Reading Those Classics #20

Classic Short Stories set in The Middle Ground 2. 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 Middle Ground, etc.

The Collected Stories of William Faulkner

This is the second half of the fifth section, featuring characters managing the middle ground, dealing with life’s transitions, adapting or not. Mostly not.

Artist at Home. In this story Faulkner examines artistic inspiration. A fiction writer and his wife have to take in a poet who may have some kind of personality disorder due to his rough childhood. An affair ensues. And out of the painful affair the fiction writer gets a story and the poet gets a poem. Sometimes that’s just how artists roll, I guess.

The Brooch. A southern gothic meets noir story in which a repressed male like Horace Benbow is tormented by a mother with rigid standards. Unusually, Faulkner gets explicitly intertextual, making reference to Hudson’s Green Mansions. The main character Howard Boyd reads that novel obsessively and has a schoolboy’s image of the doomed Rima: “All the separate and fragmentary beauty and melody and graceful motion found scattered throughout nature were concentrated and harmoniously combined in her. How various, how luminous, how divine she was!”

Grandmother Millard. Faulkner uses history as people remember it and as artist Faulkner imagines it, not as memoirists and historians wrote it down. For example, in this story Gen. Forrest is not the brute of historical truth but a down-home gentlemen with respect to the ladies. And the titular lady is a hoot. Kitchen clock in hand, Miss Rosa Millard times the family members and slaves when they do a drill burying the family silver, which amuses to no end her son-in-law Col. John Sartoris, who is fighting under Forrest. The comic story of southern romanticism is told by Bayard Sartoris, who narrated the intense stories in The Unvanquished, though chronologically this not intense story happens before those collected in that book. No fewer than eight magazines rejected this funny story of southern indomitability in the shadow of defeat. Maybe it just didn’t sit well in early 1942, just after the US entered WWII, when just the thought of the word ‘defeat’ probably made people feel sick.

Golden Land. Faulkner lived in Southern California in the Thirties. Although he didn’t get a novel out of it like Huxley or Hughes, he did get this short story. It is about a man who escaped hard-scrabble Nebraska and made a pile in real estate in Los Angeles. Only to end up a drinker, an adulterer, an abuser of his wife and kids, and a jailkeeper of his mother. The middle ground here is about the man and his mother suspended between Nebraska roots and substantial values and the culture of Hollywood which offers nothing worth enduring much less prevailing over, not even a harsh winter.

There Was a Queen. Aunt Jenny of Flags in theDust stars as the title character. She objects to the method her great-great-niece Narcissa uses to obtain the obscene letters sent to and stolen from her by Byron Snopes in Flags. A queen, however, must age and weaken, and her standards pass from the scene. This somber examination of the transience of generations is partly seen through the eyes of half-black and half-white Elnora who is loyal to Sartoris family but thinks Narcissa an upstart. Bayard and Narcissa’s son Benbow is the last Sartoris.

Mountain Victory. A disabled Confederate officer and his black companion make their way home to Mississippi after the surrender. They end up having to stay in the barn of a Tennessee mountain family. The elder son is a Union veteran with PTSD but the younger son and the daughter want to get the hell out of their dysfunctional family by accompanying the disabled officer back to his plantation. In fact, the officer’s curious backstory is that he is a descendant of the wily Indian chief who starred in Lo!. This tension-filled story is one of the longest in the collection with themes of defeat and the paradoxes of victory, the loss and recovery of the ability to feel fear, and the deep dysfunctions of unhappy families that are too much alone with each other.