As I Lay Dying

A tour de force, in Faulkner's words

Faulkner was open about how the book was made. He called it a simple tour de force, meaning a deliberate show of skill. He took one family and put them through the two worst catastrophes he could think of, flood and fire.

He said he wrote it in about six weeks without changing a word, because he knew from the beginning where it was going. He compared it with The Sound and the Fury, which he struggled over for a year. Both books, he noticed, had a sister surrounded by a gang of brothers.

The publisher's current edition quotes him saying the same thing more sharply. He knew the last word, he said, before he wrote the first.

The Bundrens

Anse Bundren is the father. Samson, a farmer who puts the family up for a night, calls him a lazy man. Anse is good at getting other people to do his work. A student at Virginia suggested Addie had worn him down. Faulkner disagreed. He thought Anse had never liked farming and married to get children who would do it for him.

Cash, the oldest, is a carpenter who thinks in joints and angles. One of his sections is a numbered list of thirteen reasons for building the coffin on the bevel. Darl, the second son, sees more than he should. He describes his mother's death in detail while he is miles away with Jewel, stuck on the road with a broken wagon wheel. Faulkner said society would call Darl mad, but to him Darl was a pitiable, tragic human being.

Jewel is Addie's favorite. He loves one thing, a spotted horse he paid for by working nights in secret. His father is not Anse but the preacher Whitfield, which Addie's own section makes plain. Dewey Dell, the only daughter, is seventeen and secretly pregnant. Vardaman, the youngest, is a small boy who cannot make sense of his mother's death.

Vardaman caught a big fish the day Addie died, and in his mind the two deaths run together. That is where the novel's most famous section comes from. It is five words long: My mother is a fish.

Addie speaks once

Addie dies early in the book, and her one section comes long after, when her body is already on the road. She was a schoolteacher before she married. She remembers hating the children she taught.

Her section explains much of what went wrong in the family. She says her father used to tell her that the reason for living was to get ready to stay dead a long time. She says she learned from her first child that words are no good. She also tells of her affair with Whitfield, and that Jewel was his son.

Donald Kartiganer, in the Mississippi Encyclopedia, groups Addie with Faulkner's women who boldly pursue what they want. He also notes that Faulkner set this book among the hill-country farmers of Frenchman's Bend, and never called them poor whites.

Comedy, horror and a rotting body

The Library of America describes the book as a mix of comedy, horror and compassion. The horror is physical. Vardaman bores holes through the coffin lid so his mother can breathe, and two of the holes go into her face. By the time the wagon reaches the town of Mottson, buzzards are following it.

Cash breaks his leg when the wagon overturns in the river. The family sets it in cement to keep it straight, and the cement makes it worse. Faulkner said the cement showed how ignorant these people were. He also said the whole foolish journey was, in its own way, heroic, because they had promised Addie and they kept the promise.

Some of the violence is done to Dewey Dell. She goes into drugstores trying to buy something to end her pregnancy. In Jefferson a clerk named MacGowan pretends to be a doctor and tricks her into sex in the basement as her treatment.

The n-word appears four times. A druggist in Mottson uses it once in his own section. Vardaman uses it three times after the barn fire, when Cash's leg and Jewel's burned back have turned black.

Paris: Larbaud's preface and Barrault's stage

French readers met the book early. In 1934 Éditions Gallimard published Tandis que j'agonise, translated by Maurice-Edgar Coindreau with a preface by the poet and novelist Valery Larbaud.

The next year it reached the Paris stage. On 4 June 1935 the young actor Jean-Louis Barrault opened Autour d'une mère at the Théâtre Montmartre, a play he drew from the translation. Barrault played Jewel himself. Jean Dasté played Darl, Paul Higonenc played Cash and Georges Lenoir played Anse, and the painter Félix Labisse designed the sets and costumes.

Faulkner himself had been in Paris in the autumn of 1925, living at 26 rue Servandoni near the Jardin du Luxembourg. The novel is set wholly in Mississippi and was written there.