Faulkner passed half of the 1940s in Hollywood, trying to write A Fable while drafting screenplays. Probably blacklisted as an unwise alcoholic risk, he now obtained film work only at a risible salary—less than half the weekly rate he had received in the 1930s. It was rumored that Jack Warner liked to brag about paying America’s greatest novelist only (what in Hollywood was considered) a pittance. Almost none of Faulkner’s scripts made it to the screen. Throughout this decade he remained immersed in the on-again, off-again relationship with Meta Carpenter. In addition, Estelle’s alcoholism flared during the 1940s as uncontrollably as his did; these were arguably the worst years of their marriage. Going off to Pine Manor Junior College in 1951, Jill was happy to escape the family nest. She would later remember “the meals eaten mainly in silence at the polished dining-room table where she would be the only channel of communication between her parents, and the periodic crises” (F 546).
The 1950s might have been a happier decade for him, if he had been the kind of man who enjoyed public recognition. Such recognition had begun massively to arrive: the Nobel Prize (1950), the National Book Award (1951, for Collected Stories), the French Legion d’Honneur award (also 1951), another National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize (both in 1954, for A Fable). He had become financially at ease as well. An iconic figure honored the world over, he now took on (with what interior grimace who can know?) the role of a “sixty-year-old smiling public man” (as Yeats wryly put it in “Among School Children”). Managing to act in accord with the Nobel image others assumed to be his genuine identity, Faulkner served often during this decade as a traveling spokesman for the State Department. To be sure, government officials micromanaged his tours, anxious to head off trouble before it worsened. But trouble rarely arrived. Faulkner had learned how to negotiate such occasions; he was at ease delivering prepared remarks and answering unscripted questions. It is hard to imagine him in the 1940s either being invited to such assignments or assenting and carrying them off so well. This was also the decade in which he was repeatedly onstage politically, publicly pursuing a civil rights solution whose terms few others (black or white) deemed viable.
Beneath these 1950s public performances, the deeper profile of the man changed little. His broken marriage did not heal, nor did he find a satisfactory way of escaping it. The self-destructive drinking, like the spine-damaging horseback riding, continued unabated. In the late 1950s—after noting his near-falls and unskilled moves—a fellow rider once asked him if he liked horses. Faulkner responded, “I’m scared to death of horses, that’s why I can’t leave them alone” (F 658). The unvanquished: however rocky the road he had chosen, retreat was not an option, and he carried on. No more than Temple was he able to look back and discover in hindsight what in himself he might change, so as to arrive at peace. Peace would remain beyond his reach. To his agent Harold Ober he had written in 1945, “For some time I have expected, at a certain age, to reach that period (in the early fifties) which most artists seem to reach where they admit at last that there is no solution to life and that it is not now, and perhaps never was, worth the living” (SL 199). There is little reason to believe that these nihilistic sentiments lifted much during the 1950s.
Rather than find his way into new insights and the breakthroughs they might permit, Faulkner persevered in his long-established rituals. We need not rehearse further the alcohol-caused hospitalizations—including probably electroshock therapy and certainly psychoanalytic sessions—that befell him throughout the 1950s. “Befell him” is the accurate phrasing. He never sought these therapies—he sought no therapy at all—but his friends and family could not simply look on as he descended deeper into self-destruction. “Befell him” is another reason why the psychoanalytic cure never worked for Faulkner. As Freud had known from the beginning of psycho-analysis, the patient must want to be cured if he was ever to overcome the resistances that the treatment deliberately provoked and engaged, in order to do battle with them.
Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow. In 1946—home again, his relationship with Meta on the skids, for how long he did not know—Faulkner decided it was time for fresh blood. He would seek it in the same form that he had attempted to find it a decade earlier. To Malcolm Cowley he wrote, “It’s a dull life here [in Oxford]. I need some new people, above all probably a new woman” (SL 245). Meta Carpenter—probably the unique love of his life—diminishes in this later phrasing to just a “woman”: a generic category permitting subsequent replacements. Three years after this letter, he would have his chance at a new one. A sensitive, twenty-year-old Memphian, Joan Williams, adored his work from afar. She yearned to become a writer, and she needed to get her life back on track. She had recently gone through an elopement and its annulling. Her parents, she was sure, understood neither her feelings nor her ambition. Perhaps this godlike fellow Southern artist would share some of his insight.
