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ABSTRACT

THE CONCEPT OF EVIL IN THE NOVELS 0F
ROBERT PENN WARREN
By
Rodney Meryl Vliet

The present study is an analysis of the concept of evil
presented in the nine novels of Robert Penn Warren. After a chapter
considering evil as a recurring theme in his novels. the three types
of evil commonly used in philosophical and religious discourse are
studied in a chapter each. The first is metaphysical evil; that is.
the evil we are: the limitation found at the core of being. The
second is moral evil; that is, the evil we do: the pain and suffering
caused by the free actions of intelligent beings. The third is non-
moral evil; that is, the evil we suffer: the psychological and physical
pain and suffering endured in life regardless of its source. The last
chapter considers the problem of evil and self-knowledge.

The data for the study was drawn primarily, but not exclu-
sively. from twenty-six selected religious characters in four
catagories: ministers. minister's children, devout laypersons, and
lapsarians. Such characters as Willie Proudfit, MacCarland Sumpter,

Jason Sweetwater. Jack Burden. Cass Mastern, Lettice Poindexter

Rodney Meryl Vliet

Tolliver, Willie Stark, and Isaac Sumpter were found to be representa-
tive vehicles for the concepts consistently presented in the novels.
The characters were emphasized because thematic concerns are presented
principally through their development. Also, evil is essentially a
personal problem because by it someone is hurt, harmed, frustrated, or
in some way left unfulfilled or threatened with destruction. punish-
ment, or failure. Therefore, the human beings of the works were the
primary sources of information about Warren‘s concept of evil.

The chapter on metaphysical evil treats the relationship of
idea and factuality, the nature of God, and the roles of history.
necessity, and original sin in Warren's concept of evil. Discussions
of the nature of the self and reality in general as related to evil
conclude the chapter. In the chapter on moral evil, the prides of
power, knowledge, virtue, and spirit are investigated. Further. sen-
suality as self-love in the forms of sexual license, love and greed
is considered as an aspect of evil. The chapter ends with a treat-
ment of moral evil and Warren's emphasis on responsibility. The
development of nonmoral evil concentrates upon death, disease and
deformity, failure and fear, and madness as vehicles for suffering in
the novels. The chapter ends with consideration of the interpenetra-
tion of things shown in the inevitable and far-reaching consequences
suffered because of evil. The final chapter is a discussion of the
concept of the osmosis of being. its implications for self-knowledge.
and its relationship to evil. It shows that Warren's principal con-

cern for the necessity of adequate self-knowledge and the inevitable

Rodney Meryl Vliet

consequences of both the achieving of and the failing to achieve self-
knowledge are related to Warren's concept of evil.

This study demonstrates that Warren presents a concept of
evil which, firstly, includes the continual threat of metaphysical evil
because reality is essentially and necessarily finite, limited. and
unperfectable. Secondly, moral evil is essentially an expression of
self-ambition in the forms of pride and sensuality. Because of the
tendency to self-love, love itself is one of the central concepts used
in the novels to express the falibility of man. Because man loves him-
self too much and others too little, he must acknowledge responsibility
for the evil he does. A person cannot use finitude as an excuse for
his inhumanity to others. Thirdly, man is a sensitive, feeling being.
As such, he is subject to the elements of his total environment. Pain
and suffering are a necessary aspect of experience because the world
is the way it is and man is the way he is. It is hopeless for anyone
to want to extricate himself or anyone else from this world of sin and
pain because his efforts are predoomed to failure. Similarly. he can-
not remove evil from the world because evil is an essential aspect of
the nature of things. Ironically, even attempts to escape evil or the
responsibility for evil become sources for pain and suffering. The
inevitability of the abuse of freedom and the inability to avoid im—
balanced and excessive modes of behavior make man's moral and physical

abuse of himself and others certain.

THE CONCEPT OF EVIL IN THE NOVELS OF
ROBERT PENN WARREN

By

Rodney Meryl Vliet

A THESIS

Submitted to
Michigan State University
in partial fulfillment of the requirements
for the degree of

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

Arts and Letters -- Interdisciplinary

I973

To Sharon, Danai, and Melanie who will
never again have to hear, "Wait until
the thesis is done."

ii

 

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I wish to express my appreciation to Dr. Virgil Scott of
the English Department for his assistance as the director of this
thesis and to Dr. Robert T. Anderson of the Department of Religious
Studies and to Dr. Paul M. Hurrell of the Philosophy Department for
their assistance throughout my program. Also, I wish to express my
special gratitude to Dr. John A. Yunck who has stood by me through
several program changes and several years of frustrating attempts to
finish this program while continuing to teach full time. To my former
colleagues at Great Lakes Bible College, Lansing, Michigan and to my
current colleagues at John Wesley College at Owosso, Michigan, I also
wish to express my thanks because they have borne additional burdens
to allow me to complete this task. But most of all, I am in debt to
my wife, Sharon, who has typed and retyped this project several times,
and to my daughters, Danai and Melanie. These women of my life have
suffered considerable neglect in the name of my education. I thank
the Lord who made it possible not only to finish, but also to begin

my doctoral program.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Chapter Page
INTRODUCTION .......................... l
I. EVIL AS THE THEME OF THE NOVELS ....... . . . . . . 6
Selected Religious Characters ............. 16

II. METAPHYSICAL EVIL ............... . . . . . 29
Relationship of Idea to Fact ............. 35

God and Evil ..................... 50

History as Metaphysical Evil ............. 59
Necessity and Evil .................. 69

Original Sin: The Nature of Man . . . ........ 88

Mixed Nature of Man ................. . 98

Quality of Being: The Self .............. l03

Quality of Being: Reality . . . . . . ........ 120

III. MORAL EVIL ........................ l32
Pride of Power ................. . . . l34

Pride of Knowledge .................. l4l

Pride of Virtue ............... . . . . . l47
Spiritual Pride .................... l53
Sensuality: Self-Love . . . . . ........ . . . 158

Sexual License .................. l63

Love ....................... 176

Money ....................... l78

Conclusions .................... lBl

Moral Evil and Responsibility ............. 182

IV. NONMORAL EVIL ...................... l88
Death: The Law of Nature ............... T93

Disease and Deformity . . . .............. 203

Failure and Fear ................ . . . 210

Madness . ................... . . . . 216
Interpenetration of Things ........ . ..... 220

iv

Chapter

V. EVIL AND SELF-KNOWLEDGE . . . . ..... . .......

The Osmosis of Being . . ...........
Implications of the Osmosis of Being ..... . . . .
Consequences of Self— -Knowledge ............
Failure of Self-Knowledge . . . ............

LIST OF REFERENCES .......... . ............

 

 

 

 

INTRODUCTION

Even though it is not remarkable that a twentieth-century
American novelist of stature should write about evil, a student may
be surprised to find that Robert Penn Warren has concentrated upon
the nature of evil as much as he has in the nine novels published to
date. When a student first confronts these novels, he will discover
that each one of them is centrally concerned with the nature of evil
in human experience. In each of the novels, evil is presented as an
essential aspect of all human experience, and one must learn how to
live with it by acknowledging its reality within and around him and
by accepting his personal responsibility for contributing to its
total force in life, if he is to find a meaningful self-definition.

This study was undertaken because of the lack of a lengthy
study of the nature of evil in the novels of Robert Penn Warren
despite the general attention given to it by his critics over the
years. The basic design is to consider evil as a recurring theme in
the novels and then on the basis of selected, representative characters
from the novels, to investigate each of the three types of evil in
order to discover the nature of their development and treatment in
the novels. Finally, there is a concluding statement about the nature
of evil in relation to Warren's fundamental concern: self-knowledge.
In developing this topic, the three types of evil commonly used in

philosophical and religious discourse are used: first, metaphysical

 

ans

 

evil, that is, the evil we are, or the evil that is at the base of
being itself; secondly, moral evil, that is, the evil we do, or the
nature of the pain and suffering caused by the free actions of intelli-
gent beings; thirdly, nonmoral evil, that is, the psychological pain
and suffering humans must endure in this life regardless of the source.

The next principle which governed this study was the selection
of characters who are in some way associated with the religious con-
cerns expressed in the novels. The reason for this is the conviction
that evil is substantially a religious or religeo-philosophical problem.
Even though this study is not intended to construct a theodicy as such,
one is implied in the novels because it has been discovered that, in
general, the responsibility for evil rests upon the people and their
human inability to accept that responsibility for the presence of evil
in their lives. There are in each novel certain types of significant
characters who were considered important as religious characters. Most
often, they are not the major characters in the novels; however, they
are occasionally among the most important. Significantly, the views
of the nonreligious or purely secular characters with respect to the
nature of evil are given in contexts in which the religious characters
also appear. Therefore, even though the dominant views expressed in
the novels may not be those of the religious characters, the religious
characters provide a practical means of access of the concept of evil
presented in the narratives.

The religious characters were classified according to four
categories: first, the preachers or ministers of the Gospel; second,

the children of the ministers or preachers; third, the devout laymen;

and fourth, the formerly devout or lapsarians. In some cases it was
possible to place a given character in more than one of the groups.

In such cases, the group which reflects his principal role in the story
was selected. Beyond the first chapter, however, these categories were
not frequently used, even though the evidence for the study was selected
primarily from among that provided through them. The decision to use
them was based upon the need to limit the body of material for this
study, and not as an organizational principle for the study. It was
decided that these four classes of characters were generally an ade-
quate selection to study the concept of evil in the novels because they
do, in fact, represent the range of opinion expressed in the novels as
a whole, and they are a widely differing group of characters. In other
words, this group of twenty-six selected characters from the nine
novels is fairly representative of the various world-views presented by
all of the characters in the novels.

However, when necessary, there was no hesitancy to make
reference to characters who were not considered religious characters.
Therefore, while this study is based primarily upon the religious
characters, it is not restricted to them. For example, there is
little reason to consider Murray Guilfort of Meet Me in the Green Glen
or Bradwell Tolliver in flogg_as religious characters; however, because
they make observations about the nature of evil independent of their
relationships to religious characters, it was deemed necessary to
include their views in this study in order to make this treatment of

Warren's concept of evil as complete as possible.

The study has emphasized the role of the characters in the
presentation of the concept of evil because the thematic concerns of
a piece of fiction are revealed primarily through the characters.
Further, evil in particular is a personal problem. In the revelation
of evil, someone has to be hurt, harmed, frustrated, or in some other
way left unfulfilled or without meaning and threatened with destruc-
tion, punishment, or failure. Because evil is a human problem, the
humans of the works are the primary source of information.

Fundamentally, this study has demonstrated that Warren does
present a concept of evil which includes the continual threat of meta-
physical evil at the very core of being itself, because man is essen-
tially and necessarily finite, limited, and unperfectable. Secondly,
moral evil is essentially an expression of self-ambition in the forms
of pride and sensuality. Because of the tendency of man to self-love,
love itself is one of the central concepts used by Warren to express
the falibility of man. In his natural tendency to love himself too
much and others too little, man is responsible for the evil he does.
A person, therefore, cannot justifiably use his condition of finitude
as an excuse for his inhumanity to others. Thirdly, man is a sensitive
and feeling being; as such, he is very subject to the influence of the
elements of his total environment upon him. Pain and suffering are
very much a part of his experience because the world is as it is, and
he is as he is. It is a hopeless dream for man to want to extricate
himself from this world of sin and pain because he cannot. Ironically,
even efforts to escape evil or the responsibility for evil become

sources of pain and suffering because of man's abuse of his freedom

and his inability to avoid imbalanced and excessive behavior. The
nature of man and the nature of the world are such that abuse is cer-

tain.

o
.u
I.

-

 

.-
o

 

CHAPTER I
EVIL AS THE THEME OF THE NOVELS

The nine novels of Robert Penn Warren constitute a remarkably
unified body of work with respect to their thematic consistency and con-
centration upon evil. Consequently, critical attention directed toward
the novels frequently has indicated that the problem of evil was one of
Warren's principal concerns. For example, in 1948 after only three of
the novels were published, John L. Stewart observed that the pattern of
Warren's concentration upon a single story--"the story of man's efforts
to flee from the problem of evil and his ultimate return to the prob-
lem"--had grown out of his even longer concern for evil as reflected
in his early poetry.1 Certainly, within the scope of Night Rider
(1939), At Heaven's Gate (1943), and All the King's Men (1946) the
general problem was defined and repeated attempts were made to deal
with the human tendency to escape personal responsibility for the pain
and suffering one creates and endures. Clearly, the notions of flight
and the falibility of man were established among Warren's basic con-
cerns. How important these three works are in the body of Warren's
novels is seen in the emphasis upon them in the study which follows.

Over the years, similar acknowledgments of the centrality of
the concept of evil in the thematic concerns of Warren's novels have
been recorded. For example, Father James S. Magmer stressed Warren's

recurring emphasis upon evil in 1959; and C. Hugh Holman cited Warren‘s

6

 

 

 

awareness of human guilt and the inescapability of evil in l958.2 Even
Warren's personal friend and co-worker, Cleanth Brooks cited the prob-

3 In

lem of evil as one of Warren's "characteristic themes" in 1963.
addition, the book-length criticism of Robert Penn Warren by Charles
Bohner in 1964 mentioned the unity of Warren's concern for the problem
of evil despite his variety of forms.4 In the Spring of 1970. Allen
Shepherd based one of his articles on the concurring opinion that
"Warren seems to have come to many of his principal themes by the time
he was 35, . . . the year in which he published his first novel,
Night Rider."5
Even in the most recent critical works, Warren's "insatiable
need to renew the journey_of exploration for the final truth of man's
existence" is cited. "He struggles for the truth again in Meet Me in

the Green Glen," Robert Cayton concluded, "and leaves us with the same

questions which were examined 32 years ago in Night Rider. As Murray

 

Guilfort learned, illusion is the only truth and that's all there is."6

I believe Cayton has misread the novel by making Murray Guilfort's
point of view the climactic one for the novel. As indicated below,
Leroy Lancaster and Cy Grinder are actually the concluding focal points
for Meet Me in the Green Glen. Nevertheless, Cayton does perceive a
unity in Warren's works, and he associated that thematic unity with
notions that are a part of Warren's concept of evil.

Warren's continual involvement with the problem of evil has

caused him to deal with difficult religious and philosophical questions.

Furthermore, he is "a philosophical novelist in the tradition of Conrad,"

as John Bradbury correctly observed in 1963, who "seeks out meaningful

patterns in the data of experience and finds symbolic patterns in the

"7 The narrative patterns in the novels are reasonably

flow of images.
consistent in that the experiences they record almost always have the
cultural clashes of the South as a common denominator. Warren is con-
cerned with tensions in the poverty ridden agrarian society confronted
by elements from the more aggressive and progressive urban society and
the various forces which represent it. In addition, his treatment of
the problem of evil almost always has one or more of the central charac-
ters who has been absent from the home, agrarian environment long
enough--usually during college and career activities--to become con-
scious of the faults which are a part of his own past. In these con-
frontations, evil is found in every aspect of life and human nature,
and it is presented in stories described in dark images of illusion
and corruption. There is a blending and flowing of experience which
make clear-cut perception and decisive decision-making nearly impossible.
Whether it is Percy Munn reflecting upon the killing of Trevelyn in
Night Rider, Angelo Passetto walking along a muddy, rut filled road
during a Fall rain in Meet Me in the Green Glen, or any of the princi-
pals in between, the pattern of philosophical concern is borne out.
Further, the characters are involved in attempts to solve
rather ordinary, yet difficult problems by applying their own initia-
tives, skills, and perspectives. In circumstances which present quests
for justice, and defense of ideals, the search for freedom, the
reestablishment of human relationships, or the exploitation of others
for one's own selfish benefit, the desired solutions are hindered and

people are usually destroyed by the ineffective way the problems are

 

 

 

attacked. Within the movement of the complexities of life, we see
carried out, time after time, the observation of Captain Todd in
Night Rider that we cannot expect to settle everything because life
is too complex. The characters struggle to find the way to live
within the world of indifferent factuality, but they usually fail and
cannot reconcile themselves to the misery they suffer.

The characters are caught in the struggle for self-definition
in their confrontations within themselves and with the socio-economic
forces around them. The involvement with the problems of evil comes
when this inner struggle is frustrated, and the character becomes
aware of the loneliness caused by his self-love or the alienation
caused by the external force which binds him. For example, he might
be bound by such things as the past or his concept of parental expecta-
tions, but he is bound nonetheless. All of the novels contain some
characters who are like Leroy Lancaster in Meet Me in the Green Glen.
He had to overcome the idea that he was merely an extention of his
father's conscience upon the community of Parkerton, Tennessee. He
had to come to the realization of his own identity in separateness
which would allow him to assume his individual, self-defined role as
a member of the community of mankind, both because of and in spite of
the evil which is necessarily a part of his experience.

In addition, evil goes beyond the characters in the novels:
the land itself is defiled. The flux of time has captured the land
in change and decay. For example, the last two novels in particular
concentrate upon the pastness of a great or near—great potential of

river valleys in Tennessee. Both are subject to flooding out by the

 

lO

backwaters of dams built to sustain the progress of the regions beyond
the valleys themselves. The flooding of the valley around Fiddlers—
burg--allegorically a place where nothing serious can happen--
dramatizes the tragic dislocation of human lives. Also, the flooding
of Spottwood Valley--allegorically, the rotting of wood and the
depleting of the land-~15 a graphic symbol of human attempts to

create good by covering up the spoiled nature left after years of
decaying exploitation.

A survey of the novels reflects the thematic unity of the
novels with respect to their treatment of evil. Warren's first novel
was Night Rider (1939). In it, Percy Munn becomes the victim of his
own participation in illegal vigilante activities to force farmers to
join an association of tobacco growers. Amidst the betrayal of him-
self, his family, his friends, and ultimately his good intentions,
Percy Munn is destroyed as he was unable to bring himself to kill the
father image Senator Tolliver who lay defenseless upon a sick bed. In
a parody of the teaching of Jesus to give water to the thirsty and to
care for the needy, the savior Munn, who fought the economic exploita-
tion of the large tobacco interests, dies, unable to fire a shot in
self-defense, because his evil is without defense.

At Heaven's Gate (1943) is a complex story of lust and
greed, emphasizing those who are like the people in Dante's purgatory
that stand just "at heaven's gate" because they are guilty of inordi-
nate love shown in their lust, greed, and gluttony. The novel actually
tells two stories which ultimately are interpenetrating. The first is

of the collapse of the financial empire of Bogan Murdock, a prince of

 

..

 
 

 

.1i\

ll

demons among the exploiters of men who diabolically sought to destroy
others for his own gain. To the end he denies his own responsibility
for any of the misfortune he causes anyone, even his own daughter. Sue
Murdock has been destroyed by the lust and gluttonous alcoholism which
is also destroying her mother. Her friends all use her for their own
purposes. On the other hand, the alternate story is the confession of
Ashby Wyndham. He tells his tale of misery from the jail cell in which
he attempts to purge his soul and renew contact with God. He is guilty
of the sin of pride; therefore, he has run before the Lord in the

power of his own might. Others have suffered, and he is lost and
alone. The tie between the two stories comes when Private Milt Porsum,
a World War hero, is moved to acknowledge his part in the Murdock
scandal because of the simple honesty of Ashby. Porsum is Wyndham's
cousin, and when a reporter tries to bribe Porsum in order to keep
Ashby's tale from becoming public knowledge, Porsum is moved to his

own honest confession of guilt.

The most famous of Warren's novels is a very complex story of
many souls' attempts at self-definition. The central character is Jack
Burden, the "dirty works" man for the corrupt and corrupting governor
of a Southern state, Willie Stark. The story line of All the King;§_
Meg.(l946) is so well known that it is unnecessary to repeat it here,
but the important thing is that through the influence of Willie Stark,
Adam Stanton, Anne Stanton, Judge Irwin (his biological father), Ellis
Burden (his legal father), and Cass Mastern (an ancestor whose story

is embedded in the novel as a parallel to Burden's own development),

a C

.

 

 
 

12

Jack Burden comes to accept mankind for what it is and to accept his
own responsibility for the evil which is done.

Jeremiah Beaumont's attempt to find justice through the
gravest sort of injustice is the central story of World Enough and
11mg (1950). However, Jerry finds that he has neither world enough
nor time to bring about his ideal through the corrupt methods he
chose for his own self-gratification. The principal thing he learns
is that he has made the mistake of separating the ideal and the real
world to such a degree that he thought the ideal could exist separately
from the painfulness of the real. The evil in this story is disclosed
step by step throughout the novel by the intertwining of lies and
deceit, death and corruption. Jerry not only murders his own father-
image in the person of Casius Fort, but he also causes the emotional
death and suicide of his lovely wife, Rachel Jordan. However, even
Rachel is not innocent, because none is innocent, as Munn Short, the
religious character in the novel, has said. Ironically, Rachel is
Jeremiah's greatest personal prize, and therefore, she is both the
greatest source of his potential joy and the greatest source of his
destructive pride and victim of his love.’

The fifth novel is Band of Angels (1955). It is the quest
for identity of Amantha Starr who has found it hard to forgive her
father for the grave injustice he has done her in begetting her by a
slave and not setting her free. In a terrible tale of misery, slavery,
and the dark corruption of the Civil War, Warren demonstrates that
Manty can have freedom only when she frees herself of the evil her

father has done. He was no better or no worse than any of the fathers

13

of all time; therefore, she must forgive and keep going. Finally,
Tobias Sears, her husband, and she find the anticipation of the ful-
filling potentials of love as they accept each other in their misery
and failure.

In a story of illusion, reality and pain, the sixth novel,
The Cave (1959), tells of many people who are struggling to find the
nature of themselves in the world of illusion. Jasper Harrick is lost
in a cave he is exploring for Isaac Sumpter. Isaac is not brave enough
nor self-confident enough to explore it for himself, but Jasper will do
it for him. While on an expedition into the earth, Jasper is lost.
The story is the impact that this tragedy has upon the people of
Johntown in general and John and Celia Harrick, MacCarland and Isaac
Sumpter, Monty Harrick, Jo-Lea Bingham, Jo-Lea's parents, Dorothy
Cutlick, and the Greek Restaurant man, Nicholas Pappadoupalous in
particular. Each struggles to clear himself of the illusions that
surround him in the inner shadows of the cave of human life, while
they reflect upon their significance during Jasper's suffering in
the cave.

A Jew is the hero of the seventh novel. Adam Rosenzweig
comes to America to fight in the war to free the Negroes. He has a
club foot which he has tried to hide by a specially designed boot,
but he fails--who can hide his inherited flaw? He is disillusioned
by the corruption, the greed and moral decay demonstrated to him as
he becomes a sutler for the armies in the Virginian wilderness. In

Wilderness (1961), however, he finds the truth that is within himself;

l4

and in apparent disgrace and defeat, he comes from the wilderness
with a new heart.

flggg_is the eighth novel (1964). An entire community has
to come to terms with its dislocation and destruction because of human
progress. In the shadow of the symbol of their bondage, the prison
which is the focal point of the town, the Tollivers, Fiddlers,
Cottshills, and others have to find what significance they can within
themselves because their past is being washed away in the rising waters
of the river. Even the Oscar-winning script writer, Brad Tolliver,
cannot artistically function under the threat of dislocation, until
he looks into the heart.

The last novel, Meet Me in the Green Glen (1971), continues
Warren's emphasis upon the problem of the mixture of the real and the
illusory in human experience. What is the reality of what happened?
Who murdered Sunderland Spottwood? However, in this story that ends
with Leroy Lancaster and Cy Grinder successfully finding the way they
can live with the appearances around them, it is possible to find
truth in love and in self-knowledge. But Murray Guilfort, the latest
of the many exploiters in the novels, must commit suicide in order to
find the threat of nothingness and nonbeing which is within himself.
Cassie Spottwood, who did murder Sunderland, is mad in the illusion
of her love and the reality of her guilt. However, she is not able to
know the reality of her guilt because of the illusion of her love for
Angelo.

The theme of a novel is the concept it all adds up to: the

total impact of the people, places, images, comments, symbols, dialog

15

and action. Overall, this summary of the novels highlights the possi-
bility of evil as the central controlling idea behind them all. The
nature of reality, the threat of illusion, and the possibility of
nothingness are all aspects commonly recognized in philosophy and
religion as aspects of evil. They are present in every one of the
novels. Therefore, I conclude with Allen Shephard, who has described
the scope of flogg, in what I believe is a valid statement of the range
of concerns for all the novels. "[Warren] attempted an anatomy of the
old and new South," he concluded, "with the conflict of traditional

and progressive values embittered by class and racial antagonism, a
dramatization of the process of self—definition and of man's place in
nature, analysis of love, marriage, sexual relationships, and the
creative process, socio-economic-historicalcliterary reflections, the
presentation of the case for the intellectual, meditations upon the
meaning of justice, and extensive experiments in narrative chronology."8
While Shepherd was not concerned directly with the concept of evil as
such in the novels, he has presented in his concise summary, many of
the elements of experience which Warren typically uses to present his
concept of evil. The conflicts and tensions dramatized in the attempts
at self-definition consistently reflect the failure, finitude, frustra-
tion and destruction which dominate the atmosphere of the novels.
Throughout his novels, Warren presents people who hurt, harm, and
destroy others and themselves unless they know or learn to know about

life.

 

 

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o. .

.""

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l6
Selected‘ReligiousWCharacters

In the analysis of evil which follows, the evidence is
drawn primarily from the statements, actions, and implications asso-
ciated with certain of the "religious" characters. The reasons for
the selection of religious characters for the study are easily stated:
first, there are representative religious characters in each of the
novels; second, because the problem of evil is essentially a religious
problem, it was thought that it would be useful to concentrate on how
Warren would use religious characters to present such a concept;
third, there is a wide range of different types of religious characters
represented in the novels from which to select representatives. Among
the preachers, preacher's children, devout laypersons, and lapsarians
selected there are a variety of subcultures, races, faiths, and genders.

From the nine novels, seven preachers have been selected.
The earliest, and one of the most extensively drawn upon, is Ashby
Wyndham from At Heaven's Gate. He is a fundamentalist, a traveling
evangelist, who has it laid upon his heart to tell the story of his
conversion to any and all who will listen. He is not formally edu-
cated, and he has a tendency to "sinful pride in the Lord." As an
employee of the Massey Mountain company of the Murdock conglomerate,
he lost his job because he was erroneously thought to be a supporter
of Jason Sweetwater, a self-styled Marxist labor leader, who happens
to be an Episcopalian minister's son. Wyndham is trying to purge his
soul, as indicated earlier, by confessing his prideful ways. His

story is replete with his consciousness of sin, lust, corruption and

l7

depravity. He is one of the characters primarily responsible, I
believe, for Warren's reputation as a “Calvinist."
The second preacher selected is Ellis Burden from All the

Kingis Men. Several of the statements which the old man makes are

 

incorporated in this study; he is well-educated, having been a success-
ful attorney from aristocratic Burden's Landing before leaving his

wife and son for the gospel mission work on skid-row. He has been

the victim (cause?) of a friend's betrayal with his wife, and one of
the discoveries of Jack Burden is that the Scholarly Attorney is not
his real father. Speaking freely of the foulness and wicked corruption
of politics, the old servant of God will not tell Jack about any
possible corruption in the background of one of his old friends, Judge
Montegue Irwin. Ironically, Jack discovers that Irwin is his real
father, and infidelity of his mother with Irwin was the cause of Ellis
Burden's leaving the mansion to her and his (?) son. It is his insights
for some tracts which he is trying to write in his old aged feebleness
that give Jack Burden some final food for thought as the events of the
novel come to an end with Jack's realization of his responsibility for
the things which have happened.

Next, Seth Parton from Band of Angels was selected. He could
perhaps be classified otherwise, because his post-preaching days are
ambiguous in their relationship to the faith. However, because he is
presented as the stern, preacher-type, Pharisee, "Puritan" in the mind
of Manty Starr, I have placed him in this group. He is from an Oberlin,
Ohio sect which believed the world was fallen and corrupt, but yet by

hard work they believed a utopia for the faithful would be established.

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Because of the hard work they were successful, and in his post-way days,
the success followed Seth to whatever he did. However, Seth and some
of the others of his Oberlin group are very useful in developing an
awareness of the concept of evil in the novels as a whole.

A Baptist minister is the fourth one in this group. MacCarland
Sumpter in The Cave is one of the several central characters in the
novel. Of the ministers, his role in The Cave is more important to
the overall story than any of the others, in terms of his total contri-
bution to the story. In addition to this, however, his own growing
doubts about himself and his relationship to God and to his son, Isaac
Sumpter, are influential upon his understanding of suffering and pain.
He is very conscious of sin, and he is subject to severe self-criticism.
He wants the best for his son, but his pride of virtue and spirit are
great. The sermons he preaches are very influential upon two of the
devout laypersons--Mr. and Mrs. Jack Harrick, his prize convert and
long-time friend, sexual rival and confidant. He is a man who earns
sympathy and contempt at once. He lies to protect his son, and his
plaintive cry is, "Is it wrong for a man to love his son?"

The fifth, sixth and seventh ministers selected are minor
characters; however, their statements and narrative functions are signi-
ficant toward developing an understanding of Warren's concept of evil.
Corinthian McClardy from World Enough and Time was a frontier revivalist,
whose meetings became more famous for their fornication than for their
preaching. The impact of these experiences upon Jeremiah Beaumont is
clear. Jeremiah turned from the faith, despite or because of his con-

version experience and his sexual initiation with a hag following one

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of the meetings. The sixth and seventh are from 51999, The White,
Brother Potts, and the Black, Leon Pinckney, are significant because

of the issues they raise as the destruction of Fiddlersburg is imminent.
In their own way they are concerned and compassionate, but Potts'
influence on Brad Tolliver in the end is greater than that of Pinckney,
even though at one time Brad wished he were the Black preachers. This
is an interesting way to say that Brad's self-concept had gotten very
low. How much lower could he have gotten than a Black preacher (even
though a Harvard graduate) in Tennessee?

For the second group, the minister's children, I have
selected four: Jason Sweetwater (At Heaven's Gate), Jack Burden (All_
the King's Men), Isaac Sumpter (The Cave), and Corinne Lancaster (Meet_
Me in the Green Glen). Two of these are children of Episcopal rectors,
Sweetwater and Lancaster. One is the son of a Baptist, Isaac (Ikey)
Sumpter. The remaining one, Jack Burden, really is not the son of a
minister, but since he was six years old, he grew up with the idea
that he was the son of that embarrassing old man on skid-row who spoke
of Jesus, handed out tracts and did good to the unfortunate bums.

Hence I have included him here.

In the order of their appearance in the novels, Jason Sweet-
water is the first son of a minister. He, too, is an ambiguous character.
In his youth, he glories in his impiety in the church. He appears to
be so spiritual, but he fooled the people. He had been prepared by
his father for college, but he left for the rough road of travel and
hard knocks that eventually brought him to Massey Mountain and the

labor organization which cost Ashby Wyndham his job. He, along with

20

Milt Porsum mentioned earlier in the summaries, is a contact between
the two stories which comprise the novel. He is a man of idea and
ideals who will fight for his right with all his might. As his father
had taught him, it was necessary for him to believe in something before
he could believe in himself. His quest for justice brought much pain
and suffering to others and to himself. He would not marry Sue Murdock
on principle, because he believed marriage a form of prostitution of
the grossest kind. After the death of Sue Murdock and the establish-
ment of his alibi, he fades from the novel.

So much has been written about Jack Burden and he is such a
rich character, he just about defies summary. The spoiled, neurotic,
rich kid became an historian; but he could not finish his Ph.D. thesis
because of the threat the necessary understanding of Cass Mastern's
story held for him. Jack was both a man to whom everything and nothing
happened. He was Willie Stark's "dirty works" man. As an historian
he was dedicated to truth, and he is a significant study of the role
of objective, scientific efforts to understand human suffering. He
could not understand evil until he confronted himself in the events of
his personal tragedy. Afterward, he could go to Judge Irwin's house to
live after finally getting to marry Anne Stanton and take the Old Man
Burden into the house. Through Jack Burden, some of the clearest
presentations of the nature of evil in the novels are presented.

Along with Jason Sweetwater, Isaac Sumpter could have been
discussed as one of the lapsarians or left out as a nonreligious
character. However, because his heritage as a Baptist minister's son

was so influential upon his progressive isolation and alienation during

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21

his abortive college career, I have included him in this group. During
the central events of the novel, Ikey has returned to Johntown to bury
himself from the failures at Nashville while at the University. After
having been expelled for gross immoral behavior, he is alone and is
the epitome of alienation. However, his alienation is caused by his
own refusal to accept others and to acknowledge his own responsibility
for his evil. He has had a torrid affair with a beautiful Jewish
artist. Rachel "Goldie" Goldstein has refused to take him back after
he betrayed her love by a thoughtless round of sexual intercourse in
her car with one of her friends as he was taking the friend home in
the rain after a party at Goldie's. He does not feel any responsibility
for the evil he does. He even resents his father's efforts to save him.
Because he has come to believe love is a form of betrayal, all acts of
love are understood as acts of betrayal. He is a diabolical charac-
ter, as close to totally depraved as any in the novels.

The last of the minister's children used in the study is
also the most recently developed. Also the child of an Episcopalian,
Corinne Lancaster is a pretty, although not strikingly beautiful, very
buxom, and highly sensually appearing young woman. She was courted and
won by a not very handsome and only moderately successful lawyer, Leroy
Lancaster. She is not able to accept herself as a body as well as a
soul. Even her actions of charity and kindness are an emasculating
threat to Leroy. He comes to view her as a plague causing his failure.
He knows she is alone and lonely, but he will not, he cannot return to
her. The frustration of their relationship is symbolized in their

fruitless union: they have no children. However, after Leroy is able

22

to come to terms with himself, she apparently is able to come to terms
with herself and to accept herself as she is as well, because they have
a child, a son, and Leroy is filled with anticipation as he can go home
to be with her. I believe it is significant that Corinne is the only
one of the minister's children who is both a faithful Christian and
able to find self-realization. Perhaps Warren's implication is that

in the self-acceptance and the acceptance of others she demonstrated,
we can find the key for dealing with evil.

There are ten individuals and two groups of devout laypersons
who were used in the development of this study. The groups may each be
counted as one person, because they represent coherent views of evil.
The first is the group of devout who followed Ashby Wyndham down the
river, to the trouble which caused them to be placed in jail because
of their having traded one Bible sin for another. They are an excel-
lent example of Cass Mastern's observation in All the King's Men that
"man is never safe, damnation is ever at hand." The second group is
the Oberlin group of devout separatists who were a part of Amantha
Starr's youthful education in Band of Angels. Their usefulness rests
in their hypocritical stand on sanctification.

Of the individuals, some of these laypersons are the most
important ones used in the study. Willie Proudfit in Night Rider, Cass
Mastern in All the King's Men, Munn Short in World Enough and Time,
Jack and Celia Harrick in The Cave, Adam and Uncle Rosenzweig in
Wilderness, Lettice Poindexter Tolliver in 51999, and to a lesser
degree, Lucy Stark in All the King'vaen and Leroy Lancaster in Meet

Me in the Green Glen furnish an impressive collection of examples of

23

devotion, struggle, suffering, sin and conversion. Also, these devout
people are among the few who find some degree of successful self-
definition. Their overall importance in the novels is certainly
significant.

Again viewing them in the order of their appearance, Willie
Proudfit in many ways set the pattern from which Warren never varied.
He was a man who at one time was found in the world of "a-gettin and
a-begettin." He was familiar with the lust and greed of wild frontier
life, to which he had gone when his sap started rising. He was, how-
ever, led to leave that wildness and sin, and he found the peace of
secluded mountain life. After five years of peaceful withdrawal from
others, his isolation came to an end because he nearly died during a
fever. He then, because of a dream, went back to Kentucky to find the
love of his dreams and to face whatever the Lord had in mind for him,
regardless of the suffering it would entail. He had seen the brutality
of the frontier and the blessedness of the Lord's face, and the Lord
led him from the mountain to the draught ridden valley to be the friend
and protector of Percy Munn. His narrative function is to serve as a
counterpoint to Munn.

Certainly one of the most significant of all Warren's charac-
ters is Cass Mastern. An introverted man with highly sensitive
spiritual possibilities, he was led into sin in Lexington while going
to Translyvania College studying for the ministry. However, he never
was able to preach to others because of his own self-concept. In a way
he is a combination of the later characters: Seth Parton and Ikey

Sumpter. Not as self-righteous as Seth and not as corrupt as Ikey,

24

Cass came through the valley of the shadow of spiritual death to find
the bullet in the battle field, so he could atone for the suicide of
his friend and the betrayal his adultery had caused. His acute aware-
ness of the evil in man and the community of common guilt all men share
are among the most significant observations given in all of the novels.

Also in All the King'smMen, Lucy Stark, the wife of Willie
Stark, is used only slightly, but significantly, to discuss resignation
to God's will in the presence of the suffering for evil. She takes
the sin of her son upon herself in honor of the father who had died in
his own sin. She is a powerful, but meek woman to be admired for her
ability to suffer, with glory and resignation.

In World Enough and Time the spiritual crisis of Jeremiah
Beaumont is caused by the story told by Munn Short. The old man, who
had known about the pain of body—dying and the even more painful experi-
ences of spiritual death, had been saved by Jesus to go and tell his
tale. He was the jailer who told all who would listen about how Jesus
had washed away the mark of the curse of Mr. Perk. He had committed
adultery with Lottie Perk which on one occasion led to her being killed
during an Indian raid and Perk's saving Munn Short from the death at
the hand of an Indian. He was a man like other men who know the
pleasure of sin and the pain of sorrow.

Among the few encouraging stories in the novels is the one
associated with Jack and Celia Harrick. In The Cave, they alone are
fully presented as coming out to the light of self-understanding. He
is dying of cancer, and she is very much in love with him and suffers

greatly for it. However, it is the death of their son in the cave

25

which is the center of the novel. Jack's ambiguous realization that
he is both like and unlike all other men is the key to his self-
understanding. Because of the frequent use of this couple in the
study below, further summary is not included here.

Christians are not the only devout followers of God presented
in the novels. The Rosenzweigs in Wilderness are Jews. The old uncle
who stayed in Bavaria is the more devout; he is avidly orthodox. Adam,
on the other hand, is more off-hand about his devotion to God, and more
excited about the possibility of man in freedom, but his transformation,
as the central character in the book, is one of the most important in
this study. He overcomes his inherited weakness by acceptance of it,
and he comes out of the wilderness with a new heart. His inner nature
is sympathetic and his development powerful.

Without Lettice Poindexter Tolliver from flggg, Warren's
presentation of sensuality would be much weaker than it is. She is a
beautiful sex machine. Very much like some of the flat characters
from the other novels, such as Lois, Jack Burden's first wife in Aflj_
the King's Men, Lettice represents the rejection of lust and what she
called "wicked foolishness with Brad." While it may be that she over-
reacted by becoming a Catholic, the only one in this study, and working
in an old folks home, she totally lets her beautiful, well-cared for
body go from lack of care. However, because of this neglect she is able
finally to deal with the psychological rivalry she experienced with her
mother. Lettice is able to accept her mother as she is, and she is
able to speak kindly of Brad. He rejected her change at first, but he

came to realize that for the first time, he has seen her as a person.

26

The final example of the devout used in this study is Leroy
Lancaster. It is not clear that he became as devout as this classifi-
cation might indicate, but he did turn to and confess his self-blasphemy
to God, and he did turn to his wife in her love and acceptance. His
transformation is complete, and he does it "in God's eye" to quote
Cass Mastern.

One of the smaller categories is the lapsarians. Willie
Stark, Jeremiah Beaumont, and to a lesser degree, Milt Porsum and
Monmorency Pugh were selected for this group. Like all of the major
characters in All the King's Men, Willie is very much discussed. It
is his view of human nature that sent Jack Burden on his second and
successful journey into history which ended in the death of Jack's
father, Anne Stanton's becoming Willie's mistress, and ultimately the
murder of Willie by Adam Stanton. Willie had attended Presbyterian
Sunday school and a Baptist college. He had little respect for either,
but he used what he could from both, just as he used what he could
from anyone. The pragmatic politician, his ambition for purity in a
hospital to commemorate his own pride brought about his own death.

In World_Enough_and Time, after the traumatic conversion of
his youth, Jeremiah Beaumont became a philosophical idealist dedicated
to purity of the ideals of justice and beauty. He betrayed his conver-
sion, and his spiritual ideal of the nobility of man he had learned
from Dr. Burnham; but he is used here as an example of one who falls
from his high philosophical-religious ideals to demonstrate the sinful
nature of man he had once rejected after his horrid sexual initiation

in McCardy's meadow.

27

Private Milt Porsum had been devout in his youth in the
mountains, but his betrayal of his folk included the leaving of his
religion. He is apparently coming back at the end of At Heaven's
Gate, but his return is not yet complete. Another minor character used
fairly frequently in the study is Monmorency Pugh in Wilderness, who
ironically killed to keep from killing, because of his desire to obey
Jesus. The irony of the act and the death of his two-year-old son
caused him to reject Jesus and become a naturalist in ethic, so that
he would "scratch where it itched."

These four types of characters, the ministers, the ministers'
children, the devout laypersons, and the lapsarians are not the only

characters referred to below, but they are the ones primarily used.

CHAPTER I

FOOTNOTES

1John L. Steward, "The Achievement of Robert Penn Warren,"
South Atlantic QuarterLy, XLVII (1948), 562, 563.

2James Magmer, S. J., “Robert Penn Warren's Quest for an
Angel," Catholic World, CLXXXIII (1956), 179; and C. Hugh Holman,
"Literature and Culture: The Fugitive-Agrarians," Social Forces,
XXXVII (1958), 19.

3Cleanth Brooks, The Hidden God: Studies in Hemingway,
Faulkner,Yeats, Eliot,_andEwarren (New Haven, 19631, p. 98.

4Charles H Bohner, Robert Penn Warren (New York, 1964),
pref.

5Allen Shepherd, "Robert Penn Warren as a Philosophical
Novelist," Western Humanities Review, XXIV (1973), 158.

6Robert Frank Cayton, "The Fictional Voices of Robert Penn
Warren," Four Quarters, XXI (1972), 52.

7John M. Bradbury, Renaissance in the South: A Critical
History of the Literature, 19 - - ape , 6 , p. .

8Allan Shepherd, "Character and Theme in Robert Penn
Warren's Flood," Critique, IX (1969), 101.

28

CHAPTER II
METAPHYSICAL EVIL

In philosophical and theological terminology, metaphysical
gvjl_designates those ontological conditions, principles, or forces
inherent in the nature of things which either furnish the circum-
stances under which evil necessarily exists, or cause the particular
conditions, deeds, or practices considered harmful, painful, undesir-
able, or frustrating to well-being or happiness. Because the acknow-
ledgment of the possibility of such a quality as metaphysical evil
depends upon an individual's total world-view, many philosophers and
theologians deny that there is, in fact, such a condition, principle
or force present in reality. However, the purpose of this present
inquiry is not to discuss all the possible choices available concerning
the nature or possibility of metaphysical evil; rather, our problem is
to determine whether or not Robert Penn Warren presents a concept of
metaphysical evil in his novels and its nature, if it is present.

In order to establish the presence and nature of metaphysical
evil as an aspect of Warren's concept of evil, four basic questions
have been adopted from Radslav A. Tsanoff's ThevNature of Evil. While
these questions are not discussed separately, they were used as the
basis for the examination of the aspects of metaphysical evil pre-

sented in the novels. According to Tsanoff, if any of the following

29

30

questions are answered in the affirmative, metaphysical evil may be
said to be present in the system under study:

1. Is Evil dualistically a principle of being itself in
opposition to the Good or Perfection?

2. Are Good and Evil somehow mixed in a world that is
futile or void of ultimate rhyme or reason?

3. Is Evil somehow involved with the very stuff of reality?

4. Is Evil a permanent characteristic of finite existence,
a limitation of being proper to the creatures themselves?1

The term metaphysical suggests an abstraction or a trans-
cendental concept. In this case, it must be remembered that the
novels of Robert Penn Warren are not technically philosophical or
theological treatises which speak directly in normal theological or
philosophical language about the abstract power or force(s) which
give rise to or are the basis for the evil(s) in common human experi-
ence. However, as it has been suggested by Albion King, metaphysical
evil is graphically and impressively presented in the concrete and
personal images of works of art and literature such as the ijlgg_
Cgmggy_and Paradise Lost. In these concrete personifications, evil
has a particularly hopeless quality because of its consistent appear-
ance in imaginative works as it confronts the Good.2 While there is
no concensus among the philosophers as to whether metaphysical evil
most of necessity be pessimistic, there certainly is a tendency to
treat it as such. Of the apparent defeat of man by evil forces does
have a pessimistic quality; and certainly, many of Warren's characters

do suffer permanent loss because of their losing the battle with evil.

31

The overall impact of several of the novels is that man's efforts to
conquer evil are futile because evil is always present and must always
be dealt with regardless of the amount of effort previously expended
to attempt to eradicate it.

Since publishing Night Rider with Percy Munn's ultimate
destruction after his failure to deal with the forces of evil around
and within him, Warren persistently has presented forces of good and
evil in a never-ending confrontation. As long as there is life, there
is misery; and this suffering is a part of life itself. Because of
this pervading presence of evil, it is safe to conclude that the evil
in Warren's novels definitely does have a metaphysical quality about
it. It is seen time and time again, in some of the novels more than
in others; but it is virtually always there. It is certainly true
that some of the characters do come to terms with evil; but the evil is
always there as a permanent characteristic of finite existence. We
might see it as the struggle for life Willie Proudfit had in contrast
to the defeat of Percy Munn or as the wickedness at the core of human
nature as presented by Proudfit, Wyndham, Stark, Sumpter, or others of
Warren's many characters who present and confront the ever present
threat of evil in human life. The belief that the confrontation with
evil is never over is expressed by Jack Burden in All the King's Men
when he affirmed the following: "But if anything is certain it is
that no story is ever over, for the story which we think is over is
only a chapter in a story which will not be over, and it isn't the
game that is over, it is just an inning, and that game has a lot more

than nine innings. When the game stops it will be called on account of

32

darkness." These stories which do not end, but are "called on account
of darkness," have led many critics to conclude as John L. Stewart
did, that Warren is a persistent dualist in ontology with respect to
the conflict between good and evil.3

The first question Tsanoff poses has to do with the presenta-
tion of good and evil as dualistic forces. Dualism technically requires
that good and evil exist as mutually exclusive, irreducible elements in
conflict. Commonly in dualistic systems, evil is presented by symbols
of darkness, filth, death and other comparable entities and forces
which produce those things destructive to well-being.4 Further, meta-
physical evil may be presented as any real physical force bent on
destruction which controls people and impedes their path to fulfillment
and happiness.5 In addition, the force of metaphysical evil may be
made visible in any external dehumanizing compulsions which degrade
man; however, there is some irony in that it is the awareness of evil

as a dehumanizing force that marks the humanity of man.6

Evil then may
be seen as both the destructive dehumanizing element in experience and
also as the force which makes man's awareness of his humanness possible.
However, these hostile metaphysical forces need not be out-
side of the self. It is possible for them to be those spiritual or
nonmaterial forces within the individual which keep him from his full
development and self-definition. In figures of darkness, filth, cor-
ruption, deformity, pain and suffering, and death, evil forces may
come from within an individual to keep him from fulfilling his potential.

