The 1930s are widely recognized as Faulkner’s most creative decade. The Sound and the Fury (1929) opened the floodgates, permitting his subsequent novels, As I Lay Dying (1930), Sanctuary (1931), and Light in August (1932) to emerge in flawless lockstep. A brief hiatus occurred in the early 1930s: his “biggest” masterpiece, Absalom, Absalom! required more brooding and revising than he anticipated. But once it was released in 1936, The Unvanquished (1938), and The Hamlet (1940) followed swiftly, rounding out a peerless decade of productivity. Throughout this decade, Faulkner was the “hottest” novelist in America.
Looking back, we can see that crises he encountered during the five preceding years made that later flowering possible. These were the years in which, stumbling, he came into his own. He also seemed to recognize that stumbling was his most powerful subject. Whether he called it “outrage” or “assault,” the core insight was the same: when life “abrupts” (his verb from Absalom, Absalom!) upon us, we stumble and are out of control. By 1930, after the publication of The Sound and the Fury and As I Lay Dying, he had made this insight his own, becoming the genius we know as Faulkner. What disorienting experiences during those five years “prepared” him for such a bout of productivity?
In 1925, he was still in the mode of what I referred to in the previous chapter as “masquerade”—pretending to be someone he was not. He traveled to Europe, likely envisaging that these four months abroad would follow the scenario made famous by the careers of Pound and Eliot: of Europe being the “mother culture.” On this model, Europe (including England) supplied culturally enriched experiences and inspiration to budding American writers. In those days, London and Paris were “sacred” destinations for expatriate artists. Such pilgrimages saw their heyday during the flowering of modernist art occurring in Paris before and after the Great War.
Yet France (a country Faulkner adored, and one that adored him back) would never offer him fertile territory. His most ambitiously troubled novel, A Fable (1954), takes place on its shores during WWI. Despite endless revising, A Fable never takes off into the air—probably because it never roots itself deeply enough into its foreign soil. In 1925, when Faulkner set for Europe, he did not know that, like the Greek god Antaeus, he was powerful only when on native soil. Even though Sherwood Anderson had given him an introduction to James Joyce, then living in Paris, Faulkner was too shy to approach the celebrated author of Ulysses. He may have dreamed of a “European career,” but he never pursued that dream aggressively. Indeed, his shyness towards Joyce foreshadowed a lifelong withdrawal from the ceremonial trappings of literary fame. He would later turn down the overtures of younger writers seeking him out just as, in 1925, he was unwilling to make such overtures toward Joyce. Perhaps because of this innate reticence, he described himself in the late 1930s, at the end of his most prolific decade, as a farmer, not a writer.
Another reason that Faulkner did not adapt well to European surroundings was that his New Orleans experience with Anderson and his crew had fostered in him a new sense of vocation. Pound and Eliot were broadly Western poets, but he came away from New Orleans determined to become a specifically American novelist. He had written, while there, several prose pieces for a local newspaper. More tellingly, he was finishing a novel centered on American materials.
In Soldiers’ Pay, however, another kind of masquerade holds sway. That novel centers on the betrayals befalling a wounded soldier of the Great War. As such, it cannot but further the masquerade of Faulkner’s own war experience. Indeed, it functions as a bid to get that masquerade accepted as truth. (Others did accept it as true. Not until a decade after Faulkner’s death in 1962 did it become widely known that he had not seen action in 1918.) By contrast, Dos Passos, E.E. Cummings, and Hemingway had actually been there. All three had suffered in the war; Hemingway had been grievously wounded. Their books, Three Soldiers, The Enormous Room, and A Farewell to Arms respectively, draw on their authors’ personal experiences. We might ask: how can Soldiers’ Pay compel its reader, even though the war experience it seems founded on was never Faulkner’s own?
One of Faulkner’s best commentators, André Bleikasten, urged readers to think of the writer’s prevarications as something more than lies—as “corrective” fictions, attempts to make reality align with his subjective sense of what was supposed to have happened—but didn’t. From this perspective, Soldiers’ Pay becomes luminous. The fatal wound it testifies to on every page is imaginatively real. No reader of that novel has trouble believing that the protagonist, Donald Mahan, is dying—and that he is being betrayed, post-war, by many people he had earlier trusted. If it fails to be one of Faulkner’s greater novels, it is because he was just learning the craft of fiction. The novel is full of vivid shards—memorable scenes of deracinated veterans now stranded at home; it shows as well an incipient grasp of what may be seen as musical structure. Contrapuntally, the novel shifts from setting to setting, character to character, vignette to vignette. But the settings, characters, and vignettes tend to remain confined to their local space. What is missing is the glue—the narrative necessity that would solder these parts indissolubly, forging a design to which each part indirectly contributes. This structural problem—what we might consider as a whole that is less than the sum of its parts—will beset Faulkner’s second novel (Mosquitoes, 1927) as well. He will overcome it in Flags in the Dust (his third novel), and he will transcend it in the fourth one, The Sound and the Fury (1929).
