All the King's Men - Robert Penn Warren [42]
He wasn’t really in touch with the world. He was not only bemused by the voice he had heard. He was bemused by the very grandeur of the position to which he aspired. The blaze of light hitting him in the eyes blinded him. After all, he had just come out of the dark, the period when he grubbed on the farm all day and didn’t see anybody but the family (and day after day he must have moved by them as though they weren’t half-real) and sat at night in his room with the books and hurt inside with the effort and the groping and the wanting. So it isn’t much wonder that the blaze of light blinded him.
He knew something about human nature, all right. He’s sat around the county courthouse long enough to find out something. (True, he had got himself thrown out of the courthouse. But that wasn’t ignorance of human nature. It was, perhaps, a knowledge not of human nature in general but of his own nature in particular, something deeper than the mere question of right and wrong. He became a martyr, not through ignorance, not only for the right but also for some knowledge of himself deeper than right or wrong.) He knew something about human nature, but something now came between him and that knowledge. In a way, he flattered human nature. He assumed that other people were as bemused by the grandeur and as blinded by the light of the post to which he aspired, and that they would only listen to argument and language that was grand and bright. So his speeches were cut to that measure. It was a weird mixture of facts and figures on one hand (his tax program, his road program) and of fine sentiments on the other hand (a faint echo, somewhat dulled by time, of the quotations copied out in the ragged, boyish hand in the big ledger).
Willie went around the country in a good secondhand automobile, which had been bought on the eighteen-payment plan, and saw his face on the posters nailed to telephone poles and corncribs and board fences. He’d got to town, and after he’d been to the post office to see if there was a letter from Lucy and after he had had a session with the local politicos and done some handshaking (he wasn’t too hot at that, too much talk about principles and not enough about promises), he would hole up in a hotel room ($2.00 without bath) and work some more on his speech. He kept on polishing and revising the damned thing. He was hell-bent on making each one a second Gettysburg Address. And maybe after he had tinkered with it awhile, he would get up and start pacing in his room. He would pace and pace, and pretty soon he would start to say his speech. If you were in the next room, you could hear him pacing and speeching, and when he stopped pacing you knew he had stopped in front of the mirror to polish up a gesture.
And sometimes I’d be in the next room, for I was supposed to cover his campaign for the Chronicle. I’d be lying there in the hole in the middle of my bed where the spring had given down with the weight of wayfaring humanity, lying there on my back with my clothes on and looking up at the ceiling and watching the cigarette smoke flow up slow and splash against the ceiling like the upside-down slow-motion moving picture of the ghost of a waterfall or like the pale uncertain spirit rising up out of your mouth on the last exhalation, the way the Egyptians figured it, to leave the horizontal tenement of clay in its ill-fitting pants and vest. I’d be lying there letting the smoke drift up out of my mouth and not feeling anything, just watching the smoke as though I didn