Spinning Tales

(The Faulkner Project) The Unvanquished from Faulkner Novels 1936-1040.  Library of America.  *****

By the time you reach Absalom, Absalom! in a survey of Faulkner’s fiction, you can’t help being overwhelmed by the sheer verbal power.  It’s been there all along; there were passages even in Soldiers’ Pay, and it blossomed in Flags in the Dust, but it comes to full flower in Absalom, Absalom!, his most sustained verbal performance.  It’s pyrotechnics all the way.  At the same time, you realize that the man had an astonishing ability to create narratives.  That too has been there all along, for any moron to see.

Not only did he take the rather simple idea for Absalom, Absalom! (“the story of a man who wanted a son through pride, and got too many of them and they destroyed him”) and spin in into a wild and extravagant melodrama, which in some way becomes a fable of the entire South, but he took a break in the middle to write Pylon (which looks in retrospect like an overblown short story, nothing at all like the longer novel he was writing).  Also during this period (a turbulent moment in his life) he needed some money—he always seemed to need money—and he not only took a detour to Hollywood to write the Howard Hawks film Paths of Glory, he wrote a couple of stories that he thought would be right for the Saturday Evening Post, and the Post bought them, so he turned them into a series, which he interrupted after the first four to finish Absalom, Absalom!, then took up again in 1936.  Eventually he saw that he was creating a novel-in-stories, a sustained and coherent narrative.  He proposed such a volume to Random House, and wrote the final story.

This combination of verbal skill and storytelling power is unmatched in the American literature I’ve read, and is positively Shakespearean.[1]  Even Shakespeare borrowed plots from various sources, but Faulkner spun them all from his experience and imagination.  It was after he finished Absalom, Absalom! that he drew the famous map of Yoknapatawpha County (it’s reproduced at the beginning of his volume).  It’s as if the place and its whole history already existed in his head, and he was racing against time to tell as much as he could (he published his last novel one month before he died).

The Unvanquished tells stories of the War Between the States, centered around two young boys, Bayard Sartoris and a slave named Ringo, owned by the family.  The two boys were the same age and were inseparable companions.  Ringo doesn’t resent his inferior status, or particularly seem to notice it; he was apparently too young (there was another man in the family, his Uncle Loosh, who did resent being a slave, and welcomed the freedom he saw on the horizon).  They were just two kids, growing up together.  The Sartoris family lived in a house, and the slaves in cabins nearby.

The first couple of stories seem to be made for the Post (though I was surprised that the magazine would accept such complicated and difficult prose; apparently Faulkner was having trouble cooling down from Absalom, Absalom![2]).  In the first, “Ambuscade” the boys are twelve, and Bayard’s father is away fighting the war (this is Colonel Sartoris, a legendary figure as early as Flags in the Dust, and a man who bears more than a passing resemblance to William Clark Falkner, the author’s great grandfather), and they know the Yanks are coming, and at the first sighting of these troops these two dadgum youngsters haul out the family musket and know how to load it and line it up somewhere so they can shoot the first Yank they see, and boom!  They take off like a couple of kids who were throwing snowballs at cars, though they had apparently just shot a soldier.  They run into the house, and the Yanks are coming after them, and Bayard’s grandmother hides them under her skirts, and eventually a Yankee commander comes in and, seeing the situation (he knows where the kids are) lets them off, presumably because he was a mischievous youngster once and he remembers his grandmother fondly, something like that.

This piece has Saturday Evening Post written all over it.  They hadn’t killed the soldier, but they had killed the horse (arguably more important than a human being in the war).  Oh, the good old days of the Civil War, when kids are kids and can depend on their granny, and the union commander was kindly and understanding, and the slaves and their masters got along perfectly, don’t we have the greatest country in the world?  Faulkner wasn’t writing Faulkner; he was writing Saturday Evening Post[3], the same way he was writing Hollywood for Howard Hawks.  He was making money.  He could do this in his sleep.  But the prose is still great, the dialogue word perfect, the story beautifully told.

Things continue in this vein for a while, with Granny emerging is the moral center of this universe (it’s always a woman in Faulkner.  It never fails), concocting a scheme where the boys are rustling mules and horses and she’s selling them to the Yankees, sometimes selling mules back to them that they previously owned, and though she knows it’s dishonest and prays to God every night for forgiveness, she’s using the money to support all the people in desperate straits around her, and to put away a nest egg for after the war, which the Southerners already know they’re going to lose.  But the boys are getting older and their view of things is changing (Bayard has been narrating throughout), and in the fourth story, as the boys are fifteen and approaching manhood, something happens that utterly shocked me.  The stories turn serious, just as the boys are becoming men.  This story, “Riposte in Tertio,” is not especially Saturday Evening Postish (especially the title), and I’m mildly surprised they published it.  Except that by now Faulkner had created a series and readers might be waiting for the next installment.

The following stories continue in this more serious vein.  It’s almost as if they trace Bayard’s deepening sensibility, though the incidents grow more serious too.  The collection ends with what I would call a great short story (which by that time is the final chapter of the novel), “An Odor of Verbana.”  That was not published separately, perhaps because it was too much for any magazine, perhaps because it was too long.  But it has some astonishing moments, including a young wife who asks her stepson (eight years younger) to kiss her, and the murder of Colonel Sartoris (which happens offstage; Faulkner’s ancestor was similarly killed by a business partner) and Bayard’s response to it.  These are powerful and stunning scenes in a brilliant story.

This is so stupid that I’m ashamed to admit it, but it wasn’t until I finished this story that I realized that this Bayard Sartoris, in his early twenties and reading law, is the same man who is 77 years old and a stodgy old banker in Flags in the Dust.  And the young Aunt Jenny, who shows up in the final story, is the marvelous character from that novel, and its moral center.

I had never read The Unvanquished.  I’m not a Civil War buff, as we used to say, and am not wild about historical fiction in general.  But just as I’m glad that my Faulkner Project made me reread Absalom, Absalom!, I’m glad it made me read The Unvanquished for the first time.  Faulkner started by boiling the pot, making money so he could get back to one of his masterpieces.  But a great artist will not be denied, and by the final story we’re reading Faulkner at his best.  You might breeze through the first half of this volume, but don’t miss “An Odor of Verbana.”

[1] My mentor Reynolds Price, in his essay on Faulkner, was the first critic to see this comparison that I know of.  Both men were formally uneducated.  The sheer genius of their work is inexplicable (though that is true of all geniuses).  But the two real points of comparison are the astonishing verbal skill (which, in both cases, could devolve into garbled and difficult passages) and the incredible variety of their output.  As Price said, both men produced the kind of variety that the Player in Hamlet outlined, “tragedy, comedy, history, pastoral, pastoral-comical, historical-pastoral, tragical-historical, tragical-comical-historical-pastoral . . .”

[2] Another author that found the Post a great market was P. G. Wodehouse.  Talk about strange bedfellows.

[3] I used to read this magazine at my own grandmother’s house, along with that other icon of Americana, the Reader’s Digest.