Sixty years after Robert Penn Warren's study of class and corruption in the American Deep South was first published, All the King's Men remains the definitive American political novel, writes Eileen Battersby
Politics is the art of subtle persuasion - according to the experts, or is it the cynics, or possibly both? But the real people know better. The real people know it's all about being told what you want to hear, what you think you want to hear, and that usually amounts to what you understand, not high flowing ideals. Ideals, you see, don't really amount to all that much. Promises are different. People like promises. It sounds simple but the formula has worked for many an aspiring demagogue - take the rabble-rousing orator Willie Stark in Robert Penn Warren's classic, All the King's Men.
Early in the novel, Stark, the redneck with a vision, has begun to sense that the crowds aren't all that interested in hearing him explain the minutiae of his tax programme. It falls to the narrator, world-weary reporter Jack Burden, to spell it out for him. "Make 'em feel alive again. Just for half an hour. That's what they come for. Tell 'em anything. But for Sweet Jesus' sake don't try to improve their minds."
Stark learns quickly. He discards the earnest, fact-laden prepared speeches and begins to address his fellow hicks as fellow hicks "just like me", and summons anger and exasperation, which they can understand. Stark wants to help, but most of all, he wants to get elected. In the pursuit of that goal he also discovers, regardless of his prim teetotal schoolteacher wife, exactly how much he likes alcohol, power, sex and the sound of his own voice booming out over a crowd.
Pretty soon it appears that a great deal of Stark's demonic energy is generated by his determination to at least look sober while "sweating and swaying and speechless" as his soaring theatrical rhetoric does the rest. As for righteous, though he is initially used by political factions, Stark is not stupid - he knows that no one believes in total goodness.
IT IS 60 YEARS since Robert Penn Warren's languidly powerful fatalistic tale, which runs to 660 pages, was published in the immediate aftermath of the second World War. It won the Pulitzer Prize and has remained the definitive American political novel. Within three years of publication, it had already inspired Robert Rossen's superb screen version. When the instant bestseller Primary Colors appeared in 1996, at the beginning of the US presidential campaign, its author may have been anonymous, but the models for the characters - the then sitting president, Bill Clinton, and his circle - were not. Nor was its source a mystery. Primary Colors even drew on Penn Warren's narrative technique, including, as many reviewers noted, a replication of the narrator's tone.
Southern politics operates within its own unique brand of Bible-bashing intrigue riven by the clash of old-style southern gentility and the equally savage redneck dimension. Penn Warren used both for his novel, and it is this cultural clash that provides much of the tension. Stark is the son of a farmer, and knows all about pouring hog swill. Jack Burden, the narrator, who eventually comes to understand Stark, has been raised in some privilege by a beautiful, manipulative mother, and is haunted by the memory of a privileged boyhood dominated by his idyllic friendship with the son and daughter of a highly respected judge. It is a dense novel about class and opposites - Stark the man of action versus Dr Adam Stanton the man of ideals. It is also often a philosophical study of corruption on many levels.
Robert Penn Warren, one of the "Fugitive" group of young southern poets and later one of the New Critics, was born in Guthrie, Kentucky, in 1905 and educated at Vanderbilt University, the University of California, Yale and Oxford. From an early age, he knew the US and certainly grasped the contrasting aspects of the southern states. He first emerged as a poet in the early 1930s and ultimately, in 1986, became the first Poet Laureate of the United States. A complete man of letters and winner of three Pulitzer Prizes, he was also revered as a teacher. More than anything though, Penn Warren, who died in 1989, was an intellectual and a fine critic. His sheer intellectualism often inhibited his creative writing, and he actively battled this. It was he who most effectively championed William Faulkner, whose work also influenced his own fiction.
PENN WARREN'S COLLABORATION with Cleanth Brooks resulted in Understanding Poetry in 1938, a seminal New Criticism textbook that revolutionised the teaching of poetry in US universities. Understanding Fiction followed in 1943. As a young academic he had taught at the Louisiana State University and witnessed for himself the reign of Huey "the Kingfish" Long, who had been governor of that vital Deep South oil state for four years. Long went on to become a senator, and planned to become president but was assassinated by the doctor son-in-law of a prominent judge in the Louisiana State House in 1935. Yet it was the complex nature of Louisiana politics that inspired Penn Warren as much as the ambivalent personality of Long, a genuine reformer turned crazed demagogue.
