Reading Those Classics #12

Classic Short Stories set in The Wasteland. 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, The Wilderness, etc.

The Collected Stories of William Faulkner

The stories in the section called The Wasteland are all war stories. I am for artists writing about whatever they want so I have no patience with critics who complain, for example, about Stephen Crane, who never saw combat, writing war stories. Faulkner was trained as a pilot in Canada but WWI ended before he could be deployed.

Ad Astra. In this story, despite their romantic image as daredevils, WWI pilots get stupid mean drunk in French bar near the end of hostilities. Just like the soldiers near the end of Dos Passos' novel 1919, they don't have the foggiest notion of their future in a peaceful world. They are unaccustomed to thinking of their own lives because for the last three years they have been giving their attention to fighting the war and staying alive. The only characters that talk any sense or have any hope are outsiders, a subadar in a turban and a German wearing a bandage on his head. Rejecting their culture's traditions and patriarchy, they point out that defeat has a silver lining and victory has its snags and crags. Bayard Sartoris puts in a cameo in a part without any lines, but we do get some backstory as to what he did after his twin John was killed in action.

Victory. This ironically titled story is profoundly sad. Alec Gray leaves to fight for the King in WWI. But along the way to becoming a hero and an officer, he ends up rejecting the attitudes of his Scottish family of shipwrights. His father frankly warns him that as a Scottish shipwright he must not, in pride and vainglory, aspire to become and officer and gentleman, both statuses temporary, contingent on the duration of the war. Alec Gray rejects this advice and having no “people” ends up an impoverished homeless veteran, so baffled that he’s driven half-mad and in London where the poor have been treated like trash for centuries. The only anchor he clings to is shaving and moustache grooming. Though the characters are not American Southerners, the theme is Southern respect for one’s raising. Faulkner seems to be saying rejecting family ties and traditional values of your native culture will have unfortunate consequences. With humility, we have to stay true to our roots and in fact endure them even after experience teaches us to examine them more objectively.

Crevasse. Lead by Capt. Alec Gray, about two dozen kind of lost soldiers fall into a crevasse. After the men get out of the cave of corpses, they listen to a Bible reading. But conventional religion seems to give them no solace, given the background of injury, disability, confusion and terror. This is an effective ‘horrors of war’ story, as unemotional as that other famous American writer from WWI, but it’s so terse that it is not like the copious and elaborate and obscure Faulkner we would like to meet even in short stories.

Turnabout. This much-needed funny war story captures the rivalry and disdain on both sides of the wartime Anglo-American relationship. The American pilots ridicule a young English Midshipman and his ilk for their drunken ways and the staccato delivery of their flashy undergrad talk. The Americans don't even know what the English guys do to contribute to the war effort but they are all judgy anyway. The young Englishman is impressed when the American pilots take him on a bombing mission and offers to take a pilot out on their torpedo boat on one of their missions, turnabout being fair play. They modestly disparage their own mission, which turns out, against all the American’s expectations, to be a harrowing brush with combat death, all treated with the English dash and grace under pressure so admired by you-know-who. Look how wrong you can be!

All the Dead Pilots. The unnamed narrator is a British officer who censors the letters of the pilots, thus giving him to know tidbits that we wouldn't expect a typical unnamed narrator to know. The narrator also knows from gossip that there is a rivalry between the American pilot John Sartoris and the English CO Spoomer for the attentions of the same French sex worker. The CO assigns Johnny to duties outside his province so the CO can visit the sex worker. Johnny seeks revenge, as any anybody from Mississippi would, by raising hell and trying to do in the CO's big dog. Faulkner provides the backstory of Johnny heedlessly and unheroically not surviving the war, an event of key importance to his twin brother Bayard in Flags in the Dust. The gritty realistic writing is recognizably Faulkner but still accessible so I can’t imagine why five magazines rejected it (it didn’t see release until Faulkner confidently included it in the collection called These 13).