Vivid Imagery

From Robert Penn Warren’s All The King’s Men, page 33:

It looked like those farmhouses you ride by in the country in the middle of the afternoon, with the chickens under the trees and the dog asleep, and you know the only person in the house is the woman who has finished washing up the dishes and has swept the kitchen and has gone upstairs to lie down for a half an hour and has pulled off her dress and kicked off her shoes and is lying there on her back on the bed in the shadowy room with her eyes closed and a strand of her hair matted down on her forehead with the perspiration. She listens to the flies cruising around the room, then she listens to your motor getting big out on the road, then it shrinks off into the distance and she listens to the flies. That was the kind of house it was.

At the risk of playing Captain Obvious here, I love books. I love reading them, and I have a deep and abiding respect for the people who put forth the effort to write them, even the books that suck. It’s not easy to sit your ass in a chair every day for hours at a time, alone, pulling ideas out of your head and organizing them in a way that will entertain a few people and if you’re lucky, a lot of people.

It is a craft. When it is done well, the words lift you from the page and transport you to those places the writer has created out of whole cloth as easily as getting out of bed in the morning. Robert Penn Warren is a master at his craft.

The book was made into a movie, winning the Best Picture Oscar and Best Actor for Broderick Crawford in 1950 . Another movie is coming out this year with Sean Penn in the lead. I haven’t seen the first movie and I look forward to this new one with hope that the lyrical poetry of Warren’s language is captured in some small way.