As I have argued, WWI was a major event affecting an entire generation of modernist writers whose careers were launched or already flourishing in the 1920s. Like Faulkner, they refused to write according to familiar 19th-century conventions of plot and character development. Although he did not fight in it, the Great War would haunt Faulkner for decades.
But there was also another war that influenced Faulkner as much as WWI, albeit indirectly. The Civil War had ended 32 years before his birth, but his native South still suffered widespread devastation—physically, politically, and socially. Its values and aspirations had not survived the ravage and humiliation wrought by Ulysses S. Grant and William T. Sherman. Those values and aspirations did not simply disappear, however. Rather, they lingered as reminders of how things used to be—or better, how (decades later) it seemed that they used to be. Growing up in Oxford, MS, young Faulkner absorbed stories and myths about the fallen glory of the Confederacy and nostalgia for the Old South.
Even decades after the war ended and the New South emerged with its commitment to commerce and industry, profit and progress, his region remained awash in sentimental war narratives of the Lost Cause. Early on, Faulkner grasped the hollowness of these narratives, even as he found the New South vulgar and repellant. This conflicted situation left him stymied: a useless past saturated in nostalgic fictions and an equally useless future dedicated to soulless materialism. Although the young Faulkner was determined to become a writer, his birthplace bequeathed him less a coherent story to tell than a cluster of shard-like, contradictory realities. When he finally worked this out—after several false starts—the results were not simple.
What added to the complexity of the situation was that people, he realized, did not move through time at the same pace. They did not have the same memories and assumptions and were not headed toward the same goals. If you were a child in such a family, you were immersed in past histories whose repercussions you had no way of understanding. You did not even know about these concealed histories until later—too late to take them into account. And if you were a white child in the American South at the turn of the 20th century, you were (willy-nilly) part of a racial drama that shaped your identity before you ever thought about race. You would have “known” black people long before you encountered them. On this model, real life situations were like icebergs. Most of what actually mattered—what could wreck you if approached without sufficient care—was at first (and often for a long time) out of sight.
Social arrangements of this New South bristled with long-simmering hostilities. But your childhood innocence, however immersed in these arrangements, was incapable of taking their measure. Most starkly, you were born in the midst of interracial dramas that ranged from intimacy to murderous violence. Faulkner absorbed this unstable mix—he was an integral part of it, yet did not see himself as such. He belonged to a family whose ancestors had years earlier done memorable and vicious things. They unleashed a chain of events that spanned and impacted several generations: the grandfathers emotionally wounded their sons who, in turn, inflicted the same pain on their own sons. Young Faulkner, moreover, had been nurtured and embraced by a Negro substitute-mother, Mammy Callie Barr. His culture would teach him, relentlessly, to recognize her as black and different. Yet, he also knew (in body and mind) that she was warm and the same. The fabric of his daily life was soaked in the scandal of ancient wounds and abiding contradictions. It was filled with acknowledgments that enabled and with disownings that crippled. Above all, it was premised on racial convictions and practices that turned a people no different from him into a people utterly different from him.
Faulkner would reach his 30s and write his first two novels before he started to see this clearly—clearly enough to recognize that these social structures and arrangements provided usable material for his fiction.
He realized there was a cauldron of race and class tensions percolating beneath the surface of conventions meant to pacify them. Pushing further, approaching the iceberg of Southern realities more closely, he would discover even deeper fissures. His first masterpiece, The Sound and the Fury (1929), reveals the Southern family engaged in its own miniature version of Civil War. Although Faulkner began his career as a poet, with this novel he ceased to define himself as poet. He had found that the prose domain of normal life could give him all he would ever need. If penetrated deeply enough, it contained the lyricism, heartbreak, and scandal that he had earlier sought to express through poetry alone. This is how he would create his Yoknapatawpha County (his “little postage stamp of native soil,” as he would call it later in The Paris Review). There, he would find that the actual and the apocryphal—the prosaic/normal and the poetic/extraordinary—were one and the same.
