24

Past and Present

February–August 1955

The Old Hunter and the Artist

In February, Faulkner worked on the dummy for Big Woods, published on October 14, in time for hunting season. This collection included what he called “interrupted catalysts.”1 Set in italics, the interpolations between stories give the book a historical heft similar to Go Down, Moses and Requiem for a Nun. In the first catalyst, Faulkner portrays the “thrusting back” of the wilderness by “one vast single net of commerce” that “webbed and veined the midcontinent’s fluvial embracement; New Orleans, Pittsburgh, and Fort Bridger, Wyoming . . .” before presenting “The Bear,” Ike’s initiation into the premodern wilderness. An excerpt from “Red Leaves” that precedes the second story, “The Old People,” depicts the Indians hunting a slave, another way of reifying the italicized history of dispossession described at the beginning of Big Woods. In “The Old People,” featuring mixed-raced Sam Fathers (Indian, black, and white), Ike is told: “Think of all that has happened here, on this earth. All the blood hot and strong for living, pleasuring, that has soaked back into it. For grieving and suffering too, of course, but still getting something out of it for all that, getting a lot out of it, because after all you don’t have to continue to bear what you believe is suffering; you can always choose to stop that, put an end to that. And even suffering and grieving is better than nothing.” The “blood hot and strong for living,” which Faulkner sought again and again in his affairs, realizing how they would end, and his willingness to suffer the consequences, made the stories about much more than hunting. Even the third story, the slight, comical “A Bear Hunt,” is given a historical frame by the italicized passage from another Indian story, “A Justice,” about the logrolling of Doom’s steamboat to his plantation, exploiting his people and ruining the wilderness as the trees are cut down for the potentate’s pleasure procession. The values Ike learns in “The Bear” and “The Old People” are overrun by the railroads driving into the wilderness, the paved roads, the economic enterprises of the Snopeses while “the Big Woods themselves being shoved, pushed just as inexorably further and further on.” Something of Faulkner’s own ambivalence, reflected in his diminishing appetite for the hunt, seems to counter the nobility of the last story, “Race at Morning,” which is preceded with semi-autobiographical passages from the essay “Mississippi” and followed by an italicized excerpt from “Delta Autumn” that ends the book: “This land, said the old hunter. No wonder the ruined woods I used to know don’t cry for retribution. The very people who destroyed them will accomplish their revenge.”

Faulkner devoted meticulous care not only to the stories but also to Edward Shenton’s drawings for Big Woods.2 On a double-page spread, he noted: “The foliage is right, most of the leaves still on. Yes, live- and pin-oaks, many. Yes, moss. Cypresses too. Contents page. I like the sumac, myself. To Mr Shenton: yes, this is right.” The observations were precise—on Lion, the dog that helps to bring down “Old Ben”: “It is the bony ridge of his brow which gives him a look of concern which seems to me a little wrong.” The history had to be right: “This was roughly about 1880. He [Ike] could have worn either hat or cap, I think. The cap makes him look more like the boy he was. I think the muffler and coat are right. He could have worn a Confederate private’s jacket, as you see country people now in 1945 battle jackets.” The interplay between the drawings and the words reveal the sophistication of an often overlooked Faulkner volume: “To Mr. Shenton: would you risk suggesting Sam Fathers is an Indian to this extent? He is bare-headed, his hair a little long, a narrow band of cloth bound or twisted around his head? Or maybe definitely long hair showing below a battered hat? Since you are not illustrating, but illuminating (in the old sense) you could have any liberty you like. I realise the figures must be too small for much detail.” Faulkner had profound respect for a fellow artist: “Mr Shenton is doing so well, I am extremely timid about getting in the way,” Faulkner said to Saxe Commins.3

Lewis Garnett in the New York Herald Tribune (October 14) called the book “something new . . . Mr. Faulkner’s fabulous Old Testament.” Carlos Baker (Nation, October 29) concluded: “Faulkner and his editor have achieved a real unity, both of theme and development.” Baker took the book’s dedication to Saxe Commins seriously: “We never always saw eye to eye but we were always looking at the same thing.” He noted the “slow swing of the seasons from November round to November, the deliberate spiral down the years from reconstruction to modern times,” the very arc and tempo of Faulkner’s own life. Baker referred to the “old ghosts of the Chickasaws” never forgotten in the book’s forward motion, the very natives that Faulkner had so enjoyed talking about with Will Bryant while shoring up Rowan Oak and making it inhabitable for another generation.

