El profeta William Faulkner
Faulkner on violence and disorder...Ignored for much of his own time and then embalmed in dignity by the Nobel Prize, William Faulkner spoke to the violence and disorder of our time with an authority and a penetration that few contemporary writers can match by Larry Levinger  N Mosquitoes (1927), William Faulkner wrote, "'I think he was crazy. Not dangerous: just crazy.'"'What was his name? Did he tell you?' "'Yes. It was.... Wait.... Oh, yes: I remember -- Faulkner, that was it.'" That was it all right. When Faulkner died, thirty-five years later, William Styron, riding in the funeral cortege, reckoned with just how fierce and probing the novelist's craziness could be. The whole of Faulkner's "maddened, miraculous vision of life wrested ... out of nothingness" came "swarming" into Styron's mind with a "sense of utter reality." Marshall Frady described the experience of reading Faulkner as "turning to find oneself looking full into the face of the sun.... Faulkner is an experience that a lot of Southern boys spend the rest of their lives trying to recover from." Southern girls, too. Flannery O'Connor wrote, "The presence alone of Faulkner in our midst makes a great difference in what the writer can and cannot permit himself to do. Nobody wants his mule and wagon stalled on the same track the Dixie Limited is roaring down." | |
| What is it about Faulkner that so arouses writers, chafes and teases critics (some 1,300 books have been written about him), and moves even casual readers to love or hate his work? Toward what betterment can his ferocious imagination tempt us, and how is it that thirty-eight years after his death and almost fifty years after he won the Nobel Prize for Literature, he is more than ever a writer for today?When Faulkner's disturbing novels surfaced in the 1930s, he was considered dark and extreme. Nowadays the dark and extreme world he portrayed is commonplace. E. M. Forster wrote that a prophetic author raises "human love and hatred to such a power that their normal receptacles no longer contain them." By such expansion and amplification the prophetic Faulkner took his "little postage stamp of native soil" -- Oxford, Mississippi -- and turned it into a mirror of the modern age. Faulkner's native soil has today been commandeered by upscale boutiques and shopping malls, but in his youth Oxford, a university town in the hill country of Lafayette County, seventy miles southeast of Memphis, Tennessee, was a village of unpaved streets with a population of about 1,500. If you stepped off the town square, you were in the woods. Faulkner played and later hunted in those woods, attended local schools, worked as an apprentice in his father's livery store and as a bookkeeper in his grandfather's bank. He joined the Royal Air Force in Canada during World War I. After the war he returned to Oxford, where he studied at the University of Mississippi, wrote poems, and worked as a carpenter and a house painter (swinging out precariously from ropes, friends recall, when he painted the steeple of the university's geology building). When a friend got him a job as a clerk at the Doubleday book shop in New York, for $11 a week, Faulkner went north, delighted to be a vagabond. "Hell," said his uncle, an Oxford judge, "he ain't ever going to amount to a damn -- not a damn." At first the twenty-four-year-old Faulkner was a good book salesman who charmed his customers; soon, however, he was advising them not to read the "trash" they had selected. Unhappy with the job, he returned to Oxford, where he was offered a place as fourth-class postmaster at the University of Mississippi, at a salary of $1,500 a year. He failed at this, too: he was forced to resign for throwing away mail, failing to deliver holiday hams on time (they spoiled), keeping magazines until he'd read them, or closing down the post office early to drive out in his yellow Model T Ford for a round of golf. Relieved of his postmaster job, Faulkner made his way to New Orleans, where in time he was introduced to Sherwood Anderson, who warned him, "You've got too much talent. You can do it too easy, in too many different ways. If you're not careful, you'll never write anything." Anderson, a writer of poetry, essays, short-story collections (Winesburg, Ohio), and novels (Dark Laughter), encouraged Faulkner to try his hand at fiction. Faulkner moved into Anderson's apartment on the Vieux Carré. There he wrote sketches for the Times-Picayune and labored at his fiction. Visitors to Anderson's apartment were impressed by Faulkner's "beautiful manners, his soft speech, his controlled intensity, and his astonishing capacity for hard drink." When Faulkner produced his first novel, Soldiers' Pay(1926), Anderson arranged to have the book published, after which Faulkner left New Orleans on a freighter bound for Italy. He tramped through Europe for six months, eventually returning to Oxford. Soldiers' Pay was printed and it would soon be forgotten. He was twenty-eight, and about as unemployable as a man could be. But he was working on two novels, Sartoris (1929) andThe Sound and the Fury (1929), that would transform him as an artist, and American literature with him. The Sound and the Fury