All the King's Men by Robert Penn Warren

Ernie's take first:

“All change is not growth, as all movement is not forward.” Ellen Glasgow

All the King’s Men explores the timeless equation of power, money and dirty politics. What better time than now to read it?

It features a rich cast that can be broken up into broad groups. On one hand, you have the power players. Willie Stark is the Governor surrounded by his staff of “fixers” that include narrator Jack Burden, a jaded former journalist with a warped morality and a sense of history. There’s a campaign manager whose original job was to see that Stark lost his first bid for governor. The governor’s part-time mistress also acts as the glue that keeps the administration on track and serves as Burden’s sounding board.  Balancing these characters are Burden’s old friends. Judge Irwin is a noble man and advisor to Jack Burden, until he becomes a target of the administration. Anne and Adam Stanton, children of a former governor are simply too good to be true. (It is really hard to figure out why Burden has anything to do with them.) Wanting nothing to do with politics, they both fall under Stark’s spell.

Governor Stark’s long-suffering wife is willing to turn a blind eye to his political and personal shenanigans until he involves their son, a spoiled jerk who grows up expecting the state to fall at his feet.

Those who started with noble intentions find themselves trapped in a quagmire of egos and reputations. When we meet the cast, most are so cynical and corrupt that you wonder how decent they were to begin with but in flashback, we discover the true origins of the governor and his righteous entry into politics. Jack explores his own downward spiral and his nonchalant attitude to the corruption around him. Others look back trying to remember when they and their lives changed forever. Even those who somehow keep their integrity become disillusioned by the storm around them.

No one escapes the turmoil and at many points, Burden wonders if there is any point in trying. While the book may make a point for the inevitability of life or fate, there are too many opportunities for everyone to have made better choices to accept this fatalistic line.

Warren’s writing is terrific. The “all-seeing narrator” usually annoys me in books but it really works in this setting. Warren’s dialogue is genuinely offensive but these are very offensive people. While I found the Willie Stark character personally reprehensible, I found myself almost sympathetic to his political goals. No matter how far he bent the law, abused his office and intimidated his opponents, I felt like he was still just doing it for his people and his state. It’s the classic question: do the “ends justify the means?” It took Mussolini to make the trains run on time so the answer is and always will be “no!” But Willie Stark, along with everyone else shows us that no man can be totally bad as he can’t be totally good. Warren once said that All the King’s Men was never supposed to be about just politics.

Read this book. Read it now. Remember all through the madness that will be Election 2012.

Our brush with fame:  Bear with me here,
My grandfather was the youngest of seven
brothers.  His oldest brother, Solon
lived in Guthrie, KY for a time.  Solon's
son, Noel (pictured here on his Uncle
Bob Lee's lap) was a classmate
of Robert Penn Warren.
Now that's incredible!



Sandra's turn:

OK, we finally have a really great book – I enjoyed reading it so much I was kind of sad when I got to the end—maybe that is an important characteristic for a “great” book.  Robert Penn Warren spins a pretty captivating tale, first published in 1946, much of it is still quite relevant today.  I could quibble over one or two things like the dated, offensive language and the fact that once or twice he gets the car stuck in a rut and spins his wheels a while, but for the most part, this is a really good story. 

In the narrative he says this is the story of Willie Stark and it is.  But mostly it is the story of Jack Burden and his tale is the more compelling one.  I have heard of this book before and may have even seen some of the Broderick Crawford film so I was aware this was inspired by and loosely based on the true story of Huey Long, governor of Louisiana in the early part of the 20^th century.  I knew the basics of that story so the ending of Willie Stark’s story will be no surprise to anyone familiar with Long.  The story of Jack Burden is the more universal story.  And I don’t think I am giving anything away to say he does find a way to live his life that he can live with.  If that makes any sense….

Warren is a masterful writer.   He uses analogy powerfully-- “…it was as though the vibration set up in the whole fabric of the world by my act had spread infinitely and with ever increasing power and no man could know the end….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…”  He is astute—Jack Burden observes in a conversation about his political work and the opportunity and ethics for making money “ ‘Graft is what he calls it when the fellows do it who don’t know which fork to use.’”  Warren sums things up for us very early in the novel:

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.  There’s the cold in your stomach, but you open the envelope, you have to open the envelope, for the end of man is to know.

Jack Burden spends much of his time musing over facts and truth and where the two meet and what the difference is.  I found much of this book extremely relevant to events happening today.  Much of the book deals with politics and I guess there is no surprise that things have not changed in eighty years.  Politics is still a dirty business and no matter how clean or noble you might be going into it, there is no chance you will come out untarnished.  Also relevant, the fact that newspapers and journalists have never been unbiased and are bought and sold just like the politicians and it was always so.   

I don’t want to give too much about the plot away but there is a classic twist on the old “sins of the father” where here the sins of the sons (Tom Stark, Jack Burden) seem to be visited on the fathers of each man.  Not that the fathers don’t contribute mightily to their fates, but as referenced earlier a man can never know exactly what the consequences of his actions will be or how far reaching those consequences can be.  I would definitely put this book on a list of great novels of the 20^th century and a whole lot higher on my list than the #36 and #38 it makes on the Modern Library and Radcliffe’s Rival lists respectively.

Next week:  Merry Christmas!! We'll return next year.....