All the King's Men - Robert Penn Warren [269]
Melodrama was the breath of life. There had been melodrama in the life I had known in Tennessee, but with a difference: in Tennessee the melodrama seemed to be different from the stuff of life, something superimposed upon life, but in Louisiana people lived melodrama – seemed to live, in fact, for t, for the strange combination of philosophy, humor, and violence. Life was a tale that you happened to be living – and that “Huey” happened to be living grandly before your eyes. And all the while I was reading Shakespeare and Jacobean tragedy, Dante and Machiavelli and Guicciardini, William James and American history – and all that I was reading seemed to come alive, in shadowy distortions and sudden clarities, in what I saw around me.
How directly did I try to transpose into fiction Huey P. Long and his world? The question answers itself in a single fact. The first version of my story was a verse drama; and the first serious writing began, in 1938, in the shade of an olive tree by a wheat field near Perugia. In other words, if you are sitting under an olive tree in Umbria and are writing a verse drama, the chances are that you are concerned more with the myth than with the fact, more with the symbolic than with the actual. And so it was. It could not, after all, have been otherwise, for the strict, literal sense, I had, as I have said, no idea what the then deceased Long had bee. What I knew was the “Huey” of the myth, and that was what I had taken with me to Mussolini’s Italy, where the bully-boys wore black shirts and gave a funny salute, and the longer I stayed there the less tidy, in other ways too, seemed the popular parallel between “Huey” and “Musso.”
I had no way of knowing what had ever gone on in the privacy of the heart of Senator Long. Now I could only hope, ambitiously, to know something of the heart of the Governor Talos of my play Proud Flesh. For Talos was the first version of my later Willie Stark, and the fact that I drew the name from the “iron groom” who, in murderous blankness, serves the Knight of Justice in Spenser’s Faerie Queene should indicate something of the line of thought and feeling that led up to that version and persisted, with modulations, into the novel.
In the novel Talos was to become Stark and Proud Flesh (with its double meaning in the adjective) would become All the King’s Men. Many things, some merely technical, led to this transformation, but a very important one was the fact that I felt the play too constricted to provide the human context that made possible the rise of the man of power: the man of power must fill, in some deep and secret way, some blankness in the people of this world. The change to the novel has some bearing, too, on the question of the ratio of fact to fiction. When, in 1943, I began the version that is more realistic, discursive, and documentary in method (though not in spirit) than the play, I had long since left Louisiana and the literal world in which the story had its roots. By now the literal world was only a memory, and therefore was ready to be absorbed more freely into the act of imagination. Even the old man by the roadside – the hitchhiker I had picked up on the way down to Baton Rouge to take my job – was ready to enter the story: he would become the hitchhiker whom Jack Burden picks up returning from Long Beach, California, the old man with the twitch in his face that gives Jack the idea of the Great Twitch. But my old Louisiana hitchhiker had no twitch in his face. Nor had I been Jack Burden.