Brandeis Uni.’s John Burt on Robert Penn Warren & All the King’s Men

The Learning Curve John Burt

[00:00:00] Albert Cheng: Well, hello everybody. Hope your day’s going well, and if not, I just wanna wish you well. Um, but hey, welcome to another episode of the Learning Curve podcast. I’m one of your hosts this week, Albert Cheng. Co-hosting with me is none other than Alisha Searcy. Alisha, what’s going on?

[00:00:40] Alisha Searcy: Hello, Albert. Hello to our listeners. You know, all is well. All is hot, but all is well

[00:00:46] Albert Cheng: hot and fortunately I think we’re gonna get a break, especially for those of you towards the east and the northeast. I know we’ve got that heat dome going on, but yeah, stay cool. But hey, we’re not here to talk about the weather.

[00:00:59] Alisha Searcy: Lots of things to talk about though, isn’t that?

[00:01:01] Albert Cheng: For sure. Oh, oh yeah. We definitely do. Yeah. So let’s talk some education news. Just to switch the topic and, and speaking of the northeast, Alisha, you, you found a story about some things going on in Massachusetts.

[00:01:12] Alisha Searcy: Yes. Now, let me preface this by saying I can get very passionate about certain things when it comes to education.

[00:01:20] When I came across this article, I reached a high level of passion because in Massachusetts, the state that we have long held as a leader. In high academic performance, yes, they’ve struggled for a long time with those gaps when it comes to black and brown and low income students, but still overall a high performer.

[00:01:43] And so it was already disappointing this past election cycle that they got rid of their high school graduation test. But it turns out, and based on this article entitled Educated Bet, Massachusetts Schools may Risk Top Ranking to Lift Struggling Students. I am very frustrated to learn that this effort to get rid of the graduation test is a part of a bigger effort.

[00:02:08] It seems to be led by the teacher’s unions. I’m not against teacher’s unions, but I’m absolutely against this move where essentially they want to water down standards because they’re suggesting that black, brown, and low income students can’t learn at high levels, and so therefore, the standards should be lowered.

[00:02:29] If you wanna make me mad, tell me that black, brown, and low income kids can’t learn at high levels. I hope that there are a lot more conversations about this. Steven Wilson, who we’ve had on the show is quoted in here essentially saying that this position by the teacher’s union quote, if academics and testing are elitist and oppressive, then the answer is to broaden the aperture to other forms of knowing and experiences like social emotional learning that are considered equally valid for obtaining a diploma.

[00:03:03] Which is clearly not what we want in terms of making sure that kids can learn at high levels. And so Albert, we have to have a conversation nationally and in the new role that I’ll be in. I’ll be announcing soon. I’m looking forward to having these conversations. Yes, there may be some challenges with the way we assess kids.

[00:03:24] Not all kids learn the same. Yes. You know, there are learning differences. Yes, there may be different ways that we can assess, but lowering the standards, as we’ve seen across the country now, seeing it in Massachusetts with first getting rid of the graduation test, lowering the standards. I talked about this, you know, several times in Georgia that literally 10,000 kids who were not proficient one day in reading all of a sudden were proficient because the the cut score changed.

[00:03:55] What’s happening in our country that we have decided that lowering the standards is okay. I won’t even go there to talk about the underlying racism that I think exists when you believe that because of a kid’s skin color, That they somehow can’t learn at a high level. It’s disgusting. And so that’s the article that I want to bring forth.

[00:04:19] I hope people will check it out. I hope it will spark a lot more conversation. And I’ll be honest, I hope that there’s something that I said that made someone mad and maybe you wanna have a conversation. Because we should expect that all kids can learn at high levels. I don’t care what their color is. I don’t care where their families come from.

[00:04:37] I don’t care if they have an IEP. We have to have high expectations for all kids. And I would imagine that teachers unions who purport to represent teachers, the people who are on the front lines responsible for educating children, should be the first in line to say that all kids can learn at high levels.

[00:04:57] So I’m gonna end it there because you can see that I got all fired up. I warned you that I would, but we have got to do better, and we’ve got to believe that kids can learn at high levels regardless of what they look like or what their backgrounds are.

[00:05:09] Albert Cheng: Yeah. Well, you know, I appreciate you, Alisha, just weighing in on that and, and appreciate your voice and, and speaking to this, I mean, this very issue is what sparked decades of education reform and efforts to improve education.

[00:05:22] And, and I get it, you know, I’ll be the first to say that not all of it was perfect and we’ve got issues to iron out, but yes to, to throw the baby out with the bath water and say. Academics don’t matter or to say nothing about the lowering of proficiency rates. There’s some worrisome waters there. I’m with you.

[00:05:40] Make sure we hold a line, and especially for populations that historically have been underserved. So I’ve got an article that that kind of dovetails with this and now I, you know, I hope I don’t. Sound like I’m contradicting myself. And hopefully with this article it might help bring some more clarity for all of us.

[00:05:58] So, you know, my articles from The Atlantic is real, real interesting title. The computer science bubble is bursting. This article discusses the decline in the number of college students majoring in computer science. And a lot of this, as the article argues, is due to the fact that there’s, the premium of getting a, a computer science degree is much lower today than it was over the past several years.

[00:06:24] And so, you know, I guess we hear these headlines out there that, you know, unemployment rates for newly minted college graduates are pretty high. And there’s some truth to that, especially for, we’re talking about computer science as this article’s. Discussing that, hey, a lot of the skills, technical skills that employers used to value and could count on in a computer science major, they’re kind of getting replaced by artificial intelligence.

