William Faulkner

AS I LAY DYING . . . Classics revisited

Firstly, I am not going to argue that this book by William Faulkner is a crime novel in the way that Intruder in the Dust, Sanctuary and several others are deeply rooted in crime and the justice system. The only illegal act in the book is when one of the characters, driven crazy by his own demons and recent events, commits arson.

We are in rural Mississippi, in the 1920s. The Bundren family are hard scrabble farmers who eke out a living growing cotton and selling lumber. Anse and Addie Bundren have five children. In order of age they are Cash, Darl, Jewel, Dewey Dell (the only girl) and Vardaman.
It is high summer, and Adddie Bundren is dying. The title of the novel, incidentally, comes from a translation of Homer’s Odyssey.
“As I lay dying, the woman with the dog’s eyes would not close my eyes as I descended into Hades.”

We must assume that Addie has cancer, as she is worn down to skin and bones. Two things here; any medical help is via Dr Peabody who is many miles away (and expensive); secondly, although Anse makes optimistic remarks about seeing his wife up and well again, it is obvious that the family (with the exception of Vardaman) know the truth. In a macabre touch, Cash – a skilled carpenter – is actually making his mother’s coffin outside in the yard just beyond her window. Addie breathes her last, and Anse reveals that he has made a promise to his wife that she will be buried near her own folks in Jefferson, many days away for a cart and mule team. It is from this point that the source of Faulkner’s title becomes apposite.

Stories told by multiple narrators were nothing new, even in the 1930s, but in my reading experience Faulkner is unique in that here, he uses fifteen different pairs of eyes – each given at least one chapter – to describe Addie Bundren’s last journey. We hear from the seven Bundrens including, perhaps from the afterlife, Addie herself. The eight other voices are neighbours and people who observe the fraught progress of Addie’s coffin to Jefferson.

The Bundren’s odyssey is a startling mixture of horror and the blackest of black comedy. Several vivid chapters describe their attempt to get across a river swollen by torrential rain. it is catastrophic, The mules are swept away and killed, Cash has his leg broken but – with great difficulty – Addie’s coffin is saved. The ghoulish comedy centres on the fact that the summer heat is having an unpleasant but inevitable effect on the unembalmed body of Addie Bundren. The people in settlements and homesteads where the cortege rests for the night are, understandably less than impressed, and each evening, as the sun sets, vultures descend from the heavens and perch near the coffin, sensing a meal.

The essence of the book is the skill with which Faulkner uses the journey (perhaps, on one level, an allegory) to describe the Bundren family. Darl has the most to say, and his thoughts reveal a deeply intelligent and perceptive individual, but one whose sensitivity could bring danger – which it does. Cash is stoical, courageous and unselfish, while young Vardaman’s bewilderment at the turn of events leads him to have strange flights of fancy. Seventeen year-old Dewey Dell is conscious of her own sexuality, and has a big secret – she is two months pregnant. Anse is a simple farmer and somewhat overwhelmed by his children. His determination to grant Addie her last wish in death is, perhaps, a result of being unable to bring her much in life.

Which leaves us with Jewel. He is very different from his siblings, possibly because he has a different father. This isn’t revealed until mid way through the novel, but it is significant. His father is Whitfield, a local hellfire preacher. To his half siblings Jewel seems permanently angry, and vexatious. Faulkner only gives Jewel one chapter, which rather confirms that he is not much given to introspection. Two actions show Jewel’s nobility of spirit. Having secretly worked at night for another farmer, he has saved enough money to buy a horse, which sets him apart from the others. When the mules are killed at the river, he allows his precious horse to be traded for a replacement team. In the same incident, when Cash and his precious tools are thrown into the river, with Cash lying badly injured and senseless on the bank, Jewel repeatedly dives into the turbulent water and, one by one, the tools are recovered.

The battered funeral party, minus Darl, whose obsessions have turned into apparent insanity, eventually bury what is left of Addie ‘alongside her own folks’, and it is left to Anse to provide two final moments of mordant humour. Books like Sanctuary and its sequel Requiem for a Nun certainly serve up plentiful reminders of the ‘evil that men do’, but As I Lay Dying is rather different. There is abundant misfortune and weakness, certainly, but apart from the lecherous pharmacist near the end who tries to take advantage of Dewey Dell, there’s little malice, many examples of human kindness, but – above all – an astonishing mixture of poetry, pathos, black humour and narrative skill. As I Lay Dying was first published by Random House in 1931.

March 8, 2025 0

SANCTUARY . . . Classics revisited

I have come to the novels of William Faulkner (left) late in life. Perhaps that is just as well. I am not sure how, as a younger man, I would have dealt with his baleful accounts of one or two truly awful human beings. Having just read Sanctuary, my first reaction is a sense of having been exposed to the very worst of us. The psychotic little gangster Popeye is an embodiment of genuine evil. He is warped both physically and mentally but seems invulnerable, echoing Shakespeare’s description of Julius Caesar ‘Why man, he doth bestride the narrow world like a colossus’.

