Grear Writing VI: All the King's Men

So I pulled the sun screen down and squinted and put the throttle to the floor. And kept on moving west. For West is where we all plan to go some day. It is where you go when the land gives out and the old-field pines encroach. It is where you go when you get the letter saying: Flee, all is discovered. It is where you go when you look down at the blade in your hand and the blood on it. It is where you go when you are told that you are a bubble on the tide of empire. It is where you go when you hear that thar's gold in them-thar hills. It is where you go to grow up with the country. It is where you go to spend your old age. Or it is just where you go.

It was just where I went.

Robert Penn Warren, All the King's Men.

As much as I bitch about grad school--and I bitch constantly--I still very much want to teach literature. I think there's value in reading great writing and discussing great writing and delving into difficult books. Literature won't save your soul or make you a better person, but it can preserve and stoke the part of your brain that says, "There's more to it than this. There are things I still need to understand and contemplate."

Anyway, that's why I bother.

Robert Penn Warren is associated with Cleanth Brooks, the head of the New Criticism movement. New Criticism is out of favour now, which means that Warren, a three-time Pulitzer winner and Poet Laureate, isn't read much. It's a shame, because his poetry is brilliant, and I'm enjoying his fiction even more.

I'm two-thirds through All the King's Men. After a slow start it takes off. It was written within a year of Citizen Kane, and it has the same king of back-and-forth structure, which makes me wonder if Warren and Orson Welles were aware of each other.

Warren became a mentor to David Milch, and there's definitely an influence apparent, especially in how Warren works metaphysical and philosophical discussions into the thoughts and words of flesh-and-blood characters.

The first film adaptation of All the King's Men was with Broderick Crawford in 1949. It was remade a few years ago--because Hollywood ran out of original thoughts, and seems in danger of running out of secondhand ones--with Sean Penn in the lead. It can be hard to imagine a character as he or she is described once that book has been turned into a film. I can't think of Tom Joad without seeing Henry Fonda in my mind's eye. But even though I started with Penn in mind, Willie Stark really came into his own once I hit page fifty. Not that the description is excessive or even prevalent in the book, but Stark and Burden and the other characters seem fully-formed. They have a psychological integrity that makes them themselves, in the way Lear is only himself, or Victor Frankenstein, or even Hannibal Lector. There are certain depths that movies and tv cannot penetrate, depths that belong only to fiction. And isn't that fucking swell for those of us still marginally literate?