Maud’s childhood had not been easy, and she didn’t make that of her children easy either. Her father, Charles Butler, had shocked everyone by abandoning his family in the late 1880s, taking with him money not his own. From that point forward, the fates of Charles’s abandoned wife and daughter were entwined. Maud’s dreams of higher education gave way to the need to support her suddenly vulnerable mother. The young woman Murry Falkner married in 1896 grimly knew what she knew about the world—and about men. As her mother’s health began to fail later, Maud insisted that Lelia (“Damuddy”) move into their new Oxford home, where she lived until her death in 1907. These were the years of Faulkner’s early childhood. They cannot have been easy for anyone involved, though his parents at least knew why. Leila Butler had not concealed her disapproval of her daughter’s choice. For years after the marriage, her letters continued to address her daughter as Miss Maud Butler, in care of Mr. Murry Falkner. Both mother and daughter possessed artistic talent and an appreciation for higher culture lacking in the Falkner family, conspicuously so in Murry. Murry might have struck Maud as a dubious bet as well.
Murry Falkner was a big strapping man, like his father before him and most of his sons. Only William was small, never to exceed five feet five and a half inches in height. As I mentioned, in 1918 he was judged too short and too light to qualify for the aviation division of the U.S. army. His small size was to affect him immeasurably, throughout his childhood, adolescence, and manhood. Perhaps the first thing all infants note about their parents is how big they are—how powerful and difficult to contest—and in Faulkner’s case the question of size was exponentially laden. The boy had inherited Butler features, not Falkner ones—his mother’s small compact body, her hooded almond eyes, thin lips, sharp nose. He knew his father found him different, inward, alien. When Murry would sometimes sneeringly refer to him as “Snake-lips,” could Faulkner have recognized that the pain inflicted by this insult was intended for his mother as well—perhaps for her most of all? That the only target Murry could reach was that son who so obviously favored Maud?
Murry had attended the University of Mississippi, like his father before him, but would never be a scholar. He loved the outdoors, passing his time in the woods or in the stables, with men (black and white) and animals. Not a man of words, he preferred to be in bodily motion rather than exploring ideas or feelings. At first his luck held good. His father had granted Murry’s supreme wish by allowing him to work for the father’s railroad company. Murry loved this work and rose steadily up the ranks. By 1900 he was essentially running the Ripley railroad office. In 1902, however—when Faulkner was five—the railroad was suddenly sold out from under Murry. As a little boy in the years following this disastrous event, Faulkner could hardly help knowing that his father was often morose and embittered. But it would take time for Murry’s sons to realize fully what wound it was he had never recovered from. When would they have grasped how much it meant when, as one of them later remembered, their father, at the sound of an approaching train’s whistle, would stop in his tracks and stare?
Though he was punctual and could usually be counted on to fulfill his commitments, Murry was inarticulate, lacking the flexibility that comes with inner resources. The only reading he cared for—apart from the funny papers—was westerns. (He seems never to have read any of his son’s novels.) After he lost his beloved railroad, he became irreparably aimless. His vision of the future, vaguely enough, involved leaving Mississippi altogether—getting clear of his domineering, job-removing, and job-imposing father—and becoming a rancher somewhere out west. Murry’s tough-minded and practical wife was not about to indulge such a proposed change in residence. So—unindulged, hemmed in, caught in domestic and business arrangements he found suffocating—Murry took his revenge. As his own father and grandfather had, he periodically exploded in outbursts of anger and bouts of drinking.
