In My Time of Dying I Know Where I’m Bound

 As I Lay Dying
William Faulkner

Earlier this year I attended a company-wide event intended to help a geographically dispersed staff function better. Similar events probably take place all over the world daily.

With the best of intentions, the meeting organizer invited all present to introduce themselves, talk about their role and tell everyone what book(s) they were reading. And so just like that, an event meant to engender unity began by dividing those present into two groups.

Sadly, it was the readers who seemed not to notice.

I bring all this up not because in a noble moment I alone noticed the error, but because I failed miserably at trying to fix it. The only thing worse than dividing people is a bad joke and I’m now certain that wordplay with the titles of novels won’t make non-readers feel suddenly well-read. Lesson learned.

If you’re interested, the novels dragooned into the service of failed humor were the Fitzgerald we recently talked about and this short masterpiece. While I am immersed in filling in gaps in my reading, this is a repeat. At some point before I completed college I went on a Faulkner tear, attacking his novels as a plow would the deep rich soil of Yoknapatawpha County

The young man who crafted this novel was not yet the dashing figure he came to be. William Faulkner in the 1920s.

And then I stopped, although that was less about Faulkner and more about fiction.

So here I am, back again with the Bundren family and while I failed to notice a few of their misadventures the first time around, they remain a singular bunch. At the outset, Addie Bundren is on her deathbed, while her oldest son, Cash, works on building her coffin. The rest of the family is caught in the twilight state that marks a death watch.

Although death has been a regular visitor since I was a tot, I had not yet buried a parent when I first read this novel. And so I read without recognizing how uncannily accurate the mood was. The tension, the sadness, the fear, the withdrawal, as if a wholesale retreat into oneself can spare one from the unique pain of a mother’s (and wife’s) departure from this life.

There are lots of Bundrens and the narration shifts between them. All five children–in addition to Cash there are three other boys (Darl , Jewel and Vardaman)  and one girl, Dewey Dell–have their say, as does Anse, the soon-to-be widower. Over the course of the novel a number of secondary players pipe in, but mostly we hear from the Bundrens.

Isn’t that always how it is? The family collapses in on itself but no one notices at first. The distracting urgency of funeral arrangements and funerary rituals consumes everyone’s emotional energy.  Action occurs without thinking, or feeling, until the time for activity has passed and all you are left with is each other, your pain and the hole in your lives. I don’t think it matters whether your family is picture-perfect or a mess the void is the same.

I suspect Addie’s final journey home was on a wagon much like this.

The Bundrens, it’s obvious from the outset, are far from picture-perfect. Jewel is forever on the cusp of disappearing, the un-Bundren who in reality is the bastard offspring of Addie’s affair with Reverend Whitfield, a secret she takes to her grave. Darl is, in the vernacular of the time, crazy and going more insane over the nine days the book describes event though his voice appears most often.

Vardaman is a child (he is the youngest Bundren) trying to make sense of his world and the violent disruption he’s experiencing. Dewey Dell is the remaining source of maternal energy who harbors a terrible secret of her own. Anse presents as a man so single-minded that if the word didn’t already exist they’d invent ‘stubborn’ to describe him. Anse, I’m certain, would prefer dutiful.

The tale itself is concerned more with the aftermath of death than dying. Anse has promised to take Addie home to Jefferson to be buried with her people. What should be a trip of a day or so turns into a mini-Odyssey. Their homeland seems to be actively conspiring to deny the Bundren family their final duty and remaining dignity.

With bridges washed out by flood waters and roads impassable from the same risen waters,  the Bundrens push forward. As they go, they prove impervious to advice and even, at times, hospitality. Horror and high comedy make common cause as the Bundrens ford a flooded river, briefly losing Addie’s coffin and Cash’s tools to the floodwaters. (Those tools mean something I’m certain, but I’m too dim to understand what.) Cash himself ends up riding in the wagon next to and sometimes atop the coffin he’s built for his mother, his leg broken and ultimately cast in concrete.

I suspect Addie’s final journey home was on a wagon much like this.

All this takes time and what should be a relatively quick journey of a day or so ends up taking nine days. Addie’s essence, shall we say, precedes her. In the countryside, that leads to tongue-wagging. By the time they get to Jefferson the perfume makes the rural-urban divide tangible, even if that divide in early 20th century Mississippi constitutes a smaller gap than that between, say, Mississippi and Manhattan.

It would be too easy, and wrong I think, to assign roles, motivations and significance to every narrator. I think the art here lies in telling this story from so many angles, from leaving in the ambiguities, from the very idea that there isn’t just a story but that there are multiple stories and these stories intersect with even more stories and so on.

