18

What Mad Pursuit

August 1949–March 1954

Joan

What happened to the fable? It had stalled, although work on it continued fitfully. Faulkner seemed to be looking for a revival of spirit. Gavin Stevens, also in his fifties, found fulfillment in marriage. Phil Stone, similarly stymied, had temporarily found a reprieve when he married a younger woman by whom he had two children. But Stone had done more than that: he had championed his wife’s work, finding in her another protégé to promote. Whom did Faulkner have? Estelle had long ago abandoned her own fiction. Jill showed no sign of wanting to be a writer. Other family members, like his stepson Malcolm, upset by the war and having trouble settling down, were no help—or like his nephew Jimmy just did not have the literary or emotional depth that Faulkner craved to share with someone. When he found Joan, he proposed two extraordinary projects: they should write a play together, and she should write an epistolary novel about their “affair.”1 The word has to be put in quotation marks because it was so sporadic and hardly consummated at all—lots of driving around looking for a place to land—and yet Joan Williams remained for four years one of the constant sources of Faulkner’s inspiration and frustration. Once upon a time, Estelle had been his be-all—deeply read and articulate and a writer. He had turned away from that part of her even as she seemed to have turned away from that part of herself. In a subordinate role, Estelle had diminished herself and seemed to him beyond recovery.

In August 1949 Joan Williams, an attractive, trim, twenty-one-year-old aspiring writer, first met an ornery William Faulkner, who regarded her as another intruder on his property and turned her away from the gates of Rowan Oak, so to speak. He had been warned in advance of her proposed visit and had grumbled, “Does she want to see if I have two heads?” Did he recall that drawing he had done for Jill during an incarceration in planet Hollywood, showing the two-headed moguls (labeled Warner Bros.) in one body, clubs in their hands, in prison-guard uniform, looking like aliens, towering over Faulkner stooped over his typewriter, pounding away at the keys, while smoke rises from his pipe, powering the studio’s products? So often he had been turned into an object, a means of production. He resented this aspect of his bondage like an inmate pining for home, sending Jill “love and kisses.” Those who came calling no doubt wanted their look at a freak of nature.

When it occurred to him that Joan might also alleviate his writer’s agony, he responded to her letter apologizing for her intrusion. He wanted to make love to her, and his writing, as in his earliest days, became suffused with the wooing of a woman, beginning with his first letter to her: “The discovered flower is already doomed for the first frost; until 30 years later a soiled battered bloke aged 50 years smells or remembers it, and at once he is 21 again and brave and clean and durable. I think you know enough now, already have enough; nothing to lack which a middle-aged writer could supply.” But if she would send him questions, he would answer them. When she did send questions, he answered, “A woman must ask them of a man while they are lying in bed together.” Taken aback, she later said she never had an affair in mind, but she continued to write to him. Shy and independent and persistent, she addressed him as an acolyte, hoping for advice about how to pursue a writing career.

He became the postulant, seeking entrance into her world even as he put himself first, never quite capitulating to her desire for not a lover but a mentor, a guiding spirit and supporter who devoted himself to her genius. The more she later learned about Faulkner from biographer Fred Karl, the more she began to distrust what Faulkner had told her: “Learning so much in more recent years about how Phil Stone really tutored Faulkner in the beginning makes me more than mystified and also miffed that Bill did not do anything of the sort for me. His mind grows more and more curious.” She wondered about the stories he told, the “untruths: did he believe them?”2 What untruths? He said that Estelle had tricked him into marriage after Cornell Franklin had thrown her out for drinking. Faulkner even claimed that Jill was not his biological daughter.3

