Snopes: The Hamlet, The Town, The Mansion

There are so many things to celebrate about this magnificent trilogy. I have elected here to speak, in awe and honor, about only a couple of things. One is the rich variety of Faulkner’s method, his endlessly inventive ways and means of telling stories. He has opened up new territories for all the writers who have come and will come after him. He has changed our ways of thinking about the power and glory of fiction. He has challenged writers and readers alike, all over the world, to bring and to give to the experience of his art nothing less than the best they have. He has demonstrated that they (we) will be well rewarded.

And I have stressed his magical capacity at characterization. The events, outrageous or quotidian, that occur in these novels are perfectly presented, executed with a timing and finesse that the finest athletes could envy. But they work, they capture our attention and sustain our involvement because they happen to characters we can care about and believe in. He presents the surface—Flem’s bow tie, Ratliff’s blue shirt, Stevens’ corncob pipe—directly and engages us with an intense physicality. Their flesh and bones seem real enough to suffer or rejoice, and the world they move in is not so much described as felt. And, above all, no matter how foolish or flawed they may be, no matter how educated or ignorant, they are blessed with the equality of an inner life and being that renders even the least of them worthy of full attention. All of this is clear, at once poetic and explicit, in the final pages of The Mansion when both Stevens and Ratliff unknowingly echo the prayer of the preacher Goodyhay—“Save us, Christ, the poor sons of bitches.” And the classic poor s.o.b. Mink Snopes has a final and authentic vision of himself among the dead, “himself among them, equal to any, good, as any, brave as any, being inextricable from, anonymous with all of them.…” Faulkner has been sometimes faulted for giving deep thoughts and feelings to common characters, but that criticism can come only from a different vision of mankind, a vision as cold and mechanical as that of Flem Snopes. Faulkner’s inclusive, democratic vision of the equality of human souls shines through all his characters and makes them matter. There is much laughter in the Snopes trilogy, but there are tears also.

A great deal has been written by scholoars and critics about Faulkner and about this trilogy. Some of it is extremely valuable to a fuller and deeper appreciation of his work. But my strong suggestion to readers coming to these novels for the first time (and there will be generations of you) is to plunge in and fare forward, allowing the experience of the story to happen as it does, without any additional mediation or guidance. Experience y before turning to or trusting the opinions and judgments of others, myself included.

The one big exception to this rule is the biography by Joseph Blotner, preferably the revised, one-volume version of 1984, wherein the story of the creation of the Snopes novels and the public reception of each as it first appeared is followed closely and accurately and does not in any way lessen the original impact. It also seems to me likely that the words and thoughts of Faulkner, himself, about these books, to be found in the Selected Letters of William Faulkner (1977) can only serve to enhance the reader’s experience.

—GEORGE GARRETT

THE HAMLET

TO PHIL STONE

CONTENTS

BOOK ONE

FLEM

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

BOOK TWO

EULA

Chapter One

Chapter Two

BOOK THREE

THE LONG SUMMER

Chapter One

Chapter Two

BOOK FOUR

THE PEASANTS

Chapter One

Chapter Two

BOOK ONE

FLEM

CHAPTER ONE

Frenchman’s Bend was a section of rich river-bottom country lying twenty miles southeast of Jefferson. Hill-cradled and remote, definite yet without boundaries, straddling into two counties and owning allegiance to neither, it had been the original grant and site of a tremendous pre-Civil War plantation, the ruins of which—the gutted shell of an enormous house with its fallen stables and slave quarters and overgrown gardens and brick terraces and promenades—were still known as Old Frenchman’s place, although the original boundaries now existed only on old faded records in the Chancery Clerk’s office in the county courthouse in Jefferson, and even some of the once-fertile fields had long since reverted to the cane-and-cypress jungle from which their first master had hewed them.