You Can Too Go Home Again

(The Faulkner Project) William Faulkner Novels 1926-1962 Library of America.  Five volumes. 5454 pp.  $157.00 *****

I began this project on a whim last June with a nagging question: why did my father, dying of leukemia at the age of 47, read almost nothing but Faulkner in his final years?  I had the second volume of the Library of America series.  I dipped into that, reading As I Lay Dying and Sanctuary, two novels that people normally think of as a brilliant masterpiece and a total failure, Faulkner’s attempt to write a sensational book and make money.  I thought Sanctuary was much better than that, but realized that, in good Faulkner and bad, in the huge variety of things he did, there was a vitality and intensity that no other fiction had.  I resolved not just to read all the books (in many cases I was rereading), but to read them chronologically, with the exception of the two I’d just read, which came early in his career.  I didn’t imagine I would read Faulkner and nobody else (though that’s what I did, as it turns out, except for the Buddhist books I continually read as devotional literature).  But every time I looked to the next Faulkner, I said to myself, do I want to read this or something else?  I always wanted to read the Faulkner.

The only other author I’ve ever read chronologically is Toni Morrison, resolving to do that after I saw the documentary on her life.  So I’ve now read the works of what I consider to be our two greatest Nobel Prize winners, if not our two greatest novelists (my brother keeps bringing up Henry James.  I’m not quite ready to tackle that).  I feel, at least briefly, content.

So what did I make of it all?  That’s what people keep asking me.

One thing I would say that, in the case of a great writer, but I suspect in the case of any writer, it’s fascinating to read the books in chronological order and see how the person evolved.  It’s richer than reading them any other way.  And though I haven’t yet read the latest Faulkner biography—I’ll be tackling that soon—I have an idea, especially because of the excellent Chronology at the back of the Library of America volumes—how his creative life unfolded.

He wanted to be a writer from way back, maybe even from the time he was a child, to be like his great grandfather, whom he never met, but who—in a life that was active in all kinds of ways—had written a novel entitled The White Rose of Memphis before he was shot to death after a dispute with a business partner (an event that would show up in his grandson’s fiction).  After an aborted attempt to get involved in World War I, Faulkner began with poetry, and with traveling to various cultural centers, trying, it seemed, to get away from the provincial backwater where he’d been raised.  He had a way of encountering other writers, including Sherwood Anderson and his wife, Elizabeth Prall.  He made the obligatory bohemian trip to Paris, and to New Orleans.  Almost on a whim, it seems, he wrote his early novels, Soldiers Pay, in which he reflected his experience with the war and demonstrated his attraction to elaborate rhetoric, and Mosquitoes, about bohemian life in New Orleans.  It was much cleaner and more accomplished than his first book, a mild satire.  He could have continued in that vein.

But somehow, in his late twenties, he realized the thing that many artists do: he may have come from a cultural backwater, he may have hoped to move beyond it, but somehow his whole artistic vision was tied up with that place, because that was where he came of age and formed himself.  It was as if he discovered his true subject, after an aborted attempt to avoid it.  He tried to encompass the whole vision in a single volume, resulting in a somewhat lumpish third novel his publisher didn’t want.  But that didn’t matter.  He had found the way to go.  And for the next number of years, working at a furious pace, he encompassed that vision in one novel after another, writing—as one of his biographers said—“as if there were no literature written in English before him.”

He complicated all that with a crazy romantic life (he could not marry his childhood sweetheart because he had no prospects as a young poet, then finally married her after she’d divorced her first husband and moved back to Mississippi), any number of family obligations, a wish to own land and live like a Southern gentleman instead of the wild bohemian he actually was, but above all he complicated things with alcohol, the nemesis that haunted and shadowed him all his life.  No one knows why he drank the way he did.[1]  He never apologized for it or seemed to admit he had a problem.  But I’m convinced it vastly shortened his life.

So this man who should have shut himself up in a garrett with a faithful loving wife who believed in his genius and supported him any way she could instead bought a huge ruined piece of land and kept trying to figure out how to pay the bills, not just for him but for his entire extended family.[2]  There was nothing he could do but write, but he seemed able to do any kind of writing, brilliant artistic avant-garde prose, stories for the Saturday Evening Post, scripts for Hollywood.  Given the choice he would probably just have written his novels.  But he did other things to keep his creditors at bay.

This heroic effort—which began in 1927 and began to wind down around 1948—resulted in three undoubted masterpieces, The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying, Absalom, Absalom!—and any number of brilliant attempts.  Every book from that period has greatness in it, starting with Flags in the Dust and ending with Intruder in the Dust.  Other readers have their favorites, and candidates for masterpieces (Light in August; The Hamlet; Go Down, Moses.  I myself would add Go Down, Moses to the list, though it is a strangely uneven piece of work.  But in some ways I see that as the quintessential Faulkner novel, though his publisher originally published it as a book of stories.  It is the one book from his middle age that is truly great.

(To engage in the idiotic but somehow irresistible question of who was the greater novelist, Faulkner or Morrison—the two candidates from the twentieth century—I would say that Morrison had a longer string of unquestionably great work, beginning with Song of Solomon and continuing through Paradise—but that Faulkner’s work has greater scope, and that he was more daring and inventive.  Morrison seemed to become a great novelist with Song of Solomon and continue imperturbably, book after book, year after year.  She seems to have been a more settled human being.  She didn’t complicate her life the way Faulkner did his.  At least she didn’t seem to.)

For the past seven months I have been stunned, overwhelmed, stupefied, exasperated, bored, annoyed, and nevertheless in love with this author; it was as if we were married.  I sometimes wished he wouldn’t keep doing the same stupid thing again and again (like using Gavin Stevens for a narrator.  That was my pet peeve.  Other readers love the guy).  In a certain way I feel released from a burden now that I’ve finished Faulkner.  But I also feel let down, as if I’ll never reach those heights again.

I have to say that, throughout my life, he’s been the one writer I’ve come back to constantly.  I was as obsessed with him at the age of eighteen as I am now, 55 years later.  The man stands the test of time, not because I say so, just because he does.  Of Faulkner there is no end.

[1] I could make a few guesses.  He came of age in a culture where drinking was just what people did, socially, especially, perhaps, in Mississippi, especially because it was illegal when he was a young man.  But he also—like many writers—had enormous creative energy and didn’t know how to turn it off when he wasn’t writing.  He was especially prone to benders when he had just finished a project.  And once you get dependent on something, it becomes its own reason for continuing.  As Jim Harrison pointed out, sometimes you’re an alcoholic because of some deep underlying problem and sometime just because you drink too much.

[2] In 1940, he wrote a letter to his editor that I’ve always loved.  “Every so often, in spite of judgment and all else, I take these fits of sort of raging and impotent exasperation at this really alarming paradox which my life reveals: Beginning at the age of thirty, I, an artist, a sincere one and of the first class, who should be free of even his own economic responsibilities and with no moral conscience at all, began to become the sole, principal and partial support—food, shelter, heat, clothes, medicine, kotex, school fees, toilet paper and picture shows—of my mother . . . a brother’s widow and child, a wife of my own and two step children, my own child; I inherited my father’s debts and his dependents, white and black without inheriting yet from anyone one inch of land or one stick of furniture or one stick of money. . . . I bought without help from anyone the house I live in and all the furniture; I bought my farm the same way.  I am 42 years old and I have already paid for four funerals and will certainly pay for one more and in all likelihood two more beside that, provided none of the people in mine or my wife’s family my superior in age outlive me, before I ever come to my own.”  Carl Rollyson entitled the second volume of his Faulkner biography This Alarming Paradox.