Final Fridays (15 page)

First delivered at a conference on William Faulkner at the University of Mississippi in 1999, this brief appreciation of that novelist's importance to this one was subsequently included (along with more scholarly presentations by other participants in the conference) in the volume
Faulkner and Postmodernism
, published later that year.
¹
Reviewing my amateur remarks in the context of theirs, I'm reminded of what Flannery O'Connor is reported to have said about her work's being compared to Faulkner's: “Best get off the track when the Dixie Special's coming down the line.”

 

 

I
T'S UNDERSTOOD, I trust, that I'm with you today not in my capacity as a Faulkner specialist, for I have no such capacity, but merely and purely as a writer of fiction, who will presently read a short passage from a not markedly Faulknerian work in progress.
²
But the great American writer celebrated by this annual conference happens to have been among my first-magnitude navigation stars during my literary apprenticeship, and I'd like to speak a bit to that subject before I change voices.

In 1947, virtually innocent of literature, I matriculated as a freshman at the Johns Hopkins University. I can scarcely remember now what I had been taught before that in the English courses of
our semi-rural, semi-redneck 11-year county public school system on Maryland's lower Eastern Shore; I certainly don't recall having been much touched by any of it, or inspired by any of my pleasant, well-meaning teachers. I borrowed books busily from the available libraries
³
—Tom Swift, Edgar Rice Burroughs—and indiscriminately from my father's small-town soda-fountain/lunchroom, whose stock in trade included magazines, piano sheet music, and the newfangled paperbound pocket books: Ellery Queen, Agatha Christie, Raymond Chandler, and my favorite of all, the Avon Fantasy Reader series (Abe Merritt, John Collier, and H. P. Lovecraft,
inter alia
). I remember being baffled but intrigued by an item called
Manhattan Transfer
, by one John Dos Passos, and by another called
Sanctuary
, by somebody named William Faulkner, when they turned up randomly in my borrowings. Those were, I came to understand later, my accidental first exposures to modern lit; I sensed their difference from my regular diet, and even found and read some other items by that Faulkner fellow in the pile:
The Wild Palms
,
Soldier's Pay
, and
Pylon
. On the whole, however, I was more intrigued by another anthology series just then appearing on Dad's shelves, called
The Ribald Reader
: pretty spicy stuff by my then standards, and illustrated with titillative line-drawings. What I only dimly registered at the time was that those naughty anthologies were of considerable literary quality and admirable eclecticism: Their ribaldry was culled from the
Decameron
,
Pentameron
, and
Heptameron
, from
The 1001 Nights
and the
Gesta Romanorum
and the
Panchatantra
, among other exotic sources—all news to me, and not to be found in either the Dorchester County Public or the Cambridge (Maryland) school libraries (where
The Arabian Nights
was a much-abridged and expurgated edition illustrated by N. C. Wyeth).

My declared major as a very green Hopkins freshman was Journalism: One was obliged to choose
something
, and I had done a humor column for our school newspaper in my senior year. Never mind how I stumbled from journalism into fiction-writing; what's relevant here, in retrospect, is that the literature most provocative to my adolescent curiosity, apart from the mystery novels and Tom Swifties, was not the canonical classics, but Modernism on the one hand (as represented in its American grain by the Dos Passos and those early, mostly minor Faulkners) and on the other hand the venerable tale-cycle tradition, as represented ribaldly in those Avon Readers. At Hopkins I had professors both excellent and inspiring and was at last baptized, though not totally immersed, in the canonical mainstream—but two circumstances, fortunate for me, reinforced those earlier, fugitive, extracurricular samplings.

The first, as I've written elsewhere,
⁴
was my very good luck in having to help pay my way by filing books in the university library. “My” stacks happened to be the voluminous ones of the Classics Department and of William Foxwell Albright's Oriental Seminary, as it was then called; the books on my cart therefore included not only Homer and Virgil and other such standard curricular items, but also Petronius and Apuleius and the unabridged Scheherazade and the
Panchatantra
and
The Ocean of the Streams of Story
and the
Vetalapanchavimsata
as well as, by some alcove-gerrymandering, Boccaccio and Rabelais and Marguerite of Angouleme and Giovanni Basile and Poggio Bracciolini and Pietro Aretino—hot stuff, which I sampled eagerly as I filed, and often borrowed from the book-cart to take home and read right through: what I think of as my
à la carte
education.

