All the King's Men - Robert Penn Warren [270]
I had not been Jack Burden except in so far as you have to try to “be” whatever you are trying to create. And in that sense, I was also Adam Stanton, and Willie Stark, and Sadie Burke, and Sugar Boy, and all the rest. And this brings me to my last notion. However important for my novel was the protracted dialectic between “Huey” on the one side, and me on the other, it was far less important, in the end, than that deeper and darker dialectic for which the images and actions of a novel are the only language. And however important was my acquaintance with Louisiana, that was far less important than my acquaintance with another country: for any novel, good or bad, must try, willy-nilly, to report the history, sociology and politics of a country even more fantastic than was Louisiana under the consulship of Huey.
As a sort of footnote, I may remark that when All the King’s Men first appeared in England, a section was omitted. That section – Chapter Four in the American version, and in this one – concerns a character of the time of the American Civil War; the original English publisher had decided that the subject would not interest his public. The omission was made with me consent, but I always felt that the section is central to the novel. When, in writing the book, I had come to the end of Chapter Three, I could not go on. I was afraid that my story would thin out into a narrative of mere intrigue, something like political shenanigans in a banana republic. I was afraid, too, that the narrator would become a mere narrator, nothing more than a technical convenience with no relation to the action. In other words, to put it into a crude short-hand, I felt that the general story would lack any deep moral dimension, and the narrator any deep psychological dimension.
So I struck on the notion of making Jack Burden, my narrator, a candidate for the Ph.D. in American history, doing a dissertation based on family papers. The character in the family papers – Cass Mastern by name – had, in his personal life and in the public event of the Civil War, come into a moral and psychological crisis. Cass had, however, finally found meaning in his life, and death, by trying to face the crisis. Burden, at the moment unable to find meaning in his own life, simply flees from the reproach implicit in the materials of the dissertation. So he is prepared, for the time being anyway, to accept another version of the world, a sort of mirror-image of that inhabited by Cass Mastern; he takes refuge in the one offered by Willie Stark.
But that is not the end of the story.
Robert Penn Warren
West Wardsboro, Vermont
July 14, 1973