[The first Pulitzer Prizes
were given out 100 years ago, on June 5, 1917.
So to celebrate that centennial, this week I’ll be AmericanStudying five
Pulitzer-winning works of fiction, leading up to a special weekend post on the
most recent winner!]
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
Pulitzer-winning novel 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.
Next Pulitzer
winner tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Thoughts on other prize-winning (or –worthy) books?
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