“On November 7, 1930 Faulkner sent a story entitled of ‘Lebanon’ to The Saturday Evening Post, which rejected it.” And one week later, another story to the same magazine, “but met with no success.” The stories were not written in a week. Sometimes, reading the scholarship, one gets the idea that there is no first version of anything in Faulkner, perhaps because of his hallucinated imagination in which forms flow and alter, replace and displace without end. In the same way, he does not often reject what was once brought into being; it reappears, renamed, defined in some new connection.
The Saturday Evening Post accepted many stories, among them the early version of “The Bear,” and Collier’s printed the first “Go Down, Moses.” None was written “for” the Post, “for” Collier’s. For instance, in the Post, one sentence of “The Bear” runs to thirteen lines of type and ends: “. . . not even a Moral animal but an anachronism, indomitable and invincible, out of an old dead time, a phantom, epitome and apotheosis of the old wild life at which the puny humans swarmed and hacked in a fury of abhorrence and fear, like pygmies about the ankles of a drowsing elephant: the old bear solitary, indomitable and alone, widowered, childless, and absolved of mortality—old Priam reft of his old wife and having outlived all his sons.” We know that to be Faulkner, unconceding. What may be learned from the quotation is the presence of certain amnesties in the prison code of the Post.
Sanctuary was, so far as I know, Faulkner’s one effort to make, with deliberation, a sow’s ear out of a silk purse. The first version, “a cheap idea deliberately conceived to make money,” was rejected as being too violent for the period, or perhaps too violent for itself. When he rewrote it a few years later, he hoped it would not “shame The Sound and the Fury and As I Lay Dying” and called it a fair job and hoped people would buy it, which they did reasonably and without excess (a pleasant superfluity Faulkner never achieved). Of course, Sanctuary is a book unlike any other, one of the author’s six or seven masterpieces. André Malraux thought of it as “the intrusion of Greek tragedy into the detective story.”
Considering the publication of leftover and subsequently revised work in this new volume, the loss, the absence most to be regretted is the disappearance, apparently, of the first version of Sanctuary. Led to reread the final Sanctuary by thoughts of the writer and money, thoughts of Faulkner’s way of working, of what is now called his process, one finds that the novel with its spectacular vitality does not exploit its genre so much as shatter it. What strikes one now is not the exaggeration of the central character, the criminal Popeye, not the stage effects, but the way Faulkner prefigures the vogue of those real-life Popeyes who make their eternal returns to the front pages and into books.
The forlorn criminal mind, beyond interpretation, this bafflement and destiny, filled with gestures, scraps of eccentricity, outbursts, fornication, drinking bouts, and always, of course, murders—its audience has aggrandized and changed. True Detective gave the facts but did not know how to solicit the aura. The criminal does not stimulate the contemporary appetite for scandal, either. Scandal now feeds on happy people, beautiful and rich, with their divorces and drugs, and inclinations to behave in ways that have an arresting inappropriateness. The miserable criminal is not a scandal; he is too lowly for that. Instead, he seems to engage the sophisticated mind by his overwhelming thereness—that alone—a thereness that is itself a sufficiency.
The sheer interest of such a man. This is what Norman Mailer takes to be the beginning and the end when he offers a hugeness of detail about the killer Gary Gilmore, and withdraws himself from it as quite unnecessary to the man’s totemic sufficiency. Imagine a being with no good intentions and therefore less cant than most. Enter the criminal mind, all underground passages with the only glimmering of light the interviewer and his tape recorder. By the concentration of his own flaming energies Mailer seems to be saying about Gary Gilmore: Few men can make such great claims on our attention.
Popeye, the creation, is certainly imagined in the fullest degree, but he is not unimaginable as a reality. He is, instead, true to the appetite or knowledge produced by a later speculative journalism. He has the necessary excited flatness of character, a flatness arising from his domination by isolated and singular aspects of the will. This is perhaps what Faulkner partly meant by his innocent use of “cheapness” to describe his original idea; that is, a decision to watch the movements of the uncomplicated will, the movement characteristic of pornography and of much detective and crime fiction.
