There is Always Something - 'All the King's Men'

Long ago in Moscow, I was stuck in a hotel waiting for an appointment that might never come, and a phone call that might take six hours to get through, or might also never happen at all.  It was winter and coming on to snow, hard. I had run out of books. I was quite alone. Late in the darkening afternoon, I slogged across town by metro to the old Foreign Languages Publishing House bookshop, in the hope of picking up a cheap classic in English. Some sort of providence had directed me. By then (it was the mid-Gorbachev era) the money was running out and the shelves were mostly bare. But there was one, slightly-foxed edition of ‘All the King’s men’ by Robert Penn Warren. I had never, to my shame, even heard of this book, which doesn’t have anything like the reputation in Britain that it ought to have.

 

The Soviet version, in pale khaki board covers, was crammed with dense footnotes, going deeply into the corrupt nature of American politics. You could see why they would like that. It was rather like those old British wartime standard volumes, poorly printed on bad paper, and all the more fun because of that. I wish I still had it, especially those old Marxist-Leninist footnotes.  I have no idea what became of it. Twice, since then, I have packed up my life and put it in a lorry or an ocean-going container, and you just lose things, try as you may to hang on to them. It is sad, but then so many things are.

 

I carried it back to the National Hotel, then a place of dingy grandeur, only accessible through bribes ( a bottle of Chanel No 5 to the reception lady , promised in advance on the phone, worked well),   had a frugal supper and retired to my huge, shadowy bedroom with its deep, wrecked armchair and its sagging, Tsarist-era bed, looking out on to what was then Gorky Street, and the great fleets of snowploughs going past every ten minutes in formation, passing the snow to each other across the broad highway like rugby forwards.   

 

Then I opened the book, and I did not stop reading it till morning. The phone call never did come through.   That was, what?, 22 or 23 years ago, and I have in a way, been reading it ever since.  I am not sure how many times I have read and re-read it. I sometimes think I know it by heart, but I never do. Each time I read it I find something else. My head is full of pictures – the big car thundering dangerously through the night, the sad houses it visits, the rending descriptions of country solitude and loneliness, of sad, failed parents - and the simply superb brief evocation of how individuals can be left behind by a close relative who achieves greatness, and who is both still present physically in the lives of those close to him, but also gone forever.

 

Penn Warren is a poet who restrains himself into prose. Sometimes the prose is a bit too lush even for me, though it is a good, justifiable lushness which has much to do with the fecund, swampy, steamy deep , deep deep South with which it deals. It drives on, for most of the time, much as Willie Stark’s four-ton Cadillac drives relentlessly down Willie Stark’s’ brand new concrete highways, with the endlessly pathetic figure of Sugar-Boy, the chauffeur and bodyguard, intent at the wheel. Even he will have his hour, fierce and sweet.

 

Willie Stark is so obviously based upon the Louisiana Governor Huey Long that nobody even bothers to pretend he is not. Look him up. Many,  at the time,  feared he might be a sort of American Fascist (another reason why the Soviet publishers brought out the book) . Others just decried his open corruption and his use of unrestrained blackmail to get his way. Others genuinely loved him for the things he did. To this day I think his memory is complicated.

 

But the book also comes quite close to making a case for him. If you want to study the argument about ends justifying means, or original sin, or whether you can do good things by bad methods, or make good buildings out of rotten materials ( a metaphor that goes back to Stark’s beginnings) , here is all the material you need, closely observed, and involving  small group of believable and likeable characters, of whom my favourite will always be Sadie Burke, with her pockmarked face and her massacred hair, the Governor’s almost permanently furious mistress and manager, who complains that he is two-timing her (which he does)  though of course she can hardly do so because she is herself two-timing Willie’s wife. Sadie is the person who – without meaning to – changed Willie Stark’s life forever in a scene of mingled farce and revenge which is one of the most enjoyable reversals of fortune ever written down.  As for the narrator, Jack Burden,  once a journalist, you will have to get to know him yourself. I have come to assume that his name has something to do with Christian’s burden in the Pilgrim’s Progress, amongst other things.

 

Penn Warren does not try to hide his purpose. The book is a terrifying statement (over and over again)  of the fact, discovered too late by most of us, that actions have consequences, that by simply brushing carelessly against the great spider’s web of the universe we can bring about the most terrible results.

 

There is a book within the book, concerning an adulterous affair in the ante-bellum south, which utterly destroys first one, then two , then three human beings (and ravages the life of a fourth, whom we never see). It simply reeks of the pain of remorse. The remembrance is grievous; the burden is intolerable. It also contains the shortest (and the most potent) illicit love-letter I have ever seen, and the most savage denunciation of hypocrisy.

 

But all the time the great black train of Penn Warren’s plot rumbles on across the sad Louisiana landscape,  towards its conclusion, in which all secrets shall be revealed. And what secrets they are. Willie Stark (the beneficiary of , among other things, a sound Presbyterian theological schooling  when theology still had some grit and muscle to it) is fond of saying ( as he prepares to blackmail an opponent or an obstacle)  ‘Man is conceived in sin and born in corruption and he passeth from the stink of the didie (nappy) to the stench of the shroud. There is always something’.

 

There always is, too.  My goodness, yes there is.  You’ll have to read the book to find out how true it is. And once you have, you’ll never get it out of your head and, if you’re lucky, you’ll always be reading it, ever afterwards. There are two films based on it – the older one better, though neither really gets within half a mile of the power of the real thing.  The book is the thing. Everyone should read it. That’s something else I owe to Moscow.