Further, metaphysical evil may be presented as an illusion or a decep-

tive appearance in reality. One example of such presentations of evil

33

in the novels occurs as Murray Guilfort in Meet Me in the Green Glen
is dying from an overdose of pills. The threat of the evil in his
life is presented in flickering hallucinations of reaching hands and
varying lights, shadows, and darkness as his consciousness sinks into
a final darkness in which he is unable to tell the real from the unreal
around him. To him, "the dream is a lie, but the dreaming is truth."
Throughout the novels the characters are frequently unable to tell if
what they perceive is true, real and substantial in external reality
or merely false, unreal, illusory figments of their corrupted imagina-
tions. This final novel begins with Cassie Spottwood's inner conflict
being expressed by her inability to separate the inner reality and
illusion from the external reality and illusion. In such cases, there
is no clear agreement among philosophers whether evil is a genuinely
true entity in itself or not; however, the consequences of such imagined
forces are just as devastating to the fulfillment of being as a "real"
one. Guilfort's pain is real and destructive to him regardless of the
"reality" of the evil he fears. The threat seen everywhere around him
in the totality of his experience forced him to self-destruction
whether it is real or illusory. However, his ironic efforts to deny
the reality of both evil and love around him eventually cause him to
succumb to that evil.

It is a characteristic of evil that to treat an evil force
"as if it were real" is just as destructive as one that is a simple
reality. That is, the imagined threat to being can kill just as well
as the disease, flood, bullet or knife. "Man is subject to fictitious

evil as well as to real," Paul Siwek has observed, in support of this

 

34

concept. "The difference between the two is merely exterior; it only
depends on the object. . . ; fictitious evil is still a true evil.

It is sometimes even more painful than what is called 'real.'"7 Evil
may be an illusion or a "Great Mirage," as Warren called it in his
essay on Conrad's Nostromo; evil is a powerfully destructive force
anyway. "In the end," Warren said, "the land, its people, and its
history had to be dreamed up, evoked out of the primal fecund darkness

that always lies below our imagination."8

The following discussion
demonstrates that this same darkness lies at the base of Warren's
imagination. Within this darkness the force of evil is found which is
ever and always present and can never be irradicated. According to the
standards indicated by Tsanoff, this makes this aspect of evil in
Warren's novels a genuinely metaphysical principle.

In the discussion which follows, the relationship of ideas
to factual existence, the relationship of God to evil, the metaphysical
force of history, and the relationship of necessity and evil are con-
sidered as ways in which metaphysical evil is presented in Warren's
novels. Also, Warren's continual preoccupation with the weight of
original sin as a special aspect of an individual's past is discussed.
Following the consideration of original sin, attention is given to
alienation, emptiness, despair, and nothingness as parts of the dark
shadow of the self which is omnipresent in Warren's characters. The
Osmosis of Being in relation to the notions of Illusion and Truth are
considered in the closing portions of the chapter as a part of the
interrelatedness of life in that spider web metaphor of existence

portrayed in the novels.

35
Relationship of Idea to Fact

An abstraction, such as metaphysical evil, is presented in
literature in concrete images and dramatic actions. The nature of a
writer's concern necessarily is expressed within the framework of his
works of art. In Warren's novels, there is a continual presentation
of the problem of evil in the lives of the characters. As he stated
in his speech, "The Knowledge and Image of Man," each of the stories
is the story of a soul's attempt at self-definition, for good or evil.9
The form which these stories take in his novels is the expression of
the ideals and the desires of the characters in actions which are,
more often than not, morally questionable or morally ambiguous actions
of evil and the pain and suffering which are the results of those
ambiguous actions. Most of the overt actions are actually analyzable
under considerations of moral and nonmoral evils; viz, the evil that
people do and the evil they suffer. However, the basis for these
actions is found in the nature of things, because evil is considered
as a part of the real stuff of the world portrayed. While considering
an abstraction, such as metaphysical evil, it is very interesting to
note that virtually all of the stories in the novels are comprised of
the efforts of the characters to give shape to the ideas they hold or
the desires they wish to fulfill. Such a motiff places Warren squarely
in the tradition which Tsanoff treats in his Nature of Evil: "Evil
and the problem of evil seem to arise from an experienced clash and
disaccord of the actuality with the ideal, whatever this may be."10

The ideas which Warren's characters hold must be expressed

in their actions. The conflict between these ideas and the factuality

36

of experience mixed with human loyalty was first expressed by Percy
Munn in Night Rider (1939). Within the first chapter of Warren's
first novel, the first central character speaks to the potential mem-
bers of the tobacco growers' association as they are challenged to
band together in an attempt to fight the evil of the big money interv
ests in the tobacco industry. "There is nothing here but an idea,"
Munn declared to them. "And that idea is dead unless you have brought
it life by your long trip here. It does not exist unless you give it
life by your own hope and loyalty." The remainder of the novel is
the unfolding of the complications that arise from bringing this idea
to life.

Eventually, the ideas held by the characters of the novels
become more important to them than anything else, often even more
important than life itself. In the case of Percy Munn, his obsessive
involvement with the association cost him his marriage, his friends,
his integrity and eventually his life. Typically, these things
happened to him because his efforts given to his idea became an embodi-
ment of the evil that is at the very core of his being. We lost sight
of his own limitations and his finite understanding became the basis
for his extreme behavior. He became a vital force for evil in the
community and brought destruction to himself and many others. In
this first novel, the imbalance between the ideal and the real,
between the thought in the character's mind and the actions he used
to bring fulfillment to his desires are typical of the action in the
subsequent novels. I also believe the thematic structure of the

novels demonstrates that even the most noble ideals of man can be

37

brought to evil ends because of the failure of those who embrace the
noble ends to keep the idea in prospective with all the limitations
which necessarily pertain to finite beings. The very act of devotion
itself becomes a force for evil and an expression of human limitation.

The most important religious characters in Night Rider is
Willie Proudfit. He is the pious farmer with whom Percy Munn finds
refuge. During Munn's flight, Proudfit provides a counterpoint of
stability and acceptance of personal responsibility. Willie once had
gone out to gain his fortune, but he had come in close touch with
death and had been turned from his willful ways. His importance cen-
ters in the fact that at the end of the novel he is alive; he has come
to terms with the forces of evil within and around him. Willie tells
Munn the way he came to know what the Lord had in mind for him. Munn
eventually came to realize what Proudfit told him, but he made his
discovery too late to reverse the direction of his fate. The force he
has given form to destroys him.

Proudfit's importance to this study rests mainly in his being
the first of the many religious characters who populate Warren's novels.
Even though his story is not developed in the detail that the major
character's is, it is a typically Warrensque tale. "This is the pat-
tern, as it relates to Warren's fiction," Hoffman has indicated.

“1. The beginnings are in innocence, in the form of imma-
turity or an incompleteness.

"2. The world is next in the sequence, and the person facing
the world. The world is a place of particulars, and man must find a

'path of action' that will test his principles, whatever they may be.

38

"3. Man, entering the world, can commit one of two kinds of
sin (or both of them): he can violate the particulars of the world in
order to achieve power, or he commits acts of violence on the assump-

tion that they are principled acts."11

The world of particulars into
which the innocent young Proudfit journeyed was the West of buffalo
hunting and eventually wilderness seclusion. The desire for economic
independence and the desire for solitude and isolation reflected in
these two experiences are symbolic of two of the ways that Warren's
secular characters in several of the novels bring themselves into the
conflict with others and become embodiments of the force(s) of or for
evil.

While slaughtering buffalo in the Kansas plains, Willie is
obsessively caught up in the idea of killing these creatures for his
own profit. The imagery of the smelling carcasses and the rotting
hides are graphic in their portrayal of the forces of natural evil set
loose by Proudfit's obsession. The greed and other associated moral
evils are made possible or brought into being because of the inability
of Willie Proudfit and his associates to control the forces which are
at work within them. Warren did not develop this story with the
detail he did the larger tales of characters like Percy Munn in Night_
Rider, Bogan Murdock in At Heaven's Gate, or Jeremiah Beaumont in
World Enough and Time, but Willie's obsession in an idea and his sub-
sequent isolation from the human community illustrated in his flight
into the mountains away from the "likker" and the “hoggishness in man,
and a hog-blindness," are just as real. His attempts to escape moral

evil brought him fever and suffering, and realization of the force of

39

metaphysical evil in him. "But no, ain't no man knows what the Lord's
done marked out fer him," Willie Proudfit told Percy Munn. "And
many's the pore, weakid man done looked on the face of blessedness.
bare-eyed, and ne'er knowed hit by name. Lak a blind man avliften his
face to the sun, and not knowen. Hit was a blessen the Lord laid on
me, and I praise hit." Willie had seen what Percy had not.

A concluding incident which Willie told Percy Munn was about
Willie's pa. In Willie's youth, his father had taken the family to
Arkansas because he did not want to fight in the War Between the States;
but, ironically, while Willie was away losing his innocence and learn-
ing the lesson of the power of evil in and around him, his father was
killed in a knife fight while defending the rebels he would not fight
with because they were not any more responsible for the war than any
other men. The murderer is never caught; Willie's father is dead, and
justice is never obtained. There is an apparent futility in the story
of Willie Proudfit; nevertheless, he has accepted the evil around and
within him. He is aware that he cannot escape from evil or remove it
from experience. He is able to live, while Percy Munn must die, running
from the law, pursued for a murder he did not commit. Munn had not
learned in time that simple, finite man could not irradicate evil even
from his own experience. His own actions will find their inexorable
conclusions, and he must face his own responsibility.

In order to illustrate further the principle that the devo-
tion of a human being to an ideal will lead him to evil when that ideal
is exposed to real experience or fact, any one of a number of religious

characters could be selected. Ashby Wyndham in At Heaven'state is led

40

to jail as an accessory to murder, because of his dedication to preach-
ing the Gospel. Munn Short in World Enough and Time is kept alive by
the man he had cuckolded. Ellis Burden forfeited his family in order
to preach the Gospel and show God's mercy to the poor in a Spanish
guetto in All the King's Men. In Band of Angels Seth Parton's dedica-
tion to the ideal of the possibility of sanctified joy is lost because
of his dedication to the abolition of slavery. In The Cave, MacCarland
Sumpter's dedication to his son cost him the love of the son for whom
he sacrificed his own reputation in his community. The very desire to
obey Jesus and not kill ironically led Monmorency Pugh in Wilderness

to murder the conscripter who came to force his service in the Civil
War. Calvin Fiddler was brought to murder and prison break because

of his jealous love for Maggie in flggg, His emphasis upon service in
the prison hospital highlights the futility of the empty lives of those
around him. The latest novel, Meet Me in the Green Glen returns to the
more pervasive pessimism. After the death of Angelo Passetto, the
insanity of Cassie Spottwood, and the suicide of Murray Guilfort, the
love and devotion of Corinne and Leroy Lancaster and the growing secular
realization of Cy Grinder are contrasted to the imbalance of those who
did not come to the calling of the game because of darkness. Through-
out his novels, Warren demonstrates again and again that the abstract
becomes the force of evil when it is improperly mixed with factuality
by the human failure to keep limitations in perspective or denying the
reality of the limitation. The message is again and again given that

for the vast majority of ordinary people, the improper mixture is

 

41

inevitable, as one learns that evil is an inevitable force in whatever
one does.

This principle is best illustrated by two of the "religious"
characters selected for this study, who were not named above. From A;_
Heaven's Gate and World Enough and Time, Jason Sweetwater, an Episcopal
priest's son, and Percival Skrogg, a former ministerial student, as
lapsarians, best represent what happens to most of Warren's central
characters.

Jason Sweetwater, the son of an Episcopalian Rector, had
rejected his father's view of God, had left the church, and thought
his father to be a simple-minded menace; but he did love and to a
degree respected his father. Some fifteen years after he had run
away from the University and a life which his father had planned for
him, Jason had come to believe one lesson his father had taught him:

“A man could not believe in himself unless he believed in something
else." He had come to know that what his father had taught him was
the truth by his continuous exposure to evil. Even though this expo—
sure is not developed in detail, the nature of it is indicated in a
single paragraph which is typical of the process by which Warren's

characters lose their innocence:

He had begun to learn that on the miserable, rat-infested, pest-
ridden schooner as it heaved greasily southward toward the Carib-
bean. He had learned that in the Marine Corps, in which he had
enlisted after one year at sea. He had learned it in France, in
great bitterness, and it had generated in him a cold ferocity

and a capacity for endurance. He had learned it later, in a
dozen ships, in fifty ports, San Francisco, Bombay, Aden, Lisbon,
Guayaquil, in hotels, barrooms, brothels, flophouses. He had
learned it in factories, on docks, in jails, on picket lines, at
the point of a gun, under the impact of the sawed-off baseball
bat, and from the electric, inchoate delight which tingled clean

42

to the shoulder when he first found the brittle bone of a jaw or
the softness of the belly. He had learned it from great dissipa-
tion from the observation of death, from violence, from loneliness,
and from considerable suffering.

For the purpose here, the important thing is not only that he had
learned that he could not believe just in himself—-simple self-
affirmation did not bring him any sense of fulfillment--but he had
learned also to accept his own past actions, despite the evil they
contained. "Now he could think back to that and see it," Warren tells
us of Sweetwater's reflection upon his past, "without the shame and
nausea. . . . It had had to be that way. I reckon, he said to himself,
a fellow dumb as I am has to get it the hard way, he has to be a son-
of-a-bitch before he can ever recognize one." The principle he had
come to believe in was the recognition and acceptance of himself and
others as human beings. Warren tells us that this principle gave him
an objective way to live his life: it made living simple. He could
now look at another person and see "just a poor, benighted hunk of
bone and gristle and fat meat, wearing pants or skirts as the case
might be, just a poor God-damned man or woman moving in the world."
Sweetwater's belief in the common humanity of man led him
into the life of a self-styled Marxist labor leader. It is he who
started the strike on Massey Mountain that eventually cost Ashby Wyndham
his job and sent him off the mountain and into the arms of Jesus. As
a labor leader, Jason had a messianic complex appropriate to a Marxist.
He believed himself to be the savior of men from suffering and pain.
"Sweetie, he said to himself, his hand lying on [Sue's] hair," in a

statement which reflects his self-concept, “you are a wonderful guy.

43

You are not a mess. You are superb. You are Socrates. You are

Bruce Barton. You are the Child Jesus expounding in the Temple. You
are Dorothy Dix. You take away the sins of the world. Your personality
is so God-damned fascinating." Certainly Jason Sweetwater began to
believe in himself when he began to believe in something else; however,
he also began to lose perspective upon his own humanity and to elevate
his own importance. It is at this point that he becomes an example

of Warren's man of Idea who turns his potential good into evil. His
efforts to bring justice and equity, "to take away the sins of the
world," for the laborers instead brought them misery, pain and suffer-
ing. Even his effort to love Sue Murdock brought her death.

He is one of the most important forces behind much of the
moral and nonmoral evil in the novel. Love of justice, the fighting
for the rights of the downtrodden, his effort to bring perfection and
to irradicate evil from human experience, his refusal to marry Sue
after she has become pregnant are primary forces behind the conflicts
and the encounters which end so disasterously for so many in the novel.
The ambiguity of his efforts is highlighted by his simply walking out
of the life of Sue Murdock after she tells him she is going to have
an abortion. He will not marry her, his principle will not allow it;
but his principled act brings her death because while she is weak and
indefensible after the operation, Slim Sarret kills her. Further,
Sweetwater had humiliated and dehumanized Slim in an earlier meeting
during which Slim had attempted to reestablish his relationship to
Sue. The ridicule heaped upon the homosexual Sarret by his defeat in

the rough and tumble fight with Sweetwater at Sue's caused Slim to

44

return and kill Sue. We are told nothing more about Sweetwater in the
novel. The morally ambiguous conclusion comes, as the story of
Sweetwater's actions clearly shows, as he became an embodiment of an
evil force even though his intentions were good and his actions based
upon his principles.

Through Jason Sweetwater, we are introduced to the notion of
the attempt to find meaning for one's self through belief in something
else. This is recognizable as an earlier appearance of the concept
developed in more detail by Cass Mastern in All the King's Men. Cass
came to recognize the great evil that lurks in the human frailty to
attempt to define oneself in another. Each must be himself, and each
must be true to the nature of things he finds within himself. If one
is not, then the danger illustrated by these characters who lose perspec-
tive on their ideals will trap him as well. I believe there is at
least a similarity between these notions and one expressed by Eric
Hoffer. "When our individual interests and prospects do not seem worth
living for," he wrote in The True Believer, "we are in desperate need
for something apart from us to live for. All forms of dedication, devo-
tion, loyalty and self-surrender are in essence a desperate clinging
to something which might give worth and meaning to our futile, spoiled
lives. Hence the embracing of a substitute will necessarily be pas-

sionate and extreme."13

The danger in this is illustrated over and
over again in the novels. Extreme dedication is a breaking of the
golden mean for happiness and fulfillment, and it becomes a force for

evil.

45

A second lapsarian religious character who illustrates
Warren's concept of metaphysical evil is Percival Skroggs of Wgrlg
Enough_and Time. Skrogg's life is a microcosm of Jeremiah Beaumont's
efforts and of many of Warren's other idealists. Just as Beaumont
had to learn about the relationship of his ideas to the real world,
so Skrogg was placed in a similar set of circumstances. The principal
difference between them is that Beaumont eventually does learn that he
must return and be hanged for his ruthless murder of his father-figure,
Casius Fort, acknowledging the crime he had done in darkness and
deceit. Ironically, just as Jeremiah Beaumont was never to make it
back to actually fulfill his realization, Percival Skrogg was to end
his life violently because, “at some point he had discovered," the
narrator tells us, "that he was part of the world, after all, and that
the pitiful body he wore was part of himself and precious. More pre-
cious than any idea," and his efforts to save his body brought his
death.

As a child Percival Skrogg was indoctrinated about a whimsi-
cal God identified in the narrative as the deity of the Presbyterianism.
His father adopted the qualities of this deity for himself, and the
father's outright contempt for his sickly son, forced Percival Skrogg
into a life of alienation, internal darkness, and a denial of reality
of the outside world. In concurrence with his father's desire that he
be a preacher, Skrogg went to Transylvania University to prepare to be
a minister. "We know little about the boy's years there," the narrator
states, "except that despite his ill health he was a devoted student
and a model of piety, famous for his dialectical skill and his nightly

46

vigils at prayer, his contempt for his own flesh and for the minds of
other men." The crises which ended in his denial of "the faith" came
during the middle of his last year; he left school, not waiting for
expulsion, and began a miserable life which was reputed to be madness
as he debated philosophic ideas and performed many noble acts of
charity, despite his own poverty. After the War of 1812, Skrogg became
editor of the Relief Party organ, Freeman's Advocate. While editing
this very controversial paper which was gaining influence and causing
havok in the Frankfort, Kentucky area, the intertwining of the action
of the characters in the novel inevitably brought Skrogg in contact
with Jeremiah Beaumont, the young idealist hero of the novel.

Political involvement, liberalism, Relief Party efforts,
scandal of atheism, and the betrayal of friendship for an ideal which
he himself was to betray are the characteristics of the life of Percival
Skrogg. They are shown over and over again in the novels. Sometimes
the person is a totally secular character such as Percy Munn in Night
3192!; Gerald Calhoun or Slim Sarrett in At Heaven's Gate, Tobias Sears
in Band of Angels, or Murray Guilfort in Meet Me in the Green Glen.

The pattern of life is much the same: the noble intention becomes the
occasion of evil; but even more, the power of evil in the character
takes on an awesome, often fearsome, force of the demonic. It must be
noted that while not all of the characters are equally despicable or
hateful, most of them take on the qualities of the villain as hero.

"A villain is a man who, for a selfish end willfully and deliberately
violates standards of morality sanctioned by the audience or ordinary

reader," Clarence Boyer has observed. "When such a character is given

47

a leading role, and when his deeds form the center of dramatic interest,
the villain has become protagonist, and we have the type of play with

the villain as hero."14

Ironically, the idealists of Warren's novels
often have a similar impact. While endeavoring to bring about good
ends, they do things that the moral standards of the readers are likely
to find odious; nevertheless, they do them with the hope that the end
will justify the means. However, their very attempt to be noble and
to bring about good by the use of evil turns the good into forces of
evil. They willfully do evil deeds while rationalizing them. They
murder, they burn or steal. Sexual crimes are frequent, and violation
of the humanity of another occurs often. Just as Percival Skrogg in
World Enough and Time, Jason Sweetwater in At Heaven's Gate, or Isaac
Sumpter in The Cave, they use others for their selfish gain doing
apparently noble things, and they become forces of evil.

I believe Warren has portrayed in these novels the observa-
tion of Rinehold Niebuhr that modern culture has a tendency to assume
that men are as good as the ideals of justice and love they entertain.
"Nevertheless" Niebuhr says, "this confusion does not justify extrava-
gant theories of total depravity, and such theories are not convincing

‘5 There is, however,

refutations of the error in liberal moralism."
wide agreement among the critics of Warren's work that one of the
points Warren is trying to make, in support of the notion he presents
in "Knowledge and the Image of Man" and "Literature and Crises," is
that the loss of a sense of sin and a failure to realize one's partici-
pation in it will cause one to become a force for the very evil he is

attempting to irradicate. It is, as Longley noted, "the truth . . . that

48

tragedy grows as often out of our own inordinate idealism as from the
grasping intentional evil of others" that is demonstrated in At Heaven's
§gtg_by Sweetwater, Sarrett, Calhoun, Murdock, Blake and the others.
Further, according to Elizabeth Kerr, it is the lack of balance between
the idea and the action related to the idea which causes the evil to
become a part of the real experience of the characters in All the

King's Men.16

Even a superficial survey of the themes and actions of
the characters in all of these novels would demonstrate the same

thing. From Percy Munn to Murray Guilfort--that is, from Night Rider

 

to Meet Me in the Green Glen, from 1939 to l971--there is an overwhelm-
ing recurrence of the notion that the effort to bring any form of
utopian idealism into reality will become a force, a personification of
the ever-present metaphysical evil in reality, destructive to those
ideals and to those who hold them. The characters like Willie Proudfit
or Leroy Lancaster live out the acknowledgment of the reality of the
evil force, and this causes the realization that the perfection desired
is not totally or fully attainable. The novels seem to support what
Niebuhr has suggested that utopian law of love or justice or world
peace or eternal personal happiness must stand on the "edge of history
and not in history, that [they] represent an ultimate and not an imme-

diate possibility."17

Modern liberal man has not learned that lesson,
and Warren's novels tell the story over and over again that they must
learn it, if they are to live. It is the conflict of the ideal and
the real and the development of the good as a force for evil that
created Warren's double hero. "The incompleteness of man," Hardy has

called it, "the struggle to reconcile the idea and the need of unity

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49

with the facts of multiplicity in human experience."18

In this, then,
Warren is giving dramatic, fictional life to the platonic principle
expressed by Paul Ricoeur that "evil is the consecration of multipli-
city in ourselves," and failure to recognize it will make us a force
for evii.19
The ideals held by the characters in the novels generally
reflect an awareness of what ought to be. "Man does not know merely
what is," Emil Brunner has said, "but [also] what ought to be.“ This
sense of the "ought to be" in human experience is the essence of
idealistic philosophy, which "since the days of Plato," Brunner con-
tinues, "has not ceased to inspire men and to move them to high
things."20 Certainly there are in Warren's works many characters who
exercise a system of values based upon this platonic notion; however,
I believe that it is significant that the overall impact of the novels
is more Aristotelian than platonic. For example, while discussing
Aristotle's ethical views, Copleston points out that Aristotle's chief
objection to platonic idealism was its failure to bridge the gap
between the sensible objects of ordinary experience and the ideal.21
Aristotle viewed the innate potentials of reality as the ideals which
are then to be given form in actual experience. This seems to be
what the novels are saying through those characters who are alive when
the novels end. The so-called Calvinists reflect this. Willie
Proudfit, Ashby Wyndham, Munn Short, MacCarland Sumpter, Ellis and
Jack Burden, Monmorency Pugh, Lettice Poindexter Tolliver, and Leroy

Lancaster, all demonstrate in one way or another that the gap between

the ideal and the real must be bridged in order for one to remain alive.

50

Each to some degree has, and most have done so by simply acknowledging
the mixed nature they have, and the reality of the evil that is at the
core of their being. The more detailed treatment of that evil is

developed below under the consideration of original sin; nevertheless,
they all recognize some force as evil and learn to deal with it by not

attempting to remove it from their total experience.
God and Evil

When consideration of God and evil is undertaken in Warren,
it is mandatory to begin with the observation of Ellis Burden, the
Scholarly Attorney, at the end of All the King's Men. He has been
taken to Jack Burden's home; and there he will live, in the house
that was once the home of Judge Montague Irwin, the biological father
of Jack Burden, Ellis Burden's legal son. The old man is weak, so he
must dictate his thoughts to Jack because of his frailty. "Separate-
ness is identity and the only way for God to create, truly create,
man," the Scholarly Attorney said, "was to make him separate from God
Himself, and to be separate from God is to be sinful. The creation
of evil is therefore the index of God's glory and His power." Placing
God in the center of his thinking about evil, the Scholarly Attorney
has touched upon the central concern in the problem of evil, the
relation of God to evil. Clearly he affirms that God created evil,
because evil by definition is separation from God; and creation by
definition must be separate from God in order to have identity. Within
the context of Warren's works as a whole, this observation is of great

importance. It is the separation from God and the great quest for

51

self-knowledge or identity which symbolize Warren's principal concern.
The thoughts which he expressed in "Knowledge and the Image of Man "
stress that it is in God that this quest for self-knowledge takes place,
because "each soul has value in God's sight. Or, with the seculariza-
tion of things, we may say: every soul is valuable in man's sight."22
In stating his belief that God created evil, the old man
has expressed his agreement with the Old Testament prophets. Isaiah
45:7 states flatly, "1 form the light, and create darkness; I make
peace, and I create evil: I the Lord do all these things." Amos 3:6
asks a rhetorical question, "Shall there be evil in a city, and the
Lord hath not done it?" While it is not the purpose of this study
to expose the concept of evil presented by the Hebrew prophets, their
notion of evil is similar to that reflected by Ellis Burden. Clearly,
as stated above, the prophets viewed God as the originator of evil;
however, often the evil they have in mind, as implied by the word RA
()F\) is the normal word for badness, or to bring harm or sorrow.23
It is more closely associated with moral and natural evil than with
metaphysical evil. It is that evil which Adam and Eve learned as
distinct from good when they partook of the fruit of the tree of the
knowledge of good and evil. It is important that generally in Hebrew
and Christian thinking, there is no actual concept of a metaphysical
evil except as it is represented in the actions of Satan, the evil
one. There is, however, in this concept a notion of practical dualism.
That is, in so far as ordinary human experience is concerned, there

are two forces--good and evil. The first is represented in God, the

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in his book, The Problem of Evil, which is essentially a commentary on
the Book of Job. Also in the book, The Two Hands of God, Alan Watts
discusses the myths of the forces of good and evil from several cultural
backgrounds, one of which is the Judaeo-Christian.24 It is generally
conceded that the general conception of good and evil in the Judaeo-
Christian heritage is not ultimately a dualism; however, there is a
practical, daily confrontation with the powers of darkness, both within
the individual and in the world around him. The Apostle Paul called
this a power of the principalities of the air. There are those, how-
ever, who insist that the belief in an eternal hell for the punishment
of the devil and his angels would in fact be an affirmation of a kind
of dualistic force in the power of evil. This is relevant to our
present study because several characters in the novels, such as Ellis
Burden in All the King's Men and Nick Pappy in The Cave, express some
belief in the power of evil in relationship to the power of God.

If evil is found in the essential nature of things, the
state of being separate from God, then the very act of creation
brings the nature of evil right to the heart of being itself. It is,
however, argued by such theologians as Rinehold Niebuhr that the doc-
trine of creation instead of affirming duality, is actually an arugment
against it because God is, in fact, the source of evil, and He will
ultimately dominate it. However, Warren does not attempt to create
a theodicy in the novels; that is, he does not really attempt to
reconcile the nature of God and the presence of evil. Instead, he
presents statements like those of the Scholarly Attorney which tend

to stress some of the orthodox forms of Calvinism. In Calvinism

53

there is no absolute dualism, even though man is subject to the power

of original sin in him; but that evil is the creation of man, not of
God, and evil is not eternal. Man created evil by his rebellion

against the revealed will of God. At this point, it does not seem that
the statement of Ellis Burden could qualify as a "Calvinistic" one.

The form of metaphysical evil present in Warren's novels in this respect
is found in evil being a quality of limitation proper to being itself
rather than a dualistic force equal to the power of Good.

Because God had created evil in the separation of creation
from Himself, the Scholarly Attorney goes on to say that the creation
of good becomes the measure of man's glory. Actually, the discussion
of the possibility of dualism in Warren's novels is difficult because
there is no consistent evidence for a power for good as well as for a
power for evil. For example, while Willie Stark is discussing Hugh
Miller's desire for good with Adam Stanton, one of the secular ideal-
ists, and Jack Burden, Willie affirms that we must make what good
we can out of badness, because badness is all there is for us to work

with. Willie continued,

When your great-great-grandpappy climbed down out of the tree, he
didn't have any more notion of good or bad, or right or wrong,
than the hoot owl that stayed up in that tree. Well, he climbed
down and he began to make Good up as he went along. He made up
what he needed to do business, Doc. And what he made up and got
everybody to mirate on as good and right was always just a couple
of jumps behind what he needed to do business on. That's why
things change, Doc. Because what folks claim is right is always
just a couple of jumps behind what he needed to do business.

The remainder of Stark's discussion is a presentation of the utilitarian
or pragmatic notion of the relativity of good and evil, with the evil

being only that which does not help or that which frustrates one's own

54

purpose. The good is whatever allows business to be conducted; the evil
is whatever does not allow business to be conducted. The Scholarly
Attorney also affirms that the creation of good is the index to the
glory of man, presumably because all that man has to work with is
tainted by his separation from God in creation. In a world like that
of Willie Stark and the Scholarly Attorney, there could be no metaphysi-
cal evil in the sense of dualism; but because evil (badness) is a
final and ultimate characteristic of being itself, there is a metaphysi-
cal evil.

While reflecting upon some of the tracts that Ellis Burden
had written, Jack Burden became introspective about the nature of God.
According to the elder Burden, God is the “Fullness of Being." Paren-
thetically, the thoughts of Jack are presented: "For Life is Motion
toward Knowledge. If God is Complete Knowledge then He is Complete
Non-Motion, which is Non-Life, which is Death. Therefore, if there is
such a God of Fullness of Being, we would worship Death, the Father."
The old man attempts to argue the point, but it is futile. Jack then
leads into some musings about the relationship of History, Knowledge,
and Life, as he argues against the possibility of God as the Fullness
of Being. The old man reprimands him for thinking in finite terms,
promising to pray for his soul. "But even if I didn't believe in the
old man's God," Jack continues in his mind, "that morning as I stood
at the window of the Capitol and looked down on the crowd, I felt like
God, because I had the knowledge of what was to come. I felt like God

brooding on History. . . . But to me they looked like History, because

55

I knew the end of the event of which they were a part. Or thought I
knew the end."

The relationship of God or a concept of God to History has
been explored by several critics;26 but for our purpose it is good to
keep in mind that the past has a special interest to Warren; there-
fore, the metaphysical force of history is discussed below in a
separate division, but now it is significant that Jack Burden comes
to consider in the end that he does have a responsibility to bear the
burden of time. Further, Ellis Burden's view of God influenced Jack.
"I nodded my head and said yes," Jack said after Ellis Burden asked
him if he knew that the statement about God were true. "(I did so to
keep his mind untroubled, but later I was not certain but that in my
own way I did believe what he had said.)" I believe this implies that
he changed from the cynical view of God cited earlier to a view much
more like that expressed by the Scholarly Attorney. Evil is a neces-
sary, inevitable manifestation of present being, because it is separated
from God; and the responsibility of man is to bring about fullness of
being by acceptance of his limitations and responsibility for the evil
manifested by himself in time. God's relationship to evil in human
life is as the creator of that life, but it is man's responsibility
for the particular manifestations of that evil in history.

Another example occurs in The Cave, as Jasper Harrick lies
trapped in a cave. MacCarland Sumpter, a Baptist preacher, is exhort-
ing the crowd, but the sermon comes to the reader through the con-
sciousness of Nick Papadoupalous. In the message, Sumpter is stressing

the omniscience of God by uSing the familiar Biblical image of the

56

fallen sparrow. In his mind, Nick begins to blame God for the things
that are happening to himself and to Jasper and praise God because

some men are able to endure the evil that is visited upon them. As
Jack Harrick told his wife when she demanded that he pray that God
would not let anything happen to Jasper in the ground, "He let the
world happen, didn't he?" The implication is that we should not expect
God to do anything. Further, neither Jack Harrick nor Mac Sumpter knew
"what God will take in hand to do." None of the characters who con-
tinue to live presume to know; but like Lettice Poindexter in flggg,
they seek to know "the nowness of God's will."

Resignation is the dominant mood of the religious with
respect to the presence of evil in experience. Lucy Stark, near the
end of All the King's Men, reflects on the type of resignation common
among these religious characters when she accepts Willie for what he
was, a good man who had made some bad mistakes, or a bad man who had
done some good, but nevertheless, a great man. She demonstrates what
Sontag has called the Kierkegaardian position in which "a naturally
religious person may simply accept evil's presence without complaint."27
Because the religious are usually absolutists to some degree, they
also reflect the point which Stalnaker says is common to all absolu-
tists: "Evil is inherent in the finite existence and thus shares the
fate of all finite existence, that is, ultimate unreality."28 However,
they do not depend upon God to take the evil from them. In fact, as
Cass Mastern learned, "man is never safe and damnation is ever at

hand." The idea that man is ever threatened by evil and will never

be delivered completely from that threat in this life by God is

 

:6

.l"

n

 

57

developed further below in the consideration of the metaphysical
implications of the doctrine of original sin as demonstrated in the
novels.

God is presented as separate from human life, and man is
presented as alienated from God. For example, in The Cave, Ikey
Sumpter had come to believe in no God; therefore, he concluded, there
was no self either. He is an example of a negative reinforcement to
the principle Cass Mastern had learned in All the King's Men: it is
essential to define the self "in God and in His great eye." Even
though Cass did finally realize the error he had committed in attempt-
ing to define himself in some other self, apart from God, he dies in
a hospital from a wound he sought in battle. God does not spare any-
one, even those who through suffering learn the relationship of evil
to themselves.

With respect to the problem of evil, no satisfactory solution
is presented in terms of a justification of the existence of God as a
moral being, in control of history. God and History are usually pre-
sented as morally neutral, and mankind is on its own to function as
best it can under the burden of its own responsibility (Cf. All the
King's Men, p. 418). Except in some negative cases, such as that of
Percival Skrogg in World Enough and Time who rejects the stern, whim-
sical God of his Presbyterian parents in favor of the abstract notion
0fJustice within his own head, an affirmation of a concept of an
Hmolute, Dispotic, Sovereign God who totally controls destiny is
vhtually absent from the novels. In fact, the weight of the experi-

emms of such characters as MacCarland Sumpter and Jack Harrick in The

58

Cg!g_and other of the pious religious characters offer no explana-
tions, only acceptance of evil as a real part of their experience, a
permanent part of earthly reality and--in some unexplained, mysterious
way--giving an opportunity to reflect upon the notion that suffering
is really a favor from God. Nick is nearly overcome by anxiety because
of Sumpter's use of the word ngjgr, but as Mac Sumpter moved toward
the conclusion of his sermon, he called out, "Oh, God, all pain will
end in Glory! Oh, God, we thank Thee for Jasper Harrick." The rela-
tionship of suffering as such to the concept of evil in the novels is
developed in Chapter Four below, but it is also of interest here
because it reflects the idea that sometime suffering will be done

away in the presence of God. This idea does not occur often in the
novels because of the overall thrust of the works to deal with the
present life and not the eternal life in a promised heaven; however,
the testimonies of Willie Proudfit, Ashby Wyndham, Lucy Stark, Cass
Mastern, Munn Short, the young Seth Parton, Uncle Rosenzweig, Brother
Potts and Corinne Lancaster support the idea that suffering will find
its end in God's fulness. God has created all things, including

evil, but evil will come to an end in God because, as Mac Sumpter
declared, he has to believe God to be a just and merciful God or else

he coqu not bear to live. Further, Willie Proudfit in Night Rider

 

hekithat God has a great plan by which He will manage all things for
tMegood of His creatures, even the sparrow. In God's overall plan,
M8CSumpter further insisted in The Cave, that the justice of God is
mm shown in "the casualness of earthly consequences," but only in

the great beyond. In these and similar instances, the religious

 

 

59

characters commonly say that they believe evil is not a metaphysical
evil in the sense of its being an eternal principle of Ultimate
Reality, because Being can find its fulfillment in God; but it could
be considered a metaphysical principle in that evil is the finite
limitation proper to the creatures. God's grace is credited by the
pious for their having the opportunity to come to know Him and by
knowing Him they know themselves, and this is basic Calvinism.29
Those who learn of themselves and survive do, in fact, have some con-
frontation with the power outside themselves. It is in God that men
know themselves and, therefore, are able to come to terms with the evil
in themselves, to accept their responsibility for their own moral evil,
and to endure the pain and suffering which living brings. However, if
the character develops some notion of being "called of God'' such as
Willie Stark had in the beginning of All the King's Men, his tendency

is to be out of "touch with the world," and in his own human extremity,

is destroyed by the power of evil within him; his separateness.
History as Metaphysical Evil

Blanding Cottshill in flggd, informed Brad Tolliver, during
the final church service in Fiddlersburg, that the Black preacher, Leon
Pinckney, had "out-foxed Brother Potts," the White preacher, by not
joining him and his congregation in his final effort "to pray with the
colored for God to grant mercy and reconciliation and what-all might
be necessary to undo the work of History." He went on to explain that
Pinckney would not allow the Whites the easy way out of the burden of

their responsibility for the racial problems of the South. In his

6O

presentation of "the work of History," Warren presents the past as a
dynamic source for evil, just as he has maintained Faulkner had done.30
Just as Brother Potts was not able to undo the work of human history,
mankind in general is caught in their situation, and they are unable
to rid themselves of the evil done before them. Warren affirms in fig
Heaven's Gate that all men are like Bogen Murdock, as Slim Sarrett
analyzed him, trapped and sick with the disease of his time, whatever
it might be.

"History is always, in one perspective," Warren has stated,
"the record of man's failure to realize his fine ideals, or the cynical
use of ideals as masks for brutal and self-aggrandizing action, and at
the very basis of the community created in the South, there was a
primary violation of the 'truth'--the institution of chattel slavery."31
His observation of the moral force of history for evil in Faulkner is
relevant to our investigation of his concept of evil. For example,
the young Seth Parton, in Band of Angels, berates Manty Starr because
her father has masked the evil of slavery by his very good treatment
of them. "But he is good," Manty insisted. "'I am not concerned with
your father as a person,’ Seth Parton said. 'What is the small and
foolish goodness of a person? May not the Adversary use best our
small personal goodness for the greatness of Evil?'" It is significant
that this illustration occurs in a discussion of slavery, the very
evil Warren is discussing in the above criticism as the example of a
dynamic source for evil from the past.

In a subsequent conversation with Parton about the problem

of her father's goodness and the evil it hides, Manty "felt that he

61

could live out his own kind of goodness, and badness, and had nothing
to do with the strangeness of the moment." However, the epigram
Warren chose for Band of Angels registers Manty's plaintiff cry, "When
shall I be dead and rid/ Of the wrong my father did?" This quotation
from Housman captures the essence of the struggle of the characters in
most of Warren's novels as they try to find a way to deal with the sins
of their fathers. As Manty was to suffer because of her father's sin,
her past became the dynamic source of evil in her life. Just as in
ancient religions, Time is regarded as the source from which are pro-

duced the forces of good and evil.32

As Chronos is the primal force
in Greek thought, Time is the "convulsion of the world" which Jack
Burden characterizes in All the King's Men as "out of history into
history and the awful responsibility of Time."

Speaking about the past, Jack Burden voiced the view of
human history which is consistently developed in the novels. He called
it "the ash pile, the midden, the sublunary dung heap, which is the
human past." Buried somewhere in every past there is that threat
which is the power of evil. Further, the weight of the past as a
force for evil is demonstrated by Charles Allen. "Band of Angels
focuses sharply on Warren's central meaning. Acceptance of the parent
symbolizes a realistic appraisal of the past; symbolizes an estimation

33 In other

of strength and fallibility, and an acceptance of them."
words, an acceptance of evil which is central to one's survival often
is demonstrated by the simple acceptance of one's parents. While it

is not given the central place in Meet Me in the Green Glen that it is

kl

62

in some of the earlier novels, the same notion is illustrated by
Warren's development of Leroy Lancaster.

In the last novel, Leroy certainly is the “King" which his
name implies. His beautiful wife and he demonstrate the ability to
come to terms with the evil in them and in their past. The evil in
their past is symbolized by Leroy's reflective walk during his crisis
as he views his parent's house in its decay; he is able to find a
measure of happiness and contentment only when he is able to answer
his internal question "What is wrong with me?" by confronting his
past as symbolized by his parent's influence upon him. He had
returned from college to take up his father's law practice in Parker-
ton, and he felt himself to be the conscience of Parkerton. As long as
he remained under the power of his father's influence, he could not
establish himself as a being separate from his concept of what his
father was. He was overwhelmed by guilt and unworthiness and was
bowed by his own sense of dislocation. "The house was on the edge of
town," the narrator says of Leroy's parent's house in which he now
lived with his wife, “the last house with a sidewalk to it, disinte-
grating concrete with smartweed crawling in the cracks, and beyond
this point, open country." A decaying house, set on the edge of town,
is the only thing between him and the freedom symbolized by the "open
country." It is an apt symbol of his past, which is a force for evil
in his life.

The same principle is illustrated in The Cave. Jack and
Celia Harrick are convinced that it is because of the father's wish

for the death of their son that Jasper had been trapped in the cave.

-_---.

_._—-

63

Were Jack not a Medal of Honor winner, were he not the man his reputa-
tion made him to be, were he not the prize convert of MacCarland
Sumpter, were he not what he was, his son, Jasper, would not be suf-
fering in the cave. Likewise, were Isaac Sumpter not the son of the
Baptist minister, he would not be the force of evil he is in the same
novel. The influence of the past, represented by the relationship of
the fathers and sons in the novels, is demonstrated as a force with
transcendent power, a metaphysical force for evil in the lives of the
characters.

The same principle may be demonstrated in each of the novels,
by nearly all of the characters. While it may not be a biological
father, it is at least a father figure. Cassius Fort is a father
figure for Jeremiah Beaumont in World Enough and Time. Senator Tolliver

and Bill Christian are father figures for Percy Munn in Night Rider.

 

It has been suggested that Judge Irwin, the biological father of Jack
Burden, had had more influence upon him that his legal father, the
Scholarly Attorney had had. However, both of them represent the
spiritual forces for evil in Jack Burden's life. In Wilderness and
Elggg, the force of the parent is illustrated. Adam Rosenzweig is
forced to go to America, even as a cripple, because his father was a
freedom fighter in Europe. Brad Tolliver and Calvin Fiddler are pro-
ducts of their parents and subject to their evil forces in their decay-
ing hometown, Fiddlersburg, which is about to be drowned out by the
forces of progress which built the dam. However, in every case men-
tioned above, the child is never really free of the evil his father

has done; he can only accept it for what it is and begin to live under

64

the burden of time it represents. In some cases, mothers fill the
same psychological function. For example, Lettice Tolliver and
Rachel Jorden Beaumont are both subject to the force of evil repre-
sented by their mothers.

In addition to the relationship to the parents, the memory
of the characters symbolizes the weight which the past has upon them.
In the confusion of the present, past, and future which is frequently
shown in the novels, the influence of the past for evil is shown. It
represents that primal fecund darkness in the person out of which he
must create his being. It is the recollection from which Plato felt
all knowledge comes. According to Jung, it is in the memory of the
race that the collective unconscious is informed. Similar notions are
developed in Warren's novels. Lettice Poindexter Tolliver, the sensual
lady from flggg_who becomes the suffering servant in a Chicago home
for the aged, is an example of a religious character who demonstrates
the need to recall. Before her conversion, the following insight into

her development is given.

She thought that this reliving was a penance she would have to go
through. Alone, she would have to relive it all--

The room on MacDougal Street--that was the place where her past
was re-enacted. The re-living happened only when she came
there. Coming into the dark vestibule she would stand before
the door, the key in her hand, afraid to enter. But she always
did. And there it would be the old, silver—jagged movie reel,
something you had to endure without music, hearing only the
pitiless whirring grinding of the projector in our head.34

Just as Warren had done in the earlier novel All the King's Men with

35

Jack Burden, memory here is symbolized by movies in the head. Notice

that it is in the room which she always entered, the darkness of her

65

head, that the penance of recollection was carried out. This is very
typical. She must remember and confess the past. She is involved
with herself in the burden of her history, the story of her self-
definition for good or evil.

Brad Tolliver, the central character of flggg, upon whom the
religious characters--Lettice Tolliver, Brother Potts, and Leon Pickney--
have their influence and from whom they derive their narrative impor-
tance, gave a very significant parody of a passage of scripture: "Suf-
ficient unto the day is the history thereof." It is important that for
"history,“ the Bible says "evil." However, history is considered
morally neutral by Jack Burden in All the King's Men; even though only
a few pages later, after Jack had discovered that the "evil“ Judge
Irwin and not the pious Ellis Burden is his father, he says, "I could
now accept the past which I had before felt was tainted and horrible.

I could accept the past now because I could accept her [his mother and
the sin to which his existence testifies] and be at peace with her and
with myself." History itself may be morally neutral, but it can become
a force for evil if responsibility is not personally accepted.

In contrast to Uncle Rosenzweig's dedication to the Jewish
tradition and law, Aaron Blaustein in Wilderness challenges Adam
Rosenzweig with the notion that History replaces God in man's life
because History is the reason for things. "If you have stopped wor-
shiping God," Aaron says to Adam, "all you can fall back on is History.“
Further, "only by learning it can you live," Aaron says to a nauseated
Adam. "That is the only way I can live. Whatever comes out of History--

out of this anguish even--will come only because everything is part of

66

everything else. . . . even the good." However, he defines history
as "the agony people have to go through," Aaron Blaustein said, "so
that things will turn out as they would have turned out anyway.“
Later in the novel, Monmorency Pugh is a vital demonstration of this
irony. His refusal to kill in the Civil War, out of obedience to
Jesus, lead him to kill the conscripter. His history is the agony
he went through to do what would have happened anyway--killing.

It is in the irony of history, the Burden of Time, as John
L. Stewart says in his book of the same title, which makes history a
metaphysical force for metaphysical evil. "Time signifies the whole
of reality as man apprehends it," Stewart says, "which is a series of
events. Even 'things' and ideas or values are really process that
change; that is history. The egotist tries to establish his dream
against or outside Time, and one reason for his rejecting the father
is that the father embodies the past and illustrates the inevitable

36 For example, even though MacCarland

mutability of human affairs."
Sumpter in The Cave admonished Celia Harrick to "Remember not the
sins of [his] youth," she looked at her husband in the wheel chair;
and she "suddenly saw that face, not as a staring, ruined, massive old
face of the moment, but as a face yelling for joy and smeared with
bear-blood. And she thought: it is his sin.

"She thought: He was young all those years before I was
born, and he sinned. Oh, it's not fair, for I wasn't even born, and
I have to suffer for the sins of his youth and--." These are examples

of the burden of time as illustrated in the novels which indicate the

metaphysical force of history for evil. But as Brad Tolliver realizes

67

at the end of £1999, the weight of the sins of the past will exceed
the rememberance of the generations who gave them form, as symbolized
by the unremembered generations who will not be moved from the old
cemetery of Fiddlersburg. The weight of sin is greater than the
rememberance of it.

The force of the memory is demonstrated in the novels by
the importance Warren gives to the flashback and the confession. In
Night Rider, it is Willie Proudfit's rememberance of things past
which is the key to his narrative importance and his influence upon
Munn. The entire statement of Ashby Wyndham in At Heaven's Gate is
a recollection in the form of a confession of his guilt. Even Jason
Sweetwater recalls his confrontations with the mulatto whore in
Galveston as he says to Sue, "Forget it. . . . Do something and it'll
be all right. You'll forget it then. And then it won't matter if you
do remember it." He says this because he thinks Sue picks the scabs
of her memory too much, and she has not yet been able to "boil the
pus out" that is in everybody. Memory is the key to understanding
the self.

