All the King's Men by Robert Penn Warren
Spoiler Alert: Plot Summary
We're in the deep South, in the 1920's, I believe, and we're following the trajectory of one Willie Talos, originally a country boy who becomes a supremely powerful politician (and Governor of the state). It's not stated clearly, I don't think, but I believe it is Louisiana, and my mother tells me that the story is a sort of fictionalized memoir of Huey Long, who perhaps you know of (I did not). Willie Talos, aka the Boss, cares about his community, but also enjoys the machinery and machinations of politicking, and eventually his varied interests and commitments (and a bit of incestuous intertangling) gets him kilt. Our story is told to us by Jack Burden, a newspaper man who finds himself attached to Willie Talos and his political machine. We see the shift from dedicated statesman to power-hungry egotist, and follow the perils, pitfalls, and triumphs along the way.
Spoiler Over: Continue Here
Dear blobbists,
I can't believe it's been something like five months since I blobbed! Here's the secret: I've been reading behind your back. You see, I started doing these book bingos a few summers back, and I got totally hooked on the concept. So when this new year started, I was working on two bingos - one to celebrate (last year's) Day of the Dead and one to celebrate Intersectional Feminism. So you see, since we've last connected, it's not like I have only read this one book (although, to be fair, ATKM was a long one). I've actually read something like...37?
So yeah. I'm going to do a blog post at some point about all the book bingos, because they've been a delightful romp and serve as an excellent distraction from ye ole pandemmy-ennui. But for now I'll tell you a bit more about my experience with this book!
I liked this book. I'm not sure that I got the same resonance from it that folks got who knew the context of Huey Long and that moment in time, but there were certainly still some very beautiful parts of it. It apparently won the Pulitzer prize and got made into multiple movies and such, which feels like kind of a lot to me, but I guess people were really into it!
I didn't love some things, like the frequent use of the n-word, the obvious racism, the erasure of black identity, and the lack of any real, meaningful female characters who weren't sexually connected to the men. But here are some of things I did like.
On the sentence and paragraph structure - neither wholly circuitous nor direct
If I was going to try to describe Robert Penn Warren's writing style, I think it would go something like this. Hemingway meets Joyce in the middle of the street, and just as they're almost across the road they tumble into Proust, who laboriously joins them. There's something sort of stream of consciousness, but also straightforward, about the prose, that I found lilting and enchanting, and made me see why it was a hit. I tried to find a few good examples. Here they are:
Perhaps that was the moment when Slade made his fortune. How life is strange and changeful, and the crystal is in the steel at the point of fracture, and the toad bears a jewel in its forehead, and the meaning of moments passes like the breeze that scarcely ruffles the leaf of the willow.
There wasn't any sound for what must have been three seconds, but seemed like a week while a mourning dove down in the clump of trees in the bottom where the hogs were gave a couple of tries at breaking his heart and mine. I really loved this line.
Inside the court house, where the big hall was empty and shadowy and the black oily floor was worn down to humps and ridges under your feet and the air was dry and dusty so that you felt in the stillness that you were breathing into yourself the last shrunk-up whispers still hanging in the air from all the talk, loud and little, there had been in there for seventy-five years - well, inside there, just off the hall I saw some men sitting in a room.
On the narrator - muckraker, dirt-digger, truth-teller
I suspect (and will have to settle for suspecting, because you know I don't like to research too much about my books) that the author wrote from Jack Burden's perspective because it mirrored his experience. In any case, the storytelling angle is very powerful, because we're just behind the veil of this monolith, Willie Talos, and his political engine. Here are some Jack lines I liked:
A man's got to carry something besides a corroded liver with him out of that dark backward and abysm of time, and it might as well be the little black books.
I was supposed to do a lot of different things, and one of them was to lift up fifteen-year-old, hundred-and-thirty-five-pound hairy, white dogs on summer afternoons and paint an expression of unutterable bliss upon their faithful features as they gaze deep, deep into the Boss's eyes.
On being on vacation - from yourself
There's a fair amount of existentialism, which really reminded me of Proust's reflections. Here's one of my favorites:
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 a very comforting thought 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.
On multiple yous - the you which you just left in one place and the you which you will be when you get to the other place
And this one:
You ought to invite those two you's to the same party, some time. Or you might have a family reunion for all the you's with barbecue under the trees. It would be amusing to know what they would say to each other. Oh, very. Oh, rather. Oh, definitely. Oh, yes, indeed. hehehe.
On Model-Ts - their form and function
I just thought it was amazing that they were driving Model-T's because they were new vehicles, since my only image of a Model-T is the one my next-door neighbor growing up, Mr. Light, has been tinkering at forever. I still remember him occasionally popping into the tiny little car and driving around the street on the rare occasions that it was in working order.
On sitting with the old ones - on a bench in the town square
I loved this description of Jack's when he goes to find some dirt and sits in the town square with 'the old ones' of the town: Time and motion cease to be. It is like sniffing ether, and everything is sweet and sad and far away.
On dress - just like Zoom
At one point, someone's look is described as: Town from the waist up, country from the waist down. Get both votes.
