Gay Faulkner

Uncovering a Homosexual Presence in Yoknapatawpha and Beyond

Phillip Gordon

• Éditeur: University Press of Mississippi
• Année: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781496825995
• Sujet: Literatura
• Sous-sujet: Biografías literarias

The life and works of William Faulkner have generated numerous biographical studies exploring how Faulkner understood southern history, race, his relationship to art, and his place in the canons of American and world literature. However, some details on Faulkner's life collected by his early biographers never made it into published form or, when they did, appeared in marginalized stories and cryptic references. The biographical record of William Faulkner's life has yet to come to terms with the life-long friendships he maintained with gay men, the extent to which he immersed himself into gay communities in Greenwich Village and New Orleans, and how profoundly this part of his life influenced his "apocryphal" creation of Yoknapatawpha County. Gay Faulkner: Uncovering a Homosexual Presence in Yoknapatawpha and Beyond explores the intimate friendships Faulkner maintained with gay men, among them Ben Wasson, William Spratling, and Hubert Creekmore, and places his fiction into established canons of LGBTQ literature, including World War I literature and representations of homosexuality from the Cold War. The book offers a full consideration of his relationship to gay history and identity in the twentieth century, giving rise to a new understanding of this most important of American authors.

Chapter 1

“Quair” Faulkner

William Faulkner never quite fit in. Despite the odds stacked in his favor as the oldest son of an established white family in a small southern town in the first half of the twentieth century, he never could inhabit the single, easy role of insider, or “one of us,” in the town that would so entirely define him. The dynamic of feeling different, of feeling like an outsider and defining himself as one in opposition to the mantle of expectation readily available for him to don, most particularly defines the life—especially the young life—of this great, established, canonical icon of American literature. This dynamic has multiple facets; among these facets is one that results from the coincidence of time and place. William Faulkner, American writer, came of age and entered the maturity of his artistic vision over a sixty-year span of history during which difference, or queerness, was taking on a new meaning, and a subculture was forming into which he would find himself immersed, though few scholars have examined the details of his life in such a way as to reveal that beneath the mask of his multiple performances of identity, at the heart of Faulkner’s sense of self, is a narrative of gay American history. From the earliest stages of his life and in his earliest efforts at self-definition, the shadow of this history cast itself onto his self-performance and greatly influenced the direction of his life and the creative impulses that generated his early prose and poetry. It remained with him even until the final novels of his prolific career. What is so remarkable is the degree to which Faulkner did not fear this shadow. He embraced it.

This study is devoted to understanding what it means that Faulkner fashioned for himself a gay identity, among the many other performances in which he often engaged. He knew about homosexuality, he knew homosexuals, and he could perform homosexual identity in ways far more complex and personal than as homophobic reactions and displays of psychosexual angst. In his life, he crafted what I am calling an apocryphal gay identity, or an apocryphal homosexuality. This study will explore the multiple manifestations and meanings of this identity in his life and in his writing. Understanding the ways in which he apocryphized gay identity—in his own performances of difference and in the fiction and poetry he produced from his observations and experiences—sheds profound light on the William Faulkner we know and, as is often the case with apocrypha, the William Faulkner we so far do not.

William Faulkner was the firstborn son of a union between two families whose histories course like blood across even contemporary maps of north Mississippi, quite literally in the case of Falkner, Mississippi, a town north of Ripley named after Faulkner’s grandfather, the “Old Colonel” William Clark Falkner, whose railroad passed through the town on its route between Middleton, Tennessee, and Pontotoc. That same Old Colonel still stands as the most prominent marble citizen of a stiller town, the cemetery in Ripley, where he gazes over his nearby railroad to the west, country just purchased from the Chickasaw Indians when he came to Mississippi as a young man in the 1840s. The Falkners cannot quite be called the most prominent settlers in the area, certainly not equal to the Jones-Thompson family and its large holdings on the Tallahatchie River in Lafayette County before the war, or the Longstreet-Lamar family, which saw local and national political prominence both before and after the war. Rather, the Falkners rose to prominence only after the war, benefiting from not being large landowners with the majority of their capital invested in slaves but instead businessmen and lawyers, the prototypes of industrious and opportunistic individualists who would ride the waves of the postwar southern economy to establish themselves as the ersatz inheritors of the planters whom the ravages of war and emancipation had usurped.¹ These Falkners would stretch across the landscape of north Mississippi along the rail lines to Oxford and New Albany, where though they could never be considered equal to the great robber-barons of the late nineteenth-century American landscape, they would carve for themselves at least local prominence and relative wealth in their little notch of native soil. Despite the declining postwar southern economy, William Faulkner grew up in Oxford down the street from “The Big Place,” owned by his grandfather J. W. T. Falkner, the Young Colonel. If he never met the Old Colonel, he still likely knew that the Old Colonel’s house had been on “Quality Ridge” in Ripley before the Old Colonel was gunned down in the streets of that town by his former business partner.²

