“I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance.”
The Portable Faulkner is a compilation of William Faulkner’s short stories and selections from his novels, and serves as a perfect introduction to his loosely connected apocryphal saga of Yoknapatawpha County—a reconstruction of the history of southern America in tales of courage, cruelty, greed, nobility, morbidity, and obscenity. For several years, I let a small collection of his works sit and collect dust on my bookshelf. I hesitated to jump in because I knew much of his work was connected—featuring the same locations, families, and themes, and so I knew once I started I wouldn’t be able to stop myself at just one or two of his books. This collection, edited by Malcom Cowley—who also provided an eloquent and informative introduction—attempts to provide a sort of overview of Faulkner’s creative work set in and around his fictional Mississippi county by collating a number of his short stories and excerpts from some of his novels, and presenting them in chronological order.
Though not comprising a single cohesive narrative, The Portable Faulkner accomplishes its goal by providing material set across a time span of 130 years. While I enjoyed the stories and excerpts on this read-through, and have enjoyed subsequent readings of several of his novels to a greater extent by having some background knowledge of the perennial family names and local legends, it is commonly recommended that re-reading Faulkner’s work can lead to even greater enjoyment. His entire Yoknapatawpha output—over fifty short stories and sixteen of his novels are set in the mythic county—has great range, as characters age, interact with those of different race, class, education, and occupation, and are considered through the different lenses of these disparate people; technology advances; and political and social changes occur. The selections here do form a loose thematic narrative, but can also be enjoyed as standalone pieces.
Faulkner’s prose is very diverse. Some of the stories contain beautiful sentence construction that sometimes had me cracking a dictionary (querying google); others are very stunted and convey only the basic information needed to propel the narrative, often because the character narrating is uneducated, young, or mentally challenged. Still others are full of very locomotive run-on sentences that are hard to follow grammatically but handily convey the essence of the story; and you almost feel the need to hold your breath while reading them. (Notably, the last selection in this book, “The Jail,” is largely comprised of one single run-on sentence, dozens of pages long.)
Sequenced chronologically, the first of these stories is set in the year 1820 and regards a Chikasaw tribe that lived in Yoknapatawpha before the white men settled it. To give you an idea of the complexity of Faulkner’s world: this story (“A Justice”) is bookended by chapters narrated by Quentin Compson, who wasn’t born until 1891 and is featured prominently in the one of Faulkner’s most well known works, The Sound and the Fury, as a nineteen year old Harvard student; In Absolom, Absolom! Quentin tells his roommate the story of the rise and fall of Thomas Sutpen, whose death is described in the short story “Wash” contained here. In “A Justice” a young Quentin is being told the main story by a character named Sam Fathers, the son of a Choctaw chief and slave-girl. Sam fathers is also an integral character in the novel Go Down, Moses, which is itself a collection of stories that form a loosely structured narrative.
The longest story in that collection, “The Bear”, is reprinted entirely in The Portable Faulkner. It tells the story of Isaac McCaslin, beginning with him as a young boy when he first tags along with the grown-ups as they travel by horse miles into the wilderness in order to hunt a legendary, nearly-immortal bear that the hunters have named Old Ben. Quentin Compson’s grandfather takes part in the hunts, and Sam Fathers mentors young Isaac through the years as a hunter and outdoorsman. The story’s final chapter is set several decades later, with Isaac now a grown man, reminiscing about the days past and his fellow woodsmen, now absent.
He had listened to it for years: the long legend of corncribs rifled, of shotes and grown pigs and even calves carried bodily into the woods and devoured, of traps and deadfalls overthrown and dogs mangled and slain, and shotgun and even rifle charges delivered at point-blank range and with no more effect than so many peas blown through a tube by a boy—a corridor of wreckage and destruction beginning back before he was born, through which sped, not fast but rather with the ruthless and irresistible deliberation of a locomotive, the shaggy tremendous shape.
Faulkner muses on the futility of war, laments the encroachment of technology and industry into the natural world, and even presents a death-defying airplane stuntman in “Death Drag”. Other selections of note include: “An Odor of Verbena” (from The Unvanquished)—in which Bayard Sartoris, a young law student at the University of Mississippi, must confront his father’s murder and become the leader of his family; “Ad Astra”—a short story of WWI fighter pilots unable to enjoy the peace that they fought for; “A Rose for Emily”—a haunting story of a reclusive woman and her potential suitor; and “Old Man” (from The Wild Palms)—the story of a convict adrift in a large-scale flood who becomes the protector of a pregnant woman. Despite several of the selections standing out from the others, I think the compilation is best taken as a whole, and as an introduction to Faulkner’s larger body of work.
But after twelve years I think of us as bugs in the surface of the water, isolant and aimless and unflagging. Not on the surface; in it, within that line of demarcation not air and not water, sometimes submerged, sometimes not. You have watched an unbreaking groundswell in a cove, the water shallow, the cove quiet, a little sinister with satiate familiarity, while beyond the darkling horizon the dying storm has raged on. That was the water, we the flotsam. Even after twelve years it is no clearer than that. It had no beginning and no ending. Out of nothing we howled, unwitting the storm which we had escaped and the foreign strand which we could not escape; that in the interval between two surges of the swell we died who had been too young to have ever lived.
Faulkner can at times get a bit carried away with his forceful writing style; his endless streams of creativity can be hard to follow and he sometimes seems to get carried away with trying to capture too much in each single line. It is best to approach The Portable Faulkner with an open mind. You won’t understand each reference the first time you read a story, but eventually the world starts to take shape. Subsequently, if you choose to read a novel from which one of the selections was taken, reading the excerpt for the second time proves to be an entirely new experience.
As Faulkner is considered a pioneer of the southern gothic genre, his work has influenced many authors, such as Flannery O’Connor (Wise Blood, The Violent Bear It Away) and Cormac McCarthy (The Orchard Keeper, Blood Meridian, No Country for Old Men), among a slew of other writers aping who ape his writing style, and even a handful of singer-songwriters who draw inspiration from the character-driven short stories of Faulkner’s oeuvre.
The connectedness of Faulkner’s world is not always apparent when plowing through his famous novels (e.g. The Sound and the Fury and As I Lay Dying) for the first time. The rest of his work will be more impactful if you read this book first to orient yourself before embarking on a longer journey through Yoknapatawpha County. For that, a thank you is due to Mr. Cowley, who set about the project on his own, and even opened Faulkner’s own eyes to the vast scale and scope of his work, and whose introductory essay is said to have breathed new life into Faulkner’s career. Faulkner later said, “I owe Malcolm Cowley the kind of debt no man could ever repay.” Plus, at only 700+ pages, it’s “portable,” so you can tuck it into your back pocket and take it with you anywhere.
Sources:
Krebs, Albin. “Malcolm Cowley, Writer, Is Dead at 90”. The New York Times. 29 May 1989.