The peace of was, the turmoil of is. Are the crucial moments of experience—those that Faulkner’s art would later find a way to grasp and explore—instants in which is explodes in the face of was, shatters all “the devious intricate channels of decorous ordering” (as he would put it in Absalom)? Does one’s life come to life only when the patterning that made it recognizable as one’s life ceases to function? Is personal outrage, intolerable affront, a condition of being itself? Much later, in a 1955 interview, he would claim that “There’s always a moment in experience … that’s there. There all I do is work up to that moment. I figure what must have happened before to lead to that particular moment, and I work away from it, finding out how people act after that moment” (LG 220). A core moment, an all-disturbing perception or outrage: the turmoil of is. His life was now in that turmoil. He could not marry her, he had to marry her; he knew he would. This tension was incandescent. Obscurely he realized that for all the poems he had written and novels he had published—including the latest that Liveright had turned down and that was, he knew, his best—he had never written such an unbearable moment. Never centered a novel on an image of the real as sheer exploding presence—an image radiant and inexhaustible in its trouble-making implications. Maybe only now did he glimpse that words exist to ward off such moments, to keep the unbearable at bay. That the real in its disturbing presence is wordless, that trying to write it is both doomed to failure and the only justification for writing. Perhaps Liveright had unknowingly set him free. Perhaps, in a novel that no one would read because no press would publish it, he could actually begin “with the picture of a little girl’s muddy drawers in a pear tree,” a girl who had climbed high enough to see through a window where her grandmother’s funeral was taking place, while her brothers—who lacked her courage—were waiting below, unaware of the death she was seeing as they focused on her muddy drawers.
Whatever the particulars of his thought process, the period spanning Liveright’s rejection of Flags in late 1927 and his marriage to Estelle in June 1929 surged with conflict and anxiety. His life was out of control, challenging him as it had not since 1918. His career ground to a halt. Then, suddenly—rather than continue trying to figure out what they did want, since they didn’t want Flags—he took the leap. He would go the other way, where no publishers were waiting. “One day I seemed to shut a door between me and all publishers’ addresses and book lists,” he would write in 1933. “I said to myself, Now I can write” (NOR 227). Thus he plunged, in the early spring of 1928, into his most lyrical novel, The Sound and the Fury. This creative work—the happiest he was ever to engage in—occupied him well into the fall of that year. At the same time, Flags was morphing (under his friend Ben Wasson’s editorial labor) into a shorter, publishable version entitled Sartoris. All the while, Faulkner was drifting toward the desired and dreaded marriage. It can hardly be accidental that during the wedding-shadowed five months of 1929 leading up to their June marriage, he conceived and drafted his darkest novel, Sanctuary. I shall attend later to Sanctuary, but the following passage may suggest its relation to his marital crisis: “When you marry your own wife, you start from scratch … scratching. When you marry somebody else’s wife, you start off maybe ten years behind, from somebody else’s scratch and scratching” (SAN 190).
Scratch and scratching: marital intercourse figured as sordid bodily moves—like the irritable response to mosquito bites—that a man and a woman inflict on each other, and that a second husband experiences as a form of cuckolding. No Keatsean “still unravished bride” here. Once married, he and Estelle seem to have experienced a honeymoon that was hardly honeyed. Neighbors near the Gulf Coast cottage where they stayed heard them often quarreling. Late one night—they had both been drinking heavily—a startled neighbor was urged by the frantic Faulkner to rescue Estelle from drowning. Ophelia-like, she had walked into the Gulf in one of her elegantly brocaded Shanghai gowns, heading for deeper waters. The neighbor rushed after her, reaching her just before she slipped away. As Faulkner would write later of Ellen’s doomed union with Sutpen in Absalom, Absalom!, “Yes, she was weeping again now; it did, indeed, rain on that marriage” (AA 47).
What had gone wrong between the two of them? Dream-lovers for so many years, they seemed to be in actuality almost strangers. The ten years apart had marked each of them indelibly, their differences strengthening and becoming impassable barriers. Always a social butterfly, she delighted in the give and take of passing flirtations. The male/female “ballet” was a dance she both delighted in and performed flawlessly. As Faulkner’s friend Ben Wasson later put it, “one would have thought, watching her as she listened to a man, that he was the most fascinating and brilliant creature in the world” (CNC 77). Playful conversation often laced with erotic innuendo sustained her equilibrium. It was true that as her first marriage had begun to come apart, she found herself increasingly dependent on alcohol to maintain that equilibrium. Even so, despite the emotional barrenness of her union with Cornell, there had been compensations. Her life with him was replete with money, maids, social encounters, and cultural activities. It had furnished a splendid setting for the public performance of her identity. Married life with Faulkner, she couldn’t help but realize, would provide none of these backdrops. For his part, the brooding misfit of twenty had become a determined loner by the age of thirty. He neither danced nor made small talk. Capable of long silences ever since childhood, he had alarmingly extended the range of occasions in which he found it appropriate to say nothing. (He would probably never realize how hard on her was the mere fact of his prolonged, unpredictable silences.) For the past decade, he had protected and nurtured his unconventional traits, turning them into facets of a stubbornly maintained maverick identity. They were, by this point, virtually destined to get on each other’s nerves.
