5

Up from Feudalism

The Hamlet, 1938–1940

Exile and Exhaustion

The haunting image of Harry in his cell also depicted the prison house of William Faulkner in exile. He did not want to forget Helen Baird or Meta Carpenter. While working on The Wild Palms, he vacationed with his family in Pascagoula. And he met with Meta Carpenter and her husband in New York. Rebner was no more jealous of Faulkner than Charlotte Rittenmeyer’s husband had been of Harry. Faulkner and Rebner got along just fine in the company of the woman they both loved, apparently saying as little about their feelings as the characters do in “The Wild Palms.” Meta watched Faulkner responding to Rebner’s erudition, even conversing in French, yet she recalled his “great mournful gaze” and “eyes burning into mine.” After this meeting he succumbed to the alcoholic binge that resulted in his passing out and burning himself so badly on a hotel radiator. Sometimes it was no better at home. During this period one of Faulkner’s fraternity brothers and his wife visited Rowan Oak, and Jill greeted them at the door, saying that “if we could step over ‘Papa’ and come into the Parlour ‘Mamma’ was looking for us. Bill was asleep (drunk) in the main hall.” Children of alcoholics grow up treating such episodes as a way of life, only later realizing the import of their upbringing.1

Faulkner and Meta would meet several times between 1938 and 1939 in New York City, sometimes alone and sometimes with her husband, who was attempting to establish himself as a concert pianist in the United States. As a Jew he could no longer perform safely in Germany or, soon, in Nazi-occupied Europe. Through Rebner and Meta, Faulkner met many exiles from fascist Europe. In May 1938, he joined more than four hundred other writers in reacting to the Spanish Civil War: “I most sincerely wish to go on record as being unalterably opposed to Franco and fascism, to all violations of the legal government and outrages against the people of Republican Spain.”2 The following October he wrote to journalist Vincent Sheean, offering the manuscript of Absalom, Absalom! as a contribution to the Spanish loyalist government. He would later create an antifascist character, the redoubtable Linda Snopes.

The Rebners struggled to support themselves, and Faulkner sent Meta money and introduced Rebner to influential friends such as Hal Smith and Bennett Cerf.3 A downcast Meta, feeling her marriage under strain, remembered Faulkner admonishing her: “Buck up, Carpenter. I’ve never seen you like this.” His rebuke hurt, she confessed, since unlike her own hypercritical husband, Faulkner had always been so supportive and curious about her inner life.

Faulkner’s marriage to Estelle was no better, he confided to Meta. If he did not choose to run away from it, he did arrange a romantic rendezvous with Meta in New Orleans, where he wanted her to stay, where he pinned gardenias to her pillow and ministered to her feverish rundown condition. But she returned to Rebner, making the choice that Charlotte Rittenmeyer had resolutely rejected. Faulkner, too, returned home. Life was not, after all, a Faulkner novel.

Sometimes he made the best of it at Rowan Oak, enjoying special occasions and holidays and dressing up for parties. Random House was a second home, providing him with advances that were never enough, given his appetite for land and also his generous loans to Phil Stone, burdened by paying off his father’s debts. Saxe Commins, now Faulkner’s editor, revered him and catered to his needs, housing Faulkner during dipsomaniac periods and also indulging the author’s idiosyncrasies. Asked by the president of Harvard what he did, Saxe said, “cleaning and repairing.”4 Sometimes Greenfield Farm settled him, although Bill did not get along that well with his brother John, who felt like a secondhand Faulkner, never receiving his elder brother’s praise for the farmwork or encouragement with his writing.

The Rise of the Redneck

For the first time, Faulkner began to say he might be written out. When he said as much to Phil Stone, no longer as close to Faulkner or as sure of his genius, Stone advised returning to the long-delayed Snopes saga, which had first been conceived in the mid-1920s.5 Perhaps finally getting down on paper all those Snopes stories he had been telling for years marked a return to first principles, a regrounding in the land displaced by the upheavals of Hollywood that had infiltrated the composition of The Wild Palms. Even so, Faulkner had taken his oral history of the Snopes saga to Hollywood, regaling fellow writers with the clan’s exploits. Joel Sayre said Faulkner always had more stories to tell—more, even, than Sayre ever found in his friend’s books.6

In a letter to Robert Haas, written in mid-December 1938, Faulkner outlined the Snopes trilogy, which would take him more than two decades to complete. He had a running start on the first part, to which he gave a Balzacian title, “The Peasants,” with three short stories he had already published. Flem Snopes, first seen in Father Abraham, dominated the story, rising from the village Frenchman’s Bend to a “foothold in Jefferson,” forty miles from his origins. The second volume, “Rus in Urbe” (country in the city), traced Flem’s trajectory from his rusticity to part ownership of a “back street restaurant” to a bank presidency. The third volume, “Ilium Falling,” suggested the grand finale to this provincial epic: the Snopes invasion and conquering of Jefferson (Troy), displacing the aristocratic Sartorises and corrupting local government with “crooked politics” while subdividing the land.

This was the story, the “rise of the redneck,” that Stone had been urging Faulkner to write all along. And while Faulkner never abandoned this saga of rapacity, it had taken him a good fifteen years to put even part of it down on the page, a time during which Stone wondered why the Snopeses remained on the margins of Faulkner’s major work. So what had changed? Why was Faulkner now, suddenly, animated to project this tripartite tale, providing a detailed treatment for his editor, as he would for a Hollywood studio? Although, as always, he needed money—the farm was not really a paying proposition, and he had so many dependents—all he could think about was his novel. The Wild Palms had become Faulkner’s best-selling novel, but it was hardly a bestseller, and he had turned away from Hollywood as a quick source of revenue.

