B006JHRY9S EBOK

by Philip Weinstein

  If he treated her as a maiden whom life had miraculously made available to him, she saw him as a lover at once strong, fatherly, and reliable. For their first few months together, she had no idea he drank heavily. When her friends told her of his reputation, she was shocked—though she would soon enough see him inebriated. At any rate, these first months of passion were the crucible in which they forged their bond together. “I was the girl he would surely have married,” she wrote, “if our paths had only crossed before 1929” (ALG 24). In her mind this was never an affair. She was not a promiscuous woman, nor—she thought—was he a promiscuous man. (“Sensualist, yes…. Womanizer not at all” [127].) A Southern girl brought up to be docile in the presence of men—and to charm them with her pliancy—Meta did not threaten Faulkner. When she sought to learn more about his inner life, she soon learned it would not be forthcoming. Even his intimately obscene phrases and poems emerged as written documents, arising in absence and communicating safely across it. She came to recognize that she learned more about him from his letters than ever in their conversations. He was, and would remain, a “moated man,” “a great carapace,” one who drew his “insularity … over himself like a second, tougher skin” (50). She was not to know until after his death that he had not fought and been wounded in the Great War. From first to last she responded to him as the famous William Faulkner. His stature acted as a screen that both brought them together and separated her from the precincts of his intimate thoughts. Which is probably how he wanted it to be.

  That summer of 1936 he returned home, and when he came back to Hollywood he had bad news. Divorce—he had done some research—would be difficult, if not impossible. He could not lose Jill, and he had been counseled that divorcing Estelle would mean losing his daughter. There was more bad news. Estelle and Jill were coming out to Hollywood. That Faulkner wanted Meta to meet his infant daughter is understandable; that he insisted as well on her meeting Estelle is less so. His affair brought out a new streak in him—at once detached and sadistic—as he schemed how to bring his two women together. He arrived at the bizarre scenario of drafting his friend Ben Wasson (working in Hollywood as well) into the performance. Wasson and Meta—Ben’s supposed date—would join the Faulkners for dinner together in the Faulkners’ rooms. Meta immediately recoiled, but he was adamant. It was an awful evening; apparently only Faulkner enjoyed the charade. Estelle drank heavily, chattered intensely, then called Wasson the next morning in fury. She had not been fooled. Wasson remembered Faulkner’s saying shortly thereafter, “Aint there something you can do to get her off my back? Get her a lover, anything, so she’ll leave me alone” (CNC 148). The phrasing is cruel, conveying both the besottedness of a lover who has glimpsed his escape and the vindictiveness of a husband who has paid too dearly. As for Meta, she came away from this dinner, as well as from later masquerade-encounters with Estelle, convinced of the wife’s shrillness and inadequacy. “Let him go, Estelle,” she thought. “I can grow with him. You can’t. I’m younger. Prettier. I can hold him, grace his life, keep him from alcohol, slake his passion, calm his volcanic rages” (ALG 180). Could she possibly have managed all of this? Did she glimpse, even then, that she’d never have the chance to try?

  By the summer of 1936, they both seem to have realized that he would not divorce. He urged her (against his own desire) to get free of him, and—perhaps surprising to him—she took him at his word. Another dimension of Meta Carpenter revealed itself in such behavior: pliant and docile though she was, this woman knew how to secure her own interest. At twenty-eight, she was aware that she would not remain forever well-positioned in the marriage market. If Faulkner would not rise to the mark, it was time to locate the right person who would. Some months earlier, close friends had introduced her to Rebner—a brilliant German pianist, a few years younger than she—and he had swiftly fallen for her. She had resisted his advances, without exactly rejecting them. By September 1936, she was emitting signals of receptivity sufficient for Rebner to propose to her. In December, she accepted his proposal; with it came her decision to refuse Faulkner entry into her bed. By early 1937, she and Rebner were married—a move Faulkner could neither criticize nor tolerate. His drinking spiked sharply during the following months. His anger toward Estelle, whom he must have seen as his jailor-wife, escalated, often brimming over during this first year of his involvement with Meta. In June 1936, unable to contain his annoyance at Estelle’s spending habits, he wrote a letter to the Oxford Eagle (picked up by the Memphis Commercial Appeal) saying that “I will not be responsible for any debt incurred or bills made, or notes or checks signed by Mrs. William Faulkner or Mrs. Estelle Oldham Faulkner” (F 372). Enraged and embarrassed by such antics, Estelle’s father lectured Faulkner sternly. The letter was not reprinted.

