B006JHRY9S EBOK

by Philip Weinstein

  A demonstration of virtue without the verbal claims that so often go with it (and at times substitute for it): Faulkner’s French translator, Maurice Coindreau, noted the same rare trait a few months after Faulkner’s death: “If he wanted to speak well of you,” Coindreau wrote, “he preferred to do it when your back was turned” (F 98). Recognition and gratitude were exactly what he did not seek in return. Faulkner’s acknowledgment had nothing to do with appearances or applause, and everything to do with a silent ethical gauge he carried within. Following his returning to Oxford in December 1950, flush for perhaps the first time in his life—thanks to Nobel largesse—Faulkner headed to his Uncle John’s office: “I want you to do something with that damned money,” he told his uncle the judge. “I haven’t earned it and I don’t feel like it’s mine. I want to give some money to the poor folks of Lafayette County” (535). This meant poor blacks as well as whites.

  Even a cursory reading of Faulkner’s letters reveals another virtue sometimes missed by readers of his work: humor. In the spring of 1958, addressing a class of English majors at Princeton, he received one especially sententious question: “I have read all your books and short stories,” the young man said, “and I want to know, is there one character that is saved by grace?” Pausing for a moment to take this in, Faulkner responded, “Well, I have always thought of God as being in the wholesale rather than the retail business” (F 650-1). Earlier, in 1948, he had written to Cowley of a handsome invitation to address Yale’s English Department and receive $200: “I don’t think I know anything worth 200 dollars worth talking about…so I would probably settle for a bottle of good whiskey” (SL 271). Turning down recognition from Yale—like his later refusal to accept President Kennedy’s invitation to join other Nobel laureates for a dinner at the White House—were moves determined and sanctioned by that inner ethical gauge. (When Blotner asked Faulkner what to say to reporters amazed by his decision, he replied: “Tell them I’m too old at my age to travel that far to eat with strangers” [F 703].) Often the humor would be wrapped around a financial offer that he wryly conceded could still tempt him. To Ober he wrote in 1959:

  Having, with THE MANSION, finished the last of my planned labors; and, at 62, having to anticipate that moment when I shall have scraped the last minuscule from the bottom of the F. barrel; and having undertaken a home in Virginia where I can break my neck least expensively fox hunting, I am now interested in $2500.00 or for that matter $25.00. (SL 433)

  Putting in the 00 cents: this is the sign of humor by a man who for much of his life had been beaten up by money negotiations he never respected and rarely got the better of. Faulkner’s humor emerged not at the expense of anyone, unless of himself. Because he knew he was a fool in the hands of the gods, he could laugh at—and sometimes share with others—the predicaments he found himself in. Beaten up by money arrangements, but not corrupted.

  Faulkner distinguished acutely between financial complications and financial dishonor. For a period of over four years (in the 1940s), he was hounded by a literary agent named Herndon, who had offered to sell some of his stories in Hollywood as materials for film. These transactions soon became sticky, as East Coast and West Coast agents jockeyed to get into the act. When Faulkner wrote Herndon that he was going with a West Coast agent and that their arrangement was off, Herndon turned aggressive. He concocted an elaborate argument about having suffered damages, and he threatened to sue if Faulkner did not comply. Faulkner was both openly defiant and inwardly aggrieved. He wrote Herndon, “You accused me of deliberate underhand dealing, which is not true, and inferred that I could be forced by threats into doing what is right, which I will take from no man.” After a genuine attempt to negotiate Herndon’s claims, Faulkner closed his letter as follows: “If this is not satisfactory to you, then make good your threat and cause whatever trouble you wish” (F 158). The tone is sublime: one would associate it more with dueling gentlemen like Hamilton and Burr than with a 1940s quarrel between writer and agent. Certainly no lawyer working for Faulkner would have encouraged him to respond thus! The aftermath is likewise revealing. Faulkner wrote Ober, “I have failed in integrity toward him [Herndon]. I was not aware of this at the time, yet and strangely enough perhaps even if it is not true, I do not like to be accused of it” (SL 160). Faulkner’s sense of honor is a critical dimension of his identity. He does not compromise with it nor suffer others to cast aspersions on it. Learning of Hemingway’s death (a year before his own), Faulkner immediately sensed it was a suicide. This form of exit obscurely ruffled Faulkner’s unspoken code of integrity: “I don’t like a man that takes the short way home,” he told a friend (F 690). Living just is the courage to stay with a bad hand until the game is over (and most hands are bad hands: the sinister gods hold the trumps).

  Against these odds, Faulkner made good on the single successful bid for sanctuary that gave his life its form: his undeviating determination to write novels. That activity was deforming as well. Deforming because writing served—as intoxication and affairs could not—as socially sanctioned escape, abiding alibi for nonaffiliation. Writing legitimized his disappearance from the socially commanded performances that dot most people’s lives from maturation onward. It gave Faulkner extended absence not only without leave but without requiring leave. Musing on the role of the map of his fictional kingdom that Faulkner drew for The Portable Faulkner, Cowley recognized that “intellectual solitude” was the “precondition of his writing. Only in solitude could he enter the inner kingdom—‘William Faulkner, sole owner and proprietor’—that his genius was able to people and cultivate” (FCF 166). Only inside the space silently generated by his words was Faulkner able to hear the voices soliciting him.

  Much as he required this sanctuary provided by words, he recognized its noninnocence from the beginning. Writing stands in for doing. In the South, serious men did not write. As Addie Bundren savagely put it in As I Lay Dying, “words are…just a shape to fill a lack.” Faulkner had learned throughout his twenties to craft a range of fictions that more insidiously took the place of the real. The Canadian RAF uniform simulated a war experience he never had. He used lies—a plate in the head, another in the knee—to persuade others of wounds never incurred. Faulkner grasped, early on, that the very idea of fiction is steeped in falsehood. His great work never succumbs to sentimental confusions between the invented and the real that lies behind all convention. What is the tireless drive for the truth of things—a drive that marks his masterpieces—if not a core conviction that the truth differs from simulations of it? This even if one can never summon forth more than speculative simulations.

  If writing was for these reasons deforming, it was also the most heroic and form-providing mode of sanctuary Faulkner was to know. Intoxication was the hopeless strategy of a man seeking to outrun his demons by dulling their inner distinctness. But writing was the successful strategy of a man seeking to escape life’s outer clamor so that he might negotiate the maelstrom of conflicting voices inside his own head. So that he could grasp the fact that they all inhabited him. Inhabiting him, the voices surged as possibilities within, and they were set in motion—by his raging “hemophilic” imagination—not as mistaken stances to be corrected but as irrepressible dimensions of identity. Intoxication—by expelling others from consciousness—served as mental meltdown (mimicking infancy’s blankness, precursor of the final sanctuary that is death). Writing, by contrast, was how he creatively “dried out” and took the fullest measure of his private and social being. It provided the priceless medium within which he was able to access the broadest implications of his own experience. There, as he encountered others again within the precincts of his imagination, he envisaged who would meet up with whom, what would precede their encounter, where it would take them, what its consequences would be. Such arranging gave the inner voices all their spoken and unspoken resonance, inserted them into their most troubling, repercussive interrelationships. The imaginative restaging did so not so much bypass judgmen
t as arrive at a grasp of the human drama that moved beyond judgment altogether.

  Writing—the arduous, agonizing, and enlivening time of conceiving, composing, and revising—was how Faulkner reckoned with what had happened to him in life. It was how he experienced as drama both his multiple identities and his disastrous mistakes—how, by doing it, he learned who he was. His writing, whenever it is great, refuses didacticism; he has no interest in pointing a moral. Instead, it was through writing that he imagined his way into how “five or six people all trying to make a rug on the same loom” would impinge on each other, and what this would look like as it unfolded in time. Faulkner was so alert to the value of this generative activity that he never ceased to protect it. When he made it clear that he did not like to talk about either himself or his work, he was not concealing information others had a right to know. Rather, everything that mattered about him mattered because he wrote. “He made the books and died”—so Faulkner fantasized his brief epitaph. Those shapely urns of words would constitute at once his private self-making and his lifelong letter to the world. If you wanted to get the good he had to give, you had to go to the labor of engaging him where he most vividly lived—in his books. No biography, including this one, could substitute for that encounter.

