29

Full Circle

January–November 1959

Faulkner on Stage

On January 30, Requiem for a Nun, starring Ruth Ford and her husband, Zachary Scott, finally premiered on Broadway. Estelle wired Mr. and Mrs. Zachary Scott: “AM DISTRESSED OVER MISSING YOUR TRIUMPH TONIGHT. STOP. CONFIDENT THE ACCLAIM WILL BE OVERWHELMING. REGARDS ESTELLE FAULKNER.”1 Both play and novel had been conceived decades earlier, encompassing Yoknapatawpha—from the courtroom to the countryside, from the gentry to the peasants (sharecroppers), with the townsmen in the middle. This world was changing, as Faulkner often pointed out in his University of Virginia talks. He no longer observed a stable middle class, he said, and that troubled him because he saw an erosion of standards. Snopeses were not the cause of this corruption but rather a symptom. Gavin Stevens, for all his faults—his high-handed pursuit of justice, his foolish romanticism—was trying to hold the world together against forces that sought to abolish all distinctions in a quest for money and respectability.

Zachary Scott, a Texan, had worked with Faulkner on The Southerner. In periodic meetings over several years as Requiem for a Nun went through several European productions, with notable successes in Paris and London until Ruth Ford was finally able to secure a U.S. run, Scott observed a Faulkner who in some respects resembled Quentin Compson, “constantly in search of reasons for the behavior of Southerners, why they left the South, and what happened to them.” It is not too much to say that Faulkner treated Ford and Scott as family. He called the couple whenever he knew they were in New York and went to see them. “He and Ruth were very simpatico,” Scott said. “It was a pleasure, a joy to see them together.” They did not have to say much; not much needed saying. All three could sit “easily in silence” for a half hour. Scott remembered walking into a room with Ruth and Bill on the sofa, saying nothing. “What are you doing, Bill?,” Scott asked. “I’m just sitting here loving Ruth,” was the reply. Estelle believed it had all begun when Ruth dated Dean Faulkner at Ole Miss. That is why Ford had the irrevocable stage rights to Requiem and why Faulkner stood by her when at least one producer wanted to replace her, and why he essentially turned the play over to her so that it could become more playable.

Scott noted that Faulkner had an actor’s keen awareness of self-presentation: “one of the most camera conscious men I ever knew. In pictures taken he was always a little apart from the rest, looking away. It might be the same way in conversation. He might seem apart from it, not hearing it, but he was still a close person, he had the heart of the conversation, the soul. . . . [H]e never imposed himself in any way.” Scott described Faulkner as a character, a creation, and a force of nature: “He looked like he should have looked. . . . He attracted children, birds, and animals. His mind was both sensitive and wicked. Yet he was sweet. He was naive and sophisticated at the same time. He radiated charm and wisdom.”2

Nearly all reviewers agreed that Ford and Scott were virtually perfect as Temple Drake and Gavin Stevens, yet the play never caught on. Faulkner had waived two weeks of royalties hoping to extend the play’s run, but it closed in March just as he completed his revised typescript of The Mansion.3 While praising several powerful scenes, critics deemed the play devoid of action with too much talking, elliptical and repetitious. Kenneth Tynan, who saw productions in Berlin, Madrid, Paris, and London, called the text “intoned rather than embodied.”4 Faulkner thought the play worked best as a closet drama with a small audience. That seems to be what Brooks Atkinson had in mind when he said the play belonged to “art theater.”5

Coming Home

No longer tied to a university calendar, Faulkner went riding, fracturing his collarbone in a fall, and in June, just as he finished working through The Mansion galleys, he found a Charlottesville home, 917 Rugby Road. He resumed riding as often as four or five times a week.6 His new editor, Albert Erskine, urged him to reconcile the discrepancies in the Snopes trilogy. Faulkner tolerated some changes but preferred, in the end, to include this prefatory statement to The Mansion: “there will be found discrepancies and contradictions in the thirty-four-year progress of this particular chronicle; the purpose of this note is simply to notify the reader that the author has already found more discrepancies and contradictions than he hopes the reader will—contradictions and discrepancies due to the fact that the author has learned, he believes, more about the human heart and its dilemma than he knew thirty-four years ago; and is sure that, having lived with them that long time, he knows the characters in this chronicle better than he did then.” The Mansion retold stories familiar to readers of The Hamlet and The Town, but the reiteration was not so much an effort to unify the trilogy as to reinforce the obsessive nature of storytelling, and of the stories a community tells to itself across generations and in different circumstances, making discrepancies a part of the nature of history itself.

