THE RESONANCE OF U
The distant, more indirect answer is no less revealing. It is well known that Faulkner chose to insert the letter u into the spelling of his name, thus distinguishing himself from the Falkners who preceded him. As in Freudian family romance, those earlier Falkners had birthed his body but not his soul. He first announced soul birth by his assertion of the u—at the time of his recruitment into the Canadian RAF. There he lied about his birthplace (England), his birth date (1898), and the spelling of his name (Faulkner). The last of these lies stuck with him. His letters home during those months of 1918 inconsistently addressed his parents as sometimes Falkner and sometimes Faulkner. When asked later why he spelled his name differently from his parents or grandparents, his answers varied but returned often to the same grounds: that was the way his legendary great-grandfather, Colonel W. C. Falkner, had originally spelled the name. He would explain that the Colonel later removed the u because he had heard of some no-good folks nearby who spelled it with a u. On this account, the great-grandson was restoring an earlier reality, not inventing a new one. More tacitly, he was disinheriting two generations of Falkners who stood between him and his mythic progenitor. What did this larger-than-life figure of nineteenth-century exploits, a man dead eight years before Faulkner was born, mean to a little boy growing up in the twentieth century? Why, when a third grade teacher asked him what he wanted to be when he grew up, did Faulkner answer, “I want to be a writer like my great-granddaddy”? (F 23).
W. C. Falkner, the young loner who showed up on his uncle’s Ripley doorstep in 1841 seeking asylum, began soon to better his position. By the mid-1840s he was reading law. When the Mexican War broke out in 1846, he joined it and saw action—including the loss of three fingers, thanks to a musket ball coming his way. On his discharge papers, issued in 1847, his name was indeed spelled “Faulkner”; at some later point he removed the u. He married Holland Pierce in 1849 and fathered a son whom he named John Wesley Thompson (“J.W.T”) Falkner. Soon thereafter he became embroiled in another scene of violence. A certain Robert Hindman (a comrade in the Mexican War) accused Falkner of blocking his membership in the Knights of Temperance. Hindman pulled a revolver, they fought, the gun misfired. Falkner killed Hindman with his knife in self-defense—a verdict the jury upheld. The Hindman family would long view it as pure and simple murder. Two years later, a friend of the Hindmans quarreled with Falkner, the two men fought, and Falkner shot him dead. He was again tried and acquitted. By then he was widowed. Soon he remarried and began to produce a second family, while continuing to practice law and extend his land investments. When Mississippi seceded in early 1861 (the second state to do so, after South Carolina), Falkner became captain (he had sought a brigadier generalship) in a company he helped to form, the Magnolia Rifles. Swiftly promoted to colonel, he fought daringly, even recklessly, during the battle of First Manassas. His imperious manner made him unpopular, however, and his troops did not reelect him the following spring as regimental commander. Piqued, he quit the Confederate army a few months later, in the summer of 1862. For the next two years, he organized and led a group of several hundred guerrilla fighters—the First Mississippi Partisan Rangers—who impeded where possible Grant’s invasion south. In 1864, he was probably running the blockade around Memphis, stealing Yankee supplies that were sorely needed back home.
Official violence ceased after Appomattox in 1865, but personal violence was never far from the Colonel. In the postwar years his law practice continued to prosper, and he became obsessed with railroad possibilities in northwest Mississippi. To that end, he made a business alliance with one Richard Thurmond. They became successful, and eventually—in typical Falkner fashion—he forced Thurmond out in order to control the railroad himself. By 1889, he had written several books (including The White Rose of Memphis, a popular yarn that went through several editions), had become wealthy through real estate and railroad investments, and was seeking to enter the Mississippi state legislature. His political opponent was Thurmond; there had been angry words between them. On the November afternoon when he was overwhelmingly elected to the seat, Falkner walked into Ripley’s town square. He had made a new will and was no longer carrying a gun. He walked toward the entry of Thurmond’s law office; within minutes Thurmond came out, carrying a .44 pistol in his hand. “Dick, what are you doing?” Falkner said, as Thurmond fired at point-blank range. His throat pierced, the Colonel died the next day. Thurmond was later acquitted in a drawn-out, acrimonious, and contested trial. The jury, it seemed, was not ready to find the Colonel innocent of the violence that had once more erupted around him. In time, a huge monument—fourteen-feet high and made of Carrara marble, with an eight-foot statue of the Colonel mounted on it—was erected over his grave in the Ripley cemetery. He had commissioned it many years earlier, hoping, it was said, that grateful townsfolk would put it up in the square after his death. They never chose to do so, and the weather-stained monument stands to this day atop his plot in the deserted Ripley graveyard. One hand of the giant marble man is hidden, protecting from view the three fingers shot off during the Mexican War. At an unknown later date, someone chose to “balance” matters by shooting off the same three fingers in the visible other hand as well.
