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The Cass
Mastern Material
The Core of Robert Penn
Warren's All the King's Men
Edited, with an Introduction,
by
James A.
Perkins
2005, LSU
Press, Baton Rouge
One of the most striking parts of Robert Penn Warren's
novel All the King's Men is Chapter 4, in
which narrator Jack Burden tells the story of his distant relative Cass
Mastern. A Confederate soldier, Mastern betrays his best friend by falling
in love with the man's wife and then out of guilt
tries repeatedly to get killed in battle but ironically becomes a hero for
his daring, before finally attaining a mortal wound. In The Cass Mastern
Material, James A. Perkins fully explores how this episode supplies the
crucial piece to a puzzle surrounding Warren's
novel, tracing the story's evolution through
several versions and genres over almost twenty years.
Found here are both the earliest, short-story rendition of the Cass Mastern
episode, originally published in 1944, and Warren's
final dramatic version, completed in 1961 and now made available in print
for the first time. The play was finally staged in 1999, and Perkins appends
related letters, production notes, and an interview that provide a context
for understanding the work's importance in Warren's
career.
"I have always felt that the section is central to
[All the King's Men],"
Warren wrote, concerning the Cass Mastern material. This unique volume
affords a view of Warren's restless creative
process and throws new light on the story that formed the core of his
masterly novel.
"This is assuredly
the definitive book on the Cass Mastern story, tracing its gestation through
two decades of genre mutations from short
story to play to the 'core' of Robert Penn Warren's greatest novel. The
scholarship is meticulous, the explication lucid, making this book a worthy
addition to the cannon of Warren studies."
Victor
Strandberg, author of The Poetic Vision of
Robert Penn Warren
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In bringing together the 'matter'
of Cass Mastern, Perkins has performed an invaluable service for Warren
studies, and his learned and daring introduction is certain to provoke
spirited discussion. This volume both broadens and deepens our
appreciation of Warren's protean genius, especially his penchant for the
theatrical."
William Bedford Clark,
author of The American Vision of Robert Penn Warren
"This haunting story hounded its
author throughout his career, and Warren returned to it repeatedly,
thinking of it as an independent short story, as a chapter in All the
King's Men, and as a play. Painstaking edited by James A. Perkins,
The Cass Mastern Material recovers a moving and important
drama that deserves to be seen in its own light both as a major
contribution to Warren's oeuvre and as a key drama about guilt, race,
and slavery in the era of the American Civil War."
John Burt, editor of
The Collected Poems of Robert Penn Warren |
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James A. Perkins, coeditor of Robert
Penn Warren's "All
the King's Men":
Three Stage Versions, and Selected Letters of Robert Penn Warren,
Volume Three: Triumph and Transition, 1943-1952. He is a professor
and chair of the Department of English and Public Relations at
Westminster College in New Wilmington, Pennsylvania.
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