B006JHRY9S EBOK (7 page)

Mahon seems mutely to harbor Faulkner’s own longings. His wound anneals him from all possibility of intimacy, both orphaning him and constituting an impenetrable sanctuary sorely unavailable to his creator. “The man that was wounded is dead,” Powers says, “and this is another one: a grown child. It’s his apathy, his detachment from everything that’s so terrible” (SP 92). Though his former fiancée, Cecily, continues to betray him, Mahon has reached a position of final indifference. It is as though Faulkner bestowed on him both the war wound he never received and the love wound he would never recover from. Mahon is at ease with both these wounds, finally safe behind his scar. He appears as a figure through whom the writer fantasized the immunity that death brings to the dying. Perhaps this is why
Soldiers’ Pay
reads like a burial ceremony—a roundabout means of getting the damaged Mahon properly dead and into the earth.

Surrounding Mahon’s ceremonial descent into death are a choir-like set of antic figures—inconstant Cecily Saunders and her stop-and-start flirtations, drunken George Farr and his frustrated lust for Cecily, goat-like Januarius Jones and his freewheeling predations on whatever female will submit to them. Faulkner makes none of these minor figures interesting.
They seem to inhabit a different universe from that of Powers and Mahon.
Soldiers’ Pay
fails to interrelate its cast of characters persuasively, as though there remain ghostly unwritten materials behind the palpably written ones. The writer’s energy—balked from release in either plot or character (Mahon is an unplumbable center, and Powers does not develop)—finds its outlet in gorgeous, overwritten settings: “Beyond the oaks against a wall poplars in restless formal row were columns of a Greek temple, yet the poplars themselves in slim vague green were poised and vain as girls in a frieze. Against a privet hedge would be lilies soon like nuns in a cloister and blue hyacinths swung soundless bells, dreaming of Lesbos” (SP 46). Yet another cocktail of words, poetic phrases doing duty for an ordeal of the spirit that Faulkner does not know how to narrate. No one in or outside the novel cares about the poplars or the privet hedge, the lilies or the blue hyacinths. “When am I going to get out?” the dying Donald Mahon murmured. Behind that question lies another this novel does not pose: when are we going to get in? When will we be enabled, by the writer’s experimental language, to encounter not Mahon’s deathly immunity but the living anguish inside his wounded mind and body?
Soldiers’ Pay
dances around the surface of this question.
Mosquitoes
, stuffed to the gills with its own artistic and erotic questions, never even takes it up.

Mosquitoes
moves with a narrative assurance lacking in
Soldiers’ Pay
, and Faulkner must have known at least one of the reasons why. He had actually experienced its main events. If the war in
Soldiers’ Pay
imposed a wounding he elaborately faked, the mosquitoes in
Mosquitoes
inflicted a kind of sting—bodily, but also verbal, sexual, artistic—he knew only too well. In 1925 he had been aboard an abortive cruise on New Orleans’s Lake Pontchartrain. Rain assailed the party, the yacht’s motor gave out, and they were unable to move. Hordes of mosquitoes descended on them. The same event, reconfigured, gives
Mosquitoes
its plot. More broadly, Faulkner was sorting out his New Orleans experience—what he had come to know of its artistic and intellectual pretensions—into a ship of fools. Each character is reduced to essential traits—the loquacious writer Fairchild, the idealistic sculptor Gordon, the sexually engorged Jenny, the lean and epicene Patricia, the gnomic semitic man, and so on. Like epithets in eighteenth-century poetry, their leading traits serve as straitjackets. No one can change in this novel (the phrase “the semitic man” accompanies Julius Wiseman like a
mantra, endlessly repeated, never varied). The central figure in this cast of characters is the hapless Mr. Talliaferro, who “often mused with regret on the degree of intimacy he might have established with his artistic acquaintances had he but acquired the habit of masturbation in his youth” (MOS 161). This piece of “information” is provided on the novel’s opening page. It refers to a sexual activity never elsewhere named in Faulkner’s novels, never elsewhere pertinent to their concerns. It is as though the writer were saying, abandon spiritual striving, all you who enter here!

