I've now re-read Robert Penn Warren's All the King's Men (1946), a novel that I hadn't looked at since the early 1950s. Once again memory has played its tricks. My fifty-year-old afterimage does not correspond to reality. The book that I thought I remembered focused on Willie Stark (Huey Long) -- his ascent to power, his anti-establishment politics, his ruthlessness, and his assassination. Willie Stark does in fact appear in the book that I re-read, but he's not the central figure -- not even close. It's a novel about Jack Burden, press-secretary and chief blackmailer for Stark, and about the various spokes of Burden's wheel: his semi-aristocratic mother, his lawyer-turned-religious-fanatic father, the apparently upstanding judge who was his mother's lover, his childhood sweetheart Anne Stanton and her doctor brother, and also Sadie Burke, the Boss's secretary-girlfriend-political guru, and of course about Stark himself. Perhaps I misremembered because the Willie Stark parts of the novel are so strong, or perhaps my memory was filtered through the 1949 Robert Rossen film. Even half a century later, it's hard to read the book without seeing Broderick Crawford and Mercedes McCambridge in the mind's eye. (The film is now in the Netflix queue, so I'll revisit it shortly.)
It's a good book, well worth the prizes and the accolades. For my money, there could have been more politics and more Louisiana and less young-man-searching-for-his-identity. It's a big, as they say, "sprawling" novel; sometimes the sprawl works, but at other times -- the long flashback in which adolescent Jack woos adolescent Anne, for example -- an editor's scissors would have done the novel a world of good. The prose is mannered and affected and derivative: hunks of Thomas Wolfe, a dollop here and there of Faulkner, along with extra-large helpings of Chandler or Hammett. But it's nevertheless strong writing.
Melodramatic? Yes, indeed: murders and suicides, betrayals and reversals, mysteries and exposures. But at the core, a genuine curiosity about America and its southland. All the King's Men persuasively creates a culture in which genuine goodness is mere namby-pamby and in which ruthlessness has become reasonable. To succeed in such a world, Jack Burden and Willie Stark become as corrupt as the world around them.
The Huey Long material is excellent groundwork for a novel. Warren dresses it up with paragraph after paragraph of murky philosophizing. I confess that I didn't make the effort to absorb the meditations -- they seemed to be the usual southern stuff about religion and about the weight of history. I think that readers are supposed to learn that "if you could not accept the past and its burden there was no future, for without the one there cannot be the other, and ... if you could accept the past you might hope for the future, for only out of the past can you make the future." But if such a platitude is the best that Warren can do, it's best to skip the tepid philosophy and stick with the rich and abundant storytelling.
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