ESSAY: GOOD AND EVIL IN THE WRITING OF WILLIAM FAULKNER

This is an early essay I wrote during the Dark Ages while attending Uni part-time. (Actually, it was during the 1990s.) It’s not too bad, more a bio of Faulkner than any real analysis of his work, though there is some. So, if you want to walk around in the shoes of a 'capital-W' writer for a bit, then have at it!

  

Cheers, Jake

 

“’Sho now,’ Ratliff said. ‘Old man Ab ain’t naturally mean. He’s just soured.’” (Faulkner. The Hamlet, 29)

 

    William Faulkner 1897-1962

IN WILLIAM FAULKNER’S 1940 NOVEL, The Hamlet, good and evil live side by side at Frenchman’s Bend. They travel the same narrow and rutted country roads together; they sit side by side in wagons or on bar stools or porches; they greet or curse each other in passing; they walk under the same sun or the same moon together, and more often as not they look out at the world from behind the same face.

IN HIS 1950 ADDRESS in Stockholm, upon being awarded the Nobel Prize for literature, Faulkner said that writers must leave room for only the “…old verities and truths of the heart, the old universal truths…love and honour and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice.” (Essays, Speeches and Public Letters, 120) In his search for the lasting and ever-present in the human condition Faulkner devoted a lifetime examining those forces that both shape and enrich the human spirit as well as those that degrade and destroy it.

 

Born in 1897, the eldest of four boys, William Cuthbert Faulkner spent his life growing up in the small town of Oxford, Mississippi, in the cotton growing country of Lafayette. His great-grandfather (the “old colonel) was a civil war hero and had helped found a railroad. His grandfather (the “young colonel”) was a banker and a local businessman. So when his father, Murray Faulkner, moved back to Oxford when Faulkner was five years old, he moved back to where home was a place rich in family lore and legend, and where he and his brothers grew up with an appreciation for their family’s past as well as for its place in the community. From an early age, young Faulkner seemed gifted with a fine imagination—telling stories, reading poetry, sketching; he grew with promise but as biographer Joseph Blotner notes, “…he seems to have distanced himself from his parents more than any of his brothers would ever do.” (Blotner, 39) Blotner goes on to say this may have resulted from that very intelligence and ability to observe and comment on the failings and triumphs of human character, that was to serve him so well later in his life, but nevertheless caused tension between himself and his family as he grew into adolescence. Faulkner also became disaffected with school, was more frequently truant, and finally left high school altogether before completing grade eleven. He returned briefly to school, this time to the University of Mississippi (at Oxford), joining its theatre group. He published privately a verse play he wrote during that time but eventually left university and was never to gain further formal education. During this time, he continued to write poetry and occasionally published some of his work in the local newspapers or university magazine. Phil stone, a family friend and student at the university, was influential in Faulkner’s early years both as a confidant and as someone who encouraged his early efforts as a poet. He would later assist Faulkner in publishing his first book of poems.

    Faulkner Receiving Nobel Prize for Literature 1949

After leaving high school, Faulkner took work as a bookkeeper in his grandfather’s bank and later as a clerk in New Haven, Connecticut. Such jobs were unsatisfying for him, and he spent much of his time reading, travelling around Mississippi and occasionally outside the state, and drinking. From his father he inherited a love for the outdoors and a love of alcohol. The latter was to remain a problem for him for the rest of his life. However, his love of the outdoors, instilled in him by his numerous camping, hunting and riding trips that he and brothers took with their father, was to remain a source of solace and inspiration for him personally and in his writings.

Like his father, Faulkner greatly admired the pioneer man of early American history, and in a 1954 essay, he was to call such a man “…the tall man…the hunter, the man of the woods…” (ESPL, 17)  Hunting, fishing, horseback riding, in the company of men, were the things Faulkner seemed most comfortable with, and during World War One and afterwards, between working at jobs he had neither skill nor inclination for, and reading and writing at night, he spent much of his time outdoors.

