Complete Works of William Faulkner

by William Faulkner

  “I know. If I leave him with you, I must not try to see him again until you and she are dead.”

  “Yes. I must; I cannot help it. I just want peace now. I don’t want equity or justice, I don’t want happiness; I just want peace. We won’t live very much longer, and then—”

  She laughed, short, mirthless, not moving. “And then he will have forgotten me.”

  “That’s your risk. Because, remember,” he cried; “remember! I don’t ask this. I did not ask you to leave him, to bring him to us. You can go up now and wake him and take him with you. But if you do not, if you leave him with us and turn your hack on this house and go away — Think well. If you like, take him with you to-night, to the hotel or wherever and think about it and make up your mind and bring him back to-morrow or come yourself and tell me what you have decided.”

  “I have decided now,” she said.

  “That you leave him here of your own free will. That we give him the home and care and affection which is his right both as a helpless child and as our gra — grand — and that in return for this, you are to make no attempt to see him or communicate with him as long as we live. That is your understanding, your agreement? Think well.”

  “Yes,” she said. “I have to do it.”

  “But you do not. You can take him with you now; all this to-night can be as if it had never happened. You are his mother; I still believe that any mother is better — better than — How do you have to?”

  “Because I don’t know whether I can buy him enough food to eat and enough clothes to keep him warm and medicine if he is sick,” she said. “Do you understand that?”

  “I understand that this — your — this other man does not earn as much in his line as Roger did in his. But you tell me Roger did not always earn enough for the four of you: nevertheless you never thought while Roger was alive of leaving the boy with us. And now, with one less mouth to feed, you try to tell me that you—”

  “I’ll tell you, if you will listen a minute,” she said. “I’m going to have another child.” Now he did not speak at all; his unfinished sentence seemed to hang between them. They stood face to face but they could not see one another: just the two vague shapes with the snow falling between them and upon them, though since her back was to the street lamp she could see him the better of the two. After a while he said quietly:

  “I see. Yes. And you know that this other child is — is not—”

  “Not Roger’s. Yes. Roger and I were — But no matter. I know, this time. Roger and I both know. So we will need money and that’s what Roger was trying to do in that meet. The ship he won a prize with the first day was too slow, obsolete. But that was all we could get and he outflew them, beat them on the pylons, by turning the pylons closer than the others dared for that little money. Then Saturday he had a chance to fly a ship that was dangerous, but he had a chance to win two thousand dollars in the race. That would have fixed us up. But the ship came to pieces in the air. Maybe I could have stopped him. I don’t know. But maybe I could have. But I didn’t. I didn’t try, anyhow. So now we didn’t get that money, and we left most of the first day’s prize to send his body here when they get it out of the lake.”

  “Ah,” Dr. Shumann said. “I see. Yes. So you are giving us the chance to — the opportunity to—” Suddenly he cried:

  “If I just knew that he is Roger’s! If I just knew! Can’t you tell me? Can’t you give me some sign, some little sign? Any little sign?” She didn’t move. The light came through the snow, across her shoulder, and she could see him a little — a small thin man with untidy, thin, iron-grey hair and the snow whispering in it, standing with his face turned aside and his hand not before it exactly but held palm out between his face and hers. After a while she said:

  “Maybe you would rather take a little time to think about it. To decide.” She could not see his face now: only the lifted hand; she seemed to be speaking to the hand: “Suppose I wait at the hotel until to-morrow, so—” The hand moved, a faint motion from the wrist as though it were trying to push her voice away. But she repeated, once more, as though for a record: “You mean you don’t want me to wait?” But only the hand moved again, replied; she turned quietly and went down the steps, feeling for each step beneath the snow, and went on down the walk, vanishing into the drowsing pantomime of the snow, not fast. She did not look back. Dr. Shumann did not watch her. He heard the engine of the car start, but he was already turning, entering the house, fumbling at the door for a moment before he found the knob and entered, his hair and shoulders (he was in his shirt-sleeves) powdered with snow. He went on down the hall; his wife, sitting beside the bed in the darkened room where the boy was asleep, heard him blunder against something in the hall and then saw him come into the door, framed against the lighted hall, holding to the door frame, the light glinting in the melting snow in his untidy hair.

  “If we just had a sign,” he said. He entered, stumbling again. She rose and approached him, but he pushed her aside, entering. “Let me be,” he said.

