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The Dialectics Of Reality In The Fiction Of Robert Penn Warren

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The Dialectics Of Reality In The Fiction Of Robert Penn Warren

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Content This dissertation has bssn
microfilmed exactly as received 68-7189
KEHL, Delmar George, 1936-
THE DIALECTICS OF REALITY IN THE FICTION
OF ROBERT PENN WARREN.
University of Southern California, Ph.D., 1967
Language and Literature, modern
University Microfilms, Inc., Ann Arbor, Michigan
Copyright © by
DELMAR GEORGE KEHL
1968
THE DIALECTICS OF REALITY IN THE
FICTION OF ROBERT PENN WARREN
by
Delmar George Kehl
A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirement for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(English)
September 1967
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY PARK
LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA 9 0 0 0 7
This dissertation, written by
..........
under the direction of Mfl Dissertation Com
mittee, and approved by all its members, has
been presented to and accepted by the Graduate
School, in partial fulfillment of requirements
for the degree of
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPK /
Dean
Date September A. . 1.96.7..........
DISSERTATION COMMITTEE
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Page
PROLOGUE: UNDERSTANDING ROBERT PENN WARREN'S FICTION:
"REFERENCES TO REALITY"
PART I. REALITY AND THE "IMAGE OF MAN"
Chapter
I. "THE UNFOLDING DIALECTIC": "THAT DEEPER . . .
AND DARKER DIALECTIC"..................... 19
II. "THE DIALECTICAL PROCESS"...................... 79
III. "A DIALECTICAL CONFIGURATION".................... 143
I
IV. "A SICK DIALECTIC"...............................214
PART II. REALITY AND "THE END OF MAN"
V. KNOWLEDGE: "THE END OF M A N " ................... 264
VI. HISTORY AND "THE AWFUL RESPONSIBILITY OF TIME" 309
VII. "THE OLD COST OF HUMAN REDEMPTION"..............376
PART III. REALITY AND "THE LITTLE MYTH" OF MAN:
A "MYTH OF THE UNITY OF BEING"
VIII. "A TRAGIC VISION OF REALITY".................... 451
SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY........................... 523
PROLOGUE
UNDERSTANDING ROBERT PENN WARREN'S FICTION:
"REFERENCES TO REALITY"
"The artist is the creator of beautiful things . . .
The critic is he who can translate into another
manner or a new material his impression of
beautiful things."
— Oscar Wilde, Preface to The
Picture of Dorian Gray
". . . The immovable critic twitching his skin
like a horse that feels a flea . .
— Marianne Moore, "Poetry"
"Intelligence, tact, discipline, honesty, sen
sitivity— those are the things we have to de
pend on, after all, to give us what we prize
in criticism, the insight."
— Warren, Preface to Selected
Essays
1
PROLOGUE
UNDERSTANDING ROBERT PENN WARREN'S FICTION:
"REFERENCES TO REALITY"
"Robert Penn Warren ..."
"A good writer?"
"Very good. Almost too good for his own good. Once
I heard someone say, 'Red speaks all languages.' He
has more talent, genius probably, than is necessary.
When that's the case, talent and genius can use a writer.
He's been safe thus far. He feels those forebears, and
he feels the world's undertow sucking away. And he's a
dedicated man ..."
Such is the colloquy between a rather incredible, resur
rected Hawthorne and the perceptive but loquacious William
Van O'Connor in Mr. O'Connor's essay "The Hawthorne Museum:
A Dialogue."^ Of few writers today can it be said that they
are "almost too good," that they have talent and genius to
spare. Indeed perhaps no American author writing today, and
few who have written in the past, is more deserving of the
William Van O'Connor, "The Hawthorne Museum: A Dia
logue, " "The Grotesque: An American Genre" and Other Essays
(Carbondale, 1962), pp. 193-231.
2
epithet "man of letters" than is Robert Penn Warren.
Warren's "dedication" is obvious from the sheer volume
of his canon, from the remarkable diversity of his accom
plishments. For his versatile success with numerous genre—
short story, novel, lyric poem, narrative poem, drama,
critical and sociological essay— Warren equals, and perhaps
even surpasses, such a versatile writer as T. S. Eliot. But
to speak of "dedication" it is necessary to note the concept
td which one is dedicated, the idea which, in the basic
sense of the term, one is "proclaiming down." In a word,
Warren is dedicated to the concept of art as a form of
heightened reality and to the concept of criticism as a form
of insightful "references to reality." Warren suggests that
true criticism, like true art, is essentially a "process of
discovery," an increasing awareness of reality.
"Criticism," Warren has written, "is a never-ending
process"? a work of art "may require the mediation of a
great deal of critical activity by ourselves and by others
before we are ready. And for the greater works we are never
2
fully ready." This critical study will find its justifica-
2
Robert Penn Warren, "A Poem of Pure Imagination,"
Selected Essays (New York, 1958), p. 271.
tion for existence in the degree to which it increases our
O
readiness for Warren's fiction. The critic, however, if he
is anything, is a humble man, for, as Warren has written,
"all critics must fail in some degree, for the simple reason
that the analysis cannot render the [work of art], the
3
discursive activity cannot render the symbolical." Des
tined to fail in some degree, the critic must practice
"intelligence, tact, discipline, honesty, sensitivity, [for]
those are the things we have to depend on, after all, to
. . 4
give us what we prize in criticism, the insight."
If we are not "ready" for some of Warren's works, we
are ready at least for some valid "mediation"; we are ready
to be made "ready." Warren, in the words of John Dos
5
Passos, is "a man worth studying"; his writing, especially
his fiction, merits a closer, more meticulous consideration
3
Warren, "A Poem of Pure Imagination," p. 271. Allen
Tate, in his essay "Is Literary Criticism Possible?" (Col
lected Essays [Denver, 1932]), expresses much the same idea:
"Literary criticism, like the Kingdom of God on earth, is
perpetually necessary and, in the very nature of its middle
position between imagination and philosophy, perpetually
impossible."
4
Robert Penn Warren, Preface to Selected Essays, xii.
5
In a letter to me, June 12, 1965.
than it has heretofore received. Whereas there is certainly
no dearth of Warren criticism, there is most assuredly a
need for a close, meticulous examination of Warren's writ
ing, an examination characterized by intelligence, tact,
discipline, honesty, and sensitivity. W. P. Southard's
comment, in 1945, that Warren has been "badly read when
g
read at all" still seems true today. William M. Frohook,
who has criticized Warren for his alleged regionalist and
agrarian weaknesses, has maintained that much of Warren's
7
writing is quite possibly "more respected than read."
Similarly, Charles Samuels has written that Warren is "an
author who has been more often eulogized or mocked than
0
studied." Still another critic, William Wasserstrom, be
lieves that "Warren's achievement has been too long either
9
misunderstood or underrated." Perhaps Robert B. Heilman
best summarizes the point in his remark that critics
0
"The Religious Poetry of Robert Penn Warren," Kenyon
Review, VII (Autumn 1945), 653.
7
"Mr. Warren's Albatross," The Novel of Violence in
America (Dallas, 1946), Chapter V.
®"In the Wilderness," Critique. V (Fall 1962), 46.
9
"Robert Penn Warren: From Paleface to Redskin,"
Prairie Schooner, XXXI (Winter 1957), 323.
are obliged to take a good, long direct look at Warren
instead of using one of those hasty city-street snap
shots at 25 cents a peep . . . Those who have looked
close enough to realize the intelligent and imaginative
richness will know that thj^ have been at least in the
neighborhood of greatness.
It is time to look long and hard at Warren's literary
output and, at the same time, to repudiate the "internecine
vindictiveness of voices" which Warren himself has deplored.
The variety of critical modes, Warren has suggested, "should
not put a premium on whimsy, lack of system, amiable ama
teurism, and irresponsibility. It should, rather, make the
critic more systematic, more responsible, more scrupulous
in his craft. . . . Most of the criticism of Warren's
fiction falls somewhere between two extremes, both of which
share a gross superficiality. At one pole is the criticism
characterized by an unscrupulous, indiscriminating eulo
gizing or, even worse, an attempt to make Warren over in
*
the critic's own image. Warren's terms "whimsy" and "ami
able amateurism" apply to this kind of criticism. At the
opposite extreme is the criticism characterized by what
Warren has called an "internecine vindictiveness of voices."
^"Melpomene as Wallflower; or, The Reading of Tragedy,"
Sewanee Review, LV (Winter 1957), 154.
11Warren, Preface, Selected Essays, xii.
7
The authors of this criticism, rather than reading the work
of art for its own sake and on its own terms, are guilty of
what Henry James called tampering with the flute and then
criticizing the music. According to Louis D. Rubin Jr.,
Time after time, Warren has had his iBooks greeted with
a flood of irrelevant and idiotic objections, making
it necessary for the serious reviews . . . to begin by
laboriously clearing away the journalistic debris. . . . •
Warren has been the victim of some of the most slip
shod literary journalism of his day. It seems abso
lutely impossible for anyone writing for a newspaper
or magazine to read one of Warren's books for its own
sake, without cutting loose with a barrage of ideologi
cal and sociological pre-judgment, or, as sometimes
happens, drowning the book in well-meant but wrong
headed praise.12
The "debris" resulting from the "slipshod" criticism Rubin
speaks of takes various forms. For example, Charles Hum
boldt, in his essay "The Lost Cause of Robert Penn Warren,"
takes Warren to task for his so-called "reactionary histor
ical outlook." Humboldt is also concerned with what he
calls "the special vulgarity with which Negroes are treated
13
in Night Rider." Similarly, Robert Gorham Davis bemoans
the "political pattern" and "the treatment of negroes" in
12
"'Theories of Human Nature': Kazin or Warren?"
Bewanee Review. LXIX (Summer 1961), 500.
13
"The Lost Cause of Robert Penn Warren," Masses and
Mainstream, I (July 1948), 8.
14
All the King's Men. Another critic, Stanley Edgar Hyman,
in his review of Wilderness. seems more concerned with
determining the extent of Southern guilt toward the Negro
than in making any really significant insights into the
15
novel itself. Maxwell Geismar also scatters "debris" in
his remark that in Band of Angels Warren creates "practi
cally an idyll of slavery in the Old South" and that "Mr.
Warren's sympathies lie with a literary legend of the Old
South. . . ."
*
Other wfiters have criticized Warren's supposed agrar
ian regionalism, which W. M. Frohock has called the "alba-
17
tross about [Warren's] neck." Still others, such as
14
"Dr. Adam Stanton's Dilemma," New York Times Book
Review. August 18, 1946, p. 3.
^"Coming Out of the Wilderness?" New Leader. XLIV
(November 13, 1961), 24. Mr. Hyman, who refers to Warren's
"three previous novels," ought to read the five previous
novels, and this sixth one, carefully.
16
"Agile Pen and Dry Mind," Nation, CLXXXI (October 1,
1955), 287.
17
"Mr. Warren's Albatross," The Novel of Violence in
America. If it seems absurd to refer to Faulkner as a
"regionalist" in the pejorative sense, it seems no less ab
surd to refer to Warren in this way. (For Warren's honor
ific sense of the term regionalism, see "Some Don'ts for
Literary Regionalists," American Review. VIII [December
1936], 142.)
18
Alfred Kazin and Norman Kelvin, have criticized Warren's
fiction apparently because they disagree with his view of
human nature. Several other writers, for example Michael
19
Mohrt, have made the error of readxng Warren's novels as
romans a clef. Often ironically applicable to Warren's
critics is Warren's remark that
some people can't read fiction . . . You have to spell
it out for some people, especially a certain breed of
professional defender-of-the-good, who makes a career
of holding the right thoughts and admiring his own
critical navel. . . .2®
One should be able validly to expect critics to read metic
ulously and to ascertain accurately what Warren is trying
to do in his fiction. Anything less is not an insightful
21
"reference to reality."
18
Alfred Kazin, "A City of the Soul," Reporter. XXIV
(June 8, 1961), 40. Norman Kelvin, "The Failure of Robert
Penn Warren," College English, XVIII (April 1957), 355.
19
"Robert Penn Warren and the Myth of the Outlaw,"
Yale French Studies, X (1953), 70. Cf. Hamilton Basso's
criticism of All the King's Men for its so-called idealized
version of Huey Long ("The Huey Long Legend," Life. XXI
[December 8, 1946], 106).
20
> Malcolm Cowley ed., Writers at Work: The Paris Re
view Interviews (New York, 1958), p. 113.
Among articles on Warren's fiction, there are numer
ous disturbing evidences of superficial reading and "slip
shod" writing. A minor but inexcusable one is the mere
10
This study of Warren's fiction proposes, in view of
the need, to take a "good, long, direct look at Warren."
It proposes, in general, to examine Warren's fiction vis-
a-vis his own criticism, just as one reads Eliot on poetry
or Forster on the novel. Warren as critic, of course, is
much more than mere apologist, attempting, as Eliot said,
to defend the kind of literature he is writing, or to for
mulate the kind that he wants to write. A more specific
purpose of this study is to examine Warren's fiction in
terms of his donnee, in terms of the underlying plexus of
his work. This is not to suggest, however, that his fiction
can be reduced, without distortion, to a neat thesis about
human existence.
t
What Warren once wrote of Milton's poetry is appli
cable to Warren's fiction: it represents "variety of sub
jects . . . but little variety of theme. It presents a
spelling of names. For example, Bogan Murdock becomes var
iously "Brogan Murdock," "Bogan Murdoch," and even "Bogan
Maddox." Similarly, Willie Stark becomes "Willy"; Wilkie
Barron becomes "Willie Barron"; Ashby Wyndham becomes
"Ashby Windham"; Jack Burden becomes "Jack Burton." Ter
ence Martin, however, goes further and adds incest to in
jury in his remark that "the knowledge that Judge Stanton
is his true father gives Jack [Burden] his identity. . . ."
("Band of Angels: The Definition of Self Definition,"
Folio. XXI [Winter 1955-56], 31.)
22
development, rather than a variety, of theme." His fic
tion represents, in the words he applies to Eudora Welty's
23
stories, "variations on the same basic theme." Or, to
put it another way, what Warren has written concerning
Faulkner's novels is true of his own: "In most novels,
Faulkner has not been linear but spiral, passing over the
24
same point again and again, but at different altitudes."
Warren's eight novels, spanning the time of the early 1820'
to the present, constitute an American epic of the self in
search, consciously or unconsciously, of reality.
Alberto Moravia once remarked that
in the works of every writer with any body of work to
show for his effort, you will find recurrent themes.
I view the novel, a single novel as well as a writer's
entire corpus, as a musical composition in which the
characters are themes.^5
22
"Literature as Symptom," Who Owns America? A New
Declaration of Independence, ed. Herbert Agar and Allen
Tate (Boston, 1936), p. 264.
23
"Love and Separateness in Eudora Welty," Selected
Essays, p. 167.
24
"The Snopes World" (rev. of Faulkner's The Hamlet),
III (Spring 1941), 253.
25
Quoted in Writers at Work, p. 113.
One can best understand Warren's fiction by examining its
primary, underlying theme— the very plexus of his work—
best expressed in the phrase "dialectics of reality." The
conflict of Warren's characters lies in their struggle, or
failure, to harmonize or balance the dialectical elements
of self and "other," truth and illusion, then and now, good
and evil, and thus, through what Wallace Stevens called "an
education to reality," to achieve an adequate sense of
reality. Warren has recognized the applicability to his
fiction of the phrase "dialectics of reality": "The main
characters in my fiction," he has said, "are involved in
some such project.
The term dialectic is applied here not in any strict
27
Hegelian sense but is used to depict the tension or oppo
sition between two interacting forces or elements. The
resolution of these antinomies or polarities, discrete and
yet often complementary, lies not so much in synthesis as
in balance. Failure to recognize the dialectical opposition,
%
26
In a letter to me, March 23, 1965.
27
Warren has said, "On Hegel, I have no notion that
there is any direct influence on my fiction. I read some
Hegel in college and graduate school, but not since." (In
a letter to me, March 23, 1965.)
13
Warren suggests, is as egregious and as disastrous an error
as the failure to balance the elements. In this connection,
R. W. B. Lewis, speaking of the "American experience," has
said that its "form has been clearest and most rewarding
28
when it has been most dialectical." Similarly applying
the term to society, Kenneth Burke has written that "the
dialectical process absolutely must be unimpeded, if society
29
is to perfect its understanding of reality. ..." If
one merely substitutes "Everyman" for "society" in Burke's
statement, he has, in succinct form, the underlying idea of
Warren's fiction.
In its broadest sense, the dialectical tension in
Warren's fiction, as it is in the American experience, is
between the ideal and the real. British writer Marcus Cun-
liffe, referring to the American experience, has written:
As a society founded with ideal aims, it finds that the
ideal is sometimes contradicted by the reality; and that
in any case the ideal and the real must always be re
ferred to one another . . . The practical and prag
matic gainsay the utopian and transcendental.30
28 > ■
The American Adam (Chicago, 1955), p. 8.
29
The Philosophy of Literary Form (New York, 1957),
p. 328. ’
30
The Literature of the United States (Baltimore, 1961),
p. 17. Warren, in The Legacy of the Civil War, points out
14
Similarly, Peter Viereck has written of the emergent meta
phor in American culture: "the gigantic scale of reality,
31
which forever weighs dream versus matter." The scale is
upset if either element is deemed "more real." America's
danger, according to Viereck, is the overemphasis of the
"outward side: the star-matter, not the gray-matter." This
opposition between ought and is., between seem and be, forms
the very nucleus of each of Warren's novels. Warren's
characters, however, seem to err more often on the side of
dream, of ideality.
But to err on either side, Warren suggests, is to upset
the gigantic scale of reality. It is the referent of this
latter term which is difficult for both the characters and
the readers of Warren's fiction to elucidate. The diffi
culty arises largely because the term has too many refer
ents: it has one meaning in logic, where its opposite is
nominalism, another in metaphysics, where its opposite is
this same conflict between the real and the ideal in Ameri
can experience, asserting that the ideal vision became a
reality only with the Civil War.
31
"The Unadjusted Man," Saturday Review (November 1,
1958). The essay appeared in slightly different form in
Viereck's book The Unadjusted Man: A New Hero for Americans
(Boston, 1956).
15
idealism, another in criticism, where its opposite is ro
mance or fantasy, and so forth. According to Wallace
Stevens,
the poet has his own meaning for reality, and the
painter has, and the musician has; and besides what
it means to the intelligence and to the senses, it
means something to everyone, so to speak.
Stevens concludes by saying that reality is not "the exter
nal scene but the life that is lived in it. Reality is
32
things as they are." One might well ask, "Well, how are
things?" which is essentially a rephrasing of the original
question, "What is reality?"
For his own part, Warren suggests that reality is not
a word to be defined but a process to be~experienced, that
if one lacks a sense of reality he cannot understand the
definition and if one possesses a sense of reality he does
not need a definition. Warren's delightful poem "Joy" ex
presses this point:
If you've never had it, discussion is perfectly fruitless.
And if you have, you can tell nobody about it.
To explain silence, you scarcely try to shout it.
Let the flute and drum be still, the trumpet tootless.
32
The Necessary Angel: Essays on Reality and the
Imagination (New York, 1965), p. 25.
16
About the word reality in his novels, Warren has said,
I should be hard put to give a definition what was not
a relative one, for the definition must inevitably
vary— in any functional sense— from person to person
. , . I might say that the word would point to whatever
any person might think validated his own existence.33
Warren's fiction presents the struggle, or at least the
need, to "validate" or confirm one's own existence.
Reality in Warren's fiction is not simply actuality,
materiality, corporeality; nor is it simply externality.
There is a transcendent, spiritual reality which goes beyond
the mere physical? and art itself is a kind of heightened
reality. More specifically, reality implies totality, com
pleteness. Willie Stark and Adam Stanton in All the King's
Men have no valid concept of reality because they are
"incomplete with the terrible division of their age." Ac
cording to Warren, reality comes only when the dream is
submitted to the world of experience. Reality, then, as
applied to Warren's fiction, may be defined as the balance,
the counterpoise, of the dialectical elements of the "human
effort": self and "other," truth and illusion, then and
33
In a letter to me, May 25, 1966. This subject of
existence and reality will be discussed in Part I.
17
now, good and evil.^
Part I of this study examines the dialectic of self
and "other" in an attempt to show that identity, self-
reality, can be achieved only by balancing the elements of
this dialectic. The Warren character, having lost his image
of internal reality, loses also his image of external real
ity, for the image which man J l s . determines the image which
man has, and vice-versa. It is essential to treat each
novel individually in chronological order to examine, in
Part I, the intricate operation of reality and unreality in
each of the novels and to show how Warren, by a "spiral"
rather than a ’ linear” technique, and by varying degrees of
complexity and emphasis, passes over the same point but at
"different altitudes," changing the subject but not the
basic theme, altering the perspective but not the essential
view of the human "education to reality." Part II examines
other dialectics which man must confront and balance in
order to achieve a sense of reality: truth and untruth,
then and now, good and evil. Man's "redemption" lies in
this "education to reality," which will either fulfill the
34
Warren has substantially concurred with this inter
pretation: "As for your general formulation about seeking
a reality, that should cover the case. ..." (In a letter
to me, May 25, 1966).
18
end of man or precipitate the end of man. Part III attempts
to show that "artistic reality," like the reality of the
human experience, is attainable only through balancing dia
lectical elements. Warren himself, as the creator of art,
a kind of heightened reality, is most successful when he
achieves the best balance of idea and experience, the Word
and the flesh, the "li t/:le myth we make" and the "big myth
we live."
In a very real sense, this critical study itself will
succeed to the degree that it is successfully equilibristic,
for, according to Allen Tate, "criticism, like man, embraces
pure experience or exalts pure rationality at the price of
35
abdication from its dual nature." "Criticism," Warren
has said, "is a perfectly natural human activity . . . Any
kind is good that gives a deeper insight into the nature of
36
the thing ..." This study attempts to provide deeper
insights into the heightened reality of Warren's fiction;
to do less would be to fail in the purpose of criticism to
become a "reference to reality."
35
"Is Literary Criticism Possible?" ^Collected Essays.
3 6
Quoted in Writers at Work.
P A R T Is
REALITY AND THE "IMAGE OF MAN"
"For Reality's all, and to seek it, some wel
come, at whatever cost, any change."
— "Ballad of A Sweet Dream of Peace"
"And unreality grows round him like a fog
And he must strike through the fog, strike
hard to find
Contact with something real, something solid.
Something that will, perhaps, scream out its
reality
And in that scream affirm, at last, poor
Lilburn1s own."
— Brother to Dragons
19
CHAPTER I
"THE UNFOLDING DIALECTIC":
"THAT DEEPER AND DARKER DIALECTIC"
"I accept reality and dare not question it. . . .
Out of the dimness opposite equals advance. . . ."
— Walt Whitman, Song of Mv-ielf
"The real is constantly being engulfed in the
unreal . . . Men must venture at last into the
hostile world, and . . . this may be called
education to reality."
— Wallace Stevens, The Necessary Angel
20
CHAPTER I
"THE UNFOLDING DIALECTIC'S
"THAT DEEPER AND DARKER DIALECTIC"
In an essay on Hemingway in 1947, Robert Penn Warren
wrote: "What good fiction gives us is the stimulation of
a powerful image of human nature trying to fulfill it
self. . . . Weighed in the balance of his own criterion,
Warren's fiction is found not wanting, for most of the
characters in his fiction seek fulfillment in the basic
sense of the term— to convert unreality into reality. As
the author-narrator of Warren's Brother to Dragons asserts,
2
"All we ask in the end is that: / Reality."
^""Hemingway," Kenvon Review, IX (Winter 1947), 1-28.
Reprinted in Selected Essays (New York, 1958).
2
Robert Penn Warren, Brother to Dragons: A Tale in
Verse and Voices (New York, 1953), p. 113. All subsequent
references are to” this edition. Warren has acknowledged
the very close relationship between his poetry and his fic
tion: "The poems and the novels are pretty closely related,
naturally." (In a personal letter to me, May 25, 1966.)
Cf. Thoreau in Walden: "Be it life or death, we crave only
reality" (New York, 1960,p. 71).
21
22
The awareness of reality which man needs, the reality
he seeks, becomes distorted for most of Warren's characters.
It is as if their visions of the realities of self, other
selves, and the external environment are characterized by
anamorphosis. It is as if each character searches for, or
in some cases rejects, the anamorphoscope which will correct
the distortions. Theirs is an elusive and illusive per
spective, which is perhaps best typified by the character
Yasha Jones's reference to the "Mystery Spot" in Califor
nia, where
a companion, stepping into a certain location, will
suddenly seem to shrink; then shifting location, will
shoot up to unusual stature. Perspectives shift,
equilibrium is impaired, the gut runs cold.
The whole effect is somewhat like the brutal parody
of experience you find in the Fun House of a street
carnival. There you pay twenty-five cents for this
distortion of experience and of the self so that, when
you come out, you can, with a gush of gratitude, take
refuge in the old dreary categories of experience and
in the old dreary self.3
Without a clear image of self, of inner reality, suggests
Warren, one cannot have a clear image of experience, of
external reality, for it is the self, the ego, which is the
3
Robert Penn Warren, Flood: A Romance of Our Time
(New York, 1964), p. 273. All subsequent references are
to this edition.
23
executive force that finds contact with the world of real
ity. Amantha Starr, the protagonist of Band of Angels, who
attempts to make the self "come true," asks the question
applicable to all of Warren's protagonists:
Oh, are we nothing more than the events of our own
story, the beads on the string, the little nodes of
fear and hope, love and terror, lust and despair,
appetite and calculation, and the innermost sensation
of blood and dream? No, I put it badly, for by the
comparison what would the string be but the self and
that is the very thing it is so hard to know the exis
tence of. 4
As if in answer, Jack Burden, toward the end of All the
King1s Men when he is learning about the nature of reality,
says:
Reality is not a function of the event as event,
but of the relationship of that event to past, and
future, events. We seem here to have a paradox:
that the reality of an event, which is not real in
itself, arises from other events which, likewise,
in themselves are not real. But this only affirms
what we must affirm: that direction is all. And
only as we realize this do we live, for our own
identity is dependent upon this principle.5
But an earlier Jack Burden, who has not yet learned this
4
Robert Penn Warren, Band of Angels (New York, 1955),
p. 62. All subsequent references are to this edition.
5
Robert Penn Warren, All the King's Men (New York,1946),
p. 407. All subsequent references are. to this edition.
24
principle of reality, rejects his identity on the principle
that
you are not you except in relation to other people. If
there weren't any other people there wouldn't be any
you because what you do, which is what you are, only
has meaning in relation to other people, (p. 136)
According to Slim Sarrett, the poet speaking appropriately
if ironically in At Heaven's Gate, the unreal self which
seeks to find reality in other selves represents
the special disease of our time, the abstract passion
for power, a vanity springing from an awareness of the
emptiness and unreality of the self which can only
attempt to become real and human by the oppression of
people who manage to retain some shreds of reality
and humanity.
It is impossible, Warren suggests, to achieve reality
of self through external experience alone. The dialectical
9
elements of inner reality and outer reality, according to
Warren, must be balanced, since they are interdependent.
Thus Jack Burden, after learning that his boyhood girl
friend, Anne Stanton, has become the mistress'" of Willie
Stark, is not assured of the reality of the people about
him,
6
Robert Penn Warren, At Heaven1s Gate (New York, 1943),
p. 250. All subsequent references are to this edition.
25
for it takes the greatest effort to believe in their
reality and to believe in their reality you must be
lieve in your own, but to believe in your own you
must believe in theirs, but to believe in theirs you
must believe in your own— one-two, one-two, one-two,
like feet marching. (All the King's Men, p. 284)
This vicious circle typifies the plight of most of Warren's
*
characters. Accordingly, in each of the eight novels one
can trace a pattern of change, with some variation, con
sisting, first, of illusion, a false image of that which
has objective existence. Illusion leads to delusion, a
false image of that which is contrary to fact or reality,
that which is not substantiated by objective existence.
The next step is usually disillusioning awareness followed
by either destruction or growth in insight and acquisition
of an image of reality that is not distorted. This fin#l
step, a kind of "education to reality," is accompanied by
realization, in the basic sense of the term: "making real,"
"making to appear real," or "grasping reality."
The pattern of change, similar to Wallace Stevens's
7
phrase "education to reality," is evident in Warren's first
g
published novel, Night Rider, which illustrates the
7
The Necessary Angel, p. 15.
8
Warren wrote two unpublished novels in the 30's, one
depicted in the opening scene on the train, where "the gath
ering force which surged up the long aisle behind him like
a wave took him and plunged him hard against the back of
the next man" (p. 1). The elements of will and world, of
self and crowd, of identity and nonentity, providing the
novel with significant underlying antinomies, are further
suggested when Mr. Munn is forced by the Tobacco Association
to speak to the crowd, which is "drawing him as though
against his will" (p. 26) . At first Munn resents the
pressure generated by the wills of all those people
behind him, . . . that pressure that was human because
it was made by human beings, but was inhuman, too,
because you could not isolate and blame any one of
those human beings who made it; (p. 3) but during the
speech he becomes "like a somnambulist," losing the «
reality of the "bunting-like platform and his friends
beside him" (p. 27).
"An idea— that was it— an idea seized parts of their indi
vidual beings and held them together and made them coalesce”
(p. 16) . After his membership in the Association Mr. Munn
realizes, but without regret, that "more and more the Asso
ciation was claiming, not only his energies and interests,
but also that inner substance of his being which was
peculiarly himself . . (p. 33). Mr. Munn becomes in
creasingly a stranger to himself and to others? he becomes
a "hollow man"? his individuality is swallowed up in some
28
absolute. He is guilty of the besetting sin of abstraction,
a sin castigated by John Crowe Ransom in God Without Thunder
and especially in the fifth chapter of The World's Body,
both the books and their author being well known and well
admired by Warren. Warren himself alludes to the danger of
abstraction when he writes that Joseph Conrad's character
Charles Gould possesses an idealism "tainted with abstrac
tion."'*''*' Toward the end of Warren's novel Mr. Munn's lack
of personal identity is apparent: "The Association, that
was what he was now, if he was anything. He thought: if
I am anything" (p. 332) .
At the beginning Munn's only sense of reality came at
the times when he could focus on individuals in the crowd.
His activities with the Association took on a dream-like
quality. To Munn, "there was something unreal about those
meetings in the long, dingy room above the bank . . . ; the
events that took place in that room did not afford Mr. Munn
the true sense of reality" (p. 44). Similarly, Mrs.
Trevelyan, whose husband Munn defends in court and later
shoots for the good of Association, at first "had been in
'The Great Mirage': Conrad and Nostromo." Sewanee
Review, LIX (September 1951), 363-391.
29
no true sense real to him" (p. 35); and the night when Munn
is searching for evidence possesses "an inky and unreal
blackness" (p. 68).
Munn's greatest detachment from reality seems to come,
ironically, when he attempts to forge the reality of his
ideation by force. When he hears of the nightriding activ
ities in which he has participated, the events seem to him
"unreal, remote, and fantastic" (pp. 173, 176). Just before
he kills Trevelyan only his hands seem "alive and real," and
he feels cut off, by his mask, "from everything, from every
one. From all the world" (p. 199). Warren seems to be
saying that it is a short distance from error to terror,
from illusion to delusion, from vacuity to violence. Munn
tries to use force but force uses him, and finally he flees
like a beast, moving down the alley, where "nothing had
seemed quite real to him, and everything had hung suspended
in the timelessness of a dream" (p. 398).
The relationship between the protagonist and the other
figures is especially significant in a Warren novel, for
other figures either reflect or refract the protagonist.
What Warren wrote of Dreiser's An American Tragedy is
equally true in his own fiction:
In the enormous cast there are no walk-ins; each actor
30
has a role in the structure of the unfolding dialectic.
And it is the pervasive sense of this participation,
however unformulated, that gives the novel its density,
the weight of destiny. . . . Apparent digressions are
really mirrors held up to Clyde's story, in fact to
Clyde himself: in this world of mirrors complicity is
the common d o o m .
For example, the character of Munn's wife, May, seems
to remain "unformulated" but her role seems clear. Munn
attempts to gain self-reality through her after becoming a
member of the Association board: "Her words or expression,
or even her mere presence, might help explain himself to
himself," might "give him some hint whereby he could realize
and master his own nature" (p. 35). But his attempt is
futile, and even May eventually becomes unreal to her
husband:
What was she? She was a certain form, certain words
to which he was accustomed and which pretended to t.ell
him of some reality within herself. What that was,
what she truly was, he did not know (p. 160).
Munn then attempts to find reality in Lucille Christian;
these two characters become Warren's first couple to seek
reality in mere sexuality, in inane bodily grapplings, only
to learn that each has brought his emptiness to the other
12
"An American Tragedy." Yale Review, LII (October
1962), 1.
31
for fulfillment.
The presence of Miss Ianthe Sprague, Munn's distant
cousin whom he visits during his lonely school days in Phil
adelphia, at first seems a superfluous "digression" but then
she is seen to mirror the ultimate in detachment from real
ity, the extremity of "negativity and rejection" of "real
being" (p. 211) . Completely isolated, what she liked to hear
when Munn read to her was
the short flat statement that had no possible reference
to her life, advertisements of merchandise which she
could neither buy nor use, the notice of the birth of
an obscure citizen in a distant part of the city, or
of the construction of a building which she would never
enter. The novel had a direction, it described lives
that were moving toward fulfillment, it pretended
meaning. Therefore, she could not listen to it. (p. 212)
"Direction is all," Jack Burden is to learn and say in a
later novel, for only as one realizes this principle does
he live and have identity.
Miss Sprague in her death-in-life existence— or, more
accurately, her non-existence— denies fulfillment, meaning,
change, reality itself, thus reflecting Mr. Munn who, in a
pivotal scene, desires to escape from the real world into
the world of the stereopticon of his childhood:
Sometimes on Sunday afternoons, in winter, when he was
a child, he had lain on the floor with the glasses and
the stack of picture-cards, each with its duplicate
32
scene. Through the lenses, the card would show a rich,
three-dimensional world, the figures there seeming to
stand up, solid and vital in their own right, about to
move about their own mysterious businesses. It was a
little world with light falling over the objects there
and casting shadows and depths like the real world,
and recesses more secret and fascinating. Sometimes,
pressing his forehead into the wooden frame until it
ached, he had felt that if he could just break through
into that little world where everything was motionless
but seemed about to move, where everything was living,
it seemed, but at the same time frozen in its tiny per
fections, he would know unutterable bliss.^3 (p. 161)
Munn here senses the dialectic— the little world of inno
cence as opposed to the big world of intrigue. The stere
opticon world is a factitious world, simply "like the real
world." It is a world of seem (a word appearing three times
in the passage) rather than of be, a world of appearance
rather than of reality. It is a world motionless, frozen
in lifeless perfection like the world of Keats's Grecian
Urn, that "foster-child of silence and slow time." It is
a world peopled by figures possessing only the semblance of
will, motion, life, like Keats's "marble men and maidens."
Hawthorne used a similar, device not only to depict
the antinomy of real and unreal and of macrocosm and micro
cosm but also to depict the distortion of the image of real
ity. In "Ethan Brand" he has the old Jew show the young
people the tattered pictures in his diorama, which presents
the distorted hand of the Jew and the head of little Joe.
Similarly, in The House of the Seven Gables, the Italian's
figures in the organ case dance a pantomime of real life but
become petrified in a dead torpor when the music ceases.
33
Unlike Keats, however, Munn is unable to balance the dia
lectic, to reconcile the real, sad world with the ideal,
blissful one. He is unable to balance the beauty of the
stereopticon world with its truth regarding the reality of
life. To deny reality, suggests Warren, is to become a
meaningless shape, a form in a stereopticon, incapable of
human communion: Munn's "communion with [Miss Sprague] was
accordingly like the communion which a worshiper may hold
with the cold, unhuman, blank, and unbending stone of the
carved image" (p. 213).
Miss Sprague, then, is a reflection of Munn and of his
ultimate fate: she "represented something as cold and un
relenting as fate, for she and he had, in however small a
proportion, the same blood in their veins" (p. 213). But
she is also a refraction of Munn, for whereas she deliber
ately isolates herself from the community of mankind, Munn,
ironically, is forced to do so when blamed for a murder he
has not committed. His private existence has deteriorated
concomitantly with his public existence, and he has been
unable to find a modus vivendi in the dialectic of isolation
and communion. He has sought human communion; for example,
in the lonely hotel room, feeling separate from other per
sons, "locked within himself," he "felt the impulse to dress
34
and hurry after that unknown person and walk beside him to
his destination. For that person would have a destination"
(p. 327). His sense of human solidarity in the "Brother
hood" has only been part of his illusion. The "relation of
man to the human community" is a characteristic theme for
Warren as it was for Conrad. Warren, for example, wrote in
his essay on Conrad, "It is through the realization of this
communion that man cures himself of that 'feeling of life-
...14
emptiness.'"
It is, in part, this realization of human communion,
achieved too late, that prompts Munn at the end of the novel
to spare Tolliver, whose betrayal of the Association and of
Munn's identification with him, had disillusioned Munn.
Instead of finding identity and reality in this identifi
cation, Munn finds only the reality of hatred—
something he could depend on and cling to, something
real, the same thing which he had held in his mind,
cherishingly, on waking at night, as one fingers a
token or a keepsake, which is nothing in itself, but
which means the reality of one's past, the truth of
one's feelings, the fact of one's identity. (pp. 301,
302)
In choosing to identify with Tolliver, the opportunist, Munn
has rejected Captain Todd, the "onl} man who had seemed
14
"'The Great Mirage': Conrad and Nostromo." p. 40.
35
fully himself" (p. 18), the only man who possessed a "deep,
inner certainty of self," as well as a "caution and detach
ment and tolerance in regard to the world outside himself"
(p. 43). Todd, the diametric opposite of Tolliver, possess
es a valid image of internal and external reality.
The only other major figure who possesses such an image
of reality is Willie Proudfit, the first in Warren's series
of rustic religionists, whose story is the first of the
tales-within-a-novel, which appear in most of Warren's other
novels. Willie— also the first in a series of figures to
make the symbolic flight to the West and subsequent return,
like the Prodigal Son, to his agrarian past— has "purged the
self and entered the human community" again (in the words
of Warren's description of Conrad's Emilia Gould).^ Another
of Warren's religionists, the Scholarly Attorney in All the
King's Men, says that "Separateness is identity" (p. 462).
Only by separation can one achieve identity, which in its
basic sense means "oneness," that quality which gives the
self a real and individual existence apart from other selvea
The narrator of Brother to Dragons says:
15 ’
Warren, "'The Great Mirage': Conrad and Nostromo,"
1?. 49.
36
Isolation is the common lot,
And paradoxically, it is only by
That isolation that we know how to name
The human bond and thus define the self.
(p. 206)
But once the self is "defined" one must return to the com
munity of mankind and its responsibility or become a "sinner
against human solidarity," an absolutist. Thus if Miss
Sprague's story mirrors the vacuity of unreality, Willie's
story mirrors the fulfillment of reality, or identity.
Mr. Munn, however, discovers too late the "unifying
fulfillment" (p. 208) which he has sought. It seems un
likely that he literally commits suicide as one critic
16
asserts, but in another sense he, like Conrad's Nostromo
committed suicide much earlier, for he "destroyed the self
17
by which he had lived." But if Munn does not achieve
fulfillment, he seems at least to show a movement toward
fulfillment, as suggested by the act of sparing Tolliver
and by symbolically giving him a glass of water. In this
connection, Irene Hendry misreads the novel when she states
that Munn "fails in his attempt to kill Tolliver because
16
Mina Curtiss, "Tragedy of a Liberal," Nation. CXLVIII
(April 29, 1939), 507.
17
Warren, "'The Great Mirage': Conrad and Nostromo."
p. 37.
37
what is required is the act of self-knowledge, the 'moral
18
certainty of self. . . True, Munn has shown a lack
of both self-knowledge and of certainty of self; but in not
killing Tolliver, Mr. Munn, like Jack Burden, who spares
Tiny Duffy in All the King's Men because of the recognition
of complicity, at that moment recognizes not only what
Tolliver really is but also what he himself really is.
Tolliver is devoid of a sense of reality; he is "nothing,"
as Lucille Christian had said earlier and as Munn tells
him; "You were always nothing. Nothing. Nothing" (p.456).
But Munn also admits, "I'm nothing." He came to kill Tolli
ver in order to become "something"— "It came to me, Do it,
do it, and you'll not be nothing" (p. 457)— but Munn's
final realization is that this last attempt to achieve
reality is as futile as all of the others, that nothing
cannot become something by destroying nothing. Munn recog
nizes what Adam Stanton, who kills Willie Stark in All the
King's Men, fails to recognize; he recognizes what Irene
Hendry— who criticizes Munn for his lack of "self-knowl
edge" and then, by logical extension, seems to praise Adam
for his self-knowledge which enables him to kill Stark—
18
"The Regional Novel; The Example of Robert Penn
Warren," Sewanee Review, LIII (January 1945), 84.
38
fails to recognize. Rather than not being able to kill
Tolliver because of his (Munn's) lack of self-certainty,
Munn is instead able not to kill Tolliver because of his
(Munn's) movement toward fulfillment. "Fulfillment," Warren
writes elsewhere,
is only in the degree of recognition
Of the common lot of our kind. And that is the death
of vanity.
And that is the beginning of virtue.
The recognition of complicity is the beginning of inno
cence.
The recognition of necessity is the beginning of free
dom.
The recognition of the direction of fulfillment is the
death of the self,
And the death of the self is the beginning of selfhood.
All else is surrogate of hope and destitution of spirit.
(Brother to Dragons, p. 214)
The "destitution of spirit," which is the result of
unfulfillment, is experienced by most of the people in
Warren’s second novel, At Heaven1s Gate (1943), for Warren
has said that "all of the main characters are violators of
19
nature" — "nature" apparently in the general sense of the
essence or basic constitution of things, the internal and
external world in its entirety, that is, the reality of
19
Robert Penn Warren, "Introduction," All the Kino's
Men (New York, 1953), p. iii.
39
things. If Night Rider presents the "unfolding dialectic,"
At Heaven1s Gate presents the "enfolding dialectic." The
second novel is a much more complex extension of the theme
of man's faulty image of reality: the first depicts the
tragedy of lost personal identity or reality; the second
depicts the tragic influence of the elaborate, unreal
"world" of a figure who is himself unreal, who is intended
to embody
the desiccating abstractness of power, to be a violator
of nature, a usurer of Dante's Seventh Circle, and to
try to fulfill vicariously his natural emptiness by
exercising power over those around him. . . ."20
Bogan Murdock is, in many ways, a more advanced, a more
monstrous Tolliver, and, in his attempt to achieve personal
reality by his power over others, he anticipates Willie
Stark.
Murdock, like most of the novel's figures, is a delu-
sionist: possessing no clear image of reality, he has
constructed an image of self and of his own "world." Slim
Sarrett's ironical comment made to Sue Murdock applies
equally to all the main characters, including Sarrett him
self— all violators of their own nature and the nature of
20
Warren, "Introduction," p. iii.
40
things:
You were making yourself up for yourself . . . It is
a very complicated picture. You don't understand
yourself, and therefore you have to make up a version
with a little best-seller plot and a happy ending. It
is a common situation. (At Heaven's Gate, p. 152)
The situation is indeed common, for in varying degrees the
main characters, to compensate for faulty concepts of real
ity, make up their own versions. The characters in the
novel may, in fact, be viewed and analyzed in terms of a
series of concentric circles, ranging from Murdock in the
center of his unreal world, out to those such as Ashby
Wyndham and Mr. Calhoun, who have managed to attain or re
tain some valid image of reality.
Murdock, a delusionist, is himself a delusion, for as
one character puts it at the end of the novel,
. . . Bogan Murdock ain't real. Bogan is a solar
myth, he is a pixy, he is a poltergeist. . . . You
can't put ectoplasm in jail. But Bogan ain't even
ectoplasm. He is just something you and I thought
up one night. When Bogan Murdock looks in the mirror,
he don't see a thing . . . Bogan Murdock is just a
dream Bogan Murdock had, a great big wonderful dream.
And you can't put a dream in jail, son. Bogan Murdock
is just a wonderful idea Bogan Murdock had. (p. 3-73)
Murdock is the most egregious of Warren's monsters, for not
only does he not know that he and his "world" are unreal
but he does not seem to know that he does not know. He is
41
an egoist, a solipsist who, ironically and paradoxically,
has no real self and attempts to achieve reality of self
through his power over others. He attempts to make others
in his own image, as the god of his world of finance capi
talism— an unnatural, anti-agrarian domain, a world typified
by the "unreal haze of cigar smoke" (p. 129) which envelops
him. To support his empire, Murdock unscrupulously violates
the nature, the reality, of others, sacrificing even his
own father, wife, son, and daughter, as shown so graphically
at the end when he uses the death of Sue as a publicity
device.'
Murdock's father is out of touch with reality, and as
for Murdock's wife, Dorothy, the only "immediate reality
for her was her body, with its tensions and blind compul
sions and aimless appetites," but, in another sense, even
these were not real, for "she felt herself to be apart from
it and from them" (p. 186). The descendant of a Revolu
tionary general, she is akin to Faulkner's decadent Mrs.
Compson, drowning even the last vestige of reality in alco
holism and self-pity. Demoralized by her husband, she had
discovered before she was forty that
her husband was strange to her and self-sufficient, and
that she was in the powerful grip of secret, insidious,
42
and suicidal vices, Which drained her life of all mean
ing and the world around her of all reality. (p. 187)
At one point she desires to escape from reality into an im
mutable little world, much like Munn's childhood stere
opticon world. She wishes to become nothing by closing
her eyes, anticipating similarly naive attempts by Jack
Burden and numerous others of Warren's later characters.
She thinks,
When I shut my eyes I am nothing but that burning where
the whiskey is in me and the rest of„me just flowing
away, and that is all there is, and if I don't think of
anything I am not anything and nobody else is anything
either and the feeling in me is all there is . . .
(p. 185)
But her attempt to become nothing is as futile as that of
I sham in Brother to Dragons:
"I'm nothing, [he says] and nothing ever happened."
I said: "I'll ride, and never have no name."
And rode.
And rode, but knew the one durn thing
A man can't do is throw himself away.
He can't just squeeze it up inside his hand
And throw away his name and days and time
And all the things inside his head, and go.
So everything was there. (p. 198)
If Dorothy Murdock recalls the effete Mrs. Compson,
Sue Murdock is similarly akin to Hemingway's Brett Ashley;
Sue echoes Lady Brett's final words, when she says, after
her breakup with Jerry Calhoun: "We could have been so
happy . . . If things had been different— " (p. 153). But
"things" were not different, and Sue, like Brett, moves from
t
one sexual affair to another in search of meaning. What
Warren has written concerning the Hemingway hero applies
here to his own character: "If there is at center only
nada, then the only sure compensation in life, the only
reality, is gratification of appetite, the relish of sensa-
21
tion." Accordingly, Sue seduces Jerry in her father's
library while her father walks about above them, much as
Lucille Christian had carried on her clandestine affair
with Percy Munn almost under the eyes of her father— the
difference, of course, being the fact that Lucille loves her
father whereas Sue hates hers and defies him. Jerry felt
at first that the "instant of contact" had "defined for him,
violently, her basic reality" (p. 16), but his illusion is
shattered later when, after Sue has broken their engagement
because Jerry seemed to reflect the emptiness of her father,
Jerry felt: "As you watch her, the whole thing doesn't
seem real to you, for you seem to be drawing farther and
21
Warren, "Hemingway," p. 28.
44
farther away so that her voice scarcely comes to you" (p.
231) .
Sue senses the same unreal detachment when she at
tempts to recount her experience to Slim after walking out
on Jerry:
The words would make it real. It wasn't real now.
It hadn't been real when she stood there in the dark
with her face pressed against the stone, empty and
happy. But the words would make it real, and you
could never tell how it would be, you never could
know-beforehand, you never knew how you would be.
(p. 151)
Mere words, however do not make reality, as Slim's own case
so ironically illustrates. While speaking to Slim, Sue
for example, "had the feeling that she wasn't talking to
anybody, that he wasn't there, that the other scene which
she reached back in her mind to grasp was more real than
this one" (p. 151). She is to realize only later that
"nothing was real by itself? things were real because they
were together" (p. 208), anticipating Jack Burden's com
ment that "reality is not a function of the event as event"
(All the King's Men, p. 407) but of the relationship of
events. One must not, then, be an abstractionist, "ab
stracting some arbitrary essence from the whole," as John
45
22
Crowe Ransom has expressed it, or an absolutist; for ac
cording to Ransom, the only absolute is the concrete object,
(p. 285).
Slim's comments made to Sue seem valid when he tells
her concerning Jerry: "You had made him up . . . He was
just a fantasy of yours. To fit your own special needs
. . . You were making yourself up, too ..." (p. 152).
Thus Sue, rebelling against her parents because of their
vacuity (she accuses her father of not liking her friends
because they were real, p. 248), reflects the very same
emptiness and delusion. Slim gives her good advice regard
ing the unreality of self, advice which he himself needs to
follow:
He told her that she had to learn never to make up a
picture of herself, never, never, to do that, but to
be what she was, that it was hard to do but she had
to do it. . . .It was much easier to make up a pic
ture to suit other people, but that was not to be
alive. It was hard to be alive, he said, and hard
to be alone as you must be to be alive. (p. 155)
Both Sue and Slim have reversed the imperative of reality
which is, in the words of Wallace Stevens, "let be be
22
God Without Thunder: An Unorthodox Defense of
Orthodoxy, (Hamden, Connecticut, 1930), p. 137.
46
finale of seem." In addition, like her father and so many
other Warren characters, she has not learned that "separ
ateness is identity," for she attempts to experience reality
vicariously.
After breaking her engagement to Jerry, Sue turns to
Slim and becomes his mistress on the night that he defies
her father. She is somewhat like the character in Mary
McCarthy's novel The Company She Keeps, of whom Warren
wrote in a review: "She expects some definition of herself
from the 'man in the Brooks Brothers shirt.' But he has
23
his own problems of definition." Indeed Slim does have
his own problems. Slim says that Murdock represents the
"special disease of our time," the attempt to find reality
of self by oppression of others who are real, but at the
outset <>f the novel he says, in conversation with Sue and
her brother about riding horses, that the "true contest
should be to set oneself against another human being, not
against a brute" (p. 4).
Slim admits, in his long fictitious autobiography, to
having cut himself "off more and more from reality" (p. 165).
23
"Button, Button" (rev. of Mary McCarthy's The Company
She Keeps). Partisan Review. IX (December 1942), 53 7-540.
47
The discourse itsel£ was completely fabricated in spite of
the fact that earlier he had told Sue that
an artist, a poet, never feels the need to "make up'r
anything. He is the only person who never experiences
that need. He finds in facts ample occupation, and he
can afford to face them. He doesn't have to "make
up" himself or his life, or "make up" a sweetheart or
wife or friends or children. He can accept people
and things without reinterpreting them to flatter his
needs. The artist is the enemy of blur. (p. 150)
What he says may be true, but it certainly does not apply
to Slim, for he is not a true artist; he violates the nature
of both the "ordinary world" and the "world of poetry," to
24
borrow two of Warren's phrases. According to Warren,
25
"poetry is a way of seeing," but Slim's image is faulty.
A poet, Warren has said, is concerned with "a sense of con
tact with reality"; a "poem is a way of knowing what kind
of person you can be, getting your reality shaped a bit
better. And it's a way of living, and not a parlor trick
26
even in its most modest reaches. ..." To Slim, who
24
"Poems by Kenneth Patchen" (rev. of The Dark Kingdom) .
The Nation, CLV (July 4, 1942), 155.
25
"Sight Unseen" (rev. of Thomas C. Chubbs' Ships and
Lovers), Poetry, XLII (August 1933), 292.
26Fuaitives' Reunion, Conversations at Vande^ji'lt, p.
142.
48
has lost all contact with reality, poetry is indeed a
"trick."
Although Slim has told Sue that he need not talk about
himself because "poetry is a much better technique for
achieving self-knowledge" (p. 27), and although he dis
courses in a seminar paper about the necessity of self-
knowledge, he has no real self and consequently no knowledge
of it. In gathering about him his little coterie, he is
much like the host in Mary McCarthy's The Company She
Keeps. Warren describes him as "a man who loves to bring
people together, who has, as it were, no self except the
27
fragments of selves he can pilfer from others." Such a
condition of unreality or nada, to borrow the Hemingway
term, can lead eventually only to destruction and/or vio
lence. Shortly after Slim's fabricated little world
collapses with the return of his homosexual friend, and
thus enlightening Sue to his true self (or non-self), Slim
moves the short distance from vacuity to violence, and
strangles Sue. The reader last sees Slim as he checks into
a New York hotel, writes another poem, and flings himself
27
Warren, "Button, Button," p. 537.
on his bed to lie there "trying to think of nothing, noth
ing, nothing at all ..." (p. 379). Although Warren has
been criticized for such violence in his fiction, one should
note that it never appears as violence for its own sake;
rather it is violence always as the aftermath of vacuity.
Warren seems to be saying that violence does not occur in
a vacuum, that it must be seen in its true perspective, that
it is the outward manifestation of inward conflict, just as
28
the violence of war manifests inner, personal conflicts
or just as racial violence manifests the failure of the
29
violent to find personal identity. "The violent man,"
in a word, "is the man taking an action appropriate to the
30
realization of the fact of nada."
After her disillusionment with Slim, Sue turns to Jason
Sweetwater, who shares with Dr. McDonald in Night Rider the
attempt to fulfill himself through devotion to an abstract
cause, in this case the labor movement. The son of a
28
Robert Penn Warren, The Legacy of the Civil War:
Meditations on the Centennial (New York, 1961), p. 84.
29
Robert Penn Warren, Segregation; the Inner Conflict
of the South (New York, 1956), p. 95.
30
Warren, "Hemingway," p. 448.
preacher, Sweetwater as a child “had sat alone in his
father's church, where he felt a "tingling, tumescent
certainty of self," for his "entering and sitting there
alone was a kind of avowal of self, a compensation for, a
repudiation of, the not-self which he was when he sat there
on Sunday ..." (p. 290). But at eighteen he became a
solipsist, believing in "nothing except himself" (p. 292),
or thought he did; for fifteen years later he realized that
his father was right, that a "man could not believe in
himself unless he believed in something else" (p. 292). In
his relationship with Sue, however, Jason shows no clear
sense of reality:
He might have been a ghost, and a damned transparent
one, for all she showed. He might just as well have
been a ghost trying to tell something to somebody
and making plenty of noise to his own ghost ears but
not a whisper to that ear less than twenty-four inches
away . . . Well, maybe the ghosts were real, and he
wasn't. Jle sure wasn't real now, he had thought,
moving beside her in the shadow of the buildings.
(p. 301)
Sweetwater, refusing to accept responsibility in marrying
Sue, whom he has impregnated, has failed to learn the les
son which Duckfoot Blake, the cynic who anticipates Jack
Burden, has learned— that "everything matters" (p. 372),
that reality consists of the interrelatedness of things.
Having gravitated toward Murdock, much as Munn gravi
tated toward Tolliver, Jerry Calhoun is caught up in
Murdock's unreal world and is almost destroyed as Munn was.
Jerry early surrenders his identity to Murdock, doing his
bidding in much the same way that Munn felt that he "had
been the Senator's dupe, his lackey-boy. He had been taken
in. When the Senator said jump, he jumped" (Night Rider,
p. 114). Both anticipate the way in which Jack Burden be
comes Willie Stark's "research man." Early in the novel
Jerry must resort to repeating his name mechanically in a
futile attempt to elicit his identity: "Jerry Calhoun, who
was Jerry Calhoun, who was Jerry— His own name echoed in
his head, over and over like a set of nonsense syllables"
(p. 34).
At the end of the novel, Jerry, like Percy Munn, moves
toward fulfillment as seen in his symbolic return to his
boyhood home and to his father, whose image for Jerry had
been one of mere fumbling, ineffectual hands. Jerry's
disillusioning knowledge of Murdock, his pseudo-father
image, leads to several realizations about reality, one
being that he had desired his own father dead, along with
his Uncle Lew and Aunt Ursala (whom "he had not been able
to fit . . . in a place in his world," for "she had never
52
again seemed real to him," p. 44). He also is able to
recognize that reality consists of unity rather than of
fragmentation and division:
Jerry Calhoun had not seen his own situation as re
lated to anything in the world except himself. His
confusion, his apathy, his grief, his bitterness, and
finally his single flash of triumph and releasing fe
rocity at the thought of Bogan Murdock— Bogan Murdock
jailed, Bogan Murdock seized and flung into a cell,
Bogan Murdock ruined— had been, simply, his own being,
almost absolute in themselves, lacking relationship
even to the events and persons of the tangible world
which had caused his own situation. . . . There had
only been the flow of feeling which was himself. But
now with his father's voice, his father was real.
(p. 380)
Lying in his old room he thus attains a valid image of his
father and of himself, for he "seemed to be sinking, not
into the old mattress, which accepted his body now as it
had years ago, but into those years themselves, into the
self he had been" (p. 386). Weary of the husks of unreal
ity, the prodigal returns. His return is like that of
Billie Potts in Warren's poem:
And the father waits for the son.
The hour is late,
The scene familiar even in shadow,
The transaction brief,
And, you, wanderer, back
After the striving and the wind’s word,
To kneel . . .
53
31
At the feet of the old man. . . .
Perhaps closest to Heaven's Gate, possessing the clear
est sense of reality, is Ashby Wyndham, the mountain evan
gelist whose "Statement" is related in the even chapters
throughout most of the novel and then combined with the
other thread of the story in Chapter XXIII. Another of
Warren's intercalated tales, the story, according to Warren,
serves a purpose in the over-all organization of the
plot. Ashby is driven out on his pilgrimage by two
forces: by the effect, even in his remote corner of
the world, of the financial speculation and corruption
in the city, and by his own repentance and vision.
When he finally reaches the city, he, in his innocence
brings down the house of cards which is Bogan Mur
dock's empire.^
Ashby, ruled by lust and greed, is at first close to Hell's
Gate, but at the time of his vision and conversion he sees
and accepts the reality of his condition: "It was lak a
man knowed how it was to be by hisself. To be by hisself
and nuthin. It was lak I was by myself in the world, and
not nobody else . . . Not nobody but me, and me nothin" (p.
214). Once again, as in the case of Ashby's counterpart
31
Robert Penn Warren, "Ballad of Billie Potts,"
Selected Poems. 1923-1943 (New York, 1944), p. 3.
32
Spearhead, New Directions Anthology (New York, 1947).
54
in Night Rider. Willie Proudfit, "the recognition of the
direction of fulfillment is the death of the self" (Brother
to Dragons, p. 214). Ashby sums it up later to his cousin,
Private Porsum, whom he influences for good:
I put out my hand and laid holt of the world one time,
but it ain't nothin. Lord put pore man in this world
and give it him and said, it is yoren, take it and
eat and know yore emptiness. I knowed it. And I
know it now. (p. 335)
Ashby, more than any character in the novel, faces reality;
his awareness of reality contrasts with the other characters'
inadequate awareness and their corresponding failure to act
responsibly. Above all, the difference lies in his accep
tance of the reality of the human condition,
For whatever hope we have is not by repudiation,
And whatever health we have is not by denial.
But in confronting the terror of our condition.
(Brother to Dragons, p. 192)
At Heaven's Gate is both a full performance in itself
and a "dress rehearsal for All the King's Men." as Robert .
Gorham Davis has called it.” *” * Warren himself, in his intro
duction to the All the King's Men, notes that it was a "con
tinuation of the experience of writing At Heaven's Gate.
^"Dr. Adam Stanton's Dilemma," New York Times Book
Review, (August 18, 1946), p. 3.
55
just as that novel had been, in a way, a continuation of
34
Proud Flesh," an earlier dramatic version of the Willie
Stark story. The writing of the former novel had, Warren
said, whetted his desire to “compose a highly documented
picture of the modern world,“ a world in which the "poli
tician rises to power because of the faculty of fulfilling
vicariously the secret needs of others, and in the process
35
. . ■ . discovers his own emptiness."
Warren has said that "stories grow out of time and
place, but they also grow, if they are any good, out of the
36
inner struggle of the writer." In regard to the ratio
between the fiction of Willie Stark and the fact of Huey
Long, Warren has said that if he had not lived in Louisiana
and if Long had not existed, the novel would never have
37
been written, but this is not to say that the novel is
a roman a clef or "a story about political morality," as
34
Warren, "Introduction," All the King's Men (New York,
1953), p. iii.
35
Warren, "Introduction," p. iii.
■^"Elizabeth Maddox Roberts: Life Is from Within,"
Saturday Review. XLVI (March 2, 1963), 20.
37
"All the King's Men: The Matrix of Experience,"
Yale Review. LIII (December 1963), 161.
some critics mistakenly insist on regarding it. Warren
has made it abundantly clear that "the book . . . was never
intended to be a book about politics. Politics merely pro
vided the framework story in which the deeper concerns,
whatever their final significance, might work themselves
39
out." These "deeper concerns," overlooked or ignored by
some critics, are related not so much to human conditions
as to the human condition. The novel depicts the precari
ousness of a false "image of men," a phrase referring both
to the image which man has and the image which man is.
Warren's remarks, in his speech at Columbia University
concerning the "absurd or dangerous image of man" are
validly applicable to the novel and to the charge that it
40
is a sentimentalizing of an unscrupulous demagogue.
Warren said,
38
See, for example, Norman Kelvin, "The Failure of
Robert Penn Warren," Charles Humboldt, "The Lost Cause of
Robert Penn Warren," Hamilton Basso, "The Huey Long Legend.
39
Warren, "Introduction," All the King's Men, p. vi.
40
Hamilton Basso ("The Huey Long Legend") states that
Warren "shows Long as a potential Lincoln who has lost his
way." Elizabeth Janeway ("Man in Conflict, Mind in Tor
ment," New York Times Book Review June 25, 1950, 1) states
that in Willie Stark fiction has been "draped about the
bones of fact."
57
such an image, horrible though it may be, could not
exist at all, or compel the imagination of millions,
if it did not spring from, and satisfy, certain human
needs, and give scope for certain human virtues. By
our own similar needs and similar virtues we are
vulnerable to the temptation of that image. . . .To
say this is not to condone a horror, but to realize
its fullness in the fact that its energies of evil
are a perversion of energies potential for good, that the
will for destruction is but the will for creation
swayed from its proper end.41
This is an appropriate description of Willie Stark— all the
men's king, who fulfills the secret needs of all the king's
men.
It would seem that Warren and Cleanth Brooks answered
the fact-fiction question when they wrote in Understanding
Fiction;
Certainly, fiction may make use of facts. Most
fiction writers get their suggestions for stories
from real life. But real life, either present
or past, never fully gives the fiction writer the
kind of facts in which he, and the reader, are most
interested. For those facts concern psychological
processes and human motives.4^
41
"Knowledge and the Image of Man," Sewanee Review,
LXIII (Spring 1955), 182-192. The escay was originally an
address given at the conference on the Unity of Knowledge
at the Biocentennial celebration at Columbia University in
1954.
42
Understanding Fiction, ed. Cleanth Brooks and R. P.
Warren (New York, 1943), p. 25.
#
58
Warren further, and more specifically, clarified the ques
tion when he wrotes
However important for my novel was the protracted
dialectic between Huey, on one side, and me on the
other, it was far less important, in the end, than
that deeper and darker dialectic for which the
images and actions of a novel are the only language.
And however important was my acquaintance with
Louisiana, that was far less important than my
acquaintance with another country: for any novel,
good or bad, must report, willy-nilly, the history,
sociology, and politics of a country even more fan
tastic than was Louisiana under the consulship of
Huey.43
That "other country" is not only the realm of fiction in
general but the human heart in particular— what Meriwether
Lewis in Brother to Dragons calls "the tracklessness of the
human heart" (p. 184). The story, what E. M. Forster called
the "low atavistic form," based on the "protracted dialec
tic," provides the framework for that "deeper and darker
*
dialectic" of the heart, for Warren has written, "It turned
out . . . that what [Jack] thought about the story was more
44
important than the story itself."
Warren wrote the novel during the time he was working
43
"All the King's Mer.: the Matrix of Experience,"
p. 161.
44
Writers at Work: Paris Interview.
on his £amous, if controversial, essay on The Rhyme of the
Ancient Mariner. The narrator. Jack Burden, a kind of
modern "mariner," feels impelled to relate his story— in
many ways an "archetypal story of Rebirth or the Night
^ 45
Journey," as Warren describes that of the Ancient Mariner.
Similarly, Warren could have been depicting Burden's exper
ience when he describes that of the protagonist in one of
Elizabeth Maddox Roberts' novels: "His 'Odyssey' is essen
tially a spiritual journey, the journey of the self toward
46
the deep awareness of identity, which means peace." The
story of Burden, who shows a line of descent from Percy
Munn through Jerry Calhoun, is intricately involved with
that of Willie Stark, who shows a line of descent from
/
Senator Tolliver through Bogan Murdock; in fact, "the story
of Willie Stark and the story of Jack Burden are, in one
sense, one story" (p. 168). This story is an intricate
dramatization of the redefinition of reality, of the re
shaping of the image that man has which, in turn, reshapes
the image that man is. In retrospect, Jack Burden expresses
45
"A Poem of Pure Imagination," Selected Essays, p.222.
46
Warren, "Elizabeth Maddox Roberts: Life is from
Within," p. 20.
60
what he thinks of the story:
This has been the story of Willie Stark, but it is my
story, too. For I have a story. It is the story of
a man who lived in the world and to him the world
looked one way for a long time and then it looked
another and very different way. The change did not
happen all at once. Many things happened, and that
man did not know when he had any responsibility for
them and when he did not(p. 461).
For most of the characters it may be said that "the
world looked one way" and then it "looked another and very
different way." Each confirms Schopenhauer's comment that
every man takes the limits of his own field of vision for
the limits of the world. The characters may be divided
roughly into those who change their image of reality; those
who begin to change, but too late; those who never change;
and those who seem to possess a valid image needing no
change. Although Willie is the motivating force in the
novel, Jack is really the unifying figure, tor only ne is
involved with, and is ultimately influenced by, the major
events and characters. He it is, after all, who attempts
to put the pieces of the puzzle together at the end to
ascertain meaning, much as Nick Carraway does in The Great
Gatsbv. Working with the faits accomplis, Jack, after Tom
Stark's accident, notes the "sense of dreamlike unreality.
It was only after the conclusion, after everything was over,
61
that the sense of reality returned, long after, in fact,
when I had been able to gather the pieces of the puzzle up
and put them together to see the pattern" (p. 407). This
"pattern," attained through the conscious ordering of real
ity, reveals, as noted earlier, that "reality is not a func
tion of event as event"; "direction is all," and personal
identity depends upon that principle. Each major event and
character contributes to Jack's changing image; as his name
suggests, he comes to assume the human burden of reality,
for
If there is glory, the burden, then, is ours.
If there is virtue, the burden, then, is ours.
(Brother to Dragons. 211)
Jack's changing picture of the world may be traced
throughout the novel as he comes, by turns, to doubt, to
attempt to deny, to manipulate, to escape from, to ration
alize, and finally to accept reality. Early in the novel,
as he rides with Willie and Sugar Boy in the big black
Cadillac to Judge Irwin's house in Burden's Landing, he
seems as dubious about his self-reality as did Jerry Cal
houn as he rode with Murdock in "that black bulk of the
automobile" (At Heaven's Gate. p. 34), for Jack reflects,
maybe you are home in bed and sound asleep and not
62
dreaming and nothing has ever happened that seems to
have happened. But, then, who the hell is this in
the back seat of the big black Cadillac that comes
ghosting through the town? Why this is Jack Burden.
Don't you remember little Jack Burden? (p. 45)
&
Like Jerry Calhoun, Jack seems to feel the necessity to re
mind himself of who he really is.
Jack, having, ironically, played a role in the trans
formation of "Cousin Willie" with his Christmas tie to the
"boss," becomes a kind of "lackey-boy," similar to Percy
Munn in his relationship to Senator Tolliver, although Jack
assures Willie, "I'm not any of your scum, and I'm still
grinning when I please" (p. 247). Unable to say why he
works for Willie, Jack is told by Stark: "You work for me
because I'm the way I am and you're the way you are. It's
an arrangement founded on the nature of things" (p. 204).
"The nature of things" is that Jack, representative of all
the king's men in his association with Willie, seeks
fulfillment of self in another, whereas Willie seeks,
through the abstraction of power, to fulfill vicariously
the needs of others but finds only his own unreal self.
Jack feels that "you are not you except in relation to
other people" (p. 136). When he visits the Mason City
courthouse to gather information for Willie, the commis-
63
sioners do not seem real to Jack:
They ain't real, I thought as I walked down the hall,
nary one. But I knew they were. You come into a
strange place, into a town like Mason City, and they
don't seem real, but you know they are . . .Oh, they
are real, all right, and it may be the reason they
don't seem real to you is that you aren't very real
yourself. (p. 62)
Nor is Jack really assured of the reality of Willie; he does
not know the "real Willie" (p. 68), any more than he knows
the "real" Jack, for as he later sees, "to believe in
another's reality you must believe in your own, but to be
lieve in your own you must believe in another's" (p. 284).
Only in retrospect, after he has gathered up the "pieces"
of Willie's story, has put them together in a "pattern,"
and has understood the reality of Willie does he achieve a
real image of self, for the two awarenesses have occurred
simultaneously.
Jack learns from Cass Mastern's story, another of
Warren's interpolated tales. Mastern also doubts the
reality of self ("I was somehow possessed by incredulity
as to my identity . . .," p. 180) and tries to find it in
his affair with the wife of his friend ("It was as though
I might know myself by knowing her," p. 184). From the
story of Cass, Jack recognizes that "it is human defect to
64
try to know oneself by the self of another" (p. 184).
Underlying Jack's doubt of the reality of self and
others was his early denial of reality. At the Stark farm,
early in the novel, he explains his "Idealism":
I heard somebody open and shut the gate to the barn
lot, but I didn't look around. If I didn't look
around it would not be true that somebody had opened
the gate with the creaky hinges, and that is a won
derful principle for a man to get hold of. I had
got hold of the principle out of a book when I was in
college, and I had hung on to it for grim death. I
owed my success in life to that principle. It had
put me where I was. What you don't know don't hurt
you, for it ain't real. They called that Idealism in
my book I had when I was in college, and after I got
hold of the principle I became an Idealist. I was a
brass-bound Idealist in those days. If you are an
Idealist it does not matter what you do or what goes
on around you because it isn't real anyway, (p. 33)
Jack's ultimate growth is from negativity, as seen by the
presence of eight negatives in this paragraph, to positiv-
ity, which opposes such a denial of reality. Jack's "won
derful principle" is proven ineffective and false by a
number of experiences. His first lesson comes from observ
ing the initial naive idealism of "cousin Willie," whose
personal motivation," Warren has said, was "in one sense,
idealistic"— Willie, who in "many ways was to serve the
cause of social betterment but who was corrupted by
65
47
power." Willie, believing he had been "called" like the
Apostle Paul, had no "realistic view" (p. 74) of the world
because he had been blinded by the divine light on the
Damascus Road. "Trying to live up to his notion of a high
destiny" (p. 76), Willie "wasn't really in touch with the
world"; even his family "weren't half-real" (p. 74) to him.
When he realizes, through Jack's instrumentality, that he
has been duped and that he has "flattered human nature"
(p. 74), he completely reverses his image of reality, ex
changing the "sugar tit" for the "meat ax." At first having
the interests of the people in mind, he becomes corrupted
by abstract power. What Warren has written of Conrad's
Nostromo is applicable:
There has been the same contamination of the vision in
the very effort to realize the vision. As Emilia
Gould reflects: "There was something inherent in the
necessities of successful action which carried with it
the moral degradation of the idea."48
But although he is corrupted by power, Willie never really
loses his idealism; his devotion to the idea of building
the "God-damnedest, biggest, chromium-platedest,
47
Warren, "Introduction," All the King's Men, p. i.
48
Warren, "'The Great Mirage': Conrad and Nostromo.1 1
p. 53.
formaldehyde-stinkingest free hospital and health center
the All-Father ever let live" (p. 148) causes him to reject
the corrupting elements represented by Gummy Larson— a
decision which precipitates the events which destroy Willie.
Jack thus learns the necessity of facing the "stark reality"
(p. 168). Likewise, in his role as Stark's "research man,"
and especially in investigating Judge Irwin, his real
father, Jack changes his premises and conclusions from "What
you don't know don't hurt you, for it ain't real" to what
might be stated as "What you do know probably will hurt you,
for it is real."
Jack's experience with the Cass Mastern episode also
serves to alter his "brass-bound Idealism" and change his
image of reality. As an Idealist he had believed that "it
does not matter what you do or what goes on around you
because it isn't real anyway" (p. 33). But from Cass's
similar experience, Jack learns that "nothing is ever lost"
