Riding the Yellow Trolley Car: Selected Nonfiction

  I came across it when I was writing about him in the sixties, and I thought of using it myself. But that seemed slavishly imitative. Surely there was one more form waiting to be invented. And so with some pleasure, back then, I gave voice to myself, and to Norman, by selectively quoting what he had written or said, and offered my readers a form I called “The Self-Interview, with the Absent Subject as Occasional Commentator.”

  I’d like to return to that form now, but, since Norman is not absent tonight, it’s only proper to give the form a new name. And so here we present, for the second time anywhere, “The Self-Interview with the Eavesdropping Subject as Occasional Commentator.”

  INTERVIEWER: Could you explain why Norman was chosen as State Author this year?

  KENNEDY: The judges unanimously agreed that his lifetime achievement in literature, journalism, and letters was extraordinary, and that his literary ambition was even beyond that. Consider his new novel, Harlot’s Ghost, which runs 1,310 pages.

  INTERVIEWER: How did Norman react when you told him about the award?

  KENNEDY: He wondered if the governor really would show up to present it. He also mentioned all the presidential clamor being heard in Albany, and said if this had happened to him when he was running for mayor of New York City he certainly would have known how to handle it.

  INTERVIEWER: What does he think about this award business?

  NORMAN: Your speaker is here to state that he likes prizes, honors, and awards and will accept them.… We are entering a world in which the value systems of the stoutest ego will spin like a turning table, the assertions of the inner voice go caroming through vales of electronic rock. So it is nice to have awards and to accept them. They are measures of the degree to which an Establishment meets that talent it has hindered and helped.

  INTERVIEWER: A friend of mine suggests that Norman has hindered himself as much as anyone has; that he has been his own worst enemy. My friend sees Norman as an imp of the perverse, the universal id.

  KENNEDY: That’s not an unreasonable judgment. Norman likes to place himself in jeopardy. As the critic John Leonard pointed out, during a lightning storm you can count on Norman to put up a kite instead of an umbrella. Isn’t that true, Norman?

  NORMAN: As one of my characters says, “If you are afraid, don’t hesitate. Get right into the trouble if that is the honest course.… The natural condition of men’s lives [is] the fear of tests.…” I admired men who were willing to live day by day with bare-wire fear even if it left them naked as drunks, incompetent wild men, accident-prone.

  INTERVIEWER: Will Norman go on writing fiction?

  KENNEDY: He’s writing a book on Picasso, but he’s also already at work on a sequel to Harlot’s Ghost. No matter what else he might do, fiction is where he lives. Am I right, Norman? Tell me I’m right when I’m right.

  NORMAN (smiling): I believe the novel has its own particular resource, which is almost magical. If you write purely and your style’s good enough, you can establish a communion between yourself and the reader that can be found in no other art. And this communion can continue for hours, weeks, years.

  INTERVIEWER: We could continue for hours with this discussion, but it is now time for Norman to speak for himself not only in his own words, but in his own voice. And so with great pleasure I now turn this microphone over to our State Author, and one of the best and most vital writers on the planet, Norman Mailer.

  1992

  Robert Penn Warren:

  Willie Stark, Politics, and the Novel

  In 1946 Robert Penn Warren published All the King’s Men, the novel that would make him an international literary figure. It was the story of Willie Stark, a Southern governor not unlike Louisiana’s Huey Long, whom Warren had observed from a distance in the early 1930s at Louisiana State University. The book became a critical success, a bestseller, won the Pulitzer Prize, and was translated into at least seventeen languages.

  Warren conceived Stark’s story first as a verse play, Proud Flesh, then wrote the novel, then wrote a new play with the same title as the novel. The U.S. film version of the book won an Academy Award, and a Russian version also won a best-picture award. The book has been the subject of a vast amount of scholarship, and has been called the best political novel of the century.

  Robert Penn Warren was sixty-eight, not all gray yet, tall, trim, and tweedy when we talked at his home in Fairfield, Connecticut, on February 14, 1973. I was writing the first of what was to be a series of interviews for a national magazine with writers on their masterworks; but the series never materialized and this interview was never published until now.

