Heroes, fools and the mirth of a nation

“Show me a hero,” F. Scott Fitzgerald is supposed to have said, “and I’ll write you a tragedy.” Had Fitzgerald felt like extrapolating, he might have added: Show me a democracy conducting its public business and I’ll write you a comedy.

With Monday’s kickoff of the Republican National Convention in New York -- likely to be a staged, scripted performance, a sort of deliberate fiction, like every other recent political party assembly -- this is a fit time to consider the ways in which writers, not the parties themselves, convert the curious tribal rites of national politics into the stuff of the other kind of fiction: the kind that’s bound between covers.

Novels of Washington and of the campaigns that aim for its centers of power are legion, but almost without exception they aspire only to tickle the reader. The satirical ones are frequently slapdash, though the best chill the heart, as they’re meant to, as well as the spleen. Many end up dissolving into farces and cartoons, unserious skits that do not outlive their occasions. The impersonations may be managed with greater or lesser skill, but the novels veer toward mechanical plots, as do election campaigns themselves.

American political novelists conjure characters who perform according to type -- the flagrant lowlife, the charming hustler, the world-weary sophisticate. They invite their readers into a warm conspiracy of shared superiority to the degraded specimens who run the collective life, as if to say, “You and I, reader, are better than the buffoons, blowhards and callow, ambitious corner-cutters in charge.” This is the American people’s consolation: We are free, after all, to turn our backs on politics, politicians and all their detestable works.

The model was set by Henry Adams’ “Democracy: An American Novel,” published anonymously in 1880. A bestseller in its time, “Democracy” is a clumsy Victorian amusement on the theme of universal corruption in the Gilded Age, with a scattering of set-piece speeches to drive home the author’s points. Adams, a guardian of gentility, plunged fearlessly into the purple depths of cliche; neither his archness nor his sentimentality wears well. The book is an aristocrat’s stiff lament for a world seized by rogues. In it, the most august senator in Washington, who barely missed the presidency earlier and stands to win it later, is a smooth connoisseur of barefaced realism. “If virtue won’t answer our purpose,” he says, “we must use vice.” Wouldn’t you know, the senator turns out to have accepted a huge bribe. What is the gentle lady who has been courted by him to do? She is graced with an inner life -- perhaps the only character in “Democracy” who is -- and discovers that the only morally satisfactory recourse is to get out of town.

Rogues abound in Joe Klein’s “Primary Colors,” but there’s too much fun to be had running around with them to justify a soul-saving exit. “Primary Colors” was deftly timed when it appeared in 1996, emerging in the early months of Bill Clinton’s second presidential campaign with a plot hewing closely to his first -- complete with the portentous hesitations of Mario Cuomo (“Orlando Ozio”), the colorful, backcountry wizard advice of James Carville (“Richard Jemmons”) and the purported dalliance of the dazzling Clinton (“Jack Stanton”) with the venal Gennifer Flowers (“Cashmere McLeod”).

“Primary Colors” remains a skilled performance, with the sort of wit that consists mainly of snap judgments, signature sum-ups, hip patter and the pat put-downs that play well in weekly newsmagazines. Such wit is composed chiefly of mimicry, with characters easily mapped onto recognizable figures like Hillary Clinton, Stan Greenberg, Betsey Wright and so on. There is even a walk-on for a simultaneously sonorous and credulous newsmagazine writer, “Jerry Rosen,” a surrogate for Time magazine’s Klein. The book might as well have come equipped with a seating chart.

Klein, disguised as “Anonymous” before he was outed by an analyst of writing style, plainly did his homework on election minutiae -- what he calls “the metabolism of the campaign.” When his writing is not bloated in the manner of an extra-long Clinton monologue, Klein can be sharp on the campaign’s “lunatic tide” and pungent on the empty conformity of the men and women of the press, who combine inside-dopester savvy with an indulgence for charlatans. In the end, though, Klein tries too hard. The mechanics of “oppo” research -- digging up dirt about the opposition -- detain him overlong, and his characters perform too much like wind-up toys. The nearest he gets to the inner life of a character is with his narrator, the young jack-of-all-assignments Henry Burton -- the closest of his principals to being altogether invented.

