Richard Luckett on a novelist of fact
There are some novels which are not masterpieces, and have never come near to chang
ing the world, which nevertheless deserve to be kept in circulation long after their initial appearance. The more praise, then, to Secker and Warburg, who have reissued Robert Penn Warren's All The King's Men with a long introduction and a chapter originally excised from the English edition restored.* When the novel first came out in the United States in 1946 it caused, as Penn Warren recounts in his introduction, a considerable stir. This was principally because the central character of the novel, Willie Stark, was closely modelled on Huey 'Kingfish' Long, the governor of Louisiana, whose assassination in 1935 brought to an abrupt end a career that might possibly have culminated in the White House. Long was, depending on your point of view, a piece ot toikiore, the embodiment of the old American populist tradition, a combination of cracker-barrel philosopher and. Al Capone, a dangerous radical, an enlightened social reformer, a would-be dictator, or a plain crook. The fact that Penn Warren had attempted to write about him in a sympathetic manner caused him to be .branded a fascist. But the issue at stake was less the case of Penn Warren than the case of Huey Long; English readers were perhaps better placed than Penn Warren's compatriots to see that what the novel was really about was power, and that matters of detail relating to Long's political and domestic affairs were neither here nor there.
But English readers were also at a disadvantage, since the version that. they read was incomplete. It was a period when publishers had strong views on what national audiences would or would not take, and just as Waugh's A Handful of Dust was vandalised for American publication, so All The King's Men suffered in England. It is written in the first person, the narrator being one Jack Burden, a journalist who had failed in almost everything but his profession. The child of a broken marriage, he rejects financial security and the emotional domination of his mother by working his way through the State University. He begins but then abandons a doctorate thesis, marries a girl distinguished for her beauty (and nothing else) only to walk out on her, and eventually abandons his newspaper column when he rejects the editorial line on local government. It is this action which persuades Stark to offer him employment as an aide, an offer which Burden accepts for
reasons that he finds it hard to define: curiosity, fascination and indolence are all equally involved. Thus he becomes an in timate but disinterested observer of Stark's final years, though in the end his lack of involvement proves to be illusory. Through Burden Penn Warren is enabled to explore Stark's career in every detail, and also to establish It in a historical and social context. But the novel is also the story of Burden, as .well as of Stark, and it is to Burden that the chapter absent in the first English edition relates.
The missing chapter gives an account of Burden's thesis, which was to based on family papers, principally the journal of his great uncle Cass Mastern. Mastern, after an affair with a married woman, rejected the slaveowning society of his time, though he con tinued to live in it. Yet when the civil, war came he felt it his duty to join the Confederate army, making a private reservation that he would not take life. He served with conspicuous gallantry and increasing involvement, until he fell wotmded outside Atlanta and the infection proved fatal. This tale within a tale is developed in a thoroughly convincing way; it would itself have made an excellent novel. It was conceived, Mr Penn Warren tells us in his introduction, as a means of giving psychological dimension to Burden, and moral depth to the story as a whole. For Cass Mas tern believes that "there is always a kind of glory, however stained or obscured, in what ever man's hand does well, and General Johnston does well." Burden's situation, by contrast, is that of the intellectual who has rejected involvement but has not rejected the right to criticise. When he does finally become involved it is at Stark's instigation, and to serve Stark's political ends. Stark, in fact, lives by a dictum that is the converse reflection of Cass Mastern's: "Man is conceived in sin and born in corruption and he passeth from the stink of the didie to the stench of the shroud. There is always something." There is always something, even on Judge Irwin, the idol of Burden's childhood, the image of the upright man. Burden investigates Irwin's past with the presumption that there is nothing, yet with the growing conviction that there may be something after all. What there is is enough to drive Utwin to kill himself. And Urwin, as it transpires, is Burden's father.
It is clear that the judges apparent virtues are the virtues of privilege; how then are we to judge Stark, who tells the voters the truth, who is prepared to admit that his hands are not clean, who sees that the central politics] issue is a matter of power, and is prepared to use the forces of corruption to obtain power, and at the same time to use power to give the community what it wants and needs?
Now that Huey Long is a fading memorY the force of All The King's Men as a drama of ends and means becomes all the more a9' parent. In the meantime recent events in the United States have pointed up the significance of Burden's situation. Anyone who has 'followed the Watergate affair must have been impressed by the strings of qualifications trailed by some of the villains in the piece. Not since the operations of Dr Israel Tonge, Dr Titus Oates, have conspirators boasted 5.0 high a level of academic attainment. There Is evena real live novelist involved. And not for nothing do many of the publications on the case resemble dissertations, with whole, forests of timber sacrificed to the tissue al inventions with which the accused have sought to cover themselves and further confound confusion. If anyone wants to know why this has come about they will find rle comfort in the explanations. ' They' will find no comfort in his conclusions either. Jack Burden provides much of the fascination of the book, but he is also its weakest link, since the presentation of each incident through his eyes put us too much at the mercy of his defective vision. The obv1005 Influence on All The King's Men is For Whorn The Bell Tolls, which bears both on the sub; ject and the style. It would be unjust to regal, Jack Burden's manner as merely derivative al Hemingway; it owes a lot to the circumstaT tial connections — of employme,h`i; temperament and education — which lln" Burden with Hemingway's heroes. Penn Warren has taken the trouble to return to the social base. But he cannot always control the effect, with the result that there are tirne,s when Burden sounds like Robert Jordan. any other moments when he sounds like phP Marlowe. This is not because Penn Warren has also been reading Chandler, but because they are both using some of the same Plls: tulates in the creation of their characters. TB' difficulty is exacerbated by the ending of ch,e, novel. The death of Stark is described great effectiveness, but it leaves Burden Wit11 on stage, and with a great many unrescolve° I suspect the unsatisfactoriness of th! conclusion encouraged reviewers to label th" book fascist. Not only did Penn Warren at., tempt a sympathetic portrayal of a II: ideologically repugnant to many lihera,. worse, he implied that some problems we'l irremediable, stemming from fundamental; defects in human nature, and that problems might afflict a democracy no severely than other political structures.,Eveot this might have proved palatable, had it nyt been for the shift of emphasis in the ending.,:e is at this final but vital juncture that attempt to interweave two narratives brea_ft; down. The convention of the big narrativ,, novel demands a resolution, and here their' are two narratives to resolve. Mr P,en,s Warren, whose major literary distinction a poet, has up to this point managed to wrIc`f a novel that, one or two brilliant flashes ot natural description aside, is determinedlY a 'poet's novel.' But in concluding he, the troduces a lyrical and private mode, anuthat suggestion is that this signifies in a way ` the Stark saga does not. There is, once agt%ri warrguil
an unpalatable truth in this, but Penn
does not establish his terms strongly erl011hee for this to impinge properly. The conseQue tai is that the conclusion seems a sentimen.e0 palliative to the tough world that has e described. It is a pity, since even a good PI° is damaged if the final chords are false.
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