But this sanctuary of retreat from women and domestic responsibilities could not last forever. A heavy bout of drinking during a hunting trip in late 1940 ended for him in unconsciousness and something alarmingly like kidney seizure or a perforated ulcer. Frightened, the other hunters rushed Faulkner home, where he soon recovered. He would continue for the next decade and longer to participate in the November Delta hunts, but his heart seemed less in it, and his drinking got increasingly out of control.
The first hospitalization for alcohol abuse had occurred in June 1936, at Wright’s Sanatorium in Byhalia, Mississippi. Wright’s would also, twenty-six later, be the locus of his last hospitalization for drinking—and his sudden death by coronary one day after he was admitted (July 6, 1962). Between these two hospitalizations were too many others to recount. One of his critics reckons that by the 1950s, Faulkner was undergoing hospitalization as often as every three months.3 The cluster of underlying reasons for his alcoholism probably never altered much, but no form of therapy made any lasting difference. Such therapies ranged from injection into the body of chemicals designed to make alcohol repugnant to the system (the Keeley Cure) to electroshock treatment and psychoanalytic sessions. None of it succeeded in separating Faulkner from the bottle. Rough spas: he seems to have believed, at the deepest level of his being, that he needed periodically to drink himself into oblivion. It was his chosen way of shaking off anxiety, as a wet dog shakes off water. When younger, he would emerge from these binges refreshed, even energized, and ready to return to his commitments—as though he had drained the battery all the way, and it was now being effectively recharged. For the last twenty years of his life, he tolerated the booze less and less well, though he indulged in it with the same frequency.
His wrestling with friends and family who sought to keep him from alcohol could seem comic if it weren’t laden with pathos. Here is Buzz Bezzerides’ account of trying, in Hollywood in late 1944, to get Faulkner to stop. The two of them were in Faulkner’s rented rooms, and he was already well on his way to oblivion. Bezzerides’ first ploy was to threaten to cut off the supply. He left the room, and on returning found copies of all of Faulkner’s novels lined up on the coffee table and autographed for Buzz. “Now will you give me a drink?” Faulkner pleaded. Remembering that a doctor had once mentioned that excessive drinking could bring on heart trouble, Bezzerides changed tack and appealed to Faulkner not to “go that way” (F 461). When he returned to the room a few minutes later, Faulkner was nowhere to be seen, and two bookshelves were bare. Bewildered, Bezzerides rushed to the porch, where he glimpsed Faulkner some distance away, struggling to heave two large sacks full of books up a steep hill. “Bill, what are you doing?” he cried. Through gritted teeth Faulkner answered, “I want to see if I’ve got a bad heart or not.” Desperate now, the athletic Bezzerides sprinted toward Faulkner, gathered him in his arms, and headed toward his car. He was taking his friend to the hospital. Apparently understanding Bezzerides’ intentions, Faulkner twisted wildly in his arms. “Bill, what are you trying to do?” the overwrought Bezzerides screamed. “I’m trying to get down,” Faulkner answered. They both stopped, looked at each other, and broke into hysterical laughter.
His stance toward alcohol was sometimes more casual. When Dave Hemphill, a Hollywood acquaintance in early 1936, grasped the gravity of Faulkner’s boozing, he asked incredulously, “Bill, how can you keep this up?” Faulkner’s reply, recycled in various situations for decades, varied but little: “Dave, there’s a lot of nourishment in an acre of corn” (F 364). As he entered his fifties, he was saying this mantra less, and ending up in hospitals more. His plight had become desperate by August 1952. He had suffered a number of serious riding falls that spring and summer, producing two compression fractures. A few months later he injured his back again—while sailing—and X-rays showed five compression fractures (some of them probably dating much further back). He was suffering convulsive seizures as well. At a doctor’s suggestion of a spinal tap he fled as usual—he had a lifelong distrust of the medical establishment—and holed up in Rowan Oak. By then he looked so ravaged that even Estelle—inured to seeing him in states of alcoholic disrepair—panicked. She summoned Random House’s Saxe Cummins to come down from New York for emergency help. Cummins came and managed to get Faulkner readmitted into the Gartley-Ramsay psychiatric hospital in Memphis. Writing home about his incapacitated author, Cummins said: “He mumbles incoherently and is totally incapable of controlling his bodily functions. This is more than a case of acute alcoholism. It is a complete disintegration of a man” (WFSH 285).
