All the King’s Men—Robert Penn Warren
Southern discomfort
Robert Penn Warren published All the King’s Men in 1946, and most people know of it in that version, the publisher’s edition. Several years ago I bought a new copy, thinking I had bought nothing more than a nice hardback edition. Publishers do that sort of thing all the time to commemorate some anniversary of a book’s first printing. I read that book this week. But when I started looking at what others have said about it, I noticed they kept referring to the larger-than-life political boss as Willie Stark instead of as Willie Talos. It turns out I had read All the Kings Men: Restored Edition. Restored? From what to what? It seems that literary scholar Noel Polk, working from Warren’s typescripts in the Beinecke Library at Yale University, put together, as best he could, the book that Warren actually wrote before the editors got hold of it and revised it into what they thought would improve sales. Polk claims that none of the changes improved the book and many of them damaged it. So, I read something like the literary equivalent to the “director’s cut” of a movie.
First, I have to say that All the King’s Men reads like a cross between lyric poetry and a novel. Told in first-person form, it contains passages that explore a wide range of the narrator’s thoughts, memories, emotions, and experiences. But it also tells a gripping story full of twists and surprises.
The book follows the growth of two characters: Foremost, I would say, comes the psychological and philosophical growth of Jack Burden, the narrator. Secondarily, we witness the political rise and demise of Willie Talos, a character modeled on Louisiana governor and US senator, Huey Long. I suspect many readers mistake Talos for the central figure, but I think his story and character has the limited depth of a public figure, whereas Jack’s character reveals new layers every few pages, all the way to the end.
Jack Burden starts his nonacademic career as a newspaper reporter, but later becomes the trusted right-hand man of Willie Talos. We learn in an extended flashback that Jack had abandoned work on his doctoral dissertation in history when he reached a point where he felt he couldn’t continue. He had hoped to write the biography of Cass Mastern, a distant relative, and found himself unable to understand Cass’s motivation. He didn’t feel he could make sense of his actions without understanding the man. But since he already had all the documentation he would ever have, he stopped, dropped out of the program, and got a job as a reporter. While this long backstory may seem unnecessary to the story, it establishes that Jack has an important research skill for when Willie tells him to dig up dirt on a political foe. But I think it establishes one more thing. Writing a doctoral dissertation says a lot about someone’s character; so does not finishing one.
From the first page, Jack’s narrative voice puzzled me. On the one hand, he cracks jokes and talks like he just stepped out of a film noir. On the other hand, he shows a sensitivity worthy of America’s first official poet laureate. I believe this and a few other peculiarities of the narrative voice make sense by the end of the novel, when we understand what Jack has made of his life and character between the time of the novel’s events and the time of his setting them down on paper, as an eyewitness to history.
Most of Jack’s poetic flights are too long to quote, but I’d like to share a short passage, just to get you a sense of the tone. A lowlife thug, “Tiny” Duffy, has just made a remark about Willie’s wife.
… and he winked ponderously with his left eye. You might call it a wink, that is. One second you were looking into that somewhat inflamed, watery, and beclouded window of Mr. Duffy’s soul, and the next you observed the puffy and slightly granulated membrane descend with deliberate emphasis, then twitch upward in its well-lubricated track. I have witnessed the event many times in my career, and have never failed to be visited by the old fascination. It is the same fascination you feel when you go to the aquarium and spy on the obscenely perfect organization of the octopus pulsing in its repose.
All it takes is one wink to tell us all we need to know about Mr. Duffy’s character—but oh, what a wink.
Some critics have complained about the novel’s unevenness, but I disagree. I wondered after the first chapter if Warren could maintain the same level of poetic intensity he establishes early on. So I kept expecting him to take short cuts or sacrifice the poetry. I didn’t detect any compromises, but I did notice that the pace picked up toward the end and the humor evaporated. That might seem like unevenness to some people, but I thought it just reflected the character development taking place in Jack.
In Jack Burden’s world, things seldom turn out the way you expect. Even if you start down a familiar-looking path, the characters still have to choose the forks they take. For example, early in the novel, in a flashback to Prohibition times when Willie and Duffy first meet in the back room of Slade’s pool hall, Duffy tries to intimidate Willie into drinking a beer. Willie has no political clout at this time of his life, and seldom drinks. He declines the offer, and asks for an orange soda instead. Duffy treats Willie’s refusal as defiance and tells Slade to bring him a beer anyway. You might expect Willie either to give in or accept it without drinking. Instead, Slade takes control and says he only serves beer to people who want it, intervening in a way that inserts his own will, averting a possible conflict. This twist means little in terms of the plot. But it introduces an important theme: people make choices, some courageous and some cowardly, but choices have consequences. Years later, as governor, Willie rewards Slade with a liquor license immediately upon the repeal of Prohibition. Jack’s desperate resistance to the consequences of his own choices and his eventual acceptance of them defines the trajectory of his moral growth.
