BOOKS
211
It was so awful that folks could do so awful.
Btut when he did it, even if I'd never heard,
It came just like an awful remembering
Like it had happened long back, not now, not now
...
Here for the first time, his form has allowed Warren to use all
the trappings proper to the shrillness of his need.
All the King's Men
suffered not only because
its
hysterical rhetoric had to be disguised as
the tough-guy patter of Jack Burden, but because its historicity pre–
vented the appearance on stage of gibbering ghosts and portents out
of nature. Even the considerably superior
World Enough and Time
per–
mitted itself only a literary, metaphorical dragon; and the excuse of its
Romantic milieu did not quite
justify
the more than Byronic bombast.
In
Brother to Dragons,
Warren has found the form most nearly
suiting his obsessive theme, and it is consequently his most convincing
and moving work. The Nightmare appears almost nakedly as Night–
mare, disrupted only by the appearance of Jefferson as its improbable
dreamer. We are upset finally not only because of the too easy triumph
of the poet over the dead apostle of perfectibility; but even more be–
cause the obvious irony of a Rousseauist confronted by the Fall is a
little beside the authentic point of the poem; and chiefly, because the
stubborn historicity cannot be purged out of Jefferson, who remains the
history-book image of a waking man interpolated into a dream.
The unredeemable public nature of the Jeffersonian imago (and
this is true also of the Meriweather Lewis who makes a brief appear–
ance) tends to reduce Lilburn Lewis and his little brother, Aunt Cat
and the dismembered slave to participants in a backwoods horror story.
If
the figure on the chopping block
is
chopped forever, the fable and
the bombast work; if it happened once (and the reference to the records,
the givenness of the case are either a frivolous irony or a mistake)
nothing could be less important. No, the truth of the event must be
consonant with the unexplained booming Lewis and Clark heard in
the mountains, with the dog that rooted up the tell-tale bone, with
the earthquake that struck at the very moment of the crime. To accept
the rhetoric we must accept the fable; to accept the fable we must ac–
cept the ghosts. The factual notes are a tic that has survived an atti–
tude, the last stand of the Archivist, the character who becomes con–
fused with the protagonist in almost all of Warren's books.
I suppose Warren felt the need to root the Nightmare into exper–
ience, to insist on its naturalistic surfaces; but for this end, much more
tactful and effective are the touches that bind the fable to the rela–
tionship of the poet and his aged father, to the personal pain of some
