The World Opens Like a Flower       

(The Faulkner Project) Flags in the Dust from William Faulkner Novels 1926-1929.  Library of America.  pp. 541-875.  *****

In October of 1927, in the rush and enthusiasm of finishing his third novel, his longest and most ambitious by far, William Faulkner sent this note to his publisher, Horace Liveright.

“At last and certainly, * * * I have written THE book, of which those other things were but foals.  I believe it is the damdest best book you’ll look at this year, and any other publisher.  It goes forward to you by mail Monday.”

Liveright, alas, didn’t agree.  He rejected the novel, saying it was “diffuse and non-integral with neither very much plot development nor character development. . . . The story doesn’t really get anywhere and has a thousand loose ends.”

Faulkner requested that Liveright return the manuscript—“I still believe it is the book which will make my name for me as a writer”—and turned it over to his friend (from the University of Mississippi) and agent Ben Wasson, who sent it to eleven publishers before Harcourt, Brace accepted it (after a year had passed) on the condition that it be cut to 110,000 words.  Harcourt also changed the title to Sartoris.  In the meantime—according to David Minter—Faulkner briefly considered giving up writing and getting some other kind of work, before sitting down to write with a different attitude.  “One day I seemed to shut a door, between me and all publishers’ addresses and book lists.  I said to myself, ‘Now I can write.’”  The book he produced at that point was The Sound and the Fury, which I—along with a number of other people—regard as his greatest.

Years ago, when I decided to read Faulkner, I asked my brother where I should start, and he said with Sartoris, because it would introduce me to Yoknapatawpha County and to a number of characters who would be important later in Faulkner’s work.  I made my way through the book, but was anxious to move on to other, greater novels, found it slow going, and perhaps gave it short shrift.  I don’t remember liking it.  I don’t remember much of an impression at all.  I was young, sixteen or seventeen.  I wanted to inhale the whole world of literature.  Then I wanted to join in.

I have an entirely different impression now, having picked the novel up after my casual return to Faulkner, my determination to read through his work chronologically and now my reading of his first two novels.  First of all, the writing is marvelous, a huge advance over the first two books and anything else he had done.  I’m surprised that Liveright didn’t accept it on the basis of the writing alone.  (I have the advantage, of course, of having read much of the subsequent work, and knowing that this man would someday win the Nobel Prize and be widely regarded as one of this country’s finest writers.)  But the sudden change in the writing is startling, and I have a feeling that once Faulkner began to focus on his “little postage stamp of soil” something happened to open up his whole artistic vision.

Proust famously said that when he tasted the petite madeleine, not only did his whole past open up to him, but also the whole of A La Research de Temps Perdu.  He saw the novel whole—what eventually became seven volumes—in a single glance.  I have a feeling that something similar happened to the 30-year-old William Faulkner.  He may not have seen the whole of his life’s work.  But he saw more of Yoknapatawpha County than he could handle in one book (and he didn’t eat a tiny cake dunked in tea.  More likely a piece of side meat and a hoecake).  He made a brave attempt to corral the material, but it didn’t quite come together, and he was so dismayed at the amount of cutting that Harcourt asked for that he allowed Wasson to do it.  “The trouble is,” Wasson said, “that you had about 6 books in here.  You were trying to write them all at once.”

I don’t agree (and I think Horace Liveright had his head up his ass).  An older more experienced Faulkner might have used this material for two or three novels, but it also goes together within this one.  The book isn’t loaded with plot, though there are several compelling subplots, and any number of characters are fully developed.  It isn’t the damdest novel I’ll read this year, but that’s because I’m about to read The Sound and the Fury (and have already read As I Lay Dying).  It’s an excellent novel, and holds the key to much of Faulkner’s work.

The book does center on the Sartoris family, a grandfather named Bayard whom we eventually find out is 77 years old and a grandson named Bayard who has just gotten back from the First World War.  He and his brother John were both fighter pilots (as Faulkner himself had wanted to be), and not only was John shot down and killed, but Bayard saw it happen, saw him bail out of the plane (without a chute, apparently; had parachutes been invented at that point?) and fall to his death.  He and John had been close and reckless and tough all of their lives, and young Bayard seems unable to deal with his grief, helling around the country in various ways (often in a fancy new motorcar he’s bought) that seem self-destructive.  We realize soon that he is trying to destroy himself, and figure he’ll succeed eventually.  That’s something of a Sartoris trait.  The elder John Sartoris, several generations back, was shot in a gunfight.

The Sartoris men tend to be headstrong, violent, and emotionally unaware.  The elder Bayard Sartoris is now a banker, much respected in the town, who doesn’t do much of anything but go sit in his office all day, then come home and have a toddy and smoke a cigar or two.  He is overseen by his aunt (a 77-year-old man has an aunt!), a widowed daughter in the Sartoris clan named Jenny Du Pre, and these two people are the moral heart of the novel, but she is more intelligent, even more headstrong—she won’t take no for an answer—and emotionally aware as well.  She’s the novel’s wisdom figure.  One of her young friends is Narcissa Benbow, who gardens with her and seeks her advice on a number of matters.

Narcissa is the sister of Horace, who figured prominently in Sanctuary.  He has an affection for his sister that verges on inappropriate, and that seems plain weird to me, compared to any brother and sister I’ve ever met.  He simultaneously adores his sister, with a surprising amount of physical affection, and also idealizes her, the way that Southern men idealize “their” women.  I mention that because it will be important not just in this novel but in The Sound and the Fury.  Horace is a lawyer, and has taken up with a married woman named Belle (whose husband tells him at one point that he would kill anyone who tried to come between him and his wife), so he idealizes his sister on the one hand and commits adultery with a married woman on the other (Belle pursues him unashamedly).  Not only that, but once he has officially broken up the marriage and is waiting for Belle’s divorce to go through, he takes up with her sister Joan, who is even more corrupt (and sounds like a lot more fun).  Narcissa, to say the least, is horrified by this behavior.  She can’t believe that her gallant knight of a brother is doing such things.

Narcissa is also horrified by a violent hell raiser like Bayard Sartoris, but we can see that her horrified distaste conceals a strong attraction.  After he’s injured in a car accident and is in a body cast, she comes to read to him while he’s in bed, as any virtuous Southern woman would, and it isn’t long before he’s all but sexually assaulting her, if that troublesome body cast hadn’t gotten in the way.  Eventually, as I guessed would happen, they wind up marrying, and Jenny assumes they’ll name their child John, to carry on the family tradition.  Narcissa has other ideas.

There’s a Snopes in this novel, who works in the Sartoris bank and eventually robs it (that subplot fizzled out, surprising me).  Toward the end of the novel young Bayard goes off for a long stay with the MacCallums, a family of strong men who live by hunting and fishing and will figure in subsequent novels.  What is characteristic about this novel is that the men tend to idolize or abuse their women, they have (or at least exert) little control over themselves, and the women become the moral and emotional and often the intelligent heart of the book.  Narcissa seems rather prissy to me (though she’s still young, and we assume young Bayard loosened her up a little).  Miss Jenny is a marvelous character, though she’s one of those aristocratic women who expects always to get her away.  At least she knows how to manipulate the situation, and doesn’t expect people to roll over.

The book is overly long, and meanders a bit; it’s not clear as a mountain stream, but Faulkner didn’t write that way.  But it’s a hell of a book, and in a more intelligent world would have made his reputation, and made him some money too.

He would have to wait some years for that.