The Essential Faulkner, Page 2

  Although the pattern is presented in terms of a single Mississippi county, it can be extended to the Deep South as a whole; and Faulkner always seems conscious of its wider application. He might have been thinking of his own novels when he described the ledgers in the commissary of the McCaslin plantation, in Go Down, Moses. They recorded, he says, “that slow trickle of molasses and meal and meat, of shoes and straw hats and overalls, of plowlines and collars and heelbolts and clevises, which returned each fall as cotton”—in a sense they were local and limited; but they were also “the continuation of that record which two hundred years had not been enough to complete and another hundred would not be enough to discharge; that chronicle which was a whole land in miniature, which multiplied and compounded was the entire South.”

  III

  “Tell about the South,” says Quentin Compson’s roommate at Harvard, a Canadian named Shreve McCannon who is curious about the unknown region beyond the Ohio. “What’s it like there?” he asks. “What do they do there? Why do they live there? Why do they live at all?” And Quentin, whose background is a little like that of Faulkner himself and who sometimes seems to speak for him—Quentin answers, “You can’t understand it. You would have to be born there.” Nevertheless, he tells a long and violent story that reveals something essential in the history of the Deep South, which is not so much a region as it is, in Quentin’s mind, an incomplete and frustrated nation trying to relive its legendary past.

  The story he tells—I am trying to summarize the plot of Absalom, Absalom!—is that of a mountain boy named Thomas Sutpen whose family drifted into the Virginia lowlands, where his father found odd jobs on a plantation. One day the father sent him with a message to the big house, but he was turned away at the door by a black man in livery. Puzzled and humiliated, the mountain boy was seized upon by the lifelong ambition to which he would afterward refer as “the design.” He too would own a plantation with slaves and a liveried butler; he would build a mansion as big as any of those in the Tidewater; and he would have a son to inherit his wealth.

  A dozen years later Sutpen appeared in the frontier town of Jefferson, where he managed to obtain a hundred square miles of land from the Chickasaws. With the help of twenty wild Negroes from the jungle and a French architect, he set about building the largest house in northern Mississippi, using timbers from the forest and bricks that his Negroes molded and baked on the spot; it was as if the mansion, Sutpen’s Hundred, had been literally torn from the soil. Only one man in Jefferson—he was Quentin’s grandfather, General Compson—ever learned how and where Sutpen had acquired his slaves. He had shipped to Haiti from Virginia, worked as an overseer on a sugar plantation, and married the rich planter’s daughter, who had borne him a son. Then, finding that his wife had Negro blood, he had simply put her away, with her child and her fortune, while keeping the twenty slaves as a sort of indemnity. He explained to General Compson, in the stilted speech he had taught himself as appropriate to his new role of Southern gentleman, that she could not be “adjunctive to the forwarding of the design.”

  “Jesus, the South is fine, isn’t it,” Shreve McCannon says. “It’s better than the theatre, isn’t it. It’s better than Ben Hur, isn’t it. No wonder you have to come away now and then, isn’t it.”

  In Jefferson he married again, Quentin continues. This time Sutpen’s wife belonged to a pious family of the neighborhood and she bore him two children, Henry and Judith. He became the biggest cotton planter in Yoknapatawpha County, and it seemed that his “design” had already been fulfilled. At this moment, however, Henry came home from the University of Mississippi with an older and worldlier new friend, Charles Bon, who was in reality Sutpen’s son by his first marriage. Charles became engaged to Judith. Sutpen learned his identity and, without making a sign of recognition, ordered him from the house. Henry, who refused to believe that Charles was his half-brother, renounced his birthright and followed him to New Orleans. In 1861 all the male Sutpens went off to war, and all survived four years of fighting. Then, in the spring of 1865, Charles suddenly decided to marry Judith, even though he was certain by now that she was his half-sister. Henry rode beside him all the way back to Sutpen’s Hundred, but tried to stop him at the gate, killed him when he insisted on going ahead with his plan, told Judith what he had done, and disappeared.