Faulkner grew up in the presence of such explosions. When the drinking reached the state of uncontrollable binge, Maud would take over. She would cart Murry off to the same Keeley sanatorium (near Memphis) his father had used when he, too, had needed to be “dried out” professionally. More, Maud would take her sons along, ensuring that they absorbed the lesson of their father’s irresponsible behavior and the humiliating treatment it required. Throughout his life, Faulkner would remember his father as awkward, incommunicative, not on his side. A vignette he later liked to tell involved one of his father’s rare bids for sympathy. Murry approached his silent oldest son, at some point well into his teens, and said he had heard that the boy had taken up smoking. He took out one of his cigars and offered his son a “good smoke.” William accepted the cigar, said “Thank you, sir,” then reached into his pocket for his pipe. He tore the cigar in half, stuffed half of it into the pipe, and lit it. Murry watched in silence, then walked away. “He never gave me another cigar,” Faulkner fondly remembered. What is most resonant about this story is less the meanness it brims over with than the son’s delight in telling it later. Whatever the father-inflicted wound might have been, his eldest son did not tire of rehearsing his moment of revenge.
His parents’ marital misery was amply before him, but not the details of its prehistory. Later he might have begun to piece it together, perhaps recognizing that his father’s unhappiness participated in a pattern at least three generations old. It went all the way back to William’s great-grandfather, mythologized (by all subsequent Falkners) as Colonel William C. Falkner of Civil War grandeur. This W. C. Falkner entered family lore as a fourteen-year-old boy arriving in Pontotoc, Mississippi, in 1839, a runaway from home thanks to a severe beating by his own father. Self-orphaned, he begged to be taken in by his maternal aunt and her husband, John Wesley Thompson. The Thompsons took him in, but some six years later Thompson refused to accept his nephew into his law practice. A few years after that, the nephew—a veteran of the Mexican war, now married and a father—lost his wife to illness. He decided to give the baby up to his uncle. They apparently agreed that the uncle would take care of the baby on condition that the nephew never ask to have him back. It seems that W. C. Falkner never did ask to have him back. Rather, he remarried and began a second family, in effect abandoning his first-born son. A few years later, in 1855, he challenged his uncle for a seat in the Mississippi legislature, and lost. Once the Civil War broke out, W. C. Falkner went on to lead a memorably violent and achievement-studded life, to which I shall return later, since he was the ancestor who meant most to his great-grandson.
Meanwhile, that abandoned boy, J. W. T. Falkner, named for his great-uncle J. W. Thompson, who brought him up, was eventually invited to join his great-uncle’s law firm (as his own father had not been permitted to do). In time, J. W. T. Falkner became a successful politician, banker, real estate owner, and railway tycoon. Called in his youth the “Young Colonel” and in later times “the Colonel,” this colorful and imposing man—Murry’s father—was fondly remembered by his grandson William. He dressed in courtly white linen suits and an elegant panama hat, both of which were complemented by his ever-present cigar. He delighted in a highly visible lifestyle while residing in the Oxford mansion he had built, The Big Place. His grandsons remembered his buying one of the first cars in town and—chauffeur-driven—touring around the countryside in it. They also remembered the story of how, fairly deep into the booze, he directed his black driver to circle around the bank he presided over. He then ordered his driver to stop the car. He carefully got out, picked up a good-sized brick, and hurled it through the bank’s plate-glass window. When asked later about his reasons, J. W. T. Falkner responded: “It was my Buick, my brick, and my bank” (F 34).
