Tributes

by Bradford Morrow

  II.

  You get to work, maybe shaky after a hump, aching to take a dump, but you don’t, you force your keister onto that hard seat among the confetti of broken glass and the after-whiff of who knows what afflatus, and begin to tap, half suspecting this is one of the last things as your imagination cocks its leg and airs its wares, muttering take it from me, folks, yair, this is just about as candid as a belated Wagner gets, they are all watching, see how the next adj comes out, tooled to dovetail with the one already lolling there in quinquireme of Nineveh.

  And WF is watching.

  Another one at it, he dreams, in that riproaring sing-song of the affronted lyre, storming in upon phenomena with a head whose aim has to be sublime; just get the pandemonium down and pay your tax to Milton.

  WF still watching from his post office counter. Yew got sumpen axplosive there, young greenhorn, you kin git awful wounded trading such, now you git offen your high horse and wraht rich. Taint your hoss nohow.

  We have all heard him, hounding us or husbanding us, saying he is the father of the tradition, even a smuggler of rum once, writing as the night fireman of someone’s estate, getting scalded by the hotwater pipe in his room at the Algonquin when in town to mingle with the nobs. His music is there before the words are. He is too melismatic to be reviewed. Bless him for being ornery, for winning second prize in some nationwide fiction contest.

  My admission includes the fact that, apart from admiring his expertise at caricatural opera, I never took much interest in Yoknapatawpha, the fantastic name apart only slightly below Brobdingnag. They might have been pinball salesmen in Ethiopia for all I cared. What bowled me over was WF’s noise, that humming and thrumming you heard in the distance even as you opened just about any novel of his except the first two. It was a deliberate obfuscation of meaning yet done with meanings, using meaning to obliterate some other meaning, and the message, if such, was something choral and echoic with in its intimate hinterland just about everything else of his you’d read. He wasn’t creative-writing, he was doing solo recitative, singing to himself all the while, so that while you have Gavin Stevens in focus, one word of gab to eight hundred of deviant penumbral gesture, some of the sign-language a thousand years old animal to animal, there comes out of the distance this electric whirr like an old Chickasaw cooling fan gone wrong, making more noise than a door buzzer, and it the real diapason of sounds appropriate to being construed by them in situ as have ears to see. On he goes, a-droning and a-gyrating, urging us to get the rhythm of all this, this the life-pulse of the banjo full of blood.

  And then you come to earth, resavoring Pylon only to end up with the Editors’ Note: “ … his publisher made a great many changes in Faulkner’s text—shortening sentences, adjusting paragraphs, and similar alterations—often without querying the author.” You blink, note that he took care of all this later, restoring his text to its original form, and turn to the opening sentence of the novel proper:

  For a full minute Jiggs stood before the window in a light spatter of last night’s confetti lying against the windowbase like spent dirty foam, lightpoised on the balls of his grease-stained tennis shoes, looking at the boots. Slantshimmered by the intervening plate they sat upon their wooden pedestal in unblemished and inviolate implication of horse and spur, of the posed countrylife photographs in the magazine advertisements, beside the easelwise cardboard placard with which the town had bloomed overnight. …

