A Backseat Conversation, 1984
One of my wonderful mentors at Vanderbilt, Prof. Thomas Daniel Young Sr., helped me tag along on an April 1984 ride from the home of Chancellor and Mrs. Alexander Heard in Green Hills, where Mr. and Mrs. Warren were staying, to Smyrna, where the Warrens were to meet contemporaries Brainard (Lon) and Frances Neel Cheney at a lovely old home. I had about 25 minutes to interview Mr. Warren as we rolled down I-24, on a hot day with the windows down.
I’m fairly sure Dan Young arranged for my Warren interview to be published by a journal in his native Mississippi. I was the most grateful sophomore ever. But I’m even more grateful that Dr. Young was decisive with me when I was thinking about pursuing a Ph.D. track and teaching career in English. After I sent him a rather whiney letter from Leeds, where I was in a year-abroad program, he wrote back: “The teaching profession can be a real drag for a man who’s not committed.” I instantly recognized that I lacked the required commitment. I think Dr. Young saved me from a lot of career angst.
The Mississippi Quarterly
Volume XXXVII
SPRING 1984, Number 2
Interview
On Native Soil: A Talk with Robert Penn Warren
By EDWIN THOMAS WOOD
Vanderbilt University
* Editor’s Note: This interview, which was not a part of the M.L.A. Discussion Group session, is included here for its timeliness and the pertinence of much of its content to the topic, Warren’s poetry.
Robert Penn Warren’s return to the familiar grounds of the Vanderbilt University campus for a recent speaking engagement occasioned reminiscences literary and otherwise. As we prepared to leave for Smyrna, where he was to meet Andrew Lytle and Brainerd and Frances Neel Cheney, he noticed the bumper sticker on the back of the automobile and inquired about the Commodores’ football fortunes. But the conversation quickly shifted toward the ars poetica. The interview that followed was recorded on tape during the ride from the auditorium in which Mr. Warren had spoken to the home of Mr. Cheney, a distance of approximately twenty-five miles:
RPW: When I was there [at Vanderbilt] we had some fine teams. There was Alf Sharp — he was an All-Southern center at one time. He looked like a badly formed pirate; he was really a menacing-looking man. He was two years ahead of me, and then I taught his younger brother [Walter Sharp, who later taught at Vanderbilt. He was instrumental in founding the Department of Fine Arts, of which he was Chairman from 1955 to 1960] when I came back to Vanderbilt in the thirties. And his younger brother came up one day and said, “You’re not going to believe this, but I have documentation: my big brother was writing poems secretly the whole time he was here.” So I saw the poems years later when the younger brother betrayed him.
TW: Any good?
RPW: Well, as a matter of fact, they were skillful. They were close imitations of Housman. Very skillfully done, totally unoriginal. But the man had this need, hidden under that murderous exterior, to write poems.
[audio, from interview in a moving car with windows down and front-seat passengers talking]
TW: So the environment at Vanderbilt then really was conducive to poetics?
RPW: Oh yes. I remember actually lining up to buy The Dial when it came out. I remember buying the November [1922] issue with The Waste Land in it. And during that period, The New Republic and The Nation published a lot of good poems; it’s hard to believe now, of course. There was a very, very active, and widespread, student interest. The undergraduates published a hardcover book called Driftwood Flames — outside the Fugitive business, though with some overlap. Very funny, this almost epidemic passion for poetry that we had. I’ve never seen any thing like it since.
TW: You wrote two unpublished novels in the thirties, both of which, as I understand it, were set in Nashville. To what extent are they interpolated into A Place to Come To [1977 novel set in Nashville]?
RPW: No, they were never used. They weren’t good. Also, it was the worst of the Depression, and nobody would take a novelist with no reputation.
I had never thought of writing fiction. I was writing poetry [in the mid-1920's]. Then I got a Rhodes Scholarship to Oxford, and worked on my first prose book [John Brown: The Making of a Martyr, 1930]. The next year I was working on my dissertation, on Baudelaire, all day long, and I got a cablegram from a publication called The American Caravan, a big book of the “new literature in America.” I had already published poems in there, and they said, “Write us a novelette from some of the tales you have told us.” I said, “Why not?” I was just so bored with the dissertation by the time six o’clock came, so I’d write this at night. I just started, tried, and wrote it [“Prime Leaf,” later expanded into Warren’s first novel, Night Rider, in 1939].
TW: I have heard several versions of the genesis of All the King’s Men. Can you tell exactly how this book was written?
RPW: I’d written a verse play, based roughly on the Huey Long theory, the American version of fascism (to put it briefly). I finished the play and laid it aside; I wasn’t satisfied with it. So I showed it to an expert drama man, who gave me a private seminar of sorts; we were close friends. I took it out in Minnesota in ’43. I hadn’t read it for a while, and I saw what was wrong with it. It was too much focused on one character. The real problem, not just in politics but always, is the question of what are the forces operating around a man, and how does he deal with the situation. That’s where Jack Burden came in. I had to have a focus for this part of the story. The character of the historian, cynically out of the picture but loving manipulation, fit what I needed. He starts out a historian, then moves into history as a nameless character-force. Then I knew it should be a novel, not a play. So I wrote the novel; I finished it in an upstairs attic of the University of Minnesota Library.