On March 17, Haas received a letter from Faulkner admitting, “I tried last month to put the novel aside and hammer out a pot-boiler story to meet this [insurance] premium with, but I failed, either the novel is too hot in my mind or I failed to keep from stewing over having to make a home run in one lick, to cook up a yarn.”7 On March 22, Faulkner cashed in an insurance policy and asked for another advance from Haas so that he could relieve the pressure on Stone over a lawsuit demanding payment of a seven-thousand-dollar note. Stone’s troubles, in other words, had become Faulkner’s, just as the depredations of Snopesism had always been their joint enterprise. By March 29, Faulkner had three thousand dollars from Haas, telling him that the novel would be on the way soon to Random House and that he had “enough stories to make another volume. What do you think about it?” The urgency to produce the grand design of the trilogy (perhaps, in part, as a way of extracting a larger advance) and Stone’s pressing need for money, coupled with Faulkner’s renewed sense of the origins of his turn to prose and to his native soil, had converged. It was now or never to make good on the promise made to Phil Stone and to himself at the conception of the Yoknapatawpha chronicle.

To a reporter in April, Faulkner revealed yet another way of looking at the trilogy—as an implicit comment on modern America: “The South seems to be the only place in the country that is interested in art these days. . . . Maybe it’s because the North is more industrialized than we are. Maybe in 80 years we’ll be as highly industrialized and we’ll quit turning out art.” Oxford at the turn of the century was not Frenchman’s Bend, but even so there might be something in the surmise that The Hamlet “mythologizes Faulkner’s childhood in the self-contained South at the turn of the century.”8 The novel approaches the classic perspective of the pastoral poet, presenting a rural, even retrograde movement, a flowing back to natural sources like the convict swept back by the mighty Mississippi. If Faulkner felt impelled to continue the Snopes saga, perhaps it is because he found himself in another place, mentally and physically. In 1931, during that writers’ conference in Virginia, he had said: “The South? Nothing of any real value is likely to come out of it in the next twenty-five years at least.”9 Now the velocity of change made it increasingly impossible to regard his heritage as stable or permanent.

Literary life was more likely to be rejuvenated by a “Keats coming out of the backwoods,” declared the 1939 Faulkner. He scoffed at the writers in the French Quarter, declaring that the “fellows who are going places are too busy working to sit around and talk about it.” The need to boil the pot had delayed the writing of the trilogy about “a poor white who comes to a little Southern town and teaches the populace corruption in government and . . .” Apparently he did not finish his sentence. Six months later, at the Plaza Hotel in New York City, he appeared to a New York Post reporter as a tweedy English country squire until he began to speak, drawling out his Snopes stories, including one that would not make it into print until The Town (1957). He described the family as creeping over Jefferson like “mold over cheese and destroying its tradition and whatever lav’liness there was in the place.”

“The Peasants,” retitled The Hamlet, published on April 1, 1940, neither advanced nor detracted from Faulkner’s formidable reputation. Many reviewers had difficulty reconciling regionalist realism with a romanticism that went beyond the bounds of the decorum and structure expected in fiction, and that Faulkner had flouted—most recently in The Wild Palms. In general, they picked apart the novel, praising the rise of Flem Snopes as though Faulkner were writing The Rise of Silas Lapham (Chicago Daily News, April 3), and deplored the reverie of Ike Snopes, “a mindless imbecile” in love with a cow: “Why, but for the gratification of the author’s perverted judgment, should any reader endeavor to interest himself for 60 pages in a minute description of a gruesome creature who grovels habitually in filth?” (Cleveland Plain Dealer, April 14). Eva Lou Walton in New Masses (April 16) found that same Ike Snopes interlude unforgettable: “sheer primitive myth—apocalyptic poetry, too.” She also grasped the importance of the most outrageous episodes, like the spotted horses and their mad frenzied race through barns, bridges, and even houses. This exciting and symbolic episode counterpointed the lives of most men “caught in part by their own stupidity, in part by poverty.” In the Santa Barbara News-Press (May 6) Maurice Swan acknowledged Faulkner’s “sheer genius to ignite images that cut open new worlds upon our sensibilities.” The reviewer understood the unities of the novel, the contrast between Flem and Ike, the former with the “bow-tie [that] gives the neck decorum, the neck through which the cells in the cortex shape schemes to tangle people into harness by the immutable civil laws of man,” and the latter a “seminal stream” of “unbridled sex of the unconfirmed, untutored virgin.” Eula, the voluptuous daughter of Will Varner, is sold to Flem “like a cow,” Swan notes. She is the Venus of a myth brought to earth, “wrangled and mangled by money and sex.”

That Faulkner operated within traditions of the tall tale and frontier humor seems to have escaped most reviewers, although George Marion O’Donnell applied a corrective in the Nashville Banner (August 21). He focused on Ratliff, a sewing machine salesman, as the principal narrator. Neither a Snopes nor a Sartoris, he stands between, the reviewer observed, in the middle and able to mediate between two extremes, a “village custodian.”10

A dismissive reviewer in the Times Literary Supplement (September 24) referred to Flem as Faulkner’s “lunatic marionette of a hero,” unwittingly pointing to exactly what makes the character so powerful in his string-pulling monomania to make money and get ahead. “He moves them around like puppets,” observed William J. Walters Jr. in the Central New Jersey Home News (April 7), admiring the novelist’s energy and perhaps realizing how the characters’ vitality depends on endowing them with only a narrow range of animating features. Flem is Ike’s denatured opposite. As Robert Penn Warren explained in the Kenyon Review (Spring 1941), “The structure of the book depends on the intricate patterning of contrasts,” a method carried over from The Wild Palms. But Warren remained in the minority. Most reviewers, like Desmond Hawkins in John O’London’s Weekly (September 20), could find no “structural purpose” in the novel. The Hamlet utterly baffled George Orwell (Time and Tide, November 9). “Disjointed” but “fantastic and compelling,” Wallace Stegner concluded in the Virginia Quarterly Review (Summer 1940).

In College English (May 1941), Warren Beck rebuked the legion of reviewers who had deplored Faulkner as amoral, immoral, melodramatic, incoherent, and sensationalistic. “A virile critical approach will first recognize the coherent rationality and humanity of Faulkner’s point of view.” That so many did not suggests how unprepared for war they were, how blinded they chose to be when they gibbered about Faulkner’s “nihilism,” Beck concluded: “Such ostrich tactics become increasingly ridiculous in a world where a recrudescence of irrationality and brutal passions have pointed up for even the most impercipient those melancholy facts about human nature and progress which Faulkner has confronted all along and has unequivocally attacked.” In short, Faulkner could see it coming, the fascism that would engulf the world, and that his own fiction, a new kind of history, had done so much to expose.