would give him his language and his sense of time; Sartoris would give him his terrain. The Sound and the Fury is the story of the dissolution of an old southern family told from multiple points of view, its characters drifting through layers of time. It was the beginning of the Faulkner of simultaneity, the creator of characters captured by unclear divisions between remembered time and present time. It was, too, the beginning of the Faulknerian obsessions: pride, lust, incest, greed, violence, endurance. And it was the beginning of a devotion to the craft of writing that would sustain the novelist through rejection, misinterpretation, and poverty.The Sound and the Fury taught Faulkner to approach language "with a kind of alert respect, as you approach dynamite," and it taught him to write for the sake of writing itself: "One day it suddenly seemed as if a door had clamped silently and forever ... between me and all publishers' addresses and book lists. I said to myself, Now I can write." Sartoris was the first of Faulkner's interconnecting novels about life in a fictional Mississippi county he called Yoknapatawpha and its central town, Jefferson. Yoknapatawpha, pronounced Yak-nuh-pa-TAH-fah or Yat-nuh-pa-TAH-fah and, Faulkner said, meaning "water runs slow through flat land," embodied a South once ruled by baron planters, aristocrats like the Sartoris clan. They had developed a society and an economy based on territory stolen from the Indians and on slavery, which put a curse upon the land. The baron planters lived by principles that led them into secession and civil war, and lost them everything. When the war was over, they tried to restore their way of life, but carpetbaggers, landless whites, and the collapse of the slave-based economic system made that impossible. Faulkner's post-Civil War South was populated by Snopeses, unscrupulous, materialistic self-seekers with a disregard for the worthy values of the Old South -- politeness, family ties, honor, love of the land. The result was moral confusion and social decay, with the old families adrift in the past, rendered impotent, and with the Snopeses made hard by ambition and knee-deep in corruption. Yoknapatawpha supplied Faulkner's novels with a big canvas on which to explore what he called the human heart's "driving complexity," and made of his South a universal setting.  URING some twenty years with the Oxford Eagle(eventually as its owner and editor), Nina Goolsby had occasion to see William Faulkner, whom she felt was "a beautiful man, soft-spoken, never in a hurry, kind and considerate." Nina's husband, J.C., was the service manager of the East Motor Company Garage, where he repaired Faulkner's Ford. Faulkner was not a reliable customer. "He ran up a bill," Nina told me when I visited Oxford some years ago. "Around fifteen hundred dollars' worth. And J.C. had to go on up to his home and try to get paid on the car. He ran up a pile of bills down at Neilson's department store, too, and at McCall's sporting goods. He wrote on one of them, 'I can't pay this now but someday this signature'll be worth more than I owe you.' He was right, but nobody would have dreamed it at the time. People around here didn't know what a Nobel Prize was until he won it."Faulkner, Nina told me, came down to the Eagle office some afternoons and watched the children exit the Oxford Grammar School, across the street. "No notes," she remembered, "just watching those children." Faulkner, it is said, related better to children (and horses) than to adults. And he often used children he observed as characters in his stories. The innocent child character Benjy, in The Sound and the Fury, is thought to have been modeled on a mentally retarded boy who lived nearby. "Watch people," Faulkner advised young writers, "never judge ... watch what they do, without intolerance ... learn." But this took a particular kind of sight.  ENNESSEE Williams said of an encounter with Faulkner, "He looked slowly up, and his eyes were so incredibly sad that I, being a somewhat emotional person, began to cry uncontrollably. I have never seen such sad eyes on a human face." A friend of Faulkner's described the novelist's eyes as burning "through the flesh and bone of everybody in front of him, seeing clearly down into the ultimate emptiness that is in most of us."People who went to grammar school with Faulkner remember that he stood around during recess and lunch hour watching the other kids play. "He would stand for long periods of time and just concentrate without saying anything to anyone," a former classmate recalls. Faulkner employed this talent for survey and detection to create, and store for later use, scenes -- glimpses, really -- of a powerfully evocative nature, which he often used as openings to his novels. The Sound and the Fury "began with a mental picture," Faulkner wrote in an introduction to the novel, "of the muddy seat of a little girl's drawers in a pear tree, where she could see through a window where her grandmother's funeral was taking place and report what was happening to her brothers on the ground below." He explained, "There's always a moment, an incident ... I work away from it, finding out how people act after that moment." Faulkner was