Perhaps Faulkner did not see the genius in Williams that Stone had seen in him. But then how was Faulkner to know what Williams might do, any more than Stone could know what Faulkner would ultimately make of himself? Williams had won a Mademoiselle prize for a story, marking a beginning not much different from her contemporary Sylvia Plath. For more than four years, Faulkner did try to help Williams. “She has been my pupil 3 years now, when nobody else, her people, believed in her,” he wrote to his agent Harold Ober, perhaps thinking of his own family, except for his mother. “I am happy to know my judgment was right,” Faulkner wrote, alluding to a piece she had published in the Atlantic Monthly. “She is shy and independent, will ask no help. But for my sake, do whatever you can for her.”4 The description could fit the young Faulkner, who did not ask for help but knew how to take advantage of it when offered. Ober replied: “Miss Williams came into the office and seems happy about the Atlantic sale. She is a nice, bright girl, and I hope that she will write other stories that we can handle successfully for her.”5

Faulkner seems to have believed she filled a lack. He had been looking for her, and she had found him. When he thanked a scholar for an article in College English, he noted: “I agree with it; I mean re Faulkner’s aim. You and Cowley have both seen it, along with Prof. Warren Beck of Wisconsin and one twenty-one-year-old Tennessee school girl.” She was then a Bard undergraduate, but his turn of phrase suited a man who believed in the percipience of young people. Never one to expatiate on the process of writing, with Joan he opened up and confided in her—not so much about his fiction as what it felt like to write and rewrite, revise and reject draft after draft as the world around him went on without much concern for his success or failure. As a writer, and often simply as a man, he had felt inconsolably lonely. He sought to share the writer’s singular plight and glory with an acolyte and lover. He believed they could become one in the suspension of life that art provided.

Faulkner’s letters to Williams were about solitude, suffering, and worry—all of which took time to work through until the “passion, the controlled heat” of writing would emerge. She could expect much unhappiness, forsaking “peace, money, duty too, if you are so unlucky.” The words seem meant to assuage himself as much as to comfort her. In retrospect, Williams came to believe that Faulkner wanted more than her: “He cared about young people wanting to follow the craft and once wanted to set up a colony for them himself.”6

When he met her in New York in February 1950, he proposed they collaborate on what would become the play Requiem for a Nun. Was he hoping to spare her some of that solitude even as he revved up his own hopes in her as the new woman he craved? He gave her specific scenes to work on, almost as he might have done in a writers’ workshop or in the Ward at Warner Brothers. He would send her a few pages, urging her to rewrite them, suggesting that first drafts often did not resemble the finished work. Pulling apart what was on paper was just part of the process. Williams made notes—astutely questioning the undeveloped character of Nancy Mannigoe—but did not write much of the play, even though Faulkner insisted it was hers. He even said that he would not continue work on it without her. But in fact he continued with the play and gradually realized it had become “some kind of novel.”

Faulkner continued to hope, even suggesting more sexual experience might heal the hurt he detected in her, the result of a narrow, middle-class upbringing in a home of stifled feelings. Her vivid words put her right beside him at Rowan Oak: “the two rows of trees and the house and the left-over rain and that was summer and now the leaves snow, so circling slowly they loosen from the trees and fall when the wind blows, only the dried brown ones are left and a few yellow, they rustle when you walk.” Whatever she meant, such passages excite. Later she would write: “To have found someone, embodying so many things I’ve looked for, in so strange a way, under strange circumstances. I guess I have felt I wanted to cry because it was all so wonderful and means so much to me; that is why it is hard to tell you about because it is so close to me and means so much. Bill, I do love you.” Sometimes she seemed about to surrender: “Oh hell, Bill, hell hell hell—I want to see you too. I want to somehow reach you, lose my restraint, timidity—all the things that keep us from being close.”7

