The Wild Palms: [If I Forget Thee Jerusalem] Read online

  William Faulkner

  THE WILD PALMS

  [If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem]

  William Faulkner, one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century, was born in New Albany, Mississippi, on September 25, 1897. He published his first book, The Marble Faun, a collection of poems, in 1924, but it is as a literary chronicler of life in the Deep South—particularly in the fictional Yoknapatawpha County, the setting for several of his novels—that he is most highly regarded. In such novels as Sanctuary (1931), The Hamlet (1940), The Town (1957), and The Mansion (1959), he explored the full range of post–Civil War Southern life, focusing both on the personal histories of his characters (especially members of the Snopes family) and on the moral uncertainties of an increasingly dissolute society. His other novels include The Sound and the Fury (1929), As I Lay Dying (1930), Light in August (1932), Absalom, Absalom! (1936), The Unvanquished (1938), Intruder in the Dust (1948), Requiem for a Nun (1951), A Fable (1954), and The Reivers (1962). For the latter two books, he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize. He also wrote several volumes of short stories, as well as collections of poems and essays.

  In combining the use of symbolism with a stream-of-consciousness technique, he created a new approach to the writing of fiction. In 1949, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.

  William Faulkner died in Byhalia, Mississippi, on July 6, 1962.

  WILLIAM FAULKNER’S WORKS

  THE MARBLE FAUN (1924)

  SOLDIER’S PAY (1926)

  MOSQUITOES (1927)

  SARTORIS (1929) [FLAGS IN THE DUST (1973)]

  THE SOUND AND THE FURY (1929)

  As I LAY DYING (1930)

  SANCTUARY (1931)

  THESE 13 (1931)

  LIGHT IN AUGUST (1932)

  A GREEN BOUGH (1933)

  DOCTOR MARTINO AND OTHER STORIES (1934)

  PYLON (1935)

  ABSALOM, ABSALOM! (1936)

  THE UNVANQUISHED (1938)

  THE WILD PALMS [IF I FORGET THEE JERUSALEM] (1939)

  THE HAMLET (1940)

  GO DOWN, MOSES AND OTHER STORIES (1942)

  INTRUDER IN THE DUST (1948)

  KNIGHT’S GAMBIT (1949)

  COLLECTED STORIES OF WILLIAM FAULKNER (1950)

  NOTES ON A HORSETHIEF (1951)

  REQUIEM FOR A NUN (1954)

  A FABLE (1954)

  BIG WOODS (1955)

  THE TOWN (1957)

  THE MANSION (1959)

  THE REIVERS (1962)

  UNCOLLECTED STORIES OF WILLIAM FAULKNER (1979, POSTHUMOUS)

  FIRST VINTAGE INTERNATIONAL EDITION, NOVEMBER, 1995

  Copyright © 1939 by William Faulkner

  Copyright renewed 1966 by Estelle Faulkner and Jill Faulkner Summers

  Notes copyright © 1990 by Literary Classics of America

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published by Random House, Inc., in 1939.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Faulkner, William, 1897–1962.

  If I forget thee, Jerusalem [The wild palms] / William Faulkner.—

  1st Vintage International ed.

  p. cm.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-79242-6

  I. Title.

  813′.52—dc20 95-17173

  The text used in this edition is from the volume Novels 1936–1940 by William Faulkner, published by the Library of America.

  v3.1

  PUBLISHER’S NOTE

  When Faulkner sent this novel to his publishers, they objected to his title, If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem, and the novel was first published in 1939 as The Wild Palms, the title it has become most widely known by. The text printed in this edition was first published in 1990 by the Library of America as If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem [The Wild Palms]. It was established by Noel Polk from Faulkner’s own ribbon typescript setting copy, now in the Alderman Library at the University of Virginia, which Faulkner typed and proofread himself. It bears his own holographic corrections and revisions, as well as alterations by the original editors. An editor’s note on the corrections by Noel Polk follows the text; the line and page notes were prepared by Joseph Blotner.

