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Night Rider

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Though it has now been almost 30 years since I last spent a fall afternoon cutting tobacco, spearing the stalks onto wooden staves, and hanging the staves into the curing barn, I still remember the smell of the plants, the stickiness of the resin, the glint of the cutting and spearing tools. This tenuous link to a much earlier time, the time of the tobacco wars that rocked rural Kentucky and Tennessee just before WWII, provided me with just a sliver of insight to the hard times Robert Penn Warren depicts in his first novel, Night Rider.

The protagonist, Percy Munn, is an affable but pliable young lawyer, happily married with a growing law practice when he is drawn into supporting "The Association," an ardent band of tobacco farmers, including doctors, politicians, and other men whom "Perse" admires and who in turn admire him for his oratory skills, leadership, and status. Percy, himself a tobacco farmer, and the association work to break the economic monopoly exerted by the big tobacco companies (those bastards were evil well before they started lying to the public about the addictive nature of their deadly products). But when legal and ethical means are not enough, the collective leadership starts down a slippery slope of coercing nonassociation members to join or else face the consequences. Bands of "night riders" fan out across countryside, first destroying the crops of those who refused their entreaties to join up, then property, until even the taking of human life is justified as a means to their end once they have made the decision to torch the tobacco warehouses in Bardsville and the other towns in the vicinity.

Percy Munn finds himself at the center, and as other men whom he admired peel off from The Association because their moral bearing will not allow their continued participation, Percy eventually finds himself cut off from his wife; men such as Capt. Todd whom he greatly admired; Lucille Christian, the woman who tries to save him from himself; and eventually the leaders of The Association who let him take a fall for something he did not do.

The story is properly characterized as a tragedy even though Percy Munn is not as noble a central figure as one might expect. His great weakness is that he attaches himself to causes without much thought of the consequences. In other words, he is an idealist, but a flawed one. Though Percy's fall is in part caused by his flaws, a series of betrayals---sometimes he is the betrayer and other times he is betrayed---also conspire against him. When loyalty becomes more a currency than a principal, tragedy is inevitable.

Robert Penn Warren captures the speech and mannerisms of this main characters effectively, but he does not develop three-dimensional characters, with the exception of Willie Proudfit, the hard-scrabble, nearly destitute farmer who is something of a mystic who lives life fully and with a fervor Perse cannot experience as he continues his spiral inward. The landscape and settings seem more like those rendered by wood cuttings rather than a photograph. Some of Robert Penn Warren's digressions meander for pages without bolstering the story, and at times the allegorical and naturalistic elements of the novel seem at war with one another.

If permitted, I might rate this novel three and a half stars. Reading Night Rider is a worthwhile book for wintertime reading, butit is not the finest work by the author who was to become the first Poet Laureate of the United States.

Penn Warren ended up with a fine reputation, largely based on "All the King's Men" and poetry and literary criticism and his standing as a "modern" Southerner in the mid-20th century who could explain some of the past sins and virtues of his ancestors and neighbors. This first novel displays promise, but is not a compelling read page-by-page. It improves with each chapter after getting off to a slow start. For my taste, there is excessive Kentucky backwoods dialogue, some uninteresting digressions, and some failure to develop the major characters in ways that make one care deeply about their fates. Percy, the lawyer and main figure, idealistically but with some vanity, jumps into a tobacco growers union which plans to fight the big corporate buyers in order to get a fairer price for the crop. However, little-by-little, the association members begin to become coercive, and then to terrorize, those who won't join. A moral cause has become an immoral enterprise by the end of the book. Lives are taken or ruined, and the acts "justified" because the cause has to be saved due to the energies already invested in it. Meanwhile, Percy commits an act against justice to get a client free of a murder charge, an act against his innocent wife which destroys his marriage, and an act of murder to preserve his cause. He does not seem to know just how he sunk that low, or how to recover. He has an affair after his wife leaves him that seems loveless and even lust-less, yet it leads to tragedy for the father of the girl with whom he sleeps. In some ways the book is a replaying of the lost Confederate cause of the Civil War. I've stated some of its weaknesses, but I must say that I did want to stick it through. I came to care about Percy and wanted to find out how it ended, even though Percy is not fully likeable. There is one earlier review posted on this site, and that writer dissects the novel more skillfully than I can. I agree with his assessment. Worth reading if you have a special interest in Penn Warren, or in Kentucky, or tobacco history, or in how organizations with high-minded goals can be corrupted by forceful leaders or strained circumstances.

Percy Munn, a young lawyer and tobacco farmer in Kentucky, becomes a powerful member of The Association - a group of farmers who band together in an effort to break the economic monopoly of the big tobacco companies. It's not an easy fight, and soon The Association is acting like the KKK, coercing farmers into doing their bidding, resorting to violence if necessary. Munn's morals disappear. Warren explores this dilemma of a good man doing bad things for a good cause and the effect it has on his life pretty well. It's a powerful work in spots, especially in Warren's use of dialogue, but finally the story, and the book itself, seems too long and drawn out. A decent first novel, but Warren would do better work later on.

Warren's first novel is a must for understanding the rural southern ethos and existence in the late 19th early 20th century. His prose is piercing, poignant and lyrical and he uses the novel to deftly resurrect the landscape, people and times into which he was born. He indulged in two decisions which do hamper the work slightly - a choice to obscure the events and geography of the action (the cultural mores of this by themselves speak to the intense feelings which remained around the peculiar piece of American history known as the "Black Patch War" a mere 22 years after the raid on "Bardsville" - Hopkinsville, Christian County in reality) the second is an unfortunate and perhaps simply immature rush of action at the books conclusion that feels - forced. However, for authenticity of character and atmosphere in this time and place Warren's voice in this work is unmatched. Excellent, enthralling and important read for any interested in Southern experience and history.

The author of ALL THE KING'S MEN wrote during a time when one could speak his mind and beliefs in an upfront way with dignity without critical interrogation as to his politics, religion, etc. He was not like Huey Long. Robert Penn Warren is a disguished Southern writer, born in Guthrie, Kentucky. Since he graduated summa cum laude from Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, we like to claim him as one of us. The first book of his I read was A PLACE TO COME TO. He went on to get degrees from University of California, Yale, and studied at Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar in 1930.

He was a most prolific writer, some of the main ones I enjoyed were THE LEGACY OF THE CIVIL WAR, JEFFERSON DAVIS GETS HIS CITIZENSHIP BACK, JOHN BROWN: THE MAKING OF A MARTYR, BAND OF ANGELS (a movie was made of this), ALL THE KING'S MEN (won Pulitizer Prize for Fiction) and EYES, ETC.: A MEMOIR. He wrote a famous play called ALL THE KING'S MEN and many volumes of poems, most especially AUDUBON: A VISION, CHIEF JOSEPH OF THE NEZ PERCE, PROMISES (1957, which won the Pulitizer Prize for Poetry) and NOW AND THEN (his third Pulitizer Prize).

In 1944-45, he was the second occupant of the Chair of Poetry at the Library of Congress. He received numerous other awards for his writing of all sorts, as he continued to be a professor of English. He was one of a special group of Vanderbilt-educated writers, including some well known personages as prolific as he and as well-loved. He did an in-depth study of Melville. He was a controversial figure in his old age, but always the true blue Southern gentleman.