In brief
The Compsons of Jefferson, Mississippi, were once governors and generals. By 1928 they have sold the pasture to a golf club, and the last son who can earn keeps the household on what he can steal. The novel is four days in the life of that collapse: three of them told from inside three brothers, the fourth from outside, on Easter Sunday, with the family’s cook at its centre. Benjy, thirty-three, cannot speak. Quentin kills himself at Harvard in 1910. Jason clerks in a store and hates everyone. Their sister Caddy, whom all three love or need or punish, has been sent away and is barely allowed in the house.
The first pages are as hard as any in American fiction, and nothing later is that hard.
The argument
Faulkner’s novel argues, I think, that a family can be destroyed by the way it remembers. Each brother has a different fatal relation to time. Benjy has no past tense: a golfer calling “caddie” across his lost pasture brings his sister back and she is gone again in the same breath. Quentin has nothing else. His father hands him a watch as “the mausoleum of all hope and desire”, and he spends his last day trying not to hear it. Jason has only grudges and the next telegram from the cotton market.
Against them stands Dilsey, who cooks the breakfast, climbs the stairs, takes the boy to church and weeps through the sermon. “I’ve seed de first en de last,” she tells her daughter, and “I seed de beginnin, en now I sees de endin.”
The centre of the novel is an absence. Caddy is its subject and has no section. Everything we know of her is what a man needed her to be: the smell of trees to Benjy, the family’s honour to Quentin, a source of cash to Jason. Faulkner saw what he had made. “So I, who never had a sister and was fated to lose my daughter in infancy, set out to make myself a beautiful and tragic little girl”, he wrote in an introduction of about 1933 that he did not publish. The sentence is tender and it is also a confession: the men in this book do the same thing to her.
The shape of the book
The novel has four sections, each headed by a date, and they are not in order. The first is April Seventh, 1928, a Saturday, Benjy’s birthday and the eve of Easter. The second goes back eighteen years to June Second, 1910, Quentin’s last day. The third is April Sixth, 1928, Good Friday and Jason’s day. The fourth is April Eighth, 1928, Easter, seen from outside. A reader moves from no language to too much, then to spite, then to something like daylight.
Faulkner’s own account is that he kept failing. “I had a quarter of the book written, but it still wasn’t all”, he said, and then Quentin told it, then Jason, “Then I tried to tell the story and it still was not enough.” The novel feels less like a design than a series of raids on one small event.
That event is a picture. Faulkner said the book “began with a mental picture”: children sent out of the house on the day of their grandmother’s death, and the girl climbing a pear tree to look in at the window and report to her brothers below, her clothes muddied by the stream. A generation later her daughter climbs down the same tree and leaves for good.
The voices
Benjy’s section opens with an unexplained game: “Through the fence, between the curling flower spaces, I could see them hitting.” Everything is sensation in plain words. He cannot infer, so the reader has to. He notices that “Caddy smelled like trees”, and when she starts to smell of perfume he howls until she washes. This man’s world is complete, and we are the ones who lack the key.
Quentin’s prose is the reverse, educated and exhausted, with punctuation falling away as the day goes on. He repeats his father’s lines like a man reciting a sentence: “Because no battle is ever won he said. They are not even fought.” By the end he hardly stops: “was the saddest word of all there is nothing else in the world”. On that last day he buys two six-pound flatirons, wanders out of Cambridge and buys bread for a small Italian girl who follows him, and is arrested for abducting her. It is comedy, given to a man with hours to live.
Jason begins with the most frightening first line in Faulkner: “Once a bitch always a bitch, what I say.” He is funny, which is the trap. The reader relaxes, and is laughing with a man who embezzles his niece’s support money and torments her for it. The fourth section is a narrator’s, beginning “The day dawned bleak and chill”. The relief is enormous, and the prose is suddenly capable of saying of Benjy’s cry that “It might have been all time and injustice and sorrow become vocal for an instant by a conjunction of planets.” Benjy himself had never been able to do more than go along the fence “trying to say”.
The coloured ink
Faulkner told his friend and editor Ben Wasson that the Benjy section ought to be printed with different colours for the different times. When Wasson, without asking, replaced the italics with line spaces in the galleys, Faulkner wrote back in fury from Mississippi, and the Library of America quotes the letter. The italics were necessary, he said, to show “that unbroken-surfaced confusion of an idiot which is outwardly a dynamic and logical coherence”, and “I wish publishing was advanced enough to use colored ink for such”. He ended: “I’ll just have to save the idea until publishing grows up to it.”
It nearly happened in his lifetime. James B. Meriwether’s textual history records Random House’s proposal of 1933, a limited edition with typography by the Grabhorn Press and a new introduction. Faulkner marked up his copy in coloured crayon and sent it in. The edition never appeared and the copy is lost.
In 2012 the Folio Society printed it: two volumes, inks in fourteen colours, a bookmark as key and a limited run of 1,480 copies that soon sold out, with the time strands decided by the scholars Noel Polk and Stephen M. Ross, whose Reading Faulkner commentary came with it. I am not sure Faulkner would have been right to want it at fourteen. Colour tells you which time you are in before you have earned it, and it has to settle every ambiguity, whereas italics say only that something has changed, as Benjy’s senses do. Still, it will carry many first-time readers through to Quentin who would otherwise have given up.
The Compson Appendix
In 1945 Malcolm Cowley was building The Portable Faulkner and could not find a clean way to excerpt this novel. Faulkner offered a genealogy instead. He told Cowley “I should have done this when I wrote the book”, and told his publisher “Be sure and print the appendix first”. The Digital Yoknapatawpha entry dates it to the Viking volume of 1946 under the title “1699-1945 The Compsons”, and to the Modern Library double volume that year, where it did go first. Later editions moved it to the back, and Noel Polk left it out of his corrected text of 1984.
