All the King's Men (78 page)

So by summer of this year, 1939, we shall have left Burden’s Landing.

We shall come back, no doubt, to walk down the Row and watch young people on the tennis courts by the clump of mimosas and walk down the beach by the bay, where the diving floats lift gently in the sun, and on out to the pine grove, where the needles thick on the ground will deaden the footfall so that we shall move among the trees as soundlessly as smoke. But that will be a long time from now, and soon now we shall go out of the house and go into the convulsion of the world, out of history into history and the awful responsibility of Time.

The End

Introduction to the 1974 English Edition
_

In August 1946, one of my novels,
All the King’s Men
_, was published, and since I had lived in Louisiana during the last phase of the regime of Huey P. Long, and since the hero of my novel is a politician who, like Long, gests himself gunned down in his capitol, it was widely surmised that my book was designed as a fictionalized biography of the Kingfish himself. The book was, in fact, declared by several reviewers to be an apologia for fascism.

After all these years I have little inclination to reopen old controversies about
All the King’s Men
_ – controversies which, certainly, could be of little interest to an English reader. But Long and the world he dominated provided the original stimulus for the writing of the novel, and did suggest some of the issues that emerge there. Furthermore, since Long and his world are so indigenously American, I should, perhaps, say something on that topic to the prospective English reader.

The life of Huey P. Long does not quite represent the classic American success story, but it is close enough to that to lend plausibility to the fiction he sedulously fostered. For example, though no born in the log in the log cabin mandatory for the myth, he was born in a log house – which, though commodious, could be conveniently for his political purposes. But Long was, indeed, reared in a thin-soiled back-country parish (as counties are called in Louisiana) where, even though by local standards his family was prosperous, he knew the sights and small of poverty; and he was clear-headed enough to sense early that, for all the respect the Long family might command in the parish of Winn, they would, in the regions dominated by the planter class, or among the rich bankers, merchants and lawyers of New Orleans, be regarded as well below middling.

But middling was not for Huey P. Long. From the beginning of his political career, which is to say from the time he left off short pants, he dramatically identified himself with the dispossessed, and to teach the dispossessed their own power became both his method and his mission. His motives were, no doubt, mixed. And it is doubtful that he understood them – or, even, gave them much analytical thought. He instinctively grasped the fact that for him the low road would be the high road.

At the age of twenty-one, Huey entered upon his mission. He had, he was later to say, come down the steps of the courthouse where he had stood before the Supreme Court of Louisiana to be formally to the bar, “running for office.” He had had a minimal education – bad schooling in the town of Winnfield, one year at the University of Oklahoma, and one year, of the three-year course, in the Law School of Tulane University in New Orleans. But from childhood, like Lincoln, Mark Twain, and other notable American autodidacts, he had read whatever books he could lay hand to in his unbookish world, and he never forgot anything he read and never failed to reflect on it. He knew the Bible well – as the myth requires – Shakespeare. A favorite play was, in fact,
Julius Caesar
_. Along with the novels of Balzac, Scott, Hugo, Dickens and Cooper, he read the autobiography of that perfect egotist Cellini, and biographies of Napoleon and, again, Caesar. Beyond books, he had studied human nature on the streets of the little courthouse town of Winnfield, and in the hard school of door-to-door selling (as a boy he boasted that he could sell anything to anybody).

Now, as a man, he was brash to a high degree, boiling with energy and boundless ambition, with his sights already set on noting else that the White House. He knew law, enough at least to make him rich at an early age, not merely what he had gleaned from the scattering of courses at Tulane, but all that his steel-trap mind seized in a year of ferociously self-disciplined cramming with time out for little beyond eating and sleeping. He was a wit, a deliberate vulgarian, a crusader and a redeemer, an orator capable of high style or low, a philosopher of politics, and an amoral schemer. He was, in short, a creature of contradictions, but every item fell into its logical place in his manic drive toward power. He was the perfect political animal.

