14

Impasse

June 1946–December 1947

Interruptions

On June 7, at a little after 7:00 p.m., Madeleine Simons showed up at Rowan Oak’s front door. A boy [perhaps Malcolm] greeted her, and she told him she was writing a study of William Faulkner’s work. “Oh, come in,” he said. “Come on in.” He went into another room and told two giggling girls [Jill and Dean?] that a French girl had arrived. They greeted her with a “good evening” and departed, followed shortly by William Faulkner, dressed in torn pants that he had evidently just worn on a fishing trip. He seemed shy and apologized for not answering her letter. He complimented her on her English, asked a few questions about her background, and wanted to know what had attracted her to his work. It was the scene in The Hamlet between Ike and the cow—so poetic—she said. He smiled and said, “I am pretty well satisfied with that chapter.” He told her he was not a literary man but would do his best to answer her questions—and she had lots of them. He had not based Thomas Sutpen on anyone, he said in answer to one of her queries. The character stood for “a state of mind,” the desire for a son. “To have a son,” Faulkner said, was “the most modest ambition you can think of. Almost anybody can have a son. But this was the thing he devoted his whole life to and was never able to achieve.” He told Simons that with Sutpen he was reaching for some “larger human truth.” Much of what he told her would be familiar to any student of Faulkner’s life and work, and she did most of the talking, which was fine with him. When she told him that “there is often more in what is written than the author realizes,” he replied: “Yes how true.”1

Musings on how such moments seemed to Faulkner are part of the inescapably wistful record of biography. A character shows up at an antebellum mansion’s front door and is not rebuffed but welcomed inside, and then is accorded the respect of its owner, who has no son but instead a devoted reader. What he tells her about not having a son is not like what he says elsewhere about his greatest novel.2 Such fleeting moments are accidentally memorialized, fixed in writing, at the solicitation of a biographer interested not only in the great achievements of the writer’s life but in his quotidian existence. Simons would go on to write a master’s thesis about William Faulkner’s work, one of several theses that students were beginning to write even before Malcolm Cowley produced his Portable Faulkner.3

A few weeks earlier Faulkner had thanked Malcolm Cowley for warning him about a proposed visit from Russian writer Ilya Ehrenburg, who said he had several questions for Faulkner, including, “How did he stand on the Negro question?” Faulkner had not given a significant interview for more than six years, and the times had changed. He would now be asked about social justice issues that by and large he had been able to avoid before the war. “What the hell can I do?,” Faulkner asked Cowley: “Last month two damned Swedes, two days ago a confounded Chicago reporter, and now this one that cant even speak english. As if anything he or I either know, or both of us together know, is worth being said once, let alone twice through an interpreter. I swear to Christ being in Hollywood was better than this where nobody knew me or cared a damn.” When a State Department official called to arrange a meeting, Faulkner said he could give Ehrenburg an hour, and that apparently was enough to prevent the encounter.4 Cowley later learned that the two Swedes had shown up in Oxford because of a rumor that Faulkner might be awarded the Nobel Prize.5

Work in Progress

Faulkner said he hated the interruptions from people who wanted to see where he kept his tail or his other head. “I am busy on this new book [A Fable], it is hot now,” he told Random House editor Robert Linscott. Faulkner had much more to write and couldn’t say “where it’s going because that’s what I’m trying to do by writing it,” but he thought the book might be not just his best but “perhaps the best of my time.” He needed more than the usual six-month break in his contract with Warner Brothers. So far he had subsisted on the five hundred dollars per month Random House sent him, and the publisher agreed to continue the payments so that he would not have to return to Hollywood. Faulkner touted the book as a War and Peace, “close enough to home, our times, language, for Americans to really buy it.” He sent along several sections, some of which might stand alone that Harold Ober could sell.6 In July, Ober sold the film rights for “Death Drag” and “Honor” to RKO for $6,600, easing, somewhat, the pressure to return to Hollywood, although Faulkner was on suspension and the studio added on to the contract the time he was away—a practice that would soon be outlawed by a Supreme Court decision.

Faulkner reported to Robert Haas that work on the novel slowed in August for farming, and then again in October for harvesting. Faulkner now estimated it would take at least another year to finish his fable, especially since he had stopped work on it to earn $3,500 for doctoring a movie script. What it was he did not say, but he returned to his novel in December, after deer hunting at the end of November. Hunting, it seems, was a kind of reprieve from the rest of life. John Cullen, one of Faulkner’s hunting companions, said he was “always cheerful, quiet, and willing to do his part of the hardest, dirtiest work in camp. I have never heard him grumble about any hardship we ever had, and sometimes it has been pretty rough in the Delta.” Faulkner did not bring books along with him or talk about his work. At most he would read a newspaper. Cullen could remember only a few occasions when his friend got drunk. Most of the time, he was just a sociable camp drinker. Faulkner had never stood out in camp and always did what Ike Roberts, the leader of the hunt, told him to do. Bill kept quiet most of the time, but Ike did remember one story. A northern senator, partial to southern women, told one that he liked their “wonderfully slow speech.” She said: “You’d love my sister. She certainly speaks slowly. One time on a date the man asked her whether she had ever had any and before she said no she had.”7

Faulkner had “missed a magnificent stag twice,” a “beautiful creature,” running at something like thirty miles per hour like a horse, coming into full view, he told Haas: “I picked two perfect openings in trees and shot twice. I left my customary 30–30 carbine at home for my boy to use and was shooting a .270 bolt action. I think the first bullet hit a twig and blew up. The second one missed him clean, over or maybe behind him; he was just running too fast. He was a beautiful sight. I’m glad now he got away from me though I would have liked his head.”8 His account suggests that when his blood was up he would shoot, no matter how ambivalent he felt about killing.

The thrilling adventure came even as Faulkner told Cowley: “It’s a dull life here. I need some new people, above all probably a new woman.” Faulkner admitted he had become a slave to his possessions, even though, in truth, he really did not want the encumbrances. At thirty he thought he might somehow escape them, but now, nearing fifty, he knew that he never would.9 But this was not the whole story. On January 25, 1947, he made the final payment on Rowan Oak. Will Bryant had died, and Faulkner now dealt with Bryant’s daughter, Maggie Lea Stone, who also tolerated his late payments but appreciated his scrupulous efforts to catch up. He told her that “throughout the whole transaction between Mr Will and myself while I was buying this property, the relationship was not that of two men doing business with one another, but rather that of a young man with an older man for whom he had a considerable respect and admiration and who, the young man believed, held for him a warmer feeling than mere acquaintanceship.” But it was more than Will Bryant who mattered: “I will never again find such nice creditors as you and your mother and father have been,” he assured Maggie Lea. All paid up, he wrote, “I hope some day to be able to call on you all, but it will be for the pleasure of seeing you again.” His last letter enclosed a blank check, since the final interest payment had to be calculated, and he trusted Maggie Lea and her husband, Ike Stone, to fill in the proper amount. “This concludes the matter,” Faulkner added. “In a way, I am a little sorry to sever at last even this slight thread with the memory of one for whom I could have felt no more warmth and admiration if I had been kin in blood.” The memory of Will Bryant, so rooted in Rowan Oak, abided, no matter what William Faulkner said about his boredom and his responsibilities.10

Another Faulkner admitted to Harold Ober that he did not write as fast as he used to. It might take two more years to complete his fable.11 He had three hundred pages, but by the spring of 1947, he considered taking a break and visiting New York. He seemed to want to allay any concerns Random House might have, so he proposed to Robert Haas a rendezvous so he could tell him the whole story.12 While Ober fended off Warner Brothers, Faulkner found “another serious bug in the ms.” He blamed Hollywood for the “trash and junk writing” that he now had to clean out, and he still thought of visiting New York since he felt “a little stale.”13

Between April 14 and 17, Faulkner met with six Ole Miss literature classes in informal question-and-answer sessions for an honorarium of $250. As usual he treated his film work as insignificant, but some of his answers were surprising. In his depiction of his native land he said he used “imagination when I have to and cruelty as a last resort. The area is incidental. That’s just all I know.” When a student asked if, then, Faulkner gave a “wrong impression” of the South, he answered: “Yes, and I’m sorry. I feel I’m written out. I don’t think I’ll write much more. You have only so much steam and if you don’t use it up on writing it’ll get off by itself.”14

Two faculty members remembered how he had excused himself: “I must go home and let the cow out.” They said his appearances left him “a little tired but also quite refreshed.”15 He discovered that his usual reluctance to talk about his work and about literature abated. He even enjoyed himself.16 But his appearances had unfortunate consequences in write-ups that quoted him as saying Hemingway had no courage. An incensed Hemingway had his friend General Buck Lanham write to Faulkner, attesting to the novelist’s bravery in both world wars and the Spanish Civil War. On June 28, Faulkner replied, saying he had not commented on Hemingway as a man but on his “craftsmanship as a writer.” Faulkner explained his ranking of writers, which he would repeat in several variations for the rest of his life. All of the writers named—Hemingway, Wolfe, Dos Passos, Caldwell, and Faulkner too—had failed, with Wolfe the “best failure because he had the most courage,” risking “bad taste, clumsiness, mawkishness, dullness, to shoot the works win or lose and damn the torpedoes.” Faulkner’s correspondence had often included comments about his own bad taste, which he deemed a consequence of his experiments with language. In this context, Hemingway had not dared to “risk bad taste.” Faulkner wrote to Hemingway, “I’m sorry of this damn stupid thing.” If he had known his remarks would be published, he would have insisted on looking them over before they were made public. He hoped it did not matter a damn to Hemingway. But if it did, “please accept another squirm from yours truly.”17 A mollified Hemingway cheerfully accepted Faulkner’s apology and threw some compliments his way and wanted, it seemed, to continue the correspondence.18 But Faulkner did not reply.