  Contents

  Cover

  William Faulkner’s Works

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Publisher’s Note

  Chapter 1 - The Wild Palms

  Chapter 2 - Old Man

  Chapter 3 - The Wild Palms

  Chapter 4 - Old Man

  Chapter 5 - The Wild Palms

  Chapter 6 - Old Man

  Chapter 7 - The Wild Palms

  Chapter 8 - Old Man

  Chapter 9 - The Wild Palms

  Chapter 10 - Old Man

  Editor’s Note

  William Faulkner (1897–1962)

  Also by William Faulkner

  Academic Resources for Educators

  Vintage International

  The Wild Palms

  The knocking sounded again, at once discreet and peremptory, while the doctor was descending the stairs, the flashlight’s beam lancing on before him down the brown-stained stairwell and into the brown-stained tongue-and-groove box of the lower hall. It was a beach cottage, even though of two stories, and lighted by oil lamps—or an oil lamp, which his wife had carried up stairs with them after supper. And the doctor wore a night shirt too, not pajamas, for the same reason that he smoked the pipe which he had never learned and knew that he would never learn to like, between the occasional cigar which clients gave him in the intervals of Sundays on which he smoked the three cigars which he felt he could buy for himself even though he owned the beach cottage as well as the one next door to it and the one, the residence with electricity and plastered walls, in the village four miles away. Because he was now forty-eight years old and he had been sixteen and eighteen and twenty at the time when his father could tell him (and he believe it) that cigarettes and pajamas were for dudes and women.

  It was after midnight, though not much. He could tell that, even apart from the wind, the taste and smell and feel of wind even here behind the closed and locked doors and shutters. Because he had been born here, on this coast though not in this house but in the other, the residence in town, and had lived here all his life, including the four years at the State University’s medical school and the two years as an intern in New Orleans where (a thick man even when young, with thick soft woman’s hands, who should never have been a doctor at all, who even after the six more or less metropolitan years looked out from a provincial and insulated amazement at his classmates and fellows: the lean young men swaggering their drill jackets on which—to him—they wore the myriad anonymous faces of the probationer nurses with a ruthless and assured braggadocio like decorations, like flower trophies) he had sickened for it. So he graduated, nearer the foot of the class than the head though not at either, and came home and within the year married the wife his father had picked out for him and within four years owned the house which his father had built and assumed the practice which his father had created, losing nothing from it and adding nothing to it, and within ten years owned not only the beach house where he and his wife spent their childless summers but the adjoining property as well, which he rented to summer visitors or even parties—picnickers or fishermen. On the evening of the wedding he and his wife went to New Orleans and spent two days in a hotel room, though they never had a honeymoon. And though they had slept in the same bed for twenty-three years now they still had no children.
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  But even apart from the wind he could still tell the approximate time by the staling smell of gumbo now cold in the big earthen pot on the cold stove beyond the flimsy kitchen wall—the big pot of it which his wife had made that morning in order to send some over to their neighbors and renters in the next house: the man and the woman who four days ago had rented the cottage and who probably did not even know that the donors of the gumbo were not only neighbors but landlords too—the dark-haired woman with queer hard yellow eyes in a face whose skin was drawn thin over prominent cheekbones and a heavy jaw (the doctor called it sullen at first, then he called it afraid), young, who sat all day long in a new cheap beach chair facing the water, in a worn sweater and a pair of faded jeans pants and canvas shoes, not reading, not doing anything, just sitting there in that complete immobility which the doctor (or the doctor in the Doctor) did not need the corroboration of the drawn quality of the skin and the blank inverted fixity of the apparently unseeing eyes to recognise at once—that complete immobile abstraction from which even pain and terror are absent, in which a living creature seems to listen to and even watch some one of its own flagging organs, the heart say, the secret irreparable seeping of blood; and the man young too, in a pair of disreputable khaki slacks and a sleeveless jersey undershirt and no hat in a region where even young people believed the summer sun to be fatal, seen usually walking barefoot along the beach at tide-edge, returning with a faggot of driftwood strapped into a belt, passing the immobile woman in the beach chair with no sign from her, no movement of the head or perhaps even of the eyes.

