Fated to Fight With the Pen, Not the Sword : Robert Penn Warren Chucked Early Dream of a Naval Career in Order to Pursue Literature

It starts with a mumbling, a word muttered on a walk through the woods with the dog, a phrase that meanders across a blank-page mind. A poem may swell to the surface while swimming, perhaps.

“Swimming is a wonderful way of writing,” said Robert Penn Warren, the poet, white-haired now and sitting in the former onion barn he turned into a home 30 years ago. “Your body is totally occupied, there’s nothing else and your mind goes blank.”

A few words, a phrase, is how it begins, and “even if you don’t know where it’s going, it has some thrust. You pick a rhythmic phrase, and you let the rhythmic phrase hunt something to tie to.”

Now a novel is something quite different. “A novel has to come in a flash to begin with,” Warren said. He leaned forward, idly scratching the neck of a small black dog, the lone survivor of five canines who once inhabited the Warren household.

“The basic idea comes in a flash, but then you have to build, you have to do a lot of construction. It takes years. It takes two or three years, but then there’s an awful lot of trial and error and projected actions that get refused because they don’t make sense, and one thing and another.”

For example, “All the King’s Men,” the 1946 fictionalized portrait of Louisiana’s Long dynasty, probably the most famous work of fiction by this soon-to-be-80-year-old dean of American letters. “I can tell you right where I was when I started it,” Warren recalled. “I remember the very day, sitting under a tree in Italy, in Umbria, with a blank sheet of paper on my knee.”

Warren was determined to undertake a play that day, a verse play, and the title he chose for the work that would one day be “All the King’s Men” was “Proud Flesh.”

The name was a pun, he explained, “because ‘proud’ flesh is swollen flesh with pus in it.” Soon Warren decided “the pun would never do, because no one would get it except me”--Warren laughed, still relishing this private joke--”or some back countrymen.

“Anyway,” he continued, “I wrote it as a verse play and I wasn’t satisfied with it, and three years later I took it out and looked at it, and saw what was wrong with it. It should have been a novel, because my conception of it was really a novelistic conception. And having just that one thought started the whole thing over again with a novelistic conception. It changed the whole story.”

It is mid-day, gray and still quite icy outside, nearly the time of day when Warren and his wife, writer Eleanor Clark, emerge from their separate writing rooms. Just now Warren is standing before a wide picture window, studying a volume that has arrived with the morning mail. These days, Warren finds himself drifting away from fiction, even in his reading.

History is what he leans to now, biography sometimes, and of course poetry: Warren is deluged still, always, with the works of all the new poets. “Fiction, I never thought fiction was,” and he pauses, seeking just the right word, “sensible, somehow.” As a writer, in any case, “There was a certain period in my life, I guess, when the poetry began to eat up the fiction.”

In fact poetry nibbled at Warren from his earliest days. As a boy in the tobacco country of Guthrie, Ky.--”Oh, a young boy, about 9, I guess,”--he remembers his joyous discovery of an old book stuck behind the shelf. The book was called “Poets in America,” and “I turned to a page that had my father’s name across the top, and there were some poems under that name,” verse his father had composed at maybe 22 years of age.

“I was so surprised and confused, I guess, that when he got home I showed it to him.” Wordlessly, Warren’s businessman father took the book from the boy and walked away with it. Was he embarrassed? Ashamed to expose this slice of his long-past youth? Warren shrugs: “It was part of his life he had put away.”

Born at the dawn of Reconstruction, Robert Franklin Warren had, after all, been educated by tutors. He had studied the classics and, years later, his own young son, Robert Penn Warren, would watch as he shaved and listen as he recited, “say, 42 lines of Greek. ‘That’s Greek,’ he’d say,” his son remembered. “ ‘Now you hear how it sounds--I think.’ ”

The Warrens were old Southern stock, a family filled with great doses of war and history, “some of it quite funny,” like the tale of the giant turnips spotted by Warren’s maternal grandfather as he was leading a scouting party up the road in Mississippi. The turnips, as it happened, were not vegetables at all, but “a whole bunch of old women who had been caught by fellow scouts, and with their big skirts tied up over their heads, they looked just like turnips,” Warren laughed, as if his Confederate cavalryman grandfather were sitting right there, as if he were just hearing the story for the very first time himself. “That was part of the war, too.”