Henry finds himself wedged in a moral dilemma that illuminates the awful truth of politics’ corrupt heart. “This is about the ability to lead,” says Gov. Stanton near the end, in a ringing and possibly unique defense of the indefensible. “It’s not about perfection.... Only certain kinds of people are cut out for this work -- and, yeah, we are not princes, by and large.... Two thirds of what we do is reprehensible. This isn’t the way a normal human being acts. We smile, we listen.... We do our pathetic little favors. We fudge when we can’t.... We live an eternity of false smiles -- and why? Because it’s the price you pay to lead.”

Henry reflects at the inconclusive end: “He could talk all he wanted about an eternity of ‘false’ smiles: His power came from the exact opposite direction, from the authenticity of his appeal, from the stark ferocity of his hunger.” It is a revelatory moment.

Henry Adams’ chief heir in our time has been Gore Vidal, whose deft touches and inside knowledge in his 1967 novel “Washington, D.C.” -- the first in order of composition though last in chronology of an extended American chronicle -- adorn a sordid saga of crusty conservatives, communists turning anti-, adulterous noblesse and Sen. Joe McCarthy. Continuing Adams’ pattern, Vidal’s metier is the comedy of bad manners. He is wittier than Adams. (“Politics is the only profession in which mediocrities can gain the world’s attention through slander.”) He is more knowledgeable about Washington’s family secrets and insider gestures, and less heartbroken, perhaps because his motive in writing is less ideological, less mournful and more commercial. His public scenes -- press conferences, Senate committee hearings and the like -- crackle, unlike the stagy melodrama he inserts in private places.

In Vidal’s Washington, as in Adams’ book, petty self-advancement and bribery are the coins of the realm. Everyone in public office is venal but for Franklin Delano Roosevelt, an offstage presence. The liberal editor Peter Sanford, Vidal’s alter ego, harbors this jaded view of the human spectacle: “[T]he generations of man come and go and are in eternity no more than bacteria upon a luminous slide, and the fall of a republic or the rise of an empire -- so significant to those involved -- are not detectable upon the slide even were there an interested eye to behold that steadily proliferating species which would either end in time or, with luck, become something else, since change is the nature of life, and its hope.” It is Vidal’s secular version of grace.

Nicholson Baker’s skimpy new “Checkpoint” begins with a possibly fruitful premise, that political energy, however demented, is to be found today among wacky outsiders -- and unravels because it fails to imagine the outsiders in more than a single dimension. Indeed, it hardly imagines anyone or anything at all. This clumsy two-character playlet involving a would-be assassin of the present President Bush is not funny enough to be comic. Its figures barely rise to the fullness of sticks. What could have possessed Baker, who elsewhere has shown a meticulous eye for close scrutiny? Perhaps the spirit of Bush hatred is poison -- a hatred of spirit.

In the realm of political comedy, the most vivid of the bunch under review is truly the most unruly: Richard Condon’s raucous, deservedly back-in-vogue “Manchurian Candidate,” which has the continuing virtue -- despite all that’s changed in the intervening 45 years since its first publication in 1959, not least the collapse of the Soviet Union -- of starting from the demonstrable fact that extraordinary scoundrels and liars do claw their way into power and at times hijack the country. Condon’s bizarre brainwashing plot, now well known, has the courage of its implausibility, for only a lunatic premise seems adequate to the insanity of Cold War bravado, as Stanley Kubrick also demonstrated a few years later with “Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.” Among the many innocent pleasures the book affords, more so than both movies it has spawned, is that Condon’s miserable assassin, Raymond Shaw, is a concocted creature who still bleeds when he’s undone. To have extracted pathos from parody is a considerable achievement.

Over the course of more than two centuries of vivid political history, there is perhaps only one full-blooded American novel of politics that plunges deep into the hearts of its characters and therefore into the hearts of its readers, thus rising to the top ranks of American fiction. That is Robert Penn Warren’s lush “All the King’s Men,” a 1946 masterpiece about the rise and precipitous fall of a demagogue.

