Robert Penn Warren's Proud Flesh (1937–39), the experimental drama that was the forerunner of All the King's Men (1946), was finally published in the year 2000 in a volume containing all three of Warren's plays about the Willie Stark figure.Footnote ¹ Yet since publication the play has not received as much critical attention as might be expected.Footnote ² Readers seem to have concurred with Warren's own judgement that Proud Flesh was only a preliminary work and one whose conception was incomplete without Jack Burden as narrator to give focus to the moral implications of the governor's rise and fall (in Proud Flesh Willie Stark is called Willie Strong). In an interview given much later Warren said he was “unhappy” with the drama because the governor “should be seen through the weaknesses of others” – by which he meant primarily those of Jack Burden – “rather than taken as an abstract power presented directly.” In the play the “abstract power” of Governor Strong is lyrically asserted “directly” through the dark expressionism of the monologues and through the choruses as manifestations of coordinated mass being.Footnote ³

But rather than being merely an unsuccessful early draft, Proud Flesh stands out as a distinct work in its own right. In some ways this compressed poetic drama has more affinities with Eleven Poems on the Same Theme (1943) and Brother to Dragons (1950), Warren's neo-Jacobean play-in-voices, than it does with the novel. The drama directly invokes the “theme” of the eleven poems: the ontological blankness of the modern self that is projected in political form as the dictatorships of Europe. In addition, Warren felt in Proud Flesh, as he did in Brother to Dragons, that he needed the essentialism of poetry to grasp the shifting paradigms of American democratic politics. In the play Warren uses the Shakespearean line of Julius Caesar and Coriolanus – dramas about Roman tyrants whom he considered forerunners of Huey Long – to create a synoptic version of interwar Louisiana history and of the coming of a mass society to both Europe and the Depression South. This line turns complex questions of contemporary political causality into a symbolic language of disease, fleshliness, animality, and the garden, a language which is already familiar from Warren's poetry of the late 1930s and early 1940s. Clara Strong, for example, in trying to pull her husband back from involvement in a corrupt scheme to build a hospital, says, “I see you, the tooth enormous on the green root” (54). The governing trope of this symbolic language is the horse disease of “proud flesh,” which was used as a metaphor for a state in decay in “Love's Parable” (1940).Footnote ⁴

As the example of the “green root” shows, Warren still uses the Fugitive genre of Virgilian pastoral (or rather ironic pastoral) as a way of measuring the insidious pressure of historical time upon a garden-like image of the agrarian community. But it is also evident that apart from the influences of Virgil and Shakespeare, Warren also strives to create modern expressionistic forms that correlate with the rise of transatlantic totalitarianism: for example, the choruses that choreograph a new principle of group identity; the use of radio voices to create a global auditory space in which demagogic speaker and listener are fused in a false totality; and the jazzy, Eliot-like montage between blank verse monologue and vaudeville song as when a cane-twirling Tiny Harper (the early version of Tiny Duffy from All the King's Men) breaks out into the number “It's Not What They Think, It's the Dollar,” in praise of the corrupt hospital scheme (82). This experimentalism brings Proud Flesh into line with the turn of modernist verse in the 1930s toward the “poetry of public speech” that Archibald MacLeish, among others, thought that the decade needed.Footnote ⁵ Indeed Warren's drama is preceded by Archibald MacLeish's radio play The Fall of the City (1937), in which the inhabitants of the Aztec capital – “masterless men” in need of a “master” – succumb to an ironclad conqueror, who turns out to be empty inside (the fall is reported as though it is a contemporary news broadcast, an Aztec Anschluss).Footnote ⁶ The circumstances of the writing of Proud Flesh between late 1937 (as Germany manoeuvred to annex Austria) and December 1939 (during the Soviet–Finnish War) meant that it is a much rawer transcription of what Jack Burden calls “the convulsion of the world” into a Louisiana locale than is the novel.Footnote ⁷ Warren wrote the “bulk” of the play in the last months of 1939 in Rome, while on a Guggenheim fellowship, “with the news of the war filling the papers and the boot heels of Mussolini's legionaires clanging on the stones,”Footnote ⁸ and this made him bolder in his equation of the Strong/Long regime with European dictatorship – comparisons that he later smoothed out of the novel in the name of presenting a “‘Huey’ of the myth.”Footnote ⁹ In Proud Flesh, however, a figure called the Crooner reflects on how the radio can sometimes tune into the speeches of Hitler or Mussolini:

In other words, the medium of radio contains on one continuous spectrum the Nuremberg rallies and their “local” or Louisiana variations. The latter are a regional replica of the European scene: both are enclosed within the phantom world-community of listeners that radio conjures into being, a community whose unity consists only in its passive receptiveness toward a single, authoritative radio voice.Footnote ¹⁰ As Warren was to say, in a commentary on his poem “Terror” (1941), the rise of the European dictatorships “sets up echoes of the same impulses and desires across the Atlantic – all part of the same world, the same modernity, at one level.”Footnote ¹¹

What led Warren into the writing of Proud Flesh? Of all the Nashville Agrarians Warren was the most preoccupied with the rise of 1930s totalitarianism. This is evident in his first novel, Night Rider (1939), which details how a liberal idealist progressively slips into a politics of secret violence during the Kentucky tobacco wars (1904–9). Later Warren was to observe that for him the project of Agrarianism that began in 1930 with the publication of I'll Take My Stand “seemed irrelevant” by the late 1930s in the face of the “unmasking of blank power everywhere,” and he was forced into a more direct engagement with contemporary history.Footnote ¹² As a young assistant professor at Louisiana State University from 1934 Warren felt that he had a privileged point of observation with regard to the interwar phenomenon of the total state: in the Louisiana of the 1930s, in the Long and post-Long regimes, it felt like “living in the great world” because this state in its “small-bore, provincial way” suggested the world of von Ribbentrop and Ciano, the foreign ministers of Germany and Italy.Footnote ¹³ Warren was hardly alone in the 1930s and early 1940s in his equation of Huey Long and the dictators; these comparisons were commonplace in southern commentators such as Harnett Kane and Virginius Dabney.Footnote ¹⁴ Only more recently have contemporary historians, notably Anthony Badger, argued against this identification because it overlooks how much Long fitted into the southern politics of “business-progressivism.”Footnote ¹⁵ But from Warren's foreshortened perspective in the Depression, the identification of Long and Mussolini or Hitler seemed plausible – even though Long was contemptuous of the European dictators and took little advantage of the politics of race. The parallelism fitted with the critique that a group of 1930s decentralists in the United States (including, but not limited to, the Agrarians) brought against the overcentralization of government that was part of the New Deal. Within this critique Long was seen as being an idiosyncratic New Dealer who was even more of a radical than Roosevelt. To these decentralists, the political centralization of New Deal government (for all of its claim to be helping the small farmer) was the counterpart of the economic centralization of big business; the upshot was that small property owners were deprived of their property and became wards of a bureaucratic state.Footnote ¹⁶ Collectivism – whether of the Fascist or Communist type – seemed the logical consequence of this process.Footnote ¹⁷

Although Warren later claimed that he was sympathetic to aspects of the New Deal, at the time he appears to have shared the decentralists’ apprehension that Roosevelt's policies would create a propertyless rural proletariat, one which would be vulnerable to political demagoguery.Footnote ¹⁸ In general, decentralists and southern newspapermen saw this threat as strongest among the poor whites of the South.Footnote ¹⁹ Despite Warren's post-1950s reputation as the liberal saint of Agrarianism, in the 1930s he was capable of a certain dissent from the “common-man-ism” of New Deal ideology.Footnote ²⁰ Katherine Anne Porter even recalls a conversation of the time in which Warren allegedly asserted, “I don't believe in universal franchise. The right to vote should be very severely restricted.”Footnote ²¹ For many decades after the Depression, Warren defended the Agrarian critique of the New Deal, often in surprisingly blunt ways.Footnote ²² In 1976 he said that it was better for a man to live on a small farm than draw relief; a Jeffersonian order of society was preferable to the “internal imperialism” that had predominated since the Civil War, in which “money was drained to a certain central point.”Footnote ²³