[00:06:47] And so the premium of getting a computer science degree is, is lowering. We’re kind of seeing that in the market signals, in terms of what. Undergraduates are deciding to major in so fascinating article. But, you know, I, I just wanna maybe dovetail, you know, tie it into your article. Alisha and I, I, I think, you know, we’ve got folks that, and I think rightly so, are worried about narrowing the curriculum and kind of reducing math and reading instruction to just acquiring literacy and numeracy skills.

[00:07:17] Now I don’t know that I’m fully aligned with them ’cause I, I do think numeracy and literacy skills are, are. Important and kids gotta know them. Yeah. But you know, I think this article challenged me because it also underscored that we don’t just want to focus on literacy and numeracy skills, right.

[00:07:33] Because some of these skills become obsolete. And I think this gets back to, I think what we, you and I discussed on the show from time to time that shaping people. To have certain skills, but also to become a kind of person that is gonna be able to face an ever-changing world. You know, to have virtues and character that employers are always gonna want, even if certain skills get replaced.

[00:07:54] That’s important in education. And I think though this isn’t. In opposition to what you were saying in your article, right? Facts. I think to expect certain student populations to not be able to rise to a certain standard, to develop certain habits of mind, to develop a certain level of character that is going to.

[00:08:17] Be essential to their wellbeing later in life. That’s totally wrong too. But you know, this does raise some questions about, Hey, how do we properly balance the focus on academics with other things while also not lowering expectations? And yeah, these two articles, I, I think it really is challenging my thinking to reflect on what’s the right balance and how do we find it.

[00:08:38] Alisha Searcy: I That’s so important and Right. It’s always about balance and sometimes the pendulum swings way too far, and we might be in one of those moments. It actually reminds me, there was an article here in Atlanta where I live, where now in Georgia, we’re returning to teaching cursive in school. Mm

[00:08:56] hmm.

[00:08:57] Alisha Searcy: And one would wonder why did we even take it out?

[00:09:01] Mm-hmm. Folks realized, well, we probably need to put it back in because kids don’t know how to sign contracts and legal documents because they never learned cursive. Yeah. Yeah. And so some, we abandoned some of those foundational pieces in search of learning more. When you kind of, when you. No better. You do better, right?

[00:09:22] Yeah. Yeah. And there’s something to be said about that. But to your point, we’ve got a balance. We want kids to be well-rounded. We want them to be good humans. We also want them to be smart and thinkers. Yep. And know how to do math and read and comprehend. That’s absolutely right. That’s why we do this work is we constantly remind ourselves as you sit at a math conference right now, you know, making sure that we do insert ourselves and our research and our best practices into the shaping of curriculum and how it’s delivered to our students.

[00:09:54] Albert Cheng: Well, Alisha, appreciate the conversation as always. These are tough issues to untie, but hey, we’re all in this together and yeah, we gotta do it for the sake of the next generation. So yes, we do. Let’s press on. And speaking of press on, we gotta press on with our show. Yes. Um, we’ve got a good one coming up, professor John Burt, who’s gonna come and talk to us about the poet and novelist, Robert Penn Warren.

[00:10:18] So that interview is coming up next.

[00:10:33] John Bur is a Paul Pross Wimmer professor of American Literature at Brandeis University and the literary executor of the poet and novelist Robert Penn Warren. His award-winning editing and scholarship include the collected poems of Robert Penn Warren. Selected poems of Robert Penn Warren and Robert Penn, Warren and American Idealism.

[00:10:57] Professor Burt is also the author of the Novel, A Moment Surrender Three Volumes of Poetry The Way Down. Work without hope and victory, as well as the celebrated nonfiction book, Lincoln’s Tragic pragmatism, Lincoln Douglas and Moral Conflict. He earned a BS in English and molecular biophysics and biochemistry.

[00:11:18] M la an MA in English, and a PhD in English. All from Yale University. Professor Bert, welcome to the show. Pleasure to have you here.

[00:11:27] John Burt: Likewise, a pleasure to be here.

[00:11:29] Albert Cheng: Let me give you the opening word to orient us to Robert Penn Warren. I mean, you’re the literary executor of the poet and novelist, Robert Penn Warren.

[00:11:39] So first of all, maybe say a little bit, what does a literary executor do, but also share with our listeners a little bit about his upbringing and, and why is he one of the greatest American writers of the 20th century?

[00:11:53] John Burt: Essentially, I’m the person who signs the contracts for republication. Ah, and I have a couple of other jobs.

[00:12:00] There’s certain things that every author should have a standard biography, but Mr. Warren took care of that before he died, his selected letters, and I selected the editors of his selected letters, which came out over a period of about 20 years from Louisiana State University Press. I edited his poetry, uh, his collected poetry so that there would be a sort of standard critical edition people could refer to.

[00:12:23] Those are the jobs of a literary executor. I have to say, I came into being a literary executor at the last minute, and Mr. Warren’s wife called me out of the blue ’cause Mr. Warren was ill at that time and asked me if I would be willing to do that. And I said. I, I don’t know how to do this. I haven’t the defined idea how to do this.

[00:12:43] And she said, well, nobody’s born knowing this. Why don’t you ask a few people how, how they do it? So I called up WH audits, literary executor, and he gave me a bunch of advice, which I have followed ever since. So, oh, so there we are. There are only a few people who have equally distinguished careers in poetry and fiction.

