Every Day by the Sun

by Dean Faulkner Wells

  At Nannie’s house I could not sleep. I stayed up all night listening as rioters tore through the town like a tornado. There was looting on the square just a few blocks away. I thought Oxford, Mississippi, was going to be wiped off the map. Just before dawn I heard the tramping of feet. Hoping that this was the army, or more National Guard troops, I rushed outside. In the hazy morning sunlight, the air thick with smoke from burning vehicles, I saw soldiers in company formation coming up the hill from the National Guard armory, nine hundred paratroopers from the Eighty-second Airborne, double-timing up University Avenue. In their combat fatigues and helmets, holding rifles with fixed bayonets, they were the most beautiful men I had ever seen. I ran into the street shouting “Thank you, thank you!” The guide-on sergeant ran over from the intersection where he was directing traffic and hollered, “Get back inside, lady, we’re shooting live!” The hut-two-three-four cadence count and thudding of army boots gave me hope, and I went back into the yard and did as I was told.

  The minute the soldiers were out of sight, a moving van stopped in front of our house. Rear doors were thrown open. Thirty or forty white men armed with shotguns and deer rifles poured into the street. A car stopped at the intersection, the driver an elderly black man probably on his way to work. The whites were on him instantly, dragging him from his car, throwing him down on the curb. They smashed the car windows and rocked the vehicle from side to side, then turned it over and set it on fire. Somehow the man got away.

  Then the mob overran the Texaco station across the street, attacking the cold-drink machines. They ripped open the machines and emptied the bottles, refilling them with gasoline. They cut up their shirts with pocketknives and used the rags as wicks. Instant Molotov cocktails. Then they headed for the campus.

  As the sun rose on that sad, violent day, anyone who dared venture to the square would have witnessed an unforgettable act of valor: Miss Kate Baker, Sandra’s mother, Pappy’s Rowan Oak neighbor, owner of Baker’s Town and Campus, had risen at dawn and gone to her shop on the west side of the square. One of the first people she saw was her store manager, a tall African American woman named Ruth, who had worked with her for many years and who had given her privileged insights into the black community, their attitudes, their fears and hopes. Miss Kate knew that “gone to Chicago” was a euphemism for being killed, and during the civil rights era she helped many African American citizens migrate north in search of a better life.

  On their way to work, as usual, Ruth, with three or four of her black assistants, approached the square. Seeing gun-toting rioters stalking the business district, they ran for their lives to Baker’s dress shop. Miss Kate motioned them into the alley behind her store and was waiting at the service entrance to let them into the basement. She slammed the heavy door and locked it, and urged them to remain quiet and to open the door for no one. Then she went back to the front of the shop, unfurled a large American flag, and placed it in a stand outside the shop, where Old Faithful waved in its lonely glory all day long.

  IN 1957, AUNT ESTELLE FELT HER MARRIAGE HAD REACHED the breaking point. She wrote Saxe Commins: “I know, as you must, that Bill feels some sort of compulsion to be attached to some young woman at all times—it’s Bill. At long last I am sensible enough to concede him the right to do as he pleases, and without recrimination. It’s not that I don’t care—(I wish it were not so)—but all of a sudden [I] feel sorry for him—wish he could know without words between us, that it’s not very important after all—” She offered Pappy a divorce that year. He did not accept her offer.

  Their marriage had withstood over thirty years of turbulence and erosion. Their last years together were tender. They shared a gentle respect for each other, a pleasure in being together, a tacit closeness that comes only from a lifetime of shared memories. It was a joy to be with them. I cannot imagine either of them being married to anyone else.

  As I met each of Pappy’s women over a twenty-year period, my first reaction was instinctive: I simply hoped they made him happy. William Faulkner—this man of many faces, literary genius, desperate alcoholic subject to severe bouts of depression, driven early on by the unassuaged fear of failure—was my Pappy, not only the sole owner and proprietor of Yoknapatawpha, but the sole means of support, financial and emotional, off and on, of our family. We took so much and gave so little in return. No wonder he looked elsewhere for solace, and how could one woman have possibly filled the void? My meetings with the women in his life were easy and cordial, accidental in some cases, arranged by mutual friends at other times. Any animosity I might have felt was tempered by feelings of gratitude for what they had meant to him. I wished the same peace and joy for Aunt Estelle in whatever form it took.

