23

Ambassador Faulkner

June 1954–January 1955

“Hemispheric Solidarity”

On June 29, Faulkner accepted an invitation from Muna Lee to attend a writers’ conference in Brazil: “Can there be more than one Muna Lee? More than the one whose verse I have known since a long time?”1 Born and educated in Mississippi, she had first been published in Poetry in 1925 and beginning in 1941 had worked for the State Department on cultural affairs in Latin America. He told Saxe Commins of his mission: “to strike a blow of some sort for hemispheric solidarity.” He expected his editor to suit him up for the trip, specifying a dinner jacket and pants, English shoes (“Church is the maker”), and even directing Saxe to a shop on Madison Avenue where Faulkner had seen the shoes in a display window. He needed a size 6½ B or C width, although he could also wear a 6D. But even that did not suffice: “Not pumps, lace shoes, patent leather evening shoes, with lace-up fronts.” This kind of detail reveals how Random House catered to William Faulkner but also how William Faulkner perfected his appearance with a meticulousness worthy of a film star. He did not say if he knew about the growing cult of Latin American writers like Gabriel García Márquez who followed him.

Estelle watched her husband’s preparation for departure and could see that he was happy.2 Two bottles of Peruvian brandy waylaid him, resulting in a two-day debacle and the attendance of a doctor. He recovered, did a public reading of the Nobel Prize speech, and spoke about the vital issue of race—signaling his increasing desire to have his say now that, in effect, the world was watching him. Interviewed by the press from Brazil, Peru, and Venezuela, he performed as the perfect diplomat, declaring he had been “deeply impressed by the intellectual energy of the youth of South America.” Time caught up with him, reporting his remark that failure “brings me stimulation to try to do better in each new book. . . . I confess honestly that A Fable does not please me. It took nine years to write that book and I once tore up its first version.”3 Was this his settled opinion? Did Saxe Commins share critic Lawrance Thompson’s long, confidential letter to the editor declaring Random House was “stuck with a dud”?4 In all likelihood, Commins spared his author that blunt judgment. Random House, especially Bennett Cerf, remained bullish on the book, writing to Faulkner on July 26: “The front-page review in next Sunday’s New York Times Book Review is wonderful and I am enclosing advance galleys thereof for you. I know you don’t care about critics in general, but this piece is so good that I beg you to read it.”5 What Faulkner ultimately thought of the book cannot be ascertained. He gave various versions of this answer: “The work never matches the dream of perfection the artist had to start with.”6

In Brazil Faulkner had what amounted to a conversion experience, as he explained to Harold E. Howland of the State Department: “I became suddenly interested in what I was trying to do, once I reached the scene and learned exactly what was hoped from this plan of which I was a part.” He wanted to do more—not just give an oral report when he was next in New York but to call on Howland to “discuss what further possibilities, situations, capacities, etc. in which I might do what I can to help give people of other countries a truer idea than they sometimes have, of what the U.S. actually is.” Faulkner had been impressed with the “high type of men and women” who ran the Foreign Service, and singled them out by name to convey his gratitude. He commended their “tact and dignity and good taste”—all in terms befitting the gentleman diplomat. It had come as a revelation—this new opportunity to spread a code of conduct. Aunt Bama, who liked to point out the physical resemblances between her father, the old Colonel, and her nephew William, might well have been heartened by this latter-day Faulkner who was doing much more than just rambling in Europe. In Brazil, he had lamented: “We Americans once had the beautiful dream of every man’s being free. What happened to that dream? . . . We failed in that we forgot the needs of the rest of mankind, perhaps we are too self contented and too rich.”7 By going abroad, he was calling on Americans to return to first principles because nothing less than the entire world depended on it. He wasn’t built for this kind of work, which vexed and weakened him, but he would not relinquish this new role, and he would triumph over his setbacks by calling on his sense of duty and obligation.

