The Books That Mattered

by Frye Gaillard

  After a year at Tulane law school, he passed the bar with flying colors, and in 1918, at the age of twenty-four, he ran for his first political office. He was elected to the state Railroad Commission, a seemingly inconsequential position, but not in the hands of Huey Long. For the next six years, he worked tirelessly—some would even say ferociously—to extend railroad service to rural areas, roll back telephone rate increases, and pursue higher taxes on big corporations. In 1928 he was elected governor, and the state of Louisiana would never be the same. When Long took office, there were fewer than three hundred miles of paved roads in the state. Within two years, there were more than three thousand. He built 111 new bridges, provided free textbooks to Louisiana school children, and adopted as his campaign slogan a quote from William Jennings Bryan: “Every Man a King.”

  The ordinary people of Louisiana loved him, particularly the poor, who, by that time, included most of the rural population. In 1930, they elected him to the U. S. Senate, though he didn’t report for duty until 1932, when he had completed his hectic term as governor and chosen a compliant, hand-picked successor. Soon after his arrival in Washington he appeared at a luncheon for Franklin D. Roosevelt, wearing a colorful suit and clashing pink tie, prompting the president’s mother to whisper, “Who is that awful man?” Huey cheerfully returned the insult. “I like him,” he said of Roosevelt. “He’s not a strong man, but he means well.”

  As early as 1934, it was clear that Long intended to run against Roosevelt two years later, charging that the president had not done enough to end the Depression. On February 23 in a half-hour radio address to the nation, Long put forward his own plan. He called it Share Our Wealth, and though some people would question his numbers, no one could deny that the broad outlines went far beyond conventional politics. Long intended to redistribute the wealth, insisting unassailably that a tiny percentage of citizens were obscenely rich while millions of others were not sure where to find their next meal. The solution, he said, was to tax away fortunes over five million dollars, confiscating everything over eight million, with similar taxes on incomes of more than a million a year. Even the greediest tycoons, he insisted, should be satisfied with an annual compensation three hundred times the national average. The confiscated wealth would then go to the poor in the form of homeowner grants, pensions for the elderly, education grants for American students, and sharply increased benefits for veterans.

  For Robert Penn Warren, watching from the vantage point of Louisiana, it was obvious that Huey meant what he said—and even more significantly, that millions of American citizens believed him. From a literary as well as a political point of view, all of this had the makings of a powerful drama, particularly because there was another, more ominous side of the story. Whatever good Long intended to do, however serious he might be about the suffering of the poor, his thirst for power was as grand as his vision for economic justice. Indeed in Louisiana, he had used intimidation, corruption, and patronage to amass more power than any politician ever dared. The state’s figurehead governor and frightened legislature passed virtually any law Long demanded, and it was a trivial measure of his lust for control that he often sat on the bench during football games and sent in the plays for LSU. The coaches knew better than to contradict him.

  “Huey Long’s great passion was for power and money,” concluded historian Arthur Schlesinger. “These methods outweighed the good he did.”

  But Long’s biographer, T. Harry Williams, a venerable historian at LSU, thought the story was more complicated—thought that the good and the lust for power were equal ingredients in a tragedy that ultimately ended in murder. On September 4, 1935, in a marble corridor at the Louisiana state capitol, a young Baton Rouge doctor whose father, a judge, was about to be gerrymandered out of office, waited in the shadows for Long. When the senator approached, Dr. Carl Weiss fired a single shot with a pistol, striking Long in the side before startled bodyguards opened fire, pumping thirty-two rounds into Weiss.

  The doctor was killed on the spot, but Long was not. Rushed to a Baton Rouge hospital, he underwent surgery to try to stem his internal bleeding, but his damaged kidney continued to hemorrhage, and slowly, but surely Long began losing strength. After extensive interviews with those who attended the senator’s bedside, T. Harry Williams, in his book, Huey Long, offered this account of his final hours:

  At times he passed into unconsciousness and then revived and talked wildly, as though he saw visions beyond the hospital walls. He saw the people out there, the poor people of America, a mass of faces, staring at him, needing him, wanting to give him power so that he could help them . . . the one-gallus farmers of the hill lands of the South . . . the white and black sharecroppers in the broad cotton fields . . . the gaunt and debt-ridden farmers of the Great Plains . . . the unemployed factory workers tramping the streets of the Northeast . . . they looked at him and trusted him . . . and they would give him the power.

  To Robert Penn Warren, all of this made an epic tale, and working off and on for the next ten years, he took the history and built a novel around it, adding more layers to a story that was already complex. By the time he finished, the book in a sense was not about Willie Stark, the fictional character based roughly on Long. Or at least Willie Stark was not the main character, which is what Hollywood never figured out in its two unsatisfying attempts at a movie. (The first attempt, with Broderick Crawford, did win an Academy Award for Best Picture, but still fell flat when compared with the book.) No, the central character in All the King’s Men is the story’s narrator, Jack Burden, a special assistant to Governor Stark, who has embarked on a turbulent journey of discovery. Willie Stark was a part of that journey. But part of it also involved falling in love, and I remember in an early reading of the book, when I was about the same age that Burden would have been, falling a little in love with Anne Stanton myself.