Most reviews were decidedly short, implying Faulkner had produced a minor work, or simply a rehearsal of previously published pieces, and did not even note, as Dayton Kohler did in the Louisville (KY) Courier-Journal (October 23) that the stories coalesced around the “theme of the passing of the wilderness, which for most Americans in our century is little more than a region of myth under the sunset, a symbol of man’s lost happiness and freedom.” That one sentence alludes to the volume’s wistful quality and humor that brought back that happiness and freedom. The book was an elegy, the “struggle to accept loss” and to restore in memory at least the virtues of a bygone time.4 Reviewers occasionally mentioned Shenton but apparently did not see, as Faulkner did, how much the illustrations—like the one of the fleet deer emerging from the woods—make this lost world magical and palpable.

Hal Smith, staunch friend of William Faulkner and his publisher, reckoned in the Saturday Review (October 29) with the book’s pessimism: “In the prefaces to each of these stories and in the epilogue to ‘Race at Morning’ he infers that while man is doubtless endurable he can also look forward to an existence that may not be worth living.” Smith might have added that the very hunters Faulkner honored had been responsible for the demise of their happiness—or perhaps Smith did say as much by quoting Faulkner’s evocation of a time when unthinking men went about “changing the face of the earth, felling a tree which took two hundred years to grow, in order to extract from it a bear or a capful of wild honey.”

Fools Rush In

William Faulkner had known for several years that the United States Supreme Court would strike down segregation. Robert Farley, a childhood friend, and dean of the Ole Miss law school (1946–63), had told him so.5 The issue of race and civil rights, muted in Big Woods, became a focal point of Faulkner’s engagement with history in the spring of 1955. On March 20, ten months after the Supreme Court declared segregation unconstitutional, the Memphis Commercial Appeal published his letter, which began, “We Mississippians already know that our present schools are not good enough.” White students went out of state to obtain their education in the humanities, law, engineering, and medicine. Phil Stone, although a staunch segregationist, had done as much. Mississippi had failed to “assuage the thirst of even our white young men and women. In which case, how can it possibly assuage the thirst and need of the Negro, who obviously is thirstier, needs it worse, else the Federal Government would not have had to pass a law compelling Mississippi (among others of course) to make the best of our education available to him.” He did not just blame the state. He made it more personal and uncompromising:

So what do we do? make them [the schools] good enough, improve them to the best possible? No. We beat the bushes, rake and scrape to raise additional taxes to establish another system at best only equal to that one which is already not good enough, which therefore wont be good enough for Negroes either; we will have two identical systems neither of which are good enough for anybody. The question is not how foolish can people get because apparently there is no limit to that. The question is, how foolish in simple dollars and cents, let alone in wasted men and women, can we afford to be?

On April 3, he made clear the damage segregation had done at home and abroad: “What we need is more Americans on our side. If all Americans were on the same side, we wouldn’t need to try to bribe foreign countries which dont always stay bought, to support us.” The world, he realized, was watching, and now adjusting to his role as diplomat he wanted America to set the right example to itself as well as to others. If Brown v. Board of Education had been the catalyst for Faulkner’s controversial letters, his work abroad, which he intended to continue, also made it imperative that he speak up. To a letter writer who had challenged Faulkner’s qualifications to speak on education, he replied: “I have no degrees nor diplomas from any school. I am an old veteran sixth-grader. Maybe that’s why I have so much respect for education that I seem unable to sit quiet and watch it held subordinate in importance to an emotional state concerning the color of human skin.”

