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World Enough and Time

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This novel is one of the big sleepers in 20th century American fiction, and adds a twin peak to Penn Warren's other novelistic masterpiece, All the King's Men.

On the surface, the story traces the rise, career, love, and misadventures of Jeremiah Beaumont in the early days of Kentucky and of this republic. Simultaneously it is a meditation on the process of history, and its strangeness to the eyes and ears of later generations. Unlike All the King's Men, wherein there is 1st person narrative by a main character, Jack Burden, who fairly almost drowns in history, here the narrative is 3rd person and objective. We are immediately distanced by the narrator/historian, who holds in his hands the letters and court documents relating to Jeremiah, in the 1st sentence: "I can show you what is left." Indeed, the story is largely based on actual material discovered by Katherine Ann Porter and given to Warren.

From here a fascinating narrative opens as we are immediately dropped into frontier Kentucky with the young lawyer's assistant Jeramiah. The passion and violence of the setting is made palpable, along with Jeremiah's youthful lust and apparent idealism, and the manner in which they affect his relationship with his employer -- but to go into details would spoil this engrossing and fascinating story. The merit is the confidence with which Penn Warren engages the strangeness of this world, without the usual method in "historical fiction" of merely dressing up contemporary figures in old costume. These people are puzzles, and the burden of the text is to unwind them. Yet they are so alive on the page, so true, that we are able to follow deeply into their bizarre depths and the alien wonder of early America.

In the end, the reader will have lived in early western Kentucky and emerged back in the contemporary world stunned. Penn Warren's passionate engagement with the American psyche carries one through the several hundred pages effortlessly. The book is many things -- straight realism, philosophical speculation, moral tale, melodrama, psychological portrait. Finally, it is simply one of the few 20th century novels to take up the multi-faceted challenge of Herman Melville to plunge into the national heart, with no pre-established goal except to come back home with as much truth as two arms can carry.

This novel, one of Warren's best, is set in Kentucky in 1825, and is concerned with power and redemption - and also what may or may not be the truth. Jeremiah Beaumont, an idealistic lawyer and promising politician, becomes disillusioned with his benefactor (Cassius Fort) when he learns that Fort has seduced a young girl (Rachel Jordan). Beaumont "rescues" Rachel and proposes marriage to her; she accepts only if he promises to kill Fort. But Fort refuses to fight Beaumont, and in an excellent piece of character development, Warren shows the betrayal and weakness this refusal instills in Beaumont. He and Rachel marry anyway, but when Beaumont reads a political handbill revealing the affair between Rachel and Fort, he thinks Fort wrote it to end his political ambitions. Now he kills Fort and is arrested. He escapes from jail and learns that another character, Wilkie Barron, had written the handbill, not Fort. Rachel commits suicide and Beaumont is murdered while trying to get the truth told.

Warren, as part of his narrative method, uses a number of letters and diaries and a manuscript written by Beaumont found amongst his papers as a means of conveying the story. But, of course, these represent only Beaumont's side of the story and may not be "the truth" at all. Warren's characters are strongly drawn; the ambitious and evil manipulator, Wilkie Barron, is particularly good. The suicide of Rachel is a bit melodramatic, though it's tempered somewhat by the unhappiness and trials she faces living with Beaumont. Warren based the novel on a true story. A highly regarded work, it's among the best of his novels.

This book is difficult, nay, impossible to review in the normal fashion. No adjectives come to mind but deep and dark, dark beyond your heart's wildest imaginings. It is if some daemon or muse from the underworld took hold of Robert Penn Warren's pen as soon as he set it to paper here. Nothing makes sense or lends itself to a rational review. The Andrew Marvell poem whence the book takes its title, with its carpe diem theme, is not apt at all to the book; nor are the Spenserian stanzas that preface the book applicable to it. It's as if Penn Warren had in mind another book altogether before he embarked upon its creation. It's as if Warren, a Pulitzer prize-winning poet, was seized by his dark muse and spirited away whilst the book took form. The poem that should form part of title or preface is Sir Walter Raleigh's "The Lie," but without that poem's consolation of the "soul."

