Generations of the Fall
Original Sin in the Writings of Robert Penn Warren
by Michael M. Jordan
Flannery O’Connor’s remarks in Mystery and Manners about the “Christ-haunted” South and her claim that “Drama usually bases itself on the bedrock of original sin, whether the writer thinks in theological terms or not” (44, 167) are easily applied to the work of her fellow Southern writer Robert Penn Warren. Although Warren was not a Christian—he called himself a “non-believer” and a “yearner” (Robert Penn Warren Talking, 204)—he had a religious temperament and utilized Christian concepts in his imaginative literature. His South is not Christ-centered, but it is haunted by a memory of the moral and spiritual teachings of the Christian faith. This is especially evident in the role sin (Original Sin and actual sin) plays in his work. He based many of his dramas on the bedrock of Original Sin, and images and symbols of Original Sin and characters haunted by sin abound in his poetry and fiction.
I believe it is possible to say that Robert Penn Warren himself was haunted by sin. His daughter Rosanna’s recollections of childhood make the claim feasible. She remembers her father’s “melancholia,” his railing against Ralph Waldo Emerson and other optimists.1 Rosanna also recollected: “One of the very first phrases I heard, or remember, was ‘Original Sin.’ That was pounded into my ears. He was constantly joking about it, but it meant he believed in it” (Blotner, 372–373). Warren himself has observed that “Literature springs from the attempt to inspect one’s own soul rather than from the attempt to cure the souls of others” (Robert Penn Warren Talking, 194). Thus there would seem to be some definite connections between the author and the images and symbols of sin and the sin-haunted characters in his writing.
Blackness of Truth
The sin-haunted world of Robert Penn Warren clearly can be seen in several of his major works. Take, for example, his best-known, Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, All the King’s Men (1946). Willie Stark, Warren’s fictionalized version of Louisiana populist and governor Huey Long, begins his career in politics as an innocent idealist with a fairly high view of human nature. In time, however, he changes his view of man to one that accords with the Judeo-Christian view. As Stark vulgarly puts it, “Man is conceived in sin and born in corruption and he passeth from the stink of the didie to the stench of the shroud” (49). Willie’s confession reminds us of King David’s slightly more dignified confession in Psalm 51, “Behold, I was shapen in iniquity; and in sin did my mother conceive me.” King David and Willie Stark are both testifying about the general sinful condition of humanity. To use the language of Christian theologians, they are talking about Original Sin, or about the results of the Original Sin.
As governor of Louisiana, Willie Stark discovers that his knowledge of human depravity is useful. His chief investigator, Jack Burden (the narrator of the novel), can find the dirt on anybody. Thus any legislator, judge, or prominent citizen who refuses to do Governor Stark’s bidding can be blackmailed into submission. Jack Burden is a student of history, and he tells us that he “does not care what he digs out of the ash pile, the midden, the sublunary dung heap, which is the human past” (157).
His boss puts him on the trail of Judge Irwin, a man thought to have been honorable in his office of judge, free from any vice or sin that he would not freely acknowledge to all men. Jack Burden initially believes the judge is spotless; he does not think he will find any dung on the honorable judge. Yet he does find something (that the judge has been involved in graft), and he also realizes that, since the judge is his friend, he does care about what he digs up out of the judge’s past. He is unwilling to share his discovery with Willie Stark; he is reluctant, as he puts it, to “frame” the judge. His boss replies: “I never asked you to frame anybody. And you know why? . . . Because it ain’t never necessary. You don’t ever have to frame anybody, because the truth is always sufficient.” When Jack Burden ironically comments on Stark’s “high view of human nature,” Stark replies: “Boy, I went to a Presbyterian Sunday school back in the days when they still had some theology, and that much of it stuck” (337). What stuck, of course, was the Calvinistic teaching of total depravity, and the Christian teaching about Original Sin.
Jack discovers, as he puts it towards the end of the novel, “that the truth is a terrible thing. . . . For there is a blackness of truth, too” (342). He discovers more than graft in the judge’s past. He learns that the judge is his father, and that his father “had cuckolded a friend, betrayed a wife, taken a bribe, [and] driven a man, though unwittingly, to death” (353). Jack learns too, that he himself is a brother in guilt with despicable people like Tiny Duffy, the new governor of Louisiana, who played a key role in the assassination of Governor Stark (417).
At one time Jack Burden viewed man as nothing more than a mechanical mixture of blood and nerves, a creature without a soul, without moral sense, without any individual or societal responsibilities. He believed this because it exonerated him from moral responsibility and moral guilt. But he learns that man, man’s history, and God’s Providence are mysterious and complex, that the past, the present, and the future are inextricably intertwined. In the end he sees that choices made in the past by himself and others, even seemingly innocent choices, profoundly affect the present and the future. Jack learned this truth in his scholarly study of Cass Mastern (the subject of his unfinished doctoral dissertation) and in his own experience. 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. (188–189)
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