B006JHRY9S EBOK (15 page)

The photographs taken of him during this period tell a collaborative story. The earliest one of “cadet Faulkner” shows him in all his inade-quacy—a slight, unsmiling young man, shapelessly immersed in the standard uniform issued to all cadets. Tellingly, he refused to send his mother this undistinguished photo. Instead, he spoke of, and drew for her, the officer’s uniform he would soon be entitled to wear—a drawing replete with officer’s belted tunic, garrison cap, breeches, putties, and stick. In November, he wrote her that his old uniform was wearing out, and that the new trousers he bought had led to his being mistaken for “a flying officer in mufti” (TH 130). On the December day he was demobilized, he replaced his cadet overcoat (apparently “stolen” from him) with one he bought “from an officer who was hard up” (138). The sartorial result: Faulkner returned to Oxford at the end of 1918 decked out in an officer’s resplendent garb, just as he had drawn it. He was proudly wearing the wings of a flying officer and a hat of the kind permitted only to soldiers who had seen action. For
the next several weeks, as demobilized soldiers streamed back to Oxford in early 1919, he wore this uniform around town, sometimes “carrying a swagger stick and taking salutes from returning soldiers who had not achieved officer status” (WFSH 183).
⁴

The role-playing did not stop with the wearing of unearned uniforms. He had peppered the Canadian letters to his mother with references to the progress he was making as a pilot. For the next twenty years he would jauntily recount solo flights he had undertaken and mishaps he had suffered. Often he would go further, speaking of military action high over France, of war-inflicted wounds requiring surgically installed plates in his head and in his knee. To enhance the role, he took to limping with a cane once he returned to Oxford. Later, he would inform his stepson Malcolm that his nose had been broken in a wartime plane crash (rather than in a high school football accident). The claims he made to others who knew him less well were often more embroidered; many of these would be dispelled only after his death in 1962. Examining his Canadian RAF discharge papers in the 1970s, his official biographer found the word “Nil” written in the column headed “Casualties, Wounds, Campaigns, Medals, Clasps, Decorations, Mentions, Etc” (F 66). There is likewise no official record of the flight mishaps he reported during those days of training. Indeed, he would have had to go to another training camp to do any solo flying at all. The facts are unambiguous. The war ended in November, while he was still in flight training school. He saw no action, flew no planes, did not even know how to fly them. What is going on in this egregious gap between role and reality?

As James G. Watson has proposed, Faulkner’s assiduous self-presentation is here on display, a claim Watson buttresses by pointing to the difference between that unflattering first flight-training photo and the ones Faulkner later had taken of him at Oxford, after the war. In the first photo Faulkner just accepted the verdict of the camera lens. He was passively “captured” by this picture rather than actively on display in it. His refusing to relinquish the photo to his mother suggests that he somehow understood this distinction. Thereafter, as in the famous 1930s photos taken by his Oxford friend J. R. Cofield, Faulkner carefully arranged how he would appear. The amused Cofield called him “a devout camera fiend.” Faulkner would meticulously arrange the attitude of his body and clothing so as to signal the performance he had in mind. The camera would obey, capturing and communicating the stance of identity he was seeking to perform—this to the point of elaborate invention, of out-and-out lies.
Why would he engage in such deception? In
Flags in the Dust
(written in 1927) Faulkner allowed Horace Benbow to answer that question: “You forget that lying is a struggle for survival … little puny man’s way of dragging circumstance about to fit his preconception of himself as a figure in the world. Revenge on the sinister gods” (FD 710).

The recollected self, like the preconceived self, is a figure in the world, a figure of consequence. This is how we project identity, as well as how—over time—we want to remember it. This is what we look like in the beneficent light of
was
or
might be
. But life occurs as neither before nor after; it erupts as
is
, an often nasty assault by the sinister gods. Puny and exposed, one encounters unanticipated circumstance, and one’s self-image as a figure in the world suffers grievously. Lying is how one makes up, later, for what one was unprepared for earlier. As another of Faulkner’s biographers puts it, his strenuous investment in lying “corrects” reality by supplying it with the rich subjective coherence denied by the events themselves.
⁵
He strides later, to make up for earlier stumbling. Faulkner was not ready when the moment to keep or lose Estelle occurred. He was not ready when the Great War occurred. He would find ways, later, to “correct” both mistakes. He would marry her later—even as he already glimpsed it was too late to make good on the first defection. And he would get into the war the only way he could, later. He would perform the role—in his dress, his words, and his gestures—of one who had experienced it.