The plot concerns, ostensibly at any rate, one Jeremiah Beaumont's coming of age in early 19th Century Kentucky and how he discovers, through trial (literally and figuratively) and tribulation that - as Raleigh sonorously intones it - the world is a lie.

The experience of reading the book was extremely visceral for me, as it will be for any poetically attuned reader. These lines from the book itself best describe its effect:

"Every gully and ditch was a bleeding wound, and every solid object, tree or stone or house, seemed to be losing itself in the vast irremediable deliquescence. Human strength and human meaning seemed to flow away, too, to bleed away with the dissolving world."

This deliquescence of everything of worth in the world is seamlessly interlarded - throughout the book - by Warren's dark muse, which is so deft as to quickly turn a description of a seemingly quiet domestic life into nightmare:

"Jeremiah says that that time made him think of what old age must be like when two people have outlived all their love and hate for each other, when they know each other's faults so well that the faults no longer have meaning, and the resentments are no more than the accustomed pain of a rheumatic joint, part of the nature of things, when they can live in peace because neither is more than a ghost to the other."

There is much ado about the law and justice herein. Jeremiah is himself a lawyer. When reading through these parts, I found myself thinking at one point that this would make good reading for anyone considering the law, only to realise quickly that it would turn any sensitive reader away from the law more powerfully than anything I have ever read. There is, in the end, no law, no justice, absolutely nothing of that nature that obtains here though Jeremiah (with the reader in tow) seeks it desperately. There remains only one truth Jeremiah discovers as he lies face down in the dark, awaiting his execution:

"It was dark, and in that darkness you could lie and not know the perimeter and boundary of your being if you did not lay finger to your face, for the darkness entered you and you dissolved into the darkness and were absorbed like a body thrown into the sea to sink forever and flow away from itself into the profundities of no intrusive light......There was always that truth."

Yes - one murmurs, much later, turning the last page - there is always that truth.

It becomes, upon finishing the novel, quite obvious why the literary world has turned a blind eye to this dark masterpiece in American fiction. It is simply too powerful.

This book was in my library for a number of years and I had not read it. Most of my reading time was taken with non-fiction. Finally, I decided that any book by an American author that had received three Pulitzer prizes including prose and poetry, must be worth reading.

If fact, this book is very well written. The character development is excellent, dialog is as I remember it when working in the rural areas of Kentucky during summer vacations from college in the 50's. The plot is well developed and the story is interesting and thought provoking.

On the surface, this is the story of Jeremiah Beaumont and his larger-than-life difficulties. Beneath the surface, this is a story of integrity, morals, truth and justice. It is not a story of "hope". The final sentence pretty well sums it up: "Was all for naught?

I'll begin by praising the plot. This is a very well told story. Robert Penn Warren excites the reader's interest early in the text, and I never lost interest in the characters he creates, nor in their fates.

The prose style is lovely and intoxicating. Yet the author's is a very ornate, southern style. It is fair, I think, to say that Robert Penn Warren's style is diametrically opposed to the stripped down simplicity of Hemingway's early prose. Where Hemingway way is terse, Warren is verbose, where the one carefully removes adjectives, the other adorns his prose with a thicket of dense verbiage. If you think I exaggerate the importance of this issue, I offer the following quote as a sample of Robert Penn Warren's style:

"In any case, he had been spewed up out of the swamps and jungles of Louisiana, or out of some fetid alley of New Orleans - out of that dark and savage swill of bloods - a sort of monstrous bubble that rose to the surface of the pot, or a sort of great brute of the depth that swagged up from the blind, primal mud to reach the light and wallow in the stagnant flood, festooned with algae and the bright slime, with his scaled, armored, horny back just awash, like a log."

