School Days
You may be surprised to learn that we didn’t read William Faulkner in the high school classrooms of Baldwyn and Booneville, Mississippi, in the 1950s. Surely at least one of our English teachers must have known that a writer living only 70 miles to the west of us had been awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in December 1950, but that information never penetrated the walls of our classrooms. Later I would learn that many of his neighbors in Oxford—and even some of his relatives—had an extremely low opinion of “Count No ’Count,” as Faulkner was sometimes called; but at least his fellow townsmen acknowledged his existence and knew that he was a writer. In Baldwyn and Booneville it was as if he had never been born.
Nevertheless, though I had no way of knowing it at the time, I was being prepared in my childhood and youth for my lifelong reading of Faulkner. The front porch of my parents’ general store at Brice’s Cross Roads was much like the porch of Varner’s store in Frenchman’s Bend, the setting of Faulkner’s 1940 novel, The Hamlet. There, local farmers gathered when the fields were too wet to plow or the cotton had been laid by or crops had been harvested. There, they swapped stories, played checkers and dominos, and spat tobacco juice onto the graveled road that came right up to the front steps. My maternal grandfather, Pappy Hickey, often sat on the storefront at Brice’s Cross Roads and, like the old-timers in Faulkner’s family and fiction, told stories of the Civil War as they had been handed down from generation to generation.
“Granddad was a wagon driver for General Forrest and served with him the whole war,” Pappy Hickey told a Chicago Tribune reporter who interviewed him in 1950. “On the day before the battle he drove his wagon, loaded with corn for Forrest’s horses, up to the farm on Tishomingo Creek and called the family out into the yard. ‘You’ll have to get away from here,’ he told my grandmother, ‘because there’s going to be a battle here tomorrow.’ But my dad wasn’t the type to run from a fight, so he clumb a tree and cheered and hollered while Forrest whupped them Yankees like they never been whupped afore. After the battle Dad came here to Bethany Church just over there behind the Brice house, and counted 17 Yankees who had crawled under the floor of the church to die.”
So, years later, when I read Uncle Buck McCaslin’s boastful remarks about the legendary Confederate colonel John Sartoris in The Unvanquished—“Heard of him? . . . Who ain’t heard of him in this country? Get the Yankees to tell you about him sometime”—it was my grandfather’s voice I heard in my head.
My contacts with African-American neighbors and playmates also provided a helpful context for my later reading of Faulkner’s novels and stories. My close friendship with one black playmate, Sonny Agnew, was not unlike the relationship between Bayard Sartoris and Ringo in The Unvanquished, although the only contacts Sonny and I had with war of any kind were the battlefield games we played in and around the park that memorialized the Union and Confederate soldiers who fought in the Battle of Brice’s Cross Roads, as well as our visits to the graves of the Confederate soldiers buried in the Presbyterian cemetery just down the road. Sonny was the only one of us boys brave enough to ride our homemade cart down a steep hill, the trip ending with the cart smashed to pieces and Sonny rolling on the ground, laughing. Araminta, the African-American woman who helped my mother wash clothes in the huge black pot in the back yard and also helped her at hog-killing time cook out the lard and cracklings and grind the sausage, was the first Dilsey, the black servant of The Sound and the Fury, I ever knew. Unlike the Compsons, my mother never asked anyone to come to our back door, and Araminta often sat with Mama and me at our kitchen table, eating lunch with us.
I would even include in my preparation for reading Faulkner my boyhood love affair with the Brooklyn Dodgers. Probably the only white Dodgers fan in all of Mississippi, I cheered for Jackie and Campy and Newk and, as a result, was sometimes called a “n——r lover” by some of my playmates—just as Faulkner was by some of his fellow citizens.
I knew only one other individual who was also a Dodgers fan—John, the black handyman who worked for Prather Auto Company, the Ford and Standard Oil dealer in Baldwyn, where my father also worked, driving a gas and oil delivery truck. During the summer months, I sometimes accompanied Daddy on his deliveries, and between runs I would often visit with the salesmen, mechanics, and other workers in the office or garage. John, the only black employee, washed and waxed cars, pumped gas and fixed flats, cleaned the floors, and emptied the trash. Called “N——-r John” by most whites, sometimes even in his presence, to me he was a prince of a man—a soft-spoken, polite, and gentle soul elevated to royalty in my eyes because he shared my love for the Dodgers. “Jackie got two hits yesterday,” he would say, or “Campy hit a home run,” and we would replay the games while I helped him chamois a car he had just washed. Looking back, I see us as comrades in arms, a white child and a middle-aged, deferential black man, underdogs and confederates conducting guerrilla warfare against a prejudiced and unjust majority. I don’t recall ever being told his last name, but I shall never forget how his face brightened and his voice became more animated when we talked of Jackie, Campy, and Newk.
Then there is the parallel of language in Faulkner’s books. Even today, when I read Faulkner’s renditions of Southern dialect, white or black, I hear again the voices from the front porches and schoolrooms and cotton fields and churches of my childhood.
But, of course, I didn’t know any of that at the time. I fell in love with reading at an early age, but my standard fare was western novels, particularly the Lone Ranger and Red Ryder series, or sports stories, like the Chip Hilton books. My sixth-grade teacher, Mrs. Bloodworth, advanced my literary appreciation a bit by requiring her class to memorize and recite a poem each week, a few of which—such as “In Flanders Field,” “My Shadow,” and “Wynken, Blynken, and Nod”—I can still partially quote six decades later. The first classic novel I ever read—on the recommendation of a seventh-grade classmate, not a teacher—was an abridged version of Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables. After that I was eternally hooked on words and stories and in high school found myself eagerly feasting on Shakespeare’s poetry and dramaturgy: Julius Caesar in Mrs. Martha Ruth Martin’s tenth-grade English class and Macbeth in Mrs. Marian Young’s eleventh-grade English class.
