Living for Love

(The Faulkner Project) If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem from Faulkner Novels 1936-1940.  Library of America.  ****

Somewhat to my surprise, this is my least favorite of all the novels I’ve reread in the Faulkner Project.[1]  I had read it only once, and I think I was still in college, because I remember telling a friend about it, that Faulkner had written a novel in which he told two completely unrelated stories, alternating chapters.  (That novel was entitled The Wild Palms, which was also the title of the first of the two stories.  The Library of America has restored Faulkner’s original title, which had been overruled by his publisher.)  My friend said, “I think he’s just like the Beatles.  He did whatever he wanted.  He didn’t care what people thought.”  A true Sixties response.  At the time I thought the novel was great, though there was a lot I didn’t understand.  Weird, but great.

Faulkner said he wrote this novel to get over a broken heart, and the editors of the LOA volume speculate that he wrote it in reaction to his affair with Meta Carpenter, Howard Hawks’ secretary when Faulkner was working on Paths of Glory.  She broke up with Faulkner because she was getting married, but within a few years got divorced and took up with him again.  Their intermittent affair lasted some fifteen years.  In the Sixties we knew nothing about Meta Carpenter, and didn’t learn much more when Joseph Blotner published his massive two-volume biography in the seventies, barely mentioning her.  Faulkner’s widow and daughter were still alive when Blotner published, and he couldn’t tell all he knew.

(I used to speculate endlessly about Faulkner’s sex life when I first read his books, always looking for the man behind the work.  Estelle Oldham, his childhood sweetheart—whom he pledged to marry when they were kids—was his eventual wife, but because both sets of parents disapproved of the match, she first married another man and had a child with him, didn’t marry Faulkner until after she got divorced.  In the meantime he had a romance with a woman sculptor named Helen Baird in New Orleans; I have wondered if she might be a model for Charlotte in this novel, because Charlotte is an artist who makes things with her hands.  When Faulkner was a young man he apparently frequented brothels during Prohibition, perhaps just to drink, but he may have done more.  In his Paris Review interview he says that the best job he was ever offered was to be the landlord of a brothel.[2]  In later years he had affairs with Meta Carpenter and a young writer named Joan Williams, and there are rumors of dalliances with other young women.  (I’m hoping to learn more from the most recent biography when I finish the novels.)  One gets the impression that, though he waited for years to marry his childhood sweetheart, that marriage didn’t work out, though he never divorced.  Both he and Estelle were alcoholics, it seems.  That doesn’t make for a good marriage.)

The Wild Palms, the first of the alternating stories, tells the story of Harry Wilbourne, an intern at a New Orleans hospital, and Charlotte Rittenmeyer, a married woman with two children.  Wilbourne comes from an impoverished family, and is barely getting by during his internship.  He’s worked hard all his life and never had a romance of any kind.  The two meet and talk at a party, then do the same at a subsequent party or two, and suddenly realize that they’re in love.  Faulkner, perhaps wisely, doesn’t try to show us how that happened.  They were struck by lightning.

They try to consummate their affair by sneaking off to a hotel—the impoverished and inexperienced Harry goes through all kinds of contortions—but Charlotte is disgusted by the place as soon as they get there, and believes their romance will be tarnished if it begins that way.  Eventually she spills the beans to her husband, who grudgingly decides to let his wife go.  Perhaps because of the awkwardness of continuing to live in the same city with her family, the couple moves away from New Orleans.  But that means that Harry—who is within months of finishing his internship—will be giving up all he has worked for his whole life.  Charlotte is giving up a marriage, a prosperous household, and two daughters.  They’re abandoning everything for love.

In that way, it seems like a quintessential Sixties story (though Faulkner wrote it in 1937), as if he had taken up “The Graduate” but told what happened after Benjamin and Elaine got off the bus.  Harry and Charlotte are trying to live a life devoted purely to love, not worrying about how they’re going to make money or where they’re going to sleep or what they’re going to eat.  That seems to be Charlotte’s idea.  And though Faulkner from the outside can look like a conventional Southerner, buying large parcels of land and living in grand if rather dilapidated houses, owning an airplane, owning a boat, supporting any number of family members, you can also see that he spent his life doing exactly what he wanted, expressing himself through nineteen novels and a number of stories, making sacrifices to make money—usually by going to Hollywood—but drawing the line elsewhere (he worked at a power plant while he was writing As I Lay Dying but quit his job at the post office because he didn’t want to be “at the beck and call of every son of a bitch who has two cents to buy a stamp”).  He was proud of what he did, to be sure, and proud apparently of the financial standing he achieved, but his life was hardly conventional.  In a way it was wildly bohemian.