In contrast to the self-understanding Willie Proudfit has
which is shown by his ability to remember his tale, Percy Munn has
had difficulty dealing with his memory. "The things you remembered,
they were what you were. But every time you remembered them you were
different. For a long time you would not notice any difference, as
you noticed no difference in the spring when, day after day in the
warm nights, the leaves thickened on the boughs, or in the fall slowly

dropped away; until the time comes when, all at once, there was the

68

difference." It is during this time that Munn is having the greatest
difficulty sorting out the evil in his actions to bring form to his
ideal in the association of tobacco growers. The burden of the
memory is his unaccepted evil.

Perhaps the idea, which is expressed in all the novels, is
best said in All the King's Men. "I tried to tell her," Jack Burden
had said to his mother, "how if you could not accept the past and its
burden there was no future, for without one there cannot be the other,
and how if you could accept the past you might hope for the future,
for only out of the past can you make the future." And she responded,
"I believe that, for if I had not come to believe it I could not have
lived." In his last novel, Leroy Lancaster came to a similar conclu-
sion and Cy Grinder is approaching it as Meet Me in the Green Glen
comes to a close. Acceptance of one's past is an affirmation of one's
future. It is, as Paul Riecoeur has noted, that realization that evil
is the past of being itself, as old as the oldest beings--parents, Adam,

ancestors, whatever but God is the future of being.37

"Meaning is
never in the event, but in the motion through the event," Jack Burden
said. "The present moment is the point of time in which the past is
made manifest and the future determined," Bohner has said concerning
Jack's previous remark. "Life is motion, a process, not of being, but
of becoming. Thus a matured and chastened Jack Burden can enter,
with Anne Stanton, 'the convulsion of the world, out of history into
history, and the awful responsibility of Time."'38
According to Niebuhr, the view of history as a dynamic is

associated with the Renaissance; however, the modern tendency is to

69 *~

deny that this dynamic is a two—fold force both for good and for evil.
Warren's novels demonstrate agreement with Niebuhr in that they show
that role of history in the definition of a soul is for good or evil.
Warren also rejects the modern conception that the end is only in

fulfillment.39

The end can be devastating and destructive of human
potentials in judgment. Further, Warren holds that a writer has the
responsibility "to reason himself into the appropriate relation to

the past."40

A proper relationship with the past, one which reflects
the burden of the responsibility of time which his works demonstrate,
is one which recognizes the endless potentials of history for good

and evil. If one is to live, Warren's novels say over and over again,
he must recognize what Niebuhr calls the tragic aspect of history;
that is, "that every new human potency may be an instrument of chaos
as well as of order; and that history . . . has no solution of its own

problem."41

Ultimately then, in time there is no removal of the final
corruptions of history (the weight of the past, the burden of time).
In short, one must realize as the younger Willie Stark had in All the
Kigg's Men, when he said of the past, "I bet things were just like

they are now. A lot of folks wrassling around."
Necessity and Evil

The previous section which treated the possibility of history
or time having the role of a force for metaphysical evil suggests the
next area of consideration: the part played by necessity in the pre-
sentation of the concept of evil in the novels. The concept of neces-

sity is related to the notions of cause and effect, and it is associated

70

with various doctrines of determinism. As indicated in Van A. Harvey's
Handbook of Theological Terms, it is possible for any system of thought
which rests upon the notions of cause and effect to be considered a

form of determinism.42

Even though there are, in philosophy and
theology, various approaches to the relationship of events (actions)
to some cause and the effects which follow them, essentially, necessity
indicates that inevitable or required relationship between cause and
effect, while ghggg§_relates to the uncaused, arbitrary, or gratuitous
relationship between events or actions to any other event or being.
Often there is a metaphysical basis upon which a given view of deter-
minism is based as in materialism or naturalism in which a necessary
relationship between causes and their effects usually is believed to
pertain. The tension between cause and effect and the free or inde-
pendent action is an important one in Warren.

The concern over the relationship of necessity and chance

is evident from the first of the novels through the last. Percy Munn

is the product of many forces throughout the course of Night Rider.

 

The determinism implied in the very opening of the novel is important.
After his arrival by train, Munn is forced along with the crowd in
Bardsville. The train and the people are symbols of two of these
forces: mechanized, modern society and public opinion. In the end,
when Munn is in hiding at Proudfit's farm, he is the product, the
determined end, of those forces. The rise of the industrial complex
which makes the efforts of the independent farmers more and more sub-
ject to the will of the big money interests is the precipitating force

for the action of the novel. Further, Munn continually is the victim

71

of the pressure of public opinion, or the opinion of others. Through-
out the novel he is forced to act, such as his giving the speech at
the organizational rally for the association of tobacco growers, not
because he freely wants to act, but because he is subject to the influ-
ence of the position and wishes of others.

Just as Jeremiah Beaumont began to feel himself to be a
chip tossed to and fro on the sea as the pressure of the trial was
building, Warren consistently shows that many of his characters are not
free of the influence of the determining actions of others. Virtually
every character is the subject of the determinism around him. These
forces are often symbolized in economic and political terms. The cen-
tral characters of the novels are "inevitably" the product of some
force or other. Munn in Night Rider was mentioned above as the product
of the will of others and of the forces of economic interest around
him. In At Heaven's Gate Jerry Calhoun is determined by his paternity
and the social, economic and political forces symbolized by Bogan
Murdock's materialism. Caught between the forces, Jerry is nearly
destroyed; but in the end there is some kind of promise as he returns
home, while released from jail on bond as he awaits his trial for his
"fooling around at the bank, for fooling with folk's money." The ten—
sion between Jerry's past as shown by his father and the house full of
old relatives and the promise of the future as represented by Murdock's
immoral materialism is ambiguously demonstrated by the determinism
apparent in Jerry's life. He really does not decide anything, other
than the initial decision to work for Murdock. But after the decision

is made, the forces begin to work.

72

Much like the forces which have been discussed previously
in the relationship of the ideal and the real and the force of the
past, each of the novels is a massive demonstration of the causal
relationship of things. What Elizabeth Kerr has said about Jack
Burden could be said about any one of the characters in the novels.
"The inexorable working of cause and effect," she has noted, "forces
Jack to alter his basic attitudes and to recognize his own share of

responsibility in what has happened."43

There are in All the King's
Mgh_two basic symbols of determinism which are centrally important
to Warren's novels and by themselves will illustrate the type of
determinism present in all of the novels.

The first is the so-called "Great Twitch" which Jack Burden
came to believe in during part of his intellectual and emotional
maturation. After the events of the novel built to the confrontation
between Anne Stanton and Jack Burden over her father's role in the evil
done by Judge Irwin, she is in a position which demonstrates that after
the discovery of her father's sin she had no reason not to sin, too.
She became Willie Stark's mistress. After learning about this, Jack
is forced to find a way of escape. In a very Warrenesque fashion, he
heads West. While in California, Jack is forced again to take a good
long look at the interrelated nature of things. If his supposed
father, the Scholarly Attorney, had not done what he had done, regard-
less of what it was, then these things would not be happening to Jack

now. The Great Twitch represents a naturalistic determinism.

73

Jack was struck by the twitch on the face of an old man to
whom he had given a ride while returning from his flight west. His

great insight was that twitch in the left cheek.

The twitch was simply an independent phenomenon, unrelated to
the face or to what was behind the face or to anything in the
whole tissue of phenomena which is the world we are lost in.
It was remarkable, in that face, the twitch which lifted that
little life all its own. I squatted by his side, where he sat
on a bundle of rags from which the handle of a tin skillet
protruded, and listened to him talk. But the words were not
alive. What was alive was the twitch, of which he was no
longer aware.44

It is this Great Twitch which Cleanth Brooks referred to as the "auto-

matic response" in mechanism.45

At this stage of his development,

Jack Burden concluded that "the twitch was all." The event is empha-
sized by the narrative structure in that immediately after his mystical
vision of the Great Twitch, Jack is with Adam Stanton, and they discuss
the prefontal lobectomy. "Well, you forgot to baptize him," Jack said

to Adam after the operation was over.

"Baptize him?" Adam asked, sliding out of the white nightshirt.
"Yeah," I said, "for he is born again and not of woman. I
baptize thee in the name of the Big Twitch, the Little Ewitch,
and the Holy Ghost. Who, no doubt, is a Twitch, too."4

Later, while watching a young couple playing tennis, Jack again
refers to the Great Twitch. He said that the young people did not
understand that things would change, that things would not remain
the same, they would not be this way forever: "they did not know
the wisdom of the Great Twitch."

As the conclusion of the novel is being reached, Jack sum-

marizes the impact of the Willie Stark story upon himself:

74

This has been the story of Willie Stark, but it is my story
too. For I have a story. It is the story of a man who lived
in the world and to him the world looked one way for a long
time and then it looked another and very different way. The
change did not happen all at once. Many things happened, and
that man did not know when he had any responsibility for them
and when he did not. There was, in fact, a time when he came
to believe that nobody had any responsibility for anything
and there was no god but the Great Twitch.

The Twitch for Burden became a way to escape personal guilt or

responsibility for his actions. The narrative continues:

But later, much later, he woke up one morning to discover

that he did not believe in the Great Twitch any more. He

did not believe in it because he had seen too many people live
and die. He had seen Lucy Stark and Sugar-Boy and the Scholarly
Attorney and Sadie Burke and Anne Stanton live and the ways of
their living had nothing to do with the Great Twitch. He had
seen his father die. He had seen Willie Stark die, and had
heard him say with his last breath, "It might have been all
different, Jack. You got to believe that."48

The conflict between Willie Stark and Adam Stanton could not be
resolved by belief in absolute necessity as indicated by the automatic
response of the twitch. Even though the old man had not been aware of
the Twitch, Jack had once thought, it would inevitably be there and
necessarily bring things to be, but his overall experience spoke
against it. He could not escape his responsibility by belief in
natural necessity.

The twitch, as a natural response, is frequently used in
the novels. Even though it is seldom used with reference to the reli-
gious characters, it is an important image. For example, the image of

twitching frog legs is used with reference to Jack Harrick as he felt

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75

terror while holding his wife's hand in the darkness. Significantly,
in The Cave, another reference to twitching is the hair of dancing
artist, Giselle Fontaine, whose real name was Sarah Pumfret, the
wife of Nick Papadoupalous. In both cases, the twitch is used in
contexts in which the character aware of the twitch is confused
by the dream-reality dichotomy. The twitch is only an illusion of
life, and not life itself. The frying or electrically stimulated
frog's legs are not alive; the hair of the dancer receives life
only from the head and the bodily movement around it; it has no
life itself.

Senator Tolliver's lips twitch as he is confronted by
Percy Munn at the end of Night Rider, and Sugar-Boy twitches as
Jack Burden discusses the death of Willie Stark with him in All_
the King's Men. In such cases, the twitch is simply a symbol of
nervous action and reaction, the unconscious action that happens
and for which there is no direct responsibility. Similarly, Amantha
Starr in Band of Angels is described in a twitching frog's leg
metaphor: "It was as though a strong galvanic current had been
passed through my being to jerk me out of my terror, to jerk me
scrambling up, not in fear, in some deeper necessity, uttering the
unplanned words that burst out of me. . . . 'I am not a nigger,

I'm not a nigger."

76

Twitching of Sunderland Spottwood and of Angelo's father

in Meet Me in the Green Glen are symbolic of the disease which they
bore, the paralysis and the inability to act on their own will. The
natural response, the twitch, is a symbol of the necessity with which
an organism must respond to the stimulus. In addition, the paralysis
of spirit which Jack Burden experienced is symbolized by the twitch
as well. While comparing Lois Seager, his first wife, with Anne
Stanton, his first love who will be his wife in the end, Jack contem-

plates a poem by Blake:

The adversary who is Prince of This World . . . could not
change Kate into Nan, [but] the mad poet was quite wrong, for
anybody could change Kate into Man, or if indeed the Prince
couldn't change Kate into Nan it was only because Kate and
Nan were exactly alike to begin with and were, in fact, the
same with only the illusuary difference of name, which meant
nothing and there was only the pulse in the blood and the
twitch of the nerve, like a dead frog's leg in the experiment
when the electric current goes through. So when I lay there
on the bed in Long Beach, and shut my eyes, I saw in the
inward darkness as in mire the fast heave and contortion of
numberless bodies, and limbs detached from bodigg, sweating
and perhaps bleeding from inexhaustible wounds.

Is the twitch itself real or illusory? The apparent determinism
represented by the twitch is only an illusion to help cover the
true responsibility one should bear.

A second image or metaphor out of All the Kingfs Men
which illustrates a form of determinism is introduced during the
Cass Mastern story. It is the dominant metaphor of the lesson which

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77

Cass Mastern lived for a few years and in that time he learned
that the world is all of one piece. He learned that the world
is like an enormous spider web and if you touch it, however
lightly, at any point, the vibration ripples of the remotest
perimeter and the drowsy spider feels the tingle and is drowsy
no more but springs out to fling the gossamer coils about you
who have touched the web and then inject the black, numbing
poison under your hide. It does not matter whether or not
you meant to brush the web of things. Your happy foot or your
gay wing may have brushed it ever so lightly, but what happens
always happens and there is the spider, bearded black and with
his great faceted eyes glittering like mirrors in the sun, or
like God's eye, and the fangs dripping.50

This concluding observation is closely related to one given a few
pages earlier in the story. After his adultery with Mrs. Trice and
the suicide of Duncan Trice, Phoebe, an innocent slave, is sold down
river because she had become aware of the sin of Mrs. Trice and Cass
Mastern. The love thought to exist between Anabelle Trice and Cass
Mastern is shown to be nothing. I'All had come," Cass observes, "from
my single act of sin and perfidy. . . . It was as though the vibration
set up in the whole fabric of the world by my act had spread infinitely
and with ever increasing power and no man could know the end. I did
not put it into words in such fashion, but I stood there shaken by a
tempest of feeling."

The dominant implication of the metaphor is that things are
interrelated, and a person cannot know the consequences of an act he
may perform. According to Casper, during the composition of All the
King's Men, Warren "was doing research for his textual analysis of
Coleridge's Rime of the Ancient Mariner. Its theme, the sacramental
vision, became accessory to his own developing 'life web' philosophy

"51

of human interaction. The notion of the interrelatedness of things

is present throughout the novels. However, the manifestations of it

78

in the works are usually in the context of suffering which the actions
cause, just as Cass Mastern is aware that his actions of evil have
caused others to suffer greatly. Therefore, the concept is discussed
most completely in the chapter on Nonmoral Evil. For the purpose of
this chapter, it is essential to note that it is necessarily so, by
the nature of things, that others should suffer for evil actions not
their own.

Marden J. Clark is right when he indicates that Warren
stresses responsibility too strongly for there to be a simple answer
of complete determinism.52 Of particular interest to this study is
the role of characters like Isaac Sumpter in The Cave. Convincing
himself "all I need to do is just be rational," Ikey Sumpter comes to
believe that he is not responsible for his own actions. Having such
a belief, he is representative of a form of determinism which would
allow him to deny his own responsibility in the events growing out
of his involvement with Jasper Harrick in the cave. For example,
"Well, it is not my fault," Isaac declared to his father, Mac, when
he was confronted about the truth concerning Jasper's condition and
location in the cave. Isaac insisted that because Jasper would have
died anyway, his falsehood and deception demonstrated while exploiting
other people were justified. Similarly, he refuses to acknowledge his
responsibility for the events which caused Rachel Goldstein, his
Jewish girlfriend, to reject him after his sexual involvement with
one of her friends in Rachel's car, because l'he hadn't caused any of
that." Isaac goes through his life as the product of his own desires

and victim of circumstances, but he never is able to recognize the

 

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79

responsibility he should bear for the evil that resulted. In his
view, necessity was a way of rejecting the burden of time that was
his. Consequently, the last picture given of Ikey Sumpter in the
novel is as a lonely, misled man. He wants to be himself, but he is
unable to do so because of his own actions. The sleeping pills, the
whiskey, and the girls available to him in New York will not give
him the opportunity to know himself.

The development of Jack Harrick in The Cave also contributes
to the above conclusion about Isaac. Jack had thought that he was not
responsible for the things he had done. He had gotten Mary Tillyard
pregnant in his youth, but he would not marry her. Mac took the girl
as his wife, to spare her the shame of Jack's immoral actions. But a
subsequent miscarriage brought Mac one of the several startling reali-
zations in the novels: ". . . MacCarland Sumpter shook with his first
knowledge of the dark deviousness of that God who knows how to wait.
The terror of God is that God conforms His will to man's will. The
terror of God is that He bends ear to man's prayer. Knock, and it
shall be opened unto you. And when it is opened, who can withstand
the horror of that vision of prayer fulfilled." The terror that
things work out often as men will them, that the determination of
God's will is the expression of man's will, is overwhelming. Mac
learned the lesson which his son does not learn at any point in the
novel: men are responsible for the consequences which follow from
their actions. It is this type of determinism which is present in

the novels.

80

Another example from among the selected religious characters
is found in flggg_in the letter sent by Lettice Poindexter Tolliver to
Brad Tolliver's sister, Maggie. She speaks of the necessity which cir-
cumstances place upon us. What she does as a Catholic laborer in the
old folks home is not a necessity of penance, but a necessity which
is the joy to fulfill. Later in the letter, she cites her failure to
fulfill the necessity placed upon her by Brad's vulnerability. Brad's
temporary refusal to accept her observation is part of the climactic
experience of the novel. Brad was not yet able to accept himself for
what he is: he was not able to accept the necessity his condition
places upon him. Therefore, he was not ready to accept his share of
the responsibility for his failure to fulfill Lettice Poindexter
Tolliver's possibility in their marriage.

The necessity to find the possibility of joy in human cir-
cumstances is similar to the possibility of joy to which Seth Parton
referred in the earlier novel, Band of Angels. "'It is,‘ he said, 'the
voice of God in the heart. Let not the world, nor the world's racket
confound! Let not the sluggishness of blood, nor the horror of dark-
ness, deceive! God were not God to deny possibility. And I affirm
the possibility of the last joy. Who has not felt the possibility?
For all joy is of God. Look in your heart, look in your heart--.'"

I believe that what Lettice Poindexter Tolliver and Seth Parton are
speaking of is the same thing that Slim Sarrett referred to in At_
Heaven's Gate when he made reference to the people who do not fulfill
the possibility of their own nature as the individuals who really need

sympathy.

81

There is in Warren's narratives a type of determinism, but
it is a determinism which seems to be more like the law of karma than
like the whimsical actions of an arbitrary Sovereignty such as those
that Percival Skrogg attributed to God because of the brand of Presby-
terian theology his oppressive father attempted to force upon him.
The causal relationship which the characters in the novels must be
aware of is that cited by Mac Sumpter: God's will is made to fit
man's will. In the long run man will get what he wants. There is an
inextricable law of the universe, that as a man sows, so shall he
reap. But as Mac Sumpter has also indicated in The Cave, God does
not judge by the casualness of earthly consequences.

The human necessity for which Brad Tolliver sought in flgggy-
“I cannot find the connection between what I was and what I am. I have
not found the human necessity"--is an identity which is true to his own
nature: that definition of himself that is himself. The nature of
the necessity in Warren's novels is a necessity which grows out of the
inward nature of man. In this regard, Warren's approach seems as much
like that of Plato and Aristotle as necessarily like the Calvanist so
many claim him to be. "For Plato and Aristotle, each man necessarily
does what his own character prompts. His character is the result of

53 Except as

his natural gifts as developed by his moral education."
shown below, man does not have the natural goodness in himself that
the Greeks would demand. However, the nature of man in Warren deter-
mines the nature that man will manifest.

The basic view of the nature of man in Warren is illustrated

when Jack Burden was asked to do some research on the life of Judge

82

Monteque Irwin, and he was sure he could not find anything evil that
Willie Stark could use for his political purposes. He told Willie that
he would not frame Irwin. ". . . It ain't ever necessary," Willie told
Jack. "You don't ever have to frame anybody, because the truth is
always sufficient." The truth is that all have sinned, and man is born
in sin. The religious training of Stark's youth gave him some Presby-
terian theology which determined his view of human nature. The key to
the necessity of evil is found in the nature of man: he is conceived

in sin. Therefore, original sin accounts for the nature of man and
the necessity of his evil. The very act of being true to one's own
nature will assure that he is a sinner.

Not only is the very nature of man evil (this is explored in
more detail in the next section, Original Sin: The Nature of Man), but
the nature of human experience in this world will make evil consequences
of evil actions a necessity with which we must learn to live. During
the trial of Angelo Passetto in Meet Me in the Green Glen, Warren
presented the latest incidents which are recognized as common in his
novels. While one of the religious characters, Leroy Lancaster, was
interrogating Cassie Spottwood, Prosecutor Farhill objected to his
line of questioning; and the judge ordered the testimony struck from
the record. This caused Murray Guilfort to come to the realization
"nothing is ever off the record, he thought and suddenly everything
he himself had ever done, said, thought, or even have not dared to
think was standing at his back, presences silently crowding, numberless
presences, waiting. . . . Nothing was ever off the record." This notion

is a repetition of one which appeared in the other novels as well. For

83

example, the ill Dr. Burnham of World Enough and Time longed for "the
fruit of his meditation in the faint hope that some men might profit,
for 'nothing human is ever lost, though burdened with error.'"

One of the clearest and best presentations is in All the
King's Men. An example appears as Jack Burden and Anne Stanton are
beginning to lose the basis for their relationship. After their cor-
respondence had once stopped, "[Jack] held out for two weeks, and then
began to apologize. So the letters began again, and far off somewhere
in the great bookkeeping system of the universe somebody punched some
red buttons every day on the posting machine and some red figures went
on the ledger sheet." Even though there is the record and nothing is
lost, "it was not the way it had been." Nothing is ever lost. Cir-
cumstances may change, but the influence of the past and the record
of the actions of the past are never lost. There is no striking from

the eternal record.

So I had it after all the months [Jack Burden confesses after
bringing his research on Judge Irwin to a close]. For nothing
is lost, nothing is ever lost. There is always the clue, the
canceled check, the smear of lipstick, the footprint in the
canna bed, the condon on the park path, the twitch in the old
wound, the baby shoes dipped in bronze, the taint in the blood
stream. And all times are one time, and all those dead in the
past never lived before our definition gives them life, and
out of the shadow their eyes implore us.

That is what all of us historical researchers believe.

And we love truth.54

With the stress that people might forget, but history does not, Jack
Burden bears out the truth in Willie Stark's statement that there is
always something. The truth is always sufficient to condemn each and

all.

84

"The World is a great big snow ball rolling down hill," Jack
Burden observed, "and it never rolls up hill to unwind itself back to
nothing at all and non-happening." When an act is done, it cannot be
undone. It must be carried out to its conclusion. Some of the charac-
ters, such as Ikey Sumpter, and his secular counterpart, Slim Sarrett,
try to deny their past, their nature, and their time, but they cannot
and find any measure of fulfillment and contentment.

Among all the apparent necessity of cause and effect and the
centrality of causation in Warren's concern, apparent chance plays a
significant part in the narratives of the religious characters. A
typical example occurs in Munn Short's story in World Enough and Time
which he narrates to Jeremiah Beaumont while Jerry is awaiting execu-
tion in the dungeon of Frankfort, Kentucky. During Munn's youthful
affair with Mrs. Perk, Mr. Perk had come out into the woods to locate
and kill Munn. Before Perk could find him, a band of Indians attacked.
Ironically, Munn was as good as dead at the hands of the Indian, but
Perk "happened" by and shot the Indian, saving Munn's life, and carry-
ing him to safety, nursed him back to health. Apparent coincidences
such as these are relatively common in the lives of the religious
characters; however, they eventually turn out to be understood by them
to be some form of Providential Will for their lives. In the case of
Munn Short in World Enough and Time, Perk preserved Munn for the time
when he could turn to Jesus and find life because he had learned that
dying in the spirit was more painful than dying in the body. Munn is
used in the narrative to stress that if it is God's will, Jeremiah

will not hang, and he introduces the thoughts which climax in one of

85

Beaumont's meditations upon death as he thinks of death for the first
time as a thing in itself, elevating it to a metaphysical force.
Incidents in the tales of Proudfit and Wyndham are similar
in their impact in the narratives in which they occur. Apparently
chance encounters are construed to be Providence at work. In dreams
and visions of faith, Warren presents a view of causality very much
like that spoken of by Paul Ricoeur. "Melange of contingency in
encounters and of necessity in the results,” he says in Falibility of

”All. "is Precisely the fate of birth."55

The mixtures of seemingly
chance encounters eventually find their necessary conclusions in the
lives of the characters.

In a more secular context in At Heaven's Gate, the "chance“
appearance of the Greek homosexual partner of Slim Sarrett's, Mr.
Constantidopeles, leads to Jason Sweetwater's remark to Sue Murdock.
"Cheer up, kid," he said. "It was all in the cards." And the collapse
of the world Slim had created is inevitable in spite of or perhaps
because of the careful creation of the fictional world he had manipu-
lated. Also, a similar mixture of chance and Providence appears in
Night Rider when Willie Proudfit says that he is going to do something
if the crops fail, but he does not know what. He could not name it,
but it would come. Munn thought it chance, Willie believed it was
Providence.

Life may be approached casually, as Lettice Poindexter
Tolliver did in her pre-Christian days in flgng but eventually the

narrative will bring the necessary conclusions of the events so ini-

tiated. For example, among her affairs is numbered a Spanish

86

Medievalist, Dr. Echegaray. He just happens to be at a party she
happens to attend while Brad happens to be in Spain fighting for
Spanish liberty. "For one thing," her psychiatrist, Dr. Sutton said,
"her lover had fought in Spain, and she had spent months of anguish
yearning to protect him; if Dr. Echegaray had not been Spanish and
had not seemed to need her pity, nothing would have happened. For
another thing, she was now on the verge of marriage, and in her desperate
desire to prove her worthiness her capacity for fidelity after her past
history of confused and compulsive adventures, she had, as it were,
submitted herself to a test." The psychiatrist contines to say, "you
acted out what it was necessary for you to act out to know what you
now know," and goes on to affirm his conviction that she is really a
Puritan who must prove her devotion. But her nature in the melange
of contingency had to work out its necessity.

Further, in Band of Angels, the seemingly far-fetched
chances of Seth Parton, Miss Idell, Lieutenant Jones and Manty Starr
remaking their acquaintances under the conditions in the story illus-
trate again how the "melange of contingency" and the "necessity of
the results" are carried out in the novels. For example, Manty con-
templates the impact of Seth, Miss Idell, and Lieutenant Jones upon
her and her realization of her own waiting and yearning to know her-
self. "It was as though your life had a shape," she says to herself,
"already totally designed standing not in Time, but in Space, already
fulfilled, and you were waiting for it, in all its necessity, to be
revealed to you, and all your living was merely the process whereby

this already existing fulfilled shape in Space would become an event

87

in Time." Even in the coincidences there is an overshelming movement
forcing each moment to its crisis: Manty's need to know who she is,
the necessity of finding a definition of herself, for good or evil.
The same kind of perpetual contingency, which has appeared
since Night Rider in the story of Willie Proudfit, appears in the last
novel, Meet Me in the Green Glen. Angelo Passetto happened to come
into Spottwood Valley. Cy Grinder happened to be out hunting. Angelo
happened to stay on at the Spottwood plantation. Eventually, Cassie
Killigrew Spottwood happened to confess the murder of Sunderland
Spottwood in the courtroom immediately after the verdict of guilty
was returned for Angelo. Things just happen in this last novel, but
they all point to the inevitable conclusion that gives the tale an
aura of tragedy in the sense Paul Ricoeur speaks of. He says in Ihe_
Symbolism of Evil that it is in the combination of causality and
choice with the absolute force of the past and the uncertainty of
the future that makes for tragedy.56
The tragic possibility of the narratives Warren has created

is heightened by an ever present hope that the dying words of Willie

Stark are in fact true:

"It might have been all different, Jack."
. . "You got to believe that. . . ."

He looked at me, and for a moment it was the old strong, probing
demanding glance. But when the words came this time, they were
very weak. "And it might even been different yet," he whispered.
''If it hadn't happened, it might--have been different--even yet."57

What had happened was the inevitable, necessary elimination of each

other by Willie Stark and Adam Stanton. The Irresistible force meeting

88

the classical Immovable object. However, the stress in this work

upon the responsibility each has for all that "happens" to him is too
great to allow an easy escape in simple determinism. The testimony

of those who live and those who are not allowed to live is clear.

Like it or not, each has his responsibility for his own actions, even
though he bears the terrible burden of time: "the awful responsibility
of Time“; therefore, things could have been different, but they were

not because people are people.
Original Sin: The Nature of Man

The idea that the essential nature of man is found in the
concept of sin is commonly present in Warren's work. As noted in the
first chapter, Warren's consistent interest in the problem of evil has
been recognized for years among his critics. The nature of man which
Warren demonstrates in his fiction is centrally related to his concern
for evil. Frequently, investigations of the view of man presented in
the novels begin by considering the statements of Willie Stark in All_
the King's Men, and well they might because certainly his direct
statements are relevant to the total view of man presented in all the
novels. In at least four separate places in the novel, the notion
that man is conceived in sin is stated.

The first is at the end of the first chapter when Willie
charges Jack Burden with the responsibility of finding some politi-
cally useful "dirt" on Judge Irwin. As it happens, Irwin is Burden's
boyhood idol; and, though unknown to Jack Burden, he is, in reality,

Jack's father. Jack does not believe he can find anything on Irwin,

89

but Stark insists that there is always something. "And [Willie] said,
'Man is conceived in sin and born in corruption and he passeth from
the stink of the didie to the stench of the shroud. There is always
something.'" It is, in fact, from this point that the story begins

to digress in flashbacks and the unfolding of Jack Burden's story as
he serves at the pleasure of Boss Stark and learns his lesson of the
burden of the awful responsibility of Time.

The second mention, at the beginning of Chapter Four, occurs
as Jack Burden recalls the words of Willie Stark. In the context,
Jack continues to describe what he dug out on the Judge in the metaphor
of a dead, partially decaying cat which had been buried in an ash pile,
”the midden, the sublunary dung heap, which is the human past." The
fourth chapter contains the Cass Mastern story which is an embedded
tale of one of Jack‘s ancestors who had to learn the horrible lesson
of the essentially evil nature of man and of the human tendency toward
evil. Jack himself was in the process of learning the same lesson.

He had not yet learned it, but by the end of the story he has. Jack
recalls his abortive effort to use Cass Mastern's journals as a basis
for his doctoral dissertation. In an important passage near the end
of the chapter, Jack asks how the Jack Burden who lived then, during
that first excursion into his family history, could have understood
the lesson which Cass had to teach. Simply, he could not; therefore,
the dissertation went unfinished. It is significant, however, that at
the end of the novel, Jack has returned to the old journals, and he is
going to write a book about Cass Mastern. From the profits he hopes

to take Anne Stanton away from Burden's Landing, so they will not have

90

to live in the house which Judge Irwin had owned, the house purchased
by his own great act of dishonesty and political sin.

The third occurrence of the "conceived in sin" speech of
Willie Stark is given at the beginning of Chapter Five; again, Jack
is recalling his charge from Willie to dig up something on the Judge,
that something that is always there. Following this appearance of the
dictum, Jack challenges Willie's explanation as to why Jack works for
him; and Willie's answer is relevant to the dictim itself: "'Boy,‘ he
said, 'you work for me because I'm the way I am and you're the way you
are. It is arrangement founded on the nature of things.‘

'That's a hell of a fine explanation.‘

'It's not an explanation,‘ he said, and laughed again.
'There ain't any explanations. Not of anything. All you can do is
point at the nature of things. If you are smart enough to see 'em.'"
The remainder of the chapter is a reflective record of Jack's search
for the dirt on the Judge which ends in success, and with Jack's signi-
ficant observations that "nothing is ever lost" and those who love the
truth will find it.

The fourth return to Willie's stated view of the nature of
man is near the end of Chapter Eight, and it immediately preceeds the
section in which Jack Burden confronts the Judge with the information
concerning the old political bribe. In this instance, the dictum,
"conceived in sin" does not occur, but the allusion to it is obvious
in that the context again emphasized that there is always something
to be found, and Jack has found what will stick on the Judge. What

is a significant addition to the overall notion of the sinful nature

91

of man is Willie's affirmation that "You don't ever have to frame
anybody, because the truth is always sufficient." And Jack immediately
counters with, "You sure take a high view of human nature." To which,
Willie replies, "'Boy,‘ he said, 'I went to a Presbyterian Sunday
School back in the days when they still had some theology, and that
much of it stuck. And--' he grinned suddenly '--I have found it very
valuable.'" Because of the information that Jack had found, Judge
Irwin committed suicide; however, the Judge first had made it clear
that he could have stopped Jack from using the information against
him, but he did not. The way Irwin would have done it was to have
told Jack that he was really his son, not the son of Ellis Burden,

the Scholarly Attorney. As it is, Jack only learns the truth from

his hysterical mother after Irwin has killed himself. The chapter
ends upon an ironic note. Jack feels better claiming Irwin as his

father than he had about accepting Burden as his father.

There was a kind of relief in knowing that that man was not my
father, [Jack commented to himself]. I had always felt some
curse of his weakness upon me, or what I had felt to be that.
He had had a beautiful and eager young wife and another man

had taken her away from him and had fathered his child, and

all he had done was to walk away, leaving her in possession

of everything he owned, and crawl into a hole in the slums

and lie there like a wounded animal and let his intellect bleed
away into pious drivel and his strength bleed away into weakness.
And he had been good. But his goodness had told me nothing
except that I could not live by it.58

To this point, Jack is affirming what Gilbert Mastern, the worldly
brother of the more saintly Cass Mastern, had declared. The goodness
of man did not do any good because, in Gilbert's view, the South did

not need good men: it needed military leadership, not moralists.

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In the Mastern Story, Cass also came to question the meaning of

man's goodness, because it was not lived out into actual experience.
"My new father, however," Jack continues his thoughts started above,
"had not been good. He had cockolded a friend, betrayed a wife, taken
a bribe, driven a man, though unwittingly, to death. But he had done
good. He had been a just judge. And he had carried his head high.
That last afternoon of his life he had done that. He hadn't said,
'Look here, Jack, you can't do it--you can't--you see, you see-~I am
your father.'"

These four key passages furnish the principle structure for
the ideas leading up to the climactic observation of the Scholarly
Attorney near the end of the novel, that man, in his identity as
separate from God, is by nature evil, and that the index to the glory
of man is his ability to make good out of the bad he has to work with.
In these thoughts dictated to Jack by Ellis Burden, the thematic struc-
ture of the novel comes full circle, beginning with Willie Stark's
Calvinistic dictum about man being conceived in sin. Further, Ellis
Burden's remarks underscore a point made previously in this chapter--
man has only evil with which to work, and any good he has he must make
himself, as Willie had told Jack Burden and Adam Stanton earlier when
they were discussing that nature of Stark's political activities in
the light of Hugh Miller's idealism. "You know Good," Willie had
said at that time, "because you make it up as you go along."

In the embedded story in All the King's Men, in the opening

lines of Cass Mastern's journal, the key to understanding the nature

93

of man as illustrated by the actions of the characters is stated.

Jack Burden narrates it as follows:

"I was born," the first page of the first volume of the journal
said, "in a log cabin in north Georgia, in circumstances of
poverty, and if in later years I have lain soft and have supped
from silver, may the Lord not let die in my heart the knowledge
of frost and of coarse diet. For all men come naked into the
world, and in prosperity 'man is prone to evil as the sparks
fly upward.'" The lines were written when Cass was a student
at Transylvania College, up in Kentucky, after what he called
his "darkness and trouble" had given place to the peace of God.
For the journal began with an account of the "darkness and
trouble"--which was perfectly real trouble, with a dead man

and a live woman and long nail scratches down Cass Mastern's
bony face. "I write this down," he said in the journal, "with
what truthfulness a sinner may attain unto, that if ever pride
is in me, of flesh or spirit, I can peruse these pages and know
with shame what evil has been in me, and may be in me, for who
knows what breeze may blow upon the carred log and fan up flame
again?"59

The weakness of man is found in the sin that is in him, which he never
takes out of himself regardless of the good he may do. He does not
know when or by what it might be revived, for, as he said later in

the journal "man is never safe and damnation is ever at hand." Fur-
ther, Cass believed that it is in the suffering of sin that the
brotherhood of all men is really demonstrated. Evil is the mark of
man's identity, even as Ellis Burden said to Jack; but Jack had read
it first in the Cass Mastern story: "Though the boil has come to a
head and has burst, yet must the pus flow. Men shall come together
yet and die in the common guilt of man and in the guilt that sent

them hither from far places and distant firesides. But God in His
Mercy has spared me the end. Blessed be His Name." But Jack had

told the listener to his tale earlier, Cass Mastern was not at home in

the world.

94

Like Willie Stark, Cass Mastern had studied Presbyterian
theology. Also, Percival Skrogg in World Enough and Time had been
taught the same theology, but he rejected it. All three die at the
hand of a gunman, but only Cass Mastern returned to a peace of mind
in terms of his acceptance of the doctrine. Willie Stark had used
it, Skrogg had denied it, only to have the evil that lurks in the
inward man kill them. Cass had sought death in war because he could
not kill himself, but Jack's real father killed himself in a stoic,
Roman style. As an intellectual, Jack found more to admire in Irwin
than he did in Mastern or the old man Burden; but at the end of the
novel, Jack is beginning to see his responsibility to them all clearly
enough that he can return to the Mastern story and begin to understand
it. Also, old Ellis Burden is living with him. He had to learn the
real nature of man: Sin.

According to Tsanoff, in the questions mentioned at the
beginning of this chapter, such a view of the nature of man as neces-
sarily evil is a metaphysical concept of evil. In addition, the view
of man's flawed nature is not restricted to Warren's most popular
novel. In the first one, Night Rider, Willie Proudfit's insight into
the nature of man as well as that of Professor Ball and Senator
Tolliver picture the essential evil nature of man as the power of
meanness that is in him. A similar power of meanness is referred to
by Ashby Wyndham in At Heaven's Gate, and by Munn Short in 39319
Enough and Time. Both insist that there is no innocent man, as does

Mr. Budd, the prison warden, in Flood.

95

The earliest significant attempt to have a religious
character give a specific definition of the nature of man appears

in At Heaven's Gate, as the opening of Ashby Wyndham's statement:

The pore human man, he ain't nuthin but a handful of dust, but
the light of God's face on him and he shines like a diamint.

and blinds the eye of the un-uprightius congregation.

Dust, it lays on the floor, under the gain forth and the comin
in, and ain't nuthin, and gits stirred up under the trompin, but
a sunbeam come in the dark room and in that light it will dance
and shine for heart joy. I laid on the floor, and it was dark

I wasn't nuthin. I was under the trompin, which was cruel hard.
But a man don't know, for he is ignorant. There ain't nuthin

in him but meanness and a hog hollerness and emptiness for the
world's slop. A man don't think of nuthin but sloppin, and
dodgen, when the kick comes. I laid on the floor, and didn't
know, and the trompin. But the light come in the dark room, like
a finger apointin at me through the hole and it was hard trompin
had stirred me. I shined in the iight.5O

Whether it is a statement of Wyndham, Proudfit, Short, Corinthian
McClardy or any other of the religious characters, the essential
message is the same, over and over again.

In the later novels the observations concerning the flawed
nature of man come from increasingly better educated and more sophis-
ticated personages. For example, in the last novel, Meet Me in the
Green Glen, Leroy Lancaster, college educated lawyer who become Pro-
secutor of Parkerton, came to a realization that, while he could not
believe that the other people in the world were wicked, they were
people like himself. He had already conceded that he was a sinner, a
blasphemer again his own life, and he had asked God's forgiveness.

He was driven to ask "What is wrong with me?" In a passage replete
with dark images of his inner self during which he is filled with
chest pains, he wrestles with the power of darkness that is in him.

It is similar to the "filth" that MacCarland Sumpter affirmed men to

96

be in The Cave, and the "dark spirit" Tobias Sears came to believe
in in Band of Angels. The two best educated men in Fiddlersburg,
Blanding Cottshill and Leon Pickney, while discussing life in the
doomed town, made reference to the flawed human nature in the form
of cracks: "There are always cracks. Even in a loving family. The
question is just how much humanness you can get over the cracks. To
hold things together."

The irony of the human condition is demonstrated in each of
the novels in that it is the humanness, i.e., the creating of good out
of the bad, which often leads men to more evil. In the first section
of this chapter the treatment of the relationship of the ideal to the
fact as an example of metaphysical evil illustrates this point, when
men become obsessive of their humanness, and it in turn leads them to
greater evils. It is the human weakness; but in human weakness, human
strength is found. This point is made directly by Cecila Harrick about
her husband Jack in The Cave. He found his cracking point, and even-
tually, his weakness was turned to his strength so at the end of the
novel he has learned that learning how to die will help him live. He
has learned how to deal with the weakness that is in his own nature.
He is one who has learned how to live with the burden living has placed
upon him.

One of the most graphic symbols of the human condition of
original sin is demonstrated through the consciousness of Sweetwater
in At Heaven's Gate. He lay with his hand on Sue Murdock's stomach.
He had made her pregnant, and what he sensed in her eventually caused

Slim Sarrett to murder her following her abortion:

97 ‘

He seemed to see, as it would be there under his hand, the
little hunched-up creature, blind, unbreathing, the tiny hands
and feet formed like delicate carving--or would they be really
formed yet? How long did it take before the nails appeared,

he wondered. He wondered when it got a face, a real face which
you could call human. He remembered fetuses in jars, the wizened,
little, simianwise faces, intent and, for all their wisdom, con-
torted in profound puzzlement. He remembered the Indian mummies
he had once seen at Salt Lake City, how they were hunched, and
the eyelids squinting because there was nothing under them any
more, and the intent contorted faces. Those faces were like the
faces of the fetuses, the same look, intent, contorted, thg same
invincible, painful abstraction. Before and after taking. 1

From birth to death, and the return to the primal fecund darkness that
is within each being. Death before birth shown in the fetus, I believe,
is the symbol of the original sin on which All the King's Men focused
so magnificently.

Even in Wilderness, which does not present the ordinary
emphasis upon the "Christian" characters normally expected in Warren's
novels, the presence of Monmorency Pugh stresses the evil that is at
the very base of the nature of man. Pugh had sought to obey Jesus and
not kill. His effort to follow Jesus led him to resist conscription
into the Confederate army. As Ashby Wyndham had done years before him,
Pugh's sinful pride in Jesus led him to commit another crime-~murder.
Unlike Wyndham, however, Pugh did not confess and turn to God for for-
giving Grace. Instead, he became a naturalist, in the sense that he
would do what came naturally. In his terms, if he had an itch, he
would scratch it. He became an immoral man, whose only reason for
not killing Adam Rosenzweig was "a man gits tahrd.”

The limitations of human nature are real and immensely
important to the notion of evil in Warren's novels. As previously

indicated, the inability of an individual to consistently live up to

 

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his own high ideals is closely related to the structure of human
nature. The limitation of being is a threat, always present, regard-
less of the task the character faces. Therefore, there are in many
cases the threat of impotence which hovers over every activity; how-
ever, in some cases it is more clearly related to the concept of
original sin than it is in others. As mentioned in an earlier sec-
tion, often the burden of history is symbolized by the son's relation-
ship to his father. One of the more obvious examples is in Wilderness.
Adam Rosenzweig was born with a club foot and the burden of his father's
ideals for freedom. The two heritages conspire against him, and he is
able only after much suffering to come to terms with both his birthmark
and his role in fighting for freedom. In a religious experience, very
much like that of Leroy Lancaster in Meet Me in the Green Glen, Adam
comes to recognize his common bond to all people, even the Rebel he
shot. In the horror of his realization, he is aware that he shot the
man, not for freedom, but because his foot was different from his own.
Of his heritages from his father, the one most closely associated with
biological inheritance, the club foot, became the dominant influence
upon him and the symbol for the burden of that inheritance. Just as
Amantha Starr had to struggle to be rid of the evil her father had done
in Band of Angels, Adam has to struggle with the evil symbolized by

his foot: the inherited limitation of being via original sin.
The Mixed Nature of Man

Even though Warren's characters generally reflect a view of

human nature consistent with the Calvinistic doctrine of original sin,

 

 

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99

this should not be understood to mean that man is totally evil. As
mentioned above, Willie Stark clearly thought of man as totally depraved
and possessed of no good at all except that good which he is able to
make. It must not be forgotten that he did believe that good could
be made out of that badness. Further, the survival of Ellis Burden
and Hugh Miller implies that not everyone is destroyed by the good
they attempt. It is true that Willie Stark is destroyed by the inevit-
able consequences of actions which he initiated, but he was apparently
free to have chosen or not to have chosen them. Even those characters
who do not live, such as Judge Irwin, are capable of good deeds. For
example, when Anne Stanton learned of her father's role in the cover-
up of Irwin's having taken the bribe, Jack Burden tried to soften the
blow by stressing that the act was actually an expression of loyalty
to a life-long friend: it was "not that bad."

Man might not be "that bad," but a very significant part of
Warren's view of the essential nature of man is that that nature is
mixed. If not "that bad," it certainly is not "as good" as some
advocates of the inevitability of progress would have us believe.
The conflicts in which the characters are engaged demonstrate the
risk to which those human efforts to bring about "good" are subject.
For example, the risk of imbalance is caused by the human tendency to
think of people as being as good as the ideas they hold. Percival
Skrogg in World Enough and Time is an example of one who came to believe
in justice and the dignity of man, but his own efforts were frustrated
and eventually defeated because he had not learned to accept the mixed

nature of man. Skrogg was not just a mind capable of an Idea, he was

 

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100

also a body which demanded preservation. His lesson, however, when

it came, was accompanied by an equally damaging, destructive over-
reaction. He began to value the body over the idea, and his transfor-
mation brought his death.

The symbolizing of the mixed nature of man in the body and
soul or mind dichotomy is frequent in the novels. Some of the more
notable among the religious characters are Lettice Poindexter Tolliver
and Seth Parton. With respect to the view represented in E199g_by
Lettice, it is significant that in the beginning she is pictured
simply as a very beautiful sex object for Brad Tolliver. As he drives
back home to Fiddlersburg, early in the novel, he is moved by memories
of making love with her. Later, Brad's recollections of her emphasize
her mixed nature--her body and her soul--as he thinks about her adven-
tures with Frog-eye and himself and her sun bathing or lying in bed
nude: so soft, juicy, red and warm. In this context, Brad recalls
that she even went to church in the winter time; but more importantly,
he recalls her former hatred of her body, then her narcisistic love
for it, and then her own awareness that her body was not herself.
"Then she said: 'You feel you can live when one thing finally comes
to you. . . . When you can feel that your body is not ygg," In this
episode, Warren has prefigured the awareness revealed indirectly via
the letter Lettice sent to Maggie in which she discusses her conver-

sion. In part, she says the following:

Well, if you see what can really happen to human bodies and
human souls, it changes you. It changes you to realize that
a body has a soul living in it--even if the word soul still
sounds strange and empty to you. It changes you because that
fact makes you realize that bodies are precious. Precious in
a way you never even thought.

101

But I don't mean in a way to make you make a lot of fuss about
your own body. Remember, Maggie, what a silly fuss I used to
make about the one I had. . . . Oh, what a fool I was, Maggie,
about that silly old me! And don't think I don't know now
that nobody can just keep his wicked foolishness private, and
I flung mine around something awful.

