The Best American Essays 2018

by Hilton Als

  Faulkner set to work but was slow to find his subject. Two novels—Soldiers’ Pay (1926) and Mosquitoes (1927)—came and went. With his third he followed Anderson’s advice to stick to “that little patch up there in Mississippi where you started from.” Faulkner loved the sprawling complex novel that followed, but one publisher after another rejected the book, Flags in the Dust, until it was radically cut and retitled Sartoris (1929). But that novel, loosely centered on Faulkner’s own struggle to fit into civilian life after the war, showed him the way. “Beginning with Sartoris I discovered that my own little postage stamp of soil was worth writing about . . . so I created a cosmos of my own.”

  Faulkner’s cosmos was Yoknapatawpha County in northern Mississippi, with a courthouse and the town of Jefferson at its center, a thinly fictionalized version of Oxford, Mississippi, where he had spent the largest part of his childhood, knew everybody, and heard many of the stories that emerged in somewhat altered but generally transparent form in fifteen of his twenty novels. Many of the characters in the books come from the same half-dozen families, both white and black, spanning a century beginning in the 1830s, when the first cotton farms were established on land ceded by the Chickasaw nation of Native Americans.

  Few of the books sold well, especially in the beginning. Faulkner got by in the early years with frequent stints writing for the movies in Hollywood, where he met the great love of his life, in Bleikasten’s view, Meta Carpenter, a script girl working for Howard Hawks, director of The Big Sleep on which Faulkner worked. Faulkner had other girlfriends as well, developed a reputation as a man hard to interview, answered contumaciously when pestered about politics, spent too much money renovating a house in Oxford, was churlish at the outset about accepting the Nobel Prize in person (“Everybody from the Swedish ambassador to my damn nigger houseboy has been telling me to do right!”), and stubbornly refused to admit that some horses were too much for him.

  Bleikasten scants none of the life but is interested above all in the books. One or two might be called entertainments, using the term in Graham Greene’s sense. Many can be as hard to read as the begats in the Bible or Heidegger on history. They are awash in detail, knotted, inexact, disturbing, and obscure in their fierce pursuit of elusive insights. It is hard to be sure what Faulkner is trying to understand, and hard to decide if he has understood it. Few Americans ever tackle Faulkner. Those forced to read him in high school or college remember little, perhaps Benjy looking at Caddy’s drawers in The Sound and the Fury or Temple Drake’s rape with a corncob in Sanctuary.

  But there is a logic to Faulkner’s dependence on difficulty. It serves two purposes. In some of the novels, and especially in Absalom, Absalom!, the difficulty ensured that Faulkner’s neighbors would not know what he was talking about lest they burn his barn, if not worse. The second purpose was to force readers to struggle to get the story straight. A poem or a short story in Faulkner’s view was too small, too soon over, to encompass the big thing on his mind—the great submerged obsessive guilty burden of slave times, when all whites knew but few said that slaves were not only unpaid laborers but unpaid sexual servants.

  To say it flat out, as that does, is a way to get past the fact in a hurry. Faulkner was not in a hurry. The narrator of his story “Uncle Willy” notes that “Papa told me once that someone said if you know it you can say it.” Faulkner knew it and somehow won permission—drinking may have helped here—to say it, “all of hit,” as Mollie Beauchamp stresses at the end of Go Down, Moses. She is speaking of the life and death of her black grandson and also of the century of slavery and its aftermath that determined his fate. “Is you gonter put hit in de paper? I wants hit all in de paper. All of hit.”

  Five books address and wrestle with Faulkner’s central obsession, which in one mood he called “the past” and in another “the South.” These novels embody the second thing Faulkner learned from writing Sartoris—“that not only each book had to have a design but the whole output or sum of an artist’s work had to have a design.” About the past he famously wrote in a late novel, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” He meant that the meaning and the burden of the past are inextricably laced within the present. “There is no such thing as was—only is,” he told his last girlfriend, Jean Stein, when she interviewed him for The Paris Review. About the South Faulkner was ambivalent, especially with strangers. “Well, I love it and hate it,” he told reporters in Japan in 1955. “Some of the things there I don’t like at all, but I was born there, and that’s my home, and I will still defend it even if I hate it.”