Before 1929, however, Faulkner did not seem to recognize his major challenges as a writer. He needed to learn not just how to get the pieces of his novels to relate more compellingly to each other but, even more crucially, he had to learn how to suppress his delegated narrator and get him out of the fictional performance. The narrative voice that tells the first three novels makes them possible, but it also makes them second-rate: that “smart” Southern voice keeps drawing attention to itself. Once Faulkner managed to make it disappear, his materials suddenly came alive, speaking hypnotically for themselves and enacting their different ways of stumbling. With these changes, his work began to jell. Indeed, these novels’ separate materials became so intensely bonded as to release an incandescent force-field of thought and feeling. A reader of his fiction written between 1929 and 1931—The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying, and Sanctuary—comes away wondering how work of such conceptual intricacy can also hit home emotionally, like a sledge-hammer.
All this would begin to occur by 1929, but we cannot leave Faulkner’s European adventure of late 1925 without elaborating further on the stakes of his decision to return home when he did. The trip served as Faulkner’s single temptation to follow a Pound/Eliot model of Euro-creativity, which aspired toward forms of alienation and citation-insistent worldliness not available on American shores. One thinks of Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922) and its incessant parade of snippets from earlier cultures, each of them signaling the writer’s ultra-sophisticated world-weariness. For well over a decade, this poem bestrode the Anglo-American cultural scene as the text to emulate. Though Faulkner would draw on Eliot’s poem, he would (more resonantly) resist its siren-like appeal. No reader of his great fiction has the sense of entering the high-art sanctuary of Eliot’s celebrated poem. Somehow Faulkner grasped that European cultural materials—the allure of an older world of finer values—were for him less a beacon than a dead end. After four months abroad he had to go home—and not just because he was out of money. Home was that “little postage stamp of native soil” that was waiting for him on the other side of the Atlantic.
I mentioned some of the defects of Soldiers’ Pay. Faulkner’s next novel, Mosquitoes (1927), also suffered from several shortcomings. It too could be considered a masquerade, in the sense that its narrator engages its materials with implicit mockery and unremitting detachment. Mosquitoes focuses on New Orleans antics Faulkner had witnessed and participated in. Seen later from an estranging distance, such foolish behavior tends to reduce to the juvenile silliness of adults who have not grown up. The narration of their doings exposes each of them with unforgiving precision. No reader is likely to relate to this cast of characters—thinly disguised versions of the New Orleans gang Faulkner had known in 1925. This is because Faulkner’s narrator doesn’t care for them either. More damagingly, the narrator attempts a sophisticated, Aldous Huxley-type of knowing humor. This is a tone Faulkner cannot make attractive. (Faulkner’s humor when it works, is savage and disturbing. But he needs a Jason Compson from The Sound and the Fury or a Joe Brown from Light in August to make it work.) Despite such flaws, Mosquitoes got a green light from Horace Liveright—New York’s premier publisher of American modernist literature. Liveright had been captivated, the year before, by Soldiers’ Pay’s musical rhythms and its elegant despair. He brought that novel out in 1926 and signed on to publish Mosquitoes in 1927. He was determined not to lose this young genius.
Within a year, however, Liveright had had enough of Faulkner. Faced with the manuscript of his third novel, Flags in the Dust, Liveright’s judgment was unconditional: he flatly turned the book down, imploring Faulkner not to show it to any other publisher. He doubtless meant well, but his words stung Faulkner to the core: “Soldiers’ Pay was a very fine book and should have done better. . . Mosquitoes wasn’t quite so good . . . Now comes Flags in the Dust and we’re frankly very much disappointed.” Faulkner read Liveright’s assessment as a pitiless summary of his career to date. Thirty years old, he was the author of a volume of poetry no one wanted to buy and of two novels few readers paid much attention to. Now he saw himself rejected by one of the most powerful publishers in America. Desperately, he tried to salvage Flags, eventually leaving the revisions to his friend Ben Wasson. It was too depressing for him to continue on his own.
Flags was not the worst of his troubles in 1928. Estelle Oldham Franklin—whom he had failed to elope with, whom he was unable to forget—had come back into his life. Divorced from her husband after several years of a marriage gone irreparably sour, and now a mother of two small children, she returned to Oxford in the mid-1920s. She turned toward Faulkner as a lifeline. Their courtship resumed, as passionate as before but more troubled than ever. At 20, he had been a markedly taciturn young man, given to excessive drinking. Now, a decade later, Faulkner had become more aggressively anti-social. Further, with three published books under his belt, he had solidified his mantle of a Bohemian Writer. Estelle must have recognized that it would be hard, maybe impossible, to change him, but her life was a mess, and she needed a husband urgently enough to accept these challenges. He, however, was not so sure he needed a wife. He had been uncertain in 1918 and now, a decade later, whatever had separated them before had grown in density and recalcitrance.
