30

Renascence

1960–1962

So with my eyes I traced the line

Of the horizon, thin and fine,

Straight around till I was come

Back to where I’d started from.

—Edna St. Vincent Millay

Between Homes

In mid-January, William Faulkner wrote a long, unusual letter to his wife. It resembled the exuberant notes he wrote to her when he first came to New York and told her about his adventures. This renewed correspondence is the surest sign of his mellowing and his revived interest in sharing his life with her. During certain periods in Hollywood, he had felt a similar tenderness about her and home. Now he was home, and she was not there. She had committed herself to a new life in Charlottesville, where in her last years, near her daughter and grandchildren, Estelle’s efflorescence would appear on her shimmering canvases, which she would sign E. O., emphasizing, her granddaughter Vicki said, independence from the Faulkner name.1 She was the one away from home—a separation her husband sought to slacken with a tall tale. The letter’s comic tone is reminiscent of the Snopes trilogy, with his brother John as his foil, playing the fool, to Faulkner’s Ratliff. The brothers looked alike, which only heightened the irony for William Faulkner. These brothers in estrangement, these Faulkners (John had added the u to his name and on his novels, which irritated Brother Bill)2 were no Snopeses, but the fictional and factional families shared some of the same tensions.

It all began when Miss Maud bilked herself into believing she had bought a bargain: a twenty-cent-per-month insurance policy that would cover all her hospital bills. When her son John told her that Dr. Holley demanded payment, she responded, as usual, that “somebody was cheating her.” First, Faulkner had to calm his mother down (he had been paying her medical bills for years), and second, enjoin John, “don’t do it again.” Let her think she had taken care of her own medical expenses. But then Faulkner came down with pleurisy and treated his heaves and high fever with penicillin and whiskey. He drank himself into a delirium and passed out. The next thing he knew, John had arrived in an ambulance and they were on the way to the Byhalia sanatorium. Folks who saw the brothers were not sure which was which: “people are always mixing us up.” When Faulkner woke up the next day, he asked for a drink and was promptly served, while John, in the other bed, was refused: “he had only paid for one.” The outraged John called a cab and left, stopping in Holly Springs to purchase two cases of beer. Or so Faulkner had gathered, like Ratliff, from community intelligence. Somehow Jim Silver also joined the cast, and then Dean’s mother, Louise, then Silver’s wife, Dutch, and John’s wife, Lucille. They were worried about John’s whereabouts, but Miss Maud, still in the hospital, assured them he was probably just riding around in the ambulance. Lucille said: “Where is John? Not that I care.” Louise assured Lucille that John would be home by night. Then John walked in with his beer. It took Faulkner himself two days to come to, and he spent the next two “getting built up.” He was home Sunday but thought if he had stayed in Byhalia a week he would have won enough to pay John’s sanatorium bill since Faulkner had already taken thirty-five dollars off of a young doctor in a poker game. That’s why, Faulkner figured, he had been discharged early—so as not to clean out the young doctor. It was funny but not so funny: “I crossed Lucille at the hospital,” Faulkner told Estelle, “she never said beans: just beamed at me, a really good beam of four or five seconds—you know, like a tiger.” Faulkner was not exaggerating, according to Estelle’s granddaughter Vicki: “Lucille hated Bill and Estelle. John was her life, and she was totally jealous of anything that Billy did.”3

As for mother, she had been becalmed with a “stack of reading matter” but fell out of bed trying to arrange her stack. She had broken nothing this time. As for Faulkner, he was “feeling pretty fair, nothing to brag about but well enough.” This comedy had to be shared: “Let Miss [Jill] and Paul read this, and Linton might enjoy it. Certain Blotner would whoop over it.” He could not resist one final dig at John, who had “sold another book or something, and is going to be a nuisance and a menace until he has drunk it up.”

The letter reveals how much Charlottesville had become a second home, with a cadre of followers not available in Oxford, and who would not mix him up with his brother or beam its hostility at him. Between October 1 and December 23, 1959, the University of Virginia’s Alderman Library had run an exhibition, William Faulkner: “Man Working,” 1919–1959, organized by Linton Massey. Walking around the Oxford square was one thing; strolling on the University of Virginia grounds, quite another. He had set up a Faulkner foundation and was now the community’s benefactor as well as its honored citizen. He was no longer that hound dog under the spring wagon, the southern refugee beating it back home. On August 25, 1960, Faulkner accepted the position of Balch Lecturer in American Literature at the University of Virginia. Essentially an honorary appointment (renewable each year), he would give one public reading a year, meet a class for questions and answers once or twice a year, and (if he liked) meet students informally from time to time. He would have no other official duties, and that suited him just fine.4 He was now asked to wear the colors of the Farmington Hunt Club. “I have been awarded a pink coat,” he wrote to Albert Erskine, “a splendor worthy of being photographed in.”5 To his nephew Jimmy he wrote asking him to send the black boots with tan tops to complete his ensemble for the fox hunt, and mind: get the right ones—not Jack Beauchamp’s but the “newer pair with newspapers rolled in them” to serve as boot trees. Below his signature, Faulkner even included a sketch of the boots.6

Faulkner continued to split his time between Charlottesville and Oxford. Family, whatever its troubles, meant as much as ever to him. He still went bird hunting with Jimmy, who always called him “Brother Will.” When Jimmy became a colonel in July 1960, he told his uncle that very day, who said “he was prouder of that than anything else I’ve ever done.” Jimmy thought it was because of the old Colonel: “Somebody in the family had to do it. Every time he had a chance after that he introduced me as Col. Falkner.”7

