three o'clock in the morning

Book review by Orville Prescott
New York Times, August 19, 1946


----------------- [the review, reprinted] ------------ The summer fiction doldrums are over.  An exciting new novel is published today.  It isn't a great novel or a completely finished work of art.  It is as bumpy and uneven as a corduroy road, somewhat irresolute and confused in its approach to vital problems and not always convincing.  

Nevertheless, Robert Penn Warren's "All the King's Men" is magnificently vital reading, a book so charged with dramatic tension it almost crackles with blue sparks, a book so drenched with fierce emotion, narrative pace and poetic imagery that its stature as a "readin' book," as some of its characters would call it, dwarfs that of most current publications.  Here, my lords and ladies, 

is no book to curl up with in a hammock, but a book to read until 3 o'clock in the morning, a book to read on trains and subways, while waiting for street cars and appointments, while riding elevators or elephants.


Robert Penn Warren, Kentucky born and Tennessee educated, poet, professor, critic and novelist, is a Southerner who hates the shortcomings of the South, as do so many Southern writers.  But he writes about such shortcomings with an eloquence and an elemental rage worlds apart from the sordid bitterness of some of his literary colleagues.  

In an earlier novel, "At Heaven's Gate," he wrote a terrible and engrossing story of moral decadence, business fraud and social degeneration, which somehow lost effectiveness because it seemed grossly exaggerated.  

But "All the King's Men," although it may stumble occasionally because of unconvincing motivation or characterization, cannot seem exaggerated, for it is still another novel about Huey Long and the looting of Louisiana.

Huey Enigmatic but Fascinating


John Dos Passos, Hamilton Basso and Adria Locke Langley have already written novels about the cracker dictator.  There is something about Huey, his combination of magnificent abilities and a genuine if primitive idealism with bottomless corruption and lust for power, which fascinates the literary as well as the political mind. 

Here was a man who destroyed the democratic structure of an American State while shouting his championship of the common man.  

How significant and how representative was he?  How serious is the threat of his kind?


Mr. Warren toys with the questions, but does not answer them.  Through the eyes of his narrator, a corrupt and cynical newspaper man enrolled in the dictator's service, he sees Huey's career without illusions as to his personal faults, his "tomcatting all over the State," his use of bribery, blackmail and force, his contemptuous destruction of freedom and decency.  


But he magnifies the roads, schools, income taxes, etc., introduced in Huey's regime.  "At least the Boss does something," says one of Mr. Warren's characters.  He might have said, "The trains run on time."  Mr. Warren has not chosen to recognize Huey as the personification of an American variety of fascism.

(Huey Long)


This does not mean that "All the King's Men" does not consider issues.  But Jack Burden, the reporter turned official blackmailer for the Boss, is an inadequate medium for their consideration.  Although learned in history, Jack is so cheaply cynical that he is entirely bogged down in a morass of relativity where ends justify means and good and bad are meaningless words.  

In the end, after contemplating the superior behavior of several others, Jack concludes that loyalty and courage really are virtues, after all.  But the reform comes too late and is not persuasive.


An Exuberant Skill With Words


Thus it is quite possible to argue with Mr. Warren about the meaning of his book and to hold reservations about several of his characters (Anne Stanton, the aristocrat whom Jack loves in his fashion and who becomes the Boss's mistress, is hard to imagine and harder to understand).  
     
     But such matters in no way impair the superb effectiveness of Mr. Warren's story telling.  Jack may be morally as blind as Willie Stark, the Boss, but Mr. Warren has endowed him with his own exuberant skill with words.

(the actor Broderick Crawford playing the part of Willie Stark in the 1949 film version of All The King's Men [the "Willie Stark" character is stand-in for real-life governor Huey Long])


"All the King's Men" is really a double story, that of Willie, the hick from the red-neck country who rose to power through eloquence, leadership and ruthless mastery of dirty politics, and that of three aristocrats drawn into Willie's orbit.  Jack was one of them, and he betrayed everything he should have stood for.  

     Anne's brother, Adam, was another, a distinguished surgeon whose conception of honor and whose desire to do good could not be adjusted to the filthy world where men like Willie got results.  And Anne was the third, a well-intentioned waverer between opposing systems.


The two themes are woven together adroitly so that they cross, and recross, with flashbacks in time, with interpolated stories almost completely independent in themselves, with episodes of thundering melodrama.  Willie Stark as a man and a politician is superbly well realized.  Jack tells his story with a cynical humor, a raw vitality and an awed wonder that are immense.  

He is equally skillful in suggesting the futility of the old tradition when confronted with men like Willie, and, in poetic passages of pure atmosphere, rushing highways at night, old towns on the Gulf, the noisome aggregate of crawling, subhuman life around the great man.  Mr. Warren has obviously studied Thomas Wolfe, but he knows how to keep a story moving and independent of himself as Wolfe never did.


"All the King's Men," in spite of the faults which will make it bitterly discussed, is a richly rewarding reading experience.

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