You Can Go Home Again.  You Have To.

(The Faulkner Project) Mosquitoes from William Faulkner Novels 1926-1929.  Library of America.  pp. 257-541. ****

My first semester at Duke University, I had the great good fortune to encounter the two best professors of my life, Reynolds Price and Wallace Fowlie.  I had courses with both of them (and it was all downhill from there[1]).  Price was 33, and taught freshman Creative Writing because the great William Blackburn was still ensconced in his position for a few more years.  Those first few months with Price remain as the most memorable days from my college career.

The most important thing he ever did for me (and he did many, reading all my halting sophomoric efforts through the years, meeting with me from time to time, recommending editors and agents, giving me a blurb for my first novel) was showing up in class that first day so I could meet him.  I’d known for three or four years that I “wanted to be a writer,” but at my secondary school that was an uppity attitude that I would never have admitted to anyone.  As far as that school was concerned, the writers of the Western canon were dead, and it was fine to study them (before you became a lawyer or businessman), but not to imagine you could do what they did.  Who do you think you are?

In Reynolds Price I met someone who had not only published three books of fiction, but was a mature male who wanted to be a great writer.  That was clearly his ambition.  And while he didn’t exactly encourage us (don’t do this unless you have to, was his general message about writing.  The world doesn’t need your fiction.  It’s already got Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky), he was a living example that a sane human being could have that wish.  We weren’t crazy.

But the one piece of advice he repeatedly gave—that we should write from strong emotion, something deeply important to our lives—was like a dagger to my heart, as if he were seeing right through me.  My father had died a year and a half before, and that fact sat like lead in my belly, as if to say: want to write about something important?  Write about this.

For my last story that semester I wrote a rather terrible story about the day of my father’s death, and Price, though he could see its many flaws, handled it with kid’s gloves, praising it and praising me for writing it.  I would try another long story in about three years, and on that occasion he was still sympathetic but more honest (“The problem with your protagonist is his heart-poisoning reticence.  The thing you’re trying to write about is what makes him off-putting as a character, and that’s a problem for the story”).  It would be another ten years before I could write that story in a way that was palatable, about a boy who wanted to prove himself to his father by playing football but who made the varsity too late.  I needed distance from the story to really tell it.

It is not my intention—of course!—to compare myself to William Faulkner, or in any way to compare his career to mine.  But when you look at his early days, he seemed obviously to have strong artistic ambitions, writing a lot of poetry, starting to write some prose.  He had taken Phil Stone as a mentor, went to visit him at law school in New Haven.  He traveled to New York, to New Orleans.  He took a long trip to Europe.  One of the greatest literary talents in our history had been born in Oxford, Mississippi, and I don’t think we can blame him for wanting to get away from there and write about something else.  He went to the extent of working on his British accent and trying to enlist in the Royal Air Force, which he actually did, going through training but never seeing any action.  He seemed to hoping for a war novel, but it didn’t work out.  So he wrote about a wounded soldier returning home, and the difficulties he and his family faced.  It was a bold imaginative effort.  But it wasn’t terribly authentic.

He moved on to the bohemian world he’d encountered in New Orleans.  He imagined a situation where a society woman with artistic—or at least cultural—pretensions, invited a number of artists to join her on her yacht for a kind of floating salon.  She invites a novelist, a poet, a sculptor (insisting he come, even though he didn’t want to).  Also on the trip were her niece and nephew, a businessman or two, a few women acquaintances, and at the last minute a young couple that her niece invited to come along.  There was a crew to pilot the vessel, a kind of social secretary to plan it.  The whole thing sounded like such fun.

It was a disaster.

The novelist was a blowhard.  Accompanying him was a businessman who soaked up everything he said and had a business plan for a new laxative that would take America—so to speak—by storm.  The poet preferred to lie on the hull of the ship and smoke (and look good). The sculptor was downright hostile, even disappeared for a while.  The men in general—predictably, for a Faulkner novel—had a stash of booze down in the cabin, so every time the hostess wanted people to talk intelligently and learnedly, or to dance—giving the women something to do—the men were down in the cabin tying one on.  The young people were vaguely romancing one another.  The woman’s best laid plans were in vain.

I haven’t checked the latest biography, but I would guess that many of these people had real life counterparts.  The writing for the most part is straightforward, lyrical, and beautiful; I would call this novel an advance over Soldiers’ Pay, especially in terms of clarity.  The author seems poised to become a biting social satirist.

The one thing he hadn’t done yet was to write about the world he really knew, the world he was probably embarrassed by and wanted to forget (as Mrs. Maurier, in the novel, wanted to rise above her background).  He had failed in love in Mississippi; the woman he cared for had married a lawyer and taken off for Europe.  In New Orleans he fell in love with a young sculptress named Helen Baird, but she too married someone else.  This novel is dedicated to her, the only dedication among the first four novels. And our novelist friend in Mosquitoes—one Dawson Fairchild—delivers  this pretentious opinion when asked if people ever die of love anymore.

“’But as for a broken heart in this day of general literacy and facilities for disseminating the printed word—’  He made a sound of disparagement.  ‘Lucky he who believes his heart is broken: he can immediately write a book and take revenge . . . You dont commit suicide when you are disappointed in love.  You write a book.’”

I don’t know if Faulkner’s heart was broken when he wrote this book.  I would say he shows promise as a satirist, though his subject doesn’t seem quite right.  He didn’t care about those pretentious bohemians.  But he was about to rediscover the people he did care about.  Once he took a glance back at the place where he was from, a whole universe opened up.

[1] Actually, it wasn’t.  I later took Price’s Milton course, and in my junior year was eligible for graduate level classes, so I could continue to study with Fowlie.  I took his two most famous classes, in Proust and Dante.  And I had a number of excellent professors at Duke, in a variety of disciplines.  But those two were the most important.