The Great American Political Novel

 I first encountered Robert Penn Warren through reading his co-authored textbooks An Approach to Literature and Understanding Poetry. Around the time I went off to college, I would peruse literary and cultural magazines like The Atlantic, Harpers, The New Republic, The New Yorker and others. Some of his poems appeared in the pages of these publications. I can't pretend I remember any lines from those early poems, but the craft stood out. Penn Warren wrote elegantly and lyrically as you would expect from someone who had also published textbooks on literature and poetry. 

I remember liking his poetry enough to purchase his New and Selected Poems, 1923-1985 in my senior year of high school. Though I knew him as primarily a poet, Robert Penn Warren has to be considered one of America's premier "man of letters" for the 20th century. A year after the publication of his selected poems book, he was named the first poet laureate of the United States. 

Even as I continued to read his poetry, I knew he had also written a novel titled All the King's Men published in 1946. It won the Pulitzer Prize the next year, one of three Pulitzer Prizes Penn Warren received. The other two were for his poetry. I learned too that Penn Warren was a part of the Fugitives, a group of southern poets associated with Vanderbilt University. Penn Warren later helped form The Southern Agrarians who compiled a book of essays titled I'll Take My Stand published in 1930. This volume defended a "southern way of life" against Northern critiques.  A work of its time, it defended racial segregation and emphasized the agrarian lifestyle of the South.  Penn Warren later renounced his segregationist views and conducted numerous interviews with writers and civil rights activists published as Who Speaks for the Negro? in 1965. 

Despite all these impressive achievements, All the King's Men remains his best-known work.  Though fictional, it is based on the life and career of Louisiana politician Huey P. Long who had served Louisiana as governor and senator until his assassination in 1935. Though a Democrat, Long criticized the New Deal program of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt for not going far enough to help the poor suffering in the Depression. As an alternative to the New Deal, Long promoted Share Our Wealth, which would have included income distribution and a tax on the rich. A year after his Share Our Wealth program launched, which included Share Our Wealth clubs throughout the United States, Long died from a gunshot wound. The protagonist of Warren's novel Willie Stark. A 2002 edition now considered to be the "restored edition" changes the character's name to Willie Talos, a name used by Penn Warren in manuscripts.  

Stark/Talos is loosely based on Huey Long who like the protagonist of the novel served as governor. Jack Burden, a political reporter, narrates the novel. Burden becomes a trusted advisor to Stark in the course of the novel. Stylistically, this literary structure reminds me of the role of Nick Carraway in The Great Gatsby. 

At 650 pages, this is not a light read, but despite the length, I found it compelling. Many reviewers have dubbed this book the best novel written about American politics. Apparently, Penn Warren has said he did not intend to write a political novel, but I would agree it is a classic study of American politics set in an era where it seemed possible for a single politician to have the type of influence Stark does. At the same time, the novel is a case study in the life of man and the decisions and compromises many politicians make.  The 19th century historian and politician, Lord Acton, famously wrote "Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely." However, most of us do not know the rest of the quote: Great men are almost always bad men, even when they exercise influence and not authority: still more when you superadd the tendency or the certainty of corruption by authority. There is no worse heresy than that the office sanctifies the holder of it." In other words, simply being a President or a Pope, (Acton was Catholic) does not make you a good or admirable individual. 

Penn Warren's prose has a rhythm and energy that expertly captures the frenzied circus of politics.  Stark's character is referred to as "the Boss" throughout the novel. Here is a scene where the narrator describes Tom Stark, Willie's son. 

        "If bottle and bbed didn't manage to slow down too soon something inside that one hundred and                 eighty pounds of split-second, hair-trigger, Swiss-watch beautiful mechanism which was Tom Stark,         the Boss's boy, the Sophomore Thunderbolt, Daddy's Darling, who stood that night in the middle of a         hotel room, with a piece of court plaster across his nose and a cocky grin on his fine, clean, boyish            face-for it was fine and clean and boyish- while all the hands of Papa's pals pawed at him and beat his         shoulders, while Tiny Duffy slapped him on the shoulder, and Sadie Burke, who sat a little outside            the general excitement in her own private fog of cigarette smoke and whisky fumes, a not entirely            unambiguous expression on her riddled, handsome face, said, 'Yeah, Tom, somebody was telling me         you played a football game tonight" (307). 