  The Rebners’ marriage did not prosper. Twice they tried to make it work; twice they divorced. Faulkner’s role in those collapses is as undeniable as it is unknowable, but the available evidence suggests that he never sought to intervene as Rebner’s rival. Nor did Rebner seem to resent Faulkner’s prior place—sometimes prior in both senses—in his wife’s affections. The decency with which all three seem to have treated each other over the next decade is remarkable. But Meta’s off-and-on marriage allowed, at the same time, an intermittent relationship with Faulkner that was going nowhere. In 1939, weakened by an operation to remove a tumor and depressed by the failure of her marriage, she wrote Faulkner of her misery. She was heading home to her parents in Arizona, to recuperate and to see if she could straighten out her life. He responded at once, urging her to route her train trip by way of Louisiana, where he would meet her. In a blinding rainstorm, he drove to the train junction and saw her emerge, feverish. They drove for hours through the storm to New Orleans, then checked into a hotel in the Vieux Carré. After a night of drinking and lovemaking, she awoke at noon, free of fever. Looking up in amazement, she saw him grinning at her as he answered her unstated question, “Good whiskey, and Mr. Bowen” (ALG 242).

  Reinvigorated after her stay in Arizona, Meta returned to New York and tried to put her marriage together again. But by 1942 she was divorced, and when she returned to Hollywood alone, it was inevitable that she would return to Faulkner. They seemed now to have become more tempered lovers, realizing that they could never live together on a longtime basis. “You’d rail at me,” Meta remembered him saying, as he playfully put words into her mouth: “‘Bill, don’t put your pipe on the table. Hang up your coat. Don’t feed Chloe [their dog] at the table. Wipe your shoes on the doormat, for heaven’s sake.’” To these bantering (but not only bantering) words she had responded, “‘And you’d see me in all my imperfections.’” This he had answered, with a grin, “‘Let us be faultless one to another’” (ALG 297). “Faultless”: something like the Keatsean opposition between ideal and reality seems to have reinserted itself—either a sustained real-life-in-time love relationship (faulty of course) or a sublimely rootless (but faultless) one. They both knew, perhaps ruefully, that they could have the second, maybe, if they no longer sought the first. The second was in its way quite wonderful. She recognized him, retrospectively, as “my lover, my rock; it was not enough, but I made it enough” (283). As one of Faulkner’s biographers has written, “There were no institutions that insisted that she had to love this man, and continue to love him regardless of circumstances. The love she gave was given—and apparently freely given—from within herself” (WFSH 249). Thanks to the erotic and emotional generosity of Meta Carpenter, the same critic claimed, “the marble faun unfroze” (253). One hopes he did.

  In 1945, Meta remarried Rebner, but their union could not come right. As she and Faulkner continued to write to each other, their mood became increasingly autumnal, past-focused. He wrote in 1949: “I know grief is the inevictable part of it, the thing that makes it cohere; that grief is the only thing you are capable of sustaining, keeping; that what is valuable is what you have lost, since then you never had the chance to wear out and so lose it s
habbily” (ALG 317). A few years later, subsequent to their last love-making, another of his letters rehearses the same sentiments: “Change in people, saddest of all, division, separation, all left is the remembering, the dream, until you almost believe that anything beautiful is nothing else but dream” (326). These are dark and touching claims. They cast this love relationship—his only one that could be called happy—as destined for grief and destruction. As though genuine love and its actualization over time (and within institutional constraints) were simply incompatible notions. If it is real, if one has not trucked with it—exploited it or cheated on it—it cannot endure. What endures gets worn down, lost shabbily, held hostage to division and separation. Chronos is our mortal enemy, indeed the carrier of our mortality. It is only in refusing the negotiations and compromises that occur over time that love can flourish: as flame, but also as doom.

