The 100 best novels: No 67 – All the King’s Men by Robert Penn Warren (1946)
A compelling story of personal and political corruption, set in the 1930s in the American south
Robert McCrum
Monday 29 December 2014
Robert Penn Warren was a southern poet and novelist, the only writer to win Pulitzer prizes for both his fiction and his poetry. In 1986, he was appointed America’s poet laureate.
All the King’s Men is one of American literature’s definitive political novels, as well as a profound study of human fallibility in politics. Set in the 1930s, it describes the dramatic rise to power, as state governor, of Willie Stark, a one-time radical attorney.
The novel is narrated by Jack Burden, a political reporter who comes to work as the governor’s most trusted aide. The passage of Stark’s career is interwoven with Burden’s life story and philosophical reflections. As he says: “This has been the story of Willie Stark, but it is my story, too. It is the story of a man who lived in the world, and to him the world looked one way for a long time and then it looked another and very different way.”
Stark, or “the Boss”, is shown becoming transformed from an idealistic lawyer into a powerful state governor, who quickly adopts all kinds of corruption to build a political machine rooted in graft and intimidation.
Stark’s politics earn him many enemies, but his constituents love his fiery, populist manner. The governor is surrounded by a typical southern political gallery of allies and thugs, as well as Burden, who had turned his back on his genteel upbringing to become Stark’s amanuensis.In the process, Burden betrays both his ideals and his career as a historian, and loses the love of his life, Anne Stanton, the daughter of a former state governor.
All the King’s Men has a complex narrative structure: events are described out of sequence to demonstrate the relationship between the past and the present. By showing how and why the characters developed as they did, and how events were shaped, the novel gives the reader the means by which to measure the characters and the events they shape.
Robert Penn Warren’s great novel is at once a political tragedy, a study of individual corruption, and a compelling southern drama with a long afterlife. In Primary Colors, by “Anonymous” (1996), homage is paid to its influence in the character of Governor Stanton.
A note on the text
All the King’s Men, the novel, began life in 1936 as a verse play entitled Proud Flesh. One of the characters in Proud Flesh was named Willie Talos, referring to the brutal character Talus in Spenser’s The Faerie Queene.
All the King’s Men was published in 1946, in a 464-page hardcover edition from the New York imprint Harcourt Brace & Company, and took its immediate title from the children’s nursery rhyme Humpty Dumpty. Among various critical responses, the New Republic praised it as a novel “in the tradition of many classics”, and compared it favourably with Moby-Dick (No 17 in this series).
The New York Times critic snootily observed that it wasn’t “a great novel or a completely finished work of art. It is as bumpy and uneven as a corduroy road, somewhat irresolute and confused in its approach to vital problems and not always convincing. Nevertheless, [it] is magnificently vital reading, a book so charged with dramatic tension it almost crackles with blue sparks; a book so drenched with fierce emotion, narrative pace and poetic imagery that its stature as a ‘readin’ book,’ as some of its characters would call it, dwarfs that of most current publications.”
Willie Stark was possibly inspired by the life of senator Huey Long, the aggressively populist governor of Louisiana and the state’s senator in the mid-1930s. Long was at the peak of his career when he was assassinated in 1935. A year earlier, Penn Warren had been teaching at Louisiana’s state university. Stark, like Long, is shot to death in the state capitol building. The title of the book was possibly inspired, in part, by Long’s populist motto, “Every man a king.”
Penn Warren, however, was always troubled by the identification of Willie Stark with Huey Long. He once complained that this had led to nonsensical and “contradictory interpretations of the novel”. He continued: “On one hand, there were those who took the thing to be a not-so-covert biography of, and apologia for, Senator Long, and the author to be not less than a base minion of the great man. There is really nothing to reply to this innocent boneheadedness or gospel-bit hysteria. As Louis Armstrong is reported to have said, there’s some folks that, if they don’t know, you can’t tell ’em...
“But on the other hand, there were those who took the thing to be a rousing declaration of democratic principles and a tract for the assassination of dictators. This view, though somewhat more congenial to my personal political views, was almost as wide of the mark. For better or worse, Willie Stark was not Huey Long… The difference between the person Huey P Long and the fictional Willie Stark may be indicated by the fact that in the verse play [Proud Flesh] the name of the politician was Talos — the name of the brutal, blank-eyed ‘iron groom’ of Spenser’s Fairie Queene, the pitiless servant of the knight of justice. My conception grew wider, but that element always remained, and Willie Stark remained, in one way, Willie Talos. In other words, Talos is the kind of doom that democracy may invite upon itself. The book, however, was never intended to be a book about politics. Politics merely provided the framework story in which the deeper concerns, whatever their final significance, might work themselves out.”
Half a century after the first printing of All the King’s Men, a southern academic, Noel Polk, undertook a “restored” edition. This version proved almost as controversial as the original. Writing in the New York Times, Joyce Carol Oates declared that “the 1946 text, for all its flaws, is superior to the ‘restored’ text, which primarily restores distracting stylistic tics and the self-consciously mythic name Willie Talos, which Warren had dropped in favour of the more plausible Willie Stark.
“That Robert Penn Warren, novelist, poet, essayist, and shrewd literary critic, not only approved the original 1946 edition of his most famous novel but oversaw numerous reprintings through the decades, including a special 1963 edition published by Time Inc with a preface by the author, and did not ‘restore’ any of the original manuscript, and did not resuscitate ‘Willie Talos,’ is the irrefutable argument that the 1946 edition is the one Warren would wish us to read.
“That Noel Polk should make a project of ‘restoring’ a text in this way, and that this text should be published to compete with the author-approved text, is unconscionable, unethical, and indefensible.”
For some critics, Robert Penn Warren remains hard to categorise (an otherwise comprehensive recent study of Anglo-American fiction, The Novel: A Biography by Michael Schmidt, almost ignores him), but his work lives on in the minds of his devoted readers, including this one, who first read him on an Amtrak train between Washington and Philadelphia in the autumn of 1974.
Three more from Robert Penn Warren
Night Rider (1939); At Heaven’s Gate (1943); Promises (1957).
Robert Penn Warren was a southern poet and novelist, the only writer to win Pulitzer prizes for both his fiction and his poetry. In 1986, he was appointed America’s poet laureate.
Stark’s politics earn him many enemies, but his constituents love his fiery, populist manner. The governor is surrounded by a typical southern political gallery of allies and thugs, as well as Burden, who had turned his back on his genteel upbringing to become Stark’s amanuensis.In the process, Burden betrays both his ideals and his career as a historian, and loses the love of his life, Anne Stanton, the daughter of a former state governor.
