Reading Faulkner: The Unvanquished

My 1990 edition.

 

The Unvanquished is a nice change of pace for those familiar with William Faulkner.  The author wrote six short stories containing the same characters over a period of years in the 1930's.  Sharing the characters and the place where all this happens allows the stories to easily fit together.  A seventh short story, the most interesting of the bunch, was published only in the novel.  Thus, the narrative is almost completely episodic though all the stories fit together into a larger overarching tale.

This is a good place to start when first reading Faulkner.  The stories are more simple and straightforward than his other prose.  Set during and immediately after the War Between the States, they are somewhat controversial today in that they depict bigoted white southerners living decently with black slaves and everyone sharing in the same difficult circumstances.  While there are a couple of slaves who are looking forward to their coming freedom, most live as they always have in the south unquestioningly.

By not obviously delving into the trauma and injustice of racism, The Unvanquished is not meeting the present cultural requirement to condemn slavery in every mention of it, if it is even hinted at.  Faulkner does little to condemn it in this novel.  Nor does he apologize for it.  This creates a “problem” in some minds when, in fact, such problems are historically inaccurate.  The overarching story of mutual suffering is, in fact, the way life was for all southern civilians in areas threatened by Yankee raids or occupation.

As the war dragged on, especially in the deep south, the Yankees burned a great deal of property, particularly plantation houses and any large barns or cotton gins in the area.  Anything to damage southern livelihood and morale.  As a matter of course, they ransacked homes and took much of the local food (especially pigs and cattle) away for themselves.  This is not a fiction.  This happened in several regions of the south between 1862 – 1865.  Each time, the slaves were not, in fact, freed.  The Yankees left them behind, wherever they were, in utter chaos.  Especially in the early years, the Yankees did not want them.  The food and resources taken from prominent white families hurt all their slaves along with the whites.

Faulkner depicts this through the first two-thirds of the novel, largely through the eyes of two teenage boys.  A white boy, Bayard Sartoris, is the teenage son of a Confederate cavalry squadron commander.  Ringo, short for Napoleon's victory at Marengo, is a black boy.  They are best friends and have some highly readable and entertaining adventures together without Bayard overmastering Ringo.  The gall.  

The other principle character through the early and middle stages of the novel is Bayard's grandmother, Granny.  Through fantastic and highly humorous (to me) circumstances, this “old order” woman abruptly finds herself engaged in the illegal trade of mules with the Yankees, making large sums of money and distributing it equally (as far as Faulkner tells us) with destitute white and black families alike.  She takes on the role of provider for all the refugees of the Yankee raids.  

The two boys are along for the ride, so to speak, and these stories are wonderfully nostalgic to read.  The earliest ones are like reading a sophisticated Mark Twain tale.  They establish the common southern life and how absurd certain aspects of it became where the war was concerned.  Being a boy, Bayard's experiences are related more simply and plainly through the first half of the book.   As he ages, the tale itself gains in complexity and svelte phrasing.  The novel expands its narrative voice in the latter stories.

This is particularly true of “An Oder of Verbena” which is the last story in the novel and the only one not published in some magazine (mostly the Saturday Evening Post) before The Unvanquished was printed.  As the novel continues, Ringo, so prominent to begin with, becomes minimized in the narrative.  This is because he is less of a part of Bayard's life as the white goes to college and enters young adulthood.  The natural segregation is unspoken but present in the narrative.

By now the novel has become rather complicated overall.  Granny has died at the hands of Rebel marauder's.  Particularly late in the war, as depravation engulfed society, lawless southern bands combed the countryside terrorizing both southern folk and Yankees alike.  Faulkner is writing about historical experiences in his native Mississippi.  Bayard's father, a colonel, has made a few appearances throughout the tale as he both soldiers and checks in at home.

“An Oder of Verbena” begins with Bayard being confronted with the death of his father, murdered by a business associate after the war.  The son is now a college boy, studying law.  Everyone assumes that because he took extreme revenge upon the murderer of his grandmother earlier in the novel he will act similarly toward his father's known killer.  But he has matured in the nine years since then and, as a twenty-four year old, he goes to face the murderer unarmed.  His father went to see this same person without a weapon (“there's been enough killing”) and Bayard decides to do so has well.  Whereas his father was murdered, however, Bayard is unharmed.  Seeing him unarmed, the associate simply fires his pistol without aiming and leaves town forever.  It is interesting that the hateful passions he felt for Bayard's father were not transferred to the confrontational son.

Faulkner seems to be depicting the coming of law and order to the south in addition to suggesting that nonviolence is actually a wiser, more learned, course of action.  For Colonel John Sartoris, the south (and the son) has seen enough death.  But actually the reader cannot be certain of Bayard's (or anyone's) motives throughout the novel.  The reader only has access to each character through their actions.  We never know anyone's thoughts or feelings throughout the tale.  This allows Faulkner to surprise and shock the reader occasionally.  This emotional opaqueness makes it shocking, for example, when the mischievous teenager gruesomely, almost monstrously, murders the Rebel partisan responsible for Granny's death earlier in the novel.  He had been a fairly normal kid up to that point but he pushes his vengeance with an extraordinary passion.

Recalling that brutal violence, it is equally surprising and even shocking that Bayard chooses to confront his father's murderer unarmed and nonviolently.  As mentioned, everyone else (including the reader) expects him to exact another gruesome revenge.  But he chooses not to, although he insists on directly confronting the murderer.  With this powerful act Faulkner sets nonviolence alongside violence and states his preference for the genuine strength and character displayed in the older Bayard.

For me, the interesting part of this story (and where it gets its title) has nothing to do with his father's death, however.  It has to do with an encounter between Bayard and Drusilla a couple of months earlier.   Drusilla is a strong female character who actually rides with the Confederate cavalry in an earlier story in the novel.  She is now his father's thirty year old wife who finds herself scandalously attracted to her stepson.  