  Faulkner’s love and his hate are knotted together most tightly in the five novels that are primarily about race, but it would be perverse to describe them as a defense of the South. Indictment is more like it. As the books appeared, Bleikasten writes, southerners, generally, starting in Faulkner’s hometown of Oxford, detested them all after a page or two. A partial exception was eventually made for the last of the five, Intruder in the Dust (1948), which they forgave and indulged when it was made into a popular film. The other four are Sanctuary (1931), Light in August (1932), Absalom, Absalom! (1936), and Go Down, Moses (1942).

  To understand how these books fit into Faulkner’s grand design on the subject of the South, it helps to examine the chosen word in the South for the woman Faulkner’s grandfather ran off with in 1887, ten years before Faulkner was born. The word is “octoroon.” It means a person who is one-eighth African American, or in polite usage in the nineteenth century, one-eighth Negro. A quadroon would have one Negro grandparent, and a mulatto would have one Negro parent. The three terms were coined in slave times and refer only to African Americans; a person with one Chinese or one Pacific Islander or one Inuit great-grandparent would not be an octoroon.

  The final point to understand is that “octoroon” neither says nor implies anything much about actual genetic makeup. The African American great-grandparent is any person who was identified, accepted, and treated at the time as an African American, whatever their actual genetic mix. Nothing about the physical appearance of an octoroon says “octoroon.” In the South of Faulkner’s childhood, somebody had to tell you who was or wasn’t an octoroon. To find out you were one changed everything.

  This point is crucial to Absalom, Absalom!, which some critics think Faulkner’s greatest novel. The central character is Thomas Sutpen, owner of a huge plantation called “Sutpen’s Hundred,” who had once been married in the West Indies to a planter’s daughter, with whom he had a son. He abandoned both when he learned that his wife was not “Spanish,” as her father claimed, but part African American. Mixed race is a factor in all of Faulkner’s core novels. Joe Christmas in Light in August agonizes over his “black blood.” “Is it certain, proved, that he has negro blood?” a character asks. Faulkner never says, but Christmas is tortured equally by the taint and its uncertainty. He murders a white lover, is hunted down, castrated, and killed by townspeople infuriated by his refusal to act “like either a nigger or a white man . . . That was what made the folks so mad . . . It was like he never even knew he was a murderer, let alone a nigger too.”

  Sexual connection between master and slave is a principal driver of Faulkner’s core novels, but it is never simple, never clearly told, and never without tragic consequence. In Go Down, Moses, the planter Lucius Quintus Carothers McCaslin has a daughter named Tomasina with Eunice, one of his slaves, who later walks into a creek and drowns herself on Christmas Day, 1832. The daughter is called Tomey and is of course McCaslin’s slave as well; she dies giving birth to McCaslin’s son, whose given name is Terrell but is called Turl and known by all as Tomey’s Turl. He in turn fathers a son with Tennie Beauchamp named Lucas, who is the main character in Intruder in the Dust, threatened with lynching for a murder he did not commit. He refuses to defend himself, claiming “I belongs to the old lot. I’m a McCaslin,” connected through his father (Turl) and his grandmother (Tomey) to L.Q.C. McCaslin. Popeye and Goodwin in Sanctuary are never clearly iden
tified by race but are frequently described as dark or black, and suffer what might be called black fates—Goodwin lynched and burned, Popeye convicted and executed, both for murders they did not commit.

  I have barely touched here on the driving force of gradations of race in Faulkner’s work, where it is “black blood” that determines fate. Each horror is the consequence, often long delayed, of real crimes in the past that generate fatal confusions, push characters to madness and suicide, and fix everyone, permanently and without appeal, on one side or the other of the great social divide marked by the word “nigger.” On one side of the color line in Faulkner’s world people can call others “nigger” with impunity; on the other they must submit to it in silence.