(p. 194); he learns, like Duckfoot Blake in At Heaven's
Gate, that "everything matters." The world to Jack had been
simply an accumulation of items, odds and ends of things
like the broken and misused and dust-shrouded things
gathered in a garret. Or it was the flux of things be
fore his eyes (or behind his eyes) and one thing had
nothing to do, in the end, with anything else. (p. 201)
67
But he learned that "reality is not a function of event as
event" (p. 407) but a relationship of events; he learned,
like Cass, 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 glit
tering like mirrors in the sun, or like God's eye, and
the fangs dripping. (p. 200)
Jack comes to recognize that it does "matter what you do or
what goes on around you” because "what happens always hap
pens and there is the spider. ..." Similarly, what one
does not know could hurt him, for "it does not matter
whether or not you meant to brush the web of things."
What Jack-the-Idealist has failed to recognize is that
every action begets a corresponding reaction. His attempt
to deny reality is clearly an attempt to preclude responsi
bility. Through Cass Mastern's experience Jack comes to
recognize the interrelatedness of things, graphically de
picted by the web metaphor. Similarly, Percy Munn, in
Night Rider, felt that the members of the Association were
68
"webbed together" by parts of their beings, by "an idea"
(p. 16); Jeremiah Beaumont, in World Enough and Time, real
izes that he is bound to Sugg Lancaster "by a thousand filmy
strands . . . as though they were two flies caught in the
49
same web"; and Maggie Tolliver, in Flood, feels that
"everybody was caught in some sort of web" (p.~331). War
ren's other metaphor depicting the influence of an act is
suggested in the reference to "vibration rippling to the
remotest perimeter." In At Heaven1s Gate Warren twice uses
the metaphor of the ripples caused by a rock thrown into a
pool; for example, Ashby Wyndham says:
When a man ever does a sin he ain't done it secret and
him private. He has done taken his own sin on his
shoulders, but another man's sin too to bear him down.
You throw a rock in a pond and it don't make one
splash but they is ripples runs out from it.50 (p. 120)
But whether seen as a ripple in a spider web or a ripple in
a pool, the reaction is real and the "brass-bound Idealist"
49
Robert Penn Warren, World Enough and Time: A Roman
tic Novel (New York, 1950), p. 306. All subsequent refer
ences are to this edition.
50
Warren uses the metaphor m World Enough and Time
(p. 370) and again in Wilderness: A Tale of the Civil War
(New York, 1961), p. 44. All subsequent references are to
this edition. The significant intensity of the influence
exerted is further suggested by Warren's use of the metaphor
69
is seen to have feet of clay. Thus having first neglected
and rejected the Mastern story, Jack is influenced to change
his image of reality through reading it, for "what was real
was back in that bedroom on the pine table" (p. 170).
Still another influence serving to change Jack's image
was his experience with Anne Stanton, a person who, in the
mind of Jack,
had a deep inner certitude of self which comes from
being all of one piece, of not being shreds and patches
and old cogwheels held together with pieces of rusty
barbed wire and spit and bits of string, like most of
us . . . (p. 220)
Jack forms an idealistic image, an absolute image, of Anne
"with her face lying in the water, very smooth, with the
eyes closed, under the dark greenish-purple sky, with the
white gull passing over" (p. 126). His unwillingness to
shatter this image of innocence makes Jack unable to con
summate his sexual encounter with Anne; ironically, this
"nobility," along with Jack's irresponsibility, results in
Anne's not marrying him. This fact, in turn, is eventually
influential in Anne's becoming Willie's mistress, an occur-
to describe "good poems" which, he says, "drop a stone into
the pool of our being and the ripples spread."
70
rence which evokes Sadie Burke's jealousy and her subse
quent part in the events leading to Willie's assassination.
Thus the web has been brushed, just as Willie himself had
brushed the web, causing Tiny Duffy to seek vengeance, and
just as Jack had also brushed the web in his "research" of
the Judge, shattering the images which Anne and Adam had
of their father, thus causing Anne to turn to Willie and
finally causing Adam to assassinate Willie. Anne's asso
ciation with Willie shatters Jack's image of her and, with
it, his devotion to an idea, for he felt that "this was the
Anne Stanton whom Willie Stark had picked out, who had fi
nally betrayed me, or rather, had betrayed an idea of mine
which had had more importance for me than I had ever
realized" (p. 327; italics mine). When the image of Anne,
Jack's ideate, changes, Jack's Idealism is shattered, for
what is Idealism without the Idea?
Perhaps Jack's greatest lesson in the fallacy of de
votion to abstract ideation comes from Anne's brother,
Adam, who lives "out of the depth of [an] idea" (p. 250).
According to Jack, Adam is
a romantic, and he has a picture of the world in his
head, and when the world doesn't conform in any re
spect to the picture, he wants to throw the world away.
Even if that means throwing out the baby with the bath.
(p. 262)
71
Adam is the avatar of idea, and rather than submitting the
idea to the test of experience, the "dream" to the "world,"
51
as Warren expresses it in his essay on Eudora Welty, he
rejects external reality completely if it does not coincide
with his image. Further, he is
a scientist and everything is tidy for him, and one
molecule of oxygen always behaves the same way when
it gets around two molecules of hydrogen, and a
thing is always what it is, and so when Adam the ro
mantic makes a picture of the world in his head, it
is just like the picture of the world Adam the sci
entist works with. All tidy. All neat. (p. 263)
As a doctor-scientist, anticipating Cal Fiddler in Flood.
Adam reminds one of John Crowe Ransom's criticism of
science: "Science is effective and yet brutal . . .: it
aims always at abstracting some arbitrary essence from the
whole.1,52
Jack comes to see that Adam and Willie represent
opposite sides of a dialectic;
he could see that Adam Stanton, whom he came to call
the man of idea, and Willie Stark, whom he came to
call the man of fact, were doomed to destroy each
51
"Love and Separateness in Eudora Welty," Selected
Essays.
52
Ransom, God Without Thunder, p. 263.
72
other, just as each was doomed to try to use the other
and to yearn toward and try to become the other, be
cause each was incomplete with the terrible division of
the age. (p. 462)
The idealist gets no better treatment at Warren's hands
than does the realist, the pragmatist. Paradoxically, each
attracts as well as repels the other. When Adam's image of
reality is shattered, when everything is not "tidy" and
"neat," he attempts to throw out the world of external real
ity. The dialectic of world and idea are not reconciled,
so they destroy eaoft other. Ironically, as a doctor who
earlier performed a lobectomy in an attempt to correct de
lusions of reality, Adam has his own delusions which lead
to violence, confirming Warren's comment that "the will
for destruction is but the will for creation swayed from
53
its proper end," that "destruction's but creation gone
astray" (Brother to Dragons, p. 99). Adam's error is best
seen in the question of Jeremiah Beaumont, whom Adam antic
ipates: "What becomes of the idea if we place it apart
from our warm world and its invisible fluids by which we
live?" (World Enough and Time, p. 505).
53
Warren, "Knowledge and the Image of Man," p. 185.
73
Recurrently, Jack tries to manipulate reality. He
feels on one occasion that he and Anne had "made up" their
relationship, much as the figures in At Heaven's Gate con
structed images of reality to satisfy their needs. Simi
larly, he tries to distort reality, for example by producing
"an optical illusion" of his wife, Lois, as though he were
"staring at her through the wrong end of a pair of binoc
ulars" (p. 324). Also, undoubtedly, much of his attraction
to Willie was due to Willie's capacity to order reality.
Besides attempting to manipulate reality, Jack
attempts to escape reality. He has three periods which he
terms "The Great Sleep," each following a disillusioning
experience and each constituting an attempt to erect a wall
between himself and reality. The first comes when he
abandons his Ph.D. dissertation because it involves hard
lessons in reality from the Cass Mastern story, the second
when he walks out on the "juicy-machine Lois," the third
when he quits his job with the Chronicle. Jack mistakenly
feels that being alone is a "vacation from being you" (p.
137). In addition, he has the delusion that by shutting
his eyes he can escape external reality, just as Sue and
Dorothy Murdock attempt to escape reality by closing their
eyes, but each time he comes to realize that "the Rip Van
74
Winkle story was all wrong. You went to sleep for a long
time, and when you woke up nothing whatsoever had changed.
No matter how long you slept, it was the same" (p. 115).
Significantly, it is Willie's call and offer of a job which
ends one period of "The Great Sleep”; another ends when
Jack feels the "finger of Fate" upon him (p. 325). But,
ironically, it is also Willie’s shattering of his image of
Anne in taking her as his mistress that causes Jack to
make still another attempt to escape reality— what Jack
calls "drowning in West"— and to discover the "dream of the
age." Jack, one of a number of Warren characters who make
the symbolic journey westward, makes the error of limiting
reality to time and space. To him the West is
where we all plan to go some day. It is where you go
when the land gives out and the old-field pines en
croach. It is where you go when you get the letter
saying: Flee, all is discovered. It is where you go
when you look down at the blade in your hand and see
the blood on it. It is where you go when you are
told that you are a bubble on the tide of empire. It
is where you go when you hear that thar's gold in
them-thar hills. It is where you go to grow up with
the country. It is where you go to spend your old
age. Or it is just where you go.
It was just where I went. (p. 286)
The westward journey is paradoxical. In one sense, the
West represents a new frontier, the "land of opportunity."
75
Charles Lewis in Brother to Dragons, for example, came west
to seek his "reality," for, according to the narrator in
"Ballad of Billie Potts,"
There is always another country and always another place.
There is always another name and another face.
And the name and the face are you, and you
The name and the face, and the stream you gaze into
Will show the adoring face, show the lips that lift to you
As you lean with the implacable thirst of self.
As you lean to the image which is yourself,
To set the lip to lip, fix eye on bulging eye,
To drink not of the stream but of your deep identity,
But water is water and it flows,
Under the image on the water the water coils and goes
And its own beginning and its end only the water knows.
Jack recognizes this flow, this motion, when he says,
meaning is never in the event but in the motion through
event. Otherwise we could isolate an instant in the
event and say that this is the event itself. The
meaning. But we cannot do that. For it is the motion
which is important (p. 288).
The "end" for Billie Potts's flight and return is death at
the hands of his parents, whereas the end for Willie Proud-
fit is rebirth. Perhaps Percy Munn, who refused to flee
westward with Lucille Christian, realized, as did Lilburn
Lewis in Brother to Dragons, that "it's all the same./
Where'er you go/ the world all stinks the same" (p. 168).
In another sense, the little world in the West, where
Jack lies with eyes closed, contemplating his pure image
76
of Anne like a talisman, is similar to Percy Munn's stere-
opticon world with its "tiny perfections." It affords Jack
the delicious pleasure of negation, a nirvana of nullity.
Jack places reality in abeyance and indulges in a willing
suspension of belief and being. He finds, however, that he
is "still and alone in that center / Where nothing screams
nothing" (Brother to Dragons, p. 83), that "nothing would
change nothing" (Brother to Dragons, p. 93) .
In his westward flight from fact Jack discovers still
another way of dealing with reality— the "dream of our age, "
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. . . . It was bracing be
cause after the dreaming 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 could mean nothing whatsoever to Jack
Burden, who himself was simply another rather compli
cated piece of mechanism. . . . I felt I had discovered
the secret source of all strength and endurance. That
dream solves all problems. (p. 329)
Unable to escape reality, because "any place to which you
may flee will now be like the place from which you have
fled" (p. 330), Jack now attempts to rationalize reality.
to absolve himself of any responsibility, "for nothing was
your fault or anybody's fault, for things are always as
they are" (p. 330) . He explains everything in terms of the
"Great Twitch," a kind of naturalistic determinism. The
"twitch" was all; the only reality was the "twitch," repre
sented by the twitch on the hitchhiker's face, "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" (p. 333).
Jack remains secure in his absolution from responsibility
until the Judge's suicide, after which Jack "speculated
upon [his, Jack's] responsibility" (p. 374). Later, when
Willie, in his dying moments, tells Jack that "it might
have been all different" (p. 425), Jack also realizes the
reality of the human will and of the possibility of self.
Finally, he recognizes his complicity in the web of things
with Tiny Duffy, whom previously he had never thought
"real" (p. 439); like Perse Munn with Tolliver, Jack is
able to spare him. In addition, Jack's mother, who has
come to possess a new image of reality, has, in turn, given
Jack a new image of herself. As Jack says, "She gave me a
new picture of myself, and that meant, in the end, a new
picture of the world" (p. 458).
Thus, Jack Burden gets a new image, a "new sense of
the world," In a sense, he is a composite of— both influ
enced by and representative of— the other figures whose
pictures of the world also change: Anne, Sadie, Jack's
mother; of those whose pictures change, but too late:
Willie, Judge Irwin; of those whose pictures do not change:
Adam and Tiny Duffy; and of those few whose pictures, by
virtue of their contact with reality, seem to need no
change: Lucy Stark, Old Man Stark, Hugh Miller. Jack Bur
den, with a "new picture of the world," is now able to face
and accept reality, to "go into the convulsion of the
world" (p. 464). He is prepared, like the narrator of
Brother to Dragons, to "go into the world of action and
liability" (p. 215).
CHAPTER II
"THE DIALECTICAL PROCESS"
The Soul: "Seek out reality, leave things that seem."
— William Butler Yeats,
"Vacillation"
"One cannot tell how really false the real is.
One cannot tell how real the really false is."
— Howard Moss,
"Venice"
79
CHAPTER II
"THE DIALECTICAL PROCESS"
Jeremiah Beaumont, protagonist of World Enough and
Time, Warren's fourth novel— his longest and perhaps his
most complex— also attempts at one point to "go out into
the world of action" (p. 129), that "violent world outside"
(p. 218), which he had repudiated, but, unlike Jack Burden,
he is unprepared to do so until it is too late. Yet, like
Jack, he feels impelled to relate his story, in the form
of a journal, in an attempt to piece together some pattern
of meaning. As in the case of All the King's Men, politics
provides the framework for "deeper concern," for Warren
has said: "I began too to think of the political struggle
of the time as a kind of mirror I could hold up to the
personal story.The "time," part of Warren's "deeper and
darker dialectic," is the nineteenth century, the "political
^Writers at Work: Paris Review, p. 113.
80
81
struggle" is between the Old Court and the New Court in
frontier Kentucky, and the "personal story" is based on the
2
murde'r-seduction details of the Sharp-Beauchamp case.
The "protracted dialectic"— the struggle between the
New Court, which regarded the law as a flexible servant of
man's needs, and the Old Court, which regarded the law as
a set of absolute precepts— reflects that "deeper and darker
dialectic," more pronounced in this novel than in any of
the others. Warren could well have been describing this
dialectic in his essay on Conrad, in which he mentions
the necessity of living with the ever renewing dilemma
of idea as opposed to nature, morality to action,
"utopianism" to "secular logic" ...» justice to ma
terial interests. Man must make his life somehow in
the dialectical process of these terms, and in so far
as he is to achieve redemption he must do so through
an awareness of his condition that identifies him
with the general human condition, but immediately.
The victory is never won, the redemption must be con
tinually re-earned.^
Jeremiah is torn between the "secret world and the
public world" (p. 333).
2
Katherine Anne Porter, Warren has said, called to his
attention the pamphlet "The Confession of Jereboam 0. Beau
champ" while both were fellows at the Library of Congress.
According to Warren, he read the pamphlet in five minutes
but was six years making the book. (Writers at Work, p.113).
3Warren, "’The Great Miraqe': Conrad and Nostromo,"
p. 54.
82
It was a nightmare in which the two worlds, the secret
and the public, merged and overlapped and intertwined,
their happy doubleness betrayed, betraying him. When
they merged and their sharp distinction was lost, you
were lost, too. (p. 335)
In his dilemma he is Everyman, for, as Warren has written,
"Man is precariously balanced in his humanity between the
black inward abyss of himself and the black outward abyss
4
of nature. Or, as Warren described the situation in his
review of Elizabeth Maddox Roberts's The Time of Man, the
conflict lies in the "relation of the self to its setting in
5
nature, in the human community, and in time." Jeremiah's
fault is his loss of the "precarious balance" between self
and the public world, his inability to balance internal
and external reality.
The novel, then, may be viewed as the dramatization,
all in a single character, of three major false images of
reality. In retrospect, Jeremiah comes to recognize his
three errors:
He had thought that the idea in and of itself might
redeem the world, and in that thought had scorned the
world. But that thought, he tells us, had led to a
4
Warren, '"The Great Mirage': Conrad and Nostromo,"
p. 55.
5
Warren, "Elizabeth Maddox Roberts: Life is from
Within," p. 20.
83
second error, which must always follow from the first
when we find that the idea has not redeemed the world:
the world must redeem the idea. "Then in this thought,"
he writes, "man will use the means of the natural
world, and its dark ways to gain that end he names holy
by the idea, and ahl the terror of that, the terror of
that.6. . . But there is a third error, he says, that
follows from the second: to deny the idea and its
loneliness and embrace the world as all or, as he puts
it, "to seek communion only in the blank cup of nature,
and innocence there." (pp. 505, 506)
Unlike the speaker in Marvell's "To His Coy Mistress,"
Jeremiah and Rachel, ironically, have more than "world
enough"; they have world de trop. Also unlike that love
casuist, Jeremiah is unable to balance the ideal and the
real and to make the most of reality. "World" for Jeremiah
is not simple space— Marvell's "vastness of empires"— nor,
more specifically, is it the forum or marketplace, but
instead it carries a pejorative concept, an "enemy":
". . . the world was the enemy. It was the enemy of the
'idea,' and of 'any truth by which a man might live, or die,
who would not be the stalled ox, drooling at a manger'"
(p. 228). To Jeremiah, "world" represents expediency, du
plicity, opportunism, violence, a "kind of mock show" or
g
Jeremiah here echoes Conrad's Kurtz, whose "heart of
darkness" allows his "idea" to degenerate to an exploitation
of the "dark ways," thus eliciting his final words, "The
horror. The horror."
84
"play-party" (p. 218). Perhaps his attitude is best ex
pressed in the description of the "world" as the "sunlit
hurly-burly," a favorite Warren delineation (pp. 129, 218)
suggesting violent confusion and turmoil.
As in the case of most of Warren's novels, the external
world with its confusion parallels or reflects the inner or
private world. As Warren says in connection with Dreiser's
An American Tragedy, "the shadowiness of the outer world is
7
matched by the shadowiness of the inner world." Accord
ingly, the other characters in World Enough and Time serve
as foils to Jeremiah, and each can be viewed as representing
an element in the complex dialectic raging in Jeremiah's
mind. The best approach to the novel, then, would seem to
be an examination of Jeremiah's errors in attempting to
achieve, in the "dialectical process," a valid image of
reality as well as an examination of Jeremiah's relation
to the other significant figures and, concomitantly, their
relation to reality.
Jeremiah's first error is that of believing the "idea"
to be all— the error of abstraction. He sees "idea" as
apart from life rather than a part of life also involving
7
Warren, "An American Tragedy," p. 1.
85
"world." Ideation becomes idealism of the Adam Stanton
variety; idea becomes idee fixe and finally leads to mono
mania which, in turn, leads to violence.
Jeremiah's attitude toward reality manifests itself in
several forms which are yet parts of each other; at times
he regards the world as real but unacceptable, thus making
it necessary for him to repudiate the world and fabricate
his own world. In either case, the essence of the error
is in believing that the "idea" will "redeem"— "buy back"
as well as "fulfill"— the self and the world:
He had lived so long with the idea that that alone had
seemed real. The world had seemed nothing. And be
cause the world had seemed nothing, he had lived in the
way of the world, feeling safe because he held the idea
pure, complete, abstract, and self-fulfilling. He had
thought that he was redeemed by the idea, that sooner
or later the idea would redeem his world. (p. 228)
The experience of Jeremiah dramatizes what Warren and Brooks
describe as the "danger of divorcement from reality and the
attempt to live in an unreal world . . ., or in any private
Q
and abstract world of thought."
At the outset, when Jeremiah learns of the "villainy"
of Colonel Fort in victimizing Rachel Jordan, he feels, as
8
Understanding Fiction, ed. Robert Penn Warren and
Cleanth Brooks, p. 203.
86
a surrogate son of Fort, a sense of "betrayal." This dis
illusionment, similar to that experienced by Percy Munn,
Jerry Calhoun, and Jack Burden in their respective surro-
gate-son relationships, causes Jeremiah to pose a key ques
tions "Could a man not come to some moment when, all dross
and meanness of life consumed, he could live in the pure
idea? If only for a moment?" (p. 62) . Like the protag-
g
onist in Joyce's "Araby, who imagined that he bore his
"chalice safely through a throng of foes," Warren's pro
tagonist bears a "pure idea" he believes to be inviolable.
But only when he experiences his own "epiphanies," to
borrow Joyce's term, does Jeremiah come to realize that the
"idea" is neither "complete" nor "self-fulfilling," for
reality involves a dialectic. Jeremiah comes to realize
also that the "idea" is not "pure" or "abstract," for it
becomes tarnished by the "world" and hence is incapable of
"redeeming" the "world."
Yet only the "idea" is real for Jeremiah; in effect
he believes that the world will become real only when it
9
According to Brooks and Warren xn Understanding Fxc-
tion, (p. 423), "Araby" is a story which deals with a boy's
growing awareness of the "discrepancy between the real and
the ideal."
87
coincides with the "idea." Jeremiah is thus a clear example
of the Romantic individualist, for whom the world is nothing
but the externalization of the self; what the self wills
the world must become. In his journal Jeremiah writes of
the period when he waits for revenge:
I seemed to live outside of time and nothing about me
was real but the thought in me. What was real was the
moment I strove toward, which was not yet in time— when
that moment should fall into the stream of time, I
thought that again time and the world would be real to
me. But not before. (pp. 149-150)
The avatar of "pure idea" and the opponent of the
"world" is Percival Skrogg whose name— Percival— itself
suggests the search for the purely ideal and the ideal pur
ity. Skrogg, a newspaper editor and advocate of Relief,
was perfectly fearless because the world outside himself
was not real now. And that unreal world could do no
harm to his own body, which was not real, either. What
was real was an idea inside himself, and all outside
the idea which was his true self— both the wide world
and his own meager body— was nothing but chaos which
could become real only in so far as it was formed by
his idea. (p. 92)
Skrogg attempts to defend his "idea" and to realize the
"moment of pure idea," the moment when "he was most fully
himself" (p. 93), by fighting duels and killing five men
for the same reason that Adam Stanton, representing idea,
destroys Willie Stark, representing action in the world.
88
In this attempt Skrogg presages and parallels Jeremiah's
similar attempt in killing Port for an idea. Because the
world and one's own body are unreal, no harm can result,
Skrogg and Jeremiah believe at this point. But the dis
covery of a vest of chain mail beneath Skrogg's shirt, as
well as the discovery of pistols and other "precautions,"
indicates that he, like Jeremiah later, comes to realize
that "he was a part of the world, after all, and that the
pitiful body he wore was part of himself and precious. More
precious than any idea" (p. 94).
If, according to Jeremiah, the world is unreal, it is
also true that "it is what is not real that we cannot bear,
who can bear reality no matter if it wear the Gorgon face
to freeze the human heart to stone" (p. 217). In the dia
lectic, if the world does not corrupt the idea— in this
case, the resolve to kill Fort— it at least seems to "ab
sorb" it at times. Faced with a task similar to that of
Hamlet, but motivated by the ghost of his own ideation,
Jeremiah berated himself for his delay; he felt that
the world had taken the mission away. The world had
absorbed it, like a cup of fresh water spilled on the
parched ground of August. But what was the world?
It was nothing. But the very nothingness was what
absorbed and drew you in. (p. 227)
For Jeremiah, this "nothingness," the world, "had many
faces, and many smiled"(p. 227). Since the "world was the
way it was" (p. 67), Jeremiah must repudiate its many faces.
Accordingly, Jeremiah attempts to "throw out" the world,
much as Adam Stanton did, and then either "create his own
world or be the victim of a world he did not create" (p.
125). (Jeremiah here is in the position of the Romantic
hero of Blake's famous comment, "I must create a system or
be enslaved by another man's.") Again unlike the speaker
in Marvell's poem, who recognizes that "we cannot make our
sun stand still," Jeremiah, unwilling to "take the world
as others take it" (p. 86), convinces his lover that they
can and will "make what world [they] will" (p. 79). "Our
world is ruined," Jeremiah tells Rachel, "but we will make
another . . . And to make another we must throw the first
away. We must pluck it out and throw it away. We must
crush it. Destroy it" (p. 124).
Just as the world was unreal to Jeremiah because it
did not coincide with his "pure idea," so Fort did not seem
real to him because Fort did not conform to Jeremiah's
image.
Colonel Fort had ceased to exist for Jeremiah the very
night when Wilkie had identified him as the betrayer
90
of Rachel Jordan. He had become, as it were, an ab
straction, a name only, without face or hands or feet.
(p. 131)
Jeremiah, nurtured early on Benjamin Franklin's
Autobiography and its lessons on "how a man might master
and use the world," (p. 10) repudiates the first "face of
the world" that presents itself— the world of power and
wealth in the form of his grandfather's inheritance to be
achieved at the expense of Jeremiah's personal identity.
The "face" of the "heavenly" world becomes not the "image
of the young female at the stake" but, rather, that of a
"snaggle-toothed hag." Consequently, Jeremiah returns
home— "to the world as it was, with which, if he was to
live, he would have to make terms" (p. 35).
Having "repudiated this first face of the world in
turning his back on Bowling Green and its fair prospects"
(p. 126), Jeremiah is confronted with another "face of the
world" in the person of Colonel Fort, who at first appears
as master of the world but later as monster of the world,
coming to epitomize, for Jeremiah, the monstrous world
itself. If Jeremiah repudiates the world, Fort represents
that heavy, arrogant breed that would seize the world and
run it" (p. 328). At the outset, Jeremiah regarded Fort
as one of those "great men"— "great" "because they took
their world greatly" (p. 36)— but upon learning of Fort's
"betrayal" of Rachel, Jeremiah felt that he, too, had been
betrayed. Rachel, resembling Anne Stanton in her relation
to Willie Stark, had seen in Fort a certain reality she
lacked: he
offered the counterpoise of his certainty and mastery
of the world. With nothing . . . he had seized and
molded the world, while she, with everything, had let
the world slip through her fingers like water. (p. 63)
But Jeremiah's counterpart in that novel is not, at this
point, Jack Burden, who resorted to the "Great Sleep" and
"Great Twitch," but Adam Stanton, who attempted to throw
the world out and create another. Realizing that "he had
almost been snared, snared by Fort's tawdry glitter, cor
rupted by his promise of easy greatness, tempted to connive
with the world" (p. 68), of Fort, Jeremiah repudiates it
by repudiating Fort. More than repudiating it, he wants to
destroy it. "You could not strangle the whole world. But
there was Fort. There was Cassius Fort. The blood of Fort
would clear him. It would clear him before the world" (p.
180) .
In a letter to Rachel admitting his betrayal, Fort
suggests, ironically, that his sin was also an act of
<
92
abstraction: "... for those months I lived in a dream
outside the hard world and its duties. Then I came back
into the world, and hope to do my duty still ..." (p.147).
Attempting to "live outside the hard world" is precisely
the error of Jeremiah, but, unlike Jeremiah, Fort came back
into the world before too late. Thought without action in
relation to reality, Fort believes, is "disease of the will,
and no virtue" (p. 209). Apparently Fort is able to achieve
a clear image of reality by balancing world and idea.
Ironically, he is killed on the eve of announcing a com
promise between the Old and New Court— "a way to reconcile
<
all" (p. 314). Thus, Jeremiah's act of killing Fort not
only represents his repudiation of the world and his crime
of abstractionism but also symbolizes his destroying the
means of reconciling the dialectical elements of world and
idea. Thereafter his descent is swift indeed.
Rachel, in part Jeremiah's foil, and, in a sense, the
embodiment of his idealism, also had attempted to "live
outside the hard world." The death of her father
left her alone to make her world. So the world she
would make, even in her ruin, would be an image of the
world she had never had, a little world outside of
time, for its natural time was gone, a little garden,
breathless with belated roses overblown in the hot,
93
hazy sunshine, lost in the wideness of the violent,
throbbing land. . . . She considered herself out of
the world and held no thought for the world's opin
ion. (pp. 64-65)
She "put the world aside" and read philosophy "to forget
what the world is like" (p. 75).
Rachel and Jeremiah construct an ideal world, a kind
of second Eden— "a warm inner world of their own, leaving
the hard frozen crust of the world outside, the way sap hid
warm in the root of a winter tree or the furred animal
curled in its warm earth to dream away the season" (p. 201).
Their ideal, private world is similar to the stereopticon
world envisioned by Mr. Munn. The difference is the point
of views Mr. Munn looked inward and imagined such a world
but never really confused the two worlds? Jeremiah looks
outward, imagining himself in his private world. He and
Rachel, like Faulkner's Emily Grierson, become two of "those
persons for whom the distinction between reality and illu
sion has blurred out."^ Accordingly, the "violent world
outside" is an "illusion" (p. 218), seen through a glass
"as when you sit in a quiet room and look through the glass
of a window upon the activity of men beyond in the sunlight
^ Understanding Fiction, p. 410.
and know what they do and see their gestures and the move
ment of their lips, but hear no sound" (p. 218).^ For
Jeremiah, the "quiet room might be reality and the sunlit
hurly-burly outside nothing but the dream. 'For it came to
me that morning,' he writes, 'that only if you look out
upon your act as from a window does your act become real
to you and take meaning in the world'" (p. 129).
The detached circle, the private world, of Jeremiah
and Rachel is, however, not inviolable. The "faces" of the
world obtrude. From the shadowy halls of the Jordan house,
"from some region of gloom," the wrinkled face of old Mrs.
Jordan peers at the young lovers, much as the wrinkled face
of old Mrs. Fiddler peers from the shadows in Flood. In
the earlier novel, however, the face is the face of the
world. Jeremiah "relished the fact that it belonged to . .
all the twilit world stretching away forever, but not to
this room and the bright hearth." He writes in his journal
I came to wait for the eyes upon me, and their secret
peering . . . and to know that they were the eyes of
the world which would pry from the shadow upon us in
our deepest solitude and before which we must act in
our fear or pride. (p. Ill)
^In much the same way Mrs. Ramsay in Virginia Woolf's
To the Lighthouse views the activities from her window.
95
The face is similar to that of the old knitting woman with
a cat, who peers from above her glasses at Marlow in
Conrad's Heart of Darkness, suggesting Fate. Just as this
face obtrudes itself upon Marlow's memory later in the
"heart of darkness," so the face of Mrs. Jordan obtrudes
itself and fuses with the face of Mrs. Fort at Jeremiah's
trial. It was the
old face peering with envy and hate from the shadows
of the Jordan house, the gray face, sallow or gray,
floating bodiless in the shadows, the face of old
Mrs. Jordan— no, not hers— the face of the world. You
could not escape it. You saw it die, you saw it buried
under the ground, but it came again and peered at you.
(p. 356)
Similarly, the face of Marlowe, who testifies against Jere
miah at the trial, is synecdochic, for it seemed "the entire
world" (p. 372).
If Skrogg is the idealistic enemy of the world who
comes to see that he is, after all, a part of the world;
if Fort is, for Jeremiah, the master and then monstrous
personification of the world; if Rachel is the victim of the
external world and the idealistic extension of Jeremiah's
private world; if Mrs. Jordan, Mrs. Fort, and Marlowe are
the eyes of the world; then Wilkie Burron is "but the mask
of all £he world" (p. 501). Ironically, it is this "friend"
96
of Jeremiah who is his Iago. It is Wilkie who instigates
and precipitates each of the three errors of Jeremiah. He
was at first attractive to Jeremiah because "he was at home
in the world, was made for the world and the world for him.
But the world was not made for Jeremiah Beaumont, nor he
for the world" (p. 453) . Wilkie remains inscrutable to the
last, however: Jermiah does not know the "real Wilkie"
(p. 60).
It is Wilkie who tells Jeremiah of Rachel, who draws
him into the political struggle and convinces him to run
for office, and who finally, after testifying against
Jeremiah, plans the escape from jail and the sojourn in the
evil domain of La Grand' Bosse. What had appeared to be a
triangular relationship between Jeremiah, Rachel, and Fort
proved, ironically, to be a quadrangular relationship with
the added presence of the inscrutable Wilkie, who, for
Jeremiah, was
all the world, or rather, was the mask of the world,
and was, therefore, nothing. But Wilkie Barron was
something, was somewhere. His face was the mask of
the world, but he was not his face and a mask, but
was real, he was a cold, bright, terrible seed in the
dark, somewhere in the darkness behind the world, be
yond the world, and it sprouted forever and grew, and
the world was the mask of it, the world was its ter
rible leaves that grew from the stalk. (p. 502)
•97
But just as Skrogg, representing "pure idea," comes to
realize that he is a part of the world, so Wilkie, who is
all the world, comes to realize that the world is not all.
In the midst of a wealthy, prosperous, and prestigious
existence in Washington he, similar to Richard Cory, shoots
himself "tidily through the heart." His "crime" was his
attempt to "justify himself only by the world," but Jeremiah
comes to believe that far worse is the crime of attempting
to justify oneself, "not by the world, which he would deny,
but by the idea" (p. 505). Each "crime" is equally disas
trous and destructive, for each is isolating rather than
integrating. If there is no integration, no balance of
the dialectical elements, there can be only violence and
destruction. As in the case of Willie Stark and Adam
Stanton, the elements are mutually destructive, for each is
incomplete "with the terrible division of their age."
Jeremiah is much like the young girl in Eudora Welty's
"A Memory"— discussed by Warren as one "who demanded that
the world conform to her own ideas." Both Jeremiah and the
young girl recognize what Warren calls the "two poles" of
existence: "the dream and the world; the idea and nature;
innocence and experience; individuality and the anonymous,
devouring life-flux; meaning and force; love and knowledge."
98
These "contrasts," Warren notes, "provide the terms of
human effort, for the dream must be carried to, submitted
to, the world, innocence to experience, love to knowledge,
12
knowledge to force, individuality to communion." Jeremiah
says almost the same thing in describing his second errors
I had seen before, that the idea as but idea had been
a vanity, too, and a deceit I practiced, and that it
had to be redeemed by the world. But how could the
world redeem the idea but by the flesh and way of the
natural world? And the world was but the world, and
its ways crooked and dark. Then I put the last ques
tion. If the idea could not wear the dark flesh and
could not keep its foot firm in the crooked track,
what was it worth, after all? I knew that that was
the last hazard, and like the bold gamester I staked
all on a card. I would submit the idea to the way of
the world. (p. 233)
Thus, having held the misconception that "he was redeemed
by the idea, that sooner or later the idea would redeem his
world" (p. 228), Jeremiah embraces another misconception—
that "the world must redeem the idea, . . . that the idea
must now take on the flesh and fact, not to redeem, but to
be redeemed" (p. 228).
Jeremiah's error has been twofold: in believing that
"idea" is isolable and discrete from "world" he also
12
Warren, "Love and Separateness in Eudora Welty,"
p. 246.
believes that the "act" in support of "idea" is equally
isolable; and in believing that "idea" is "perfect," "pure,"
"untarnished," he believes likewise that the supporting act
is equally "perfect." "There was the perfect act, outside
the world, pure and untarnished. Outside the world, the
beginning and the end, the perfect justice self-defining
and since defining self, defining all else" (p. 181). This
significant passage may serve as a basis for a further ex
amination of Jeremiah's false images of reality.
Jeremiah, then, has attempted to live outside the
world with his "pure" idea. His error is similar to that
of Aylmer in Hawthorne's "The Birthmark," who attempts to
"draw a magic circle . . . within which no evil might in
trude." Jeremiah comes to realize, however, that man must
live in the world and its dialectic. He recalls the words
of Fort, which come to apply so ironically to Jeremiah:
"We live in the world, boy, and when the sun is down it is
a place of darkness and the foot knoweth not the way" (p.
131). Later, Old Mr. Barron, Wilkie's father, tells Jere
miah he knew that his own children "had to go forth and
lay hand on the world. For it is right" (p. 161). Wilkie
himself tells Jerry: ". . .my boy, when the first blush
100
is past, then you will find that you live in the world" (p.
168). Jeremiah comes to realize this truth and tells Rachel
"that a man [has] to play his part in the world, that they
[have] to live in the world ..." (p. 216). Still later,
when Rachel tempts him with the possibility of living "away
from everybody, from the world," Jeremiah replies, "I have
been away from the world too long" (p. 239). Correct in
this knowledge that he must be in the world, Jeremiah then
goes too far and errs by becoming "of" the world. That is,
he seeks to redeem the "pure" idea by the "crooked and dark
ways" of the world, believing that the perfection of the
idea makes the act perfect. He fails to realize what Jef
ferson expresses in Brother to Dragons: "The stench of
action is not always sweetened / By the civet of motive,
nor motive by good action" (p. 36). Nor does he share the
insight which R. P. W., the author-narrator of Brother to
Dragons, shows when he says:
. . . every act is but a door
Between two rooms, on equal hinges hung
To open either way, on either room,
And every act is Janus-faced and double,
And every act to become an act must resolve
The essential polarity of possibility.
Thus though the act is life and without action
There is no life, yet action is a constant withering
Of possibility, and hence of life.
So by the act we live, and in action die. (p. 55)
101
In Jeremiah's mind the act is not double but single, a mono
lith. He does not recognize the "essential polarity," the
dialectic. Thus, in much the same way that Mr. Munn
stooped to the "dark ways" of the world in killing Bunk
Trevelyan in defense of "idea" and in the way that Adam
Stanton commits a violent act in killing Stark to defend
his pure idea of honor, so Jeremiah, using the corrupt "way
of the natural world," kills Fort to achieve his lofty idea.
He writes in his journal: "My motive was innocent though
my guilt was in deed" (p. 327).
Further, Jeremiah fails to realize that not only is
action not single but neither is motive, for
. . . the origin of no human action,
No matter how sweet the action and dear, is ever
Pure like the flower. For if sweetness is there,
then bitterness, too,
In that hel1-broth of paradox and internecine
Complex of motive and murderous intensity
We call the soul, and from that
Anguish of complication any act,
Any act at all, the bad, the good, affords.
Or seems to afford, the dear redemption of simplicity,
The dear redemption in the mere fact of achieved
definition,
Be what that may.
(Brother to Dragons, p. 56)
In his own "hell-broth of paradox" and "anguish of compli
cation, " Jeremiah fails to find the "dear redemption." Just
as idea and motive, being impure and violable, cannot
102
"redeem" the world, so the world and its ways, being unpure
and violating, cannot redeem the idea. Like Lilburn Lewis,
who contemplates the "thrilling absoluteness of the pure
act," Jeremiah yearns "toward the peace of definition"
(Brother to Dragons, p. 57). Action of Warren’s characters,
especially violent action, is often motivated by the attempt
to achieve definition, identity, reality of self.
As a young man Jeremiah had refused to sacrifice his
identity by giving up his name in order to acquire worldly
power, his grandfather's estate. In his succeeding obses
sion with idea, however, he reduces himself to the level of
mere abstraction. He is real only so far as his ideal is
real. He believes the "perfect justice" to be "self
defining and since defining self, defining all else." Like
so many other Warren characters, he attempts to find reality
in the person of another, in this case in Rachel, who is,
in a sense, an embodiment of his idealism. He writes:
"It is the sadness of love that one who cannot find the
reality of himself cries out most for the reality of her
whom he loves ..." (p. 217). The "gratuitous act" of
taking Rachel as his wife was the "only way he knew to de
fine himself" (p. 126). He sought the "gratuitous act,"
an "act of the world" which he had repudiated, because "the
103
self is gratuitous in the end" (p. 126).
By extension, Jeremiah believes that he can achieve
reality of self by performing the "perfect act" in support
of his idea, much as Skrogg, in his acts of idealism, be
lieves that he "was himself, bigger than the whole world
that shriveled to nothing in the blaze of his Justice" (p.
89). Only the idea and the act, the means, are real to
Jeremiah. At the Jessup home, shortly before the murder,
Jeremiah
had the momentary sense that nothing about him was
real, that the people below . . . and the very houses
were not real. They were shadows and emptiness. Then
his glance fell on the saddlebags. Ah, that was real.
(p. 249)
But the violent act serves only to distort his image of
reality further, causing him to think at one point, “Myself.
oh what am I?" (p. 295).
Jeremiah, lacking a clear image of himself, lacks
identity, reality. As Warren expresses it elsewhere,
knowledge gives [man] his identity because it gives
him the image of himself. And the image of himself
necessarily has a foreground and a background, for
man is in the world not as a billiard ball placed on
a table, nor even as a ship on the ocean with loca
tion determinable by latitude and longitude. He is
rather, in the world with continual and intimate
interpenetration, an inevitable osmosis of being,
which in the end does not deny, but affirms, his
104
identity. It affirms it, for out of a progressive
understanding of this interpenetration, this texture
of relations, man creates new perspectives, discovers
new values— that is, a new self— and so identity is
continually emerging, an unfolding, and self-affirm
ing and, we hope, a self-corrective creation.13
But instead of a continually "emerging" identity, Jeremiah's
is a continually submerging one— enfolding rather than
"unfolding," self-destroying rather than "self-affirming."
The result of attempting to "use the means of the natural
world, and its dark ways, to gain that end he names holy by
the idea" is terror. Ironically, Jeremiah in the prison
cell is unable to find reality even in Rachel, who then
seemed "as though she had been another person never before
seen." Even their passionate sexual encounters, reminiscent
of those between Mr. Munn and Lucille Christian and between
Sue Murdock and her companions— vain attempts to achieve
reality— become attempts "to fan [the] appetite so that in
the end neither knew the other but only the hot blackness
of self, and then a sleep" (p. 413). Failure to achieve a
sense of reality leads finally to an attempt to escape it.
In "courting a dreamless oblivion," "a kind of sleep, a
kind of oblivion of the present world ..." (p. 415),
13
Warren, "Knowledge and the Image of Man," p. 55.
105
Jeremiah and Rachel duplicate Jack Burden's theory of the
"Great Sleep." But unlike Burden, who profits from Cass
Mastern's story (and unlike Munn, who seems to profit from
Willie Proudfit's story, and Private Porsum, who seems to
profit from Ashby Wyndham's tale), Jeremiah seems to profit
little from Munn Short's tale of his religious experience.
Like Dreiser, whom Warren discusses elsewhere, Warren finds
"an image of the responsible self" in "the image drawn from
14
religion." Failing to acquire such an image of reality,
Jeremiah turns to what_might well be called the "Greater
Sleep."
Death— destruction, rather than a "self-corrective
creation"— becomes "real to him" (p. 427). There was some
thing, "some reality behind the word" die (p. 386) ; Jere
miah repeats the word aloud, "fearfully, as though the sound
might suddenly by terrible magic define a reality" (p. 396).
He comes to believe that "only when life and death shake
hands do we know what is real, and in that acquaintance
find our being" (p. 413). Thus, unable to find reality in
the death of Fort and the world, he_ seeks it in the death
14
Warren, "An American Tragedy." p. 3.
of his and Rachel's bodies, possessors of souls long since
dead. He has failed to learn the lesson of the life of
Dr. Burnham, his old teacher: "Nothing human was ever to
be lost, though burdened with error" (p. 243). This lesson
recalls that which Jack Burden learned from Cass Mastern:
that "nothing is ever lost." It is the lesson learned
also by the figure in "Original Sin: A Short Story":
"Oh, nothing is lost, ever lostl At last you understood."
But "the grand exit was muffed" for Jeremiah and Rachel;
illusion, distinguishing itself from reality, "knows where
reality abides: in the femur cracked and the buttocks
black and blue" (p. 442).
Wilkie Barron, by effecting Jeremiah's escape to the
decadent domain of La Grand1 Bosse, precipitates Jeremiah's
third major error which, Jeremiah says, "follows from the
second: to deny the idea and its loneliness and embrace
the world as all, . . . 'to seek communion only in the
blank cup of nature, and innocence there'" (pp. 505-506).
At first, life in the swamp is all a dream to Jeremiah, a
feeling that "nothing would ever be real again" (p. 451).
Having been unable to find fulfillment in the life of the
idea, he now seeks it in the death of the idea. He is
similar to Hazel, the wife in Eudora Welty's "A Memory,"
107
9
who, according to Warren, "had sunk herself in the devour-
15
ing life-flux, has lost her individuality there. ..."
Ironically, Jeremiah earlier had wanted to come West "where
he could be alone and be himself" (p. 295). Now he abne
gates, in the "black inwardness and womb of the quagmire"
(p. 479), what identity remains. In this timeless, amoral
world, any dialectic is effaced, for "all is the same in
that darkness" (p. 506).
Jeremiah thus errs in seeking "sameness" rather than
"separateness." He seeks the "bond of communion" (p. 486)
in the common jug and a "surer communion" (p. 491) in his
sordid sexual relations and resultant canker sore, which
only was real ("like a jewel fit for a royal diadem") be
cause it proclaimed him "one of them." He seeks their
being rather than his owns "If I could be one with them I
should reach the end of a journey and nothing more would
matter" (p. 486). But as Warren has written elsewhere,
Man's process of self-definition means that he dis
tinguishes himself from the world and from other men.
He disintegrates his primal instinctive sense of
unity, he discovers separateness. . . . In the pain
of isolation he may achieve the courage and clarity
15
Warren, "Love and Separateness in Eudora Welty,"
p. 164.
108
of mind to envisage the tragic paths of life, and
once he realizes that the tragic experience is uni
versal and a corollary of man's place in nature, he
may return to a communion with man and nature.1
Unlike Munn Short, who, along with Fort, is perhaps the
only character in the novel to achieve such an image of
reality, Jeremiah seeks communion without first experienc
ing a "growth of moral awareness." His communion thus be
comes contamination. His return to nature must, instead,
involve
the discovery of love, and law. But love through sep
arateness, and law through rebellion. . . . His unity
with nature will not now be that of a drop of water
in the ocean? it is rather the unity of the lover with
the beloved, a unity presupposing separateness. His
unity with mankind will not be the unity of a member
of the tribal horde with that pullulating mass; his
unity will be that of a member of sweet society.
Jeremiah must learn that reality lies not in identification
(with Fort, Wilkie, Skrogg, Rachel, or the reprobates in the
swampland) but in identity.
Since his "idea" is dead, so for all practical pur
poses is Rachel, the embodiment of his "idea," dead for
Jeremiah, who writes: "I looked at her and would ask
16
Warren, "Knowledge and the Image of Man," p. 55.
17
Warren, "Knowledge and the Image of Man," p. 55.
109
myself, who is this, and how did I come here? For it seemed
that I did not know her, and even the name" (p. 483). Ra
chel, having been deceived by both world and idea and having
lived up to her name in her role as a victimized "ewe," now
lives up to it further in her lament for a child. Con
versely, Jeremiah does not live up to his name, "exalted of
God," but as "Jacob" he does, for he is both deceived and
18
deceiver. Rachel, in a sense the embodiment of Jeremiah's
idea, destroys herself no less than Wilkie, the "face of
the world," does. Perhaps Warren is suggesting that not
only do idea and world, if not balanced, destroy each other,
as in the case of Adam Stanton and Willie Stark, but they
also, if allowed to reach their extremity, destroy them
selves .
"Was all for naught?" Jeremiah writes in his journal?
and the question ends the novel. Jeremiah is killed in an
attempt to return from the degraded swampland in order to
seek expiation. Perhaps he has experienced a "movement
18
Early in the novel Warren alludes directly to the
Biblical story of Jacob, having Jeremiah reflect: "The fact
that her name was Rachel seemed to confirm my fear, and I
was Jacob who would sleep with his head on the stone and
wrestle with an angel for naught" (p. 72). The novel ends
with the searching question, "Was all for naught?"
110
toward fulfillment" in this effort, as seen in his recogni
tion of his errors recorded in his journal. He acknowledges
his "crime," a crime which he considers worse than that of
Wilkie; and he "no longer seeks to justify" but only to
suffer. Further, he realizes complicity: "I will shake
the hangman's hand, and will call him my brother, at last"
(p. 506). But it is too late, and the death he had sought
earlier comes now at the hand of One-eye, who beheads him
as Julien Sorel, Stendhal's ambitious idealist, was be
headed. Perhaps all was not for naught, however, for
according to Cass Mastern and Dr. Burnham, "nothing is ever
lost." Perhaps Jeremiah best answered his own question
earlier when he echoed the dying words of Willie Stark:
"All might have been different" ( World Enough and Time, p.
483)— "different," that is, if Jeremiah had been able to
reconcile world and idea, to achieve in the "dialectical
process" a valid image of reality.
Warren suggests that human experience consists of a
"long dialectic." "Ideals grow out of the act of living,
out of the logic of life; and in a long dialictic, even as
they grow, they modify living." This passage from Who
Ill
19
Speaks for the Negro? could well serve as the epigraph
for his fifth novel, Band of Angels. Whereas World Enough
and Time ended with the searching question, "Was all for
naught?" this novel begins with an equally searching,
encompassing question, "Oh, Who am I?" It is a question
which leads to a quest— a quest by the questioner, Amantha
Starr, for identity, for reality— a quest which leads, ul
timately, to "modified living."
Band of Angels possesses the questionable distinction
of being perhaps the most criticized and least understood
of any work in the Warren canon. One reviewer called it a
"magnolia-scented potboiler of the Civil War era . . .
[with] little to offer the readers but blood, sex, sweat,
and crocodile tears." He called Manty a "girl with ants in
her semantics," who easily confuses "a lofty love for free-
20
dom . . . with freedom to love." It would seem, rather,
that the reviewer has ants in his pedantries and too easily
confuses Manty's quest for reality and the reality of her
quest. Those who shout "melodrama" the loudest would do
well to ponder the truth of Warren's statement in The Legacy
^ (New York, 1965), p. 413.
20
"Forever Manty," Time, LXVI (August 1955), 86.
%
112
of the Civil War: "History is not melodrama, even if it
usually reads like that" (p. 50) . As Amantha says at one
point in the novel, "What you are is an expression of
History" (p. 134). Perhaps Warren's purpose in the use of
seemingly melodramatic, violent materials is best under
stood in view of what he wrote concerning Faulkner's Requiem
for a Nun:
William Faulkner has often dealt with bold, shocking,
or implausible materials. His triumph has been to
make such materials acceptable by developing their
symbolic significance, striking down to some unsus
pected, mysterious level of nature, or creating by the
hypnotic power of his narrative voice the atmosphere
of his special world.
Warren has, in a similar way, developed the symbolic sig
nificance of his materials, focusing on the symbolic impli
cations of the Civil War and of race. Race, he has written,
22
"becomes a total symbolism for every kind of issue."
In refuting a critic who called the novel an "apology
for the plantation system," Warren said, "the story of Band
of Angels wasn't an apology or an attack. It was simply
21
"The Redemption of Temple Drake," New York Times
Book Review (September 30, 1951), p. 1.
22
Writers at Work; Paris Review, p. 113.
113
23
trying to say something about something." The "something"
about which Warren is "trying to say something" is expressed
more directly in The Legacy of the Civil War, a work of
nonfiction which complements and illuminates the two works
of fiction. Band of Angels and Wilderness, which have the
conflict of the Civil War as their backdrop. (In many ways
Alfred Kazin is correct in his suggestion that all of
Warren's works could be called "The Legacy of the Civil
24
War.") Warren's interest in, and use of, the Civil War
and its conflicts in his fiction is expressed in his state
ment that
in our contemplation of the Civil War we see a
dramatization of our humanity; . . . it holds in
suspension beyond all schematic readings and claims
to total interpretation, so many of the issues and
tragic ironies— somehow essential yet incommensur
able— which we yet live. (Legacy, pp. 107-108)
The Civil War, for Warren, is seemingly both synecdochic
and metonymic in its "dramatization of our humanity." It
is, in other words, the "protracted dialectic" paralleling
and reflecting the "deeper and darker" personal dialectic.
Or as Warren has expressed it,
23
Writers at Work: Paris Review, p. 113
^"A City of the Soul," p. 40.
114
all the self-divisions of conflicts within individuals
become a series of mirrors in which the plight of the
country is reflected, and the self-division of the
country a great mirror in which the individual may see
imaged his own deep conflicts, not only the conflicts
of political loyalties, but those more profoundly
personal. (Legacy. p. 84)
The self-division of the country, as both a cause and
effect of the Civil War, is thus a projection of the self
division of Amantha Starr, the mulatto protagonist of Band
of Angels. Characterizing both the external and the
internal conflict is the "long dialectic," the struggle be
tween freedom and slavery, identity and nonentity, white
and black, reality and idealism, reality and unreality. In
his work Segregation: The Inner Conflict of the South
(with emphasis properly placed upon the adjective), Warren
says, "Division between man and man is not as important in
the long run as the division within the individual man"
(p. 92). Band of Angels dramatizes well the truth of War
ren's statement that "the whole context of Southern life
made for some sort of self-division" (Legacy, p. 87) . In
her self-division, Manty resembles Adam Stanton and Willie
Stark, who were "incomplete with the terrible division of
their age."
Within Manty a civil war, a dialectical struggle, is
115
raging. It is a struggle similar to that attributed by
Warren to certain Southerners whose "many lines of fracture
. . . all amount to the same thing, a deep intellectual rub,
a moral rub, anger at the irremediable self-division, a deep
exacerbation at some failure to find identity" (Segregation,
pp. 94-95). Whites who deny the Negro identity, Warren
indicates, deny themselves identity as well. Manty, a mix
ture of both races, allows her whiteness to deny her black
ness and thus she denies herself reality of self. As Leslie
Fiedler has said, "... she must be nothing because she
25
cannot will to say, 11 am a Negro.'" But it goes much
deeper than this, for her whiteness, in denying the reality
of her blackness, also loses its own identity, according to
Warren's premise. Coupled with this inner denial, of
course, is the outer denial by the Southern whites.
Manty's problem goes much deeper than her inability,
or refusal, to admit and accept her true nature, because
this latter is only a part of her wider faulty image of
reality. Thus she joins the fictional world of Mr. Munn,
Calhoun-Murdock, Burden, and Beaumont— the common denomin
ator of which is want of reality. Paradoxically, Manty both
25
"Romance in the Operatic Manner," New Republic.
CXXXIII (September 1955), 28.
116
searches for reality and refuses to accept it. She attempts
in vain both to ignore and to repudiate the dialectics of
reality rather than to face and reconcile them. Warren
shows this symbolically early in the novel when he has
Manty, in the house of Hamish Bond, refuse a light, with a
"violent gesture of repudiation" and with the words: "For
me, it's all the same! Light or dark!" The servant— or
perhaps it is Warren himself— answers aptly, "Nothing is
always the same. There is always some difference" (p. 94).
Perhaps Manty's quest is even more intensified than
those of Munn, Calhoun, Burden, and Beaumont, for her very
divided nature is a symbol of her struggle. In her case it
would seem that an examination of her quest is best achieved
through an examination of her questions.
r*
Manty asks the questions for the same reason that she,
in retrospect, narrates the story— it is the same motive
which impels Jack Burden to try to piece together the events
of Willie Stark's story, which is also his own, and which
impels Ashby Wyndham and Jeremiah Beaumont to write their
journals. Perhaps Warren himself, similarly impelled, ex
presses this impulsion best in his discussion of the Civil
War: "We shall not be able to anatomize this portentous
richness, but we feel that we must try. We must try
117
because it is a way of understanding our own deeper
selves ..." (Legacy, p. 81). Manty shares not only this
impulsion but also this sense of inability to communicate
fully: "Can I convey this to one who has not felt it? Or
have all, in one way or another, felt it, too?" (p. 62).
Warren, of course, expects an affirmative answer. The
impulsion is indeed universal, and "we have to try to make
sense of what we have lived, or what has lived us, and there
are so many questions that cry for an answer ..." (p. 134).
The novel's underlying question crying for an answer
is an epigraph from Housman, "When shall I be dead and rid /
Of the wrong my father did?" The question formulates the
lines of Manty's struggle. But she, like Jeremiah Beau
mont, must learn that death, escape, is not an answer, not
a reconciliation. Although she wishes to be "dead and
free," a wish accompanied by "some sense of a lifting
flicker of wings, over bright water" (p. 74), no "band of
angels" comes to sweep her away from her struggle. Rather
than escaping in death as she tries to do at one point,
Manty must learn how to live in a dialectical world. She
must learn likewise that she cannot be "rid" of wrong but
that she must accept it as part of a dialectic of reality.
In a sense, however, Manty's difficulty in the novel is
118
not so much her father's wrong as it is her own wrong to
herself in refusing to accept reality.
Manty's agonizing opening question— "Oh, who am I?"—
echoes that of Jeremiah Beaumont— "Mvself. oh. what am I?"
Both questions indicate the loss of self-reality. Like
Jerry Calhoun, Manty attempts to elicit her reality by re
peating her name:
There were times when I would say to myself my own
name— my name is Amantha Starr— over and over again,
trying, somehow, to make myself come true. But then,
even the name might fade away in the air, in the
bigness of the world. The world is big, and you feel
lost in it, as though the bigness recedes forever,
in ail directions, like a desert of sand, and distance
flees glimmering from you in all directions. Or the
world is big, and the bigness grows tall and close,
like walls coming together with a great weight and
you will be crushed to nothingness. Nothingness—
there are two kinds, the kind which is being only
yourself, lonely as the distance withdraws forever,
and the kind when the walls of the world come to
gether to crush you. (p. 3)
The dialectic of self and world, so significant in the case
of Jeremiah Beaumont, is prominent here as well. Earlier,
before learning of her true nature, Manty felt a "certainty
of self" (p. 44), a "sense of . . . identity in the face of
all the insidious pulls of the world" (p. 41). But when
she learns of her Negro blood she asks, "Who had I, Amantha
Starr, been before that moment? I had been defined by the
119
world around me ..." (p. 61). She loses her sense of
identity, that sameness in all that constitutes reality.
The above images of agoraphobia and claustrophobia, suggest
ing two kinds of unreality or "nothingness," become clear
when she says later: "Now all had fled away from me, into
the deserts of distance, and I was therefore, nothing" (p.
62). Later to become Bond's mistress, hardly "coy," Manty,
like the "mistress" in Marvell's poem, sees that "Yonder
all before [her] lie / Deserts of vast eternity."
Manty, viewing her struggles in retrospect, realizes
that she had experienced reality only by proxy, only
vicariously. "For in and of myself," she says, "I had been
nothing except their continuing creation. Therefore, though
I remember much of that earlier time, my feelings, my de
sires, my own story, I do not know who I was." She then
poses two more questions which cry for answers:
Or do we ever come to know more? Oh, are we nothing
more than the events of our own story, the beads on
the string, the little nodes of fear and hope, love
and terror, lust and despair, appetite and calculation,
and the innermost sensation of blood and dream? No,
I put it badly, for by that comparison what would the
string be but that self, and that is the very thing it
is so hard to know the existence of. (p. 62)
Manty must learn the lesson of self-reality which Jack
Burden learns: that "reality is not a function of event as
120
event . . ., for only as we realize this do we live, for
26
our own identity is dependent upon this principle."
No longer defined by the world, Manty now sees herself
as "a being without being . . ., a non person, the thing
without soul . . ., suspended in that vacuum of no identity"
(p. 62). Or, as she sums it up, "I had been snatched from
t
my old world and dropped into a new one burgeoning with
confused shadow and nameless terror. I had, in a way, lost
my identity" (p. 105). It is now a "shadowy" world rather
than the "great brilliant, opening, coruscating happy con
fusion of the world" (p. 21) she had known previously. Her
former world was, in many ways, the idealistic, garden-
world of Rachel Jordan— "a little world outside of time
. . ., a little garden, breathless with belated roses over
blown in the hot, hazy sunshine, lost in the wideness of
the violent, throbbing land" (World Enough and Time, p. 64).
And like Rachel, Manty feels a sense of betrayal by her
26
All the King's Men, p. 407. Warren expresses this
same "principle" in Who Speaks for the Negro? "An event is
never single and isolated. It is not a bright unit gleaming
before the eye of God. It is a complex of various factors.
It is hard to know where accident comes in. It is hard to
know where necessity comes in" (pp. 202-203). Accident and
necessity, velleity (another of Warren's favorite terms) and
action, free will and determinism constitute the "irrevers
ible dialectic" of which Warren writes in Brother to Dragons
(p. 127).
121
father. "He might have taken her hand, like a father, and
led her down the path in the garden among roses that were
not ruinous." (World Enough and Time, p. 58).
The rosy world of illusions, however, turns into the
thorny world of delusion for Manty. The world "besmirches"
the idea. Just as Jack Burden's idealistic "image of the
little girl on the waters of the bay, all innocence and
trustfulness, under the stormy sky" and Jeremiah Beaumont's
"image of the young female at the stake" are sullied by
experience in the world, so Manty's image of herself as
"little Manty," as the "young girl clothed in white robes,
with face shining in meekness and mission" (p. 38) is
sullied. And as the "old image" passes she feels a "sneak
ing sense of loss and alienation. The future, suddenly,
seemed nothing but a vista of grayness" (p. 38). As War
ren has expressed it elsewhere, "the dream must be carried
to, submitted to, the world, innocence to experience, love
to knowledge, knowledge to fact, individuality to com-
27
mumon.
An early instance of this conflict between dream and
world, between innocence and experience, is Manty's child-
27
"Love and Separateness in Eudora Welty," p. 246.
hood experience with Shadrach, the family's retainer. En
raged at the innuendo that his play with Manty has been
other than innocent, Shadrach asks, "What she?" external
izing and ironically anticipating Manty's own subsequent
question. Left forever with the image of his face, his
ironic question, and a sense of guilt that she had spit on
the "niggerness" in him, Manty recalls how his "grimace of
mock ferocity about eating my liver-and-lights was, sudden
ly, real. What I felt, as I well remember, was a kind of
incredulity, but at the same time I knew that it was a
terrible game coming true" (p. 16). But later she has to
ask another question— "Was the scene real?" for she "now had
some experience in the insubstantiality of things" (p. 18).
Manty's "experience in the insubstantiality of things"
is duplicated later when she is taken away by Mr. Marmaduke,
the slave trader. Lacking a sense of her own reality, she
comes to doubt the reality of everything: "I looked around
at the dirty boxes and rubbish of the attic, the shadow-hung
and cobweb-hung beams, and I was sure that nothing was real"
(p. 63). The feeling is similar to that of Jack Burden when
he remarks that "to believe in their reality you must be
lieve in your own, but to believe in your own you must be
lieve in theirs ..." (All the King's Men, p. 284). Manty
123
feels the same detachment, even from her own body: "I
touched my face, I prodded my body, and I was sure that this
was not myself ..." (p. 63). She also experiences Jack
Burden's vicious circle, for "with that thought a horrible
question dawned. Was I here— oh, no, it wasn't I— " (p.
63). Loss of self-reality, of identity, causes a loss of
external reality, which, in turn, causes a further loss of
self-reality.
Still another dialectic of reality is expressed in
Manty's question, "Would I fly away, be free and fly away?
But where, oh where, would I fly?" (p. 74). Manty seems
to equate reality, identity, and freedom; she says, for ex
ample, "I felt . . . I could never be myself, be free" (p.
338). She is never quite able, though, to define what she
seeks to be free from. "Free from what," she asks, "from
what? I did not know ..." (p. 362). She feels an impul
sion much like that of Jeremiah Beaumont, and perhaps her
question could be answered in his words: "All our freedom
is in the necessity within us" (World Enough and Time, p.
81). "The recognition of necessity is the beginning of
freedom," Warren writes in Brother to Dragons (p. 214). It
is this "human necessity" which Brad Tolliver, in Flood,
feels that he must find— but only after he has heard Cal
124
Fiddler say, "When everything has finally come true [become
real, the same phrase used by Manty] maybe that's when you
can feel free" (p. 409).
In a sense, Manty seeks freedom from self or part of
herself— the black part. "I was not one of them I was no
nigger, I was I, I was Amantha" (p. 75). Certainly she
seeks more than freedom from racial bondage and from Bond,
for when Bond sets her free, she does not take advantage of
it. In another sense, she seeks to be free from the harsh
reality of the external world— ". . . free from the lonely
nothingness of being only yourself when the world flees
away, and free from the closing walls that would crush you
to nothingness" (p. 3). She wants to be free from "crude
reality" (p. 6) and to flee back to her splendid ideality.
Although she first seeks freedom from unreality, she comes
also to seek freedom from reality. Like Jack Burden, Mrs.
Murdock, and others, she feels that she can escape harsh
reality by closing her eyes: "I simply closed my eyes. If
I closed them tight, nothing would be real" (p. 85). Much
later in her experience she lies, like Jack Burden in the
midst of his "Great Sleep," "wanting to be nothing," and she
feels that she is "next to nothing, the slow unspooling of
all the images of . . . life, with no feeling, no reason"
125
(p. 310).
Thus, unable to achieve freedom either from an unre
ality she does not desire or from a reality she does not
desire or yet the freedom of an ideality she does desire,
Manty seeks freedom, identity, reality, and ideality in
others. She early asks the question, "Oh, who would save
me?" (p. 74) and much later answers it herself— "Nobody had
helped me. Nobody had set me free. Nobody can set you
free . . . But the words came: except yourself" (pp. 363-
364). But before she learns this most important lesson,
Manty exemplifies the "human defect" which Jack Burden
learned about from Cass Mastern— "to try to know oneself by
the self of another." Manty expresses the point in another
of her searching questions:
Do we give love in order to receive love . . . Or do
we give with an arrogance after all, a passion for
self-definition? Or do we simply want a hand, any
hand, a human object, to clutch in the dark on the
blanket, and fear lies behind everything? Do we want
happiness, or is it pain, pain as the index of re
ality, that we, in the chamber of the heart, want?
Oh, if I knew the answer, perhaps then I could be
free. (p. 12/ italics mine)
Manty does indulge her "passion for self-definition" in
achieving a kind of pseudo-ideality, pseudo-identity and
reality, and a pseudo-freedom in other characters. As is
126
often the case in a Warren novel, these characters exter
nalize the dialectic of the protagonist, for every person
enters the story with a role in the dialectic. Although
the other characters are most often not simply "flat"
characters, in the terminology of E. M. Forster, each seems
to lend his flatness to the roundness of the protagonist.
Manty thus combines, paradoxically, selfishness with
selflessness; she becomes increasingly careless of others
as she comes to care less for others and more for herself.
She does not find reality of self in the selves of others
because, as she comes to learn, each of them has his own
pattern of illusion> But even a pseudo-image of reality,
a simulacrum, is a possible step toward reality if it shows
what reality is not. Manty's growth toward reality is thus
one of indirection: the simulacra point to the true image
of reality.
One of the first in the sequence of simulacra is that
of Miss Idell, who, as the name suggests, is the "ideal" of
Manty during the latter's days at Oberlin. For Manty at
that time, Miss Idell is both surrogate mother and the epi
tome of all of Manty's idealism and aestheticism (a rela
tionship resembling, in some ways, that of Maggie Tolliver
and Lettice Poindexter in Flood). In her naive idealism,
Manty feels that she "might squeeze out and possess some of
the mystic virtue that infused all things honored by Miss
Idyll's contact" (p. 22). But Manty comes to realize— in
the pure sense of the word, "to make real"— the true image
of Miss Idell: one of mundane vice instead of "mystic
virtue," one of dishonor instead of honor. In her multi
role as Mrs. Muller, "Mrs. Starr," Mrs. Morton, and "Mrs.
Parton," Miss Idell possesses only a pseudo-identity. Be
sides being the avatar of Manty's idealism tainted, she
expresses Manty's self-pity in the words "Poor little Manty
(p. 290), words which Manty significantly rejects at the
end of the novel. Conversely, although no longer her
father's "Miss Sugar and Spice," Manty comes finally to
accept the truth of Miss Idell's statement that Manty's
father, also having created a simulacrum, truly loved Manty
Another of Manty's simulacra is that of Seth Parton,
epitome of her religious idealism, who promised her "the
assimilation of body and soul in the gleaming vision of
reality" (p. 27). A key word here is "assimilation," sug
gesting an attempt to reduce the dualism of the physical
and spiritual to a monism. Significant also is the phrase^
"gleaming vision of reality," an ironical double-entendre r
there can be no vision of reality, however, because there
128
is no reality in the vision. Seth, with his eyes "afire
with the compelling poetry of spirit and sanctification,"
typifies, for Manty, the early church founders, who had come
to America to establish their "ideal commonwealth" (p. 27);
with his promise of a "gleaming" vision he typifies Manty's
"coruscating" world of idealism. In a sense, he is Manty's
"gleaming vision": she "saw the high, hieratic head of
Seth Parton moving off through the snow" (p. 44). Later,
on the southbound slave ship, Manty dreams of Seth standing
high above her, promising freedom through sanctification,
shattering her manacles with his smile and causing her to
expect to "feel lifted up, . . . to see all the others
lifted up in effortless flight to whirl away" (p. 82). But
Seth is no redeemer, nor is he a leader of a "band of
angels." Like Jeremiah Beaumont's idealistic image of the
beautiful young girl at the stake, which becomes the reality
of the snaggle-toothed old hag, Manty's idealistic dream of
Seth becomes a nightmare of reality. Seth tumbles from his
"hieratic" heights. Having previously attempted to pros
elytize Manty for sanctification, he now attempts to "pros
elytize" her for his evil desires. Seth has come to
realize, and causes Manty to realize, that he is a true son
of Adam. He seems to have gone from a belief in the
129
monism of good to that of evil, for he tells Manty: "Only
in vileness may man begin to seek, and now to seek we must
confirm what vileness has been enacted in my heart" (p.
284). What both Seth and Manty must realize is that only
in the recognition of the dualism of good and evil may man
have an accurate image of reality.
Perhaps the implications of Manty's futile attempt to
find reality in others, especially in the major figures—
Seth Parton, Hamish Bond, and Tobias Sears— is best indi
cated in her question cited above: "Do we give love with
. . . a passion for self-definition? . . . Do we want hap
piness, or is it pain, pain as the index of reality that we
. . . want?" (p. 12). Manty's is indeed a "passion for
self-definition," and in her relation to Hamish Bond her
"index of reality" is truly one of pain and fear. When,
shortly after being bought by Bond and removed to his house,
Manty is frightened by Bond's dog, she asks herself, "Why
had fear been precious to me? Was it that the fear itself
defined me, and the challenge of the feared thing was my
own chance to know myself real?" (p. 124).
In Bond, Manty seeks identity, self-definition, She
sees him as "that creature who was the source of all power
and the disposer of fate," one who would "give [her] back
130
[her] identity" (p. 105) . He has no identity to give,
however, for his own is a kind of pseudo-identity. His
name is an assumed one, and he tells Manty, "Maybe I don't
even know who I am" (p. 176) . This man who has kindness
"like a disease" (p. 110) is a man who turned his back on
his parents and became a slavetrader; he who appeared to be
the "disposer of all fate" was in reality as much a victim
of fate as was Manty herself. At one point he echoes the
words of Slim Sarrett, when he tells Manty, "We're just
what we are, little Manty. That's all we are" (p. 139).
But he seems something he is not and he is not something he
seems. Like many of Warren's characters, he violates the
old adage "Esto quod esse videris" ("Be what you seem to
be"). Warren, however, would doubtless reverse the imper
ative: "Seem to be what you really are." Bond's words
later reverberate in Manty's mind when Rau-Ru, Bond's sur
rogate son, tells her, "You're just the way you are" (p.
327). But as in the case of Bond, there is a discrepancy
between appearance and reality, between "seem" and "be,"
for Rau-Ru also has a pseudo-identity, typified by his
assumed name, "Lieutenant Oliver Cromwell Jones." Gide
expressed the point well in "Autumn Leaves":
To take things as they are.
Play with the cards one has,
Requires one to be what one is.
Manty, "child of bondage" (p. 207), seeks freedom in
Bond, but, although he gives her the manumission papers, he
cannot really set her free, for he, too, is in the "bonds"
of his own past. If Seth is the true son of Adam, Hamish—
Ham, the traditional progenitor of all the African tribes—
is the true son of Noah. In another of Warren's stories
within a novel, Bond tells how he repudiated his parents—
his father for his debilitation and his mother for her de
cadence of the Mrs. Murdock-Mrs. Compson variety— and be
came a slavetrader. Like Conrad's Kurtz he went into the
heart of darkness, where "daylight never comes" and although
he lives to tell Manty the "horror of it," his soul is more
scarred than his body. Ironically, the new-born baby he
saves is Rau-Ru, who comes to hate him. Thus, Manty learns
the truth of Bond, but his truth is not enough to make her
free; she must learn and accept her own truth, for only
then will she be free.
Manty seeks reality in Bond, but he has only a kind of
pseudo-reality of his own. She comes to feel "cold and
detached from everything": "I didn't feel like myself. I
132
didn't feel like anybody" (p. 201). Bond has not been real
to Manty; he has been only a "human object to clutch," as
she clutched her doll when a child:
I had known Hamish Bond for a long time, and I guess
he had been nothing but a bulk, a voice, a protecting
warmth in the darkness, a pressure on my body. He
had not been real, just a dream I was having, a dream
I had to have and cling to. (p. 163)
He becomes the index of Manty's own unreality:
If Hamish Bond had been nothing but a dream I was
having, this was like finding out, of a sudden, that
I myself was nothing but a dream which he had been
