Jones doubled the church at a good speed and let himself out at the gate. He saw no pursuit so his pace slackened to a walk. Beneath quiet elms his breath became easier. Branches motionlessly leafed were still against stars, and mopping his face and neck with his handkerchief he walked along a deserted street. At a corner he stopped to dip his handkerchief in a trough for watering horses, bathing his face and hands. The water reduced the pain of the blows he had received and as he paced fatly on from shadow to moonlight and then to shadow again, dogged by his own skulking and shapeless shadow, the calm still night washed his recent tribulation completely from his mind.
From shadowed porches beyond oaks and maples, elms and magnolias, from beyond screening vines starred with motionless pallid blossoms came snatches of hushed talk and sweet broken laughter. . . . Male and female created He them, young. Jones was young, too. ‘Yet ah, that Spring should vanish with the Rose! That Youth’s sweet-scented Manuscript should close! The Nightingale that in the Branches sang, Ah, whence, and whither flown again, who knows! . . .’ Wish I had a girl tonight, he sighed.
The moon was serene: ‘Ah, Moon of my Delight, that knows’t no wane, The Moon of Heav’n is rising once again: How oft hereafter rising shall she look Through this same Garden after me — in vain!’ But how spring itself is imminent with autumn, with death: ‘As autumn and the moon of death draw nigh The sad long days of summer herein lie And she too warm in sorrow ‘neath the trees Turns to night and weeps, and longs to die.’ And in the magic of spring and youth and moonlight Jones raised his clear sentimental tenor.
‘Sweetheart, sweetheart, sweetheart.’
His slow shadow blotted out the pen strokes of iron pickets but when he had passed, the pen strokes were still there upon the dark soft grass. Clumps of petunia and cannas broke the smooth stretch of lawn and above the bronze foliage of magnolias the serene columns of a white house rose more beautiful in simplicity than death.
Jones leaned his elbows on a gate, stating at his lumpy shadow at his feet, smelling cape jasmine, hearing a mocking-bird somewhere, somewhere. . . . Jones sighed. It was a sigh of pure ennui.
7
On the rector’s desk was a letter addressed to Mr Julian Lowe, —— St, San Francisco, Cal., telling him of her marriage and of her husband’s death. It had been returned by the post office department stamped, ‘Removed. Present address unknown’.
8
Gilligan, sitting in the hyacinth bed, watched Jones’s flight. ‘He ain’t so bad for a fat one,’ he admitted, rising. ‘Emmy’ll sure have to sleep single tonight.’ The mocking-bird in the magnolia, as though it had waited for hostilities to cease, sang again.
‘What in hell have you got to sing about?’ Gilligan shook his fist at the tree. The bird ignored him and he brushed dark earth from his clothes. Anyway, he soliloquized, I feel better. Wish I could have held the bastard, though. He passed from the garden with a last look at the ruined hyacinth bed. The rector, looming, met him at the corner of the house, beneath the hushed slumbrous passion of the silver tree.
‘That you, Joe? I thought I heard noises in the garden.’
‘You did. I was trying to beat hell out of that fat one, but I couldn’t hold the so — I couldn’t hold him. He lit out.’
‘Fighting? My dear boy!’
‘It wasn’t no fight; he was too busy getting away. It takes two folks to fight, padre.’
‘Fighting doesn’t settle anything, Joe. I’m sorry you resorted to it. Was anyone hurt?’
‘No, worse luck,’ Gilligan replied ruefully, thinking of his soiled clothes and his abortive vengeance.
‘I am glad of that. But boys will fight, eh, Joe? Donald fought in his day.’
‘You damn right he did, reverend. I bet he was a son-of-a-gun in his day.’
The rector’s heavy lined face took a flared match, between his cupped hands he sucked at his pipe. He walked slowly in the moonlight across the lawn, towards the gate. Gilligan followed. ‘I feel restless tonight,’ he explained. ‘Shall we walk a while?’
They paced slowly beneath arched and moon-bitten trees, scuffing their feet in shadows of leaves. Under the moon lights in houses were yellow futilities.
‘Well, Joe, things are back to normal again. People come and go, but Emmy and I seem to be like the biblical rocks. What are your plans?’
