It’s difficult to imagine William Faulkner as a young novelist. One pictures him as the silver haired, mustached “Dixie Flyer” (as Flannery O’ Connor called him) crafting his epics in the Mississippi heat and then knocking back a bottle of whiskey. Or maybe that’s just me. Anyway, he was young Bill before he was venerable old Bill, and he was still working on finding his literary voice.
As we saw in What the Faulkner?!, Part 1, Bill wore his influences in his first novel, Soldiers’ Pay. Evoking the voices of Sherwood Anderson, John Dos Passos and I’m guessing other moderns, Faulkner attempted a little bit of everything in his take on World War I and the southern American Lost Generation.
In Faulkner’s second novel, Mosquitoes, he returns to the Lost Generation subject by placing a group of New Orleans-based artists, bohemians, and other folks on a rich lady’s boat and floats them around on a lake for a few days. A comedy of flirtation and hot air philosophizing ensues.
It’s late summer: “August was on the wing, and September—a month of languorous days regretful as woodsmoke.” But this regretful time doesn’t bother one of the main protagonists, Mr. Talliafero, a widower and a woman’s clothing salesman, for “Mr. Talliaferro’s youth, or lack of it, troubled him no longer. Thank God.”
In the prologue Mr. T. boasts to a sculptor, “…frankness compels me to admit that the sex instinct is perhaps my most dominating compulsion.” Yet every time he attempts to speak to one of the vivacious young women on the boat, he bungles the situation, only managing to bewilder and creep them out.
His artist buddies on the boat, notably the other main protagonist, Dawson Fairchild, a novelist, mock Talliaferro’s vain pursuit of the flappers in dismissive, misogynist fashion: “Where…are the soft bulging rabbitlike things women used to have inside their clothes? Gone, with the poor Indian and ten cent beer and cambric drawers. But still, they’re kind of nice, these young girls: kind of like a thin monotonous flute music or something.”
Interesting that a novelist in his late twenties devotes much of this novel speaking in the voices of two middle-aged men. But after all, Faulkner was interested in the big boy theme of time: time wasted, time passing, time eternal. Sez Mr. Fairchild, “Art reminds us of our youth, of that age when life don’t need to have her face lifted every so often for you to consider her beautiful. That’s about all the virtue there is in art: it’s a kind of Battle Creek, Michigan, for the spirit. And when it reminds us of youth, we remember grief and forget time. That’s something.”
But of course, as we will see in The Sound and the Fury (two novels hence) you forget time at your own peril. More assured than his first novel, a comic pleasure to read, and a test run for images (the memory of a girl’s muddy drawers, an idiot mournfully clutching a girl’s slipper) and themes that we’ll see again in later novels, Mosquitoes is well worth investigating.
