by Paul Clemens
I began again at the beginning, with the monologue of Benjy, the retarded Compson son who narrates the opening section of The Sound and the Fury. I recalled Hugh Kenner’s line: “A work conceived as Faulkner conceived his art could hardly not have generated an idiot.”
In the second section of the novel, narrated by Quentin Compson on the day of his death, June 2, 1910, Quentin recalls conversations he’d had with his father before moving north to begin his freshman year at Harvard. These recollections are, to my mind, the best thing in the book, maybe the best thing in Faulkner: the dialogue between the earnest, talented, suicidal son and the cynical, witty, apathetic father, a man who has so lost his ability to be shocked that, at Quentin’s suggestion that he has slept with his sister, Caddy, Mr. Jason Compson III, drink in hand, does little more than scoff. “You are too serious,” he says to his son’s false revelation of incest, “to give me any cause for alarm.”
Even Quentin’s suggestion (and I’ve added the punctuation to these lines, conveyed in the book in Quentin’s stream of consciousness) that suicide may be on his mind is met by his father with nothing more forceful than moral relativism. “We must just stay awake,” Mr. Compson says in his greatest, bleakest pronouncement, “and see evil done for a little while.” “It doesn’t have to be that long,” Quentin replies, “for a man of courage.” “Do you consider that courage?” “Yes sir. Don’t you?” “Every man is the arbiter of his own virtues,” Mr. Compson says. “Whether or not you consider it courageous is of more importance than the act itself.”
We must just stay awake and see evil done for a little while—could that possibly be bettered? But if Mr. Compson truly felt this way—why, then, send your son to Harvard, especially when you had to sell off your family’s land to finance that education? Why the pessimism on the one hand, and the steep investment in the future on the other?
Faulkner could be confusing this way. If you want to read him at his least convincing, look at the transcript of a speech delivered in Stockholm on December 10, 1950, wherein the Nobel laureate, surveying the human landscape from his newfound literary heights, says: “Man will not merely endure; he will prevail.” Do the novels that earned him that Nobel Prize—the books that brought him to Sweden and earned him the right to speak those very words—bear out this claim?
In The Sound and the Fury, Quentin Compson’s suicide sets off a chain of disasters—deaths, departures, acts of drunken despair—that, by book’s end, leave the once-proud Compson clan to be represented only by their black cook, Dilsey, and their overgrown, retarded, castrated son, Benjamin.
In As I Lay Dying, the Bundren family overcomes fire, flood, and the circling of buzzards overhead and succeeds, barely, in burying the corpse of their steadily decaying mother, Addie, forty miles from their home, after which their most sensitive son, Darl, gets carted off to a mental institution.
In Light in August, Lena Grove, in her ninth month of pregnancy, begins the book by walking from Alabama to Mississippi in search of the father of her unborn child, and ends it in the back of a pickup truck in Tennessee, husbandless, looking at the scenery with her new son in her arms while, in the book’s other narrative line, Joe Christmas, the tragic mulatto, ends his days martyred and, like Benjamin Compson, with his balls cut off.
In Absalom, Absalom!, Thomas Sutpen, founder of Sutpen’s Hundred, Yoknapatawpha County’s largest plantation, sees his grand design begin to crumble along with the rest of the Old South when, at the outset of the Civil War, his half-breed son from his first marriage gets romantically entangled with his daughter from his second marriage—the half-breed’s white half sister, in other words—setting in motion the most disastrous plotline in all of Faulkner, culminating with pretty much everyone dead, or near dead, and the teller of this ghost-haunted tale, who is reciting it from his freezing Harvard dorm room—Quentin Compson—about to be dead by his own hand, thus bringing Faulkner’s seven most productive years as an artist full circle.
Man will prevail? This was preposterous. Everything worthwhile Faulkner had written said otherwise. As a way to counterbalance such insipid optimism, I kept the book’s basic premise—the novel would still end with a death—except instead of killing the guy who raped his mother—a scene I’d never write—the smart-ass would kill himself. A suicide, like Quentin Compson.