She explains that now her body is "gone." She simply does not care
for it as she used to. She is heavy and unkept. The thought made
Brad sick, and his contemplation of her mixed nature as both body and
soul made his world rock: he was not ready to think upon her new
self. He was not ready to accept her beautiful body as evil, even
though it had kept him from seing her as something other than a sex
object.

Warren is accustomed to presenting the sensual nature of
mankind in the form of sensual women. Lucille Christian in Nighe
Rieeg, Sue Murdock in At Heaven's Gate, Lois Burden in All the Kingfs
Meg, Rachel Jordan Beaumont in World Enough and Time, Miss Idell in

Band of Angels, Jo-Lea Bingham in The Cave, Maran Goetz Meyerholf in

 

Wilderness, Lettice in fleeg, and even Cassie Spottwood and Corinne
Lancaster in Meet Me in the Green Glen are all in the narrative in
order to stress the sensual nature of man. In varying degrees, all
are sex objects. It is interesting to note, however, that the women
from the later novels are increasingly capable of spiritual develop—
ment and this indicates an increasing awareness of the spiritual side
of human nature in addition to the bodily side.

Further, a few of these women are capable of awareness of
the mixed nature of mankind as body and soul. Even though a flat

character, Corinne Lancaster, the daughter of an Episcopal Bishop,

 

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102

best represents the spiritual power latent in a sensual body. Leroy
was overcome by sexual fantasies before their marriage, and their
marriage had not fulfilled them, as symbolized by their lack of
children. She was not willing to accept her body; she was a pious
soul full of good works, which represents the other side of the body-
soul dichotomy portrayed earlier by Lettice in fleeg, However, after
Leroy had his experience in which he recognized himself for what he
was in the common guilt of man, she, too, is able to accept her body
as a part of her true self. I believe this is symbolized by the
eagerness with which Leroy goes home--she eventually has a son, and
they find happiness.

In the last novel, Meet Me in the Green Glen, the possibility
of the assimilation of body and soul seen in the heavenly vision by
Seth Parton in Band of Angels is achieved by the balance between the
vanity of the hypersensual and the austerity of the spiritually
oriented in Corinne and Leroy Lancaster. The earlier novels also
indicate that the balance may be achieved. Lucy Stark, in her resigna-
tion, accepts Willie's greatness and his evil. Amantha Starr finds the
balance by the happiness implied by the anticipation her rediscovered
love for Tobias might bring. Of the characters developed well enough
to be able to give a basis for judgment, it is only in Meet Me in the
Green Glen that the balance of the body and the soul in the women is
shown as a genuine possibility for human happiness. Otherwise, it is
a positive threat for evil and damnation, inherent in human experience,

as shown in the section on Sensuality in the next chapter.

103

The body-soul or the physical-spiritual dichotomy of the
mixed nature of man is also seen in fleeg_in Brad Tolliver's conver-
sation with Blanding Cottshill and LeonFankneyu Cottshill leads the
discussion, but Pinckney meekly concurs. Potts is a good man, but he
has failed to acknowledge the doubleness of life: the irony of his-
tory and man's nature which creates places and times like Fiddlersburg
and the present. But of them all, Cottshill says, "So I do not know
which of us lives in the more perilous balance." It is, however, only
in balance between the elements in the mixed nature of man that one
is able to learn how to live. Whether as an idealist, realist,
naturalist, or pragmatist, a character who is to survive in Warren's
world must come to terms with the apparent contradictions in the
mixed nature of man. As Jack Burden observed in All the Kingis Men,
while telling Anne Stanton of Irwin's perfidy, "The human being is a
very complicated contraption and they are not good or bad but are
good and bad and the good comes out of bad and the bad out of good,
and the devil take the hindmost." When he made this statement, he
was not aware of the implication of his conversation with Anne or of
the concept he was uttering; however, by the end of the novel, Jack
has learned to accept this mixed nature, so he can live "out of his-

tory into history and the awful responsibility of Time."
The Quality of Being: The Self

"You talk like you were blaming me," he said. "For
being what I am."

104

Thus Jack Harrick in The Cave registers his version of one of the
familiar concerns found in Warren's novels: Who or What am I? The
concern was first voiced in Night Rider; and, in one example, it is
indicative of the disintegration of the interpersonal relationship
between Percy and May Munn when he attacked her for "being the way

you are." The fifth novel, Band of Angels, begins with the penetrat-
ing question, "Oh, Who Am I? The ninth one (Meet Me in the Green Glen)
ends with Murray Guilfort's apparently very slow death by suicide dur-
ing which the end of his life is characterized as a fading terror "as
he sank deeper, sinking into truth, into the truth that was himself,
whatever his self was, as into joy, sinking there at last," and a

final encounter with Cy Grinder as he is undergoing the terrible
realization of the nature of his own suffering and the reality of his
own being in relationship with other beings. According to Warren, each
story is the story of the definition of a self, a search for identity

63 Consequently, it

based upon the quality of being, for good or evil.
is not surprising that each novel is, in fact, a quest for self-
definition by the characters involved. However, the purpose of this
section is not to discuss that process of self-definition as such,
but rather to deal with the essential qualities related to the osmosis
of being, from which the new self and the new identity come.

According to Warren, the process of the osmosis of being is
the finding of one's identity by affirming one's alienation, while
realizing that this fragmentation of being is a common tragic pathos

of life as seen in the universality of suffering. In the novels, only

the characters who go through this osmosis are allowed to develop any

105

degree of apparent happiness or fullness of being and achieve the
realization of the nature of being. In previous sections, reference
was made to the dictated statement of Ellis Burden in All the King's
flee_which, after having lain three days in his breast, he resurrected
to share with his wife's son: man's separateness is the quality of
his own identity as a being separate from God, and the creation of
good is the index to his glory. It is this fragmentation which is
demonstrated over and over again in the novels by the alienation that
is the root for the metaphysical limitation or finitude which lies at
the core of man's being; therefore, the nature of the self is the
basis for metaphysical evil as presented in the novels.

The characters are virtually all either lonely, isolated,
solitary individuals, or people who have come through the isolation

to affirm the common guilt of man, in the manner of Cass Mastern.

Remember me, but without grief [he dictated from his hospital
bed]. If one of us is lucky, it is I. I shall have rest and

I hope in the mercy of the Everlasting and in His blessed
election. But you, my dear brother, are condemned to eat

bread in bitterness and build on the place where the charred
embers and ashes are and to make bricks without straw and to
suffer in the ruin and guilt of our dear Land and in the common
guilt of man. In the next bed to me there is a young man from
Ohio. He is dying. His moans and curses and prayers are not
different from any others to be heard in this tabernacle of
pain. He marched hither in his guilt as I in mine. And in the
guilt of his Land. May a common Salvation lift us both from
the dust. And, dear brother, I pray God to give you strength
for what is to come.64

Cass's separateness from his brother Gilbert is heightened
by his death, alone in a strange place, from a wound sought in a war
in which he was an abolitionist who was in the Rebel army. The irony

and paradox in such a situation is great. But time after time the

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characters of the novels have similar experiences. For example, Willie
Proudfit in Night Rider, taken by the fever while in his mountain hide-
away, has to come close to death to find the awareness of his identity
in the universal suffering of mankind. By the grace of God, he is
allowed to return to the land of striving and begetting. He does so

in a remote place, subject to all the suffering around him. He does

so happily in the love of his wife, the literal fulfillment of his
dreams. He had found love in separateness; he had found the secret of
living in the separation of man. His serenity and acceptance of his con-
dition during the threat of loss of his farm because of draught is a
vivid point of contrast to the inner turmoil of Percy Munn. Munn,
while in the city, in the activities of civilization and materialistic
society, is lost and alienated even though he is increasingly unaware
of what is happening to him. Eventually, after time with the Proudfits,
Munn does come to some closure within himself; however, his experience
is not a successful one. He must strike out, and he attempts to find
and to kill his rejected father-figure, Senator Tolliver. He does
eventually find him, a betrayer who is not to be betrayed. Tolliver

is alone, ill and unable to defend himself, but Munn cannot bring
himself to kill him. His impotence to act is oppressive; he gives
Tolliver some water and leaves as he hears the troops coming. In his
flight, he resigns himself to his fate, and he is shot down without
returning any meaningful or intentional shots. "Lying there, while
the solid ground lurched and heaved beneath him in a long swell, he
drowsily heard the voices down the slope calling emptily, like the

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107

In the second novel (At Heaven's Gate), Ashby Wyndham's
statement is written while he is in prison which heightens his isola-
tion and alinenation. He has been arrested following a disturbance
during one of his preaching rallies, because one of his flock, Pearle,
had shot and killed a policeman who had chased some of the group back
to the river boat. His story emphasizes the wicked, depraved nature
of man, as already indicated earlier in this chapter; however, it is
essential to see him as a man in the crisis of isolation. He even has
lost the ability to pray, a rather common recurring symbol for man's
separation from God. One incident he relates is about his telling
Jasper Littlefoot that he might be "a pore sinful man in God's sight,
but I ain't no son of a bitch." He then went on to tell Jasper that
he, too, had lain in a dark prison--his sinful self--until he was let
out by the grace of God.

The prison of the self is stated or implied in nearly every
novel. The self is a form of solitary confinement, which each person
makes for himself. As each man acts and thereby creates his self, he
begins to build a pattern; however, "by the time we understand the
pattern we are in, the definition we are making for ourselves," Jack
Burden has observed in All the King's Men, "it is too late to break
out of the box. We can only live in terms of the definition, like a
prisoner in the cage. . . . Yet the definition we have made of our-
selves is ourselves. To break out of it, we must make a new self.

But how can the self make a new self when the selfness which it is, is
the only substance from which the new self can be made? At least that

was the way I argued the case back then." The creation of a new self

 

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108

is the problem of being, but the quality of being itslef is isolation,
alienation and estrangement.

In World Enough and Time and The Cave, for example, the cave
is a symbol of the inner space in which we may become trapped. The
prison cell for Jeremiah Beaumont is a cavern type of dungeon in which
Munn Short says all kinds have slept, “the wickit and the pure in
heart." But this prison cell is only one of the symbols of the isola-
tion lived by the characters. The remoteness of the farm, the darkness
in which they travel, the flight to the west and the land of Gran Bosse
are all indications of the depth of the inner estrangement experienced
by Jeremiah Beaumont. During his prison experience, the depth of his
alienation is highlighted in part by the story told by Munn Short in
which he relates the death he had experienced years before, and his
experience of finding Jesus and the release of his guilt for his
adultery with Lottie Perk.

Among the religious characters, upon whom this study is
primarily based, Isaac Sumpter in The Cave, is the one upon whom a
study of alienation could well concentrate. As a preacher's son who
rejects the heritage of the father's faith, he is actually a represen-
tative secular character. He is a "user," one of the many exploiters
found in the novels. As such, he is able only to treat other people
as objects and not as other suffering individuals. He has been
expelled from the university by the time the event which triggers the
story takes place. He has returned home, having concealed the truth
from his father. His alienation from his father is heightened by the

initial appearance of MacCarland and Isaac Sumpter through the

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contemplations of Mac, a Baptist preacher. His study is like a box,
and it has the qualities of the cave around which the story finds its
focus. Mac is in agony over the memory of his wife who died giving
Isaac life. Isaac is reading romantic poetry, and he envisions him-
self as the immortal bird of Keat's poem. As Mac interrupts his
reading, their alienation is demonstrated. Ikey, as he was called,
did not believe in God, and he had lost any concept of self. His
estrangement is total.

Isaac demonstrates this alienation and isolation of being.
He has few, if any, friends. His love affair with Rachel Goldstein
was brought to an end by his own senseless immorality and failure to
accept responsibility. He could not establish meaningful relation—
ships with anyone. In addition to his journeys into the cave in his
fraudulent efforts to save Jasper Harrick who was trapped there, his
flight from town in the old Studebaker is a symbol of his separateness.
In fact, the car is a common symbol of the alienation of modern, mecha-
nized man in the novels: one person moving in isolation through the
environment, detached and surrounded by blurred perception. As he
drove to escape his responsibility in the death of Jasper Harrick, he
fantasizes his sexual relationship with Goldie. While at the airport
he saw an old man, a derelict, dirty and poor. The old man's presence
heightens the alienation of Isaac as he is reminded of an old enemy,
Jim Haworth, from the newspaper for which he used to work. With the
purpose of antagonizing Haworth, Isaac telephoned him; but to his own
dismay and further alienation, Haworth succeeded in antagonizing him

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Jewish broker from New York city. The news was a terrible blow to
Ikey. "He was standing there, holding the dead phone," after Haworth
had hung up on him, "feeling sick and deprived, knowing that all his
striving had been in vain, for a man suffered for his success only to
find, in the end, that it was ashes, and that others, the shining
ones, moved serenely off into their glory. He was standing there when
the flight to New York was announced. He went out, numbly, and like a
condemned man mounted the scaffold, climbed the steps into the body

of the plane."

The episode ends in the midst of Isaac Sumpter's fantasy
which reflects the future into which he is flying: revenge sought for
the old rejections, false fame founded on his exploitation, covered by
his father's lie; alone. But how different the story of Isaac Sumpter
is from that of Adam Rosenzweig in Wilderness. Adam also is alone
when the novel ends, but he is not alienated as Ikey was. Adam
Rosenzweig had experienced a "mystic shame for being himself" which
gripped him after he was exposed as a cripple trying to get to America,
but he finds strength to overcome that shame by the humble recognition
that "he was not so different from other men." He felt at the begin-
ning of the book that if he could only keep the vision that other men
were like him, he "might find a way to live." "With that, however,"
the narrative continues, "he seemed to see his uncle staring sadly at
him saying: 'You would pray to God to give you the delusion of the
glory of Man, and that is the last foolishness.'" His story is his
definition, which allows him to accept others, and himself, not for

their glory, but in their error. He changes from shame and guilt, not

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111

to pride and glory, but to humility and acceptance. However, the
important thing is that he finds his truth, and he lives.

At the very point that Adam Rosenzweig had succeeded, Isaac
Sumpter failed. Whereas Adam had attempted to define himself in his
father's ideals, Isaac had tried to deny his father's ideals. Whereas
Adam was humble and learned the importance of acceptance, the end of
the novel comes before Isaac has learned that one cannot find a defini-
tion of himself in any other. In other words, Isaac is exercising the
common human fault of attempting to define himself in another, as
expressed by Cass Mastern, but he will not recognize it. Whereas
Adam comes to accept himself as the same as others, Isaac refuses to
identify himself with the common guilt of mankind. Whereas Adam is will-
ing to be totally himself, Isaac only wishes to be totally himself, but
he is not willing or able to take those necessary, painful steps for
self-realization which will allow him to fulfill that wish. Whereas
Adam's story closes with his affirmation of the truth and the realiza-
tion that "only the betrayer is ever betrayed, and then only by his
own betraying," Isaac's ends with his rejection of his father, because
he feels that he has been betrayed by his father, and he is not will-
ing to acknowledge that he in reality has betrayed himself, failing
to his own self to be true.

Also in Adam Rosenzweig, Warren demonstrated that the death
of the father brings the birth of the son through the son's obligation
to fulfill the dream of the father. Adam was only partially, if at
all, able to fulfill his father's dreams, but he did make an attempt

to do so. In his failure, he found himself. There is a sense in which

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112

this Jewish cripple becomes the model of all of Warren's successful
characters, in that he deals directly with his problem of self-
definition with the minimal distraction into the moral evils so
commonly indulged in by the people of Warren's fictional world. It
is not that Adam is without sin, but he completely came to terms with
his inherited limitations, his paternal obligations, and his own
separateness.

In contrast to those who deal with themselves, Warren repre-
sents the crowd of thrill and curiosity seekers in The Cave who
gathered at the cave, as a multitude that "with all their heart" had
come to Johntown and "had striven to break through that mystery which
was themselves." An awareness of oneself is not an easy task. For
example, Jack Burden was not yet ready for self-knoweldge when he
first approached the journals of Cass Mastern. "Perhaps he laid
aside the journal of Cass Mastern not because he could not understand,
but because he was afraid to understand," the narrative says, "for
what might be understood there was a reproach to himself." Self-
knowledge can be psychologically intolerable, without adequate prepara-
tion. As Jack Burden was prepared by his story to accept his self-
knowledge, Brad Tolliver in fleee_had come back to Fiddlersburg and
began to experience an inward awareness described as "discovering a
buried self. It was the true self that would live forever." However,
that self was not discovered completely by the end of the novel. His
awareness that there is no country but the heart gives hope that he

will learn to "trust the secret and irrational life of man, which

113

might be the truth of man." It was in himself he would find the
human necessity.

Another example of how Warren demonstrates the alienation
of his characters is shown in Brad Tolliver's perception of Brother
Potts in 51999, Potts is actually a compassionate man who has come
to love Fiddlersburg very much because of his ability to identify
with the people, but he is a lonely man, cancerous and dying. He
accepted a call to the ministry because he came to believe that a
man could not insure himself against either himself or God. The
insurance against oneself or God is impossible because of the nature
of both. To Potts, God is Sovereign; "We have got to remember," he
told Brad and Yasha, "the life we had was the life God wanted us to
have." But the self is a finite, limited, frail, depraved being,
weak and alienated.

The narrative demonstration of his loneliness comes as
Brad and Yasha discuss Brother Potts while strolling toward the ceme-
tery. In a pathetic potential scene for the movie, Brad's perception
of Potts' loneliness is given: "He stands there and takes a grim
delight in what he has done." That is, has given "a great, slow,
rumbling, deliberately uncontrolled fart. No correct that to heleh,"
while eating cold beans out of the can in his dark, inadequate kitchen.
"Nobody sees him. Nobody hears him. Nobody cares. He is alone. In
his aloneness he feels, suddenly, mysteriously, strong. He feels
heavy, dangerous, merciless, like a beast." Yasha then identifies
this much of the story as "mutatis mutandis, the story of us all."

Brad then continued the plot line by having Potts fall into a

114

passionate prayer "to rouse God from His lethargy." He raises blue
welts on his head from pressing it into the bottom of the chair. How-
ever, he would have to lie about how the marks got there, so he would
not be convicted of spiritual pride. The widower preacher, dying of
cancer, is the epitome of estranged loneliness, estranged by his
compassion.

The self certainly is a basis for evil in human experience.
While it is the source for potential fulfillment, more often than not
it is a prison, a trap, breathing black beast within, as Brad experi-
enced when going to visit Cal Fiddler in prison after recuperating from
the gunshot wound which ironically Cal had inflicted upon him and
then, subsequently, Calvin saved Brad from death. However, the self
can also of itself be expressive of a crime: the crime of being the
self one has made. As Jack Burden was waiting while Willie was think-
ing about what to do about Tom Stark's affair with Miss Frey, he wanted
to do something for Lucy, but he felt especially inadequate for the
visit. However, he realistically grasped and understood his own
situation, and he realized he did not owe her anything. He only wanted
to help. "My only crime," he thought to himself as he rejected the
idea of the necessity to apologize to her, "was being man and living
in the world of men, and you don't have to do a special penance for
that. The crime and the penance . . . are identical."

An expression similar to the above is given by Jeremiah
Beaumont near the end of World Enough and Time, as he became aware
that his crime was the crime of being himself: "That crime for which

I seek expiation is never lost. It is always there. It is unpardonable.

115

It is the crime of self, the crime of life. The crime is I." In
this climactic realization, Jeremiah acknowledges his own perfidy,
and his own crime had its basis in his own abuse of his ideals. He
had estranged himself from mankind. By this acceptance, his loneli-
ness became communion. His concluding paragraph in his statement
before he heads back for Frankfort is important at this point: He

says,

"There must be a way I have missed," he says, and looks mourn-
fully back on his story. "There must be a way whereby the word
becomes flesh. There must be a way whereby the flesh becomes
word. Whereby loneliness becomes communion without contamina-
tion. Whereby contamination becomes purity without exile. There
must be a way, but I may not have it now. All I can have now is
knowledge. But if we can have knowledge, if we can know the
terrible logic of life, if we can only know! But at least I know
now that life tells no lies in the end, for all the lies, single
and particular, will at last speak together in a great chorus of
truth in many voices. Thus all the lies and false witness
against me told truth, but in my anger and betrayal I did not
guess that this is all we need: knowledge. That is not redemp-
tion, but is almost better than redemption. I go home through
the wilderness now and know that I may not have redemption. I

no longer seek to justify. I seek only to suffer. I will shake
the hangman's hand, and will call him my brother, at last."65

He did not make it, but in his inward self he had obtained the recon-
ciliation with himself that is essential to fulfill human necessity.
He acknowledged his crime and his responsibility for the self he had
made, but he could not stop the inevitable fate that would come at the
hand of One-eye Sam Jenkins who brought his head in for the reward.
One of the powerful insights into the racial problem seen
in fleee_occurs when Pretty Boy, a Black prisoner waiting to be exe-
cuted, spits on Brother Potts who has come to him to try to minister

to him in his time of need. It is powerfully relevant that in an

 

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earlier passage Brad Tolliver has given a discourse to Yasha Jones on
the racial problem. The heart of the race problem, Brad says, is not
guilt. "It is," he says, "simply that your Southerner is deeply and
ambiguously distrubed to have folks around him who are not as lonesome
as he is. Expecially if they are Black folks.“ This is part of the
high lonesomeness to which Brad refers in fleeg, The characters all
demonstrate this lonesomeness. The alienation of one being from
another is a demonstration of that internal loneliness all experience
as a part of their being.

Another presentation of the existential loneliness which
pervades most of the novels occurs in Meet Me in the Green Glen when
the narrator records the mood of the town which was wrapped in silence
concerning the trial. "Guilty or innocent, the thing was uncomfortable
to talk about in another way. It was lonesome. It was lonely. It was
lonely to think of yourself paralyzed, trapped in yourself that way
like you were your own coffin, and somebody picking you up carefully
and setting a knife to go into your back. It was lonelier than getting
stabbed, face forward, of a sudden." How could anyone be more isolated
than Sunderland Spottwood, the paralyzed stroke victim who lay in the
dark prison-like room for twelve years. The entrapment of the victim
in this murder is symbolic of the condition of each of the characters
in the novels who is, indeed, trapped in himself, in his own coffin.

It is such a pervasive condition that it gains a metaphysical quality
by virtue of that very pervasiveness. Further, however, the loneliness
and separation in love is shown, as the narration continues: "it was

lonely to think of that young fellow--the dago--and that old woman

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lying up there together at night, in that fallen-in house, and that
paralyzed man in the next room. It was lonely to think of that woman,
even if she was crazy--but was she crazy then?--driving to Nashville
and trying to see the Governor and not seeing him." In her isolation,
no one really willing to help could, and no one who could would. The
totally oppressive loneliness that is found throughout this last novel
makes it essential that it be recognized that the very fiber of being
itself is saturated with essential solitude and existential loneliness.
The total impact, however, of this loneliness is shown next.
To those familiar with the novels, the paragraph given below, in its
entirety, demonstrates the alienation and its role within the world

of Warren's novels:

It was, then the loneliness that made people uncomfortable when
they talked about the trail. But it was the loneliness, strangely
enough, that made people keep on remembering even if they did not
talk. You thought of it at night just before going to sleep. Or
woke up just before day and started thinking about it. You might
be walking home from the store or office and suddenly think that
your wife was getting old and shapeless and when you came in the
door she would look at you as though she didn't know you. Or you
might realize that you yourself were old, and you might suddenly
wonder what was in her head. Or if you were a woman, you might
be sitting in a room shuttered shadowy against the heat on a sum-
mer afternoon, and wonder what that crazy Spottwood woman had got
out of life that you never got, and the loneliness would suddenly
overcome you like lostness and too-lateness, and a grief you had
no name for.57

It is significant that in such passages, there is a mixture of time

and the dark color of shadow and the oppression of heat, all indicative
of evil. Also, there is a mention of the nameless pain or dread that
is at the core of life. Notice also the left-out, outsider feeling of

which the women are said to be aware. Virtually every line of this

118

typical passage is filled with the threat of evil at the very base of
being itself.

Another symbol of this loneliness which is in nearly all of
the novels is the light in a window which is seen in the dark from a
distance. As Jack Burden explained to Anne Stanton at one point in
All the King's Men, "I felt as you do when you pass down a dark street
and look up to see a lighted window and in the bright room people
talking and singing and laughing with the firelight splashing and undu-
lating over them and the sound of music drifts out of the street while
you watch; and then a hand, you will never know whose hand, pulls
down the shade. And there you are, outside." Since Percy Munn was
made to feel left out of the Proudfit circle at the farm and he became
so vitally aware of his alienation of others, Warren has continued to
picture people outside of the center of activity in this way. In each
novel there are several such instances. Throughout Warren's novels
someone is always on the outside looking in, out of the darkness into
the light.

Near the end of The Cave, the gravely ill Jack Harrich is
recalling his youthful conquests, among them Mary Tillyard who was the
late Mrs. Sumpter and Celia Hornby, who was to be his own wife. "Yes,
he hadn't cared what even [Celia] had wanted or needed, what emptiness
she had to fill to be herself. All that had mattered was his own
terror when, not knowing for a second whose hand he held in the dark,
he had been caught in the vertigo of his own non-being." The threat
of falling into non-being, as Jack was caught in here, is frequently

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119

self, which is empty and striving to be filled, is an ever present
part of the life each character leads.

A few pages earlier in The Cave another example of confront-
ing loneliness is shown. After Jack Harrick contemplated the sermon
of MacCarland Sumpter from the thirty-eighth Psalm on inherited sin
from the father's point of view, Jack considers whether or not all
men are like him. As he contemplates his sons, Monty and Jasper, he
concludes that Monty is not like him. Monty has gone into the cave to
hold his dead brother's hand. Jack feels better realizing that the
younger son is not going to have to be like him. Monty will continue
to make his own song and build his own life, presumably with Jo-Lea
Bingham. Jack takes his pill and begins to play the guitar; he has
learned how to die, now he can live until he does die, and he will
fight to live.

Consequently, Jack Harrick has overcome the finitude of his
being, or at least the fear of the finitude in his being. He has
changed from the desperate man who will not take his medicine that
sat with MacCarland Sumpter under the single light which hung from
the ceiling while insects hit against the screen on the door. As Mac
and Jack talked of the people being more willing to believe a lie
than the truth, the moths and the light with the screen interposed
become a symbol of the finitude of being which is everywhere present

around this Baptist preacher and his prize convert.

120

Quality of Being: Reality

The problem of identity for an individual is not the only
type of being with which Warren is concerned. It is true that self-
knowledge is the central theme of Warren's novels; however, the world
which is created in those novels reflected a world in which truth,
reality, dream and illusion are so mixed that the very nature of all
existence is perceived as a source for evil. In none of the novels is
this concern demonstrated any more clearly than in the last. Meet Me
in the Green Glen begins with the mixture of real and imagined experi-
ences seen through the eyes of Mrs. Cassie Spottwood. In her own mind,
she is confused as to what is happening within and what is going on
outside of her own mind. The dark colors and the dreary rain and mud
all add to the illusory, dream-like quality of the world around her.

As the story develops, Murray Guilfort, who was influenced very much
by a friend he met at a convention, has difficulty separating the true
from the false, the real from the illusion, the dream from the real
possibility.

In many respects all of the novels do have this reality-
illusion quality about them. Scenes set in the twilight and in the
dark often so dominate the mood of the stories that the pessimism they
contain gives total reinforcement of the metaphysical notions already
discussed in this chapter. In a crude pun, Alfred Milbank, the conven-
tion friend of Guilfort, stated the concept concisely: "'Yes, Guilfort,‘
he went on, 'art is all, and a good lie is worth a million facts in any

court. Or in any bed. Illusion, Guilfort, is the only truth.'" As

121

one might expect in Warren, even a Philistine conventioneer cites

art as the reality, and illusion as the truth. "A thing ain't ne'er
what you think it is!" Mrs. Pugh told Adam Rosenzweig in Wilderness.
This is precisely the type of illusion very often presented.

Among the religious characters in the novels, Jason Sweet—
water's recollections of his father's stories which were really lies
represent the illusion creation similar to that which appears in the
novels. In the mind of Sweetwater, his father was not a malicious man;
therefore, Sweetwater did not consider his father as dangerous as the
other illusions around him. He made specific reference to Sue Murdock
about the illusion created by Slim Sarrett which was the world in which
he lived. Sweetwater had not lived with Sue until Slim Sarrett's world
was turned from his created illusion to the truth by the Greek homo-
sexual. Another forceful representation of the same problem is the
concluding scene with Isaac Sumpter in The Cave already alluded to in
the previous section. When his fraudulent effort to build a reputation
of fame and honor and to make a fortune from the cave on his property
failed because of his father's discovery of his lie, he fled into
another lie, an illusory world. Ironically, his father had to create
a lie in order to save his son from a lie. But he did it. Jack
Harrick tried to encourage Mac by telling him that the people would
believe him anyway, because they would want to; they would believe
what they needed to believe.

Further, Jack Harrick himself was not a reality; that is, the
Jack Harrick in the minds of all the people in the valley was not the

Jack Harrick who loves his wife and his sons. But the clear impact of

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122

Celia Harrick's concern for her lost son in that Jasper felt the pres-
sure to live up to the dream version, the imaginative version of Jack,
not the actual one. ". . . Jack Harrick, he knew then, was nothing
but a dream," Jack himself thought during his crisis. "He was a dream
dreamed up from the weakness of people. Since people were weak, they
dreamed up a dream out of their need for violence, for strength, for
freedom. Sitting there, he hated them for their weakness, or all
their praise and envy, for the hands clawing at him for his strength,
or in supplication of it." But in the next paragraph, the narrative
continues, "He hated them for their weakness, which made him what he
was."

Another important aspect of the nature of reality and illu-
sion in the novels is that dreams, like that given above about Jack
Harrick, have a way of coming true. This reinforces what MacCarland
Sumpter had learned earlier in The Cave, that the will of God is formed
by the will of man. Men have the terror of getting what they want.

In an earlier novel, At Heaven's Gate, Duckfoot Blake, one
of Murdock's employees and a part of Slim Sarrett's manipulated group,
comments to Gerald Calhoun upon learning that Bogan Murdock has been
apprehended. "'No,' he repeated, 'it wouldn't mean much. Because
Bogan Murdock ain't real. Bogan is a solar myth, he is a pixy, he is
a poltergeist. Son,‘ he said, 'you can't put ectoplasm in jail. But
Bogan ain't even ectoplasm. He is just something you and I thought up
one night. When Bogan Murdock looks in the mirror he don't see a
thing." Then a few lines later, "Bogan Murdock is just a dream Bogan

Murdock had, a great big wonderful dream. And you can't put a dream

123

in jail, son. Bogan Murdock is just a wonderful idea Bogan Murdock
had. And that,‘ Duckfoot said sadly, 'is why Bogan Murdock is a great
man.'"

With respect to human greatness, Uncle Rosenzweig called the
delusion of human greatness the last foolishness. The old Jew's remark
brings the famous concern of Jack Burden over the greatness of Willie
Stark to mind. In All the King's Men, Jack agreed with Lucy Stark that
one must believe that Willie was a great man either despite of or
because of the mixture of good and evil so evident in his rise to and
maintenance of power. However, there is in the novels an overall impact
that does cause me to join with Cass Mastern and wonder about the mean-
ing of goodness of men, if we judge the nature of the influence of the
good men in history. Such things as the Justice for which Jeremiah
Beaumont or Percival Skrogg strove was turned to wickedness, as was the
good Percy Munn had wanted before him in World Enough and Time and 51933.
Eflgeg, respectively. In the many instances in which the ideals of
people are turned into evil ends, good is the delusion and, therefore,
the evil that follows is more real than the good that spawned it. Even
in the last novel, the friendship and the charity shown by Murray
Guilfort to Cassie and Sunderland Spottwood were masks for his own deep
seated resentment for Sunderland and his desire for Cassie. His act
of suppressing evidence out of a concern for Cassie became an act of
selfish pride which caused the execution of the innocent Angelo. In
Warren, there is nearly as large a problem with the nature of human

goodness as there is with the problem of evil.

124

The difficulty of distinguishing the real and the unreal is
also demonstrated by the ambiguity of the plots and the situations in
which these characters function. Motives are never clear and the mix-
ture of the right and wrong, the true and the false, the illusion and
the reality is so complete that Jack Burden becomes a very typical
example of Warren's characters engaged in the problem of separating
them. "But I had to know," Jack said while investigating Irwin for

Stark.

Even as the thought of going away without knowing came through
my head, I knew that I had to know the truth. For the truth is
a terrible thing. You dabble your foot in it and it is nothing.
But you walk a little further and you feel it pull you like an
undertow or a whirlpool. First there is a slow pull so steady
and gradual you scarcely notice it, then the acceleration, then
the dizzy whirl and plunge to blackness. For there is a black-
ness of truth, too. They say it is a terrible thing to fall
into the Grace of God. I am prepared to believe that.

In other words, the very nature of truth as perceived by the characters
contributes to the ambiguous base from which good and evil come, and
this ambiguity touches them all. All of the stories could carry with
them the admonition of Aaron Bleustein to Adam Rosenzweig, "The hardest
thing to remember is that other men are men." Just about every charac-
ter who is touched by the notion of evil in Warren's novels fails to
keep this advice in mind. To be a person is to have a mixed, ambiguous
nature.

Leroy Lancaster of Meet Me in the Green Glen has the same
ambiguity. He had the existential dread that is common to men,
especially in Warren's world. He was aware that life was passing him

by, and he was a failure. He even questioned his wife's love for him.

125

During his walk at the time of crisis and realization, he came to their

house, but he would not go in or even approach very closely.

He stood there, staring at the distant light as though he could
spy on her loneliness. He had the impulse to enter the yard
and creep toward the window. He would have to be careful. The
old acorns that strewed the ground would crackle underfoot in
the dark. He imagined himself secretly peering into the window
where she stood, alone in the pale light.

What would he see there?

His breath came short.

Then, all at once, he felt old and dry. He wondered where
life had gone. 69

He thought: When will I be done with illusion?

Later during that same walk, Leroy had a fantasy [unreal]
that Angelo was making love to his very sensual wife. This dream
brought him the idea [true or false] that he, too, down deep, had
wanted Angelo dead. It forced him to see his identity with other men,
and brought him to the climactic realization [real and true] of his
own blasphemy of his own life. The illusion had brought him truth.

The problem of understanding life is complex. Even Senator
Tolliver in Night Rider said that life was too complex for simple
answers to its problems. Because of this, many different approaches
are necessary in order to find the truth that there is. Most of them
presented in the novels are in one way or another presented in some of
the selected religious characters, but there is one passage particu-
larly of interest here which relates to one of the other characters.
"Yes, reality was the uncapturable. That is why we need illusion.
Truth through lie [Yasha Jones] thought. Only in the mirror, over
your shoulder, he thought, does the‘ghost appear." The threat of
emptiness, alienation and despair are all a part of the stuff of

reality that is only grasped or seen through the illusion of the art,

126

especially the created story. But God also participates in the illu-
sion of reality. While discussing the complexity of life and the
causes of his Great Sleep, Jack Burden said, "I would lie there and
know I didn't have to get up, and feel the holy emptiness and blessed
fatigue of a saint after the dark night of the soul. For God and
Nothing have a lot in common. You look either one of Them straight
in the eye for a second and the immediate effect on the human consti-
tution is the same."

Sometimes the complexity of reality is too much for the mind
to grasp so the mind makes its own reality. This is what happened to
Cassie Spottwood. She had killed her husband, and finally, she con-
fessed it in open court. Because no one in authority would believe
it, Angelo was executed. Cassie was placed in a sanatorium, and there
she became happy and knew joy, because she created her own reality,
the delusion of love and her own innocence. Angelo had gone away,
and he was happy.

Nevertheless, the true nature of reality is the "spooky
interpretation of things" symbolized in the spider web analogy of Cass
Mastern in All the King's Men, and illustrated by all the novels. In
Warren's view of the nature of being, as Calvin Fiddler in fleee.had
learned the truth, "In solitary you decide, well, I'll just shut my
eyes, for only what you can think can truly exist. But then you shut
your eyes and that thing that was unthinkable--it really does come
true. It blazes up around you like a brush fire. It blazes up like
spilled gasoline. It blazes in the dark inside your head. You

realize in that flash that there is no yee_except in relation to all

127

that unthinkableness that the world is. And you yourself are. So
you begin to cry." Calvin goes on to describe how he grew beyond that
despair to see life as a beautiful possibility for all existence.
"Anyway," he went on, "now it was just like seeing life like in a
mirror--but nothing there before the mirror to be reflected. You
might say the only thing reflected was just the possibility of some-
thing."

C

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CHAPTER II
FOOTNOTES

1Radslav A. Tsanoff, The Nature of Evil (New York, 1931),

2Aibion Ray King, The Problem of Evil (New York, 1952),

3John L. Stewart, The Burden of Time: The Fugitives and
Agrarians (Princeton, New Jersey, 1965), p. 533.

4"Zoroaster," Encyclopaedia Britannica (1952). XXIII. 933-

5José Luis Duhourq, "The Presentation and Interpretation of
Moral Evil in the Contemporary Cinema," in Moral Evil Under Challenge,
ed. Johannes B. Metz (New York, 1970), p. 140.

6Jakob Amstutz, "Sickness and Evil in Modern Literature,"
Religion in Life, XXXIV (1965), 289.

7Paul Siwek, The Philosgphy of Evil (New York, 1951). p. 100.

8Robert Penn Warren, "'The Great Mirage': Conrad and
Nostromo," in Selected Essays (New York, 1966), p. 33. Italics sup-
p ie .

9Robert Penn Warren, llKnowledge and the Image of Man," in
Robert Penn Warren: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. John Lewis
Longley, Jr. (New York, 1965T, p. 275.

10

1lFrederick Hoffman, The Art of Southern Fiction: A Study of
Some Modern Novelists (Carbondale, Ill., 1967), p. 32.

12

Tsanoff, p. 4.

Robert Penn Warren, At Heaven's Gate (New York, 1943), p. 292.
13

14Clarence Valentine Boyer, The Villain as Hero in Elizabethan
Tragedx (London, 1914), p. 8.

Eric Hoffer, The True Believer (New York, 1951), p. 24.

128

«V

‘ §

129

15Rinehold Niebuhr, The Nature and Destiny of Man, I (New
York, 1964), 279.

16ETizabeth M. Kerr, "Polarity of Themes in All the King's
Men," Modern Fiction Studies, VI (1960), 28f.

17Niebuhr, I, 298.

18John Edward Hardy. "Robert Penn Warren's Double—hero,"
Virginia Quarterly Review, XXXVI (1960), 587.

19PauT Ricoeur, The Symbolism of Evil (New York, 1967), p. 343.

20Heinrich Emil Brunner, The Scandal of Christianity
(Philadelphia, 1951), pp. 54, 55.

2lFrederick Copleston, A History of Philosgphxs 1 (Garden
City, 1966), 375.

22Warren, "Knowledge and the Image of Man," pp. 237, 238.

23[Benjamin] Davidson, Analytical Hebrew and Chaldee Lexicon
of the Old Testament (Mac Dill AFB, Florida, n.dT), p. 678.

24Alan W. Watts, The Two Hands of God: The Myths of Polarity
(Toronto, 1969), passim.

25Robert Penn Warren, All the Kingfs Men (New York, 1953),
p. 273.

26These sources have dealt with Warren's concept of God or
the relationship of God to history. Keith Beebe, "Biblical Motifs in
All the King's Men," Journal of Bible and Religion, XXX (1962), 123-
130; Rabert Berner, "The RequirediPast: [World Enou h and Time,“ Modern
Fiction Studies, VI (1960), 55-64; Brooks, pp. 9831 ;_MaFden J. ClarE,
"Religious Implications in the Novels of Robert Penn Warren," Brigham
Young_Universiiy Studies, IV (1961), 67-79; Lyle Glazier, "Reconstructed
Platonism: *Robert Penn Warren's The Cave," Litera, VII (1960), 16-26;
Harvey Gross, "History as Metaphysical Pathos: Modern Literature and
the Idea of History," Denver Quarterly, I (1966), 1-22; Harry P.
Haseltine, "The Deep, TNTsting Strain of Life: The Novels of Robert
Penn Warren," Melbourne Critical Review, No. 5 (1962), 76-89; Magmer,
pp. 178-183; L. Hugh'MBore, JF}, RObert Penn Warren and History: "The
Big Mygh We Live," (The Hague, 1970); L. Hugh MOore, Jr., "Robert’Penn
warren and the Terror of Answered Prayer," Mississippi Quarterly, XXI
(1967), 29-36; James E. Ruoff, "Robert Penn Warren's Pursuit of Justice:
From Briar Patch to Cosmos," Research Studies of the State College of
Washin ton, XXVII (1959), l9-38; Shepherd, "Robert Penn Warren as a
Philosophical Novelist," pp. 157-168; John L. Stewart, "Robert Penn
Warren and the Knot of History," Journal of Engiish Literary History,

Fl
rl

11'

130

XXVI (1959), 102-136; and Curtis Whittington, Jr., "The 'Burden' of
Narration," Southern Humanities Review, II (1968), 236-245.

27Frederick Sontag, The God of Evil: An Argument from the
Existence of the Devil (New York, 1970), p. 68}

28Luther Winfield Stalnaker, Humanism and Human Dignity,
Yale Studies in Religion, No. 13 (New Haven, 1955), p. 2757’ 7

29Cf. Hugh Thomson Kerr, Jr., ed., A Compend of the Institu-
tes of the Christian Religion by John Calvin, Trans. John Allen
(Philadelphia, 1939), I, i, 2.

30Robert Penn Warren, "Faulkner: The South, The Negro, and
Time," in Faulkner: A Collection of Critical Esseys, ed. Robert Penn

Warren (Englewooa CliTTs, 1966), p. 269.
31

32Michael Grant, "Gods of Light and Darkness," History
Today, XVIII (1968), 269.

33Charles A. Allen, "Robert Penn Warren: The Psychology of
Self-Knowledge," Literature and Psychology, VIII (1958), 22.

34

35Jack Burden says of his flight West after learning of Anne
Stanton being Willie Stark's mistress, "That is why I drowned in West
and relived my life like a home movie," All the Kingfs Men, p. 327,
cf. p. 315 also.

Warren, "Faulkner," p. 257.

Robert Penn Warren, Flood (New York, 1963), pp. 138, 139.

36Stewart, The Burden of Time, p. 495.

37Ricoeur, p. 178.

38Bohner, p. 98.

39

40Robert Penn Warren, "Some Recent Novels," Southern Review,
I (1936), 629.

41

Niebuhr, II, 166.

Niebuhr, II, 155.

42Van A. Harvey, A Handbook of Theological Terms (New York,
1964), pp. 69, 70.

43
44

Elizabeth Kerr, p. 28.

Warren, All the King's Men, p. 333.

(1'51er
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131

 

 

 

45Brooks, p. 108.

46Warren, All the King's Men, p. 338.
47Warren, All the King's Men, p. 461.
48Warren, All the King's Men, p. 461.
49Warren, All the Kingfs Men, p. 328.

 

50Warren, All the King's Men, p. 200.

51Leonard Casper, Robert Penn Warren: The Dark and Bloody

Ground (Seattle, 1960), p. 1211

VIII, 763.

p. 506.

1971), p.

52Clark, p. 76.

53"Ethic5. History of," EncyclopaediaBritannica (1962),

54Warren, All the King's Men, p. 242.

55PauT Ricoeur, Falibility of Man (Chicago, 1965), p. 97.

56Ricoeur. The Symbolism of Evil, pp. 220. 221.

57Warren, All the Kingjs Men, p. 4252

58Warren, All the King's Men, p. 375.

59Warren, All the King's Men, p. 172.

60Warren, At Heavenig Gate, p. 35.

6Warren, At Heaven's Gate, p. 317.

62Warren, Flood, p. 429.

63Cf. Warren, "Knowledge and the Image of Man," p. 237.

64Warren, All the King's Men, p. 173.

65Robert Penn Warren, World Enough and Time (New York, 1950),

66Robert Penn Warren, Meet Me in the Green Glen (New York,
345. 7

67Narren, All the Kingfs Men, pp. 363, 364.

68Robert Penn Warren, The Cave (New York, 1959), p. 272.

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CHAPTER III

MORAL EVIL

Lived lak a man will, and labored fer bread. I seen the
belt tight and I seen the gut full to plenish, in the change
of time and the seasons, how they come. I taken what come and
ne'er give thanks, fer hit was my strength I laid trust in.

And I taken my pleasure. I drunk likker and laid on the ground
lak a hog. I fit with folks fer no cause, and cut men to let
the blood come out. I stole, and I grieve to say hit. A man
layin drunk, and I taken what he had. I laid out with women

in the bresh. I done all the meanness of man. But a man comes
along and he falls in the world and the mud lak a man will.
Ain't nuthin to tell him, if he don't harken soft, fer the
world, hit is a quagmire and don't hang out no sign.

Given the nature of man and the nature of the world as indi-
cated in the previous chapter, the way men live in such a place with
such people is summarized in Munn Short's statement of his life to
Jeremiah Beaumont as they waited for Jeremiah's execution. When
finite men are placed in a world of finite creatures, actions and
interactions bring harm, displeasure and death. Such human actions
are often called "evil." Because they are actions which originate
in the will and are the responsibility of the ones who perform them,
they are called moral evil. In the previous chapter, consideration
was given to the nature of the evil which rests at the base of
reality as demonstrated in the novels of Robert Penn Warren. The
purpose of the inquiry now is to consider the nature of the evils
men inflict upon each other that bring harm, pain, suffering, or

frustration to others and themselves.

132

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133

In many respects, Munn Short's brief account of his life to
Jeremiah Beaumont given in part above is typical of the lives of many
of the characters in the novels. Having lived the way other people
lived, the laboring Munn Short had experienced times of want and times
of surplus. Also, he pridefully trusted in his own strength and did
not feel any obligation to anyone because he felt he had earned it
himself. Having then demonstrated the human quality of pride, he
also is guilty of sensuality. He had his pleasure and had lived human
meanness. The meanness refers to lowness, or the inferior quality of
action or behavior: those vile, immoral things which are expressive
of moral evil. Several kinds of action are named by Short which
qualify: drinking likker and living like a hog, aggression, vicious-
ness, violence, stealing, and fornication. As such, these activities
are representative of the "mean" actions many of the characters
engage in.

Finally, Munn Short makes an astute, yet homey observation
concerning the nature of the world in which we live; it is, he says,
a quagmire. The implications of the quagmire are significant. Not
only is it a muddy bog which will not bear the weight of anyone trying
to walk over it, but it also is a situation from which extrication is
extremely difficult. Certainly one of the things the novels of Robert
Penn Warren say is that the world is so much with us that we cannot be
easily taken from it, and we will sink in it. The quagmire image indi-
cates the interrelationship of the three kinds of evil; the finite,
flawed man who will walk on it; the mud, dirt, and filth that is in it;

and the ever-present continuing threat of it.

 

*E

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134

As indicated in Chapter I, the classifications of moral evil
developed by Rinehold Neibuhr are used for this study. The first type
of moral evil is self-ambition, sometimes called pride, and in classi-
cal literary vocabulary, DEEEIE: The second type of moral evil is
self-love which expresses itself in sensuality. 522312.15 sometimes
called an insolent pride, in that it expresses disregard for human
limitation or finitude in the face of deity. According to Niebuhr,
pride expresses itself in four specific ways: (1) pride of power, (2)
pride of knowledge, (3) pride of virtue, and (4) spiritual pride.
These categories are developed below with examples from the novels and
relevant discussion. Next, sensuality is discussed in terms of its
principal manifestations: (l) self-defeating sensuality, (2) escape
into externals, and (3) inner escape to deny the outside world.
Finally, there is a discussion of responsibility as it relates to
moral evil in the forms of irresponsible use of power in moral or
ethical imperialism and moral irresponsibility in the form of moral

isolationism.