History marked the Warren men, branded them in such indelible ways, much like the names they bore for life. “My father’s father had the habit of naming his sons for people he admired,” Warren explained. “Benjamin Franklin of course was one. But another was called Cortez!”

All the military legend and lore was bound to have its effect on young Robert Penn Warren. Indeed, it was not a poet at all that he set out to be at age 14, but admiral of the Pacific Fleet. “Sure I did. I wanted to go to Annapolis.” Warren even received a congressional appointment to the Naval Academy but, at the last moment, an accident kept him from enrolling. “So I went to the university instead, and studied to be a scientist.” That plan, he said, chuckling, “lasted about three weeks.”

For at Vanderbilt University, Warren was quick to tumble into “the bad company of people teaching English.” One professor in particular “was a very fine poet,” Warren said, “and also they crammed you full of stuff. You had to memorize 800 lines of Tennyson for the first term, and then be tested on it. So your head got full of stuff, and I began to enjoy it.” And it was then that Warren began writing verses. “I was 16.”

Was it good, this early work of a man who went on to win three Pulitzer Prizes, a National Book Award, the Bollingen Prize in poetry, the Edna St. Vincent Millay Prize of the Poetry Society of America, the National Medal for Literature, the Emerson-Thoreau Award of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Copernicus Award of the Academy of American Poets, the Harriet Monroe Prize for Poetry and the first MacArthur Foundation award for literature?

“Oh, I’ve seen one in print,” Warren said, blanching a shade. “But I haven’t got a copy of it, thank God.”

At 17, still enamored of things military, Warren signed up for a summer at CMT camp, the Citizens’ Military Training. It seems clear now that the aspiring Pacific Fleet admiral was fated to fight with the pen, not with the sword, for “somehow at the end of the summer, they asked me to write a poem. I don’t know how they got the notion that I could write a poem, that I could write at all for that matter. I guess it was because I could write my name--most of them couldn’t do that. So I wrote a poem for the yearbook.”

If it was not the most memorable of Warren’s voluminous verses, certainly it was among the most significant: “From that time on, I took it seriously.”

At Vanderbilt, Warren committed himself to the poet’s life, signing on as a charter member of the Fugitives, a group of Southern poets. It was, Warren said, “a strange mixture of people who had grown, and a few young people, kind of an informal school of constant argumentation and criticism. It wasn’t classes, it was all outside of classes. And for me it was ideal, because it was mixed up with friendships and people of different ages and some who had already achieved wide recognition. It was just a group of friends, really, who argued poetry and read it to each other--people who knew modern poetry, knew modern critical theory. I was a kid. It was great to have this going on around you. You couldn’t buy that kind of experience.”

Graduate school beckoned, and Warren packed off for a master’s at Berkeley. He speaks fondly of his academic experience there, but it is less the experience of going to Berkeley than of getting there that truly rouses his recollections. So many of Warren’s poems, so many, for example, in “New and Selected Poems,” the book Random House is publishing to mark his 80th birthday on Wednesday, take their titles, and certainly their poetic springboards, from places and sights in the United States.

“I had a great passion when I was quite young, I think I was 20, to see all the country. I knew parts of the South extremely well. I was interested in it. I got interested more and more in parts of the Southwest, and parts of California. Especially the north of California, the mountains.”

