All the King's Men (79 page)

A few miles away, there was the University, where students were like students anywhere in the country in the big state universities, except for the extraordinary number of pretty girls and the preternatural blankness of the gladiators who were housed beneath the stadium to have their reflexes honed, their diet supervised, and through the efforts of tutors – their heads crammed with just enough of whatever mash was required (I never found out) to get them past their minimal examinations. Among the students there sometimes appeared, too, that awkward boy from the depth of ‘Cajun country or from some hard-scrabble farm in some parish like Winn, with burning ambition and frightening energy and a thirst for learning; and his presence there, you reminded yourself, with whatever complication of irony seemed necessary at the moment, was due to Huey, and to Huey alone. For, as I have said, the “better element” had done next to nothing to get that boy out of the grim despair of his ignorance.

Conversation in Louisiana always came back to the myth of Long, to politics; and to talk politics is to talk about power. So conversation turned, by implication at least, on the question of power and ethics, of power and justification, of means and ends, of “historical costs.” The big words were not often used, certainly not by the tellers of the tales, but the concepts lurked even behind the most ungrammatical folktale. The tales were shot through with philosophy.

The tales were shot, too, with folk humor, and the ethical ambiguity of folk humor. The tales, like the politic conversations, were shot through, too, with violence – or rather, with hints of the possibility of violence. There was a hint of revolutionary desperation – often synthetically induced. In Louisiana, in ‘34 and ‘35, it took nothing to start a rumor of violence. There was going to be, you might hear, a “battle” at the airport at Baton Rouge. A young filling-station operator would proudly display his sawed-off automatic shotgun – I forget which “side” he was on, but I remember his fingers caressing the polished walnut of the stock. Long held a public investigation of an alleged conspiracy against his life, and you heard that the next day the arrests would be made. You heard that there was going to be a march on the Capitol – but not by whom or for what. And when Long stirred abroad he moved flanked by his armed guards.

Melodrama was the breath of life. There had been melodrama in the life I had known in Tennessee, but with a difference: in Tennessee the melodrama seemed to be different from the stuff of life, something superimposed upon life, but in Louisiana people lived melodrama – seemed to live, in fact, for t, for the strange combination of philosophy, humor, and violence. Life was a tale that you happened to be living – and that “Huey” happened to be living grandly before your eyes. And all the while I was reading Shakespeare and Jacobean tragedy, Dante and Machiavelli and Guicciardini, William James and American history – and all that I was reading seemed to come alive, in shadowy distortions and sudden clarities, in what I saw around me.

How directly did I try to transpose into fiction Huey P. Long and his world? The question answers itself in a single fact. The first version of my story was a verse drama; and the first serious writing began, in 1938, in the shade of an olive tree by a wheat field near Perugia. In other words, if you are sitting under an olive tree in Umbria and are writing a verse drama, the chances are that you are concerned more with the myth than with the fact, more with the symbolic than with the actual. And so it was. It could not, after all, have been otherwise, for the strict, literal sense, I had, as I have said, no idea what the then deceased Long had bee. What I knew was the “Huey” of the myth, and that was what I had taken with me to Mussolini’s Italy, where the bully-boys wore black shirts and gave a funny salute, and the longer I stayed there the less tidy, in other ways too, seemed the popular parallel between “Huey” and “Musso.”

I had no way of knowing what had ever gone on in the privacy of the heart of Senator Long. Now I could only hope, ambitiously, to know something of the heart of the Governor Talos of my play
Proud Flesh
_. For Talos was the first version of my later Willie Stark, and the fact that I drew the name from the “iron groom” who, in murderous blankness, serves the Knight of Justice in Spenser’s
Faerie Queene
_ should indicate something of the line of thought and feeling that led up to that version and persisted, with modulations, into the novel.

In the novel Talos was to become Stark and
Proud Flesh
_ (with its double meaning in the adjective) would become
All the King’s Men
_. Many things, some merely technical, led to this transformation, but a very important one was the fact that I felt the play too constricted to provide the human context that made possible the rise of the man of power: the man of power must fill, in some deep and secret way, some blankness in the people of this world. The change to the novel has some bearing, too, on the question of the ratio of fact to fiction. When, in 1943, I began the version that is more realistic, discursive, and documentary in method (though not in spirit) than the play, I had long since left Louisiana and the literal world in which the story had its roots. By now the literal world was only a memory, and therefore was ready to be absorbed more freely into the act of imagination. Even the old man by the roadside – the hitchhiker I had picked up on the way down to Baton Rouge to take my job – was ready to enter the story: he would become the hitchhiker whom Jack Burden picks up returning from Long Beach, California, the old man with the twitch in his face that gives Jack the idea of the Great Twitch. But my old Louisiana hitchhiker had no twitch in his face. Nor had I been Jack Burden.

I had not been Jack Burden except in so far as you have to try to “be” whatever you are trying to create. And in that sense, I was also Adam Stanton, and Willie Stark, and Sadie Burke, and Sugar Boy, and all the rest. And this brings me to my last notion. However important for my novel was the protracted dialectic between “Huey” on the one side, and me on the other, it was far less important, in the end, than that deeper and darker dialectic for which the images and actions of a novel are the only language. And however important was my acquaintance with Louisiana, that was far less important than my acquaintance with another country: for any novel, good or bad, must try, willy-nilly, to report the history, sociology and politics of a country even more fantastic than was Louisiana under the consulship of Huey.

As a sort of footnote, I may remark that when
All the King’s Men
_ first appeared in England, a section was omitted. That section – Chapter Four in the American version, and in this one – concerns a character of the time of the American Civil War; the original English publisher had decided that the subject would not interest his public. The omission was made with me consent, but I always felt that the section is central to the novel. When, in writing the book, I had come to the end of Chapter Three, I could not go on. I was afraid that my story would thin out into a narrative of mere intrigue, something like political shenanigans in a banana republic. I was afraid, too, that the narrator would become a mere narrator, nothing more than a technical convenience with no relation to the action. In other words, to put it into a crude shorthand, I felt that the general story would lack any deep moral dimension, and the narrator any deep psychological dimension.

So I struck on the notion of making Jack Burden, my narrator, a candidate for the Ph. D. in American history, doing a dissertation based on family papers. The character in the family papers – Cass Mastern by name – had, in his personal life and in the public event of the Civil War, come into a moral and psychological crisis. Cass had, however, finally found meaning in his life, and death, by trying to face the crisis. Burden, at the moment unable to find meaning in his own life, simply flees from the reproach implicit in the materials of the dissertation. So he is prepared, for the time being anyway, to accept another version of the world, a sort of mirror-image of that inhabited by Cass Mastern; he takes refuge in the one offered by Willie Stark.

But that is not the end of the story.

Robert Penn Warren

West Wardsboro, Vermont

July 14, 1973