Howland replied enthusiastically to Faulkner’s offer of service, saying, “Reports from Peru and Brazil have been most glowing.”8 Muna Lee told Saxe Commins that the Faulkner visit had inspired several favorable articles and described how the reticent writer had opened up, impressing everyone with his “high idea of the purpose of writing and his deep faith in humanity.” In Peru, he withstood an onslaught of questions for two hours with an aplomb that made the time go quickly. In Brazil, Faulkner spoke impromptu to a capacity audience who listened to him speak about his books, including A Fable—“good work although weak in spots.” He thought more highly of Light in August. Lee relayed the opinion of the secretary general of the Organization of American States that Faulkner and Robert Frost, who had also appeared under State Department auspices, had been “immensely valuable . . . in counteracting international communist propaganda attempts to depict the United States as not only lacking culture but inimical to it.”9

“The Perfect Virgin”

Faulkner returned to Oxford a week before Jill’s wedding on August 21. Saxe and Dorothy Commins attended, making the “event perfect and complete,” Jill wrote to them, knowing full well how often they had comforted, encouraged, and rescued her father. Ben Wasson acted as Faulkner’s dresser, helping him put on a wing collar, studs, and cuff links. In a double-breasted waistcoat and striped trousers, he gave his daughter away in a “big and beautiful” ceremony at “quaint red brick” St. Peter’s Episcopal Church, with his niece Dean and step-granddaughter Vicki attending as bridesmaids behind Jill in her white satin wedding dress, a sheer white veil, a pearl necklace, heavy lace around her wrists, and with “lace panels inset in the cathedral-length train”—the very cynosure of a traditional wedding as the church’s century-old bell rang out. Dean remembered that there were “so many satin-covered buttons at the wrists and from the neckline to below the waistline that Miss Kate Baker had to use an old-fashioned buttonhook to get Jill into the gown, which showed off her eighteen-inch waist to perfection.”10 At the reception Estelle appeared in a “stunning marionette blue taffeta gown fashioned by Triana-Norell of New York,” reported Jane Sanderson of the Memphis Commercial Appeal. Guests spread out over the lawn decorated with Chinese lanterns Estelle had purchased in Peiping (Beijing).

Shelby Foote remembered a euphoric Faulkner who said in front of his daughter: “Isn’t Jill the perfect virgin?” She wouldn’t look at her father.11 Bern Keating, who photographed the wedding, found Faulkner an impressive physical specimen. He was extremely strong with the “kind of muscle on his back that farmers have.”12 Faulkner invited Carvel Collins and his wife and daughter to the wedding. Collins noted to another member of the family that Faulkner’s “mother and his brother John were, through the years, most supportive of my attempts to get at least some of the facts straight about William Faulkner’s life and works.”13

Upset over the printing of family photographs in Robert Coughlan’s Life magazine articles, Faulkner forbid press coverage of the wedding. The Memphis Commercial Appeal, which ran an interview with Estelle years earlier, assigned Sanderson to infiltrate the event. She called Estelle, thinking “mothers are sympathetic.” Sanderson supposed Estelle would want a record of the wedding to “cherish for a lifetime.” Sanderson arrived at Rowan Oak properly dressed in a “luscious raspberry organza.” She had brought a photographer with her, and both quietly went about their business, insinuating themselves into the event. Sanderson did not see a euphoric father. He was “sulking under a mammoth magnolia tree.” He looked “resplendent” in tails, “gazing pensively at absolutely nothing.” Sanderson, mission accomplished, decided to accost Faulkner and tell him about her assignment. She described him as standing back and taking a good look at her. He seemed amused and said, “Now they’re coming in disguise.”14

Faulkner seemed to like Paul Summers, described by Faulkner friend Jim Silver as “an extremely pleasant guy, wonderfully outgoing, extroverted . . . and a nice man.” Silver told Carvel Collins that he had once heard Faulkner “make a very quiet remark which struck Silver as an extremely damaging one.” Faulkner, musing, said, “‘I have never seen Paul pick up a book.’ This was not said with great hostility but with a kind of judgment on the kind of person he [Paul] was.”15

For both mother and father, their daughter’s wedding proved a joy and a woe. Estelle’s granddaughter Vicki remembered that after Jill’s wedding, her grandmother’s drinking rapidly got out of control: “Dorothy and Saxe left, and my parents had to go on elsewhere. I was left after the wedding at Rowan Oak with Grandmama and Pappy. I had just learned to drive that summer, and I didn’t drive too well, and I didn’t have a license yet. Grandmama went off the deep end and was in bed, immobile, out! She had lost her baby. Her Jill was gone!”16