Though pressed by Estelle, he kept putting off a date for the marriage. Soon Estelle’s sister, Dot, was working on him to step up to his responsibilities. Finally, he set the date. Then—frantic over what he was about to sign on to—he wrote his friend and publisher, Hal Smith, the following:
I am going to be married. Both want to and have to. THIS PART IS CONFIDENTIAL, UTTERLY. For my honor and the sanity—I believe life—of a woman. This is not bunk; nor am I being sucked in. We grew up together and I don’t think she could fool me in this way; that is, make me believe that her mental condition, her nerves are this far gone. . . . It’s a situation which I engendered and permitted to ripen which has become unbearable, and I am tired of running from the devilment I bring about.
At the time, Faulkner was completing his bleakest novel, Sanctuary. It cannot be accidental that he set June 20 as the date on which its protagonist, Temple Drake, enters a courthouse and perjures herself. That was the very day he set for contracting a marriage that must have seemed to him as a sort of perjury as well. Temple, in time, would find it impossible to get beyond her all-damaging mistakes. The same may be true for her creator.
Flags in the Dust, which Faulkner completed in 1927, cannot keep the company of the four masterpieces that followed it in the next five years. Yet, Faulkner was not mistaken when he told Liveright (on submitting the manuscript): “At last and certainly, I have written THE book, of which those other things were but foals. I believe it is the damdest best book you’ll look at this year, and any other publisher.” In hindsight, we can perhaps see better why Liveright was blind to the book’s merits. He was a New York publisher intent on upsetting parochial sensibilities—on honoring Pound’s modernist dictum, “Make it new.” He would have had little trouble recognizing Soldiers’ Pay’s appeal because it belonged to a burgeoning American genre—the “lost generation” novel—and held its own in that company. In Mosquitoes, Liveright would have appreciated Faulkner’s superior stance toward a colony of would-be artists and writers. These were sophisticated figures being mocked by an even more knowing narrator, providing grist for Liveright’s “smart” New York mill. With Flags, however, the discernable genre and the sophisticated tone were absent.
He couldn’t see that in Flags Faulkner began to make that “postage stamp of native soil” his own, recognizing that his region’s history—as broad as Southern heartbreak, as narrow as family legend—was inexhaustibly writable. It would take two more novels before Faulkner gave his county its fictional name, Yoknapatawpha (in As I Lay Dying). But the county, though unnamed, was born in Flags. The book draws centrally on once-aristocratic families, the Sartorises, and the Benbows. It draws as well on a roster of community figures ranging from garrulous old white men to deranged white youths and low-lives, as well as to a hill-country family nestled in the backwoods and steeped in earlier ways. And this is not to mention its three generations of black servants managing to eke out their lives under inattentive white masters. Flags is in no hurry to get its story told—something Liveright misread as “you don’t seem to have any story to tell.” He did not grasp—as many others in 1927 would not have understood—that Faulkner was making his debut as a Southern writer. He was showing, with wide-angled, nonjudgmental attention, what happened if you had stayed home during the Great War: you remained enclosed within an enervated, quietly suffocating set of outdated rituals of thinking, feeling, and doing, slowly wasting away. But if you had participated in that war, you found yourself, on return, incapable of communicating to anyone the brutality of your experience. Worse, you were unequipped to make peace with the slow-paced Southern pieties you had departed from.
Flags was Faulkner’s first novel about the South, his South. That’s what it can do. No less instructive is what it cannot do—according to the measure that Faulkner himself would provide two years later in The Sound and the Fury. A comparison of two scenes of emotional intensity (one from each novel) brings this point home. We begin with the relatively traditional rhetoric of Flags. Here is the protagonist, Bayard Sartoris, wounded and asleep, watched over by Narcissa Benbow, whom he eventually marries. His anguish erupts swiftly:
He made an indescribable sound, and she turned her head quickly and saw his body straining terrifically in its cast, and his clenched hands and the snarl of his teeth beneath his lifted lip, and as she sat blanched and incapable of further movement he made the sound again. His breath hissed between his teeth and he screamed, a wordless sound that sank into a steady violence of profanity; and when she rose at last and stood over him with her hands against her mouth, his body relaxed and from beneath his sweating brow he watched her with wide intent eyes in which terror lurked, and mad, cold fury, and questioning despair.
Narrated in standard syntax and a hyperbolic vocabulary, this scene invites us to look on from our distance. Its prose reveals, as well, the threadbareness of predictable formulae. Bayard’s sound is “indescribable,” for Faulkner can describe it only from the perspective of a narrator observing someone else’s distress. Faulkner uses Narcissa to provide physical cues for how to read Bayard’s torment: his terrific straining, her “blanched” paralysis echoing his “clenched” paralysis, his hissing breath and wordless scream. Like an orgasm, his body relaxes after this release. Yet, Faulkner can articulate what is going on inside Bayard only through a roster of familiar nouns like “terror,” “fury,” and “despair.” This could be Joseph Conrad relying on the same well-worn vocabulary to articulate Lord Jim’s torment. Both writers understood that their target (the traumatized psyche) was “unspeakable.” But neither knows (Conrad never, Faulkner not yet) that it is “unspeakable” only within conventional strategies for narrating the psyche as a coherent entity unified in time and space.
