Simply Faulkner

Philip Weinstein

• Publisher: Simply Charly
• ISBN:
  9781943657032
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Biographies
• Index: Literature

Nobel Laureate and two-time Pulitzer Prize-winner William Faulkner (1897–1962) was one of America's greatest and most celebrated writers,whoseworkreflects and, at the same time, questions the South's most deeply held values.His novel The Sound and the Fury is frequently cited as one of the best books of all time, and all of his works powerfully explore complex societal and family issues that continue to be relevant in our own day. Yet, because of his decidedly difficult, stream-of-consciousness style, Faulkner's books remain sadly unknown to many readers.

In Simply Faulkner, author Philip Weinstein not only helps usunderstand these challenging works, but also explains why Faulkner had to write them as he did, in an effort to capture the sheer abundance and unruliness of life. Further, in his exploration of the author's own colorful life—including decades of working for a film industry he despised—Weinstein reveals a fascinating connection between Faulkner's troubled personal biography and his groundbreaking fiction.

The goal of Simply Faulkner is not to simplify the author, but, rather, to create a framework that allows us to comprehend him in his own idiosyncratic way. It strives to show us the real Faulkner—warts and complications and all—and to demonstrate why his brilliant masterpieces still speak to us in a deeply meaningful way.

2

Stumbling into Fame

The 1930s are widely recognized as Faulkner’s most creative decade. The Sound and the Fury (1929) opened the floodgates, permitting his subsequent novels, As I Lay Dying (1930), Sanctuary (1931), and Light in August (1932) to emerge in flawless lockstep. A brief hiatus occurred in the early 1930s: his “biggest” masterpiece, Absalom, Absalom! required more brooding and revising than he anticipated. But once it was released in 1936, The Unvanquished (1938), and The Hamlet (1940) followed swiftly, rounding out a peerless decade of productivity. Throughout this decade, Faulkner was the “hottest” novelist in America.

Looking back, we can see that crises he encountered during the five preceding years made that later flowering possible. These were the years in which, stumbling, he came into his own. He also seemed to recognize that stumbling was his most powerful subject. Whether he called it “outrage” or “assault,” the core insight was the same: when life “abrupts” (his verb from Absalom, Absalom!) upon us, we stumble and are out of control. By 1930, after the publication of The Sound and the Fury and As I Lay Dying, he had made this insight his own, becoming the genius we know as Faulkner. What disorienting experiences during those five years “prepared” him for such a bout of productivity?

In 1925, he was still in the mode of what I referred to in the previous chapter as “masquerade”—pretending to be someone he was not. He traveled to Europe, likely envisaging that these four months abroad would follow the scenario made famous by the careers of Pound and Eliot: of Europe being the “mother culture.” On this model, Europe (including England) supplied culturally enriched experiences and inspiration to budding American writers. In those days, London and Paris were “sacred” destinations for expatriate artists. Such pilgrimages saw their heyday during the flowering of modernist art occurring in Paris before and after the Great War.

Yet France (a country Faulkner adored, and one that adored him back) would never offer him fertile territory. His most ambitiously troubling novel, A Fable (1954), takes place on its shores during WWI. Despite endless revising, A Fable never takes off into the air—probably because it never roots itself deeply enough into its foreign soil. In 1925, when Faulkner set for Europe, he did not know that, like the Greek god Antaeus, he was powerful only when on native soil. Even though Sherwood Anderson had given him an introduction to James Joyce, then living in Paris, Faulkner was too shy to approach the celebrated author of Ulysses. He may have dreamed of a “European career,” but he never pursued that dream aggressively. Indeed, his shyness towards Joyce foreshadowed a lifelong withdrawal from the ceremonial trappings of literary fame. He would later turn down the overtures of younger writers seeking him out just as, in 1925, he was unwilling to make such overtures toward Joyce. Perhaps because of this innate reticence, he described himself in the late 1930s, at the end of his most prolific decade, as a farmer, not a writer.

Another reason that Faulkner did not adapt well to European surroundings was that his New Orleans experience with Anderson and his crew had fostered in him a new sense of vocation. Pound and Eliot were broadly Western poets, but he came away from New Orleans determined to become a specifically American novelist. He had written, while there, several prose pieces for a local newspaper. More tellingly, he was finishing a novel centered on American materials.

In Soldiers’ Pay, however, another kind of masquerade holds sway. That novel centers on the betrayals befalling a wounded soldier of the Great War. As such, it cannot but further the masquerade of Faulkner’s own war experience. Indeed, it functions as a bid to get that masquerade accepted as truth. (Others did accept it as true. Not until a decade after Faulkner’s death in 1962 did it become widely known that he had not seen action in 1918.) By contrast, Dos Passos, E. E. Cummings, and Hemingway had actually been there. All three had suffered in the war; Hemingway had been grievously wounded. Their books, Three Soldiers, The Enormous Room, and A Farewell to Arms respectively, draw on their authors’ personal experiences. We might ask: how can Soldiers’ Pay compel its reader, even though the war experience it seems founded on was never Faulkner’s own?

One of Faulkner’s best commentators, André Bleikasten, urged readers to think of the writer’s prevarications as something more than lies—as “corrective” fictions, attempts to make reality align with his subjective sense of what was supposed to have happened—but didn’t. From this perspective, Soldiers’ Pay becomes luminous. The fatal wound it testifies to on every page is imaginatively real. No reader of that novel has trouble believing that the protagonist, Donald Mahan, is dying—and that he is being betrayed, post-war, by many people he had earlier trusted. If it fails to be one of Faulkner’s greater novels, it is because he was just learning the craft of fiction. The novel is full of vivid shards—memorable scenes of deracinated veterans now stranded at home; it shows as well an incipient grasp of what may be seen as musical structure. Contrapuntally, the novel shifts from setting to setting, character to character, vignette to vignette. But the settings, characters, and vignettes tend to remain confined to their local space. What is missing is the glue—the narrative necessity that would solder these parts indissolubly, forging a design to which each part indirectly contributes. This structural problem—what we might consider as a whole that is less than the sum of its parts—will beset Faulkner’s second novel (Mosquitoes, 1927) as well. He will overcome it in Flags in the Dust (his third novel), and he will transcend it in the fourth one, The Sound and the Fury (1929).

Before 1929, however, Faulkner did not seem to recognize his major challenges as a writer. He needed to learn not just how to get the pieces of his novels to relate more compellingly to each other but, even more crucially, he had to learn how to suppress his delegated narrator and get him out of the fictional performance. The narrative voice that tells the first three novels makes them possible, but it also makes them second-rate: that “smart” Southern voice keeps drawing attention to itself. Once Faulkner managed to make it disappear, his materials suddenly came alive, speaking hypnotically for themselves and enacting their different ways of stumbling. With these changes, his work began to jell. Indeed, these novels’ separate materials became so intensely bonded as to release an incandescent force-field of thought and feeling. A reader of his fiction written between 1929 and 1931—The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying, and Sanctuary—comes away wondering how work of such conceptual intricacy can also hit home emotionally, like a sledge-hammer.

All this would begin to occur by 1929, but we cannot leave Faulkner’s European adventure of late 1925 without elaborating further on the stakes of his decision to return home when he did. The trip served as Faulkner’s single temptation to follow a Pound/Eliot model of Euro-creativity, which aspired toward forms of alienation and citation-insistent worldliness not available on American shores. One thinks of Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922) and its incessant parade of snippets from earlier cultures, each of them signaling the writer’s ultra-sophisticated world-weariness. For well over a decade, this poem bestrode the Anglo-American cultural scene as the text to emulate. Though Faulkner would draw on Eliot’s poem, he would (more resonantly) resist its siren-like appeal. No reader of his great fiction has the sense of entering the high-art sanctuary of Eliot’s celebrated poem. Somehow Faulkner grasped that European cultural materials—the allure of an older world of finer values—were for him less a beacon than a dead end. After four months abroad, he had to go home—and not just because he was out of money. Home was that “little postage stamp of native soil” that was waiting for him on the other side of the Atlantic.

I mentioned some of the defects of Soldiers’ Pay. Faulkner’s next novel, Mosquitoes (1927), also suffered from several shortcomings. It too could be considered a masquerade, in the sense that its narrator engages its materials with implicit mockery and unremitting detachment. Mosquitoes focuses on New Orleans antics Faulkner had witnessed and participated in. Seen later from an estranging distance, such foolish behavior tends to reduce to the juvenile silliness of adults who have not grown up. The narration of their doings exposes each of them with unforgiving precision. No reader is likely to relate to this cast of characters—thinly disguised versions of the New Orleans gang Faulkner had known in 1925. This is because Faulkner’s narrator doesn’t care for them either. More damagingly, the narrator attempts a sophisticated, Aldous Huxley-type of knowing humor. This is a tone Faulkner cannot make attractive. (Faulkner’s humor when it works, is savage and disturbing. But he needs a Jason Compson from The Sound and the Fury or a Joe Brown from Light in August to make it work.) Despite such flaws, Mosquitoes got a green light from Horace Liveright—New York’s premier publisher of American modernist literature. Liveright had been captivated, the year before, by Soldiers’ Pay’s musical rhythms and its elegant despair. He brought that novel out in 1926 and signed on to publish Mosquitoes in 1927. He was determined not to lose this young genius.

Within a year, however, Liveright had had enough of Faulkner. Faced with the manuscript of his third novel, Flags in the Dust, Liveright’s judgment was unconditional: he flatly turned the book down, imploring Faulkner not to show it to any other publisher. He doubtless meant well, but his words stung Faulkner to the core: “Soldiers’ Pay was a very fine book and should have done better. . . Mosquitoes wasn’t quite so good . . . Now comes Flags in the Dust and we’re frankly very much disappointed.” Faulkner read Liveright’s assessment as a pitiless summary of his career to date. Thirty years old, he was the author of a volume of poetry no one wanted to buy and of two novels few readers paid much attention to. Now he saw himself rejected by one of the most powerful publishers in America. Desperately, he tried to salvage Flags, eventually leaving the revisions to his friend Ben Wasson. It was too depressing for him to continue on his own.

Flags was not the worst of his troubles in 1928. Estelle Oldham Franklin—whom he had failed to elope with, whom he was unable to forget—had come back into his life. Divorced from her husband after several years of a marriage gone irreparably sour, and now a mother of two small children, she returned to Oxford in the mid-1920s. She turned toward Faulkner as a lifeline. Their courtship resumed, as passionate as before but more troubled than ever. At 20, he had been a markedly taciturn young man, given to excessive drinking. Now, a decade later, Faulkner had become more aggressively anti-social. Further, with three published books under his belt, he had solidified his mantle of a Bohemian Writer. Estelle must have recognized that it would be hard, maybe impossible, to change him, but her life was a mess, and she needed a husband urgently enough to accept these challenges. He, however, was not so sure he needed a wife. He had been uncertain in 1918 and now, a decade later, whatever had separated them before had grown in density and recalcitrance.

Though pressed by Estelle, he kept putting off a date for the marriage. Soon Estelle’s sister, Dot, was working on him to step up to his responsibilities. Finally, he set the date. Then—frantic over what he was about to sign on to—he wrote his friend and publisher, Hal Smith, the following:

I am going to be married. Both want to and have to. THIS PART IS CONFIDENTIAL, UTTERLY. For my honor and the sanity—I believe life—of a woman. This is not bunk; nor am I being sucked in. We grew up together and I don’t think she could fool me in this way; that is, make me believe that her mental condition, her nerves are this far gone. . . . It’s a situation which I engendered and permitted to ripen which has become unbearable, and I am tired of running from the devilment I bring about.

At the time, Faulkner was completing his bleakest novel, Sanctuary. It cannot be accidental that he set June 20 as the date on which its protagonist, Temple Drake, enters a courthouse and perjures herself. That was the very day he set for contracting a marriage that must have seemed to him as a sort of perjury as well. Temple, in time, would find it impossible to get beyond her all-damaging mistakes. The same may be true for her creator.

Flags in the Dust, which Faulkner completed in 1927, cannot keep the company of the four masterpieces that followed it in the next five years. Yet, Faulkner was not mistaken when he told Liveright (on submitting the manuscript): “At last and certainly, I have written THE book, of which those other things were but foals. I believe it is the damdest best book you’ll look at this year, and any other publisher.” In hindsight, we can perhaps see better why Liveright was blind to the book’s merits. He was a New York publisher intent on upsetting parochial sensibilities—on honoring Pound’s modernist dictum, “Make it new.” He would have had little trouble recognizing Soldiers’ Pay’s appeal because it belonged to a burgeoning American genre—the “lost generation” novel—and held its own in that company. In Mosquitoes, Liveright would have appreciated Faulkner’s superior stance toward a colony of would-be artists and writers. These were sophisticated figures being mocked by an even more knowing narrator, providing grist for Liveright’s “smart” New York mill. With Flags, however, the discernable genre and the sophisticated tone were absent.

He couldn’t see that in Flags Faulkner began to make that “postage stamp of native soil” his own, recognizing that his region’s history—as broad as Southern heartbreak, as narrow as family legend—was inexhaustibly writable. It would take two more novels before Faulkner gave his county its fictional name, Yoknapatawpha (in As I Lay Dying). But the county, though unnamed, was born in Flags. The book draws centrally on once-aristocratic families, the Sartorises, and the Benbows. It draws as well on a roster of community figures ranging from garrulous old white men to deranged white youths and low-lives, as well as to a hill-country family nestled in the backwoods and steeped in earlier ways. And this is not to mention its three generations of black servants managing to eke out their lives under inattentive white masters. Flags is in no hurry to get its story told—something Liveright misread as “you don’t seem to have any story to tell.” He did not grasp—as many others in 1927 would not have understood—that Faulkner was making his debut as a Southern writer. He was showing, with wide-angled, nonjudgmental attention, what happened if you had stayed home during the Great War: you remained enclosed within an enervated, quietly suffocating set of outdated rituals of thinking, feeling, and doing, slowly wasting away. But if you had participated in that war, you found yourself, on return, incapable of communicating to anyone the brutality of your experience. Worse, you were unequipped to make peace with the slow-paced Southern pieties you had departed from.

Flags was Faulkner’s first novel about the South, his South. That’s what it can do. No less instructive is what it cannot do—according to the measure that Faulkner himself would provide two years later in The Sound and the Fury. A comparison of two scenes of emotional intensity (one from each novel) brings this point home. We begin with the relatively traditional rhetoric of Flags. Here is the protagonist, Bayard Sartoris, wounded and asleep, watched over by Narcissa Benbow, whom he eventually marries. His anguish erupts swiftly:

He made an indescribable sound, and she turned her head quickly and saw his body straining terrifically in its cast, and his clenched hand...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Table Of Contents
• Praise for Simply Faulkner
• Other Great Lives
• Series Editor's Foreword
• Preface
• William Faulkner
• Introduction
• Stumbling into Fame
• Flight and Fall
• “Go slow now”
• Hollywood and Heartbreak
• Alcohol and Accolades
• Suggested Reading
• About the Author
• A Word from the Publisher