Thus charged, she gathered her courage and—determined to seek him out at home—headed to Rowan Oak. To her embarrassment, Faulkner responded to the uninvited knock at his door coldly, with unconcealed annoyance. Mortified, Joan beat a hasty retreat, then wrote a profuse apology from her parents’ home. Identifying some of her reasons for wanting to see him, Joan’s letter piqued him, brought her before his mind’s eye as the surprise visit had not. Thus it began. Interested, he wrote back, and she warmly continued the correspondence from Bard College, where she was a student. Her letters teemed with questions about how she might become a novelist, but he was soon responding in a quite different register. “These are the wrong questions,” he wrote back. “A woman must ask these of a man while they are lying in bed together” (F 507). Shocked by this sexual advance, yet encouraged by his sympathy, she sought to redirect the relationship onto an artistic plane.
There ensued, at a pace lurching between frustrating stasis and agonizing slow motion, a three-year relationship marred by awkwardness and incompatible longings. Twenty-year old Joan Williams, on the voyage out, did not want an affair with fifty-three-old William Faulkner—much as she admired him. But she could not see her way to relinquishing his attentions either. It was a comedy waiting for someone other than Faulkner to write it. Bernard Shaw had already captured in Pygmalion something of the wry pathos wrought into their different positions. A restless Henry Higgins, Faulkner sought strenuously to straddle the roles of lover and teacher. The project was false from day one, and it could not be made true. His bad-faith letters to her read as recurrently double-edged—an erotic tug skewing and sugaring his artistic advice. Her letters must have been troublingly mixed in their motives as well, for Estelle became enraged once she intercepted some of them. She had put up with Meta Carpenter, but this twenty-year-old Memphis girl was too much. Estelle challenged Joan face-to-face, telephoned her parents and complained, then took more heavily to the booze. Intent on keeping her letters coming, Faulkner directed Joan to send them to “Quentin Compson,” care of General Delivery, at the Oxford post office. Some disguise!
His amorous moves resisted but not quite rebuffed, Faulkner assiduously pursued the courtship. Finally, by the summer of 1953 they became—briefly, unsatisfyingly—lovers. (She would later fictionalize this relationship in her novel The Wintering.) Faulkner’s letters of artistic advice to her were generous, if useless; he knew them to be useless. No one could help anyone else become a writer; no one could have helped him. Rather than give advice as such—a stance he had avoided his entire life and would have avoided here if the letters had really been about advice—he urged her to trust her own thoughts and feelings, to ignore others’ rules and models. He invited her to help him write Requiem for a Nun, a collaboration she wisely refused. Throughout it all he was seeking the bodily and psychic reassurance of a consummated sexual relationship. Whatever else Joan meant for him, he envisaged her as a sanctuary in which he could keep at bay his advancing years and—visible in the distance—the specter of sexual waning. For her part, she must early on have sensed an erotic denouement approaching. Somew
here inside her psyche—where the deeper quid pro quos take place—she must have decided to accept him as a lover. If that was the price for keeping his precious attention, she would pay it. This cannot have been easy. In her imaginary, Faulkner would have combined, incoherently, aspects of her parents and her ideals, her prison and her escape. It was perhaps sympathy rather than strategy that led her to consummation. She could not have failed to realize how badly he needed her. Years later, at a Faulkner conference in the early 1990s, I sat opposite Joan Williams at dinner. As she spoke off and on with Faulknerians whom she had met before, I watched the tears repeatedly gather in her eyes. Forty years after their affair, thirty after his death, she seemed freshly wounded. I wondered: did he ruin this woman’s life, too?
As for Faulkner’s role in this misguided affair, surely Labove—depicted so authoritatively a decade earlier—should have taught him (if these things can be taught) that pedagogy and eros make strange bedfellows. Rising from different intentions and pursuing different ends, they are all too likely to encounter each other comically, pathetically. By the fall of 1953, Joan would end the affair and become engaged to a man her own age. Within the next year, she and Faulkner would begin to go their separate ways. What perhaps redeemed this relationship—transcending the banality of his sexual insistence and her reluctant submission—was the care he gave her during their time together and by way of letters. For her part, she responded with kindred generosity, doing what she could to address his alcoholism—finding New York doctors, helping him recover from binges. Between them, they may have managed to bestow on their foredoomed relationship something of grace after all.
