• Abstract and Figures
• Public Full-text

~~ h,,. ~p~ wnxxEN Robert Penn Warrea bit in the full- d to enjoy the othe`S from a ~sive climax of S.All the King's Men: n's o'n'es, and houseboy, who The Matrix of Experience :r, Duckfoot is it commitment 3 they are wait- ction: "Well it his voice iously, ~?, ,K,~N I AM ~s~.n white nostrils ~, how much All the Kings Men owes to :the y actual of ~y it don t! .. politics Louisiana in the 'go's, I can only be sure that p the pee out of if I had never gone #o live in Louisiana and if Huey bong had ool, a complete, ~'' not existed, the nove} would never have :been written.But this and you're here is far from,saying, that my "state" in AIZ the Kmg's is comfoik Men gent in ~° Louisiana or an ofsthe other fo fla the nostrils of r { Y rtj'-nine stars in our g), or id my i white-slick face #hat Willie Stark is the Iate Senator. What Louisiana and aside, which was Senator Long gave me was aline of thinking and feeling that ff his long white did eventuate ~ the.novel out Nhatever was In thesummer of 1434 I was offered a job—a much-needed.. cuzdling and and j, job—as assistant professor at the Louisiana State Unive~ity, in knew that every- Baton Rouge. It was.:"Huey Long's University," and definitely ever done or said L, on the make—with a sensational Football team and with money which.had been '` to spend even for assistant professors at a `time when assistant pride ass and his professors were being 5red, not hired—as I knew all too well. It it before, , known ~ ~s Huey's University, but he, I was assured, would never mess with my classroom. l'hat was to prone true; he was fat too adept ~e final piece in in the arts of power to care what an assistant professor might. mself. Like Jack, have to say.-T7ae only time that his presence was ever felt in my ~n of the world classroom was when; in my Shakespeare course, I gave my little ~ibility of Time.' annual lecture on the political background of Julius Caesar; and then, for thetwo weeks we spenE on the play, backs gew straighter, eyes grew brighter, notes were taken, and the girls stopped knitting in rclass, or repairing their faces, ~~ In September, iq~q, I left Tennessee, where Thad .been living on a farm near Nashville,`drone down across Mississippi; ~a .~ 3 ~:. - ~ ~ - _ -- ~6 ROBERT PENN WARREN Fiction 77 crossed the river by ferry (where I can't be sure—was it at There were a thousand tales, over tl~e years, and some of I t Greenville?) and was in Nortli Louisiana. tllong the way hem were, no doubt, literal]y and Factually true. But they were a picked up a 1~itcUhiker—a country man, tl~e kind you calla red- ll true in the world of "FIaey"—that world of myth, folklore, neck or a wool-hat, aging, aimless, nondescript, beat up by life poetry, deprivation, rancor, and dimly envisaged hopes. That probaUly w and hard times and bad Lick, clearly tooth-broke and orld had a strange, shifting, often ironical and sometimes ir- of gut-shot, standing beside the road in an attitude that spoke relevant relation to the factual world of Senator Huey P. Long in a infinite patience and considetable fortitude, holding a parcel nd his cold manipulation of the calculus of power. 11~e two twine, his hand, wrapped in old newspaper and tied with binder worlds, we may hazard, merged oiily at the moment when in S waiting for some car to come along. He was, though at tl~e eptember, i935> in the corridor of the Capitol, the little .3z slug moment I did not sense it, a mythological figure. Uit meanly into tUe senatorial vitals. above He was the god on the battlement, dimly perceived There was another world—this a factual world—made political p the darkling tumult and the steaming carnage of the ossible by tl~e factual Long, though not inhabited by him. It the was struggle. He was a voice, a portent, and a natural force like a world that I, as an assistant professor, was to catch fl Mississippi River getting set to bust a ]evee. Long before the eeting glimpses of, and ponder. It was tl~e world of tl~e parasites on of Fascist March on Rome, Norman Douglas, meditating power, a world that Long was, apparently, contemptuous of, would but Naples, had predicted that the fetid slums of Europe knew how to use, as he knew how to use other things of make possible the "inspired idiot" His Predictive diagnosis of which he was, perhaps, contemptuous. This