Settling into the Rugby Road home made the contrast between past and present all the more palpable. Faulkner now lived in town, not adjacent to it. He had become a fixture in a community that had invited him to reside there in a home now “furnished in at least a livable fashion,” Estelle reported to her sister Dorothy. Faulkner liked to walk in the city, visiting a saddle shop, where he bought tack or had it repaired. He sat in one of two chairs smoking his pipe, returning the greetings of people who knew him. Sometimes he would talk about horses, but just as often he would remain quiet, saying nothing.7

The first reviews of The Mansion, dedicated to Phil Stone, appeared.8 While still in Oxford Faulkner had dropped off a copy of the book at his friend’s law office, and Stone sent him a note: “Don’t think I am not interested by the fact that I have not yet had time to read it. [Hal] Freeland [Stone’s law partner] and I have been working four nights a week and I work every Sunday, so I don’t have much time to read a book, but I do hope to get this one read during the holidays.”9 Freeland, on the other hand, always had plenty of time for Faulkner, answering his questions about the law and learning much from the nature of this genius’s interests.10

Stone, the man who recognized himself in Gavin Stevens and claimed the conception of the Snopeses as his own,11 now working so hard to discharge his debts, watched Faulkner finesse his way from one home to another, and from one honor to another. A Stone law clerk remembered Faulkner coming into the outer office “hungry to see Mr. Phil,” and Stone would duck out the back door, dreading that Faulkner might demand the money he had lent to his mentor.12 What Faulkner thought of Stone’s cold note is not known, but the long-delayed denouement of the trilogy, and the story of Mink’s abiding his long-contemplated revenge against Flem, has to be factored into Stone’s own resentments as he saw his erstwhile protégé ensconced in the mansion of Virginian ascension that neither one of them had foretold.

Some reviewers treated The Mansion as a career-ending novel of a writer in decline: “Mr. Faulkner, as it has become painfully evident in recent years, is not the writer he once was,” concluded R. E. L. Master in the Shreveport Times (November 1). The prose lacked intensity; the telling was typically confused and repetitious and undramatic. “An intolerable bore,” declared Orville Prescott in the New York Times (November 13). Already, Granville Hicks (Saturday Review, November 14) propounded what became the customary view that Faulkner had reached his peak between 1929 and 1942.

Perhaps the oddest criticisms were also the oldest, dating back to his first reviews—that Faulkner’s characters were depraved. None of the negative notices contemplated for a moment that The Mansion, like The Town, had three ethically inspired narrators: Gavin Stevens, Charles Mallison, and V. K. Ratliff, who do not merely try to do good but are committed to monitoring—and are implicated in—what happens in their world, both good and evil. The moral compass of the trilogy is hard earned through the narrators’ complex examination of themselves and the Snopeses, Varners, Sartorises, and those who come into contact with them. What the narrators know, or suppose they know, depends on who they are and what they do. Their world and their characters cannot exist outside of their own creation and interpretation, which means that the straightforward telling of a story, as if that story is somehow a fact, is precisely what Faulkner could not endorse but that his detractors desired.

Even the negative reviews praised the story of Mink Snopes, “one of Faulkner’s driven men,” Hicks proclaimed, nursing a thirty-eight-year-old grudge in Parchman prison against Flem, who did not save his relative from serving a life sentence for murdering Jack Houston. Mink Snopes exemplifies Faulkner’s practice, enunciated at the University of Virginia, of not judging his characters but understanding them—in this case, Mink’s grandiose sense of his own dignity and how it has been violated first by Jack Houston and then by Flem Snopes. Mink, a small, scrawny man of no accomplishment, is never patronized in Faulkner’s prose. The unapologetic Mink, confirmed in his own probity, is magnificent, if deluded and determined and nearly ridiculous in his belief that he has been cheated out of what is owed to him: the cow he has conveniently wintered over on Jack Houston’s property and that he has then to buy back when Houston refuses to return the cow, now much more valuable since it has been fattened up. Mink turns the situation completely around until he regards himself as the wronged party. His logic seems sound to him, and Faulkner endows him with a powerful self-deceiving imagination. Objectively, Mink is a fool and one of Faulkner’s “depraved” characters, and yet, by his own lights, Mink has stood up for his own humanity. He has to be included in what Faulkner constantly called the verities at the University of Virginia. Mink is, for all his faults, an individual supreme, and as such he too is an example of why Faulkner thought man would not only endure but prevail. Mink’s tenacity and dedication, over decades in prison, mirrors Faulkner’s own sense of mission. Hicks calls Mink an “ugly little man, bestial in appearance and manner” but “heroic in his pursuit of his evil ends.” True, but hardly enough to explain Faulkner’s commitment to his character. James Meriwether insisted in the Houston Post (November 15) that The Mansion is Mink’s book. He is the one to bring Flem down because Flem has, above all, dehumanized so many people, including himself.

Another favorite of reviewers: Senator Clarence Eggleston Snopes, who haunts whorehouses and is described as the “apostolic venereal ambassador.” The epitome of the corrupt and irredeemable, he is the gravamen of the charge sheet that can be drawn up against humankind. He relishes his salacious repasts and is the very antithesis of that anomalous Wall Snopes, who pursues his grocery chain business with integrity and independence and with an energy very like what Montgomery Ward Snopes puts into his pornographic enterprise. The clever Clarence almost gets away with becoming a U.S. senator by turning his World War II hero opponent into a “nigger lover” because he has commanded black troops. But Ratliff engineers a humiliation for Clarence—making a pack dog urinate on the politician’s surreptitiously scented pants—so that a disgusted Will Varner, Snopes’s political boss, makes him withdraw from the race. Although Stevens finds Ratliff’s ploy too simple to believe, the point, really, is that Clarence has not been paying attention, like the acute Flem Snopes, and is bound, one way or another, to fail.