More significant to the young William Faulkner’s sense of place and identity may well have been the maternal line he inherited from an equally industrious family but perhaps one with less romantic appeal than the legendary Old Colonel of Faulkner’s paternal line. Joel Williamson relates the story of Maud Butler Falkner’s father absconding with the yearly tax revenues of Oxford in the late 1880s; Dean Faulkner Wells has confirmed that he also took with him his octoroon mistress and likely settled with her for a time somewhere in Arkansas. On the one hand, as Williamson argues, though it may never have been openly spoken of at the dinner table, young William surely knew this story and likely felt a keen stigma from it. On the other hand, the name Charles Butler—shared by Faulkner’s maternal grandfather and great-grandfather—would not necessarily have brought shame in Oxford. His great-grandfather, Charles Butler, is memorialized in contemporary Oxford on a historical marker in front of the First Baptist Church on Van Buren Avenue, leading downhill from the Square toward the old depot.³ This Charles and his wife, Berlina, along with Lelia Swift, Maud’s mother, are all buried in a family plot in St. Peter’s Cemetery in Oxford in the shadow of the central grove of cedar trees surrounding the graves of the Jones-Thompson family, who gave the land for the cemetery to the town but provided the highest (and metaphorically the most important) ground in it for their posterity. The prominence of other “old” Oxford families can largely be measured by their proximity to those cedars, including the Butlers, Kings, Shegogs, and Isoms.

This same older Charles Butler is directly responsible for the actual geography of the Oxford in which his great-grandson would grow up. Charles Butler Sr. surveyed the land that is now Oxford and laid out the grid pattern that marks the streets of the original town. The younger Charles Butler was responsible for the construction and upkeep of the sidewalks and street-lamps of the town, for which he was collecting the tax dollars with which he absconded.⁴ In a completely nonmetaphorical sense, when young Billy walked around Oxford, he followed in the paths of his forefathers, his world their world, his life and its patterns preset by theirs. In a metaphorical sense, perhaps he could understand the duality of that path and the different ways his forefathers negotiated it: the Charles Butler of civic virtue, the Charles Butler who ran away.

Young William Faulkner never quite assimilated into the Victorian regularity of his hometown. Writing from New Orleans in 1925, he would claim that his youthful interest in poetry sprang from the double compulsions “firstly, for the purpose of furthering various philanderings in which I was engaged, secondly, to complete a youthful gesture I was then making, of being ‘different’ in a small town” (ESPL ₂₃₇). That Faulkner was “different” seems a true enough statement, but his claim that he intentionally affected this difference is more specious. Accounts of Faulkner in his teens collected by biographers confirm that, to some degree, Faulkner performed this difference, primarily sartorially. Frederick Karl explains that Faulkner’s initial interest in books probably led him to his affinity for Estelle Oldham, but Karl continues, “what must be stated and even stressed was another side of Billy, not in sexual tastes, but in the desire to pass himself off as a dandy, or certainly someone different” (70), which he pursued through “a feeling for clothes and flamboyance [as of] someone who seeks roles, even at nine and ten; who, somehow, transcends his time and place and relocates himself with Charles Baudelaire, Oscar Wilde, and others like them who acted out” (71). Given the rigidly defined world he inherited, Faulkner would likely have put on these differences precisely for the reasons Karl suggests, to get out of (to transcend) his time and place for one not so stultifying; yet the reference to Oscar Wilde, arch-homosexual of the Victorian age, and “acting out” seem like slips in Karl’s rhetoric, both of which register latent implications about the insistence that the “side of Billy” that wanted to act out was not indicative of “sexual taste.” Karl also ascribes to the young Faulkner agency for acting different, as if his difference was intentionally affected and not the result of the way others perceived his identity against the local standards for belonging.

Not all the roles that Faulkner would play were necessarily self-created, and one of the ubiquitous biographical anecdotes from Faulkner’s youth implies something far less intentionally affected in his youthful difference. Joseph Blotner relates this revealing anecdote:

[William] and his brother [Murray] shared a taste for comic novels, just as his mother liked the serious novelists he did and Estelle enjoyed some of the same poetry that moved him. But it would be two years before a new friendship [with Phil Stone] would provide a mind as keen as his own to supply the excitement of a sympathetic response to new literary experience. And before that would happen [ … ] his alienation would prompt some students at the Oxford High School to tease him and call him “quair.” (39)

Williamson relates the same story, pausing to clarify that the colloquial spelling of the word Blotner supplies “means ‘queer’” (169), in case readers tone deaf to the peculiar timbre of that word find themselves unable to decipher it. Queer is a strange but powerful word, one which may sound very different to individual listeners, and one whose history was undergoing much change in the period of Faulkner’s adolescence. But then, what might the word queer, or more properly “quair,” have meant to William Faulkner?

Jay Parini expands a bit on what he thinks the word “quair” might have meant when applied to Faulkner: “According to Blotner, it was about this time that his fellow students referred to him as ‘quair,’ in part because of his dandyish dress and in part because he shunned the company of athletes and those students who led more active social lives” (30, italics added). The italicized portion of Parini’s assertion is his interpretation of why Faulkner might have been called queer, not Blotner’s. Parini owes his interpretation largely to Frederick Karl, who does not relate the story about Faulkner being called “quair,” but does repeatedly ponder the significance of what he calls Faulkner’s “feminized life” (86). Regarding Faulkner’s early life, Karl describes as “feminine” his artistic pursuits—drawing, writing—in a town with clear demarcations between appropriate activities for young boys and young girls. In his later life, Faulkner’s own perspicuous understanding of these same gendered divisions manifests in some of his best-known stories. After all, Emily Grierson briefly trains young girls to paint china dishes but no young boys are ever sent to her house. In his psychoanalytically informed biography, Karl also suggests that Faulkner’s later love of horses and keenness on male activities such as hunting and on spending time in all-male spaces such as the hunting camp stem directly from his need to compensate for the other, more “feminine” pursuits of his youth, or at least feminine in the eyes of the community in which he needed to define himself.

That what made Faulkner “quair” might be associated with his gender or sexuality is no minor point for a young man growing up in the 1910s. As Marilee Lindemann points out in her biography of another famous queer writer, Willa Cather, of whom Faulkner was a younger contemporary, the cultural “moment—from the 1890s to the 1920s,” when Cather and Faulkner both experienced their “sexual and literary coming[s]-of-age” was “a period when ‘queer’ became a way of marking the differences between still emerging categories of ‘homosexuality’ and ‘heterosexuality,’ and the word acquired a sexual connotation it had lacked in nearly four hundred years of usage” (2). Teenage boys calling teenage Faulkner “quair” is not the same as their calling him homosexual, nor equivalent to our contemporary term gay. At that precise cultural moment when Faulkner was called “quair,” the word would have been in too much a state of connotative flux to pinpoint precisely what it would have meant, though it seems unlikely it would have registered the same note as the more contemporary slight “that’s so gay” does among teenagers a hundred years later. But somewhere on the periphery of its connotations, the word queer had already begun to acquire its homosexual associations; that we feel it strike a chord in our contemporary acoustics is not an altogether unjustified feeling.

Reference to our contemporary usage might seem out of place in a discussion of small-town gender politics in the dusty Mississippi of the 1910s, but I include it here to highlight a point about acoustics. As recent anti-bullying campaigns (and recent highly publicized teenage suicides) demonstrate, this expression in our contemporary context has a distinct but layered resonance. Whereas people use the expression almost thoughtlessly as just an acquired and general way of demeaning any number of things that they find trifling, annoying, or disgusting, to kids who already feel “different” and may even be contemplating their own developing sexual identities, these words sting and feel far more directly derogatory than the off-hand ubiquity of their use is purportedly meant to imply. Though separated by time, the label “quair” and our contemporary expression “that’s so gay” bear similarities in the degree to which someone already sensitive to their sexual identity in relation to their peers may hear such language much more acutely than most people would. We can understand the import of the term by way of a syllogism: If Faulkner had any nascent or latent homosexual desires, and since the word “queer” was gaining a homosexual connotation during this period, then it follows that Faulkner would hear the term as a derogatory statement about his perceived (homo)sexuality. In this regard, the experience of contemporary teenagers facing antigay bullying may serve as a germane model to understand how “quair” might have sounded to Faulkner and the reaction he might have had to it.

Parini is the only one of Faulkner’s major biographers willing to posit that “[i]t is not outlandish to suppose that Faulkner himself had homosexual feelings at this time” (31). He explains as his basis for this supposition that homoerotic interests are not uncommon in adolescent boys. Though Faulkner by the latter half of the 1910s was no longer an adolescent (had he been born in 1997, not 1897, by the 2010s, a teenage Faulkner would have had access to a growing genre of LGBTQ-themed young adult, not adolescent, literature) his particular consciousness, noted for its profound depth, could certainly have stored away those nascent feelings and been able to access them for roles he would play in his later life. Of course, there is something outmoded in the notion that many boys have childish homoerotic feelings but, naturally, grow out of them, for we now generally acknowledge that homosexuality is not simply an experimental stage of childhood development that disappears with maturity. Such reasoning follows in the path of Freud and other late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century psychological theorists or their intellectual descendants in the 1940s and 1950s, including Alfred Kinsey. In the early 1970s, the psychiatric community began a long and still evolving process of revising this basic maturation pattern to a more realistic understanding of sexual identity. By the early 2000s, the condescending dismissal of homosexual desire as “just a phase” has been replaced by reminders that “I can’t change, even if I try,” to borrow from Mary Lambert, and “Baby, you were born this way,” to borrow from the indomitable Lady Gaga. We should read even a relatively recent biographer such as Parini with a more open mind than some of his rhetoric would seem to allow about homosexual development and the maturation of natural or normal sexual desires. One does not grow out of homosexual desire as one grows out of old clothes. Nonetheless, Parini stands alone in making so bold a pronouncement about Faulkner’s youthful identity, and there is little reason to believe Faulkner threw off this queerness just because he happened to grow up. Faulkner seems to have nurtured this identity, primarily in response to an event that would crystalize his developing sense of place and expectations: the marriage of Estelle Oldham, the girl who was supposed to be his promised bride.

Two Roads Diverged

The square regularity of the streets of Oxford bears metaphorical connection to the Victorian order pervasive in the South in which Faulkner grew up. Daniel J. Signal traces the influence of this Victorian order on Faulkner’s generation that was coming of age in the dawn of the Modernist period, and he singles out the South from the rest of the country for the distinctive way in which its Victorianism “was certainly not riddled with morbid introspection” (5) but rather linked proper values to the attainment of rewards for industry and labor via clear and direct lines. Though Signal does not light directly upon what this worldview means for queer sexuality, he nonetheless outlines in broad terms the trajectory (and rewards for proper performance) that a boy such as William Faulkner was implicitly meant to travel to his maturation and societal fulfillment as a “man” with certain rights, privileges, and familial obligations. Joel Williamson asserts that “[i]n regard to gender roles” this Victorian order “was exceedingly clear” for young Faulkner as for all his peers “born into a Southern world that had a vision of itself as an organic society with a place for everyone and everyone, hopefully, in his or her place” (365). Faulkner’s dandy dress and interests in arts put him at odds with this vision and resulted in his being labeled “quair” as a teenager, though as Williamson’s use of the word “hopefully” implies, this vision that southern society had of itself was a vision—a normative vision—which not everyone managed to attain. Still, that Faulkner was a “quair” youth does not mean his attainment of a southern/Victorian ideal was hopeless. Youth, in this vision, could serve as protection against the full force of the word “queer,” ameliorating it into a colloquial form with, surely, its own peculiar sting but also its own exceptions. So long as the young Faulkner would someday put away his childish things and mature to manhood, his “quair-ness” could be written off as the idylls of youth, which would allow its presence in the community to remain unthreatening.

To put a metaphorical spin on it, we might say that Faulkner was given to cutting across yards and through alleyways, tracing crooked pathways off the grid of the streets his great-grandfather surveyed, but the streets remained intact, and the owner of a violated garden or jumped fence could take consolation in knowing that one day the young man would understand the value of the plan the community had laid for itself; one day the young man would learn to stay on the sidewalk and walk along the preordained streets. Joel Williamson succinctly describes the plan Faulkner’s life was meant to take (meant in the sense that convention, not necessarily any personal desire, dictated it) as following a preset “progression of love, marriage, and sex; family, clan, and community” (365). Of these steps, marriage is the most crucial because, if not the initial step, it is the most legally, morally, and communally binding. As for the initial step, love, Faulkner was safe being “quair” as a teenager because he had Estelle Oldham, the girl from down the street whom he supposedly wanted to marry, safeguarding his place in the social milieu of Oxford regardless of his being a little different from everyone else.

Williamson narrates the prescribed premarital progression in the southern/Victorian community:

In the Victorian mind, God had so arranged the world that there was one certain woman ideally created for every man and one man for every woman. When they found one another they would recognize their destiny instantly and intuitively. There would be a sequence—rituals of recognition, love, courtship, engagement, and marriage. Before marriage the woman would be a virgin. After marriage would come sex and then children. (365)

The extent to which this progression describes any actual courtship is suspect, but it is not mea...