1

Faulkner’s Shadow

Pylon, 1935

I have a title for it which I like, by the way: ABSALOM, ABSALOM; the story is of a man who wanted a son through pride, and got too many of them and they destroyed him.

—William Faulkner to Hal Smith, August 1934

If Absalom proves to be about the sins of the father, lines of descent, a society’s decline, and the burden of the Southern past, Pylon takes up the irrelevance of sin (not to mention fathers), lines of ascent, a society’s transformation, and a weightless future.

—John T. Matthews, William Faulkner: Seeing through the South

A Hanger-on with High Flyers

By 1935, in several short stories, film scripts, and novels, Faulkner had already connected the world of Yoknapatawpha to the high flyers of World War I and the barnstormers of the postwar period in the figure of young Bayard Sartoris, bereft of his place in traditional southern culture and willing to risk all in the test-piloting that results in his death. Young Bayard and his twin, John, belong to that reckless crew of aviators in “Death Drag,” “Honor,” and other short stories. They live in the moment, unsure of the future, even as they continue to engage in “mock heroic” actions.1 On what terms, if any, can the world of the gentlemanly ideal, still in the sway of the Falkner family and their community, prevail in the modern world of airports and air circuses? It is a question posed by Faulkner’s own actions. In New Orleans, in 1925, he accompanied Hamilton Basso, who was writing a feature story about “The Gates Flying Circus.” Basso recalled that Faulkner seemed to relish the frightening flights in a rickety Wright Whirlwind two-seater: “Nobody else in our crowd had gone looping-the-loop in a bucket seat and open cockpit over the Mississippi River.”2

In mid-February 1934, William Faulkner attended an air show at the newly dedicated Shushan Airport in New Orleans, named after Colonel A. L. Shushan, president of the Levee Board. Faulkner had flown there with his flight instructor, Vernon Omlie, and both received the royal treatment, including a big black Cadillac with a driver at their disposal. Later, when Faulkner showed Omlie the novel that resulted from their trip, the aghast flyer said: “But you are calling these people unpleasant, and you are attacking the people who set up the airport, the levee board and the rest, and they were so nice to us, putting the car at our disposal. Do you still want to do that?” Faulkner said, “Certainly.” Omlie’s wife later claimed that Faulkner saw Pylon as another potboiler like Sanctuary, “somewhat pornographic” and designed to make money.3 Like the flyers he wrote about with such great fascination, he did what he loved to do in a world that put a price on everything, and in which he had to figure out the price he could exact for his work. That did not mean, as he told the Omlies, that he would not try to suit himself as well.

Faulkner keenly understood that like the flyers financed by Shushan and other businessmen, he was implicated in the commerce of book publishing and film production. In subtle ways, the novelist fashioned an objective correlative for his own ambition and how he compromised it in his depiction of the airport and its creator. Colonel H. I. Feinman, a “fine man,” touts his project in terms reminiscent of the novelist’s aspirations. The airport is the expression of an “Undeviating Vision and Unflagging Effort,” an achievement “Raised Up and Created Out of the Waste Land at the Bottom of Lake Rambaud.” It is not too much to read an allusion to T. S. Eliot’s poem The Waste Land in this corporate announcement, or even to detect ironic echoes in the site of the lake-bottom airport of the name of that visionary poet Arthur Rimbaud, who regarded himself as a seer, who cultivated his own soul and reached for the unknown—to quote one of his famous letters. Like Feinman, Faulkner wrested his work out of the “limbo of imagination”—as would Thomas Sutpen in Absalom, Absalom!, establishing his kingdom, Sutpen’s Hundred, just as Faulkner would create his Yoknapatawpha and deem himself its sole owner and proprietor on the map inserted into the novel. Like Feinman, Faulkner believed in the originality of his vision and remained steadfast in the great effort required to write great fiction. But all his effort had to be disseminated in a marketplace that touted, as in Feinman’s case, the “Cost of a Million Dollars.” This novel may well be the “most devastatingly self-critical of Faulkner’s whole career.”4

This was the era of Governor Huey Long, whose administration promoted the construction of high-visibility projects that enhanced the profile of Louisiana and his own reputation as a politician who put people to work during the Depression while contributing to the progress that made modern life comfortable. Faulkner had little interest in Long. The governor’s life could not be the basis of a great novel.5 But the consequences of a regime that conjoined commerce and politics and cut corrupt deals, afterward staging celebrations purported to be for the public good, agitated an author who had become part of a Hollywood no less self-promoting and venal than Long’s Louisiana.

The Shushan layout may have reminded Faulkner of a movie set. The airport had two large hangars not so different from sound stages, and a tower with murals commemorating the history of flight in high-relief depictions of airplanes and their daring pilots. And like a Hollywood studio emblazoning its logo, the airport had Shushan’s name or his initials inserted in every available spot. In short, if you wanted to see the show, you had to put up with the advertising. And Faulkner was there for the show, indulging his keen interest in barnstorming pilots. He had organized his own local air shows, and flying was a Faulkner business, taken up by his brothers Murry, John, and Dean. The very idea of flight had captivated all of them since that day Faulkner had convinced them they could make their own air machine. That their dreams had crashed into a ditch did not dissuade the boys from pursuing the lift that flying always offered. And crashing, after all, was part of the excitement.

The Shushan show did not disappoint. Milo Burcham defied the rainy weather and demonstrated why he was the world champion at upside-down flying. The famous Michel Détroyat, on a calmer day, performed his air acrobatics, as did Clem Sohn, jumping from ten thousand feet with a flour sack he emptied to mark his descent. After some near-collisions and a forced landing, a pilot and parachute jumper plunged to their deaths in Lake Ponchartrain. In one case, the body could not be found; in another, no relatives could be located for the nomadic airman.6

Perhaps the anonymity of these deaths disturbed Faulkner and led to his writing Pylon. His own explanation is that Absalom, Absalom! had stalled, and he needed the relief that writing a different kind of novel provided.7 But it “seems significant that the novel Faulkner wrote ‘to get away from’ the high modernist Absalom, Absalom! is a book patterned to a degree after Hollywood criteria.”8 In fact, in July 1934, Howard Hawks suggested to the stalled novelist that he should write about flyers, and Faulkner told him about “This Kind of Courage,” the story that evidently presaged Pylon. Hawks said, “That sounds good,”9 and that seems to have been good enough for Faulkner. Pylon and Absalom, Absalom! are both about deracination and displacement. Like Thomas Sutpen, Pylon’s rootless flyers swoop down on land that has been converted into property, into the possession of one man, the not so fine Colonel Feinman.