The world of Louisiana was the perfect place for the perfect political animal. Here, in the “banana republic of the United States,” as it has been termed, political maneuvering was regarded as a sporting event, and even the politician steeped in corruption might be regarded, he had humor and style, as more of a folk hero than a public menace. At the same time, in the upper reaches of society, politics presented a façade of respectability, for the real power, for many generations, had rested in the hands of a tight oligarchy of rich and sometimes well-born, and even well-meaning, planters, merchants and corporation lawyers. The state was their fief, lock, stock and barrel, and by divine dispensation. Roads were foul, schools farcical, illiteracy a national scandal, per capita income abysmal and social services nonexistent, but the oligarchs had always been able to buy off or blunt the occasional demagogue or reformer who sought to exploit, or to remedy, the situation.

Huey Pierce Long was not, however, a mere demagogue or a mere reformer. He saw the world of Louisiana steadily and saw it whole, and he saw it in the harsh light of the immediacy. He was without illusion or sentiment. He wasted no time on the standard demagogic appeals to the Lost Cause, the dogma of White Supremacy, or the sanctity of Southern Womanhood. He had even less time for the rhetoric of the reformer who put his trust on the goodness of human nature or the efficacy of unassisted virtue. The role of the prophet unarmed never held any attraction for him.

The oligarchs of Louisiana were the natural prey of the young man who came down the courthouse steps running for office. They, for all their experience of power, were the dupes of illusion: they believed in all the big words, old ideas and rituals of their world, and, most fatally of all, believed that their world would never change. They could not see a fact before the face, the main fact not visible to their bemused gaze being the one-gallus, wool-hat, scrabbled farmer sitting on the doorstep of his cant-wise shack with a rusted-down barbed-wired fence separating his bare yard from a road hock-deep in dust or mud, according to the season.

So by 1928, Huey was Governor, and was beginning to build his roads, free bridges, schools, hospitals and universities, and to establish various social services. By 1932, he was United States Senator. By 1935, by methods that would not always bear legal or moral scrutiny, he had liquidated all serious opposition in Louisiana; had centralized, to a degree never paralleled in ant state, all power in, for all practical purposes, his own hands, executive, legislative and judicial; had gained a reputation that, on the mere rumor of a speech by Huey, would pack the galleries of the Senate Chamber of the national capitol; and had, by his charisma and radical economic program, made himself the only figure that Franklin Delano Roosevelt, himself no mean or compunction-bound operator, feared in the impending presidential election of 1936. By September 8, 1935, in the marble hall of the skyscraper capitol he had built in Baton Rouge, he was shot down by an assassin. By September 10, he was dead.

There were two versions of the dying man’s last words. The first version: “What will my poor boys at L. S. U. [the Louisiana State University] do without me?” The second, and more generally accepted version: “God, don’t let me die. I have so much to do.” One wonders what set of sounds could have reasonably suggested both interpretations. The only thing that the two interpretations have in common has no relation to linguistic and rhythmical questions; it is the implication that the speaker was dying as a martyr to his humanitarian ideals.

Long may have been such a martyr. That is, he may have been, as T. Harry Williams put it in the inaugural address of his Harmsworth Professorship at Oxford, a latter-day manifestation of the old American Populism. But there was, too, the ruthless drive toward centralized power and contempt for the democratic process, and the atmosphere of violence that hung over his career and reached climax in the hall of his capitol.

The definition of the nature of Huey Pierce Long, is, however, far from the concern of my novel, and even today I have not the ghost of a notion of what he, in truth, was. What caught my eye, and imagination, was the myth that I saw growing before my eyes. But when, in 1934, I went to Louisiana to live, I did not even know about the myth. I met the myth on the road there.

I was going there because, in the midst of the Depression, Huey’s University, at Baton Rouge, was the only one in the country that was hiring, and not firing, young assistant professors. So I drove down from Tennessee, across the state of Mississippi, crossed the river by ferry at Greenville (there, I think), and was in North Louisiana. Along the way I picked up a hitchhiker – a country man, the kind you call a red-neck or a wool-hat, aging, aimless, nondescript, beat up by life and hard times and bad luck, clearly tooth-broke and probably gut-shot, standing beside the road in an attitude that spoke of infinite patience and considerably fortitude, holding a parcel in his hand, the parcel wrapped in old newspaper and tied with binder-twine, waiting for some car to come along. He was, though at the moment I did not sense it, a mythological figure.