[00:13:05] There’s Thomas Hardy and there’s Herman Melville. Warren always thought of himself as first and foremost as a poet. All of his work in the thirties was poetry, and most of his greatest novels were written during a 10 year period when he couldn’t finish a poem, he was in a period of poetic crisis. As in 1953, when he broke out of that crisis by publishing his book, Lank Poem, brother to Dragons, he continued to write fiction and it was well received fiction.

[00:13:34] But before 1943 and after 1953, the center of his life was his poetry and had always been though the center of his fame is as a novelist, and that’s mostly on all the Kings men because it’s really the most distinctive and I think. By a long shot, the best novel about politics by anybody in any language.

[00:13:56] And the reason for that is that I think it takes seriously the work politicians have to do and the moral problems politicians have to face, and it recognizes that some of those moral problems don’t lend themselves to easy solutions. Too many books about politics are written by outsiders who look down on politicians and think that politics is just about throwing power around.

[00:14:19] And that the story of politicians is always about the corruption of idealism. And you’ll notice how a lot of people think that’s what all the Kings men is about too. And it is partly about that. But there are many other larger and deeper themes in all the kinks men, and I think he entered into the moral universe of what it is to be a political actor, particularly in the 20th century.

[00:14:41] And he happened to do it at a very point in time. You know, as the US was grappling with the great mid-century tyrannies, he started conceiving of this book. Believe it or not, in Italy, lying down in an olive grove listening to Mussolini’s troops marching around behind him, and the book was received as being about the possibility of a totalitarian regime in the United States.

[00:15:05]

[00:15:05] Albert Cheng: So one of his influences perhaps was his grandfather. Oh, Gabriel Penn. Yes. Yeah. Gabriel Penn, literary minded, former Confederate cavalry officer. And so in 1961, according to my notes here, Penn Warren authored the widely influential book, the Legacy of the Civil War Meditations on the Centennial. So let’s start with American Civil War history.

[00:15:25] How did that shape Pen Warren’s writing?

[00:15:28] John Burt: Well, remember, he’s a kentuckian. Who to other Southerners Kentuckians are considered northerners and to the rest of the North Kentucky is considered a, south Kentucky was divided. It was union loyal, but many Kentuckians fought for the Confederacy. There was an extended gorilla war in Kentucky between pro Confederate and pro-US Partisans and Gabriel Penn actually had fought with forests, and that’s a very particular story that needs to be pointed out.

[00:15:58] Forrest was the guy who founded the clan. Forrest was also the guy whose troops committed, probably the one genuine war crime of the Civil War, the massacre of the Garrison of Fort Pillow. Although Forrest himself says he wasn’t there. And I don’t know if Gabriel Penn was there at the same time. Forrest was probably, you know, second to Genis Khan, the greatest cavalry commander there ever was.

[00:16:22] So he really was sort of a Rommel of the Confederacy that said. Gabriel Penn was not a die hard, lost cause follower since he kept saying that he would regret seeing the United States broken up. I don’t sense that the lost cause ever had any hold over Robert Penn Warren’s imagination that he always approached it with the irony and skepticism and the ability to see all the way around it that he did with every political ideology

[00:16:52] A lot of his friends when he went to Vanderbilt were sort of pro confederate romanticist, although usually I’d say they idealized, you know, the yeoman south and the mountains rather than the plantation south on the flatlands. I, I suppose we’ll get to that where we talk about the, the agrarian later.

[00:17:11] Warren certainly heard all the stories growing up as he did in Guthrie, Kentucky, which is right on the Kentucky Tennessee border. And as an adult you get a, a very complex view of the Civil War. And lemme just mention two texts where he really developed that text. The first is in the chapter in all the King’s Men, that’s devoted to what’s called the cast master story.

[00:17:33] All of Warren’s early novels have inset short stories that deal with similar themes, but cast a different light on the main story. The cast mastered story is Jack Burden’s failed PhD dissertation, which is a biography of his. Well, I wanna say kinsman, but he is actually turns out not to be his direct kinsman, that master who went to college in Lexington, which is important because that’s where Henry Clay and Mary Todd Lincoln were from in.

[00:18:02] In other words, it’s the place that represents the south that was not South Carolina. It represents the road not taken for the South. It represents very much the border state South’s convictions. He gets involved with his best friend’s wife, who and his best friend commit suicide in such a way. He thinks that his wife and he will see that he’s committed suicide, but nobody else will see it.

[00:18:31] But to glue his wife in that he didn’t accidentally kill himself while he was cleaning his pistol. He left his wedding ring on his pillow, his wife’s slave, Phoebe, discovered the wedding ring. And of course she put the whole story together. And so Anabel Trice, which is the wife’s name, just could not stand what her slave knew about her and sold her down the river.

[00:18:50] Well, this was shocking to cast master and ’cause it showed that his sexual crime with Annabel. Had done horrible things to Phoebe who had been sold down to Louisiana to be a prostitute and really faced a totally horrible life. And he tried to find her and he tried to do atonement, but it really wouldn’t go.

[00:19:12] There was nothing he could do that would put him morally back in the right. I just point this out because all the Kingsmen is mostly a story about class, but the cast master in episode is a story about race. ’cause Warren wants to tell you, yes, I do know about race and I am a southerner who has thoughts about race and what happens to cast master and is when the civil war happens, he feels he cannot join the US forces because he isn’t morally pure enough and he can’t really fight for the confederacy because he doesn’t believe in their cause.