As a younger reader, I recognized what made this novel different. Some decades on I recognize its quiet power and artistic mastery.  And that is a lesson worth learning.

READER BONUS: The Vintage paperback edition contains the corrected text found in the Library of America edition.

 

 

 

 

 

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Take Me Down to the Paradise City

This Side of Paradise
F. Scott Fitzgerald

Tales of the Jazz Age come up against some tough competition in my family.

My grandmother, who stood 5 feet 9 or so and was, even when I knew her, a live wire,  allegedly won a Charleston competition, though I’ve never tried to ascertain if such competitive dancing actually occurred. She and my grandfather must have cut quite a swath in the Bronx. Their friends knew them by their nicknames:  Swat and Bullets. In our house, stories of speakeasies and rum running fell around the table like leaves in late October.

Until now, F. Scott Fitzgerald has managed to keep up.

Although my grandfather and Fitzgerald were near contemporaries, Fitzgerald occupied a perch at least a couple of rungs up the ladder from my family’s.

Dancing the Charleston. I’m pretty sure neither Swat nor Amory Blaine ever cut such a rug.

Grandma graduated high school in upstate New York and I’m certain grandpa spent even less time in a classroom. He was more a school of hard knocks guy who’d enlisted back-to-back in both the Army and the Navy. The roaring 20s found him a steamfitter– a man with his own truck. Imagine the possibilities.

I doubt the principal character in this novel, Amory Blaine, knew how to sweat a joint.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. My initial contact with Fitzgerald was through his short stories. A septuagenarian literature professor at UMass whose resemblance to Robert Frost suggested separation at birth assigned Babylon Revisited and Other Stories during my lone semester there. The same prof also assigned Heinrich Böll‘s 18 Stories,  so he had a huge impact on my reading life.

After the stories, I read Gatsby. I’m tempted to ask “Who hasn’t?,” though I recognize that his light may no longer shine bright in the firmament. With its Long Island setting (I was certain I’d identified the actual locales of East and West Egg; I’ve never accepted the hypothesis that the novel’s true setting is Westport, Connecticut), local color and familiar cadences, it felt like truth on the page.

Things educated people typically don’t know how to do: sweating a joint
Click on the picture to learn more.

Now I can say it’s a good thing I read Gatsby first, because This Side of Paradise, Fitzgerald’s first novel, published when he was just 24, proved daunting. The class divide–and I am always eager to discuss how the class divide lies at the root of our biggest social problems even though most Americans would rather not discuss it–is the least of it.

The entire book seems designed to make me feel stupid, in the same way a T.S. Eliot poem does. It’s not that I can’t comprehend the class of people able to attend Princeton in the first quarter of the 20th century. And it’s not that one shouldn’t expect too much from a steamfitter’s grandson. I spent my entire time with the book feeling like I was losing a gigantic struggle to understand.

You might think that’s structural. After all, the book throws everything at the wall. Our hero is a man of words whose boon companions are likewise oriented. Versifying is par for the course. There’s an entire section written like a play. In the second half, quick cuts and odd juxtapositions appear. It would be unsettling if I didn’t have reverence and real affection for John Dos Passos‘  USA trilogy.

We first meet Amory, along with his mother, in the tony mid-western precincts of Lake Geneva, Wisconsin. As if to announce the imminent arrival of a new age, the Blaines have a relationship that I don’t associate with pre-World War I times. It was unusual for children to call parents by their first names in the 1970s.  What that looked like in the 1910s I can only imagine.

College fun at Princeton, circa 1910.
Photo courtesy Princeton University Archives, no infringement intended

Like many a midwesterner (more accurately, like many a character created by an author with midwestern roots who made a similar journey),  Amory ends up, first, at a prep school, St. Regis, and then Princeton. On his way east, he meets with Monsignor Darcy who reinforces Amory’s sense of his own singularity.

I’ll pause for a moment here to reflect on the Catholic angle. Blaine and Darcy are among the least Catholic characters I have ever encountered in literature, though they obviously are meant to be recognized as such. Compared with characters created by Böll and Kerouac, these two strike me as having never made it out of first-year catechism. The Monsignor almost makes me understand Henry VIII‘s preferred manner of dealing with frustrating clerics.

Okay, okay. Art isn’t meant to be didactic, I get it. It’s not like Catholics were lousy on the ground in early 20th-century American letters, though. It wasn’t that long before that Mark Twain was seen indulging in some first-class anti-Catholic bigotry and the Smith presidential campaign, in 1928, would display that ugliness on the national stage.

