“I HAVE CREATED QUITE A SENSATION”
He was too busy doing it to realize what he had done. He would later look back in amazement at that “one matchless time” when almost everything he put on paper took on incandescent form.6 Decades later, in Manila in 1955, he would say “The writer’s got to add the gift of his talent; he has got to take the truth and set it on fire” (LG 201). At that time he might, on looking back, have been unable to see in Sanctuary any embodiment of “the truth.” But he could not have denied that in Sanctuary he had set something on fire—his career itself. “I have created quite a sensation,” he would write Estelle from New York in November 1931 (SL 53). Prospective publishers were buzzing about him like bees about honey, competing with each other to sign the next book. How had this sudden courtship come about?
It started with the publication of The Sound and the Fury. Only a modest popular success, the book made professional critics sit up and take notice. He would never receive a more penetrating encomium than that penned in 1929 by Evelyn Scott—a contemporary novelist whose review was included in a special edition (a thousand copies) of the book: “Here is beauty sprung from the perfect realization of what a more limiting morality would describe as ugliness,” she wrote. “Here is a humanity stripped of most of what was claimed for it by the Victorians, and the spectacle is moving as no sugar-coated drama ever could be” (CH 78). Even though baffled by his procedures, critics recognized that Faulkner was breaking new ground—that no American novelist had written like this before.
One critic even grasped that the book’s experimental procedures placed on its reader an extraordinary burden: “This is not an easy book,” the Nashville Tennessean reviewer conceded. “It cannot be read objectively; the reader, if he is to savor the best in this book, must surrender himself entirely” (CH 84). “You can do it too easy,” Anderson had warned. Beginning with The Sound and the Fury, Faulkner would henceforth rarely be easy—not on himself, not on his reader. To inhabit Benjy and Quentin, Darl and Vardaman, to get inside their “damn heads,” he had had to yield up his own defenses—his masks of superiority and pose of indifference. He had had to write them as if wholly inside them, seeing and feeling what they saw and felt, judging as they judged—but never judging them. To savor the best in this and his subsequent masterpieces, readers would likewise have to forego defensive judgment—and plunge. Some were beginning to do so.
The Sound and the Fury began it, As I Lay Dying expanded on it, and Sanctuary set it into juggernaut motion. What contributed most to the Faulkner “sensation” was perhaps not so much the brilliance of any of these novels, nor even that of the three of them together. It was the astonishing pace at which they had appeared, meteorically, between October 1929 and February 1931—in less than sixteen months. Almost overnight, he had become a literary phenomenon, a name in every serious fiction reader’s face. For a decade, he had been dreaming of such recognition, but it had taken the fantasy form of might-be. When it finally hit—in 1931—he was unprepared. Encountering the arrival of his own fame—a reality, like other realities, “in advance of itself”—the best he could muster was a bewildered acceptance. Like the young Joe Christmas (in Light in August), he was being catapulted into experiences that escaped his ordering framework. Like Joe as well, he might have glimpsed that he would never understand what was happening. At most, he might develop practices to make it manageable. These would only “come later, when life had begun to go so fast that accepting would take the place of knowing and believing…. The accepting was to come later, along with the whole sum of entire outrage to credulity” (LA 530). He stumbled into fame.
If recognition was what he wanted, it was no less something that, after June 20, 1929, he would have little time to ponder. Married now, the honeymoon over, he had to start performing as a husband and eventual father and home owner—lifetime roles that, unlike his earlier ones, he would neither abandon nor master. To take on these latest roles properly, he knew he would need money—regularly and in substantial amounts. This had never been his forte. Beginning in early 1930, with several published novels now under his belt, he targeted more aggressively the short story market: the national journals such as Scribner’s, Harper’s, Collier’s, the American Mercury, and especially the Saturday Evening Post. These paid dramatically better than the advances he received for his novels (as much as $750 per story), and he could write the stories swiftly. In turn, they exacted something from him that he was loath to provide: a simplification of plot and character lines, such that the finished product be swiftly recognizable as salable. He thought of this quid pro quo, even then, as the whoring required by his new marital status. He could hardly know that such compromises would barely count as a peck on the cheek compared to Hollywood assignments he would soon be carrying out. Sanctuary was too spectacular for its author to escape the movie moguls’ notice for long. In less than two years, his need of funds and their desire to trade on his name would come together as an agreement legally executed above ground but fiendishly conceived in hell.
Faulkner both married a family and in time produced his own. Estelle’s two children (at least at first) lived with them; he chafed at their doing this together in rented rooms. He was thirty-two, and Oxford, after all, was his town. He knew that he had begun to demonstrate the fallacy of his Uncle John’s contemptuous judgment. Not worth a cent. Well, four published novels didn’t bring in much money, but they revealed—to anyone willing to notice—that this vagabond was not to be dismissed. Ownership of a house would further demonstrate his mounting respectability. Not any house though: he wanted a significant house—one that already spoke of his region and would signal his rightful place within it. The old Shegog place on Taylor Road, just outside town, fit the bill. An antebellum two-story colonial with a once-elegant portico, Georgian doors, a wide gallery, and a curved, cedar-lined drive, situated on four wooded acres: it was redolent of nineteenth-century Southern tradition. Badly dilapidated, it was also—just barely—affordable. For $6,000 at 6 percent interest, with no down payment, it could be his. Estelle, he hoped, would soon be pregnant with his own child. This was the right place for all of them, and he signed the papers for it in April 1930. It needed a new name for its new lease on life. Having read in Frazer’s Golden Bough of the rowan tree as a Scottish symbol of domestic protection against witches, he decided to call it Rowan Oak. He would need all the help he could get.
Luckily, his vagabond years had included a good deal of amateur carpentering. He required those resources and more, as he set about repairing beams, putting in a new roof, installing screens, attending to the plumbing, and painting the walls. This labor would continue not for months but for years, as he moved on to more intricate improvements. Like Sutpen in Absalom, once he began to get his new home’s material needs under control, he started to manage its cultural ones. Mammy Callie and Uncle Ned—black domestics intimately associated with his own upbringing and going back even further, to the Young Colonel—soon joined, unbidden but welcome, the new home owner and his wife. Uncle Ned took over butlering duties, as well as caring for the yard. Mammy Callie would help Estelle bring up the children not yet born, as she had helped bring him up earlier. A powerful rhythm older than he was began to assert itself, as Rowan Oak came into symbolic plantation focus, gathering to itself its modest but obligatory retinue of servants. Centuries of black/white Southern relations, passively encoded in these arrangements, were being renewed. He was now the master. Uncle Ned and Mammy Callie asked for no wages; they did not need to. They knew without speaking, as he did, that he would be responsible for their food, shelter, clothing, and health care. He would do the right thing.7
The man who not long ago had spent three years in his university post office job deliberately doing the wrong thing had not undergone a change of heart. Rather than change his identity, he took on these new responsibilities as unavoidable overlay to his earlier, still unrelinquished commitment to bohemianism and vagabondage. His pride in his house and
his resentment toward its demands—like his acceptance of his marriage and his resistance toward it—silently competed with each other. He would complain about mortgages, taxes, insurance, and domestic outlays for the rest of his life, even as he insisted on—took pride in—shouldering these burdens.
Within two months of moving into Rowan Oak, Estelle became pregnant, and this pregnancy was difficult—like Estelle’s earlier ones. The new baby was born at an inopportune time: an icy night in January 1931, some eight weeks before expected. They named her Alabama, in honor of his beloved great-aunt, but the name bestowed no protection. The baby’s health began bad and quickly got worse. Unprepared for life outside her mother’s body, she probably needed an incubator, but none was available nearer than Memphis. Faulkner took her home to Rowan Oak, the obstetrician made visits every day, but the child was sinking. Ten days after her birth, Alabama died, without her weakened and hospitalized mother having ever seen her alive. Once more, Faulkner recognized his impotence before the assault of is—as though his baby’s irreversible decline stayed mockingly in advance of any counter-measures he could cobble together. He watched her death approach inexorably—a coming reality he viewed with horror but could not prevent. Her fate seemed sealed by the sinister gods. Alabama would haunt him later, and her unlived possibilities would appear to him as uncannily prefigured in the earlier genesis of his heart’s darling, Caddy Compson. “So I, who never had a sister,” he would write in an unpublished 1933 preface to The Sound and the Fury, “and was fated to lose my daughter in infancy, set out to make myself a beautiful and tragic little girl” (NOR 228). The peace of was, the turmoil of is. Unable to save his daughter during the assault of present time, he repossessed her imaginatively, retrospectively yet in advance of her actual birth. Aligning his dead baby with his immortal Caddy, he bestowed on her a fullness of meaning she could not have possessed that dark day in January 1931—bestowed it later.