I could not believe this was only one sentence, but as a poet well aware of the importance and utility of punctuation, Penn Warren creates a nearly palpable energy on the page. The novel has has been adapted for film twice. I could imagine a director giving us panoramic and dizzying camera angles here as Tom takes in all the attention given to him by the Boss' followers. 

A strength of this novel is when Penn Warren uses a character's situation to tackle larger issues beyond the narrative. "Perhaps the only answer, I thought then, was that by the time we understand the pattern we are in, the definition we are making for ourselves, it is too late to break out of the box. . . . Yet the definition we have made of ourselves is ourselves." (529) Or when he writes about what he terms "the theory of moral neutrality." Penn Warren writes, "Process is neither morally good nor morally bad. We may judge results but not process. The morally bad agent may perform the deed which is good. The morally good agent may perform the deed which is bad. Maybe a man has to sell his soul to get power to do good" (593).

Passages like this support the greatness of Penn Warren's book and why so many readers consider it the quintessential book of American politics. However, the conclusion of the book is a series of scenes and meditation on love, family, and legacy. At this point of the novel, the story being told is Jack's story. Jack Burden stands in for us the readers who have our own hardships and struggles and who like Jack and his wife will have to "go into the convulsion of the world, out of history into history and the awful responsibility of time" (661). 

Madness Managed

 Within popular culture, depictions of madness or mental illness tend towards a romantic view of the condition. With those who fancy themselves artistic types often view madness as a necessary corollary to creativity. Figures like Charles Baudelaire, Edgar Allan Poe, Ernest Hemingway are viewed tragically. Others like the poets Robert Lowell and John Berryman I studied in a college English seminar attempted to use their madness as material for their own creative work.  Sylvia Plath, who along with Anne Sexton, studied for a time under Robert Lowell, might be the queen bee of this type of view. I remember how many of my female students lionized The Bell Jar in high school and college. When I finally read the book myself, I found it unsettling rather than inspiring. 

Like most adolescents, there were times I found myself wondering like Hamlet if I should live or die. After learning of the death of a classmate during my senior year of high school, I sunk into an existential funk that probably would have been solved a decade later with a dosage of antidepressants. Thankfully, I worked myself out of this mostly on my own, though a few heart-to-hearts with sympathetic teachers and my high school girlfriend kept me from taking any dire measures. 

When I learned of my mother's hospitalization with postpartum psychosis after the birth of my eldest brother, I wondered if I might inherit some form of mental illness from her. I do not think I have, but my admiration and appreciation of writers like Lowell and Berryman, has made me particularly interested in bipolar disorder, formerly known as manic depression. 

Through a winding path, approximately five or six years ago, I found myself taking on the task of teaching Advanced Placement (AP) Psychology. I had virtually no academic training for this course. I took an intro Psychology course in college to fulfill a general education requirement. I had taken various Sociology courses as both an undergrad and grad student, but this is a tangential connection. I did study Philosophy and had taught an elective class on World Philosophy. I had also been a lifelong student of Religion and I knew that one of the earliest academic studies of Religion was American psychologist William James' Varieties of Religious Experience. 

Nevertheless, I dove into the material which included a daunting amount of hard science relating to the brain, nervous system, and other topics more connected to the Sciences than Humanities, my wheelhouse. Around this time I learned of the work of Kay Redfield Jamison. Jamison is one of the world's foremost experts on bipolar disorder, on both a personal and academic level. Jamison has lived with this condition and has become an expert on the topic through her education and academic work. Jamison is on the Psychiatry Faculty at Johns Hopkins Medical School. In addition to her work, An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness, Jamison has written additional works on the topic. These include Fires in the Dark: Healing the Unquiet Mind, Touched With Fire: Manic-Depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperament, and more recently Robert Lowell, Setting the River on Fire: A Study of Genius, Mania, and Character. The Lowell book is a distinctive hybrid of a book. It is a biography, but one that foregrounds his struggle with bipolar disorder. She received permission from the Lowell estate to access his medical records. I have read several biographies and literary studies of Lowell, but none of those authors had the personal or professional background of Jamison. 

Regarding An Unquiet Mind, I found the work to be lyrical, candid, and ultimately hopeful as the reader sees how Jamison has managed to have an exceptionally successful life as a psychiatrist and also maintain relationships with friends and family too. Her acknowledgements include numerous debts to professional friends, doctors who treated her, and to her own siblings and her husband. Jamison dedicates the book to her mother.  Sadly, some of the primary victims of bipolar disorder beyond the person suffering from this disorder are family members who endure the vitriol and abuse of the individual while in these episodes. 