The play, then, shows a partial, perhaps skewed, understanding of the European dictatorships from the Agrarian viewpoint of “the relation of the science-society and the power-state” (the Agrarians assumed that a society based on the philosophy of positivism would have tyrannical tendencies).Footnote ²⁴ Writing in the late 1930s, Warren did not have available to him such theoretical studies of Fascism as Franz Neumann's Behemoth (1943) or Hannah Arendt's The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951). Rather he anticipated some of these theoretical studies in intuitive images and anecdotes, which he bent in an Agrarian direction. For example, Warren later said, in an article on the genesis of the Long play and novel, that his project started to germinate when he picked up an old hitchhiker en route to taking up a position at Louisiana State University in 1934. He thereby suggested that he, like Arendt, saw interwar totalitarianism as a product of the rise of the “superfluous” man, an individual who has no group or class allegiances and in fact possesses nothing but a bare embodiment of an abstract humanity. For Arendt, this figure particularly emerged in the “stateless persons” who appeared in Europe after World War I,Footnote ²⁵ and Warren, as he explained in the article, elicited a parity between this European persona and the landless poor of the Depression South: the hitchhiker was in this sense a “portent” of “Fascism,” a “god on the battlement.” Further, a symmetrical relationship exists between the hitchhiker, a man who is a representative of a reduced human nature as a new anthropological universal, and the “Huey” whom he uncritically praises; in this codependency all social mediations and institutions are cancelled out in a kind of mass politics.Footnote ²⁶ In All the King's Men the hitchhiker reappears on Jack Burden's return from California in the homeless man with a facial twitch, and this connects him with Jack Burden's vision, revealed to him in Long Beach, of the Louisiana polity as the Great Twitch (this new Leviathan is all-democratic protoplasm and dissevered nerve endings). Within the novel's larger theme of the rise of the positivistic society, the twitch becomes a symptom of the behaviouristic abnegation of the moral life.

Warren, therefore, saw in 1930s America evidence of the “disintegration of the notion of the individual” in “this so-called democratic state.” Figures such as Strong held power because they fulfil “the blanknesses and needs of people around [them].”Footnote ²⁷ In representing the “disintegration” of the individual, the choruses in Proud Flesh, with their “postures of wooden rigidity” (23), play a crucial role. Three of the four choruses – the patrolmen, the football players, and the surgeons – specifically exemplify Huey Long's populist policies in, respectively, building up the state highways, fostering the football team at Louisiana State University, and founding a School of Medicine in this institution. But, more than this, they are collective extensions of the political body of Willie himself; as the patrolmen chant, “Us nameless, and yet he has named us” (23). The members of the chorus are, in Siegfried Kracauer's expression, examples of the “mass ornament” that was prevalent in groups such as sports players and musical choruses in Weimar and Nazi Germany, “a social mass of functionally linked individuals.”Footnote ²⁸ The blindness of motive that Kracauer locates at the centre of these groups is voiced immediately by the patrolmen, who ask, “What hand flings the white road before us?” (22). They are the “glittering” core of an “errand / Blind” and this is because for them the instrumentalism of technical means has subsumed any supposed end. In the chant of the patrolmen the wheels of the motorcycles exemplify the merely transitive operation of this power, which has “no crossed aims, distractions” (24). The group becomes opaque to itself, waiting to be named with the false “name” provided by Strong. The next chorus, the football players, has a similar need: “For we only perform them, like dancers, the names which / We cannot name” (59).

But this emptiness of being, in more self-conscious form, also applies to Willie Strong himself. In keeping with many World War I and interwar governments (notably the late Weimar presidential republics), Willie is an enactor of emergency rule in the mode of Carl Schmitt. His government by executive exception suspends normative law and the usual legislative process. After all, Willie's model, Huey Long, had said, “I am the Constitution around here now.”Footnote ²⁹ Warren's way of expressing this decisionism is to say that Willie embodies the pure act – the act that is morally ambivalent because it is empty of qualitative content. In a letter to Kenneth Burke written during the writing of the play, Warren explained that Strong has never asked himself the question of what power means: “The play is the story of his attempt to give meaning to power, and the only meaning that seems available to him, in our world, is mere humanitarianism.” But this retrospective insertion of the goal of New Deal humanitarianism does not absolve the sovereign's act of its initial emptiness: the instrumentalist assumptions of Strong's philosophy of means, Warren says, cannot be “repudiated.”Footnote ³⁰ Hence Strong's involvement of Tiny Harper in the scheme to build the hospital in pursuit of “mere humanitarianism” has fatal consequences, even though Strong stops Tiny's participation after the death of Strong's son Tom.

