Review: All the King's Men, by Robert Penn Warren

Don’t know how I’ve missed mentioning this, but I’ve plowed my way through Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men , and it absolutely blew me away. Brilliant, brilliant book.

Warren melds pitch-perfect descriptive language with deep-fried country-boy-isms to create an extremely distinctive style. Here’s a free-sample tray:

“…her own glance strayed about the room in that abstracted way a good housewife has of looking around to surprise a speck of dust in the act.”

“ ’I know you and the boss was like that.’ He held up two large, white, glistening episcopal fingers as in benediction.”

“Then the boss spied a fellow at the far end of the soda fountain, a tall, gaunt shanked, malarial, leather-faced side of jerked venison wearing jean pants and a brance of mustaches hanging off the kind of face you see in photographs of General Forrest’s cavalrymen…”

I mean, come on, how good is that! Right?

The story doesn’t disappoint either. He weaves links to the past into the story in rewarding, surprising ways. As I’ve mentioned before, this is a sure-fire way to win me over as a reader. He also makes use of something I’ll call the Literary Cosmic Boomerang. It’s not quite Karma, and not poetic justice. But one way or another, the unseen ramifications of a character’s actions come right back to kick him in the crotch and give the story new and deeper meanings. (And even though Willie Stark’s assassination by the same doctor who  just days before had operated on his son should have taken a private tale of corruption public, I can overlook that simple oversight.) I loved it.

There is, however, one chief complaint: The Cass Mastern side story. Our main character, Jack Burden, interrupts his main narrative thread tracing the rise and fall of a folksy southern political star, with a too-long, overly thorough side story of star-crossed lovers in the Civil War era. It was still well-written, and pretty compelling in and of itself, but I was antsy to get back to the main story, and saw little if any parrallels that would justify its inclusion in the book. And yeah, I’ve read the commentary that says the Cass Mastern line of research helps Jack see that every action will have implications and ripples we can’t control, but I just didn’t see the point. Warren and his editor were asleep at the switch on this one.

But it still won the Pulitzer, and it still deserved it. That’s how awesome the rest of the book is. Run, don’t walk…

H.L. Mencken Steps In It

In 1917, H.L.  Mencken published an essay about what he saw as the abject, cultural wasteland of the American South, titled “The Sahara of the Bozart-” Bozart being a low-brow play on the term ‘beaux-arts.’ You can read the whole thing here. Now, there are a whole host of things one could say about his wacky racial theories (Anglo-Saxon blood is apparently best, Celtic blood the worst, with Blacks and Frenchmen somewhere in the middle), but I’ll just pick out a few choice lines from the essay to give you the gist of his argument:

“Down there a poet is now almost as rare as an oboe-player, a dry-point etcher or a metaphysician. It is, indeed, amazing to contemplate so vast a vacuity.”

“There are single acres in Europe that house more first-rate men than all the states south of the Potomac;”

“Once you have counted James Branch Cabell (a lingering survivor of the ancient regime: a scarlet dragon-fly imbedded in opaque amber) you will not find a single Southern prose writer who can actually write.”

“There is a state (Georgia) with more than half the area of Italy and more population than either Denmark or Norway, and yet in thirty years it has not produced a single idea.”

He sure doesn’t pull any punches. But one of the chief risks of being an arrogant, condescending blowhard, is the possibility that the object of your scorn might just turn around and prove you to be an idiot.

As it turned out, the timing of Mencken’s essay coincided with a Southern literary renaissance that would make any region of the world envious. Writers like William Faulkner, Thomas Wolfe, Tennessee Williams, Robert Penn Warren, and Kathryn Anne Porter were already hard at work and would come to share 6 Pulitzers and a Nobel Prize between them. The “Fugitive” poets at Vanderbilt University were emerging at the same time. And this early group would inspire a follow-on generation of southern writers like Margaret Mitchell, Eudora Welty, Zora Neale Hurston, Flannery O’Connor, Carson McCullers, Walker Percy, William Styron, Harper Lee, Truman Capote and John Kennedy Toole. (Not too shabby, South!)

But speaking of tools, Mencken was no dummy. Rather than claiming he had been wrong when reprinting his famous essay, he simply prefaced it with this audacious claim: “there is reason to believe that my attack had something to do with that revival of Southern letters which followed in the middle 1920 's.”

I’m  not buying it, but well-played Mr. Mencken. Well-played.