There remains a final vignette perhaps sadder than all the others. Jill Faulkner told this one, culled from a reservoir of painful childhood memories. (“Given his independent personality,” she once said with considerable restraint, “he shouldn’t have burdened himself with a family” [WFSH 294].) As one of her childhood birthdays approached, she saw her father moving toward a binge. Such binges, she knew better than most, typically lasted from a few days to a couple of weeks. Faulkner would consume bottle after bottle in his bedroom—dressed only in underwear and uninterested in eating—and would not stop until ready to stop. Alarmed, Jill begged him to hold off until after her party. Hearing this plea once too often, Faulkner told her, “No one remembers Shakespeare’s children.” Perhaps, but Faulkner’s child remembered that zinger—whether her father did or not—and I heard her cite it in a TV interview some two decades later. Faulkner’s tenderness toward his daughter was demonstrable and deep, but she grew up a troubled child, in the shadow of an unpredictable and (often) unapproachable father. (As she told one biographer, she “ached for mediocrity” [294].) When in 1954 Jill met her husband-to-be, Paul Summers, she was enraptured to learn how Summers had responded on hearing of her famous father. “Who’s he?” Summers had said—a remark that elicited from Jill an instant conviction: “he’s for me” (294).
No single cause emerges as the key to Faulkner’s abuse of alcohol. A chorus of contributing motives—all of them dimensions of his encounter with the world—cooperate, increasing his susceptibility to this disease.4 Hypersensitive from childhood on, Faulkner toughened himself as he could. At an early age he knew himself destined to write, but he knew as well that Southern culture viewed writing as a sissified vocation appropriate for women. Malcolm Cowley—who came to know Faulkner well during the later 1940s—was alert to this cultural dynamic. He saw that to withstand his fellow white Southerners’ dismissive incomprehension, Faulkner had had to overcultivate the resources of “pride, will power, and tough-hided indifference” (FCF 167). Faulkner remained a loner who never confided easily in others—including those he loved: his wife, his mother, his daughter, his siblings, his mistresses. Confession of any sort seems to have been torture to him: an exposure of his being. His extensive letter to the world was indirect and indirectly signed, via a lifetime of stories and novels. This virtually visceral reticence was one reason why later sessions of psychoanalysis (in New York in the 1950s) not only failed but were offensive. No one was entitled to know what was going on inside him—not that he always knew either. But this he did know: it was himself against the “sinister gods,” and they held the better cards.
Faulkner was unprepared for experience as it actually arrived. At the crucial juncture with Estelle—to elope or not to elope—he didn’t so much decide against it as found himself unable to decide for it. She seems to have been ready to take the leap. What emerges with increasing emphasis are the lineaments of the “untimely” man explored earlier—the man on whom “they stopped the war,” the man who married (too late) the woman he had failed to marry at the right time, the man who couldn’t fly a plane but pretended he could, who hadn’t seen action in the Great War but limped and lied to persuade others otherwise. He would be “a figure in the world”—the “figure” he saw when he envisaged his own identity—but “the Ones who set up the loom” seem to have determined otherwise. Conflicting impulses, a penchant for Keatsean dream scen
arios, an incapacity to accommodate emergent realities, the intransigent difficulty of writing A Fable (he spent a decade trying to get control over it): all these contributed, during the 1940s and early 1950s, to an acutely troubling gap between what he was and what he wanted to be.
Faulkner’s stumbling descended more broadly from a shared cultural malaise. A Southerner whose regional ideals had been decapitated ever since 1865, Faulkner dreamed backward, not forward. His dreams took the form of negative sanctuaries, holding patterns, attempted stays against the pell-mell forward movement of his life. A primary model for the domestic dignity he sought to maintain—as a bulwark against rampant, profit-driven American “progress”—was antebellum largesse. He wanted to display the valor and courage of his military progenitor—Colonel W. C. Falkner—and he wanted to inhabit the big house (Rowan Oak) built in antebellum times. Eventually, he would purchase the Bailey woods (neighboring his property) as well as Greenfield Farm. As he saw it, a Southerner was meant to be a rural (Jeffersonian) figure—one requiring an expansive mirror of land and animals to reflect his proper identity. A life of Southern graciousness should follow, enabled by a retinue of black maids and butlers, punctuated by ceremonial hunting in the big woods. As head of the household, Faulkner took on the expenses of his extended family. Such responsibilities defined the master as one who paid incumbent bills without evasion or negotiation downward.
