The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Robert Penn Warren · a novel in ten chapters · Harcourt, Brace, New York, 1946 · scored on the novel as Warren published it, with the Willie Stark of the published text, not the restored edition of 2001; read from knowledge, no text in hand, and English quoted only where its words are certain
Mode
The American political novel crossed with the retrospective confession of a narrator who served the man whose story he tells, and who finds the story is his own
Mythos
The son’s search for the father, discovered by the plot; the fall, under the title’s nursery rhyme of the king’s man who cannot be put together again; original sin worked out in the politics of a Southern state
Phase
The later 1920s and the 1930s in an unnamed Southern state, with the 1850s and the Civil War in an inset journal; written by a poet who taught at Louisiana State University from 1934 to 1942, in and after Huey Long’s rule
Presentation
Fiction; ten numbered chapters in the first person, retrospective, with the whole of the fourth given to the story of Cass Mastern from his journal and letters
Register
A vernacular and metaphysical voice, wisecrack and elegy in one narrator; comic hick speech and political dialogue against a journal held at the pitch of the King James
Scale
A state and its machinery, three families of fathers and sons, the Civil War past and the historian’s trade, at the length of a long novel
Governing Proposition
Willie Stark, whose name is made by the Mason City schoolhouse scandal, a fire escape of graft-built brick that collapses at a fire drill and kills children, is put up for governor as a dummy to split the vote, learns it at a picnic, throws away his speech and turns on the men who used him. He becomes the Boss of the state, builds highways, means to build a hospital clean, and is shot in the Capitol by Adam Stanton, the idealist to his realist. The story is told by Jack Burden, a former student of history and newspaperman who is the Boss’s researcher, and who is sent to find something against Judge Irwin, the man who was most a father to him; he finds it, uses it, and by using it kills his own father. The wager of the novel is that the political novel, a form of exposure, can be made to carry a man’s discovery of his own complicity and of what knowledge of the past does, with a Civil War journal set inside it as its theorem.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The novel opens on the road. Its first words are “Mason City.”, and the drive on Highway 58 that follows is a drive along the new road of the modern state, cut through the old South. The road is the Boss’s work, and the book begins inside his machine, with his researcher and fixer beside him, looking back on what that machine did.
Mason City is where Willie Stark began, in the schoolhouse scandal: a fire escape of graft-built brick collapsed at a fire drill and killed children. The scandal made his name. The plain fact of a building that falls because it was bought is the first stroke of the book’s law: a touch at one point runs to the edge.
The narrator is Jack Burden, a former graduate student in history, once a newspaperman, now the Boss’s man. He tells it in the first person and in retrospect, so that the Jack who acts does not know what the Jack who tells already knows. That gap is the book’s form. This, it will turn out, has been the story of Willie Stark and the story of the man who served him, and the second is the one the book is about.
Movement II
Willie is put up for governor by men who want him only to split the vote. He learns it at a picnic. He throws away the speech he has prepared and tells the crowd that he is one of them and that he was used. It is the moment the hick becomes the Boss, and the book gives it in burlesque and in earnest together: the comedy of the stump and the grievance it answers are both real.
That grievance is the book’s political disclosure. The demagogue answers to a wrong the respectable order made, and the planter families of Burden’s Landing, Jack’s own people, are not let off. Willie rises on the red-neck counties against them, and governs by patronage, highways and hospitals, the courthouse ring and the threat of impeachment. His doctrine, that good must be made out of bad because there is nothing else to make it from, is given to him whole and is not refuted.
The book shows it instead, half true and fatal. Willie means to build a hospital clean, the one thing in his reign to be without graft; Adam Stanton is the idealist to his realist, and each man is incomplete without what the other is. Around him the machine works: the Byram B. White affair, Tiny Duffy, the contractor Larson, Sadie and Sugar-Boy, the dialogue of the court caught precisely and comically. “There is always something”: the book’s political epistemology is in four words.
Movement III
The fourth chapter leaves the state house for the 1850s. Jack had once meant to write a doctoral dissertation on Cass Mastern, from his journal and letters, and abandoned it. Here he tells the story he could not then read. Cass’s adultery with Annabelle kills Duncan Trice, and there is the ring on the dead man’s hand; Annabelle sells the slave Phebe down the river; Cass walks unarmed into battle in the Civil War and dies slowly of his wound in an Atlanta hospital.
The journal’s diction is plain, against Jack’s flourish, a period pastiche held at the pitch of the King James, and it gives the chapter a gravity nothing else in the book matches. It is the summit of the novel’s height, and the chief place where the racial order of the South, described elsewhere in passing, is examined.