Throughout his life, Faulkner would return to the legendary figure of his great-grandfather, reborn in his fiction as Colonel Sartoris. His brooding statue presides over Flags in the Dust. Later, he would stir Faulkner’s imagination further as the ruthless progenitor Carothers McCaslin in Go Down, Moses. Between Colonel W. C. Falkner’s violent death in 1889 and Faulkner’s own childhood in the first decade of the twentieth century, there grew around the storied ancestor an irremovable patina of grandeur and violence. Decisive, ambitious, talented, murderous, he was above all unstoppable. It is not too much to say that Colonel Falkner incarnated for his young great-grandson the force that underlay Southern masculinity and achievement. Like the railroad he fostered, his life signaled unambiguously the release of power. So to address the question why Faulkner might have lied as he did about his participation in the war, we listen again to Horace in Flags: “lying is a struggle for survival … little puny man’s way of dragging circumstance about to fit his preconception of himself as a figure in the world.” Men serve in war—especially, perhaps, Southern men do. That is their obligatory figure in the world. His own great-grandfather had served sublimely. Faulkner would go on to view this ancestor in the most intricately critical ways, but surely the first response was captivation. His earliest statement of the bond with his legendary great-grandfather occurs in the biographical sketch he submitted to the editors at Four Seasons Press, as they prepared to bring out The Marble Faun (1924):
Born in Mississippi in 1897. Great-grandson of Col. W. C. Faulkner, C.S.A., author of “The White Rose of Memphis,” “Rapid Ramblings in Europe,” etc. Boyhood and youth were spent in Mississippi, since then has been (1) undergraduate (2) house painter (3) tramp, day laborer, dishwasher in various New England cities (4) Clerk in Lord and Taylor’s book shop in New York City (5) bank- and postal clerk. Served during the war in the British Royal Air force. A member of Sigma Alpha Epsilon Fraternity. Present temporary address, Oxford, Miss. “The Marble Faun” was written in the spring of 1919. (SL 7)
Faulkner here reconfigures his own genealogy. Such a performance cleanly deletes Murry Falkner, and J. W. T. Falkner before him, as though the descent of the family u were a ceremony that took place only once every four generations. Anxiety about the unimpressiveness of his first twenty-six years may show as well in the cavalier details. Faulkner was an “undergraduate” at the University of Mississippi for only three terms (and even then thanks to a postwar law classifying him as “special” along with other demobilized men who were allowed to attend university without a high school diploma). The other activities he mentions seem deliberately whimsical, and his claim of service in the war is downright mendacious. His identifying Oxford as a “temporary” address almost suggests that he
sees his real (but as yet undeclarable) address as Mount Parnassus.
Off-balance, uncertain—“they had stopped the war on him”—the range of roles he affected during the immediate postwar years implied Parnassus more than Oxford. With Phil Stone he continued his sorties—to Clarks-dale, Memphis, and New Orleans—to engage in gambling, bootleg drinking, and other activities unavailable in Oxford. At Stone’s instigation, he also actively submitted for publication the poems he was writing. Once he got a lucky break. The New Republic accepted his reworking of Mallarmé’s “L’Après-Midi d’un Faune,” offering him $15 for it. They would publish it in their August 6, 1919, issue. Enchanted, he and Stone redoubled their efforts, only to find each subsequent submission rejected. They then copied out “Lines from a Northampton Asylum,” by the early nineteenth-century English poet John Clare, and submitted it to the same magazine. It, too, was rejected. Finally they copied out a widely known masterpiece—“Kublai Khan”—and submitted that to the New Republic under the name of its real author, Samuel T. Coleridge. Another rejection soon arrived, along with—according to Stone—this editorial note “We like your poem, Mr. Coleridge, but we don’t think it gets anywhere much” (F 72).