On April 17, Faulkner commended an anonymous letter from a student supporting integration and pointedly placed his faith in the younger generation, implying that he knew full well that many of his own contemporaries did not share their children’s sense of fair play and tolerance. “And what a commentary,” he concluded, “that is on us: that in Mississippi communal adult opinion can reach such a general emotional pitch that our young sons and daughters dare not, from probably a very justified physical fear, sign their names to an opinion adverse to it.” In his speeches at Jill’s graduation from high school and college, he had called on students to assert their individuality, which now meant, he admitted, taking the risk not only of disapproval but even of violence.6

An Education

What had Faulkner learned?—not only from Mammy Callie, Uncle Ned, many other family black people, the workmen who had helped him to restore Rowan Oak, and all the others he saw around the square and talked to, but also from Earnest McEwen Jr.? Two years earlier, sometime in the spring of 1953, Faulkner met McEwen for the first time. Born in Oxford, Mississippi, in 1931, McEwan grew up wanting two things: a house with running water and a college education. He read everything he could find—not an easy task in a community without a bookstore and where black people could not check out books from a library. Only half the state was literate, and of that 50 percent, only half were literate enough to read a book; among the African American population that figure was surely lower. But Earnie, his friends said, was the kind of person who could see the other side of the mountain—a man ahead of his time, although they wouldn’t put it that way.

No one in Earnie’s family served as a model for his aspirations. With the exception of his father, who bought some land from a friendly white man, Earnie knew about only two kinds of black families: those who were sharecroppers and those who were not. Both his parents had eighth-grade educations. Unlike his light-skinned father, McEwen looked quite black. His family, a mixture of African American, Native American, and white—every range of color—picked cotton from sunrise to sunset. They could not afford books. He liked to read the books borrowed from his teachers; others he retrieved from the trash. He sold packets of seeds to buy books. He was the first in his family to make it through high school. Then a janitor’s job opened up on the Ole Miss campus, and Earnie was hired. After work, he would read the newspapers, books, and magazines wherever he could find them. A black janitor reading on a segregated campus excited attention. A faculty member let Earnie use his office as a quiet place to read.

If you were black and had dreams of bettering yourself, you kept it to yourself. To do otherwise could lead to trouble and worse. True enough, the old Colonel had financed an African American’s education, but such support remained an anomaly in the Jim Crow South that hemmed in Earnie and his contemporaries. To speak up about his dreams, as Earnie did, to anyone—white or black—would invite attacks for not knowing his place in a segregated and oppressive economy of human relations that restrained, when it did not crush, a black young man’s ambitions. But Earnie was magnetic, and he persisted, talking to anyone, white or black, on the Oxford square or on campus, expressing himself with a natural spontaneity that seemed to charm, when it did not overwhelm, his auditors. Logically, someone like Earnie should not have existed. Writing him into fiction as a character might well have elicited cries of “improbable!” William Faulkner might conceive of a character like Lucas Beauchamp, proud and independent, acting like the equal of the white people who tried to subdue him and even lynch him, if necessary, but to imagine, let alone to actually find, a man like Earnest McEwen Jr. in the environs of Oxford, Mississippi, would have seemed unlikely. But what could not be imagined happened. Sooner or later, it is apparent now, Earnie would tell his story to someone who would not only want to help him but would find a way to do so.

In 1953, on the campus of Oxford, Mississippi, an Ole Miss student introduced Earnie to Dean L. L. Love, who had heard the janitor’s story. Love had been raised in Oregon and educated at Ohio State, where he received his Ph.D. and served as a dean. He had family in Kentucky and Tennessee and considered himself partly southern. Earnie was not an activist. He was not a member of the NAACP and did not advocate integration. Love saw him as the type of black leader the state needed.7 But Earnie wanted to study engineering at a northern college. Love initially thought of Howard University but then persuaded Earnie to consider Alcorn A&M College, the nation’s first public historically black land-grant institution, founded in 1871 in Lorman, Mississippi.8 Love told him, “Mr. McEwen, I think I know someone who can help you.” When Earnie’s daughter, Gloria Burgess, later recalled this moment, she marveled at “Mr.” Who called a young man like Earnie “Mr.” in the Jim Crow South? Dean Love handed over a piece of paper with the name William Faulkner written on it. “Tell him I sent you,” Dean Love said. Earnie had heard about this aloof author who lived on the edge of town but could not imagine why William Faulkner would take an interest in him.

