Books: When the Dam Breaks

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Moral. Had Faulkner been content to let The Wild Palms rest with the convict's story, the book might have become a classic of involuntary adventure. It is a pulsing, racing story, a kind of hysterical Huckleberry Finn, its humor at once grotesque and shrewd, its moral at once grim and humane. The convict, with his thoughtless courage, his exasperation at the titanic forces unleashed against him, is Faulkner's most original and attractive character. And the whole book is conceived in the grand manner. Faulkner makes you feel the terrible fragility of man's levees, boats, prisons, other civilized trappings; he suggests that man's life is a little like the bewildered spin of the convict in the current, attended by a woman and child, never sure of where he is going.

When Faulkner finished the convict's story, however, he felt that it was incomplete. He therefore wrote another novel and inserted the chapters between chapters of the convict's tale. This second novel tells of a young New Orleans doctor who runs off with another man's wife. When she becomes pregnant he performs an abortion, as a result of which she dies and he is jailed for life.

This story reverses that of the convict—the doctor, too, is trying to erect barriers against nature—and the sick, squalid, miserable sequence of events he goes through contrasts with the nightmarish but still exhilarating adventures of the convict. It does not come off: the doctor and his mistress are not credible characters, the prose is turgid and confusing. But not even careless writing can weaken the cumulative effect of Faulkner's imaginative fertility, the boldness and originality of his themes.

Background. William Faulkner's great-grandfather entered northern Mississippi, so the legend has it, at the age of ten. Colonel William Falkner (the name is spelled both ways) ran away from his home at Middleton, Tenn., walked several hundred miles to Ripley, near Oxford, to stay with an uncle. He found the uncle in jail, charged with murder. He sat down on the courthouse steps and "swore he would some day build a railroad along the route he had walked."

He did. He grew up to own a plantation, fight under Longstreet in Lee's Army of Northern Virginia, raid with Forrest, build railroads with a fellow Confederate veteran, Colonel Thurmond, after Appomattox. He fought duels, wrote a popular thriller, The White Rose of Memphis, which had sold 160,000 copies before it went out of print 30 years ago, made the grand tour of Europe, always went armed. He also quarreled with peace-loving Partner Thurmond, ran against him for the legislature. On election day 1889, after a savage campaign, Colonel Falkner walked out unarmed after hearing he had won, met Colonel Thurmond, who shot him down on the main street of the town they both helped to build.

Drifter. The family wealth died with him. William Faulkner's grandfather moved the family to Oxford, where William, the eldest of four sons, grew up in indolence, his romantic contributions to the local literary magazine, The Double Dealer, for the amount of liquor he drank.

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