With Pylon, Faulkner could dispense with Absalom, Absalom!’s genealogy of characters fraught with the intricacies of a narrative overwhelmed by the eruption of the past in the present. Faulkner’s flyers—Roger, Laverne, and Jack—have, for most of the novel, no past. Their lives seem the work of happenstance. Their mechanic, Jiggs, is an unreliable alcoholic who is nevertheless devoted to them, which is all they seem to require. The novel’s center of consciousness—always referred to as “the reporter”—is not even given a name. He is drawn to the aviators because they are so alive in the air. On the ground, their lives seem rootless and sordid. Roger and Jack share Laverne, who is married to Roger because he won the roll of the dice with Jack. Laverne is like the tough-talking women—Hildy Johnson in His Girl Friday and “Feathers” in Rio Bravo—who populate Howard Hawks’s later films. She is also like Joan Crawford’s character Ann in Today We Live, the female fulcrum of male triangles in the terse tension of war and romance.

Laverne Shumann is not the nymph pursued in Faulkner’s early poetry. She is full-bodied—part of a life intensely lived, which means risking death, precisely what Dr. Martino urged upon Louise. Laverne is a woman possessed, the cynosure of male society, but also her own woman, dogged by a reporter who is a descendent of Keats’s frail knight, “alone and palely loitering”—in effect, a knight manqué.10 The war is mentioned only once in Pylon, when Jiggs buys “one of the pulp magazines of war stories in the air,” which will give Laverne and her male companions “something to do on the train” that takes them to the air shows in which they will duel in the air with their competitors. If this is not the world of gentleman flyers, it remains, nevertheless, a kind of chivalric endeavor involving sacrifice and heroes, however corrupted for popular entertainment and profit.

Faulkner’s treatment of the reedy reporter is original and yet probably based on Hermann Deutsch, a thin, tall journalist with a shambling gait whom Faulkner transformed into his shambolic, skeletal character. The two men first met in 1925 in New Orleans and were impressed with one another. Deutsch remembered Faulkner saying to him, “If somebody in the Yale Bowl was going to be shot, you’d be standing next to him.”11 It was a line Faulkner would elaborate on in Pylon, when the editor says as much to the reporter.

At the air show, the novelist spent a good deal of time in Deutsch’s company, watching the journalist carry around on his shoulders a little boy who belonged to one of the aviators. Out of this meager material, Faulkner conceived of the reporter who becomes increasingly involved in the lives of the flyers he comes almost to worship because they seem solely intent on their air missions. They are “hooked on speed.”12 They are adventurers and likened to “immigrants walking down the steerage gangplank of a ship.” They are refugees hazarding a trip into what was still then the new world of flight. They no longer have a secure place, a home to which they could return “even if it’s just only to hate the damn place good and comfortable for a day or two.”

It looks as though Faulkner patterned the besotted, drunken reporter on himself. Faulkner could become voluble when it came to talking about flying.13 When he turned up in New Orleans after the air show, he looked as if he had slept in the gutter. “Yes, ma’am, I have,” he assured writer Roark Bradford’s wife. Faulkner claimed to have become involved with the flyers, sleeping and fighting. It was a “disjointed, confused, nightmarish tale of having been offered a ride by a man and woman riding a motorcycle, or perhaps riding two motorcycles, with stops to visit bootleggers,” said Roark Bradford’s son, who also remembered that Faulkner never forsook his “elaborately polite and chivalrous” manners: “He was the only person over the age of twenty-one who was allowed to call my mother ‘ma’am.’”14 Faulkner had not eaten for several days. He certainly acted like the starved reporter when he devoured three eggs and bacon she made for him. He talked about two women and three men living together indiscriminately,15 which he compacted into the one woman and two flyers who become the reporter’s obsession. This was Faulkner as hanger-on in this world of high flyers. To Vernon Omlie’s wife, Phoebe, Faulkner was very much like the reticent reporter who goes along for the ride and puts himself at the service of the flyers. She said Faulkner had “no real desire . . . to be a precision flyer” or make flying a business. It became, instead, “a mental and emotional release”—as it does for the reporter who liberates himself from the grimy and gloomy environs of the newspaper office. Phoebe observed a “rather shy man who wanted to be left alone.” In a “pair of old coveralls” he would lose himself in a “group of mechanics, and help out by washing parts or doing what he would around the general aircraft operation rather than be out where people could see him and lionize him.”16 In short, Faulkner craved the anonymity he confers on his reporter.

The reporter appears like an allegorical figure, almost like a ghost in a medieval mystery play. In the popular imagination, especially as it was fed by movies like I Cover the Waterfront (1931), the journalist is usually self-sufficient and cynical, manipulating the woman he loves and willing to do whatever it takes to get the story, which often involves corruption and solving a crime or a criminal conspiracy. The journalist is like H. Joseph Miller (Ben Lyon) in I Cover the Waterfront or Hildy Johnson (Pat O’Brien) in The Front Page. Both journalists are humanized and redeemed by beautiful women, who bring out the reporters’ qualms about newspaper work. In fact, in Miller’s case, he is a budding novelist—a sure sign that morally he is better than most crass reporters.

Faulkner forgoes the Hollywood sin-and-redemption scenario with characters who never do follow a conventional moral compass and are not bound by any community’s standards of propriety. This air crew belongs nowhere and everywhere. It does not matter where they go so long as they can perform their show. By one definition, these are free spirits, not bound by any rules except those of the air races funded by capitalists like Colonel H. I. Feinman, Faulkner’s version of Colonel A. L. Shushan. To emphasize the impurity of Feinman’s power, he is identified as chairman of the Sewage Board. He is, in effect, the lord of a landfill, since the airport rests on reclaimed lake bottom. Ironically, the press treat Roger, Laverne, and Jack with fascination and scorn while spending not a moment inquiring into how the airport got built or what purpose the air race show fulfills in Feinman’s master plan that includes stamping the letter F all over his property.

