Yair (and No)

(The Faulkner Project) Pylon from Faulkner Novels 1930-1935 pp. 775-992.  Library of America.  ****

Years after the fact, Faulkner told a class at the University of Virginia that he wrote Pylon because Absalom, Absalom! had become “inchoate” and he needed to take a break from it.  Only William Faulkner would take a break from writing a novel by writing another novel.  He wrote the book at furious speed, beginning in October of 1934 and finishing it by December 15^th, though he did a lot of revising in galleys.  The novel was published the following March (those were the days), and he took up Absalom, Absalom! again.  Faulkner was in the midst of his most frantically creative period (from 1926-1936 he wrote nine novels, four of them masterpieces).

Pylon also moves at breakneck speed (while Absalom, Absalom! moves like pouring molasses; nothing occurs but that several people have to comment on it with the most complicated vocabulary and rhetoric possible).  Again, like everything Faulkner wrote during this period, it seems completely different from everything else, so you’re thinking, the same guy wrote this who wrote [insert title here]?  And though it’s a fairly straightforward narrative, about some rather bizarre people, every now and then Faulkner the rhetorician comes  barging in, as if he just can’t help himself.  For instance:

“And here also the cryptic shieldcaught (i n r i) loops of bunting giving an appearance temporary and tentlike to the interminable long corridor of machine plush and gilded synthetic plaster running between anonymous and rentable spaces or alcoves from sunrise to sunset across America, between the nameless faience womanface behind the phallic ranks of cigars and the stuffed chairs sentineled each by its spitooon and potted palm;–the congruous stripe of Turkeyred beneath the recentgleamed and homesless shoes running, on into an interval of implacable circumspection: a silent and discreet inference of lysol and a bath—billboard stage and vehicle for what in the old lusty days called themselves drummers: among the brass spittoons of elegance and the potted palms of decorum, legion homeless and symbolic: the immemorial flying buttresses of ten million American Saturday nights, with shrewd heads filled with tomorrow’s cosmic alterations n the firm of pricelists and the telephone numbers of discontented wives and highschool girls.”

Whew.

The novel tells the story of barnstorming airplane pilots at a Mardi Gras competition in New Orleans at roughly the time he was writing (he mentions that Prohibition is over, so now it’s legal to drink.  Not that Prohibition seemed to slow anybody down).  There’s a small cluster of characters: a pilot, a parachute jumper, a woman involved with both of these men (shocking stuff in 1934), a child who may be the son of either man, a reporter fascinated by the whole situation (and halfway in love with the woman himself) and a mechanic named Jiggs.  Jiggs is the first one who answers in the affirmative with the strange locution Yair.  From then on in the novel, everyone uses the same word.  Is it something about New Orleans, or Mardi Gras, or pilots, or 1934?  I’ll never know.

Flying was not an idle interest for Faulkner.  He began to take lessons early in 1933 (and traveled to New Orleans to work on a film script set there).  He bought a biplane in the fall, and arranged to have his teacher train his brother Dean as well.  By 1934 he traveled to New Orleans and participated in an airshow with his teacher and his brother, entitled “William Faulkner’s (Famous Author) Air Circus.”  He continued flying now and then, but sold the biplane to Dean.  In November of 1935, Dean was killed when the plane crashed.  Dean’s wife was pregnant, and Faulkner took financial responsibility for her.  Faulkner’s mother was depressed to the point of being suicidal.

One can only imagine the guilt that Faulkner felt.

Pylon is not autobiographical (though it’s startling how it portrays events that came close to actually happening).  The characters in this novel are barnstorming low lifes, leading as hand-to-mouth an existence as anyone in all of Faulkner.  We’re close to Bukowski territory here.  They literally don’t know where they’re going to stay on any given night, or where their next meal is coming from.  At the end of the novel Faulkner writes a chapter which supposedly explains their motivation, why the pilot was so interested in a good payday, to the point that he was willing to risk flying two airplanes that had serious structural defects, but these people lived this way because they wanted to, risked life and limb every day because they enjoyed it, and there was an element of that in Faulkner himself, all his life.  He was still jumping horses toward the end of his life, when he had numerous health problems and had no business doing so.  He fell off a horse just a couple of weeks before he died.

I keep talking about all the drinking in Faulkner, and there’s heavy drinking in all of his books, but this is the first time he portrayed a down and out alcoholic, the mechanic Jiggs, who opens the novel by buying a pair of boots out of a New Orleans store window even though he doesn’t have the money for them (he puts down two bucks and later makes the final payment by stealing from his boss’ prize money) and doesn’t know what size they are (he winds up wearing them over his tennis shoes).  He must be a good mechanic, because he’s a dreadfully undependable human being; it’s because he was sneaking off to get a drink that the pilot’s first plane became unusable, because Jiggs didn’t change the valves as he said he was going to.  And though Faulkner said in public that his own excessive drinking, and huge binge drinking, was a perfectly healthy impulse (I remember reading that somewhere, though I can hardly believe it as I type it), this novel is in part the story of an alcoholic, and of the nature of addiction in general.  Here is Jiggs contemplating a morning drink.

“He could have heard sounds, even voices, from the alley beneath the window if he had been listening.  But he was not.  All he heard now was that thunderous silence and solitude in which man’s spirit crosses the eternal repetitive rubicon of his vice in the instant after the terror and before the triumph becomes dismay—the moral and spiritual waif shrieking his feeble I-am-I into the desert of chance and disaster.  He raised the jug; his hot bright eyes watched the sticky glass run almost half full; he gulped it, raw, scooping blindly the stale and trashladen water from the dishpan and gulping that too.”

You know you’re an alcoholic when you use dishpan water as a chaser.

Maybe that’s what the whole novel is about.  These men and women are addicted to this life in the same way Jiggs is addicted to booze, in the same way the reporter is addicted to stories (though he too has a serious alcohol problem).  It’s a strange little novel about a group of people Faulkner would never come back to again, in a city which he apparently enjoyed, though he clearly saw its excesses.  In a way it’s a trifle, a 200-page diversion before he got back to the important novel he was writing, in which he would give free rein to the rhetoric once and for all and create a defining myth for the South.  He needed time to let that settle.  In the meantime, he wrote this scorching novel about people who throw their lives away because they’re addicted to danger and excitement.