The differences in their ages bothered her. She treated him like a father confessor, a role her own father had not fulfilled. Faulkner tried another tack—“an idea for you”—this time in the form of a letter that reads like a film treatment: A famous man of fifty spends a day with a college senior. They have an instant rapport and talk about everything. She is flattered and thinks “maybe he will of a sudden talk of love to her.” But the meeting is unresolved, and she is troubled by the meaning of it all. The next day a telegram arrives with the announcement that he is dead from a heart attack. She realizes that “he knew it was going to happen and that what he wanted was to walk in April again for a day, an hour.” She represents, in other words, his youth, his love. Faulkner may well have been reading Hemingway’s Across the River and into the Trees, in which Colonel Cantwell develops just this kind of attachment to the young Renata. “You can do it,” Faulkner urged Williams. She rejected the idea as “gimmicky.”8 It sounded like the kind of movie an aging, still handsome Gary Cooper could do with the youthful Patricia Neal. Joan felt Faulkner wanted her to do it all his way, and for her to be forever in love with him, although his letters to her do not rival the passion he expressed for Meta. It had been Joan’s first letter to him, not her face, that had stirred him. He knew that Joan was not exclusively his—that she saw other men. But the “patterns of erotic longing” established in his pursuit of Helen Baird and Meta recurred with Joan, including his penchant for quoting from Cyrano,9 the lover by letter. Later Faulkner took her to a performance of Cyrano starring Jose Ferrer.

Joan became a rendezvous point for him in New York. She remembered how much he liked his getaways from Oxford, playing the literary lion and introducing her to writers and editors and publishers. But for nearly three years she put him off. She would not sleep with him, and he then resorted to drinking—blaming her for lapses that resulted in more Algonquin Hotel overdoses that came perilously close to finality since he also took Seconal to put himself to sleep and had to be hospitalized. Joan had coped with such episodes in her father’s life and knew what to expect. She still wanted Faulkner’s approval, seeking his comments on her stories, which he supplied, saying: “I am only trying to help you become an artist. You owe me nothing in return for what I try to do or succeed in doing for you.” But he did want more, as he told her while saying that he wrote The Wild Palms “in order to try to stave off what I thought was heart-break too. And it didn’t break then and so maybe it wont now, maybe it wont even have to break for a while yet, since the heart is a very tough and durable substance or thing or whatever you want to call it.”

Involved in the romance with Joan was Faulkner’s love of intrigue, of finding ways to meet her that evaded Estelle’s suspicions. At some point they collaborated on a script, “Innocent’s Return,” perhaps meant for television. Henry Morgan, in his mid-forties, a member of a prosperous publishing house, is dominated by his forceful wife but contented in his marriage. He is caught in compromising circumstances with Jackie Gordon, “successful nightclub singer, making good money, good looking in a hard metropolitan way, about 25.” During a hotel fire he is seen coming down in the elevator with Jackie in his bathrobe. Nothing has actually happened, but his wife accuses him of infidelity. He then pursues an affair with Jackie, who leads him on but only to arouse her husband, the agent Tony Minetti, “big, handsome, in Madison Avenue clothes.” The story ends with Tony spanking Jackie and Jackie telling Henry to respect her privacy.10 Nothing came of this effort, but Faulkner seemed fascinated with the idea of being found out in his own pursuits, if not his pajamas. He even proposed a meeting between Estelle and Joan reminiscent of the Estelle-Meta engagement.11 Joan did visit Rowan Oak in the company of a boyfriend, just as Meta had been escorted to the Estelle encounter. In this theater of duplicity Faulkner seemed subdued and Estelle even quieter and not very attractive, remembered Joan’s date, who found the Faulkners an “odd match.” But then Joan’s mother had seemed to him much the same, a lonely woman lost in her marriage.12

When Joan had initiated lovemaking in her car after a return trip from Europe, her momentary, spontaneous, and passionate pursuit was baffling, especially since she almost immediately drew away, although they resumed, at intervals, their sexual intimacy.

