May 11, 1942—At a low point in his life, William Faulkner produced one of the
central achievements of his long career, as Random House published his Go Down, Moses. In typical fashion, what the master chronicler of the dark
Deep South intended and what readers perceived diverged.
Only a few weeks away from returning to Hollywood
for a much-needed stint as a screenwriter to stabilize his finances, the Mississippi-born
writer was still three years away from the event that would secure him
mainstream acceptance for keeps: Malcolm Cowley’s edition of the anthology The Portable Faulkner. The Nobel Prize for Literature lay four years beyond
that. In the meantime, he was obliged to deal with indignities. On the scale of
things, what his publisher did, on a book he had labored over assiduously these
last couple of years, was relatively small.
Faulkner had noticed several common themes and
characters in his recent short fiction. He had added a couple more to produce
seven stories that were, in fact, heavily interrelated—so much so that they
really constituted a whole. He did not
like it, then, when he turned to the title page of his latest book and saw that
Random House had appended the words “And Other Stories” to “Go Down, Moses.” The New York publisher had been in such a hurry to put the book into production that it had made minimal changes in Faulkner's retyped manuscript, not noticing, for instance, that he'd left out a crucial sentence that would have made the work more understandable--yet it wanted this large marketing change.
It
would not be until 1949, when his editors proposed to reprint the title
following his more successful Intruder in
the Dust, that they accepted his argument that Go Down, Moses was actually a novel and that “And Other Stories”
should be dropped from the title. Ever since then, a critical consensus has
accepted Faulkner’s assessment of the work as one—particularly because all
seven stories feature one character, Isaac “Ike” McCaslin, and his family over
the course of a century in the fictional Yoknapatawpha County.
I had read some Faulkner—e.g., “A Rose for Emily”—before
my major immersion in his work in college. Go
Down, Moses, along with the earlier The
Hamlet, served as my introduction at that point. In many ways, Moses is an
ideal way to introduce neophytes to this demanding writer. It doesn’t contain
the full-scale modernist experimentation of The
Sound and the Fury, but it also includes enough idiosyncrasies (for
instance, a parenthesis that goes on for two whole pages) to let you know that
you are, indeed, not in Kansas anymore.
More important, many of the major obsessions of his work
and life show up here: the hopelessly entangled destinies of the white, black
and red races; incest; the inability of white masters to escape history,
especially the legacy of slavery; the nearly primeval beauty of the land, the majesty
of hunting—and the destruction this sport brings to the environment; and somehow,
despite the overwhelming tragedy of history, instances when a sense of the
ridiculousness of human beings also breaks through.
Two stories seem especially central in this book.
First is “The Bear,” which is on the short list of great American novellas—at heart,
a tale about attempts at purification that, tragically, produce no salvation.
Ten-year-old Isaac McCaslin, at the start of the story, is introduced to the
rituals of nature in much the same way that Ernest Hemingway’s Nick Adams is:
carefully, through ritual, learning there is a right and wrong way to how
things are done. The titular bear is a creature beyond the norm, commanding not
merely respect but awe. Nature is restorative for those who might not always
make their way in a confusing outside world—but that world, in the end, wins
out, as the forest is destroyed following a lumber deal.
The adult Ike decides on a different kind of
purification: recognition of his African-American siblings (born as the result
of a slavemaking ancestor’s miscegenation) as he renounces his own land claims
in their favor. But the gesture, for all its good intentions, offers no hope
that Ike will effect any moral improvement in in their situation.
Violence, guilt and injustice are inescapable in
Faulkner’s universe, but so is the need of many characters—including notably, a
number of African-Americans—to maintain their dignity. Nothing escapes the
novelist’s eyes, including the absurdities that can make readers laugh out
lead. Such is the case with Isaac’s mother, Sophonsiba, who patterns servants' attire after English country estates.
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