I had never heard of William Faulkner until I took that book into my hands. Going to Bard as a junior I first heard of Time magazine, did not yet know of The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Harper’s, much less about quarterlies. In my household my father read only True Detective, often lying in bed and reading it while recovering from nightmarish binges of his own. My mother read women’s magazines, and sometimes best sellers such as Gone with the Wind. One of my peers, a young man, who introduced me to The Sound and the Fury, and I decided that summer of 1949 to try to see Faulkner; it was considered a rather silly idea by our friends, perhaps a lark: the way once, on a double date, four of us decided at night to visit a Negro funeral home. We entered, walked about, were met by a gracious older black man who could do nothing but show these white teenagers, cordially, the establishment. I shudder to think of it now, but that was the South then.
Catching wind of my proposed visit, older Mississippi relatives told my mother not to let me go near Faulkner’s place. He was liable to be up a tree in the yard, naked, and reciting poetry. I found the image intriguing.
We set off for the house of my first cousin Regina, who was married to a native of Oxford. John Reed was a contemporary of Faulkner’s stepson, and went in his childhood to the Faulkner residence, Rowan Oak, to hear tales on Halloween. He phoned and asked if he might bring over a cousin who wanted to be a writer, and Faulkner said no; now that the rain had slacked, he was going sailing. My friend and I were crushed, and John Reed suggested at least driving by to look at the house. I wanted to renege at once when we drove in past the “No Trespassing” sign. I had thought he meant to view it from the road, in passing. But it was obscured by large cedars. We stopped just after turning in, to back out again, and John Reed said, There he is. He went over to ask Mister Bill if he’d just come and speak to us.
Typical of our summers, it was as hot and dry in the aftermath of rain as if the morning’s rain had never been. Faulkner emerged with John Reed from a copse of trees where he had been pulling down vines. I had the sense that in that shelter raindrops remained. A grown man in shorts and wearing no shirt was a surprise to me, and I did not even note his smallness. I had looked away instantly, mortified by our intrusion. And though he bent to the car window to shake hands with my friend, who asked if he might shake Faulkner’s hand—the audacity of it infuriating me—I did not look at him then. Whatever he saw of me in that instant was his only glimpse. Standing beside the car he spoke a few words to John Reed and to his toddler with us; then he went away again.
We drove out and my friend shouted, “I’ll never wash my hand again.” John Reed was laughing. “You know what Mister Bill said? He was tired of people coming down here to see if he had two heads.”
Dear Mr. Faulkner, I began a letter the minute I walked into my house in Memphis, knowing if I didn’t do it then, I never would. Probably you have a secretary and will never see this letter. I told him I had come not to see if he had two heads but because I had read The Sound and the Fury and knew he had thought, felt, and suffered everything I ever had. And I wanted him to tell me the reason for suffering: why some people had to, and others never did. What were the rewards? I told him not to be embarrassed about his drinking, that I knew all about it. And it was all right; my father drank too. And could I see him again?
Eventually he would tell me I told him even about my dog being recently run over. By then, he was Bill. Bill, I couldn’t have.
I don’t remember him ever really laughing aloud. His laugh was a chuckle and seemed always to reach beyond the moment and to be for all the foibles of mankind he understood so well, to bring back memories. His eyes were hooded and nearly black, but when he was amused they took on decided amber glints; his moustache wagged and his thin lips twitched. Oh, yes, he said. Yes, you did. Perhaps he had waited so long to recall it to make certain I would know he was not poking fun.
He had to tear up the first letter; his mail was never safe. But a letter from a stranger? There was presentiment in it; he thought that he might fall in love, and tried the best he knew how to prevent it by discouraging a meeting between us. In answering the letter he apologized. He had thought I was to be some grim beldame of forty or fifty summers (ironical today) and president of some limited literary society come out of curiosity, and he was wrong. Something charming came out of my letter, remembered from youth. A smell, a scent or flower, not in a garden but in the woods, stumbled on by chance and with no past or particular odor and already doomed for the first frost; until thirty years later a soiled and battered bloke of fifty smells or remembers it and is twenty-one again and brave and clean and durable. He thought I already knew enough, had enough, and lacked nothing a middle-aged writer could supply. I could not have disagreed more. But write him the questions, he urged, and sooner or later he would answer them.