However, a book is written as well as conceived. In this case, the “selling” idea was the rape of a college girl by a corncob, which serves as what Sade might have called the “instrument” for the impotent Popeye. In the rendering of the idea, intensities of language and oblique modes in the narration transform flatness and shock into a contemplation of the mysteries of action. The writing is also impelled by a curious and powerful disgust, the pessimistic insight aroused in particular by the promiscuous, empty, arrogant young Southerners. “He’s as good as you are. He goes to Tulane” and “My father is a judge,” they like to say.
The brilliant concentration of images by which Popeye is introduced would be a problem for the writer looking at an actual criminal—going over the record, as it were. The strain of verisimilitude, of accuracy, of conformity to photograph and news story would hinder the flight of independent metaphor: “His face had a queer, bloodless color, as though seen by electric light . . . he had that vicious depthless quality of stamped tin . . . his tight suit and stiff hat all angles, like a modernistic lampshade.”
These are the striking thoughts that led Malcolm Cowley to see Popeye as one of those “who represent the mechanical civilization that has invaded and partly conquered the South.” And further as “the compendium of all the hateful qualities that Faulkner assigns to finance capitalism.” This is indeed a heavy historical burden for the reduced, perverse, and changeless psychopath, and Popeye can bear it no better than The Misfit in Flannery O’Connor’s “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” (“You can do one thing or you can do another, kill a man or take a tire off his car. . . .”). Popeye is relevant only to himself, and his human connections are with others of his type, the replications that turn up year after year to work out their unalterable passages, like birds flying south in the autumn.
Vice, coldness, impulse attached to a nature that is flat and toneless, in spite of a certain bravura and little bits of “style.” “Fix my hair, Jack,” Popeye says as he approaches the scaffold. Gary Gilmore says: “Let’s do it.”
Faulkner imagines, in an epilogue, an interesting sociology for Popeye, a sort of placing or rooting of the extreme, which also has its beginnings. The sweep of devastation is not unfamiliar. Popeye’s mother meets his father, a professional strikebreaker, on a streetcar. When she becomes pregnant and says they must marry, the father replies, “Well, don’t get upset. I just as lief. I have to pass here every night anyway.” Of course, the father is soon gone, leaving the mother with Popeye, syphilis, and her own breakdown. The boy is left in the care of a pyromaniac grandmother, and nearly perishes when she burns down the house. He is stunted and abnormal physically, but survives to cut up birds and a half-grown kitten and to be taken off to institutions. In the body of the novel he has some success in bootlegging and commits the two murders that form part of the plot. In the end, refusing counsel, indifferent to his own life, he is hung for a murder he didn’t commit. So it is “Fix my hair, Jack,” and all is over.
In the Uncollected Stories there are two versions of a story about bootlegging written in the late 1920s, a few years before Sanctuary. No one would make a connection between the two, not even a Faulkner scholar with his special eyeglasses that can see in the dark. The notes of the Uncollected Stories do inform us that Faulkner claimed to have worked at bootlegging in New Orleans around 1925. And we believe it.
1979
NABOKOV
Master Class
WHEN VLADIMIR Nabokov died in Switzerla
nd in 1977, a life chronically challenged by history ended in the felicity of a large, intrepid, creative achievement. Nabokov left Russia with his family in 1919, took a degree at Cambridge University and in 1922 settled among the Russian colony in Berlin, where he began his work as a poet and novelist in the Russian language. In 1937, after fifteen or so un-Teutonic years “among strangers, spectral Germans,” he pushed on to France for three years, to those “more or less illusory cities” that form the émigré’s past. In 1940, with his wife and son, he arrived in the United States, “a new and beloved world,” as he calls it in his autobiography Speak, Memory where, among other adaptations, he patriotically stopped “barring my sevens.”
To America, Nabokov brought his supreme literary gifts and wide learning and a great accumulation of losses: childhood landscape devastated, gravestones blurred, armies in the wrong countries, and his father murdered, hit by a bullet intended for another on the stage of one of those intense political debates among the Russian exiles in Berlin.
