The Two Williams

William Faulkner was born in 1897 into a well-to-do family in Mississippi. He grew up in the university town of Oxford and was surrounded by culture and learning. He enlisted in the Canadian Air Force in WWI and later told stories of the action he saw as a pilot. Researchers have found his stories to be false. He was married, unhappily, and he drank to excess, especially in his later years. He had bouts of depression. He set many of his novels and stories in the mythical Yoknapatawpha County. He had financial difficulties for most of his life; his books, with their difficult prose, didn’t appeal to readers. But some influential critics promoted his work, and at age fifty-two he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. He died of a heart attack thirteen years later. He now belongs to the pantheon of American authors.

William March was born in1893 into an impoverished family in Alabama. His early years were spent moving from one lumber camp to another, and he received almost no formal education. He enlisted when WWI broke out and, as a marine sergeant, he saw action in the major battles. For his bravery he received the Distinguished Service Cross, the Croix de Guerre,  and the Navy Cross. After the war he had little to say about his experiences. He began as a clerk at the Waterman Steamship Company and rose to vice-president; he became a wealthy man. He never married and there is no record of his having any intimate relationship. He was a moderate social drinker. He had bouts of depression. His novels, many of which were set in the mythical Pearl County, were critically well-received, but he had a meager readership until his last novel, The Bad Seed. Shortly after its publication he died of a heart attack at age sixty. Then he sank into obscurity.

Just the names of the two counties reflects the different approaches the authors took. Yoknapatawpha and Pearl. I find much of Faulkner’s writing so dense and convoluted as to be  impenetrable. I’ve appreciated things he has written, but, in some cases, I think youthful vanity played a role. Did I, as a teenager, really like The Sound and the Fury? Or was I enamored of the fact that I was able to make it all the way through? It was a struggle — and I won! But now, at this point in my life, I have nothing to prove to myself. I won’t read a writer who is difficult to follow.

And so here we part ways with one of the Williams.

I came upon March in my middle teens and early twenties, and he played a major role in my becoming a reader of fiction. Though I’m not claiming greatness for him, his strengths were considerable — at least, they spoke to me. And he wasn’t just a juvenile fancy; much later in life I went back to two of his novels, and they held up quite well. But I won’t be rereading his work for this essay; I’ll rely on memory. For impressions to stick — to even have power after sixty years — is a tribute. And this essay is a tribute to the William who shouldn’t be forgotten.

One of the qualities of his writing that appealed to me was his clarity. This aspect is found in his simple, unadorned prose. If he were subjected to a MFA critique, he’d probably be accused of a dull style. I can appreciate inventiveness and sparkle in prose, but I have no problem with a workmanlike approach. And an excess of talent on display (those novels which are described by reviewers as lyrical, etc) often serves to call attention to the author. It’s obvious that March believed that the author should be invisible. Never, in any of his novels or stories, do you get stuck in verbiage. His work moves along, with no obfuscation or distraction. 

Clarity also involves choices as to what to include and what to omit. March tells enough to give us the setting (a particular necessity in his rural Alabama novels), but there are no lengthy flights of descriptive prose. His people and their dilemmas were his primary focus, and he limited his efforts to developing them. He was not one of those authors who are out to impress by putting the scope and complexity of their minds on display (sometimes doing so for over 800 pages). His scope and complexity were limited to the emotional lives of his characters.

Another of his virtues is that he constructed his novels and stories. So many writers of today claim that when they sit down at their computer they have only the core of an idea — maybe just an image. They let the muse take them on their journey of discovery. This is a romantic view of the creative process, and most often, I’ve found, the structure begins to totter, to fall apart. It was not sound. March planned out his work before he set words to paper, just as an architect makes detailed plans before beginning a structure. It holds up because the beginning knows exactly where things will end. Is creativity only spontaneous? Or is it to be found in the planning? Why is thinking out a story in one’s head any less creative an endeavor then winging it? But — here’s the thing about March’s planning — the reader is not aware that it has taken place. It’s only in retrospect that one can discern how something in the beginning has an effect on something later. And it often emerges in a way that is startling but completely plausible.