Only the reporter believes the story is the air crew themselves, not just their antics in the air. He is fascinated with how they live apart from the society they entertain. They seem to find it enough to be with one another. They work together as one unit, although Jack has a temper he expresses by kicking Jiggs, and Roger—even more than the others—lives to fly. Even as he expects to survive, he never discounts the danger. The reporter alone sees these characters as admirable—in part because he is a Prufrock, afraid to bring the moment to its crisis, to confess his love for Laverne and for what the flyers represent to him. As the reporter, he is a passive observer. He is repeatedly described as a scarecrow and a cadaver, one of the walking dead in T. S. Eliot’s unreal wasteland city, one of the poet’s impotent hollow men.

Faulkner is careful to provide almost no details about the reporter’s life save for the mention of a thrice-married mother who does not care for her son. He is, in short, as deracinated as the flyers. But lurid newspaper ink circumscribes his world: “In the driver’s seat there lay folded a paper: one of the colored ones, the pink or the green editions of the diurnal dogwatches, with a thick heavy typesplattered front page filled with ejaculations and pictures.” This is the mediated prurient world of print culture, one that Faulkner had absorbed while hanging around newspaper offices in New Orleans writing his sketches of the city,17 transmogrified in the novel into New Valois, the name of a French royal line, and a fitting irony for the tawdry city’s aggrandizement of itself. Using journalistic jargon like “dogwatches” evokes the environs of journalism, but the novelist’s compounded neologisms like “typesplattered” create a vocabulary that vitiates the reporter’s profession. The stories journalists tell are a sensationalistic mess.

The factitious Feinman Airport opening is presided over by a disembodied amplified voice, “apocryphal, sourceless, inhuman.” The newspaper office is similarly disquieting, a room right out of a film noir, with “down funneled light” from the editor’s desk lamp. Journalism would not be depicted in such dim surroundings until the release of Citizen Kane (1941). In the hermetic “dusty gloom,” the editor expresses a frustration with the reporter that many readers of the novel have also experienced:

You have an instinct for events. . . . If you were turned into a room with a hundred people you never saw before and two of them were destined to enact a homicide, you would go straight to them as crow to carrion; you would be there from the very first: you would be the one to run out and borrow a pistol from the nearest policeman for them to use. Yet you never seem to bring back anything but information. Oh you have that, all right, because we seem to get everything that the other papers do and we haven’t been sued yet and so doubtless it’s all that anyone should expect for five cents and doubtless more than they deserve. But it’s not the living breath of news. It’s just information. It’s dead before you even get back here with it.

Like the new journalists Tom Wolfe first touted in the 1960s, the reporter becomes part of the events and people he covers, latching on to just those characters who appeal to newspaper readers. But then he is unable to go beyond recording what they say to him. He cannot, in other words, turn his reports into stories, the “living breath of the news.” But what the reporter wants to do cannot be contained within a newspaper article, any more than Faulkner felt his talent could be fully articulated in movie scripts or stories for popular magazines. Faulkner’s “anxieties about his place in the world—as an artist and reporter on life, as a man subjected to the wiles of larger economic forces, as a frustrated novelist unable to focus entirely on his major vision—seem reflected in the figure of the reporter, who tellingly has no name. He is, in a sense, Faulkner’s shadow,” emanating from a “fantasy world Faulkner had created about himself.”18

Faulkner’s anomie in Hollywood is akin to the flyers who are confined to stunts and have neither the equipment nor the venue to show just how good they are. Journalism is a dead end for the reporter, and the editor explains, “patiently, almost kindly,” why: “The people who own this paper or who direct its policies or anyway who pay the salaries, fortunately or unfortunately I shant attempt to say, have no Lewises or Hemingways or even Tchekovs on the staff: one very good reason doubtless being that they do not want them, since what they want is not fiction, not even Nobel Prize fiction, but news.” Just substitute the “people who own this paper” for Howard Hawks talking about the “people who own this studio.” The reporter, like the screenwriter, can never own his story, make it his sole property, or root himself in his own work. The flyers seek fulfillment only in flight, just as Faulkner sought fulfillment only in fiction, but both are bound, nevertheless, to paymasters who determine when they can fly and what he would write.

In the popular imagination, as depicted in The Front Page and I Cover the Waterfront, the conflict is between the wayward reporter and his disciplinarian editor. Seldom, until Meet John Doe (1941), did Hollywood take on newspaper owners. But in Pylon, the editor could just as well be a Hollywood producer advising Faulkner to stay within the conventional boundaries of a script. And the reporter’s reaction, like Faulkner’s, is to drink and subside into silence rather than engage any more deeply in the corporate culture that enmeshes him. The editor in Pylon is like Monroe Stahr in The Last Tycoon lecturing the recalcitrant writer about how to make movies. News, the editor implies, is not a narrative of lives and events per se but an account of a certain set of circumstances: “What I am paying you to bring back here is not what you think about somebody out there nor what you heard about somebody out there nor even what you saw: I expect you to come in here tomorrow night with an accurate account of everything that occurs out there tomorrow that creates any reaction excitement or irritation on any human retina; if you have to be twins or triplets or even a regiment to do this, be so.” The newspaper reader has to get it all in one gulp, one documented day, in a you-are-there drama or movie. No flashbacks, Howard Hawks would say.

Of course, the repressed reporter romanticizes the flyers, who fascinate him because of their uninhibited sex lives, which the reporter as voyeur watches—but not with the journalist’s practiced passivity. He yearns to be one of them, just as Faulkner coveted the role of war pilot, which his Hollywood buddy Laurence Stallings accorded him in a review of Pylon.19 The reporter, escaping that dim newspaper office and the grind of a reporter’s routines, gravitates to the open spaces that the deracinated Roger, Laverne, and Jack navigate with aplomb. The air is their world elsewhere come to grief on the wasted ground of New Valois.

