‘All the King’s Men,’ Now 70, Has a Touch of 2016
The 100 best novels / No 67 / All the King’s Men by Robert Penn Warren (1946)By Dwight Garner
April 11, 2016
“Southern political personalities, like sweet corn, travel badly,” the journalist A. J. Liebling wrote. “They lose flavor with every hundred yards away from the patch.”
Liebling was talking about Huey Pierce Long, Louisiana’s governor from 1928 to 1932. A fiery populist, a devotee of white linen suits and ruthless politics, Long was also that state’s senator from 1932 until he was assassinated in Baton Rouge in 1935, at 42.
Like some groceries, Long may have traveled poorly. Visiting New York City, he seemed like a rube to reporters. Yet in his afterlife, Long has traveled far and traveled quite well. He lingers in a corner of the national imagination, especially in this strange election year, like the shadow of a crow’s wing across a sunny day.
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Photo by Ed Clark |
Long lives most expansively in Robert Penn Warren’s novel “All the King’s Men” (1946), an epic that turns a youthful 70 this year. The novel is based loosely on Long’s life and times, and by wide consensus, it’s America’s essential political novel — less funny but more sweeping than “Primary Colors” (1996), by Joe Klein, and less wonky but more sensitive than “Advise and Consent” (1959), by Allen Drury, to name two contenders.
I reread “All the King’s Men” recently, in the wake of the Ohio and Florida primaries. It remains a salty, living thing. There’s no need for literary or political pundits to bring in the defibrillators. It is also eerily prescient, in its portrait of the rise of a demagogue, about some of the dark uses to which language has been put in this year’s election.
“All the King’s Men,” which won a Pulitzer Prize in 1947, details the rise and governorship of a Long-like politician named Willie Stark. (A revised edition of the novel calls him Willie Talos, Penn Warren’s name for the character before he was persuaded to change it. I’m going to stick with Stark.) It’s told from the perspective of Jack Burden, a former political reporter who is Stark’s conflicted right-hand man — his Doug Stamper, if you watch “House of Cards.”
Burden’s crucial observation, early in the novel, is that Stark needs to stop droning about policy in his speeches and start stirring up the animals, as H. L. Mencken once put it. Here’s Burden advising Stark after a speech that has flopped:
“Just stir ’em up, it doesn’t matter how or why, and they’ll love you and come back for more. Pinch ’em in the soft place. They aren’t alive, most of ’em, and haven’t been alive for 20 years. Hell, their wives have lost their teeth and their shape, and likker won’t set on their stomachs, and they don’t believe in God, so it’s up to you to give ’em something to stir ’em up and 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 becomes a belter. He learns to stand on a podium, refer to himself as a redneck (“like you all, if you please”) and intone: “Look at your pants. Have they got holes in the knee? Listen to your belly.” He says: “Look at your kids. Are they growing up ignorant as you and dirt because there isn’t any school for them?” He stirs class resentments; the crowds are mesmerized.
There was some Donald J. Trump in Long’s anti-establishment, outsider persona and his knack for free-range invective. Yet the comparisons between Huey Long/Willie Stark and Mr. Trump can be stretched only so far. Long was a Democrat, for one thing. He did not grow up wealthy and was not a businessman. As a lawyer, he bragged that he never took a case against a poor man.
Long’s big issues were essentially liberal ones: health care, infrastructure, schools. He understood policy. He was among the rare politicians to attack Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal from the left. He built his coalition by making poor whites and poor blacks realize that they had the same problems.
There was no belt he was unwilling to hit below. He had a paranoid style of attack. Long relied on threats and insults. There was an ozone stink of violence at his rallies; hecklers were dealt with severely.
Long trampled upon Louisiana’s old-boy political network in the same manner that Mr. Trump, and, to some degree, Ted Cruz, have flattened and baffled the Republican Party’s establishment.
In “All the King’s Men” — the title comes from the nursery rhyme “Humpty Dumpty” — there’s a remarkable scene in which Stark drives to a judge’s house late at night to confront him for endorsing another candidate. It’s a scene that speaks to this novel’s obsession with social class.
The judge won’t offer him a drink, so Stark takes one. “There’s lots of things you never get, Judge,” he remarks, “if you wait until you are asked.” He adds, “That is why I am not a gentleman.”
“All the King’s Men” is a long novel and, like an accordion, it’s got a bit of wheeze, especially in its subplots. But like an accordion, too, it makes powerful and sometimes appealingly demented sound, unique to Louisiana.
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| Robert Penn Warren |
Long’s nickname was the Kingfish. Randy Newman, in his indelible song “Kingfish,” gets at some of his folksy, if authoritarian, appeal:
Everybody gather ’round
Loosen up your suspenders
Hunker down on the ground
I’m a cracker
And you are too
But don’t I take good care of you
“All the King’s Men” is a powerfully bleak novel; many lives are ruined over the course of it. Burden is a student of ruin, a poet of it. “There is a kind of snobbery of failure,” he thinks. “It’s a club, it’s the old school, it’s Skull and Bones.” Stark’s failures are on a grander moral scale.
His political promise, his inborn need to help people like himself, curdles. He becomes drunk with power; ends justify any means. It’s an old story that Penn Warren makes sickening and fresh. When Stark eliminates one foe, he delivers a line that sends an icy arrow across the decades to land in the reader’s back: “I fixed him so his unborn great-grandchild will wet their pants on this anniversary and not know why.”
“All the King’s Men” is a sophisticated and even sensual novel about the breakdown of a kind of moral order. It’s about the breaking of things that — as the nursery rhyme goes — can’t be put back together again.
Correction:
A Critic’s Notebook article on Tuesday about Robert Penn Warren’s novel “All the King’s Men,” which was published 70 years ago, misspelled the given name of the author of another novel about politics, “Advise and Consent,” to which it was compared. He was Allen Drury, not Alan.
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