[00:19:44] So what he does is he joins the Confederate army, but he never discharges his weapon and he eventually it turned into a sort of elaborate way of committing suicide that he winds up getting shot somewhere in the Georgia front. I think it might be at the Battle of Chicka Maga for all I know. It’s interesting that he, Warren is mostly interested in that front, not in the Virginia front, the less romantic front, but the cast mastermind story is about realizing that to be human.

[00:20:12] Is to live in a morally complicated world where you can never be pure, and that’s a big political lesson for Warren.

[00:20:19] Albert Cheng: You’re really describing, you know, the complexity of his thinking. And so maybe to drill down on this with a another particular issue. So it’s well known that Penn Warren became associated with a group of poets and writers known as the fugitives, and then he contributed a chapter to the Southern Grand Manifesto.

[00:20:36] I’ll take my stance in which he defended racial segregation. So tell us about the fugitives. Yes. Okay, sure. And that influence.

[00:20:44] John Burt: There’s several phases to Warren’s associations with all these are all his friends in Nashville. Warren had at a little boy, had planned to go to the Naval Academy and he was admitted to the Naval Academy, but just a few weeks before he was gonna go to Annapolis.

[00:20:59] He had an accident. His brother threw an acorn or something at a squirrel, and it bounced off a tree and put out his eye, put out Robert and Warren’s eye so he could not go to the Naval Academy and become Admiral Warren. And his parents arranged at the last minute for him to go to Vanderbilt, where Alan Tate with his friend and John Crow Ransom was his teacher, and he began to be associated with a group of.

[00:21:25] You know, literary minded amateurs who would meet every week and talk about literature and poetry known as the fugitives. The interesting thing is this made Vanderbilt, as far as English literature is concerned, one of the liveliest places in America, much more interesting than Yale was, or Berkeley was, or any of the academic institutions that Warren went to later in the twenties and in the early thirties.

[00:21:47] But these were all people who wanted to write poetry and who were reading poetry to help them write it. They were reading Hardy, of course, who’s a big influence for Warren, and they were one of the main peoples who took TS Elliot seriously, and they talked about TS Elliot all the time. And they published a little literary magazine, which considering that it was a private venture put out by a group of amateurs in Nashville, supported, I believe, by the Maxwell House Hotel.

[00:22:13] Surprisingly, they published Hart Crane, they published Laura writing. They published lots of people who weren’t fugitive, who weren’t Alan Tate and Donald Davidson and all the others, and they were really one of the literary magazines that made American literature begin to flourish in the twenties.

[00:22:29] Along with the double dealer in New Orleans who first published Faulkner. Well, as the Depression took hold, these guys thinking took a political turn. I wouldn’t say that they’re thinking when they were publishing, the Fugitive was essentially was political at all and. They published a book called, I’ll Take My Stand, a title incidentally that Warren hated because he thought it was sentimental and yucky in all sorts of ways.

[00:22:54] And their argument was that the future for the South lay with farming and agriculture. Now, what was going on with the agrarian is the South was modernizing, it was modernizing its economy. There was a common belief among New South intellectuals, particularly at the University of North Carolina, but also associated with Atlanta.

[00:23:15] People like Henry Grady, who coined the phrase the New South, their view was that if the South modernized its economy, it would also modernize its politics and that it would leave behind racial hatred and that capitalist development would solve social conflict. You’ll notice that’s. One of the premises behind reconstruction, it’s one of the premises behind American intervention everywhere in the world.

[00:23:38] Mm-hmm. Modernize the economy and you make society less brutal. And it was American forward policy in the nineties too. Well, the agrarian felt, one of the things that happens when every traditional society modernizes is it loses touch with many of its traditional sources of value. The great sociologist Max Faber calls this disenchantment.

[00:24:00] There’s this feeling that modernity is rootless and that modernity values nothing but power and money, and that modernity has an exploitive attitude towards nature and also an exploitive attitudes towards gender. Now, this was an idea that the agrarian had picked up out of Tolstoy. It’s fair to say that they just saw their relationship to the University of North Carolina.

[00:24:23] It was precisely Tolstoy’s relationship to Nia and Chekhov and that they were playing out the fight between the Slava files and the westerns just in the south, and this happened. Wherever modernization happened, it happened in Ireland. That’s what the Celtic Twilight was about. It happened in India.

[00:24:40] That’s what the conflict between Gandhi Naru was about. It’s a common feature of modernizing economies. Now that said, their book is often received as idealizing the plantation south, which is a complete mistake. They idealized the subsistence farmer economy of the mountain south, but of course, they knew nothing about it.

[00:25:02] They weren’t farmers, they were English professors, and what they were really doing was just translating into English. I think it’s also fair to say that the agrarian did not actually influence American policy anywhere by one iota, but they did generate a lot of good books out of it. And their ideals have an interesting afterlife.

[00:25:25] Uh, that common green ideology sounds to me a lot like agrarianism. They put together this book. And Warren at this time was a Rhode Scholar at Oxford, and they asked him to write about racial segregation. Warren wrote this essay and when he sent it to them, they were all mad with him because it didn’t read to them like a defensive racial segregation.