At the end of the novel, everyone leaves Detroit. Some things I couldn’t change.
I eventually found what I was looking for in Chapter 10 of Light in August, which opens with echoes of the first line of Chapter 6: “Knowing not grieving remembers a thousand savage and lonely streets.” The chapter then goes on, in typically circuitous Faulknerian fashion, to follow Joe Christmas as he attempts to run from his past and his mixed ancestry following a beating he receives at age eighteen. The beating is at the hands of whites who, on the basis of Joe’s trace or two of black blood, have identified him as a nigger and have dealt with him accordingly. “From that night,” Faulkner writes of Joe’s fifteen years on the road, “the thousand streets ran as one street, with imperceptible corners and changes of scene, broken by intervals of begged and stolen rides, on trains and trucks, and on country wagons with he at twenty and twenty-five and thirty sitting on the seat with his still, hard face and the clothes of a city man and the driver of the wagon not knowing who or what the passenger was and not daring to ask.” Who or what Joe is, of course, is at the heart of the novel, and who gets to define who or what Joe is defines his tragedy, which culminates with his death at the Christlike age of thirty-three, when Joe allows himself to be shot by the redneck National Guardsman Percy Grimm.
“They ran my father out of Alabama for being an uppity nigger,” Coleman Young said of his early years in the South. The Young family moved to Detroit when he was five years old, in 1924, the year Faulkner published his first book, a collection of poems (“most of them worthless,” according to Malcolm Cowley) entitled The Marble Faun. The Young family settled on Detroit’s east side, in the area known as Black Bottom, and Coleman, after being denied entrance to De La Salle by the Christian Brothers, went on to graduate from Eastern High School, work for Ford, serve with the Tuskegee Airmen, testify before HUAC, get elected state senator—and, eventually, become the goddamn Mayor of Detroit.
After being run out of Mississippi, Joe Christmas, in Faulkner’s telling, reaches Detroit twice. “The street,” Faulkner writes, “ran into Oklahoma and Missouri and as far south as Mexico and then back north to Chicago and Detroit and then back south again to Mississippi.” Later, after Joe, while still in the South, has “tricked or teased white men into calling him a Negro in order to fight them,” and has fought a “Negro who called him white,” he again reaches the North, making it back to Chicago and then to Detroit, where “he lived with Negroes, shunning white people.” In Detroit in the early 1930s, living with Negroes would have meant living in Black Bottom, and there Joe Christmas “lived as man and wife with a woman who resembled an ebony carving.”
In a Detroit Free Press interview from the fall of 1990, Young said, “I was telling some of Louis Farrakhan’s people the other day that the original founder of the Muslims was a door-to-door silk merchant, who lived near us in Black Bottom on the lower east side. I’d see him all the time. He used to call on my mother, selling her silks and perfumes.”
In 1923, Elijah Muhammad (then Elijah Poole) moved his family from Georgia to Detroit, for fear of a white employer who had cursed him. Eight years later, in 1931—at the very moment that Faulkner was creating Joe Christmas and writing of his trips to Detroit—Elijah Muhammad met, on the streets of this city, a light-skinned transient of mixed ancestry who went door-to-door selling silks and telling all who would listen about the Lost-Found Nation of Islam. Could it, in fact, have been Joe Christmas that Elijah Muhammad met, posing as a seller of silks? There were those who claimed that the original founder of the Muslims was a character no less fictitious than Faulkner’s creation. So if one were to assert that it was in fact Joe Chri
stmas who had knocked on Elijah Muhammad’s door that day in 1931, that it was Joe Christmas from whom Coleman Young’s mother had bought perfume, would we be any further from the truth? What more appropriate instrument than the pen of William Faulkner—the man who said that he’d fight for Mississippi against the United States even if it meant going out into the street and shooting Negroes—to have brought the Nation of Islam into being, and to have made Black Power possible?
Dear reader, I was losing my mind.
