Initial Impressions: Knight's Gambit, by William Faulkner - April 2021

[Lawyer, "Moderator Emeritus"]

Steve wrote: "To Lawyer and all:
we exchanged thoughts earlier about Faulkner's use of the real life Stone for the Stevens character. What do you think about the obvious Bilbo as Faulkner's model for the governo..."

To Steve and All : Wnat Faulkner craved was anonymity. If Faulkner had a political agenda, he never expressed it reegarding any particular politician. When appproacheded by Malcolm Cowley about the publication of The Portable Faulkner, Faulkner was adamantly opposed.


What follows is a review of The Saddest Words: William Faulkner's Civil WarMichael Gorra

I’s too late to cancel Faulkner; he already cancelled himself. “I will protest to the last: no photographs, no recorded documents,” he wrote in a letter to the critic Malcolm Cowley on February 11, 1949. “It is my ambition to be, as a private individual, abolished and voided from history, leaving it markless, no refuse save the printed books; I wish I had had enough sense to see ahead thirty years ago and, like some of the Elizabethans, not signed them.”

Cowley was the editor of “The Portable Faulkner,” a 1946 anthology that collected and excerpted Faulkner’s short stories and novels, ordering them chronologically according to their story lines rather than by their publication dates. It was an attempt to rescue Faulkner from an unsurprising obscurity: many of his books are difficult, and many had been published during the Great Depression or the Second World War, when both the money and the appetite for such writing was scarce. To make a living, Faulkner had turned to writing screenplays, including those for “The Big Sleep” and “To Have and Have Not.” Cowley made the case for Faulkner’s genius, providing in the anthology a figurative as well as a literal map that showed the contours and connections of Yoknapatawpha County and its people. The volume put Faulkner’s earlier novels back into print, and helped readers make sense of his modernist texts. Cowley had already published a similar anthology of Hemingway’s work; it was a subsequent profile of “Papa” for Life that occasioned Faulkner’s letter begging off any such publicity.

Faulkner expressed his desire for authorial anonymity in other venues, too. “If I had not existed, someone else would have written me, Hemingway, Dostoyevsky, all of us,” he told The Paris Review. “Proof of that is that there are about three candidates for the authorship of Shakespeare’s plays. But what is important is Hamlet and A Midsummer Night’s Dream, not who wrote them, but that somebody did. The artist is of no importance. Only what he creates is important.”

It’s hard to say whether those sentiments grew out of Faulkner’s aversion to publicity in general or were instead a response to his particular stumbles with the press, but he seemed to know how much his personal reputation might damage the reputation of his work. Faulkner had grown up using racial slurs and deployed them in correspondence; after he became well known, he continued to write and say things that were just as scandalous, if not more so. In a letter to the editor of a newspaper in Memphis, he suggested that justice was delivered by juries and lynch mobs alike and that no innocent man of any race had ever been lynched. In an article for Life, he seemed to equate the N.A.A.C.P. with the white-supremacist Citizens’ Council, and opposed what he called the “compulsory integration” of the South by the North. He told the New York Herald Tribune that he longed for the return of the “benevolent autocracy” of slavery, in which “Negroes would be better off because they’d have some one to look after them.” In 1956, several years after he won the Nobel Prize and around the time the federal government began deploying him as an international ambassador for democracy and human rights, he told a journalist that if that same government used troops to enforce integration in the South he would do as his Confederate great-grandfather had done before him. “If it came to fighting,” he said, “I’d fight for Mississippi against the United States even if it meant going out into the street and shooting Negroes.”

The outcry was swift. W. E. B. Du Bois challenged Faulkner to a debate on the steps of the Mississippi courthouse where Emmett Till’s murderers had been acquitted the year before. Faulkner declined, saying, “I do not believe there is a debatable point between us.” He also issued a carefully hedged statement: the words attributed to him, he insisted, were ones “no sober man would make, nor, it seems to me, any sane man believe.” (Faulkner was a notorious drunk, but elsewhere he seemed to subscribe to the in-vino-veritas model of alcohol consumption.) He also published an apologia in Ebony titled “If I Were a Negro,” calling for moderation on racial questions and appealing for civil-rights advocates to “go slow, pause for a moment.”

The remarks were not well received, and the denials convinced no one who was not already intent on defending Faulkner. James Baldwin excoriated him in the pages of Partisan Review, writing that Faulkner was exactly like “the bulk of relatively articulate white Southerners of good-will,” in that his arguments “have no value whatever as arguments, being almost entirely and helplessly dishonest, when not, indeed, insane.” Baldwin understood that there was no middle ground between segregationists and integrationists, and no reconciling the equal rights and freedoms articulated in the Constitution with the discrimination and oppression of Jim Crow. With regard to Faulkner, he asked, “Where is the evidence of the struggle he has been carrying on there on behalf of the Negro? Why, if he and his enlightened confreres in the South have been boring from within to destroy segregation, do they react with such panic when the walls show any signs of falling?”

