Warren was moving fast, but, he later recalled, “fate gave me a passenger.” On the second day of the trip to Baton Rouge, somewhere in northern Louisiana, Warren picked up a poor stranger on the roadside. “He was a somewhat aging fellow, unshaven, missing a tooth or two, with tobacco juice oozing from the place where a tooth had been, not quite as ragged as a tramp, skin sun-baked to leather, the kind of rural drifter born in some shack with a roof you could see the stars through at night …” Warren wrote four decades later. “He was a ‘wool-hat.’ He was a ‘red-neck.’ He was ‘pore white trash.’ He was a citizen of Louisiana. He was the backbone of America, and he probably couldn’t write his name. Or barely.” He was something else, too: he was, Warren said, “what made Huey possible. He was what Huey had been smart enough to see would make him possible.”
On that stretch of Louisiana road in the early autumn, the man talked and Warren listened as the Studebaker roared toward Baton Rouge, toward Long’s university. The drifter was, Warren said, “my introduction to the legendry of Huey. He told me how Huey would build you a road. How he would build bridges with no toll. How he was going to fix your teeth free. He told me what Huey had said to a certain ‘son-of-a-bitch.’ Then he vengefully spat. “‘That Huey,’ he said, ‘he ain’t farten round. He gits ’m tole, and tole straight.’”
Fate had been kind to Warren that day, for from that chance conversation grew the idea for what became “All the King’s Men,” the landmark novel Warren published in August 1946. In the pages of the novel, which went on to win the Pulitzer Prize and has now inspired a terrific new movie version, a crucial scene unfolds along a road not unlike the one Warren was driving when he was so reliably told that Long “ain’t farten round.” In the book, and in Steven Zaillian’s new film, the Long figure, Willie Stark, needs his aide Jack Burden to undertake what later American generations would call “oppo research” on a political foe. As Stark speaks, the drawl is deep—recognizable by, and endearing to, folks like Warren’s passenger—and the point timeless. Burden is reluctant; maybe, he says, he won’t find anything. “Man is born in sin and conceived in corruption and passeth from the stench of the didie to the stink of the shroud,” Stark tells Burden. “There is always something.”
Two cars, two journeys, two conversations: one real, the other fictional, but both pointing toward truth, or at least great literary truth about the nature of power and the complexities of politics in the tradition of “The Iliad” or of Shakespeare’s history plays. And like those epic works, Warren’s story transcends the particular time and place of its setting; “All the King’s Men” is grounded in Huey Long’s Louisiana, but the issues the novel so lyrically explores are universal.
Depending on the age in which it has been read, the novel has been taken as a comment on Long’s brute populism, on the rise of fascism in midcentury Europe, and, in more recent years in America, on the commingling of light and dark in the personal lives of politicians (more than one commentator saw a lot of Willie Stark, who cheated on his wife and cut ethical corners while accomplishing great good for the people, in Bill Clinton). Watching the new movie now and rereading the book, it is difficult not to see the story through the lens of America’s response to September 11 and the concentration of authority in George W. Bush’s White House. The rise and fall of Willie Stark powerfully illustrates that the tension between ends and means, between pragmatism and idealism, and between practice and principle is eternal, and that our lives unfold in moral twilight more than in Manichean clarity.
The politician who, as Warren’s drifter put it, “gits ’m tole, and tole straight” can be hero or tyrant, and both history and human nature suggest that Willie was right when he said that the only way to make bricks was to work with mud, and that good must come from bad—because, as Willie says, “there isn’t anything else to make it out of.” Pressed by Dr. Adam Stanton, an idealistic character and his eventual assassin, who asks: “If, as you say, there is only the bad to start with, and the good must be made from the bad, then do you ever know what the good is?” Willie’s reply is quick.
“Easy, Doc, easy … You just make it up as you go along.”
“Make up what?”
“The Good … What the hell else are we talking about? Good with a capital G.”
“So you make it up as you go along?”
“What the hell else you think folks been doing for a million years, Doc? When your great-great-grandpappy climbed down out of the tree, he didn’t have any more notion of good or bad, of right and wrong, than the hoot owl that stayed up in the tree. Well, he climbed down and he began to make Good up as he went along. He made up what he needed to do business, Doc.”
Cynical? Yes, somewhat, but close to the truth, or at least as we can judge truth in the light of experience. “All the King’s Men” has, we would say now, long been a multiplatform product. Warren first conceived of it as a verse play before deciding to write it as a novel; a 1949 movie version won an Academy Award. Zaillian’s interpretation is vivid and compelling. Sean Penn is a little younger, and a little thinner, than most depictions of Stark, but he is interesting and convincing in the role (why his hair seemed to verge on “Three Stooges” dimensions is a mystery, and a distraction, but hardly fatal). Jude Law’s Jack Burden, Anthony Hopkins’s Judge Irwin, Kate Winslet’s Anne Stanton and James Gandolifini’s Tiny Duffy are all strong, and I think fans of the novel will find the movie rewarding. Those less familiar with the story may be at a disadvantage, particularly in grasping the significance of the Stanton-Stark tension, but the movie sweeps you up and carries you through. “What I love is you can follow it but it doesn’t draw conclusions for you, and everytime I see it I take something different away,” says James Carville, the Democratic strategist who served as an executive producer.
Carville, a Louisiana native who knows something about the ambiguity of politics, sees Warren’s narrative through eyes conditioned by years of working with Clinton; the theme of how good and bad are inextricably linked resonates in a very personal way. “They all start wanting to do something right,” Carville says of politicians, “and things happen to people.”
They do indeed. The novel is largely a tragic story, and an eternal one. (The critic Robert B. Heilman once said that “All the King’s Men” is about Depression-era Louisiana in the same way “Hamlet” is about Danish politics.) The movie’s conclusion is bleaker than the book’s; in the novel, Warren’s Burden emerges as a Fortinbras-like figure, and the book closes on a note not only of hope but of duty—the duty all of us have, to some extent and to some degree, to engage the world outside ourselves. “We shall go out of history into history,” Burden says in the book, “and the awful responsibility of Time.” In that, as in so much else in the story, Warren, like his drifter, tole us straight.