  Warren had moved to Fairfield in the early 1950s, converting two old seventeenth-century barns into a spacious rustic-modern home with eighteen-foot ceilings. He had published nine novels up to this time, plus nine volumes of poetry, and had won a second and third Pulitzer (both for poetry; he is the only writer ever to win the prize for both fiction and poetry), a National Book Award, the Bollingen Prize, the National Medal for Literature, the National Humanities Foundation’s Thomas Jefferson Award, and much more, all these for his poetry. In 1986 he would be named the first official Poet Laureate of the United States.

  Warren’s wife, the writer Eleanor Clark (The Oysters of Locmariaquer, a National Book Award winner), prepared lunch for us all in the midst of our Fairfield conversation. The Warrens both work at home, each with an office in one of the two converted barns. To reach Robert Penn Warren’s office you walked past garden implements and fertilizer and then you arrived at what he called his boar’s nest.

  But we talked in tidier surroundings, a living room of the main house with a picture window that looked out onto a meadow with tall pine trees that Warren had planted in the 1950s. His Kentucky twang was difficult to understand at first, but then you quickly tuned in, and you noticed how often he laughed when he talked.

  KENNEDY: When you look back, does the book have a special place among your works?

  WARREN: It’s a hard question. I don’t think any of the novels had the intimacy of the poems, but putting the poetry aside, if I’m just rating the novels, I think it’s one of the three I have to rest my case on, feel closest to.

  KENNEDY: And the other two?

  WARREN: World Enough and Time, the novel that came after it, and then Flood, which came out in ’64. The first two were extremely well received, and Flood had, you might say, a controversial press. Lot of savage attack, and praise too. Those three, I think, are the novels with the most weight in them. Of course I always say the next one’s going to be it.

  KENNEDY: In some ways it’s not political at all, but it’s been called the best political novel of the century. Why are there so few memorable political novels?

  WARREN: I don’t think of novels in categories like that, novels about horse racing, about crapshooting, and lovemaking. I think of them in terms of the emotional tone or the thematic issues they propose, categories which are more inside.

  KENNEDY: But when you think of novels of substance with political content, what comes to mind?

  WARREN: I guess you could call The Gilded Age by Mark Twain a political novel and that’s a memorable thing; it involved politics. Democracy by Henry Adams is an unreadable novel but a fascinating book. He sure couldn’t write novels but as a commentary on politics it’s fascinating. Under Western Eyes by Conrad is political in one sense; revolutionary psychology is what it’s about rather than the practical applications of it. Of course there’s Shakespeare’s plays, some intensely political, and they’re quite memorable; but it isn’t the first thing you remember about them.

  KENNEDY: Or your book either. Maybe in retrospect it’s Willie Stark’s story but when you’re reading it it’s Jack Burden’s dominance, and the structure of a society.

  WARREN: When I was in Italy in ’48 Berenson wrote me. I went to see him and he said, “Your book’s not about Stark,” and that surprised me a little because I didn’t think it was about him either. And he says “Stark’s
not very interesting. The book’s about Burden and that’s what I like. That’s your book.” I hadn’t thought of it so baldly, total dismissal of the Stark story.

  KENNEDY: But Stark did dominate your first work on the subject, the verse play.

  WARREN: Yes. I began that play in the shade of an olive tree in a wheat field outside Perugia in the fall of ’37, finished a first draft just before Christmas in 1939. I rewrote it but then put it aside and started another novel, and when I looked at it again in early 1943, my whole feel for it changed. And I decided there were more things involved than I was able to get into a play. I began to see that one thing that caught my interest originally had not been the notion of a man of power, obsession of power, riding against the obstacles in his way to success and then disaster—but the context—his relations to other people. More and more I had felt more than a personal story here. The man of power is only half of the matter—the other half being the context in which power is achieved. The man of power achieves power only because he fulfills the needs of others, in both obvious and secret ways. In its most obvious form in my novel this appears in Sugar Boy, the little stuttering gunman, whose devotion to Stark comes from the fact that Stark “can talk so good,” is an orator. And so on up to Jack Burden, who having lost a grip on his personal life, only comes alive when he identifies himself with the man who can act. The pattern that finally emerged—emerged because it was not according to a scheme but by a development, a slowly growing envisagement—was that Stark fulfilled some need in every person around him. And this, of course, has implications for politics, or history.