Gorra has no direct answer to Baldwin’s question, and he acknowledges that some readers may find in these biographical facts reason enough to banish Faulkner from syllabi, if not from shelves. But Baldwin’s essay is a condemnation of the writer’s personal politics, not his work; it never mentions Faulkner’s fiction. Gorra’s argument, however, depends on close readings of everything from individual sentences to symbols and characters and themes across the author’s novels, which collectively make the case that a racist person can be a radical writer. “Faulkner the man shared many of the closed society’s opinions and values,” Gorra writes. “But when the novelist could inhabit a character—when he slipped inside another mind and put those opinions into a different voice—he was almost always able to stand outside them, to place and to judge them.”

Faulkner was unwilling in his own life to adequately acknowledge the evils of slavery and segregation, but he did so with savage thoroughness in his fiction. He was a Hieronymus Bosch of prose: his tortured imagination filled story after story with sins of every form and with characters turned grotesque by committing them. Though much historical fiction is escapist, Faulkner’s is brutalizing, depicting a South debased first by degeneracy and then by the refusal to atone for it, even in the face of defeat. In 1936, the same year that Margaret Mitchell offered the world a romance between the roguish Rhett Butler and the Southern belle Scarlett O’Hara, Faulkner published a story of rape and incest and racist terror. It was the seventy-fifth anniversary of the start of the Civil War, and Americans made clear which version of events they wanted to remember: “Absalom, Absalom!” sold around ten thousand copies; “Gone with the Wind” sold more than a million and won the Pulitzer Prize.

“Absalom, Absalom!” was Faulkner’s ninth novel, published ten years after his first. In that astonishing decade, he also wrote “The Sound and the Fury,” “As I Lay Dying,” and “Light in August.” A high-school dropout, Faulkner experimented with poetry as a teen-ager, then enlisted to fight in the First World War with the Royal Air Force. It’s unclear why he didn’t join the U.S. Army; in any case, the Armistice arrived before he had finished training, and he was discharged. Faulkner brought home an officer’s uniform and the “u” he had added to his family’s surname to make it seem more English. Both were part of the persona he cultivated at the University of Mississippi, where fellow-students mockingly called him Count No ’Count. His family had once been prominent in the part of Mississippi where he was born—his lineage included bankers and businessmen—but Faulkner was not much of a student. He took a few literature and language classes but ended up spending more years on campus as the school’s postmaster. That didn’t last long, either: busy playing cards and golfing during business hours, he neglected to forward mail, misdelivered some letters while throwing others in the garbage, refused to prepare return receipts, and, when he could be bothered to open the office at all, often sat inside it working on his first book.

That was a collection of poetry, “The Marble Faun,” probably the most traditional and certainly the least remarkable of all the books Faulkner published—he borrowed the title from Nathaniel Hawthorne and the style from the Romantics and the Symbolists. But the prose that followed was all his own. Faulkner’s fiction does not have influences so much as analogues. He burned down houses with the gothic zeal of Edgar Allan Poe, staged moral crises as dramatically as Dostoyevsky, and fashioned fanatics who would have pleased Herman Melville. He created characters who migrated from one novel to another, and he wrote stream-of-consciousness narration that featured broken syntax and typographical experiments...

The excerpt abovemay be found complete at Faulkner's Demons, Casey Cep, New Yorker Magazine, 11/30/2020

There's that CANCEL word ke. Hmmm...When I'm asked why contemporary Literary Critics have a penchant for canceling the culture of authors of classic southern literature, it's brcause they cannot recognize that the culture of the past does change. For the better. Nor do they recognize that racism exists outside the South. How convenient. I suppose it's easier to salve one's conscience if you ignore the problem you condemn exists where you live. Whereupon Lawyer steps down from the lectern.

[Sue]

Thanks for that information, Mike. I used an edition of Cowley’s book when reading Faulkner during college. In fact I think I may still have it though the print may be too small for me to comfortably read now. I didn’t know the biographical info you provided and it does give pause. But I will continue to read Faulkner as I believe he shows a wider and more nuanced portrait than his mouth may have spoken in his outbursts.

I have also finished Hands across the waters and enjoyed watching Stevens playing Perry Mason again.

