William Faulkner the Unvanquished

William Faulkner The Unvanquished FOREWORD _The Unvanquished_ is the story of Bayard's victory. William Faulkner's most romantic novel, it is clear and fast-moving. But when it first appeared, in 1938, its critical reception demonstrated the prevailing confusion about Faulkner's fiction. The range of opinions in the book reviews of the time proved the truth of the statement Robert Penn Warren later made: "The study of Faulkner is the most challenging single task in contemporary American literature for criticism to undertake." Kay Boyle, always perceptive, was ahead of her time in her review of the novel when she credited Faulkner with "the strength and the vulnerability which belong only to the greatest artists: the incalculable emotional wealth, the racy comic sense, the fury to reproduce exactly not the recognizable picture but the unmistakable experience." She accorded _The Unvanquished_ "that fabulous, that wondrous, fluxing power which nothing Faulkner touches is ever without." She went on to express an opinion less widely held then than today: that Faulkner is "the most absorbing writer of our time." But some of the other reviewers of this novel, just over twenty years ago, demonstrated the misunderstanding and hostility which dogged Faulkner until after the Second World War and his winning of the Nobel Prize, when his reputation rose to a level with that of the foremost writers America has produced. On rereading those reviewers one puzzles why they applied to _The Unvanquished_ their standard charges against Faulkner; for the central idea of the novel is explicit, its style relatively simple, and its demonstration of Faulkner's phenomenal storytelling power quite obvious. One problem worrying some of the reviewers was whether _The Unvanquished_ is actually a novel. Because six of the seven chapters appeared originally as stories in _The Saturday Evening Post_ and _Scribner's Magazine_ between 1934 and 1936, some critics said that Faulkner had not made a novel by revising and assembling those six parts and adding the previously unpublished final chapter. A similar charge has since appeared against Faulkner's _The Hamlet_, and is equally false. Just as _The Hamlet_ is unified by the steady, monstrous rise of Ab Snopes's son to corrupt power, so _The Unvanquished_, in much happier vein, is unified by Bayard Sartoris' rise to maturity and true courage. Skillfully interwoven with Bayard's development are other themes which enrich the novel, among them the baleful influence of the "poor white" Ab Snopes, as well as slavery with its after-effects, the evil of which Faulkner clearly presents, and which he finally points up by showing Ringo's ultimate lack of opportunity. _The Unvanquished_ relates to other Faulkner works by its themes and by many of its people, chiefly the Sartoris family, Ab Snopes, and the McCaslin twins. But we need no longer follow the critical opinion that Faulkner's major contribution to our literature is the fact that most of his books form a loosely interlocked series about his imaginary Yoknapatawpha County. Readers increasingly see that Faulkner has created several works of art, each having a unity of its own and giving readers pleasure apart from its presumed position in his "saga." Though a number of Faulkner's other novels have more scope and depth, _The Unvanquished_ is attractive for its moving presentation of Bayard's growth. In Chapter I, "Ambuscade," we see him, twelve, childishly committing the violence of firing at the Union soldier and hiding from punishment behind Granny Millard's skirts. Succeeding chapters show him growing older surrounded still by the violence and chaos of war. In "Vendee," only fifteen, he follows the code in full revenge. In "Skirmish at Sartoris" he experiences one more episode in his family's record of violence. It is in the final chapter of the book that Bayard, at the age of twenty-four, comes to a greater test than his pursuit of Grumby nine years before. After Redmond shoots Colonel Sartoris, who purposely went unarmed in repudiation of violence, when Drusilla, Ringo, and the people of the town expect Bayard to perpetuate the code of revenge, he grows up completely: facing Redmond he breaks the chain of violence. This hopefulness at the conclusion of the novel increases when not only the town recognizes the maturity of Bayard's action but Drusilla, herself grown up, awards him the verbena. Bayard accomplishes his triumph of character in part because Granny Millard, even when involved in what she considered sin, set him an ethical example from his earliest days. But the triumph is not alone, Bayard's aided by Granny's teaching; Colonel John Sartoris shares it too. That this is so is well stated by James B. Meriwether in an excellent, unpublished dissertation to which I am indebted: "Father and son