All the king's men

Introduction to the 1974 English Edition

In August 1946, one of my novels, _All the King's Men__, was published, and since I had lived in Louisiana during the last phase of the regime of Huey P. Long, and since the hero of my novel is a politician who, like Long, gests himself gunned down in his capitol, it was widely surmised that my book was designed as a fictionalized biography of the Kingfish himself. The book was, in fact, declared by several reviewers to be an apologia for fascism.

After all these years I have little inclination to reopen old controversies about _All the King's Men__ – controversies which, certainly, could be of little interest to an English reader. But Long and the world he dominated provided the original stimulus for the writing of the novel, and did suggest some of the issues that emerge there. Furthermore, since Long and his world are so indigenously American, I should, perhaps, say something on that topic to the prospective English reader.

The life of Huey P. Long does not quite represent the classic American success story, but it is close enough to that to lend plausibility to the fiction he sedulously fostered. For example, though no born in the log in the log cabin mandatory for the myth, he was born in a log house – which, though commodious, could be conveniently for his political purposes. But Long was, indeed, reared in a thin-soiled back-country parish (as counties are called in Louisiana) where, even though by local standards his family was prosperous, he knew the sights and small of poverty; and he was clear-headed enough to sense early that, for all the respect the Long family might command in the parish of Winn, they would, in the regions dominated by the planter class, or among the rich bankers, merchants and lawyers of New Orleans, be regarded as well below middling.

But middling was not for Huey P. Long. From the beginning of his political career, which is to say from the time he left off short pants, he dramatically identified himself with the dispossessed, and to teach the dispossessed their own power became both his method and his mission. His motives were, no doubt, mixed. And it is doubtful that he understood them – or, even, gave them much analytical thought. He instinctively grasped the fact that for him the low road would be the high road.

At the age of twenty-one, Huey entered upon his mission. He had, he was later to say, come down the steps of the courthouse where he had stood before the Supreme Court of Louisiana to be formally to the bar, "running for office." He had had a minimal education – bad schooling in the town of Winnfield, one year at the University of Oklahoma, and one year, of the three-year course, in the Law School of Tulane University in New Orleans. But from childhood, like Lincoln, Mark Twain, and other notable American autodidacts, he had read whatever books he could lay hand to in his unbookish world, and he never forgot anything he read and never failed to reflect on it. He knew the Bible well – as the myth requires – Shakespeare. A favorite play was, in fact, _Julius Caesar__. Along with the novels of Balzac, Scott, Hugo, Dickens and Cooper, he read the autobiography of that perfect egotist Cellini, and biographies of Napoleon and, again, Caesar. Beyond books, he had studied human nature on the streets of the little courthouse town of Winnfield, and in the hard school of door-to-door selling (as a boy he boasted that he could sell anything to anybody).

Now, as a man, he was brash to a high degree, boiling with energy and boundless ambition, with his sights already set on noting else that the White House. He knew law, enough at least to make him rich at an early age, not merely what he had gleaned from the scattering of courses at Tulane, but all that his steel-trap mind seized in a year of ferociously self-disciplined cramming with time out for little beyond eating and sleeping. He was a wit, a deliberate vulgarian, a crusader and a redeemer, an orator capable of high style or low, a philosopher of politics, and an amoral schemer. He was, in short, a creature of contradictions, but every item fell into its logical place in his manic drive toward power. He was the perfect political animal.

The world of Louisiana was the perfect place for the perfect political animal. Here, in the "banana republic of the United States," as it has been termed, political maneuvering was regarded as a sporting event, and even the politician steeped in corruption might be regarded, he had humor and style, as more of a folk hero than a public menace. At the same time, in the upper reaches of society, politics presented a façade of respectability, for the real power, for many generations, had rested in the hands of a tight oligarchy of rich and sometimes well-born, and even well-meaning, planters, merchants and corporation lawyers. The state was their fief, lock, stock and barrel, and by divine dispensation. Roads were foul, schools farcical, illiteracy a national scandal, per capita income abysmal and social services nonexistent, but the oligarchs had always been able to buy off or blunt the occasional demagogue or reformer who sought to exploit, or to remedy, the situation.

Huey Pierce Long was not, however, a mere demagogue or a mere reformer. He saw the world of Louisiana steadily and saw it whole, and he saw it in the harsh light of the immediacy. He was without illusion or sentiment. He wasted no time on the standard demagogic appeals to the Lost Cause, the dogma of White Supremacy, or the sanctity of Southern Womanhood. He had even less time for the rhetoric of the reformer who put his trust on the goodness of human nature or the efficacy of unassisted virtue. The role of the prophet unarmed never held any attraction for him.

The oligarchs of Louisiana were the natural prey of the young man who came down the courthouse steps running for office. They, for all their experience of power, were the dupes of illusion: they believed in all the big words, old ideas and rituals of their world, and, most fatally of all, believed that their world would never change. They could not see a fact before the face, the main fact not visible to their bemused gaze being the one-gallus, wool-hat, scrabbled farmer sitting on the doorstep of his cant-wise shack with a rusted-down barbed-wired fence separating his bare yard from a road hock-deep in dust or mud, according to the season.

So by 1928, Huey was Governor, and was beginning to build his roads, free bridges, schools, hospitals and universities, and to establish various social services. By 1932, he was United States Senator. By 1935, by methods that would not always bear legal or moral scrutiny, he had liquidated all serious opposition in Louisiana; had centralized, to a degree never paralleled in ant state, all power in, for all practical purposes, his own hands, executive, legislative and judicial; had gained a reputation that, on the mere rumor of a speech by Huey, would pack the galleries of the Senate Chamber of the national capitol; and had, by his charisma and radical economic program, made himself the only figure that Franklin Delano Roosevelt, himself no mean or compunction-bound operator, feared in the impending presidential election of 1936. By September 8, 1935, in the marble hall of the skyscraper capitol he had built in Baton Rouge, he was shot down by an assassin. By September 10, he was dead.

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.

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 – or rather, with hints of the possibility of violence. There was a hint of revolutionary desperation – often synthetically induced. In Louisiana, in '34 and '35, it took nothing to start a rumor of violence. There was going to be, you might hear, a "battle" at the airport at Baton Rouge. A young filling-station operator would proudly display his sawed-off automatic shotgun – I forget which "side" he was on, but I remember his fingers caressing the polished walnut of the stock. Long held a public investigation of an alleged conspiracy against his life, and you heard that the next day the arrests would be made. You heard that there was going to be a march on the Capitol – but not by whom or for what. And when Long stirred abroad he moved flanked by his armed guards.

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.

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