Back to those Paris Review interviews. I don’t even remember if any of the collected volumes I pillaged included the interview with Robert Penn Warren. I hadn’t read All the King’s Men at that point, and had no idea of how mindblowingly good that novel is.
Here’s a piece of Warren’s interview:
First thing, without being systematic, what comes to mind without running off a week and praying about it, would be that America was based on a big promise — a great big one: the Declaration of Independence. When you have to live with that — the house, that’s quite a problem — particularly when you’ve got to make money and get ahead, open world markets, do all the things you have to, raise your children, and so forth. America is stuck with its self-definition put on paper in 1776, and that was just like putting a burr under the metaphysical saddle of America — you see, that saddle’s going to jump now and then and it pricks.
There’s another thing in the American experience that makes for a curious kind of abstraction. We suddenly had to define ourselves and what we stood for in one night. No other nation ever had to do that. In fact, one man did it — one man in an upstairs room, Thomas Jefferson. Sure, you might say that he was an amanuensis for a million or so people stranded on the edge of the continent and backed by a wilderness, and there’s some sense in that notion. But somebody had to formulate it — and we’ve been stuck with it ever since. With the very words it used.
Do you know the Polish writer Adam De Gurowski? He was of a highly placed Polish family; he came and worked as a civil servant in Washington, a clerk, a kind of self-appointed spy on democracy. His book America — of 1857, I think — begins by saying that America is unique among nations because other nations are accidents of geography or race, but America is based on an idea.
Behind the comedy of proclaiming that idea from Fourth of July platforms there is the solemn notion, Believe and ye shall be saved. That abstraction sometimes does become concrete, is a part of the American experience — and of the American problem — the lage between idea and fact, between word and flesh.
I’m pretty happy I found these interviews. Just reading them again throws me back 10 or 11 years, except without having to listen to Lucas with the Lid Off.