Pride of Power

 

When a person begins to trust too much in himself and in his
own abilities, he is likely to develop an exaggerated sense of self-
sufficiency. As we might expect, the pride of power will express this
self-sufficiency in many forms of ambition and greed. Further, the
pride of power is associated with the rejection of dependency and
limitation. As demonstrated in the second chapter, Warren clearly shows

the view of man as limited and dependent. To willfully disregard or to

135

deny the reality of such a natural condition is to be guilty of the
moral evil, the pride of power.

The pride of power is associated with the human tendency to
give too much trust to an idea and the amount of effort they can give
to them and the amount of the human ability to bring the idea of
actuality by the trust put in the idea. However, this particular evil
is also associated with the other sins of pride as well. With respect
to the pride of power, "the human ego,“ Niebuhr says, "assumes its
self-sufficiency and self-mastery and imagines itself secure against

all visissitudes."2

One of the principal examples of this attitude in
the novels is Isaac Sumpter in The Cave. Because he had such an
exaggerated view of his own abilities, he exploited others by his
fraudulent attempt to save Jasper Harrick. His clear motive is power
and glory. He wanted money, he was ambitious and his greed was self-
evident as he encouraged Nich Papadoupalous to cooperate in the conces-
sions outside the cave to capitalize upon the tragedy. The greatest
expression of this pride of power perhaps is at the very end of his
appearance in the novel as he is projecting into the future and he sees
himself as the center of attention in the New York party circuit because
of his "heroic" efforts to save Jasper.

The emptiness of his claim for pride is highlighted by basing
his claim upon the lies which made it possible. His believing that he
could actually get away with such a perposterous thing is demonstrative
of this gross evil. The worst thing is that there were those outside

of the cave who could, and apparently would, have gone into the cave to

save Jasper, but Isaac prevented them. Further, he lacks any sign of

136

contrition or repentance when his father, the Baptist preacher,
MacCarland Sumpter, discovered his lie and in turn lied to cover
the sin of his son.

The human condition is by nature insecure. In attempts to
find a security beyond that to which his condition entitles him, a
person will commit the sin of pride of power. In At Heaven's Gate,
Jason Sweetwater's efforts as a labor leader can be understood as this
type of pride of power. His efforts to bring improved working condi-
tions, in and of themselves, may not be evil; in fact, he is doing
what he can to bring some justice into the world in the terms of its
great injustice. Nevertheless, there is the threat that his effort to
find security for them is subject to this moral tension. It was Jason
who initiated the sequence of events that eventually cost Ashby Wyndham
his job and sent him on the road that led him to Jesus. This appears
to be a good; however, after a short time, Ashby's sinful pride in the
Lord cost him his own confidence and his relationship to God. Further,
the pride of power in Jason's own abilities eventuated in the murder
of Sue Murdock.

To adequately consider the pride of power in the novels of
Robert Penn Warren, it is necessary to refer to the career of Willie
Stark in All the King's Men. A great deal has been said about this
pragmatic politician who caused his own destruction. For example, it
is his interest in building a great hospital for the people of the
state that causes him to enter into the series of events that actually
end in his murder at the hands of Adam Stanton. The pride that is

involved in the project is demonstrated by his desire to name the

137

hospital the Willie Stark Memorial Hospital. Even though he does want
later to change the name to honor his son who was killed by a football
injury, the motive of pride and the self-glorification implicit in
naming the effort after his own son is obvious.

Further, Willie believes that he can go against his own doc-
trine or belief and build a hospital that is "clean" and absent of all
political corruption. He is forced into this project not only by his
own pride, but also by the insistance of Dr. Stanton; however, his
inability to do so is also indicative of the inherent limitation in a
human to go against the weight of the events he starts. Willie had
gotten where he was because of his astute exercise of his will to
power. In the end, that exercise brought not only his own destruction,
but the death of Adam Stanton as well. While Willie had learned his
Presbyterian theology well enough to use the doctrine of the depravity
of man to his advantage, he had not learned it well enought to keep
himself from becoming the victim of the pride of power. In terms of
power, Willie had it all, and he abused it all. His manipulation of
others in order to achieve his own ends is demonstrative of his total
pragmatic approach to life. The end for which one strives does not
justify the means when those means are the exercise of the pride of
power.

Willie's pride of power had caused him to deny his father in
all but a practical political way. The return to the farm for publicity
pictures, and his reaction to the old dog in the opening chapter indi-
cate that his interest in home was not out of a genuine loyalty to his

past or his father. He also exploited his relationship to the people

138

of Mason City as much as possible in order to build his own political
advantage.

Ironically, Adam Stanton cites Willie's intention to do good
for the people as a bribe. "I will do those things," Willie declared
in a speech, "So help me God. I shall live in your will and your
right. And if any man tries to stop me in the fulfilling of that right
and that will I'll break him. I'll break him like that!" He continues
to say that he will literally do anything to achieve his ends. And
he does. This expression of a will to power is not unique to Willie
Stark. Certainly, the efforts of Percy Munn, which in the beginning
were apparently sincere efforts to work the will of the people of the
association, were eventually nothing less than an expression of the
will to power in which he became totally unaware Of his own contin-
gency. By the end of the novel, however, he was reminded of it again,
and he found it necessary to strike out at the one he thought was
responsible.

In another of the novels, Percival Skrogg is expressive of
the will to power. His use of Jeremiah Beaumont and even Wilkie
Barron, although in that case it is not clear who used whom, is a
typical example of the driving need to have power. The cause of the
Replevin Party was greater than that of universal justice. His con-
cept of justice was more important than his own life and body. His
willingness to have others suffer in order for his cause to prosper
is certainly an example of the will to power. He is an example of
the Willie Stark type of political worker in an era before our own;

nevertheless, the evil he does eventually brings his own destruction.

139

Examples could also be drawn from the prideful kindness of
Hamish Bond or the vanity of Thingism idealistically opposed by Tobias
Sears as presented in Band of Angels, or the exploitation by the sut-
lers or the greed of Monmorency Pugh in Wilderness. The ambition of
Judge Irwin caused him to take the bribe and caused the death of Mr.
Littlepaugh in All the King's Men. In fleee_the exploitation of
others for personal power is represented by Brother Potts and Rev.
Leon Pinckney's attempts to bring Pretty Boy to his praying knees
before his execution. Murray Guilfort's desire for political influence
in his home state is an example of pride of power in Meet Me in the
Green Glen. In this last case, Murray got what he wanted, just as
many others did in the novels; but he found the price paid was too
great. He committed suicide to end the torment and the terror of the
great injustice done for personal glory and power. In each of the
novels, there are many examples of the exercise of the pride of power
to gain riches, power or glory. Greed and ambition are powerfully
present. On every hand, on nearly every page, characters are trapped
because they ignore their human limitation and strive to make them-
selves sufficient to the end they plan.

Sometimes Warren addresses the problem of pride very directly,
as he did in the case of Jack Harrick in The Cave as he is recalling

his baptism at the hands of MacCarland Sumpter.

Later, he felt a little ashamed of having suspected that Ole

Mac was trying to drown him. Then the shame turned into a wry,
secret joke. He reckoned that Ole Mac, knowing all he did about
him, had to give him a little deeper dunking than the ordinary
sinner needed. Once, meeting Ole Mac on the street, he even had
the impulse to tell him the joke. . . . He reckoned it was a sort
of pride, just plain ornery human man-pride in sinfulness, that

140

made him want to tell the joke in the first place. So he made
another joke to himself. He reckoned since even if he was saved
he still had such a bait on sin-pride, he might take longer than
most to build up saint-pride.

While referring in the last sentence to what is discussed below as
pride of virtue, i.e., saint-pride, Jack is also exhibiting a type of
pride which could be read as a pride for glory or a pride of power
over another in his effort to make a joke with Mac Sumpter over what
he knew was an intensely serious thing for MacCarland.

Certainly, the novels are replete with examples of the type
of greedy pride of power that Willie Proudfit identified in Night Rider
when he said, "We got our'n and didn't reckon on no end, hit looked
lak. But a man's that a-way. He sees sumthen, and don't reckon on no
end, no way, and don't see hit a-come-en. They's a hoggishness in man,
and a hog-blindness." He goes on to describe the exploitation of the
buffalo and the Indians in which he participated while out West with
Mingo. "But I seen 'em lay, skinned and stinken, black-en the ground
fer what a man could ride half a day. A man couldn't breathe fresh
fer the stinken. And before you knowed hit, they wasn't no buffalo in
Kansas." The suffering he helped cause the Indians is an interesting
and ironic event because it is a group of compassionate Indians that
administered the care that helped him live through a terrible fever.

A final example of the role of pride of power is furnished
by Ashby Wyndham in At Heaven's Gate. "I stopped down at the foot of
Massey whar a man could git him a bottle of moonshine whiskey from
Buck Barkus what made it and sold it and stirred up abomination and

taken silver for it, for it looks lak ain't nuthin pore man won't do

141

for money, and what he won't do for money he up and does for lust of
his flesh and sinful pride, and it for pride the angels fell out of
heaven and God's sight." Such actions of pride are very common in the
novels and clearly the pride of power is what is meant. Incidences
like this one reflect the desire for glory, power, ambition and greed

which Niebuhr used as the basis for his considerations of moral evil.
Pride of Knowledge

The concept of intellectual pride or the pride of knowledge
is a more spiritual and less material form of the elevation of human
ability and knowledge and the denial of man's essential finite nature.
"All human knowledge," Niebuhr maintained, "is tainted with an 'ideo-
logical' taint. It pretends to be more true than it is. It is finite
knowledge, gained from a particular perspective; but it pretends to be
final and ultimate knowledge. Exactly analogous to the cruder pride of
power, the pride of intellect is derived on the one hand from ignorance
of the finiteness of the human mind and on the other hand, from an
attempt to obscure the known conditioned character of human knowledge
and the taint of self-interest in human truth."4 In his development
of this notion, Niebuhr cites fanaticism as one of the aspects of intel-
lectual pride. A fanatic sees his answer and only his answer as the
acceptable alternative to a given problem. According to Bonhoeffer, the
fanatic is doomed to defeat because he charges in and is blind to the
totality of evil in human experience; therefore, the very means by
which some attempt to counter a given evil becomes a means by which

5

evil is perpetuated. The purity of the motive of such a person is

142

rarely questioned, but the validity of his dedication to a finite
principle is. Similarly, in Warren, the fanatics usually do not per-
ceive their principles or causes as finite, and this becomes the basis
for their intellectual pride.

Among the religious characters, Seth Parton from Band of
figgele_is one of the best examples of intellectual pride. In his early
meetings with Amantha Starr, before it is discovered that she is a
slave of Starrwood plantation, he confronts her with the demands of
truth. He is among those of the abolitionists at Oberlin who chastise
Miss Starr for her father's slave holdings. While Seth adopts the
morally superior role, which qualifies him as an example of pride of
virtue as well as of knowledge, his appeal to her is based upon his
perception of truth and not his superior virtue; therefore, I have
considered this incident as an example of intellectual pride. Speak-
ing of Aaron Starr's goodness to his slaves as a mask for a greater
evil, Seth says, "I am not concerned with your father as a person. . . .
What is the small and foolish goodness of a person? May not the
Adversary use best our small personal goodness for the greatness of
Evil?" Here Parton is clearly adopting the position of an intellec-
tually superior person; further, he perceives the truth which he has
received as an absolute because it is revealed from God. So, when he
says, I'No, we must not be concerned with persons. Only the Truth!"
he judged the knowledge or the truth of another, and he was unable to
.see the limitations of his own position.

Also, Seth really wants to be an absolutist in ethic and in

his view of truth; however, his own view of things is not able to

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endure the test of the War Between the States. After the War's end and
the assassination of Lincoln, he had come to Manty's home and said
that he did not know what he would do other than stay in the army with
his commission and do the duty of the day. "He did not know," he said,
"that he could return to the ministry. Did not know that in the vio-
lence, even in the combating of evil one did not assume contamination,
and he might have to wait long to purge his own soul before he could
speak again of the peace which passeth understanding." Certainly his
pride which is demonstrated in the narrative is a pride of knowledge.
Similar to Seth Parton's position of intellectual pride was
that of Tobias Sears in the same novel. Even though this Emersonian
philosopher is not one of the religious characters upon whom this study
concentrates, his demonstration of intellectual pride and his fall
from it are too central to this point to totally pass by. After the

war, Tobias had written a book, The Great Betrayal, in which he exposed

 

the notion that the war for ideals and ideas had been turned into a
sacrifice for the great god Thingism. He was repulsed by the repudia-
tion of ideals demonstrated by the post-war era. However, he, himself,
betrays his own ideals by an affair which caused him to have to move
his family West. Even though he eventually is able to approach a
meaningful realtionship with Amantha by the end of the novel, he
never again is able to place his false confidence in his intellectual
notions.

Of all the instances of pride presented in the novels, those
who possess the pride of knowledge more consistently than those who

are guilty of other forms of pride are brought low, and the finitude

144

of human knowledge is demonstrated. Not many of the so-called intel-
lectuals really turn out very well. Few of them are closely associated
with the religious characters we are using here; but whether it is
Slim Sarrett in At Heaven's Gate, Adam Stanton from All the King's
Meg, Jeremiah Beaumont in World Enough and Time, or other of the poten-
tial idealists in the novels, their exaggerated confidence in their
intellectual abilities bring them misery and cause misfortune for
others.

An appropriate example is the labor work of Jason Sweetwater.
He was also guilty to a degree of the pride of power, but his response
to the attempt of Murdock's men to bribe him is the response of one
guilty of the pride of knowledge. "Well, it's me your old man's
offering the dough to now," the self-styled Marxist told Sue Murdock.
"If I am a good boy. A guy took me to a beer joint. . . . Even if I
didn't do anything but just clear out of town, he had some dough for
me. When he got to the point, I have a mouthful of brew, so I just
let him have it in the eye. I let him have a mouthful for eye-wash.
Gee some folks think money can buy anything." Jason's intellectual
pride rests upon his belief in his economic and intellectual views.
What he wants to say to the Bogan Murdocks of the world is that they
cannot weaken his economic position by the bribe. His pride is in his
position, not in himself; but it is pride nonetheless.

Willie Proudfit spoke of the maltreatment of the Indians in
Night Rider. Such mistreatment is an example of racial pride which
Niebuhr considers a form of intellectual or cultural pride. In

effect, what the maltreatment of a racial group says is that they are

145

not capable of enjoying the profits of civiTization.6 Proudfit told
of the Indians being herded into corrals and their being fed chunks of
raw meat thrown to them as if they were animals. Also, he told of the
confrontation between rival Indian leaders. Kicken Bird is presented
as a betrayer of his people because he made peaceful concessions to
the White men. Lone Wolf and Maman-ti opposed him, and consequently,
they are taken from their people in Oklahoma to Florida as punishment
for their resistence. Kicken Bird is cursed by them as they leave.
Subsequently, Kicken Bird does not survive because of his sense of
betraying his people. He died in a short time, alone and unnoticed.
Proudfit tried to show that the Indians were sensitive people who had
capable, self-sacrificing leaders as well as self-seeking betrayers,
and that the Whites had no basis for racial pride.

According to Niebuhr all such examples of racial or cultural
pride are types of intellectual pride. Therefore, the confrontations
between the Blacks and the Whites in the novels qualify as this type
of pride ij;the incident makes one of the groups superior to the
other. For example, Rev. Leon Pinckney's refusal to join the White
memorial service for Fiddlersburg in 51229.15 properly interpreted by
Blanding Cottshill as an example of racial pride. It brings hurt to
Brother Potts, who only longs to know that the lives they have lived
in that place could be blessed. It also contributes to the prolonged
tension in history; however, it is a good demonstration of the very
real tensions caused by such pride of knowledge. A similar incident
occurs earlier in 51229 when Jingle Bells, that is Mortimer Sparlin,

the service station operator at the motel, knocked Brad Tolliver down

146

in the driveway after Brad had slept with the blind Leontine Purtle
at the motel in the afternoon. It is simply an attempt on the part
of the Black man to establish his racial pride before the upstart new-
comer he believes is from California. He is wrong, and the pride which
gives rise to the action is intellectual pride.

The final example is found in Wilderness. After Adam
Rosenzweig finally had killed a man, the Rebel who was attempting to

steal his boot from his club foot, he was overtaken by emotion.

Yes, he had come. Everything in the world had tried to stop him,
temptations, disillusion, fear, the blankness of the world and
time, all the betrayals of his dream. But he had come. By God,
he had come here.

Nothing had been able to stop him, he thought. He felt a
surge of pride in that, a manliness.

He had been cautioned at the beginning of his journey by his old Jewish
Uncle not to fall victim of the last and great delusion of human good-
ness. Also, he had left his homeland with the words of his father's
poem on his mind, "If man could only be worthy of what he loves."
Further, the Uncle cautioned him about the anti-Semitism his father
had endured from those with whom he had fought for freedom. In his
intellectual pride, in the tradition of his father who had died in
Bavaria fighting for freedom, Adam had come to America to fight for
freedom. Now, at this climactic moment, he seems to have found the
fulfillment of his deepest desire; but then he realizes that he shot
the rebel not for freedom, but because his shoeless foot was different
from his own twisted, crippled foot. He had done only what he had to

do, not what he had wanted to do. Therefore, like so many of the

147

idealists before him, Adam Rosenzweig ends his story with the dis-
covery of the reality of his sinful pride of knowledge; he had to
learn to place himself in prospective as a finite being; he had to
learn his lesson and go forward with a new heart.

The novels bear the message over and over again that man
should not lean upon his own understanding without taking into full
account that that understanding is limited, because too much trust in
it will lead to his downfall. He will learn with Isaac Sumpter in
The Cave that there is a great price to pay for a little ego satis-

faction.

Pride of Virtue

When an individual begins to treat his own ”good'I as an uncon-
ditioned moral value, moral pride or pride of virtue is revealed in the
"self-righteous" judgments and actions which follow. As Niebuhr dis-
cussed this aspect of pride he made reference to the Pharisees in
Biblical literature.8 In the terms of the religious characters in the
novels, Seth Parton in Band of Angels is a principal example of pride
of virtue. Along with the entire religious community at the Oberlin
school which Manty Starr attended, Seth represents the pharisaical
heteronomy that is implied by this form of Christian moralism. He has
centered his spiritual life on the rules of the community, so that Seth
and the others are examples of the juridical behavior. Further, there
is the ritualized behavior of the worship and devotional instruction
with times of prayer which are associated with pharisaical morality.

The sentimentalization of the rules of the past is also present in that

148

there is a definite tradition associated with the behavior of this
separatist community of ardent abolitionists. Each of these attri-
butes--legalism, ritualism, traditionalism, and separation--is given by
Ricoeur in The Symbolism of Evil as a characteristic of Phariseeism.9

The scrupulous moral conscience associated with such atti-
tudes is often admirable, or would be admirable, if it were not
associated with an additional trait which is difficult to keep from
developing in a pharisaic environment: viz., hypocrisy. Seth Parton
demonstrates these traits as he takes Manty, who is young, beautiful
and ambivalently attractive to him, to the place in the country where
Horace Norton had been tricked to appear by the fraudulent lure of a
young female. Seth sought to redeem the place from its association
with evil by bringing Manty and not commiting sin. "Listen," he had
said to Manty. ”This is the test. I said to myself I will discover
that spot the lustful boy defiled. That is it. I said to myself, if
I can conduct her there, if there I can put behind me the promptings
of evil and the tale of lubricity, if there she will pray--then I can
know that there can be sanctification, and know that with it we may
enter upon our joy." Forthwith, he commanded her to pray. The context
clearly shows that Seth is wanting to establish a meaningful relation-
ship with Manty, and she with him. However, the overall impact of the
event brought total disaster to Manty. It destroyed her prayer life
and confused her emotionally.

Shortly after the scene in the woods mentioned above, Manty‘s
father died in Cincinnati. It is Seth who broke the news to her. She

was shocked by his attack against her father: "Listen," he said, ”you

149

have been deceived. I know it to be true, for Miles Jebb cannot

lie. Your father was in Cincinnati for lust. He has consorted in
adultery with a woman named Muller, whose husband yet lives and--.“

He stood in cold and harsh judgment of her and her father. Ironically,
Seth eventually married the same woman with whom Mr. Starr had com-
mitted adultery after the Civil War, and they established a profitable
business in Chicago. But even more damaging to the pride of virtue
demonstrated by the young Seth Parton is the confession he made to
Manty years after the original rebuke in Manty Starr Sear's home.

"For what is done in the heart," he told her at that time, "'is done
already,‘ he was saying, with the air of careful instruction, 'and if
the deed is done in the heart it should be done in the flesh that the
vileness of the heart may be confirmed. For only in vileness is the
beginning, and therefore--." He fell to his knees and asked for her to
spit on him and abuse him, because as it is now made clear, he had in
fact lusted for her. "I will explain to you," he cried in anguish.
"Once I sought immortal perfection in moral life, for the Book says it
is possible, and I told you that we two should seek it together for our
final joy, but I did not know what I know now, that only in vileness may
man begin to seek, and now to seek we must confirm what vileness has
been enacted in my heart." At this point, the pride of virtue which
had been Seth's has gone, and he is aware of the internal vileness
which is his nature. In moral pride there is a denial in one's self

of the moral weakness that is at the base of every finite person's
being. The demonstration in Band of Angels of the sin found in the

pride of virtue is strong.

150

Other examples from the same novel support this observation.
As Manty recalled her days at Oberlin, she had occasion to think of
Miss Hopewell, who she thought was mean. Then she corrects herself
and says, "No, you had to say she failed by an exceys of spiritual
pride, and you would remember her in your prayers." This is a refer-
ence to the pride of virtue, which Niebuhr spoke of as the judgmental,
pharisaic, moral self-righteousness. The pride of virtue is shown as
characteristic of the Oberlin community. They believed that morality
could be established and maintained by laws for behavior; however, the
very acts of enforcing the laws became immoral. The incident revealing
the fall of Mr. Taylor, the postmaster who had tricked Horace Nelson
into the lubricious meeting with the female mentioned earlier, rein-
forces Warren's condemnation of the pride of virtue. Taylor had
lectured on the cupidity of the flesh and had expelled Nelson from
school, but later he himself was guilty of embezzling from a magazine
and "wound up snugly in [a] young female's garret bed." Manty's nar-

rative says the following about the incident:

It must have been an unsettling time at Oberlin. If anyone had
been sanctified, it was Mr. Taylor, and if sanctification meant
anything it meant that you might reach Christian perfection in
this life, not, indeed, by freedom from temptation but by a
sensibility so charged in favor of holiness that temptation
might not prevail. How much Mr. Taylor's fate had to do with
the falling away at Oberlin of the doctrine of sanctification,
I do not know, but by my time the emphasis was on constant
vigilance against sin rather than a yearning toward perfection
in this Tife.10

However, the narrative identifies Seth Parton as wanting to return to
the doctrine of sanctification in his sermon given upon his admission

to the School of Theology. "It is," he said as he approached the

151

conclusion of that sermon, "the voice of God in the heart. Let not
the world, nor the world's racket confound! Let not the sluggishness
of blood, nor the horror of darkness, deceive! God were not God to
deny possibility. And I affirm the possibility of the last joy." For
Warren, such examples of moral pride are doomed to failure, because
Seth Parton and the others such as Ashby Wyndham and Cass Mastern all
come to the awareness that moral perfection is not a possibility. As

Cass had said in All the King's Men, "man is never saved and damnation

 

is ever at hand, 0 God and my Redeemer!" Certainly, moral pride is
empty and vain, just as these religious characters and others had found.
Everyone needs to be reminded, as Cass Mastern had written in his jour-
nal to remind himself "if pride is in me, of flesh or spirit, I may
peruse these papers and know with shame what evil has been in me, for
who knows what breeze may blow up the charred log and fan up flame
again?"

The religious characters are not the only ones who are guilty
of equating their value systems with those of God. Anne Stanton, for

example, indicated in All the King's Men that Adam Stanton is proud

 

of his views and puts his pride before the doing of good in the Medical
Center. Given the nature of his conflict with the pragmatic politics
of Willie Stark, I read her statement as an indictment of Adam for
pride of virtue. Adam was overlooking the finitude of man and making
his value system supreme and mistaking his standards for God's; there-
fore, whether the pride of virtue is like Ashby Wyndhams' "sinful pride
in the Lord" or like Adam's, it is a serious moral evil present in

virtually all of the novels in some form or another.

152

Murray Guilfort's dedication to the law and order during the
trial of Angelo Passetto in Meet Me in the Green Glen is also an example
of moral pride. It becomes clear when he is placed in the self-
contradictory position of destroying or at least hiding evidence which
could implicate Cassie Spottwood. His moral judgment was that she did
not do it, so he imposed his judgment on the evidence and made his
scruples law to the death of Angelo and ultimately his own suicide.
Also, Leon Pinckney's refusal to cooperate with Brother Potts in HEEL
for the memorial service for the town could be read as an example of
moral pride. Uncle Rosenzweig's pride in the law is a type of pride of
virtue in Wilderness, as is Adam Rosenzweig's pride in freedom and his
fighting for freedom. Though it may be pride of knowledge, Ikey
Sumpter's pride, which did not allow him to see his identity with
those around him in The Cave as a person who has paid a great price
for his "ego satisfaction," is an example of moral pride as well,
especially because of his failure to see his own weakness that he
projected on others. Certainly Jeremiah Beaumont in World Enough and
Time_is guilty of moral pride when his own standards of justice are
allowed to replace all common sense and legal definitions as he seeks
to avenge Rachel's honor for his own "ego satisfaction," as Ikey
Sumpter might call it. Finally, in Night Rider, Percy Munn's actions
on behalf of the association and the entire association itself is
guilty of the pride of virtue when they allow the good of the cause
to replace all notions of justice under law as the standard for obtain-

ing justice. Pride of virtue is a continual threat to the moral

153

well-being of mankind throughout the novels, for the religious and

the nonreligious alike.

Spiritual Pride

"The third type, the pride of righteousness," Neibuhr said,
"rises to a form of spiritual pride, which is at once a fourth type and
yet not a specific form of pride at all but pride and self-glorification

"11 Spiritual pride is the

in its inclusive and quintessential form.
ultimate form of moral pride in that it claims divine sanction for its
partial standards. This level of pride might be indicated by the
presence of the minister to offer prayer at the meeting of the associa-

tion at the beginning of Night Rider; however, the evidence that the

 

pride had raised to that level that early in the novel is very slight.
"Brother Morgan, a Methodist preacher, had opened the rally with a
prayer that this great occasion might serve in the end to glorify the
goodness of God as well as to increase the prosperity of His children
upon earth." Certainly the actions which gave life to the idea of the
association, as indicated earlier in this study, indicate the threat
of spiritual pride as man has a tendency to claim divine sanction for
his actions.

It also is clear that Ashby Wyndham in At Heaven's Gate
claimed divine sanction for his evangelistic preaching mission which
claimed such victories as Pearle from the Bible sin of lust. But
Ashby came to recognize that it was his own pride which led to the cir-
cumstances which culminated in Pearle changing one Bible sin for another:

she killed the policeman. Ashby did what he did under the conviction

154

of the sanction of God; however, he came to recognize his pride for
what it was, and he is repentant in jail at the end of the statement
when he meets with Private Milton Porsum. Perhaps closely related to
Ashby's pride is that of Slim Sarrett in the same novel, who possesses
a pride, secular in nature, which raised itself to the level of the
divine. He was the creator of a small band of unusual people which he
controlled in a god-like way. He is an artist who created a fictitious
autobiography to make his own life story reflect the inner nature he
felt he possessed. He theorized about the nature of tragedy and

talked of the need to be true to the self that is within, true to one's
own nature. But he, too, is brought low. He represents the hypocricy
of the Pharisee, but without the external law. He claimed that one
should be true to one's self; but as Jason Sweetwater affirmed, "He
just didn't lie when he had to. For some purpose. He was a lie."

Also in At Heaven's Gate, spiritual pride is found in Jason

 

Sweetwater's father. The Episcopal Bishop, according to his son, was
not a liar, but he did tell stories that were not true. "He's got
everything so mixed up, he thinks Jesus Christ was killed in Pickett's
charge. He thinks the Virgin Mary was a Confederate spy in Washington
and carried documents through the Federal lines done up in her petti-
coats." It is important that the Bishop himself does not claim divine
sanction for the Confederacy; but in this indirect report, his son
indicates that he did. Certainly, in Warren's novels, the institutions
of the South are often presented as if they had divine sanction. The
claiming of diving sanction for the perpetuation of the aristocracy,

slavery and war represent this type of pride.

155

Jack Burden, as he recalls his earlier days with Willie Stark,
has a parenthetical aside with Ellis Burden concerning the nature of
God as the Fullness of Being. On either side of that introspection,
Jack says, "I felt like God brooding on History." Jack has assumed the
perspective of Willie Stark and came to believe that he could live out-
side of history, transcend it, observe it, know it and be untouched by
it. The story of Jack Burden is the discovery that such pride, feeling
oneself to be God, is erroneous and will bring nothing but misery.

Jack was able to move "out the house and go into the convulsion of the
world, out of history into history and the awful responsibility of
Time." Many attempts have been made to interpret this last observation.
In connection with Niebuhr's understanding of pride, it might simply
mean that what the Burdens have learned, at the price of their compla-
cency, is to accept their finitude, their humanity, and the responsibility
it implies. Earlier in the story, for example, in the incident of feel—
ing like God referred to above, Jack had felt himself to beatranscen-
dent observer of things, one to whom nothing ever happened; "But

nothing happened to Jack Burden, for nothing ever happened to Jack
Burden, who was invulnerable. Perhaps that was the curse of Jack
Burden: he was invulnerable."

What Jack had to learn was the lesson his legal father even-
tually articulated for him, and he learned it also from Cass Mastern.
Human limitation is always his, and he cannot transcend it and give his
own actions the divine sanction implied by invulnerability. Essentially,
it is the same lesson that Jeremiah Beaumont learned in World Enough and

Time. There is an interesting parallel between Old Ellis Burden, who

156

really was not Jack's father, and Dr. Burnham, who was Jeremiah's men-
tor, but not his father. Burnham was aware of the mixed nature of
man, just as Ellis Burden was. The sons eventually learn this from
them, but only after a great deal of misery. I believe there is also
a parallel between the Kingdom of God syndromeirithe Replevin Party
position for justice which exploited Jeremiah's idealism and the Willie
Stark version of his mission, for Willie had once believed he was called
of God. Early in his career he was not in touch with the world, but
after he had been tricked by the politicians, he became his own sanc-
tion. Willie's hardbound pragmatism became a law unto itself, but it
also became the source of the corruption in government which even—
tually contributed to his assassination.

Another aspect, referred to briefly above, is the notion
that law itself is able to control or restrain evil. One of the impli-
cations given throughout the novels is that this is not true. The cor-
ruption in government, the involvement of men in the formulation of the
law, will make it automatic that limitation and finitude are also a
quality of their laws. "The freedom of man," Niebuhr maintains, "is
such that he can make the keeping of the law the instrument of evil.
He can screen motives by outward conformity to the law. . . . He can

'2 This

also use observance of the law as the vehicle of sinful pride."
is precisely what happens in Meet Me in the Green Glen when Murray
Guilfort uses the machinery of the law to wrongly convict Angelo
Passetto and to place Cassie Killigrew Spottwood in a mental sanatorium.

The operations are consciously legal, conforming to the letter of the

law. Even the American Civil Liberties Union will not take up Angelo's

157

case after contacted by his attorney, Leroy Lancaster. Also, the
trial of Jeremiah Beaumont in World Enough and Time has the same over-
all effect when it is viewed from the awareness that the witnesses who
testified to the guilt of Jeremiah did so with lies. The truth was
discovered by the lies. There are in this novel several discussions
of the ironic fulfillment of truth by the use of falsehood. There
are in the novels two types of falsehood that are discussed. One is
the artistic falsehood. Through characters like Slim Sarrett and
Yasha Jones, the idea of using art to arrive at truth is explored.
There is a hint of pride in this when the truths so discovered are
elevated to the position of the divine as it was in Sarrett's or
Reverend Sweetwater's case in At Heaven's Gate. The other is the
legal use of the lie as it is in the trials mentioned above. Human
law is not a replacement for the Divine Law. The overall impact of
Wilderness can be understood as exactly this. Uncle Rosenzweig's
warnings about the delusion of the glory of men and the need to hold
to the sanctity of the Law of God are implied very strongly in the
climactic realization of Adam Rosenzweig.

In conclusion, it may be said that the novels of Robert Penn
Warren do indeed present pride as a very real part of the structure of
moral evil. The threat of pride is found in the very tendency of man-
kind to overestimate its place in the world and to forget its inherent
limitations of contingency in the nature of the human being. Prides of
power, knowledge, virtue and spirit are realities of human experience,
and if one will realize it, he can be allowed to find the true meaning

of his self as a being separate from God, but capable of love.

158
Sensuality: Self-Love

In addition to the human tendency to overestimate his ability
or his importance in the forms of selfishness shown in his prides of
power, knowledge, virtue, and spirit, people also have the tendency to
indulge themselves in sensuality. Rinehold Niebuhr's definition of
sensuality is significant for our understanding of Warren's concept of
moral evil. “A provisional distinction must certainly be made," Niebuhr
has said. "If selfishness is the destruction of life's harmony by the
self's attempt to center life around itself, sensuality would seem to
be the destruction of harmony within the self, by the self's undue
identification of harmony and devotion to particular impulses within
itself. The sins of sensuality, as expressed for instance in sexual
license, gluttony. extravagance, drunkenness and abandonment to various
forms of physical desire, have always been subject to a sharper and
readier special disapproval than the more basic sin of self-love."13

The distinction between Pride and Self-love may be confusing
to a degree because Neibuhr is not consistent in his use of the terms
selfishness, self-ambition, self-love, and sensualiiy, For him, the
basic human sin is pride, which is an expression of the freedom of man
to make himself his Lord. It is precisely in this possibility that sin
finds its root and its most fundamental expression. For him pride finds
its expression in two general forms, selfishness and sensuality. The
overlapping of these categories is apparent because they all rest in
.EEEEEE- Pride and sensuality are both forms of self-love and are ego-

tistical in nature. Man's fundamental sin then is what Ikey Sumpter

159

called "ego satisfaction,” as cited in the previous section of this
chapter; however, what we call sensuality is the more overt demonstra-
tions of selfishness in the forms of self-indulgence. As indicated
above, it is our tendency to be more judgmental of the outward and
visible forms of moral evil. The outward actions of people that are
obvious to us as self-indulgence are not as tolerable and are less
admirable because of the ego-centricity they express. However, it
should be understood that such actions as sexual license, extravagence,
drunkenness and other forms of indulgent physical desire are not moral
evil only because they are self-satisfying or even expressions of
self-love. They are moral evil because these actions of self-
indulgence are also the vehicle for abdication of human responsibility
to oneself and others and are the source of pain and suffering for all
concerned.

To return to the citation from the story of Munn Short given
at the beginning of this chapter, his pride of power expressed in his
ungrateful disposition and his sinful indulgence in sensuality in the
forms of drunkenness, violence, robbery, and sexual license are recog-
nized as morally evil not only because they are self-indulgent, but
also because of their consequences of pain and suffering. Human mean-
ness is more than just self—love, it is self-love that causes pain in
others. Specifically, Short's self-love caused the death of Lottie
Perk, the alienation and impotency of Mr. Perk in hatred and suffering.
It also caused his own suffering, death of his body and, the worst of
all, the death of his soul, his inner self. Frequently moral evil or

sin rests in the relationship of a given action to three parties. To

160

the self who acts, it is the inner violence which abandons the inner
man to the self-defeating fulfillment of his desire. It is, secondly,
the outward violence of exploiting other people for the purpose of
satisfying these selfish desires. Frequently, this is also the aban-
donment of the inner man to externals which these other parties
represent. Finally, sin is rebellion against God and, therefore, is
the violence of the self, for itself, against God's purposes. Often,
sin is an expression of inner escape in which the actor tries to deny
the existence of the claims God has on him. Short manifests all of
these things in his brief autobiography to Jeremiah in the dungeon.
His indulgence brought sub-human behavior which he described as "hog-
gishness." This violence to himself and his potential was a part of
his self-defeating moral evil. His exploitation of Lottie for his own
lustful purposes and his pride at having done Perk a favor by father-
ing Lottie's child (unborn at her death) are examples of his violence
toward others that is inherent in moral evil. Self-indulgence is
usually at the expense of others. Short stole from others when they
were drunk and defenseless. He fought for no reason other than the
thrill of the violence. The third aspect, the rebellion against God
and violence toward Him, is the reason for his alienation from God
demonstrated in his guilt and inner death which were reconciled only
upon his acknowledgement of God's claim upon him. Body dying was
easy, Munn Short had said. But the hard part was carrying the burden
that his evil brought him. It was, he says, Jesus who took the burden
of that evil away. It was this last aspect of his evil that Short
came to recognize, but it was the part he had to see before he could

be freed from it to live the rest of his life in God's eyes.

161

The pattern developed in the tale of his life by Munn Short
is typical of the pattern the moral evil demonstrated in the novels.
On the basis of his prideful self-concept, Munn indulges himself in
his physical desires and painful consequences follow. Further, Munn
is brought to the point at which he recognizes his own responsibility
for his moral evil. "Body-dyin was easy when I laid on the ground,
but dyin every day when you walk in the sun, hit it hard, and I cried
out fer the mercy," he said to Jeremiah. The mercy he found was in
Jesus, and the mark of the curse that old Perk had put on him was
washed away. "I found the way and the promise, and Jesus come in my
heart," he continued. "He is hung on my heart lak a cow-bell and a
cow-bell caint keep no secret. I move and I got to tell about Jesus,
how he come. I know you ain't no believer, but . . . ." The movement
from the sin to the confession of it and profession of faith in Jesus
is the scheme followed by virtually all of the religious characters
who learn how to live with their evil doings.

If there is a change in the way Warren treats this subject,
it is that in the later novels he spends less time dealing with the
less sophisticated Willie Proudfit, Ashby Wyndham, Munn Short type of
country-simple, fundamental faithfuls. In Meet Me in the Green Glen,
the hillbilly rivival received only one paragraph or so in the unfolding
story of Corinne and Leroy Lancaster. We know it still exists in the
territory, but Warren does not concentrate on it as he did earlier.
Likewise, fleeg_has no examples at all of the totally unsophisticated
faithful. Wilderness has only Monmorency Pugh as an example, and he is

a lapsarian. The Meyerhoffs might be Cabalists, but they are not

162

adequately developed to make this conclusion definite. Other than the
Harricks and Mac Sumpter in The Cave and a few very minor characters,
there are no characters who fit the type created in these simple men
of faith. Moreover, even Mac Sumpter seems too well educated to be
considered one of them. Certainly, the Scholarly Attorney and Cass

Mastern in All the Kingfs Men are not uneducated. Old man Stark,

 

Willie's father, is perhaps close to them in education and culture,
but he has not developed in the fulness nor in the pattern of these
other men. Therefore, in Night Rider, At Heaven's Gate, and M
Enough and Time Warren has most completely developed that pious convert
from the hills. But it is abundantly significant that the other, more
sophisticated religious characters follow the same general pattern.

Even Adam Rosenzweig in Wilderness, follows it by his affirmation of

 

his limitation in God, and he is a Jew. Leroy Lancaster follows it,
and, like Jack Burden, he is a more secular character. Warren seems
to be developing a psychological pattern of sin, guilt, and acknow-
ledgment of responsibility which is uniform regardless of the faith
of the character. As indicated in "Knowledge and the Image of Man,"
human life is understood to be "the individual's right to exist as
himself, the right to the hazards and glories of trying to develop
most fully as himself." His novels develop those hazards as the evil
within and around him whether as metaphysical force or the evils he
commits in pride and sensuality. Increasingly, this process of self—
determination and self-knowledge is secularized in the novels. However,

every soul is valuable, either in the sight of God or man, and the

163

story of every soul is the story of "its self-definition for good or

evil, salvation or damnation."14

Sexual License

The evil in the sensuality expressed by the characters is
found in the exploitation, the violence, and the withdrawal from respon-
sibility which accompanies the inordinately turning to the mutable and
the harmful. As Niebuhr suggests in his discussion of sensuality,
sexual license is one of the primary symbols of sensuality to which

15 Anyone

Christians have responded since the time of the Apostles.
with even a passing acquaintance with Warren's novels is aware of the
central role sexual activity plays in the action. As one might expect,
the relationship between a male and a female character is illustrated

by the nature of their sexual activities.

The value of sexual intercourse as a symbol of interpersonal
relationship is perhaps self-evident. It has been understood as a
symbol of union and love which is deeply a part of the collective uncon-
sciousness in the Western and Eastern worlds alike. However, in the
West, there is a tendency to associate any form of intercourse with
its abuses; normally in Warren, sexual intercourse is associated more
with the difficulty of establishing meaningful relationships than it
is with their success.

One of the principal examples among the religious characters
is the adultery of Cass Mastern and Anabelle Trice in the embedded

story in All the King's Men. The key event in Cass's discovery of the

evil nature of man and his always being in danger of damnation is the

164

temptation and sin he experienced with the lovely Mrs. Duncan Trice.
It is a massive symbol of the betrayal and perfidy to which a man may
sink if he thoughtlessly seeks fulfillment of his desires. Because of
this one act of sin, Cass learned that many innocent people suffered
for his act. Duncan killed himself, and a totally innocent slave,
Phoebe, was sold down the river into a dreadful life of misery. In
this act, Warren demonstrates the self-defeat, externalization, and
the escape from reality which all sinful acts of sensuality include.
Ultimately, his sin led Cass to go to war and to seek the bullet that
would kill him; but his sin is self-defeating in that instead of the
pleasure he had sought, it brought pain and suffering to him and those
around him. Cass himself confesses that in the act, he had fallen
victim of the human flaw of attempting to define himself in another,
rather than in God and His great Eye.

The third consequence which Cass experienced was his escape
into his meditative existence for two years after he left Mrs. Trice
at Lexington and returned to the plantation. He had been seriously
injured trying to recover the slave sold down river. His condition

is described as follows:

A couple of days later his wound infected, and for some time he
lay in delirium between life and death. His recovery was slow,
presumably retarded by what he termed in the journal his "will
toward darkness." But his constitution was stronger than his
will, and he recovered, to know himself as the "chief of sinners
and a plague spot on the body of the human world.‘I He would have
committed suicide except for the fear of damnation for that act,
for though "hopeless of Grace I yet clung to the hope of Grace."
But sometimes the very fact of damnation because of suicide seemed
to be the very reason for suicide: he had brought his friend, by
that act, was eternally damned; therefore he, Cass Mastern, should,
in justice insure his own damnation by the same act. "But the

165

Lord preserved me from self-slaughter for ends which are His and
beyond my knowledge."16

After his recuperation and the two years of willess struggle to make
it right, he escaped into the conscious efforts to be killed in war.
All three of the existential problems of the sin as sensuality as pre-
sented by Niebuhr are present.

Freely and willfully Cass led the life which brought the
temptation of the "sweetness of the flesh" to him. Cass tells of his
succuming to the temptation to taste the "sweetness." We have his
record only after being convicted of his sin. "Thereupon," he says
in climax of his recollection of the motives leading up to the event,
"in the blindness of our mortal blood and in the appetite of our heart
we performed the act." Repeatedly, in images of darkness and inevit-
ability, they met and sinned repeatedly, often with others in the house
who might discover them. This process became the escape from the pri-
son of themselves into an ultimate, lustful concern outside of them-
selves.

In these sexual acts and those similarly demonstrated in all
the other novels, the dehumanizing of the sexual partners is very evi-
dent. After the funeral of Duncan Trice, and Cass's paroxysm fear that
it was a hoax to catch him in his sin, he, in an unarranged and
inevitable meeting in the summerhouse in the garden, recorded, "I was
perfectly cold, as of a mortal chill. And the coldness was the final
horror of the act which we performed, as though two dolls should parody
the shame and filth of man to make it doubly shameful." However, she

told him that the event was a sign they should continue. But she told

Ln-

166

him of the manner of Duncan's revelation of his awareness of their sin
as Cass put on her wedding band which Duncan had removed from her hand
the evening that he went to the study and shot himself. Impersonal sex
is an escape into the mutable good of sexual intercourse. Whether it
is Miss Christian and Mr. Munn in Night Rider or Sue Murdock and Jerry
Calhoun (and others) in At Heaven's Gate, sexual intercourse is over
and over again shown as a dehumanizing escape into human finitude

which is uniformly self-defeating. None of these relationships,

unless accompanied by a general spiritual conversion and renewal, is
redeemable into meaningful human experience.

Ashby Wyndham in At Heaven's Gate. had committed fornication
with Marie. He had stopped drinking liquor, he succumbs to Bible lust.
"It was my fault," he said, "she taken spot and had blemish laid on to
her. It was pore human mans love, but love ain't nuthin if it ain't
in God's eye. Ashby confesses freely that it was in selfishness and
in lust that he sought his own satisfaction, but his lust led him to
other sin. The child born from the sinful union eventually died, and
he betrayed his brotherly obligation. The human love of which he
speaks is described in terms of self-love: betrayal of others in
selfishness, lust and greed. The homey religious character whose
story is alternatley told in a confession of guilt and responsibility
is a perfect counterpoint to the other characters in the novel who are
in a purgatory of lust at heaven's gate, exactly as Dante presented
the lustful in the purgatory of the Divine Comedy. Some of them are

purged, others are not; but the skillful treatment of the alienation,

167

finitude and perversion of the human condition in lust is redundant
and final.

Another example, Isaac Sumpter in The Cave, became very
involved with a beautiful, long-legged Jewess, Rachel Godstein. In
the beginning, their love seemed to have some possibility. From their
first meeting, he was "sick with desire." She was a former Radcliffe
student home because of her father's health. Two months after their
meeting, they were in the middle of a hot affair which is replete
with copulation on nearly every page of its telling. However, the
necessity of his past is demonstrated as the affiar grew more defini-
tive in its possibility for love. "The son of MacCarland Sumpter, by
whose side night after night, he, a little boy and then a big boy, had
knelt in prayer, he could not think of doing to the body of Goldie
Goldstein those things which he was accustomed to do, without thinking
of marriage. Not that he put it that way to himself," the narrative
continues. "He thought of those things which he did to that body.
Then he thought of marriage. There was a blankness between the
thoughts, but something was in the blankness, not discernable but it
was there."

As the relationship between Ikey and Goldie grew, she began
to speak of it in terms of her own self-definition. In other words,
she began to express the human flaw to define herself in another.
Ikey, on the other hand, was filled with despair because he felt that
he could not give this rich girl anything; he did not understand that
she could want him simply because he was himself. "'Ikey, you gave me

the only thing I want,‘ she paused, then: 'You gave me, me, Ikey. I

isn't
the sa
you is
32‘ sen
accept

love i

self-t

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”i re:

168

wasn't ever myself before. You give myself to me, Ikey.'" Later in
the same episode, she said, "I just want to try to think what loving
you is, Ikey." By and large, Isaac Sumpter's life is one gross episode
of sensuality after another. He is unable to be loved and unable to
accept love. Even his father is plagued by the problem of how to
love his son. In the episode which last presents Isaac in the novel,
he is torn by the question of love, as he begins to feel the ”terrible
self-betrayal which love is." In his lostness within self-love expressed
in sensuality, he is not able to view love in any way except betrayal.
He lost the love of Goldie because of a betrayal for which
he refused to accept responsibility. One evening after a party at
Goldie's studio, he drove EustaciaPinckney Johnson home in the rain.
In a passage of very impersonal sexual relationships, he takes her
(perhaps more exactly, she takes him) in Goldie's small foreign car.
He has a terrible night afterwards; but his inner argument is lost
because he tells himself, "No, he hadn't caused any of that, and why--
for God's sake why?--had Goldie pushed him off that afternoon. . .?"
The betrayal he felt was experienced when he sought intercourse that
afternoon, but she refused. She did not want to be used as "some kind
of Grade-A masturbation." From his impersonal lust with Goldie and
the one-time indulgence with Eustacia, he was plunged into a numbing
despair of drinking and carousing. He demonstrates again the self-
destroying aspects of sensuality. He is selfish, crude and cruel.
Unable to reestablish a meaningful relationship with anyone
Isaac returned to Johntown. He had been expelled from the university

because of his immoral behavior. His efforts to escape were destroying

169

him. He stayed in Nashville until commencement to deceive his father,
but he returned home an alienated, ego-centric young man, incapable of
meaningful interpersonal relationships. And while Jo-Lea Bingham was
running to tell the news of Jasper Harrick's accident in the cave, he
saw her, and he "went sick with longing and deprivation."

