Uses of Setting; Example: Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men

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Like John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, Robert Pen Warren’s All the King’s Men begins with several pages of description.  Penn Warren’s pages are not quite as directly metaphoric for the theme of his story as are Steinbeck’s opening pages of The Grapes of Wrath. (See September’s post.)  Rather, Penn Warren carries one along using run-on sentences to create a sense of speed and a strong first person voice–that of Jack Burden, a reporter working for Louisiana governor Willie Stark. He is in a car with the governor and his entourage, driving to Stark’s home town, Mason City.  It begins:

“… You look up the highway and it is straight for miles, coming at you, with the black line down the center coming at and at you, black and slick and tarry-shining against the white of the slab, and the heat dazzles up from the white slab so that only the black line is clear, coming at you with the whine of the tires, and if you don’t quit staring at that line and don’t take a few deep breaths and slap yourself hard on the back of the neck you’ll hypnotize yourself and you’ll come to just at the moment when the right from wheel hooks over into the black dirt shoulder off the slab, and you’ll try to jerk her back on but you can’t because the slab is high like a curb, and maybe you’ll try to reach to turn off the ignition just as she starts the dive.  But you won’t make it, of course…
“…But if you wake up in time and don’t hook your wheel off the slab, you’ll go whipping on into the dazzle and now and then a car will come at you steady out of the dazzle and will pass you with a snatching sound as though God-Almighty had ripped a tin roof loose with his bare hands…”

From there, Penn Warren goes into descriptions of what one passes on the ride, using that to show the changes over time of the society:

“There were pine forests here a long time ago but they are gone.  The bastards got in here and set up the mills and laid the narrow-gauge tracks and  knocked together the company commissaries and paid a dollar a day and folks swarmed out of the brush for the dollar and folks came from God knows where, riding in wagons with a chest of drawers and a bedstead canted together in the wagon bed, and five kids huddled down together and the old woman hunched on the wagon seat with a poke bonnet on her head and snuff on her gums and a young one hanging on her tit…Till, all of a sudden, there weren’t any more pine trees.  They stripped the mills.  The narrow-gauge tracks got covered with grass.  Folks tore down the commissaries for kindling wood.  There wasn’t any more dollar a day. The big boys were gone, with diamond rings on their fingers and broadcloth on their backs.  But a good many of the folks stayed right on, and watched the gullies eat deeper into the red clay.  And a good handful of those folks and their heirs and assigns stayed in Mason City.”

…”That was the way it was the last time I saw Mason City, nearly three years ago, back in the summer of 1936.”  The narrator then goes on to describe the different characters riding in the governor’s entourage.

After one has read the entire novel, the descriptions of going off the road or waking up in time to stay on it can be seen as foreshadowing Jack Burden’s journey throughout the story–and, on some level, Willie Stark’s as well.  Penn Warren’s description of changes in the landscape, of who came and made a profit on it, and who was left behind, tells us much about Willie Stark’s roots, the kind of man he is and, perhaps, what in his background made him that way.

The point:  setting rarely just describes scenery or sets a scene or mood to prepare us for the entrance of characters onto a stage.  At its best, it is integrally connected to the development of character and theme.  (Note:  this is not to say that it is done consciously, or in a calculated fashion, which could make such description feel forced.  But if the setting fits the story well, it may quite naturally supply these other connections.)

Uses of Setting–Example: Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath

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When it comes to long descriptions of setting, I tend to react like Alice:  what’s the use of a book without pictures or conversation?

That said, I’ve been examining chapter one of John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, which contains two and a half pages (seven long paragraphs) of description of the landscape and the weather before any humans come into it–and he keeps my interest throughout.

  How does he do it?

The language has a poetic beauty.  But that is not the key.  Rather, it is his use of verbs and adverbs to give weather, plants, and tools life–some examples (emphasis added):

To the red country and part of the gray country of Oklahoma, the last rains came gently, and they did not cut the scarred earth.  The plows crossed and recrossed the rivulet marks…The sun flared down on the growing corn…The clouds appeared, and went away, and in a while they did not try anymore…the wind cried and whimpered over the fallen corn.

And a little further in:

During a night the wind raced faster over the land, dug cunningly among the rootlets of the corn, and the corn fought the wind with its weakened leaves until the roots were freed by the prying wind and each stalk settled wearily sideways toward the earth and pointed the direction of the wind.

Here, the vagaries of weather and nature are not used merely to set a scene or mood but presented as characters that act.  Phrases like the wind “dug cunningly” or the stalks “settled wearily” suggest intention–a struggle between elements.  In presenting his Oklahoma setting this way, Steinbeck sets us up to feel the emotional connection of the tenant farmers to the land–for them, it is a living, but also something more than just land, or just a living–and therefore to understand the largeness of their catastrophe when the land does not produce and they are thrown off of it.