I didn’t do any research on it at all, didn’t even read the newspapers. I was trying to make an imaginative creation, not a history. I was trying to make the world that Long’s strange doubleness suggested.
TW: I was thinking about two black characters in your novels: Jingle Bells, in Flood, and the Swami, in A Place to Come To. Each character disguises himself in order to find a niche in Southern society. Are you trying to display an existential conflict within the race?
RPW: I wasn’t thinking of anything as schematic as all that. I was thinking of the possibilities for individuals as possibilities for the race were opened up (by civil rights laws, etc.). The rich black man [posing as a Swami] who becomes a big international drug dealer and takes up with the high-class Nashville woman — that’s the black man in a phase where he has taken on the white man’s vices, and capacities. It’s a legitimate question, and now that you mention it, I can see that it’s part of the whole question there. I wouldn’t deny that correlation as being true, but it’s not a conscious device.
This is something you’re always up against: things happen in the process of writing which are outside of plot and plan. So you’d better give yourself up to growing suggestions. You try to flow with the inner logic. Poetry is largely a matter of being able to open yourself to possibilities, rather than to fulfill ideas.
TW: Mr. Warren, can you tell me why you have not written more short stories?
RPW: I finally just decided that short stories are just a waste of time for me. They would take as long as a novel would, and I would find myself trying to get rid of possibilities instead of exploring possibilities.
TW: So you tend to have narrative poems now that might have been stories before.
RPW: Might have been, yes. Much of my poetry of the past thirty years has had a narrative germ. That’s taken the place: a possible short story now will lead to a poem. I haven’t written a short story in years, since 1946, and I never intend to write another one.
TW: Mr. Warren, your contribution to the Agrarian symposium I’ll Take My Stand (1930) was “The Briar Patch,” an essay calling for a more realistically “equal” side to the application of the Supreme Court’s 1896 decision (Plessy vs. Ferguson) that mandated a “Separate but Equal” society. Can you tell me how you came to write this essay, and a little about your association with the Agrarians?
RPW: You see, the Agrarian movement was not a club, not a church. It was like a big tent with a menagerie under it of all kinds of people, held together primarily, I should think, by a common shared history as Southerners. On the one hand, a person like [John Crowe] Ransom was mainly interested in the philosophical implications of man’s relationship to nature.
[Andrew] Lytle was a practical farmer. He had the notion that some kind of “subsistence-plus” farming would be a partial economic solution, and it’s not so certain that would be untrue. Many people since that time have taken up the idea, in other ways. Then there were a few cases of old-fashioned Southern chauvinism, like Stark Young. And then [Donald] Davidson was an absolutely unreconstructed Rebel. He didn’t even want to publish my piece!
TW: How did it happen that you were the one to articulate the Agrarians’ racial stance?
RPW: I was asked to; I don’t know why. Ransom didn’t have much interest in the racial question, whereas Davidson was just fanatical. And my point to him was that all I was doing was to go by the straight Supreme Court view. Nothing revolutionary about it. At the time I couldn’t see what might eventually follow — it’s an act of imagination, you see. The only thing revolutionary was that if it’s Separate-But-Equal, then Equal should
be Equal. Equal wages for equal work.
TW: You told Marshall Walker that the Depression had “destroyed your sense of historical fatalism” concerning the racial situation.
RPW: Yes, and I had forgotten the fact that things could change from Separate-But-Equal to something else. But I came back to America to find New York a hellhole and people fist-fighting each other to take my suitcase for a dime.
TW: Mr. Warren, you have used your grandfather, Gabriel Thomas Penn (1836–1920), as the subject of several poems, and he figures prominently in the essay Jefferson Davis Gets His Citizenship Back (1979). Would you care to comment on this fact? Why did you find him so interesting?
RPW: I was raised every summer by a Confederate grandfather who had fought in the long war. (My other grandfather fought in the long war, but I never knew him. He died before I was born.) But the one I spent so much time with was full of poetry and history. He quoted poetry all the time. I was his only companion; he never wanted visitors. He used to say, “I know everything everybody in this county will say before they say it.” He would narrate history, and he could report every campaign in great detail. He’d sketch the battlefields out in the dust with a stick. He loved to lecture me on the disposition of troops and the strategy of the battle of Austerlitz. Then, as his eyes failed, I would read to him. The last book I was reading him was a history of Egypt. I remember building a pyramid of clay blocks, very detailed, with rooms and interiors, with mummies, and with gold-leaf or silver-leaf all over the outside and then excavating it.
