Books: He Will Prevail

You try to say and sum up something, an impression of life, in what necessarily is a small space, and you’re given only sixty years to do it. Savin’ a few exceptions that’s all anybody has; a short time.

—William Faulkner

The time of William Faulkner was long enough for his work to be read, misread, raged at and, for a long while, largely forgotten. By 1945 not one of his novels was in print in the U.S. Neglect suited Faulkner well enough; he was a shy man, and as indifferent to the reception of his work as it is possible for an artist to be. But before long, reporters were straining his Southern civility. The praise of a few perceptive U.S. critics had stirred interest in Europe, and in 1950 Faulkner received the Nobel Prize. By last week, when William Faulkner died of a heart attack at 64, presidents and professors alike lifted their voices to acclaim his life and mourn his death.

He was a little (5 ft. 5 in.) whippet of a man, with the manners of a Southern aristocrat and the look of a riverboat gambler. He never finished college, hated literary talk (“I’m not a literary man, I’m a retired farmer”), often spoke like a country yokel (spattering his conversation with ain’ts and double negatives), and drank like a desperate man. Above all, he was—like his forefathers before him—a Mississippian.

Out of the “rich deep black alluvial soil” of Mississippi, Faulkner created a darker earth: Yoknapatawpha County, a fictional fief 2,400 square miles in breadth and two centuries in depth, veined with the spilled blood of successive owners—the Indians, the Spanish, the French for a moment in time, then the Anglo-Saxons, “roaring with Protestant scripture and boiled whisky, changing the face of the earth: felling a tree which took 200 years to grow, in order to extract from it a bear or a capful of wild honey.”

Rousing Rabble. Yoknapatawpha and its county seat, Jefferson, have their pale counterpart in actuality: Lafayette County and Oxford, where Faulkner lived, worked and occasionally puzzled his mildly curious fellow citizens. “The posted woods on my property contain several tame squirrels,” he advised them a few years ago in a sarcastic no-trespassing notice he published in the weekly Oxford Eagle. “Any hunter who feels himself too lacking in woodcraft and marksmanship to approach a dangerous wild squirrel, might feel safe with these.” But the real county is the one Faulkner invented, just as the real Troy is Homer’s. Faulkner began to survey his birthright in 1929, with his third novel, Sartoris, modeling its chief character after his own greatgrandfather, Colonel William Falkner (as the name was spelled then). The old colonel, a Civil War hero, railroad builder, bad novelist in the manner of Walter Scott, and excellent knife-and gunfighter in the manner of Wild Bill Hickok, was more than a ready-made fictional hero: he was an embodiment of aristocratic tradition. As it happened, successive Falkners had successively less gumption. Novelist William, fourth in line, had in his father and grandfather suggestions of the thinning Sartoris and Compson clans—weak and neurotic aristocrats who let slip inherited wealth and inherited tradition.

Waiting to grab the wealth, and caring not a squirt of tobacco juice for tradition, are the Snopeses, the most rousingly written rabble ever to infest a novel. Their founder and archetype is Flem Snopes, the blank-eyed son of a horse thief who arrives in Yoknapatawpha during the 18903 and proves his mettle by cheating the sewing-machine agent, previously the slyest man around. Flem takes over the town of Frenchmen’s Bend, and soon Snopeses are upon the county like rats. Their rise, which in Faulkner’s view reflects the South’s post-Civil War decline, is chiefly chronicled in The Hamlet (1940), The Town (1957) and The Mansion (1959).

“That Morbid Stuff.” Almost everything that Faulkner cared to write from 1929 on fit easily into his vast, loose scheme (with the exception of The Fable, a religious allegory). Since the scheme was a tract of land, not a piece of architecture, nothing could unbalance it. He was free to try a full-dress period novel (Absalom! Absalom!}, trivial contemporary whodunits (Knight’s Gambit}, any amount of roistering backwoods humor (The Spotted Horses}, or an allegorical novella (The Bear}. The dark soil supported it all.

Faulkner is often charged with being obsessed with violence. Author Mickey Spillane once asked: “Why does he go in for all that morbid stuff?” More justly, he has been reproached for a style that seems deliberately obscurantist, in which events seem to occur in blurred, faintly unreal slow motion as if they were happening underwater. A reader begins to feel he must surface for a breath of air, or suffocate. “Bill, when you write those things, are you drinkin’?” asked his cousin Sallie. It was a question even friendly critics had sometimes thought of. Faulkner’s answer—”Not always”—was as near as he ever came to self-defense.

Particularly in his later books, this style often degenerated into mere mannerism, often seemed to be indulged out of sheer whim or laziness. But in his best works, Faulkner built his oblique parenthesis-artichokes with artful care. In the often cited fourth section of The Bear, for instance, he attempts several things that require complexity: he evokes nostalgia and anguish more intensely than would be possible with direct statements; and, without blunting his point by stating it directly, he shows the painfully oblique way a Southern mind at the turn of the century would have approached the realization that slavery was a curse on the land. Perhaps as important, he inserts a slow movement between brisk sections of a hunting story in the same way he might have done if he had been composing a concerto.

Through the Roof. The perplexer of critics began by puzzling his parents; he was obviously bright, but too lazy to finish high school (later he took a few courses at the University of Mississippi). Instead, he hung about the courthouse in Oxford, listening to the old whittlers tell lies to one another. In 1918, he joined the R.A.F. (the U.S. Army Air Service turned him down because he was too short). He got no nearer to combat than a training area in Canada, but came home with a leg injury nevertheless; on Armistice Day he and another pilot had taken a plane and a bottle aloft, stunted for a while and then plowed to an upside-down landing on the hangar roof.

“I was running whisky in New Orleans back in Prohibition days, and I met Sherwood Anderson,” Faulkner used to explain when someone asked how he started to write. His first novel, Soldier’s Pay, was published in 1926, but Faulkner had to make his living by odd jobs (including an epic failure as postmaster at Ole Miss) until Sanctuary, his seventh book, came out five years later. For almost the only time in his life he showed bitterness in public, boasting in a preface that the book was a “cheap idea” written only for money. But the money came, and when it was gone Faulkner had his choice of temporary film jobs. Married by now to Mississippian Estelle Oldham,he settled down to what would be his life for 30 years—quiet stretches in Oxford interrupted by occasional forays to the Hollywood money-orchard (he conserved money in odd ways, perhaps to put off visits to California; often he mailed his personal letters in old business-reply envelopes with the addresses scratched out).

He had no small talk, and was often abstracted; stalking around Oxford with his pipe in his teeth, he frequently passed close friends in the street without seeing them, or with only a cursory nod. He once told an interviewer: “If I were reincarnated. I’d want to come back a buzzard. Nothing hates him or envies him or wants him or needs him; he is never bothered or in danger, and he can eat anything.”

Faulkner was deeply troubled by the uproar over school integration, and two years before the height of the Little Rock troubles, he told an interviewer: “I don’t like enforced integration any more than I like enforced segregation … As long as there’s a middle road, all right, I’ll be on it. But if it came to fighting, I’d fight for Mississippi against the United States even if it meant going out into the street and shooting Negroes.”

Deceptive Date. There were occasional drunks, too; Bill Faulkner had more violence in him than he could let out by writing, and he was too polite ever to raise his voice. His drinking bouts lasted for weeks, and relatives used to sit in relays with him as they ran their course. He launched into one just before he was slated to go to Stockholm to pick up his Nobel Prize, and his family, worried he might not come out of it in time, set the calendar ahead. Then someone said something about the local high school football game. Faulkner sat up in bed and snapped: “Somebody’s been deceivin’ me! They don’t play football on Tuesday. I got three more days to drink.”

But his acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize was eloquent: “Our tragedy today is a general and universal physical fear so long sustained by now that we can even bear it. There are no longer problems of the spirit. There is only the question: When will I be blown up? Because of this, the young man or woman writing today has forgotten the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself. He must learn them again. He must teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid; and, teaching himself that, forget it forever, leaving no room in his workshop for anything but the old verities and truths of the heart. Until he does so. he labors under a curse. He writes not of love but of lust, of defeats in which nobody loses anything of value, of victories without hope and, worst of all. without pity or compassion. His griefs grieve on no universal bones, leaving no scars. He writes not of the heart but of the glands.

“Until he relearns these things, he will write as though he stood alone and watched the end of man. I decline to accept the end of man. It is easy enough to say that man is immortal simply because he will endure; that when the last ding-dong of doom has clanged and faded from the last worthless rock hanging tideless in the last red and dying evening, that even then there will still be one more sound: that of his puny inexhaustible voice, still talking. I refuse to accept this. I believe that man will not merely endure; he will prevail.”

It was, of course, what Faulkner had been saying all along.