Maud Falkner remained an audience of one for her eldest son. Ratliff had become a family friend for the both of them. She never tired of her son’s tales about him. As she neared the end, dying on October 18, 1960, at eighty-eight, she latched on to her son’s comment that “most people died of boredom.” “I’m bored enough and tired enough,” she replied. He gave her a good look: “I won’t let you die on me.” Then he “changed the subject to the latest whodunit they had read.”8 He always thought he could keep life going with another story. Her three boys were at her bedside and kissed her good-bye. What Faulkner felt, he kept to himself. Not even his brothers record his reaction in their memoirs. He picked out the casket, a simple wooden box, as she requested. She wanted no embalming and said she wanted to “get back to earth as fast as I can.” She was a bit like Addie Bundren with a son like Jewel who did not care to share his feelings with others but would just as soon expend them upon a horse. The Faulkners, Bundren-like, were the only ones to handle the casket on its way to St. Peter’s Cemetery. Maud Falkner left behind something like six hundred paintings, some of which can still be seen in her home on Lamar Avenue.

In a March 1961 letter to Muna Lee, discussing another trip to Venezuela for the State Department, Faulkner said he did not want to be “shielded from tiredness and boredom and annoyance.” He considered his mission a job and would do his best, even though he still feared “I am the wrong bloke for this,” since he was not the literary man people expected, and even as a writer he had run dry: “I am not even interested in writing anymore: only in reading for pleasure in the old books I discovered when I was 18 years old.” He would sign autographs for Venezuelans and other Latin Americans but preferred not to deal with Anglo-Americans, “since the addition of my signature to a book is part of my daily bread.”9 He confided to Bill Fielden, then in the tobacco business in Caracas, that he had been reluctant to undertake the trip because it was sponsored by a “group of North Americans who found they could make more net money living in Venezuela than anywhere else.” He doubted they had any interest in him, but he had capitulated to the State Department’s pleadings. The week (April 3–10) in Venezuela went well, and Faulkner seems to have enjoyed himself more than he expected, since Bill Fielden “through his connections was able to take Pappy into the interior,” Vicki recalled, and “showed him some of the horse farms there, and Pappy rode some of the horseflesh. . . . He had quite a good time. It was not the sophisticated cocktail party scene.”10

In Charlottesville that spring Elliott Chaze, a Hattiesburg, Mississippi, native, did another one of those annoying impromptu doorstep interviews that sometimes worked if, as Jill said, her father was in the mood. Chaze interrupted Faulkner’s two-finger typing, announcing, “I drove a thousand miles to see you.” Chaze had tried to call but was told Faulkner did not answer the phone. “That’s right, sir,” said Faulkner in a barely audible voice; he was “composed and motionless as a photograph.” Faulkner stared: “What is it you want from me?” Chaze chattered about stories he found more exciting than Hemingway’s. Faulkner sighed. He did a lot of sighing and just looking at Chaze before saying, “You come on in and we’ll see what we can do to help you.” Those were the exact words he seemed to use for such intrusions whenever he decided to relent. Faulkner had a “controlled glitter,” which brings to mind Edwin Arlington Robinson’s “Richard Corey,” the masterwork of a poet Faulkner had spied in a New York City bookshop so long ago. Although Chaze did not refer to the poem, his awestruck impressions accord with that evocation of a community’s worship of elegance and grace. Faulkner seemed to know it, explaining his writer-in-residence role: “you walk around and people see you and say, well, there he is, there he goes.” Faulkner would give them that much—but not much more. He did not like talking about writing even when he talked about writing. How he worked—the specifics—he would not supply. He changed the subject: “There is something about jumping a horse over a fence, something that makes you feel good. Perhaps it’s the risk, the gamble. In any event it’s a thing I need.” For the rest, Chaze got boilerplate, and left after hearing Faulkner raise his voice only once to say, “Good luck to you.”11

He felt fit, rising at daylight on most mornings and riding until about ten. He had three horses he could rely on for hunting four days a week. Then the unexpected happened. He began another novel, The Horse Stealers: A Reminiscence, later retitled The Reivers. He showed three chapters to Joseph Blotner, who noted on July 9: “Strikes me as mellow & funny.” Certainly it put Faulkner in a good mood. Nine days later he had more pages to read to Blotner. “Most laughing & eye contact I can remember with him ever,” Blotner recorded. “WF convulsed & red with his silent laughter. ‘This book gets funnier all the time,’ he says.”

The novel began, “Grandfather said:” and was as much a book for the grandchildren as for himself. His step-granddaughter Vicki remembered sharing a tender moment with him and her grandmother when he announced with a smile that he had dedicated the book to her and his other grandchildren. Vicki remained convinced that Estelle’s sobriety had turned around the Faulkner marriage, helping Faulkner to “right his ship” and produce some of his best work in years, starting with Saxe Commins’s sudden death. Albert Erskine, a fine editor, nevertheless could not do all that Commins had done for Faulkner, and so he turned increasingly to his wife. Their life in Charlottesville had become quite social. “He was easier with people,” Vicki observed. “He wasn’t so isolated.”12 “I intend to be in Charlottesville every winter for the hunting,” he wrote to Alexander Rives, a fellow horseman. Rives and his wife visited the Faulkners for drinks, and their son Billy received a copy of Requiem for a Nun after Faulkner spotted the nine-year-old on a shaggy pony at a fox hunt and became fond of him, perhaps remembering that pony he rode when he was a boy.13