  She was, I thought, the steadiest, sanest character in the book, and at the age of seventeen, she seemed so beautiful and so full of life. She came, like Jack, from a patrician family in south Louisiana, but hers was a part of the post-money aristocracy, her father, a former governor, having set an example of public service. Her older brother, Adam, was Jack’s best friend, and would soon grow up to be a doctor, so devoted to his practice, to saving lives and doing good, that he lived an almost monastic existence. Anne herself would eventually embark on a similar path, devoting herself to charity work, but before that happened, she was a girl in love with Jack Burden, and finally one night she lay on his bed, somehow more sure of herself than Jack, whose passions were suddenly riddled with doubt.

  “Anne,” he whispered, “. . . it wouldn’t be—it wouldn’t be right.”

  Many years later, when the romance was over and they had both moved on, when Anne, in fact, had become the unlikely mistress of Willie Stark, Jack still carried the image in his head, tangled, he knew, with childhood memories of summers by the sea—of picnics and innocent games about to give way to something more real.

  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 hands upon her and had, without understanding myself, called out her name. At that time I 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 the 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 un
derstood 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.

  Such was Jack Burden’s flirtation with meaning, as well as with love, but for much of the book he is resistant to both, choosing to believe that “all life is but the dark heave of blood and the twitch of the nerve.” The shock to Burden, as he discovers in the rush of tragedy near the end, is that there really is a meaning after all, and the pain of that truth is something with which he will have to contend.

  All of this, for me, was the power and the glory of All the King’s Men, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1947. It was a remarkable book in so many ways—the characters, the plot, the brilliant evocation of a time and a place, and all of those things delivered in a lush and poetic prose. I’m tempted to say that Robert Penn Warren never came close to any of this again. His other novels may have had their moments, but he never found another story quite as strong. He did win two more Pulitzer Prizes for his poetry and, with Cleanth Brooks, produced two textbooks, Understanding Poetry and Understanding Fiction, that helped shape the modern study of literature. He also wrote with increasing eloquence about the civil rights movement, enlarging his understanding of equality. And there was this: among his literary peers he was widely admired for his civility and grace, his generosity of spirit. Albert Murray wrote about it in South to a Very Old Place, and even more colorfully, his friend Will Campbell talked about it often.

  Campbell himself was an interesting character, a white Baptist preacher from south Mississippi who became a stalwart in the civil rights movement. In 1978, when he finally sat down to write about it—a memoir of his civil rights years, intertwined with the story of his big-hearted, drug-addicted, older brother, Joe—the resulting book, Brother to a Dragonfly, became a finalist for the National Book Award. It also won the admiration of a wide array of authors, including Robert Penn Warren.

  “Brother to a Dragonfly,” Warren wrote, “is as compelling as a fine novel, is packed with convincing characterizations, strong humor, and deep emotional appeals, and more than any single book I know tells what Southern life is like on the rough side, where the lath and plaster have not been smoothed off, including matters of daily bread, race, and the belief in Jesus Christ.”

  It was hard to say which of these writers admired the other more. But Campbell, who plied his literary trade in a three-room cabin outside of Nashville, loved to tell the story of a visit that Warren once made to his place. “Yep,” he said with a mischievous grin, “ol’ Red Warren—I called him Red—was sure quite a talker. He sat right there in that very chair. The one you’re sitting in right now. And let me show you something else.” Campbell led me out the back door of the cabin and gestured toward a large flat boulder half hidden in the weeds.

  “You see that rock? The one right there? That’s a very historic spot. There probably ought to be a marker or something. Ol’ Red Warren peed on that very rock.”

  II

  I remember how, in that same conversation, Campbell talked a long time about All the King’s Men, and why one book stands out above another. He mentioned Faulkner and Walker Percy, and how they both had that Southern sense of place, and we tried to think of other writers, not from the South, who were able to evoke the same kind of feeling. I remember that I mentioned two books, Peter Matthiessen’s often overlooked novel, At Play in the Fields of the Lord, and David Guterson’s Snow Falling on Cedars—both of which, for whatever personal and complicated reasons, rank right there for me with All the King’s Men. Both authors, certainly, have a gift for the language. In Matthiessen’s case, it’s been honed over the course of a colorful career that has led him to the distant corners of the earth. As a young writer in the 1950s, he made the obligatory journey to Paris, much like James Baldwin or Ernest Hemingway, and there in 1953 he was a founding editor of the Paris Review.