was a world of incom- a sick the origins of fascism—and of communism—may be yearning for elegance and the sight of one's name on the -side society plete, but it is certain that the rutted back roads and slab page of a New Orleans paper; it was the world of the with the electric shacks that had spawned my nameless old hitchhiker, moon devised, it was alleged, to cast a romantic glow over twine-tied paper parcel in his hand, had, by that fall of ig34. the garden when tl~e president of tl~e university and his was, wife made possible the rise of "Huey:' My nameless hitchhiker entertained their politicos and pseudosocialites; it was a mythologically speaking, Longs sine qun non. world of pretentiousness, of bloodcurdling struggles for aca- epi- So it was appropriate that he should tell me the first demic preferment, of drool-jawed grab and arrogant criminal- ity. sode of the many I had to hear of the myth that was "Huey." Tt was a world all too suggestive, in its small-bore, ptovincial to ay, The roads, he said, was shore better now. A man could git w of the airs and aspirations that tl~e newspapers attributed notion o market, he said. A man could jist git up and git, if'n a t that ex-champagne salesman Von Ribbentrop and to tl~e neither. i come on liim. Did'n have to pay no toll at no toll bridge nner circle of Edda Ciano's friends. me Fer Huey was afree-bridge man. So lie went on and told For in Louisiana, in the i93o's, you felt somehow that you what river were how, standing on the river bank by a toll bridge (by living in the great world, or at least in a microcosm with presi- and what Uridge was never clear), Huey had made the all the forces and fatalities faithfully, if sometimes comically, cash dent of the company that owned tl~e bridge a good, fair drawn to scale. And the little Baton Rouge world of campus and hitchhiker g offer, and the man laughed at him. But, tl~e old overnor's mansion and capitol and the gold bathroom fixtures him up a r said, Huey did'n do nothing but lean over and pick eported to be in the house of the university contractor was, that chunk of rock and throwed it off a-ways, and asked did once the weight of Long's contempt and political savvy lead ~e president-feller see whar the rock hit. The feller said yeah, been removed by the bullet of the young Brutus in the Capitol, be big seen. Wal, Huey said, the next thing you see is gonna a to plunge idiotically rampant to an end almost as dramatic as son-of-a- new free bridge right whar that rock hit, and you, you the scenes in the last bunkers of Berlin or at the filling station it. Uitch, are goen bankrupt a-ready and doan even know nn the outskirts of Milan. The headlines advertised the suicides, ]8 ROBERT PF,NN WARREN Fiction ~q and the population of penitentiaries, both federal and state, whom hated Huey Long—except, of course, for that percentage received some distinguished additions. who, for one reason or another, had reached an accommodation. But this is getting ahead of tl~e story. ~t feanwhile, there They hated l~im sometimes for good reasons and sometimes for was, besides the lurid wo.-Ids, tl~e world of ordinary life to look bad, and sometimes for no reason at all, as a mere revulsion of at. There were the peop:e who ran storey or sold insurance or taste; but they never seemed to reflect on what I took to be the had a farm and tried to survive and pay their debts. There were obvious fact that if the government of the state had not pre- —visible even from tl~e ne~v concrete speedway that Huey had viously been marked by various combinations of sloth, com- slashed through tl~e cypress swamps toward New Orleans—the placency, incompetence, corruption, and a profound lack of palmetto-leaf and sheet-iron ]novels of the moss pickers, rising political imagination, there would never have been a Senator like some fungoid growth from a hummock under the great Huey P. Long, and my old hitchhiker by the roadside would, in cypress knees, suaounded by scum-green water that never felt September, i934> >>ave i~ad no tale to tell me. sunlight, back in t17at Frwdianly contorted cypress gloom of Conversation in Louisiana always came back to the tales, to cottonmouth moccasins big as the Uiceps of a prizefighter, and the myth, to politics; and to talk politics is to talk abort power.

Load more

  39

Copy Link