The second lucky circumstance is that in Hopkins's literature departments at that time, one did not generally study still-living or even
recently dead authors; but our brand-new and somewhat frowned-upon Department of Writing, Speech, and Drama (later renamed the Writing Seminars) broke ranks and energetically held forth on Proust, Joyce, Kafka, Mann, Eliot, Pound, Hemingway, and Faulkner—this last via my very first fiction-writing coach, a Marine-combat-veteran teaching assistant from the deep South at work on the university's first-ever doctoral dissertation on the sage of Oxford, Miss.

Let's cut to the chase: For the next three years I imitated everybody, badly, in search of my writerly self, while downloading my innumerable predecessors as only an insatiable green apprentice can. Owing to some tension between our writing operation and the English Department, my curricular reading in literature was freighted with the Greek and Roman classics, with Dante and Cervantes and Flaubert, and with the big Modernists aforementioned, while my library cart supplied me with extracurricular exotica. What I never got, for better or worse, was the standard fare of English majors: good basic training in Chaucer and Shakespeare and the big 18th-and 19th-century English novelists, though there had been some naughty Canterbury Tales in those
Ribald Readers
, and I reveled in Fielding and Dickens on my own. So many voices; so many eloquent and wildly various voices—none more mesmerizing to me (thanks to that ex-Marine T.A. writing coach, the late Robert Durene Jacobs of Georgia State University) than Faulkner's. I read all of him, I believe—all of him as of that mid-century date—and I saw that the Faulkners I'd stumbled upon in high-school days were mostly warm-ups for such
chef d'oeuvres
as
The Sound and the Fury
,
As I Lay Dying
,
Light in August
, and
Absalom, Absalom.
It was Faulkner at his most involuted and incantatory who most enchanted me, and while I had (and have) never thought of myself as a capital-S Southerner—nor a
Northerner either, having grown up virtually astride Mason's and Dixon's Line—I felt a strong affinity between Faulkner's Mississippi and the Chesapeake marsh-country that I was born and raised in. My apprentice fiction grew increasingly Faulknerish, and when I stayed on at Johns Hopkins as a graduate student, my M.A. thesis and maiden attempt at a novel was a heavily Faulknerian marsh-opera about sinisterly inbred Chesapeake crabbers and muskrat trappers. The young William Styron, visiting our seminar fresh from winning his National Book Award for
Lie Down in Darkness
, listened patiently to one particularly purple chapter, a mishmash of middle Faulkner and late Joyce, and charitably praised it; but the finished opus didn't fly—for one thing, because Faulkner intimately
knew
his Snopeses and Compsons and Sartorises, as I did not know my made-up denizens of the Maryland marsh. A copy of the manuscript made the rounds of Manhattan in vain until my agent gave up on it; I later destroyed it as an embarrassment. The original languished in the dissertation-stacks of the Hopkins library for a couple of decades until, to my indignant half-relief, some unprincipled rascal stole it. Thanks anyhow, Bill Faulkner and Bill Styron.

 

AND WHERE WERE Scheherazade and company all this time? Singing in my other ear and inspiring my second and final major apprentice effort: A Faulknerian/Boccaccian hybrid this time, called
The Dorchester Tales
: 100 tales of my Eastern Shore Yoknapatawpha at all periods of its human history. This, too, failed, at round about Tale 50, and this manuscript too, lest it come back to haunt me, I later destroyed except for a few nuggets that worked their way, reorchestrated, into
The Sot-Weed Factor
. But I like to think that it was a step in the right direction: an attempt to combine the two principal
strains of my literary DNA. In hindsight, as I've declared elsewhere,
⁵
it's clear to me that what I needed to do was find some way to book Faulkner, Joyce, and Scheherazade on the same tidewater showboat, with myself at both the helm and the steam calliope. Another way to put it is that I needed to discover, or to be discovered by, what later came to be called Postmodernism. With the help of yet another fortuitous and highly unlikely input—the turn-of-the-century Brazilian novelist Joaquim Machado de Assis, whose works I stumbled upon in the mid-1950s, this came to pass.

In the decades since, I am obliged to report, although the figure of Ms. Scheherazade has remained so central to my imagination that merely to hear one of the themes from Rimsky-Korsakov's suite is enough to deliquesce me yet, Mr. Faulkner's currency in my shop has had its ups and downs. My wife used to teach
Light in August
to her high-school seniors; while rereading it periodically for that purpose, she would recite memorable passages to me, and a time came when the rhetoric that had once so appealed to me now seemed . . . over-pumped. I would tease her (and Faulkner, and myself) by wondering, for example, whether it was the Immemorial Wagon-Wheels going down the Outraged Path or the Outraged Wheels on the Immemorial Path, and what final difference there was between those sonorous propositions.