  What Faulkner contributes to this knotted history is the understanding that slavery’s grip on white masters was sexual, and that the coping mechanism of the white South was denial. One of the few southerners to name the problem frankly was Mary Chesnut, daughter of one large slave owner and wife of another, who recorded the great fact in her diary before the Civil War:

  I wonder if it be a sin to think slavery a curse to any land. Sumner said not one word of this hated institution which is not true. . . . Like the patriarchs of old our men live all in one house with their wives and their concubines, and the mulattoes one sees in every family exactly resemble the white children—and every lady tells you who is the father of all the mulatto children in everybody’s household, but those in her own she seems to think drop from the clouds.

  The Sumner she credits with speaking the truth was Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts, who said as plainly as he dared that it was the lure of sexual license that explained the furious defense of slavery by slave owners. Everybody understood what Sumner meant when he attacked Senator Andrew Butler of South Carolina by name in 1856, saying, “Of course he has chosen a mistress to whom he has made his vows, and who, though ugly to others, is always lovely to him; though polluted in the sight of the world, is chaste in his sight—I mean the harlot, Slavery.” Butler’s kinsman, Congressman Preston Brooks of South Carolina—some say he was a nephew, some say a cousin—avenged the insult by beating Sumner nearly to death on the floor of the Senate with a gutta-percha cane, an act of violence that helped bring on the war that followed.

  “As soon as the abolitionist Yankee North started to contest slavery,” Bleikasten notes, “its justification drove all political discourse.” He stops there, but we might go further and date the birth of the “solid South” to the 1845 split of the Baptist Church into a Southern and a Northern Convention, resulting from disputes over the issue of slavery. The solid South has never cracked but has continued to speak with a single dominant voice, justifying slavery before the Civil War and defending Jim Crow laws and lynching in the following century. During that century the solid South controlled the US Senate on the issues that mattered to it most, and it is no less solid in speaking with a single political voice now following its takeover of the Republican Party.

  Faulkner learned about the history of race in the South from living there, not from books. His use of the word “nigger,” of which Bleikasten offers a full spectrum of examples, along with much else, identifies him as indelibly white in the southern manner of the times. The day is probably coming when younger readers, bumping into “the N-word” repeatedly, can no longer pass the test I earlier mentioned. But the word was an ineradicable part of Faulkner’s world. A walk through the streets of Oxford in his youth revealed the South’s great either/or—black or white, one or the other, no exceptions. What Faulkner saw, and found a way to say that could not be silenced, was the fact of two centuries of sexual exchange, in which African Americans were compelled to endure exploitation that whites minimized, rationalized, and violently denied.

  Faulkner did not ultimately disguise what he thought about the great fact. The thing he refused to admit to the Japanese reporters in 1955 was something he had already said plainly in the final words of Absalom, Absalom! when Quentin Compson is flatly asked, “Why do you hate the South?”

  The question comes at night in Quentin’s room at Harvard College from his friend Shreve, a Canadian. Quentin has been telling Shreve the story of Thomas Sutpen, his two sons, and the fate of his house at Sutpen’s Hundred. Quentin had been present when Clytie, Sutpen’s daughter by a slave, burned the house to the ground, killing both herself and her white brother, Henry, who had shot to death their half-black brother thirty years earlier.

  Then Shreve’s question and Quentin’s answer:

  “I dont hate it he thought, panting in the cold air, the iron New England dark; I dont. I dont! I dont hate it! I dont hate it!”

  David Salle

  Clothes That Don’t Need You

  from The New York Review of Books

  The first time I visited Japan I fell hard for the highly abstract, ritualized form of musical drama called Noh. My Japanese friends found this a little puzzling, since I couldn’t understand the dialogue, and there was no simultaneous translation such as one finds at the opera. Even they didn’t understand the arcane Japanese dialect from hundreds of years earlier. There were synopses of the plays, of course—usually just a few lines in a mimeographed program. My traveling companion and I were often the only Westerners at these performances, which were held in the late afternoon, adding to the oddness of the experience. The atmosphere was very different from the more popular Kabuki. No beer. No cheering, no talking in the house at all. Pretty soon, as the intricate rhythms and the rising and falling pitch of the atonal chanting start to work on your brain, you begin to get a feeling for the dramatic arcs.

