Brandauer in "Mephisto"
An interesting political debate has arisen about whether Mitt Romney’s penchant for making things up would make him a problematic president. Some think he is putting his soul in peril while others find his lying irrelevant and even, in the case of The Washington Post’s Richard Cohen, perversely admirable. I think the Faust story and specifically Klaus Mann’s novel Mephisto contribute something important to this debate.
First, those who see it as a problem. Romney’s opponents have been complaining for a while. “The guy will say anything,” Rudolph Giuliani said in the 2008 Republican primaries, and Mike Huckabee mused, “I don’t think Romney has a soul.” More recently, also picking up on the soul question, The Washington Post’s Matt Miller has invoked Picture of Dorian Gray:
Simply put, Obamacare has forced Romney to reveal how much 100-proof drivel he’ll swallow and spit out with a smile if that’s what it takes to get to the Oval Office. The man passed a great health reform in Massachusetts that inspired Obama’s and he pretends otherwise every day. I’m no purist about what it takes to win elections. But at some point the total denial of your record, your sincere views and your problem-solving instincts takes you into soul-destroying territory. If there were a health-care version of The Picture of Dorian Gray, Romney’s portrait offstage would be a hideous thing to behold.
Richard Cohen of The Washington Post, on the other hand, seems almost impressed, arguing that Romney uses lying the way a CEO wields a business plan. “I admire a smooth liar, and Romney is among the best,” he writes, and then, “what his career has given him is the businessman’s concept of self — that what he does is not who he is.”
Jon Chait of New York Magazine and Richard Yeselsen are less admiring but agree that concerns about Mitt Romney’s authenticity or soul are off the mark. The search for the real Mitt Romney is pointless, Chait says, because of course he is going to say whatever is necessary to get elected:
The point is that it’s just not useful to try to understand the link between a politician’s moral beliefs and his public conduct as a moral question. Politics is an art. Politicians present themselves to the public as they need to present themselves in order to obtain their goals. Romney has had to wildly reinvent his public persona because he had to win the approval of a liberal Massachusetts electorate in 2002 and then an extremely conservative Republican primary electorate in 2012, not due to any character defect.
Yeselsen, meanwhile compares him to an actor, and here is where the Klaus Mann novel proves useful. Yeselsen (quoted by Alec MacGillis) writes:
Whoever he is, the real Romney is mostly irrelevant. Romney, like all of us, performs the roles he must within the public institutions he inhabits and the different dramas which he plays a part in enacting. There are reasons why he performs on the stages he does—he’ll never be any kind of liberal—but he doesn’t just play the same character every time. Each of those institutions will have a different set of observers with which the individual engages. The audience, venue and dramatic script shape and constrain our public performances.
But while Yeselsen doesn’t care whether Romney is authentic or not, he is concerned that Romney can’t play authenticity:
People are what they do, and part of what presidential candidates must do is project a fully integrated depth of being before multiple audiences. Romney’s political problem—his poor job performance as a professional politician—is that he has an almost poignant difficulty in managing to do that.We will probably never find out who the real Romney is, just like we haven’t found out who the real Obama or the real Lincoln is.
Okay, now to Mann’s 1936 novel, which is about an actor in Nazi Germany who has essentially sold his soul to be famous, turning his back on his former political convictions. Not surprisingly, then, he is very good at playing the devil in Goethe’s Faust. He cannot, however, play a truly deep character, which is to say, he can’t play Hamlet. Or rather, he can play a version of Hamlet that impresses his Nazi audiences, but he knows deep down that this Hamlet is ultimately inauthentic.
As he’s about to play him, he imagines a former director, who acts as his conscience, looking on. Hendrik first addresses himself to the Hamlet role:
I’ve got to play you. If I fail at playing you, I’ll have failed everything. You’re my ordeal by fire; I’ve got to pass. My whole life, all the sins I’ve committed, my great betrayal, all my shame can only be vindicated by my art. But I’m an artist only if I can play Hamlet.”
And then he hears his old director saying,
You are not Hamlet, you don’t have the nobility that only suffering and experience can give. You are merely the monkey of power, a clown to entertain murderers.
And further on,
You had the choice, my dear fellow, between nobility and a career. You made your choice. Be happy with it, but leave me in peace.
The Nazis love Henrik’s Hamlet. Given how Henrik interprets this role (he describes it to reporters), it’s clear why:
Hamlet wasn’t a weak man. There was nothing weak about him. Generations of actors have made the mistake of viewing him as a feminine character. His melancholy wasn’t hollow but came from real motives. The prince wants to avenge his father. He is a Renaissance man–a real aristocrat and something of a cynic. I want to strip him of all the melancholy traits with which he has been burdened by conventional portrayals.
But despite the applause, Henrik is not happy. Mann writes,
Yet, he himself realized he wasn’t expressing the real content, the poetic mystery of Hamlet. His interpretation remained on the level of rhetoric.
So how does this help us understand Romney? While I think Yeselsen is right that we can become too hung up on authenticity, there is more than exteriority to the art of politics, just as there is to the art of acting. To be sure, politics is an art and Reagan, Clinton, George W and Obama have all been pretty good at artfully portraying authenticity, just as George H. W., Dukakis, Gore, and Kerry were not. Yeselsen is on to something when he says we can’t know the real Obama any more than we can know the real Lincoln and it doesn’t matter anyway. What matters is what one does.
But Mann’s novel indicates that one has to have something to build on in one’s performance, some sincerely-held convictions, and it’s hard to see what Romney has. Maybe the emptiness, the Mittbott persona that even his supporters fret about, is the result of his no-holds-barred assault on the presidency. When you sell your soul, people pick up on it. That’s why the Faust story seems so applicable to the Republican nominee.
The performance may be good enough for those who want to be convinced. Mann, however, would say that even supremely talented actors can’t pull off a compelling performance if they have no soul.
Previous posts using literature to understand Mitt Romney
Mitt (who told lies and was burned to death)
Romney as Shakespeare’s Dark Lady?!
Presidents as Points of Projection