While involved in the identity crises which he is experi-
encing living in his father's house, feeling his dislocation and isola-
tion because no one else in the family has ever been named Isaac, he
is called upon to enter the cave and search for Jasper. On the way to
the cave, a significant introspection is given which relates to the

role of sexual license in Warren's concept of moral evil.

Was it his fault that he had to be born in Johntown, (He thought
to himself), got by a Bible-thumper out of some woman who, no
doubt, was the kind would marry a Bible-thumper, and the Bible-
thumper, no doubt, had had to work his way past eight or nine
yards of the dry goods such a woman would swathe herself in and
call a nightgown, and when he got there, he and his partner in
the crime of begetting Little Ikey Sumpter had, no doubt, pre-
tended they were doing something quite different from what they
were doing, even pretending they were sound asleep so that every-
thing were merely a guiltless and pleasureless somnambulism and—-

No, he brought himself up, not somnambulism, for they hadn't been
ambulating when they were working on Little Ikey. I would have
to be somni--somni-what? Somnifornicating, you might say, and so
Little IEe , Little Ikey the Jew Boy, prize product of somnicon-
ception, was sort of first cousin to an Immaculate Conception,
first cousin being probably as good as the Baptists could do in

a place like Johntown.17

The only way Isaac was capable of understanding sexual relationships
was in an impersonal and unmeaningful way. Earlier in the novel,
through a stream of consciousness presentation of MacCarland Sumpter,

it was revealed that Mac Sumpter loved his son very much. He wanted

is son 1

TN died

tenant
together
in that
been ter

07. God 1

170

his son to redeem the circumstances of his marriage to Mary Tillyard,
who died when Ikey was born.

MacCarland Sumpter had married Mary Tillyard because she was
pregnant by Jack Harrick, and Jack would not marry her. They had lived
together for eighteen years before she "ejected from her body the bur-
den that was to be known as Isaac Sumpter." Her first pregnancy had
been terminated by a miscarriage which was understood by Mac as an act
of God fulfilling his prayers to spare Mary the shame of that "love
child." Mac had lived for years with the sweet moan of her orgasm in
his mind, but it was an orgasm brought about by Jack Harrick. "Yes,"
the narrative says, "he had heard that moan a million times. But he
had never heard it uttered for him." Certainly in The Cave, the
imagery of sexual license is vividly portrayed to symbolize the moral
evil in sensuality. Over and over again it conveys the notions of
human finitude and limitation, isolation and loneliness.

Jack Harrick, a devout layman of The Cave and Mac's prize
convert, had been a wild sensualist in his youth. MacCarland Sumpter
had taken upon himself to cover one of his sins of fornication by
marrying Mary Tillyard in his place. His messianic role for Jack is
highlighted when he declared over her weeping, "We can at least be
what we are. We can offer our filth on the alter in God's name and
the name of Truth." Jack had continued in his sensualist ways, until
after Jasper had been born. In a life familiar with "dirty whores" and
debauchery, the love of Cecila Hornby Harrick and the preaching of
MacCarland Sumpter brought him to Jesus and the beginning of the human

possibility he demonstrates at the end of the novel. The indirect

Nicrts
mnqst
hit TN“
11109“
Tet, i)“
hit Th

iii}:

171

reports of his sexual license are highlighted by the "clapp swapping
amongst the nonintroduced" and the sexual connotations among the crowd
that waited for the news of Jack's son's death or salvation. In the
anxiety of the drama of Jasper's pain and destruction, the people
wept, prayed, boozed, sung, fought and fornicated, because when Mac
told them of Jasper's death, they had to prove they were alive.

The last example of sexual license is taken from Eleeg,
Lettice Poindexter Tolliver had been married to Brad and had left him
before she was converted to Catholicism. I believe she is the only
practicing Catholic in the novels, and she is one of the most sensuous
of the lot. I do not, however, believe that her becoming a worker in
a Catholic old folks home is particularly significant beyond her find-
ing a way that she could continue to live, after what she called the
"wicked foolishness" with Brad. She had had a series of affairs and
was a person well accustomed to the practices of sexual license. Her
psychiatrist had called her a Puritan idealist. "Unfortunately," he
told her, "your Puritan idealism does not square with your compulsive
sexual rivalry with your mother."

In many instances, Lettice ksportrayed as a young socialite,
from a prominent family with a mother whose sexual conquests are infa-
mous. As her name implies, her "shape" was conducive to sexual excite-
Tnent and activity. Further, her name is related to the Latin word for

18 Brad engages his memory in a play on her name, "One thing led

Joy.
'to another. Lettuce to Lettice to Let's." He goes on to recall,
"'Let's' she would say, and it would be all she would need to say, for

heiknew exactly--oh, precisely, precisely, as she used to be in the

172

habit of saying-~what she meant." Returning briefly to the psychia-
trist's reference to her mother, and she managed very well, and she
confessed it often. Brad remembered as he thought of Fiddlersburg,

a town in which all one could do on Sunday afternoon was "screw your
wife." He remembered "her muted voice" as she "told about herself,
about her heart, about her body, about her life, in her aphrodisiac
of expiation and surrender." She had attempted to find meaning in
her sexual license, but she had failed. Ironically, as her bitterness
and resentment for her mother were once demonstrated, she said her
mother was "a bitch in heat, forty-six years old and you sit there
and hear her pant. It's enough to make you want to be a nun." It
took many years of attempts to find meaning through sexual license to
bring her to the fulfillment of that foreshadowed event. While she
did not become a nun, she did become a worker in a Catholic home and
foreswore the "wicked foolishness."

It is an understatement to say that Lettice and Brad had
had an active sex life. It also is an understatement to say that
there life together had not been particularly fulfilling. They had
known each other physically, but that relationship had not brought
them identity and self-knowledge. In the statements developed in All_

the King's Men by Ellis Burden and lived by Cass Mastern, Warren has

 

demonstrated years before the impossibility of finding one's defini-
tion in someone else, and Warren demonstrates it again in 51299: Once
when he awakened in the apartment and she was gone, Brad remembered
rejecting her idea that they go to Mexico for a vacation so he could

clear his mind to work better.

L001
not
TNT
lie '
ear
he

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115 lo

173

Look here, I can read your mind, and the answer is no. For I'm
not going to screw you, my pet, in any place I don't pay the
rent on. Or the railroad fare to get there.

He wished to God she was here now. If she hadn't left so damned
early to paint that picture, they could knock off a piece. Then
he could forget things.

For at least as long as it took [eie].]9

He tried to use sex as a way of escape from himself and his present.
Brad also uses sex as an escape from the past when he took Leontine
Pertle to the motel where he and Lettice had stayed a long time

before, in order to "lay him a ghost." For Brad, his ritual of love
and redemption in sexual intercourse with Lettice had not been success-
ful, even though she had been "forgiving . . . in total indulgence,
because she loved him."

The entire sexual life of Lettice Tolliver is presented
indirectly through the memory of Brad. It is significant that there
was love there, and he remembered it. Once while he had looked out of
the window of the old house toward the penitentiary where Calvin
Fiddler was to be an inmate, he saw the image of Lettice on a window
pane and he recalls her love, and he is filled with sweetness. In the
experienced calmness, he thought he was "discovering a buried self.

It was the true self that would live forever." He was moved to write
Lettice a love letter in which he spoke of her goodness, beauty, and
love. Ironically, it was this letter composed just before they married
that prompted her telling him of her love affairs in her past, espe-
cially the one with the Spanish Medievalist while Brad was fighting

in the war. One of the many significant passages which convey the

19.111

this

174

attitudes toward sexual license is a part of his reaction to that

confession:

Bradwell Tolliver stood there and heard the words and felt like
a man being tumbled and torn in surf too heavy for him. One
feeling after another struck him and whirled him. There was

the pure animal rege. There was the hurt vanity. There was the
savage mirth that even as he stood there’he should see on the
table the letter telling of his new awareness of love and of
human life in Time. There was the black desolation. There was
the savage mirth that said that fuckin is only fUckin , rip off
a piece rTght’here and now and to hell with it. lhere was the
anguished sense of some secret justice in the world, or at least
a punishThg logic, that said that this was all that could ever
happen if you began with that leaf-hung peep show in Central
Park. There was the impulse to knock her teeth out, anything

to make her stop talking. ere was the an er at her for being
honest. There was the savage mirth that Brad Tolliver--bright
old Brad--had been getting him a pair of round heels for a wife.
There was the self-contempt in the fear that even now she held
some power over him, even now in the gray unbeauty of that
lifted face. There was the panic fear at the beauty of her
suffering. There was the impulse to run out into the snow.

There was so much. And at the same time, there was so little,
only a dreary diminishment, like age, like flannel-gray water
draining slowly, with no sound, down the clogged drain of a
bathtub. There was, finally, nothing.

For in one dimension of his being he was merely an observer of a
charade. He saw the two figures fixed in that harsh light, the
man standing in his overcoat with snow melting on his hat, the
woman in the chair lifting that gray face. Nothing seemed real.

He was not sure what might be the inner reality. was there ever
an inner reality.2

He felt rage, hurt vanity, black desolation, anguish, anger, fear,
self-contempt, impulses to violence, and to fight, and savage mirth
(irony). In this one passage, I believe the typical Warrenesque hero
is capsuled; and significantly, it is in a context of impersonal indul-
gence in sexual license, shown by the word fucking. Brad is the victim
of her affair with someone else, she is the round heeled wife any man

could lay. But it led him to a final nothingness and to the

fl.

1‘ l

r,

175

overwhelming question as to whether or not there is, in fact, an
inner reality. At the end of the novel, he is still in the process
of discovery, but he has found "There is no country but the heart";
there is, in other words, an inner reality. Further, his confronta-
tions with sexual license with Lettice and others had led him to that
conclusion. At the end, he is at the church service and Brother
Potts is preaching; he is watching Leontine Purtle , the "stacked
up" blind girl he took to the motel to help him lay a ghost; and he
is reading Lettice's letter. He has responded very negatively to her
letter up to the very end when the weight of the circumstances began
to come through.

He had been forced to remember how things were, and among
them was his parting intercourse with Lettice as he was taking her to

the train in Nashville so she could go to Reno for the divorce.

Lettice asked him to stop on the way and make love just once
more so she could remember how things had been before the bad
began. In a sardonic trance, he got a blanket out of the trunk
and went back into a grassy glade by a stream, under a cedar
bluff. It was very confused and numb and strange, but in the
end like a plunging into the black center of things, where
nothing equaled nothing.

Whether the episode was a victory or a defeat, he was not
quite sure."2

Impersonal sex is never a clear symbol of victory or defeat to those

who engage in it, especially, those in the novels who have not

achieved an osmosis of being. However, as in the case with Brad
Tolliver, it may become a means for finding one's self. In the "revelen
and carryen on" and the "foolishness and foulness" referred to by the

other religious from Night Rider through Flood, sexual license is a

 

dominate symbol for the inability of people to find a proper definition

176

of themselves, and their attempts to do so outside of themselves.
Cass Mastern, Isaac Sumpter, and Lettice Poindexter Tolliver are
only a few of the several examples of those in the novels who made
the effort to define themselves in another, and that effort is sym-
bolized by their intercourse. In Meet Me in the Green Glen the same
symbolism is perpetuated by Angelo Passetto and Cassie Spottwood's
frantic search for meaning in the nothingness and mutability of sex.
In the end, it is doomed to failure, just as Sunderland was not able
to find meaning in his sensuous life, and he ends up a paralyzed
invalid. Certainly, as a form of sensuality, sexual license is (l)
self-destroying, (2) an effort to escape the prison of the self in
externals, and (3) in fantasy from, a subconscious form of inner

escape.

Love

Jack Burden in All the King's Men had identified love as
one of the reasons for man to sin. We have seen several instances of
this already in the treatment of sexual license as an expression of
moral evil. However, love not necessarily expressed in sexual inter-
course may also be a source for evil. Some of the aspects of evil
associated with love are treated as nonmoral evil or suffering, but
there are also sources of pain and harm caused by love. It is often
a motive to seek other forms of indulgence.

As mentioned above, Lettice loved Brad, but the relationship
could not stand the strain of the other sensual actions associated

with their relationship. The excape from self in the drinking and

177

indulgence were only a part of the total weakness of their relation-
ship. There love itself was a "ferocious flash into blackness," and
it was a shield to reality. According to Seth Parton in Band of
Aegele, while kindness is seductive, love must scourge, in the name
of Truth, and that scourge will produce pain. The pain he caused
Manty was to come with his rebuke and condemnation of her father in
the power of his spiritual pride. In addition, it was also to come
when he came into her life again with the demonstration of lust that
was a reflection of the weakness inherent in his prideful self-
ambition. Even though the book does not detail any sexual license
between Idell and Seth, it is implied.

Sweetwater and Sue Murdock in At Heaven's Gate were guilty
of sexual license. She was pregnant by him, but he would not divorce
his first wife to marry Sue because he would not betray his principles
to the prostitution he felt marriage to be. "It was worse because in
the other kind of prostitution, a body was sold for something, and he
believed that marriage was a system by which love was sold for some-
thing. And he believed in love." Their sexual license had caused
or contributed to the pain and suffering they were to experience
because of Jason Sweetwater's pride. Sue thought his love was a
betrayal, and her attitude is much like that of Isaac Sumpter's men-
tioned above.

Finally, it is in the words of Ashby Wyndham that we are
given our concluding observation on love and lust. Recalling the
incident cited earlier that he had to marry Marie because he had made

her pregnant, it is significant to note the degree to which their love

178

had grown, and it is unsurpassed in all of the novels, and equalled
only by that of Corinne and Leroy Lancaster, or Lucy Stark's love for
Willie. "A man don't love no woman true," he say, "but in his pore
man way may be it can learn him to love the Lord. It is lak a school
and the young un goes to school and they learns him to spell and if
he studies on it he gits so he can read the Lords blessed word. Oh,
Marie, I said to her you learned me to spell, and I see it clear."
The only problem is that Ashby did not say these words until Marie

was dead and near to smelling.

Money

A third cause for moral evil cited by Jack Burden while
preparing to do his research on Judge Irwin was money. When he addres-
sed his inquiry to the old Scholarly Attorney, he cried that he did
not want to remember about Judge Irwin in All the Kingis Men and those
dead days of the past. "The sinful man I was," he told his legal son,
"who reached for vanity and corruption is dead. If I sin now it is in
weakness and not in will. I have put away foulness." In the discussion
associated with Burden's enquiry, the old man used the terms eie,
vanity, corruption, foolishness and foulness frequently. He touches
the pride and sensuality and the motives which bring them forth.
Finally, however, Jack had to go elsewhere for his information. Ellis
Burden would not give it to him. But he found it eventually, and it
was money that had made Irwin bend his standards. Jack has properly
deduced that ambition, love, money or fear would get him something on

Irwin, and it did.

 

179

Money, in the form of the prices for their tobacco, was the
motive behind the formation of the association for which Percy Munn
became a night rider, but money was not a major factor in his own

actions in Night Rider. His actions are more accounted for under ambi-

 

tion, as indicated earlier. Money, however, does play an interesting
counterpoint in the story. Munn had a two-thousand dollar reward on
his head while he stayed at Proudfit's place. Willie was hard put for
funds, but he did not turn in Munn. Willie and Sylvestus with the
women worked very hard for very little, but Willie would not turn in
Munn for mere money. As the story he told to Munn had revealed, he
had seen his time of greed and "a-gitten and a-begettin, and not knowen
the marrow." He had seen the evils done under the influence of likker
and the sensual indulgences associated with immorality while he was
living down on the plains. But it is Proudfit's loyalty to Munn that
is counterpointed against the greed of those who sold out, such as
Senator Tolliver had done. Ironically, Proudfit's loyalty is the final
cause for Munn to leave and find Tolliver who was a bad man, among bad
men.

Among the religious characters in At Heaven's Gate, Private
Milt Porsum had sold out to the money interests of the Bogan Murdock
financial empire. In the end, he confessed the evil he had done, with
the realization that he could not undo that evil. He admitted being
the puppet of the big money interests as Jason Sweetwater had charged
that he was while Jason organized the workers for the strike which cost
Ashby his job. In Porsum the two worlds of the exploited hill people

and the big money interests were combined. He was the victim of the

180

best symbol in the novel for the affect of money-~Mr. Murdock himself
and his family as they corrupted all they touched. The lust and the
vanity and the appeals to pride were great; and the evil associated
with the money interest was considerable. Porsum's contact with
Ashby Wyndham reminded him of his debt to the common people, and he
kept it by confessing just as Ashby had done. In these two hill men,
the two stories and the two worlds combine, and evil rising out of
greed and lust are at the very basis of it because Porsum learned
Ashby's story from the attempt of a Mr. Tucker to bribe him.

Isaac Sumpter of The Cave also has significant connection
with money and the greed and violence associated with it. His effort
to exploit the cave and the tragedy of Jasper's accident were horrible
evils. However, the appeal of money as such is much more an appeal to
the pride of self-ambition than to the self-love of sensuality. Ikey
wanted fame and fortune, but fame meant more to him than fortune. How-
ever, his consciousness of money is demonstrated by the problem of
working with the wealth associated with the Goldstein family. He was
jealous, and envy motivated some of his hatreds. He is the most
materialistically minded of all the religious characters, but through-
out Warren's novels, the greed we see is more often associated with
pride than with sensuality.

It is among the nonreligious characters that money, as such,
really becomes a motive. In World Enough and Time, there is a whole-
sale betrayal of truth for the sake of bribes and possible financial
gain from the trial. Tobias Sears' stand against Thingism in Band of

Angels is another frontal attack on the evils associated with money;

181

but in the end, Tobias is ready to join the materialists. Aaron

Blaustein in Wilderness was grateful to be persecuted as a rich man

 

rather than as a Jew. In Wilderness also, Adam Rosenzweig found that
the sutlers would exploit the fortunes of war for profit, but he went
along to get to the places of battle. He also confronted grave
robbers who would not leave the sanctity of the dead for money.
Negroes for whose freedom the war was being fought were humiliated
for money in cheap games to entertain the other soldiers. Adam
Rosenzweig saw the prostitution of Molly the Mutton, for money and
lust. Other than perhaps At Heaven's Gate, Wilderness is developed
around the themes of greed and its misery more than any of the other

novels, even though greed has its portion of influence in each of them.

Conclusion

Robert Penn Warren consistently presents the nature of moral
evil in the terms easily associated with pride and sensuality. In
pride the concept of ambition is easily understood in terms of the
pride of power, knowledge, morality and spirit. Sensuality is chiefly
associated with sexual imagery, specifically impersonal sexual inter-
course and the efforts of the characters to find self-knowledge or
definition by identification with some other person. The abuses of
love indicated by these improper sexual relationships are analogous to
Dante's purgatory in which lust and pride are the extremes of the abuses
of love: inordinate love on one hand and bad love on the other. Con-
sistent with Warren's interest in self and self-knowledge and building
upon his concept of metaphysical evil, it is possible to understand

Warren's concept of evil in these terms.

182
Moral Evil and Responsibility

As was indicated in the first chapter, moral evil implies
the presence of a basis for responsibility before blame or account-
ability may justly be demanded. There is among the critics of
Warren's novels a general tendency to insist that the overall implica-
tions of the novels indicate an affirmation of a high degree of
responsibility for moral actions on the part of the characters in the
novels. One such critic, Clark, in the article on the religious impli-
cations of some of Warren's novels, declares that Warren would not
allow anyone to escape his responsibility for his actions by laying
claim to an easy determinism.22 Of course, the real possibility of a
genuine responsibility is, I believe, totally dependent upon there
being genuine freedom.

In Wilderness, after Adam Rosenzweig escaped from the Elmyra,

 

his flight was unopposed. He was totally unnoticed. "Nobody, not any-
body, had tried to stop him. Nobody even yelled after him. He had
escaped, he was free, and in that moment freedom felt completely
devalued. Nobody, nobody in the world, cared what he did. He could
go or come, like a leaf in the eddy of a stream, like a mote of dust
in the wind. This was America." An unopposed freedom is a devalued
freedom; I believe that the novels consistently present this type of
concept of freedom. When our actions are resisted, when we are under
restraint, be it of the law, history, or necessity, we really have a
kind of appreciated freedom because it has value when we are allowed
to function. As indicated in the first chapter, we have a responsi-

bility in the sense of obligation and accountability, as implied by

183

the notion of liability. By our position in life, we have responsi-
bility to perform in accordance with that place, and secondly we have
a responsibility to honestly stand by the actions and face the conse-
quences which necessarily follow from them.

I find no consistent evidence in the novels to support a
notion of complete freedom in the sense that Adam Rosenzweig spoke of.
In fact, the story in that novel is a tale showing that he is nei free
in that sense. He is limited, he is finite, he has a position, he has
a place, he has responsibility. Hugh Miller and Jack Burden are dis-
cussing the nature of things near the end of All the King's Men, and
Mr. Miller, the former Attorney General under Willie Stark, observed,
"History is blind, but man is not," with respect to the moral neu-
trality of history. Man has responsibility of time and place. This
excludes a totally gratuitous act as a justifiable means for defining
ourselves. Even though the nature of things does not leave us the
luxury of being arbitrary, we do have a range of choices open to us,
and we are able to select from them which way we should go. For
example, Isaac Sumpter did not have to have intercourse with Eustacia
Johnson in Rachel's car on that rainy night. He could have said no,
but he refused to take his responsibility seriously, and he did not
behave properly with respect to either his position, as Rachel's lover,
nor according to his nature for he allowed the circumstances to dominate
him.

An example of the abdication of responsibility even when
claiming to accept it is demonstrated by Bogan Murdock at the end of

At Heaven's Gate. He attempts to explain his compromising position to

 

184

the television audience by explaining that he is a victim of untrust-
worthy associates and friends instead of the victimizer the novel has
shown him to be. He claims to have been betrayed instead of betraying.
Perhaps no other of Warren's novels demonstrates any better the notion
that the moral consequences of our actions are not judged with the
easiness of earthy consequences, as MacCarland Sumpter acknowledged as
the nature of God's judgment in The Cave.

Human responsibility in the face of the threat of DEE!1§.15
to acknowledge the limitations of finitude and accept the role which
man is to have as a partial and inadequate judge. Perhaps this is what

Cass Mastern in All theKingfs Men meant when he said that his brother

 

Gilbert was the only type of man who could survive in this world
because he was able by keeping flexible and contingent, to do a little
justice in the face of the great injustice which is so much a part of
the world, because such a stance will allow him to maintain a degree
of innocence in an attitude of strength.

With respect to the threat of self-definition in the self-
destroying externals or the false internals of sensuality, a similar
need for responsible action is called for. One cannot deny the claims
that the flesh has upon him. Seth Parton, Ashby Wyndham, Munn Short,
and virtually all of the others together demonstrate that man is body
and spirit, not just spirit. It is the sensual aspect of man which is
to keep him in touch with the world. By living a life of sensible
moderation, one can avoid the efforts of definition in the externals,
so that definition of the self, in the terms of the qualities of the

self, is possible. Distortion of the self is to destroy the self,

185

which is inner death. Depending upon one's philosophical orientation,
Warren declared each soul valuable in either God's or man's eyes, but
valuable nonetheless. Moral evil makes it abundantly clear that the
threat of the loss of self is ever at hand, and one must be prepared

to deal with it responsibly.

1967), 5.

CHAPTER III
FOOTNOTES

1Warren, World Enough and Time, p. 420.

2Niebuhr. I, T88.

3Warren, The Cave, p. 140.

4Niebuhr, I, 194, 195.

5Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Ethics (New York, 1965), p. 66.
6Niebuhr. I, 198.

7Robert Penn Warren, Wilderness (New York, 1961), pp. 299, 300.
8

 

Niebuhr, I, 199.

9Ricoeur, Symbolism of Evil, p. 138.
10

11

Robert Penn Warren, Band of Angels (New York, 1955), p. 46.

Niebuhr, I, 188.

12Niebuhr, II, 40.

13Niebuhr, I, 228.

14Warren, ”Knowledge and the Image of Man," pp. 237, 238.

15Niebuhr, I, 228, eassim.

16Warren, All the King's Men, p. 193.

17Warren, The Cave, p. 191.

18
v.
19

Basil Cottle, The Penguin Dictionary of Surnames (Baltimore,

Warren, Flood, p. 134.

186

187

20Warren, Flood, p. 204. Italics supplied.

2lWarren, Flood, p. 335.

22C1ark, p. 76.

CHAPTER IV
NONMORAL EVIL

When the knock came at the front door--the knock of Nick Peppy--
Brother Sumpter had already risen from his chair, about to go.

He had done the things he could do. He had asked Jack Harrick

how he was today, he had told how they were broadening the high-
way over toward Athens, he had told how Mr. Broadus had sold the
hundred head of shorthorns he had brought in to feed for Chicago,
he had read a chapter in the Bible, he had prayed. He had sat in
his chair in the silence that sometimes, in its sense of communion,
had nourished his soul by the thought that even through pain and
sorrow, life drew to its glory.

The glory of God is indexed in the creation of evil, the Scholarly

Attorney had said in All the Kingfs Men; and further, the index of

man's glory is creating some good out of the stuff he had to work with,

providing he has God's help and sacred wisdom. A few years later,

Robert Penn Warren has MacCarland Sumpter indicate while attempting

to minister to a man who is dying of cancer that there is a communion

of silence, through pain and sorrow, and that life was heading toward

a glorious climax. However, the context for the above quotation

reveals that Brother Sumpter could not be in communion with Jack that

day because he was distracted by his own pain of isolation. As Mac

confesses his distress to Jack, he does not seem to understand this

intrusion into his own private world of pain. As he acknowledges his

own sin of questioning God's will, Mac wants to trade places with Jack

because his distress is so great. He pleads with Jack to pray for him,

because he believes that in Jack's pain God might listen to his prayer.

188

189

Jack was about ready to consent when a new pain is thrust upon him:
Your Son is Lost In the Cave.

What is the purpose of pain and suffering? Why must men
endure so much in a world like this? What has God got in mind for men,
that he should have made this a place of woe? Throughout the nine
novels of this study, we are confronted page after page with a world
in which pain and suffering are part of real experience. Every attempt
to avoid it or to eradicate it from human experience is predoomed to
failure and a reduplication of pain for the efforts. As noted in the
first chapter, Warren's concentrated creative effort has been given to
the presentation of this very real problem for mankind. We have at
this point surveyed metaphysical evil, or its possibility in a world
such as Warren's, and have concluded that it does exist, if nowhere
else, in the limitation of human nature in contingent finitude and in
the force of history upon us. Then we noticed briefly the moral evil
which grows from this nature in the forms of pride and sensuality.

Now it is time to inquire into the nature and power of the pain and
suffering which is thrust upon men from outside of themselves, for
which they often have no direct personal responsibility, but must
accept and endure.

There is a communion of suffering in the novels. All men
suffer, and eventually, those who suffer the most are those who deny
that they suffer at all. After refusing Private Porsum's charitable
offer for assistance to get out of jail, Ashby Wyndham said, "It is
the world. . . . I put out my hand and laid holt on the world one time,

but it ain't nuthin. Lord put pore man in this world and give it him

190

and said, it is yoren, take it and eat and know your emptiness. I
knowed it. And I know it now." All men share in this world of sin
and pain, feeding on its slop. Not everyone in the novels is totally
aware of the way things are in Warren's world, but if they are to
survive, they have to learn, and share in the suffering. It is, Mac
Sumpter says in The Cave, the Christians' lot to suffer together.
Sumpter's friends, Celia and Jack Harrick, are among the best, if not
the very best, examples of this principle demonstrated in the novels.
They love each other dearly and they are bound together by the pain
of disease, the reality of death in their son, and the hope of the
future in their younger son, Monty, and his girlfriend Jo-Lea Bingham.
They all struggle together to find the meaning of their suffering.
While preaching at the opening of the cave as the crowd of
curiosity seekers gathers, Mac Sumpter tries to make some Bible sense
out of the tragedy. Jasper is suffering to remind us of the burden of
our sin, which is taken away by the death of another. He is suffering
to show that it is not evil for a man to love his son. He is suffering
because someone has to go into the ground, to find the inner meaning
of things. These thoughts and others are exchanged by the characters
as they act out the drama that is their own definition. At times, it
is even hoped that nothing had happened, because "If nothing had
happened, then there would be no suffering and terror under the stone."
And at another point, contempt is expressed for what might be “the
ignorance that set value on pain and pleasure." However, I believe
the last page contains the answer. The overwhelming question of the

novels has to do with finding a reason for living, and in The Cave, Jack

191

Harrick says, "I reckon living is just learning how to do. . . . And
dying . . . --It's just learning how to live." This is Jack's way of
creating good--by learning how to live and how to die.

Learning to deal with evil is essential because the world is
the way it is. However, it is not easy, and those who believe in God,
in particular, have trouble with the notion of evil. Brother Potts,
in fieee, said, "I know the world is God's will, but I can't get used
to some things." Mrs. Pugh in Wilderness, who may still be a believer,
even though her husband is not, told Adam Rosenzweig, "Ain't every-
thing in the world a man kin help." At the death of their two-year-old
son, Monmorencey Pugh could not pray, because the world was no place
for praying; however, he could not cry either, because the world was
no place for crying. Finite men just does not know. Pugh had tried
to do the will of Jesus and not kill in war, but he had to kill to
stay out of the war. He just couldn't help it. Further, in EQElQ.
Enough and Time, Rachel Jordan Beaumont told Munn Short that she was
not a religious woman because she had not seen any working of God's
will in this world, and she grieved for it. Further, she denied the
Lord by saying, "Where was the Lawd to let the world be so?“ Moreover,
man not only cannot help the way the world is, but he also cannot know
the time for things to happen, either. As Ashby noted in At Heaven's
geie_when their son was born prematurely, "pore man never knows the
time." But regardless of the attempts to answer these questions,
acceptance of the world as it is, is the key to survival in the novels.

Seth Parton had to abandon his ideals, and Percival Skrogg. Willie

192

Stark and Adam Stanton were all killed because their notions did not
confrom to the reality of the world.

The nature of man lends itself to our suffering. Even love
is a source of pain for people. For example, Leroy Lancaster in EEgfl;
Me in the Green Glen suffers from the thought that his wife loves him
because he is a failure and she is able to foretell the disaster that
has become the hallmark of his life. He is flooded by despair and pain
at the thought of returning home to her sweet tenderness. He even
thinks that her love for him might be an expression of pity, and the
thought emasculated him. The ability to remember the beauty and love
of the former Lettice Poindexter is a source of pain for Brad Tolliver
in E1229: In addition, while staying with the Proudfits in Night Rider,
Percy Munn clings desperately to the recollections of happiness with
the pain of current emptiness, which gave him a pervasive numbness, a
kind of paralysis. The impending destruction of Fiddlersburg and his
own cancer made Brother Potts appear preoccupied and distracted in
pain. The comment about Jeremiah Beaumont and the pretrail, public
attention given hhn is applicable to them in principle. "But if
Jeremiah Beaumont was a chip on the tide,“ the narrator says, "he was
a thinking and suffering chip, and his dearest thought was that he was
not a chip at all but a mariner who had made calculations of tides and
a decision for his course. His calculation was that in the very con-
fusion of the currents lay his hope, for once he had struck the right
one he might ride it through and thread past all dangers to his peace."
Of course, we know that he did not calculate correctly and the last

notation he made in his journal was, "Was all for nought?" Man's

193

impotency causes him pain. Therefore, there are things that go on
that he cannot help, such as Leroy Lancaster being overwhelmed with
an internal pain that was too deep for him to find relief by anything
he had done.

In the following consideration of nonmoral evil, the discus-
sion takes the form of a topical presentation of death, disease,
failure, madness, and the interpenetration of things. These items
have been selected because they are the categories of suffering experi-
enced by the religious characters in the novels, and they are also
representative of the types of suffering confronted by all of the
characters so that this study may be considered representative of all

the characters of the novels.
Death: The Law of Nature

So one of the men dies on the ground. His death is a natural
event. Under the given circumstances the heart stops beating.
Then the chemistry in that certain mass of flesh alters. Under-
ground in the dark, the hair and nails and beard grow a little
longer. Then that growth stops, and the disintegrating chemistry
proceeds according to its natural law. That death, which we
regard as perfectly silly and unnecessary, is the most real con-
tent of the event.

Thus it is that Jeremiah Beaumont viewed death, early in the book,
before he had been convicted of the murder of Cassius Fort. To him at
this point, death was merely the absence of life, a negative, no
reality in itself. The negative quality of suffering or evil is often
used to say that it has no reality in itself, but Jeremiah cane to
believe differently. After Munn Short had told his tale of double

death to Jeremiah, "death became real to him." He began to view death

194

as a thing in itself and something that is with everyone in the midst
of life. "It is horrible to think," he says, "that the poor body of
man is so blind that it does not know life from death or light from
dark, or love from hate, and spends and spills itself always in such
ignorant spasm. . . . I lay there and shuddered that all man's life
should be but the twisting and contortion of a cat hung up strangling
in a string for sport of boys." He has heard that a hanged man will
erect his male part and spill his seed, and he sees it in images of
shadow and darkness mixed with flashes of light. The dread of death
and the threat it holds for man is clear.

By and large, Warren's symbols for death are traditional and
few are surprising. One of the more remarkable, used at least twice,
is the act of digging up the dead. In Wilderness the act of exhumation
of the war dead is a graphic portrayal of the irreverence of war and
the greed of the camp followers. In a nearly comic scene, reminiscent
of the grave yard scene in fleniei, Dr. Sulgrave and his group of non-
descript men rearrange the dead; they claim to be embalmers and'
patriots as they portray the death, gore and dehumanizing motive
behind the battle scene. Again, Adan Rosenzweig is given insight into
how to fight for freedom--rob graves. Moreover, exhumation is used for
another purpose in 51999, While waiting for the entire town to be
destroyed and relocated as much as possible, one of the priority items
is the moving of the cemetery. As he sits in the cemetery during the
final church service, Brad points out that many of the great, great
grandparents are being thought of for the first time by their successful

relatives who forsook Fiddlersburg a long time ago. Brad has had his

195

parents moved, but he as yet has not been able to locate the apparently
unmarked grave of Issie Goldfarb, the Jewish friend of his youth. In
the cemetery, appropriately, the last of the great memories of Brad

are raised by the sermon of Brother Potts and the letter from Lettice
Poindexter. Amidst the images of flood and dreams, vulnerability and
foolishness, the mind cannot be kept from acknowledging the very real
presence of human finitude. The lonesomeness of the cemetery, the
solitary observer who is isolated from the crowd, illustrates perfectly
the limitation Brad must experience if he is to find the human neces-
sity.

In contrast to those at the church service in Fiddlersburg,
the morticians in All the King's Men who prepared Judge Irwin for
burial attempted to make it appear as though nothing had happened. ‘"I
left the dead man under the grass of the mortician's fancy," Jack
Burden declared, "which spared all tender sensibilities the sight of
raw earth and proclaimed that nothing whatsoever had happened and veiled,
as it were, all significance of life and death." In other words, try
as we might we cannot hide death, if we want to know the significance
of life. In Night Rider, Percy Munn's consciousness of death is very
typical of the Warren central characters. "Death grew in you like the
leaves on the trees in spring, gentle and tender and unobtrusive, and
then, in the moment of knowledge, was already luxuriant, full-blown,
blotting out the familiar objects. If not the small pain in the side,
some word you spoke. some careless gesture, some momentary concession

to vanity, some burst of pity, or some trivial decision-~that was the

196

bud, the leaf swelling toward recognition." Dying is a part of life,
part of the process of being.

In addition, there is more than one type of death. The body-
dying and the dying when one walks in the sun mentioned by Munn Short
in World Enough and Time as he told the Beaumonts of his conversion,
first demonstrates the awareness of the death of the soul during life,
which is worse than just body-dying. In the eighth novel, fieee,
Warren again used the concept of two kinds of dying: spiritual and
physical. The destruction of Fiddlersburg has placed Mother Fiddler
in a race with the two kinds of death. In harmony with the notions
considered under the mixed nature of man, there are two types of
death. The whole man stands under the threat of dying.

With burial grounds in disrepair and fathers wishing sons
deep, deep-seated psychological aspects of death are dealt with in
some of the novels. In The Cave, both MacCarland Sumpter and Jack
Harrick confess that they want their sons to die. Mac also confesses
that he wanted Jasper dead because he was Jack's son, because of an
inner twinge of vengeance for the spoiling of Mary Tillyard's virginity
which forty years before had caused Mac to marry her and take Jack's
shame to himself. His human limitations as a "man of God" are graphi-
cally portrayed in his fear of death, his alienation from God and his
frenzied prayer life. Further, Jack Harrick is aware, by the end of the
novel, that his whole life, the myth that had been created by the com-
munity concerning him, did not prove anything about the quality of his
death. Before the novel is over, only Jack and Celia Harrick have

come to terms with the life-in-death, death-in-life dichotomy.

197

Even the young die and few are allowed to live. In fact,
young children are conspicuously absent from Warren's novels to any
significant degree. The young suffer from the sin of their elders,
and they are a source of suffering for the elders. The only genuinely
youthful character is the brief attention paid to the young Amantha
Starr during most of the first chapter of 83nd of Angels. However,
the story is being told by the older Amantha Starr Sears as she sorts
through her youth for the key to her identity. Other than that, all
the children of the novels are late adolescent or young adult.

Usually, the infants do not live, or have not lived; and when the
stories are told, the children are already dead. For example, Ashby
and Marie Wyndham in At Heaven's Gate have a young boy who does not
live long; because he was a premature and sickly child, his death is
understood by Ashby as a judgment upon their sin. Similarly, Mr. and
Mrs. Monmorency Pugh in Wilderness had a son who was two years old when
he died. However, he was dead before they entered the narrative. The
child's death is understood in some way to be related to the father's
inability to pray or cry. It is significant that Jack Harrick in ihe_
geye_is unable to pray for Jasper, and MacCarland Sumpter has diffi-
culty praying for his son as well. The death of the children or, as in
Ikey Sumpter's case, the alienation of the child is closely related to
events which could be understood as punishment for sin. From the other
side, the children typically have difficulty relating to their parents,
and the parents are usually quite elderly or nearly retired. Warren

writes normally about the middle aged group of characters who are

198

between childhood and old age. He is in nearly every sense of the
world an adult writer.

Related to the death of children is the problem of the still-
born child or the miscarriage. Lettice Poindexter in fieee_and Rachel
Beaumont in World Enough and Time are two of the women who are not able
to bear children. Rachel even steals a child that its mother would
gladly let her have, but the child's presence in the story is so breif
that beyond the function of demonstrating Rachel's insanity, and the
depravity of the Gran Bosse, it serves no real purpose. Also, in 5.1.9.99:
a minor character, Miss Pettifew had buried the premature fetus in a
jar in her yard. She is discovered digging it up to move it before
the impending flooding of Fiddlersburg. The natural abortion had taken
her baby from her, and her unknown lover. The death of Fiddlersburg
was causing the digging up of all kinds of ghosts in the people's
pasts. In Meet Me in the Green Glen, the Black woman, Arlita, says
that she wishes Angelo were born dead rather than to get mixed up with
her daughter. Sue Murdock in At Heaven's Gate also says that she would
rather be dead than be like her mother. Generally, I believe that the
symbol of the stillborn child is saying that the child is better off
having been born dead. It is now saved the pain and suffering of this
world. There is, however, one baby born who is alive and well at the
end of the novel--the son of Corinne and Leroy Lancaster in Meet Me in
the Green Glen. They are the only couple in all of Warren's novels to
both come to the end of the novel with an optimistic frame of refer-
ence, each other, and a child. Perhaps an elder Warren is getting

more optimistic for the children of the land.

199

Death is also the end of change and the perpetuation of
loneliness. While contemplating the "wisdom which is resignation"
and contemplating the inner self, "he thought of night coming on,"

the narrative says of Adam Rosenzweig, in Wilderness. "He thought

 

of the loneliness of tonight, this first night on the ground. This,
he thought was the moment when the dead must first feel truly alone.
This, he thought, was the moment when the dead must first feel truly
alone. This was the moment when the dead, in loneliness, feel the
first stirrings of the long penance of decay. This was the moment
when the dead realize the truth: This is it, it will never be dif-
ferent." This is compared to the safety Ashby Wyndham feels in Ai_
Heaven's Gate for his parents because they have died in bed and his
mother is safe in Jesus, but his father was lost. The death bed is

a finality. However, before death things could be different. On his
death bed, Willie Stark in All the King's Men said that he had to
believe that things could have been different from what they were.
Man does control his destiny to a degree, within his natural limita-
tions, until death; but after death, he has no control. "Warren's
Osmosis requires acceptance of one's annihilation. . . ," Stranberg
has said. "But if the price of osmosis is high, meaning death for the
conscious ego, the rewards are also high, meaning a kind of immortality

3 Further, I must say

through the ministration of that shadow self."
that I have found nothing in Warren's novels to require the changing

of this statement, except that the characters who have the fundamental
faith--Willie Proudfit, and the others--will look to a time of reward

or condemnation in Jesus.

200

The fear of death includes the fear of the possibility of
judgment or discovery of evil, and neither the universality of death

4 "Death has a

nor the likelihood of annihilation removes that fear.
positive significance," Berdyaev has said, "but at the same time it is
the most terrible and the only evil. Every kind of evil in the last
resort means death. Murder, hatred, malice, depravity, vengeance, are
death and seeds of death. Death is at the bottom of every evil passion.
Pride, greed, ambition are deadly in their results. There is no other
evil in the world except death and killing. Death is the evil result
of sin. . . . Death is a denial of eternity and therein lies its onto-
logical evil, its hostility to existence, its striving to reduce

creation to non-being."5

This threat of non-being in annihiliation for
all is evident in the death scenes in the novels. I have selected only
one which I consider very typical. When Murray Guilfort in Meet Me in
the Green Glen is dying at his own hand from an overdose of pills, his
last flashes of consciousness are "the terror of discovery: they woujd
know, theyuwould find out" about the things of Cassie Spottwood's he
had put in the safe which could implicate her in the murder of her hus-
band. However, as he is slipping further and further into death, the
terror is fading too, "as he sank deeper, sinking into truth, into
truth that was himself, whatever his self was, as into joy, sinking
there at last." The novel is not clear as to whether this is the joy
of annihiliation or some other. 1

One of the characters upon whom this study has concentrated

sought death at the hand of another because he did not have the courage

or the irreverence to take his own life. Cass Mastern joined the army

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and would not kill in order to find the bullet that would kill him.
He sought this form of justice because he had been responsible for
the death of his best friend. Mr. Duncan Trice had shot himself after
the discovern of the adulterous affair between Mastern and Mrs. Trice.
In All the Kingfs Men, Cass Mastern laments his being unable to commit
suicide in order to guarantee his condemnation. So he sought vicarious
suicide, and threw himself upon the grace of God. "'I shall die,‘ he
wrote in the journal, 'and shall be spared the end and last bitterness
of war. I have lived to do no man good, and have seen others suffer
for my sin. I do not question the Justice of God, that others have
suffered for my sin, for it may be that only by the suffering of the
innocent does God affirm that men are brothers, and brothers in His
Holy Name.'" We will have to judge whether he is dying in the Lord,
in harmony with the view of a Munn Short, who says in World Enough and
Iime_"anguish and moan is of living time, not dyin." Whether Cass is
in moan or in rejoicing is a judgment I will make in favor of the
rejoicing. To his death he has done nothing for the glory of man, he
humbly claims. That remains to be seen in the judgment, a Munn Short
or a Willie Proudfit might say. But he does have trust in both the
justice and the grace of God, and that is no small thing to have for
the rejoicing, if the testimony of these characters has any coherent
message at all.

Perhaps the mourning of Cass Mastern, because he asks to be
remembered without grief, is like that of Ashby Wyndham for his dear
wife Marie, before he succumbs completely to his sinful pride in the

Lord. True mourning is only in God, as Ashby has said in At Heaven's

202

geie, "To mourn in God and of His Will is a kind of sweetness. It is
gittin closter to them as is dead than ever you was them livin and
drawin breath. It is a gift God give, and I give praise." I believe
that Ashby and Mastern are saying substantially the same thing. By
the grace and mercy of God there is a union in the common guilt of
man, which we share in by the suffering of the innocent and the mercy
of the Everlasting. Ironically, perhaps, I believe this harmonizes with
the concluding thoughts of Adam Rosenzweig as he contemplated the dead
in the ground in the chapter of the exhumation in Wilderness. He sat
there and I'thought of the living, who did not have peace." There is

a peace for the dead in Warren's novels, whether it is a peace in God
or in Annihilation, and remember, according to Jack Burden in All the
King's Men, God and Nothingness have a lot in common if you look them
straight in the face.

Finally, death is frequently symbolized in terms of corruption
and decay. The dark colors of the scenes, the relative infrequence of
bright daylight scenes, and similar effects all support the general
tone of death and gloom in the novels. By and large, the novels are
not optimistic, and the atmosphere of the stories helps to develop the
concentration on the dark side of life. One example of decay I
believe, is sufficient because they are so common and so much alike in
the novels. When Marie Wyndham died it was in the heat of August. As
they floated down river, they were going through the bog country that
lay low around the river, and there was not a decent place to bury Mrs.
Wyndham. Therefore, they moved slowly down river in the oppressive

heat, and the pestulence. Two days later they purchased some cheap

203

lumber for a coffin, and "we put her in the ground where there was a

church and Christian folks was standing there."
Disease and Deformity

The suffering of illness has long been associated with the

concept of nonmoral evil.

"There's a hell of a lot of sick people," [Adam] said glumly,
"but I don't see--"

"Pain is evil," [Jack] said, cheerfully.

"Pain is an evil," [Adam] said, "but it is not evil--it is not
evil in itself," and took a step toward me, looking at me, like
an enemy.

"That's the kind of question I don't debate when I've got the
toothache," [Jack] retorted, "but the fact remains that you are
the way you are. And the Boss--" [Jack] delicately emphasized
the word Boss--"knows it. He knows what you want. He knows
your weakness, pal. You want to do good, and he is going to
let you do good in wholesale lots."

There are philosophical positions which argue against the reality of
physical and emotional pain caused by disease and deformity, but
Robert Penn Warren does not present them in his novels. In harmony
with his general position of insisting upon the taking of evil
seriously, his novels are populated with many characters who suffer
from illness and paralysis or crippling disease of some kind.