It took Faulkner hardly more than two months to complete The Reivers during another hot Mississippi summer. On August 21, he finished a draft of a work first described in May 1940 in a letter to Robert Haas: “a sort of Huck Finn—a normal boy of about twelve or thirteen, a big, warmhearted, courageous, honest, utterly unreliable white man with the mentality of a child, an old negro family servant, opinioned, querulous, selfish, fairly unscrupulous and in his second childhood, and a prostitute not very young anymore and with a great deal of character and generosity and common sense, and a stolen race horse which none of them actually intended to steal.” This picaresque novel, to which Faulkner later added a stolen car, led to an adventure lasting a “matter of weeks,” written, in a sense, in real time, when he went at it twenty years later. The story had a sort of moral, with the boy learning from “experiences which in his middle class parents’ eyes stand for debauchery and degeneracy and actually criminality; through them he learned courage and honor and generosity and pride and pity.” The last words with their coordinating conjunctions show how the Faulkner of 1940 was on his way to the Faulkner of the Nobel Prize address and the fiction of the 1950s and early 1960s. And that jibe at parents suggests he saw himself as a sort of middle man between parent and child, a role he now played with relish as a grandparent.

It took another month to clean up the first draft, and by the end of November he was in New York working at Random House with Albert Erskine, readying the book for publication in June 1962.

Grandfather Faulkner

The novel was something special. It delivered what its subtitle promised: a reminiscence. It came close to the memoir Faulkner would never write. “Dear Bill,” his brother Jack wrote: “We are pleased with the book and proud that you sent it to us. I recognize most of the folks in it, the others I never met or they exist only in your imagination. It brings back Dad to where I can almost see him again.”14 Earl Wortham, the Oxford blacksmith, remembered, “The Colonel [Faulkner’s grandfather] had him a man named Chester Carruthers” who drove the Faulkner car: “I can still sees them two tearing across these old gullies—the old Colonel sittin’ back there, staring straight ahead, and Chester just a glowing ’cause he was chasing all them white folks off the street.”15

Murry Falkner finally had a place in his son’s fiction. Faulkner’s affection for his father had always been muted, if not entirely absent from his recorded comments. Thanks to his father, Faulkner had never been a “starving artist.” He did not trouble his son “about the need for sweat to earn your daily bread.”16 Faulkner told Malcolm Franklin that Murry was “a kind and gentle man who always made sure I had two feet under the table.”17 Murry also came off well when Faulkner told University of Virginia students about the origins of “Spotted Horses.” In The Reivers, Maury, like Murry, is the owner of a livery stable. He has three sons. Like Faulkner, Lucius is the oldest. Like Murry and his father, Maury remains a diminished figure compared to Lucius’s grandfather, Boss Priest. Maury, unlike Murry, is not so much checked by his powerful father as he is an extension of his father’s authority. When Maury gets out his razor strop to punish Lucius for his reiving, Boss Priest stops him, and Maury objects: “ ‘No,’ Father said. ‘This is what you would have done to me twenty years ago.’ ‘Maybe I have more sense now,’ Grandfather said.” The brutal days of the frontier justice and family discipline give way to Grandfather’s more modern approach concerning old-school values: a conversation with Lucius about the obligations of a gentleman that makes the boy feel more chastened than any beating could accomplish. In such scenes, Faulkner brought his awareness of the past into the present, making his heritage function all the same in a changing world that Boss Priest has prophesied:

“Twenty-five years from now there wont be a road in the county you cant drive an automobile on in any weather,” Grandfather said.

“Wont that cost a lot of money, Papa?” Mother said.

“It will cost a great deal of money,” Grandfather said. “The road builders will issue bonds. The bank will buy them.”

“Our bank?” Mother said. “Buy bonds for automobiles?”

“Yes,” Grandfather said. “We will buy them.”

“But what about us?—I mean, Maury.”

“He will still be in the livery business,” Grandfather said. “He will just have a new name for it. Priest’s Garage maybe, or the Priest Motor Company. People will pay any price for motion. They will even work for it. Look at bicycles. Look at Boon. We dont know why.”

Like horse races, the racing automobile rouses the community out of the “fatigue and the inertia of everyday life” and fosters a “communal solidarity,” so that “motion unifies the whole novel.”18 It also brought Faulkner home, so to speak, to a family that had not always welcomed him. He stood apart, like the “I” who narrates The Reivers, but in the same novel he became “we” when Lucius celebrates his brotherhood in the comedy of crime and the solidarity of family, to whom he must account.

Here, finally, was a novel that all the family members could rejoice in. Faulkner had always resisted pleas to write in a crowd-pleasing way, and this novel served that purpose, as Bennett Cerf quickly realized even before the book went into production: “I read your novel over the weekend and think it’s one of the funniest books I have ever read. I can’t tell you how fine I think it is, and I have great hopes for a big best seller, believe it or not.”19 The Reivers became a Book of the Month Club main selection.

