442 Making It New: 1900–1945All the King’s Men (1946), Warren’s most famous and accomplished novel,
shows precisely how he gave these fundamental ideas fictional life. At its center is a
division typical for Warren between an idealist and an opportunist: Adam Stanton,
whose forename suggests his prelapsarian innocence, and Willie Stark, whose
equally eponymous surname indicates just how far he is committed to stark fact.
The protagonist and narrator, Jack Burden, is the man who must face and heal this
division by coming to terms with the burden of his past, specifically in the shape of
his father, and so enjoy the chance of a purely secular redemption. All this makes
All the King’s Men sound schematic. Like all Warren’s fiction, the novel does veer
toward the heavily freighted, a narrative so loaded with significance that it threatens
to sink its surface naturalism. Like the best of it, though, it is rescued by its personal
specificity and social density – and because Warren obeys his own injunction to
immerse himself in history. The personal detail comes from Jack Burden, who is both
man acting and man narrating. Burden in the narrative present, radically altered by
experience, is recalling Burden in the narrative past, and the particular experiences
that altered him, crucially. He is intimately involved in the story he is telling and,
through him, Warren makes sure that the reader is too. As for the immersion in
society and history, that comes from the understanding of place the novel reveals,
the peculiar, polyglot culture of early twentieth-century Louisiana with its mix of
populist enthusiasm and easygoing cynicism, its romanticism and its money-
grabbing. Something of this culture is caught in the rich variety of idioms Warren
deploys, from the hardboiled to the dreamlike and lyrical. But even more to the
point here is Warren’s reimagining of a pivotal moment in Louisiana history. The
character of Willie Stark is clearly based on Huey Long, the populist politician elected
governor in 1928 who ran the state as if it were his own personal fiefdom, and, just
before being assassinated, was preparing to run for president on a “Share Our Wealth”
program that made the New Deal look positively conservative. What Warren does is
to take this story, the facts in the case of Long, and set it in the kind of dialectical
relationship with the shaping idea of All the King’s Men that creates a new shape and
meaning for both. He does not distort history in revising it, at least in terms of its
essential pattern. What he does is to place it in such a context as will demonstrate its
direct and effective relationship to other experience. The present is charged by the
past, in the sense that Warren has found in a specific set of circumstances a means of
dramatizing the “terrible division” of his age. And the past is charged by the present,
since the “odds and ends” of history, as Jack Burden calls them, have been woven into
a pattern that makes them coherent, “all of one piece” with each other and with the
lives of those remembering. All the King’s Men is consequently an apt realization of
Warren’s project: to remain true to the imperatives of the past and the needs of the
present and future. It is also that rare thing, a philosophical novel that makes its
discoveries in the welter of politics and social conflict. And it is a genuinely historical
fiction in a dual sense because it tries to come to terms with the stark facts of
historical experience, and because it tries to formulate an idea of history.
Ransom, Tate, Warren: together, these three major figures chart the various
possibilities of traditionalism, and in particular Southern traditionalism. But theyGGray_c04.indd 442ray_c 04 .indd 442 8 8/1/2011 7:53:59 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 53 : 59 AM