a master at presenting a common incident with an uncommon image, and this -- along with the publication of his powerful sixth novel, Sanctuary -- accounts for Hollywood's interest in him. Faulkner was invited out to Hollywood to write for the screen, but he was so broke he asked to borrow five dollars from his uncle in order to wire Hollywood that he would come. He worked on dialogue and scenes for The Big Sleep, To Have and Have Not, and other movies. Hollywood wasn't exactly a fit for Faulkner. "I've got an idea for Mickey Mouse," he told his boss, and he once asked Clark Gable what he did for a living. When he turned in his first scene for The Big Sleep, it was two pages long, single-spaced, for one character to speak. "Impossible," Lauren Bacall later remarked, "totally impossible on the screen.... Howard [Hawks] kind of chuckled, and Bogey kind of chuckled." Faulkner, rumors were, once asked his producer if he could work at home. The producer agreed. A few weeks went by with no word from Faulkner. He had checked out of his hotel. For Faulkner, home was Mississippi. On average, a movie consists of 132 scenes. A skilled filmmaker carefully selects scenes that will invite the viewer into the role of collaborator to complete the story. Film addresses the viewer's eye -- the way the eye supplies what isn't in the story. But writing is about the writer's eye -- the way it supplies what is in the story. Faulkner's eye saw life as a river running in the dark, and he felt that the best he could do was shine a light on its veering surface. Faulkner held the light unflinchingly until the "complex and troubled hearts" carried along by the river revealed that there was "no such thing as was ... no such thing aswill be." Consequently, life "must be before itself" while "in advance of itself." The novelist's job -- the one Faulkner designed for himself -- was to "arrest motion," to capture time in an "inconclusive and inconcludable" sentence, one in which "human experience" is "reduced to literature." This was impossible, he knew, but he was compelled to try it anyway. It was his ambition to put everything into one sentence -- "not only the present but the whole past on which it depends and which keeps overtaking the present second by second." Thus, famously, in his 1942 story "The Bear," Faulkner conceived an 1,800-word sentence. But there was peril in such floods of language: that they could turn swiftly to "talk, talk, talk: the utter and heartbreaking stupidity of words." Or it could, as Faulkner thought it did in the work of James Joyce, consume a writer in the "divine fire" of his own talent out of control. The language had to rise naturally from the thoughts and actions of characters who suffer, usually by their own hand, but suffer for the sake of, and in the rectifying light of, a universal conscience that intrudes on the present and sustains, for better or worse, human nobility. To accomplish this task Faulkner entered so deeply into his characters that he passed through them, leaving them bare for absorption by the reader. The monk and writer Thomas Merton said of Faulkner's characters that as they become "worthy by suffering," the reader realizes "That's me" -- realizes it because he remembers it. What kind of memory is this? One that "believes before knowing remembers," Faulkner wrote inLight in August. "Believes longer than recollects, longer than knowing even wonders." Not memory as we think of it -- a data bank -- but what Merton called a wisdom not our own. Not selective recall but the sense of union with which we enter the world and with which, perhaps, we'll leave it. How a self-taught and compulsive experimenter with words who lived in a backwater southern town in the 1930s could become the century's herald of such mysteries is a mystery in itself. Faulkner himself regarded his gift as both a curse and a blessing. He had "discovered," he wrote, "that my doom, my fate, was to keep on writing the books." He agreed to that fate because he realized that he had to get the books written while "the demon" that drove him still considered him "worthy of, or deserving of, the anguish of being driven."  AULKNER was a high school dropout who dabbled in college courses at the University of Mississippi. He was given a D in English there, and a university literary society rejected him for membership. Even after he began to write in earnest, delivering brooding, complex, and shocking stories and novels, he remained no more interested in the literary locals than they were in him. Not until 1947, when Faulkner was nearing fifty, did the university invite him to give a series of lectures to creative-writing students. He agreed, but asked that no faculty members be present. When some faculty members arrived to chat after one of the lectures, Faulkner said, "Gentlemen, I have a cow to let out of the pasture," and left. A few years later the university voted against awarding him an honorary degree. It reconsidered when he received the Nobel Prize, but never got around to actually awarding it.So Faulkner worked without a literary community, without support, even without a dictionary. He often made up words as he went along -- joining unassociated ones, eliminating apostrophes, changing