having, and had to have for his own need. So I was
nothing, and alone in the middle of nothing. It was
the feeling of that old nightmare of mine, of being
in the middle of a desert and the horizon fleeing
away in all directions. (p. 163)
If the recurring image of agoraphobia typifies the sense of
unreality which Manty does not want, the image of claustro
phobia typifies the sense of reality she does not want.
Later, with Rau-Ru in Bond's house, she feels "as though
the walls were coming closer and closer" (p. 328). Bond,
Rau-Ru, and part of herself were "beginning to come real"
to her, and that was frightening. "Oh it's always fright
ening when somebody becomes real to you" (p. 163). It is
even more frightening, but essential, Manty must learn,
when one becomes real to oneself.
133
Unable to achieve a true sense of reality through Bond
at the same time that she is unable to preclude a reality
of truth she cannot face, Manty turns to still another
simulacrum— Tobias Sears. If Bond has "kindness as a
disease," Tobias has "nobility like a disease" (p. 225).
Manty seeks both identity and freedom in Tobias. When he
proposes marriage, at first the words seem spoken "to a
person who was not the person that I now was. But the next
instant came a sweetness, a tenderness, a yearning . . .
toward identity with that self I no longer was" (p. 232).
She feels "not now the lost, lonely child flung into the
world, dependent on his [Bond's] appetite or kindness" (p.
234)— she was at last, she thought, Amantha Starr. She
believes mistakenly that the freedom of Tobias has set her
free: "His own clarity and freedom had made me free. Free
from everything in the world, all the past, all my old
self, free to create my new self" (p. 234). But even though
Tobias seemingly possesses a clearer sense of identity and
freedom, Manty must learn still another lesson about
reality— that one cannot be free and real through the free
dom and reality of another.
Manty commits the same error with Tobias that she had
with Miss Idell, Seth, and Bond— she idealizes him. He
134
stands "forever beautiful, naked, and pure, like a white
marble statue" (p. 224), and his "beauty seemed to flow
into, and involve" Manty (p. 225). Even on their wedding
night Tobias is not really human and real to her; she goes
to bed with an abstraction, an idea, an ideal.
He had no clothes on, and he looked like a fine statue.
He looked like the statue of a Greek athlete, and
every muscle swelling strong and true in the white
marble. For he was white and slick-looking, like marble,
except for the crisp and precisely arranged black hairs
of his body. He looked like a beautiful, strong, nar
row-hipped statue walking toward me in the dusk of the
room, setting his white feet down on the red carpet,
coming toward me, smiling." (p. 237)
Manty fabricates an image of Tobias in her mind; she yearns
"toward an image," and the "brilliant whiteness, the beau
tiful whiteness, of that image" overhangs her mind "like
a bright cloud" (p. 241). With this "bright image" she
attempts to overcome "some coldness and desperation" in
herself. Like Seth, Tobias merely leans "down from his
height," inclining his "white hieratic head," that glimmers
like a statue" (p. 372). Hieratic, used to describe the
image of both Seth and Tobias, is a key term, epitomizing
Manty's whole false image of reality. Earlier in the novel,
on the slave ship, Manty notices on the bluffs above Memphis
a horseman "high above, . . . sharp and hieratic against
135
the morning sky. He was like a statue of dire and beautiful
meaning, but a meaning not fathomable. Or like a heroic
creature of air" (p. 79). Seth and Tobias, like the horse
man, are simply "creatures of air" for Manty.
When unpleasant thoughts of her past come, Manty feels
that if she fixes her "gaze firmly on the high, clear-cut,
beautiful face of Tobias" and keeps it there, "all would be
well" (p. 236), just as earlier she hoped that by closing
her eyes she could escape reality. She seems to want a
High Priest of Idealism rather than a human husband, for
she feels, as she looks at Tobias, "like offering the very
blood in [her] body" (p. 236) . She seeks an ideal image to
worship rather than a real man to live with. Rather than
submitting idea to the test of experience, she attempts to
mold experience in the shape of idea.
Like Rachel and Jeremiah Beaumont, Amantha and Tobias
attempt to make their own ideal world— their "own world of
love and loving-kindness"— in the midst of the harsh, real
world. "But the world outside, that world was coming" to
them (p. 254), was encroaching. "Oh, why did the world
intrude? But the world was there, creeping in like cold
air under a door, collecting like lint in the corner,
crowding in . . . like the camel in the tent ..." (p. 257).
While Tobias— like Mr. Munn, Jeremiah Beaumont, and others
motivated by "pure idea"— is being drawn into the vortex of
violent reality, Manty is taken by Rau-Ru into the swamp
land, reminiscent of the domain of La Grand' Bosse. There
she sees Bond commit suicide, jumping into "the apocalyptic
pain"— his "index of reality"— "into quietness" (p. 324).
Manty also desires quietness— the quietness of unreality;
when she returns to New Orleans she reflects: "I would
live in a cocoon of quietness, I would move in the sweet
ness of wanting nothing but the quietness, and nothing
would ever have happened" (p. 335) . In spite of her exper
iences she still has not learned the lessons of reality—
that she cannot isolate herself in a cocoon; that she
cannot, by willing it, undo the past; that she cannot in
life achieve a perfect quietness, for the world of reality
is a "hurly-burly."
Together in their world, Amantha and Tobias attempt to
define themselves as themselves (p. 353) . Like so many
Warren characters, they go West, seeking "the new country"
and "the new place," first to St. Louis and then to Kansas
— "failing westward," much as Jack Burden "drowns in West."
A sense of reality, however, is not to be achieved simply
by changing one1s environment or manipulating outer space
137
while "inner space" remains unchanged. Consequently, Manty
must ask herself still another question: "When is the
reality of a moment to be defined? In act or consequence?
And in what consequence?" (p. 339).
Manty sees Tobias and herself as a "charming young
couple, posed eternally . . . for a photograph" with herself
as "the photographer eternally taking the photograph," for
"the photograph is what we need to prove the reality." It
is a clear index to their sense of unreality when Warren's
characters view the image, the reflection, the shadow of
reality as more real than the reality itself. Jerry
Calhoun in At Heaven1s Gate views the face of Sue Murdock
in a photograph and feels it "real and compelling, as
though he shared the actual memory" (p. 106), whereas in
the same novel Sweetwater finds it difficult to "tell the
difference between the faces in the pictures and the faces
there across from him" (p. 308). Mr. Bingham in The Cave
visualizes his daughter, Monty, and their baby in "a pic
ture, in color, in beautiful, rich, subdued color, full-
page, in a big magazine, perhaps in a Christmas issue," and
he cannot understand why the thought of the picture of them
should be "even sweeter than the thought of them real";
"the picture, he guessed, was more outside some of the
138
28
trouble of life." But the photographs which clutter the
room of Miss Sprague in Night Rider, but which she never
looks at, are "the very symbol of her discipline" (p. 213);
that is, they represent the reality she has rejected.
Manty is unable to find reality in Tobias for the same
reason that Rachel Jordan, even if she had tried, could
have found none in Jeremiah Beaumont. Tobias is, in many
ways, an extension of Manty's own idealism. He had "fine
ideals" and practiced "fine worship of the Idea" (p. 344),
Manty says. Like Jeremiah Beaumont, Tobias believed that
Idea could and would "redeem" the world but, also like
Jeremiah, he and Manty see that "the world was besmirching
his youthful dream of the Idea that was to redeem all evil
and butchery" (p. 342). He believed that "imperfect men
must fulfill the perfection of idea . . ." (p. 238); as
Seth tells Manty, Tobias believed "that perfection, that
joy, may come easy in this life" (p. 227).
Significantly, Warren makes Tobias a follower of
Emerson. In a 1928 review Warren wrote: "After Emerson
had done his work, any tragic possibilities inherent in
28
Robert Penn Warren, The Cave. (New York, 1959), p.
397. All subsequent references are to this edition.
139
29
that [New England] culture were dissipated. According to
Warren and others, what Emerson's creed, and by extension
that of Tobias, did was to destroy the dualism, the dialec-
30
tic of good and evil, and to substitute a monism. But
Tobias becomes increasingly disillusioned as his "idea" is
besmirched by the world. He could well speak for Mr. Munn,
Jerry Calhoun, Adam Stanton, Jeremiah Beaumont, and other
characters who worship the Idea, when he says:
You try to believe in some idea . . . but . . . you feel
yourself getting lost in the confusion of things, and
then to keep from getting lost you try to do something
and then you have to explain yourself. That's what's
so awful, you feel like a Pharisee. (p. 241)
What Tobias expresses here is essentially Jeremiah Beau
mont's pattern of errors: the idea cannot "redeem" the
world and becomes besmirched and in danger of becoming lost
29
"Hawthorne, Anderson, and Frost" (rev. of Herbert
Gorman’s Nathaniel Hawthorne: Gorham Munson's Robert Frost;
N. Bryllion Fagin's The Phenomenon of Sherwood Anderson),
New Republic. LIV (May 16, 1928), 399. Cf. Warren's recent
poem "Homage to Emerson, or Night Flight to New York," Se
lected Poems: New and Old. 1923-1966 (New York, 1966).
Cf. also Allen Tate's comment (Collected Essays) that "Emer
son discredited more than any other man the puritan drama of
the soul" and Randall Stewart's comment (American Literature
and Christian Doctrine [Baton Rouge, 1958]) that Emerson
proclaimed the millenium of pure abstraction."
30
The dialectic of good and evil will be discussed in
Chapter VII.
140
in the world of "Thingism" so the idealist tries to "do
something"— he attempts to "use the means of the natural
world" to "gain that end he names holy by the idea." Thus,
Tobias comes to reject the Emersonian creed. Just before
he rides off to take action he tells Manty that "Emerson
had things reversed"; that "spirit above our heads" is the
"spirit of darkness": "We went out to do fine things but
there was that spirit of darkness above us" (p. 294). This
recognition of the dialectic, the dualism, of imperfection
and perfection is perhaps the beginning of his "movement
toward fulfillment."
"Fulfillment," Warren writes, "is only the recogni
tion / Of the common lot of our kind" (Brother to Dragons,
p. 214). But this "fulfillment" comes only after a period
during which Tobias seeks communion in the "blank cup,"
when he flees from innocence toward the guilt of his drunk
enness and failure. During the episode in which Tobias
assists Mr. Lounberry reclaim and honor "Old Slop," the
latter's father, who had rejected his son, Tobias finally
stoops from his "hieratic" heights and becomes "involved
in that commonality of weakness and rejection." Instead of
being "hieratic," Tobias becomes human and recognizes com
plicity when he meets Lounberry's eyes, which are saying
141
"you, too" (p. 370). He recognizes the value of "the honor
ing of Father, the redeeming of the past and all the vanity
of heroism" (p. 373), and he, like Lounberry, is able to
accept reality and achieve a true image thereof.
Paralleling Tobias1s experience and achievement is
Manty's own "movement toward fulfillment." A final illu
sion, a simulacrum, is her belief that an old negro beggar
on the street in Halesburg, Kansas, is Rau-Ru. At first
she gives him money, as if she "could buy something, abso
lution, oblivion, knowledge, meaning, identity" (p. 355).
These five substantives, each with its abstract referent,
summarize succinctly the object of Manty's frustrated
search: she has sought futilely both identity and oblivion,
both meaning and meaninglessness, both a freedom that comes
from knowledge and a freedom from knowledge. After she
visits the old negro's grave, Manty realizes that he was
not Rau-Ru but "simply an image [she] had called up, as it
were, out of the darkness of time, to fulfill some need
. . ." (p. 365), just as she had called up images of Miss
Idell, Seth, Bond, and Tobias to fulfill a need.
Coupled with this realization is Manty's realization
of the truth of her father's love, a realization which is
the consequence of her desire to honor her father, who
142
seemingly had rejected her, just as Lounberry accepts the
unpleasant reality of his father and honors him. Finally,
she sees her image, her hieratic ideal, lean from the
heights; his word, and along with it, Manty's, becomes flesh
and she beholds his glory— the glory of the idea put finally
to the test of experience and reconciled with it. Both To
bias and Manty are able finally to balance the ideal and
the actual. And with that reconciliation comes the "awful
ness of joy." But contrary to Tobias's earlier view that
"joy comes easy in life," true joy— the aftermath of the
balanced dialectic— is born in anguish: it is "awful" in
the dual sense of the term— both "terrible" and "awesome,"
"impressive." The possession of it prepares Manty and To
bias, as it prepares Jack and Anne Burden, to go into "the
convulsion of the world" and to experience another "terri
ble" and "awesome" element— "the awful responsibility of
Time." The words of the speaker in Warren's poem "Dark
Night Of" provide a fitting epilogue: "May we all at last
31
enter into that awfulness of joy. ..."
31
This poem, in which a young boy's encounter with a
tramp teaches him about reality, recalls a similar situation
in "Blackberry Winter." Both works involve the dialectics
of youth and age, light and dark, innocence and experience,
naivete and knowledge, dependence and independence.
CHAPTER III
"A DIALECTICAL CONFIGURATION"
"I can't imagine real flowers for if I
could, they would somehow
not Be real"
— e. e. cummings, "in a
middle of a room"
"Reality comes from giving an account
of yourself and that's the worst of
being helpless."
— Saul Bellow, The Adventures
of Augie March
143
CHAPTER III
"A DIALECTICAL CONFIGURATION"
In a review published in 1953, six years before the
publication of Warren's sixth novel, The Cave, John Crowe
Ransom wrote: "There is perhaps a dialectical need for
[symbolism] to fill a gap and complete a series of literary
effects, . . . to heal the ill-formed split between the
subject and the object. . . . Warren must have been aware
of such a "dialectical need" in the writing of all his
novels but especially so in The Cave. He could well have
been describing himself when, in his essay on Conrad, he
wrote: the "philosophical novelist" is
one for whom the documentation of the world is con
stantly striving to rise to the level of generaliz
ation about values, for whom the image strives to
rise to symbol, for whom images always fall into a
^■"Symbolism: American Style" (rev. of Charles Feidel-
son's Symbolism and American Literature), New Republic,
CXXIX (November 2, 1953), 18.
144
145
dialectical configuration, for whom the urgency of
experience, no matter how vividly and strongly ex
perience may enchant, is the urgency to know the
meaning of experience.2
The figure which makes up the configuration in The Cave
is to be found in the title itself, a figure which appar
ently has for some time occupied the mind of Warren, who
once said that he always carries a novel about in his head
and that "you don't choose a story; it chooses you. You
get together with that story somehow; you're stuck with
3
it." One might add that of the many who are called and
the fewer who are chosen, few writers have been called or
chosen more fortuitously than Warren. The story which has
"chosen" him apparently found its origin in an actual his
torical event occurring in 1925— the fatal entrapment of
one Floyd Collins in a Kentucky cave, an event which, like
the fictional one, drew sensation-seeking crowds. Isaac
Sumpter at one point in the novel asks a Nashville newspaper
editor, "Did you ever hear of Floyd Collins?" (p. 195) .
Warren most assuredly had, and was "stuck with it."
2
"'The Great Mirage': Conrad and Nostromo," p. 363.
^Writers at Work: Paris Review, p. 113.
146
What is a recurrent figure in each of his other seven
novels becomes, in his sixth, the dominant figure. The
image of the cave— the central object of a series of related
situations and chains of events— provides Warren an effec
tive "objective correlative" for what might be called his
correlative objectives in the eight novels. Warren, that
is, uses the cave image as a formula for the evocation of
emotions and ideas regarding reality and unreality. The
cave, like Melville's whale, is a rich and variant symbol;
to examine its implications and ramifications is perhaps to
write a sequel to "The Whiteness of the Whale." What War
ren wrote elsewhere about "a fuller sense of the complexi
ties of things and of the shadowy, unsaid, unreconciled
meanings that must haunt every story worth writing or
reading," is applicable to all of his fiction, but especial
ly to The Cave. As he says, "Fiction is experience, not a
footnote" and the "urgency of experience" is the "urgency
4
to know the meaning of experience. In examining the
meaning of experience in The Cave, one can best understand
the configuration in this novel if first he briefly examines
4
Introduction, "A Long Fourth" and Other Stories, by
Peter Taylor (New York, 1948), ix.
147
it in the rest of Warren's fiction. As Faulkner once said,
"Not only does each book [have] to have a design but the
5
whole output of a writer's work [has] to have a design."
The epigraph from the Allegory of the Cave in Plato's
Republic provides a significant clue to the meaning of the
figure. (Jeremiah Beaumont, one recalls, read philosophy—
and the Republic in particular— to learn "the truth of the
world.") The cave is, then, the Cave of Illusion, where
reality is merely the shadow of a shadow, for the objects
which cast the shadow are themselves unreal, factitious.
Like the inhabitants of Plato's cave, who are chained with
their backs to the mouth of the cave, many of Warren's
characters are "strange prisoners" viewing a "strange
image," accepting shadowy illusion for reality. But even
if, and when, they are released and brought to the real
world of sunlight, they often make the reverse error; they
view reality as a shadowy illusion, for the bright sunlight
is often, as in the case of Isaac Sumpter, too harsh for
them to accept. "The light which puts out our eyes is only
darkness to us," wrote Thoreau in Walden. These figures
5
Writers at Work: Paris Review, p. 113.
148
are like the "blind fish from a cave, hurled into light,"
g
mentioned in "The Circus in the Attic." Like these fish,
which eventually became blind by never being subjected to
light, many of Warren's characters, so long in the Cave of
Illusion, become blind to reality and never accept it even
when "hurled into light." Jasper Harrick's mother at one
point reflects: "The fish down there didn't have any eyes,
and the crawfish down there didn't have any eyes ..."
(p. 202).
Beginning with his first published work of fiction,
"Prime Leaf" (1930), a short story whose subject of night-
riders and tobacco growers anticipates Night Rider, shadows
have been prominent in Warren's fiction, suggesting both
the shadowy illusions within the characters themselves and
the shadows of unreality on the walls. In critical scenes
of Night Rider, for example, the shadows— "large and pos
sessive and black" (p. 324)— appear on the walls. Mr.
Munn's shadow sways "amorphously behind him on the walls"
(p. 43 5) in the scene in which Lucille Christian comes to
g
Robert Penn Warren, "The Circus in the Attic" and
Other Stories (New York, 1948), p. 243. All subsequent
references are to this edition.
149
visit him at the Proudfit farm— "amorphously" because both
the shadow and the shadow of the shadow lack reality.
Many of the settings where many Warren characters live
and move, but have no being, are Platonic Caves of Illusion.
Just as the stable hall in "Prime Leaf" is "cavernous" (p.
243), so at the beginning of Night Rider the interior of
the hotel is, to Munn, "like a great cavern full of shadowy
moving forms and the insistent rise and hum of voices" (p.
6)y whereas at the end of the novel the most significant
part of the landscape of the Proudfit farm is the cave with
its "chill shadow" (p. 376). Similarly, at the end of All
the King's Men, when Jack Burden visits Sadie Burke at the
sanatorium, the boughs above the avenue meet and drip
"stalactites of moss to make a green aqueous gloom like a
cavern" (p. 431). In World Enough and Time the store at
Bowling Green, where Jeremiah works, is a "big, dusky cave"
(p. 43) and later his prison cell is referred to numbers of
times as "a cave" (pp. 401, 407) and a "dark hole" (pp. 404,
418, 430). In Band of Angels the swamp where Manty is taken
by Rau-Ru is a "caverned darkness" (p. 315)y and in Wilder
ness the darkness of Virginia is described as being "like
a cave" (p. 135) . A corporal tells his men that going into
the wilderness after Lee is "like crawling in a cave at
150
night to wrassle a bear and it the bear's cave" (p. 202).
Having entered the woods— the cave— Adam encounters still
another cave— a cave within a cave— Monmorancy Pugh's cabin,
a place "more like a cave, a den, than a constructed habi
tation" (p. 253). This cabin with its "blackness like a
cave" (p. 247) is similar to the "cavernously dim room" of
the Fiddler house in Flood (p. 44).
Many of Warren's characters are not only "strange
prisoners" to an outward cave of shadows but also to a
shadowy cave or abyss within themselves. At the end of
World Enough and Time Warren writes that the Indians called
Kentucky "the Breathing Land and the Hollow Land, for be
neath the land there are great caves" (p. 511). Many
inhabitants of this Hollow Land are equally hollow men, for
within them there are great caves, suggesting the unreality
of self. The outer darkness is paralleled by inner dark
ness. The "inky and unreal darkness" of the night in Night
Rider (p. 68), for example, is surpassed only by the
"private darkness" (p. 114) of the self. Early in that
novel, Munn, at Tolliver's house, realizes that "all he
knew was the blackness into which he stared" and the ques
tion comes to him,
151
Was he staring into blackness, a blackness external
to him and circumambient, or was he the blackness,
his own head of terrific circumference embracing,
enclosing, defining the blackness, and the effort of
staring into the blackness a staring inward into him
self, into his own head which enclosed the blackness
and everything? (p. 109)
Similarly, Jebb Holloway, a minor character in The Cave,
senses, like most of the other characters, the "darkness
that was himself," "the suffering self" (p. 256).
Just as Mr. Munn stares into a "dark coiling depth"
within himself (Night Rider, p. 162), so Willie Stark in
All the King's Men has something inside him "big and coil
ing, " something for which there is no name, for "maybe there
isn't any name" (p. 32). Perhaps it is, as in the case of
Old Big Hump in World Enough and Time, an "old coiling
darkness of the heart" (p. 476), or perhaps it is simply
the "darkness of self," which to Jeremiah Beaumont is "more
trackless than the wild country" (World Enough and Time,
p. 188) toward which man moves, or the "self" which to
Manty Starr is the "one thing unknowable" (Band of Angels,
p. 125). Perhaps it is a darkness which prompts Jeremiah
Beaumont to ask himself if his life is "like a blind river
in one of those great caves of the region" (World Enough
and Time, p. 241).
152
This image of the darkness of the heart, paralleling
the wider heart of darkness, appears again in Band of
Angels when Manty describes her feelings upon her arrival
at Bond1s house:
It was as though, there in the bright sunlight, I were
falling inward, were flowing inward, as though myself
were some dark delicious pit into which I fell inex
haustibly, like sleep, like dying, but I didn't want
to stop the falling, the flowing, the dying. (p. 93).
Subsequently, one sees her, like Munn and others, looking
into her own "inward shadows" (p. 147), just as Adam in
Wilderness has his "private darkness" (p. 201), the
"darkness of himself" within a wider, external, "public"
darkness— a cave within a cave. Similarly, Brad in Flood
has the sense of an "inner darkness" within a "deeper dark
ness" (p. 404).
In addition to suggesting shadowy illusion and the
unreality of self, the exploration of self as a cave within
a cave, the image has further implications of unreality in
relation to sound. Warren's caves are similar to the
Marabar Caves in E. M. Forster's A Passage to India, where
there is a "terrifying echo"
entirely devoid of distinction, . . . where whatever
is said, the same monotonous noise replies, and
quivers up and down the walls until it is absorbed
by the roof. "Boum" is the sound as far as the human
alphabet can express it, or "bou-oum" or "ou-boum"—
utterly dull. Hope, politeness, the blowing of a nose,
the squeak of a boot, all produce "bourn.
This echo, which reduces everything to indistinction and
futility, points up the unreality of a number of Warren's
characters and their circumstances. They dramatize Fors
ter's statement that "nothing, nothing attaches" to the
caves. The same echo appears in Warren's caves. Toward
the end of Night Rider, the clamor of the dogs in the woods
is, to Munn the fugitive, "vibrant as in a cave" (p. 341).
When Sue Murdock, in At Heaven's Gate, tells Jerry Calhoun
that she has to make love— part of her futile striving for
reality— "her words [ring] in his head, as in a cave" (p.
103). Similarly, Jack Burden envisions young Willie Stark
in his cold north bedroom, his blood beating in his head
"with a hollow sound as though his head were a cave as big
as the dark outside" (All the King's Men, p. 32). This
description anticipates that in Flood, where Brad feels
"the blood beat in his head, but the sound was far away, as
in the darkness of a cave" (p. 394). And Manty Starr's
sense of unreality and futility is suggested when, on her
^ (New York, 1924), p. 147.
154
way back to New Orleans from the swamp, her anguished
thoughts return "like an echo from a dark cavern" (Band of
Angels, p. 334).
This sense of unreality and futility is further sug
gested by the role of the cave as vagina dentata. In Flood,
when Brad's marriage breaks up and he and Lettice make love
one last time, it is like "plunging into the black center
of things, where nothing equals nothing" (p. 33 5). Simi
larly, in World Enough and Time the inane sexual grapplings
of Rachel and Jeremiah on the prison floor,"as on the floor
of a cave" (p. 412), suggest those of primitive man, yield
ing not communion but only the "hot blackness of self."
And in The Cave the woman in the darkness of the mountain
says to Monty Harrick, "It's a cold hole he's in— but you,
sweetheart, come here, sweetheart— " (p. 347). Concerning
the numerous instances of frustrating sexual experiences
in The Cave, one can only conclude, not that "a freely
copulating world is happy," as John Bradbury facetiously
g
suggests, but that reality is not to be found in the "black
center of things where nothing equals nothing."
g
Renaissance in the South (Chapel Hill, 1963), p. 67.
155
The function of the cave as womb has further implica
tions concerning reality. Some of Warren's characters seek
to escape reality by a return to the womb. For example,
Jeremiah Beaumont seeks in the swamp a kind of peace which
he calls the "black inwardness and womb of the quagmire"
(World Enough and Time, p. 479), similar to Manty Starr's
"dark delicious pit." Jack Burden speaks of assuming the
"prenatal position" and being "little and warm and safe in
the dark" (All the Kina's Men, p. 140). Similarly, Jasper
Harrick's mother believes he has crawled into the cave to
escape the filthy touch of those outside; perhaps he has
"cave-crawled into the earth like it was some sort of joyous
dark-dreaming he was crawling into, and to lie snug and
complete with the whole earth tucked in around him" (The
Cave, p. 19).
Conversely, the "bright, beautiful, silvery soprano
scream" uttered by Jack Burden's mother in All the Kina's
Men (p. 370) when she learns of Judge Irwin's death, signals
the beginning of both her emergence (and that of Jack) from
the womb of unreality. Thus, the cave as womb functions
as symbol of both escape from reality and rebirth to real
ity. According to Gertrude Levy, primitive races considered
the cave the mother from whom they were born again, and
156
they conducted "rites of passage," celebrating the indiv-
9
idual's birth, initiation, death, and rebirth. The events
in The Cave are, in a sense, a parody of these rites.
If the cave is a womb it is also a tomb, the "contain
er" which "holds and takes back." As Erich Neumann ex
presses it,
the womb of the earth becomes the deadly devouring
maw of the underworld, and beside the fecundated womb
and protecting cave of earth . . . gapes the abyss of
Hell, the dark hole of the depth, the devouring womb
of the grave and death, of darkness without light, of
nothingness.
The cave is both Mother and tomb, the beginning and the end.
For Jack and Celia Harrick, Mr. Bingham, Jo-Lea, Monty
Harrick, Rev. Sumpter, and Nick Pappy, it is a symbol of
beginning, perhaps a "movement toward fulfillment"; but for
Isaac Sumpter it is only the beginning of the end, the end
of any possible beginning, a movement away from fulfillment.
For Jasper Harrick it literally becomes a tomb; for Isaac
it becomes a symbolic tomb.
Although he never appears, Jasper is actually the
9
The Gate of Horn (New York, 1946).
10The Great Mother (New York, 1955).
157
central, unifying figure in the novel, or, more accurately,
his entrapment in the cave is the central event, an event
which, to borrow Warren's metaphor, is a pebble dropped into
a pond, causing ever-widening ripples of influence. The
novel illustrates that although it is impossible for one to
find reality in the self of another, the reality of another
self (or even the unreality, as in the case of Bogan Mur
dock) can point the way toward reality. The cave, and
Jasper's entrapment in it, serves two major functions in
the novel: as an outward form of an inner condition it
parallels or symbolizes the entrapment of all the charac
ters; each character has his own cave experience. Jasper’s
entrapment also serves to focus climactically the attention
of the surrounding figures on their condition of unreality,
to "thrust them into light," or, to use Joycean terminology,
to evoke an "epiphany." An examination of each of these
"strange prisoners" and their "strange images" would seem
to provide the most effective method of analysis.
Although the motivation for Jasper's "cave-crawling"
remains nebulous both for the inhabitants of Johntown and
for the reader, there are subtle indications as to its
significance. Like earlier prototypes of the independent
self in American literature— Huck Finn, Tom Sawyer (who
158
also explored a cave), Henry David Thoreau— Jasper would
just laugh his easygoing way and off to the woods
again, or drift down the river in his skiff, miles
and miles, nobody knew where, flat on his back in
the skiff, his hat over his face against the moon
light, dreaming in the darkness of his head, drifting
on past afternoon into bullbat time, into nighttime,
all night long, and alone . . . (p. 19)
"A man thinking or working is always alone, let him be where
he will,"^ wrote Thoreau, who did his own drifting on the
Concord and Merrimack Rivers. Perhaps the television
reporter in the novel is ironically accurate when he says
that Jasper embodies "the courage to plunge into the un
known" (p. 248), in this case the "unknown" of self.
Lying in the ground, Jasper feels "complete," not
divided "with the terrible division of the age." Perhaps
he goes to his caves for the reason that Thoreau went to
the woods, a reason Thoreau expressed succinctly in the
statement, "Be it life or death, we crave only reality"
(Walden, p. 71). Jasper seems to illustrate what Thoreau
writes: "When we are unhurried and wise we perceive that
only great and worthy things have any permanent and absolute
existence, that petty fears and petty pleasures are but
*^Walden, p. 95.
159
the shadow of the reality1 1 (p. 69; italics mine) . Thoreau
further sums up the situation of the surrounding figures in
Warren's novel, for whom "shams and delusions are esteemed
for soundest truths, while reality is fabulous." Like many
of Thoreau's New Englanders, many of the inhabitants of
Johntown, Tennessee, live "mean" lives because their "vision
does not permeate the surface of things." They "think that
that is. which appears to be"; they confuse be. and seem,
reality and appearance, reality and illusion. "We are
enabled to apprehend at all what is sublime and noble,"
Thoreau continues, "only by the perpetual instilling and
drenching of the reality that surrounds us."
For Thoreau, the pond is "earth's eye, looking into
which the beholder measures the depth of his own nature"
(p. 128); for Jasper, the cave is also "earth's eye," the
exploration of which measures the depth of self. Thoreau
plumbs the depths of the pond and makes conclusions con
cerning the "height and depth" of man's character; Jasper
plumbs the depths of the cave and in so doing he illustrates
Thoreau's formula for achieving reality by "exploring
thyself":
Let us settle ourselves, and work and wedge our feet
downward through . . . prejudice, and tradition, and
160
delusion, and appearance, that alluvion which covers
the globe . . . until we come to a hard bottom and
rocks in place, which we call reality and say. This
is and no mistake . . . (p. 70)
Similarly, Jasper finds a point d'appui, and his experience
becomes not a "Nilometer" but a "Realometer," enabling some
inhabitants of Johntown to recognize the "shams and appear
ances" in their surface living.
Jeremiah Beaumont, as a boy, also had associated cave-
crawling with living deliberately and deeply. Lying in his
prison cell, he remembers how
when he was a boy, he had explored some of those sinks
and caves that riddled tortuously the soft stone be
neath the land of his home section, and how once he had
crawled back a long way, through windy, cranky gullets
that constricted breath, how he had come to great cham
bers and stood (he knew their size despite the black
ness because when he shouted his voice bounced back
from high unseen ceilings and farther walls), how he
had felt along the wall, inch by inch, to another
aperture, how he had crawled again, deeper, deeper and
narrower, and had come at last to a place where he
could crawl no more, it was so close. "So I lay there,
and breathed the limey, cool, inward smell of earth's
bowels, which is not like any smell common to the
superficies, though in spots dank and unvisited by sun.
It is a smell cleanly and rich, not dead and foul but
pregnant with a secret life, as though you breathed
the dark and the dark were about to pulse. And while
I lay there, I thought how I might not be able to re
turn, but would lie there forever, and I saw how my
father might at that moment be standing in a field full
of sun to call my name wildly and run to all my common
haunts to no avail. I felt a sad pity for him, and for
161
all who ran about thus seeking in sun and shade. But
I felt no terror. It was like a dream of terror with
the terror drained away, and the dark was loving
kindness. (World Enough and Time, p. 344)
One has constantly to remind himself that Jeremiah, not
Jasper, is speaking here? Jasper, if he knew, must have
felt a "sad pity" for all who ran about seeking in sun and
shade, too. From all indications, Jasper's cave experience
is similar to that of Jeremiah as a boy. (Jeremiah's ex
perience in the "dark hole" of his cell is an experience in
the Cave of Illusion, whereas that in the cave as a boy is
an experience in the cave of reality, a reality he has long
since lost.) Like Jeremiah's early cave, Jasper's cave is
an ironical reversal of the Platonic Cave of Illusion:
Jasper, although a prisoner, is really free, whereas those
outside, although not literal prisoners, are entrapped in
their own caves. "They had," Mr. Bingham reflects at the
end of the novel,
wept, and prayed, and boozed, and sung, and fought, and
fornicated, and in all ways possible had striven to
break through to the heart of the mystery which was
themselves. No, he thought . . ., to break out of the
dark mystery which was themselves. (p. 396)
Brother Sumpter prays for the souls of all who are there,
"on whom the weight of sin lay, in darkness like the cave"
162
(p. 318); telling them that "whoever lives with a guilty
secret lives in a dark cave and cannot breathe for the
weight of sin," he cries out "that those . . . in the dark
cave should come into the daylight bright and clear" (p.
320). Thus, Jasper's cave shows more contrasts with than
parallels to the caves of these people. The key passage
from World Enough and Time points up a number of signifi
cant contrasts.
Unlike the Cave of Illusion, this cave is both vital
ized and humanized: it has "cranky" (in the sense of
tortuous, twisting) "gullets" in the "earth's bowels."
Similarly, Jasper's cave has a passage "like a dry, black
gullet" (The Cave, p. 132; italics mine). It is "pregnant
with secret life"; the dark, "about to pulse." is "loving
kindness." The passage is vibrant in its sensory appeal,
especially to the tactile, olfactory, and auditory senses.
In the Cave of Illusion the senses are dulled, and deluded;
here they are heightened so that the experience becomes one
of Transcendent Reality. Here the echo is not a mere "bourn"
but an aid to knowledge, for it bounces back from the walls
and indicates size and location. Young Jeremiah-Jasper
"feels" not only with his fingers but also with his soul;
he feels a "sad pity" but no "terror." He smells the
163
"limey, cool, inward smell of earth's bowels," unlike "any
smell common to the superficies"; it is a clean smell of
*
life, transcending surface existence or, more accurately,
non-existence. Although it is dark and the ceilings are
"unseen," one is able to "see" inwardly. In short, the
paragraph points up significant dualities: inner versus
outer life; "secret life" versus open life; "inward smell"
versus "common," outer smell; a rich smell versus a dead
smell; cleanness versus foulness; coolness versus heat in
the "field of sun"; lying deliberately versus running
wildly; life versus death. Paradoxically, inside the cave
the dark is light, whereas outside the light is dark; those
outside run about "seeking in sun and shade." An expecially
significant world is the pejorative superficies— surface,
external appearances of a thing as opposed to the reality
of depth.
Perhaps Jasper best summed up his cave-crawling motiv
ation when he said, "It's not what you'd expect, down there
. . . It's not like above-ground folks would expect" (p.
239). The idea of a Transcendent Reality is further seen
in Jasper's comment that "it is not summer and it is not
winter. There aren't any seasons to bother about down
there." "A lot of things don't matter down there," he
164
concludes (p. 240). k
Significant also is Jasper's remark to his mother that
"in the ground at least a fellow has a chance of knowing
who he is" (p. 241). Early in the novel the reader learns
that Jasper "had that trick of being himself so completely,
it looked like he wore the whole world over his shoulders
like a coat and it fit" (p. 19). He had a sense of identity
and had succeeded in reconciling the dialectic of self and
world. "That was why everybody reached out and tried to
lay a hand on him, get a word off him, have something rub
off him, hold him back a minute, before he moved on toward
wherever he was going" (p. 19). The "above-ground folks,"
the "strange prisoners," lack Jasper's image of reality,
as an examination of their own "cave experiences" will
evince. At least eight of them have something of Jasper
"rub off" on them.
Jasper's own brother, Monty, lacks a sense of self
reality: "He couldn't even be himself, whatever that was"
(pp. 20, 29). He believes Jo-Lea "prevented him from being
himself" (p. 21). He has identified himself with "Big
Brother," even to the point of dressing like Jasper and
seeking similar sexual adventures, but identification is
not only not identity but it serves even to rob Monty of
165
any identity he may have. He feels at one point "like he
was nothing but a paper sack full" of iron filings used at
school to illustrate magnetic pull. He possesses only a
"velleity" rather than real volition identified with a real
self.
Like other Warren characters lacking a sense of self
reality, Monty, in the act of removing Jo-Lea's panties,
feels a sense of detachment: "It was as though his own
hand, his right hand, wasn't his. It was as though that
hand was doing what it was doing on its own responsibility"
(p. 33). In the act of embracing Jo-Lea he hears her heart
beating, "making a strange, dark-sounding, juicy-sounding
bumpitv-bumpitv. Like a sound down a well. Or in a cave"
(p. 32). The word strange recalls the "strange image" in
the Cave of Illusion; the bumpitv-bumpitv is another version
of the "bourn" of the Marabar Caves; and both are fused in
dark-sounding. an effective example of synesthesia.
Later in the novel, after Jo-Lea tells of her preg
nancy on a television interview, causing people to believe
Jasper responsible, Monty feels that he has awakened from
a dream, "but the reality he woke into was exactly like the
dream he had waked out of, with the only difference the fact
of being worse for being real" (p. 338). After having
166
chased Jo-Lea and elicited from her a confirmation of the
truth of her condition, Monty felt as though, "for the first
time in his life, he was himself. It was as though he had
never been Monty Harrick before" (pp. 340-341). His sense
of selfhood disappeared, however, when Jo-Lea refused to
say that the child is his: "it was as though the wind had
snatched even his name away" (p. 342). Subsequently, when
he heard the orgiastic sounds of a couple making love in
the darkness he had a sensation similar to that experienced
earlier, when he heard Jo-Lea's heart beating strangely as
in a cave. Now his own "heart was making a hollow, painful
thump in the dark of his chest. His chest seemed as big
and deep as a cave, an enormous emptiness where nothing
could even happen except that painful thumping in the dark"
(p. 343). Monty is further initiated to reality when he
overhears the conversation of the lieutenant and the com
missioner. With Jasper's death, Monty is free to be
himself. Significantly, Mr. Harrick tells Jo-Lea that
Monty has crawled in the ground to Jasper and "will hold
his Big Brother's hand." As seen above, everyone "tried
to lay a hand on" Jasper; the recurrent act of touching
another, or failing to do so, throughout the novel seems to
symbolize an attempt to confirm reality, or a failure to do
167
so.
Paralleling Monty's initiation and consequent apparent
"movement toward fulfillment" is that of Jo-Lea. In the
early scene with Monty she "proclaimed her identity" by
saying, "I'm me . . . I'm not my daddy. . . . I'm not any
thing he says or thinks" (pp. 30-31). This attempt to
achieve reality of self in rejection of the father is rem
iniscent, in a milder form, of Sue Murdock's similar at
tempt. Later, when her mother questions her about the
father of the child, Jo-Lea feels "that if she told one
thing, said even one word, she would never be herself again.
She would cease to exist." Then, paradoxically, she desires
non-existence, escape from reality. "She wished she were
dead, but if you aren't dead you have to exist, and if you
have to exist you have to be yourself, or it is worse than
being dead, or anything" (p. 311). Only when Jo-Lea accepts
her reality with Monty instead of the illusion she has
associated with Jasper and has been reconciled with her
father, does she begin her "movement toward fulfillment."
Jo-Lea avoids becoming another Sue Murdock, at least
in part, because her father is no Bogan Murdock, although,
as chief stockholder, president, and cashier of the People's
Security Bank of Johntown, Tennessee, Timothy Bingham also
168
seeks reality in "thingism," in materiality. His life con
sists largely of the attempt to maintain "apple-pie effi
ciency" both in his books and in his life. When this order
is disrupted by knowledge of his daughter's pregnancy and
his wife's subsequent vituperation, he desires to escape
reality: "He closed his eyes and thought of himself dead,
and being lowered gently down. He wanted to die" (p. 315).
His wife is ironically correct when~~she tells him, "Oh,
don't put your hands over your eyes. You cannot hide from
the truth" (p. 315). The events precipitated by Jasper's
entrapment eventuate in Mr. Bingham's own "cave experience";
something happened in "the dark bottom of his mind" (p.
220). Only when he accepts reality by allowing Jo-Lea to
be "happy in her own wav" and recognizes that perhaps she
is moving toward "final fulfillment" (p. 398), can he move
toward his own fulfillment. And only when he asserts the
reality of self in repudiation of his effete wife, Matilda
— who, like Mrs. Murdock, is a domineering, decadent member
of an illusory aristocracy— can he be free of his own en
trapment in the Cave of Illusion.
If, among the "strange prisoners" representing a cross-
section of Johntown or Anytown, Mr. and Mrs. Bingham are
representatives of an illusionist, decadent gentility,
169
Mr. and Mrs. Nick Pappy are representatives of an equally
illusionist, equally decadent bourgeoisie. A three-time
failure as a restaurateur, Nick sees Jasper's entrapment as
an opportunity to make money by selling refreshments to the
crowds. Tobias Sears's summation of Cameron Perkins in
Band of Angels applies also to Nick: "He has found reality.
It is Dough. It is the Buck. It is the Dollar" (p. 350).
Reality and happiness to Nick are "having money in the bank
so you did not have to go bankrupt" (p. 309) or driving
his "yellow Cad" with the top down, just as Sugar-Boy in
All the King's Men finds his only reality in driving the
Cadillac and shooting his pistol.
Of the "strange prisoners," Nick is undoubtedly one of
the strangest, entrapped as he is in that "deep, dark . . .
secret center of his being" (pp. 41-42), "the inside dark
which was himself" (p. 199). Like Mr. Munn, who at one
point in Night Rider attempts to avoid reality by creating
an optical illusion of his wife, Nick, while making love
to his wife, pretends she is Jean Harlow, the "platinum-
blond, swivel-built movie queen" (p. 42). Like Mr. Bingham,
who attempts to avoid reality by putting his hands over his
eyes, Nick shuts his eyes tight to escape harsh reality,
for "a man couldn't live with it if it was real" (p. 72).
170
In the "shifting shadows" he feels "trapped in an agony of
infidelity" (p. 51), either to the reality or to the fanta
sy; he is unable to balance vision and reality.
In the Indianapolis honky-tonk where he first met
Giselle Fontaine alias Sarah Pomfret, Nick believed the fan
tasy and the real to be one, but later "the two things— the
fantasy and the real woman . . .— started to fall apart.
They got ungummed" (p. 50). All of their bizarre sexual
encounters
were only a way to make actuality take on the ideal
intenseness of fantasy, a ritual to call down, to the
sprawl of the bath mat or the tangle of the clothes
closet, the romance, the mystery, the mana, the glory,
of the dream that had glimmered in the dark of his
head. (pp. 51-52)
But Nick is unable to transform reality into ideality, for
"the impromptu drama, the ritual, the squinched eyes, never
quite accomplished . . . what they were supposed to do— that
is, the fusion, the identification, of the dream and the
actuality" (p. 52). Consequently, the vision of Jean Harlow
falls "more vindictively into nothingness," and the un
pleasant reality of Sarah Pomfret swells more and more into
"somethingness, which was worse than nothingness" (p. 53).
Giselle, or Sarah, who had previously glimmered "like a
dream, too beautiful to be real," was "real enough now— if
171
she was that bloat of blubber on the bed" (p. 176). When
closing his eyes in an attempt to see "some lost vision of
the glimmer of dream veiled in blue smoke" proves futile,
Nick can only stare at her, "trying to make sense of what
was real and what was not real" (p. 177).
Nick seems to have trouble making sense of what is
real and not real about himself as well; he lacks a sense
of self-reality, as suggested by allusions to his name. On
one occasion he "seemed to wonder who the hell that name
could belong to. . . .It was like remembering a name of
somebody you used to know, but you couldn't remember where,
or even the face" (p. 71). To Mrs. Harrick, who alone
bothers to learn to say his name correctly, Nick says, "If
it is not your right name, it looks like sometime you don't
know who you are, maybe" (p. 304). But it is also true, as
it is for Dorothy Cutlick, about whom the "realest thing"
is an "empty ache," that "a person's name is not a good
enough name for the ache a person is" (p. 40). Cleared of
some of his shadowy illusions through his experiences in
the events surrounding Jasper's entrapment, Nick, at the
end of the novel, is able to face reality and to accept it;
significantly, "he lifted his eyes to look at [his wife's]
face" rather than shutting his eyes to escape reality.
172
Away from the darkness and "strange images" of the cave,
"the light was better now" (p. 365).
Presenting still another study in the anatomy of un
reality and representing still another stratum, the illu
sionist proletariat, are the parents of Jasper— Jack
Harrick, former blacksmith now dying of cancer, and his
wife, the former Celia Hornby. "With her sureness of self,"
Miss Hornby "would know who she was, no matter what you
called her" (p. 147), but as Mrs. Harrick she finally comes
to confess, "I was never me before" (p. 402). The girl who
seemed to possess reality of self becomes the woman who
m
feels "that if you really didn't have to think of yourself
ever again, not what had happened or might ever happen, you
could be happy" (p. 299). She becomes the woman who needs
to confirm her own reality and that of her husband and son
by reaching out to touch them. In her longing to hold
Jack's hand (p. 158) and to have him put out his hand to
her (p. 250), she resembles Margaret Schlegel in E. M.
Forster's Howard1s End. who feels the compulsion to "only
connect," to "live in fragments no longer." While feeling
guilty for not having "touched" Jasper, Celia both resents
those who put "their filthy hands on him" (p. 297) and
feels she herself could not bear the reality of "the touch
173
of the world" (p. 373).
Like Nick Pappy, Celia shuts her eyes in hopes of
escaping present reality; in the "dark of her mind" she
sees her husband only as an illusory figure "balancing on
the back of the skidding pickup truck" (291). Like Nick,
too, she stares at the light "beyond her curtain of shadow"
(p. 290). She blames her husband— who "didn't seem real,
just a black paper cutout, two-dimensional"— for Jasper’s
entrapment; later, when she accuses him of not wanting
Jasper to come out of the ground, "it was like not knowing
who you were." She wonders if anything-had ever happened,
for "if nothing had happened, then there would be no suf
fering and terror under the stone" (p. 3 75). But something
had happened; she is confronted with reality, and when
Jack accuses her of never having forgiven him for an es
capade, an idea fills her head "like a burst of light."
At the end of the novel, Celia, like Nick Pappy, having
emerged from the Cave of Illusion and having "opened her
eyes . . . and looked up" at Jack, says, "Oh, John T.— I
never saw you before! . . . Maybe it's because— because I
was never me before" (p. 402).
It was the hand of Celia Hornby which drew Jack Harrick
"back to reality" when he felt that he was being "snatched
174
up into darkness like the field mouse by the hoot owl" (p.
146). Jack is another character who seeks reality in the
person of another, but instead of gaining self-reality from
Celia he causes her to lose her own "self-sureness." At
times he did not know whose hand he held and
that was the terror. It was like waking up in the
dark and not knowing who you are. Yet he was afraid
to look and find out who was there, and therefore who
he himself was. His head spun, as in a kind of ver
tigo of all the past times he had walked in the dark.
x l e was afraid that if he turned his head to look he
might find nobody, nothing there at all . . . (p. 144)
T h e "vertigo" here is the "vertigo of his own non-being"
alluded to later (p. 387). Terror lies in unreality, yet
a greater terror lies in facing unpleasant reality. "The
danger was in the fact that Jack Harrick might not know
that Jack Harrick himself was there, might not, in fact,
know who Jack Harrick was, or if Jack Harrick had ever
existed" (p. 148).
Jack Harrick alias John T. Harrick alias Old Jack
Harrick alias John T. alias "Jumping Jack Harrick" (who,
like Private Porsum in At Heaven1s Gate. had received a
ribbon for "German-killing") seeks a sense of self-reality
in his thought, * ‘I am me. I am me" (p. 388), just as Jo-
Lea did earlier. "But who was Jack Harrick?" he asks
175
himself. He realizes then that Jack Harrick is "nothing
but a dream.” "He was a dream dreamed up from the weakness
of people. Since people were weak, they dreamed up a
dream out of their need for violence, for strength, for
freedom" (p. 388). He sees himself as a "strange image"
to other "strange prisoners," but his awareness must go
deeper: he sees himself as a "strange image" of himself—
"He knew then, as calmly and indifferently as morning mist
parting on the mountain, the weakness was not theirs. It
was his. Out of his own weakness, he had dreamed the dream
of Jack Harrick. And from that, all had followed" (p. 388).
Jack's weakness lies not only in his attempt to find
reality in Celia and in dreaming the dream of self but
also in his relation to his son. Celia tells him, "There
was always something wrong about you and him" (p. 299).
Warren reverses his usual father-son relationship by having
the father wrong the son and by having the experience of
the son point the way to the "redemption" of the father.
Jack admits that he wanted his son to die: "I did not want
mv son to come out of the ground because somebody always has
to go in the ground. If he was there I would not have to
go” (p. 385). He seems to be correct in his first state
ment but incorrect in his second. Jasper's cave experience
176
will not suffice for him; he must, and does, have his own.
At one point, "it looked like there was a big black hole
right in the middle of him where a man's thinking and
feeling and living ought to be, and he was going to fall
into the hole and fall forever into black nothing" (p. 139).
When his experience comes to its climax in his discussion
with Rev. Sumpter, "it was like being trapped. It was as
though everything you touched in the dark suddenly turned
into small fingers that clutched and held" (p. 382). When
the illusions of self are dispelled, he realizes that all
men, including Jasper and Monty, are not like himself, which
means that "he would have to feel worse for being himself"
(p. 400). When he does achieve a realistic image of self,
however, he can be reconciled to his wife; son; friend, Rev.
Sumpter; and his future daughter-in-law, to whom he becomes
a real father. His movement from his own Cave of Illusion
toward the Cave of Reality is further signaled by several
things. One is his attitude toward his "box," the guitar,
a symbol both of the relation between father and son and
of self-reality, for "every man's got to make his own kind.
his own kind of song" (p. 401). Another indication of
Harrick's movement is the kind of song he makes, especially
the final line, which suggests an entrance into the Cave
177
of Reality and a personal contact to confirm reality: "I'm
coming, son, I'm coming, take your Pappy's hand" (p. 402).
Another father-son relationship, that of Reverend
MacCarland Sumpter and Tsaac, provides yet another plot
strand and part of the configuration. Reverend Sumpter
bears sane resemblance to the Scholarly Attorney in All the
King's Men, especially in the fact that his wife has born
the child of another man, but even more he anticipates
Brother Potts in Flood. If the obsession of the latter is
the desire to preach a stirring sermon to the people of
Fiddlersburg before the town is inundated, the obsession
of the former is his desire to see his son's "salvation."
Ironically, Isaac sees his father as Abraham about to sac
rifice his son, Isaac, but instead Reverend Sumpter sac
rifices himself, his own honor, by telling a lie to cover
up for Isaac's lie, just as earlier he had sacrificed him
self for Jack Harrick and Mary Tillyard by marrying Mary,
who had been impregnated by Jack. Instead of Abraham, he
is David crying out for Absalom: "My son, my son . . .
Would God I had died for thee" (p. 82). Sumpter has his
own illusion— that it is his son who will be "saved"— and
the illusion leads to collusion and to self-delusion to
the extent that he wishes Jasper to die. It can be said
178
of him what Jack Burden says— that a man's "crime may be
but a function of his virtue" (All the King's Men, p. 463).
Of Isaac Sumpter, who somewhat resembles Jack Burden
in his cynical attitude, it may be said that his quasi-
"virtue" in seeming to aid Jasper— a virtue which is actual
ly a delusion— is a function of his crime. He it is who
actually sacrifices another— Jasper— for his own self-
aggrandizement. He it is who, of all the figures in the
novel, or the cave, is most entrapped, most surely a
"strange prisoner." When he first appears and flings his
gaze about his "bare box room," it is "as though he were
trapped in a box, an animal, as though the gaze itself were
claws scraping the wood walls, witlessly trying to claw
out" (p. 99). He is more than a prisoner in his room,
however; he later feels a "sense of entrapment," a kind of
human bondage, in his relations with Rachel Goldstein.
Still later, when his whole deception is in danger of being
revealed by his father, he again feels an "entrapment in
the infinite series of unfoldings, in which each new reality
denied the reality of the last reality of anger" (p. 333).
In the final confrontation with his father, under the "naked
light of the hanging bulb"— symbolic of the harsh, searching
light of reality which he is unable to bear— Isaac feels
179
that "he should have known he was trapped. Oh it wasn't
Jasper Harrick, it was he, Isaac Sumpter, who was trapped.
He was trapped by something in him that, against all logic
and all possibility, had made him tell that lie" (p. 3 58).
Finally, as he flees to New York, even more deluded, he
feels "some dry entrapment of the heart ..." (p. 366).
Isaac's image of self, which he equates with Keats's
"immortal bird," is an illusory one rather than "a self of
the self, a free, immortal self ..." (p. 99). It is both
a deluded and a deluding self. Having abandoned his intent
to become a preacher like his father— itself a deception
assumed in part in order to obtain a college scholarship—
Isaac increases his illusions.
He was himself, and there was no God. No, he was not
himself. There was no God and there was no self. There
was no reality but the icy joy in the moment of achieve
ment. There was not even fatigue, or hunger, or
sleepiness, or pain. There was not even hope. He had
no plan, no ambition— nothing to hope for, or about.
(p. 101)
He achieves something elusive to hope for when he meets
Rachel Goldstein, whose flashback story comes closest to
being the common Warren story-within-a-novel. But sexual
encounters, even so numerous and autonomous as those of
Isaac and Goldie, cannot impart a sense of reality. Isaac
180
has difficulty in distinguishing between dream and reality:
"It was as though he had entered a dream. Or perhaps, had
left the dream and, at last, entered reality" (p. Ill).
But he had not entered reality, for, like Lucille Christian,
who sought reality of self in Mr. Munn, who, in turn, sought
it in her, Goldie seeks reality in Isaac: "You give me,
me, Ikey," she tells him. "I wasn't ever myself before.
You give myself to me, Ikey" (p. 114). (They are the same
words Jeremiah Beaumont speaks to Rachel in World Enough and
Time.)
Goldie, the "Jew Girl," who, like Manty Starr, is a
member of a race lacking a clear sense of identity, antic
ipates Warren's further use of the symbol in the person of
Adam Rosenzweig in Wilderness and Izzie Goldfarb in Flood.
Isaac's resentment at being mistaken for a Jew both by his
colleagues and by Goldie recalls Manty Starr's struggle for
a clear sense of identity. (Isaac's struggle is further
indicated by his various names and his attention to them:
Isaac, "Ikey," "Ikey-Baby.") This resentment leads to
Isaac's sexual entrapment by Gentile Eustacia Pinckney
Johnson, and his eventual ironic rejection by the "Jew
Girl."
Following his loss of Goldie, Isaac reverts to his
181
period of "no ambition— nothing to hope for, or about," a
period resembling Jack Burden's "Great Sleep." In his
attempt to escape reality he closes his eyes and holds his
breath, for then
it was as though something that had mattered was,
slowly, not mattering. He did not know what it was
that was not mattering, because the cool dew fell
in his darkness, or what made that cool dew suddenly
begin to fall so sweet, but he did know that if he
stirred, if he even drew a single breath, the dew
might cease to fall, the not-matterinq would again be
that dark, grinding mattering which was every breath
you drew. So he held his breath, as long as he could,
letting himself slip loose into the coolness of that
dewfall. (p. 98)
The imagery here— the coolness, the darkness, the breath
lessness— is that of the cave, the womblike cave of un
reality or escape from reality. Isaac envies Jasper
"because he lay in the cool, cool dark, and did not suffer"
(p. 324) .
Before entering the literal cave, Isaac again shuts
his eyes and sees the "absolute darkness" of the fourth
chamber "in the absolute darkness of his head— and the pit
. . ." (p. 193). Not only does he equate his inner darkness
with that of the cave but he also identifies himself with
Jasper:
Whether it was his body, or Jasper Harrick's, he couldn't
182
tell. No, it was not Jasper's, it had to be his own,
for if you couldn't see anything, you could still
feel things, and if he knew that the body was there,
it would have to be because he himself was the body
in that water, and he himself was that knowledge in
that absolute darkness. (p. 193)
It is precisely such an absolute darkness, in the sense of
being total and unmixed, which Isaac seeks— a "dark recess
of the self" as it is called later (p. 287).
Finally, crouched in the literal cave itself, Isaac
again closes his eyes and desires a "comforting darkness,"
a "darkness which had none of the deep, twisting strain of
life, and yet was life, a state of being which was, at the
same time, both peace and achievement, both non-life and
life" (p. 278). Desiring to be someone else and then
realizing that he could not also be himself, he tries to
reassert the reality of self in the way that Jo-Lea and
Mr. Harrick did— by saying, "I am myself" (p. 2 79). But he
never achieves the reality of self; he is last seen fleeing
to New York, where he thinks he "could at least be totally
himself" (p. 372) . Unlike Jerry Calhoun, who moves toward
fulfillment in his flight from the large city and in his
return to his father, Isaac flees to the city and away from
his father. His search for identity is predicated on op
portunism, as in the case of Wilkie Barron in World Enough
183
and Time, and one may imagine that Isaac may meet the same
end. Isaac's flight to New York parallels that of Slim
Sarrett to the same city (At Heaven's Gate), where Isaac,
too, may lie "trying to think of nothing, nothing, nothing
at all," where the great towers heave "massively into black
sky and [hedge] them about" (At Heaven's Gate, p. 379)—
"strange prisoners," indeed, with a "strange image."
Warren's seventh novel, Wilderness: A Tale of the
Civil War, further illustrates "a kind of dialectical
progression." "We are sadly human," Warren wrote in 1961,
"and in our contemplation of the Civil War we see a dram
atization of our humanity." This statement from The Legacy
of the Civil War (p. 107), published the same year as
Wilderness, serves as an apt commentary on the significance
of the novel's subtitle. Warren returns to the subject
and symbol which occupied him in Band of Angels, because
"the war grows in our consciousness. The event stands there
larger than life, massively symbolic in its inexhaustible
and sibylline significance. Significance^, rather, for it
is an image of life, and as such is a condensation of many
kinds of meanings" (Legacy, p. 80). This "condensation" of
meanings is further seen in Warren's comment that "the
lessons of the fighting are very apt, in a kind of
184
dialectical progression, to modify and refine the thinking"
(Legacy, p. 16). We must, Warren has written, "absorb"
values of the past "into something— that is, into the pro
gressive dialectic of all our values, into, in fact, our-
12
selves." The protagonist, Adam Rosenzweig, a Bavarian
Jew who comes to America to "fight for freedom" in the Civil
War, learns lessons which "modify and refine" his thinking,
his sense of reality.
Adam, another of Warren's Devotees of Idea, decided
that "the belief did not come out of the action" but that
"the action came out of the belief" (p. 89). Having re
ceived the legacy of the Idea, the Vision, from his father,
Adam comes also to receive the "legacy of the Civil War,"
the same legacy which America received. Prior to the War,
according to Warren, "the vision had not been finally sub
mitted to the test of history. . . . The anguished scrutiny
of the meaning of the vision in experience had not become
a national reality. It became a reality, and we became a
nation, only with the Civil War" (Legacy, p. 4). Similarly,
Adam achieves reality only after his vision is submitted
. . < •
12
Warren, Who Speaks for the Negro? p. 441.
185
to experience.
In his review of Edmund Wilson's Patriotic Gore. Warren
sees one of the themes of Wilson's work as "the contrast
between the various forms of myth and reality"; his phrase
"the pathos of the contrast between the dream and emerging
13
reality" expresses the major theme of Wilderness. One
may well approach the novel by posing the question Warren
himself has posed in relation to Faulkner's fiction: "How
much does he employ a line of concealed (or open) dialecti-
14
cal progression as a principle for his fiction?" In
attempting to answer this most significant question, one
may note at the outset that Adam moves in a "dialectical
progression" from dream to emerging reality. This progres
sion, which formulates the structure of the novel, may be
examined in terms of E. M. Forster's "pattern." Adam's
progression is a movement both afferent and efferent; that
is, while outwardly he moves, in the longest flight of any
Warren figure, from his father's home in Bavaria to the
center of the Wilderness in Virginia, inwardly he
13
"Edmund Wilson's Civil War," Commentary, XXXIV
(August 1962), 151.
14
"Cowley's Faulkner," New Republic, CXV (August 12,
1946), 176-180 and (August 26, 1946), 234-237.
186
simultaneously moves outward from the center of his own
wilderness of illusion. The two lines meet at the climax
when, in the literal Wilderness, Adam emerges finally and
decisively from his own inner wilderness. Apart from the
bold maneuverings of Grant, Adam fights his own Battle of
the Wilderness.
Warren's method, usually what he elsewhere calls
"intensive," is in this novel more of the "extensive order,"
a "method which works by accumulating illustration, and it
primarily depends for its success on the degree of struc
tural sense the writer possesses and the degree to which
the writer is committed to a single vigorous leading con
ception by which situations can be defined."^5 Adam, the
"innocent abroad," goes through an ordeal by experience,
an ordeal which inculcates the "udoubleness of experience"
or the dialectics of reality. This "vigorous leading con
ception" is illustrated episodically in Adam's progression
through four major phases, each occurring in a different
location, each precipitating encounters with characters who
influence Adam's sense of reality, and each serving to move
15
Robert Penn Warren, "The Fiction of Caroline Gordon"
(rev. of Aleck Maury. Sportsman), Southwestern Review. XX
(Winter 1935), 5.
187
him closer to the physical Wilderness and farther from his
wilderness of illusion— in the latter case by dis-illusion-
inq him, in the basic sense of the term. The first phase,
occurring in Bavaria, marks the beginning of the journey
toward the external Wilderness and away from the inner
wilderness; the second phase depicts Adam en route to New
York and his arrival there; the third phase presents Adam's
experiences in Pennsylvania and Virginia en route to the
Wilderness; the fourth depicts Adam's journey in the
Wilderness.
In Bavaria Adam encounters two kinds of contrasting
illusions, represented respectively by his father and his
uncle. His father had been a man of Idea, of Vision, of
faith in man; his legacy to his son was the belief that
"there was no nobler fate for a man than to live and die
for human liberty" (p. 7). Adam's uncle, on the other hand,
trusted only the Law of God and was cynical in his attitude
toward man; he waited for the day when all the world would
know the Law. Although the views conflict, both are
illusory, visionary, unreal. Six months before his death,
Adam's father is persuaded by his brother to repudiate his
visionary faith in man, to repudiate "all that he had
suffered for and had been," and to embrace the Law.
188
Thereupon, Adam feels a sense of betrayal; he feels that
"the gift," the legacy has been withdrawn. In the six
months "while the father was bearing the pain of his death,
the son had borne the pain of his birth" (p. 71), a birth
into manhood; he feels that "when his father's self had
died, his own self had been born" (p. 9). Only in the "com
bination of pain and gratification" (p. 229), is reality
to be found, as he later thinks concerning Jedeen Hawks-
worth. Adam comes to realize that he has lived only in the
"dream of his father's life, the father's manhood, the
father's heroism" (p. 9).
Adam continues to live in a dream, the only difference
being his attempt to make it his own. Like his namesake
in All the King's Men, Adam Stanton, Adam dramatizes the
"fallacy of abstraction" of which Warren writes in The
Legacy of the Civil War. Quoting Harold Laski, Warren al
ludes to the individual who "is not seen in his context as
a member of a particular society at a particular time" but
"as an individual standing outside society who can by an
act of will . . . assure his own regeneration" (Legacy, p.
30). Adam is certainly in "the pure blinding light of
isolation," always standing outside looking in. He, too,
must learn that all social problems are not best "solved
189
by an abstract commitment to virtue" (Leaqacy, p. 31). Only
later does he
find out that the noise he heard in his dream was
somebody knocking the molasses jar off a very high
shelf, and now he has to pick up the pieces, and they
are sticky. He has to leave his dream and put re
ality back together again— the reality of America and
himself. In other words, he . . . is suffering a
crisis of identity.^-®
Adam and his father at first share the illusory, ab
stract trust in man which Jefferson held but which, in
Brother to Dragons, he abandons for a more realistic view
of the "terror” of man's condition. To Meriwether Lewis
the illusion becomes delusion, the "great lie that men are
capable of the brotherhood of justice" (Brother to Dragons,
p. 182). In Wilderness Adam tells Mose, the Negro, that his
father called him "Adam," meaning "man": "He gave me that
name that I might try to be a man in the knowledge that men
are my brothers" (p. 92). But Adam must come to realize,
as Jefferson does, that man is a "brother to dragons."
In his wilderness of illusions Adam is also, like
Tobias Sears in Band of Angels, an apt recipient of the
16
Warren, Who Speaks for the Negro? p. 431.
17
Warren epithet "bully boy of virtue." He subscribes to
the Northern "Treasury of Virtue," which, according to War
ren, viewed the War "as a consciously undertaken crusade so
full of righteousness that there is enough overplus stored
in heaven, like the deeds of saints, to take care of all
small failings and oversights of the descendants of the
crusaders, certainly to the present generation" (Legacy, p.
64). Adam, too, has the image or "ikon" of himself as "a
boy in blue striking off, with one hand, iron shackles from
a grizzle-headed Uncle Tom weeping gratitude, and with the
other passing out McGuffey's First Reader to a rolypoly
pickaninny laughing in hope" (Legacy, p. 60). Although Adam
never passes out any McGuffeys, he does attempt to teach
Mose to read. Both Tobias and Adam are victims of what
Warren calls a "sentimentality" about oneself. One "cannot
afford," he continues, "to feel that he is going to redeem
the Negro. For the age of philanthropy is over, and it
would be a vicious illusion for the white man to think that
he, by acting alone, can reach a solution and pass it down
17
Writers at Work: Paris Review, p. 113. Warren speakst
further of the "local bully boys" in Who Speaks for the
Negro? (p. 428).
191
18
to gratefully lifted black hands. Adam's is just such a
"vicious illusion."
A third figure in Adam's first phase, Old Jacob, seems
the only figure in the novel, other than perhaps Mrs. Pugh
and Adam at the end, to achieve a reconciliation of the
dialectics of reality. Early a kind of idealist himself,
he comes to accept the harshness of reality: he learns to
live, for, as he tells Adam, "a man can learn to live" (p.
31). Similarly, Jack Harrick, at the end of The Cave, con
cludes that "living is just learning how to die" and dying
is "just learning how to live" (p. 403). Old Jacob has
achieved the "awfulness of joy" (p. 31), the same phrase
used to describe the experience of Tobias and Manty Sears
at the end of Band of Angels. Significantly, it is the
legacy of the boot made by Old Jacob which plays a role in
Adam's egress from his illusory wilderness.
On the ship to New York, at the beginning of his
second phase, Adam feels that "his dream would become a
reality" (p. 20). But, being "too confident in his dream"
and having lost his balance, revealing his deformity, he
seeks to escape harsh reality in the way that the typical
18
Warren, Who Speaks for the Necyro? p. 443.
Warren character does: "He shut his eyes as though his
private darkness could blot out the external reality" (pp.
20-21). Earlier, standing outside his father's house he
had shut his eyes to evoke his images of idealism: his
father as a visicnary young man and the world "absolute in
beauty" with its gleaming white mountain and puff of cloud
"white as whipped cream" (p. 3). Now on the ship he closes
them not so much to confirm his Idea as to escape unpleasant
external reality? already his Idea, his Dream, is being put
to the test of experience. Meiriherr Duncan epitomizes this
harsh reality, just as Mr. Calloway on the slave ship epit
omized harsh reality for Manty in Band of Angels. And like
Manty, Adam loses— or perhaps never really possessed— a
sense of reality:
Nothing that was happening to him was real. . . .
Nothing was real, and Adam knew that his voice saying
what he then said was not real. It was merely his
self speaking in the darkness of himself, trying to
explain something to himself. (p. 23)
Even when he saw the coast of America in the distance,
"nothing seemed real." In fact, "nothing since that second
morning out of Bremerhaven had seemed real" (p. 26). Not
only does nothing seem real but he also confuses the dream
and the reality:
193
It was as though what he had dreamed, back in Bavaria
in the long months while his father was dying and he
himself was being born into manhood, had been the re
ality, and what had actually happened since was only a
dream. Or was it even a dream? For a man's deepest
dream is all he is, Adam said to himself in the night,
and if that is withdrawn can anything else ever be
real? (p. 26)
b
The question is a most important one not only for Adam but
for all of Warren's Devotees of Idea; it is a question
which informs the incidents of the novel, one which, as
Adam learns, can receive only a negative answer. It is
predicated upon a fallacious assertion, for man, as Adam
also learns, is more than his "deepest dreams," more than
an abstraction. But only when Adam's experience has an
swered the question for him— just as Manty Starr's experi
ence answered her questions— can he recognize the fallacy
of the assertion upon which the question is predicated.
Adam's experiences in New York are as illusory as
those of Slim Sarrett and Isaac Sumpter, but whereas the
implied permanent stays of these latter figures mark their
final sinking into nothingness, Adam's New York sojourn,
coming near the beginning of his ordeal, serves to contri
bute to his eventual awareness of reality. Upon his arrival
even the smoke rolling upward over the rooftops seems "un
real, with no reference to human pain or loss, like a
194
picture" (p. 41). Even the evening light has a "greasy
blackness," contrasting with the gleaming whiteness of the
mountain, snow, and clouds in his image of Bavaria. An even
more startling contrast is the black body of the lynched
negro, the first black man Adam had ever seen— not the form
of a "grizzle-headed Uncle Tom" but a grotesque, mutilated
black body covered with dark blood. Ironically, this fig
ure, representative of those Adam has come to save, elicits
the question, "Can I be that vile?” (p. 45). The question
is ironically ambiguous, for Adam is not thinking of his
complicity in the vileness of the lynchers but rather of
the vileness of the victim. He feels much better, however,
after he concludes that "the Rebels had done it" (p. 47),
a rationalization of the "Treasury of Virtue." "The North
has its own mechanism for evading reality," Warren has
written (Legacy, p. 58); and Adam uses the same mechanism.
In his subsequent search for the house of his uncle's
friend, Adam is reminiscent of another young man searching
for a house in a strange city— Robin, in Hawthorne's "My
Kinsman, Major Molineaux." Robin's mind, like Adam's, vi
brates "between fancy and reality" and he feels at one point
"as if a dream had broken forth from some feverish brain.
. . ." Like Robin, but even more like Mr. Munn in his
195
debouchment from the train at the beginning of Night Rider,
Adam is caught up in the crowd, is "whirled around with the
press of bodies" (p. 48). Adam, who wears a special boot
so as to "look almost like anyone else" (p. 17), almost
comes to act like everyone else: he too feels "the need to
thrust with that knife" (p. 52). Caught up in the mob
violence, his self becomes "other," isolation becomes dom
ination, individuality becomes anonymity, identity becomes
nonentity.
After he is saved— ironically by a Negro— from death
by water in the cellar, Adam experiences what seems to be
his first sense of guilt— "and the guilt came from the real
ization that he was himself" (p. 56). He could now well
answer in the affirmative his question, "Can I be that
vile?" He begins to achieve an awareness of the reality of
his own— and all of mankind's— condition: his legacy is
not only a gift of ideality but also one of humanity. The
baffling knowledge that the Rebels were responsible neither
for the lynching nor for the riot further tests his illu
sions .
Aaron Blaustein, although a catalyst in Adam's chang
ing image of reality, has not himself achieved a valid sense
of reality. A very rich man, he has learned how to make a
196
living but, unlike Old Jacob, he has not learned how to
live. He seems to see reality only in external, corporeal
things. "I have to touch things to think they are real,"
he tells Adam, "that I'm real. I shut my eyes and I think,
Is this me?" (p. 68). In his advice to Adam he says, "The
hardest thing to remember is that other men are men. . . .
But that . . . is the only way you can be a man yourself.
Can be anything" (p. 67). The view is partly true, for, as
Jack Burden learned of the vicious circle of reality, "to
believe in their reality you must believe in your own, but
to believe in your own you must believe in theirs." Or, as
Adam reflects earlier, if man consists only of his deepest
dream and that is withdrawn, can anything else be real?
Blaustein's second bit of advice is that "everything is part
of everything else" (p. 74), a version of Jack Burden's
"spider web theory," suggesting the interrelatedness of
things. Reality, Adam must learn, does not consist of ab
solutism, abstractionism, purism, isolationism.
Blaustein, with his half truths and partial principles
of reality, desires to escape in death from the reality
of life without his son, who has been killed in the War,
but, he tells Adam, he "cannot die." Later, in the army
camp, when Adam, whom Blaustein has chosen as surrogate
197
son, learns that Blaustein has died, he feels that "it was
only the existence of Aaron Blaustein that had made him
feel real, had made him know who he was" (p. 193). Even
though he possesses, and imparts to Adam, only a sense of
quasi-reality, Blaustein contributes to Adam's cumulative
initiation to reality.
Adam's third phase begins after he has abandoned his
surrogate father, as he had his real father, in order to
pursue his Ideal, and has joined the southbound sutler
company of Jedeen Hawksworth and Mose Talbutt. In five
nucleating chapters this phase of Adam's initiation to re
ality shows him on the road to Virginia, alternating between
Jed's wagon and that of Mose; encamped in Pennsylvania near
the Myerhof farm; visiting Gettysburg; and finally staying
in the army camp in Virginia near the Wilderness. The uni
fying figures appearing throughout— Jed and Mose— along with
minor characters in each of the three final locations and
episodes, contribute further to Adam's "dialectical pro
gression. "
The delicate fritillary which Adam contemplates and
seems to identify with at the beginning of Chapter VI re
calls the butterfly motif in Madam Bovarv. in which the
major figure also pursues a dream and is tragically unable
198
to reconcile romantic ideality with reality. But even