Faulkner advised her to jettison her middle-class morality and risk everything on becoming an artist, which also meant his lover. Yet he talked about “Mrs. Faulkner.” His marriage made a huge difference to Joan; she could not overlook it. He claimed Estelle did not respect his life as an artist, but Estelle spoke otherwise to Saxe Commins: “Truly, he has too much to do here—It is bad, I know, for an artist to undertake all Bill does—but how to circumvent it? I am at a loss.”13 Estelle added that she had done all she could for “Billy’s comfort and well being—Keeping an even keel mostly!” Four days earlier, on October 25, 1952, he told Saxe a different story: “Hell’s to pay here now. While I was hors de combat, E. opened and read Joan Williams’s letters to me. Now E. is drunk, and I am trying to nurse her before Malcolm sends her to a hospital, which costs like fury and does no good unless you make an effort yourself. I cant really blame her, certainly I cant criticize her. I am even sorry for her, even if people who will open and read another’s private and personal letters, do deserve exactly what they get.” He wanted to get to New York but could not leave so long as Estelle continued to drink and suspect his motives: “nothing would ever convince her that it was not only to be near Joan, since she (E.) has never had any regard or respect for my work, has always looked on it as a hobby, like collecting stamps.” What Estelle thought of his work, other than her expressions of pride, remains a mystery. She did sometimes venture an opinion. She didn’t care for Chick Mallison in Intruder in the Dust and told her husband so. “That was the end of that & they never talked about the book again,” Joseph Blotner’s notes record Estelle saying: “He was very sensitive to any kind of criticism.”14 This family man lamented: “I used to be the cat who walked by himself, and wanted, needed nothing from anyone. But not any more.” Like Estelle, he solicited Commins’s advice, adding: “I probably wont take it, but it should comfort me.”15

Estelle

“Estelle Faulkner, without Bill & Jill, would be a total nonentity,” she had written to Saxe Commins.16 She went to Memphis, accompanied by Dean’s widow, Louise, and a close friend and neighbor, Kate Baker, to confront Joan.17 Estelle wanted to know Joan’s intentions: “Do you want to marry my husband?” The question astounded Joan, who would not have considered such a proposal until Faulkner had divorced Estelle.18 Mrs. Faulkner’s foray had its intended impact. Joan, more than ever, worried over her involvement with a married man, although she continued to see Faulkner, seek his advice, and unburden herself to him.

A concerned but confident Estelle stood her ground, writing to Saxe: “Unfortunately, a man in Bill’s position is an object of envy and an awful lot of malice—A friend? of mine from Shanghai days delights in sending me accounts that could be disturbing. Luckily I have managed a stiff upper lip & retained my dignity.”19 She did not believe her husband’s claim that Joan was his student or that they were seriously collaborating on a play. Estelle let the drama play out while enlisting the sympathy of Faulkner’s editor. Faulkner often portrayed his wife as pitiable, a weak person in her cups. But she had begun to attend Alcoholics Anonymous meetings and would manage eventually, in 1955, to stop drinking, abetted by the painting her granddaughter watched as part of Estelle’s recovery of herself as an artist.20 In her forthright correspondence she seems a very different person from the wife he denigrated. Estelle, upset, to be sure, persevered and remained, to use a Faulkner word, indomitable, even though she sometimes seemed on the verge of giving up on her husband. In such moments she counted on Commins, who had stood by Faulkner during his worst alcoholic bouts in New York: “Your letter Saxe gave me pause. I was just on the verge of writing Bill that I was suing for divorce. I still believe it the only wise thing to do—on his account, as well as Jill’s & mine.” During the four-year period of his involvement with Joan he had been away from home frequently—the Nobel trip, a stint in Hollywood to work on a script, time in Europe scouting locations for A Fable, various trips to New York to see his editors and pick up awards, and then an excursion to Egypt to work on yet another film. Stays at home had become a “nightmare of drunkenness. He must be very unhappy—so the only cure I know of is to help him get free—legally—Heaven only knows he has been free in every other sense.” She wanted Saxe’s advice: “Please believe that I’m only endeavoring to make everyone concerned a little happier.”21 “Nothing can alter my love & devotion—nor upset my faith in Bill’s actual love for me. Though right now, he swears he doesn’t care,” Estelle confessed.22 She told Saxe he could tell Bill whatever Saxe thought he should hear about her letter.