“Flem”

In book 1, “Flem,” the first paragraph corresponds to the map of Faulkner’s domain that had become fixed in the minds of his regular readers. No previous passage had been quite so close in spirit to Scott’s Waverley novels that had done so much, Mark Twain contended, to shape the South’s own sense of itself:

Frenchman’s Bend was a section of rich river-bottom country lying twenty miles southeast of Jefferson. Hill-cradled and remote, definite yet without boundaries, straddling into two counties and owning allegiance to neither, it had been the original grant and site of a tremendous pre-Civil War plantation, the ruins of which—the gutted shell of an enormous house with its fallen stables and slave quarters and overgrown gardens and brick terraces and promenades—were still known as the Old Frenchman place, although the original boundaries now existed only on old faded records in the Chancery Clerk’s office in the county court house in Jefferson, and even some of the once-fertile fields had long since reverted to the cane-and-cypress jungle from which their first master had hewed them.

Like Scott, Faulkner situates his story in the recent past—in the late nineteenth/early twentieth century in a pocket of the past, and from a pastoral point of view among ruins that the Romantics found so evocative. Decaying plantation grandeur, the traces of something that had once been “tremendous,” is now a relic with remains retrievable only in “old faded records,” themselves a sign of a culture reverting to its primitive state. Civilization has come and gone in this Babylon, once the preserve of oppressors, leaving no trace of their power and oppression except for “fallen stables and slave quarters.”

Into this indeterminate territory, lacking exact boundaries, a foreign Ozymandias built his establishment, and its decayed remnant is now ruled by Will Varner, who has bought up the land from Jefferson bankers and presides over the remnants—the “walnut newel posts and stair spindles, oak floors which fifty years later would have been almost priceless”—and the legend of a buried treasure. “Somebody is always digging for treasure since the Civil War,” John Cullen told scholar Floyd Watkins.11 In the novel, the past is prologue to a new rapacious generation—not yet announced in the narrative—and its leader, Flem Snopes. Varner is the landlord and the law of this land, a shopkeeper, mill owner, justice of the peace, and election commissioner. The ballots are stuffed his way. He lends money and tends to animals, a veterinarian as well. No one gins cotton or grinds meal outside of Varner’s regime. He sits, apparently indolent, watching the Old Frenchman place, wondering why any man would need such a colossal residence just to sleep and eat in. It dismays Varner that the Old Frenchman place is the only property he has never been able to sell and that people have tired of dismantling.

Will Varner rules more like a feudal lord than a capitalist. While he drives a hard bargain and has the consolidating mentality of a capitalist, he also has a warmth and genuine interest in his fellows that is absent in the man who will become his business partner: Flem Snopes. Will is neighborly, humorous, insightful, and a student of human nature. He may exploit people, but he has some sense of community and obligation to others as well. He even inspires respect, or at least deference, among those beholden to him and to whom they must account.

Faulkner understood this sort of man very well because he had done business with him. Will Bryant had sold to William Faulkner a modest version of the Old Frenchman place. He had been patient in extending the terms of repayment and had taken an interest in Faulkner’s writing. Faulkner, in turn, enjoyed not only talking with Will Bryant about Indians and the history of their region, he felt beholden and accountable to this landlord. In letter after letter addressed to “Mr Bryant” and later “Mr Will” and “Miss Sallie,” Faulkner gave an accounting of himself to a couple who addressed him as “William” or “William Faulkner,” never Bill. On September 2, 1939, for example, Faulkner explained that he was “short of cash” and could not pay the installment due that month because of an additional assessment of his 1937 taxes: “Is it convenient to allow me some more time on this next payment.” He wanted an extension to January 1, 1940. The same letter includes two columns of eleven handwritten dates and amounts paid to the Bryants.12 The meticulousness of these letters, their author’s mixing of business and pleasure, and his unvarying deference to the Bryants were reciprocated in their tolerant and even generous responses to his pleas for more time to settle his debts. They represented, in short, the very world that Flem Snopes dismantles piece by piece.

The dreams of the past that the Old Frenchman place represents are dead. New wealth will be generated some other way—and not by Jody Varner, the ninth of Will’s sixteen children, who oversees the family operation. He is the epitome of the “masculine Singular” gone to flab. His incompetence is “a nuisance in the operation of Varner’s businesses but to the Varner legacy Jody is a threat.”13 Jody’s malfeasance will provide an opportunity for Flem. Jody initiates his debacle by supposing he can shortchange Flem’s father, Ab Snopes, holding Ab’s reputation as barn burner over him, since Snopes has engaged to work Varner’s farm so late in the season and will have nowhere else to go. But Ratliff, who has followed Snopes’s history, explains how much trouble Snopes caused his previous landlord, Major de Spain, ruining an expensive rug by walking on it with manure-laden boots, then ruining it again by having it harshly cleaned, then suing De Spain and finally burning down his barn—although De Spain could not prove arson. In short, Ab Snopes thwarts the traditional sharecropping system that is supposed to keep men like him in thrall. This is the first sign that doing business as usual will no longer be possible now that Ab and his family have arrived. They are as unpredictable as the wild spotted horses Flem brings from Texas in what is the founding event of the Snopes trilogy established in Father Abraham. The unruly horses are an import upsetting the community’s way of doing business and establishing an economy that no longer can be controlled by the old school Varners, a family that depended on the deference and cooperation of peasants (Faulkner’s original title for the novel). Creating a market with those unbroken horses sets up a competitive, subversive dynamic that diminishes the very idea of privilege that the Varners have perpetuated.

Jody Varner, now scared of what Ab will do, rides out to the Snopes farm to assuage Ab: “just send me word and I’ll ride right up here as quick as I can get here. You understand? Anything, just anything you dont like—.” Ab declares his truculent independence: “I been getting along with fifteen or twenty different landlords since I started farming. When I cant get along with them, I leave. That all you wanted?” Ab is immovable, except when he wants to move. On his return home, Varner looks at the contract he had made with Snopes and thinks it “must have occurred in another time”—exactly so, since Snopes is the new dispensation.

