Nearing the End of My Faulkner Journey

A while back I decided I should really read those Faulkner novels I'd never read before. I mean, the guy won a Nobel Prize (1949), for Pete's sake (who is Pete, by the way? The OED traces it back to 1903 and says it's "a euphemistic replacement for God"), and I taught his wonderful As I Lay Dying for the final ten years of my career.  William Faulkner, 1897-1962. He died the summer I graduated from Hiram High School.

In the summer of 2004, Joyce and I drove down to Mississippi and spent a Grand Few Days driving around seeing as many sites as we could, including, of course, his grave in Oxford.

June 13, 2004

I'd read pretty much all of the famous ones: The Sound and the Fury, Light in August, the volumes about the Snopeses. But some of the others, as they say, had slipped under the radar. And so off I went, back to FaulknerLand, and read in order of publication the ones I had not read before.

I was doing other reading at the time, mind you. But when I finished some other book by some other writer, I'd grab the next Faulkner, all of which I own, by the way, in the Library of America anthology volumes.

So ... here's a list of the ones I've read since I started this journey, beginning with Soldiers' Pay, which I began on January 28, 2017:

• Soldiers' Pay (1926)
• Mosquitoes (1927)
• Sartoris (1929)
• Sanctuary (1931)
• Pylon (1935)
• The Unvanquished (1938)
• The Wild Palms (1939)
• Go Down, Moses (1942)
• Intruder in the Dust (1948)
• Requiem for a Nun (1951)
• A Fable (1954)
• The Reivers (1962--the one I'm reading right now)

So ... I'm reading The Reivers now--his final novel. I have some vague memories of seeing the film when it came out in 1969--with Steve McQueen! (Link to film trailer.) I've ordered the DVD from Netflix and will watch it when I finish the novel--a task I'll finish (I hope) by the end of this week. Just checked in IMDb and saw it was released on Christmas Day, 1969, when Joyce and I were on our honeymoon in New Orleans ...

I'll write more about The Reivers when I finish it, but right now--and the principal reason (i.e., excuse) for this post--is a little passage I came across today, a passage I've retyped for your pleasure:

It's not men who cope with death; they resist, try to fight back and get their brains trampled out in consequence, where women just flank it, envelop it in one soft and instantaneous confederation of unresistance like cotton batting or cobwebs, already de-stingered and harmless, not merely reduced to size and usable but even useful like a penniless bachelor or spinster connection always available to fill an empty space or conduct an extra guest down to dinner. (762, Lib of Amer edition)

So ... I'm not sure what all that means, but it's all Faulkner in a sentence! Can't wait to read the rest!