The tick-tock of clock-time is progressive and ongoing, but if you look harder, you come to a more disturbing model of temporality. Faulkner saw that lives, which were apparently moving forward, might be invisibly arrested or deformed by events from the past because Southerners remained passionately attached to values that had ceased to be viable since 1865—when the South lost the Civil War. All around, a racial divide was hysterically insisted upon yet physiologically groundless. The two races scandalously shared each other’s blood. Yet, one had gone to war—and would continue to erupt into violence—in order to keep the other subordinate and its bloodline separate. Shock—what Faulkner calls “outrage”—would become the bass note of his novelistic canvas. The Sound and the Fury (like his subsequent masterworks) would center on shock. But this shock had little to do with the trenches or the bombs of World War I. Such war wounds—the central premise of his first novel, Soldiers’ Pay (1926)—had all along been an exotic alibi. The real shock, the one that tore his protagonists apart, was home-grown. And there was simply no simple way to say that.
It is time now to open up the history of that “little postage stamp of native soil” that Faulkner would recreate as Yoknapatawpha County. In Absalom, Absalom! (1936), Faulkner’s Southern protagonist, Quentin Compson, tries hard to explain the South to his incredulous Canadian roommate at Harvard. Frustrated, he says: “You can’t understand it. You would have to be born there.” The South Faulkner was born into struck Quentin—as it struck his author—as both all-explaining and inexplicable to others. The history of actual Oxford and Lafayette County undergirds the doings in his fictional Jefferson and Yoknapatawpha County. Take away the former, and the latter lose their ground and resonance. The place precedes the writer, spurring him—often by its very recalcitrance—to his most remarkable fictional moves.
Lafayette County, in North Central Mississippi, was founded by repeated acts of violence. In taking over this territory in the early 19th century, white settlers had to dislodge the native Chickasaw Indians who had long been living there. (They were forcibly expelled to the “Indian Territory,” which later became Oklahoma.) The US government acknowledged Lafayette County’s legal status in 1836. Soon enough, in order to produce its major crop, cotton, the region required a cheap and exploitable workforce. That is why it began to import slaves—to labor in the cotton fields. Cotton brought wealth to its planters, the state prospered, and in 1848 Mississippi founded its University in Oxford. The racial politics of town and county were the same. The planters treated those requisite black slaves less as kindred human beings than as animals requiring white surveillance and care. Mississippi hewed tightly to this racial stance—both economically and ideologically. When the Civil War broke out in 1861, the state took only a few weeks longer than South Carolina to determine, defiantly, that it too would secede.
A war, at first distant, soon came home. Grant and Sherman were bent on capturing a Confederate river fortress in Vicksburg and, as they advanced, they laid waste. An earlier strategy of persuasion and reconciliation had hardened into one of punishment: these Southerners had to be brought to heel. Grant took Oxford in December of 1862, and 20 months later the city was burned down. In the aftermath, an imperishable narrative of Yankee wrongdoing was launched, one which young Faulkner grew up with some 40 years later. Although the North won the War in 1865, the South insidiously won it back during the 1870s. It turned out that the promise of Reconstruction—the project of giving former slaves a full American citizenship—was beyond fulfilling. It required more courage, funding, and protection than any post-1865 federal government was willing to provide. By 1875, noting with horror his state’s successful denial of civil rights to its black population, Mississippi’s Republican Governor Adelbert Ames recognized the heartbreaking irony (as cited by Eric Foner in Reconstruction): “A revolution has taken place—by force of arms—and a race are disenfranchised—they are to be returned to a condition of serfdom—an era of second slavery.”
Throughout the first half of the 20th century, Mississippi’s racial politics strenuously enforced its abusive treatment of blacks. Redneck politicians like Theodore Bilbo and James Vardaman worked to keep it that way. “Six thousand years ago,” Vardaman declared in 1903, “the Negro was the same in his native jungle as he is today.” A year later, Vardaman, now the Governor, warmed to his topic: “You can scarcely pick up a newspaper whose pages are not blackened with the account of an unmentionable crime committed by a negro brute, and this crime . . . is but the manifestation of the negro’s aspiration for social equality.” Such was the closed and discriminatory society of the South, with its white and black spaces militantly separated. In 1962, a reluctant President John F. Kennedy would need the National Guard to force segregationist Governor Ross Barnett to allow black military veteran James Meredith to enter the University of Mississippi Law School.
