The Old Man

Malcolm Cowley said in his book, The Portable Faulkner: “In Wild Palms, a man sacrificed everything for freedom and love and lost both. In The Old Man, a prisoner sacrificed everything to escape freedom and love and return to the safety of the prison farm, devoid of women.” In both short stories, originally published together, women are a force, a contemplative and irrefutable truth. In 1927, the Mississippi River: The Old Man became a reality and more than a reality for the tall, thin, sunburned prisoner. Ordered to move away from the black earth of the penal plantation when the Mississippi River flooded, he was placed in a boat with the plump prisoner, ordered to bring back the woman from the cypress trunk and the man from the cotton shed. He was transported to a strange new world. He was caught in the swirling, shifty waters, now separated from his friend. The river placed the woman in the prisoner’s long boat, and she was the burden of a female life whose heart was not only the Circe in his Odyssey, but the river also held for him the inevitable, stubborn dangers of Odysseus’s sea, and life itself. Despite all the terrors of the river, the alligators crawling in its tributaries, and the snakes, the tall prisoner is safer than Harry in *Wild Palms*. His woman is something to care for and is brought to safety, not to the life of a man. The tall prisoner achieves a double victory: he not only survives the flood, but also against his will, in a kind of From heroic passivity and understanding of the “old man,” he survives from and against the will of the woman, the woman he never loved. He feels this, but he is unaffected by the destructive power of both.
The Tall Prisoner is a man from the Pine Hill countryside. This is his only geographical connection to the Yokna Patawpha County area and Faulkner’s other great novels. But in The Tall Prisoner, all of Faulkner’s extraordinary power of storytelling and poetry is present—violent, lost, and lived in tension. Harvey Brett recently said in The New York Times, “I think Faulkner is the most wonderful author writing in America these days.”