Faulkner’s back pages

HERE’S my favorite story about William Faulkner: In 1925, while living in New Orleans, he became friendly with the wife of Sherwood Anderson and persuaded her to pass along his first novel, “Soldiers’ Pay,” for the older writer to read. Anderson is reported to have grumbled, “I’ll get it published if I don’t have to read it,” and the book came out the following year. The incident is, at least in part, apocryphal -- in reality, Anderson admired the manuscript and recommended it enthusiastically -- but the fact that Faulkner would make such an overture suggests something important, offering a glimpse of him in protean form.

We have a tendency to ossify our artists, to imagine them as inevitable. Faulkner, though, is fascinating for the opposite reason, because he was vibrantly, scrappily alive. Burdened with debt and family obligation, he wrote, always, for money and yet created the most significant body of work in American literature. He struggled and suffered, went to Hollywood, drank to excess and fooled around. For the first half of his career, he was neglected; only with the 1946 publication of “The Portable Faulkner” did he begin to be appreciated in any widespread way. Perhaps most important, he did not (unlike, say, his contemporary F. Scott Fitzgerald) emerge fully formed as a talent but rather stumbled to greatness, hitting his stride not with his first but with his fourth book, “The Sound and the Fury,” the densely visionary novel in which, three years after “Soldiers’ Pay,” he would showcase his mature style.

How did Faulkner come so far so fast? That’s an elusive question about which even the author was at something of a loss. “One day,” he noted, “I seemed to shut a door, between me and all publishers’ addresses and book lists. I said to myself, Now I can write.” The truth is more complex, as we see in “Novels 1926-1929,” the fifth and final volume of the Library of America’s comprehensive set of Faulkner’s longer works. Opening with “Soldiers’ Pay” and ending with “The Sound and the Fury” (it also features Faulkner’s second novel, “Mosquitoes,” as well as a restored version of “Flags in the Dust,” originally published in truncated form in 1929 as “Sartoris”), “Novels 1926-1929” is a record of apprenticeship, a portrait of the artist as a young man.

If, in the past, the tendency has been to dismiss Faulkner’s first three novels, here we get a fuller picture, in which the early books offer glimpses of the writer he would become. “Soldiers’ Pay” -- the story of two World War I veterans bringing a gravely wounded comrade home to Mississippi -- may be a modernist fugue, highly mannered, but it also introduces the themes (the effects of the Great War; the influence of heritage, of family) and imagery that recur throughout Faulkner’s work. “Night,” he writes in one such moment, “was almost come: only the footprint of day, only the odor of day, only a rumor, a ghost of light among the trees.” Even “Mosquitoes,” a negligible satire of 1920s literary New Orleans, is important for showing what Faulkner can’t do: the cosmopolitan story, the tale of flittering urban life. It’s no coincidence that in the wake of this book, he returned, literally and figuratively, to Mississippi, creating the fictional Yoknapatawpha County and tilling, as he put it in a 1956 Paris Review interview, “my own little postage stamp of native soil.”

That postage stamp emerges full-blown in “Flags in the Dust,” which introduces Yoknapatawpha as well as many of its central families, from the Sartorises, who represent the tragedy of the past, to the Snopeses, who represent the tragedy of the future. (In Faulkner, it’s always tragedy, no matter where you look.) In unexpurgated form, the book is a revelation, an essential bridge between the author’s first two novels and the remainder of his oeuvre. It’s also something of a reclamation, since, in the canon of Faulkner’s writing, “Flags in the Dust” has never gotten its due. Moving fluidly among three generations, it is the saga of two Bayard Sartorises, grandfather and grandson, both cursed by their bloodline, the “despair and the isolation of that doom [they] could not escape.”

What’s remarkable about the novel is its breadth, its air of history, the idea that time is lingering, that a decision made 50 or 75 years earlier can have a direct effect on people’s lives. This has always been the power of Faulkner’s fiction -- its depth, its sense of consequence. In the wake of “Soldiers’ Pay” and “Mosquitoes,” “Flags in the Dust” marks a profound expansion of the author’s vision, especially in regard to destiny, to the questions of fate and obligation that occupy so much of Faulkner’s work. “Nothing to be seen,” young Bayard reflects, in one of the bleakest passages in the novel, “and the long long span of a man’s natural life. Three score and ten years, to drag a stubborn body about the world and cozen its insistent demands. Three score and ten, the bible said. Seventy years. And he was only twenty-six. Not much more than a third through it. Hell.”

Of course, when it comes to fate and obligation, there may be no more compelling effort in American literature than “The Sound and the Fury,” a great harmonic convergence of a book in which the collapse of the Compson family is recorded in a multiplicity of voices, from the inside out. Commonly regarded as Faulkner’s masterpiece, it has long been a staple of college literature surveys, where students wrestle with the intricacies of the “Benjy” and “Quentin” sections -- one narrated by an innocent, the other by a schizophrenic on the verge of suicide.

Certainly, the technical achievement here is overwhelming, but if “Novels 1926-1929” has anything to tell us, it’s that “The Sound and the Fury” is the result of a natural evolution, a nearly seamless melding of the experimentalism of “Soldiers’ Pay” with the sense of place and history that gives “Flags in the Dust” such weight. It’s also a tragic story in the most biblical terms, as the sins of one generation are visited on the next. For the Compsons (not just Benjy and Quentin but their brother Jason -- bitter, loveless, brutal in the face of all that he has not been given -- and their sister Caddy, who runs off, leaving her daughter, also named Quentin, who will, in turn, run off herself), time is an affliction, and the past remains as vivid as the present -- more so, since they continue to play out and react against its degradations and its slights. “I give you the mausoleum of all hope and desire,” Quentin recalls his father saying after presenting him with a watch that had belonged to his own father. “I give it to you not that you may remember time, but that you might forget it now and then for a moment and not spend all your breath trying to conquer it. Because no battle is ever won he said. They are not even fought. The field only reveals to man his own folly and despair, and victory is an illusion of philosophers and fools.”

The fixation with time is hardly a modernist sentiment. Rather, it’s a classical perspective, in which everything matters and nothing is forgotten or forgiven or redeemed. Yet this is Faulkner’s genius: the way he uses modernist strategies but is, in the end, not really a modernist -- his ability to be of his time and timeless at once. Unlike Joyce or Pound, there is no orthodoxy in his writing; unlike Stein, he is not using language to play games. No, for Faulkner, stylistic innovation -- the lack of punctuation, the run-on sentences, the blurring of chronology, of memory and action -- becomes a matter of emotional impact, of the effort to re-create life as it is lived. That’s an idea he had to learn how to inhabit, as he moved from the studied diffidence of “Soldiers’ Pay” to an aesthetic more three-dimensional and profound. In “Novels 1926-1929,” we see the arc of this development, the dramatic shift from artifice to art.