Even as he played this role honorably, he bitterly recognized its incompatibility with his artistic calling. To Bob Haas he wrote in 1940: “Beginning at the age of 30, I, an artist, a sincere one and of the 1st class, who should be free even of his own economic responsibilities and with no moral conscience at all, began to become the sole, principal and partial support—food, shelter, heat, clothes, medicine, kotex, school fees, toilet paper and picture shows—of my mother … brother and his wife and two sons, another brother’s widow and child, a wife of my own and two step children, my own child; I inherited my father’s debts and his dependents, white and black without inheriting yet from anyone one inch of land or one stick of furniture or one cent of money” (SL 122). A footloose and unshaven maverick artist (beholden to no one) on the one hand, an antebellum paterfamilias (responsible for everyone) on the other: Faulkner awkwardly straddled these opposed stances. He had learned the rebellious bohemianism in Oxford during his teens, and then perfected it later in New Orleans, New York, and abroad. He had been absorbing the requirements of noblesse oblige ever since his mother’s milk and the childhood vignettes of Old South civility and rectitude. A maverick artist without income—who is at the same time a married gentleman with costly notions of propriety—is a man under considerable stress.
He drank to forget his defections as husband, son, father, uncle, and citizen of the South—roles he both accepted and submitted to ruthless critique. Like Jason Compson and Gail Hightower laboring furiously to escape something inescapable—themselves—so Faulkner grasped (even as he refused to know) that his forays into sanctuary were doomed. “Truth is the constant thing,” he would say in a 1955 interview in Japan, “it’s what man knows is right and that when he violates it, it troubles him … and he’ll try to escape from the knowledge of that truth in all sorts of ways, in drink, drugs, various forms of anaesthesia, because he simply cannot face himself” (LG 145). “The human heart in conflict with itself,” so Faulkner declared in his Nobel Prize speech (1950), is the core concern of great literature. It was no less the conflict gnawing at his own core.
He may also have been drinking because of professional anxiety. His big book—A Fable—was stalled. Its snail-paced composition would menace for over a decade his sense of artistic identity. Critics have marveled at how Faulkner had conceived, by 1930, most of the materials that would flower into novels during the next three decades: Go Down, Moses (1942) leading to Intruder in the Dust (1948); Sanctuary (1931) followed by Requiem for a Nun (1951); The Hamlet (1940) inaugurating the Snopes trilogy—The Town (1957) and The Mansion (1959). Less often noted is that, in the 1940s and 1950s, Faulkner generated little that was genuinely new—except for A Fable (1954). It would be hard to overestimate the dreams and anxieties that accumulated for over a decade during the stop-and-start composing of this novel. Deep down, as he conceded more than once, he knew that the book—his major new departure—was in trouble. What did the difficulty getting it written mean, if not that it went obscurely against the bent of his own genius? I shall return to the strange intensity—the rhetorical insistence mounting at times to a deafening roar—of Faulkner’s work between 1948 and 1954 (Intruder, Requiem, A Fable). For now the point is clear. The longer this belated novel took him to write, the more it had to become his Moby Dick or War and Peace.5 However wistfully he spoke of its promise, it comes as no surprise that, faced with its unending unfinishedness, he took to drink.
Finally, though, the distress sending him with rising frequency to the bottle may have arisen most from emotional needs. These had been thwarted ever since his disastrous marriage in 1929 to Estelle. “I started drinking … You know why,” he had muttered to Meta Carpenter Rebner in his Algonquin room in November 1937. Those cryptic words suggest that burn-sick and booze-sick and heart-sick were fused together in him, and that Meta serves as a key for exploring all three.
META
He met her in Hollywood in December 1935, one of the most fraught periods of his life. Dean’s crash had occurred just a month earlier. He was trying to complete Absalom, to survive guilt for his brother’s death, and to make enough Hollywood money to gain control over his debt. Meta was eleven years younger, slender, attractive, demure, and Southern. She was Howard Hawks’s script girl—as he would later, in a different sense, become Hawks’s screenplay guy—and her Mississippi provenance meant much to him. Thousands of miles from home, he missed his region—and especially his infant daughter. He felt that he had no respectable reason for being in California. It was only and always about the money. Meta’s shared background and mannerisms charmed him: a Southern oasis in the great Babylonian desert. But in a deeper sense, she offered no oasis of difference. His affair with her—though it might have happened elsewhere—took on its precise contours in Hollywood. Hollywood existed as the timeless, placeless stage set for launching the heart’s longings and liabilities. No less, the relationship with Meta was doomed because it happened in Hollywood.