ADVENTURES OF COUNT NO ‘COUNT
During the postwar years in Oxford, Faulkner remained in aggressively role-playing mode. Following the initial season of sporting his unearned war uniform—worn not just on ceremonial occasions but at dances and on the golf course as well—he settled into an equally self-conscious role as special student at the university. He took courses in English, Spanish, and French, but he was better remembered for his cultural and sartorial pretensions. Earlier, his expensively tailored suits had earned him the title “the Count.” Now his more elaborate costuming—replete with cane, limp, and swagger—elicited from his university peers the derisive term “Count No ‘Count.” Seemingly descended from Parnassus and returned from war-torn France, Faulkner maintained his façade of imperturbability. He published poems in the university literary magazine, the Mississippian, as well as contributing elegant, Beardsley-inspired drawings. Annoyed classmates eventually refused to take his cultural pretensions lying down. The title of one of his poems—a translation of Paul Verlaine’s “Fantoches”—was misprinted in the Mississippian as “Fantouches.” That title and the poem’s most famous line—“la lune ne garde aucune rancune”—soon generated a satiric response. There appeared in the same magazine a counter-poem—“Whotouches,” described as “Just a Parody on Count’s ‘Fantouches’ by Count Jr.”—and it ended thus: “how long the old aucune raccoon” (F 81). Journalistic ripple effects continued, and a month later the Mississippian published “Cane de Looney,” written by one “Peruney Prune.”
By the fall of 1921, having quit his desultory studies at the university, Faulkner found himself at loose ends. His poems, though occasionally accepted by the Mississippian, were turned down by national journals. Estelle’s periodic returns to Oxford—her married status blazoned in the figure of her accompanying daughter, Victoria—stimulated him and frustrated him in equal measure. Neither the stimulation nor the frustration was welcome. Finally, there was no job he could conceive of in Oxford that remotely appealed. Played out, he turned once more to the man who had bailed him out in the past and would, he hoped, do so again. Once contacted, Stone proposed the same path of escape that had worked earlier; he urged Faulkner to come north, offering to share his rooms in New Haven. So Faulkner packed his bags and headed to the Northeast for the second time in his life—to New Haven at first, preparatory to a more protracted stay in New York. He was determined to become an artist; attempting to perform that role in Oxford had become too burdensome to continue. New Haven would at least not object to his artistic striving, and Greenwich Village was widely fantasized as the sort of place that might actually abet it.
New Haven did accommodate him, and Greenwich Village amazed him. Of his first subway trip in the big city, he wrote his mother:
The experience showed me that we are not descended from monkeys, as some say, but from lice…. Great crowds of people cramming underground, and pretty soon here comes a train, and I swear I believe the things are going a mile a minute when they stop. Well, everybody crowds on, the guards bawling and shoving, then off again, top speed. Its like being shot through a long piece of garden hose. (TH 157-8)
Amusing, but also latently horrifying: as always, Faulkner was attuned to the speed of things. The machine-fueled rush and roar of New York penetrated his nerves. Later, in Sanctuary, his most disturbing images would circulate around unstoppable entities hurtling at inhuman speed underground, as well as the menace of an encroaching “little rubber tube wrong side outward” (SAN 331). Nevertheless, the generosity of Stark Young (thanks to Stone) and Elizabeth Prall took care of basic needs. Young gave him lodging until he could find a place of his own; Prall found him the Lord and Taylor job. He could look into the mirror every morning and say to himself that he was holding his own, even supporting himself in the bohemian capital of America. Yet he knew that this was hardly a sustainable life rhythm; he would never be a New Yorker. When Stone reached him, late that fall, with another proposal—this one a homecoming—it was hard to say no.
