Last month I finally read Faulkner - Faulkner's stories, that is, for a book club I took part in. Like Shakespeare, Faulkner is an icon of the English literature whom I heard about back in high school (in Belgium) twenty-five years ago but truly discovered rather late in life. While I adore Shakespeare's plays, I doubt I'll ever love Faulkner's works a third as much, but I was amazed by his insights into human nature and the originality of his plots.
Most of the stories we read have been collected in this book, although the one that stuck out most in my mind, The Unvanquished, is not. (But it makes a chapter of Faulkner's eponymous novel, which is easy enough to get.) I liked The Unvanquished because of the grandmother, a woman with great resilience, grit and outright "spunk" in spite of her old age. The characters are unique and clearly defined, and have strong motivations that make for spellbinding conflict.
(Warning: the following paragraphs contain spoilers.)
The first story of Faulkner's I ever read is the first one in the book, Barn Burning. In it, a young boy tries to warn a landowner that the boy's father is going to set fire to his barn, but the landowner arrives too late. I watched The Long, Hot Summer starring Paul Newman last summer (a very bad movie that even Paul Newman couldn't save) and interestingly enough, Barn Burning recounts the incident that kicks the young boy out of town, while Long, Hot Summer follows the boy, now grown-up, as he returns to town. Although I knew the story's ending because of the movie, Faulkner's prose still took my breath away. The story just gripped me and didn't let go.
Another story that I couldn't stop thinking about was Dry September, a story where a white thirty-something spinster, who had once been the life of the party and realized last that she wouldn't get married, accuses a black man of assaulting her. This results in the black man's murder by a posse of white men, in spite of the white barber's insistence that the black man didn't do it. The white woman's female friends give her fleeting attention, but soon everything will return to normal, except that the black man's death weighs on the white woman's conscience. She has a breakdown where she can't stop laughing hysterically.
When we discussed this story in the bookclub and the book club leader asked what the woman's problem was, an older woman with her hair dyed brown, maybe sixty-eight years old wanting to look fifty (in other words, not young but not the very elderly people the book club can attract), exclaimed gleefully "she didn't get picked up!" When you saw the sheer delight on her face, you could only imagine how life must have been for an unmarried woman in the South sixty or seventy years ago. What stayed with me in the story is that the woman hadn't been a particularly mean or vicious girl growing up, in fact it seemed that she had been quite popular and just as nice as the next person, and yet her life went off track (because of her parents, if I remember correctly). She committed that awful act, accusing an innocent black man, and in the end it only succeeded in pushing her further off the deep end.
Two other stories I recommend are A Rose for Emily and Centaur in Brass. I have to say, I didn't see the ending of A Rose for Emily coming. It is told for the point of view of the townspeople, who believe that Emily is an odd, harmless but determined elderly lady and who speak of her in a somewhat condescending tone, so I didn't think the smell outside the house that they get rid of without telling Emily was that of a corpse and I didn't think she had used the arsenic she had bought from the pharmacist to kill him. (I thought she might want to kill herself.) It's only at the end of the story that we find out that she keeps the corpse of her beau in a bedroom upstairs. He thought he could leave her? He should have thought again. Obviously she was unhinged, but she is such a great character.
If Barn Burning and The Unvanquished have Ab Snopes as the "bad" character (barn burner and horse thief), Centaur in Brass is about Ab Snopes's son Flem, who is supposed to come back so ethical and handsome in The Long, Hot Summer (under the name of Ben Quick) and, in Faulkner's story, is stealing brass from the factory he supervises but is ultimately defeated by his black employees. I always love a good story where both sides are very shrewd.
That Evening Sun was also quite stunning in its description of a black woman's fear that her violent man has come back into town. It is not clear he did, the story is told from the point of view of the young children of the white man who employs the black woman and they clearly don't believe he's back, but all the signs point toward him being back nonetheless, and the woman being about to be killed.
I haven't written a story in many years, but reading Faulkner's stories made me remember how much I liked the genre, back in the days.
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