This is an unexpected and even shocking behavior because we do not know Drusilla's emotional motives either.  Out of nowhere, Bayard narrates to us that “she was looking at me in a way she never had before.  I did not know what it meant then...I just knew she was looking at me as she never had before and that the scent of verbena in her hair seemed to have increased a hundred times, to have gotten a hundred times stronger, to be everywhere in the dusk in which something was about to happen which I had never dreamed of.”

Drusilla asks (commands?) that Bayard kiss her.  Faulkner presents this to us with subtle sensuality but the emotional opaqueness ensures that her reasons for wanting to kiss him and for what follows remain ambiguous in the reader's mind.  The ambiguity is not just her forwardness but how Bayard responds to her.  Nevertheless, it is as intimate a moment as we get anywhere in The Unvanquished.  Initially, he rejects her absurd request but that doesn't last long and his refusal seems a mere formality.  Is he attracted to her too?  We can't tell.  He tries simply giving her a peck which she refuses, we are led to believe, as not enough.

“So I put my arms around her.  Then she came to me and melted as women will and can...using the wrists to hold my face to hers until there was no longer any need for wrists;  I thought then of the woman of thirty, the symbol of the ancient and eternal Snake and of the men who have written of her, and I realized then the immitigable between all life and all print – that those who can, do, those who cannot and suffer enough because they can't, write about it.”  A sharp yet somewhat humorous line.

After this apparently passionate kiss and embrace, Drusilla removes a sprig of verbena from her hair and places it in his lapel.  When Bayard states that he must tell his father, Drusilla oddly insists that he do so and that he kiss her again.  “So again it was like it had been before.  No.  Twice, a thousand times and never like – the eternal and symbolical thirty to a young man, a youth, each time both cumulative and retroactive, immitigably unrepetitive, each wherein remembering excludes experience, each wherein experience antedates remembering; the skill without weariness, the knowledge virginal to surfeit, the cunning secret muscles to guide and control just as within the wrists and elbows lay slumbering the mastery of horses: she stood back. Never having looked at me, already moving swiftly on in the dusk.”

I'm not sure what to make of this complex and exquisite moment.  Faulkner invites the reader to interpret Drusilla's surprising intent.  There are some additional moments to better contextualize it but this is the main event.  This sensuous interaction is told in Faulkner's sultry, gritty style.  It captures the transformational moment when Bayard sexually becomes a man, contrasting with all previous experiences told throughout the rest of the novel.  

Faulkner uses this amazing moment for a demarcation.  Bayard the youth, the friend of Ringo, now becomes Bayard the young man.  In this way, this particular short story within the novel serves as the climax of the overarching narrative.  Ultimately, The Unvanquished is one of Faulkner's most hopeful works.  A brave white man of ethics (he's a law student) and nonviolence had been born in the south.

But the demarcation is also racial.  How can it be otherwise with Faulkner and his perceptive honesty?  As mentioned above, Ringo is a major, equal character up until after Granny dies.  In “Verbena”  he is mentioned only incidentally.  Though he continues to play an significant supporting role, he has not become a young man.  He has merely become the servant of Bayard.  He cannot always go where Bayard goes because Bayard is a white man.  The disintegration into servitude of the Bayard-Ringo relationship is the novel's fundamental tragedy along with the deaths of Granny and Colonel Sartoris.  

It is interesting and highly revealing to note that when Bayard eventually does tell his father about the passionate moment, Satoris does not care.  Business difficulties with a partner, consume his mind, which finally ends in his murder.  Instead, the father pours himself and the new young man a drink to converse with him about the future.  This simple act is the first and only time the colonel acknowledges the “coming of age” of his son.

While the novel reveals a lot about how common whites and slaves actually lived together during the deprivations of the war, The Unvanquished acknowledges racism the way it is still acknowledged today – in subtle ways that are as insidious as strict segregation.  Of course, Sartoris kills two "carpetbaggers" who are attempting to organize the post-war blacks to vote.   In a powerful moment, he asks is any of the many witnesses to his act have a complaint.  None do.  But this is singular moment.  Otherwise, he is a "night rider" (KKK), possibly their local leader.  Granny, meanwhile, always praises “the old order” even though she shares the large spoils of her mule trading with everyone regardless of race.  For her, within the wartime disorder of southern society, blacks should all go back to wherever they “belong.”  The whites can stay, of course.  But while everybody's here, it is her Christian duty to share what she steals from the Yankees.

I relate to this novel because I was raised when the world was not too far removed from this world that Faulkner reflected upon and captured in often exquisite prose in the 1930's.  The Great Depression consumed my grandparents, whose great-grandparents had lived and fought the War Between the States.  As a child, I played out that war just as Bayard and Ringo do at the beginning of the novel.  I grew up hearing people talk in the simple slang and express the same attitude as the characters here.  Though several generations removed, the older people of my youth spoke of the war as if it had just happened.  I relate to their customs and cultural heritage.  Faulkner captures the earthy, dirty, physical, grind of this time and place so eloquently.  It is astonishing.  I suspect some are critical of him for doing that as well.

For me, the first stories in The Unvanquished are sheer fun and entertainment to read.  They capture so much about my youth, a series of small adventures, each captivating in its own way.  The late stories, particularly the one highlighted in this review, are entertaining in a different way.  In the miracle of Faulkner's prose.  The Unvanquished could be read as a set of short stories, each one stands alone.  But to read all seven together justifies the novel.  The telling of Bayard and Ringo and Granny and, to a lesser degree, Sartoris and Drusilla, over a span of years makes the tour well worth it.  If you have never read William Faulkner this is a good place to start before you take a deeper dive.