All the King's Men.

There are some books of fiction that are simply a joy and a privilege to read. They remind us of the greatness of the human spirit, perhaps even while teaching us about its opposite qualities as well. The experience of reading such a book is deep and entrancing, and often even ennobling. The author has an unusually encompassing range. He or she draws you in to the lives of particular people and their places so that you feel like one of them, walking among them as an observer, and sometimes even as a ghostly participant. You get to know the characters and care about them. But such an author, with another part of that range, can also use the feelings and foibles and fates of the characters to show you fundamental philosophical truths. Sometimes, it’s from what a character says. Often it’s from what the story shows.

One prominent novelist told me years ago that there is no great book that’s great just because of its beautiful or clever or scintillating language, but that every great book contains great ideas. He intimated to me that he sees himself doing exactly what I do, but just in a different way. That was before my novels came to me. But even in my nonfiction days, he said that we were both attempting to plumb the depths of human nature and understand our common condition well enough to help ourselves and others navigate this life a little better.

Robert Penn Warren is such an author, and All the King’s Men is such a book. In it, there are many physical descriptions that are nearly musical in their intensity and almost mesmerizing. And there are protracted musings on little things that can be transporting. The narrator, Jack Burden, once says this in passing about a young woman’s laugh, mentioning at the end of his description a couple of famous royal mistresses of history past, one from England, and the other France, who were apparently widely known in his time for their beauty and power. He writes these words about his friend and her laugh that he had just experienced:

<<Her eyes were glittering like the eyes of a child when you give a nice surprise, and she laughed in a sudden throaty, tingling way. It is the way a woman laughs for happiness. They never laugh that way just when they are being polite or at a joke. A woman only laughs that way a few times in her life. A woman only laughs that way when something has touched her deep down in the very quick of her being and the happiness just wells out as natural as breath and the first jonquils and mountain brooks. When a woman laughs that way it always does something to you. It does not matter what kind of face she has got either. You hear that laugh and feel that you have grasped a clean and beautiful truth. You feel that way because that laugh is a revelation. It is a great impersonal sincerity. It is a spray of dewey blossom from the great central stalk of All Being, and the woman’s name and address hasn’t got a damn to do with it. Therefore, that laugh cannot be faked. If a woman could learn to fake it she would make Nell Gwyn and Pompadour look like a couple of Campfire Girls wearing bifocals and ground-gripper shoes and with bands on their teeth. She could set all society by the ears. For all any man wants is to hear a woman laugh like that. (256-257. Pagination is from the 1981 edition of the 1946 book)>>

When on page one I noticed that the second sentence in the novel was 152 words long, I was prepared for lengthy stretches of pondering like this. And the contemplative passages throughout the novel never fail to delight or enlighten in their details. You even get little bits of pondering along the way like this, again, from our narrator:

<<The end of man is knowledge, but there is one thing he can’t know. He can’t know whether knowledge will save him or kill him. He will be killed, all right, but he can’t know whether he is killed because of the knowledge which he had got or because of the knowledge which he hasn’t got and which if he had it, would save him. (13)>>

The story of the book is about a small town country boy who becomes Governor of a southern state bordering the Gulf of Mexico. The man fails and fails again in his initial political ambitions. But he learns from his failures, and then seems to be providentially given the opportunities he needs to rise to high office. He begins his quest for bigger and better as a public speaker armed with facts and figures. But he doesn’t become effective until he learns to tell stories, make jokes, and embody the frustrations and dreams of the ordinary voter in his state, giving voice to their fears and resentments and faraway hopes.

Corruption and Sin

The political center of the story, Willie Stark, seems to have some genuine ideals. He has long watched state funds get looted by the small time crooks of politics and business in his region for far too long. He wants to be Governor so that he can build roads and schools and hospitals that will genuinely benefit the people. But he also wants the personal and historical reflection of greatness that he feels will result for him from all those things. And he’s willing to do whatever it takes to put his stamp on the state’s fortunes, with an even larger agenda as his ultimate intent. Unfortunately, he seems to be a cornpone genius and master of using dirty tricks against those who have lived and breathed nothing but dirty tricks for their entire lives. He turns what they do against them. And he does so brilliantly. At one point, when he orders his assistant, our narrator Jack Burden, to dig up compromising dirt on someone and Jack objects that there may not be any dirt on such a person to be discovered, he says something that he repeats in other contexts, using a version of country slang for a baby’s diapers:

“Man is conceived in sin and born in corruption and he passeth from the stink of the didie to the stench of the shroud. There is always something.” (239)

And it turns out in this case, as in others, that he’s right. He always seems to be deeply astute in his dim view of human nature, and about the errors and compromises, and even corruptions, that almost any life in the public sphere of our rough and tumble world too often will involve. People in search of a better or more comfortable life will far too frequently compromise their ethics and sense of right for what they think will get them what they want. We see that plentifully displayed in our own time. And the central irony of the book is that Willie does exactly the same thing, beneath his high-minded rhetoric, which proves to be his own undoing, as it is in the case of all those other crooked politicians whose misdeeds he is able to use to bring them down.