As for Willie, he plays the role of a cynical and ruthless political boss, but he keeps surprising the reader by revealing glimpses of an underlying integrity. He never makes up lies about his enemies, for example. He never resorts to violence either, say by vandalizing an opponent’s home or office. He never threatens physical harm. And while he seeks more and more power, his motivation lies elsewhere. He sees political power as a means, not as an end in itself. This makes him into a more complex character than I expected. In fact, from beginning to end, he pursues the greater good. His political career starts when, as a county treasurer, he objects to the choice of a contractor to build a school. The governor rejects the lowest bidder and contracts with a crook at a higher price, who uses faulty materials. When a poorly made fire escape later collapses, killing some children, the locals all remember how Willie Talos had tried to warn them. Years later, as governor himself and at the height of his career, he latches onto the idea of building a hospital, something that actually makes a difference to the well being of the citizens. He refuses to accept bribes or play favorites with the construction, and he chooses an enemy, Dr. Adam Stanton, the best medical doctor around, to set up and run the hospital. Willie wins Stanton over by giving him a free hand with a large budget with no strings attached. He wants to build a hospital simply because he wants to do good. While clearly the most cynical person in the novel, he also has a nobility that most of the other characters lack—a nobility that somehow emerges from realpolitik. In the following key passage, he explains himself to the suspicious Dr. Stanton. He ridicules another rich politician who left politics because he wouldn’t get his hands dirty. Willie accuses him of wanting something that all his wealth couldn’t buy.
“Goodness. Yeah, just plain simple goodness. Well, you can’t inherit that from anybody. You got to make it, Doc. If you want it. And you got to make it out of badness. Badness. And you know why, Doc? […] Because there isn’t anything else to make it out of.”
Willie makes goodness out of badness not by lying and cheating, but by blackmailing people, using their own wrongdoing as leverage. No one has the virtues they pretend to have or the moral purity the public demands of them. Willie knows that no matter how squeaky clean someone may look, one just has to dig deep enough to find the dirt. “Man is conceived in sin and born in corruption and he passeth from the stink of the didie to the stench of the shroud.” In Willie’s case, this cynical view of humanity translates into utilitarianism rather than nihilism, and that makes him much more than a stereotypical corrupt Southern politician.
I’ve gone on too long and have left out an enormous amount. You can find more plot details in one of the many summaries out there. But trust me, a lot happens and I’ve only shared my big-picture impressions without dropping any real spoilers. But I do want to say more in defense of the edition as restored by Noel Polk.
Lambert Davis, one of the editors at Harcourt, wanted Warren to change Willie’s last name from Talos to something else. Polk quotes from a letter that Davis sent to Warren.
This was the feeling, generally expressed, that Talos was not the right sort of name for the character. It presents an ambiguity of pronunciation, and in addition carries a foreign flavor that suggests a different background for the man than is actually the case. I recognize some metaphorical overtones in the word Talos that may be important to you, but I think this criticism of the name has some point on the practical level. The book might gain by a name of less ambiguous pronunciation, and one that suggests more definitely an American origin.
Someone or other came up with the name Stark, not American, but German, and, as Polk puts it, “what better name for a dictator, in 1946, than a German one?” Stark may work at one level, but I have to say I resent Davis’s breezy dismissal of “some metaphorical overtones” that “may be important” to Warren in order to make Willie’s name easier on the reader. Consider some of the following metaphorical overtones. In Roman mythology, Talos protects the island of Crete from pirates or invaders. Made of bronze and therefore almost invulnerable, he has but one weakness: a vein on his ankle. When Medea and Jason return with the golden fleece, Medea casts a magic spell and Talos accidentally injures himself so that the ichor drains from his body like sap from a tree. Another overtone: In Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, a man of iron, Talus, dispenses justice without mercy. And another: The name comes from the Latin word, ”talus,” meaning ankle, hence the medical name for the ankle bone: the “talus bone.” And finally, you don’t have to know any mythology or anatomy for the name Talos to suggest a raptor’s talon. Now, I don’t go in much for interpretation, but when a two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize for poetry picks a meaning-rich name for a central figure in his novel, what the hell gives an editor the right to mess around with it?
Polk offers several other examples of subtle and not-so-subtle changes Davis made or suggested Warren make to the original typescript. I found Polk’s argument to be persuasive enough to convince me of the superiority of the restored version over the publisher’s version, even though I haven’t compared the two.
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I apologize for taking so long to get this reflection posted. Robert Penn Warren’s masterpiece took more concentration than I expected, and I also did a bit of traveling. I think I’ll do some shorter, less demanding works for this week and next. How about starting with Shakespeare’s pastoral comedy, As You Like It?
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Works mentioned in this reflection
All the King’s Men, by Robert Penn Warren
All the King’s Men: Restored Edition, by Robert Penn Warren, restored by Noel Polk
The Faerie Queene, by Edmund Spenser
As You Like It, by William Shakespeare