This was the world that young William Faulkner grew up in. How did it affect him? Like all children, he listened to his elders’ nostalgic narratives. Indeed, the Civil War was presented to him in sugar-coated terms as the Lost Cause—the New South’s conviction that the Old South had been noble and heroic. Over time, he might have sorted out a deeper picture of his region and his family’s past. He would probably have noted, early on, his father’s surly unease around his own more colorful father. But when would he have begun to recognize a pattern repeating his grandfather’s relationship with his own father, the flamboyant Colonel W. C. (William Clark) Falkner? An orphan making his way in 1839 to Pontotoc, MS, the young Falkner had at first been accepted by his maternal aunt and her husband, John Wesley Thompson. But later—and inexplicably—Thompson rejected young Falkner from his burgeoning law practice. Years later, this same Falkner married, fathered a child, and lost his wife. He gave up his baby to the Thompsons, agreeing never to get the boy back. Instead, he remarried and began a second family. The child—J. W. T. (John Wesley Thompson) Falkner—grew up in his adoptive family, becoming in time a successful banker and railway tycoon. But J. W. T. (aka “the Young Colonel”) never matched the larger-than-life figure of his biological father, the Old Colonel. He almost certainly knew that he did not. Many years later, at the turn of the 20th century, J. W. T. chose to sell (at a loss) his profitable railroad. He did this at precisely the moment when his eldest son Murry was running it efficiently. Subsequently, at the sound of a train whistle, Murry—William’s surly father—stopped whatever he was doing and just stared vacantly into space. When would William have decoded his father’s wistful stare? When did he grasp something that his great fiction rarely forgets: that wounded fathers find intricate ways to destroy their own sons?
There was perhaps even more to discover in the life story of the fabled Old Colonel. It is possible (according to historian Joel Williamson’s painstaking research) that the Old Colonel may have fathered a child with a mulatto slave named Emeline, who lived in his yard in the 1860s. Two decades later, the elderly Old Colonel might have had sexual relations with a much younger mulatto woman named Lena. This Lena might well have been Emeline’s daughter. No one doubts that in 1889 the Old Colonel met his end, shot by his enraged business partner, Richard Thurmond. That murder clearly arose out of political competition and humiliation. (The Old Colonel had just defeated Thurmond in a local election and apparently had gone to his house to taunt him.) Was the murder also charged with racial and sexual tensions? After all, Emeline and another of her daughters were mulatto members of Thurmond’s family in the 1880s. The Old Colonel’s abuse of Lena—if abuse there was—might have rankled Thurmond no less than the political motives undoubtedly at play. All of this is inevitably speculative. Yet, in 1942, Faulkner wrote Go Down, Moses, perhaps his most powerful narrative of paternal abuse. Circuitously, by way of a grandson’s later recognitions, it told the story of a white master impregnating his own black slave. Twenty-five years later, that same master, widowed and old, would impregnate that slave’s (and his own) daughter. Faulkner was surely seeking to articulate the scandalous substructure of miscegenation that haunted Southern culture. Was he at the same time airing his own family’s dirty laundry?
Finally, the Old Colonel takes us, indirectly, to the “u” in Faulkner’s name. William’s spelling of the name as Faulkner—rather than his family’s traditional spelling of Falkner—conveys his bid for fame. He first signed himself as “Faulkner” in 1918, when seeking to get accepted into the Royal Air Force in Toronto. He would later use that spelling, more pointedly, when signing his volume of poems, The Marble Faun. There, he identified himself as the “great-grandson of Col. W. C. Faulkner, C.S.A.” When asked about the “u” in the Colonel’s name, he liked to claim that his ancestor had originally spelled his name with a “u,” but he had changed it to Falkner after discovering some “no-good” folks living nearby named Faulkner. With this account, the great-grandson was merely restoring an earlier reality. However, there was more at stake—a child’s bid for independence and his own identity. He was, as William Faulkner, erasing two generations of Falkners who stood between him and his famous ancestor. We will never know the precise motive, but my use of both “Faulkner” and “Falkner” in this book refers to an intricate family history. It does not indicate a lazy job of proofreading.
