If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem

If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem by William Faulkner. “If I forget thee, O Jerusalem” is from Psalm 137:5.

Let’s start by talking about Faulkner’s book. Is it a novel? Hard to say. There are two seemingly totally unrelated stories in it. “The Wild Palms” and “Old Man” each have five sections. Does a book with sections alternating between two novellas constitute a novel? The method of construction here is intriguing. Faulkner did not write each story in turn. Instead, he wrote it just as it appears, alternating back and forth between each section.

It is easy to tell from reading the book, and is confirmed by Faulkner’s own account of the writing, that “The Wild Palms” is the primary story, while “Old Man” is there to slow the narrative down. (The book was originally published, over Faulkner’s objection, with the title The Wild Palms; apparently the publisher also had the same realization.) “The Wild Palms” is gripping, a sense of looming horror, told in flashback. We know from the first section that this story does not end well, sections 2-4 tell us how this situation arrived, and section 5 proceeds to the inevitable conclusion. The story leaps from one intense peak to another. “Old Man,” by contrast, has the lazy feel of a methodical story slowly unfolding itself. “The Wild Palms” reads like Sanctuary; “Old Man” reads like Absalom, Absalom!

The stories: “The Wild Palms” is the tale of a young doctor, nearing the end of his residency in New Orleans, who runs off with a married woman to Chicago. Then, just when they finally look like the might settle down there, they leave behind all hope of leading a normal lives and head off to a Utah mine, where things don’t work out well. She gets pregnant, so they head to the Mississippi coast, where he botches an abortion, and she also dies.

“Old Man” is the story of a Mississippi convict, in jail for a botched train robbery. A storm hits, and the Old Man River floods. The convicts are sent out to rescue some people who are stranded by the flood. The river has other ideas and our protagonist end up being washed away with one of the women (pregnant) he was sent out to rescue. He spends the rest of the story trying to get back to the authorities with both the boat he was provided and the women he was sent out to rescue.

The only narrative connection between these two stories is the jail in which both protagonists end up, but the commonality of the jail does not affect the stories at all. So, why are these two stories woven together? Either one can stand on its own. They could easily have been published just one after another as a set of two stories. Yet Faulkner not only interwove them in the publication; he wrote them like that. Clearly, they are connected in Faulkner’s mind.

Finding that connection would have been nearly impossible when the book was published under the title The Wild Palms. Faulkner’s title is the glue. No wonder he objected to renaming the book. With the proper title in place, it becomes apparent what Faulkner was doing here: he was writing a gloss on a poem.

The poem is Psalm 137, from which Faulkner’s title is drawn. Here it is in the King James Version:

By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea, we wept, when we remembered Zion.
We hanged our harps upon the willows in the midst thereof.
For there they that carried us away captive required of us a song; and they that wasted us required of us mirth, saying, Sing us one of the songs of Zion.
How shall we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land?
If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her cunning.
If I do not remember thee, let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth; if I prefer not Jerusalem above my chief joy.
Remember, O Lord, the children of Edom in the day of Jerusalem; who said, Rase it, rase it, even to the foundation thereof.
O daughter of Babylon, who art to be destroyed; happy shall he be, that rewardeth thee as thou hast served us.
Happy shall he be, that taketh and dasheth thy little ones against the stones.

It is a striking poem, to put it mildly. A lament by someone hauled off to captivity in Babylon, full of pathos and anger. And when you look again at what Faulkner has done in this book, he is capturing the emotions of that poem.

The flooding Mississippi river, the Old Man River (read: the river of Babylon), has cut off the teller of the tale from all that he has known. He spends the story trying to get from the strange land in which he finds himself back to the jail. Is the jail his Zion? At the end of the story, we find out there is a deeper story. Our convict is in jail for the attempt to rob a train, but why did he want to commit that crime in the first place? There was a girl. Having read deeply in the crime novels of the day, the convict hoped to impress her with wealth and excitement. After he ends up in jail, the girl visits him just once before sending him a remarkably brutal postcard, reading “This is where were honnymonning at. You friend (Mrs) Vernon Waldrip.” The convict will never get back to his Zion: “If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her cunning.”

“The Wild Palms” ends with the protagonist hanging up his harp in the wild palms of Mississippi; he will sing no more. In jail, he is provided (by the women’s husband) a cyanide pill, with which he can end his life. Faced with the decision between nothing and a life of grief, he chooses grief. Why? Grief maintains the ability to remember. Remembrance for the daughter of Babylon (read the whore of Babylon) with whom he ran off. “O daughter of Babylon, who art to be destroyed.” Seeing the connection between story and psalm, the utterly chilling part hits with a wallop. “Happy shall he be, that taketh and dasheth thy little ones against the stones.” That was a false promise; the little one is killed, but no happiness ensues. And there in a jail next to the Mississippi River: “By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea, we wept, when we remembered Zion.”

As Eliot noted, poetry is bet when it is vaguely understood. That is exactly what Faulkner is doing in this remarkable book. Taken by themselves, these are two stories well worth reading when you want to settle into Faulknerian prose. But, once you see how the stories are interwoven with the sense of the Psalm, it becomes a haunting experience. You can read Psalm 137 and ponder it, but if you want to feel the Psalm in your bones, immerse yourself in If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem.

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