I loved it because it made me think of the way we dress in the pandemic - business from the waist up, and jammies from the waist down, more often than not. ;)
On persimmons - here, there, and everywhere
I loved this line: But is any relationship a relationship in time and only in time? I eat a persimmon and the teeth of a tinker in Tibet are put on edge. The flower-in-the-crannied-wall theory. We have to accept it because so often our teeth are on edge from persimmons we didn't eat. Do you find this is the case, reader? Are your teeth on edge from the persimmon you didn't eat today?
Referents and Reverberations
This book reminded me of several books. Initially, it definitely rang of...
- Atlas Shrugged - naming, cronyism
- Faulkner - any and all
- The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, Carson McCullers
- On the Road, Jack Kerouac - the line below, in particular -
So they sat there in there common knowledge, while the chunk on the heart stewed and hissed and crumpled, and were together in the down-beat and pause of the rhythm of their lives.
Reminded me of lines like this one:
Are we straight in the deepest and most wonderful depths of our souls, dear darling?
- Proust - so many lines reminded me of In Search of Lost Time/Remembrance of Things Passed. Here's one:
The grandfather's clock in the corner of the room, I suddenly realized, wasn't getting any younger. It would drop out a tick, and the tick would land inside my head like a rock dropped in a well, and the ripples would circle out and stop, and the tick would sink down the dark. For a piece of time which was not long or short, and might not even be time, there wouldn't be anything. Then the tock would drop down the well, and the ripples would circle out and finish. I love this line because we have a grandmother clock in my mom's house that isn't getting any younger and tends to lose time over the week, and we also had many metronomes that swung a bit heavily to one side. This reminded me of both of those things.
- The Master and Margarita, Mikhail Bulgakov - this passage describing love -
We didn't say a word, but some afternoons I read to Anne. I read the first book I had laid hand to the first afternoon when I found I couldn't sit there any longer in that silence which bulged and creaked with all the unsaid words. It was the first volume of the works of Anthony Trollope. That was a safe bet. Anthony never upset any equilibriums.
In a peculiar way those late autumn days began to remind me of the summer almost twenty years before when I had fallen in love with Anne. That summer we had been absolutely alone, together, even when people were around, the only inhabitants of the kind of floating island or magic carpet which being in love is. And now we were absolutely alone, but it was a different kind of floating island or magic carpet. That summer we had seemed to be caught in a massive and bemusing tide which knew its own pace and time and would not be hurried even to the happiness which it surely promised. And now again we seemed to be caught in such a tide and couldn't lift a finger in its enormous drift, for it knew its own pace and time. But what it promised we didn't know. I did not even wonder.
Reminded me of one of my favorite scenes from The Master and Margarita:
During the Maytime storms, when streams of water gushed noisily past the blurred windows, threatening to flood their last refuge, the lovers would light the stove and bake potatoes. The potatoes steamed, and their charred skins blackened their fingers. There was laughter in the basement, and in the garden the trees would shed broken twigs and white clusters of flowers after the rain."
Words I didn't know (or maybe knew at some point but forgot)
catalpa - Catalpa, commonly called catalpa or catawba, is a genus of flowering plants in the family Bignoniaceae, native to warm temperate and subtropical regions of North America, the Caribbean, and East Asia
litotes - ironic understatement in which an affirmative is expressed by the negative of its contrary (e.g., you won't be sorry, meaning you'll be glad ) - I feel like I knew this for the GRE or the SAT, but forgot. ;)
lob-lolly - a porridge or stew, coming to mean swamp. It is used in the names of: Loblolly pine (Pinus taeda), a tree. Loblolly-bay (Gordonia lasianthus), a tree. Loblolly boy, an assistant to a ship's surgeon.
sebaceous - relating to oil or fat [this one's from the Latin, Mom, so I should have known that - 'sebum', meaning tallow']
thunder-mug - old slang for a chamber pot
Lines I Liked
- What they had in common was a world of wordless silence by the fire.
- So I decorously withdrew my gaze from the pair, and resumed my admiration of the dying day on the other side of the hog lot and the elegiac landscape.
- Her face was girlish, with soft, soothing contours and large deep brown eyes, the kind that make you think of telling secrets in the gloaming.
- If something takes too long, something happens to you. You become all and only the thing you want and nothing else, for you have paid too much for it, too much in wanting and too much in waiting and too much in getting.
- There is nothing like a good book to put you to sleep with the illusion that life is rich and meaningful.
- By the time I got out to my car, the sky was curdling blue with dawn.
I'm off to play a rousing game of Wingspan with seesters (if you haven't played it, you really should, #birdlover) but I'll leave you with this, one of my favorite passages. It reminded me a bit of how I think we're starting to feel as we begin to creep at the edges of an ending to the pandemic.
I drifted over to the window back of the Boss's desk and looked out over the grounds. It had rained during the night and now in the weak sunlight the grass and the leaves of the live oaks, even the trailing moss, had a faint sheen, and the damp concrete of the curving drives and walks gave off an almost imperceptible, glimmering reflection. The whole world, the bare boles of the other trees, which had lost their leaves now, the roofs of the houses, even the sky itself, had a pale, washed, relieved look, like the look on the face of a person who has been sick a long time and now feels better and thinks maybe he is going to get well.
Sending everyone (and especially the AAPI community) love, health, rest, relaxation, and comfort. I'm on to Gertrude Stein.