  But it was not the heart, the doctor told himself. He decided that on the first day from where, without intending to eavesdrop, he watched the woman through the screen of oleander bushes which separated the two lots. Yet this very postulation of what it was not seemed to him to contain the secret, the answer. It seemed to him that he saw the truth already, the shadowy indefinite shape of truth, as though he were separated from the truth only by a veil just as he was separated from the living woman by the screen of oleander leaves. He was not eavesdropping, not spying; perhaps he thought, I will have plenty of time in which to learn just which organ it is she is listening to; they have paid their rent for two weeks (perhaps at that time also the doctor in the Doctor knowing that it would not require weeks but just days), thinking how if she should need assistance it would be fortunate that he, the landlord, was also a doctor until it occurred to him that since they probably did not even know he was the landlord, they would probably not know either that he was a doctor.

  The real estate agent told him over the telephone of the renting of the house. “She’s got on pants,” the agent said. “I mean, not these ladies’ slacks but pants, man’s pants. I mean, they are too little for her in just exactly the right places any man would want to see them too little but no woman would unless she had them on herself. I reckon Miss Martha aint going to like that much.”

  “That will be all right with her if they pay their rent on time,” the doctor said.

  “No damn fear,” the agent said. “I saw to that. I aint been in this business this long for nothing. I said, ‘It will have to be in advance’ and he said ‘All right. All right. How much?’ like he was Vanderbilt or somebody, in them dirty fishing pants and nothing but an undershirt under his coat, hauling the wad of money out and one of the bills wasn’t but a ten and I just gave him ten change back out of the other one and there wasn’t but two of them to begin with and I says ‘Of course if you want to take the house like it is, with just what furniture is in it now, you can get out pretty cheap’ and he says ‘All right. All right. How much?’ I believe I could have got more than I did because if you ask me he dont want any furniture, all he wants is four walls to get inside of and a door to close afterward. She never even got out of the taxi. She just sat there, waiting, in them pants that was just exactly too little for her in just exactly the right places.” The voice ceased; the doctor’s head filled now with suspended wirehum, the rising inflection of a risible silence, so that he said almost sharply:

  “Well? Do they want more furniture or not? There’s nothing in the house but one bed, and the mattress on it aint—”

  “No, no, they dont want anymore. I told him the house had a bed and a stove in it, and they had a chair with them—one of these canvas ones that fold up in the taxi along with the grip. So they are all fixed.” Now that suspension of silent laughing filled the doctor’s head again.

  “Well?” the doctor said. “What is it? What’s the matter with you?” though he seemed to know already, before the other spoke, what the voice would say:

  “I reckon Miss Martha is going to have something that will set heavier on her stomach than them pants even. I dont think they are married. Oh, he says they are and I dont think he is lying about her and maybe he aint even lying about himself. The trouble is, they aint married to each other, she aint married to him. Because I can smell a husband. Show me a woman I never saw before on the streets of Mobile or New Orleans either and I can smell whether——”

  They took possession that afternoon of the cottage, the shack, which contained the one bed whose springs and mattress were not very good, and the stove with its one frying pan incrusted by generations of cooking fish, and the coffee pot and the meagre collection of mismatched iron spoons and forks and knives and cracked cups and saucers and drinking vessels which had once been containers of bought jams and jellies, and the new beach chair in which the woman lay all day long apparently watching the palm fronds clashing with their wild dry bitter sound against the bright glitter of the water while the man carried driftwood into the kitchen. Two mornings ago the milk wagon which made the beach route stopped there and the doctor’s wife saw the man once returning up the beach from a small grocery store owned by a Portuguese ex-fisherman, carrying a loaf of bread and a bulky paper sack. And she told the doctor about watching him cleaning (or trying to clean) a mess of fish at the kitchen steps, told the doctor about it with bitter and outraged conviction—a shapeless woman yet not fat, not anywhere near as plump as the doctor himself, who had begun to turn gray all over about ten years ago, as if hair and complection both were being subtly altered, along with the shade of her eyes, by the color of the house dresses which she apparently chose to match them. “And a mess of it he was making!” she cried. “A mess outside the kitchen and a mess on the stove too probably!”