I am cheating a bit to shoehorn Warren’s brooding hero-villain into the category of national politics, since Willie Stark never in the course of the book leaves his home state of more-or-less Louisiana. Never mind. When Willie’s prototype, Huey Long, was assassinated in 1935, he was already a U.S. senator; he would have run for president against FDR and made himself the most imposing American fascist of the 20th century. Anyway, politics for Warren is where the whole tragic American experience of longing and loss, hope and betrayal goes to fill out its full dimension. He crams many dark days of the American soul into what is ostensibly the rise-and-fall story of “the Boss” from honest people-protecting populism to ruthless abuse of power.

Unlike most of the political comedies, “All the King’s Men” exhibits the politician as popular hero. Stark is more than a backstage trickster -- he’s a politician whose followers fall in love with him. One who does, to his later horror, is the narrator, pundit and ex-historian Jack Burden, who lectures Stark about how to talk to the multitude: “Tell ‘em anything. But for Sweet Jesus’ sake don’t try to improve their minds.” He pays, too.

Stark’s destructiveness matters because he is no buffoon. Once, he cared to improve the lives of his constituents -- he began his political career by exposing a contractor who built a collapsible schoolhouse with shoddy brick. “There is always something” becomes his motto. That is: There is always some mud to force down an enemy’s gullet. To watch Stark bring down the good and the half-good all around him fills the reader with, you might say, shock and awe.

“All the King’s Men” aside, why does the nation’s politics generate so many cartoons aspiring to be novels? The quick, tempting answer might be that the satire is barely disguised realism -- that the nation’s capital really is a swamp of rogues, cheats, blowhards, bullies and petty buffoons, some of them lovable, most of them not, and the best ascend no higher than the category of good-old-boy “characters.” Stereotypic is as stereotypic does, and therefore it could be said that Washington gets only what it deserves. But Warren demonstrates that the literary problem runs deeper.

Part of the problem with writing about Washington is the city itself, a company town that like all others takes itself too seriously and not seriously enough. Unlike other national capitals, Washington does not double or triple as a commercial, intellectual, religious or academic center. London, Paris or Moscow it is not. So it has not harbored a Balzac, Tolstoy, Trollope or George Eliot, even a C.P. Snow.

Today as in Henry Adams’ time, the easiest gag line includes the word “politicians.” But the consequences of politics, of who politicians are and what they do, are no joke. They are sometimes ennobling and sometimes tragic: wrecked bodies, impoverished citizens, the casually imprisoned, the ill housed and ill fed, the paved-over forests and oil-soaked beaches.

Who is up to capturing the Washington of George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and Tom DeLay? Theodore Dreiser, had he tried, might have produced a Washington tragedy that, taking the full measure of human failure, succeeds in ripping your heart out. William Faulkner, had he turned his attention to the District of Columbia swamps, might have bathed in the corrosion of the half-innocent and half-guilty who think themselves free and robust but find themselves trapped eventually in unyielding history. Fitzgerald might have turned out a rhapsody of reckless innocence and impudent imposture.

John Cheever might have taken an interesting turn with John Kerry. John Updike might yet. And Ralph Nader? For him, no less than a Herman Melville would be required -- Melville the connoisseur of American innocence and destructiveness, writing away in hot pursuit of the man who stomps down the deck across the churning seas in pursuit of the whiter-than-white whale. *

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Reading list

Democracy

An American Novel

Henry Adams, introduction

by Arthur Schlesinger Jr.

Modern Library

*

Primary Colors

A Novel

Joe Klein (Anonymous)

Random House

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Washington, D.C.

A Novel

Gore Vidal

Random House

*

Checkpoint

A Novel

Nicholson Baker

Alfred A. Knopf

*

The Manchurian

Candidate

A Novel

Richard Condon, introduction

by Louis Menand

Four Walls Eight Windows

*

All the King’s Men

A Novel

Robert Penn Warren

Harcourt Brace/Harvest