Unvanquished
William Faulkner
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 Perm 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 s.ome 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
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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critics said that Faulkner had not made a novel by revising and assembling those six parts and adding the previously unpublished final chapter.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 aftereffects, 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
FOREWORD
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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 hi 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 gar-
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risoned 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 FaJkner, in an episode on which his great-grandson may have drawn for Colonel Sartor/s' d'ramatic escape in Chapter II of The Unvcmquished, 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
FOREWORD X
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 Shuoh 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. As Meriwether has pointed out while noting its historical discrepancies, The Unvanquished is not primarily about the Civil War; so objection to the spacing of the military events in the novel serves little purpose, especially when the spacing gives shape and force to the drama of Bayard's growth to real manhood.
The day is past when readers considered it Faulkner's chief function to explain his section of the South and the detail of its history. They now recognize him to be artist instead of sociologist or regional historian. By setting not only The Unvanquished but many of his other works in the part of our country which he knows best, he is not so much recording the life of that particular region as making it a base from which he examines, in book after book, significant aspects of man's life in general.
Faulkner's feeling about man's endurance and courage,
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virtues he implicitly gave to the young Southerner Bayard Sartoris in The Unvanquished, appears explicitly in the address he wrote 'To the Youth of Japan," when they—half a world away from Yoknapatawpha—were suffering the aftermath of another war, another defeat. Having mentioned the people of the South in the Civil War and then' particular troubles during Reconstruction, William Faulkner went on to speak of man in general and to add that in his opinion art has one high purpose—which surely we may conclude that The Unvanquished serves: "I believe our country is even stronger because of that old anguish since that very anguish taught us compassion for other peoples whom war has injured. I mention it only to explain and show that Americans from my part of America at least can understand the feeling of the Japanese young people of today that the future oilers . . . nothing but hopelessness, with nothing ... to hold to or believe in. Because the young people of my country during those ten years must have said in their turn: 'What shall we do now? . . .'
"I would like to think that there was someone there at that time too ... to reassure them that man is tough, that nothing, nothing—war, grief, hopelessness, despair—can last as long as man himself can last; that man himself will prevail over all his anguishes, provided he will make the effort to ... to seek not for a mere crutch to lean on, but to stand erect on his own feet by believing in hope and in his own toughness and endurance.
"I believe that is the only reason for art. . . . That art is the strongest and most durable force man has invented or discovered with which to record the history of his invincible durability and courage beneath disaster, and to postulate the validity of his hope."
—carvel collins Massachusetts Institute of Technology
AMBUSCADE
m»ehind the smokehouse that summer, Ringo and I had a living map. Although Vicksburg was just a handful of chips from the woodpile and the River a -trench scraped into the packed earth with the point of a hoe, it (river, city, and terrain) lived, possessing even, in miniature that ponderable though passive recalci-, trance of topography which outweighs artillery, against which the most brilliant of victories and the most tragic of defeats are but the loud noises of a moment. To Ringo and me it lived, if only because of the fact that the sunimpacted ground drank water faster than we could fetch it from the well, the very setting of the stage for conflict a prolonged and wellnigh hopeless ordeal in which we ran, panting and interminable, with the leaking bucket between wellhouse and battlefield, the two of us needing first to join forces and spend ourselves against a common enemy, time, before we could engender between us and hold intact the pattern of re-capitulant mimic furious victory like a cloth, a shield between ourselves and reality, between us and fact and doom. This afternoon it seemed as if we would never get it filled, wet enough, since there had not even been dew in three weeks. But at last it was damp enough, damp-colored enough at least, and we could begin. We
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were just about to begin. Then suddenly Loosh was standing there, watching us. He was Joby's son and Ringo's uncle; he stood there (we did not know where he had come from; we had not seen him appear, emerge) in the fierce dull early afternoon sunlight, bareheaded, his head slanted a little, tilted a little yet firm and not askew, like a cannonball (which it resembled) bedded hurriedly and carelessly in concrete, his eyes a little red at the inner corners as Negroes' eyes get when they have been drinking, looking down at what Ringo and I called Vicksburg. Then I saw Philadelphy, his wife, over at the woodpile, stooped, with an armful of wood already gathered into the crook of her elbow, watching Loosh's back.