nouns into verbs and verbs into nouns. If he had to know a word, he'd go down to the Gathright-Reed drugstore, on the town square, and ask the proprietor, Mac Reed, to look up the word for him in the dictionary that Reed kept at the store. Sometimes Faulkner would approach children, saying, "I'm looking for a word. It means the same as 'running fast' but I don't want to use 'running fast.'" He taught himself what to do with words outside the confines of formal education, because inside them he could learn only what not to do with words. If he wanted to create characters who "stood up on their hind legs and cast a shadow," he wasn't going to do it in a setting where writing was a device for measuring task-worthiness. He learned literature in isolation. Some say his isolation begat the unique writing he produced. That's true, but it is also true that his independence, inventiveness, and creative gifts were prodigious. And he read. Without apparent cohesion or direction, he read the Old Testament, Dickens, Shakespeare, Cervantes, Flaubert, Tolstoy, Balzac, Joyce, Melville, Spenser, Homer, Swinburne, Shelley, Keats, Housman, Conrad. Faulkner learned especially from Conrad, though what he learned he made uniquely his own. Like the protagonist of Conrad's Lord Jim, Faulkner's characters violate the rules of decency and honor. Like Jim, many of them are deluded and disgraced; many are obsessed with notions about naming or claiming something in this life, and are shattered when fate overtakes them. In their uncertainty, unpredictability, violence, and narcissism, his characters struggle with what Faulkner called "the old verities and truths of the heart ... love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice." Without such a struggle, Faulkner believed, one is divorced from the "edifice on which the whole history of man has been founded" and by means of which "as a race he has endured." As such, one is dangerous to the American ideal: "That's what I am talking about: responsibility," Faulkner remarked in a speech to his fellow Mississippians, "not just the right, but the duty of man to be responsible ... if he wishes to remain free ... responsible for the consequences of his own acts.... lacking which, freedom and liberty and independence cannot even exist."
OTEE Daniels, who was Faulkner's bootlegger, never read any of his customer's books. "Hell," Daniels told me during one of my visits to Oxford, "you can't eat a book. Faulkner liked to starve from writing. We all thought him a damn fool here. He's worth more now that he's dead than when he was alive."
Chester McLarty, who was Faulkner's physician, told me that most people in Oxford didn't understand Faulkner's books, didn't agree with them, or didn't read them. "You see," McLarty said, "people in Oxford never figured out William. Sometimes he spoke, most times not. And country folk set great store in speaking on the street."
For Faulkner, speaking on the street, or at all, depended on whether he was in Yoknapatawpha County, which he invented, or Lafayette County, where he lived; in Jefferson, his fictional town, or in Oxford, the real town it represented. He lived in the world of Yoknapatawpha during the creation of seventeen interconnecting books, whose settings ranged from the days of the Indians to World War II and beyond. Faulkner went so deep into that world that he had trouble leaving it. Often he had to drink himself out. And going into that world cost him in other ways. Most of the time he couldn't pay his grocery bill, and the grocer, among other local businessmen, was forever sending somebody out to his house to hunt him down. Faulkner was used to this, and to other unannounced visitors, so when one drove up the driveway, he began sweeping it like a workhand.
"Where's Faulkner?" the visitor would inquire.
And Faulkner, in overalls and a straw hat, head down, following the swish and swoop of his broom along the driveway, would answer, "Ain't seen 'im. Been here sweepin' all day an' I ain't seen 'im a-tall."
Faulkner was regarded by his fellow townsmen as "Count No Count," a man often overdrawn at the bank and often in debt (the local sporting-goods store refused his check for three dollars), regarded as a man who wrote books all but one of which were by 1944 out of print in his own country. When, after as long a stretch of writing as twelve hours, Faulkner walked to town for his mail, his Borkum-Edgeworth tobacco, and a copy of the Memphis Commercial Appeal, he was reckoned a loser, a drunk, a man self-absorbed to the point of haughtiness, who failed to perform the most minor courtesies -- a nod or a "Good afternoon." And those books he had written -- they were inspired by stories common to the region, stories Daddy had told by firelight in the cool of winter. And here Faulkner had gone and exposed those stories to outsiders, exposed Oxford in his mythical Yoknapatawpha, his mythical Jefferson -- "publicized their lives," one resident put it. Worse, he'd made of the South, of southerners, made of his own, a scandalous, fallacious portrait. And as if that weren't enough, on his small and unsuccessful farm he provided food for Negro families and the right to profit from the land they worked.