Historical change, mainly the subject of fascinating asides in Flags in the Dust, flashbacks in Light in August, a murky subtext in Absalom, Absalom! that suddenly emerges in Shreve’s prediction of the future, now becomes the dominant narrative that will pick up apace in Go Down, Moses, Intruder in the Dust, and Requiem for a Nun. The Hamlet is at the forefront of this new kind of history, which is no longer the subtext as in The Sound and the Fury, where Jason fulminates about an unpredictable commodity market, and Sanctuary, where Popeye’s predations occur on the grounds of a ruined plantation. Characters like Jody Varner and Ratliff see change coming and comment on it as the shaping force of their lives.

Ratliff, in particular, embodies the neoteric phase of Faulkner’s fiction that continues all the way to The Reivers. Whatever Ratliff’s limitations and misperceptions, his temptations and renunciations, he follows a moral compass, fitfully and imperfectly, but without the preconceptions of a Horace Benbow or Gavin Stevens, his competitors in working out an ethical approach to the developing history of Yoknapatawpha. Ratliff is tenacious, if not always successful, in his opposition to Flem Snopes, who represents a “devastating threat to principled existence that cannot go unchallenged by men committed to justice and equity in human affairs.”14

Flem’s first appearance in the novel signals how history is about to change. Jody Varner has only seen Flem through the window of Ab’s house, and now meets him in a scene typical of Flem’s ability to waylay his marks while apparently doing nothing: “One moment the road had been empty, the next moment the man stood there beside it, at the edge of a small copse—the same cloth cap, the same rhythmically chewing jaw materialised apparently out of nothing and almost abreast of the horse, with an air of the complete and purely accidental which Varner was to remember and speculate about only later.” Even the shrewdest observers, like Ratliff, have to catch up with Flem, who appears and acts before they can spot or deter him. Flem has a broad flat face and eyes the “color of stagnant water.” If he is not as menacing as Popeye, he is just as inhuman and mechanical—the marionette that one reviewer complained about. Flem gives nothing away: “His face was as blank as a pan of uncooked dough.” Varner has to do all the talking, trying to smooth things over with the Snopeses. Like Ab, the monosyllabic Flem does not carry the conversation forward. To Varner’s allusion to the family’s moving around and its dissatisfactions, Flem remarks, “There’s a right smart of country.” That sounds innocuous, but it can be interpreted as a warning: Everything is available and all of it can be a Snopes business. Flem, in other words, cedes no ground and acknowledges no fiefdoms. Varner tries to buy Flem off with the offer of more farmland. But Flem finds “no benefit in farming. I figure on getting out of it as soon as I can.” Flem then breaks through Varner’s palaver with a question, “You own a store, don’t you?” It doesn’t take Varner long to understand that Flem wants to be a store clerk, a job he has secured without having to ask for it. By the end of the first chapter, Flem’s business plan and his way of doing business have been revealed without his saying more than sixty-eight words. At the same time, chapter 1 has covered fifty or so years of history from the Civil War to Reconstruction to the post-Reconstruction period that coincided with the rise of the redneck and the politics of populism that overcame the Faulkner way of doing business in the decades to come. The last thing Flem would think to do is restore the Old Frenchman place, a dilapidated relic grander than Rowan Oak, since he craves employment as store and bank clerk, the very occupations William Faulkner disdained.

“Evening, Uncle Will,” Ratliff says at the beginning of chapter 2, “in his pleasant, courteous, even deferent voice.” “Deferent” is the operative word, reflecting a code of courtesy and respect that Flem and his family do not honor, starting with the Civil War, when Ab Snopes in The Unvanquished gets the better of Rosa Millard in a mule trade and then leads her into the trap that results in her murder. “Ab had to withdraw his allegiance to the Sartorises, and I hear tell he skulked for a considerable back in the hills until Colonel Sartoris got busy enough building his railroad for it to be safe to come out,” Ratliff reports. Flem’s clerkship is actually a sinecure, a marvel to Frenchman’s Bend since the store is a casual self-service enterprise needing no help. Ratliff grew up watching Ab curdle, bilked in a horse trade with the infamous Pat Stamper, and now mistrustful of humanity itself. Ab relies on his son Flem to take away Jody Varner’s advantage, and now Ab has a team of mules he has not had to trade for, except insofar as Flem himself is the commodity traded, so to speak, for the mules. Flem is a comer acting, as Ratliff says, as if he was “raised store-keeping.” Ratliff gets around in his sewing machine business, absorbing the lay of the land and its people’s lore as he adds his own eyewitness to events, past and present. No other character in Faulkner’s fiction has such reach, such disinterested curiosity in how events will turn out, and how the community will react to change. Snopesism is the catalyst, but it is just one driver of history, a fundamental point so many reviewers missed in their fixation on Faulkner as southern novelist.

In chapter 3, the sinecure becomes a cynosure for the community as members purchase items to get a good look at the new novelty clerk. When Will Varner arrives, he orders Flem to bring him some chewing tobacco. Flem stands there while Varner continues with a story but is disturbed by Flem at his elbow. “What?” Varner asks. “You aint paid for it,” Flem responds. The transaction, not the person, is the principle Flem propounds. The ancien régime relinquishes its authority to Flem’s strict accounting. Jody Varner made mistakes, usually in his favor, but had always been generous with customers, too. Now no leeway, no credit, is offered by Flem, whose arithmetic is meticulous. Jody begins to neglect the store. When Flem turns his attention to the cotton gin, suddenly it is Jody who must mind the store, while months later Ratliff figures out that Flem has “passed” Jody, becoming more indispensable to Will Varner than Varner’s own son. When it is time to settle accounts with farmers, Will Varner, who has always done it alone, now has Flem at his side. They resemble a “white trader and his native parrot-taught headman in an African outpost.” The colonial, imperialistic nature of the enterprise has been established on a new basis, with the headman “acquiring the virtues of civilization fast.” Soon Flem is operating as essentially a payday lender, doling out anywhere between twenty-five cents and ten dollars “if the borrower agreed to pay enough for the accommodation.” Then he begins importing family members to run other businesses, like the blacksmith shop. A hapless Jody Varner exclaims: “How many more is there? How much longer is this going on? Just what is it going to cost me to protect one goddamn barn full of hay?” Of course, Flem does not answer. His mind is on more than a protection racket.