Linda Snopes, whom Gavin successfully spirits out of Jefferson, comes home the widow of a Jewish, Communist sculptor-husband named Barton Kohl. He dies during their mission to save the Spanish republic. Some reviewers deemed her unconvincing and an example of Faulkner’s faulty understanding of post–World War II America. That Faulkner had seriously come to terms with his travels abroad and with the national security state never seems to have penetrated their mind-sets. What role an individual can still play in a centralizing and collectivist world—Faulkner’s constant concern—was not even dimly discerned. Linda represents the return of the native, the next generation not bound by the perfidy of her clan or the racism of her fellow southerners, and as such hers is a very American story of the progress, however fitful, that Faulkner thought possible. But her story, like the others, is not without irony, since it is Linda who works to get Mink out of prison and into Flem’s sitting room for Mink to kill him.

As in The Town, where Stevens does not act upon his love for Eula—even when she offers herself to him—so in The Mansion he deflects Linda’s love, wishing to make their bond more selfless than Faulkner ever achieved with the young women he pursued. It might be, though, that Linda, deafened by war and speaking in a quacking voice—no match for the beauty Ruth Ford—nevertheless owes something to Ford, who did not want to trouble her friendship with Faulkner by promoting him to a romance. His loyalty to Ford, dating from his first meeting with her in Oxford and continuing in Hollywood and New York, seems to inform Gavin Stevens’s devotion to Linda, who has to make a world for herself, which has included working in a wartime factory, unencumbered even by the man who has done so much to advance her dreams.

Eula remains an abiding presence in The Mansion as its Helen of Troy. The references to her as Helen, as the woman who got away from Gavin, call to mind Helen Baird. Gavin and Linda even rendezvous in Pascagoula, where Linda works in a war plant. Physically Helen Baird is no match for Eula Varner Snopes, but Helen Baird’s reserved and even aloof response to Faulkner, whose poems to her, however impassioned, came nowhere near to winning her, still stimulated him to think of her as the very embodiment of desire. Like Faulkner, Stevens has to live with the grief of never having consummated a love that once meant everything to him.

Jean Stein witnessed Faulkner’s experience of prolonged grief on a deserted Pascagoula beach at sunset: He saw “a woman in the distance and as we got closer he realized that it was someone he had known and he went over and talked to her for a few minutes and then we walked on and that was it. And only years later did I find out from someone else, a biographer or someone, that it was a woman that he had been very much in love with in about 1926 when he was writing I believe Mosquitoes. But he never told me. He never said anything.” That kind of grief he shared with no one but vouchsafed in his fiction. The trajectory from Helen Baird to Jean Stein was akin to that from Eula Varner Snopes to Linda Snopes Kohl and her avatars: Ruth Ford, Joan Williams, and perhaps even his date Leane Zugsmith, the politically engaged proletarian writer, friend of Lillian Hellman and Dashiell Hammett, whose brother Albert produced The Tarnished Angels (1957), an adaptation of Pylon.

The Mansion is a brooding political novel. Not only Flem Snopes has to be watched. As Gavin Stevens puts it: “That one in Italy and one a damned sight more dangerous in Germany because all Mussolini has to work with is Italians while this other man has Germans. And the one in Spain that all he needs is to be let alone a little longer by the rest of us who still believe that if we just keep our eyes closed long enough it will all go away.” The rest of us is not just Gavin, Chick, and Ratliff and not just Jefferson, but us—everyone. In The Mansion, Yoknapatawpha is a geopolitical creation, reflecting, in Warren Beck’s words, the “ubiquity and persistence of evil, and the innate tendency in many men to resist it.” As essential to the global Faulkner is Ratliff inasmuch as his “magnificently vernacular accent” reflects a “point of view that is anything but local.”13 Ratliff is, paradoxically, the international voice, seeking to make sure that the Snopeses are not appeased. Faulkner’s first short stories about fascism that derived from his 1925 walking tour of Italy and the inception of the Snopeses are in close proximity. That Linda Snopes is an antifascist is a fulfillment, not a factitious outcome, of the Snopes trilogy.

In the Delta Democrat-Times (November 22), Ben Wasson understood that the trilogy had become in its final iteration a world-historical saga, moving from the strictly southern locale of Sartoris, which Wasson had edited, to New York and London and Paris, with Snopeses “burrowed into the nooks and crannies of all the world: cheap, shoddy, sleazy, vicious, uncaring, unmoral.” “Snopes” is a word for “corporate man,” J. Robert Barth suggested in America (February 27, 1960): “A Snopes is any materialist, any opportunist, any man who has allowed greed to triumph over love in his life. It is the curse of the South, Faulkner says; it is the curse of modern society; it is the curse of fallen man.”

