TAPESTRY OF THE SOUTH
GLICK, NATHAN
Tapestry of the South ft' RavMweaf fry NATHAN GUCK ALL THE KING'S MEN. By Robert P«nn Warren. New York: Hartourt, Brace. Mi oat**. 18.00. i »*W OBEBT PENN WARREN'S three novel* seem to moke np...
...There li in each of the book* the separation and , XV conflict between the city and country, aristocrat and backwoodsman, the search fay power and profit and the search for faith...
...he has no story...
...gainst his will, he is increasingly involved without understanding why...
...Social Day or Night...
...Jerry Calhoun cannot love Sue Murdork with conviction because he is in awe of her father who employs him, and because his ambition and partial success in business cannot cope with an intense love-relationship...
...it is made to order by skilltu and cunning artisans...
...THE MYTH OF THE STATE...
...We shall then live in an eternal night, If we live at all...
...There is also present in each the pttssssd quality that common speech and political oratory take on in the South, f/arren reacts wiVi obsessive intensity to the kind of electrical charge set up between orators and crowds, and reproduces in detail the texture of speechmaking when it ia simultaneously inspired and crafty...
...If these values are lost, then all Is lost—all our intellectual, artistic and ethical forces...
...Jack Burden is the latest of Robert Penn Warren's disorganized, "lost" heroe...
...The tragic flaw in the Shakespearean hero is a defect in self-knowledge...
...Language objectifies sense-impressions...
...it performs a function in his social life...
...it is the act of violence that incorporates and releases the tensions and frustrations of the people in the book...
...In 1044 came his Essay on Man (Yale University Press), a summary of hia work in the field of philosophical anthropology...
...We have seen him as the cynical reporter, the Weary, knowing and hard-drinking detective, the foreign correspondent always in on the making of history.' He is uncommitted, an outsider looking on, even when he is involved in the heart of events...
...He comes to learn that responsibility and guilt are difficult thinga to establish, that "a man's virtue may be but the defect of his desire, as his erimu may be but a function oi his virtue...
...Under the circumstances, we must be grateful for the bounty of riches he has left us as an inheritance...
...Cassirer'* book has a laddening effect for the reader is painfully aware of th fact that the desperate conditions tha obtained after World War I are dupli cated today after World War II...
...Slim Sarrett Is emotionally parasitic and capable of passion only with regard to hia poetry and his imaginative vanity...
...paradoxically, for thia very reason, he Is unable to meet the demands that Sue makes upon him...
...it is so disappointing to find the manner in All the King's Men because, on another level, this book continues the ambitious project begun in Night Rider and extended in At Heaven's Gate...
...In Germany there appeared no prospect of a solution by normal mean...
...Although large sections of the book appear to be devoted to matters one expects to find in a history of political theory, rather than in an essay which attempts to elucidate our own political myths, a reading of the book will leave one with the feeling that nothing dealt with by the author has been irrelevant to his theme...
...The cynicism anticipates the plot, for the "truth' directly causes the suicide af Burden's father (whose identity h* learn* only after the event) and, indirectly, the deaths of Willy Stark and Dr...
...At what moment could a man trust his feelings, his convictions.' At what point define the true and unmoved center of his being, the focu* of his obligations...
...Kant...
...All the elements that went into the making of the myth of the twentieth century were known before...
...The successful man "offers only the smooth surface, like an egg...
...in 1045 came his exciting little book Rousseau...
...it records laces and objects with the glaring precision of overcorrected lenses...
...The fact thaf a mythical monster is alive proves that out intellectual, ethical and artistic forcei have become weakened...
...What was added was a new technique...
...The Germans began to make theii myth even before they began to mak< machine guns...
...In At Heaven's Gate, it is suggested more explicitely that failure in selfknowledge shows itself aa failure in the capacity to love...
...This Greek sequence of unrelenting disaster reveal* Warren's vision of life as blind and tragic, where every ireepMenu I man la bound to talift his hands, and where sorrows spread unpredictably in widening circles...
...but another one is still very much alive...
...the sudden awareness of political crookedness...
...Language was used foi its magical, rather than semantic, value Word-magic was supplemented by rites The whole life of the German wai inundated by a high tide of n«w rituals The effect of the word-magic and rite was to lull to sleep all the powers o: judgment and to take away the feelinj of personality and responsibility...
...We shall go oat of the house and go into the convulsion of the world, out ot history Into history and the awful responsibility of Tim...
