Inner Workings Read online

  For someone so determined to follow his own inclinations, it is odd that, rather than packing his bags and heading for the bright lights of the metropolis, he chose to remain in the town of his birth, where his pretensions were regarded with sardonic amusement. Jay Parini, his most recent biographer, suggests that he found it hard to be out of reach of his mother, a woman of some sensibility who seems to have had a deeper relation with her eldest son than with a dull and spineless husband.3

  On forays to New Orleans Faulkner developed a circle of bohemian friends and met Sherwood Anderson, chronicler of Winesburg, Ohio, whose influence on him he was later at pains to minimise. He began to publish short pieces in the New Orleans press; he even dipped into literary theory. Willard Huntingdon Wright, a disciple of Walter Pater, made a particular impression on him. In Wright’s The Creative Will (1915) he read that the true artist is solitary by nature, ‘an omnipotent god who moulds and fashions the destiny of a new world, and leads it to an inevitable completion where it can stand alone, self-moving, independent’, leaving its creator exalted of spirit.4 The type of the artist-demiurge, suggests Wright, is Balzac, much to be preferred to Émile Zola, a mere copyist of a pre-existing reality.

  In 1925 Faulkner made his first trip abroad. He spent two months in Paris and liked it: he bought a beret, grew a beard, began work on a novel – soon to be abandoned – about a painter with a war wound who goes to Paris to further his art. He hung out at James Joyce’s favourite café, where he caught a glimpse of the great man but did not approach him.

  All in all, nothing in the record suggests more than a would-be writer of unusual doggedness but no great gifts. Yet soon after his return to the United States he would sit down and write a 14,000-word sketch bursting with ideas and characters which would lay the groundwork for the series of great novels of the years 1929–42. The manuscript contained, in embryo, Yoknapatawpha County.

  As a child Faulkner had been inseparable from a slightly older friend named Estelle Oldham. The two were in some sense betrothed. When the time came, however, the Oldham parents, disapproving of the shiftless youth, married Estelle off to a lawyer with better prospects. Thus when Estelle returned to the parental home it was as a divorced woman of thirty-two with two small children.

  Though Faulkner seems to have had doubts about the wisdom of taking up with Estelle again, he did not act on them. Before long the two were married. Estelle must have had doubts of her own. During the honeymoon she may or may not have tried to drown herself. The marriage itself turned out to be unhappy, worse than unhappy. ‘They were just terribly unsuited for each other,’ their daughter, Jill, told Parini many years later. ‘Nothing about the marriage was right.’ (Parini, p. 130) Estelle was an intelligent woman, but she was used to spending money freely and to having servants carry out her every wish. Life in a dilapidated old house with a husband who spent his mornings scribbling and his afternoons replacing rotten timbers and putting in plumbing must have come as a shock to her. A child was born but died at two weeks. Jill was born in 1933. Thereafter sexual relations between the Faulkners seem to have ceased.

  Together and separately, William and Estelle drank to excess. In late middle age Estelle pulled herself right and went on the wagon; William never did. He had affairs with younger women which he was not competent or careful enough to conceal. From scenes of raging jealousy the marriage by degrees dwindled into, in the words of Faulkner’s first biographer, Joseph Blotner, ‘desultory domestic guerrilla warfare’. (p. 537)

  Nevertheless, for thirty-three years, until Faulkner’s death in 1962, the marriage endured. Why? The most mundane explanation is that, until well into the 1950s, Faulkner could not afford a divorce – that is to say, could not, in addition to the troops of Faulkners or Falkners, to say nothing of Oldhams, dependent on his earnings, afford to support Estelle and three children in the style she would have demanded, and at the same time relaunch himself decently in society. Less easily demonstrable is Karl’s claim that at some deep level Faulkner needed Estelle. ‘Estelle could never be disentangled from the deepest reaches of [Faulkner’s] imagination,’ Karl writes. ‘Without Estelle . . . he could not have continued [to write].’ She was his ‘belle dame sans merci’ – ‘that ideal object man worships from a distance who is also . . . destructive’. (p. 86)

