Leading Pulitzer Contender

All the King’s Men.
by Robert Penn Warren.
New York, Harcourt, Brace, 1946. 464 pp. $3.00.

This is the story of Willie Stark, a Huey Long type of governor in a Louisiana type of state, and of his intellectual gunman Jack Burden, who tells the story. Willie starts out as an Honest Abe Lincoln used by the politicians to split the vote; he discovers the fact, turns into a spellbinder, and later takes over the state. He becomes a typical Boss, surrounded by sycophants, brooking no opposition, having or being able to get the goods on anyone who stands in his way, a hard drinker and wencher, a despiser of all men as corrupt and weak; and Jack Burden, rootless and uncertain actor-observer, follows along, never sure whether Willie is god or devil.

For one reader, the book was dull and callow. The story is aimless until in the last three chapters it explodes into reckless Hitchcock, patched together out of indiscriminate violence and mechanical surprise. The characters are merely reiterated stock types: the good woman who bakes a cake in the midst of disorder, the cartoon politician, the high-minded Southern jurist and gentleman who reads the classics and drinks good Bourbon, the idealistic young doctor, and so on. . . . None of them comes alive. For most of the book, the style varies between the turgidly poetic and the flat hardboiled, the latter much like Hemingway and for the same reason—to hide the hero’s aching heart. Occasionally there is a flash of superb writing, but by and large the style is over-smart or high-flown or semi-hysterical. “I saw her small gloved hands clench the railing, and felt sorry for the railing.” “The faint mumble of traffic, like the ocean chewing its gums.” “Off yonder in the myrtle hedge a mocking-bird hysterically commented on the total beauty and justice of the universe.” This is a description of a prefrontal lobectomy: Dr. Stanton “did a job that would have made a Comanche brave look like a tyro with a scalping knife.” As for the novel’s formal but erratically-presented philosophy, it is underdeveloped and unconvincing and unrelated to the narrative, both in its first phase (that we are merely neural agents) and in its second phase (that we surely possess wills). The values of the book are never clear-cut; loose poetry substitutes for intellect. All the King’s Men can only be called a bad failure as a novel.

Nevertheless, its failure is the failure of a serious novel. Jack Burden, the narrator, surely engages one’s sympathies in some of his aspects. Here, one may say, is the lorn individual of our time. He cannot accept or reject his self-centered mother. His relationship with the unworldly weakling whom he thinks to be his father has also been emotionally unsatisfactory. He not only discovers his real, and admirable, father too late, but also—the twist of the knife!—causes his death. He cannot marry the woman he loves until she has thrown his universe into turmoil by becoming Willie Stark’s kept mistress, until horror has come upon horror and passion is almost spent, at the threshold of middle age. His relations with his first wife are solely sexual—and abhorrent to him. Jack never quite knows what he wants sex to be—but surely it must not be animal-like, somehow it must be tender and fine. Too, the ideals of youth must somehow not be lost. Jack feels a pervasive dullness and grayness. City people are degraded in soul. Country poor are voiceless and helpless. The municipalities, the counties, and the state are run by conscienceless, stupid, grasping politicians. Willie Stark, the one man who stands above all this, who moves the people like reeds in the wind, the strong man to whom Jack’s feelings are attached and could become more attached, dies before Jack has understood him or himself.

All the King’s Men is a serious attempt to set forth in the personality of its hero—in his constant frustration, in the complete lack of inner security that drives him to hitch on to the substitute father Willie Stark—a valid sensibility of our time, and through that sensibility, a valid image of our world. That, I suppose, is why the critics have given the novel such high marks. They have correctly identified the heart and mind that inform it as undeniably contemporary, and they have apparently considered that this novel represents the best that can be thought and done in American letters today. They may be right. The “I’s” of Nathanael West’s Miss Lonelyhearts and Edmund Wilson’s Memoirs of Hecate County also suggest that to think and feel today is automatically to be damned. These “I’s”—alike in being more-than-average serious, intelligent, observing, sensitive—are neurotics who suffer intensely from the modem world. They are not like the “I” of Juvenalian satire, who looks bitterly upon man’s messy kettle of fish; they are in the kettle themselves, and they know it.

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Seemingly, then, there could be two disparate judgments concerning the make-up of the narrator in Warren’s novel. On the one hand, it could be said that his ambiguity, confusion, and high emotionality turn the book into a kind of case history of delayed adolescence, and that a case history, as American critics in general have yet to learn, is not a novel. Furthermore, since a novel is a construct that always seems to demand a limited and clear moral viewpoint, it may also be said that Warren has written a confused book, because his own relationship to the narrator of the novel is never made clear: what is his attitude toward Jack Burden? Does he too surrender to Willie Stark? On the other hand, one could say in reply what could also be said about another seemingly bad but disturbing novel, Hemingway’s To Have and Have Not: Here is a hero who is sweating it out. He is neither careless nor sure. He sees a great deal and reacts deeply. He truly represents the contemporary ego. If art falsifies this ego, the less art it is.

This last seems true in principle. But I do not see why a truthful depiction of a modern Hamlet need necessarily be presented in bad prose, in a bad plot, and among hackneyed characters. Moreover, it is exceedingly debatable whether the particular neurotic patterns of Jack Burden’s personality are truly representative of the situation of man in our time. Jack’s inexplicable and hysterical refusal to have sexual relations with the woman he loves, romanticism castrating itself, seems to me a highly individual infantilism, and Jack’s final amoral and mystical approval of the American fascist Willie Stark—who brings almost no named objective good to his people, who does not even recognize the presence of Negroes in his state—is a total abnegation of manhood that cannot be regarded as inevitable in any terms: neither the modem world, nor Willie Stark’s state, nor Jack Burden’s character, requires it.