As we are told in Douglas Day's introduction, Flags was rejected by Horace Liveright, the editor who had bought the first two. Faulkner's agent, Ben Wasson, eventually sold the third to Harrison Smith, an editor at Harcourt, Brace & Company, but only on condition that it be severely cut. The agent did the cutting -- about a quarter of the text, and the book appeared with the title Sartoris. Flags in the Dust was the original title and the current edition with that title is the original uncut text
Flags is brilliant, classic Faulkner. It's hard to believe that the same person who wrote Soldier's Pay and Mosquitoes could have written in this totally different style -- the style we instantly recognize as Faulkner. Somehow, he suddenly found his voice and his subject.
Sartoris was dedicated to Sherwood Anderson, who gets credit for encouraging Faulkner to write about the Mississippi he grew up in and to use characters based on people he had known or heard of.
He begins Flags with dialect, reminiscent of Mark Twain. It's as if now, instead of having to invent and structure characters and stories, he just has to record what he hears in his head. He has a complex multi-generational story to tell, and he's anxious to get it all down.
Each scene is fully envisioned. Every character matters and is fully portrayed. You sense that he has much more to tell about each person, each place, each animal. Every detail of description seems tied to a myriad of other details, equally important. What's on the page is just what he's been able to capture for now; but he'll be back, again and again, to focus on a different character, a different generation, a different piece of a very large interconnected tale. And the unity which seems to pervade his work from Flags on comes not from meticulously planned structure, but from talking about the same set of folks and events, over and over again, not worrying about inconsistencies from one book to the next -- just trying to put the essence of it all down on paper. It's as if he could begin his life's work anywhere -- telling about any person, any event, any animal, any desktop at any time. It's all there waiting to be revealed. In his telling, he is moving a flashlight from here to there across time and space, revealing now this, now that -- but regardless of how much is shown at any one time, we sense the pieces are all integrally tied together, and that they in turn are tied to the far larger and more intricately complex story of mankind and nature. Yoknapatawpha is no "microcosm". We don't see the world portrayed here in miniature. Rather the world is all one huge, fascinating fabric of story, and this is a piece of it.
Rare is the rambling and beautifully wrought paragraph that doesn't contain at least one extended simile or metaphor, connecting the everyday ordinary people, circumstances, and events of this piece of Mississippi with the rest of human history and nature.
This first of the classic Yoknapatawpha books, like others to follow, consists of a series of short stories or character sketches, strung together or interleafed. Perhaps that's what confused the editors Faulkner submitted it to. This book is an essential part of the single work which Faulkner wrote for the rest of his life. But it must have seemed wild and undisciplined, unstructured and aimless when seen out of context.
The Snopes Trilogy (The Hamlet, The Town, and The Mansion, published as a single volume by Modern Library) is probably the best introduction to Faulkner's world, because there, in over 1000 delightful pages the tale has time and space to take full shape, with beginning and middle and end; and you can get wrapped up in these lives and begin to really care for the characters and their fates. So when you encounter a Gavin Stevens in another book (like Intruder in the Dust), you already know him and understand him, like an old friend, and can get right into the new story.
And one book will tell in a paragraph or two the basic story of what becomes another entire book. For instance, on p. 181 of Flags, Faulkner gives a quick summary of the rise of the Snopes clan. And in the Snopes Trilogy, on pp. 450-451, you see in capsulized form the main event from Flags: Colonel Sartoris ("Old Bayard"), owner of the bank, dies of a heart attack when his grandson Bayard (twin brother of John, killed as aviator in WW I) crashes his car.
Inconsistencies from one book to the next make these tales sometimes feel like parallel worlds, where much of the detail is the same, but one small change has led to the spinning out of new stories. For instance, in Flags, the lawyer is Horace Benbow, brother of Narcissa Benbow, who married young Bayard Sartoris. But by The Snopes Trilogy, Horace has disappeared, and his place appears to be taken by Gavin Stevens, a major actor in many of Faulkner's books. (Perhaps it was not a coincidence that Faulkner dropped "Horace", the name of the editor who gave him his start as a novelist, but then rejected Flags). In another minor change, V.K. Surath, an itinerant salesman of sewing machines, who appears briefly in Flags, becomes V.K. Ratliff, the itinerant salesman of sewing machines who figures prominently as a narrator in the Snopes Trilogy.
In Flags, Faulkner turned not just to the land and people that he knew, but also to story for the sake of story, regardless of structure. Old Bayard (Colonel) Sartoris reads and rereads Dumas, another master of story. And the name Bayard recalls the hero of many rambling interwoven Charlemagne romances. The impractical, often fatal, and yet fascinating idealism of the Sartoris family is contrasted again and again with the down-to-earth calculating practicality of the Snopes family; as the feudalistic idealism of the Confederacy is to the capitalistic materialism of the new breed of southern leaders in the early 20th century.
In Faulkner's world, everyone, regardless of status or race or mental condition, matters. Mentally deficient, ignorant, and broken people are presented with the same humor and compassion as the most brilliant and successful citizens. They are all part of the same fabric, all interdependent, all equally valid as subjects and narrators.
Like Faulkner, Cormac McCarthy sometimes focuses on minimalist, broken characters, as in Child of God. But McCarthy's portrayal, while "realistic" and compelling, lacks Faulkner's humor and compassion. The God behind the scenes in Faulkner's world is a quirky old-timer, perhaps forgetful and fallible and inconsistent, but basically benevolent, with love for all, whoever they may be and whatever they may have done.
My favorite passage in Flags is the dialogue between Horace Benbow and his sister Narcissa about Shakespeare (starting on p. 185):
"Shakespeare doesn't have any secrets. He tells everything." [says Narcissa]
"I see. Shakespeare had no sense of discrimination and no instinct for reticence. In other words, he wasn't a gentleman," he suggested.
"Yes... That's what I mean.
"And so, to be a gentleman, you must have secrets."
"Oh, you make me tired." She returned to the magazine and he sat beside her on the couch and took her hand in his and stroked it upon his cheek and upon the fine devastation of his hair.
"It's like walking through a twilit garden," he said happily. "The flowers you know are all there, in their shifts and with their hair combed out for the night, but you know all of them. So you don't bother 'em, you just walk on and sort of stop and turn over a leaf occasionally, a leaf you didn't notice before, perhaps you find a violet under it, or a bluebell or a lightning bug; perhaps only another leaf or a blade of grass. But there's always a drop of dew on it."
In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Shakespeare
was considered wild and untamed, unrefined, incapable of keeping to a structure
or maintaining the "unities" (which were so important to the generation
of critics in the days of Dryden, Corneille, and Racine). Faulkner, similarly,
has no "secrets." He tells everything -- some here, some there, but not,
apparently, in accordance with some master plan or aesthetic theory. Sure,
he uses all the traditional tricks of narrative to hold a reader in suspense
and build to a climax of revelation. But, overall, he feels compelled to
tell us everything, just as Shakespeare feels compelled to give us every
side of Hamlet's dilemma rather than crisply focusing on a single aspect.
Let all the secrets out. Faulkner tells everything from this perspective
and that, shining light in all directions. Then he retells it again from
a different starting point and with a different focus. He loved to tell
that story, and reading it and rereading it in all its forms is a sheer
delight.
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Other book reviews by Richard Seltzer
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