I’ve been focusing on novels inspired by real life personages. An editor I admire suggested Robert Penn Warren’s 1947 Pulitzer Prize winning All the King’s Men. “If I had never gone to live in Louisiana and if Huey Long had not existed, the novel would never have been written,” Warren noted. “What Louisiana and Senator Long gave me was a line of ‘thinking and feeling’ that did eventuate in the novel.”
Huey P. “The Kingfish” Long inspired numerous authors, though none of the resulting fictional characters entranced the public’s imagination like Warren’s Willie Stark. Stark bears the least resemblance to the politician, yet he’s the fictional character most associated with him.
I was glad to be made aware of Long, and after I finished the novel, I spent time researching the politician. Long was a champion of the poor, and he accomplished quite a bit, though he did so with questionable methods. Despised by the wealthy elite, Long was poised to run for President on his “Share the Wealth” platform when he was assassinated in 1935 at the age of 42. The recent demonization of words like “liberal” and “socialism,” and the linking of the euphemism “redistribution of wealth” to theft make it difficult to imagine a politician charismatic and powerful enough to use “Share the Wealth” for votes. Stark’s motto “Every man a king” echoes Warren’s novel’s title, taken from the Humpty Dumpty nursery rhyme.
All the King’s Men is regarded as “The definitive novel about American politics,” but it’s far less a political novel than a philosophical, meditative, and sprawling one. Its melancholic narrator, Jack Burden, has a lyrical way with words, and a deeply questioning, sardonic voice.
Of finding Burden as his narrator, Warren says, “Burden got there by accident. He was only a sentence or two in the first version—the verse play from which the novel developed… It turned out, in a way, that what he thought about the story was more important than the story itself. I suppose he became the narrator because he gave me the kind of interest I needed to write the novel. He made it possible for me to control it. He is an observer, but he is involved.”
At the core of the novel’s multi-layered themes are the nothingness of man and the impermanence of all things. The prose is unaffected, elegant, and poetic, with stealth word repetitions. Here’s Burden on the road:
There is nothing more alone than being in a car at night in the rain. I was in the car. And I was glad of it. Between one point on the map and another point on the map, there was the being alone in the car in the rain. They say you are not you except in terms of relation to other people. If there weren’t any other people there wouldn’t be any you because what you do, which is what you are, only has meaning in relation to other people. That is very comforting when you are in the car in the rain at night alone, for then you aren’t you, and not being you or anything, you can really lie back and get some rest. It is a vacation from being you. There is only the flow of the motor under your foot spinning that frail sound of its metal gut like a spider, that filament, that nexus, which really isn’t there, between the you which you have just left in one place and the you which you will be when you get to the other place.
A movie adaptation of All the King’s Men won the Academy Award for best motion picture in 1949. Critics and the public universally panned a 2006 remake with an all-star cast, including Sean Penn, Jude Law, and Kate Winslet. I got almost half way through the 1949 adaptation, but finally turned it off, unwilling to sully Jack Burden’s voice with the simplistic and histrionic film. The trailer for the 2006 version was enough. Sometimes I can appreciate adaptations, but this time I couldn’t.
In Joyce Carol Oates’s insightful essay in The New York Review of Books she notes: “There are numerous aspects of the historical Huey ‘Kingfish’ Long that might have been developed by Warren to suggest a greater depth and originality than his Willie Stark possesses, but Warren’s imagination seems to have led him to simplified, if not stereotypical, resolutions…” (Oates also calls out academic Noel Polk for his unfortunate “restored” edition, and levels Warren for his racism and sexism, but that’s another essay.) Warren seems to have based his novel less on history’s factual potential and relevance than on its emotive power and resonance, and if he’d followed a more literal path, Oates might have approved, but the resultant novel wouldn’t have the same mythological and graceful weight.
In his interview with Ralph Ellison in The Paris Review, Warren expresses his distaste for historical fiction and what he terms costume novels. Warren’s ability to breathe space and meaning without tightly linking his prose to its historical subject fascinates me as a writer, and it’s this facility that makes All the King’s Men soar. (In my own domestic writer realm, I visualize this skill as the flapping and shaking out of a sheet—my words, research, background, etc.—and then letting it settle beautifully on a bed—the page.) But how does one research a novel without making the novel feel researched? How does one find the line of “thinking and feeling” that can eventuate into a novel, and into meaning?
“You see the world as best you can—with or without the help of somebody’s research, as the case may be,” notes Warren. “You see as much as you can, and the events and books that are interesting to you should be interesting to you because you’re a human being, not because you’re trying to be a writer. Then those things may be of some use to you as a writer later on. I don’t believe in a schematic approach to material. The business of researching for a book strikes me as a sort of obscenity. What I mean is, researching for a book in the sense of trying to find a book to write. Once you are engaged by a subject, are in your book, have your idea, you may or may not want to do some investigating. But you ought to do it in the same spirit in which you’d take a walk in the evening air to think things over.”