  By choosing to marry Estelle, by choosing to make his home in Oxford amid the Falkner clan, Faulkner took on a formidable challenge: how to be patron and breadwinner and paterfamilias to what he privately called ‘[a] whole tribe . . . hanging like so many buzzards over every penny [I] earn’, while at the same time serving his inner daimon. Despite an Apollonian ability to immerse himself in his work – ‘a monster of efficiency,’ Parini calls him – the project wore him down. To feed the buzzards, the one blazing genius of American literature of the 1930s had to put aside his novel-writing, which was all that really mattered to him, first to churn out stories for popular magazines, later to write screenplays for Hollywood. (Parini, pp. 319, 139)

  The trouble was not so much that Faulkner was unappreciated in the community of letters as that there was no room in the economy of the 1930s for the profession of avant-garde novelist (today Faulkner would be a natural for a major fellowship). Faulkner’s publishers, editors, and agents – with one miserable exception – had his interests at heart and did their best on his behalf, but that was not enough. Only after the appearance of The Portable Faulkner, a selection skilfully put together by Malcolm Cowley in 1945, did American readers wake up to what they had in their midst.

  The time spent writing short stories was not all wasted. Faulkner was an extraordinarily tenacious reviser of his own work (in Hollywood he impressed by his ability to fix up dud scripts by other writers). Revisited and reconceived and reworked, material that made its first appearance in The Saturday Evening Post or The Woman’s Home Companion resurfaced transmogrified in The Unvanquished (1938), The Hamlet (1940), and Go Down, Moses (1942), books that straddle the line between story collection and novel proper.

  The same buried potential cannot be claimed of his screenplays. When Faulkner arrived in Hollywood in 1932, riding on his passing notoriety as the author of Sanctuary (1931), he knew nothing of the industry (in his private life he disdained movies as much as he disliked loud music). He had no gift for putting together snappy dialogue. Furthermore, he soon acquired a reputation as an undependable lush. From a high of $1,000 a week his salary had by 1942 dropped to $300. In the course of a thirteen-year career he worked with sympathetic directors like Howard Hawks, was friendly with celebrated actors like Clark Gable and Humphrey Bogart, acquired an attractive and attentive Hollywood mistress; but nothing that he wrote for the movies proved worth rescuing.

  Worse than that: his screenwriting had a bad effect on his prose. During the war years Faulkner worked on a succession of scripts of a hortatory, uplifting, patriotic nature. It would be a mistake to load all the blame for the overblown rhetoric that mars his late prose onto these projects, but he himself came to recognise the harm Hollywood had done him. ‘I have realised lately how much trash and junk writing for movies corrupted into my writing,’ he admitted in 1947.5

  There is nothing unusual in the story of Faulkner’s struggles to balance his accounts. From the beginning he thought of himself as a poète maudit, and it is the lot of the poète maudit to be disregarded and underpaid. All that is surprising is that the burdens he took on – the high-spending wife, the impecunious relatives, the disadvantageous studio contracts – should have been borne so tenaciously (though with much griping on the side), even at the cost of his art. Loyalty is as strong a theme in Faulkner’s life as in his writing, but there is such a thing as mad loyalty, mad fidelity (the Confederate South was full of it).

  In effect, Faulkner spent his middle years as a migrant worker sending his pay packet home to Mississippi; the biographical record is largely a record of dollars and cents. In Faulkner’s worryings over money Parini rightly discerns a deeper absorption. �
�Money is rarely just money,’ Parini writes. ‘The obsession with money that seems to dog Faulkner throughout his life must, I think, be regarded as a measure of his waxing and waning feelings of stability, value, purchase on the world . . . a means of calculating his reputation, his power, his reality.’ (pp. 295–6)

  A position as writer in residence on some quiet Southern college campus might have been the salvation of William Faulkner, giving him a steady income and demanding not much in return, allowing him time for his own work. A canny Robert Frost had since 1917 been showing that one could trade on the bardic aura to secure oneself academic sinecures. But, lacking a high-school diploma, mistrustful of talk that sounded too ‘literary’ or ‘intellectual’, Faulkner made no return to the groves of academe until 1946, when he was persuaded to speak to students at the University of Mississippi. The experience was not as bad as he had feared; at the age of sixty, at a more or less nominal salary, he joined the University of Virginia as writer in residence, a position he retained until his death.

  One of the ironies of the life of this academic laggard is that he had probably read more widely, if less systematically, than most college professors. In Hollywood, said the actor Anthony Quinn, even though he wasn’t highly rated as a screenwriter he had ‘a tremendous reputation as an intellectual.’ Another irony is that Faulkner was adopted by the New Critics as master of a kind of prose ideally suited to dissection in the college classroom. ‘So much to unfold that had been carefully and ingeniously folded by the author,’ enthused Cleanth Brooks, doyen of the New Criticism. Thus Faulkner became the darling of the New Haven formalists as he was already the darling of the French existentialists, without being quite sure what either formalism or existentialism was.6

  The Nobel Prize for literature, awarded for 1949, presented in 1950, made Faulkner famous even in America. Tourists came from far and wide to gawp at his home in Oxford, to his vast irritation. Reluctantly he emerged from the shadows and began to behave like a public figure. From the State Department came invitations to travel abroad as a cultural ambassador, which he dubiously accepted. Nervous before the microphone, even more nervous fielding ‘literary’ questions, he prepared for sessions by drinking heavily. But, once he had developed a patter to cope with journalists, he grew more comfortable with the role. He was ill-informed about foreign affairs – he did not read newspapers – but that suited the State Department well enough. His visit to Japan was a striking public relations success; in France and Italy he received massive attention from the press. As he remarked sardonically, ‘If they believed in my world in America the way they do abroad, I could probably run one of my characters for President . . . maybe Flem Snopes.’7

  Less impressive were Faulkner’s interventions back home. Pressure was building on the South and its segregated institutions. In letters to editors of newspapers, he began to speak out against abuses and to urge fellow white Southerners to accept the Negro as a social equal.

  There was a backlash.‘Weeping Willie Faulkner’ was denounced as a pawn of Northern liberals, as a Communist sympathiser. Though he was never in physical danger, he claimed (in a letter to a Swedish friend) to foresee a day when he would have to flee the country ‘something as the Jew had to flee from Germany during Hitler’.8

  He was of course overdramatising. His views on race were never radical and, as the political atmosphere grew more charged and developed states’ rights overtones, descended into confusion. Segregation was an evil, he said; nevertheless, if integration were forced upon the South he would resist (in a rash moment he even said he would take up arms). By the late 1950s his position had become so out of date as to be positively quaint. The civil rights movement should adopt as watchwords, he said, decency, quietness, courtesy, and dignity; the Negro should learn to deserve equality.

  It is easy enough to disparage Faulkner’s forays into race relations. In his personal life his behaviour toward African-Americans seems to have been generous, kindly, but, unavoidably, patronising: he belonged, after all, to a patron class. In his political philosophy he was a Jeffersonian individualist; it was this, rather than any residue of racism in his blood, that made him suspicious of black mass movements. If his scruples and equivocations soon rendered him irrelevant to the civil rights struggle, he was courageous in taking any stand at all at the time when he did. His public statements made him somewhat of a pariah in his home town, and had more than a little to do with his decision, after his mother’s death in 1960, to quit Mississippi and move to Virginia. (At the same time, it must be said, the prospect of riding to the hounds with the Albermarle County Hunt was a powerful drawcard: Faulkner in his last years regarded himself as pretty much written out, and foxhunting became the new passion of his life.)

  Faulkner’s interventions in public affairs were ineffectual not because he was stupid about politics but because the appropriate vehicle for his political insights was not the essay, much less the letter to the editor, but the novel, and in specific the kind of novel he invented, with its unequalled rhetorical resources for interweaving past and present, memory and desire.

  The territory on which Faulkner the novelist deployed his best resources was a South that bears a strong resemblance to the real South of his day – or at least the South of his youth – but is not the whole of the South. Faulkner’s South is a white South haunted by black presences. Even Light in August, the novel that is most clearly about race and racism, has at its centre not a black man but rather a man whose fate it is to confront or be confronted with blackness as an interpellation, an accusation from outside himself.

  As historian of the modern South, Faulkner’s abiding achievement is the Snopes trilogy (The Hamlet, 1940; The Town, 1957; The Mansion, 1959), in which he tracks the takeover of political power by an ascendant poor white class in a revolution as quiet, implacable, and amoral as a termite invasion. His chronicle of the rise of the redneck entrepreneur is at the same time mordant and elegiac and despairing: mordant because he detests what he sees as much as he is fascinated by it; elegiac because he loves the old world that is being eaten up before his eyes; and despairing for many reasons, not least of which are, first, that the South he loves was built, as he knows better than anyone, on twin crimes of dispossession and slavery; second, that the Snopeses are just another avatar of the Falkners, thieves and rapists of the land in their day; and therefore, third, that as critic and judge he, William ‘Faulkner’, has no ground to stand on.

  No ground unless he falls back on the eternal verities.‘Courage and honor and pride, and pity and love of justice and of liberty’ is the litany of virtues recited in Go Down, Moses by Ike McCaslin, who is pretty much spokesman for Faulkner’s wished-for, ideal self, a man who, having taken stock of his history and of the diminished and fast-diminishing world around him, renounces his patrimony, abjures fatherhood (thus putting an end to the procession of the generations), and becomes a simple carpenter.9

  Courage and honour and pride: to his litany Ike might have added endurance, as he does elsewhere in the same story: ‘Endurance . . . and pity and tolerance and forbearance and fidelity and love of children . . .’ (p. 225) There is a strongly moralistic strain in Faulkner’s later work, a stripped-down Christian humanism stubbornly held to in a world from which God has retired. When this moralism proves unconvincing, as it often is, that is usually because Faulkner has failed to find an adequate fictional vehicle for it. The frustrations he experienced in putting together A Fable (written 1944–53, published 1954), which he intended to be his magnum opus, were precisely in finding a way to embody his anti-war theme. The exemplary figure in A Fable is Jesus reincarnated in and re-sacrificed as the unknown soldier; elsewhere in the late work he is the simple, suffering black man or, more often, black woman, who by enduring an unendurable present keeps alive the germ of a future.

  For a man who lived an uneventful and largely sedentary life, William Faulkner has evoked prodigious biographical energies. The first big biographical monument was erected i
n 1974 by Joseph Blotner, a younger colleague from the University of Virginia whom Faulkner clearly liked and trusted, and whose two-volume Faulkner: A Biography provides a full and fair treatment of his subject’s outward life. Even Blotner’s one-volume, 400,000-word condensation (1984) may, however, prove too rich in detail for most readers.

  Frederick R. Karl’s huge tome William Faulkner: American Writer (1989) has as its stated aim ‘to understand and interpret [Faulkner’s] life psychologically, emotionally, and literarily.’ (p. xv) There is much in Karl that is admirable, including dauntless ventures into the maze of Faulkner’s compositional practices, which involved working on numbers of projects at the same time, shunting material from one to another.

  As Karl justly observes, Faulkner is ‘the most historical of [America’s] important writers’; accordingly he treats Faulkner as an American responding creatively to the historical and social forces in which he is enmeshed. (p. 666) As literary biographer what he tries to comprehend is how a man so deeply suspicious of modernisation and what it was doing to the South could at the same time in his novelistic practice have been a radical modernist.

  Karl’s Faulkner emerges as a figure of grandeur as well as pathos, a man who, perhaps in thrall to a Romantic image of the doomed artist, was prepared to sacrifice himself to the project of living through a destiny from which any rational person would have walked away. But Karl’s book is spoiled by continual reductive psychologising. For instance, Faulkner’s neat handwriting – an editor’s dream – is taken as evidence of an anal personality, his silly lies about his exploits with the RAF as a sign of a schizoid personality, his attention to detail as proof of obsessiveness, his affair with a young woman as revealing of incestuous desires for his daughter.