While Estelle held on, Faulkner seemed to be looking for a way out in the fall of 1953. Estelle told Saxe: “Bill had Malcolm open and read her [Joan’s] letters to him & Mac, shocked, gave them to me.”23 Malcolm described to southern historian Jim Silver a scene during which a drunken, naked Faulkner on his bed listened to a Negro family servant reading, with difficulty, one of Joan’s love letters as Estelle entered the room, sat on the bed’s edge, and took the letter, “dramatically rendering it for her husband.” Malcolm and his sister also copied one of Joan’s letters they thought might be useful if the Faulkners divorced.24

The role-playing that Jill had often observed in her parents’ exchanges and their desire to have others participate in the theatrics of their marriage reached a climax in scenes worthy of Edward Albee—not to mention Knight’s Gambit, where Gavin Stevens mixes up the letters to his two beloveds so that they discover his divided passions. Faulkner resumed his liaison with Meta when he returned to Hollywood in early 1951 for work on The Left Hand of God. On his return home, he shared the family romance with Phil Stone, who served as the recipient of Meta’s letters, so that she did not have to use a Rowan Oak address.

Estelle’s remarkable letters to Saxe Commins described her husband’s behavior but did not air her personal grievances as the put-upon wife fending off the “other woman.” A divorce on the grounds of incompatibility seemed ridiculous to her after twenty-five years of marriage. She seemed buoyed by Saxe’s supportive, uplifting letters, and disavowed jealousy: “I certainly don’t blame Joan. In all probability had I been an aspiring young writer and an elderly celebrity had fallen in love with me—I would have accepted him as avidly as Joan did Bill—Who am I, to judge her? I dont—And, in a way, I feel sorry for Bill—He is in a mess.”25 Elderly? Faulkner, approaching his mid-fifties, did write about himself as old. He had allowed Malcolm to read Joan’s letters around the time she said she intended to marry. Why he chose that moment to confide in Malcolm, who was exceptionally close to his mother, is a mystery. Faulkner had written to Joan in October 1953, declining to “stop in”: “If this is the end, and I assume it is, I think the two people drawn together as we were and held together for four years by whatever it was we had, knew—love, sympathy, understanding, trust, belief—deserve a better period than a cup of coffee—not to end like two high school sweethearts breaking up over a Coca Cola in the corner drugstore.”

By March 1954, Faulkner had dismissed Joan Williams as a worthy mate, telling Saxe Commins: “We knew a year ago that her life was not right, she was not demon-driven enough for art, writing, to suffice, too much middle class background. . . . I was not free to marry her, even if I had not been too old.”26 She had failed to become the “daughter of his mind.”27 But Faulkner, who loved to celebrate birthdays, would continue to send Joan telegrams remembering hers, which came the day after his: “Many happy returns on your birthday and love.”28

Jill and Joan

Jill came of age during the Joan Williams affair. She had graduated from high school in May 1951 listening to her father’s warning words about “forces in the world today” that were using “man’s fear to rob him of his individuality, his soul, trying to reduce him to an unthinking mass by fear and bribery—giving him free food which he has not earned, easy and valueless money which he has not worked for.” It did not matter what the government called itself—“communist, socialist, or democratic”—he summoned Jill’s generation to “never be afraid to raise your voice for honesty and truth and compassion, against injustice and lying and greed. If you, not just you in this room tonight, but in all the thousands of other rooms like this one about the world today and tomorrow and next week, will do this, not as a class or classes, but as individuals, men and women, you will change the earth.”29

How many actually heard the speech? Or wanted to listen? When Jill’s friends heard her father would address them, they said, “Aw, Jill, let’s get somebody important.” But then they had grown up with her and perhaps remembered what she said when children were asked in school what their fathers did. Jill said, “Pappy doesn’t do anything.”30 Faulkner spoke, according to the school principal, “like a man who is seventy years old. He seemed frightened and was inaudible.”31 But he did better backstage. “Mr. Faulkner pretty well ruined his reputation as a recluse and as being uncooperative with the press and the general public,” reported Phil Mullen in the Oxford Eagle (May 31, 1951). “A chunky teenage girl, obviously a visitor, said timidly, ‘Mr. Faulkner, would you shake hands with me.’ He said certainly and he talked for several minutes with her and a young lad.”