At some level Willie is aware of this ontological drama of the nothingness within him. Willie tells his wife Clara that as a boy he had laid in “a house set on the bare ground” and had struggled to define his own inner space, “The name of what was big in me,” but in the end he “had no name but the act” (55). Again and again he reveals in his private moments a struggle against an existential core of nothingness, a vacuum that is the internal correlate of his public display of “abstract” power. Hence in the scene where Strong rips the radio from its socket, and its ghostly voice continues to voice his secret fears as he falls asleep, the audience learns that Strong fears “nothing but self, but self nothing, fears nothing therefore, / But yet fears the more” (57).The radio voice speaks from the residual conscience that the spectral community of the airwaves possesses (for even this community cannot be completely at one with the voice of its leader), and this conscience is also that of Willie's private self. Willie's conscience, which Clara recognizes keeps him from being one of the “true sons of fact,” coincides with the ghost-self of radio (54).

Perhaps one needs to go beyond Kracauer's notion of the “mass ornament” in describing Warren's choruses and consider the way they enact Shakespearean figures of the state as body. Such figures are pertinent because Warren, as an Elizabethan specialist, saw Huey Long (and hence Strong) as a recapitulation of the tyrant-figure that appears in Shakespeare's Julius Caesar and Coriolanus. For Warren these Roman plays contained “the germs of the issues and the problems of our modernity,”Footnote ³¹ and Robert Lowell's poem “Louisiana State University in 1940” shows how Warren in his lectures on Elizabethan literature went back to these plays as condensed proto-forms of the phenomenon of modern tyranny (Lowell was then Warren's student).Footnote ³² In the opening scene of Proud Flesh Al Suggs, a member of the chorus of patrolmen, is about to give Doctor Keith Amos (the original of Adam Stanton) a speeding ticket, but he hurriedly withdraws it when he learns that Amos's companion, Doctor Shipworth, works for Strong. However, Amos pedantically insists on being given the ticket and he refers to Suggs as a “rotten tooth,” even though Suggs himself isn't what “makes the breath stink. It comes stinking from the belly … the inwardness rotten” (29). In referring to Strong as the “belly,” Amos is elaborating on the Roman conception of the commonweal in Coriolanus (originally from the historian Livy). In Shakespeare's drama, Menenius Agrippa rebukes the rebellious plebeians by way of comparing the patriciate to the indispensable “belly” of the state, a source that feeds all of the lesser members of the body (1.1.88–107). In the language of Elizabethan political doctrine, which extends this Roman conception, the figure of the royal body is a way of incorporating the commonality into the king's actual body. The king was seen as having two bodies: a natural one and a collective one, which lives in perpetuity and ensures the continuation of royal rule.

Eric Santner has argued, building on Ernst Kantorowicz's classic study of the medieval and Tudor doctrine of the king's two bodies, that in post-monarchical societies such as the French republic – and by extension Huey Long's Louisiana – the idea of the king's sacred or collective body does not go away, but is transferred into “the sublime ‘life-substance’ of the People.”Footnote ³³ Willie Strong, in his exaggerated fleshiness, is able to represent this “life-substance” and, in bearing it, wield the people's authority. This explains Amos's insistent characterization of Strong as an embodiment of “proud flesh”: a term which means, on the one hand, the swaggering physicality that makes up Willie's populist, collective body and, on the other hand, the morbid consequence of this identification of Willie and his electorate – an identification captured in the equine disease known as “proud flesh.” “Proud flesh” in this veterinary sense is an inflamed proliferation of cells on a horse's leg in response to a wound, a condition described by Amos as “the flesh's final pride / Thriving on flesh” (30). This corruption of the flesh Amos returns to with a pathological puritanism. In his first speech he elaborates with an entranced disgust on how, in Strong's Louisiana, the “stink” is “on a man's fingers / Whatever he lays hand to,” including the knob of the bedroom door (29). In Julius Caesar, Brutus, Amos's model as high-minded assassin, bursts out to a fellow conspirator, “shall we now / Contaminate our fingers with base bribes” (4.3.24), but in Amos's monologues Brutus’ flush of anger against the turpitude of everyday politics expands into something more systematic and obsessive. It becomes an anti-populist's visceral rejection of the “life-substance” of the sovereign people. For more than Amos's squeamish disdain of Strong's sexuality is involved here: Amos rejects wholesale what he sees as a biopolitical theory of the state and the suffocating presence of what Santner calls the “surplus immanence” of the body of the people.Footnote ³⁴ He also sees Strong as an excess of the flesh or, in one of Warren's favoured metaphors, as an animal example of submergence in a purely immanent life: “Eastern and mogul, his mass savagely drowses, / His coils stir. Our name in him is essential, / O nomenclature swollen now!” (31). In Brother to Dragons, the character “R.P.W.” declares his antipathy to a “perfect adjustment” to the environment through the notorious image of the catfish: “The catfish is in the Mississippi and / The Mississippi is in the catfish and / Under the ice both are at one with God.”Footnote ³⁵ For Amos, Strong is an example of the catfish as the type of “adjustment” and he has given up the moral struggle for “definitions” (44) in favour of an instinctual immersion of the flesh.

