All the King's Men - Robert Penn Warren [265]
When the old man is dead and the book is finished, I shall let the First and Third National Bank take the house and I don’t care who lives here afterward, for from that day it will be nothing to me but a well-arranged pile of brick and lumber. Anne and I shall never live here again, not in the house or at the Landing. (She doesn’t want to live here any more than I do. She has let her place go to the Children’s Home she was interested in and I imagine it will become a kind of sanatorium. She’s not very complacent about having done that. With Adam dead the place was not a joy but a torture to her, and the gift of the house was finally her gift to the ghost of Adam, a poor gift humbly offered, like the handful of wheat or a painted pot in the tomb, to comfort the ghost and send it on its way so that it would trouble the living no longer.)
So by summer of this year, 1939, we shall have left Burden’s Landing.
We shall come back, no doubt, to walk down the Row and watch young people on the tennis courts by the clump of mimosas and walk down the beach by the bay, where the diving floats lift gently in the sun, and on out to the pine grove, where the needles thick on the ground will deaden the footfall so that we shall move among the trees as soundlessly as smoke. But that will be a long time from now, and soon now we shall go out of the house and go into the convulsion of the world, out of history into history and the awful responsibility of Time.
The End
Introduction to the 1974 English Edition
In August 1946, one of my novels, All the King’s Men, was published, and since I had lived in Louisiana during the last phase of the regime of Huey P. Long, and since the hero of my novel is a politician who, like Long, gests himself gunned down in his capitol, it was widely surmised that my book was designed as a fictionalized biography of the Kingfish himself. The book was, in fact, declared by several reviewers to be an apologia for fascism.
After all these years I have little inclination to reopen old controversies about All the King’s Men – controversies which, certainly, could be of little interest to an English reader. But Long and the world he dominated provided the original stimulus for the writing of the novel, and did suggest some of the issues that emerge there. Furthermore, since Long and his world are so indigenously American, I should, perhaps, say something on that topic to the prospective English reader.
The life of Huey P. Long does not quite represent the classic American success story, but it is close enough to that to lend plausibility to the fiction he sedulously fostered. For example, though no born in the log in the log cabin mandatory for the myth, he was born in a log house – which, though commodious, could be conveniently for his political purposes. But Long was, indeed, reared in a thin-soiled back-country parish (as counties are called in Louisiana) where, even though by local standards his family was prosperous, he knew the sights and small of poverty; and he was clear-headed enough to sense early that, for all the respect the Long family might command in the parish of Winn, they would, in the regions dominated by the planter class, or among the rich bankers, merchants and lawyers of New Orleans, be regarded as well below middling.
But middling was not for Huey P. Long. From the beginning of his political career, which is to say from the time he left off short pants, he dramatically identified himself with the dispossessed, and to teach the dispossessed their own power became both his method and his mission. His motives were, no doubt, mixed. And it is doubtful that he understood them – or, even, gave them much analytical thought. He instinctively grasped the fact that for him the low road would be the high road.
At the age of twenty-one, Huey entered upon his mission. He had, he was later to say, come down the steps of the courthouse where he had stood before the Supreme Court of Louisiana to be formally to the bar, “running for office.” He had had a minimal education – bad schooling in the town of Winnfield, one year at the University of Oklahoma, and one year, of the three-year course, in the Law School of Tulane University in New Orleans. But from childhood, like Lincoln, Mark Twain, and other notable American autodidacts, he had read whatever books he could lay hand to in his unbookish world, and he never forgot anything he read and never failed to reflect on it. He knew the Bible well