J. W. T. Falkner may well have had his own filial/paternal issue to resolve—by recycling it, this time with himself in the position of power. After installing his oldest son, Murry, in his railroad business and shepherding his success there, J.W.T. abruptly—in 1902—sold the railroad out from under his son. He did this, moreover, when railroads were one o
f America’s boom industries. The railroad that he sold for $75,000 had made a profit that year of nearly $35,000. A smart businessman who sells an enterprise earning an annual 45 percent of its sale price: that is an enigma begging to be explained. Perhaps J.W.T.’s banking and real estate commitments in Oxford really did require the supportive presence of Murry. Maybe they really did mandate the sale of the railroad and the uprooting of Murry’s family from Ripley to Oxford. Perhaps not.3 In any case, the Murry Falkners were soon installed in a house conspicuously smaller than J.W.T.’s Big Place, and Murry was now permanently at loose ends. Reflecting on a family pattern of paternal abuse and abandonment repeating itself over generations, it would hardly have been lost on Faulkner how strident present troubles have voiceless histories. He might even have generalized this insight and seen that fathers often find ways direct and indirect to destroy their sons. Only in the mid-1930s would he write Absalom, Absalom!— one of his greatest novels—but the paternal/filial concerns of that book were all around him thirty years earlier, alive in the dinner-table quarrels between his mother and his father. Alive there, but significant only if his mind moved from the immediate piece at hand to the far-reaching pattern in family history. Significant only if he could see that the abuse he himself suffered at his father’s hands had a prehistory of abuse imposed and received, dating back to before the Civil War.4
How much damage did these mismatched parents do to their firstborn son? The question cannot be answered, though there is good reason to think that in each of his supreme novels he was rehearsing and exploring it. The father’s incapacity to enter his son’s subjectivity cannot but have hardened the son’s emotional defenses—Faulkner’s default sense of being misunderstood. Ben Wasson once reported that Faulkner flared out at him, “Godamighty, fellow, if there’s anything that upsets the world, it’s people who do things because they consider it’s ‘well-meaning’” (CNC 74). This outburst was in immediate response to his mother having decided on her own to write a letter to Liveright, asking him to reconsider his dismissal of Flags. The outburst has a broader resonance. It conveys Faulkner’s belief that others could not possibly put themselves in his shoes—even those who believed, because they loved him, that they shared his hopes and fears. Murry was unable to offer this needy child an open paternal heart, to see in William a version of himself. This closure worked to seal off Faulkner’s own heart, persuading him that even the most intimate relationships were founded on distortion, guesswork, misunderstanding.
This wound is likely to have become compounded inasmuch as, despite Maud’s many virtues and lifelong loyalty, she, too, seems to have suffered from a hardened heart. Perhaps she had been through too much before he was born. She powerfully modeled character and loyalty for him, but not empathic generosity of feeling. Self-discipline in the face of obstacles was her watchword. When she determined that, as a young teenager, he was falling into incorrect posture, she did not hesitate to make him wear a back brace for two years. What he thought of the discipline mandating this brace—which in addition to its discomfort embarrassingly resembled a woman’s corset—he never said, but we do know that the odious Mrs. Compson in The Sound and the Fury forced her daughter Caddy to wear something similar. Maud’s inability to confirm him in a bodily fashion—her need to improve rather than endorse his bodily being—seems to emerge in a 1925 letter he wrote to his great-aunt Alabama. Faulkner is referring here to her niece, Vannye:
I will be awfully glad to see Vannye again. The last time I remember seeing her was when I was 3, I suppose. I had gone to spend the night with Aunt Willie [in Ripley] and I was suddenly taken with one of those spells of loneliness and nameless sorrow that children suffer, for what or because of what they do not know. And Vannye and Natalie [her sister] brought me home, with a kerosene lamp. I remember how Vannye’s hair looked in the light—like honey. Vannye was impersonal; quite aloof: she was holding the lamp. Natalie was quick and dark. She was touching me. She must have carried me. (SL 20)
To find anything like this bodily sensibility in his work before The Sound and the Fury, one would have to return to Elmer. The unpreparedness and vulnerability of infancy and early childhood resonate here, as they will so powerfully in the narratives of Benjy Compson, Vardaman Bundren, and the young Joe Christmas. Judith Sensibar has suggestively read this passage as a screen memory. Vannye and Natalie, she argues, are stand-ins for his mother Maud and his black nurse, Mammy Callie. Maud the impersonal and aloof caregiver, the figure of light; Callie the dark one who touches him, who must have carried him. I shall return to Callie later, when I explore the issue of Faulkner and race. Her importance to him is inestimable. His daughter once claimed that of the women in his life, “Mammy Callie meant the most to him” (OFA 237n34).
