21

Steal Away

January–December 1953

Into the Night

Going again, yes, but not in a “fine ecstatic rush like the orgasm we spoke of at Hal’s that night,” Faulkner wrote to Joan Williams. “This is done by simple will power; I doubt if I can keep it up too long. But it’s nice to know that I still can do that: can write anything I want to, whenever I want to, by simple will, concentration, that I can still do that.” It was no longer the same sort of fun, though—more like proving to himself that he still could.1 He worked on A Fable every day, he told Saxe Commins, repeating what he said to Williams, but adding, “I must get away as soon as I can.” He hoped to be in Princeton by February 1.2

Estelle’s cataracts had worsened. Malcolm, always close to his mother, took her to the hospital on January 14 for an operation. A week later she had the other cataract removed and recovered quickly. Faulkner feared she would want to accompany him east, but Malcolm alone drove Faulkner to the bus station on January 26. Malcolm’s diary reveals that the family depended on him to watch over his mother.3 Faulkner often portrayed Estelle as the problem, but his mid-February letter from New York to Malcolm suggests otherwise. After a rough two weeks in New York, hospitalized twice because of more problems with his back and self-medication with alcohol, he confessed: “I am distressed at heart very much to have caused all this worry. I know that I have not been quite myself since last spring. I mean, those spells of complete forgetting. I have had three of them, one in Paris for two days last spring, two here. The idea has occurred to me that maybe, when Tempy snatched me off Sunny last March, that when I hit the ground so hard on my back, that I might have struck my head too.” He didn’t want Malcolm to say anything about these blackouts, assuring his stepson that “Mr. Saxe” had found a good doctor. “Tell Mamma I am all right,” he instructed a concerned Malcolm, who had called Commins. “I will take better care of myself. I want you to be fond of me always, but I dont want you to worry, to let worry over me interfere with your work. Don’t worry. Am glad you called Saxe. Reassure Mamma, as he has tried to do. Remember, he will not lie to you about me. When anything serious happens, he will tell you.”

Faulkner’s letter to Malcolm suggests that he had brooded some on his drinking, although he never made excuses for his drunks even if he apologized for them. He also did not rationalize his periodic alcoholism, which would soon become public knowledge in Robert Coughlan’s “The Private World of William Faulkner.”4 The trouble in New York started when he discovered a bottle of forty-year-old applejack in Hal Smith’s sideboard. Perhaps that discovery triggered his memory of Charles Jackson’s The Lost Weekend, which includes a memorable episode about alcoholic writer Don Birnam’s craving for applejack that is locked in a farmhouse closet.

On February 19, Faulkner delivered a nineteen-page typescript of “Weekend Revisited,” a story the New Yorker rejected but that the Saturday Evening Post retitled as “Mr. Acarius” and published after Faulkner’s death.5 Faulkner later called it “funny but true.” Before the atom bomb blows everything up, fifty-year-old Mr. Acarius wants to experience the “opium of escaping” and to anticipate the luxury of recovery: “with a butler to pour your drink when you reach that stage and to pour you into the bed when you reach that stage, and to bring you the aspirin and the bromide after the three days or the four or whenever it will be that you will allow yourself to hold them absolved who set you in the world.” In Oxford, in Hollywood, in New York, in Paris, and on later trips abroad, Faulkner perfected this periodic alcoholism and recuperation, which in his story becomes Mr. Acarius’s effort to “be one with man, victim of his own base appetites and now struggling to extricate himself from that debasement.”

Faulkner’s story makes a paradox out of periodic alcoholism, which is an acknowledgment of the doom of being human and the equally human, if futile, desire to escape that doom. Mr. Acarius realizes that “in the last analysis there is no escape, that you can never escape and, whether you will or not, you must reenter the world and bear yourself in it and its lacerations and all its anguish of breathing, to support and comfort one another in that knowledge and that attempt.” Supposing that he should join other alcoholics institutionalized in a posh hotel, Mr. Acarius, a dilettante who has done nothing, it seems, except collect art, is undone by their constant, frantic schemes to bootleg drinks in a comedy of craving that drives him to flee down a fire escape, saved from an arrest by his rescuing doctor. They rush home, where Mr. Acarius smashes all his liquor in a bathtub as his doctor comments: “So you entered mankind, and found the place already occupied.” Mr. Acarius agrees, “Yes,” and cries out: “You can’t beat him. You cannot. You never will. Never.”

