The pilots who compete for the prizes are both desperate for the money and cavalierly dismissive of it. Mere cash is beneath contempt as a motive for directing behavior. Yet Pylon is rife with monetary transactions (one critic has counted some sixty-seven of them). The unnamed Reporter (through whose mesmerized eyes Faulkner narrates this novel) is a spendthrift—with others’ money. Borrowing gobs of cash from his inexplicably generous boss, the Reporter takes dozens of cab rides, throwing dollar bills at the drivers as he rushes away from their vehicles. One is reminded of Faulkner’s similarly conflicted stance toward money. He would borrow—casually and extravagantly—from his publishers (sometimes not asking permission in advance). In letters to his agents and editors, he would also obsess endlessly over his need for money. Whenever he was in temporary possession of it, it poured out of him. He would have liked to be Maecenas. To allow one’s life to be ruled by money appeared to him as a form of thralldom. “I reckon I’ll be at the beck and call of folks with money all my life,” he had fumed in 1924, “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.” Being fired from that job had liberated him from a routine he detested to the point of scandalous inattention. Scheming to make one’s money appreciate—in and of itself—struck him as no less despicable. It signaled a slavish devotion to incrementally paced hoarding—a sort of Yankee-inspired tiptoeing through life, always checking the credit-debit sheet. It plotted life in an anal and unworthy fashion.
By contrast, the flyers risked their lives utterly, each time they rose into the air. “They had escaped the compulsion of accepting a past and a future” (FIU 36), Faulkner would say of them later, at the University of Virginia. In Pylon itself, the same point emerges starkly: “And the ship is all right,” one of them says, “except you wont know until you are in the air whether or not you can take it off and you wont know until you are back on the ground and standing up again whether or not you can land it” (906). So much for plans for mastering life in advance, for calculating before and after. To fly those “kites” is to experience time as pure presence. We will know what is happening when it has happened; no prior preparation is any good. Or rather, prepare as we can, such preparation is puny and futile. Once we leave the sanctuary of the earth, we are flaunting the sinister gods—the unknowable force that Mr. Compson calls the “dark diceman” (SF 1013). Or, as Faulkner would later (in The Hamlet) describe the time-model implicit in the flyers’ behavior: “Breathing is a sight-draft dated yesterday” (313). As though our breath itself had an unappealable liquidation date of yesterday written on it, collectible on sight. The encounter could come at any moment; it will give no prior notice. No experience brought this more powerfully home to Faulkner than flying planes.
Pylon enacts these convictions by its way of representing the human body. Characters rarely eat in this novel, though they frequently remind themselves or each other to do so. Instead, they smoke and drink; they vomit too. Even that is closer to their core identity than eating. Consider this passage in which one of the pilots, Shumann, has browbeaten his crewman, Jiggs, into eating a sandwich:
Chewing, Jiggs looked full at Shumann, holding the bitten sandwich in both grimed hands before his breast as though it were a crucifix, chewing with his mouth open, looking full at Shumann until Shumann realized that Jiggs was not looking at him at all, that the one good eye was merely open and filled with a profound and hopeless abnegation … and that Jiggs’ face was now slicked over with something which in the faint light resembled oil in the instant before Jiggs began to vomit. (PYL 902)
That sandwich will never get eaten. Eating—the basic function enabling self-sustaining over time—is as revoked within him as swallowing will be for Faulkner’s intoxicated characters. Locked into his present moment, Jiggs smokes, drinks, and vomits. He does not eat; that practical activity is transcended in Pylon.
Does it follow that what is being pursued—in the antics of the flyers and of the Reporter obsessively following them—is something opposed to all practicality? Does the risking of life constitute flight’s core fascination? Fatal accidents grimly accumulated during the barnstorming events Faulkner witnessed during the early 1930s. Did he grasp that what hypnotized him in this activity was the dance of death? It is hardly coincidental that after hearing in June 1934 of the famous pilot Jimmy Wedell’s fatal crash, he deemed the moment right for executing his own last will and testament. Wedell had gone down while giving a beginner flight lessons. Surely the all-risking encounter with death is what Faulkner had seen eight years earlier in young John Sartoris in Flags. With his warplane riddled with German bullets, John swung his feet out of the cockpit, seconds before taking the plunge. He thumbed his nose at his brother Bayard—helplessly watching from another plane—then “flipped his hand at the hun … and jumped” (FD 765), mocking the death he hurtled toward. For John’s epitaph, Faulkner had chosen a text from Exodus: “I bare him on eagles’ wings and brought him to me.” When Faulkner wrote those words in 1927, he surely cognized their meaning. At the end of 1935—suddenly, awfully off course—he would recognize in them a different meaning.
