Stories of Then That Still Hold Up Now
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Version 0 of 1. Inevitably, 2020 has been a year filled to the brim with books about politics — and not just in nonfiction. Novelists are as focused on the state of the world as any journalist or Washington insider. We decided to ask four accomplished writers to revisit a favorite political novel from the past — telling us why they admire it, and why it remains relevant and timely (or timeless, if you prefer). — John Williams It was 1984 — in real life, not the book. My family and I were living in West Berlin, where I was beginning to write “The Handmaid’s Tale.” Berlin was iconic for me: Having been born two months after the start of World War II, I’d lived all my life in the long shadows it cast. The Soviet Union and its satellites were still in place, and showed no signs of vanishing: Every Sunday, the East German Air Force made sonic booms, just to let us know it was right next door. The Berlin Wall was still firmly standing, and people were still being shot while trying to escape. No one suspected that in a mere five years we’d be buying fragments of it for souvenirs. We were in Berlin at the invitation of the D.A.A.D, an academic exchange group that brought foreign artists into West Berlin so that local artists would not feel so cut off. West Berlin at that time was partly empty — young men could avoid the draft there, but young families hesitated to expose their children to the risks — so the D.A.A.D had a range of rental apartments available for their visiting artists. Ours had a large iron safe in the living room. Who had lived here? I wondered. What had they kept in that safe? What had become of them? I didn’t have a good feeling about that. The echoes of jackboots on the stairs were not audible, but they were there. The D.A.A.D provided German lessons, so, as I had some elementary German left over from high school and college, I took them. My teacher was a stickler who was worried about the decline of the dative case, and who discouraged me from using expressions I picked up on the street. But I wanted to use expressions I picked up on the street. I copied slang from ads, and read popular magazines. In aid of my German, I sought out a novel with short sentences. This is how I came to read “Mephisto.” It could not have been a more appropriate choice for the book I was writing, and it chimes eerily with the times we are living through now. “Mephisto” was written by Klaus Mann, the son of the famous writer Thomas Mann, and was first published in 1936, when Hitler’s Third Reich had been in power for three years and Klaus Mann was already in exile. It tells the story of an actor named Hendrik Höfgen, who, having started out as a Brechtian radical socialist activist, changes course and rises to great heights in the theater world of National Socialist Germany. But he rises at a cost: As he scrambles up the ladder, Höfgen betrays his former associates and renounces his Black lover, while slipping on the required Nazi ideology like a costume. Höfgen’s most acclaimed role — and yes, he’s talented — is as the demon Mephistopheles in Goethe’s “Faust,” who persuades the hero to sell his soul in return for worldly wealth, status and pleasure. In life, however, Höfgen plays Faust, the weak, tempted one, while the part of Mephistopheles is taken by the Nazi state and its functionaries. Of course, Höfgen could have left — gone into exile, as Klaus Mann did. But he was an actor, and an actor without an audience is nothing. In no political system do artists have real power. They may have influence of a kind, but they don’t control the purse strings or give the marching orders, and they’re always at the mercy of prevailing winds. Patrons and gatekeepers decide who’s hot and who’s not, who gets the grants, and, in locked-tight regimes, even who gets the theatrical roles. Is Höfgen only doing what he has to in order to fully achieve his own greatness? Does art justify everything? How much complicity in a criminal regime, how much collaboration, how much failure to speak up, before your soul is damned? These are the questions “Mephisto” raises. They were both pertinent and prescient in 1936, and they’re still with us today. Imagine an America in which an increasingly ruthless authoritarian regime has laid its hands not only on the judiciary and the environment and the Postal Service, but on all media and all educational and artistic institutions. Then imagine trying to function as an artist. That’s the sort of world Höfgen is navigating. It’s difficult to picture such a state of affairs coming to exist in America; but, after the last four years, it’s