  “Shhhhhh,” she said. “Don’t wake him. You come on and eat your supper.”

  “Let me alone,” he said, pushing with his hand at the empty air now since she stood back, watching him approach the bed, fumbling at the foot-board. But his voice was quiet enough. “Go out,” he said. “Leave me be. Go away and leave me be.”

  “You come on and eat your supper and lay down.”

  “Go on. I’m all right, I tell you.” She obeyed; he stood holding to the bed’s foot-board and heard her feet move slowly up the hall and cease. Then he moved, fumbling until he found the light-cord, the bulb, and turned it on. The little boy stirred, turning his face from the light. The garment in which he slept was a man’s shirt, an old-fashioned garment with a once-glazed bosom, soft now from many washings, pinned about his throat with a gold brooch and with the sleeves cut recently off at his wrists. On the pillow beside him the toy aeroplane rested. Suddenly Dr. Shumann stooped and took the boy by the shoulder and began to shake him. The toy aeroplane slid from the pillow; with his other hand Dr. Shumann flipped it to the floor, still shaking the little boy. “Roger,” he said, “wake up. Wake up, Roger.” The boy waked; without moving he blinked up at the man’s face bending over him.

  “Laverne,” he said. “Jack. Where’s Laverne? Where’m I at?”

  “Laverne’s gone,” Dr. Shumann said, still shaking the boy as though he had forgot to tell his muscles to desist. “You’re at home, but Laverne is gone. Gone, I tell you. Are you going to cry? Hey?” The boy blinked up at him, then he turned and put out his hand towards the pillow beside him.

  “Where’s my new job?” he said. “Where’s my ship?”

  “Your ship, hey?” Dr. Shumann said. “Your ship, hey?” He stooped and caught up the toy and held it up, his face twisted into a grimace of gnome-like rage, and whirled and hurled the toy at the wall and, while the boy watched him, ran to it and began to stamp upon it with blind maniacal fury. The little boy made one sharp sound: then, silent, raised on one elbow, his eyes a little wide as though with curious interest alone, he watched the shabby wild-haired old man jumping up and down upon the shapeless trivial mass of blue-and-yellow tin in maniacal ludicrousness. Then the little boy saw him pause, stoop, take up the ruined toy and apparently begin to try to tear it to pieces with his hands. His wife, sitting beside the living-room stove, heard his feet too through the flimsy walls, feeling the floor shake too, then she heard him approaching up the hall, fast now. She was small — a faded woman with faded eyes and a quiet faded face sitting in the stuffy room containing a worn divan and fumed oak chairs and a fumed oak revolving bookcase racked neatly with battered medical books from whose bindings the gilt-embossed titles had long since vanished, and a table littered with medical magazines on which lay at the moment a thick cap with ear-muffs, a pair of mittens and a small scuffed black bag. She did not move: she was sitting there watching the door when Dr. Shumann came in, holding one hand out before him; she did not stir
even then: she just looked quietly at the mass of money. “It was in that aeroplane!” he said. “He even had to hide his money from her!”

  “No,” the wife said. “She hid it from him.”

  “No!” he shouted. “He hid it from her. For the boy. Do you think a woman would ever hide money or anything else and then forget where she put it? And where would she get a hundred and seventy-five dollars, anyway?”

  “Yes,” the wife said, the faded eyes filled with immeasurable and implacable unforgiving; “where would she get a hundred and seventy-five dollars that she would have to hide from both of them in a child’s toy?” He looked at her for a long moment.

  “Ah,” he said. He said it quietly: “Oh. Yes. I see.” Then he cried, “But no matter! It don’t matter now!” He stooped and swung open the door of the stove and shut it again; she did not move, not even when, glancing past him as he stooped, she saw in the door and looking in at them, the little boy in the man’s shirt carrying against his chest the battered mass of the toy in one hand and the clothes which he had worn wadded in the other, his cap already on. Dr. Shumann had not seen him yet; he rose from the stove; it was the draught of course, from the opening and closing of the door, but it did seem as though it were the money itself passing in flame and fire up the pipe with a deep faint roar into nothing as Dr. Shumann stood again, looking down at her. “It’s our boy,” he said; then he shouted: “It’s our boy, I tell you!” Then he collapsed; he seemed to let go all at once, though not hard because of his spareness, on to his knees beside the chair, his head in her lap, crying.

