All the King's Men

by Robert Penn Warren

  I never saw her again, but I know what she looks like now when cocktails, bonbons, late hours, and nearly forty years have done their work on the peach bloom of cheeks, the pearly, ripe but vigorous bosom, the supple midriff, the brooding, black, velvety-liquid eyes, the bee-stung lips, the luxurious thighs. She sit on a divan somewhere, held more or less in shape by the vigor of a masseuse and the bands of lastex which secretly sheathe her like a mummy, but bloated with the entire universe she has ingurgitated with a long delicious sigh. An now with a hand on which the pointed nails are as red as though she had just used them to rip greedily the guts from a yet living sacrificial fowl, she reaches out to a silver dish to pick up a chocolate. And while the chocolate is yet in mid-air, the lower lip drops open and beyond the purplish tint of the microscopically scaling veneer of lipstick, one sees the damp, paler red, expectant membranes of the mouth, and the faint glitter of a gold filling in the dark, hot orifice.

  Good-bye, Lois, and I forgive you everything I did to you.

  As for the way Anne Stanton went meanwhile, the story is short. After two years at the refined female college in Virginia, she came home. Adam by this time was in medical school up East. Anne spent a year going to parties in the city, and got engaged. But nothing came of it. He was a decent, intelligent, prosperous fellow, too. After a while there was another engagement, but something happened again. By this time Governor Stanton was nearly an invalid, and Adam was studying abroad. Anne quit going to parties, except an occasional party at the Landing in the summer. She stayed at home with her father, giving him his medicine, patting his pillow, assisting the nurse, reading to him hour by hour, holding his hand in the summer twilights or in the winter evening when the house shook to the blasts off the sea. It took him seven years to die. After the Governor had died in the big tester bed with a lot of expensive medical talent leaning over him, Anne Stanton lived in the house fronting the sea, with only the company of Aunt Sophonisba, a feeble, grumbling, garrulous, and incompetent old colored woman, who combined benevolence and a vengeful tyranny in the ambiguous way known only to old colored women who have spent their lives in affectionate service, in prying, wheedling, and chicanery, in short-lived rebelliousness and long irony, and in secondhand clothes. Then Aunt Sophonisba died, too, and Adam came back from abroad, loaded with academic distinctions and fanatically devoted to his work. Shortly after his return, Anne moved to the city to be near him. By this time she was pushing thirty.

  She lived alone in a small apartment in the city. Occasionally she had lunch with some woman who had been a friend of her girlhood but who now inhabited another world. Occasionally she went to a party, at the house of one of the women or at the country club. She became engaged for a third time, this time to a man seventeen or eighteen years older that she, a widower with several children, a substantial lawyer, a pillar of society. He was a good man. He was still vigorous and rather handsome. He even had a sense of humor. But she did not marry him. More and more, as the years passed, she devoted herself to sporadic reading–biography (Daniel Boone or Marie Antoinette), what is called “good fiction,” books on social betterment–and to work without pay for a settlement house and an orphanage. She kept her looks very well and continued, in a rather severe way, to pay attention to her dress. There were moments now when her laugh sounded a little hollow and brittle, the laughter of nerves not of mirth or good spirits. Occasionally in a conversation she seemed to lose track and fall into a self-absorption, to star up overwhelmed by embarrassment and unspoken remorse. Occasionally, too, she practiced the gesture of lifting her hands to her brow, one on each side, the fingers just touching the skin or lifting back the hair, the gesture of a delicate distraction. She was pushing thirty-five. But she could still be good company.

  That was the Anne Stanton whom Willie Stark had picked out, who had finally betrayed me, or rather, had betrayed an idea of mine which had had more importance for me than I had ever realized.

  That was why I had got into my car and headed west, because when you don’t like it where you are you always go west. We have always gone west.

  That was why I drowned in West and relived my life like a home movie.