He was the god on the battlement, dimly perceived above the darkling tumult and steaming carnage of the political struggle. He was a voice, a portent, and a natural force like the Mississippi river getting set to bust a levee. Long before the Fascist March on Rome, Norman Douglas, meditating on Naples, had predicted that the fetid slums of Europe would make possible the “inspired idiot.” His predictive diagnosis of the origins of fascism – and of communism – may be incomplete, but it is certain that the rutted back roads and slab-side shacks that had spawned my nameless old hitchhiker, with the twine-tied paper parcel in his hand, had made possible the rise of Huey. My nameless hitchhiker was, mythologically speaking, Long’s
sine qua non
_.

So it was appropriate that he should tell me the first episode of the many I was to hear of the myth that was “Huey.” The roads, he said, was shore better now. A man could git to market, he said. A man could jist git up and git, if’n a notion come on him. Did’n have to pay no toll at no bridge, neither. For Huey was a free-bridge man. So he went on to tell me how, standing on the river bank, by a toll bridge (what river and what bridge never clear), Huey had made the president of the company that owned the bridge a good, fair cash offer, and the man laughed at him. But, the old hitchhiker said, Huey did’n do nothing but leaning over and pick up a chunk of rock and throwed it off a-way, and asked did that president feller see whar the rock hit. The feller said yeah, he did. Wal, Huey said, next thing you see is gonna be a big new free bridge right whar that rock hit, and you, you son-of-a-bitch, are goen bankrupt a-ready and doan even know it.

There were a thousand tales, over the years, and some of them were, no doubt, literally true. But they were all true in the world of “Huey” – that world of myth, folklore, poetry, deprivation, rancor, and dimly envisaged hopes. That world had a strange, shifting, often ironical and sometimes irrelevant relation to the factual world of Senator Huey P. Long and his cold scrutiny of the calculus of power. The two worlds, we may hazard, merged only at the moment in September 1935, in the corridor of the capitol, when the little.32 slug bit meanly into the senatorial vitals.

There was another world, a factual world, made possible by the factual Long, though not inhabitated by him. It was a world that I, as an assistant professor, was to catch fleeting glimpses of, and ponder. It was the world of the parasites of power, a world of sick yearning for elegance and the sight of one’s name on the society page of a New Orleans newspaper; it was the world of the electric moon devised, it was alleged, to cast a romantic glow over the garden when the President of the University and his wife entertained their politicos and pseudo-socialities; it was a world of pretentiousness, of blood curdling struggles for preferment, of drool-jawed grab and arrogant criminality. It was a world all too suggestive, in its small-bore, provincial way, of the airs and aspirations that the newspapers attributed to the ex-champagne salesman Von Ribbentrop and to the inner circle of Edda Ciano’s friends.

As for Long, he was concerned with nothing but power, and though he surrounded himself with a motley crew on whose cupidity, vanity and yearnings he could play, he could once give a cynical warning too to a group of such hangers-on: if he died, he said, they would all go to the penitentiary. He was a prophet, and once the weight of his contempt, political savvy and discipline had been removed by the young Brutus in the capitol, the feverish little world of Governor’s Mansion, capitol, and even campus was to go on a spree of high-geared and low-geared looting and larceny, and plunge idiotically rampant toward the day when headlines would advertise the suicides, and the population of prisons, Federal and state, would receive some distinguished additions.

But this is getting ahead of the story. Meanwhile, there was, beside the lurid world, the world of ordinary to look at. There were the people who ran stores or sold insurance, or had a farm and tried to survive and pay their debts. There were – visible even from the new concrete speedway that Huey had slashed through the cypress swamps toward New Orleans – the palmetto-leaf and sheet-iron shacks of the moss-pickers, rising like some fungoid growth from a hummock under the great cypress knees, surrounded by scum-green water that never felt sunlight, back in that Freudianly contorted cypress gloom of cottonmouth moccasins big as the biceps of a prize-fighter, and owl calls, and the murderous metallic grind of insect life, and the smudge-fire at the hovel door, that door being nothing but a hole in a hovel wall with a piece of crocker sack hung over it.