At the beginning of his life, William Faulkner, the future novelist, was known as Billy Falkner. He never wrote directly about his early years, and he abhorred confession of every sort. Given the dearth of information, we can only speculate about the inner dimensions of his childhood. The first of four sons (born in New Albany, MS on July 5, 1897), he was a querulous, colicky infant. His mother Maud had to rock him for hours each night in order to soothe him into sleep; coincidentally or not, he would be a light, easily troubled sleeper his whole life. Family moves (to Ripley in 1898 and then to Oxford in 1902) forced young Billy to reconfigure his sense of his surroundings. And his privileged status as an only child was soon shattered by the births of his three brothers. The last one, Dean, came into the world in 1907 and required sustained attention from Maud. She had just lost her own mother; between her grief over that loss and Dean’s infantile needs, not much of her heart may have been left over for 10-year-old Billy.
Maud Butler Falkner’s impress on her son is difficult to summarize. We know that, throughout his life, he composed his fiction on a spindle-legged desk she had given him, while seated in a tall-backed chair that was also a gift from his mother. These facts speak powerfully to her hold on Faulkner’s imagination. Unlike her outdoorsy, unlettered husband, Murry, Maud was also a practitioner of the arts. She painted during much of her life, and she was an avid proponent of literature. She introduced her oldest son to the Bible, as well as to the writings of William Shakespeare, Miguel de Cervantes, and the 19th-century novelists. Later on, she defended his fiction, however iconoclastic. Murry—who seems never to have read any novel his son wrote—once complained to his wife about the scandal that Sanctuary, the 1931 novel about the rape of a young co-ed, provoked in Oxford. Maud replied, “Let him alone, Buddy, he writes what he has to.” Maud mattered immeasurably to William, yet we find few positive portraits of her in his fiction. His first masterpiece, The Sound and the Fury, goes alarmingly the other way: the character of Mrs. Compson reveals a mother who is uniquely damaging to her offspring. When William was a child and Maud determined that his posture was sloppy, she made him wear an uncomfortable back brace for two years. Can it be accidental that the odious Mrs. Compson forced her daughter Caddy to wear one too?
Father figures fare better in Faulkner’s novels, but only slightly. Murry was in fundamental ways his oldest son’s opposite: he was tall (like his own father and grandfather) while William was short; he was blunt-featured while William had his mother’s finely chiseled brows and lips; and he was unlettered while William was precociously literary. Perhaps most of all, he seems to have been uninterested in the intricacies of the inner life. (His favorite reading was the Sunday comic strips in the newspapers.) Murry’s relations with his eldest son were strained and uncomprehending. When he tried once to improve their relationship, matters only got worse. Faulkner loved to repeat the anecdote about his father finding out that William had taken up smoking. To Murry, this discovery provided an opportunity to bond with his oldest child. One night, he took out a cigar and offered his son a “good smoke.” William accepted and reached into his pocket for his pipe. He then broke the cigar in half, stuffed one-half into his pipe, and lit it. Watching this, Murry said nothing, then left the room. “He never gave me another cigar,” Faulkner gleefully recalled.
Faulkner would undoubtedly learn most about bad marriages from his own troubled union with Estelle Oldham, but that of his parents gave him some early glimpses into incompatibility between spouses. Maud apparently sought from Murry a culture-enriched responsiveness that he could not provide. He, on the other hand, needed a bodily tenderness toward his shortcomings that she could not proffer. Unfocused after his father sold the railroad, Murry found a self-destructive way to take his revenge. He gave up on his career and began to drink with greater abandon, following an old Falkner “tradition”—traceable back to the Old Colonel and operative in each generation of males thereafter—of excessive drinking. Maud sought to turn Murry’s periodic “drying out” cures into a pedagogic demonstration. She insisted that her sons join them on the ritual trek to Keeley’s Institute, 15 miles from Memphis, to witness their father’s ongoing humiliation.
Although Murry would become Business Manager of the University of Mississippi in his later years, the job required little labor. What labor it did require involved a kind of work he did not enjoy. A taciturn outdoorsman, he loved stables, carriages, and horses far more than doing bookkeeping for a university. Probably, even more, he loved trains—until his father sold his railroad out from under him. Murry’s drinking eventually led to health problems, including a heart condition, and he died of a heart attack in 1932—almost exactly 30 years before William too succumbed to the same condition. Working in Hollywood at the time of Murry’s death, William did not find it necessary to attend the funeral. In retrospect, we can see that Murry had been overmastered by a stronger-willed spouse. He had also been eclipsed by a famous son who ignored him. As though to erase his identity even further, the local obituary spelled his name as “Faulkner.” Years later, as Maud was nearing her own death, she asked William about the afterlife. “Will I have to see your father there?” she wondered. “No,” Faulkner answered, “not if you don’t want to.” “That’s good,” she said, “I never did like him.” That Faulkner enjoyed this vignette as much as the cigar one gives us the mean-spirited measure of his relations with his father.
