DATE: Sunday, April 20, 1997                TAG: 9704170560

SECTION: COMMENTARY              PAGE: J2   EDITION: FINAL 

TYPE: Book Review

SOURCE: BY JEFFREY H. RICHARDS 

                                            LENGTH:   90 lines

RETURNING TO WARRENFAVORING DETAIL OVER INTERPRETATION, BLOTNER'S BIOGRAPHY REKINDLES INTEREST IN ROBERT PENN WARREN

ROBERT PENN WARREN

A Biography

JOSEPH BLOTNER

Random House. 585 pp. $35.

In Southern Literary Study: Problems and Possibilities (1975), the leading scholars of Southern literature spoke of Robert Penn Warren (1905-1989) as if his place in the canon were assured.

They had good reason. By 1975, Warren was already a gray eminence in American letters, winner of multiple Pulitzer Prizes and the Bollingen Prize, and significant author of poetry, novels, essays and groundbreaking textbooks. Identified early with the Agrarian and Fugitive movements, Warren had outlasted his contemporaries as a major figure, taking up civil rights, changing styles and showing a diversity that few others of his generation could match.

Despite all that, the publication of Joseph Blotner's sizable biography struck me as peculiar. Warren's place in literature is not nearly as fixed as it seemed two decades ago. Dozens of new Southern writers have crowded the bookshelves with their smart books of fiction and poetry. Think Southern lit and after William Faulkner, the subject of an enormous two-volume biography by Blotner, one conjures the likes of Lee Smith or Dorothy Allison or Jil McCorkle or even T.R. Pearson before one remembers Robert Penn Warren.

As with Faulkner: A Biography, Blotner here chooses comprehensiveness of detail over style or thesis. Beginning with Warren's ancestors, Blotner moves year by year until the writer's death, then stops abruptly after the funeral. Using letters by Warren and his friends and family as his primary sources, along with interviews that he conducted with Warren himself and other survivors, Blotner constructs an immensely readable and uncomplicated story of a long and productive literary life. Despite the bulk, one can cruise through Robert Penn Warren: A Biography with surprising speed and with minimal reference to notes.

Blotner's access to such documents as medical records and to family members provides an insider's look at the literary life of an Agrarian contributor to I'll Take My Stand (1930), the co-author with Cleanth Brooks of Understanding Poetry (1938), the Pulitzer Prize-winning writer of All the King's Men (1946), the cranky, father-obsessed poet of Or Else (1974). One comes away impressed with Blotner's research and with respect for Warren's output.

But behind the fact and correspondence-illustrated wallpaper is a darker, shadowy Warren who peers and disappears. As Blotner reminds us, Warren in his work returned to the theme of fatherhood, or rather to the son who cannot shake the influence of the father.

There is nothing especially dramatic about Warren's relationship to his own father, no gunshot suicide as for Hemingway. Warren, by Blotner's account, was himself a good, story-telling father to his two children by Eleanor Clark, his second wife. Nevertheless, because the biographer stays well clear of psychologizing, we get few probes into Warren's mind beyond what the author records in his letters and literary texts.

In other words, having read - and enjoyed - this meticulous account of Warren's comings and goings and pains and pleasures, I felt there ought to be a second biography, an interpretive one, that reconnects the facts to the work and accounts in some deeper way for what made Warren tick.

As a student at Yale in the late 1960s, I could not escape Warren's shadow. Brooks and Warren's Understanding Poetry had given rise to New Criticism, the dominant school of literary interpretation at Yale, where both men taught. Warren's undergraduate writing seminar was hard to get in, but revered by the lucky few who could sit with the master. Within a few years of my departure from there, however, Warren would quit teaching at Yale, driven out, he felt, by unliterary students and a new generation of literary theorists and poststructuralist critics.

Although New Criticism is not entirely dead, mine was probably the last generation to be thoroughly schooled in its painstaking, text-centered methods. I no longer preach it, but in the privacy of my study, I still read with Warren's eyes behind me.

It remains to be seen whether this book will revive Warren. Nothing in the biography is as compelling as the photographs of the bare-chested, octogenarian Warren taken by Annie Liebowitz in the 1980s, yet not even mentioned by Blotner.

But if the biography can send readers back to All the King's Men or to reconsider a cry that echoes throughout his poetry, ``Have I learned to live?,'' then reading Blotner's book will have turned out to be a multiple pleasure. MEMO: Jeffrey H. Richards is an English professor at Old Dominion

University. ILLUSTRATION: Photo

LOS ANGELES TIMES/FILE

Robert Penn Warren reads in his Fairfield, Conn., home in 1985.

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