In a fury of composition, he completed Pylon in December 1934. Three months later, Dean received his transport license; he was flying the newly acquired Waco regularly. In November 1935, he flew it to an air show in Pontotoc, Mississippi, where he would give flying lessons. Louise was four months pregnant; when the baby came, they would need the money. Dean took up one last group of passengers that afternoon, but the Waco failed to return to the airfield. Rumors of a crash soon began to spread. Late in the afternoon, Faulkner got the phone call at Rowan Oak: Dean was dead. The Waco had been found, buried six feet into the earth; all of the bodies were mutilated beyond recognition.
Faulkner would not allow other family members to approach the mangled corpse. He carried a photo of Dean with him, and he worked all that night with the undertaker, using the photo to help recompose a face that might passably resemble Dean’s. The motives driving this nightmarish act are unknowable, but one can hazard some grotesque mix of family piety (make Dean presentable again), self-inflicted torture (his Waco: his fault), and the engraving of a life-long memory (Dean’s mangled face to remain forever inside him). The next morning, they transported the body back to Oxford. Faulkner’s grieving cousin Sally Murry persuaded him to keep the coffin closed; neither Maud nor Louise ever saw Dean again. The accident would never be fully explained, though expert witnesses—after studying the position of instruments on the destroyed Waco—believed they knew what might have happened. They speculated that one of the passengers, with some flight training already under his belt, had been offered the controls by Dean, had panicked, and had suddenly put the Waco into a plummeting spin that Dean had no time to prevent. “Don’t reproach yourself,” Jack consoled his older brother. “What happened wasn’t your fault. You weren’t responsible for it” (F 356).
That was the official verdict, but Faulkner’s private one was different. He had actively encouraged Dean’s fascination with flight, paid for Dean’s instruction, and sold Dean (at reduced cost) the plane in which he went down. How could the Waco he had proudly displayed in that earlier photo be the plane that killed his brother? The dreams that had attached to that craft, the horror that now replaced them.. Dean’s death set off in him a self-indictment that would remain beyond pacifying. He started to drink again sometime after the accident, and he reached a point—talking with Louise—when his anguish suddenly mounted and spilled over. Tears welled up and his body shook, as he said to her, “I’ve ruined your life. It’s all my fault” (F 356). When he made the arrangements for the funeral, he chose for his youngest brother the same epitaph he had bestowed on young John Sartoris: “I bare him on eagles’ wings and brought him to me.” Maud resisted this repetition, perhaps seeing in it an excessive marker of Faulkner’s own grief. What he saw in it we can never know, but one thing is likely: that the assault of life has noth
ing in common with the dreams and aspirations we draw on to imagine it before it arrives.
The three of them lived together for the next few weeks in Maud’s house: mother, son, and widow. Maud would survive this disaster, but something in her was permanently broken. She kept sleeping pills by her bedside, wondering when the moment would come to take them all. “I’ve lived too long,” her sister-in-law remembered her saying. During these days of grief, Faulkner would help Louise as he could—run her bath, bring her a glass of milk. One morning at breakfast she said, “I can’t eat. I dreamed the whole accident last night.” He was silent, then replied, “You’re lucky to have dreamed it only once. I dream it every night” (F 356). Untimely: our lives are premature, inconclusive, and inconcludable. “Maybe happen is never once,” Quentin Compson would muse in Absalom. We play and replay the events that give us identity. In advance of themselves when they first arrive, they come up different, later. The woman he had not eloped with, the war he had not entered, the plane he had secretly been incapable of flying: each of these had multiple, incompatible lives over time. Each had escaped him at first. Each had then become an intricate part of his life. The first and the last would break his heart. Along with Estelle’s marriage to Cornell Franklin, Dean’s death was the worst thing that ever happened to him. Its subterranean half-life would last as long as he did.
