THE LATER FICTION 2: “WE DON’T WANT HIM TAME”
I have cited before these words of Sam Fathers (in Go Down, Moses), after he has captured the wild dog Lion and has begun to train him to take down Old Ben. Faulkner’s fiction aspired more broadly to the condition of untamedness. “When something is new and hard and bright,” Cash had said in As I Lay Dying, “there ought to be something a little better for it than just being safe, since the safe things are just the things that folks have been doing so long they have worn the edges off and there’s nothing to the doing of them that leaves a man to say, That was not done before and it cannot be done again” (AILD 85-6). Cannot be done again: the 1929 breakthrough that took Faulkner from Flags to The Sound and the Fury required a refusal of novelistic safety. Faulkner had good reason for believing that no publisher would take on the risk embodied in his latest novel. Yes, Ulysses had appeared in 1922—and without Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus (presented to the reader through interior monologue) there might well have been no Quentin Compson—but Benjy’s narrative is pure Faulkner. More, Faulkner choosing to open The Sound and the Fury in that untamed idiotic mind involved a greater risk than Joyce opening Ulysses in the comparatively accessible first chapter, “Telemachus.” (Ulysses becomes increasingly bewildering once it moves past its initial investment in characters, but it begins familiarly enough.)
Each of Faulkner’s novels that followed The Sound and the Fury—from 1929 through 1936—pursued its version of untamedness. Retaining an interior monologue format, As I Lay Dying departed dramatically from Compson dysfunction. Its world was rural, vernacular, and comic rather than once-aristocratic and tragic. Its cast of characters—each granted an interior lens—expanded from the earlier book’s three to a dizzying fifteen. Sanctuary, for its part, ran a different kind of risk: embarking on a sequence of the most sordid sexual misdeeds and their unmoralized consequences. (“Good God, I can’t publish this,” Hal Smith had remonstrated after reading the manuscript; “we’d both be in jail” [F 239].) Light in August opened up a new territory of unsafe materials: the murderous territory of Southern race relations that Faulkner would continue to probe in Absalom and Go Down, Moses. Each of these novels was never far from offending its reader in its own way. Next came the rhetorically overwrought Pylon, soon followed by Absalom. In the magisterial Absalom—difficult to write not least because it was so freighted with historical, racial, and personal troubles—Faulkner’s thematic range and technical inventiveness surpassed the capacity of all of his American contemporaries. He had become a writer of stunning risks taken and made good on.
Of the next four books—The Unvanquished (1938), If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem (1939), The Hamlet (1940), and Go Down, Moses (1942)—only the first could be called tame. Each of the others reached into high-risk zones of analysis and implication—his own sexual experience, the broadest repercussions of racial injustice in America—that put the writer at risk. The form of each was new; Faulkner was continually reinventing himself. Then, following the six-year hiatus, came the three novels of “Faulknerese.” Shrill to the point of seeking to outshout God himself, these ambitious novels failed less because they were “tamed” than because they escaped rhetorical control. Faulkner had long admired Thomas Wolfe’s project of “trying to put the whole history of the human heart” into a single sentence (FIU 144). Thus formulated, this would be a disastrous program for fiction, and Faulkner’s great work happily eluded it (whatever lip-service he paid). In that unbridled trio of “Faulknerese” novels, however, he seems in some ways to have attempted to out-Wolfe Wolfe.
It is possible to glimpse—in Faulkner’s own early fifties, the years in which he wrote these rhetorical monsters—a cumulative despair rising and overflowing its earlier unstable boundaries. It was probably the period of his greatest personal misery and self-doubt as a writer, joined by his most damaging attempts to elude these by way of sanctuary. By the later 1950s, however, it is as though Faulkner had emerged onto the other side of a climacteric (both imaginative and experiential). The “sinister gods” remained in charge, to be sure. Life remained something that was “not now, and perhaps never was, worth the living.” But his intensity had diminished, his sense of outrage seemed to have lessened, and his last novels began to escape a “Faulknerese” compulsion to insist. He became tame(r). The doting grandfather (Jill’s first child was born in 1956), the amiable (though still impenetrable) Charlottesville gentleman and sartorial fox hunter, the serviceable teacher at the University of Virginia and global spokesperson for American culture: this more presentable persona began to emerge. Not that Faulkner’s underlying anxieties and misgivings got resolved, but they seemed—for periods of time during his last five years—to weigh less heavily. “Pappy really changed,” Jill said, reflecting on his silent delight in her two young sons: “He became so much easier for everyone to live with…. He was enjoying life” (F 671). This older, tamer Faulkner wrote The Town (1957), The Mansion (1959), and The Reivers (1962).
The Town—the second volume in the Snopes trilogy—suffers when compared to the earlier Hamlet. Many of the same characters reappear, but it is as though they, too, have passed through a sort of climacteric. The book is domestic, more polite, at moments almost genteel. The Ratliff who shares the narrative focus with Chick Mallison (the child protagonist of Intruder) and with Gavin Stevens has lost much of his earlier force. His task here—as narrator—is shrewdly to counterpoint the ever-verbose Gavin Stevens. Other than narrating about Flem, Eula, her lover De Spain, her daughter Linda, and a few other odd Snopeses, the narrators have little to do. (The voyeuristic dimension of The Town is extensive and a touch unpleasant.)
The Mansion (two years later) is stronger. Eula’s illegitimate daughter Linda Snopes, as uncompromising as her mother, has grown up, traveled abroad, and returned home, endowed with radical convictions. A left-wing politics begin to manifest itself. It is as though the reactionary racism that Faulkner tried to confront throughout the 1950s produced finally its fictional antagonist: a fearless girl who pursues the projects her benighted fellow white Southerners abhor. But this last Snopes volume comes most alive when it dilates on Mink Snopes’s fanatic pursuit of his treacherous brother Flem. In this pursuit Mink is abetted by Linda—who has long detested Flem for ruining her mother’s life. Finally, Mink emerges (exiting from Parchman prison thirty-seven years behind the time) as a sort of walking anachronism. Through him, Faulkner intimates his own nostalgia for the early twentieth-century South of his childhood—the world as it used to be.
“I listen to the voices, and when I put down what they say, it’s right” (FCF 159): so Faulkner had long ago described to Malcolm Cowley his creative procedure. Most readers caught up in the vortex of his greatest characters’ dilemmas would grant the claim. Unlike Henry James or James Joyce, Faulkner rarely proceeds by way of a modulated authorial stance—intricately nuanced and carrying latent judgments—enacted upon his fictional universe. When Faulkner is great, he is inseparable from his characters—immersed utterly in their voices, gestures, and actions. Perhaps it is that dream-like projection into his materials—neither subtly judgmental nor sentimentally endorsing—that is most missing from these two tamer Snopes novels.
Such intensity is missing from The Reivers as well. Filled with light-hearted adventures whose pathos rarely turns toward tragedy or obsession, this last novel was written for—and dedicated to—his grandsons. (Its opening words are “Grandfather said.”) Mink’s long backward glance has now stretched into reminiscence of events that took place a lifetime ago. These involve derring-do vignettes—a stolen car, betting on and fixing horse races, several sorts of Memphis mayhem. Miss Reba’s whorehouse features as prominently here as it did in Sanctuary, but this time shorn of menace. It has become an all right place for boys to read about. Often compared to Twain’s boy books on the one hand and to Shakespeare’s valedictory Tempest on the other, The Reivers possesses little of The Tempest’s inexhaustible resonance. Insofar as it is Twai
n-like, it is closer to the shenanigans of Tom Sawyer than the more brooding inwardness of Huckleberry Finn. “The human heart in conflict with itself”: so Faulkner had identified, in his Nobel Prize speech, his signature concern. The raging, conflicted heart is what (apart from Mink in The Mansion) these last novels lack—a lack one can only hope softened their author’s final years as well. Less driven once he had passed the age of sixty, perhaps more accepting of his inescapable conditions, Faulkner seems to have stumbled less, even if peace remained beyond his grasp. His valedictory novel, at any rate, hardly stumbles at all: a testimony to its lightness and charm.
EPILOGUE
“MUST MATTER”
You get born and you try this and you dont know why only you keep on trying it and you are born at the same time with a lot of other people, all mixed up with them, like trying to, having to, move your arms and legs with strings only the same strings are hitched to all the other arms and legs…like five or six people all trying to make a rug on the same loom…and it cant matter, you know that, or the Ones that set up the loom would have arranged things a little better, and yet it must matter because you keep on trying…and then all of a sudden it’s all over and all you have left is a block of stone with scratches on it…and after a while they don’t even remember…what the scratches were trying to tell, and it doesn’t matter.
—Absalom, Absalom!
“Cant matter” is primordial in Faulkner’s understanding of life and is never gainsaid. In the passage from Absalom that I opened this book with and quote again here, the pathos of “must matter” is sandwiched between a “cant matter” and a “doesn’t matter” that remain inalterable. All the “Kilroy was here” scrawls on all the walls in the world do not change the fact that the human being is a puny creature up against the “sinister gods,” “the Ones who set up the loom.” Life is not a winning situation, and Faulkner never forgot that it wasn’t. Yet he tenaciously insisted on writing his books as though they “must matter.” No less, this stumbling man persevered throughout his life as though (against all better judgment) somehow it, too, must matter.