But still, no Faulkner. That didn’t change when I enrolled at Northeast Mississippi Junior College in my hometown of Booneville, where we had moved when we left the Cross Roads. At Northeast I studied English literature with a brilliant and inspirational teacher, J.C. Pardue, but since that was British literature, there was no place for Faulkner in the syllabus. Though a Mississippian, Mr. Pardue read Keats and Wordsworth in a precise, clipped, perfect English accent (or so it seemed to me) that made the poems sing and me wish that I were in England (as one day I would be). Nevertheless, though Mr. Pardue was one of my finest teachers and greatly contributed to my love and appreciation of literature, I never once heard him mention William Faulkner.
After being graduated from the junior college, I transferred to Delta State College in Cleveland, in the heart of the Mississippi Delta; and there it was, in my junior year in the spring of 1959, that I first heard of Faulkner.
That semester I enrolled in a class in Southern Literature, taught by Dr. Thomas Daniel Young, an outstanding scholar who would later become the Gertrude C. Vanderbilt Professor of English at Vanderbilt University. Dr. Young was the co-editor—with Richmond Croom Beatty, Floyd C. Watkins, and Randall Stewart—of the textbook we used, The Literature of the South. That book, which still holds its honored place on my bookshelf, includes three selections from Faulkner: the short stories “That Evening Sun Go Down” and “An Odor of Verbena” and the Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech. My penciled underlinings and marginal notations in the book evidence that I read all three selections quite closely, and these readings were my first introduction to the writings of William Faulkner.
I don’t recall any of Dr. Young’s remarks about these stories or Faulkner’s magnificent speech, but I do recall a personal story he told about his own discovery of Faulkner. A native of Louisville, Mississippi, Dr. Young served as an Army intelligence officer in France during World War II. There he met quite a few academics and intellectuals, and when they found out he was from Mississippi, they wanted to talk with him about that Mississippi writer Faulkner. Sadly, and to the amazement of his French compatriots, he had to confess that he knew nothing of Faulkner. But, Dr. Young told our class, when the war was over and he returned stateside, one of the first places he went was to a library to check out some books by Faulkner. He quickly learned why the French were so excited about his fellow Mississippian, and now he was passing on his enthusiasm for this author to his students. [Dr. Young repeated this story to an audience at Southeast Missouri State University in 1989 when I invited him as one of the principal speakers during our first exhibit of the Brodsky Faulkner collection.]
I was so impressed by the Faulkner selections we read in that Southern Literature class, and by Dr. Young’s endorsement of Faulkner, that I chose to write my term paper that semester on Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying. While I had been moved by Nancy’s plight in “That Evening Sun Go Down,” and impressed by Bayard Sartoris’s courage and sense of honor in “An Odor of Verbena,” and of course uplifted by the poetic phrasing of the Nobel Prize Speech, none of that prepared me for the immense pleasure and awe I experienced as I turned the pages of As I Lay Dying. I had never read, or couldn’t even have imagined, a story told in this fashion. As readers of the novel well know, Faulkner tosses the narration of this novel around like a football on a playground. First Darl speaks, and then Cora, and then Darl again, and then Jewel. Eventually we learn, if we bother to keep count, that there are 15 different narrators and 59 separate chapters in the novel. Fortunately, the story line being presented is a fairly simple one: about a rural Mississippi family, the Bundrens, who are taking the corpse of Addie, the wife and mother, back to her hometown of Jefferson to be buried with her family. So it’s not the plot but the way Faulkner chooses to unravel the plot that makes this such a complicated and intriguing novel.
And why would anyone choose to tell a story in this manner? The principal result of Faulkner’s shifting the storytelling from one character to another is fairly easy to identify—and quite compelling. We know from our own experience that if two or more people observe the same event, they will see it—and later recount it—somewhat or perhaps even quite differently. Anyone who has served on a jury knows how a parade of witnesses, some friendly, some hostile, offer varying and often contradictory versions of the same event. And the juror must decide what actually happened and who’s telling the truth and who isn’t. It’s the same with this novel, with the reader playing the role of the juror. Is Cora right about which of the sons is Addie’s favorite? What is Anse’s real reason for wanting to go to Jefferson? Why is Jewel so angry and spiteful? What is Darl’s problem? Answers to such questions depend on who’s talking—and who’s reading. Clearly, what Faulkner is conveying here is not an absolute, “capital-T” Truth but a “little-t” truth that depends in large measure on narrative viewpoint.
I had never before been so taken with the way an author chooses to tell a story; and with that reading of As I Lay Dying, I began what became a career-long interest in Faulkner’s technique—not so much the stories Faulkner tells as the way he chooses to tell them. Henry James once remarked that there must be a thousand different ways to tell a story, and, as I continued reading Faulkner in the years to come, I became convinced that he was determined to experiment with every single one of those methods.
[Note: In 2005, when I was invited as one of the three professors to lead the online discussion of Faulkner for Oprah Winfrey’s Book Club, I chose As I Lay Dying for the focus of my remarks.]
I love the jury metaphor. It perfectly encapsulates how to read Faulkner. So simple yet profound for interpretation and understanding