It is also the book’s theorem. The law is the web of consequence, “an enormous spider web” in which a touch at any point runs to the edge and returns. A hostile reader may call the chapter a detachable novella. It is the opposite: the chapter states the law, the main action proves it, and Jack’s ability at the end to write Cass’s story is the sign that he has changed.
Movement IV
Jack has two evasions. The first is the Great Sleep. The second he finds on a night drive west to Long Beach and the road back from California, in the face of an old man: the Great Twitch, the view that all action is nervous reflex and nobody is to blame. It is an alibi, and the book shows it to be one by making the man who holds it the instrument of a death.
Willie sends Jack to find something against Judge Irwin, the Upright Judge, the man who was most a father to him. Jack goes into the past as a historian goes, and finds it. He uses it. The Judge kills himself, and Jack’s mother’s scream tells him who his father was. The son’s search for the father has been made by the plot, not laid over it, and knowledge of the past has acted and killed before Jack can state that it does.
The book argues the coincidence and does not hide it. The paternity is the machinery of melodrama; but the novel’s claim is that the past one investigates is always one’s own, and the revelation enacts the claim. The idealist and the realist are now set to destroy each other: Tom Stark’s football injury, Tiny Duffy’s telephone call, and Adam Stanton waiting in the Capitol.
Movement V
Adam Stanton shoots Willie Stark in the Capitol. The idealist and the realist, each incomplete, have destroyed one another, and the compromise that kept the hospital in reach, Tiny Duffy, Larson and the contract, has killed the man who made it. The double catastrophe, the Judge’s suicide and the Boss’s shooting, completes the web the Cass chapter drew.
The title is the nursery rhyme’s: the king’s man who cannot be put together again. The book is a narrative of the fall worked out in a Southern state, original sin in patronage and impeachment and a hospital contract, with the Scholarly Attorney’s tracts and the idiot George carving angels to keep the theological register in the room.
Jack marries Anne and houses the Scholarly Attorney in the Judge’s house, a reconciliation that arrives faster than the book’s own physics would grant, and whether it is earned or asserted is still argued. The last sentence sends him “out of history into history and the awful responsibility of Time”: the Great Twitch given up, and the man who served the Boss ready, at last, to write Cass Mastern’s story.
Act III · The Twelve
The lowest of the twelve, level with one other. Subtract and see. The bones are required: the schoolhouse whose fire escape collapses, the picnic at which Willie learns he was a dummy, the hospital he means to build clean, the Byram B. White affair, Tom’s football injury, and the double catastrophe of the Judge’s suicide and Willie’s shooting. Each act of Jack’s turns a screw that the next needs, and the Cass Mastern chapter, which a hostile reader would call a detachable novella, is the book’s key. What holds the axis here is the flesh: Jack’s recurring set pieces of reflection, the Great Sleep, reprises of the same mordant wisecrack, scenery that repeats a mood already won. A book of four fifths the length would know the same things.
Score: 8.0 / 10
The highest of the twelve after The Imperishable. The disclosure is the condition of moral responsibility under the knowledge that everything is connected and everything is mixed. Willie’s doctrine, that good must be made out of bad because there is nothing else to make it from, is not refuted but shown half true and fatal; Jack’s two evasions, the Great Sleep and “the Great Twitch”, the view that all action is reflex and nobody is to blame, are shown up as alibis. The idealist and the realist are incomplete men who destroy each other; knowledge of the past is an act with consequences; the demagogue answers a real grievance the respectable order made. The truths are often stated in Jack’s essays as well as enacted, and the women are disclosed chiefly as they bear on men.
Score: 8.6 / 10
The book rises often, and its height is real but frequently pushed. The Cass Mastern chapter is the summit: the ring on the dead Duncan Trice’s hand, Annabelle’s selling of the slave Phebe down the river, Cass walking unarmed into battle and dying slowly of his wound in an Atlanta hospital, all in the plain diction of a journal that gives it a gravity nothing else in the book matches. The Judge’s suicide and the mother’s scream that tells Jack who his father was is a second height; the night drive west to Long Beach and the last pages carry real grandeur. Against this, the temperature of Jack’s voice is high for so long that elevation and overstatement become hard to tell apart, and the similes pile up.
Score: 8.3 / 10
On the line of the gate. The archetype is built at two points that bear weight. The son’s search for the father: Jack goes into the past for dirt on Judge Irwin, the man who was most a father to him, finds it, uses it, and so learns that Irwin was his father and that he has killed him; the structure is discovered by the plot, not pasted on. The fall: the title’s king’s man who cannot be put together again makes the book a narrative of original sin in the politics of a Southern state, with Cass Mastern as the antebellum type of the same fall, and the Scholarly Attorney’s tracts and the idiot George carving angels keep the theological register present. It goes no higher because Willie is more a type, the hick redeemer, than a myth newly made.