“A loving gentleman,” she called him in the title of her 1976 memoir, written fourteen years after his death, almost twenty-five after they had last seen each other. The title is both sentimental and accurate. “Miss Meta,” “m’ honey,” “dear one,” “ma’am”: these were the courtly, distancing terms he used for addressing her. Though mannered, they exude his delight in her presence, his Southern appreciation of this charming woman. His respect for her never failed—she responded to it from the beginning—and it was in keeping with his need to idealize her as a woman on a pedestal, his young maiden. “The idealization of me as a girl far too young for him was to last for a number of years,” she wrote. “I never protested, and my acceptance of his vision of me as a maiden nourished his fantasy” (ALG 78). As though she were Estelle as Estelle had been meant to be, Meta opened up, for him, a hermetic space of fulfillment at once erotic and sublime.
Her bared body aroused him; at the same time he wanted to know only certain things about that body. At their first dinner together (after his assiduous courtship that December in 1935) she noted how repelled he was by nearby diners consuming their meal. “There’s something about human mastication that’s downright unattractive” (ALG 35), he explained to her. As the courtship developed into an affair during the early months of 1936, and their physical intimacy deepened, his squeamishness about the body’s basic functions struck her more forcefully. He would run water in the bathroom to muffle the sound whenever he urinated or defecated and she was nearby—a delicacy that touched and amused her. It also strengthened her awareness that he was sequestering the two of them into a rarefied love-space that had
room for little else. Others were not to enter. “Bill had placed me in a bubble,” she wrote, “and we were using up the air in it; one day we would not be able to breathe” (67). But in his mind, where would ideal lovers live, if not in a Keatsean world of bliss beyond the mundane needs of eating and breathing and socializing? He was a troubadour courting his lady; she was to be his alone.
Six years earlier, his world had come crashing down when a married and possessed Estelle had been superposed on an earlier and unpossessed Estelle. The two images were radically incompatible, and the later one did not so much annihilate the earlier one as exile it to a space in his mind where it would remain compelling and unrealizable. Their 1929 honeymoon was in many respects a disaster; by 1933 they might not have been sleeping together any longer. At least he told Meta that after Estelle’s difficult delivery of Jill that year—followed by months of unstable health—Estelle had shown no interest in intercourse. With Meta, for the only time in his life, he would enjoy a coalescence of the ideal and the actual. If his language of courtship suggested the need to maintain distance, it no less expressed his amazement that this lovely woman could be his.
Soon he was drawing (doodling would be closer to it) erotic, cartoonlike figures of their intercourse, and he was writing her tenderly obscene phrases and poems of sexual gratitude. “Meta/Bill/Meta/who soft keeps for him her love’s long girl’s body sweet to fuck Bill” (ALG 75). Showing her his unexpurgated copy of Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover, he developed for the two of them a kindred erotic lexicon: not Chatterley’s “John Thomas” and “Lady Jane” for their intimate parts, but “Mr. Bowen” and “Mrs. Bowen.” His correspondence with her delighted in these terms; the phrase-maker was Faulkner, not Meta. In another letter he wrote in the same vein, “For Meta, my heart, my jasmine garden, my April and May cunt; my white one, my blonde morning, winged, my sweetly dividing, my honey-cloyed, my sweet-assed gal. Bill” (76). “Keeps for him,” as well as that string of “my”’s: such terms intimate less a couple’s shared richness than his astonishment at possessing her: all this is his. With Meta, during the passionate early months of 1936, he enjoyed the honeymoon (“honey-cloyed”) that had failed with Estelle six years earlier. A photo she took reveals a grinning Faulkner seated in the courtyard of her Hollywood apartment complex—grinning in appreciation of his fabulous luck. This photo joins that other one of him grinning, his hand pointing proudly to his Waco, taken a few years earlier. I know of no others of Faulkner that approach these two as unguarded expressions of delight. In each, he expresses his joy in possessing something he had assumed to be beyond his reach. The “sinister gods” must have been napping: this was too good to be true.
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