Later, in the mid-1950s, Faulkner would meet in Rome the bohemian Jean Stein (only nineteen years old—younger even than Jill—but sophisticated and already well traveled in several senses). They would soon engage in a more carefree physical relationship. Jean Stein was no tortured Southern girl in need of advice and acknowledgment. Descended from a wealthy family, intellectually adventurous, she was already perhaps more worldly than he would ever be. More, she admired his work—producing, with his help, the best interview of him that would ever be written, published in the Paris Review in 1956. Jean served as well as an epistolary lifeline of understanding during Faulkner’s embattled civil rights encounters. She may finally have meant as much, to him, for her generous free spirit as for her sexual acceptance of this self-enclosed, sixty-year-old Southern writer—possessed of genius, but afflicted by it, too.
THE LATER FICTION 1: FAULKNERESE
It is one thing to attempt to persuade my reader how and why Faulkner’s great work is great. It is another to try to persuade my reader why the lesser work is lesser. It is distasteful—and serves little purpose—to linger on what is lacking in a supreme writer’s lesser work. I do not recant my conviction that Faulkner’s contribution to the world of letters began in 1929 (The Sound and the Fury) and concluded in 1942 (Go Down, Moses). Apart from a small number of scholars who argue otherwise, this has long been the consensus about Faulkner’s work. In terms of my argument, those were the years in which Faulkner’s unpredictable becoming found its way into his experimental masterpieces. These works narrate poignant dramas of time—unpreparedness before the onslaught of experience, incapacity to map it in the present moment—such as no other Western novelist has matched.
The years between Go Down, Moses and Intruder in the Dust—from 1942 to 1948—stand out as uniquely barren in Faulkner’s career. Six years would be a notable gap for any prolific writer; for one with Faulkner’s habits of composition, it is astonishing. In the later 1920s, he published at a clip of a novel a year. Seven novels appeared during the 1930s, and four in the 1950s. Apart from the dry spell of 1942-48, the largest temporal gap between novels is three years: this 1940s drought begs to be explained. Rather than speculate on its causes, I want to identify its fallout. The writer who emerged in 1948 has changed: less a different man than a different writer. For the next six years, his novels would provide the quarry for what later came to be called (by all who dislike his work) “Faulknerese.”
What rhetorical traits combine as “Faulknerese”? I begin with a rough definition, to be followed by a couple of examples. “Faulknerese” is a verbal practice given to proliferating syntax and Latinate/polysyllabic vocabulary. Its insistence manifests in seemingly numberless clauses that thunder onward. “Faulknerese” does not pare down; it has no interest in the Flaubertian mot juste. It refuses to pause, to let readers catch their breath, by supplying that (increasingly longed for) period that would announce: this sentence has now ended. Such “Faulknerese”—either previously encountered or dreaded in advance—is a major reason many readers are skittish toward Faulkner’s work. It appears full-blown in Intruder in the Dust (1948), Requiem for a Nun (1951), and A Fable (1954). To see what is at stake, we might examine part of the first sentence of Requiem’s opening section, “The Courthouse”:
The settlement had the records; even the simple dispossession of Indians begot in time a minuscule of archive, let alone the normal litter of man’s ramshackle confederation against environment—that time and that wilderness;—in this case, a meager, fading, dogeared, uncorrelated, at times illiterate sheaf of land grants and patents and transfers and deeds, and tax- and militia-rolls, and bills of sale for slaves, and counting-house lists of spurious currency and exchange rates, and liens and mortgages, and listed rewards for escaped or stolen Negroes and other livestock, and diary-like annotations of births and marriages and deaths and public hangings and land-auctions, accumulating slowly for those three decades in a sort of iron pirate’s chest in the back room of the postoffice-tradingpost-store, until that day thirty years later when, because of a jailbreak compounded by an ancient monster iron padlock transported a thousand miles by horseback from Carolina, the box was removed to a small new leanto room like a wood- or tool-shed built two days ago against one outside wall of the morticed-log mud-chinked shake-down jail; and thus was born the Yoknapatawpha County courthouse. (RN 475)
Each detail is saliently put before us, but they relentlessly accumulate into a sort of overwhelming. One adjective (“meager”) gives birth to four more (“fading, dogeared, uncorrelated…illiterate”), in turn followed by—it seems—every possible item that might have been preserved as “records.” When Faulkner thinks “settlement records,” he thinks exhaustively. The collection is overfull; one has little sense that the twelve different categories of archival material will later take on selective significance. (They don’t.) Rather, the Faulkner imaginary has become plenary. This is how he sees that historical “archive.” He seems compelled to note not only every item or object there but its metamorphosis in time or extensiveness in space (“postoffice-tradingpost-store”).
We go for a second example to Faulkner’s “biggest” novel, A Fable. There the reader learns immediately that the crucial plot-event has already taken place. The Great War has unexpectedly, without orders from above, ground to a halt, in a small village in France. The rest of the novel will invest this mutual cessation of fighting with extraordinary significance—moving toward the Christian passion on which the text is openly modeled. I cite the swift arrival (a few pages into the book) of a military car carrying the three top generals. They have come to crush the incipient rebellion:
It [the car] came fast, so fast that the shouts of the section leaders and the clash of rifles as each section presented arms and then clashed back to “at ease,” were not only continuous but overlapping, so that the car seemed to progress on one prolonged crash of iron as on invisible wings with steel feathers,—a long, dusty open car painted like a destroyer and flying the pennon of the supreme commander of all the allied armies, the three generals sitting side by side in the tonneau amid a rigid glitter of aides,—the three old men who held individual command over each of the three individual armies, and the one of that three who, by mutual consent and accord, held supreme command over all (and, by that token and right, over everything beneath and on
and above the distracted half-continent)—the Briton, the American, and between them the Generalissimo: the slight gray man with a face wise, intelligent, and unbelieving, who no longer believed in anything but his disillusion and his intelligence and his limitless power—flashing across that terrified and aghast amazement and then gone, as the section leaders shouted again and the boots and the rifles crashed back to simple alert. (FAB 678)
This is a carefully meditated piece of writing. If I claim that its cumulative insistence makes it hard on the reader, one might remember my earlier claim that Faulkner’s difficulty was inseparable from his importance. Indeed, the opening page of Absalom is more daunting than this passage. But there is difficulty, and there is difficulty. Like the other earlier masterpieces, Absalom proceeds in such a way as to test a reader’s willingness to sustain confusion: not to know, not yet. Its first page moves from Rosa and Quentin talking intensively together, one afternoon in September 1909, to the two-generational family history of the room they are talking in (the closed shutters, the tomblike atmosphere). From there it moves to the absent nineteenth-century company haunting that room: the ghost of Thomas Sutpen, musing on them. Then it turns to something earlier yet, and apparently inaugural: Quentin’s imagining (thanks to Rosa’s words) the spectacular imposing (in 1833) of Sutpen’s Hundred—“Be Sutpen’s Hundred!”—on the land. A slew of characters and events and settings are hurled at an unprepared reader: yet each of these elements becomes (eventually) crucial to Absalom’s still-to-unfold range of meanings.
The difficulty of the passage from A Fable has nothing to do with not knowing enough in present time, unpreparedness for all that is at stake in a moment of experience. By contrast to the opening of Absalom, the later passage is oddly static—a sort of monumental tableau—as it presses us to attend to the stature of its cast of officers. The prose is at pains to insist that the Generalissimo’s “supreme command” goes beyond present company, extending to everything “beneath and on and above the distracted half-continent.” That quoted phrase is slack, as are “by mutual consent and accord,” “by that token and right,” and “terrified and aghast amazement.” We are in the presence of a “big” scene full of grandiloquent phrases—a scene whose author pulls out the stops to make sure we see how big it is. We are to be impressed by military pomp and circumstance, the arrival of men of unparalleled power. Faulkner’s prose draws attention to specific commands and positions, described to impress: presenting arms, returning to at ease, rifles moving to alert. A Fable rarely ceases underlining the gravity and importance of its major players. (In some ways, its rhetoric oddly reminds the contemporary reader of the 2003 phrase, “Operation Shock and Awe,” during the Iraq War.) Thematically, the book’s plot is unambiguously antimilitary. But its relentless declaiming—its verbal onslaught as a series of massive set pieces, a parading of the author’s biggest verbal guns—seems suggestively to echo the same military grandeur that the plot works to undermine.
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