Moreover, he had not sought out this wedding. It took an urgent phone call from Estelle’s sister, Dot, to make him concede the depth of Estelle’s plight and the necessity of their marriage. Even so, he recoiled, desperately writing to his new publisher, Hal Smith, a few days before the wedding:
I am going to be married. Both want to and have to. THIS PART IS CONFIDENTIAL, UTTERLY. For my honour and the sanity—I believe life—of a woman. This is not bunk; nor am I being sucked in. We grew up together and I don’t think she could fool me in this way; that is, make me believe that her mental condition, her nerves are this far gone…. It’s a situation which I engendered and permitted to ripen which has become unbearable, and I am tired of running from the devilment I bring about. (OMT 138)
Their commencement of life together appears as an ending neither can avoid. Weddings often darkly punctuate his fiction—as funerals not yet understood as such. As he finished drafting Sanctuary in May 1929, he contemplated his heroine Temple Drake entering the courthouse and about to commit perjury. Since he had her do so on the same date (June 20) on which he would publicly utter his marriage vows, he might have been pondering his own approaching perjury, envisaging with dread the portal he was about to pass through.2
At any rate, Faulkner’s concession to marriage may have been more apparent than real. Physically present at the church ceremony and the Pascagoula honeymoon, he was spiritually absent, inextricably involved in the page proofs for The Sound and the Fury. These had just arrived, and the contrast between the beauty of his book and the mess of his life was not lost on him. Ignoring for hours on end the bodily bride who shared his actual space in those late June days in Pascagoula, he worked his way more deeply into the fabric of his novel, focusing on its central figure, Caddy Compson, whom he thought of as his “heart’s darling.” Of his entire gallery of created characters, she was the one he would cherish most throughout his lifetime. Whatever tarnish she sustained in the harrowing course of the novel she inhabited, she would remain for him a still unravished Keatsean bride, protected in the sanctuary of his art.
What extraordinary light might the conceiving and writing of this new novel have sh
ed, what disturbing view might it have provoked, on his entire earlier output? What is at stake in claiming that The Sound and the Fury thrust him upon a world stage? That Faulkner before it is not yet Faulkner? That Faulkner without it would not have become Faulkner?
RETROSPECT
“A Sort of Cocktail of Words”: Faulkner’s Poetry
In The Sound and the Fury (as I will go on to explore) words themselves were the enemy Faulkner learned to recognize as such, then struggled to outwit. Their conventional ordering loomed as cottony insulation softening the ferocity of is into the tameness of was. In the light of that recognition, his long-sustained output of poetry might have suddenly appeared problematic, even defective. He had been ardently writing poems since his midteens—so ardently that his guide and would-be mentor, Phil Stone, would often proclaim that his destined form was poetry, not fiction. By the late 1920s Faulkner himself was less sanguine. In Mosquitoes (1927) he had Dalton Fairchild read aloud a modern poem and then ask another character, “What do you make of it?” The latter responds, “Mostly words, a sort of cocktail of words”—an assessment probably not far from Faulkner’s own, since the unidentified poem is one Faulkner had written. Was the rest of his poetry also just a heady brew of words?
It had hardly seemed so at the time. But he could not deny that his withdrawal from the routines of school and work occurred simultaneously with a turn inward toward the construction of a substitute universe—a private and poetic word-world. The making of poems served as both anesthesia and a strange blend of discipline and release. It supplied a lifeline for performing his otherwise inarticulable specialness, the “youthful gesture” (as he later put it) “of being ‘different’ in a small town” (HEL 163). Not just any poems, moreover, but aggressively rhyming, rhythmic ones—full of fauns and nymphs, pastoral woods and streams, erotic quests and histrionic collapses—poems that articulated his alienation from the mundane pieties of Oxford, Mississippi. Among the late nineteenth-century poets whose practice threw him this lifeline, the one who mattered most was Algernon Charles Swinburne. “At the age of sixteen, I discovered Swinburne,” he wrote in 1924. “Or rather Swinburne discovered me, springing from some tortured undergrowth of my adolescence, like a highwayman, making me his slave” (163). (Such attachment never entirely disappeared. His daughter Jill would remember his teaching her Swinburne in the 1940s. Of the two hundred of his books in Jill’s library, the Swinburne volume is the most worn [OFA 78].)