Ratliff tries to beat the Snopeses at their own game but is swindled nevertheless, accepting from Mink Snopes, Flem’s cousin, a promissory note that Ratliff cannot collect on because, Flem tells him, it has been signed by an idiot, Isaac (Ike) Snopes, a helpless victim Ratliff does not care to exploit. These transactions do not just reflect the rise of the redneck that obsessed Phil Stone. This is a change from feudalism to capitalism—from the liege lord Will Varner to the banker Flem Snopes—the complications of which took Faulkner more than a decade to work out as he meditated on the implications of the spotted-horses episode in Father Abraham and the changes in the national and local economy that occurred during the Depression. Ratliff’s insistence that Ab Snopes “soured” after the Civil War marks the breakdown of deference and the destruction of the comity—no matter how fragile—that kept communities together. Ab’s anomie becomes Flem’s opportunity. He builds his business one client at a time, spreading his risk, never depending on specific properties or allegiances that make owners like Jody Varner vulnerable.

“Eula”

What is missing in book 1, “Flem,” called the “female principle” in The Wild Palms, is supplied in abundance in book 2, “Eula.” In chapter 1, Jody Varner, outraged that his sedentary and already well-endowed eight-year-old sister does nothing, drives her to school but is aghast at the spectacle she arouses, a scent she gives off if a man is within one hundred yards of her. His dilemma is macrocosmic: “He had a vision of himself transporting not only across the village’s horizon but across the embracing proscenium of the entire inhabited world like the sun itself, a kaleidoscopic convolution of mammalian ellipses.” Eula is an eruption, an affront to a dollars-and-cents economy, the careful calculation of profit and loss, and an interruption of business as usual. She can be factored into the monetary mind only as an acquisition. The trouble is she cannot be quantified like hard currency. Her appeal is incalculable.

In the Sleepy Hollow of Frenchman’s Bend, Labove, the besotted schoolteacher—as much of an anchorite as Harry Wilbourne before he encounters Charlotte Rittenmeyer—is undone by his infatuation with Eula. Labove’s drive and intelligence has caught the interest of Will Varner, who is looking, it seems, for an heir to usurp Jody’s place, now that no other male Varner is available.15 The ambitious Labove is no Faulknerian poet, but until teaching Eula he has wanted to be “fiercely free,” sharing Faulkner’s “ ‘sardonic not-quite belief’ in the unreality of the university and its systems of values.”16 Labove also resembles Flem insofar as he, too, is the son of a dirt farmer determined to leave the farm behind. But unlike Flem, Labove is undone by the female principle that diverts his steady, determined pursuit of a college degree and a place in the law profession. Eula is impervious to his clumsy effort to seduce her. Pushing him aside, she sums up what she has learned at school, telling him to stop pawing her, “You old headless horseman Ichabod Crane.” Eula conflates the two characters of Washington Irving’s story—one looking for the head he lost in battle, and the other fleeing after his courtship of a wealthy farmer’s daughter fails. Labove is both, since he has lost his head over his passion for Will Varner’s daughter, and like Crane he disappears in defeat. Labove’s frustration is akin to what Faulkner himself felt, it would seem, during those years when he inscribed his handmade books to the married Estelle. Labove comes to believe he is no more “a physical factor” in Eula’s life “than the owner’s name on the flyleaf of a book.”17

Eula becomes Flem’s prize as he consolidates his position and place, and an ornament of his power and prestige. She is as much the “centrice” in her world as Flem is the center of his, her child by another man no trouble to a Snopes who now possesses, thanks to a transaction with Will Varner, the seigneurial rights to the Old Frenchman place in this farce of a knight, the semblance of a frog prince, saving the damsel in distress. Eula, the community property of every male’s sexual fantasy, becomes a Flem Snopes asset.

Flem’s rescue of the Varner pride, if you want to call it that, provokes in Ratliff a fantasy of Flem as a Faustus with a used-up and much-reduced soul who bargains with the devil for hell itself, which the devil has no capacity to offer, but which Flem feels is the price of the note payable by the devil for Flem’s work. Confronted by the unrelenting Flem, the Prince of Darkness screams, “Take Paradise!” In Ratliff’s book, Flem outdevils the devil, arrogating to himself a sovereignty that none of the other males who salivate over Eula can imagine, let alone assert.

“The Long Summer”

Chapter 1 of book 3, “The Long Summer,” cuts across the cash nexus of Flem’s career with Ike Snopes’s romance. This erotic attachment to a bovine beauty baffled most reviewers, many of whom deplored the sensationalism and perversity of an author they presumed only wanted to shock his readers. He did—but not in quite the way they supposed. He offended their sense of propriety, to be sure, but in the service of establishing the very ground of love lacking in the transactional world of Flem Snopes. The inarticulate Ike, who cannot even pronounce his last name, pursues the cow as the female principle, “speaking to her, trying to tell her how this violent violation of her maiden’s delicacy is no shame, since such is the very iron imperishable warp of the fabric of love.” Like Benjy, Ike is sensate and devoid of shame and purely loving without pretext, finding his equilibrium in the cow’s company in a world he otherwise has trouble negotiating—like the steps he falls down at home. That domesticated world roars back at Ike when Houston catches him with the cow in the creek and slashes at the cow, calling it a whore, and strips Ike of his fouled clothing, which Houston throws into the water and scrubs with a stick on the grass, shouting at Ike to go home. But not even this terrifying rebuke and assertion of propriety deters Ike from resuming his courtship as he returns to the cow to milk her and feed her and eat along with her. The leaves and blossoms and petals Ike strews upon the ground forming an “abortive diadem” are reminiscent of Faulkner doing the same when he garlanded Meta’s bed. What Faulkner felt in her caress is the same tenderness Ike feels for his beloved, wishing to crown the ground for her. Like Ike, Faulkner found his love in a transactional world that told him what to do even as he made his paradise of it as others like Flem made the same world a hell. In the bed of nature, Ike is sovereign. In the hour between sunset and dark Ike lies down with the cow at the very time that Houston, four years a widower, misses his wife the most. The private nature of Houston’s grief retroactively suffuses the coupling of Ike and the cow, which, in turn, becomes a public spectacle to which Ratliff puts a stop. Ratliff, a fastidious bachelor, seem incapable of joining in with crude barnyard humor.18 He appeals to I. O. and Eck Snopes, arguing they must buy the cow (another transactional solution) and dispose of it to preserve the family’s honor, although no such honor exists but only Ratliff’s shame that Ike’s passion should be a matter of public entertainment. In place of his living love, Ike is given a toy cow. Like Eula Varner, the “object of love has been turned into an object.”19

