The Kentucky Review Volume 2 | Number 3 Article 4 1981 Some Observations on Robert Penn Warren's Bibliography James A. Grimshaw Jr. U.S. Air Force Academy Follow this and additional works at: https://uknowledge.uky.edu/kentucky-review Part of the English Language and Literature Commons Right click to open a feedback form in a new tab to let us know how this document benefits you. Recommended Citation Grimshaw, James A. Jr. (1981) "Some Observations on Robert Penn Warren's Bibliography," The Kentucky Review: Vol. 2 : No. 3 , Article 4. Available at: https://uknowledge.uky.edu/kentucky-review/vol2/iss3/4 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the University of Kentucky Libraries at UKnowledge. It has been accepted for inclusion in The Kentucky Review by an authorized editor of UKnowledge. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Some Observations on Robert Penn Warren's Bibliography* ]ames A. Grimshaw, ]r. in The cutoff date of Robert Penn Warren: A Descriptive Bibliography is 31 December 1979, and already the bibliography is out-of-date. Twelve months later, an additional twenty-seven primary and fifty secondary items, as well as notices of twenty-eight forthcoming items, have appeared. Excluding reviews, that is approximately one f publication by or about Warren every three days in 1980. By the time this bibliography is published-probably in late fall1981-the number of entries waiting for a possible revision will have increased proportionately. Such statistics, however, simply lend credence to the often repeated statement that "Robert Penn Warren is America's most productive, versatile writer," a fact recently recognized with the presentation of the 1980 Jay B. Hubbell Medal to Warren who, the citation reads, "assiduously exemplified the vocation of the man of letters in twentieth-century America." I came to Robert Penn Warren's works relatively late, as an undergraduate in 1962, in an American novel course at Texas Tech University. His novel was, as you might guess, All the King's Men, which had won a Pulitzer Prize, had been made into an award­ winning movie, had been produced off Broadway, and had already been critically praised in academia as a book no student should graduate without having read. Such praise continues into this new decade. 1 In a recent essay on 'The American Political Novel" in the New York Times Book Review, Robert Alter writes: Among American political novels of the last several decades, it seems to me that Robert Penn Warren's All the King's Men (1946) may still be the book that most adequately meets both these tests, providing a probing scrutiny of -f. political man's character and a suggestive 19 A n e1 a1 d tf P< re J<j C( a< a ~ ' in ; I di 0 Robert Penn Warren in Lexington, 1 June 1980. Lexington Herald­ tH Leader Photo 20 sense of the connection between politics and the enigmas of human existence.2 As pleased as Warren enthusiasts must be with this continued recognition of Warren's genius, Alter and others seem to me to emphasize the political at the expense of other aspects of the novel and, in doing so, not to listen to the author. Robert Rossen, director of the film version of All the King's Men, chose to emphasize the Willie Stark story, too, and his film bears little resemblance to Warren's complete novel. .But in the novel Warren's narrator, Jack Burden, tells us: This has been the story of Willie Stark, but it is my story too. For I have a story. It is the story of a man who lived in the world and to him the world looked one way for a long time and then it looked another and very different way. The change did not happen all at once. Many things happened, and that man did not know when he had any responsibility for them and when he did not.3 This observation, to me, epitomizes Warren's chief theme throughout his writings and the thrust of All the King's Men in particular: " ... the end of man is to know."4 Just as too many readers of Warren's writings have slighted this point in All the King's Men, so too have they slighted his other literary contributions. This assertion I make with full awareness of the many medals, honorary degrees, and literary prizes which he has garnered over the past fifty years.5 But in 1962, I did not realize the slight. What I did notice was the tour de force of his writings, the depth of his philosophical soundings, the breadth of his historicity, and the subtle but conscious interrelationships in All the King's Men. For some reason, now lost to me, Warren's use of the word "yellow" in that novel activated my curiosity. Although I have nothing startling to report about that word's significance in the novel, 6 it started me on an investigation which has ranged through a master's thesis, a doctoral dissertation, a descriptive bibliography, and into a continuing study of the most engaging author living today. For the next few pages, that odyssey will be the subject of my remarks. 