the innocent American caught up in the malevolent spell of Europe discards the blinders of naivete. “Don’t try to be good,” Countess Gemini advises her. “Be a little wicked, feel a little wicked, for once in your life.” Beneath the outward charm of these upper crust lives sizzles a cauldron of mistrust, jealousy and revenge, intricate plots, and hidden pasts, and plain cruelty.
All The Portrait of a Lady lacks is sex. In a novel which otherwise so richly evokes personality, its absence is striking. How, one wonders, does the intimate life of Isabel and her husband reveal, if at all, early signs of the descending coldness? We see occasional hints of something other than conversational repartee between Osmond and his old lover, say; or Isabel’s rough-hewn newspaper friend and her traveling companion. But there’s onlya single impetuous and passionate kiss in the whole book, and this after some 500 pages. To a modern reader, it seems unnatural and archaic, a sad casualty of its times.
All the rest of this dense psychological portrait, however, seems as fresh and alive as dinner with one’s most interesting friend, at her most enthralling.
As I Lay Dying
____________
By William Faulkner
First published in 1930
How to articulate the strangled voices of the inarticulate?
William Faulkner does it in As I Lay Dying .
In it, he writes of the death of Addie Bundren and her family’s tragedyburdened trek across back country Mississippi to bury her. The Bundrens bear washed out bridges, the drowning of their mules, fire, the duplicity of townspeople, and their own ignorance, while all the while Addie’s corpse smolders under the southern sun and buzzards hover overhead.
Good story—yet it accounts for barely a hundredth’s part of the novel’s power. Much more resides in the intensely wrought inner lives of the family members—poor, unsophisticated, country folk not given to expressing much in the way of finer feelings, yet each of whom is granted life through Faulkner’s artistry.
Anse, the father: Proud, stubbornly intent on hewing to his wife’s dying wishes—and also on getting a new set of teeth, to “get my mouth fixed where I could eat God’s own victuals as a man should.”
Cash, one of four sons, patient coffin maker, hewer of beveled edges, philosopher of wood and life: “The animal magnetism of a dead body,” he pronounces, in one of a numbered list of principles, “makes the stress come slanting, so the seams and joints of a coffin are made on the bevel.”
Dewey Dell, the only daughter, seventeen and pregnant: “I feel like a wet seed wild in the hot blind earth.”
Darl, the oldest son, whose eyes see more than the others, whose tangled brain ultimately hatches an act of mad impetuosity—the instrument for much of Faulkner’s literary virtuosity: As the brothers carry the coffin, “Cash begins to fall behind, hobbling to keep up, breathing harshly; then he is distanced and
Jewel carries the entire front end alone, so that, tilting as the path begins to slant, it begins to rush away from me and slip down the air like a sled upon invisible snow, smoothly evacuating atmosphere ...”
On one hand, Faulkner’s story confirms stereotypes—of ignorant rural folk, barely touched by civilization, victims of their own dumb pride, getting into one impossible, sometimes funny scrape after another—the Keystone Kops of Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi.
And yet Faulkner undermines stereotypes, too, laying to rest the conceit that maybe such people are not quite so human as the rest of us, are less “interesting,” less rewarding of our attention. Their minds may not work like those of more educated people. But their sensibilities are no less rich.
And, in some ways, may be more so, their lives being so much closer to the growings and strainings and dyings of nature. Dewey Dell, alone in the night: “I feel the darkness rushing past my breast, past the cow; I begin to rush upon the
All The Portrait of a Lady lacks is sex. In a novel which otherwise so richly evokes personality, its absence is striking. How, one wonders, does the intimate life of Isabel and her husband reveal, if at all, early signs of the descending coldness? We see occasional hints of something other than conversational repartee between Osmond and his old lover, say; or Isabel’s rough-hewn newspaper friend and her traveling companion. But there’s onlya single impetuous and passionate kiss in the whole book, and this after some 500 pages. To a modern reader, it seems unnatural and archaic, a sad casualty of its times.
All the rest of this dense psychological portrait, however, seems as fresh and alive as dinner with one’s most interesting friend, at her most enthralling.
As I Lay Dying
____________
By William Faulkner
First published in 1930
How to articulate the strangled voices of the inarticulate?
William Faulkner does it in As I Lay Dying .
In it, he writes of the death of Addie Bundren and her family’s tragedyburdened trek across back country Mississippi to bury her. The Bundrens bear washed out bridges, the drowning of their mules, fire, the duplicity of townspeople, and their own ignorance, while all the while Addie’s corpse smolders under the southern sun and buzzards hover overhead.
Good story—yet it accounts for barely a hundredth’s part of the novel’s power. Much more resides in the intensely wrought inner lives of the family members—poor, unsophisticated, country folk not given to expressing much in the way of finer feelings, yet each of whom is granted life through Faulkner’s artistry.
Anse, the father: Proud, stubbornly intent on hewing to his wife’s dying wishes—and also on getting a new set of teeth, to “get my mouth fixed where I could eat God’s own victuals as a man should.”
Cash, one of four sons, patient coffin maker, hewer of beveled edges, philosopher of wood and life: “The animal magnetism of a dead body,” he pronounces, in one of a numbered list of principles, “makes the stress come slanting, so the seams and joints of a coffin are made on the bevel.”
Dewey Dell, the only daughter, seventeen and pregnant: “I feel like a wet seed wild in the hot blind earth.”
Darl, the oldest son, whose eyes see more than the others, whose tangled brain ultimately hatches an act of mad impetuosity—the instrument for much of Faulkner’s literary virtuosity: As the brothers carry the coffin, “Cash begins to fall behind, hobbling to keep up, breathing harshly; then he is distanced and
Jewel carries the entire front end alone, so that, tilting as the path begins to slant, it begins to rush away from me and slip down the air like a sled upon invisible snow, smoothly evacuating atmosphere ...”
On one hand, Faulkner’s story confirms stereotypes—of ignorant rural folk, barely touched by civilization, victims of their own dumb pride, getting into one impossible, sometimes funny scrape after another—the Keystone Kops of Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi.
And yet Faulkner undermines stereotypes, too, laying to rest the conceit that maybe such people are not quite so human as the rest of us, are less “interesting,” less rewarding of our attention. Their minds may not work like those of more educated people. But their sensibilities are no less rich.
And, in some ways, may be more so, their lives being so much closer to the growings and strainings and dyings of nature. Dewey Dell, alone in the night: “I feel the darkness rushing past my breast, past the cow; I begin to rush upon the
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