(Author’s note: Easily the greatest piece of literary criticism in American letters is Mark Twain’s “Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offenses”, though I believe Mark might have titled it more euphoniously. My piece takes a much more somber hue than Mark’s, exploring, to be blunt, Faulkner’s frequent failure to free himself emotionally from the limitations of his southern heritage, which in turn suggests how unlikely it is that any of us will be able to see beyond our own vanity. Shortly after I began this piece, I discovered that I had been largely lapped, if not indeed swamped, by a new book by Michael Gorra, The Saddest Words: William Faulkner’s Civil War, discussed in this recent article in the Atlantic by Drew Gilpin Faust. Rather than learn how badly Dr. Gorra had surpassed me, I put the article aside and plowed ahead on my own, determined to leave for posterity this lonely, erratic furrow.)
I first started reading William Faulkner in high school in 1962, prompted quite possibly by his death in that year. I started with the hardest, The Sound and the Fury, absorbing at most 25%, yet somehow being greatly impressed. The rush and intensity of Faulkner’s prose carried me along, even though I didn’t know where I was or where I was going. I reread it several times, with increasing satisfaction each time, though I was, and am, far from “mastering” it. Despite its density and confusion, it’s the most successful depiction of Faulkner’s world, in which it seems both that nothing yet has happened and yet everything already has happened, that the past and present are inextricably mingled in a dream world from which one cannot wake because the dream world is the true one.
I went on to read a good deal of Faulkner while I was in college—As I Lay Dying and Light In August, along with The Hamlet, and got half way through The Town before wearying of Gavin Stevens, and also picked up The Bear and The Old Man from the Three Short Novels collection. I later read Intruder in the Dust and The Reivers, enjoying both, and got half way through A Fable before deciding that Faulkner was struggling nobly, yet failing, to say something meaningful to a world staggering beneath the horrors it had visited upon itself in World War II. Years later I picked up a second-hand paperback copy of Absalom! Absalom!, which I never read but for some reason shelved in the bookcase near my computer. A year ago, glancing at the book somehow triggered a desire to read more Faulkner, and somehow I ended up going a little crazy, reading not only Absalom but Go Down, Moses, along with Flags in the Dust, and Sanctuary, and a chunk of The Undefeated, as well as some or all of several Faulkner biographies/studies—Jay Parini’s One Matchless Time, in particular—though, again for “some” reason, never really immersed myself in his life the way I did with a little study I wrote of James Thurber, consuming two massive door-stop volumes. My own “personal” Faulkner, I think, is so “personal” to me that I don’t want the actual facts of his life intruding to the extent that they might obliterate the Faulkner I’ve created.
What I did discover through all this reading1 is that there are “two Faulkners” (at least) and I had, serendipitously, only encountered one of them. I had read exclusively what I now think of as “Old South Faulkner”, novels and stories in which the characters live in a world entirely defined by the South, which in turn is defined almost entirely by the Civil War, even if the characters (some of them) think and know little if anything about the war itself. “New South Faulkner” contains characters like Horace Benbow, a major figure in both Flags in the Dust and Sanctuary, a proud southerner, certainly, but trying not to be defined by the south, interested in “contemporary” ideas, even if they come from the north, and clearly (and vocally) embarrassed by the more vulgar aspects of southern culture.2
I discovered something else with my new reading: there was also such a thing as bad Faulkner. I had encountered “boring” Faulkner in The Town, but actively “bad” Faulkner, which I encountered most spectacularly in Flags in the Dust, was a new experience.
As any Faulkner buff knows, Faulkner was intensely proud of Flags in the Dust,3 his third novel, in which he “found his voice”, the dramatic, insistent, incantatory prose, which wraps itself slowly around the truth, if there be such, coming to rest only when the past and present have been joined into one. The novel begins:
As usual old man Falls had brought John Sartoris into the room with him, had walked the three miles in from the county Poor Farm, fetching, like an odor, like the clean dusty smell of his faded overalls, the spirit of the dead man into that room where the dead man’s son sat and where the two of them, pauper and banker, would sit for a half an hour in the company of him who had passed beyond death and then returned.
But if Faulkner had found his voice, the substance was, for the most part, woefully lacking. Most of the characters of the novel are dreary clichés, of the sort that could have been found in surely dozens of novels cranked out by southern gentlemen of literary aspiration but no talent. Bayard Sartoris, son of the no longer living John Sartoris, born a few years too late to have fought in the War, is a “classic” southern gentleman, living a life surrounded by emblems of gentility. The family silver, buried, of course, during the war to save it from the Yankees, is “silver so fine and soft that some of the spoons were worn now almost to paper thinness where fingers in their generations had held them”. He has a chest of family keepsakes, including Mechlin lace, a “Toledo” rapier,4 a calvary saber—John Sartoris rode with JEB Stuart5 (of course)—along with “two duelling pistols with silver mountings and the lean, deceptive delicacy of race horses”.
Bayard walks with most erect posture of anyone in Jefferson, exceeding even that of his widowed sister, “Miss Jenny.” As a teenager, Faulkner, who had been filled since birth with stories of the Civil War, and southern heroism, by his grandmother, very consciously molded himself in the image of a southern gentleman and maintained a “proudly erect” posture all his life. He was deeply embarrassed that his father showed no interest in maintaining the family’s “honor”. Faulkner’s great-grandfather had been a colonel in the Civil War, had founded a railroad and a bank, and had had a statue of himself, carved from Italian marble, to mark his grave. Apparently, this meant nothing to Murry Falkner (Faulkner, of course, changed the spelling of his name.). In Sartoris, Faulkner conveniently “disappears” his father from the Sartoris family tree, with young Bayard Sartoris, of Faulkner’s generation, being raised by his grandfather and grand aunt rather than his parents.
Young Bayard is another cliché, the tormented World War I veteran, a pilot, which Faulkner pretended to be but was not.6 Bayard’s twin brother John, also a pilot, was killed in the war, leaving Bayard doubly tormented because John was the “good twin”, open and confident and generous, while Bayard was sullen and withdrawn. We’re told, absurdly, that Bayard avenged his brother’s death by shooting down the German pilot who killed him—Faulkner can’t/won’t resist the allure of cheap heroism—but Bayard is, naturally, tortured by Byronic remorse. “I told him not to go up in that goddamned popgun!” He spends much of the novel racing through the back roads of Mississippi in his elegant sports car at speeds approaching eighty miles an hour.
Miss Jenny, young Bayard’s great aunt, based largely on Faulkner’s grandmother, who filled his head with her encyclopedic grasp of virtually every southern cliché regarding the Confederacy, is herself a painful cliché, endowed with a “dowager duchess” personality one so often encounters in trash fiction, the grand old lady who, full of worldly wisdom, always shocks everyone by saying precisely what she thinks. Miss Jenny speaks poignantly of dancing a pre-war “valse” with Union general to be John Pope in Baltimore in 1858 and bitterly recalls the suffering of southern women in the Civil War: “hiding in nigger cabins while drunken Yankee generals set fire to the house your great-great-great-grandfather built and you and all your folks were born in”—words that, read today, don’t quite carry the same message that Faulkner intended, and, applied literally make no sense, since the town of Jefferson was founded only a few generations before the Civil War. The Sartoris “big house” was built at best two generations before the Civil War, not two centuries.
