The Gettysburg Review Volume 5, Number 3 / Summer 1992 Essays and Essay-Reviews FLOYD SKLOOT Trivia Tea: Baseball as Balm 377 WARREN GOLDSTEIN Inside Baseball 410 LOUIS SIMPSON Going Back 462 VICTOR STRANDBERG Robert Penn Warren and the Search for Design 480 FLOYD COLLINS The Sublime and the Quotidian 514 STEVEN G. KELLMAN Fighting Trim 530 SANFORD PINSKER What We Talk About When We Talk About Lit 540 Fiction GEOFF SCHMIDT The Man Who Saved Ted Williams from Death 392 VICTOR STRANDBERG Robert Penn Warren and the Search for Design "f j The artist in me cries out for design," Robert Frost's persona (Job) tells I God in A Masque of Reason. His Modern counterparts seconded the -*- motion—Wallace Stevens by formulating "the supreme fictions with- out which we are unable to conceive of {life]," Hart Crane by invoking the subliminal powers of his "higher consciousness," and T. S. Eliot by propagating a neo-classicist creed: "It is a function of all art to give us some perception of an order in life, by imposing an order upon it." Robert Penn Warren encompassed all these perspectives in his long and polymorphous career, but what makes him distinctive is the way his search for design intensified as he grew older, feeding a tremendous late-flowering cre- ativity up through the ninth decade of his—and the twentieth-century's— existence. As his books cascaded off the press in those later years, his literary reputation grew apace, bringing not only a plethora of prizes but a burgeoning shelf of scholarship and criticism, itself of prize-winning caliber when written by such people as James Justus, James Grimshaw, and Floyd Watkins. Coming soon will be the authorized biography by Joseph Blotner, who did similar service for William Faulkner, and an updated version of James Grimshaw's bibliography. Insofar as critics and scholars are also seekers of design, either in an artist's life and work or in the larger context that the artist contemplates, the books we have before us for review are a valuable contribution to the project of tracing Robert Penn Warren and the American Imagination. By Hugh Ruppersburg. Univer- sity of Georgia Press, 216 pp., $27.50. The American Vision of Robert Penn Warren. By William Bedford Clark. University Press of Kentucky, 176 pp., $19.00. , The Braided Dream: Robert Penn Warren's Late Poetry. By Randolph Paul Runyon. University Press of Kentucky, 262 pp., $17.00. The Taciturn Text: The Fiction of Robert Penn Warren. By Randolph Paul Runyon. Ohio State University Press, 290 pp., $35.00. Talking with Robert Penn Warren. Edited by Floyd C. Watkins, John T. Hiers, and Mary Louise Weaks. University of Georgia Press, 448 pp., $45.00. 480 VICTOR STRANDBERG out the design of Robert Penn Warren's life, thought, and work. Talking with Robert Penn Warren provides an indispensible collection of interviews from 1950 to the 19805. Hugh Ruppersburg and William Bedford Clark, in books about Warren's "American Imagination" and his "American Vision," try to piece out the design of Warren's thought through examining the political and social implications of his books, primarily his prose writings. And Randolph Runyon focuses intensively on the formal design of Warren's art in two books that trace out the interconnections of motif and image in the later volumes of poetry and in all eleven volumes of fiction (ten novels and a book of short stories). I shall return to these books after a general survey of Robert Penn Warren's search for design. Warren's last major work, "Altitudes and Extensions: 1980-1984" (the "New" poems in his New and Selected Poems: 192 3—1985), amounts to a spiritual autobiography in which the thirst for self-knowledge is measured by the source of the volume's epigraph, St. Augustine's Confessions. The initial poem, "Three Darknesses," announces the intention of the entire grouping— and of Warren's whole oeuvre—in its opening lines: "There is some logic here to trace, and I / Will try hard to find it." But that annunciation is followed at once by a primal image of frustration—an old memory of a great bear in the zoo in Rome. This creature—who slugs mightily at an iron door all through the day, "as rhythmic as / A pile-driver"—epitomizes the futility of seeking self-knowledge, no matter how determined the effort: "The door, / Heavy, bolted, barred, must have been / The entrance to a dark enclosure, a cave, / Natural or artificial." Impervious to the pounding paws, the door will not open; the cave of self remains inaccessible: "There is something / Hidden in the dark. The bear / Was trying to enter the darkness of wisdom." This image of the bear in Rome, apparently deriving from Warren's stay there in 1939—40 while writing All the King's Men, also left a memorable imprint upon that novel's