According to Blotner, apart from a few close friends such as Phil Stone, Faulkner had few he could share his other love with—writing. Estelle Oldman was one of the exceptions. He first met her when his family moved onto her street and they grew up as neighbours. Though she was two grades ahead of him in high school, Faulkner continued to call on her and they became close friends. As their relationship developed, Faulkner hoped they would eventually marry but Estelle chose to marry Cornell Franklin. (Ten years later, shortly after her divorce to Cornell, she and Faulkner were to marry.) Soon after her marriage, Faulkner decided to leave Oxford and he worked for a time in New Haven, staying with his friend Phil Stone. In 1918, he joined the R.A.F. as an air cadet but was disappointed not to see active service before the war’s end. He was to write of this disappointment humorously in the novel Soldier’s Pay:

 

“He suffered the same jaundice that many a more booted one than he did, from Flight commanders through generals to the ambrosial single-barred (not to mention that inexplicable beast of the field which the French so beautifully call an aspiring aviator); They had stopped the war on him.” (7)

 

AFTER THE WAR, he returned to Oxford and continued to write poetry, publishing his first work, The Marble Fawn, in 1924. During this time he took odd jobs, wrote book reviews and newspaper articles, experimented with prose, and travelled a little but it was the influential meeting with Sherwood Anderson in New Orleans in 1924 that proved decisive in his decision to become a prose writer. Faulkner had previously visited New Orleans on several occasions with friends, and had enjoyed the open and supportive environment he had found there in the city’s artistic community. He was later to comment on this time, and of his need—any young writer’s need—“…to be with people that have the same problems and the same interests as him, that won’t laugh at what he’s trying to do, won’t laugh at what he says…” (Faulkner in the University, 231) New Orleans of the 1920s fulfilled this need for him, as did Sherwood Anderson, through whom he learned that his talents and future lay with prose writing. Through conversation and criticism and by example Anderson encouraged Faulkner to develop his writing skills. Throughout 1925, Faulkner refined and developed his apprenticeship prose pieces into his first novel, Soldier’s Pay, and in 1926, again with Anderson’s support, it was published.

From his biography, we see from an early age that Faulkner lived with an insularity and solitude not experienced by other members of his family. He came from a large family, with aunts and uncles, grandparents and cousins but Faulkner himself seems to have remained aloof and mostly outside this group. Of his parents, he says surprisingly little. And it is interesting to note he was to write an elegy in 1940 for Mammy Caroline Barr, the black woman who served three generations of his family, and again in 1955, in an essay "Mississippi", he concluded with a tribute to her, but no such compositions were to be created for his parents. (ESPL, 117; 11) In interviews granted (particularly the early ones given during the 1930s-40s) Faulkner’s replies to questions are characteristically terse and circumspect, sometimes rude or even deliberately misleading. In replying to questions concerning his personal life, his literary influences, or his writing methods we see he strove to remain a private person. In a 1951 interview, he was to say, “I’m a farmer…I ain’t a writer…” (Lion in the Garden 64) And in his 1955 essay, “On Privacy”, he was to respond to what he felt was an intrusion by the press into his life, stating that it [the press] will “…destroy man’s individuality as a man by destroying the last vestige of privacy without which a man cannot be an individual.” (ESPL, 72)

 

    Mammy Barr and Faulkner's sister Jill

Individuality, privacy, and solitude were characteristics of Faulkner’s own life and they were also characteristics of many of the people and events he wrote about in his short stories and novels. In The Hamlet, for example, we see Ratliff, an itinerant sewing machine salesman, who is a watcher and gatherer of knowledge, an illuminator and a teller of stories. He is a man of conscience and intelligence and compassion. We see him struggle to understand the growing phenomenon of the Snopes clan, with Flem as its leader, as the clan gradually asserts its power and authority over the people and country around Frenchman’s Bend:

 

“…I just never went far enough, he thought. I quit too soon [trying to understand the Snopes]. I went as far as one Snopes will set fire to another Snopes’ barn and both Snopes know it, and that was all right. But I stopped there…” (99).

 

He goes on to examine the moral imperatives (or lack thereof) that a Snopes lives by—how far they will go in order to pursue their ends, and where they will stop (and it seems for Flem and other members of his family, they will stop at nothing).

Here is an important example of Faulkner’s view of morality: It is an essentially learned process, not one that can be taught or handed down as a lesson from one generation to the next; it is also a private development—individuals each making their own observations and decisions and then choosing how they will live out their lives.

Through Ratliff, we see the story of Frenchman’s Bend unfold; we come to understand its history and its people through his eyes. We also come to understand Ratliff’s own moral dilemma as he examines his role in the drama of the rise of Flem Snopes. Ratliff must choose where and how he will engage Snopes and under what conditions he will challenge him, and how, too, he will warn the townspeople of this new threat to their lives. In discussing with Tull and Bookwright what can be done to stop Flem, Ratliff says, “…I believe I would think of something if I lived there” (71) Here Ratliff’s character is more clearly shown. He is an observer, acute and accurate but he is not a man of action. He engages Flem on two or three occasions throughout the novel buts meets with little success in changing the course of events Flem has put in motion. Flem, in fact, never seems to lose control of the situation and is shown to be a much more sinister and manipulative personality than previously suspected. 