  I agree with Jill’s comment “Pappy liked the ladies.” Having personally known five of the women Pappy loved, I must say that he had great taste in women.

  Though none of them resembled one another physically—some were dark-haired, others blond—all were graceful, charming conversationalists, sophisticated, quick-witted, and well-read, with a subtle vulnerability that drew people to them. This description also fits Aunt Estelle, who was a consummate hostess, gourmet cook, master gardener, and lady of the house when she chose to be.

  The difference was that his mistresses were ambitious, self-supporting, or independently wealthy, and working to establish themselves. Their self-reliance was clearly an attraction to Pappy. None would have swapped places with Aunt Estelle, or buried herself behind closed doors at Rowan Oak. None ever put demands on him, leaving him free to gallivant around the globe, martinis with Lauren Bacall, parties at St. Moritz with Howard Hawks, drinks at the Algonquin with Dorothy Parker and Dashiell Hammett, brunch with Claudette Colbert, dove shoots with Clark Gable. He was a man of the world, while Aunt Estelle was stuck in Oxford, Mississippi, waiting for him to come home to her, until she escaped to Virginia.

  It is easy for me to be objective about Pappy’s affairs, because as much as I loved him, he was not my father. The fact is, I have a weakness for writers and tend to forgive them anything. I was not as defensive about Aunt Estelle as I would have been had she been my mother. Being Mrs. William Faulkner seemed to be all that mattered to her. As long as she held the title to the throne, though her position might be challenged, no one could take her place. In the meantime, Pappy could do as he pleased. He had his bedroom. She had hers.

  After she joined AA, Aunt Estelle became interested in religion, or several religions, from Catholicism to Zen Buddhism. She moved the sewing machine where she had made dresses for Jill and Vicki and me and replaced it with an easel. She painted large Rousseau-like oils on canvas, variations on jungle scenes with dark green backgrounds and splashes of deep reds and purples, often with a stark white long-legged bird standing in a ripple-free pond and, above it, crouched on a massive slab of rock, a panther, coat gleaming, teeth bared, ready to spring.

  She had always loved to fish and was very good at it, and now she returned to this wholesome pastime. She would come downstairs at Rowan Oak all turned out in white cotton slacks with cuffs turned up, white middy-blouse style shirt, deck shoes, and straw hat—sometimes with insect netting attached. Off she would go, creel basket and fishing pole in either hand, sometimes with Chrissie, sometimes alone. She would go to the car with a lightness in her step and a smile on her face. I think her favorite fishing spots were on Hickahala Creek or the Tallahatchie River or at Sardis Reservoir. After she returned, the house would be filled with the smell of frying fish, hushpuppies, and homemade tartar sauce.

  She either ignored the other women or pretended they did not exist. Distance was her protection, a natural barrier, with Meta Carpenter in L.A., or Jean Stein in Europe or New York. In Memphis, however, Joan Williams would prove too close to home.

  When I met Meta Carpenter in Los Angeles, she was eighty-five. Larry and I took her to lunch at Jimmy’s Restaurant in Century City. Jerzy Kromolowski, screenwriter and director, joined us. We had met him in Oxford when he was d
eveloping As I Lay Dying as a film. As we waited for Meta to arrive, Jerzy spoke of her career with awe. She was known in the movie business as a legendary script supervisor. It was said that Mike Nichols would not direct a film without Meta on the set. For years she had been a judge for the Academy Awards. We were having lunch with a Hollywood celebrity. When she entered the restaurant dressed in black with a brilliant red beret, heads turned. Her carriage was regal as she approached our table and we stood to greet her. Her self-confidence was as beautiful as her smile. She was one glamorous lady.

  I had read her autobiography, A Loving Gentleman, about her romance with Pappy, and my first impression was much as she had described herself: “I was pretty enough, with blonde hair that fell in a straight sweep to my shoulders, with a ninety-two-pound body as lean and as lithe as a ballerina’s, and with a waist that was a handspan around.”

