I Am Haunted by the Civil War

I grew up in the Deep South of the 1950s and 1960s. Social change wasn’t only in the air; it was in the streets and, more importantly, in the city buses, the dime store lunch counter, and the public schools. The Civil War had ended a century before, but it seemed like it was still being fought in the civil rights battles that competed for newspaper space with the growing war in Vietnam. 

The school board of Jefferson Parish in suburban New Orleans, anticipating the racial integration of schools, had segregated the high school student populations by gender – boys went to one school, girls to another. The first year of integration saw riots, fights, and protests, the more violent ones at the boys’ high school but including the girls’ school to a lesser degree. Federal marshals became an in-school presence.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Some Thursday Readings

 

“The Graduate Leaving College,” poem by George Moses Horton – Sally Thomas at Poems Ancient and Modern.

 

“The Old Swimmin’ Hole,” poem by James Whitcomb Riley – Anthony Esolen at Word & Song.

 

The Hawthorn – poem by David Whyte.

 

“On the Vanity of Earthly Greatness,” poem by Arthur Guiterman – Joseph Bottum at Poems Ancient and Modern.

Some Monday Readings - Nov. 25, 2024

4 Mistakes I See Nonfiction Authors Make (and How to Fix Them) – Ann Kroeker, Writing Coach. 

The Old World is Not Coming Back – speech by Bari Weiss of The Free Press.

 

The Nights of Old London – Spitalfields Life.

 

The Sound and the Fury: William Faulkner’s Great-Grandfather – Brian Kowell at Emerging Civil War.

 

In 1177 BCE, Civilizations Fell Apart In A Mysterious Simultaneous Collapse – IFL Science.

 

Plainsong – poem by Donald Platt at New Criterion.

 

Tales from the Road: ‘Disappearing into Dill Branch Ravine – John Banks’ Civil War Blog.

 

Justice Inverted – guest post by Daniel Pomerantz at Clarity with Michael Oren.

 

Learning to love. How the poet Dana Gioia discovered his vocation through music – The Common Reader.

 

Photograph: William Clark Falkner, great-grandfather of William Faulkner and the inspiration for the Old Colonel.

“The Saddest Words: Wiliam Faulkner’s Civil War” by Michael Gorra

If there is one writer who cast the largest shadow upon southern U.S. literature in the 20^th century, it’s William Faulkner. He also cast one of the largest shadows over all American literature in the 20^th century. At my university, few escaped the required courses in American literature without reading the short stories “Barn Burning” and/or “The Bear.” I’d read “Barn Burning in high school, but, taking English rather than American literature in college, I didn’t read Faulkner until years later. It was Flannery O’Connor who led me to Faulkner, and then I read nearly everything he wrote. 

Michael Gorra has studied and taught Faulkner, Faulkner’s works, and literature for more than 40 years. The Mary Augusta Jordan Professor of English Language and Literature at Smith College, he’s also served as editor of the Norton Critical Editions of Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying and The Sound and the Fury. The man knows his Faulkner.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Dancing Priest.

A poem and a post at Literary Life

I have two features at Literary Life today.

One is a poem, "Imago Dei," that helps to introduce Literary Life's book feature in September, Madeleine L'Engle's Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art. The poem is inspired by this statement by L'Engle: "If the work comes to the artist and says, "here I am, serve me," then the job of the artist, great or small, is to serve." The poem provides a little (poetic) explanation of the origin of a critical scene in my novel Dancing King. You can read "Imago Dei" here.

The second feature is post on fiction, "Finding Faulkner via Mexico and Peru." I never read William Faulkner until my mid-30s, and here I was, a born-and-raised Southerner. I discovered Faulkner after reading Conversation in the Cathedral by Mario Vargas Llosa and novels by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Carlos Fuentes, and other Latin American writers. You can read the post at Literary Life here.

William Faulkner’s “Soldier’s Pay”

William Faulkner wrote Soldier’s Pay, his first novel, during the first six months of 1925. He was living in New Orleans, in a ground-floor apartment on Orleans Alley in the French Quarter. The house had been built in 1840 on what had been part of the Spanish colonial prison, located at the rear of the administration building known (then and now) as the Cabildo.

Today, Orleans Alley is called Pirate’s Alley, in the very heart of the French Quarter. Faulkner’s ground-floor apartment is now occupied by Faulkner House Books. A plaque on the wall outside notes that this is the place where he wrote his first novel. The story is that Faulkner, who had considered himself a poet, wrote the novel at the urging of novelist Sherwood Anderson.

Soldier’s Pay is the story of Donald Mahon, an American who became a captain in the British Royal Air Force in World War I. He had supposedly been killed when his plane was shot down; but he is on his way home, severely injured, his face scarred, and not much of his mind left. He has a relatively small part in the story, but there is no question he is the character around which the entire story revolves.