Ella Somerville, a family friend who had been part of the drama group at Ole Miss when Faulkner wrote The Marionettes, explained what it was like when Estelle drank. She would come over to Ella’s and say she was out of gin because her guests drank so much. Ella would play along with this “ladylike fiction” and say that she, too, had guests, but they had not been drinkers. Ella would produce a bottle and offer a few drinks to Estelle—but not enough to get her drunk. During one of Estelle’s boozy bouts, Faulkner interceded, calling Ella and pleading with her to take Estelle with her on a planned trip to New York. A reluctant Ella said she already had her plane reservations and theater tickets. In truth, she did not want Estelle to ruin her trip. An insistent Faulkner said he would arrange with Random House to supply more theater tickets and cover expenses. Ella relented, and to her surprise Estelle came through the New York excursion without causing trouble. This example of how Faulkner looked out for his wife impressed Collins, who had heard so many stories to the contrary.17

Weddings in Faulkner’s fiction (think of The Sound and the Fury and Absalom, Absalom!) are fraught affairs. Ella Somerville said husband and wife were in their bedrooms passed out.18 Then Faulkner went on a “binge of binges,” with only young Vicki to take care of him. After two days of trying to “keep at least the beds clean of vomit and excrement and everything else, Pappy somehow, in his drunken stupor, realized I couldn’t take it anymore, couldn’t handle it. I was too immature.” He mumbled, “Get Malcolm to take me to Byhalia.” He spent a few days at Wright’s Sanatorium in Byhalia and then, on his return home to Rowan Oak, greeted Vicki with, “I knew you were in trouble.”19 He could never relinquish the idea that even while drenched in drink he was in control.

Then he departed for New York in early September, leaving Estelle stranded, and Jill upset, trying to reassure her father of her happy marriage but also suggesting that it partly depended on her mother’s well-being. “Dear Pappy,” she wrote on September 20: “You’ve always scrupulously kept your word to me—so there’s really no reason I should mention this, but for the record, you have opened an account for Mama at the Oxford bank so she will feel free to do as she wishes? (& be able to do so). We agreed that was the best solution—remember?” Jill wanted his help “in making Mama happy. Please, Pappy, I’m depending on you to do every thing possible to give Mama happiness. I’m afraid she feels I’m more or less lost to her.”20

In New York, in the early fall, Faulkner worked on short stories and recorded work for Caedmon Publishers in that soft breathless voice that glided over the long sentences, keeping inflections to a minimum. He recited but did not dramatize his work. In addition to selecting excerpts from As I Lay Dying and “Old Man,” he included his Nobel Prize address and parts of A Fable, suggesting that whatever his misgivings, he saw this later work as central to his achievement. He asked Random House to keep the recording and to send a copy to Jean Stein, who remained much on his mind.21

Home Alone

On his return home in mid-October, Estelle, for once, would not be there to back him. On October 4, she had visited Phil Stone’s office, asking him to help her with a passport application. She was going to visit Cho-Cho, then living in the Philippines with her husband, Bill Fielden. Estelle told Phil that she wanted to get away “before Bill got back.” Stone did not know what this meant and told Robert Coughlan, “it probably means nothing, as most of what Estelle says means.” He had never accepted her as a worthy wife to his friend, and in this instance his disgust prevented him from even imagining she was about to make some momentous changes that would in the years to come mark a recovery of an artist’s identity and independence.

Faulkner did not see this coming change. Apparently no one did, perhaps not even Estelle. “E leaves for Manila Friday [October 29],” he told Saxe Commins, “still says she does not want to go, but ticket bought, trunk shipped, and apparently she is. Nice to be able to spend 3000 bucks doing something you constantly remind the owner of the 3000 bucks you dont really want to do.”22 Estelle did balk. She wasn’t eating, and Gloria and Malcolm Franklin found her constant requests for them to eat with her tiresome, but “anything to keep peace and get her on her way,” Gloria said. But she understood what Estelle had had to put up with. “I don’t know how long Pappy will be able to stand it alone in the house—with no one to cook for him etc. . . . I sort of wish he would go back to N.Y. . . . Pappy is doing fine, so far, he has been in good spirits & I think utterly amazed that Mama really left him,” Gloria Franklin wrote to Saxe and Dorothy Commins. “Perhaps a taste of being alone in that house would serve him right & do him good. I hope when he finds that no one is going to entertain him, he will return. That would be just one more thing off of our minds to worry about.”23

