by Paul Theroux
The house lies at the end of a suburban street, and this street—orderly, bourgeois, well tended, tidy, conventional—is everything Faulkner’s fiction is not, and is at odds with Faulkner’s posturing as a country squire. On this road of smug homes Rowan Oak rises lopsidedly, like a relic if not a white elephant, with porches and white columns, windows framed by dark shutters, and stands of old, lovely juniper trees. The remnants of a formal garden are visible under the trees at the front—but just the symmetrical brickwork of flower-bed borders and walkways showing on the surface of the ground, like the remains of a neglected Neolithic site.
Faulkner was anchored by Oxford but lived a chaotic life; the surprising thing to me is that from this messy, lurching existence, which combined the asceticism of concentrated writing with the distractions of binge drinking and passionate infidelities, he produced an enormous body of work, a number of literary masterpieces, some near-misses, and a great deal of garble. He was no scholar, he was self-made, and—Mark Twain aside—no Southern writer of his stature preceded him.
The rooms at Rowan Oak were austerely furnished, with a number of ordinary paintings and simple knickknacks, a dusty piano, the typewriter, and the weird novelty of notes, puzzling out the plot of A Fable, written by him on the wall of an upstairs room. Notes to clarify the multilayered if not muddled plot for Faulkner was a good idea, and would serve a reader too. Nothing to me would be more useful than handwriting on a wall, explaining the plot, as a fixture for readers of Faulkner’s novels. Baffled by seven pages of meandering prose, you glance at the wall and see: “Charles is the son of Eulalia Bon and Thomas Sutpen, born in the West Indies, but Sutpen hadn’t realized Eulalia was of mixed race, until too late . . .”
“We’ll be closing soon,” the docent warned me.
I went outside, looked at the brick outbuildings, sheds, and the stable, and lingered in the plainness of the yard among the long shadows of the junipers in the slant of the winter sun and the remnants of the formal garden. From where I stood the house was obscured by the trees at the front, yet it had the look of a mausoleum, marked—you might say—by the myriad coruscations of immolation and abnegation and time, or simply peeling and weather-beaten. I was moved to think of Faulkner in those rooms, exhausting himself with work, poisoning himself with drink, driven mad in the contradictions of the South, obstinate in his refusal to simplify or romanticize its history, resolute in mirroring its complexity with such depth and so many human faces—all this before his early death, at the age of sixty-four.
Tupelo Blues
A penetrating melancholy possessed me in the gathering Mississippi darkness. Writers often exaggerate the difficulties of their lives, but Faulkner didn’t complain, and in his work he aimed higher than anyone I had ever read. And I had felt, in his house and in his town of Oxford, that there was something fatally stubborn in the man.
It was an hour to Tupelo, and all the way there the words to “Tupelo Blues” were playing in my head—“A dark cloud rolled, way back in Tupelo”—the soft lament of John Lee Hooker (who was born elsewhere in Mississippi), singing of the Tupelo flood. The name of the town comes from the tupelo tree, a black gum tree, known in the North as a pepperidge—a tall, noble one stood at the end of my Cape Cod road, its horizontal branches flung wide apart. My sadness was also the effect of the look of Tupelo at twilight, a large, still-working town surrounded by fast food joints, with the aura of Elvis hanging over it: his two-room house—an improved shack, really—built by his father; the church where he sang gospel.
The mood of the South is powerful and the weight of its history is palpable in people’s faces, their postures, their clothes, the houses and shacks, the look of abandonment. You wonder, after all that has gone before, what’s going to happen next. Impossible to travel through the South and not ask: Who will inherit this land and its conflicts?
I chose a small motel at random after dark, intending to look at the town more leisurely in the morning, Elvis’s Tupelo—the house just outside of town. No sooner had I stepped inside the motel lobby than I recognized the aromas of the New South, that whiff of Hindustan, the eye-tickle and nose-buzz of smoking joss sticks, a reek of burnt sugar and scorched onions, the tang of bubbling curry, odors undreamed-of by Faulkner or Elvis.
The manager appeared and squinted as if to underline the thought: I am inevitable. Whom else were you expecting?
“Single room, one night, nonsmoking,” I said.
He licked his thumb and pushed pages with it. “I will see what I have available.”
“Thank you, Mr. Patel.”