[00:25:47] It read to him like one, and he was ashamed of the essay for the whole rest of his life, but they were expecting him to say it’s a good thing. And the argument of it is industrialization will not lead to a lowering of racial hatred because the factory owners will whip up racism to keep the unions out.

[00:26:06] Well, that’s not an argument. A really serious segregationist would’ve ever embraced. Cornell West said that to me once, but that’s one of the interesting things about that essay is that its defensive Segregation seems a little bit half-hearted, and his argument is. The title is The Briar Patch, and if you think about where that title comes from, it comes from the Joel Chandler Harris Tale about Brayer Rabbit.

[00:26:31] At the end of that story, when Breer Fox has caught Brayer Rabbit and is suggesting different ways to eat him, brayer Rabbit keeps saying, oh, do what you want, but don’t throw me in the Briar patch. And finally. Huh Brear Fox. Actually, I think it’s Bre Wolf throws Brear rabbit in the B Briar patch and the Brear scratch off all the tar.

[00:26:51] He gets away and he says, I’ve been living in the B Briar patch all my life. Well, it’s clear that that Joel Chandler Harris story is about the resilience and urge to survive and wit and cunning of black people under racial oppression. And obviously Warren picked that title ’cause he knew it. Now, that said.

[00:27:13] He said, better black people live in the segregated south where they know how to live than move to the north, where they’ll face a different kind of racism. A not entirely false proposition. Now, Warren also said lots of sentimentally racist things like, oh. We love our black people. We know how to take care of ’em and they love us, and blah, blah, blah.

[00:27:34] There may not have been a lot of race hatred in that book, but there was a lot of condescension in that essay. He began to be nervous about it almost as soon as it came out. One thing happened to him almost right away. He, while he was in Oxford, he was writing the novella crime leaf. That was sort of a rough draft of his first novel.

[00:27:52] The Knight Writer. Something bothered him while he was writing Prime Leaf and it occurred to him that he could not make that book go as long as he felt he had to defend southern defenses of segregation and stuff like that. And there was kind of a moral education involving that book. So when he moved back to the South at the Depression was really gating speed, he thought, well, holy smoke.

[00:28:19] Everything I’ve thought has been wrong. And I think you could see that Warren is critical of the racial ideology of the south, even in all the kings men, where it’s not that foregrounded. But Warren changed his mind in the thirties about slavery, joined the NAACP in 1948 and really came out in 1953 and spent the fifties and sixties trying to persuade the south.

[00:28:44] That adopting racial equality didn’t mean that they had to surrender to their longtime cultural enemies up here in the north. That it is perfectly possible to be a Southerner and have relaxed positive relationships with black people, and indeed, probably easier for Southerners than for Northerners.

[00:29:04] Albert Cheng: Thanks for, for articulating just, I mean, the, the complexity of, you know, the arc of Penn Warren’s thinking and, and life here. So let’s kind of pivot and talk about all the Kings men specifically. And so I’ll ask you to do two things and then Alisha will, will take over the rest of the discussion in the book.

[00:29:19] So just to orient our listeners, why don’t you give a brief summary, what’s the novel’s plot, and then say a bit about Willie Stark, the main character, and then also Jack Burden. Mm-hmm. Who is mm-hmm. A narrator right of the book.

[00:29:34] John Burt: Why don’t I start by saying a little bit about Huey Long? Huey Long was governor and then senator from Louisiana in the late twenties and early thirties.

[00:29:43] He was assassinated in 1935. He was widely feared. It was thought of as a sort of left insurrectionist alternative to Roosevelt. Roosevelt feared that if the New Deal failed, he would be overthrown by a coup from the right, led by Douglas MacArthur. Mm-hmm. Or a coup from the left, led by Huey Long. Now what was interesting about Huey is at the end of reconstruction, the South had been ruled by a former slave holder class who called themselves the redeemers ’cause they redeemed the south from black rule.

[00:30:16] I said, but who ruled the south? Pretty much in their own interest, as former slave holders said they really did not follow the interests of poor whites, although they whipped up their racism to stay in power. They were the guys who introduced racial segregation, and they introduced a really harsh, bloody minded race hatred into southern politics and certain figures like Tom Watson in Georgia and Pitchfork, Ben Tillman in South Carolina, and even the name tells you what kind of guys these were, and they ruled the south up to the fifties.

[00:30:47] Huey appeared to come from that faction. One of the great differences between Huey and the other populous leaders is he provided a lot of goods for Louisiana. The other thing to know about Huey is that Huey did not especially bait race. He didn’t attack segregation. The goods he provided for the white South, he also provided for the black South.

[00:31:10] And they knew that although he wasn’t gonna challenge Jim Crow, he was somebody who was gonna make sure that their lives got a little better. Now, QE was also, it’s fair to say, totally corrupt, though mostly the money went into maintaining his power rather than making him rich. Warren always Stoutly denied that Willie Stark was based on Huey Long, and that’s true because he’s really only based on Huey Long in the first few years of his governorship.

[00:31:35] There’s an awful lot of close details that connect Huey and Willie. So it’s not true to say that he’s not based on Willie. I think Warren really means I made up Willie, so I know him a lot better than I know Huey. So there’s two stories in all the Kingsmen. There’s Willie’s story. It’s Jack’s story.

[00:31:53] Willie’s story is sometimes taken as a story about how idealism goes wrong. That’s part of the story, but I think the important thing to realize is that Lily is somebody who believes that the language of honor and Noble OBL is totally owned by the bourbons and is totally discredited by their use of it for self-serving purposes.

