B006JHRY9S EBOK (10 page)

There remains one further insight he might have garnered from his father’s postrailroad sequence of failures: a sense for untimeliness, for the difficulty of being ready to take on what the present moment carries for good or ill. Murry chose to own a livery stable in the first decade of the
twentieth century—just as cars were beginning to become the vehicle of choice. When that business failed, he turned to the coal oil (for lamplighting) business—just as electricity was beginning to replace gas light. It would be easy to mock Murry for these unpropitious choices. His oldest son might have reflected further and arrived at a rarer insight. He might have glimpsed that humans are typically not wise in present time—that wisdom is a retrospective angle of vision (and often useless because too late) whereby men and women see beyond the error of their earlier stumbling. Did Faulkner grasp that erasing the present moment’s blindness was a way of denying experience itself? He would recurrently stumble throughout present-tense crises in his own life, and he would learn to respect his mistakes (which did not mean justifying them). In time, his art became supremely invested in the unavoidability of stumbling. And he discovered that the tradition of the novel—as he had inherited it from earlier practitioners in the West—was hostile to that insight, shaped so as to minimize it. Which meant—though he would never have put it to himself in this way—that he would have to reinvent the form of the novel.

His childhood was hardly limited to an engagement with the dilemmas I have just explored. In fact, biographers have mainly portrayed it as a scene of idyllic, rough-and-tumble play, at least until his early teens. If his father’s limitations damaged his emotional growth, his father’s consolations for a failed career expanded his range of activities. It was Murry who introduced him to the delights of male camaraderie—who let him pass hours silently taking in the all-male activities and conversations that occurred in the livery stable. (To Malcolm Cowley he would say in 1945, “I more or less grew up in my father’s livery stable” [FCF 67].) A hunter and a lover of animals, Murry introduced all his sons to the pleasures of life in the big woods. Mammy Callie enriched these pleasures by teaching the boys the names of the birds, the virtues of the plants that flourished in nature. All the boys became scouts, and Faulkner—whose tenderness toward children was notable his entire life—later served as scoutmaster.

The three older boys grew up as inseparable playmates, joined soon by their tomboy cousin Sally Murry. (The four Compson children of
The Sound and the Fury
—three boys and one radiant girl—owe much to his own childhood experiences.) Thanks to books written (after his death in 1962) by his brothers Jack and Johncy, we have a vivid picture of the Falkner boys’ early adventures and shenanigans. As the oldest brother, William played the role of the boss who gives the orders. He participated equally in their escapades but did not need—or care—to explain his commands. Flying
kites, rolling in mud, building a “steam engine,” accidentally setting fire to the house, joining together to fight gangs of other kids (often using corncobs to do so): such scapegrace activities seem to have punctuated their childhood. Perhaps the most suggestive of them involved a (homemade) airplane. Under Faulkner’s supervision, the brothers labored for weeks to jerrybuild a plane from designs taken from an
American Boy
journal—using rotten wood, rusty nails, grocery bags, and wrapping paper. The day arrived finally when their improvised craft was to take off. Boss Faulkner insisted that luckless Jack would serve as pilot. At the last moment, though, they couldn’t make their plane slide down a bluff in order to begin its flight. Jack was given a reprieve, joining the others, who were to push as hard as possible. Faulkner honorably replaced his brother at the controls. Heaving together, the others finally launched the vehicle. The collapse that followed was the first, but not the last, air disaster in which he would participate.

