All the King's Men - Robert Penn Warren [268]
There was another world, a factual world, made possible by the factual Long, though not inhabitated by him. It was a world that I, as an assistant professor, was to catch fleeting glimpses of, and ponder. It was the world of the parasites of power, a world of sick yearning for elegance and the sight of one’s name on the society page of a New Orleans newspaper; it was the world of the electric moon devised, it was alleged, to cast a romantic glow over the garden when the President of the University and his wife entertained their politicos and pseudo-socialities; it was a world of pretentiousness, of blood curdling struggles for preferment, of drool-jawed grab and arrogant criminality. It was a world all too suggestive, in its small-bore, provincial way, of the airs and aspirations that the newspapers attributed to the ex-champagne salesman Von Ribbentrop and to the inner circle of Edda Ciano’s friends.
As for Long, he was concerned with nothing but power, and though he surrounded himself with a motley crew on whose cupidity, vanity and yearnings he could play, he could once give a cynical warning too to a group of such hangers-on: if he died, he said, they would all go to the penitentiary. He was a prophet, and once the weight of his contempt, political savvy and discipline had been removed by the young Brutus in the capitol, the feverish little world of Governor’s Mansion, capitol, and even campus was to go on a spree of high-geared and low-geared looting and larceny, and plunge idiotically rampant toward the day when headlines would advertise the suicides, and the population of prisons, Federal and state, would receive some distinguished additions.
But this is getting ahead of the story. Meanwhile, there was, beside the lurid world, the world of ordinary to look at. There were the people who ran stores or sold insurance, or had a farm and tried to survive and pay their debts. There were – visible even from the new concrete speedway that Huey had slashed through the cypress swamps toward New Orleans – the palmetto-leaf and sheet-iron shacks of the moss-pickers, rising like some fungoid growth from a hummock under the great cypress knees, surrounded by scum-green water that never felt sunlight, back in that Freudianly contorted cypress gloom of cottonmouth moccasins big as the biceps of a prize-fighter, and owl calls, and the murderous metallic grind of insect life, and the smudge-fire at the hovel door, that door being nothing but a hole in a hovel wall with a piece of crocker sack hung over it.
A few miles away, there was the University, where students were like students anywhere in the country in the big state universities, except for the extraordinary number of pretty girls and the preternatural blankness of the gladiators who were housed beneath the stadium to have their reflexes honed, their diet supervised, and through the efforts of tutors – their heads crammed with just enough of whatever mash was required (I never found out) to get them past their minimal examinations. Among the students there sometimes appeared, too, that awkward boy from the depth of ’Cajun country or from some hard-scrabble farm in some parish like Winn, with burning ambition and frightening energy and a thirst for learning; and his presence there, you reminded yourself, with whatever complication of irony seemed necessary at the moment, was due to Huey, and to Huey alone. For, as I have said, the “better element” had done next to nothing to get that boy out of the grim despair of his ignorance.
Conversation in Louisiana always came back to the myth of Long, to politics; and to talk politics is to talk about power. So conversation turned, by implication at least, on the question of power and ethics, of power and justification, of means and ends, of “historical costs.” The big words were not often used, certainly not by the tellers of the tales, but the concepts lurked even behind the most ungrammatical folktale. The tales were shot through with philosophy.
The tales were shot, too, with folk humor, and the ethical ambiguity of folk humor. The tales, like the politic conversations, were shot through, too, with violence