Four Quarters Volume 21 Article 1 Number 4 Four Quarters: May 1972 Vol
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Four Quarters Volume 21 Article 1 Number 4 Four Quarters: May 1972 Vol. XXI, No. 4 5-1972 Four Quarters: May 1972 Vol. XXI, No. 4 Follow this and additional works at: http://digitalcommons.lasalle.edu/fourquarters Recommended Citation (1972) "Four Quarters: May 1972 Vol. XXI, No. 4," Four Quarters: Vol. 21 : No. 4 , Article 1. Available at: http://digitalcommons.lasalle.edu/fourquarters/vol21/iss4/1 This Complete Issue is brought to you for free and open access by the University Publications at La Salle University Digital Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in Four Quarters by an authorized editor of La Salle University Digital Commons. For more information, please contact [email protected]. ^our" L€)|€|0101 Quartet^ VOL. XXI NO. 4 MAY 1972 ONE DOLLAR Robert Penn Warren Issue \ Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2010 with funding from Lyrasis. Members and Sloan Foundation http://www.archive.org/details/fourquarters41972unse Four Quarters VOL. XXI, No. 4 MAY, 1972 PUBLISHED BY THE FACULTY OF LA SALLE COLLEGE A Conversation with Robert Penn Warren, interview by Ruth Fisher 3 Rotation of Crops, poem by John Hollander 18 Brooks on Warren, a reminiscence by Cleanth Brooks 19 Warren, Huey Long, and All the King's Men, a reminiscence by Arthur H. Scouten 23 Robert Penn Warren: The Poetry of the Sixties, article by Victor Strandberg 27 The Fictional Voices of Robert Penn Warren, article by Robert Frank Cayton 45 The Penn Central Makes Some Connections, poem by Judith Kroll 53 Madness in At Heaven's Gate: A Metaphor of the Self in Warren's Fiction, article by H. D. Herring 56 Two Poems, by Claude Koch 67 Right On! All the King's Men in the Classroom, article by Earl Wilcox 69 The Earned Vision: Robert Penn Warren's "The Ballad of Billie Potts" and Albert Camus' Le Malentendu, article by Curtis Whittington, Jr. 79 From a Notebook, by Mark Strand 91 Warren and the Doctrine of Complicity, article by James H. Justus 93 Intimations of Mortality, poem by John Keenan 100 Carrying Manty Home: Robert Penn Warren's Band of Angels, article by Allen Shepherd 101 Ark, Flood, and Negotiated Covenant, article by Leonard Casper 110 Love's Definition: Dream as Reality in Robert Penn Warren's Meet Me in the Green Glen, article by D. G. Kehl 116 Notes on Contributors 123 Front cover: "Willie Stark" Back cover: "Cherry Tree in the Green Glen" by James Hanes Published in November, January, March, and May by the faculty of La Salle College. Subscriptions: $2.00 annually. Single copies: $.50 each. © 7972 by La Salle College. Manuscripts may be sent to four quarters, La Salle Col- lege, Phila., Pa. 19141. Unsolicited manuscripts must be accompanied by a stamped self-addressed envelope. The editors cannot assume responsibility for loss or damage to manuscripts beyond that of reasonable care for materials received. ^^friarginatia . • • —what Is man but his passion ? —Audubon: A Vision Over the forty years of his career as poet, novelist, critic, teach- er, editor, and essayist, Robert Penn Warren s passion, has been knowledge. In his seminal 1946 essay on William Faulkner, Mr. Warren spoke of the challenge Faulkner's technique presented to criticism, describing him as "an incorrigible and restless experimenter." For this reason, he notes, critical readings of Faulkner to date had too often been "hasty," "unscholarly," and "superficial." It is ironic that Warren's comments on Faulkner should apply so well to himself. In his desire to know—to know himself and man's relationships to the human community, to time, and to nature—War- ren too has been "an incorrigible and restless experimenter." In "moving toward values and modifying, testing and exfoliat- ing older values," Robert Penn Warren has moved from one literary genre to another, from one narrative technique to another, from one style of verse to another. In his restless seeking he has often con- founded critics who have tried to fix him "in a formulated phrase" and leave him "pinned and wriggling on the wall" under such labels 05 historical novelist. Southern writer, or perpetrator of "metrical high jinks." He remains a writer personifying the quest of our age: the search for a vision of the self capable of enduring time and tragedy. In the tradition of Hawthorne and Faulkner, he too writes of "the truth of the human heart," aware that "The recognition of complicity is the beginning of innocence . And the death of the self is the beginning of selfhood./All