When Earnie arrived at Rowan Oak in his Sunday best, walking down that long corridor flanked by cedar trees and approaching the front steps of this restored antebellum home with the pillars that are so much a part of a southern white hegemonic world, no one can say what he was thinking, but Earnie did not break stride as he walked into his future. Awaiting him was William Faulkner, who already knew his visitor’s story and had decided on what was needed. They spoke for hours in the shade of old oak trees. Earnie talked about his reading. Already married with two daughters, he wanted a better future for them. “Mr. McEwen, do you have a college in mind?,” Faulkner asked. He approved of Earnie’s choice of Alcorn. The segregated University of Mississippi would not enroll its first black student, James Meredith, until 1962—and then only with the support of federal troops.

Faulkner said he would pay for Earnie’s college education. When Earnie, who had always been his own man and always supposed that somehow he would fund his own dreams, told his benefactor that he could not accept his offer, William Faulkner, in effect, told him: “You do not understand. I do not expect you to pay me back. All I ask is that someday, when you can, do for someone else what I have done for you.” Every month Faulkner sent money to Alcorn, arranging for Earnie and his wife to get jobs too so that they could live near school. Dean Love also sent food and clothes.

So began a lifelong friendship. Earnie moved away to Michigan but brought his family home to Oxford, usually at Easter, and, as his daughter Gloria remembered, they would sit on Rowan Oak’s side porch sipping lemonade as their father paid his respects to Mr. Faulkner. No one in the McEwen family ever said much about these visits, and Earnie made no special effort to tell this remarkable story, which probably would not have become part of William Faulkner’s biography without Gloria’s efforts. Over more than a decade she sought to learn more details about her father’s story. She made calls to William Faulkner’s family, but they rebuffed her. No one came forward, which may not have surprised William Faulkner, because he had cautioned Earnie: “Even with a college education, you may find that the world has not changed that much for you.” But Earnie persisted, becoming a lab technician and then beginning a career in engineering; his daughters pursued careers in education and social work.

The world did change for the McEwen family. A whole row of McEwens came to hear Gloria Burgess tell the story of her father at a congregation of Faulkner readers on the Ole Miss campus, sharing with the assembly what a difference his friendship with William Faulkner had made in all their lives. As she told a part of the story related here, the family responded, as they would in church, with the familiar call-and-response in a rising crescendo of affirmation reminiscent of the Reverend Shegog’s sermon in The Sound and the Fury. Gloria Burgess, an inspirational speaker, was just as moving as Shegog and with the same mission, as though she arose out of the pages of a William Faulkner novel, with her family whom she called out by name, giving a voice and a character to the history that William Faulkner had helped to foster.9

“The Empty Mouthsound of Freedom”

Quite aside from helping a deserving black man, Faulkner saw in Earnest McEwen Jr. “hope for the individual man,” the bedrock conviction on which America had been founded, audiences at the University of Oregon and the University of Montana were told in April 1955. The speech, later published as “On Privacy” in Harper’s (July 1955), had been occasioned by Robert Coughlan’s biographical profile. To inhabitants of the “old nations,” the new land had proclaimed, Faulkner wrote: “There is room for you here from about the earth, for all ye individually homeless, individually oppressed, individually unindividualised.” Civil rights, and the right to an education, derived from this promise of a relief from oppression. Embodied in every American, in short, was the nation itself. To tyrannize over any individual in effect meant violating the nation as well. That American dream of the sovereign individual “is gone now,” he asserted: “We dozed, slept, and it abandoned us. And in that vacuum now there sound no longer the strong loud voices not merely unafraid but not even aware that fear existed, speaking in mutual unification of one mutual hope and will. Because now what we hear is a cacophony of terror and conciliation and compromise babbling only the mouthsounds; the loud and empty words which we have emasculated of all meaning whatever—freedom, democracy, patriotism—with which, awakened at last, we try in desperation to hide from ourselves that loss.” Upset over McCarthyism and over the invasion of his own privacy, Faulkner lamented the loss of a core belief, that the writer—apart from his work—could be free from public scrutiny, that “his private life was his own; and not only had he the right to defend his privacy, but the public had the duty to do so since one man’s liberty must stop at exactly the point where the next one’s begins; and that I believed that anyone of taste and responsibility would agree with me.” But Faulkner had discovered that the public not only wanted a piece of that privacy, it kept in business the publications that catered to their tastes for such personal exposure. Thinking of Coughlan, Faulkner said, “It’s not what the writer said, but that he said it.” The writer now became part of the market for bad taste: “The point is that in America today any organization or group, simply by functioning under a phrase like Freedom of the Press or National Security or League Against Subversion, can postulate to itself complete immunity to violate the individualness—the individual privacy lacking which he cannot be an individual and lacking which individuality he is not anything at all worth the having or keeping—of anyone who is not himself a member of some organization or group numerous enough or rich enough to frighten them off.” Faulkner cited other examples—Lindbergh and Oppenheimer—stripped of their privacy so that they became “one more identityless integer in that identityless anonymous unprivacied mass which seems to be our goal.” This de-individualization had been carried out in the name “of the empty mouthsound of freedom.” The erosion of privacy he equated with the eradication of individuality. He cited instances of people who had perished in press campaigns that took away their sense of themselves as individuals. A special anger seethed through the speech, emanating from Faulkner’s belief that in America the artist did not count—unless his fame could be used to sell something.10

