Human genetics and All the King's Men: the case of Jack Burden's paternity.

Perkins, James A. ; McCarthy, Patrick C. ; Allen, Frank D., Jr. 等

BY THE END OF THE 1946 VERSION OF All the King's Men, the reader is led to believe, along with Jack Burden, that Jack's father is not Ellis Burden, the Scholarly Attorney, but is Judge Irwin, the man who commits suicide as the result of information Jack uncovers about the Judge's past. However, on the various occasions when he published or republished the Cass Mastern material (chapter four of the 1946 edition) as a short story, Robert Penn Warren referred to Cass Mastern as Jack Burden's relative. (1) On these occasions, Warren always used the text that appears in the "setting copy" (and now in the Restored Edition) rather than the text that appears in the 1946 edition of the novel. When chapter four, the Cass Mastern material, was reinserted in the third English edition of the novel (after having been left out of the first two editions), Warren wrote in his introductory statement, "I have always felt that the section is central to the novel." (2) He went on to say, "So I struck on the notion of making Jack Burden, my narrator, a candidate for the Ph.D. in American History, doing a dissertation based on family papers" (pp. xiv-xv, emphasis added).

Among the things restored in the Restored Edition of All the King's Men (edited by Noel Polk and based on the "setting copy" of the novel found in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University) is the statement in chapter four that Jack Burden was related to Cass Mastern: "Cass Mastern was one of Jack Burden's father's two maternal uncles, a brother of his mother, Lavinia Mastern, a great-uncle to Jack Burden" (3) (p. 228). In the 1946 edition this relationship was obscured to read: "Cass Mastern was one of the two maternal uncles of Ellis Burden, the Scholarly Attorney, a brother of his mother, Lavinia Mastern." (4) This ambiguity was created at the suggestion of Warren's editor, Lambert Davis, who wrote to Warren on November 19, 1945: The Cass Mastern passage has troubled me in the way in which it is introduced. Jack Burden is quite dead-pan, introducing this episode, in calling Cass his Great Uncle, and yet Cass is not his Great Uncle. The reader finishing this story call legitimately say he has been tricked. (5)

When Warren rewrote the material in chapter four at the request of Lambert Davis, he wrote nothing that would contradict the fact that Ellis Burden is Jack's father. He merely removed the direct statement of that fact. Warren responded to Davis on November 24, 1945, and said nothing that would indicate who he thought Jack's father was. As for the things you mention: Check on the matter of deception about the relationship of Cass Mastern to Jack. This is easily remedied. I can simply state the relationship of Cass Mastern to the Scholarly Attorney and then let the chips fall where they will. (6)

While working on the introduction to my Robert Penn Warren and the Cass Mastern Material, which is forthcoming from LSU press, I came up with an extremely convoluted explanation for the fact that in the novel Jack's father is apparently Judge Irwin while in the short story Jack's father is apparently Ellis Burden. (7) This explanation centered on the New Critical belief in the unity, the integrity, and the separateness of each individual work of art.

Rereading All the King's Men in the Restored Edition led me to ponder once again about Jack's paternity and about Warren's seemingly contradictory attitudes toward it. This reconsideration led me to think about Ockham's Razor, a theory attributed to William of Ockham, a medieval scholastic and supposedly the greatest logician ever. The theory holds that a plurality of reasons should not be posited without necessity. It is based on the principle of assuming as little as possible to explain a fact. Ockham's Razor suggests that Robert Penn Warren might well have said over and over that Cass Mastern was Jack Burden's great uncle because it is true.

It seems clear that Lambert Davis was reading a simpler novel than the one Warren had written. At the end of the 1946 version of All the King's Men, Jack accepts his mother's statement that Judge Irwin was his father, and the changes in chapter four that Davis requested support Jack's acceptance.

