World Within The Word

by William H. Gass

  Blotner has tried to write a biography of Faulkner’s books, too. He has literally tried to supply us with the knowledge Faulkner drew on when he imagined them, and that is surely a laudable enterprise; but this is not Lowes’s The Road to Xanadu, because Blotner is not in the least interested in the creative result, and his long descriptions of the plots of every Faulkner novel, story, project, poem (and we are spared none of the poems), each in terms of the most degenerate theory of fiction conceivable, are models of the “missed point.”

  Faulkner’s life was nothing until it found its way into Faulkner’s language. Faulkner’s language was largely unin-trigued by Faulkner’s life.

  Feaster’s thoughts are lengths of language, too, of course, but rarely does he put his experience into words like a sports announcer or reporter at a wedding; consequently they pass to oblivion comparatively unformed, since he has not decided, for instance, whether to call the water “tepid,” “hike,” or “safe,” when he tests it with his hand … he has not had to. He thinks, in effect: the water is now the right temperature so it’s okay to slope under. In effect, but not in so many words. When Faulkner is Feaster, he’s in no different case.

  We know that Feaster’s experience has been formed, too, because the relation, nature, and value of its objects have been culturally defined. It is a commonplace to observe that the contents of his medicine chest will comprise a kind of psychological inventory, and we can be certain that he never imagines that the water watches him turning its tap in order, then, to gush forth obediently. The mouthwash which is sitting on the floor in the corner, we can also be confident, is “out of place.” A crumpled Kleenex is “waste.” He feels no life in his toothbrush despite its hum, while the vibrator with which he tickles his testicles has not even the humanness of his own hand.

  Principally, the things around him will be seen as in or out of chests, drawers, or closets. Doors and windows will be either open or closed. Feaster himself will be either going or coming. Switches and machines will be either on or off, containers full or empty, people occupied or idle, and these simple alternations will no doubt dominate his day. Yet what conceivable importance are such matters to Mr. Feaster?—he serenely overlooks them—or to biography?—which will not observe them either.

  They are dreary, insignificant details—yes—but repetitive like rites, and that is the key, for a steady drip can drive men mad; the feet of the faithful, the repeated steps of the common people, can slope a granite stair, and a cancer can begin in the corner of the mouth where for thirty years a pipe’s been gripped. Indeed, it’s the daily diet—angers, fears, humiliations—Dr. Johnson’s tea, Balzac’s coffee, Freud’s cigars—which lead the liver to overlabor, stomach to puncture, heart to fail, the quiet worker to go berserk and ghetto to erupt, though it’s only the seizure, stroke, or strike which reaches the papers.

  Our present biographers love to accumulate details until their books are longer than the lives their subjects led (look at the booklines of our literary aces which have been drawn out lately: Lewis, Dreiser, Hemingway, Strachey, Hart Crane, Woolf, Cocteau, Proust, Flaubert, Fitzgerald, Ford, Frost, Faulkner now, Browning, Joyce, and James), and in most cases these details are held together with the biographer’s sweat like wet sand.

  They are extraordinary details, the details which fill these books. They are not unicorns, for unicorns are quite particular departures from reality. Neither private sensation nor public fact, an event of the moment nor a general law, neither Hume’s impressions nor Plato’s Ideas, they fall into that soggy never-never land of biographical summary; yet the philosophical difference between “I just saw a cow,” and “I lived in Hollywood for three weeks,” seems never to be felt. Though, of course, Faulkner himself felt it. And he used abstractions to achieve immediacy.

  A book like Blotner’s teeters between the historical past and the habitual future—between “he had” and the familiar from now on “he would”—like a walker on a wire. Letters sometimes flash Faulkner before us epiphanously, and in the curtain-like context of Blotner’s text make us feel like Peeping Toms. When the woman with whom he is having an affair tells him how much his letters mean to her, he responds:

  Of course you like mine. Who wouldn’t like to read the letters Faulkner wrote to the woman he loves and desires? I think some of them are pretty good literature, myself; I know what I would do if I were a woman and someone wrote them to me.