  But who could tell the story? It had to be somebody who was intimately involved in the process, who had a deep personal stake and who was intelligent and detached enough to understand his own predicament. Then Burden came in almost as an accident. He had been in the original play as merely a technical device in the assassination scene. He didn’t have a name even. He came in to distract the audience and in a sense distract the assassin, before the victim comes on and is shot. A newspaperman, an old friend of the assassin, Adam Stanton, they talk and Adam is caught at the moment of murder and suicide with one backward look to boyhood, to the other world, the unspoiled world.

  Then two years after I finished the play I saw Burden as the key to the context I was after. The first morning I sat down with pencil and paper and started to write the novel, Burden started talking.

  KENNEDY: Would you explain why you decided to write the Cass Mastern section [a long flashback to a pre-Civil War episode].

  WARREN: I was jammed. I’d gotten to the point where I was going to have a flat, straightforward story. I couldn’t see how I could give a new dimension to it. You know you don’t think about things in these abstract terms at the time. You feel it rather than think it. At that point the story was going in a straight line to a preconceived climax. I had to have a new dimension to put the whole story against. The Cass Mastern story gave that. It came in a kind of flash.

  KENNEDY: How far were you in at the time?

  WARREN: At the exact point where the story is interpolated (about one-third in). I was reading a lot of stuff about Kentucky history at that time.

  KENNEDY: I wondered about your research on that.

  WARREN: It wasn’t research, it was reading. I don’t research a novel. I did no research at all for the Stark side of the thing, not a damn minute of it, didn’t even read a newspaper. What I didn’t have in my head I didn’t have. I was not following Huey Long; I never did one minute of research on Long. I didn’t care what Long was, in that sense. I was trying to make a character. But I was reading a lot of Kentucky history, just reading, at the time I was writing the novel and this character [Mastern] began to take shape.

  KENNEDY: You’ve credited your editor on that book, Lambert Davis, with changing it. What did he change?

  WARREN: He was an extraordinarily able editor at Harcourt Brace, my editor and friend. He was not much older than I but was farther along in the world than I was. The big thing was he said the novel is starting wrong. Cut that out and start right here, where I start now.

  KENNEDY: What was wrong about it,

  WARREN: Too wordy, too abstract.

  KENNEDY: Was it nonrealistic?

  WARREN: No, it was realistic, but rhetorical rather than specific. Abstract in that sense. I remember in that opening description, when Burden meets Stark the first time in a saloon … it was like Caesar described by Plutarch. The young man standing on a street corner of Rome, delicately scratching the top of his scalp with one finger; who would’ve thought he had any harm in him? That kind of crap. Now Lambert said, “This is where the thing begins, on this road, going to Mason City. And this [other] is all preparatory and obviously preparatory, and a lot of bad writing here too, inflated writing.” And so I tried what he suggested. In the car going to Mason City the scene comes alive, something happens and you get into Stark’s world immediately. Lambert was right. You had to take the author’s promise that [the original opening] was going to mean something later. That’s a very poor way to start a book.

  KENNEDY: How did the Elizabethans influence the book? You’ve written about that but without being specific.

  WARREN: Let me take an indirect approach to that question. Back then—and now—I was much more soaked in poetry and Elizabethan drama than I was in fiction, and that fact, no doubt, made me think of a novel in much the way I think of a poem. I think of a story, sure, but I also think of it as a metaphorical structure going at the same time as the narrative and other structure. And frequently this feeling I’m driving for seems to come as an image, even a scene, that is floating there, not tied to narrative yet. It’s there ahead of me. It couldn’t be dramatized directly yet it is somehow in the background. That’s related to the Elizabethan stuff. The literal plays behind the novel were two Shakespearean political plays, Julius Caesar and Coriolanus; they were there consciously. And then, less consciously, Webster’s White Devil. Flaminio, a character in White Devil, was in the back of my mind in some sense, I’m sure. I did not realize it at the time but I now see it was. He was somehow behind Jack Burden. Flaminio is a man of blankness gone evil, who’s taken refuge in evil to find meaning.