not impossible. Margaret Atwood is the author of more than 20 works of fiction. Her latest novel, “The Testaments,” was recently published in paperback. Her new collection of poems, “Dearly,” will be published in November. The title character of Miguel Ángel Asturias’s novel “El Señor Presidente” (1946) is a shameless egomaniac. He’s vain, insecure and unpredictable, and he’s the commander in chief. When a priest takes down a poster announcing the birthday of the president’s mother, he has the priest arrested. It’s an open secret that he keeps assorted prostitutes as his mistresses. Asturias transformed Latin American literature when he published this book. It helped spawn a new genre: the “dictator novel.” The author’s use of extended dream sequences and rich, figurative language inspired what would become known many years later as magical realism. But what I find most compelling about “El Señor Presidente” is how much it speaks to the here and now. We live in an age of demagogues. We’ve seen how the whims and fears of a leader, transformed into deeds by an army of sycophants, can spread chaos through a nation’s institutions. Asturias saw this madness, too, and created art from it. The country where the novel is set isn’t named, but most of the book unfolds in a place recognizable as Guatemala City, where Asturias was born and raised. The dictator isn’t named either, but he is based on a real person: Manuel Estrada Cabrera, Guatemala’s president for the first two decades of the 20th century. Most of “El Señor Presidente” unfolds from the point of view of one of the president’s minions, the handsome fixer known as Miguel Cara de Ángel, or Angel Face, in the archaic English translation from 1963. Angel Face is “as beautiful and as wicked as Satan.” The president asks him to neutralize a general who is an incipient political rival. But then Angel Face falls in love with the general’s daughter. To feel worthy of love, Angel Face performs a good deed: He rescues the life of another army officer the president wants dead. Then he gives the officer some friendly advice about how to stay alive in a dictatorship. “Try and find a way of getting on the right side of the president,” he counsels. The best way to gain the president’s good will is to break the law on his behalf. “Commit a public outrage on defenseless people,” Angel Face says. Show the public “the superiority of force. … Get rich at the expense of the nation.” In real life, Estrada Cabrera modernized Guatemala by opening it to U.S. capital. The president lined his pockets in the process, and helped create the culture of venality that has plagued Guatemala ever since. As a young man, Asturias saw how Estrada Cabrera ruled Guatemala with ever-increasing doses of cynicism and sadism. In “El Señor Presidente,” the regime’s prisons are hell on earth; those awaiting execution are kept in a lightless cell where they are forced to stand in their own excrement. For generations before and after the novel was published, Guatemala’s idealists went into exile; or they stayed home and were murdered. As Asturias writes: “The men of this town who desired their country’s good are far away now: some of them begging outside houses in a foreign land, others rotting in a common grave.” In today’s Guatemala, criminal gangs have privatized violence and corruption: Just like the dictators, they’ve left a trail of mutilated corpses and a terrified populace in their wake. Guatemalans migrate away from their country, in part, to escape the collapse of the rule of law. They suffer existential torments not in the dungeons depicted in “El Señor Presidente,” but in desert holding cells on the U.S.-Mexico border. My parents left Guatemala in the early 1960s. I was born in Los Angeles. When Asturias won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1967, I was about to start elementary school in East Hollywood. The Nobel was a source of great pride for my Guatemalan expatriate parents, who purchased several of his books; these were the first novels I ever laid eyes on. In a family that was a generation removed from illiteracy, Asturias’s books and his Nobel stood for our right as guatemaltecos to claim to be people of letters. Owning copies of “El Papa Verde,” “Hombres de Maíz” and other books from Asturias’s oeuvre was an act of cultural preservation. Today, I read Asturias with the eyes of a novelist. I see a writer using every tool at his disposal to make us feel how one man can inflict a daily assault on the collective psyche of a people. In “El Señor Presidente,” Asturias shows us how a writer can vanquish the darkest and most omnipotent leader. He exposes the lies of a strongman and shrinks him into