From 1940 to 1960, here he is among us, cheerful it seems, and unpredictable in opinion. Not a bohemian, not at all, and not a White Russian dinner partner, but always dramatic and incorruptible. On the present occasion he is standing before his classes at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, delivering the now published first volume of Lectures on Literature. He is forty-nine years old, an outstanding modern novelist in the Russian language, and still in need of money. During the next ten years, the Ithacan afternoons and evenings will be spent writing in English: Pnin, the memoir Speak, Memory, and his uncompromised masterpiece, Lolita, a financial success that released him from one of the cares of the literary life. When he goes back to Europe, to settle with his wife in an old, interesting hotel in Montreux, Switzerland, he will be one of the great twentieth-century novelists in English.
Not much happened during the American years that escaped transformation to the mosaic of the Nabokov page, with its undaunted English words glittering in their classical, rather imperial plentitude, a plentitude that is never a superfluity. Although Nabokov himself was unassimilable, his imagination is astonishingly porous. It is rather in the mood of Marco Polo in China that he meets the (to us) exhausted artifacts of the American scene. Motels, advertisements, chewing-gum smiles, academics with their projects like pillows stuffed under an actor’s tunic, turns of speech advancing like a train on his amplifying ear—for Nabokov it is all a dawn, alpine freshness. His is a romantic, prodigal imagination, with inexhaustible ores of memory buried in the ground of an unprovincial history. “And one day we shall recall all this—the lindens, and the shadows on the wall, and a poodle’s unclipped claws tapping over the flagstones of the night. And the star, the star.”
As a teacher, Nabokov had, before Cornell, spent a good deal of time at Wellesley College, and not much time at Harvard. His misadventures with the Comparative Literature Department at Harvard, told in Andrew Field’s biography, Nabokov: His Life in Part, have the comic “Russianness” of some old head-scratching tale of serf and master. Nabokov lectured at Harvard in 1952. There the exile’s brightly confident dimming of a long list of classic authors and works shed its blackening attention upon Cervantes. Professor Harry Levin, on behalf of the old Spaniard, said: Harvard thinks otherwise. The remark, put into Professor Levin’s pocket like a handkerchief, has the scent of Nabokov’s own wicked perfume on it . . . but no matter. And all to the good indeed. Cambridge, Massachusetts, was not the proper setting for the touching derangements of Nabokov’s created Professor Pnin and Dr. Kinbote—and not the right New England village in which Humbert Humbert would marry Lolita’s mother. So, it was to be Cornell.
The published lectures are, apart from everything else, dutiful, even professorial. They are concrete, efficient, not the wanderings of an imported star who takes off early by way of discussion periods. We are told by Andrew Field that Nabokov’s scientific work on butterflies was “painstaking” and marked by a “scale by scale meticulousness.” There is something of this also in the approach to the performance before as many as 400 students and the acceptance of certain ever-returning weekends with 150 examination papers to read.
The young audience is there to hear him, even if he does not know what they may have brought with them. Nabokov stands aside in the beginning, perturbed, it may be imagined, not only by the rarity of literature, but by the rarity of reading, true reading. He solicits rather poignantly from the students the ineffable “tingling spine” and “shiver” of the aesthetic response, all that cannot be written down in notebooks and which is as hopeless of definition as the act of composition itself.
The first of Nabokov’s Cornell lectures, as printed here, was given to Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park. This author and this particular novel had been urged upon Nabokov by Edmund Wilson. Wilson was dismayed by Nabokov’s cast-offs, those universally admired works that seemed to be resting in overflowing boxes in the Nabokov vestibule, as if waiting to be picked up by the Salvation Army. A lot of it appears to be mischievous teasing by Nabokov, good-humored, even winking, if such a word may be used. (“Henry James is a pale porpoise.”) Satire is one of Nabokov’s gifts, and nearly all of his novels are appliquéd with little rosette-asides of impertinent literary opinion.
In any case, Mansfield Park finds Nabokov laying out the plot with a draftsman’s care, patiently showing that one parson must die so that another can, so to speak, wear the dead man’s shoes. And Sir Bertram must be sent off to the West Indies so that his household can relax into the “mild orgy” of the theatrical presentation of a sentimental play called “Lovers’ Vows.”