What are we to make of sentence like this? How does one approach an author capable of such a passionate, ornate prose? Either the reader closes the book, insisting that he will not read even one word more, or else he must give himself completely to this author, relinquishing his own will, setting himself afloat upon a current that will drag him inexorably into the heart of human sorrow and loft him to the heights of human imagination. There is no middle ground here. The reader cannot sit back and dispassionately turn the pages of a book whose every paragraph is aflame with passion and intellect.

Something must be said of the book's themes. The other reviewers have given a taste of Robert Penn Warren's interests. I would add only that I think his main theme is the danger of idealism, of falling in love with an idea and clinging to it with an unrelenting egoism. Warren writes at one point: "No, that crime for which I seek expiation is never lost. It is always there. It is unpardonable. It is the crime of self, the crime of life. The crime is I.... For ... it is the first and last temptation, to name the idea as all, which I did, and in that error was my arrogance, and the beginning of my undoing...."

Though I find it unlikely that Robert Penn Warren was interested in eastern philosophy, I nevertheless find it interesting that the sentiments expressed in the previous paragraph are central to certain forms of Buddhism. Those philosophies reject the very idea of the existence of a self, and they warn constantly about the danger of being caught up in ideas, in "views."

Well, regardless of the idiosyncratic interpretations and interests that I bring to the book, I hope that others take up this wonderful text and spend a few enjoyable evenings borne along on its current. As others point out, this is a dark book, but it is also a great story, well told, and a fierce, fiery example of what a passionate and deeply engaged writer can do with the English language. The fact that no one in this day writes in this style, and with this deep sense of commitment, makes me wonder about what we have lost in the last sixty years. Certainly it is refreshing to take up a text that is so passionate, so engaged, and to relish the experience of reading a great story told in a powerful, intoxicating style.

Back in 1958 I read All the King's Men and it was the best book I read that year. Recently I read a history of Kentucky and was interested in the Relief and anti-Relief factions which were big things in Kentucky in about 1820 and thereafter, and in the Old-Court-New Court dispute. I learned that this novel was laid in that time so decided to read it. The part of the novel which relates Jeremiah Beaumont's expedition to kill Colonel Fort and the trial are interest-holding, but the many pages preceding that part, and the many pages after that part I found quite boring and if I were a quitter I would have ceased reading the book. Much of the philosophizing which Jeremiah relates endlessly was a real drag. I do not know how much of the novel is based on fact, but I know that much of it is not. Warren states some charachters were elected to the Senate but they were not, altho some historical figures are referred to. I am always disturbed by fiction which says things which clearly are not true. If you enjoyed All the King's Men, I would say that you will not be admiratory of this work. I am not.

As a music major during the mid-to-late 50s, I missed out on the great literature classes offered at Hendrix College, in Conway, AR.--except for Modern Novel (Dr. Walter Moffett). After retiring in 1994,I decided to begin collecting all the classics I could lay hands on in flea markets (a great source), Goodwills, and library book sales. I picked up World Enough and Time in 2005 in Eureka Springs AR merely because of Robert Penn Warren's reputation--three Pulitzers and a stint as US Poet Laureate.

I began without reading any online reviews--only the flyleaf. It had been so long since I read All the King's Men I had no recollection of it. I found this volume logy, dense and--as other reviewers have said--verbose. I had to read rapidly to keep up with the undercurrents of "idea," "truth," "lie," etc. About halfway through, after underlining several sentences that could just as well relate to my own late father, I read the reviews.

As one comment says, someone (reviewer) gave away two of the big events. Thereafter, I kept looking for them. I didn't realize until the "epilogue"--I thought the saving of Jeremiah would be the end--who was the villain. And the "surprise" came four pages from the end. I pursued the reading--hours' worth--until at midnight one night--I finished.

I'll keep the old, stained, well-used copy for my descendants, but I will not recommend it to anyone--unless it's my social worker brother in California.

At least I consider myself "more" well read--especially for one who desires to publish a novel. But never will I write in Warren's style--never.