The flyers forsake bourgeois values and live for their own sakes. They are willing to risk everything to pursue a society of their own. Such an uncompromising sense of self results in tragedy because of their human fallibility, which is caught up in modern mechanisms over which they cannot exert complete control. Even in the air this liberated trio is fixated on those pylons that enforce the boundaries of the racers’ route. Roger, flying first an inferior plane, bests his competitors but crashes because the drunken Jiggs has not performed all of the necessary maintenance. Then, in a dangerously experimental plane, Roger plunges to his death. This flawed teamwork contributes to the flyers’ fate as much as do Feinman’s machinations. Pylon is not a parable of economic determinism. Faulkner’s characters are too implicated in their own destiny to attribute their actions to forces outside themselves. Faulkner might rail against Hollywood, but he never forgot he chose to be there to pick up the check.

In the novel’s closing chapters, the journalists cluster together to chew over the crash story, just like they do in countless newspaper movies—most memorably in Citizen Kane, a film Pylon anticipates by layering together reporters, editors, and their corporate masters. Unlike the star reporters in Hollywood dramas, Faulkner’s reporter is hardly a hero. What he discovers makes him ill. “I could vomit too,” one of the journalists says to the reporter. “But what the hell? He aint our brother.” The irony, of course, is that the reporter wants to write about his fraternal feeling for Roger. When the reporter says, “you dont understand,” he might as well quote Prufrock’s lament that it is impossible to say just what he means.

The reporter’s final effort to tell the story ends up in fragments the copyboy picks out of a wastebasket. Like an embryonic editor or budding scholar experiencing his first joy in deciphering an unpublished manuscript, the copyboy—bright, ambitious, and with a literary sensibility—pastes together the fragments, which “he believed to be not only news but the beginning of literature.” After a bald summary of Roger’s crash, the reporter observes that the pilot’s “competitor was Death.” Acknowledging Roger’s honorable end—he deliberately steered his plummeting plane away from the people below—his two rivals circle the spot where he disappeared: “Two friends, yet two competitors too, whom he had met in fair contest and conquered in the lonely sky from which he fell, dropping a simple wreath to mark his Last Pylon.” Less florid than the narrator of Flags in the Dust, the reporter nevertheless ennobles the aviators as knights of the air in a scene reminiscent of the romantic salute to war pilots in Wings (1927)—and also in the florid prose of Hermann Deutsch, who wrote about the dead aviator as “a gay cavalier of the skies” whose ashes are scattered from “scudding clouds,” the remains of a man with “pulsing tissues” that had “once formed a living part” that had “clouded in the fine tingle of zestful living.”20 It is not hard to imagine Faulkner’s scorn and yet affection for such romantic literary effects.

Reporters in Hollywood films—like H. Joseph Miller in I Cover the Waterfront—are often aspiring novelists chafing at the constraints of journalism, or playwrights like Stu Smith in Platinum Blonde (1931) seeking to evade the daily grind of the news. That they overcome the limitations of the trade and also, of course, win their ladyloves is precisely what Faulkner’s novel contradicts as it shows how deeply mired the unrequited reporter is in events that he cannot surmount through literature. Thus the copyboy spots another draft on the editor’s desk, a draft that is factual, detailed, specifying time, place, and outcome, but not the reporter’s personal response: “At midnight last night the search for the body of Roger Shumann, racing pilot who plunged into the lake Saturday p.m. was finally abandoned by a threepiece biplane of about eighty horsepower which managed to fly out over the water and return without falling to pieces and dropping a wreath of flowers into the water approximately three quarters of a mile away from where Shumann’s body is generally supposed to be since they were precision pilots and so did not miss the entire lake.” Of this version, the reporter comments in a penciled note to the editor: “I guess this is what you want you bastard.” The reporter’s last words are directions to where he will be getting drunk, and where the editor can come with cash to pay for the drinks. This disgust with the higher-ups is typical of movie journalists, who delight in charging whatever they can to their bosses, and it is also, of course, the reporter’s declaration of independence. His behavior is not so different from Faulkner’s conflicted relationship with Hollywood producers, or with the aftermath of working on a story. In fact, after completing Pylon, Faulkner went off on one of his alcoholic binges. His mother called Dean: “William is drinking. He needs you.” Dean came to Rowan Oak while his wife, Louise, remained with Maud.21 The usual routine involved staying in Bill’s Rowan Oak bedroom. Sometimes Dean took him for long country drives. Sometimes Dean did not know what else to do except drink with his brother until the bout subsided.

No one else intervened; no one else talked about such episodes. Remarkably few people, even family members, ever saw him intoxicated. His niece Dean Faulkner Wells wrote, “I never saw William Faulkner drunk.” Her mother told her about the time in the Waco when after twenty minutes the liquored-up Bill gave up trying to land the plane and at Dean’s request turned over the controls: “It was typical of the understanding between the brothers that William did not resent Dean’s taking over. Nor did Dean judge his brother for losing his nerve.”22

Homage to Howard Hawks

It is not surprising that Faulkner wanted to sell the novel to Howard Hawks. It contains crucial elements of their earlier collaborations: a love triangle in the fraught world of flyers. Tom Dardis goes so far as to argue that Pylon is an homage to Hawks.23 It is an action story resembling the director’s Ceiling Zero and Only Angels Have Wings. Faulkner’s characters exhibit “all of the typical Hawksian virtues of professional competence before danger, combined with stoical endurance, qualities equally esteemed by Faulkner.” That the reporter can only observe these taciturn figures from the outside is of course consonant with what the camera can capture. The reporter is, so to speak, the camera eye.