In Proud Flesh, a central feature of the plot is Strong's desire to build a new hospital. This particular aim refers back to Long's founding of a School of Medicine at Louisiana State University, an act which Long thought had “done more to prolong life … than anything I've seen in my lifetime.”Footnote ³⁶ It could be argued that Long's attachment to “life” as an inestimable value is the ungrounded ground of Warren's play, a redefinition of the sacred within secular limits. Warren's elaboration of the medical image of “life” in both the play and the subsequent novel draws in the eugenic ideology of the period, one that extended into the South in the interwar years (a number of southern states, for example, legalized sterilization of the “unfit” after Virginia did so in 1924). Strong's all-engrossing project of the hospital speaks to the overlap that Warren identifies between the liberal and Fascist forms of government in the 1930s (it was progressives in the South of the 1930s who were most vocal in support of sterilization). Warren, in trying to bring to a point of symbolic focus the inherent continuities between a liberal democracy in the 1930s and the Fascist states, had an intuitive sense of the bridging role of biological substance or “flesh,” as the title of his play attests. In this he shows a certain prescience. For, according to such present-day scholars as Giorgio Agamben, both liberal and Fascist states in the 1920s and 1930s converged in that both shared the common goal of husbanding the eugenic stock of the nation.Footnote ³⁷ The task of government, as Keith Amos says of the Strong regime, was to secure a “healthier people. Better babies” (29). Life in and of itself, zoë rather than bios, becomes that which the state produces and husbands. Agamben argues that the emergence of twentieth-century dictators who established states of emergency outside normative law (this also applies to states of emergency in liberal governments such as those of Roosevelt and Wilson) is complemented by the representation of the governed as embodiments of bare life.Footnote ³⁸ The battered hitchhiker, the figure on the battlements for Warren, is exactly such a figure of bare life and his very fleshly exposure translates immediately into support for Huey.

That statecraft is passing into biopolitical management is evident in the words of the final chorus of the surgeons in Proud Flesh (in Act V, scene iii). For this reason the surgeons are the most important of the various choruses and in his first two-page draft Warren imagined that they would overlook the whole action of the play while seated on benches like those of an operating theatre, all the time commenting upon the unfolding events below as a medical phenomenon.Footnote ³⁹ In the final, published drama the chorus reveals the surgeons as the de facto sovereigns of the state: they proclaim, “Colonel, capitalist, statesman, and all the nameless” are “our lackey[s]” (96). In a “small and white” hospital room they “worship the twilit and featureless god of No-pain”: an image of human life that has been reduced to an untroubled minimum of animal-like sentience or zoë. This “No-pain” god – “featureless, white, and shaven like an egg” – enshrines the human in its neutral, anaesthetized, malleable definition as biopolitical substance (97). This substance reappears as a perverse biological dream in Warren's poem “Terror” – a poem which more broadly examines the interchangeable “emptiness” that motivates the ideologies of Fascism and Communism at the time of the Nazi–Soviet pact – when it becomes the chicken heart artificially kept “alive” in an experiment carried out by Alexis Carrel, the leading eugenicist in the United States in the 1930s. This “immortal” bit of flesh is Warren's stark embodiment of the germinative plasma of the eugenic state (the somatic counterpart in the People of the “immortal” second body of the king). In “Terror” the fostering of this “immortal” animal accompanies the loss of an “adequate definition of terror,” or the adequacy that respects the proper sense of human limit.Footnote ⁴⁰ It is an experiment quite appropriate, therefore, to the totalitarian view of the human as a substance which can be remoulded to its schemes, both in the moral and in the biological sense. In a letter of explication of the poem Warren wrote that the experiment demonstrated the current view that “science … will solve the problem of evil by reducing it merely to a matter of ‘adjustment’ in the physical, social, economic, and political spheres.”Footnote ⁴¹ Some of the progressivist figures in the play believe that disease is a form of “evil” and this belief gives sense to Willie's hospital project as one of “adjustment.” Doctor Shipworth, for example, says that “pain” is “evil itself. And we're the answer. The only one” (30).