  Who could resist it? Here, I thought when I first read this page, was a man unafraid of the language, unobliged to the comma, intoxicated with the compound adjective and fired with an impressionist’s, pointilliste’s, rendering of light as it sped past us. He goes on in an always nostalgic mutter for how things were only seconds ago, amassing clauses like courts of miracles, polysyllabically babbling his way home: “unblemished and inviolate implication”! Just hear it, like a scholarly rebuke to the Mickey Spillanes of the world. Here was a man with an organ in his head, and his main point, vastly important, was that the verbal impasto you make from phenomena not only adds itself to the original target, but briefly wipes it out in the interest of making the world verbal. Among twentieth-century writers, only Dylan Thomas, Wallace Stevens, Joyce, Proust (remember his romp with place names), Beckett and Nabokov do it. So you cheer up. That’s quite a crew, but only WF has this enduring “light spatter” that preaches the interconnectedness of things, even their occasional fusion, but also warms you up for the arrival of slightly skewed sense-data. If Cézanne’s doubt, according to that most readable of philosophers Maurice Merleau-Ponty, had to do with whether the world he drew was out there or only in his head, Faulkner wonders if it isn’t a divine miracle that rapturous immersions in what’s there go right through it and join it. To view the world is constantly to revise it, to make it molten before letting it set hard again in a different format. If this be sorcery, he lets us in, shows us how. The opening chapter I have just mentioned bears the title “Dedication of an Airport,” but Pylon is the dedication of a language to aerial doings, the whole composed at white heat: “Faulkner began Pylon in October 1934, writing so rapidly that he sent chapters to his publisher in November and December, as he typed them.” Was any prose less like typewriting? More like ectoplasm. I was only four then, long years away from discovering one of my favorite novels, and there he had been, pounding it out not long before.

  So Faulkner is here to tell us he is a writer of voice, not of tone, much less than Henry James occupied with hyperfine finitudes of decipherable intonation, but more his own barker, not so much a voice-over as a chorus-over of his own endlessly speculative, insinuant noise multiplied by itself many times. He is proud of his wares, reluctant ever to let them go until voluptuously plumbed, and even then, when they have been emptied out over a long haul of seismic paragraphs, unwilling to leave them alone because they have become as sea-shells, culverts of his own clamor all over again. It is one of the most effective vocal tricks in literature, akin to but utterly different from Beckett’s antic cavort and the one prevailing voice yapping about voices. Faulkner drains the tune out of all his people and refurbishes it for solo rant. Djuna Barnes in Nightwood and Gabriel García Márquez in Autumn of the Patriarch tried something similar, she assigning the incessant voice to one character who blooms vocally larger than the book, he melding the voices of a community into a presumptuous vox populi, both of them intent on how a voice can overpower not only listeners but also the mere sound of the world going about its business that Beckett called “aerial surf.” The highly individuated characters in Waugh, say, and James and Nabokov never do this, so we might conclude that Faulkner makes an anthropological point in spite of his societal underpinnings. Faulkner works head-on with élan vita!, intent on the ontological significance of the constant human shout amid which a narrator’s characters vie for a hearing.

  Astronomers speak continually not only of those who were truly great but also of blackbody radiation, the buzz left over from the big bang, still going on like a permanent cosmic hangover, more a hiss, perhaps, or even a sharp-edged sigh: an afterbirth with some disappointment in it. You can buy CDs of it or tune it in on a radio or a TV. Faulkner, I have felt, provides a similar obbligato in his prose, forever asking us to heed the fizz of things not immediately being written about. It is as if the vital presence of phenomena in the preceding sentence or paragraph leaks over into what follows it. So there is almost a simultaneity in the background, emphasizing that things, people, voices, matter not only in their own right but also for where they have come from. Inseparability of the context is a Faulkner fetish, but who is to gainsay him? Ground is his main figure because his view of humans is processive, which is to say he views them as subject to a process such as what’s now called punctuated evolution going on in and through them even as they try to think about something else. He is an ace at this. It’s why his novels feel so spacious—he needs the huge counterpoint for that stifling deep Southern ethos, smaller-seeming for being monotonous. He de
als in the endless proliferation of connected characteristics, and this amounts to a vision of createdness reported by a crushingly observant man.

  III.