In Oregon, the speech earned Faulkner a thousand dollars and a little peace of mind. He was driven to the Mackenzie River, a great fishing spot. He didn’t say much but offered that the scene was “even more beautiful than I thought.” Over an enjoyable dinner, especially two drinks, he conceded, “This type of thing could get to be a habit—people listening and such a substantial check.”11

For the brief stopover in Montana, where critic Leslie Fiedler headed the English department, Robert Linscott passed on this advice: “As you can imagine, Bill doesn’t enjoy lecturing and does it, frankly, for the money. . . . He doesn’t like crowds, receptions and chit chat. You’d get along with him just fine and he’d love to see the Montana country but inquisitive females and fancy cocktail parties make him nervous. . . . Bill likes a Martini at lunch, one or two Bourbons (preferably Old Grandad) and water before dinner. . . . Bill is a good guy and a gentleman in the absolute sense of the word.”12

What to make of Faulkner’s dour necropsy of the American Dream while he enjoyed himself on various jaunts? Was it enough to have his say and move on? “I do a lot of moving about these days,” he wrote to Else Jonsson, “doing jobs for magazines in New York, and international relations jobs for the State Department, have been in South America and there is a possibility of Europe some time soon I understand.” He did not sound upset over these assignments: to cover a hockey game and the Kentucky Derby for Sports Illustrated,13 but then he seemed between novels, or perhaps even wondering if he would write another one. Sailing on the Sardis Reservoir in his sloop occupied part of his time. Another offer came from Hollywood, but he thought not—“I dont think I need the money at present,” he told Saxe Commins.14

But he still considered escaping from home—now a troubling place, he wrote to Else Jonsson on June 12, because “there are many people in Mississippi who will go to any length, even violence,” to prevent integration and full voting rights for the Negro. “I am doing what I can. I can see the possible time when I shall have to leave my native state, something as the Jew had to flee from Germany during Hitler.”15 Surrounded by family and friends who remained arch segregationists, Faulkner felt cornered and alienated. “Apparently what has happened to Bill is that the Nobel Prize has completely turned his head and has convinced him that he is now a world authority on every subject including education and law,” Phil Stone wrote to their old friend Hubert Starr. “He has been writing a lot of letters to the Memphis paper about the situation. Also, as you know, glorifying the nigger is now one of the leading fads in New York City and that is where Bill sells his product. I am still bewildered that glorifying the nigger should be popular in New York and at the same time glorifying the Confederacy is too. I can’t figure that one out. Perhaps you can.”16

On July 5, Faulkner responded promptly to Harold Howland at the State Department: “Yours of July 1st at hand. I will be prepared to leave here at any date you set.” By July 29, he was on his way to Japan, desperately drinking and worried about how well he could perform abroad but determined to do his duty anyway.