B006JHRY9S EBOK

by Philip Weinstein

  He would write once again about race relations. And he would seek to play his part—confusedly and at some risk to himself—in the civil rights turmoil that was already brewing. His last race-focused novel, Intruder in the Dust, appeared in 1948. Its keen (and easily decipherable) attention to contemporary racial agitation doubtless played a part in his being awarded the Nobel Prize two years later. But that novel’s stance moved from paternal to paternalistic. Its plot was simple. Lucas Beauchamp, now an old man charged with a murder he did not commit, had to be saved from lynching. Faulkner ensured that it would take white people cooperating together to save him. Lucas’s efforts in his own behalf were to be quietly stymied (he remained locked up in jail). Thus the motion and emotion in this novel belonged to the Southern whites who labored to clear him. Not that this number was large. Lucas’s rescue turned on a pair of boys and an old lady who refused to sit by and see injustice done. Because Faulkner was too honest to propose that the larger adult white South wanted anything other than to lynch this “uppity nigger,” the novel’s strategy for liberating Lucas emerged as more than a little sentimental. On one matter, Faulkner was crystal clear. Lucas’s dilemma was not one in which well-meaning Northern outsiders had any business interfering. Lucas’s defense lawyer, Gavin Stevens, referred to his silent client throughout as Sambo. One wonders how much is gained by freeing a black man only on condition that he continue to answer to Sambo. Once again, looking forward and looking backward merge as incoherently fused dimensions of Faulkner’s racial imagination.

  Intruder, at any rate, was commercially successful (its first several weeks of sale outpaced even Sanctuary’s record). MGM not only paid $50,000 for screen rights but went on to produce the movie. Much of it was shot in Oxford during the spring of 1949—Faulkner helped the director, Clarence Brown, cast local acquaintances in several bit parts—and the world premiere would take place in Oxford that fall. The town appreciated the business generated by the several weeks’ work required to shoot the film, whatever their private thoughts about their most celebrated citizen. As the filming hullabaloo approached its end, Estelle decided that a fitting conclusion would be a party at Rowan Oak itself. There was only one hitch. A Puerto Rican named Juano Hernandez had been signed on to play the principal role in the film—that of Lucas Beauchamp. Faulkner had even helped Hernandez work on a black accent that would sound more like Mississippi than the islands. Such professional cooperation was one thing, but attendance at a Rowan Oak party was another. Hernandez was himself presentable, but if the Faulkners invited him, they would have to invite his Negro hosts in Oxford. After some soul-searching, they determined they could not do that. “So the whole crew, with the exception of the portrayer of Lucas Beauchamp, came out to Rowan Oak” (F 503). We recall an earlier arc of nonrecognition launched by the closing of a door in young Thomas Sutpen’s face. Trash like him were to use the back door of a white plantation. A kindred arc repeats itself in 1949 at Rowan Oak. “Maybe happen is never once,” Faulkner had written in Absalom. Whatever images he saw in that mirror posed by Juano Hernandez’s black hosts, they did not figure for him as dark twins deserving acknowledgment.

  CHAPTER 4

  IN SEARCH OF SANCTUARY

  ROUGH SPAS: FAULKNER AND ALCOHOL

  He was not unconscious the whole time. Specific details would flare into focus, then flee as swiftly as they had come. All he knew for sure was that he could not move, though he could not remember why. Where was he anyway? Sprawled out—half sitting, half lying—he pressed tentatively on his pounding head, trying to frame this moment of pure distress. An image arose in his mind: he was in New York, at his favorite hotel, the Algonquin. He had come here to complete the contracts with Random House for The Unvanquished: which meant that it was November 1937. He had come here to forget something as well—he suddenly knew what that was—but he had less luck there. Meta Carpenter was who he wanted to forget, who now appeared in his mind’s eye with aching clarity. He concentrated again, his screen of consciousness widened. Depressed—he had his reasons for it—he had been drinking steadily the night before. He had drifted from bar to bar, then seen no need to stop once he returned to his room. He vaguely remembered the sensation of booze sliding down his throat, the sought-after numbness it radiated. But how had that moment led to this one? Straining once more, he got hold of another image. The last thing he had done was to make his way into the bathroom and settle onto the toilet seat, bottle in hand. Time for one more swig before bed.

