The edition I read is a Bantam Classic with 438 pages and ten chapters, complete and unabridged. Here are some random thoughts that occurred to me while and since I read this book.
The first thing one notices about this book is the brilliant, lilting, poetic language that entices the reader to continue. It’s prose, but very often transcends prose. It opens with
Mason City.
To GET there you follow Highway 58, going northeast
out of the city, and it is a good highway and new. Or was new, that day we went up it. You look up the highway and it is straight for miles, coming at
you, with the black line down the center coming at and at you, black and slick
and tarry-shining against the white of the slab, and the heat dazzles up from
the white slab so that only the black line is clear, coming at you with the
whine of the tires …
There are numerous passages even more eloquent. (I didn't know at the time I began reading this that Warren had once been the US poet laureate.) These words should be read aloud - spoken with excruciating intonations and rhythmic cadences.
The novel’s narrator is Jack Burden, a newspaperman. He tells the story of his friendship with Willie Stark, a smalltime, local politician who eventually becomes governor. It’s a chronicle of Willie’s rise to, and eventual fall from, power. It’s also the story of Jack’s relationship with Willie. It’s also, I think, a story of Jack’s finally growing up.
This has been the story of Willie Stark, but it is my story, too. For I have a story. It is the story of a man who lived in the world and to him the world looked one way for a long time and then it looked another and very different way. The change did not happen all at once. Many things happened, and that man did not know when he had any responsibility for them and when he did not. There was, in fact, a time when he came to believe that nobody had any responsibility for anything and there was no god but the Great Twitch.
- JB, page 435.
Jack grows up in an affluent neighborhood. He is the son of a Scholarly Attorney who is good friends with the governor, Stanton. Jack himself is best friends with the governor’s children Adam and Anne. The Stantons and the Burdens are good friends with Judge Irwin who is especially fond of Jack and treats him like his own son, after Jack’s own father (The Scholarly Attorney) abandons the family to become a poor and kooky street preacher. The neighborhood is called Burden’s Landing – named after one of Jack’s progenitors. From the beginning, we suspect that there is something special in the relationship between Jack and Judge Irwin – a fact seemingly lost on Jack.
Despite the affluent surroundings, Jack’s life is not stable. Throughout his childhood Jack’s mother marries several men, “The Tycoon,” “The Count,” and most recently “The Young Executive.” Jack is tormented by the fact that his mother marries these men only for their money and not because she loves them. This leaves Jack with a feeling of mistrust for women. It makes him – so I feel – reluctant to commit to a single woman.
Meanwhile, The Scholarly Attorney passes out leaflets in the city containing passages from, for example, Mark 4:6. This passage in the Bible reads “But when the sun was up, it was scorched; and because it had no root, it withered away.” We understand that this must be important somehow, but the significance of the quote is not clear until one has made some progress into the book.
By contrast, Willie Stark is the son of a very poor man in a very poor, rural region. Even after Willie becomes governor, Willie’s pa is reluctant to put a coat of paint on his old house for fear the neighbors would accuse him of “putting on airs.”
Jack befriends a down-on-his-luck, minor politician named Willie Stark. The story documents the corruption of this honest man. Willie sees a corrupt system - is himself used by this system (chewed and spit out as it were). But he learns well and quickly. He later rises to the post of governor. He brings with him Jack Burden, a reporter to handle “special projects,” Sadie Burke who started out as a spy for Harrison but who has extensive understanding of the inner workings of politics, and Tiny Duffy who set Willie up as a patsy, but whom Willie wants to keep around.
The back cover of this edition says, “ [The book] has remained unsurpassed as the definitive novel of American political morality, its corruptions, power, privilege and guilt – a horrifying story of the rise and fall of a potential dictator.”
I’m not sure I agree with this assessment. It may be true, but I don’t think an expose of political morality is the thrust of the story. Rather, I think that there are a number of important themes that are intricately connected. Furthermore, it’s important to understand that the system was corrupt when Willie came to it. In fact, Willie appears scrupulously honest until he’s the patsy in an attempt to tamper with an election. Willie is attempting to cull goodness from an inherently evil system. Finally, the author doesn’t really portray Willie in such a bad light. After all, Jack and Anne and even Lucy see things in him that are fundamentally good.
Willie – the Boss - comes into this corrupt system with a vengeance. He turns it on its ear and begins strong-arming and blackmailing people. There is reference made to files he keeps on people – files for blackmailing them. And there are hints of blackmailing and perhaps worse, but the indications are that these are the same practices that other politicians do. On page 126 Jack says to Lucy, his mother:
“Oh, Son – what Mr. Patton
said – those people you’re with – Son, now don’t get mixed up in any graft, now
–“
“Graft is what he calls it
when the fellows do it who don’t know which fork to use.”
“It’s the same thing, Son –
those people –“
“I don’t know what those
people, as you call them, do. I’m very
careful not to ever know what anybody anywhere does any time.”
· You reap what you sow: actions – particularly bad deeds - have rippling effects.
· Altering one's perception of the world alters how one reacts to the world.
· For things to end well, they must start good and remain uncorrupted.
· Corruption of Innocence – goodness alone is insufficient.
· Theory vs. Practice
· We can’t control our destinies, but we can affect them.
Regarding the first of these themes, there are numerous instantiations and discursive passages relating to it.
1. Judge Irwin's corruption is uncovered by his own biological son (Jack), which leads to the Judge committing suicide.
2. Willie sows an evil seed with Tom whom he refuses to discipline. Willie allows a crucial hospital contract to go to a sleazy competitor in order to prevent Tom from having to marry a woman he might have impregnated. The hospital is a symbol to Willie himself of his contrition – and his desire to do good.
