I first encountered Robert Penn Warren through reading his co-authored textbooks An Approach to Literature and Understanding Poetry. Around the time I went off to college, I would peruse literary and cultural magazines like The Atlantic, Harpers, The New Republic, The New Yorker and others. Some of his poems appeared in the pages of these publications. I can't pretend I remember any lines from those early poems, but the craft stood out. Penn Warren wrote elegantly and lyrically as you would expect from someone who had also published textbooks on literature and poetry.
I remember liking his poetry enough to purchase his New and Selected Poems, 1923-1985 in my senior year of high school. Though I knew him as primarily a poet, Robert Penn Warren has to be considered one of America's premier "man of letters" for the 20th century. A year after the publication of his selected poems book, he was named the first poet laureate of the United States.
Even as I continued to read his poetry, I knew he had also written a novel titled All the King's Men published in 1946. It won the Pulitzer Prize the next year, one of three Pulitzer Prizes Penn Warren received. The other two were for his poetry. I learned too that Penn Warren was a part of the Fugitives, a group of southern poets associated with Vanderbilt University. Penn Warren later helped form The Southern Agrarians who compiled a book of essays titled I'll Take My Stand published in 1930. This volume defended a "southern way of life" against Northern critiques. A work of its time, it defended racial segregation and emphasized the agrarian lifestyle of the South. Penn Warren later renounced his segregationist views and conducted numerous interviews with writers and civil rights activists published as Who Speaks for the Negro? in 1965.
Despite all these impressive achievements, All the King's Men remains his best-known work. Though fictional, it is based on the life and career of Louisiana politician Huey P. Long who had served Louisiana as governor and senator until his assassination in 1935. Though a Democrat, Long criticized the New Deal program of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt for not going far enough to help the poor suffering in the Depression. As an alternative to the New Deal, Long promoted Share Our Wealth, which would have included income distribution and a tax on the rich. A year after his Share Our Wealth program launched, which included Share Our Wealth clubs throughout the United States, Long died from a gunshot wound. The protagonist of Warren's novel Willie Stark. A 2002 edition now considered to be the "restored edition" changes the character's name to Willie Talos, a name used by Penn Warren in manuscripts.
Stark/Talos is loosely based on Huey Long who like the protagonist of the novel served as governor. Jack Burden, a political reporter, narrates the novel. Burden becomes a trusted advisor to Stark in the course of the novel. Stylistically, this literary structure reminds me of the role of Nick Carraway in The Great Gatsby.
At 650 pages, this is not a light read, but despite the length, I found it compelling. Many reviewers have dubbed this book the best novel written about American politics. Apparently, Penn Warren has said he did not intend to write a political novel, but I would agree it is a classic study of American politics set in an era where it seemed possible for a single politician to have the type of influence Stark does. At the same time, the novel is a case study in the life of man and the decisions and compromises many politicians make. The 19th century historian and politician, Lord Acton, famously wrote "Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely." However, most of us do not know the rest of the quote: Great men are almost always bad men, even when they exercise influence and not authority: still more when you superadd the tendency or the certainty of corruption by authority. There is no worse heresy than that the office sanctifies the holder of it." In other words, simply being a President or a Pope, (Acton was Catholic) does not make you a good or admirable individual.
Penn Warren's prose has a rhythm and energy that expertly captures the frenzied circus of politics. Stark's character is referred to as "the Boss" throughout the novel. Here is a scene where the narrator describes Tom Stark, Willie's son.
"If bottle and bbed didn't manage to slow down too soon something inside that one hundred and eighty pounds of split-second, hair-trigger, Swiss-watch beautiful mechanism which was Tom Stark, the Boss's boy, the Sophomore Thunderbolt, Daddy's Darling, who stood that night in the middle of a hotel room, with a piece of court plaster across his nose and a cocky grin on his fine, clean, boyish face-for it was fine and clean and boyish- while all the hands of Papa's pals pawed at him and beat his shoulders, while Tiny Duffy slapped him on the shoulder, and Sadie Burke, who sat a little outside the general excitement in her own private fog of cigarette smoke and whisky fumes, a not entirely unambiguous expression on her riddled, handsome face, said, 'Yeah, Tom, somebody was telling me you played a football game tonight" (307).
I could not believe this was only one sentence, but as a poet well aware of the importance and utility of punctuation, Penn Warren creates a nearly palpable energy on the page. The novel has has been adapted for film twice. I could imagine a director giving us panoramic and dizzying camera angles here as Tom takes in all the attention given to him by the Boss' followers.
A strength of this novel is when Penn Warren uses a character's situation to tackle larger issues beyond the narrative. "Perhaps the only answer, I thought then, was that by the time we understand the pattern we are in, the definition we are making for ourselves, it is too late to break out of the box. . . . Yet the definition we have made of ourselves is ourselves." (529) Or when he writes about what he terms "the theory of moral neutrality." Penn Warren writes, "Process is neither morally good nor morally bad. We may judge results but not process. The morally bad agent may perform the deed which is good. The morally good agent may perform the deed which is bad. Maybe a man has to sell his soul to get power to do good" (593).
Passages like this support the greatness of Penn Warren's book and why so many readers consider it the quintessential book of American politics. However, the conclusion of the book is a series of scenes and meditation on love, family, and legacy. At this point of the novel, the story being told is Jack's story. Jack Burden stands in for us the readers who have our own hardships and struggles and who like Jack and his wife will have to "go into the convulsion of the world, out of history into history and the awful responsibility of time" (661).
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