The novel came right out of family lore about Judge J. W. T. Falkner’s stolen automobile. “Somebody did actually take his car to Memphis without his permission,” said a friend of Faulkner’s uncle. The judge preferred reading novels like Ben-Hur and The Clansman. A few years before the judge’s death on January 20, 1962, he said to his nephew in front of Mac Reed’s drugstore: “You’re one of the finest writers. Why don’t you write something . . . your friends here would really appreciate?” Faulkner “dropped his head, smiled and said, ‘I may do that.’ ”20

The Reivers, dedicated to Faulkner’s grandchildren, uses the Scottish ancestral word for thieves, recalling all those earlier Faulkners or perhaps Falconers, as Faulkner liked to believe, who had stolen away to a new world. The novel casts a retrospective and ruminative eye on the history of Yoknapatawpha in the mellow tones of a grandfather, Lucius Priest, telling his grandchildren about the Mississippi of 1905 and focusing on a seemingly simpler era, when an automobile was a work of wonder, and when a trip from Jefferson to Memphis could seem like an epic adventure. In fact, Lucius says, the car made only one such trip—the one he is about to recount. The human scale of this world, when Faulkner was eight, had to be recovered for a generation that never knew it.

It is the biographer’s temptation to see Lucius as the author’s self-portrait,21 but the differences between the creator and his character stand out: Lucius does not have Faulkner’s early aesthetic bent, or an encouraging artistic mother, or a precocious female playmate like Estelle. Lucius has to be lured into trouble; young Billy Falkner had no trouble stirring up his own. Where author and character coincide is in a love of horses and an education in the gentleman’s code—their standard of measurement in a changing world. Like Faulkner’s other characters, Lucius is true to some particulars of the world William Faulkner grew up in but also fictionalized out of Faulkner’s own biography, although sometimes the parallels are tight: Mammy Callie becomes Aunt Callie.

Lucius recounts the time he and Boon Hoggenbeck, a family retainer, become reivers22 when they “borrowed” the Winton Flyer belonging to Boss Priest and set off for the big city. Boon is in love with a car that has to be hand-cranked—perhaps the same way Boon treats his whores—and can perform at night with kerosene lamps. This open touring car has curtains that could be put up to convert the vehicle into a boudoir. But in the open air it became part of a special outing: “all of us, grandparents, parents, aunts, cousins and children, had special costumes for riding in it, consisting of veils, caps, goggles, gauntlet gloves and long shapeless throat-close neutral-colored garments called dusters.” The almost ceremonial, formal feel of life then, Faulkner knew, would seem a novelty to his younger readers not schooled in the decorum and manners of north Mississippi way back when.

Boon wants to visit Miss Corrie in a Memphis cathouse and introduce eleven-year-old Lucius to a world that (Boon assures him) Lucius will one day understand and avail himself of. Boon is not exaggerating. Many young boys then did go to Memphis brothels for their sexual initiation, and Faulkner himself would turn his own time in bawdy houses into both horrifying and humorous fiction ending in this PG-13 performance, with Grandfather Lucius doing the guidance. It might have occurred to Faulkner—at the advent of the 1960s, and after the lubricious talk of semen in The Mansion—that the times for a wholesome whorehouse tale were just right.

Boon’s employer, Boss Priest, has put the noisy, noxious conveyance out of circulation. Grandmother can’t stand the smell of gasoline. Boon is a fool to think that he can make it all the way to Memphis in anything like good time and get back undiscovered. The car comes with “a new axe and a small coil of barbed wire attached to a light block and tackle for driving beyond the town limits.” In other words, these “flyers” often broke down, especially on muddy, unpaved roads. In 1903, one enterprising motorist took more than sixty-three days to travel from San Francisco to Manhattan, trying to find decent roads, using block and tackle to get out of mud holes and horse teams to get pulled out of sand.23

Lucius’s escapade with Boon is made possible by Boss Priest having taken the train to attend the funeral of his wife’s father, Lucius’s other grandfather. Boon is supposed to lock up the automobile and not use it while Boss is away. The meaning of “gentleman,” which involves taking responsibility for one’s actions and abiding by a code of honor, is developed in references to Yoknapatawpha history in the first chapters of the novel, in which descriptions of the Sutpens, the Compsons, the McCaslins, and all the county’s important families impinge on Lucius’s consciousness. What he does, in other words, will be measured against what his forebears and predecessors have done. Lucius’s decision to leave home is a declaration of independence, but it is also another act in the drama of his community’s history. In effect, Lucius as “grandfather” is telling his children their history, showing how the individual has to understand it in order to come to terms with himself.

Calling The Reivers nostalgic and a summation of Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha saga is understandable but also misleading, since doing so suggests that the novel is not in the same class as his earlier and presumably greater novels. In just this way many critics and biographers have discounted The Reivers, taking the narrator’s relaxed tone as a sign of the author’s more indulgent and less complex art. This assumption ignores the circumstances of the telling: a grandfather addressing his grandchildren. His narration is all about the child’s discovery of the adult world as told by an adult to his own kin, who will, in turn, discover the world in their way. To confuse Faulkner with his narrator—no matter how many similarities between them can be assembled—is to wreck the fiction and to deny Lucius Priest his independent existence as a character. His word, as he admits, is not the last word: “I’m sure you have often noticed how ignorant people beyond thirty or forty are.”24