The Falkner boys’ childhood narratives evoke Mark Twain; a series of Tom Sawyerish pranks and experiments are pursued with innocent fanaticism, while the horrified parents arrive on the scene always just too late. For Jack and Johncy, their shared childhood may well have appeared thus in memory. Shared is the key word: such shenanigans give their childhood many of its sharable dimensions. We need to remind ourselves that both brothers wrote about a childhood that had taken place a half century earlier—childhood gathered retrospectively into a Twain-like story. Faulkner himself never wrote of his childhood at all, and, more curious, none of his fiction prior to
The Sound and the Fury
even broaches childhood. Childhood as a scene of play and pranks is something he is able to write only in his sixties, at the end of his career, in
The Reivers
. (Is it accidental that both brothers’ narratives of their famous sibling resemble that last novel more than anything else he wrote?) What actually emerges in each of his brothers’ memoirs is less the childhood life of William than his unapproachability, his self-protecting armor, which neither of them can penetrate. His inviolate separateness stamps their family stories with unintended pathos. He grew up in their midst, made indelible impressions on them, remained a loyal and responsible sibling, and won the Nobel Prize—but they did not know him.

Jack comes closest to understanding such guarded privacy when he writes of Faulkner’s delight in horses and mules: “I think his feeling toward them was a sort of compassion born of reflecting that a mule is actually nothing more than a freak of nature…. He regarded animals in the same light as he did human beings: neither asked to be here, both were, and both had to
exist the best way they could” (FOM 198). Jack goes on to say that Faulkner admired mules for “always standing on their own four feet and … eternally daring anyone to try to push them off” (198). Don’t complain, don’t explain: hold your ground, maintain integrity, stay who you are.

When does the young Faulkner start to demonstrate his “mulishness”? Entering first grade at the age of eight, he adored his teacher, Miss Annie Chandler. He performed admirably for her, even giving her three of his watercolor paintings. As a token of her gratitude, she offered him a copy of
The Clansman: An Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan
, by Thomas Dixon—a racist novel that served a decade later as the basis of D. W. Griffith’s (in)famous film
The Birth of a Nation
. A beloved teacher choosing to offer this book—as pedagogical encouragement—to one of her most promising students speaks volumes about racial norms in the early twentieth-century South. I shall revisit those norms when I later consider Faulkner’s insertion in his region’s drama of race. For the next three years, he continued to make the honor roll; he was even allowed to skip second grade. Such model behavior ceased after the fifth grade. By then he had turned to playing hooky, was regularly skipping school, and was refusing to do the chores his parents assigned. He had lost interest, giving no reasons for it. School no longer mattered, and it would never play more than a negligible role in his fiction. Labove, one of the very few teachers in Faulkner’s novelistic world, appears in
The Hamlet
as a young man starved for higher culture, one who has sacrificed much to obtain it. His misfortune is not long in coming. Irresistible Eula Varner ambles into Labove’s classroom—a teenager exuding a deadly sexual attraction and not only indifferent to him but unaware of his uncontrollable lust. Smitten, he is helpless to repress the most humiliating attempts to embrace her, or failing that, to put his face into her just-vacated classroom seat, besotted by its still-present imprint. Labove’s education project has vanished: his real education—degrading, involuntary, disastrous—has taken over.

“To me, all human behavior is unpredictable, and, considering man’s frailty … irrational” (FIU 267), Faulkner would later propose to the University of Virginia’s Department of Psychiatry in the late 1950s. The enabling premise of education struck him as in large part self-doomed, inasmuch as it involved professors attempting to prepare students to deal with realities that had not yet arrived. He knew they weren’t real until they arrived. No one else can teach you how to manage them in advance. As he wryly put it to a class of students that year at the University of Virginia, “Actually, nobody can bathe for you, you know. You’ve got to do that yourself” (133). Privacy inviolable—what he would call in
Absalom
the
“citadel of the central
I-Am’sprivate own”
(AA115, emphasis in the original)—marked his childhood. The key things in your life: you’ve got to do them yourself. Fiercely protected privacy, on the one hand, menaced by unpredictable assaults, on the other. Such assaults were both dreaded and desired. In breaking into his “citadel,” might they also spring him free from its confines? To quote his earlier poem, “marble-bound must he ever be?”