The Sartoris clan are, most assuredly, bad enough, but Faulkner also throws in some absurd, crowd-pleasing (one assumes) and entirely irrelevant kitsch in the form of a beloved old family doctor:
This was Doctor Lucius Quintus Peabody, eighty-seven years old and weighing three hundred and ten pounds and possessing a digestive tract like a horse. He had practiced medicine in Yocona county when a doctor’s equipment consisted of a saw and a gallon of whisky and a satchel of calomel; he had been John Sartoris’ regimental surgeon, and up to the day of the automobile he would start out at any hour of the twenty-four in any weather and for any distance, over practically impassable roads in a lopsided buckboard to visit anyone, white or black, who sent for him; accepting for fee usually a meal of corn pone and coffee or perhaps a small measure of corn or fruit, or a few flower bulbs or graftings.
In my opinion, anyone who is 87 years old and weighs 310 pounds would have had grave difficulty getting out of bed in the morning, much less traveling around rural Mississippi in all kinds of weather in the dead of night, but Faulkner must have his cliché. The good doctor has no role in the plotting of the novel at all, but shows up frequently nonetheless, most egregiously at a gathering of the Sartoris clan to celebrate Thanksgiving, Faulkner apparently having filched his description of the feast from an early issue of Southern Living, intended to show that southerners were just as rich and sophisticated as their northern kin, offering these accounts of first the main courses and then the desserts:
a roast turkey and a smoked ham and a dish of quail and another of squirrel, and a baked ’possum in a bed of sweet potatoes; and squash and pickled beets, and sweet potatoes and Irish potatoes, and rice and hominy, and hot biscuit and beaten biscuit and delicate long sticks of cornbread, and strawberry and pear preserves, and quince and apple jelly, and stewed cranberries and pickled peaches.
pies of three kinds, and a small, deadly plum pudding, and cake baked cunningly with whisky and nuts and fruit as ravishing as odors of heaven and treacherous and fatal as sin; and at last, with an air sibylline and solemnly profound, a bottle of port.
Cliched as all these white characters are, the black characters are even worse. Most featured is “Simon”, Old Bayard’s coachman/major domo, a colorful rascal full of malapropisms and mischief, though, of course, completely devoted to the Sartoris clan. Equally tedious is “Elnora”, one of the Sartoris house servants, conveniently singing “meaningful” spirituals at the drop of a hat:
Just beyond the corner from the invisible kitchen, Elnora’s voice welled in mellow falling suspense. All folks talkin’ ’bout heaven aint gwine dar Elnora sang ….
So true, right? I mean, out of the mouths of babes! Or negresses!
Worst of all are the reminiscences served up by “Old Man Falls”, Will Falls, truly old, old John Sartoris’ personal slave, serving him, naturally and loyally, throughout the War, and thus able to provide first-hand testimony to the Great Thing itself, about the time, for example, the Cunnel captured a whole company of Yankees all alone, and offering, when prodded, the sort of fatuous, self-serving gloss on the war that southerners liked to provide:
Old Bayard shook the ash from his cigar. “Will,” he said, “what the devil were you folks fighting about, anyhow?”
“Bayard,” old man Falls answered. “Be damned ef I ever did know.”
Of course not. Nobody ever knew. It wasn’t about slavery or anything like that. It was just high spirits, that’s all. Men—real men—fight for glory, not for purpose.
Even more offensive is a long narrative supplied by old man Falls during which John Sartoris murders two “nawthuners” for the most unspeakable of all offenses, registering blacks to vote. Faulkner throws this in our faces, as if to say, “we southerners don’t give a goddamn about what you Yankees think! If you have any complaints, come on down here and we’ll serve you the same!”
But the banal story of the Sartoris clan, though the “heart” of the novel, is the least of it. There are other narratives involved, through which the “real Faulkner” emerges. In the first pages of the novel we encounter a “man with a green eyeshade”, who speaks “in a voice utterly without inflection”, a “hillman of indeterminate age, a silent man who performed his duties with tedious slow care and who watched Bayard constantly and covertly all the while he was in view,” who will turn out to be a Snopes, Byron Snopes. Byron, like so many of Faulkner’s corrupts, shows little sign of life on the outside, but churns within, writing secret, smutty, self-abasing letters to Narcissa Benbow, Horace Benbow’s sister: “I think of you at night the way you walk down the street like I was dirt”—letters that Narcissa, whose own passions seem a bit tangled, keeps in a drawer. Byron’s obsession will eventually drive him to disaster, the first of Faulkner’s protagonists, though far from the last, to launch himself on a wild, dark, doomed—“doomed not from the first but even before it”, as Faulkner might say—attempt to free himself—to master—the passions and limitations of the flesh.
Horace Benbow doesn’t make an appearance until almost half-way through the novel, returning from the war like Bayard but sans glory. I tired of him very quickly. Faulkner seems to have based him, at least partly, on his friend Phil Stone, Faulkner’s mentor/confidante when Faulkner was still in high school. Stone, a lawyer like Horace, was the first man Faulkner had met who enjoyed literature. He had degrees from both the University of Mississippi and Yale (Horace went to Sewanee and Oxford). If Stone could recognize himself in Horace the experience couldn’t have been very pleasant. Faulkner condescends to Benbow, remarking when we first meet him on “his air of fine and delicate futility.” Horace has more than a touch of Ilya Ilyich Oblomov, the titular character of Ivan Goncharov’s Oblomov, the superfluous man, and more than a touch as well of his far more likable successor in Faulkner’s gallery of misfits, Quentin Compson, for his relationship with his sister Narcissa is dismayingly close. What makes Horace so tedious is his theatrical advertising of his uselessness. His “passion” is glass-blowing, a bizarre hobby he picked up in Europe. He describes his visit to Venice to observe the masters of the art to Narcissa while taking a bath (she’s in the next room, of course). The campy self-indulgence of his (barely believable) speech7 tell us more about his “fine and delicate futility” than we care to know:
“They work in caves,” he was shouting through the door, “down flights of stairs underground. You feel water seeping under your foot while you’re reaching for the next step, and when you put your hand out to steady yourself against the wall, it’s wet when you take it away. It feels just like blood.”
“Horace!”
“Yes, magnificent. And way ahead you see the glow. All of a sudden the tunnel comes glimmering out of nothing, then you see the furnace, with things rising and falling before it, shutting the light off, and the walls go glimmering again. At first they’re just shapeless things hunching about. Antic, with shadows on the bloody walls, red shadows; a glare, and black shapes like paper dolls weaving and rising and falling in front of it like a magic lantern shutter. And then a face comes out, blowing, and other faces sort of swell out of the red dark like painted balloons.
“And the things themselves! Sheerly and tragically beautiful. Like preserved flowers, you know. Macabre and inviolate; purged and purified as bronze, yet fragile as soap bubbles. Sound of pipes crystallized. Flutes and oboes, but mostly reeds. Oaten reeds. Damn it, they bloom like flowers right before your eyes. Midsummer night’s dream to a salamander.”
Yet though “we” tire of Horace quickly, Faulkner does not, as he will not tire of another futile lawyer, Gavin Stevens, who appears in Faulkner’s later novels and stories any number of times. Although it seems that Faulkner can’t, or at least doesn’t, resist making Benbow both ridiculous and creepy, he also seems convinced that if he lets Horace talk long enough we’ll see the good in him—the “good” man both trapped in and corrupted by a corrupt society, which is the role he will play in Sanctuary. As a young man, Faulkner often seemed to think of himself as “sheerly and tragically beautiful” (I’m pretty much guessing here), and a part of him never stopped admiring that fate and thinking it noble.
