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anything for his benefactor, including cover up his crime if it turns out that Madvig
is a murderer (146).
The one thing Beaumont will not do is to allow Madvig to pretend he can gain
acceptance into the local aristocracy (however vicious its pretensions might be). In
both All the King ’s Men and The Glass Key, the political boss (Willie Stark, Pau l
Madvig) falls for a woman of patrician standing (Anne Stanton, Janet Henry), and
both politicians try to rise above their class to win her. In each case the attempt is
self-defeating. In both novels the refined woman’s sexuality is stimulated less by
longing for the politician-suitor than by disillusionment with her formerly revered
politician-father (Governor Stanton, Senator Henry). Her discovery of her father’s
corruption destroys her sense of innocence and eroticizes her. In both books the
agent who provides her with this shattering knowledge of paternal guilt is the male
sleuth (Jack Burden, Ned Beaumont), who discovers criminality beneath the aris
tocratic veneer. At the end she turns to this man as a romantic partner to fill the
emotional void left after her father has been displaced. By a Freudian transference,
Jack/Ned becomes sexually appealing to Anne/Janet precisely because he has dis
credited her father. In turn both men offer a cold, lonely masculinity that attracts
these disillusioned women. They chose these men as romantic partners at least as
much to free themselves from the infantilizing influence of their domineering fa
thers as to establish independent adult relationships.
These intertextual similarities strongly suggest that The Glass Key was a di
rect influence on All the King ’s Men. To be sure, Warren’s novel draws heavily on
the conventions of the hard-boiled detective novel as the plot leads Jack Burden
through a web of guilty secrets. More certain yet is that Paul Madvig in The Glass
Key is the first Long-like character in a fictional chain that leads to Governor Stark
in All the King's Men. True, Madvig is not an elected office-holder. But he controls
his state’s political machine in a way that is just as iron-fisted as Stark’s domi
nance - or as the despotism of any of the disguised “Huey Long” dictator-politi
cians in other American novels of the Thirties and Forties.
Indicating the extent of Madvig’s power, a portrait of the state governor hangs
for all to see at the second-floor landing (4,140) of Madvig’s speakeasy. The sug
gestion, of course, is that the casino displaces the statehouse and that Madvig is the
real authority figure in a skein of vice from the gutter to the capitol. The novel’s
plot is set in motion by Madvig’s effort to reelect a veteran state senator, Ralph
Bancroft Henry, whose hold on office has weakened. Madvig’s effort to rescue
Henry’s fading political fortunes has nothing to do with the senator’s merit as an
office-holder; it is merely a ploy for Madvig to get close to Henry’s pretty blond
daughter, Janet. So eager is the senator to accept this unexpected political boost
that he panders her to Madvig, a man whose crude sexuality incites Janet both to
hatred and self-hatred, for she falsely encourages him to please her domineering