All the King's Men

Last night I finished reading Robert Penn Warren's All The King's Men (the restored edition, based on Penn Warren's manuscripts housed at Yale's Beinecke Library). I'm not sure of all the differences, other than a changed first chapter and more prominently, the name of the Boss was originally Willie Talos, but was changed to Willie Stark for the published edition. In an earlier post I noted that Joyce Carol Oates basically called these changes sacrilege. I'm not sure if that's the case. Stark is a better name because it seems more "real." Talos doesn't sound like a name for someone from the Louisiana back country. Talos, does however, lend a mythic air to the story by hearkening back to the ancient Greeks. Not only was Talos a name given to the sun (that which gives life and which everything else revolves around), but it was also the name of a powerful bronze giant, who, you guessed it, had only one small weakness and it proved to be his undoing. At any rate, on to the book itself.

I went into reading this book thinking that it was a simple, well-written fictionalized account of the rise and fall of Louisiana political giant Huey Long. Turns out that's only one aspect of the book. Rather than being a political story, it's a character study; a story of personal relationships; a story of the power the past has over the present; all of which is set in the context of a political story. The narrator, Jack Burden, is the right-hand man of the Boss (Willie). Jack was a newspaper man and failed law and Ph.D. student who covered the Boss when he was just a scrupulously ethical small town bureaucrat. He enlists Burden's help (after being used as a pawn by the state's political machine) to become a political titan who uses graft, blackmail, intimidation, and bribes to accomplish his goals. Throughout most of the book, Burden is a very detached narrator, participating in events, but not really being "involved." Burden tries to keep his personal attachments to a minimum and is, in many instances, a first-rate jerk. But when you're inside Burden's head, you realize that he has a classic case of anomie, an alienated man without a real purpose in his life. I don't quite get it at this point, but I think that Burden's attraction to the Boss was that the Boss believed in something pure at one time. Jack seemed to want to go along for the ride and see where that turned out. Even though he tells you the Boss was a first-rate S.O.B., there was, at least at one time, something noble in his character.

Burden is a very well-chosen name for our narrator. He carries many burdens with him, primarily the burdens of history, particularly family history. In many ways, one could interpret the theme of the book as being "the sins of the fathers are visited upon the generations." Not only with Jack, but with other characters as well. Moreover, the book is really about how everyone we know (and often those we never knew) affects our lives. If you think of the intersection of lives as a spider web, it doesn't take much to imagine how plucking on one thread disturbs the entire web. Penn Warren takes the metaphor a step further by imagining a third dimension to the web, one that stretches back in history. And so it happens that ripples in the web that occurred long ago still resonate to the current day.

Until I got to the final quarter of the book, I was going to say that the writing in the book was some of the best I ever read, but that the story was just OK. Don't get me wrong, the writing is wonderful. Take this example:

"Thus the fact of his death was absorbed effortlessly into the life of the community, like a single tiny drop of stain dropped into a glass of clear water. It would spread outward and outward from the point of vindictive concentration, ravelling and thinning away, drawing away the central fact of the stain until nothing at all was visible."

It seems like there's great stuff like that on every page. One can really tell that poetry was Penn Warren's true vocation. That being said, the final quarter of the novel wraps the threads of the story together so well, at such a rapid pace, and in such unexpected ways, it raises the narrative from just OK to truly outstanding.

So far, the list is three for three...all should be, in my book, considered classics.