Estelle remained weak that entire spring and into the summer as well. He urgently needed money to keep his household intact; he had already missed the March mortgage payment. In droves, he began to submit short stories to the national journals, trying to remedy the situation. Despite a number of acceptances, the rejection letters came back, also in droves. Then something quite different arrived in the mail. Professor James Wilson of the University of Virginia wrote to invite him to a conference of Southern writers, to be held in Charlottesville. Instigated by Ellen Glasgow and supported by notables such as James Branch Cabell, Thomas Wolfe, Paul Green, Donald Davidson, Sherwood Anderson, and Allen Tate, the conference would seek to shed light on the recent flourishing of Southern letters. Sanctuary had been published in February 1931, to a hailstorm of critical response. The Sound and the Fury and As I Lay Dying had appeared shortly before that, and the latter was now lined up for translation into French. Faulkner had become unignorable, and they wanted him to be among the thirty-four conference attendees. The letter he wrote in response reveals his misgivings even as he said yes:
Dear Mr Wilson—
Thank you for your invitation. I would like very much to avail myself of it, what with your letter’s pleasing assurance that loopholes will be supplied to them who have peculiarities about social gambits. You have seen a country wagon come into town, with a hound dog under the wagon. It stops on the Square and the folks get out, but that hound never gets very far from that wagon. He might be cajoled or scared out for a short distance, but first thing you know he has scuttled back under the wagon; maybe he growls at you a little. Well, that’s me. (SL 51)
He arrived in Charlottesville apprehensive, and apparently his first words to the reporter-host awaiting him were “Know where I can get a drink?” The host took him to his own bootleg supplier, and, cushioned by a bottle of corn whiskey, the two of them spent an amiable evening together. As the conference got under way, things went from bad to worse. He appeared at the first meeting wearing what the playwright Paul Green took to be an aviator’s cap, and he swiftly became the focal point of the conference. His response to this unwonted attention was to hit the booze more aggressively. “Bill Faulkner had arrived and got drunk,” Sherwood Anderson later reported. “From time to time he appeared, got drunk again immediately and disappeared. He kept asking everyone for drinks” (F 286). Allen Tate recalled Faulkner asking Tate’s wife where he could get another drink, then vomiting all over her dress (WFSH 233). The situation had gotten out of hand. Hal Smith, Faulkner’s friend and publisher, finally reacted. With the help of Paul Green, they got him into a car and drove to New York. Faulkner seems to have been steadily drinking the whole time. As they drove through Washington, D.C., he jovially invited a policeman they passed on the street to join them for yet another. On October 26, they arrived in New York.
A virtual firebomb of attention was waiting for him there. Harold Guin-zburg of Viking and Alfred Knopf of Knopf and Bennett Cerf of Random House were already lined up, impatiently expecting his arrival, each determined to sign him up. The presence of such figures of power stridently bidding for his attention increased Faulkner’s anxiety, and he stepped up the drinking. Hal Smith became alarmed again and once more got him away, this time on a boat trip to Jacksonville and other Southern cities, before returning to New York a week later. Throughout this side trip, Faulkner drank heavily, rashly promising manuscripts to young admirers who were there to help manage him. Once back in New York, he started to careen out of control again. When Tallulah Bankhead, on meeting him, begged him to do a screenplay for her, he wrote Estelle excitedly: “The contract is to be signed today, for about $10,000” (F 289). (Nothing ever came of this project.) A couple of days later, he wrote to Estelle again, still more excitedly: “I have created quite a sensation…. In fact, I have learned with astonishment that I am now the most important figure in American letters” (291).