The first disease of interest is the fever which Willie
Proudfit confronted during his escape to the mountain hideaway with

the Indians in Night Rider. He had left the reveling and prowling of

 

the plains to go to the mountains where he found peace and a time to
think through his life. After five years of having his ease and not
having to do and strive as he had used to, he took sick. "The fever

come. Hit taken me, and I said, 'Willie Proudfit, you gonna die.‘

204

That's what I said, and the words was in my head lak a bell. Then hit
come to me, how other men was dead, and they taken hit the best they
could and the bitterness, and I said, 'Willie Proudfit, what air man
kin do, you kin do.‘ But the fever come again, and I said, 'You gonna
die, and in a fer country!'" Willie reports that the Indians did what
they could administering black and bitter herbs and so forth to him
and finally placing him in the medicine house to take out the evil.
During his time of fever he was in delirious dreams, and his experi-
ence is interpreted by him to mean two specific things. First, it
taught him more about the will of the Lord. "Ain't no man knows,"
Willie said, "what the Lord's done marked out fer him. And many's the
pore weakid man done looked on the face of blessedness, bare-eyed,

and ne'er knowed hit by name. Lak a blind man a-liften his face to
the sun, and not knowen." Second, he saw the dream which called him
back home, to Kentuck, where he found his wife of his dream, just as
it was given to him in his sleep. In this instance, the fever furnished
the crisis situation which took Willie out of a place he probably would
not have left had he not "had" to. He was able to function as the
ministering angel to Percy, because he had had the fever. Adelle was
his young and loving wife, because he had had the fever. Good came
out of the evil.

The second disease of concern here is cancer. Two of the
religious characters are inflicted with it. Jack Harrick in The Cave
and Brother Potts in fieee_are victims of this universal symbol for
extremely dangerous and very bad evil. This outside infection or this

inner growth, whatever it might be, feeds on the very thing it is

205

consuming, the bodies of these two Christian men. Jack Harrick's
story is an encounter with evil through his having such a terrible
disease, because his task is to adjust to his condition and learn how
to live and how to die. After the turmoil of his circumstances, he
does learn to take his pills, and he returns to the guitar to begin to
make his own song. His pain is bearable because he has learned how to
live by drawing on his resources. Among these resources is his belief
in God, which he blasphemously has suggested should change as the
truth of the situation changes. He is not as alone and isolated as
some of the characters in the novel(s), but he is not an open person
either except with his very small group of friends. He bears and en-
dures the physical and emotional pain inflicted upon him by his condition.
Brother Potts is in a similar situation. His greatest desire
is to send the people away from Fiddlersburg knowing that their lives
have been blessed, that they have come to some good end. He is a
pathetic person--alienated both by his profession and by his disease.
He has already lost one arm, and he is dying. Brad Tolliver concen-
trates upon him as a central symbol for the lonesomeness he wants to
present in his movie. Potts is always preoccupied with the pain and
distraction which his spiritual and physical burdens place upon him.
He demonstrates the finitude of being, and he generally succeeds in
avoiding condemnations for moral evil. His relationship to Pretty Boy
in prison, when he tried to get the Black murderer to pray, might be
interpreted as an example of spiritual pride, but I do not think it
may be properly so read. The farewell service represents a genuine

climax in his life. He has had three operations and is not believed

206

by the community to have much time to live before cancer of the bone
kills him.

Another illness or diseased condition which is perhaps
related to cancer or fever or both is the pus and boils. It is used
in the Cass Mastern story in All the Kingis Men as a metaphor; "Though
the boil has come to a head and has burst, yet must the pus flow."
Symbol of the inner infection which must be taken out before the heal-
ing is completed, the boil and its pus represent the moral and spiritual
decay caused by war and other evils. As a physical condition, the pus
appears in Wilderness in the chapter at the military cemetery. Young
Sull, one of the group of exhumers, was once saved from a swollen
throat because Doc had sucked out the pus with a tube, at the risk of
his own life.

Old age is another symbol of disease and deformity, even
though there are not very many aged people in the novels. To Anne
Stanton the Scholarly Attorney looks ill, and at the end he is feeble
and aged. His eyes are bad, and he cannot do his own writing. He can
talk only for short periods at a time. The deformity he suffers from
is merely old age, crippled by sacrificial living. In a sense he is
an unusual character merely because he gets old. Like Dr. Burnham in

World Enough and Time, he is suffering from years of work and strain.

 

Not many of Warren's people are brought to old age. Mrs. Jordan in
World Enough and Time also succumbs to old age and a generally ornery
disposition. Rachel is not sad when she dies; in fact, she is glad to

be rid of her. In Night Rider, Senator Tolliver is ill and bedridden.

 

Being immoble and helpless, his “son” Percy is not able to kill him,

207

and Munn ministers to his need before leaving. The role of the defor-
mity of old age emphasizes Senator Tolliver's view that all life is a
compromise with the ideal. The last scene demonstrates this, as Percy
compromises and does not kill him. Also, Tsanoff in the Nature of Evil
has stressed that the problem of evil essentially arises from con-

7 Tolliver's miserable life

flicts between the ideal and the real.
demonstrates it well. He betrays the cause for personal gain and
makes the notion of compromise seem more like selling out.

In addition, there are emotional cripples such as Jerry
Calhoun and physical cripples like Rosemary Murphy in At Heaven's Gate.
Jerry's Uncle Lew has a clubfoot, and Duckfoot Blake suffers from bad
feet. At one point in the story, Milt Porsum stares like a paralytic
whose desperate plea cannot be articulated. These characters fore-
shadow the condition of Sunderland Spottwood in Meet Me in the Green
§ien_whose stroke has him bedriddern and paralyzed for twelve years.
Now unable to move, he cannot speak. Sunderland was a wild, wicked
young man who was an exploiter extraordinary. He drank and fornicated
in a way to rival Jack Harrick in The Cave, but he did not become a
Christian. He remains vulgar and offensive to the very end. Ironi-
cally, as a cripple, he is not any more alienated or isolated from
his fellows than he had been before. He is a graphic illustration of
moral paralysis. Further, the other exploiters may be read as emo-
tional cripples, because they are not able to effectively relate to
other people or new environments.

A major character who has a birth defect, Adam Rosenzweig in

Wilderness, is born with a clubfoot for which he has to wear a special

 

208

boot. The boot itself becomes a "red badge of courage" for him, in
that it was because of the boot that he eventually does kill a Rebel
soldier and participate in the war for freedom. He has been ridiculed
and alienated because of the mark of his birth, the heritage that his
father left him; however, he is no more handicapped by it than he was
by his father's ideological heritage in his fighting for freedom. In
other words, the physical defect is a symbol of the spiritual defect
or limitation he received from Leopold the liberator.

In fieee_we have several important disabilities. Most of
them are related to Brad Tolliver. He has a war wounded knee which
gives him difficulty from time to time, and he is shot by Calvin Fiddler
after Cal broke out of prison while Yasha Jones was in town. But at
the end of the novel, we are told that his recovery from that temporary
injury should be complete. Also, Lettice is an emotional cripple.

She is seeing a psychiatrist, but she is not afraid to discuss it in
public. Once when Brad was obviously uncomfortable about it, she

said, "Afraid somebody will spot you out with a leper, huh?" The
crippling and deformity of the human form is carried to its height

in this novel in old sheriff Purtle, the father of Leontine Purtle,
Brad's motel mate during his return to lay ghosts in Fiddlersburg.

She is beautifully built, and she was born blind. At the Church service
at the end, she pushes her father to the service in a wheel chair
because of his paralysis. They become symbols of the dislocation
approaching the citizens of Fiddlersburg. While she can find her way

around her home town, she will be literally lost in a strange place,

209

and she will not be able to care for her father because of the burden
of her own handicap.

One more item, in addition to Sunderland Spottwood from Meei_
Me in the Green Glen, is the bifocal eye glasses of Leroy Lancaster and
Murray Guilfort. Because of the emphasis upon illusion, truth, dream
and vision, the need to aid the natural organ of vision is significant.
Bifocals not only help the wearer to see, they also shield the wearer
from observation by outsiders; they are genuine symbols of private
vision. For example, because of Leroy's bifocals, Corrine cannot see
that Leroy is unable to keep his eyes off her very generous breasts
while they are courting. He remains hidden because of his glasses,
and he is able to see things more clearly because he has them. The
ambiguous use of the glasses symbolizes the ambiguity of our own
knowledge.

It is ironic that the quotation beginning this section
appears in the middle of Jack Burden's offer to Adam from Willie for
the position of director for the Medical Center. It is the very doing
of good represented by that medical center which is the evil which
undoes the two principles in the offer. Men suffer greatly by disease
and deformity, but even the human efforts to do away with nonmoral
evil can become sources for suffering. It is as if twisted, deformed
efforts to achieve good will be diseased or deformed to some degree:

often fatally.

210
Failure and Fear

One of the very important aspects of nonmoral evil is asso-
ciated with failure. Failure in turn is related to frustrations and
fear. These are internal and psychological forms of suffering which
one may experience and no one else may be aware that the pain is pre-
sent. "There is nothing in us more deeply rooted and less perceptible
than the feeling of some essential failure," Cioran has noted. "It is
everyone's secret. . . . The remarkable thing is that most people
don't even suspect that they experience this feeling. . . . The
strength of a being resides in his inability to know how alone he is.
A blessed ignorance, thanks to which he can bustle about and act."8
Frustration is a result of the failure to reach an aim or an intention,
and in many systems of ethics this in itself constitutes a major type
of evil. If we behave so as to avoid pain, then the avoidance of
frustration is paramount. In many respects it is an individual's
ability to rebound from a failure that is the genuine measure of his
stability as an individual.

In All the Kingfs Men, Cass Mastern states the Warren ideal

 

to avoid the human flaw of attempting to define oneself in another.
Significantly, Jack Burden was the first one to confront it consciously,
and he was the first to fail. He had to lay aside the journal of Cass
Mastern. Internally, Jack speculates as to the reasons why that Jack
Burden, back then, could not understand the nournal. He had not seen
the world in a piece the way Cass had; to him, it was fragmented and

an accumulation of items. He did not, perhaps, see anything in

211

relationship to anything else. Also, "he was afraid to understand
for what might be understood there was a reproach to him." Typically,
failure in the novels is shown in the threat of failure of self-
knowledge. If there is a character in Warren's novels who has the
potential for failure in self-knowledge it is Jack Burden. The failure
is shown in alienation and fragmentation. As Jack is described in the
novel, he is a divided and alienated, isolated individual, suffering
from the principal disease of his time, all time: personal fragmenta-
tion. In this state of frustration and fragmentation, he had to fail.
In one of the important metaphors in the "modern time"

novels, the car, Jack is described as follows:

There is nothing more alone than being in a car at night in the
rain. I was in the car. And I was glad of it. Between one
point on the map and another point on the map, there was the
being alone in the car in the rain. They say you are not you
except in terms of relation to other people. If there aren't
any other people there wouldn't be any you because what you do,
which is what you are, only has meaning in relation to other
people. That is a very comforting thought when you are in the
car in the rain at night alone, for then you aren't you, and
not being you or anything, you can really lie back and get some
rest. It is a vacation from being you. There is only the flow
of the motor under your foot spinning that frail thread of sound
out of its metal gut like a spider, that filament, that nexus,
which isn't really there, between the you which you have just
left in one place and the you which you will be when you get to
the other place.

You ought to invite those two you's to the same party, some time.
Or you might have a family reunion for all the you's with bar-

beque under the trees. it would be amusing to know what they
would say to each other.

It is the failure to achieve genuine self-knowledge which marks many
of Warren's people. It is such a failure that makes it a crime to

have been yourself, as Jeremiah Beaumont found in World Enough and

 

Time. It is also the nature of the indictment that Brad Tolliver

212

makes of the whole city of Fiddlersburg: the crime of having existed.
It is the frustration of life and the fear of failure that is charac-
teristic of all life in the novels.

The failure which Ashby Wyndham experiences is the failure

to be true to the Christian humility and unworldliness. In At Heaven's

 

geie, his spiritual pride has caused him extreme pain and the suffering
of separation from God without identifying himself in the creation of
good. Instead, his pride in the Lord is sinful. There is a terror of
failure in every enterprise, and the risks are genuine and frightful.
It is the terror that Jack Harrick spoke of in The Cave when he woke

in the dark not knowing who he was.

Seth Parton fails to achieve his possibility of sanctified
joy. He sought it with Manty during their Oberlin school days. His
failure is highlighted by his inability to identify his goals after
the civil war is over and his terror of a position contradictory to his
earlier Christian ethics. Band of Angels has several similar failures.
Hamish Bond and Tobias Sears are both caught in the circular terror
ascribed to Tobias when he described the overrun of Blacks into an
area as they are escaping from terror into terror, like an inorganic
mass, moving over one another.

A special brand of failure is realized by Leroy Lancaster
before he has an opportunity to complete his process of self-knowledge.
In Meet Me in the Green Glen, he has the fearful sense of Corinne's
being clairvoyant because he feels she can tell when he comes home
that he has failed to obtain freedom for Angelo Passetto. To make

matters worse, their sexual relationship has broken down because he

213

fears that she is awarding herself in her sweetness to him as a reward
for his failure. Feeling that he is followed by an odor of failure
that eminates from him, Leroy did not want to go home. This sense of
failure brings Leroy to the crisis moment that culminates in his
realization that he has been blaspheming against himself. It is only
by this experience that he is able to feel that he can, and in fact,
must go home again. The evil of failure is made very real in this
one, remarkable character in this latest novel; and he is able to
overcome the threat of the destiny he had perceived for himself.

At one point in fieee, the central character, Brad Tolliver,

is having a genuine crisis in which

Brad Tolliver saw Brother Pinckney [the Black minister] stand at
the top of the wide steps, staring into distance, and then
descend the stairs. His heart was, suddenly, filled with a dry,
angry envy of that man. He wanted to be Leon Pinckney. He
wanted to be Pretty Boy [a Black prisoner]. He wanted to be

any nigger. For he yearned for the simplicity of purpose, the
integrity of life, the purity of heart, even if the purity was
the purity of hate, that a nigger must have.

That would be, at least, something.10

Knowing what we know about Warren's novels, we can tell that Brad is
heading for a heteronomous failure if he maintains this feeling. He
will repeat the error of Cass Mastern expressed earlier in this section.
What Brad eventually learns because of the influence of the religious
characters-~Lettice Poindexter, Brother Potts, and Leon Pinckney--is
that he has to learn to trust the inner necessity that is the human
necessity in order to discover that inner country of the heart which

is every individual, himself. It is that which every man owes himself,

the being true to himself, which is his own definition. As Private

214

Porsum told Mr. Murdock in At Heaven's Gate, "A man owes himself some-

 

thing, Bogan." Specifically, it is being true to himself and his
heritage that Private Porsum has in mind when he gives Murdock a copy
of his statement of his involvement with the corporation's illegal
financial dealings. He owes himself his being true to himself.

We also know that when Ikey Sumpter declares that all he has
to do was to be rational, as he did in The Cave, he is heading for the
failure he experienced. The attempt to be totally rational is doomed
to frustration in Warren's quest for self-knowledge. Ikey's suffering
is predictable and necessary, given the nature of man and the nature
of the world. Ikey's associate in the exploitation of the cave
disaster, Nick Pappy, declares that "a man ought to have something."
What he forgets is that he is headed for failure as long as he wants
something external to himself, such as his nice yellow, Cadillac con-
vertible.

Another man who is taken in the terror of his impending

failure is Adam Rosenzweig in Wilderness. In typical Warren style,

 

Adam is wrapped in internal monolog:

He thought how short his own life had been. He thought of the
swift emptiness of his time. It was, he thought, like wind.
He thought suddenly, with a strange unspecified despair, of all
he had not had.

He had never had his arms around a woman. He had never had
a friend to talk with about the way life was. He had never had
money in his pocket to buy the respect of the world. He had
never, he thought sadly, been sure that he had found Truth.
With a sweet yearning that seemed ready to break his heart, he
thought how a man has to have something in order to be ready to
die.

i

215

At the end of the novel, Adam has obtained a new heart and
is ready to come out of the wilderness. He achieves the inward name-
lessness which is required for self-fulfillment. It is very important
to note that the things Adam has not had are the things the people who
have had them must give up before they can achieve the self-knowledge.
He has no possessions to foreswear before he can journey inward to the
country of the heart to discover himself there. He is right, a man
has to have something in order to be ready to die. Now he has it, but
he does not have those things for which he was yearning.

The last example of the suffering related to terror and
failure is George, the paralyzed aerialist adopted by Ellis Burden in

All the Kingfs Men. In Chapter Five, we see an example of the Chris-

 

tian charity of the Scholarly Attorney who gave the insight into the
nature of God, man and evil. This aerialist was the man who got
hanged. One day, with the rope around his neck, he froze, he could

not jump.

"He was completely paralyzed," [the older Burden] repeated,
ignoring my wit. "Through no physical cause--if—-" he paused--
"anything ever comes to pass from a physical cause. For the
physical world, though it exists and its existence cannot be
denied without blasphemy, is never cause, it is only result,
only symptom, it is the clay under the thumb of the potter and
we--“ He stopped, the gleam which had started up fitfully in
the pale eyes flickered out, the hands which had lifted to
gesticulate sank. He leaned above the gas plate and stirred
the soup. He resumed, "The trouble was here," and he laid a
finger to his own forehead. "It was his spirit. Spirit is
always cause--I tell you--" He stopped, shook his head, and 12
peered at me before he said sadly, "But you do not understand."

George is partially recuperated now, but he is still a young boy, an

infant, mentally. The suffering of her terror is complete. His fear

216

of something that might happen is so great that it drove his sanity
completely from him. The incident is significant not only because it
tells us about the old man, but also because it shows the spiritual
causes of suffering. George is completely disoriented, dislocated as
a person solely from spiritual or psychological causes, if the old man
is right. It is the spirit in Warren's novels which is generally the
cause of the fears, frustrations, failures and terrors so frequently
shown. The terror of what might be, or what could have been, is real

in the novels.
Madness

Madness is very closely related to failure and fear. Arising
from the improper mental or sensational awareness of the individuals
with respect to their own experience and/or their relationship to
others, madness is an explicit form of suffering relatively common in

the novels. As H. D. Herring suggests,

Warren has portrayed characters facing the dissolution of order
and sense and reality, the components upon which the sane world
is based. However, because his writing has emphasized always
the individual's need of a secure knowledge of himself in his
world, madness, the radical disorientation of the person that
destroys the reality and the meaning of his existence, poses
the most corrosive threat to the establishment of the self in
Warren's novels and short stories. Conceived as one of the
important metaphors of the failure of the individual to clap
together the diverse components of himself into a unified being,
madness illuminates the interpretation of individual novels and
allows insight into the meaning of the fiction as a whole.13

In this present study, madness is considered through some examples of
withdrawal, dreams and hallusinations, persecution, and numbing of

Perceptions as they relate to the religious characters. These

217

categories were adopted from Simmon's article on "Adam's Lobectamy
Operation and the meaning of All the King's Men."14

There certainly are instances of severe madness in the novels,
as Herring's adequate and up-to-date article cited above has demon-
strated. The purpose here is to indicate that there is a correlation
between the characteristics of schizophrenia and the behavior of
Warren's characters. However, other than Percival Skrogg and Isaac
Sumpter, the religious characters do not adequately demonstrate the
qualities of madness to allow a generalization other than that the
religious characters do not generally demonstrate schizophrenic behavior.
Warren's religious characters are among the more normal ones of the
entire group. This is not to say that they do not have emotional prob-
lems. For example, Lettice Poindexter was under treatment by a psychia-
trist until her conversion, but the total disregard she speaks of for
her body causes some to question the sanity implied by her becoming a
Catholic, literally slaving away in an old folks home in Chicago, and
allowing that beautiful, well cared for sex machine body to go up to
170 pounds. However, her one dream would not really qualify as hallu-
cinations, and she is a better integrated person at the end of the
book than at any time during it.

According to direct statements in World Enough and Time,
Percival Skrogg developed a reputation for madness which the people
understood to be a good and wise madness. He became a curiosity piece
for the intellectuals of Lexington. In his withdrawal, he is an alien-
ated and increasingly isolated individual. While he apparently remained

active in the political activities of his party, he withdrew more and

218

more and became more alienated from others. Second, the dreams and
hallucinations which he experienced have more reality than the exter-
nal world. Only the ideas in his head were real to him. His politi-
cal involvement caused persecution; for example, the first time that
Jeremiah met him was at an election day event in which he forced the
fight by his own activities. His numbing misery is illustrated in
his hiding away in his hot stuffy office listening for the people who
were, he thought, coming after him. Certainly he fits the pattern
for madness.

Whether or not Ikey Sumpter is understood to be mad depends
upon the reading of his last episode of The Cave. He is in flight;
his withdrawal to New York is clearly an attempt to escape his home
and the ties with his past. He is in isolation, and he certainly is
alienated. There are certain dream-like qualities about the descrip-
tions of his leaving for New York. He is numb and his perceptions
are blurred, and he is in misery. He does apparently have dream
fantasies, if not hallucinations, about Goldie Goldstein. He also
feels persecuted as a Jew because of his name, even though he is not.
Madness would explain his immoral or amoral exploitation of the life
of Jasper Harrick and the emotions of those close to him. From his
first appearance, there is no question about his alienation from his
father. His ability to identify with the bird of Keat's ode is indica-
tive of his desire for escape. Even his loss of himself in sensual
license is indicative of his isolation and alienation. He simply is
not able to integrate his experiences within himself. His suffering

is the suffering of madness.

219

The withdrawal stage of madness is reflected in the develop-
ment of increased isolation and alienation. Willie Proudfit could be
said to have such a withdrawal when he went for five years into the
mountains and lived a quite peaceful life removed from all the cares
of the outside world. This characteristic is symptomatic of madness
only when accompanied with other characteristics. In a fever Willie
has the hallucination or dream in which he saw the image of Adelle
whom he was to marry. Willie does not meet the criteria for madness;
however, Percy Munn, who comes to stay with him, does. He is with-
drawn, even further than he has to be, into isolation and keeps in
hiding because he is pursued for a murder he did not commit. However,
it is not until the end of his stay with Proudfits, when he is caught
in a pervasive numbness, that he is moved to go out and seek to kill
Senator Tolliver. At the end, his perceptions are numbed; he is
alienated and persecuted; in addition, he has very unusual dreams in
which it appears that his separation from his family causes him to
lose any touch with order, sense and reality. He has lost a sense of
the future. The disintegration of his perceptions in mixed images and
blurred visions of emptiness indicate that he is losing touch with
reality. Mr. Munn is going mad, and his trust to kill Tolliver is the
act of a mad man.

In the last novel, the religious characters do not experience
these qualities of madness; however, Mrs. Cassie Spottwood does. She
has been in and out of the sanatorium much of her adult life. For
example, she is taken out of the sanatorium in order to care for her

husband after his stroke. Her withdrawal is demonstrated in her life

220

style on the old farm. She has lived alone for twelve years with a
paralyzed, invalid, in an old, decaying, increasingly less livable
place. Her difficulties of perception are demonstrated from the begin-
ning of the novel. She is unable to tell the real from the imaginery.
As she and Angelo begin to lose themselves in their sexual fantasies,
she becomes more and more out of touch with reality. When Angelo
begins to show interest in Charlene, Sunderland Spottwood's illegiti-
mate daughter by the Black woman, Arlita, she cannot mentally bear it.
Her escape into hallucinations is typical of her withdrawal
from reality. There certainly is no question at the end of the novel
when Leroy Lancaster, Cy Grinder, and Murray Guilfort visit her that
she has created an illusion of love and happiness that has no basis
in fact and is a cover for her actually having murdered Sunderland.
By the time she has Cy take her to the governor and the prison in
unsuccessful attempts to stop Angelo's execution, she is well within
the grips of madness. The world she has created gives her comfort
and protection of the horror she did not want to remember. Such
examples of illusion as escapes from reality and the suffering related

to it are frequent in the novels.

Interpenetration of Things

Cass Mastern lived for a few years and in that time he learned
that the world is all of one piece. He learned that the world
is like an enormous spider web and if you touch it, however
lightly, at any point, the vibration ripples to the remotest
perimeter and the drowsy spider feels the tingle and is drowsy
no more but springs out to fling the gossamer coils about you
who have touched the web and then inject the black, numbing
poison under your hide. It does not matter whether or not you
meant to brush the web of things. Your happy foot or your gay

221

wing may have brushed it ever so lightly, but what happens
always happens and there is the spider, bearded black and with
his great faceted eyes glittering like mirrors in the sun, or
like God's eye, and the fangs dripping.15

Even though there are only three of the novels which make specific
mention of the spider web metaphor, it is quite generally understood
that Warren's world view rests upon the notion that all things are
ultimately related. As the image suggests, if one aspect of life is
disturbed by anyone, tremors are set up which will affect everyone
else to some degree. The risk of experience in this life is that the
spider, the symbol for the threat of evil in the world, with its poi-
son dripping fangs will come forth and eventually will get whoever is
responsible for the tremor, and several who are not.

Another interesting aspect of the metaphor is that the
offense does not have to be great, only a light touch will do it;
further, the touch can be given during one of the lighter moments; he
would have us believe that one is never safe, damnation is always at
hand. Once is all that is necessary. ". . . All of these things--
the death of my friend, the betrayal of Pheobe, the suffering and rage
and great change of the woman I had loved--all had come from my single
act of sin and perfidy, as the boughs from the bole and the leaves from
the bough. Or to figure the matter differently, it was as though the
vibration set up in the whole fabric of the world by my act had
spread infinitely and with ever-increasing power and no man could know
the end. I did not put it into words in such fashion, but I stood
there shaken by a tempest of feeling." Certainly this statement

affirms the belief in the interpenetration of things: the fabric of

222

the world, the spider web, or what Maggie Tolliver Fiddler in Flood
called "the crazy tied-togetherness of things." Maggie had purchased

a marriage manual and had a copy of Fannngill. Her husband had seen

 

them and had hastily concluded that some infidelity was going on
between his wife and some man. In response to this development,
after the trial, she says "I sat there and thought that there was
something worse even than being that gosling on the pond and feeling
that first sudden illogical grab of that snapping turtle under the
black water. The thing worse was to feel what I felt sitting there
on the floor--not the blankness, the illogicality, no--the crazy tied-
togetherness of things." Earlier she had said, "I began to get the
feeling that everybody was caught in some sort of web, you might say."
The essential thing to keep in mind with respect to this
metaphor is that the touching of the web does not have to be close
to the spider in order to bring him out, and the one who gets bitten
is not necessarily the one who touched the web. Cass had seen others
suffer for his sin, and he did not question the wisdom and justice of
God for it. However, he did attempt to redeem the situation with the
notion that the suffering of the innocent created a community of suf-
ferers in God's Name. While Cass holds to the possibility of there
being some innocent parties, the general tendency of Warren's work is
more in agreement with Mr. Budd, the warden at the Fiddlersburg Peni-
tentary in fieeg, "There are no innocent men." Cass does mention a
common guilt: "Men shall come together, yet,“ he said, "and die in

the common guilt of man and in the guilt that sent them hither from

223

far places and distant firesides." The fact of the stories is that
people do suffer for the actions of others.

Being born is a risk, the crime of existence has been dis-
cussed in this study already, but there is more to the problem of
suffering than just being born. Each action that the person takes
in life sets off a certain amount of force, apparently very much like
the Karmic force of Hinduism. These forces together create the en-
vironment for pain in which we live. The act of killing the buffalo
was not an action which touched only Willie Proudfit, the buffalo and
the people who bought their hides. The Indians who were dependent
upon the herd for their lives were put to extensive suffering because
of the exploitation of the herd. The Indians had not touched the web,
but they were bitten by the poison fangs of the spider of suffering.
The risk is increased because “Nothing is ever lost," according to
Cass Mastern. The nothing here is absolute, because as Duckfoot
Blake mentions in At Heeven's Gate, "Everything matters, and don't you
say it don't! Everything--."

If a time comes when it doesn't matter any more what happens,
then the person is in spiritual trouble. It is only the highly selfish,

self-loving person like a Monmorency Pugh in Wilderness who will say

 

that "nuthin don't make much diff'runce." The indifference of moral
fatigue is to fail to fulfill the responsibility one has toward his
time, toward his own. The construction of impersonal relationships is
to doom oneself to a life without sharing in the common brotherhood of

suffering. Those who try are the Isaac Sumptens.the Slim Sarretts, the

224

Bogan Murdocks, the Wilkie Barrons, the Percy Munns, the Murray Guil-
forts, or the Hamish Bonds of the world.

At a time when people have a tendency to hide the individual
responsibility for the actions of nations or of cities or of families
within the framework of the group, of the whole, Warren is asking us
to take a good look at personal, individual responsibility for the
vibrations that are being set off around us. The fabric of the world
is such that each touches all in his every action. The ardent
Jeremiah Beaumont in World Enoughiend Time sets out to avenge the
honor of a young girl. However, he did more than take justice into
his own hands. He may have taken from the state the one man who had
worked out the solution to the pressing civil problem of his day.
When Jeremiah stabbed Cassius Fort in the dark, in cowardice and
perfidy, he did more than just fulfill his personal will. He deter-
mined that his wife would be driven insane and that he would die in
the wilderness. Further, when Munn Short started pinching Lottie
Perk, he did not intend to kill her; but an Indian arrow found its
mark after the Indian had watched them having their relish in the
brush. One thing leads to another, and the vibrations do not stop
until the requirements of the force have been fulfilled.

I believe that the comment of Warren's novels is that given
the nature of man and the nature of the world, if someone touches the
web of life, the vibrations will work themselves out, but you can be
careful; nevertheless, damnation is close at hand, beware. However,
if we will go "into the convultion of the world," as Jack Burden sug-

gests, "out of history into history and the awful responsibility of

 

225

Time," we shall survive and be able to obtain some degree of self-
knowledge. The reason that it is possible to go into that vibrating
world and find one's identity amidst the common suffering is the same
as that which Blanding Cottshill told Brad Tolliver to explain why
things happened the way they did in Fiddlersburg. "Things are tied
together different. There's some spooky interpenetration of things,

a mystic osmosis of being, you might say."

 

CHAPTER IV

FOOTNOTES

1Warren, The Cave, p. 177.

2Warren, World Enough and Time, p. 128.

3Victor Strandberg, "Warren's Osmosis," Criticism, X
(1968), 33.

4Niebuhr. II, 10.

 

 

5Nicolas Berdyaev, The Destiny of Man (New York, 1960),
p. 252.

6Warren, All the King's Men, p. 252.

7Tsanof, p. 4.
198 8E. M. Cioran, "Evil Demiurge," Hudson Review, XX (1967),

 

9Warren, All the King's Men, pp. 136, 137.

10Warren, Flood, p. 290.

11Warren, Wilderness, pp. 264, 265.

 

12Warren, All the King's Men, p. 211.

13H. D. Herring, "Madness in At Heaven's Gate: A Metaphor
of the Self in Warren's Fiction," Four Quarters, XXI (1972), 56.

14J. C. Simmons, "Adam's Lobectom Operation and the Meaning
of All the Kingfs Men," PMLA, LXXXVI (1971 , 84-89.

15Warren, All the Kingis Men, p. 200.

226

CHAPTER V

EVIL AND SELF-KNOWLEDGE

"Know Thyself“ and "Nothing Too Much," the two-fold inscrip-
tion on the Delphic Oracle, would be appropriate epigrams for each
and all of the novels of Robert Penn Warren. Significantly, also
found within these two insights is the essential nature of the tragic
implications of the novels. The requirement of self-knowledge and the
admonition against the human tendency to express itself in the destruc-
tive force of immoderate behavior indicated in the oracle are bound
together, psychologically, in a third classic admonition: l'To Thine
Own Self Be True." Importantly, Slim Sarrett's analysis of the nature
of Shakespearean tragedy in At Heaven's Gate is summarized by these
epigrams also, because he claimed that tragedy demonstrates the neces-
sity of self-knowledge and that the tragic flaw of the hero is defec-
tive self-knowledge. In characteristic Warrenesque irony, Sarrett
himself suffers from the delusion of inadequate self-knowledge and
attempts to present a fraudulent self-image to the people he attempts
to manipulate and exploit. He deceives them and himself as he con-
structs a fictional self. This fictional self is a lie he lived before
everyone and is reflective of the great division within himself that
caused the pathetic unfolding of his demonic being. The depth of self-
deception portrayed in the dissolution of his unreal, created manipulated

world is a pathetic unfolding of the fact that the one who needs and

227

228

frequently gets our sympathy is the one who fails to live out the

self that is within him. However, Sarrett is demonic insofar as he
represents the intentional deception of others and the ultimate vanity
when he murdered Sue Murdock, escaped to New York and appears to be
getting away with murder. However, the imagery of his closing poem,
in which the beast within is tormenting him and his guilt makes him
suspect that the noise in the hall is someone coming for him, demon-
strates that his torment will not allow the legally unpunished murder
to go unpunished.

Knowledge and understanding of the self are central to the
entire development of values and are the key to interpersonal relation-
ships. The disintegration of interpersonal relationships, as shown
throughout the novels, relates the problem of self-knowledge of the
demonstration of evil. "This places a big moral strain upon the indi-
vidual," Ralph Ellison said in an interview with Warren, "and it
requires self-confidence, self-consciousness, self-mastery, insight,
and compassion. In a broader sense, it requires an alertness to human
complexity. Nevertheless, isn't this what civilization is all about?

1 It is

and isn't this what tragedy has always sought to teach us?"
Slim Sarrett's intellectual grasp of the nature and importance of
self-knowledge and his failure to live it out in experience which
cause the rise of the tragic emotions of pity and fear. There often
is and can be pity for Slim because of the possibility his life held.
He is bright, athletic and creative, a man whom many could admire;

however, his cruel intentionality moves that pity from him to those

he abuses, and it fills us with the fear that similar failures of

229

self-knowledge and susceptibility to manipulation and exploitation
could fall upon us.

"What ever you live is Life," Jack Burden concluded follow-
ing a consideration of Adam Stanton's idealism in All the Kingfs Men.
Often in Warren's development of character, the conflict between ego-
ism and altruism is shown. The conflict between the selfishness of
being and the sense of what "ought to be" which are inherited from
our time and place of being is the center of the dialectic of fate

2 What we do

and freedom which is at the core of tragic possibility.
live is what Slim Sarrett identified as the process of life as a
temporal art, the art of creating a self. However, the self which is
made cannot be a fictitious self. Slim Sarrett and Hamish Bond are
two examples of attempts to create fictitious biographies as efforts
at deceptive self-definition. The self must be a true self, which
comes from a correct understanding of the self which is within
ourselves.

A growing awareness of selfhood is essential for knowledge
of the tragic possibility of man. This is particularly true of modern
or recent tragedy with its emphasis upon the psychological struggle
with human destiny. However, even in a classical sense, the emotions
of pity and fear as demanded by an Aristotelian concept of tragedy are
impossible unless there is sufficient self-knowledge to make sympathy
with another's suffering genuine and the awareness of the threat to
oneself real. Even though evil is the subject matter of tragedy, it

must be recognized that it is an evil of a very special type: egoism.

The tragic hero, in a classical sense, must not be totally depraved,

230

but possessed of a flaw which is expressed in his huh;ie,3 Pride by
definition rests in a concept of human worth, which in turn is related
to our understanding of evil. "The characteristic worth of man is . . .
essentially bound up with . . . the tragic enterprise," Tsanoff insists,
"and upon the adequate conception of the nature of evil hangs the
whole philosophy of value."4 As noted by Frederich Brantley, "Warren
shares a task with Joyce, Hardy, Faulkner, Melville, and Conrad in
striving 'to illuminate the tragic experience by presenting it imagina-
tively in the light of the conflict of self, the private struggle in a
world of public action to achieve self-definition."5
Because of the value of each person, Warren insists it is the
right of each individual to know himself and to develop a personality
true to his own nature. Further, self-knowledge is essential to one's
existence as a human being. He deplores the so-called saviors of men
who offer cheap and easy solutions to the critical problems of mankind
at the expense of the individual self-awareness and acknowledged respon-
sibility for one's actions. The fundamental nature of things as pre-
sented in Chapter Two of this study, particularly the basic human
nature, requires that man must come to terms with reality by knowing
himself. His self-knowledge is achieved by participation in and an
awareness of the "interpenetration of things" which is the key to
man's ability to find himself and to define himself, from himself.
Every soul, Warren said, is valuable in the sight of God or man; how—
ever, an adequate understanding of evil is necessary to understand
that value and to make the definition of the self, for good or evil, a

real possibility.6

231

The Osmosis of Being;

 

"Only by knowledge does man achieve his identity," Warren

7

maintains, "because it gives him the image of himself." By this

developing self-image, Warren continues to say in the speech, "The

Knowledge and Image of Man," man begins to see that

he is . . . in the world with continual and intimate interpene-
tration, an inevitable osmosis of being, which in the end does
not deny, but affirms, his identity. It affirms it, for out of
a progressive understanding of this interpenetration, this tex-
ture of relations, man creates new perspectives, discovers new
values--that is, a new self--and so the identity is continually
emerging, an unfolding, a self-affirming, and we hope, a self-
corrective creation.

Despite this osmosis of being to which I have referred, man's
process of self-definition means that he distinguishes himself
from the world and from other men. He disintegrates his primal
instinctive sense of unity, he discovers separateness. In this
process he discovers the pain of self-criticism and the pain of
isolation. But the pain may, if he is fortunate, develop its
own worth, work its own homeopathic cure. In the pain of self-
criticism he may develop an ideal of excellence, and an ideal of
excellence, once established implies a depersonalized communion
in that ideal. In the pain of isolation he may achieve the
courage and clarity of mind to envisage the tragic pathos of
life, and once he realizes that the tragic experience is univer-
sal and a corollary of man's piace in nature, he may return to a
communion with man and nature.

It is this process of absorption and diffusion which the characters in
the novels are to seek. It is the ideal to which they are to aspire.

It is the process which Victor Strandberg has described as the "relating
themselves to the totality of time and nature and society, whereas they
characteristically are observed bent towards opposite ends, narrowing
their identity to a bias of fame, sexual prowess, success in business,

or membership in a philosophical, religious, or political sect."9

232

The pain, isolation and separation--ideas associated with the
concept of evil--are all essential parts of human experience, if one
is to achieve the goal of full knowledge of himself, his humanity and
true unity with his fellows. Warren speaks of the results of such an
osmosis of being as "growth of moral awareness. The return to nature
and man is the discovery of love, and law. But love through separate-
ness, and law through rebellion." The entire process is metaphorically
described by Warren as follows: "Man eats of the fruit of the tree of
knowledge, and falls. But if he takes another bite, he may get at
least a sort of redemption. . . . The unity of the lover with the
beloved, a unity presupposing separateness. . . . Not . . . the unity
of a . . . tribal horde . . . ; his unity will be that of a member of

"'0 It is in this possibility of man to find unity

sweet society.
that the tragic possibility of man is found. Not only does he have
the high promise of fulfillment, he has the deep threat of failure.
The failure is frequent and often final. "I suppose,"
Warren said in the speech, "that the ultimate unity of knowledge is
in the image of himself that man creates through knowledge, the image
of his destiny, the mask he stares at. This would mean the manipula-
tive knowledge. . . . The knowledge of @359, that of en, that of gee,
that of he_. . . [which] ultimately interfuse in our life process."11
However, man's ability to see, to do, to make, and ultimately to be
are all contingent upon his ability to perceive and to perform in
accordance with his finitude. This knowledge will change the nature

of our being because knowledge itself in the growth of moral awareness,

which in turn changes "the quality of making, doing, seeing" and being.

233

However, not all knowledge is good. Many kinds of knowledge and self-
images which modern men have formed will not contribute to genuine
self-knowledge and self-fulfillment. Consequently, many efforts,
particularly those expressed in the great "isms" of the day, have
added to the misery of life.

We should not, however, blame knowledge itself for the misery
which comes with the abuse of it. "We should," he said, "blame incom-
pleteness of knowledge--the fact that knowledge of human nature, human
needs, human values, has not kept pace with knowledge of fruit flies
and atoms, that fact that we have not achieved balance and responsi-

‘2 The risk

bility in the ever-unfolding process of self-defining."
implied in the very nature of man, his mixed, ambiguous nature, is that
the horrible side which expresses the needs of the perverted will win.
It is in this, the impending defeat of the good in human experience,
which also holds tragic possibility for man.

Citing Lord Jim, Warren commented upon the "human need for
moral vindication," and Jim and Brown's "dark dialog of communion and
complicity.” Just as Marlowe said of them, Warren also concluded
"each of us longs for full balance and responsibility in self-knowledge,

‘3 What we

in a recognition and harmonious acceptance of our destiny."
want is to see the “form" or "structure" of our being, so we can see
its meaning. Again, it is the notion that life is itself an art. The
notion expressed, but not fulfilled by Slim Sarrett and other of the
characters. We want to see the form to perceive the meaning. Life
must have artistic shape. "The form" Warren says, "is a vision of

experience, but of experience fulfilled and redeemed by knowledge."14

234

He says that the osmosis of being is a developing of the rhythm of
life; a process which is self-fulfilling. "How does the knowledge

of form give man an image of himself?" he asks.

It does so insofar as it gives the image of experience being
brought to order the harmony, the image of a dance on the high
were over an abyss. The rhythm is, as it were, a myth of order,
or fulfillment, an affirmation that our being may move in its
totality toward meaning. The soul faces some potentiality of
experience, drawn from actuality, and the form is the flowing
vibration of the soul, the abstraction of experience by imagi-
nation. The form gives man an image of himself, for it gives
him his mode of experiencing, a paradigm of his inner life,
his rhythm of destiny, his tonality of fate. And this evoca-
tion, confrontation, and definition of our deepest life gives
us, is new self-awareness, a yet deeper life to live.

But not merely the life of contemplation . . . gazing prepares
for the moment of action, of creation, in our world of contin-
gency. It is, as Yeats puts it,

. . . our secret discipline
Wherein the gazing soul doubles her might."

The might is there for the moment when the soul lifts her head.15

Warren's use of the metaphors of the balance of the dance on
the high wire over the abyss, the vibration of the soul, and the ab-
straction of experience indicate the threat and risk involved in the
individual demand for self-knowledge if one is to find fulfillment by
the osmosis of being. In it one can find the wisdom necessary to live.
The wisdom necessary for a meaningful life.

Life is an art, as Slim Sarrett affirmed, in the light of
this concept of the interpenetration of being. While discussing the
nature of tragedy, as mentioned above, Slim also mentions that the
interpretation of the process could not be done by isolation of ele-
ments in the characters, situation, and plot, statement, or language;

rather, the theme "is defined only by an investigation of the dynamic

235

interpenetration of all the metaphors of the one discourse, and a com-

n16

parison among the several discourses. If he had done so, he would

have discovered the wisdom which allows the osmosis of being to find

fulfillment.

Wisdom, then, [Warren said in "The Great Mirage,"] is the
recognition of man's condition, the condition of the creature
made without gills or fins but dropped into the sea, the neces-
sity of living with the ever renewing dilemna of idea as opposed
to nature, morality to action, "utopianism" to "secular logic"

. . Justice to material interests. Man must take his life
somehow in the dialectical process of these terms, and in so
far as he is to achieve redemption he must do so through an
awareness of his condition that identifies him with the general
human communion, not in abstraction, not in mere doctrine, but
immediately. The victory is never won, the redemption must be
continually re-earned.

The self-criticism then that the process of osmosis demands is poten-
tially dangerous. There is great risk in discovering isolation and
the threat of non-being that is at the core of being-itself, as the
second chapter of this study demonstrated Warren's view of being to
be. In fact, Warren's literary criticism, as expressed by John Hicks,
is an "exploration of value." It is a process of the discovery of
form and meaning in that form. It has to do with immediate and intui-

tive grasping of the significance of works of art.

The act of criticism, [Hicks declares,] does not lie in "stating
discursively" what an imaginative work means; the successful ima-
ginative work is massive in its implications, and too condensed
for discursive summary without violating the richness of the
imaginative object as experienced. Mere allegorical "interpreta-
tion" "does little to carry us toward the 'kernal' or 'concept' or
root-attitude of the poem, which, it is true, we can never wholly
frame in words but which it is the business of criticism to carry
us toward." Carry us toward, he says: for however complex is the
exploratory process, Warren always believes that he is leading a
reader by criticism toward the work itself, which finally, and
after however much preparation, he can only experience immediately
and intuitively for himself.

 

236

Therefore, this process of self-criticism for the finding of the osmo-
sis of being is, in fact, analogous to the process of literary criti-
cism. There can be no objective, discursive explanation of a being;
that is, one cannot find meaning in someone or something outside of
oneself. This is why Cass Mastern in All the King's Men found that

the common human flaw was to try to find meaning for the self in some-
one else. This is why Jason Sweetwater in At Heaven's Gate experienced
identity problems, because for him "life had become an objective prob-
lem, complicated in its detail, but susceptible to solution in terms

of a single principle. It was a tough problem, no denying, but nobody
had crooked the deck; it was straight goods"; however, the novel illus-
trates that the principle Jason had learned from his minister father
was not valid. One cannot approach life as an objective problem.

Jason could not, no one can. Because of this approach to life, he
missed the possibility of osmosis of being. He had attempted to find
definition in the labor actions and the principles of love which
excluded marriage. It brought only misery in the death of Sue Murdock
and his own alienation. He could not find the key which would allow
him to return to the community of guilt in all men. In this, there

is tragedy.

Implications of the Osmosis of Being

As was indicated at the end of the previous section, Warren
uses the principle of the osmosis of being to develop his characters
in the novels. Such a view forces the characters back upon themselves

as the source for the possibility of salvation and/or the

237

responsibility for damnation. It also means that his presentation of
the process is rhetorical and freely developed by association rather
than in discursive presentations of values. Certainly it must be kept
in mind that this quest for identity is not an easy one. In fact, the
implications are quite the opposite. The view grew out of Warren's
awareness that modern man has the tendency to make his existential prob-
lems of identity too easy by associating them with the external causes
or ideas for which people easily die, and from which they will accept
their definition and fulfillment. In fact, ease is to be avoided.

Not many can endure the pain of self-criticism, and not many can fol-
low the destiny self-knowledge gives them. "Only the strong," Warren
has said, "can afford the luxury of radical self-criticism."19 This
is why so few of Warren's characters are able to experience the osmosis
and face the destiny they find in it.

One of the implications of the osmosis, which is very impor-
tant here, is the relationship between evil and self-knowledge.
"Studies of the individuation process," Frey-Rohn has pointed out in
gyii, "corroborate the fact that there can be no self-realization with-
out the experience of evil. Recognition of the reality of evil seems
actually to be the first step in establishing a relationship with a

20 As the old Scholarly Attorney

centralizing factor in the psyche."
declared at the end of All the Kingie_Men, one's identity is found in
his separation of God, but that very separation is to exist in a state
of evil. Unless one takes the threats of one's being seriously, he

stands under the threat of being destroyed.

 

238

In terms of contemporary psychology, Warren's concept of
self-knowledge by the process of the osmosis of being is related to

the view of the Jungian school.

The more we become conscious of ourselves through self-knowledge,
and act accordingly, [Philip has observed in Jung and the Problem
of Evil,] the more the layer of the personal unconscious that is
superimposed on the collective unconscious will be diminished.

In this way there arises a consciousness which is no longer
imprisoned in the petty, oversensitive, personal world of the
ego, but participates freely in the wider world of objective
interests. This widened consciousness is no longer that touchy,
egotistical bundle of personal wishes, fears, hopes, and ambi-
tions which always has to be compensated or corrected by uncon-
scious countertendencies; instead, it is a function of relationship
to the world of objects, bringing the individual into absolute,
binding, and indissoluble communion with the world at large.2

It seems to me that Philp has described the characters in Warren's
novels who are able to make that long journey of the soul which ends in
self-knowledge. The difficulty of this journey might be inferred from
the relatively small number of characters who emerge from the novels
with self-knowledge. Willie Proudfit in Night Rider has seen the face
of God and is now a part of the universal suffering of man. There is
no character in At Heaven's Gate who has it at the end of the novel;
however, Ashby Wyndham, Milt Porsum, and possibly Jerry Calhoun are
shown to be heading in the direction of possible fulfillment. At

least they have begun the process of self-criticism which is preliminary
to the osmosis.

