Reading Those Classics #16

Classic Short Stories set in The Middle Ground. 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, The Wasteland, etc.

The Collected Stories of William Faulkner

The reviews below cover the first half of the fifth section, The Middle Ground. These stories star characters managing the liminal spaces, dealing with life’s transitions, adapting or not. Mostly not.

Wash. The title character is a poor white handy-man that feels connection with the cavaliers who “set the order and the rule of living” and went to war in the North to preserve their way of life. Not going to the war himself because he felt he had to take care of his own family, Wash put up with derision and mockery even from the enslaved. Wash had accepted as given that his white superiors really were gallant, proud, and brave. But Wash discovers that "the chosen best among them" were just evil braggarts who saw Wash and his kind – and Wash’s own family - as less than human. So disabused of his old meanings Wash decides that life makes no sense and does the old ultra-violence for which Faulkner is notorious. A powerful story of loss.

Honor. In this ironically titled tale, the WWI pilot that we met in Ad Astra, Buck Monaghan, is having a rocky post-war career, never holding a job for more than three weeks. He has ended up in the silly entertainment job of barnstorming. You would also think that the simple rule of honor says, “Don’t take up with anybody else’s wife” would be easy enough to follow. But, no. You would also think that a wing-walker would not take up with the wife of his pilot since the pilot could easily fix the wing-walker’s wagon but good. But, no. I mean, where would literature be if everybody acted sensibly, honorably? We’d have a literature of uplifting stories. Yuck.

Dr. Martino. A widow and her daughter meet an ailing doctor every summer at a spa in northern Mississippi. The doctor takes an interest in the fatherless girl and wants to get across to her the idea, "When you are afraid to do something you know that you are alive. But when you are afraid to do what you are afraid of you are dead." To beat fear, she does things like swim in snake-infested rivers, which of course scares her mom brickless. The story is narrated by a young man still too conceited to be sensible that even an alluring girl may have plans for herself that don’t revolve around oil-rich Yale men. He wants to marry the girl so he forms an alliance with the fearful mother to pull the reins in on the girl. Another story about the trapped female, like the shuttlecock girl in The Good Soldier, powerless to escape other people who are oblivious as to what the trapped female might want for herself.

Fox Hunt. This 1931 story is not connected to the world of Yoknapatawpha and is a Post-Depression acerbic look at the Roaring 1920s. It’s an examination of the degenerate ways of rich people from the point of view of their minions and hangers-on. Nobody remains unsullied by money, power, property, flattery, attention, the best tables. Harrison Blair is an Oklahoma Osage, a member of the band who were in the 1920s the richest group of people per capita in the world. Oil that is, black gold. Made rich by Texas tea, he is so fallen, so without values of either culture he’s between, that he brutally dispatches a fox just because his redheaded wife (another trapped female) is attracting attention from another man.

Pennsylvania Station. What could be ground more central than the majestic railroad station in New York City? And what more ironic than two homeless men soon to be driven from a warm waiting room in the majestic symbol of the city of business? The two down and out men, one young and one old, talk about the older man’s nephew. The uncle is an unrelatable narrator in the sense that he seems not to have tumbled to the fact that his nephew (“not bad, just wild as young men are”) is an unfilial son to his trusting mother. The uncle covers for the thieving shit by saying he was “confused” by shady actions that are all too clear to the reader. Besides the cruelty of children, death skulks in the background of this bleak story. The uncle is the last of a big family, though he was not expected to live beyond 20 years of age. He says, “But sometimes it looks like a man can stand just about anything if he don't believe he can stand it.”