Faulkner in a Time of Pandemic: Tracing the Influence of the 1918 Influenza in His Works

Alfred Crosby, in his landmark study on the 1918 influenza pandemic, addresses in the Afterword his surprise “that among those Americans who let the pandemic slip their minds were many members of that group of supposedly hypersensitive young people who were to create some of the greatest masterpieces of American literature” (315). Crosby pauses particularly on William Faulkner, who, despite being “an author rather prone to the gloomy and awesome . . . never included an influenza epidemic in his novels or stories, not even as a means of alluding to some appalling punishment visited on Yoknapatawpha County by a just and ireful God” (316). While the pandemic “is memorialized in reams of published statistics in every technologically advanced nation that was not in a state of chaos in 1918” (311), it is documented hardly at all in literature and rarely discussed in schools and in society generally. Thus, Crosby’s choice of titles for his study bluntly names this most significant of crises America’s Forgotten Pandemic. He generally concludes that this cultural amnesia derives from timing: the pandemic got lost against the backdrop of war.

Disease, particularly when pandemic, has a way of seeping into the daily discourse of our lives. The effects of the most significant pandemics can shape the perspectives of whole generations. In fact, as I write this essay in the Spring of 2020, our global community faces a new pandemic, the novel coronavirus designated COVID-19. The impact and extent of the novel coronavirus has evolved into staggering proportions— a weight seemingly insurmountable, as high and endless as the sky. In looking for comparisons to our current crisis, few have connected it to Ebola, HIV, or even yellow fever. Rather, the comparison most often made is to the no-longer-forgotten 1918 influenza, commonly referred to as the Spanish flu due to the incorrect assumption that it began in Spain. Surely, if we cannot imagine our current plague will be forgotten too soon, then the dearth of cultural memory about the 1918 pandemic should unsettle us. It also calls for us to reassess where and how its influence might have taken hold. Crosby claims it never emerges in the writing of William Faulkner, but perhaps it is time to reconsider that assertion.

Born in 1897, Faulkner was a twenty-one-year-old cadet on an RAF training base in Toronto, Canada, when the second, and deadliest, wave of the 1918 influenza swept across the globe, including his native Mississippi. It directly touched his life, primarily through the death of Victoria Oldham, sister of his future wife Estelle. He also lived under quarantine on base through that fall, an experience he documented in letters home to his parents while waiting to join the other great calamity of his youth, World War I. Faulkner never fought in the war, but it profoundly influenced his writing. His fiction is replete with wounded soldiers, and late in his career he returned to the war in his overlong epic, A Fable. The war influenced his personal life, too, primarily in that he lied about his military service, at times faking a limp and even claiming to have a metal plate in his head, despite the fact he saw no combat, never left Canada, and possibly never flew a plane at all, even in training. If a war that happened elsewhere and skipped right over him could so profoundly influence him and occupy such an enormous portion of his creative life, it is odd to find so little direct evidence in his work of the pandemic that followed it.

This essay is devoted to understanding how the 1918 influenza influenced Faulkner. Minus a handful of letters from 1918, its presence is not explicit, but that does not mean it isn’t there. It is not embedded in his war fictions but appears elsewhere, in more subtle ways. I will begin by discussing why the 1918 influenza is so noticeably absent from the writing of many of Faulkner’s peers, not only in his novels and stories. I will then detail...