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FICTION CHRONICLE
ALL THE KING's MEN.
By Robert Penn Warren. Harcourt Brace.
$3.00.
THE FALL OF VALOR.
By Charles Jackson. Rinehart.
$2.75.
WoMAN OF THE PHARISEES.
By Francois Mauriac. Translated by Gerard
Hopkins. Henry Holt.
$2.50.
Jov.
By Georges Bernanos. Translated by Louise Varese. Pantheon.
$2. 75.
THE BIG CLOCK.
By Kenneth Fearing, Harcourt Brace.
$2.50.
R
OBERT PENN WARREN's third novel,
All the King's Men,
is a mysti–
fying book. Its difficulties do not spring from verbal or thematic
obscurity, but rather from the contraries within the author himself.
Warren has extraordinary novelistic endowments, remarkable energy,
zest, and skill; he also has deficiencies that are equally undeniable. Had
he either to a lesser degree the book would be more easily comprehen–
sible; as it is, one finds it hard to explain his lavish gifts while remem–
bering the absence, in this novel at least, of a fructifying intellect and
precise discrimination.
All the King's Men,
though not at all experi–
mental in style, is almost always rhetorically splendid and beautifully
at ease in the realistic tradition. Unhappily, it is also frequently con–
ventional in attitude, intellectually platitudinous, and frivolously melo–
dramatic. Briefly it is the story of Willie Stark's rise to political power
and the details conform more or less to the familiar materials of the
Huey Long Legend-the impoverished backwoods youth, incredible
vote-getting antics, fabulous spending, increasing egomania, and even–
tual assassination by an idealistic young doctor.
Willie Stark's career is seen and recorded by Jack Burden, an
alienated aristocrat of a perceptive if unspectacular mind, a sensitive,
reasonably normal young man limited by provincialism. The choice of
Jack Burden as the interpretive personality reduces the entire novel.
Though he has the willingness to embrace experience, the necessary lack
of squeamishness, he is neither interesting nor creative enough to com–
mand and extend a book of this potential scope. Jack Burden's mind
never surprises one in the right way, but always in the wrong way, in–
asmuch as he is constantly leading up to a banality with an eagerness
that is unaccountable. His role and the nature of his comments un–
comfortably remind one of the hard-boiled detectives in Hammett and
Chandler. Like the detectives, he has more grace and detachment than
the criminal (Willie Stark), but he is also aggressively "realistic" and
quick to assume the criminal's methods and mentality. He can, with
his easy virtue, get inside the criminal's mind and still, since he is not
the source of evil actions, remain outside it. This position could be
advantageous for ·warren's purpose, but his book is infinitely more
serious and ambitious than the detective stories and it is questionable
