Sentences in the dust

‘... a fairy-like piping of young frogs’ and more lines to make you love Faulkner. Yes, love. Yes, Faulkner.

Finally got around to Faulkner’s “Flags in the Dust,” having previously only read the much-cut version that was published as “Sartoris” in 1929. As a saga of family doom — Faulkner’s thing — it lacks the power and weight, the emotional heft, of what was to come over the next few years, from “The Sound and the Fury” (also 1929) to “Absalom, Absalom!” (1936).

But for pure, sentence-level writing — for lovely lines, passages of pure beauty, flashes of wry wit — I think it might be his best. I also see, more clearly than ever, the direct style-line between Faulkner and early Cormac McCarthy — the McCarthy of “Suttree.”

Anyway, some faves from “Flags in the Dust”:

The sun was almost gone and from the secret marshy places of the stream came a fairy-like piping of young frogs.

Or:

The room was cluttered with indiscriminate furniture — chairs and sofas like patient ghosts holding lightly in dry and rigid embrace yet other ghosts — a fitting place for dead Sartorises to gather and speak among themselves of glamorous and old disastrous days.

And this passage about Miss Jenny reading the afternoon newspaper out of Memphis:

She enjoyed humanity in its more colorful mutations, preferring lively romance to the most impeccable of dun fact, so she took in the more lurid afternoon paper even though it was yesterday’s when it reached her, and read with cold avidity accounts of arson and murder and violent dissolution and adultery; in good time and soon the American scene was to furnish her with diversion in the form of bootleggers’ wars, but this was not yet.

Finally, this description of old Bayard …

… in immaculate linen and a geranium like a merry wound.

Faulkner’s writing desk. Rowan Oak. Oxford, Mississippi. 2022.