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A few miles away, there was the University, where students were like students anywhere in the country in the big state universities, except for the extraordinary number of pretty girls and the preternatural blankness of the gladiators who were housed beneath the stadium to have their reflexes honed, their diet supervised, and through the efforts of tutors – their heads crammed with just enough of whatever mash was required (I never found out) to get them past their minimal examinations. Among the students there sometimes appeared, too, that awkward boy from the depth of ’Cajun country or from some hard-scrabble farm in some parish like Winn, with burning ambition and frightening energy and a thirst for learning; and his presence there, you reminded yourself, with whatever complication of irony seemed necessary at the moment, was due to Huey, and to Huey alone. For, as I have said, the “better element” had done next to nothing to get that boy out of the grim despair of his ignorance.

Conversation in Louisiana always came back to the myth of Long, to politics; and to talk politics is to talk about power. So conversation turned, by implication at least, on the question of power and ethics, of power and justification, of means and ends, of “historical costs.” The big words were not often used, certainly not by the tellers of the tales, but the concepts lurked even behind the most ungrammatical folktale. The tales were shot through with philosophy.

The tales were shot, too, with folk humor, and the ethical ambiguity of folk humor. The tales, like the politic conversations, were shot through, too, with violence – or rather, with hints of the possibility of violence. There was a hint of revolutionary desperation – often synthetically induced. In Louisiana, in ’34 and ’35, it took nothing to start a rumor of violence. There was going to be, you might hear, a “battle” at the airport at Baton Rouge. A young filling-station operator would proudly display his sawed-off automatic shotgun – I forget which “side” he was on, but I remember his fingers caressing the polished walnut of the stock. Long held a public investigation of an alleged conspiracy against his life, and you heard that the next day the arrests would be made. You heard that there was going to be a march on the Capitol – but not by whom or for what. And when Long stirred abroad he moved flanked by his armed guards.

Melodrama was the breath of life. There had been melodrama in the life I had known in Tennessee, but with a difference: in Tennessee the melodrama seemed to be different from the stuff of life, something superimposed upon life, but in Louisiana people lived melodrama – seemed to live, in fact, for t, for the strange combination of philosophy, humor, and violence. Life was a tale that you happened to be living – and that “Huey” happened to be living grandly before your eyes. And all the while I was reading Shakespeare and Jacobean tragedy, Dante and Machiavelli and Guicciardini, William James and American history – and all that I was reading seemed to come alive, in shadowy distortions and sudden clarities, in what I saw around me.

How directly did I try to transpose into fiction Huey P. Long and his world? The question answers itself in a single fact. The first version of my story was a verse drama; and the first serious writing began, in 1938, in the shade of an olive tree by a wheat field near Perugia. In other words, if you are sitting under an olive tree in Umbria and are writing a verse drama, the chances are that you are concerned more with the myth than with the fact, more with the symbolic than with the actual. And so it was. It could not, after all, have been otherwise, for the strict, literal sense, I had, as I have said, no idea what the then deceased Long had bee. What I knew was the “Huey” of the myth, and that was what I had taken with me to Mussolini’s Italy, where the bully-boys wore black shirts and gave a funny salute, and the longer I stayed there the less tidy, in other