Making History: The Biographical Narratives of Robert Penn Warren (review)

Jonathan Cullick's Making History constitutes an important contribution to Robert Penn Warren studies, especially in the attention it gives to what we might consider Warren's "minor" works. Although Cullick takes as his topic the one aspect of Warren's writings that even casual readers identify with the novelist—Warren's interest in history—he uses largely unfamiliar nonfiction works to revisit and expand old critical truisms, all with considerable confidence and interest. Moreover, he identifies a pattern in Warren's writings that stretches beyond the nonfiction to the novels, and indeed to Warren's entire philosophical and artistic project. As it applies to one of the New Critics, Cullick's thesis is fitting. He argues that the form of Warren's narratives (as it reflects his narrative strategy) reveals to us his historical and ethical imperatives as a writer. Of course, as the title suggests, the greater (and the better) part of Cullick's study focuses on Warren's nonfiction, especially those pieces concerned with historical figures. Even so, he identifies and persuasively explicates a pattern in these works that seems to resonate with the novels as well, although not as convincingly. Most of Warren's narrators, Cullick argues, follow a pattern of return, reconciliation, and redemption in their respective encounters with history, albeit to varying degrees. These three "tropes," as Cullick terms them, "construct a new program for ethical action" and at the same time "form a new historical realism" (15). "Reconnecting with the past, renegotiating the relationship between the myths of the past and the needs of the present, are tools with which Warren certifies his biographical narratives as authentic records" (15). Especially in the nonfiction narratives, Cullick is most interested in how honest and brave the narrator is (often Warren himself, or an autobiographical persona such as R.P.W. in Brothers to Dragons) in confronting the past in a way that will allow for reconciliation and redemption. Upon the authenticity of this confrontation hinges the historical and artistic integrity of the narrative.

Cullick begins with the assertion that Warren cut his teeth on John Brown, The Making of a Martyr (1929), wrestling with and staking out the terms of his search for an authentic marriage between history and narrative—a search manifest in all of his work, fiction and nonfiction. Just as Warren himself would do in later years, Cullick deconstructs John Brown, demonstrating the nonexistence and impossibility of "neutral narration," which is the claim—at once haughty and naïve—that the young Warren made for his first book. For the remainder of Making History, John Brown serves almost as a straw man against which Cullick measures Warren's growing maturity in later years.

Cullick is at his best when he focuses on those works that most clearly strike us as biographical: John Brown, Jefferson Davis Gets His Citizenship Back (1988), Portrait of a Father (1988), Brothers to Dragons (1953), Audubon: A Vision (1969), and Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce (1982). His readings of All the King's Men (1945) and World Enough and Time (1950), on the other hand, seem forced. And, ironically, that is because Cullick makes his discussion of the biographical histories—both Warren's and his narrators' engagements with the lives of actual historical figures—so fascinating. Once we understand the terms of Cullick's premise, which he forcefully lays out in his dissection of the narrator's persona in John Brown, we are anchored to the idea of the actual historical agency of Warren's narrators (again often autobiographical figures) as they confront actual history in a self-consciously nonfictional context. For any number of reasons, this same approach to the fiction doesn't gain nearly as much traction. Cullick's close reading of All the King's Men pays undue and sometimes tedious attention to matters...