Certainly the darker events of Faulkner’s earlier novels—the suicide of Quentin Compson, the castration of Joe Christmas, and revelations about the evils of slavery—are not explored. But their consequences are—especially in the figure of Ned McCaslin, Boss Priest’s coachman, who stows away in the automobile and declares he also wants his fun in Memphis. He has been called “a black man of inexhaustible vitality and well-forged folk wisdom”25—and as such he is an alternative authority even if he is bound to white power. His insubordination and wiliness, including a certain minstrel “Uncle Remus” behavior, has been attributed to Faulkner’s atavistic view of race,26 but this seems a misguided perception in view of Ned’s ability to subvert the status quo even as he appears to serve it. His own stature and family identification is reflected in the way he speaks: “What Boss likes is a horse—and I dont mean none of these high-named harness plugs you and Mr Maury has in that livery stable: but a horse”—horse, not hawse, or any variant on that word that would make Ned simply a dialect character, part of the black chorus that appeared in Hollywood films as racist variants on Sir Walter Scott’s or Thomas Hardy’s rustics. Ned does have his origins partly in the comedy of subordination, but he is also, like Lucas Beauchamp, a proud clan member. He is also one of Faulkner’s “avatars of motion,” one of those individuals using horses, airplanes, automobiles, and horses that engage in the “comedy of motion” conveying the “pure sense of being alive” while providing in their races in Pylon, The Unvanquished, The Hamlet, and A Fable a “pure sense of being alive.”27

Lucius refers to Ned as “our family skeleton.” He was born in 1860 and claims that his mother “had been the natural daughter of old Lucius Quintus Carothers himself,” the original progenitor of the clan. In other words, Ned claims direct descent from a founding father, whereas Lucius’s line “were mere diminishing connections and hangers-on.” He is reminiscent of Uncle Ned Barnett, born in 1865, who not only served the old Colonel but in Faulkner’s day wore his master’s clothes. To readers of Faulkner’s other novels—especially Go Down, Moses, which explores the McCaslin genealogy and the white family’s inextricable connections with the lives of the McCaslin slaves—Ned’s pride and self-assurance are all the more appreciated. Boon cannot gainsay Ned’s presence, even though as a white man Boon ought to be able to master his so-called inferior in this highly segregated society.

The Ned of The Reivers, like Uncle Ned, affects an air of authority based on his proximity to the family’s “boss.” This kind of consanguinity between black and white, and the idea of a black man as both authority figure and servant, seemed so alien in 1969 that the producers of the film adaptation made Boon and Ned rivals, completely distorting the complex nature of race that Faulkner tried to show Cantwell by introducing him to Uncle Ned and that pervades The Reivers.

Segregation and racial distinctions keep breaking down in the world of Faulkner’s fiction. Ned McCaslin represents a deft way of showing that dissolution even in an adventure story intended to entertain children. Compared to the crafty Ned, Boon and Lucius are innocents abroad. Lucius has been rightly called a “motorized Huck Finn,”28 and yet it is as if Faulkner takes Jim off the raft and puts him in control of the story that becomes The Reivers. Ned turns the seemingly simple road trip that Boon and Lucius have planned into a rococo plot that involves getting his kinsman Bobo Beauchamp out of trouble by trading the Winton Flyer for a racehorse, which Ned will then put up in a race against another horse, with the prize being the automobile and other winnings that will pay off Bobo’s debts and return the vehicle to Boss Priest. So devious is Ned’s strategy that it is not revealed until near the end of the novel, which becomes the denouement of a mystery of Ned’s devising. In fact, only after the race is won does Ned divulge to Boss Priest the intricate series of events and developments that neither Lucius nor Boon has been able to explain. Without Ned as the mastermind, the novel has no engine, no way to proceed or to resolve itself.

Because Lucius is telling the story, remembering his childhood even as he invokes his status as a grandfather, The Reivers has a double perspective: Lucius then, Lucius now; the world then, the world now. Although a good deal has changed since 1905, the moral values Lucius seeks to impart remain the same and belong to the historical continuum that the novel itself enacts. And Ned is the conduit of that continuum. He is forty-five years old in 1905, Lucius reports. Ned will live to the age of seventy-four, “just living long enough for the fringe of hair embracing his bald skull to begin to turn gray, let alone white (it never did. I mean, his hair: turn white nor even gray. . . .).” Although Ned responds to change, represented by the automobile, he has no interest in driving it or learning about the new technology. And yet his very steadfastness in the midst of change, his knowledge of his own mind and his place in the world, renders him able to adapt to every new and unforeseeable situation on the ride to Memphis and in its aftermath. In short, he cannot be distracted by novelty or deflected from his purpose.

On the other hand, the slow-witted Boon (he failed the third grade twice) is impulsive, a man who acts in the moment without taking aim. His poor shooting is legendary. He is all id to Ned’s ego, with Lucius trying to manage his own superego and inclinations and adhere to his upbringing while coping with the behavior of the shrewd black man born into slavery and the excitable white man saved from undoing himself by the grace of his gentlemen employers, beginning with old General Compson. Boon may be six feet four and weigh 240 pounds, but he has the “mentality of a child.” He is a rough-hewn woodsman, with a “big ugly florid walnut-tough walnut-hard face.” This physical description suggests an impermeable quality in Boon, who cannot learn from experience as Lucius does, or profit from it as Ned can. Boon can drive the action forward, just as he drives the Winton Flyer, but he cannot plot his adventures or predict their pitfalls.

A case in point is Boon’s confident belief that he can drive the automobile through Hell Creek bottom, a treacherous bog maintained that way by a farmer who makes his living dragging vehicles out of the mud. Even though Boon paid the man two dollars the summer before to pull out the Winton Flyer, he thinks that this time, with Ned and Lucius helping, he can use block and tackle to move the car through the sludge. After several efforts that saturate Boon and Ned with muck, Boon pays the man with the mules two dollars per passenger to rescue them from the mire. This episode is a perfect example of Boon’s self-defeating actions, which tend to make his dilemmas worse than they were to begin with. In short, Lucius’s up-to-now pristine existence, guided by the courtly examples of his father and grandfather, is enveloped in the mess Boon makes.