The shift in chapter 2 of “The Long Summer” is at first puzzling. How does Houston’s story impinge on the Snopes saga? Love is part of the answer—not a love that conquers all but love that is simply indispensable, even though it plays no part in Flem’s rise to wealth and power any more than love has a role in Sutpen’s ascent. Houston grows up with Lucy Pate, the woman he marries, and when she dies six months after they wed, he is inconsolable and raging. She is nothing like Estelle Oldham; Houston is nothing like William Faulkner, but matrimony nevertheless binds both as chosen men: “It was as though she [Lucy] had merely elected him out of all the teeming earth, not as one competent to her requirements, but as one possessing the possibilities on which she would be content to establish the structure of her life.” Estelle had done as much—even if she had chosen someone else first—and her election of Faulkner made it nigh on impossible for him to repudiate her, no matter how hard he tried. He was her destiny—just like Houston’s wife, still waiting for him after he returned from thirteen years away from home. He is not an easy man to love—torn as he is between his desire to be let alone and to have her support: “It was a feud, a gage, wordless, uncapitulating, between that unflagging will not for love or passion but for the married state, and that furious and as unbending one for solitariness and freedom.” Houston, a paradox like Faulkner, is pinned between these alternatives.

Then Mink Snopes shoots and kills Houston over a cattle dispute, with repercussions that continue right to the end of the trilogy in The Mansion. So much for the family honor—although Mink believes he has asserted his dignity and delivered a blow against that “conspiracy to frustrate and outrage his rights as a man and his feelings as a sentient creature.” Mink has subsisted on the rented land and meager resources that Flem has repudiated in his rise. Mink is the sum of bitterness, with no plan or purpose, other than to survive—as he proves when his food runs out and he eats the shavings in a grain barrel. His vulnerable and impecunious condition is precisely what Flem has sought to surmount. Mink’s sense of honor leads him to murder Houston not for money, and not even with the idea of escaping his punishment—as his wife urges him to do—but as an assertion (as paradoxical as it sounds) of his humanity. He does not consider what is to his own advantage, or to his family’s well-being. He rejects Lump Snopes’s offer of an alibi. It seems that anything that might compromise the principle of self-determination involved in Houston’s murder must be rejected. Only pride of self matters to the uncompromising Mink, who refuses to accommodate himself even to the idea of self-preservation, except for his bungling attempts to hide Houston’s body.

Just as uncompromising in his own way is Lump. He can think only of the fifty dollars he is sure that Mink forgot to retrieve from Houston’s body. Lump cannot conceive of a crime that does not involve money, and he wants to split the proceeds with Mink, doggedly pursuing his cousin, playing checkers with him for six hours while trying to cajole him into going back for the Houston loot. Lump even lies to the sheriff about Mink’s whereabouts, even after Mink knocks Lump down and ties him up. Even though Lump thinks Mink may assault him again, all he can think about is the money. Lump’s pecuniary personality—the Snopes brand, you might say—drives him forward like an eighteenth-century humors character. Mink has more in common with the proud man he murders than with his covetous cousin.

Money was never far from William Faulkner’s concerns, although not for its own sake. Even so, the scheming, playing games, ingratiation—none of which he was very good at or even wanted to perfect—were an inescapable part of his experience as family man and enterprising writer, even though his family (no Snopeses, to be sure) could not figure out the motivations of a man who was as silent about himself as Mink is with his wife, with Lump, and with everyone else he encounters. In fact, what it meant to be William Faulkner, and what it meant to be Mink Snopes, coincided in the most crucial way: Both depended on silence to remain themselves, to be at an essential remove from the commerce of the world. It is no wonder then that Mink engaged Faulkner as a character he would be compelled to return to in the most brilliant passages of The Mansion.

In jail, after the sheriff and deputy have caught up with Mink trying to dispose of Houston’s body, Mink says to a group of incarcerated black men that he was all right “until it started coming to pieces,” meaning the disintegrating body. The black men want nothing to do with this white man’s confession. And Mink, entirely absorbed in the cultural determinants of what constitutes his rights, watches them rush the stairs toward the smell of food, and thinks: “Are they going to feed them niggers before they do a white man?”

Mink awaits trial in chapter 3, not bothering to defend himself or hire a lawyer. Everyone supposes he is waiting for Flem to somehow get him out of jail. But Flem remains in Texas on his honeymoon and does not return with Eula, leading Ratliff to suppose that Flem will wait until Mink’s case is closed. Ratliff provides a home for Mink’s wife and children even as the rest of his kin stay away from him as someone who has detracted from the family brand. Their absence, for all their clannishness, is telling. Mink is simply not worth anything to them. Only Mink, right to the last, believes that the traditional clan code will save him from the life sentence imposed during Flem’s truancy.

