All the King's Men. Robert Penn Warren. (Novel)

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


Why read it? Willie Stark is a politician, said to be based on Huey Long of Louisiana. He is a populist and the issue is why he is a populist. A populist appears to be a champion of the common people.


My impression is that, for Willie, "good" is a practical necessity--it has to be done in order for him to succeed politically. There are no moral reasons for his doing good for people. If doing good for others helps him gain power, then he does good; if doing good will not help him to gain power, then he does not. And his methods to succeed are ruthless, making people suffer because they know that Willie knows what will destroy them. For me, the key issue in the plot is Adam's doing good for altruistic purposes vs. Willie's dong good in order to achieve power that eventually corrupts him.


But against this background, the novel is actually a meditation on life. And if you are interested in ideas on life, you will be interested in the reflections expressed in this novel. Jack Burden, the narrator, may seem to be purposeless in his life and without ambition, but he focuses on what happens around him and he thinks about it. What he thinks is often complex. Hard to read. Cryptic. And worth thinking about. The story may be about Willie, but the novel is about the consciousness of Jack Burden.


Sample ideas from the novel.


"I never tell anybody anything. I just listen." "She had made her way in the world up from the shack in the mud flat by always finding out what you knew and never letting you know what she knew." "They've got a talent for being quiet." "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." "My God, you talk like Byram was human! He's a thing! You don't prosecute an adding machine if a spring goes bust and makes a mistake. You fix it." "You are talking so you won't tell me." "Goodbye, Lois, and I forgive you for everything I did to you."


"...it was as though the vibration set up in the whole fabric of the world by my act was spread infinitely and with ever increasing power and no man could know the end." "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 injects the black, numbing poison under your hide. It does not matter whether or not you meant to brush the web of things." "I eat a persimmon and the teeth of a tinker in Tibet are put on edge.""Does he think that I am his son? I cannot be sure. Nor can I feel that it matters. For each of us is the son of a million fathers."


"He's interested in Willie. Quite simply and directly. And when anybody is interested in himself quite simply and directly the way Willie is interested in Willie you call it genius. It's only half-baked people...who are interested in money." "You're a gent, and so you don't ever get impatient." "The subject of my future, as a matter of fact, was one on which I had never cared to dwell. I simply didn't care. I would think that I'd get a job, any kind of job, and do it and collect my pay and spend the pay and go back to the job on Monday morning, and that would be all. I had no ambitions. But I couldn't sit there and say to Anne, 'Oh, I'll just get some kind of job.' I had to give the impression of being farsighted and purposeful and competent." "God cannot be fullness of being, for life is motion...toward knowledge."


"Yeah, just plain, simple goodness. Well you can't inherit that from anybody. You got to make it, Doc. If you want it. And you got to make it out of badness." "Was our happiness tonight like the light of the moon, which does not come from the moon, for the moon is cold and has no light of its own, but is reflected light from far away." "If the human race didn't remember anything it would be perfectly happy." "And what we students of history always learn is that the human being is a very complicated contraption and that they are not good or bad but are good and bad and the good comes out of the bad and the bad out of the good."


Note: The preceding thoughts should give you an idea of the kind of meditations expressed in the novel. The final quote will tax your comprehension, your reflection and, if you so desire, discussion.


Quote: "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 hm 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."