  In his way, Faulkner is as much part of an entente cordiale as that wonderful specimen of cosmopolitan grace and diplomatic ardor, the late Pamela Harriman. On the one hand, he just about qualifies under the old seven-years-before-the-mast rubric by having worked as deckhand on a shrimp trawler, house painter, carpenter, golf pro, postmaster and even amateur handyman fixing up his own house, Rowanoak. What could be more American? He comes right out of the American vein. On the other hand, in spite of all the aw-shucks and bubba-jabber of the Mississippi cycle, he has things in common with Gide, Bernanos and Malraux (not to mention Saint-Exupéry and Chateaubriand). Perhaps this transatlantic element drew me to him, I who began by whoring after Gallic gods instead of studying Sir Walter Scott and Sir Philip Sidney and other knights and now went after American ones. People used to ask me, when I was a novelty here, before I joined, what brought me here, and one of the answers was “Faulkner,” who died as I arrived to stay. “Swing” would have been an earlier answer, of course, and a somewhat later one would have been “American classical composers,” almost all of them. But, because I did not go to Paris, or Rio, I came here, and a jubilant, climactic year at Columbia in the fifties gave me a taste for American life in the round. It was Gallic Faulkner, though, who like me had served with the RAF, was plane-besotted, who egged me on at a distance, luring and filling my imagination, and my first novel was a well-received but disowned pastiche of Hemingway and him.

  Inasmuch as this aims to be an essay not only about Faulkner but about my own response to him, I fear I have overshot, neglecting my childhood and early teens when, without knowing of Faulkner, I showed certain tendencies comparable to his: addiction to French, to French literature, intoxication with words, a preference for the maudit and the conte noir. In a way, between ten and eighteen, I set myself up as the ideal recipient of the European in him, who had read not only his household’s Dickens but someone else’s Baudelaire, Verlaine and Mallarmé. He had taught himself French in order to do it and it was no surprise that the enterprising, dangerous-living French should cleave to his work as, later, they cleaved to the nouveau roman (first welcomed by Americans). Faulkner ended up trying to get French results from American stuff, and I think he succeeded, certainly in Sanctuary (though at least one critic identified in it the holy grail of American myth criticism), The Wild Palms and Requiem for a Nun. If French fiction as well as being tart, curt and solemn is also sophistical, epistemological and atavistic, then Faulkner’s is often French. Myself, I kept looking, all through my so-called education, for French results from English literature, and then I suddenly found them in English in Faulkner. Whatever it may be that Baudelaire, Verlaine, Mallarmé and Camus, Malraux and Proust have in common (these last, three of my own favorites), it must be something like voluptuous cliff-hanging, a certain pagan sensuality when dealing with the absurd.

  When he was teaching at the University of Virginia, 1957-8, someone in one of his seminars asked if he deliberately patterned As I Lay Dying after The Scarlet Letter. Such a question must strike a sophisticated, educated reader as gratuitous, as if literary activity itself were a great big plot. Answering, Faulkner said

  No, a writer don’t have to consciously parallel because he robs and steals from everything he ever wrote or read or saw. I was simply writing a tour de force and, as every writer does, I took whatever I needed wherever I could find it, without compunction, and with no sense of violating any ethics or hurting anyone’s feelings because any writer feels that anyone after him is perfectly welcome to take any trick he has learned or any plot that he has used.*

  Of course: there is a freemasonry attaching to such things, and the best writers steal boldly and seize the best ideas. What matters is not that Faulkner stole or didn’t, or that he sometimes pinned chapter-synopses on the walls around him where he wrote. His writing was part of the main, especially shall we say the English Channel and the waters off France’s western coast. To him, more than to almost any established American novelist, writing was impetuous and involuntary, automatic even, and the element he worked in was cosmopolitan. So, more than thinking he sometimes appears to speak in tongues discovered in Dickens or someone else, we have to concede that some of his cadences, his interpolations, his initiations of a rhetorical unit owe something to the manners of the French Symbolist poets, who go so far from everyday locutions into abstruse formality, Mallarmé most of all. This is what gives Faulkner his often remote and sometimes obtuse style, almost as if he got in his own way. Purifying the dialect of the tribe, they honed it into an Ur-language of the future, whereas Faulkner appears to be conducting, say, an octet whose players do not create counterpoint so much as something perilously close to stasis or deadlock, whose point always seems to be that narrative, “telling,” auscultating, whatever we call this act of suggestively overhearing, is earned within bitter constraints, not easily yielded up by the world from everyday happenstance to unique rendering. That the phrase “the sound and the fury” in Macbeth spoke to and for him is no accident; what he managed to set down came from amid a shocking pandemonium in his own head fueled by regional storytellers such as Caroline Barr. His head was full of the usual mess that aids and abets all novelists save the hardened minimalist who makes a fetish of drawing on the sparsest materials and so makes a career garotting earthworms.

