I'm sitting here, listening to James Taylor sing "Country Road" in a public television concert, and it makes me think about my travel out West, a literal coast-to-coast journey along major highways and also small country roads. It was an awe-inspiring trip and I'll never forget it. This project too has been even thus far an amazing journey through Canadian and American literature, through the cities and small towns that make up these two great countries, discovering authors that I would have never ever known about otherwise and reading some of the "classics" that I probably should read at some point but haven't yet. I'm almost half-way through both lists(actually just about half-way on the Canadian side) and there's still so much more to go, but it's books like the last one I read, Robert Penn Warren's All the King's Men that make me excited to keep going, to see what still lies ahead. I decided to read Warren's book because of the timeliness with all of the excitement swirling around the presidential election coming up in November. It's only a few days away from two big deciding states on the democratic side, Texas and Ohio's primaries and caucus. Robert Penn Warren's novel is supposed to be THE political novel of American literature, about a well-meaning attorney who at first is blindly led to the slaughter of politics in Louisiana and then, only a few years later, takes the gubernatorial election by storm and becomes the great, but as the years add on extremely corrupt, Governor Willie Stark. Stark's character is based upon Huey Long, a real-life famous governor of the same state. I have to admit, politics have always fascinated me, I voted in my first democratic primary (at the state level) only days after I turned 18, and have followed the road to the White House in these past months and will continue to follow it rapt. It is kind of sad that two of my new favorite shows are Charlie Rose and George Stephanopoulos. But, I eat that stuff up. So, I was looking forward to this book, though apprehensive too, because even though it had garnered great reviews, I have been deceived on that front before. Boy, was I pleased. This is probably(and I've already said this more than once this week)one of the best books I HAVE EVER READ. Not only am I talking at the enjoyability level, but also in terms of how well it is written. Warren was named as the first poet laureate of the United States and has won two Pulitzer prizes for books of poetry, being the only writer in the history of the prize to win in both categories. Michael Ondaatje(my author that I LOVE to hate) and also Margaret Atwood won Governor General's for poetry and the novel, but even though I haven't read Robert Penn Warren's poetry, I can surely say that this man writes a truly poetic novel. The descriptions are luscious and dripping with the sweat in Governor's house and the humidity of the Louisiana bayou. I clung to every word, aching to read more, and that's just because of his choice of words and phrases. The story too is complicated and rich, as complicated as all our lives are. The title of the work makes reference to the nursery rhyme "Humpty Dumpty" in which after Humpty Dumpty falls, "all the king's horses and all the king's men couldn't put Humpty together again." This book is supposed to be about the rise and fall of Governor Willie Stark, but it is so much more than that. It is about the narrator himself, Stark's right-hand man Jack Burden and his life, as well as all of the people that he and Stark touch or destroy along the way. This book has echoes of F.Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby in which an unreliably biased(possibly experiencing homosexual desire and love)narrator depicts the rise and fall of a tycoon named Jay Gatsby. Warren blows Gatsby away. You see not only the rise and fall of Stark, but of all of his cronies and every one he touches, and come to realize that one's life is shaped so very much by the relationships that one has with other people; children can be borne out of relationships, but so also is experience born and depending on the kind of experiences one has is how one's life shifts and changes. Politics obviously plays a huge part in this book and shapes everyone surrounding Gov. Stark, and it made me think of the candidates that we have now...Obama, for example, still seems wide-eyed and not as calculating as I presume Hillary to be, but I know he's got his calculating side as well, and how far is he really from backroom deals and screwed up spending? I would like to think that he is above all that, but then you can look at Willie Stark and see how quickly one can run down a slippery slope...I also, for whatever reason, seem to have a penchant for books about the deep South and this book is so great for that, perhaps I like books about the South so much because it seems to have a dreamy quality to it. I've only been to Florida in terms of travelling to the South, which is full of magnolias and gardenias, azaleas, live oaks and cypress. Soon, though, in about a month, I will travel to North Carolina as well, and even though it will just be early spring, I'm hoping to enjoy some of the landscape. But, I digress. What I also really liked about the book is that EVERYONE is flawed. There is absolutely no perfect character in Warren's book, which is, of course just like in real life.:) I'm not sure why this book grabbed me so, I just have to put it on the list of top reads next to Faulkner, To Kill a Mockingbird and Gone with the Wind. Funny, all those books take place in the South as well...I've got a lot of favorite quotes from this book, and I hope by reading these you can see a little bit about how well Warren writes, though the brevity of them doesn't do him justice...
"That was why I had got into my car and headed west, because when you don't like it where you are you always go west. We have always gone west.[paragraph] That was why I drowned in West and relived my life like a home movie.[paragraph] That was why I came to like on a bed in a hotel in Long Beach, California, on the last coast amid the grandeurs of nature. For that is where you come, after you have crossed oceans and eaten stale biscuits while prisoned forty days and nights in a storm-tossed rat trap, after you have sweated in the greenery and heard the savage whoop, after you have built cabins and cities and bridged rivers, after you have lain with women and scattered children like millet seed in a high wind, after you have composed resonant documents, made noble speeches, and bathed your arms in blood to the elbows, after you have shaken with malaria in the marshes and in the icy wind across the high plains. That is where you come to lie alone on a bed in a hotel room in Long Beach, California.(464-465)

Also..."I dismissed the question finally. Perhaps the only answer, I thought then, was that by the time we understand the pattern we are in, the definition we are making for ourselves, it is too late to break out of the box. We can only live in terms of the definition, like the prisoner in the cage in which he cannot lie or stand or sit, hung up in justice to be viewed by the populace. Yet the definition we have made of ourselves is ourselves. To break out of it, we must make a new self. But how can the self make a new self when the selfness which it is, is the only substance from which the new self can be made? At least that was the way I argued the case back then (529).

And,
"This is not remarkable, for, as we know, reality is not a function of the event as the event, but of the relationship of that event to past, and future, events. We seem here to have a paradox: that the reality of an event, which is not real in itself, arises from other events which, likewise, in themselves are not real. But this only affirms what we must affirm: that direction is all. And only as we realize this do we live, for our own identity is dependent upon this principle" (578).

This too:
"So I went back down and stood in the garden among the black magnolia trees and the myrtles, and thought how by killing my father I had saved my mother's soul. Then I thought how maybe I had saved my father's soul, too. Both of them had found out what they needed to know to be saved. Then I thought how all knowledge that is worth anything is maybe paid for by blood. Maybe that is the only way you can tell that a certain piece of knowledge is worth anything: it has cost some blood" (647).

And finally, two quotes from the same page...The first "I tried to tell her how if you could not accept the past and its burden there was not future, for without one there cannot be the other, and how if you could accept the past you might hope for the future, for only out of the past can you make the future"(656). And, the beginning of the end, where Jack Burden(what's in a name after all? his is fitting since he has such a burden of a story to carry with him...)begins to wrap it up..."This has been the story of Willie Stark, but it is my story, too. For I have a story. It is the story of a man who lived in the world and to him the world looked one way for a long time and then it looked another and very different way. The change did not happen all at once. Many things happened, and that man did not know when he had any responsibility for them and when he did not..." (656).

We have no idea how even the minutest events will affect us until they turn us down the path on which we now walk. I could quote Robert Frost, but I think you get the point. This book is all about roads taken and not taken and the sometimes horrific consequences that ensue, all written in an extremely beautiful lyrical way. This is what American literature is all about and why we give out a prize like the one it won. I'm so glad I read it. PP-37, GG-35