The deficiencies of his childhood do not enforce limitations in his art. Rather, such emotional withholding spurred him to his greatest work, strengthened his need to understand the failure of the heart in all its dimensions and fallout. Perhaps no other novelist has explored more powerfully the consequences upon the child of parents who—for the most intractable reasons—cannot love that child as it needs to be loved. That this emotional dilemma launches the fiction into greatness does not mean, however, that the author did not suffer from it his entire life. Self-yielding, self-opening: these are nearly absent in his life, and their near absence is inseparable from the notorious silences he would maintain, as well as his passionate defense of privacy.
There remains one further insight he might have garnered from his father’s postrailroad sequence of failures: a sense for untimeliness, for the difficulty of being ready to take on what the present moment carries for good or ill. Murry chose to own a livery stable in the first decade of the twentieth century—just as cars were beginning to become the vehicle of choice. When that business failed, he turned to the coal oil (for lamplighting) business—just as electricity was beginning to replace gas light. It would be easy to mock Murry for these unpropitious choices. His oldest son might have reflected further and arrived at a rarer insight. He might have glimpsed that humans are typically not wise in present time—that wisdom is a retrospective angle of vision (and often useless because too late) whereby men and women see beyond the error of their earlier stumbling. Did Faulkner grasp that erasing the present moment’s blindness was a way of denying experience itself? He would recurrently stumble throughout present-tense crises in his own life, and he would learn to respect his mistakes (which did not mean justifying them). In time, his art became supremely invested in the unavoidability of stumbling. And he discovered that the tradition of the novel—as he had inherited it from earlier practitioners in the West—was hostile to that insight, shaped so as to minimize it. Which meant—though he would never have put it to himself in this way—that he would have to reinvent the form of the novel.
His childhood was hardly limited to an engagement with the dilemmas I have just explored. In fact, biographers have mainly portrayed it as a scene of idyllic, rough-and-tumble play, at least until his early teens. If his father’s limitations damaged his emotional growth, his father’s consolations for a failed career expanded his range of activities. It was Murry who introduced him to the delights of male camaraderie—who let him pass hours silently taking in the all-male activities and conversations that occurred in the livery stable. (To Malcolm Cowley he would say in 1945, “I more or less grew up in my father’s livery stable” [FCF 67].) A hunter and a lover of animals, Murry introduced all his sons to the pleasures of life in the big woods. Mammy Callie enriched these pleasures by teaching the boys the names of the birds, the virtues of the plants that flourished in nature. All the boys became scouts, and Faulkner—whose tenderness toward children was notable his entire life—later served as scoutmaster.
The three older boys grew up as inseparable playmates, joined soon by their tomboy cousin Sally Murry. (The four Compson children of The Sound and the Fury—three boys and one radiant girl—owe much to his own childhood experiences.) Thank
s to books written (after his death in 1962) by his brothers Jack and Johncy, we have a vivid picture of the Falkner boys’ early adventures and shenanigans. As the oldest brother, William played the role of the boss who gives the orders. He participated equally in their escapades but did not need—or care—to explain his commands. Flying kites, rolling in mud, building a “steam engine,” accidentally setting fire to the house, joining together to fight gangs of other kids (often using corncobs to do so): such scapegrace activities seem to have punctuated their childhood. Perhaps the most suggestive of them involved a (homemade) airplane. Under Faulkner’s supervision, the brothers labored for weeks to jerrybuild a plane from designs taken from an American Boy journal—using rotten wood, rusty nails, grocery bags, and wrapping paper. The day arrived finally when their improvised craft was to take off. Boss Faulkner insisted that luckless Jack would serve as pilot. At the last moment, though, they couldn’t make their plane slide down a bluff in order to begin its flight. Jack was given a reprieve, joining the others, who were to push as hard as possible. Faulkner honorably replaced his brother at the controls. Heaving together, the others finally launched the vehicle. The collapse that followed was the first, but not the last, air disaster in which he would participate.
B006JHRY9S EBOK Page 7