[00:32:13] You can see that in the big fight he has with Judge Irwin early in the novel. Jack Burton, his press secretary and General Factotum says, corruption is what you call it when you don’t know which fork to use. Willie says when he defends himself, that law is like a single bed blanket on a double bed.

[00:32:35] There’s never enough law to cover the subject, and if the people are suffering, which they are, ’cause it’s the south, you’re always going to have to push law to its limits to serve justice. For Willie, what that means is I will make corrupt deals if I could provide the goods. The difficulty with that is it looks like the goods is the bribe and the corrupt power is what you want.

[00:32:59] One of the ironies, and one of the weird facts about Willie is that thought is mortifying to him. Early on in the novel, his state comptroller is found with his hands in the till, and Willie beats him up so badly that he says his unborn great-grandchildren will wet the bed on the anniversary of this day and not know why, but he lets him off the hook and that causes his upright Attorney General Hugh Miller to resign.

[00:33:25] Willie is shocked that Hugh is resigning. He’s saying you’re like somebody who likes to have a good beef steak, but doesn’t want to think about what they do in the slaughterhouse. An oblique quotation of Bismarck’s famous argument that you don’t wanna pay attention to the making of law or to the making of sausage.

[00:33:40] And when Hugh Miller leaves more in sorrow than an anger. Willie suddenly conceives this idea of I’m gonna build a hospital and everybody could go to it and there won’t be a nurse in it who hasn’t won a beauty contest in Atlantic City and blah, blah, blah. And this hospital becomes a hysterical project for him to prove that he’s actually one of the good guys after all.

[00:34:03] And in doing this, he crosses a bunch of people whom he could have made plausible bargains with and still delivered the hospital and winds up getting himself killed. But the irony is that. Willie wants to be somebody who says, of course I could use corruption as long as I’m aware of being the good guys.

[00:34:20] And the problem is, once you cross the line, you can no longer tell whether you’re a good guy or not. Mm-hmm. And that drives him crazy. And that’s what leads to all the complexity about the hospital plot. Jack’s story was not originally part of this book at all. Warren originally wrote this book as a play called Proud Flesh, which was a five act first tragedy complete with choruses of masked motorcycle policemen.

[00:34:47] And you can see it’s the kind of book only a professor could write. Um, one of the chief ways it’s different is there’s no Jack Burton in it. The character who becomes Jack Burton is in there and he has like one line. But when Warren realized that you just could not put on Proud Freshs as a play and he had to rewrite it as a novel.

[00:35:05] He was looking for a way to tell it, and he seized on this character and made him into the narrator. Now, the narrator is an intellectual. He can’t finish his dissertation, so he takes a job with Willie, but he is from the downstate, flatland, wealthy part of the country. He. Hide to the aristocracy, which ruled the state, whom he hates, and whom he feels are corrupt and self-serving and awful.

[00:35:29] But unlike Willie, who believes he’s gonna serve the ideal by breaking the law, Jack is somebody who likes to discredit people. He’s a Jer, he’s an ironist, and Willie hires him to find ways to coerce his opponent into agreeing with him. He essentially is, is Willie’s Blackmailer, and Willie famously says.

[00:35:50] Man is born in sin and dies in corruption. He passes from the stink of the, to the stench of the shroud. There’s always something. So what he argues is all people are corrupt, except of course me and I could use their corruption against them, by blackmailing them into supporting wholesome legislation.

[00:36:07] That’s Willie’s program.

[00:36:09] Alisha Searcy: I appreciate that. I love your excitement and your so much knowledge about Warren. I wanna move to 1956, professor and an article for Life magazine, Robert Penn. Warren recanted his 1930s views on race with divided South searches its soul, which he expanded into a book. Titled Segregation, the Inner Conflict in the South.

[00:36:35] He published Who Speaks for The Negro in 1965, a collection of interviews he conducted with black civil rights leaders, including Malcolm X and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. And others. Can you talk about these writings? These interviews and pin Warren’s evolution on race?

[00:36:54] John Burt: Particularly, I wanna speak about who speaks for the Negro.

[00:36:57] I mean, that is a great underappreciated book. The first book, segregation. The Inner Conflict of the South is mostly about the South’s guilty conscience about race. Mostly about their feeling that this isn’t really right, but I don’t wanna go spit on my grandfather’s grave. And I certainly don’t wanna admit that all those people who’ve looked down on us from the north all these years have been right about us.

[00:37:20] On the other hand, I really have to do a better job of paying attention to the equal part of the separate but equal. And maybe that isn’t even workable. That’s really the groundwork that’s laid in the segregation book. But I think of that really only as a sort of rough draft. The who speaks for the Negro book is the main thing.

[00:37:38] In 1965, he interviewed hundreds of people, not just King and Malcolm or Ellison and Baldwin and Kenneth Clark, but he influenced all of the sort of civil rights leaders, but also lots of the foot soldiers of the Civil Rights movement. And also interviewed himself and did a fair bit of coming clean about his own history in that book too.

[00:38:03] And he captured the civil rights movement at a very important moment, just when the civil rights movement had moved from the south to the north, just when the leadership of King and his circle was giving way to the leadership of people like, well, not Malcolm X, ’cause he was assassinated, but of people like Stokely Carmichael and people like that.