  That was why I came to lie on a bed in a hotel in Long Beach, California, on the last coast amid the grandeurs of nature. For that is where you come, after you have crossed oceans and eaten stale biscuits while prisoned forty days and nights in a storm-tossed rat-trap, after you have sweated in the greenery and heard the savage whoop, after you have built cabins and cities and bridged rivers, after you have lain with women and scattered children like millet seed in a high wind, after you have composed resonant documents, made noble speeches, and bathed your arms in blood to the elbows, after you have shaken with malaria in the marshes and in the icy wind across the high plains. That is where you come, to lie alone on a bed in a hotel room in Long Beach, California. Where I lay, while outside my window a neon sign flickered on and off to the time of my heart, systole and diastole, flushing and flushing again the gray sea mist with a tint like blood.

  I lay there, having drowned in West, my body having drifted down to lie there in the comforting, subliminal ooze of the sea floor of History. Lying there, I had what I thought then was a fine perspective on my own history, and saw that the girl I had known that summer a long time back hadn’t been beautiful and charming but had merely been smooth-faced and healthy, and though she had sung songs to Jackie-Bird while she cradled his head on her breast, she hadn’t loved him, but had merely had a mysterious itch in the blood and he was handy and the word love_ was a word for the mysterious itch. And that she had been tormented by the mysterious itch and torn between its impulse and fear, and that all her withholdments and hesitations had not been prompted by some dream of making “love mean something” and making me understand that dream but that they had been prompted by all the fears which the leaning, sibilant, sour-breathed old dough-faces of conventional society had whispered into her ear like fairy godmothers while she lay in her cradle, and that those withholdments and hesitations were no better or worse than the hottest surrender nor better or worse than those withholdments practiced by Lois for other ends. And in the end you could not tell Anne Stanton from Lois Seager, for they were alike, and though the mad poet William Blake wrote a poem to tell the Adversary who is Prince of This World that He could not ever change Kate into Nan, or if indeed the Prince couldn’t change Kate into Nan it was only because Kate and Nan were exactly alike to begin with and were, in fact, the same with only the illusory difference of name, which meant nothing, for names meant nothing and all the words we speak meant nothing and there was only the pulse in the blood and the twitch of the nerve, like a dead frog’s leg in the experiment when the electric current goes through. So when I lay there on the bed in Long Beach, and shut my eyes, I saw in the inward darkness as in mire the vast heave and contortion of numberless bodies, and limbs detached from bodies, sweating and perhaps bleeding from inexhaustible wounds. But finally this spectacle, which I could summon up by the mere act of closing my eyes, seemed merely funny to me. So I laughed out loud.

  I laughed out loud, and then after watching for some time the rhythmic flushing of the sea mist by the neon sign, I went to sleep. When I woke up I made ready to go back to the place and the things I had come.

  Years before, a young girl had lain there naked on the iron bed in my room with her eyes closed and her hands folded over her breast, and I had been so struck by the pathos of her submissiveness and her trust in me and of the moment which would plunge her into the full, dark stream of the world that I had hesitated before laying my hand upon her and had, without understanding myself, called out her name. At that time I had had no words for what I felt, and now, too, it is difficult to find them. But lying there, she had seemed to be again the little girl who had, on the day of the picnic, floated on the waters of the bay, with her eyes closed under the stormy and grape-purple sky and the single white gull passing over, very high. As she lay there that image came
into my head, and I had wanted to call her name, to tell her something–what, I did not know. She trusted me, but perhaps for that moment of hesitation I did not trust myself, and looked back upon the past as something precious about to be snatched away from us and was afraid of the future. I had not understood then what I think I have now come to understand: that we can keep the past only by having the future, for they are forever tied together. Therefore I lacked some essential confidence in the world and in myself. She came, as time passed, to suspect this fact about me. I do not know that she had words to describe the fact to herself. Or she only had the easy words people gave her: wanting to have a job, studying law, doing something.

  We went different ways in the world, as I have said, but I had with always that image of the little girl on the waters of the way, all innocence and trustfulness, under the stormy sky. Then, there came the day when that image was taken from me. I learned that Anne Stanton had become the mistress of Willie Stark, that somehow by an obscure and necessary logic I had handed her over to him. That fact was too horrible to face, for it robbed me of something out of the past by which, unwittingly until that moment, I had been living.