Here there is a curious intermission in which Nabokov tells the class about the old play, summarizing it from the original text. And again when Fanny cries out against a plan to cut down an avenue of trees, “What a pity! Does it not make you think of Cowper? ‘Ye fallen avenues, once more I mourn your fate unmerited,’ ” Nabokov takes time out for a reading of the long, dull poem, “The Sofa” by William Cowper. It is true that Nabokov liked to remember the charm of vanished popular works of the sort that slowly made their way over land and sea to the Russian household of his youth. Still, the diversion to these texts is strikingly unlike the microscopic adhesion to the matters at hand in other lectures. There are brushings of condescension in the Jane Austen chapter, delicate little streakings, like a marbleizing effect. She is “dimpled” and “pert,” a master of this dimpled pertness.
“Style is not a tool, it is not a method, it is not a choice of words alone. Being much more than all this, style constitutes an intrinsic component or characteristic of the author’s personality.” Nabokov’s method in these carefully prepared lectures is somewhat less impressionistic and darting than one might have expected from his irreplaceable book on Gogol and the fantastical commentaries to Eugene Onegin. Words and phrases, even the words of Joyce, Proust, or Dickens, are not themselves often the direct object of inquiry. Plots, with their subterranean themes, are the objects, plots to be dug up tenderly so as not to injure the intention of the author by too gleeful an excavation.
Nabokov goes along the plot, step by step, telling us where we are now and what is happening there; and the steps are not mere excavations but attended by readings aloud from the texts. About Joyce’s Ulysses: “Demented Farrell now walks westward on Clare Street, where the blind youth is walking eastward on the same street, still unaware that he has left his tuning fork in the Ormond Hotel. Opposite number 8, the office of the dentist . . .”
Flaubert’s punctuation and syntax most interestingly command Nabokov’s attention. “I want to draw attention first of all to Flaubert’s use of the word and preceded by a semicolon.” And the use of the imperfect form of the past tense in Madame Bovary. Translators are rebuked for not seeing, in Emma’s musings about the dreariness of her life, the difference between “She would find [correct translation] again in the same places the foxgloves and wallflowers,” as against the simple “she found.” These moments are the grandeur of
Nabokov in the act of reading a novel. And when he speaks in the voice we know from his own novels, “Notice the elaboration of the moonlight in Proust, the shadows that come out of the light like the drawers of a chest. . . .”
Madame Bovary, Mansfield Park, Swann’s Way, Bleak House, Ulysses, The Metamorphosis—two in French, one from the German, two from English—and to these a third from English, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, a Nabokov surprise, so as not to confound expectations. The mad pseudo-science of “Dr. Jekyll” appeals to Nabokov, who in his discussion of Bleak House lingered lovingly on the “spontaneous combustion” of the gin-soaked Mr. Krook. He likes the “winey taste” of Stevenson’s novel, and “the appetizing tang of the chill morning in London.” “Appetizing” is the word most often used about the fable. The plan of Dr. Jekyll’s house is the back and front of the man himself. Not too little and not too much is made of the work, “a minor masterpiece on its own conventional terms” and far from The Metamorphosis, with its “five or six” tragic dimensions.
Kafka is “the greatest German writer of our times.” Yes, yes—pause—“such poets as Rilke or such novelists as Thomas Mann are dwarfs and plaster saints in comparison to him.” So, proceed. The Metamorphosis, an exceedingly painful tale about Gregor Samsa waking up one morning to find that he has turned into an insect, arouses in Nabokov the most passionate and emotional moments in the lecture series. As an entomologist, he pronounces Gregor a large beetle, the lowly cockroach being just that, too lowly, for the largeness of Kafka’s descriptive inventions. The doors, the poor beetle’s legs or teeth or whatever finally turning the lock, the family theme, the “Greek chorus” of the visit of the clerk from Gregor’s office, the “coleopteran’s” food slipped under the door, the appalling suffering: all of this is tragically affecting once more as the lecturer puts it before us.
The Collected Essays of Elizabeth Hardwick Page 35