Throughout the story, Watkins, one of the alcoholics, keeps repeating the lyric, “Did you ever see a dream walking?” Faulkner told Joan Williams that the character had been based on a hospital experience in which an old man would sing the line all night. Faulkner thought it was funny.6 Watkins never finishes the song, although its final words, “was you,” tell the whole story for those who know how the song ends: “Well, the dream that was walking and the dream that was talking / And the heaven in my arms was you.” Watkins wants his girl, Judy, who is kept away by the nurse, but Watkins addresses the lyric to Mr. Acarius, who is another dream walking, a deluded soul. The song seems to sum up a kind of romantic quest in the very dregs of human waste, a wistful, almost beatific vision of the kind that Don Birnam conjures while drinking that sooner or later subsides into ridicule of his own delusions. Mr. Acarius supposes he can escape and also experience the suffering and recovery of mankind, but he finds himself unequal to the occasion. Neither escape nor recovery suffices any more than the alcohol that he annihilates. For Faulkner, such abstinence was as periodic as his alcoholism. He seemed to have no interest at all in psychological explanations of his drinking. He saw it as a manifestation of his anguish and anxiety, not his psyche.7 In spite of the smashed liquor bottles at the end of the story, “Mr. Acarius” is not the work of a man who wanted to stop drinking.

Robert Linscott, an editor at Random House, had the rare privilege of hearing Faulkner talk about his drinking—“a matter of chemistry.” For weeks or months he drank sociably, “then the craving would come,” and he would fight it off, or “something would happen that would ‘get me all of a turmoil inside,’ ” and he would escape into liquor. Linscott learned to read the signs: “drumming fingers, evasive looks, monosyllabic replies to questions,” and Faulkner would disappear and be discovered “out cold.”8

Recovery

Faulkner liked working in Saxe’s New York office, where he had his own typewriter and desk, but he needed a quieter routine in Princeton, where in mid-February he worked on A Fable in the morning, took walks with the Comminses’ dog in the afternoon, and then resumed work until tea time, then more work, and a relaxed dinner at seven.9 Sometimes he accompanied his editor into the city.

Near the end of the month Faulkner submitted to a New Yorker interview—more like an observation—in Commins’s office as the author “typed very, very slowly, mostly with the middle finger of his right hand, but with an occasional assist from the index finger of his left.” The keyboard work continued as the phone rang, Faulkner coughed, and his editor worried about a cold. “Isn’t anythin’ Ah got whiskey won’t cure,” Faulkner said, getting up and stretching: “Work hurts mah back. Ah think Ah’m goin’ to invent somethin’ like an ironin’ board, so Ah can lie flat on mah back while Ah type.” After some talk of Jill and jumping horses and falling off them, Faulkner said, “Ah have a feelin’ of doom hangin’ over me today,” as he returned to his tepid typewriting. Then he began to red-pencil a pile of pages with X’s, saying, “Ah wish mah doom would lift or come on. Ah got work to do.” To his editor’s worried words, Faulkner replied, “Ah can bear anythin’.” This routine went on for another half hour until he departed for a lunch date. How much of this was for show is hard to say.

“Not much happier here but am working, busy,” Faulkner wrote Else Jonsson on February 22. Even though his back continued to hurt, and he continued to worry that he might have a brain injury resulting from his fall from a horse, he had produced “Weekend Revisited,” a reminiscence about Sherwood Anderson, worked on a television adaptation of the “Old Man” section of The Wild Palms, and on “Mississippi,” his semi-autobiographical essay that continued the movement in Requiem for a Nun to explicitly juxtapose his creation of Yoknapatawpha against the state’s actual history. All this work helped to cover significant medical expenses and hospitalization and tests, which showed he did not have a skull injury, although a doctor advised him that “a lobe or part of my brain is hypersensitive to intoxication. I said, ‘Alcohol?’ He said, ‘Alcohol is one of them.’ The other was worry, unhappiness, any form of mental unease, which produced less resistance to the alcohol.” The doctor did not say to quit drinking forever, but he did advise a three- or four-month respite and then more tests. “He said my brain is still normal, but it is near the borderline of abnormality. Which I knew myself, this behavior is not like me.”