  Pappy met Meta in Hollywood in 1935 when he was writing for MGM and she was Howard Hawks’s secretary. His screenwriting period had begun two years earlier when director Hawks had read and admired Soldiers’ Pay and lured him to Hollywood with promises of seeing his stories and characters on the silver screen. Some of his early work was eventually adapted for film, though not to his liking. In 1933, his sensational Sanctuary was adapted as The Story of Temple Drake, starring Miriam Hopkins and Jack La Rue. Pappy had submitted a film treatment adapting his Saturday Evening Post short story “Turn About.” This story was about two WWI officers, a torpedo boat commander and a bomber pilot, who meet in a British pub and invite each other to go on a combat mission. Each is courageous in his own environment—air or water. The navy skipper is terrified during the bombing run and the pilot equally frightened on the torpedo run. Hawks decided the film should revolve around a romance and cast Gary Cooper and Joan Crawford in Today We Live.*

  Meta spoke lovingly of the “Bill” she had known while working at MGM. “I looked up and there he was in a tweed coat, leaning against the doorway. I could see his black eyes all the way across the room.”

  Once he took her to a bookstore and bought a copy of Sanctuary and signed it for her. She recalled wearing low heels so the difference in their heights would not be apparent. What was apparent to me was how happy they had made each other.

  Our lunch stretched into four hours. I did not want it to end. Meta was a southerner, born in Memphis, brought up in Tunica, Mississippi. That alone would have drawn Pappy to her. She spoke freely, without recrimination, of the heartache of losing him—not to Estelle but to Jill. In a sad, gentle, self-effacing way she observed that Pappy’s love for Jill was what kept him from leaving Estelle. She spoke of her only visit to Oxford. She’d been working on the film The Reivers, shot in Carrollton, Mississippi, sometime after Pappy died. One afternoon, after being assured that Estelle was in Charlottesville, she and a friend drove to Oxford and visited St. Peter’s Cemetery. She went to Pappy’s grave alone and said good-bye.

  Because Aunt Estelle treated me always with unfailing kindness I would very much like to believe that Pappy’s affairs caused her little if any pain, but I am aware of at least two instances when she was directly affected.

  Both involved Joan Williams.

  Joan was twenty years old in 1949 when she met Pappy at Rowan Oak. He was fifty-two. She had first fallen in love with The Sound and the Fury. Its creator was a literary god to this young woman, whose every dream and ambition was to be a writer. I’m sure she was an attractive girl with her strawberry blond hair, freckles, and green eyes, but that first encounter was abysmally awkward. Pappy got the feeling that he was being used. Joan went home and wrote him a passionate letter of apology, opening the door to an affair that proved more destructive to Pappy and Aunt Estelle’s troubled marriage than any other. As his literary “protégé,” Joan held a unique position in his life, and her proximity to Oxford was a double threat.

  Her affair with Pappy evolved into a stormy on-again, off-again relationship. Both of them suffered periodic bouts of clinical depression, and with Aunt Estelle’s awareness of what was going on under her nose, Rowan Oak turned into a war zone.

  Aunt Estelle was determined to end the affair. Possibly this one hurt more deeply than the others because so many people in Oxford knew about it. The buffer of distance was gone. One morning, walking through the pantry where the only phone at Rowan Oak was located, Vicki noticed a snapshot of a young, attractive woman placed conspicuously on the shelf beside the phone. Vicki had heard the angry voices, the accusations, and the threats between Aunt Estelle and Pappy for months. Although she had never met Joan, she knew instinctively whose picture it was and who had placed it there and why. She was angry and shocked that Pappy would sink to such depths of intentional cruelty in order to hurt her grandmother. So was I.

  That Pappy had placed her picture next to the phone made it all the more spiteful. The numbers of Pappy and Aunt Estelle’s friends and kinsmen were written in pencil and ink on the pantry walls above the telephone. There sat Joan. He had allowed her to intrude on this intimate family circle.

  Aunt Estelle began to intercept Joan’s letters and make copies of them. She telephoned Joan’s home and spoke to her parents, threatening to go to Memphis and confront them. These threats came to a head on the day that Aunt Estelle asked Miss Kate to drive her to Memphis. My mother went along for support. Determined to save her marriage, Aunt Estelle had arranged a meeting with Joan at the Peabody. The two of them met in a private room while Miss Kate and Wese had lunch in the restaurant. By the time lunch was over, Aunt Estelle returned to the table and said she was ready to leave.