The novel was published in 1931, which in itself gives pause for thought. I can’t think of an earlier novel published as mainstream fiction which dealt with depravity in the same way. The version that made it into print was, however, a toned down version of Faulkner’s original manuscript. In one sense, Sanctuary embodies the way Shakespeare adapted Aeschylean tragedy. Yes, there are truly evil people at work here, but the main characters are fundamentally unremarkable folk who, through a toxic blend of circumstance and human frailty, are brought down.

The story is this. A humdrum lawyer, Horace Benbow, leaves his wife, and makes his way to the town of Jefferson, where he has a property, shared with his sister. On the way, he meets a Memphis gangster known as Popeye, who takes him to a semi-derelict plantation house, where a bootlegger called Lee Goodwin brews his moonshine. Perhaps the only thoroughly decent person in the book is Goodwin’s common-law wife, Ruby. She prostituted herself to raise money for lawyers when he was first tried for murder, stuck by him while he was away fighting in the The Great War, and brings up their sickly child in the most challenging of circumstances. By a trick of fate, 18 year-old college girl Temple Drake ends up at the property. She is assaulted by Popeye, while a simpleton called Tommy is shot dead. Temple is taken off by Popeye to a Memphis brothel run by a woman called Reba, where she meets another petty crook called Red. Goodwin is arrested for the murder of Tommy, and the story hinges on Goodwin’s murder trial, where he is defended by Benbow.

Faulkner’s narrative style in Sanctuary is much more conventional than in some of his other novels. While it is not quite the same as the “show or tell” option, one of his techniques here is for something to happen, but the exact details are only fully revealed to the reader some time after. Three examples: we don’t learn the grim details of what Popeye did to Temple in the corn store until Goodwin’s murder trial: although Temple hints at it very briefly; it is only when Reba and her lady friends are consoling themselves with gin after Red’s funeral that the details of the sordid relationship between Popeye, Temple and Red become clear. Likewise, it is only in the final pages of the novel, when Popeye is on trial for a murder he could not have committed (because he was miles away at the time, murdering someone else) that we learn of his tormented and traumatic childhood.

The courtroom drama has been a fiction staple for decades, and they range from the dry and interminable wrangling of Bleak House, via the comedic genius of Israel Zangwill in The Big Bow Mystery, to the smarts of Michael Connolly’s Micky Haller novels, but it is the trial of Lee Goodwin which becomes the pivotal moment of Sanctuary. The adversarial nature of American court rooms lends itself readily to dramatic fiction even when the court is in some sophisticated city like New York or Boston. When the court is in a febrile small Southern town, the novelist will lick his/her lips in anticipation.

The novel, even its bowdlerised state, had so much in it that was impossible to film at the time and, probably today, too (please don’t give Lars Von Trier any ideas) but in 1933 a cinema version of the story was made, called The Story of Temple Drake, with Miriam Hopkins in the title role. Despite its inevitably sanitised version of the novel, it is said to be one of the films that prompted the Hays Code, a self censuring set of rules by film executives that set out just what could and couldn’t be seen in mainstream films. They tried again in 1961, but this was an amalgamation of Sanctuary and its 1951 sequel Requiem For A Nun. Faulkner, despite holding his nose at some of Hollywood’s excesses, was frequently employed by film makers, most notably as co-writer of the screenplay for Howard Hawks’s The Big Sleep. He still didn’t manage to resolve the question, “Who killed the chauffeur?”(For aficionados only)

Sanctuary concludes with two men dying for crimes they did not commit, and a young woman whose journey takes her through brutal rape, sexual decadence and perjury reaching a kind of limited restoration, but leaving behind her a trail of broken lives. Some commentators have decided the book is an allegory, and when people decide on this approach they inevitably disagree on what it is an allegory of, and choices range from the destruction of the Old South to middle-class apathy in the face of evil. For me it is, first and last, a very good crime novel. Faulkner was way ahead of the Noir game here, and although he openly admitted that the book was written to make money from those who like sensationally lurid stories, it remains a revealing glimpse into the darkness of the human soul.

February 28, 2025 0

INTRUDER IN THE DUST . . . Classics revisited

Published in 1948, this is regarded by some as Faulkner’s masterpiece. Any modern reader, picking up a Faulkner novel for the first time needs to adapt quickly to his style; either that, or put the book back on the shelf. Be prepared for long paragraphs with minimal punctuation. This, in 1948 was, of course, nothing new. Writers as diverse as Proust and Joyce had written in what became known as the “stream of consciousness” style. You will also need to be alert and follow the text closely to understand who is speaking. You will rarely find anything as obvious as “Grant said,” or “Mother replied,”.