Jack's mother, whose "bright beautiful, silvery soprano scream" wakens him on the morning after Judge Irwin's death, is the sole source of his knowledge of his "true" father's identity (p. 486/370). (8) Although she goes on talking about her relationship with Judge Irwin (p. 595/454), she never makes a sworn statement about it to the authorities. That would be the only way she could overcome the Civil Code presumption that a child born within a marriage is the issue of that marriage. (9) Certainly conventional wisdom holds that Jack Burden is Ellis Burden's son. What ever happened to Ellis Burden? Hell, I don't know, nobody around here had any word going on years. He was a queer 'un. Damn if he wasn't queer, going off and leaving a real looker like that woman out of Arkansas. Maybe he couldn't give her what she craved. Well he give her that boy, that Jack Burden. Yeah. (p. 60/45)

Even Jack, when he is considering the Judge's possible weaknesses, rules out women: I asked: "What about love?" I was perfectly sure that the Judge had had his innings, but I was also perfectly sure that nobody around the Landing had anything on him in that respect. For that is one thing that sure gets around in a small town. (p. 271/205)

If Judge Irwin believes that he is Jack's father, Jack's mother is the source of his information. He does call Jack "son" (p. 379/288). He does intimate that he could say something to Jack that would make Jack stop his investigation into the Judge's past (p. 484/368-369). He does leave his estate to Jack (p. 493/375-376). But as Jack points out the Judge never actually says that he is Jack's father: He had been a just judge. And he had carried his head high. That last afternoon of his life he had done that. He hadn't said, "Look here, Jack, you can't do it--you can't--you see, you see--I am your father." (p. 493/375)

Such a declaration, even though it would have been, as I am arguing in this paper, untrue, might have strengthened the emotional relationship between Jack and Judge Irwin and might have saved the Judge's life. However, it would not have changed their legal relationship. To establish filiation between an illegitimate child and a parent, the parent must formally acknowledge the child (Civil Code, art. 203.A). The formal acknowledgment must be in writing in the form of "an authentic act by the parent that contains such a declaration" or by "a signature on a birth certificate or baptismal register on the line marked parent" (Civil Code, art. 203.A). Even if this had been done it would have made no legal difference because the act would not have been timely. "To be timely, this action must be brought by the earlier of (i) the alleged father's death and (ii) the child's 19th birthday" (Civil Code, art. 209.C).

If Ellis Burden, the Scholarly Attorney, believes that his friend Judge Irwin is Jack's father, Mrs. Burden would again be the source of his information. Other than Mrs. Burden's assertion, following that "bright, beautiful, silver soprano scream," there is no evidence in the novel that Jack Burden is Judge Irwin's son.

But Jack is not the only son whose parentage is open to question in All the King's Men. Near the end of the novel, Jack visits Willie's widow, Lucy. She shows him Sibyl Frey's baby: "It looks like Tom," she said. "Don't you think so?" Then before I could get an answer ready that wouldn't be too horrendous a lie, she went on: "But that's silly to ask you. You wouldn't know. I mean he looks like Tom when he was a baby." (p. 591/450) (10)

Lucy asks Jack about the young woman to whom she has given six thousand dollars so that she could go to California (p. 592/451): "do you think that poor girl--the mother--would have given it to me if she hadn't known it was Tom's? No matter what that girl did--even what they said--don't you think a mother would know? She would just know" (p. 591/451). (11) If Sibyl had more than one partner around the time of conception, the answer to this question is "no." Since Jack was old enough to question his mother when Ellis Burden left (p. 160/121), we can assume that Mrs. Burden and her husband continued to have conjugal relations during the period of her affair with Judge Irwin. Therefore, the answer to the question ("don't you think a mother would know?") in Mrs. Burden's case is also very likely "no."

Jack is certainly capable of making a physical comparison between consanguineous relatives. Earlier in the novel he looks at Willie and Tom: So there was a circle in the proof, and the son was merely an extension of the father, and when they glared at each other it was like a mirror looking into a mirror. As a matter of fact they did look alike, the same cock to the head on the shoulders, the same forward thrust of the head, the same sudden gestures. Tom was a trained-down, slick-faced, confident, barbered version of what the Boss had been a long time back when I first knew him. (pp. 509-510/388)

This sort of physical comparison is what we generally rely on as we look for family traits among consanguineous relatives. If we apply this method to the physical descriptions of the major characters in All the King's Men, we discover interesting patterns of evidence.

Mrs. Burden is a blue-eyed blonde (p. 185/137); Judge Irwin has yellow eyes (p. 171/130), a tall skull (p. 270/204), and faded red hair (p. 171/130); Jack Burden is rather rail, somewhat gangly, has a bony horse face, dark unkempt hair, dark eyes (not burning and deep like the eyes of Cass Mastern) and big hands (pp. 393-394/299); Ellis Burden has a shock of tangled black hair and eyes usually hidden by his glasses (p. 160/121) 12; and Cass Mastern was tall (p. 234/175) had a long bony face, thick dark hair, dark, wide-set, deep eyes and strong wrists and bony hands (pp. 228-229/171).