Although Faulkner insinuates his name once into this novel—as “a little kind of black man” (MOS 371) whom Jenny met once and considered crazy—he stays out of
Mosquitoes
. The consequences are considerable, for his willingness to pass judgment correlates with his distance from his materials. Faulkner would never again be so imaginatively indifferent, so insistently mocking. The shameless self-display of artistic convictions, the nonstop aesthetic and cultural manifestoes that he encountered among Anderson’s New Orleans coterie: for a man who treasured silence, these were not only sterile but offensive. “Talk, talk, talk: the utter and heartbreaking stupidity of words. It seemed endless” (408). Faulkner’s later often-stated conviction—those who can, do, while those who can’t, write—might have dated from the heady logorrhea of New Orleans literary life.

On the boat, an endless stream of pontification, punctuated for the males by steady drinking (heading toward stupor), and for the females by aimless chatter and flirtation. Off the boat, no better. When Pat and David romantically jump ship in order to elope, Faulkner subjects them to a fate crueler than on-board boredom. Bombarded by mosquitoes, lost in a swamp, brutalized by the penetrating summer sun, their romance fizzles. They almost die of exposure. Their rescue is as unchivalric as that Temple Drake receives two years later in
Sanctuary
. A sweat-stained local appears, glares at them, spits near their feet: “You folks been wandering around in the swamp all day? What you want to go back fer, now? Feller got enough, huh?” He spits again, “Aint no such thing as enough. Git a real man next time” (MOS 431). If Faulkner was thinking of his own failed elopement with Estelle, he granted no reprieve in this sordid replay. The novel reads more broadly as a refusal of all reprieve. There is no escaping the itch and scratch of desire stimulated and frustrated, of art contemplated but not created, of ceaseless talk that goes nowhere. “It’s like morphine, language is” (516).

Only the aloof and silent sculptor, Gordon, operates above this infecting realm of talk and tease. Faulkner opens the book inside Gordon’s studio, letting us see the real thing that the others’ verbal antics merely play at: “it was
marble … motionless and passionately eternal—the virginal breastless torso of a girl, headless armless legless, in marble temporarily caught and hushed yet passionate still for escape” (MOS 263). Such lyrical language appears in
Mosquitoes
only one other time. Seeing in Pat an intolerable embodiment of the wrought torso that obsesses him, Gordon suddenly swings her into the air: “and for an instant she stopped in mid-flight … Sunset was in his eyes: a glory, he could not see; and her taut simple body, almost breastless … was an ecstasy in golden marble, and in her face the passionate ecstasy of a child” (320-1). Flight, marble, ecstasy: these signal an exercise of spirit that nothing said or done on the novel’s yacht can match. Flight will always enkindle Faulkner’s imagination, and it will usually involve—what is absent here—the mortal danger that attaches to transcendence.

On the ground, as on the water,
Mosquitoes
rehearses its suffocating rituals. “They rolled smoothly, passing beneath spaced lights and around narrow corners, while Mrs Maurier talked steadily of her and Mr Talliaferro’s and Gordon’s souls” (MOS 270). To talk of one’s soul is, for Faulkner, to have no soul. Apart from the two moments identified earlier,
Mosquitoes
has no genuine interest in the soul. Nothing is more than skin deep here. The “profound” talk, saturated in self-consciousness, is especially skin deep. “You become conscious of thinking, and then you start right off to think in words. And first thing you know, you don’t have thoughts in your mind at all: you just have words for it” (445). Words appear as the ceaseless outpouring of open-mouthed beings, as the tiresome gesture—arousing and irritating—with which portentousness would pass itself off as spirit.

Before taking on this book, Faulkner had been hesitant—he wasn’t sure he knew enough yet to manage its materials—but the problem was deeper than lack of knowledge. He loved New Orleans for its encouraging a free-living, free-drinking release of the spirit and the body. But New Orleans as a scene where pontificating artists and philosophers endlessly talked of work they never created: toward that city he felt contempt. Some writers—like Aldous Huxley, whose example served him here—make good use of contempt, creatively deliver a scene saturated in corrosive ironies. Not Faulkner. His great work to come would involve unthinking projection into the materials, would center on the ordeal of outraged spirit. The talkiness of words, their cheap exchangeability and the social/cultural jockeying that accompanied them, was outside the fictional territory he could imaginatively bring to life.