Why Hawks did not buy Faulkner’s novel is not clear, but as producer Darryl Zanuck used to say, a movie had to develop a rooting interest for the hero, and neither the reporter nor Roger Shumann invites that kind of empathy or exudes the kind of charm that would make them, or characters based on them, attractive. Of course, Hawks could have had the novel rewritten, but under the new Production Code that was coming into full force in 1935, the sexual innuendo in The Front Page (1931) was impermissible. By having Roger and Laverne copulate in midair Faulkner goes well beyond anything the masterful Hawks could confect by way of bypassing the Breen office, enforcer of the Production Code. In fact, just then Hawks was going through elaborate rewrites on Barbary Coast because the film linked prostitution and gambling. So the scene in Pylon after Roger Shumann’s death could not be filmed without radical revision, which would also have needed the backing of an independent studio boss like Sam Goldwyn,24 willing to resist the kind of sanitization Breen demanded. Pylon features the kind of joking about sex and marriage prevalent in pre-Code films:

“While you are supposing,” the fourth [reporter] said, “what do you suppose his [Roger Shumann’s] wife was thinking about?” “That’s easy,” the first said. “She was thinking, ‘Thank God I carry a spare.’” They did not laugh; the reporter heard no sound of laughter, sitting quiet and immobile on his beer-case while the cigarette smoke lifted in the unwinded stale air and broke about his face, streaming on, and the voices spoke back and forth with a sort of brisk dead slap-slap-slap like that of the cards. “Do you suppose it’s a fact that they were both laying her?” the third said. “That’s not news,” the first said. “But how about the fact that Shumann knew it too? Some of these mechanics that have known them for some time say they dont even know who the kid belongs to.”

The Production Code forbid this portrayal of cynical and salacious journalists—even with the chastising comment that followed: “ ‘You bastards,’ the second [reporter] said. ‘You dirtymouthed bastards. Why dont you let the guy rest? Let them all rest. They were trying to do what they had to do, with what they had to do it with, the same as all of us only maybe a little better than us. At least without squealing and bellyaching.’ ” The word “bastard” would never have made it to the screen.

Malcolm Cowley thought Pylon was constructed like a play: “The characters are easy to recognize: every time they walk on the stage, the author identifies them by phrases that have the same function as the catch lines or gestures of actors doing character bits. Thus, the reporter is known by his flapping coat, Jiggs the mechanic by his bouncing walk, and Laverne by her ‘savage mealcolored hair.’ ” But Cowley’s description, including his mention of the “quick, sharp, condensed” action,25 is as applicable to a shooting script. Critics have complained about the lack of character development in the novel, but that is to measure Pylon by standards Faulkner is not observing in a work that does not probe motivation. In the hands of deft actors bringing to life the faces, gestures, and movements of his characters, Pylon might well succeed better on the screen than on the page. Douglas Sirk showed as much in his adaptation of the film, Tarnished Angels, which Faulkner liked.26

Peter Lurie calls the novel’s basic elements—“the courageous pilots, the love triangle, and the boldface ‘headlines’ ” used in Faulkner’s own screenplays—“Hollywood fodder.”27 The absence of other salable features, however, argues for a more ambitious novel-cum-film. “Pylon evokes Weine’s classic German Expressionist film The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari,” Susie Paul Johnson observes: “As the reporter appears for the first time, the narrator describes the way the other characters ‘were now looking at something which had apparently crept from a doctor’s cupboard and, in the snatched garments of an etherized patient in a charity ward, escaped into the living world.’”28 Faulkner’s antirealism in such passages countermands the journalistic imperative to record and document. So often in Pylon journalists resort to their lurid imaginations, which are stymied by what they cannot see when Roger, Laverne, and Jack are off-screen, so to speak. The novel is “a story trying to tell a story,”29 and such films are rare in Hollywood and evoke the kind of hostile reactions Orson Welles had to confront after the release of Citizen Kane. The reporter himself pivots between elite and popular culture. He is the “sensitive go-between . . . alternately the tough, alert reporter of the American newspaper tradition or his more detached, urbane, Eliotic contemporary.”30 That kind of oscillation has perplexed certain readers of a novel Hollywood would have been hard put to homogenize. Without a clear denouement, separating fact from fantasy, the novel-cum-film founders. Even the ambiguous Citizen Kane required an RKO resolution, a Rosebud.

Back to Bailey’s Woods

Even though Hollywood did not purchase Pylon, Faulkner felt a little better about his circumstances, reimbursing the Bryants for taxes they had paid on his property. Harper’s had published a short story, “Lion,” in December, bringing in a little cash, and he expected a two-thousand-dollar advance from Smith and Haas (it arrived on February 5) for Absalom, Absalom! “We have spring to look forward to now; I think that the smell of plowed earth and the sight of greening willow buds and the sound of birds is always the best tonic which a man can have,” he wrote to Will Bryant.31 Faulkner still had his eye on Bailey’s Woods, property adjacent to Rowan Oak where he had played as a child and that would serve as barrier to anyone encroaching on his domain from the side of his property close to the Ole Miss campus. He was as tenacious about property as Sutter or Sutpen, although he could not yet afford Bryant’s purchase price. Faulkner’s tone in his letters to Bryant is remarkable—so different from his letters to publishers and agents like Hal Smith, Morton Goldman, Ben Wasson, and Bennett Cerf. Faulkner may well have been mollifying Bryant until Faulkner could secure all the property he desired. But Bryant showed none of the skepticism or contempt that Faulkner’s own family had often shown for his efforts. As property owner and literary man, Faulkner seemed to have Bryant’s respect and even affection. And Faulkner wanted to please and impress him: “I have a great deal of respect for credit; if it had not been for that institution, I should not have now the home which I want. But I have too much respect for my credit now and in the future to abuse it. And to me, the taking on of this third obligation [securing more land without a down payment] with the first two (or neither of the first two) still undischarged, would be just that.” Pylon would be out in a month, he told Bryant. “I have you on my list.” The patient, encouraging Bryant replied: “I am watching your literary growth. Hope you see with me as to the Bailey Woods.”32

Faulkner spent these first months of 1935 buggering up stories, to use his expression, and refusing to do a nonfiction book about Mississippi while assessing the state of his career, telling his agent, Morton Goldman: “I cannot and will not go on like this. I believe I have got enough fair literature in me yet to deserve reasonable freedom from bourgeoise material petty impediments and compulsion, without having to quit writing and go to the moving pictures every two years. The trouble about the movies is not so much the time I waste there but the time it takes me to recover and settle down again; I am 37 now and of course not as supple and impervious as I once was.”33

