To begin, the cover image you see on the left is not what the cover of my copy looks like. It is, so far as I can determine, the cover of the most recent Vintage paperback edition; my edition is also a Vintage paperback, but was published in 1966, and has a rather tacky yellow and brown photo of some birds and marshes on the cover. My edition was also rather poorly typeset and printed, but the spine was nice and supple, so it still felt nice and comfortable in the hands. About the actual content of the book: it would be better to call this two separate, interlaced stories, joined more by common (and contrasting) themes, than a single, unified novel. The first tale, the one the novel opens with and spends the most pages on, is called “The Wild Palms” (the title of the novel was intended to be If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem, but was renamed The Wild Palms by Random House, the original publishers back in 1939), and concerns a young almost-doctor (Harry Wilbourne) and his mistress (Charlotte, who’s last name I can’t recall and can’t be bothered to look up), the wife of another man, and the first woman he has ever loved (in all senses of the word). This storyline, like the other (which I will come to shortly), chiefly concerns the relationship between a man and a woman in desperate circumstances, although those circumstances are of their own choosing. Charlotte, for reasons that may have been clear to readers in 1939, but were not clear to me, is running away from a life with her successful, more or less kind husband, her children, and all the domestic bliss you could possibly imagine. She may or may not fall in love with Harry at a party (another thing that is not clear, but may have been to readers when it was originally published; writers in the 1920s and ’30s—and American writers in particular, I find—had a way of saying things without saying them that is more obtuse than their European counterparts, and I often cannot figure out just what the hell they are trying to say), but he certainly falls in love with her. With virtually no conversation they decide to live together, and she leaves her husband. He (the husband) tries to offer them financial support, a move that I can actually understand; the jilted lover does indeed feel a strange mixture of anger, pain, and guilt, but also still feels a kind of proprietariness, an urge to continue protecting the happiness of the one he loves. At any rate, the lovers refuse his help, and they head out on the road to live a strange life, a life that is somehow both decadent and spare. Faulkner is not at his best in this part of the novel. I admit that I am not at all partial to these types of stories (I am reminded, though the similarities are only superficial, of Fitzgerald’s Gatsby, a novel which I hated because it was vague, circular, and decadent, describing a myth of America which is often cited by Americans as the myth they love to tell about themselves, but which I have neither access nor an attraction to, and am therefore bored by), but Faulkner does not seem at home with the material. His language, the slow, dignified, graceful prose, almost biblical in its strength, is simply too ponderous and thoughtful for the flitting, wasteful, nearly insubstantial life that he is describing. Harry and Charlotte certainly believe there is substance to their quest (his towards a perfect and therefore unattainable love with a woman who does not, and never did, exist, and her away from a life she never felt at home in, but could never quite articulate why), but that substance never materializes. He becomes the angst-ridden teenage poet that most young men eventually grow out of, and she becomes frenetic, nearly crazed, but somehow still managing to embody a kind of archetype of the Practical Housewife. She dies, eventually, from a failed abortion she forces Harry to perform (the sequences describing her post-abortion decline and the consequences of her death, both at the beginning and end of the book, are the only genuinely strong portions of this story, the only times at which Faulkner is truly Faulkner). It was, at times, a struggle to finish the book more or less exclusively because of this storyline.
“The Old Man” is something different. “The Old Man” follows a convict from a Parcham, Mississippi work farm as he is dispatched during a flood to rescue two citizens trapped on their roofs. He and the pregnant woman he does manage to rescue are swept away down one of the Mississippi’s many tributaries (the title of this storyline refers, of course, to the mighty river itself) and are effectively lost for about seven weeks. Neither the convict, nor the woman, nor, in fact, the baby she eventually gives birth to on the skiff, are ever named. The distance works for Faulkner, as it usually does. One of the strengths of his prose is how it is sober, concrete, and often clinical in tone; the actual content of his books, his stories and characters, are intensely human and quite complex emotionally. For most writers that kind of distance would rob them of the chance to fully explore their characters, but Faulkner seems to see it as an opportunity. Faulkner is in full form in this portion of the novel, with the convict being at once a blank space and a lightning rod for all the feelings the rest of the book evokes. The only fault, if it can be called such a thing, is that the entire storyline seems to be a set up (well, not really, that’s just sort of what happens in the last sentence or two) for an elaborate joke about the general infidelity of the female sex.
In short: not his best book, but definitely worth checking out.
Next, Orlando, by Virginia Woolf.