  At some point in the mid-1950s, divorced again and her life in tatters, she found herself reduced to borrowing $150 from Faulkner. By then—a celebrated Nobel laureate—he was free of money troubles. Tortured by exploiting her relationship thus, she sent him a check for $75 as soon as she could, promising to repay the remaining $75 swiftly thereafter. Within days she received his letter enclosing her torn-up check: “You can’t possibly owe me anything like money,” he wrote. “I remember too much” (ALG 327). It was at about this time that she realized, all at once, that he was never coming back. “[H]e was past the time of the blood’s violent flood,” she thought. “It was not Bowen so much as memory … that tormented him in the still hours of the night” (329).

  Memory: this is perhaps the appropriate note to sound in closing a discussion of Faulkner and Meta Carpenter. He had sought her as a sanctuary in which he could escape the miseries of his actual life—his marriage’s failure, his California-enforced separation from his adored daughter, his guilt for the violent death of Dean, his discomfort at being caged in the money-trap that was Hollywood. She figured for him the illusion of transcendence. Together, they would create an erotic utopia, made up of their two bodies and their two souls. Themselves alone, sealed off from society and change. Wonderful as it was—for a time—it could not be sustained. Nothing good, he came to believe, could be sustained. Alcohol soon found its way into their love nest; so did Estelle and Jill and Rebner and the conflicting needs and desires of each of them. Conceived as the other of normal life, this affair became, gradually, a part of normal life. It became inextricably enmeshed with the other commitments that made up their quotidian lives.

  It was helplessly open, he finally saw, to the pain that memory is uniquely capable of inflicting. Memory as the unwanted resource that keeps reminding us, like a bell tolling, that we live our lives in ever-changing time, that what comes later mocks (and is mocked by) what came earlier. “Hit look lack Ah just cant quit thinking,” Rider realized at last (in Go Down, Moses). To be conscious is to remember, and to remember is to grieve for what is gone. “Between grief and nothing, I will take grief,” Faulkner wrote Meta in 1947. He had already decided that the novel he was then writing—If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem, the most autobiographical he was ever to write—would pivot on that choice. He would never have sought sanctuaries as aggressively as he did if he had not known that—lurking within them all, alcoholic binges as well as passionate affairs—was the day of reckoning. The bell would sound, he would be in time again, and he would remember. There would be grief, and he would take it.

  TINSEL TOWN

  In December 1931, the first “summons” to Hollywood was set in motion. Though no great reader himself, Sam Marx of MGM gathered that the author of Sanctuary was a property worth acquiring. To Leland Hayward in New York (Ben Wasson’s boss), he sent the telegram quoted earlier: DID YOU MENTION WILLIAM FAULKNER TO ME ON YOUR LAST TRIP HERE. IF SO IS HE AVAILABLE AND HOW MUCH (F 296). William Faulkner was available, and “how much” did not pose great difficulties. Hayward ended by negotiating an MGM contract at $500 per week. Given that Cape and Smith—publishers of The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying, and Sanctuary—was going into receivership, Faulkner realized that the hefty royalties he anticipated from Sanctuary’s notoriety might never materialize. (He was right. Smith was never able to pay him the $4,000 that was his due.) So, expecting from Hollywood nothing but the cash that had compelled him to sign on, Faulkner set out on his journey west. The scene of his arrival there intimates his larger relation to Tinsel Town.