Should a novel be about something that matters? Well, human nature matters to me. And that was, as I’ve noted, March’s preoccupation. He dealt mostly with aberrant emotions, with people who had been twisted in some way. Notable is how forces working on the psyche of a child can determine the entire course of a life. These forces operate on a subterranean level, which makes them all that more powerful. The people in his novels are not contrived. I stop reading many a novel when the characters lose credibility. But with March’s characters, I understood them and how the twisting that drives them took place. Even at a young age I believed in his dark, grim world, in which people and relationships are dangerous. And I found the deep-seated iconoclasm underlying his work — his cynicism about human institutions such as family, religion, patriotism — to be bracing.

I recently read Roy S. Simmonds biography, The Two Worlds of William March. Since he had little to say about March’s private life (there was little available for him to reveal), he gave lengthy synopses of the novels and stories. I barely skimmed these. The novels I knew well, but March wrote many stories, and, in my skimming, a title or a fragment given by Simmonds would open up to me a story I had, as a boy or a young man, read one time, many decades before. It was all there, in detail, even the exact ending. This is not a feat of memory; it’s a feat of creativity.

What follows are William March’s novels, in the order they were written, with a few words of description:

Company K

This war novel, by someone who knew that subject intimately, is structured in a unique way. We have 131 men give an account of an aspect of their experience. Some take up only one page, some maybe four or five. The accounts progress from boot camp to the years long after combat had ended. The men are disparate types, and their take on events reflect their differing sensibilities. The result of this approach is that no one man stands out; all are mere servants responding to War’s brutal demands.

Come in at the Door

We’re in Reedyville, in rural Pearl County, Alabama. An eight-year-old boy is caught up in the snare of the malignant emotions of adults. One of them manipulates him into saying something that isn’t true. He’s made to witness the event that is the result of his words; afterward he loses all memory of what he saw. But for the rest of his life he will be dominated by what happened on that day.

The Tallons

Another Reedville novel. It concerns two brothers, one whose good looks allow him to have his way with the women of the county. The other is born with a disfiguring harelip which also impairs his speech. A submerged guilt begins to display itself, and events move indomitably toward tragedy.

The Looking Glass

The third and last of the Reedyville novels, and the one that some critics consider to be March’s masterpiece. I couldn’t read all of it, though I tried numerous times.

October Island

The Reverend Samuel Barnfield and his wife Irma, members of a strict religious sect that requires celibacy (both are virgins), come to a South Pacific island to convert the natives — who, in their generous environment, are indifferent to any moral restrictions. Events occur that elevate Irma, in their eyes, to the status of a Goddess. Meanwhile, off stage, is Irma’s sister, who violently rebelled against their tyrannical father. A delicious brew, a true novel of ideas. (This is one of the March books that I reread; it was reviewed here.)

The Bad Seed

We’re mostly in the mind of Christine Penmark as she gradually discovers what her daughter is. And, ultimately, a long submerged memory arises, one in which she’s a child and a woman with a hatchet is calling her. The novel is diabolically constructed, and the final chillingly cynical words are an appropriate ending to March’s life as a writer. He considered The Bad Seed to be a potboiler.  But there’s a link between it and the intensely felt Company K. Rhoda is acquisitive — she wants possessions — and she will do anything to get what she wants. Even kill. And what is the basis for war?

March also wrote many stories (some of which were light, humorous). Though generally  not crafted as carefully as his novels, there are at least a dozen that can stand with the best American stories ever written. I have special affection for “The Arrogant Shoat.” It covers the life of a woman who, as a young girl, trained a shoat to do tricks; she had a dream about joining a circus and traveling the country. But everyday life sidetracked her, and she lived an everyday life. At the end, an old woman on her deathbed, she gives a summing up. Did she, as her husband claimed, live a full and happy life? I can remember, to this day, what she said. And I can also remember a scene in the middle of the story. The shoat is sold to pay for a wedding dress; it’s destined to be butchered. As it is being carted off, it tries, in its fear and bewilderment, to perform its tricks in the back of the truck. A March touch.