I don’t know what questions I wrote him from college. But he replied that they were the wrong ones; that a woman must ask these questions of a man when they are lying in bed together, at peace. I was a little shocked, and also apprehensive. And I might not find answers, as most people didn’t, he said. But he had the idea I would at least find something workable; then tell him. It would be a good subject for the last letter I need ever write him. And I was not to grieve over having the problems and the questions. The kindest thing the gods could give people at twenty was the capacity to ask why, and a passion for something beyond vegetation, even if what was gained by it was grief and pain. Meanwhile, read Housman, a lot.
These were words of rare comfort for the young woman I was: without much guidance in my life, out of my environment; the first indication I was going through a more thoughtful growing up than many my age, and might be a better person for it, as I’d suspected myself. I was not to him the oddity my parents thought me. To pass through childhood I’d invented at an early age the belief I would go someday to a place where people would love me, and I would not be hurt anymore. I could not keep myself from believing I was not worthless, as I was told at home I was.
Obediently, I read “A Shropshire Lad,” and immediately wrote him:
“‘Now, of my threescore years and ten,
Twenty will not come again,
And take from seventy springs a score,
It only leaves me fifty more.’
See, I always listen to you.”
In October, Faulkner found, suddenly, that he wanted to see me, and almost came east. And during my Christmas vacation we wrote back and forth trying to figure out how to meet. Not here, he wrote from Oxford. There might be nothing, or repercussions that would put a bad taste in the mouth. He disliked drawing into intrigue someone who had never known it. So I would have to think about it, or maybe better, forget it.
At ten A.M. the Southern Trailways bus emptied, its passengers scattered. A small man was left, bundled, belted into a trench coat and wearing a brown Tyrolean hat. I moved forward. Mr. Faulkner?
Miss Williams.
As pressing as where to meet was then where to go? He knew nothing about the city and had no ideas; the only object was not to be recognized. He had something to take to a typist in the Peabody Hotel. Would I drive him there? I would drive him there.
Is it a book? I asked as we moved along, and he replied, I hope so. Ignorant of the capriciousness of creativity, editors, publishers, and the public, I wondered what he was talking about. Was it a book or not? The Peabody had been part of my upbringing, yet I was momentarily uncertain when he said to take him around to the carriage entrance. I assumed he meant to drive beneath a portico where cars came closest to a door. Courtly manners, a willfulness toward the old-fashioned, would strike me many times, and he was still calling me Miss Williams. I didn’t think Faulkner so old as to have come to the Peabody in a carriage.
In our part of the country, the Peabody Hotel was a fabled place. Ducks swam in a pool in the lobby and waddled across it nightly to an elevator to be borne to the Plantation Roof to sleep, near the bandstand and open-air dance floor where I
’d been so many times. Part of my middle-aged dream is to be given gardenias again. Waiting, I thought about getting into something I had never expected. I had expected to see Faulkner as Faulkner, but his need for secrecy had turned the situation into my seeing a married man. I was three years away from Miss Hutchinson’s School for Girls, where on Monday mornings gaunt old Miss Hutchinson bowed stiffly from the waist, on the platform of an assembly room, and said, Good morning, young ladies; and we bowed in return and said, Good morning, Miss Hutchinson; and the week began. I had spent my first year of college in Memphis too, and the second at a girls’ junior college in Maryland outside Washington, D.C. I had gone north to school! On Saturdays, going into the city, we not only had to wear hats and gloves but had to appear at five P.M. at the Willard Hotel before an emissary from the college to prove our bodies still in the District of Columbia and our hats and gloves intact, at least. Bard College was a great leap. And now, rather unintentionally, I’d taken another one. By the day’s end, driven almost beyond endurance by cold and aimlessness, I took him to see my mother: the house being both warm and stationary was the only reason. I told no friends about the meeting, for I felt they would either see no significance or make a joke.