more, Adam's attention to the butterfly recalls the words
of his compatriot in Lord Jim— Stein, the butterfly keeper—
regarding still another "romantic" man of Idea:
This magnificent butterfly finds a little heap of dirt
and sits on it; but man he will never on his heap of
mud keep still. He want to be so, and again he want to
be so. . . . Every time he shuts his eyes he sees him
self as a very fine fellow— so fine as he can never
be. . . . In a dream . . . And because you not always
can keep your eyes shut there comes the real trouble—
the heart pain— the world pain.^
Stein's words fit not only Jim but also Adam, who cannot
keep still on his mud heap because he sees it not as a mud
heap but as a gleaming white mountain; but, as Stein says,
one cannot always keep his eyes shut.
Adam, whose name means "man," epitomizes the condition
of all mankind, for as Warren has written, "it is not some,
but all, men who must serve the 'idea.' The lowest and
most vile creature must in some way idealize his existence
in order to exist, and must find sanctions outside him
self."20 Stein continues,
19
Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim (New York, 1958), p. 137.
20
"'The Great Mirage': Conrad and Nostromo." p. 43.
199
A man that is born falls into a dream like a man falls
into the sea. If he tries to climb out into the air
as inexperienced people endeavor to do, he drowns.
. . . The way is to the destructive element submit your
self, and with the exertions of your hands and feet in
the water make the deep, deep sea keep you up.
Warren's own explication of this passage points up its rel
evance to his own writing:
It is man's fate to be born into the "dream"— the fate
of all men. By dream Conrad here means nothing more or
less than man's necessity to justify himself by the
"idea," to idealize himself and his actions into moral
significance of some order, to find sanctions. But
why is the dream like the sea, a "destructive element"?
Because man, in one sense, is purely a creature of na
ture, an animal of black egotism and savage impulses.
He should, to follow the metaphor, walk on the dry land
of "nature," the real, naturalistic world, and not be
dropped into the waters he is so ill equipped to sur
vive in. Those men who take the purely "natural" view,
who try to climb out of the sea, who deny the dream and
man's necessity to submit to the idea, who refuse to
create values that are, quite literally, "supernatural"
and therefore human, are destroyed by the dream. They
drown in it, and their agony is the agony of their
frustrated humanity. Their failure is the failure to
understand what is specifically human.
"To surrender to the incorrigible and ironical necessity of
the 'idea,'" Warren concludes, "is man’s fate and his only
triumph"; and Stein concludes about Jim: "He is romantic—
romantic . . . And that is very bad— very bad . . . Very
21
Warren, "'The Great Mirage': Conrad and Nostromo,"
p. 43.
200
22
good, too." Service to the "idea," the "dream," is,
paradoxically, both fateful and triumphant, both "bad” and
"good." It is good because as a part of man's condition—
his legacy— it is the index of his possibility. But to see
only the abstraction of "idea," untested by experience, is
to submerge oneself rather than to submit and keep oneself
up by the exertions of hands and feet. To attempt to emerge
from the "dream" and walk on the dry, naturalistic ground
is to "drown"; to submerge oneself in the "dream" with no
exertion against the element of the dream is also to "drown."
"The way" is to recognize, accept, and reconcile the two
elements in the dialectic.
Adam, who fails to see man as "a creature of nature,
an animal of black egotism," is submerged in his "dream";
Mose and Jed, along with others who deny the dream and fail
to "understand what is specifically human," are attempting
to walk on the naturalistic dry land. Riding along beside
Mose, Adam feels "lost in a realm of fantasies" (p. 88);
riding beside Jed, he feels that "the self that had once
existed and had had that dream no longeer existed. Only
the dry, pale shell, like that discarded by a locust,
22
Conrad, Lord Jim, p. 139.
201
existed now" (p. 99). A victim of his own ideality, Adam
consists only of his abstract, "deepest dream," which, being
thwarted and unfulfilled, causes Adam himself to lack a
sense of self-reality. His problem of self-reality is com
pounded: not only is he a Jew but a crippled Jew, and
further, a crippled Jew in a foreign land, with a dream
misunderstood by everyone. Later he feels the need to
"affirm his history and identity in the torpid, befogged
loneliness of this land" (p. 163). Later still, he feels
"his identity draining away" (p. 224). Showing the usual
concern of the typical Warren figure for his name, Adam
asks Mose to call him "Adam" to help him be "worthy" of the
name, but Mose nicknames him "Slewfoot" because of his de
formity, and calls him "Slew." Ironically, Adam is already
worthy of the name "Adam," for he epitomizes the "fate of
all men," who are born into the "dream," and, like his
namesake, he gradually loses his innocence and acquires
knowledge. Adam is careful to tell Mrs. Myerhof his real
name and she alone informs him that she is glad to know him
by his right name, much as Mrs. Harrick alone bothers to
get Nick Papadoupalos1s name straight in The Cave.
Hans and Maran Myerhof briefly enter the cast of minor
characters, make their contributions to Adam's "dialectical
202
progression," and are left behind as the wagons move south
ward to the Wilderness. Shortly before meeting Maran, Adam
reflects that he is nearly thirty and has never lain with
a woman. Closing his eyes, he dreams of stretching forth
his hand and laying it on "a white, swelling breast," for
then "nothing, nothing else, matters" (p. 94). But whether
it is the white mountain or the white breast of his dreams,
it never becomes a reality for Adam; the abyss between the
idea and the reality is vast; or, as the point has been
expressed so adeptly elsewhere,
Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the shadow . . .
Between the desire
And the spasm
Between the potency
And the existence
Between the essence
And the descent
Falls the shadow . . .
A kind of "hollow man,” Adam lacks the courage to reach out
a hand to Maran. Later, on the road south, he wishes he had
had even "the courage to tell her goodbye" (p. 135). A
"stuffed man" with headpiece filled with illusions, only at
the end does he become a "violent soul."
203
If Maran is momentarily a surrogate wife, Hans is
briefly a surrogate father to Adam— a dying father, who,
Adam thought, would not repudiate his idealism. But Adam
experiences only disillusionment. The molasses jar has
broken and the pieces are sticky: Hans has never heard of
Adam's father or his heroics. The gallantry of Hans and
the other Germans has been misconstrued as cowardice respon
sible for the loss of the Battle of Chancellorsville; and
the noble image of a hero becomes that of a dying man with
a smelling wound and with a "gray glaze" over his eyes. As
Adam leaves the farmhouse for the final time, he once again
shuts his eyes in an attempt to escape this unpleasant re
ality— "to shut out that dim gleam" (p. 130).
With his chimera even further tested by experience,
Adam arrives with Jed and Mose at Gettysburg, where they
meet the opportunistic, cynical entrepeneur, Dr. Mordecai
Sulgrave, who is exhuming and "rearranging" the corpses.
Lofty rhetoric, not reality, is Sulgrave's forte; his insis
tent euphemizing is only an expression of his cynical, blase
attitude toward the reality of both life and death. Death
to him is only a business which is not "slack": "There is a
grave need," he says (p. 147). Sulgrave climaxes the gro
tesque scene by displaying one of his "specimens" as though
204
it were Yorick's skull, and then passing out in a drunken
stupor. Thus, Adam's doctrinaire heroics are contraposed
by the cynicism of Sulgrave, the nondescript man, and even
the young man who had been wounded. The pieces of the
molasses jar are even stickier.
If Hans Myerhof is the disillusioned hero unrecognized,
Simms Purdew, in the Virginia army camp, is, to Adam, the
disillusioning hero recognized. Purdew, who had been
awarded the Medal of Honor for gallantry, engages in an
"unheroic" game of baiting the Negroes. Later, when the
soldiers take sadistic pleasure in the beating of "Mollie
the Mutton," the camp prostitute (reminiscent of the old hag
in World Enough and Time), Adam closes his eyes to the harsh
reality. And when a fight breaks out over the presence of
Mose at the whipping of a white woman, Adam feels hatred for
a Negro, one of whom he has come to save and who, instead,
has saved him. Shortly thereafter, recognizing the incon
sistency and betrayal of his ideal, he lies with his eyes
closed, trying "to know nothing in the world" (p. 209).
Further betrayal comes when Adam later curses Mose, only to
be haunted with guilt for his imagined part in the succeed
ing violence.
The violence— the murder of Jed by Mose— which provides
205
the denouement and the "epiphany" of Adam's third phase,
is inevitable, for it results from the reality of the nature
of the two men as well as the nature of their attitude
toward reality. When Adam finds Jed's body he suddenly
realizes that "what had been a charade, a dream, the logical
working out of a story told long ago, was suddenly real"
(p. 229). Both Jed and Mose, Adam comes to realize, have
only a fabricated, pseudo-reality: they are imposters.
The Negro is not Mose Talbut but Mose Crawfurd, deserter,
with a "W" (for "worthless") branded on his thigh— a badge
of cowardice. Seeking identity in a white world, Mose had
called Maran Myerhof "sauf and juicy," had peeked at the
decomposing face of the dead white man, had relished the
beating of the white prostitute. Another of Adam's gleam
ing white ideals is besmirched; another illusion is shed;
another molasses jar has broken: the negro is no "grizzle-
head Uncle Tom weeping in gratitude," just as his supposed
liberator, to vary the allusion, is no Galahad. Jed, Adam
learns, has been motivated not by his love for the Negro
but by his hatred for his own father.
The reality is hard for Adam to accept, and once again
he seeks to avoid it by closing his eyes. But the "dream,"
the "charade," of Mose and Jed is real. Yet "nothing was
206
over. Everything was just beginning" (p. 229). Adam, that
is, is just beginning to emerge from the wilderness of his
own dream just when he prepares to enter the literal Wil
derness .
In the advancing procession of men and materials, Adam
is reminiscent of Stephen Crane's Henry Fleming, who in the
retreating procession, encounters the tattered man, who
seems to probe his guilty secret of no "badge of courage."
Adam encounters the old man with a white beard, who seems
to probe Adam's secret— his Jewishness. Feeling "blanched
into nothingness," Adam escapes from the procession and
enters the Wilderness, and his final phase.
Mrs. Monmorancy Pugh, whose own son has died, briefly
becomes a surrogate for Adam's mother, whom Adam has never
forgiven for her own unforgiveness of his father's idealism
and whom he has rejected in order to pursue his own ideal
ism. Mrs. Pugh combines a simple love of beauty with a
realistic common sense. The reality of her son's death has
made her strong and has given her a tighter grip on reality,
whereas it has made her husband cynical and has loosened
his grip on reality. She holds no illusory trust in man,
including her husband; the fact that she gives Adam a gun
for protection shows her sense of reality and practicality.
whereas the fact that she does not load it shows her human
ity. Her hint that Adam should remain goes unheeded in the
face of his monomaniacal pursuit of his ideal. Whether the
ideal is a white whale, a red badge, or a symbolic white
mountain, the devotee feels impelled to abandon natural
impulses of domesticity and humanity. Although Mrs. Pugh
tells him that "one side a durn river [is] jes lak t'other"
(p. 267), Adam feels the impulsion to "cross over to find
out what I have to find out" (p. 266). So, "under the
twinkle of a fading star" he crosses over to "death's other
kingdom." Finally, he finds himself alone in the very
heart of the Wilderness; "everything in the world had tried
to stop him, temptations, disillusion, fear, the blankness
of the world and time, all the betrayals of his dream. But
he had come" (p. 2 99).
Adam's contemplation of the images of the various
figures whose experiences have tested his dream is inter
rupted when the "world" breaks into the thicket, "as though
his fantasy had conjured up reality" (p. 291). In the
course of the struggle between the eight gray "scarecrows"
and the "two men in blue," Adam kills a Confederate boy.
There is none of the "Homeric glory" or extravagance of
"color lurid with breathless deeds," which another youth.
208
Henry Fleming, looked for in the same war. But the experi
ence has shattered Adam* s illusions and has brought him a
certain awareness of reality. The effects of the War which
Warren attributes to the participants xn general seem to
accrue also to Adam:
Those men, from conflict and division, rose to strength.
From complication they made the simple cutting edge of
action. They were, in the deepest sense, individuals;
that is, by moral awareness they had achieved, in vary
ing degrees, identity. (Legacy, p. 90)
The novel is not simply another stereotyped Bildungsroman.
however, for there are the two lines— the line of learning
and the line of unlearning, with the emphasis on the latter.
Only by shedding his illusions can Adam achieve a sense of
reality, a sense which comes as the result of at least
three important lessons after he has killed a man.
In causing the death of a fellow human, Adam confronts
the dialectic of life and death, and comes to realize that
not only does death follow life but that life may follow
or come from death. He asks, in effect, the question asked
by Eliot's magus, "Were we led all that way for / Birth or
Death?" Adam experiences a kind of birth in the midst of
death— a birth to reality— and yet a death— a death to his
old illusions. The novel, beginning with the physical death
of the father and ending with the birth of the son to re
ality, is filled with death. Not only does Adam's real
father die but his surrogate father, Blaustein, wishes to
die, because his real son, Stephen, is dead; and presently
Blaustein does die. Hans Myerhof is dying a frustrated
death— a real hero dying the death of a hero manque'' . The
deaths of the men at Gettysburg constitute a business for
the Sulgraves of the world. Jed Hawksworth, a "hollow man"
long dead within, dies physically at the hand of Mose, who
himself possesses little real life within. Similarly,
Monmorancy Pugh, who died inside when his son died, feels
that "nuthen don't make much diff'runce" (p. 275). Adam
realizes that to be dead "was to know that nothing would
ever be different" (p. 4). Accordingly, Willie Stark, dying
physically in All the King's Men, tells Jack Burden, "It
might all have been different" (p. 425). Like Jeremiah
Beaumont, who thinks at the end of World Enough and Time,
"All might have been different" (p. 483), Willie and a num
ber of other Warren figures must use the subjunctive, real
izing too late the possibilities of difference. Adam,
assessing his experiences, feels that he would have gone
through them again— "But, oh, with a different heart!" (p.
210
'>
Although Willie Stark recognized possibility, he
predicated it on the hypothetical: "If it hadn't happened,
it might— have been different ..." (All the King's Men,
p. 425). Similarly, Sue Murdock in At Heaven's Gate tells
Jerry Calhoun, "We could have been so happy . . . if things
had been different" (p. 143); and Jack Harrick in The Cave
thinks, "If something had been different . . ." (p. 3 76).
Lettice in Flood also wishes things were "different"; and
Maggie, who thinks at one point, "If only you could feel
this wav, always ..." (p. 245), imagines a "thousand ifs.
It sometimes just seems . . . that life is a stalk with the
ifs— the possibilities— just falling off one by one, like
leaves when the cold comes ..." (Flood, p. 248). Through
out Wilderness. Adam also predicates his attitude upon the
hypothetical rather than upon the real; he sees the if,
rather than the is,. From the opening page with its six _if
clauses to the final chapter, where Adam applies the _if to
his experience with Mose, Adam concerns himself with what
"could have been" and what "may be" rather than with what
really i_s. In Brother to Dracrons. "R. P. W." berates Isham
for saying, "If I had known," for "the great Machine of
History / Will mesh its gears sweetly in that sweet lubri
cation / Of human regret, and the irreversible / Dialectic
211
will proceed" (p. 127). Only when one predicates his views
on reality is one able to achieve a sense of reality. Like
wise, "if you are different / Then everything is different,
somehow, too" (Brother to Dragons, p. 128).
Above all, Adam comes to realize what his true legacy
is: that "he was only human" (p. 309). Now most fully
"worthy" of the name "Adam,” he seeks only to be "worthy"
of the "namelessness" of the dead Confederates and "of what
they, as men and in their error, had endured" (p. 310). No
longer holding the philosophy of the "Treasury of Virtue,"
Adam illustrates "the glory of the human effort to win
meaning from the complex motives of men and the blind ruck
of event" (Legacy, p. 108). Mrs. Pugh summed up the lesson
most succinctly when she told Adam, "A thing ain't ne'er
what you think it is!" (p. 260). If Adam had to learn the
lesson of the jLf and the is, he also had to learn the lesson
of the seem and the be., of appearance and reality. Adam's
whole struggle may be examined in terms of his attention to
and misunderstanding of motive— both the motive of others
and of himself. From the outset, when he is unable to
understand the motive of his father in betraying his trust
of man, Adam erroneously believes that all men are moti
vated by an ideal. Accordingly, when the sailor who effects
Adam's escape from the ship tells him he does not know why
he did it, Adam is incredulous and then disillusioned. None
of the crew believes that Adam's motive for going to America
is to "fight for freedom." Later, Adam tells Jed Hawksworth
that he knows why Jed defended the condemned Negro, but he
learns that Jed was motivated by hate rather than by love,
by a repudiation similar to Adam's repudiation of his own
father. Like Hamish Bond, Jed was merely acting in repudi
ation of the aloof aristocracy of his mother and the
sycophancy of his father; and, like Bond, who was the in
tended victim of Rau-Ru whom he had saved# Hawksworth be
comes the real victim of Mose, his own kla. Adam learns
further that Mose had saved him (Adam) in the water-filled
cellar, not for noble, altruistic reasons but to avoid a
"racket" which may have endangered his own life. Adam's
understanding of the motivation for the War itself is
altered. "Their reason is hard to guess," Warren wrote in
the poem "History Among the Rocks." Blaustein had told
Adam that "they got into this war because they know nothing
of the world" (p. 66). Perhaps the same could be said of
Adam. Mrs. Pugh further challenges Adam's noble concepts
with her view: "They is killen fer killen" (p. 266).
Blaustein had also told Adam: "The only way to know why
you do a thing, is to do it" (p. 89). When Adam kills the
man, it is not so much the act itself— although he finally
is able to act— which brings the awareness, but the motive
behind it. At first, he feels that he did it "for freedom,
but later he reflects, "I killed him . ♦ . because his foot
was not like mine" (p. 304). Like Henry Fleming, who car
ries the flag "heroically" to prove that he was not a "mule
driver," Adam realizes that his own motivation is not so
noble.
Thus stripped of his illusions, Adam feels that "every
thing he had ever known was false" (p. 303). With the
realization comes the resignation and with the resignation
comes the exultation: "He felt that if this was the way
the world was, it was a joy to know it" (p. 303). It is
the "awfulness" of joy experienced by Old Jacob and other
Warren figures who achieve a sense of reality; with it he
is able to put on the boots and walk out of the Wilderness
and into the "awful responsibility of Time."
CHAPTER IV
"A SICK DIALECTIC"
"Reality is harsh to the feet of Shadows."
— C. S. Lewis, The Great
Divorce
"Nothing genuine is allowed to appear and
nobody knows what1s real. . . . That's
the struggle of humanity, to recruit others
to your version of what's real."
— Saul Bellow, The Adventures
of Aucrie March
214
CHAPTER IV
"A SICK DIALECTIC"
"Smile now life's gold Apollonian smile at a sick
dialectic." This line from Warren's poem "Infant Boy at
Midcentury" could well serve as the epigraph for his latest
novel, Flood. The subtitle, A Romance of Our Time, indi
cates that the events are set in the present, unlike the
settings of six of the other seven novels: the period of
the tobacco wars in 1905-1908— Night Rider; the 20's and
30's— At Heaven's Gate and All the King's Men; the early
nineteenth century— World Enough and Time; and the Civil
War— Band of Angels and Wilderness. "Our time" is a time
characterized by the "dusk of compromise," a time when
"Good and Evil, to iron out all their differences, stage
their meeting at summit." "This is an age of depersonali
zation," Yasha Jones says in Flood:
You can think of a person as definable only at the point
— no, only a£ the point— where an infinite number of
215
216
lines intersect in flight inward and outward. Person
equals point-from-which. And point-toward-which.
Which is nothing. This is the issue of our age . . .
(p. 180)
The infant boy can only smile "life's gold Apollonian smile"
— harmonious, balanced, ordered— at such a "sick dialectic"
— "sick" because its elements are compromised rather than
reconciled. "We must find," Warren writes elsewhere, "a
dialectic which will accommodate. . . . We must find a def
inition of our humanity which will transcend. . . .
Flood: A Romance of Our Time is a dramatization of this
attempt.
The novel is a "Romance" of our time— in much the same
sense that World Enough and Time is "A Romantic Novel,"
according to its subtitle. In each case the word "romance"
2
may be applied m a number of significant ways. There is,
of course, the popular sense of love and adventure. Warren
and Brooks have defined "romantic" as that which "implies
the remote, the exotic, the exaggerated" as opposed to
^"Robert Penn Warren, "The Themes of Robert Frost, "
Selected Essays (New York, 1958), p. 124.
2
Robert B. Heilman examines the significance of the
term in connection with World Enough and Time ("Tangled
Web," Sewanee Review. LIX [Summer 1951], 107-119).
217
"realistic"— "having a strong sense of fact or actuality,
. . . the presentation of ordinary, easily observable de-
3
tails which give an impression of fidelity to experience."
The term, then, is applicable both literarily and generally
to one's attitude or response toward experience, toward
reality. In the former sense, although not observing the
artificial distinction between Romance and the Novel noted
by Hawthorne, Warren is very much in the Hawthorne tradi
tion; he presents the "truths of the human heart" under
circumstances of his own choosing and creation, and is some
times charged with writing melodrama, with being an
4 5
"anatomist of monsters," with using "drug store Gothic."
But like Hawthorne, who, in his "Custom House Sketch,"
expresses his concern for both the Actual and the Imaginary,
the Real and the Romantic, Warren is concerned with a dia
lectic— the dialectic' of the realistic and the romantic.
In a review of Edith Sitwell's poems— a review entitled
3
Understanding Fiction, p. 608.
4
Oscar Cargill, "Anatomist of Monsters," College Eng
lish. IX (October 1947), 1-8.
5
Wallace W. Douglas, "Drug Store Gothic: The style of
Robert Penn Warren," College English. XV (February 1954),
265-272.
"The Romantic Strain"— Warren seems to view the term as both
honorific and pejorative. He notes, for example, Sitwell's
"lament for the lost and terrible innocence," but he casti
gates such "escapist poetry" for its failure to exhibit "a
sort of understanding of the world from which it flees."
This literary attitude suggests also the general attitude
in Flood, in which Brad Tolliver comes to understand the
world of Fiddlersburg, Tennessee, from which he has fled;
and concomitantly, he comes to understand self, for in a
sense, each character is. Fiddlersburg. On the other hand,
Cal Fiddler, who returned to Fiddlersburg to practice medi
cine, is called "fine and romantic" (p. 218) in much the
way that his counterpart in medicine— and in idealism—
Adam Stanton is, in All the King's Men. Thus, in the words
of Joseph Conrad's Stein, to be "romantic" is "very bad—
very bad . . . very good, too. ..."
The novel's central image, the flood— both imminent
and eminent— also has a number of significant implications.
Similar to the cave image in Warren's sixth novel, the flood
6"The Romantic Strain" (rev. of Edith Sitwell's Rustic
Elegies). New Republic. LIII (November 23, 1927), 23.
219
image serves as a kind of objective correlative. Not only
does it motivate most of the action but it also clears away
illusions, focuses attention upon reality, and brings real
ization, in the most basic sense of "making real." Blanding
Cottshill, the lawyer, sums up its effect: "That moment
when some place is just overpassed but still extant and
waiting for the flood, that's the time you can see its vir
tues and vices most clearly. Like that queer light before
7
a storm in summer. You get a queer feeling then" (p. 48).
The title of an early short story, "Testament of
Flood," could serve as a subtitle for the novel. In the
novel, however, the flood provides both testament and hand
sel; that is, the flood, which has yet to occur at the end
of the book, is significant not only for what it will do—
its legacy— but also for what it is doing in the lives of
those who are anticipating it— its earnest. Brother Potts
expresses the effect of this anticipation of the flood:
"It looks like all this waiting to be flooded out is doing
7
The "queer light," the ominous green which shines be
fore a storm, recalls an early short story, "When the Light
Gets Green," in which the narrator acquires a sense of re
ality regarding life's mutability and human relationships—
as seen in the realization of his incapacity to love his
grandfather.
something to good people. They are turned inside out" (p.
236). The major figures are indeed "turned inside out,"
enabling each to see the reality of self and others for the
first time. —
The theme of relocation is introduced by the epigraph,
a verse from the book of Amos, which serves as Brother
0
Potts's text. In the verse, God promises his people that
they shall no more be pulled up out of their land. The
fifth verse of the chapter warns of a judgment like a flood
"And the Lord of hosts is he that toucheth the land, and it
shall melt, and all that dwell therein shall mourn: it
shall rise up wholly like a flood." At one point in the
novel, Maggie has the impression that the land itself is
"flowing" (p. 73). Similarly, in a flashback depicting his
earlier return to Fiddlersburg, Brad feels "as though the
very silence and darkness of the house were a rising flood,
a medium that rose deeper and deeper around him and in him,
absorbing him" (p. 195; italics mine).
0
The Bible is also a significant, underlying "text"
for Warren, who has advised aspiring young writers to "read
your Bibles and mark them well." He has said further, "I
used to read the Bible a lot, and still do, off and on.
And I mean the King James Version, too, by God." (In a
personal letter to me, March 23, 1965)
221
In a sense, four of the major characters— Brad, Maggie,
Yasha, and Cal— have a "flood experience" within themselves,
in much the same way that the characters in Warren's sixth
novel have an internal "cave experience." Brother Potts
attempts to make the townspeople see that "the Gospel of
Christ is about relocation"— that "it is jerking a man out
of one life and relocating him in the life of the spirit"
(p. 80). The novel dramatizes a kind of relocation to
reality.
The flood image also points up the dialectic of self
and the "blind ruck of event," as seen in the line from
Brother Potts' song: "When I see the life I led / Whelmed
and drowned beneath the flood— " (p. 82). Implicit here
are the "two poles"— "individuality and the anonymous de-
9
vouring life-flux" which Warren writes of elsewhere. Mr.
Munn, at the beginning of Night Rider, was caught up in the
"drift of people" as one "marooned in the midst of rising
flood waters" (p. 3). Conversely, Captain Todd, who pos
sessed self-reality,
was like a great gray boulder, still unsubmerged, in
the course of some violent, flooded stream. You knew
that when the flood season was past and the waters
9
"Love and Separateness in Eudora Welty," pp. 246-259.
222
lost their turbulence and had shrunk back into their
normal and modest bed, the boulder would be there
still, still itself and solid as ever. (Night Rider,
p. 44)
But Munn, lacking reality of self, was no boulder, nor was
Jeremiah Beaumont, who, in prison, was "like a man caught
in a black flood and being borne down, and all words spoken
now would be but bubbles and froth on that blackness"
(World Enough and Time, p. 379). Later, Jeremiah feels
that he and Rachel are "tossed together" in a "blind flood"
— "tossed together and clinging in a desperate embrace
while the flood rolled them and spun them" (p. 411). Simi
larly, when Brad enters the house and discovers that Maggie
has eloped with Yasha, the emptiness is "like a flood that
had filled the house" (Flood, p. 385). The oxymoronic
phrase "full of emptiness" suggests the paradoxical nature
of the flood: it may involve both the engulfing of self
and the realization of self as part of the relocation to
reality.
The flood is further paradoxical in its power to de
posit the unpleasant detritus of reality as well as to
sluice it away. In his discussion of Eudora Welty's "At
the Landing," Warren notes that when the flood comes over
the Landing it upsets the "ordered lives, leaving slime
223
in the houses."10 Warren uses this image of the "slimed
foundations" at least eight times in his fiction. The
flood in "Blackberry Winter" had washed "a lot of trash and
mud and gravel" into the flower bed; and later Seth is dis
turbed by the fact that the flood had washed
a lot of trash and filth out from under Dellie's
house . . . Old pieces of rag, two or three rusted
cans, pieces of rotten rope, some hunks of old dog
dung, broken glass, old paper, and all sorts of
things like that had washed out from under Dellie's
house to foul her clean yard. It looked just as
bad as the yards of the other cabins, or worse. It
was worse, as a matter of fact, because it was a
surprise. I had never thought of all that filth being
under Dellie's house.^
The flood causes Seth to realize that reality consists not
only of clean yards and neat cabins but also of trash and
filth which he had never thought of before— that appearance
is not reality.
In explaining how he came to write "Blackberry Win-
12
ter," Warren mentions the significance of the flood-detritus
10"Love and Separateness in Eudora Welty," p. 246.
^"Blackberry Winter," "The Circus in the Attic and
Other Stories, p. 78.
12
Robert Penn Warren, "Writer at Work: How a Story
Was Born and How, Bit by Bit, It Grew," New York Times
Book Review, (March 1, 1959), pp. 4-5, 36. Reprinted in
Understanding Fiction. 2nd ed.
224
image:
Whatever the rights and wrongs of the matter, the war,
Melville said, would show the "slimed foundations" of
the world. There was the sense in 1945 that we had
seen the slimed foundations, and now as I write this,
the image that comes to mind is the homely one from
my story— the trash washed out from under Dellie's
cabin to foul her pridefully clean yard.
In the same way, the prospect of the flood in Warren's most
recent novel forces the trash of reality into open view in
people's lives. They search for the reason of things, but
it is gone; they are, as Mr. Munn in Night Rider expresses
it, "like flood water going down and leaving trash and
stuff up in a tree" (p. 356). Like these people, Jeremiah
Beaumont, in the early unreality of his frustrated idealism,
experiences a nausea "like the slime left on the trunks and
stones when a flood withdraws from the valley" (World Enough
and Time, p. 114); and in the domain of La Grand' Bosse
Jeremiah observes the "slimed foundations" of the shacks;
"I saw from the grayish staining of the lower part of the
stakes that flood water had here come up some five feet from
the ground. I looked down at the ground and the objects of
13
filth and waste that had accumulated there" (p. 462).
^Helen Beaumont, in the short story "Testament of
Flood," was so "dry" she "was like those bits of straw or
That the trash is associated with unpleasant reality
is suggested in Flood when Maggie, after remarking that
moonlight maintains "kind illusions," makes Yasha promise
to look over the wall behind the Fiddler house in order to
observe the trash "just for a touch of reality" (p. 46).
Later, Brad's remoteness from reality and his attempt to
escape reality are indicated when, lying beside Leontine
Purtle, he desires to drift in the flood, letting the cur
rent "go past and carry with it everything that had ever
happened, like the trash and plunder sluiced away on the
crest of a freshet" (p. 361). Only when Brad and others
realize that unpleasant reality cannot be simply "sluiced
away" but must be accepted, can the floods "lift up their
voice" and "clap their hands" in joy, as in the text of
Brother Potts's farewell sermon. This "awfulness of joy"
is attainable only with the acceptance and reconciliation
of the dialectics of reality.
Each of the major characters— Brad, Maggie, Yasha, Cal,
trash lodged innocently in the branches of creek-bottom
sycamores as a testament of long-subsided spring flood— a
sort of high water mark of passion in the community." ("The
Circus in the Attic" and Other Stories, p. 163.) Here the
flood-trash image suggests the reality of the past.
226
and Brother Potts— experiences "intimate psychological
cruxes," to borrow a phrase Warren uses in discussing John
14
Crowe Ransom's poetry. "Crux" here may be applied in
four ways. It is a difficult, puzzling problem— the prob
lem of what is real and enduring in the face of a destruc
tive flood (as expressed, for example, in Brad's question,
"Was there ever an inner reality?" p. 204). It is a
determinate point— the point of insight, of "realization,"
in its basic sense. It is essence— the individual reality,
the ultimate nature. It is a "cross" in a secular sense—
a symbol of death to illusion, of relocation to reality.
Life itself in Fiddlersburg, a town about to "die," is a
crux. If it is true, as Brad says, that "Fiddlersburg will
be convicted of the crime of having existed" (p. 101), the
main characters are convicted of having never really ex
isted. An exception is Brother Potts. "He exists," Brad
says, for "he is Fiddlersburg" (p. 85). Another exception
14
Robert Penn Warren, "John Crowe Ransom: A Study in
Irony," Virginia Quarterly Review. XI (January 1935), 93.
Warren, who has found in the poetry of Ransom "a sad, or
gay, awareness of the polarities of life" ("John Crowe
Ransom: Some Random Remarks," Shenandoah. XIV [Spring
1963], 19; italics mine), manages to insert a tribute to
the poet in Flood. Driving past Vanderbilt University,
Yasha Jones remarks to Brad: "His [Ransom's] poetry is very
beautiful" (p. 23).
is Izzie Goldfarb, of whom Brad says, "He is Fiddlersburg.
I have been ten thousand miles away and I have shut my eyes
and I have said the word Fiddlersburg. and what I saw was
Old Goldfarb. . . . I don't know why he is Fiddlersburg,
but he is. . . . Yes, I do know why. He made me see
Fiddlersburg" (164, 165). Thus, Fiddlersburg— a town about
to be sentenced for its "crime" of existence; the flood—
a phenomenon about to render the town nonexistent; and the
folk— those about to be relocated— all serve to precipitate
the "intimate psychological cruxes" of the major figures.
The five major characters— Brad, Maggie, Cal, Yasha,
and Brother Potts— share the attempt to give expression to
reality in some form. Brad, in attempting to depict the
reality of Fiddlersburg in the movie script, parodies real
ity but comes eventually to discover not only the reality
of Fiddlersburg but also the reality of self. Maggie, in
"fleshing out" in words her own reality and that of Cal,
discovers it for the first time. Cal, having lost self
reality, and with it his expressive fulfillment as a doctor,
regains some of both. Yasha, who came to Fiddlersburg to
document a vision, both learns that vision is not itself
reality and discovers a new vision. Brother Potts, seeking
to express in a song and a sermon his own reality and that
of Fiddlersburg before cancer or the flood can be victori
ous, finds joy in fulfillment. At least five minor char
acters lend a "pervasive sense of participation" and "give
15
the novel its density, the weight of destiny": Lettice
Poindexter, Brad's former wife, who appears only in flash
backs; Blanding Cottshill, philosophical town lawyer, an
elderly version of Faulkner's Gavin Stevens; Old Frog-Eye,
a somewhat more domesticated La Grand' Bosse; Mother Fiddler,
a combination of Mr. Munn's "cousin," Ianthe Sprague, Jerry
Calhoun's Aunt Ursula, and Rachel Jordan's mother; and
Leontine Purtle, a blind girl, who is "evermore stacked
up," a kind of Pippa who "passes" significantly in Brad's
life, where all's not right with the world. What Warren
has written concerning Dreiser's characters is equally true
of his own; "As every person enters the story with a role
in the dialectic, so every person enters with a human need
16
which seeks fulfillment in the story." Each character
in Flood has a role, varying in degrees of influence, in
the struggle and growing awareness of reality by Brad, the
unifying figure of all the characters; yet each has his
15
Robert Penn Warren, "An American Tragedy." p. 1.
16
Warren, "An American Tragedy," p. 3.
229
own need for fulfillment. An examination of the five major
characters, with primary attention given to Brad, and of the
five minor characters in their relation to the major ones
will provide an understanding of the novel.
Yasha Jones, who comes to Fiddlersburg to put an
"image" on celluloid (p. 270)— Yasha, who has lived for
years in the "joy of abstraction" (p. 264)— feels that the
place and its doom will give him the "perfect image of his
pure and difficult joy" (p. 100). Like modern man, ad
dressed in Warren's poem "Terror," Yasha "leans after" joy,
but, also like all of modern man, he was "born to no ade
quate definition" either of joy or terror. Riding beside
Brad in the Jaguar, Yasha remembers in a flash of terror the
crash in which his wife was killed, and then he reflects,
"Terror [is] so near to joy, anguish to ecstasy" (p. 33).
A sense of reality, as other Warren characters learn, in
volves an "awfulness of joy"— both "anguish and ecstasy."
Yasha, however, knows only the abstraction of joy and
the "joy of abstraction"— "which means participation in all
that is not yours, since you have lived past all that was
yours" (p. 264). Having experienced the anguish of war and
of his wife's death, Yasha arrives in Fiddlersburg with a
sense of pseudo-reality in unreality, in nothingness:
"Having nothing, he had all" (p. 264). "All he now had
left was joy: or that difficult and austere thing that,
because it was all he had salvaged, he called joy" (p. 105).
Everything else was something he "would have to endure, with
joy ..." (p. 168). "Joy" to him is all that is left after
the "depersonalization" of the age. He eventually finds
the "awfulness of joy," not as the unreal remnant of deper
sonalization but rather in the reality of a person— Maggie.
It is a joy based not on vision but on reality. He is
impressed by Brother Potts, who seeks a similar goal, as
expressed in the line of his song, "Oh, let me know . . .
perfect joy" (p. 239). At the end of the novel, both Yasha
and Brother Potts can say with the narrator of Brother to
Dragons, "I have made new acquaintance with the nature of
joy" (p. 209).
Both Yasha and Brother Potts struggle with the "shadow"
"between the idea and the reality." When the minister has
difficulty writing his song, Yasha quotes Dante: "The
idea is there— the vision . . ., but the hand trembles" (p.
240). Later, sitting in the moonlight at the base of the
monument, the "spiritual center" of Fiddlersburg, Yasha
tells Brad that the expression of reality will come in what
Stendhal called le silence du bonheur. the "quietness of
231
good fortune" or "joy."
Yasha has possessed the idea, the "vision"— "I had a
vision," he tells Maggie. "An image seemed to hang there
in the air, but the sunlight struck through it. California
sunlight, you know, is very bright" (p. 102). (Sunlight
reveals reality whereas, in Maggie's words, "the moonlight
maintains your kind illusions" [p. 46]. Maggie insists that
Yasha look at the trash in daylight for a touch of reality.)
Yasha hopes to "recapture," to "document," his vision, which
"comes and goes." There is, first, the "vision of himself"
(p. 227). Four major flashbacks indicate that during the
war Yasha had worked in the OSS under the assumed identity
of Monsieur Duval, and he wonders at one point "who Yasha
Jones was" (p. 265). Later, with Maggie in Fiddlersburg,
he feels himself falling "perilously into the shadowy depth
of himself" and longs "to establish connection with some
thing" (p. 187) . Like the characters in The Cave, he feels
the impulsion to reach out, to grasp, in order to confirm
reality— his own and that of others— but "his hand could
close on nothing" (p. 187).
Yasha's vision of self is that of "the shadow of a
human figure," "dim and without feature," drifting "across
a blank screen in an empty theater" (p. 57). The cinematic
232
image appears again later when he sees himself in a film
which he had also made: "It was as though, while he watched
the film, he realized that in making it he had lost the
thread of meaning which the film had been supposed to have
. . (p. 227). In this sense, Yasha resembles Jack
Burden, who felt that without "vision"— in his case, a pure
image of Anne— "our lives would be nothing except an old
piece of film rolled on a spool and thrown into a desk
drawer among the unanswered letters" (All the King's Men.
17
p. 126).
Sitting by the monument in the heart of Fiddlersburg,
Yasha recalled the "Mystery Spot" in California, where
17
The film image, one of Warren's favorxtes, appears xn
five of the eight novels, the exceptions being, of course,
the two set in the time of the Civil War and the one set in
the early nineteenth century. In each case, the image sug
gests a detached confrontation with the reality of self, a
"remembrance of things past," or a sense of meaninglessness
in life. Mr. Munn, imagining his "former and later selves"
to be "nothing more than superimposed exposures on the same
film," feels that all of his actions had been "unaimed and
meaningless" (Night Rider, p. 114). Jerry Calhoun, like
Yasha, has a vision of his other self and feels the need to
explain, to find meaning: "It was like there were two Jerry
Calhouns, the Jerry Calhoun to whom it had happened and the
Jerry Calhoun to whom nothing had happened . . . the Jerry
Calhoun to whom it had happened kept trying scrupulously to
explain it all to the Jerry Calhoun to whom nothing had
happened at all" (At Heaven's Gate, p. 232) . Jack Burden,
"drowning in West," relived his life, which was "like a home
233
visitors pay twenty-five cents for a "distortion of experi
ence and of the self," and he realized the difficulty of
achieving reality of self. "He thought how, if you look at
a thing, the very fact of your looking changes it. He
thought how, if you think about yourself, that very fact
changes you" (p. 2 74). Further, he seemed to fear the re
ality of self: "He was afraid that, if he thought about
himself, something would happen" (p. 274). Something does
indeed happen, and toward the end of the novel Yasha tells
Cal that the private laboratory where one submits himself
to experimentation is not the "pen" but the "self."
Yasha, who has an unrealistic vision of self as a mere
image on film and who agrees with Mr. Budd that "no man can
stand being himself" (p. 169), hopes to "document things"
and represent them on film. He seeks "the real thing," but
the real thing for Yasha is the "vision." "You have to
movie" (All the King's Men, p. 327). Similarly, Mrs. Har-
rick experiences a remembrance of things past: "She saw,
in the dark of her mind, like a movie suddenly coming on
the screen in a dark theatre, big and sudden and shaking
before it settles into focus, the face of John T. . . ."
(The Cave, p. 291). Lettice Poindexter's past is also re
enacted in her head— "sharp, jerky, colorless, slashed and
spotted with blurs of silver, soundless, like an old movie
being run off without music" (Flood, p. 138).
document things," he tells Maggie, "but if you depend on
documentation, then the real thing— . . . the vision, it
may be— . . . be gone" (p. 103) . Unlike Jeremiah Beaumont,
who felt "the surge of energy in him which would make the
vision real" (World Enough and Time, p. 164), Yasha sees the
"vision" as real and in danger of being destroyed by too
much dependence upon documentation. He attempts to manip
ulate reality, to "violate life," to "stylize life," as he
tells Brad (p. 127). "He would, very cunningly, do some
thing to it so that it would no longer be what it actually
was, what it really was, but because it was unreal would be
taken for real" (p. 50). Yasha resembles the narrator of
Henry James's "The Real Thing," who possessed "an innate
preference for the represented object over the real one:
the defect of the real one was so apt to be a lack of
representation." "I like things that appeared," James's
character says; "then one was sure. Whether they were or
not was a subordinate and almost always a profitless ques
tion." Here again, seem is finale of be. It is true that
the Monarchs of the world must bow their heads in bewilder
ment to "the perverse and cruel law in virtue of which the
real thing could be so much less precious than the unreal."
It is also true, as Yasha reflects, that "reality is the
235
uncapturable" and "that is why we need illusion" (p. 50).
And it is further true, as John Ciardi has written, that
"only by illusory means can the sense of reality be trans
mitted in an art form" because the "subject is reality but
the medium is illusion." It is equally true, however, as
Ciardi writes further, that the artificer "must learn, nec
essarily of himself and within himself, that his subject is
18
the nature of reality. ..." He must, in a word, rec
ognize both the "nature of reality" and the reality of his
own nature. He must not, like Slim Sarrett, be "guilty of
a confusion between art and life," of blurring out a "fund
amental distinction." He must not fail to recognize the
dialectic of art and life, of the vision and the real thing.
Above all, he must not allow his artistic craft to become
a means of "flight from the world" (p. 189). Yasha, who
in his attempt to "violate life" is in danger of "doing a
violation" to his own nature and of "cutting [himself] off
more and more from reality" in the manner of Slim Sarrett,
does find realistic documentation for his vision in the
person of Maggie, but only after he learns something of the
18
"What Every Writer Must Learn," Saturday Review.
December 15, 1956.
236
nature of reality.
Yasha early regards Maggie as "the kind of person Who
can stand being herself" (p. 169). Yet, Maggie, too, must
learn her lessons of the nature of reality. In forbidding
Brad to publish a story based on the events in Fiddlersburg
and in refusing to visit her husband in prison, she has
attempted to avoid reality. It is significant that, at
Maggie's urging, Yasha looks over the garden wall and views
the trash— the "rusty lard cans and rusty coffee cans,
19
. . . the old shoe, old bottles, a broken glass jug" (p.
188)— on the same day that Maggie tells him her story and
reveals the reality of the past.
Perhaps Lettice best describes the Maggie of twenty
years earlier when she calls Maggie "just a little girl full
of ideals" (p. 322) . Reminiscent of Anne Stanton and her
innocent illusions, Maggie had lived in a "fairy story”—
where "nothing seemed really real"— waiting "for some spell
to be broken" (p. 200) . The spell is broken, the illusions
shattered, when Lettice teaches Maggie how to make her body
"real for the first time" (p. 216). When Al Tuttle dis-
19
To Jack Burden, xn All the King's Men, the world "was
simply an accumulation of items, odds and ends of things
. . . broken and misused ..." (p. 201).
237
covers the "realness" of her body and the two yield to
passion, Maggie experiences a sense of distorted self-real
ity similar to that of Yasha's "Mystery Spot." With her
self-illusion shattered, it was
like finding out that the vou you thought you were
isn't you at all. . . . the worse terribleness is that
you don't know any center of vou any more, you don't
feel vou any more, and you are sick because everything
is sliding out of focus, out of equilibrium, as when
those canals go wrong in your ears. (p. 32 5)
She asks the searching question similar to that of Manty
Starr: "How can you live if there is no vou to do the
living?" (p. 325).
Maggie's movement from fairy world illusion to disil
lusion is complete when she learns of the infidelity of
Lettice, who tells Maggie, "You have to make your vou out
of all that sliding and brokenness of things" (p. 325).
Therefore, lacking a sense of self-reality— as evidenced
in the uncertainty as to whether her image in the glass is
really her— and feeling "that nothing in the world is real"
(p. 326), Maggie remains in Fiddlersburg in an attempt to
achieve reality of self: "Maybe it was just what I had to
do in order to be, in the end, myself. No, not to be me—
to become me, if I could. Me, in Fiddlersburg" (p. 337).
She reflects upon the aftermath of a holocaust destroying
238
Fiddlersburg, similar to that which destroyed Pompeii:
There wouldn't be any me in that hole, just the empti
ness— maybe there had never been any real me. But there
would at least be the shape of a life. At least you
could live . . . so that the world around you would
hold, if nothing else, the shape of your emptiness. I
might try to be that much of a me. (p. 338)
Maggie has become a kind of "hollow'' woman, whose life is
only a shape— "shape without form, shade without colour, /
Paralyzed force, gesture without motion." She fears that
she is "just blank," unreal— stuffed not with straw, but
with "old rags and lies" "like a rag doll" (p. 338). She
shares Brad's equation of unreality, in which "nothing
equals nothing" (p. 335).
The blankness, however, is not the worst feeling, for,
like Jack Burden, Maggie feels that everyone is caught in
"some sort of web" (p. 331). It is "not the blankness, the
illogicality, no— the crazy tied-togetherness of things
. . ." (p. 332). Unreality can produce further unreality,
but it is also true, ironically, that this "tied-together
ness" of events and people can work to produce a sense of
reality. The imminence of the flood, for example, triggers
a series of events which lead to a confrontation with, and
an acceptance of, reality. It elicits Maggie's attempt to
objectify her experience, to make the word become flesh,
239
with the result that she is able to recognize and accept
reality (as shown, for example, in the giving of her con
sent to Brad to write about the experiences). The flood
also brings Yasha, who provides the means of escape from
the shadowy house of illusion.
"Everybody ought to have something," Maggie said early
in the novel, in defense of old Mother Fiddler's fantasy
and illusion (p. 99), but now she recognizes that one must
have reality "if you want to exist" (p. 188). Mother
Fiddler's illusion of her son's innocence is shattered when,
like Mrs. Jordan in World Enough and Time, she stands in the
shadowy hall and overhears the truth. Maggie is finally
"dis-illusioned" when she escapes from the shadows of the
Fiddler house and, as she tells Brad in a note, goes forth
into "broad daylight," which is "like going blind from too
much light" (p. 386). It is significant that in the last
scene before they go away together, Maggie cries for Yasha
to hold her hand, a gesture deeply symbolic of the attempt
to confirm one's own reality and that of another.
Not only has Maggie lacked a sense of self-reality but
she also feels that Cal was equally lacking in a realistic
image of her: "That picture in his head— was that all of
me, the real me?" (p. 332). The question must obviously
be answered in the negative, for, lacking the reality of
you intensive, Cal lacks the reality of vou extensive. In
the pen— what Maggie calls the "real heart of Fiddlersburg"
(p. 109)— in the laboratory of the pen— what Yasha calls
"the self" (p. 396)— Cal comes to realize "that there is no
you except in relation to all that unthinkableness that the
world is" (p. 412). Only when one faces and accepts this
"unthinkableness," this extensive reality, can one have
intensive reality.
Cal, the doctor with the "picture in his head," is
much like Adam Stanton, the doctor who also "has a picture
of the world in his head, and when the world doesn't con
form in any respect to the picture, he wants to throw the
world away” because "he is a romantic" (All the King's Men,
p. 262). Cal, whose return to Fiddlersburg to practice
medicine Maggie had regarded as "fine and romantic" (p.
218), knows little, in the opinion of Lettice, about the
world, "about the way things are" (p. 324). When "the way
things are" fails to conform with the "picture in his head,
Cal like Adam, attempts to "throw the world away," even "if
that means throwing out the baby with the bath. Which
. . . it always does mean" (All the King's Men, p. 262).
But, unlike Adam Stanton, Cal "has lived past his own death
241
(p. 278) and has the chance to learn of the reality of the
world and of the self and, along with this knowledge, the
chance of recovering the "baby." Yasha is able to under
stand Cal so well because Yasha feels that he himself is
at the point where "you have lived past all that was yours"
(p. 265) . In prison after his first act of violence, Cal
does not feel "alive" (p. 289); after his attempted second
act of violence, he wants to die; but, like Yasha, he comes
to realize that he is not dead and will "have to endure,
with joy, his life" (p. 168).
"Living past your own death" is, for Cal, "like coming
out on the other side of yourself" or non-self, "like a
picnic on the dark side of the moon. The side other people
never get to even see" (p. 280). The dark other side of
self, unseen by people— the reality as opposed to the
appearance— is one of the "incommensurables" Cal speaks of
later. He has been unable to balance the elements in the
dialectics of reality and unreality, of existence and non
existence, of life and time. He has been unable to achieve
"that one instant when . . . the incommensurable shall put
on commensurability"— perhaps "that moment of preciousness"
which Yasha had never been able to achieve" (p. 41). Cal's
error lies in his idealistic attempt to achieve commensur-
242
ability in "that instant when both of the incommensurables
cease to exist but have not yet begun their nonexistence."
He attempts the equilibrist's precarious balance on a non
existent tightrope. Rather than seeking "a dialectic which
will accommodate," "which will transcend," he seeks no
dialectic at all, or at best, a "sick dialectic."
Another of Cal's errors, reminiscent of Jack Burden's
"Great Twitch" theory, is his deterministic belief that
"everybody becomes, tautologically enough, his own me," that
there is "something dark and shapeless" waiting (p. 284),
that all events are "just a coming true" (p. 397) of things
long ago determined. Thus, another dialectic— that of
determinism and individual free will— is compromised. When
he looks down at the body of Brad, who is seriously but
accidentally wounded in preventing Cal's murder of Yasha,
Cal feels that everything is "different" and is able to
regain both his will and his skill in treatment. Events
"come true" for him, not so much deterministically as real
istically.
"When everything has finally come true," Cal tells
Brad later, "maybe that's when you can feel free" (p. 409).
Ironically, then, Cal becomes freest when most confined—
when he is in solitary. (In a sense all of the characters
243
have their experience in the "pen"— the self, the center
of Fiddlersburg. (Each one of us, Tennessee Williams has
written, is sentenced to solitary confinement within him
self.) It is in solitary confinement that things "come
true," become real, for it is there that Cal makes yet
another mistake and learns yet another lesson. The mistake,
reminiscent of Jack Burden's "Great Sleep," lies in Cal's
believing that it is possible to detach oneself from both
internal and external reality:
that there is, somehow, a you different from, and above,
that thing that they have just put into solitary. You
don't see, theoretically speaking, why you can't simply
lie down, the way you'd throw an old coat down, and
close your eyes, relax— die, perhaps— no, let the coat
die and let the silence flow over, and the real vou
will ride on that flood of silence like a chip on water.
Withdrawal of stimuli . . . (pp. 411-412)
The closing of the eyes signals the common attempt of the
Warren character to retreat from reality: "You shut your
eyes and think that all you have known in the world outside
you is, quite literally, unthinkable, not to be thought"
(p. 412). Such a retreat from reality invariably brings the
next error— rejection of harsh reality: "I'll just shut my
eyes, for only what you can think can truly exist" (p. 412).
Based on this concept, reality is entirely subjective,
measurable only in terms of self and intellection. Its
244
formula is: "I think; therefore it is." When the eyes are
shut, however, the "unthinkable" "comes true": "It blazes
up around you like a brush fire. It blazes up like spilled
gasoline. It blazes in the dark inside your head." When
the "unthinkable" becomes "thinkable," when events "come
true," when reality "blazes," there comes the realization
that there is no self except in relation to that "unthink
ableness," and Cal's "incommensurables" begin to put on
"commensurability."
Having recognized the accepted external reality, Cal,
for the second time, feels "different." Unlike Willie
Stark, who could only say "it might have been different,"
Cal can say it is. different. He accepts external reality
and with it the possibilities of beauty: "that life, which
is a sort of medium in which the vou exists, like a fish
exists in water, is beautiful" (p. 412). The mere fact that
beauty is real causes joy— "then you have to find a way
to say it" (p. 413). Like Maggie, who must objectify her
experience, make the word become flesh, Cal feels the
impulsion to make Brad understand. "If you won't understand
then I can't be sure what happened. And I've got to be
sure" (p. 412). Thus, Cal's final utterance in the novel
is a question: "About things suddenly being different.
245
You understand that, don't you?" (p. 414). Brad answers
with a perfunctory "Yes . . . sure," but, unsure twenty
years earlier "what might be the inner reality" or even if
there ever was "an inner reality" (p. 204), he realizes now
twenty years later that he still does "not know how things
[are]" (p. 324). Only when Brad understands that for him
self things can be "different," because they are real— an
understanding aided in part by his observations of Cal's
experience— can Brad answer truly either Cal's question or
his own question concerning "inner reality."
Brad, in many respects, is a composite of the protag
onists of Warren's other seven novels: "Every man is an
index to you and you are an index to every man" (p. 405).
He returns from the city to his boyhood home, to Fiddlers
burg, as he had earlier with Lettice. He returns, as he
says, because "I figured it was the only place I could live,
and be me" (p. 261). "After Fiddlersburg," lawyer Cottshill
asks Brad, "where can a man go, anyway? And feel real?"
(p. 426). The answer, implicit in the conclusion of the
novel, is that when one has learned the lesson of Fiddlers
burg, when one has achieved a sense of inner reality, he
then realizes, as Brad does at the conclusion, that "there
is no country but the heart" (p. 440).
246
An earlier question by Cottshill further points up the
significance of Brad's returns "Did you come back to
Fiddlersburg to be made whole? All of a piece in yourself
and with the world around you?" (p. 349). In spite of his
sardonic answer that he has come only to "make a movie,"
Brad does seek "to be made whole"— a double entendre phrase
at once reminiscent of the Biblical expression meaning
complete healing qf body and soul and also suggesting re
conciliation of the conflicting dualities of inner and outer
reality. The latter is especially true, for Brad, like
Adam and Willie in All the King's Men, is "incomplete with
the terrible division" of his age.
Brad, like Jack Burden, had fled to California, "drown
ing in West," after his disillusioning love experience,
first with Prudence Brandowitz and then with Lettice Poin
dexter. His return is, in a sense, "The Return: An Elegy"
but, unlike the speaker in the poem, who is returning to
his dying mother. Brad returns for the "death of a town"
(p. 50), for "the funeral of Fiddlersburg" (p. 423). Brad
and the speaker, both deracinated individuals, share an
ambivalent attitude toward the object of moribundity and,
by extension, toward the South. Twenty years earlier, Brad,
frustrated in his writing, felt trapped in the "sun-blaze"
247
reality of Fiddlersburg, and "stood there and hated
Fiddlersburg" (p. 307) . Now, having returned, he leans
over the wall (where the trash represents unpleasant real
ity) , spits as if in defiance of the reality, and says,
"Oh Fiddlersburg, . . . I love you" (p. Ill). Underlying
the words is an ambivalence, for, although uttered con
temptuously and cynically, they are also sincere.
"Fiddlersburg is a kind of pen," Brad tells Yasha, but
he also says, "What I believe in . . .is Fiddlersburg."
In answer to Yasha's question, "So that is why you are back
here?" Brad answers, "Yes" (p. 166). Later, in his dis
cussion with Cal, Brad says, "I wish I'd never heard of
Fiddlersburg" (p. 285). Perhaps Cal later hits upon the
reason when he says, "I should think that no reason would
make you want to come back here," for "you are you in
Fiddlersburg" (p. 289). No amount of contemptuous spitting
upon reality or of closing one's eyes to it can negate re
ality. Brad's changed, or changing, attitude at the end
of the novel is significantly epitomized in his altered
attitude toward Fiddlersburg, now no longer ambivalent:
"Over the years, he had run hither and yon, blaming
Fiddlersburg because it was not the world and, therefore,
248
was not real, and blaming the world because it was not
Fiddlersburg and, therefore, was not real" (439).
Along with his ambivalence, and frequently a part of
it, is Brad's cynicism, which most resembles that of Jack
Burden. Especially evident is his attitude toward the
South, which he blames because "it was not the world and,
therefore, was not real." Nashville, he tells Yasha, "as
pires to be the Kansas City of the upper Buttermilk Belt"
(p. 47); Southern ladies "remember being goosed on the
stairs after dinner by the aging Jefferson Davis" (p. 99);
General Forrest's men he describes as "those hairy, flea-
bit, under-fed, iron-rumped and narrow-ass-ted, whooping
and caterwauling, doom-bit bastards, on hammer-headed nags
20
gaunt as starvation ..." (p. 258). This is no noble,
galloping cavalry such as that envisioned by Faulkner's
Reverend Hightower. "The whole South," Brad tells Yasha,
is lonesome . . ., as lonesome as coon hunting. . . .
The South is the country where a man gets drunk just
so he can feel even lonesomer and then comes to town
and picks a fight for companionship. The Confederate
States were founded on lonesomeness . . . "The South"
. . . is a term without a referent. No— it means
20
Warren's own maternal grandfather was among the
group, for he rode with Forrest, Warren writes in Who Speaks
for the Negro?
249
something . . . It is angry lonesomeness. Angry lone
someness makes Southerners say the word South like an
idiot Tibetan monk turning a broke-down prayer wheel
on which he forgot to hang any prayers.2^- (p. 166)
But at the end of the novel, after his lessons in reality,
Brad feels that "this was his country." He would say, like
Faulkner's Quentin Compson speaking to Shreve McCaslin at
Harvard, "I don't hate it! I don't hate it!"
Brad's cynicism, of the Jack Burden-Isaac Sumpter
variety, is further evident in his view of "creeping ideal
ism, " "the nastiest star in the syndrome," something to be
"cut out just in case it is malignant" and "it is, in fact,
always malignant" (pp. 168-169). But despite his display
of cynicism, Brad is not simply the pragmatic "man of fact"
as opposed to the "man of idea," nor has he been entirely
divested of his "fastidious and romantic dream" (p. 115).
Brad, too, has his "vision," his "idea," his "dream," He
has had, first, the "vision" of Lettice, with an image re
sembling Jack Burden's ideal image of Anne Stanton: "He
In spite of his cynicism, Brad at one point seems to
be Warren's mouthpiece on the social issue, when he says:
"The only folks in the South who are not lonesome are the
colored folks . . . That [lonesomeness] is the heart of the
race problem. It is not guilt. That is crap. It is simply
that your Southerner is deeply and ambiguously disturbed to
have folks around him who are not as lonesome as he is.
Especially if they are black folks." (p. 166)
2 50
saw the face of Lettice Poindexter in the air before him,
as though that image floating there in shadowy translucence
were fused with that dark land and sky on which it was
superimposed" (p. 195). He envisions, too, what their life
would be (p. 196). And even two decades after the vision is
marred by the unfaithfulness of Lettice, Brad, seeking to
indulge the vision, is seen to close his eyes, just as
Lettice had suggested when he last saw her: "We could
. . . shut our eyes and just be ourselves just one more
time" (p. 30). But their "dream" of being together "in the
dark out of the world" (p. 334) has become a nightmare.
Brad's ideal vision next appears in the form of
Leontine Purtle, who, being blind, does not need to close
her eyes. To Brad she is "pale, pure, and noble" (p. 87).
Like Poe's Helen and Ligeia, she represents, at least for
Brad, ideal beauty and purity. In the motel they are
momentarily together in the tent of the sheets? "the world
was outside" (p. 361), and the "breathless instants" ful
filled themselves "like a dream." When Brad strikes the
diaphragm, however, the "dream," the "vision," is marred,
just as Jack Burden's image of Anne is marred when she be
comes Willie's mistress.
Brad has, or seeks, another kind of "vision," the
251
vision of expression, which all the major characters seek.
"It is about time for the vision," Brad tells Maggie (p.
245), but, as Yasha tells Brother Potts, "no one can restore
the vision" (p. 240). Yasha rejects Brad's script because
it has missed the "vision of life which Fiddlersburg could
be" (p. 342). The point is ironical, for twenty years
earlier Brad had had, momentarily, a "vision of the beauty
and spaciousness of life— the beauty and spaciousness that
would come if you suddenly saw reality and embraced it" (p.
136; italics mine). But Brad has not accepted and embraced
reality. Disillusioned by the marring of his two visions,
he lost his sense of reality. When he learned of Lettice's
unfaithfulness, "nothing seemed real. He was not sure what
might be the inner reality. Was there ever an inner real
ity" (p. 204). Similarly, he felt that "if he was not a
writer then he was nothing, he was not real, he did not
exist. He stood there in the cold terror of nonexistence"
(p. 134).
While it is true that "where there is no vision the
people perish," the reverse is equally true: "people" in
the novel, and Brad in particular, have no "vision" because
they have "perished"; that is, they have lost the sense of
self-reality. The process is a vicious circle, once again
illustrating the "spider web" theory, the interaction of
things, the need for a reconciled and reconciling dialectic.
Maggie's advice to Brad on how to evoke the "vision" is
apparently accurate: "All you need is to relax and be your
self, your inside self" (p. 242). The vision will not come
because there is no reality of self which, in turn, had
been lost when the vision of Lettice was marred. Brad lost
his sense of "the true self that would live forever" (p.
195)— his "vou-ness," as Cal calls it— which he had when
his image of Lettice was still unsullied. Now, twenty years
later, he also loses his sense of "who he is" when his
vision of what his "life would become" with Leontine— the
"promise in that moonlight"— is marred. The novel is a
dramatization of Brad's struggle, more unconscious than
deliberate, to answer the question, "Was there ever an inner
reality?" and to recover the "vision" of "beauty and spac
iousness that would come if you suddenly saw reality and
embraced it."
Brad first embraces not reality but Lettice, who,
lacking a sense of her own "inner reality," feels that the
embrace will "redeem all the past and in the process create
the true, the real Lettice Poindexter" (p. 68). One must
"make your you," she believes, "out of all that sliding
and brokenness of things" (p. 325). Brad suddenly sees
Lettice's reality and embraces it at the end of the novel
as he reads her letter to Maggie, describing how Lettice
has found "inner reality" and its concomitant joy through
devotion to religion and to others. "Lettice Poindexter
was real to him. She had really existed. Somewhere, in
her way, she existed now . . . he knew, at last, that she
was real" (pp. 436-43 7). His awareness of his past failure
to "embrace" her reality makes him aware of his own unre
ality: "He wondered if the fact that he had not known she
was real meant that he himself had not been real" (p. 437).
Brad's own sense of unreality is, then, at once a cause and
an effect of his sense of Lettice's unreality.
In much the same way, Leontine does not seem real to
Brad; to him she is the Lady of Shalott, unable to look
outward at the real world but only inward. Brad, not a
red-cross knight with "brazen greaves," rides by, not on a
mighty steed but in a "Jag one-fifty." "Let's give the
Lady a ride," Brad tells Yasha, "We can give her that much
reality" (p. 222) . Only the tiny drops of sweat on her
temples momentarily "made everything real" (p. 222) to Brad.
Brad earlier shattered Leontine's mirror of illusion, for
as Leontine told him, his stories made her want to "reach
2 54
out and touch the world" (p. 232) . But she has reached
farther than Brad realizes; the Lady has already been to
many-towered Camelot, and it is she who gives Brad a ride.
Expecting to deflower her, Brad discovers that she has
already been deflowered. Yasha's oxymoron seems accurate:
she looks into "her illuminated darkness" (p. 222).
The "illuminated darkness" fascinates Brad; he feels
that in Leontine's "world of light-is-dark and dark-is-
light he could be all right" (p. 126). Hers is also a state
of both existence and non-existence: "You don't exist in
a certain way" and yet "you exist a hell of a lot more
completely in another way" (p. 127). In answer to Brad's
question, "What's it like to be blind?" Leontine says,
"It's just being yourself." The reverse is also true:
"Being you is like being blind" (p. 232) . Ironically, it
is Brad who finally becomes sick of shadows and embraces
reality. He recognizes that "Leontine Purtle was Leontine
Purtle and Bradwell Tolliver was Bradwell Tolliver, and
that was all there was to it" (p. 367). Brad's relation
ship with both Lettice and Leontine is characterized by
inane sexual encounters— futile, selfish attempts to find
reality in the person of another.
Brad's fascination in the "difference," the
255
"otherness," as well as the "darkness" of Leontine, takes
another form in his fascination in, and even identification
22
with, the "Negro-ness" of the colored preacher, Leon
Pinckney, and even of the condemned prisoner, Pretty-Boy.
He wanted to be Leon Pinckney. He wanted to be Pretty-
Boy. He wanted to be any nigger. For he yearned for
the simplicity of purpose, the integrity of life, the
purity of heart, even if that purity was the purity of
hate, that a nigger must have. That would be, at
least, something. (p. 290)
Even Mortimer Sparlin, alias "Ralph Punch" (remarkably close
to Ralph Bunche) alias "Jingle Bells," is "something," for,
like being blind, being a Negro in the South felt like being
oneself (p. 366) . Brad, however, possesses neither the
"selfness" of being blind nor the "selfness" of being a
Negro. Brad is a kind of "non-me" (p. 180), in a state of
nada, to borrow the Hemingway term, for, as Yasha says,
"Person equals point-from-which. And point toward which.
Which is nothing" (p. 180). Brad, more than any character
in the novel, illustrates how, in such a state of unreality,
22
Warren uses the term in Who Speaks for the Negro? in
discussing the attempt of white sympathizers to adopt the
ways of the Negro (p. 70). Some young whites supposedly
attempt "to become more Negro than Negroes" (p. 96).
"people try to grab something, . . . anything to hold on to
(p. 180) even the "otherness" of blindness and the "some-
thingness" of "Negro-ness." In Brad's state of nada,
"nothing connects" (p. 243); "nothing equals nothing" (p.
335); and at one point words have "no meaning"— "meaning
is in a vacuum of no-relation" (p. 323).
The dialectics— something and nothing, self and other,
meaning and non-meaning— are introduced early in the novel,
when Brad enters Fiddlersburg, passes the factitious Seven
Dwarfs Motel, and contemplates the real water in the arti
ficial setting. He "wished that the water did not look
real. What always worried you was to find something real
in the middle of all the faking. It worried you, because
if everything is fake then nothing matters" (p. 4). The
dialectic of reality and artificiality is, in Brad's case,
indeed "sick." This passage, which underlies the meaning
of the whole novel, may be read and applied in several ways
In one sense, it depicts Brad's retreat from reality, for
if everything is fake, there is no meaning,, and if there is
no meaning there is no responsibility. In the course of
events precipitated indirectly by the imminence of the
flood, Brad does in fact encounter the real in the middle
of his own faking and that of others; he is "goosed," not
257
specifically to God, through whom Lettice achieves a sense
of reality, but to reality of both self and "other." He
realizes, like Cass Mastern and Jack Burden, that "every
thing matters" and "nothing is lost." Once he learns this
lesson he recognizes that he has perhaps caused much of
"the tangle of things." His attitude— one of lust and con
cern with the purely physical— was apparently influential
in causing Lettice to view her body as the only reality.
His acts, culminating in the staging of a wild party, re
sulted in A1 Tuttle's rape of his sister, Maggie, and the
subsequent murder of Tuttle by Cal. His sophisticated,
worldly ways— so out of place in Fiddlersburg, as Cal tells
him— influenced Cal negatively. His stories initially
motivated Leontine*s attempt to "reach out," an attempt
carried eventually to the point of sexual promiscuity.
When Brad comes finally to recognize, as he tells Cal, that
"this is the real thing. It is L-I-F-E," he has apparently
learned a basic lesson: he has seen the real in the middle
of the fake.
Read in another sense, the above passage represents a
stage somewhere in the process of growing awareness: one
may be worried about finding the real in the middle of the
fake because only the real, in juxtaposition with the fake,
258
can reveal the fake. In this case, it is the fake Which
worries rather than the real; and the idea of the final
clause is desaqreinent rather than desideratum. The final
clause read with emphasis on the final verb points up the
dialectic of meaning and non-meaning. Read with emphasis
on "nothing," the clause points up the dialectic of "every
thing and nothing"; that is, one rejects the "everything,"
because it is fake, for the "nothing," the nada, which alone
23
matters. If Brad at the outset of the novel seeks the
"nothing," his "movement toward fulfillment" is seen later
when he seeks the "something"— or the "anything"— in "Negro-
ness."
Not only does Brad seek to share the identity— even
the identity of hate— of the Negro; he seeks also the
identity of "Jew-ness" in the person of Izzie Goldfarb, an
ironic representative of a race of people who putatively
have no identity. Strongly reminiscent of Old Jacob in
Wilderness, Goldfarb "had, in Fiddlersburg, been himself"
(p. 65). His is a healthy dialectic, for he was "alone but
The two readings are possible also in the following
lines from Frost's "Desert Places": "A blanker whiteness
of benighted snow / With no expression, nothing to express."
259
not lonesome" (p. 165). Further, he was "complete," not
divided with "the terrible division of his age" as are most
of the characters in this, or any other, Warren novel. He
possessed not only a sense of "inner reality" but also a
sense of outer reality, which he furthermore evoked in
others, whereas many, lacking self-reality, evoke only a
sense of unreality in others. Brad says,
He would look at a sunset or a man or a dog in . . .
a way that made the thing seem real. He was not of
Fiddlersburg, but he made Fiddlersburg real. It was
his being in Fiddlersburg made me know what Fiddlers
burg is. (p. 86)
Later, speaking metonymically, Brad tells Yasha: "Old Izzie
Goldfarb . . . He is Fiddlersburg . . . I don't know why
he is Fiddlersburg, but he is . . . Yes, I do know why. He
made me see Fiddlersburg" (pp. 165-166). Paradoxically,
however, Goldfarb "was Fiddlersburg and at the same time he
was not Fiddlersburg. He was non-Fiddlersburg and he was
anti-Fiddlersburg" (p. 165) . Once again, the dialectic is
balanced, "healthy." Brother Potts also "is Fiddlersburg,"
but only at the conclusion does he perhaps become "non-
Fiddlersburg." Being Fiddlersburg is being apart from; being
non-Fiddlersburg is being a part of. Being Fiddlersburg
is being "alone"; being non-Fiddlersburg is being "complete."
260
Being Fiddlersburg is having identity; being non-Fiddlers
burg is having identification. Being Fiddlersburg is having
a sense of the reality of self; being non-Fiddlersburg is
having a sense of the reality of what is "other."
Brad recognizes at the end of the novel that his dia
lectic of Fiddlersburg and the world, of the "here" and the
"there," has been unbalanced, distorted, "sick": "He had
run hither and yon, blaming Fiddlersburg because it was not
the world and, therefore, was not real, and blaming the
world because it was not Fiddlersburg and, therefore, was
not real" (p. 439). Suddenly, both Fiddlersburg and the
world become real to him and with this sense of reality
comes the realization that he does not have to try to find
the grave of Goldfarb, who was at once Fiddlersburg and non-
Fiddlersburg. It is unnecessary because, first. Brad has
begun to learn the lesson of reality inculcated by the
memory of Goldfarb: having begun to achieve a sense of
"inner reality," he no longer needs to seek that of his
surrogate father. It is unnecessary, furthermore, because
he realizes that reality consists of more than the mere
physical and personal. More important than the physical
remains of Goldfarb is his legacy— his life, which was truly
"blessed." It is unnecessary, finally, because Brad has
261
been able to reconcile Fiddlersburg and non-Fiddlersburg;
he could go Wherever he might have to but he might even
come back to Fiddlersburg. Like Jack Burden, he can go
"into the convulsion of the world, out of history into his
tory, and the awful responsibility of Time."
Above all, Brad is able to balance the dialectic of
inner and outer reality. He recognizes Fiddlersburg as
"his country," but then he realizes that "There is no coun
try but the heart" (p. 440) . More important than the
"protracted dialectic" of Fiddlersburg is the "deeper and
darker dialectic" of the heart. As a writer, Brad learns
what Warren expresses elsewhere: "However important was
my acquaintance with Louisiana [or Fiddlersburg, Tennessee]
that was far less important than my acquaintance with
another country. . . ."A piece of writing, Warren goes on
to say, whether "good or bad, must report, willy-nilly, the
history, the sociology, and the politics of a country even
24
more fantastic than was Louisiana [or Fiddlersburg]."
Perhaps Gertrude Stein expressed it best when she wrote:
24
Warren, "All the Kina's Men: The Matrix of Experi
ence," p. 161.
. . . writers
have to have two countries,
The one where they belong and
The one in which they live really.
The second one is romantic.
It is separate from themselves,
It is not real,
but it is really there.
PART II
REALITY AND "THE END OF MAN"
"Be it life or death, we crave only reality."
— Henry David Thoreau,
Walden
". . . Human kind
Cannot bear very much reality."
— T. S. Eliot,
"Burnt Norton"
263
CHAPTER V
KNOWLEDGES "THE END OF MAN"
"The most you can hope from life is some knowledge
of yourself. ..."
— Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness
"I must endeavor to learn what
I must learn before I must learn
The other thing."
— Warren, "Notes on a Life to Be Lived"
"Between the beginning and the end, we must learn
The nature of being, in order
In the end to be. . . ."
— Warren, "Tale of Time"
". . . The truth that we experience when we are in
agreement with reality is the truth of fact."
— Wallace Stevens, The Necessary Angel
264
CHAPTER V
KNOWLEDGE: "THE END OF MAN"
Closely associated with the image of man— both the
image man is, and the image man has — is the truth, the knowl
edge— the truth through knowledge— of man. Man, Warren
suggests, can achieve a valid image of reality only when
he reconciles the dialectical elements of self and that
which is "other." He can, in turn, achieve this reconcili
ation only by successfully confronting another series of
dialectics— the dialectics of knowledge and existence, of
knowledge and delusion, of knowledge and experience, of
truth and untruth.
