Robert Penn Warren and The Knot of History

Abstract

speculation which tends to inhibit feeling and action, he becomes involved in the violent tobacco wars which swept the Black Patch region between 1906 and 1908.4 Yet even after he has been made leader of a band of night riders, even when he seems most entangled in the destiny of others, he is still alone; in fact, the more he tries to commit himself to their hopes and sufferings, the less he succeeds, for there is in him no real humanity to be committed. Indecisive, wobbling between the desire to retreat from life altogether and the desire to live by feeding upon the vitality of strong men about him, who treat him rather as a son, he turns to violence and becomes for a short time an outlawidealist 5 somewhat like John Brown, though he has embraced violence not so much on behalf of something as in search of something-something to give him an illusion of being. But it is too late, and the bullets of the soldiers stalking him for a murder he did not commit (but which, if he had, might have signified a devotion to something) strike the body of a man long dead within. Jerry Calhoun, one of two central figures in At Heaven's Gate (1943), seems at first to be wholly different from Munn. The All-American boy-friend of the Twenties, he has come up from the farm through football and bond-selling to a vice-presidency in a bank. Murdock, the president, is caught in embezzlement; his daughter, whom Jerry hoped to marry, is murdered; and Jerry ends up back in his old bed on the farm asking himself, What had be been? And what did he share with that Jerry Calhoun who, long ago, had lain there? What he shares, and shares with Penrcy Munn, is the melancholy bordering on sullenness, the sense of loneliness and exclusion which was likely to come over him even when he sat in the shrine of power and spoke the language of the mysteries, and the indecisiveness which made him dependent upon the seemingly stronger personalities around him. But not on his father; for, again like Munn, he is cut off from his ' The Planter's Protective Association was established in Guthrie in September, 1904. One of Warren's earliest memories is of the troops still stationed in the village when he was a boy to prevent the recurrence of dynamiting and burning of barns and warehouses. 'The term outlaw was first applied to Warren's protagonists by Michel Mohrt ( Robert Penn Warren and the Myth of the Outlaw, Yale French Studies, No. 10, 70-84). My phrase outlaw-idealist owes something to it but is more restricted and places greater emphasis upon law.