portrait of Willie Stark undertaking his struggle toward self-realization. From his next-door bedroom, Jack Burden gets a pre- view of Willie's later self-awakening: Knowing what you knew, you would lie there listening to him getting ready to be Governor, and want to stuff the pillow slip in your mouth to stop the giggles.... But the voice would keep on going over there beyond the wall, and the feet would keep on tramping, back and forth like the feet of a heavy animal prowling and swinging back and forth with a heavy swaying head in a locked-up room, or a cage, hunting for the place to get out, not giving up and irreconcilably and savagely sure that there was going to be a loose board or bar or latch sometime.... And listening to it, you wouldn't be so sure for a minute that the bar or board would hold. 481 THE GETTYSBURG REVIEW But though Willie Stark did break out of the cage at last, releasing his deepest self with the help of alcohol, he seems regrettably different from ordinary human clay, at least so far as Warren's persona, Jack Burden, can ascertain: "it is possible that fellows like Willie Stark ... are what they are from the time they first kick in the womb until the end. And if that is the case, then their life history is a process of discovering what they really are, and not, as for you and me, sons of luck, a process of becoming what luck makes us." For most of us—for Warren himself, according to one of his finest late poems, "Old Nigger on One-Mule Cart"—there is only the urgent question, un- answered: "by what magnet, I demand, / Are the iron and out-flung filings of our lives, on / A sheet of paper, blind-blank as Time, snapped / Into a polar- ized pattern ... ?" It is axiomatic that the pattern of being unfolds most clearly in the lives of other people. Throughout his career, Warren was both an avid consumer and a writer of biographies. From his first such publication, John Brown: The Making of a Martyr (192 9), to his last, Portrait of a Father (1988), one finds an imagination repeatedly drawn to biographical materials: poems about Flaubert, Dreiser, Audubon, Thomas Jefferson, and the Roman emperors Domitian and Tiberius; novels peopled by surrogates for Huey Long, Private York (At Heaven's Gate), Floyd Collins (The Cave}, and the victims of the real-life "Kentucky Tragedy" (World Enough and Time); and literary criti- cism strongly involving biographical research, as in his landmark pieces about Coleridge, Hemingway, Conrad, Whittier, Melville, Twain, and Dreiser. Not to mention the incisive character portraits of historical figures in his non-fiction prose: the black leaders in Who Speaks for the Negro?, most notably Martin Luther King, Jr., and Malcolm X; the Lincoln, Grant, Sherman, and Jefferson Davis of The Legacy of the Civil War and Jefferson Davis Gets His Citizenship Back; the tragic hero of Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce; and the large number of writers in the magisterial anthology of American literature that Warren co-edited with Cleanth Brooks and R. W. B. Lewis in 1973. No adversary of the New Criticism ever violated more consistently its supposed allegiance to the autonomy of art. The pattern that Warren discerned in history and biography unfailingly disclosed paradox, irony, a dialectical configuration. Here, for example, is his assessment of the two opposing Presidents in the Civil War: Both Calhoun and Davis ... saw the Constitution as equivalent to the tablets that Moses delivered from Sinai, in contrast to Lincoln . , who had no compunction about brushing aside legal technicalities. Without a shadow of legal justification, he had hordes of Northern citizens seized on the merest suspicion ... and held them incommunicado, ignoring the right of habeas corpus. [With] no shadow of legal authority, he 482 VICTOR STRANDBERG reached into the Treasury for what sums he considered requisite. Lincoln did make a sort of bow to the Constitution by implying that in violating it he was saving it. (It may be recalled that early in life he had replaced the Deity with his own notion of evolution in nature and man.) It was characteristic of Warren to extend this sort of pattern, so that the contrast lay not merely between Davis and Lincoln, but between their respec- tive societies—"one embracing antique values, the other in the process of de- veloping new ones." In The Legacy of the Civil War, Warren defined what those values were: in the South, Legalism in defense of slavery before the War, followed by The Great Alibi blaming the North for its post-bellum de- fects; in the North, Higher Law making bloodshed unavoidable before the War, to be followed by the Treasury of Virtue, which blinded the victors to their own need for social reform from the Gilded Age onwards.