When he isn’t “teasing” his sister, Horace pays a sort of passive court to a woman named Belle Mitchell, married, with a daughter also named Belle, part of a “fast set” of decadent young folk, of whom Faulkner furiously disapproves, southerners with no real sense of being southern, caring nothing for honor or sacrifice. Belle is introduced to us as follows:
Belle greeted him [Horace] with a sort of languid possessive desolation. Her hand was warm, prehensile, like mercury in his palm exploring softly with delicate bones and petulant scented flesh. Her eyes were like hothouse grapes and her mouth was redly mobile, rich with discontent; but waked now from its rouged repose, this was temporarily lost.
Belle will eventually divorce her husband and marry Horace, Faulkner apparently anticipating his future, because in 1929, two years after he finished the first draft of what would become Sartoris, he would marry a divorced woman with a daughter (and a son), Estelle Oldham. Faulkner was 10 years old, living in Oxford, when he met Estelle, the same age as himself. They both loved to read and became friends. Both the physical and emotional changes that girls experience in adolescence—the change from asexual innocence to knowing sexual self-confidence in particular—never ceased to obsess and horrify Faulkner, changes he beheld in Estelle first hand. At age 21, she was engaged to a much better catch than Faulkner, Cornell Franklin, from a far wealthier family and a law school graduate rather than a high school dropout. Remarkably, Estelle offered to elope with Faulkner, but, whether out of honor or fear, he refused to do so. She married Franklin and moved with him to Hawaii. Ten years later, she returned to Oxford, divorced and with two children in two. Only her family’s wealth and standing in the community saved her from being a virtual outcast. Faulkner married her, with a sort of doomed fatality, two months after her divorce became final. Both were very unstable—they probably could not put up with “normal” people.
Before his marriage, in late 1928, before the publication of Sartoris, Faulkner began work on a new novel, staggeringly different in tone and quality, The Sound and the Fury. It’s hard to imagine a greater leap. Flags/Sartoris is stuffed with bad writing, banalities, and cliches. The Sound and the Fury is as close to perfection as a novel could be. He followed it with another masterpiece, As I Lay Dying. Both novels rely on stream of consciousness almost entirely and make severe demands on their readers. Unsurprisingly, they made little money. Faulkner followed his first two masterpieces with a semi-deliberate “shocker”, Sanctuary, which reintroduces us to Horace and Belle (and Little Belle) in what was surely an unwise exercise in overly autobiographical writing. In The Sound and the Fury and “As I Lay Dying”, Faulkner depicted his demons. In Sanctuary, his demons depicted him.
A man who marries his childhood sweetheart after her divorce and writes a novel about a man who marries a divorced woman and then is drawn to his humiliation and destruction by another—a “society belle” who suffers endless sexual outrages and, it is very strongly suggested, welcomes them all—is likely to reveal more about his feelings for women than he would wish, and that is certainly the case with Sanctuary, which, much as Faulkner tried to pooh-pooh it, is not a mere “potboiler. It is written in an extremely artful manner, deliberately difficult to follow, particularly the first scenes, taking place in a run-down mansion, intended to create a dream-like atmosphere, in which vague, shadowy events happen in an apparently random manner. There is, perhaps, a temporal order—though even that isn’t certain—but not a causal one. People appear, speak, and disappear, but they rarely seem to speak to each other, or to any discernable purpose. We are never given an explanation for their behavior, nor does any sort of “pattern” appear. Back in 1931, it seems, people were willing to put up with a great deal of artful, willful ambiguity in order to soak in the southern decadence, which, once you figure it all out, is pretty decadent.
There are many “shocking” events—Temple Drake, the “society belle” and ultimately Horace’s obsession, is raped with a corncob by the impotent gangster Popeye, after which Temple, rather inexplicably, moves in at a brothel and engages in sexual intercourse while various people watch—but this is all presented elliptically rather than graphicly described. We do not know what actually happens when Temple is raped, early in the book, in a corncrib, though we know that something did. Towards the middle of the book she gives a long, ornate “interview” with Horace that makes it more clear that she was raped—“I could feel the jerking going on inside my knickers ahead of his hand and me lying there trying not to laugh about how surprised and mad he was going to be in about a minute," but that’s as explicit as it gets.8 It is only near the close, at the trial of Lee Goodwin, another gangster, unjustly accused of a murder, that we learn the details:
The district attorney faced the jury. “I offer as evidence this object which was found at the scene of the crime.” He held in his hand a corn-cob. It appeared to have been dipped in dark brownish paint.
Horace, who has volunteered his services to defend Goodwin, more or less to see if he can do any good in his life, discovers of course that he can’t.9 Horace, Goodwin, Popeye, and Temple all very dubiously turned up at the “Old Frenchman’s Place” at the beginning of the novel, where both the rape and the murder took place. Horace expected Temple to testify that Goodwin did not commit the murder (up until this point the rape is not public knowledge), but, thanks to the clever questioning of the district attorney, clearly pre-arranged, Temple testifies against him, presumably seeking to protect Popeye . As a “wronged woman”, Temple’s word is, naturally, unquestionable, and Goodwin’s guilt is proclaimed as a matter of course. Faulkner, a bit hungry, one might say, for a big finish, has a mob break into the jail and burn Goodwin alive in a “coal oil lynching”, the ultimate southern horror—though much more likely, I suspect, to be visited on black than white offenders, Faulkner rather too neatly dodging the issue of southern racism, though otherwise he shows little respect for southern “honor”: during the assault on the jail, one of the lynchers, speaking of Temple, chuckles, “She was some baby. Jeez. I wouldn’t have used no cob.” Yeah, they’re protecting southern “honor”, all right!
Faulkner followed Sanctuary with another masterpiece, Light in August, which rather combined the exhausted southern gentility of The Sound and the Fury and the blindly striving poor whites of As I Lay Dying, with the added twist of tormented racial identity—tormented racial identity and tormented sexual obsession—though Faulkner seemingly couldn’t resist ending with another lynching, this time without the corncob but with a castration.
After that came the generally unheralded Pylon, about barnstorming pilots, allowing Faulkner to show off his knowledge of flying and to describe rootless, “modern” people, a novel I haven’t read. Faulkner followed that with Absalom! Absalom!, his longest novel and, I suspect, his attempt to outdo himself. “I think it’s the greatest novel ever written by an American", he reportedly told a friend. Well, a Moby Dick it definitely tries to be—Moby Dick with more than a dash of Great Expectations—but a Moby Dick it ain’t, in my opinion.10
Faulkner could be quite “cavalier”—cavalier or just careless, one might say—when putting together his novels. (The same could be said of Shakespeare and Dostoyevsky.)11 In The Sound and the Fury and As I Lay Dying, Faulkner as author presents a collection of stream of consciousness passages from various characters that the reader must grasp and understand. In Absalom! Absalom!, there is a similar collection of passages but it is two characters within the novel, Quentin Compson12 and his roommate at Harvard, “Shreve”, a Canadian, who must do so, Quentin narrating the story as a way of “explaining the South” to Shreve in a series of conversations that last over an extended period of time, Quentin returning from Jefferson on occasion with “new information” as the two try to figure out “what really happened”. Yet the number, length, and baroque profusion of detail of the various accounts that Quentin supposedly first masters himself and then conveys to his roommate is absurd. The novel, though still heavily flawed, would have worked much better if Faulkner had omitted the framing device. What is the point of “explaining” a novel in the first place? A novel should explain itself.
The basic story of Absalom! Absalom! is the all-too-Ahab-like obsession of a poor white, Thomas Sutpen, a man who grew up without either a comb or a toothbrush, and without even being able to imagine that such things existed. When he discovers that there is such a thing as privilege, when he, a man who has never worn shoes, discovers that there are men so rich that they can own shoes, dozens of them, and yet choose not to wear them, can spend the day lying in a hammock while being fanned by an elegantly attired slave, himself wearing shoes a poor white could only envy, he is determined that he will be the most privileged of all, that he will own the finest house, and, even more than that, he will found a dynasty. Yet his blind will to dominate corrupts everything it touches, and his family collapses in a single generation, in a welter of sexual and racial torments.