Perhaps his dearest hope for breakthrough rested on a girl who lived nearby. He had known her family since they were children together; his attraction to her had deepened over time. A half-year older, Estelle Old-ham was voluble and charming as he could never be. Carefully trained by her socially established and ambitious parents, she was well on her way to becoming a southern belle. Not a tomboy like her sister Victoria or his cousin Sally Murry, Estelle flourished on a feminine stage—she played the piano, danced the old and the new dances, engaged effortlessly in the art of conversation. Boys adored her. Yet she sought out the reclusive young Faulkner, sharing his private aspirations, his love of poetry and the arts. As they spent more and more time in each other’s company, they forged a bond whose hold on them both exceeded their capacity to give it focus and direction. They somehow knew they would remain part of each other’s lives. Was he beginning to believe—without thinking it out in so many words—that a future life with her might, miraculously, both unlock him and render him intact as never before?

Childhood as he had actually experienced it had little of the playfulness that his brothers later remembered. It was not a sequence of boyish shenanigans. “She must have carried me,” he had written his great aunt about her niece, the “quick and dark” Natalie who “was touching me” during “one of those spells of loneliness and nameless sorrow that children suffer.” Like Elmer, he was sensitized to touch as only a child who has not received enough of it can be. His own mother, so obviously there for him throughout his life—a model of loyalty and rectitude he never ceased to honor—was also, perhaps, at a deeper bodily level, not there at all. Not there because of earlier dilemmas she had suffered from, been scarred by; not there for her husband either. They all lived in the same household, but each inhabited the shared domestic space in his or her incommunicable way. Murry and Maud were his authoritative parents, yes. But he had seen enough of their parents—of Colonel J. W. T. Falkner and of Leila Dean Swift Butler—to grasp that though his own mother and father were no longer children, yet they were children still. Perhaps life, alongside its undeniable ongoing movement, did not move at all? Perhaps everything changed, but nothing changed, those earlier wounds both inflicted long ago yet still damaging, indeed immortal?

Childhood wrought upon him the experience of incapacity, of being little among others who were big. It gave him no less the experience of not-knowing, of coming on the scene not at the beginning but in the middle. Others acted out of motives he couldn’t yet know—motives formed before he was born, but whose impact on him was unavoidable. Childhood was about unavoidability, about being in a body not yet able to avoid what it had not chosen to encounter. And if some of its sorrows would always remain “nameless,” others would open up to understanding—later. That was when, he would discover, things did open up—usually too late to be of use. His own childhood had led him unswervingly, though without his planning it, toward silence and an inwardness he could not shed. Strangest of all, this had all occurred in the presence of others continuously sharing his space and attentive to his being there.

To narrate this experience of childhood would require an unconventional sense of how things occurred—a sense outside Mark Twain’s narrative range. He would have to show that what is shared with others in common space is doubled by what is unsharable. He would also have to show that what namelessly assaults the child, in the moment of now, has its namable roots in what occurred earlier, before the child was born. Childhood was about double exposure: the nameless violence of
is
, juxtaposed against the name-filled mapping of
was
. He had never told this earlier because its strangeness had seemed untellable, hostile to narrative itself. Donald Mahon at least had an explanatory war behind his all-damaging wound. But Mahon’s war, like the range of neurotic behavior represented in
Mosquitoes
, had not been unspeakably Faulkner’s own. Childhood was unspeakably his own, and he had had to lose it before he could begin to see it. Lose it in the sense of getting past it, but lose it also in the sense of turning it into coherence. Could he tell it in such a way that his words would supply the coherence that words do supply, yet preserve the violence that was there before the saying? Could he make the clash of
is
and
was
penetrate, as heartbreak, yet also intimate, as beauty?

Perhaps the best brief summary of what happens in
The Sound and the Fury
is provided by Faulkner himself, in a letter to his friend and editor Ben Wasson. Editing the first chapter of the novel, Wasson was confused
by Faulkner’s use of italics to indicate sudden shifts of time. As a trusted friend, Wasson decided to improve matters. He took the liberty of substituting a spatial device (skipping a line of type whenever there was a time shift) for Faulkner’s typographical one (italics that replaced roman script). He then sent the revised proofs to Faulkner at Pascagoula, where the newlyweds were honeymooning. Soon after came this response from Faulkner: