As Much as Ere a Man

As I Lay Dying a novel by William Faulkner.  Faulkner Novels 1930-1935 in the Library of America. Pages 1-178.  *****

I picked up As I Lay Dying almost on a whim—I’d read the early stories and novels of Hemingway and had this Library of America volume of Faulkner, so I thought it might be interesting to compare the two—and found myself suddenly in the vast universe of the great writer.  I’d almost forgotten what that was like.  “I am going to write a book,” the 32-year-old Faulkner resolved, “by which, at a pinch, I can stand or fall if I never touch ink again.”  He had actually already done that with The Sound and the Fury.  He did it again with As I Lay Dying.

I read this book when I was a teenager, longing to be a writer.  It was one of the first Faulkners I read.  It’s a hell of an experience to encounter it again fifty years later.

It tells the story of the Bundren family, country people who figure only tangentially in Faulkner’s other work (I actually don’t remember mention of them anywhere).  Addie is the mother who is dying.  Though she has one son who is still young, Vardaman, she’s so worn out by life (or perhaps felled by some serious illness) that she’s taken to bed to die, lies there like a bag of sticks.  Her son Cash—the family carpenter—is out in the yard making her coffin.  Two other sons—Jewel and Darl (the strange one, though all these people seem pretty strange to me) are heading off to sell some lumber and earn three dollars, though they might miss their mother’s death.  Still, they need that three dollars.

Addie’s daughter, Dewey Dell, fans her as she lies in bed.  And Anse, the patriarch of this clan, is mystified by how to proceed, whether his sons should actually perform this errand, when a bad rainstorm is threatening and they might not get back with the family’s only wagon.  The one promise Anse made to his wife, apparently when they first married (their courtship lasted about twenty minutes) was that when she died he would get her to the town of Jefferson for her burial.  She wants to be buried with her people.

“I mislike undecision as much as ere a man,” he says.  “Don’t ere a man mislike it more.”

What’s amazing about this simple story, a country family trying to give the matriarch a decent burial, is the way it’s told, which seems startling now but must have been even moreso in 1930.  Fifteen characters—Bundrens and others—narrate the ongoing story in the first person, beginning abruptly with Darl.

“Jewel and I come up from the field, following the path in single file.  Although I am fifteen feet ahead of him, anyone watching us from the cottonhouse can see Jewel’s frayed and broken straw hat a full head above my own.

“The path runs straight as a plumb-line, worn smooth by feet and baked brick-hard by July, between the green rows of laidby cotton, to the cottonhouse in the center of the field, where it turns and circles the cottonhouse at four soft right angles and goes on across the field again, worn so by feet in fading precision.”

I don’t hesitate—despite the grim situation—to call the book a comedy.  It’s true that Addie is dying; her time has come, and that’s part of life.  What happens around her—Anse’s ruminations on undecision, Cash holding up the coffin so she can see how it’s going, Vardaman showing up with a fish he has caught that is nearly as big as he is, dragging it through the dust, somehow confusing his experience of cleaning and cutting up the fish with his mother’s demise, resulting in the shortest chapter in all of Faulkner, under the heading Vardaman.  “My mother is a fish.”  But Anse has my favorite line in the book, this toothless man who nevertheless manages to gum snuff but has been living for years without being able to eat like a normal human being.  He has one immediate reaction when his wife dies: “God’s will be done.  Now I can get them teeth.”

The rains come, and Jewel and Darl have terrible difficulties but eventually get back; there is a funeral at the house but then the family sets out for Jefferson to bury the body, and runs into more rains, a flooding river, washed-out bridges, one calamity after another.  People urge Anse to bury the woman closer to home—they’re still trying to get to Jefferson nine days after Addie’s death, with buzzards hovering the wagon, people covering their mouths and scattering as the wagon approaches—but he is obsessed with getting to Jefferson, and we eventually discover it isn’t just for them teeth.  In the meantime, we hear from every member of the family, including the dead Addie, and realize there’s much more here than meets the eye.  This is an epic tale told in a small space.

Faulkner had published four novels when he composed it, the apprentice novels Soldier’s Pay and Mosquitoes, the large novel which he called Flags in the Dust and his eventual publisher (he had to shop it around a lot) abridged and retitled Sartoris, and the book I consider his greatest, The Sound and the Fury.  He regarded As I Lay Dying as a tour de force: “Before I ever put pen to paper and set down the first words I knew what the last word would be.”  His books hadn’t made money, so he’d taken the nightshift at the University of Mississippi power plant, composed the book in his free time from shoveling coal, in six weeks, he said, without changing a word (his editors say it was eight weeks, and that he changed some words but not many).  He was an instinctive artist with a love of rhetoric, so he sometimes leaves his reader scratching his head.

“Cash labors about the trestles, moving back and forth, lifting and placing the planks with long clattering reverberations in the dead air as though he were lifting and dropping them at the bottom of an invisible well, the sounds ceasing without departing, as if any movement might dislodge them from the immediate air in reverberant repetition.  He saws again, his elbow flashing slowly, a thin thread of fire running along the edge of the saw, lost and recovered at the top and bottom of each stroke in unbroken elongation, so that the saw appears to be six feet long, into and out of pa’s shabby and aimless silhouette.”

It is nevertheless an astounding book, in which he characterizes an entire family, a place and a way of life; there’s far more to the story than I’ve mentioned.  Even at that age he envisioned the much larger world he would create; Ben Quick makes an appearance, along with a Snopes or two, and Jewel is riding one of the spotted horses that Flem Snopes sold in a story that Faulkner wouldn’t write for several years.  Somewhere between Mosquitoes and The Sound and the Fury Faulkner was struck by lightning; it wasn’t quite Whitman moving from his apprentice work to Leaves of Grass, but something like that.  The universe took this young Mississippian and made him a great writer, leaving us to wonder how that comes about.