In the fall of 1951, Jill enrolled in Pine Manor Junior College, a two-year junior college for women in Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts. She was still “Missy” to Faulkner’s “Pappy,” as he put it in many letters to her: “Pappy loves [her] more than even his soul” (October 15, 1951).32 He often referred to himself in the third person, as if examining his role as a father, which sometimes he failed to fulfill, apologizing to Jill, for example, for the insobriety that hurt her. This “dreadful behavior” (September 20, 1953) appalled him. But if fatherhood functioned as a role he struggled to perform, so, too, daughterhood served as a projection of his own concerns. As with Joan Williams, Faulkner provided Jill with guidance, if not an attentiveness to Jill’s own concerns. He told her he was proud of her, encouraged her to study well, and wanted to hear from her, but he never inquired about what life was like at college.

Faulkner wrote Jill most often from Rowan Oak, providing reports on the days there, especially his experiences with horses, which were important to Jill. He did not ask about her social life, her dates, or do more than, in a general sense, say much about her maturation, other than to provide her with an allowance and stipulate that she could now learn to manage her own money. What mattered is that she become her own person, the theme of a graduation speech that revived what he had said two years earlier: “It is us, we, not as groups or classes but as individuals, simple men and women individually free and capable of freedom and decision, who must decide, affirm simply and firmly and forever never to be led like sheep into peace and security.” Even within a normal life, with no ambition to be another Joan of Arc, a person could make a difference. “Because it begins at home.”33

What did Jill think about her own home and her parents’ marriage then, as she listened to her father say that home meant “love and fidelity and respect to who is worthy of it, someone to be compatible with, whose dreams and hopes are your dreams and hopes, who wants and will work and sacrifice also that the thing which the two of you have together shall last forever; someone whom you not only love but like too, which is more, since it must outlast what when we are young we mean by love because without the liking and the respect, the love itself will not last.”34 Like her father, she remained, in important respects, opaque. Even family members were wary of the formidable Jill—which made her parents’ worries a wonder. They made her part of their equation, a factor in their own complex calculations vis-à-vis Joan Williams. In the fall of 1952, Estelle wrote to Saxe Commins about her husband’s deepening involvement with Joan: “I am worried—almost to the point of desperation—but mostly about Jill and her future—Unless it’s the only way to save Billy—I must put Jill and her happiness first.”35 Ten days later Bill wrote to Saxe: “I am fearful about Jill. I mean, to disrupt her in the middle of her senior year at school.” He feared that his daughter, at Pine Manor Junior College, might have to deal with her mother’s demand for a “formal separation and so forth.” He worried about Jill doing something desperate in reaction to the school gossip, putting in italics the kind of sentence found in a Faulkner novel: “All these people know that my parents have separated.” He owed his “first responsibility” to himself as an artist, but “there is a responsibility too to the female child whose presence in the world I am accountable for.”36

Estelle described her husband’s unhappy summer in a late-July 1953 letter to Saxe and Dorothy Commins: “Jill and I will be relieved and glad when he decides to ‘take off’ again,” although Joan, living in New York, had apparently come home, “so perhaps Jill and I will leave first after all.”37 By early February 1954, Estelle reported to Saxe: “Jill (she will tell you this very frankly) and I are happier and more at ease when Bill is away—Since his unfortunate disclosure to Jill about his current affair—she hasn’t felt too secure around him.”38 According to Estelle, Bill “chided Jill for not having ambition like Joan, and several other comparisons that aren’t worth mentioning. . . . He is afraid to face reality because of Jill—Jill worshipped him—still does—youth is resilient and she’ll forget soon that Pappy hurt her—if he will permit it. . . . The only thing that I shudder at and might try to evade, is a divorce—and that only on Jill’s account.”39 Estelle set forth her mission in a following letter: “My one thought was really to get all three of us, Bill, Jill and me, out of a tragic—and in some ways—comic—situation, in as dignified a manner as possible.”40 By March 12, 1954, the drama was over: “Jill showed me the announcement of Joan’s wedding,” Estelle reported to Saxe.41

