William Faulkner’s ‘Tomorrow’
I can barely believe it’s nearly three already. Still, I suppose I got up late. I read the second half of a short story by Angus Wilson earlier, which I was supposed to read and analyse by tomorrow. Well, I intended to get onto analysing it, but then I read another Raymond Carver story. It was one of his better ones, in my opinion, since some speak to me less than others. It was about a man who felt his life was falling about going to abandon his children’s dog because he hated it. Having read that, still procrastinating, I decided to reread William Faulkner’s short story Tomorrow.
Tomorrow was a film I wanted to see for a long time, having first heard about it in the booklet for the Grandaddy album The Broken Down Comforter Collection. One of their instrumental songs, my favourite on the album, Fentry, begins with a sample from the movie and in the CD notes they credit as being taken from “a nearly perfect movie made in the seventies.” Eventually I found the movie on Amazon as a Region One DVD for considerably more than I would usually pay for a DVD (about £19 I think), so I bought it, and watched it, I think, on New Year’s eve.
“Nearly perfect” is as good a description as any, but it’s a sad movie as well, one of the saddest movies I’ve ever seen, but in a good way more than just a depressing way. In a way it’s a love story, but not a romance, just about human devotion and, more than anything, human suffering. The title comes from a line at the end of the original story which sums up the main theme of the story:
“The lowly and invincible of the earth – [who] endure and endure and then endure, tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow.”
It’s the kind of story that I like, that Hemingway and Carver also write, of the struggles of ordinary men living their lives.
Both the film and the story have well-written lines, though they are narrated in quite different ways, but perhaps my favourite passage from Faulkner’s original story is this one:
“Quick told it, sprawled on the bench beyond Uncle Gavin, loose-jointed, like he would come all to pieces the first time he moved, talking in a lazy sardonic voice, like he had all night to tell it in and it would take all night to tell it. But it wasn’t that long. It wasn’t long enough for what was in it. But Uncle Gavin says it don’t take many words to tell the sum of any human experience; that somebody has already done it in eight: He was born, he suffered and he died.
“”It was pap that hired him. But when I found out where he had come from, I knowed he would work, because folks in that country hadn’t never had time to learn nothing but hard work. And I knowed he would be honest for the same reason: that there wasn’t nothing in his country a man could want bad enough to learn how to steal it. What I seemed to have underestimated is his capacity for love. I reckon I figured that, coming from where he come from, he never had none a-tall, and for that same previous reason – that even the comprehension of love had done been lost on him back down the generations where the first one of them had had to take his final choice between the pursuit of love and the pursuit of keeping on breathing.”"
I suppose the real brilliance of Faulkner in this story is the way he tackles these big themes of love and human experience in such simple terms, with such a simple narrative, although that seems fairly common to fiction set in the American South when you consider superlative works such as To Kill a Mockingbird (which remains my favourite novel), Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and The Green Mile.
Now I suppose I ought either to eat or analyse this story. I recommend you, reader, if you feel so inclined, to check out either version of Tomorrow, particularly if you’re in America, since the Region DVD comes with the original story.
Tags: Angus Wilson, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Harper Lee, Horton Foote, procrastination, Raymond Carver, Robert Duvall, short stories, Stephen King, Tennessee William's, The Green Mile, To Kill a Mockingbird, Tomorrow, William Faulkner. Ernest Hemingway