  (Blotner, p. 1445)

  The clips we get from these letters are like short lengths of hair.

  Otherwise, here are records of visits paid, dinners attended, grades reached, bottles drunk, birds shot, letters written, remarks made, when what we want to know is whether the Great Man ground his teeth; we need the feel of the normal and everyday; we don’t desire merely a list of Our Hero’s laundry, but we covet the pattern there may be concealed in the way he dirtied it; that Feaster, for instance, likes to plug the drain with his big toe is only of passing interest, but that he holds his hand over his nose, bites his breath, lets coins sift slowly through his fist, and would stop time with talk if he could—each is, together, a clue to the shapes his consciousness assumes.

  For look at the kind of consciousness Faulkner constructed:

  There was snow on Thanksgiving and though it did not remain two days, it was followed early in December by an iron cold which locked the earth in a frozen rigidity, so that after a week or so actual dust blew from it. Smoke turned white before it left the chimney, unable to rise, becoming the same color as the misty sky itself in which all day long the sun stood pale as an uncooked biscuit and as heatless.

  White before it left the chimney. In passage after passage (I am quoting from “The Long Summer”) cold, heat, wind, light, shadows, stenches, are rendered with an accuracy of imagination which is unique. No American has written down the weather as Faulkner has. No one asks how. No one wonders why.

  What we want to know, then, is the difference between the structure of Feaster’s consciousness, a consciousness of no account like all the rest of everyday awareness and soon to go goooooog as a fast drain does … (thank god, can you imagine consciousness piling itself up in basins, tubs, and pots, and needing to be garbaged off, or consciousness simply emptied like a lung into the available air the way peasants pee against walls?) … no, what we need to know is the distance and the difference between the life of Feaster and a sentence of Faulkner, because Feasters, alas (and by assumption here), are a dime a dozen, while Faulkner wrote sentences—who cares?—which had never been seen before, felt before, sentences with feverish impatient bodies, sentences which enclosed whole paragraphs, rising through their clauses like stairs, and which sometimes folded back upon themselves, came suddenly open and were suddenly shut in the same way the book they were a part of opened in the reader’s hands, anywhere the reader was, and shut like the amusing mouth of a paper dragon or eyelids in an illness, as Clytie folds the following sentence over, neat as a note you prefer remain private:

  She passed the rest of that week in the one remaining room in the house whose bed had linen sheets, passed it in bed, in the new lace and silk and satin negligees subdued to the mauve and lilac of mourning—that room airless and shuttered, impregnated behind the sagging closed blinds with the heavy fainting odor of her flesh, her days, her hours, her garments, of eau-de-cologne from the cloth upon her temples, of the crystal phial which the negress alternated with the fan as she sat beside the bed between trips to the door to receive the trays which Clytie carried up the stairs—Clytie, who did that fetching and carrying as Judith made her, who must have perceived whether Judith told her or not that it was another negro whom she served, yet who served the negress just as she would quit the kitchen from time to time and search the rooms downstairs until she found that little strange lonely boy sitting quietly on a straight hard chair in the dim and shadowy library or parlor, with his four names and his sixteenth-part black blood and his expensive esoteric Fauntleroy clothing who regarded with an agha
st fatalistic terror the grim coffee-colored woman who would come on bare feet to the door and look in at him, who gave him not teacakes but the coarsest cornbread spread with as coarse molasses (this surreptitiously, not that the mother or the duenna might object, but because the household did not have food for eating between meals), gave it to him, thrust it at him with restrained savageness, and who found him one afternoon playing with a negro boy about his own size in the road outside the gates and cursed the negro child out of sight with level and deadly violence and sent him, the other, back to the house in a voice from which the very absence of vituperation or rage made it seem just that much more deadly and cold.