Joan Williams was only four years older than Jill and very aware of Jill’s plight, which Faulkner made palpable for Joan when he had her read one of Jill’s letters, beseeching him to be “nicer to Momma.” Joan was familiar with the routine—her father’s long absences from home and her mother’s drinking. Jill’s letter, Joan said, was “exactly what I was escaping from with my own parents, and what I wanted to say to them.”42

Neither Jill nor Joan seemed to have had any illusions about parents who believed they were protecting their children. Unlike Meta, who accepted Faulkner’s accounts, Joan scoffed at Faulkner’s attacks on Estelle’s competence. That was typical of Joan’s own father’s attitude toward her mother and also typical, Joan believed, of southern men at that time, who had a compulsion to chase after women and talk about their unhappy marriages.43 Joan marveled at Faulkner telling her “what a terrible childhood I had and feeling so sorry for me, and he’s doing the same thing to his own daughter.”44 Williams may have overlooked, however, a crucial difference between her father and Faulkner. Making sure that both Estelle and Jill knew about his attachment to Joan made them, in some paradoxical fashion, a part of the Faulkner team. Many years later, Jill said: “Pappy liked ladies, liked women, you know, plain and simple. I think that Joan was important because she was writing and it appealed to something in Pappy to have a protégé.”45 He seemed to want Jill and Estelle to understand as much.

The ladies? Not Joan alone, but Ruth Ford and Else Jonsson and Jean Stein deserve their own chapters. Their stories form erotic enterprises that intersected and counterpointed one another in ways worthy of a Faulkner novel.

Joan

The Wintering (1971) resembles the epistolary novel Faulkner wanted Joan Williams to write about their love affair. Sometimes his letters appear almost verbatim, or altered just enough to make the novel a little more pointed and to incorporate what he said as well as what he wrote. Joan met Estelle on only a few occasions but managed to evoke the pathos of a fading belle (renamed Inga) as she appeared to Faulkner (renamed Jeffrey Almoner):

She came totteringly on the weak heels of the aged silver dancing shoes.

God, Almoner thought, she had done it all in exact sequence, the sweetly seductive bath, then her hair and her make-up and a nap in her robe; her dress had been donned a moment before the beau’s arrival. Now, she held out a hand. For the corsage? Almoner anguished over life itself as much as over what it had done to Inga.

There are moments when Inga commands the house and Almoner is overridden. Just as fascinating are glimpses of the black people, like Jessie, who attend Almoner, trying to read his moods, giving a sense of him that is missing in Faulkner biographies. Here is Jessie watching Inga when she discovers Almoner’s obsession with Amy (Joan): “Miss Inga’s shadow was going all over the room and she walking up and down telling him she wasn’t going to put up with it and he not saying nothing. Usually he say something make her just shut up. Some reason he ain’t saying nothing. Then I thought, Mister Jeff care. He ain’t taking no chances on saying nothing because this time, Mister Jeff care.” Almoner presses his suit, as Faulkner did with Joan, making Amy feel that “in trying to help her, Jeff was about to take over what belonged to her.” Faulkner’s patient, even humble courtship sometimes turned her toward resentment, which is shown in Amy’s cornered observations: “Jeff, by waiting to see what she was going to decide, made her often feel put on a spot.” Fiction and fact blend when Amy, like Joan, a woman of silences and stubborn independence, is a match for Almoner/Faulkner, who says, “I like to think I made you, as you made me over.”