Flags conveys Bayard’s distress: he is caught up in a traumatic afterlife of previous events. He is still at that earlier stage, overtaken and penetrated. Something unspeakable happened in the war and holds him prisoner now. The closest Faulkner comes to unlocking Bayard’s inner wound is to describe it as ruptured “with ghosts of a thing high-pitched as a hysteria.” Faulkner has no interest in narrating this “thing high-pitched;” he focuses instead on its disturbing aftereffects. Bayard attracts Faulkner to the extent that he is “absent” here and now, beyond the reach of therapy. Intensity of portrait and dysfunction of character go hand in hand. Bayard’s distress was obviously based on that of Donald Mahan, the wounded protagonist of Soldiers’ Pay. But Faulkner has not yet figured out how to craft the prose that—in yoking then with now, there with here—will dance its manic fusion inside Bayard and make his wound come to life. He finally figures it out in the tormented Quentin Compson of The Sound and the Fury:
I have committed incest I said Father it was I it was not Dalton Ames. And when he put Dalton Ames. Dalton Ames. Dalton Ames. When he put the pistol in my hand I didn’t. That’s why I didn’t. He would be there and she would and I would. Dalton Ames. Dalton Ames. Dalton Ames. If we could have just done something so dreadful and Father said That’s sad too people cannot do anything that dreadful they cannot do anything very dreadful at all they cannot even remember tomorrow what seemed dreadful today and I said, You can shirk all things and he said, Ah can you. And I will look down and see my murmuring bones and the deep water like wind, like a roof of wind, and after a long time they cannot distinguish even bones upon the lonely and inviolate sand. Until on the day when He says Rise only the flat-iron would come floating up. It’s not when you realise that nothing can help you—religion, pride, anything—it’s when you realise that you don’t need any aid. Dalton Ames. Dalton Ames. Dalton Ames. If I could have been his mother lying with open body lifted laughing, holding his father with my hand refraining, seeing, watching him die before he lived. One minute she was standing in the door.
To find his way into Quentin’s ungrammatical anguish, Faulkner had to rupture proper syntax. No less, Quentin’s mind is no longer treated as something unified in space and time. Traditional narrative frames its materials in sentences shaped by subject, verb, and predicate. Such decorous sentences render Flags’s Bayard as a coherent doer performing his discrete deed (however troubled). But not Quentin. Faulkner’s prose for writing him has broken free. Quentin’s phrases either lack verbs or mix them up indiscriminately—present perfect, past, conditional, conditional perfect, present, future. The 19th-century tools for representation that Faulkner inherited could only narrate character as a something seen from a distance and gathered into wholeness, in black and white, so to speak. By contrast, Faulkner knew that the psyche under enormous stress was radically different—it was in motion, in full color, penetrated by absent forces, hurtling through space and time.
To articulate that color, Faulkner’s prose had to reposition his character’s mind in space, time, and the field of others. Most of all, Faulkner had to get his own narrator out of the scene of writing. He had to dramatize his character’s distress as though it were happening on its own, without Faulkner’s narrator telling it. Thus, we get Quentin’s frantic mind careening between different spaces and nonsequential times. No less, this Quentin is drowning in the force-field of absent others. Spaces in this passage lose their distinctiveness. Events that happened in different places are narratively jumbled together—which is exactly how they explode within Quentin’s distressed mind. The scene the previous summer with Caddy’s first lover, Dalton Ames, shifts abruptly to his dark conversations with Father. Then Faulkner takes us to Quentin’s fantasy of looking down on himself as a suicide so deep in the waters of the Charles River that even Christ’s call for resurrection will fail to make him stir. Finally, Faulkner takes the reader to Quentin’s even stranger fantasy of being secretly present at Ames’s conception. In this fantasy, incredibly, Quentin imagines himself as Ames’s mother removing Ames’s father’s penis just before ejaculation, thus killing Ames before he could be conceived.
Faulkner deranges the representation of time even more forcefully. He presses together the Dalton Ames moment, the Caddy at the door moment, and the moment with Father. Pressed together, yet kept apart: the moments are not fused but confused. Time’s forward motion (perhaps the deepest assumption our sanity requires and that conventional narrative blessedly supplies) disappears. Finally, the clamorousness of absent others inside the self is beyond pacifying. Quentin’s mind is a defective transformer; incompatible human voices pass through it like electric charges. He is a figure composed of screaming phrases, some spoken, some remembered, some fantasized, none assimilated, and none forgettable. In Quentin Compson, Faulkner produced his most memorable character caught in multiple times and splayed out into multiple spaces. No less, Quentin is penetrated by multiple others, most of them absent. It is inconceivable that any of this could be said in a simple fashion.