  KENNEDY: Did you consider Willie evil?

  WARREN: I wanted to make him a good man, a decent man.… He’s gone so far into making the means defile his ends that there’s a horror he can’t dig out of in the end.

  KENNEDY: Have you ever written about a totally evil figure?

  WARREN: No, I have no desire to. This thing came to a head when they were making a movie from the book. There were two movies made in this country, one by [Joseph] Mankiewicz, a two-shot TV thing I never saw, I was out of the country; and Robert Rossen did the other, made a damn good movie of it. But about two-thirds through he left my character entirely and made a total villain out of Stark: the fascist brute. My man, you see, gets some redemption out of the novel … dies repentant. Now Bob had four or five endings and ran them all off and said “Now, Red, which do you like?” I picked one but said none of them represent what I said in the book. “Son,” he said to me, “when you come to Hollywood you’ve got to learn one thing—there’s not going to be anything called irony in the end of an American picture. It’s gonna be cops and robbers, cowboys and Indians.” And so Willie died muttering the last line from the Horst Wessel … tied right into the Nazi-Mussolini picture. Bob and I got along fine because we understand each other. It’s his movie, not mine.

  KENNEDY: Did the book and movie make a big financial difference to you?

  WARREN: After the book I felt I could eke out a living without teaching. I’d tried it before but it didn’t work out.

  KENNEDY: Part of the success of the book, its wide appeal, seems at least in part the Huey Long element, the politics, the feeling people have that they’ve got a window on something authentic. You’ve written about this but I wonder if you’d take it now into the question of fiction versus nonfiction, the appeal. r />
  WARREN: A lot of fiction from the start has been based on the fact that it must claim authenticity.… A Journal of the Plague Year … the manuscript found in the chest, the bottle, the thing being authenticated. This is the appeal to journalistic interest, in the best sense of that word. We want the facts of the case.… With the rise of modern journalism, in terms of the Civil War, the rise of big newspapers, the country put tremendous new weight on the fact, and this, associated with the rise of pragmatic philosophy, not only William James but the whole sense of the state of mind you associate with James’s philosophy: the open-endedness of moving in to see what action means—this is all mixed up with it. By the time you get to the 1880s and the nineties, with the rise of protest journalism, organized muckraking, you have a new urgency about the handling of fact, fact as meaningful politically, in another spirit: we are exposing the hideous underside of life. You get a person like Stephen Crane as a young boy going down in the mines, standing in soup lines and sleeping in flophouses to see what it was like. He was saying the fact is better than the story. Now this became so acute that one of the reigning novelists at that time, H. B. Fuller, who is recognized by Dreiser as the father of American realism, said that the novel is dead, that novelists should become biographers, writers of fact; there’s no reality in fiction anymore. Now in another aspect of the romance of fact you get Richard Harding Davis, this handsome, well-mannered, adventurous youth whose life is more interesting than fiction—war correspondent par excellence. He became an arbiter of taste and the model for young men to follow in their lives, the pre-Hemingway model. Davis was so famous it’s hard to believe it. The old Oliver Wendell Holmes, the great autocrat of the breakfast table, the dictator of taste, would make a personal call on Davis. Now these two impulses [that Crane and Davis represent] are very strong and we’ve had them with a vengeance. But Crane is very mixed, on one hand in the flophouses to capture the sensation, to say the imagination can act, and on the other hand his most famous book [The Red Badge of Courage] is about a war he never saw, pure imagination. Interviewing a few old men down around Frederick and then reading the official record of the Civil War and thinking about it, imagining it, he gets a masterpiece. He made a very fruitful blending of these things, the technique of fact in the world of the imagination. The point I’m getting at is you find a world now hailing this as a new discovery.