  Memory plays. Ghost stories.

  Noh is the carrying forward of misfortune, of a stain of disgrace that won’t go away; fate unwinds in front of you. Most of the action takes place before the play begins. Characters speak from beyond the grave, recounting memories of betrayal, luckless love, suicide by drowning. (George Saunders’s Lincoln in the Bardo is American Noh.) The clacking together of two wooden blocks signals a change of scene and releases a heavy sense of malaise into the present. Visitations from the underworld are routine. The weeping cherry tree on a bare stage turns out to be the tears shed by an abandoned lover waiting to tell her story.

  What elevates these narratives of woe is the solemnity of their staging, which contributes to a feeling that the boundaries between past and present, human and spirit, have loosened or dissolved altogether. The slowed-down movement across an empty stage, the actors’ white masks, the plaintive chanting and its shattering rhythmic accompaniment, the even, undramatic lighting—the theatrical illusion is hard to account for, but after two or three hours’ immersion in the Noh world, I would begin to feel myself overtaken by an immeasurable sadness, with tears spilling down my face. Such exquisite perfection in the telling, so much suffering in the tale.

  Walking mesmerized through the Rei Kawakubo retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum was the closest I’ve come since to the feeling of Noh theater. Without always understanding what I was looking at, I was gripped by the kind of melancholy that seems to accompany the toughest, most searching and demanding levels of beauty.

  The exhibition design, a collaboration between Kawakubo and the Met curators, follows no perceptible chronology. Enclosures of various shapes—inverted cones, flattened spheres and semicircles, keyholes, ovals, triangles—contain the clothes, which are grouped by collection or theme. These frames are rendered in white plasterboard and lit from above by dense rows of fluorescent tubes, making a shadowless space, objective in tone. They are like viewing platforms, some of which function as small proscenium stages, while others are more like theater in the round. Still others are like caves whose restrictive openings give only a partial view of the clothes within. There is no attempt to make the clothes themselves look inhabited. Dresses and other garments are displayed on mannequin forms supported by thin metal rods, like sculpture. They are what Giacometti’s figures would be wearing had they taken the time to get dressed
.

  White muslin, bias-sutured Hans Bellmer dolls with steel wool hair, their bulbous silhouettes like Jean Arp cutouts.

  Call it an alphabet/poncho. A dress that, seen from the front, is a near-perfect circle formed by a ten-inch-wide band of black velvet, the top of which thickens to form a cowl-neck that hides the wearer’s chin. The interior of the circle is a complex pattern of vertically striated pale beige lace, which is bisected in two places by horizontal tiers of contrasting ruffles. The arms do not protrude, but stay inside the circle, and the head is draped with black lace, mantilla style, so that the wearer appears as a walking “O” with a soft, furry center.

  Black, aggressively ruched satin bomber jackets over wavy black panel skirts. One sleeve of the jacket has an extra-long extension that hangs down below the skirt, as if for an elephant’s trunk.

  An antebellum-style dress with full and puckered cap sleeves, a low, scooped, and ruffled neck, and a skirt made of rows and tiers of short ruffles, all in a salmon-pink floral fabric, with brown and pale blue flowers. Sewn to its front and made out of the same fabric as the dress is a large stuffed bear, such as a child might carry, but with extra-long arms and an oversized snout, or maybe even a trunk, a bear becoming Babar; from another angle, the whole thing becomes a pink ruffled kangaroo.

  Dome-shaped forms made out of gray-blue chenille, like an accumulation of upholstered headrests, gathered about the upper torso, shoulders, and neck; the meeting points of the heavily textured fabric recall the creased skin of a pachyderm. On top of this vertical Frank-Gehry-of-cloth is a “skirt” of shaggy black fake fur, which gives the whole composition ballast. Even though the dress falls to midcalf, to wear it without the articulated black froufrou would be like walking out of the house fully dressed but without pants.