Faulkner remained on cordial terms with Hal Smith, who visited Rowan Oak early in the year. The two men went hunting with shotguns and dogs in snow and mud, getting nothing but wet feet. Then Faulkner took Smith flying.34 “All the ladies express bright pleasure and appreciation of the suave metropolitan breath which you brought to our snowbound and bucolic midst,” Faulkner wrote Smith.35 But another publisher, Faulkner hoped, might provide a better offer. Immersed in writing stories and still struggling with Absalom, Absalom!, he seems not to have paid any attention to reviews of Pylon, although they have their place in gauging his controversial reputation, especially since reviewers seemed bent on predicting Faulkner’s extinction as a noteworthy writer.

Something Is Going to Bust

Smith and Haas published Pylon on March 25, 1935, just four months after Faulkner finished his typescript. The novel excited a small core of reviewers and disappointed many others. A “breathless adventure in reading,” A. B. Bernd concluded in the Macon Telegraph (March 23, 1935). Ted Robinson in the Cleveland Plain Dealer (March 24), who had followed Faulkner’s career with admiration, captured the novel’s complex temper: “He adds the power of loving the people whom he scorns and of sparing us no brutality or vulgarity concerning the people whom he loves.” Harold Strauss (New York Times Book Review, March 24) seemed prophetic, assessing Pylon as “an experimental book that contains a strong promise of leading to another major work.” Faulkner had proven himself capable of turning to “any scene of human activity where there is tension and a wealth of nervous motion and treat[ing] it with persuasiveness, power, and imagination.” Mark Van Doren (New York Herald Tribune, March 24) concurred: “Mr. Faulkner has never written a better story than this, or a more painful one.” George Currie in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle (March 25) could not have known that he was trespassing on Faulkner’s own experience when he described the novel as “reeking with the hot smell of engine oil” and with “alcoholic nausea.” Faulkner had arrived in New Orleans after the air meet well-oiled, his exhaustion transmitted into the traumatic prose Currie quotes: “the garblement which was the city,” featuring Laverne and “her strange little court of the knights of monkey-wrench and cotter-pins” in an “age in which a machine is more important than the hand which directs it.”

In the Nashville Banner (March 24), the poet John Crowe Ransom, another frequent Faulkner reviewer, concluded it was a “bad book” that “seems to mark the end of William Faulkner.” The reviewer deplored Faulkner’s effort to make the flyers a mystery as a “hard lot but fearless.” The novelist was one of those boys in the poolroom who admire “strong, silent, and vicious” types. Then Ransom resorted to the lowest form of criticism, biography: “Faulkner has never quite outgrown being one of those boys, but he likes to be a good deal more at the same time.” The characters had no “depth or human dignity.” They were just dirt, and not even country dirt—the kind that the Southern Agrarian Ransom preferred. The uncomprehending Ransom found the reporter “so limited” that “Faulkner is not in him either.” This last phrase is striking because it is so proprietorial, so certain in its assertion of what is proper Faulkner. Similar sentiments came from a former admirer, William Soskin in the New York American (March 25), who spoke of his negative reaction to the novel as the “repudiation of an old friendship or a creed of thought or belief.” Pylon invited epithets such as “disgusting, nauseating.” Faulkner was now “passing out of the picture,” declared Sterling North in the Chicago Daily News (March 27), a “genius astray,” announced John T. Orr in the Miami News (May 26). John Bassett counted at least twenty similarly negative reviews.36

Several reviewers suggested Faulkner’s prose was actually poetry, but only Malcolm Cowley showed how the sentences could be broken down into “separate lines as places where the voice instinctively breaks”:

Above the shuffle and murmur

of feet in the lobby

And above the clash and clatter

of crockery in the restaurant

the amplified voice still spoke,

profound and effortless.

Cowley likened the “steady pulse-beat” of the poetic lines to the offstage tom-toms of The Emperor Jones, a play Faulkner admired—perhaps most of all for its atavism, its evocation of ancient and elemental forces that modern life cannot quite override with its amplified, technological voices. The new airport, described further on in the passage Cowley arranged as poetry, is a “steel-and-chromium mausoleum” juxtaposed against the “puny crawling painwebbed globe” emerging out of the “blind iron batcave of the earth’s prime foundation.” The airport, in other words, may seem to represent progress, an emergence from the cave, but it is a deathtrap, a cynosure of modernity that dooms the flyers. If Roger Shumann is “nearer to being a hero than any other character in Faulkner’s eight novels,” as Cowley claims, his fate chillingly reflects Faulkner’s prophetic sense of how personal this novel had become, with its fatal denouement on November 10, 1935, when Dean’s plane crashed. The reporter, a stand-in for the novelist, is instrumental in securing for Shumann the plane that will crash and end his life, just as Faulkner did for his beloved brother Dean, the only brother the novelist truly favored. And Dean reciprocated, worshipping William, telling his wife, Louise, that his brother and their mother came first. Dean’s life had been disordered, and flying seemed to give him a mission. Faulkner, never really very adept at flying planes, conceded that lead role to Dean, a better pilot who, it was thought, could go into business for himself, avoiding the very corporate hegemony that Faulkner’s novel deplores. Shumann, in Cowley’s words, “preserves his integrity in the midst of disorder; he is capable, strong, devoted, ready to sacrifice himself and to protect others even when his plane is crashing [he steers away from the grandstand]. He is also the technician, the type of modern demigod. And he is killed partly by the business men who control the Airport Commission and partly by the interference of a literary weakling [the reporter].”