Some of these details are more important than others. Eyes and hair are rather well understood and fairly predictable as genetic traits. (13) Given what was known about human genetics in 1939, the year in which the main actions of All the King's Men take place, it is unlikely that Judge Irwin is Jack Burden's father. Recessive genes would express both Jack's mother's blonde hair and blue eyes. Likewise recessive genes would express Monty Irwin's red hair and yellow eyes (a variation of green eyes). Their combination would not likely express itself in Jack's dark hair and dark eyes. On the other hand, Jack's mother's recessive genes for blonde hair and blue eyes combined with Ellis Burden's dominant genes for dark hair and dark eyes would likely express themselves in Jack's dark hair and dark eyes. Patrick McCarthy, a biologist who teaches genetics, wrote, "It's certainly safe to say that there is no chance that the Judge (light hair) and Jack's mother (light hair) could parent a dark-haired son, unless there was a new gene mutation coming from one of them." (14)

Certainly Sadie Burke's description of Jack as "a box of spilled spaghetti [, a]ll elbows and [a] dry rattle" (p. 104/79) calls to mind the description of Cass Mastern as a "hobbledehoy" (p. 232/174).

When Jack calls attentions to the differences between Judge Irwin and Cass Mastern ("For Judge Irwin and Cass Mastern do not resemble each other very closely" [p. 608/463-464]), he is comparing their personalities and attitudes, but his statement could also call attention to their physical differences as well. These physical differences, as we have seen, if viewed from the perspective of genetics, suggest that Ellis Burden is Jack's father. James A. Grimshaw, when he previewed this paper, reduced the argument to a valid disjunctive syllogism: Either Irwin or Ellis is Jack's father. Irwin is not Jack's father. Therefore, Ellis is Jack's father. (15)

All the evidence introduced here to support the biogenetic relationship between Ellis Burden and Jack Burden and thus the relationship between Jack Burden and Cass Mastern exists in either edition of the novel. So this is not a matter of building an argument out of material that Warren left out of the 1946 edition.

The question may remain, why don't the characters in the novel discover the nature of Jack's relationship to Cass Mastern? There is no pressure within the novel to expose the fact that Ellis Burden is Jack's father. The Judge is dead. He went to his death without articulating his belief that he was Jack's father, and he has no heir to contest the willing of his estate to Jack. Jack's mother, responding to the emptiness of her life, clings to her affair with the love of her life, Judge Irwin. She no doubt believes that the Judge is Jack's father. After her initial grief (during which she is protected by Jack and her physician), she has no reason to make her indiscretion public by making a legal statement concerning Jack's father. Ellis Burden, who no doubt believes that his good friend Judge Irwin violated his friendship and his wife in fathering Jack, has made peace with his past and refuses to discuss it with Jack: "'I will not touch the world of foulness again,' he said, his pale eyes looking steadily upward into my face, 'that my hand shall come away with the stink on my fingers'" (p. 284/215).Jack who has twice proven his skills at getting to the bottom of things, in the matter of Cass Mastern and in the Case of the Upright Judge, doesn't dig into this third enigma. He accepts his mother's version of the facts because, in part, it allows him to see his mother and himself in a new way: "Well I had swapped the good, weak father for the evil, strong one. I didn't feel bad about it" (p. 493/375). Finally the community of Burden's Landing (with the exception of the gossip Mrs. Randall [p. 490], who was called Mrs. Daniell in 1946 [p. 373]) has no interest in creating a scandal involving some of its leading citizens, and the community in the person of Dr. Bland acts to suppress information about both Mrs. Burden's revelation and the circumstances of Judge Irwin's death.

If we accept the fact that Ellis Burden and not Judge Irwin is Jack Burden s father, then we have in All the King's Men a novel in which the reader knows more than the narrator at the end, a novel that closes with dramatic irony, a favorite device of the New Critics. It is, in that way, structurally very similar to the 1941 movie Citizen Kane.