In his address on "Knowledge and the Image of Man,
Warren asserted that knowledge is man’s right— his right to
^Sewanee Review, LXIII (Spring 1955), 182-192. This
essay was originally an address given at the conference on
the Unity of Knowledge at the Bicentennial celebration of
Columbia University in 1954.
265
266
exist, to be himself, to be a man. This right of knowledge
brings numerous rewards. To know the truth is indeed to
be made free, as Jack Burden in All the King's Men (p. 276)
and Thomas Jefferson in Brother to Dragons (p. 10) state,
echoing the words of Christ. Similarly, Cal Fiddler, in
Flood, learns that "when everything has finally come true,
maybe that's when you can feel free" (p. 409)— free from
delusion, free from unreality.
Besides its ability to "make one free," truth is able
to make one different. "If you know, / Can really know, a
thing in all its fullness," says the narrator of Brother to
Dragons, "then you are different, and if you are different,
/ Then everything is different, somehow, too" (p. 128).
Among all of Warren's characters perhaps Jack Burden best
illustrates this change through knowledge. His is the
"story of a man who lived in the world and to him the world
looked one way for a long time and then it looked another
and very different wav" (All the King's Men, p. 461; italics
mine).
Accompanying the freedom and the change wrought by
knowledge is a sense of power. To Mrs. Parton, in "The
Circus in the Attic" (p. 47), and to Jack Burden in All the
King's Men (p. 331), "knowledge is power," a power which,
267
of course, may be abused. Jack returns from the West with
a sense of "new confidence" and of "great strength" in
secret knowledge. Although Jack's knowledge at this point
is incomplete and his wisdom is that of the "Great Twitch,"
it is true, as he says, that "with knowledge you can face
up to anything, for knowledge is power" (All the King's Men,
p. 332) . Perhaps Slim Sarrett in At Heaven's Gate is more
correct in saying that "self-knowledge is power" (p. 196).
Simon Bolthart in "The Circus in the Attic" possesses such
knowledge? he is "one of the lucky ones who carries with
him the explanation of everything." Simon illustrates the
fact that if a man "knows the truth he can live past all
passion ..." ("The Circus in the Attic," p. 18).
If it is true that the truth shall make one free, make
one different, make one powerful, it is also true, Warren
suggests, that the truth shall make one? that is, the truth
shall provide a sense of reality by giving man an image of
himself. More than a right of existence— a birthright
which some of Warren's characters exchange for the pottage
of pseudo-reality— knowledge is a requisite of existence.
"Only by knowledge does man achieve his identity," Warren
has written; and knowledge gives man his "identity because
268
2
it gives him the image of himself."
Man's ontology, then, is dependent upon his episte-
mology. "Knowing," R. P. W. tells Isham in Brother to
Dragons, "is / Maybe, a kind of being ..." (p. 128). Sim
ilarly, Jeremiah Beaumont, at the end of World Enough and
Time, acquires a "knowledge beneath knowledge, the 'kind of
knowledge that is identity'" (p. 502). Personal reality
is dependent upon personal truth: "You have to tell the
truth if you want to exist," Lettice Poindexter reminds
another character in Flood (p. 188).
Man, then, must know himself in order to be, himself,
according to Warren; but he must have a self to know. If
man becomes— acquires identity— by knowing, he also knows
by being— a kind of paradoxical vicious circle similar to
Jack Burden's "one-two, one-two" circle of identity, in
which one gains a sense of internal reality only by having
a sense of external reality, which, in turn, one gains
through a sense of internal reality. "We know by creating,"
Warren has written, "and one of the things we create is
the Self. . . . Does one exist, have personal reality,
2
Warren, "Knowledge and the Image of Man," p. 182.
3
"A Poem of Pure Imagination," Selected Essays, p. 207.
269
through knowledge or does one know through his sense of
identity? Which comes first— knowing or being? Is knowing
subject or object? To say that it is both is not to admit
paradox. It is, instead, to recognize the inherent inter
dependence of knowing and being; it is to see the two in
Warren's terms, as "complementary aspects of a single
4
reality."
The importance of knowledge, according to Warren, is
equally the importance of existence. "All is redeemed /
In knowledge," he writes in Brother to Dragons (p. 195).
This knowledge is a "knowledge of form," and "the form is
a vision of experience, but of experience fulfilled and
5
redeemed in knowledge ..." (italics mine). Knowledge
"redeems"— a word which, in its various meanings, summarizes
all the functions of knowledge mentioned above. To redeem
is to free, to deliver from bondage; to redeem is, in its
theological sense, to make different through the payment of
a purchase price; to redeem is to render powerful, giving
one the ability to act independently; to redeem is, finally,
to fulfill, to confirm one's reality. Jack Burden, for
4
Warren, "A Poem of Pure Imagination," p. 207.
5Warren, "Knowledge and the Image of Man," p. 182.
270
example, has varied experiences with, and because of, Willie
Stark, but they remain only the experiences of the "Great
Sleep," of the "Great Twitch," of cynicism, until knowledge
redeems the experience. One must know the meaning of ex-
g
perience, Warren writes in his essay on Conrad. The truth
of his own self, of his father and his pseudo-fathers, of
Cass Mastern, and of Anne Stanton sets Jack free from his
old delusions, typified by his philosophy that "what you
don't know don't hurt you" (All the King's Men, p. 33). The
truth changes Jack's attitude toward the world, enabling
him to go out into the "awful responsibility of Time."
Jack progresses, by means of a knowledge of the truth, from
an irresponsible sense of the power of "research" to a
sense of the need to "re-search" his own life. Through
knowledge he achieves, finally, a sense of fulfillment, of
the reality of self.
If experience must be redeemed in knowledge, knowledge
must also be redeemed in experience. If one must submit
"love to knowledge," it is equally true that one must sub-
7
mit "innocence to experience" and "knowledge to fact."
g
"'The Great Mirage's Conrad and Nostromo." p. 58.
7
Warren, "Love and Separateness in Eudora Welty,"p.167.
271
These dialectical elements, these contrasts which "provide
the terms of human effort" (p. 167), must be reconciled.
Knowledge without experience is dead, being alone. One must
in effect be a doer of the truth and not a knower only.
"The only way to know why you do a thing," Aaron Blaustein
tells Adam Rosenzweig, "is to do it. That is the only way
. . . for a man to know what he needs to know" (Wilderness,
p. 81). One knows only by doing, according to Aarony ex
perience must redeem knowledge. Adam learns, however, just
as Jack Burden does, that the reverse must also be true,
for one can do right only by knowing right.
Knowing the truth must be balanced by doing the truth,
knowledge balanced with action. Manty Starr comes to re
alize that knowing would never, in itself, be enough: "It
isn't enough just to be true, we have to say the truth to
make it living truth" (Band of Angels, p. 292). Later,
when her knowledge is more complete, she realizes that "it
doesn't do you any good to know a fact if you don't know
how to go about doing anything about the fact" (p. 364).
Similarly, Celia Harrick in The Cave learns that "if you do
not want to do certain things you should not find out cer
tain things" (p. 152). Knowledge is the end, the purpose,
of man, but it is not the be-all and end-all. Knowing and
2 72
doing, like knowing and being, are "complementary aspects"
of reality.
The title of a short poem by Warren, "Problem of
Knowledge,” epitomizes the plight of Warren's characters,
and indeed of Everyman. One can, in fact, place the char
acters of the eight novels in a kind of knowledge spectrum,
their locations on the spectrum being determined by their
degrees of knowledge. The progress of the characters is
most often from lack of knowledge or a state of quasi
knowledge to pseudo-knowledge to an attempt to escape knowl
edge to a position of incomplete knowledge to the acquisi
tion of a kind of true knowledge submitted to experience.
Or one may describe the steps in another way. There is the
character, frequently appearing at the beginning of the
novel, who does not know (himself, others, the reality of
both) and does not know that he does not know. For example,
at the beginning of Band of Angels Manty Starr does not
know who she really is, nor is she aware of not knowing.
Another character, or perhaps a member of the first group
moved to this step, does not know but thinks he does know;
he is self-deluded, possessing a quasi-knowledge. Mr. Munn,
Jack Burden, Adam Rosenzweig, and Brad Tolliver all feel
confident that they know themselves at the outsets of their
2 73
respective novels. Part of their "education to reality"
lies in learning that they do not know. They then arrive
at the next progressive position, at which one does not
know but knows he does not know.
Two kinds of characters vie for the distinction in the
Warren canon as the most undesirable, the most egregious,
offender in relation to knowledge. The first does not
know, knows that he does not know, and does not want to
know. The most obvious rejecter of knowledge is Isaac Sump
ter in The Cave. Closely related to this offender, but
even worse— perhaps the most despicable of all of Warren's
characters— is the one who does not know, knows that he
does not know (or may think he does know), and not only re
jects knowledge but deceives others in order to get them
to think that he does know. Slim Sarrett is the most
egregious example of this kind of character, for he speaks
some truth but does not live it; he has not submitted
knowledge to experience. His own words condemn him as
false; "poetry," he tells Sue Murdock, "is a . . . technique
for achieving self-knowledge" (At Heaven's Gate, p. 27).
According to this criterion Slim neither is a poet nor has
he a sense of identity. He would do well to heed the words
of his own discourse on self-knowledge or, perhaps, the
274
counsel given by Hawthorne to the readers of The Scarlet
Letter: '"Be truel Be truel Be true! Show freely to the
world, if not your worst, yet some trait whereby the worst
may be inferred!'"
At the same end of the spectrum with Slim is the char
acter who, knowing only falsely and incompletely, yet knows
how to use the power of knowledge to exploit others who
may not know the truth. Bogan Murdock and Willie Stark
exemplify this "madness," this "cancer of the truth, the
arrogance / Of truth gone wild and swollen in the blood"
(Brother to Dragons, p. 12). If Slim has not submitted
knowledge to experience, Bogan and Willie have not submitted
g
knowledge to love. Willie, for example, after learning of
political corruption, vows: "The truth is going to be told
and I'm going to tell it" (All the King's Men, p. 100). He
begins nobly with his projected telling of the truth about
corruption but ends ignobly by corrupting his own truth.
The truth goes "wild," as Warren says, when, for personal
gain, Willie employs Jack Burden as a "research man" to
0
In his essay on Eudora Welty ("Love and Separateness
in Eudora Welty," Selected Essays, p. 167), Warren writes
of submitting "love to knowledge," a point to be discussed
in a later chapter. It would seem that the reverse is
equally true.
275
uncover sordid truths in the pasts of his political oppon
ents. "You don't ever have to frame anybody# he tells Jack#
"because the truth is always sufficient" (All the King1s
Men# p. 358). The truth may indeed be sufficient, but only
so if one is sufficient for the truth.
Some of Warren's characters acquire partial knowledge
of reality through experience; they may be described as
those who know only in part but know, at least# about know
ing. They see through a glass darkly, but at least they
see, and they want to see more clearly. Jeremiah Beaumont,
for example, came to know "what was possible, and if there
was not happiness, there was at least knowledge. At least
knowledge, he would say" (World Enough and Time# p. 485).
Similarly, Jack Harrick, who realizes that "living is just
learning . . .," tells his wife, "I was always a poor
scholar. But I'm trying. I'm trying to learn ..." (The
Cave, p. 403). If it is true that living is learning, it
is also true, as Old Jacob tells Adam in Wilderness, that
"a man can learn to live" (p. 31). Adam's acquired knowl
edge of himself and of the truth of man gives him a "dif
ferent heart"; he at least knows about knowings "He knew
. . . that he would have to try to know what a man must
know to be a man" (Wilderness# p. 310).
276
In Warren's fiction there is a final choice group
comprised of those few characters who know, know that they
know, and perhaps influence others to know. These, the
most admirable figures in Warren's fiction, are most often
minor charactors— Captain Todd ("Captain Todd seemed to
know," Night Rider, p. 104), and Willie Proudfit in Night
Rider; Mr. Calhoun and Ashby Wyndham in At Heaven's Gate;
Mrs. Stark, Hugh Miller, and Cass Mastern in All the King's
Men; Munn Short in World Enough and Time; Jasper Harrick in
The Cave; Old Jacob in Wilderness; Old Izzie and perhaps
Brother Potts in Flood. It is they who also possess a
valid image of reality, for knowledge, according to Warren,
provides man with the "image of himself."
Knowledge, then, becomes the end of every man who is
not beyond hope. "A time comes," writes Jeremiah Beaumont,
"when all the heart asks is truth. . . . What truth is in
me, I do not know but I have felt the need to set all down
that I might try to know the truth of my own coming hither"
I
(World Enough and Time, p. 439). For most of Warren's
characters, as for Jeremiah, "a time comes" when they feel
this will to know, this "urgency to know the meaning of
experience." It is an impulsion, at times almost a com
pulsion, toward knowledge. "You have to know if there is
277
a truth in the world," Adam Rosenzweig reflects (Wilderness,
p. 289). Further, according to Tobias Sears, "you want to
see truth work out in the world" (Band of Angels, p. 241).
Jack Burden, the "historical researcher" who saw life as
"motion toward knowledge" (All the Kina's Men, p. 161), knew
that he "had to know the truth" (p. 363) about Judge Irwin.
He later attempts to piece together Willie Stark's story
in an attempt to arrive at the truth. Similarly, Jeremiah
Beaumont, who had searched his books "for what truth might
be beyond the bustle of the hour and the empty lusts of
time" (World Enough and Time, p. 26), who had read philos
ophy to tell the "truth of the world" (p. 75), wrote his
journal as a "pursuit of truth" (p. 417). "A time comes"
when each character is like Adam Rosenzweig, who cries out:
"I don't understand things . . . I don't understand any
thing. Oh, God, I want to understand" ( Wilderness, p. 232).
Each character appears, furthermore, as another Adam, the
first Adam, reaching out eagerly for the proffered fruit
of the Tree of Knowledge.
The impulsion toward knowledge is, first, the impulsion
to know about knowing, to know what Truth is before knowing
what is true. "Knowing and not knowing" are not one thing,
as Isham Lewis in Brother to Dragons (p. 127) mistakenly
278
believes. "Men may wish to act for truth . . .," Warren
writes, "but the problem of definition is a difficult one
and solution may be achieved only in terms of his own ex-
9
ercise of will and his appetite for action."
The definition of knowing troubles most of Warren's
protagonists. They need, in the words of the narrator of
Brother to Dragons (p. 127), "some new and better definition
of knowing." Jeremiah Beaumont sums up the point when he
asks, "Whose heart does not recoil and go cold before
Pilate's jest?" (World Enough and Time, p. 439). In his
next statement Jeremiah shows that Pilate's famous question
is no jest: "What truth is in me, I do not know." The
statement is applicable in two ways: Jeremiah does not
know what particular truth, among many, is in him; or he
does not know the meaning of the truth which is in him.
Like Jeremiah, who at one time in prison, felt he had "de
fined a truth" (World Enough and Time, p. 413), Mr. Munn,
early in Night Rider, feels that "sometime he might be able
to define the truth ..." (p. 45).
Truth— Jeremiah, Mr. Munn, and Everyman must learn— is
not simply of the head but also of the heart. "What is any
9
Robert Penn Warren, "Melville the Poet," Selected
Essays, p. 191.
*
knowledge," asks the narrator of Brother to Dragons, "with
out the intensive mediation of the heart?" (p. 212). Warren
notably like Hawthorne and Faulkner, writes of "the old
truths, and verities of the heart, the old universal truths
. . ., the problems of the human heart in conflict with
itself," as Faulkner expressed it in his Nobel Prize accep
tance speech. In the Foreword to Brother to Dragons.
Warren notes that the writer is not at liberty to "violate"
what he takes "to be the nature of the human heart" (p.
xii). Unless one discovers, as Meriwether Lewis does in
Brother to Dragons, the "truth of the heart," the "track
lessness of the human heart" (p. 184), he lives not on the
level of the heart but on the level of the glands; he lives,
in short, in a reality so limited as to amount to unreality.
Knowing, then, according to Warren, is associated not
only with being and doing but also with feeling. One must
know, Warren suggests, with the whole being, not just with
the head; it (knowing) must be a "knowledge of form," not
a mere "knowledge by report." Such a knowledge of the
heart, a knowledge of form, necessarily includes a sense of
responsibility, a moral awareness. Perhaps Mr. Munn,
whether he is not able to kill Tolliver in Night Rider or
whether he is able not to kill him, illustrates this kind
of awareness. In At Heaven1s Gate, Jerry Calhoun, in re
turning to his father and not seeking revenge on Murdock,
avoids becoming a kind of Murdock himself. Jack Burden in
All the King's Men, recognizing complicity with Duffy, does
not seek revenge through Sugar Boy. Similarly, Jeremiah
Beaumont in World Enough and Time seeks no revenge on Wilkie
but purposes to "shake the hangman's hand." In Band of
Angels, Manty Starr stops condemning her father and comes
to recognize his love; and Tobias steps from his "hieratic"
heights to save a human life. Reverend Sumpter in The Cave
violates his moral code in an effort to save his son; Jack
Harrick, in an effort to see his son saved, gains a moral
code. Adam Rosenzweig destroys a human life in Wilderness
but then recognizes the falsity of his motives. In Flood
Cal Fiddler, saved from destroying life a second time, re-
dedicates himself to saving lives; Brad, in the symbolic
act of ripping up his telegram, renounces the falsity of
his past life and sets out to salvage the future.
Each of these figures comes to know about knowing;
each gains not only a definition of truth but a definition
of self. The impulsion to know is an impulsion toward
self-definition, a "passion for self-definition," as Manty
Starr expresses it in Band of Angels (p. 12). To Manty,
"that is always, in any calculation, the one factor unpre
dictable, the one thing unknowable: the self'1 (Band of
Angels, p. 125). Yet her cry, like that of Sue and of Mrs.
Murdock (At Heaven's Gate, pp. 307, 185), of Jeremiah Beau
mont (World Enough and Time, pp. 295, 383), and others, is
"What am I?" (Band of Angels, p. 62). What Warren writes
of Katherine Anne Porter's Mr. Thompson in Noon Wine is
equally true of his own characters: "He can't stand not
knowing what he himself really is."^
The self is indeed unpredictable but not entirely un
knowable. Furthermore, knowledge of self is necessary to
"self-fulfillment," to sincerity, to a "true image," as
Slim Sarrett ironically points out in At Heaven's Gate (pp.
196, 161). Mr. Munn learns that self-knowledge is nec
essary, further, if one is to know others, "or anything"
(Night Rider, p. 113). One can know others only through
knowledge of self, he says, but "it is human defect to try
to know oneself by the self of another" (All the King's Men
p. 184). Sue Murdock has not learned this lesson, as
shown by her plea to Slim: "Oh, Slim, you've got to make
10Warren, "Irony with a Center: Katherine Anne Porter
Selected Essays, p. 147.
282
me know, know about me. You've got to make me, you've got
to!" (At Heaven's Gate, p. 251). Jeremiah Beaumont epito
mizes this impulsion to know "the true self" in his search
ing question: "if a man is robbed of his truth, and of a
sudden, how can he know what he is?" (World Enough and Time,
p. 179).
Jeremiah's question suggests still another point about
the nature of truth: there are particular, individual
truths and there is The Truth; and, as Warren writes else
where, "'Truth' and the truth may be very different things
in the end."^ Such is the case with Mr. Munn in Night
Rider and with Jeremiah Beaumont in World Enough and Time.
Mr. Munn reflects:
The truths of those people [witnesses] were not the
truth that had been his that night; but that truth was
his no longer. The truth: it devoured and blotted out
each particular truth, each individual man's truth; it
crushed truths as under a blundering tread; it was
blind. (Night Rider, p. 365)
Similarly, Jeremiah Beaumont feels that a witness at his
trial was not lying but "telling his own truth" (World
Enough and Time, p. 358). Then, like Mr. Munn, unsure of
^Warren, "Melville the Poet," p. 191.
283
his own truth, Jeremiah cries out, "Where was my truth?
Where was my truth?" (p. 360). Perhaps he finds it only at
the moment of death, like Skrogg (World Enough and Time, p.
319) or like Mose in Wilderness, who, "in that moment, [of
humiliation] found his truth" (p. 290). Ultimately, accord
ing to Jack Burden, "one can only know oneself in God and in
His great eye" ( All the Kina's Men, p. 184). "What we call
Truth with a capital T" is "the stunning, shattering,
noiseless collision of the dimension of Time and non-Time,
Dream and non-Dream," Warren writes in The Cave (p.43).
The Truth, which devours and blots out each particular
truth, is achieved, in the words of Cal Fiddler, "at that
instant when both of the incommensurables cease to exist
but have not yet begun their nonexistence" (Flood, p. 396).
Truth, then, like reality— or, more accurately, truth, a
kind of reality— is found when dialectical elements come
together and are reconciled, balanced.
Truth, like opportunity, the Eastern bride who came
veiled to the side of Jim in Joseph Conrad's Lord Jim, is
veiled to man. Only rarely, Warren suggests, does one
catch a glimpse of her face. Accordingly, Mr. Munn felt
that "some profound truth . . . even now was vieled from
his view" (Night Rider, p. 130) . It is true, as Mr. Calhoun
284
tells Old Lew, that "it is hard to know a thing for certain"
(At Heaven's Gate, p. 366), but it is also true that "the
only knowledge worth the knowing is / The knowledge too deep
for knowing" (Brother to Dragons, p. 159).
Mr. Munn, who early felt that he could tell the mul
titude "what he knew to be the truth" (Night Rider, p. 30),
later realizes that "he had not known himself (p. 112) or
even his own wife (p. 160). (Similarly, Jeremiah Beaumont
felt he never knew Rachel, understood Wilkie, or knew what
he sought, just as Brad Tolliver felt he had never known
Lettice and did "not know where he was going" [Flood, p.
350].) "It is hard to know anybody," Mr. Munn thinks,
"really know them" (Night Rider, p. 163). He muses further:
"Mighty few seemed to know, and they never told. . . . The
chances were you never knew. Just kept on peeling. Like
skin off an onion. And if you stopped you died, or rather,
you were dead already" (p. 105). Mr. Munn himself had
stopped "peeling"; because he had not known himself he could
not know others and could not be known of them. Lucille
Christian tells him, "I've felt all at once like I didn't
know you" (Night Rider, p. 435). Her command to "light the
lamp" suggests the presence of more than physical darkness.
Thus, Mr. Munn is dead long before the bullets enter his
285
body, for "life is motion toward knowledge," and if motion
has ceased there is only death. When Mr. Munn threatened
to kill Tolliver, the latter summed up Munn's true condi
tion: "A man never knows what he is. Perse. You don't
know what you are, Perse. You thought you knew one time,
Perse" (p. 456).
Tolliver's remark applies equally to other Warren pro
tagonists. Manty Starr, for example, thinks, "I do not
know who I was. Or do we ever come to know more?" (Band
of Angels, p. 62). Jed Hawksworth asks a similar question
of Adam Rosenzweig in Wilderness: "What do you know? About
anything?" (p. 179). Some fifty pages later Adam answers
the question himself: "I don't understand anything" (p.
232). Adam "decided that he did not know what his life
was"; he "did not know what to believe. Suddenly he felt
that he knew nobody, nobody in the entire world. He was
lost in a realm of fantasies" (Wilderness, p. 88). Without
knowledge, Warren suggests, one is always in a "realm of
fantasies," never in the realm of reality.
Jeremiah Beaumont uses another analogy to depict the
difficulty of knowing— that of steering a keelboat at night
on the Ohio River.
286
In a darkness without moon or stars, you look to the
shore but cannot know it. You see only the denser
dark rising from the dark water, but it may be but the
shadow of a bluff or cliff where the darkness thickens
to make a false shore, and the true shore beyond, and
you look up and cannot be sure of a bluff against the
sky, only darkness. So I looked into that darkness
of men's hearts and words and could not be sure where
lay the shore of truth. ( World Enough and Time, p. 360)
However, the inability to discern truth in man's "heart of
12
darkness," suggests Warren, is not as fearful as the in
ability experienced "when you look into your own heart, and
in that darkness the shadow and shore confound" (World
Enough and Time, p. 360). Despite the difficulty, Warren
concludes, one must distinguish the shore— truth, reality,
reality of truth— from the shadow— unreality, illusion of
truth. Failure to do so brings destruction; thus the end
of knowing could be the end of being.
This truth, which man must find, but only through dif
ficulty, lies, according to the ancients, at the bottom of
a well. Warren uses the well image in each of his novels,
fifteen times in all, to depict the difficulty of human
communication, of human understanding. If Mrs. Tolliver
The passage, for both its content and style, sounds
Conradian. Especially apparent is the verbosity, the repe
tition— for example, of forms of darkness seven times in
three sentences.
feels poised on the verge of "a velvety and bottomless
inward well of blackness” (Night Rider, p. 90), Jack Burden
has "the impression of stumbling into a well" (All the
King1s Men. p. 268) when confronted by the wide eyes of Anne
Stanton. Similarly, outside Jasper Harrick's cave, Miss
Abernathy's "wailing cry of lostness" was "like somebody
falling down a well, a well infinitely deep, it seemed, for
the cry kept going on and on, falling, spinning out thinner
and thinner, but somehow sharper and sharper, with depth
and distance ..." (The Cave, p. 321). In At Heaven1s
Gate. Jerry Calhoun recalls how as a boy, having been unable
to rescue his puppy from the bottom of a well, he had killed
the animal with a brick. He had, in effect, discovered a
truth about himself at the bottom of the well. He had
also discovered a lie, however, for his father's justifi
cation of Jerry's action seemed false to Jerry.
The well image most often suggests the inability of
man to perceive truth through the senses— for example, the
sense of sight. In Wilderness, after Adam Rosenzweig has
killed a Confederate soldier, he wonders if every man is
simply a sacrifice for every other man. "He did not know.
He could not read the depth of the thought, but stared
down into it as into a deep well where a little light
288
glimmers on the dark water" (p. 302). There is only a
"little light"— truth— on the dark water, and the well is
very deep. This description recalls the scene in Band of
Angels, in which the slave-trader looks into Hamish Bond's
face "'like he was studying something in the bottom of a
well'" (p. 185), or the scene in World Enough and Time, in
which Jeremiah's grandfather leans down at the boy "as
though'peering down a well . . (p. 18).
The well image further suggests that it is difficult
to perceive truth because the well muffles sound. While
talking to Adam Stanton, Jack Burden senses this difficulty
of communication: "I had the feeling that I was trying to
talk to somebody down a well and had better holler if I
wanted to be understood" (All the King's Men, p. 335). In
the same way, when Jeremiah Beaumont converses with Rachel
after the death of their baby, Rachel's voice "seemed to
come from far off, or down a well ..." (World Enough and
Time, p. 222). In The Cave Jo-Lea's heart sounds to Monty
Harrick "like a sound down a well" (p. 32). Later in the
same novel Monty's father, Jack, suggests the deep inscrut
ability of the human heart when he recalls the words he
spoke as a young man to Celia Hornby: "I bet if I threw a
rock down your well, I'd be listening down in the dark a
289
long time before it hit water" (The Cave, p. 168). This
throwing or dropping a stone in the well and listening for
the sound also suggests Cal Fiddler's attempt to know.
While telling Brad how he became a doctor, Cal
dropped the word, and waited as though it were a stone
falling down a well and he were waiting for the splash
down in the dark to know how deep it was. He suddenly
lifted his head as though he had heard the splash, and
now knew what he needed to know. (Flood, p. 283; italics
mine)
Truth is further difficult to know because it is mul
tifarious, because it seems to be protean— or perhaps it is
man and his circumstances which are protean. Yasha Jones
in Flood feels this vicissitude as he sits in the moonlit
square of Fiddlersburg and thinks how "if you look at a
thing, the very fact of your looking changes it. He thought
how, if you think about yourself, that very fact changes
you" (p. 274). Another vicious circle is operative here:
the contemplation of the truth of self changes the self,
and the new self has a new truth, which, in turn, changes
the new self. Truth changes man, and because man changes,
truth changes. Jack Harrick expresses the idea at the end
of The Cave: "Truth changes. A man changes, and I reckon
truth changes" (p. 384). This does not mean, however, that
all truth is relative, that there is no Ultimate Truth.
290
It means, rather, that because man changes, his truths
change. Man, Warren reminds us, is "in the world not as a
billiard ball placed on a table . . instead, he is "in
the world with continual and intimate interpenetration, an
inevitable osmosis of being . . .," necessitating the cre-
13
ation of "new perspectives," "new values," "a new self."
In a pensive mood similar to that of Yasha Jones, Mr.
Munn looks out his office window at the leafing trees and
thinks "that things were as they were, you thought, and
then even as you looked, were not" (Night Rider, p. 350).
One of the reasons "a thing ain't ne'er what you think it
is," as Mrs. Pugh tells Adam in Wilderness (p. 260), is
that both the subject and the object change.
Jeremiah Beaumont comes to know how hard it is
to know the inwardness and truth of things, for a man
remembers what was the fact, but even as he remembers
he knows the fact to be a fleeting shadow of something
that passed, as when he looks at the ground and sees
the swift shadow of a bird's flight and lifts his eyes,
but the hawk, or whatever bird it was that had swooped
thus low, is gone. (World Enough and Time, p. 414)
Jack Burden uses another analogy to express the same idea:
It is the picture of a man trying to paint a picture
13
Warren, "Knowledge and the Image of Man," p. 182.
291
of a sunset. But before he can dip his brush the
color always changes and the shape. Let us give a
name to the picture which he is trying to paint:
Knowledge. (All the.King's Men, p. 161)
Even if one catches a glimpse of the hawk or captures the
sunset's glory, Warren suggests, the result is both truth
and lie, only the truth of the moment. "Words are always
the truth, and always the lie," says the narrator of Brother
to Dragons (p. 8), for "what I say of Philadelphia now / Is
true, but true now only, not true then."
Besides being protean, truth may also be paradoxical.
"Even a lie is a kind of truth," Warren writes in his Fore
word to Who Speaks for the Necrro? In his essay on Conrad,
Warren discusses the oxymoronic "true lie" of Marlow at
the end of Heart of Darkness. Marlow, confronted by the
belief and love of Kurtz's betrothed, tells her that Kurtz's
final words were her name rather than "The Horror." "He
has," Warren says, "literally, lied, but his lie is a true
lie in that it affirms the 'idea,' the 'illusion,' belief
14
and love." Warren has several examples of the "true lie"
in his own fiction. At the end of All the King's Men, when
Jack Burden's mother asks Jack if Judge Irwin had been in
14
Warren, "'The Great Mirage': Conrad and Nostromo."
p. 46.
292
trouble, Jack tells her that the suicide was because of ill
health. Then, as he stands looking after the train which
carries his mother away, Jack thinks how he has lied to her:
. . . I had given that lie to her as a going-away
present. Or a kind of wedding present, I thought.
Then I thought how maybe I had lied just to
cover up myself.
"Damn it," I said out loud, savagely, "it wasn't
for me, it wasn't."
And that was true. It was really true.
I had given my mother a present, which was a lie.
But in return she had given me a present, too, which
was a truth. (All the King's Men, p. 458)
Jack's lie, like that of Marlow, is "true," Warren would
have us believe, because it confirms Mrs. Burden's belief
in and love for the Judge. It is a lie that "tells a
deeper truth," to use Manty Starr's phrase (Band of Angels,
p. 303). The lie is further "true," Warren suggests, be
cause its ultimate result is truth— Jack's new understanding
of his mother. Finally, it is "true" because it indicates
a truth about Jack. It is not the cynical Jack who dug
in the garbage heap to present the Judge, his real father,
with a piece of truth that killed him. The lie is unself
ish, humane, human, an act of love.
Similarly, in The Cave Reverend Sumpter tells a "true
lie" in order to spare his own son, whose very life is a
lie. When Isaac says to his father, "I thought you wouldn't
293
tell a lie," Reverend Sumpter replies, "Yes, I lied. I had
to tell my lie to undo the lie you told . . . I had to lie
for the sake of Jasper— for the sake of living— for the
sake of truth ..." (p. 355). Through his lie Reverend
Sumpter affirms the truth of his love for his son and, in
so doing, he affirms his own human reality. George Orwell
wrote that
the essence of being human is that one does not seek
perfection, that one _is^ sometimes willing to commit
sins for the sake of loyalty . . ., that one is prepared
to be defeated and broken up by life, which is the inev
itable ice of fastening one's love upon other human
beings.
The "true lies" of Marlow, of Jack, and of Reverend Sumpter
could perhaps more validly be called "lies of love."
A lie, then, may be "true" if it confirms a special
kind of reality, namely that of humanity, Warren suggests.
Reality is "uncapturable," says Yasha Jones in Flood, so
"we need illusion. Truth through lie ..." (p. 50). A
16
work of art is itself a kind of "true lie." Its existence
is justified only if it confirms a kind of humane reality.
15
George Orwell, "Reflections on Gandhi," Shooting An
Elephant (New York 1945), p. 182.
16
This point and its ramifications will be treated in
Chapter VIII.
Whether a work of art or a life, it must not violate
the principle that truth is "unbetrayable." Jeremiah Beau
mont ultimately learns this principle: "I know that life
tells no lies in the end, for all the lies, single and
particular, will at last speak together in a great chorus
of truth in many voices. Thus all the lies and false wit
nesses against me told truth . . ." (World Enough and Time,
p. 506). Munn Short, the jailer in the same novel, ex
presses the idea in his own homespun way: "You git so many
lies and hit jest biles down to truth. Lak renderin lard"
(p. 370). Jeremiah learns that this world is not the
Domain of Artegall, where "simple Truth did rayne, and was
of all admyred"; truth in this world is not simple or
monolithic.
If one must, like Pilate, ponder the question, "What
is truth?" one must also ponder the equivalent question
put to Lettice Poindexter by Dr. Sutton in Flood: "What
is a lie?" "Can you," he continues, "call by the word lie
certain words you utter, or refrain from uttering, in order
to give fullest scope for the deepest truth that is in
you?" (p. 150). The question is indeed a profound one,
one for which there is no facile answer. Lettice answers
in the affirmative, realizing that it would be no "true
295
lie" to withhold the truth of her infidelity to Brad. "The
shadow of truth unspoken," Manty Starr says in Band of
Angels. . .is darker than the shadow of a lie" (p. 292).
God, Transcendent Truth, is able to make even the wrath of
men to praise Him; man is not so capable.
A lie is "true," then, Warren suggests, only if it
confirms reality, a "deeper truth"; only if it is unselfish;
only if it sustains belief and love rather than delusion.
Without these qualities even truth can be false. For ex
ample, Manty Starr speaks in Band of Angels of people
telling to the New Orleans Select Committee "truth that was
lies" (p. 303). Truth reached by lies may be a false
17
truth. In his essay on Dreiser's An American Tragedy.
Warren mentions that Clyde Griffiths's lawyer persuades
Clyde "to testify to a 'lie' in order to establish . . .
18
the 'truth.'" Jeremiah Beaumont, who believes that "the
17
The concept of truth through lie comes dangerously
close to the concept of end justifying means and the "for
tunate fall," both subjects to be considered in a later
chapter. Truth may "justify," as Jeremiah Beaumont says
(World Enough and Time, p. 414), but does it justify fals
ity? Contrariwise, the "lie that justifies" is, according
to Charles Lewis in Brother to Dragons, the "only lie man
may / Not tell and live . . . (p. 13).
18
"An American Tragedy." p. 1.
296
price of truth [is] lies" (World Enough and Time, p. 320),
attempts the same thing at his trial, only to learn eventu
ally that the real price of truth is anguish. Similarly,
Jerry Calhoun in At Heaven's Gate feels that he has to tell
Sue Murdock "the lie to make her believe the truth ..."
(p. 231). If truth and untruth cannot always be separated,
neither can they be manipulated. "Truth" through lies may
be, after all, only a pseudo-truth, an incomplete "truth of
the moment," for actual truth must affirm reality.
If the truth of the moment is incomplete and inade
quate, such is not the case with the moment of truth, the
instant in time when one recognizes Truth which transcends
time. James Joyce called it an epiphany; it is also a kind
of secularized pentecost, when the spirit of truth, in order
to enlighten and empower man, comes suddenly. One must
remember, however, that although the revelation is sudden,
the moment of truth is preceded by a gradual series of ex
periences, often unpleasant, and perhaps by numerous truths
of the moment. The Magi recognized in an instant the means
of Redemption, but they could do so only after their ardu
ous journey. In addition, their moment of truth was
followed by action; they gave gifts, just as the apostles,
after Pentecost, went forth to propagate their knowledge.
297
The moment of truth, then, requires both: the series of
preparatory experiences and the subsequent action.
Both elements are present in Willie Stark's moment of
truth. "He's been on the road to Damascus and he saw a
great light . . .," Jack Burden says (All the King's Men,
p. 95). Both the revelation itself and the subsequent
action, however, become perverted. Willie, like Hawthorne's
Goodman Brown, comes to see only evil in man; unlike St.
Paul, who is "obedient unto the heavenly vision" following
his illumination, Willie perverts the vision to a hellish
one and is obedient unto it.
No flash of heavenly light comes to Jeremiah Beaumont,
although he longs for light to come. He does, however,
come to some realization concerning his life: "I felt
nothing now but a numbness and the knowledge without even
despair that my life was nothing and all I had ever done
was nothing and meant nothing ..." (World Enough and Time,
p. 428). For Jack and Celia Harrick, however, the light
does flash. The sudden realization of truth about her hus
band fills Celia's head "like a flash of light" (The Cave,
p. 300). For his part, Jack looks at his wife "out of the
shadow" (p. 301), realizing that she had never forgiven him
for his earlier perfidy.
Adam Rosenzweig— like Isaac Sumpter, who "seemed on
the verge of the unveiling of truth" (The Cave, p. 285)—
feels himself constantly at the point of revelation. "He
felt himself trembling on the verge of a revelation" after
his encounter with "Mollie the Mutton." Mollie, the de
based camp prostitute, like Jeremiah Beaumont's snaggle-
toothed hag, seems somehow representative of the world. For
Adam, she "was a revelation about the world. The whole
world. It was not about flight from the world, but about
the nature of the world. He was about to put the truth into
words" (Wilderness, p. 253), but he fell asleep instead.
Unlike Isaac Sumpter, who remains on the verge of truth and
eventually regresses into complete delusion, Adam later
experiences a moment of truth: he realizes that "the truth
is unbetrayable, and that only the betrayer is betrayed,
and then only by his own betraying" (Wilderness, p. 310).
Thus, like Hemingway's Frederic Henry, who in another cen
tury and another war sought idealistically to help Make the
19
World Safe for Democracy, Adam, recognizing the truth of
19
In his essay on Hemingway (Kenvon Review. IX [Winter
1947], 1-28), Warren calls A Farewell to Arms "another doc- *
ument of the human effort to achieve ideal values." The
same could be said of Wilderness.
Brad Tolliver in Flood feels that Hemingway had "at
299
mankind and the truth of himself/ sheds his naive idealism.
He has not been betrayed by his father; he has# instead/
betrayed himself.
The same statement applies equally to Manty Starr, who,
like Adam, blames her father until her moment of truth.
"All at once, like catching the glint of a piece of thistle
down drifting in high sunlight, I knew that my father had
loved me . . . No, he hadn't betrayed me" (Band of Angels,
pp. 373-374). The passage is reminiscent of the lines in
"Burnt Norton," where Eliot says: "Love is . . . caught in
the form of limitation / Between un-being and being. / Sud
den in the shaft of sunlight ..." Manty had betrayed
herself through her illusions, through her refusal to accept
the truth about herself, a truth which was unbetrayable.
The delicacy, the grace, of Warren’s simile depicts the
ecstasy, the glory, of the moment of revelation, when "all
last discovered the deep truth of man's relation to other
men, and had fused it with his own tragic sense of destiny"
(p. 306; italics mine). This "deep truth" seems to be what
Nathan Scott has called the "essential truth" in Hemingway:
"the essential truth about human existence, namely, the
glory and the blackness" (Nathan Scott, Jr., Ernest Heming
way [Grand Rapids, Michigan, 1966], p. 29). Brad and War
ren' s other characters also must learn this dialectical
truth.
300
the old shadows of our lives [are] canceled in joy . .
[Band of Angels, p. 375) .
Some characters, however, prefer the shadows to the
light. If many of Warren's characters feel an impulsion
toward knowledge, some show a repulsion from it, an attempt
to escape from the truth. If there is no truth, there need
be no belief and if there is no belief there need be no
change in attitude or action, no responsibility. In War*
ren’s poem "Elijah on Mt. Carmel," Ahab, on his way back to
Jezebel's palace after her priests have been slaughtered
by Elijah, thinks:
Nothing
Is true. Therefore nothing
Must be believed,
But
To have truth
Something must be believed . . .
The king prays that God, Ultimate Truth, might not exist so
that he, Ahab, need not believe. But truth does exist, and
"you cannot hide the truth," as Mrs. Bingham reminds her
husband in The Cave (p. 315).
Equally futile is the attempt to believe only part of
the truth, to select what truth one wishes to believe and
reject the rest. The narrator of "Circus in the Attic"
says, "People always believe what truth they have to, to
301
go on being the way they are" (p. 8). The police lieutenant
outside the cave, in the novel by that name, expresses the
same idea: "Folks believe what they want to believe" (p.
350). Jack Harrick echoes these words later in the same
novel: "Folks believe what they want to believe . . . they
will believe what they need to believe" (p. 384). Individ
ual truths may change but Truth changes individuals, and
this change some of Warren's characters cannot abide. Each
must learn, as Manty Starr does, that "the shadow of truth
unspoken ['unspoken' even to self, and thus unaccepted],
though known, is darker than the shadow of a lie" (Band of
Angels, p. 292).
The Scriptural jeremiad, "My people perish for lack of
knowledge," could well be uttered by Warren concerning his
fictional people. Or it could be said, more accurately,
that they perish from refusal of knowledge. The terse
statement describing Adam Rosenzweig sums up the condition
of many in Warren's fiction: "Rapt in his own dreams, he
had refused the knowledge" (Wilderness, p. 192). A similar
commentary describes Brad Tolliver: "He did not yet know
that the true shame is in yearning for the false, not the
true, story" (Flood, p. 68).
If, therefore, as Warren suggests, one cannot hide the
302
truth and if one cannot hide part of the truth and believe
what is convenient, neither can one hide oneself from the
truth. Jack Burden best exemplifies this latter attempt,
especially in his Westward flight and in his theory of "The
Great Sleep." Jack is unable to complete his Ph.D. disser
tation because he cannot "bear to live with the cold-eyed
reproach of the facts." (All the King's Men, p. 167). At
another time he imagines the yellow telegram envelope under
the door,
but the clammy, sad little foetus which is you way down
in the dark which is you too lifts up its sad little
face and its eyes are blind, and it shivers cold inside
you for it doesn't want to know what is in that envel
ope. It wants to lie in the dark and not know, and
be warm in its not-knowing. (All the King's Men, pp.
11-12)
Jack prefers the dark shadow, the womb-warmth of not-know
ing, because, as he says later, "what you don't know don't
hurt you, for it ain't real" (p. 33). Reality, however, is
not delimited by man's incomplete knowledge; just as truth
is "unbetrayable," it is ultimately unavoidable.
Jack, although incorrect in his concept of not-knowing,
is correct in his concept of the possible result of knowing,
for what one knows can hurt him. Knowledge, Warren suggests,
can serve either as the end or else as the ending of man;
that is, if knowledge has the potential to bring about the
end, the fulfillment, of man, it has the equal potential to
cause the destruction of man. "There is a natural distress
/ In learning to face Truth's glare-glory, from which our
eyes are long hid," Warren writes in his poem "Modification
of Landscape." The "glare" and the "glory," constituting
another dialectic, are both a part of knowledge. There is,
on one hand, Jack's womb-like security of not-knowing
opposed by the "terribleness of knowledge," as Lucy Lewis
refers to it in Brother to Dragons (p. 82); there is, on
the other hand, the awful delusion of not-knowing opposed
by the glorious ecstasy of knowing. Accordingly, in At
Heaven's Gate, Duckfoot Blake, when he learns that "every
thing matters," feels "sick and exalted with Ijis knowledge"
(p. 373; italics mine). From the time when man first ate
the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge he has experienced both
the sickness and the exaltation, the glare and the glory,
of knowledge. "Man eats of the fruit of the Tree of Knowl
edge, and falls," Warren writes. "But if he takes another
bite, he may get at least a sort of redemption. And a
precious redemption.
20
Warren, "Knowledge and the Image of Man," p. 182.
304
The knowledge which brings redemption is itself
"precious," in the sense of its being both very valuable
and very costly. "Knowledge is the most powerful cost,"
says Jefferson in Brother to Dragons; "it is the bitter
bread" (p. 196). "Truth is a terrible thing," says Jack
Burden, historical researcher and purveyor of other people's
truth but rejecter of his own.
You dabble your foot in it and it is nothing. But
you walk a little farther and you feel it pull you
like an undertow or a whirlpool. First there is the
slow pull so steady and gradual you scarcely notice
it, then the accelerating, then the dizzy whirl and
plunge to blackness. For there is a blackness of
truth, too. (All the Kina's Men, p. 364)
When Jack digs "the truth up out of the ash pile, the gar
bage heap, the kitchen midden, the bone-yard" and sends
"that little piece of truth to Adam Stanton," Adam cannot
endure the bitterness, the blackness of truth. Jack, for
his part, could not "cut the truth to match his [Adam's]
ideas" (p. 276), but neither could Adam make his ideas match
the truth. Jack digs further in the garbage heap and de
livers another piece of truth, this time to Judge Irwin,
his real father: "I . . . dug up the truth and the truth
always kills the father . . . and you are left alone with
yourself and the truth ..." (All the King's Men, p. 375).
305
The Judge can no more make his ideas match the truth than
Adam could, so he commits suicide for the same reason that
Adam committed homicide: the truth for him is too bitter,
too black. Each attempts to remove the visible manifesta
tion of the unpleasant truth— the Judge himself and Willie
Stark, respectively.
Little Jack "Horner" Burden has sat in his corner eat
ing his Pie of Truth; he has put in his thumb and pulled
out his plums and has exclaimed, "What a good research boy
am I." Now the erstwhile purveyor of truth is alone with
his own truth, a precious truth indeed. He concludes that
"all knowledge that is worth anything is maybe paid for by
blood. Maybe that is the only was you can tell that a
certain piece of knowledge is worth anything: it has cost
some blood" (All the King's Men, p. 455). The blood may
flow vicariously by way of purchasing knowledge for others,
as in the case of the Judge, Jasper Harrick, and Cassius
Port; or it may, at the same time, flow to purchase a kind
of knowledge for the individual himself, as in the case of
Jeremiah Beaumont. It is significant that each of Warren's
21
eight novels contains at least one homicide or suicide.
21
In Night Rider Mr. Munn kills Bunk Trevelyan and dies
306
All of the blood flowing in Warren's fiction does not vali
date the charge that he exploits violence; instead, it in
dicates the high cost of knowing and not-knowing. If Truth
is a flame, as Jeremiah and Rachel Beaumont regard it
(World Enough and Time, p. 333), its fire not only purifies
but it occasionally consumes.
Whatever knowledge man may gain, one thing remains,
finally, unknowable: the result of knowledge itself. Jack
Burden expresses the idea well:
The end of man is knowledge, but there is one thing he
can't know. He can't know whether knowledge will save
him or kill him. He will be killed all right, but he
can't know whether he is killed because of the knowl
edge which he has got or because of the knowledge which
he hasn't got and which if he had it, would save him.
There's the cold in your stomach, but you open the en
velope, you have to open the envelope, for the end of
man is to know. (All the King's Men, p. 12)
Either way— whether man is saved or destroyed— knowledge is
later for a murder he did not commit; in At Heaven's Gate
Slim Sarrett strangles Sue Murdock; in All the King's Men
Adam Stanton kills Willie Stark and is cut down by Sugar
Boy; Judge Irwin commits suicide; in World Enough and Time
Jeremiah kills Cassius Fort, later attempts unsuccessfully
to commit suicide with Rachel in the prison, and is finally
slaughtered after Rachel commits suicide; in Band of Angels
Hamish Bond dies a suicide; in The Cave Isaac Sumpter may be
said to have killed Jasper Harrick; in Wilderness Adam
Rosenzweig kills the Confederate soldier; in Flood Cal Fidd
ler, who has killed A1 Tuttle, attempts to kill Yasha.
the "end of man.
"Can man wish more than knowledge?" R. P. W. asks in
Brother to Dragons (p. 56). As if in answer, Jeremiah
Beaumont, just before his death, says, "That is all we need
knowledge. That is not redemption, but it is almost better
than redemption" (World Enough and Time, p. 506). Knowl
edge, in other words, is not fulfillment but a movement
toward fulfillment. If it is not redemption itself, it may
be a kind of redemption. Lucy Lewis in Brother to Dracrons
says that knowledge of "the old cost of the human redemp
tion" is, "in itself, a kind of redemption" (p. 193).
The cost of knowing is high, Warren suggests, but the
cost of not-knowing is even higher. "It is awful not to
know what the worst is," says a character in Brother to
Dragons, "for if you don't know that, I reckon there's
nothing, / Not anything, to know, and if you don't know /
Not anything, then, God— Oh, God— then all / My life and
living are just nothing, God, / And I am nothing ..." (p.
68). The great terror of not-knowing, then, is the terror
of lacking reality. The great triumph of knowing, despite
the great cost, is the triumph of possessing a sense of
reality. Perhaps Thomas Jefferson, who learns this impor
tant lesson, but only in the "No place," "Any time" setting
308
of Warren's long poem Brother to Dragons, could be said to
speak for all of Warren's characters who come to recognize
the preciousness of truth:
I think I begin to see the forging of the future.
It will be forged beneath the hammer of truth
On the anvil of our anguish. We shall be forged
Beneath the hammer of truth on the anvil of anguish.
It would be terrible to think that truth is lost.
(p. 194)
CHAPTER VI
HISTORY AND "THE AWFUL RESPONSIBILITY OF TIME"
"Reality is not a function of the event as event,
but of the relationship of that event to past, and
future, events."
— Jack Burden, All the King's Men
"Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future.
And time future contained in time past."
— T. S. Eliot, "Burnt Norton"
"I spoke of Time. You said:
There is no Time."
— Warren, "Resolution"
309
CHAPTER VI
HISTORY AND "THE AWFUL RESPONSIBILITY OF TIME"
Screwtape, the sophisticated devil in C. S. Lewis's
The Screwtape Letters, advises his nephew, Wormwood, the
fledgling devil, that "humans are amphibians— half spirit
and half animal . . . As spirits they belong to the eternal
world, but as animals they inhabit time. . . . The humans
live in time, but our Enemy destines them to eternity."^
The diabolical stratagem is to distort man's time-sense, to
effect an imbalance in the dialectic of then— past and
future— and now. Making men think of the past, to the ex
clusion of the present and future, or of the future, to the
exclusion of the present and past, is, according to Screw
tape, to "make them think of unrealities" (p. 68). If
Screwtape speaks for the powers of evil opposing man, the
speaker in Warren's poem "Bearded Oaks" could be said to
*C. S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (New York, 1961),
pp. 36-3 7.
310
311
speak for man:
We live in time so little time
And we learn all so painfully,
That we may spare this hour's term
To practice for eternity.
Both devil and bedeviled agree on one point— that man lives
in time, that he is a time-bound creature. Man must learn
in time; his future must "be forged beneath the hammer of
truth / On the anvil of [his] anguish" (Brother to Dragons,
p. 194).
If, according to Warren, one must achieve his end in
knowledge in order to achieve his image of reality, one must
know and accept his past and "that rich detritus of all
history" (Brother to Dragons, p. 122), "the sad detritus of
time" (All the Kina's Men, p. 205), in order to know himself
and his reality, for the past has made him what he is and
has planted the seed of the future. "You live through time,
that little piece of time that is yours," says Manty in
Band of Angels (p. 134), echoing Warren’s poem, "and what
you are is an expression of History. . . ."To "affirm"
one's history is perhaps the same as affirming one's ident
ity, as Adam Rosenzweig learns in the "befogged loneliness"
of Virginia (Wilderness, p. 163) . Thus, according to War
ren, both knowledge and identity are dependent upon one's
312
concept of time. "Reality," Jack Burden says, "is not a
function of the event as event, but of the relationship of
that event to past, and future, events" (All the King's Men,
p. 407). Reality lies in relationship, reconciliation,
balance of then and now. Screwtape's later comment to
Wormwood applies to most of Warren's characters: "You will
notice that we have got them completely fogged about the
meaning of the word 'real'" (p. 142). One of "them," Brad
Tolliver in Flood, admits to himself, "I cannot find the
connection between what I was and what I am. I have not
found the human necessity" (p. 439).
Jack Burden is undoubtedly correct when he says that
"Time is nothing to a hog, or to History, either" (All the
King's Men, p. 102). To be in time and to balance its dia
lectic is a "human necessity." It may be true that Ulti
mate, Transcendent, Eternal Reality is attainable only
outside of time, that "the close, true look at a thing can
only be one snatched outside of time ..." (All the King's
Men, p. 263) . It may also be true, as C. S. Lewis has
written, that "eternal reality is not waiting for a future
in which to be real. ..." "Ye cannot know eternal reality
by definition," Lewis has George McDonald say in The Great
Divorce;
313
Time itself, and all acts and events that fill time,
are the definition, and it must be lived. . . . Time
is the very lens through which ye see— small and
clear, as men see through the wrong end of a telescope—
something that would otherwise be too big for ye to see
at all. That thing is Freedom: the gift whereby ye
most resemble your Maker and are yourselves parts of
eternal reality. But ve can see it only through the lens
of time. . . .^
Even "eternal reality," then, is attainable only through
time; man must use time to "practice for eternity."
Adam Rosenzweig illustrated the "human necessity" of
confronting truth and reality in time. Seeking to confirm
his ideal about his father, Adam questioned the dying Hans
Myerhof. In response to his questions, Adam heard "a voice
not out of Time, but in Time, marked by Time." Adam real
ized that "he had to live in Time. He had only what he had
to live by and with . . . He was in Time. What had happened
had happened" ( Wilderness, p. 121). Only by being "in
time," Warren suggests, can one know reality. T. S. Eliot
expresses the idea in "Burnt Norton":
. . . only in time can the moment in the rose-garden,
The moment in the arbour where the rain beat,
The moment in the draughty church at smokefall
Be remembered; involved with past and future.
Only through time time is conquered.
2
C. S. Lewis, The Great Divorce (New York, 1946), p.
125; italics mine.
314
The underlying paradox of time is evident also in
Warren's Brother to Dragons, where the narrator mentions
the "thrust toward timelessness, in time" (p. 121). In
addition to the oxymoronic "true lie" and "false truth" in
Warren's fiction, there is "timeless time." Reverend Sump
ter, at the end of The Cave, for example, stands in a
"timeless time" when he reports the death of Jasper Harrick
(p. 378). Similarly, Mr. Munn, after helping to kill Bunk
Trevelyan, seeks to "escape from time by surrendering most
completely to time" (Night Rider, p. 202). Like an equil
ibrist, Mr. Munn attempts to walk the narrow line between
time and non-time:
He felt like a man who, in the ease of a dream, walks
a wire across space, surprised that what had in waking
reality seemed so impossible is so easy, but at the
same time still aware that with a single misstep, a
single failure in balance, he will go hurtling down to
one side or the other. (Night Rider, pp. 202-203)
In much the same way, Cal Fiddler in Flood seeks "that in
stant when both of the incommensurables cease to exist but
have not yet begun their nonexistence" (p. 396). Most of
Warren's characters, however, are poor equilibrists; they
are unable to balance between time and non-time.
Jeremiah Beaumont makes an error in balance and loses
his sense of reality:
315
I seemed to live outside of time# and nothing about
me was real but the thought in me. What was real was
the moment I strove toward, which was not yet in time.
When that moment should fall into the stream of time,
I thought that again time and the world would be real
to me. But not before. (World Enough and Time, pp.
149-150)
To be "out of time," then, at least for Jeremiah, is to be
unreal. In The Cave Nick Pappy recalls how, in the Indi
anapolis honky-tonk, Giselle Fontaine "had not belonged in
Time," how she had "risen there, pure as foam, out of some
timelessness like the sea. Being out of Time, she had had
no past, glimmering like a dream, too beautiful to be real"
(p. 176). Now, however, as Mrs. Papadoupalos, she is "real
enough . . . and being real [is] in Time . . ." (p. 176).
In both examples, the real is "in time," the ideal outside
time.
To lose the reality that comes with being "in time,"
Warren suggests further, is to lose the reality of self.
Failure to realize one's ideal "in time" and make it real
may result in loss of self-reality. Adam Rosenzweig, for
example, comes to feel that he is "out of time. And the
self that had once existed and had that dream no longer ex
isted" ( Wilderness, p. 99). Later, when the dying Hans
Myerhof fails to confirm Adam's idealism, Adam feels "as
316
though his life were curving backward on itself, had veered
out of the dimension of Time" (Wilderness, p. 120). The
same relation between reality of time and reality of self
is evident in the early experience of Mr. Munn, who "seemed
poised out of himself and, as it were, out of time" (Night
Rider, p. 37; italics mine). For Mr. Munn, unlike Adam, the
out-of-time unreality is the result of the "absolute, throb-
less pleasure" at the ostensible success of his Ideal, which,
however, has not become real.
Manty Starr in Band of Angels feels that "the shape of
[her] life . . . stood out of time" (p. 267) in the "coiling
shadows." She waits, she says, "to know mv life, myself."
It was as though your life had a shape . . . standing
not in Time but in Space . . . and you were waiting for
it, in all its necessity, to be revealed to you, and
all your living was merely the process whereby this
already existing, fulfilled shape in Space would become
an event in Time . . .; something in you is certain
that that shape exists there out of Time and will be
transposed into Time . . . (Band of Angels, pp. 265-
266; italics mine)
To know oneself, then, one must know his life as it exists
in time— in "all its necessity," a "human necessity."
Like Manty, Lettice Poindexter in Flood recognizes that
personal reality is associated with time. Also like Manty,
Lettice waits, but not for an already existing, fulfilled
317
self to be "transposed into time." Rather, she waits for
the moment of Brad's embrace, which, she feels, will "redeem
all the past and in that process create the true, the real
Lettice Poindexter" (Flood, p. 68). Although there is
truth in the idea that reality comes from "redeeming" the
past, Lettice errs, first, in thinking that another can
"redeem" one's past or that one can "create" another's re
ality. She errs, further, in failing to realize that one
must reconcile past with present and future.
Adam Rosenzweig also errs in his attitude toward time.
Shortly after his arrival in New York, he thinks, "A man
lives in time. . . . I have seized on the concept of time.
therefore I must be a man ..." (Wilderness, p. 56). As
in the view of Lettice, there is some truth here— for ex
ample, in the recognition that man must live "in time" and
in the relation between living in time and being a man,
being real. Adam errs, however, in thinking that merely
living in time, merely existing, makes one real. To be
real one must be "in time," Warren suggests, but to be "in
time" is not necessarily to be real. "Are we nothing more
than the events of our own story?" Manty Starr asks in
Band of Angels (p. 62). Jean-Paul Sartre, in his essay on
time in Faulkner, provides an unintentional answer:
318
Man is not the sum of what he has, but the totality of
what he does not yet have, of what he could have . . .
Consciousness can be "in time" only if it becomes time
by that movement itself which makes it consciousness.
. . . It is no longer possible to stop man at each
successive moment and to define him as the "sum of what
have you."3
"Time," Warren writes in "The Ballad of Billie Potts," "is
only beginnings, / Time is only and always beginnings.
. . . For Time is motion. ..." Man, Warren suggests, is
not real for being in time but rather for becoming in time;
for him "direction is all."
"The humans live in time and experience reality suc-
4
cessively," C. S. Lewis's Screwtape says. T. S. Eliot, in
"Burnt Norton," provides one of the reasons that reality
must be experienced "successively": "Human kind / Cannot
bear very much of reality." Another reason is that change
is part of the "human necessity," of human reality. God is
the "same yesterday, today, and forever," for He is "out of
time," as Jack Burden reflects in All the King's Men (p.
160). Man, however, is "in time," and "to be in time means
3
Jean-Paul Sartre, "Time in Faulkner: The Sound and
the Fury." William Faulkner: Three Decades of Criticism,
ed. F. J. Hoffman and Olga Vickery (New York, 1960), p. 231.
Cf. Walt Whitman's assertion, in Song of Myself, that the
"fitful events . . . are not the me myself."
4
Lewis, The Screwtape Letters, p. 116 .
319
5
to change." Sue Murdock clung to the illusion that she
lived in "a timeless world" and that "the people in it would
never change" (At Heaven's Gate, p. 242). This illusory
"sense of unchangingness comforted Sue Murdock, like a warm
blanket you snuggle under in the dark . . (p. 242). Long
before Sue lay strangled under a literal blanket, slightly
over a hundred pages later, she was dead spiritually and
hence ironically beyond change, for to feel "that nothing
would ever be different," Adam Rosenzweig realizes, is "to
be dead" ( Wilderness, p. 4).
Sue Murdock, as well as other Warren characters,
wanted no change, for, according to Jack Burden's "theory
of historical costs," all change costs something (All the
King's Men, p. 417). The implicit syllogism is clear:
change costs something; time produces change; therefore,
time costs something. Like knowledge and redemption, or
more accurately, along with them— for the three are comple
mentary— time can be costly. There is a "burden of time
and things," Jeremiah Beaumont realizes (World Enough and
Time, p. 16). Similarly, Jack Burden is finally able to
assume his namesake and go out into "the awful responsibil-
5
Lewis, The Screwtape Letters, p. 37.
320
ity of time" (All the King's Men, p. 464). "The essence of
individuality," Warren writes, "is the willingness to accept
the rub which the flux of things provokes, to accept one's
6
fate in time."
Living in time, according to Warren, is at once man's
judgment and his joy. In Brad Tolliver's letter to Lettice,
written before he learns of her infidelity, he writes of
"how humanly sweet it is to live in time ..." (Flood, p.
196). But if it is "humanly sweet" to live in time, it is
also humanly bitter, as Brad learns shortly. Part of the
lesson he must learn is that all of human life in time is
both sweet and bitter; man must find his reality in time,
which is both his glory and his misfortune, Warren seems
to say. "A man is the sum of his misfortunes," Mr. Compson
tells Quentin in William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury;
"one day you'd think misfortune would get tired, but then
7
time is your misfortune. ..."
Warren specifies two times— "chronological time and
g
history" — and it is important that one does not confuse
&
Segregation: The Inner Conflict of the South, p. 97.
7(New York, 1946), p. 123.
8
Writers at Work: Pans Review, pp. 113-140.
321
time with mere chronology. In Flood, Cal Fiddler, who has
had twenty years in the penitentiary to think about time,
does not recognize this distinction when he says, "Time is
the measure of life and life is the measure of time ..."
(p. 395). Conversely, Henry David Thoreau did recognize
the distinction and was referring to chronological time
9
when he wrote: "Time measures nothing but itself."
Chronological time is measured by the clock, and "in
a novel there is always a clock," E. M. Forster wrote in
Aspects of the Novel.^ The chronometer and the calendar
are the inventions— and all too often the masters— of man.
The reader of Flood is reminded on three occasions that
the courthouse clock in Fiddlersburg stopped years earlier.
Lawyer Cottshill says, "That clock opposite my office has
stood at eight thirty-five for a hell of a long time— A.M.
or P.M., nobody knows. . . . Fiddlersburg is the place
where God just forgot to wind his watch" (Flood, p. 48; cf.
pp. 3 50, 428). Similarly, the Louis XVI clock in the
Fiddler house had been stopped for years; Brad "couldn't
9
A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (New York,
1961), p. 268.
^(New York, 1954), p. 29.
322
think whether it was broken or just nobody gave enough of
a damn to wind it. . . . The world was full of clocks that
had stopped and nobody knew or cared" (p. 386). This
apathy is potentially either undesirable or desirable— un
desirable if it indicates a refusal to accept the reality
of time but desirable if it indicates an attempt to trans
cend mere chronology.
Perhaps more remarkable than Fiddlersburg's clock
which has stopped were Mason City's clock faces which
"weren't real. They were just painted on, and they all said
five o'clock . . ." (All the King's Men, p. 7). If
Fiddlersburg is the "place where there isn't any time"
(Flood, p. 48), Mason City is "the place where Time gets
tangled in its own feet and lies down like an old hound and
gives up the struggle" (All the King's Men, p. 56).
Adam Rosenzweig, like Faulkner's Quentin Compson, at
tempts to transcend chronological time, characterized by
"the rustling sound which was compounded of all the tickings
of all the watches and clocks hung on the walls around him
. . ." ( Wilderness, p. 9). "Clocks slay time," Mr. Compson
tells Quentin^in Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury. "Time
is dead as long as it is clicked off by little wheels; only
when the clock stops does time come to life" (p. 104).
323
Man's reality and chronological time are incommensurables,
both Warren and Faulkner suggest. Perhaps the admirable
figures are "the old ones" in Mason City, who are able to
keep time by the painted clock, just as Faulkner's Dilsey
is able to tell the time by the cabinet clock with its one
hand and inaccurate strike— more in spite of the clock than
because of it. These figures, able to transcend chrono
logical time and yet remain in the "human necessity" of
time, are unlike Quentin Compson, who breaks the watch's
hands. The figure who truly grasps the reality of time
has, like Dilsey, "seed de first en de last."
A primary conflict in Warren's fiction is that between
his characters and chronological time. Like the speaker
in Andrew Marvell's "To His Coy Mistress," they must, like
"birds of prey," "at once [their] time devour" or "languish
in his slow-chapt power." Chronos is no less cannibalistic
in Warren than in Marvel. Warren uses a variety of lin
guistic figures to depict the effect upon man of chronolog
ical time. Time, like an abrasive, threatens with its
"slow attrition" (Night Rider, p. 113); or "time uncoils
like the cottonmouth" ("The Returns An Elegy"). "In the
turpitude of Time / Hope dances on the razor's edge" ("In
the Turpitude of Time: N. D."). Time not only defiles but
also entraps in its dark "abysm" (All the King's Men, p.
23). Manty Starr, at one point in Band of Angels, feels
that time is a tropical, carnivorous plant and she the
victim insect: "I knew myself the victim, the insect, the
animal, struggling among down-spiked hirsuteness, against
the sweet fetidness of dark secretions, against the con
striction of the great gullet of time, caught in the corolla
of history" (Band of Angels, p. 309). Manty not only learns
of but experiences the "involution of time" (p. 262) . Per
haps the most common image of the devasting effects of time,
however, is that of the overwhelming flood. "Time will
always flow," R. P. W. says in Brother to Dragons (p. 17).
In the same work we are told that "Time flowed back. /
Flowed back and over. It whirled [Lucy] like a flood" (p.
85). Similarly, Jack Burden feels "the slow swell of Time"
(All the King's Men, p. 28), and Brad Tolliver feels "Time
simply flowing through [him] and over [him] in a deep pro
cess ..." (Flood, pp. 195-196, 209). Manty Starr des
cribes a similar experience: "Something like a wave broke
over me, a physical, suffocating mass, green like a wave
. . . whirling me over, and I knew it was the past" (Band
of Angels, p. 355).
Sometimes the attrition, turpitude, entrapment, and
325
inundation of impersonal chronology point the way to the
other kind of time: history. Jack Burden felt that his
mother "had the trick of making a little island right in
the middle of time, and of your knowing, which is what time
does to you" (All the King's Men, p. 119; italics mine).
Time, Warren suggests, teaches man the reality of history.
History is not mere chronological record. The word,
it is significant to remember, comes from the Greek historia
— meaning "knowledge" or "a learning by inquiry"— and is
akin to eidenai, "to know." To Warren, history is the
meaningful, valuable past.^ Man arrives at reality, War
ren has said, not so much through a combat with the past
In his introduction to A Southern Harvest: Short
Stories by Southern Writers (Boston, 1937), Warren wrote,
"It has been said that the Southerner is incurably and in
corrigibly historical minded, and this seems to be true."
Four years earlier, in a review entitled "T. S. Stribling:
A Paragraph in the History of Critical Realism" (American
Review. II [November 1933], 463), Warren castigated Strib
ling because "his historical sense is deficient." An "his
torical sense" is important to Warren. "I like history,"
he says in an autobiographical note in the New York Times
Book Review (October 11, 1953, p. 10); "that was what my
father selected when he read aloud to his children." On
another occasion, Warren said, "I have a romantic kind of
interest in the objects of American history: saddles, shoes,
figures of speech, rifles, etc. They're worth a lot. Help
you focus. There is a kind of extraordinary romance about
American history. That's the only word for it— a kind of
self-sufficiency" (Writers at Work: Paris Review).
326
but through "trying to find what there is valuable to us,
12
the line of continuity to us, and through us." In his
review of Edmund Wilson's Patriotic Gore. Warren says,
"Patriotic Gore does not say history makes sense. But it
clearly says that men must, in the end, try to make sense
13
of history." Warren is saying much the same thing in his
own writing. In The Legacy of the Civil War, he writes,
"History cannot give us a program for the future, but it
can give us a fuller understanding of ourselves, and of our
common humanity, so that we can better face the future" (p.
100). Jack Burden in All the King's Men acquires such an
historical sense and with it a knowledge of self. Jack, a
self designated "student of history," sheds his early illu
sion that "if the human race didn't remember anything it
would be perfectly happy" (All the King's Men, p. 44).
Jack at this point does not realize that happiness or "joy,"
14
to use the term Warren chooses elsewhere, must be based
12
Writers at Work: Pans Review, p. 113.
13"Edmund Wilson's Civil War," p. 151.
14
Compare C. S. Lewis's similar use of the word "joy,"
for example in his autobiographical work Surprised bv Jov
(London, 1955). In The Great Divorce Lewis equates Joy and
Reality: "There is always something [lost souls] prefer to
joy— that is, to reality" (p. 69).
327
upon truth, upon reality. Jack possesses such a "joy" at
the end of the novel, where he is able to go "out of history
into history" (All the King's Men, p. 464). History for
him has not only become a meaningful, valuable past but has
also pointed to a meaningful, valuable future.
Dr. Echegaray in Flood, a professor of medieval history
at Madrid and hence a true "student of history," "believed
that God's hand moved in history, and as a historian, be
lieved that man's obligation was to enter history, not to
flinch from history. For to be a man, he said, a man
must— " (Flood, p. 147). The conclusion of the elliptical
statement may be supplied from Warren's The Legacy of the
Civil War: to be a man he must submit his vision, his idea,
15
to the "test of history." Whether of a nation or of an
individual, "the anguished scrutiny of the meaning of the
vision in experience" must become a reality? history pro
vides this reality, for "history is the image of [the] idea"
(Legacy, p. 78). By this criterion, Brad Tolliver's
15
Legacy, p. 3. Warren's point is that America had
no history "in the deepest and most inward sense" before
the Civil War submitted our vision "to the test of history."
"The anguished scrutiny of the meaning of the vision in
experience had not become a national reality. It became a
reality, and we became a nation, only with the Civil War"
(pp. 3, 4).
remoteness from reality is great indeed, for he has doubts
about the existence of history. "Fiddlersburg," he says,
"is as far as you can get outside of history and still feel
that history exists. If . . . it does" (Flood, p. 46;
italics mine). Brother Potts, in a sense Brad's opposite
and the moral norm of the novel, attempts to show the in
habitants of Fiddlersburg, before the town is inundated by
the flood of Time, that their lives have been "blessed,"
that they have had a meaningful, valuable past and, conse
quently, can have a meaningful, valuable future. Brad,
however, has no such historical sense until the very end
of the novel. History, for him, if it exists at all, is
"merely what happened, no matter how blank the happening
. . . Yes, for him— out of nowhere, toward nowhere— that
was History" (Flood, p. 69). Brad's philosophy of history
is essentially a restatement of his equation of unreality:
"Nothing equaled nothing" (p. 335) . He must learn, as
Jack Burden does in All the King's Men, that "reality is
not a function of the event as event ..." (p. 407), that
reality does not consist of mere blank, unrelated happen
ings. If nothing is ever lost, as Jack Burden learns in
his historical research of Cass Mastern, and if everything
matters, as Duckfoot Blake learns in At Heaven's Gate.
329
history is more than "out of nowhere, toward nowhere." By
the end of the novel, Brad discovers that time, a flood
greater than the one threatening Fiddlersburg, has deposited
the "rich detritus of all History, / Muck, murk, and humus,
and the human anguish, / And human hope ..." (Brother to
Dragons. p. 122).
History, Warren suggests, is not monolithic; it con
sists of both human anguish and human hope. "Whatever comes
out of History," Aaron Blaustein tells Adam in Wilderness,
"— out of this anguish even— will come only because every
thing is part of everything else . . . even, the good" (p.
74). The "irony of history" is that it involves a "double
ness of experience (Legacy, p. 71). History itself is a
kind of dialectic; man is frequently "caught in the cleft
stick of history, in the tragic dilemma of opposing goods,
16
and opposing evils." Tobias Sears in Band of Angels,
even while he refuses to accept its existence, is caught
in the "cleft stick of history." He expresses his anguished
disillusionment to Manty:
It's so hard in the middle of things to remember that the
power of soul must work through matter, that even the
16
Warren, Who Speaks for the Negro? p. 27.
330
filthiness of things is part of what Mr. Emerson calls
the perennial miracle the soul worketh, that matter
often retains something of its original tarnishment,
that history is a movement of matter, and that even if
history is the working out of the design of the Great
Soul, the redemption of matter is not always complete,
that imperfect man must fulfill the perfection of idea,
that— . (Band of Angels, p. 238)
Tobias finds it difficult to accept the "cleft stick," the
dialectic of history; he seems to desire the soul and Over
soul but not matter, spirit but not flesh, spiritual but not
physical, perfection but not imperfection. Tobias idealizes
history; in a word, he seeks the nutriment of its "rich
detritus" without the "muck, murk, and humus, and the human
anguish." The more he seeks to separate the opposite points
of the "stick," the more he becomes caught in its cleft.
If Brad Tolliver questions the existence of history
or, at best, sees it as a series of blank happenings, and
if Tobias Sears idealizes history, Aaron Blaustein in
Wilderness uses history as a rationalization. "That's what
History is," he tells Adam,
— the reason for things. That's why it can take the
place of God. God being the reason for things, too
. . . it's just that God is tired of taking the blame.
He is going to let History take the blame for a while.
(p. 73)
One suspects that for Aaron history provides more rational
ization than reason. Aaron wants to see history as hieratic
331
rather than as hortatory, as being more venerable than
instructive.
If you stopped worshipping God [he says] all you can
fall back on is History. I suppose I worship History,
since a man has to worship something. I suppose I am
not wise enough to let worshipping History make me
ironical. ^ (p. 69)
If history is hieratic, if history offers forgiveness rather
than needing forgiveness itself, man can then rationalize
away his own responsibility in history. Carried to its log
ical conclusion, such a philosophy degenerates into a cyni
cal, debilitating determinism. "Do you know what History
