All the King's Men. Robert Penn Warren.

All the King’s Men
Robert Penn Warren
New York: Time Incorporated, 1946/1963.

Why read it? Novel. Understand the complexity of a politician’s motivation. Willie Stark does good for political purposes vs. the idealist who does good for the sake of humanity. In the end, the idealist shoots the political pragmatist.

This is the story of Jack Burden and of Willie Stark, the latter a complex mixture of “good” and “evil” intentions who uses “good” and “evil” methods (the most effective of the latter being pressure—the threat of revealing an individual’s past, hidden mistakes) who, through legislation, gives the ordinary citizen hope and help. The question which one asks about Willie is—does Willie do good because he sincerely wants to help he ordinary citizen? Or because he recognizes that the ordinary citizen is the source of his power? The answer, probably, “both.” My impression is that, for Willie, “good” is a practical necessity—it has to be done in order to succeed politically and that’s it. There are no moral reasons why he does it. If doing good for others helps him gain power, then he does it; if doing good will not help him to gain power, then he does not. And his methods to succeed are ruthless, making people twitch and suffer because they know that Willie knows what will destroy them.

But this book is also the story of Jack Burden, who, unlike Willie, is a man without a cause or purpose in life (the chief reason for Anne’s rejecting him) although he looks at and feels life deeply. Jack seems to learn that the past and responsibility and the problems which arise from human relationships should not be shifted, but must become part of the reality of present and future which the individual shapes to make life a significant experience. The story is told through the point of view of Jack.

The purpose of life? Living is all.

Is the key to Jack Burden the rejection of responsibility? I think the key issue in the novel is Adam’s doing good for altruistic purposes vs. Willie’s doing good in order to achieve power, which corrupts him. The theme is producing good from evil.

All the King’s Men is not so much the story of Willie Stark and Jack Burden, but a meditation on life as Nabokov’s Lolita is not so much the story of a middle-aged man’s obsession with a teenager, but a celebration of the English language and American culture, not unlike Kerouac’s On the Road, which is not a travelogue, but a portrait of American culture in the 1950s and 1960s.

Best sentence: “The creation of man whom God in his foreknowledge knew doomed to sin was the awful index of God’s omnipotence. For it would have been a thing of trifling and contemptible ease for perfection to create more perfection. To do so would, to speak truth, be not creation but extension. Separateness I identify and the only way for God to create, truly create, man, was to make him separate from God Himself and to be separate from God is to be sinful. The creation of evil is therefore the index of God’s glory and His power. That had to be so that the creation of good might be the index of man’s power and glory.” p. 600.