All the King's Men Book

"For this is the country where the age of the internal combustion engine has come into its own. Where every boy is Barney Oldfield, and the girls wear organdy and batiste and eyelet embroidery and no panties on account of the climate and have smooth little faces to break your heart and when the wind of the car's speed lifts up their hair at the temples you see the sweet little beads of perspiration nestling there, and they sit low in the seat with their little spines crooked and their bent knees high toward the dashboard and not too close together for the cool, if you call it that, from the hood ventilator. Where the smell of gasoline and burning brake bands and redeye is sweeter than myrrh. Where the eight-cylinder jobs come roaring around the curves in the red hills and scatter the gravel like spray, and when they ever get down in the flat country and hit the new slab, God have mercy on the mariner…"
- Robert Penn Warren, All the King's Men

Look, I understand that you may not want to read a political novel right now, especially not one about a populist demagogue who harnesses the rage of the people to gain power, while engaging in no small amount of corruption.

But here's a little secret about Robert Penn Warren's All the King's Men. Despite its reputation, it really isn't about politics at all. It's about a man searching for himself by sifting back through history - his own and his family's - and discovering a bit about the skeletons that live in the past, yet still haunt the present.

However you classify it, you should know this: All the King's Men is a damn good read.

It is, in fact, one of my favorite books. Funnily enough, that makes it hard to talk about.

It's easy to explain the things about a book you did not like. Poorly-drawn characters, lazy plotting, and clueless pacing are simple to highlight. It's much harder to express appreciation or even love, because so much of that is tangled up in an emotional response that can be intensely personal.

I first read All the King's Men at a turning point in my life. I had just passed the bar exam, I was engaged to be married, and I was weeks away from my first real job. It was in that heady environment that Penn Warren's classic first came into my hands. To be honest, at that moment in time, I'd probably give a five-star rating to an Arby's menu. Thus, it's a bit hard for me to separate the objective from the subjective in formulating a review. In fact, instead of scratching out my thoughts, it'd be far easier to simply strip naked and run around the block screaming Robert Penn Warren's many virtues at the top of my lungs. Since local law enforcement has asked me to stop doing that, I'll try to put it into complete sentences.

All the King's Men is a novel about local politics, back room deals, and bombastic speeches; it is about greed and corruption, secrets and lies, vendettas and murder; it is about the dreams of youth, the realities of age, and love.

At the center of this gloriously overstuffed novel is Willie Stark, who Penn Warren based on Louisiana's Huey "the Kingfish" Long. When All the King's Men opens, Stark is a small-time politico in an unnamed southern state who is tapped by the local Democratic bosses to run for governor. Unbeknownst to Willie, he has been asked to run in order to split the so-called "rube vote." When Willie finds out he's been duped, he gets angry, and sets out to campaign as a vengeful populist with nothing to lose.

Over time, and with a plot contrivance or two, Willie climbs the ladder to real power, able to do good things like building roads and schools and hospitals. A real man of the people. Unfortunately, for Willie, his definition of "man" is not altogether sparkling, as expressed in his famous motto:

Man is conceived in sin and born in corruption and he passeth from the stink of the diddy to the stench of the shroud.

While the larger-than-life Willie gets top billing, he is not actually the central personage of Penn Warren's opus. Indeed, All the King's Men is about Willie Stark in the same way that Moby Dick was about Ahab. Stark, like Ahab, is the center of gravity, but not necessarily the focus. The story flows through them but is not necessarily about them. Instead, the main character here is really Jack Burden, the first-person narrator of All the King's Men. It is Jack with whom we spend most of our time. It is through Jack, a natural cynic, that we gain our perceptions of Willie as an increasingly ambitious, unstoppable force:

"So you work for me because you love me," the Boss said.

"I don't know why I work for you, but it's not because I love you. And not for money."

"No," he said, standing there in the dark, "you don't know why you work for me. But I know..."

"Why?" I asked.

"Boy," he said, "you work for me because I'm the way I am and you're the way you are. It is an arrangement founded on the nature of things."

Jack, like Melville's Ishmael, has a lot to say. Unlike Ishmael, Jack is actually interesting most of the time. He is a former history student who begins the novel as a journalist and later joins Willie's campaign. If I'm being honest, he's a bit of a navel-gazing narcissist, with a penchant for long, digressionary detours that force you to pay close attention. For all the side-paths and narrative excursions, which see Jack putting together the mysteries of his youth, I was never less than fully engaged.

The reason - and the determining factor in whether you love or hate this novel (there seems to be no in-between - is Penn Warren's distinctive style. He was a poet by trade - the nation's first poet laureate, actually - and his writing takes on certain cadences, like poetry, that had an effect on me that I felt but cannot accurately describe. One element that jumps out are his long, detail-packed sentences, filled with rhythm and repetition, sentences that start one way, seem to veer off, then loop back to their origin. It can be exhausting and exhilarating at the same time. I don't like overwritten books, but though this came close at times, it always stayed on the right side of the line.

All the King's Men is a novel that is more than a bit skeptical of the realities of American politics. Every bit of good in Willie is balanced by a bit of bad. The constant horse trading, in which ideals have less currency that expediencies, holds true today. Yet for all that, there is also more than a strain of unabashed sentimentalism in All the King's Men. For all its uncertainty about politicians, it is more sure about humans in general. There is, for example, a beautiful passage where Jack is ruminating about falling in love:

[F]or when you get in love you are made all over again. The person who loves you has picked you out of the great mass of uncreated clay which is humanity to make something out of, and the poor lumpish clay which is you wants to find out what it has been made into. But at the same time, you, in the act of loving somebody, become real, cease to be part of the continuum of the uncreated clay and get the breath of life in you and rise up. So you create yourself by creating another person, who, however, has also created you, picked up the you-chunk of clay out of the mass. So there are two you's, the one you yourself create by loving and the one the beloved creates by loving you. The farther these two you's are apart the more the world grinds and grudges on its axis. But if you loved and were loved perfectly then there wouldn't be any difference between the two you's or any distance between them. They would coincide perfectly, there would be perfect focus, as when a stereoscope gets the twin images on the card into perfect alignment.

It is a surprising bit of writing to find in a book that has been sold - since the time it was first published - as a bracingly cleareyed look at the dark side of democracy.

To be sure, Penn Warren does not neglect that angle, and All the King's Men is both a very particular Roman à clef about Huey Long, and also a general indictment of the political process as a whole, where gaining power requires convincing a bunch of people that you are what they want you to be.

All the King's Men, however, has achieved its timelessness because it is far more than a fictionalized version of a New Deal-era public servant who lost his way. It is a novel filled with ornate prose and memorable passages and excellent dialogue, and which is populated by characters that are hard to forget. Though it is sometimes as slow as a summer afternoon in the deep south, it creates a world that you are in no real hurry to leave.