 

Final Catch-Up

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July and August:

July is a blur.  I remember that friends visited, but other than that, I must have slept away most of that month–oh, and probably that’s when I read the novel Landfall, by Ellen Urbani, which I was assigned to review for Washington Independent Review of Books.

August was spent reorganizing my writing space, reminding myself of where I was in my various projects, and writing the review.  At this point,  My review has been turned in, edited, should be out soon.  Stay tuned.

Catching Up: Another Small NYC Adventure–Henry Street Settlement House

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The first time I headed down to Chinatown, I stepped into Henry Street Settlement Playhouse instead, and got to chat about the settlement house movement with David Garza, Henry Street’s Executive Director.

My father used to tell me about activities at Madison House–one of the settlement houses existing in New York in the early part of the last century. At the time, one could participate in the arts there–theater, dance, writing, painting, etc. (Now, combined with another settlement house to become Hamilton-Madison House, it tends more toward the provision of only basic social services.)  Hearing my father’s stories about the artistic stimulation provided for slum-dwellers in his days living on the Lower East side made me want to learn more about the settlement house movement with a view to how it might be adapted to today’s world.

I noticed Henry Street Settlement House on a map and set out to walk left on Grand street to visit it before heading east to Chinatown.  Fortunately, a native New Yorker directed me to the new Henry Street Settlement House–the playhouse–since the old one is now used as an administrative office and would have required a longer walk on a hot day to no purpose.

When I explained my interest to the two people I found inside, the man–Garza–said to the woman that he’d take care of what I was asking.  And he talked with me for at least 20 minutes, telling me about the current umbrella organization, United Neighborhood Houses, telling me that Hull House (in Chicago) has been closed, and explaining the difficulty of doing now what was done in my father’s day because gentrification has destroyed the cohesiveness that communities had back then.

I was very impressed by Mr. Garza.  Unlike many public faces of organizations, I strongly felt  his sincere concern was for what this movement is trying to do, not for the furtherance of his organization or himself.

I do hope to do research on this subject and write in greater depth about it (not necessarily on my blog).  This visit was meant to be a beginning.  Walking in off the street, I did not expect to get lucky enough to speak with someone at that level, and very much appreciate the time he took to do so.

Somerset Maugham–Writer of Spy Fiction!

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I recently read Somerset Maugham’s The Painted Veil.  It’s not terribly deep, but much of it is engaging, which is more than I can say for a lot of current literary fiction.  More engaging though, is a book of his (long) short stories. The Betty Davis movie, The Letter, was based on his short story of the same name.  Hollywood changed the ending of course; it couldn’t let a murderess get away with her crime as Maugham did in the story.

Now, though I’m reading other stories in that book–a number of them about a British World War I spy named Ashenden, apparently loosely based on time Maugham spent as a member of British Intelligence.  These stories are sometimes a bit slow, but each builds to reveal an aspect of human nature.  In some ways, I think these stories could be considered a predecessor to John Le Carré’s works.

Catching Up: My Small Adventure in Chinatown

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Still, New York in June:

On one Sunday, I had a delicious lunch in Little Italy and then walked south on Mulberry Street, crossing Canal Street into Chinatown.  I angled my way through the tourist hordes until I got past them to a quieter street and came upon a small park.  (Columbus Park–I didn’t know the name at the time, but have since found it on a map.)

The park’s narrow, winding path was filled with various Chinese music groups, from small ensembles to small orchestras, most with singers– each singer armed with a body mic, all competing with each other at the top of their lungs in a space certainly no larger than DuPont Circle.  Their audiences sat on benches or stood along the sides of the path, listening.

The winding path let to a little plaza where an old man sat, with his stringed instrument, on the base of a statue of Sun Yat-Sen.  His instrument, like a cello, was one you set between your knees.  But the tuning knobs at the top of its long neck were much larger than on a western instrument and, unlike a cello, the long neck did not connect to a wide base but to a small canister-like box.

The man kept motioning for me to sit down beside him.  Finally, I did.  He immediately handed me his instrument and tried to teach me to play it.

When I drew the bow across the strings, it sounded like I was killing a cat.  My teacher pushed the bow down to the string’s base where it met the box, thus instructing me to pull the bow there.  He also changed the placement of my fingers on the strings.  I had been tentatively experimenting.  Some people stopped to watch.  Every time I pulled the bow across the strings, I’d start laughing because it sounded so terrible.

My teacher did not appear to speak English, and I’m not sure how much of it he understood.  But at one point, when I seemed to be catching on a little, I could have sworn he was asking whether I’d played an instrument before.  I told him that I had learned the viola when young, but that that was a very long time ago.

Eventually, I left, but I put a dollar in his cap, recompense for the lesson.

(P.S.  Although I thought, from the sound, that the music in the park was Chinese, I am not so knowledgeable about the music of different Asian countries, and could have been mistaken.)

Next time:  Henry Street Settlement House