Flags in the Dust Read online

  William Faulkner

  FLAGS IN THE DUST

  1929 (Edited as Sartoris)

  1973 (Restored, Uncut)

  Introduction

  In the autumn or winter of 1926, William Faulkner, twenty-nine, began work on the first of his novels about Yoknapatawpha County. Sherwood Anderson had told him some time before that he should write about his native Mississippi, and now Faulkner took that advice: he used his own land, and peopled it with men and women who were partly drawn from real life, and partly depicted as they should have been in some ideal mythopoeic structure. A year later, on September 29, 1927, the new novel was completed. It was 596 pages long in transcript, and he called it Flags in the Dust. Full of enthusiasm, Faulkner sent Flags in the Dust up to Horace Liveright (who had published his first two novels) in New York. Liveright read it, disliked it, and sent it back with his firm recommendation that Faulkner not try to offer it for publication anywhere else: it was too diffuse, too lacking in plot and structure; and, Liveright felt, no amount of revision would be able to salvage it. Faulkner, crushed, showed Flags in the Dust to several of his friends, who shared Liveright’s opinion.

  But he still believed that this would be the book that would make his name as a writer, and for several months he tried to edit it himself, sitting at his work-table in Oxford. Finally, discouraged, he sent a new typescript off to Ben Wasson, his agent in New York.

  “Will you please try to sell this for me?” he asked Wasson. “I can’t afford all the postage it’s costing me.” In the meantime, convinced that he would never become a successful novelist, Faulkner began work on a book that he was sure would never mean anything to anyone but himself: The Sound and the Fury.

  Wasson tried eleven publishers, all of whom rejected Flags in the Dust. Finally he gave the typescript to Harrison Smith, then an editor of Harcourt, Brace & Company. Smith liked it, and showed it to Alfred Harcourt, who agreed to publish it, provided that someone other than Faulkner perform the extensive cutting job that Harcourt felt was necessary. For fifty dollars, Wasson agreed to pare down his client’s novel. On September 20,1928, Faulkner received a contract for the book, now to be called Sartoris (no one knows who changed its name), which was to be about 100,000 words long, and which was to be delivered to Harcourt; Brace sixteen days later. Faulkner left immediately for New York, presumably to help Wasson with his revision.

  But when he sat down in Wasson’s apartment to observe the operation on his novel, Faulkner found himself unable to participate. If it were cut, he felt, it would die. Wasson persisted, however, pointing out that the trouble with Flags in the Dust was that it was not one novel, but six, all struggling along simultaneously. This, to Faulkner, was praise: evidence of fecundity and fullness of vision, evidence that the world of Yoknapatawpha was rich enough to last. As he later wrote of his third novel, “I discovered that my own little postage stamp of native soil was worth writing about and that I would never live long enough to exhaust it” Nevertheless, Wasson kept Ms bargain with Alfred Harcourt. For the next two weeks, while Faulkner sat nearby writing The Sound and the Fury, Wasson went through the typescript of Flags in the Dust, making cuts of every sort until almost a fourth of the book had been excised. Harcourt, Brace published this truncated version on January 31, 1929, as Sartoris (with a dedication: “To Sherwood Anderson through whose kindness I was first published, with the belief that this book will give him no reason to regret that fact”), and the old Flags in the Dust was soon forgotten—by everyone but Faulkner.

  He had preserved the original holograph manuscript of Flags in the Dust, 237 pages in his neat but minuscule and almost illegible hand; and he had bound together with thin wire the 596 pages of a sort of composite typescript of the novel, produced by the combination of three separate but overlapping typescript drafts. The first of these, 447 pages long, seems to have been begun before he completed his manuscript version. The second, ‘’ pages of which are in the composite typescript, was probably written after he had completed the manuscript and the first typescript. In the third, 146 pages appear to have been a revision of the second typescript. Why Faulkner should have labored over the reconstruction of this text is not clear: perhaps he thought of his composite typescript as a working draft which would allow him ultimately to restore to his novel that which Wasson had carved from it—or perhaps, fastidious man that he was, he simply could not bring himself to throw away all of those typed pages. In any case, the manuscript and typescript both were eventually deposited at the Alderman Library of the University of Virginia, where they lay more or less undisturbed until Mrs. Jill Summers, Faulkner’s daughter, remembered that her late father had spoken often of a restoration of Flags in the Dust. Mrs. Summers asked this writer and Albert Erskine, editor at Random House, to undertake the task.

  The result is, now, Flags in the Dust, which aims at being a faithful reproduction of that composite typescript. Certain nonsubstantive alterations in spelling and punctuation have been made, in order to bring this novel into conformity with Faulkner’s other books; but wherever possible his many idiosyncrasies, especially those on which he himself insisted during his years of working with editors at Random House, were allowed to stand. The final complete typescript, which must have served as setting copy for the Harcourt, Brace edition of Sartoris (and which must have been the draft in which Wasson made his cuts), has not survived, nor have any galley proofs. All we had to work from, then, was the composite typescript, by any scholar’s standards a suspect source. There was no way, finally, to tell which of the many differences between Flags in the Dust and Sartoris were the result of Faulkner’s emendations in the hypothetical setting copy and the galley proofs, and which belonged to Wasson. If there were to be any publication of Flags in the Dust at all, then, it had to be what we have here provided.

  Whether it is better than Sartoris, as Faulkner so firmly believed it to be, is of course a matter of taste. It is tempting to launch into a study of the genesis and development of the novel, from the manuscript version through the typescript of Flags in the Dust to the publication of Sartoris; but this is not the place to do so. Suffice it here to suggestt that whereas Sartoris is chiefly about the Sartoris clan, their surly gallantry, and their utter and uncaring inability to adjust to the demands of whatever age they find themselves in, Flags in the Dust is far more complicated: primary focus is still on the Sartorises, but Faulkner clearly wished to make of his novel an anatomy of the entire Yoknapatawpha social structure, excluding only the Indians. As foils to the doomed and hawklike Bayard Sartoris, we have not only his dead twin, John, but Horace Benbow, too, as a sort of Delta dilettante; and Buddy MacCallum, the young hillman who possesses all the steady virtues Bayard lacks; Harry Mitchell, as the type of the new southern middle class—and even Byron Snopes, the desperate and reptilian representative of a new class threatening to overthrow the old aristocratic order of the area. All of these are present in Sartoris, to be sure; but in Flags in the Dust their roles are lengthened and heightened, until we realize that each of them is in his way a commentary not only upon Bayard Sartoris, but also upon the Deep South in the years after the First World War.

  Flags in the Dust, then, may or may not be a better work of art than Sartoris; but few will dispute that it is a more complete fictional document of a time and place in history—or that it is a better introduction to the grand and complex southern world that William Faulkner was to write about until he died.

  DOUGLAS DAY

  University of Virginia

  February, 1973

  ONE

  1

  Old man Falls roared: “Cunnel was settin’ thar in a cheer, his sock feet propped on the po’ch railin’, smokin’ this hyer very pipe. Old Louvinia was settin’ on the steps
, shellin’ a bowl of peas fer supper. And a feller was glad to git even peas sometimes, in them days. And you was settin’ back agin’ the post. They wa’nt nobody else thar ‘cep’ yo’ aunt, the one ‘fo’ Miss Jenny come. Cunnel had sont them two gals to Memphis to yo’ gran’pappy when he fust went away. You was ‘bout half-grown, I reckon. How old was you then, Bayard?”

  “Fourteen,” old Bayard answered.

  “Hey?”

  “Fourteen,” Bayard shouted. “Do I have to tell you that every time you tell me this damn story?”

  “And thar you all was a-settin’,” old man Falls continued, unruffled, “when they turned in at the gate and come trottin’ up the carriage drive.

  “Old Louvinia drapped the bowl of peas and let out one squawk, but Cunnel shet her up and tole her to run and git his boots and pistols and have ‘em ready at the back do’, and you lit out fer the barn to saddle that stallion. And when them Yankees rid up and stopped—they stopped right whar that flower bed is now—they wa’nt nobody on the po’ch but Cunnel, a-settin’ thar like he never even heard tell of no Yankees.

  “The Yankees they set thar on the hosses, talkin’ ‘mongst theyselves if this was the right house or not, and Cunnel settin’ thar with his sock feet on the railin’, gawkin’ at ‘em like a hillbilly. The Yankee officer he tole one man to ride back to the barn and look for that ‘ere stallion, then he says to Cunnel:

  “ ‘Say, Johnny, whar do the rebel, John Sartoris, live?’

  “ ‘Lives down the road a piece,’ Cunnel says, not battin’ a eye even’. ‘Bout two mile,’ he says. ‘But you won’t find ‘im now. He’s away fightin’ the Yanks agin.’

  “ ‘Well, I reckon you better come and show us the way, anyhow,’ the Yankee officer says.

  “So Cunnel he got up slow and tole ‘em to let ‘im git his shoes and walkin’ stick, and limped into the house, leavin’ ‘em a-settin’ thar waitin’.

  “Soon’s he was out of sight he run. Old Louvinia was waitin’ at the back do’ with his coat and boots and pistols and a snack of cawn bread. That ‘ere other Yankee had rid into the barn, and Cunnel taken the things from Louvinia and wropped ‘em up in the coat and started acrost the back yard like he was jest takin’ a walk. ‘Bout that time the Yankee come to the barn door.

  “ They ain’t no stock hyer a-tall,’ the Yank says.

  “ ‘I reckon not,’ Cunnel says. ‘Cap’m says fer you to come on back,’ he says, goin’ on. He could feel that ‘ere Yank a-watchin’ ‘im, lookin’ right ‘twixt his shoulder blades, whar the bullet would hit. Cunnel says that was the hardest thing he ever done in his life, walkin’ on thar acrost that lot with his back to’ads that Yankee without breakin’ into a run. He was aimin’ to’ads the corner of the barn, whar he could git the house between ‘em, and Cunnel says hit seemed like he’d been a-walkin’ a year without gettin’ no closer and not darin’ to look back. Cunnel says he wasn’t even thinkin’ of nothin’ ‘cep’ he was glad the gals wa’nt at home. He says he never give a thought to yo’ aunt back thar in the house, because he says she was a full-blood Sartoris and she was a match fer any dozen Yankees.

  “Then the Yank hollered at him, but Cunnel kep’ right on, not lookin’ back nor nothin’. Then the Yank hollered agin and Cunnel says he could hyear the hoss movin’ and he decided hit was time to stir his shanks. He made the corner of the barn jest as the Yank shot the fust time, and by the time the Yank got to the corner, he was in the hawg-lot, a-tearin’ through the jimson weeds to’ads the creek whar you was waitin’ with the stallion, hid in the willers.

  “And thar you was a-standin’, holdin’ the hoss and that ‘ere Yankee patrol yellin’ up behind, until Cunnel got his boots on. And then he tole you to tell yo’ aunt he wouldn’t be home fer supper.”

  As usual old man Falls had brought John Sartoris into the room with him. Freed as he was of time, he was a far more definite presence in the room than the two of them cemented by deafness to a dead time and drawn thin by the slow attenuation of days. He seemed to stand above them, all around them, with his bearded, hawklike face and the bold glamor of his dream.

  Old Bayard sat with his feet braced against the side of the fireplace, holding the pipe in his hand. The bowl was ornately carved and it was charred with much usage, and on the bit were the prints of his father’s teeth.

  “What’re you giving it to me for, after all this time?” he said.

  “Well, I reckon I’ve kep’ it long as Cunnel aimed fer me to,” old man Falls answered. “A po’ house ain’t no place fer anything of his’n, Bayard,” he added. He sat bent forward, elbows on knees, chewing his tobacco for a while.

  “Not fer a pipe of his’n,” he said. “Hit ‘ud be different ef ‘twas him, hisself now. Wouldn’t no place be a po’ house whar he was at; But that ‘ere thing that belonged to him, hit ‘ud be takin’ a advantage of him after he’s gone.” Old man Falls chewed his tobacco for a while. “I’m goin’ on ninety-fo’ year old, Bayard,” he said.

  He spat neatly into the fireplace and drew the back of his hand across his month.