It is a different book in miniature, chilly and showy, in the voice of a historian who knows what the town knows. It carries the family back to a Quentin MacLachan fleeing Culloden, and it gives Jason the line every reader remembers, “The first sane Compson since before Culloden”. It also hands us Caddy’s later life, which the novel withholds: a librarian finds a magazine photograph of her with a Nazi general and takes it to Jason and to Dilsey, and nobody will claim her. For Dilsey’s family it offers two words: “They endured.”
The Appendix contradicts the novel, because he wrote it without rereading. Miss Quentin climbs down a rainpipe instead of the pear tree, and the money is different. Cowley pointed this out. Faulkner replied that “the inconsistencies in the Appendix prove that to me the book is still alive after 15 years”. I think the Appendix is magnificent as a story and bad as an instruction. Read first, it explains what the novel makes you discover. Read it after, as a late, partly unreliable fifth telling. As for “They endured”, it is a tribute that also relieves white readers of any further curiosity about who Dilsey was.
The people
Benjy Compson
Benjy was named Maury until his mother changed the name when his condition became clear. He is castrated after running at schoolgirls at the gate, “trying to say”, and in 1928 he is looked after by a boy who wants a quarter for the show. He registers every loss and judges none.
Quentin Compson
Quentin is sent to Harvard on the sale of a pasture: “We have sold Benjy’s pasture so that Quentin may go to Harvard”. He tells his father the worst thing he can think of, “I have committed incest I said Father it was I it was not Dalton Ames”, and Faulkner later said that this conversation happened only in Quentin’s head. He wants the family’s shame to be spectacular rather than ordinary.
Jason Compson
Jason lost a promised job at a bank when Caddy’s marriage collapsed, and he has made the world pay. He is the most openly racist voice in the book, in a novel whose white speakers use the language of their time freely.
Caddy and Miss Quentin
Caddy is the child who climbs the tree and the only Compson with any nerve. Pregnant by a man she will not marry, she is married off to another and thrown out when he finds out. Her daughter, named after the dead brother, is raised in the house under Jason’s thumb, and goes in the night before Easter with the money he has stolen from her. It is the nearest thing the book has to a happy ending, and all we are shown of it is an empty room.
Dilsey Gibson
Dilsey was modelled on Caroline Barr, the family servant to whom Faulkner later dedicated Go Down, Moses. Her dignity is real and the writing about it is a white man’s writing, in phonetic dialect while his white characters are spelled straight. Admire her and notice who is doing the admiring.
How it was made
Faulkner was thirty and thought he was finished as a writer. His third novel, Flags in the Dust, had been refused and then cut down to Sartoris, and in that mood, he said, “When I began it I had no plan at all. I wasn’t even writing a book.” It started as a short story and took about six months. The working title was Twilight; the final one comes from Macbeth’s speech about life as a tale told by an idiot. Harcourt Brace turned the manuscript down. Harrison Smith, the editor who liked it, left to form his own firm with Jonathan Cape, took Ben Wasson with him, and published the book on 7 October 1929, three weeks before the Wall Street crash. A booklet by the novelist Evelyn Scott came with early copies to explain it.
Readers and critics
Clifton Fadiman, in The Nation, called the theme and characters “trivial, unworthy of the enormous and complex craftsmanship expended on them”. Faulkner’s money came from Sanctuary in 1931, and Cowley’s Portable did as much as anything to restore him before the Nobel Prize of 1949. Sartre’s essay of 1939 read the novel as a philosophy of time, with the present swallowed by the past. Recent critics have turned to what the novel does with Caddy, disability and race. Faulkner’s own verdict, from the Paris Review interview of 1956, applied to all his contemporaries: he rated them on “our splendid failure to do the impossible”.
Afterlives
Martin Ritt’s film (1959) has Yul Brynner as Jason and Joanne Woodward as Miss Quentin, who stays, and it has few defenders. James Franco’s film (2014) has Franco as Benjy and was shown out of competition at Venice.
What is free, and where
The novel’s position depends on where you are. Published in the United States in 1929, it came out of copyright there on 1 January 2025. Faulkner died on 6 July 1962, so in the EU and the United Kingdom, where protection lasts for the author’s life plus seventy years, it stays in copyright until 1 January 2033. Readers in Prague or Paris should buy a copy or use a library. The link on this page is to Standard Ebooks, a corrected text cleared for the United States, which warns readers elsewhere to check their local law. It rests on a transcription at Faded Page, a Canadian site, since in Canada the old term of life plus fifty ran out for Faulkner at the end of 2012. The novel is also at Project Gutenberg, again as public domain in the USA. These hold the 1929 text only. The Appendix was published in 1946 and is not in them, and neither are Polk’s corrected text or the Folio edition.
How to read it
- Do it Faulkner’s way. Asked what readers should do if they could not follow him after two or three goes, he said, “Read it four times.”
- Treat the Benjy section as music on a first pass. Italics mark a jump in time. The names of whoever is minding him tell you when: Versh in the early years, T. P. in the middle, Luster in 1928.
- Mind the two Quentins and the two Jasons. Quentin is both the brother and Caddy’s daughter, and Jason both the son and the father. Benjy’s old name, Maury, is his uncle’s.
- Read Sunday and then go back. Most people understand the first section only after the fourth.
- Leave the Appendix until the end. Polk’s corrected text is the one to own, with the Norton Critical Edition, which reinstates the Appendix, as the best single volume with notes.
Read next
- William Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom! (1936). Quentin in Harvard again, telling a worse Southern story.
- William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying (1930). The same method, a poorer family and far more jokes, written soon afterwards.
- James Joyce, Ulysses (1922). Where the method came from.
- Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway (1925). One day, inner lives and a suicide, at the opposite social pole.