The sound and fury of distress: the phrasing registers both the title of Faulkner’s first masterpiece and its core concern. Or (to use Faulknerian terms introduced earlier), life as it assaults us in the fierce zoom lens of is. This is present consciousness under stress, its jagged edges unsoftened by the retrospective wide-angled ordering of was. Opening this novel in the disordered mind of the idiot Benjy Compson, Faulkner narrates events before any reader can understand them. He hurls us into the glass before it has been retrospectively cleansed of its gnats, tacks, and fissures. The passage quoted above comes from the second chapter, the monologue of Benjy’s suicidal brother, Quentin. The third chapter will attend to the embittered third brother, Jason. Each chapter adheres claustrophobically to the limited optics available to its distressed first-person narrator. Only in the final chapter does Faulkner seek to bring it all together. And it does come together as a Southern tragedy narrated (in three of its four chapters) during Easter weekend in 1928. But no grace hovers on the novel’s horizon—there is no risen Christ to save the lost Compsons.
Yet, when the novel ends, we come away with a feeling that is the opposite of Macbeth’s nihilistic phrase, “signifying nothing.” Instead, we all but choke on how much Faulkner has managed to signify in barely 200 pages. We now know the mother who will not mother, the father who is drinking himself to death, and the blacks who do their best to keep this collapsing family from falling apart faster. Most of all, we know the unparented and disoriented Compson children: the disabled Benjy, the suicidal Quentin, the runaway Caddy (the only girl), and the last boy, Jason. He, it turns out, is the only one still standing in 1928 (the novel’s present time). Yet, now grown up, Jason is the most abusive of them all. This entire family history is unforgivable, but The Sound and the Fury blames none of the Compsons for being who and what—for overwhelming cultural reasons—they had to become.
Realizing that Flags would never see the light of day (at least in his lifetime—it was finally published a decade after his death, in 1973), Faulkner spoke of a door being closed. Finally, he thought, he could write wholly for himself. He would long remember the ecstasy he felt during the composition of The Sound and the Fury. He literally did not know, day by day, what was coming on the next page. All he was sure of was that it would be fresh, right, and entirely his own. He never expected the book to be published, but when Hal Smith surprisingly said yes, a masterwork appeared. Few critics had a clue about what to make of this extraordinary novel. However, one reviewer, Evelyn Scott, grasped what Faulkner had wrought: “Here is beauty sprung from the perfect realization of what a more limiting morality would describe as ugliness,” she wrote. “Here is a humanity stripped of what was claimed for it by the Victorians, and the spectacle is moving as no sugar-coated drama could ever be.”
As I Lay Dying followed The Sound and the Fury. Written in barely seven weeks, it is even leaner and more jagged. The novel centers on something one might think beyond fiction’s capacity to say: “that pride, that furious desire to hide that abject nakedness which we bring here with us . . . carry stubbornly with us into the earth again.” It probes the barriers we draw on to conceal our psychic nakedness from others; it also grasps the distress that occurs when those barriers are breached. Many of the book’s 59 chapters articulate the self’s imprisoning inwardness. Oddly enough, this is an inwardness experienced even in the presence of others: Addie Bundren, the dead mother, had felt her imprisonment inside herself the most keenly. Her awareness (earlier, as a teacher) of her students “each with his and her secret and selfish thought” drove her wild. She would whip them with a switch, thinking with each blow, “Now you are aware of me! Now I am something in your secret and selfish life, who have marked your blood with my own for ever and ever.” Mere words between teacher and students could not cross this divide. “We had had to use one another by words like spiders dangling by their mouths from a beam, swinging and twisting and never touching, and that only through the blows of the switch could my blood and their blood flow as one stream.”
Words that swing and twist and never touch are no good. They do not reach the other person with their force intact, and they fail to penetrate the pride-installed boundaries that protect each self’s lifelong nakedness. What is needed are words that hurt and break through the self’s defenses. Addie’s insulated husband, Anse, will go to his grave unmarked and virginal (despite his having fathered four children). He has remained cradled throughout his life, thanks to the cottony protection of the words he lives within and takes to be real.
The Sound and the Fury was Faulkner’s first novel to hew its way into “wordless” territory. In it, he twisted syntax and procedure with unprecedented violence; in doing so, he charged that novel with something rarely seen before: it enacts (like As I Lay Dying) less a saying that goes into the air than a doing that “goes along the earth.” It seeks not to entertain or deliver truths, but aims to penetrate the reader’s heart.
With these two novels behind him, the even starker Sanctuary appeared in 1931. It is no surprise that these three back-to-back books catapulted Faulkner into fame and recognition as America’s most powerful novelist. Never again would Faulkner write the drama of stumbling with more brutal force. Sanctuary became notorious, and it would remain, throughout his life, the one novel that pigeonholed his identity. For countless people who never even read the book, it established Faulkner as the “corn-cob man,” because they thought Sanctuary centered on the horrific corncob rape of its main character, Temple Drake. The fact that this scene is all but undiscoverable in the published novel mattered little to those who hadn’t read it anyway. But for Faulkner, completing the book posed a unique challenge.