  Bright sunlight bore down on him, and the room was unaccountably full of cold, moving air. A glance downward showed him he was wearing only his undershorts. Looking up, he saw an open bathroom window. Had he imagined last night that he was still in Mississippi, where on going to bed he would often open the window a crack, even in winter? Then he recognized the noise he had been hearing for some time now: the hissing sound of a steam pipe, just behind him, his back resting on it. He had passed out in this bathroom. His mind, still whirling, permitted larger oases of lucidity. He realized suddenly that he was in the wrong place: he had no business lying against that pipe. He could tell from its sound how hot it had to be, but his back—which ought to know—had reported no signals of pain. It didn’t even hurt now. How long had he been in this position? When would he find the energy and focus needed to get up again? Like’s Joe Christmas caught in the dietitian’s room in Light in August—lying flat out in his own vomit and realizing that, for better and surely for worse, he was completely in others’ hands—Faulkner waited for someone to come. Eventually someone always did. This was a hell of a way to begin the day.

  The moment is emblematic in its self-destructiveness, though its gravity is new. He had been drinking heavily—and occasionally passing out—for over twenty years. But up to now he had been lucky enough to avoid New York hotel steam pipes, as well as other complications linked to a lifetime of boozing. Some time later that morning—minutes? hours?—he heard knocking, at first cautious and then louder. He could not move, and he had nothing to say, so he waited. Within a few minutes Jim Devine—Random House fellow writer and boon drinking companion—had managed to get the door opened. Devine found him there, moved him gingerly, then gasped. The wound inflicted on his lower back by the steam pipe must have looked pretty alarming. Though it didn’t hurt yet, Faulkner had done himself real damage this time. The sought-after numbness that the booze provided was at the same time a dangerous abdication, an invitation to further troubles. These third-degree burns (the size of a man’s palm) would eventually require several skin grafts—grafts that in turn became infected and never entirely took. His sleeping, not good in the best of times, was all but impossible for the next few months, and his lower back would never forgive how cavalierly he had treated it. The doctor that Devine took Faulkner to stared at his patient’s back, then at the patient himself, and asked, “Why do you do this?” Grimacing with incipient pain but showing no other emotion, eyes hooded by emphatic curved brows, Faulkner responded, “Because I like to” (F 387).

  Abdication: such excessive drinking—revealing his incapacity to manage himself—led to his need to be managed by others. In this instance, Jim Devine not only nursed him through the worst of his convalescence, but (urged by Bob Haas) accompanied him by train to Oxford, once Faulkner was well enough to leave New York. Hal Smith had played a similar chaperone role at the Virginia Writers’ Conference in 1931. Later, both Bob Haas and Saxe Commins of Random House would more than once find themselves drafted into the service of managing their self-destructive genius. Malcolm Cowley occasionally stepped in as well, to play the role of nurse-manager in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Joan Williams and then Jean Stein inherited something of the same responsibilities later. In Hollywood during the 1940s, his friend and fellow scriptwriter “Buzz” Bezzerides recurrently took on this job.

  In addition to these caretakers, there were the various black servants Faulkner would employ to drive for him and tend to domestic needs. Nor is this to take into a
ccount the policy adopted by larger institutions that occasionally sponsored him (like the State Department): to make sure that potential crisis managers would be on hand whenever Faulkner served as an unofficial cultural ambassador during the 1950s. He had become widely identified as a man who required handlers, and he recognized himself in that mirror. For some time now he had been casting himself in that role. To an annoyed Hal Smith he had written (in January 1932)—after one of his hurriedly summoned managers had persuaded him to part with some unpublished poems—“I’m sorry…. goddam me for getting mixed up with it and goddam you for sending me off … in the shape I was in. I don’t think it will happen again. But if I should do so, for God’s sake find Ben [Wasson] and turn me on to him next time” (SL 55). If I mess up again, “turn me on to” a more trustworthy manager. The stance is that of a self-accepting ingénu—a man who sees himself as a receptive “me” rather than an active “I.” Such a man cannot be expected to take care of himself in intricate situations: his calling as writer of genius preempts the responsibilities that normally go with adulthood.