both faced Redmond unarmed; had it not been for the example of his father, perhaps Bayard could not have so faced Redmond; had it not been for the memory of the father, perhaps Redmond would have aimed at the son." In writing a novel about this hopeful development, Faulkner drew much from the history of his own family, chiefly of his great-grandfather, Colonel William C. Falkner, who closely resembled Bayard's father. Both the real Colonel Falkner and the fictional Colonel Sartoris formed their own troops for the Civil War and won colonelcy by election. After both later lost re-election for leadership of their regiments, they returned home and formed partisan cavalry units. Colonel Falkner was almost as dashing as his fictional counterpart, for in the words of Andrew Brown, who is a fine student of Mississippi history, Colonel Falkner, shortly after he organized his regiment, "decided on a move that illustrates his self-confidence and his rashness." At the head of his one regiment of raw recruits, who were "armed mostly with shotguns," he assaulted Rienzi "which was garrisoned by three veteran regiments under the command of hard-bitten Sheridan," and led his men "in a thundering charge down the main road into the town." Like Colonel Sartoris in the novel, Colonel Falkner went on to become locally well known in combat. Mrs. Virginia Bardsley's excellent, unpublished biography of Colonel Falkner, which she has kindly lent me, reproduces an official letter praising his courage at First Manassas. According to local legend, Colonel Falkner, wearing a large feather in his hat, so distinguished himself in the battle that General Beauregard reputedly told nearby soldiers to follow "the knight with the black plume." Later Jeb Stuart--and who could better judge?--complimented Falkner's regiment for its gallantry in that action. Early in the War, Colonel Falkner, in an episode on which his great-grandson may have drawn for Colonel Sartoris' dramatic escape in Chapter II of _The Unvanquished_, barely got away when Union troops surrounded his home town of Ripley, Mississippi. After the war, still the model for Sartoris, Colonel Falkner became a community leader and devoted himself to building a railroad. Both the fictional and real men were involved in violence more personal than war. Colonel Falkner killed two men in Ripley, for which the courts acquitted him on grounds of self-defense. Finally he modeled for the fictional Sartoris even m the manner and violence of his own death. His former partner in the railroad, a man named Thurmond, fell out with him as Redmond did with Colonel Sartoris in _The Unvanquished_. Though Colonel Falkner knew Thurmond was threatening to kill him, like Sartoris in the novel he went unarmed. According to two Ripley residents interviewed by Mrs. Bardsley some years ago, he was as conscious of what he was doing as Colonel Sartoris, for he said "that he had killed his share of men and hoped never to shed another drop of blood, so that if anyone shot, it would be Thurmond and not he." And it was Thurmond--who shot him dead in the public square. In _The Unvanquished_ William Faulkner drew on his family's history for more than events. That it gave him real understanding of how Bayard felt when he became "the" Sartoris at the death of his father is suggested by a statement Faulkner made in 1955 while visiting Japan. To a question about family responsibility in Mississippi he replied, "We have to be clannish just like the people in the Scottish highlands, each springing to defend his own blood whether it be right or wrong." He went on to say that a family usually has an hereditary head, "the oldest son of the oldest son and each looked upon as chief by his own particular clan." He concluded that this is "because only & comparatively short time ago we were invaded by our own people--speaking in our own language, which is always a pretty savage sort of warfare." Having chosen that warfare as the exciting backdrop for _The Unvanquished_, Faulkner writes of it well. By the time of the fall of Vicksburg, when the novel begins, the Confederate defeats at Shiloh and Corinth had opened northern Mississippi to the Federal armies. The confusion which permitted Granny Millard, Ringo, Bayard, and Ab Snopes to carry on their fantastic "mule business" was real enough; for the border region of north Mississippi, as Brown puts it, was "overrun by both the Union and Confederate armies but controlled by neither." For artistic purposes Faulkner somewhat alters the timing of the events of the War, and in Chapter VI he places Reconstruction much closer to the surrender at Appomattox than it was in reality. But he catches the essence of the confused conflict over north Mississippi in addition to presenting the collapse of the Confederate hope for victory.

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