Warren understands that the new authority of the surgeons is invested with the remains of the sovereignty derived from the Tudor doctrine of the king's second body; the white carcass of “No-pain” is the detritus of the rotting sublime body of the monarch in Elizabethan political theology (to use Santner's language).Footnote ⁴² Proud Flesh is a play that adopts Elizabethan conventions of liturgy and public rite to the depiction of the modern state of the 1930s.Footnote ⁴³ The “procession” of the surgeons who wheel the wounded Governor Strong on a stretcher in the final scene proceeds at a “slow, ceremonial pace”; in this secular pageant of the surgeons it is eugenic medicine, or the creation of humans by humans, that is celebrated as the final result of the drama of the state (98). Willie dies but his sovereign investiture in the flesh continues in these biopolitical administrators. In a more literal way, the logic of the king's second body remaining in perpetuity is seen in the probable succession of Tiny Harper as governor. Tiny, who is left holding the stage in the final moments of Proud Flesh, is a burlesque duplication of Willie's corporeal presence and the next representative of the Louisiana “hayride” of Huey Longism, which continued after the Senator's death in 1935 until the election of 1940.

Warren responds to this biopolitics of “man” as a religious humanist of the Agrarian kind (although he was not a Christian believer, as Allen Tate was, and, at one time, John Crowe Ransom tried to be). Tom Strong's accident on the football field and the inability of the doctors to save him is a comment on the medical attempt to regulate the contingency of being by “adjustment.” Once again it is Keith Amos who resists this eugenic discourse of the “progressive State” (32) most stubbornly. When his sister tries to convince him to accept Strong's offer of the directorship of the hospital by saying that the elimination of pain is a “good in itself,” Amos says that if this is true then “all acts [are] but dead leaves blown” (42). For Amos this kind of secular ministration to the flesh “won't cure us” and he debunks Alexis Carrel's experiment by saying that he once held a “heart alive” in his own hand but that this “tremendous blood-blob” “said/Nothing” (40). It makes sense that Amos should extend the image of the blob-heart to Strong as an embodiment of the corrupt political flesh: Amos sees the governor as a “jelly-blob blind in its shell,” exuding his monuments to “Vanity,” such as the new Capitol building, like a mollusc (37).

Amos is possessed by the rage and rigidity of moral idealism. However, located within the play – in the stances of Clara, Anne, the chorus of women, and even of the private Willie – is another, more fluctuating line of resistance to the fictions of the totalitarian body. This might be called an existentialist attempt to define the tragic, liberal self and so draw back from biological states of immersion in the “coils” of animal or corporate being. Here Warren draws on another discourse that grew out of the European political crisis of the 1920s: the Existenz philosophy of Heidegger, Arendt and others (the extent to which Warren was aware of thinkers such as Heidegger is debatable, but he was much influenced by Heidegger's mentor, Saint Augustine, and by Augustine's argument in Confessions that the soul defined itself through the will and within time).Footnote ⁴⁴ Proud Flesh is also the story of the struggle of Willie Strong's self for “definition” (83): for the articulation of self as an eidetic form that stands above the immanent blur of events.Footnote ⁴⁵ Willie calls this form “The deed, in time, out of time, the crystalline form at last” (80). In an essay entitled “Knowledge and the Image of Man” (1955), Warren explained that the acquisition of knowledge or the fixing of the self as form was originally a Christian structure of experience, although for Warren it had become largely an existential category (“the story of every soul is the story of its self-definition for good or evil, salvation or damnation”).Footnote ⁴⁶ Only after accepting responsibility for Tom's death on the football pitch does Strong recognize that he can no longer “bumble definition; / Which is clear” (83). Even though Anne (a very different character in the play than in the novel and one much closer to the unredeemed Strong in her impulsive eroticism) admires the governor's “magnificent immediacy,” which she contrasts with the “crepuscular clutter” of domestic “compromise,” it is Clara's chastened love that Warren sees as the highest form of “definition” of the self (21). In Act III, scene i, when the chorus of women appear, and sing a paean to “intensity” of feeling, Clara detaches herself and says that the “vision lives” not in “the instancy of passionate conquest” but in “purgatorial knowledge” (67). After Tom's death Strong sees that he must turn from Anne and ask Clara “humbly” for “Some charity of your excess, the slosh / Of what fullness you are” upon his parched lips (77). After this turning point Willie experiences what can only be described as the de-investiture or stripping away of his ceremonial second body. This inversion of power is analogous to the way that Kantorowicz sees Shakespeare's Richard II going through a rite of degradation during his trial and imprisonment.Footnote ⁴⁷ Willie tells his secretary that he now peers into “the cistern of time's stagnation” and can make out the reflection of his shrunken natural self, like the “hotel-drunk” that sees a winking “stranger” in the mirror (84). At this point Willie tentatively formulates a new mode of the flesh, that of a humble animality of “hope,” the “soft blundering” of the snail's “prong” into the future (85). But such new beginnings are quickly broken off by his assassination.

