What good fiction gives us, Robert Penn Warren observes, is “a powerful image of human nature trying to fulfill itself.” He continues: “Neither the economic man nor the political man is the complete man: other concerns may still be important enough to engage the attention of a writer—such concerns as love, death, courage, the point of honor, and the moral scruple. A man has to live with other men in terms not only of economic and political arrangements; and he has to live with himself, he has to define himself.” Although Warren is responding to Hemingway and his fiction in this passage, what he says applies equally well to much of his own fiction, including his brilliant first novel, Night Rider (1939).
Percy Munn, the protagonist of the novel, tries to define himself in economic—and, more especially, political—terms; but he is far more engaged by the roil and ruck of human possibility that Warren limns—“love, death, courage, the point of honor, and the moral scruple”—than he is by mere economic considerations or even by political necessity. Of course no one can compartmentalize every urge and pressure, every idea and attitude and emotion, in his or her life; and any person, real or fictive, will be subjected to the pressure of events beyond his or her control and understanding. Mr. Munn finds himself buffeted by events throughout the action.
The opening sequence of the novel dramatizes the blind force of circumstance in a simple yet beautifully dramatic way as Munn, standing in a train pulling into Bardsville, Kentucky, finds himself caught in the press of moving bodies as the train brakes—feeling “the grinding, heavy momentum.” “The gathering force which surged up the long aisle behind him like a wave took him and plunged him hard against the back of the next man.” Munn has been unable to brace himself properly against that powerful blind force. Mr. Munn never finds his moral bearings and, unable to brace himself, continues to be buffeted by human circumstance. In that image, caught in the action of the packed lurching train, Warren dramatizes a principal theme in Night Rider: “Mr. Munn again resented that pressure that was human because it was made by human beings, but was inhuman, too, because you could not isolate and blame any one of those human beings who made it.”
One of the ironies of Munn’s situation is that he is not only an attorney but a leader in the movement in which he finds himself enlisted; yet, despite his profession and his position of authority, he is unable to follow a course consistently moral and right. There are many instances of this failing, but the most obvious involves his defense of Bunk Trevelyan, who has been charged for murder. Munn, in defending Trevelyan against what he thinks are groundless charges, subverts the judicial process and causes an innocent man to be hanged. Later he realizes Trevelyan is more nearly a fascist than a representative example of the common man, and Munn recognizes that, despite his good motives, he has acted wrongly. Trevelyan, he perceives, is in some respect the dark side of himself, his brutal alter ego. And in the same manner Mr. Munn reacts strongly against Senator Tolliver because he fears that the opportunistic Tolliver’s weakness, his tendency to make accommodations and his inability to remain true to a cause, will infect and undermine Munn himself. On the other hand Munn betrays Mr. Christian, and he in turn is betrayed by Professor Ball. Only Captain Todd remains true to himself and his principles as the Association of Growers of Dark Fired Tobacco reels out of control, moving from a democratic to a revolutionary organization, and finally standing for much the same values as those its makers originally bridled against when they organized themselves to fight the vast power of the tobacco companies that colluded against the growers by holding down the wholesale price of dark tobacco. After the growers march on Bardsville and fire the warehouses there, this world goes mad, with the night riders attacking not only the public enemies of the Association but their own private enemies. One is reminded of the Reconstruction South and of contemporary Ireland, but the larger significance of the novel suggests the beginnings of the Third Reich and the Soviet Union as democratic ideals are set aside for totalitarian ends.
Such were the discontinuities and disruptions occurring in western Kentucky during the tobacco wars that raged when Robert Penn Warren (1905–1989) was a little boy. Warren gives us not only the men and the motives that drive them but presents the whole flavor of this world—its sights and sounds and smells, its texture and tonality. Percy Munn, who comes from farming people, is himself a farmer as well as a lawyer; and he constantly measures the weather of his days despite his knowing that weather has nothing to do with his real expectations. But it is his exact sense of the natural world that enables us to savor the life of the small town and the spacious outlying country punctuated by plantations and small farms, country joined by the railroad and traversed by horse or train.
As Percy Munn retreats farther and farther from the community and becomes more isolated and alienated from the human communion, he loses the ability to love anyone, even himself. First his love for his wife, May, withers; and then his affection for Lucille Christian dies as well. In this process his commitments become more abstract and less human, real, and binding; and finally his only friend is Willie Proudfit, who gives him refuge after he falsely is suspected of murdering a witness—another of the novel’s many biting ironies.
