Mississippi Quarterly

Beware a brother,For every brother plays the role of Jacob,And every friend spreads scandal.One deceives the other …Fraud upon fraud, deceit upon deceit.

—Jeremiah 9:3–5

That was something that probably every soldier in war has felt … that my brother is the man I am trying to kill.

—William Faulkner

The first line of Tolstoy's Anna Karenina Tells us that "Happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." William Faulkner grew up in an unhappy family. His parents, Maud and Murray Falkner, did not get along, and their discord eventually had a negative effect on the relations among their four sons, whom they played off each other. William's envy of his brothers, which had begun in childhood, expanded exponentially when he and his sibling Jack joined the allied forces during World War I, a conflict that, like many wars, was read as pitting brother against brother.

Most people grow up alongside siblings, who have both positive and negative effects on each other. Psychologists tell us that these relationships are the gateway for friendships beyond the family, and more generally, to personal socialization. Faulkner repeatedly depicted troubled sets of brothers. Only bands of brothers, however, it is said, can gain victory in combat. I would like to interrogate this myth of fraternity, [End Page 1] examining its relation to armed struggles. Fraternity lies deep in the heart of our culture, and it permeates Faulkner's work, especially the magnificent stream of writing he produced from 1926 through 1936, from Soldiers' Pay to his masterwork, Absalom, Absalom!. Faulkner's troubled relations with two of his brothers meant that many of the narratives he created had much to do with what I call his "fraternal fury." This obsession led Faulkner into much more than biographical fiction, for in his quarrel with Jack and John Falkner he found a metaphor for war, regional animosities, finance capitalism, the split consciousness of literary modernism, and, finally, the tragic racial history of the region and nation, as he turned to the "brother in black" and interracial sexuality and conflict, particularly in the masterful Go Down, Moses, which dramatizes relations between white and black members of the McCaslin family.

War became for Faulkner a central pole of masculine identity, partly through the legacy of his great-grandfather, William C. Falkner, "the Old Colonel" who fought in both the Mexican-American War and the Civil War but also became the founder of a railroad and, more importantly, a successful novelist. Throughout Faulkner's life, he was fascinated with the circumambient and glamorous legend of the Lost Cause, reiterated endlessly by his great aunts, but he would condemn war as the ultimate human disaster. In his six World War I stories, and in his novels The Unvanquished, Absalom, Absalom!, and A Fable, we see this paradox repeatedly. What has not been noted, however, is that Faulkner felt actual combat would enable him to reclaim his prominence within his family and his community, which had evaporated after he became a high school dropout, a heavy drinker, and failed to achieve either a career or marriage and paternity.

How did Faulkner's envy of his brothers begin? Identity of any sort proceeds from the mother. As Maud Falkner's firstborn, Faulkner always had a special relation to her. When he was a child, his position as eldest and, for a time, the largest of the siblings presented him with privilege and power. Faulkner's solitary reign ended in 1899 when his brother Murry Charles Jr. ("Jack") was born. Two years later a second rival, John Wesley Thompson III ("Johncy") joined the family. Ominously, Johncy was born on September 24, a day before William's fourth birthday. This meant that for the rest of their lives, his birthday would be celebrated the day before William's, even though William [End Page 2] was born first. As the brothers aged, Jack—and especially the tall and handsome John—came to exceed William in size and in athletic ability and...