3. Cass Mastern, in the story within the story, causes the death of his friend and the selling of a slave girl by sleeping with his friend’s wife.
4. The point is stated nowhere so clearly and eloquently by Jack on page 188:
Cass Mastern lived for a few years and in that time he learned that the world is all of one piece. He learned that the world is like an enormous spider web and if you touch it, however lightly, at any point, the vibration ripples to the remotest perimeter and the drowsy spider feels the tingle and is drowsy no more but springs out to fling the gossamer coils about you who have touched the web and then inject the black, numbing poison under your hide. It does not matter whether or not you meant to brush the web of things. Your happy foot or your gay wing may have brushed it ever so lightly, but what happens always happens and there is the spider, bearded black and with his great faceted eyes glittering like mirrors in the sun, or like God’s eye, and he fangs dripping.”
In fact, it seems as if everything is connected in such a way that no particular thing is so important as the sequence of things. On page 271, Jack says:
It was not
so much any one example, any one event, which I recollected which was
important, but the flow, the texture of the events, for meaning is never in the
event but in the motion through event.
There are several instances where changing a world view changes the way a person reacts to the world.
This has
been the story of Willie Stark, but it is my story, too. For I have a story. It is the story of a man who lived in the
world and to him the world looked one way for a long time and then it looked
another and very different way. The
change did not happen all at once. Many
things happened, and that man did not know when he had any responsibility for
them and when he did not. There was, in
fact, a time when he came to believe that nobody had any responsibility for
anything and there was no god but the Great Twitch.
A first that thought was
horrible to him when it was forced on him by what seemed the accident of
circumstance, for it seemed to rob him of a memory by which unconsciously, he
had lived; but then a little later it gave him a sort of satisfaction, not even
of having squandered happiness or of having killed his father, or of having
delivered his two friends into each other’s hands and death.
But later, much later, he
woke up one morning to discover that he did not believe in the Great Twitch any
more. He did not believe in it because
he had seen too many people live and die.
That good systems must start out good is a counter example to Willie’s contention that good must be culled from the evil system. Since everything crumbles around Willie, it’s pretty clear that this philosophy didn’t work. An example of the positive view is Hugh Miller, who resigns rather than become tainted, but who later successfully reenters politics.
On page 238, Jack and Adam are talking:
I
shrugged. “A thing is good in itself –
if it is good. A guy gets ants in his
pants and writes a sonnet. Is the
sonnet less of a good – if it is good, which I doubt – because the dame he got
the ants over happened to be married to somebody else, so that his passion, as
they say, was illicit? Is the rose less
of a rose because –“
“You are
completely irrelevant,” he said.
In this case, Jack is defending the contrary view. But
Examples of innocence corrupted are Willie himself, Anne, and Judge Irwin.
Also, innocence that doesn’t acquiesce can be destroyed: Adam, the Littlepaughs, Cass Mastern’s friend, Cass himself.
The secret seems to be able to accept enough of evil and to work with it. The characters that seem to be able to do some good were Irwin and Gilbert. The characters who “feel too much” end up not doing anyone any good. Examples of this are Cass, Littlepaugh, and the Scholarly Attorney. Maybe the secret is not to accept evil, but not to struggle against the world as Willie did, but to understand it and as Gilbert did and try to work with it. On page 184, Cass says,
Perhaps only a man like my brother Gilbert can in the midst of evil retain enough of innocence and strength to bear their eyes upon him and to do a little justice in the terms of the great injustice.
And on page 435, Jack says to Anne:
I tried to tell her how if you could not accept the past and its burden there was no future, for without one there cannot be the other, and how if you could accept the past you might hope for the future, for only out of the past can you make the future.
Another theme is the disjunction between theory and practice. Willie had studied the law books and the history books and in an academic sense, he was well acquainted with government and how things ought to work. It was much later that he came to understand that things aren’t what they appear to be. This is partly the reason he keeps Tiny Duffy around, though he has a strong contempt for Tiny. On page 97, Jack asks Willie about this and Willie explains
“Hell,
somebody’s got to be Lieutenant Governor, and they all look alike.” But once he said: “I keep him because he
reminds me of something.”
“What?”
“Something I don’t ever want to forget,” he said.
“What’s that?”
“That when they come to you sweet talking you better
not listen to anything they say. I
don’t aim to forget.”
Finally, I think an underlying theme of the books is that while we can’t absolutely control our destinies, we can affect them – we can steer them, at least on a very gross level. This revelation comes very late to Jack on page 313.
He was an old
fellow, seventy-five if a day, with a face like sun-brittled leather and pale-blue
eyes under the brim of a felt hat which had once been black. The only thing remarkable about him was the
fact that while you looked into the sun-brittled leather of the face, which
seemed as stiff and devitalized as the hide on a mummy’s jaw, you would
suddenly see a twitch in the left cheek, up toward the pale-blue eye. You would think he was going to wink, but he
wasn’t’ going to wink. The twitch was
simply an independent phenomenon, unrelated to the face or to what was behind
the face or to anything in the whole tissue of phenomena which is the world we
are lost in. It was remarkable, in that
face, the twitch which lived that little life all its own.
He was an old
fellow, seventy-five if a day, with a face like sun-brittled leather and pale-blue
eyes under the brim of a felt hat which had once been black. The only thing remarkable about him was the
fact that while you looked into the sun-brittled leather of the face, which
seemed as stiff and devitalized as the hide on a mummy’s jaw, you would
suddenly see a twitch in the left cheek, up toward the pale-blue eye. You would think he was going to wink, but he
wasn’t’ going to wink. The twitch was
simply an independent phenomenon, unrelated to the face or to what was behind
the face or to anything in the whole tissue of phenomena which is the world we
are lost in. It was remarkable, in that
face, the twitch which lived that little life all its own.