is?" Aaron later asks Adam. "No," Adam replies. "It is the
agony people have to go through . . . so that things will
turn out as they would have turned out anyway" (Wilderness,
p. 77). If, in the extreme of Tobias Sears's philosophy, he
finds it difficult to recognize the "human anguish" in his
tory, Aaron, in the extreme of his philosophy, can recognize
only the "human anguish" and no "human hope." Manty Starr
17
Aaron's view of history is similar to the view at
tributed by Warren to the Northerner regarding the Civil
War. In The Legacy of the Civil War, Warren asserts that
the Northerner considered the War inevitable. The "North
was merely the bright surgical instrument in the hand of
God, or History" (p. 98). Aaron, like the Northerner, be
lieves that "we are all shriven by History" (Legacy, p. 97).
Conversely, Adam, later in the novel, feels that the Negro,
Mose, "needed no forgiveness, not for anything. He had
done nothing. History needed forgiveness."
332
expresses a version of the latter philosophy when she says:
"What you are is an expression of History, and you do not
live your life, but somehow, your life lives you, and you
are, therefore, only what History does to you" (Band of
Angels, p. 134). Manty and Adam, indeed Everyman, must
learn that if man is the expression of History, History is
also the expression of man.
Perhaps even more egregious than the concepts of a
nonexistent history, of an idealized history, or of a ra
tionalized history is the concept of an "unhistorical his-
18
tory," of history manipulated. Miss Burnham, a minor
character in Night Rider, invents a "magnificent and fan
tastic history" (p. 226) . But whether it is a delusory
history or an illusory one, the results are equally damning.
Indeed "History is a process fraught with risks . . .," as
19
Warren states in an essay on Joseph Conrad. History is
costly: "Blood is the first cost. History is not melo
drama, even if it reads like that" (Legacy, p. 50). It is
sometimes forgotten that with risks come rewards. "It is
18
Legacy, p. 79. Warren alludes to the "manipulation
of propaganda specialists" who discuss the Civil War.
19
’ "The Great Mirage': Conrad and Nostromo." p. 54.
333
forgotten, in fact, that history is history" (Legacy, p. 63).
Warren could well have been describing his own fiction
when he wrote, in a review of Madison Jones's The Innocent:
"Mr. Jones is dealing with some old and general questions,
the relation of man and his past, of a man and his illu-
20
sions, of modernity and myth." In Warren's fiction,
history with a small "h" is sometimes synonymous with the
past. For example, Sweetie Sweetwater and Sue Murdock in
At Heaven's Gate feel that they can "shut the mind to
history and future, as to the most trivial irrelevancies
. . ." (p. 313; italics mine). Earlier, in a review of John
Peale Bishop's Many Thousands Gone. Warren wrote: "The
21
present is already held mortmain of the past." Warren
depicts this mortmain metaphorically through the father-son
relationship, a motif which appears in each of the eight
novels. "The drama of the past that corrects us is the
drama of our struggles to be human, or our struggles to de
fine the values of our forebears in the face of their
20
"A First Novel," Sewanee Review. LXV (Spring 1957),
p. 347.
21
Robert Penn Warren, "Lavender and Old Ladies," New
Republic. LXVII (August 5, 1931), 321.
334
difficulties."22
To reject the father, Warren suggests, is to reject
the mortmain of the past, the legacy of history, and to
cause a discontinuity between then and now. In Night Rider
Mr. Munn vacillates between two surrogate fathers— Tolliver
and Todd— and then chooses the wrong one. Even after Todd's
real son is killed, Mr. Munn chooses Tolliver, who had hated
his own father. In a real sense, Mr. Munn is the true son
of Tolliver, for he follows the same obsession toward un
reality. Mr. Munn does not kill Tolliver at the end, per
haps because Mr. Munn realizes his complicity with, and
legacy from, Tolliver.
Jerry Calhoun in At Heaven's Gate rejects his father,
wishes him dead, and chooses Bogan Murdock as surrogate
father, whereas Sue rejects Murdock, her true father. But
Jerry, unlike Sue, comes to realize, in the words of R. P.
W. in Brother to Dragons, that
The failures of our fathers are the failures we shall make.
Their triumphs the triumphs we shall never have.
But remembering our fathers, we are compelled to praise,
And for their virtues hate them while we praise,
And praising, wonder . . . (p. 28)
22
Fugitives' Reunion: Conversations at Vanderbilt.
p. 142.
335
Slim Sarrett, who possesses a more distorted time sense
than either Sue or Jerry, tells Sue that "the artist has
no father. Only a multiplicity of fathers, who don't owe
him a thing . . . and . . . he doesn't owe them anything
either" (At Heaven's Gate, p. 167). Slim, the pseudo-poet
who fabricates the story about his father, is saying that
history has no significance for a man and a man has no
significance for history. Earlier, in fact, he stated that
"the past is valuable only in so far as one can recognize
it as past" (At Heaven1s Gate, p. 166).
Jack Burden in All the King's Men has three fathers—
the Scholarly Attorney, his supposed father; Willie Stark,
his surrogate father; and Judge Irwin, his real father.
Jack learns from, and comes to honor, all three. Because
he does. Jack will have a new surrogate father, Hugh Miller,
the moral norm of the novel, who tells Jack, "History is
blind, but man is not" (All the King's Men, p. 462). Jack
concludes: "It looks as though Hugh will get back into
politics, and when he does I'll be along to hold his coat.
. . . the discovery of truth had . . . robbed me of the past
and had killed my father. But in the end the truth gave
the past back to me . . ." (p. 462).
In World Enough and Time. Jeremiah Beaumont, who chose
336
to relinquish his grandfather's inheritance rather than to
repudiate his father's name, chooses Cassius Fort as a sur
rogate father. Jeremiah comes to feel for Fort "not merely
the respect and gratitude I owed him for kindness, but love
as though he had been a father and good to me" (World Enough
and Time, p. 48). When Jeremiah later kills Fort he seeks
to kill the past: "The past would be dead," he thinks (p.
235). But by attempting to destroy the past, Jeremiah
destroys the future for himself and for Rachel. All that
remains for Rachel— who "had not loved her father" (p. 53)
— and for Jeremiah is a grotesque parody of the father
image— Old Big Hump, the decadent swamp pirate.
Manty Starr in Band of Angels feels even more disillu
sioned about her father than does Rachel Jordan. She feels
a betrayal of love and thus rejects her father. Manty,
along with Tobias Sears, who has philosophical differences
with his father; Hamish Bond, who has hated his father; and
Rau-Ru, who despises Bond, his surrogate sire and savior of
his life— all these, by rejecting their respective fathers,
cut themselves off from history. As a result they lose
their sense of reality. Only by "honoring of the Father,
the redeeming of the past . . .," do Manty and Tobias
regain their sense of identity.
337
In The Cave. Mrs. Harrick, speaking to her husband
about their son, says, "There was always something wrong
about you and him ..." (p. 299). The same applies to
Reverend Sumpter and his son, Isaac. Both fathers lose
their sons— one to a kind of life-in-death cave experience
and the other to a death-in-life unreality. Isaac, by re
jecting his pietistic legacy and by causing the death of
his surrogate brother, Jasper, becomes a wanderer like Cain.
History for him is indeed a step "out of nowhere, into no
where ."
Like Adam Stanton in All the King's Men, Adam Rosenz-
weig in Wilderness becomes disillusioned with his father
when the latter betrays A.dam's ideal. Having rejected
Aaron Blaustein as a surrogate father, Adam, in order to
pursue his ideal, seeks in Hans Myerhof a surrogate father
who will confirm his ideal. "He felt as though, again, he
sat beside a dying father, a father who . . . would not
repudiate the old truth" (Wilderness, p. 120). Later Jed
Hawksworth's vituperative hatred for his own father (p. 160)
illustrates to Adam what his own hatred could become. But
only when he realizes that he is "only human" himself (p.
309) can Adam accept his father as human. Then he can even
pray to his Heavenly Father.
In Warren's most recent novel, Flood, Brad Tolliver
hates even the memory of his father, a nouveau-riche "musk
rat skinner." He seems to despise in his father what he
recognizes in himself— an inability to face reality. Brad
retreats to the primordial swamp no less certainly than his
father had, no less certainly than Mr. Munn did as he lay in
the "primal namelessness" of the mud (Night Rider, pp. 381-
382), no less certainly than Manty Starr did as she rode
with Rau-Ru amid the "Gothic-grained, antediluvian roots of
the cypresses" (Band of Angels, p. 315) in the Louisiana
quagmire, no less certainly than Jeremiah and Rachel Beau
mont did in the decadent domain of the Old Big Hump. Brad
Tolliver's surrogate father is the paresis-plagued Frog-
Eye, the swamp rat reminiscent of the Old Big Hump in World
Enough and Time. It was Frog-Eye who initiated Brad into
"the dark wood of manhood" (Flood, p. 115). Both Frog-Eye
and Brad's other surrogate father, Old Izzie Goldfarb, are
projections of Brad's own conflicting nature: the wild and
sensuous opposing the orderly and spiritual. What was true
of the protagonist in Warren's first novel is equally true
of the protagonist in the eighth: "His past [was] as value
less and as unstable as a puff of smoke, and his future
meaningless, unless . . . he might by some unnameable,
339
single, heroic stroke discover the unifying fulfillment"
(Night Rider, p. 208). Although Mr. Munn apparently never
finds the "unifying fulfillment," Brad does. At the end of
the novel he no longer needs his surrogate fathers, for,
accepting the mortmain of his real father, he has begun to
achieve an integrated self. Brad, like all father-history
rejecters, must learn that
A people without history
Is not redeemed from time, for history is a pattern
Of timeless moments. (T. S. Eliot, "Little Gidding")
A second, recurring metaphor of history in Warren's
fiction is the West and the westward journey. Willie Proud-
fit in Night Rider had learned of reality in the West, just
as Munn Short had in World Enough and Time. But the pro
tagonists of the two novels— Mr. Munn and Jeremiah Beaumont
— do not profit from the stories of Proudfit and Short,
respectively. Mr. Munn refuses to flee westward, and Jere
miah's journey westward to the swamp is a grotesque parody
of a return to Eden. Jack Burden in All the King's Men
and Brad Tolliver in Flood both flee to California, perhaps
for similar reasons— to escape the harshness of the real
present. Jack, however, returns after a day, whereas Brad
stays for twenty years. Tobias and Manty in Band of Angels
migrate westward, first to St. Louis and then to Kansas.
340
[
"Time is West," Warren writes in "The Ballad of Billie
Potts," the tragic poem recounting another westward journey
and return. If being in the West is being "at the end of
History," as Jack Burden asserts (All the King's Men, p.
329), it is also being at the beginning of history, for
"there is innocence and a new start in the West" (All the
King1s Men, p. 330). The West, according to Henry Nash
23
Smith, is the image of the American past, but it is also
an image of the American future built upon the legacy of
the past. Both elements are present in Warren's poem
"History," in which the metaphor is the westward migration.
Louis Rubin, Jr., in his discussion of Warren's poetry, has
observed that "Warren conceives the westward trek as sym-
24
bolizing the essential engagement in time. ..." Each
of Warren's characters who make the Western trek is in some
23
Henry Nash Smith, "West as Image of the American
Past," Kansas City Review. XVIII (Autumn 1951), 29.
24
Louis Rubin, Jr., "The Eye of Time: Religious Themes
in Robert Penn Warren's Poetry," Diliman Review, III (July
1955), 215. For a more thorough discussion of the westward
journey as symbol see Sam Hynes, "Robert Penn Warren: The
Symbolic Journey," University of Kansas City Review, XVII
(Summer 1951), 279. Perhaps a better treatment of the sub
ject is Joe Davis's "Robert Penn Warren and the Journey to
the West,” Modern Fiction Studies, VI (Spring 1960), 73.
Neither article, however, treats the significance of the
West in relation to time.
341
way readjusted to reality thereby. If "Time is West,"
Warren seems to suggest that man's hope lies in time itself,
in the discovery and recovery of history's legacy.
Time, for Warren, is both metaphysic and dialectic, a
point which a closer examination of the elements of time
in Warren's fiction will reveal. It is clear that Warren's
is a metaphysic of time; this is so because time provides
man's ontology. By discovering the reality of his past,
Warren suggests, man discovers the reality of himself.
"Discovering his past, the Southerner might find himself,
25
and the courage to be himself," Warren has written. Con
versely, by failing to discover, or by discovering and re
jecting, one's past, the Southerner, or Everyman, fails to
discover the reality of self and with it the courage to be
himself.
Mr. Munn, one of Warren's fictional Southerners,
illustrates the loss of a sense of the past and with it the
loss of self. During one of his visits with his "cousin,"
Miss Sprague, herself a rejecter of the past, Mr. Munn at
tempts "in a last, desperate or thrifty automatic effort to
salvage something of his own past being ..." (Night Rider.
25
Who Speaks for the Negro? p. 428.
342
p. 210). His efforts, however, are misdirected and futile.
Later he is shown clinging to his hatred of Tolliver as to
a keepsake, "which is nothing in itself, but which means the
reality of one's past, the truth of one's feelings, the fact
of one's identity" (Night Rider, p. 302). Lacking the first
two— reality of his past and of truth— Mr. Munn lacks the
third— reality of self.
To the dying Jack Harrick in The Cave, the past seems
unreal: "All the past . . . was nothing, nothing but
whirling blankness" (p. 144). Because he has not discovered
his past. Jack has not discovered himself. To have no past,
Warren suggests, is to be "out of time," and to be "out of
time" is to be unreal. In the same novel, Nick Pappy had
envisioned Giselle Fontaine as not belonging in time:
"Being out of time, she had had no past . . ., too beautiful
to be real." But as his wife, Giselle— or Sarah Pumfret—
was "real enough," and "being real, was in time, and being
in time, had a past . . ." (p. 176).
Manty Starr in Band of Angels asks a question which
many of Warren's characters seem, by their actions, to ask:
"What had the past to do with me? Nothing, I told myself,
and believed it" (Band of Angels, p. 234). The correct
answer, according to Warren, is "everything," for man must
343
"try to learn what the contemplation of the past, conducted
with psychological depth and humane breadth, can do for us"
(Legacy, p. 99). Manty errs in believing, first, that she
could be "free from everything in the world, all the past
. . ." and, second, that by being free from the past she
would be "free to create [a] new self" (Band of Angels, p.
234). "I denied the past," she says (p. 262). Hers is the
delusion that she can undo the past— for example by changing
location: "We would go to that strange place, and nothing,
nothing that had ever happened, would have happened. My
heart, and mind, closed on the past, like a valve" (p. 339).
Rachel and Jeremiah Beaumont in World Enough and Time
labor under a similar delusion and take even more drastic
measures to escape the past. The intended completion of
his ellipsis becomes clear as Jeremiah tells Rachel, "When
the past is destroyed, when it is plucked out ..." (World
Enough and Time. 124). The intended completion, however,
is not the true one, for rejection of the past is essential
ly a rejection of reality. Jeremiah thought that "the past
would be dead" (p. 23 5) if he killed Cassius Fort, not re
alizing that rather than the past being dead he and Rachel
would be dead to the past and to the future as well.
Those who have tried to escape the past often discover.
when they do seek it, that the past escapes them. Jeremiah
Beaumont, having attempted to destroy the past, later strug
gles "to know it, to live back into the past time and know
it as he had not been able to know it when caught in the
toils of its presentness" (World Enough and Time, p. 414).
Similarly, Sue Murdock, toward the end of At Heaven's Gate,
seeks to "put the past together, fumblingly, like a kid
working a jigsaw puzzle . . . but there was always one piece
missing, and she couldn't tell whether it was a picture of
a hula dancer or a map of classic Greece" (p. 297). After
he has strangled Sue, Slim— a combination of Raskolnikov
and Porphyria's lover— longs to regain his past times with
her: "If he shut his eyes, it might not be this time, it
might be any other time and not this time" (At Heaven's
Gate, p. 362) . Rather than longing to undo the past, as
Manty Starr hoped to do, Slim longs to redo the past and
undo the present.
Jack Burden in All the King's Men also seeks the "other
time," the past. Unlike his two roommates at the univers
ity, who are hiding from the future, Jack is hiding from
the present: "The other two took refuge in the present.
Jack Burden took refuge in the past" (All the King's Men,
p. 170). Only the past, represented by Cass Mastern, seems
345
real to Jack. He becomes a self-styled "historian" and
enters "the enchantments of the past" (p. 320). Enchantment
soon becomes disenchantment, however. Jack abandons his
Ph.D. dissertation, with its research into the past, and
undertakes research of the past for Willie Stark, only to
discover truths which rob him of his past and kill his fa
ther. His two "journeys into the past" disillusion Jack
in the pejorative sense of the word but also in the positive
sense of causing him to shed his illusions. The past gave
him the truth, which then robbed him of his idealized past,
"but in the end the truth gave the past back" (All the Kincfe
Men, p. 462)— a real past. Jack concludes: "My mother
gave me back the past. I could now accept the past which
I had before felt was tainted and terrible. I could accept
the past now because I could accept her and be at peace
with her and with myself" (p. 458). Reality, Warren sug
gests, is to be found only in the acceptance of the past.
There is more to time, however, than the past, impor
tant though it may be. Time, for Warren, is more than
metaphysic; it is also dialectic. In his review of William
Faulkner's Requiem for a Nun. Warren writes of Faulkner's
"fundamental concern . . . with the interpenetration of
past and present. . . . And as for the concern with the
346
past, that is the very essence of Temple's problem: the
26
past is not even past." Faulkner's concern is also War
ren's, and the problem is often that of the Warren charac
ter.
"The present," Warren has written in another essay on
Faulkner, "is to be understood, and fully felt, only in
27
terms of the past." Again, in his essay on Katherine Anne
Porter, Warren emphasizes "the meaning of the past for the
28
present." And in a 1931 review, Warren wrote, "The ran
dom violence of the present is given its meaning by refer-
29
ence to the past." "The past cannot be presented."
Thoreau wrote in A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers;
but neither can the past be cut off and isolated from the
present if one is to experience reality. As Adam in
Wilderness watched the dying Hans Myerhof, he "felt that a
gray film was coming down over all the past and what it had
meant, cutting it off from the present. He was left alone
26
"The Redemption of Temple Drake," p. 1.
27
"William Faulkner," Selected Essays, p. 62.
28
"Irony with a Center," Selected Essavs. p. 152
29
"Lavender and Old Ladies," p. 321.
347
with the present, and he did not know what it meant" (p.
122). At the outset of the novel, Adam could accept only
an ideal, rather than a real, past represented by his
father's legacy. Only after he submitted his ideal version
of the past to the test of experience in the present could
he achieve a realistic past. On the other hand, it was
only through his concern with the past that the present
became meaningful; and only when present and past became
real and meaningful could the future have similar prospects.
Simon Lovehart in "The Circus in the Attic" illustrates
the faulty time sense of the Warren character, when he asks
himself: "Is the present the victim of the past, or the
30
past the victim of the present?" The answer, of course,
is that neither must be "victim" of the other if man is to
experience reality. In Night Rider. Mr. Munn's present be
came "victim" of his past "at those unstable moments when
the past flooded obliteratingly over the present" (p. 307).
At such times, "faces and speculations and events from the
past . . . crowded through his head with a clamorous and
independent vigor above his will, crowding devouringly
and aimlessly like a mob breaking at last into a locked
30
"The Circus in the Attic" and Other Stories, p. 17.
348
mansion" (Night Rider, p. 307). Warren introduces these
two metaphoric descriptions of the encroachment of the past
— the obliterating flood and the surging mob— in the
opening paragraph of the novel, where the "gathering force"
surges up the aisle of the train and "like a wave" (p. 1)
plunges Mr. Munn on against his will.^
If the past for Mr. Munn becomes a kind of sleepless
dream, for Jeremiah Beaumont, in prison near the end of
World Enough and Time, it becomes a "dreamful sleep" (p.
415). For Jeremiah, the past is "'the last dream a man
31
The train motif is again linked to the past xn the
description of Mr. Munn's "occupationless days and nights,"
when "the items of the past . . . seemed to be flashing from
him into distance, like objects seen from a moving train
. . ." (Night Rider, p. 214; italics mine). Even at this
point, Mr. Munn is unable to gain from the past "some hint
of interpretation for the present." The simile anticipates
the scene in All the King's Men in which Jack observes ob
jects from a moving train. Jack contemplates the "secret"
inside the woman's house, just as earlier, riding in Stark's
Cadillac, he had contemplated what was inside the brain of
the cow along the road. One might conclude that the train
in Night Rider. Murdock's car in At Heaven's Gate, Stark's
Cadillac in All the King's Men. Nick's yellow "Cad"in The
Cave, and Brad's Jaguar in Flood all function as a kind of
time machine, not only moving characters through space but
also precipitating their engagement in time. In a sense,
all of Warren's characters are following "Number 58," de
picted in the opening of All the King's Men, and either
crash their time machine or "wake up in time."
must make, the dream of himself and the way he has come and
how things came to be'" (p. 415). He contemplates the
"perfect point" at which "the world of blankness and the
world of dream, the present and the past," will "coincide,"
a point at which he feels he will then die. Jeremiah, who
had attempted to destroy the past, now recognizes its impor
tance, but he still errs in thinking that the incommensur-
ables, past and present, can coincide. Past and present,
dialectical elements, must interpenetrate and interact, but
they cannot coincide. If there is a "perfect point" at all,
perhaps it is the meeting of time and eternity, as depicted
by T. S. Eliot in Four Quartets. Eliot depicts the Chris
tian revelation as the mystical experience in which "the
saint" is enabled to "apprehend / The point of intersection
of the timeless / With Time." Jeremiah, unlike his Bibli
cal namesake, is no saint; he dies violently, without hav
ing achieved his "perfect point."
Because past and present are incommensurables, there
is danger in "trying to justify the present by the past or
the past by the present" (Legacy, p. 98). Rather than
seeking justification in the past, Warren suggests, man
must accept the rebuke of the past. Warren has said:
3 50
The past is always a rebuke to the present, it's
bound to be, one way or another: it's your great
rebuke. It's a better rebuke than any dream of the
future. It's a better rebuke because you can see
what some of the costs were, what frail virtues were
achieved in the past by frail men.32
The rebuke of the past is better than the dream of the
future also because without the acceptance of the past there
can be no meaningful future. In the dialectic of time, the
past interpenetrates and interacts not only with the present
but also with the future. Jack Burden learned, and told
his mother, the lesson that "if you could not accept the
past and its burden there was no future, for without one
there cannot be the other, and [that] if you could accept
the past you might hope for the future, for only out of the
past can you make the future" (All the King's Men, p. 461).
Jefferson, another "brass-bound Idealist," learns the same
lesson in Brother to Dragons; he tells Lucy: "The dream of
the future is not / Better than the fact of the past, no
matter how terrible. / For without the fact of the past we
cannot dream the future" (p. 193).
Rejection of the past, according to Warren, means re
jection of the future. Miss Sprague in Night Rider "did
32
Fugitives' Reunion: Conversations at Vanderbilt,
p. 142.
351
not like to talk of the past. . . . Indeed, she had little
memory of the past. That, too, she had rejected, for out
of memory rises the notion of a positive and purposive
future, the revision of the past" (p. 212). Because "time
future [is] contained in time past," as T. S. Eliot has
written in "Burnt Norton," failure to accept the latter
eventuates in unreality. Cal and Maggie Fiddler in Flood
illustrate the same principle. Cal, a penitentiary inmate
and hence a literal captive of his past, tells Brad: "You
think about the past because there isn't any future" (p.
284). Cal's wife, Maggie, is no less a captive of the
past, and, like Vinnie in Eugene O'Neill's Mourning Becomes
Electra, she has voluntarily entrapped herself in the family
house. The husband and wife, captives of a past they have
rejected, achieve prospects of a future only when each
accepts the past and its rebuke.
If the fact of the past is necessary for the dream of
the future, the future, Warren suggests, is necessary in
maintaining the past. Jack Burden says, "We can keep the
past only by having the future, for they are forever tied
together" (All the King's Men, p. 329). ^ Warren had
33
Perhaps Jasper Harrick's cave, in Warren's novel by
352
already illustrated the point in his first novel, in which
Mr. Munn realized that
he did not have the seed of the future in himself, the
live gem. It had shriveled up and died, like a
sprouting grain of corn that has been washed out of the
hill to lie exposed to the sun's heat. He could not
tell exactly when it had died . . . But now it was dead;
and because the future was dead and rotten in his breast,
the past, too, which once had seemed to him to have its
meanings and its patterns, began to fall apart . . .
(Night Rider, p. 390)
Mr. Munn truly illustrates the hollow man, living in unre
ality, his past falling apart because his future is "dead,"
that is, meaningless. Another of Warren's vicious circles
is operative: without the rebuke of the past there can be
no future, which is a revision of the past, and without the
future the past cannot be maintained.
Perhaps the meaningful, valuable past is the most
significant element of time in Warren's fiction, for if a
that name, best illustrates this continuity of past and
future. In her discussion of the cave in E. M. Forster's
A Passage to India. ("What Happened in the Cave?" Modern
Fiction Studies. VII [Autumn 1961]), Louise Douner makes the
point that the cave, as symbol of creative life-force,
"implies the continuity between past and future." In War
ren's cave, however, there is a sense of timelessness or
perhaps a transcending of time; Jasper tells his mother:
"There aren't any seasons to bother about down here ..."
(The Cave, p. 240).
353
character fails to accept the onus of the past he necessar
ily renders his present and future unreal. Time is dia
lectic in Warren's fiction, with past interacting with
present and future. But Warren also has a significant con
cept of the present. Like that of Faulkner, it is not a
clearly circumscribed point between past and future. The
present moment is, in the words of Thoreau in Walden, "the
meeting place of two eternities, the past and the future.
. . ." Accordingly, to Mr. Munn, beginning his activities
for the Tobacco Association early in Night Rider, the
present moment seemed "a point of vantage from which he
could survey other moments in their true perspective and
worth, moments of the past and, perhaps, moments of the
future" (p. 48). There is, however, no clear line of de
marcation between then and now, for, as T. S. Eliot expres
ses it,
Time past and time future
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.
("Burnt Norton")
One characteristic of Warren's present, then, is com
pression: past and future are fused in present; time is
foreshortened. "All times are one time," Jack Burden says
in All the King's Men (p. 242). "It is hard to remember,"
354
Aaron Blaustein tells Adam in Wilderness, "all that goes
into the making of any one moment we live . . (p. 66).
To "know" the present moment, however, would require not
only memory but foreknowledge, for the seed of the future
is in the present. But even if one could remember and
foresee, Warren seems to suggest, he could not clearly dis
tinguish past and future events fused in the present.
In three climactic scenes in World Enough and Time,
time became fused for Jeremiah Beaumont. Two future mo
ments— "the moment when [Jeremiah] should strike Fort and
the moment when he should at last take [Rachel] into his
arms fused into one moment" (p. 150)? both moments, the
fulfillment of Jeremiah's ideal, fused into his present
dream. Later, at the trial, the face of Mrs. Fort and that
of old Mrs. Jordan merged "in a foreshortening and fusing
of time" (p. 355), perhaps symbolizing Jeremiah's fate in
time. Finally, in prison, Jeremiah mused on an image of
his youth— that of a keel-boat floating downstream— and of
his impulsion to pursue it: "Now it seemed that that time
and this time were the same time, foreshortened and fused
in the dream ..." (p. 453). The apparent fusion was only
delusory, however, for Jeremiah could not recapture the
Edenic innocence of the naked boy plunging into the water
355
in pursuit of the receding boat.
In Band of Angels Manty has a similar recurring image
of past innocence: that of the frightened little girl in a
storm, searching for her lost doll. When Bond, the aging
man, seduces the young girl— an act symbolizing the rape of
present by a violent past— Manty is still "storm-drenched
and storm-scared and lonely and confused in a foreshortening
of time ..." (Band of Angels, p. 134). Earlier, when
Manty was placed on the slave boat, she recalled how her
father had placed her on the steamboat to Cincinnati, and
"with the fusion of that old moment and the present one"
came "irremediable anguish" (p. 72). For both Manty and
Jeremiah the innocent, ideal moment past fuses with the un
pleasant, real moment present. Somewhat different, however,
is Adam Rosenzweig's fused moment at the end of Wilderness,
where the disillusioned moment past fuses with the disillu-
sive moment present. Adam's prayer, finally made possible
because he has submitted his idealized past to the test of
the real present experience, reminds Adam of the same words
uttered over his father's grave: "He was saying them now,
and as he said them that place and this place and that time
and this time, flowed together" (p. 308). Adam's is a
fusion of both space and time. For each of the three
356
characters— Jeremiah, Manty, and Adam— the past is fused
with the present through memory, what Bergson called the
intersection of mind and matter. Even more obviously,
34
memory is the interfusion of past and present.
In his idealistic vision of the present. Brad Tolliver
in Flood contemplated the fusion not only of the past— mem
ory— but also of the future— anticipation. In a letter to
Lettice he wrote of having "the past and the future in a
present vision" (p. 196). Brad's fusion, however, later
proves too facile when Lettice*s addendum to her past— her
infidelity— destroys Brad's ideal image.
Closely related to the fusion of past and future in
present is the compression of the present itself— a version
of the carpe diem theme. Rather than fusing then and now,
the attempt is to compress as many events as possible into
the present moment, to "roll all . . . strength and . . .
sweetness up into one ball," as Marvell expressed it in "To
His Coy Mistress." The best examples of the compression of
34
Still another example of foreshortened or fused time
appears in "The Circus in the Attic," where Simon Lovehart,
dying of a stroke, recalls an earlier shock received when
he was thrown from a horse: "He knew again, in the fore
shortening and fusion of time, the pure essential astonish
ment at the clap of peace out of fury" ("The Circus in the
Attic" and Other Stories, p. 28).
357
the present appear, as one would expect from the title, in
World Enough and Time. In the first paragraph of the novel,
the narrator depicts Jeremiah in a frenetic race with time,
attempting to record his story in his journal before he is
executed. "The bold stroke of the quill catches on the
rough paper, fails, resumes, moves on in its race against
time, to leave time behind, or in its rush to meet Time at
last at the devoted and appointed place" (p. 3). It is the
winged chariot of chronological, minuscular time which
hurries near the backs of men. But neither minuscular time
nor majuscular Time— Time in its true metaphysical and
dialectical essence— can be seized or compressed. And of
the two, only the latter can be "redeemed." "Redeem your
time because the days are evil," the Scriptural writer ad
monishes. But, as T. S. Eliot reminds us, "if all time is
eternally present / All time is unredeemable" ("Burnt
Norton"). The very effort to compress time, then, destroys
the chance of redeeming it: of gaining it by paying the
35
"historical costs," of fulfilling it and, concomitantly,
fulfilling oneself.
35
The so-called "theory of historical costs" is not so
much Jack Burden's (see All the King's Men, pp. 417-418),
as it is Warren's. See Legacy, p. 50.
358
Jeremiah Beaumont, attempting merely to fill the
present moment full rather than to fulfill it, bemoans his
lack of "world enough and time." At one point, he imagines
himself locked in the Jordan library, "fighting through the
books and through time to reach some end he would never
reach. There would be too many books, and too little time"
(World Enough and Time, p. 72). Later, more a prisoner of
time than of the dungeon, Jeremiah tells Rachel bitterly:
"There is not much time for love ..." (p. 411). Perhaps
Rachel is closer to the truth when she answers: "Love
doesn't need time ..." (p. 411). Although man must love
"in time," Warren suggests that true love transcends time
3 6
and is never its thrall. Jeremiah does indeed have "world
enough and time"; what he lacks is not more time but a more
realistic concept of the time he does possess.
Quite the opposite of Jeremiah is Warren's other major
character engaged in a race against time— Brother Potts in
Flood, who attempts to prove his life blessed before his
death by cancer or flood. Unlike Jeremiah, Brother Potts
does redeem his time; he wins, in the words of Brad Tolli
ver, "his race" (p. 438). Rather than attempting to
36
Warren suggests that time, on the.oth^r hand, needs
love. Chapter VII will consider this point in more detail.
359
compress time. Brother Potts fulfills it. His struggle
represents not so much carpe diem as caroe verum. Robert
Frost, in his poem "Carpe Diem," seems to summarize the
point well:
. . . bid life seize the present?
It lives less in the present
Than in the future always,
And less in both together
Than in the past. The present
Is too much for the senses,
Too crowding, too confusing—
Too present to imagine.
Closely associated with the concept of present as the
fusion of past and future is the concept of continuous
present, linear time, the eternal moment. "We should be
blessed," Thoreau wrote in Walden, "if we lived in the
present always. ..." The eternal moment, however, is
ideal rather than real. Brother Potts in Flood finds
blessedness not through living in an extended present but
through accepting a distended past and thereby preparing
for a portended future.
The attempt of Warren's characters to "live in the
present" is essentially the attempt to find in ideality, in
unreality, an escape from the unpleasantness and responsi
bility of reality. The Jack Burden in the early part of
All the King's Men, who thinks and acts "as though [he]
didn't have any past or future" (p. 75), is not the same
Jack Burden, who, at the end of the novel, goes out into
Time's "awful responsibility" (p. 464). Throughout the
novel Jack attempts to retain his pure image of Anne Stanton
placed in a kind of perpetual present, "an extension of the
moment long back" when Anne had "floated on the water, her
face turned up to the purple-green darkening sky, her eyes
closed, and the white gull passing over, very high" (p.
293). For Jack it is truly a "Picnic Remembered," the title
of an early poem by Warren. But Jack, like the speaker of
the poem, comes to realize that he cannot "mock Time's
marvelling after-spies." The present with its ideal image
cannot be extended, for the then and the now are "each
cenotaph of the other."
Other characters, in varying degrees of egregiousness,
also seek to isolate themselves in a continuous present.
Timothy Bingham in The Cave is typical: he "thought of the
future only when forced to do so to calculate interest and
thought of the past, not at all" (p. 37). Mr. Munn in
Night Rider felt that old Miss Sprague lived in a perpetual
present of "negativity and rejection," that she "had really
always been as she was now," that her "present being had
always been . . . her real being" (Night Rider, p. 211).
361
Mr. Munn himself, after helping to kill Bunk Trevelyan, at
tempted to sink into "a moment without affiliations with the
past or the future" (p. 202). Sue Murdock in At Heaven1s
Gate sought a similar continuous moment; she acted "like
the minute was all there was, like there wasn't any yester
day and there wasn't any tomorrow, or like what yesterday
was or tomorrow would be didn’t have any connection ..."
(p. 117). Sue's delusion lay in believing that "if the
present was just going to keep on being present and never
was going to be the past, then everything was just what it
was. If you found the time when the present was all, then
you didn't have to worry. You could just be" (p. 242).
But the present is not all; one cannot "shut the mind to
history and the future, as to the most trivial irrelevan-
cies, and thereby maintain and define the moment" (At
Heaven's Gate, p. 313). Warren suggests that one cannot
ignore the then in a delusory, continuous now, and "just
be"; failure to recognize the dialectic of time results not
in being but in non-being, in unreality.
In World Enough and Time. Jeremiah and Rachel experi
ence this sort of non-being when they seek the "affairs of
the present without reference to past or future ..." (p.
211). Their delusion of a continuous present leads only
362
to the ultimate retreat from reality: the "'black inward
ness and womb of the quagmire.'" In the decadent swamp of
Ole Big Hump, Jeremiah seeks a "black peace," a "peace with
no past and no future, the absoluteness of the single, sep
arate, dark, massive moment that swells up fatly like a
bubble from the deep mud ..." (World Enough and Time, p.
479). It is almost as if the constant rejection of past
and future leads eventually to the ironical, inextricable
imprisonment in an unreal present. Mr. Munn, who earlier
sought a continuous present, later lies in the cold mud—
similar to the primeval mud of Jeremiah Beaumont's quag
mire— and discovers that he cannot, "no matter how hard he
tried, think beyond the moment" (Night Rider, p. 390).
Other characters bring the delusory continuous present
upon themselves as a result of their disillusionment in
time. Jery Calhoun's immediate past becomes a continuous
present "like a movie inside his head": "The pictures of
what had happened kept going past, and it all kept happen
ing over again in its perpetual present ..." (At Heaven's
Gate, p. 232). For both Maggie Tolliver in Flood (p. 248)
and Manty Starr in Band of Angels (p. 92), "the past and
future, it seemed, fell away." For Manty, "all joys and
angers and apprehension [sank] to nothingness, or to the
363
pitiful shadows of themselves." He who lives in a delusory
continuous present, Warren suggests, can experience only
"nothingness" and "pitiful shadows."
Besides the eternal moment, linear time, there is in
Warren's fiction the suspended moment, punctiliar time.
The present of Warren's characters is not only kinetic but
at times static, an arrested motion in time. Warren has
observed in William Faulkner's fiction "the device of what
we call the frozen moment, the arrested action which be-
37
comes symbolic. ..." Warren employs the same technique
he admires in Faulkners
That's the frozen moment. Freeze time. Somewhere,
almost in a kind of pun, Faulkner himself uses the image
of a frieze for such a moment of frozen action. It's
an important quality in his work. Some of those mo
ments harden up an event, give it its meaning by hold
ing it fixed. Time fluid versus time fixed. In
Faulkner's work that's the drama behind the drama . . .
the balance of the frozen, abstracted moment against
violent significant action. These frozen moments are
Faulkner's game.38
The frozen moments are also Warren's game, and the
device is equally important in his work. Warren, like
37
Warren, "William Faulkner," pp. 176-180. Reprinted
in Literary Opinion in America, ed. Morton Dauwen Zabel
(New York, 1962), II, 477.
3 8
Writers at Work; Paris Review, p. 113.
364
Faulkner, at times arrests the motion at the very heart,
the very crux, of the matter. What Warren has said of Civil
War figures provides an apt commentary on the purpose in his
fiction, which "affords a dazzling array of figures, noble
in proportion yet human, caught out of Time as in a frieze,
in stances . . . profoundly touching or powerfully mythic.
. . ." (Legacy, p. 81; italics mine). Accordingly, at the
end of Wilderness, his "tale of the Civil War," Warren
freezes the moment when eight Confederates burst into Adam's
peaceful glade— an "instant outside time and place," an
"instant in which the ferocity of motion was frozen for
[Adam's] inspection . . ." (pp. 292-293). The frozen mo
ment serves a dual function: it arrests the motion at its
crux and it serves as one of Adam's "moments of truth."
Adam experienced an earlier fixed moment at the onset of
his journey with Hawksworth: riding along on the wagon he
felt that "all time had ceased, and life would drift forever
in this deep-bosomed sleep that was not quite sleep"
(Wilderness, p. 94).
If Adam's frozen moment is an oxymoronic sleepless
sleep, that of Mr. Munn in Night Rider is a timeless dream.
Having fled from the violence of a crime he had not com
mitted, but haunted by the guilt of one he had, Mr. Munn
365
felt that "as he moved down the alley, nothing had seemed
quite real to him, and everything had hung suspended in the
timelessness of a dream" (p. 398). This suspended moment,
however, like the face of Mr. Christian, "frozen in a
pained and inquiring grimace" (p. 312), served to haunt Mr.
Munn rather than to enlighten him. Quite the opposite had
been the frozen time in the almost mystical experience of
Willie Proudfit, who tells Mr. Munn: "Hit was lak I could
see, plain as day, ever thing and ever body I'd e'er knowed
layen out a-fore me, all at one time . . . All together,
lak a man lived his life, and the time not a-passen while
he lived it" (p. 421). The passage is reminiscent of one
in Faulkner's The Sound and the Furv: "Beneath the sag of
the buggy the hooves neatly rapid like the motions of a
lady doing embroider, diminishing without progress like a
figure on a treadmill being drawn rapidly offstage" (p.
143) .
Like Mr. Munn, Manty Starr in Band of Angels is haunted
by frozen moments, but they lead ultimately to her recogni
tion and acceptance of reality. Fixed in Manty's mind is
the moment when reality broke in upon her at Starrwood and
she was carried away a slave. Fixed there are the images
of those who did nothing to help her— "frozen in that
366
posture, all of them in their own anguish ..." (Band of
Angels,p. 63). Manty later experiences other significant
frozen moments in her encounters with Rau-Ru, the Negro.
Meeting him for the second time she stands in a "frozen mo
ment of recognition" (p. 262) . Previously, "he had walked
away to be fixed in the uniqueness of the past event, to be
fixed in the darkness of the past, as I have read of the
bodies at Pompeii caught in the descending darkness of the
volcanic ash" (p. 262) . Manty can be free of the fixed mo
ment with its eidetic image only by accepting the reality
of her past and by reconciling it with her present.
The image of the Pompeians arrested in their actions
is an apt one for depicting the frozen moment, and Warren
uses it again, in Flood. In relating her past to Yasha
Jones, Maggie Tolliver says: "I have heard about the people
of Pompeii when Vesuvius blew up and the ashes fell, how
some of them were caught just as they were ..." (p. 338).
Manty herself is "caught" in her own past like a kind of
human fossil fixed in time and space. Perhaps others
besides Southerners are "trapped in history" (Legacy, p.
56); "we are," Warren has written, "the prisoners of our
367
39
history."
In another sense, Maggie's life is like the stuck
phonograph record, which, at Brad's party some twenty years
earlier, had provided the hypnotic background for the chain
of events eventuating in murder. The record and the dancing
did not seem to "have anything to do with time passing
. . ." (Flood, p. 317). Indeed, time itself seems to have
stopped in Fiddlersburg, for "the clock, above the maples,
was frozen at 8:35" (Flood, p. 350).
Besides pointing up the crux of a matter and providing
an insight into reality, which, along with its eidetic
image, leads to an acceptance of reality, the frozen moment
in Warren's fiction at times provides the illusion of es
cape from reality. In Night Rider Mr. Munn yearns for his
childhood "little world" of the stereopticon, "where every
thing was motionless but seemed about to move, where every
thing was living, it seemed, but at the same time frozen
in its tiny perfections ..." (p. 161). It is the little
world of the frozen ideal, the hiatus in time at the point
of perfection. Jack Burden in All the King's Men envisions
Ann Stanton in a similar fixed point of perfection:
39
Segregation: The Inner Conflict of the South, o.
109. — — -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
368
. . . I chiefly remember her far over yonder across
the court, tiptoe, poised to serve, at the moment when
the racket is back of her ribbonbound head, with the
pull of the arm lifting the right breast, and the left
hand, from which the ball has just risen, still u p . as
though to pluck something out of the air, the face
lifted gravely and intensely to the bright light and
the wide sky and the absolute little white ball hung
there like the spinning world in the middle of bril
liance. Well, that is the classic pose, and it is too
bad the Greeks didn't play tennis, for if they had
played tennis, they would have put Anne Stanton on a
Greek vase. (p. 290; italics mine)
Anne, suspended in the "classic pose," is to Jack the
"fosterchild of silence and slow time," to borrow the words
of Keats. The image, however, is not inviolable, and Anne
by no means remains the "unravished bride of quietness."
Manty in Band of Angels envisions herself as a veri
table "bride of quietness." Resembling the stasis of time
in Mr. Munn's stereopticon and in Jack Burden’s modernized
Grecian urn is the stasis in Manty Starr's vision of her
married life as a romantic photograph: "I suppose I actu
ally saw it that way, like a picture— life frozen in quiet
ness, in eternal stasis, out of time, no past, no future,
no beat of the heart" (Band of Angels, p. 340). The image
is reminiscent of the frozen ideal moment in "The Circus
in the Attic," which depicts the Bolton family as being
"fixed there in a photograph in an album to prove something
369
40
sweet and sure about the past." In every instance, the
frozen moment in Warren's fiction proves something "sweet"
or "sure." The sweetness of the ideal, however, is not
always reconcilable with the surety of the real.
Stephen Dedalus, who learns about both the "sweet" and
the "sure" in James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist, writes
in his diary: "The past is consumed in the present and the
41
present is living only because it brings forth the future."
Stephen's concept of time is, according to Warren, only
partially valid. The past, Warren suggests, is not victim
of the present; rather than being consumed in present, the
past informs it and must be reconciled to it. It is true,
Warren would say, that the present is living only if it
brings forth the future, but it is also true that the future
is viable only if the present and past are. A "positive
and purposive future" is possible only through the proper
"revision of the past" (Night Rider, p. 212) .
In a sense, the future is the most unreal component of
40
Warren, "The Circus in the Attic" and Other Stories.
p. 17.
41
James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
(New York, 1956), p. 251.
370
time, for the past has a real, determinate nature and the
present affords, in the words of C. S. Lewis's Screwtape,
"an experience analogous to the experience which our Enemy
has a reality as a whole; in it alone freedom and actuality
42
are offered. ..." It is part of the diabolical strata
gem, therefore, to make "man hagridden by the Future," for
"in making [men] think about it, [the devils] make them
think of unrealities." The devils
want a whole race perpetually in pursuit of the rain
bow's end, never honest, nor kind, nor happy now, but
always using as mere fuel wherewith to heap the altar
of the Future every real gift which is offered them
in the present. (p. 70)
If one is to experience reality, Warren suggests, he must
not sacrifice the present on the altar of the future. He
must recognize, further, the dangerous idealism of seeking
to impose the future perfect upon the present imperfect,
eternity upon time. This error, one may recall, was com
mitted in literature long before Adam Stanton and Tobias
Sears committed it. It was precisely the error of Aylmer,
in Hawthorne's "The Birthmark," that he attempted to live
"once for all in eternity, to find the perfect future in
42
C. S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters, p. 68.
371
the present."
Although a perfect future is not to be found in the
present, the imperfect past and present are to be found in
the future. Further, only the existence of a viable past
and present can lead to a purposive future. By denying his
past and failing to reconcile it with his present, Mr. Munn
in Night Rider caused his mind to close "like a valve
against all thoughts of the future" (p. 219). "The idea of
the future had no meaning for him. When he tried to think
of the future he was like some blundering insect that tries,
again and again, to climb up the smooth wall of a dish into
which it had fallen" (Night Rider, p. 385). Mr. Munn's
future was unreal because his past and present were. With
the future "dead and rotten in his breast" (p. 390), there
only remained the pathetic, ignoble death of his body. The
death of Mr. Munn, running, stumbling, and falling in the
dark woods, is more that of "some blundering insect" than
that of a man.
Perhaps it is significant that Warren's first novel,
Night Rider, with its futureless finality, is the most
pessimistic novel in the Warren canon, whereas his most
recent novel, Flood, which concludes with an almost mawkish
"brightness of moisture" in the protagonist's eyes, is one
37 2
of the most optimistic. Five of the novels— All the King's
Men. Band of Angels. Flood. Wilderness, and The Cave, ranked
in descending order of the future prospects they offer,
have affirmative endings, with an arrow pointing forward
to a purposive future. The other three novels— At Heaven1s
Gate. World Enough and Time, and Night Rider, also ranked
in descending order of future prospects, have interrogative
endings, with a question mark in place of an arrow.
If the conclusion of Night Rider provides no purposive
future for its protagonist, that of World Enough and Time
does little more. Like Mr. Munn, Jeremiah killed his
future long before his own decapitation. Neither character
accepts his past until too late to salvage his future. Each
comes to only a nebulous awareness of reality, as evidenced
in their respective realizations of complicity— Mr. Munn
with Tolliver and Jeremiah with One-Eye on one hand and
with Wilkie on the other. The last entry in Jeremiah's
journal— and the last line of the novel— is appropriately
a question: "Was all for naught?" (World Enough and Time,
p. 512).
Somewhat less dubious is the conclusion of At Heaven's
Gate, at least for Jerry Calhoun, who seems likely to have
a future because he seems finally to accept the past, as
373
symbolized by his father, to whose house Jerry returns.
One can only hope that, in his father's words, "tomorrow
morning . . . [will] be different" (p. 390) for Jerry, just
as one knows assuredly that tomorrow will be no different
for Murdock, a different kind of son of a different kind of
father. Murdock, despite his avowal to "look to the future"
(p. 391), will doubtless find it as unreal as his present,
for he has refused to confront his past, also symbolized by
his father. He has romanticized the past by twisting the
reality of his father's act of murder into the unreality of
an act of honor.
If Bogan Murdock faces an unreal future because he has
romanticized the past, Isaac Sumpter in The Cave has no
future because he has rejected the past represented by his
father. For Isaac even the future is past: "Life-to-be-
lived Was already life-lived, the future was already stale
with sardonic recollection" (p. 353) . Conversely, the
future holds promise for Isaac's father, as well as for Mr.
and Mrs. Harrick, Monty and Jo-Lea, Mr. Bingham, and Nick
Pappy. All of these characters struggle, as Nick does, "to
think of a future— the future— even a day past the day that
was dawning ..." (The Cave, p. 364). Similarly, Adam in
Wilderness thinks of his future "with a different heart"
374
(p. 310), for he has been reconciled with his past. Having
accepted the reality of his own motives, he can now follow
the arrow's point out of the wilderness. In Flood. Brad
also comes to accept with a "different heart" his place in
"the grinning calculus of the done and the undone" (Flood,
p. 439). Several decades earlier, the future had "seemed
like a great fruit hanging in darkness, the skin already
burst with the pressure of a ripe inward potential" (p. 67),
but such tantalizing fruit, Brad learns, can elude one's
grasp. He learns in Fiddlersburg the necessity of finding
the "connection" between what he was and what he is— between
past and present— in order to have a purposive future.
Manty and Tobias, at the end of Band of Angels, are
able to find, and accept, a similar "connection" between
past and present. For Manty, at the onset of the novel, the
future "seemed suddenly nothing but a vista of grayness"
(p. 38). But by "the redeeming of the past," the "old
shadows" are "canceled in joy." Manty's image of the sudden
glint of sunlight on a piece of thistledown is similar to
Brad Tolliver's "brightness of moisture" and "flicker of
sun" in Flood. For Jack Burden in All the Kina's Men, pos
sibly Warren's best and most optimistic novel, there is
also a gleam, not so much in his own eye as in the eye of
375
Anne Stanton (p. 459) . By accepting "the past and its
burden" (p. 461), Jack and Anne assure their future and
43
follow its gleam.
Warren, like Faulkner, is essentially an optimistic
writer, but neither writer is optimistic with a misty optic;
that is, neither offers a facile optimism. Because, ac
cording to Warren, reality is the "relationship of [an]
event to past, and future, events" (All the Kina's Men, p.
407), one can achieve reality only by confronting the dia
lectic of then and now. This confrontation, although im
perative, is not without its anguish: "If there is glory,
the burden, then, is ours" (Brother to Dragons, p. 211).
Man's future, Warren suggests, can only be
. . . forged beneath the hammer of truth
On the anvil of our anguish.
— Brother to Dragons, p. 194
43
There is no support for Leslie Fiedler's remark, made
in 1955, that "Band of Angels . . . is the only book of
Warren's to end short of bewilderment and despair." ("Ro
mance in the Operatic Manner," p. 28).
CHAPTER VII
"THE OLD COST OP HUMAN REDEMPTION"
"We are human, and must work
In the shade of our human condition. The dream
remains . . .
It will be nobler because more difficult and cold
In the face of the old cost of human redemption,
And knowledge of that cost is, in itself, a kind
o f redemption."
— Warren, Brother to Dragons
"It is possible— and necessary if man is to strive
to be human— to achieve some measure of redemption
through love."
— Warren, "William Faulkner"
"Redeem
The unread vision in the higher dream ..."
— T. S. Eliot, "Ash-Wednesday"
Professor Eucalyptus said, "The search
For reality is as momentous as
The search for God."
— Wallace Stevens, "An Ordinary
Evening in New Haven"
376
CHAPTER VII
"THE OLD COST OF HUMAN REDEMPTION"
In his seminal speech "Knowledge and the Image of Man,"
Warren remarked that "the story of every soul is the story
of its self-definition for good or evil, salvation or
damnation."^ Each of Warren's novels, in its own way, pre
sents the story of “every soul" in "its self-definition for
good or evil." Like John Milton's poetry, which Warren has
described as presenting a variety of subjects but a single
2
developed theme, Warren's fiction presents a development,
rather than a variety, of theme. Part of the theme, common
3
to both writers, is "the relation of Good to Evil." The
^Sewanee Review. LXIII (Spring 1955), 182-192. This
essay was originally an address delivered at Columbia Uni
versity in 1954.
2
"Literature as Symptom," Southern Review. I (Winter
1936), 624. Reprinted in Who Owns America? A New Declara
tion of Independence, ed. Herbert Agar and Allen Tate, p. 264.
3
Warren, "Literature as Symptom," p. 626.
377
378
nature of this dialectic— good atid evil— determines the
second— salvation and damnation— which is, in turn, related
to a third— love and hate or non-love. Each of the dia
lectics, Warren suggests further, is intimately and signif
icantly related to "self-definition"— to identity, to
reality.
The experience of reality, according to Warren, is an
experience of doubleness. The "irony of history" lies in
the "doubleness of experience," the difficulty of moral
definition (Legacy, p. 71). Warren's description of the
theme of one of Katherine Anne Porter's short stories
applies equally to most of his own fiction: "The story is
4
about the difficult definition of guilt and innocence."
The failure to recognize this truth is to live in "illusions
of innocence and virtue." Warren might also have been
describing his own fiction when he wrote that the poetry of
Herman Melville is concerned "with the fundamental ironic
dualities of existence."^ In Flood, Blanding Cottshill re
fers to an "awareness of that doubleness of life" (p. 294).
4
"Irony with a Center: Katherine Anne Porter," Se
lected Essays, p. 148.
5
"'The Great Mirage': Conrad and Nostromo," Selected
Essays, p. 190.
379
Similarly, in World Enough and Time, Jeremiah Beaumont
recognized this truth when "there came to [him], upon the
instant, a fancy which made [him] see the paradox and
doubleness of life" (p. 114). Later he feels "sick at
heart with the doubleness of life and with the thought how
a man does not know on which path his foot is set" (pp. 153,
327, 479). "It is horrible to think," Jeremiah writes in
his journal, "that the poor body of man is so blind that
it does not know life from death or light from dark, or love
from hate ..." ( World Enough and Time, p. 427) . These are
the same three sets of polarities which "every soul" must
confront.
Because of this "doubleness," this difficulty of moral
definition, human redemption, according to Warren, is also
both difficult to define and costly to achieve. In Wilder
ness Adam Rosenzweig reflects upon "how little is the dif
ference between being lost and being saved" (p. 225).
Similarly, in All the King's Men Jack Burden marvels "how
little is required for a man to be lost or saved" (p. 255);
and in Flood Yasha Jones realized how "terror was so near
to joy, anguish to ecstasy" (p. 33). In The Legacy of the
Civil War Warren reminds the reader of "how well Grant knew
how narrow is the margin between being lost and being
380
saved. ..." (p. 85). The soul, itself a "hell-broth
of paradox and internecine / Complex . . .," can only ex
perience "the dear redemption in the mere fact of achieved
definition" (Brother to Dragons, p. 56). Through self
definition, identity, comes redemption. Warren suggests
further that "we have to remain ourselves in order to redeem
ourselves." And, "in the end, everybody has to redeem
himself.
If "all is redeemed / In knowledge"(Brother to Dragons,
p. 195) , it is, in part, a knowledge of the conflict between
good and evil, justice and injustice, right and wrong, or
"innocence and experience," as Warren expresses it else-
7
where. This conflict is a part of human reality: these
"contrasts provide the terms of human effort," for innocence
must be "carried to, submitted to," experience. Only in the
"dusk of compromise," where a "sick dialectic" exists, do
"Good and Evil, to iron out their differences, stage their
meeting at summit" ("Infant Boy at Midcentury"). "There
is never an instant's truce between virtue and vice,"
Thoreau wrote in Walden. And T. S. Eliot wrote:
6
Who Speaks for the Negro? p. 441.
7
"Love and Separateness in Eudora Welty," Selected
Essays, pp. 162, 163, 167.
381
However you disguise it, this thing does not change:
The perpetual struggle of Good and Evil! (The Rock)
Jeremiah Beaumont, at one point in World Enough and
Time, wonders "which had been the dream, . . . the good or
the evil" (p. 217). His "education to reality," and indeed
that of "every soul," Warren suggests, is in part the real
ization and acceptance of the existence of both good and
evil. "Every soul" must admit, in the words of C. S. Lewis,
"that there is more than one kind of reality; that . . .
there is something above and beyond the ordinary facts of
men's behaviour, and yet quite definitely real— a real law,
which none of us made, but which we find pressing on us."
"Every soul," in short, is forced "to believe in a real
Right and Wrong. People may be sometimes mistaken about
them, just as people sometimes get their sums wrong; but
they are not a matter of mere taste and opinion any more
g
than the multiplication table."
Many of Warren's fictional "people" are indeed "mis
taken" about good and evil. Some characters— most notably
Tobias Sears in Band of Angels, Jeremiah Beaumont in World
g
C. S. Lewis, "Right and Wrong as a Clue to the Mean
ing of the Universe," Mere Christianity (New York, 1960),
pp. 30, 20.
382
Enough and Time, and Adam Rosenzweig in Wilderness— have
"illusions of innocence and virtue." To them moral experi
ence seems a monism rather than a dualism. It is signifi
cant that Tobias Sears, who qualifies for Warren's epithet
"bully boy of virtue," is an Emersonian transcendentalist.
He accepts Emerson's view, expressed in his "Divinity School
Address," that only "good is positive. Evil is merely
privative, not absolute: it is like cold, which is priva
tion of heat. All evil is so much death and nonentity.
Benevolence is absolute and real." Randall Stewart, in
commenting on this passage, remarks: "Emerson's system
. . . is a monism. There is no conflict, in the strict
sense, between good and evil because evil is a mere nega-
9
tion, a minus quality. ..." Warren undoubtedly concurs
with this interpretation, for early in his career he wrote:
"After Emerson had done his work, any tragic possibilities
inherent in that culture were dissipated."10 Whether or
9
American Literature and Christian Doctrine, p. 47.
10"Hawthorne, Anderson and Frost," p. 399. Compare the
remarks of another Southern writer, Allen Tate: "Emerson
discredited more than any other man the puritan drama of
the soul . . . There is no struggle because there is no pos
sibility of error. There is no drama in human character,
because there is no tragic fault. ...” "Emily Dickinson,"
Collected Essays.
383
not one accepts this interpretation of Emerson's philosophy,
one can be sure of Warren's purpose in Tobias.
In the words of Manty Starr, for whom "light or dark
are all the same" (Band of Angels, p. 94),11 Tobias had in
him "the secret disease of virtue" (Band of Angels, p. 22 5).
Manty realizes further that "once you know what secret
disease of virtue a person has in him, then you have more
power over him than if you had spied his most concealed and
disgraceful_vice" (p. 22 5). To put it another way, service
to an abstract good which fails to recognize and confront
the reality of evil can itself become evil. It is for this
reason that such figures as Mr. Munn in Night Rider and
Jerry Calhoun in At Heaven1s Gate lose their wills and be
come the victims of powerful forces which themselves have
become evil. In the human situation, Warren suggests, good
must always contend with evil; it cannot be isolated or
abstracted if one is to experience reality.
If Tobias is deluded in his "service to an abstract
^Compare Brad Tolliver's fascination with Leontine
Purtle's blindness: a "world of light-is-dark and dark-is-
light," where one could be "in velvety darkness which is
your light . . .," where one could "be free of something
. . ." (Flood, pp. 125-126). Both Manty and Brad want to
be "free" of moral reality and its responsibility.
384
good," he is further deluded in his belief that man is able
to achieve absolute goodness, with ease, in this life. Seth
Parton asks Manty: "You remember how I once believed that
man, even in this world, may put on perfection and perfect
joy?" (Band of Angels, p. 227). Seth still believes, at
this point, that absolute perfection is attainable but only
with great difficulty. Of Tobias, however, Seth says:
"Tobias thinks that perfection, that joy, may come easy in
this life" (p. 22 7). Any sense of struggle, any dialectic,
is conspicuously missing here. Absolute goodness, however,
does not come easily for Tobias; in fact, it does not come
at all. Tobias later expresses his disillusionment to
Manty:
Emerson had things reversed . . . I would tell you that
we said fine things— oh, yes, we promised ourselves all
virtue— and a spirit sat over our heads and contradicted
all. We went out to do fine things but there was a
spirit of darkness above us. Oh, Manty, we undertook to
do good in the world, but we had not purged our own
soul. (Band of Angels, p. 294)
These are the words of a disillusioned moral idealist
caught in the "irony of history," coming to realize that
human reality is an experience of good and evil rather than
of good or evil.
The counterpart of Tobias, Jefferson in Brother to
385
Dragons, has labored under a similar either-or concept of
morality. Like Tobias, he has failed, or perhaps even re-
Jinsed, to recognize that a real good presupposes a real
evil and that the two are closely related. He "held man
innocent” (Brother to Dragons, p. 37), even if he was real
istic enough to admit that not all men are innocent. Quite
the reverse is the view of Mr. Budd, the penitentiary warden
in Flood, who says, "There ain't no innocent man" (p. 158).
This latter view is essentially the one which Meriwether
Lewis, Jefferson's cousin, comes to accept. Disillusioned,
as Tobias was, with the view of goodness as the only real
ity, he tells Jefferson: "I / Was lulled in your great lie
that men are capable / Of the brotherhood of justice"
(Brother to Dragons, p. 182).
Lulled by an illusion similar to that of Tobias and
Jefferson, Jeremiah Beaumont in World Enough and Time wor
ships an abstract concept of absolute justice. He is "de
termined, at whatever risk, to do . . . full obeisance to
that unsmiling goddess and glut her to sleep" (p. 2 54).
Failing to grasp the truth that injustice and evil cannot
be eradicated, Jeremiah sacrifices humanity to abstraction,
reality to a dream. Like Tobias, he believes it is possible
to achieve "the perfect act, outside the world, pure and
386
untarnished. Outside the world, the beginning and the end,
the perfect justice self-defining and since defining self,
defining all else" (World Enough and Time, p. 18; italics
mine). Earlier, Jeremiah reflects upon "the greatness of
life" and asks, "Was it only a dream? Could a man not come
to some moment when, all dross and meanness of life con
sumed, he could live in the pure idea?" (p. 62). Aylmer,
in Nathaniel Hawthorne's "The Birthmark," sought a similar
goal of absolute goodness: around his wife he "felt that
he could draw a magic circle . . . within which no evil
might intrude." The tragic results of both delusions are
the same: death. Only when his delusion has been shattered
does Jeremiah come to recognize the truth of his old teach
er's words: "Oh, God, a good man is good by the barest,
his good is mixed up with his foulness ..." (p. 434).
Still another deluded devotee of abstract justice and
goodness is Adam Rosenzweig in Wilderness. Adam seeks to
"work for the day when the world will know Justice" (p. 14);
he seeks to "be a man in the knowledge that men are [his]
brothers" (p. 92). He seeks, in short, the perfect "broth
erhood of justice" which Jefferson, Jeremiah, and Tobias
also sought. Men are indeed brothers, he learns, but it is
a brotherhood of complicity in common, flawed humanity.
387
just as Jefferson and Meriwether Lewis learn that man is
a "brother to dragons." Adam learns that the world is not
neatly black or white, that man himself is an admixture of
good and evil. Essentially a reformer like Tobias Sears,
Adam, too, finds that he has undertaken "to do good in the
world" without first purging his own soul. He expresses
his shock of complicity experienced upon finding the dis
figured body of the hanged negro: "Can I be that vile?"
(p. 45). Later he thinks, "I do not want to be this wicked"
(p. 62). And later still, in the midst of an overwhelming
sense of evil, Adam feels that "only if you had some kind
of fantastic innocence could you have power to look at the
world" (p. 206). Adam's concept of good and evil has been
exactly that— "fantastic," in the basic sense of the term,
"unreal" or "imaginative." Adam learns a most valuable
lesson in the end: he learns that he is "only human" (p.
309); and to be human, Warren suggests, is to have a dual
nature. Adam learns also what Aaron Blaustein told him
earlier— that "everything is part of everything else . . .,
even the good" (p. 75). Thus, what Adam learns from his
journey into the wilderness is similar to what Hawthorne's
Goodman Brown learns from his journey into the woods. Both
young men are initiated to the fact that mankind cannot be
388
divided neatly into good and evil, that there lurks in every
human heart a germ of evil. The difference, however, lies
in the fact that Brown is unable to achieve a balanced viewy
whereas he had seen everyone as good or evil, now, after the
pendulum swings, he can only see everyone as being only
evil. He has been wrong twice or, more accurately, he has
made the same mistake twice, only in reverse. Adam, on the
other hand, by recognizing that a good deed may be prompted
by an ignoble motive, just as an evil deed may be produced
by a good motive, is able to achieve a balanced view of
good and evil. Man is not good or evil but good and evil.
Adam thus fulfills the words of the novel's epilogue from
Pascal: "La grandeur de l'homme est grande en ce qu'il se
connait miserable." ("The greatness of man is great in that
he knows himself to be miserable.") It is significant that
Adam feels he would repeat his actions, if necessary— "but.
oh, with a different heart" (p. 310).
If moral reality is not a monism in the sense that good
is positive and evil only privative, Warren suggests that
neither is it a monism in the sense that evil is the only
positive force. If man is not all good, neither is he all
evil, Warren seems to suggest. As Shakespeare expressed
it, "There is some soul of goodness in things evil, would
men observingly distil it out." Among all of Warren's
characters, perhaps Willie Stark best exemplifies both
errors— seeing only good, and then only evil, as the posi
tive force of reality. The naive, trustful Cousin Willie
with his Christmas tie could not seem to recognize evil as
a real force; but after he is suddenly made aware of du
plicity in man he becomes politician Willie armed with meat-
ax and seems unable to recognize good as a real force. Like
Hawthorne's Goodman Brown, Willie comes to believe, in the
words of the devil in Hawthorne's story, that "Evil is the
nature of mankind. Evil must be your only happiness."
Willie's knowledge is too much, too soon, taking him beyond
reality on the side opposite his former position. Willie
has, in the words of Jack Burden, been on "the road to
Damascus" and has "seen a great light" (All the King's Men,
p. 95), but, ironically, the light blinds him and he can
see thereafter only the darkness of evil. Willie, then,
has had two flaws, both equally tragic: the first was his
failure to recognize a tragic flaw in man; the second was
his ability to see only a tragic flaw in man. In neither
case is Willie able to balance idea with reality.
If Willie errs in conceiving of moral reality as a
monism. Jack Burden at first errs in conceiving of moral
reality as a kind of vacuity. Jack's "theory of the moral
neutrality of history" may be partly true; but if history
is neutral, man is not, nor can he be. "History is blind,
but man is not" (All the King's Men, p. 462), Hugh Miller
tells Jack, echoing the words of Captain Todd in Night
Rider; "Things and events were blind. Blind as a bat" (p.
44). But Jack does not learn this important truth until
he is caught in the tangled skeins of good and evil, in
the Spider Web of personal responsibility. Before he is
"educated to reality" by his research of Cass Mastern and
his research for Willie, Jack regards his actions as neither
good nor evil but meaningless. He is reluctant to acknowl
edge the reality of good and evil, for to do so would be
to acknowledge personal responsibility. Both the "Great
Sleep" and the "Great Twitch" preclude any responsibility
because they preclude the existence of good and evil. Jack
learns, however, that, in the words of R. P. W. in Brother
to Dragons, "there is still no way out of the responsibil
ity / Of trying to achieve responsibility. / So, like it or
lump it, you are stuck" (p. 112). In the end. Jack, neither
liking it nor lumping it, assumes responsibility when he
accepts the reality of both good and evil in every man. He
realizes that Willie had mixed up his "greatness" and his
391
"ungreatness," but he feels that he must believe Willie was
a great man. Believing that, he can "think better of all
other people," including himself, and at the same time he
can more surely condemn himself (p. 442). He can, for ex
ample, recognize in himself the same evil and responsibility
he sees in Tiny Duffy; he can recognize that he and Tiny
are "twins bound together more intimately and disastrously
than the poor freaks of the midway who are bound by the
common stitch of flesh and gristle and seepage of blood"
(All the King's Men, p. 442).
Each of Warren's characters must come to accept the
"common stitch" and "seepage of blood," the "taint in the
blood stream," as Jack Burden refers to it earlier in All
the King1s Men (p. 242). "Whatever hope we have is not by
repudiation," R. P. W. says in Brother to Dragons, "but in
confronting the terror of our condition" (p. 192). Men
must, in short, experience "what it is to be men" (Brother
to Dragons, p. 214). To be men, to be human, Warren sug
gests, is to be tainted by Original Sin, a most significant,
recurring theme in all of Warren's works. The concept is
somewhat less popular with most moderns like Celia in T. S.
Eliot's The Cocktail Party, who had
3 92
. . . always been taught to disbelieve in sin.
Oh, I don't mean that it was ever mentioned!
But anything wrong, from our point of view.
Was either bad form, or was psychological.
Willie Stark expresses his view of human nature and
Original Sin when he tells Jack, on several occasions,
"There is always something . . . Man is conceived in sin
and born in corruption and he passeth from the stink of the
didie to the stench of the shroud. There is always some
thing" (All the King's Men, pp. 54, 203). In his effort to
blackmail Judge Irwin, Willie asks Jack, "For what reason,
barring Original Sin, is a man most likely to step over the
line?" (p. 205). On another occasion, Willie tells Jack
that it is never necessary to frame anybody, "because the
truth is always sufficient" (p. 358). Jack's facetious
reply to this remark— "You sure take a high view of human
nature"— is doubly ironic, for previously Willie had indeed
taken a "high view of human nature." At the onset of his
career, Willie had "flattered human nature" (p. 74) and had
tried "to live up to his notion of a high destiny" (p. 76).
He had been, in a sense, a romantic idealist; for according
to the criterion set up by T. E. Hulme in Speculations. a
"romantic" is "one who rejects the doctrine of original
sin." Adam Stanton, the young doctor who kills Willie, is,
3 93
like Dr. Cal Fiddler in Flood, an example of a romantic,
unable to accept Original Sin. Both doctors, however, by
their very acts of violence, illustrate Original Sin.
Neither Willie nor Adam achieves a realistic, balanced view
of man, but their errors enable Jack Burden to do so.
Allen Tate once remarked informally that there are
two kinds of people— those who believe in Original Sin and
those who reject the concept. Warren's characters, and
12
perhaps even his critics, can be so divided. An apt sub
title for Warren's fiction would be the title of one of his
best poems: "Original Sin: A Short Story." In one such
story, At Heaven's Gate. Sweetie Sweetwater echoes the words
of Willie Stark when he tells Sue Murdock: "There's
Perhaps most notable among critics who seem person
ally irritated by Warren's use of the concept is Alfred
Kazin, who has written: "To complain in every book that man
is a brother to dragons . . ., that human nature is full of
'bitter paradoxes'— this, though not for me to disprove in
our baleful times, seems to me not the attitude of an imag
inary artist." ("City of the Soul," p. 40). Another crit
ic, Leonard Casper, in his discussion of Wilderness, talks
about "Original Goodness," which he says is "perhaps more
immemorial and ingrained than Original Sin itself." ("Trial
by Wilderness: Warren's Exemplum," Wisconsin Studies in
Contemporary Literature. Ill [Fall 1962], 45). Casper seems
to misunderstand both the meaning of Original Sin and the
meaning of Warren's novel. He confuses man's potential for
goodness with his possession of goodness.
394
something horrible in everybody . . . till they work it out.
13
It looks like a man's got to boil the pus out1 ' (p. 307).
In another story. Wilderness, Aaron Blaustein tells Adam,
"There is always something from birth. There is your fate
to bear. There is yourself. There is . . . even life" (p.
71). There is, Adam learns, the legacy of the father; it
is a human legacy consisting of the taint of Original Sin
but also of the potential for good.
Original Sin, to Isaac Sumpter in The Cave, was "some
thing in him" which trapped him, which, "against all logic
and all possibility, . . . made him tell that lie" (p. 3 58).
In Brother to Dragons, Jefferson, whose fatal flaw had con
sisted of not recognizing Original Sin, now realizes that
"in the deep / Hovel of the heart that Thing lies / That
will never unkennel himself to the contemptible steel . . ."
Images of putrefaction and necrosis are frequent in
At Heaven1s Gate. referring in each case to man's evil na
ture. Cf., for example, "pride pus" (p. 85), "pus-proud"
(p. 295), "glitter of pus" (p. 196), "squeeze out pimples"
(p. 203), "pus-busted" (p. 295), "pick scabs" (p. 302).
Closely related to these images is the tumescent image in
a number of novels. It is significant that Warren called
his dramatic version of All the King's Men, Proud Flesh,
the phrase meaning, among other things, an excessive growth
of granulation tissue. (Cf. the line in "Love's Parable":
"Proud flesh on the sounder grows / Till rot engross the
estate of men. . . .")
3 95
(p. 42). Original Sin is the ubiquitous "Thing"; it is the
"heavy bear who goes with me," in Delmore Schwartz's poem
by that name; it is the rage of "man-brained and man-handed
ground-ape" in Robinson Jeffers's poem "Original Sin"; it
is the nebulous but real creature in Warren's own poem
"Original Sin: A Short Story," "nodding, its head rattling
like a gourd."
Original Sin takes other metaphorical forms in Warren's
fiction. To Jeremiah in World Enough and Time, the birth
mark on his wife's cheek is a repulsive "visible mark of
earthly imperfection," suggestive of Georgiana's birthmark,
and Aylmer's similar attitude toward it, in Hawthorne's
"The Birthmark." The blemish, symbolic of flawed humanity,
and the concern it causes, symbolic of obsession for per
fection, are mentioned eight different times in the novel.
Jeremiah "saw . . . how the brown mark was suddenly bold on
the left cheek. He thought quite coldly how it was a
blemish, and wished it were away. He could not conceive
now how he had longed to set his lips there" (World Enough
and Time, p. 180). To Jeremiah, "the brown spot on the
left cheek was no index of the warmth of [Rachel's] blood
like the russet bloom on fruit, but a blotch" (p. 383).
As in Hawthorne's story, the mark seems to grow as the
396
obsession grows: "The brown spot . . . was enormous and
each instant was larger and more devouring" (p. 206). Ayl
mer and Jeremiah are unable to accept the reality of flawed
human nature.