Even reviewers well read in the trilogy did not have the space to consider the shifts in point of view—for example: Jack Houston’s grief over his wife’s death in The Hamlet mitigates what Ratliff calls in The Town Houston’s “overbearing” nature, which becomes in The Mansion his mean-spirited treatment of Mink—demanding a “pound fee” in addition to the increased price of the cow. Mink’s own degradation now becomes the focus of Faulkner’s compassion, as Mink finds it hard to relinquish his belief in clan solidarity, his hope that Flem would bail him out. Mink’s murder of Flem is not simply revenge but a recognition that blood ties do not matter. He can dispose of a Snopes just as Flem has discarded Mink, Montgomery Ward, and any other Snopes who gets in his way. The fading, isolated Flem, inside a mansion no one has entered except for Linda and the help, has nowhere to go, no further goal to achieve now that he is a bank president. When the lethal Mink, now an old man, shows up, Flem remains seated, awaiting Mink’s second and successful effort to get him with a rusty gun. The length of Mink’s twenty-year sentence, doubled when the Flem-directed Montgomery Ward tricks Mink into a doomed attempt to escape prison, is also the length of Flem’s own incarceration in his senescent dream of success. In the Columbia Spectator (November 20), Luciano Rebay observed that Flem, “an elemental force in conflict with the world,” joins the civilization he sought to undermine and is ironically brought down by the man who once thought President Flem was omnipotent.

Race and Politics and Sex

Faulkner’s consciousness of race and politics—how they shapes Mink’s behavior, for example—is evident in the very grain of the novel’s sentences. We watch him watch his adversary: “Houston ordered whoever was on the front gallery to step inside and fetch him out whatever it was he had come for like they were Negroes.” Mink does not have to say it: Houston has treated him like a “nigger,” which is particularly galling since Houston has a black employee who, Mink thinks, condescends to him. Later Mink’s racism is on display when he has to work for a black man, picking cotton to earn enough to get to Jefferson for the kill. It is the black man, in fact, who refutes Mink’s scornful comment that Linda is faking her deafness: “A woman in a war. She must have ever body fooled good. I’ve knowed them like that myself. She jest makes claims.” The black man, offended at such ignorance and sexism, rejoins: “Whoever it was told you she is fooling is the one that’s lying. There are folks in more places than right there in Jefferson that know the truth about her.” Linda’s work, it seems, has had more of an impact than Stevens or Ratliff or Chick could possibly realize. The black man can see and hear precisely what eludes Mink’s consciousness. Mink understands nothing about oppression—other than personal slights—whereas the black man is politically aware and understands his place in the world. Mink encounters another example of a changing South and is clearly puzzled when a soldier turned preacher has a congregation that includes black people. The war, as Faulkner foresaw in “Battle Cry,” would produce characters like the soldier/preacher and the war hero leader of black troops who runs against Clarence Snopes.

Mink’s resentment of Linda, whom he has never seen and only heard about, is not simply the product of his own psychology. She seems to virtually everyone an anomaly. She has grown up a Snopes, although her birth father is Hoke McCarron, whom Stevens later arranges for her to meet in New York. She does not really need this meeting, which is more for Stevens’s sake as part of his anti-Snopes crusade. She is sui generis, which means she is a challenge for everyone in Yoknapatawpha, as such women were for William Faulkner when he went to New York and met southern-bred women like Leane Zugsmith, who operated beyond the boundaries of southern womanhood and history in ways that Estelle Faulkner could not contemplate or that Joan Williams could not quite transcend—notwithstanding Faulkner’s urging her to jettison her family’s middle-classism. Later Williams would say that she never conceived of acting like the free-spirited Jean Stein. Linda is closest to Stein, bred by a powerful Hollywood family fortune and industry force but rebellious and her own person. Linda, like Stein, is a culturally transformative figure, a bank president’s daughter fighting for the new aesthetics and politics. Marrying a Greenwich Village sculptor means that her devotion is to principle, to the work itself, not to the way a society requires her to behave. She is, as Ratliff remarks, “the first female girl soldier we ever had, not to mention one actually wounded by the enemy.” With eardrums blown out by a bomb, she has become deaf to the talk that would try to turn her away from her conscience. Faulkner had traveled quite a distance in time and space from Drusilla Hawk.

Linda’s independence owes something to the changing position of women in the Faulkner family. College-educated Dean, whom he had watched mature in Mississippi and then in a year abroad, and his step-granddaughter, Vicki, made him look at this new generation “with a new respect.”14 Linda Snopes is conceived five years before Susan Sontag—born the same year as Jill, and three years before Dean—disrupted the modern scene. Linda à la Sontag enters The Mansion with “a fine, a really splendid dramatic white streak in her hair running along the top of her skull almost like a plume.” The straight-up-and-down Linda, like the tall Sontag, flies under her own flag, a cause in herself—served by Gavin Stevens, Ratliff, and Charles (Chick) Mallison, her court, but as a sovereign who keeps her own counsel. Faulkner makes her a Hollywood tough guy who don’t say much: “Because Linda didn’t talk now any more than she ever had: just sitting there with that white streak along the top of her head like a collapsed plume, eating like a man.”15

Linda is so far out ahead of everyone else that even Chick, six years younger, is baffled and supposes the way to get at her is in bed. He even asks his Uncle Gavin for permission! Even with the go-ahead, however, Chick retreats. And here is why: “it wasn’t his uncle he was jealous of over Linda Snopes: he was jealous of Linda over his uncle.” Gavin Stevens has been Chick’s mentor, but the stodgy Stevens will not do. Only Linda can bring the world home to Yoknapatawpha. But that is why she is so scary to Chick. She defines the shifting ground on which all of them try to stand. She waits for no man, telling Gavin she loves him in as bold and unembarrassed manner as her mother, so that Stevens, once again, passive and fearful, demurs and marries, instead, a more docile woman.

