Quote of the Day (Robert Penn Warren, on Louisiana in Early April)

“A month from now, in early April, at the time when far away, outside the city, the water hyacinths would be covering every inch of bayou, lagoon, creek, and backwater with a spiritual-mauve to obscene-purple, violent, vulgar, fleshy, solid, throttling mass of bloom over the black water, and the first heartbreaking, misty green, like girlhood dreams, on the old cypresses would have settled down to be leaf and not a damned thing else, and the arm-thick, mud-colored, slime-slick mocassins would heave out of the swamp and try to cross the highway and your front tire hitting one would give a slight bump and make a sound like kerwhush and a tinny thump when he slapped heavily up against the underside of the fender, and the insects would come boiling out of the swamps and day and night the whole air would vibrate with them with a sound like an electric fan, and if it was night the owls back in the swamps would be whoo-ing and moaning like love and death and damnation, or one would sail out of the pitch dark into the rays of your headlights and plunge against the radiator to explode like a ripped feather bolster, and the fields would be deep in that rank, hairy or slick, juicy, sticky grass which the cattle gorge on and never get flesh over their ribs for that grass is in that black soil and no matter how far the roots could ever go, if the roots were God knows how deep, there would never be anything but that black, grease-clotted soil and no stone down there to put calcium into that grass—well, a month from now, in early April, when all those things would be happening beyond the suburbs, the husks of the old houses in the street where Anne Stanton and I were walking would, if it were evening, crack and spill out onto the stoops and into the street all that life which was now sealed up within.”—Pulitzer Prize-winning American poet and novelist Robert Penn Warren (1905-1989), All the King’s Men (1946)

Quote of the Day (Robert Penn Warren, on How the World is ‘Like an Enormous Spider Web’)

“[T]he 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 spring 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 glittering like mirrors in the sun, or like God's eye, and the fangs dripping.”—American poet-novelist Robert Penn Warren (1905-1989), All the King's Men (1946)

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.)