21 II In 1968, just after completing my thesis on All the King's Men and being assigned to the faculty at the United States Air Force Academy, I decided that before I could adequately begin to study Warren's works, I should learn as much as possible about his canon and about his critics' opinions of his writings. A colleague suggested that I do a bibliography since a full bibliography had not yet appeared. Little did I realize at the time what that entailed. Twelve years and many pleasant memories later, the final 1,033-page manuscript is in composition at the University Press of Virginia. What prompts a person to follow such a pursuit is, and possibly always will be, an enigma. One might as well try to verbalize the inner meaning of Zen Buddhism. My ostensible purpose-and pragmatic use of the material found-is to write eventually whh greater understanding about Warren's works. Discoveries such as the inconsistencies of dates and the editorial changes in words, "adjustment" (Harcourt, p. 299.13) to "alignment" (Bantam, p. 282.25), both in All the King's Men, may be of interest, although I do not mean to imply that I have found anything as potentially embarrassing or critical as the "soiled-coiled" discovery in Melville's White-Jacket. 7 At least, I have not done so yet. We know, however, that bibliographies are useful. As Fredson Bowers notes about their function: "Scholarship by its very nature turns to the past to preserve and then to correlate the history of culture. Moreover, scholarship requires a stable body of material on which to operate; from this material by the patient accumulation and interpretation of facts it can attempt to draw up a sound basis for criticism."8 Exactly. That view is similar to what Robert Pirsig has written in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, that the combining of the romantic (aesthetic) and the classical (underlying form) modes of thought provides a more complete understanding of the object.9 Bibliography provides the means to study the underlying form on which sound scholarship relies. The sense of adventure and discovery which Richard Altick so dramatically describes in his book, The Scholar Adventurers, is present even in modern bibliography.10 From Warren's first published poem, "Prophecy," in 1922 in The Mess Kit: (Food for Thought), a publication of the Military Training Camps Association, Camp Knox, Kentucky, to his most recent volume, Being Here: Poems 1977-1980, the excitement continues. Fifty-eight 22 years of publishing: 40 volumes-including limited editions such as To a Little Girl, One Year Old, in a Ruined Fortress, designed by Jane Doggett, Yale University, circa 1956; Blackberry Winter (Cummington Press, 1946); Two Poems (Palaemon Press, 1979); and Ballad of a Sweet Dream of Peace: A Charade for Easter (forthcoming)-by Warren alone; 37 items done with others or as editor; 438 poems; 16 short stories; 10 dramas; 91 articles/ essays; at least 70 reviews; 89 unpublished items. Selections from his works have been anthologized approximately two hundred times and appear in translations in thirty-one foreign countries. Among the resources available on Warren's works are a modest 22 complete books, about 124 books devoted in part to his writings, 388 essays, over 400 reviews, 103 biographical sketches, 126 news releases (an obviously conservative estimate from the following selected newspapers: New York Times, Chicago Tribune, Nashville Tennessean, San Francisco Chronicle, Washington Post, plus the Baton Rouge Morning Advocate and State Times); 201 theses and dissertations; and 34 checklists. For fifty-eight years, something has appeared by or about Warren on an average of every ten days. My task of accumulation, then, was no small one. And thus, the challenge and adventure of acquisition kept my interest high. Gradually a person becomes "hooked." So many possibilities emerge: analysis of audience, the problem of inclusion and exclusion, the question of arrangement, the nagging concern over consistency, and the anxiety over completeness. The entire process involves a myriad of decisions, fascinating to a bibliographer. I will explore briefly just the five areas mentioned above. Audience Who will use the book determines much about content, arrangement, and the other considerations. For me, this audience consists of students, teachers, scholars, librarians, booksellers, and collectors; that is, a heterogeneous group with diverse expectations and needs. Hence, the need for a full bibliography which will meet the following five requirements: 1) Full description of the book as a material object which is the product of a printing press [from printer to publisher].