  Convalescence after the 1937 Algonquin disaster was slow. He was unable to keep to his commitments in the next week or so—including an emotionally fraught lunch with Meta Carpenter and her new husband, the gifted German pianist Wolfgang Rebner. She had recently introduced the two men; she was intent on them liking each other. Faulkner knew only too well that Rebner had become her husband because he himself had refused to go through the distress—divorce from Estelle and separation from his daughter, Jill—required to step into that role. His back by now was torturing him; he was not up to seeing the Rebners together at this moment. Meta would have to understand. But she didn’t understand, and his failure to show up at the restaurant sent her into panic. She rushed (with Rebner in tow) to the Algonquin and then up to his room. Like Devine earlier, she knocked softly, then loudly, then managed to get the door open. She found him lying naked on the bed, barely able to move, his body reeking with burn medication. Rebner looked on at a distance, nonjudgmentally. Meta and Faulkner stared at each other, then he mumbled, “I started drinking…. You know why” (ALG 224).

  Drinking had become a sort of rough spa meant to provide sanctuary—a place where no one else could follow, an attempt to distance himself from the unmanageable stresses of his life. The foregoing vignette reveals a number of the elements motivating Faulkner’s dependence on alcohol. Three places are here involved—Hollywood (Meta’s setting), New York (his publishing center), and Oxford (home: the opposite, in different ways, of both other places). Three people are involved as well: Meta (his mistress, his single chance at successful love) silhouetted against Estelle and Jill (his now-rejected wife, whom he would divorce if he could, and his precious daughter, whom he would lose if he left Estelle). The elements that come together to launch a bout of uncontrolled drinking can be reshuffled. Sometimes such drinking is called forth by the near-hysterical rush of feeling set loose in him by the completing of a novel. Sometimes it erupts as a means for negotiating (i.e., avoiding) encounters that raise his anxiety level beyond tolerance: a group of professors and writers discussing “southern letters,” a major New York interview for discussing race relations in America. Sometimes it occurs for reasons no one—including Faulkner himself—can fathom. But it does not occur as mere bodily event, as the predictable reenactment of an illness—alcoholism—with no psychological profile. That “diagnosis” would make Faulkner’s chemical dependence essentially the same as anyone else’s: alcohol calls the shots, not the profile of the alcoholic. It omits the intricate algebra of this troubled man’s encounters with the world.1 In what follows, I argue that alcohol provides a revealing window into Faulkner’s psychological and social makeup.

  Alcohol penetrates to Faulkner’s private core as a human being. But several aspects of its appeal locate more broadly outside him—as dimensions of a larger (and typically masculine) history of family, region, and country. Male Falkners had been drinking excessively, and being dragged to clinics to dry out, long before William was born. Colonel W. C. Falkner was an inveterate drinker; legends of his alcoholic exploits were passed on to his great-grandson. As for the Young Colonel’s extravagance, Faulkner could draw on both recounted stories and personal experience. He remembered the Buick/brick/bank vignette as though it had happened to him, and long-ago afternoon séances with the charming but irascible and often sodden old man remained in his mind. Faulkner had seen a good deal of his grandfather in those early years; Murry’s quarrel with J. W. T. was never his. Finally, his father himself was widely known in Oxford as a “mean drunk”—one all too likely to move from intoxication to violence. As well, Faulkner was unlikely to forget those vivid instances of Murry being hustled off by Maud to take the “Keeley Cure.” The boys were brought along, so they could recognize the evils of alcohol (and—this part unspoken—witness at pedagogic length the degradation of their father). The logic was inescapable and, for Faulkner, perfectly normal. Men in his family drank to excess—all of his brothers had trouble with alcohol as well. Wrought into the fiber of their identity, alcohol was their tacitly affirmed way of (not) coping.