  “A thing he toted in his pocket and got enjoyment outen, in them days. Hit’d be different, I reckon, while we was a-buildin’ the railroad. He said often enough in them days we was all goin’ to be in the po’ house by Saturday night. Or cemetery, mo’ likely, him ridin’ up and down the track with a saddle-bag full of money night and day, keepin’ jest one cross-tie ahead of the po’ house, like he said. That ‘us when hit changed. When he had to start killin’ folks. Them two carpet-baggers stirrin’ up niggers to vote, that he walked right into the room whar they was a-settin’ behind a table, with they pistols layin’ on the table, and that robber and that other feller he kilt, all with that same dang der’nger. When a feller has to start killin’ folks, he ‘most always has to keep on killin’ ‘em. And when he does, he’s already dead hisself.”

  It showed on his brow, the dark shadow of fatality and doom, that night when he sat beneath the candles in his dining room and turned a wine glass in his fingers while he talked to his son. The railroad was finished, and today he had been elected to the legislature after a hard and bitter fight, and on his brow lay the shadow of his doom and a little weariness.

  “And so,” he said, “Redlaw’ll kill me tomorrow, for I shall be unarmed. I’m tired of killing men...Pass the wine. Bayard.”

  After old man Falls had gathered up his small parcels and gone old Bayard sat for some time, the pipe in his hand, rubbing the bowl slowly with his thumb. But presently John Sartoris too had departed; withdrawn rather, to that place where the peaceful dead contemplate their frustrated days, and old Bayard dropped his feet to the floor and rose and thrust the pipe into his pocket and took a cigar from the humidor on the mantel. As he struck the match the door behind him opened and a man wearing a green eye-shade entered and approached.

  “Simon’s here, Colonel,” he said in an inflectionless voice.

  “What?” Old Bayard turned his head, the cigar between his teeth and the match in his cupped hands.

  “Simon’s come,” the other shouted flatly.

  “Oh. All right” Old Bayard flung the match into the grate and thrust the cigar into his breast pocket. He took his black felt hat from the desk and followed the other and stalked through the lobby of the bank and emerged onto the street, where Simon in a linen duster and an ancient tophat held the matched geldings at the curb.

  There was a hitching-post there, which old Bayard retained with a testy disregard of industrial progress, but Simon never used it. Until the door opened and Bayard emerged from behind the drawn green shades, Simon sat on the seat with the reins in his left hand and the thong of the whip caught smartly back in his right and usually the unvarying and seemingly incombustible fragment of a cigar in his mouth, talking to the horses in a steady, lover-like flow. Simon spoiled horses. He admired Sartorises and he had for them a warmly protective tenderness, but he loved horses, and beneath his hands the sorriest beast bloomed and
acquired comeliness like a .caressed woman, temperament like an opera star.

  Bayard crossed to the carriage with that stiff erectness of his which, as a countryman once remarked, was so straight as to almost meet itself walking along the street. One or two passers and a merchant or so in his shop door saluted him with a sort of florid servility; and behind him the shade on one window drew aside upon the. disembodied face of the man in the green eyeshade. The book-keeper was a hillman of indeterminate age, a silent man who performed his duties with tedious slow care and who watched Bayard constantly and covertly all the while he was in view.

  Nor did Simon dismount even then. With his race’s fine feeling for potential theatrics he drew himself up and arranged the limp folds of the duster, communicating by some means the histrionic moment to the horses so that they too flicked their glittering coats and tossed their leashed heads, and into Simon’s wizened black face there came an expression indescribably majestical as he touched his hat brim with his whiphand. Bayard got in the carriage and Simon clucked to the horses, and the shade fell before the book-keeper’s face, and the bystanders, halted to admire the momentary drama of the departure, fell behind.

  There was something different in Simon’s air today, however; in the very shape of his back and the angle of his hat: he appeared to be bursting with something momentous and ill-contained. But he withheld it for the time being, and at a dashing, restrained pace he drove among the tethered wagons about the square and swung into a broad street where what Bayard called paupers sped back and forth in automobiles, and withheld it until the town was behind them and they trotted on across burgeoning countryside cluttered still with gasoline-propelled paupers but at greater intervals, and his employer had settled back into that drowsing peace which the rhythmic clopping of the horses and the familiar changeful monotony of the land always gave him. Then Simon slowed to a more sedate pace and turned his head.