Originally written in Spring 1996
Robert Penn Warren, in All the King’s Men, uses the crumbling of a political regime as background for Jack Burden’s search for self-confidence and self-esteem, which were really steps in his search for himself.
Men search. Jack learned that life was a series of unrelated events in which one’s actions were so determined that one was not to blame for anything. He learned that from searching into his own past. He also believed that a man must have something to live for. But is any relationship a relationship in time and only in time?
Separated from both his real father and the man whose name he bears and whom he supposes to be his father, and believing that his mother does not love him, he was too unsure of his own worth to risk getting involved in life.
Men discover. Jack’s crisis began when he understood the relevance of the Cass Mastern story for himself. That with voices trapped in yearning and memories trapped in time, night was his companion and solitude his guide. He spent forever there and was not satisfied. He also learned of the affair between Anne and Willie.
Under the flood of words and the savage finger and the snapping eye, I jerked myself forward, dropped my feet to the floor with a crash, and lunged up to stand before her, while the blood pounded in my head to make me dizzy, as it does when you rise suddenly, and little red flecks dance before me and the words kept on.
He discovered that the toy was gone, the grass was trampled, the barn was down, the old people he loathed when he should have loved them had died, and he was what he was and there was no going back.
Men wander. He was constantly trying to relive his past or at least go back to the point in his childhood that made him aware of his innocence.
Then I thought of the image of the face on the water, under the purple-green darkening sky, with the white gull flying over. It was almost a shock to remember that, to have the image come back, for the thing which had, apparently, provoked the rapture had itself been lost and forgotten in the rapture which had exploded out into the whole universe. Anyway, now I saw the image again, and all at once the rapture was gone, and I experienced a great tenderness, a tenderness shot through and veined with sadness, as though the tenderness were the very flesh of my body and the sadness the veins and nerves of it. That sounds absurd, but that was the way it was. And for a fact.
Jack was aimless until Willie aimed him. But, Willie could not control Jack the way he controlled others - with a leash. Jack needed the ability to just get away. Whether it was wanderlust or escape, Jack constantly ran from something or ran towards something. Jack was a restless soul and knew something.
For West is where we all plan to go some day. It is where you go when the land gives out and the old-field pine encroach. It is where you go when you get the letter saying
Flee, all is discovered.It is where you go when you look down at the blade in your hand and see the blood on it. It is where you go when you are told that you are a bubble on the tide of empire. It is where you go when you hear that thar’s gold in them-thar hills. It is where you go to grow up with the country. It is where you go to spend your old age. Or it is just where you go.
Men go West. Jack, when he learned of the affair between Anne and Willie, went West. For as long as there has been an horizon and as long as there has been a man, there has been the need to find out where the sun goes. First by foot, then horse, then ship and now by car.
I was headed back and was no longer remembering the things which I had remembered coming out….For example. But I cannot give you an example. It was not so much any one example, any one event, which I Recollected which was important, but the flow, the texture of the events, for meaning is never in the event but in the motion through event. Otherwise we could isolate an instant in the event and say that this is the event itself. But we cannot do that. For it is the motion which is important. And I was moving. I was moving West at seventy-five miles an hour, through a blur of million-dollar landscape and heroic history, and I was moving back through time into my memory. They say the drowning man relives his life as he drowns. Well, I was not drowning in water, but I was drowning in West. I drowned westward through the hat brass days and black velvet nights. It took me seventy-eight hours to drown. For my body to sink down to the very bottom of West and lie in the motionless ooze of History, naked on a hotel bed in Long Beach, California.
If there had been a solid piece of land mass that went completely across the world, somewhere between the two tropics and crossing the equator twice, so that he could completely drive west and never have to stop and turn back, Jack would not have stopped at Long Beach. He would eventually drive in a complete circle and come back to where he started. If he still hadn’t found what he was looking for or accepted what he found he could have just passed by and kept going.
Men accept.
So having lain on the bed in Long Beach, California, and seen what I had seen, I rose, much refreshed, and headed back with the morning sun in my face. It threw in my direction the shadows of white or pink or baby-blue stucco bungalows (Spanish mission, Moorish, or American-cute in style), the shadow of filling stations resembling the gingerbread house of fairy tale or Anne Hathaway’s cottage or an Eskimo igloo, the shadows of palaces gleaming hills among the arrogant traceries of eucalyptus, the shadows of leonine hunched mountains, the shadow of a boxcar forgotten on a lonely road out of the distance which glittered like quartz. It threw the beautiful purple shadow of the whole world in my direction, as I headed back, but I kept right on going, at high speed, for if you have really been to Long Beach, California, and have had your dream on the hotel bed, then there is no reason why you should not return with new confidence to wherever you came from, for now you know, and knowledge is power.
He was able to come back at once for he succeeded in persuading himself that everything was pre-determined. He had the knowledge that no one else had. Just as Willie Stark had knowledge on others for his gain of doing good so did Jack have knowledge to use against or for others.
But now, as I whirled eastward, over desert, under the shadow of mountains, by mesas, across plateaus, and saw the people in that magnificent empty country, I did not think that I would never have to envy anybody again, for I was sure that now I had the secret knowledge, and with knowledge you can face up to anything, for knowledge is power.
Men move on.
And so I had come home to the place where everything was fine. Everything was fine just the way it had been before I left, except that now I knew the secret. And my secret knowledge cut me off. If you have the secret, you cannot really communicate any more with somebody who has not got it, any more than you can really communicate with a bustling vitamin-crammed brat who is busy with his building blocks or a tin drum. And you can’t take somebody off to one side and tell him the secret. If you do that, then the fellow, of female, you are trying to tell the truth to thinks you are feeling sorry for yourself and asking for sympathy, when the real case is that you are not asking for sympathy bur for congratulations. So I did my daily tasks and ate my daily bread and saw the old familiar faces, and smiled benignly like a priest.
Even though he was still running, Jack had in him the life long search and the hope for the discovery that in the end, proves stronger than his longing to preserve his irresponsibility of leaving Anne and the dependency of a suitable parental figure in his childhood. Jack finally had something to live for.
