Appealing New ‘King’s Men’ Is Old

Richard Dyer
The Boston Globe

ALL THE KING’S MEN
By Robert Penn Warren
restored edition by Noel Polk

   Robert Penn Warren’s novel “All the King’s Men’’ has been in print since it was first published 55 years ago. The definitive Great American Novel may remain elusive, but “All the King’s Men’’ has as strong a claim to the title as any.
   It is certainly a definitive American story; in fact, it’s two of them. One is the public story of the rise and fall of a politician, Willie Stark, whose career parallels that of Governor Huey Long of Louisiana, and whose yeasty language not only sounds like Long’s but also anticipates that of President Lyndon B. Johnson. The other is the private story of one of his lackeys, Jack Burden, a bright, cynical man who lacks the sense of purpose that Stark has. The core of “All the King’s Men’’ is the story of Jack’s journey toward the discovery of his identity.
   Before publication, Warren revised the work in consultation with his editor, Lambert Davis. There is no evidence that the novelist was particularly unhappy with the final published version, but it did depart from some of his original intentions. Many of the revisions were made to accommodate considerations of “taste, custom and style’’ that are no longer relevant. A few changes altered structure, and some alterations and deletions changed the tone, or the slant of the light, over Warren’s design.
   Now Noel Polk has restored Warren’s original version. None of the changes Warren agreed to or made on his own initiative is as important, or as damaging, as the editing of Thomas Wolfe’s “Look Homeward, Angel,’’ which has also been published recently in a restored edition under its original title, “O Lost.’’ But Polk is probably right in asserting that the original version of “All the King’s Men’’ is “superior to, more interesting and complex than, the novel published in 1946.’’
   The most immediately startling change is the name of Willie Stark, a name now immortal on the page, on the screen, on the stage, and in the opera house. Warren first called Stark Willie Talos, a name with mythological resonance: Talos was the bronze man, guardian of Crete, outwitted by a vengeful woman, Medea, just as Sadie Burke brings Willie down. The reason for the change was the desire for a more American-sounding name, unambiguous in pronunciation. It’s hard to feel that a great deal was lost in this change; how many readers were going to know who Talos was? But that name does more neatly position the governor opposite his chronicler, Jack Burden, also symbolically named, and it won’t bother anyone who hasn’t read the novel before.
   Other restorations emphasize the parallels between research Jack conducts as a graduate student and as a gatherer of damaging information for Willie, research that carries Jack back into his history and identity. He remains a tightly wound personality, a stranger to himself, but he was looser-limbed in the early version, more candid about sexual matters, and funnier. That makes the book read a little faster, although it may be longer. In an appendix the new edition prints Warren’s original first chapter, which doesn’t lay the groundwork as securely as its successor does, but it has a breezy appeal of its own.
   Reading “All the King’s Men’’ again after an interval of several decades was a treat; it’s a book to be patient with. Some of Warren’s plot manipulations now seem contrived, and the characterization of the impossibly noble physician Adam Stanton is so unconvincing that his unraveling is also unconvincing. But most of the other characters, even minor ones, remain uncommonly vivid, fresh and surprising. Willie Talos is a foul-mouthed, wily icon, but Jack Burden is the character who lodges in the imagination. As the narrator, he is the recipient of Warren’s gift of language and capacity for moral discrimination. Many passages in “All the King’s Men’’ are famous, but just about every page has something on it that deserves to be —- a football player is “a cross between a ballerina and a locomotive,’’ a hotel room is a place “where nothing was mine and nothing knew my name and nothing had a thing to say to me about anything that had ever happened.’’
   Adam wonders: “Were we happy tonight because we were happy or because once, a long time back, we had been happy? Was our happiness tonight like the light of the moon, which does not come from the moon, for the moon is cold and has no light of its own, but is reflected light from far away?’’ No wonder “All the King’s Men’’ has long since gone “out of history into history, and the awful responsibility of time.’’