B006JHRY9S EBOK (43 page)

“I listen to the voices, and when I put down what they say, it’s right” (FCF 159): so Faulkner had long ago described to Malcolm Cowley his creative procedure. Most readers caught up in the vortex of his greatest characters’ dilemmas would grant the claim. Unlike Henry James or James Joyce, Faulkner rarely proceeds by way of a modulated authorial stance—intricately nuanced and carrying latent judgments—enacted upon his fictional universe. When Faulkner is great, he is inseparable from his characters—immersed utterly in their voices, gestures, and actions. Perhaps it is that dream-like projection into his materials—neither subtly judgmental nor sentimentally endorsing—that is most missing from these two tamer Snopes novels.

Such intensity is missing from
The Reivers
as well. Filled with light-hearted adventures whose pathos rarely turns toward tragedy or obsession, this last novel was written for—and dedicated to—his grandsons. (Its opening words are “Grandfather said.”) Mink’s long backward glance has now stretched into reminiscence of events that took place a lifetime ago. These involve derring-do vignettes—a stolen car, betting on and fixing horse races, several sorts of Memphis mayhem. Miss Reba’s whorehouse features as prominently here as it did in
Sanctuary
, but this time shorn of menace. It has become an all right place for boys to read about. Often compared to Twain’s boy books on the one hand and to Shakespeare’s valedictory
Tempest
on the other,
The Reivers
possesses little of
The Tempest’s
inexhaustible resonance. Insofar as it is Twain-like, it is closer to the shenanigans of Tom Sawyer than the more brooding inwardness of
Huckleberry Finn
. “The human heart in conflict with itself”: so Faulkner had identified, in his Nobel Prize speech, his signature concern. The raging, conflicted heart is what (apart from Mink in
The Mansion)
these last novels lack—a lack one can only hope softened their author’s final years as well. Less driven once he had passed the age of sixty, perhaps more accepting of his inescapable conditions, Faulkner seems to have stumbled less, even if peace remained beyond his grasp. His valedictory novel, at any rate, hardly stumbles at all: a testimony to its lightness and charm.

You get born and you try this and you dont know why only you keep on trying it and you are born at the same time with a lot of other people, all mixed up with them, like trying to, having to, move your arms and legs with strings only the same strings are hitched to all the other arms and legs…like five or six people all trying to make a rug on the same loom…and it cant matter, you know that, or the Ones that set up the loom would have arranged things a little better, and yet it must matter because you keep on trying…and then all of a sudden it’s all over and all you have left is a block of stone with scratches on it…and after a while they don’t even remember…what the scratches were trying to tell, and it doesn’t matter.

—Absalom, Absalom!

“Cant matter” is primordial in Faulkner’s understanding of life and is never gainsaid. In the passage from
Absalom
that I opened this book with and quote again here, the pathos of “must matter” is sandwiched between a “cant matter” and a “doesn’t matter” that remain inalterable. All the “Kilroy was here” scrawls on all the walls in the world do not change the fact that the human being is a puny creature up against the “sinister gods,” “the Ones who set up the loom.” Life is not a winning situation, and Faulkner never forgot that it wasn’t. Yet he tenaciously insisted on writing his books as though they “must matter.” No less, this stumbling man persevered throughout his life as though (against all better judgment) somehow it, too, must matter.

His abiding tenderness toward children shines through the biographical data. One notes it first in his volunteering to be local scoutmaster (a post he held in the early 1920s, until church dignitaries found him morally unworthy of this trust and forced his resignation). Toward his daughter Jill—“Missy”—he remained deeply attached from her birth until his death, perhaps most so during the “salt mine” years (much of the 1940s) that he
spent in exile in Hollywood. Learning from Estelle that his nine-year-old daughter had had her hair cut, he responded:

Pappy misses that yellow hair that had never had an inch cut off of it since you were born, but Pappy knows and can remember and can see in his mind whenever he wants to every single day you ever lived, whether he was there to look at you or not…. So any time he wants to think so, that hair is still long, never touched with scissors. So, that being the case, your hair can be cut like you want it, and it can still be like Pappy wants to think of it, at the same time. So I am glad you had it fixed the way you like it, and I want you to enjoy it and write me about it. (SL 173)

Like a Keatsean “still unravished bride,” Jill lived both in and out of time for her father: a growing woman disappearing Eurydice-like from him, an immortal child housed securely in his mind. Two years later, he was brooding over her parting words to him about “Lady Go-lightly” (the horse he had bought for her in Hollywood): “Pappy, I’ve got to have that horse. It hurts my heart,” she had said (F 468). For $125 he bought a two-wheeled horse trailer and paid $350 more to have others help him haul Lady to Mississippi behind his car. (“I’ve got a mare that’s going to foal,” he told a Hollywood colleague, “and I want it to foal in Mississippi” [467-8].) Driving at top speed for three days across country (with brief motel stops), they arrived at Rowan Oak after midnight. Jill was awakened. Sleepily, she made her way down the stairs, then saw him standing there next to the horse trailer, and started running: “It’s my horse,” she said, incredulous, as she embraced Lady, “it’s my horse.”