  When the city room began to fill that evening a copy-boy noticed the overturned waste-basket beside the reporter’s desk and the astonishing amount of savagely defaced and torn copy which littered the adjacent floor. The copy-boy was a bright lad, about to graduate from high-school; he had not only ambitions but dreams too. He gathered up from the floor all the sheets, whole and in fragments, emptied the waste-basket and, sitting at the reporter’s desk he began to sort them, discarding and fitting and resorting at the last to paste; then, his eyes big with excitement and exultation and then downright triumph, he regarded what he had salvaged and restored to order and coherence — the sentences and paragraphs which he believed to be not only news but the beginning of literature:

  “On Thursday Roger Shumann flew a race against four competitors, and won. On Saturday he flew against but one competitor. But that competitor was Death, and Roger Shumann lost. And so to-day a lone aeroplane flew out over the lake on the wings of dawn and circled the spot where Roger Shumann got the Last Checkered Flag, and vanished back into the dawn from whence it came.

  “Thus two friends told him farewell. Two friends, yet two competitors too, whom he had met in fair contest and conquered in the lonely sky from which he fell, dropping a simple wreath to mark his Last Pylon.”

  It stopped there, but the copy-boy did not. “O Jesus,” he whispered. “Maybe Hagood will let me finish it!” already moving towards the desk where Hagood now sat, though the copy-boy had not seen him enter. Hagood had just sat down; the copy-boy, his mouth already open, paused behind Hagood. Then he became more complete vassal to surprise than ever, for lying on Hagood’s desk and and weighted down neatly by an empty whiskey bottle was another sheet of copy which Hagood and the copy-boy read together:

  “At midnight last night the search for the body of Roger Shumann, racing pilot who plunged into the lake Saturday p m., was finally abandoned by a three-place biplane of about eighty horse-power which managed to fly out over the water and return without falling to pieces and dropping a wreath of flowers into the water approximately three-quarters of a mile away from where Shumann’s body is generally supposed to be since they were precision pilots and so did not miss the entire lake. Mrs. Shumann departed with her husband and children for Ohio, where it is understood that their six-year-old son will spend an indefinite time with some of his grandparents and where any and all finders of Roger Shumann are kindly requested to forward any and all of same.”

  And beneath this, savagely in pencil: I guess this is what you want, you bastard, and now I am going down to Amboise St and get drunk awhile and if you don’t know where Amboise St is ask your son to tell you and if you don’t know what drunk is come down there and look at me and when you come bring some jack because I am on a credit.

  Absalom, Absalom!

  Absalom, Absalom! (1936) concerns events during and after the Civil War, telling the story of three families of the American South, focusing on the rise and fall of Thomas Sutpen. A white man born into poverty in West Virginia, Sutpen comes to Mississippi with the complementary aims of gaining wealth and becoming a powerful family patriarch. The story is mostly narrated in flashbacks by Quentin Compson to his roommate at Harvard University, Shreve, who frequently contributes his own suggestions and surmises. The narration of Rosa Coldfield, and Quentin’s father and grandfather, are also included and re-interpreted by Shreve and Quentin, with the events of the story unfolding in non-chronological order and often with differing details, as the true story of the Sutpens is gradually revealed in subtle stages. Rosa initially narrates the story, with long digressions and a biased memory, to Quentin Compson, whose grandfather was a friend of Sutpen’s. Quentin’s father then fills in several details to Quentin. Finally, Quentin relates the story to his roommate Shreve, and in each retelling, the reader is given more details as the parties augment the story with new layers of information. The final effect leaves the reader more certain about the attitudes and biases of the characters than about the facts of Sutpen’s history.

  As with many of Faulkner’s novels, Absalom, Absalom! allegorises Southern history. The title is an allusion to a wayward son fighting the empire his father built, as told the Biblical story of King David and Absalom. The history of Thomas Sutpen mirrors the rise and fall of Southern plantation culture, as Sutpen’s failures replicate the weaknesses of the idealistic South. Along with The Sound and the Fury, the novel played an important part in Faulkner winning the Nobel Prize in Literature and today it is regarded as a staple work of modernist literature.

  Interestingly, the 1983 Guinness Book of World Records claims that the “Longest Sentence in Literature” is a sentence from Absalom, Absalom! containing 1,288 words. The sentence can be found in Chapter 6; it begins with the words “Just exactly like father”, and ends with “the eye could not see from any point”. The passage is entirely italicised and incomplete.