Our action takes place in the 1930s. At one point, Jack is doing historical research into the lives of two brothers who lived in the previous century, the 1800s, around the time before the Civil War. In the course of his research, he discovers what he takes to be a universal principle that one of the brothers came to realize. He writes:

<<Cass Mastern lived for a few years and in that time he learned that the world is all of one piece. He learned that the world is like an enormous spider web and that if you touch it, however lightly, at any point, the vibration ripples to the remotest perimeter and the drowsy spider feels the tingle and is drowsy no more but springs out to fling the gossamer coils about you who have touched the web and then inject the black, numbing poison under your hide. It does not matter whether or not you meant to brush the web of things. Your happy foot or your gay wing may have brushed it ever so lightly, but what happens always happens and there is the spider, bearded black and with his great faceted eyes glittering like mirrors in the sun, or like God’s eye, and the fangs dripping. (234)>>

Dirt and Badness

An interesting thread runs through the story, with people doing something bad in order to get something they think of as good. At one point, the Governor is having a conversation with a judge who strongly opposes him. The Governor speaks:

   “Somebody dug up some dirt for you, huh?”

   “If you choose to call it that,” the Judge said.

   “Dirt’s a funny thing,” the Boss said. “Come to think of it, there ain’t a thing but dirt on this green God’s globe except what’s under water, and that’s dirt too. It’s dirt makes the grass grow. A diamond ain’t a thing in the world but a piece of dirt that got awful hot. And God-a-Mighty picked up a handful of dirt and blew on it and made you and me and George Washington and mankind blessed in faculty and apprehension. It all depends on what you do with dirt. That right?” (56)

In another passage, we get a related discussion of goodness and badness. Hugh Miller, the Attorney General for the state and a man from a good family who has enjoyed, along with his pedigree, a superior education, has resigned his post, finding the Governor’s methods morally beneath him. In a later conversation about it with a young surgeon who also dislikes his methods, the Governor, referred to again by our narrator as “the Boss,” says this:

   “Yeah, old Hugh—he never learned that you can’t have everything. That you can have mighty little. And you never have anything you don’t make. Just because he inherited a little money and the name Miller he thought you could have everything. Yeah, and he wanted the one last damned thing you can’t inherit. And you know what it is?” He stared at Adam’s face.

   “What?” Adam said, after a long pause.

   “Goodness. Yeah, just plain, simple goodness. Well you can’t inherit that from anybody. You got to make it, Doc. If you want it. And you got to make it out of badness. Badness. And you know why, Doc?” He raised his bulk up in the broken-down wreck of an overstuffed chair he was in, and leaned forward, his hands on his knees, his elbows cocked out, his head outthrust and the hair coming down to his eyes, and starred into Adam’s face. “Out of badness,” he repeated. “And you know why? Because there isn’t anything else to make it out of.” (320)

The Secret

When Jack’s childhood friend and longtime love interest Anne Stanton shockingly betrays him and enters into an affair with his boss, the Governor, Jack leaves town and drives across the country to California where, lying in a cheap hotel bed, he has a vision of what philosophers call reductive materialism, and sees this as something that can soothe his pain. He writes:

<<So I fled west from the fact, and in the West, at the end of History, the Last Man on that Last Coast, on my hotel bed, I had discovered the dream. That dream was the dream that all life is but the dark heave of blood and the twitch of the nerve. When you flee as far as you can flee, you will always find that dream, which is the dream of our age. At first, it is always a nightmare and horrible, but in the end it may be, in a special way, rather bracing and tonic. At least it was so for me for a certain time. It was bracing because after the dream I felt that, in a way, Anne Stanton did not exist. The words Anne Stanton were simply a name for a peculiarly complicated piece of mechanism which should mean nothing whatsoever to Jack Burden, who himself was simply another rather complicated piece of mechanism. At that time, when I first discovered that view of things—really discovered, in my own way and not from any book—I felt that I had discovered the secret source of all strength and all endurance. That dream solves all problems. (386)>>

Except the problem that it doesn’t. And it can’t. Because it’s false. Of course, if you believe there are no values, you can’t rationally grieve any loss, because nothing of value, on this view, is ever lost, since there simply is nothing of value. But grief isn’t merely rational. But it’s perhaps also deeply rational. Our grief reflects reality. And so the view that there are no values unfortunately lacks one value itself, that of truth.

