JF Murphy

Not Yet Two O'Clock: Faulkner Sets the Scene The finest thing ever written about Pickett's Charge does not appear in a history of the battle. It appears in a novel about a murder in a fictional Mississippi county, published eighty-five years after the guns fell silent, buried mid-paragraph as though its author were half embarrassed to be caught caring so much. William Faulkner set it down in Intruder in the Dust in 1948, and no historian before or since — and I include the best of them — has come closer to explaining what that afternoon became in the Southern mind after the fact of it was done. Shelby Foote would have been the first to say so. He held Faulkner above every American novelist living or dead — a fellow Mississippian, near enough a neighbor — and as a young man he once drove down to Oxford with Walker Percy to pay the great man a call, Foote marching up to the door at Rowan Oak while Percy, too awed to move, sat waiting in the car. When Foote spent twenty years writing his own three volumes on the war, it was Faulkner's shadow he wrote in, and he knew it, and never pretended otherwise. What Faulkner understood — what the passage below holds suspended like a fly in amber — is that the charge exists twice. Once in history, where it ran its course in less than an hour on the afternoon of July 3, 1863, and cannot be called back. And once in memory, where the clock stands forever at "not yet two o'clock," the brigades in position, the flags loosened, everything still in the balance — where there is still time, every time, for it not to begin. The boy in Faulkner's conceit gets to stand in that instant whenever he wants it. The men behind the rail fence got it once, and briefly, and then the word came. Notice, too, who inhabits Faulkner's tableau: Pickett with his oiled ringlets, Garnett, Kemper, Armistead, Wilcox. No Pettigrew. No Trimble. No Davis's Mississippians waiting off to the left with the railroad cut two days behind them, no Brockenbrough, no fences. Faulkner's passage does not merely describe the legend — it demonstrates how the legend was built, and who was left outside it. The boy dreams of Virginians. This series has spent its length among the men he never dreams of. But read the passage. Read it aloud if you can, the way it was built to be read, one sentence carrying you the whole way down like the slope of Seminary Ridge itself. Then look at the painting, and the men standing ranked and waiting in it, and remember that for them there was no whenever he wants it. There was only the once. — William Faulkner, "Intruder in the Dust," 1948, follows below.