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Tuesday
I’m beginning to understand some of the reasons for my current Faulkner fascination: although Faulkner precedes me by two generations (he was born in 1897, two years before my grandfather), he deconstructs the segregated south of my childhood. I was three when my family moved to Sewanee, Tennessee in 1954, and I grew up thinking that segregation was a permanent fact of life. When I started teaching and saw my Black and White students taking integration for granted, I never ceased to be amazed and gratified.
I’m working my way through Faulkner’s novels (Absalom, Absalom!, Intruder in the Dust, Sanctuary, and The Reivers and I’m on the Libby waitlist for Light in August and The Sound and the Fury) and am also reading about Faulkner. I’m riveted by Michael Gorra’s The Saddest Words: William Faulkner’s Civil War.
In one of the early chapters, Gorra contrasts Faulkner the man with Faulkner the novelist. While Faulkner the man was a racist like those around him—better than some but a racist nonetheless—Faulkner the novelist brilliantly shows how racism has corrupted both the South and America as a whole.
We see this contrast particularly vividly, Gorra notes, in Faulkner’s mixed message about lynching. In the 1931 short story “Dry September,” the author reveals the dynamics of a horrific lynching in which an innocent Black man is killed. A month after the story appeared, however, Faulkner wrote a public letter defending lynching. The difference between artist and man could not be more starkly set forth.
More on artist vs. individual in a moment. First, the details. “Dry September” shows how a mob, hearing that a spinster has been “attacked, insulted, frightened” by a Black man, works itself up into a frenzy and goes after a random individual. When the town barber Hawkshaw mentions that the man can’t have been night watchman Will Mayes, the mob—now having a name—goes and kills Mayes.
Lest the scene appear a relic of America’s past, it is worth pointing out that Americans stormed the U.S. Capitol on evidence just as bogus. In fact, barroom conversations following Trump’s defeat in 2020 were probably not unlike the ones that Faulkner describes leading up to the lynching. In our terms, the barber would be like someone pointing out to the MAGA faithful that there’s no evidence of significant voter fraud:
“Except it wasn’t Will Mayes,” a barber said. He was a man of middle age; a thin, sand-colored man with a mild face, who was shaving a client. “I know Will Mayes. He’s a good nigger. And I know Miss Minnie Cooper, too.”
“What do you know about her?” a second barber said.
“Who is she?” the client said. “A young girl?”
“No,” the barber said. “She’s about forty, I reckon. She ain’t married. That’s why I don’t believe…”
“Believe, hell!” a hulking youth in a sweat-stained silk shirt said. “Wont you take a white woman’s word before a nigger’s?”
“I don’t believe Will Mayes did it,” the barber said. “I know Will Mayes.”
“Maybe you know who did it, then. Maybe you already got him out of town, you damn nigger-lover.”
“I don’t believe anybody did anything. I don’t believe anything happened.”…
“Then you are a hell of a white man,” the client said. He moved under the cloth. The youth had sprung to his feet.
“You don’t?” he said. “Do you accuse a white woman of lying?”
And further on:
The barber said in his mild, stubborn tone: “I ain’t accusing nobody of nothing. I just know and you fellows know how a woman that never…”
“You damn nigger-lover!” the youth said.
“Shut up, Butch,” another said. “We’ll get the facts in plenty of time to act.”
“Who is? Who’s getting them?” the youth said. “Facts, hell!”
The same “facts” that galvanized a mob to lynch Mike Pence send forth the men in Faulkner’s story to lynch Will Mayes. And unlike the January 6 insurrectionists, these men succeed.
Gorra, however, then tells the following story of what happened following the story’s publication. A letter appeared in the Memphis Commercial Appeal, written by a Black reader
to thank the white women of Mississippi for organizing an anti-lynching society. In reply, Faulkner sent in a rambling, incoherent, and apparently unmotivated screed that effectually contradicted the story he’d just published. “No balanced man can…hold any moral brief for lynching,” he writes, and yet mobs, “like our juries…have a way of being right.” For try as he might he cannot remember any case, outside of fiction, in which “a man of any color and with a record beyond reproach, suffer[ed] violence at the hands of men who knew him.”
Gorra concludes from this dramatic contrast that
Faulkner could not see the racial ideology of his world—could not even really think—except when writing fiction. He could stand outside that ideology only by first assigning it to a character. He inhabited those beliefs by inhabiting another person. Then he saw them clearly, and in that act he became better than he was.
Of the short story “Dry September,” Gorra notes that Faulkner could not “have written so clearly of mob psychology…without knowing it from within, without feeling or recognizing the force of its communal roar.”
The miracle of great fiction is that somehow, in the act of writing, the author becomes a better person than he or she is in real life. And that’s how it is for readers as well. When I’m reading Tolstoy or Hugo or Austen or—yes—Faulkner, I become open to human nobility and human possibility in ways that can evade me in the rough and tumble of everyday life. To borrow a word invented by cartoon character Lisa Simpson, I am “embiggened.”
In my case, however, I then try to live up to this glimpse of a better self, using it to guide my personal growth. That’s why I see reading literature as vital to the human community. Unfortunately, there have been numerous authors who don’t appear to have personally benefited from their miraculous creations.
I’m reading Gorra in part to discover where Faulkner ended up. Perhaps, although James Baldwin wasn’t impressed, Faulkner became less of a racist the more he wrote his books. Certainly, given that there were Mississippians who called him an “n-word lover,” perhaps his sentiments moderated some. In any event, I’ll report back when I get further into the book.