All the King's Men by Robert Penn Warren

All the King's Men by Robert Penn Warren

wow wow wow what a book. I don't even know how it ended up on my bookshelf. Had to read it slowly to suck up all its goodness and stark truths. A compelling tale of the base but ever-hopeful nature of humanity.

It's a story of the 1930s dramatic and theatrical political rise of governor Willie Stark, an idealistic but underhanded populist in a fictional state very much like Louisiana. The novel is narrated by Jack Burden, a political reporter who evolves into Governor Stark's right-hand man. The trajectory of Stark's career is intertwined with Burden's slowly revealed backstory and philosophical reflections, particularly about history. Beautiful, descriptive writing. Inspired by the life of U.S. Senator and Louisiana Governor Huey P. Long, who was assassinated in 1935, it won the Pulitzer Prize in 1947.

Excerpts of some of the beautiful writing:

... I just lay there in the hammock. I lay there and watched the undersides of the oak leaves, dry and grayish and dusty-green, and some of them I saw had rusty-corroded-looking spots on them. Those were the ones which would turn loose their grip on the branch before long— not in any breeze, the fibers would just relax, in the middle of the day maybe with the sunshine bright and the air so still it aches like the place where the tooth was on the morning after you’ve been to the dentist or aches like your heart in the bosom when you stand on the street corner waiting for the light to change and happen to recollect how things once were and how things might have been if what happened had not happened. ...

... Cass Mastern lived for a few years and in that time he learned that the world is all of one piece. He learned that the world is like an enormous spider web and if you touch it, however lightly, at any point, the vibration ripples to the remotest perimeter and the drowsy spider feels the tingle and is drowsy no more but springs out to fling the gossamer coils about you who have touched the web and then inject the black, numbing poison under your hide. It does not matter whether or not you meant to brush the web of things. Your happy foot or your gay wing may have brushed it ever so lightly, but what happens always happens and there is the spider, bearded black and with his great faceted eyes glittering like mirrors in the sun, or like God's eye, and the fangs dripping. ...

And, a this! A student of history can have no agenda,  something that Connie Borders in If Not the Whole Truth had to learn: ... A student of history does not care what he digs out of the ash pile, the midden, the sublunary dung heap, which is the human past. He doesn’t care whether it is the dead pussy or the Kohinoor diamond. ...

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