But Hollywood could never, for Faulkner, be other than a perversely willed invention, a huge stage set, a scene of bloated egos and untrustworthy performances: all of this resting on a meretricious art form. It was a place of exploitative machinations disguised by tinselly mirages—alluring surfaces with nothing reliable underneath. It battened on sentimental illusion. The unceasing hum of high profit—greed—bespoke its subterranean motor if one listened hard enough. When Jack Falkner, aware of his brother’s intensified drinking and fearful for his health, joined Faulkner in 1937, he asked if Faulkner could recognize his rented house from the air. Faulkner answered no, saying that it “was practically impossible to distinguish even when driving along the street right in front of it” (F 382). Later he would say of the entire region, “Nobody here does anything. There’s nobody here with any roots. Even the houses are built out of mud and chicken wire” (467). Los Angeles was a city invented by the car, rather than a set of communities where people had long lived together, prior to Henry Ford’s abstract organizing of their shared space. No house had its unique insertion, its own history. No abiding stories attached to dwellings, giving them an irreplaceable personality, a patina of time. Seemingly built yesterday, the whole place could disappear tomorrow.
As I have noted, though Meta was Southern, his affair with her was pure Hollywood. There they could be unknown in a sense that would have been impossible back home. Acquaintances in Oxford were encumbered with parents and grandparents, uncles and aunts and cousins and offspring, friends and enemies. Extensive family stories predated them, intermingling with other families’ stories. Three generations earlier, Hindmans and Falkners had intimately and publicly done damage to each other. His grandfather was abidingly interwoven into the texture of Oxford banking, business, and politics—a friend or enemy of important and unavoidable men and women. His father Murry had grown up under the shadow of an extensive family history that he could have wished less oppressive—but that he could not wish away. Faulkner’s own identity presupposed a sustained Falkner/Oldham/Stone history whose duration was inescapable—for better and for worse. Toward the end of his life, when he was preparing to shift his primary residence from Oxford to Charlottesville, Virginia, the idea of slipping that lifetime noose of “known-ness” must have appealed to him. In Charlottesville, he could fantasize being only who he now was: a universally acclaimed writer, an occasional professor, a doting grandfather, a sartorial fox hunter. He would be just William Faulkner, not also the former but unforgotten Billy Falkner whom his Uncle John had openly ridiculed in Oxford’s public square some thirty years ago.
Faulkner’s fictional genius required, as one of his critics has noted, several generations of intertwined family histories as their enabling premise.7 There are no Sartorises at all if you strip away their nineteenth-century avatars; likewise no Compsons or Sutpens or McCaslins. Even Snopeses presuppose extensive passing time. At the end of The Mansion, an outraged Mink Snopes makes his way from Parchman prison back to Jefferson, revenge on his mind. He has returned to kill his cousin Flem for not protecting him thirty-seven years earlier and allowing him instead to rot in prison all that time. Remove the complications of “all that time” and there is no plot in The Mansion. The entire sequence from The Hamlet to The Town to The Mansion sits squarely atop the frame of extensive, ongoing time. Faulkner is a time writer (as Hemingway is not). It takes cumulative changes—with their unpremeditated consequences—for him to come to life as a novelist.
Hollywood understood time and space differently. It had no interest in the cumulative, in the unfolding of trouble-making causes and consequences—traps that would unavoidably involve others in unforeseeable ways. Hollywood promised time as nirvana and space as utopia, and it promised them now—or if not now, within the scope of a two-hour film. Its model for an enrooted place was a stage set, its model for an entangled time was a love story simplified enough to be compassed on two hours of celluloid. Faulkner never tired of cursing Hollywood as a betrayal of his calling. Although he rarely identified the specifics of that betrayal, Hollywood’s cheapening of the actual texture of experience must have been crucial. He knew perfectly well how the popular magazines required shortcuts—in language and in sequence—that his own more intricate sense of unfolding would have forbidden. He had accepted those short cuts then, and he accepted them now. Off and on for some twenty years, he labored in Hollywood to produce the scripts the moguls wanted—some ten thousand pages of writing, it has been estimated. But he could neither accept nor escape the Hollywood stamp irremovably placed on his affair with Meta Carpenter.
At first they had dreamed of his divorce and their marriage. But the more she envisaged Oxford’s endlessly repercussive response to her replacing Estelle, the more Meta realized that it was doomed. Too many people, long since part of his established world, would refuse to endorse this new marriage. She would never be accepted, and she was not cut out for confrontation or ostracism. For his part, he seems to have understood even earlier—by the summer of 1936—that only as a pair of lovers did they have a chance at all. Take into account three people or four (Estelle and Jill), and it could never work. The puppet strings controlling their movements were inextricably entangled with those of others—as he had put it in Absalom. Too many incompatible human wills were engaged for their union to thrive. It had one chance and one only: in Hollywood. There, in rented rooms and during stolen weekends—in that setting dedicated to the heart’s release, licit or not—they experienced their love for each other. It was not enough, as she later said—a beleaguered sanctuary—but they both made it enough. It could not save their lives, and it arguably damaged hers beyond repair. But gentle Meta Carpenter was the dark flame that both consumed him and made him—during the troubled years of their affair—a novelist of irresistible, hopeless love.
“WHERE DO WOMEN BLEED?”: IF I FORGET THEE, JERUSALEM
By September 1937, he had begun a novel that both poured out of him and dried up on him, unpredictably. If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem—published as The Wild Palms and given its proper name only in 1990—draws intimately on his ongoing experience with Meta Carpenter. Or more accurately, it draws less on Meta herself than on his experience of the bodily phenomenon she brought to a crescendo: orgasm. Charlotte Rittenmeyer, one of the two protagonists, hardly resembles Meta Carpenter. Marked by “a faint inch-long scar on one cheek” (IIF 520), Charlotte burns with an unsmiling ferocity foreign to Meta’s well-bred docility. Perhaps because of the scar, critics have proposed Helen Baird as the model for Charlotte: Helen was similarly scarred, forthright, demanding. But Helen was an unpossessed flame some fifteen years earlier, on Faulkner’s voyage out. The crucial event here is erotic consummation. The entire novel pivots on the unmanageable force of sexuality.
It is true that one half of the novel (“Old Man”)—oddly interwoven with the love-story half (“Wild Palms”)—features no acts of sexual intercourse. But no great leap of imagination is required to grasp that the intercourse enacted literally in the love story of “Wild Palms” is enacted figuratively in the landscape of “Old Man.” Faulkner was never to describe a more hallucinatory landscape than that of the ferocious Mississippi (Old Man) flooding its borders and wreaking havoc on all the puny schemas of order meant to contain its force. The protagonist of this narrative—an unnamed convict sent out on the water to rescue a stranded and terminally pregnant woman, equally unnamed—has only a frail boat between him and the exploding waters:
[Suddenly the place] where the phosphorescent water met the darkness was now about ten feet higher than it had been an instant before and … it was curled forward upon itself like a sheet of dough being rolled out for a pudding. It reared, stooping; the crest of it swirled like the mane of a galloping horse…. He continued to paddle though the skiff had ceased to move forward at all but seemed to be hanging in space while the paddle still reached thrust recovered and reached again; now instead of space the skiff became abruptly surrounded by a welter of fle
eing debris—planks, small buildings, the bodies of drowned yet antic animals, entire trees leaping and diving like porpoises above which the skiff seemed to hover in weightless and airy indecision like a bird above a fleeing countryside … while the convict squatted in it still going through the motions of paddling, waiting for an opportunity to scream. He never found it. For an instant the skiff seemed to stand erect on its stern and then … (IIF 601)
Immersed in water like this, one does not steer; there is not even time to scream. Time disappears. Spatial demarcation vanishes as well. What was earlier dry land with fixed orientational markers (trees, farms, roads) is now a roiling universe of water. Horizontal becomes vertical, down becomes up, forward becomes backward, fixed things swirl by as moving and dangerous debris. The sexual dynamic interior to “Wild Palms” has here transformed into outer apocalypse. The setting of this story has slipped its mapped and masculine fixity, becoming bottomless, unmanageable, female waters. Fall into these and you drown. At their symbolic core—the targeted but unlocated object of the convict’s quest—is a nameless nine-months-pregnant woman, swollen, and with her own waters ready to rupture. The landscape of “Old Man” keeps screaming the same message to the hapless convict trapped upon it: you can’t live here. In this, it squarely intersects the kindred message at the heart of the love story—one Charlotte passes on to Harry: “You live in sin; you cant live on it” (IIF 551, emphasis in the original).