Arriving in Memphis, the action shifts to the brothel and to its madam, Miss Reba—last seen accommodating Clarence and Virgil Snopes in The Mansion. She is enchanted with Lucius’s manners—such a contrast to the conniving Otis, a young nephew Miss Corrie is trying to reform. Lucius is smitten with Miss Corrie, whom he describes as a “big girl. I don’t mean fat: just big, like Boon was big, but still a girl, young too, with dark hair and blue eyes and at first I thought her face was plain. But she came into the room already looking at me, and I knew it didn’t matter what her face was.” She may be a whore, but there is an innocence in her that Lucius connects with, and they quickly form a bond that leads to Lucius being cut by Otis’s knife in a fight that starts when Lucius strikes out at Otis for denigrating Miss Corrie. She, in turn, decides to reform herself in order to be worthy of Lucius’s devotion. Set against her sincerity is Mr. Binford’s cynicism. He turns a critical eye on Lucius and tries to corrupt him, offering beer even though Lucius steadfastly refuses the drink, announcing that he has promised his mother that he will not imbibe until he is of age.

Then Ned shows up with a horse he has named Lightning, informing Boon that the Winton Flyer can only be recovered by winning a horse race. On the way to the race site, Ned, Boon, and Lucius encounter the sadistic deputy sheriff Butch Lovemaiden, who arrests Boon and Ned for possessing a horse that is stolen property. The price of their release, Butch informs them, is a night with Miss Corrie. Seeing no way out, she complies and is later assaulted by Boon, who thus loses Lucius’s respect.

The novel’s exciting denouement centers on the horse race. Ned admits to Lucius that he believes he can make their horse a winner (Lightning has lost races against his rival, Acheron), but the neck-and-neck heats in which the neophyte jockey Lucius rides make the result anything but certain. After their triumph, Ned explains that he has studied the psychology of his horse and discovered its liking for sardines, which Ned carries with him at the finish line in sight of the galloping Lightning, who vindicates Ned’s prediction.

In the novel’s coda, when Lucius is spared the beating his father is prepared to give him, Boss Priest intervenes and suggests that it is punishment enough for Lucius to live with a sense of his transgressions. “A gentleman accepts the responsibilities of his actions and bears the burden of their consequences, even when he did not himself instigate them but only acquiesced to them, didn’t say No though he knew he should.” To the young Lucius, expecting corporal punishment, the psychological and moral burden his grandfather places on him seems overwhelming. But Boss tells him, “A gentleman can live through anything.” And this is surely what Lucius, as narrator, is telling his grandchildren without actually saying so directly. Lucius has lived to tell the tale and is the better for it.

All along, Ned has been preparing Lucius for the moment when he will have to confront Boss. Ned has known from the start that they could not get away with their adventure, or even just accept their punishment and be done with it. Instead, as in all of Faulkner’s fiction, the past is never past. It has to be borne and contended with as an inextricable part of a community’s and an individual’s history.

Fool about a Horse

During the summer of 1961 in Oxford, Jack Cheatham, from a Florida racetrack family, and a devotee of fox hunts and a polo player, began pestering an Ole Miss law school classmate, William Lewis Jr., for an introduction to William Faulkner. “Oh, no, Jack, I don’t think I can do that. I can’t take you there,” Lewis told him. Lewis’s father ran Neilson’s Department Store on the square, and Lewis Jr., the same age as Faulkner’s niece Dean, had grown up in and around Rowan Oak and saw a good deal of William Faulkner. They were by no means close friends, but Lewis knew how Faulkner guarded his privacy. Lewis also believed that, contrary to lots of stories about Oxford’s neglect of their famous author, those who knew about Faulkner’s writing respected his right to be let alone. At a dinner in the Lewis home, Jack asked Lewis’s father about meeting Faulkner. Lewis Sr., well read in Faulkner, called Rowan Oak and said: “Bill, I’ve got a man here interested in a lot of the things you are. He’d like to see if you could meet him.” Faulkner said, “Send him right on out.” Jack went that night and thereafter they became riding companions—in Virginia as well, where Jack later saw displayed in the University of Virginia library, the wok he had used to make meals when out on expeditions with Faulkner. Jack remembered Faulkner always brought a bottle along and would say, “Jack, would you like a little tug?” Jack could see that Faulkner’s horses were too strong for him.29

On December 24, 1961, William Faulkner was admitted to Tucker Hospital in Richmond, suffering from an acutely painful back and a respiratory infection. Five days later he was back home and on a horse by January 3, and off again—he could not remember how—coming home with a black eye, a bruised forehead, and a broken tooth. A Demerol shot did not deaden the pain, and he turned to drink, checking into Tucker once again on January 8. The doctors examined a man in good shape for a sixty-four-year-old. X-rays revealed ribs that had been broken quite some time ago—the aftermath of his riding accidents. Tests showed a normal heart, normal blood pressure and liver. They treated him for pleurisy. Faulkner seemed unconcerned. He behaved the perfect gentleman, if unwilling to do much about his health. He did what he pleased. He seemed to have a feeling nothing would happen to him. Yet he did tell Dr. Asa Shield: “I’m going to stop being a damn fool and acting like a 45-year-old and start living as a 65-year-old and perhaps live to be 85 years old.”30

Like Robert E. Lee on his favorite horse, the intrepid Traveller, charging into many battles Billy Falkner had read about as a boy, one horse, Tempy, came to epitomize all the others William Faulkner rode, throwing her rider regularly and refusing jumps over fences even as he continued to train her and sorely savage his own body. “Faulkner’s men of action ride horses—Jewel Bundren, John Sartoris, Thomas Sutpen, Roth Edmonds, Jack Houston,” symbols of masculinity, control, and power.31 But horses ultimately meant something more, which is why Faulkner had to remount after a fall. They recaptured his youth on that pony his father bought for him, and the pony he bought for himself, and the art he always described as a “splendid failure,” and memorialized in the poet’s revery in “Carcassonne”: “on a buckskin pony with eyes like blue electricity and a mane like tangled fire, galloping up the hill and right off into the high heaven of the world.”