Swinburne appealed as an intoxicating word-man. Faulkner’s modeling his verse on the earlier poet’s also permitted him—as he wryly put it in 1924—to further “various philanderings in which I was then engaged” (HEL 163). The point seems trivial but is not. The young Faulkner’s versifying recurrently joins hands with the aim of impressing or seducing its intended female reader—usually Estelle (mostly absent between 1918 and the late 1920s) but also, at least twice, Helen Baird (the young woman to whom he proposed in the mid-1920s and who turned him down flat). If the release embodied in The Sound of the Fury is inseparable from his believing no one else would care for it, the abortiveness of the poems owes something to their never-forgotten bid for impressiveness. This, too, he was to recognize in Mosquitoes, where Fairchild says to his audience, “I believe that every word a writing man writes is put down with the ultimate intention of impressing some woman that probably don’t care anything at all for literature” (MOS 460).
One eye on the page, another on the woman it is to impress: the poems are written in the mirror of other poets’ already distinctive styles. T. S. Eliot’s “Prufrock” reappears throughout the 1921 Vision in Spring (“Let us go then; you and I, while evening grows / And a delicate violet thins the rose”). Although critics have argued that Faulkner strategically rewrites his sources, there is no denying their priority. In addition to Swinburne and Eliot (each serving different moods), A. E. Housman’s Shropshire Lad marks his verse recurrently: “Once he was quick and golden, / Once he was clean and brave. / Earth, you dreamed and shaped him: / Will you deny him grave?” (MF 35). In these lyrics (published later in A Green Bough) one hears Housman’s elegantly shortened lines, his pastoral ambiance and world-weary melancholy. Finally, the poetry of Conrad Aiken both aroused Faulkner’s generosity (rarely proffered to other living writers) and inspired his imitations. Ben Wasson recounts showing Faulkner some Aiken lines suspiciously similar to Faulkner’s own. Glancing at them, Faulkner wryly responded: “Anyhow, you’ll have to admit I showed good taste in selecting such a good man to imitate” (41).
The Marble Faun (1924) reveals most clearly the failure of Faulkner’s poetic vocation. Failure means different things in Faulkner’s lexicon. At the high end, there is the failure that attaches to language’s intrinsic incapacity to say the real, as in “the splendid magnificent bust that [Thomas] Wolfe made in trying to put the whole history of the human heart on the head of the pin” (FIU 144). Failure at this level of aspiration was unavoidable—it involves language’s attempt to transcend its own condition as language—and Faulkner regularly assessed his own great work accordingly. I shall argue later that despite his own negative judgment (which was sincere, not posture), such work was uniquely successful. By contrast, the poems fail at the low end. Rather than seek to escape the limit imposed by words, they indulge in words, swoon over them, aspire toward a word-world elsewhere. Though The Marble Faun ostensibly recounts a specific time (April through June) and place, the cycle of poems establishes no location:
With half closed eyes I see
Peace and quiet liquidly
Steeping the walls and cloaking them
With warmth and silence soaking them;
They do not know, nor care to know,
Why evening waters sigh in flow;
Why about the pole star turn
Stars that flare and freeze and burn;
Nor why the seasons, springward wheeling
Set the bells of living pealing.
They sorrow not that they are dumb:
For they would not a god become. (MF 48)
“Half closed eyes”: the entire cycle circulates around landscapes “liquidly” glimpsed in the mind’s eye, not vividly delineated for the reader. The insistent end-rhymed lines, the vaguely allegorical “peace and quiet,” the generic stars and seasons and bells: there are no specifying hooks in this language, no detail that pins the words down and lets them deliver a nonverbal experience. Its aim is to anesthetize—a “cocktail of words” that functions all too often (as in Gail Hightower’s reverie in Light in August) as “fine galloping language, the gutless swooning full of sapless trees … like listening in a cathedral to a eunuch chanting in a language which he does not even need to not understand” (LA 634).
True for everything but that closing couplet, its last line the most provocative in the entire poem cycle. What ordeal do we alone undergo in the scene of natural space and time—undergo because only we seek, but cannot attain, god-status? How do space and time themselves shape the prison that we inhabit from birth to death? What limiting conditions do they impose on our desire for completeness, conditions that only a god could transcend? Faulkner hardly knew in the early 1920s how to answer these questions. The melancholy of the immovable faun testifies to the failure of a “word-world” to supply completeness to the human creature painfully caught up in real space and time. The experience of loss is the scandalous human lot, Faulkner would come to realize. The cheat of words—including those that make up most of his poetry—involved pretending to repair or transcend this loss. He would later develop a comprehensive term for all attempts to evade the loss of being that comes with life in ongoing time: sanctuary. To Jean Stein he said in 1955, “There is no such thing as was—only is. If was existed there would be no grief or sorrow” (LG 255). Long before 1955—in The Sound and the Fury (1929)—he was to articulate the explosion of life in moment-by-moment time. There would be no more “fine galloping” words that served as a fantasy word-world of escape from the unpreparedness
and fleetingness of here and now. Rather, he would bend language downward, toward the earth, until it shed all pretence of plot, teetered on incoherence. He would strip language of its illusory orderliness, twisting it until it conveyed the grief and sorrow of is—the specific moment exploding in its defenseless exposure, flaring incandescently before disappearing into the nothingness of was.
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