He smiled. “How you are knowing my name?”
Bluegrass
That there were no direct roads from Tupelo across the state line to Huntsville, and only a zigzag route on narrow roads after that, was a blessing. All that slow country way I listened to bluegrass on the radio, Front Porch Fellowship in Mississippi, then “bluegrass gospel.” Under January skies clotted with clouds, down the empty road, the easy talk and spirited music of East Tennessee radio, “Clinch River Breakdown,” the bluegrass specials, the Hill Benders, fiddles and banjos, “neighbors,” “salvation,” and the repeated assurance “You gonna be all right.”
Over to Chattanooga, up to Knoxville, and past Bristol, the way I’d come on my first trip. It was chilly in East Tennessee. Light snow began to fall, and after that, fat icicles and frozen drip hung or bulged from the roadside cliffs, flurries farther on, deep snow in Virginia, and all along the Appalachians cold and snowy hills, sleet blowing on the road, poor visibility, into the blur of winter again, northward.
INTERLUDE
* * *
The Paradoxes of Faulkner
The memory of my visit to Rowan Oak stayed with me, and in the time I spent preparing for my next drive to the Deep South, I reread Faulkner. I contemplated his life, which was one of paradoxes, a certain amount of posturing, and many secrets. He was undoubtedly a writer of genius; he was also a writer of flapdoodle and a successful Hollywood screenwriter. His education was sketchy, yet he was immensely learned in the oblique and selective way of someone self-taught. He seemed to come from nowhere, but he put his Nowhere on the map. That’s what I mean by his paradoxes.
“Once you have counted James Branch Cabell,” H. L. Mencken wrote in 1917 in “The Sahara of the Bozart,” a broad mocking piece about the philistinism of the South, “you will not find a single Southern prose writer who can actually write.” Mencken regarded the South as the bunghole of America, a cesspool of Baptists, a miasma of Methodism, snake charmers, real estate operators, and syphilitic evangelists. And an artless place, to boot. “Georgia is at once the home of the cotton-mill sweater, of the Methodist parson turned Savonarola and of the lynching bee,” he writes with contempt. And again, “The most booming sort of piety, in the South, is not incompatible with the theory that lynching is a benign institution. Two generations ago it was not incompatible with an ardent belief in slavery.”
Perhaps provoked by this spleen, thirteen years after Mencken’s essay appeared, Faulkner sent Mencken himself a short story, which (heavily edited by Mencken) appeared in his magazine, the American Mercury, as “That Evening Sun,” in 1931. In the meantime, Faulkner had published his first novel, Sartoris, and he kept writing until he died, defying Mencken by turning Southern literature into a peculiar art form, and hallowing through fiction the particularities of Southern life. He is the writer all aspiring American writers are encouraged to read, yet with his complex and speechifying prose he is the worst possible model for a young writer. He is someone you have to learn how to read, not someone anyone should dare imitate, though unfortunately many do.
My introduction to Faulkner—the book most students read first—was The Sound and the Fury. Confused by its multiple narrators, one a thirty-three-year-old idiot struggling to make noises, and by the tangled Compson family history, I became lost in it but discovered much to love. I was still young enough to see its excesses and flourishes as triumphs rather
than faults. I would come to a sentence such as this, of Dilsey weeping at Reverend Shegog’s church service: “Two tears slid down her fallen cheeks, in and out of the myriad coruscations of immolation and abnegation and time,” and I did not dare to say this was ridiculous and purple.
Faulkner taught himself how to write and wished to be distinguished by his excesses and his obscurities. It’s clear from his prose and the structure of his narratives that his literary inspiration came less from books than from the talkers he’d known in his early life—his writing often has the endless ear-bending yak-yak of monologues over cracker barrels, or that preacher’s thump of damnation from the pulpit. In Wyndham Lewis’s crisp denunciation, Faulkner was “the moralist with a corn cob.” You might agree when Faulkner delivers such judgments as, “People need trouble—a little frustration to sharpen the spirit on, toughen it. Artists do; I don’t mean you need to live in a rat hole or gutter, but you have to learn fortitude, endurance. Only vegetables are happy.”