Ole Big Hump, the decadent swamp pirate, is another
visible manifestation of Original Sin in World Enough and
Time. Years later Big Hump may be forgotten, the narrator
says, but
he might grin to think that the joke, in the end, was
not on him but on the world, for those most respectable
descendants, who did not know him and would have denied
him with shame, still carried under their pink scrubbed
hides and double-breasted sack suits . . . the mire-
thick blood in his veins and the old coiling darkness
of his heart. (p. 476)
Brad Tolliver in Flood is a "respectable descendant" of
another "swamp rat," whom he denies with shame at the same
time that he adopts as surrogate father Old Frog-Eye, a
more modern version of Ole Big Hump. The swamp in both
novels seems to represent a decadent Eden after the Fall,
itself a result of the Original Sin.
Another emblem of Original Sin, Adam Rosenzweig's
congenital defect, his clubfoot, plays a significant part
14
in Wilderness. Adam feels that his father's greatest
14
Among Warren's array of grotesquerxes, at least one
397
betrayal was in giving him the defect: "Mv father, he
thought, that is what he gave me” (Wilderness. p. 303).
Similarly, Manty Starr in Band of Angels feels betrayed be-
15
cause her father gave her Negro blood. Both Manty
of which appears in each of his novels, are two other club
feet: Smullen's in Night Rider, (p. 339) and that of Jerry
Calhoun's Uncle Lew, the cantankerous old man who carved
peach stones into "grotesque faces" (At Heaven1s Gate, p.
45). In the latter novel, Rosemary is a cripple, who with
her naive benevolence, contrasts with almost everyone else
in the novel— "emotional cripples," as Sue calls Jerry (p.
99). The deformed street peddler, who confronts both Sue
and Sweetie in the same novel (pp. 71, 237), seems to have
wandered from Warren's early poem "Pursuit." In Band of
Angels Hamish Bond is the scarred cripple, for reasons mys
terious. Another kind of symbolic defect is the twitch in
the cheek of the hitchhiker whom Jack Burden picks up in
New Mexico (All the King's Men, pp. 332-333). In the same
novel, Sugar Boy, whose earthiness is suggestive of that of
Hawthorne's Aminadab, possesses Billy Budd's stutter without
his innocence. In World Enough and Time, Jeremiah's syphi
litic canker perhaps represents not Original Sin but Unpar
donable Sin: "the inward sore / Of self that cankers at the
bone ..." (“Love's Parable"). In Flood the scar on Yasha
Jones's skull becomes, in Brad's mind, subconsciously at
first, a symbol of human imperfection (p. 125). Even in The
Cave. Warren, as if determined to include such a visible
emblem in all eight novels, describes a woman "who had a
great purple swelling thing, grainy and knotted, on her
cheek, the color of an overripe plum" (p. 241).
15
Warren mentions in Who Speaks for the Negro? that to
the Negro has been attributed "a disproportionate dose of
Original Sin. ..." (p. 438). In the reverse vein, he
writes elsewhere that "there are . . . an impressive number
of objective difficulties in the race question in the South
— difficulties over and beyond those attributable to
Original Sin ..." (Legacy, p. 58).
398
and Adam learn, however, that these legacies constitute both
their humanity and their identity. Adam, for example, sud
denly realizes that he has killed a man not for the ideal
of freedom but "because his foot was not like mine" (p.
304). Significantly, at the end, Adam puts on the boot
which Old Jacob, his spiritual father, had made, and walks
out of the Wilderness, just as Manty, who had sought "to
deny kinship with the coon, [strikes] out to defend the
coon" (Band of Angels, p. 373).
It is significant that each of these defects is con
genital. Each illustrates, as Jeremiah Beaumont learns
from Brother McClardy and later from Percival Skrogg's
father, that all men are "black and damned from birth and
wallowing in the sink of nature" (World Enough and Time, p.
30), that men live "in a dark world damned from birth" (p.
87). Warren suggests that the acceptance of Original Sin
is, in a sense, the acceptance of one's humanity, the real
ity of one's nature. The term Original Sin, according to
Randall Stewart,
refers not so much to overt acts as to the whole nature
of man, his limitations, his fallibility, his self
involvement, the "wrongness" of his attitudes . . . ;
it means basic human nature, fallible, imperfect human
nature; it means the state of being human; it means
399
that we live in an imperfect non-ideal world.^
Is it any wonder, then, that such romantic perfectibilitar-
ians as Adam Stanton, Adam Rosenzweig, Jeremiah Beaumont,
and Tobias Sears find it difficult to accept the reality of
Original Sin?
Warren suggests, then, that man must accept and come
to terms with this legacy of limitation. The concept of
Original Sin is not merely the "moral nexus" of Warren's
17
works, as one critic has called it; it is the underlying
plexus of his work. In an essay entitled "The Inklings of
Original Sin," another Southern writer, Warren's former
teacher, John Crowe Ransom, confirms this point but with a
cautionary word: "Original Sin is a philosophical term, or
at least a theological one, which we should use provided we
remember that [Warren] has not put all his secrets into one
18
word." It is clear that the concept of Original Sin, as
a part of the dialectic of good and evil, underlies much
^ American Literature and Christian Doctrine, pp. 36,
80.
17
Sam Hynes, "Robert Penn Warren: The Symbolic Jour
ney," p. 279.
18
(Rev. of Selected Poems. 1923-1943), Saturday Review.
XXVII (May 20, 1944), 10.
400
of Warren's writing; what is not always so clear are the
implications of meaning and interpretation.
The term, in the first place, is not limited to its
theological sense. Warren has said.
As for Original Sin, I don't think of it in any strict
theological sense, but in a rather dense metaphorical
way, an image conforming to the nature of experience.
Would the theological notion have arisen if it did not
conform to something experience f sicl? But I would not
exclude a theological reading.
Original Sin provides an effective but complicated metaphor
for the reality of man's nature and experience. It has,
in the words of Ransom, "proved too formidable an incubus
to rate as an idle 'metaphysical' entity, for it can infect
the whole series of our human successes with shame and
guilt." Then Mr. Ransom provides his definition: "Briefly,
Original Sin is the betrayal of our original nature that we
commit in the interest of our rational evolution and prog-
20
ress." The matter of evolution or devolution, progress
or regress, is another important question to be considered
19
In a letter to me, April 12, 1965. Leslie Fiedler,
in his dogmatic manner, has insisted that "the term has no
religious connotations." ("Seneca in the Meat-House"
[rev. of Brother to Dragons1, Partisan Review. XXI [March-
April 1954], 208).
20
"Inklings of Original Sin," p. 10.
401
later.
The sense of betrayal is a significant component of
Original Sin, but Warren seems to suggest that it is pri
marily a betrayal of oneself by oneself, a betrayal of one's
original nature, of one's potential. Some of Warren's
characters miss this point and blame the past and their
fathers for betraying them. Manty Starr and Adam Rosenzweig
do so but finally come to realize that rather than having
been betrayed, they have betrayed themselves. Thus, Origi
nal Sin, in a sense, is "original" because each man origi
nates it for himself. Jack Burden, eager for the fruit of
his "research," becomes Adam eating of the Tree of Knowl
edge, passing it on to Anne Stanton, and bringing about a
chain of events leading to three deaths. Like his ancient
progenitor, Jack desires the knowledge of good and evil but
21
not the responsibility. His series of acts re-enacts the
Fall. Warren notes in his famous essay on The Rime of the
21
It is difficult to understand in what sense Original
Sin is "lack of self-knowledge," as Frederick P. W. Mc
Dowell has called it. ("Psychology and Theme in Brother to
Dragons, PMLA, LXX (September 1955), 565. Desire for knowl
edge of good and evil, a knowledge which man did not then
possess, was, in part, the cause of the Sin in Eden. Per
haps it would be more accurate to say that lack of self-
knowledge is the result of Original Sin rather than the sin
itself.
402
Ancient Mariner that Coleridge believed "Original Sin is
. . . original with the sinner and is of his will . . . The
22
act [killing the albatross] re-enacts the Fall. ..."
The mariner's killing of the albatross, Warren points
out later in his essay, was also "an act of pride, of self
idolatry— the very word Coleridge uses later in describing
Original Sin" (p. 290). "Self-idolatry" and presumption are
two manifestations of Original Sin in Warren's fiction as
well, especially as seen in Jeremiah Beaumont's obsessive
attempt to achieve his abstract Ideal, his rejection of
world for idea. His sin is not only that of the Ancient
Mariner but also that of Hawthorne's Aylmer and Melville's
Ahab.
Besides presumption, Original Sin manifests itself in
perverseness. In "A Poem of Pure Imagination," Warren cites
the comments in Poe's "The Black Cat" on the spirit of Per
verseness: "'Perverseness is one of the primitive impulses
of the human heart— one of the indivisible primary facul
ties, or sentiments, which give direction to the character
of man.'" Warren adds, "All we have to do is to read
22
"A Poem of Pure Imagination," Selected Essays, p.
'227.
403
Original Sin for Perverseness; and Poe himself carries us
from the psychological treatment under Perverseness to the
theological treatment under Sin" (pp. 230-231). "Perverse"
best describes Isaac Sumpter in The Cave and Slim Sarrett
in At Heaven's Gate, for both have an intellectual knowledge
of truth and goodness, but they deliberately refuse to come
to terms with reality.
There is still another way of looking at Original Sin.
In his discussion of Faulkner's fiction, Warren wrote:
"There is . . . a contamination implicit in the human con
dition— a kind of Original Sin, as it were— the sin of use,
23
exploitation, violation." What Cleanth Brooks has said
of Faulkner's concept of evil seems to apply also to War
ren's: "Evil for Faulkner . . . involves a violation of
nature and runs counter to the natural appetites and affec-
24
tions." Perhaps the two characters in Warren's fiction
most guilty of the sin of exploitation or violation are
Willie Stark in All the King's Men and Bogan Murdock in
At Heaven's Gate. Of the latter novel, Warren himself has
23
"William Faulkner," Selected Essays, p. 69.
24
Cleanth Brooks, The Hidden God (New Haven, 1963), p.
29; italics mine.
404
written, "All of the main characters are violators of na
ture." Most egregious of all, however, is Murdock— the
"violator of nature" who tries "to fulfill vicariously his
natural emptiness by exercising power over those around
him ..." (All the King's Men, introduction). "Nature"
violated seems to be of three kinds: nature of self, nature
of others, and external nature, that is, the physical
environment.
At least six of Warren's major characters, several of
whom violate all three kinds of nature, go beyond Original
Sin and commit the Unpardonable Sin, what Hawthorne called,
in The Scarlet Letter, the violation "in cold blood, [of]
the sanctity of a human heart." It is the sin of Chilling-
worth and Ethan Brand, the story of the latter defining the
Sin further: It is "the sin of an intellect that triumphed
over the sense of brotherhood with man and reverence for
God, and sacrificed everything to its own mighty claims."
As in the case of Brand and Chillingworth, Bogan Murdock,
Sue Murdock, and Slim Sarrett in At Heaven's Gate; Willie
Stark in All the King's Men: Jeremiah Beaumont in World
Enough and Time; and Isaac Sumpter in The Cave all "use" or
"violate" the natures of others. In so doing, they violate
their own natures— in the sense of betraying their original
405
natures and thereby sacrificing reality of self. Their
moral natures fail to keep pace with their calculating in
tellectual natures; they lose the counterpoise between head
and heart, between physical and spiritual. Frederick P. W.
McDowell has pointed out that Jeremiah Beaumont's "Faust-
like pursuit of knowledge divorced from the spirit" "is an
25
unpardonable sin. ...” Similarly, William Wasserstrom
notes that Jeremiah "learns that a denial of grossness of
the world does not result from a pure heart but from a
heart more corroded than any other because it commits . . .
26
the Unpardonable Sin."
To Jeremiah himself the Sin is "the crime of self":
"that crime for which I seek expiation is never lost. It
is always there. It is unpardonable. It is the crime of
self, the crime of life. The crime is I" (World Enough and
Time, pp. 505-506). Earlier in the same novel, Rachel feels
that she cannot forgive her mother for two things: "for
the fact that she was Maria Hopeby and for the fact that
she, Rachel Jordan, was Rachel Jordan. They are crimes
25
"The Romantic Tragedy of Self in World Enough and
Time." Critique. I (Summer 1957), 34.
26
"Robert Pen Warren: From Paleface to Redskin," p.
323.
406
27
past any repentance or expiation" (p. 54). "That I was
born," she says later, "that is my misery. And the misery
of others" (p. 402). In Flood Brad Tolliver remarks
facetiously that "Fiddlersburg will be convicted of the
crime of having existed" (p. 101); and in Brother to Dragons
Jefferson says to Lucy, "There's no forgiveness for our
being human. / It is the inexpugnable error" (p. 24). In
these passages Original Sin and the Unpardonable Sin seem
to be synonymous. The enigma is resolvable in several pos
sible ways. First, one must realize that in each case the
speaker, at the time, has not come to grips with moral
reality; he has not yet experienced redemption. Second,
Warren seems to suggest that Original Sin— the condition of
being human, of possessing an evil nature— if unredeemed,
ultimately becomes unredeemable. Third, evil, Warren sug
gests, is perhaps never fully expiable by man while he is
27
Rachel realized that her hatred for her mother was
wicked, but "she knew, too, that wickedness was better than
nothing . . ." (World Enough and Time, p. 57). A number of
Warren's characters— for example, Bogan Murdock and Isaac
Sumpter— seem to choose wickedness and violence because
these at least provide reality in the midst of their own
unreality. Cf. Baudelaire: "So far as we are human, what
we do must be either evil or good; so far as we do evil or
good, we are human; and it is better, in a paradoxical way,
to do evil than to do nothing: at least we exist."
407
in his human state because evil is an ever-present reality.
To eradicate evil would be to remove man's humanity and to
remove man's humanity would be to rob him of his identity.
The Scholarly Attorney's tract at the end of All the King's
Men says: "Separateness is identity and the only way for
God to create, truly create, man was to make him separate
from God Himself, and to be separate from God is to be sin
ful" (All the King's Men, p. 462). Fourth, because man is
born with an inherited evil nature— Original Sin— the very
fact that one has been born in a sense constitutes a "crime
of existence" inexpiable by man. Perhaps the enigma is re
solvable only in the words of R. P. W., narrator of Brother
to Dragons: "We know we all need grace . . ." (p. 112).
Violation of the third kind of nature— man's physical
environment— symbolizes, in Warren's fiction, a kind of
collective guilt bringing a curse similar to that brought
by miscegenation and slavery in Faulkner's fiction. War
ren's agrarian proclivities are more evident in his earlier
works. In "Blackberry Winter," for example, Old Jed, the
Negro, tells Seth in apocalyptic tones:
This here old yearth is tahrd. Hit is tahrd and ain't
gonna perduce . . . Folks cut down all the trees and
burn 'em up . . ., and the yearth won't grow no more.
I been tellen 'em . . . But they doan listen to me,
408
how the yearth is tahrd. Maybe this year they find
out. (“The Circus in the Attic" and Other Stories,
p. 83)
Evil men, Warren suggests, have not learned the right rela
tionship to nature; they live not in nature but on nature.
In a paragraph of brilliant prose at the beginning of All
the King1s Men. Warren repeats this theme of nature-exploi-
tation:
There were pine forests here a long time ago but they
are gone. The bastards got in here and set up the
mills and laid the narrow-gauge tracks and knocked to
gether the company commissaries and paid a dollar a
day and folks swarmed out of the brush for the dollar
and folks came from God knows where . . . Till, all of
a sudden, there weren't any more pine trees. (pp. 4-5)
According to Warren, man can no more violate external nature
with impunity than he can his own nature or that of others.
Moral reality, Warren suggests then, is neither a
monism nor a simple dualism: man is a compound of good and
evil, both of which are realities which man must accept.
Moral experience, Warren seems to suggest, involves double
ness but is not a Dualism, if one defines the latter term
as "the belief that there are two equal and independent
powers at the back of everything, one of them good and the
other bad, and that this universe is the battlefield in
409
28
which they fight out an endless war." Things are not
neatly black or white, Adam Rosenzweig and others learn;
moral reality is not a Manichean monstrosity. Evil is, in
a sense, the violation of the good; badness, so to speak,
is goodness violated, but still a reality in itself. "Wick
edness, when you examine it," says C. S. Lewis, "turns out
29
to be the pursuit of some good in the wrong way." "There
is no odor so bad," Thoreau wrote in Walden, "as that which
arises from goodness tainted."
More difficult for Warren's characters to accept than
the reality of opposing good and evil is "the tragic dilemma
30
of opposing goods, and opposing evils." If there is a
doubleness consisting of good and evil, there is also a
doubleness of good and a doubleness of evil. Jeremiah Beau
mont wrote in his journal: "'Innocence' . . . I wrote that
word down and looked at it and knew its doubleness of mean
ing. My motive was innocent though my guilt was in deed"
(World Enough and Time, p. 32 7). The key to an understand
ing of Jeremiah's error is to be found in the words of
28
C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, p. 48.
29
Mere Christianity, p. 49.
30
Warren, Who Speaks for the Negro? p. 27.
410
Jefferson in Brother to Dragons: "The stench of action is
not always sweetened / By the civet of motive, nor motive
by good action" (p. 36). The presence of the adverb always
makes the statement equivocal and raises several significant
questions: Can a noble motive ever "sweeten," or justify,
evil action? And can good action ever "sweeten" an evil
motive? Warren's characters encounter these questions re
peatedly, and their answers, conscious or unconscious,
determine their behavior. The equivocation of the answers
at times obfuscates Warren's fiction. One wonders if this
murkiness is intentional on Warren's part, perhaps for the
purpose of suggesting man's difficulty in discerning moral
reality, or if it is an extension of murkiness in the
author's own mind.
The dilemma of moral reality which Warren's characters
confront may be stated simply as follows: Does evil come
out of good? And does good come out of evil? Jack Burden,
near the middle of All the King's Men, answers yes to both.
What we students of history always learn is that the
human being is a very complicated contraption and that
they are not good or bad but are good and bad and the
good comes out of the bad and the bad out of the good,
and the devil take the hindermost. (p. 263; italics mine)
If Jefferson's use of the adverb always made for equivoca-
411
tion, Jack's use of it makes for dogmatism; in the former
case there was no room for assurance, in the latter, no
room for doubt, at least in Jack's mind. Jack's subsequent
"education to reality" at once confirms man's nature as a
complicated compound of good and evil and shows him to be
much more than a mere "contraption." But even a "contrap
tion, " a computer, can emit material only on the basis of
the data it has been fed; it is not as yet capable of cre
ating "good" material out of "bad" data, unless, of course,
the "contraption" is not operating properly, in which case
it is more likely that "bad" data will come out flagitious
and "good" data bad.
Two of the "fundamental ironical dualities of exis
tence," according to Warren, are "the bad doer against the
31
good deed and the bad result against the good act. ..."
Similarly, Jack Burden, shortly before Willie Stark is shot,
thinks, "Process as process is neither morally good nor
morally bad. We may judge results but not process. The
morally bad agent may perform the deed which is good. The
morally good agent may perform the deed which is bad" (All
31
"'The Great Mirage': Conrad and Nostromo," p. 190.
412
the King's Men, p. 418). Jack errs in thinking that man
is able to isolate process neatly and completely from re
sults— means from end— and judge each independently. Warren
has written that "attitudes, like means, are important; they
32
can fortify or poison a cause."
Warren's romantic idealists must learn that the "moral
ly good agent may perform the deed which is bad," that evil
may result from good. They must realize that the lofty
Idea, the noble motive, is not enough; it must be put to
the test of experience, and when this occurs, the Idea may
degenerate, producing evil in the end. They must learn,
as Tobias Sears does in Band of Angels, "that imperfect men
must fulfill the perfection of idea ..." (p. 238). Be
cause of the imperfection of men, a good act may produce
an evil result. "Unnatural vices," T. S. Eliot says in
"Gerontion," "are fathered by our heroism. Virtues / Are
forced upon us by our impudent crimes."
Romantic idealists must learn also that men may do
good for the wrong reason, as T. S. Eliot writes in Murder
in the Cathedral. Adam Rosenzweig in Wilderness learns
32
Who Speaks for the Negro? p. 443.
413
these lessons, ultimately. He learns, for example, that
the sailor who aided him had no lofty motive; that Mose,
the negro, saved his life for a completely selfish reason;
that Jed's motive for helping negroes was one of hatred
rather than one of love; that those fighting the War itself
lacked noble motives; and finally that he, Adam Rosenzweig,
had been motivated largely by selfishness. Even his kind
acts for the Myerhofs had been prompted largely by selfish
ness: the need for confirmation of his lofty ideal.
Warren suggests not only the possibility of the "bad
result against the good act" but also the "bad doer against
the good deed." The Scholarly Attorney's tract at the end
of All the King's Men expresses, in many ways, the epitome
of the relationship between good and evil in Warren's fic
tion. Its significance is indicated by the fact that Jack
Burden, now "educated to reality," remarks: "I was not
certain but that in my own way I did believe what he had
said" (All the King's Men, p. 463). The tract makes the
point that man's evil nature is "the awful index of God's
omnipotence," for whereas perfection would have been mere
extension, "separateness is identity." His conclusion is
that "the creation of evil is therefore the index of God's
glory and His power. That had to be so that the creation
414
of good might be the index of man's glory and power. But
by God's help. By His help and in His wisdom" (pp. 462-
463). Even after several readings, this passage seems an
"index" of the Scholarly Attorney's moral ignorance and,
by extension, that of Burden and of Warren. Man, Warren
suggests elsewhere, was not created with evil but with a
capacity for evil. Thus, evil was, and is, goodness taint
ed? Original Sin was, and is, a violation of the original
nature, according to Warren. Perhaps the passage would be
less murky, then, if it read "creation of the capacity for
evil" rather than "creation of evil."
If one regards "evil" in the Scholarly Attorney's
tract as meaning the necessarily limited and imperfect con
dition of man as a result of his Fall, "good" must, in this
sense, come out of "bad." "'We are human,'" Lucy says in
Brother to Dragons. "'and must work / In the shade of our
human condition'" (p. 193). In this sense, Willie Stark is
right when he tells Adam Stanton,
Goodness. Yeah, just plain, simple goodness. Well
you can't inherit that from anybody. You got to make
it, Doc. If you want it. And you got to make it out
of badness. Badness . . . Out of badness . . . And
you know why? Because there isn't anything else to
make it out of. (All the King's Men, p. 2 73)
415
Yet When Willie attempts to "make goodness"— the hospital—
he refuses all political deals. Even Jack recognizes the
inconsistency:
Now if Willie Stark believed that you always had to
make the good out of the bad, why did he get so excited
when Tiny just wanted to make a logical little deal
with the hospital contract? Why did he get so heated
up just because Tiny's brand of Bad might get mixed
up in the raw materials from which he was going to
make some Good? (p. 2 76)
Willie's hospital— goal of absolute goodness— is never
built, for Adam, possessing another concept of goodness,
33
kills Willie. In a sense, Willie and Adam adopt the moral
stance of the other: Willie, who has insisted that good
must be made out of bad, seeks, in building the hospital,
to make good apart from bad; Adam, who has insisted that
good is neatly separable from bad, attempts to use evil
means— murder— to eradicate evil— Stark and all he stands
for.
Jack Burden realizes that the Scholarly Attorney's
33
Even Highway 58, a "good" thing which Willie had
built out of "evil"— corrupt politics— is symbolic of man's
inability to achieve absolute goodness. Both the highway
and the hospital seem to have been motivated largely by
selfish ends. It is ironical, or perhaps it is not ironical
at all, that Willie's son, Tom, is destroyed in an accident
on Highway 58.
416
tract is also true in the sense that in a world of moral
involutions, even an evil act may eventuate in good, but
perhaps more in spite of it than because of it. Jack
achieves "good," that is, he receives knowledge from, the
tragedy and death of Cass Mastern, of Willie Stark, of Adam
Stanton, and of his father, Judge Irwin. Jack's father,
by his life, gave Jack a legacy of evil; by his death he
gave Jack a lesson which led to Jack's redemption. Simi
larly, Adam Rosenzweig's act of killing may be considered
"evil," but it helps to bring about "good," that is, Adam's
knowledge of reality. Jeremiah Beaumont seems to grasp the
same point when he thinks in World Enough and Time: "Only
through injustice . . . do we grasp at the idea of justice"
(p. 214). It would seem, however, that the adverb only,
like always mentioned above, modifies far more than its
verb in the sentence. Jeremiah believes, further, that it
is part of the "'paradox and doubleness of life'" that
Fort's evil seduction of Rachel has given him his "good"
— Rachel; "The very act that made him my enemy had brought
me to that room and into the presence of her whom I knew as
all my good . . . Should I not kiss his hand in gratitude?"
(World Enough and Time, p. 114). Later he feels that Wilkie
Barron's lie has given him his truth— Rachel (p. 417). The
417
speaker in Warren's poem "Late Subterfuge," who has "ob
served at length the inherited defect" and has "known
error's pang," summarizes these points regarding good coming
from evil:
Our grief can be endured,
For we, at least, are men, being inured
To wrath, to the act unjust, if need, to blood;
And we have faith from evil bloometh good.
Warren suggests that because of the Fall and the subsequent
"inherited defect," good if it comes at all comes at great
price— even at the price of blood.
Evil, in Warren's view, is a compost from which Good
may bloom. The very fact of man's humanity makes him
"inured to wrath"; and God, it is important to recall, makes
even "the wrath of men to praise Him." In this third sense,
then, good may "come" of evil. The final chorus of T. S.
Eliot's Murder in the Cathedral expresses it well: "Thy
glory is declared even in that which denies Thee; / The
darkness declares the glory of light." A line from The Rock
expresses the same idea: "We thank thee that darkness re
minds us of light." Light is not created from darkness,
but the light, in its dialectical struggle with darkness,
receives glory by comparison. Eliot's chorus sings of a
Transcendental, Spiritual Reality, where "all things exist /
418
Only in Thy light." Versions of the phrase "in Thy light"
appear in Warren's fiction as "in His Wisdom" or "in His
Eye." The Scholarly Attorney's tract, for example, states
that evil is the index of God's glory only "in His Wisdom"
(All the Kina's Men, p. 463). Earlier in the novel, Jack
thought to himself that "one can only know oneself in God
and in His great eye" (p. 184). Similarly, in At Heaven's
Gate, Ashby Wyndham remarks on four occasions that "a man
cannot be good out of plain humankindness. He cannot be
good for it ain't in a pore man. He cannot be good unlest
it is good in the light of God's eve (p. 119? italics mine??
God's "light," God's "Eye," signifies Ultimate, Transcendent
Reality, of which man, who at best sees "through a glass
darkly," experiences only a part. Being incomplete, man's
goodness is necessarily imperfect, and imperfect goodness
is in immediate danger of becoming badness. But even this
badness, this darkness, Eliot and Warren suggest, "declares"
the Ultimate Goodness— light— of God through His Grace.
Warren suggests, then, that in certain senses evil may
34
Cf. World Enough and Time, pp. 120, 170, 322-323.
The phrase appears also in The Cave, where Reverend Sumpter
feels he could have "stood up before the eyes of men, in the
arrogance of a man who would move in God's eye" (p. 91).
419
result, from good and good from evil. Many of his characters
distort moral reality, however, and err in thinking that it
is right to do wrong in order to be able to do right. R.
P. W., narrator of Brother to Dragons, says, "That's the
instructive fact of history, / That evil's done for good,
and in good's name— " (p. 143). Again Warren writes, "Who
can fail to be disturbed and chastened by the picture of the
joyful mustering of the darker forces of our nature in [a]
just cause?" (Legacy. p. 23).
Mr. Munn in Night Rider is only initially "disturbed
and chastened" to learn that the Tobacco Association "will
adopt such means as seem advisable to further" their "just
cause" (p. 155). He is subsequently caught up in the
delusion that the good cause will justify the evil means.
He fails to realize that the crimes and violence, however,
are not merely evil means but evil in themselves. In a
sense, Mr. Munn, Willie Stark, and Jeremiah Beaumont each
does what Jack Burden at one point feels may be a necessity:
"Sell his soul in order to get the power to do good" (All
the King's Men. p. 418).
There is something Faustlike about Jeremiah Beaumont's
attempt to use evil to achieve good. It is not surprising
that one topic of his philosophical discussions with
420
Hawgood is "concerned with whether or not the end of a man
may justify his means . . (World Enough and Time, p.
326). The advocates of Relief, like the members of the
Tobacco Association in Night Rider, attempted to "work for
justice outside the holy bonds of law" (p. 310). Skrogg,
champion of Relief, is "wedded to justice, and . . . [would]
do anything for that good end" (p. 323) . Like Willie in
All the King's Men, the Reliefers take it upon themselves
to "make the law" they need" (p. 166). Jeremiah, like Mr.
Munn and Adam Stanton, who also commit murder for a "good
cause," feels that
the blood of Fort would clear him. It would clear him
before the world. It would clear him before himself.
He would bathe in it and be clean, and the words of
the hymn ran through his head, of a fountain filled
with blood which would wash away all guilty stains.35
( World Enough and Time, p. 180)
Only after it is too late does Jeremiah learn his error;
he writes in his journal: "Man will use the means of the
natural world, and its dark ways, to gain that end he names
35
Jeremiah's delusion resembles that of Raskolnikov in
Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment. To Porfiry and Razumi-
kin, Raskolnikov says: "If . . . one is forced for the sake
of his idea to step over a corpse or wade through blood, he
can, I maintain, find himself, in his conscience, a sanction
for wading through blood— that depends on the idea and its
dimensions— "
421
holy by the idea, and ohl the terror of that, the terror of
that!" (p. 505). Jeremiah learns that evil results when
man unscrupulously pursues, with no regard for means, even
the most noble idea.
Warren suggests finally that the good end cannot come
of evil means— according to the deluded views of Jeremiah,
Mr. Munn, Willie Stark, and others— for a number of reasons.
Not only can means and end not be neatly separated and
judged in isolation but the "civet of motive" itself can
never be completely pure in an impure world; and even if it
were, the corrupt means would be likely to defile not only
the noble end but the noble doer as well. "Virtues,"
Warren writes in The Legacy of the Civil War, can be "per
verted by being abstracted from the proper human context"
(p. 105). What Warren says of Joseph Conrad's Charles
Gould applies also to Willie Stark's efforts, and those of
other Warren characters, to use evil means in order to
achieve good; "His idealism is tainted with abstraction
. . . There has been . . . a contamination of the vision in
36
the very effort to realize the vision."
36
"'The Great Mirage': Conrad and Nostromo." pp. 3 7,
53.
422
In his introduction to All the King's Men, Warren dis
cusses Willie Stark as "a man whose personal motivation had
been, in one sense, idealistic, who in many ways was to
serve the cause of social betterment, but who was corrupted
by power, even by power exercised against corruption. That
is his means defile his ends." Willie's means for achiev
ing a good end not only became evil in themselves but they
also corrupted both his ends and himself. Warren suggests,
further, that no end is worth the price of evil-doing. In
"Prime Leaf," old Mr. Hardin, whose opposition to fighting
evil with evil stands in sharp contrast to his son's accep
tance of this philosophy, tells his son, "Nothing in the
world's worth winning or doing, no matter how. You always
cut your own throat that way" ("The Circus in the Attic"
and Other Stories, p. 252).
Another version of the good-out-of-evil philosophy is
felix culpa, a concept which Warren, like Hawthorne, has
been fascinated by, although the fiction of neither writer
contains explicit acceptance or rejection of the idea. If
the Fall in Eden, and each fall since, was "fortunate,"
then the existence of evil is theologically justified, since
good will come of it. Suggestions of the "fortunate fall"
in Warren's fiction bear, as does Original Sin, not only a
423
theological application but also, according to Warren, a
37
"densely metaphorical" one as well. In Flood. Dr. Sutton
tells Lettice Poindexter that her act of infidelity has
given her valuable knowledge about herself. "You acted
out," he tells her, "what it was necessary for you to act
out to know what you now know . . ." (p. 150). Her acquired
knowledge of her love for Brad— a knowledge which certainly
could have come through less extreme means— is indeed "for
tunate," but her "fall" is not, as evidenced by the events
38
in the rest of the novel. A "fall," Warren suggests, is
"fortunate" if it leads to knowledge, which, in turn, leads
37
In a letter to me, April 12, 1965.
3 8
Leonard Casper points to the conclusion of Wilderness
— where Adam kills a Confederate soldier— as an example of
felix culpa— "Abel improved for having been Cain." ("Trial
by Wilderness: Warren's Exemplum," p. 45.) One must re
member, however, that the very fact that Cain is Cain— and
Adam, Adam— and that each does what he does is mute evidence
of a most unfortunate Fall, a misera culpa. Casper says
also that "in that supreme act of hate, at last [Adam]
understands love. ..." Such an over-simplification puts
the novel on the level of sentimental melodrama and attrib
utes to Adam a kind of mawkish, idealistic naivete similar
to what he has at the onset of the novel. Adam's act, in
the first place, is motivated by "moral repugnance" (Wilder
ness. p. 297); and what Adam learns about is what both he
and Mr. Casper have forgotten or refused all along to rec
ognize: that his father's legacy to him includes the un
fortunateness of a pristine Fall.
424
to man's identity. "Man eats of the fruit of the Tree of
Knowledge, and falls. But if he takes another bite, he may
get at least a sort of redemption. And a precious redemp-
39
tion." Warren, like some of his characters, seems to
forget, however, that it may be the second bite that con
tains the worm. Goodman Brown, one may recall, was going
back to the woods for the "second bite"; after his rendez
vous on that momentous night he fully intended to cling to
the skirts of Faith and "follow her to heaven." It is fur
ther true that belief in felix culpa often fails to take
into account what James Folsom has called the ultimate
Real world, that of God's purposes, which is inscrutable in
40
itself but upon which the [world of appearance] depends."
Whether or not man's fall is "fortunate," his redemp
tion, according to Warren, is "precious." In Brother to
Dragons, Lucy refers to "the old cost of human redemption"
and remarks that "knowledge of that cost is, in itself, a
kind of redemption" (p. 193). Similarly, at the end of
World Enough and Time, Jeremiah thinks, "In my anger and
39
"Knowledge and the Image of Man," p. 182.
40
James K. Folsom, "The Nature of Reality," Man's Ac
cidents and God's Purposes; Multiplicity in Hawthorne's
Fiction (New Haven, 1963), p. 14.
425
betrayal I did not guess that that is all we need: knowl
edge. That is not redemption, but is almost better than
redemption" (p. 506). Knowledge of man's condition and of
the cost of redemption, Warren suggests, is so essential as
to be almost a kind of, or even better than redemption
itself. This knowledge leads to an acceptance of the real
ity of both evil and good, whereby man recognizes his
affinity for the former and his potential for the latter.
Warren suggests, in the second place, that human re
demption is predicated upon a spiritual reality of the
heart, a reality which transcends mere externality. "The
real problem," he writes, "is a spiritual and moral one
. . . The problem is finally one of understanding and, in
a sense, conversion: conversion and . . . expiation.
Some of Warren's characters, such as Tobias Sears in Band
of Angels, seek to "redeem" society before their own hearts
are "redeemed." What Warren has written elsewhere points
up this fallacy: "The moral regeneration of society de
pends not upon shifts in mechanism but upon the moral
regeneration of men."^
41
'William Faulkner," Selected Essays, p. 78.
42
Warren, "'The Great Mirage': Conrad and Nostromo,"
426
Time, Warren suggests further, is a requisite of human
redemption, for redemption must take place "in time." War
ren writes in "The Ballad of Billie Potts" that "time is
the redemption of our crime. ..." To Warren, as to
Melville, "if history was fate . . . it might also prove to
43
be redemption." But man is not "automatically redeemed,"
or redeemed by a history which he has rewritten to "suit
his own deep needs" (Legacy, p. 59); instead, he is redeemed
through his acceptance of history's realities and the re
ality of his place in time.
It is Warren's belief also that human redemption must
come, paradoxically, through both isolation and unification.
In Brother to Dragons he writes:
Selected Essays, p. 54. It is for this reason that Warren
insists that mere legislation cannot cure the ills of so
ciety. Cf. the similar theme in Hawthorne's "Earth's Holo
caust": "The heart, the heart— there was the little yet
boundless sphere wherein existed the original wrong of which
the crime and misery of this outer world were merely types.
Purify that inward sphere, and the many shapes of evil that
haunt the outward, and which now seem almost our only real
ities, will turn to shadowy phantoms. ..." Outer reali
ties can thus be altered only after, and because, inner
realities have been. Tobias Sears and Adam Rosenzweig learn
this truth in their efforts for the Negro, just as Hawthorne
-Coverdale learns it in regard to Brook Farm.
43
Warren, "'The Great Mirage': Conrad and Nostromo,"
p. 195.
427
Isolation is the common lot,
And paradoxically, it is only by
That isolation that we know how to name
The human bond and thus define the self.
(pp. 205-2-6)
The fact of man's separateness, his isolation, from God by
his own sinfulness, and from other men by the disintegration
44
of "his primal instructive sense of unity," provides man's
identity. "In the pain of isolation he may achieve the
courage and clarity of mind to envisage the tragic pathos
of life, and once he realizes that the tragic experience is
universal and a corollary of man's place in nature, he may
return to a communion with man and nature" (p. 182). This
statement is essentially Warren's formula for human redemp
tion. Without separateness, Warren suggests, man lacks
both identity and a knowledge of his true condition; with
out a sense of self-reality, man does not feel complicity
with other men; and without a sense of complicity, man
cannot experience communion with other men and with nature.
Thus, without a sense of self-reality and of the reality of
others— internal and external— no redemption is possible.
The pattern of isolation-realization-return is clearly
44
Warren, "Knowledge and the Image of Man," p. 182.
428
illustrated in the experiences of Willie Proudfit in Night
Rider, Ashby Wyndham in At Heaven's Gate. and Munn Short
in World Enough and Time. Each has experienced the "pain
of isolation," physical as well as spiritual; has come to
grips with reality and acknowledged complicity; and has
returned to the communion of men. The isolation must not
be, or at least must not remain, a mere escape from reality,
as in the case of Jack Burden and Jeremiah Beaumont. Nor
can there fail to be a return, as in the case of Mr. Munn.
Manty Starr, looking retrospectively at her experience
of isolation, recognizes the existence of "some deep, re
deeming unity in life that makes beauty out of disgust"
(Band of Angels, p. 100; italics mine). This unity implies
a balance, a counterpoise of the dualities of existence.
Withdrawal and isolation must be balanced by, or submitted
to, return and communion, self by that which is "other,"
dream by world, innocence by experience, individuality by
45
the "anonymous, devouring life-flux." Jeremiah Beaumont
in World Enough and Time seeks such a balance:
45
Warren, "Love and Separateness in Eudora Welty,"
Selected Essays, p. 163. "Individuality," Warren says else
where in the essay, "must be submitted to communion" (p.
167) .
429
There must be a way whereby the word becomes flesh.
There must be a way whereby the flesh becomes word.
Whereby loneliness becomes communion without contam
ination. Whereby contamination becomes purity with
out exile. (p. 506)
Jeremiah's search proves futile, however, because of his
delusion that abstract "idea in and of itself might redeem
the world" (p. 505). He discovers, as Tobias Sears does
in Band of Angels, that "the world was besmirching his
youthful dream of the Idea that was to redeem all evil and
butchery" (Band of Angels, p. 342). Jeremiah's second
error is equally as delusive as his first: that "the world
must redeem the idea" (World Enough and Time, pp. 228, 505).
He learns too late that Idea must be submitted to, and re
conciled with, the World.
It is significant that the characters who provide a
kind of redemptive norm in Warren's fiction are those whose
experiences find expression in religious images. This is
not to say that Warren is offering a purely doctrinal solu
tion; but it is to say, as Warren has said of Theodore
Dreiser and his American Tragedy, that "in the image drawn
from religion," Warren finds "an image of the responsible
46
self." Jeremiah Beaumont feels that the peace of
46
Warren, "An American Tragedy," Yale Review. I (Octo
ber, 1962), 1.
430
redemption "would be like being born again, would be like
the joy of grace and salvation, as when he had gone to the
meeting when he was a boy, and Corinthian McClardy . . .
had loomed above the people" (World Enough and Time, p.
458). Brad Tolliver in Flood uses the same Biblical ex
pression, only facetiously, when he asks Maggie: "Mysteri
ously, mystically, I am to relax and am born again. Is
that it?" (p. 243? italics mine). In each of Warren's
novels there are those who would answer "Yes," and at the
47
end of Flood. Brad himself is perhaps one of them.
The rustic Willie Proudfit in Night Rider recounts to
Mr. Munn his experiences in the West, experiences which led
to his being, so to speak, "born again." Similarly, Munn
Short in World Enough and Time, in telling Jeremiah of his
mystical experiences in the West, says, "'I found the way
and the promise, and Jesus come in my heart'" (p. 425). In
At Heaven1s Gate. Ashby Wyndham's similar experiences are
interspersed with, and stand in ironic contrast to, those
47
It is noteworthy, however, that not all religious
figures fare so well in Warren's fiction. In Night Rider.
Sylvestus, Willie's nephew and his foil, is the self-right
eous hypocrite, whose betrayal leads to Mr. Munn's death.
Another sanctimonious hypocrite is Seth Parton in Band of
Angels, who at Oberlin sought to "redeem" his "spot" of lust
by praying with Manty but who later sought to confirm his
vileness by attempting to seduce her.
431
emanating from Murdock's unreal world. The Scholarly At
torney, the religious figure in All the King's Men, despite
his outward weakness, writes of truth and reality which Jack
Burden comes to accept. Lucy Stark, perhaps the most ad
mirable character in the novel, "had gone to a hick Baptist
college where they believed in God ..." (All the King's
Men, p. 151). Norton Girault says of her:
Lucy, guided by her faith in human goodness and love,
is able to maintain control over herself. She does
symbolize a faith which pronounces commentary on the
Boss's faith in himself and on Sadie's faith in her
eye-for-an-eye code.48
If Reverend Sumpter in The Cave is somewhat more remote
from redemption and reality than is Brother Potts in Flood,
both at least depict "the image of the responsible self"
in a religious framework. Reverend Sumpter's foil in the
novel is his own son, Isaac, who, according to his father,
"stands . . . sorely in need of salvation" (The Cave, p.
379). But Isaac and his father have contrasting views of
"salvation." Isaac, elated when he believes Jasper Harrick
to be dead, thinks,
48
Norton R. Girault, "The Narrator's Mind as Symbol:
An Analysis of All the King's Men." Accent. VII (Summer
1947), 220.
432
I'm saved. . . . and his heart overflowed with grati
tude to Jasper Harrick, who had saved him . . . He
could be good now forever, for he was, he knew, en
tering upon that success which was his due, and for
which the price had been paid. He could afford to be
good now. (The Cave, p. 287)
But Isaac is not "saved." Predicating his goodness upon the
sacrifice of another, Isaac does not at this time realize
that he has in fact sacrificed Jasper for his own selfish
gain. Isaac's father, on the other hand, believes that
Isaac's salvation lies in a sacrifice by Isaac rather than
for him. Reverend Sumpter tells Jack Harrick: "He must
crawl into the ground for another. He must do something,
whatever, in expiation. If he should do these things . . .
it would be the beginning of his salvation" (p. 379). Rev
erend Sumpter was willing to sacrifice his own honor— by
lying to cover Isaac's lie— so that his son could experience
salvation.
Two other religious figures, both Jewish— Old Jacob in
Wilderness and Old Izzie in Flood— seem to be essentially
the same person with different names. Both are minor char
acters who have major influences on the protagonists of the
two novels. One can hardly accuse Warren, in his latest
novel, Flood, of being anti-ecumenical: Brother Potts is a
Baptist, Old Izzie Jewish, and Lettice Poindexter becomes
433
a Catholic. Lettice learns the importance of knowing "the
nowness of God's will" after she is "goosed to God," as she
expresses it in her letter to Maggie. Thus, the religious
image provides Warren an apt metaphor for the experience
of redemption, for the religious person necessarily con
fronts not only the world of appearance but the world of
49
Ultimate, Transcendent Reality.
If the existence of evil necessitates redemption and
if knowledge of both good and evil is one requisite for
achieving redemption, another requisite, according to War
ren, is the reality of love. Redemption, Warren suggests,
cannot be had except through loves "It is possible— and
necessary if man is to strive to be human— to achieve some
49
A deficient sense of Eternal, Transcendent Reality—
suggested, for example, by a character's inability to pray
— often signals, or perhaps even leads to, a deficient sense
of temporal reality, and vice-versa. Manty Starr, trying to
pray in Hamish Bond's house, recalls the time at Oberlin
when she was unable to pray with Seth. Unable to pray now,
she recites the multiplication table, for "if you can't
pray, I suppose you have to hang on to something" (Band of
Angels, p. 93). Similarly, in The Cave, at the same time
that he lost a sense of his own identity, Isaac Sumpter lost
"the habit of prayer." Consequently, "there was no reality
but the icy joy in the moment of achievement" (p. 101). At
the outset of Wilderness, Adam Rosenzweig was unable to pray
(p. 32); later, in the army camp "he wished that he could
pray" (p. 219); and finally, when he accepts reality, he
can, and does, pray (p. 308).
434
50
measure of redemption through love." Again he writes:
"Reality cannot be bought. It can only be had by love."51
Similarly, in an essay honoring John Crowe Ransom's seventy-
fifth birthday, Warren notes the "great quality" of "char
ity," which shines through all of Ransom's poems:
It is a charity possible only to one who has under
stood and mastered the self so fully that he can turn
outward upon the world his full power of sympathy.
This charity may not be Christian, but if not it shows
us . . . a world redeemed bv. at least, natural love,
and somehow sweetened by the pathos of a love that is
only natural.52
This charity, so essential for human redemption, is not a
mere facile, sentimental emotion. It must be a love predi
cated upon knowledge of self; it must be a "love submitted
to knowledge," tempered by justice and truth. Lettice Poin
dexter, in her letter to Maggie in Flood, shows that she
has learned something of this love: "Oh, dear little
Maggie, how hard it is to be worthy to love anybody!" (p.
422). This redeeming love, according to Warren, presupposes
50
"William Faulkner," Selected Essays, p. 69.
51"William Faulkner," p. 71.
52
"John Crowe Ransom: Some Random Remarks," p. 19?
italics mine.
435
reciprocal worthiness on the part of the lovers. Charles
Lewis in Brother to Dragons had felt this "terrible burden
of love" and expressed relief over the death of his wife—
"relief that [he] was no longer / In need to strive to be
worthy of her love" (p. 97).
This love must also be "natural," according to Warren.
In his discussion of Faulkner's fiction, Warren gives his
definition of love: "The right attitude toward nature and
man is love. And love is the opposite of the lust for
53
power over nature or over other men. . . ." Again he
says, "The return to nature is the discovery of love.
54
. . ." Such definitions clearly exclude from love, and
from redemption, such "monsters" as Bogan Murdock, Willie
Stark, Wilkie Barron, Isaac Sumpter, and others. (They
are "monsters" in the basic, etymological sense of monstrum,
one "outside of nature" or "unnatural.") Each of these has
lust rather than love— lust for personal gain through ex
ploitation of others. Each illustrates the truth of
R. P. W.'s words in Brother to Dragons:
^"William Faulkner," p. 71.
54
"Knowledge and the Image of Man," p. 182.
436
Charity is the index
Of strength, and the worship of strength is but the index
Of weakness . . . (p. 112)
Jack Burden's ruminations on love suggest its signifi
cant relation to reality:
. . . When you get in love you are made all over again.
The person who loves you has picked you out of the
great mass of uncreated clay which is humanity to make
something out of . . .At the same time, you, in the
act of loving somebody, become real, cease to be a
part of the continuum of the uncreated clay and get
the breath of life in you and rise up. So you create
yourself by creating another person, who, however, has
also created you, picked up the you-chunk of clay out
of the mass. (All the King's Men, pp. 298-299; italics
mine)
One becomes real, Jack suggests, only by loving and by being
loved. He says, in effect, "You're nobody till somebody
loves you" and till you love somebody. Laetitia in Brother
to Dragons confirms this point, as shown by her effort to
"try to love [Lilburn], just to be" (p. 81; italics mine).
Lucy, in the same work, says to Jefferson:
If love's anything, it is the thing
That, once existing, may not be denied,
For it is definition, and denial
Is death . . . (p. 174; italics mine)
Denial of love is death, but "if you love enough, and well,
no death / Can come to kill you while there's need of you"
(Brother to Dragons, p. 22).
437
To love and to be loved, then, is essential for achiev
ing redemption and an adequate sense of reality, but "the
human curse is simply to love and sometimes to love well, /
But never well enough" (Brother to Dragons, p. 23). But
if imperfect man cannot love perfectly, he can at least
learn "love's mystery": "that substance long in grossness
bound / Might bud into love's accident" ("Love's Parable").
The inability of the typical Warren character to love
at all, much less to love well, reflects his deficient sense
of reality and precludes, ultimately, his redemption. He
is, in the words of Sue Murdock, "an emotional cripple"
(At Heaven's Gate. p. 99). Some characters,like Lilburn
Lewis in Brother to Dracrons, can neither love nor
bear to be loved.
And strange: for Love was all he asked, yet love
Is the intolerable accusation of guilt
To all the yearning Lilburns who cannot love.
(p. 113)
Like Lilburn, Sue Murdock asked only love, yet could not
bear to be loved, for "love was a terrible thing sometimes.
It made somebody see right into somebody else, sometimes.
It gave them the drop" (At Heaven's Gate, p. 312). To
love, really to love, and to be loved, Warren suggests, is
to make real and to be made real; consequently, those who
438
treasure unreality cannot bear love. Real love, Warren
suggests, is, paradoxically, both result and requisite, both
indication and instigation, of self-reality.
If lovelessness represents the unreal self and if the
unreal self cannot truly love, then pseudo-love, or lust,
as Warren referred to it in the passage from his essay on
Faulkner cited above, is the attempt of an unreal self to
find reality in another. "'It is the sadness of love,'"
Jeremiah Beaumont says, "'that one who cannot find the re
ality of himself cries out most for the reality of her whom
he loves . . .'" (World Enough and Time, p. 217). This
kind of "love," basically selfish, leads ultimately to ex
ploitation of the person loved. Manty Starr in Band of
Angels asks:
Do we give love in order to receive love . . . or do
we give with an arrogance after all, a passion for
self-definition? Or do we simply want a hand, any
hand, a human object, to clutch in the dark on the
blanket, and fear lies behind everything? Do we want
happiness, or is it pain, pain as the index of real
ity. that we, in the chamber of the heart, want?"55
(Band of Angels, p. 12; italics mine)
55
Cf. C. S. Lewis (Screwtape Letters, p. 58): "The
characteristic of Pain and Pleasures is that they are un
mistakably real, and therefore, as far as they go, give the
man who feels them a touchstone of reality."
439
Warren's characters discover that mere sexuality is no
"index to reality," for, in the words of Jeremiah Beaumont,
"without love it [is] only vile coupling in violence (World
Enough and Time, p. 237)y it is a "loveless hurly-burly,"
as Warren expresses it in his poem "Ballad: Between Box
cars." There is no dearth of sexuality in Warren's novels,
but real, "natural" love is less common. Each of the eight
novels contains scenes depicting loveless, almost mechani
cal, sexual relationships. In At Heaven's Gate. for ex
ample, Sue Murdock seduces Jerry Calhoun in the family
library with her father walking about in the room above
them:
In that room, straining for the sound of feet above or
in the dimly, mellowly lit hall, with his eyes fixed
on the windows to catch any glint of light from an
approaching car, clasped in that unnatural, awkward,
frustrating posture, almost impotent at first from
anxiety, he had violated her, coldly, desperately,
without p l e a s u r e . 56 (At Heaven's Gate. p. 32)
56
An almost identical scene appears m "The Circus m
the Attic," in which Sara Darter "seduced" Bolton Lovehart
"with a cold pertinacious, clumsy methodicalness based on
dark hints and whispered lore [sic] and inept experiment,
there on the red plush sofa in Professor Darter's parlor,
under the portrait of Professor Darter and the serried eyes
of dead grandfathers and grandmothers peering through the
gloom, while from the room above came the faint rhythmic
creak of the rocking chair of the old aunt who now lived in
the house" ("The Circus in the Attic" and Other Stories.
440
This episode is only the first in a series of loveless sex
ual affairs by Which Sue attempts to escape her father's
unreal world, which has robbed her of the meaning of reality
and love. "Love me hard," she begs Jerry later (At Heaven1s
Gate, p. 94). "Do you love me?" she asks him (p. 229); but
she must admit to Rosemary, "I don't love anybody ..."
(p. 184). Unable to love or to bear being loved truly, Sue
is unable to achieve a sense of reality; for such a one
there is no redemption— only a violent death. Conversely,
there is promise of redemption for Jerry Calhoun, who
p. 35). It is noteworthy that besides these two couples, at
least three others carry on clandestine sexual affairs with
the imminent danger of discovery; Mr. Munn and Lucille
Christian in Night Rider, Cass Mastern and Annabelle Trice
in All the King's Men, Jeremiah Beaumont and Rachel Jordan
in World Enough and Time. (Jack Burden and Anne Stanton,
in a similar circumstance in All the King's Men, do not cli
max their affair.) Thus, the loveless, sexual relationship
is associated with frustration, desperation, violation, un
naturalness, and guilt. Other loveless sexual encounters
are those between; Mr. Munn and his wife, May, a struggle
of "resistance and revulsion" (Night Rider, p. 206); Jere
miah and Rachel in prison, "a blank and absolute passion,"
a "hot blackness of self" (World Enough and Time, pp. 412-
413); Hamish Bond, with his "sandpaper thumb," and Manty
Starr (Band of Angels, p. 135); Nick Pappy and Giselle in
"the sprawl of the bath mat or the tangle of the clothes
closet ..." (The Cave, pp. 51-52); Isaac Sumpter and Goldie
(The Cave, p. 130); Brad and Lettice, a "plunging into the
black center of things, where nothing equaled nothing"
(Flood, p. 33 5) ; Brad and Leontine Purtle, with her well-
used diaphragm (Flood, p. 362).
441
paradoxically comes to admit his hatred for his family and
is thus able to love them.
Niaht Rider re-enacts the "falling-off" of love de
picted in Warren's early poem "Love's Parable." Mr. Munn
and May, his wife, come to feel, in the words of the poem, a
As Mr. Munn gradually surrendered his self-reality to the
Association, he gradually lost his capacity to love. His
obsession "colored everything, even his love for May"(p.
Heiress of All Ages: Sex and Sentiment in the Genteel Tra
dition [Minneapolis, 1959], p. 114) that Mr. Munn commits
himself to a public cause "in part because he wants to es
cape a dull wife" seems totally unfounded. Such a view
misses an essential point— that Mr. Munn's capacity to love
decreases as his sense of identity decreases through his
increasing involvement in the public cause. The unsuccess
ful marriage is an effect rather than a cause of his in
creasing remoteness from reality. Even more insupportable
are the question-begging comments of Norman Kelvin, who sees
"no relationship at all between Percy's doom in the public
world and his fate in love. . . . Percy dies because life
is like that, and this is true tragedy. With respect to
the women, he fails not because he fell in love and then
became the victim of unforeseen consequences, but because
he never was in love with either of them" ("The Failure of
Robert Penn Warren," p. 355). Such a view represents a
serious misreading of the novel, which explicitly states
and shows that Mr. Munn's love is "colored" (Night Rider,
p. 48) by his involvement with the Association. It is true
that he does not fail because he falls in love and then
becomes victimized, but neither is it true that he fails
Contempt of very love [they] bore
And hatred of the good once known. . .
57,
William Wasserstrom's remark (in "Sugar and Spice,"
His love became "a task, not a whole but a part of a whole
which he could not see, not a poise but a motion . . . It
was not the answer, as it had once seemed, but the question"
(Night Rider, p. 48). Subconsciously, he sought his lost
reality in an affair with Lucille Christian, who, like Sue
Murdock, sought the same thing in him. Even as he expressed
his love for her, "the word [love] rattled in his head like
a pea in a dried pod" (p. 325) . At their final meeting,
Lucille echoed Sue Murdock's words when she told Mr. Munn:
"'I couldn't say I love anything . . . I'm just cold inside
. . . That's why I did what I did, come to you. I was cold;
I thought you'd warm me.'" Mr. Munn and Lucille sought in
each other what neither had in the first place: the warmth
of reality.
All the King's Men presents still another version of
the incapacity to love. Jack Burden is unable to climax a
sexual encounter with Anne Stanton because it is damaging
to his ideal image of innocence, but he is also unable to
because he has never been in love with May. His growing
incapacity to love his wife, and his subsequent frustrating
affair with Lucille, are both results of his failure to re
tain a sense of his own identity.
443
bring himself to propose marriage because he cannot accept
the responsibility. He turns temporarily to Lois, the
"juicy, soft, vibrant, sweet-smelling, sweet-breathed ma
chine." "The only thing Lois knew about love was how to
spell the word and how to make the physiological adjustments
traditionally associated with the idea" (All the King's Men,
p. 321). Jack acquires a capacity for real love through
his "education to reality." He is able, for example, to
love his mother, who he had thought "never loved anybody":
"I felt not only pity for her but something like love, too,
because she had loved somebody" (p. 373). Jack comes also
to love even Tiny Duffy: "We were bound together forever
and I could never hate him without hating myself or love
myself without loving him" (p. 442). Jack's ability to love
the world, and to be loved in return, is indicated by his
marriage to Anne Stanton.
In World Enough and Time. Warren presents the tragic
irony of a sacrifice, made in the name of love, to abstrac
tionism. Neither Jeremiah nor Rachel ever really loves
the other: Jeremiah can love only his ideal, whereas Rachel
clings only to her feelings of non-love and betrayal.
Rachel, who "had not loved her father" (World Enough and
Time, p. 53) and hated her mother (p. 54), has a heart as
dry as a leaf (p. 79). "'Love' . . . she said it as though
the word was in a language unfamiliar to her and had no
meaning beyond the empty sound" (p. 78). "How shall I know
what love is?" she asks Jeremiah (p. 123). "Nobody ever
loved me,” she tells him (p. 184). Perhaps old Mrs. Jordan
is correct when she tells Jeremiah: "There's nothing but
ruin in this house ..." (p. 157). Jeremiah promises
Rachel that he will teach her "what love is" (p. 123), but
in the process he loses the love he thought he had. In the
prison he thinks, "I loved her once," and although he
assures her of his love, "he knew that it was not love"
(World Enough and Time, p. 411). Jeremiah and Rachel be
come like "two people [who] have outlived all their love
and their hate for each other," and "neither is more than
a ghost to the other" (p. 221). The ultimate degradation
of love, the supreme irony, comes when Jeremiah "works his
lust" with the vile woman in the unnatural, decadent domain
of Old Big Hump.
The dramatic inability to love takes another form in
Band of Angels, where Manty's whole struggle is based on her
feeling of being unloved, betrayed, by her father. To
Manty, not to be loved is to be nothing, to be without iden
tity. She repeats to herself, "I was I, I was not somebody
445
else, somebody without value, unloved. Yes, I was loved"
(p. 75); but she is hard to convince. Her episodes with
Bond and her marriage to Tobias, futile attempts to find
reality, only point up her own inability to love. Eventu
ally, however, she accepts reality: "I knew that my father
had loved me. I knew it, as though my desire to honor him
had brought me the knowledge" (p. 373).
The ability to love and be loved acquired by Manty and
Tobias resembles that acquired by a number of major charac
ters in The Cave. Charles Samuels has accused both novels
of possessing a "sentimental vulgarity." "The Cave," he
says, "resembles nothing so much as a soap opera so that
its solution— love, love, more love— is entirely appropri-
58
ate, if not completely sobering." Such a misreading,
which further sees the characters as suffering from "sexual
deprivation," fails to recognize Warren's use of the love
less sexual episode as metaphor. Warren is showing the
very opposite of what Mr. Samuels says the novel is about;
that is, Warren shows that sentimental love and mere sexu
ality are not only not the solution but are the reflection
of the characters' real problem— remoteness from reality.
58
"In the Wilderness," p. 46.
446
It is Mr. Samuels, not Warren, who provides the facile so
lution. Mr. Samuels lumps together as one, and fails to
distinguish between, at least nine different kinds of "love"
59
in The Cave. Each of these kinds of love is faulty in
ways too elaborate to be discussed here. At least seven
characters, however, achieve some measure of redemption
through "natural love"— a love possible only to "one who has
understood and mastered the self." Monty, Jo-Lea, Jack and
Celia Harrick, Nick, Timothy, and Reverend Sumpter gain a
sense of self-reality by coming out of their "caves" of
lovelessness; Isaac and Goldie, Matilda Bingham, Giselle,
and various citizens of Johntown remain entrapped in their
own "caves," beyond love and redemption.
If loveless sexuality is rampant in The Cave, it is
conspicuously absent in Wilderness, except, perhaps, for the
presence of Mollie the Mutton, an army camp prostitute.
59
The kinds of love are: adolescent love (Jo-Lea and
Jasper-Monty, Isaac and Goldie); marital love (Nick and
Giselle, Jack and Celia Harrick, Timothy and Matilda Bing
ham) ; father-son-daughter love (Jack and Jasper-Monty Har
rick, MacCarland and Isaac Sumpter, Timothy and Jo-Lea
Bingham); Mother-son-daughter love (Celia and Jasper Har
rick, Matilda and Jo-Lea Bingham); fraternal love (Monty and
Jasper Harrick); love for fellowman (Isaac and Jasper, Rev
erend Sumpter and Jack Harrick); God-man love (Reverend
Sumpter); love of nature (Jasper Harrick); orgiastic "love"
or lust (various citizens of Johntown).
447
Adam Rosenzweig thinks, "I am nearly thirty years old, and
I have never lain with a woman" (p. 94). "Love in this
novel is primarily that between father and son and between
fellowmen. Adam, like Manty Starr, comes to love his father
by accepting his legacy. Concomitantly, Adam learns that
he cannot truly love mankind until he accepts the humanity
of men, and of himself, that he cannot truly love until he
accepts hatred as a reality, and that he cannot "redeem"
others until he himself is "redeemed." "There is one . . .
kind of sentimentality that the white man cannot afford,"
Warren has written, "a sentimentality about himself. He
cannot afford to feel that he is going to redeem the
60
Negro." Adam Rosenzweig came to America to "redeem" the
negroes but discovers instead a hatred for the negro: "He
stood there and hated Mose Talbutt. He thought: I have no
right to hate anyone" (Wilderness, p. 208). He discovers
also a hatred for his fellow beings because he is "like
them" (p. 237). "Am I different from other men?" he asks
(p. 307). The answer is, in effect, both yes and no. By
accepting his defect, Adam achieves a sense of identity and
by accepting complicity with other men he achieves communion
60
Who Speaks for the Negro? p. 443.
448
with mankind; as a result of both, he achieves some measure
of redemption through love.
The same theme is repeated, with significant varia
tions, in Warren's final novel, Flood. There is the same
search for reality in mere sexuality. Lettice Poindexter,
for example, believes Brad's embrace will "create the true,
the real, Lettice Poindexter" (p. 68). Similarly, Brad
feels that by his relation with Leontine Purtle, "something
could be redeemed. Everything could be redeemed" (p.360).
Brad's hatred for his "swamp rat" father re-introduces that
recurrent theme. It is by the new theme of love for a town,
a town about to be inundated, that Warren is able to fuse
the various kinds of love in an apt metaphor. Brad, who
has hated Fiddlersburg (p. 306), comes to accept and love
it, "for this was his country," but then he thinks; "There
is no country but the heart" (p. 440). His acceptance of
Fiddlersburg symbolizes his acceptance of tradition and the
past, his father, his responsibility. He learns also from
Lettice's discovery of human love through love of God and
from Brother Potts's singular ability to fuse the two kinds
of love. Howard Nemerov summarizes the points well in his
discussion of Warren's poetry:
449
. . . Man is of two substances— the corruptible and
the incorruptible, the essence and the existence. And
it is love which— with . . . sufficient awareness— has
attempted with initial but precarious success to fuse
the two . . . The ideal condition of earthly love is
modeled on and flows into the love of man for God,
with its attendant virtues of humility, abnegation of
self. . . .61
"Love ain't nothin," Ashby Wyndham says in At Heaven's Gate,
"if it ain't in God's eye" (p. 120).
Thus, only by learning to love and be loved in return,
Warren suggests, can man experience redemption, for only
love— love based on self-knowledge, an "understanding and
mastery of the self"— can balance the dualities of man's
nature. Warren offers no facile redemption through senti
mental love; he offers instead "the old cost of human
redemption." Man, caught in another of Warren's paradoxical
vicious circles, must have self-reality in order to love
truly, which is in itself a source of self-reality. "We
have to remain ourselves in order to redeem ourselves,"
6 2
Warren writes. To understand and master the self, Warren
further suggests, one must recognize and accept the moral
6 X
Howard Nemerov, "The Phoenix in the World," Furioso.
Ill (Spring 1948), 36.
62
Who Speaks for the Negro? p. 441.
reality of his own nature— the reality of good and evil and
the multiplicity of their relationships. This struggle of
acceptance, or rejection, constitutes "the story of every
soul . . . [in] its self-definition for good or evil, sal
vation or damnation.” It is, according to Warren, a costly
struggle. It is a constant struggle, for "the victory is
never won; the redemption must be continually re-earned."
But it is a struggle not without hope,
. . . For there are testaments
That men, by prayer, have mastered grace.
("Love's Parable")
PART Ills
REALITY AND "THE LITTLE MYTH WE MAKE":
"A MYTH OP THE UNITY OF BEING"
"Fiction ends, if it is good fiction and we are good
readers, by returning us and the world to ourselves.
It reconciles us with reality."
— Warren
"Literature is a way of knowing what kind of person
you can be, getting your reality shaped a little
bit better."
— Warren
"We are human, and the human heart
Demands language for reality. ..."
— Warren, "Dragon Country:
To Jacob Boehme"
451
CHAPTER VIII
"A VISION OF REALITY"
"The rhetorician would deceive his neighbours,
The sentimentalist himself; while art
Is but a vision of reality."
— William Butler Yeats
"In any art, the central problem is always the
problem of reality."
— Wallace Stevens,
The Necessary Angel
452
CHAPTER VIII
"A VISION OF REALITY"
In his foreward to Brother to Dragons. Warren writes,
"If poetry1 is the little myth we make, history is the big
myth we live, and in our living, constantly remake." Warren
then concludes, on the basis of this significant comment
that "historical sense and poetic sense should not, in the
end, be contradictory. ..." "Fiction," he writes in an
essay on Eudora Welty,
may be said to have two poles, history and idea, and
the emphasis may be shifted far in either direction
. . . [but] when the vividness of the actual world is
best maintained, when we get the sense of one picture
super-imposed upon another, different and yet somehow
the same, the stories are most successful.^
Warren often uses the term poetry in the generic sense
to include fiction (Cf. "Why do We Read Fiction?" Saturday
Evening Post. CCXXXV [October 20, 1962], 82), to designate
"literature as a dimension of the creative imagination"
("Knowledge and the Image of Man," pp. 182-192).
2
"Love and Separateness in Eudora Welty," Selected
Essays, p. 168.
453
If, as Warren suggests, every soul must confront and re
concile the image of self and that which is "other," of
truth and untruth, of now and then, of good and evil, of
love and nonlove, in order to achieve human reality, the
effective raconteur of every soul's struggle for self def
inition must also confront and reconcile these dialectical
elements. He must do so in order to achieve artistic real
ity, for good fiction, according to Warren, is the "echo"
of experience, the "image of life." Warren suggests fur
ther, however, that it is the onus of the recorder of man's
dialectical struggle to confront and reconcile still another
set of polarities, a dialectic variously designated as idea
and history, art and life, idea and experience, "little
myth" and "big myth," artistic illusion and reality, aes
thetic vision and reality. If Warren's characters can be
examined in terms of their success or failure in balancing
the elements of their dialectics— a human necessity—
Warren's fiction itself can be examined and evaluated in
terms of the success or failure of Warren to balance the
elements of his own dialectics— an artistic necessity. The
criterion is Warren's own: "The stories are most success
ful," he says, "when we get the sense of one picture super
imposed upon another, different and yet somehow the same."
455
The measure of artistic success, in short, is determined by
3
the writer's own dialectical dexterity.
The writer, according to Warren, achieves artistic
reality, as man achieves basic human reality, through con
fronting and balancing dialectical elements. The artistic
experience, like universal human experience, is one of
doubleness; the writer has, so to speak, two countries, each
interacting upon the other. In the words of Gertrude Stein,
Everybody that writes is interested in living
inside themselves [sic] in order to
tell what is inside themselves.
That is why writers
have to have two countries,
the one where they belong and
the one in which they live really.
The second one is romantic,
it is separate from themselves,
it is not real
but it is really there.
Cf. Richard Chase's discussion of Whitman's "dialectic
world out of whose 'dimness opposite equals advance'"— a
"collocation of the natural and the transcendent, the im
perfect and the utopian, the personal and the generic."
According to Chase, "what finally happens is that Whitman
loses his sense that his metaphor of self vs. en-masse is
a paradox, that self and en-masse are in dialectical oppo
sition. When this sense is lost the spontaneously eventful,
flowing, and largely indeterminate universe of 'Song of
Myself' is replaced by a universe that is both mechanical
and vaguely abstract." ("One's Self I Sing," Walt Whitman
Reconsidered [New York, 1955], pp. 58-70).
456
Warren, clearly aware of his "two countries," has objected
to those who have insisted on applying to All the King's
Men only "the one where [he belongs]," to the exclusion of
"the one in which [he lives] really." In his essay "All
the King1s Men: The Matrix of Experience," Warren has
written that his acquaintance with the former "country,"
represented in this case by the State of Louisiana, was far
less important than his acquaintance with "another country"
— a "country even more fantastic" than the first, a "coun
try" whose "history, sociology, and politics" "any novel,
good or bad, must report." Warren acknowledges the impor
tance of both "countries"— one involving "the protracted
dialectic," the other "that deeper and darker dialectic for
which the images and actions of a novel are the only lan-
4
guage" (p. 161) . Brad Tolliver, the writer-protagonist of
Flood, is finally able to reconcile existence in both coun
tries. He realizes that Fiddlersburg, Tennessee, is "his
country" at the same time he realizes that "there is no
country but the heart" (p. 440). Warren allows Brad, and
the reader, the assurance that Brad, with his newly acquired
4
Cf. Edgar Allan Poe's remark: "The terror of which
I write is not of Germany, but of the soul."
457
but costly sense of reality, will also be a successful
writer because he has learned to accept and reconcile his
"two countries."
This same necessity to confront and reconcile opposites
is expressed in a comment by Elizabeth Maddox Roberts quoted
by Warren in his essay "Elizabeth Maddox Roberts: Life is
From Within." Warren notes that Mrs. Roberts was searching
for a "fusion of the inner and the outer, at what she called
'poetic realism.'" Mrs. Roberts wrote in her journal:
Somewhere there is a connection between the world of the
mind and the outer order— it is the secret of the con
tact that we are after, the point, the moment of union.
We faintly sense the one and we know as faintly the
other but there is a point where they come together,
and we can never know the whole of reality until we
have these two completely.5
It is not surprising that Warren quotes this passage, for
Mrs. Roberts is expressing in other words Warren's own
criterion for good fiction: "a balance of history and
idea," "one picture superimposed upon another, different
and yet somehow the same."
Nathaniel Hawthorne, writing in the Custom House in
troduction to The Scarlet Letter, seems to express the need
5
"Elizabeth Maddox Roberts: Life is From Within,"
p. 20; italics mine.
458
for a similar balance, seeking "a neutral territory, some
where between the real world and fairy-land, where the
Actual and the Imaginary may meet, and each imbue itself
with the nature of the other." To say that Warren writes
in the tradition of Hawthorne is to make a banal, truistic
statement. Suffice it to say here that Warren, like
Hawthorne, has recognized the need in art to balance the
real and the imaginary, to submit one polarity to the test
of the other. Failure to do so effectively, both Warren
and Hawthorne seem to recognize, results in defects of the
dialectician.
Another writer, Samuel Coleridge, sought the balance
of opposites in the "imagination." Warren and his literary
cohort, Cleanth Brooks, noted in a 1937 article that "Col
eridge described the imagination as resolution of oppo-
6
sites." In his Bioqraphia Literana, Coleridge expressed
the need of the writer to recognize and reconcile opposite
qualities through the "imagination":
The poet . . . diffuses a tone and spirit of unity,
that blends and (as it were) fuses, each into each,
by that synthetic and magical power, to which we
"The Reading of Modern Poetry," American Review, VIII
(February 1937), 435.
459
have exclusively appropriated the name of the imag
ination. This power . . . reveals itself in the
balance or reconciliation of opposite or discordant
qualities: of sameness, with difference; of the gen
eral, with the concrete; the idea, with the image;
the individual, with the representative. . . .
Warren's own phrase "different, yet somehow the same" echoes
Coleridge's pharse "sameness with difference." Similar to
both is Wallace Stevens's emphasis on "the balance between
7
reality and the imagination." "Poetic truth," according
to Stevens, "is an agreement with reality. ..." "Poetry
is a part of the structure of reality . . . The structure
of poetry and the structure of reality are one or, in ef
fect, . . . poetry and reality are one or should be" (pp.
54, 81).
Thus Warren is not alone in suggesting that the writer,
in order to achieve artistic reality, must confront and
balance art with life, the "little myth we make" with the
"big myth we live." Furthermore, the reader, on his part,
must sense this relationship or fiction becomes a mere
7
The Necessary Angel, p. 74. In spite of significant
semantic differences between Coleridge's use of imagination
and that of Stevens, differences too involved and tangential
to expatiate here, a basic common denominator is recogniz
able. To both it is the resolution of opposites, a concept
which constitutes the very plexus of Warren's work.
460
"fantasy to redeem the liabilities of our private fate
. . ., a flight from reality and therefore the enemy of
g
growth, of the life process." Literature then becomes a
kind of escapism which, in the words of Wallace Stevens,
"applies where the poet is not attached to reality, where
the imagination does not adhere to reality. ..." (p. 31).
Slim Sarrett, the poet, or more accurately the pseudo-poet,
in At Heaven's Gate, is a prime example of a writer not
"attached to reality." He tells Sue Murdock that his double
life
was not the double life which every artist is forced
by his nature to lead . . . I had been guilty [he says]
of a confusion between art and life. I had blurred out a
fundamental distinction . . . I had mixed myself up.
But it wasn't the double life of the artist I was talk
ing about. I was cutting myself off more and more from
reality. (p. 165; italics mine)
In one of his earliest reviews, Warren wrote that "escapist
poetry, to be more than this, must exhibit . . . a sort of
