The Web of Politics

WORLD ENOUGH AND TIME (512 pp.)--Robert Penn Warren--Random House ($3.50).

Three years ago, Robert Penn Warren's novel based on the story of Huey Long won him a Pulitzer prize. In its movie version. All the King's Men walked off with a whole shelf full of Oscars. Now Novelist Warren is at it again. Though he has shifted his setting back to 19th Century Kentucky, he is still burrowing into his favorite theme: the corrosive corruption of power politics.

Picked by the Literary Guild as its July selection. World Enough and Time seems certain to go bounding right up the bestseller lists. Like its predecessor, it is rich with authentic Americana and bulging with violence, drama and seething characters. But it is also a strangely uneven novel which wades through all the conventional heroics and posturings of the mine-run historical novel before it finally hits its stride.

The Tickle of the Flesh. The ambitious, foredoomed politico this time is restless, willful Jeremiah Beaumont who grew up in backwoods Kentucky, realizing that "I could not take the world as other men for the brightness of the moment and the tickle of the flesh." Apprenticed to Colonel Cassius Fort, a rousing linsey-woolsey lawyer who was leading the poor farmers' fight for "relief" from land debts, Jeremiah fell in love with Rachel Jordan, who had been seduced by Cassius Fort and delivered of a stillborn baby. At first she refused him. Then, in a series of extravagantly emotional scenes, Jeremiah finally wore down her resistance. She agreed to marry him on one chilling condition: "Kill Fort!"

Up to this point Author Warren has pumped neither breath nor blood into his characters (who are drawn partly from history). But when he turns from his lurid romantic tale to the political intrigues he best describes, the book blazes suddenly into life.

Inhuman Necessities. Jeremiah enters Kentucky politics as a "Reliefer," feels uneasy about the underhanded tactics of his party, but is caught up in a web from which he can never escape. After Fort abandons "Relief," his former cronies publicly denounce him as Rachel's seducer. The dirt becomes even thicker when Jeremiah mysteriously receives a circular signed by Fort in which Rachel is charged with having given herself to a Negro slave. For Jeremiah, pressed by the inhuman necessities of politics and the all-too-human taunts of his wife, there is no longer a choice.

From then on, Jeremiah rushes headlong to disaster--an elaborate venture into murder, his apprehension by some bumbling louts intent on gaining the reward for the murderer's discovery, the climactic trial at which he hears himself convicted by false testimony he cannot refute because of his even greater fear of the truth. After a last-minute escape to a miserable outlaw camp in the wilderness of Kentucky, he comes to the final, crushing discovery that he has been the victim of a plot by his political cronies.

"Was I Worth Nothing?" In the end, outcast and betrayed, Jeremiah sends his last unheeded cry to the world: "I had longed to do justice in the world, and what was worthy of praise. Even if my longing was born in vanity and nursed in pride, is that longing to be wholly damned? . . . And in my crime and vainglory of self is there no worth lost? Oh, was I worth nothing, and my agony?"

Too late to save himself, Jeremiah realizes how much of his downfall was due to a "black need within me," some inescapable core of evil which led him to seek power and vainglory in the name of righteousness. And again too late he learns that once blood is shed it bands men in an unbreakable chain of moral suffocation. What relation the man of conscience should have to political movements Author Warren does not say, but his book repeatedly affirms the idea that each man is responsible for his own behavior and can never justify it merely by pleading external necessity.

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