What if the North had won the Civil War? That technically factual counterfactual animated almost all of William Faulkner’s writing. The Mississippi novelist was born thirty-two years after Robert E. Lee surrendered to Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox, but he came of age believing in the superiority of the Confederacy: the South might have lost, but the North did not deserve to win. This Lost Cause revisionism appeared everywhere, from the textbooks that Faulkner was assigned growing up to editorials in local newspapers, praising the paternalism and the prosperity of the slavery economy, jury-rigging an alternative justification for secession, canonizing as saints and martyrs those who fought for the C.S.A., and proclaiming the virtues of antebellum society. In contrast with those delusions, Faulkner’s fiction revealed the truth: the Confederacy was both a military and a moral failure.
The Civil War features in some dozen of Faulkner’s novels. It is most prominent in those set in Yoknapatawpha County, an imaginary Mississippi landscape filled with battlefields and graveyards, veterans and widows, slaves and former slaves, draft dodgers and ghosts. In “Light in August,” the Reverend Gail Hightower is haunted by his Confederate grandfather; in “Intruder in the Dust,” the lawyer Gavin Stevens insists that all the region’s teen-age boys are obsessed with the hours before Pickett’s Charge at Gettysburg. In these books, no Southerner is spared the torturous influence of the war, whether he flees the region, as Quentin Compson does, in “The Sound and the Fury,” or whether, like Rosa Coldfield, in “Absalom, Absalom!,” she stays.
A new book by Michael Gorra, “The Saddest Words: William Faulkner’s Civil War” (Liveright), traces Faulkner’s literary depictions of the military conflict in the nineteenth century and his personal engagement with the racial conflict of the twentieth. The latter struggle, within the novelist himself, is the real war of Gorra’s subtitle. In “The Saddest Words,” Faulkner emerges as a character as tragic as any he invented: a writer who brilliantly portrayed the way that the South’s refusal to accept its defeat led to cultural decay, but a Southerner whose private letters and public statements were riddled with the very racism that his books so pointedly damned.
It’s too late to cancel Faulkner; he already cancelled himself. “I will protest to the last: no photographs, no recorded documents,” he wrote in a letter to the critic Malcolm Cowley on February 11, 1949. “It is my ambition to be, as a private individual, abolished and voided from history, leaving it markless, no refuse save the printed books; I wish I had had enough sense to see ahead thirty years ago and, like some of the Elizabethans, not signed them.”
Cowley was the editor of “The Portable Faulkner,” a 1946 anthology that collected and excerpted Faulkner’s short stories and novels, ordering them chronologically according to their story lines rather than by their publication dates. It was an attempt to rescue Faulkner from an unsurprising obscurity: many of his books are difficult, and many had been published during the Great Depression or the Second World War, when both the money and the appetite for such writing was scarce. To make a living, Faulkner had turned to writing screenplays, including those for “The Big Sleep” and “To Have and Have Not.” Cowley made the case for Faulkner’s genius, providing in the anthology a figurative as well as a literal map that showed the contours and connections of Yoknapatawpha County and its people. The volume put Faulkner’s earlier novels back into print, and helped readers make sense of his modernist texts. Cowley had already published a similar anthology of Hemingway’s work; it was a subsequent profile of “Papa” for Life that occasioned Faulkner’s letter begging off any such publicity.
Faulkner expressed his desire for authorial anonymity in other venues, too. “If I had not existed, someone else would have written me, Hemingway, Dostoyevsky, all of us,” he told The Paris Review. “Proof of that is that there are about three candidates for the authorship of Shakespeare’s plays. But what is important is Hamlet and A Midsummer Night’s Dream, not who wrote them, but that somebody did. The artist is of no importance. Only what he creates is important.”
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