Gilligan lit a cigarette with ostentatiousness, hiding his embarrassment. ‘Well, padre, to tell the truth, I ain’t got any. If it’s all the same to you I think I’ll stay on with you a while longer.’
‘And welcome, dear boy,’ the rector answered heartily. Then he stopped and faced the other, keenly. ‘God bless you, Joe. Was it on my account you decided to stay?’
Gilligan averted his face guiltily. ‘Well, padre—’
‘Not at all. I won’t have it. You have already done all you can. This is no place for a young man, Joe.’
The rector’s bald forehead and his blobby nose were intersecting planes in the moonlight. His eyes were cavernous. Gilligan knew suddenly all the old sorrows of the race, black or yellow or white, and he found himself telling the rector all about her.
‘Tut, tut,’ the divine said, ‘this is bad, Joe.’ He lowered himself hugely to the edge of the sidewalk and Gilligan sat beside him. ‘Circumstance moves in marvellous ways, Joe.’
‘I thought you’d a said God, reverend.’
‘God is circumstance, Joe. God is in this life. We know nothing about the next. That will take care of itself in good time. “The Kingdom of God is in man’s own heart,” the Book says.’
‘Ain’t that a kind of funny doctrine for a parson to get off?’
‘Remember, I am an old man, Joe. Too old for bickering or bitterness. We make our own heaven or hell in this world. Who knows; perhaps when we die we may not be required to go anywhere nor do anything at all. That would be heaven.’
‘Or other people make out heaven and hell for us.’
The divine put his heavy arm across Gilligan’s shoulder. ‘You are suffering from disappointment. But this will pass away. The saddest thing about love, Joe, is that not only the love cannot last forever, but even the heartbreak is soon forgotten. How does it go? “Men have died and worms have eaten them, but not for love.” No, no;’ as Gilligan would have interrupted, ‘I know that is an unbearable belief, but all truth is unbearable. Do we not both suffer at this moment from the facts of division and death?’
Gilligan knew shame. Bothering him now, me with a fancied disappointment! The rector spoke again. ‘I think it would be a good idea for you to stay, after all, until you make your future plans. So let’s consider it closed, eh? Suppose we walk further — unless you are tired?’
Gilligan rose in effusive negation. After a while the quiet tree-tunnelled street became a winding road, and leaving the town behind them they descended and then mounted a hill. Cresting the hill beneath the moon, seeing the world breaking away from them into dark, moon-silvered ridges above valleys where mist hung slumbrous, they passed a small house, sleeping among climbing roses. Beyond it an orchard slept the night away in symmetrical rows, squatting and pregnant. ‘Willard has good fruit,’ the divine murmured.
The road dropped on again descending between reddish gashes, and across a level moon-lit space, broken by a clump of saplings, came a pure quivering chord of music wordless and far away.
‘They are holding services. Negroes,’ the rector explained. They walked on in the dust, passing neat tidy houses, dark with slumber. An occasional group of Negroes passed them, bearing lighted lanterns that jetted vain little flames futilely into the moonlight. ‘No one knows why they do that,’ the divine replied to Gilligan’s question. ‘Perhaps it is to light their churches with.’
The singing drew nearer and nearer; at last, crouching among a clump of trees beside the road, they saw the shabby church with its canting travesty of a spire. Within it was a soft glow of kerosene serving only to make the darkness and the heat thicker, making thicker the imminence
of sex after harsh labour along the mooned land; and from it welled the crooning submerged passion of the dark race. It was nothing, it was everything; then it swelled to an ecstasy, taking the white man’s words as readily as it took his remote God and made a personal Father of Him.
Feed Thy Sheep, O Jesus. All the longing of mankind for a Oneness with Something, somewhere. Feed Thy Sheep, O Jesus. . . . The rector and Gilligan stood side by side in the dusty road. The road went on under the moon, vaguely dissolving without perspective. Worn-out red-gutted fields were now alternate splashes of soft black and silver; trees had each a silver nimbus, save those moonward from them, which were sharp as bronze.
