Ratliff Was a Zen Master

Vladimir Kyrilytch, That Is[1]

Though pedantry denies

It’s plain the Bible means

That Solomon grew wise

While talking with his queens

I don’t know who was Faulkner’s favorite among his narrators, in the Snopes novels and elsewhere.  Sometimes I think it’s (for me the rather tiresome) Gavin Stevens, a lawyer who likes to elaborate endlessly, or maybe Charles Mallison, Stevens’ nephew, who with his youth and common sense brings a fresh perspective to things.  But my favorite is without doubt V.K. Ratliff (known as V.K. Suratt in some early stories[2]), who takes life as it is, enjoys a broad perspective, has a homespun wisdom and a way with words, and never seems fazed by any shenanigans the Snopes pull off.

The one exception to that—in a most uncharacteristic moment, showing that he’s human, like the rest of us—occurs when he gets taken in by Flem Snopes and buys the old Frenchman’s place, losing his share in a local restaurant.  I couldn’t believe he did that at the time (especially because I’d been alerted by an earlier Faulkner story about a similar swindle).  Ratliff seems like Faulkner himself without all the book learnin’.  He loves to hear stories, and he loves to tell them.

But I must say I was pleased, and especially charmed, by one brief anecdote told by Charles Mallison in The Mansion, the trilogy’s final novel.  Charles is back from college for Christmas break, and V.K. invites him and his uncle over for supper.  Stevens can’t come, so Charles goes by himself, and here’s how he describes the situation, or what Ratliff would call the “millyew”: “I went alone, to sit in Ratliff’s immaculate little kitchen with a cold toddy of old Mr Calvin Bookwright’s corn whiskey . . . first the sugar dissolved in a little water, then the whiskey added while the spoon still stirred gently, then rain water from the cistern to fill the glass—while Ratliff in a spotless white apron over one of the neat tieless faded blue shirts which Uncle Gavin said he made himself, cooked the meal, cooking it damn well, not just because he loved to eat it but because he loved the cooking, the blending up to perfection’s ultimate moment.  Then he removed the apron and we ate it at the kitchen table, with the bottle of claret Uncle Gavin and I always furnished.  Then with the coffee and the decanter of whiskey we moved (as always) to the little immaculate room he called his parlor, with the spotlessly waxed melodeon in the corner and the waxed chairs and the fireplace filled with fluted green paper in the summer but with a phony gas log in the winter, now that progress had reached us, whelmed us . . .”

Until that moment, I’d seen Ratliff hanging around the porch of Will Varner’s store, talking with the other gents sitting in those wooden chairs, listening more than he talked, and when it was mealtime adjourning to a local eatery.  I thought of him as an itinerant human being, who probably lived in a boarding house, eating there or at some cheap place in town (the final recourse always being crackers and cheese from Varner’s store, maybe with a can of sardines).  I knew he had some original home, out in the wilds of Mississippi where the Snopes came from, which was how he knew so much about them.  But the idea that this confirmed bachelor actually had a place in Jefferson, one that he kept immaculately, and that he was an expert cook, I found stunning.  I’d underestimated the man.

Ratliff originally rode a wagon with a pair of mismatched mules around Yoknapatawpha County, apparently switched eventually to a small truck, though I missed that innovation; I picture him in the wagon.  He made a living selling sewing machines to the women in Faulkner country, and if there ever seemed to be a hopeless enterprise, that would be it.  But he did well, and made a living, apparently because he had a genial manner, he could talk about the advantages of having such a machine (which were obvious to a country woman), he let women put off payments until they had the money, and he knew how to use it.  He made his own shirts! (another detail which Faulkner snuck into the novels rather late).

Ratliff never seemed in a hurry to get anywhere (one or two sales could keep him going for months).  He knew how to handle money (with that exception of being swindled by Flem Snopes, but even Will Varner got swindled by Flem Snopes).  He was glad to talk to anybody, but did more listening than talking.  He was a man’s man in the sense that he liked to hang out in town, but obviously spent much of his time, perhaps most of it, talking to women, with the menfolks not around.  That’s how he knew all the news, and all the gossip (an important part of the news).  That’s why he was a wisdom figure: he was often the person people turned to for advice, or for predictions about how things would go.  He was the closest thing Yoknapatawpha County had to an oracle.

‘Men do the bidness in a small place like Jefferson, making and breaking things, and often making mistakes (like buying one of those damned spotted horses that Snopes brought from Texas.  It was the women who urged them not to).  But the women, rolling their eyes at the men, were in touch with the undercurrents, the true reality, of life.

A lot of what I find charming in Faulkner is a portrait of an older way of life (which had its good and bad side; Faulkner never romanticized it).  The thought of Ratliff riding around those dusty old roads with his mismatched team of mules, going slowly (obviously), seeing the landscape, hearing the news, but also keeping a small but immaculate house, cooking expertly, sewing his own shirts.  He led life the way it should be lived.  And he lives on immortally, in these unforgettable novels.

[1] We discover in this third volume of the trilogy, much to our surprise, that this man who sounds in his discourse like the backwoods of Mississippi actually has Russian ancestry.  It’s interesting that Faulkner made that decision during the height of the Cold War.

[2] Apparently someone who had that name complained, and Faulkner changed it.