  He might have been called Maestro Crescendo, like Rossini, and it is assuredly true that he overwrote with a regularity rivaling the seasons. Hoping like Conrad to increase the mystery and majesty of his prose, Faulkner crammed it with abstractions beginning with im-, in-, and un-, prefixes of lordly largeness and menacing absence; he tightened and rhythmed his rhetorical forms, trebled his modifiers, and doubled his os and his ms and his ps. He fancied fine words in the fashion of the self-taught and used them to render their opposites, the vulgar, illiterate, and innocent, with sometimes thrilling, often laughable, results, although his intuition that it would take repeated spins of the most pointed intelligence to ignite the dullest life seems now sound enough. The grotesque made him lyrical, and as he lowered the mental threshold of his characters, the sensual flood rose, so that when, for instance, the idiot Isaac waits in the wet dawn to greet his beloved cow, Faulkner embraces his reader with words the way Ike, who has wordless desires and otherwise only sensations, is embraced by sensation itself:

  He would smell her; the whole mist reeked with her; the same malleate hands of mist which drew along his prone drenched flanks played her pearled barrel too and shaped them both somewhere in immediate time, already married. He would not move. He would lie amid the waking instant of earth’s teeming minute life, the motionless fronds of water-heavy grasses stooping into the mist before his face in black, fixed curves, along each parabola of which the marching drops held in minute magnification the dawn’s rosy miniatures, smelling and even tasting the rich, slow, warm barn-reek milk-reek, the flowing immemorial female, hearing the slow planting and the plopping suck of each deliberate cloven mud-spreading hoof, invisible still in the mist loud with its hymeneal choristers.

  … malleate hands … minute magnification … rosy miniatures … hymeneal choristers … what a disaster, the critic is inclined to exclaim, and many did, and many do, and they would have been right in fine had they not been wrong in large.

  Then he would see her; the bright thin horns of morning, of sun, would blow the mist away and reveal her, planted, blond, dew-pearled, standing in the parted water of the ford, blowing into the water the thick, warm, heavy, milk-laden breath; and lying in the drenched grasses, his eyes now blind with sun, he would wallow faintly from thigh to thigh, making a faint, thick, hoarse moaning sound.

  “I am taken to task for my long sentences, and my style is called pompous and ponderous. But good Lord, it is graceful toe-dancing compared with the overcrowded, overburdened, dragging, and thoroughly opaque periods that Faulkner for some reason thought appropriate for this book,” Mann wrote about A Fable, and it is not just this book his judgment is relevant to. Everywhere full of tent damp, hog wash, shoe dew, cracker-barrel wisdom, spellbinding, storytelling, and bombast … yet, as in Carlyle’s case, this writing holds a wind which glorifies its bag: so vigorous, so outspoken, so personal, perceived, original, so significant, serious, continuously strong and deeply felt, it blows the whistle back between our teeth—the whistle which was to accompany our wonder at such tastelessness, such boggy sentiments, such thoughts, such nerve, such genius.

  While Ike and others like him have an animal’s vulnerability to man and live in a kind of drooling harmony with nature, Faulkner’s tragic figures have the dignity and force of his grandfather’s statue fixed above the earth like a cold granite phallus. They are drunk with dreams, these heroes, alive through pride the way the rest of us resort to air; they won’t bend in the face of adversity; they refuse to recognize change (with enemy and cannon in front of them, after unfolding their flags like flowers, wonderfully, ridiculously, nobly, on wooden nags, they charge); yet Faulkner, persistent moralist, does not ask that we survive, he asks that we endure, and the damage his inflexible dreamers do to themselves and others (to Faulkner’s father and Faulkner, for instance), is nothing compared to the evil of the opportunists, the adaptable, the unscrupulous realists, the scramblers, the starlings, the Snopes.

  Because … And Faulkner offers us an explanation for whatever actions he’s imagined which, surrounded by nots and other negations—not this, not that—like wisely untaken yet informative blind alleys, is invariably vast, detailed, obscure, indeed inexplicable, and the fruit of a family past. His narrative loops from present punishment to ancestral crime with a milliner’s absent mind, and in the same matter-of-fact way, he chews apart destiny’s threads with his teeth. The seam is complete. The knot is tied. It’s time.

  Yet he had to write for the Post, to pile up pages as you might heap potatoes, to dicker with editors and agents, write drivelly and usually useless scripts for Howard Hawkes movies, cut his gift with sugar for the street. He drank continuously, intermittently, moderately, heavily, in bursts and bouts, in long languid arcs, not at all, or murderously. He could be terribly silent. He would tell wonderful stories about the Snopes family. He was polite, even courtly, rude. He would spiff up, lose his shoes, collapse in the street.