else is surrogate of hope and destitution of spirit." This special issue of Four Quarters brings together some of the critical voices that have pioneered in the perceptive reading of War- ren's poetry and prose. It is but part of a continuing effort to assess his significant contributions to American literature. To borrow again from Warren on Faulkner: such a collection "will be of slight service to (Warren), who, as much as any writer of our place and time can rest in confidence. He can afford to wait. But can we?" —I. J. K. A Conversation with Robert Penn Warren • Ruth Fisher (The following conversation was taped in Robert Penn Warren s of- fice at Silliman College, Yale University, on November 18, 1970. Early this year, Mr. Warren reviewed the typescript, aiding me greatly in pre- paring a draft suitable for publication. He was most gracious and helpful at every step, and I want to express my deep appreciation here.—R.F.) 4Q: Both Leonard Casper (The Dark and Bloody Ground) and Victor Strandberg (In Colder Fire) apparently feel that many critics have ap- proached your works unprepared and with very little perception of your method of persuasion and what you are really trying to say. Therefore, what we find in the evaluations of your works are many incomplete expli- cations and inadequate critical analyses by some critics. I wonder if you could give me a basic framework that could be used in the approach to your works? Are there some general assumptions about man that you feel are essential to an understanding of your works? RPW: Let me say this. In general—and I have certain reservations about what I am going to say—if a man's work does not deliver some- thing, there is no discussion about it that is going to make it deliver. Now, discussion, or background information, can sometimes make it possible to go beyond what had been written in the work. But you can't simply talk a good game of bridge; you have to play the game of bridge. Neither your intentions nor the theoretical assumptions behind your work are really relative to the work, in one sense. The work has to deliver itself. So you can't undertake to apologize for your work and try to make the apology take the place of your work. All work does need context to be fullv under- stood. But context doesn't necessarily make the work any better. It may lead to fuller understanding, but it may lead to a fuller understanding of the errors of your work, the failures of your work. But to answer the question, I don't want to put it on the level of apology. And I don't know how I would go about saying that there is some particular image of man that I have in mind. The books that I have written, for better or for worse, are a record of the various kinds of images of man that I have had at different times. Of course, I have changed my notions, or at least changed my feelings about my notions along the way. And this leads me to another point. I should think that in most cases, in most cases, anyway— I don't want to be dogmatic about this—the pro- cess of writing the novel or the poem, is a process of trying to find out what the writer thinks. He is not working deductively from a highly arti- culated image, a careful scheme of values; he is trying to find the values, find the ideas, by a process of trial and error, as it were. Life is a process of trial and error about our own values. We may have certain assumptions about our values. We do have them. But at a certain age, say 21, we feel one way; by the time we reach 31, we feel quite different. Our ideas have changed. They may be more firmly established by experience; they may be completely blown up by experience. Certainly, they won't be the same; they can't be the same. They will have gone through, to a greater or lesser degree, the test of experience. They can't be the same after just a little bit of living. And the writing is the process in which the imagination takes the place of literal living; by moving toward values and modifying, testing and exfoliating older values. So, since I see the whole process as one of continu- ing experiment with values, I don't know how to answer that question about setting up a framework at any given moment. My ideas have changed so much over the years. My feelings have certainly changed about many things. But critics have to set up this contextual world in order to understand the writer in question. They do this in order for the reader to better under- stand the work of the writer in question. By setting up the contexts, the critics may come to like the writer less or may come to like him more.