“With astonishment”: astonishment and inebriation seem to have characterized the six weeks of his frenetic stay in New York. He was more or less continually sprung. Pressed in an interview by a New York journalist, he claimed that Southern Negroes were childlike and would be better off “under the conditions of slavery … because they’d have someone to look after them” (F 292). He would later make race remarks more offensive than that, typically when under the influence. Once he met Lillian Hellman, Dashiell Hammett, and Nathaniel West, that same fall, he had available a peerless New York crew of fellow drinkers. He was now passing out in public places frequently enough for Hal Smith to contact Ben Wasson for help. Wasson urged Estelle to come up quickly to New York and rescue her high-flying husband; she took the train and arrived by the beginning of December. Her presence, however, seemed to add fuel to the fire. Cerf later remembered her standing at the window of his apartment on Central Park South, during one of his parties. She turned to him, remarked on the beauty of the view outside, and said: “I feel just like throwing myself out the window” (295). Alarmed, Cerf responded, “Oh, Estelle, you don’t mean that.” She stared back and said, “Of course I do” (295, emphasis in the original). Dorothy Parker spoke as well of scenes of hysteria, of Estelle ripping her dress and attempting to leap out the window of one of Parker’s Algonquin Hotel rooms. Another of their new acquaintances, Marc Connelly, recalled her slipping out of control at a social gathering one night. Faulkner was standing next to her, engaged in conversation, when he noticed what was happening. With no expression on his face, Connelly said, Faulkner quietly reached out and slapped her, very hard. She returned immediately to normal, and he continued his conversation.
What was going on during this astonishing outburst of manic behavior that lasted from late October to mid-December 1931? He had long been a heavy drinker, but something newly disturbing seemed to emerge during the University of Virginia fiasco. Faulkner knew that no other American writer could have produced that trio of masterpieces, but somehow this knowledge was private, his alone. The Sound and the Fury, he would later say, was a book he wrote for himself. As I Lay Dying followed hard upon it, compose
d in a power plant during night hours with no other company than that of an unlettered black coworker. Sanctuary was indeed written with a larger audience in mind—as a potboiler, as he would repeatedly characterize it in later interviews. But we know that it, too, was conceived and drafted during the ominous days of his last five months of bachelorhood—one of the most brooding and incommunicable periods of his life. Suddenly, all three books were no longer his but the property of an aroused and clamorous literary world. He was under siege, in the hands of strangers, and he did not know how to handle it. If this was fame, it was violent, dizzying, impossible to manage. Moreover, it left a bad taste in the mouth the next morning.
“You know that state I seem to get into when people come to see me and I begin to visualize a kind of jail corridor of literary talk,” he wrote Ben Wasson about the Southern conference debacle (SL 56). “Jail corridor”: so he had viewed the marital prison he was preparing to enter in June 1929. But the reasons for this later feeling of claustrophobia were different. He could not forget that—no matter how deliberately—he had not pursued his education past the eleventh grade. He had no business speaking to these literary people. He wrote novels but despised “literary talk.” That was the province of university professors who loved to hear the words coming out of their mouths. He required silence—for his sanity and to get his work done. His intense bond with his books was speechlessly enacted in writing them, not in talking about them later. He was a hound dog who sought the widest recognition, but more than that, viscerally, he wanted to stay scuttled under that wagon. Is it any wonder that his greatest fiction—including the three novels that launched the New York frenzy—centers on the unpreparedness experienced during moments of sudden exposure? That his signature work involves a risking of “the clotting which is you” to the dissolving force of “the myriad original motion”? Or, as he put it in Sanctuary, those moments when “the flatulent monotony of … sheltered lives [is] snatched up without warning by an incomprehensible moment of terror” (287)? Crisis: the assault of what you are not ready for. This rhythm of untimeliness marked his life. It marks his greatest fiction as well.
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