When Almoner dies, Amy hears the news from Jessie, sent to Amy by the dying man. Amy asks Jessie if anyone else knows about Jessie’s mission to Amy. “What?,” Jessie asks, with “a practiced dumb look, for white people.” Amy says, “Nothing,” and takes the cue from the black woman who knows better than to admit everything she knows. It is hard not to believe Faulkner would have liked such a scene.

Faulkner’s romance with Williams occurred during a time when the South was just entering the modern civil rights era, and she captures that, too, in scenes with a young black man who cannot sit at a drugstore counter but who boldly has Amy sit beside him in his car. She asks him, “Things are changing, aren’t they?” He agrees: “Yes . . . I would have to say that they are better.”

Nine years after the novel’s publication, Williams published in the Atlantic Monthly (May 1980) a memoir, “Twenty Will Not Come Again,” a line from Housman, whom Faulkner urged her to read.46 The memoir adds to the poignancy of their story: “In time, Faulkner would say, I don’t know anything else to do with the rest of my life but put it into your hands.” Williams wanted to emphasize that their romance occurred during a more formal time with a sense of propriety and decency that was also changing but still held in their culture. At Rowan Oak on her first visit a “grown man in shorts and wearing no shirt was a surprise to me.” Going into the city always meant putting on hats and gloves.

She wondered why he needed her: “Once, in New York, we were going to a party given by a Random House editor and Faulkner said he was so much more comfortable going with me. I was surprised because he had known these people a long time. But you are my countryman, he said.” He had said the same to Meta. He did not take out other women in New York. He was alone much of the time, and, she could have added, he liked to drink alone, like many alcoholics do, like Don Birnam in The Lost Weekend, which Faulkner read and rewrote in “Weekend Revisited,” published as “Mr. Acarius.”

She reported on the reasons for Faulkner’s drinking: “Writing, he told me, was the only thing he ever found to alleviate the boredom of living. And I believe he drank to help pass time. All writers know the feeling: what to do with time left over when the day’s writing is done.” He could not handle pressure, so he turned to alcohol and to art: “He contended that art is a little stronger than any human passion for thwarting it.”

Williams wrote her memoir as she was turning fifty—about the same age as Faulkner when she met him. “Someday, Joan,” he told her, “you will know that no one will ever love you as I have.” She knew that now and also realized, “I was taking care of him for the whole world, remember.”

The End of the Affair

During his agonizing affair with Joan Williams, Faulkner read Graham Greene’s The End of the Affair (1951), “for me,” he wrote, “one of the best, most true and moving novels of my time, in anybody’s language.”47 He did not often, at this point, read the work of his contemporaries, and Greene’s Roman Catholicism would not seem to have had any special appeal, although the religious-like intensity of Faulkner’s quest for meaning was akin to Greene’s, and in later interviews Faulkner’s invocation of God as vital to his understanding of man accorded with the English novelist’s belief. The writer/protagonist in The End of the Affair, Maurice Bendrix, is full of Faulknerian doubts. When asked about one of his novels—if he believes it is a failure—Bendrix replies, as Faulkner would, “I feel that way about all of my books.” It is said of Bendrix, as it could be said of Faulkner, “you can hear the nerves twitch through his sentences.” But it is not so much Bendrix as writer, but Bendrix as lover, who resembles Faulkner and Faulkner’s characters. Bendrix mourns and rages over the loss of his lover, Sarah Miles, married to a dull civil servant, just as Harry Wilbourne grieves over Charlotte Rittenmeyer, who jettisons her middle-class life for her lover. It would not be out of character for Bendrix to declare, as Faulkner had, “Between grief and nothing, I will take grief.” Unlike Charlotte, Sarah remains with her husband, unwilling to shatter his life in order to fulfill hers. Her pain over her marriage, over staying with a man who cannot speak to her dreams while he provides for her comfort, resembles Faulkner’s own disappointment with Estelle. Greene’s powerful romantic and religious novel struck home.