Charlotte, alas, wasn’t a great artist.  She liked to make things with her hands, but was an inspired crafts person, who was able to sell things at various intervals but not to make a living over a long period of time.  And Harry had abandoned his career altogether; he had a medical degree but an interrupted internship, and no one would give him a chance to do what he’d spent his life learning.  He had long periods of unemployment, when he basically spent the day waiting for Charlotte to get back from work.  One can only imagine what was going on in the man’s head during those hours.  The author doesn’t go into it.

I suppose I was inspired by this story when I was twenty years old, or whenever I read it.  But when I read it now, at the age of 73, I would say to these young people: Life isn’t just about finding someone to love and keeping that love pure.  It’s also about finding work that you enjoy and that will pay the bills.  If you devote everything to love, you sacrifice too much.

In some fundamental way, I didn’t believe the story this time around.  I didn’t believe the romance would last as long as it did (which wasn’t terribly long).  I also didn’t believe Charlotte’s husband would be as understanding as he was.

I think that Faulkner also realized at some point that, while he’d wanted to write a love story, there was something about it that didn’t work.  He made an odd statement to his editor.  “To me, it was written just as if I had sat on the one side of a wall and the paper was on the other and my hand with the pen thrust through the wall and writing not only in invisible paper but in pitch darkness too.”  I never knew what to make of that.

As if to shore up this rather fantastic story—which wandered from his “little postage stamp of soil” to the point where part of it is set in Utah—he decided to weight it down with another one.  As he told The Paris Review, “When I reached the end of what is now the first section of The Wild Palms, I realized suddenly that something was missing, it needed emphasis, something to lift it like a counterpoint in music.  So I wrote on the ‘Old Man’ story until ‘The Wild Palms’ story rose back to pitch.”

“Old Man”—I believe the title refers to a river—is about a convict who temporarily escapes prison because of a horrific flood that takes place in Mississippi.  He’s not a hardened criminal, had actually attempted armed robbery using pulp fiction as an instruction manual.  The flood conditions were so dire that the authorities gave him and another convict a skiff and set them off to rescue a couple of people who needed help.  They found one victim, a pregnant woman who was sitting on her roof, but somehow got separated and the “tall convict” never found the other.  His task at that point was to fight the elements as best he could.  He could have escaped altogether if it weren’t for the woman.  But he couldn’t bring himself to abandon her.

“Old Man” is much more Faulknerian than “The Wild Palms,” funny and tragic all at the same time.  He’s a descriptive writer of genius, and the descriptions of the flood are surreal; I’ve never read anything like them.  And of course we’re down in Mississippi, where Faulkner knows how everything looks and how people talk.  It would stand better alone, I would think, than in conjunction with the other story, but we see the obvious irony of the one couple who is doing everything they can to stay together, the other where the man is doing everything he can to get rid of the woman.  The stories end with two of Faulkner’s most famous lines, which don’t give away too much plot.  The Wild Palms: “Between grief and nothing, I’ll take grief,” a line which deeply moved me when I was young.  Old Man ends with the line, “Women, shit.”), though in the original version it was amended to “Women ——-!”).

I had vowed during the Faulkner Project not to hurry through any book; when I didn’t understand a sentence, I’d keep reading until I did.  (In the Paris Review interview, Jean Stein says, “Some people say they can’t understand your writing, even after they read it two or three times.  What approach would you suggest for them?” and he says, “Read it four times.”[3])  But I must admit that there was a fair amount in The Wild Palms that I didn’t understand no matter how many times I read it.  I think it was a story that sounded better it its conception than its execution (as Faulkner suggested in that remark he made to his editor).  For me it ranks with his lesser work.  But the man made a quick recovery.  He was about to write The Hamlet.

[1] I’m past the halfway mark.  This is the eleventh of nineteen novels, and in the lineup of five Library of America volumes on my shelf, my bookmark was dead in the middle of the third volume.  The fourth volume includes his longest novel (which I have never read), A Fable.  The fifth volume has only three novels.

[2] No doubt an apocryphal story.  Faulkner the yarn spinner and fiction writer was having a good time in that interview, which I read several dozen times when I was young.  The interviewer was Jean Stein, 37 years his junior, and another possible love interest according to the LOA chronology.

[3] The man had a lighthearted approach to interviews.  Early in the interview, when he says he needs only a few things to ply his trade, including tobacco and whiskey, she asks if he means bourbon.  He replies that he isn’t particular.  “Between Scotch and nothing, I’ll take Scotch.”