Why was it so important to have seen military action? The painfully close answer is that his brother, Jack, had indeed experienced the war that Faulkner pretended to know. Joining the Marines in May of 1918, Jack did make it to scenes of action in France. He encountered the enemy in Belleau Woods and Soissons, as well as St-Mihiel and Epinal. He was gassed in Champagne, and on November 1—ten days before Armistice—he was badly wounded in the Argonne. Shrapnel tore open his right knee and penetrated his skull, miraculously lodging there without doing further damage. (With characteristic modesty, Jack later viewed the Purple Heart he was awarded “as everlasting evidence that I forgot to duck” [FOM 103].) Jack knew only too well—and had surgically installed plates to prove it—the war to which his brother pretended.

The distant, more indirect answer is no less revealing. It is well known that Faulkner chose to insert the letter
u
into the spelling of his name, thus
distinguishing himself from the Falkners who preceded him. As in Freudian family romance, those earlier Falkners had birthed his body but not his soul. He first announced soul birth by his assertion of the
u
—at the time of his recruitment into the Canadian RAF. There he lied about his birthplace (England), his birth date (1898), and the spelling of his name (Faulkner). The last of these lies stuck with him. His letters home during those months of 1918 inconsistently addressed his parents as sometimes Falkner and sometimes Faulkner. When asked later why he spelled his name differently from his parents or grandparents, his answers varied but returned often to the same grounds: that was the way his legendary great-grandfather, Colonel W. C. Falkner, had originally spelled the name. He would explain that the Colonel later removed the
u
because he had heard of some no-good folks nearby who spelled it with a
u
. On this account, the great-grandson was restoring an earlier reality, not inventing a new one. More tacitly, he was disinheriting two generations of Falkners who stood between him and his mythic progenitor. What did this larger-than-life figure of nineteenth-century exploits, a man dead eight years before Faulkner was born, mean to a little boy growing up in the twentieth century? Why, when a third grade teacher asked him what he wanted to be when he grew up, did Faulkner answer, “I want to be a writer like my great-granddaddy”? (F 23).

W. C. Falkner, the young loner who showed up on his uncle’s Ripley doorstep in 1841 seeking asylum, began soon to better his position. By the mid-1840s he was reading law. When the Mexican War broke out in 1846, he joined it and saw action—including the loss of three fingers, thanks to a musket ball coming his way. On his discharge papers, issued in 1847, his name was indeed spelled “Faulkner”; at some later point he removed the
u
. He married Holland Pierce in 1849 and fathered a son whom he named John Wesley Thompson (“J.W.T”) Falkner. Soon thereafter he became embroiled in another scene of violence. A certain Robert Hindman (a comrade in the Mexican War) accused Falkner of blocking his membership in the Knights of Temperance. Hindman pulled a revolver, they fought, the gun misfired. Falkner killed Hindman with his knife in self-defense—a verdict the jury upheld. The Hindman family would long view it as pure and simple murder. Two years later, a friend of the Hindmans quarreled with Falkner, the two men fought, and Falkner shot him dead. He was again tried and acquitted. By then he was widowed. Soon he remarried and began to produce a second family, while continuing to practice law and extend his land investments. When Mississippi seceded in early 1861 (the second state to do so, after South Carolina), Falkner became captain
(he had sought a brigadier generalship) in a company he helped to form, the Magnolia Rifles. Swiftly promoted to colonel, he fought daringly, even recklessly, during the battle of First Manassas. His imperious manner made him unpopular, however, and his troops did not reelect him the following spring as regimental commander. Piqued, he quit the Confederate army a few months later, in the summer of 1862. For the next two years, he organized and led a group of several hundred guerrilla fighters—the First Mississippi Partisan Rangers—who impeded where possible Grant’s invasion south. In 1864, he was probably running the blockade around Memphis, stealing Yankee supplies that were sorely needed back home.

