Quote of the Day (Robert Penn Warren, on the Summer Love of One of ‘The King’s Men’)

“Anne was crazy about diving that summer. She would go up high … and stand up there in the sunlight poised at the very verge. Then, when she lifted her arms, I would feel that something was about to snap in me. Then down she would fly, a beautiful swan dive, with her arms wide to emphasize her trim breasts and her narrow back arched and her long legs close and sweet together. She would come flying down in the sunlight, and as I watched her it would be as if nobody else was there. I would hold my breath till whatever was going to snap inside me snapped. Then she would knife into the water, and her twin heels would draw through the wreath of ripple and the flicker of spray, and be gone.”—American poet and novelist Robert Penn Warren (1905-1989), All the King’s Men (1946)

The 1949 screen adaptation of Robert Penn Warren’s Pulitzer Prize-winning All the King’s Men understandably stressed its narrative thrust. But passages like the above demonstrate that there was far more to the novel than that—especially the manner in which Warren’s poetic bent fueled his sense of setting and characterization. 

You can understand all too well from this description why the narrator—the all-too-appropriately named Jack Burden—is besotted by Anne Stanton; why he is crushed when, dismayed by his youthful aimlessness and lack of ambition, she breaks off the relationship; and why, still unable to forget her, he is all the more devastated when he learns she is now the mistress of his boss and the man who runs the whole state, Gov. Willie Stark (a character inspired by the career of Louisiana’s Huey Long).

The languor of the season and the loveliness of the young woman at the heart of it blend inextricably in this brief but heartrending private interlude in what may still be the greatest American political novel.

I could not find a still from the film showing Anne swimming, let alone swan-diving, so I chose another image of the actress who portrayed her, Joanne Dru. In real life, she and the actor who played opposite her as Burden, John Ireland, fell in love during production of the movie and were married for eight years.)