And yet Faulkner, off the horse, and off the page, often struck interviewers as “utterly still . . . composed and motionless—almost to an inhuman extent,” as Simon Claxton, an English visitor to Rowan Oak, noted in March 1962. Faulkner’s “glittering hooded eyes” held him, as they had Elliott Chaze a year earlier in Charlottesville. Claxton generated no news, except for Faulkner’s comment that he was not then working on a book, but even that, given Faulkner’s admitted inclination to give different answers at different times, cannot be taken as definitive. “I am not working on anything at all now,” he had told Bennett Cerf. “I wont work until I get hot on something; too many writing blokes think they have got to show something on book stalls. I will wait until the stuff is ready, until I can follow instead of trying to drive it.”32 He was still riding every morning and fox hunting in Virginia, he told his foreign visitor. Although taciturn, Faulkner seemed to relent, talking to Claxton about the Lake District and saying that “he hoped I was enjoying his country as much as he had enjoyed mine.”33

President Faulkner

On April 19, Mr. and Mrs. William Faulkner, accompanied by Jill and Paul Summers, arrived at the Presidential Suite of Hotel Thayer on the West Point campus, where Faulkner had been invited to speak and to meet with students. It was almost like an official state visit, with Henri Cartier-Bresson assigned to take the photographs. Although Faulkner had been offered a car, he preferred to walk along the banks of the Hudson River on the nearly mile-long ascension to Thayer Hall, where he met his host, Colonel Alspach, and drank coffee with members of the English department, telling them: “I make my coffee at home in an old lard bucket that I haven’t cleaned for twenty years. I put some coffee and water in, boil it for a while, and that’s coffee.” The Faulkners dined with West Point commandant William Westmoreland and his wife, and then Faulkner read from The Reivers to an audience of 1,400, including a thousand cadets.34

In the question-and-answer period, he addressed the familiar questions, occasionally adding variations. How had he succeeded in lifting man’s heart? “It’s possible that I haven’t,” Faulkner replied, although “that is the writer’s dedication.” He was asked about Ernest Hemingway’s suicide, which had occurred on July 2, 1961. In private, Faulkner had been quite critical. Even if Hemingway had been sick, he had done something unmanly. But in public, perhaps after reconsidering, Faulkner said: “I’m inclined to think that Ernest felt that at this time, this was the right thing, in grace and dignity, to do. I don’t agree with him. I think that no man can say until the end of his life whether he’s written out or not.” Faulkner seemed to have himself in mind. The two writers had never met, and yet Faulkner used Hemingway’s first name twice, the second time later in a classroom making it sound as if they had known one another: “The last time I saw him he was a sick man. But I prefer to believe that he had reached that point that the writer must reach—Shakespeare reached it in The Tempest—he said ‘I don’t know the answer either,’ and wrote The Tempest and broke the pencil. But he didn’t commit suicide. Hemingway broke the pencil and shot himself.”35

After bowing in his courtly manner to audience applause, Faulkner submitted to a press conference. Asked about his impressions of West Point cadets, he observed: “In Princeton and Virginia there is something a little sloppy which is not here.” Not a surprising comment from this erect, stately man, with his love of uniforms and even the discipline they commanded. He appeared to connect his own idea of the writer’s service and even subordination to literature to martial virtue. One journalist expressed his surprise at the cadet response to Faulkner’s declaration, “If a spirit of nationalism gets into literature, it stops being literature.” Certain “predecessors from this institution,” the questioner observed, “think nationalism is a great virtue.” Faulkner shot back: “Well, they didn’t believe nationalism was a great virtue while they were here. It’s only after they got out that they become Edwin Walkers—years after here.”36 President Kennedy had accepted General Walker’s resignation after he had persisted in right-wing politicking among the troops under his command. Lee Harvey Oswald would later shoot at and slightly wound Walker, an anti-Communist zealot and racist who would later become involved, after Faulkner’s death, in the 1962 Ole Miss riot over the admission of African American James Meredith.

The next day in an American literature class, the author of A Fable made himself felt: “War is a shabby, really impractical thing anyway, and it takes a genius to conduct it with any sort of economy and efficiency.” He was explaining the ending of “Turnabout,” when the dive-bombing pilot curses “all the higher echelons that got all of us into this to kill some of us.” But it was a dramatic moment in a story, not an “idea,” Faulkner emphasized: “That was something that at that moment he could feel, but it would not be a conviction of his that he would keep always—just at that moment.”37

Asked about student riots, Faulkner mused: “It could be a perfectly normal impulse to revolt,” although he thought it “a force of youth that is misdirected.” He did not want to condemn protest. “I am not sure it does any harm. But it’s a force that, if it could be directed into another channel, it could do something a little more—well, I don’t like the word productive either.” As always, he was open to change, whatever his regrets and criticisms, and responded sympathetically to a student questioner who asked if youth rebelled as a result of “not living what our hearts would have us live? In other words, the conformity of today? . . . Do you feel that the outbursts of youth are the result of this sort of constriction or restrictions?” Faulkner acknowledged such pressures and attributed them to an overpopulated world trying to order and regiment itself.38 It had all been different once upon a time, his public reading of The Reivers seemed to imply.