Official violence ceased after Appomattox in 1865, but personal violence was never far from the Colonel. In the postwar years his law practice continued to prosper, and he became obsessed with railroad possibilities in northwest Mississippi. To that end, he made a business alliance with one Richard Thurmond. They became successful, and eventually—in typical Falkner fashion—he forced Thurmond out in order to control the railroad himself. By 1889, he had written several books (including
The White Rose of Memphis
, a popular yarn that went through several editions), had become wealthy through real estate and railroad investments, and was seeking to enter the Mississippi state legislature. His political opponent was Thurmond; there had been angry words between them. On the November afternoon when he was overwhelmingly elected to the seat, Falkner walked into Ripley’s town square. He had made a new will and was no longer carrying a gun. He walked toward the entry of Thurmond’s law office; within minutes Thurmond came out, carrying a .44 pistol in his hand. “Dick, what are you doing?” Falkner said, as Thurmond fired at point-blank range. His throat pierced, the Colonel died the next day. Thurmond was later acquitted in a drawn-out, acrimonious, and contested trial. The jury, it seemed, was not ready to find the Colonel innocent of the violence that had once more erupted around him. In time, a huge monument—fourteen-feet high and made of Carrara marble, with an eight-foot statue of the Colonel mounted on it—was erected over his grave in the Ripley cemetery. He had commissioned it many years earlier, hoping, it was said, that grateful townsfolk would put it up in the square after his death. They never chose to do so, and the weather-stained monument stands to this day atop his plot in the deserted Ripley graveyard. One hand of the giant marble man is hidden, protecting from view the three fingers shot off during the Mexican War. At an unknown later date, someone chose to “balance” matters by shooting off the same three fingers in the visible other hand as well.

Throughout his life, Faulkner would return to the legendary figure of his great-grandfather, reborn in his fiction as Colonel Sartoris. His brooding statue presides over
Flags in the Dust
. Later, he would stir Faulkner’s imagination further as the ruthless progenitor Carothers McCaslin in
Go Down, Moses
. Between Colonel W. C. Falkner’s violent death in 1889 and Faulkner’s own childhood in the first decade of the twentieth century, there grew around the storied ancestor an irremovable patina of grandeur and violence. Decisive, ambitious, talented, murderous, he was above all unstoppable. It is not too much to say that Colonel Falkner incarnated for his young great-grandson the force that underlay Southern masculinity and achievement. Like the railroad he fostered, his life signaled unambiguously the release of power. So to address the question why Faulkner might have lied as he did about his participation in the war, we listen again to Horace in
Flags:
“lying is a struggle for survival … little puny man’s way of dragging circumstance about to fit his preconception of himself as a figure in the world.” Men serve in war—especially, perhaps, Southern men do. That is their obligatory figure in the world. His own great-grandfather had served sublimely. Faulkner would go on to view this ancestor in the most intricately critical ways, but surely the first response was captivation. His earliest statement of the bond with his legendary great-grandfather occurs in the biographical sketch he submitted to the editors at Four Seasons Press, as they prepared to bring out
The Marble Faun
(1924):

Born in Mississippi in 1897. Great-grandson of Col. W. C. Faulkner, C.S.A., author of “The White Rose of Memphis,” “Rapid Ramblings in Europe,” etc. Boyhood and youth were spent in Mississippi, since then has been (1) undergraduate (2) house painter (3) tramp, day laborer, dishwasher in various New England cities (4) Clerk in Lord and Taylor’s book shop in New York City (5) bank- and postal clerk. Served during the war in the British Royal Air force. A member of Sigma Alpha Epsilon Fraternity. Present temporary address, Oxford, Miss. “The Marble Faun” was written in the spring of 1919. (SL 7)

Faulkner here reconfigures his own genealogy. Such a performance cleanly deletes Murry Falkner, and J. W. T. Falkner before him, as though the descent of the family
u
were a ceremony that took place only once every four generations. Anxiety about the unimpressiveness of his first twenty-six years may show as well in the cavalier details. Faulkner was an “undergraduate” at the University of Mississippi for only three terms (and even then thanks to a postwar law classifying him as “special” along with other
demobilized men who were allowed to attend university without a high school diploma). The other activities he mentions seem deliberately whimsical, and his claim of service in the war is downright mendacious. His identifying Oxford as a “temporary” address almost suggests that he sees his real (but as yet undeclarable) address as Mount Parnassus.