The romance of flight began early. The Wright brothers—starting with nothing and ending with the grand prize—had been enshrined as American heroes. As a kid, Faulkner had persuaded his siblings to build their own aircraft. They used rotten wood, rusty nails, grocery bags, wrapping paper, and a design taken from a boys’ magazine. After several weeks, William decided to give the plane its trial run. The collapse that followed eerily foreshadowed some subsequent attempts to take to the air.
As his brother John would later recall, at about the same time there was another airborne adventure. At one of the local fairs, the most spectacular stunt involved the exploits of a scruffy self-proclaimed airman. This fellow would arrive on the scene already drunk, carrying a parachute and a huge canvas bag. The plan was to fill the bag with hot air to the point where, with him attached below, it would rise into the air. While the bag was filling, the airman steadily cursed and clamored for more booze, his eyes red and streaming, thanks to the smoke and flames. Once the balloon seemed ready, its inebriated passenger would fasten his parachute harness and strap himself in. By the time the balloon started its climb, the Falkner boys’ excitement would be beyond containing. They ran at full speed, following the airborne balloon, hoping to see the pilot make his escape. They came upon him minutes later, already on the ground and so drunk that he hardly felt the violence of his abortive landing. Drink, grease, cursing, and desperate risk: Faulkner may from the beginning have carried these associations with the human attempt to fly. They were probably revivified during the 1930s when he avidly watched scruffy barnstorming flyers perform their daredevil stunts at county fairs—the years prior to his writing Pylon.
In 1918, his only alternative to Estelle’s marriage to Franklin had been a protracted attempt to fight in the Great War. Whether that would be made possible in America or Canada, Faulkner invariably insisted on joining the Air Force. The letters RAF (Royal Air Force) would remain a precious acronym he never tired of mentioning. His five months of flight training in Canada not only gave him material for a number of stories and, at least, four novels, but they also nurtured his fascination with the mechanics of flight—with the fragile and murderous beauty of aircraft. He could not get enough of the planes, and his sketches of them were exquisitely precise. What most drew him to these flying machines, it seems, was their apparent weightlessness. They were mere “kites” constructed of wood and canvas and wire, powered by untrustworthy engines. Soon Faulkner could distinguish expertly among the different military craft at the air base, and he was writing home to his mother of solo flights. These vignettes would later expand—balloonistically—into more high-flying fantasy. Flights, crashes, and injuries: he asserted all of these with great energy, though no evidence supports the claims.
As early as 1919, Faulkner was squirming over his flying predicament. “Everybody thinks I can fly, but I can’t,” he told a pilot friend at the University of Mississippi. The only remedy was to take lessons on the sly, off and on for the next decade. As soon as he expected bigger money to come his way—royalties anticipated from the notorious Sanctuary (1931)—he returned to the flying project. Vernon Omlie, a professional instructor, taught him all spring of 1933. The training took place in Omlie’s powerful Waco F biplane. Faulkner lifted off for his first solo flight on April 20 of that year. By the fall, he was confident enough of his abilities to purchase Omlie’s Waco at the considerable cost—for the time—of $6000. Considering that three years earlier he had paid the same amount to purchase his home, Rowan Oak, and its four acres, we get a measure of how far he would go to indulge his flying obsession. Faulkner adored this plane, and it elicited one of the rare photos of him smiling that exists. In it, he’s grinning broadly, his hand extended possessively toward his Waco as though it were a precious object he had never believed he might own.
The subsequent step seemed obvious. He wanted his three younger brothers to become as passionate about flying as he was. That turned out to be easy, and soon enough—barnstorming together across several counties—they were collectively known as “the flying Falkners.” Not long thereafter, it became clear to Faulkner that his youngest brother Dean, though unable to support himself financially, was the most talented flyer of them all. Faulkner adored this youngest sibling, and Dean reciprocated the feeling. He even cultivated a thin mustache that resembled Faulkner’s, and he added a “u” to his name so as to tighten their bond. So Faulkner sold Dean the Waco, at a price so low as to make it virtually a gift. The transaction apparently worked. Dean married the woman he had been engaged to and began to earn a decent living giving flying lessons.