  On May 7, 1932, a man bleeding profusely from a head wound walked into Sam Marx’s office. He said that he was William Faulkner, and that—en route to Los Angeles—he had been hit by a taxi while in New Orleans. He was now ready to begin work. Marx, perhaps stunned and certainly suspicious, responded that Faulkner would be working on a Wallace Beery picture. “Who’s he?” Faulkner asked, then added, “I’ve got an idea for Mickey Mouse.” Marx explained that the famous mouse was a Disney property, then instructed an office boy to take Faulkner to the projection room where some footage of the Beery film was being shown. Faulkner entered the room but refused to look at the screen. Instead he turned to the office boy. “Do you own a dog?” he demanded. When the boy responded negatively, Faulkner retorted, “Every boy should have a dog.” He then informed the group of speechless adults around them that they should all be ashamed if they did not own a dog. At that point—although the Beery footage had barely gotten under way—Faulkner turned to the projectionist, “How do you stop this thing?” He said he already knew how the story would come out, and he abruptly left the room. When Marx later asked where he had gone, no one had the faintest idea. Nine days later he reappeared at MGM—as mysteriously as the first time, and again unsteady on his feet. By way of explaining his absence, he allowed that he had been wandering about in Death Valley. His MGM contract was not renewed a month later, and without the intervention that summer of Howard Hawks, his Hollywood stint might have ended then and there.

  This vignette suggests in summary fashion the absurdity of Faulkner’s tenure in Hollywood. He cared more for dogs than for film (he’d rather have been that hound scuttling back under the wagon than have to deal with these strange folks and their stranger business). He didn’t know the difference between Disney and MGM. A Wallace Beery film bored him to death after the first fifteen minutes, since any fool could see how the story would turn out. Heavy drinking predated his arrival in Hollywood, lubricated his off-and-on twenty-year stay there, and would continue once he left for good. His entries and exits were unpredictable. He would never—one sees this right away—be a company man. The moguls who ran this multimillion dollar industry did not appreciate such erratic behavior.

  Howard Hawks made possible Faulkner’s Hollywood career, at least money-wise. A graduate from Exeter and then Cornell, Hawks had the strenuous masculine profile—accomplished, risk-taking, self-contained if not taciturn—to which Faulkner responded. Hawks had flown army planes in the Great War and later done a stint of car racing. Moreover, he already admired Faulkner’s fiction to the extent of purchasing screen rights for the story “Turn About.” That summer (1932), he approached Faulkner to see if he would do the script for it, entitled Today We Live. Hawks offered Faulkner a drink, then settled into more detail about how he envisaged the film. Faulkner was silent while Hawks spoke, seemed positive about the idea, and then rose to leave. “See you in five days,” he told Hawks. When Hawks demurred that it shouldn’t take that long to decide, Faulkner answered, “I mean, to write it” (F 307). He was as good as his word, and both Hawks and his boss, Irving Thalberg, liked the script. The studio gave the green light. In almost no time, Today We Live became one of the few projects Faulkner would work on that made it to the screen. Not that it did so without considerable revision. Joan Crawford, it turned out, was an expensive MGM property waiting for a film. Higher-ups decided that a starring role would be created for her in Today We Live. When Faulkner demurred—“I don’t seem to remember a girl in the story” (307)—Hawks explained that this was Hollywood. Highly paid top stars had t
o be placed in films. Faulkner accepted the rules without further rejoinder and adroitly wrote her role into the script.

  Hawks was Faulkner’s principal Hollywood mainstay. Today We Live premiered in 1933, and in 1934 Hawks rehired Faulkner—at $1,000 per week—to work on the script for Sutter’s Gold. Better yet, understanding Faulkner’s intense dislike of Hollywood, Hawks arranged more than once for Faulkner to remain on payroll while working at home in Oxford. A year later, Hawks hired Faulkner again for The Road to Glory, this time with Twentieth Century Fox. For more than fifteen years, Hawks was to procure work for Faulkner that would not otherwise have come his way: screenplays for Battle Cry in 1942,6 To Have and Have Not in 1944 (one of Faulkner’s finest scripts, and one of the least revised by others), The Left Hand of God in 1951, and The Land of the Pharaohs in 1953. Through Hawks, Faulkner met not only Meta Carpenter in 1935, but Clark Gable and other of Hawks’s Hollywood friends with whom he would later hunt, fish, and carouse. If Hollywood could have been turned into a home-like space, one would have to credit Hawks for it.