These existential life stories of the characters inflect the political pressure of history into an internal drama: the drama of the humanist “self” familiar from Warren's essays such as “Knowledge and the Image of Man.” But the public story of the community, as Warren shows it, is always larger than these individualistic attempts to close off the excesses of the social body. Right through to the end of the play the “proud flesh” of Strong's new polis accumulates what Santner calls a “surplus” of “immanence” (Amos refers to “the tendon's / Twitch” which twitches with this surplus (89)); and the persistence of this surplus is perhaps the principal reason why Warren felt compelled to continue Willie Strong's story with Jack Burden in All the King's Men. The very sensibility of Jack Burden is one that is prepossessed by the public flesh embodied in Willie Stark (as Strong is now called), and Jack's narrative in the novel has to be that of overcoming his libidinal and stylistic investment in fallen, cynical materiality. Jack has to resist the lure of the Great Twitch – the somatic stuff that holds together Long's Louisiana – and he does this through an identification with a radical sacrifice of the flesh made by Cass Mastern, who offers up his body during the Civil War in expiation for seducing a friend's wife. This identification supposedly repositions the empty act of Willie Strong or of the Great Twitch within an interconnected web of moral consequences (in Burden's celebrated image of the spider's web). But since at the centre of this cobweb Jack puts the carnivorous trope of a consuming spider, and since part of the “awful responsibility of Time”Footnote ⁴⁸ that Burden turns toward in the summer of 1939 at the end of the novel is that of facing the militarism of European dictators, then it seems that he has not ultimately escaped the bind or surplus of “proud flesh” and its global political staging.

Although this essay has focussed on the neglected drama Proud Flesh, it is worth considering briefly how Warren's central concerns in the drama continue in its sequel, All the King's Men. Unlike its predecessor, the canonical novel has accumulated a large mass of criticism since its publication, but most relevant to the poetics of embodiment in Proud Flesh are more recent interpretations of the novel by Michael Szalay and Forrest Robinson that examine its evasive relation to race in the mid-century South.Footnote ⁴⁹

Warren's shift in telling the Long story from philosophical verse to novelistic prose had far-reaching consequences. Proud Flesh is essentially a chamber play in which the policy specifics of the governor's programme are absorbed into the superstructural drama of his court; this process allows Warren to sustain an abstract equivalence between Strong's empty power and that of the European dictators. But when Warren returned to his Huey Long project in early 1943 and started to conceive of it as a novel this meant that he had to expand this abstract schema into “a highly documented picture” of the “modern” South.Footnote ⁵⁰ For one thing, he had to specify some of the policy content of Willie's agrarian radicalism and its appeal to an electorate made up of “wool-hats and red-necks.”Footnote ⁵¹ Above all, he had to face what became in 1945 the unavoidable political question in the South: that of the continuation of segregation. Prior to the ending of World War II the southern Democrats, the supposedly progressive party, had largely acquiesced in Jim Crow, an acquiescence that maintained their monolithic political grip on the region. It is this complacency that Stark breaks open. When he is elected governor in 1930 he is in the interracial vanguard of the party, if only because, unlike most southern Democrat populists, he does not use race baiting for political advantage (indeed as treasurer of Mason City he had supported integrated labour in the building of the schoolhouse). According to Michael Szalay, Willie Stark embodies the radical force of black political muscle in the Depression and postwar South and this is particularly conveyed in his erotic dynamism, which mobilizes a revolutionary black sexuality (Szalay writes that Stark is “symbolically black”).Footnote ⁵²