He had conceived it in 1928 as a potboiler, a story based on the most lurid plot he could imagine—“a cheap idea,” as he liked to call it. After reading the manuscript, his friend and editor, Hal Smith, was sure that the book was unpublishable. If they released it, Smith told Faulkner, “We’ll both be in jail.” But, for unknown reasons, Smith changed his mind in 1931, and Faulkner suddenly received the galleys. This half-forgotten novel—started before The Sound and the Fury or As I Lay Dying, and dropped from sight for two years—was now going to see the light. Faulkner was aghast at what the galleys for Sanctuary revealed. He had in the interim become a different writer, so how could he publish Sanctuary without tarnishing the achievement he had wrought in the previous two masterpieces? His answer was to revise it thoroughly, and entirely at his own expense.
The resulting novel is perhaps the one that sparks the most disagreements among Faulkner’s critics and readers alike. French critics were the first to celebrate Sanctuary. And they were not just any French critics, but some of the most revered names in 20th-century Western culture: Jean-Paul Sartre, André Malraux, and Albert Camus. (Malraux memorably characterized Sanctuary as the union of Greek tragedy and the detective novel.) It would take decades before American commentary on Faulkner caught up with their level of sophistication. Perhaps as well, a French penchant for the bleaker Faulkner has Sanctuary ranking so high for so long. The novel’s cast of characters, at any rate, is close to unrelievedly sordid. They include a deformed underworld figure named Popeye, a senile old man named Pap, a half-wit named Tommy, and a crew of violent bootleggers. Into this mix comes, by the sheer misfortune of a car accident, a drunken young Oxford man as pretentious as he is out of his depth. And with him, his unfortunate date, the flirtatious young Ole Miss undergraduate (and the daughter of a judge), Temple Drake. At Frenchman’s Bend (where the bootleggers carry out their trade), surrounded by these lawless men, she will meet her fate. Here is how Faulkner writes her distress:
She snatched it [her hand] up with a wailing shriek, clapping it against her mouth, and turned and ran toward the door. The woman caught her arm . . . and Temple sprang back into the kitchen. . . . “Let go,” she whispered, “let go! Let go!” She surged and plunged, grinding the woman’s hand against the door jamb until she was free. She sprang from the porch and ran toward the barn . . . Then suddenly she ran upside down in a rushing interval; she could see her legs still running in space, and she struck lightly and solidly on her back and lay still . . . Her hand moved in the substance in which she lay, then she remembered the rat . . . Her whole body surged in an involuted spurning movement . . . so that she flung her hands out and caught herself upright . . . her face not twelve inches from the cross beam on which the rat crouched. For an instant they stared eye to eye, then its eyes glowed suddenly like two tiny electric bulbs and it leaped at her head just as she sprang backward, treading again on something that rolled under her foot. She fell toward the opposite corner, on her face in the hulls and a few scattered corn-cobs gnawed bone-clean . . . Then she got to her feet and sprang at the door . . . rasping at the planks with her bare hands.
This entire passage registers the ongoing rape of Temple, hours before the actual incident occurs. None of the material surfaces near her accommodate contact with her body: kitchen door and barn door, the other woman’s hand, her own hand, her own legs, and scattered corn-cobs (for the moment harmless). These entities seem wired, gone awry, capable of “rasping” her. Charged with hostility, they align with the rat. As in a nightmare, the rat that is glimpsed will next be only 12 inches from Temple’s face. It stares at her as though it knows her; then it leaps. As in a nightmare, she can escape nothing that enters her space.
The power of Sanctuary lodges in passages such as this. Faulkner cannot take his eye off what is being done to Temple at Frenchman’s Bend. Layer after layer, the sanctuaries that protect her identity are stripped away. The assault is both bodily and psychological. “My father’s a judge,” she wails, as she seeks to smile, cringe, or fantasize her way back into security. Her defenses are ripped from her, and—hooked on booze and riddled with lust—she becomes, for the last third of the book, a denizen of the Memphis underworld. She has traded Daddy (her father the judge) for “Daddy” (Popeye). Impotent himself, he makes orgasmic, whinnying noises as he stands by her bed. As though mesmerized, he watches her writhe in intercourse with his delegated substitute, Red. Waiting for Red, Temple “felt long shuddering waves of physical desire going over her, draining the color from her mouth, drawing her eyeballs back into her skull in a shuddering swoon.” Her drawn-back eyeballs recall the rat’s glowing ones. Living creatures are accessed as body parts enlivened by instinct; they surge and glow, and “She could tell all of them by the way they breathed.” The human world, stripped of its sanctuaries, transforms into a barnyard.
Sanctuary joined As I Lay Dying as a sort of narrative experiment in how much pressure people can bear. In both novels, Faulkner submits the habits and pieties of his central figures to an all-but-apocalyptic assault. These include flood and fire in the one novel and the underworld of Frenchman’s Bend and Memphis in the other. He does this to discover what, under the impress of that assault, those figures will become. With almost inhuman detachment, he experiments with his characters, pushing them past the conditions that sustain their coherence, making them stumble out of their familiar identity.
