Flem Makes His Move

(The Faulkner Project) The Town from William Faulkner Novels 1957-1962  Library of America pp. 1-326  ****

It’s an irony of William Faulkner’s career that he finally became financially solvent—and began to receive kudos in his own country—for work that is far inferior to his best.  Intruder in the Dust put him over the top financially, primarily because he sold the movie rights, and A Fable won both the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award.  Those things opened the floodgates on a variety of movie sales, public appearances, travels and stints at universities; his life in his later years bears little resemblance to the early ones, when he was writing furiously, both in Oxford and Hollywood, to keep creditors at bay.

I would now say that his great period ran from 1928—when he sat down at the age of 30 to write his greatest novel, The Sound and the Fury—to 1942, when he published Go Down, Moses.  Not everything he produced in those years was great—and of course the ranking of the novels is largely a matter of personal taste—but all of the great novels come out of that period.  After that, the intensity of the work, and of the novels themselves, diminishes.[1]

Faulkner conceived of the Snopes trilogy in the late thirties, and apparently envisioned all three volumes, but didn’t get around to The Town and The Mansion until the mid-fifties.  One wonders if he was competing them dutifully, just because he’d conceived of them, but that isn’t the impression I get from reading; they seem to be Faulkner in his tale spinning mode, as in The Unvanquished, telling the history of his mythical county as if he were on the porch of Will Varner’s store.  He dedicates The Town to his old friend and mentor Phil Stone, with the words, “He did half the laughing for thirty years.”  He seems to be implying he told the stories to Stone first, or they spun them out together.  The name Snopes seems to be a code word for a kind of behavior that was taking over the South.

I could swear that I read all three of these books—I remember owning the paperbacks—but I didn’t read them consecutively, so my impressions were somewhat disjointed.  And I didn’t remember them at all, because I was startled, and puzzled, by an event toward the end of this novel.  I also somehow forgot the whole tenor of it.

My impression was that the Snopes trilogy is a description of how a certain family—which actually represents a mindset—gradually took over Yoknapatawpha County in the course of the author’s lifetime, beginning with Flem, followed by such unforgettable names as I.O., Wallstreet Panic, Montgomery Ward, Byron, and Virgil.  No sooner did one Snopes move up in the world than another moved in.  That, I would now say, is an accurate description of The Hamlet.  But The Town actually centers on Flem Snopes, and the way that he was interested not just in money, though that was his first goal, but respectability, which proves much more elusive.  To find that, he must not only achieve his ultimate goal—becoming president of the town’s major bank—but get rid of any Snopes who might bring his reputation down.  Which basically means any Snopes who happens to be around.

So the maneuver we saw Flem enact at the end of The Hamlet—marrying Will Varner’s daughter Eula in order to make an honest woman out of her, after she’d been impregnated and abandoned by one of her numerous suitors—was not just a financial move, as I thought at the time, but the opening salvo in his bid for respectability: he married into the first family of Jefferson.  He was this enigmatic guy who showed up every day wearing the same little bow tie, the same hat, always chewing tobacco but never spitting (that you could see), always kept track of every penny in the till, wouldn’t cut a break to anybody, even his own family, and she was the most beautiful, or perhaps just the most sexually alluring, of all the women in town, starting when she was fifteen.  Talk about your unlikely couples.  The child of that union shows up in this novel as Linda Snopes, equally alluring but not oozing sexuality the way her mother did.  She becomes the object of affection of, among others, the middle-aged Gavin Stevens.

Stevens is my nemesis among Faulkner narrators.  Faulkner obviously find his extreme verbosity, his ability to spin out Southern rhetoric about any subject whatsoever, hilarious.  I find the idea hilarious in the abstract.  But when I have to read through page after page of Stevens’ endless explanations of things that require no explanation, I begin to understand Rebecca Solnit.  If she thinks mansplaining happens in Silicon Valley, she should come to the South.

Other narrators include V.K. Ratliff, the sewing machine salesman who is always a genial storyteller, and generally a wise person (though he gets taken in by Flem in a major scheme) and Charles Mallison, who was a boy in Intruder in the Dust and gradually grows up in this one.  Charles’ mother is Gavin’s twin sister, and Gavin at this point lives with them.  He seems to be what used to be called a confirmed bachelor, one of those courtly Southern men who takes great interest in women, admires and helps and improves them[2] (he has given both Eula and Linda a copy of John Donne’s poetry), but never quite makes it into bed with them.  Maybe he’s gay.  It wouldn’t surprise me.

In any case, these narrators alternately tell the story of what at first seems just more Snopes shenanigans, but is actually Flem eliminating his less savory cousins from the picture—one of whom bilks the insurance company for a living, another of whom peddles porn—and battling the old established families, most notably Major DeSpain, for presidency of the bank.   The man is ruthless, I’ll say that for him.  And he’s successful, if achieving a certain position achieves respectability.

I complained after reading The Hamlet about the long chapter on Eula Varner’s youth; I think what I really didn’t like was the way she seemed such a stereotype, and we were only seeing her from the outside.[3]  In a brief chapter toward the end of this novel, we hear her speak, in a conversation with Stevens, as a mature human being, who has spent her life in this bizarre marriage (she reveals that Flem is impotent, so there hasn’t been any sex) but has had a lover the whole time.  She’s talking to Stevens because she’s concerned about her daughter’s welfare.  Following that intimate scene, something happens that is so sad that I couldn’t believe I didn’t remember it.  And honestly, I think it was a mistake in what had been an essentially comic novel.  Throughout Faulkner’s writing about the Snopes, they haven’t quite been real human beings.  (No one really names their child Wallstreet Panic or Montgomery Ward.)  We’ve been reading what we took as a light satire, then something tragic happens.  Or at least terribly sad.

As Faulkner wrote to Jean Stein, “Just finishing the book.  It breaks my heart.  I wrote one scene and almost cried.  I thought it was just a funny book but I was wrong.”  We thought it was funny too.  Now we’re not so sure.

[1] I would now say, from this most recent rereading, that the great novels are The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying, Absalom, Absalom!, and Go Down, Moses, with The Hamlet as first runner up.  In the not-great-but-surprisingly good category I would put Flags in the Dust, Sanctuary, and The Unvanquished.  All of the novels are worth reading, including certain sections of A Fable.  But I’m not sure I would recommend that book as a whole, for Faulkner lovers.  He was trying to do something different and it didn’t work out.

[2] This notion of a man improving a woman’s mind is offensive to a modern sensibility, but was common when Faulkner wrote about it.

[3] In the movie based on The Hamlet, “The Long Hot Summer,” Joanne Woodward played Eula Varner, and she really vamped it up.  Paul Newman played the Flem Snopes character, though he was called Ben Quick in the movie, actually the name of a different Faulkner character.  Bizarrely—but very effectively—Orson Welles played Will Varner, who is supposed to be tall and thin and lanky.  They couldn’t make Welles thin and lanky.  But he’s blustery and overbearing.