They’d Even Cheat Another Snopes

(The Faulkner Project) The Hamlet from Faulkner Novels 1936-1940. Library of America pp.727-1075 *****

The most surprising thing about Faulkner’s Snopes novels is that he took so long to get around to them.  He was apparently writing sketches about the Snopes in his twenties, before his career really began, and wrote several versions of the story “Spotted Horses” (possibly the most brilliant narrative in this novel) early on, though he couldn’t find a magazine to publish them.  He didn’t begin The Hamlet until he turned 40, conceiving of it as the first volume of a trilogy, but though he published this novel in 1940, he didn’t publish the succeeding volumes until 1957 and 1959.  Yet Snopes appear in various novels and stories throughout his career.  It’s as if he always had Snopes in his back pocket, and could pull them out when he needed to.  When other things weren’t stirring (like the stories that eventually became Go Down, Moses or the long novel A Fable, which took up a decade of his life) he sat down and wrote a novel about them.

So what is a Snopes?  They’re a family of sharecroppers, though there are honorable sharecroppers in Faulkner who are not Snopes.  They’re vaguely associated vaguely with barn burning—that’s the first thing someone mentions when they show up in Frenchman’s Bend—though there is no fire in this book; “Barn Burning” is incorporated into a later volume.  The problem isn’t that they’re poor, or trying to get ahead in the world; being a Snopes has nothing to do with having or not having money.  Flem—in some ways the quintessential Snopes—seems to have quite a bit by the end of The Hamlet.

What Faulkner seems to be saying is that, despite the problems Mississippi obviously had—most notably its past as a slaveholding state and its persistent racism—there was a certain honor and decorum in Mississippi society that most people didn’t question.  The Snopes either hadn’t heard of these things or didn’t care.  Will Varner’s general store, where everyone in town knew the price of everything, was a place where people could go in and out as they pleased, where Jody Varner might be behind the counter or not, but if no one was there you could take what you needed and leave the money in the box.  And if you didn’t have the money, the Varners would give you credit.  But when Flem Snopes became clerk (and following him a succession of other Snopes), he was there every minute the store was open, he always made sure he got cash for every item, and there was no credit.  Will Varner himself came to the store to talk to the guys on the front porch, and called out for Flem to bring him a plug of tobacco, then Flem kept standing there, until Varner wondered what was wrong.  What was wrong was that Varner hadn’t paid.  He paused to take in this request, then paid the man.

In a way it is Varner—possibly the most Rabelaisian character in all of Faulkner—who is the real traitor.  He let Flem win out over Jody and take his job, because Jody was lazy and half-assed and didn’t give a damn.  Will even let Flem marry his daughter Eula, though she was pregnant at the time and the apparent father had taken off.  But once Varner chose business practices over basic decency and honor, that was the start of the New South.  As soon as you let the Snopes in, you’re on the road that leads from Varner’s General Store to Wal Mart (Faulkner didn’t live to see that abomination, thank God).  We all know how “wonderful” Wal Mart is.  We also know the many things that are wrong with it.

After a creative period that was truly furious (especially the years covered by this LOA volume, when he constantly seemed to be short of money), Faulkner was almost leisurely in his composition of this novel, beginning in the fall of 1938 and finishing in December of 1939, a snail’s pace for the man who wrote Pylon in a couple of months.  He seemed to have abandoned the narrative experiments of books like The Sound and the Fury or If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem; the Snopes narratives are comparatively straightforward.  The Faulkner who wrote these books—whatever was going on in his personal life—seems relaxed, sitting back and spinning yarns about this mind-boggling family.  He seemed to be able to take any character, any minute incident, and spin a whole narrative out of it.  It looks effortless.

Faulkner introduces two of his most vivid and memorable characters in this book (though I may be forgetting their appearances elsewhere), Will Varner himself, the progenitor of fourteen progeny (I believe I’ve got that right) and the putative mayor of Frenchman’s Bend, and V.K. Ratliff, the itinerant sewing machine salesman who travels around Yoknapatawpha County to make a living (he looks to sell about three machines a year) but whose real job is to collect the stories of all the families that surround him and to act as a chorus and a moral arbiter of all he sees.  He’s not Faulkner, of course, but one suspects he’s a spokesman for the author’s point of view.

I was surprised at how bogged down I got in the second section of this novel, about Eula Varner.  That seemed to be a place where Faulkner’s ability to spin a story out of anything worked against him.  Though she eventually married Flem (a truly unbelievable union), that section seems an interruption in the larger story Faulkner is telling.  And I’m afraid I didn’t find Eula terribly interesting (though many suitors did).  There wasn’t a whole lot to her other than a body that exuded sex.

But the story of Flem Snopes taking over from Jody, the various goofy members of the Snopes family who follow, the sale of the wild spotted horses to the unsuspecting people of Frenchman’s Bend: all of these stories are vintage Faulkner.  And I have seldom felt such rage in a novel that is basically comic as I did when a few poverty-stricken townspeople tried to get their money back from the sale of those horses.  A Snopes has no shame.

Nearly fifty years ago, when I was teaching at a secondary school and trying to write a novel myself (at 5:00 in the morning), and raise a son and coach track and run the school newspaper, I chose The Hamlet as a novel for high schoolers to read, though there were three sections of tenth grade and I only taught one.  I’m trying to explain why I didn’t reread the book before I chose it (it’s even possible I hadn’t read it, just knew of it from hearing my father and brother talk in the old days).  I had forgotten (or didn’t know) that there is an episode in this novel where a developmentally challenged Snopes has fallen in love with a cow, to the extent of having sex with it, and another Snopes is selling tickets to this performance (Ratliff winds up attending without knowing what it’s all about).  My fellow teachers were horrified when they read ahead and discovered this scene, immediately said that we had to find another novel and make up some excuse, such as that The Hamlet was too difficult for tenth graders (which it probably was, actually).  I went along, though I always thought I could face any subject with my students.  Tenth graders like being treated as adults.

Faulkner wouldn’t get back to the Snopes for many years (and a whole LOA volume of a thousand pages).  I’m already looking forward to their return.