This author attempts to connect William Faulkner's personal history, the history of Mississippi, and in particular he tries to connect the Civil War to Faulkner's work. It's a complicated story.
The book is as much a discussion of civil war issues by itself as it is relating those issues to Faulkner's work.
Faulkner's work is deeply complex. I simply cannot devote the time to connecting it all by actually reading all if. I can only read commentaries like this.
William Faulkner was a man of his time and place, a Southerner thru and thru, racist by any definition, in Jim Crow America. He would never rise above his staring point.
Historians Beard and Craven. P. 52
One of Faulkner's first characters is Flem Snopes. With a name like that, you have to immediately question his sanity. P. 99
The origin of Yoknapatawpha. The first sign of a Faulkner lover is to accurately pronounce the Mississippi landscape of his most famous work. P. 100
Frontier humor with wild horses and Flem Snopes. P. 101
William Faulkner and Estelle Oldham were married on June 20, 1929. No adult relationship could match the dreams of his adolescence, and their union was never untroubled. He was already an alcoholic, a binge drinker, and prone to black-outs; Estelle soon became on if she wasn't already. They had a difficult honeymoon, at Pascagoula on the Gulf Coast, with Faulkner preferring bourbon to the bedroom, and her parents were no more pleased with the idea of him as a son-in-law than they had been ten years before. Writers were disreputable even when, as soon happened, when they appeared in the Saturday Evening Post. In 1930 Faulkner used the proceeds from such magazine sales to buy the house he called Rowan Oak, and it became a home for Estelle's son and daughter. His sense of fantasy and ability to listen made him good with children, and he was an attentive stepfather.
Mary Chestnut's diary. Big deal. P. 140
Shiloh spoke to Faulkner. P. 161
What the white South feared most was black men with guns. P. 183
"One of the war's ironies is that the most prejudiced of of the Union great captains is also remembered as a liberator." P. 185
The Emancipation Proclamation. P. 187-188
Thomas Sutpen came back home once during the war. Grant took control of the Union armies in March of 1864. His strategy required action on all fronts. P. 202-203
The South had to make defeat seem sacred. P. 205
In 1861 Jefferson's young men had stood in the square and hoped that they were brave; by the winter of 1865 they knew that they were and also knew that bravery was not enough. P. 210
Over the years the tally of Southern soldiers who said they served Nathan Bedford Forest continue to grow like the young people who said they were at Woodstock. P. 213
"I felt like anything rather than rejoicing at the downfall of a foe who had fought to long and valiantly, and suffered for a cause, though that cause was, I believe, one of the worst for which a people ever fought." General Grant after his victory at Vicksburg, P. 226
"What do the Compsons---the Sutpens and the Falkners, the Lees and the Chestnuts---what do they owe to those they held in bondage, and to their children after them?" Forty acres and a mule was rescinded. The Civil War Amendments were not enforced properly. Reconstruction expired replaced by Jim Crow. Racial tensions continue to explode today. So does inequality. The freedmen after the war would get no share of the wealth they had helped produce; those left with nothing were told instead that they must learn self-reliance and make their own way. P. 256
Go Down, Moses is a novel about Reconstruction. P. 265
P. 266
The infamous Dunning School. P. 277
The South wanted to keep the bulk of their Negroes as landless laborers. P. 281
Reconstruction didn't fail because of corruption or incompetence. It failed because most of white America did not want it to succeed. P. 281
As great as Faulkner's fiction may be, he was still a product of his environment in the first half of the 20th Century in the heart of the Confederacy which he never transcended with the same Jim Crow attitudes of his contemporaries and mistaken attitude of the "moderate" of the time that MLK justifiably pilloried. His racial statements in the 50's are problematical and cannot be wishes away. Reason not to read him, sure, as a matter of personal choice.
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