The drinking and flying in the novel and the drinking and flying among the Faulkners appeared obliquely in Lewis Garnett’s review of Pylon: “Faulkner himself, I hear, is flying from airport to airport in the South with a sort of air circus; it may well be that he finds this rootless life lived on the rim of death far more to his taste than the fear-haunted clinging to mere life of the little towns whence these planes take off. For to Faulkner this life had always been a dreadful thing, and there is a certain glory in the mere act of escaping from it into the mists of alcohol.” Glory, as in heroic drinking, and “mists,” as in a world of imagination, and the novel as a kind of spell cast on the reader, an intoxicant, align Faulkner and the reporter. Garnett quotes the reporter “shrieking his I-am-I into the desert of chance and disaster.” He is Prufrocked, asking, “Do I dare disturb the universe?” Or the speaker in Faulkner’s favorite Crane poem, who announces, “Sir, I exist!” To which the universe replies, “The fact has not created in me / A sense of obligation.”

Garnett captured the experience of reading the novel better than any other reviewer: “ ‘Pylon’ snatches you away from the daily world; and when you emerge at the end of the book, you are likely to feel with the reporter that ‘Something is going to happen to me. I have got myself stretched too far and too thin and something is going to bust.’ Maybe in his oblique way Faulkner is saying that his reporter is the world.”37 It may be that Pylon, more than any other novel Faulkner ever wrote, immerses you in what it was like for him to discover and track a story. Like the reporter, he was fond of saying his characters found him, and he had only to follow their lead.

Defying Death

A month after the publication of Pylon, on April 27 and 28, William and Dean Faulkner and Vernon Omlie held an air circus in Oxford. Five planes in the show featured wing walking and parachute jumping by the only black performer in the world, the Jackson (MS) Clarion-Ledger reported: “An added attraction will be given by Mr. Faulkner when he releases from the plane a copy of his latest book ‘Pylon’ attached to a miniature parachute. Mr. Faulkner is going to autograph this copy for the lucky person who receives it.”38

Bill doted on Dean, as did their mother, especially after Murry Falkner’s death. Bill worried that Maud would smother Dean, who was doing no more than pumping gas. Bill wanted his younger brother to have something of his own, which is why he had set Dean up with the Waco. Soon the brothers were taking long trips in the plane—as far as New York and Washington, D.C., luxuriating in the leather seats, each with its own ashtray. Dean turned out to be a pilot’s pilot, earning Vernon Omlie’s respect. Dean had the perfect timing of a superb athlete and often said he would rather fly than eat. On more than one occasion, when an engine failed in midair, he was able to safely guide the plane to the ground.

Although Estelle spoke of Dean’s wild streak, others viewed him as far more open and compassionate than his brothers and without their brooding sense of family heritage. Certainly his outgoing nature appealed to his brother Bill, who teamed Dean up with Vernon Omlie in the brotherhood of the air and a thriving business: flying lessons, charter flights, aerial photography, sightseeing, and barnstorming.39 In the summer of 1934, in Memphis, where Dean stayed while working with Omlie, he met Louise Meadow, easygoing and stylish, introduced to him by his cousin Sue Price. Soon Dean and Louise were joined by Bill and Estelle for get-togethers at the airport. On September 29, 1934, Dean and Louise married without telling anyone, apparently wanting no interference, especially from Maud, who had not taken to her sons’ wives. A letter from Dean’s aunt tacitly acknowledges as much: “Be a good sport and write to your little mother sometimes and just know that I’m always for you.” In fact, Maud seemed to take the marriage well after Dean and Louise paid her a visit. “Thank goodness,” Maud said, “I thought you’d never marry.” Bill and Estelle were the next to know and the following week hosted a party for the newlyweds. “To the best wife of the best flier I have ever known,” William Faulkner toasted. He would often appear in Memphis unannounced, Louise recalled, and if he did not show up, then Dean made his way to Oxford.40 Sometimes the call was urgent: Bill had been drinking again, and Dean had to be there to watch over his brother, saying virtually nothing about it to anyone, not even his wife. Louise realized this Faulkner part of her husband’s life simply did not admit anyone else. As Dean’s daughter wrote, “My relatives were private people, building walls not only to shield themselves from outsiders but from one another.”41 The independent Louise seemed to have no problem coping with taciturnity and apparently kept her own counsel. Many years later she said Maud Falkner was an “extraordinarily self-centered, selfish, and demanding woman.”42

The Faulkner who drank was the same man who wrote sober letters in the hot weather of July to Will Bryant: “It is with both pleasure and satisfaction that I send you the enclosed [another house payment] and so reply to your request of last month, if not to the full amount, at least sooner than I believed at the time I would be able.” He was sorry to hear that both “Mr. Will,” as he always addressed Bryant, and his wife, Miss Sallie, were not well. He mentioned “working steadily on a new novel [Absalom, Absalom!] which I hope and believe that you will like better than some, many, of the others.”43

The day-to-day responsibilities that Faulkner took on with such grace also seemed to undo him, and drinking relieved the pressure until he reached a point when the drinking itself was his undoing. His recoveries were remarkable. Whatever Bill and Dean said and did during these debilitating bouts they kept to themselves. The point was to get on with it. During three weeks spent in New York in late September and early October 1935, Faulkner tried to raise money by selling manuscripts of The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying, Sanctuary, Light in August, and Pylon. He did not want to part with this work, but he feared losing his home and land, as Sutter had done. With no takers, he hit up Hal Smith for a loan to be repaid by another stint in Hollywood. He had borrowed just enough to cover rent, taxes, insurance, and clothes for Estelle and the children. If Smith had not come through, Faulkner had been prepared to approach Harold Guinzberg at Viking Press. “I feel good and ready and ‘hard-boiled’ now, enough to cope with Shylock himself,” Faulkner wrote Estelle. She was to be careful, paying cash for everything.44

He had some time to socialize, reporting to Estelle about seeing S. J. Perelman, one of his few Algonquin Round Table friends who was not in Hollywood working. He also maintained contacts with Smith’s rival publishers Harold Guinzberg and his wife, Alice, Bennett Cerf, and Donald Klopfer—perhaps dangling in front of them the first four chapters of his novel. He also had time to see two Broadway plays, although he did not say which ones. He continued to work on short stories, gauging the market by meeting with a Saturday Evening Post editor.45 By October 15, back in Oxford, he had started chapter 5, the halfway point of Absalom, Absalom!