The addition of Jack Burden and the Cass Mastern story is central to Warren's new focus in 1943 because in this Civil War narrative the slave-owner Cass sees into the primal sin of slavery and renounces it.Footnote ⁵³ Cass's insight into the racial order is one that Jack, a later member of the southern patriarchy, refuses to comprehend, and because of his refusal he is unable to complete his historical study of the Mastern materials. As Szalay has argued, Jack exemplifies the impasse of the southern liberal in the 1940s, the liberal who agrees to tinker with segregation but who cannot finally acknowledge the source of his or her wealth in black labour.Footnote ⁵⁴ Indeed it is possible to historicize Jack's newfound ethic of humanist “responsibility” (which was also Warren's in “Knowledge and the Image of Man”) as having its political equivalent in mid-century southern liberalism. However, Jack's political indecision is not primarily an intellectual quandary; it is more a response emerging from the depth and blindness of his body. He inherits the patriarchal disgust of Keith Amos in Proud Flesh toward various sexual manifestations of the social flesh of the sovereign. What Jack calls his “nobility” means that he rebuffs Anne Stanton at a crucial moment of their relationship,Footnote ⁵⁵ and causes her to turn to the more radical, decisive and “symbolically black” Stark.

If Szalay and Robinson are right, then All the King's Men offers up the possibility that the king's second body, the life-substance of the people, in Louisiana might also contain the phantasmal flesh of black labour. Such an inference would be consistent with the most recent work of Eric Santner, who has argued in The Weight of All Flesh that in the modern political economy the king's second body is transformed into the spectral image of the commodity.Footnote ⁵⁶ In the southern version of this shift found in All the King's Men the labour of the black worker emerges in two images of spectral commodity discussed by Szalay and Robinson: in the betrayed husband's ring that materializes in the house-slave's “gold hand” as an index of her economic value in Cass Mastern's narrative, and, in the opening paragraph, in the dazzle on the hoes of the black labourers next to the highway (a “heliograph” whose secret message Jack cannot read).Footnote ⁵⁷ In both cases Jack is caught up in his own conservative understanding of agrarian wealth, blinded by excesses of a light whose social origin is unfathomable to him. Willie, however, has his own proletarian deconstruction of this transformation of agricultural work into spectral commodity: he tells Judge Irwin, who has scruples about one of Stark's tainted appointees, that “dirt” is the ubiquitous stuff of wealth production and even diamonds are just dirt (all wealth, as Szalay glosses the passage, has its origins in the dirt of black labour).Footnote ⁵⁸ The judge, Adam Stanton and even Jack can hardly accept this little fable of agrarian labour because they draw back from Stark's way of managing dirt-to-wealth production in Louisiana and see in his governmentality only the dirt of matter in the wrong place.

Every reader of Robert Penn Warren is aware of how deeply the notion of the flesh permeated his work: the Great Twitch; Stark's “meaty” lips; Duffy's obesity; the “damp, paler red, expectant membranes” of the mouth of Jack's ex-wife as she consumes a chocolate; Billie Potts's birthmark; and so on.Footnote ⁵⁹ But the appearance of this carnal imagination in the Huey Long works amounts to more than being a particularly graphic offshoot of Warren's naturalism. For in these works this is a carnality of a public or social flesh – one that occurs at what Santner calls the “jointure of the somatic and the normative.”Footnote ⁶⁰ Warren, as a “Jeffersonian Democrat” who thought that the project of Agrarianism was about finding a “rational basis for a democracy,” resists what he considers to be the deadly pressure of this flesh of the common man.Footnote ⁶¹ In the late 1930s he does this in the neo-baroque court drama Proud Flesh, with its analogies between the statist power of Long and of the Fascist dictators. But by the time of All the King's Men, completed just after World War II, Warren was slowly moving toward the disavowal of Jim Crow that he eventually made unequivocal in Segregation: The Inner Conflict of the South (1956) and toward a recognition that Stark's radicalism had some value in breaking up the stultifying log-jam on the race issue that the South had become by 1945. Nevertheless, even in the novel Warren – through his narrator Jack Burden – seems to have a certain ambivalence toward Stark and the social flesh that he incarnates (this flesh, according to some critics, is partly black). There is still a lingering anxiety in Jack, who is a kind of maudit liberal, about the authoritarian and eugenicist tendencies of the sovereign's second body. Because of these inner doubts Jack partly holds himself in contempt for remaining Stark's assistant and promulgating the politics of the Great Twitch. Jack's negotiation of the attractions and repulsions of the sovereign's second body, as it is embodied in Stark, gives rise to a narrator of noir-like complexity (which has been well explored by critics such as John Burt).Footnote ⁶² But although Jack, as his name suggests, certainly carries a burden, this burden is not so much a purely psychological one as it is the obligation to live out an impossible internality within the public flesh.