In the preface to my edition, Jamison writes about originally publishing the book fifteen years earlier. Jamison had struggled with this condition from the age of 17 and had still managed in the decade since that diagnosis to have earned an assistant professorship at UCLA. She notes that when she decided to write this book twenty years after her first academic appointment, it was not without risks. Though she had by this time earned tenure and had a sterling reputation in the field, who could anticipate the fallout from this type of public acknowledgement. What would her colleagues think of her? Would her academic community embrace this admission?  Jamison had spent two decades keeping this secret from the world, though she admits she was heading into a manic episode right at the time she joined the UCLA faculty.  I applaud Jamison's courage, because then and now, much of society feels mental illness is not truly an illness, but as Jamison writes "Far more people than I had realized conceptualize mental illness as a spiritual flaw or shortcoming in character" (xii). Jamison, like William Styron before her, in his memoir on depression, Darkness Visible, has done a great deal to destigmatize mental illness for the general public. 

Jamison divides the book into four sections: The Wild Blue Yonder, A Not So Fine Madness, This Medicine, Love, and An Unquiet Mind. The first section recounts Jamison's life growing up with a father in the military and frequent moves around the country before settling in Washington state after her father's retirement from active service. Jamison notes her suicidal thoughts that she hid from family and revealed only to a few close friends. When she goes off to college at UCLA, rather than her dream school of the University of Chicago, Jamison cannot hide her disappointment, though she comes to learn this was likely the best experience for her. Jamison completed her undergraduate studies and entered the PhD program in Psychology at UCLA. The first section ends with Jamison's appointment to the UCLA faculty. "I had a glorious-as it turns out, too glorious-summer, and, within three months of becoming a professor, I was ravingly psychotic" (63).

The second part of the book begins with Jamison explaining that her condition did not appear suddenly. As she writes, "I did not wake up one day to find myself mad" (68). Instead it was a process, an acceleration of thoughts that reached a point where she found herself in a world of chaos. Like many patients, Jamison often resisted medication, because how it made her feel.  However, when she emerged from the haze of her mania, the crushingly reality of spending sprees and other destructive behaviors had to be faced. 

Through therapy Jamison learns how to work towards the gentle balance between her condition and the possible treatment. "The challenge was in learning to understand the complexity of this mutual beholdenness and in learning to distinguish the roles of lithium, will, and insight in getting well and leading a meaningful life. It was the task and gift of psychotherapy" (88). Jamison as both a patient and psychiatric practitioner understood the treatment of mental illness is not an either/or choice between medication and therapy, but ideally should involve a complimentary approach to treatment. 

In the chapter "Missing Saturn" Jamison describes the experience of getting better which often required patients to abandon those mental flights they had found exhilarating while in the midst of those states. Finding a new normal is not always easy. "When I am my present 'normal' self, I am far removed from when I have been my liveliest, most productive, most intense, most outgoing and effervescent. In short, for myself, I am a hard act to follow. And I miss Saturn very much." (92). 

Jamison lucidly, but honestly recounts her battles with her medication, in her case, Lithium. Once again, her academic knowledge of mental illness provides an insight beyond other patients. Unfortunately, those who take medications for mental illness often have to work with various medications and dosage levels before finding an optimum combination.  It reminds us that we must be fierce self-advocates unafraid to challenge the medical knowledge and experience of our care providers.  In this same chapter, Jamison includes a humorous but also poignant list of 13 "Rules for the Gracious Acceptance of Lithium into Your Life." Rules #1 and 13 illustrate the societal costs of acknowledging mental illness. Rule # 1 states "Clear out the medicine cabinet before guests arrive for dinner or new lovers stay the night." Rule # 13 "Restock your medicine cabinet." 

In a lighthearted way, Jamison encapsulates the powerful social forces that make one reluctant to admit you suffer from some form of mental illness. As a teacher for approximately 25 years now, I am glad to admit more students and families comfortably inform me of their own or their child's psychological conditions.  Nevertheless, there are still many obstacles and barriers to acceptance on both personal and professional levels.  A recent documentary Persona: The Dark Truth Behind Personality Tests addresses many of these concerns. 