Toward his stepchildren Malcolm and Victoria his relations were complex, sometimes involving disciplinary gestures they would remember. But he was there for Victoria during her own crisis in early 1938. A young mother with a baby only a few months old, and suddenly abandoned by her husband, she had sought refuge at Rowan Oak. Faulkner kept her occupied, gave her typing to do, worked crossword puzzles with her, and read Keats and Housman to her during the terrible evenings. “He kept me alive,” she later said of his care. But it was his niece Dean to whom—apart from Jill—he must have felt the greatest emotional and financial responsibility. His role in her father’s crash in 1935 had never ceased to torment him, and he steadfastly supported her during her years of growing up, college education, and subsequent travel, as her father would have done. When, in the fall of 1958, she married John Mallard in Oxford, he and Estelle hosted the wedding events. He gave her away at the altar. After
the newlyweds had left for their honeymoon, he and Estelle took the altar flowers to the St. Peter’s cemetery late that night, and he laid them on the grave where Dean was buried. As Blotner interpreted this gesture, “the flowers told his brother that he had seen his daughter through childhood and adolescence, from maidenhood to marriage. He had fulfilled the vow made twenty-three years before by the wreckage of the Waco” (F 655). If I forget thee, Jerusalem: Faulkner honored at least this vow, among the vows he made.

His generosity toward his extended family was unfailing but far from sentimental. In June 1942, he wrote his agent Harold Ober (who, ever reserved, must have been shocked by reading it) the following complaint: “I have been trying for about ten years to carry a load that no artist has any business attempting: oldest son to widowed mothers and inept brothers and nephews and wives and other female connections and their children, most of whom I don’t like and with none of whom I have anything in common, even to make conversation about” (SL 153). Though doubtless penned in a moment of irritation, the letter remains telling. Its terms presage his larger lover’s quarrel with his state itself. “Loving all of it even while he had to hate some of it,” he would write in 1954 about Mississippi, “because he knows now that you don’t love because: you love despite; not for the virtues, but despite the faults” (ESPL 42-3). These blood-kin and family-kin were his world—partly shaped by him, more deeply simultaneous with him and inherited. His honor was at stake in the quality of his treatment of them. Although the puppet-strings of their desires may have interfered with his own, he was not free to abandon them. The difficult, silent loner and the embroiled, responsible family man came together—in irresoluble tension—as one William Faulkner.

His stance toward Phil Stone reveals the same underlying loyalty. More than anyone else, Stone helped to launch the young Faulkner’s career. But his mentoring became at times insufferable. Promoting (and paying production costs for)
The Marble Faun
(1924), Stone had informed the Yale
Alumni Weekly:
“This poet is my personal property and I urge all my friends and class-mates to buy his book” (F 123). As Faulkner’s fame increased, the darker side of Stone’s attachment to him emerged more often. In the
Oxford Magazine
in 1934, Stone launched what he proposed as a six-installment narrative of Faulkner and his family. Granting that Faulkner was one of the “most noted exponents…of modern technique,” Stone denied his protégé any “trace of genius” and opined that “he has gone as far as he will ever go” (331). Happily, the magazine fizzled out after three issues. Against
this emotionally intricate backdrop, we can measure Faulkner’s generosity when Stone himself fell into overwhelming money troubles. When his father’s bank collapsed in 1930, Stone assumed his considerable debts. Ten years later, the same debts were crushing Stone, and foreclosure on one of the notes was fast approaching. Desperate, Stone turned to Faulkner, who immediately wrote Bob Haas at Random House: “I have a friend here, I have known him all my life, never any question of mine and thine between us when either had it…. Of course I will sign any thing, contracts, etc…. I will sell or mortgage…. $6000 is what we have to raise” (SL 100)—in three weeks. Borrowing $1,200 against future royalties on
The Hamlet
, and collecting $4,800 as the cash value of his own life insurance policy, Faulkner got the $6,000 to Stone just in time. Over a decade later, in an
Oxford Eagle
tribute to Faulkner for having won the Nobel Prize, Stone remembered his friend’s generosity: “A lot of us talk about decency, about honor, about loyalty, about gratitude,” Stone wrote. “Bill doesn’t talk about these things; he lives them” (F 526).

A demonstration of virtue without the verbal claims that so often go with it (and at times substitute for it): Faulkner’s French translator, Maurice Coindreau, noted the same rare trait a few months after Faulkner’s death: “If he wanted to speak well of you,” Coindreau wrote, “he preferred to do it when your back was turned” (F 98). Recognition and gratitude were exactly what he did not seek in return. Faulkner’s acknowledgment had nothing to do with appearances or applause, and everything to do with a silent ethical gauge he carried within. Following his returning to Oxford in December 1950, flush for perhaps the first time in his life—thanks to Nobel largesse—Faulkner headed to his Uncle John’s office: “I want you to do something with that damned money,” he told his uncle the judge. “I haven’t earned it and I don’t feel like it’s mine. I want to give some money to the poor folks of Lafayette County” (535). This meant poor blacks as well as whites.

Even a cursory reading of Faulkner’s letters reveals another virtue sometimes missed by readers of his work: humor. In the spring of 1958, addressing a class of English majors at Princeton, he received one especially sententious question: “I have read all your books and short stories,” the young man said, “and I want to know, is there one character that is saved by grace?” Pausing for a moment to take this in, Faulkner responded, “Well, I have always thought of God as being in the wholesale rather than the retail business” (F 650-1). Earlier, in 1948, he had written to Cowley of a handsome invitation to address Yale’s English Department and receive $200: “I don’t think I know anything worth 200 dollars worth talking
about…so I would probably settle for a bottle of good whiskey” (SL 271). Turning down recognition from Yale—like his later refusal to accept President Kennedy’s invitation to join other Nobel laureates for a dinner at the White House—were moves determined and sanctioned by that inner ethical gauge. (When Blotner asked Faulkner what to say to reporters amazed by his decision, he replied: “Tell them I’m too old at my age to travel that far to eat with strangers” [F 703].) Often the humor would be wrapped around a financial offer that he wryly conceded could still tempt him. To Ober he wrote in 1959:

Having, with THE MANSION, finished the last of my planned labors; and, at 62, having to anticipate that moment when I shall have scraped the last minuscule from the bottom of the F. barrel; and having undertaken a home in Virginia where I can break my neck least expensively fox hunting, I am now interested in $2500.00 or for that matter $25.00. (SL 433)

Putting in the 00 cents: this is the sign of humor by a man who for much of his life had been beaten up by money negotiations he never respected and rarely got the better of. Faulkner’s humor emerged not at the expense of anyone, unless of himself. Because he knew he was a fool in the hands of the gods, he could laugh at—and sometimes share with others—the predicaments he found himself in. Beaten up by money arrangements, but not corrupted.

Faulkner distinguished acutely between financial complications and financial dishonor. For a period of over four years (in the 1940s), he was hounded by a literary agent named Herndon, who had offered to sell some of his stories in Hollywood as materials for film. These transactions soon became sticky, as East Coast and West Coast agents jockeyed to get into the act. When Faulkner wrote Herndon that he was going with a West Coast agent and that their arrangement was off, Herndon turned aggressive. He concocted an elaborate argument about having suffered damages, and he threatened to sue if Faulkner did not comply. Faulkner was both openly defiant and inwardly aggrieved. He wrote Herndon, “You accused me of deliberate underhand dealing, which is not true, and inferred that I could be forced by threats into doing what is right, which I will take from no man.” After a genuine attempt to negotiate Herndon’s claims, Faulkner closed his letter as follows: “If this is not satisfactory to you, then make good your threat and cause whatever trouble you wish” (F 158). The tone is sublime: one would associate it more with dueling gentlemen like Hamilton and Burr than with a 1940s quarrel between writer and agent. Certainly no lawyer working for Faulkner would
have encouraged him to respond thus! The aftermath is likewise revealing. Faulkner wrote Ober, “I have failed in integrity toward him [Herndon]. I was not aware of this at the time, yet and strangely enough perhaps even if it is not true, I do not like to be accused of it” (SL 160). Faulkner’s sense of honor is a critical dimension of his identity. He does not compromise with it nor suffer others to cast aspersions on it. Learning of Hemingway’s death (a year before his own), Faulkner immediately sensed it was a suicide. This form of exit obscurely ruffled Faulkner’s unspoken code of integrity: “I don’t like a man that takes the short way home,” he told a friend (F 690). Living just is the courage to stay with a bad hand until the game is over (and most hands are bad hands: the sinister gods hold the trumps).