  As they drove back to Oxford, Miss Kate asked, “Did it go well?”

  Aunt Estelle replied, “She will not destroy my marriage.” Nothing else was said.

  Among Pappy’s mistresses, Joan was the only one who wanted to be a writer. Pappy had helped her with suggestions, close editing, and revisions. Pappy had his agent Harold Ober submit Joan’s novel The Morning and the Evening to the Atlantic, whose fiction editor, Sam Lawrence, excerpted the story as an Atlantic “First.” Sometime later, Joan contacted Sam and suggested that they meet in New York. She had a “friend” that she wanted to introduce to him. They agreed to meet at the Harvard Club for lunch. Of course, the friend waiting in the mahogany-paneled Grill Room, decorated with the stuffed heads of wild game bagged by such eminent Harvard alumni as Theodore Roosevelt, was Pappy. He and Sam hit it off, and Sam invited him back to the Harvard Club on several occasions, offering to let him charge drinks to his account. Sam told us that one night he arrived late and apologized to Pappy, who said, “That’s all right, Mr. Lawrence. I’ve been having a good time pretending I’m you.” On the table was a neat stack of bar chits signed “Seymour Lawrence” in a small, distinctive hand.

  In 1953, Pappy met Jean Stein, the third (I assume) of his mistresses, at a Christmas party at St. Moritz. She was nineteen, he was fifty-six. At the time Pappy was working with Howard Hawks on the script for The Land of the Pharoahs. Pappy was infatuated right away with Jean’s youth and beauty, and drawn to her when he noticed she was shy around the talkative, self-absorbed older people at the party. He took her away so they could spend time alone getting to know each other. This was the beginning of an affair that would last several years. Pappy wrote Saxe Commins, “She is charming, delightful, completely transparent, completely trustful. I will not hurt her for any price. She doesn’t want anything of me—only to love me, be in love.”

  By 1956, their affair had blossomed into a literary collaboration. Jean convinced Pappy to grant her an interview for the Paris Review. His only condition was that he be allowed to edit it. This is widely considered the best interview he ever gave, making Jean Stein the only one of his lovers who added to the Faulkner legend by drawing out Pappy and getting him to tell his story in his own words. Several unforgettable lines came from this interview, such as “Between Scotch and nothing, I’ll take Scotch.” When Jean asked if he believed in reincarnation, Pappy replied that he’d like to c
ome back as a buzzard, because “they are protected by law and can eat anything.”

  When she asked if he followed a formula in his writing, Pappy replied, “An artist is a creature driven by demons. He doesn’t know why they choose him.… He is completely amoral in that he will rob, borrow, beg or steal from anybody and everybody to get the work done.”

  To which she responded, “Do you mean the writer should be completely ruthless?”

  “The writer’s only responsibility is to his art,” he said. “He will be completely ruthless if he is a good one.… If a writer has to rob his mother, he will not hesitate; the ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ is worth any number of old ladies.”*

  I first met Jean Stein when she visited Willie Morris, then writer-in-residence at the University of Mississippi, and was a guest at his writing class. He asked Larry and me to host a dinner for her. Intrigued by her Paris Review interview with Pappy and Edie, the biography she coedited with George Plimpton, we were eager to meet her. My daughter Diane and her fiancé, Michael Cawley, joined us for dinner. A biographer had described her at nineteen: “striking, fine-featured with dark hair and eyes,” and with a charming, soft, breathless voice. She was still stunningly attractive.

  I had recently finished reading Edie. When I asked how she put Edie Sedgwick—and Pappy, by implication—at ease, Jean told me she pretended to have trouble starting her tape recorder. I can see Pappy trying to help. Let’s see, why don’t we turn it to “record” and push this button.…

  We stayed in touch with Jean, at first through Willie, and through the years we contacted her whenever we were in New York. She returned to Oxford for Willie’s fiftieth birthday party. One Christmas she sent the children a lovely Italian ice cream maker complete with recipes in English and Italian. It was the hit of many a dinner party, the first bilingual dessert served in Oxford.