the artist’s own pliable creation. The novelist condemns the “great leader” to a terrible fate: spending eternity as a character trapped between the covers of a book. Héctor Tobar’s latest novel is “The Last Great Road Bum.” He is a contributing writer for The Times’s opinion pages. In the summer of 1975, Gore Vidal was completing “1876,” what would be the third novel in his seven-volume “Narratives of Empire.” He asserted, in the book’s afterword, that “1876 was probably the low point in our republic’s history” — quite a claim from a writer who regarded most of the republic’s points as being close to rock bottom, and whose readers had just lived through Watergate. His novel allowed Americans to view their bicentennial through the commemorative year of a century before; present-day readers, six years away from the semiquincentennial of the republic (if we can keep it), can discern some of their own grotesque times through the author’s vision of 1876. Vidal’s narrator is the fictional Charles Schermerhorn Schuyler, a widower and “very old,” he tells us, at the age of 62. An illegitimate son of Aaron Burr (the hero of Vidal’s previous volume in the series), Schuyler is a diplomat long since turned writer who has spent the last 40 years in Europe. He is now returning to the States with his daughter — a titled, 35-year-old widow named Emma — because they’ve gone broke in the speculative “Panic of ’73.” Beset with heart, lung and mobility problems, Schuyler must hustle like a man decades younger. Just being “the New York press’s perennial authority on European matters” will no longer be enough to keep him afloat. He now needs to chase after the big stories of his native land, from the Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition to the scandals of the Grant administration to the presidential hopes of New York’s surprisingly honest Democratic governor, Samuel J. Tilden. If Schuyler succeeds — pleasing editors and Tilden’s own circle with his commentaries — he may wind up not only financially revived but as ambassador to France. If a year in the States also helps to find a proper new husband for Emma, his happiness will be complete. The real purpose of Schuyler’s fictional existence is to serve as Vidal’s eyes and ears, to notice the cultural changes that would strike a man who can remember shaking Andrew Jackson’s hand in his youth. He’s aghast over the girth and beardedness and nasality of voice that has befallen the Yankee male. Even that subspecies’ potency has been sapped — “something tragical,” an Irish prostitute tells Schuyler — by the economic panic. Urchins swarm the sidewalks of New York, and dogfighting is a “new, dreadful, illegal sport.” The citizenry guzzles “razzle-dazzle” cocktails, and munches a new snack called popcorn. The protocol affectations of Mrs. Astor’s dinner parties bore Schuyler, but recent polyglot waves of immigration display to him a “new world, more like a city from the ‘Arabian Nights’ than that small staid English-Dutch town or village of my youth.” Washington’s rapid modernizations include the finally completed Capitol, “floating like a dream carved in whitest soap.” Inside it, Schuyler finds “the old red hangings and tobacco-stained rugs have been replaced by a delicate gray décor with hints here and there of imperial gilt” — ornamental foreshadowings of Vidal’s preoccupation with empire. But in “1876,” the theme is corruption, the kind facilitated by the Senate cloakroom’s informality: “the practical tribune of the people prefers making himself easily accessible to those who want to give him money.” The political class, more awash in cologne than soap, literally smells bad, and it howls whenever anyone is honest enough to notice its hands in the till. “God save us!” cries Mrs. Puss Belknap, the thieving wife of the thieving secretary of war. Vidal speedily animates a whole gallery of political figures — the “plumed Knight,” James G. Blaine; the charmingly venal Chester Arthur; the nobly dyspeptic Tilden — as they prepare for what will be the wildly disputed election to choose Grant’s successor. The contest’s defining elements — the implacable partisan divide; the electorate’s inability to become aroused against plunder; racial division and anti-immigrant sentiment; the ineffectuality of “the better sort of Republicans” — will hurl readers, allegorically, smack into the present. What citizens of our gerontocracy won’t recognize is the general youthfulness of the novel’s key political figures. Schuyler shares Vidal’s taste for aphorism and paradox (“like most people who hate everyone, he desperately needs company”), and seems vulnerable to the idea that there is no history except for “fictions of varying degrees of plausibility.” And yet, Schuyler’s self-induced pep, his need to be back on the make in his 60s, gives his voice a verve that the later Vidal, compulsively world-weary and mandarin, would sometimes lack when writing in the third person. Vidal’s dark wit almost single-handedly awakened the American historical novel from its costumed midcentury slumbers, but his Schuyler is also capable of a Dickensian warmth. When he greets the impending birth of a child with a kind of shudder — “Poor boy! What a world to come into!” — he is expressing the dread that every era somehow believes is unique to itself, but which historical fiction consolingly shows was ever thus. Thomas Mallon has written 10 novels, including “Landfall,” “Finale” and “Watergate,” as well as several works of nonfiction and essays. Last March, during the first weeks of the pandemic, I began pulling old novels down from the shelves, hoping to find the comfort or momentary escape they once delivered. When I opened Robert Penn Warren’s Pulitzer Prize-winning “All the King’s Men” around Super Tuesday, I assumed it would offer a consoling picture of a demagogue’s demise but not much more. Then the world changed, and so did the novel. Context is all, or at least a lot. Sure, the book’s central character, Willie Stark, has come to signify chicanery, political bossdom and populism run amok. Sure, it’s the story of a charismatic politician in a Southern state (resembling Louisiana) who rises to power after learning he’d been taken for a fool. Lackeys of the former governor, Joe Harrison, persuaded Willie to run for office, assuming he will split the “hick” vote with Harrison’s rival and allow Harrison to waltz to re-election. Known as “Cousin Willie from the country,” Stark is so shaken when he learns of the scheme that he gets drunk for the first time. The self-taught and somewhat naïve, even idealistic, county treasurer who had studied his secondhand law books — and Emerson and Macaulay and Shakespeare — in front of a rusty old stove at the family farm then reaches deep and finds his calling. Appealing to the resentments of his poor white constituency, he rallies crowd after crowd almost to madness. Pretty soon, he’s sitting in the governor’s mansion. Willie Stark has gotten really good at beating corrupt politicians at their own game. In his state, machine politics has replaced the illusory rectitude of old boy aristocrats, but Willie is neither an aristocrat nor a machine pol; he’s a solo act. He’s also an authoritarian grandstander who uses all the means at his disposal, whether court-packing or blackmail. “There’s always something,” he tells his expert dirt-digger, Jack Burden, who narrates the novel. Yet Willie sincerely wants to bring roads and schools to his state, to tax the rich and to create a more equitable social structure. Unfortunately, though, he thinks only he can deliver the goods, and that how he chooses to do it doesn’t matter. He believes he embodies the people’s will. “Your need is my justice,” he shouts to them. He’s their ruthless, energetic “Willie.” But what surprised me most on rereading the novel was that a hospital — a hospital — lay at its center. When the basically unsympathetic but complex Governor Stark escapes impeachment (impeachment), he promises a roaring crowd that he’s going to build a big, beautiful, free hospital to ease pain and sickness. “You shall not be deprived of hope,” he tells them. Willie’s dream is not a dream of meretricious beauty, like Jay Gatsby’s. It’s a dream of health care as a basic human right. Before that hospital goes up, Willie is fatally shot by the priggish and somewhat self-deluded romantic who happens to be the famous physician picked to run the place. “It might have been all different, Jack,” a dying Willie tells the narrator. “You got to believe that.” Maybe so; maybe he’d have built his beautiful hospital just the way he said he wanted, without graft or sin. I like to think so. But maybe he’d build it however he could, simply to get it done. As it is, we’re left with the slightly portentous narrator, who bears the novel’s “burden,” having finally discovered that we’re all connected, for better and worse: “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,” he says. “It does not matter whether or not you meant to brush the web of things.” We’re all connected, yes, and in connection lies responsibility. Willie Stark may finally grasp that. But frankly, I don’t care who builds that hospital: Just build it. Brenda Wineapple is the author of several works of history and literary biography, most recently “The Impeachers: The Trial of Andrew Johnson and the Dream of a Just Nation.” |