A great deal of the story is conveyed to Quentin by Rosa Coldfield, another “too literary” character, with a heavy flavor of Dickens’ Miss Havisham, from Great Expectations, wearing her wedding dress and sitting beside her rotting wedding cake for decades, refusing to move past the moment when her life ended, when she learned her husband to be had defrauded her. For Rosa, her life ended when Sutpen, as we ultimately learn, asked her to marry him on the condition that she first “prove her fertility” by bearing him a son. Years earlier, Sutpen had married and then outlived Rosa’s older sister Ellen, the mother of Sutpen’s two children, also deceased at the time of Sutpen’s “proposal” to Rosa. Rosa’s furious reaction to this most indecent proposal is to wear black for the next forty years, though one gathers from her narrative that, long before, she was one of those that held herself apart from the fury and mire of human veins. It is surely only Sutpen’s desperation that makes him willing to overlook Rosa’s chill, frightened demeanor.
Rosa is one of many spinsters that Faulkner ungallantly insists on making fun of, a literary exercise that I find trivial and self-congratulatory.13 His treatment of both Joanna Burden in Light in August, and Emily Grierson in “A Rose for Emily”, an absurdly overpraised short story whose best claim to fame is that it quite likely served as an inspiration for Psycho, is grotesquely sadistic. The best that can be said for Faulkner’s treatment of Rosa is that she survives the major events of the novel to die peaceably, though in her extended diatribes/monologues in which she fills Quentin in on the “demon” Sutpen and the endless indignities he inflicted on her and her family, which consume surely half the book, portray her—at very great length—as a pathetic sexual hysteric.
Absalom! Absalom! is told in a heavily layered manner, with numerous unreliable narrators and conflicting narratives, from which Quentin and Shreve attempt to sift “the truth”, the truth about the South. Faulkner is recreating his own experience: When you are young, and are told about the past, as Faulkner compulsively was, particularly by his grandmother, the past is a monolithic truth. Everything you are told is true. But gradually you notice contradictions, repetitions, things that seem unconvincing or clearly out of place. And so the revisions begin. And so is there any “truth”, truth real and entire? If we gather enough narratives, if we can judge confidently the motives and interests of the narrators, as well as the quality of the information available to them, and do the same as well for the actual historical actors, can we at last be confident that we know what happened and why?
For Faulkner and Quentin and Shreve, the answer is “yes”. The two hold a series of conversations at Harvard, Quentin brining back new information that supplements the original narrative supplied by Rosa, a frenzied largely first-hand account of all the outrages she either saw or heard about, filled with the frenzied bitterness of one who stood aside from life and stared furiously and helplessly at the unashamed antics of those who did not. Quentin’s father, a generation younger than Rosa, provides a much more sober account, and also has information that Rosa lacks, because his father was one of the first to “accept” Sutpen into respectable society in Jefferson.
We learn, if not from Rosa then Quentin’s father that Sutpen had his awakening to the existence of privilege as a young man in what was then western Virginia, but actually went to seek his fortune as an overseer at a plantation in Haiti. There is a slave insurrection, but after three days of hostilities the slaves voluntarily turn themselves over to Sutpen, declaring that they want him to be their master! A more disgusting turn one could not imagine, and one can only feel contempt for Faulkner’s racist nonsense at this point.
Bad faith and bad taste continue to haunt Faulkner’s imagination as both Sutpen and his son, who calls himself Charles Bon, whom Sutpen has disowned, because he believes his son’s mother had black ancestors, make their way to the U.S. Bon, somehow immensely wealthy, travels to New Orleans, depicted by Faulkner, as so many southern authors have, as a sort of cross between Paris and Baghdad, while Sutpen, also wealthy, heads for Jefferson, Mississippi, with his “willing” slaves in tow, along with a French architect, to build himself a proper mansion. In telling Sutpen’s story, Faulkner repeatedly resorts to the tactic of saying that Sutpen “somehow” acquired an immense fortune in a handful of years, “somehow” persuades slaves to willingly serve him, etc., etc., endowing Sutpen as a character with a sort of magical ability to become whatever Faulkner wants him to be, at significant cost to the believability of the narrative.
When Sutpen arrives in Jefferson, he once more “somehow” pushes himself into the forefront of Jefferson society, a shameless arriviste who “somehow” gains acceptance from the leading citizens, like Quentin’s grandfather, “General Compson”, who loans him money to plant his first crop of cotton. Sutpen horrifies the locals with his intimacy with his “foreign niggers”, as an outraged Rosa calls them, speaking a sort of bastard French to them and laboring naked in the mud with them to build the mansion his French architect has designed like monsters arising spontaneously from the muck. Yet, “somehow”, when the mansion is done he cements his position in the town by marrying Ellen Coldfield. After both children are born, we learn from Rosa that Sutpen continued his grossly inappropriate—and grossly unbelievable and grossly homoerotic—intimacy with his slaves by holding bizarre, debauched rituals on his plantation—boxing matches, where he fights half-naked with his own slaves—presumably fighting with such demonic fury that he always wins. His children watch the proceedings, son Henry shocked but daughter Judith fascinated (as one might guess).
Henry—growing up quickly because all of this has to happen before the Civil War—heads off to the University of Mississippi, where of course he becomes good friends with, who else, Charles Bon, and quickly becomes obsessed with the idea that Charles has to, absolutely has to, marry his sister Judith, and Faulkner’s bizarre homoerotic subtext, which first reared its incoherent head in Old Man Sutpen’s nude intimacies with his slaves, begins to burn at a white heat, though one can wonder—very much—if Faulkner had even half an awareness of what he was doing with this. Faulkner includes as text a letter— apparently given to Quentin by either Rosa or his father (probably the latter)—a ridiculously long and affected letter—written by a New Orleans attorney who manages Charles’ finances, fussing over him as though he were the Dauphin of France, determined to pamper him within an inch of his life, an absurdly self-indulgent exercise in hot house prose that, again, seriously damages the believability of Faulkner’s narrative.14
Charles visits the Sutpen mansion repeatedly, and eventually the engagement is announced. On the day of the wedding, however, Sutpen forbids the marriage. According to Rosa, Sutpen secretly followed Charles to New Orleans and discovered that he had already entered to a marriage (of sorts) with a woman of mixed race. Thus the marriage must be forbidden although the reason must be concealed, though Sutpen does tell Henry about it. However, Henry refuses to believe the story, and, disgusted by what he believes is his father’s deceit, he “renounces his birthright” and departs with Charles to take part in his wanton life in New Orleans, where, ultimately, he learns that his father’s story is true, though Bon doesn’t see why his “marriage” to a black woman should be considered relevant to his continued desire to marry Judith. At this point the Civil War has conveniently just broken out, causing all the men to depart and fight bravely. As Rose tells it, the two survive and return to Jefferson, Henry now willing, for whatever reason, to allow the marriage to proceed, until, in another sensational turn of events, Henry murders Charles by the mansion’s gates.