On race, Faulkner had not changed, still supposing “the Negro has got to be better than the white man” so that the latter would be compelled to say, “Please join us.” But he also blamed political leaders and wished they had been “trained for leadership coming up as a constant new crop of military officers coming up all the time; instead of using government as a refuge for your indigent kinfolks as we are prone to do in this country. A man can’t make a living any other way, we elect him to something.”39 Global Faulkner rejected the implication of a question that consigned democracy to western Europe and the Americas: “I would not like to believe that certain people are ethnologically incapable of democracy.” But democracy was a matter of education and leadership. “I don’t believe that we are any wiser or more sensible than Russians or Chinese.”40

Faulkner admitted that at West Point he had “expected a certain rigidity of—not thinking—but of the sort of questions I would get. And I was pleasantly astonished to find that the questions I got came from human beings, not from third class men or second class men or first class men” who had honored him with the idea that he might have some answers. Shortly afterward his comments on the old Colonel—that he was a “martinet”—raised again the responsibilities of leadership in a changing world that his own forebears had not adjusted to very well.41

Two days at West Point seemed enough. Major Fant, one of Faulkner’s hosts, asked him if “there was anything else he’d like to see.” Faulkner said: “No sir. I think I’ve seen enough. I’ll just let it gestate for a while.”42 Estelle had enjoyed the generals who squired her around. The trip had been fine but exhausting.43 Faulkner wrote to General Westmoreland expressing his “pleasure and pride” at seeing his name recorded in the Academy’s “handsome log book.” The honor was all the more memorable in the company of his wife, son, and daughter. “Our pleasure was of course a private one. That was watching our youngest daughter being fetched back to visit his alma mater by her husband (Paul Summers, class of ’51), not as a guest of the class of ’51 but among the very top brass hats themselves.”44

A New Home

At the end of June, Faulkner announced his desire to purchase a $200,000 property in Albemarle County. The Red Acres estate included a 250-acre farm not far from Farmington and the posh set, so different from the setup at Rowan Oak that Faulkner had worked so hard to hold on to. It would stretch his finances to acquire the property, but he counted on Random House and Linton Massey, whose Faulkner collection was now housed at the University of Virginia, to advance some of the funding, or at least guarantee it if necessary.45 The land alone, not to mention its various old buildings and pristine landscape, would become the citadel to which Joseph Blotner would later repair for his circumspect interviews with Estelle Faulkner.

On April 20, President Kennedy invited William Faulkner to the White House. Blotner laughed when he heard Faulkner say, “I’m too old at my age to travel that far to eat with strangers.” Those strangers were the fifty-one American Nobel laureates. The snub is puzzling. To be sure, Faulkner disliked such large social gatherings that put him on display with nothing to say. But he had never refused an American president—in this case a Democrat, the head of Faulkner’s party. He had voted for Stevenson in 1956. One biographer calls Faulkner’s response “sanctioned by that inner ethical gauge.”46 How was it unethical to accept such an honor from his president? Another supposes he no longer needed the recognition of the outside world.47 More likely is Fred Karl’s view that Faulkner felt used by a president who liked the “patina of culture.”48 Whatever the honor, Faulkner still believed the writer’s place in America was marginal. President Kennedy would get no help from William Faulkner, who had Lucius Priest sum up the political landscape: “a Republican is a man who made his money; a Liberal is a man who inherited his; a Democrat is a barefooted Liberal in a cross-country race; a Conservative is a Republican who has learned to read and write.”

On May 6, in his last recorded interview in Charlottesville, with a visiting Yugoslav academic, Faulkner recalled his youth and “restless life,” rushing “all over America and the world. I took an interest in everything. And now I prefer to be here.” His answers were curt and formulaic. He remained a believer in change, even if he preferred nature and no longer cared for “the hustle and bustle.” Toward the end he acknowledged his recalcitrance: “I don’t know whether you have got what you expected of this interview. I am sorry. I am not a conversationalist.”

On May 24, Faulkner reluctantly left home for New York to accept the Gold Medal for Fiction, presented to him by Eudora Welty, a fellow Mississippian and no stranger. He met, as well, old friends like Lillian Hellman and Conrad Aiken, reciting one of the poet’s poems. To Malcolm Cowley, Faulkner just wanted to talk about his grandsons and his desire for a granddaughter. He looked like a countryman, “his face bronzed under the white hair and apparently glowing with health.”49

This most marginal of writers, so often treated in reviews as a perversion of literature, had at last found a way to integrate himself into the mainstream—not by attending White House dinners but by associating himself with the “individuality of excellence,” as he put it in his acceptance speech, drafted by Joseph Blotner: “I think that those gold medals, royal and unique above the myriad spawn of their progeny which were the shining ribbons fluttering and flashing among the booths and stalls of forgotten county fairs in recognition and accolade of a piece of tatting or an apple pie, did much more than record a victory. They affirmed the premise that there are no degrees of best; that one man’s best is the equal of any other best, no matter how asunder in time or space or comparison, and should be honored as such.”50