“The Peasants”

In chapter 1 of book 4, “The Peasants,” Faulkner finally circles back to the precipitating event of the Snopes saga, the sale of the spotted horses. He told an audience that he drew on a childhood experience. To hear him tell it is to realize how much he enjoyed the impracticality of buying such an animal: “That the man even in a society where there’s a constant pressure to conform can still be taken off by the chance to buy a horse for three dollars. Which to me is a good sign, I think. I hope that man can always be [tolled] off that way, to—to buy a horse for three dollars.”20 So much commentary emphasizes how the men are gulled into buying the horses, but the spirit of those ponies appealed to Faulkner, who became unusually loquacious, almost a little boy, when he remembered his own experience in such a wholehearted way that his audience fell in love with him:

I bought one of these horses once. [audience laughter] They appeared in our country. Every summer somebody would come in with another batch of them. They were western range-bred ponies, pintos. Had never had a bridle on them. Had never seen shell corn before. And they’d brought—be brought into our town and auctioned off for prices from three or four dollars up to six or seven, and I bought this one for four dollars and seventy-five cents. I was—[audience laughter] oh, I reckon ten years old. My father at that time ran a livery stable, and there was a—a big man. He was six feet and a half tall. He weighed two hundred pounds, but mentally he was about ten years old, too. And I wanted one of those horses. My father said, “Well, if you and Buster can buy one for what money you’ve saved, you can have it.” And so we went to the auction, and we bought one for four dollars and seventy-five cents. We got it home. We were going to gentle it. We had a two-wheel cart made out of the front axle of a buggy with shafts on it, and we fooled with that [creature]. It was—was a wild animal. It was a wild beast. [audience laughter] It wasn’t a domestic animal at all, and finally Buster said that it was about ready, so we had the cart in a shed. Estelle probably remembers this. We put a croaker sack over the horse’s head and backed it into the cart with two niggers to—to fasten it in, to buckle traces and toggles and things, and me and Buster got in the seat, and Buster said, “All right boys, let him go.” [audience laughter] And they snatched the—the sack off the horse’s head, and it went across the lot. There was a big gate. The lane had turned at a sharp angle. It hung the inside wheel on the gatepost as it turned. We were down on one hub then. Then about that time, Buster caught me by the back of the neck and threw me, just like that, and then he jumped off. [audience laughter] And the cart was scattered up that lane, and we found the horse a—a mile away run into a dead-end street. All he had left on him was just the hames, the harness was gone. [audience laughter] [But] that was a [pleasant] experience. But we kept that horse and gentled him to where I finally rode him. But I loved that horse because that was my own horse. I bought that with my own money. [audience laughter]

This is rare Faulkner, the Faulkner we can see growing up when it was all right to talk about “niggers” as he does without a second’s reservation or embarrassment. To be a fool about a horse did not lower a man or boy in Faulkner’s estimation. In fact, in The Hamlet he has a boy, Eck Snopes’s son, who constantly gets too close to the bucking ponies so that Eck has to tell him to stay back. For Faulkner, those spotted horses evoke the wonders of his childhood, and a story his own father told too—without the addition of Flem Snopes.21 The laughter, which can be heard on the website recording, is robust, and it helps to animate Faulkner. When he gets to the part about the cart, his voice picks up speed, and then by the time Buster catches him by the back of the neck, you can hear Faulkner’s amusement and imagine his smile as the audience laughs along with him. In this reliving of his childhood, he re-creates a kind of community in this University of Virginia classroom that gives you some idea of the collective experience with horses Faulkner and his contemporaries shared and that is so much a part of The Hamlet. And how very rare of Faulkner to put Estelle in the story, if only as a bystander, as if to corroborate and make even more real his relish of the past for its own sake and for the sake of those like him who did not mind seeming impractical, as artists are always impractical. Estelle would not only remember, but he could be sure she would think, always, of that gallant, impractical boy she fell in love with the first time she saw him parading down a street on a horse. And don’t forget Faulkner’s tolerant father, so often shown as misunderstanding his son, but who allowed his eldest boy’s fantasy to fructify in this livery stable period, providing for his son not only the pleasure of his own purchase but with a memory that turned into such literary profit. Faulkner’s emphasis on “my own money” and “my own horse” and how much he paid for that horse link him to all the poor childlike men who will buy Flem’s horses out of their meager savings, wanting to own some part of that wild spirit, much to their wives’ consternation.22

The fun Faulkner had as a child would be put to a more serious purpose in The Hamlet: The spotted-horses auction marks a momentous change in the economy of Frenchman’s Bend, disrupting traditional, normative practices and launching Flem’s takeover not only of business but of the way to do business, commanding the greed and power dynamics incipient in a populace he knows how to exploit, creating a spectacle that diverts his audience even as they hand over their treasure to him, including Henry Armstid’s last five dollars to take possession of a horse he cannot control but that has become the same as an assertion of his will. He puts his wife in danger and strikes her when she cannot head the horse in Henry’s direction. The Texan auctioneer offers to return the five dollars to Armstid’s wife, but Flem halts the offer, saying he wants to honor the sale—if such a word can be employed to describe Flem’s cupidity. In effect, the auction has become a bet on horses as in a race where most of the betters are losers but cannot resist the idea of winning. The horses break loose when the owners come to collect them. All along Mrs. Littlejohn has been doing her chores, barely glancing at the auction, until one of the wild ponies scrambles onto the porch and she bashes it with a washboard. As an injured Henry Armstid is carried into her house, she declares, “You men.” This practical-minded woman, as Faulkner explained, watched these men “committing puerile folly for some gewgaw.” Her disgust is palpable at seeing the beaten man who has beaten his wife: “See if you cant find something else to play with that will kill some more of you.” Her comment is apt coming after the antics of Eck Snopes and his boy besotted with catching the “free” horse the Texan bestowed on them at the auction. Several times the menagerie of wild horses has been called Flem Snopes’s circus. He has put on a show appealing to these boy-men who also want to be animal tamers and exert their need to dominate. As Will Varner says, “You take a man that aint got no other relaxation all year long except dodging mule-dung up and down a field furrow. And a night like this one, when a man aint old enough yet to lay still and sleep, and yet he aint young enough anymore to be tomcatting in and out of other folks’ back windows, something like this is good for him.” The tall-tale tradition and the dime novel converge in Ratliff’s comment when he refers to the Texas auctioneer as “Dead-eye Dick.”

The episode ends on a sour note, with Flem pretending he does not have the five dollars Mrs. Armstid asks him for, claiming the Texan has taken all the sale money. Flem makes his meanness even plainer when he gifts a sack of five-cent candy to Mrs. Armstid for the children. Fed up with trying to ameliorate Flem’s depredations, a revolted Ratliff refuses to do any more for the hapless Armstids, announcing: “I never made them Snopeses and I never made the folks that cant wait to bare their backsides to them. I could do more, but I wont. I wont, I tell you!” His vehemence suggests that he will nevertheless do something, just like Faulkner helped out his brother John, with a wife and two children, by giving him the farm to manage even as Faulkner complained about the added responsibility.

