A Few More Words on Faulkner

Stories by William Faulkner.  Library of America.  1160 pp.  *****

I have now, so help me God, read every word William Faulkner wrote and published, at least all the prose.  I enthusiastically reviewed this book some weeks ago, and had just a couple of small sections to go.  Also, I hadn’t read the first volume in the collection, Knights Gambit, because I’d read it previously.  But I’ve now read everything.

And I have to say, in my ongoing discussion with various members of my family (and in my own mind) about who the greatest American writer is, I will make this (not terribly definitive statement): when Faulkner is at the top of his form, no one can touch him, Henry James, Toni Morrison, anybody you can name.  This final group of stories includes both “The Bear” and “Spotted Horses” (the latter of which, astonishingly, had never been collected in an anthology, probably because it revised into a portion of The Hamlet; it might be Faulkner’s single greatest story).  “The Bear,” while exciting and fascinating as a story, is also a fable about twentieth century Mississippi and twentieth century America, not polemical, not judgmental, just laying the whole thing out (and confirming my feeling that, if there is one Faulkner novel I would go back and read again, it is Go Down, Moses).  And Spotted Horses is simultaneously one of the funniest and most heartbreaking stories ever written.  If you want to know how we ended up with Home Depot instead of the old neighborhood hardware store, you’ll find it there.  Flem Snopes is the key.  There are a lot of ways in which those two stories sum up the American experience.

That final volume, Big Woods, compiled and written when Faulkner was 57 (after A Fable) shows no diminution of his power.  It’s vintage Faulkner.  “Other Works,” at the end of this volume, includes not just “Spotted Horses,” but also an eerie and fascinating story called “The Hound,” also one of the first Faulkner pieces I ever read, an autobiographical essay entitled “Mississippi.”  It was the first time I ran into what we might call the extended Faulkner sentence (what the fuck is this? I said to myself at age 16), but I was fascinated that someone could and would write that way.  It also serves as a kind of commentary on “The Bear” and “Spotted Horses.”  I didn’t really absorb the piece the first time I read it.  But I haven’t forgotten the experience.

I also went back and read the first collection of stories, Knight’s Gambit, and though I understand why Theresa M. Towner put the volume together this way, I wish she hadn’t started with that book.  You could easily argue that the Collected Stories—which won the National Book Award—should be featured first, despite the fact that Knight’s Gambit was published earlier.  That book was Faulkner’s foray into the mystery genre.  And Georges Simenon he’s not.

The stories revolve around Gavin Stevens, the Faulkner character whom I’ve complained about before, though he doesn’t narrate them (thank God), and they’re often told from the point of view of his nephew, Charles Mallison.  Stevens is the primary blowhard in all of Faulkner, a lover of Southern rhetoric and the vocabulary that sends you off to your dictionary, and in each story Stevens notices some tiny little detail—the fact that there was a paddle in a canoe, for instance—which other people have overlooked and which solves the whole mystery.  In that way the stories seem more Agatha Christie than Simenon, though Faulkner cited Simenon as an influence in the Paris Review interview.

Simenon’s style was famously lean and understated, whereas the rhetoric in these stories, even when Stevens isn’t speaking, is quite the opposite.  Simenon’s Inspector Maigret seemed to focus on some aspect of the criminal’s character, something that didn’t quite feel right; he was more intuitive than ratiocinative, to quote a favorite Faulkner word.  The feeling of reading a Maigret is all about mood and atmosphere.  The stories in Knight’s Gambit are like looking for a needle in a haystack of verbiage, although the writing is still Faulkner, and you’re amazed that he can put together sentences like these.  The rhetoric seems worth it when you’re reading Absalom! Absalom! or “The Bear.”  These stories don’t seem worth the trouble.

Stevens, with his education at Harvard, his degree from Heidelberg, his prominently displayed Phi Beta Kappa key, seems to be modeled on Phil Stone, who was a huge influence on Faulkner and who in later years wished he’d gotten more credit than he did.  That raises the eternal question of how he influenced Faulkner (at the very least, he seems to have suggested things to read, also possibly lent him books, in a place and at a time where such literature was not readily available).  But how did Faulkner, educated in Mississippi public schools and a first-year dropout from the University (with a D in Freshman English) acquire such a knowledge of literature, control of elaborate rhetoric, even just such a massive vocabulary?  We’re not talking about somebody who spent years in the library.  After he dropped out of the University he took off for Europe, where he wrote poetry and tried to get into the war.  He published his first novel at 29 and wrote at a furious pace after that, certainly all through his thirties.  His kind of genius is always inexplicable, but in this case it came out of nowhere.

All that is to say: do what I did.  Begin with the Collected Stories, proceed through the volume from there, don’t skip even the uncollected stories at the end; they’re among the best.  And when you’ve read all that, read Knight’s Gambit.  It’s a falling off.  But it’s still Faulkner.