Munn stands at the head of a long line of Warren’s idealistic protagonists who are undone by their idealism. Their very efforts to achieve their ideals, often by immoral or even illegal means, undermines their goals, shakes their senses of identity and their values, and forces them deeper and deeper into the maelstrom of the self. Willie Stark, the leading figure in All the King’s Men, is but the most obvious instance. By the end of Night Rider Percy Munn has lost everything, but he is still “poised on the brink of revelation,” as he has been throughout the course of the unfolding action.
Although Night Rider is Warren’s first published novel, it was the third that he wrote; and it came out of a considerable period of gestation. His first published work of fiction, a long story entitled “Prime Leaf” (1931), concerns many of the same issues and involves the same setting and situation, an instance of what Abraham Cowley called “troublous times,” “the best times to write of but the worst to write in.” Warren quotes Cowley and then explains: “A period of cultural and moral shock, short of the final cataclysm, does breed art. . . . When the pieties are shaken, you are forced to reexamine the whole basis of life. A new present has to be brought in line with the past, and the other way around.” Such is the situation explored in Night Rider, and Warren suggests that the reason this particular story picked on him is that writing about it enabled him to find its essential significance, the meaning that had eluded him when he heard it growing up in Guthrie, Kentucky, and then when he first wrote about it in “Prime Leaf.”
This story and its ramifications embodies Warren’s essential fictive action and plot. The idealistic hero, searching for his place in the world, is misled by his motives and caught in the coils of his idealism. And, in searching for the meaning of self and trying to achieve selfhood in the uncertain world of action and liability, a world fraught by change, he is undone. Hence his effort often takes on a tragic dimension or cast, as Robert B. Heilman and other critics have argued. We are reminded of Aristotle’s definition of tragic action in his Poetics: the story of “an intermediate personage, a man not preeminently virtuous and just, whose misfortune, however, is brought upon him not by vice and depravity but by some error of judgement” (Butcher translation). Munn, who is such an “intermediate personage,” makes a series of such mistakes in judgment, as do many of his associates, with the result that the Association finally becomes a revolutionary and totalitarian organization.
In contemplating the brilliance of The Tempest, Mark Van Doren observes that the play is like an electric field in that it lights up if you touch it at any point. This splendid metaphor applies to any enduring work of literature in that there can never be any final reading or any critical orthodoxy about it (I deliberately echo Brooks and Warren on the critical response)—and that there will always be more than one way of interpreting such a work, whether it be fiction or poetry or drama or still another literary mode. You can read Night Rider not only as a tragedy of defeated expectations but as an allegory (with Munn as Everyman), as a mystery (with the subplot involving Bunk Trevelyan signifying the novel’s larger action), as a novel embodying archetypal American experience (in which case the Willie Proudfit story is essential), and as a naturalistic novel (with Munn caught in the vise of circumstance and event beyond his control to alter or affect). You can also view it, as is the case with any novel by Warren, as a fiction partaking of both the romance and realism that run through the classic American novel in the ways long ago described and defined by Richard Chase and Daniel Hoffman.
My own view is that the novel’s weaknesses derive from its being, on occasion, too allegorical on the one hand or too naturalistic on the other. The only other defect of real magnitude that I find in it is that the author rushes the action toward the end, forcing the conclusion. The novel might have been stronger were Percy Munn to confront Senator Tolliver in the same way that he does and then to flee toward the West. But this is a small point, perhaps even a quibble.
In any event, regardless of how one views the action of this superb novel, he should see it as one of the best first novels written over the history of American fiction from Nathaniel Hawthorne to the present time. There are few first novels that are better—perhaps only Sister Carrie and The Sun Also Rises. Hawthorne did not do so well in his first novel, nor did Herman Melville, Henry James, and a great number of other important American writers. And Night Rider is by any reasonable measure a powerful work of fiction for which no apology need be made. It is obvious that Warren, in writing Night Rider in his early thirties, did not think of himself as a young writer whose miscues and mistakes “ought to be forgiven.” He knew even then what he would say twenty years later at Vanderbilt University about the young writer: “Nothing will be forgiven. It will stink just as much if you did it as if Hemingway did it.” And so he played for keeps, and playing at those high stakes, with everything to win or lose, he wrote what Andrew Lytle has said is his best novel—his most finished and fulfilled.
Night Rider’s power and urgency and subtlety continue to move us and to appeal to new generations of readers. It is a novel that bears rereading and that repays our closest scrutiny. To expect more of any literary work would be preposterous.
Sewanee, Tennessee |
GEORGE CORE |