Life is but a walking shadow.
A poor player that struts and frets
His hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.
–William Shakespeare (“Macbeth”)
“Uneasy lies the head that wears the crown.” (“King Henry the. Fourth, Part Two” by William Shakespeare)
The foregoing words certainly are applicable to Donald Trump. It would be bad enough just to have the pressure of running the country if things were going smoothly. But he is faced with a country in turmoil from a raging pandemic to racial tensions to the misconduct of certain police officers to protesters tearing down statues of famous people, and at the same time he’s campaigning for a second term in the White House.
How in the hell has the guy avoided a massive nervous breakdown? But there’s more! Just a few weeks ago “The Room Where It Happened: A White House Memoir,” the no-holds-barred picture of the Trump administration painted by former U.S. National Security Advisor John Bolton, hit bookstores and subsequently flew off the shelves to the tune of 780,000 copies the first week.
But wait! There’s still more! After dealing with the storm Bolton’s book caused, Trump now faces the imminent publication of “Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man” by Mary Trump, the president’s niece. The Trump family has attempted to block the publication of this potential bombshell, but in the most recent legal development a New York appellate court made a ruling that gave Simon and Schuster the green light to publish the book.
I am eagerly anticipating the publication of Mary’s book on July 28, but it’s not because it may contain some juicy gossip about the president. Rather my interest in it has been piqued by a recent story in the Washington Post written by Michael Kranish.
Kranish pointed out that while she was an undergraduate at Tufts University, Mary enrolled in a seminar on William Faulkner that offered an in-depth study of the Compson family from “The Sound and the Fury,” one of Faulkner’s most famous novels.
Then Kranish wrote the following: “The Compsons bore some similarities to her own family: Like Donald Trump’s mother, the Compsons immigrated to the United States from Scotland, and the family was riven by dysfunction. At the time, Donald Trump was running his Atlantic City casinos, which went into bankruptcy, and preparing to divorce his first wife, Ivana, and marry Marla Maples.”
Kranish also conducted a telephone interview with the now retired Professor Alan Lebowitz, who offered the Faulkner seminar and who had high praise for Mary during the interview.
“She was just as smart and accomplished as any I’ve taught in 40 years,” Lebowitz said. “She took a seminar on William Faulkner with me, and she wrote two absolutely stunning papers, long, deep and elegant. We studied an enormously complex, interesting writer, and she got deeply into it because she is a deep thinker.”
The Compsons are one of the most famous fictional families in American Literature. Incest, alcoholism, insanity, and underage pregnancy are rampant in this prototypical dysfunctional family. In his additional novels, Faulkner has woven a rich and intricate tapestry of mankind throughout the deep South, and his families run the gamut from the aristocratic white people to the poor and oppressed Blacks.
In “The Sound and the Fury” the once-proud Compsons are a family in decay with a 33-year-old idiot (Benjy)/, who needs constant monitoring, another brother (Quentin), who commits suicide, and a third brother (Jason), one of the most despicable characters ever created, and a sister (Caddie), whose illegitimate daughter (also named Quentin) drives Jason to distraction. The children’s mother is a whining hypochondriac, and holding the whole train wreck together is Dilsey, the indomitable Black servant and the personification of unyielding strength and unselfish love. She treats the Compson children as her own.
In his appendix to “The Sound and the Fury” Faulkner commented on the characters in the novel, and for Dilsey he wrote simply, “They endured.” This is the highest compliment Faulkner could pay her because she represents the courage and fortitude of all the black people living in the deep South from the late 1920s through the early 1960s.
Yes, they endured, and let’s hope that during these terribly uncertain and troubled times we all can indeed endure.
PLEASE WEAR A MASK IN PUBLIC.