So, in effect the task before Quentin and Shreve is essentially to solve a decades-old murder mystery, a poor decision on Faulkner’s part, in my opinion. The resolution of a “serious” novel should not, I feel, turn on the revelation of mere “facts” that have been previously withheld from the reader. My summary will pass over a multitude of other horrors, as Old Man Sutpen himself must be ingloriously murdered, along with a variety of his miscellaneous offspring, who must be first introduced and then killed off, bringing the story down to the present day—everyone coming to no good end and taking their own sweet time in doing so, as a contemporary reviewer complained (I believe Clifton Fadiman, writing for the New Yorker)—without adding anything essential to it. But eventually we learn that Henry Sutpen murdered Charles not because he had discovered that Charles was his half-brother (though this is what Quentin and Shreve first believe), but because his mother had “Negro blood,” all of this sleuthing improbably occurring (in my opinion) in a Cambridge dorm room, occasionally interrupted for exercises in bare-chested deep breathing before an open window in the middle of the winter, thought to promote manliness.
A good many reviewers seem to extract from all this that Faulkner’s “moral” is that racism is the “explanation/curse” of the South, ignoring Quentin’s famous concluding line “I don’t hate the South”, and, really, ignoring Faulkner’s choice of the arriviste Sutpen as the villain of the piece. It was the arrivistes who ruined the South!
First of all, it is the hoariest and cheapest trick in the aristocrats’ book to blame everything on the arrivistes. Secondly, it is Faulkner’s frequent point in his other novels that Mississippi prior to the Civil War was a frontier society—the supposed “first families” of Jefferson have only been there a few more decades than Sutpen himself. Yet in Absalom! Absalom! Faulkner also places endless stress on Sutpen’s measureless hunger for dominion, to “catch up”, which both raises him up and hurls him down, though, at the same time, Quentin, and thus Faulkner, clearly doesn’t consider Sutpen to be “the South”—his story is true, but it isn’t the whole truth of the South itself.15
As I’ve repeatedly indicated, to take Absalom! Absalom! as an indictment of southern racism is more than a little absurd, since the novel itself is filled with unconscious racism of the grossest kind. Quentin himself, the moral core of the novel (far more stable than the “real Quentin” we met in The Sound and the Fury)16 tells us “I was raised to believe that there are three kinds of women: ladies, prostitutes, and niggers.”
Remarkably—or not—Faulkner dealt far more effectively with many of the issues raised in Absalom! Absalom! in one of his very best short stories, “Barn Burning” (1939). “Barn Burning” introduces us to presumably the first of the Snopes, Abner Snopes, who fought in the Civil War under Colonel Sartoris, naming his second son after him. The son, mercifully (I guess) called Sarty, as innocent as his father is vicious, irresistibly recalls Huckleberry Finn, though the frequent comic overtones of Twain’s classic are entirely absent in Faulkner’s story. Sarty is both terrified of his father and tied to him, seeing him as an authority that cannot be denied, the center of his life, however viciously he behaves, constantly longing to believe that his father is worthy of the respect he feels for him—though clearly Abner is worthy of no one’s respect. A petty tyrant who rules despotically over his poverty-stricken family, Snopes relieves his poor white hatred of his betters not by seeking to emulate them but by burning down their barns, this form of social revenge necessitating frequent moves. In the climax, Sarty informs on his father and then, ultimately, runs away, both from a father whom he believes is likely dead and his mother, older brother, two sisters, and aunt (all pictured by Faulkner as thoroughly unlovable).
“Barn Burning” is unusual, though hardly unique, among Faulkner’s short stories in being, well, “good” (in fact, great). Most of Faulkner’s short stories are frankly commercial in nature, whether sentimental or “shocking”, with a point (and, often, a moral as well) that the reader can hardly miss. Most of Faulkner’s critics, it seems to me, tend to dance around this point, pretending to be bewildered as to why the stories are so often on a different level entirely from the great novels, when the reason is obvious: commercial success was quite important to Faulkner, both for its own sake and because his compulsive marriage to Estelle Oldham had burdened him with three dependents, increased to four with the birth of his own daughter.
Two years after the publication of Absalom! Absalom! Faulkner published The Unvanquished, a connected series of seven short stories revisiting the Sartoris clan in the midst of the Civil War itself, a very mixed collection of southern cliches and occasional truths. It is in essence a picaresque coming of age novel, introducing us to “young Bayard” Sartoris, whom we first met as “old Bayard”. Bayard’s father, Colonel John Sartoris, is portrayed as a near godlike figure, almost always glimpsed on horseback and almost on his way to an urgent errand that conveniently keeps him out of the action, the family held together in his absence by “Granny”, another avatar of Faulkner’s own grandmother, a successor to her successor in time, “Miss Jenny”, from both Sartoris and Sanctuary.
Granny, I’m afraid, was a deal-breaker for me, her dowager duchess dialogue exhausting my patience half-way through the first installment, “Ambuscade”. The stories are narrated by “young Bayard”, who sounds very much like Huckleberry Finn, accompanied by “Bingo”, a black slave Bayard’s age whom we are supposed to admire for his loyalty to his master. In “Ambuscade”, Bayard and Ringo ambush a contingent of Yankee soldiers, Bayard firing a single shot. The two run off, thinking they killed themselves a Yankee, taking refuge in the Sartoris mansion. The Yankees naturally invade the house, but Granny hides the boys, a bit dubiously, underneath her skirts. More than a bit dubiously, a gentlemanly Union officer, who clearly sees through Granny’s ruse, refuses to violate a lady’s honor and allows the boys to escape—though we learn, eventually, that they “only” killed a horse—a deed that, I think, would, in real life, have provoked a far more violent response. There is, in fact, nothing more that soldiers hate than being fired upon by “civilians”—who under the circumstances are very likely to be peremptorily shot as “spies”.
One of my aunts, born in 1914, lived in Louisville, Ky., from 1920 to 1926 and as a child read a series of books, Two Little Confederates, two little devils who you can be sure subjected the invading Yankee devils to all manner of devilment. Edmund Wilson, in his study of Civil War literature, Patriotic Gore, discusses a similar genre for adults, in which the Confederates constantly outwit the Yankees, capturing wagonloads of lobster salad and chilled champagne supposedly destined for Yankee generals’ luncheons. Faulkner, I am sure, read many such novels as a child, and could not/did not resist the temptation to revisit them, adding “realistic” touches here and there, but, ultimately, not nearly enough of them.17 In particular, Faulkner repeatedly insists on the appalling lie that southern blacks preferred being slaves, as long as they had “good” masters, and repeats the gross cliché of Sartoris that the South fought, not for “gain”—not to keep millions of innocent and abused human beings in bondage—but rather for “honor”, for the “privilege” of dying—and killing—for its own sake. I won’t bother to summarize all the nonsense Faulkner delivers (you can read an extended summary here), but I won’t refrain from singling out one of the worst: even though we are told that Ringo is “smarter” than Bayard and in the course of the stories he is relied upon by both Bayard and Grannie as essentially an equal in their intelligence and reliability, Faulkner has Ringo say, in the Civil War’s aftermath, “I ain’t a nigger no more. I done been abolished”, which sounds to me like a particularly lame southern “joke”, repeated perhaps a million times to soothe southern vanity. Hang thy head in shame, William Faulkner! Hang it deep in shame!
In 1939 Faulkner published The Wild Palms, which he preferred to call If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem (his publisher objected to “If I Forget Thee", though I can’t understand why, since The Wild Palms is no more informative). The “novel” consists of two novellas, The Wild Palms and The Old Man, presented in alternating chapters. Faulkner says he wrote them that way, though one can wonder. There must be a Faulkner critic somewhere who argues that the two stories do complement and enhance one another, but I haven’t encountered that critic. What we have is a counterpoint of the two Faulkner worlds—the “Old South”, entirely embedded and defined by tradition, and the “New South”, broken free from tradition and all restraint, heading unrestrainedly towards disaster.