  The first edition

  CONTENTS

  I

  II

  III

  IV

  V

  VI

  VII

  IX

  CHRONOLOGY

  GENEALOGY

  The first edition’s title page

  I

  FROM A LITTLE after two oclock until almost sundown of the long still hot weary dead September afternoon they sat in what Miss Coldfield still called the office because her father had called it that — a dim hot airless room with the blinds all closed and fastened for forty-three summers because when she was a girl someone had believed that light and moving air carried heat and that dark was always cooler, and which (as the sun shone fuller and fuller on that side of the house) became latticed with yellow slashes full of dust motes which Quentin thought of as being flecks of the dead old dried paint itself blown inward from the scaling blinds as wind might have blown them. There was a wistaria vine blooming for the second time that summer on a wooden trellis before one window, into which sparrows came now and then in random gusts, making a dry vivid dusty sound before going away: and opposite Quentin, Miss Coldfield in the eternal black which she had worn for forty-three years now, whether for sister, father, or nothusband none knew, sitting so bolt upright in the straight hard chair that was so tall for her that her legs hung straight and rigid as if she had iron shinbones and ankles, clear of the floor with that air of impotent and static rage like children’s feet, and talking in that grim haggard amazed voice
until at last listening would renege and hearing-sense self-confound and the long-dead object of her impotent yet indomitable frustration would appear, as though by outraged recapitulation evoked, quiet inattentive and harmless, out of the biding and dreamy and victorious dust.

  Her voice would not cease, it would just vanish. There would be the dim coffin-smelling gloom sweet and over-sweet with the twice-bloomed wistaria against the outer wall by the savage quiet September sun impacted distilled and hyperdistilled, into which came now and then the loud cloudy flutter of the sparrows like a flat limber stick whipped by an idle boy, and the rank smell of female old flesh long embattled in virginity while the wan haggard face watched him above the faint triangle of lace at wrists and throat from the too tall chair in which she resembled a crucified child; and the voice not ceasing but vanishing into and then out of the long intervals like a stream, a trickle running from patch to patch of dried sand, and the ghost mused with shadowy docility as if it were the voice which he haunted where a more fortunate one would have had a house. Out of quiet thunderclap he would abrupt (man-horse-demon) upon a scene peaceful and decorous as a schoolprize water color, faint sulphur-reek still in hair clothes and beard, with grouped behind him his band of wild niggers like beasts half tamed to walk upright like men, in attitudes wild and reposed, and manacled among them the French architect with his air grim, haggard, and tatter-ran. Immobile, bearded and hand palm-lifted the horseman sat; behind him the wild blacks and the captive architect huddled quietly, carrying in bloodless paradox the shovels and picks and axes of peaceful conquest. Then in the long unamaze Quentin seemed to watch them overrun suddenly the hundred square miles of tranquil and astonished earth and drag house and formal gardens violently out of the soundless Nothing and clap them down like cards upon a table beneath the up-palm immobile and pontific, creating the Sutpen’s Hundred, the Be Sutpen’s Hundred like the oldentime Be Light. Then hearing would reconcile and he would seem to listen to two separate Quentins now — the Quentin Compson preparing for Harvard in the South, the deep South dead since 1865 and peopled with garrulous outraged baffled ghosts, listening, having to listen, to one of the ghosts which had refused to lie still even longer than most had, telling him about old ghost-times; and the Quentin Compson who was still too young to deserve yet to be a ghost, but nevertheless having to be one for all that, since he was born and bred in the deep South the same as she was — the two separate Quentins now talking to one another in the long silence of notpeople, in notlanguage, like this: It seems that this demon — his name was Sutpen — (Colonel Sutpen) — Colonel Sutpen. Who came out of nowhere and without warning upon the land with a band of strange niggers and built a plantation — (Tore violently a plantation, Miss Rosa Coldfield says) — tore violently. And married her sister Ellen and begot a son and a daughter which — (Without gentleness begot, Miss Rosa Coldfield says) — without gentleness. Which should have been the jewels of his pride and the shield and comfort of his old age, only — (Only they destroyed him or something or he destroyed them or something. And died) — and died. Without regret, Miss Rosa Coldfield says — (Save by her) Yes, save by her. (And by Quentin Compson) Yes. And by Quentin Compson.