The novel is set in the fictional town of Jefferson, within Yoknapatapha County. It is almost certainly based on the city of Oxford, Mississippi, where Faulkner lived for much of his life. He has little in common with Thomas Hardy, except that both men drew maps of the area where their novels were set, Hardy’s, of course, being of Dorset and its surrounds. We can date the action in the novel fairly accurately, as one of the characters refers to ‘the atom bomb’ which would only become public knowledge after August 1945.

The main character is a teenage boy called Charles ‘Chick’ Mallison. He comes from a very respectable and well-to-do white family. Early in the story, he is out fishing with some other boys, when he falls into the creek. His friends try to get him out, but he is then rescued by an austere black man called Lucas Beauchamp. Their early relationship is established when, after being taken to Beauchamp’s cabin to dry out, Charles attempts to pay the man for food he has been given. Beauchamp throws the money to the ground.

A couple of years later, Beauchamp is arrested for shooting dead a local white man called Vinson Gowrie whose kinsmen are all criminals. It is fully expected that at some point, Gowrie’s relatives will storm the jail and lynch the prisoner. Charles’s uncle is Gavin Stevens, the county attorney and, in true lawyer fashion, he has no particular position on whether or not Lucas did kill Gowrie, but is more concerned with matters of proof and evidence.

Charles is friends with a young black boy called Aleck Sander, son of the woman who cooks for the the Mallison family, and he was with Charles when Lucas rescued him from the creek. Charles goes to talk with Lucas in the jail, and is persuaded to go and dig up the coffin of the recently buried Gowrie, because Lucas is sure that a proper examination will show that the man was not killed by a bullet from Lucas’s old revolver, but with something of a different calibre. It is at this point that Faulkner introduces the character of Eunice Habersham, a rather eccentric and elderly white woman who keeps chickens. She is a descendant of one of the early settlers in the county; she is thin and apparently frail, but made of stern stuff. She has a truck, and with Charles’s horse Highboy in tow, they go out to the remote graveyard and dig up the coffin.

What happens next is for you to find out. This book may be 77 years old and a classic of literature, but it has many of the elements of a crime thriller, and reviewers – even amateurs like me – never give the game away. I will be neither the first nor the last to point out the similarity between this novel and the best-seller that came out 12 years later, which also featured a black man unjustly accused of a crime, with the events viewed through the eyes of a white teenager. Suffice it to say that the two novels have different endings, but both reflect on racial injustice in the American South, although Faulkner’s book is set decades after that of Harper Lee.

The full glory of Intruder In The Dust is the poetic language encased in prose, albeit prose of an unconventional nature. I have referred elsewhere to Faulkner’s majestic words describing the faint hope that if a Southern boy squeezes his eyes closed and holds his breath, Pickett’s charge might never have happened or had a different outcome. There is, however, more. So much more. Here, he describes the atmosphere within the black community of Jefferson waiting for the inevitable raid by the Gowries in the town jail, and the immolation of Lucas Beauchamp.

“But not now, not tonight: where in town except for Paralee and Aleck Sander, he had seen none either for twenty four hours but he had expected that, they were acting exactly as Negroes and whites both would have expected Negroes to act at such a time; they were still there, they had not fled, you just didn’t see them – a sense a feeling of their constant presence and nearness: black men and women and children breathing and waiting inside their barred and shuttered houses, not crouching cringing shrinking, not in anger and not quite in fear: just waiting, biding, since theirs was an armament which the white man could not match nor – if he but knew it, even cope with patience; just keeping out of sight and out of the way.”

It is one of the great ironies of modern sensibilities that if an unknown writer presented this manuscript to a modern publishing house, it would certainly be rejected. It’s all about words and language, obviously. Regarding the current debate over the capitalisation of the word Black and its obverse, in this review and elsewhere I have avoided capitals in both cases.

February 17, 2025 0

PICKETT’S CHARGE, THE SOUTH, & WILLIAM FAULKNER

In his 1948 novel Intruder In The Dust, William Faulkner tells of a black man accused of a murder he did not commit. Eventually, due to the efforts of a white teenager and an elderly lady, the real killer is identified. Along the way, Faulkner attempts to explain – but not apologise for – the residual bitterness felt by white people in the South, so many decades later, about the outcome of the Civil War. General Robert E Lee is a heroic figure in Southern mythology. He came close to winning the battle of Gettysburg in 1863, but on the third day of the battle his hopes hinged on what we now think of as a military blunder. Confederate forces, under General George Pickett, made a full frontal assault on Union forces holding high ground. The charge was a disaster, and although Lee won later battles, that afternoon is known as The High Watermark of The Confederacy. Faulkner’s character voices what remains one of the finest short pieces of prose in the English language. It is the ultimate “what if?”