Miss Hutchinson’s was the first real academic training I’d had, having been in public schools up to the ninth grade. There I first began to show any aptitude for writing, and impressed everyone with a theme written from the viewpoint of a powder puff. I wrote a long poem as a mother with a son gone off to war and killed, which caused my English teacher to burst into tears. She had me read it before assembly; but since I was not a mother with a son gone off to war, some of the girls wouldn’t believe I wrote it. While I considered myself serious, I was equally interested in obtaining White Shoulders cologne and Spalding saddle shoes, of which there were shortages during the war, and wearing the shoes as dirty as possible, and the darkest, bloodiest lipstick to be found, and I wore my cardigan sweaters backward like everyone else, the buttons imprinting themselves on my backbone while I sat at my school desks. As southern teenagers, our lives were consumed with social activities, centering on sororities and clubs we called inter-sororities: S K S, Chez Nous, La Jeunesse, Junior Cotillion, and on and on, followed upon graduation by Girl’s Cotillion. The only cultural events I remember going to in Memphis in my younger days were Anita Louise playing her harp in the stage show after the movie at the Orpheum and Colleen Moore exhibiting her doll house at the auditorium. But all the organizations to which I belonged, and fraternities, gave informal parties year round, and at Christmas, and in early May, when schools let out because of the heat, large formal dances, preferably in the ballroom above my head while I waited for Faulkner at the typist’s. The hotel held childhood memories too of eating with my parents in the enclosed rooftop dining room, looking down at the glitter of the city, and out at stars. A tall, gray-haired, tan-skinned headwaiter named Alonzo called me “the little princess.” I consider it lucky I never overheard him address another small girl similarly. Vanilla muffins were the Peabody’s specialty and would become one in my household for my sons, someday.
But I could not predict that any more than the time coming, too soon, when Faulkner’s wife, Estelle, asked me to meet her in the Black Cat restaurant of the Peabody, where she asked if I wanted to marry her husband. In astonishment, I said no, and, I am glad, did not have the presence of mind to add, I didn’t think I knew him well enough, yet. Why then did I want to see him? Because I wanted to be a writer; didn’t she understand? If she wanted to be a painter, wouldn’t she want to know Picasso?
No, she said.
She thought Bill was going through the menopause; men had one as well as women. I had no idea of that. And all I knew about the menopause anyway was that women could no longer have babies, and might act peculiar. However, I did understand what she meant: change; and that he needed one. I said in couched, careful words that it was my understanding about life that when people had been married for a long time their feelings were not the same as they were at first; and I was thinking about my parents’ separate bedrooms. But, misunderstanding me, she said abruptly that she did not consider herself too old, at fifty, to fall in love.
But who, I wondered, would fall in love with a woman fifty? I felt her full of delusions, and wished she were not so frail that she’d taken my arm for support on the way into the restaurant. I felt protective of her, too. History goes round, an old black woman would someday tell me. And, at forty, when I was getting a divorce, my oldest son asked why I was ruining his and his brother’s lives when mine was already over.
And someday, too, Bill would tell me a wise thing when I was trying my wings thoughtlessly. “You won’t have that face forever, Joan. You better have something else to offer people when you are older.”
If, while driving with him one day, his wife threw out the car window the manuscript of Light in August and he had to get out into the road and pick up the scattered pages, perhaps resentment on both their parts can be understood. Faulkner told me he sent out short stories for thirteen years before an editor ever bought one. Where, she might well have asked, was he, after all, going? And from where were the creature comforts to come she expected as a southern woman born to the time and place she had been? Success came too late for happiness, I suppose.