Linda does not look like Eula. Linda is straight where her mother was curved. And yet Chick cannot resist imagining Linda undressed because he is sure this surprising woman would surprise him yet again. But like Sontag, busting out of Southern California and Chicago and arriving in New York via London and Paris in 1959, Linda is just too big for these men, and Yoknapatawpha cannot hold her for long. Her mission is to eliminate Flem via Mink, a mission of which she tells no one but that becomes obvious at the end of the novel as she leaves town. All along, Stevens has denied the truth that Ratliff has tried to tell him: Linda has engineered all of it—getting Stevens to petition for Mink’s release and then providing Mink with getaway money so that he can return to Jefferson to murder Flem Snopes.

Linda’s father, Hoke McCarron, it becomes clear, has contributed significantly to her genetic independence. His invasion of Yoknapatawpha upset all the rules—you might even say the laws—of courtship by which Stevens and everyone else has abided: “Because this here was a different kind of a buck,” Ratliff observes:

coming without warning right off the big mountain itself and doing what Lawyer [Stevens] would call arrogating to his-self what had been the gynecological cynosure of a whole section of north Missippi for going on a year or two now. Not ravishing Eula away: not riding up on his horse and snatching her up behind him and galloping off, but jest simply moving in and dispossessing them; not even evicting them but like he was keeping them on hand for a chorus you might say, or maybe jest for spice, like you keep five or six cellars of salt setting handy while you are eating the watermelon, until it was already too late, until likely as not, as fur as they or Frenchman’s Bend either knowed, Eula was already pregnant with Linda.

When Linda meets McCarron in New York, he does not tell her he is her father, and she does not need anyone else to tell her so. It is obvious. And she doesn’t need him precisely because she is so like him. It is the other men who need to talk it out, not Linda. No one knows what it was like for Faulkner to create such a magnificent character, but it is hard to believe he was not as thrilled to discover Linda as he was when he met Jean Stein.

Linda erupts out of all those trips to New York City, where Faulkner felt out of place so often and yet sometimes in place. On the trip to New York with Linda and Stevens, Ratliff has an ur-Faulkner experience:

And I remember how he [Stevens] told me once how maybe New York wasn’t made for no climate known to man but at least some weather was jest made for New York. In which case, this was sholy some of it: one of them soft blue drowsy days in the early fall when the sky itself seems like it was resting on the earth like a soft blue mist, with the tall buildings rushing up into it and then stopping, the sharp edges fading like the sunshine wasn’t jest shining on them but kind of humming, like wires singing. Then I seen it: a store, with a show-window, a entire show-window with not nothing in it but one necktie.

The ties in the shop are expensive—no less than seventy-five dollars apiece, and the frugal Ratliff cannot bear the thought of wearing one back home, even though they are handmade by a Russian woman who learns what V. K. stands for. To do a Hoke McCarron, to dress in such a way as to violate community conventions, is anathema to Ratliff, who for all his singularity wants to fit in—as, in important ways, Faulkner did too. You cannot take New York home with you. Only Linda Snopes can do that, but Faulkner could not resist making his own kind of left-handed homage to the city, where a significant portion of the trilogy was written and revised. No more than Ratliff was he actually going to wear his Nobel Prize getup or talk about that store on Madison Avenue where he had spotted the shoes he wanted to wear away from home. He might joke about putting the Nobel suit on display in Rowan Oak, but all that, as with Ratliff, had to be tucked away.

As long as Linda is there, the men can hit the hot spots—the Stork Club and Twenty-One—and they can talk a brand of politics that otherwise does not get into the Yoknapatawpha novels: “the war, about Spain and Ethiopia and how this was the beginning: the lights was going off all over Europe soon and maybe in this country too.” Spain, World War II, drives part of the narrative in The Mansion as in no other Faulkner fiction. Similarly, Chick Mallison reflects on his uncle’s generation and the World War I experience: “young men or even boys most of whom had only the vaguest or completely erroneous idea of where and what Europe was, and none at all about armies, let alone about war, snatched up by lot overnight and regimented into an expeditionary force, to survive (if they could) before they were twenty-five years old what they would not even recognise at the time to be the biggest experience of their lives.” These men return home thinking nothing has changed. But the world they left no longer exists. Twenty-five years after the war’s end, Chick Mallison refers to young Bayard’s twin, John, as the “last Sartoris Mohican”—the last one to believe World War I could perpetuate the glory and martial values of the Civil War.

