Robert Penn Warren (1905–1989)

This was not at all what I expected it to be. It seemed everyone I know had read this book in college, but I am many many many years past that time and had just not gotten around to it. I thought it would be like Confederacy of Dunces (a book I loved) but it was not at all. Yes, an insular and corrupt state government lead by a man of outsize personality is at the center of things, but that is not what this book is about. It is about what it is to be a good person. It is about costs of going show more with the flow rather than taking decisive actions and taking responsibility for those actions. It is about love, in its many forms. It is very much about honor. These are big themes, and this is no beach read. The book is complicated and challenging. It is also one of the most beautifully written books I have ever read and I will be thinking about it for a long time to come. show less

Murder, adultery, seduction, an illegitimate child, political double crossing: throw them all together and they make an engrossing tale. Base it on a true crime, and it’s even more compelling.

Robert Penn Warren took the case and did just that. The basic facts were that
on November 7, 1825, Solomon Sharp, a Kentucky legislator, was murdered. Jereboam Beauchamp was convicted of the murder and executed, becoming the first person to be legally executed in Kentucky.

Warren sticks closely to the show more original story. Beauchamp become Jeremiah Beaumont; Sharp is now Colonel Cassius Fort. The wronged woman was Anna Cooke, here known as Rachel Jordan. While in prison, Beauchamp had written his side of the story, and Warren uses this device in his novel, sifting through Jeremiah’s letters and prison diary to tell of a man and a world where violence was all pervasive, and murder was perhaps justified.

Kentucky at that time was a frontier. It was a violent and lonely land, and when the night came on, the loneliness was equal for the big brick house with the portico overlooking a meadow or the log house set at the head of a cove in the knobs. Eastward, cutting off the past, rose the wall of mountains, and westward the wilderness stretched away forever with its terror and its promise.

Land speculation was rampant; people would be on top one day and bankrupt the next. The political debate and legal wrangling over capital and credit, debt relief and imprisonment, is an important backdrop to the tale of young Jeremiah, who managed to survive his father’s financial downfall and become a lawyer. As he moved in increasingly more connected circles, he came to realise how honest hard working men came to be victims of these dealings.

He also learned that love can be bound up in speculation too. This was the start of his downfall. Writing his diaries in prison, he and his world come into sharper focus than stories from two hundred years ago normally do. The reader starts to root for Jeremiah, following him through to the end, the only place where Warren differs from what became known as The Kentucky Tragedy.

Written at a time when people routinely read long novels with many characters, it still holds up well, as does his All the King’s Men. At times it seemed like Cormac McCarthy, must be a fan; it’s every bit as immersive, but less brutal. show less

This is a collection of interviews Warren conducted with civil rights leaders and workers in 1964, interspersed with his own observations and conclusions. Originally published in 1965, my 2014 edition contains an excellent introduction by David W. Blight.

It is fascinating to read the varying positions of such well-known men as James Baldwin, Adam Clayton Powell, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Carl Rowan and Roy Wilkins on subjects from integration to non-violence in historical context, as show more well as the perspectives of the low-profile individuals dedicated to the difficult task of carrying out their leaders' agendas. It is also demoralizing to realize that despite all the work of all the people who devoted their lives---even sacrificed their lives, and all the changes that did come out of that troubled period, our country has not resolved the fundamental issues underlying racial conflict, and seems now to be moving in the wrong direction. Warren took on an incredibly ambitious project here, especially for an OWM from the Southland, and did a remarkable job with it. This book deserves to be read alongside all the 21st century works on the subject of race that are currently gracing our shelves. show less

My take away from my reading is that the black community represented here with their interviews of the likes of Charles Evers, Kenneth B. Clark, Martin Luther King Jr., Septima P. Clark, Roy Wilkins, Malcom X, Bayard Rustin and many more did not speak in one voice or have one vision or strategy but what united the movements and its people in the early 60s was their reaction, leading to a vibrant willingness to deal through a gaining confidence. with a punishingly never ending violent show more oppression. My guess is that Robert Penn Warren was hoping that his readers would be both black and white , all other American groups for the most part are not discussed, and would gain an understanding that would lead to some kind of meeting of the minds and action. One can see from the enclosed discussions the grappling with and defining of problems then and how painfully incremental there has been some present successes. Along with the rawness and pain the seeds of cautious hope are clearly there, especially on Mr. Penn's part.

Quotes: (page 13, Clarie Collins Harvey) “And many of the Charles Evers, Kenneth B. Clark, Martin Luther King Jr., Septima P. Clark, Roy Wilkins, Malcom X, Bayard Rustin said that their sanity was maintained while they were under torturous conditions, in this tremendous heat, and with the brutal treatment they were receiving in Parchman, because they knew that back in Jackson, Mississippi, there were woman who were concerned and interested and who represented something of the mind of the community. They felt their efforts were not being wasted.”

(page 61, Robert P. Moses) “The students were constantly renewed by the people who came off the land. The farmers, they're unsophisticated, but simply voice, time and time again, the simple truths. They speak from their own lives and their own personal experience.. So the students are rooted in that. This is what keeps them from going off on some kind of a tangent, as long as they keep working with the people. The people are really the force of values. At this [organizing] meeting, for instance, that we had on Sunday.”

(pages 254-255 James Baldwin) “The American Negro has had to accommodate a vast amount of hatred since he's been here. And that was a terrible school to go through. I myself am accused of hating all white people and saying that all Negroes do. I, myself, don't feel that so much as I feel a bitterness.
You can despise [white people]. You may have given moments when you want to kill them. But here it's your brother and your sister, whether or not they know that they are your brothers and your sisters. And that complicates it. It complicates it so much that I can't quite see my way through this.”

(page 294 Malcolm X) “When I was in Mecca, I noticed they had no color problem. They had people there whose eyes were blue and people there whose eyes were black, people whose skin was white, people whose skin was black, people whose hair was blond, people whose hair was black, from the whitest person to the blackest person. There was no racism; there was no problem. But the religious philosophy that they had adopted, in my opinion, was the only thing, that can remove the white from the mind of a white man and the Negro from the mind of a Negro. I have seen what Islam has done with our people. Our people who had the feeling of [being a] Negro, and it had a psychological effect of putting them in a mental prison.”

(page 316 Bayard Rustin) “ I think the identity crisis on the part of a number of Negro writers and thinkers today, has attempted to turn the Negro toward a separate state---nationalism or a return to Africa---or to a rejection of whites. It's calling for the emergence of a Negro expression. Many of them talk about Negroes as being the soul people. And they feel that from this a great new thing is going to spring. I happen to believe that the Negro does have a very peculiar mission, that he is, as it were, the chosen people. But that does not mean superior, or that he's any better, or that he's anymore noble or any more depraved. It means that he has an identity which is part of the national struggle in this country for the extension of democracy. Like many who are at the bottom of the barrel, if he shakes, the barrel shakes, And I believe that we are chosen---nonviolently---to eradicate from this country the last vestiges of privilege and racism. This is our destiny.” show less