While in Italy on a Guggenheim Fellowship during 1939, Penn Warren, by then an established poet and published novelist, read Dante while working on a verse play, Proud Flesh, when the news of Germany's invasion of Poland broke. England declared war, as did France. Penn Warren began to consider Europe's fascists as he recalled the smaller world of Long's Louisiana. The play began to preoccupy him, but as it evolved and he made more changes, he realised the form was wrong and it was not going to work. The choruses became a narrator, and the play became his second novel - All the King's Men.
It is telling that his first novel, Night Rider (1939), is set in Kentucky and follows the career of Percy Munn, an idealist who joins the Night Riders, an illegal organisation formed to defeat a tobacco-buyers' ring that is threatening the small growers. It is a violent book. The Night Riders operate outside the law and Munn's role in it eventually destroys him.
Night Rider is as much a study of corruption as All the King's Men. Both novels reveal Penn Warren's philosophical preoccupation with the theme.
This philosophical quality is true of Burden's narrative, which alternates between the cryptic and the lyric. Here is a man who watches and remembers and, above all, thinks. He muses throughout the book, which opens in a long, almost leisurely recollection of driving to Mason City. "To get there you follow Highway 58, going north east out of the city, and it is a good highway and new. Or was new, that day we went up it. You look up the highway and it is straight for miles, coming at you, with the black line down the center coming at and at you, black and slick and tarry - shining against the white of the slab, and the heat dazzles up from the white slab so that only the black line is clear, coming at you with the whine of the tires, and if you don't quit staring at that line and don't take a few deep breaths and slap yourself hard on the back of the neck you'll hypnotize yourself and you'll come to just at the moment when the right front wheel hooks over into the black dirt shoulder off the slab . . . "
IF STARK IS the subject, the abiding consciousness is that of Jack Burden, who is to this novel what Nick Carraway is to The Great Gatsby. The main difference is that, whereas Carraway expresses himself with midwesterner economy, Burden draws on full southern eloquence in a meandering, time-shifting narrative. Admittedly, most of his locution is directed at himself and the reader, as the dialogue is sharp, often caustic, with the characters invariably edgy with each other.
Steven Zaillian's new, heavily choreographed film version, which falls lamentably short of Rossen's dark rendition, certainly reiterates that it is Burden's story, as much if not more so than Stark's - that, as Jack announces, "the story of Willie Stark and the story of Jack Burden are, in one sense, one story" - as the camera lingers endlessly on the ridiculous beauty of Jude Law's Jack Burden. Law's carnal languor conveys something of the disillusionment and disaffected romanticism that possess Burden. Frequently throughout the novel it seems that it is the abiding presence of Thomas Wolfe, particularly the Wolfe of Of Time and the River (1935), and not Faulkner, that most influences Penn Warren.
Stark in the novel moves inevitably closer to disaster, and not even the tragic accident that cripples his son Tom elevates Stark to the level of a Shakespearean hero. In the novel, and in this stagy new film version, Stark, for all his antics, is never as interesting as Burden. This is not to dismiss Sean Penn's animated interpretation of Stark as local redneck made dangerously powerful national redneck, but Burden the passive observer aware of the "enchantments of the past" is given dangerous powers of his own.
Almost from the beginning of the book, this history graduate with an unfinished PhD is the central conscience who finally finds a father only to destroy him.
As Jack informs Anne, "I am a student of history, don't you remember? And what we students of history always learn is that the human being is a very complicated contraption and that they are not good or bad but are good and bad and the good comes out of bad and the bad out of good, and the devil take the hindmost". Waiting outside Stark's paternal home, he hears someone, " . . . but I didn't look around. If I didn't look around it would not be true that somebody had opened the gate with the creaky hinges, and that is a wonderful principle for a man to get hold of. I had got hold of the principle out of a book when I was in college, and I had hung on to it for grim death. I owed my success in life to that principle. It had put me where I was. What you don't know don't hurt you, for it ain't real. They called that Idealism in my book I had when I was in college, and after I got hold of that principle I became an Idealist. I was a brass-bound Idealist in those days. If you are an Idealist it does not matter what you do or what goes on around you because it isn't real anyway."
Yet it is the real that continues to stalk the pages of Robert Penn Warren's cautionary and most famous book.
All the King's Men by Robert Penn Warren has been reissued by Penguin, at £9.99. The movie All the King's Men is on release