  After that, his travels began in earnest. Between the 1950s and the early years of the twenty-first century, Matthiessen explored the far reaches of Alaska, Australia, and South America, and later Antarctica, New Guinea, and Tibet. Most of his twenty-two works of nonfiction, including his best-known book, The Snow Leopard, are based on those travels. And so, in fact, are some of his novels. At Play in the Fields of the Lord is a story set in the Amazon jungle, a land overflowing with violence and life—like some kind of Eden, many writers have noted, and Matthiessen did not disagree:

  . . . the morning light was vague and luminous, sepulchral, like the light in a dark cathedral; the brown-greeniness of the atmosphere was so tactile that he could rub it between his fingertips. The forest life went on far overhead, in the green galleries; it was only in the sun space cleared by death and fall that new life could rise out of the forest floor. Beneath his feet the ground was not ground at all, but a dark compost of slow seepings and rotted leaves which, starved of sun, reared nothing but low fungi; it gave off a thick, bitter smell of acid.

  A few years after first reading that description, I, too, made a trip to the Amazon jungle, flying out across the unbroken forest in a small bush plane. The pilot tried to be reassuring.

  “This plane,” he said, “is specially made for jungle flying. It’ll fly very slow, so we can land in any kind of clearing. And if it were to crash we’d probably survive. The metal is reinforced.”

  “That’s good,” I said.

  “Not that good,” replied the pilot. “As you can see we’re flying over very dense jungle. If we crashed we’d land in the top of the canopy, and these trees are two hundred feet tall. There would be no way to get down.

  “Welcome to the Amazon,” he added.

  Already in awe of its unfamiliarity, I had come to the jungle on a newspaper assignment, a story on a group of missionaries who had set out on an unlikely quest—to translate the Bible into every language on earth. They worked for an organization called the Southern Institute of Linguistics, which had, in its first forty years of existence, begun translations in more than seven hundred dialects. Most of those were previously unwritten, and thus the cultural implications were startling. For better or worse, these particular missionaries were bestowing upon hundreds of remote and primitive cultures the awesome gift of a written language—the rough anthropological equivalent, you could argue, of the wheel, or maybe even fire.

  I had come to observe their work in Peru, stopping first in the tiny village of Aguachini where the Andes Mountains gave way to the jungle, and where some of the people in the Ashenica tribe had never seen a white person before. There was a small landing strip in a clearing near the village, a place where visitors came so seldom that the grass was nearly eight feet tall. But David Payne had been there before. Payne was twenty-six years old, a tall and shaggy-haired missionary-linguist who reminded me more of a Peace Corps volunteer. He had a deep respect for the people of the jungle, admiring the gentleness of a culture in a place where life could be so hard. He understood that one of the most common words in the Ashenica language was nonashitaro, which means “to suffer,” and like many others who respected its past he also feared for the future of the tribe.

  The outside world was closing in quickly, lured of course by the prospect of wealth—by oil and precious metals and timber—and by an ethic of exploitation and greed; a world view leaving little room for worry over cultural or ecological disaster. Against this reality, David Payne held fast to an article of faith, or at least to a hope, that his work was helping jungle people to prepare. If they could read and write—and if, in addition, they could secure a written title to their land, and build their own health clinics and schools, and if they understood the workings of the world bearing down—perhaps, somehow, they could fortify themselves for a collision that everybody knew was coming.

  The key, Payne believed, was a literacy rooted in their own written language, and a cultural identity that went along with it, and thus he was deeply committed to his mission. He understood, however, that it could b
e double-edged. The critics of the Southern Institute of Linguistics saw it not as a buffer for the jungle Indians, but simply as the first wave of development—an advance team for the forces of greed who tore at the heart of the tribal way of life. For some of these Indians, their departure from the Stone Age was easy to measure—a machete, perhaps, or an aluminum pot. Otherwise, the ancient ways survived, but were fragile in the face of Christian theology, or even the simple notion that germs, and not evil spirits, caused the Indian people to get sick. In the massive cultural confusion that followed, the indigenous tribes became easy prey for an oil or timber company that wanted their land.

  In the broadest sense, this is what Matthiessen’s novel is about—the collision of cultures in the Amazon Basin in which the Indians, inevitably, are the losers. But the story, not surprisingly, is more complex. Matthiessen has a gift for creating character, for using dialogue and point of view to bring unfamiliar figures to life—a missionary struggling to understand his own faith; a missionary’s wife, slowly falling out of love with her husband; a soldier of fortune, wrestling with his American Indian boyhood; the dignified chief of a wild jungle tribe, trying to lead his troubled people through their first encounter with the outside world.

  It is easy to imagine in a setting such as this that the story would crackle with adventure and violence, which it does. But for me at least, the unforgettable brilliance of Matthiessen’s novel was that it was driven more by character than plot—by the spiritual quests of Boronai and Lewis Moon, the sexual longings of the girl, Andy Huben, and by a missionary’s loss of faith, not in God, but in his own faith.