All the King's Men - Robert Penn Warren [267]
There were two versions of the dying man’s last words. The first version: “What will my poor boys at L.S.U. [the Louisiana State University] do without me?” The second, and more generally accepted version: “God, don’t let me die. I have so much to do.” One wonders what set of sounds could have reasonably suggested both interpretations. The only thing that the two interpretations have in common has no relation to linguistic and rhythmical questions; it is the implication that the speaker was dying as a martyr to his humanitarian ideals.
Long may have been such a martyr. That is, he may have been, as T. Harry Williams put it in the inaugural address of his Harmsworth Professorship at Oxford, a latter-day manifestation of the old American Populism. But there was, too, the ruthless drive toward centralized power and contempt for the democratic process, and the atmosphere of violence that hung over his career and reached climax in the hall of his capitol.
The definition of the nature of Huey Pierce Long, is, however, far from the concern of my novel, and even today I have not the ghost of a notion of what he, in truth, was. What caught my eye, and imagination, was the myth that I saw growing before my eyes. But when, in 1934, I went to Louisiana to live, I did not even know about the myth. I met the myth on the road there.
I was going there because, in the midst of the Depression, Huey’s University, at Baton Rouge, was the only one in the country that was hiring, and not firing, young assistant professors. So I drove down from Tennessee, across the state of Mississippi, crossed the river by ferry at Greenville (there, I think), and was in North Louisiana. Along the way I picked up a hitchhiker – a country man, the kind you call a red-neck or a wool-hat, aging, aimless, nondescript, beat up by life and hard times and bad luck, clearly tooth-broke and probably gut-shot, standing beside the road in an attitude that spoke of infinite patience and considerably fortitude, holding a parcel in his hand, the parcel wrapped in old newspaper and tied with binder-twine, waiting for some car to come along. He was, though at the moment I did not sense it, a mythological figure.
He was the god on the battlement, dimly perceived above the darkling tumult and steaming carnage of the political struggle. He was a voice, a portent, and a natural force like the Mississippi river getting set to bust a levee. Long before the Fascist March on Rome, Norman Douglas, meditating on Naples, had predicted that the fetid slums of Europe would make possible the “inspired idiot.” His predictive diagnosis of the origins of fascism – and of communism – may be incomplete, but it is certain that the rutted back roads and slab-side shacks that had spawned my nameless old hitchhiker, with the twine-tied paper parcel in his hand, had made possible the rise of Huey. My nameless hitchhiker was, mythologically speaking, Long’s sine qua non.
So it was appropriate that he should tell me the first episode of the many I was to hear of the myth that was “Huey.” The roads, he said, was shore better now. A man could git to market, he said. A man could jist git up and git, if’n a notion come on him. Did’n have to pay no toll at no bridge, neither. For Huey was a free-bridge man. So he went on to tell me how, standing on the river bank, by a toll bridge (what river and what bridge never clear), Huey had made the president of the company that owned the bridge a good, fair cash offer, and the man laughed at him. But, the old hitchhiker said, Huey did’n do nothing but leaning over and pick up a chunk of rock and throwed it off a-way, and asked did that president feller see whar the rock hit. The feller said yeah, he did. Wal, Huey said, next thing you see is gonna be a big new free bridge right whar that rock hit, and you, you son-of-a-bitch, are goen bankrupt a-ready and doan even know it.
There were a thousand tales, over the years, and some of them were, no doubt, literally true. But they were all true in the world of “Huey” – that world of myth, folklore, poetry, deprivation, rancor, and dimly envisaged hopes. That world had a strange, shifting, often ironical and sometimes irrelevant relation to the factual world of Senator Huey P. Long and his cold scrutiny of the calculus of power. The two worlds, we may hazard, merged only at the moment in September 1935, in the corridor of the capitol, when the little .32 slug bit meanly into the senatorial vitals.