...The subject is spectacular: the career of Huey Long from his beginnings as a petty backwoods politician to his governorship and finally, his assassination...
...Sweetwater is the only person in the book who has come to terms with himself In a hard-earned serenity...
...But modern man needs aome "reason*" for his belief...
...These heroes are always failures because "poetry is concerned only with failure, distortion, imbalance—with impurity...
...In desperate situations man will alwaya have recourse to desperate mean*—and our present-day political myths have been *uch desperate means...
...had his eye on the Nazi myth...
...To me, especially significant were the sections dealing with Machiavelli, Carlyle, Gobineau, and Hegel...
...Here the theory of hero w.orship made itself felt ThE modern myth differ* from tlx primitive myth in at least one important respect: the modern myth does not grov up freely...
...IN all three novels, the hero (that is, the person through whose consciousness and observation the stories are told— he is never very successful or very admirable) is caught up in a movement or series ot events, reluctantly, but with the feeling that as part of something "big" he will find himself...
...Our dilemmas are only broade: and deeper...
...When reason faila us, there is always the power of the miraculous and.mysterious...
...Myth issues from deep human emotions...
...Finding persuasion ineffectual, Oiie group forms a secret society to burn the crop* of non-cooperating fanners...
...Myth reaches its full force when an unusual and dangerous situation arises...
...Slim Sarrett, the strange, brilliant, perverted intellectual of At Heaven's Gate, states, in a paper on Shakespeare's plays, Robert Penn Warren's own theme: the necessity of self-knowledge...
...and had Cassirer been spared us a number of years more, he would have further enriched us and posterity with important contributions...
...Aftei World War I Germany created thii monstrous myth—an amalgam of word magic, worship of the leader and th« "race" and the totalitarian state...
...New Haven: Yale University Press...
...His blindness to the probable consequences of the movement reflects his blindness to his own nature and motives...
...i »*W OBEBT PENN WARREN'S three novel* seem to moke np port of a complex lef Upeetry of Southern life...
...In the mood of the close of Scott Fitzgerald'* The Great Gatsby, ha bids a nostalgic farewell to the places of hi* youth...
...All the King's Men is a puzzling novel because of the disparity between its fictional patterns and most of its language...
...Before long Yale will publish The Problem of Knowledge...
...He dismisses his education with the sort fo flourish that seems to suit our everyday American democracy, but he is something of a philosopher, nevertheless, as witness his remarks on tne conclusion of a successful bit of political "research": So I had it after all the months...
...It is manufactured just as guns and airplanes are manufactured, made according to specifica tions...
...When they lose their strength, mythical thought rise* anew and pervades our social and cultural life...
...Even as art gives us a unity of intuition and science a unity of thought, rite and myth give us a unity of feeling...
...After World War I even the victorious nations realized that the war had brought no real solution to any important problem...
...In treating of any subject Cassirer follows the method of Aristotle: he summarizes what others have bad to say on the subject, analyzes the arguments for and against each position, states his own view and offers arguments in support of it...
...he must have a "theory" to justify hi* belief...
...We know equally well the charactertype represented by Jack Burden, Willy Shark's confidential investigator and the navel's first-person narrator...
...Fo the latter war also has not brought i solution to any really important prob 1cm...
...His violent participation in this apparently just cause lead* to the breakup of his marriage, then to a strained and unhappy love affair, and* finally to his being shot a* an outlaw...
...myths objectify the feelings...
...But whin I consider the danger that faces us, I see that they, and Ernst Cassirer and John Dewey, are quite right If our intellectual values are saved, all other things will be added unto us...
...the tragic denouement wherein the proposed head of the hospital shoots Willy Stark to avenge his sister's honor...
...Aftei World War II people in despair art turning to the Bolshevik myth—ar amalgam of word-magic, worship of th< leader andj the "working class" and th< totalitarian state...
...evlewe* by MILTON R. KONVITZ WHEN on April 18, 1946, Ernst Cassirer died in New York, philosophy and humanism lost a great spirit Hia name and hia work were known throughout the world and mentioned with reverence and affection wherever men met to discuss philosophical ideals...
...In Night Riders, Munn, lawyer and tobacco grower, joins an association of growers which aims to secure a better price for their crops...
...Therefore one's first suspicion is that Warren has in his latest work deliberately set out to write a bestseller...
...it changes pace like a broken field runner without losing any of ita enormous energy...
...myth is an objectification of man's social, and not individual, experience...