Initial Here
WHAT’S WITH THE GLASSES?” I asked my father a few years back, on the second day of his wearing an old pair with a dark tint. It was evening, and I’d stopped by my parents’ house, where I have a standing invitation—from my mother, anyway—for dinner. My father removed the glasses slowly, revealing a horribly blackened eye. “And you got that how?” I asked. He motioned for me to walk with him out to his car.
He opened the door and reached down under the driver’s seat; his hand emerged holding a knife with a twelve-inch blade. “A guy tried to carjack me the other morning as I pulled into work,” he said. My father still works downtown. “He came at me with this”—he pushed the knife my way in slow motion—“and I grabbed it with both hands. I hung on, he let go, and because I was exposed he got me with a right cross.” “Can you describe the suspect for me?” I asked. He smiled, declining to do so. Such easy antipathy was not his style. Though he’d never read Baldwin—has never willingly read a book in his life, as far as I know—he seemed to grasp instinctively Baldwin’s statement at the end of “Notes of a Native Son.” “Hatred,” Baldwin writes, “which could destroy so much, never failed to destroy the man who hated and this was an immutable law.” My father would have appreciated the sentiment’s praiseworthy selfishness: Stay clear of hatred, not to make the world a better place, but so as not to destroy yourself.
That’s what his silence said to me when I’d tried to egg him on, asking him to describe the suspect—the same thing it’d said when I told him of the attack, trying to connect it to my sister’s relationship, which by this time had run its course: Let it go. Gut it out. Suck it up. Ride it out. These were the thought rhythms—his—more familiar to me than those of Baldwin and Ellison, O’Connor and Faulkner combined.
Think.
Last summer, I accompanied my daughter to the birthday party of one of her classmates, a black girl who’d chosen a Macomb County fun center as the site of festivities for her and her four- and five-year-old friends. I was the only father there, with the exception of the birthday girl’s dad. Besides us it was all women, and the girl’s mother insisted that I sit by her husband. “The men need to sit together,” she said, handing us each a plate of pizza and smiling. “Here—eat, eat.” It was a comfortable sort of insistence, gender solidarity trumping racial distinctions. The two of us discussed schools, how our summers were progressing, the lovable snottiness of little girls, and our basic helplessness before female assertiveness, whether it be from wives or daughters. It all felt very simple. We watched the little kids, evenly balanced between black and white, jumping around on the indoor playscape, spinning themselves sick and screaming themselves hoarse with that obliviousness to consequence that is one of the great blessings of childhood.
When we were moving into our current house, my mother and father stopped at a garage sale in the block behind us, in search of a tool kit for me. To my father, this was lunacy: that a grown man, a homeowner, should be without a set of tools. The family holding the sale—a small surprise—was black. “I didn’t know if I should say anything to you,” my mother said. The house was barely outside the limits of the blackest big city in American history, and she didn’t know if she should say anything. I was reminded of the funniest line in Coleman Young’s autobiography, which comes not from the mayor, though he repeats it with relish, but from a white state senator with whom Young, then a senator himself, had lived in Lansing during the 1960s. Four senators from the east side of Detroit—two black, two white—lived together in a house in the capital, and though they tended to vote together on most issues, one of the white senators, out of deference to his Polish-Catholic constituency, broke ranks on an open-housing bill. Questioned about this apparent contradiction—voting against open housing while living with two black men himself—the representative said: “Oh, I can live with them. I just don’t want to live next to them.”
Of the black family hawking their wares, my father said, “No, no, they were good. They had a lot of nice stuff. I asked if they had a tool kit, and the mother said to the kid there, ‘Go get your father’s toolbox and bring it up front.’ The kid ran right back and got it. Here,” he said, handing the thing over. It was surprisingly heavy. “You owe me twenty bucks.”