Dorothy Parker once confided to Ben Wasson that Faulkner’s attempts at social repartee were awkward and embarrassing: “He should leave it to
the likes of us to see how feather-brained we can be. My God, his wit is execrable. He’s too great a man for our kind of foolishness” (CNC 109). Did Faulkner glimpse that foolishness—not folly but foolishness—was outside his fictional range, when he characterized
Mosquitoes
to Liveright as “trashily smart”? If so, it would have been an unwelcome recognition, since the man whose
Flags in the Dust
had just been turned down was hardly regarded as a “great” man. Parker was speaking of the Faulkner she met in the early 1930s; in November 1927 he was not yet that man. Three masterpieces—
The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying, Sanctuary
—would appear in the next three years. Seen in the light of their brilliance, as well as the attention they had garnered, he might well have struck her as “great.” But that aura was beyond his wildest fantasies in late 1927. All he wanted to do was to get
Flags
published, to stay on his feet. The future could wait; his insurmountable trouble was the present.

Despite Liveright’s rejection, Faulkner knew that
Flags
was the best novel he had yet written. A glance at its opening paragraph intimates why:

As usual old man Falls had brought John Sartoris into the room with him, had walked the three miles in from the country Poor Farm, fetching, like an odor, like the clean dusty smell of his faded overalls, the spirit of the dead man into that room where the dead man’s son sat and where the two of them, pauper and banker, would sit for a half an hour in the company of him who had passed beyond death and returned. (FD 543)

“As usual”: none of Faulkner’s earlier fiction had risked—or reaped the rewards of—the “usual.” From
New Orleans Sketches
through
Mosquitoes
, he had sought the unusual, the extraordinary. A certain desire to grandstand—“Pay attention to me!”—insinuates itself throughout that earlier work. It may not be too much to say that such work (poetry as well as prose) was damagingly invested in his need to demonstrate his difference.
Flags
opens instead on a familiar Southern town engaged in one of its identity-confirming rituals: rehearsing how the South lost the Civil War sixty years ago.

New, as well, is Faulkner’s willingness to begin with old folks.
Soldiers’ Pay
and
Mosquitoes
deal mainly with ardent and aggressive people younger than either of these old men, unspeakably wounded soldiers and the women they court, self-important artists and the theories they sport. Old man Falls
carries into that room neither wound nor theory; he brings with him a past—and a ghost. Within a paragraph, Faulkner has found his way into his region’s abiding neurosis. Its present is overshadowed, quietly suffocating under a past that has not passed. The South that is incidental to
Soldiers’ Pay
and marginal to
Mosquitoes
is now center stage. Although Liveright seems not to have noticed it (he could find no unity in
Flags)
, every vignette in the novel contributes to a diagnostic rendering of Faulkner’s South. Diagnostic, not adversarial: could Liveright have missed
Flags
’s unemphatic but sustained critique because he found nothing Mencken-like in it, nothing contemptuously dismissive?

Just a page further, old man Falls brings something else to this book: white Southern vernacular. Faulkner had used black vernacular (often heavily stylized) in both the New Orleans sketches and
Soldiers’ Pay
, and
Flags
goes on to delight more amply in black speech. “Delight” is the right verb, though a troublesome one. Delight in black vernacular fuels innumerable passages of white-authored Southern literature, testifying to racial affection cushioned on an unthinking conviction of white superiority. Little Southern white vernacular, however, had appeared in Faulkner’s earlier work (urban gangster and underclass idioms are a different matter). In making old man Falls speak, Faulkner began to tap what would become one of his greatest novelistic resources:

“They was times back in sixty three and fo’ when a feller could a bought a section of land and a couple of niggers with this yere bag of candy. Lots of times I mind, with ever’thing goin’ agin us like, and sugar and cawfee gone and food scace, eatin’ stole cawn when they was any to steal and ditch weeds ef they wa’nt; bivouackin’ at night in the rain, more’ n like.” (FD 730)

Did Faulkner recognize that Falls’s voice was worth a dozen Swinburnes? That the poetry he had been recycling from other sources was all around him—in a different form—in the spoken vernacular of his region? There are many keys that help explain the master that Faulkner was to become, but one is that—in the figure of Falls, and later of Suratt and the MacCallums in
Flags
—he irresistibly sounds the vernacular rhythms of his place. No need to borrow from Housman or Eliot or Aiken; no need to tend an unspeakable wound; no need to sound “trashily smart” or to mock others for doing so.