U R a Snopes

(The Faulkner Project) The Mansion from William Faulkner Novels 1957-1962  Library of America pp. 327-723  *****

Somewhat to my surprise, this time around I enjoyed The Mansion the most of all three Snopes novels.  Part of the reason is that I had just read the others; I suspect that when I read this novel the first time, I didn’t remember the plots of the earlier books, and was entirely at sea.  I also appreciate the stripped-down Faulkner style in this novel; he’s just spinning yarns, letting people talk, and he was a master at that.  But I think the real reason is that, in this novel, the Snopes finally become human.

I believe it was in The Hamlet that Mink Snopes kills Zack Houston, in what seemed a petty dispute over a wandering cow.  At that point it seemed the Snopes were a kind of vermin who were spreading throughout Yoknapatawpha County and that they had to be stopped.  But in The Mansion we see that murder in more detail, from Mink’s viewpoint, and though I can’t condone murder as a way of resolving disputes, I can see why Mink killed him.  The man wasn’t just abusive, he was needlessly brutal.  Plain mean.  I can also see that, as itinerant sharecroppers who were exploited by the system, the Snopes have real grievances.  The whole world seems stacked against them, and nothing they do gets them ahead.  That explains a lot of Snopes behavior through all three novels.  For the first two, along with Ratliff and Gavin Stevens, I was laughing at them.  In this novel I felt for them, especially for Mink.

And it emerged clearly in this novel that, not only is Flem the quintessential Snopes, he’s also the single character in all of Faulkner who cares for absolutely no one.  All he wants is money and what he thinks of as respect.  He’ll do anything to get those things, not only to the people around Jefferson, but also to his own people.  But when he betrays Mink Snopes, perhaps the most downtrodden person in the clan, he meets his match.

Spoiler alert: I’m about to give away the whole plot.

The Mansion opens with the improbable scene that appeared in one of the previous novels: Mink Snopes, on trial for murder, is being asked how he pleads, but is so focused on looking for his cousin Flem that he doesn’t answer.  He’s convinced that Flem is so powerful and influential that he can save him from this murder trail.  When Mink realizes that, not only is Flem not going to do that, he actually wants Mink to be put away, his whole world changes.  Flem even sends Montgomery Ward Snopes to Parchman to encourage Mink to try to escape, so his twenty year sentence will be doubled to forty.  With that, Flem thinks, he’s rid of his unsavory cousin forever.

I think of Flem as the most inscrutable character in all of Faulkner.  At first I thought all he wanted was money, and when he finally had enough, would reveal his humanity.  But money wasn’t enough; he wanted respectability and position, two other things that life had denied him.  He gained respectability when he married Eula Varner; everybody knew she was pregnant with another man’s child, but no one would say so, because she came from the first family of Jefferson.  Then later when Flem became president of the bank, he had everything (one would think).  He should have been a happy man.

He was no different, completely uncommunicative, utterly joyless.  He spent his days at the bank, his evenings in a room of his grand house, not reading, just sitting in front of the fireplace, staring.  His wife had committed suicide.  She’d told Gavin Stevens that Flem was impotent and that they’d never had sex.  His daughter, who had come back to live with him, was deaf, made so by an explosion in the Spanish Civil War.  She too was widowed.  They lived in that house in utter silence.

Linda Snopes is as fascinating as Flem is inscrutable.  She had grown up in Jefferson, gone to college at the University of Mississippi, moved to Greenwich Village to get away from her father, then become political, married a man named Kohl and fought in the Spanish Civil War.  When she returned to Jefferson she was still involved emotionally with Gavin Stevens, who had been her mentor when she was young.  They flirted (not sure that’s the word) with becoming more than friends, either lovers or marriage partners.  She seemed ready, but Gavin—ever the dithering intellectual—wasn’t up to it.  So she saw to it that he married someone else.  She wanted him to have that experience.

It is Linda who sees to it that Stevens gets Mink pardoned, two years before he would have gotten out.  Stevens knows that’s the right thing to do, also knows—as he assumes Linda doesn’t—that Mink will come to Jefferson and try to kill Flem.  Stevens arranges to keep that from happening.  His arrangement doesn’t work.  At the very end of The Mansion, after a long, suspenseful, and improbable trek, Mink arrives in Jefferson and kills his cousin.  Again, I’m opposed to murder.  But there was something deeply satisfying about that moment.

It left two mysteries.  Mink had acquired a pistol so cheap and old that the hammer sometimes missed the bullet; it would come down on the right cartridge but not squarely, so the bullet wouldn’t fire.  When he first pulled the trigger on Flem, it just clicked.  He had to recock the gun, move the cartridge back, and try again.  That whole time, Flem sat there and watched.  Was he paralyzed with fear?  Did he see some justice, or inevitability, in what was happening?  Did he want to die?  We’ll never know.  All we know is that he never moved, just sat there watching his cousin, and the second shot killed him.

That little pistol was so loud, the reverberations so strong, that it didn’t raise the dead, but did raise the deaf; Linda came to the door of the room where Mink was standing.  He had no more bullets and threw the pistol at her, tried to exit through a door that was locked.  But she said to him, in that strange duck voice that she had as a deaf woman, holding out the pistol, “Here.  Come and take it.  That door is a closet.  You’ll have to come this way to get out.”

She seems to have known he was coming to kill Flem.  She seems to have colluded.

The other piece of corroborating evidence is that she was planning to leave town in a new Jaguar, which she had on order but couldn’t pick up until her father was dead and she’d inherited his money.  She’d ordered the car back in July, after she arranged for Mink to be released.  She didn’t pick it up until September, when the release and the murder actually happened.  She seems to have cold-bloodedly killed her father.  And not to have a bit of remorse.

Gavin Stevens, on the other hand, is apoplectic with guilt.

Thus ends the Snopes empire.  The emperor is dead, and all the other Snopes are gone.  Faulkner seems ready to give up too; he wrote to a friend, “I am not even interested in writing anymore: only in reading for pleasure in the old books I discovered when I was 18 years old.”

As it turns out, he had one more novel left in him.