Both stories circulate around something more primordial than fixed forms: liquid that has escaped its normal boundaries and is flowing uncontrollably. In the love story, that liquid is Charlotte’s blood. The narrative opens in the perspective of a puritanical older doctor suddenly summoned to treat a badly—but invisibly—injured woman. Charlotte and Harry have rented the doctor’s bungalow on the Gulf Coast. She is bleeding—fatally, it turns out—from Harry’s botched abortion. Although the doctor senses immediately “the secret irreparable seeping of blood” (IIF 496), his defenses keep him from knowing more. He has to ask, “Where is she bleeding?” and Harry responds, “Where do women bleed?” (504).
Female bleeding marked Faulkner’s imagination long before this novel. In The Sound and the Fury, Quentin was mesmerized by women’s menses—“periodical filth between two moons balanced” (SF 975). As I Lay Dying and Sanctuary both attended hypnotically to an illicit rupture of the hymen—Dewey Dell’s pregnancy, Temple’s rape. Light in August went on to consider more broadly this male obsession. “Womanfilth!” the incensed Doc Hines thunders at both of Joe’s “mothers” (the dietitian who substituted as mother, his real mother, Milly, who died in childbirth virtually at Hines’s hands). Christmas is likewise fascinated and terrified by where women bleed. When other boys first told him about female periods, he rushed into the woods—horrified—where he found a stray sheep, slaughtered it, and immersed his hands in its blood. He was seeking inoculation from an intolerable leakage at the core of the woman one desires. Joe thought he had got such inoculation until—years later—he tries to bed the waitress Bobbie and learns that she is having her period. Shocked speechless by the invisible liquid moving beneath her apparent stillness, he erupts into violence, jabbing her hard twice in the head, then fleeing. When he stops within a grove of trees to get his breath, he sees all the trees, hallucinatorily, as deformed and bleeding urns, issuing drop by drop a deathly, foul-smelling liquid. Menstruation figures in Faulkner’s masculine imaginary (and not just his) as an unbearable confession of instability and bodily rot—of “liquid putrefaction”—lurking within what ought to manifest as an intact female form.
But none of these earlier novels—no matter how intense their interest in female menses—centered on orgasm. And none of them drew so openly on recent personal experience. If Pylon and If I Forget Thee both deal with autobiographical experience (flying and intercourse), only the latter imagines it as something like a perpetual drowning. Here is Faulkner trying to say it to Bob Haas in 1938: “To me, it [If I Forget Thee] was written just as if I had sat on the one side of a wall and the paper was on the other and my hand with the pen thrust through the wall and writing not only on invisible paper but in pitch darkness too” (SL 106). Here is Harry trying to say it in the novel proper: “Yes out of the terror in which you surrender volition, hope, all—the darkness, the falling … you yet feel all your life rush out of you into the pervading immemorial blind receptive matrix, the hot fluid blind foundation—grave-wound or womb-grave, it’s all one” (IIF 589). And here is the diagnosis offered by a doctor in “Old Man.” To the convict—who has been bleeding through the nose for much of the narrative, as well as battling with raging waters and trying to deliver the liquid-swollen, stranded mother—the doctor says, “Anyone ever suggest to you that you were hemophilic?” (658).
Common to these three passages is the uncontrollable release of liquid—through the pen, out the body, from the nose. The release seems to occur “in pitch darkness,” and its recklessness is steeped in fatality: “grave-wound or womb-grave, it’s all one.” The bursting is at once ecstatic and transgressive of every boundary that makes selfhood recognizable. “Hemophilic”: let us take the term figuratively as suggesting an unstanchably porous and “leaking” imagination. Things surge in and out too easily. It has long been noted that vomiting plays a large role in Faulkner’s fiction. Vomiting first shows up as the result of binges in the aviator stories, as well as in Bayard in Flags, Gowan in Sanctuary, Jiggs in Pylon. But in the greater work—The Sound and the Fury and Light in August—vomiting begins to signify more broadly the drama of the ego’s exposure, its incapacity to ward off coming assault. Honeysuckle threatens to choke Quentin (drenching him in Caddy’s sexuality); Benjy’s vomiting after drinking sarsaparilla at Caddy’s wedding expresses a violation of his entire psychic economy; and Joe Christmas’s throwing up in Light in August enacts the breaching of his meager resources for self-sustaining. In the presence of a black girl in a shed—this is to be his sexual initiation—the young supposedly-white Christmas explodes into violence. Her “black” scent has penetrated him, undone his sense of racial distinctiveness. He goes briefly berserk.