Chester McLarty told me, "See, Bill was a shy man. A great man can be shy. But he was peculiar, eccentric -- went to a lot of trouble to be eccentric. Now, you get a pot boiling here, like the kind Bill Faulkner was heating up with his books, and the town is going to take offense."
The writer Elizabeth Spencer described Faulkner as "one of us," yet one
exposing us to people elsewhere with story after story, drawn from the South's own private skeleton closet ... the hushed-up family secret, the nice girl who wound up in the Memphis whorehouse, the suicides, the idiot brother kept at home, the miserable poverty and ignorance of the poor whites ... the revenge shootings, the occasional lynchings, the real life of the blacks. What was this man trying to do?
He was trying to do his "duty." In his Nobel speech Faulkner made clear his belief that the writer's obligation was to help man "endure by lifting his heart, by reminding him of the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of his past." Anything less than this was no reason to write. And there was plenty of writing without reason around. "The young man or woman writing today," Faulkner said in that speech, "has forgotten the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about.... He [the writer] must teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid ... leaving no room in his workshop for anything but the old verities and truths of the heart ... lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed.
... 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.... His griefs grieve on no universal bones, leaving no scars. He writes not of the heart but of the glands." AULKNER liked sausage and biscuits, country-cured ham, "tubfuls" of turnip greens, fried cornmeal with butter and molasses -- and collards and coon, too. He liked to hunt raccoons (and also frogs and water moccasins) with a .22 rifle. He'd go out into Big Woods at night, alone, with his compass and his gun. Or he'd ride the river in a boat and shoot raccoons while they fed on clams. For breakfast Faulkner liked fruit, eggs, and broiled steak. He'd rise early, eat his hearty breakfast, and drink great quantities of coffee; then he'd gather his tobacco and pipe and go to his writing room, with its big windows and its hearth, where he would remove the doorknob and carry it inside with him. There he wrote by hand on large sheets of paper that had ample margins for revisions. When he had what he wanted, he typed it with two fingers on an old Underwood portable. It is remarkable that he produced so much material by this method. In a mere four years he published Sartoris, The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying (1930), Sanctuary (1931), and Light in August(1932). It is remarkable, too, that he produced what he did without either much success or literary support, writing for nearly eleven years with little recognition or money. How was this possible?
By "writing the books for the sake of writing the books." When he was broke, when nearly all his novels were out of print, when he was down, doubtful, he kept on writing. Not, he confessed, "for any exterior or ulterior purpose." It was his ambition, he avowed, "to be, as a private individual, abolished and voided from history, leaving it markless, no refuse save the printed books.... that the sum and history of my life, which in the same sentence is my obit and epitaph too, shall be them both: He made the books and he died."
 NCE, at a dinner party Faulkner was attending, a polite man pulled a dining chair out for one of the women, who, talking with another guest, was unaware that he had done so. She fell to the floor, surprised and chagrined. Faulkner sat down on the floor with her. The gesture -- noble, tender, humane -- was much in character. Faulkner could not abide harm or diminishment. He preferred to get down on the floor with the fallen. That's where he found his muse.
The fallen South of Faulkner's fiction is, Chester McLarty assured me, an accurate picture, though McLarty never heard of anybody's getting raped with a corncob, as happens in Sanctuary. A scathing depiction of dehumanized modern man, Sanctuary sold more copies in three weeks than The Sound and the Fury sold in two years. Sanctuary was intended to shock readers, and it succeeded. Upon reading the manuscript, Faulkner's publisher remarked, "Good God, I can't publish this. We'd both be in jail."