Donald is engaged to Cecily Saunders, a hometown girl who is known as something of a flirt. She is shallow, somewhat vain, and in love with another man. Donald doesn’t recognize or his father, an Episcopal priest. Nor does he recognize Emmy, the family’s servant.

The wounded soldier is accompanied home by a fellow veteran, Joe Gilligan, and a woman they meet on the train, Margaret Powers. And there is Januarius Jones, whom Donald’s father meets early in the story and becomes in a way the narrative’s anti-hero, if not the villain. It says something of Faulkner’s writing ability that Joe and Margaret move in with the family, Joe to dress and care for him, and Margaret is some of a protective role, and it doesn’t seem odd.

As these characters respond and react to each other and what is clearly Donald’s declining health, secrets begin to play themselves out. Even Donald had at least one secret of which he and the other characters are unaware, and that is how he got his terrible injuries. But the secrets are of lesser importance; what is happening here is a theme that Faulkner will return to again and again in later novels, and that is the impact of modernization on family, relationships, love, and the social structure.

In Soldier’s Pay, modernization takes on the guise of war and its aftermath. It is not so much deadly as deadening, eroding what have long been the foundations of social and family life. Donald’s father seems to move through the story in something of a trance, his faith not rejected but forgotten and almost irrelevant. Joe Gilligan and Emmy are the characters who represent faith at work, as Joe ministers to Donald’s basic needs and Emmy feeds him. Margaret Powers is the hard, perhaps hardened, realist in the story, her own husband killed in the war and Donald offering a kind of atonement.

What Faulkner will later produce in a series of remarkable novels is foreshadowed here – the tantalizing secrets that shape so much of what the reader can see but not all at once, the complexities of the story, and even some of the circularity of the narrative. Soldier’s Pay may not be quite in the same league as The Sound and the Fury and As I Lay Dying, but in many ways it is the father to those children, and the resemblance is there to see. 

Image by Karen Arnold via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

I Almost Didn’t Read Faulkner

My introduction to the writing of William Faulkner was indirect. It began in college and almost didn’t survive college.

Way back when, sophomores at LSU were required to take two semesters of English – American or English. The vast majority took English 55 and 56, American literature. English majors were required to take English 51 and 52, English literature, instead. I wasn’t an English major, but I opted for 51 and 52 (likely influenced by what I learned with my high school English teachers). We had small, rather serious classes, compared to the auditoriums overflowing with students taking 55 and 56.

At some point, early in my sophomore year, I became the unofficial English tutor for my fraternity. That meant helping pledges (and actives) prepare for tests, helping explain assignments, and reading papers.

Every sophomore at LSU who took English 56 had to write a paper on “Barn Burning” by William Faulkner. At the fraternity, that meant anywhere from 30 to 40 papers.

I came to hate that story. I came to hate reading about it, and reading a lot of really bad papers about it. One of the worst experiences I had was to see yet another fraternity member standing at the door of my room, paper in hand, smiling hopefully.

I didn’t look at anything with Faulkner’s name on it for more than a decade after college.

In 1983, I enrolled in a master’s program at Washington University in St. Louis, managing to balance one course per semester with work and family. Early on, I took a course called “the Nature of Story.” The required reading list included Faulkner.

I initially clutched, still haunted by reading those papers. Fortunately, the work wasn’t “Barn Burning.” It was The Sound and the Fury. I decided to plow through it, expecting to be gritting my teeth.

It was difficult, confusing, and a work that had to be read slowly and carefully. We had exactly one week to read it, and I think I used the entire week.

I loved it.

“Barn Burning” burnout was over.

I began to read other works by Faulkner. I took about master’s course on the Latin American novel, and discovered the authors that Faulkner had had a powerful influence on – Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Mario Vargas Llosa, and Carlos Fuentes (Faulkner is the patron saint of “magic realism”).

I read almost everything written by those authors, and continued to read Faulkner. Last month, I was in New Orleans, and visited the Faulkner Book House in the French Quarter, the building where Faulkner lived for six months in 1925. And there I learned that before he wrote novels, Faulkner considered himself primarily a poet, and had actually published a book of poetry shortly before he moved to New Orleans.

I just finished reading the one novel of his that I had never read before, Soldier’s Pay, his first novel and the one he wrote during those six months in New Orleans. More on that next week, but I can say that it is both a first novel and a definite foreshadowing of what was to come with the novels that transformed American (and world) literature.

This week, I wrote about the Faulkner Book House for Tweetspeak Poetry. Go take a look. If you leave a comment, your name is in the hat for a giveaway of Faulkner’s New Orleans Sketches. 

And, no, the sketches do not include “Barn Burning.” If you want to read it, and I still don’t, you can find it here. (Or you can get hold of the movie “The Long Hot Summer” with Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward; “Barn Burning” is condensed into one mercifully short scene.)