  “The South,” Shreve McCannon says as he listens to the story. “The South. Jesus. No wonder you folks all outlive yourselves by years and years.” And Quentin says, remembering his own sister with whom (or with a false notion of whom) he was in love—just as Charles Bon, and Henry too, were in love with Judith—“I am older at twenty than a lot of people who have died.”

  But Quentin’s story of the Deep South does not end with the war. Colonel Sutpen came home, he says, to find his wife dead, his son a fugitive, his slaves dispersed (they had run away before they were freed by the Union army), and most of his land about to be seized for debt. Still determined to carry out “the design,” he did not pause for breath before undertaking to restore his house and plantation as nearly as possible to what they had been. The effort failed; Sutpen lost most of his land and was reduced to keeping a crossroads store. Now in his sixties, he tried again to beget a son; but his wife’s younger sister, Miss Rosa Coldfield, was outraged by his proposal (“Let’s try it,” he seems to have said, though his words are not directly repeated—“and if it’s a boy we’ll get married”); and later poor Milly Jones, whom he seduced, gave birth to a girl. At that Sutpen abandoned hope and provoked Milly’s grandfather into killing him. Judith survived her father for a time, as did the half-caste son of Charles Bon by a New Orleans octoroon. After the death of these two by yellow fever, the great house was haunted rather than inhabited by an ancient mulatto woman, Sutpen’s daughter by one of his slaves. The fugitive Henry Sutpen came home to die; the townspeople heard of his illness and sent an ambulance after him; but old Clytie thought they were arresting him for murder and set fire to Sutpen’s Hundred. The only survivor of the conflagration was Jim Bond, a half-witted, saddle-colored creature who was Charles Bon’s grandson.

  “Now I want you to tell me just one thing more,” Shreve McCannon says after hearing the story. “Why do you hate the South?”—“I dont hate it,” Quentin says quickly, at once. “I dont hate it,” he repeats, apparently speaking for the author as well as himself. I dont hate it, he thinks, panting in the cold air, the iron New England dark; I dont. I dont hate it! I dont hate it!

  The reader cannot help wondering why this somber and, at moments, plainly incredible story had so seized upon Quentin’s mind that he trembled with excitement when telling it, and why Shreve McCannon felt that it revealed the essence of the Deep South. It seems to belong in the realm of Gothic romance, with Sutpen’s Hundred taking the place of a haunted castle on the Rhine, with Colonel Sutpen as Faust and Charles Bon as Manfred. Then slowly it dawns on you that most of the characters and incidents have a double meaning; that besides their place in the story they also serve as symbols or metaphors with a general application. Sutpen’s great design, the land he stole from the Indians, the French architect who built his mansion with the help of wild Negroes from the jungle, the woman of mixed blood whom he married and disowned, the unacknowledged son who ruined him, the poor white whom he wronged and who killed him in anger, and the final destruction of the mansion like the downfall of a social order: all these might belong to a tragic fable of Southern history. With a little cleverness, the whole novel might be explained as a connected and logical allegory, but this, I think, would be going far beyond the author’s intention. First of all he was writing a story, and one that affected him deeply, but he was also brooding over a social situation. More or less unconsciously, the incidents in the story came to represent the forces and elements in the social situation, since the mind naturally works in terms of symbols and parallels. In Faulkner’s case, this form of parallelism is not confined to Absalom, Absalom! It can be found in the whole fictional framework that
he has been elaborating in novel after novel, until his work has become a myth or legend of the South.