Feed Thy Sheep, O Jesus. The voices rose full and soft. There was no organ: no organ was needed as above the harmonic passion of bass and baritone soared a clear soprano of women’s voices like a flight of gold and heavenly birds. They stood together in the dust, the rector in his shapeless black, and Gilligan in his new hard serge, listening, seeing the shabby church become beautiful with mellow longing, passionate and sad. Then the singing died, fading away along the mooned land inevitable with tomorrow and sweat, with sex and death and damnation; and they turned townward under the moon, feeling dust in their shoes.
Mosquitoes
First published in 1927 by Boni & Liveright, Mosquitoes is a satirical novel and was largely inspired by Faulkner’s involvement in the New Orleans creative community, where he spent time before moving to France. Beginning and ending in the city of New Orleans, the narrative follows a diverse cast of artists, aesthetes and adolescents as they embark on a four-day excursion aboard the motorised yacht, the Nausikaa, owned by a wealthy patron of the arts. The narrative is organised into six sections, with a prologue that introduces the characters, followed by four body sections each of which documents a day of the yacht trip hour-by-hour, concluding with an epilogue that returns the characters, changed or unchanged, to their lives off the boat.
The inspiration for Faulkner’s second novel has been traced to a specific yachting excursion in Faulkner’s life that took place in April 1925 on Lake Pontchartrain. He was joined by members of the real-life New Orleans’ artistic community, which included artist William Spratling, author Hamilton Basso and the novelist and short-story writer Sherwood Anderson. Though the parallels between this trip and the fictive journey documented in Mosquitoes are clearly evident, it has been noted by critics that direct references to Faulkner’s life do not end here. Dawson Fairchild’s character, for example, is known to be a satirical portrait of his mentor Sherwood Anderson and is cited as the reason for his falling-out with Faulkner.
The hour-by-hour, day-by-day organisation of the narrative’s body sections suggests, in form as well as function, the nature of the days spent on the cruise ship, vastly repetitive and mundane. By grounding the repetitive activities of the characters in concrete temporal divisions, Faulkner fashions a structure to what might otherwise appear as an endless stream of conversation and interaction between various combinations of the yacht’s passengers.
Though many views on the contemporary culture of the 1920’s American South could be drawn from the endless cultural references in the text, two major themes are notable: Faulkner’s exploration of sex and sexuality and the societal role of the artist.
Several critics consider Mosquitoes to be Faulkner’s weakest and most imitative work, recognising his debt to the styles of Aldous Huxley, T. S. Eliot, and James Joyce. Nonetheless, Mosquitoes represents a period in Faulkner’s career where he begins to cultivate the personal literary style for which he would later become famous.
The first edition
CONTENTS
PROLOGUE
THE FIRST DAY
THE SECOND DAY
THE FOURTH DAY
EPILOGUE
Lake Pontchartrain, Louisiana – a primary setting of the novel
Sherwood Anderson, Faulkner’s friend and mentor. Unfortunately, due to Faulkner’s satirical depiction of Anderson in ‘Mosquitoes’, the two authors fell out.
TO
HELEN
In spring, the sweet young spring, decked out with little green, necklaced, braceleted with the song of idiotic birds, spurious and sweet and tawdry as a shopgirl in her cheap finery, like an idiot with money and no taste; they were little and young and trusting, you could kill them sometimes. But now, as August like a languorous replete bird winged slowly through the pale summer toward the moon of decay and death, they were bigger, vicious; ubiquitous as undertakers, cunning as pawnbrokers; confident and unavoidable as politicians; They came cityward lustful as country boys, as passionately integral as a college football squad; pervading and monstrous but without majesty: a biblical plague seen through the wrong end of a binocular: the majesty of Fate become contemptuous through ubiquity and sheer repetition.
PROLOGUE
I
“THE SEX INSTINCT,” repeated Mr. Talliaferro in his careful cockney, with that smug complacence with which you plead guilty to a characteristic which you privately consider a virtue, “’is quite strong in me. Frankness, without which there can be no friendship, without which two people cannot really ever ‘get’ each other, as you artists say; frankness, as I was saying, I believe—”
“Yes,” his host agreed. “Would you mind moving a little?”
