Reading Those Classics #5

Classic Short Stories set in The Village. A collection of 42 stories, it won the National Book Award for Fiction in 1951. The stories were first published in weekly magazines such as The American Mercury, Forum, Harper’s Magazine, The Saturday Evening Post, Scribner’s Magazine, and The Sewanee Review. Faulkner came up with the themed section headings, such The Country, The Village, etc.

The Collected Stories of William Faulkner

This is the second section of the collection, with the setting Jefferson, a village in Mississippi.

A Rose for Emily. His first short story sold to a national weekly is also the one most often collected in anthologies and taught in high school English classes as an exercise in close reading for themes, symbols, and other literary ornaments. A paragon of the Southern Gothic genre, the story evokes the dust, squalor, inertia, and aloneness of a reclusive life a.k.a. a living death and the slow painful passing of generations in the South.  The generation gap is illustrated at the town council meeting where greybeards and young ‘uns are discussing how to deal with the terrible smell around great lady Miss Emily’s property. “Dammit, sir,” Judge Stevens said, “will you accuse a lady to her face of smelling bad?”

Hair. One of the facts of The Tale of Genji that creeps out us post-moderns is that the Shining Prince raised Murasaki to be a model Heian mistress from the time she was a child. Hard to take. Really. In this story too small-town barber Hawkshaw gives a girl-child customer special attentions he gives no other clients. All for reasons not to be spoiled in a review; reasons the reader will have to decide how to take after they learn the back-story of the barber. Faulkner chides smalltown gossips, joke-relators, storytellers, and orators with an indictment of The Oral Tradition of the South: “I guess maybe a talking man hasn't got the time to ever learn much about anything except words.”

Centaur in Brass. Phlegm contains virus, bacteria, and other sloughed-off ick. Flem Snopes is parts cunning, greed, manipulativeness and cowardice, as ambitious as Lucifer to be somebody. He concocts a complicated scheme of harassment, theft, and blackmail. But the two black employees, the objects of Flem’s machinations, manage to get out from under. The climax between the two firemen calls to mind Stepin Fetchit humor so simultaneously funny and cringe-worthy for us post-moderns nowadays but powerful is the vivid characterization of the implacable dignity of TomTom and the reptilian nature of Flem.

Dry September. A harsh story in which prolonged drought and ever-present dust intensify traditional racism and penchant for violence as a solution to everything. Such that a rumor of a sexual assault of a white woman by a black man drives the white men to kidnap, torture, and murder an innocent black man, despite the intervention of the barber Hawkshaw who urges the killers to let the law investigate in the proper way. John McLendon is an odious fascist, like the militarist vigilante Percy Grimm in Light in August. After the murder, McLendon feels nothing but sweaty, goes home, and knocks around his wife, who, unsurprisingly, fears for her life when he’s around. Like A Rose for Emily, this story is about how life in a small town is hard on older single females and it has often been included in anthologies because it also feeds class discussion on intersections of race, class, and gender.

Death Drag. A story that smacks of long journalism, about a team of pilots who travel to small towns to give flying shows and perform aeronautical stunts. That the daredevil is Jewish the local unnamed narrator takes pains to emphasize, and a reader wonders why until the story plays out. The Jewish guy is manipulated and lied to, has suffered injury resulting in partial disability, and made to crash through a barn, all for the idle entertainment of villagers who are not convinced he’s a human being.

Elly. For young single white females, life in a small southern town in the early Thirties offers a future of marriage and children and homemaking and shopping. If this prospect is not enough for content - and it is not for the title character - there is always defiance in the form of the greatest transgression. Sex with a black male, however, carries risk: social opprobrium, self-loathing, and distress culminating in madness, to name only a few. That Faulkner is able to pack so much incident and theme in one short story testifies to his power as an artist and vision as a human being.

Uncle Willy. For the last forty years, the 60-year-old title character has dealt with stifled life in a small town with secluded bachelorhood, a subsistence bodega, unfailing attendance at Sunday school, and an addiction to morphine. For human connections, he has a posse of teenage boys and an ancient black retainer. Keeping himself to himself is an idyll of innocence that cannot be permitted to continue by right-thinking villagers that can’t abide the idea of somebody somewhere living and let live, quietly and harmlessly. Dare to be different, see what happens.

Mule in the Yard. This story starts with slapstick as a widow and her black companion chase Flem Snopes’ mules off the widow’s property on a winter morning spooky with fog. But the fraught backstory between the widow and Flem is smoothly revealed, showing Faulkner’s power of economical narrative. It’s also a satisfying story of ‘the biter bit,’ as the widow gets belated revenge over Flem, who, of course, deserves hurt ten times what he dished out in the first place.

That Will Be Fine. Great Christmas tale narrated by seven-year-old Georgie. He unknowingly tells of a family crisis precipitated by his Uncle Rodney’s defalcations at a company unwise enough to employ him despite his playboy reputation. Faulkner makes no missteps in causing Georgie to note and report but not understand the unfolding of events. Distracted by the prospects of getting presents and quarters, Georgie’s kiddish tone is breathless and fresh and believable and relentless. The story manages to be comic in a tragically ironic way.

That Evening Sun. "… didn't God Himself make a mistake when he settled the Jews in Russia so they could be tormented as if they were in hell," asks a character in an Isaac Babel story. And when he plunked souls down in Mississippi and made them poor, female, and black. This story examines what it’s like to be utterly powerless to stave off coercion and violence, doomed to be a murder victim, with the white people utterly oblivious to a black person’s fate. Besides a story that examines inequalities of race, class, and gender, it also has Compsons from The Sound and The Fury: Quentin (the narrator), Caddie, and Jason appear as kids, all of them acting consistently with their adult characters in the novel. This story was written before TS&TF so the chronology is all cockeyed, but who cares? Faulkner sure didn’t so why should we?