The Wild Palms, by William Faulkner

I read the two novel version of William Faulkner’s The Wild Palms. This version alternates between chapters of The Wild Palms and The Old Man, the title of which refers to the Mississippi River. Each novel is five chapters long and together they offer a pointed interplay between narratives. The Wild Palms seems to contain the main story: Henry and Charlotte meet, fall into forbidden love, travel the country, and, ultimately, experience tragedy when the abortion Henry performs on Charlotte kills her. The Old Man is the story of a convict who, while being forced to help victims of a flood, rescues a pregnant woman. They are swept downstream by the flooding Mississippi, she gives birth, and he is returned to prison in the end.

Though neither of these novels is generally considered to rank among Faulkner’s best, the writing style is noticeably his own. Both works contains many detailed descriptions of situations and people and, while the stories' events are sparse, they are constructed strongly enough to create a tight narrative. Some of the sentences are very long (taking up entire pages; of which I will provide two examples later). Here is an example of a sentence that is shorter, but is still some of the best writing from the works, showing Faulkner’s dexterity with description, exacting use of adjectives (but not overuse), and the tense, breathless expression that the sheer length of his sentences gives his writing:

But the days themselves were unchanged—the same stationary recapitulation of golden interval between dawn and sunset, the long quiet identical day, the immaculate monotonous hierarchy of noons filled with the sun’s hot honey, through which the waning year drifted in red-and-yellow retrograde of hardwood leaves sourceless and going nowhere.

Now onward, to examine the novel for plot techniques. Are Henry and Charlotte characters who create action and drive plot? Henry is quiet and remarkably passive, though intuitive and acute in his observations. Alone, he might not have created much plot. Charlotte is brash, passionate, artistic, and strong. She drags Henry along on a trip in search of freedom, and ends up dead. Together they drive the plot more strongly than either would have separately.

Charlotte’s choices seems appropriate for her character: after she informs her husband she’s fallen in love with Henry, she runs off with Henry; when selling models does not work out financially, she settles down to a job at a department store; and when she gets pregnant, she encourages Henry to perform an abortion on another woman first so he would gain experience to perform one on her. I could imagine Charlotte, before she entered the novel, flirting with everyone, having affairs with some, and running through many lovers until she settled on one who could support her financially, and emotionally—until Henry came along.

Henry’s character is a little more difficult to pin down. Some of his choices, like making Charlotte quit the department store to join him being a doctor in a mining town in winter, don’t seem to fit his character as well as Charlotte’s choices because he seems so passive—too much a babe in the woods about sexuality and working and relationships to make any sentient decision. I imagined him passively moving in with his older sister once his parents died and passively accepting his jail sentence after he killed Charlotte. I imagine, after he served his time, what he does would be determined by whom he met and what kind of relationship they form. Alone, Henry does not seem to drive the action of the novel.

However, Henry may be a form of fate, a purveying senseless violence or a guiltless innocence, that plays counter to Charlotte’s informed, strong, worldly character. Faulkner often puts a character into his novel who acts as a kind of narrative everyman (Benjy, in The Sound and the Fury or Lena Grove in Light in August, for example) to represent a person of innocent nature who, together with a person of worldly character, drive the plots of his novels.

The story in The Old Man presents some interesting comparisons and contrasts with the story in The Wild Palms. The main character in The Old Man is a convict; Harry is ultimately convicted and sent to prison for botching the abortion on Charlotte. The prisoner saves a pregnant woman and helps with the delivery of the baby; Henry makes a woman pregnant and kills her and her baby performing an abortion. The Old Man appears to be an archetypal story: the prisoners are referred to as ants often and the characters are generic; they aren’t given names. The story in The Wild Palms is intensely personal; the relationship between Henry and Charlotte almost smothers the reader. The prisoner reads “pulp-printed fables,” the kind of books that Henry writes. The flood in The Old Man overwhelms the characters and pulls them from their comfortable routines. Sexuality in The Wild Palms does much the same to Henry, ruining his future and ultimately killing Charlotte. In The Old Man, time (a popular subject for Faulkner) is an annoyance to the prisoner who accepts his jail time. To Henry, it’s his dire enemy through the work: he left his internship to be a doctor four weeks too early, he lost track of the time they spent in the woods together, he arrived at the mining site at the wrong time of year, etc. In both novels, women are the scourge of the planned out, predictable, rational lives the male characters expect to lead.

Within The Wild Palms, Faulkner often uses foreshadowing. The following example is very characteristic of the techniques he uses. When Henry and Charlotte are in the woods living off the last of their money, Faulkner writes, “Then one day something happened to him.” Two pages later, after more description of their experience in the woods, he writes, “That was when the thing happened to him.” It’s twelve pages later the reader actually finds out what exactly happened, “[Henry] had turned into a husband.” And then the reader watches his first decision as a husband, to be a doctor in a mining town, play out poorly and end in Charlotte’s death.

One event that was not foreshadowed seems inconsistent with the narrative. At the end of the novel, Charlotte’s husband (Henry had always been her unmarried lover), offers Henry a cyanide pill to kill himself instead of going to prison. This seemed out of character for Charlotte’s husband. It might have made a more graceful entry into the narrative had it been foreshadowed, or had Faulkner hinted at some aspect of Charlotte’s husband character that would cause him to do this. Perhaps Faulkner had him do it because the husband was shamed by the audience watching Henry’s trial proceedings when he asked for leniency for Henry. Maybe he offered Henry the pill as an attempt to kill him in order to regain his manhood. But it doesn’t seem consistent with the rest of the novel and it feels out of place when it happens.

Two points of interest that are not plot related. The first may just be an interesting note of prudishness characteristic of the time: The Wild Palms was written in 1939 and Faulkner has Charlotte refer to having sex as “bitching” (Henry never names it). The second seems to provide evidence that Faulkner read Hemingway’s works: Faulkner refers to the abortion as “A touch with the blade to let the air in.” In 1927, in “Hills Like White Elephants,” Ernest Hemingway refers to an abortion as, “They just let the air in and then it’s all perfectly natural.”

There is also a theme of incest running through The Wild Palms, but Faulkner doesn’t develop it like he did in The Sound and the Fury. Charlotte tells how she loved her four brothers and sought someone to marry like them, and ended up marrying one of her brothers' best friends. When she asks Henry about the abortion, Charlotte asks, “Does it matter who you do it on?” And Henry is quizzical. She adds, “That was foolish, wasn’t it, maybe I was mixed up with incest.” Faulkner may be trying to add depth to Charlotte’s character: maybe she’s not in love with her husband because she really did love her brothers more, or maybe she married him because he reminded her of her brothers, but she ended up with only affection, not lust for him, and thus got together with Henry, etc. But coming as it does, not fully developed and popping into the narrative on scattered occasions (and not being paralleled any in The Old Man), the incest theme is flimsy and only provocative, not charged with complexity and collapse as in The Sound and the Fury.

Finally, (and this part you can skip if you don’t want to make a digression from discussing plot just to read long sentences for fun!), Faulkner writes his famously long sentences throughout the work, though not as long or involved as those in Absalom, Absalom!. They seem to get longer throughout the work and reach their zenith during chapter four of The Old Man. The first sentence is a glossolalia of movement presented through the relationship of a river rat, the convict, and the pregnant woman, beautifully done by Faulkner in one sentence:

That’s what he does in order to eat and live, knowing it was a hide, a skin, but from what animal, by association, rationcination or even memory of any picture out of his dead youth, he did not know but knowing that it was the reason, the explanation, for the little lost spider-legged house (which has already begun to die, to rot from the legs upward almost before the roof was nailed on) set in that seeming and myriad desolation, enclosed and lost within the furious embrace of flowing mare earth and stallion sun, divining through pure rapport of kind for kind, hill-billy and bayout-rat, the two one and identical because of the same grudged dispensation and niggard fate of hard and unceasing travail not to gain future security, a balance in the bank or even in a soda can for slothful and easy old age, but just permission to endure and endure to buy air or feel and sun to drink for each little while, thinking (the convict), Well, anyway I am going to find out what it is sooner than I expected to, and did so, re-entered the house where the woman was just waking in the one sorry built-in straw-filled bunk which the Cajan had surrendered to her, and ate the breakfast (the rice, a semi-liquid mess violent with pepper and mostly fish considerably high, the chicory-thickened coffee) and, shirtless, followed the little scuttling bobbing bright-eyed rotten-toothed man down the crude ladder and into the pirogue.

In another example, Faulkner crams a ton description into one sentence describing a scene as it changes throughout the year. Almost poetic in its form and wording, it advances the plot too:

But four weeks later it [the river] would look different from what it did now, and did: he (the old man) had recovered from his debauch, back in banks again, the Old Man, rippling placidly toward the sea, brown and rich as chocolate between levees whose inner faces were wrinkled as though in a frozen and aghast amazement, crowned with the rich green of summer in the willows; beyond them, sixty feet below, slick mules squatted against the broad pull of middle-busters in the richened soil which would not need to be planted, which would need only to be shown a cotton seed to sprout and make; there would be the symmetric miles of strong stalks by July, purple bloom in August, in September the black fields snowed over, spilled, the middles dragged smooth by the long sacks, the long black limber hands plucking, the hot air filled with the whine of gins, the September air then but now June air heavy with locust and (the towns) the smell of new paint and the sour smell of the paste which holds wall paper—the towns, the villages, the little lost wood landings on stilts on the inner face of the levee, the lower storeys bright and rank under the new paint and paper and even the marks on spile and post and tree of May’s raging water-height fading beneath each bright silver gust of summer’s loud and inconstant rain; there was a store at the levee’s lip, a few saddled and rope-bridled mules in the sleepy dust, a few dogs, a handful of negroes sitting on the steps beneath the chewing tobacco and malaria medicine signs, and three white men, one of them a deputy sheriff canvassing for votes to beat his superior (who had given him his job) in the August primary, all pausing to watch the skiff emerge from the glitter-glare of the afternoon water and approach the land, a woman carrying a child stepping out, then a man, a tall man who, approaching, proved to be dressed in a faded but recently washed and quite clean suit of penitentiary clothing, stopping in the dust where the mules dozed and watching with pale cold humorless eyes while the deputy sheriff was still making toward his armpit that gesture which everyone present realized was to have produced a pistol in one flashing motion for a considerable time while still nothing came of it.

Then the prisoner turns himself in and chapter four ends. Classic Faulkner.