Score: 8.5 / 10
The lowest of the twelve, level with The Inevitable. The departure is real: the political novel, a form of exposure and documentary, fused with a metaphysical first-person narrator whose subject is his own complicity and the nature of historical knowledge, and a Civil War journal set inside it as its theorem. Jack’s voice, a hard-boiled wisecracker who is also a failed historian and a philosopher, was new. But the form is inherited. The witness who tells another man’s story and finds it his own is Conrad’s Marlow and Fitzgerald’s Nick Carraway, and the Southern meditation on inherited guilt had been made by Faulkner in the decade before. Warren placed his wager close to proven paths and won it; the stake was moderate, and that holds the axis here.
Score: 8.0 / 10
Change the form and much is lost. Told in the third person, or from Willie’s side, this would be the story of a demagogue; told by Jack, it is the story of the man who served him, who supplies the facts that kill, and whose education is the book’s true action, as he says himself in substance. The retrospective first person lets Jack disclose his ignorance at each stage while the narrating Jack knows the outcome, so that the form is the movement from the Great Twitch to the acceptance of responsibility. The Cass chapter is formally necessary: it is the past Jack could not read when he was young and must now read. The charge is the plot’s machinery, the paternity and Tiny Duffy’s telephone call, which is melodrama and would work in another vessel.
Score: 8.4 / 10
Evidence over promise. Eighty years of reading: as political novel, as philosophical novel, as Southern novel of the past, as a study of narration. Noel Polk’s restored edition of 2001, which goes back to Warren’s typescript and names the Boss Willie Talos, reopened the text and the question of its hero’s name. It is still argued whether Jack’s closing acceptance is earned or asserted, and whether Willie or Jack is the book’s centre. It yields on return chiefly through the Cass Mastern chapter, whose echoes through the main action a first reading misses. But the yield is of a known kind: the ideas, which Jack states outright, are exhausted sooner than the scenes, and the scholarly attention, though continuous, is narrower than that given to Faulkner or Fitzgerald.
Score: 8.2 / 10
The intrinsic force is real: the book made the American political novel capable of philosophy, and carried the Southern preoccupation with the past into the modern state, its machine politics, highways and hospitals. That reorganises a subgenre more than the novel itself. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the novel set the type of the American fiction of the Boss and his aide, which runs through Robert Rossen’s film of 1949, which won Best Picture, Carlisle Floyd’s opera Willie Stark of 1981, and later political fiction told by the insider aide, of which Joe Klein’s Primary Colors of 1996 is the best known; and it is the standing classroom text on American political power. Its reach outside the political novel is slight, and Warren’s larger influence on letters came through the New Criticism, not through this book.
Score: 8.1 / 10
The highest of the twelve. Eighty years, and the text whole and continuously in print. It is taught without a break in American schools and universities, kept in the standard series, and held in view by two films and an opera. The book has outlived Huey Long and the populism of the Depression that occasioned it, and is read now for what it says about power and responsibility, not as a key to a governor: Warren denied that Stark is a portrait of Long, and the book does not need the question settled. The charges keep it at the lowest figure its age allows: its presence outside the United States is modest beside Faulkner’s or Fitzgerald’s, and some of its surface, the dialect of the hick politics and a racial order described in passing and rarely examined outside the Cass chapter, is tied to its moment.
Score: 9.0 / 10
Warren was a poet, and the prose shows it at both ends. At its best it is a controlled vernacular and metaphysical voice: the opening on Highway 58, whose first words are “Mason City.”; the picnic speech; the hospital-room scenes; the dialogue of Willie, Sugar-Boy and Sadie, which catches speech and comedy precisely; and the Cass Mastern journal, a feat of period pastiche held at the pitch of the King James. The construction of the ten chapters, with the Judge’s story laid down early and sprung late, is skilled. What holds the axis below the upper band: the prose is often overwritten, adjectival and heavy with simile, Jack repeats his effects, and the reflective passages explain what the scenes have already shown. Load-bearing in places, mannered in many.