The world that has changed is what Linda Snopes helps to define. She is named the “inviolate bride of silence” because she cannot be possessed or manipulated to be other than what she is. She can be invoked, like Keats’s urn, but not captured. She is the epitome of all Faulkner’s nonfiction talk about individuality. She may also be the “new and final woman of his heart.”16 She brings with her connections not only to communism but the National Recovery Act, Harry Hopkins (Roosevelt’s righthand man), John L. Lewis (head of the mine workers’ union), and the FBI. She stands for and is investigated for her solidarity with the Left that Faulkner did not share and yet supported when it came to the Spanish Civil War and the intrusiveness of the federal government. Linda and her husband, Barton Kohl, for those who know their history, served alongside “35,000 anti-fascists of fifty-two different nationalities” in the Spanish Civil War. When she enters Yoknapatawpha again, she brings with her a world of experience. The Lincoln Brigade the Kohls served in suffered more than seven hundred casualties, “a higher rate than the casualties sustained by the U.S. in WWII.”17 She is the survivor of a defeated and decimated remnant, and she is determined not to lose again.

In Linda Snopes, Faulkner provided a gloss on his controversial “go slow” admonition to the civil rights movement. At the University of Virginia he had reiterated that while southerners had to resolve the race issue themselves, that did not mean they should be entirely left to themselves: “the outsider who is doing it because he’s a do-gooder serves some purpose in keeping a certain pressure on. But nobody knows when to let well enough alone, and if he could just keep the constant, faint pressure and let it be at that, he would serve his purpose, but he gets too enthusiastic with changing overnight a—a condition which is emotional according to a pattern of morality which he can’t do.” Yet Linda, not exactly an outsider, persists: “Apparently she went without invitation or warning, into the different classrooms of the Negro grammar and high school,” Chick reports. Linda contacts the teacher and principal, who are wary of her activism and more comfortable with the gradualism of Booker T. Washington and George Washington Carver, Faulkner’s own favorites. Linda takes on the school board and then the Board of Supervisors and is called a “nigger lover,” although she still has, as far as the community is concerned, cover as a banker’s daughter. Not even blazing crosses deter her or signs that call her a Jew and Communist. Being married to a Jew is enough to marginalize her and make groups like the Ku Klux Klan a constituent part of the American fascism she has been called home to combat.

Only Munich and the advent of World War II cause Linda to scale down her activities, so that she now meets black children in churches on Sundays while the FBI investigates her. “Then Poland,” Chick announces in a two-word sentence like no other in Faulkner’s previous fiction. Heretofore public history had not been the driver of events; it followed in the train of his characters’ doings. The Faulkner who worked on “Battle Cry,” on the Soviet segments, the episodes of the French woman giving herself to the occupiers, and who had written to Churchill praising his wartime speeches, now enters 1940 Yoknapatawpha: “The Nibelung maniac had destroyed Poland and turned back west where Paris, the civilised world’s eternal and splendid courtesan, had been sold to him like any whore and only the English national character turned him east again; another year and Lenin’s frankenstein would be our ally but too late for her; too late for us too, the western world’s peace for the next hundred years, as a tubby little giant of a man in England was already saying in private, but needs must when the devil etcetera.” The wartime alliance that saved the Soviet Union also promulgated the Cold War, which makes its way into Yoknapatawpha just as Faulkner moved out of it on his State Department missions. Tellingly, though, he had rejected the invitation to tour the Soviet Union, not wishing to do the devil’s work, even as he was approaching the trilogy’s denouement.

What must his FBI brother have made of Stevens’s principled anti-McCarthy stand against a government agent?: “ ‘I see,’ I said. ‘You offer a swap. You will trade her [Linda’s] immunity for names. Your bureau will whitewash her from an enemy into a simple stool-pigeon. Have you a warrant of any sort?’ ” Linda solves her security problem by going to work in a defense plant, which is her antifascist contribution. “Oh, she was still doing her Negro Sunday school classes,” Stevens reports, “still ‘meddling’ as the town called it, but after a fashion condoned now, perhaps by familiarity and also that no one had discovered yet any way to stop her.” Not a revolution but a nudge, the kind of insistent but low-key pressure Faulkner endorsed.

Stevens, Faulkner’s flawed knight, seeker of truth and justice, now resembles a “Hollywood Cadillac agent,” settling into marriage with a woman his own age—as Faulkner now seemed to do with Estelle—and the life of a squire, although without the “boots and breeks” that Faulkner now wore for fox hunting, which at West Point he would soon say he “liked best.” If he tacitly admitted to himself that he had in some respects retired, he still had Linda streaking ahead of him. Whatever misgivings he might have about her activism, he recognized that, like the Freedom Riders, she is a “part of the change.” Asked about student riots and protests, Faulkner responded that they demonstrated “a perfectly normal impulse to revolt.”18 Even Chick is not young and bold enough for Linda. He has trouble keeping up. He has to run after her, so that she is “startled—not alarmed: just startled; merely what Hollywood called a double-take, still not so far dis-severed from her Southern heritage but to recall that he, Charles, dared not risk some casual passerby reporting to his uncle that his nephew permitted the female he was seeing home to walk at least forty feet unaccompanied to her front door.”19 It is a constant scramble to keep up with Linda, with what is truly young and fresh. Faulkner never forgot this, constantly asking Joan when they were together, Am I too old for you?

Stevens’s devotion to Linda is all-consuming, but he remains a high-minded Humbert Humbert.20 His nephew Chick is almost as besotted but explains his uncle’s celibacy as the cagey old “spider-lover” wise enough to realize “that initial tender caressing probe of the proboscis or suction tube or whatever it is his gal uses to empty him of his blood too while all he thinks he is risking is his semen” while he loses his “insides too in the same what he thought at first was just peaceful orgasm.” Linda is too powerful for these males and is beyond the reach of Stevens’s chivalric code and Chick’s romantic and their mythological illusions. Ratliff is not as beclouded by male fantasies and shares a secret bond with Linda. His Russian ancestry—never really discussed—is nonetheless enough to make him appear suspect and an alien if, like Linda, he spent more time in New York and came home wearing the expensive tie Stevens offers to purchase for him. In a sense, Ratliff’s very identity has made him a potential subversive—not such an absurd notion in McCarthyite America, which is why he is so careful to speak the dialect of his neighbors even when he knows what is grammatically correct. Ratliff is bound by the town. Only Linda can seize a place on a world stage, representing Faulkner’s response to the “cold war and the racial struggle more radical than in his interviews, letters, and speeches.”21 Is she also an “immoral character”—as ruthless as Flem in her premeditated plan of assassination, driving off in a Jaguar, ordered to coincide with his death and departure?22 She has the luxury of revenge, having turned Stevens, Ratliff, and Mallison into her accomplices. Her departure is stylish, like a scene in a film noir, with Linda as the femme fatale23 in an international car, a world motor sport winner, advertised for its “Grace, Space, Pace.”24 She is a character who could easily fit into Mildred Pierce and other women’s films of the 1940s, like Johnny Belinda (1948), featuring Jane Wyman as a deaf mute protected by a doctor (Lew Ayres, a Gavin Stevens figure) who guides her to a sense of her own worth. Linda outdoes Manfred de Spain’s “swaggeringly sexual roadster,”25 and Stevens’s own Cadillac roadster that he has garaged rather than showing it off.

What exactly Linda is revenging she does not say, but her retaliation seems overdetermined and involves her mother’s isolation and suicide; Snopesism’s perversion of community values into a form of fascism valuing only winners that her husband fought against; and her disgust with a society in which Flem’s criminal activity goes unpunished while the poor suffer the harshest punishments of the law. She opposes, in short, “undue process.”26 Although Flem does not involve himself in politics and is not a member of the Ku Klux Klan that Clarence Snopes tries to use to his advantage, Flem profits from a society lacking in social justice that links him to demagogues abroad.27 Linda is that “rare thing in Faulkner: a political person.”28 She is not, however, without precedent. Remember Maria Rojas in the “Mythical Latin-American Kingdom Story”? Linda’s meetings with Jefferson’s two Finnish Communists in her father’s parlor, not to mention her community organizing among black people, has brought her to strike a blow at the man who pretends to be her father and who is, in that respect, a fake. In existentialist terms, she has struck a blow at the inauthentic.

There is one more motive for revenge that cannot be proved but should not be discounted: self-defense. Linda gets her father before he gets her. Flem had duped a younger, more naive Linda into making him the beneficiary of her will. She never discloses how she later reacts to his connivery, but after she meets her birth father, Flem’s trading on his bogus blood tie to Linda, it can be imagined, outrages her as much as Mink is maddened by Flem’s refusal to aid a kinsman. Stevens surmises that Flem himself has scrawled “nigger lover on the sidewalk” so as to “bank a reserve of Jefferson sympathy against the day he would be compelled to commit his only child to the insane asylum.” Far-fetched? It does not matter because this is the kind of duplicitous world that Linda has learned to navigate. She dare not remain exposed to Flem’s nefarious schemes. Fascists can be overcome only by deadly force. In this respect, it is difficult not to see Stevens as the ineffective liberal attempting to ameliorate Flem-fascism rather than to eradicate it. Early on, as soon as she leaves Jefferson for the first time, Linda chooses the radical option: to root out evil. To Linda, apparently, the Stevens way would only isolate her even more from the world and perpetuate evil.29

The impotent Flem Snopes ends up a burnt-out case, facing “a cold empty fireplace” just like played-out old Bayard in Flags in the Dust. The generational changes that Faulkner kept forecasting in his interviews and essays begin to emerge in The Mansion. She is the change that is coming for the black people she tutors. Mink, so scornful of her, is the unwitting executioner of her plan.30 Mink, like all males in Yoknapatawpha, regards Linda as one of the weaker sex. His attitudes also fit the fascist model that Faulkner exposed when he created another disabled character, Eddie, in To Have and Have Not. A homegrown fascism that believes that it shows strength by preying on the weak eventually weakens itself by not perceiving there are many different ways to be strong.

Mink, now sixty-three, near Faulkner’s age when the novel was published, tries to sleep anywhere but on the ground as a result of thinking, in the narrator’s words, “The very moment you were born out of your mother’s body, the power and drag of the earth was already at work on you.” Mink is fighting not only his age but, in a sense, life itself, which has tried to down him. It is every man’s purpose, the novel implies, to elevate himself above the earth even as he knows it will claim him someday. What Mink wants is what Charles Bon wanted, what everyone wants: to be acknowledged. Mink imagines the death scene with his nemesis: “Look at me Flem.” In the end, Mink does not have to say the words because Flem turns to look at him, staring his own death in the face in a fulfillment of Mink’s destiny. All along, Mink has expressed his faith in “Old Moster,” his way of believing that his revenge has divine sanction notwithstanding the weak weapon he has brought to this reckoning.