Overhead on Friday, November 9, Dean Faulkner in the fire-engine-red, four-seater Waco biplane that his brother Bill had flown with Hal Smith aboard now made several low passes, leafleting Oxford to the delight of clapping children and excited adults, all set to watch, as Dean put it in his own words:

MAMMOTH ARMISTICE DAY AIR PAGEANT

Two days—Nov. 10–11, Two O’Clock.

Featuring Dean Faulkner and Navy Sowell.

THRILLING EXHIBITION OF STUNT FLYING

AND AERIAL ACROBATICS.

Death-defying parachute jumps by Navy Sowell.

See Pontotoc from the air.

Long rides, one dollar.

Landing field west of Pontotoc.

In case of inclement weather show will be held

the following week.

On Sunday, November 10, Dean took three farmers, Lamon Graham, Henry Graham, and Bud Warren, for a long ride. All three wanted an aerial view of their farms and talked about taking flying lessons. All had been drinking. They were a “rough type,” Dean told his wife, but he needed the money.46 Nearly an hour later, the plane had not returned. Louise, Navy Sowell, and two others drove along the plane’s route and discovered the Waco crashed into a pasture. One of Dean’s fellow pilots called William Faulkner, who turned to Estelle with the news and then called his brothers, asking them to meet at their mother’s house. By the time they arrived, another pilot had already called her, and she simply gripped Bill’s hand and said nothing next to her silent son. A little later, she said, “Did I ever do anything to make him unhappy?”

The crash had destroyed most of the plane. Interviewed by a local newspaper, Faulkner said Lamon Graham, who had some flying experience, was found with the wheel in his lap. Perhaps Graham had frozen at the controls.47 The engine had been driven into the cockpit and into Dean. “Hell, Dean, is that you?,” Faulkner was overheard to say. What was left of Dean? Faulkner claimed to have worked all night on his brother’s face to make him presentable to his mother. But the casket, on a bier in Maud’s front parlor, remained closed, and he told her, “I want you to remember him the way he was.” Cho-Cho watched her grandmother Maud try to throw herself into the grave and be held back as the grave filled with earth.48

Exactly what happened has never been determined. E. O. Champion, an aviation mechanic, well disposed to Dean, who always “had a word for everyone,” said Dean was “a fine flyer, but had been at it long enough to have grown careless in addition to the drinking at the time.”49 Decades later, Dean’s daughter concluded, “Finding fault for the crash is beyond mortal consideration.” But William Faulkner blamed himself—for all of it, getting Dean into the flying business and even supplying him with a plane. From now on Dean’s widow and baby would be William Faulkner’s responsibility. After the funeral on November 11, Armistice Day, Faulkner moved in with his distraught mother on 510 South Lamar, the home he had visited so often, and where Louise now recuperated. He drew a bath for her at night and brought her warm milk and a sleeping pill before bed. When she said at breakfast, “I can’t eat. I dreamed the whole accident last night,” he replied: “I dream it every night.”

It was a bad time to be away from Rowan Oak, where Estelle was drinking heavily, Louise remembered. No one mentions what Estelle was going through at this time, or how isolated she may have felt as her husband withdrew into his own sorrow, focusing on his mother and Louise, especially when he moved into the house with his mother and brother’s widow.50 He slept on a cot and used the dining room table to work on Absalom, Absalom! Louise heard him at the typewriter steadily working every night. He began drinking three weeks after Dean’s death. On the sofa, reminiscing with Louise, he began to cry and said, “I have ruined your life.” She was only eighteen and five months pregnant. Maud appeared and said to the sobbing Louise: “You understand, Louise, he cannot help it. He could not stand it anymore. He had to have some relief.” On Dean’s gravestone, Faulkner saluted his brother with the same inscription he had given to John Sartoris in Flags in the Dust: “I bare him on eagles’ wings and brought him unto me.” This making of literature out of a life troubled Maud, who regarded the inscription as a monument to William Faulkner’s grief. Dean had the Butler body. Only a few inches taller than Bill, he had grown a mustache like his older brother, written stories, and added a u to his name. Dean, the pilot’s pilot, Vernon Omlie’s star, had been a projection of William Faulkner’s own dreams, and now Dean, “not yet thirty, had died in his stead.”51

Dean’s death occurred at the very time barnstorming was coming to an end, a relic, really, of the 1920s. Flying was a more orderly business now. Dean represented in his high spirits and daring what Faulkner had written about in his stories and also in “Flying the Mail,” in which the pilot is regarded with “awed respect,” a cavalier of the air.52 Later Maud told her granddaughter, named Dean after her father, that the “merry wild spirit” attributed to John Sartoris emanated from the “warm and ready and generous” brother, who stood apart from Jack, John, and William, who had more of young Bayard’s aloof and tormented character. William Faulkner rarely spoke of his youngest brother to Dean, born four months after her father died, although she remembered his telling her on one occasion, “Your father was a rainbow.”53 Fraternal feelings, so much a part of Absalom, Absalom!—figured into the way Henry Sutpen worships Charles Bon, the more worldly, accomplished brother—became the increasing focus of Faulkner’s work in the last two chapters of his novel. So, too, did the focus on their sister, Judith, so self-contained like Louise and at the same time the object of their intense affections.

Faulkner’s stepdaughter, Cho-Cho, said he had fallen in love with Louise, and Louise admitted to Cho-Cho that she was “very much drawn to him,” but they did not become lovers.54 Did his drinking in the wake of Dean’s death relate to an ardor he could not express, or was it, as Louise supposed, because he now worried about leaving home for another Hollywood assignment, which also meant interrupting work on his novel? On December 4, he wrote to Morton Goldman that Absalom, Absalom! “is pretty good and I think another month will see it done.” But he needed to get a movie contract: “I dont care how . . . just so I do.” He did not “particularly want to go,” but he had to repay Hal Smith.55

On December 10, Faulkner flew to California to work on a film adaptation of Wooden Crosses, a French novel about World War I. There he would meet a young woman whom he could love, far from home, who reminded him of home.