He was a very fascinating old guy. He was from a Virginia family, the younger son of a younger son of an officer in the Revolution who had gotten a very big land grant in Virginia. The officer sat on that, and sent his younger sons west. You know, give ’em a rifle and a horse. My grandfather still spoke with a Virginia accent, as many of those people did.
He was opposed to secession. He said, “We’ve made the goddamn country, and now they’re trying to take it away from us!” He said — and the word sticks in my mind; I’ve never heard anyone else use it — “I don’t want to see the country Balkanized.”
But he said, “As soon as Virginia was invaded, I joined.” Also he said that slavery was an antiquated form of labor and it would be outgrown. He was not an abolitionist. He just called it an antiquated form of labor. And he said the cotton business made slaves out of everybody, black and white.
I was full of Civil War lore, but a very peculiarly revisionist sort of Civil War lore. Oddly enough, I never took any course in history except for one in English history. I would read a great deal of history: classical, English, and American history. Now I read mostly American history.
TW: Mr. Warren, you published Who Speaks for the Negro?, a volume that included interviews with all the important black leaders of the time. How were you impressed by Malcolm X?
RPW: He was one of the most fascinating persons I ever knew. This man went to Islam, and he said, “I saw blue eyes everywhere and pink cheeks.” “Black Islam,” he said, “is a myth. Islam is for all men, just as Christianity is for all men. Race has nothing to do with Islam.” That’s why they killed him; it was the hard-core Black Islam people.
We got along fine. At first he said he would see me for ten minutes, that’s all. “Newspapermen are all liars,” he said. But we talked until four o’clock. He said, “Come back and spend all day with me tomorrow. It’s my day to make the rounds of Harlem. I’ll show you people and things you could never imagine.” But I couldn’t; I was set to fly to Italy the next day. Missing that was really hard. He was murdered the next February.
TW: What is the connection between the poem “Rumor Unverified,” in Promises (1957), and the 1981 volume Rumor Verified?
RPW: None that I can think of offhand. I don’t even remember that poem; it was a long time ago. I don’t sit around reading them all the time, you know.
TW: I do. Let’s see if we can find it here . . . (He opens the volume from which he has read.)
RPW: Well, this is a very peculiar poem, in a way. But there’s no relation to the more recent book — though I could cook one up if you’d like me to. This poem is about the naturalist man devoured by the hogs [a prominent symbol in other poems within the same section, called “Sweet Dreams of Peace”]. There are these mystic hogs that eat him. Let’s see:
[audio, from interview in a moving car with windows down]
“Yes, clients report it the tidiest way” —
the “tidiest way” is to submit, to assume this is your natural fate. The clients are those who have died. —
“For the first time at least, when all is so strange
And helpers” (they help arrange you for the hog) “get awkward
sometimes with delay,
But later, of course, you can try other methods that fancy
suggests you arrange.
There are clients, in fact, who, when ennui gets great,
Will struggle, or ingeniously irritate
The helpers to acts I won’t state:
For Reality’s all, and to seek it, some welcome, at whatever
cost, any change.
But speaking of change, there’s a rumor astir” —
This is the rumor that Christ has come. There’s a “rumor astir”’ that this brutal cycle is broken —
“That the woods” (this dark world) “are sold, and the purchaser
Soon comes” (that’s Jesus), “and if credulity’s not abused,
Will, on this property, set
White foot-arch familiar to violet,
And heel that, smiting the stone, is not what is bruised,” —
You know, the heel of Christ will bruise the stone. —
“And subdues to sweetness the pathside garbage,” —
As Christ’s foot passes, all this changes. That’s a rumor, unverified. —
“or thing body had refused.”
Crap. It’s a rumor, that all this can be made sweet again.
TW: At the end of the new book-length poem Chief Joseph Of the Nez Perce, you enter and bring the setting up to the present time, just as “RPW” enters Brother to Dragons. Is the “you” in each poem performing a sort of choral function?
RPW: There is a similarity, though I haven’t thought of a chorus. I’m trying to give the poem its visceral reality, but at the same time to certify its literal reality.
TW: I particularly admire the ending of “Going West”: “I have seen blood explode, blotting out sun, blotting/Out land, white ribbon of road, the imagined/Vision of snowcaps.” What exactly does the blood represent?
RPW: That incident [in the poem, a bird is splattered on the windshield] actually happened — a big mess. That ties into the same theme [as Chief Joseph]; it’s the bloody story of the West. The poem is really about the bloody history of the conquest of the West. It’s not a charming romance. One of the most murderous stories we can think of.
TW: The poem “Eagle Descending,” first published in the Vanderbilt Poetry Review and then in Being Here (1980), is, I assume, about Allen Tate. At the end of the poem, the eagle dips his wing and the wing: “uncoils . . . to sing with joy of truth fulfilled.” What is the “truth fulfilled”?
RPW: It is about him, yes. He got his work pretty well done. He’s a pretty fine poet. That’s basically what I had in mind. I wasn’t thinking of his Catholicism or anything like that. I was thinking primarily of his passion for literature, which he made mean something.