It is a short step to move from “almost inhuman” and arrive at “misogynistic.” Many readers—offended by the abuse inflicted on Temple—take that step. Some of the abuse Temple endures supports such a reading. The novel indulges in recurrent sneers about Temple’s privilege, dilating on her ignorance of everything outside her family’s genteel, protected world. To that extent, Sanctuary can be seen as committed to “teaching her a lesson.” Yet, Temple learns no lesson. The book is darker than any pedagogic purpose can illuminate. “It’s like there was a fellow in every man,” Cash Bundren thinks at the conclusion of As I Lay Dying, “that’s done a-past the sanity or the insanity, that watches the sane and the insane doings of that man with the same horror and the same astonishment.” Temple reveals such sanity/insanity as she is being raped:
Then I said That wont do. I ought to be a man. So I was an old man, with a long white beard, and then the little black man got littler and littler and I was saying Now. You see now. I’m a man now. Then I thought about being a man, and as soon as I thought it, it happened. It made a kind of plopping sound, like blowing a little rubber tube wrong-side outward. It felt cold, like the inside of your mouth when you hold it open. I could feel it, and I lay right still to keep from laughing about how surprised he was going to be. I could feel the jerking going inside my knickers ahead of his hand and me lying there trying not to laugh about how surprised and mad he was going to be in a minute.
In this passage, we encounter Temple’s trauma itself. Faulkner doesn’t narrate it; rather, he makes it speak. The fantasy-narrative it speaks both reveals and conceals the assault she is undergoing. We see everything materially relevant—the corncob, the invaded body, the jerking flesh. But we see it fantastically reconfigured. That is, we see the crazily cross-gendered scenario that her defenses have summoned into being if she is to survive the rape. In The Sound and the Fury, Quentin fantasized himself as Dalton Ames’s mother in a scene of intercourse. He imagined her withdrawing her husband’s penis before ejaculation, thus killing Ames before he was conceived. No less bizarrely, Temple has fantasized herself onto an impossible stage. Won’t Popeye be surprised, she now thinks, to discover she has become an old man with a long white beard? Faulkner dwells less on what is done to Temple than on what she frantically does with what is done to her.
Her doing is psychic alone because there is no other way of escaping Popeye. He co-opts material reality; she absents herself through psychic fantasy. The poetry of this passage is the poetry of Temple’s outraged system of defenses. Inasmuch as the defenses are there to prevent such outrage, Faulkner’s prose finds its way to Temple’s very core. With horror and astonishment, we hear her psyche speak. What it speaks is no barnyard, no release of animal instinct. It speaks a kind of pain that only human beings, on the rack, are capable of.
Faulkner called this novel a cheap idea, a potboiler. His critics looked deeper and glimpsed the psychological insights of Fyodor Dostoevsky. Faulkner claimed not to have read the Russian author’s books, but he said that about a lot of writers. Secret sharers—the term is Joseph Conrad’s, a writer Faulkner never disowned—were his imaginative company. His great work penetrates beneath the sanctuaries that sustain identity. It undoes those conceptual bulwarks within which we can claim that we are thus and so, and not otherwise. Exerting strong pressure, these novels come upon unspeakable transformations. It is as though, deep down, humans were alterable plasma rather than fixed essence. The one who writes a misogynistic potboiler—a man who sees his difference from a woman as absolute, who narratively abuses her and believes she deserves what she gets—is the corn-cob man. But the one who stages the nightmarish transferences that stalk our daytime identities is a genius. They are both Faulkner, and it took them both to write Sanctuary.
The novel was published in February 1931. On a personal front, it was a difficult time for Faulkner and Estelle. The previous year they had moved into a new home, Rowan Oak, and were now expecting a child. But the pregnancy had been difficult, and the baby was born two months early, on an icy night in January 1931. They named her Alabama, after his beloved great-aunt, but the tiny infant was immediately sick and she worsened steadily. Despite every move the desperate Faulkner could think of—including a feverish search for an incubator impossible to locate outside of Memphis—Alabama died 10 days later. The weakened and hospitalized Estelle never saw her child alive.
Once more, Faulkner recognized his powerlessness before the assault of is—as though his infant’s irreversible decline stayed mockingly in advance of any counter-measures he could cobble together. Alabama would haunt him later; her unlived possibilities would appear to him as uncannily prefigured in the earlier genesis of his heart’s darling, Caddy Compson. “So I, who never had a sister,” he wrote in a 1933 preface to The Sound and the Fury, “and was fated to lose my daughter in infancy, set out to make myself a beautiful and tragic little girl.” The peace of was, the turmoil of is. He had been unable to save his daughter during the assault of is. But he repossessed her imaginatively and retrospectively, yet in advance of her actual birth. Aligning his dead baby with his immortal Caddy, he bestowed on her (in that 1933 preface) a fullness of meaning she could not have possessed that dark day in January 1931.