What might it have been like for a sensitive oldest son to grow up in this household? Again, we can only speculate since Faulkner himself never talked about such matters. Some insight, however, can be gleaned from his brothers, who write in their later memoirs of a happy childhood full of shared, Twain-like misadventures. But what emerges with equal force from their accounts is William’s unapproachability. He grew up in their midst, remained loyal and supportive, and impressed them indelibly. Yet, they did not know him well. For him, childhood may not have been Twain-like at all. He had once written his great aunt that her niece, the “quick and dark” Natalie, “must have carried me.” In the same letter, he spoke of her as “touching me” during “one of those spells of loneliness and nameless sorrow that children suffer.” He was perhaps sensitized to touch as only a child who has not been touched enough may be. His own mother was obviously there for him throughout his life—a model of rectitude and fidelity that he always honored. Yet, at a deeper bodily level, she may not have been there at all. It was probably Mammy Callie, not Maud Falkner, who attended most intimately to Billy’s childrearing. They all lived in the same house, but each in his or her own way—spatially together, yet speechlessly apart.
We may speculate that childhood wrought upon William the experience of being little among others who were big. No less, it might have given him something his own fiction renders unforgettably: the experience of not knowing, of coming to the family history not at its beginning but in the middle. He was discovering that others acted out of motives he would come to recognize only later—or not at all. Their impact on him was nonetheless unavoidable; in fact, he might have grasped, childhood was about unavoidability. It was about being in a body not yet able to avoid encounters it had not chosen to have. Some of childhood’s sorrows—as he had mentioned to his great-aunt—would remain forever inexplicable. But other sorrows might open up to understanding—later—when things did open up. And he perhaps recognized that, without having chosen it, his own childhood had launched him toward a personal silence, an inwardness beyond relinquishing. Strangest of all, this took place in the presence of others sharing his household space.
To tell this in its intricacy would require something more than Mark Twain’s narrative resources. He would need to show how what is shared is doubled by what is unsharable. No less, he would need to show how what namelessly assaults the child now had namable roots in what had happened before he was born but could be discovered—if at all—only later. Childhood, he seemed to grasp, was about double exposure: the sudden violence of is, juxtaposed against the clarifying context of was. In 1957, he would tell this to a class of students at the University of Virginia: “Maybe peace is only a condition in retrospect, when the subconscious has got rid of the gnats and the tacks and the broken glass in experience and has left only the peaceful pleasant things—that was peace. Maybe peace is not is, but was.” The later retrospect of was looks back, frames, and clarifies the immediacy of is. Childhood’s significance opens up later, even as it is actually lived in the present. Could he ever get words to say that?
There was, at least, one person in Oxford who might have thought he could. Phil Stone was a Yale graduate, a University of Oxford alumnus, and the intellectual scion of a local aristocratic planter family. Several years older than Faulkner, he was on the lookout for promising young Mississippians. Was Stone seeking to escape his own loneliness by sharing his gifted sensibility with that of another Southerner? Was he looking for a mirror in which he might recognize his own unexpressed possibilities? Whatever his motives, he took young Faulkner under his wing. He gave him poetry and fiction to read, and he appointed himself (unasked) as the young man’s mentor. For the decade between 1915 and 1925 Stone would serve as Faulkner’s stimulus, critic, friend, book-lender, and would-be war comrade. He would also serve as the patron who funded (in 1924) the publication of Faulkner’s first book of poems, The Marble Faun.
Unquestionably, the young Faulkner imagined his future as that of a poet. He not only wrote verse from his teens forward, but that verse aggressively called attention to its identity as verse: by jettisoning all (local) prosaic surroundings. It teemed with fauns and satyrs, battened on classical narratives, was intent on fashioning a world elsewhere. The late 19th-century British poet, Algernon Charles Swinburne, appealed precisely to Faulkner’s longings for escape: “At the age of sixteen, I discovered Swinburne,” Faulkner wrote in 1924. “Or rather Swinburne discovered me, springing from some tortured undergrowth of my adolescence, like a highwayman, making me his slave.” On at least two fronts Swinburne would have been hard to resist. His verse, heavily rhymed and rhythmical, labored to transport its reader to exotic settings—to not-Mississippi. Swinburne’s settings were drenched in pagan references; they were defiantly anti-Christian. As he wrote in his Hymn to Proserpina, “Thou hast conquered, O pale Galilean, the world has grown gray from thy breath.” Swinburne rejected the deathliness of the dispensation that Christ (the “pale Galilean”) brought into the world. His poetry signaled a passionate bid for bodily liberation from Christian prohibitions—the liberation that was strictly forbidden by the Presbyterian norms blanketing the Oxford Faulkner grew up in.
This liberal orientation toward the body would remain in Faulkner’s life and work. In Light in August, nine years later, a central female character named Lena will embody something of Swinburne’s appeal. Impregnated by one man, Lena chooses to make her way unhurriedly through the countryside, walking on foot from Alabama to Mississippi. She remains casually receptive to the prospect of finding in her travels a better man than the one who got her pregnant and then ditched her. She is not bothered by the issue of legitimacy. Lena—her name alluding (Faulkner later acknowledged) to the Greek Helen of Troy—stands out luminously in Light in August. Faulkner powerfully juxtaposes her bodily plenitude against the (male) crucifixions and self-crucifixions erupting all around her. But this was to come later. Reading Faulkner’s poetry in 1915 or 1916, Phil Stone was sufficiently moved by their passion to underwrite their publication. More, he would continue to claim—long past the time when the claim made sense—that Faulkner missed his true vocation when he became a novelist. The Marble Faun, for its part, would enter the literary world without making the slightest splash.
Stone plays a significant role in Faulkner’s career. But the central figure in his emotional development was a lively young woman about his age, Estelle Oldham. She was the daughter of a prominent Oxford family that lived not far from the Falkners. The two were mere teenagers when they first met. Over time, they began to see each other with increasing frequency. Voluble and charming (as he would never be), Estelle sustained an intricate inner life as well. She loved to read—enough to be delighted with this silent boy already carrying inside himself a teeming world of thoughts and feelings. Estelle captivated most of the young men in Oxford and was the most popular figure at the dances. Yet, she set her sights on Faulkner, eventually getting him to share more and more of his poetry and aspirations. By the time they were nearing 20, they were deeply (but unofficially) bound to each other. They knew they would marry—when the right moment came.
That moment did not come. In its place came a bid for Estelle’s hand from one Cornell Franklin. He was the handsome son of an eminent Mississippi family, who graduated from the University of Mississippi with all the honors it could bestow. Clearly destined for a successful legal career, he was hard to turn down. Nor did Estelle—quite—turn him down. Franklin may not even have known about his rival, Faulkner, who in 1918—the critical year in their relationship—hardly looked like a good bet. Known already for immoderate drinking, recognized as maybe talented but certainly moody and difficult, he seemed no match for Franklin. Sure of his acceptance, Franklin sent Estelle an expensive engagement ring from Honolulu (where he held a prestigious job at the port). The two families began to elaborate plans for a big April wedding. As though paralyzed by the force of this new development (a consequence of her belle-of-the-ball charm), Estelle became desperate. She pressed Faulkner for a last-minute elopement; she would flee if he would. There was still time. For reasons we will never know but which must have caused him anguish for years to come, he refused to elope, insisting that they get their parents’ consent. He must have realized that this would fail; both sets of parents immediately opposed their union. So Estelle married Cornell Franklin in April 1918, and Faulkner fled with Phil Stone to New Haven, CT. Ostensibly he wanted to fight in the Great War. More urgently, he had to escape from unbearable emotional distress.