His abiding tenderness toward children shines through the biographical data. One notes it first in his volunteering to be local scoutmaster (a post he held in the early 1920s, until church dignitaries found him morally unworthy of this trust and forced his resignation). Toward his daughter Jill—“Missy”—he remained deeply attached from her birth until his death, perhaps most so during the “salt mine” years (much of the 1940s) that he spent in exile in Hollywood. Learning from Estelle that his nine-year-old daughter had had her hair cut, he responded:
Pappy misses that yellow hair that had never had an inch cut off of it since you were born, but Pappy knows and can remember and can see in his mind whenever he wants to every single day you ever lived, whether he was there to look at you or not…. So any time he wants to think so, that hair is still long, never touched with scissors. So, that being the case, your hair can be cut like you want it, and it can still be like Pappy wants to think of it, at the same time. So I am glad you had it fixed the way you like it, and I want you to enjoy it and write me about it. (SL 173)
Like a Keatsean “still unravished bride,” Jill lived both in and out of time for her father: a growing woman disappearing Eurydice-like from him, an immortal child housed securely in his mind. Two years later, he was brooding over her parting words to him about “Lady Go-lightly” (the horse he had bought for her in Hollywood): “Pappy, I’ve got to have that horse. It hurts my heart,” she had said (F 468). For $125 he bought a two-wheeled horse trailer and paid $350 more to have others help him haul Lady to Mississippi behind his car. (“I’ve got a mare that’s going to foal,” he told a Hollywood colleague, “and I want it to foal in Mississippi” [467-8].) Driving at top speed for three days across country (with brief motel stops), they arrived at Rowan Oak after midnight. Jill was awakened. Sleepily, she made her way down the stairs, then saw him standing there next to the horse trailer, and started running: “It’s my horse,” she said, incredulous, as she embraced Lady, “it’s my horse.”
Toward his stepchildren Malcolm and Victoria his relations were complex, sometimes involving disciplinary gestures they would remember. But he was there for Victoria during her own crisis in early 1938. A young mother with a baby only a few months old, and suddenly abandoned by her husband, she had sought refuge at Rowan Oak. Faulkner kept her occupied, gave her typing to do, worked crossword puzzles with her, and read Keats and Housman to her during the terrible evenings. “He kept me alive,” she later said of his care. But it was his niece Dean to whom—apart from Jill—he must have felt the greatest emotional and financial responsibility. His role in her father’s crash in 1935 had never ceased to torment him, and he steadfastly supported her during her years of growing up, college education, and subsequent travel, as her father would have done. When, in the fall of 1958, she married John Mallard in Oxford, he and Estelle hosted the wedding events. He gave her away at the altar. After the newlyweds had left for their honeymoon, he and Estelle took the altar flowers to the St. Peter’s cemetery late that night, and he laid them on the grave where Dean was buried. As Blotner interpreted this gesture, “the flowers told his brother that he had seen his daughter through childhood and adolescence, from maidenhood to marriage. He had fulfilled the vow made twenty-three years before by the wreckage of the Waco” (F 655). If I forget thee, Jerusalem: Faulkner honored at least this vow, among the vows he made.
His generosity toward his extended family was unfailing but far from sentimental. In June 1942, he wrote his agent Harold Ober (who, ever reserved, must have been shocked by reading it) the following complaint: “I have been trying for about ten years to carry a load that no artist has any business attempting: oldest son to widowed mothers and inept brothers and nephews and wives and other female connections and their children, most of whom I don’t like and with none of whom I have anything in common, even to make conversation about” (SL 153). Though doubtless penned in a moment of irritation, the letter remains telling. Its terms presage his larger lover’s quarrel with his state itself. “Loving all of it even while he had to hate some of it,” he would write in 1954 about Mississippi, “because he knows now that you don’t love because: you love despite; not for the virtues, but despite the faults” (ESPL 42-3). These blood-kin and family-kin were his world—partly shaped by him, more deeply simultaneous with him and inherited. His honor was at stake in the quality of his treatment of them. Although the puppet-strings of their desires may have interfered with his own, he was not free to abandon them. The difficult, silent loner and the embroiled, responsible family man came together—in irresoluble tension—as one William Faulkner.
His stance toward Phil Stone reveals the same underlying loyalty. More than anyone else, Stone helped to launch the young Faulkner’s career. But his mentoring became at times insufferable. Promoting (and paying production costs for) The Marble Faun (1924), Stone had informed the Yale Alumni Weekly: “This poet is my personal property and I urge all my friends and class-mates to buy his book” (F 123). As Faulkner’s fame increased, the darker side of Stone’s attachment to him emerged more often. In the Oxford Magazine in 1934, Stone launched what he proposed as a six-installment narrative of Faulkner and his family. Granting that Faulkner was one of the “most noted exponents…of modern technique,” Stone denied his protégé any “trace of genius” and opined that “he has gone as far as he will ever go” (331). Happily, the magazine fizzled out after three issues. Against this emotionally intricate backdrop, we can measure Faulkner’s generosity when Stone himself fell into overwhelming money troubles. When his father’s bank collapsed in 1930, Stone assumed his considerable debts. Ten years later, the same debts were crushing Stone, and foreclosure on one of the notes was fast approaching. Desperate, Stone turned to Faulkner, who immediately wrote Bob Haas at Random House: “I have a friend here, I have known him all my life, never any question of mine and thine between us when either
had it…. Of course I will sign any thing, contracts, etc…. I will sell or mortgage…. $6000 is what we have to raise” (SL 100)—in three weeks. Borrowing $1,200 against future royalties on The Hamlet, and collecting $4,800 as the cash value of his own life insurance policy, Faulkner got the $6,000 to Stone just in time. Over a decade later, in an Oxford Eagle tribute to Faulkner for having won the Nobel Prize, Stone remembered his friend’s generosity: “A lot of us talk about decency, about honor, about loyalty, about gratitude,” Stone wrote. “Bill doesn’t talk about these things; he lives them” (F 526).
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