Also if we accept this fact, we must take a serious look at the changes wrought by this fact on the last dozen or so pages of the novel. James A. Grimshaw, Jr., observes that "Chapter 10 has often been read by critics as an epilogue," and many critics are uncomfortable to some degree with the seemingly contrived ending of All the King's Men, (16) most of them generally follow Murrary Krieger's assessment: The "bright, beautiful, silvery, soprano scream" of Jack's mother when she learns of the suicide turns the book around by giving Jack a new fact--the actual identity of Irwin as his father--and a new sense of the sort of humanity she has been capable of during the many years of his contempt for her.... Like many of literature's oldest heroes, Jack must discover who his father really is--a man crucially different from his apparent father.... And this discovery is central to his discovery of who he can really be. So much of what Jack has been seems to be a reflection of the Scholarly Attorney, his supposed father, and his superficially flighty mother that his sense of his own identity must be profoundly changed by the twin discoveries which the "silvery soprano scream" forces him to make. (17)

But Jack's self-discovery is based on a misconception (the pun is intended). Jack wonders if Ellis Burden thinks that Jack is his son and concludes that it doesn't matter, "for each of us is the son of a million fathers" (p. 606/462). But of course we are not. Each of us is the issue of particular individuals whether we know it and acknowledge it or not.

Sitting on the porch swing on the gallery of the Stanton house, Jack explains it all to Anne Stanton this way: "He's not my father," I said. "Not your father!" she exclaimed. "No," I said, and sitting there in the motionless swing on the dark gallery, I told her what there was to tell about the palehaired and famish-cheeked girl who had come down from Arkansas, and tried to tell her what my mother had finally given back to me. I tried to tell her how if you could not accept the past and its burden there was no future, for without one there cannot be the other, and how if you accept the past you might hope for the future, for only out of the past can you make the future. (p. 604/460-461)

Since we now know that Ellis Burden is his father, Jack's willingness to accept the past and its burden, in order to have the possibility of a future, is completely ironic.

Finally Jack says of himself and Anne, "soon now we shall go out of the house and go into the convulsion of the world, out of history into history and the awful responsibility of Time" (p. 609/464). Of course it was Robert Penn Warren who said in the introduction to the 1953 version of Brother to Dragons, "history is the big myth we live." (18)

Certainly now we have a new novel to read, a novel in which Jack and his mother and the Cass Mastern material are more central, a novel with an ending vastly different from the one so long discussed. At the very end of his introduction to the third British edition of All the King's Men (the same introduction in which he said that he had always felt the Cass Mastern material was central to the novel), Warren writes: "But that is not the end of the story" (p. xv). How true.

(1) In the Partisan Review (Fall 1944), in The Best American Short Stories 1945, in 200 Years of Great American Short Stories, and in A Robert Penn Warren Reader, Warren refers to Cass Mastern as "one of Jack Burden's father's two maternal uncles." In This is My Best, Warren designates Jack as "a cousin, two generations later, of Cass Mastern." I have no ideas how to account for this change.

(2) Robert Penn Warren, All the King's Men (London: Secker & Warberg, 1974), p.xiv.

(3) Robert Penn Warren, All the King's Men, Restored Edition, ed. Noel Polk (New York: Harcourt, 2001), p. 228.

(4) New York: Harcourt, 1946, p. 170.

(5) "Letter to Robert Penn Warren," November 19, 1945. Held in the Warren collection at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University.

(6) "Letter to Lambert Davis," November 24, 1945 (Harcourt Brace Archives).

(7) The reader trying to determine how Warren could have it both ways on the subject of Jack Burden's ancestry should consider the bedrock "New Critical" belief in the integrity, the separateness and the unity, of each individual work of art. I got my best exposure to this notion when I tried to argue with Cleanth Brooks that the Quentin Compson of The Sound and the Fury was the same Quentin Compson in Absalom, Absalom! and that Quentin created the idea of miscegenation in Absalom, Absalom! because he was the Quentin Compson of The Sound and the Fury, and he could not believe that a man could be shot for incest. Today we would refer to this as an inter-textual reading. Mr. Brooks said it was trash. He said the two books are different works, each separate and unified, and there's an end to it. I don't believe that this is a particularly persuasive attitude, but it does explain how Warren could sometimes refer to the Cass Mastern (in the short story) as Jack Burden's great uncle and at other times (in the novel) as something else.

(8) Most of the evidence in this paper can be found in both the 1946 edition and the 2001 "restored" edition of All the King's Men. Citation to the text will be parenthetical with the 2001 pagination listed first, followed by the 1946 pagination. In the few cases where the material is from only one of the editions, the text will make that fact clear.