 

Toward the end of the novel, Ratliff enters into a business dealing with Flem only to discover that he, along with his partners, have been tricked again. It is interesting here that we see Ratliff succumbing to greed and losing for a time his own sense of honesty and integrity. While he loses financially in the deal and gets his ‘just rewards’ in the end, he is still able to learn from his experience not to ‘bargain with the devil’. We are left with the impression of Ratliff emerging wiser and stronger from his defeat. For in a real sense his struggle was not in attempting to out-manoeuvre Flem but rather in understanding more clearly his ability to choose between good and evil, and further, to become aware that he was in fact acting with “…the old evils, the old forces…” (LIG, 115) when he used dishonesty in his dealings with Flem. Not so his partner, the desperate Armstid who, succumbing to his own greed,  loses all, including his sanity, in a hopeless search for buried treasure.

 

From his essays, we gather that Faulkner felt the struggle of good against evil to be, again, an individual one. He once said, “It’s got to be that single voice that’s the important thing. When you get two people, you still get two human beings”, and no matter how large the group gets, he continued, “…it’s still got to be a party of individual men.” (LIG, 102-3)

In the character of the schoolteacher Labove we see another example of that intensely personal struggle Faulkner believed existed between good and evil. Labove, hired by Will Varner to teach at his school, gradually becomes obsessed with Varner’s young daughter Eula. The reader witnesses Labove struggling with his hopeless passion over the years, during which time Eula continues to become more and more an object of desire for him. We witness his long winter nights and his isolation and his resignation to the fate of desiring that which he cannot (and should not) have. It is a long, cold and claustrophobic episode in the novel and it ends anticlimactically one night with Labove, after attempting and failing to rape Eula, quietly hanging up his keys to the schoolhouse and leaving Frenchman’s Bend forever. The reader here witnesses a greater defeat for Labove than was witnessed for Ratliff. Labove does not indicate he has resolved his own feelings or understood his motivations. He leaves, not with a greater sense of awareness, humility (and repentance) as did Ratliff, but instead with only anguish and despair. He still struggles to understand his choices.

Communication, according to Faulkner, is the primary role of the writer. To communicate to another person that intensely private experience of the world is an art, he said, was done with “tremendous difficulty…But man keeps on trying to express himself and to make contact with other human beings…Personally, I find it impossible to communicate with the outside world.” (LIG, 70-71) In the story of Jack Houston we see this struggle for communication elegantly and simply illustrated by Faulkner in his depiction of Houston, a widower, living in the house he had built for his wife. His wife had been trampled to death by a horse early in their marriage but Houston continues to live in the house they had shared together. Faulkner shows how despair and loneliness overtook Houston. He shows how important her life was to Houston’s by subtly portraying the effect her absence has on the physical character of the house. Empty now of the furniture and decorations he had bought for her, the dark, silent rooms contain an embittered and solitary Houston—a man seen closing himself off from the rest of the world in the same manner as he closes the shutters of the bedroom window to the moon because it “…used to fall across the two of them…” (The Hamlet, 216) Houston, we observe, is essentially a compassionate and gentle man but he remains unable to rise from his own despair, and the chapter ends, as Labove’s does, almost anticlimactically, with his death by murder at the hands of Mink Snopes. Like Labove, Houston in the end is unable to communicate—to himself most of all—the choices he has to make. Both characters remain in a state of despair, and to remain in such a state is, for Faulkner, evil, for it does not allow the communication necessary to share the self with others. Sorrow and despair, like all human emotions, must be shared to be understood—but they need to be understood by the self first. If they cannot be understood, they cannot be transcended. The death of Houston is anticlimactic because he had closed so much of himself off from the world he was already, to a great extent, dead.

It is interesting here to contrast the depiction of Eula with that of Houston’s wife, Lucy. It is with delicacy and circumspection that Faulkner alludes to Houston and Lucy’s late-blooming passion and the happiness their union brought to them. The plain gingham dress she wore and which Houston kept after her death is in contrast to the more elaborate and fashionable clothing worn by Eula. In Faulkner’s own life, marriage came late, and interestingly enough, his Estelle, like Lucy, [But Lucy wasn’t at school with Faulkner’s Ratliff] was two grades ahead of Faulkner in school. This suggests to the reader how intensely private experience remains, and how tremendously important it is to communicate it. Faulkner, intensely private in his own life, communicates to the reader his own passion with subtlety and grace.