At the end of 1935, Faulkner was finding himself once more embroiled in money troubles. His financial responsibilities badly exceeded his capacity to meet them on the proceeds brought in by his writing. He was now committed to supporting Louise and her not yet born son (who would be named Dean). He would of course continue to take care of both his widowed mother and his recently increased family (his daughter Jill was by then two years old). His other brothers recurrently needed his help as well. In addition, Estelle’s parents had fallen into precarious financial straits, not to mention Faulkner’s continuing responsibility for Estelle’s older offspring, Victoria and Malcolm. It went without saying that he would not cease to be answerable for the needs of Uncle Ned and Mammy Callie. All told, he was paying taxes and insurance on two houses—his own and his mother’s—and helping meet the expenses of the several other households of his extended family. As home owner and inheritor of traditional ideas about a Southern master’s duties, he accepted all of these obligations. But he was under greater monetary stress than ever before. The emotional stress was perhaps even keener; it was certainly more intricate.
Reaching him from several sources, guilt was ravaging Faulkner. For the rest of his life he would feel guilt for the death of Dean. More, Hollywood provided the only solution he knew for his money troubles—an ambivalent solution composed of temporary release and habit-forming entrapment. Some four years earlier, he had first embraced that solution. In December 1931, Sam Marx of Twentieth-Century Fox sent Leland Hay-ward (Ben Wasson’s boss at the time) the following telegram: “DID YOU MENTION WILLIAM FAULKNER TO ME ON YOUR LAST TRIP HERE. IF SO IS HE AVAILABLE AND HOW MUCH” (F 296). How much would it cost to buy him? For the next twenty years, Faulkner would be a purchasable Hollywood property, assessed wholly in monetary terms. He knew this and hated it. He disapproved of the tinselly glitter of the place. Worse, he always remained disdainful toward the film medium itself. He had found, however, a consolation there that could only have deepened his feelings of guilt. He had met and fallen hard for Meta Carpenter, a Southern-born woman who was divorced, attractive, and eleven years younger. She worked for Howard Hawks, typing scripts among her other duties. Faulkner pursued her intently, and soon they were lovers.
I shall return in chapter 4 to both Meta Carpenter and Hollywood. Before us now—and the subject of the following chapter—is a final, more impersonal and pervasive source of the guilt surrounding him throughout his life but assailing his imagination only in the 1930s. This source derived from racial experience all Southerners shared, few acknowledged, and none would explore as he did—to the point of nightmarish recognitions: white abuse of blacks. Centuries of socially sanctioned racism tarnished his country’s proudest claim of liberty and justice for all. Faulkner believed in that claim, had tried seventeen years earlier to go to war in defense of it, and would try again during World War II.
In Light in August, he had first broached the brutality of his region’s race relations. Soon he was writing gentler stories of whites and blacks at the time of the Civil War. He would later reconfigure and assemble these as The Unvanquished. Most of all, though, he was trying to think his way through the recalcitrance of a bigger book—one that would seek to articulate the comprehensive tragedy of race in America. He hardly knew, as he was struggling with Absalom, that he would eventually produce—in the trio composed of Light in August, Absalom, Absalom! and Go Down, Moses—the most resonant exploration of the national trauma of race that any white novelist has yet written. How could he have known? He was at the time riddled with competing calls on his conscience. Writing the final chapters of Absalom, he was trying to keep his head above water, as an inner chorus continued silently to indict him. There was no lack of relevant charges: his failed marriage, his role in Dean’s death, his increasing alcoholism, his bargain with Hollywood, his affair with Meta, his participation in his region’s deep-rooted abuse of blacks. All of these missteps clamored inside, as he wrote his way into Thomas Sutpen’s appalling innocence and Quentin Compson’s even more appalling inheritance. Light in August had implicitly launched a rendezvous with race in America. Half deliberately, half unthinkingly—his talents now at their high-water mark—he would take on the encounter.
CHAPTER 3
DARK TWINS
The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color-line.