The following was delivered (in English) in 1998 at Spain's León University as part of the conference described below and published two years later in Volume I of that conference's proceedings.
¹

 

 

W
HAT A REMARKABLE occasion for a pan-American literary conference at a Spanish university: the centennial of the Spanish-American War and of Spain's consequent loss of her last American colonies; the end of her enormous empire, which, as the British historian Hugh Thomas recently declared, “in its duration and cultural influence . . . overshadows the empires of Britain, France, Holland, Belgium, and even Russia.”

At first one might wonder, Why commemorate such an historical setback with a literary conference? But then one remembers that when a newspaper reporter once asked William Faulkner what, in his opinion, accounted for the impressive literary flowering of the North American Southland after our Civil War, Faulkner replied: “We lost.” And does not Homer somewhere remark ironically that “Wars are fought so that poets will have something to sing about”? Perhaps we can revise that
obiter dictum
to read “Wars are
lost
so that” et cetera. Clearly, the aphorism applies with particular poignancy to Spain after 1898. I shall return to it after expressing my gratitude to
this university, to the Fulbright Commission, and to the organizers of this conference for providing my wife and me with an occasion to revisit España: a country for which we share a longstanding affection; a country that we have visited a number of times over the decades, and that has been of some importance to me as a writer of fiction.

Indeed, for reasons that I shall presently make clear, one of my tentative titles for this talk was “One Hundred Years of Gratitude” (
Cien Años de Gratitud
: The rhyme with
solitude
works in English, though not in Spanish). Reflecting upon the literary activity in North and South America since 1898 and upon literary relations between the two continents as well, I also considered “One Hundred Years of Plenitude.” But then, shaking my head at some unfortunate aspects of our
political
relations through that period, I thought perhaps “One Hundred Years of Turpitude” might be more appropriate. (Do we have the word
turpitud
en español? No? We certainly have it in English.) And then, considering what my more knowledgeable friends tell me of the vigor and diversity of contemporary
Spanish
literature, I considered “The (Re)Generation of '98;
²
or, Forget the
Maine
!” To this subject, too—I mean the infamous event that triggered the Spanish-American War—I shall return.

What a formidable
cien años
ours has been! As a novelist, I make occasional use of what are called in English “time lines”: those reference books and computer software programs that attempt to show, like an orchestral concert score, what was happening more or less simultaneously in various fields in various parts of the world at particular periods of history. To look back upon the closing years of the 19th century and at the year 1898 in particular with the help of these time lines is to be impressed by their
busyness
, by their sheer activity in just about every area of human endeavor, and by what their
remarkable accomplishments can now be seen to have portended for the century that followed. Perhaps the same could be said of virtually any decade in recent centuries if one examines it through the lens of hindsight; but just consider: The years 1890 through 1899 gave us the Nobel prizes and the modern Olympic games, Social Darwinism, the Dreyfus Affair, Gobineau's “scientific” racism, and the Klondike Gold Rush. They saw the triumph of Europe's colonization of Africa (except for Ethiopia and Liberia) and the suppression of our North American Indians at the battle of Wounded Knee, along with our westward expansion into the new states of Idaho, Wyoming, and Utah. They gave us the Sino-Japanese War and the Cuban Revolution and Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee; they gave us the first cinema and the first comic strip; they gave us the discovery of radioactivity and the invention of wireless telegraphy, the diesel engine, the automobile, electromagnetic sound recording, rocket propulsion, synthetic fibers, electric subways, the clothing zipper, the safety razor, and the “safety bicycle.” They gave us Frazer's
Golden Bough
and Freud's
Studien über Hysterie
and Havelock Ellis's
Psychopathia Sexualis
; Karl Marx's
Das Kapital
(Volume 3) and Bergson's
Matiere et Memoire
and Herzl's
Der Judenstraat
and John Dewey's
School and Society.
It was the decade of Post-Impressionism and Art Nouveau; of Debussy and Puccini and Richard Strauss and Sibelius and Mahler and Massenet; of Chekhov and Darío and young Yeats and old Tolstoy, of Ibsen and Shaw and Conrad and Henry James and Machado de Assis.