[00:38:21] I should point out that there is a great archive about this book at the Library of Vanderbilt University, and it’s up on the internet, so you can hear all these interviews and read transcripts of the complete interviews, not just the excerpts Warren used in this book. Wow. And get biographical information and photographs and everything you need to know about all of the interlocutors.

[00:38:42] It’s really an unequal archive about the civil rights movement. There’s a great story about his. His interview with Malcolm X, Malcolm was very leery of being interviewed by white journalists ’cause they always thought of him as a bomb thrower and they were always setting trap for him and they were always asking him loaded questions, you know how it is to deal with journalists.

[00:39:04] And he was very reluctant to let Warren interview him. But Warren was charming and Warren was an intellectual, and Lauren recognized that Malcolm was an intellectual. Mm-hmm. So Malcolm said, well, I’ll give you 15 minutes. And he captured Malcolm at a really important time, just as Malcolm was breaking with Elijah Mohammed and was deciding that white people aren’t the literal children of the devil.

[00:39:27] And was beginning to move in a direction, you know, he was moving a little bit, right? While King was moving, a little bit left, you know, there was a promising convergence going on there. And Warren captured that moment. And you know, he interviewed Warren Warren and he spoke to each other for like more than 90 minutes, and they actually had.

[00:39:45] Really kind of a lot of fun together. And so at the end of the interview, Malcolm said, well, why don’t you come see me in about two weeks? But before they could arrange it, Malcolm was assassinated, so it never happened. Oh, Warren also interviewed Stokely Carmichael. And they really warm to each other, and there’s correspondence in the Beneke library between them, and it’s kind of a surprise that Stokely Carmichael looked up to Warren.

[00:40:10] I really wouldn’t have thought of that. You know, a thought of him as, as kind of a, a mentor. I was very surprised to find that.

[00:40:18] Alisha Searcy: Mm, it’s important. Yeah. Thanks for sharing those stories. I, I have to look that up at Vanderbilt. It’s very fascinating. My final question is Robert Penn Warren remained the only writer to have won Pulitzer Prizes for both fiction and poetry.

[00:40:35] And when all the King’s Men was turned into a major motion picture in 1949, it was nominated for seven Oscars and won three of them. Best picture, best actor and best supporting actress. Can you talk about Robert Penn Warren’s enduring? Complicated literary legacy and his wide influence on American arts letters and culture.

[00:40:57] John Burt: I hope it remains as large as possible, but I mean all the Kings Men is still a book widely taught in high school, used to be taught in the Soviet Union too. ’cause they thought it showed the corruption of bourgeois democracy, which I guess it didn’t. I remember when reading essays by. Foreign applicants to Brandeis in the nineties, and a Russian student said, when I was in high school, they assigned me a book called All the Kingsmen by Robert Pen Warren, and reading it persuaded me to go to the land where it was written.

[00:41:24] It’s been translated all around the world because every place they face these political problems. It’s interesting to look at the coverage of these books. The Indian version has a Willie Stark on the cover who looks a little bit like S Carno. Anyway, that novel has influence everywhere and. I’d say every election year, all the Kingsmen has a little boost in sales.

[00:41:46] Warren has tremendous influence in poetry because he stands at the crossroads of different movements in American poetry. Warren strangely only really came into his, you know, he’d started writing poetry before Elliot wrote The Wasteland, and when Thomas Hard, he still had two books to go, but he really only hit his stride as a poet.

[00:42:07] In the late 1960s when not only were all the poets of his generation dead, but most of the poets of the generation after him were dead too. The middle of his poetic career is 1969 when he published Audubon A Vision, and a lot of his great poetry comes in the seventies. Part of the reason that’s interesting is that there’s a big poetic evolution in the fifties.

[00:42:29] Everybody starts writing in the fifties, sort of buttoned down poetry under the influence of Auden, and by the time the fifties are over, everybody’s writing confessionalist poetry and beat poetry and all this stuff in free verse and all this stuff that’s highly personal and highly political. Warren stood on both sides of that fence.

[00:42:45] He is after all the Warren of Brooks and Warren, the guys who wrote Understanding Poetry. And you would think that if you look at his poetry, it’s going to be a lot of neat boxes that if you push a button, it, uh, spring goes and it says Boo. It’s a real surprise just how raw and how visceral his late poetry is.

[00:43:03] But even as early as 53, how raw and visceral it is, the way he sets angry alliterations up the way he uses and Jamin to break the structure of the line. Helen LER said, not intending it as a compliment, but it was that Warren sounds like he’s physically wrestling the English language into submission, but I think that he stands as a part of all of the great poetic movements of the post-war poetic era, and that makes him a perennially interesting poet.

[00:43:31] Alisha Searcy: Thank you. Very helpful. I’m gonna turn it back over to Albert.

[00:43:35] Albert Cheng: Yeah, thanks professor. And I just wanna close out the interview with, I’m gonna give you some, you know, famous passages from all the Kings men. And I’d like to hear your commentary on, on what was Penn Warren trying to teach us or, or convey, or what might we learn from them?

[00:43:51] So early on, Penn Warren writes In All the Kings Men, the end quote, the end of man is knowledge. There’s one thing he can’t know. He can’t know whether knowledge will save him or kill him. What was he trying to convey to readers about the limits of human knowledge there?

[00:44:05] John Burt: Yeah, that’s a big passage and it’s also a big theme in his poetry too.

[00:44:11] In the context of the novel, it seems to leap completely out of the context of where it’s spoken, because he’s just, you know, Willie is about to speak and Jack sees the speech forming in his mind and thinks, oh, here it comes. And sometimes people read that passage as big about Jack’s self knowledge that there’s stuff he doesn’t wanna face about himself.

[00:44:31] But I think the bearing of the passage is much deeper. I think the question is, what is knowledge? Knowledge seems to be a loaded term in Warren for some organic appreciation of the meaning of being, of how we behave to each other, how we behave in politics, how we behave in love, how we behave in religion.

[00:44:54] One of the big lessons for Warren is that whatever knowledge is, it’s never anything we can put into words. It’s never anything that provides a neat solution to the problem we’re facing at hand, facing in the moment that it’s somehow a way of mysteriously opening yourself up to all of the light and darkness of being itself.

[00:45:18] I think that’s what Warren means by knowledge, and he also knows that knowledge is somehow thrilling. But also terrifying because it means facing down both the bright and the dark.

[00:45:32] Albert Cheng: It’s fascinating how, how insightful he was. Let, let me give you another line here and I’ll ask you to do some exposition on it.

[00:45:39] And it, it’s the closing line actually, and then, we’ll, we will end with this. It’s from Jack burden. He, he’s, he’s speaking and he says, quote, and soon now, we shall go out of the house and go into the convulsion of the world. Out of history into history and the awful responsibility of time. Yeah. What did he mean by that closing line?

[00:46:00] John Burt: That’s a hard passage. Yeah. I, I think the first thing to know about that passage is it’s set in the summer of 1939 and Jack’s mommy is proposing to go to Europe, essentially take, take that away from the guilt and all this other stuff. But I think the argument I, so in the background of that is enormous world historical events are about to occur.

[00:46:22] Because remember he writes, he, he, he’s setting that in 1939, but he’s writing it in 1945 or 46 maybe. Maybe it’s latest when he finishes writing it in 46. I think the idea here is we are unlikely to solve the problems of politics. We’re unlikely to solve the problem of how great, but how terrible human nature is.

[00:46:45] We are unlikely to find a way to serve the good without being turned into monsters by it. We are unlikely to find ways to follow rules without being limited by them, but nevertheless, that’s what we’re called on to do. That’s what the awful responsibility of time is to face down. The urgent, but insoluble political problems we’re always faced with as best we can.

[00:47:08] That’s what I think is the awful responsibility of time is, and that’s what the convulsion of the world is out of history and into history. That’s interesting to me. ’cause remember, history is a loaded word. Uh yeah. C Van Woodward said that Americans always believed that history is something that happens to other people.

[00:47:26] Americans are at the end of history and have no history. Woodward argues with Robert Penn. Warren in mind, as an example, is Southerners can never believe that because they’ve had a history and it’s a dark one. The big lesson of Woodward as a historian, and really the big lesson of American history since the sixties is yes, America has a dark history.

[00:47:47] America does have a history with a capital h. History that is both great and terrible. And that to know it is to know both those things and that to love America is to love it. Knowing what it is. You know all the ugly facts about your parents too, but you don’t stop loving them. I think out of history, into history is really about that entering onto the world stage where you can’t keep clean hands.

[00:48:11] Where nobody gets into heaven without hands that are a little dirty. That’s how I read the last line of that book. Yeah. Oh, I agree. It’s kind of puzzling sentence.

[00:48:20] Albert Cheng: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I mean, thanks for giving your take on that. And, and, and look, I, I think it’s, I’ve just enjoyed this interview so much. I mean, what’s clear to me is the complexity and, and the depth of insight that Robert Penn Warren had and, and.

[00:48:35] His works. I mean, there are timeless things to learn about, about human nature itself. About ourselves, and so, hey, we just wanna thank you for taking your time to share your insights and expertise into Robert Penn Warren. And so really big, big thank you from, from myself.

[00:48:50] John Burt: Thank you so much. It’s been such fun.

[00:49:09] Albert Cheng: Alisha, I, I’m glad to have, you know, helped you moderate that interview. Robert Penn Warren is a literary figure that I was less familiar with, but it’s cool to get to know him a little bit.

[00:49:18] Alisha Searcy: Yes. I think it was such an important conversation to have and really answer some questions for me because I definitely had some questions about some of the writings of Robert Penn Warren, and so having John Burt on to kind of break that down and help us to understand his evolution was really important.

[00:49:35] Albert Cheng: Yeah. Well that’s gonna bring us the end of our show. Let me leave you with the tweet of the week. It’s from the 74 million this week. Texas students make gains in Reading but struggle with Math Star scores show. So check out that article if you’re curious about how Texas students are performing on their standardized test of achievement.

[00:49:57] And certainly, of course, we ought to be looking at all the other states, but, uh. This week we’ve got that article about Texas students, so check it out. Alisha, appreciate you co-hosting again, always fun. Stick around for our next episode. It’s actually a special episode coming up tomorrow, so not next week, but tomorrow we’re gonna have a special episode with our friend Ian Rowe, who’s going to interview Steve Wilson.

[00:50:22] Let’s talk about his new book and, and some of the issues that we’ve raised earlier on the first segment of this show. So make sure you tune into that. And until then, Alisha and I will see you next time. See you soon. Hey, it’s Albert Cheng here, and I just wanna thank you for listening to the Learning Curve podcast.

[00:50:41] If you’d like to support the podcast further, we’d invite you to donate to the Pioneer Institute at pioneerinstitute.org/donations.