  I call it a legend because it is obviously no more intended as a historical account of the country south of the Ohio than The Scarlet Letter was intended as a history of Massachusetts or Paradise Lost as a factual account of the Fall. Briefly stated, the legend might run something like this: The Deep South was ruled by planters some of whom were aristocrats like the Sartoris clan, while others were new men like Colonel Sutpen. Both types were determined to establish a lasting social order on the land they had seized from the Indians (that is, to leave sons behind them). They had the virtue of living single-mindedly by a fixed code; but there was also an inherent guilt in their “design,” their way of life; it was slavery that put a curse on the land and brought about the Civil War. [I must add one remark in deference to an argument of Cleanth Brooks’, in his very useful work William Faulkner: The Yoknapatawpha Country (1963). Although Sutpen had more than his share of the guilt, he never pretended to follow the code of conduct that in some measure atoned for it. Temperamentally he was less of a Southerner than a Northern robber baron out of his time and place; or he might even stand for the blindly ambitious man of all ages. To the other planters, he was always an alien. Quentin Compson, their descendant, regarded him as “trash, originless”—so Faulkner told me in a letter—but Quentin also grieved the fact that a man like Sutpen “could not only have dreamed so high but have had the force and strength to have failed so grandly.” Thus, it was not at all in his character, but rather in his fate, that Sutpen became emblematic of the South.]

  After the War was lost, partly as a result of the Southerners’ mad heroism (for who else but men as brave as Jackson and Stuart could have frightened the Yankees into standing together and fighting back?) the planters tried to restore their “design” by other methods. But they no longer had the strength to achieve more than a partial success, even after they had freed their land from the carpetbaggers who followed the Northern armies. As time passed, moreover, the men of the old order found that they had Southern enemies too; they had to fight against a new exploiting class descended from the landless whites of slavery days. In this struggle between the clan of Sartoris and the unscrupulous tribe of Snopes, the Sartorises were defeated in advance by a traditional code that kept them from using the weapons of the enemy. As a price of victory, however, the Snopeses had to serve the mechanized civilization of the North, which was morally impotent in itself, but which, with the aid of its Southern retainers, ended by corrupting the Southern nation.

  Faulkner’s novels of contemporary Southern life—especially those written before 1945—continue the legend into a period that he regards as one of moral confusion and social decay. He is continually seeking in them for violent images to convey his sense of outrage. Sanctuary is the most violent of all his novels; it has been the most popular and is by no means the least important (in spite of Faulkner’s comment that it was “a cheap idea … deliberately conceived to make money”). The story of Popeye and Temple Drake has more meaning than appears on a first hasty reading—the only reading that early critics were willing to grant it. Popeye himself is one of several characters in Faulkner’s novels who represent the mechanical civilization that has invaded and conquered the South. He is always described in mechanical terms: his eyes “looked like rubber knobs”; his face “just went awry, like the face of a wax doll set too near a hot fire and forgotten”; his tight suit and stiff hat were “all angles, like a modernistic lampshade”; and in general he had “that vicious depthless quality of stamped tin.” Popeye was the son of a professional strikebreaker, from whom he had inherited syphilis; he was the grandson of a pyromaniac, and he had spent most of his childhood in an institution. He was the man “who made money and had nothing he could do with it, spend it for, since he knew that alcohol would kill him like poison, who had no friends and had never known a woman”—in other words, he was a compendium of all the hateful qualities that Faulkner assigns to finance capitalism. Sanctuary is not a connected allegory, as George Marion O’Donnell condemned it for being4—he was the first critic to approach it seriously—but neither is it a mere accumulation of pointless horrors. It is an example of the Freudian method turned backward, being full of sexual nightmares that are in reality social symbols. It is somehow connected in the author’s mind with what he regards as the rape and corruption of the South.

  In his novels dealing with the present—I am speaking of those written before 1945—Faulkner makes it clear that the descendants of the old ruling caste have the wish but not the courage or the strength to prevent this new disaster. They are defeated by Popeye (like Horace Benbow), or they run away from him (like Gowan Stevens, who had been to college at Virginia and learned how to drink like a gentleman, but not to fight for his principles), or they are robbed and replaced in their positions of influence by the Snopeses (like old Bayard Sartoris, the president of the bank), or they drug themselves with eloquence and alcohol (like Quentin Compson’s father), or they retire into the illusion of being inviolable Southern ladies (like Mrs. Compson, who says, “It can’t be simply to flout and hurt me. Whoever God is, He would not permit that. I’m a lady.”), or they dwell so much on the past that they are incapable of facing the present (like Reverend Hightower of Light in August), or they run from danger to danger (like young Bayard Sartoris) frantically seeking their own destruction. Faulkner’s novels are full of well-meaning and even admirable persons, not only the grandsons of the cotton aristocracy, but also pine-hill farmers and storekeepers and sewing-machine agents and Negro cooks and sharecroppers; but they are almost all of them defeated by circumstances and they carry with them a sense of their own doom.

