Mayday is derivative in idea and technique, a product of a self-conscious affecting of Symbolist art quivering at its own fragility in a harsh and cruel world at the same time it openly parodies young passions and lusts. The setting is medieval: Sir Galwyn of Arthgyl is given a dream of death by St. Francis, and, accompanied by Pain and Hunger, he sets out on his journey of life to be united with this Little Sister. The first men who try to stop him protect Yseult whose naked bathing in a pool not only arouses Sir Galwyn but is meant to double the Little Sister Death he searches after. Naked, Yseult rises from the pool to romp and lie in the woods with her new lover until the cold darkness causes him to suggest she get dressed; at this first opportunity, as he shows Pain and Hunger, he escapes, sighing with relief. Two other princesses, representing the evening and morning stars, come to him, the first as a deer, the second carried in a chariot by dolphins, but his affairs with both are brief. In each instance the knight is lightly mocked by the vulgar colloquialism of the women he leaves behind: at the end, he welcomes not the Afterworld but Death herself. This singular journey towards embracing death obviously anticipates Quentin's section in The Sound and the Fury, especially in the closing lines of Mayday, but where the later portrait is cautious in defining Quentin's psychology and tragic in its implications, Mayday is romantic and parodic, the language enjoying its departures from a more serious French original: "'I am Gallwyn of Arthgyl, knight at the hand of the Constable du Boisgeclin,'" the knight tells Yseult upon surprising her, "'who, having heard the beauty of the Princess Yseult sung by many a minstrel in many a banquetting hall, must needs dare all things to see her; and who, now that he has gazed upon her, finds that all his life before this moment was a stale thing, and that all the beautiful faces upon which he has looked are as leaves in a wind; and that you are like honey and sunlight and young hyacinths have robbed him of peace and contentment as a gale strips the leaves from a tree; and because you are the promised bride of a king there is no help for it anywhere.'"… Even the attempts to stress themes of greater depth—"it is not the thing itself that man wants, so much as the wanting of it" …; "'I … remarked once that man is a buzzing insect blundering through a strange world, seeking something he can neither name nor recognize, and probably will not want. I think now that I shall refine this aphorism to: Man is a buzzing fly beneath the inverted glass tumbler of his illusions'"—are embarrassingly if unintentionally bald. The first is the sort of sentimental indulgence that still marks Soldiers' Pay and much of Faulkner's poetry to which it is most clearly aligned; the second anticipates the rambling and precious comments that constitute Mosquitoes. In this it is recognizably Faulkner. The thick, cloying images, too—notably of hyacinths—look forward to the imagist thoughts of Benjy and Quentin, while Sir Galwyn's opening vision, with its whirling vortex of faces, will remind readers of Hightower's vision in Light in August and the use of the pool of visions adumbrates passages in Sanctuary. Yet even these observations may press too hard what is, by any account, a slight and adolescent piece of writing, however fashionable it may have been in establishing a self-portrait of the lover as a young artist. (pp. 337-38)
Arthur F. Kinney, in a review of "Mayday," in Modern Fiction Studies (© 1980 by Purdue Research Foundation, West Lafayette, Indiana 47907, U.S.A.), Vol. 26, No. 2, Summer, 1980, pp. 337-38.