Here the scene changes from tragic to comic. In New Haven, Stone and Faulkner set about inventing zany ways of getting into a war that was nearing its end. Faulkner had earlier been turned down from the air division of the US Army because he was too short, by half an inch, and too light, by a few pounds. But the British Royal Air Force, operating out of Toronto, did not follow these protocols. So, pretending to be British (not the first and not the last of Faulkner’s masquerades), they managed to get into a Royal Air Force training program. Stone soon dropped out, but not Faulkner. For months he trained in Toronto, writing his parents about his fascination with the military and the innards of airplanes. (His pencil drawings of the planes, accompanying some of the letters, are exquisitely detailed.) The War ended in November of 1918, and a month later Faulkner returned home to Oxford. He arrived at the train station regally decked out in an officer’s uniform he had bought from a veteran but was not entitled to wear. He was also carrying a cane to help him cope with a war-wound in the knee—supposedly incurred while flying over France in the last dark days of the war. This wound was invented out of whole cloth. It serves as a metaphor for Faulkner’s larger narrative of a turbulent war experience for which no evidence exists. He got his wings only in late December, over a month after Armistice. The self-proclaimed aviator who had been shot down over France hardly knew how to fly a plane.
The comedy of masquerades continued. Pretending to be a wounded veteran, Faulkner was admitted as a special student at the University of Mississippi. (He would have needed this veteran-status. Having deliberately refused to go past the 11th grade, he was not otherwise a candidate for college). His university classmates were not slow in noting and mocking his airs. “Count No-Count,” they called this attitudinizing figure who postured as a war-wounded veteran familiar with the latest French poetry. After a year or so, this pretense of jaded sophistication was wearing thin, and Faulkner was becoming increasingly restless. He left the university and returned to the Northeast, where he worked for Lord and Taylor’s in New York for the better part of a year. Bored with that job and uncertain what to do next, he then embarked on probably the most preposterous masquerade of his life: he accepted, not without misgivings, the position of Postmaster of the University of Mississippi. The ever-enterprising Phil Stone had pulled political strings to get the position offered to Faulkner. Although it was virtually a sinecure—the postal area he oversaw was tiny—Faulkner royally mishandled it. He just could not get himself to take other people’s mail seriously. (He was, however, not above rifling through their magazines and “borrowing” the ones he found interesting.) After three years of such cavalier behavior and the complaints that steadily accrued, the Post Office fired him. Walking away from the job, he got off a final riposte: “I reckon I’ll be at the beck and call of folks with money all my life, but thank God I won’t ever again have to be at the beck and call of every son of a bitch who’s got two cents to buy a stamp.”
Soon he was on to the next masquerade: several months spent in New Orleans, in early 1925. Thanks to the Lord and Taylor job, he had met Elizabeth Prall in New York. Subsequently, she had married the novelist Sherwood Anderson. They were living a bohemian life in New Orleans, and she invited Faulkner to visit them. In an atypical move, he accepted her offer. His visit was to be but a stopgap; the real voyage he had in mind (in this, echoing Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot before him) was to Europe. En route, he traveled to New Orleans, where he met the group of avant-garde writers gathered around Anderson. Thanks to the tremendous success of Winesburg, Ohio (1919), Anderson had become famous. Making the most of his celebrity, he had attracted a virtual colony of practicing and would-be writers and artists. From all reports, they were having one hell of a good time. The siren call of New Orleans would have been hard for this Northern Mississippian to resist. He had spent years persevering in heavy drinking despite the local strictures against it. His iconoclastic bent had more than once got him into trouble in hide-bound Oxford. In New Orleans, however, he found—and would celebrate for decades—a welcome emancipation from the Presbyterian pieties he had long chafed under. Indeed, New Orleans seemed to serve as a setting for a perpetual holiday. The Anderson gang caroused all day and drank all night—all the while talking, talking, talking… Faulkner had come to New Orleans for a few weeks, but he stayed for a few months.
Finally, though, the unsentimental critic lodged deep inside Faulkner’s imagination had had enough. It was time to quit the talk-engorged antics of the Anderson Circle and book his passage for Europe. Before his disenchantment set in, however, a foundational change of vocation had occurred. Anderson and his coterie had persuaded the restless young Faulkner—less on purpose than gradually and by multiple examples—to change his calling. He would no longer be a poet, but instead, become a novelist. He would go to Paris later that fall where—refocused and energized—he would complete his first novel begun in New Orleans, Soldiers’ Pay.