  So I fled west from the fact, and in the West, at the end of history, the Last Man on that Last Coast, on my hotel bed, I had discovered the dream. That dream was the dream that all life is but the dark heave of blood and the twitch of the nerve. When you flee as far as you can flee, you will always find that dream, which is the dream of our age. At first, it is always a nightmare and horrible, but in the end it may be, in a special way, rather bracing and tonic. At least, it was so for me for a certain time. It was bracing because after the dream I felt that, in a way, Anne Stanton did not exist. The words Anne Stanton_ were simply a name for a peculiarly complicated piece of mechanism which should mean nothing whatsoever to Jack Burden, who himself was simply another rather complicated piece of mechanism. At that time, when I first discovered that view of things–really discovered, in my own way and not from any book–I felt that I had discovered the secret source of all strength and all endurance. That dream solves all problems.

  At first it was, as I have said, rather bracing and tonic. For after the dream there is no reason why you should not go back and face the fact which you have fled from (even if the fact seems to be that you have, by digging up the truth about the past, handed over Anne Stanton to Willie Stark), for any place to which you may flee will now be like the place from which you have fled, and you might as well go back, after all, to the place where you belong, for nothing was your fault or nobody’s fault, for things are always as they are. And you can go back in good spirits, for you will have learned two very great truths. First, that you cannot lose what you have never had. Second, that you are never guilty of a crime which you did not commit. So there is innocence and a new start in the West, after all.

  If you believe the dream you dream when you go there.

  Chapter Eight

  So having lain on the bed in Long Beach, California, and seen what I had seen, I rose, much refreshed, and headed back with the morning sun in my face. I threw in my direction the shadows of white or pink or baby-blue stucco bungalows (Spanish mission, Moorish, or American-cute in style), the shadows of filling stations resembling the gingerbread house of fairy tale or Anne Hathaway’s cottage or an Eskimo igloo, the shadows of palaces gleaming on hills among the arrogant traceries of eucalyptus, the shadows of leonine hunched mountains, the shadow of a boxcar forgotten on a lonely siding, and the shadow of a man walking toward me on a white road out of the distance which glittered like quartz. It threw the beautiful purple shadow of the whole world in my direction, as I headed back, but I kept right on going, at high speed, for if you have really been to Long Beach, California, and have had your dream on the hotel bed, then there is no reason why you should not return with a new confidence to where you came from, for now you know, and knowledge is power.

  You can put your throttle to the floor and let the sixty-horse-power mystery whine like a wolfhound straining on leash.

  I passed the man who was walking toward me, and his face whirled away like a scrap of paper in a gale or boyhood hopes. And I laughed out loud.

  I saw the people walking in the plaza of little towns in the desert. I saw the waitress in the restaurant wave in feeble protest at the fly while the electric fan needled the air which was as thin and hot as the breath of a blast furnace. I saw the traveling salesman who stood at the hotel desk just ahead of me and said, “You call this a hotel, bud, and me wiring for a room and bath and you ain’t held it. It’s a wonder you got a room and bath in a burg like this.” I saw the sheepherder standing alone on an enormous mesa. I saw the Indian woman with eyes the color of blackstrap molasses looking at me over a pile of pottery decorated with the tribal symbols of life and fertility and eminently designed for the five-and-tencent-store trade. As I looked at all these people I felt great strength in my secret knowledge.

  I remembered how once, long back when Willie Stark had been the dummy and the sap, at the time when he was Cousin Willie from the country and was running for governor the first time, I had gone over to the flea-bitten west part of the state to cover the barbecue and speaking at Upton. I had gone on the local, which had yawed and puffed for hours across the cotton fields and then across the sagebrush. At one little town where it stopped, I had looked out of the window and thought how the board or wire fences around the little board houses were inadequate to keep out the openness of the humped and sage-furred country which seemed ready to slide in and eat up the houses. I had though how the houses didn’t look as though they belonged there, improvised, flung down, ready to be abandoned, with the scraps of washing still on the line, for there wouldn’t be time to grab it off when the people finally realized they had to go and go quick. I had had that thought, but just as the train was pulling out, a woman had come to the back door of one of the nearest houses to fling out a pan of water. She flings the water out, then looks a moment at the train drawing away. She is going into the house to some secret which is there, some knowledge. And as the train pulled away, I had had the notion that I was the one running away and had better run fast for it was going to be dark soon. I had thought of that woman as having a secret knowledge, and had envied her. I had often envied people. People I had seen fleetingly, or some people I had known a long time, a man driving a long, straight furrow across a black field in April, or Adam Stanton. I had, at moments, envied the people who seemed to have a secret knowledge.

  But now, as I whirled eastward, over desert, under the shadow of mountains, by mesas, across plateaus, and saw the people in that magnificent empty country, I did not think that I would ever have to envy anybody again, for I was sure that now I had the secret knowledge, and with knowledge you can face up to anything, for knowledge is power.

  In a settlement named Don Jon, New Mexico, I talked to a man propped against the shady side of the filling station, enjoying the only patch of shade in a hundred miles due east. He was an old fellow, seventy-five if a day, with a face like sun-brittled leather and pale-blue eyes under the brim of a felt hat which had once been black. The only thing remarkable about him was the fact that while you looked into the sun-brittled leather of the face, which seemed as stiff and devitalized as the hide on a mummy’s jaw, you would suddenly see a twitch in the left cheek, up toward the pale-blue eye. You would think he was going to wink, but he wasn’t going to wink. The twitch was simply an independent phenomenon, unrelated to the face or to what was behind the face or to anything in the whole tissue of phenomena which is the world we are lost in. It was remarkable, in that face, the twitch which lived that little life all its own. I squatted by his side, where he sat on a bundle of rags from which the handle of a tin skillet protruded, and listened to him talk. But the words were not alive. What was alive was the twitch, of which he was no longer aware.

  After my tank had been filled, I continued to watch that twitch, with glances stolen from the highway, as we sat side by side in
the car and hurtled eastward. He was going east, too, going back. That was back in the days when the dust storms were blowing half the country away and folks headed west like the lemmings on a rampage. Only, the folks who got there lacked the fine ecstasy of the lemmings. They did not start swimming in teeming, obsessed hordes straight out to the middle of the blue Pacific. That would have been the logical thing for them to do, just start swimming, pa and ma, grandpa and grandma, and baby Rosebud with the running sore on her little chin, the whole kit and kaboodle of ‘em, flailing the water to a froth and heading out. But, no, they were not like the lemmings, and so they just sat down and starved slowly in California. But this old fellow didn’t. He was going back to north Arkansas to starve where he had come from. “Californy,” he said, “hit is jes lak the rest of the world, only it is more of hit.”

  “Yeah,” I replied, “that is a fact.”

  “You been thar?” he demanded.

  I told him I had been there.

  “You goen back home?” he asked I told him I was going home.

  We rode across Texas to Shreveport, Louisiana, where he left me to try for north Arkansas. I did not ask him if he had learned the truth in California. His face had learned it anyway, and wore the final wisdom under the left eye. The face knew that the twitch was the live thing. Was all. But, having left that otherwise unremarkable man, it occurred to me, as I reflected upon the thing which made him remarkable, that if the twitch was all, what was it that could know that the twitch was all? Did the leg of the dead frog in the laboratory know that the twitch was all when you put the electric current through it? Did the man’s face know about the twitch, and how it was all? And if I was all twitch how did the twitch which was me know that the twitch was all? Ah, I decided, that is the mystery. That is the secret knowledge. That is what you have to go to California to have a mystic vision to find out. That the twitch can know that the twitch is all. Then, having found that out, in the mystic vision, you feel clean and free. You are at one with the Great Twitch.