Often, amid the cadenzas and the phantasmagoria that he makes of the South, there is a passage of pure brilliance, such as this: “the first seconds of fall always seem like soar: a weightless deliberation preliminary to a rush not downward but upward, the falling body reversed during that second by transubstantiation into the upward rush of earth.” The trouble is that these lovely lines are buried in one rolling six-thousand-word sentence in the “Jail” section of Requiem for a Nun that continues breathlessly for almost forty pages. It’s “like farting ‘Annie Laurie’ through a keyhole,” as Gulley Jimson remarks in The Horse’s Mouth. “It may be clever but is it worth the trouble?”
FAULKNER KNEW FIRSTHAND how the marvelous self-deceiving paradox of falling seemed like flight. Still in his teens, he signed on as a pilot in the Royal Air Force, intending to fly in the First World War, though he was disappointed that he didn’t see any action. Later on, in 1933, when he had the money, he bought his own airplane, a Waco-210 monoplane, quite a boast for anyone in Mississippi, or elsewhere for that matter.
He was full of surprises, living overlapping lives that were various and contradictory: dependable highly paid screenwriter, innovative poorly paid fiction writer, supporter of a large extended family, part-time fox hunter, occasional binge drinker, fantasist and sometimes fop (hunting pinks, top hat, white gloves, shiny boots). It is part of his legend that he failed as a student at Ole Miss, failed as a postal clerk, and worked briefly and unwillingly at the Ole Miss power plant. But all that time he was writing, first poetry, then As I Lay Dying, among the boilers of the power plant.
It is a measure of how well Faulkner knew the mind of rural Southerners that people who have never read him are able to paraphrase his sentiments. They may not have known his stories, but many people I met were living his narratives and could easily have fitted themselves into his fictions. Reverend Lyles had the dignity and defiance of Lucas Beauchamp; Robin Scott, the valiant mother I met in Natchez, was the granddaughter of another Joe Christmas; the Snopeses are still scheming everywhere in the rural Deep South.
Though it’s hard to find many people outside a university English department who read him for pleasure, some of Faulkner’s South still exists, not on the land but as a racial memory. Early in his writing life he set himself a mammoth task: to create the fictional world of an archetypical Mississippi county where everything happened; to explain to Southerners who they were and where they’d come from. Where they were going didn’t matter much to Faulkner. Go slowly, urged Faulkner, always the gradualist.
He gave Southerners heroes and villains and good ole boys; he added names and histories to Southern stereotypes: the Major, the Colonel, the Lawyer, the Landowner, the Preacher, the Runaway, the Alien, the Jailbird, the Criminal, the Meddler, the Interloper. And he differentiated among the Indians and the categories of blacks, all sorts—the mixed-race characters in Absolom, Absolom! and Light in August, upright and falsely accused black Lucas Beauchamp in Intruder in the Dust, the enduring housekeeper Dilsey (“I seed the first en de last”), the field hands, and the ambiguous accomplices: Levi “Too Tight” Collins, the black laborer who helped dispose of Emmett Till’s corpse, is Faulknerian right down to his name. Faulkner’s most memorable characters are his villains, Popeye in Sanctuary, the Tall Convict in “The Old Man,” and all the Snopeses, especially the wicked and wily Flem Snopes, who succeeds as the ideal of a Snopes, set forth (in The Mansion) in the words of his cousin Montgomery Ward Snopes: “All right . . . every Snopes will make it his private and personal aim to have the whole world recognize him as THE son of a bitch’s son of a bitch.”
Faulkner’s lurid narratives (“A Rose for Emily,” Sanctuary) were his most commercially successful. My favorites remain Light in August, As I Lay Dying, the stories in Go Down, Moses (especially “The Bear”), The Wild Palms, Sanctuary, and the Snopes trilogy: The Hamlet, The Town, The Mansion. I reread them for this Southern trip, and still admire them, and though they still seem like textbooks from my college dorm room, they have lasting value.
Ralph Ellison, the author of Invisible Man, once said, “If you want to know something about the dynamics of the South, of interpersonal relationships in the South from, roughly, 1874 until today, you don’t go to historians; not even to Negro historians. You go to William Faulkner and Robert Penn Warren.”
But Warren, like Ellison and many Southern writers (Mark Twain, Thomas Wolfe, William Styron, Willie Morris, Truman Capote, Tennessee Williams, Carson McCullers, Richard Wright, and others), fled the South for the glory and the hospitality and praise and full employment in the North: Warren in New Haven, Ellison in New York. In North Toward Home, Willie Morris writes, artlessly but to the point, “Why was it, in moments just before I leave the South, did I always feel some easing of a great burden? It was as if someone had taken some terrible weight off my shoulders, or as if some old grievance had suddenly fallen away.”
“You go north. You became expatriated, exiled,” says a character in Styron’s Lie Down in Darkness, “yearning to repudiate the wrong you’ve grown up with.”
A Paris Review interviewer asked Barry Hannah, writer of wild stories and inspired novels, why so many Southern writers “have felt this need to leave.” Hannah replied, “They have indeed, and they write their best Southern fiction when they’re in Vermont.”
Hannah eventually came to rest in Mississippi, where he was born. He ended up in Oxford, like Faulkner, who stayed put in the town where he’d grown up, obsessed with remaining a provincial. His characters are of the same mind—determined to remain in the South, not inward-looking but backward-looking and embattled, resigned to their fate. In their stubborn provinciality (and you could say the same about Faulkner) they cannot imagine a life elsewhere.
Something about his isolation and inwardness must have contributed to Faulkner’s prose style; perhaps a twitch of his compulsiveness as a binge drinker is indicated, too, in his garrulous and tipsy and tumbling narration. But if at first glance he seems slapdash, even careless, piling on the effects, on reflection you may conclude that he wrote this way because at bottom he knew he had a scheme he wished to disguise. Self-conscious about formality, he hung his verbosity on a superstructure that was rigid and socially sound, on families and people whose background he knew intimately, determined to write a novel without a center, a text that radiated outward. He was old-fashioned in the way he lived, but as a writer he was a modernist. As for his “eye-blinding, mind-stunning” modernism, which took the form of incantations, the English critic V. S. Pritchett once wrote, “Faulkner clutches at every sight and suggestion with the avidity of suspicion and even mania, and all manias create monotony.”
Faulkner insisted on how different Southerners are from the rest of Americans; it is a belief that many Southerners cling to, and it explains Faulkner’s appeal. His fiction is an elaboration of this difference, which is also insisted upon by Flannery O’Connor in her forceful but self-serving essay “The Regional Writer.” Southern identity is not
a matter of local color, quaintness, biscuits, white columns, dusty roads, and so forth. “It lies very deep. In its entirety, it is known only to God, but of those who look for it, none gets so close as the artist.” This is a spirited explanation for the peculiar detail of Faulkner’s fiction, and her own.
But what of the eye-blinding mannerisms? “The artist, journalist, or historian who ponders the South for a living,” the distinguished Southern journalist Edwin Yoder writes in his foreword to John Shelton Reed’s The Enduring South, “must at times be haunted, as I am, by the fear that the regional ‘differences’ he traffics in are essentially obscurantist when you get down to it: elegantly so, it may be, but obscurantist all the same.”
This deflecting, shrouding manner is often employed when a writer (Joyce in Ulysses is a good example) suspects that his work suffers from an excess of design; the oratory and hyperbole and special effects are ways of distracting from the big plan. But Faulkner was a genuine homegrown experimenter in language and narrative form. It must have taken courage to write like this in the narrow and disapproving world of literary Mississippi, and it also explains why all his books were out of print when Malcolm Cowley discovered the figure in the carpet, and guided readers back to the man’s grand design with his Portable Faulkner (1946). That anthology showed that all along Faulkner knew what he was doing, and he went so far as to provide Cowley with a detailed map of his imaginary Yoknapatawpha County, its landmarks and its citizens.
SO MUCH FOR the contradictions in his fiction. Another paradox looms. It is Faulkner the Hollywood screenwriter, the go-to scenarist for the director Howard Hawks. As a fiction writer, Faulkner was uncompromising—look at the tangled prose on any of his pages and you have to conclude it was printed as it was typed out on the manual typewriter on view at Rowan Oak. His manuscripts would have been a copy editor’s nightmare had his publisher not sent a memo saying that not a word, punctuation mark, or lengthy italicized passage was to be changed. A six-thousand-word sentence? Leave it as is was Faulkner’s wish. Keep the semicolons and the neologisms, make it more opaque, bury the message, cloud it with hyperbole, obscure the speaker, force the reader to solve the puzzle.
