Making It New: 1900–1945 441a sense of energetic composure, disciplined ease. At the same time, the preoccupation
with failure or chilly forms of redemption that characterized the early writing
gave way to an interest in existential humanity, the possible sources of courage and
awe. Above all, Warren began to seek the springs of well-being more fiercely than
ever before: to search for an identity forged out of a passionate, positive engagement
with the world. “Tell me a story of deep delight,” Audubon concludes, and that line
articulates the impulse that prised the poet loose from his earlier habits. Traditionalist
Warren remained, but a traditionalist seeking poetic narratives that released the
glory of life – or, as he put it once, enabled him to “frame a definition of joy.”
The development in the fiction was less marked, but there was still a general
tendency noticeable over the course of Warren’s ten novels, from Night Rider (1939)
to A Place to Come To (1977), to move from the more highly wrought to the
more expansive and openly personal. Night Rider, for instance, a novel exploring
its author’s characteristic moral concerns with reference to a struggle between
tobacco growers and manufacturers in early twentieth-century Kentucky, is a care-
fully articulated work of symbolic naturalism. Each episode in it, each character is
rendered in naturalistic detail, but each is clearly balanced against some meaningful
opposite and, equally clearly, resonates with meaning. A Place to Come To is no less
concerned with exploring Warren’s familiar preoccupations. Presented as the
reminiscences of a 60-year-old classics scholar starting with his youth in Alabama it
is, however, not only more relaxed in tone but creates the illusion of being less
premeditated. And it is an engaging mix of anecdote and autobiography, meditation
and tall tale. Consistently, however, in all his fiction Warren returns to the themes
that dominate his other work. There, on one side of the dialectic, are a rich gallery of
dreamers and idealists. There are political fanatics like Professor Ball in Night Rider,
Percival Skrogg in World Enough and Time (1950), religious visionaries like Ashby
Wyndham in At Heaven’s Gate (1943), romantic dreamers like Adam Rosenzweig in
Wilderness, those driven by some purely erotic illusion such as Nick Pappy in
The Cave (1959) and Leroy Lancaster in Meet Me in the Green Glen (1971), and those
who simply retreat from human engagement into the role of observer like Yasha
Jones in Flood (1964) and Jed Tewkesbury in A Place to Come To. And there, on the
other side, are the realists, those who sacrifice moral principle to material interests.
They include some of Warren’s finest fictional creations: the financier Bogan
Mordock in At Heaven’s Gate, the politician Willy Stark in All the King’s Men (1946),
and Murray Guilfort in Meet Me in the Green Glen. Products of what is called, at
the end of All the King’s Men, “the terrible division of our age,” they are no less
hollow – without guiding principles, and so no less deficient in their creator’s eyes –
than those who live in the ice-cold world of ideas or intellectual detachment. And it
becomes the project of the novels, as it is of the poetry, to explore those divisions and
express the possibility of resolution. Each novel is, to use Warren’s own term, an
“adventure in selfhood” in which the protagonist struggles to heal those divisions –
and sometimes succeeds in doing so, as in the poetry, by finding a place to come to
where his father, literally or metaphorically awaits him: a homeplace where, as
Warren puts it, he can “return to his lost unity.”GGray_c04.indd 441ray_c 04 .indd 441 8 8/1/2011 7:53:59 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 53 : 59 AM