What behavior? Hal Smith had told Faulkner he could no longer use his apartment. Apparently Faulkner had misbehaved to such an extent that even an old and close friend could no longer tolerate his stays. Faulkner had usually been a sweet drunk, but his alcoholic lapses had become ugly, and that is what Smith found so disturbing. Now sober, Faulkner worked steadily, and planned to stay in New York until June, when he would give the graduation address at Pine Manor Junior College and then take Jill home to Rowan Oak.10

Then on Friday, April 10, Malcolm wrote in his diary: “Mama had gastric hemorrhage.” The next day, at the hospital, Malcolm noted her condition was fair as he lined up blood donors. She returned home on April 12, still only in fair condition. On Saturday, April 18: “Mama started hemorrhaging again—rounding up donors. P.M. called Pappy. Went to meet P & Jill at airport & picked up 5 pints blood!” Estelle began to recover almost immediately, and by April 25, she was home and, on May 4, part of an outing to see High Noon.11

During this worrisome period, Faulkner continued to work on the “big book,” calling it the last ambitious effort of his career. “I know now that I am getting toward the end, the bottom of the barrel,” he wrote to Joan Williams. “The stuff is still good,” but now he had to sift out the “little trash” that constantly came up. Did he mean the mannerisms that infect mature writers? Now that he had to labor so long to achieve his best he realized “for the first time what an amazing gift I had: uneducated in every formal sense, without even very literate, let alone literary, companions, yet to have made the things I made. I dont know where it came from.” How to reconcile the man Joan knew as Bill Faulkner and the man who wrote those books? He seemed to see “little connection” between them. Perhaps this is why he never bothered much to deal with himself. In his mind, the work stood alone “apart from what I am.”12

By mid-May, Faulkner had returned to New York, evidently still convinced that he worked better there. He wrote to Meta about her troubled marriage to Wolfgang Rebner. He had seen Wolfie recently. “Write me here [Random House],” he directed her: “tell me your problems, if I can help with them.” He seemed in a melancholy mood, telling her he still saw Hal Smith and Eric Devine, though “not as much as I would like. Devine and I liked each other well in the old days. Change in people: the saddest thing of all, division, separation, all left is the rememberings, the dream, until you almost believe that anything beautiful is nothing else but dream.”13 He sounded the refrain of Watkins in “Weekend Revisited”: “Did you ever see a dream walking?” The same day he wrote Else Jonsson that Estelle was “better now” and that after Jill’s graduation in June he would “go away somewhere to have peace and quiet to work in; I hope it might possibly be Europe for the time or at least some of it, but still I cannot say yet.”14

On June 18, an exuberant Estelle wrote to Saxe Commins: “What a lovely trip I had & how good it is to be Home once more. The very nicest & best part of my little vacation was the three days spent with you.” She hoped that Saxe would visit Rowan Oak. It would “please Pappy no end!” The proud mother and wife announced that Jill had the “highest scholastic record in her class. Bill’s address was perfect. He looked very handsome and distinguished in his cap and gown. . . . Remembered Saxe’s injunction—say every word as clearly as possible—hence the message was plainly understood.” She enjoyed having all of her family at home. “I was so long without them.”15 Did Estelle’s happiness mean anything to Faulkner at this point? Still obsessed with Joan Williams, he did not say.16 But Jill, in a note to Dorothy Commins, certainly put her mother’s happiness first: “To these poor thanks let me add my deepest for all you did to make Mama’s visit with you wonderful—wonderful for her.”17

