From the Lists: #36 All the King's Men

Between spring allergies and a cold that has lingered for the best part of two weeks, I have been somewhat off my game lately. The blog topics have been piling up and I have pledged to catch up this week with few rapid-fire entries.

First up, I finished reading #36 on the list of the Best 100 English Novels of the 20^th century:  All the King’s Men (1946) by Robert Penn Warren, which is loosely based on the life of Louisiana Governor Huey Long, nicknamed The Kingfish. The book won the Pulitzer Prize for literature in 1947.

Back in the day, I had an English professor in a Modernism course who stated: “When the dwarf shows up, you know it’s a southern gothic novel.” In this case, the role of the dwarf is played by an aggressive pock-marked, political insider, who is instrumental in both the rise and fall of a southern politician – think female James Carville. 

For fans of southern gothic political dramas, this book is for you. The settings are draped in Spanish Moss. The language and descriptions drip with a humid fecundity that all native southerners in the United States recognize as summer in the deep South. 

I don’t usually quote long passages in these blog posts, but when I read this, I was so struck by the description that I had to read it again and again:  

“A month from now, in early April, at the time when far away, outside the city, the water hyacinths would be covering every inch of bayou, lagoon, creek, and backwater with a spiritual-mauve to obscene-purple, violent, vulgar, fleshy, solid, throttling mass of bloom over the black water, and the first heartbreaking, misty green, like girlhood dreams, on the old cypresses would have settled down to be leaf and not a damned thing else, and the arm-thick, mud-colored, slime-slick mocassins would heave out of the swamp and try to cross the highway and your front tire hitting one would give a slight bump and make a sound like kerwhush and a tinny thump when he slapped heavily up against the underside of the fender, and the insects would come boiling out of the swamps and day and night the whole air would vibrate with them with a sound like an electric fan, and if it was night the owls back in the swamps would be whoo-ing and moaning like love and death and damnation, or one would sail out of the pitch dark into the rays of your headlights and plunge against the radiator to explode like a ripped feather bolster, and the fields would be deep in that rank, hairy or slick, juicy, sticky grass which the cattle gorge on and never get flesh over their ribs for that grass is in that black soil and no matter how far the roots could ever go, if the roots were God knows how deep, there would never be anything but that black, grease-clotted soil and no stone down there to put calcium into that grass – well, a month from now, in early April, when all those things would be happening beyond the suburbs, the husks of the old houses in the street where Anne Stanton and I were walking would, if it were evening, crack and spill out onto the stoops and into the street all that life which was now sealed up within.”

And, it’s one sentence. Jeeze, I can’t even imagine trying to get that past a teacher, but I can dream of one day creating a sentence with this much power. As is obvious from the excerpt above, this is an atmospheric book as much as it is a political potboiler, complete with illicit love affairs, backroom dealings, corruption, and redemption – but sadly, no dwarves. 

I was immediately pulled in by the style and found myself hoping that the governor would make everything all right and bring down the bad guys. But in truth, there is a little bit of bad in all of us, we just have to learn how to make good things from it. 

I have added the Oscar winning, 1949 film version to my Netflix Queue. I am eager to see how the screenwriters adapted the narrative to film.

Next up: #33 Sister Carrie

From the Lists: #48 & 49: A Little DH Lawrence Anyone?

1st Edition

I continue my effort to make it through the list of 100 Best English-Language Novels of the 20th Century and D. H. Lawrence comes in at both #48 and #49. Oddly, other entries on the list that include multiple books in a series are presented as a single entry (#70 The Alexandria Quartet, #23 The USA Trilogy, #57 Parade's End). In this case, The Rainbow and Women in Love are listed separately. Perhaps the reason for this is Lawrence's radically different approach to describing the various forms of love in each.

Many of Lawrence's novels are devoted to the exploration of love outside the bounds of popular romantic Victorian novels. As such, The Rainbow (1915) was initially banned and printed copies were burned in the UK due to the frank discussion of sexual fulfillment and its importance (primacy) in relationships. The three generations of Brangwens introduced in this work, do not find themselves in particularly happy or romantic love matches. Instead, their relationships are based mainly on grudging respect, desire, and physical satisfaction. Mind you, there is no cheating, adultery, or other shenanigans presented in the text, but the idea of relationships based purely on physical needs was evidently insulting to the prim British reading public of the time. By today's standards, this work is extremely tame; however, the suggestive use of "verdant, fecund, turgid, pulsating, and burning" language when describing the mundane lives of these characters can be quite entertaining.

Women in Love (1921) picks up with the two oldest Brangwen daughters, Ursula and Gudrun, and their love interests, Rupert and Gerald. The girls fall in love at first sight with the two male characters. The men, on the other hand, are oblivious and seem to be just a bit (a lot, really) in love with each other. Some critics have suggested that this novel was intended to be Lawrence's "gay" novel, but due to the public outcry following the release of The Rainbow (i.e. bonfires), he dialed back the relationship between the two men. Where the previous novel explored physical love, this novel focuses on the various ideals of love each character strives to fulfill:

• Ursula wants to be cherished as the center of her husband's attention
• Gudrun is an artist who thinks she wants a powerful domineering lover only to discover that she feels smothered in his presence
• Rupert is looking for a separate but equal love, similar to the love he feels for his best friend Gerald (see sexy, naked wrestling scene - WOOF)
• Gerald enjoys the attentions of everyone, but feels pressure to settle down with a woman in order to fulfill his role as the eldest son of local gentry. 

Obviously, the story's tension arises from the mismatched couples - a little girlfriend swapping or a simple threesome would solve all their problems. Actually, Rupert does suggest the threesome option to Gerald - who ultimately refuses. In my opinion, the subject matter of this novel is much racier than that of the previous work. It is possible that the British public lost some of its Victorian innocence following the hardships of WWI and was more open to exploring love in all its myriad forms.

Recommendation: It is not necessary to read both books as each stands on its own merits. They are both relatively easy reads, but there is quite a bit of internal dialog and soul searching as each character navigates through their desires, emotions, hopes, and personal inventories in search of companionship and happiness. The Rainbow does not appear to have much of a defined story arc other than an extended family history of turbulent lusty relationships. Women in Love is more traditionally limited in its plot, but quite modern in its treatment of the subject matter. If you only have time for one - I suggest Women in Love.

PS - Women in Love is coming up soon in my Netflix queue. It received a slew of awards in 1968. I am really interested in seeing how the director presents the subject matter. With that said, I think that there were many more movies with challenging subjects produced in the late 1960s and early 1970s before the advent of super-quick film cuts and inexpensive special effects (for example The Graduate, The Godfather, Last Tango in Paris, Lolita, Midnight Cowboy, The French Connection, Chinatown, etc.).