The Unvanquished
Authors: William Faulkner
T
HE
M
ARBLE
F
AUN
(1924)
S
OLDIER’S
P
AY
(1926)
M
OSQUITOES
(1927)
S
ARTORIS
(1929) [F
LAGS IN THE
D
UST
(1973)]
T
HE
S
OUND AND THE
F
URY
(1929)
As I L
AY
D
YING
(1930)
S
ANCTUARY
(1931)
T
HESE
13 (1931)
L
IGHT IN
A
UGUST
(1932)
A G
REEN
B
OUGH
(1933)
D
OCTOR
M
ARTINO AND
O
THER
S
TORIES
(1934)
P
YLON
(1935)
A
BSALOM
, A
BSALOM! (1936)
T
HE
U
NVANQUISHED
(1938)
T
HE
W
ILD
P
ALMS [
I
F
I F
ORGET
T
HEE
J
ERUSALEM] (1939)
T
HE
H
AMLET
(1940)
G
O
D
OWN
, M
OSES AND
O
THER
S
TORIES
(1942)
I
NTRUDER IN THE
D
UST
(1948)
K
NIGHT’S
G
AMBIT
(1949)
C
OLLECTED
S
TORIES OF
W
ILLIAM
F
AULKNER
(1950)
N
OTES ON A
H
ORSETHIEF
(1951)
R
EQUIEM FOR A
N
UN
(1954)
A F
ABLE
(1954)
B
IG
W
OODS
(1955)
T
HE
T
OWN
(1957)
T
HE
M
ANSION
(1959)
T
HE
R
EIVERS
(1962)
U
NCOLLECTED
S
TORIES OF
W
ILLIAM
F
AULKNER (1979, POSTHUMOUS)
F
IRST
V
INTAGE
I
NTERNATIONAL
E
DITION
, O
CTOBER 1991
Copyright
© 1934, 1935, 1936, 1938 by
William Faulkner
Copyright renewed
1961, 1962
by William Faulkner
Copyright renewed
1964, 1965
by Estelle Faulkner and Jill
Faulkner Summers
Notes copyright
© 1990
by Literary Classics of the United States
,
Inc
.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published by Random House, Inc., New York, in 1938. This revised text and the notes are reprinted from
Novels 1936–1940
by William Faulkner, published by The Library of America, 1990, by permission.
“Ambuscade,” “Retreat,” “Raid,” “Riposte in Tertio” (under the title “The Unvanquished”), and “Vendée” appeared originally in
The Saturday Evening Post
. “Skirmish at Sartoris” was first published in
Scribner’s Magazine
.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Faulkner, William, 1897–1962.
The unvanquished / William Faulkner ; drawings by Edward
Shenton.
—1st Vintage international ed.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-307-79219-8
I. Title.
PS3511.A86U5 1991
813′.52—dc20 91-50010
v3.1_r1
An editor’s note on Noel Polk’s corrections to the text of
The Unvanquished
is set out at the end of this volume.
THE
UNVANQUISHED
Drawings by
EDWARD SHENTON
1.
B
ehind the smokehouse that summer, Ringo and I had a living map. Although Vicksburg was just a handful of chips from the woodpile and the River a trench scraped into the packed earth with the point of a hoe, it (river, city, and terrain) lived, possessing even in miniature that ponderable though passive recalcitrance of topography which outweighs artillery, against which the most brilliant of victories and the most tragic of defeats are but the loud noises of a moment. To Ringo and me it lived, if only because of the fact that the sunimpacted ground drank water faster than we could fetch it from the well, the very setting of the stage for conflict a
prolonged and wellnigh hopeless ordeal in which we ran, panting and interminable, with the leaking bucket between wellhouse and battlefield, the two of us needing first to join forces and spend ourselves against a common enemy, time, before we could engender between us and hold intact the pattern of recapitulant mimic furious victory like a cloth, a shield between ourselves and reality, between us and fact and doom. This afternoon it seemed as if we would never get it filled, wet enough, since there had not even been dew in three weeks. But at last it was damp enough, damp-colored enough at least, and we could begin. We were just about to begin. Then suddenly Loosh was standing there, watching us. He was Joby’s son and Ringo’s uncle; he stood there (we did not know where he had come from; we had not seen him appear, emerge) in the fierce dull early afternoon sunlight, bareheaded, his head slanted a little, tilted a little yet firm and not askew, like a cannonball (which it resembled) bedded hurriedly and carelessly in concrete, his eyes a little red at the inner corners as negroes’ eyes get when they have been drinking, looking down at what Ringo and I called Vicksburg. Then I saw Philadelphy, his wife, over at the woodpile, stooped, with an armful of wood already gathered into the crook of her elbow, watching Loosh’s back.