Estelle remained weak that entire spring and into the summer as well. Faulkner badly needed money to keep his household intact; he had already missed the March mortgage payment. In droves, he began to submit short stories to the national journals. The rejection letters came back, also in droves. Then something different arrived in the mail. Professor James Wilson of the University of Virginia wrote to invite him to a conference of Southern writers, to be held in Charlottesville later that year. The conference had been instigated by the novelist Ellen Glasgow and was supported by notables such as writers Thomas Wolfe, Paul Green, and Sherwood Anderson, philosopher Donald Davidson, and poet Allen Tate. Its aim was to shed light on the recent flourishing of Southern letters. Sanctuary had been published in February 1931, to a flurry of critical responses. The Sound and the Fury and As I Lay Dying had appeared shortly before that. The latter was now lined up for translation into French. Faulkner had become pretty hard to ignore, and the conference organizers wanted him to be among their 34 attendees. He responded to their invitation with a letter that revealed his misgivings even while agreeing to participate:
Dear Mr Wilson—
Thank you for your invitation. I would like very much to avail myself of it, what with your letter’s pleasing assurance that loopholes will be supplied to them who have peculiarities about social gambits. You have seen a country wagon come into town, with a hound dog under the wagon. It stops on the Square and the folks get out, but that hound never gets very far from that wagon. He might be cajoled or scared out for a short distance, but first thing you know he has scuttled back under the wagon; maybe he growls at you a little. Well, that’s me . . .
He was apprehensive when he arrived in Charlottesville. Apparently his first words to his host were, “Know where I can get a drink?” Since Prohibition was still in effect, the host took him to his own bootleg supplier. Cushioned by a bottle of corn whiskey, the two of them spent a convivial evening together. But as the conference got under way, things spiraled out of control. Faulkner appeared at the first meeting wearing what Paul Green took to be an aviator’s cap. Swiftly he became the focal point of the conference. His response to this unwonted attention was to hit the bottle even more aggressively. “Bill Faulkner had arrived and got drunk,” Sherwood Anderson later reported. Allen Tate recalled Faulkner’s asking Tate’s wife where he could get another drink, then vomiting on her dress. His friends knew he had to be extricated, and soon. Paul Green and Hal Smith got him into a car and drove him to New York. Faulkner seems to have been steadily drinking the whole time. As they passed through Washington, D.C., he invited a policeman they crossed on the street to join them for yet another tipple. On October 26, they finally arrived in New York.
An unbearable posse of attention was waiting for him. Harold Guinzburg of Viking, Alfred Knopf of Knopf, and Bennett Cerf of Random House were there, each determined to sign him up. Faced with all this attention, Faulkner became even more anxious and stepped up the drinking. During these two weeks, he was out of control. When the actress Tallulah Bankhead begged him to do a screenplay for her, he wrote Estelle: “The contract is to be signed today, for about $10,000.” (Nothing ever came of this project.) A couple of days later he wrote Estelle again: “I have created quite a sensation . . . In fact, I have learned with astonishment that I am now the most important figure in American letters.”
In fact, “astonishment” and inebriation seem to have characterized the six weeks of Faulkner’s frantic, alcohol-fueled stay in New York. Once he had met Lillian Hellman, Dashiell Hammett, and Nathaniel West, he was surrounded by a peerless crew of fellow boozers. He was passing out in public places frequently enough for Hal Smith to contact Faulkner’s friend Ben Wasson for help. Wasson urged Estelle to come up quickly to New York and rescue her husband; she took the train and arrived at the beginning of December. But her presence seemed to add fuel to the fire rather than calm things down. Bennett Cerf remembered her standing at the window of his apartment on Central Park South, at one of his parties. She remarked on the beauty of the view outside, saying to him: “I feel just like throwing myself out the window.” Cerf was alarmed: “Oh, Estelle, you don’t mean that.” She stared at him and said, “Of course I do.” Writer Dorothy Parker spoke of Estelle’s ripping her dress and attempting to leap out the window of Parker’s Algonquin Hotel rooms. Another of their new acquaintances, playwright Marc Connelly, remembered her losing control at a social gathering one night. Faulkner was next to her, engaged in conversation, when he noticed what was happening. With no expression on his face, he reached out and slapped her, very hard. She returned immediately to normal, and he continued his conversation.
This whirlwind outburst of manic behavior lasted from late October to mid-December of 1931. Faulkner had long been a heavy drinker, but something newly disturbing seemed to emerge during the University of Virginia fiasco. “You know that state I seem to get into when people come to see me and I begin to visualize a kind of jail corridor of literary talk,” he wrote a friend about the conference debacle. Earlier, we recall, he had viewed his approaching and inescapable marriage with Estelle as a sort of “jail corridor.” But the reasons for this later feeling of claustrophobia were different: Faulkner could not forget that—however deliberately—he had not gone past the 11th grade, so he had no business speaking to these literary people. He required silence for his sanity and to get his work done. His intense bond with his books was speechlessly enacted in writing them, not in talking about them later. He may have sought the widest recognition, but more than that, viscerally, he was a hound dog that wanted to stay scuttled under the wagon. Is it any wonder that his greatest fiction—including the three novels that launched the New York frenzy—centers on the unpreparedness experienced during moments of crisis? The assault of what you are not ready for, the outrage of is? This rhythm of stumbling marked his life and it marks his greatest fiction as well.