Why this book:  Selected by my literature reading group. I had read it for the first time  about 7 years ago, and loved it then.  I was uncertain the group would like it, since it is rather long (~600 pages) and not very fast moving, but I enthusiastically endorsed it, since I recall how it affected me then. It was even more powerful for me this time.  And I hope to read it again in a few years. It is very much worth it to read the restored edition, which rescues R.P. Warren’s original work from the politically correct and often uninspired modifications of the original editors.

My Impressions:  I place this near the top of the list of books I’ve ever read.   The writing is beautiful,  the story compelling, the characters have depth and complexity and are believable – they come to life.   It is not fast-food reading –  more  a gourmet meal, to be savored slowly, when one’s appetite is ready for the best we can offer it. I could not read it when I was tired; not that the writing was complex or difficult – on the contrary.  But reading tired, I would miss the nuances and poetic descriptions of people, places, things, events. One shouldn’t go to the Louvre when one is tired and cranky.  One should visit the Louvre when one is well rested, alert, has had a cup of coffee,  is in a good mood and energized.  That’s how I felt about reading this book. I made a point to read it mostly in the morning.

The principle character around whom the novel is based is a fictional version of Huey Long, the infamous charismatic and demagogic populist governor of Louisiana in the 1930’s.  But he is not the protagonist of the novel.  The protagonist is Jack Burden, one of the governor’s personal assistants, and the novel is really about Burden’s experience of the corruption endemic to the politics of Louisiana at the time, and how he, being close to the power, played in and around the horse trading, the corruption,  and the exercise of power and political ambition.

But most important and interesting to me was Jack Burden’s  maturing process in his  relationships with key people in his life outside of the political arena – his mother, father, mentor, his childhood best friend, and his childhood sweetheart.  And his own moral development and understanding of the world, as he moved from romantic idealist, to cynicism and then to a nothing-matters nihilism, finally to an accommodation with love and man’s better nature.  Robert Penn Warren is nothing if not a realist and he demands that we and his characters see things as they are – flawed, though often striving to be good – in a clumsy, often self-centered  and sometimes tragic way.  Betrayal and forgiveness, hubris and the fall, idealism and disappointment, corruption and redemption are all part of Jack Burden’s experience and the story he relates to us as narrator.

The writing was like nothing I’ve ever read before.  Not complex, but evocative.  From the very beginning, the writing and the style pulled me into Louisiana of the 1930s and I could almost sense and feel the characters.  His descriptions were poetic but not overdone.  I offer a few samples below.  I can’t say enough about how much I enjoyed his writing.  In the last several years I have read other prose pieces written by poets, (Maya Angelou and Robert Service) and each time I have loved the writing.  Robert Penn Warren however wasn’t just a poet.  He won the Pulitzer prize twice for poetry and was the United States first poet-laureate.  Yeah, he could craft an image, and pull you into it.

All the King’s Men is mostly about flawed men. But there are some very interesting strong multi-dimensional women in the book as well.  Women will not be disappointed.

For me a possible downside was that there was not much real joy in the book.  All the characters were somehow struggling with their own humanity – struggling to be as good as they hoped to be, as others wanted them to be, but not living up to their own or other’s expectations.  His characters have to live a type of double life -pretending to be something they aren’t, while striving to be better than they are.   And Warren would have us believe that this is how all -or most of us  – are, and that this is simply part of the American experience.  His characters struggled to understand and deal with the challenges they were facing,  trying often valiantly, to achieve something of value.  I was edified and occasionally even inspired, but there wasn’t much joy or  exuberance.

There are no real heroes in this book – all the characters were very human and flawed – no one was particularly good, nor particularly bad.   You might say this book is not about the struggle between good and evil, rather between better and worse – in the simple striving hearts of the people who populate this story.

All the King’s Men does indeed have a positive message and an ending I didn’t expect.  It is a beautifully written, thoughtful, and very satisfying read.

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A few quotes, to give you a sense of the poetry of his descriptions and the earthiness of his language (page numbers from the Mariner Books 2001 restored paperback edition – the copy you see in the picture above.)

He learned that the world is like an enormous spider web and 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.  266

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 has got or because of the knowledge which he hasn’t got and which if he had it, would save him. 13

“That’s why I can see what the law is like. It’s like a single-bed blanket on a double bed and three folks in the bed and a cold night.  There ain’t never enough blanket to cover the case, no matter how much pulling  and hauling, and somebody’s always going to nigh catch pneumonia.”  194

There is nothing like a good book to put you to sleep with the illusion that life is rich and meaningful.  108

“…it’s up to you to give ’em something to stir ’em up and make ’em feel alive again.  Just for half an hour.  That’s what they come for. Tell ’em anything. But for Sweet Jesus’ sake don’t try to improve their minds.”  102

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…..For all any of us really wants is to hear a woman laugh like that.  289

And he said: “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.” 268  (this is a key quote in the book, as the Huey Long character believed and repeatedly proved that he could always find something about which any one, no matter their public virtue, was ashamed, and which he could use for blackmail.)

“Its not an explanation, ” he said, and laughed again. “there ain’t any explanations. Not of anything. All you can do is point at the nature of things. If you are smart enough to  see ’em.” 269

For years I had condemned her as a woman without a heart, who loved merely power over men and the momentary satisfaction to vanity or flesh which they could give her, who lived in a strange loveless oscillation between calculation and instinct. 601

I had given my mother a present, which was a lie.  But in return she had given me a present, too, which was a truth. She gave me a new picture of herself, and that meant, in the end, a new picture of the world.  601

…and you look at the floor where now there are little parallel trails of damp sawdust the old broom left this morning when the unenthusiastic old negro man cleaned up, and the general impression is that you are alone with the Alone and it is His move.  19

Fate comes walking thought the door, and it is five-feet ten inches tall and heavyish in the chest and shortish in the leg …19

You get into bed and you shut your eyes and you think of something you did or you didn’t do, and wanted and didn’t get, or didn’t want and got, and pretty soon it doesn’t matter which, for you are asleep.  44

..their life history is a process of discovering what they really are, and not, as for you and me, sons of luck,  a process of becoming what luck makes us.  89

Well, Willie began to appear in the Chronicle in the role of the boy upon the burning deck, and the boy who put his finger in the dyke, and the boy who replies “I can” when Duty whispers low, “Thou must.”  90

…the theory of the moral neutrality of history: “History is blind, but man is not.” 606