Score: 8.4 / 10
Level with The Archetypal Deep and The Encompassed. Take the two furthest elements: the burlesque of the picnic and the hick speech, and the antebellum confession of Cass Mastern. Both obey one law, the web of consequence, “an enormous spider web” in which a touch at any point runs to the edge and returns. Cass’s adultery kills Duncan Trice and sells Phebe; Jack’s research kills his father; Willie’s compromise, Tiny Duffy, Larson and the hospital contract, kills Willie. The tonal range runs from wisecrack to elegy, and the narrating voice holds both. The law bends where the plot needs coincidence, in the paternity, and where Jack’s reconciliation, his marriage to Anne and his housing of the Scholarly Attorney in the Judge’s house, arrives faster than the book’s own physics would grant.
Score: 8.5 / 10
The book holds in one structure the state and its machinery, patronage, impeachment, the highway and the hospital, the courthouse ring; class and region, the red-neck counties against the planter families of Burden’s Landing; the family, the Starks, the Burdens and the Irwins, and the Stantons with their fallen governor; history, both as the Civil War past and as the historian’s discipline; the sacred, as original sin and the Scholarly Attorney’s religion; and consciousness, Jack’s. They are integrated rather than listed, because each order is tied to the others through Jack’s research. What holds the axis where it is: labour and the natural order are present but thin, and race is held almost wholly in the Cass chapter.
Score: 8.5 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.4 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Imperishable at 9.0, then The Unconcealment at 8.6, then The Archetypal Deep, The Inner Law and The Encompassed, each at 8.5. Eighty years in print and in the classroom, read now for its argument about power and not as a key to a governor; a disclosure of moral responsibility in a world where everything is connected and mixed, in which knowledge of the past is an act that kills; a search for the father that the plot itself discovers; one law, the spider web of consequence, governing a picnic burlesque and an antebellum confession; and a state, its families, its history and its religion held through one man’s research.
Limiting Dimension
The Inevitable and The Swerve, each at 8.0, then Pressure on Tradition at 8.1 and The Bottomless Well at 8.2. The book is required in its bones and permitted in its flesh, long and talkative, its reflections and wisecracks reprised; its turn is placed close to Conrad’s and Fitzgerald’s witness and to Faulkner’s past, and its stake was moderate; its reach is real but runs within the political novel and its adaptations; and its ideas, stated outright, are exhausted sooner than its scenes.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.0 against a threshold of 7.5, the book required in its structure though not in all its texture. The Coherence Floor clears: The Living Form at 8.4, The Made at 8.4, The Inner Law at 8.5, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet: The Imperishable at 9.0 and The Unconcealment at 8.6 clear the bar of 8.5, and The Archetypal Deep meets it on the line at 8.5, its archetype built in the plot though Willie stays more a type than a new myth; but The Swerve at 8.0 falls five tenths short, its fusion of the political novel and the metaphysical confession a wager placed close to the proven paths of Conrad, Fitzgerald and Faulkner, and Pressure on Tradition at 8.1 falls four tenths short, its reach strong within the fiction of the Boss and his aide and slight in the novel at large. The Universal Minimum is met (no axis it covers falls below The Inevitable and The Swerve at 8.0, against 7.5) and The Encompassed, which is exempted, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 8.5. The aggregate stands below 9.0 in any case, and the novel is placed in the Canonical tier on its standing.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men, first published by Harcourt, Brace, New York, in 1946, and awarded the Pulitzer Prize for the Novel in 1947. It is scored as the novel as Warren published it, in ten numbered chapters, with the Willie Stark of the published text. The restored edition edited by Noel Polk (2001), which returns to Warren’s typescript and names the Boss Willie Talos, is a different editorial object; it is named as part of the book’s history and is not scored. The novel was written in English, so there is no question of translation. No text was in hand; nothing was measured on a text, and no quotation was checked against a file. The plot, the persons, the structure and the manner are known closely; the wording of the prose is not. English is quoted only where the words are certain: “Mason City.”, “There is always something”, “the Great Twitch”, “an enormous spider web” and “out of history into history and the awful responsibility of Time”; everything else, Willie’s doctrine and Jack’s words on whose story this has been among it, is paraphrase. Composition: the novel grew out of Warren’s verse play Proud Flesh, written in the later 1930s; Warren taught at Louisiana State University from 1934 to 1942, during and after Huey Long’s rule, and denied that Stark is a portrait of Long. The title comes from the nursery rhyme of Humpty Dumpty. Named as history: Conrad’s Marlow; Fitzgerald’s Nick Carraway; Faulkner; Robert Rossen’s film of 1949; Carlisle Floyd’s opera Willie Stark (1981); Joe Klein’s Primary Colors (1996); the New Criticism. Matters that could not be verified, among them the year from which Jack narrates, the length and word count of the book, the extent of its translation, and the exact words of Willie’s sayings on sin and corruption, are not given.