By mid-July, Faulkner had accumulated more than four hundred pages of his fable and projected that it would run to at least one thousand. Again he thought he might have to return to Warner. Otherwise he did not see how he could pay his tax bill, now that the IRS had rejected his exemption claims for his 1944 residence in California. But on a summer visit Buzz Bezzerides laughed about the income tax problem and called Faulkner a “sap.” Buzz’s tax consultant, specializing in movie writers’ tax returns, could save Faulkner a lot of money. “I have graduated from trying to make my own returns now,” Faulkner reported to Harold Ober.19

Bezzerides, working on a script in Florida about sponge fishermen, had contacted Faulkner, who insisted on a visit before Buzz returned to California. Faulkner picked him up at the train depot in a dilapidated car that had no floorboards. Bezzerides had to sit with his feet propped up on the dashboard. It seemed to take hours driving in the dark to Oxford. Estelle served marvelous meals, part of the payback, Buzz thought, for the times he had put up Faulkner in Hollywood. It was all a little ramshackle, almost a parody of the master and the big house and the black attendants—so it seemed to Bezzerides, who noticed, he thought, how people said “Good morning, Bill,” with “an air of contempt.” Others treated Faulkner’s farming as a big joke. A few years later Phil Stone told Carvel Collins that Faulkner had “enough resentment of the town’s early attitude toward him to say that he’d like to be a Prussian officer & put his foot on some of their necks.”20

Cho-Cho’s daughter, Vicki, confirmed that the Faulkners were “a constant source of ridicule and slander.” She “never knew quite why we were treated differently.” To her, Faulkner was not a famous writer; “he was simply Pappy.” She heard his typewriter in the mornings, but “it just didn’t register.” While Faulkner typed, Estelle read Dostoevsky, Gogol, Henry James, and H. P. Lovecraft. She liked to build a fire in her bedroom on cold winter nights and read while, at a card table in the same room, Jill, Vicki, and an animated Pappy played “cutthroat Hearts.” “He wanted to dump the lady on us every time,” Vicki said. “Oh he loved getting that Queen of Spades.”21 It was fun at home. In town, she felt “a subtle shunning.”22 But what did it matter? “To me, as a young child, Rowan Oak was an enchanted place, a cocoon that protected us all, thanks to Pappy,” Vicki said. When her parents returned home from the Far East in 1941, they lived at Rowan Oak until Bill Fielden found a job. “There was never any question that my family would share living quarters at Rowan Oak until we could get our lives in order.”23

Vicki was not the only one who viewed Rowan Oak as a place of enchantment. William Lewis Jr., the son of one of the town’s merchant princes, remembered Estelle at the piano, playing, it seemed, every show tune of the 1920s and 1930s from Sigmund Romberg to George Gershwin. He was one of Dean’s school friends and just one of many children who used to congregate at Rowan Oak and play in Bailey’s Woods. Faulkner was “Pappy” to all children, as they sat to hear stories that kept them on edge. Just when he would get to the climax and say, “And then,” he would pause, examine his pipe, take out a pipe cleaner, puff on his pipe, and with the children just about ready to wet their pants in anticipation, he would say, “Now where was I?” Estelle would break in and say, “Now Bill, go on.” Pappy was such a tease. Estelle remained in the background, but she was welcoming to the children, greeting them sometimes with a hug, always with an exclamation of pleasure. Sandra Baker Moore remembered Estelle’s bedroom, where she had an easel set up at just the right window to catch the light. For Sandra, Rowan Oak exuded the nimbus of family, including “Aunt Dot,” Estelle’s sister Dorothy. Only years later did Sandra realize they were not actually related.

For Faulkner this realm stood against the change taking place in town. Kate Baker, who had spent four years in Fort Smith, Arkansas, had returned to run her dress shop on the square, and she wrote in her letters about postwar Oxford, “a different town, crowded and busy.” Soldiers were returning to the university under the GI Bill and looking for rooms to rent. Postwar shortages meant she had trouble stocking enough lingerie for their wives.