If Stone’s proposal had not been so outlandish, he might have accepted it at the outset. But the proposition was incredible. With the help of Lem Oldham (Estelle’s politically influential father), the entrepreneurial Stone had somehow persuaded U.S. senator Byron Harrison to offer Faulkner the position of postmaster of the University of Mississippi post office. Faulkner turned it down immediately. When Stone pressed again, and yet a third time (with Maud Falkner’s secret collusion to get her boy back home), he at last relented. He did so against his better judgment, which told him—even in the brevity of the moment—that this was no job for him. But what were his other options? The post office would pay $1,500 a year, more than double his salary at Lord and Taylor’s. Why not give it a try?
During the next three years, in Stone’s often-quoted words, Faulkner “made the damndest postmaster the world has ever seen” (F 109). He could not take the job seriously. His favorite activities—when he was in the office and ostensibly at work—seem to have been bridge and mah-jongg. If the weather was fair, he liked to close shop and join others for a game of golf. Eventually he set up his working quarters so as to indulge in tea with his friends, or, if alone, to do some private reading in “the Reading Room.” Reading materials were not hard to come by. He developed the habit of casually “borrowing” any journals that crossed his desk and appealed to his eye—journals intended for their Oxford recipients. Taciturn as ever in conventional situations, he saw no need to carry on conversations with his customers. He hardly knew most of them and never did care for small talk. He seemed to consider them lucky to get their mail at all; many complained that they did not get their mail at all. Discontent mounted, and eventually, in September 1924, it boiled over. Mississippi’s postal inspector, Mark Webster, sent him a three-page letter laying out seven categories of dereliction of duty alleged against him. Apparently he felt no need to read that letter either, so he was surprised when—in the midst of a bridge game in the office—Webster appeared at his door. The game was over, Faulkner immediately realized. Silently walking away with his bridge buddies, he turned and said, “I reckon I’ll be at the beck and call of folks with money all my life, but thank God I won’t ever again have to be at the beck and call of every son of a bitch who’s got two cents to buy a stamp” (118).
The years between 1918 and 1924 testify to a wide range of sustained performances. In addition to the preposterous postmaster, there was the frustrated lover—still writing poems for his beloved Estelle, still arrested in his desire for her. There was also Count No ’Count, University of Mississippi poseur par excellence, as well as the weary, war-wounded veteran who had flown planes and seen action overseas. No less, we find the vagabond Faulkner whose gambling and boozing trips increased as he moved into his midtwenties, with many of hi
s friends married off and in domestic arrangements. There is as well Faulkner the scoutmaster, remembered with something close to adoration by his younger charges. (He occupied this position until one of the local ministers objected to a well-known boozer sullying that sacrosanct post.) Placed next to each other, all these Faulkners appear as performances. Although each role being performed expresses some abiding dimension of the same human being, they add up to make a troubling portrait. The man who mishandles his postmaster job to that spectacular degree seems both to lack any unifying core and to be willing to make others pay for it—a man given to colorful performances yet obscurely in flight from himself. It was not only Estelle’s parents who considered him a bad bet, some six years earlier. He might have struck himself as a bad bet even now. Such self-criticism would have been sharpened by the all-but-public assessment of him leveled by his uncle John at about the same time. Standing on the central square in Oxford, his uncle had told a group of listeners, “that damn Billy is not worth a Mississippi goddam—and never will be…. He’s a Falkner and I hate to say it about my own nephew, but, hell, there’s a black sheep in everybody’s family and Billy’s ours. Not worth a cent” (F 117–8).
Not worth a cent. To what extent did this unforgiving assessment roil inside the young man who made his way to New Orleans a few months after the Post Office debacle? Did the newcomer to Sherwood Anderson’s literary circle harbor a set of doubts about himself—more as a human being than as a fledgling writer—that functioned as an unwanted secret sharer? Does Elmer’s bumbling helplessness, written while Faulkner lodged in Paris later the same year (1925), testify to something still unformed, exposed, and damaged inside him—a defective “clotting which is you” that would unclot if not protected by carefully maintained posturing? Did the published author of Soldiers’ Pay and Mosquitoes recognize in Liveright’s harsh verdict on Flags an inner incoherence that nothing was likely to straighten out, least of all marriage to a just-divorced Estelle? Whatever the answers to these questions, the man who wrote a trio of masterpieces between 1928 and 1930—The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying, and Sanctuary—was someone in trouble, a man who was stumbling. And writing masterpieces inseparable from it.
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