  They also carry, whether heroes or villains, a curious sense of submission to their fate. “There is not one of Faulkner’s characters,” says André Gide in his dialogue on “The New American Novelists,” “who properly speaking has a soul”; and I think he means that not one of them, in the early novels, exercises the faculty of conscious choice between good and evil. They are haunted, obsessed, driven forward by some inner necessity. Like Miss Rosa Coldfield in Absalom, Absalom! they exist in “that dream state in which you run without moving from a terror in which you cannot believe, toward a safety in which you have no faith.” Or, like the slaves freed by General Sherman’s army, in The Unvanquished, they blindly follow the road toward any river, believing that it will be their Jordan:

  They were singing, walking along the road singing, not even looking to either side. The dust didn’t even settle for two days, because all that night they still passed; we sat up listening to them and the next morning every few yards along the road would be the old ones who couldn’t keep up any more, sitting or lying down and even crawling along, calling to the others to help them; and the others—the young ones—not stopping, not even looking at them. “Going to Jordan,” they told me. “Going to cross Jordan.”

  Most of Faulkner’s characters, black and white, are a little like that. They dig for gold frenziedly after they have lost their hope of finding it (like Henry Armstid in The Hamlet and Lucas Beauchamp in Go Down, Moses); or they battle against and survive a Mississippi flood for the one privilege of returning to the state prison farm (like the tall convict in “Old Man”); or, a whole family together, they carry a body through flood and fire and corruption to bury it in the cemetery at Jefferson (like the Bundrens in As I Lay Dying); or they tramp the roads week after week in search of men who had promised but never intended to marry them (like Lena Grove, the pregnant woman of Light in August); or, pursued by a mob, they turn at the end to meet and accept death (like Joe Christmas in the same novel). Even when they seem to be guided by a conscious purpose, like Colonel Sutpen, it is not something they have chosen by an act of will, but something that has taken possession of them: Sutpen’s great design was “not what he wanted to do but what he just had to do, had to do it whether he wanted to or not, because if he did not do it he knew th
at he could never live with himself for the rest of his life.” In the same way, Faulkner himself writes, not what he wants to, but what he just has to write whether he wants to or not.

  IV

  It had better be admitted that almost all his novels have some obvious weakness in structure. Some of them combine two or more themes having little relation to each other, as Light in August does, while others, like The Hamlet, tend to resolve themselves into a series of episodes resembling beads on a string. In The Sound and the Fury, which is superb as a whole, we can’t be sure that the four sections of the novel are presented in the most effective order; at any rate, we can’t fully understand the first section until we have read the three that follow. Absalom, Absalom! though at first it strikes us as being pitched in too high a key, is structurally the soundest of all the novels in the Yoknapatawpha series—and it gains power in retrospect; but even here the author’s attention seems to shift from the principal theme of Colonel Sutpen’s design to the secondary theme of incest and miscegenation.

  Faulkner seems best to me, and most nearly himself, either in long stories like “The Bear,” in Go Down, Moses, and “Old Man,” which was published as half of The Wild Palms, and “Spotted Horses,” which was first printed separately, then greatly expanded and fitted into the loose framework of The Hamlet—all three stories are included in this volume; or else in the Yoknapatawpha saga as a whole. That is, he has been most effective in dealing with the total situation always present in his mind as a pattern of the South, or else in shorter units which, though often subject to inspired revision, have still been shaped by a single conception. It is by his best that we should judge him, as every other author; and Faulkner at his best—even sometimes at his worst—has a power, a richness of life, an intensity to be found in no other American writer of our time. He has—once again I am quoting from Henry James’s essay on Hawthorne—“the element of simple genius, the quality of imagination.”