He Got a D in English at Ole Miss

The Life of William Faulkner, Volume One: The Past Is Never Dead 1897-1934.  By Carl Rollyson.  University of Virginia Press.  476 pp.  $34.95  ***1/2

This is the third biography of William Faulkner I’ve read, and I should mention right off the bat—something I don’t remember ever saying before—that I didn’t read every word.  I read Joseph Blotner’s 2,000-page two volume door stop back in the seventies when it came out.  It took a huge chunk our of my frugal budget, and I wondered at the time if any book was worth that kind of money.  I read every word of that book despite the plodding, pedestrian writing, avid for any information I could get about the writer I considered the greatest in all of American literature.  A few years later I read the much slimmer David Minter volume, reviewing it for The Sun[1], and remember liking that better, and feeling it was better written.  Since then I’ve ignored the multiple Faulkner bios that have appeared.  But having recently finished a long survey of his work, I thought I’d check out the latest scholarship on the man.

This is a beautiful two-volume biography, which I will definitely finish, by a capable biographer, who writes better than Blotner and apparently had access to a lot of new material.  But somehow I wasn’t counting on so much literary criticism, page after page of summaries of not only all the novels (which I just read), but also many stories and even screenplays.  I read Rollyson’s analysis of the important novels, like The Sound and the Fury and As I Lay Dying, but I don’t care to go through an intricate analysis of Soldiers Pay or Mosquitoes, novels which the man wrote before he discovered his little postage stamp of soil.  And I sure as hell don’t want to hear about screenplays of movies that never got made.

There is still no explaining the man’s genius.  But I got a better understanding of how this complex figure emerged from an ordinary family in Oxford, Mississippi, and what relationship he might have to the various fictional characters he created.  Faulkner’s father was a nullity, not so much like the elder Compson in The Sound and the Fury and Absalom! Absalom! (he shared that man’s love of booze, but wasn’t the same kind of blathering philosopher) but more like Jason Compson, stuck in dead-end work and furious that his life had come to this.  He didn’t communicate much with his son.

But Faulkner in a way had two mothers, the cultivated and sympathetic Maud Faulkner, who lived nearly to the end of her son’s life and encouraged his artistic pursuits all along (she had the precocious young man reading Conrad and Shakespeare when he was ten) and Caroline Barr, the black woman to whom he dedicated Go Down, Moses[2] and who filled him in on the African American perspective.  Especially early on, Faulkner wasn’t much different in his attitudes from many white Southern males.  But he had Caroline Barr’s stories in there somewhere, giving him a fuller perspective that flowered eventually.

Faulkner was always a bit of an outsider, hanging around with the girls rather than the boys, and he was terribly attached to a little girl who shared his interest in poetry and the other arts, Estelle Oldham, the woman he eventually married.  She saw the young man when he was just a boy and said she would someday marry him.  They were close companions throughout their youth.  And though Faulkner started off as a graphic artist, then became a poet, then moved on to longer fiction, he was always focused on some kind of artistic life.  In that way his life seems one steady stream.

The other major influence was Phil Stone, the older attorney whom people always mention and who was very influential on and helpful to Faulkner as he came into his manhood.  Stone always sounds like a blowhard (especially if he’s a model for any of the lawyers in Faulkner’s fiction), and no one has said he was a scholar, but he seemed to know which writers were important and to have supplied his protégé with books, something that didn’t go without saying in Mississippi in the early twentieth century.  He also helped Faulkner seek publishers for his early poetry and helped fund the volumes himself.  He really believed in the man.

Faulkner’s early wanderings weren’t aimless; he was consciously trying to enlarge his perspective.  He traveled to New Haven because his mentor had gone to Yale, went to New York, New Orleans, eventually set off for some months in Europe because he knew he wanted to be a writer and to see these places.  He had some of the arrogance of young artists trying to make their way in the world (“I could have written Hamlet,” he said to one startled group of young poets), but mostly he was an introvert hanging around on the fringes of things and watching.  And though he was never interested in formal education—he enrolled in the University of Mississippi in a desultory way, but never came close to graduating—he was reading and writing furiously, had finished Soldier’s Pay at the age of 28 and was already working on Mosquitoes on the voyage to Europe.

Estelle, meanwhile, had been married off to another man by her parents, someone who had better prospects, and moved to Hawaii, though she returned to Mississippi periodically.  She became a full-fledged alcoholic, and cocaine user, during that her marriage, so she and her future husband shared that predilection (Rollyson never mentions in this book that Prohibition was in effect during much of Faulkner’s young manhood, so all the boozing he did was illegal, in addition to being problematic in other ways).  Faulkner in the meantime was mooning after and falling in love with a number of women.  He also frequented brothels, especially in Memphis, but may just have used them as safe places to drink.  No one ever remembers him going upstairs with one of the women.[3]

He seemed to be pushed in two directions by his parents, developing the artistic side that his mother cultivated, but also wanting to overcome the dead end of his father’s life.  He didn’t just want money and things (though he eventually bought an airplane), he wanted to own land, and lots of it.  So he was constantly alternating between his more artistic work—like The Sound and the Fury and As I Lay Dying, brilliant works like nothing else in American literature—and work that would make money, like Sanctuary and the stories he wrote for the Saturday Evening Post, and eventually the screenplays for Hollywood.  But it was the same man who wrote all of those things, and there are flashes of brilliance in all of them.  Rollyson points out that when Faulkner famously rewrote Sanctuary in the galleys, trying to make sure he didn’t shame his more artistic work, he didn’t take the sensational elements out (it’s still a story of sexual assault and rape); he worked to make it a more exciting and compelling narrative.

The sad thing—which I don’t remember reading before—is that while Sanctuary sold much better than his previous novels, it was published as the Depression struck, and his publisher—Hal Smith, who had long championed his work—went bankrupt, and couldn’t pay him anything.  There was a harrowing period when he couldn’t make the mortgage payment on Rowan Oak (the huge dump of a house that he had bought, and on which he himself did most of the repair work; he was an excellent carpenter, like Cash in As I Lay Dying).  And it was around that time that Hollywood discovered there was a literary genius in Mississippi, and began to pay him the money he needed.  It took him away from his important work, but never for good.

This book ends as Faulkner has started Absalom! Absalom!, perhaps his second greatest novel, and is working in Hollywood.  He interrupts both those things to write Pylon in a period of a few weeks, and has bought the small airplane which he would fly and eventually give to his youngest brother Dean, who would learn to fly it and die in it.  The man never did greater work than he had already done.  But he sometimes matched it, and grew more complex as an artist and as a man.

[1] https://www.thesunmagazine.org/issues/65/he-took-the-doorknob-with-him

[2] “Who was born in slavery and who gave to my family a fidelity with stint or calculation of recompense and to my childhood an immeasurable devotion and love.”

[3] I’m not sure I believe that.  Faulkner’s overtures to other women in those days sound unsuccessful, and he didn’t marry Estelle until he was nearly 32.  He had no sexual outlet at all through his teens and twenties?  He seems in his writing quite familiar with brothel culture.