  Most who knew Faulkner for any length of time noted both his courtliness and a self-containment bordering on silence. To these traits we should add his scrupulous self-respect (Faulkner never groveled) and his respect for others, coupled with his vigilant demand that others respect him. He never ceased to be astonished at how this demand was regularly overrun by those who sought to exploit him. There was finally a lifelong stubbornness in Faulkner—extending to ruthlessness: it is not for nothing that his favorite animal is the mule. Perhaps from his mother he learned not to back down if he thought he was in the right. Another term for such stubbornness bordering on ruthlessness is endurance: Faulkner endured his life. As Edouard Glissant glossed that verb in its French provenance, he was equal to the abiding hardness of his life.

  Endurance joins together “must matter” and “cant matter,” taking us far into his emotional and conceptual economy. He respected blacks most, it seems, for their unillusioned capacity to endure—to accept the worst that whites had inflicted on them without losing their grace and humanity. Relatedly, but in a different key, he lived out his life unbendingly himself, even self-damagingly himself. Not that he sentimentalized this hardheaded insistence on who he was. It was as well the source of an abiding inner critique. But he was who he was—not tall, not especially handsome, not smart about his life. He rarely failed to hear the silently sounded inner chorus of his own mistakes. Why else would he have so sought out sanctuaries of escape? He was stumbling man, off-balance man, man in the present moment and under duress—man who endured but (despite occasional rhetoric) rarely prevailed.

  Unless one were to say that in one arena only he prevailed: as an artist. For the first twenty years of his nearly forty-year career, he tirelessly persisted in producing and marketing his work. This meant facing down hundreds of rejection slips (as he told a budding writer once, you needed a hundred rejections before you made it to zero). So it is finally as avatars of his own incorrigibility, perhaps, that we recognize the company he keeps. Bayard Sartoris, Quentin and Benjy and Caddy and Jason Compson (yes, Jason too), all the Bundrens male and female, Joe Christmas, Sutpen, Lucas Beauchamp, Labove and Houston and Mink, Charlotte Rittenmeyer, even the tall convict: these are the unteachable ones, heading into disaster as he would himself head into another painful rehearsal of who he was. “I don’t understand it,” the suffering but undefeated Houston would say to himself as he lay down rigid in his bed: “I dont know why. I wont ever know why. But You cant beat me. I am strong as You are. You cant beat me” (HAM 220). Such grim fortitude suffuses the figure Jay Parini describes when he ends his biography on the note of Faulkner’s grit:

  Faulkner pushed ahead like an ox through mud, dragging a whole world behind him…. There is something primordial about the unfolding of Faulkner’s work, which often came rushing to the fore, as if unpremeditated, although stories and characters would lie at the back of his mind for years. When they emerged, they did so with terrifying force. Faulkner rode them like wild horses, tamed them, brought them to book. (OMT 429)

  Over and against these “primordial” figures there is The Hamlet’s Ratliff—the virgin messenger, the voice who makes possible the community. Nourished by vernacular wisdom, Ratliff is Faulkner’s greatest figure of balance. He releases much of the humor in Faulkner—the humor of endurance—a humor that hardly pretends to change things but wryly recognizes their makeup. Ratliff is who Faulkner might have been if he had enjoyed living in the company of others. Ratliff is the gift Faulkner makes to the community, in place of himself. All but unflappable, serenely inscrutable, Ratliff is his creator’s moral compass and would perhaps be his major figure if Faulkner’s fictional world centered on ethical judgment. But it doesn’t. At its best, it is not about making the right decisions, not about children outwitting parents and repressive elders or even a mob who would lynch Lucas Beauchamp. At its best, the work is not crazily—à la Thomas Wolfe—seeking to put the whole impossible history of the human heart into one sentence, as Faulkner attempted in the swollen portions of Intruder in the Dust, Requiem for a Nun, and A Fable. At its best, the fiction hardly brings to mind the avuncular figure who worked in behalf of the State Department, who lectured at the University of Virginia (politely taking questions from the students)—the man who donned his elegant fox-hunting uniform, rode with the Charlottesville aristocrats, and let himself be photographed in his displayed finery.