“Hemophilic”: Faulkner suffered from—and tapped unforgettably in his work—the overwhelming of his defenses. Eventually he would realize that bodily distress was at the same time cultural distress. His hypersensitivity to the dynamics of “taking in” and “leaking out” made him a virtual seismographer of unnegotiable cultural encounters. Outrage—the signature event in his tragic work—is precisely the overwhelming of culturally inculcated boundaries. Outraged, invaded, one is no longer oneself. Like Freud, Faulkner seems to have known that only what hurts—what cuts “across the devious, intricate channels of decorous ordering” (Absalom, emphasis in the original)—is instructive. The lacerating wound carries the bad news that one’s defenses have been breached, one’s map of selfhood now in shambles. In a Southern culture fixated on mapping and maintaining differences between male and female, white and black, aristocrat and white trash, Faulkner reveals with extraordinary power the phenomenon of cultural hemorrhage: the collapse of identity-sustaining boundaries. What is the invisible spectacle of such a collapse if not light-skinned Joe Christmas parading in Mottstown’s central square, waiting to be recognized as “black”? What is the miscegenation at the heart of both Absalom and Go Down, Moses—not to speak of Faulkner’s own ancestral shadow family—if not the transgression of sanctuaries meant to keep out the secretly desired but socially intolerable other?
Invisible to the eye but not to the nose: the idiot Benjy in The Sound and the Fury “sees” Caddy’s ruptured virginity with his nose—“he smell hit.” More broadly, the larger social armature of segregation itself was installed to quarantine a black difference impacting whites at the level of smell itself. In a white South obsessed with maintaining racial distinctions, smell becomes hypercharged. More primitive and disturbing than sight—which satisfyingly keeps others at a distance by identifying them as “out there”—smell does
its work retroactively. Once you smell it, it is too late: the damage is done. The other has invaded you, is in your nostrils, your entire body—without warning. Your only recourse is a violent, virtually orgasmic expulsion of the intolerable. “Hemophilic”: Faulkner matters because he did not manage to keep his borders (at once personal and cultural) intact and stanch the bleeding, and because he somehow grasped what was at stake in such overwhelming. The troubled life and the troubling work are inseparable.
If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem is certainly centered on trouble. “You live in sin; you cant live on it.” You cannot make a life out of it; sin cannot be tamed—willed into familiar spatial or temporal order. The novel takes this core conviction all the way. At the level of plot, one could call both stories scorched-earth narratives, if they weren’t so saturated in liquid. Place as we know it—familiar, stabilizing—disappears in “Old Man.” The story deals in frantic motion on the water, with minor intervals alongside larger boats or interludes among incommunicable Cajun hunters. The expelled convict longs to return to the dry enclosure of Parchman prison: anything that will keep him away from the watery and unfathomable female world. In “Wild Palms,” place doesn’t so much disappear as take on kaleidoscopic motion. The narrative lurches from New Orleans to Chicago to Utah, then back to New Orleans and finally to a Mississippi prison. At the story’s end, Harry is set to spend the rest of his days in the same prison as the convict, sent there for having killed Charlotte with his botched abortion. Though offered escape, Harry has no interest in taking it. None of these settings is sustaining, provided with a stabilizing history, populated by others one might come to know. None is available for normal activities (getting a job, buying a house, marrying a spouse, raising a family). Fleetingly, other people and places flash by in “Wild Palms,” like two-dimensional landscapes glimpsed on a speeding train. The train is the lovers’ sexual bond(age): it has room for only two figures—Charlotte and Harry—and it is at home nowhere.
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