Flying was on Faulkner’s mind in other ways as well. In the fall of 1934, he suddenly began to write—at breakneck speed—a new novel, Pylon. It was devoted to the madness of barnstormers scrapping to make a living high in the air. He completed his manuscript in just two months because, one supposes, the larger challenge of dominating the air had been on his mind for years. He had grown up seeing daredevils risking hot-air balloon rides at the carnivals of his childhood. Before, during, and after his RAF stint in Toronto during the war years, he was fascinated with airplanes; in 1935, Pylon was born out of this obsession.
Linguistically, it is Faulkner’s most extravagant novel. Its sentences burst at their seam, as though they were land-constrained, striving to rise into the air. Of the planes themselves Faulkner wrote:
Creatures imbued with motion though not with life and incomprehensible to the puny crawling painwebbed globe, incapable of suffering, wombed and born complete and instantaneous, cunning intricate and deadly, from out some blind iron batcave of the earth’s prime foundation.
The source of his fascination with flying leaps off the page here: the inhuman power of the planes. They pulse with capacities that mock self-imposed human limits. They transcend conventions erected to make life safe, organized, mutual. Free of the messiness of human attachment (life on the “painwebbed globe”), they beam forth sheer autonomous speed.
The pilots who fly them, drunk on such speed, have abandoned all calculations that sustain life on the land. As one of the pilots says about the races in Pylon, “And the ship is all right, except you won’t know until you are in the air whether or not you can take it off and you won’t know until you are back on the ground and standing up again whether or not you can land it.” You also won’t know if you’ll survive until afterward. No preparation is any good. So much for plans to master life in time, to calculate before and after. To fly those “kites” was to experience time as pure presence.
“Breathing is a sight-draft dated yesterday,” Faulkner’s character, Will Varner, later claimed in The Hamlet (1940), the first novel of Faulkner’s Snopes family trilogy. His words imply that our breath has a possible liquidation date of “yesterday” written on it—it is collectible on sight. Our final exit could be any time, and there will likely be no notice. Nothing brought home this dimension of life’s uninsurable tenure more powerfully than flying. In its intrinsic risk Faulkner must have recognized its hypnotic appeal: the dance with death itself. Is that why, after hearing in June 1934 of the famous pilot Jimmy Wedell’s fatal crash, he deemed the moment right for writing his own will? Wedell had crashed while giving a beginner flight lessons. But how would this event—how would anyone else’s disaster—have prepared him for the airborne nightmare hurtling toward him?
The Waco biplane deal with Dean seemed too good to be true, and it was. One day in late 1935, after Dean had taken up a group of student-passengers in the Waco, he failed to return. Rumors of a crash spread. Late that afternoon Faulkner got the dreaded call. The plane had crashed, and Dean was dead. The Waco had been found, buried six feet under the earth; all the bodies were mutilated beyond recognition. That night, Faulkner did not allow other family members to approach the mangled corpse of his brother. Carrying a photo of Dean with him, he worked with the undertaker for hours, recomposing a face that might pass for Dean’s. What atonement was Faulkner enacting during this gruesome ritual? Likely it was a mix of family piety (make Dean presentable again for his mother and his wife), self-inflicted torture (it was his Waco, hence his fault), and the painstaking inscription of a life-long memory (Dean’s ruined face to remain forever inside him). The accident was never fully explained, though experts believed one of the passengers had been given the controls and had put the plane into a fatal spin.
No one was officially to blame, yet Faulkner could not forgive himself for what had happened. His love of flying, his Waco, Dean’s death: he kept asking himself how to explain that sequence? Later, a tear-wracked Faulkner told Dean’s grieving widow Louise, “I’ve ruined your life. It’s all my fault.” A few weeks after that, at breakfast one morning, Louise said, “I can’t eat. I dreamed the whole accident last night.” Faulkner responded, “You’re lucky to have dreamed it only once. I dream it every night.”
In this state of mind, Faulkner played and replayed the events that had shaped his identity: the woman he had not eloped with, the war he had not entered, and the plane he had secretly been incapable of flying. Each of these had multiple, incompatible lives over time. Each had escaped him at first. Each had then become an intricate part of his life. The first and the last would break his heart. Along with Estelle’s marriage to Cornell Franklin, Dean’s death was the worst thing that had ever happened to him. It would haunt him for the rest of his life.