  Faulkner always needed money, but he and his wife both drank, he supported two households, servants, had two cars, flew a plane, and Fox paid him nearly $20,000 in 1936. In the same year an ad in the Memphis Commercial Appeal announced that William Faulkner would not be responsible for his wife’s debts. Later he bought a farm, a boat, at considerable sacrifice to himself lent money to his friend, Phil Stone, and in letter after letter bitched beautifully about the whole business of writing for a living and being hemmed in by henfolk as well as other kinds, kiths, and kin.

  He was rarely among people who understood his achievement, not that this might have lifted his loneliness very much (solitude was the space of more than his imagination), and the needs, sensations, and feelings—the pity, the pure fury—which one time had created those incredible lengths of language, those new and powerful forms, became themselves rhetorical habits, last rites, passionless gestures of passion like the bouncing bottoms and sighing faces in porno films, and of mainly monetary significance, too: that empty extended hat in Feaster’s hand, for instance, or, for all that, the hat he holds over his heart at the sound and hearing of the band, since we all die Feasters. Thus it is solemnly written. Becoming and remaining one—a Feaster—may be the first step in life, but it is also, and unequally, the last step toward the dust and disappearance and the silence of History.

  1 Joseph Blotner, Faulkner: A Biography (New York: Random House, 1974).

  Gertrude Stein and the Geography of the Sentence

  When Gertrude Stein was a young girl, the twentieth century was approaching like a distant train whose hoot you could only just hear. A whole age was about to end. Nations would rededicate themselves, an entire generation bite into a fresh loaf, turn over a new leaf … tremble, pray. Despite this threat from the realm of number, though, most of the world went on as before, repeating itself over and over in every place, beginning and rebeginning, again and again and again.

  Kipling had just written The Phantom Rickshaw. Stevenson was about to bring out The Master of Ballantrae, Howells to publish A Hazard of New Fortunes, while recently young Miss Stein had composed a melodrama called Snatched from Death, or the Sundered Sisters.

  Henry James had also been busy. The Bostonians and The Princess Casamassima appeared in the same year, almost moments ago, it must have seemed, and Scribner’s Magazine was now serializing A London Life. Writing machines were prom
inently advertised in the same periodical, as well as a restorative medicine made of cocainized beef, wine, and iron, said to be invaluable for nervous prostration and brain exhaustion, among other things, cases of the opium, tobacco, alcohol or chloral habit, gastric catarrh, and weak states of the voice or generative systems. Indeed, women were frequently in need of similar elixirs to combat depressions of the spirit: neurasthenia, sick headache, dyspepsia, and loss of appetite, were the most common. Nevertheless, Adelina Patti was recommending Pears Soap. There were several new developments among stoves. Lew Wallace, Dr. Abbott, Motley’s Works, Walter Besant’s novels, Charles Dudley Warner, Rider Haggard, and a series labeled “The English Men of Letters” were being smartly puffed, as well as the stories of Constance Fenimore Woolson (grandniece of the novelist she was middle-named for and friend of Henry James, in Venice dead of self and fever) and an edifying volume by Charles Reade called Bible Characters (12mo, cloth, 75 cents).

  At Gettysburg, on the twenty-fifth anniversary of the battle, George Parsons Lathrop read a very long commemorative ode.

  And, with a movement magnificent,

  Pickett, the golden-haired leader,

  Thousands and thousands flings onward, as if he sent

  Merely a meek interceder.

  And at the great Paris Exposition, among the Americans represented, Thomas Hovenden showed his picture, The Last Moments of John Brown, of which one critic said: “It is easy to believe that we are looking at a faithful transcript of the actual scene, and that photography itself could not have made a more accurate record.” “It is the best American painting yet produced,” wrote another. Holloway’s reading stand was deemed particularly good for ladies, combining a book rest, dictionary holder, lamp stand, and invalid’s table. It was sold where made in Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio.