Monday, December 23, 2024

Reading Those Classics #22

Classic Short Stories set in Beyond. 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 Waste Land, The Middle Ground One & Two

The Collected Stories of William Faulkner

This is the sixth section, in which the tales have an other-worldly feel, wandering less-trod byways of the mind, anomalous in Faulkner’s body of work.

Beyond. Beyond this mundane plane and into the bardo goes a recently deceased judge where he meets an angry acquaintance who snuffed himself, famed agnostic Robert Ingersoll, and the gentle female minder of the Christ Child who is literally a toddler in this liminal state between death and the higher reaches of Heaven. A genuinely odd story in which Faulkner mines a sourcebook of Western Civilization.

Black Music. A mild-mannered architect’s assistant from Brooklyn is drafted by extramundane forces to thwart the plans of tasteless rich people to “develop” an old, old vineyard in Mississippi. It is a comic story within a story as Faulkner has an unnamed narrator hand over the narration to the architect’s assistant. Faulkner also gives a glancing and mildly disparaging look at down-and-out expatriate Americans in Mexico as well as the mania of greedheads that run extraction industries.

The Leg. The story opens relating the carefree boating antics of two Oxonians just before WWI. Then it shifts to the war, which kills the one and takes the leg of the other. But the disabled soldier is visited by the ghost of his boating buddy. The disabled one tasks the spook with finding the lost leg and making sure it is dead. The leg, however, has other ideas and begins to kick over the traces, so to speak. A weird unsettling story which makes the reader wonder what raging and rebellious wells Faulkner was tapping in order to write it.

Mistral. Readers of Ross Macdonald’s Archer novels will recall how he used the Santa Ana winds to stir raging wildfires and dark passions. In this story Faulkner uses as a metaphor for pervasive evil the mistral, the strong cold dry wind that blows through Italy and France in winter. Set in the early Twenties in the Italian Alps, two young American hikers find out how wicked Wicked Old Yurrup can be. Faulkner says in the story, "Maybe in any natural exaggerated situation - wind, rain, drouth - man is always alone." See his novella Old Man in which a guy fights a hundred-year flood on his own.

Divorce in Naples. Two sailors George and Carl dance on deck of their cargo ship plying the Atlantic, to the bemusement of their fellow crew members who demonstrate a tolerance for alternative sexualities we don’t expect in American working men in the 1920s. But their relationship is disturbed when Carl disappears for three days with an Italian sex worker. A female one, no less. That this story told frankly, matter-of-factly, without sniggering, is as unexpected as the subject matter. Until the reader remembers that in the novels too Faulkner saw sexuality, as Derek Jarman said, “as wide as the sea.”

Carcassonne. Faulkner the poet pens in florid prose a fantasy concerning the musings of a skeleton. Just bones are left of a fighter’s thoughts, feelings and actions. But this is not excuse for giving up the fight or worse avoiding the fight altogether. A short short story to return to for some inspiration, it is fitting to end the collection of 42 stories.

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