The Essential Faulkner (2 page)

Faulkner’s mythical kingdom is a county in northern Mississippi, on the border between the sand hills covered with scrubby pine and the black earth of the river bottoms. Except for the storekeepers, mechanics, and professional men who live in Jefferson, the county seat, all the inhabitants are farmers or woodsmen. Except for a little lumber, their only commercial product is baled cotton for the Memphis market. A few of them live in big plantation houses, the relics of another age, and more of them in substantial wooden farmhouses; but still more of
them are tenants, no better housed than slaves on good plantations before the Civil War. Yoknapatawpha County—“William Faulkner, sole owner and proprietor,” as he inscribed on one of the maps he drew—has a population of 15,611 persons scattered over 2400 square miles. It sometimes seems to me that every house or hovel has been described in one of Faulkner’s novels, and that all the people of the imaginary county, black and white, townsmen, farmers, and housewives, have played their parts in one connected story.

He has so far [1945] written nine books wholly concerned with Yoknapatawpha County and its people, who also appear in parts of three others and in thirty or more uncollected stories.
Sartoris
was the first of the books to be published, in the spring of 1929; it is a romantic and partly unconvincing novel, but with many fine scenes in it, such as the hero’s visit to a family of independent pinehill farmers; and it states most of the themes that the author would later develop at length.
The Sound and the Fury
, published six months later, recounts the going-to-pieces of the Compson family, and it was the first of Faulkner’s novels to be widely discussed. The books that followed, in the Yoknapatawpha series, are
As I Lay Dying
(1930), about the death and burial of Addie Bundren;
Sanctuary
(1931), for a long time the most popular of his novels;
Light in August
(1932), in some ways the best;
Absalom, Absalom!
(1936), about Colonel Sutpen and his ambition to found a family;
The Unvanquished
(1938), a cycle of stories about the Sartoris dynasty;
The Wild Palms
(1939), half of which deals with a convict from back in the pine hills;
The Hamlet
(1940), a first novel about the Snopes clan, with others to follow; and
Go Down, Moses
(1942), in which Faulkner’s principal theme is the relation between whites and Negroes. There are also many Yoknapatawpha stories in
These 13
(1931) and
Doctor Martino
(1934), besides other stories privately printed (like
Miss Zilphia Gant
, 1932) or published
in magazines and still to be collected or used as episodes in novels.
²

Just as Balzac, who may have inspired the series, divided his
Comédie Humaine
into “Scenes of Parisian Life,” “Scenes of Provincial Life,” “Scenes of Private Life,” so Faulkner might divide his work into a number of cycles: one about the planters and their descendants, one about the townspeople of Jefferson, one about the poor whites, one about the Indians, and one about the Negroes. Or again, if he adopted a division by families, there would be the Compson-Sartoris saga, the continuing Snopes saga, the McCaslin saga, dealing with the white and black descendants of Carothers McCaslin, and the Ratliff-Bundren saga, devoted to the backwoods farmers of Frenchman’s Bend. All the cycles or sagas are closely interconnected; it is as if each new book was a chord or segment of a total situation always existing in the author’s mind. Sometimes a short story is the sequel to an earlier novel. For example, we read in
Sartoris
that Byron Snopes stole a packet of letters from Narcissa Benbow; and in “There Was a Queen,” a story published five years later, we learn how Narcissa got the letters back again. Sometimes, on the other hand, a novel contains the sequel to a
story; and we discover from an incidental reference in
The Sound and the Fury
that the Negro woman whose terror of death was portrayed in “That Evening Sun” had indeed been murdered and her body left in a ditch for the vultures. Sometimes an episode has a more complicated history. Thus, in the first chapter of
Sanctuary
, we hear about the Old Frenchman place, a ruined mansion near which the people of the neighborhood had been “digging with secret and sporadic optimism for gold which the builder was reputed to have buried somewhere about the place when Grant came through the country on his Vicksburg campaign.” Later this digging for gold served as the subject of a story published in the
Saturday Evening Post:
“Lizards in Jamshyd’s Courtyard.” Still later the story was completely rewritten and became the last chapter of
The Hamlet
.
³

As one book leads into another, the author sometimes falls into inconsistencies of detail. There is a sewing-machine agent named V. K. Suratt who appears in
Sartoris
and some of the stories written at about the same time. When we reach
The Hamlet
, his name has changed to Ratliff, although his character remains the same (and his age, too, for all the twenty years that separate the backgrounds of the two novels). Henry Armstid is a likable figure in
As I Lay Dying
and
Light in August
; in
The Hamlet
he is mean and half-demented. His wife, whose character remains consistent, is called Lula in one book and Martha in another; in the third she is nameless. There is an Indian chief named Doom who appears in several stories; he starts as the father of Issetibeha (in “Red Leaves”) and ends as his nephew (in “A Justice”). The mansion called Sutpen’s Hundred was built of brick at the beginning of
Absalom, Absalom!
but at the end of the novel it is all wood and inflammable except for the chimneys.
But these errors are inconsequential, considering the scope of Faulkner’s series; and I should judge that most of them are afterthoughts rather than oversights.

All his books in the Yoknapatawpha cycle are part of the same living pattern. It is this pattern, and not the printed volumes in which part of it is recorded, that is Faulkner’s real achievement. Its existence helps to explain one feature of his work: that each novel, each long or short story, seems to reveal more than it states explicitly and to have a subject bigger than itself. All the separate works are like blocks of marble from the same quarry: they show the veins and faults of the mother rock. Or else—to use a rather strained figure—they are like wooden planks that were cut, not from a log, but from a still living tree. The planks are planed and chiseled into their final shapes, but the tree itself heals over the wound and continues to grow. Faulkner is incapable of telling the same story twice without adding new details. In the present volume I wanted to use part of
The Sound and the Fury
, the novel that deals with the fall of the Compson family. I thought that the last part of the book would be most effective as a separate episode, but still it depended too much on what had gone before. Faulkner offered to write a very brief introduction that would explain the relations of the characters. What he finally sent me is the much longer passage printed at the end of the volume: a genealogy of the Compsons from their first arrival in America. Whereas the novel is confined (except for memories) to a period of eighteen years ending on Easter Sunday, 1928, the genealogy goes back to the battle of Culloden in 1745, and forward to the year 1943, when Jason, last of the Compson males, has sold the family mansion, and Sister Caddy has last been heard of as the mistress of a German general. The novel that Faulkner wrote about the Compsons had long ago been given what seemed its final shape, but the pattern or body of legend behind the novel—and behind his other books—was still developing.

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.”

“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.