All the King's Men

All the King's Men
by Robert Penn Warren
read: 2012
Time 100 Novels, Modern Library #36, Pulitzer Prize

I'm impressed by tightly-constructed novels like a puzzles where all the pieces fit together in the end.  But I find that many of the books that stick with me over time are ones where not all the pieces fit; there's a chapter that doesn't make sense, or a decision I can't quite understand, or a line that conveys meaning that isn't apparent.  The apparent incompleteness causes me to ruminate on what it is that I'm missing.  I just finished All the King's Men, and largely it ties up the loose ends; Warren does a terrific job bringing the plot together while keeping things thematically linked.  There are a couple questions I still have after reading the book.

Why is Stark so insistent that they not cut any corners while building the hospital?  Stark is not only unprincipled, he is principled in his unprincipledness; he believes you really can't make an omelette without breaking a few eggs.  He says at one point that "You've got to make it [goodness], Doc.  If you want it.  And you've got to make it out of badness.  Badness.  And you know why, Doc? ... Because there isn't anything else to make it out of."  With such a cynical viewpoint, which is he so committed to avoiding the badness when constructing the hospital?

I guess on some level, the answer is obvious: he wants the hospital to be an emblem of goodness.  The interesting questions is the philosophical one: does he want it to be an emblem of goodness because of his philosophy on goodness (i.e., to prove that the purest goodness can come out of badness) or despite that philosophy (i.e., to show that this one time he can make something good without all the ugliness that normally attends his accomplishments)?

What is the Cass Mastern chapter all about?  Sometimes I go to a really nice restaurant, and there's something on the menu that doesn't make any sense.  Why are there nachos on the menu at this four-star restaurant?  Well, you got them, and they're ridiculous good, with some sort of inventive twist that only this celebrity chef could think of.  Art is similar; the one element that doesn't seem to fit in often ends up being the emotional touchstone of the whole work.  In the case of All the King's Men, the incongruent piece is the chapter on Cass Mastern, narrator Jack Burden's relative, that forms the subject of his (uncompleted) history thesis.  It's the only story that doesn't involve Jack, Willie Stark, and the Stanton's.

The story revolves around Cass, an ancestor of Jack's, having an affair with Annabelle Trice, the wife of a friend, who finds out and kills himself.  The slave Phebe knows the reason for the suicide, so Annabelle sells her.  Cass is distraught and attempts to track down Phebe, only to find she has been sold into a life of sexual abuse.  Jack tells the story in third-person as a flashback; while studying history he decided to write about Cass's letters.  But ultimately he is unable to, "perhaps ... not because he could not understand, but because he was afraid to understand for what might be understood there was a reproach to him."

Warren wraps this up later by suggesting that once Jack can confront the past he can finally move forward.  "The past" has three levels here: Jack's individual failures (in his personal relationships and in his career ambitions), the inherited family sin (because Cass is Jack's relative), and the sin of slavery that hangs like a cloud over the whole South.  Maybe I'm reading a bit too much into that - Warren doesn't delve too much into the plights on blacks otherwise - but there's no sin without Original Sin and in the South that's slavery.

The other element of Cass' journey that's significant is his fatalism.  He doesn't plan for affair to happen; it just does.  He doesn't intend for Phebe to be sold into a life of rape (in fact, he has strong abolitionist tendences), but she is.  Similarly, Jack finds the pattern of his life directed by others: the disintegration of his relationship with Anne, his marriage and divorce, and his coming to work for Willie Stark all are told as events that happen to him.  His lack of control manifests itself physically in the Big Sleep he suffers when going through difficult times and in the God-given Twitch he sees in the hitchhiker he picks up.  Only when he is ultimately able to see himself as a moral agent is he able to break free from the pattern Cass has set for him.  There he finds that neither Stark's Machiavellianism nor Adam Stanton's uncompromising idealism are satisfactory; we all have to make decisions as best we can and live with the results.