Jamison addresses her eighteen-month struggle with suicidal depression during which she bought a gun and periodically went to the eighth floor stairwell of the UCLA hospital where she pondered jumping off. She eventually took a massive dose of lithium. Jamison continues this narrative with gracious thanks to her personal therapist.  Another element of this work I appreciate is its insistence to not seek easy answers or romanticize her life. While she has been married three times, her second husband died, and had another significant romantic relationship that ended with the tragic death of her love, Jamison does not give false hope about her condition and what someone as close as your spouse can do for you. Near the end of part three, Jamison makes the following statement. "I have become fundamentally and deeply skeptical that anyone who does not have this illness can truly understand it" (174).  She goes on to argue "No amount of love can cure madness or unblacken one's dark moods. . . . Madness, on the other hand, most certainly can, and often does, kill love through its mistrustfulness, unrelenting pessimism, discontents, erratic behavior and especially, through its savage moods" (174). Jamison's remark strikes me deep because of knowing both those who suffer from bipolar disorder and caregivers and family of those who suffer from this condition. The frustration, bitterness, and sadness of these caregivers is palpable because they want nothing more than to have their parent, partner, child, or friend to be well and "happy."  Similarly, those suffering from various psychological disorders wish for similar things, but the shame, inadequacy, or guilt they feel is no less real. 

The fourth section of the book is the shortest and it has more professional and academic topics.  The opening chapter "Speaking of Madness" is an excellent personal and professional meditation on the terminology used to refer to various psychological conditions.  Throughout this post, I have used bipolar disorder, though Redfield prefers and uses manic depression. I plan to use this chapter with my AP Psychology students to discuss the importance of accuracy in these matters. Another chapter "The Troubled Helix" explores the genetics of psychological disorders and "Clinical Privileges" recounts some of Jamison's reluctance to tell her colleagues of her condition, though thankfully her department chair proves to be completely supportive of her disclosure. The final chapter "A Life in Moods" and the "Epilogue" address what it has meant for Jamison personally and professionally to have bipolar disorder.  As she has done throughout the memoir, Jamison is honest and I found her conclusions to be well-earned. 

I have purchased a couple of other titles by Jamison and I hope to review them both in these pages. I would recommend Jamison's book for anyone curious about bipolar disorder and especially for those who have this condition and for those who know someone who has bipolar disorder.  I cannot think of a better introduction to this illness than An Unquiet Mind. 

The Sabbatical is Over

 I cannot pretend that the handful of followers of this blog have awaited another post from me, but I do regret having been away from this blog for so long. Much has happened since my last post in 2018. I have moved, I have changed jobs, I have earned another graduate degree, and we have lived through the worst of a global pandemic. 

I have a stack of books that I have meant to review in this blog for some time now. I am going to endeavor through work through this list in the coming days. I find myself on Spring Break from my current position and have just returned from a writing conference energized. I attended this conference to participate in a panel for an anthology on the subject of La Llorona. An essay of mine, "Living with La Llorona" will appear in this anthology in the fall of this year. 

I completed the requirements for an MFA (Master of Fine Arts) in Creative Nonfiction in the fall of 2021. My advisor recommended we establish social media preferences and I suppose this blog is the sort of thing he had in mind. Unfortunately, I did not maintain this blog during the three years I worked on that MFA, but now I feel the itch to return to some more regular schedule of writing. For 15 years from 2005 to 2020, I wrote an op-ed column for the Topeka Capital-Journal. For the first five years I wrote every week and I truly enjoyed that round-the-clock schedule which forced me to write or think about writing for most of the week. 

By the end of my time as a columnist, the column came out twice a month, the immediacy had been lost. I am feeling inspired to write again based on the reception to my Llorona essay at this conference. While the type of writing I blog for is not the same as op-ed writing, it is still writing, and writing about books and ideas. 

Once I find myself in a more regular rhythm, I will introduce this blog to my social media accounts in the hopes that more folks may follow my writing. Though I have not written for the TCJ since 2020, I have maintained a writing routine through my work on the journal, Law Wise, published by the Kansas Bar Association. No, I am not a lawyer, but my eldest son is an attorney in New York City. I serendipitously fell into Law Wise through Facebook. Law Wise is an outreach journal published by the KBA for teachers of social studies, civics, and American History and Government. I have written for Law Wise since 2017 publishing issues on a variety of topics related to constitutional and legal issues. The most recent issue found here is on the Age of Majority/Emancipation. 

Writing for Law Wise has been another form of education for me as I have learned a great deal about the various topics covered in these issues over the years.  

Well, I am back, Ides of March and all.  

Keep Reading, 

Czar