"What's that?" Loosh said.
"Vicksburg," I said.
Loosh laughed. He stood there laughing, not loud, looking at the chips.
"Come on here, Loosh," Philadelphy said from the woodpile. There was something curious in her voice too —urgent, perhaps frightened. "If you wants any supper, you better tote me some wood." But I didn't know which, urgency or fright; I didn't have time to wonder or speculate, because suddenly Loosh stooped before Ringo or I could have moved, and with his hand he swept the chips flat.
"There's your Vicksburg," he said.
"Loosh!" Philadelphy said. But Loosh squatted, looking at me with that expression on his face. I was just twelve then; I didn't know triumph; I didn't even know the word.
"And I tell you nother un you ain't know," he said. "Corinth."
"Corinth?" I said. Philadelphy had dropped the wood and she was coming fast toward us. "That's in Mississippi too. That's not far. I've been there."
"Far don't matter," Loosh said. Now he sounded as if he were about to chant, to sing; squatting there with the fierce dull sun on his iron skull and the flattening slant of his nose, he was not looking at me or Ringo either; it was as if his red-cornered eyes had reversed in his skull and it was the blank flat obverses of the
AMBUSCADE y;>
balls which we saw. "Far don't matter. Case hit's on the way!"
"On the way? On the way to what?" "Ask your paw. Ask Marse John." "He's at Tennessee, fighting. I can't ask him." "You think he at Tennessee? Ain't no need for him at Tennessee now." Then Philadelphy grabbed him by the arm.
"Hush your mouth, nigger!" she cried, in that tense desperate voice. "Come on here and get me some wood!"
Then they were gone. Ringo and I didn't watch them go. We stood there above our ruined Vicksburg, our tedious hoe-scratch not even damp-colored now, looking at one another quietly. "What?" Ringo said. "What he mean?"
"Nothing," I said. I stooped and set Vicksburg up again. "There it is."
But Ringo didn't move, he just looked at me. "Loosh laughed. He say Corinth too. He laughed at Corinth too. What you reckon he know t
hat we ain't?"
"Nothing!" I said. "Do you reckon Loosh knows anything that Father don't know?"
"Marse John at Tennessee. Maybe he ain't know Either."
"Do you reckon he'd be away off at Tennessee if there were Yankees at Corinth? Do you reckon that if there were Yankees at Corinth, Father and General Van Dorn and General Pemberton all three wouldn't be there too?" But I was just talking too, I knew that, because niggers know, they know things; it would have to,.be something louder, much louder, than words to do any good. So I stooped and caught both hands full of dust and rose: and Ringo still standing there, not moving, just looking at me even as I flung the dust. "I'm General Pemberton!" I cried. "Yaaay! Yaay!" stooping and catching up more dust and flinging that too. Still Ringo didn't move. "All right!" I cried. "I'll be Grant this time, then. You can be General Pemberton." Because it was that urgent, since Negroes knew. The arrangement was that I would be General Pemberton twice in succession and Ringo would be Grant, then I
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would have to be Grant once so Ringo could be General Pemberton or he wouldn't play anymore. But now it was that urgent even though Ringo was a nigger too, because Ringo and I had been born in the same month and had both fed at the same breast and had slept together and eaten together for so long that Ringo called Granny 'Granny' just like I did, until maybe he wasn't a nigger anymore or maybe I wasn't a white boy anymore, the two of us neither, not even people any longer: the two supreme undefeated like two moths, two feathers riding above a hurricane. So we were both at it; we didn't see Louvinia, Joby's wife and Ringo's grandmother, at all. We were facing one another at scarcely arms' length, to the other each invisible in the furious slow jerking of the flung dust, yelling "Kill the bastuds! Kill them! Kill them!" when her voice seemed to descend upon us like an enormous hand, flattening the very dust which we had raised, leaving us now visible to one another, dust-colored ourselves to the eyes and still in the act of throwing:
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