Robert Penn Warren's All the King's Men: A Reader's Companion by Jonathan S. Cullick (review)

This slim, useful volume should be guaranteed to elicit mixed feelings from readers. Jonathan S. Cullick's deep understanding of Warren's best-known novel shows in his deft explanations of its most salient elements and many of its subtler ones, and he argues convincingly that the 1946 novel has become increasingly relevant in recent years. Readers will definitely benefit from Cullick's expertise as a Warren scholar and his facility for reinterpreting classic texts, skills displayed to great effect in his excellent Making History: The Biographical Narratives of Robert Penn Warren and sure to inform his forthcoming Mockingbird Grows Up: Re-reading Harper Lee Since Watchman. The mixed feelings will likely result from the fact that Cullick does his job so well. He compellingly argues that Warren's tale of political corruption "is the textbook for our time" (xv). This is a good thing for Cullick's book and Warren's novel, but not for the US or much of the world.

The book does make some minor missteps: its references to technology (including iPhones, FaceTime, Facebook, Instagram, and Tumblr) will likely age badly, as will the phrase "Spoiler alert" (14). Lee Atwater died in 1991, so encountering his name in a list of "today's celebrity campaign strategists" is jarring (63). Claims about timelessness (several in a chapter titled "The Timelessness of All the King's Men") are vague and ultimately unprovable, and are at odds with Cullick's detailed claims about the novel's relevance vis-à-vis the peculiarities of the Trump era (or whatever one chooses to call it). The epilogue goes into tedious detail describing the route Cullick and his wife followed driving from New York to the cemetery in Vermont where Warren and his second wife Eleanor Clark Warren are buried. The Cullicks each recited a Warren poem and left a copy by Warren's headstone before traveling home to Kentucky. This was no doubt an important, memorable moment for them, and would be for anyone who feels moved by the work of a great writer, but the epilogue (which never mentions Warren's novel) seems unrelated to the rest of the material. The book would have been better without these glitches, but it is impressively effective even with them.

Throughout A Reader's Companion, Cullick balances two imperatives (one presumably assigned and one presumably a matter of conscience): the need to provide insightful criticism appropriate for a reader's guide and the need to point out the ways All The King's Men seems to have anticipated many aspects of America's recent political turns toward demagoguery and a politics of simmering rage. Cullick notes that Willie Stark's "speeches demonstrate what [political scientist and Warren scholar Steven D.] Ealy calls 'redneck resentment not as something incidental to his campaign, but as its emotional core'" (65); mentions Stark leading the crowds at his rallies to chant "Nail 'em up!" (meaning nail the hides of his opponents and cultural elites to a barn door, a chant that will sound somewhat familiar to anyone who has paid attention to American politics in recent years) (66); aptly coins the word "nonspeeches" because Stark tells his crowds he is not going to give a speech and then launches into long, improvisational rants (56); and observes that in politics "power starts with language, power is pursued through language, and, in the end, the deal is closed through language" (55). In part because Cullick repeatedly points out the need for the nation to return to a civil, non-dysfunctional political dialogue and persuasively claims that All the King's Men can help inoculate readers against propaganda and demagoguery ("Citizens must learn how this kind of rhetoric works. We must be able to identify how language is weaponized. We must be able to name and recognize the strategies of persuasion" [xv]) and in part because Cullick draws...