9
understanding of the world from which it flees." Artistic
illusion becomes a pernicious delusion for Slim, who fails
O
"Why Do We Read Fiction?" p. 82.
9
"The Romantic Strain" (rev. of Edith Sitwell's Rustic
Elegies). New Republic, LIII (November 23, 1927), 23.
461
to realize that, in Wallace Stevens's words, "reality is the
central reference of poetry" (p. 71).
Slim errs in thinking that the artistic illusion is a
deception, a trick, rather than a kind of heightened real
ity. Donald Davidson expresses the point well when he
writes that "the illusion of reality"
is not a deception, a trick, a lie. It is an illusion
(that is, in the dictionary phrase, "an unreal image,
a deceptive appearance") only in the sense that the
events being related are not actually occurring at the
time of the reading of the narrative . . . The illu
sion thus created may well be a high and noble form of
reality and thus an aspect of the truth.10
Warren himself has said that the poem is "a way of living,
and not a parlor trick even in its most modest reaches
. . . What you are concerned with is a sense of contact with
reality.
The writer, then, must neither "blurr" the "fundamental
distinction" between art and life nor cut himself off from
either of the major "poles"— "history and idea." Warren
suggests even further, however, that the writer must
10American Composition and Rhetoric (New York, 1959),
pp. 326-327.
^ Fugitives' Reunion: Conversations at Vanderbilt,
p. 142.
462
recognize the interrelationship of the two "poles." He
must realize that the “little myth" must "adhere" to the
reality of the "big myth" and at the same time heighten
one's awareness of the reality of the "big myth." Litera
ture, to be worthy of the name, according to Wallace Stev
ens, "touches the sense of reality; it enhances the sense
of reality, heightens it, intensifies it." "Thus poetry
becomes and is a transcendent analogue composed of the par
ticulars of reality. ..." (pp. 77, 130). Warren has
expressed much the same idea; "A piece of literature, new
or old . . . should intensify our awareness of the world
(and of ourselves in relation to the world) in terms of an
12
idea, a 'view.'" Good fiction, in short, "gives us that
13
heightened awareness of life." To Warren, then, fiction
must adhere to the reality of life, and if this is so, the
artistic reality of good fiction becomes itself a kind of
transcendent reality.
Good fiction is a kind of transcendent, heightened
reality in one sense because it is the image of experience;
12
"Love and Separateness in Eudora Welty," p. 159.
13
Warren, "Why Do We Read Fiction?" p. 83.
463
it submits the "dream" to "world," "innocence to experience,"
"knowledge to fact," The artist, according to Warren, seeks
"to arrive at his meanings immediately, through the sensuous
renderings of passionate experience, and not merely to de-
14
fine meanings in abstraction. ..." Warren suggests that
the abstractionist writer can no more achieve artistic re
ality than the abstractionist can achieve self-reality; that
is, the writer, like man in general, must submit abstract
ideation to concrete experience. A piece of fiction
achieves artistic reality in the way a life achieves human
reality— by submitting idea to experience. For the writer
and for the reader, Warren summarizes tersely, "fiction is
15
an experience, not a footnote."
The fictional experience, a kind of heightened reality,
both complements and transcends actual experience at the
same time that its emphasis cannot be shifted too far from
this "pole" of experience. This transcendence of actual ex
perience comes, in part, from the ability of the fictional
experience to objectify, to formulize without formularizing the
14
"'The Great Mirage1: Conrad and Nostromo.1 1 p. 57.
15
Introduction to "A Long Fourth" and Other Stories
by Peter Taylor, p. ix.
464
amorphousness of actual experience. The "illusion of real
ity" has, in the words of Donald Davidson,
this difference from actual experience: that, although
actual experience is fleeting, and cannot be recovered
once it has gone, and furthermore is rarely intense in
character, and may be confusing rather than clear, <1
narrative of experience gives experience a lasting form,
permits it to be recovered and re-established in that
form by any reader, establishes it forever in a certain
degree of intensity, and makes it stand forth clear and
precise. (p. 326; italics mine)
By giving form to experience, the writer of fiction makes
experience manageable. Warren has written that "fiction is
a 'telling' in which we as readers participate and is,
therefore, an image of the process by which experience is
made manageable. Fiction provides the revisable "shape
of experience" or, to borrow Wallace Stevens's phrase, "the
structure of reality."
If fiction provides form to experience it must never,
according to Warren, degenerate to mere formalism. Litera
ture must struggle to "engage the deep, inner issues of
life . . ."at the same time that it gives form to the
"outer" issues of life and runs the risk posed by "all the
disintegrative and paradoxical possibilities in that
16
"Why Do We Read Fiction?" p. 83.
465
17 . . .
dialectic." The novel, Warren has insisted, is not re
portage, nor is it merely cultural or linguistic "symptom."
Instead, the novel is typified by what Warren calls
"knowledge of form"—
the organic relation among all the elements in the
work, including, most emphatically, those elements
drawn from the actual world and charged with all the
urgencies not to be denied but transmuted . . . The
form is a vision of experience, but of experience
fulfilled and redeemed in knowledge, the ugly with
the beautiful, the slayer with the slain, what was
known as shape now known as time, what was known in
time now known as shape, a new knowledge. It is not
a thing detached from the world but a thing springing
from the deep engagement of spirit with the world.
Warren is most emphatic about his view that fiction must not
deny but must transmute the elements from the actual world.
This transmutation involves essentially a dialectical syn
thesis, which thereby lends form to experience. The Word,
in effect, becomes flesh at the same time that the flesh
finds expression in the word.
In addition to "form," the novel provides what Warren
calls "rhythm,"
17
Warren, "A Lesson Read in American Books," New York
Times Book Review. December 11, 1955, p. 1.
18
"Knowledge and the Image of Man," p. 555.
466
the image of experience being brought to order and
harmony, the image of a dance on the high wire over
an abyss. The rhythm is, as it were, a myth of order,
of fulfillment, an affirmation that our being may
move in its totality toward meaning. ^
Like his own character, Mr. Munn— who seems to walk "a wire
across space . . . aware that with a single misstep,a single
failure in balance, he will go hurtling down to one side or
the other" (Night Rider, pp. 202-203)— Warren, as a writer,
equilibrates between artistic experience and actual experi
ence of life. The "little myth," "a myth of order," is the
equilibrant. And by providing form and order for the reader,
the author, through his "little myth," provides for the
reader and for himself the possibility of meaning. Meaning
becomes possible through the reconciliation of man and his
ordered experience. "If poetry does anything for us," Warren
has written,
it reconciles, by its symbolical reading of experience
(for by its very nature it is in itself a myth of the
unity of being), the self-divisive internecine malices
which arise at the superficial level on which we con
duct most of our living.20
Art, then, is "the little myth we make" as opposed to "the
big myth we live"; it is the "myth of order" as opposed to
19
"Knowledge and the Image of Man," p. 555.
20
"A Poem of Pure Imagination; An Experiment in Read
ing," Selected Essays, p. 272.
467
the myth of disorder, which is history, experience; it is
"myth of the unity of being" as opposed to the myth of the
disunity of being.
Warren suggests that fiction is less a compensation
for reality than a reconciliation to reality and not at all
an escape from reality. Good fiction, he says, provides
"some sense of reconciliation with the world and with our
selves. And this process of moving through conflict to
reconciliation is an echo of our own life process." Warren
then summarizes the point well:
If fiction begins in daydream, if it springs from the
cramp of the world, if it relieves us from the burden
of being ourselves, it ends, if it is good fiction
and we are good readers, by returning us to the world
and to ourselves. It reconciles us with reality.21
Good fiction, Warren suggests, is itself reconciled with
reality; then, with its image of experience, it reconciles
the reader with reality. Both reconciliations are implicit
in Warren's remark that readers, like the princess in one
of Hans Christian Anderson's tales, "want an artificial
22
bird— an artificial bird with a real song." Marianne
Moore, in her phrase "literalists of the imagination," seems
21
"Why Do We Read Fiction?" p. 84.
^"Why Do We Read Fiction?" p. 84.
468
to have in mind the same kind of dialectical reconciliation.
Warren's "artificial bird with a real song" is little dif
ferent from Moore's "imaginary gardens with real toads in
them."
According to Warren, the "myth of order," both recon
ciled and reconciler, affirms the possibility of meaning
in the "ruck of experience." The impulsion to find meaning
through objectifying and ordering experience prompts a
number of Warren's characters to employ "the little myth."
Its forms range from the simple narratives of Willie Proud-
fit, Munn Short, Hamish Bond, Maggie Tolliver, and Cal
Fiddler, to the sophisticated poetry of Slim Sarrett and
his discourse on self-knowledge, to the poetry of Tobias
Sears and his book The Great Betrayal, and to the novels
and film scripts of Brad Toliver. Somewhere in between
these forms are the episodic journals of Ashby Wyndham, Cass
Mastern, and Jeremiah Beaumont. There are also the stories
of Jack Burden and Manty Starr, narrated in retrospect.
Regardless of the form the "little myth" takes, all of these
have in common the impulsion, similar to that of the Ancient
Mariner, to objectify experience and thereby to find mean
ing, reality. Jack Burden, for example, feels the need to
put together in some objective form the pieces of Willie
469
Stark's, and his own, story: "It was only after the con
clusion, after everything was over, that the sense of real
ity returned, long after, in fact, when I had been able to
gather the pieces of the puzzle up and put them together
to see the pattern" (All the King's Men, p. 407). Jack
discovers a sense of reality, of meaning, from seeing the
"pattern," which, in turn, comes from the "myth of order."
Similarly, Cal Fiddler in Flood realizes that the "little
myth" is an expression of the pattern of new-found meaning
in life. When one discovers "that life, which is a sort
of medium in which the you exists, like a fish exists in
water, is beautiful . . . — then you have to find a way to
say it" (pp. 412-413).
Yasha Jones, the movie director in the same novel, also
seeks to "find a way to say it" by means of another kind of
"little myth" in the form of images on celluloid. Yasha is
painfully aware of the dialectical poles and their necessary
interdependence: "Reality [is] uncapturable," he thinks.
"That [is] why we need illusion. Truth through lies ..."
(Flood, p. 50). Yasha realizes that the artist must, in
the words of Wallace Stevens, "create his unreal out of
what is real" (p. 58). But Yasha realizes also that the
"unreality" of the artistic illusion heightens the reality
470
of life and even takes on a reality of its own. The reality
of life "would no longer be what it actually was, what it
really was, but because it was unreal would be taken for
23
real" (p. 50). Unlike Brad, Yasha recognizes the pre
carious balance between vision and experience. "You have
to document things," he tells Maggie. "But if you depend
on the documentation, then the real thing— all right. I'll
say it— 'the vision,' it may be . . . be gone ..." (Flood.
23
The recurring "cadenza" of the mockingbird in this
passage is reminiscent of the mockingbird aria, symbolic of
poetic inspiration, in Whitman's "Out of the Cradle Endless
ly Rocking." In a sense, Yasha, who still grieves over, and
blames himself for, the loss of his wife in an automobile
accident, is the male bird lamenting the loss of his mate.
But in another sense, Maggie, who "sings" an aria of her
own "loss" of a mate, is the mockingbird. It is the plain
tive song that arouses the "unknown want, the destiny" of
Yasha, (Cf. the mockingbird in All the King's Men, p. 294,
and the recurring bird image.) Unlike this significant
parallel is the ironical contrast in The Cave between Isaac
Sumpter and the nightingale, the "immortal Bird" of Keats's
poem, with which Isaac tries to identify. But, unlike the
"free and immortal bird," Isaac is both bound to delusion
and dead to reality. "It wasn't the bird," he realizes;
"it was his self," an unreal self, a self revealed as a
member of the "hungry generation" treading down the true
nightingale, Jasper Harrick. Jack Harrick's "box," the
guitar, a legacy to his sons, symbolizes the rhapsodic means
of making the "myth of order." Monty's musical improvisa
tions provide meaning in the welter of confused events.
Only when one understands these points do the final words
of the novel, those of Mr. Harrick, take on real meaning:
"'I don't want to bust the box . . . It's Monty's box"
(The Cave, p. 403).
471
p. 103). Brad, for example, keeps detailed, documentary
notebooks, but for him the vision is gone. But even when
the vision is present, Yasha realizes further, it is not
easy to reconcile it with experience and discover a form
for the "little myth"; it is not easy to discover the means
whereby the Word may be made flesh. Yasha tells Brother
Potts, "The idea is there— the vision, shall we say— but
the hand trembles" (p. 240).
Art, according to Yasha, must "give the impression of
the mysterious inwardness of life," a paraphrase of Warren's
comment elsewhere that "literature struggles to engage the
24
deep, inner issues of life." The "inwardness of life"
must be balanced with the "outwardness," says Yasha; "to
be overwhelmed with the outward, moving multiplicity of the
world— that means we can never see, really see, or love the
single leaf falling. And, therefore, can never love life,
the inwardness of life" (p. 127). It is this sense of
"inwardness" which Brad's writing lacked, since "he was not
sure what might be the inner reality. Was there [he asked]
ever an inner reality?" (p. 204). The writer, according to
Warren, must also reconcile history and idea. Tobias Sears,
24
"A Lesson Read in American Books," p. 1.
All
writing his book in Band of Angels, attempts, but fails, to
"affirm the Idea in our History ..." (Band of Angels, p.
347). This loss of artistic counterpoise leads to the most
egregious offense of an artist: "That is the last sin, for
people in our business," Yasha says, "no, in any business—
the sin of the corruption of consciousness" (Flood, p. 127).
The "sin of the corruption of consciousness" is pre
cisely the "sin" of poet Slim Sarrett in At Heaven1s Gate
and, for a time, that of Brad in Flood. For Slim, art in
volves not doubleness but duplicity. He and Brad stand in
direct contrast to Brother Potts, who struggles to write
a song and a sermon for his, and Fiddlersburg's, final ser
vice. Both the song and the sermon are "little myths,"
"myths of order," which attempt to find and express meaning
in the welter of experience. In them Brother Potts attempts
to show that life in Fiddlersburg has been blessed, meaning
ful. One is reminded of Croce's definition of art as in
tuition, along with his suggestion that one cannot know
what he has intuited until he has named it or given it a
formal character, and that this action is essentially the
work of art. It seems likely that Warren would also concur
with British writer Joyce Cary's description of art as "a
473
25
discovery of something real."
Warren suggests that for both successful writer and
careful reader the art of fiction is an act of discovery of
the reality of the self, of truth, of time, and of redemp
tive values— dialectics, all of which engage the human
struggle. Ernst Cassirer, in his Essay on Man. has pointed
out that poetic imagination is the only clue to reality.
Similarly, Wallace Stevens has written that poetry is "an
unofficial view of being," that literature "illustrates the
achieving of an individual reality" (pp. 40, 98). Warren
expresses much the same idea in his comment that "the poem
is a way of knowing what kind of a person you can be, get
ting your reality shaped a little bit better." "Language,"
26
he adds, "drags the bottom of somebody into being." A
key word in the statement is shaped. Art, as the shaping
of experience, provides the image of the self. "The form
gives man an image of himself," Warren writes elsewhere,
for it gives him his mode of experiencing, a paradigm
of his inner life, his rhythm of destiny, his tonality
of fate. And this evocation, confrontation, and def
inition of our deepest life gives us, in new self-
25Art and Reality (New York, 1958), p. 16.
26 . .
Fugitives1 Reunion, p. 142; italics mine.
awareness, a yet deeper life to live.
474
Fiction, then, provides the "paradigm," the pattern of
meaning which Jack Burden and others seek in the "myth of
order"; this shape or form, in turn, provides man the image
of himself, the "myth of the unity of being." The ironic
words of Slim Sarrett in At Heaven1s Gate seem to epitomize
Warren's own attitude: "In the most fundamental sense, to
be an artist means to be a certain way, not to do certain
things, perform certain tricks" (p. 198).
The meticulous reading of fiction may, according to
Warren, have a similar effect of leading to a sense of self
reality. It leads
to an awareness of ourselves; it leads us, in fact, to
the creation of the self. For the individual is not
born with a self. He is born as a mysterious bundle
of possibilities which, bit by bit, in a long process
of trial and error, he sorts out until he gets some
sort of unifying self, the ringmaster self, the offi
cial self.28
Fiction, in short, provides "a heightened sense of being."
Besides contributing to this sense of identity, the reality
of oneness, fiction gives a sense of identification, the
27
"Knowledge and the Image of Man," p. 555.
28
Warren, "Why Do We Read Fiction?" p. 82.
475
reality of that which is "other." It satisfies "our yearn
ing to enter and feel at ease in the human community." In
Flood, Leontine Purtle's reading of Brad Tolliver's early
novel may have caused her to yearn too much toward the
human community, to seek "communion" in the wrong way, but
at least it made her "want to reach out and touch the world"
(p. 232) . It led, in short, to a discovery of reality.
Warren suggests that fiction also leads to, or more
accurately is., a discovery of truth. Katherine Mansfield
expands the point in her remarks that "truth is a very big
thing. We have to discover it— that's what the artist is
29
for, to become true by discovering the truth." Similarly,
Wallace Stevens's remark that poetry is an "attempt to
approach truth through imagination" (p. 41), expresses much
the same idea as Warren's remark that "poetry— that is,
literature as a dimension of the creative imagination— is
30
knowledge." "Insofar as a piece of fiction is original
and not merely a conventional repetition of the known and
predictable, [says Warren] it is a movement through the
29
Katherine Mansfield, quoted in Masters of the Modern
Short Storv. ed. Walter Havighurst (New York, 1955), viii.
30
"Knowledge and the Image of Man," p. 555.
476
'unknowable' toward the 'knowable'— the imaginatively
31
knowable." John Ciardi summarizes the same point well:
Writing is not a decorative act, but a specific, dis
ciplined, and infinitely viable means of knowledge.
Poetry and fiction, like all the arts, are a way of
perceiving and of understanding the world. Good writ
ing is as positive a search for truth as is any part
of science . . . The writer must learn necessarily
of himself and within himself, that his subject is the
nature of reality, that good writing always increases
the amount of knowledge available, and that the one
key to that knowledge of reality is A S - I F . 3 2
If poetry and fiction represent a positive "search for
truth," "poetry is only reality, after all," as Wallace
Stevens has written; and "poetic truth is a factual truth
. . .; the truth that we experience when we are in agreement
with reality is the truth of fact" (p. 59).
To Warren, the very act of composition is "a way of
knowing, a way of exploration." Similarly, the very act of
composition is evidence of the need to know: "The urgency
of experience, no matter how vividly and strongly experience
may enchant, is the urgency to know the meaning of experi
ence." This urgency to know makes the writer "willing to
\
go naked into the pit, again and again, to make the same
3^"Why Do We Read Fiction?" p. 83.
32
"What Every Writer Must Learn," p. 212.
477
33
old struggle for his truth." Warren suggests that the
writer, in the "old struggle for his truth," must go beyond
the enchantment of experience and "succumb" to "the last
and most fatal enchantment: the enchantment of veracity,
[for] . . . that is what, in the end, makes the artist
* ,.34
free."
This struggle for truth is not in vain, for art itself
is, in a sense, a realization. "Instead of describing re
ality, " writes Charles Feidelson, "a poem is a realiza-
35
tion." Similarly, in an early review, Warren wrote that
3 6
"poetry . . . is a way of seeing." One might add that
the creative process is a way of seeing, of discovering the
reality of the world and of the self. "The creation of a
poem," according to Warren, "is as much a process of dis-
37
covery as a process of making." It is both a discovery
33
"'The Great Mirage': Conrad and Nostromo," p. 58.
34
Introduction to Peter Taylor's "A Long Fourth" and
Other Stories, x.
35
Charles Feidelson, Symbolism and American Literature
(Chicago, 1953), p. 18.
36
Robert Penn Warren, "Sight Unseen," p. 292. Cf.
Warren's charge that Lanier is a "blind poet" (American
Review. II [November 1933], 27).
37
"A Poem of Pure Imagination," p. 268.
478
and a creation— a process of discovering by creating as well
as creating by discovering. "We know by creating," Warren
has written, "and one of the things we create is the Self.
38
. . ." Slim Sarrett in At Heaven's Gate, therefore, is
ironically correct when he tells Sue Murdock that "poetry
is a . . . technique for achieving self-knowledge" (p. 27)
and later that "the artist is the enemy of blur" (p. 150).
The irony lies in the fact that by his own criterion Slim
is not a true aruist. His poetry constitutes not a search
for truth but an escape from it, not a way of knowing truth
but a way of perverting it, not a way of exploration but
a way of delusion, not a struggle for knowledge but an
exercise in falsehood, not a way of discovering self-reality
but a way of concealing it. Because he is not "in agree
ment with reality," his poetry, rather than heightening
reality, distorts it. Because he is enchanted not with
veracity but with untruth, he is not free but bound. Quite
the opposite is Hemingway, whose novel Brad Tolliver in
Flood reads and recognizes as a "masterpiece of a master
writer, who, in this, had at last discovered the deep truth
of man's relation to other men, and had fused it with his
38
"A Poem of Pure Imagination," p. 207.
479
own tragic sense of individual destiny" (p. 306). This
statement by Brad succinctly expresses Warren's criteria
for evaluating fictions it is "masterful" to the extent
that it leads to an achievement of self-knowledge and fuses
with it a knowledge of others, of the community of man
kind: "The form," Warren says in his essay "Knowledge and
the Image of Man," is a vision of experience, but of exper
ience fulfilled and redeemed in knowledge . . . It is not
. . . detached from the world but . . . [springs] from a
deep engagement of spirit with the world."
The "master writer," Warren suggests, must also con
front and balance the dialectic of time, of then and now.
If Warren's fiction is, as Frederick Brantley has described
it, "the story of human effort to come to some enriching
39
relationship with history, with the past," Warren, in the
artistic process, shares in the human effort in a heightened
sense. Regarding the relation of art and time, Slim Sarrett
tells Sue Murdock in At Heaven's Gate that "living is,
metaphorically, a temporal art, like poetry or music" (p.
166). The artist, Warren suggests, must realize what T. S.
39
Frederick Brantley, "The Achievement of Robert Penn
Warren," Modern American Poetry, ed. B. Rajan (New York,
1951), p. 66.
480
Eliot expressed so well in "Burnt Norton":
Words move, music moves
Only in time . . .
Words, after speech, reach
Into silence. Only by the form, the pattern.
Can words or music reach
The stillness . . .
Artistic reality, both Eliot and Warren suggest, is to be
found only in time, even though in a sense true written
art, "the form, the pattern," of temporal experience, tran
scends time. Yasha Jones in Flood thinks, "There is a fame
in Time, and a fame out of Time . . . the disease of those
who struggle for the fame out of Time— that is a deeper
kind of damnation. It is deeper because the medium promises
more. And the word promises most of all" (p. 56). The
word promises, above all, the fusion of past, present, and
future, and thus the possibility of transcending time. The
writer, according to Warren's view, is, in a sense, similar
to Thoreau's artist of Kouroo, who, seeking to make a per
fect staff, seems to transcend the passage of tyrannous
time. "As he made no compromise with time, time kept out
of his way, and only sighed at a distance because he could
40
not overcome him." Unlike the artist of Kouroo, Tobias
40
Thoreau, Walden, pp. 216-217.
481
Sears in Band of Angels, by "anatomizing the evils of . . .
time, became himself a child of the time" (p. 347).
Warren suggests, however, that a transcendence of time,
such as that of the artist of Kouroo, can come only after
the artist has confronted time and has achieved a balance
of then and now. In this struggle, he must face reality;
he must realize, for example, that if the word "promises,"
it also at times may not keep its promises, for
Words strain,
Crack and sometimes break, under the burden,
Under the tension, slip, slide, perish,
Decay with imprecision, will not stay in place,
Will not stay still. (Eliot, "Burnt Norton")
Similarly, Warren has written in Brother to Dragons:
Language betrays.
What I mean is, words are always the truth,
and always the lie.
For what I say of Philadelphia now
Is true, but true now only, not true then. (p. 8)
The artist, according to Eliot and Warren, must realize that
because both life and art are temporal, both are subject to
temporal vicissitude.
Furthermore, the writer must recognize the dialectic
of time, realizing the interaction of past, present, and
future. Warren has written that "no one . . . can write un-
sentimentally of the past unless he has a lively sense of
482
the present? but, conversely, no one can write unsentiment-
41
ally of the present who is contemptuous of the past." A
would-be artist "contemptuous of the past" is Slim Sarrett
in At Heaven1s Gate. who tells Sue Murdock that "the artist
has no father. Only a multitude of fathers, who don't owe
him a thing . . . And therefore, the artist is free, be
cause he doesn't owe them anything, either" (p. 167). Not
only does Slim lack a "sense of the past," symbolized in
Warren's fiction by the father, but he is contemptuous of
its reality. Although he had told Sue earlier that "an
artist . . . never feels the need to 'make up’ anything"
(p. 150), Slim rejects and distorts his real past and "makes
up" an unreal father.
In one of his ironically true statements which belie
his false actions. Slim remarks that "the past is valuable
42
only m so far as one can recognize it as past." Art, he
adds, "is dynamic and consecutive in its structure" (p. 166).
Significant here is the word structure, like the words form
41
Introduction to A Southern Harvest, p. ii.
42
Slim echoes Warren's own remark in his review of
Faulkner's Requiem for a Nun; "The very essence of Temple's
problem is that the past is not even past." ("The Redemp
tion of Temple Drake," p. 1.)
483
and pattern in Eliot's passage above. The "myth of order,"
by objectifying and formulizing experiences of then and now,
balances the dialectic and provides the possibility of
meaning, of interpretation. In the artistic process, Warren
has written, "experience is foreshortened, is taken out of
the ruck of time, is put into an ideal time where we can
43
scrutinize it, is given an interpretation." Good fiction,
then, according to Warren, can come only from a reconcilia
tion of the dialectical elements of time, and it must itself
44
be a reconciliation of the dialectical elements. "We
cannot look at the past or the future," Wallace Stevens
wrote, "except by means of the imagination. ..." (p. 144).
If the "little myth" necessarily confronts and balances
the dialectics of self and other, truth and untruth, then
and now, it must also, according to Warren, confront and
balance the dialectic of good and evil, of redemption and
damnation, at least in a secular sense. The "myth of order,"
43"Why Do We Read Fiction?" p. 83.
44
Charles Humboldt, who criticizes what he calls War
ren's "reactionary historical outlook," considers Warren's
a "dialectic in reverse, a dream grinding to a halt, bogged
down in yearning for the past, fear of the future, and dis
gust for the present." ("The Lost Cause of Robert Penn
Warren," p. 8.)
484
itself based upon an adequate view of moral reality, the
reality of both good and evil, may, by objectifying human
experience, permit realistic interpretation of human values.
Warren has written that
behind the good story, no matter how light its tone,
no matter how trivial its subject matter, or how cranky
its end, we feel that an interesting mind and tempera
ment has made contact with life. Even though the point
of the story stated or implied, may be contrary to our
personal conclusions about things, it enlarges our own
sense of human possibility for good or bad. The really
fine story is by a writer who has some characteristic
slant on the world, some characteristic reading of hu
man values.45
Fiction enlarges the sense of "human possibility for good
or bad" by permitting contemplation of the consequences of
human action and the ensuing judgment that may be passed
upon it. "We are reconciled," Warren writes, "to the ter
rible necessity of judgment— upon our surrogate self in the
46
story, our whipping boy and scapegoat." Good fiction,
according to Warren, forces a confrontation with the reality
of both good and evil.
We must confront the redeemed as well as the damned,
the saintly as well as the wicked; and strangely enough,
45
Robert Penn Warren and Albert Erskine, eds., Short
Story Masterpieces (New York, 1954), Introduction.
46
"Why Do We Read Fiction?" p. 84.
485
either confrontation may be both humbling and strength
ening. In having some awareness of the complexity of
self we are better-prepared to deal with that self.47
Warren is saying, in effect, that the good reader of good
fiction may experience vicariously what Adam Rosenzweig, for
example, had to come to the American Wilderness to experi
ence: a sense of reality. In the reader's case, it is an
experience of heightened reality gained through illusion.
If "all is redeemed, / In knowledge," if knowledge of the
"old cost of human redemption" is, in itself, a kind of re
demption" (Brother to Dragons, pp. 195, 93), the empathetic
reader of fiction is able to achieve "redemption." As
readers, Warren says, "we are free from the Garden curse:
We may eat of the Tree of Knowledge, and no angel with
48
flaming sword will appear."
If fiction offers the possibility of "redemption"
through knowledge— a knowledge of reality— it is, however,
no facile "redemption." The "old cost of human redemption"
is high in both life and art. Warren makes it unmistakably
clear that fiction must never become a mere "fantasy to re
deem the liabilities of our private fate," a mere escape
47
"Why Do We Read Fiction?" p. 83.
48
"Why Do We Read Fiction?" p. 83.
486
from reality. Warren, with Cleanth Brooks, summarizes the
point well:
The dogmatist who is author paints a world of black
and white, a world in which right and wrong, truth and
falsehood, are clear with statutory distinctness, a
world of villain and hero. The artist who is author
paints a world in which there is, in the beginning
neither black nor white, neither right nor wrong which
can be defined with absolute certainty. The certainty
can come only in terms of the process, and must be
earned, as it were through the process.49
There is little doubt that Warren himself is "artist as
author."
If fiction must not become mere escapism, neither must
it become duplicity, according to Warren. Warren, somewhat
after the manner of Hawthorne, suggests that the writer,
like his characters, may commit the artistic "unpardonable
sin" by violating "what the writer takes to be the nature
of the human heart" (Brother to Dragons. Introduction).
The writer, according to Hawthorne in his famous Preface to
The House of the Seven Gables, "sins unpardonably so far as
he may swerve aside from the truth of the human heart ..."
"The last sin for people in our business," says Yasha Jones,
"is the sin of the corruption of consciousness" (Flood, p.
127) .
49
"Letter to the Teacher," Understanding Fiction, xviii.
487
There is still another sense in which Warren suggests
that the dialectic of good and bad, redemption and damna
tion, has ramifications in fiction: the question of the
"purity and impurity" of art itself. Slim Sarrett in At
Heaven1s Gate tells Sue Murdock,
Poetry itself is impurity. The cry of pain is not
poetry. The pure gasp and sigh of love is not poetry.
Poetry is the impurity which an active being secretes
to become pure. It is the glitter of pus, richer than
Ind, the monument in dung, the oyster's pearl. (p. 196)
There is some truth in these assertions, but Slim, who con
fuses life with art, does not have it quite right. Warren
himself has written that
poetry wants to be pure, but poems do not. At least,
most of them do not want to be too pure. The poems
want to give us poetry, which is pure, and the elements
of a poem, in so far as it is a good poem, will work
together toward that end, but many of the elements,
taken in themselves, may actually seem to contradict
that end, or be neutral toward the achieving of that
end.50
According to Warren, one of the "impurities" which call
us back to the world of "imperfection" is irony, a most sig
nificant device for Warren. Irony, according to Warren and
50
Warren, "Pure and Impure Poetry," Selected Essays,
p. 4.
488
Cleanth Brooks, "always involves contrast, a discrepancy
between the expected and the actual, between the apparent
51
and the real." Thus, not only do Warren's artistic
theories involve dialectics but also many of his artistic
techniques employ a dialectical method, one of which in
volves irony. Irony is much more than "a trick of light on
the late landscape" (Brother to Dragons, p. 7); it is more
even than a "cracked glass" (World Enough and Time, p. 36).
It is, according to Blanding Cotshill in Flood, "an
51
Warren and Brooks, Understanding Fiction, p. 685. Of
this discussion of irony, Warren has said, "I don't remember
who actually wrote the remarks on irony in Understanding
Fiction and Understanding Poetry. But I substantially con
curred— even though Cleanth tends to make irony somewhat
more of an aesthetic system than I do." (In a letter to me,
March 23, 1965). Cf. "Irony and 'Ironic' Poetry," College
English, IX (January 1947), 231, in which Brooks defines
irony as "the obvious warping and modification of a state
ment by the context. ..." The work of art, with its
"pressures of context," becomes a kind of analogue of the
human life, with what Wallace Stevens has called the "pres
sures of reality." The successful poem, like the successful
life, balances the dialectics of reality. The dialectical
implications of irony are further suggested by I. A. Rich
ards's remark that irony "consists in the bringing in of the
opposite, complementary impulses." (Principles of Literary
Criticism [New York, 1938]). Richards's "poetry of synthe
sis" is essentially the poetry which, according to Brooks,
"does not leave out what is apparently hostile to its domin
ant tone, and which, because it is able to fuse the irrele
vant and discordant, has come to terms with itself and is
invulnerable to irony" ("Irony and 'Ironic' Poetry," p. 235).
This poetry is, in turn, what Warren refers to as "impure"
poetry.
489
awareness of that doubleness of life that lies far below
flowers of rhetoric or pirouettes of mind ..." (p. 294).
Warren and Brooks specify the purpose of irony: "Irony
is intended, on the one hand, to intensify the implications
of the conflict, and on the other, to raise the issue above
52
the level of merely dogmatic and partisan vilification."
Effective irony, that is, must intensify the dialectical
conflict without losing its own artistic balance. Warren
suggests further that irony can intensify only if it is
itself intensive; effective irony is "irony with a center."
Warren attributes the failure of Hemingway's To Have and
Have Not largely to the fact that its "irony is essentially
53
an irony without any center of reference." Similarly,
he considers much of Thomas Wolfe's irony to be "interpo-
52
Warren and Brooks, Understanding Fiction, xix.
Charles Humboldt, who grinds his axe and then chops away,
criticizes Warren's irony in At Heaven's Gate for not rising
above "partisan vilification," or what Humboldt calls "ab
stracting from the conditions of real life, from history,
class struggle and the social basis of ethics ..." ("The
Lost Cause of Robert Penn Warren," p. 8). "Irony used in
this manner," Humboldt says," is bound to become mechanical.
It does not grow out of incidents but produces them, or,
rather, the god of irony, the author spins them at will."
Humboldt, whose main purpose seems to be the castigation of
what he calls Warren's "reactionary historical outlook,"
presents no cogent support for his charge.
53
"Ernest Hemingway," Selected Essays, p. 103.
490
plated," "an irony almost regularly derivative and mechani-
54
cal." Conversely, Warren considers Eudora Welty's fiction
successful to the degree that "there is an implicit irony"
55
in it. The irony in Miss Welty's fiction, like that m
56
John Crowe Ransom's poetry, is built in, so to speak, not
added on. Especially successful, according to Warren, is
the irony of Katherine Anne Porter's fiction: "Her irony
is an irony with a center, never an irony for irony's
sake." It is, above all, an irony which "intensifies" the
dialectical struggle: "It affirms . . . the constant need
for exercising discrimination, the arduous obligation of
the intellect in the face of conflicting dogmas, the need
57
for a dialectical approach to matters of definition. . . ."
Warren's own fiction is most successful when his irony
has a "center of reference" and when the irony is itself
the very center of the novel. Each of Warren's novels has
54
"A Note on the Hamlet of Thomas Wolfe," Selected
Essays, p. 179.
55
"Love and Separateness in Eudora Welty," p. 167.
56
"John Crowe Ransom: A Study in Irony," p. 93.
57
Warren, "Irony with a Center," Selected Essays, p.
155.
491
at its base a core of irony in the form of disparity be
tween appearance and reality. There is, for example, the
double image of self— the distorted, illusory image in the
"cracked glass," opposed to the reality of the self. There
are the shadows of illusion and delusion upon the walls of
the cave opposed to the reality of the "strange prisoners."
There is the disparity between expectations of the Idea
and the reality of the World. Each of Warren's novels de
picts the irony of a character seeking reality through
another character, only to discover that the other character
not only lacks a sense of reality but is actually seeking
reality in him. The irony is broadened, given both center
and circumference, for example, in World Enough and Time,
where Jeremiah, originally motivated by lofty, noble designs
toward Rachel, becomes unfaithful to her and despises the
very idea she represents, an idea for which he has sacri
ficed everything. Perhaps the deepest irony in Warren's
fiction comes when characters, for example, Mr. Munn and
Jeremiah Beaumont, gain an awareness of reality too late
to allow rectification of the damage done to themselves and
to others.
Immediately following the publication of Understanding
Fiction, in which Warren and Brooks discussed the importance
of irony, appeared possibly the two most ironical of War
ren's novels— All the Kina's Men and World Enough and Time,
certainly two of Warren's best works. The irony in each
has a "center of reference" which is the very nucleus of
the novel. In no other Warren novels are the ironical ram
ifications and implications so numerous and so significant.
In these two works the irony is implicit and perhaps less
contrived than that in Band of Angels, where at times the
irony seems to exist for its own sake. The disparity be
tween Willie Stark, "man of fact," and Adam Stanton, "man
of idea," and the fact that each destroys the other, is
the very center of All the King's Men. Another part of the
ironical center is the disparity between the reality of
Jack's three "fathers" and the way they appear to Jack. If
the Scholarly Attorney is his "good, weak father" and Judge
Irwin, whose death he causes, is his "evil, strong father,"
Willie Stark proves to be his good and evil, weak and
strong surrogate father. Such irony as this is effective,
for it intensifies what Warren calls the "dialectic of
i • • ,.58
living."
58
Warren, "Irony with a Center," p. 154.
493
A second device of the dialectical method is the sym
bol, used to effect what Kenneth Burke has called "the
59
dialectics of imagery." "The symbol," Warren has written,
"affirms the unity of mind in the welter of experience; it
is a device for making that welter of experience manageable
for the mind— graspable. It represents a focus of being.
60
. . ." According to Warren, the "little myth" of litera
ture is itself a symbol, an analogue of experience, which
renders experience manageable. But besides being itself a
symbol, the "little myth" often employs the literary symbol,
which unifies idea and experience and by its unification
makes experience "graspable." The symbol "is the only
means," according to Joyce Cary,
by which it is possible to achieve any unity between
knowledge of fact and the feeling about the fact, the
machine and the soul, the universal consistencies and
the individual character, so that they can be joined
together in an ordered experience of the real. . . .
(p. 190? italics mine)
59
Kenneth Burke, "The Dialectics of Imagery," A review
of Charles Feidelson's Symbolism and American Literature.
Kenyon Review, XV (Autumn 1953), 625. Cf. George Palmer
Garrett's allusion to Warren's personal lyric as "a dialec
tic of images rather than a pattern of song" (Rev. of
Promises, Georgia Review. XII [Spring 1958], 106).
^"A Poem of Pure Imagination, " p. 218.
494
The symbol, then, partakes at once of idea and of experi
ence. It is precisely the ambivalence of the symbol that
permits the writer to link individual idea with the reality
of universal experience. In addition, the symbol enables
one to go beyond sheer actuality and materiality to ideality
Charles Feidelson's discussion of the symbol, in Sym
bolism and American Literature, suggests its dialectic
function. "The symbolist," according to Feidelson,
redefines the whole process of knowing and the status
of reality in light of the poetic method. He tries
to take both poles of perception into account at once,
to view the subjective and objective worlds as func
tions of each other by regarding both as functions of
the forms of speech in which they are rendered. (p. 56)
Both "the symbolist and the dialectician [Feidelson adds]
extend the boundaries of present reality." "The symbolist,"
according to John Crowe Ransom in his review of Feidelson*s
book, "would like to heal the ill-famed split between the
61
subject and the object. ..." Consequently, Ransom
concludes, "there is a dialectical need for [symbolism] to
fill a gap and complete a series of literary effects."
Warren, clearly sensing this "dialectical need," fits
^John Crowe Ransom, "Symbolisms American Style,"
p. 18.
his own definition of a "philosophical novelist"— one "for
whom the image strives to rise to symbol, for whom images
62
fall into a dialectical configuration." Many of the key
images which "strive to rise to symbol" have been discussed
above: the stone dropped into a pool, the well image, the
spider web, the cave and shadow image, the trash-debris
image, the bird, the film image, the blemish-defect image,
the image of putrefaction, and the mirror image, perhaps
63
the most frequent and significant of all. Another such
symbolic image in Warren's fiction is that of the eye. Like
Poe, Warren is able to suggest qualities of character by
focusing on the eyes. Sometimes, as with "the eyes of the
world" in World Enough and Time (for example, p. Ill),
Warren uses the eyes as synecdochic. But perhaps for War
ren the optical sense is most significant for its symbolic
function as a means of perceiving external reality. A
recurring symbolic gesture, discussed earlier, is the futile
attempt of Warren's characters to escape reality by closing
their eyes.
62
'"The Great Mirage': Conrad and Nostromo." p. 58.
63
Closely associated with the image of putrefaction
and the blemish is that of the hidden, bleeding wound. Cf.
Flood, p. 69 and The Cave, pp. 294, 302, 326, 366.
496
In addition to this optical image, there is the re
curring auditory image— the sound of insects. More specif
ically, the "grinding" of insects, especially of locusts,
which recurs in each novel does much more than contribute
to atmospheric mood. Especially significant in The Cave
and Flood, the insect noise serves to confuse the inner and
outer worlds. Mr. Munn in Night Rider, for example, is
drawn, enveloped, by "that dry rasping sound from the in
sects" with their "unpatterned, unrelenting, interminable
sound . . . It was as though it was in him, finally in his
head, the essence of his consciousness, reducing whatever
word came to him to that undifferentiated and unmeaning
insistence" (p. 431). Similarly, in Flood, the "tinny,
merciless reiteration of the locusts [was] like Time passing
through your head" (p. 352), while for Rachel Jordan in
World Enough and Time, the sound of the July flies, a
"grinding, remorseless, barbaric sound, [was] like a nerve
twitching in her head" (p. 54). The insect noise, then,
suggests the incomprehensibility and the harshness of
reality.
If the insect image suggests the unrelenting harshness
of reality, the recurrent subaqueous image suggests the
out-of-time delectation of unreality, of ideality. This
497
image, appearing twenty-five times in Warren's fiction--in
each novel and in two short stories— appeared in the early
idyllic poem "Bearded Oaks." The oaks are "subtle and
marine, / Bearded, and all the layered light / Above them
swims." The couple, "twin atolls on a shelf of shade," lie
in the "kelp-like" grass. Into their innocent, ideal
quietus from reality, "passion and slaughter, ruth, decay"—
qualities of reality's "hurlyburly"— only "minutely whisper
down."
If reality is under the aegis of piercing, blinding
sunlight, unreality, in Warren's fiction, is under the aegis
of shadows or soft green light filtered through water or
foliage. The image of the couple in "Bearded Oaks" becomes,
in Warren's fiction, the image of Jack Burden and Ann Stan
ton in All the King's Men, swimming and diving together
under the "dark, greenish-purple sky" (p. 126), that is,
before innocence has been submitted to experience. The
image of the couple becomes in the early pages of The Cave
that of Monty Harrick and Jo-Lea Bingham when Monty envi
sions Jo-Lea
drowning deliciously under the weight of softness of
self into the deeper and softer recesses of herself,
like a body, relaxed and glimmering whitely into the
darker depth of water, swaying and shelving downward,
498
surrendering itself in voluptuous fluidity to the ele
ment.64 She would be, somehow, both the body glimmer
ing whitely down and the dark envelopement, the self
drowning into self, self-glutting in its own fulfill
ment of softness. (pp. 11-12)
Or the image of the couple becomes, in World Enough and
Time, the visionary image of Jeremiah and Rachel "some place
in the West in a silent, wooded valley where the great trees
let only a green light down like the light under water when
you dive deep and where everything is still" (p. 275). In
each case, the image rises to the level of symbol, suggest
ing either the ideal state of innocence before experience,
a kind of Edenic time, or the escape from the reality of
experience. The sensory significance of the images causes
them to "fall into a dialectical configuration." Opposing
the harsh brilliance of sunshine is the mellow green light
and the shade; opposing the clamor of the "hurlyburly"
is the "somnambulistic, submarine muffling and muting" (Band
of Angels, p. 113); opposing the sharp, hard outlines of
the real world is the womblike, indistinct softness, the
64
This passage and the image itself are reminiscent of
Stein's speech in Joseph Conrad's Lord Jim; "A man that is
born falls into a dream like a man who falls into the sea
. . . The way is to the destructive element submit your
self. ..." Cf. Warren's discussion of the passage in
"'The Great Miraqe': Conrad and Nostromo," Selected Essavs.
p. 44.
499
"voluptuous fluidity" of the ideal world; opposing the
pungency of the real world is the delicious delectation of
the unreal world.
This submarine world, the world of the diver, is char
acterized variously not only by delectation but also by
mystery, strangeness, and danger. The image establishes an
air of unreal mystery in The Cave, for example, where
leaves outside the window give Brother Sumpter's study a
"greenish flickering, like the light you see when you open
your eyes after a dive into a woodland creek, in summer"
(p. 82; cf. "water-green glimmer of vinelight," pp. 90, 91).
In Flood, the image combines mystery with strangeness, even
grotesqueness. When Brad, about to discover Maggie's
elopement with Yasha, enters the Fiddler house, he feels
"like a diver who, with monstrous gear— the helmet nodding
like a nightmare, the trailing cords and pipes, the shape
less, swollen gray body, the lead-weighted feet— enters a
65
chamber long submerged" (Flood, p. 385). This second
65
Earlier in the novel, Brad entered Leontine Purtle's
room, which "swam with a green light from the pulled-down
window shades over open windows . . ." (p. 228; cf. p. 232).
The typical Fiddlersburg home was one in which "the green
roller shade was pulled down on the window and the April
sunshine gleamed aqueously through the green shade ..."
(p. 303) . Similarly, in the room where Jack Burden visits
500
subaqueous image, appearing in the passage from Flood, gives
a sense of nightmare unreality which supersedes the sense of
innocent ideality suggested by the image in the previous
passages. If, according to T. S. Eliot, "human kind / Can
not bear very much reality," neither, according to Warren,
can human kind bear very much unreality. The diver must
return to the real world of the surface. Warren skillfully
captures the moment of return to reality in Night Rider,
when at one point Mr. Munn felt "as though he himself had
been lost in some great lag of time, and now, suddenly, had
risen again into time, like a diver bursting to the surface"
(p. 345) . The resurfacing to reality is as unpleasant as
the diving is pleasant? but man is made for reality, Warren
suggests, not for an out-of-time unreality: he is not, in
effect, very amphibious.
Warren combines all of the qualities— delectation,
mystery, strangeness, danger— in his short story "A Chris
tian Education," where he describes a real diver. The
narrator of the story, diving for the body of a drowned
Lucy Stark in All the King's Men, the curtains are drawn to
give "a shadowy, aqueous light . . ." (p. 3 54), foreshadow
ing the "green, aqueous gloom" of the hospital yard where
Jack later visits Sadie Burke.
501
boy, is momentarily attracted by the delectation of the sub
marine world; then he senses the mystery and strangeness,
and finally, becoming frightened by the danger, he re
surfaces:
The bottom of a pond is the softest place in the world
and dark deep down, not water and not mud, just like
velvet in the dark, only softer, and when my hand
touched bottom that time, just for a split second I
thought how nice it would be to lie there, it was so
soft, and look up trying to see where the light made
the water green. Then I got scared, and I swam for
the top and popped out of the water with my ears roar
ing and the light sudden like an explosion. ("A
Christian Education," "Circus in the Attic" and Other
Stories, p. 141)
Warren adeptly uses the subaqueous image in what might
be called a process of imagistic conditioning: each appear
ance of the image signals a retreat from reality into a
dreamlike unreality. Manty Starr, during the siege of New
Orleans described in Band of Angels, moved and saw others
move "only in a dream-like submarine retardation . . ." (p.
309), a phrase reminiscent of Jerry Calhoun's "dreamlike,
submarine circumstances" in At Heaven1s Gate (p. 279). It
is the same retreat into illusion which many of Warren's
characters attempt to achieve by closing their eyes. When
your eyes shut out reality, Mrs. Murdock thinks,
502
then you can be happy like shifting downward in deep
water and the water weak-green-silver-streaked-bright
but your eyes closed and the water breathes into you
like you were a fish and you love it and all around you
and on you and under you like hands, and that would be
all if one minute could not remember the last one and
didn't want the next one, didn't want anything. (At
Heaven's Gate. pp. 185-186)
Sue, like her mother, attempts to retreat into unreality, to
experience "self drowning into self," much as Brad Tolliver
falls "perilously into the shadowy depth of himself in
Flood (p. 187). Sue cuts herself off from the "surface
world," and it is because of this delusion that she is
killed.
She did not even read the newspapers. If now and then
news filtered down from that other world, like frag
ments shifting down uncertainly into the dim, subaqueous
world she lived in, she scarcely paid them any atten
tion. The agitations of the surface— whatever they
were, and she didn't care— created scarcely a waver of
outline here. (At Heaven's Gate, p. 244)
Both Sue and her mother, because they stay too long beneath
the surface of reality, are irretrievably lost to reality.
The very elements of reality become indistinct and lose
their definition. Similarly, for Mr. Munn, hiding at the
Proudfit farm in Night Rider, even "the contours of objects
now familiar to him— the trees, the barn, the fences, the
bluffside— lost definition and merged and faltered aqueously
503
in the shadows and in the uncertain striations of mist and
dim light" (p. 393). It is not only external objects which
have "lost definition" and "faltered aqueously," however.
Mr. Munn is almost as irretrievably lost to reality as Sue
Murdock was, for into his "privacy the thought of what he
had been or what he might become filtered only thinly,
sourcelessly, like light into a submarine depth” (p. 399).
In addition to the imagistic conditioning through the
recurrent use of images that rise to the level of symbols,
Warren uses the eidetic image. The eidetic image, a re
current visualization of previously seen objects, is effec
tive on several levels. It has implications and ramifica
tions, first, for the character who visualizes it and,
second, for the reader. Thus it frequently serves a dual
symbolic function with the character's idea often ironically
undercutting that of the reader. As an image evoked from
the past and recurring in the present, the eidetic image
may either spring from reality and thus conflict with
ideality or spring from ideality and conflict with reality.
The former is true in Night Rider, where Mr. Munn's inescap
able eidetic image is the face of the old man who joined
the Tobacco Association at one of Mr. Munn's meetings. The
face, with its wen "the size of a quarter, and purple
504
colored" (p. 47), intrudes itself upon Mr. Munn's ideal
istic thoughts (pp. 46-47, 104, 148). Similarly, in At
Heaven's Gate. Jerry Calhoun cannot escape the recurrent
image of his father's fumbling hands, until the very end
when he comes to terms with reality.
Most frequently, however, the eidetic image is one of
ideality which conflicts with reality. In All the King's
Men, for example, Jack Burden's eidetic image is his ideal
istic vision of Anne Stanton floating innocently on the
waters of the bay (pp. 126-127, 290-291, 328). "I got an
image in my head that never got out," Jack says. Later,
however, the image conflicts with experience and is shat
tered, just as Brad Tolliver's image of Lettice in Flood is
shattered and superseded by the sordid image of raw sexual
ity represented by the scene in the park. A similar process
occurs in Band of Angels, where Manty learns ultimately to
make her illusory image of self ( pp. 38, 162) and her
"hieratic" images of idealism (44, 47, 79, 93, 234, 372)
conform to the reality of experience. Similarly, in The
Cave, Celia Harrick must reconcile with reality her eidetic
image— her first glimpse of her husband, "balancing in the
back of the skidding pickup truck ..." (The Cave, pp. 291,
203). Adam Rosenzweig's eidetic image is the gleaming white
(mountain, symbol of his idealism, which he must reconcile
with the reality of the Wilderness. Jeremiah Beaumont in
World Enough and Time has two separate eidetic images, both
idealistic: the image of the young girl martyr bound to
the stake (pp. 11, 31, 34, 78, 227) and the image of the
keelboat, bound for New Orleans, passing him and seeming to
summon him, a young boy, to plunge into the river and follow
(pp. 21, 101, 453). The former image, suggesting his
idealistic, heroic aspirations, is shattered and partly
superseded by the repulsive image of the "foul dark-faced
female creature in the woods" (p. 227) ; the latter image,
suggesting the call of the world, of romantic adventure,
comes back to Jeremiah in his cell "as an image for whatever
had summoned him to plunge into a stream stained darker than
the Kentucky River ever was at flood" (p. 21). It appears
safe to say that Warren, through his skillful use of images
which "arise to the level of symbols," is successful in
"extending the bounds of reality." One of the primary pur
poses of fiction, indeed of all art, is to create in its
audience, by means of the representation of real objects,
an awareness and knowledge which transcends the limitations
of such reality. According to this criterion, Warren is a
successful artist.
j 506
Warren's fiction is most successful, then, when the
"dialectical need" is best satisfied, that is, when idea
and experience are balanced, when subject and symbol, idea
and figure are best harmonized. His fiction is least suc
cessful when the "gaps" are not filled but extended, when
artificially contrived symbols rise to the level of gener
alizing allegory and abstraction. What F. O. Matthiessen
wrote of Warren's poetry applies as well to his fiction:
"Warren shares with Tate and some of the French Symbolists
a fondness for images of violent disorder, and it sometimes
becomes a question whether these images rise inherently
from his concept, or whether they are manipulated too
66
cerebrally upon it." Delmore Schwartz makes a similarly
perceptive criticism:
In some of Warren's . . . work there [is] a gap between
the ideas which concern him and the experience upon
which the ideas [are] focused. The experience posses
ses a rich vividness which gives the idea the appear
ance of being superimposed. ^
Herbert Muller, in this connection, has pointed out the
66
F. 0. Matthiessen, "American Poetry Now," Review of
Warren's Selected Poems. Kenvon Review. VI (Autumn 1944),
683.
6 7
Delmore Schwartz, "The Dragon of Guilt," Review of
Warren's Brother to Dragons. New Republic. CXXIX (September
14, 1953), 17.
507
"excess of symbol and contrivance" in the concluding chap-
68
ters of Night Rider. This criticism, however, does not
seem to apply as much to that novel as it does to Band of
69
Angels, considered by many to be Warren's weakest novel.
In this novel, miscegenation, which serves as symbol for
the self-division of man and his consequent loss of iden
tity, seems rather contrived, "manipulated too cerebrally."
Perhaps like the cave image in The Cave, the miscegenation
image gives one the impression of being superimposed while
experience gives the impression of being abstracted. In
addition, Manty, the protagonist of Band of Angels, seems
more a symbol than a real person, but is perhaps neither,
for a character can be effectively symbolic only if he can
70
be first considered a real person. Just as any symbol
68
Herbert Muller, "Violence Upon the Roads," Kenyon
Review. I (Autumn 1959), 323.
69 . .
Perhaps most critical is Stanley E. Hyman, who refers
to "the preposterous hokum" of "a beautiful Southern Belle's
discovery that she is a negro slave"— a plot which "would
seem too corny for Frank Yerby." ("Coming Out of the Wil
derness?" p. 24). It seems, however, that Mr. Hyman's
charge is prompted by his own inability to see the trees
for the forest.
70 . .
Cf. the criticism of Manty as character in Madison
Jones's "The Novels of Robert Penn Warren," South Atlantic
Quarterly. LXII (Autumn 1963), 488, and Roderick Craib's "A
Novel of Freedom," The New Leader. XXXVIII (September 26,
508
must function on a literal level as itself before it sug
gests something else, so a symbolic person must first
function as a person before he suggests abstract ideas.
Some of Warren's characters run the risk of being "flat,"
in the sense of E. M. Forster's use of the term in Aspects
of the Novel and, less frequently, perhaps in the collo
quial, more pejorative sense of the term. The characters
are weakest when they seem mere mouthpieces for Warren's
ideas. Warren's comments regarding the fiction of Eudora
Welty apply in this connection to his own fiction: the
weakest novels are those "in which the material seems to be
manipulated in terms of an idea, in which the relation be
tween the image and the vision has become mechanical, in
71
which there is a strain. ..."
1955), 24. Rachel Jordan in World Enough and Time seems
less a real character than does Manty. There is perhaps
some truth in Maxwell Geismar's charge that although Warren
writes very well he "views life in terms of abstractions"
("Agile Pen and Dry Mind," p. 287). It must be realized,
however, that the presentation of characters as abstractions
is frequently part of Warren's purpose of depicting both
their own unreality and their distorted image of external
reality. For example in World Enough and Time, "Colonel
Fort had ceased to exist for Jeremiah . . . He had become,
as it were, an abstraction, a name only, without face or
hands or feet" (p. 131).
7^"Love and Separateness in Eudora Welty," p. 168.
509
Wallace Douglas has criticized Warren's fiction for
another kind of imbalance, a "gap," a "curious dispropor-
72
tion" between subject and style. Style, a third element
in the dialectical method of the "little myth," represents,
according to Warren, the writer's
stance toward experience, toward the subject of his
story; and it is also the very flesh of our experience
of the story, for it is the flesh of our experience
as we read. Only through his use of words does the
story come to u s . 73
Style, Warren suggests, provides the link between the "big
myth we live" and the "little myth we make." Similarly,
John Crowe Ransom has written that "style converts the
world of utility, whose objects are attended to as mere
commodities, into the world of objects built up in the ful-
74
ness of their actual being." A successful style is that
72
Wallace W. Douglas, "Drug Store Gothic: The Style
of Robert Penn Warren," p. 265. To refute Mr. Douglas's
argument is beyond the scope of this paper. Suffice it to
say that much of his discussion, which does little more than
level a repeated charge of "melodrama," seems superficial,
biased, and unconvincingly supported. It is, however, one
of the few studies of Warren's style; a close rhetorical,
linguistic study of Warren's fiction is needed.
73"Why Do We Read Fiction?" p. 83.
74
John Crowe Ransom, "The Understanding of Fiction,"
Kenvon Review, XII (Spring 1950), 189.
510
i
which best balances idea and experience, the 'Style which,
according to Warren, "is secreted from the inwardness of the
material and is an extension of the material. It has no
substance of its own and offers nothing to come between us
75
and the story." According to Warren, structure, form,
and style must issue from and balance with content and
76
idea. Successful fiction consists of "factual richness
of life absorbed into the pattern so that content and form
77
are indistinguishable in an expressive flowering. ..."
Style, the ordering of words, is important to Warren
because words, symbols of experience, are important in the
"little myth." "We are human," Warren has written in his
poem "Dragon Country," "and the human heart / Demands lan
guage for reality . . .V Again he has written, "We are
creatures of words, and if we did not have words we would
75
Introduction to Peter Taylor1s "A Long Fourth" and
Other Stories, p. x.
76
Warren and Brooks in Understanding Fiction distin
guish between these three synonyms. Structure is the order
ing of the larger elements, such as episodes and scenes;
form is the ordering of ideas, images, characters, setting;
style is the ordering of words. (Understanding Fiction, p.
684). In an early review, Warren observed that "from one
point of view form in fiction is determined by the treatment
of character." ("Not Local Color," Virginia Quarterly, VIII
[January-October 1932], 153).
^"Why Do We Read Fiction?" p. 84.
511
have no inner life. Only because we have words can we
envisage and think about experience. We find our human
78
nature through words.” It is not surprising, therefore,
that "words didn't have much meaning" for Sue Murdock in
At Heaven's Gate (p. 251), nor is it any less surprising
that Jack Burden in All the King's Men must learn that not
"all words are alike" (p. 215).
Warren, for whom words do have "much meaning," suggests
that the language of fiction must reconcile the "little
myth" with the "big myth." John Ciardi expressed it another
way when he wrote that the writer deals in the "AS-IF," the
"mode of all imaginative writing." "IS is the mode of what
passes for reality and of all information-prose. Is IS more
79
real than AS-IF?" Similarly, Joyce Cary has written, "It
may be said that all works of art . . . are 'As If,' but
. . . they can be checked with an objective reality. They
might be called propositions for truth and their truth can
be decided by their correspondence with the real" (p. 20).
Perhaps these points explain Warren's frequent use of the
78
"Why Do We Read Fiction?" p. 84.
^"What Every Writer Must Learn," p. 15.
512
80
as if or as though clause. The recurrence of the subjunc
tive, contrary-to-fact assertion, like the recurrence of
the verb seem, suggests appearance rather than reality.
The style is thus aptly balanced with the content, for it
reveals, often without .stating directly, the characters'
remoteness from reality because of their failure to balance
the dialectics of reality.
Much of the criticism of Warren's techniques essen
tially charges him with failure to balance his own dialec
tics: means with end, idea with image, content with style,
word with flesh. If, according to some critics, Warren
fails to close the "gap" between idea and experience and
between subject and symbol, he fails, according to others,
to close the "gap" between idea and language. Walter Allen
has written concerning All the King's Men: "The reader
recognizes pretentiousness when he senses, as the author
80
The as if-as though clause appears, by actual count,
201 times in Night Rider. 13 7 in At Heaven's Gate. 254 (more
than once every other page) in All the King's Men. 192 in
World Enough and Time. 171 in Band of Angels. 190 in The
Cave. 79 in Wilderness, and 175 in Flood. (Cf. Hawthorne's
similar, frequent use of the as if clause.) More signifi
cant than the question of overuse is the question of dis
tinction of styles. For example, in All the King's Men Cass
Mastern uses the clause just as Jack Burden does, and in
World Enough and Time both the narrator and Jeremiah use it
with no distinction.
513
himself apparently has not done, the gap between the end
the author has set himself and the means which he has used
to reach it." Allen suggests further that Warren is, in
effect, guilty in a literary sense of the dialectical fail
ings of his own characters. "Pretentiousness," Allen con
tinues, "is essentially a failure in self-criticism, in
self-knowledge. It has been, it seems to me, Warren's be-
• ..81
setting sm."
A similar "gap," an imbalance, exists, according to
Terence Martin, between language and character in Band of
Angels. Manty Starr, he charges, fails to "translate real
ity" into her own idiom; the style is "almost totally
82
separable from the character." Apparently Mr. Allen and
81Walter Allen, The Modern Novel in Britain and the
United States (New York, 1965), p. 130. Cf. Stanley E. Hy
man's general charge that much of the style of Wilderness
is "pretentious and overblown, like a bad poem" ("Coming Out
of the Wilderness?", p. 24). It is noteworthy that Hyman,
in his discussion of Northern and Southern guilt, reveals
himself as the truly "tendentious" one.
82
Terence Martin, "Band of Angels: The Definition of
Self-Definition," p. 31. Diana Trilling notes a similar gap
between character and language in All the King's Men but
attributes it to a fault of characterization rather than of
language. She admires the prose for its "sheer virtuosity,"
its "genius of colloquialism," its "speed and evenness of
its pacing," its "precision of language," but she believes
that "the conception of almost all of Mr. Warren's charac
ters fails to match the energy of the prose in which they
are delineated” ("Fiction in Review." Nation, CLXIII TAugust
1946] , 220). ------
514
Mr. Martin both fail to consider Warren's purpose of showing
characters out of touch with reality; if, in fact, Warren's
characters do fail to "translate reality" into idiom, per
haps it is because they have no reality to translate. The
critic, if he fails to consider technique in light of pur
pose, can be guilty of fabricating the very "gap" he accuses
the author of making.
It is significant though that much of the criticism
of Warren's style involves essentially a charge of imbalance.
Warren, in his own criticism, subscribes to the view that
rhetoric must never become a retreat from reality. The
lofty rhetoric of Slim Sarrett's poetry and criticism in
At Heaven's Gate, like the bombastic and euphemistic lan
guage of Sulgrave in Wilderness, suggests a remoteness from
reality. Similarly, the anonymous narrator of World Enough
and Time, commenting on the language of Jeremiah's journal,
asks: "Did that language cleanse his hands for the moment,
and restore him to the society of men?" (p. 270). Further
more, Warren's own philosophy seems implicit in Brad
Tolliver's view that if he could not use language effective
ly "then he was nothing, he was not real, he did not exist"
(Flood, p. 134).
Warren does use language effectively; nevertheless,
515
without making the extreme, unsupportable charges of Mr.
Allen, Mr. Martin, Mr. Douglas, and others, one must
grant that Warren's fiction shares some of the same defects
Warren has seen in Faulkner's fiction. "Sometimes,'' says
Warren, "the tragic intensity becomes mere sensationalism,
the technical virtuosity mere complication, the philosoph-
83
ical weight mere confusion of mind." Warren's style is
sometimes uneven, but it appears to have become less so
through the years, just as it has, like his poetry, become
somewhat more colloquial and less formal. Perhaps John
Bradbury is correct in saying that
no other writer of our time, with the possible ex
ception of W. H. Auden, has exhibited such fluency
and narrative ability in so many styles. Only
Faulkner has approached his mastery of colorful
vernacular speech, and even Faulkner, whose highly
personal flavor so permeates everything he writes,
does not achieve the individualized authenticity or
the variety of Warren's dialects."®'*
At times, however, Warren's "technical virtuosity"
83
"William Faulkner," Selected Essays, p. 59.
84
John M. Bradbury, "Robert Penn Warren's Novels:
The Symbolic and Textual Patterns," Accent, XIII (Spring
1953), 77.
516
85
seems to become mere diffusion. For example, the accum
ulation of minor details concerning Sue Murdock in At
Heaven1s Gate (p. 207) and the minute description of Jason
Sweetwater's background seem totally irrelevant to the
novel. Warren's control seems to have degenerated to a mere
fetish for factual detail when he writes that Jason# a
relatively minor character# "was born in a red-brick, ivy-
draped# story-and-a-half house, with a slate roof, and a
chastely designed portico, which had once been white ..."
(p. 289), and on and on. Equally as diffusive and appar
ently irrelevant is the detailed description of the back
ground of Old Mr. Barron, a minor character in World Enough
and Time (p. 134). In the same novel, one can hardly
believe that Warren wrote the following conglomeration:
"But now justice was the bright needle lost in the haystack
of lies, it was the coin tarnished and thumbed by lies till
85
Cf. Arthur Mizener's comment that in World Enough and
Time Warren "is indulging his brilliant but irrelevant
pedagogue's gift for excessive explanation" ("Amphibian in
Old Kentucky," Kenyon Review, XII [Autumn 1950], 697). Sim
ilarly, according to Andrew Schiller, World Enough and Time
is "too long," with the last hundred pages anticlimactic
("The World Out of Square," Western Review. XV [Spring 1951],
234-237). Note also Irene Hendry's charge of "frequent ir-
relevancies" in At Heaven1s Gate ("The Regional Novel: The
Example of Robert Penn Warren," p. 84).
517
the minted face was gone, it was swallowed in a fog of lies"
(p. 398). One is equally surprised at such tautology as
86
"uninhabited vacancy" (Band of Angels, p. 83).
Perhaps Robert Heilman best summarizes the nebulous,
almost inexplicable weakness one sometimes senses in War-
87
ren's fiction: "The seams are strained. ..." At its
weakest, then, Warren's fiction suffers from an imbalance
of what he himself has called a novel's "subject" as opposed
to its "theme." Sometimes the plot, the medium, especially
in the case of Band of Angels, seems an inadequate vehicle
for bearing the burden of Warren's abstractions. Perhaps
Madison Jones is correct in suggesting that Warren's chief
flaw is his "determination to extend meaning beyond the
Note Warren's proclivity, especially in his two
earliest novels, for inexplicably maladroit modifiers, such
as furrilv (Night Rider, p. 219; At Heaven's Gate, p. 129);
tinnilv (Night Rider, p. 293); relievedlv (Night Rider, p.
296); retardedlv (Night Rider, p. 313); puzzledlv (Night
Rider, p. 387, 456; At Heaven1s Gate. 181); witheredlv
(Night Rider, p. 434); steelilv (At Heaven's Gate, p. 182);
blondined (At Heaven's Gate, p. 351); griefful (The Cave, p.
50). Equally dubious are several instances of abrupt shift
in point of view from first to second person and back with
no apparent, justifiable reason. (Cf. At Heaven's Gate. pp.
225, 239, 251, 308).
87
"The Tangled Web," p. 107.
518
88
limits which his material demands." Another critic, Don
W. Kleine, describes the weakness as a "philosophic bent,"
which produces "an effect of radical dislocation between
89
inner and outer reality." One feels at times that what
Warren considers to be the failures of Hemingway are also
his own: "The failures occur when we feel that [he] has not
respected the limitations of his premises— that is, when the
dramatization seems to be 'rigged' and the violence, there-
90
fore, merely theatrical."
One may conclude that Warren's fiction is weakest when
it lacks the dialectical dexterity which Warren attributes,
for example, to Katherine Anne Porter. It is least success
ful when vision and experience are not balanced, when, as
Warren writes of Thomas Wolfe's fiction, "there is scarcely
88
"The Novels of Robert Penn Warren," p. 488.
89
Don W. Kleine, "Robert Penn Warren, Wilderness,"
Epoch, XI (Winter 1962), 264. Similarly, Roger Sale consid
ers the source of Warren's weakness to be the fact that his
"genius lies in one direction and his bent and ambitions lie
in another . . . The nagging concern with symbol and theme,
the effort to rise to the level of generalizing about values,
mars and finally negates much that is good. ..." ("Having
it Both Ways in All the King's Men," Hudson Review. XIV
[Spring 1961], 68.)
90
"Ernest Hemingway," p. 103.
519
91
a fusion or a correlation; rather, an oscillation.” His
fiction is most successful when it fulfills "the need for a
92
dialectical approach to matters of definition . . ., " when
it balances history and idea. In general, Warren's fiction
fulfills his own criterion: it serves to "intensify our
awareness of the world (and of ourselves in relation to the
93
world) in terms of an idea. ..." It does, in short,
heighten one's awareness of reality.
Warren, in All the King's Men, has Judge Irwin tell
Jack Burden that Governor Stanton's "failing was a defect
of his virtue" (p. 369); and later Jack himself concludes
that a man's "crime may be but a function of his virtue"
(p. 463). This truth is also applicable to Warren as a
writer. If, because of his intense concern with the dia
lectics of being and non-being, reality and unreality, truth
and non-truth, then and now, good and evil, "big myth" and
"little myth," Warren sometimes does not quite succeed, his
is nonetheless a noble failure. As Warren himself has
written of Saul Bellow, "it is, in a way, a tribute, though
Thomas Wolfe's Hamlet," p. 181.
92
"Irony with a Center," p. 155.
93
"Love and Separatertess in Eudora Welty," p. 159.
520
a back-handed one, to point out the faults . . ., for the
94
faults merely make the virtues more impressive." Malcolm
Cowley summarizes the point well: "Fourth and fifth-rate
books get praised because they try to do so little that
they could hardly fail. The almost first-rate books get
severely blamed for trying to do too much, even if they
95
partially succeed." Most of Warren's novels could be
called "almost first-rate books"; and All the King's Men
is clearly a "first-rate" novel. In each case, it is pre
cisely Warren's remarkable achievement that makes one so
aware of his defects. John L. Stewart contends that War
ren's defects are "rather Shakespearean: the overabund
ance, looseness, reliance on verbal invention at points
where the organization falters. ..." But Stewart also
contends that some of the virtues are Shakespearean too:
like Shakespeare, who Warren has declared to have been the
greatest influence on his work, Warren
94
"The Man with no Commitments" (rev. of Saul Bellow's
The Adventures of Augie March), New Republic, CXXXIX (No
vember 2, 1953), 22.
95
"Luke Lea's Empire" (rev. of At Heaven's Gate). New
Republic. CIX (August 23, 1943), 258.
521
looks to violent stories from the past for the meaning
of the present. His skill with those stories is so
great that for all_ the faults noted he is one of the
few writers of our time whose work can be set beside
Shakespeare's without suffering an intolerable humil
iation.
One must realize, even as Warren, perceptive artist
and critic that he is, most assuredly realizes, that "there
is no form to hold / Reality and its insufferable intransi
gence" (Brother to Dragons, p. 44), just as Jack Burden
realizes that "no story is ever over" (All the King's Men,
p. 377). No art form can entirely "hold reality," but if
it is successful, it may become a kind of heightened re
ality itself. It becomes, in the words of Joyce Cary, "a
dream which is truer than actual life and a reality which
is only there made actual, complete, and purposeful to our
experience" (p. 191). Fiction, the "little myth we make,"
ends, "if it is good fiction and we are good readers, by
96
John L. Stewart, "Robert Penn Warren and the Knot of
History," English Language History. XXVI (March 1959), 102.
For a consideration of the ability of Warren's fiction, like
that of the plays of Shakespeare in his time, to appeal to
popular taste for entertainment at the same time that it
appeals to discriminating taste, see Granville Hicks, "Mel
odrama with a Meaning," Saturday Review. XLII (August 22,
1959), 25, and William Wasserstrom, "Robert Penn Warren:
From Paleface to Redskin," p. 323.
returning us to the world," "the big myth we live." Warren
has fulfilled his part of this condition by writing "good
fiction"; if his readers fulfill their part, Warren's
fiction cannot fail in its purpose to "reconcile us with
reality."
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Asset Metadata

Creator Kehl, Delmar George (author)

Core Title The Dialectics Of Reality In The Fiction Of Robert Penn Warren

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program English

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag Literature, Modern,OAI-PMH Harvest

Language English

Contributor Digitized by ProQuest (provenance)

Advisor Metzger, Charles R. (committee chair), Crittenden, Walter M. (committee member), Malone, David H. (committee member)

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c18-603938

Unique identifier UC11359906

Identifier 6807189.pdf (filename),usctheses-c18-603938 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier 6807189.pdf

Dmrecord 603938

Document Type Dissertation

Rights Kehl, Delmar George

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Access Conditions The author retains rights to his/her dissertation, thesis or other graduate work according to U.S. copyright law. Electronic access is being provided by the USC Libraries in agreement with the au...

Repository Name University of Southern California Digital Library

Repository Location USC Digital Library, University of Southern California, University Park Campus, Los Angeles, California 90089, USA