I drive to work downtown each morning listening to NPR. We subscribe to magazines and journals that tilt our mailbox a touch to the left. I’ve become, to some extent, what I beheld growing up: a suburban liberal. When my daughter’s best friend from the year before, a black girl, switched to an expensive private school, my daughter kept asking why she didn’t see Jasmine anymore. I told her it was because Jasmine was going to a new school. Could she go to that school too? No. Why? Because I didn’t have the money to send her there. How could Jasmine’s parents send her to that school? “Because,” I said, “they have a lot more money than we do.” I felt not the slightest pang. Instead, I felt a pleasant lessening of what I had never thought myself capable of feeling: liberal guilt.
At times, I feel like a failure in several directions simultaneously: that, with my education and reading, I should be more broad-minded than I am; and that, with the education I received from my father and Sal, I should be angrier about what the broad-minded morons have wrought. I can hear the men in the barbershop: “Liberal guilt? They destroy your city, rape your wife, try to carjack your father—and what you feel is guilt?” A while back, when my father was discussing some expensive, harebrained scheme the city leadership had hatched, he said, after failing to get a rise out of me: “You realize, don’t you, that even though you don’t live in the city, you pay a one and a half percent city tax just for working in it?” I didn’t realize. Why can’t I get worked up about this stuff? I’ll never lecture my kids about wasted tax dollars, about the need to come home when the streetlights come on, about the demand of some nun that a sweater be kelly green instead of hunter green. I’m no longer working class enough, no longer urban enough, no longer Catholic enough. And I’m insufficiently indignant, to those to the left and the right of me. Detroit, which drives people to extremes, has left me stranded in the middle.
I dug through box after box in my parents’ basement while writing this book, sorting through the effluvia of an existence that felt like someone else’s, someone who was a Cub Scout, a crossing guard, a National Honor Society president, a proud Catholic schoolboy, a toothless first-grader. At the bottom of one box that was beginning to mildew, I found a note from an old grade-school classmate. Though not someone I was particularly close to, he refers to me, in a chummy way, as “a fellow nigger hater.” The note goes on to list other hatreds we shared in common—a science teacher, a certain song—and closes with the sincere wish that I enjoy my summer.
My first instinct, upon reading this, was to throw up. My second was to throw the note away—burn it, destroy the evidence, bury it in the garbage. Then I thought: why? Who among us, if judged by opinions we held when we were twelve and thirteen years old—less opinions, really, than poses—would escape whipping? We also wrote “666” in our notebooks and carved pentagrams into our desktops, like any self-respecting heavy metal fans; that didn’t make us Satan worshippers, then or now. Anyway, I didn’t recall this opinion being one I had held with any conviction, and if it was a pose I struck occasionally, well, such was life. A hell of a lot had happened since then.
Still, rather than throwing the note away, I put it in my wallet as a reminder. Of what? I wasn’t entirely sure. Of the need to fight such tendencies, I suppose,
because my grasp on open-mindedness is tenuous, however pleased I might be at donating to Amnesty International.
From a few months back, by way of example:
“Hello, sir—no need for concern. I’m not the neighborhood bad guy, I assure you. I’ve just got some magazines for sale.” It was dinnertime, dark, and I didn’t know the guy at the door, and neither did I want what he was selling. I’d just worked a long day. Scram. “Where are my manners?” He held out his hand, which I took. “My name is Stephen, and I live in a halfway house. You know what that is, right?” I told him I did. Stephen was black, in his midthirties, and in a hooded sweatshirt. I was in a tie, pressed pants, and Italian shoes—my office attire.
“A number of your neighbors, as you can see here”—he held out a sign-up sheet on a clipboard—“have seen fit to make a donation. It’s not about the magazines, it’s about supporting what I’m all about, which is trying to improve myself by accumulating points. As you can see on the sheet, I get a hundred points for each subscription I sell. When I make it to fifty thousand points, I become an assistant manager, overseeing other guys who go out and make sales. I also get an additional thousand dollars toward improving myself. I’m sure you get a lot of magazines coming to the house, so as I say, it’s not about the magazines. A twenty-dollar donation earns me the same number of points as a subscription sale. Most of your neighbors have made a donation. May I ask what you do for a living?”