Writing to Joan Williams in early July, Faulkner “ran dry” on A Fable: “I would destroy it every night and still try again tomorrow, very bad two weeks.” By early August, however, he was so “near the end of the big one that I am frightened, that lightning might strike me before I can finish it. It is either nothing and I am blind in my dotage, or it is the best of my time. Damn it, I did have genius, Saxe.” He estimated they would need a few weeks to go over the book (sometime in September, he expected) and do some cutting of the projected seven hundred typed pages.18 But then Commins had a heart attack, and Faulkner, after hearing Commins was making a recovery, wired: “GLAD TO HEAR IT. BEGGED YOU LAST SPRING TO REST AND LET JOINT EXPLODE. MAYBE YOU WILL NOW. LOVE TO DOROTHY. BILL.”

On September 1, Phil Stone, a Carvel Collins informant, announced: “Bill stopped me on the street the other day and told me that he had just finished the best thing that he had ever written and probably . . . the best thing anybody had ever written, and yet there are still people who believe in Faulkner modesty.” A week later, Faulkner was not so sure. His mood swings, and what he told Phil Stone, Ben Wasson, and Joan Williams, widened as he alternated between euphoria and depression. On September 8, he checked into the Gartly-Ramsay Hospital for three days, according to the doctor’s notes:

Patient is intoxicated from drugs as he was on previous admission. (Had been dosing self?) Asked for paraldehyde constantly. Appetite good but looked dilapidated. Dr. Adler saw him.

9 Sept. Patient complained of vague abdominal distress. The liver was palpable below the costal margin [lower edge of the chest]. There was tenderness on palpating in the right upper quadrant.

10 Sept. Patient left before treatment could be completed. Impossible to reason with him. Called family, but patient left. An acute and chronic alcoholic.

Faulkner seemed to allude to this periodic alcoholic episode in a letter sent later from New York to Malcolm: “Am feeling fine, working again on my mss. which ran dry on me at home in August, which may have been partly responsible for my—and your—trouble. It’s going all right now though.”19 Malcolm continued to clean up after Faulkner’s lapses.

Then this: On September 28 and October 5, 1953, Life published Robert Coughlan’s profile, “The Private World of William Faulkner.” The piece contained some errors but was the work of a diligent researcher and writer who admired his subject’s work. Coughlan had shown up at Rowan Oak, startling Estelle and angering her husband, who then relented and allowed the reporter to ask questions as long as they were not personal. Phil Stone, one of Coughlan’s informants, wrote him on September 30: “the article is extremely good and has in it some splendid phrasing. . . . You emphasize too much that Bill occasionally, very occasionally, throws a drunk. . . . On the whole he drinks very little.”20 The next day, Stone reported, “Your article, I think, has the whole town stewing.” He promised to collect the gossip and pass it on to Coughlan.21 A week later he added: “We thought you would also like to know that almost all the grand old ladies around Oxford think your article is very fair and very accurate. . . . I don’t know whether Bill is drunk or not, but I haven’t seen him for two weeks.”22

Mac Reed ordered thirty copies of the Life issues and showed one to Faulkner when he came into the drugstore. Mac thought Faulkner would be “interested in seeing it.” Mac was taken aback when Faulkner asked, “Aren’t you ashamed of yourself?” Mac protested: “But people have been requesting it.” A furious Maud Falkner canceled her subscription to Life and asked Reed to burn his stock. Reed refused. She said interest in the articles was “malicious.” He disagreed: “people were interested in her son and admired his ability to write.”23 An outraged Faulkner declared: “There seems to be in this the same spirit which permits strangers to drive into my yard and pick up books or pipes I left in the chair where I had been sitting, as souvenirs.” Sweden and France had honored him, but his native land had invaded his privacy “over my protest and my plea. No wonder people in the rest of the world dont like us, since we seem to have neither taste nor courtesy, and know and believe in nothing but money and it doesn’t much matter how you get it.”24 Gloria Franklin, Malcolm’s second wife, said Faulkner had taken an axe to his driveway to make holes to deter visitors. Lamar Stevens, who sometimes took care of Rowan Oak when the Faulkners were away, claimed that Faulkner “urinated systematically in the flower beds off the front porch when he was menaced by tourists.”25 Locals splattered paint on his “private property” sign, and two teenagers stole it.26 Such incidents revealed a lingering feeling among some in Oxford that Faulkner was a “character,” a neighbor out of place, and, to some, a phony. You never knew what you would meet, how he would be dressed, whether he would have anything to say or pass you by without a word. Such erratic and unpredictable behavior meant people could not place this performance artist—a term that no one then would have used.27