...the deep desire for a monument of pure philanthropy in the form of the biggest and freest hospital in the country...
...Although the climax of Warren's previous novel, At Heaven's Gate, is also a melodramatic murder, it does not seem contrived...
...In plotting the story, Warren has missed few available melodramatic devices...
...By Ernst Cassirer...
...We in this country had begun to think of him aa a native, for his work were beginning to appear in English—his earlier books translated from German, and his newer work, tha ripest fruits of hia mind, written and published in English...
...Sometime* I feel that perhap* my friend* Professor* Horace M. Kallen and Sidney Hook are guilty of this overemphasis...
...Goethe (Princeton University Press), k maaterplece in the field of the history of ideas...
...Munn becomes a leader in spite of his belief that "politicians were slaves .. ." and if he desired anything of lite, that thing was to be free, and himself...
...One mythical monstei has been destroyed (at least, let us hop* it is destroyed...
...the myth dissolved and dis integrated all other values...
...The final words of the book, however, shock us again with their excess...
...Conflicts became more intense, and they were felt everywhere...
...Pew writers use the American language with greater idiomatic intimacy or imagination...
...He sets Adam Stanton, the man of Idea, and Willy Stark, tha man of fact, doomed to destroy each other, ''because each waa incomplete with the terrible division of their age...
...Sue Murdpck reject* her wealthy, influential father, and haphazardly becomes the mistress of Jerry Calhoun, Slim Sarrett, and the labor organizer Sweetwater, in each of whom she seeks a father-confessor who will give her a clue to her own identity...
...He is pure...
...last year came Myth and Language (Harper) and The Myth of the State...
...Willy Stark's career follows a familiar pattern: the early act of civic integrity...
...all feelings are concentrated on the leader and the leader's will...
...Professor Cassirer in this boo...
...At tha and, he returns to hi* childhood sweetheart, chastened, softened, and vaguely a believer in God's justice and omnipotence...
...For nothing is ever lost There is always the clue, the canceled check, the smear of lipatick, the footprint in the canna bed, the condon on the park path, the twitch in the old wound, the baby shoes dipped in bronze, the taint in the bloodstream...
...Th racial myth changed the men who be lieved in it...
...the use of bribery and blackmail to take and keep power...
...It gMtters with metaphors...
...Warren is unusually gifted in a variety of styles, but this proof that he can write Hollywood scenarios as well is irrelevant to the purposes of serious fiction, unless he means to say mockingly that our imitation culture has so infected life that we must regard its manner aa one means of viewing experience...
...The moral of this significant book by a great genius who wa* driven to our shore* by a mythical monster is quite plain: it is the duty of man to nurture and sustain, with every ounce of .his strength, all the forces that stand for intelligence, and to fight against all the force* that stand for myth, word-magic, irrationality...
...Yet I cannot recall another serious American novelist who has made as free use of Hollywood plot tricks or of the glib cynical talk found in the CanHammett-Chandler school of violent Action...
...808 pages...
...And again* the myth syllogisms and philoaophy wer< ineffective...
...That Warren is not only a serious, but a highly deliberate writer is evident in the contrasting styles of his tensile poetry and his patient, exact Criticism, both quite foreign to his fiction...
...If Warren's style does not have, the selfless perfection of Dos Passos', It has a richer, more brilliant surface...
...it expresses these emotions...
...Tbe sections on MachiaveJli and Carlyle especially illustrate this method...
...that they neglect other positive aspects of life...
...What, then, will happei next...
...The collective desire becomes concrete in the myth and personified in the leader...
...When these, forces are strong, myth Is tamed and subdued...
...Not since John Dos Passos' V. S. A. has there keen a comparable attempt to capture the rhythms and colloaulal variety of American Speech...
...Adam Stanton, Burden'* best friend...
...When one has read a book by Cassirer, one justly leaves it with the gratifying feeling that one has been exposed to an encyclopedic mind which haa not stinted the reader...
...Law, justice, constitutions are forgotten...
...Perhaps one can overemphasize the value of Intelligence...
...The volume under review should not be overlooked by anyone interested in the political phenomena of our day...
...His version of culture conflict is the simplified one of the well-mannered seaboard aristocrat with his seamy side, versus the rough, vulgar country hick with his idealism...
...But what are we to make of the kind of writing that Warren allows himself to use in the - scene where Jack Burden visits the dying Willy Stark...
Vol. 30 • January 1947 • No. 3