Ads for Sanctuary described it as "a mosaic of furious evil, of cold brutality, of human viciousness and human hopelessness." George Raft, a veteran actor in gangster roles, declined a part in the movie on the grounds that it would mean "professional suicide." Critics were divided. One called Sanctuary a work of "prodigious genius"; another called it a "devastating, inhuman monstrosity." The New York Times reviewed the book in a piece titled "Dostoevsky's Shadow in the Deep South." A few months after the review, when Bennett Cerf, at Random House, asked Faulkner to contribute Sanctuary to The Modern Library series, Faulkner asked Cerf to "send me what Dostoyefsky [sic] you have in the list ... I will appreciate it very much. I have seen several reviews of my books in which a Dostoyefsky influence was found. I have never read Dostoyefsky, and so I would like to see the animal."
Sanctuary was the talk of Oxford, and although few of Faulkner's townsmen bought his books, the ones who did sent their servants down to Mac Reed's drugstore for copies, or had them wrapped in plain paper before they left the store. In the story a college student, Temple Drake, a tease and a troublemaker, is raped with a corncob by an impotent gangster. Nine murders are mentioned, along with voyeurism, incest, and sadism. Faulkner wroteSanctuary after having "made a thorough and methodical study of everything on the list of best-sellers. When I thought I knew what the public wanted," he said, "I decided to give them a little more than they had been getting."
That decision set the tone for much of what Faulkner wrote from then on. In fact, one friend remarked that Faulkner was writing Sanctuary over and over again. If so, it was because he was seeing the story over and over again -- a story of violence, corruption, obsession, abuse. "Billy looks around him," Faulkner's mother once said of him, "and he is heartsick at what he sees." In effect, what Faulkner decided to give the public, the public was already giving him.
The origins of Sanctuary are two stories Faulkner had heard, one about an impotent gangster named Popeye Pumphrey who had raped a woman with a freakish device and held her hostage in a Memphis bordello. The other was about a popular University of Mississippi coed who, while traveling by train to an out-of-town ball game, left the train and was sexually defiled. Faulkner pieced in other characters and plot lines, and conjoined the whole. He tried more than a hundred pages at different places in the story, and tried sixteen of twenty-seven chapters in different arrangements. When the galleys arrived, Faulkner still felt the book was "cheaply approached" and "badly written." So he tore it apart again. What had started out as a potboiler became a haunting meditation on the nature of evil.
"It's horrible," Faulkner's wife told him. "It's meant to be," he replied. He was convinced that the novel mirrored society -- a society under "the power of darkness," as one critic put it. In an introduction to The Sound and the Fury,Faulkner called on southern writers not "to draw a savage indictment of the contemporary scene or to escape from it into a make-believe region of swords and magnolias and mockingbirds" but to speak of modern life with "that cold intellect which can write with calm and complete detachment." In Sanctuary he was able to do just that.
ANCTUARY put Faulkner on the map. It didn't make him a household name, but the book made a buzz in the publishing industry, and it got Hollywood's attention. The money he made in Hollywood allowed him to make repairs on the four acres and the much-neglected 1840s colonial house he had bought for $6,000 (nothing down, $75 a month). Nevertheless, he brooded on the nature and the origins of Sanctuary, as he had some years earlier when he began writing what would become the novel's ending. Back then (1925) he had wondered, "Did that ugly ratty-looking face, that mixture of childishness and unreliability and sublime vanity, imagine that? But I did.... I listen to the voices, and when I put down what the voices say, it's right. Sometimes I don't like what the voices say, but I don't change it."
Faulkner was hardly alone in his uneasiness about what the voices had told him to say. For decades after its publication Sanctuary was considered trashy and extreme. Lately, though, critical opinion has shifted, as the world has. Sanctuary reads today like realism rather than Southern gothic, which is why, perhaps, some critics are re-evaluating it, placing it among Faulkner's greatest works.
"From beyond the screen of bushes which surrounded the spring," the novel begins, "Popeye watched the man drinking.... the drinking man leaned his face to the broken and myriad reflection of his own drinking. When he rose up he saw among them the shattered reflection of Popeye's straw hat, though he had heard no sound." This is classic Faulkner -- an image captured as if on film, and packed with the menacing and the tranquil: with the tension between the soundlessness of Popeye's presence and the bubbling water, between sunlight broken by the foliage of cypress, gum, and beech trees and Popeye's face, "a queer, bloodless color, as though seen by electric light."