He complied with obsequious courtesy, remarking the thin fretful flashing of the chisel beneath the rhythmic maul. Wood scented gratefully slid from its mute flashing, and slapping vainly about himself with his handkerchief he moved in a Bluebeard’s closet of blonde hair in severed clots, examining with concern a faint even powdering of dust upon his neat small patent leather shoes. Yes, one must pay a price for Art.... Watching the rhythmic power of the other’s back and arm he speculated briefly upon which was more to be desired — muscularity in an undershirt, or Ms own symmetrical sleeve, and reassured he continued:
“... frankness compels me to admit that the sex instinct is perhaps my most dominating compulsion.” Mr. Talliaferro believed that Conversation — not talk: Conversation — with an intellectual equal consisted of admitting as many so-called unpublishable facts as possible about oneself. Mr. Talliaferro often mused with regret on the degree of intimacy he might have established with his artistic acquaintances had he but acquired the habit of masturbation in his youth. But he had not even done this.
“Yes,” his host agreed again, thrusting a hard hip into him. “Not at all,” murmured Mr. Talliaferro quickly. A harsh wall restored his equilibrium roughly and hearing a friction of cloth and plaster he rebounded with repressed alacrity.
“Pardon me,” he chattered. His entire sleeve indicated his arm in gritty white and regarding his coat with consternation he moved out of range and sat upon an upturned wooden block. Brushing did no good, and the ungracious surface on which he sat recalling his trousers to his attention, he rose and spread his handkerchief upon it. Whenever he came here he invariably soiled his clothes, but under that spell put on us by those we admire doing things we ourselves cannot do, he always returned.
The chisel bit steadily beneath the slow arc of the maul. His host ignored him. Mr. Talliaferro slapped viciously and vainly at the back of his hand, sitting in lukewarm shadow while light came across roofs and chimneypots, passing through the dingy skylight, becoming weary. His host labored on in the tired light while the guest sat on his hard block regretting his sleeve, watching the other’s hard body in stained trousers and undershirt, watching the curling vigor of his hair, Outside the window New Orleans, the vieux carré, brooded in a faintly tarnished languor like an aging yet still beautiful courtesan in a smokefilled room, avid yet weary too of ardent ways. Above the city summer was hushed warmly into the bowled weary passion of the sky. Spring and the cruellest months were gone, the cruel months, the wantons that break the fat hybernatant dullness and comfort of Time; August was on the wing, and September — a month of languorous days regretful as woodsmoke. But Mr. Talliaferro’s youth, or lack of it, troubled h
im no longer. Thank God.
No youth to trouble the individual in this room at all. What this room troubled was something eternal in the race, something immortal. And youth is not deathless. Thank God. This unevenly boarded floor, these rough stained walls broken by high small practically useless windows beautifully set, these crouching lintels cutting the immaculate ruined pitch of walls which had housed slaves long ago, slaves long dead and dust with the age that had produced them and which they had served with a kind and gracious dignity — shades of servants and masters now in a more gracious region, lending dignity to eternity. After all, only a few chosen can accept service with dignity: it is man’s impulse to do for himself. It rests with the servant to lend dignity to an unnatural proceeding. And outside, above rooftops becoming slowly violet, summer lay supine, unchaste with decay.
As you entered the room the thing drew your eyes; you turned sharply as to a sound, expecting movement. But it was marble, it could not move. And when you tore your eyes away and turned your back on it at last, you got again untarnished and high and clean that sense of swiftness, of space encompassed; but on looking again it was as before: motionless and passionately eternal — the virginal breastless torso of a girl, headless, armless, legless, in marble temporarily caught and hushed yet passionate still for escape, passionate and simple and eternal in the equivocal derisive darkness of the world. Nothing to trouble your youth or lack of it: rather something to trouble the very fibrous integrity of your being. Mr. Talliaferro slapped his neck savagely.
The manipulator of the chisel and maul ceased his labor and straightened up, flexing his arm and shoulder muscles.
And as though it had graciously waited for him to get done, the light faded quietly and abruptly: the room was like a bathtub after the drain has been opened. Mr. Talliaferro rose also and his host turned upon him a face like that of a heavy hawk, breaking his dream. Mr. Talliaferro regretted his sleeve again and said briskly:
Complete Works of William Faulkner Page 29