But Warren soon forsook California, accepting a post-graduate fellowship at Oxford. And next the leap was not to Yale and a Ph.D., as he had envisioned, but deep into the literary scene of New York. “By accident, again, by happy accident, I happened to know a group of literary people in New York who ran an annual book called the ‘American Caravan.’ It was an anthology of new writing, so called, and they cabled me at Oxford and asked me to write a novelette.” It was odd, said Warren, because “I had never thought of writing fiction, it had never even crossed my mind. But I had just finished my thesis at Oxford, and I was bored with that anyway, so I did.”

Forget the Fellowship

Warren cabled Yale, told them to forget his fellowship, and for the next 10 years played the role of the struggling writer-poet. It “took 10 years to make it pay,” Warren said, but in the meantime, he was part of a literary community most people have only read and romanticized about. “There was a kind of widespread excitement in the country,” Warren said. “There was interest in the new writing.”

These days, he contends, “the movement is much more scattered.” For that matter, “I would say now we are still in the tail end of what was new in the ‘20s and ‘30s. I’m not saying all of it, I’m saying some of it is that’s still hanging on.

“One thing you can notice, I think, in very young poets is the specialized kind of use of free verse, which dates back to the early days, when free verse was a new thing. Now it’s not a new thing, and--” Warren shifted, the poet-professor taking on a new topic-- “and it’s a very hard thing to do, see. It looks easy; it’s not easy at all. The rhythm is much more difficult than the rhythm in formal verse, much more difficult to handle.”

Warren himself was “oh, 35, 40 years old” before he attempted this medium. “It’s tough,” he said, “because to carry a rhythmic construction through verses that are not rhymes, it’s much more difficult than to write a formal verse where you have some kind of structure to hang on to.”

But poems cling also to another kind of framework, Warren believes, for “any rhythm that is not bodily rhythm is not worth having at all.” To get “the full feeling” of a poem, “to feel myself make the mouth movements,” Warren reads a poem silently to himself, but carefully stretching his mouth to feel each word.

“The whole thing is muscular,” Warren said of his chosen art. “From the heels up to the top of the head.”

With the spring thaw, Warren will once again exercise his anatomical muscles with daily dips in a pool that sits behind the two old barns that interconnect to make the Warren residence. Again there will be the daily walks with Nino, a vociferous mutt of indeterminate parentage. And, as always, Warren and National Book Award-winner Clark will continue to take to their isolated writing chambers: she with the typewriter and the cat, he with the yellow pad and the dog, both with such fierce ideas about their own writings that they never discuss a word until the binding is on the books.

“Long ago,” Warren says, about 40 years ago if the truth be known, Warren and Clark met at the Washington, D.C., home of the late novelist Katherine Anne Porter. Warren was poet-in-residence at the Library of Congress, then; Clark, a writer with the Office of Strategic Services. “Katherine had a little party, a dinner party at her house in Georgetown,” Warren said, “and Eleanor was there.”

Relentless Adventurers

They settled in Italy, “in a fishing village near Porto Ercole which shortly afterward became one of the most fashionable places in Europe. That’s when we left.” Relentless adventurers, two years ago the Warrens joined their two now-grown children in a camel expedition across the Sahara.

Life and certainly an assortment of publishers and awards committees have been generous to Robert Penn Warren, a man whose last novel, “A Place to Come To,” brought $400,000 for paperback rights alone. As for the acclaim, and the litany of awards he continues to receive, “Well,” said Warren, “you don’t dislike the idea.”

Not every writer needs solitude, certainly; not every poet loves loneliness. “Everybody’s different,” Warren said, “that’s all I can say. There are a lot of wonderful poets, God knows, who didn’t spend a lot of time in the woods, or swimming in the ocean.

“I don’t have any theory about it. All I can say is it happens.”

It happens, and “you never can know whether you’ve managed to find your own way. That’s the whole problem, trying to find your own way.”

And now, Warren said, for his own poetic part, “Well, whatever I’ve got, I’ve got. I certainly can’t change it now.”

Write, is what Warren tells the aspiring poet who seeks his advice. Write, put the words on paper. “And wait and see what happens. Wait and see what happens to you.”