In mid-October, Faulkner returned to Princeton and New York to complete the final revisions of A Fable. He had written to Saxe: “I will be frank: I would like to stay in Princeton with Dorothy and you, not only because it will be good to work in the quiet and you and I can unravel the manuscript, but because of money.” A crop failure had been costly, and working on his book at home gave him no peace. “I have almost got to teach myself again to believe in it. I seem to have reached a point I never believed I ever would: where I need to have someone read it and tell me. Yes, it’s all right. You must go ahead with it.”28 Estelle could not be that person. As she told Joseph Blotner, she never did understand why her husband wrote a book so far away from Yoknapatawpha County. And he had tried—reading whole chapters to Estelle and Jill.29

Random House rallied around editor and author. “I think Bill’s book is simply tremendous. To my mind it’s one of the greatest novels that I’ve read, and I use the word ‘greatest’ advisedly,” Robert Haas wrote to Saxe Commins. Even so, he found parts of it confusing and suggested the “structure and sequences are sometimes harder to follow than need be.”30 “It’s great,” was Donald Klopfer’s succinct verdict on A Fable.31 On November 5, Commins announced to Klopfer: “With this letter Bill is bringing the final, complete, ready-for-the press manuscript of A Fable. Both of us feel, in the excitement and lift of working so steadily and to such wonderful purpose, that the script is as near perfection as we can make it.”32 “Random House thinks it’s ‘a masterpiece.’ I’m afraid I think it’s a flop,” Robert Coughlan wrote to Phil Stone.33

Mississippi on the Nile via the Alps

During this final work on A Fable’s structure and style, stretching to the end of November, Howard Hawks wrote, cabled, and called Faulkner about a new film project, Land of the Pharaohs. He made it sound a lot like The Wild Palms, Banjo on My Knee, and “Louisiana Lou” aka Lazy River, a New Orleans/Delta medley, with Pharaoh as the original slavemaster:

Egypt is great, perfectly beautiful and very interesting. This can be an amazing picture. Here’s a little description which you probably already know.

Egypt is a river, outside of the land alongside of the river it’s a desert and all life is centered around the river. Old days the Nile used to overflow and the land was inundated except for the villages which are always built on higher ground, naturally or artificially. During flood times the people worked for the Pharaoh. The Pharaoh was God, he controlled all the people, fed them, and according to his nature, ruled them. If he were warlike they fought, if he were artistic the arts became worth while.

Did Hawks’s account of dragging pyramid stones to the Nile remind Faulkner of the Indians rolling that riverboat home to their plantation?

At any rate it was enough for Bill Faulkner, who took off on December 1 to join Hawks in Paris with no word to Estelle. “Did he get away?,” she asked Saxe and Dorothy Commins, nine days later.34 He would not be home for Christmas, a holiday at Rowan Oak he had rarely missed. The job would bring in fifteen thousand dollars plus expenses. To his mother he claimed he did not want a movie job, but “Mr Hawks has been too good to me.”35 His letters home to Maud are reminiscent of his European hegira in 1925, although Hawks put him up in hotels and palaces in Stresa (Italy) and St. Moritz (the Swiss Alps). It was all very beautiful, with stars like Gregory Peck and powerful agents like Charles Feldman, and writers galore, but he said he did not like it and preferred to be home with “Missy and little Jimmy and Dean and Vicki and all my children.”36 He had no word for Estelle. She claimed that “both Jill and I have the happy faculty of never becoming lonely even in this big untenanted house.”37 No one back home heard about his first meeting with Jean Stein in St. Moritz on December 25, or his stopover in Stockholm the next day to see Else.