrayed where old white men sitting around barber shops would complain that African Americans are taking over their jobs. Perhaps then, that this novel is more relevant to ages gone past than to the political landscape today. But this is not to say that the novel is not relevant at all.
In the story, Burden would study the life of Cass Mastern, from a bygone era and who would in some way, mimic the life and times of Willie Stark. It is a repeating pattern and perhaps something that we see over and over again without our realising it. Did Trump start off as an idealistic young man? It’s hard to see it now. Though the origins of one’s idealism may not be obvious, the results of one’s moral corruption is much, much more evident. Who knows what sort of damages the Americans would suffer from the decisions of its leader, whether personal matters come into it or not?
Trump’s America, in this regard is Humpty Dumpty sitting on the wall. Whether he will survive a second term or not, America is bound to take a fall and it will be up to the king’s men to pick up the eggshells. But who are these men who would clean up the mess? Who are the Jack Burdens of our days who would play lackey to the chief? In the book, Penn aptly wrote:
“That was why I got into my car and headed west, because when you don’t like it where you are you always go west. We have always gone west.”
The American Dream, with its logical geographical end in California has turned into a mess of dreams. There is no more west to pursue now. Where will the poor Americans go when the west is no longer an option, when all the exit routes have been cut out?