Jack Burden's awareness of his responsibility, reflected in
the closing of All the King's Men, certainly is an example of Jack's
new self. Unlike the catatonic schizophrenic who would get a new per-
sonality, but not new values; Jack's experience of osmosis is more like

the conversion Adam Stanton mentioned. "When you get converted," he

239

said, "you still have the same personality. You merely exercise it in
terms of a different set of values." Certainly one of the implications
of the osmosis is that one gets a new set of values, therefore, a new
self. As Warren has said, the new relations, new perspective, new
values, understood in the interpenetration of things will yield a new
seTi.22

The tragic implications of self-knowledge are definitely
portrayed in World Enough and Time. Jeremiah Beaumont has lived a
very dedicated life. He had given it to the great purpose of revenge
for Rachel, upon Casius Fort. He had used her, and he had lost sight
of the relationship of the ideal to the real world. He became a dan-
gerous man who had attempted to find truth by lies, but instead the
truth was found by the lies at his trial. He was guilty, but he was
improperly found so by the trial. He escaped from jail and attempted
to find himself in the flight west to the evil hideaway of La Grand'
Bosse. He was a total failure until he came to himself that he should
return to Frankfort for execution. However, irony again arises and,
as the last entry in his journal indicated, he was not sure, but what
all was for naught. He is killed before he can act out his new
insight into his guilt. This too late factor in human experience
designates another of the tragic possibilities implied in the osmosis.
Some may find it too late to be able to reverse the fate they have
already unleashed.

After a life of anguish in which she finally learned that
only she could set herself free, Amantha Starr and her husband, Tobias

Sears seem to have found the possibility in the anticipation of human

240

love. However, neither she nor Tobias are the same individuals who
began the series of moves which brought them to the Western plains of
Kansas to find, finally, the release from their past, so they could
find hope in tomorrow. After stopping to look inside, instead of
outside themselves, they found a measure of fulfillment not before
possible.

In The Cave, only Jack and Celia Harrick seem to be heading
toward the fulfilling osmosis of being. It might be that Mr. Bingham
or Dorothy Cutlick or Nick Pappy could find it, if they can bear the
risk of self-criticism. They are headed in the right direction. How-
ever, Jack and Celia definitely have found it as Jack takes his pill,
picks up the guitar, and begins to play his own song. Because Jack
finds it, recognizing both his identity with others and yet his son
Monty's difference from himself, Monty Harrick and Jo-Lea Bingham, if
they have love, might be able to escape the trap of the inauthentic
life of buried existence seen in the painful distractions of those
around them. But it is here. Even MacCarland Sumpter might be able
to find it, if the people have faith in him, if he has faith in himself
and God, he might make it. However, Ikey Sumpter will not find it.
The Seconal, the whiskey, the women of the New York studio, and his
desire to find fame by his betrayal of Jasper will conspire against his
finding any self-knowledge and fulfillment. Further, he could not see
the commonality he had with Jebb Halloway, "How am I different from
that turd?“ Ikey thought. However, he felt that he had to be differ-

ent from him. "A man could not live if he were like Jebb Halloway."

241

The irony is that he is just like him. He will pay any price for some
ego-satisfaction.

In a story which demonstrates, as Uncle Rosenzweig had
declared, that if it were not for the wicked there could be no virtue,
Wilderness ends with Adam Rosenzweig finding a new heart, a new inner
'man from which to view the world. He accepts himself for what he is
and those around him for what they are. He has seen Blacks mobbed; he
has seen them mistreated and killed. He himself has insulted Moses
and, he feels, caused the death of Jed, but now he can go on, hoping
to be true to the cause of the unnamed dead who have taught him to
develop his own self-knowledge. As one of the most complete examples
of the osmosis, I believe it is significant that Adam is not a Chris-
tian. He does not have the weight of the Christian hypocrisy to over-
come. Americans are prepared to accept a suffering Jew who has to
learn that he is separate from his father, but part of mankind. In
figures of gore and blackness, the sexual license of Molly the Mutton
and the immorality of war, he learns that he can kill, not for freedom,
but because a Rebel took his boot, which was made for his clubfoot;
Adam shot him because his foot was different from his own.

Blanding Cottshill spoke directly of the "spooky interpene-
tration of things" in fieed, he felt that was why the things that hap-
pened there had happened. Also, it is because of this interpenetration
of things, that the things could have happened anywhere. In this large
book, Brad Tolliver finally looks to the country of the heart, the
inner territory of the self, and there he finds what might be the key

to the human necessity for which he is looking.

242

In the last novel, Meet Me in the Green Glen, two men have
experiences which indicate the beginning of the osmosis, and the impli-
cation is that Leroy Lancaster and Cy Grinder are now, like Jack
Burden of years before, able to go out into the convulsion of the
world and accept the responsibility which time places upon them: the
responsibility to their own selves to be true.

As this survey of the Osmosis experiences in the novels indi-
cates, there is a similarity to an observation Plato made in the
Charmides. He indicated that in self-knowledge we have the command of
our appetites and passions in a proper relationship to our parents and
official superiors, "in balance and sanity amid the ups and downs of

fortune."23

Of course, it cannot be forgotten that in Plato generally
the learning of virtue was accomplished by the stimulation of the mind
by sense-experiences to remember what it once knew, but has forgotten.
The implication of this for Warren is significant especially in the
light of Lyle Glazier's "Reconstructed Platonism: Robert Penn Warren's
The Cave." He says Platonic themes symbolized by the cave drawn from
Plato's analogy of the cave in the Republic are "transformed by prag—
matic relativism so that the novel denies the existence of absolutes
and affirms the values of secular humanism."24 However, I believe if
Glazier's observations were made with a greater awareness of the con-
sequences of genuine osmosis of being, he would have been more aware of
the unity of mankind and the shared nature of our responsibility for
what happens to each and all. Warren's people in The Cave go through

the usual pattern of development in which each must gain an insight

into his true image, if he is to live; it is this unity of mankind

243

in this condition which is the absolute governing the novel's develop-
ment. Just as Plato believed that the inhabitants of the cave could
not perceive reality, Warren also believes that the inhabitants of
the world who live lives buried in their passions were not able to
see themselves as they really are until Jasper Harrick's journey into
the interior of the earth brought them the occasion for their search
into the interiors of themselves. It is, I believe, Warren's perva-
sive irony which caused him to stress that this occasion for self-
knowledge was a journey into a cave rather than a journey out of a
cave as per Plato. Nevertheless, I believe Warren does, throughout
his works, affirm the essentially Platonic notion that the appearances
of things can, and usually do, keep us from comprehending the reality
of things--especially of ourselves.

I believe this is clarified by Warren in "Why Do We Read
Fiction?" In this essay he says, "role-taking leads us . . . to an
awareness of ourselves; it leads us, in fact, to the creation of the
self. For the individual is not born with a self. He is born as a
mysterious bundle of possibilities which, bit by bit, in a long process
of trial and error, he sorts out until he gets some sort of unifying

self, the ring-master self, the official self."25

Surrounded by illu-
sions and pretense, we must make ourselves out of that which is in us.
The potentialities of which he speaks remind me of Aristotle's view of
life as a process of actualization of the potentials which are within
us; but the realization of the shadows around us in the cave in which
we live is the result of the courage to be, the courage to accept one's

self, as accepted, even though we feel unaccepted and unacceptable.26

244

Warren says because we make ourselves, we must accept ourselves as we
are, and acknowledge our responsibility for our entire process of
becoming: all of the trials and errors involved in the process and
our debt to the past which established the theater in which we create
the role that is ourselves. Warren's consistent urging is for each
person to be himself, rather than to attempt to pass as someone else.
The denial of the responsibility to be one's self and the failure to
accept one's self are an ever-present threat to us as a part of the
world of illusions which hinder that realization--the absolute of
self-realization in spite of the illusions which distract us.

The ideals which give form to the illusions must be tested
by the seeker within the framework of action in the world. As Everett
Carter points out in "The 'Little Myth' of Robert Penn Warren," Warren
writes "Romantic Novels [which] announce an attempted fusion between
two forms of poetic fiction, one that has been associated with the
idea and the ideal--the romance, and the other which has been asso-

27 Certainly

ciated with the world of social appearances-~the novel."
for Warren, the world is both ideal and action. It is precisely that
which causes the problem of the illusion of reality--the whole world

is a cave. As Tsanoff indicated in Neture of Evil, it is often the

 

conflict between the ideal and the real which give rise to the problem
of evil.28
It is in such a world that the pattern of the search for self

recurs in Warren's fiction. Hoffman gives the pattern as follows:

1. The beginnings are in innocence, in the form of immaturity or
an incompleteness.

245

2. The world is next in the sequence, and the person facing the
world. The world is a place of particulars, and man must
find a 'path of action' that will test his principles, what-
ever they may be.

3. Man, entering the world, can commit one of two kinds of sin
(or both of them): he can violate the particulars of the
world in order to achieve power, or he commits acts of via-
lence on the assumption that they are 'principled' acts.

But, I believe we cannot forget that those who commit these sins either
come to terms with them through genuine self-knowledge or fail to
experience the osmosis of being which Warren believes is the solution
for the disease of our condition: the division of the age against the
divided self, which finds identity only by recognition of its separate-
ness and, then by the pain of that separateness, is brought into con-
scious unity with the community of the human condition.

However, Warren's osmosis cannot be understood as an excuse
for gratuitous action in the name of an existential freedom or any
other form of absolute autonomy. "Self-discovery [in Warren,]" accord-
ing to Heilman, "is not an autonomous process, with the material yield-
ing up its own definitions; rather, it is the application to the self

"30 As Jack

of the best available categories of meaning and value.
Burden came to realize, it is an awful responsibility of Time. In
other words, a person must develop enough self-knowledge to know how to
exist as himself; but he must know where he came from, why he is where
he is, and have some sense of the destiny into which he is going. "The
acquiring of that knowledge necessary for self-fulfillment," according
to Shephard, "entails the attempt to grasp or perhaps even to resolve
the contradictions or polarities which seem to define man's experience

of the world. It is usually a character's perception of these polari-

ties, and the resulting sense of shock and imbalance that leads or

246

drives him to a redefinition of his experiences which will comprehend

"31 As Warren himself has said, "the important

apparent contradictions.
thing . . . is the presence of the concept of truth-~that covers all
things which touch the heart and define the effort of man to rise
above the mechanical process of life."32
While his characters engage in the struggle to know them-
selves, I believe Warren is emphasizing that they have to come to the
place that they can choose to recognize their responsibility for what
has and will happen. If this indeed is the case, then they will make
the movement toward self-realization which J. P. Cole has identified
as the movement from a state determined by need to a state of choice,

33 A single example may illustrate this point adequately.

freely taken.
Lettice Poindexter in fieeg_lived the life of sensual liciense that
she did out of psychological need to fulfill a rivalry with her very
sexually active mother; however, when she chose to renounce that form
of life began to serve the needs of others in the old folks home, she
freely determined the identity she would have. Brad thought she was
crazy, but by taking the journey into the country of the heart, she
found her own human necessity and embraced it freely.

In a book-length study on violence in Southern literature,
Louise Gossett gave extensive consideration to the role of violence in
Warren's novels. She concentrated upon the violence which causes pain
and suffering in the world of illusion and appearances created in the
novels. With respect to the osmosis she has said, "The man of self-

knowledge is characterized by a mature acceptance of the strengths and

weaknesses of his father, and consequently, of the past. He is prepared

247
to act free from the most serious errors of ignorance, delusion, and
immaturity. He and his action will not be faultless, for the nature
of man contains the unfathomable, but the integrated, responsible self
is unlikely to abuse others or to be gratuitously violent."34
However, in addition to the recognition of the past, full
self-knowledge requires a recognition of personal guilt and responsi-

bility, which will lead to what Warren has had R.P.W. describe in

Brother to Drdgons, as

 

The recognition of complicity is the beginning of innocence.

The recognition of necessity is the beginning of freedom.

The recognition of the direction of fulfillment is the death
of the self,

And the death of the self is the beginning of selfhood. 35

All else is surrogate of hope and destitution of spirit.

With reference to the role of freedom in guilt, Cole observed that
self-knowledge is to choose to be guilty and to choose to be guilty is
to recognize our responsibility for what we are. This is part of the
process which produces the authentic self: the recognition of the
past as the source of our potentiality and of our responsibility for
what we have made out of it; therefore, "the price of selfhood is
guilt."36

The significance of the acceptance of guilt is clear. "Among
the most important results of increased consciousness and growing self-
realization" according to Frey-Rohn, "is the ability of the individual
to accept his own guilt. There is no acceptance of the shadow, no

possibility of allowing the shadow to live, without the simultaneous

acceptance of guilt [sic.]. Life which is truly lived always involves

 

becoming guilty. Man can no more rid himself of the fact of his guilti-

ness than he can cast off his relationship to the community or to the

248

self."37 The acceptance of one's past and personal guilt and respon-

sibility for what he has become are given greater emphasis in that
"only he who confesses that he is the author of evil," Ricoeur affirms,
”discovers the reverse of that confession; namely, the nonposited in
the positing of evil, the always already there of evil, the other of
temptation, and finally the incomprehensibility of God, who tests me
and who can appear to be as my enemy."38
The act of confession, as the acknowledgment of evil, is
important in Warren's fiction. One of the dominate images is the
necessity to tell or to say something, and its companion image is the
character's inability to communicate. For example, Cassie Spottwood
tries to confess in Meet Me in the Green Glen, but she is not believed
and she goes mad. James H. Justus in "The Mariner and Robert Penn
Warren" points out that many of Warren's central figures are driven by
the same compulsion of confession which required the Ancient Mariner
to tell his tale. Further, he points out concerning Munn in flighi_
31922? "His murky idea of self is reflected in his compulsion to
explain himself to others," but he does so in rationalization not in

acceptance of his evil.39

However, Angelo Passetto, in Meet Me in the
Green Glen, ". . . never explained more than he had to. If he did not
explain, he protected something. He protected the fact that he was
himself." In other words, his identity was his, if he did not have to
explain it.

On the other hand, those like Angelo who do not explain or

confess are not successful in the self-realization. For example, as

of the end of At Heaven's Gate, Slim Sarrett was not close to confession

249

of his murder of Sue Murdock, and the implication is clear that Anse,
the Black hired hand on the Murdock ranch, will be executed for her
murder. Bogan Murdock denies his responsibility for the evil that
has happened in an interestingly contemporary act of denying respon-
sibility by appearing to accept it. Also, Jeremiah Beaumont in Weel_d_
Enough and Time had to learn that it was his own desire to murder
Fort in the dark in deception, and he could not blame Rachel for it;
his realization required that he write and tell all, just as Munn
Short had to tell his tale.

Similarly, Brad Tolliver, in fieee, did not know that
"every man yearns for his story. He did not yet know that the true
shame is in yearning for a false, not the true story.“ It is abso—
1utely essential that the story told be true. This is indicated by
the outcome of two individuals who created very complicated false
autobiographies. Comment has already been made upon the story making
of Slim Sarrett. He created a very moving fictionalized autobiography
in which his mother was a prostitute and his father a no good. He told
of participation in crimes in order to show his separateness from
society and his refusal to share in the loot to show his separateness
from his friends. But he was exposed by his homosexual Greek friend
for what he was. Hamish Bond also created a false story in order to
maintain the sympathy of Amantha Starr. Such falsehood is doomed, as
the fate of Bond shows, when Rau-Ru turned on him and executed him by
hanging. His kindness was a disease which brought him death, because

he did so in the context of a false story. He was not true to himself.

250

The confession is the form which acknowledgment of one's
responsibility frequently takes. The simple story of Willie Proudfit
in Night Rider, Ashby Wyndham's confession which comprises a parallel
story to that of the Calhouns and Murdocks in At Heaven's Gate, Cass

Mastern's journal in All the King's Men, and Jeremiah Beaumont's

 

journal and Munn Short's tale in World Enough and Time are the form
given in the early novels. In these cases, the confession is a part
of the overall tale and integral to it, but in Band of Angels the
entire story is Amantha Starr's painful recollections in her quest
for self-knowledge. In the four most recent novels, confessions as
such do not play the central role they did before. While Lettice
Poindexter Tolliver's letter and Calvin Fiddler's discourse with Brad
are close to the confessional stories of the earlier novels, Warren's
treatment is much less direct than in earlier novels. I believe the
significance of this change is that the osmosis can occur within the
person, and he can acknowledge his responsibility and accept his guilt
without having to purge himself in open and frequent confession. In
fact, Cassie Spottwood's confession which is very short is not believed.
The story itself is not built around this confession as estensively as
some of the early novels used the confessions. Nevertheless, Cassie,
Leroy Lancaster, and Cy Grinder are in the process of acknowledging
their responsibility and their unity with other people.

Speaking of the means by which self-knowledge is obtained,
J. M. Spier gives a key insight in Christianity and Existentialism,
"self-knowledge is the key to philosophical understanding and the know-

ledge we have of ourselves cannot be the result of rational analysis,

251

because rational analysis is itself a function of the self." He had
said earlier "self-knowledge rests upon a commitment which we must

necessarily make on faith. It is not possible for reason to determine

40

what man is." I believe that the acceptance of one's self and the

 

evil which is a part of that self of which Warren speaks is this type

of faith. Further, the experiences of self—realization recorded by
Warren have a Gnostic quality of salvation by inner knowledge which
Michael Grant describes as the "secrets of the universe acquired through

4] Intuition is an ultimate form of awareness

piety and inner vision."
of meaning and truth, itself not analyzable, but having an analogy
with visual perception. A study of the novels indicates that visions,
dreams, and other forms of eye imagery and illumination are very com-
mon. For example, Willie Proudfit's dream of delirium in Night Rider
is presented as his having "looked on the face of blessedness, bare-
eyed." Also, Ashby Wyndham in At Heaven's Gate had a vision of his
dead son which brought him onto his knees by his bed, convicted that
he needed to find his brother whom he had betrayed.

Another example of the visual aspect of the grasping of

spiritual knowledge is shown by Adam Rosenzweig in Wilderness.

He shut his eyes, and strained to catch the cry. To shut the
eyes--that was a mistake. For immediately the darkness of his
head rang with a thousand cries. The cries that the strange,
clear, beautiful, vaulted and vaulting hollowness of a cry
uttered in the deep woods. Cry after cry rang in his head, with
that soaring purity. Hands reached out in the darkness of his.
The red reflection of the flame glowed on the faces from which
the eyes distended maniacally, and in which the mouth made the
perfectly round Q_of the scream, the scream he could not, in
fact hear.

252

Then he was on his knees in the ferns, eyes shut. He was saying
the words: "What dost Thou? 0 Thou who speakest and doest, of
Thy grace deal kindly with us, and for the sake of him who was
bound like a lamb. O hearken and do--.42

Other such reaching hands and screaming faces are seen in dreams and
truths are apprehended in visions in many of the novels. Lettice
Poindexter Tolliver reminds Brad of an old dream which she came to
understand only after her conversion experience in fieee, Finally,
Leroy Lancaster's dream-like walk in the night around Parkerton in

Meet Me in the Green Glen has strong visual perceptions as the means I

 

for the communication of deep truths for his spectacled eyes. He is
an interesting contrast to Murray Guilfort who saw the suppressed

evidence in his safe in a vision. With palms sweating,

He again saw those objects, but as they were not, in the safe in
his study at Durwood, as though his eyes had, suddenly, the power
to see all that distance, to see through steel and see those
objects glowing in that enclosed darkness. And at that moment,
the crazy fear struck him that another eye than his might even
now pierce all the miles of distance, and pierce the steel, to
see those objects glowing like live coals in the enclosed dark-
ness of the safe.4

For a person like Murray Guilfort who is not looking into himself for
the truths at the core of his own being, the spiritual insight into

his guilt only fills him with fear. Eventually, Guilfort commits sui-
cide; but Leroy Lancaster, coming from the realization of his blasphemy
of his own life, rises to walk in a new life of fulfillment and realiza-
tion. Because of his experience, he is changed; and when Guilfort
offered him a position in his firm, Leroy told him, "I just don't want

your fucking job."

253

The disclosure of the self-knowledge is an intuitive, non-
rational experience: nearly a conversion experience of insight into
one's self, which the character and his/her associates do not completely
understnad because there is no rational explanation of it. From this,
it seems to me that the ethic developed by Warren's characters who
successfully have the experience of osmosis of being is the intuitional-
ists ethic of "self-evident" truths verified by direct personal
experience in the form of some special "insight" into his nature and

the nature of reality around him.
Consequences of Self—Knowledge

Everett Carter has observed, "All [of Robert Penn Warren's]
fiction deals with the struggle, the dialectic between the little
myths men make and the great myth that Americans live, with tragedies
that ensue when these are kept separate, and with the comedy that is

possible when a synthesis is reached."44

As demonstrated above, the
process by which the desired synthesis is achieved is the osmosis of
being which results in self-knowledge. It is the failures to obtain
this synthesis which occupied most of the effort of the novels; how-
ever, there are some instances which demonstrate the possibilities
life may hold for some happiness or comedy. The comdey implied here,
of course, is nothing other than the possible happiness which follows
from the satisfaction of self-fulfillment. Generally, the critics
agree that there are some special consequences which follow self-

knowledge which I believe are particularly relevant to this study of

evil in the novels. The first is an awareness of the community of all

254

men. The second is the increased ability to forgive the offenses of
others. The third consequence is the realization of the possibility
of love. The fourth is the emergence of the character as a genuine
moral force.

Earlier in this study reference was made to Cass Mastern's
having learned of the community of common guilt for mankind. He had
to learn that all have sinned, and that none is righteous in and of
himself. He also had to know that he could not stand in any moral
pride because of himself. He had tasted of the sweetness of his
friend's wife's flesh and many people had suffered from it. In the
images of the spider web and of the fabric of the world, he demon-
strated that all people suffer from the evil actions of others. He
began to see the dying young soldier as the victim of the guilt of
others.

Also, after Jack Harrick in The Cave considered the question
"Are all men like Me?" by recalling Mac Sumpter's sermon on Psalm
Thirty-Eight, he accepted Jo-Lea, even though she had lied about hav-
ing been made pregnant by Jasper--the baby is Manty Harrick's. He is
open to the needs of everyone. When the narrative returns to him
after an aside to Mr. Bingham as he progresses toward some sense of
the unity of all men, the question is again in his mind. He also con-
siders the opposite side of the question. If all are like him, he
reasons, he would feel better; but if all are not like him, he would
feel worse. However, after some inner struggle, he concludes that his
son, Monty, is not like him, because he could go into the ground and

hold Jasper's hand. "My son is not like me. All men are not like me,"

255

he thought; but he did not feel worse, he felt better." I do not
believe that this contradicts the generalization that the consequence
of self-knowledge is an awareness of the community of all men. Jack
had been alienated and alone; but after the insight that he is not
like every one else, he feels a new closeness to his surviving son
and his wife. He can take the old guitar and play his song. It
brings him, ironically, a new sense of the community of men in sin.
All sin, but all are not alike, absolutely. He was himself, a unique
being with a unique song. Other instances of the sense of community
occur in the novels. From Willie Proudfit to Cy Grinder, those who
confront their own alienation and separation and endure the pain of
self-criticism will find that self-knowledge reunites them with the
body of mankind.

This awareness of the community of men manifests itself in
a new responsibility to all men. It is what has been mentioned so
many times in this study, the "awful responsibility of Time" which
Jack Burden realized in All the Kingfs Men. He could not find the
isolation from action which the Scholarly Attorney sought in order to
avoid the foulness and foolishness of political action. There is a
responsibility to act in this life, and only by action one can fulfill
that responsibility, but he cannot use the action as a coverup for
inadequate self-knowledge. Cass Mastern's brother, Gilbert, was able
to move from one world (pre-Civil War) to another (post-Civil War)
because he could change as the times demanded; but even though he
died rich and successful, he did not really maintain his responsibility

to others.

256

Further, Lettice Poindexter demonstrated the responsibility
to the whole of mankind by willingly accepting the responsibility of
labor in the old folks home; she no longer lived for herself, she gave
herself for others. Brother Potts demonstrates this as well, even
though he was filled with pain and alienation. He is perhaps the
only one of the characters in fieeg_who did not face the need for the
osmosis of being during the course of the narrative, because he had
already accepted his burden and responsibility before Brad returned
to Fiddlersburg. Willie Proudfit also was taken from the mountain top
haven to the drought plagued valley of Kentucky because he saw that he
was not to spend his life there. The Lord had something else for him
to do. His responsibility was to return to his father's home and there
to make do with what the Lord provided. He is the perfect contrast to
Percy Munn throughout Night Rider. The abuse of the sense of community
of mankind, in the name of improving the lot of mankind is the grossest
sin. And Munn had committed it.

In this sense of community of mankind, Warren demonstrates a
view very similar to the Jungian view indicated by Frey-Rohn. "Con-
sciousness of the archetypal shadow," he said, "is essential not only
for individual self-realization, but also for the transformation of
creative impulses within the collective upon which depends the preser-
vation of both individual and collective life. The individual cannot
detach himself from his connection with society: responsibility toward
oneself always includes responsibility tonard the whole [sic.]. One
can perhaps risk the statement: Whatever consciousness the individual

struggles for and is able to transmit benefits the collective. By

257

coming to terms with the archetypal adversary he is able to sense

45 I sub—

collective moral problems and anticipate emerging values."
mit that this is precisely what Leroy Lancaster of Meet Me in the
Green Glen does. He had once accused himself of being the conscience
of Parkerton, and this was why he was working so hard to try to get
Angelo Passetto acquitted. However, he failed to achieve that goal,
but he came to recognize that he had wanted Angelo dead himself, sub-
consciously. He accepted his guilt, and then continued to work to
get Angelo free. He continued to fail, but this time he could accept
his own failure, as his own. He attempted to find justice for the
community. He accepted his wife's love without further inner con-
flict. He became a public officer in the community and, in fact, did
become the conscience of Parkerton, but this time, freely and with a
new heart.

The achievement of the ability to forgive others is another
aspect of the community of men, but I believe it deserves special
emphasis in this study. We have several negative examples in the

novels of those who are not able to forgive others. Lew Calhoun in

At Heaven's Gate is an old, angry man who is not able to rise above

 

the hatred he feels for old man Murdock. It causes him to have a
miserable and unfulfilled life. Slim Sarrett and Jason Sweetwater
are not forgiving men; therefore, those around them suffer greatly.
Ikey Sumpter in The Cave is not able to accept others; therefore, he
cannot accept himself. The relationship of the forgiveness of others
and one's own forgiveness is a common notion in the Christian faith.

Anyone who has learned the Lord's Prayer knows about "forgive us our

258

debts/ As we forgive our debtors." The acceptance one receives is
commensurate to the acceptance one gives. The ability to accept is
dependent upon receiving adequate self-knowledge. ”Without con-
sciousness of their own need of forgiveness," Niebuhr has noted,

46 One of the

"geeg_people never show mercy towards hee_people."
principal examples of this is the way Willie Proudfit and Munn Short
demonstrated their acceptance of Percy Munn and Jeremiah Beaumont,
respectively, in Night Rider and World Enough and Time. Because
Willie and Munn had accepted themselves, they accepted Percy and
Jerry for what they were; however, there is some circularity in the
relationship because their ability to accept themselves depended

upon their ability to see themselves in the "egg? men.

As is often the case, the ability to see the "bad" and
accept that all men share the same condemnation is risky. "An evil
imperceived cannot threaten us," Coser has commented in his very valu-
able article, "Visibility of Evil"; therefore, "it cannot upset the

complacency of our quolibetic lives."47

Each of the people who finds
the "burden" of I'the responsibility of Time" will find that an easy
relationship with mankind is not possible. The achievement of a per-
spective from which to view and to appreciate the bad in others and in
oneself is not a comfortable one. The taking of the conscience of the
whole community upon oneself is a difficult task, but it is one which
can and should be taken with joy. Another risk is demonstrated in the
novels, which Tsanoff has identified. "There is . . . no coming to

terms with evil not ever," he said. "Only he who straight forwardly

accepts the universe, who accepts it unreservedly as a battleground of

259

achievement, only he who is thus accepting it is clearly aware of evils

to be resisted and overcome."48

Without the risk of self-criticism
and self-knowledge, we will waste our energy in counter-productive
efforts. One must see to forgive, to be forgiven, to accept, to choose
to be guilty, to resist what one can.

The third consequence is that acceptance of self in accord-
ance with the osmosis of being makes love possible. "Because there is
love," Casper has noted, "the law itself requires something more diffi-
cult than resignation: will, action and responsibility."49 Lucy
Stark in All the King's Men demonstrates this when she tells Jack
Burden after the death of Willie that she is resigned to the kind of
man that Willie was. She has to believe that he was a great man, if
not a good one. She shows Jack the baby which has been born to Miss
Frey, by her late son, Tom Stark. She has taken him, adopted him, and
named him Willie Stark. She sums it up this way, "Then after I was
resigned, God gave me something so I could live." She has the will,
action and responsibility to love.

The separation of the true love from the false is as diffi-
cult as separating the illusion from the reality. In Meet Me in the
Green Glen this is very difficult indeed. In fact, one of the points
made in the novel through Cassie Spottwood and Murray Guilfort is that
love is, or can be a dream, an illusion in which the dreaming is true,
but the dream is a lie. While being reprimanded by Miss Edwina about
his abuse of his wife's love, Murray Guildort had this thought. ”Leye_

. so that is love. To dream a fool dream like that fool Bessie

Guilfort, to dream a fool lie like that fool Cassie Spottwood, to dream

260

a lie and call it truth. And he thought of all the power people moving
over the land, moving in streets, standing in doorways, lying in the
darkness of houses, all in their monstrous delusion, and so he swept
the picture from the mantel." There is a love which is illusion.
Alfred Milbank, Murray Guilfort's convention buddy, proved it. "'Yes,
Guilfort,‘ he went on, 'art is all, and a good lie is worth a million
facts in any court. Or in any bed. Illusion, Guildort, is the only
truth. And as for me, I solemly affirm that, within the hour, I shall
lay out one hundred dollars for a big juicy chunk of Illusion." The
illusion of sensuality is a lie. Just as when Brad and Lettice, in
{1999, could not find love, really, in their sensuality, she eventually
called it "wicked foolishness."

Further, love, as Warren well knows, is the source of the
seven deadly sins as developed by Virgil's exposition to Dante in the
Divine Comedy. The three types of love--bad love, inadequate love and
immoderate love--account for all the mortal sins. The sins of pride,
envy and wrath are caused by bad love, the love of the wrong things.

It is essentially a self-love in the form of self-ambition as analyzed
in Chapter Three in the four kinds of pride. Inadequate love causes
inaction which is sloth, and immoderate love causes the sins of sen-
suality treated in Chapter Three as self-love. According to Sigfried
Wenzel, the notion of the deadly sins being inordinate love was
developed from St. Augustine.50 In addition, Warren demonstrated the
same difficulty of man's loving well on the basis of his own nature, as
Augustine taught; but he does believe that love is possible. Because,

if man will undergo the osmosis of being, he will be able to return to

 

261

nature and man in the discovery of love and law. And, according to
Warren, every awakening is an opportunity for self-definition for
good or for evil.51
The fourth consequence of self-knowledge is the emergence
of the self as a genuine moral force. Normally called conscience,
this makes its appearance in the willingness of the characters to do
what they perceive God wants them to do. This is particularly true'
of the religious characters. If there is a failure at self-knowledge
or a betrayal of earlier conviction in the Lord, there is a turning
from the ministry as shown by Seth Parton in Band of Angels. It is
possible that outside of Manty's awareness in the novel, Seth also
received the osmosis of being as implied by the nonworldly description
of Miss Idell whom he had mirried. Their marital success is implied in
the news story of his death and the founding of the Parton School of
Theology in Chicago. His conscience would not allow him to return to
the ministry after the war, but he would give of himself to see that
others would have the opportunity. The impact of the event upon
Manty is such that it is likely that she understood their happiness to
have been real and genuine. It made her jealous, but it did even-
tually help her to her own realization that she had to set herself free.
The final example in this section is taken from the discus-
sion between Hugh Miller and Jack Burden in All the Kingis Men. Miller
insisted that while history is blind, men are not; therefore there is
a moral force in man which can have an ultimate authority. Those who
know themselves can and often do use their conscience as the supreme

authority, "[The awareness of evil] is a distinct mark in the long

262

development of self-consciousness," Weisinger has observed, "the slow
process which culminated in the emergency of the individual as a moral

force, an individual appealing to conscience as an ultimate authority."52

Failure of Self—Knowledge

In addition to the successful self-realization and the learn-
ing how to live successfully in this world of sin and pain, as Ashby
Wyndham called it, there is the threat of failure. In the chapter on
Nonmoral Evil, the notion of failure as a part of suffering was
treated; however, here it is necessary to make some concluding obser-
vations upon the role of evil in the failure to achieve self-knowledge.
There are five general observations which need to be made. First,
those who fail to achieve self-knowledge will not realize their fullest
potentials. Second, they have a tendency to turn even the good inten-
tion to evil. Third, the unfulfilled participate in the dehumanization
which follows from their evil deeds. Fourth, they will project their
own faults upon others which will heighten their own alienation. And
fifth, they will create some single principle as a pseudo-ultimate
concern.

"The man who fails in self-knowledge," Hendry has concluded,
"fails to act rightly or even to act at all; he lives in doubt, confu-
sion, error and sin; he fails to realize his fullest potentials as a
man."53 Beginning with Percy Munn, Warren has consistently demon-
strated the kind of characters Hendry has described in this quotation.

It might be an Ikey Sumpter, who simply refuses to acknowledge his

responsibility for the evil he has done or Murray Guilfort who does

263

not put aside his self-ambition long enough to genuinely serve the
truth, even for an old friend. His inauthentic behavior with respect
to Sunderland and Cassie Spottwood renders this ambitious man unable
to fulfill the confidence placed in him by his public office. He has
to escape it by self-destruction.

Nor is this fault restricted to the male population of
Warren's fictional world. Lucille Christian in Night Rider, Sue
Murdock in At Heaven's Gate, Rachel Jordan in World Enough and Time,
and Cassie Spottwood in Meet Me in the Green Glen all fail to develop
their human potentials by true self-knowledge. Their attempts to find
definition fail completely and leave them only lives of misery and
sin. This judgment might be too harsh for Lucille who came to Munn
at the Proudfit's to say that she could now marry him because she had
found the way to live with her guilt. But the coldness of the scene
and Munn's inability to get a divorce would prevent their marriage
unless they just disregarded his previous marriage and went away; but
it was too late for that. The next day Munn left to kill Tolliver and
to meet his doom. Her attempts to lose herself in sensuality were
counter productive and destructive of the human potentials she had.

Virtually the same thing could be said of most of the women
in Warren's novels. Their attempts to find themselves are buried in
their sexuality. Sue Murdock is involved in one debauchery after
another. From Jerry Calhoun to Slim Sarrett to Jason Sweetwater to
death, her experience was one massive flight from herself. She is
aware that something is wrong with her, and she on occasion asks Slim

or Jason what is wrong with her, but neither of them is able to

264

sympathetically respond to her need and help her find definition. Her
own individual resources are not adequate; therefore, an innocent
Black man will die for her murder, while the other men who made such

a mess of her life go free. Certainly there is in Sue Murdock's
characterization a total illustration of Hendry's observation.

Third, Rachel Jordan Beaumont of World Enough and Time com-

 

mits suicide in the filthy camp of La Grand' Bosse in the west. She
has lost her mind, and she is unable to construct even the vagest
shadow of reality. She was beautiful and bright, but her sin with
Fort, her marriage to Jeremiah, her hatred of her mother, her miscar-
riages, all conspired to keep her from coming to terms with herself.
Both Jeremiah and Rachel had attempted to lose themselves in the sen-
suality of the cave dungeon, but it did not work. They found no true
knowledge. She could not define herself. In some ways she is the
female Isaac Sumpter. Neither believed in God, and neither found any
concept of self. Sin and error, betrayal and denial of the self are
all interrelated in her.

Finally, Cassie Spottwood of Meet Me in the Green Glen is an
example of one who tried desperately to find herself, but her confes-
sion after her disappointment in love came too late. By the time she
did confess to the murder of Sunderland, Angello was already found
guilty and no one would believe her. She told the truth, but then she
had to change the truth to a lie, so she could live. Just as was the
case with Rachel, the symbol of Cassie Killigrew Spottwood's failure
was her insanity. Old Pearl, who killed the policeman and was respon-

sible for Ashby Wyndham's being in jail, in At Heaven's Gate had become

265

lonely in jail. She had forsaken one Bible sin, fornication via prosti-
tution, for another, murder. Ashby had brought her from the house of
abomination to the jailhouse via the gospel of God's love. When he held
her after she shot the policeman she had cursed him hysterically. Mad-
ness is the ultimate isolation of failure to obtain self-knowledge.

The person who has not successfully found fulfillment will
turn his good to evil. Many cite Ashby Wyndham as an example of one
who has done this by his sinful pride in the Lord. He is aware of it
at the end; but he is still not able to pray. He is alone and isolated
in his misery, but the pain of self-criticism is going on. He recog-
nizes that he did bring the good to evil, and he acknowledges his sin
in his pride. There is a sense in which he is an exploiter of those
around him for his own ego satisfaction. However, he is taking his
punishment. He is a good example too because he illustrates the prin-
ciple that Cass Mastern articulated later in All the King's Men, that
man is never saved, damnation is ever at hand. He cannot rest in his
good, it will become evil. Percy Munn found this, Jeremiah Beaumont
also found it out. Even Adam Rosenzweig found that the threat of evil
coming from the good motive is ever at hand.

Many examples were given above in the previous chapters, but
evil and self-knowledge are related precisely by the good being made
evil. MacCarland Sumpter tried to love his son. He even lied to cover
up for him, but it alienated the son. His love for his son could not
cover the rejection Ikey had felt for years. Just as the good that
Willie Stark did could not cover the evil that was in his nature or

created by him, Irwin was not spared the consequences of his taking

266

the bribe. He had spared Jack Burden the news that he was really
Jack's father, but Jack then took the information and went to give it
to Stark, and Irwin committed suicide.

The third result of failure to achieve self-knowledge is the
dehumanization of others. If self-knowledge brings a feeling of com-
munity, failure causes the loss of the awareness of the community of
common guilt. The dehumanization of the Indians as told by Willie
Proudfit is a cruel reality of the consequences of the loss of brother-
hood in man. Jerry Calhoun in At Heaven's Gate dehumanized his rela-
tives. His aunt, uncle and father are hardly human to him, even after
he is taken from jail by his father to return to the old farm place.
They somehow are not fully people. Certainly the Blacks in the school
in which Manty followed her Godly occupation in Band of Angels after
the War were dehumanized by mass handling and condescending treatment.
Even Brad Tolliver could not picture Lettice Poindexter as real at
first while he was reading her letter at the end of fieeg, Warren

describes it as follows:

"Goosed to Glory," Bradwell Tolliver said, and thrust the
sheets of paper, crumpled, into his side pocket, and again found
himself in the grip of wild laughter.

Then he stopped laughing. He slowly began to realize, as
you realize the first dull beginnings of a headache, that now,
for the first time in all the years, even in the years of the
contact and the clutching, of the blending of hopes and the mix-
ing of breaths, Lettice Poindexter was real to him. She had
really existed. Somewhere,in her way, she existed now. He
marveled, slowly, at that fact. And he wondered, in a slow,
powerful, painful way, why he had not, at some time in all the
years, realized that fact. And why, at some time, he had not
even had the thought of going across whatever thousands of
miles necessary, to tell her: to tell her that he knew, at
last, that she was real.54

 

267

Within the next two or three pages of the novel, Brad has come to know
that he could not or should not have trusted anything, but the "secret
and irrational life of man, which might be the truth of man."
Self-knowledge would not allow the dehumanization of the
victims of impersonal acts, even done without the intention of harm.
The implications of this for racism in the novels is real. For exam-
ple, Angelo Passetto is the victim in Meet Me in the Green Glen.. He
is frequently called "dago," because he is a foreigner. At one time,
he is beaten up because he attempts to pass himself off as a Black man
even though the people in town know he is not. Further, the role of
the other Blacks in the novel, Arlita and Charlene, Sunderland Spott-
wood's Black mistress and his illegitimate daughter, are placed away
and are treated in a dehumanizing fashion. Warren and Ellison main-
tained that racial resistence. which is very evident in the Negroes
in the novels, is "an impulse to maintain identity" in the face of
dehumanization.55 Coser has also indicated that the role of things
such as mental hospitals is to protect the population from the visi-
bility of evil by dehumanizing the inmates, via the "out of sight,

out of mind" kind of treatment.56

It is significant that Cassie
Spottwood, for example, is in and out and into sanatoria as the story
of Meet Me in the Green Glen unfolds.

The acts of violence of Jeremiah Beaumont, or Percy Munn

among others in the novels are dehumanizing and impersonal. Killing

in Wilderness is impersonal. The only way that man can endure the

 

violence he inflicts upon other people is to not see them as people.

According to Louise Gossett, dehumanization of others is also

 

268

57 It is inter—

responsible for the actions of exploitation of others.
esting that after Jack Burden comes to view both Tiny Duffy and Sugar
Boy as people, suffering beings, capable of hurt and pain in All the

King's Men, he is not able to give Sugar Boy the information which

 

would surely lead to the killing of Tiny Duffy. Humanization causes
him to spare Duffy. The same principle applies to his treatment of
Sadie Burke after he directly and cruelly confronts her with her role
in telling Adam Stanton about Stark and Anne Stanton, which led to the
murder and the killing. After Jack sees them as people his response
to their suffering changes him.

The projection upon others of one's own faults is the fourth
consequence of failure of self-knowledge. As indicated earlier in the
study, Isaac Sumpter in The Cave totally unaware of his similarity to
the people he has condemned for paying the price they have for some
ego-satisfaction. He can not see that he has sacrificed his self-
respect and his future, in a sense, for a cheaper form of satisfaction
than they have. He is just as big a falsifier as Jed Halloway; there-
fore, he is also a turd. Jeremiah Beaumont was guilty of this because
he sought revenge upon Casius Fort because he used Rachel for his self-
satisfaction; but certainly, it is clear, from the story itself, that
Jeremiah also had used Rachel for his ego-satisfaction, but he forced
her to marry him first. Amantha Starr blamed her father and Hamish Bond
for her troubles in Band of Angels; but in doing so, she projected to
them the denial of freedom, the evil, which she really had in herself.
They'were both "kind," they both had caused her great pain by their

kindness. In the first place, she was not told of her slave status or

269

not given manumission papers because her father was kind. Second, she
initially could not accept the papers from Bond because he was too kind
for her to be able to leave. She was betrayed by their kindness. How-
ever, she projected her own animosity and judged them harshly because
of her projection to them of her own attributes.

Finally, another consequence of the failure of self-knowledge
is the giving of oneself to some single mutable principle as an ulti-
mate. Warren has shown this in character after character, and naming
them now becomes almost futile. An individual who does not know him-
self will be tempted to and usually does do things too much, totally
ignoring the Delphic inscription with which this chapter began. They
fail to obey the second, nothing too much, because they do not do the
first, "know thyself." Therefore, they fail to account for their
limited, finite, human condition and become laws unto themselves.
Throwing any realization of human community to the wind, they furiously
attempt to find definition in their belief in something, some justice
in a cause, something outside themselves in which they can find mean-
ing. The pride of an individual will cause him to place himself and
his own concerns in the position of false ultimates. He will try to

become his own god.

CHAPTER V
FOOTNOTES
1Robert Penn Warren, “Robert Penn Warren and Ralph Ellison:
A Dialogue," eporter, XXXII (1965), 48.

2Ricoeur, The Symbolism of Evil, p. 220.

3Philip Leon, The Ethics of Power: or The Problem of Evil
(London, 1935), p. 223.

4Tsanoff, p. viii.

5Cited by Stanley J. Kunitz and Vineta Colby, eds. Twentieth
Century_Authors, First Supplement (New York, 1955), p. 1051.

6Warren, l'Knowledge and the Image of Man," p. 237.
7Warren, "Knowledge and the Image of Man," p. 241.
8Warren, "Knowledge and the Image of Man," p. 241.

9Strandberg, p. 24.

10Warren, "Knowledge and the Image of Man," p. 242.
1]Warren, "Knowledge and the Image of Man," p. 242.
12Warren, "Knowledge and the Image of Man," p. 243.
13Warren, "Knowledge and the Image of Man," p. 244.
14Warren, "Knowledge and the Image of Man," p. 245.

15Warren, "Knowledge and the Image of Man," p. 246.

16Warren, At Heaven's Gate, p. 196.
17Warren, Selected Essays, p. 54.

18John Hicks, "Exploration of Value: Warren's Criticism,"
South Atlantic Quarterly, LXII (1963), 515.

270

271

19Robert Penn Warren, "A Lesson Read in American Books," Nen_
York Times Book Review, LX (December 11, 1955), 33.

20Liliane Frey-Rohn, "Evil from the Psychological Point of
View," in Evil, The curatorium of the C. G. Jung Institute, eds.
(Evanston, Ill., 1967), p. 185.

21H. L. Philp, Jung_and the Problem of Evil (London, 1958)
pp. 182, 183, citing C. G. JUng, Two Essays onTAnaTytical Psycholggy
(London, 1953), p. 176.

22Warren, "Knowledge and the Image of Man," p. 241.

23Alfred Edward Taylor, "Plato," Encyclopaedia Britannica
(1962), XVIII, 52.

24Glazier, p. 16.

25Robert Penn Warren, "Why Do We Read Fiction?" Saturday
EveninguPost, CCXXXV (October 20, 1962), 82.

26Paul Tillich, The Courage to Be (New Haven, 1952), passim.

27Everett Carter, "The 'Little Myth' of Robert Penn Warren,"
Modern Fiction Studies, VI (1960), 10.

28Tsanoff, p. 4.

29Hoffman. p. 32.

30Robert B. Heilman, "Tangled Web," in Robert Penn Warren:
A Colleetion of Critical Essays, John Lewis Longley, Jr., edi (New
York, 1965), p. 99.

3lShepherd, "Robert Penn Warren as Philosophical Novelist,"
p. 160.

32Warren, "William Faulkner," in Selected Essays, p. 67.

33J. Preston Cole, "Function of Choice in Human Existence,"
Journal of Religion, XLV (1965), p. 202.

34Louise Y. Gossett, Violence in Recent Southern Fiction
(Durham, 1965), p. 62.

35Robert Penn Warren, Brother to Dragons (New York, 1953),
pp. 214, 215.

36CoTe. p. 200.

37Frey-Rohn, p. 198.

 

272

38Ricoeur, The Symbolism of Evil, p. 324.

39James H. Justus, "The Mariner and Robert Penn Warren,"
Texas Studies in Literature and Language, VIII (1966), 120.

40J. M. Spier, Christianity and Existentialism, David Hugh
Freeman, Trans. (Philadelphia, 1953), p. ix.

4lGrant, p. 27.

42Warren, Wilderness, p. 308.

 

43Warren, Meet Me in the Green Glen, p. 251.

44Carter, p. 4.

45Frey-Rohn, p. 196.

46Niebuhr, II, 201.

47Lewis A. Coser, "Visibility of Evil," Journal of Social
Issues, XXV (1969), 106.

48Tsanoff, p. 400.

49Leonard Casper, "Trial by Wilderness: Warren's Exemplum,"
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Longley, ed. (New York, 1965), p. 165.

50Siegfried Wenzel, "Seven Deadly Sins: Some Problems of
Research," Speculum, XLIII (1968), 7, 8.

5Warren, "Knowledge and the Image of Man," pp. 242, 237.

52Herbert Weisinger, Tragedy and the Paradox of the Fortunate
Fall (East Lansing, 1953), p. 92.

53Irene Hendry, "The Regional Novel: The Example of Robert
Penn Warren," Sewanee Review, L111 (1945), 89.

54Warren, Flood, pp. 436, 437.

55Warren, "Robert Penn Warren and Ralph Ellison," p. 44.

56Coser, pp. 106, 107.

57Gossett. pp. 59, 60.

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GENERAL REFERENCES

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283
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