The Wild Palms

Speaking at the Purcell Room early last year, Carlos Fuentes reiterated the well-established notion that for him and countless other writers of the great Latin American Boom, it was Faulkner that showed them the way.

And so I have occasionally dipped into his texts, albeit with little enthusiasm. I think the problem always was the the world of the USA's deep south just didn't appeal to me that much as a millieux. Then last year I 'discovered' Cormac McCarthy and my reticence for all things howdeedoodee started to recede.

Reading The Wild Palms (aka If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem) the debt that McCarthy owes to Faulkner is clear, but what of all those magical realists? (It actually took this superb short story, A Rose for Emily, emailed to me by Scott, for me to see without any shadow of a doubt the tensile hilito attached to the big toe of Gabriel García Márquez.)

Flicking through the pages of this novel now I find I have marked out passage after passage for its exceptional vividness or wit. Yet much of the narrative is also as awkward as the two male characters whose very maladroitness drives the pair of alternating storylines.

One is the tale of a luckless med-school grad called Wilbourne who absconds with a wealthy man's wife and appears to do everything possible to worsen his (and her) fortune, while the other tells of an inept train robber who somewhat accidentally escapes from prison when the levees break flooding the countryside, and duly finds himself drifting in a boat with a pregnant woman whose presence he can barely tolerate.

One little rule I have with fiction is that if dialogue is so obtuse that I am unsure of what the characters are trying to say even after re-reading an exchange of words several times, then how were they themselves supposed to have kept hold of the right end of the stick?

And where the dialogue is intelligible it is just a little too grandiose. In the central conversation between Wilbourne and McCord (apparently based on Hemingway) Wilbourne ends his diatribe on the horrors of respectability thus: "it was the mausoleum of love, it was the stinking catafalque of the dead corpse borne between the olfactoryless walking shapes of the immortal unsentient demanding ancient meat." Whatever doubts I might have about a relationship, somehow I don't think I'd express them quite like that to a drinking buddy!

There's another literary guideline that I suspected was being violated here: that the reader must feel that the decisions that the characters take are inevitable...under the circumstances. "I have made a bust of that part of my life which I threw away," Wilbourne ruefully muses towards the end, but I still couldn't help feeling that this bust had lacked the proper determination of tragedy.

Yet Faulkner's wry, omniscient narrator keeps coming up with magesterial flourishes, including some descriptions of landscape and atmospheric conditions that must leave even the likes of McCarthy drooling with awe. I have lived beside the Thames for 17 years and have always imagined how I might put this phenomenon into words:

"It was full dark now. That is, night had completely come, the gray dissolving sky had vanished, yet as though in perverse ratio surface visibility had sharpened, as though the light which the rain of the afternoon had washed out of the air had gathered upon the water as the rain itself had done, so that the yellow flood spread before him now with a quality almost phosphorescent, right up to the instant where vision ceased."

He even does southern lawmen better than McCarthy!

"A...man with the indelible mark of ten thousand southern deputy sheriffs, urban and suburban − the snapped hat-brim, the sadist's eyes, the slightly and unmistakably bulged coat, the air not swaggering exactly but of a formally pre-absolved brutality."