On two of the things
that make one of our most under-appreciated novels so great.
I haven’t done a
poll or anything, but it seems to me that when we Americans think about Robert
Penn Warren’s All
the King’s Men (1946) at all, we tend to do so through the lens of its
portrayal of a fictionalized Huey Long,
the popular and controverial Louisiana governor. That’s an entirely
understandable perspective, not only because the novel does focus much of its
attention on Willie Stark (its Long figure), but also because the Academy Award-winning film
(1949) featured a bravura performance from Broderick Crawford as
Stark. The book has a lot to say about Stark, not only as an individual and a
representation of his own place and era, but in relationship to enduring
questions of power and corruption, hope and cynicism, democracy and
demogoguery. But my love for Penn Warren’s novel, which is one of my favorite
American texts, stems from other, and to my mind even more impressive and
important, elements.
For one thing,
there’s the narration. Penn Warren’s narrator, Jack Burden, sounds like a
combination of the best hard-boiled
private detective narrators and H.L.
Mencken (or other similarly critical and whip-smart commentators on
American society and human nature). I could say more, but instead I’m just
going to transcribe one paragraph from the opening chapter, in which Burden is
all of those things and then some: “The Boss was down at the other end of the
yard where the crepe myrtles were, prowling up and down on the dusty grass
stems. Well, it was all his baby, and he could give it suck. I just lay there
in the hammock. I lay there and watched the undersides of the oak leaves, dry
and grayish and dusty-green, and some of them I saw had rusty-corroded-looking
spots on them. Those were the ones which would turn loose their grip on the
branch before long—not in any breeze, the fibers would just relax, in the
middle of the day maybe with the sunshine bright and the air so still it aches
like the place where the tooth was on the morning after you’ve been to the
dentist or aches like your heart in the bosom when you stand on the street
corner waiting for the light to change and happen to recollect how things once
were and how they might have been yet if
what happened had not happened.”
Penn Warren wasn’t
a hugely talented poet for nothing, after all. But he was also one of our most
interesting and meaningful historical
philosophers; and, as I’ve written at length in
this (free and downloadable!) article, All
the King’s Men is also a complex treatise on the limitations and
possibilities of historical research, knowledge, and engagement. I won’t
restate that article’s arguments here, but will simply say this: prior to the
events of the novel, Jack Burden was a PhD candidate in History, and in one of
the novel’s most successful set-pieces he recounts the story of his Civil
War-era ancestor, Cass Mastern, into which he was digging for that thesis. It
doesn’t seem to me that we can possibly remember Penn Warren’s novel without
remembering the
amazing Cass Mastern section—and even if the rest of the novel (to which
that section certainly connects) didn’t exist, the Mastern narrative would be
one of our most compelling and powerful historical fictions. For that reason,
and so many others, I can’t recommend Penn Warren’s novel strongly enough.
Final
AmericanStudier love tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you love
about or in American history, culture, identity, community?
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