Free of his mission to murder Flem, Mink finally feels he can risk resting on and in the earth. His revery, one of the most remarkable passages Faulkner ever wrote, is, ultimately, about the journey from life to death, the nearing of an end that he could imagine approaching, freed from “bother and trouble”:

following all the little grass blades and tiny roots, the little holes the worms made, down and down into the ground already full of the folks that had the trouble but were free now, so that it was just the ground and the dirt that had to bother and worry and anguish with the passions and hopes and skeers, the justice and the injustice and the griefs, leaving the folks themselves easy now, all mixed and jumbled up comfortable and easy so wouldn’t nobody even know or even care who was which anymore, himself among them, equal to any, good as any, brave as any, being inextricable from, anonymous with all of them: the beautiful, the splendid, the proud and the brave, right on up to the very top itself among the shining phantoms and dreams which are the milestones of the long human recording—Helen and the bishops, the kings and the unhomed angels, the scornful and graceless seraphim.

Like all of Faulkner’s other characters—none of whom he wanted to judge—Mink joins the hallowed history of humanity. He, too, gets his salute in a grand ending that can be set beside the tribute to his “betters,” the Sartorises of Flags in the Dust, with Mink’s “Old Moster” the equivalent of “the Player” that has a hand in the first family’s outmoded game.

At the end of The Mansion, which might have marked the end of Faulkner’s career, since he spoke of breaking the pencil as often as he said he had more to write, the last words are “Charlottesville, Virginia 9 March, 1959,” appending yet another bit of history—even autobiography—to his fiction.

“An ‘Interview’ with ‘Pappy’ Faulkner”

In the summer of 1959, Hollywood columnist Joe Hyams, visiting Oxford to report on the filming of MGM’s Home from the Hill, starring Robert Mitchum, decided to tree the elusive William Faulkner. He asked around and was advised that the usual forms of communication—a letter, a phone call, or just showing up at Rowan Oak—would result in a rebuff. The redoubtable Hyams, a World War II veteran and Bronze Star winner, persisted, taking up his post between 2:30 and 3:30 across from Mac Reed’s drugstore—where local intelligence had it his prey would show up to talk with friends and acquaintances. Wait fifteen minutes, he was told, and then introduce yourself. If, however, Faulkner did not show up, then Hyams was directed to visit Miss Maud and say he wanted to buy one of her paintings, which he should admire in the hope of getting her to loosen up about her son. If Hyams’s prize showed up, the reporter would try to get his drive-by interview. But then Hyams would need to go slow, trying to make out Faulkner’s soft voice while never asking Faulkner to repeat himself. But even that much seemed doubtful, since Faulkner, Hyams heard, was drying out and “testier than usual, which is pretty damn ornery.” Several topics could not be discussed: Faulkner’s private life, his work, and, “under no circumstances,” reviews of his play Requiem for a Nun. Hyams might be able to engage Faulkner on his early days in Hollywood, a friend suggested, or segregation. After getting drenched on the square, the impatient and pugnacious Hyams took a taxi out to Rowan Oak. A servant let Hyams into the house, and after about ten minutes, to the accompaniment of creaking floors and slamming doors, Faulkner, in the “shabbiest tweed jacket” the reporter had ever seen, “slipped” into the room. “What do you want?,” Faulkner asked. “An interview,” Hyams replied. Faulkner said he did not like to answer questions and was not one of those people who wanted to see his name in the papers, “but you have a job to do.” Hyams described Faulkner as then closing his mouth on his pipe “like a ten cent mousetrap.” The two men stared at one another in a twenty-second standoff as Hyams took in his subject’s “grey flannels, sturdy shoes, and regimental tie,” looking like a “dehydrated movie version of a college professor with short, cropped white hair and a military mustache.” Faulkner advised the reporter to give up. Then an “irate” Estelle entered and asked, “How did you get in here?”—adding that “Mr. Faulkner doesn’t see people, but since you’re here, sit down.” More staring between Faulkner and Hyams, who tried to relieve the silence by saying Faulkner had granted a “superb interview” with a reporter in Japan. Faulkner countered: But that was on the State Department’s time and he had been paid for his services. Then Hyams mentioned Jerry Wald. Faulkner said he liked Jerry, although they were in different rackets. Wald had produced two film adaptations of Faulkner’s work. Faulkner understood Wald, but Wald did not understand Faulkner, Hyams was told. Faulkner supposed Wald had done the best he could with Faulkner’s work, although Faulkner said he had not seen the films. Talk of the films shown in the local theater did not interest Faulkner, who did not go to see films that appealed to kids and college students, who went to see anything that moved. After a little more desultory talk, Hyams decided it was time to move on. A relieved Faulkner said to say hello to Wald and to Harry Kurnitz, if Hyams saw him: “They’re nice fellows.” Perhaps Faulkner was responding to what Hyams said of his departure: It had been a kindness to leave.