Word: bayards
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...disappointing Manon, which inaugurated the Royal's five-week New York-Washington, D.C. season, Nureyev scored a double success. He danced an impressive debut in the comic ballet La Fille Mal Gardée. On the other half of the program was a scene from La Bayardère, the "white ballet" he restaged at Covent Garden...
Except for young Bayard Sartoris, like his ancestors, who is abrupt, almost violent. After returning from the First World War, his tranquil surroundings suffocate him. To escape the vacuum, he buys a car and speeds through the old country roads. The speeding car ultimately kills his grandfather; so does Bayard's impatience with life end abruptly in an airplane crash. Even the Sartoris' old "nigger," Simon, dies ending that era which never accepted Lee's surrender at Appomattox...
FLAGS IN THE DUST is like an old Southern mansion. The older characters are the no longer used rooms--cloaked in dust, the furniture swaddled in decaying sheets affords little protection against the erosions of time. The newer wings, like the younger Bayard, are cast in the same traditional mold, but lack individual presence, and only make a mockery of emulation. And as each room's individual history is revealed, the mansion's benign cool-white exterior loses its gracious dignity...
...perhaps a slightly better introduction to Yoknapatawpha County because it describes in more detail a few characters who will play a larger part in later Faulkner novels. Scholars of Faulkner will eat the stuff up--comparing the manuscript to the original, chasing down differences in dates, names, places, etc. (Bayard's great-grandfather, according to those in the know, died on three different dates in three different novels...
...three overlapping manuscripts--no intact manuscript was found--the scholars will add Flags in the Dust to their literary graveyard, and dispute, one can be certain, the ghosts that fly out of it. One such ghost sums up the difference between Sartoris and Flags. In Sartoris, this sentence appears: "Bayard answered mildly, with weak astonishment." In Flags it is: "Bayard answered weakly, with mild astonishment...