The first meeting in Memphis would set the tone for all of them there: so much aimless driving. I saw parts of the city I had never seen before, and have never been able to find since; eventually, in warm weather, we could sit beneath trees near the Mississippi River. Once, driving through a park in the city’s center, he said that I should write a novel about us: write it as a fast, urgent exchange of letters, the way it really was, and name the girl Laurel; Laurel Wynn, he added. I used that name in my second novel, but it was a book about my father’s life, Old Powder Man. Trees figured prominently in his poems in A Green Bough and in much of his prose; and finally it was Mississippi woods that offered shelter with the least strain for meeting near where we lived. Yet, walking once at Bard in snow, he said that trees were our enemies, and hoped we would lose our way among them. I wondered why all people his age couldn’t talk that way, rather than so boringly. That January day in Memphis I drove across the bridge over the river into Arkansas and back. And finally stopped on a bluff in a park, the Mississippi in panorama below. He might have guessed, he said, that I’d like the river too.
Sitting there, I asked if he thought he’d have written if he had left Oxford. And he replied that if he’d gone to the New York Bowery, what was worth it in Faulkner would have gotten itself written. But if he’d been the Bowery bloke, he wouldn’t have been Faulkner.
Rain turned to slush on the windshield, and I was cramped and frozen from sitting so long behind the steering wheel. Once he put a hand on my arm, and I tensed in surprise, and he took it right away. I suggested lunch finally, and he was contrite. He had not remembered, he said, that at my age I had to eat in the middle of the day; at his age, he didn’t. I drove a long way across town to pass time, and to a drive-in I’d frequented as a college freshman in Memphis. Midweek and past the rush hour, it was almost empty. On the nickelodeon the Mills Brothers sang “You Always Hurt the One You Love.” And he said that might be for me. But why? Because he was going to fall in love with me, or possibly already had. Hadn’t I realized what it might mean when I wrote that letter? No, I had not. Well, don’t worry about it; if he fell in love, we couldn’t help it.
Memphis and northern Mississippi, our countryside, always have been one place. At that time neither industry nor strangers had moved in. Memphis was not much more than an overgrown small town. An acquaintance of Mrs. Faulkner’s saw us in the booth that day and reported us in a Memphis juke joint. Juke joint? I said. This first meeting was the last one in which I was not a known factor in his life.
Letters took the place of what would have been more meetings. Sometimes “the thing” that moved him so in the first letter came out of mine again: the wind over Cyn
dos, blowing the April, whitening the seas, the falcon the hawk diving down a white cliff somewhere something in the sad the eternal the wanting believing heart.…
And now certainly his mail was not safe, and he suggested General Delivery in Oxford, in care of Quentin Compson; but then supposed him too well known and suggested instead A. E. Holston (from The Hamlet). I rather doubted that the postmaster in Oxford knew Quentin Compson, either.
That February he came east, and, sitting over a drink at the Biltmore, we talked and devised a play, and he set to work immediately on Requiem for a Nun. Correspondence says that had it not been for our discussion, he would never have thought of a play, though I remember nothing of what was said. He sent me copy at Bard, wishing me to write on the play too; to be his collaborator, he thought, would be my breakthrough in writing. I made some attempts, but at twenty-one my heart was not in trying seriously to rewrite Faulkner. My being his collaborator on the play would also be an excuse to offer his people and mine for our seeing one another. He wished when the book was finished that he could dedicate it to me. If only, I said, I could have been born earlier, or you later. No, he said. Earlier I was too busy writing to have had time for you.
I knew instinctively I had come along in his life at the right time: when he needed something, a catalyst to start him writing again. He wrote that when he picked up A Fable, after many years away from it, he needed something, someone, to write not to but for: to be close and read the work and say, almost inattentively, Yes, yes. Keep on. I love you and believe in you.
But I worried it was simply my age that drew him. It wasn’t your face in the Memphis bus station that day. I would never have known it if you had not come up to me. And didn’t I realize I was not the only young woman to write him? I could imagine that, and knew there was a multitude of young women who would like to be in Faulkner’s company; and in New York girls far more worldly than I. He never cared to use his fame to his advantage. It is sad that in a recent documentary of his life on television he was depicted as something of a womanizer; he was not. Many times after I moved to New York, and he was there for long periods, he ate alone at the New Weston if I had other plans. By chance, after I was married, I saw him coming out of his dining room alone one evening; and the idea of his solitariness moved me to wonder, as I always had, why he chose to be alone when he could so easily have summoned company.
The Wintering Page 38