The two men face each other, the stream between them -- an image that echoes throughout Sanctuary. Everyone in the novel faces someone else across a stream of some kind. Popeye is cold, sadistic, and murderous, his violence a manifestation of his impotence; the other man, Horace Benbow, is charitable, benign, principled, even respectable -- and these are manifestations of his impotence, though he knows it. "You see," says Benbow, a lawyer, a man on the run from a marriage, a man sexually drawn to his sister and young stepdaughter, "I lack courage: that was left out of me. The machinery is all here, but it wont run."
Popeye squats, facing the kneeling Benbow across the stream. Something in Popeye's coat pocket sags "compactly against his flank." It is a pistol. Faulkner tells us that the pistol is like a body part. You can "feel it on him."
"Look here," Benbow says. "My name is Horace Benbow.... You cant keep me here like this.... Suppose I break and run."
Popeye peers at Benbow, the features of his face intermittently disappearing, "like the face of a wax doll set too near a hot fire." He peers with "vicious cringing," through eyes like "two knobs of soft black rubber." His face has the "depthless quality of stamped tin."
The two men leave the stream and walk, Popeye with a silent, menacing power over Benbow, for Popeye never draws the pistol. The men arrive at a broken-down antebellum plantation house, where a man named Lee Goodwin and his woman, Ruby Lamar, assisted by Popeye, a feeble-minded man named Tommy, an old man both blind and deaf, and two gangsters, run a bootlegging operation. Ruby, who once whored to get Goodwin freed from prison, keeps a listless, sickly baby in a box near the kitchen stove.
No small challenge to humanize these hard cases, but Faulkner did so. Not, however, before he had his say about them. And it is not a pretty say.
Temple Drake and her companion, Gowan Stevens, potential lovers on their way to a college ball game and a party weekend, head for the old plantation house to buy booze. On the way Gowan, who is drunk, crashes into a tree that Popeye has felled in order to block the road. At the house Temple stops, sensing evil. (In Light in August,Faulkner wrote of the female's "spontaneous comprehension of evil.") "I dont want to go there," she says, but she goes anyway, exploring the house with a hysteria so complete that the reader is overwhelmed by her duality -- her resistance to and infatuation with the depravity she intuits.
When Temple meets Popeye, she, like Horace Benbow at the stream, instantly senses his menace. Popeye is always "lurking," his presence a "black and nameless threat." He is deviated nature, the balance and interaction of its opposites mutant, combined. Faulkner created a character both ice and fire, inert and combustible. Sensing Popeye's nearness, Temple runs in panic; then she whirls, stops, runs again, but returns to the house. She will be delivered to Popeye on the momentum of her alienation, obstinacy, and rebellion.
Before Temple is raped, Ruby Lamar warns her to leave the plantation house, but she won't go. "Something is going to happen to me," Temple says. But she says it to the old man who is blind and deaf. When Tommy tries to protect Temple, Popeye kills him. With Tommy out of the way, Popeye rapes Temple with the corncob. Later he imprisons her in a brothel, where he brings a gangster to have sex with her so that he, Popeye, can watch. Temple tells Popeye that the gangster is a real man. Popeye then kills the gangster. Temple's defiance and Popeye's evil are extensions of each other. Connected by the victimizations of their pasts, which assign them the familiar roles of victim and victimizer, they perform their parts with unconscious and escalating precision.
In Sanctuary, Faulkner captured the mind of the modern sociopath long before his deeds -- a form of relationship to the community -- became the awful stuff of the eleven-o'clock news. Faulkner saw in the perverse relations between Popeye and Temple a twisted substitute for connection in the modern world, a world in which everyone was hostage to someone or something: hostage jobs, marriages, religions; hostage notions about race and gender, self and wealth, prerogative and power; social and sexual hostages; child hostages in homes or communities; but mostly people held hostage by the past, individual and cultural, their behavior determined by both, creating new hostages with new pasts that hold both them and others captive. Faulkner meant Sanctuary as a metaphor not just for the South but for the American century during which he lived. He saw a crippled, unjust, morally and communally corrupt society, sexually confused and obsessed, as cool and cut off as its cold machines. In such a society everyone is on the verge of violence -- and this was something he knew a lot about.
N 1849 Faulkner's great-grandfather, Colonel William Clark Falkner (who dropped the u), was attacked by a man named Robert Hindman. Refused membership in the local chapter of the Knights of Temperance, Hindman believed that the colonel was responsible, and pulled a revolver on him. There was a struggle, the revolver misfired, and Falkner killed Hindman with a bowie knife.
Some called it murder. The jury called it self-defense. Two years later Falkner was confronted by a friend of Hindman's, Erasmus Morris. The colonel shot and killed Morris, and was again acquitted.
Forty years later Falkner was killed by Richard Thurmond, a disgruntled former partner in his railroad business. Passing by Thurmond's office, the colonel stopped and, some say, peered through Thurmond's window, and reached into his pocket. Thurmond didn't wait to find out why. He fired his .44 point-blank.
Faulkner's father, Murry, embroiled in a set-to between a girl of his liking and a seamstress named Mollie Walker, was shot and nearly killed by Mollie's brother Elias, a gambler and a grocer. While Murry sat on a stool at a drugstore fountain, Elias blew a hole in his back with a twelve-gauge shotgun. Then, while Murry was on the floor, Elias shot him in the mouth with a pistol. Murry's father found Elias hiding in the local hardware store. He pulled his revolver, stuck it in Elias's belly, and fired six times. But it misfired every time. Elias pulled his own gun and shot Faulkner's grandfather in the hand.
Hair-trigger violence like this, though not limited to the South, has been its signature. Southerners, Marshall Frady wrote, tend to "believe with their blood," a manner of reasoning that Faulkner used well in many of his novels, stacking up one violent act after another to convey the intensity that linked them -- an intensity that people substitute for communication, for community. Sanctuarytransmits just such an intensity. Everyone is on the verge of violence because everyone is trapped in personal history in the form of fear or ferocious indifference, cynical realism (another form of indifference) or manipulative, self-serving respectability. No one creates, nothing is fertile, everything is consumed.
Yet the nature of evil in this story is subtler than the sum of its violence and perversion. The corruption of Faulkner's characters in Sanctuary is so unconscious, so automatic, so complete in itself, that it has about it a tragic innocence, as if the characters were simply standing too close to the fire and got sucked into the flames. Faulkner's point, Ithink, is that evil exists not by will but by possession. Therefore, something greater than evil allows it a brief blossoming and then snatches it away, leaving the characters not blameless or harmless but destroyed, and in the very destruction, humanized. Of his characters Faulkner remarked, "That they go down doesn't matter ... the pity is in the human striving against its own nature, against its own conscience."
N 1958 Faulkner, as writer in residence at the University of Virginia, fielded questions from members of the Department of Psychiatry. The exchange, collected in a book called Faulkner in the University, begins this way: "Mr. Faulkner, could you say a few words about what you might consider ... irrational human behavior?"A: No, I couldn't.... all human behavior is unpredictable and, considering man's frailty ... and ... the ramshackle universe he functions in, it's ... all irrational....Q: You don't have any idea of [where you learned psychology]? N one of my visits to Faulkner's Mississippi hill country, I was out driving under dark, humid, weather-threatened skies. I passed tumbledown cabins and neglected houses, broken-down cotton gins, decomposing tractors, crumbling Cadillacs, punctured sofas divested of stuffing on sagging porches. Faulkner country: whites and blacks clustered around shacks with leaning chimneys, girdled by woods, by bottomland barely ahead of the menacing kudzu vines ghosting in the trees.
As I drove, I recalled something Chester McLarty had said to me: he had spent seventeen years traveling throughout the world, and had discovered that most people, when they found out he was from Mississippi, identified the state with Elvis Presley. "I've hardly ever heard of anyone [who] ever heard of Faulkner," McLarty observed, "and he's had more study than any writer except Shakespeare. But we're a popular culture. Anyone in the world will bore you to death talking about Elvis Presley."
I drove on and then stopped the car on an empty red-clay road and read a comment by Robert Penn Warren from the text of an educational-television documentary on Faulkner.
"I don't know why a person should read anything.... I mean maybe we're doomed to a world where nobody will read.... Maybe we're doomed to be animals and go back to the caves. I think a person who wants to be human should read Faulkner. Now, if you're satisfied with your degree of humanity and your understanding of human nature, don't read him. But if you have any discontent or any aspiration to be more human than you are, read him."
A chain saw caught hold somewhere and fired itself up, sending blue smoke and a language all its own from the thickets and trees. I shut the car window as the machine ground into something back there in Faulkner's woods, hooting and wailing and shrieking as it ran.
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