—W. E. B. Du Bois
“GO SLOW NOW”
He had apparently been drinking fairly heavily, and the outrageous words tumbled out: “If I have to choose between the United States government and Mississippi, then I’ll choose Mississippi…. [I]f it came to fighting I’d fight for Mississippi against the United States even if it meant going out into the street and shooting Negroes” (LG 261). So spoke Faulkner in a New York interview with Russell Howe. It was early 1956; civil rights turmoil was approaching a boiling point. A young black woman named Autherine Lucy had been accepted into the University of Alabama. Southerners were already rioting at the prospect, but a federal court ordered the university to admit her nevertheless. Faulkner desperately wanted Lucy and the integrationists who stood behind her to back off. He was certain she would not enter the university alive. Word of his desire to speak got out, and the Reporter magazine set up an interview. Howe might been amazed to hear America’s foremost novelist—however intoxicated—speak as he did. When the interview appeared in print (in the London Sunday Times as well), Faulkner was horrified by his own words. He had seen no prior draft. He immediately wrote a letter to the Reporter explaining that the statements attributed to him were ones “which no sober man would make, nor … any sane man believe” (ESPL 225). Off-balance in that charged interview moment, he felt betrayed by the mirror image of his own quoted voice. A month later, he would claim that Howe’s interview was “more a misconstruction than a misquotation” (F 618). Even though accurately reported (as Howe strenuously insisted), the views expressed in that interview were not his. Faulkner’s words, but not his thoughts. Not really Faulkner. Something more than incoherence is at work here.
Dark twins—the title of this chapter—is a phrase Faulkner used in Mosquitoes to characterize the intricate bond between an author’s life and his work: “A book is a writer’s secret life, the dark twin of a man: you can’t reconcile them” (MOS 461). The phrase conveys a pairing that is intimate and inalienable, yet foreign and alienated. The two entities are bonded by way of a commonality that estranges the one from the other. With respect to race (a realm already implied by “dark”) the phrase may suggest a similar vexed bonding—Faulkner’s abiding twinship with blacks and his no less abiding difference from them, by way of h
is whiteness. The dark face he sees—as a Southerner—in the mirror proposed by race cannot be his own, yet he fleetingly glimpses himself there as well. More broadly, for several centuries in the South, the two races have been intertwined and cordoned off—at once inseparable and unreconcilable, scandalously connected by blood though segregated by law. Most of his fellow white Southerners denied the twinship, insisting instead on the unbridgeable difference between whiteness and darkness. But Faulkner—caught in a weave of racial realities he could neither master nor escape—moved through this uncertain territory like a man careening between the poles of blindness and insight. Deeply fissured within, he found himself making incompatible utterances, each true to incompatible experiences. Recurrently he appeared—and heard himself as—not-Faulkner. He knew at once too much and not enough. His lifelong immersion in the sea of race enacts this paradox in a range of ways.
The default pole in Faulkner’s paradoxical racial stance is disidentification. He is not his dark twin. “Shooting Negroes” is an utterance, however accidental and unintended, whose hostility cannot be explained away. It is hard to imagine his saying “shooting whites,” no matter how much he had been drinking. Somewhere inside his psyche, inculcated there and confirmed by his region’s truisms, he could envisage shooting Negroes. His words to Howe further reveal his incapacity to enter black lives. “I have known Negroes all my life,” he proclaimed, “and Negroes work my land for me. I know how they feel.” Warming to his theme, he added that, if it came to violence, “My Negro boys down on the plantation would fight against the North with me. If I say to them, ‘Go get your shotguns, boys,’ they’ll come” (LG 262). The master/slave model is patent. He is the master of the plantation, they its obedient workers; he is the man, they the boys; he owns the guns and gives the orders, they followsuit. He is the active subject, they the docile object. This widely shared fantasy failed the South in the Civil War, when black slaves—given the chance—fled in huge numbers from their astonished Southern masters. The fantasy is all the more outrageous when sounded in 1956. Even intoxicated, he had to have known that neither his home (Rowan Oak) nor his farm (Greenfield Farm) was a plantation. Or is it that in foundational matters, the passage of time itself seems illusory? That beneath and behind the twentieth-century Southerner’s home and farm there lurks the destroyed yet indestructible antebellum plantation? Untimely: remnants of antebellum identity remain embedded, shard-like, in this anguished Southerner caught up in mid-1950s racial turmoil. In crucial moments, such as this unrehearsed New York interview, these remnants rise troublingly to the surface. Dark twins is also a notion about identity over time. The living Faulkner harbors inside himself the unaltered convictions of his dead fellow white Southerners of 1865.
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