Not the One Who Likes Spinach

Sanctuary by William Faulkner.  Library of America Faulkner Novels 1930-1935.  pp. 179-399 ****

The official version of the genesis of Sanctuary—which Faulkner told in the preface to the Modern Library edition—is that, after publishing four novels, he was tired of making no money (how he thought The Sound and the Fury would make money I do not know) and decided to write “the most horrific tale I could imagine” in the hope of getting some readers.  He wrote the novel and his editor wrote back to say, “Good God, I can’t publish this.  We’ll both be in jail.”  So Faulkner put it out of his mind and took a job at the power plant at the University of Mississippi.  While working the night shift there he composed As I Lay Dying in six weeks, without changing a word.  When he finished that he got the galleys of Sanctuary (apparently his editor had changed his mind) and Faulkner suddenly had a crisis of conscience, not wanting to publish that book and shame The Sound and the Fury and As I Lay Dying.  So he did a huge amount of rewriting, more than he had ever done on a set of galleys, and recast the novel into a form he could live with.  He thought he had done a decent job.

I don’t believe a word of this story.  Faulkner was a great storyteller (to understate things wildly) and often told stories to obfuscate the truth about himself.

For one thing, no one who is writing a sensational novel to make money writes passages like this.  “The last trumpet-shaped bloom had fallen from the heaven tree at the corner of the jail yard.  They lay thick, viscid underfoot, sweet and oversweet in the nostrils with a sweetness surfeitive and moribund, and at night now the ragged shadow of full-fledged leaves pulsed upon the barred window in shabby rise and fall.”  (In fact, only Faulkner wrote passages like that.)  Faulkner could write simply and he could write commercially; he wrote short stories for the Saturday Evening Post and wrote the screenplays for “The Big Sleep” and “To Have and Have Not.”

His editors tell us that the Sanctuary manuscript was much revised throughout, not just in galley form, and that Faulkner had heard stories about a Memphis gangster named Popeye and had written about him in a sketch years before he wrote the novel.  He was definitely writing about a horrific act and I don’t doubt he wanted to make money, but he was trying to understand the criminal mind that would do such a thing and also writing about lowlife in Memphis, a subject he came back to.  I think Sanctuary was a completely serious novel that Faulkner tried to make as good as everything else he wrote.  But it was a difficult book and it gave him fits.  He finally gave up in his rewrite of the galleys and let it be published.

(Faulkner was an instinctive novelist, as I said before, but he also had strong critical faculties and revised when he needed to.  That having been said, the speed at which he worked at this period in his life was astonishing.  He actually wrote As I Lay Dying in eight weeks, and Light in August in five months, both books among his best.  He wrote Pylon in what seems to be three weeks, though he revised it extensively in galleys.  He also composed Sanctuary quickly but then kept revising.  He had trouble putting it in its final form.)

Alcohol hangs like a pall over this novel; it is hard to remember that, every time someone takes a drink in this book, it’s a crime, because Prohibition was still in effect.  The man we will eventually think of as the moral center of the novel, Horace Benbow, opens in a standoff with the gangster Popeye, who is hanging out at the still of a bootlegger named Lee Goodwin.  For a thug and a killer, Popeye is oddly squeamish and skittish, and doesn’t like the fact that anyone sits around and drinks in the vicinity of the still.  People do that anyway, driving him crazy.  Horace himself, though a lawyer and basically a good man, has a taste for booze.

But the problems really begin when an acquaintance of Horace’s sister, Gowan Stevens, shows up at the bootleggers with an adventurous University of Mississippi coed named Temple Drake.  Stevens is an alcoholic and a binge drinker, and by the time he shows up at Goodwin’s place—and has a car accident that strands both him and Temple—we know the basic set-up: Goodwin is a bootlegger and small time criminal, accompanied by his common law wife and a child; a simple-minded man named Tommy—who also has a taste for booze—helps him out, and the menacing figure of Popeye, whom we can’t quite figure out, and who seems to represent the big-time money from Memphis,[1] is lurking in the shadows.

Goodwin is just running a business, though he’s a bit of a bully and has a taste for booze himself.  His wife is a battered woman who has been a prostitute, and has nothing but contempt for Temple and her kind, though she tries to help her.  Tommy also tries to help and protect Temple.  And Gowan Stevens is the kind of Southern gentleman drinker—he learned at the University of Virginia, which was still the premier boozing school when I was in college—who claims to know how to handle liquor but is basically a falling down drunk.  The scenes where Temple is trying to stay out of danger and various people are helping her, Popeye keeps showing up and going away, the moonshine is flowing like water, various fistfights erupt, are literally terrifying.  And then the thing we’re fearing actually happens: as casually as he lights a match, Popeye kills Tommy and first assaults, then kidnaps Temple.  He takes her to a Memphis brothel.  There she is his captive.

In a weird way, once the worst has happened, the novel seems to calm down.  Temple tries to free herself, but she’s so closely watched that her situation is hopeless.  The women that surround her, especially the Madam, named Reba, and her maid, named Minnie, are oddly comforting comic figures.  They know nothing of Temple’s background—her father is actually a judge—and believe she’s found a gold mine, because Popeye is in their eyes a wealthy man and lavishes her with clothes and jewelry, none of which she wants.  The patter from Reba, a nonstop talker, is hilarious, and somehow sweet; she laments the fate of fallen women while not doing a thing to change it and profiting from it mightily herself.  I can imagine people dismissing her as the quintessential whore with a heart of gold, but I think she’s one of Faulkner’s great female creations.  And speaking of her incessant yapping: overlooked in all the other elements of his genius is the fact that Faulkner is one of the great dialogue writers of all time.  There must be five or six social classes represented, and everyone in the novel has their own peculiar way of speaking, which sounds spot on for who they are.  This small Mississippian with the abstracted air—maybe because he’d had a sip or two—noticed everything.  He was one of those on whom nothing is lost.

Lee Goodwin calls the authorities but is somehow nevertheless accused of Tommy’s murder, because Popeye has disappeared.  Goodwin fears retribution if Popeye discovers he accused him (Popeye is apparently a deadly shot, so much so that Goodwin cowers in a corner of his cell because he doesn’t want to be visible through the barred window), so he refuses to do so, just maintains that no one can prove that he himself did it.  Horace Benbow, who seems henpecked not only by his offstage wife but also by his moralistic sister, believes Goodwin and tries to defend him, though it’s difficult to defend a moonshiner who has a whore for a wife and won’t speak up for himself.  A Snopes figures in the action as a legislator and frequent brothel patron who discovers the truth of what happened.  But true to being a Snopes, he sells the truth to the highest bidder.  The truth of what actually happened is more horrifying than what we initially imagined.

I can’t call this an entirely successful novel because Faulkner never quite found the form for it.  He was trying to portray a woman who, having been kidnapped, somewhat identifies with her kidnapper—her behavior is sometimes inexplicable—and in the last chapter Faulkner makes a brief and not terribly successful attempt to humanize Popeye by giving us his background, which is as horrific as anything he ever did.  And yet, though its structure is a bit of a mess, it’s still William Faulkner, portraying a whole world from genteel aristocrats to brothel owners to lowlife thugs, the story compelling, the dialogue pitch perfect.  A flop from Faulkner is more compelling than most people’s best work.  And I wouldn’t call this a flop.  It’s a flawed novel the way Horace Benbow is a flawed man.  There’s a lot that’s good about it.

[1] That’s just a guess, actually.  I never felt clear about why Popeye was there.