(9) Civil Code art. 179. Here and elsewhere in this article, I am dependent for my knowledge of the Civil Code on Frank D. Allen, Jr., a Washington lawyer, who has worked in both the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department and the Pension Guaranty Corporation.

(10) Prior to this, Jack Burden had reason to consider the physical evidence of paternity as he read in Cass Mastern's journal of the "yellow" Phebe and the octaroon at Lewis C. Robard's bacracoo.

(11) Willie's henchmen were ready to present evidence that Sibyl had had more than one partner. "Tom had been just one of a platoon of Sibyl's friends, according to Tom himself. But aside from the legal point of view. that fact just made the Boss madder, Tom's being one of a platoon. It would be convenient in any discussion of the paternity of Sibyl's alleged child, but it seemed to hurt the Boss's pride" (p. 461/351).

(12) Twice Ellis Burden's eyes are described: "He stopped, the gleam which had started up fitfully in the pale eyes flickered out" (p. 279/211); "He straightened up to face me, blinking palely behind the spectacles as he had blinked at me upon coming from light into the darkness of the Mexican restaurant below" (p. 282/214). The term "pale" does not refer to color itself, to hue, rather it refers to intensity of color, or in this case a lack thereof, a deficiency in chroma, a dullness, a dimness. So Ellis Burden's eyes, given the relationship to Cass Mastern are probably dark (as are Jack's eyes) but (also like Jack's eyes) "not burning and deep like the eyes of Cass Mastern" (pp. 398-394/299).

(13) "Eye color was the first normal Mendelian character recognized in man, when the Davenports (1907) and Hurst (1908) independently suggested that blue eyes are recessive to brown" (Reginold Ruggles Gates, Human Genetics I [New York: MacMillan, 1948], 88).

(14) E-mail, March 6, 2002; I am indebted to Patrick McCarthy for any understanding of genetics that this paper displays. He pointed out that H.J. Muller, in 1922 (studying changes in fruit flies), began work that led to a Nobel Prize and later allowed J. V. Neel, in 1962 (long alter All the King's Men was published), to establish mutation rates in humans at 4/100,000. Since Jack's dark hair and eyes would require two mutations in the same gamete (either sperm or egg), the rate of mutation would be 4/100,000 x 4/100,000 or 16 in 10 billion or 1 in 625 million. Those would be the odds that the Judge is Jack's father. While we are on the subject of genetic possibility, consider "yellow eyes." They are a very rare variation of green eyes, and yet they make two appearances in All the King's Men. Phebe has them and so does Judge Irwin. Phebe is of the generation of Judge Irwin's parents (who are not mentioned in the novel) and she was sent to New Orleans "soft." It is much more likely that Phebe is Judge Irwin's mother than it is likely that he is Jack's father. In fact, Jack Burden, after he discovers the Judge's secret says, "There is always a clue"; then he catalogues a number of possible clues ending with "the taint in the blood stream" (p. 319/242 emphasis added). I would also like to credit Raymond W. Beck's A Chronology, of Microbiology in Historical Context (Washington: AMS Press, 2000). It was interesting to read and very useful in establishing the order of events in the development of human genetics.

(15) James A. Grimshaw, Jr., e-mail to James A. Perkins, "The Scholarly Attorney or the Judge," April 14, 2002.

(16) James A. Grimshaw, Jr., Understanding Robert Penn Warren (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2001), p. 50. For some of this discomfort see John Butt, Robert Penn Warren and American Idealism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988), p. 171; William Bedford Clark, The American Vision of Robert Penn Warren (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1991), p. 93; David B. Olson, "Jack Burden and the Ending of All the King's Men," Mississippi Quarterly, 26 (Spring 1973), 167; and Norman Kelvin, "The Failure of Robert Penn Warren," College English, 18 (April 1957), 359. For an example of an unparalleled close reader doing his best with what the ending has given him, see James H. Justus, The Achievement of Robert Perth Warren (Baton Rouge: Lousiana State University Press, 1981), pp. 201-203.

(17) "The Assumption of the 'Burden' of History: A Revaluation of All the King's Men," in Robert Penn Warren's "All the King's Men," ed. Harold Bloom (New York: Chelsea, 1987), p. 80.

(18) Robert Penn Warren, Brother to Dragons (New York: Random House, 1953), p. xii.

JAMES A. PERKINS

Westminster College

PATRICK C. McCARTHY

Westminster College

FRANK D. ALLEN, JR.

Washington, D.C.