Perhaps Fitzgerald–or should I say Blaine–is merely putting aside his childish things. I can’t imagine any WASP bastion feeling comfortable to outsiders. So maybe not making too much of your origins is strategic. I’d buy that, given the overall autobiographical feel of the entire enterprise.

Times Square in the Rain.

The novel, after all,  can reasonably be cartooned as one big mash note to  Mercer County‘s member of the Ivy League. That Blaine and his classmates are selfish insipid beings doesn’t change the fact that this is their coming-of-age story, right down to the psychological derailment of the war to end all wars.

The post-graduate, post-war sections of the novel worked better for me although I’m pretty certain the perfect girl who gets away and marries the wrong guy is a tale often told, even to the rejected suitor confronting the official news of his loss in the newspaper.

The girl crazy enough to gallop a horse off a cliff? Before I reformed, I used to say I had an unusual capacity to be attracted to the nuttiest woman in any room. Since I think the crazy woman might be Zelda, I am willing to accept amateur status in this area from now on.

So, why, why does this novel have its reputation? I think it’s the beauty of the language. I can do no better, after all this carping, than to let Fitzgerald have the final say in words I find hauntingly evocative and beautiful:

“Under the glass portcullis of a theatre Amory stood watching the first great drops of rain spatter down and flatten to dark stains on the sidewalk. The air became grey and opalescent; a solitary light suddenly outlined a window over the way; then a hundred more danced and glimmered into vision. Under his feet, a thick, iron-studded skylight turned yellow; in the street the lamps of the taxi-cabs sent out glistening sheens along the already black pavement. The unwelcome Novermber rain had perversely stolen the day’s last hour and pawned it with that ancient fence, the night.: p. 236

 

 

I’ll Just Stay Here and Drink

Pick-Up
(Crime Novels: American Noir of the 1950s, A Library of America Volume)
Charles Willeford

While you’d be forgiven for not remembering why I put this multi-title volume down, I can’t. Part of me thinks such behavior would be more understandable if the book contained works of a single author. I can even offer proof: one of the several Henry James volumes from the Library of America sits across the room, daring me to pick it up

Missin’ Like a Cuckoo Brain

One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
Ken Kesey

This is not my first encounter with this book. The classics, the things you’re supposed to read when you’re young because you’ll never take the time to read them later in life, those I avoid until they turn up in this space.

Kesey, though,  suffers from the opposite problem with me. There he is,  smack dab in the middle of the great

The Pain of the Scars That Won’t Heal

The Book of Daniel
E.L. Doctorow

I grabbed this book as I walked out the door for what, to date, is only the second Jersey shore vacation I’ve ever taken. During the first, way back in 1976, I heard a priest (my mom didn’t believe in suspending Catholic rules) deliver a sermon built around E.L.Doctorow‘s recently

A Supersonic Honeymoon

The Glimpses of the Moon
(Four Novels of the 1920s, A Library of  America Volume)
Edith Wharton

Come with me to a favorite locale: Wharton country. There’s no reason you’d know that; supporting evidence isn’t exactly abundant.

I may even be overstating the case. A better, though dated, analogy might be a certain type of uptown resident who

Raise Your Voice up to the Sky

The Way to Rainy Mountain
N. Scott Momaday

There’s been so much noise lately that I needed a
quiet book.

So I went hunting in the unread stash I keep in my basement, the acquired-but-unread treasures of a life-long booklover. And I found exactly what I was looking for.

Look this book up–on Wikipedia, say, or on a bookseller’s website–and you’ll find a synopsis. Perhaps

The Gravity of the Situation

Slapstick (or Lonesome No More)
Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.

Now I remember why I stopped.

Reading novels, that is.

You might not know that from the list of books discussed in this space.  But for at least a half decade the only craftsman I trusted with story-telling was

Life is In a Spin

Passing
Nella Larsen

Fifteen or so years ago I found myself on Main Street in downtown Flushing, NY at midday. The sidewalks were filled with crowds, some jostling their way between errands, some in search of lunch.

It’s an experience I can recommend because Flushing, which in my childhood had Jewish and Italian enclaves, is nowadays more than 50% Asian. To be in a crowd and be

Days of Miracle and Wonder

Goodbye Columbus
Philip Roth

This week I’m revisiting a modern classic. You didn’t think I’d lived this long without reading Roth, did you?

Roth is Philip Roth, the one-time enfant terrible of American letters, a man who long ago crossed the great divide into the land of literary writers. This volume, originally published in 1959, contains the title novella and