Writing the Trump Years Into History

"As a boy, he'd "read American history, not for school, not because I had to, but because I had, by accident, stepped through the thin, crackly crust of the present, and felt the first pull of the quicksand about my ankles." Tripping into that quicksand is how Burden would one day end up doing Stark's dreadful bidding: using his formidable research skills to discover the darkest deeds in the deepest past of Stark's political enemies. But, as Warren insisted, "the story of Willie Stark and the story of Jack Burden are, in one sense, one story." They're in that quicksand together, up to their gizzards."

""All the King's Men," the best American political novel ever written, is generally read as a cautionary tale about how power poisons slowly, like arsenic, or cynicism. But it's also a fable about history, and why, like poetry, it's so hard to write it fast. Robert Penn Warren's 1946 novel is the story of the rise and fall of a Southern populist, the Louisiana governor Willie Stark-a fictional Huey Long (even if Warren downplayed the likeness)-as told by Stark's wisecracking, anguished, Hamlet-y henchman, Jack Burden."

"Warren is the only writer to have won a Pulitzer Prize for fiction, for " All the King's Men," and another, or, rather, another two, for poetry. But he could have equally won a Pulitzer for history, not least because the American-history prizes are so often arbitrarily awarded. (After all, no one remembers James Phinney Baxter III's " Scientists Against Time," which won the Pulitzer for history the year of "All the King's Men.")"

A political novel about the rise and fall of a Southern populist uses a fictional governor and his henchman to show how power and cynicism spread slowly. The story also treats history as something hard to write quickly, because the past exerts a pull that can trap people in its consequences. A character describes reading American history by accident, feeling the present crack and the quicksand of the past begin to pull at his ankles. Research into enemies’ pasts becomes part of political work, yet the personal journey and the political story remain inseparable. The result is a shared entanglement in the same moral quicksand.

Read at The New Yorker