  That notion of manhood-and-alcohol went beyond Falkners. It partook more broadly of a Southern male mystique—one not limited to the South but prevalent there. Southern boys (long before Faulkner, all during his youth, and during mine as well some forty-five years later) often learned to drink excessively, early on. Faulkner not only stole from his grandfather’s cache of whiskey while working in his Oxford bank, during his late teens, but was already engaging in sustained bouts of drinking two or three years earlier. He did not, as a young man, gain the sobriquet of town drunk without having put in some effort. More speculatively, one can say that many Southern men sought, and found, a haven of male camaraderie by way of drink. The shared bottle of booze was a talisman allowing them to secede from the world of womenfolk and adult responsibilities—to declare once more their untamed independence. “We don’t want him tame,” Sam Fathers says of the wild dog, Lion, that eventually takes down the great bear, Old Ben, and forfeits his life in doing so (Go Down, Moses). There are few values more abidingly lodged in Faulkner than the desire to remain untamed. Throughout his life, he would refuse to compromise, come to terms—as though doing so would amount to caving in.

  Alcohol-soaked behavior stands out as a salient dimension of Faulkner’s rebellious teens and twenties. The forays with Phil Stone to Clarksdale, Memphis, and the Gulf Coast; the gambling ventures and speakeasies with Reno De Vaux; the heavy drinking with Sherwood Anderson’s New Orleans coterie: these experiences unfolded as rituals of male bonding as much as they embodied a deliberate intent to flout the law. It is as though early on in Faulkner’s psyche, the law began to take the shadowy form of a humorless judgmental female who said No. It’s not hard to see Maud Falkner lurking behind this figure, as well as admirable Jenny DuPre in Flags in the Dust and odious Mrs. Compson in The Sound and the Fury. Such older women seem to have accepted the social decree to abide by the rules and be grown up, but boys—and then men—in the South liked to escape by getting drunk. It was a sanctioned form of playing hooky. Faulkner did not refuse to go past the eleventh grade for nothing.

  In addition, there was the influence of Prohibition. Getting hold of liquor was already an enchanting notion for underage boys together on a night out. It became doubly alluring when federal law mandated that the mere possession of liquor could land you in jail. To the risk of purchasing it was added the risk of drinking it. One could end up unknowingly with “Old Jake,” a villainous rum-based concoction that often paralyzed its drinkers.2 And a range of entertaining narratives attached to illicit booze: what it was composed of, where it originated, the travails undergone in transporting it to the places of purchase and consumption. To engage in such activities was to enter the romance of law-breaking, to show oneself a risk-taker among others fraternally bonded by the same daring. Thanks to Prohibition, drinking excessively—under dangerous
conditions—became for many men a normal expression of independence.

  Finally, there was for Faulkner the decades-long ritual of hunting in the Delta. As early as his midteens, he had joined Phil Stone to participate in General Stone’s annual November bear and deer hunting expedition. Each year he looked forward to renewing this ceremony. It confirmed his sense of himself as a woodsman in the female-free company of other woodsmen, as well as in relation to the wilderness and its creatures, rather than an impecunious youth yet to accept a place in the labor force. Those two weeks in the big woods were amply lubricated by sustained nighttime drinking, during which the pleasures of the day, memories of the past, and expectations of the future would find their way into men-speech. As Faulkner put it in Go Down, Moses,

  the best game of all, the best of all breathing and forever the best of all listening, the voices quiet and weighty and deliberate for retrospection and recollection and exactitude…. There was always a bottle present, so that it would seem to him [Ike McCaslin] that those fine fierce instants of heart and brain and courage and wiliness and speed were concentrated and distilled into that brown liquor which not women, not boys and children, but only hunters drank. (GDM 140–1)