Some things had not changed: Faulkner would show up outside the dress shop and call to Ruth Mullet, the black woman who worked for Miss Kate. He would hand her a note, and Kate Baker would come out in her riding habit to accept Faulkner’s invitation. “Men, you know, did not like to enter women’s shops,” Kate’s daughter Sandra said.24

Saturdays on the square were the same, too, with the “colored folk,” as they were called then, coming into town. They bought secondhand clothes in an open-air market on a corner of the square close to Phil Stone’s law office. Stone, too, seemed the same, carrying around Juicy Fruit gum for children and smelling of cigars.25

Faulkner drove Buzz around the countryside complaining about the changes: A stream had been dammed up to make a lake stocked with fish for tourists. “Faulkner fulminated about how they had destroyed a natural stream that was a beauty in the area.” He predicted the lake would silt up and become polluted. Buzz had trouble downing the local corn liquor—“like drinking fire!” Bill drank and drank without any apparent impact. Estelle also seemed a target of veiled ridicule because of her drinking.

On one of the early mornings of their weeklong stay, Buzz and his wife were startled to hear, coming from Estelle’s bedroom, her “vicious whisper”: “Don’t you touch me.” Then they heard a sound, a “sharp, intense striking of a hand against flesh.” Buzz assumed Bill had slapped Estelle, but who is to say it was not Estelle who landed the blow? What really happened? “Shortly after that, we became aware of a sexual encounter on the other side of the door.” The next morning a cheerful Estelle served breakfast. To Buzz, the incident reflected what he knew of the unhappy marriage. Bill needed sex and love, Buzz said, but Estelle’s angry response showed that she “didn’t want to be taken advantage of.”26 It was a lot to assume, even in such proximity to this complicated couple. Buzz saw her as frail, the weaker partner in this marriage, and he had sought to comfort her, but was she showing him something quite different at breakfast?

Vicki suggested that her grandmother feared having another child. She wanted separate bedrooms. “Contraceptives were largely unknown then, and I think Grandmama probably said, at the age thirty-six or so, ‘Enough is enough.’ . . . She was a tired, sick lady by then.” Not too sick or tired, though: “Grandmama ran the place. And she did a damn good job of it!,” Vicki insisted. “Almost single-handedly she maintained Rowan Oak. She made repairs, grew and [during the war] worked the ‘Victory garden,’ made it produce; she canned vegetables and made jams and jellies.”27

Estelle, whatever her lapses and troubles, carried on, sounding exuberant, as usual, in her letters. “We are the busiest family imaginable,” she had written to her daughter Cho-Cho, living in China with her husband, Bill Fielden, before the beginning of the war. Their daughter, Vicki, stayed at Rowan Oak. Shanghai, where the Fieldens lived, seemed a dangerous place for a child. “Mama & Daddy, PLEASE don’t let those people (the communists) get you, and come on home,” Vicki wrote to her parents.28

“School, of course, comes first—but the children’s extra-curricular activities keep pappy and me up and (often times) out, all hours of the day & night,” Estelle wrote: “Vicki looks positively lovely with her hair short and we think she has gained a bit too—very popular at school Jill says, and she is definitely proud enough to want to stand pretty high in her class.” Estelle did not reveal her feelings when she reported that “Uncle Ned died in Ripley yesterday—with his burial tomorrow. Billy & I will go over of course.”29 Ned Barnett, the crusty family retainer who had worn the old Colonel’s clothes and slaughtered Black Buster, reminded the Faulkners every day of their heritage. Ned could have lived rent-free at Greenfield Farm but had wanted to return to Ripley and a place of his own, just like independent Lucas Beauchamp in Go Down, Moses. Both Faulkners had cried as they sorted through Ned’s possessions, one of the few times Malcolm had ever seen his stepfather in tears.30

Throughout the summer and into the fall, Faulkner continued work on what might be a masterpiece—or might be no good. It worried him, but he wanted to press on. Random House continued to back him, sending monthly checks and covering his back taxes.31 He seemed to lack confidence. Partisan Review rejected an excerpt from the novel. Why?, Faulkner asked Ober. “Did they find it dull as written?” Random House had never given him an opinion, “other than to go ahead.” Faulkner wanted Ober’s opinion. “Dull? Too prolix? Diffuse?” He sought some explanation for his impasse, declaring that

man is in a state of spiritual cowardice: all his bottom, reserve, strength has to go into physical stamina and there is nothing left to be concerned with art. That magazine does not exist now which would have printed sections from Ulysses as in the 1920’s. And that the man crouching in a Mississippi hole trying to shape into some form of art his summation and conception of the human heart and spirit in terms of the cerebral, the simple imagination, is as out of place and in the way as a man trying to make an Egyptian water wheel in the middle of the Bessemer foundry would be.

Partisan Review editor Philip Rahv had rejected the fable fragment, saying “it read like a first draft—it just wasn’t ready for publication.” Faulkner, refusing to believe he had wasted his time, supposed that it would be “50 years before the world can stop to read it. It’s too long, too deliberate.”32

What to do? The same as he had done with Absalom, Absalom!: write another novel.