[Jane]

Highly informative Lawyer , thank you for this

[Lawyer, "Moderator Emeritus"]

Jane, you're most welcome. If you could see this I imagine hyou would burst into peals of laughter. These books and theses, doctoral dissertations are wedged around my laptop. Yes, I put my tablet aside. The laptop has keys I can SEE. And they are large enough I am not hitting the wrong keys with numb and twitching fingers so much. However, I'm getting further away from a direct discussion of the stories, scurrying through the stacks to respond to very astute comments and questions relating to different aspects of partocilar stories. Yes, you would laugh to see this study/library. I so enjoy being back. A neighbor happens to teach Faulkner at the University of Alabama. "Well," she said. " You have put quite a serviceable selection of key material. Oh my.God! You've got the unabridged two volume Blotner?" Yes, I guess I preened a bit. Uh=huh. Uhm, they are first prints. In the Brodart Archival Dust Jscket Covers."should have been ashamed, but I wasn't. I've worked years putting this together. I am proud to be of some use if only to pass on information not easily obtained at times. It's been a while since I have continued the hunt for particular items. The last Gavin Stevens story is "By the People." it takes place almost simultaneously with the end of Snopes. It is not included in either the Collected Stories of William Faulkner or The Uncollected Stories of William Faulkner.

[Sara]

Faulkner the man was as complex and difficult to unravel as some of his stories. A completely fascinating article, Mike. Thanks so much! I am grateful that no one was able to bury his work, they are often too obscure as it is. I have always found it is essential to separate the author from the works initially. You will get the most by not considering the author's background until after you have contemplated his writing. I would disagree with Faulkner on his point about it not mattering who the man is, someone would write the material. I think with great works, who the man is informs every line. Perhaps what we see most in Faulkner is his own personal struggle with his own soul.

[Lawyer, "Moderator Emeritus"]

Franky wrote: "I've only just now got to this one today and read the first one "Smoke" and enjoyed it. Interesting point of view. Is the narrator the town of Jefferson? The pronoun "we" is used the describe the a..."

So glad to see you reading this one.
I think you're right. Remember in "A Rose Ffor Emily," Shoot. Memory blank. Is that the right title? I thought the narrstor was the "conscience" of the town. Another possibility...Gavin's nephew, Charles Mallison may be the implied narrator. Randall made that point. It works for me under either theory.

[Sue]

Sara, I appreciate your summary so much. Thank you for it.

[Franky]

Lawyer wrote: "Franky wrote: "I've only just now got to this one today and read the first one "Smoke" and enjoyed it. Interesting point of view. Is the narrator the town of Jefferson? The pronoun "we" is used the..."

Lawyer, now that you mention it I do recall the same type of point of view in "A Rose for Emily."

Oh, and thanks for the information about Faulkner and your thoughts on the cancel culture of books, history and racism. I think you hit it totally on the nail.

[Lawyer, "Moderator Emeritus"]

Franky wrote: "Lawyer wrote: "Franky wrote: "I've only just now got to this one today and read the first one "Smoke" and enjoyed it. Interesting point of view. Is the narrator the town of Jeffrrson? The pronoun "..."

I'm glad that folks find the "Faulkner's Demons," informative. I found it generally repeated information found in previously published works. I"ve read The Saddest Words: William Faulkner's Civil War. Actually I believed Cep editorialised a good bit.

I still prefer William Faulkner and Southern History by Joel Williamson.

[Sue]

The Williamson book looks very interesting, Mike. I’m adding that. And my library has a copy.

[Sue]

Actually I just checked the “other” market at Amazon and bought a paperback copy In very good condition for a low price. Easier to read a more than 500 page book if I own it.

[Steve]

The grand finale at Frenchman's Bend as the founding frenchman's, whose aristocratic Huguenot name has been mangled from Grenier to Grinnup, last descendant is murdered for money on the river, presumably the Yocona River, at the Bend. All good things must end, not only the Frenchmen's plantation, but also his remaining kin, while the surviving Stevens line prevails assuming the role of the new aristocracy armed with education and wit. And Joe comes out of nowhere, like Twain's Injun Joe, and takes care of Boyd.

[Randall]

Lawyer wrote: "Yes, I put my tablet aside. The laptop has keys I can SEE. And they are large enough I am not hitting the wrong keys with numb and twitching fingers so much."

Good to see you've found a work-a-round for your typing.

[Lawyer, "Moderator Emeritus"]

Sue wrote: "The Williamson book looks very interesting, Mike. I’m adding that. And my library has a copy."lso revvomm

Sir, it'd s s magnoficrnt rrsd.

[Sue]

Glad to hear it. I have a copy on its way to me.