Estelle Faulkner had returned to the environs of her first marriage and to the grounds of her fiction. She enjoyed the Fieldens’ “charming home on the Bay,” a lovely garden adjacent to the beach, with “interesting neighbors” and “splendid servants.” She confessed to homesickness.24 She also revealed a sensibility that had not changed, and an imagination like her husband’s that transcended the confines of her time and place: “The artificially induced gaiety of the Far East is very pronounced here—a feverish clutching at nothing that is a little short of terrifying,” she wrote to Saxe and Dorothy Commins. She sat “looking out on Manila Bay with its warships & carriers . . . ready for instant action.” She felt “an insecurity verging on panic. But in a little while I’ll go on out to tea, cocktails, dinner & what have you, and join in all the inconsequential chatter of the internationals.”25 William Faulkner was not the only one dining with diplomats.

“The Dream of Perfection”

In November, Faulkner went on the annual hunt, but his heart, he told Jean Stein, was not in it. “I began to discover several years ago that I dont want to shoot deer, just to pursue them on a horse like in the story.” He referred to “Race at Morning,” which he had finished in September and the Saturday Evening Post would publish on March 5, 1955. The story features a twelve-year-old adopted by Mr. Ernest, who teaches the boy how to hunt while showing that the chase is more important than the kill. Mr. Ernest lets the twelve-point buck survive another year. The life shared between the boy and the buck is the point, Faulkner realized, just as Jean Stein’s youth revived for him his own youth. He had had enough of killing: “Because every time I see anything timeless and passionate with motion, speed, life, being alive, I see a young passionate beautiful living shape.26 Did writing A Fable also have an impact on how he now felt about the hunt? He had written a note (unpublished) insisting it was not a pacifist book, but the power of pacifism is evident, especially in his depiction of war’s futility, although the mood that prevails in “An Odor of Verbena” is pacific as well.

Faulkner spent Christmas with Jean Stein at the Comminses’ Princeton home, while Estelle wrote to Saxe and Dorothy to say: “What a treat for him [Bill]—You are so wonderfully kind and generous to us.” Jean accompanied Faulkner to receive the National Book Award on January 25, 1955. His brief speech announced a theme he would often repeat about the artist’s struggle “to create something which was not here before him,” and the failure to match the “dream of perfection.” The award stood out in a culture that went on its way avoiding artists most of the time, he said. The award was like writing on the wall of existence: “ ‘Man was here also A.D. 1953 or ’54 or ’55’, and so go on record like this this afternoon.” He gave the award a kind ambassadorial purpose: “To tell not the individual artist but the world, the time itself, that what he did is valid.” The failure that he earlier spoke of had to be “splendid,” a quest for “unattainable” perfection. Success had not come easily to him, and perhaps that is why he distrusted it in a country, he said, where success is “too easy.” He ended his speech with what amounted to a proposal: “Perhaps what we need is a dedicated handful of pioneer-martyrs who, between success and humility, are capable of choosing the second one.”

The very way Faulkner walked along Park Avenue near Grand Central Station in his trench coat and Alpine hat, looking into shop windows impassively, bespoke a man “contained and unhurried, in the madding crowd,” said interviewer Harvey Brett, who accompanied him. Faulkner’s words came right out of the National Book Award address: “The writer in America isn’t part of the culture of this country. He’s like a fine dog. People like him around but he’s of no use.” But then he mentioned the possibility of doing more work for the State Department, prompting Brett to suppose writers might yet have their uses in the Cold War competition with the Soviet Union. Faulkner seemed doubtful and yet counted on writers to show a “side of our country” that people abroad did not know. It would never be easy, though, for Faulkner to believe in this new role: “The artist is a little like the old court jester. He’s supposed to speak his vicious paradoxes with some sense in them, but he isn’t part of whatever the fabric is that makes a nation.”27