In the aftermath of the horse mayhem, causing Armstid’s injuries and Tull’s, whose wife brings a suit against Eck, whose gift horse caused the trouble, the judge cannot decide in favor of Mrs. Armstid since it cannot be proven that the horses are Flem’s. Even worse, Lump Snopes swears Flem gave back Mrs. Armstid’s five dollars to the Texan. And Mrs. Tull is outraged when the judge decides Eck never really owned the horse that upset her husband, since no deed of ownership was drawn up. The only recompense offered to Mrs. Tull is possession of the very horse that has brought her to sue Eck. Behind it all, Flem Snopes remains impervious and beyond the law, as chapter 1 concludes with Mink in the courtroom shouting out the absent Flem’s name, the name of the one man he thought could save him from a life sentence.

Flem, now the obsession of just about everyone in Frenchman’s Bend, is observed at night digging for the treasure supposedly buried by the original owner of the ruined property that Varner deeded to Flem when he married Eula. Varner has dangled the possibility of selling the Old Frenchman place before Ratliff, without actually putting up the property for bidding. It may well be that Varner and Flem, as business partners and family members, are colluding in an effort to bilk Ratliff: “Like characters in the novel, the reader will never have quite enough information to be certain that he knows what is going on. The narrative voice is shrewd, secret, and, if he seems to be entertaining, seems as well to hide as much as he reveals.” In one of his most cunning novels, Faulkner implicates readers in these transactions. How good are you at figuring the deal that is about to go down? Caveat emptor. As Claude Pruitt observes, “This is a level of verisimilitude that transforms the novel into a horse trade and the reader (along with the folks of Frenchman’s Bend) into unwary buyers likely to be ‘skinned’ in the deal.”23

Ratliff arrives with Armstid and Bookright, who hear Flem’s pickaxe, all certain that he would not waste his time if he had not come near to discovering a fortune. “Just look at what even the money a man aint got yet will do to him,” Ratliff realizes even as he digs deeper, the men finding three bags of silver coins with the aid of Uncle Dick Bolivar and his silver-detecting equipment. Certain that they will have to return the next night for more digging, they pool their resources to buy the property from Flem, never questioning why he would want to sell. And so they dig—grave deep—their own doom, with only Ratliff suspecting but not yet admitting they have been had. Flem had even set up a relative, Eustace Grimm, as a decoy, letting the trio of treasure hunters suppose Flem had another prospective buyer. Only the maniacal Henry Armstid refuses to believe the truth: “Get out of my hole,” he tells his partners, who know only too well what holes they have put themselves in.

Ratliff, one of the principal critics of Flem Snopes’s rise, succumbs to Flem’s monetary scheme of values, believing he can become rich with one quick strike. Ratliff did not arrive in time for the spotted-horses auction, and now he has another opportunity to participate in the “thrill of competitive acquisition.”24 All along, he has been twitted by the community about his know-it-all attitude, and now he has been brought low—into a ditch, in fact, soiled with Flem’s money-grubbing chicanery.

Ratliff’s greed is not so different from Faulkner’s first reaction to Hollywood gold, when he wrote home to Estelle to say he could make several thousand dollars writing for Tallulah Bankhead. Although Faulkner quickly soured on Hollywood, the urge to make a quick buck in the Hollywood go-round never deserted him for long. Like Ratliff, he could come and go in the economy of his world, selling his wares, remaining somewhat aloof, and yet realizing how deeply implicated he was in everybody’s business. The whole business, in fact, leads one reader of Faulkner’s life to conjecture: “Madly digging for gold before an audience on the lawn of his antebellum mansion, Armstid is made in the image of his creator’s sometimes outraged image of himself at work at Rowan Oak.”25

Chapter 2 of “The Peasants” concludes with Flem’s move to Jefferson. Eula appears in the “first tailored suit ever seen in Frenchman’s Bend,” as part of her husband’s new profile as a townsman entering modern life with the vestiges of the village life he is leaving behind: “the weathered and creaking wagons, the plow-galled horses and mules, the men and women and children entering another world, traversing another land, moving in another time, another afternoon without time or name.” This departure and new beginning, a part of historic changes taking place in Faulkner’s land and across the South, will become an increasing part of this novelist’s concern, the new kind of history he and his characters will make. The South of decaying plantations, the Civil War–haunted characters, will begin to recede from subsequent narratives, if not, certainly, expunged from the latter-day consciousness of old and young alike. The image of Henry Armstid still digging after two weeks, a holdover of the past searching for its treasures, closes out the story, if not the history of Frenchman’s Bend. He makes a spectacle of himself—like Flem’s spotted horses—drawing “the rapt interest of a crowd watching a magician at a fair.” His faithful wife continues to bring him food in a pail, and the couple become a staple of community conversation while people also gather to watch Flem leave town, marking the end of an era.

But not the end of Ratliff, who is already climbing out of the hole, like Faulkner, daring failure to become a success. Faulkner’s own comments about Snopesism show how closely he aligned his own efforts as an artist with Ratliff’s opposition to Flem:

When the battle comes, it always produces a Roland. It doesn’t mean that they will get rid of Snopes or the impulse which produces Snopes, but always there’s something in man that—that don’t like Snopes and objects to Snopes and, if necessary, will step in to keep Snopes from doing some irreparable harm. There’s whatever it is that—that keeps us still trying to paint the pictures, to make the music, to write the books. There’s a great deal of pressure not to do that because certainly the artist has no place in—in nature, and almost no place at all in our American culture and economy, but yet people still try to write books, still try to paint pictures.26

Faulkner, acutely aware of his own marginality during most of his lifetime, with no more status, in some respects, than an itinerant sewing machine salesman, a hired hand in a Hollywood studio, on the sidelines of an economy that favored the bottom line, began to see with the advent of the Snopes trilogy that his writing, while not designed to uphold conventional morality, could nonetheless enact a moral purpose. The impulse to battle Snopesism became the same as creating his books.