  Rather, the Faulkner whose work—and life—inspired this book is the writer Evelyn Scott recognized when, astonished, she first read The Sound and the Fury. “Here is beauty sprung from the perfect realization of what a more limiting morality would describe as ugliness,” she wrote. “Here is a humanity stripped of most of what was claimed for it by the Victorians, and the spectacle is moving as no sugar-coated drama ever could be” (CH 78). It is the spectacle of being off-balance and lurching—being seen and respected and pitied as we move through the stages of our fall, heading toward the earth. Cant matter and must matter: Faulkner takes the drama of the human heart in conflict with itself too seriously to either console or pretend to resolve. The self in free fall—not knowing why, but not trying to escape either. Later it might all make sense, later, when the storm yielded to calm, as confusion gave way to recognition. That story of retrospective recognition is perhaps the greatest we have—the story that narrative was invented to tell—and some of Faulkner’s later work participates in it. But at his most moving, he shows how life in ongoing time necessarily involves stumbling. To be buffeted by storm is to know the reality of “cant matter.” To endure it—and to continue seeking, impossibly, to put the storm into words—is to insist on “must matter.”

  NOTES

  PROLOGUE

  1. As “larger cultural loom” implies, the collapse of one’s dreams is caused by something more than metaphysical malice. Judith Sutpen inhabits an antebellum Southern world of sanctioned aspirations and agreed-on taboos. Her defeat in Absalom, Absalom! has everything to do with racial and economic protocols shaping her hopes and shattering them too. But—caught up as an individual merely endowed (like all individuals) with partial perspective—Judith registers this confounding as incomprehensible disaster. Faulkner’s great novels home in on the emotional tenor of such collapse. He centered his work on the subjective vertigo of coming undone, even as that work suggests, all along its periphery, the larger, interwoven, cultural dimensions of collapse. I argue throughout this book that his novelistic signature consists in respecting—and inventing ways both to represent and pass on to his reader—the experience of unpreparedness, of shock. Shock goes deeper—is more telling—than retrospective explanations for it. Faulkner’s great work was invested in writing how it felt to stumble, and in suggesting (b
ut only later) what contributed to the stumbling. It had less interest in proposing cultural analyses that might make future stumbling obsolescent.

  2. André Bleikasten’s Faulkner: Une Vie en Romans (2007) provides an extraordinary account of the novels, along with a scrupulous account of the life. But, as he would have been the first to admit, Bleikasten saw no way meaningfully to interconnect his parallel accounts. This important work has not yet been translated into English.

  3. No one has better expressed this point than Madeline Chapsal, a French journalist who observed Faulkner’s cornered moves at a party given for him in Paris, in 1955, by his grateful publishers, Gallimard. Faulkner’s recalcitrance, she noted, “is built of the most exquisite but the most obdurate politeness” (LG 229). She concluded: “There is no use looking at Faulkner. You must read him. To someone who has read him, Faulkner has given all that he has, and he knows it” (230).

  CHAPTER 1

  1. My account of the divorce proceedings is indebted to Judith Sensibar’s Faulkner and Love: The Women Who Shaped His Life (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), 470. Sensibar revises not only Blotner’s account but more broadly—as I shall address in subsequent notes—his understanding of the relationship between Faulkner and Estelle. Sensibar’s study appeared in print only as I was copy-editing my own manuscript. In the form of footnotes I seek recurrently to engage its argument: that Faulkner’s work owes more than has been acknowledged to the formative influence of three women—Mammy Callie, Maud Falkner, and Estelle Faulkner.