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