 

Faulkner’s family had a rich tradition, with stories ranging from the civil war campaigns fought by his grandfather, to his father’s own fighting days. He was influenced by these tales as well as those of the Deep South, which is itself as culturally distinct a region as any in the United States, with a dense and complex history. In his essays, tradition and the past are themes he returns to time and again. In his fiction, he uses images of clothing, for example, or horse carriages being passed down from one generation to the next, their histories visible even as they grow shabbier and less recognizable with the years, or in the image of milk souring we see that the past, the original, while changed, is nevertheless active and recognizable in the present. Past good and evil—though also changed—are also recognizable in the present. In a 1955 interview, he was to say of civilization:

 

“It’s got to go forward and we have got to take along with us all the old rubbish of our mistakes and our errors…We must take the trouble and the sin along with us, and we must cure that trouble and sin as we go.” (LIG, 131)

 

    Faulkner and Estelle

For Faulkner, the past is in the present as are “…the old forces…that were in man’s blood, his inheritance…which was nature.” (LIG, 115) In his essays, Faulkner seems to say that these original forces in humanity were neither good nor bad, but rather, they were impulses that carried one through daily life—surviving, growing, and reproducing.  Morality is hard won. It occurs only when we take the time to think about it. “Life is motion…What time man can devote to morality must be taken by force from that motion of which he is a part.” (LIG, 253)

In The Hamlet, we see Mink Snopes actively involved in the pursuit of his own life. He does not reflect on the morality of his choices as Ratliff does. Like Flem, he is all motion; his primitive impulses, according to Faulkner, are in charge of his actions. Yet, after he murders Houston, we see Mink becoming conscious of the moral dimension of his actions. He enters, literally and spiritually, a wilderness where, in his despair, he reaches for his conscience and at least temporarily faces the truth of what he has done. Truth, for Faulkner is that which “…the violation of …makes your writhe at night…in shame for something you’ve done that you know you shouldn’t have done. (LIG, 145)

 

Interesting here, also, is Faulkner’s concept of Original Sin. If, as he says, life is motion and both good and evil are born of that motion, and if the primitive life forces he speaks of are neither good nor evil but simply are, then the responsibility for sin lies exclusively with humanity. Then, just as Ab was not born of the ‘bad seed’—he just soured—neither was Flem or Eula or Ratliff, or any of the other characters in The Hamlet born with sin. Instead, Faulkner seems to say everyone is capable of good and evil, of “…almost anything—heroism or cowardice, tenderness or cruelty…” (LIG, 32) Everyone then is capable of good and evil, and each person’s life is spent either ‘in motion’ avoiding the truth of their lives, or else in stopping that motion like Ratliff and (for a time) Mink Snopes; as perhaps will someday Abner and even Flem—for Faulkner believed that everyone was born with a conscience and that sooner or later everyone must choose (and choose again) between good and evil, because, unlike the rest of the animals we share this world with, only human kind can dream. 

AND BY DREAMING is meant that we can imagine something better. And of this gift to dream, that comes from the gods Faulkner says, it also comes with a price: our conscience. “[M]oral conscience is the curse he had to accept from the gods in order to gain from them the right to dream.” (LIG, 253) If, for Faulkner, the price to pay for such dreams seems high, for us reading of them, the price seems worth it.

___________________________________________

 

BIBLOGRAPHY

 

Blother, Joseph. Faulkner: A Biography. New York, Toronto: Random House, 1984

 

Faulkner, William. The Hamlet. 3^rd ed. New York: random House, 1964

 

---. Essays, Speeches and Public Letters. Ed. James Meriwether. New York: Random House, 1985

 

---. Faulkner in the University. Des. Gwynn, Frederick L, and Joseph L, Blother. New York: Vintage, 1967

 

---Lion in the Garden: Interviews with William Faulkner, 1926-1962. Eds. Meriwether, James and Michael Millgate. New York: Random House, 1968

Grade= 87%

Very thoughtful and well written. At times organization seemed weak--you might check transitions between paragraphs--but you don't in fact lose sight of the topic and you draw your ideas together very well in the end.