Back to the Classics #17

I read this book for the reading challenge Back to the Classics 2022.

Classic Short Stories. The first five stories were written for the Saturday Evening Post and the sixth was rejected by the Post but snapped up by Scribner’s. The author needed the revenue so he polished the six stories, added a seventh story to improve overall unity, and published the book in February, 1938. If I can put on my ESL Teacher hat, Sartoris is said “SAR-tris” or “SAR-dƏ-ris” because in unstressed syllables /t/ becomes /d/, like city, right or left, forgettable. It’s not “sa-TOR-is.” And “Bayard” is said “baird.

Content Advisory: Since we live in a twitchy society where the needless to say increasingly needs to be said, that rotten racist epithet is all over this story, which shouldn’t be a shock because the fiction is set in a racist society.

The Unvanquished – William Faulkner

The stories are set in Mississippi during and just after the Civil War. They tell the story of the Sartoris family and their slaves. The protagonists Ringo (black) and Bayard (white) have grown up together and are in their mid-teens. Ringo lives in the house and calls Bayard’s grandmother Miss Rosa Millard “Granny,” making the reader wonder if Ringo and Bayard are half-brothers.

The first couple of stories easily hold the attention because they were written for a general magazine audience that Faulkner knew was not up to the challenges of complex grammar and narrative devices as found in The Sound and the Fury or As I Lay Dying. Narrated by the adult Bayard Sartoris, they combine humorous storytelling and gallantry of the Lost Cause stuff (shades of Margaret Mitchell) with the more realistic background anxiety of nearby combat, depredations by the Union army, robbery and murder committed by Southern highwaymen, and uncertainty about how swiftly the war is going to end in defeat for the Confederacy. The mature Bayard remembers that Ringo and he were “the two supreme undefeated like two moths, two feathers riding above a hurricane.” One feels the storm was not only the Civil War but tense racial relations during Reconstruction too.

Gradually, the stories become darker. Granny, a strict Christian woman with no tolerance for cussing or lies either of omission or commission, has to balance the imperative to provide food and money to kin and neighbors with deception, thievery, forgery, and fraud. Granny’s good-intentioned but illicit activities not only force her to consort with ruffians and corrupt her into the sin of pride but also suck Ringo and Bayard into felonies, violence, revenge, and corpse mutilation.

Faulkner’s subject here: know at some point conscience and ethics have to be reconciled with the cultural imperatives of ‘help the poor and afflicted’ and an ‘eye for an eye.’ Ponder disregarding public opinion in an honor-bound culture when reputation – a must-have when you don’t have money, property, or future prospects - is involved.

Faulkner’s next subject is memory’s contribution to our knowing things, our accepting a version of reality as true. To divert the boys on a rainy day, Granny Millard reads out cake recipes from a cookbook (I had an aunt that read recipes aloud, providing running commentary on whether she thought they would work or not). Ringo always requests a specific recipe be read.

“Cokynut cake, Granny." He said coconut cake every time because we never had been able to decide whether Ringo had ever tasted coconut cake or not. We had had some that Christmas before it started and Ringo had tried to remember whether they had had any of it in the kitchen or not, but he couldn't remember. Now and then I used to try to help him decide, get him to tell me how it tasted and what it looked like and sometimes he would almost decide to risk it before he would change his mind. Because he said that he would rather just maybe have tasted coconut cake without remembering it than to know for certain he had not; that if he were to describe the wrong kind of cake, he would never taste coconut cake as long as he lived.

Ringo would rather think that he ate coconut cake but doesn’t remember eating it than know positively that he’d never eaten it. Ringo naturally prefers to remember something in a way that makes him feel good. Ringo wisely avoids jumping to conclusions, as the consequence of being wrong may be disturbing to his sense of self and his place in the world. Bayard, admitting Ringo is ahead of him, also treats memory in a wary fashion. When he relates the story of his child-self witnessing Granny and Loosh burying a trunk full of the family silver, he thinks, “I either looked out or dreamed I looked out the window and saw (or dreamed I saw) the lantern.”

Faulkner’s big subject: Given memory is so tricky, unreliable, self-serving, biased, how do we view huge historical events, especially while we are personally involved? As for the Civil War in American memory, many books have been written. See David W. Blight. Given the world is so complicated, we accept explanations of life and events that are pragmatic or satisfying – good enough, as it were -  even if not logical or based in reality. 

The cover of the Vintage edition and various critics claim this is a novel, but I think it would be better to read this book as a collection of inter-related short stories – that is, read only one or two every Sunday for a month – because Faulkner himself never intended the stories to coalesce into a novel. He said, “I saw them as a long series. I had never thought of it in terms of a novel, exactly. I realized they would be too episodic to be what I considered a novel, so I thought of them as a series of stories.”