Literary Tour: Faulkner House Books, New Orleans

In 1925 New Orleans, it was called Orleans Alley, more a broad walkway from Chartres Street and Jackson Square to Royal Street. On the east side of the alley was St. Louis Cathderal. On the west side was the Cabildo and then a group of three-story townhouses built on what had been part of the Cabildo’s jail yard. The Cabildo was the government building from which the Spanish (1767-1803) administered the territory of Louisiana (what would later be known as the Louisiana Purchase).

Today, it walkway is known as Pirate’s Alley, renamed not because pirates haunted the area but more because this was the place where pirates, including Jean Lafitte, were often jailed (Cabildo tours include the jail area, but it’s much changed from the original).

It was in one of those townhouses, 624 Pirates Alley, that a young writer from Mississippi lived for six months in 1925. He lived in the first-floor apartment; upstairs was an artist named William Spratling who did work for the New Orleans Times-Picayune. The writer lived there only six months, but it was sufficient to launch his literary career.

The writer was William Faulkner; during those six months of 1925, he wrote character sketches for the Times-Picayune; likely some poetry; and the draft of his first novel, Soldier’s Pay.

To Continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Photograph: Interior of Faulkner House Books, New Orleans.

Sunday in the Quarter

The bacchanals of the night before

consigned to memory, someone else’s,

and it is sufficient to walk the streets

from Canal to Esplanade,

from Rampart to Decatur,

imagining, as I do, if I might meet

Faulkner as he leaves his apartment

on Pirate’s Alley, or Dreiser emerging

from a nearby alleyway, or Tennessee

with eyes older than his years walking

to his place on Dumaine. Perhaps

I should let some grizzled artist pay me

ten dollars to draw my picture, or sit

with the lady at the card table

with her Tarot cards as people stream

from the 11 a.m. mass at the cathedral.

Instead, it is sufficient to walk the streets

from Decatur to Rampart,

from Esplanade to Canal,

and catch the streetcar for home.

Photograph taken by Janet Young, October 2010.

Flannery O'Connor and the Avoidance of Celebrity

I can pinpoint the year I first read Flannery O’Connor. It was 1976, I was 24 going on 25, and a new person had joined the Public Affairs Department at Shell Oil where I worked. She came from a well known Houston family, had lots of eccentric relatives and was an extraordinarily fine writer. She and I talked about Shell, the oil industry, relatives, literature and writing; most of all, writing.

She was shocked that I hadn’t read Flannery O’Conner.

I started with Three by Flannery O’Connor, which included The Violent Bear It Away, Wise Blood and A Good Man is Hard to Find. From there I went to The Complete Stories, and then to Mystery and Manners, which included her essays and speeches. Finally, I read The Habit of Being, her letters collected and published in 1979, 15 years after her death from lupus.

There are all kinds of stories about Miss O’Connor, some true and many apocryphal. One that could be true or untrue is that John Kennedy O’Toole left New Orleans to drive to Georgia to see her, learned she had died some years before, and killed himself, leaving his manuscript for his mother to worry over. His mother did, made a huge pest of herself, and finally convinced Walker Percy to read it. The manuscript became A Confederacy of Dunces and won the Pulitzer Prize.

O’Connor’s works were – are – extraordinary. She is often considered a Southern writer, and she is that in the sense she was born and lived in the South. But she is more than that, too.

Her writing bears the likeness of William Faulkner but in a wholly original way. She is a kind of heir to Faulkner, particularly in the sense of having challenged the norms of literature and writing.

But, as if not more importantly, she is also the heir to G.K. Chesterton. Like him, she was Catholic. As author Bret Lott points out in an essay on O’Connor in the most recent issue of The Writer’s Chronicle, she is a Catholic writer even more than she is a Southern writer, and that’s something not normally taught in the English classes where her stories are studied.

Lott says something else in his essay (not available online, unfortunately) that strikes me as profoundly true: you will not find her in her stories. When you read one of her stories, you forget who’s written it; the point is the story, not the author. In an age of instant and often fleeting celebrity, her stories still resonate – and one of the reasons may very well be that she refused to be one. For her, the story, not the author, was the story, and she was not very patient with questions about what stories meant or what different aspects or elements or plot devices or characters were really about. She would tell such questioners to “read the story.”

She had a model for this, of course, and that was Jesus. He spent 33 years on this planet, and then physically removed himself from the Christian narrative – the narrative that he is still the point of. In many ways, the fact that he’s physically removed makes the mystery all the greater and all the more important, and he’s left us his story to study, to tell and to live. And one day he’ll return to complete it.

It was that mystery that defined O’Connor’s writing. She’s been dead for 48 years, but her influence has, if anything, grown in the intervening years. She left us with a number of remarkable stories, stories that “tell” just as well now as they did when she first published them.

This post was originally published by The Christian Manifesto, but they revamped the site and the archive disappeared. So I’m occasionally reposting a few of the articles.