  “Maybe she can cook,” the doctor said mildly.

  “Where? how? sitting out there in the yard? When he carries stove and all out to her?” But even that was not the real outrage, though she did not say so. She did not say ‘They are not married’ though it was in both their minds. They both knew that, once it was said aloud between them, he would turn the renters out. Yet they both refused to say it and for more reason than because when he turned them out he would feel conscience-bound to return the rent money; more than this on his part anyway, who was thinking They had only twenty dollars. And that was three days ago. And there is something wrong with her, the doctor now speaking louder than the provincial protestant, the Baptist born. And something (perhaps the doctor here too) talking louder than the provincial Baptist in her too because this morning she waked the doctor, calling him from the window where she stood shapeless in the cotton nightgown shaped like a shroud and with her gray hair screwed into papers, to show him the man coming up the beach at sunrise with his belted faggot of driftwood. And when he (the doctor) came home at noon she had the gumbo made, an enormous quantity of it, enough for a dozen people, made with that grim Samaritan husbandry of good women, as if she took a grim and vindictive and masochistic pleasure in the fact that the Samaritan deed would be performed at the price of its remainder which would sit invincible and inexhaustible on the stove while days accumulated and passed, to be warmed and rewarmed and then rewarmed until consumed by two people who did not even like it, who born and bred in sight of the sea had for taste in fish a predilection for the tuna, the salmon, the sardines bought in cans,
immolated and embalmed three thousand miles away in the oil of machinery and commerce.

  He delivered the bowl himself—a shortish fattish untidy man with linen not quite fresh, sidling a little clumsily through the oleander hedge with the bowl covered by a yet-creased (and not yet even laundered, it was that new) linen napkin, lending an air of awkward kindliness even to the symbol which he carried of the uncompromising Christian deed performed not with sincerity or pity but through duty—and lowered it (she had not risen from the chair nor moved save the hard cat’s eyes) as if the bowl contained nitro glycerin, the fattish unshaven mask beaming foolishly but behind the mask the eyes of the doctor within the Doctor shrewd, missing nothing, examining without smiling and without diffidence the face of the woman who was not thin but actually gaunt, thinking Yes. A degree or two. Perhaps three. But not the heart then waking, rousing, to find the blank feral eyes staring at him, whom to his certain knowledge they could scarcely have seen before, with profound and illimitable hatred. It was quite impersonal, as when the person in whom joy already exists looks out at any post or tree with pleasure and happiness. He (the doctor) was without vanity; it was not at him the hatred was directed. It’s at the whole human race he thought. Or no, no. Wait. Wait—the veil about to break, the cogs of deduction about to mesh—Not at the race of mankind but at the race of man, the masculine. But why? Why? His wife would have noticed the faint mark of the absent wedding ring, but he, the doctor, saw more than that: She has borne children he thought. One, anyway; I would stake my degree on that. And if Cofer (he was the agent) is right about his not being her husband—and he should be, should be able to tell, smell, as he says, since he is apparently in the business of renting beach cottages for the same reason or under the same compulsion, vicarious need, which drives certain people in the cities to equip and supply rooms to clandestine and fictitious names.… Say she had come to hate the race of men enough to desert husband and children; good. Yet, to have gone not only to another man, but to live apparently in penury, and herself sick, really sick. Or to have deserted husband and children for another man and poverty, and then to have—to have—to.…… He could feel, hear them: the cogs, clicking, going fast; he felt a need for terrific haste in order to keep up, a premonition that the final cog would click and the bell of comprehension ring and he would not be quite near enough to see and hear: Yes. Yes. What is it that man as a race can have done to her that she would look upon such a manifestation of it as I, whom she has never seen before and would not look at twice if she had, with that same hatred through which he must walk each time he comes up from the beach with an armful of firewood to cook the very food which she eats.