Jack clearly values his new view that there are no values. And, as a person, he is affirming a view that there are no persons who can hold values, or value anything. He thinks of himself as a mechanism. And mechanisms can’t think or affirm. Persons can. But not mechanisms. And yet, there he is thinking and avidly affirming that he is a mechanism and not a person and that neither he, nor Anne, nor their actions have any value.

This false comfort can’t last. and it doesn’t. But he subsequently toys for a while with a big picture perspective that we can follow his own terminology and think of as The Big Twitch View of the Universe. It’s a worldview akin to Richard Dawkins’ notion of The Selfish Gene, and in another way is related to The Swerve concept to be found in the ancient materialist philosopher, Lucretius. There are particles and energies that vibrate and swerve, or twitch. And this results in all there is and all that happens within all there is. And there is nothing more to the story.

Driving back home from California with the luggage of his new philosophy, Jack picks up an old man at a gas station who is also on his way east, and who has a twitch under his eye. Our narrator takes the man a long distance toward his destination and then lets him out when his own road home demands it. Jack then writes:

<<I did not ask him if he had learned the truth in California. His face had learned it anyway and wore the final wisdom under his left eye. The face knew that the twitch was the live thing. Was all. But, having left the otherwise unremarkable man, it occurred to me, as I reflected upon the thing which made him remarkable, that if the twitch was all, what was it that could know that the twitch was all? Did the leg of the dead frog in the laboratory know that the twitch was all when you put the electric current through it? Did the man’s face know about the twitch, and how it was all? And if I was all twitch how did the twitch which was me know that the twitch was all? Ah, I decided, that is the mystery. That is the secret knowledge. That is what you have to go to California to have a mystic vision to find out. That the twitch can know that the twitch is all. Then, having found that out, in the mystic vision, you feel clean and free. You are at one with the Great Twitch. (392)>>

He later reflects on all this again when he’s back home and back at work:

<<Everything was fine just the way it had been before I left, except that now I knew the secret. And my secret knowledge cut me off. If you have the secret, you cannot really communicate any more with somebody who has not got it, any more than you can really communicate with a bustling vitamin-crammed brat who is busy with his building blocks or a tin drum. And you can’t take somebody off to the side, and tell him the secret. If you do that, then the fellow, or female, you are trying to tell the truth to thinks you are feeling sorry for yourself and asking for sympathy, when the real case is that you are not asking for sympathy but for congratulations. So I did my daily tasks and ate my daily bread and saw the old familiar face, and smiled benignly like a priest. (393)>>

A lot then happens. And it’s a great story. And Jack much later ponders all that has transpired for others and for himself. He writes:

<<This has been the story of Willie Stark, but it is my story, too. For I have a story. 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. The change did not happen all at once. Many things happened, and that man did not know when he had any responsibility for them and when he did not. There was, in fact, a time when he came to believe that nobody had any responsibility for anything and there was no god but the Great Twitch.

   At first that thought was horrible to him when it was forced on him by what seemed the accident of circumstance, for it seemed to rob him of a memory by which, unconsciously, he had lived; but then a little later it gave him a sort of satisfaction, because it meant that he could not be called guilty of anything, not even of having squandered happiness or of having killed his father, or of having delivered his two friends into each other’s hands and death.

   But later, much later, he woke up one morning to discover that he did not believe in the Great Twitch any more. He did not believe in it because he had seen too many people live and die. (542)>>

Earlier, he had reflected in a different context, about the nature of truth. He had wanted to know the truth about something and then realized something else about that wanting.

<<Even as the thought of going away without knowing came through my head, I knew that I had to know the truth. For the truth is a terrible thing. You dabble your foot in it and it is nothing. But you walk a little farther and you feel it pull you like an undertow or a whirlpool. First there is the slow pull so steady and gradual you scarcely notice it, then the acceleration, then the dizzy whirl and lurch to blackness. For there is a blackness of truth, too. They say it is a terrible thing to fall into the Grace of God. I am prepared to believe that. (426)>>

But then, it is a wonderful thing, once your understanding has begun to catch up with your commitment. And that’s the truth.

This beautiful book has provided me with a deeper understanding of politics, and of our human condition, than I had enjoyed before reading it. It blessed me.

For the book, click: All The King's Men