In the autumn or winter of 1926, when William Faulkner was twenty-nine, he began work on his third novel and also what would become his first novel about Yoknapatawpha County. The title of this book? Well, it depends upon which version you read.
The massive manuscript, entitled Flags in the Dust, that Faulkner sent to his publisher, Horace Liveright, was rejected. They told him it was too unfocused and lacked plot and structure (this information courtesy of Douglas Day, the editor of the re-reconstructed version of Flags, and also the author of its introduction). Hurt by this criticism, Faulkner showed the manuscript to a couple of friends. They also agreed with Liveright. Indomitable in his belief, Faulkner sent the manuscript on to his agent, Ben Wasson, and begged him to find a publisher for it. “I can’t afford all the postage it’s costing me,” Faulkner told Wasson. After eleven rejections, Harcourt, Brace & Company accepted it provided that someone else besides Faulkner would do the “extensive cutting job” that they felt was necessary. Faulkner paid Wasson (who believed this was six novels crammed into one) fifty bucks to do the job. Faulkner even went to New York to oversee the revisions, but when he saw the editorial scalpel being wielded, he fled, unable to bear watching his baby being sliced up. Interesting fun fact: while Wasson was having his way with Flags, Faulkner sat nearby writing The Sound and the Fury.
Ultimately, a slimmed down version (one quarter was excised) of Flags in the Dust entitled, Sartoris, was published by Harcourt. Not that Faulkner was happy about this. He felt that Flags in the Dust, despite its multiple character story lines, was the template for his “little postage stamp of native soil,” the fictional Yoknapatawpha County. He held on to all of his typescripts and hand written manuscripts which, in the course of time, found their way to the Alderman Library of the University. And there they sat for years until Faulkner’s daughter, Jill Faulkner Summers remembered that that her pappy had often talked about a restoration of Flags. Cue Mr. Douglas Day from the University of Virginia and Mr. Albert Erskine, an editor from Random House. Day and Erskine cobbled together the manuscripts and produced what is now known as Flags in the Dust, William Faulkner’s official third novel. Sartoris has been out of print since then.
I summarized the history of this novel’s publication because it got to the heart of my dilemma as I approached the third part of this Faulkner reading project: which book to read? Sartoris or Flags in the Dust? I opted for Flags. It’s a hefty slab of literature, clocking in at 432 pages in my 1973 Vintage pocket size version. Whereas Sartoris focuses on the stupidly romantic and doomed Sartoris clan, Flags tells their tale as well as those of the Benbows, the Snopeses, the McCallums, and various black servants and their families.
Does Flags succeed? It depends upon your perspective. As a first view Faulkner’s “postage stamp,” it’s an intriguing glimpse of what’s to come in his Yoknapatawpha sagas, but as a narrative, it pulls us away from the central focus of the novel: the stupidly proud tragicomedy of the Sartorises.
In the present time of the novel, young Bayard Sartoris is back from World War I, having successfully survived air combat in Europe. His twin brother John was not so lucky—he was shot down and killed behind enemy lines during the war. As we learn in the course of the book certain Sartorises are historically notorious for their dumb daredeviltry. Bayard, in fact, is the namesake of a Civil War-era Bayard who was “(N)ot so much a black sheep as a nuisance all of whose qualities were positive and unpredictable.” When he got involved in the war, “the Sartorises were privately a little glad, for now Bayard would have something to do.”
We’re mean to understand that these Sartorises are ultimately oblivious to history, duty to land and country and so forth. Wars are only bigger stages for their mad acts. Bayard returns from the war, blaming himself for John’s death, and feeling that Lost Generation ennui (if not combat-induced PTSD) that Faulkner explored in his first novel, Soldiers’ Pay. Everyone—including his relatively tame grandfather, also named Bayard, and his long Sartoris-suffering great-great aunt, Miss Jenny— crosses their fingers and hopes for the best as Bayard races around the country roads in his car just looking for trouble. It finds him.
In the meantime, the above mentioned characters—the Snopes, the McCallums, etc.—who represent different levels and directions of Southern social strata, make their first of many appearances in Faulkner’s fiction. Also of note are the black characters such as Simon and Caspey Strother, father and son, who work in the Sartoris household. While Simon is devoted to the memory of Sartorises past, Caspey has returned from the war in Europe with radical (for this Mississippi environment) ideas about racial equality: “I don’t take nothin’ f’um no white folks no mo’…War done changed all dat. If us colored folks is good enough to save France f’um de Germans, den us is good enough to have de same rights de Germans has.”
Faulkner doesn’t push this potential conflict very far. In time, Caspey bows to the reality of his world and reluctantly goes back to work. Still, it’s an intriguing observation about the domestic ironies of the War to End all Wars.
I’ll leave off there. Flags in the Dust may not be the successful work of art Faulkner hoped it would be, but it’s a fascinating read, a must for Faulkner superfans and an impressive work from a novelist who still hadn’t hit thirty.
Okay, batten down the hatches for Pt. IV of What the Faulkner?! We’ll be stepping into the world of the crazy Composons and The Sound and the Fury.