The Wild Palms could be called “Horace Benbow Runs Off with Temple Drake”, because it is another tale of hapless innocence wrecked by soulless passion, callow intern Harry Wilbourne running off with Charlotte Rittenmeyer, a pretentious socialite/“artist”, just the sort of woman who would get on Faulkner’s nerves. Charlotte is married with two children, rather like Faulkner’s wife, though unlike Estelle, she did not divorce her husband. Charlotte ultimately destroys Harry’s life, dying from a botched abortion which he administered and for which he is sentenced to life imprisonment. Easily the most famous line from The Wild Palms comes from Harry’s refusal to regret his disastrous life: “If I have to choose between grief and nothing I’ll choose grief,” quoted many times in films, probably owing to its use in Jean-Luc Godard’s novelle vague classic, Breathless.
I haven’t read The Wild Palms, and my lack of enthusiasm for “New South” Faulkner has dissuaded me from attempting it. The Old Man, which I have read, is “classic” Faulkner and much more enjoyable, largely a reworking of themes from Light In August, and, really, Faulkner’s own life, a man assuming the responsibility for another man’s child, although the protagonist of The Old Man, an unnamed convict freed, more or less, from prison due to a massive flood, exits the picture after saving the life of a pregnant woman adrift, like him, in the flood.
The convict, understandably, is not happy to see her, because it was the “love” of a woman that sent him to jail. He tried to rob a train so that he and his girlfriend could run off together, the enterprise predictably ending in disaster. Shortly after entering prison, he receives a postcard from his now-former girlfriend showing the site of her “hunnymoon.” As Faulkner tells the story, it’s clear that prison is the best thing that ever happened to his protagonist, freeing him “forever” from the fury and mire of human veins, only to have the “freedom” granted by the flood place the burden on his shoulders once more.18 “Fortunately” for the convict he is able to surrender the burden, though not until after the woman gives birth.19 In a typical Faulkner twist, prison officials, to cover up a previous error, claim the prisoner was trying to escape, and add ten years to his sentence, not realizing that for the convict, ten more years of prison is ten more years of freedom, a gift from heaven.
In 1940, Faulkner published The Hamlet, a book-length discussion of the Snopes family, which I read in college with great pleasure, not realizing at the time that Faulkner had pieced it together from a number of short stories and other material. The Hamlet is almost the exact opposite of The Unvanquished, composed of “good” Faulkner stories rather than bad ones, existing on a par with the great Faulkner novels of a decade earlier. Two years later Faulkner published Go Down, Moses a collection revolving largely around black southerners and representing Faulkner’s late-blooming struggle to treat blacks as protagonists in his stories—with, in my opinion, very mixed success.
The first story, Was, written specifically for the collection—almost, one guesses, as a genealogical exercise—takes us right back to the Civil War era, actually pre-Civil War, since the year is 1859, incorporating many characters that first appeared in the stories included in The Unvanquished, in particular two bachelor brothers, Theophilus and Amodeus McCaslin. The clumsy, “funky” names (and there will be others) let us know that Faulkner is retreating to his coy, fussy, fantasy South of myth. The two brothers live together and strongly resemble a pair of old queens, and in fact the air of misogyny and camp is so thick that one can wonder (again) if Faulkner even half knew what he was doing. In The Unvanquished, the relationship between Bayard and Ringo had clear homoerotic overtones as well. But if Faulkner ever tried to write “honestly” about homosexuality—between a black and a white man in particular—I’ve never heard about it. Instead, homosexuality in Faulkner always presents itself as a strange subtext, always there but never resolved.
Was creates the family tree of both Isaac McCaslin, son of Buck, who will ultimately function as one of the “consciences” of Yoknapatawpha County, and Lucas Beauchamp, a black man who will function as another. Isaac will be the protagonist of three more of the stories within Go Down, Moses, “The Old People”, “The Bear”, and “Delta Autumn”, stories in which Faulkner seeks to create a sense of myth, of red, white, and black men all emerging from a primordial state of nature where the “rules” of civilized society have not yet taken hold and all things blend into one another. It is very important to Faulkner to be able to trace Yoknapatawpha County back to its very beginnings, when it was first hewn out of the wilderness. The wilderness itself is a major character in all three stories, a brooding, overwhelming presence, complete in itself, and indifferent to humanity. In “The Old People” and “The Bear”, Isaac in effect becomes the “brother” of the wilderness. He never marries and holds himself apart from civilization, preserving himself, one might say, from its original sin, for Faulkner repeatedly implies, very strongly, that the settled cultivation of the land, the very foundation of “civilization”, is in itself the foundation of sin. There is, I think, a definite flavor, though far more somber, of the famous conclusion of Huckleberry Finn:
But I reckon I got to light out for the Territory ahead of the rest, because Aunt Sally she’s going to adopt me and sivilize me, and I can’t stand it. I been there before.
This is, I think, Faulkner’s attempt to dodge the South’s original sin, that of slavery, saying, in effect, “Sure, we’re awful, but so is everyone else.” Too easy by half in the first place, and, secondly, Faulkner generally praises “civilization”, specifically “honor” and “pride” as bestowing meaning on existence. If “silence” is the answer, why write books?
In the two stories following “Was” and preceding those dedicated to Isaac McCaslin, Faulkner sets before himself the “interesting” task of describing a black man who is eventually brought to the state where he is determined to kill a white man—pretty much the ultimate confrontation in the “Old South”. In both cases, in my opinion, his efforts fall well short of the “heart of the matter”, the simple and overwhelming wrong of white oppression of the black race. In each story, Faulkner gives his protagonist a specific reason for attacking a specific white man, rather than a generalized rage against an entire culture of oppression. Furthermore, he softens the matter by having both men “accept” the fact that will pay for their action with their lives—in fact, both men are portrayed as consciously accepting not only death, but death by lynching, and not only that, death by “coal oil” lynching—Faulkner’s fondness for melodramatic excess getting the better of him once more (as it so often did). But why should a man who repays injustice with justice—deserved punishment—be punished? Faulkner just can’t abide the thought of a black man triumphing over a white man and living to enjoy the fruits of his triumph. Moral victories yes, real ones no!
In constructing both stories, Faulkner takes a page from Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, portraying both the protagonist of “The Fire and the Hearth” (Lucas Beauchamp) and “Black Pantaloon” (“Rider”) as, in effect, “noble peasants”, who lead simple lives, close to the earth, both humbly and proudly accepting the burdens life gives them without thought of complaint. Both are men of immense strength and, it is strongly implied, strong sexual presence, yet both live chaste lives, devoted to their wives. Both are, in effect, the negatives of both the lazy, larcenous, libidinous “darkie” of American popular culture of the time and the “dangerous negro” rapist/murderer. Yet both men go up against a white man with a straight razor, the supposed standard weapon of the “dangerous negro”.
Faulkner can’t follow Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky completely in his sentimentalizing and romanticizing of Lucas and Rider because he can’t portray blacks as the “foundation” of the nation, the men who feed us all and defend us all, who bear the full weight of society uncomplainingly on their backs (so those who are getting the free ride like to believe), because as a southern white he can’t admit that the south is in its essence “black”.
“The Fire and the Hearth”, which follows “Was”, introduces us more extensively to Lucas Beauchamp, a black man who shares ancestry with Isaac, via a common grandfather, Lucius Quintus Carothers McCaslin. Lucas is an old man in “The Fire and the Hearth”, but we receive extensive backstory about him, to set up his eventual collision with another of his white relatives, his cousin Zack Edmonds, whose land he farms as sharecropper. Faulkner portrays Lucas as a sort of “Negro version” of Aristotle’s “megalopsychos”, aka, “great souled man”, a man with an immense—immense and justified—sense of his own self-worth. But some of the “choices” Faulkner makes in displaying Lucas’ greatness of soul are less than attractive to us today. For example, Lucas takes particular pride in his white ancestry (unfortunately, Faulkner can find no better way to compliment a black man than to say that he’s part white). He received a $1,000 legacy from his grandfather, a legacy that he refuses to spend, to show, in effect, that he doesn’t need anyone’s help. He also “insists” in wearing an aged top hat—clearly, a “white man’s hat”, again, clearly, to Faulkner’s intense approval. In the ultimate graceless touch, Faulkner describes a young Lucas’ face as “a composite of a whole generation of fierce and undefeated young Confederate soldiers,” Faulkner somehow honestly believing that it was an objective, verifiable truth that the Confederate soldiery were the bravest men who ever lived.
The relationship between Lucas and his cousin Zack replicates that of Bayard and Ringo in The Unvanquished: to Lucas Zack is “the man whom he had known from infancy, with whom he had lived until they were both grown almost as brothers lived. They had fished and hunted together, they had learned to swim in the same water, they had eaten at the same table in the white boy’s kitchen and in the cabin of the negro’s mother; they had slept under the same blanket before a fire in the woods.”
Unlike the case of Bayard and Ringo, whose relationship remains always if implausibly deferential, Faulkner works up an immense confrontation between Lucas and Zack,20 one that goes on for pages, full of Faulknerian mystification and flamboyance—rather like an opera—everything happening in slow motion because the actors must sing, at length, about everything they are doing, or have done or are going to do. When something dramatic is actually going to happen in Faulkner, he becomes compulsively vague about it, always trying as hard as he can to make it difficult to understand what is happening and why, because that is how life is. Ultimately, we reach a point at which Lucas is on the verge of killing Zack, with a pistol that Zack was pointing at him, sparing Zack’s life only when the pistol misfires, Lucas keeping the unfired bullet as a souvenir.
“The Fire and the Hearth” is Faulkner’s greatest attempt to deal with relationships between black and white in the south, and it comes up a very mixed bag. On the one hand, there are statements like this one:
Without changing the inflection of his voice and apparently without effort or even design Lucas became not Negro but nigger, not secret so much as impenetrable, not servile and not effacing, but enveloping himself in an aura of timeless and stupid impassivity almost like a smell.
Yet Lucas himself attributes his courage, his willingness to resist the white man—his willingness to accept even a “coal oil” lynching as his fate if he had killed Zack—to his “Carothers blood” and sets himself above Zack because he is a direct descendent of Carothers McCaslin and Zack is not. Faulkner presents Lucas as a man of immense moral strength, but only because he never gets above himself, lives “naturally”, according to the rhythms of nature, plowing his field with a team of mules rather than a tractor, massaging their muscles after a long day, never ceasing till the work is done, and never questioning why this is his fate, to labor while others do not, a black man so proud he refuses to protest his fate, as if to complain of his oppression were a sort of confession of weakness.
“Black Pantaloon” is a free-standing story, with little connection to the Yoknapatawpha “universe”, Faulkner attempting to tell the tragic story of a black man, “Rider”, and not doing a very good job of it, depicting him much as he does Lucas Beauchamp, though much less self-aware and “proud”. There were, and are, such black men, but they (generally) are deeply religious and live within the shared framework of the black church, a world that Faulkner rarely depicts, except for the extended scene near the end of The Sound and the Fury, a church service featuring an ecstatic preacher whose furious passion provokes a similar though calmer ecstasy in Dilsey—“I seed de beginnin, en now I sees de endin.” Faulkner deeply disliked white evangelicals, and always portrays them as sexually repressed hysterics.
Rider is unhinged by the death of his wife and runs wildly about the countryside, looking for trouble, eventually finding it in a confrontation with “Birdsong”, a white man who runs a crooked crap game, exploiting poor blacks desperate for excitement. When Rider confronts Birdsong with his deceit, the white man attacks him, but Rider, acting in self-defense, cuts Birdsong’s throat with a razor. Naturally, he is lynched for the “crime” of defending himself. Faulkner wants to show us the “truth” behind the standard “bad nigger” of white cliché, but simply turns the cliché inside out, no more convincing, if less repulsive, than the original.
What Faulkner really wants to write about, it seems to me, is black hatred of whites, not for some specific offense but rather for trapping them in a racist, oppressive, corrupting society that denies their humanity, but he lacks the nerve to do it. He doesn’t want to admit the full corruption of white society, doesn’t want to admit that blacks hate whites, or that whites deserve that hatred. The task was performed much better by Faulkner’s contemporary and rival, Thomas Wolfe, in his short story “The Child by Tiger”(1938). Wolfe is, if not forgotten, much less of a name now than Faulkner, but his first novel, Look Homeward Angel (1929) was for a long time one of the most famous twentieth-century American novels.21 Wolfe was a fellow southerner, from North Carolina, but wrote for the most part about the north, most specifically New York City. Faulkner once ranked Wolfe ahead himself, saying that Wolfe attempted “more” (presumably because Wolfe drew both on his southern past and his northern experience), but also suggested, both rudely and accurately, that Wolfe tended to repeat himself, writing the same passionate novel about a passionate struggling young novelist over and over again. This, however, is not a problem in “The Child of Tiger”, which tells the story of a powerful, mysterious black man who goes on a murder spree, killing both blacks and whites, virtually at random, with remorseless skill. At the conclusion, pursued by a lynch mob clearly out for blood, he exhausts his ammunition and races away, heading for a creek.
And here he did a curious thing—a thing that in later days was a subject of frequent and repeated speculation, a thing that no one ever wholly understood. It was thought that he would make one final break for freedom, that he would wade the creek and try to get away before they got to him. Instead, arrived at the creek, he sat down calmly on the bank, and, as quietly and methodically as if he were seated on his cot in an army barracks, he unlaced his shoes, took them off, placed them together neatly at his side, and then stood up like a soldier, erect, in his bare feet, and faced the mob.
“Black Pantaloon” was written in 1940, while “The Fire and the Hearth” was apparently written specifically for *Go Down, Moses”, published in 1942. One can wonder, very much, if Faulkner hadn’t read Wolfe’s story and twice tried to match it.
The next three stories in Go Down, Moses, “The Old People”, “The Bear”, and “Delta Autumn”, are in effect a trilogy devoted to Isaac McCaslin, building him up as a quasi-mythic figure, a woodsman scarcely separable from the woods itself, the brother of the black and red man, and the beasts of the forest primeval. “The Bear” is of course one of Faulkner’s most famous works, but in many respects it’s little more than an expansion of the themes found in “The Old People”, the encounter with the wild. In both “The Bear” and “Delta Autumn”, Isaac has an encounter with a “yankee” negro. They both speak in excruciatingly “correct” English, are contemptuous of Isaac, thinking him an ignorant southern hick, and show themselves utterly lacking common sense. Faulkner’s deep hostility towards blacks who dare “judge” the south is evident.
Despite the extraordinary humanity displayed in Faulkner’s greatest works, he could not rise above his origins. Having been born to privilege, he failed to surrender the notion that, if you possess privilege, you must somehow be worthy of it—not for the “old” reasons, of course, but for new ones. The parallels between Faulkner and Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky are again obvious. Tolstoy could never rid himself of the desire to be the center of attention, to be the handsome young prince, however much he preached “humility”, while Dostoyevsky both venerated the peasantry and refused to give them the vote. And their failure should make us wonder if we could ever do better.
1. I have never read Faulkner’s first two novels, Soldiers’ Pay and The Mosquitoes, since they don’t have much a reputation, or Pylon, or Requiem for a Nun, or The Wild Palms, the novella that, with The Old Man, which I have read, forms the “novel” The Wild Palms, aka If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem.
2. In Sanctuary, Horace, reacting to the arrest of Lee Goodwin for the murder of “Tommy”, says the following to “Miss Jenny”: “This morning the Baptist minister took him for a text. Not only as a murderer, but as an adulterer; a polluter of the free Democratico-Protestant atmosphere of Yoknapatawpha county. I gathered that his idea was that Goodwin and the woman should both be burned as a sole example to that child; the child to be reared and taught the English language for the sole end of being taught that it was begot in sin by two people who suffered by fire for having begot it. Good God, can a man, a civilised man, seriously . . .” In fact, Goodwin will be burned alive in a “coal oil” lynching, but “the woman”, Temple Drake, will walk after falsely accusing Goodwin both of raping her and murdering Tommy.
3. Notoriously, Faulkner’s publisher, after his agent managed to find him one, refused to publish the book as Faulkner had written it, severely cutting the original text and publishing the book under the title Sartoris, though the original text has long since been made available under the title Flags in the Dust, even though the title should be Banners in the Dust, for on page 19 “Miss Jenny” recalls dancing a “valse” in 1858 with then not yet General John Pope, “and her voice was proud and still as banners in the dust.” “Banners” is certainly more refulgent than “flags”, but apparently Faulkner was forgetful of his own prose, as he often was. General Pope was routed by Generals Lee and Jackson (and Longstreet) at the Second Battle of Bull Run. It is apparently a southern legend, which Faulkner either believed or made up himself, that the southern advance was so rapid that Pope had to flee wearing only his nightshirt.
4. The rapier merits the following dithyramb: “It was just such an implement as a Sartoris would consider the proper equipment for raising tobacco in a virgin wilderness; it and the scarlet heels and the ruffled wristbands in which he broke the earth and fought his stealthy and simple neighbors. And old Bayard held it upon his two hands, seeing in its stained fine blade and shabby elegant sheath the symbol of his race; that too in the tradition: the thing itself fine and clear enough, only the instrument had become a little tarnished in its very aptitude for shaping circumstance to its arrogant ends.” Faulkner seems to be implying that at least one Sartoris actually used the rapier on his “stealthy and simple neighbors”, which seems unlikely both in real life and even in Faulkner’s fiction.
5. J.E.B. Stuart was a “legendary” calvary officer for the south, though it seems a lot of people think he screwed up prior to Gettysburg and was one reason why the south lost that legendary battle.
6. Faulkner, despite his supposed obsession with “honor”, seemed not at all anxious to fight in the war. As a high school dropout, he would have had a hard time entering as other than a “common soldier”, which I’m sure he would not have enjoyed. However, in 1918, with the war apparently having no end, the British military established a flying school in Canada that, it seems, would accept virtually anyone who walked through the door, including William Faulkner. The war ended before Faulkner ever sat at the controls as a student pilot, but, a bit remarkably, he was allowed to buy a British officer’s uniform, which he was supposed to wear only on official occasions with the rest of his unit. Safe in Oxford, Faulkner wore the jacket and hat frequently, and, what’s more, walked with a cane and a limp for several years, telling people he had been shot down in France, a story he would tell in Hollywood in the thirties. In fact, Faulkner became a pilot, but never had any military experience beyond the few months training in Canada.
7. Barely believable and definitely too close to Faulkner’s often overripe prose. An author must separate himself from his creatures.
8. In a long, and not terribly convincing monologue (for which I blame Faulkner rather than Temple), she says that her “plan” is to thwart Popeye by changing herself into a boy, which is why she says she was “trying not to laugh about how surprised and mad he was going to be.”
9. He becomes both obsessed with and disgusted by Temple, and at one point, in a furiously vague and over-written passage, appears to be imagining himself raping his step-daughter Belle in a corn crib. When he returns home after his disastrous defense of Lee Goodwin, his wife Belle, lying in bed reading a magazine and eating chocolates (something I strongly suspect Faulkner does not approve of), informs him that “Little Belle” is “out”—that is, out disgracing both herself and Horace, informing all the world that he is a failure as a husband, as a father, and as a man.
10. In this long review of Hamlet, I discuss some of the many inconsistencies in Shakespeare’s greatest play.
11. Faulkner’s decision to resurrect Quentin, who of course committed suicide at the end of The Sound and the Fury, is the first of many bad decisions of Faulkner’s part. Quentin’s greatness as a character is inseparable from his doom. Making him in any sense of the word “normal” simply makes him trivial and insipid. Who wants a sensible Hamlet?
12. Consider first the master, describing Ahab: “There seemed no sign of common bodily illness about him, nor of the recovery from any. He looked like a man cut away from the stake, when the fire has overrunningly wasted all the limbs without consuming them, or taking away one particle from their compacted aged robustness.” And then the apprentice, describing Sutpen: “Not like a man who had been peacefully ill in bed and had recovered to move with a sort of diffident and tentative amazement in a world which he had believed himself on the point of surrendering, but like a man who had been through some solitary furnace experience which was more than just fever, like an explorer ay, who not only had to face the normal hardship of the pursuit which he chose but was overtaken by the added and unforeseen handicap of the fever also and fought through it at enormous cost not so much physical as mental, alone and unaided and not through blind instinctive will to endure and survive but to gain and keep to enjoy it the material prize for which he accepted the original gambit.”
13. Back in the 1990s, Paul Scott’s “Raj Quartet” novels became extremely famous thanks to the BBC series The Jewel in the Crown. I read the first chapter of the first book, encountering a silly spinster who looks forward to getting tipsy at parties. After that I read no further.
14. The enthusiasm Faulkner displays in conveying the attorney’s fussiness—he seems to be enjoying himself immensely—strikes me as quite “spinsterish”. I’ve forgotten who the letter is supposedly addressed to and am too lazy to bother to check.
15. Faulkner dealt far more intelligently with the tensions between poor and wealthy whites in one of his best short stories, “Barn Burning”.
16. However, Faulkner did revive Quentin effectively in That Evening Sun, one of his best short stories. A black friend of mine who spent his first years in the “Old South” (late 1940s) said the story captured the atmosphere of his youth perfectly.
17. For example, in “Ambuscade”, Bayard cannot lift the rifle by himself and must rest it on Bingo’s shoulder, and the recoil sends him sprawling. Yet the episode is not strictly humorous because Bayard believes he did kill a Union soldier and eventually we learn that he did kill a horse. Killing a Yankee’s horse is almost as good as killing a Yankee! (In addition, it might be noted that Huckleberry Finn has no difficulty handling a rifle. When he wants to shoot something he does so.)
18. The Shawshank Redemption, Steven King’s well-known novel/film, is an innocently misogynistic celebration of the blessed freedom of prison life: No chicks, dude! No chicks! You’re safe! You’re perfectly safe!”
19. Even more conveniently, both for the convict and for Faulkner, the convict passes out when the woman gives birth, which she somehow manages to accomplish satisfactorily all on her own. Faulkner very often omits the description of climactic events—too often, in my opinion—enveloping their outcome in “mystery”, but also freeing him from the burden of having to describe them. Bill, the true artist never flinches!
20. The wives of both men give birth at the same time, but Zack’s wife is so weakened by the birth that she cannot care for her child and Zack forces Lucas’ wife to care for it instead, to the neglect of her own, which eventually dies.
21. Fifties novelists like Norman Mailer grew up on Look Homeward Angel’s throbbing, passionate prose. Wolfe’s complete works are now available on Kindle for $0.99.