  No, Faulkner is your irresponsible sponge who chants stuff to himself and his typewriter, not so much getting it wrong as sensuously apocryphalizing it until it develops that peculiar doting crow of his, in which or amid which more things seem to be going on than are being narrated, simply because he cranks the language up to such a polyphonic pitch you are going to be hypnotized. This is what sets him aloft, a mumbo-jumbo of the anxious heart, looping and stunting around until the impasto is thick enough (almost after Joyce, who would not let Stuart Gilbert take a page away until it was obscure enough). Faulkner is not writing magazine fiction, not often, or for demure critics. The language sucks the improvisations out of him and those improvisations drive him even deeper into the arms of language. “What happened” counts, of course, but its bizarre and unique snail track through the tidy grid of print matters much more. You eventually become accustomed to the cranky reporter who moans around you with many voices, using almost a community throat, a fat orotundity, to weave his spell with, unable to plan or scheme because the lure of fiction writing lies in the vertiginous moment in which you will not discover (uncover) what you have to have unless you hang out at the cliff-edge, staring into silence and nothing, waiting for the “event” to form itself verbally in the teeth of never having existed. It was a game he adored to play, whether working as night stoker at the university power station or clerking in a Manhattan bookstore. Imagination, he reminds us, deals in what is not there, makes it seem real; it is not a camera, but it is savagely mercurial. It will sometimes let you down just because you are too tired to whip it into a sufficient frenzy, or, more common, because you have absorbed too much of the world. Inflating his see-through Yoknapatawpha balloon, Faulkner transcended his own limits even in the act of creating them.

  Above all he reminds us, in this age of reverence for the natural and the organic, how important to us the artificial is. A character in Witold Gombrowicz’s Cosmos recoils from the ravishing superabundance of nature because he feels it will smother and engulf him, as indeed one day it will; he prefers the man-made. And that of course includes language, style, symbol, to all of which Faulkner pays homage, brittle and arbitrary and merely ingenious as they are. Savants who preach biophilia remind us how nostalgia afflicts us, making us create gardens, opt for a view of the sea or the mountains, often spending most of our lives earning the ticket to a few months of guaranteed atavism. We do not hear anything like as much about the comfort of the artificial, the man-made, from window-pane to telephone, from language to ma
ttress, and this is a pity, at worst unrepresentative of humankind, at best absent-minded—we take so much for granted, speaking across several thousand miles without even the distracting buzz of the old days, being hurled at several hundred miles an hour from exact point to exact point at thirty thousand feet. Our technology may beset us, but it saves us from dossing down on skins in caves. Faulkner, full of boundless primitive feeling as he is, recreates the world for us in a style that proclaims its artificiality. Nobody, even in the South, talks or narrates like that, with such a profusion of Latinate words moving as naturally from his mouth as elephants’ teeth, worn-out, do from theirs. Yet, to his immense credit, while his style fits congruously into a world of toothbrushes, shoes, hearing aids, bulldog clips and sunglasses, it also develops a simulacrum of energy, seeming, no matter how artificial, to have an urge, an impetus, a crescendo akin to that of the planet itself—because his mind is always switched on, pounding, shoving (hardly ever the case with that mauve lyricist Hemingway). Hypothesis dogs aperçu in Faulkner, often rising to the level of what I would call internal combustion. He sweeps us along, omitting neither detail nor transcendent vision, until we almost undergo the illusion of being in the hands of a Creator who accurately mimics the habits of a bigger one, spewing the majestic around him in sheer exuberance. He is often at play in the fields of the deity, who owns them.